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Links and Notes for June 6th, 2025

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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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <img src="{att_link}report_all_foreign_invaders_2025.webp" href="{att_link}report_all_foreign_invaders_2025.webp" align="none" caption="Homeland Security: Report all foreign invaders 2025" scale="75%"> <bq>Help Your Country... and Yourself... Report All Foreign Invaders ICE...</bq> This is a screenshot of an actual tweet put out by the official account of U.S. Homeland Security. For once, I have no words. <hr> <img src="{att_link}connorsimon.webp" href="{att_link}connorsimon.webp" align="none" caption="It's really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist..." scale="50%"> <bq>It's really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/05/the-guns-are-again-ablaze-in-libya/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Guns Are Again Ablaze in Libya</a> <bq>The guns are again firing in Libya. Money pours in from outside with the hope that one day Libyan oil will allow money to move in the opposite direction. In the shifting sands of Libya’s interior, hope is minimal. The desire is for no more conflict, but that is unlikely. There are so many men with guns across the country. And they have so many bullets.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/new-book-details-how-u-s-normalized-homelessness/" source="ZNetwork" author="Randy Shaw">New Book Details How U.S. Normalized Homelessness</a> <bq>Four decades of rising homelessness has led many to seek alternative explanations. The most common blames homelessness on drug addiction, rather than the lack of housing low-income people can afford.</bq> <bq>Foscarinis’ first three chapters should be essential reading for anyone interested in why homelessness skyrocketed in 1982. In addition to Nixon’s ending of new public housing in 1974 and Reagan’s massive 1981 budget cuts to affordable housing, she reminds us of other misguided policies.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/01/vijay-prashad-meanwhile-100s-of-millions-of-people-die-of-hunger/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">Meanwhile, 100s of Millions of People Die of Hunger</a> <bq>In 2023, the world’s total wealth was approximately $432 trillion. Of that, the top 1 percent of the global adult population collectively owned 47.5 percent of the world’s total wealth, equivalent to $213.8 trillion (an average of $2.7 million per person). The bottom 50 percent, or 4 billion people, owned less than 1 percent of global wealth or $4.5 trillion ($1,125 per person). The yawning gap of wealth inequality continues to increase every year.</bq> <bq>If you want to end hunger, you must end poverty. In 2021, the Chinese people ended absolute poverty in their country. By November 2025, the people of Kerala, India, will have ended extreme poverty – one year ahead of their target date. Vietnam is on the road to eliminating absolute poverty. This was also the ambition of Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) and has been reborn under the country’s new leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré. Not through charity or foreign aid, but through self-reliance. At the National Conference for the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution in Ouagadougou on April 4, 1986, Sankara declared, “We must succeed in producing more – producing more, because it’s natural that he who feeds you, also imposes his will.” In 2023, Traoré raised Sankara’s spirit and said, “Our predecessors taught us one thing: a slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied. We do not feel sorry for ourselves, we do not ask anyone to feel sorry for us. The people of Burkina Faso have decided to fight, to fight against terrorism, in order to relaunch their development.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-second-class-citizenship-of-palestinian-israelis/" source="ZNetwork" author="Ilan Pappé">The Second-Class Citizenship of Palestinian Israelis</a> <bq>A sociologist in Haifa said, there is no need for a sample, because he knew all of them. I mean, Zionism is a colonialist movement that colonized Palestine for the last 120 years. But it is one of the few colonial movements that never learned the language of the colonized people and never mingled with them. Even in apartheid South Africa, there were more relationships between whites and Africans than there [are relationships between Israelis and Palestinians] in Palestine. But that’s the nature of Zionism: it is a Jewish supremacy and exclusivity, and therefore the pressure on mixed couples is huge. Most of them find themselves outside the country eventually.</bq> <bq>[...] from above, there is a great effort to make sure that this kind of living together is not nurtured and cannot develop. If you left it to people themselves, I think it would naturally develop. But if it develops, it defeats the whole idea of an exclusive Jewish state. The members of the Israeli political elite don’t want that.</bq> <bq>That’s like saying because India had a female prime minister for a moment, the situation of women in India is absolutely fine. Of course, such symbolic achievements are important, but they never indicate the reality on the ground.</bq> <bq>In the Communist Party, Palestinians and Jews were working on equal footing and treated each other with respect and equality. Probably, they had the best model for how life should have been.</bq> <bq>October 7 was used as a pretext to remove even the little freedom of expression and protest that Palestinians in Israel used to have. Israel acted as if what Hamas did was something the Palestinians in Israel did. Therefore, they are not allowed to demonstrate any compassion to the Palestinian babies in Gaza. It is considered support for terrorism. People get arrested for such things without trial. This is why many people are afraid to speak out; they fear they might lose their jobs or be arrested.</bq> <bq>Yes, Israel is still powerful and has powerful allies, and the Palestinians are weak and cannot liberate themselves or end their oppression. But they will continue their struggle. And the world is beginning to understand that they are the victims — and not Israel. These processes will persist. We can already see that those Israelis who want a normal, democratic, liberal life don’t find it in Israel. They go to places like Germany or elsewhere. And those left behind don’t seem to be capable of running a state.</bq> <bq>[...] they are the ones who can create a win-win situation for both sides. Because if not, instead of restitution, we get retribution, and that is terrible to think about. That is why the Palestinians in Israel are such an important community. And instead of understanding that their future really is in the hands of this particular group of Palestinians, the Israelis are limiting and destroying it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/YesAmericaBad/comments/1l5iiic/america_nah_its_just_a_bunch_of_megacorps_larping/" author="Significant-Sir-4343 / transgender marx" source="Reddit">America? Nah, it's just a bunch of mega-corps LARPing as a nation.</a> <bq>The U.S. isn't even a country; it's just fifteen corporations in a trenchcoat.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1l5o8xe/julian_assange_on_his_biggest_disappointment/" author="Julian Assange" source="Reddit">On His Biggest Disappointment</a> <img src="{att_link}courage_is_rarer_than_intelligence.webp" href="{att_link}courage_is_rarer_than_intelligence.webp" align="none" caption="Courage is rarer than intelligence" scale="50%"> <bq quote-style="none">Question: What has been your biggest disappoinment? Julian Assange: Learning that intelligent people can be cowards and that courage is a much rarer attribute than intelligence.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/YesAmericaBad/comments/1l6wd31/where_were_at/" author="Blurple694201" source="Reddit">Where we're at</a> <img src="{att_link}where_we_re_at.webp" href="{att_link}where_we_re_at.webp" align="none" caption="Where we're at" scale="50%"> <bq>America has finally invaded America to protect America from America.</bq> In another meme, <a href="https://v.redd.it/f3z5w6pzav5f1" author="Mohamad Safa" source="Reddit"> Oh CIA Where art thou? We need "COLOR"...</a>, it's phrased as <iq>if the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the United States.</iq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/06/roaming-charges-the-delicate-sound-of-plunder/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Delicate Sound of Plunder</a> <bq>Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on why everyone should ask Qatar for a private jet of their own: “If you’re liberal, they want you to take public transportation … the problem is that it’s dirty. You have criminals. It’s homeless shelters. It’s insane asylums. It’s a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people.” Re: Duffy’s contention that public transport is too dangerous for most real Americans: The death rate for driving is about 60 times higher than for taking public transportation. Trump found someone even less competent to run FEMA than Michael Brown: “Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season…” I’m convinced that a random selection of 26 people shopping for groceries at Piggly Wiggly would prove more competent and serious at running the government than those Trump hand-picked for his cabinet. Sen. Reed: I’m not a great mathematician, but I think you were talking about a trillion dollars in savings. I believe 1.5 billion times ten is 15 billion. Ed Sec. Linda McMahon: I think the cut is 1.2 billion a year. Reed: That would be 12 billion, not a trillion. McMahon: Okay. Sen. Mullin: What were we ranked nationally in math and reading in 1979?” Education Sec. McMahon: We were very low on the totem pole. Mullin: We were number 1 in 1979.</bq> <bq>Dan Sheehan: “AOC—a person I once greatly admired, arguably the country’s most influential progressive politician, and one of very few members of Congress not funded by the pro-Israel lobby—has not posted about Gaza since Nov 2024. Not one tweet in over six months.”</bq> <bq date="1995" author="Umberto Eco" source="Ur-Fascism">[Ur-fascism depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore, culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/tucker-carlson/" author="Jack Hunter" source="Responsible Statecraft">Tucker escalates war with neocons over Iran</a> <bq>On Thursday, Carlson shared a lengthy post on X that read, “Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and likeminded ideologues in Washington are now arguing. They’re just weeks away.” Carlson reminded his audience what a farce this was. “If this sounds familiar, it's because the same people have been making the same claim since at least the 1990s. It’s a lie,” Carlson wrote. “In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb, or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest.”</bq> <bq>On enrichment, Carlson observed, “[M]any Americans would die during a war with Iran. People like Mark Levin don’t seem to care about this. It’s not relevant to them. Instead they insist that Iran give up all uranium enrichment, regardless of its purpose. They know perfectly well that Iran will never accept that demand. They’ll fight first. And of course that’s the whole point of pushing for it: to box the Trump administration into a regime change war in Iran.”</bq> <bq>Carlson finished his post, writing, “The one thing that people like Mark Levin don’t want is a peaceful solution to the problem of Iran, despite the obvious benefits to the United States. They denounce anyone who advocates for a deal as a traitor and a bigot. They tell us with a straight face that Long Island native Steve Witkoff is a secret tool of Islamic monarchies. They’ll say or do whatever it takes. They have no limits”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-resistance-is-still-resistant/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">The Resistance Is Still Resistant</a> <bq>At this point, it shocks me when people still refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization. Al Qassam is hitting exclusively military targets while the IOF hits almost exclusively civilians. Since when did we let obvious terrorists define terrorism? Just look at the ruins these men have to fight through, and the oppression their people live under. Hamas are clearly freedom fighters, and being told you must slander them as terrorists is part of the oppression you live under.