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Links and Notes for June 13th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#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> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-a-war-with-iran" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Folly of A War With Iran</a> <bq>Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.</bq> <bq>Israel and its neocon allies believe they can eradicate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by force and decapitate the Iranian government to install a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, eludes them. Israel, at the same time, wants to divert world attention from its genocide and mass starvation in Gaza and the accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.</bq> It has honestly worked out absolutely fantastically for the elites, who have collected more and more power and wealth with each of these actions. They don't care about the rest of us. <bq>So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other Takfiri groups, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile? The generals, politicians, intelligence services, neocons, weapons manufacturers, so-called experts, celebrity pundits and Israeli lobbyists are not about to take the blame for two decades of military fiascos. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The humiliating defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failed states of Syria and Libya, the proliferation of extremist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault.</bq> <bq>International law, along with the rights of almost 90 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their leadership, do not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be attacked or occupied. They will resist. And we, and Israel, will pay.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/the-illegal-attack-on-iran/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Illegal Attack on Iran</a> <bq>Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West – egged on by Israel – has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/america-is-the-3-military-now/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">America Is The #3 Military Now</a> <bq>America is no longer the #1 military in the world, and they’re not even #2. They're third, at best, behind China and Russia. America still spends the most money, but that’s just a measure of corruption, not capacity. When it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, America has been losing wars for decades, it’s time to call it. They’re losers.</bq> <bq>America's plan is to do a World War II reboot against Chinese technology that's science fiction to them. And they want to do this after getting their ass beat by Yemen. It's history repeating as farce. The US Navy just lost to men without a Navy or Air Force at all, just sophisticated missiles and balls. Three F-18s ‘fell off boats’, aircraft carriers mysteriously ‘ran into something’ and the USS Truman is so wrecked it has to complete a “multi-year midlife refueling and complex overhaul.” As you can see from my scare quotes, they're running scared, from a brave and ingenious nation that's barely industrialized.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/11/patrick-lawrence-for-whom-the-drones-buzz/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">For Whom the Drones Buzz</a> <bq>There is a general consensus among analysts not bound by their ideological allegiances that Western intelligence directed the drone operation last week, so confining the debate to which service or services held the conductor’s baton. I am with Andrei Kelin, Russia’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who had this to say in an interview with Sky News after the attacks: “Such a kind of attack involves, of course, provision of very high technology, so-called geospace data, which can only be done by those who have it in possession. And this is London and Washington. I don’t believe that America [was involved] — that has been denied by President Trump, definitely, but it has not been denied by London. We perfectly know how much London is involved, how deeply British forces are involved in working together with Ukraine.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/youre-a-bunch-of-cowards" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">You're a Bunch of Cowards!</a> <bq>There is much to be said about the political processes that deployed these men, and the chain of socioeconomic failures that placed our nation in the position we find ourselves. But there is another important thing to be said directly to the men who go to work every day and don the tactical vests and facemasks and act like the willing gestapo agents of our idiot political leader: You guys are fucking cowards.</bq> <bq>Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage. Knowing that, I like to imagine all those big, bad, ICE agents, manly men, so macho, shifting uncomfortably around a conference room table as they are harangued by that psychotic little bureaucrat, and then rushing out to kidnap working men from a Home Depot parking lot in order to demonstrate to their master, Stephen Bitch Ass Miller, how good they are at being America’s new gestapo.</bq> <bq>Fucking clowns. Straight up clowns. All you guys lacked proper male role models or whatever. All you ICE agents wear shades and face masks because you huddle in deep fear of being seen. I’m quite sure you can hardly stand to look at yourselves in the mirror each morning before you set out to lick the feet of your racist paymasters. Change everything about your lives immediately or I promise that your self-loathing will consume you forever. Clowns.</bq> <bq>I laugh at the cowardly ICE agents. There’s a reason people are yelling at you, man. It’s because you’re being a fucking asshole. Do you know what would constitute bravery? Saying, “No, I am not going to carry out this grotesque and racist government assault on its citizens, because I know it is unjust.” That would be brave. Saying “no.” Putting on your bulletproof vest and breaking up families and shrugging and saying “just following orders” and hiding your face is the most weak-ass thing I can imagine. “I’d rather destroy the lives of entire families than have the fellas make fun of me. I’d rather tear mothers away from their children than get a regular job.” Go fuck yourself man. Because nobody cool is ever going to fuck you. That, I guarantee. Keep on dreaming.</bq> <bq>On one side of these protests you have women and children and grandmothers and teenagers and a skater kid who becomes a national icon by dancing around while you shoot at his feet. On the other side we have you and all your colleagues dressed up like a bunch of ridiculous fucking paramilitaries, as if you’re at war in Iraq instead of on a street in the middle of LA, shooting rubber bullets at people because they don’t want their neighbors deported, and because they believe in the First Amendment, and because, somewhere along the line, you made a bad choice in your life, and bought into the idea that this sort of thing makes you strong, badass, admirable, instead of admitting that it demonstrates to everyone with eyes that you are ignorant, weak, and cowardly. Too cowardly to say no when a bad person who doesn’t care about you asks [you] to do evil things on their behalf. Real sad.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/media-panics-about-crime-waves-but-downplays-crime-committed-by-corporations/" source="ZNetwork" author="Alec Karakatsanis">Media Panics About “Crime Waves” — But Downplays Crime Committed by Corporations</a> <bq>Air pollution kills 10 million people each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering. It kills at least 100,000 people in the United States alone annually — about five times the number of police-reported homicides. But it rarely features in daily news stories. Police and prosecutors ignore pollution, much of which is criminal, and so do most journalists. For example, federal prosecutors charged 23 people with environmental offenses in 2020, and they charged more than 23,000 people with drug offenses in the same period. Daily news stories focus on the kinds of legal violations publicized by police and prosecutor press releases, usually involving poor people.</bq> <bq>The same editors and reporters who wrote thousands of stories about low-level shoplifting from chain stores chose for years not to cover the estimated $137 million in corporate wage theft that happens every day, including by the same companies whose press releases about shoplifting they quoted.