</bq> Their last terrorist strike was almost two years ago. <bq>How do these heroes amidst the horror keep supplied with explosives when even food, water, and healthy air is denied? One way is “reverse-engineered explosive devices and shells” from the multiple Hiroshimas worth of western munitions the 'Israeli' delivery boys having been dropping.</bq> <bq author="Henry Kissinger">The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, fighting in their own country, needed merely to keep in being forces sufficiently strong to dominate the population after the United States tired of the war. We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.</bq> <bq>You can say that after 600 days the Resistance cannot stop 'Israel', but at the same time after 600 days, 'Israel' cannot stop the Resistance. Hamas et al are still undisputed the leaders of Gaza and the moral leaders of the Muslim world. Meanwhile 'Israel' is now hated the world over.</bq> <bq>'Israel' is already a lost cause, and this is because of the armed resistance. All the protests and speeches about Palestinian freedom are effects of Palestinian freedom fighters bleeding in the dirt, week in and week out. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and these people are insistent. Still they persist in lighting the stormtroopers up, long after most of us find it exhausting to even pay attention.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rule-of-idiots" author="Chris Hedges" source="Substack">The Rule of Idiots</a> <bq>A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.</bq> <bq>Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.</bq> <bq>The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.</bq> <bq>Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead. Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/06/07/the-decision-that-murdered-privacy/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Decision That Murdered Privacy</a> <bq>Before this, District Judge Ellen Hollander issued a 137-page decision. The Fourth Circuit on appeal issued a 169-page en banc decision, which was upheld en banc. There are two things about these opinions worthy of note. The first is that they thoroughly, ad nauseum perhaps, parsed the facts and the law. The second is that they ruled against DOGE and stayed its access to information so private only a handful of people at the Social Security Administration were authorized to access it, none of whom was called “Big Balls” or had been fired for violating confidences by handing over information to adversaries. But this Supreme Court majority saw it differently than the district and circuit courts, which in itself isn’t wrong per se. But this Supreme Court could not be bothered to explain itself any more than the government could be bothered in the courts below.</bq> <bq>[...] once DOGE gets access, including the ability to download it to a server or build in a backdoor, the only party irreparably injured will be “countless Americans” who can’t get their privacy back.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s too late now, as the Supreme Court has ruled. And with that ruling, it murdered privacy for the sake of DOGE. Countless Americans will never, but never, be confident that the confidential information they provide the government will be private again.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/america-is-attacking-its-own-supply-lines/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">America Is Attacking Its Own Supply Lines</a> <bq>As the Govini report says, “More than 40% of the semiconductors that sustain DoD weapons systems and infrastructure depend on Chinese suppliers.” And, “between 2005 and 2020, the level of Chinese suppliers in the U.S. supply chains quadrupled… Between 2014 and 2022, U.S. dependence on China for electronics increased by 600%.” As mentioned, if you're a wrongheaded racist, this is all going the wrong way.</bq> <bq>What we are seeing is that socialism is actually a better production system than capitalism. Even the capitalists depend on socialist production! We are where Deng Xiaoping predicted, ahead of schedule, when he said, “it is only in the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately-developed countries, that we will be able to say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism and that we are really building socialism.” This fact is too traumatic for the American id (Trump) to process, so he's just throwing his toys out the pram and screaming about it.</bq> <bq>Hundreds of military contractors became five, at which point you might as well nationalize them, they're already centralized. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” and that's exactly what happened. By the Biden era, the Defense Secretary walked straight in from the Raytheon boardroom and no one batted an eye. Even the authors of the Govini paper are Lockheed/Palantir alum that rotated through the Defense Department. The corruption is casual and it's causal. The foxes are running the hen house. Private companies consolidated to the point that you might as well nationalize them, but in ass-backwards American fashion, they privatized the nation instead.</bq> <bq>Honestly, capitalism crashed already, historically speaking. In 2008, their whole system crashed into the ground, but rather than getting out and walking they just bailed out the same sinking boat and floated it on a tsunami of funny money. After 2008 America pumped capital into the banks (et al) without taking equity, violating basic business sense. If you pay for something, you own it, unless you're the American people, in which case you get thrown out of your house. Capitalism doesn't even make sense on its own terms anymore. It's just a zombie ideology, eating brains.</bq> <bq>China is both able to execute industrial policy and execute billionaires, there is no misplaced power here. The only people who say China isn't communist have no concept of communism as a process (we'll get to that) and haven't read Chinese history at all. In pretty standard Marxist-Leninism, China is building towards communism, though it says it has 100 years of socialism to go.</bq> <bq>As Deng said in 1984,<bq>It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only [a] “capitalist” market economy. Why can’t we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy.</bq></bq> <bq>While socialist China invested in education, basic research, and a non-profitable industrial base, America found it more efficient to just buy stuff from the socialists. The NYCrimes reports that “Rare earth chemistry programs are offered in 39 universities across the country [in China], while the United States has no similar programs.” And more generally, “Making rare earth magnets requires considerable investments at every stage of production. Yet the sales and profits are tiny.” Within the capitalist system, why would you do this when you can just buy the inputs from the socialist system next door and profit? America thus reaped the benefits of the socialist market economy, and sowed next to nothing at home. In so many ways, America went from a shipping nation to a drop-shipping nation. A lot of American businesses just import stuff, literally white-label it, and jack up the price. People literally think that ordering stuff is making it. It's a nation of designers and managers and marketers and assorted bullshit. This makes their GDP rise and they think everything is fine, but it's empty calories. All icing and no cake. Most of America's ‘wealth’ is just capitalists rent-seeking atop an increasingly socialist production system somewhere else. If you slice the layer cake—as the ghouls at Govini have—it's socialism at the base. America does not own the means of production anymore. They rent it from the socialists.</bq> <bq>They don't need an office to study China's industrial base, they need to study the socialism with Chinese characteristics the whole thing it's based on. But they can't do that because that would make them commies. So they'd rather die dumb, attacking their own supply lines with China, and incinerating children to stop the future from coming. The old world's dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of morons.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-is-bombing-iran-here-are-some" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel Is Bombing Iran. Here Are Some Future New York Times Headlines.</a> <bq><ul>Iranian strikes rock Israel in unprovoked attack. American Jews feeling anxious, unsupported amid spiraling wars in the Middle East. Opinion: I feared for my life during airstrikes on Tel Aviv. Nobody in the world can possibly understand what this is like. US launches strikes on Iran in preemptive attack. Opinion: Is the U.S. being sucked into a third world war? Opinion: Is the U.S. tumbling headlong into a nuclear exchange with Russia and China? Opinion: The sky is darkening as nuclear radiation creeps across our land, so we must all come together and condemn Hamas. Opinion: The earth is a barren wasteland. Nothing remains. Check on your Jewish friends.</ul></bq> F&@k that's dark but it's also deeply funny because it's so on the nose. Meanwhile, 99% of the western public says: is something going? Did something happen in the Middle East again? Is the U.S. proxy-bombing---a fig leaf so transparent that no-one without brain damage even bothers engaging that argument anymore---a second country that it has for decades declared as an enemy and with which it is simultaneously engaged in truce/peace negotiations? The U.S.? Really? Can I still go shopping in NYC, though? <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/israel-iran-war-trump-netanyahu/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">Trump Is Delivering an Iran War No One Wants</a> <bq>[...] last night, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on Iran, damaging one of its key nuclear facilities and assassinating six nuclear scientists. The attack was sold as a way to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but it was much bigger: Israel also assassinated a spate of top Iranian military commanders, the man leading the negotiations with the Trump administration, and dozens of civilians, including children, in bombings on residential buildings. To say this is a provocation doesn’t really do it justice. There are many countries that consider the United States a threat, the way that Israel sees Iran. If any of them suddenly started bombing the United States, killed American scientists and children, and assassinated Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top military brass, all on the basis that they feared that war-hungry Washington politicians might some day attack them, this would be immediately understood as beyond the pale and outrageous. But Netanyahu and Israel do not operate by the constraints of common sense and decency, let alone international law. For more than thirty years, Netanyahu has been trying to make this happen, bleating over and over again that Iran was set to have a nuclear weapon within a few years. That includes all of this year, during which his “warnings” that the world needed to act immediately to stop the nonexistent bomb grew incessant. Of course, in all those decades, Iran’s nuke never materialized, something that is still the case today as Netanyahu pummels the country: on the eve of the attack, US intelligence had not changed its long-standing assessment that Iran is not actually working toward a nuclear bomb. Doesn’t matter. The problem for Netanyahu was never the fact that the nuke he kept crying wolf about wasn’t real: a possible Iranian nuclear weapon was just the geopolitical version of Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, the interchangeable object that didn’t matter other than as a mechanism to move the plot along. For Netanyahu, that plot is a war with Iran that would finally defang a leading regional rival, a war he hopes and expects to be fought by and paid for by the United States.</bq> <bq>Netanyahu is closer than he’s ever been to his life’s goal of having American men and women fight and die against Iran on his behalf [...]</bq> <bq>Trump and the Israeli government are playing with US lives with comments like these. Iran and other actors in the region were already inclined to look at this as a joint US-Israeli attack, given that everything Israel does is militarily and politically underwritten by Washington. But these comments remove even the thin layer of plausible deniability that might have led Iranian leadership to leave US targets be. But it wouldn’t even necessarily take an attack on US personnel or interests to make this another disastrous American war. Large swaths of Washington already view any attack on Israel as tantamount to an attack on the United States itself — even though Israel is not one of the United States’s fifty-one treaty allies, meaning those countries it’s legally obliged to go to war for if it’s attacked.</bq> <bq>[...] a devastating Iranian attack on Israel would likely create irresistible pressure on Trump and almost the entire US political class to directly intervene, sacrificing yet more US lives and money on behalf of a foreign country that has completely lost the plot. And make no mistake: Israel has lost it. As it starts this war, consider that Israel is also: still bombing neighboring Lebanon in violation of a cease-fire it signed; illegally and violently occupying the territory of its other neighbor Syria; escalating its war on nearby Yemen; and continuing its nearly two-year-long, stomach-churning genocide of mostly children in Gaza. That’s five different wars Israel is now fighting simultaneously. Other than the United States, there is no other country on Earth you can say this about. If it puzzles you how a tiny country with a population a little larger than New York’s could do this, all you need to do is look at the response to these strikes. Officials across partisan lines in the United States and the wider Western world, whether France, Germany, or the UK, lined up to not just not condemn Israel’s preemptive war — as clear-cut a case of illegal aggression as you can possibly get — but in some cases condemned Iran, the country being attacked. They’ve done so by perversely insisting on Israel’s “right to self-defense,” a right that apparently allows Israel to do everything from starve and burn children alive to, now, launch a preemptive war on the off chance that its target may some day start one first.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/14/ujqn-j14.html" author="WSWS Editorial Board" source="WSWS">Stop the imperialist war on Iran!</a> <bq>Citing US and Israeli officials, Axios reported Friday that “Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public—and didn’t express opposition in private. ‘We had a clear U.S. green light,’ one claimed. The goal, they say, was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.” The fact that Iran allowed a significant portion of its leadership to be killed—apparently while they were in civilian dwellings vulnerable to missile strikes, even as the American press openly telegraphed an Israeli attack—is a devastating indictment of the Iranian regime. Terrified of its own working class, the Iranian capitalist elite is desperately seeking an agreement with the imperialist powers, who have demonstrated their full commitment to Iran’s destruction and subjugation. Israel’s attack on Iran has also exposed where the European imperialist powers really stand, despite their recent criticisms of aspects of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The German government announced that Netanyahu had informed Chancellor Merz of the planned assault. Both the French and German governments issued statements affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemning retaliatory strikes by Iran. The attack on Iran is the direct outcome of the longstanding US-Israeli drive to create a “new Middle East” under imperialist domination, intensified in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023. It was made possible by the immense political, military and intelligence support Israel has received from the United States for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Pentagon and Israeli military have long planned and war-gamed an assault on Iran and its nuclear program—an attack that Trump has repeatedly vowed to authorize. US imperialism has never accepted the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a key American ally in the Middle East. Washington backed Iraq in its brutal war against Iran throughout the 1980s. Even as it turned on Iraq—waging war in 1990–91 and invading in 2003—the installation of a US-aligned regime in Tehran remained a central objective. Today, Iran is grouped with Russia, China, and North Korea as a major obstacle to US global hegemony—one that Washington is determined to eliminate at any cost. The ultimate aim of this assault is the imperialist domination of the Middle East—the world’s most important oil-exporting region and home to critical trade routes and strategic chokepoints, including the Persian Gulf. By subjugating Iran, a key ally of both Russia and China, the United States aims to strengthen its global position in preparation for direct confrontation with its principal strategic rivals.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-reaction-israel-attack/" author="Eldar Mamedov" source="Responsible Statecraft">Pure Orwell: Europe condemns Iran for attacks on its own territory</a> <bq>The president of France Emmanuel Macron set the tone by condemning Iran’s “ongoing nuclear program” and reaffirming “Israel’s right to defend itself and secure its security.” President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen seemed to have spoken from the same script “reiterating Israel’s right to defend itself,” embellished by some generic platitudes about the need for restraint and de-escalation. The German foreign ministry went a step further and actually “strongly condemned” Iran for “an indiscriminate attack on Israeli territory” — even before Tehran launched its missiles in response for Israel’s attack on its territory — while fully endorsing Israel’s actions. This Orwellian rhetoric isn’t just incompetence or ignorance. It’s the culmination of years of European diplomatic malpractice that helped to manufacture this crisis — and exposed the "rules-based order" as a corpse. Europe’s double standards killed its credibility.</bq> Europe is morally repugnant, just the worst. <bq>European powers’ staggering descent into diplomatic irrelevance was starkly illustrated by Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi’s categorical rejection of his British counterpart David Lammy’s pleas to de-escalate. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine why Tehran should heed these calls when they come from parties it sees as actively colluding with the aggressors.</bq> Europe is irrelevant. No-one cares what it thinks. Why would they? The U.S. tells them what to think, even now, as the U.S. empire is also sunsetting. The Israelis don't seem to realize---or don't care---that the horse they're flailing is running into a desert to die. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/we-are-of-course-being-lied-to-about" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">We Are, Of Course, Being Lied To About Iran</a> <bq>The western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “preemptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true. Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again. US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”</bq> Benjamin Netanyahu is a world-class piece of shit. He has been for decades. He has been lying about Iran's nuclear-weapons program since at least 1984. That is over four decades. We should all be happy to hear that the western world considers satisfying Netanyahu's life dream to be the pinnacle of human achievement. All resources and efforts are to be applied to this purpose: satisfying Netanyahu's every lying whim. There is no reason to waste a single second of your life listening to what that execrable excuse for a human being has to say. No good will come of it. He's a piece of shit. You don't need to argue with a piece of shit. You need to flush it. Pete Hegseth is in the bowl with Netanyahu. This is what passes for rhetoric at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century: <iq>There have been plenty of indications Iran is moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.</iq> Shut your stupid fucking mouth, you absolute assclown. This is a nothing statement that basically means you know nothing at all but you have an opinion that is not based in reality. But we already knew that by looking at your simpering stupid face and your eyes, so devoid of even a glimmer of intelligence. Hegseth is only the currently most vocal of the inarticulate liars that make up the U.S. administration. Trump and Rubio are also nearly boundless in their mendacity and stupidity. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/this-was-all-so-very-avoidable" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">This Was All So Very Avoidable</a> <bq>Israel isn’t just exposing itself, it’s exposing its supporters. It’s showing us that we’re surrounded by psychopaths who think genocide is fine. Friends. Family members. Coworkers. They all have a big fat “I WOULD’VE SUPPORTED HITLER IN NAZI GERMANY” sign around their necks now.</bq> There's so much war going on right now. There are so many ex-soldiers, so many politicians perpetrating horrific crimes. There are so many people with terrifyingly basic and core parts of their personalities that are immoral, evil, and criminal These people are to be found throughout these societies. When you deal with U.S. Americans or Israelis, you have to ask yourself whether they've been in the military. Have they been part of the empire's machine? What have they done? What horrific crimes have they perpetrated on innocents in other countries? In their own countries? Have they spit on other people that they don't like? Have they taken part in raids on mosques on holy days? Have they snuck onto people's land to kill their farm animals? Who is sitting across from you at the meeting? Who is sitting next to you in the café? <bq>Everything that’s happening right now is happening precisely BECAUSE the US is involved in Israel’s wars. The US is involved PRESENTLY. To say “It’s not our fight and we should stay out of it” is to take your stand in an imaginary fantasy land where the US hasn’t been balls deep inside Israel’s warmongering this entire time. The US has spent the last two years pouring weapons into Israel and bolstering its air defenses to help it attack its neighbors with impunity. Israeli intelligence services operate hand in glove with US intelligence services. The Pentagon is moving two destroyers toward the eastern Mediterranean as you read this.</bq> When Israel feels uncomfortable with other countries, it is legally allowed to bomb them until it feels comfortable again. Iran should feel privileged that Israel has chosen it as a target. Israel doesn't even have to choose military targets. Israel can designate anyone as a terrorist and anything as a terrorist stronghold, so that civilian targets are perfectly viable and moral. Israel is special, so when they attack Iran when the U.S. has lulled Iran into thinking that the sixth round of discussions were about to happen, this is a masterstroke of military genius, rather than a cowardly slaughter of civilians. If Russia or Iran were to do something like this, it would be different, of course! Then we would all see the attack for what it was: a cowardly and perfidious maneuver that burned up every possibility of diplomacy with the U.S. in any possible future. Honestly, this is probably a good thing, as no-one should have been negotiating with the U.S. as if it could possibly be doing so in good faith. The U.S. never negotiates in good faith. The U.S. doesn't have allies, it doesn't have friends; it only has vassals. But since it's Israel that did it, we're obligated to consider it differently. There is a priori no way that the most moral military on Earth could be immoral, so perish the thought. Seriously: perish it, or you'll be arrested for anti-Semitism. When Israel announces that it will be flying its jets over Iran's capital city Tehran---a non-military target---and will be bombing whatever it feels like bombing, then you better believe your belly should be filled with a warm feeling of justice being done, or, well, you're an anti-Semite and you should totally open the door when the police come knocking to arrest your for wrongthink. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CQtV0IVotw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3CQtV0IVotw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Hasan Piker" caption="OH NO! TRUMP PARADE WAS A DISASTER!"> <bq>Millions of people on the streets of the United States, protesting Trump all around the nation. Meanwhile, no-one is attending his birthday party. This is proof, once again, that the repulsive far-right hug box that Twitter and online spaces have become, is not representative of real-world support for MAGA and right-wing policies. Do not be deluded. Do not be discouraged. Become undeniable. Become unavoidable.</bq> Top comment on the video: <iq>Turns out that bots don't show up to parades.</iq> I'm not going to lie, though: the costumes look pretty cool. Trump's pride parade has some snappy uniforms. The parade was officially sponsored by coinbase. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-last-days-of-gaza" author="Chris Hedges" source="Substack">The Last Days of Gaza</a> <bq>We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but [to] deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.</bq> <bq>Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.</bq> <bq>Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them? What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South? It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth. “To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:<bq>To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-iran-war/" author="Trita Parsi" source="Responsible Statecraft">Israel is not winning. Trump must not cave to new demands for help.</a> <bq>Israel’s war of choice with Iran is proving far less decisive than President Donald Trump initially believed when he praised Israel’s performance as “excellent.” What now appears to be an escalating, inconclusive conflict with no clear end in sight will soon force Trump into a challenging decision: end the war — or enter it.</bq> Trump has already entered the U.S. in the war. Israel is part of the U.S. military, FFS. Do not allow the myth to persist that this is not the case. The Israelis fight nearly exactly the way the U.S. fights. Further down in the article, Parsi even notes that, <bq>Reports indicate that the U.S. military has provided its missile defense capabilities to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles but it has so far not joined Israel in offensive strikes.</bq> <bq>Israel’s opening strike was undoubtedly a tactical success. Caught off guard by the assumption that Israel wouldn’t act before the sixth round of nuclear talks, Iranian leaders had taken no precautions. Many were asleep in their homes in northern Tehran, alongside their families, when Israeli strikes killed them in their beds. Iran’s air defenses were also unprepared and inactive. Israel aimed to eliminate as many Iranian commanders as possible to disrupt Iran’s command and control structure and effectively paralyze its military response. Initially, the strikes were so successful — and Iran so subdued — that it was unclear whether Tehran retained any meaningful capacity to retaliate. Impressed by Israel’s early success, Trump moved quickly to claim credit for the operation, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio having declared just hours earlier that the strikes were a "unilateral action" by Israel and that the U.S. was not involved. As the saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But within 18 hours, Iran had restructured its chain of command, activated its air defenses, and, most critically, launched four missile barrages aimed primarily at Israeli air defense systems. Many of the missiles penetrated Israel’s multilayered defenses, lighting up the Tel Aviv skyline as they struck their targets — including a direct hit on Israel’s Ministry of Defense. That Tehran could mount such a response just hours after losing several top military commanders was the first clear sign that Israel’s initial success would be short-lived.</bq> <bq>Trump likes winners — and by asking him to intervene, Israel is signaling that it’s losing. It has failed to eliminate Iran’s regime or cripple its nuclear program, and is now absorbing unexpected blows in return (today Iran sent a barrage of missiles during daytime rather than night to throw the Israelis off). Why would Trump risk American lives, endanger his presidency, and join a war he didn’t start — just to rescue Israel from a failed and unprovoked conflict? Trump prefers to take credit for victories, not inherit blame for someone else’s potential fiasco.</bq> How were Iran's retaliations "unexpected"? Did the Israelis honestly believe that they could just attack Iran and nothing would happen in return? Have they truly lulled themselves into believing this? Just because Syria collapsed? Just because Lebanon is helpless to defend itself? Did it really think that Iran would just collapse without a peep? How deluded are all of these people? Do they actually believe their own bullshit? It seems that they might. I just saw a video of the Haifa oil refinery in Israel in flames. Apparently, that facility is responsible for 60% of the fuel---gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel---which means that not only will their military's ability to project force outward be significantly degraded but their ability to defend themselves as well. The article <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/15/juan-cole-irans-hypersonic-missiles-hit-israeli-refinery-military-sites-as-israel-does-the-same-to-tehran/" author="Juan Cole" source="Scheer Post">Iran’s Hypersonic Missiles Hit Israeli Refinery, Military Sites, as Israel does the same to Tehran</a> writes, <bq>If these reports are correct, Iran has inflicted a significant blow on the Israeli economy and even on its war efforts. Israel imports significant amounts of crude oil from Azerbaijan, Gabon and Kazakhstan. But it isn’t clear who has the excess capacity and the will to supply Israel with refined petroleum. Crude petroleum is useless — it has to be refined into gasoline or diesel for fuel. Many Arab countries would be afraid of the rage of their own people if they supplied Israel after the Gaza genocide.</bq> Oh, yeah, and also the Israeli people will suffer---and they are a high-end, first-world kind of people, utterly unused to even minor deviations in their relatively luxurious lifestyles, to say nothing of the huge sacrifices a continued war effort like this will bring. Yemenis have nothing to lose, so they can cheerily bomb whatever they can because the Imperium has already bombed them flatter than a pancake. Israel is like the U.S.: its people are very accustomed to waging wars of choice that have nearly zero impact at home. Even the genocide in Gaza---an unending bombardment of a people will nearly no capability of fighting back---has caused large cracks to appear in the Israeli economy. This war of aggression on Iran will be orders of magnitude worse. <bq>America’s backing of Israel’s attack — coupled with Trump’s self-congratulatory rhetoric — has led Tehran to believe he deliberately lulled Iran into a false sense of security to boost Israel’s chances. As a result, what little trust remained in Trump as a negotiating partner has further eroded. And the less trust there is, the narrower the path to a deal.</bq> I think that this is wildly understating the case. The U.S. cannot be trusted to sign a $10 check. Crude-oil prices are already up by almost 10%. Juan Cole writes, <bq>As for the Israeli strikes on Iran’s refineries and natural gas facilities, it is a dangerous game for the rest of the world. In the past, when Iranian authorities wanted to protest Trump’s maximum pressure sanctions, they have struck at ships and refineries of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, underlining that other countries in the region would not have the security to export their oil if Iran did not. If Iran did lash out again in this way now, it would drive petroleum prices through the roof and harm industrialized societies.</bq> Hell, maybe this is Trump and Netanyahu's gift to the world: an end to the oil infrastructure that is heating our planet incessantly. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWW86Emvubw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/YWW86Emvubw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lee Camp" caption="UNREDACTED: The US Wants To Coup This Small Country + Abby Martin Joins The Show! [Ep 15]"> <bq>Traoré's actions helped spark a wave of other West-African nations, formerly part of the French Empire, to do the same. Today, Mali, Chad, Senegal, Niger, and Ivory Coast have expelled French forces from their lands. President Emanuel Macron responded by accusing Burkina Faso and others of ingratitude, adding that these nations <iq>forgot to thank France.</iq> Oh, did they forget to thank France? Yes, much like an abused spouse forgetting to thank her husband for when he stopped hitting her because it was her birthday.</bq> 🎤 💧 <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/roaming-charges-from-the-halls-of-montezuma/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Venice Beach</a> <bq>Trump: “I think Israel has enough problems without kidnapping Greta Thunberg” For once, he was right. Greta’s a whole lotta problems. After her release, Greta gave a master class for activists on how to stay on message under questioning from a hostile press corps… Reporter: How did the Israelis treat you, we saw them giving sandwiches? Greta Thunberg: They probably have posted lots of PR stunts, they did an illegal act by kidnapping us in international waters, but that’s not the real story here. The real story is the genocide in Gaza and systematic starvation. Reporter: Are you worried about the others? Greta: Yes…I’m calling for everyone who can to mobilize to demand their immediate release and, of course, to demand not only humanitarian aid being let into Gaza but also a ceasefire and most importantly an end to the occupation, an end to the systemic oppression and violence that Palestinians are facing on an everyday basis. Reporter: “Why do you think so many countries and governments around the world are just ignoring what’s happening in Gaza?” Greta Thunberg: “Because of racism.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/be-like-greta-thunberg/" author="Angelina Giannopoulou" source="ZNetwork">Be Like Greta Thunberg</a> <bq>By now, you’d think that many of her critics—on both ends of the political spectrum—might have offered an apology. After all, Greta was simply a young girl moved to action by the greatest threat facing our planet—one that her generation will be forced to pay for dearly. And what’s been proven over these six years? That she was never a puppet of capital, never a distraction from the real struggle, never a spokesperson for green neoliberalism. In fact, the more Greta developed a sophisticated critique of the global economic and political order, the more she disappeared from mainstream media—despite her enduring influence on European social movements and her persistent political interventions. Meanwhile, much of the left failed to conduct even the slightest self-criticism of how it misread and mistreated the “Greta phenomenon.” It simply couldn’t stomach the idea that a privileged, white Swedish girl could be truly anti-capitalist [...]</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <img src="{att_link}google_needs_to_provide_context_about_the_holocaust.webp" href="{att_link}google_needs_to_provide_context_about_the_holocaust.webp" align="none" caption="Google needs to provide context about the Holocaust" scale="60%"> This video by Hasan Piker mentioned the Holocaust for a few seconds, so Google thought it needed to provided context in case we didn't know what the Holocaust was---and in case anyone were to even entertain the notion that other events in human history might be just as bad, e.g., the genocide in Gaza. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1l5klvz/be_proud_be_loud/" author="segobane / sepulchritude" source="Reddit">Be Proud, Be Loud</a> <bq>one thing I don't think people realize is that in arguments about human rights, it's not about trying to persuade the other party. it's not about them at all. they've already made up their mind. it's about persuading the audience. if I call out my teacher on being homophobic I'm not trying to change his opinion. I'm trying to convince any closeted kids in the room that they're not the monsters he's made them out to be. if I argue with my aunt about how racist she's being it's not because I expect to change her mind. it's because I'm hoping to god my cousin's kids hear and learn that maybe skin color doesn't mean what she says it means. people will try to hush you and say "they're not going to change their minds, don't bother" but it's not about them. it was never about them.