</bq> <bq>Politicians felt intense political pressure to pass laws, hire and assign thousands more police officers, and increase “enforcement” budgets to tackle a supposed “wave” of retail theft, even as police-recorded theft crimes were going down. These politicians and journalists nonetheless projected an urgency they have never shown for wage theft.</bq> <bq>[...] unlike theft from big retail stores, wage theft is a crime committed by people with a lot of money against workers, many of whom struggle to meet their basic needs.</bq> <bq>What about the 28,260 to 412,000 deaths caused every year in the U.S. because of toxic lead exposure? When a bombshell investigation by The Guardian revealed in 2022 that a huge percentage of pipes in Chicago, the third-largest city in the U.S., contained unsafe levels of lead for children, the story was not covered at all by CNN, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, or NBC News. Intentional action, incompetence, and corruption leading to delays in lead abatement is almost never covered in the news, local or national. As a result, cities like Chicago have exhibited little urgency to fix the problem: the current pace of lead abatement in Chicago would not finish the project for a thousand years.</bq> <bq>[...] in many years fraudulent overdraft fees charged by banks total about the same as all burglary, larceny, car theft, and shoplifting combined. But the news doesn’t report on anecdotes of overdraft fraud crimes by bankers every day. Similarly, it is hard to grasp the scope of the news’s daily silence on the estimated $1 trillion in yearly tax evasion — this is 1,672 times the value of all U.S. robberies combined. What about the estimated $830 billion in other forms of corporate fraud each year? Addressing financial crimes could significantly alter the distribution of wealth, the array of life opportunities, and physical safety for hundreds of millions of human beings. But neither the police nor the media pay much attention to them, and they certainly don’t foment panic about them.</bq> <bq>None of this is to say that violent crime and property crime recorded by police doesn’t matter, or that we shouldn’t care about it. To the contrary, we should care about anything that harms people. But it is vital to be cognizant of what kinds of harm — by whom, against whom, in which moments, and to what end — are treated as “news.” The news about public safety is a social and political creation that contains judgment calls at every turn, one that creates winners and losers and that could look different if we wanted it to.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-last-days-of-gaza" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Last Days of Gaza</a> <bq>In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.</bq> Nice. <bq>"I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived," wrote veteran Apple analyst John Gruber on Daring Fireball in a tribute. "Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us."</bq> <bq>As Apple employee number 51, Atkinson transformed abstract computer science into intuitive visual experiences that millions would use daily: His QuickDraw graphics engine made the Macintosh interface possible; he introduced the wider world to bitmap editing with MacPaint; and HyperCard presaged hyperlinked elements of the World Wide Web by years.</bq> <bq>He also invented the selection lasso and "marching ants" (an animated dotted line that mark a selection area) while creating 1984's MacPaint for the original Macintosh, which established the conceptual framework that image editing apps like Adobe Photoshop would later follow.</bq> <bq>When Lisa managers required engineers to submit weekly reports tracking lines of code written, Atkinson had just finished optimizing QuickDraw's region calculations. His rewrite made the code six times faster while eliminating 2,000 lines. On his first progress report, he entered "-2000" in the lines of code field. After a few more weeks, managers stopped asking him to fill out the form.</bq> <bq>Atkinson developed an innovative high-contrast dithering algorithm that created the illusion of grayscale images with a characteristic stippled appearance that became synonymous with early Mac graphics.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident" author="" source="Wikipedia">USS Liberty incident</a> <bq>The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship (a spy ship), USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War.[2] The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian NSA employee), wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship.[</bq> Get ready for a repeat but falsely flagged to make it look like it was an Iranian missile. Israel already has drone-launching capability from within Iran. The false flag doesn't have to last 30 or 40 years. It just has to last long enough for the first U.S. plane to drop a bomb. The U.S. is already involved in this war, arguably even more than but at least as much as it is in Ukraine. But actively dropping bombs from its own planes would ramp up participation to 100%. <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-shadow-fleet/" author="Anatol Lieven" source="Responsible Statecraft">Europe's risky war on Russia's 'shadow fleet'</a> <bq>It is important to note in this regard that moves to damage Russia’s “shadow fleet” have not been restricted to sanctions. In recent months there have been a string of attacks on such vessels in the Mediterranean with limpet mines and other explosive devices — developments that have been virtually ignored by Western media. In December 2024, the Russian cargo ship Ursa Major sank off Libya after an explosion in which two crewmembers were killed. The Reuters headline reporting these attacks was rather characteristic: “Three tankers damaged by blasts in Mediterranean in the last month, causes unknown, sources say.” Unknown, really? Who do we think were the likely perpetrators? Laotian special forces? Martians? And what are European governments doing to investigate these causes?</bq> <bq>Washington also needs — finally — to pay attention to what the rest of the world thinks about all this. The overwhelming majority of senators who are proposing to impose 500% tariffs on any country that buys Russian energy have apparently not realized that one of the two biggest countries in this category is India — now universally regarded in Washington as a vital U.S. partner in Asia. And now America’s European allies are relying on U.S. support to seize ships providing that energy to India. The U.S. administration would also be wise to warn European countries that if this strategy leads to maritime clashes with Russia, they will have to deal with the consequences themselves. Especially given the new risk of war with Iran, the last thing Washington needs now is a new flare-up of tension with Moscow necessitating major U.S. military deployments to Europe. And the last thing the world economy needs are moves likely to lead to a still greater surge in world energy prices. European governments and establishments seem to have lost any ability to analyze the possible wider consequences of their actions. So — not for the first time — America will have to do their thinking for them.</bq> This is the exact kind of analysis I would expect from a slightly off-mainstream source: he assumes that the U.S. isn't already at war with Iran; he assumes that the U.S. is the adult in the room; he assumes that the U.S. ability to project force is unrestricted by reality. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/16/mryd-j16.