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/we-all-live-in-the-vampire-castle" author="Yasha Levine" source="Nefarious Russians">We all live in the Vampire Castle now</a> <bq>In the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131129003704/https://thenorthstar.info/?p=11299">Vampire Castle</a>, Mark Fisher focused on online left-liberal politics — specifically how toxic identity politics were being used to destroy the left. But I think the Vampire Castle is bigger than just the left. All politics in our world have become trapped in the Vampire Castle — trapped in endless culture wars where everyone is constantly pitted against each other in an endless fight that involves constantly evolving identity politics, fringe causes, peripheral issues, and perceived slights. All of it addictive and destructive. All of it preventing us from coming together. Fisher didn’t focus on the politics of the technology that created the Vampire Castle. But those technological politics are there. That’s because the Vampire Castle was built on social media, and social media has been engineered to create and multiply conflict, to trigger anger, to create division and strife, and ultimately to control and pacify us by getting us addicted to online interactions. That’s how these giant monopolies make money, it’s how they keep us on their platforms. This kind of virtual sociality has become central to our political culture. The social media platform is where most of our politics and our political interactions take place. I mean, hell, the President of the United States is addicted to social media and has his own social media platform. And his former buddy Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is also addicted to social media and bought a platform to promote his ideas. Now they’re ridiculously dueling with each other from the safety of their own social media castles. So, yeah, social media is central to politics. From the lowliest peon to the mightiest capitalist — we all live in it and are affected by it, shaped by it.</bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/technology-does-not-solve-political" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems</a> <bq>If you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to spend time around people who work for big tech firms, you will find that their views on every issue tend to be rooted in the assumption that the tech industry itself will determine the future of said issue. So discussions about the economy become, “What will AI mean for the economy?” Discussions of politics become, “How will new tech help my side win the next election?” Discussions of climate change become, “How fast can we innovate ways to capture carbon in the atmosphere?” Discussions of culture become, “Is AI making good art?” In other words, do not hang out with tech people if you can help it.</bq> <bq>[...] technology, while an extraordinarily powerful tool, does not, by itself, change the way that power is distributed in society. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to clear away rocks, you get great new roads. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to make bombs to drop on neighbors, you get mass death. If you say, “We’ll only give dynamite to peace-loving people,” the stronger, war-loving people will come and take it away. If you don’t change the overall power arrangement, new technology will just make strong people stronger. So too with today’s technologies. Except worse.</bq> <bq>Is that the big socioeconomic story of the internet? No. The big socioeconomic story of the internet, despite all of the ways that it has changed our culture and entertainment and communication and Ways We Summon a Car, is that it has produced the biggest individual fortunes that the modern world has seen. It has, by any reasonable measure, increase inequality. It has consolidated more power in a smaller number of hands. Yeah, the Arab Spring was planned on Facebook. It failed. So were some genocides. They succeeded. In the past you had to buy a printing press to spread your words. Now you can publish things globally for free. Despite that fact, information control has become so centralized on a small number of platforms that the world’s richest man saw fit to spend $44 billion to buy a social media platform, and used it to help elect a fascist.</bq> <bq>Technology is not politics. It cannot solve political problems. It can, however, exacerbate political problems. The power of new technologies, controlled by the strong, makes them stronger. Obviously! I’m sure it sucked to get hit with a stick but it sucked even worse to get sliced in half with a hardened steel sword and even worse to be mowed down with a machine gun and even worse to have your whole city incinerated with an atomic bomb. All of these technologies have far more productive uses than war; but they were used for war because war is how strong people build and consolidate and maintain their own power. That is the thing that strong people do, above all.</bq> <bq>[...] it is virtually certain that AI will lead to a greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, as it replaces labor to the benefit of the investment class. To a lesser degree, the winners of this process will be the executives and (to an even lesser degree) the workers at the tech firms that produce and perfect the new technology. You don’t have to be much of a futurist to see this all coming. Nor do you have to be unreasonably grumpy to be a pessimist about the prospects of reining this in before it’s too late. Having watched this generation of big tech companies successfully avoid most meaningful regulation, the AI companies have a strong playbook to follow, and plenty of money to invest in removing all obstacles in their path.</bq> <bq>A union at Google or Facebook or OpenAI or other big tech firms would be in a position to negotiate rules about how AI could be used that would benefit all of society. The workers who build the product have an inherent power that no one else does. A union would allow them to wield that power. If you are a distraught tech worker searching for a way to avoid the bleak knowledge that your own prosperity comes at the cost of very scary downstream political consequences, organize your workplace.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/03/pkyk-j03.html" source="WSWS" author="Marc Wells, Nancy Hanover">How Wall Street cashes in on charter schools</a> <bq>The CSP program, established in 1994 under Democratic President Bill Clinton, is the primary federal mechanism to fund charter schools. The grants amount to lavish handouts to businesses seeking to launch new charter schools; it has provided tax dollars to start nearly half of existing charter schools. For example, in 2010 under Democratic President Obama, the program awarded $138 million to 12 recipients. In addition to increasing the CSP’s federal financing, Trump supports expanding eligibility to allow for-profit Charter Management Organizations to be directly eligible for these grants.</bq> <bq>An additional measure, the Republican-proposed “High-Quality Charter Schools Act,” now introduced in both the House and Senate, would create a $5 billion tax credit scheme that supporters claim could triple charter enrollment nationally, increasing it from 6 percent to 18 percent of public school students. This scheme allows donors to support the creation and expansion of charters by receiving up to 75 percent of their “donation” as a tax write-off.</bq> <bq>These leases often come at inflated rates. For the 2012-2013 school year, Academica-managed schools that paid rent to Academica-owned properties spent an average of 17.7 percent of total expenses on rent ($1,214 per student), which is significantly higher than the 11.5 percent ($816 per student) paid to unrelated landlords. In Dade County alone, this overpayment totaled more than $4.1 million annually—funds that were diverted from classroom instruction.</bq> <bq>Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan openly declared schools should be run like investment portfolios. Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, with its $4.35 billion in federal grant money, forced states to compete by adopting charter-friendly legislation, tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, and expanding school choice measures.</bq> <bq>In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina became the pretext for the mass charterization of the city’s schools and a national model for “education reform.” Immediately after Katrina, the district fired its entire 7,500-person teaching staff. Over 1,200 teachers were to retire, and 1,000 others, unable to find jobs in the changed education landscape, never returned to teaching in the city. The gap was filled by young, barely-trained Teach for America recruits.</bq> <bq>Charter school teachers earn about 10-15 percent less than their traditional counterparts, though this varies by location. In Michigan, the pay gap is much larger, with charter school teachers making $43,000 a year compared to $63,000 for traditional schools. Charter schools do not offer the level of services of traditional schools. Many don’t offer lunch, others do not provide transportation. There are less sports or enrichments offered.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/libertarian-torn-between-investing-in-shiny-rocks-or-magic-computer-coins/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Libertarian Torn Between Investing In Shiny Rocks Or Magic Computer Coins</a> <bq>It's only a matter of days or weeks or months or years or decades," he said. "Everything our government's Keynesian economic house of cards is built upon has to come crashing down, and when it does, the man who has shiny rocks — or magic computer coins — will be king."</bq> Yet another scam with no basis in reality, no way of providing actual value to people. People just want to collect rent. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/meta-beefs-up-disappointing-ai-division-with-15-billion-scale-ai-investment/" author="Financial Times" source="Ars Technica">Meta beefs up disappointing AI division with $15 billion Scale AI investment</a> This exceedingly stupid article starts with, <bq>Meta has invested $15 billion into data-labeling startup Scale AI and hired its co-founder, Alexandr Wang, as part of its bid to attract talent from rivals in a fiercely competitive market. The deal values Scale at $29 billion, double its valuation last year. Scale said it would “substantially expand” its commercial relationship with Meta “to accelerate deployment of Scale’s data solutions,” without giving further details. Scale helps companies improve their artificial intelligence models by providing labeled training data. Scale will distribute proceeds from Meta’s investment to shareholders, and Meta will own 49 percent of Scale’s equity following the transaction.</bq> Why is this stupid? Because it is trying so hard to make it sound like something happened other than what happened: Meta overpaid for just under 50% of a data-labeling company that has the word "AI" in its name, and which has a long history of oppressing its developing-world workforce---which is the only place you can find people working cheaply enough to make labeled data palatable to AI companies, which are already bleeding a spectacular amount of money per year. Meta did not "invest"; it "bought." This entire move smacks of incredible desperation as Meta twists and turns under the weight of its own success in an economic system that strangles anything that doesn't grow, no matter how big it already is. The rent-seekers want their rents. They don't care about anything else. If you can provide 7-10% returns by burning people for fuel, they are in. As <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/whatre-we-even-doing/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's your Ed at?">What're We Even Doing?</a> writes, <bq>[...] the biggest problem with a deal like this is it effectively kills Scale, in part because it's taking its CEO, and in part because why would you [Google, OpenAI] possibly want to work with a company selling you training data that is basically owned by Meta?</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2025/06/05/occasional-paper-the-impossible-predicament-of-the-death-newts/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Doug Muir">Occasional paper: The impossible predicament of the death newts</a> <bq>The world’s most toxic newt is Taricha granulosa, the Rough-Skinned Newt, a modest little amphibian native to the North American Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades from around Santa Cruz, CA up to the Alaska Panhandle. It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.</bq> <bq>One thing to keep in mind is that nothing in nature is free. The newt’s toxicity comes with a cost: the metabolic load of supporting all those bacteria. More toxicity means more bacteria means more load. A very toxic newt has to consume more calories than its less-toxic cousin. Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it.</bq> <bq>[...] tetrodotoxin is a neurotoxin. To resist it, you have to make changes to the biochemistry of your nervous system. Even a small snake has a very very complex nervous system, where those changes might show up in ways that are hard to measure. Like, if the resistant snakes were clumsier or had slower reflexes, sure, we could see that. But maybe they’re suffering from much more subtle neurological effects, like being prone to insomnia or hallucinations or sexual dysfunction. Or maybe they’re just a bit dim.