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Israel attacks civilian infrastructure in Iran as Netanyahu calls for regime change</a> <bq>In an editorial published Sunday, June 15, the Wall Street Journal called for direct US bombing of Iran, declaring, “Central to an Israeli strategic victory will be whether it can destroy Iran’s main nuclear-weapons sites, and that effort deserves American help.” It writes that the effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear reactors is “where the U.S. comes in. Israel lacks the deep penetrating bombs, and the heavy bombers to deliver them, that could do more damage to buried sites. The U.S. has both, and Israel would like U.S. help in taking out those nuclear sites.” It declares, “Now that the war is underway, the U.S. has a strategic and moral interest in destroying Iran’s nuclear threat and a rapid Israeli victory.” On Saturday, Trump opened the way for direct US involvement in the attack on Iran, saying that if the US were “attacked in any way, shape, or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the US Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before.” The Democratic Party is, meanwhile, openly backing the illegal Israeli assault on Iran. In an interview on NBC Sunday, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff endorsed the attack on Iran, saying, “I think [Israel] found this the opportune moment to go after a nuclear program that was coming closer and closer to fruition. So I support those actions. And I support the administration’s actions in helping Israel defend itself.” Schiff opened the door to supporting the US bombing of Iran, saying, “if Iran attacks the United States, when the administration has made it very clear that we have not been part of the offensive operations against Iran. If they should respond by attacking us, then we should respond by defending ourselves. And then I think Iran opens itself up to potential attacks on Fordow [uranium enrichment refinery] or elsewhere.”</bq> This is what they've wanted all along. It's a repeat of the Russia/Ukraine script. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/16/the-folly-of-the-us-israeli-war-on-iran/" author="Chris Hedges" source="CounterPunch">The Folly of the US/Israeli War on Iran</a> <bq>The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure us into yet another military fiasco with Iran. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.</bq> <bq>A war could last months, if not years. It will be an aerial duel, one largely between Israeli warplanes and missiles and Iranian missiles. But to subdue Iran it will require perhaps a million U.S. troops being deployed to invade and occupy the country. An occupation of Iran will end with the same humiliating defeat the U.S. experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fantasy of Israel and the neocons is that they can break Iran with aerial assaults, an updated version of Shock and Awe, the bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/starmer-and-lammy-are-terrified/" author="Craig Murray" source="ZNetwork">Starmer and Lammy are Terrified</a> <bq>It is of course simply untrue that Iran was about to produce a nuclear weapon. Every Spring a CIA-led US intelligence exercise formally reviews the situation, and the firm position of Five Eyes intelligence remains that Iran genuinely was not seeking to make a nuclear weapon. I hope that Iran learns the lesson of Southern Lebanon. There, over many months, Israeli air superiority enabled them to substantially degrade missile systems of various resistance factions. Israel does – not least because of the traitors ruling Jordan and Syria – have air superiority over Iran. In a long war of attrition, Israeli bombing raids could do real damage to Iranian capabilities. Iran’s best strategy would be to view this as the existential crisis, and seriously unload its missile capacity on Israel without restraint. The period of measured tit-for-tat reprisals is at an end. The decision of nuclear-armed Pakistan to stand behind Iran was extremely helpful. These are early days in the Israeli-Iranian war. I do not sense any popular enthusiasm in the USA to be involved. Even the mainstream American media is characterising Iranian attacks as “retaliation” and the Israeli victim card is no longer as Platinum as it used to be here in the USA. Germany has been refuelling Israeli jets en route to attack Iran, and the UK may also have been doing so. Starmer and Macron have both expressed determination to defend Israel with their own military but both would face massive popular resistance. We wait to see what happens next. But having lived through vicious Israeli bombardment of Beirut, having been menaced by drones in the Bekaa Valley, having stood on the line at Kfar Kila while a twelve-year-old boy was shot standing next to my producer, having witnessed 100,000 Lebanese homes destroyed, I have no sympathy left for Tel Aviv.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/19/jhxi-j19.html" author="Peter Schwarz" source="WSWS">German Chancellor Merz: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”</a> <bq>On the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz endorsed Israel's attack on Iran in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF. He said, “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. I can only say that I have the utmost respect for the Israeli army and the Israeli leadership for having had the courage to do this.”</bq> Merz is a pile of human trash. What a fucking moron. Just giving Netanyahu and Trump a run for their money in the race of stupid criminality. My God, at least they're getting something out of it. Merz is just a lackey and doesn't even realize it. Killing scientists, their families, and their neighbors in their beds in their homes is "courageous." ...time to read Orwell's 1984 again. <bq>In another interview with the ARD public broadcaster, Merz advocated violent regime change in Tehran. “It would be good if this regime came to an end,” he said. If the Iranian regime is not prepared to enter into talks, then “Israel will go all the way.” </bq> Oh my God he doubled down. He's all "did I stutter?" He's absolutely mad. This is deeply delusional but that's who's running things on "our side." <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/bombing-hospitals-is-bad-again" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Bombing Hospitals Is Bad Again</a> <bq>If your case for going to war contains the words “the Bible says” or “God commands us”, then you do not have a case for going to war.</bq> <bq>The lesson here isn’t that war hawks are too lazy or stupid to learn things about the nations they want to destroy, the lesson is that they are lying when they say they care about the people in those nations and want to liberate them. They don’t care about Iranian people. At all. They care about power, empire-building, oil, and Israel, and then they make up a bunch of stories about wanting to rescue the people they’re about to murder from the rule of a tyrannical regime. All wars are built on lies.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/war-is-the-worst-thing-in-the-world" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">War Is The Worst Thing In The World</a> <bq>They always tell us the new war they want us to fight is about self-defense, or about liberating an oppressed population from a tyrannical dictatorship, or about preventing terrorism, or about spreading freedom and democracy. Usually they tell us it’s about all of these things. But it never is. They are always lying. Always. They are pushing human beings into the worst circumstances they could possibly experience here on earth for no other reason than power and profit. To advance the hegemonic agendas of empire managers and to fill the coffers of war profiteers. That’s all it ever is. Always, always, always. They say whatever they need to say and move whatever chess pieces they need to move to get their war, and then they send a bunch of poor suckers to go fight in it, lying to them that they are doing something noble and heroic. They ship them off to a foreign land, and then they are trapped. They can’t flee into the wilderness because they don’t know how to survive and have no way of getting home. They can’t ask the locals for help because the locals are their victims. They have no choice but to either fight and kill people who have never wronged them, or lay down their arms and be caged like animals. If they choose to fight, the best case scenario is that they spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed other human beings who wanted to live just as much as themselves, and who had just as much right to. All because some people who already had far too much power wanted a little bit more.</bq> <bq>Yet we are told it’s normal. We are trained to believe this is just the reality we live in which we should expect and accept, first by our parents and teachers, and then by our news media and by Hollywood. War is aggressively normalized by pundits, propagandists and politicians, and enthusiastically glorified in movies and documentaries.