</bq> <bq>[...] when the snakes eat Rough-Skinned Newts, they may sometimes show signs of discomfort. The snake may visibly gag. It may writhe in obvious unease. In some cases, it may go into respiratory distress. Eating the newt looks pretty unpleasant. Yet the snakes persist.</bq> <bq>[...] they don’t harbor the bacteria, so they don’t produce tetrodotoxin of their own. So eventually, the toxin that they’ve ingested breaks down. And then they need to eat another newt to refresh their defense.</bq> <bq>Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues.</bq> <bq>In sum: the unfortunate newt is not once, not twice, but three times screwed over here. They have to be extra-toxic, carrying that metabolic load, just to maybe make the garter snakes think twice about eating them. Then they have to evolve defenses against their own toxin. But they can’t evolve aposematic coloring, because that’ll just lead to the snakes gobbling them all up. And finally, they can’t go back to being not-very-toxic, because the snakes will just eat more of them to gain the same amount of tetrodotoxin. They can’t win, they can’t break even, and they can’t leave the game.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/these-va-tech-scientists-are-building-a-better-fog-harp/" author="Jennifer Ouellette " source="Ars Technica">These VA Tech scientists are building a better fog harp</a> <bq>Arid coastal regions that are also prone to fog are prime locations for fog-harvesting devices as a water source, especially during prolonged droughts. But the standard technology is prone to clogging. Scientists at Virginia Tech have created an improved version of their earlier "fog harp" alternative design to address that issue, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.</bq> Today I learned about fog-harvesting and "fog harps." <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/biofuels-policy-has-been-a-failure-for-the-climate-new-report-claims/" author="Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News" source="Ars Technica">Biofuels policy has been a failure for the climate, new report claims</a> <bq>The new report points to research saying that increased production of biofuels from corn and soy could actually raise greenhouse gas emissions, largely from carbon emissions linked to clearing land in other countries to compensate for the use of land in the Midwest. On top of that, corn is an especially fertilizer-hungry crop requiring large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which releases huge amounts of nitrous oxide when it interacts with the soil. American farming is, by far, the largest source of domestic nitrous oxide emissions already—about 50 percent. If biofuel policies lead to expanded production, emissions of this enormously powerful greenhouse gas will likely increase, too. The new report concludes that not only will the expansion of ethanol increase greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also failed to provide the social and financial benefits to Midwestern communities that lawmakers and the industry say it has. (The report defines the Midwest as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.) “The benefits from biofuels remain concentrated in the hands of a few,” Leslie-Bole said. “As subsidies flow, so may the trend of farmland consolidation, increasing inaccessibility of farmland in the Midwest, and locking out emerging or low-resource farmers. This means the benefits of biofuels production are flowing to fewer people, while more are left bearing the costs.”</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/what-im-learning-from-maha" source="Your Local Epidemiologist" author="Katelyn Jetelina">What I’m learning from MAHA</a> <bq>One of the hardest parts of engaging with MAHA hasn’t been the conversations themselves. To me, it’s the anticipation of backlash from within my field. The quiet fear of a thousand paper cuts. So before this post circulates more widely, I want to make an important distinction. One that I think many of us are struggling to see clearly: There’s a real difference between the leadership of MAHA, like RFK Jr., and the grassroots supporters drawn to the movement. I don’t believe RFK Jr. is acting in good faith. His record is riddled with contradictions and falsehoods. His tactics often erode trust under the guise of restoring it. Treating him as a serious partner would be a mistake. But many people who support MAHA at the grassroots level are asking real, good-faith questions. They’re responding to gaps and failures that public health professionals recognize, too. If we fail to see that difference, we risk further alienating those who already feel unheard. We confirm the very narrative they’ve been fed: that the health ecosystem doesn’t listen, doesn’t care, and paints all its critics with the same brush. There’s meaningful common ground to build on—clean food, chronic illness, safe schools, and air quality. That’s a good place to start.</bq> <bq>Respect different realities. Her biggest suggestion was adding a question: If someone can’t—or won’t—vaccinate, what else can they do to protect their family? It reminded me to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.</bq> <bq>This not only highlights the need to co-develop but also to partner with trusted messengers in established information networks, as there are clearly echo chambers.</bq> Great advice but also no shit. Reviews matter people. <bq>it signaled something else: the burden of medical decision-making is entirely on individuals. It tells people: diagnose yourself, verify your doctor’s guidance, interpret the vaccine schedule, and sort fact from fiction. Alone. Most Americans don’t have the time, training, or tools to do that. And they shouldn’t have to. That’s why we build public systems and scientific consensus. Just like I rely on a mechanic to fix my car, we should be able to rely on public health experts to interpret the science.</bq> <bq>RFK’s comment affirmed their autonomy. It signaled that they can make decisions for themselves and their families, even if those decisions go against expert consensus.</bq> <bq>One public health colleague said, “Sure, do what you need to do, but please don’t kill someone else.” That didn’t land well, and one MAHA person said, “Just saying that will lose so much ground [in trust].” I understand why. MAHA members do care deeply about protecting their families and those around them. Assuming that they don’t, doesn’t help. But for them, autonomy still comes first. Here’s where I hope the learning flows both ways: Autonomy matters. But so does community. Public health isn’t about either/or. It’s about both. It’s about protecting individuals and protecting each other through collective action.</bq> <bq>[...] this is where we need to be louder and clearer: public health is not Big Pharma, Big Food, or Big Insurance. It doesn’t profit but rather protects. There seems to be a genuine misunderstanding of this separation from MAHA. So, when scientists speak up for vaccines, it can sound like defending the industry in their eyes, which erodes trust with this group.</bq> <bq>Public health has flaws (bureaucracy, underfunding, and clumsy communication, to name a few), but the mission is fundamentally different. And that distinction matters. Some in MAHA are starting to see that. One member recently said: “We have to stop they-ing you.” That stuck with me.</bq> <bq>In public health, we need to do a better job educating people on what we do and who we are and honestly voice our general frustration with the systems, too. What are our solutions to the industry-captured health ecosystem?</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/exhibitions-post/the-lure-of-the-image-wie-bilder-im-netz-verlocken/" author="" source="Fotomuseum Winterthur">The Lure of the Image</a> <bq>The Lure of the Image explores contemporary digital forms of photography and their seductive powers: How do images bait or beguile us as they circulate online? How do they compel, capture or control us? The 14 artistic positions presented in the exhibition engage with visual phenomena that serve as vehicles for online communication, criticism and humour, highlighting the crucial role images play in shaping our social, cultural and political landscapes. The show invites you to explore the visual worlds of social media feeds, dating app profiles, beauty filters, memes, ASMR videos, ‘cute’ and ‘cursed’ images, emojis, computer-generated imagery and low-resolution screenshots used for conspiracy or protest.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-the-cure-for-the-wests-individualist-worldview" source="Aeon" author="Sam Dresser">What is the cure for the West’s individualist worldview?</a> <bq>The Confucian alternative begins from a notion of what contemporary scholars call the ‘relational self’ – that a person cannot be understood in isolation from their connections with those around them. What is most relevant about me is not that I am a free and autonomous agent, but rather that I am so-and-so’s son or daughter, grandchild or sibling; someone’s teacher, colleague or mentor; a member of such-and-such neighbourhood and community. In its conception of the person as inseparable from their relationships, the role-bearing self poses a challenge to the social contract view of humans as pristine individuals who participate in society only voluntarily.</bq> <bq>For the early Confucians, familial roles come first. Children are expected to practise filial piety (xiao) towards their parents, which means not just serving them, but doing so out of a sense of gratitude and respect. According to the Confucian text Classic of Filial Piety, xiao begins with treating our body like it is a gift from our parents, and culminates in conducting ourselves in the right way so that we uphold our family name for posterity.</bq> <bq>[...] for the early Confucians, the values that we learn from good relationships within the family are central to building a society where people treat one another in the right way. They teach us what it means to be a member of a group that is held together by bonds of mutual consideration.</bq> <bq>On the Confucian role-based view, the right thing to do depends largely on the particular person with whom we are interacting. Each relationship comes with different norms, and some of these norms are contained in specific rituals that are meant to govern our interactions. For instance, the way I greet my older and wiser retired colleague is different from the way I say hello to a group of students.</bq> Same here in Switzerland. I think every culture does this, to at least some degree. <bq>In the classical Chinese context, harmony does not mean uniformity or sameness; as Confucius says in the Analects, the cultivated person harmonises but does not necessarily agree. Instead, harmony is a quality that emerges when people in different roles complement and support one another. One Confucian text compares it to a soup, where the combination of different ingredients produces something that is more complex and flavourful than any one ingredient on its own.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-parable-of-a-communally-bought" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">The Parable of a Communally-Bought Lot</a> <bq>[...] the YIMBY movement is a neoliberal movement - I’m sorry, it just is, it always was - and neoliberals worship the market and the affluence that the market creates. So they don’t have a problem with “market” behaviors that are undertaken for the same purpose and have the same effect as NIMBY behaviors. They just don’t like it when ordinary people use government to gain some slice of the leverage the wealthy enjoy.</bq> <bq>As a big ol’ lefty who actively disdains “the market,” I’m under no obligation to pretend that the rich buying giant lots and enjoying the peace and quiet enabled by long driveways and big manors is somehow more legitimate than NIMBY behavior. And I am free to ask why exactly we’ve created a society that’s so geared towards enriching a tiny few that the entirely ordinary goal of owning a home has become impossible - and in doing so I get to consider the whole damn show, not just the eeeevils of regulation and selfishness of ordinary people. You see, when I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. And when I ask why ordinary people have no money to buy houses, they call me a NIMBY.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/06/what-mental-illness-has-taught-me-about.