</bq> <bq>Those who push for peace are framed as treasonous freaks who must surely have covert loyalties toward whatever government the empire is trying to target this time around. Those who suggest that there might be some solution apart from war are dismissed as infantile dreamers. And once the war has started, it is almost impossible to stop. The entire political/media class treats the war as the new normal, and any suggestion that it’s time to wrap things up is regarded as outlandish and suspicious. It’s never time to end the war, because this or that objective has not yet been achieved, or because this or that faction might come into power if troops are pulled out, or because this or that disempowered group might suffer without our military there to protect them.</bq> <bq>Do not let the warmongers shout you down or shut you up. You are right, and they are wrong. Let your voice thunder with confidence. Let nothing cause you to waver. Blessed are the peacemakers. Don’t let anyone trick you into doubting what you know to be true.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/israel-iran-and-tucker-carlsons-plans" author="Yasha Levin" source="Nefarious Russians">Israel, Iran, and Tucker Carlson's plans for domestic regime change</a> <bq>Tucker’s entire frame for understanding recent American history is totally flipped on its head. To call Bill Clinton a left-winger is to live in an alternative reality divorced from basic verifiable facts. Like him or hate him, Bill is the poster child of the neoliberal turn. He gutted welfare, deregulated Wall Street, helped ship out American manufacturing overseas even more, and destroyed labor. Bill’s neolib policies were so extreme that some of them got opposition from the business populist right like Ross Perot. Not sure what’s left about Clinton, maybe other than his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell gays in the military policy — which, you know, is pretty conservative. BE GAY. JUST DON’T TELL US! OR YOU ARE FIRED!</bq> <bq>In the 1990s, the neoliberal wing took power in Russia and went on a shock therapy capitalist transformation of their own society — fully backed and propped up by the Clinton Administration. What Americans didn’t understand that was that the very policies that their government was supporting in Russia were about to come home and were going to be applied to the United States itself. The USSR collapsed and the Cold War front came home…</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aL4G_E24U8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9aL4G_E24U8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Daily Reminder" caption="NORMAN FINKELSTEIN CALMLY OWNS ZIONIST!"> The title is clickbait and the presentation is bizarre. It looks like it's snowing and the video looks a bit like it was clipped together, but that's probably more to evade copyright claims than to fool you. I wrote about the full, original video in <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5004#finkelstein">Links and Notes for March 29th, 2024</a>, which is well-worth watching in its entirety. The clip above comes from 01:26:00 of the full video. I wrote at the time, <bq>It was fascinating to see how the first 15 minute of questions were turned by the first questioner---who was clutching a little Israeli flag---to the question of the Houthis and their slogan. It reads, "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam." This is not good, of course, but it's so far beside the point. And it's completely understandable, as Finkelstein explains with an example from his own family. He says that his Mother's only experience of Germans was that they were all monsters. Every one she met was involved in trying to kill her. So, she didn't feel she needed to talk about Nazis and talked about Germans instead. That is her right as someone who's experienced what she experienced. Similarly, as Finkelstein points out, the Houthis only experience of Jews is Israelis, who have always had their boot on their necks. So it's hardly surprising that they are so virulently against them. That the Houthis might be people who you wouldn't want to have as neighbors doesn't change the fact that they are the only state that has actively tried to prevent the ongoing genocide---with no effectiveness, but no matter. They are honest about their aims, whereas the Israeli motto could be "God is the Greatest, Life to America, Death to Palestine, A Curse Upon the Muslims, Victory to Israel." Actually, to be fair, Israel is also very clear about the supremacy of Judaism and Israel, and their desire to wipe out out all of their enemies, be they in mosques, hospitals, schools, or their own beds in their own homes.</bq> I would like to add, though, that it is the privilege of anyone who's not been as directly affected as Finkelstein's mother to not be prejudiced against whole classes of people. You really only have an excuse if you've been deeply damaged by a people, as the Jews were in WWII or as the Houthis have been in their interactions with Israel for that last 75 years. Hell, I couldn't blame anyone from fifty of more countries into which the U.S.A. has stomped a mudhole over the last century from hating me personally as a citizen of that country. I'd wish it weren't so, I'd wish they could get past it, if only for their own sanity and for their own soul, but I would be neither surprised nor would I judge them for it. I've occasionally told people that I'm occasionally surprised that I've never met someone who just hates Americans and then wants to take it out on me (my accent is very recognizable). It's never happened. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi0b0rnMcic" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bi0b0rnMcic" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Man Carrying Thing" caption="the media trying to sell WW3 right now"> This is a pretty good 50-second video but I very much liked the top two comments at the time that I watched it. <bq author="VirtualBoy500">"I wish life could be more like when I was a child." monkey's paw curls</bq> In case you don't get the reference, it's kinda from the <a href="{att_link}simpsons-monkeys-paw.mp4">Simpsons Monkeys-Paw episode</a> but also from the short story <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey's_Paw" author="" source="Wikipedia">The Monkey's Paw</a> <bq author="AsiniusNaso">“This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t” - The Onion, 2003</bq> This article still exists, <a href="https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-region-and-1819594296/" author="Nathan Eckert & Bob Sheffer" source="The Onion" date="March 26, 2003">This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t</a> <bq>If you thought Osama bin Laden was bad, just wait until the countless children who become orphaned by U.S. bombs in the coming weeks are all grown up. Do you think they will forget what country dropped the bombs that killed their parents? In 10 or 15 years, we will look back fondly on the days when there were only a few thousand Middle Easterners dedicated to destroying the U.S. and willing to die for the fundamentalist cause. From this war, a million bin Ladens will bloom.</bq> Time is a wheel. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfXmpJRZPYI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/HfXmpJRZPYI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Tony Benn" date="February 17, 1998" caption="House of Commons Iraq Bombing Speech"> From <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1998/feb/17/iraq#column_928" author="" source="API Parliament UK">HC Deb 17 February 1998 vol 306 cc899-990</a> and <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Benn" author="" source="Wikquote">Tony Benn</a>, <bq>War is easy to talk about; there are not many people left of the generation which remembers it. The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup [sc., Edward Heath] served with distinction in the last war. I never killed anyone but I wore uniform. I was in London during the blitz in 1940, living where the Millbank tower now stands, where I was born. Some different ideas have come in there since. Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames house. Every morning, I saw docklands burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 news item. Every Member of Parliament who votes for the Government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins, as I fear it will. That decision is for every hon. Member to take. In my parliamentary experience, this a unique debate. We are being asked to share responsibility for a decision that we will not really be taking but which will have consequences for people who have no part to play in the brutality of the regime with which we are dealing. And I'll finish with this. On 24 October 1945, [...] the United Nations charter was passed. The words of that charter are etched on my mind and move me even as I think of them. It says: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind". That was that generation's pledge to this generation, and it would be the greatest betrayal of all if we voted to abandon the charter, take unilateral action and pretend that we were doing so in the name of the international community. I shall vote against the motion for the reasons that I have given.</bq> Credit where credit is due, I watched this speech in the video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyTtz0Wri-8" author="Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom" source="YouTube">BEST ANTI-WAR SPEECH!</a> but included a reference to just the speech in a separate video. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2025/06/19/israels-attack-on-iran-the-violent-new-world-being-born-is-going-to-horrify-you/" author="Jonathan Cook" source="Antiwar.com">Israel’s Attack on Iran: The Violent New World Being Born Is Going To Horrify You</a> <bq>[...] the double standards are enforced to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control.</bq> <bq>This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us. If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want. The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/genocide-can-be-live-streamed-because" source="Nefarious Russians" author="Yasha Levine">Genocide can be live-streamed because social media has pacified us</a> <bq>[...] this technology is designed to pacify us by trapping us in endless loops of conflict, outrage, and desire…and about how this technology wastes our lives and limited energy while giving us the illusion that we’re engaged in politics and meaningful social interaction.</bq> <bq>[...] you can point to the Biden administration putting pressure on social media companies to lightly restrict vaccine skepticism and COVID denialism on their platforms in the name of the public good. It’s something that the right has made a huge political deal about — Biden as Communist Big Brother and all that.</bq> Why do you have to soft-pedal this one? Porque no los dos? Tell you're against censorship unless done by the right people without telling us directly. And then, the author doubles down by saying that <iq>the right</iq> were the ones who made a <iq>huge political deal</iq> about it. This from the person who can't stop writing about how the app Signal is still somehow captured by the CIA. Dude, WTF. <bq>If Israel and America were concerned with stopping the live-streaming of the genocide, they would have taken out Gaza’s internet access. They would have disabled or hacked and jammed the last bits of internet lifeline that Gazans now use to connect to the world — which is primarily done through Egypt’s cell towers right across the border. Israel could have made Gaza go totally dark.</bq> Well, they not only cut off the last Internet connection to Gaza but they also simultaneously launched a war of aggression on Iran so that no-one will even notice that far fewer videos are coming out of Gaza. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html" source="" author="Drew DeVault">Unionize or die</a> <bq>Far from mounting any kind of resistance, most of tech labor doesn’t even understand that this is happening to them. Your boss is obsessed with making you powerless and replaceable. You may not realize how much leverage you have over your boss, but your boss certainly does – and has been doing everything in their power to undermine you before you wizen up. Don’t let yourself believe you’re a part of their club – if your income depends on your salary, you are part of the working class.</bq> <bq>Think about strategic investments in cheap(ish), broadly available courses, online schools and coding “bootcamps” – dangling your high salary as the carrot in front of wannabe coders fleeing dwindling prospects in other industries, certain that the carrot won’t be nearly as big when they all eventually step into a crowded labor market.</bq> <bq>Have you been ordered to use an LLM assistant to “help” with your programming? Have you even thought about why the executives would push this crap on you? You’re “training” your replacement. Do you really think that, if LLMs really are going to change the way we code, they aren’t going to change the way we’re paid for it? Do you think your boss doesn’t see AI as a chance to take $100M off of their payroll expenses?</bq> <bq>[...] a tech union isn’t just about negotiating higher wages and benefits, although that’s definitely on the table. It’s about protecting yourself, and your colleagues, from the relentless campaign against labor that the tech leadership is waging against us. And more than that, it’s about seizing some of the awesome, society-bending power of the tech giants. Look around you and see what destructive ends this power is being applied to. You have your hands at the levers of this power if only you rise together with your peers and make demands.</bq> <bq>Limiting warming to 2° C requires us to cut global emissions in half by 2030 – in 5 years – but emissions haven’t even peaked yet. Present-day climate policies are only expected to limit warming to 2.5° to 2.9° C by 2100.</bq> The 3-degree scenario is nearly inconceivably different---bad---than what we experience now. <bq>Climate change is accelerating, and faster than we thought, and the rich and powerful are making it happen faster. Climate catastrophe is not in the far future, it’s not our children or our children’s children, it’s us, it’s already happening. You and I will live to see dozens of global catastrophes playing out in our lifetimes, with horrifying results. Even if we started a revolution tomorrow and overthrew the ruling class and implemented aggressive climate policies right now we will still watch tens or hundreds of millions die.</bq> And the same number---tens or hundreds of millions---will migrate. The future is land and water wars. What has happened until now is just the beginning. The crackdown on immigrants in the EU and the U.S. is just the beginning. <bq>The plutocracy has an answer to climate change: fascism. When 12% of the world’s population is knocking at the doors of the global north, their answer will be concentration camps and mass murder. They are already working on it today. When the problem is capitalism, the capitalists will go to any lengths necessary to preserve the institutions that give them power – they always have. They have no moral compass or reason besides profit, wealth, and power. The 1% will burn and pillage and murder the 99% without blinking.</bq> <bq>The rich are literally going to kill you and everyone you know and love just because it will make them richer. Because it is making them richer.</bq> <bq>Our opinion has no influence whatsoever on policy adoption. Public condemnation or widespread support has the same effect on a policy proposal, i.e. none. But for the wealthy, it’s a different story entirely. I’ve never seen it stated so plainly and clearly: the only thing that matters is money, wealth, and capital. Money is power, and the rich have it and you don’t.</bq> That citation refers to the 2014 study by Gilens and Page that established that, in the U.S., at least, there is statistically no influence on the part of most people on policy. Zero. None. No matter how much they want something. No matter how much they don't want something. It doesn't matter. They don't get what they want, no matter how large their numbers. The only thing that matters is money. Economic elites get what they want a large amount of the time. <bq>Together, we do have power. In fact, we can fuck with those bastards’ money and they will step in line if, and only if, we organize. It is the only solution, and it will work. The ultra-rich possess no morals or ideology or passion or reason. They align with fascists because the fascists promise what they want, namely tax cuts, subsidies, favorable regulation, and cracking the skulls of socialists against the pavement. The rich hoard and pillage and murder with abandon for one reason and one reason only: it’s profitable. The rich always do what makes them richer, and only what makes them richer. Consequently, you need to make this a losing strategy. You need to make it more profitable to do what you want. To control the rich, you must threaten the only thing they care about.</bq> <bq>The call has gone out: on Labor Day, 2028 – just under three years from now – there will be a general strike in the United States. The United Auto Workers union, one of the largest in the United States, has arranged for their collective bargaining agreements to end on this date, and has called for other unions to do the same across all industries. The American Federation of Teachers and its 1.2 million members are on board, and other unions are sure to follow. Your new union should be among them. This is how we collectively challenge not just our own employers, but our political institutions as a whole. This is how we turn this nightmare around.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-subway-is-not-scary" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">The Subway Is Not Scary</a> <bq>There are homeless people on the subway. They are there because they have no homes. Some of them are mentally ill. If you ride the subway a lot, it is possible that you will see a homeless person who does not smell good sleeping on a train. It is possible that you will see a mentally ill person ranting and raving. This may make you uncomfortable. But imagine how they feel. Not only are they homeless, but they are also in need of mental health treatment, and they don’t have it, and instead they are consigned to riding a train all day, where people constantly move away from them and view them with disgust. An awful fate. What might a serious policy response to this situation look like, from mature adults who take this issue seriously? Is it… “have cops with guns arrest them all?” Come on. Give me a freaking break. Stupid Rambo ass policy. A real solution would involve a serious investment in mental health and housing programs, and then having a dedicated team of outreach workers who can go onto subways and connect the homeless people there to the services they need. Incidentally, this is Zohran Mamdani’s proposal. When Serious Political Thinkers talk about it, they say “he wants to defund the police.”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPGvXhicF2M" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/iPGvXhicF2M" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="antipodeonline" caption="David Harvey and the City – An Antipode Foundation film"> I didn't know that David Harvey has lived in the U.S. since 1969. He teaches Marx's Kapital at NYU. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/making-plagues-investable/" source="Jacobin" author="Olivia Oldham">Making Plagues Investable</a> <bq>The pandemic bonds were the first catastrophe bonds to deal in health and, ostensibly, public service. Erikson — keeping her bearings amid the seductive, self-reinforcing logic of the financial industry, the abstract wonkiness of eager modelers, and the hubris of the global bank — concludes that public health and finance have fundamentally opposing aims; that saving a life may not result in an increase in “human capital.” She scrutinizes the forces that pulled at the inventor of pandemic bonds, finding that the tensions that divided Kim’s priorities led to instability in the edifice he built. Instead of using the knowledge he had accumulated from his years of public health and development experience, he tried to graft the newly inherited culture of finance onto an incompatible problem.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/we-have-always-lived-in-the-casino/" source="Jacobin" author="Doug Henwood">We Have Always Lived in the Casino</a> <bq>Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in the twelfth chapter of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the best thing ever written on speculative markets. “But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”</bq> <bq>[...] there’s an aspect of the markets that people who only focus on price movements might overlook: they’re real instruments of power and control. That angle is an important part of the economic history of the last several decades, beginning with the shareholder revolution of the early 1980s. From the time of the 1929 stock market crash through the Great Depression and into the early post–World War II decades, the stock market barely counted in the running of actual companies, even though stockholders are their ultimate owners. Stocks were mostly held by individuals who couldn’t coordinate their actions with one another. Managers ran corporations, and stockholders sat back and collected their dividends. It was a time when Keynesian “marriages” defined the relationship.</bq> <bq>A somewhat disreputable crew of takeover artists, using mostly borrowed money, launched wars on what they saw as underperforming corporations throughout the 1980s, buying up their stock and displacing management. In their eyes, CEOs were wasting money on investment, employees, and their own perks rather than distributing it to their ultimate bosses, the shareholders. The raiders demanded aggressive cost cutting and a single-minded focus on getting profits and stock prices up. Outsourcing, layoffs, and speedup became the order of the day. The sense of perpetual insecurity still experienced by the contemporary working class has its roots in this period.</bq> They still feel insecurity because this phase has never ended. It's just called private equity now. <bq>Distinctions like these, however, are often favored by apologists for capitalism: if we could just wipe away the speculative froth and get back to a determined industriousness, everything would be a lot better. It would be — but capitalism won’t do that for you. Even the most industrious enterprises, ones set up to sell fundamental use values like food, clothing, and shelter, depend on the pursuit of profit. Since there’s no guarantee the capitalist can sell the products, it’s an undertaking that is ultimately speculative. For truly industrious enterprise, we need some socialism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/the-crypto-state/" source="Jacobin" author="Ramaa Vasudevan">The Crypto State</a> <bq>While Bitcoin ETFs were already trading in Bitcoin futures, regulatory approval expanded the terrain, so it was a watershed moment in mainstreaming crypto that opened the floodgates.</bq> I hate that I know what this means. I don't invest. Why should I profit from other people's work when they don't? I feel kind of like the native American who wouldn't dream of buying forests because they belong to everyone. The idea doesn't even make sense. <bq>Right now, it’s about $2.8 trillion, and Bitcoin dominates with about $1.8 trillion. Approximately 60 percent of the crypto market is accounted for by Bitcoin. By way of comparison, the combined market capitalization of the four largest US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — reached about $1.5 trillion at the beginning of 2025. Despite the claims and promises of decentralization, the actual functioning of the crypto sphere is dependent on large, centralized exchanges where you buy and sell crypto assets.</bq> <bq>What all these policies boil down to is a relaxation of restrictions on the issuance, use, and trading of crypto assets, while at the same time easing constraints on banks and fund managers in dealing with these assets. Crypto is being brought out from the shadows to the center stage, and with minimal regulatory oversight. Pension funds like the State of Michigan Retirement System and the State of Wisconsin Investment Board are already holding Bitcoin funds.</bq> <bq>Even if we ignore the fact that the crypto sphere is rife with fraud and graft, we have to recognize that crypto is a segment of finance that is completely detached from funding production and real investment. Finance is a complicated and contradictory beast. It is essential plumbing for the capitalist economic system, but it is also the basis of speculation. Crypto is a sphere that is completely about speculation. It is finance for its own sake, and this reserve is extending a safety net to this sphere while giving it free rein to pursue speculation. This is a setup for disaster.</bq> <bq>If anything, the tendency for financial fragility has been exacerbated with the mainstreaming of crypto and the permissive attitude of regulators, despite the highly speculative nature of cryptocurrency and the perils of exposing unsophisticated or retail investors to this volatility.</bq> That's not a bug; it's a feature. <bq>That is the key thing about a stablecoin. It has to maintain parity with a peg, yet not one of them has been able to. When this happens, the impact will be a run on the stablecoin. Depositors will pull out in a way that is similar to a conventional bank run, magnified by social media effects, as we saw with Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023.