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">What "Mental Illness" Has Taught Me About Anarchism</a> <bq>There are a number of problems with this narrative, the chief one amongst them being that it relies almost entirely on the biological illness model of mental health; the contrived but commonly accepted notion that any form of mental distress or neurodivergence is the result of some kind of chemical imbalance. The reality is that this generally assumed notion is largely unsupported by any real substantial and verifiable evidence. This isn't to say that mental illness is necessarily a myth, it's just not a fucking illness, it's more of a response to trauma and some of us seem to be more traumatized than others. The biggest commonalities among the chronically distressed appear to be poverty and various forms of institutional disenfranchisement. Poverty alone has been shown by numerous statistics to be a direct pipeline to the asylum with individuals beneath the poverty line being eight times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than more affluent patients.</bq> <bq>The reasons behind this demographic epidemic really shouldn't be that hard to conjure and they have nothing to do with illness. To put it succinctly, it is fucking traumatizing to be anything but a wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dude in a world run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes and when said wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes make all the rules, anyone else who pushes back or even just gets bummed out is deemed sick and usually by the same institutions that we are being encouraged by MTV and YouTube to seek help from which (Surprise! Surprise!) are pretty much all run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes.</bq> <bq>There is also zero effort to address the fact that the biggest comorbidity across all of these demographics of diagnosed Americans is being a survivor of sexual violence which every demographic listed above experiences at far higher rates because rape culture is a direct byproduct of marginalized existence under a post-colonial hierarchy.</bq> <bq>[...] this system's sudden concern with 'mental health awareness' strikes me as a last-ditch effort by an abusive shepherd to convince his wayward flock to voluntarily subjugate themselves back at the barn but it isn't working. The barn is on fire, and we can all see the flames. Call me ill all you want but I'm not the one who needs help. I don't fear the collapse of your precious "civil" society and its various forms of abusive governance. I have already developed the means to govern myself and you can too. All you have to do is stop listening to the gods and masters they've prescribed for you and start listening to the voices in your head.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WqxMOfXYlg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-WqxMOfXYlg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chris Hedges" caption=" How Paradise Lost Revolutionized the World (w/ Orlando Reade)"> This was an absolutely wonderful, wide-ranging discussion centered around Milton and abolitionism, including Malcom X's reading of Milton, as well as Thomas Paine's. They also discuss William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, T.S. Eliot, C. L. R. James, Herman Melville, and many others. <bq>Orlando: So, it's a complicated passage that you read, but I think the thought is a fairly clear one, and that is that, even though America is a democracy, that democracies have their own tendency to generate forms of totalitarianism. It's an obvious thought today because we've seen it happening in the last nine or ten years in America. When CLR James was writing about Moby Dick and writing about Paradise Lost, he had seen it happening in America with McCarthyism. But I think James was describing a more fulfilled kind of totalitarianism, a more fulfilled kind of American totalitarianism that is ... we're really seeing in earnest in its most fully fleshed-out form under Trump. [...] It just shows, I think, goes to show that works of literature published 50, 100, 350 years ago have an uncanny capacity to return and to speak to our concerns today, because they grapple with the same issues.</bq> <bq>Orlando: It forces us to reckon with the things that change, as well as the the things that don't change. And, unfortunately, I think one of the things that doesn't change is the psychology of the tyrant. Chris: Well and the poison of power</bq> Man, am I so happy that I have grown into the kind of person who can deeply appreciate that there are still people doing this kind of stuff and there is still space for them to do it. I'm glad to see Chris getting back to what his show on RT used to do all the time: author interviews and book reviews. <hr> <a href="https://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4342" author="Ryan North" source="Dinosaur Comics">Raven Paradox</a> <bq>Suppose I theorized that "all ravens are black"! Doing so is logically equivalent to hypothesizing 'if something is not black, then it is not a raven.</bq> <bq>If I then Saw a black raven, that'd be some nice. evidence that then supports all ravens are black" hypothesis. NOW, let's suppose I see Sonic - famously a blue hedgehog that runs Fast and It ent entirely "this moT bat is nore, NOT a raven".</bq> <bq>Sure, a black raven supports my ravens are black" "a17 theory. blue hedgehog is equally evidence iF something is not black, then hypothesis. GREAT. But remember, that hypothesis is LOGICALLY EQUIVALENT TO all ravens are black"!</bq> <bq>So we've LOGICALLY PROVEN that seeing SoNIC D. HEDGEHOG is somehow evidence for all ravens being black!! BUT THAT'S NUTS!</bq> This comic taught me about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox" author="" source="Wikipedia">Raven Paradox</a> <bq>The raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox, Hempel's ravens or, rarely, the paradox of indoor ornithology,[1][2] is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for the truth of a statement. Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated. This problem was proposed by the logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/academia-in-the-age-of-trump.html" author="Mindy Clegg" source="3QuarksDaily">Academia in the Age of Trump</a> <img src="{att_link}isaac_asimov_on_anti-intellectualism.webp" href="{att_link}isaac_asimov_on_anti-intellectualism.webp" align="none" caption="Isaac Asimov on anti-intellectualism" scale="75%"> <bq href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism" source="Newsweek" date="January 21, 1980" author="Isaac Asimov">There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."</bq> Pay attention, people: The cult of ignorance was already evident in 1980. <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/we-all-work-for-the-same-boss-now" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu" source="The Hinternet">We All Work for the Same Boss Now</a> <bq>...and no one is allowed to quit.</bq> <bq>A zoomed-out perspective on our current revolution in information technology tells me that, like pretty much everything human beings do, and like Leonard Cohen’s description of shooting heroin, it’s doing “some good”, and “some harm” — almost as if it were operating according to a hidden law ensuring, at every instant of human history, that all our efforts will balance out to exactly zero, that the old problems we solve with our innovations will be exactly compensated by the new problems they generate.</bq> <bq>It’s already getting ugly. And just like the imagined Sumerian wine-merchant, who shrugged and went right back to his business the first time he saw a cuneiform representation of, say, “jug” or “ladle”, it may be that we are not yet sufficiently attuned to all the new ways this ugliness is going to manifest itself — that we cannot yet see all the ways our new technologies threaten us, because we have no historical experience, yet, that could possibly have prepared us.</bq> <bq>I take the paper home, and I take a photo of it with my iPhone, and I send it as a .jpg attachment by e-mail to the human-resources department. Surprisingly, they reply to me after only a short delay, but with a further request: that I send them the same document in .pdf format. I know there is a way to convert .jpg’s to .pdf’s, and I believe it’s something you can do using Adobe, so I try to open Adobe, and it tells me I need to update the version I have. But I can’t do that because I can’t remember my password, and the password-reset function is associated with my Princeton e-mail address, which is no longer active. I suspect most people, most days, face comparable obstacles. And yet, notwithstanding the cognitive and emotional strain of this emerging form of life, such incidents as I describe almost always trigger little more than a shrug [...]</bq> These things all infuriate me. <bq>I think in my case it’s pretty clear that I need either to downscale or to upscale — either to go and live in some group-home where I earn my keep by feeding the resident hamsters and tending the turnips and so on, while the state, having deemed me incompetent, takes care of all my paperwork (as we still call it, skeuomorphically); or to become rich enough to pay a full-time personal assistant for the maintenance of my social identity in good standing, to manage all my portals, to keep track of all my passwords. The truth is I’d much prefer the latter option, but so far not nearly enough of my readers are willing to upgrade to paid subscriptions to The Hinternet. So I guess we’ll see.</bq> <bq>Academics have been particularly slow in coming around to appreciating just how deep the problems of what I have been calling the open internet really are. They honestly thought, for example, that the sudden surge of people expressing views incompatible with their own came down to the fact that these people were under-informed. They thus set themselves up as correctors of misinformation. Meanwhile, the prevailing view in Silicon Valley was that the great memetic agon had little or nothing to do with exchange of units of information, and therefore that such activities as “fact-checking” were basically useless in the effort to reduce polarization. And for better or worse, Silicon Valley was right. Peter Thiel, to cite one particularly “problematic” voice, really did understand where the new technology of what I call “universal punditry” would bring us. It brought us to a polarized stalemate not because we have two equally tasty stacks of hay lying equidistant to the left and the right of our asinine heads, but because the great majority of people have no business being pundits in the first place, and if our new technologies thrust them into that role, these people are going to be in a position really only to offer up a farce of opinion-having, guided as they are not by a search after truth, but by a desire for belonging.</bq> One commentator (Judith Stove) wrote, <bq>Every time I am forced to consult my phone for the 'two-factor authentication' code, without which I cannot communicate with the bank which holds my money, I feel for the elderly, the less-competent in English, all the people whom our overlords don't care about - how do they manage in this world?</bq> This is exactly what I rage against as well, when the opportunity arises to do so. It's not that I, with much more technical skill in these things than most, am unable to navigate these systems. It's not only that it's a spectacular waste of my time---the technology is nearly uniformly designed to satisfy goals other than the efficient completion of my tasks---but I'm raging on behalf of all of the wasted time of myriad others trapped in this suffocating web. P.S. The Höhere Fachschule in Switzerland, where I teach part-time, uses Moodle and I have, from the beginning about five years ago, refused to use it. It is a Kafkaesque nightmare of ill-conceived design. I was surprised to read that this blight of a tool's range extends to elite universities in Paris. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/heres-a-perfect-example-of-why-matt" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Here's a Perfect Example of Why Matt Yglesias Should Debate Me</a> <bq>Left-wing protestors don’t carry American flags because carrying the American flag is a symbol of support for the United States of America, its government and its actions, of condoning its project in whole or in part, and left-wing people (like me) can’t do that because the United States is a brutal and immoral actor in the world and has been longer than any of us have been alive. To wave the flag at a pro-immigrant rally would be to somehow suggest that the country the flag represents is worth celebrating, and it is not. It’s not for many reasons, the most direct and salient of which is that no country on earth has caused more wanton destruction, cruelty, and degradation of freedom and democracy than the United States, since the fall of the Third Reich.