</bq> Because it's a scam. It doesn't have to work. It has to make enough people believe it will work for people to make money on it before it goes tits-up. Your first clue is that it doesn't even promise to do anything for you other than make money for the speculators who can jump when the rug is pulled. <bq>Milei has developed a reputation for tackling Argentina’s debt and inflation crisis with a particularly perverse and autocratic brand of austerity. With the fall in the stock market and the value of the peso, Milei returned to the International Monetary Fund for yet another loan while bypassing the legislature in order to boost his economic agenda and electoral prospects. This is a depressing story of grift, graft, and greed. But it’s also a sign of what to expect from the melding of crypto and political power that is being celebrated right now by the regime in the United States.</bq> <bq>[...] a Silicon Valley–Washington nexus is being grafted onto the existing Wall Street–Washington nexus that had implicated the state and the Fed in bailing out Wall Street from all the consequences of its risk-taking over and over again. We are seeing the extension of the doom loop that ties the state to finance and now to Big Tech spreading to crypto and financial technology in order to harness the immense possibilities of monetizing and weaponizing the data and digital footprints of everyday life in the pursuit of private profit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/the-house-always-wins/" source="Jacobin" author="Matt Zarb-Cousin">The House Always Wins</a> <bq>Like the statistics surrounding FOBTs, around 45 percent of those who engage with online slots and casino games experience gambling problems, and online slots have a six times higher rate of “problem gambling” than other products. More than 85 percent of the sector’s revenues come from just 5 percent of its customers, most of whom are losing more than they can afford. When the UK Gambling Commission made it mandatory for operators to carry out affordability checks before assigning their customers VIP status, which would trigger more inducements to gamble, the number of VIPs decreased by 90 percent. These kinds of VIP status programs are now prevalent in the United States and have become the subject of lawsuits against operators for their aggressive and relentless bespoke marketing from personally assigned “VIP hosts.”</bq> <bq>This is reflective of a commercial model based on cross-promoting the most addictive content and extracting as much as possible from a user until they have nothing left to lose. And given the shift to app-based gambling, the addictive casino table game content and VIP hosts aren’t the only tools at operators’ disposal.</bq> <bq>[...] the inconvenient truth for the sector is that the legalization of sports betting hasn’t displaced a black market that is already entrenched among US consumers. In fact, according to the market surveillance platform Yield Sec, illegal online gambling operators now control 74 percent of the $90 billion US online gambling marketplace. Last year, illegal gambling revenues grew twice as fast as those of the legal industry.</bq> <bq>The second narrative advanced by the gambling lobby is that by allowing licensed operators to compete commercially with illegal gambling sites, standards of consumer protection and harm reduction will somehow improve. Illegal gambling operators pay no taxes and abide by no regulations, so competing with them through tax cuts and liberalization is impossible. But the idea that this is feasible is very convenient for a gambling lobby seeking to reduce taxes and regulations for its own industry.</bq> <bq>The way things stand now, the general trend is bad and only going to get worse. It is the first time in human history that slots and casino games are this accessible. The British experiment that turned every high street into a roulette parlor — and then every smartphone into a casino — has had miserable consequences. In the UK, one in ten people is directly or indirectly harmed by gambling, and 9 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds are problem gamblers.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/an-island-of-little-landlords/" source="Jacobin" author="John Merrick">An Island of Little Landlords</a> <bq>With growing inequality severing the link between work and wealth, it is no wonder that the landlord, who sits in his spacious home and collects his fat monthly checks without breaking a sweat, has become the new aspirational figure of British culture.</bq> <bq>Today the vast majority, 93 percent, of properties in the residential rental sector are held by individuals and households rather than large companies. Of these individual landlords, 86 percent own between one and four properties, and only 4 percent do so as their full-time job. For the rest it is a supplement to their employment, not a replacement for it, a fact that none of Britain’s landlord influencers choose to mention.</bq> <bq>Influencers like Leeds don’t act alone. They are part of a nexus of online content creators who speak directly to the insecurities of those whom Britain’s economy is failing. Many alienated and insecure young people spend hours every day on their phones, their social media feeds offering them glimpses into a world of wealth, fame, and adulation, all seemingly just out of reach.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/speculation-in-the-age-of-no-growth/" source="Jacobin" author="Aaron Benanav">Speculation in the Age of No Growth</a> <bq>[...] most people feel like nothing in their lives is moving at all. Wages have barely budged in years. Housing is unaffordable. Infrastructure is crumbling. Jobs offer less security, fewer benefits, more anxiety. For all the motion at the top of the economy, ordinary life feels stuck. This sense of stuckness isn’t an illusion. It reflects something real: the economy is stagnating. Despite all the churn, growth remains sluggish. New industries are harder to come by, and living standards inch upward at a snail’s pace. The economy struggles to create good jobs, rising incomes, and meaningful opportunities.</bq> <bq>That’s why speculation has become central to the system. It isn’t the cause of stagnation; it’s how the system tries to outrun it. When the real economy stops delivering, capital doesn’t just sit idly by. It looks elsewhere. With fewer profitable investments in production, money flows into whatever assets might go up in price: housing, stocks, tokens, hype.</bq> <bq>The government didn’t just let this happen; it helped make it happen. Since the 1980s, the state has deregulated finance and pumped money into the economy through cheap credit, tax cuts, deficit spending, and quantitative easing. But instead of triggering a wave of productive investment, most of that money flowed into speculation. It propped up asset prices, inflated bubbles, and rewarded the already wealthy, all without restoring real dynamism.</bq> <bq>You don’t buy an apartment to earn rent; you flip it. You don’t back a company because it’s profitable; you bet on its valuation exploding. This shift has profound consequences. It doesn’t just change what capital does. It changes what kinds of businesses get built, what kinds of risks workers are exposed to, and what kind of future anyone can reasonably plan for. In the old model, a company attracted investment because it sold a profitable product. In the new model, what matters is growth, speed, scale, and hype.</bq> <bq>Firms like Uber and WeWork weren’t valued for their earnings. They were valued for how much market share they could grab before anyone started asking questions. The hope was simple: dominate now, profit later. Grow big enough, burn enough cash, and eventually you’d become too essential to fail.</bq> <bq>In a slow-growth economy, the only companies making serious money are those with massive scale: firms that can corner markets, lock in users, and extract steady returns through sheer dominance. Think of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, or older giants like Comcast, Verizon, and UnitedHealth. These are not start-ups chasing new frontiers. They are entrenched players, sitting on top of essential infrastructure — subscriptions, platforms, logistics, data — and collecting rents.