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-vs-yes-but" author="Scott Alexander" source="Astral Codex Ten">"But" vs. "Yes, But"</a> This article is about people who ruin the mood in an argument because they can never, ever admit when they've overstepped or exaggerated to the point where they've undermined their argument. When their lack of credibility due to invalid data is pointed out, they blow past it as they'd never set it. However, Alexander showed a comment that did exactly this ... but which was pretty interesting in its own right. <bq>I think you really want time machines and warp drive and an android buddy, and while those are all understandable things to want, they are not things that an adult should expect. You live in a boring, mundane world of asphalt and taxes, Scott, a ceaselessly unimaginative post-industrial capitalist system that's about spreadsheets for the lucky and making venti lattes for the unlucky. I'm trying to convince people that their understandable desire to live in a different kind of world is how you get to absurd places like today, where people are insisting that because probabilistic text generators have become fairly convincing, that means we are imminently (as in, any day now) going to see a godlike Al rise up and rescue them from the mundane - maybe through doom, maybe through deliverance. But it'll be the end of all of this boring, grinding, same-shit-different-day reality that is adult existence. I don't think nurturing those hopes is compassionate, and I certainly don't think basing public policy or enormous economic decisions on them makes sense. And I will bet every dime I have that you will live out the rest of your life in a world that looks almost exactly like the one we live in now. Which for you will be fine, because you live a largely contented life, or so it would seem. But it's just gonna be life. You're still gonna have to take out the trash, and if you get some robot that takes out the trash for you tomorrow, there will be a new boring and thankless task for you to grumble about. Because that's what human life is.</bq> This sounds like Freddie deBoer commenting on Alexander's blog. Or me. <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <img src="{att_link}smaky_6.jpg" href="{att_link}smaky_6.jpg" align="none" caption="Smaky 6" scale="35%"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smaky" author="" source="Wikipedia">Smaky</a> <bq>The Smaky is a line of mostly 8-bit personal computers and accompanying operating system developed by Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and others at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland beginning in 1974. The computers were used at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and in Swiss schools. The names derives from SMArt KeYboard, reflecting the form factor that contained a compact motherboard which fit within the same housing as the keyboard.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://lithub.com/on-the-very-real-dangers-of-the-artificial-intelligence-hype-machine/" source="Literary Hub" author="Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna">On the Very Real Dangers of the Artificial Intelligence Hype Machine</a> <bq>In an environment where the battle for American supremacy in the Cold War was being fought on all fronts—military, technological, engineering, and ideological—these men sought to gain favor and funding in the eyes of a defense apparatus trying to edge out the Soviets. They relied on huge claims with little to no empirical support, bad citation practices, and moving goalposts to justify their projects, which found purchase in Cold War America.</bq> Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. <bq>These startups, and a slew of others, have been chasing a gold mine of investment from venture capitalists and Big Tech companies, frequently without any clear path to robust monetization. By the second quarter of 2024, venture capital was dedicating $27.1 billion, or nearly half of their quarterly investments, to AI and machine learning companies. The incentives to ride the AI hype train are clear and widespread—dress something up as AI and investments flow. But both the technologies and the hype around them are causing harm in the here and now.</bq> <bq>In 2017, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli authorities over a Facebook post in which he posed next to a bulldozer with the caption (in Arabic) of “good morning.” Facebook’s machine translation software rendered that as “hurt them” in English and “attack them” in Hebrew—and the Israeli authorities just took that at face value, never checking with any Arabic speakers to see if it was correct.</bq> This is a bad example. Many---if not most---Israelis read enough Arabic to recognize "good morning", for God's sake. They just used the mistranslation as an excuse to fuck with a Palestinian. They knew that it meant "good morning"; they just didn't care. <bq>What all of these stories have in common is that someone oversold an automated system, people used it based on what they were told it could do, and then they or others got hurt. Not all stories of AI hype fit this mold, but for those that don’t, it’s largely the case that the harm is either diffuse or undocumented.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/03/is-ai-sparking-a-cognitive-revolution-that-will-lead-to-mediocrity-and-conformity/" source="Scheer Post" author="Wolfgang Messner">Is AI Sparking a Cognitive Revolution That Will Lead to Mediocrity and Conformity?</a> <bq>The Industrial Revolution replaced artisanal craftsmanship with mechanized production, enabling goods to be replicated and manufactured on a mass scale. Shoes, cars and crops could be produced efficiently and uniformly. But products also became more bland, predictable and stripped of individuality. Craftsmanship retreated to the margins, as a luxury or a form of resistance. Today, there’s a similar risk with the automation of thought. Generative AI tempts users to conflate speed with quality, productivity with originality. The danger is not that AI will fail us, but that people will accept the mediocrity of its outputs as the norm. When everything is fast, frictionless and “good enough,” there’s the risk of losing the depth, nuance and intellectual richness that define exceptional human work.</bq> <bq>I wasn’t surprised by these findings. My students and I have found that the outputs of generative AI systems are most closely aligned with the values and worldviews of wealthy, English-speaking nations. This inherent bias quite naturally constrains the diversity of ideas these systems can generate.</bq> <bq>What AI generates may satisfy a short-term need: a quick summary, a plausible design, a passable script. But it rarely transforms, and genuine originality risks being drowned in a sea of algorithmic sameness. The challenge, then, isn’t just technological. It’s cultural. How can the irreplaceable value of human creativity be preserved amid this flood of synthetic content?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-makes-the-humanities-more-important" source="Res Obscura" author="Benjamin Breen">AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder</a> <bq>When an IBM mainframe system broke down in the 1950s (or a steam engine exploded in the 1850s), the people who had to fix it likely did not spare a moment’s thought to consider any of these topics. Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down.</bq> <bq>[...] there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.</bq> <bq>My greatest concern when it comes to LLMs in humanities education is that they will lead to a further polarization in educational outcomes. The Princeton students who Burnett teaches seem extraordinarily thoughtful and creative in their responses to his assignment. I suspect students in a social studies class at an underfunded public high school class would not be. For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do. If we cede that ground, if we ignore the challenge, then we will watch helplessly as education gets taken over by cynical and stultifying “AI learning tools” which trumpet their interactivity while eroding the personalized student-teacher relationship that is at the heart of learning.</bq> Unless you change the system, this is 100% going to happen. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.sumsar.net/blog/pandas-feels-clunky-when-coming-from-r/" author="Rasmus Bååth" source="Publishable Stuff">Why pandas feels clunky when coming from R</a> <bq>[...] what seems even harder, is explaining to “Python people” what they are missing out on. From their perspective, pandas is this fantastic tool that makes Data Science in Python possible. And it is a fantastic tool, don’t get me wrong, but if you, like me, end up in many “pandas is great, but…”-type discussions and are lacking clear examples to link to; here’s a somewhat typical example of a simple analysis, built from the ground up, that flows nicely in R and the tidyverse but that becomes clunky and complicated using Python and pandas.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/partial-keyframes/" author="Josh Comeau" source="">Partial Keyframes: Creating dynamic, composable CSS keyframe animations</a> <bq><code>@keyframes oscillate { from { transform: translateX(calc(var(--amount) * -1)); } to { transform: translateX(var(--amount)); } }</code>Instead of hardcoding a specific value like <c>16px</c> inside our keyframe definition, we can access a CSS variable! With a little help from <c>calc</c>, we can flip that value to its negative counterpart, so that we can oscillate to/from a dynamic value. In order for this to work, we need to define an <c>--amount</c> value on each element that is being animated. For example, we could do that with an inline style:<code>

</code></bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6nuxLCt1LM&t=121s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/u6nuxLCt1LM&t=121s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="AltaSkiArea" caption="Steeped In Tradition Episode 8 - The Farmer"> A best friend told me about farming a couple of years back. It's wonderful. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_x0zO5Gg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/4k9_x0zO5Gg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="wcnmgfw" caption="ABC嘴硬中文点餐"> This is hilarious. No idea how it has only 5 likes. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/totallynotrobots/comments/1l5byci/human_yells_im_back_baby/" author="" source="Reddit">HUMAN YELLS: "I'm back, baby!"</a> <img src="{att_link}totally_intential_robot.webp" href="{att_link}totally_intential_robot.webp" align="none" caption="Totally intentional Bender" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/BicyclingCirclejerk/comments/1l8j3pm/this_sub/" source="Reddit">/r/BicyclingCirclejerk: This sub</a> <img src="{att_link}my_1992_rim-brake_colnago_could_stop_on_a_dime_and_give_you_nine_cents_change.webp" href="{att_link}my_1992_rim-brake_colnago_could_stop_on_a_dime_and_give_you_nine_cents_change.webp" align="none" caption="My 1992 rim-brake Colnago could stop on a dime and give you nine cents change" scale="75%"> <bq>My 1992 rim-brake Colnago could stop on a dime and give you nine cents change. That's nice, Grandma. Time for your medication.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/AdultHood/comments/1kwqxh0/a_good_box/" author="" source="Reddit">A Good Box</a> <img src="{att_link}a_really,_really_good_box.webp" href="{att_link}a_really,_really_good_box.webp" align="none" caption="A really, really good box" scale="50%"> <bq>ONE THING NOBODY EVER TALKS ABOUT BEING AN ADULT IS HOW MUCH TIME YOU DEBATE YOURSELF ON KEEPING A CARDBOARD BOX BECAUSE IT'S LIKE A REALLY, REALLY GOOD BOX.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgSMVSVV_QM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/GgSMVSVV_QM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bindaya Didat" caption="I Am a Viking (Yngwie Malmsteen Cover)"> I forgot to watch this when a friend sent it to me. I love that it was almost two weeks later and there were still only 99 views and 5 upvotes. That's my kind of video. NO ENGAGEMENT. The song is unrecognizable. Grew on me a little bit, though. It took me a minute to even remember what the original was. Then I immediately listened to it. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qALqXrAS9Ug" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/qALqXrAS9Ug" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Louis C.K." caption="Sincerely Louis CK 2">