</bq> <bq>[...] the real prize isn’t building something better. It’s becoming too big to lose. That logic is now powering the AI boom. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are losing billions of dollars a year, but they’re backed by billions more from powerhouses like Microsoft and Amazon chasing the next big thing.</bq> <bq>[...] with so much capital chasing so few real returns, the money keeps flowing anyway. Not because the fundamentals are strong, but because there’s nowhere better to put it.</bq> <bq>If you can’t earn your way to a better life, maybe you can bet your way there. Retail trading, crypto, and sports betting have exploded. During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions opened brokerage accounts — not to save for retirement but to gamble on meme stocks like AMC and GameStop. It didn’t matter what the asset was, as long as someone else might buy it for more tomorrow.</bq> <bq>The system has taught people that risk is the only path to reward. For a lucky few, it works. Someone turns a Reddit post into a meme stock windfall and becomes a millionaire overnight. Yet most lose money and fall further behind.</bq> <bq>Rich countries shifted from producing manufactured goods to services. Factory jobs that once lifted wages and drove productivity were replaced by work in education, health care, retail, and food service, sectors where efficiency gains come more slowly. You can double the output of a car plant, but you can’t double the number of patients a nurse can treat without lowering the quality of care. This matters because productivity growth is what drives rising living standards. It allows wages to rise and prices to stay stable. In services, that engine sputters. Gains come slowly, and prices rise faster.</bq> <bq>As more income concentrated at the top, spending power drained from the broader economy, weakening demand and further reinforcing the slowdown. In this environment, talented people stopped building things and started managing portfolios. Aspiring engineers became consultants. Scientists went into private equity or corporate law. And through it all, the justification stayed the same: that the markets knew best. That the next boom was just around the corner. But it wasn’t.</bq> <bq>We could invest directly in what people actually need: homes, transit, schools, hospitals, clean energy, shared spaces. Not to chase returns but to improve lives. Not every project would succeed. Not every idea would work, but we would be choosing what kind of future we want and using our collective resources to build it. We don’t have to keep organizing society around private equity firms and stock market valuations. We could shut those systems down and replace them with institutions designed to direct investment where it matters most.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502" source="Quartz" author="Catherine Baab">The hidden time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs</a> <bq>For almost 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the costs. Salaries, software, contractor payments — if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it came off the top of a firm’s taxable income. The deduction was guaranteed by Section 174 of the IRS Code of 1954, and under the provision, R&D flourished in the U.S.</bq> This is a neat answer to a conversational partner I had early last week, where they were arguing that China subsidizes everything, warping the market. I had responded that the West does the same thing---they just don't subsidize companies in the textile market, as China does. Instead, it nearly exclusively subsidizes high tech and weaponry. This is another good example: The U.S. government basically pays for all R&D for U.S. companies---in that R&D is a 100% deduction. The only way that this changed in 2023 was that the 100% deduction is now amortized over 5-15 years (depending on various conditions). Remember also that the top corporate-tax rate had been simultaneously reduced from 35% to 21% at the same time. The only reason that this change would reduce R&D is that the entire U.S. economy is filled with companies that are utterly unwilling to do anything without free state support. I would like to know how that differs from Chinese companies and the Chinese government in a positive way. <bq>When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the signature legislative achievement of President Donald Trump’s first term, it slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — a massive revenue loss on paper for the federal government. To make the 2017 bill comply with Senate budget rules, lawmakers needed to offset the cost. So they added future tax hikes that wouldn’t kick in right away, wouldn’t provoke immediate backlash from businesses, and could, in theory, be quietly repealed later. The delayed change to Section 174 — from immediate expensing of R&D to mandatory amortization, meaning that companies must spread the deduction out in smaller chunks over five or even 15-year periods — was that kind of provision. It didn’t start affecting the budget until 2022, but it helped the TCJA appear “deficit neutral” over the 10-year window used for legislative scoring.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4iSs-VzDKc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/_4iSs-VzDKc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Center for Brooklyn History" caption="CBH Talk | “Capitalism and Its Critics” with John Cassidy and Doug Henwood"> This was an excellent talk, mostly by John Cassidy, about capitalism, Luddism, Marxism, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, John Maynard Keynes and so on. I learned the term <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap" author="" source="Wikipedia">Thucydides Trap</a> <bq>The Thucydides Trap, or Thucydides' Trap, is a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.[1] The term exploded in popularity in 2015 and primarily applies to analysis of China–United States relations.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/20/yqhj-j20.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">UBS Wealth Report 2025 exposes exponential growth of inequality internationally</a> <bq>The report notes a “significant gap in wealth per adult persists between North America and Oceania on the one hand, and the world’s other sub-regions on the other.” In 2024, adults in North America were the wealthiest on average ($593,347), followed by Oceania ($496,696) and Western Europe ($287,688). Despite Western Europe’s position, it “trails far behind North America and Oceania.”</bq> <bq>The number of dollar millionaires globally increased by 1.2 percent in 2024, adding “more than 684,000 people.” The United States leads this surge, creating “over 379,000 new millionaires” in 2024—an alarming fact that translates to “more than 1,000 a day.” The US now accounts for “almost 40 per cent of global millionaires,” counting “almost 24 million of them,” which is “over four times as many as the number two, mainland China, and more than the latter, France, the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan and Australia put together.”</bq> The maw of empire consumes all. <bq>The Gini coefficient, where a higher score indicates greater inequality, ranges from “0.38 in Slovakia, the most egalitarian score in our sample, to 0.82 in Brazil” and Russia.</bq> I'm not sure which data they're using because the GINI data is wildly out of date in for some countries in the sources that I could find. In most of them, though, Russia was at 35.1% (2021), China at 35.7% (2021), and the U.S. at 41.3% (2022), and Brazil at 52% (2021). Israel is just under the U.S. at 37.9% (2021). What about Europe? Switzerland is at 33.7% (2020). Italy, Germany, and France are all very similar. Slovakia and Slovenia at 24% (2021). Other parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans as well as Scandinavia are in the high 20s or low 30s. <bq>The exponential growth of wealth for the few amidst an exponential suffering for the many is not a malfunction of capitalism: it is its fundamental operating principle.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-core-of-fermats-last-theorem-just-got-superpowered-20250602/" source="Quanta Magazine" author="Joseph Howlett">The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered</a> <bq>It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February (opens a new tab). Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form. Their new portal could one day be as powerful as Taylor and Wiles’ result, revealing more about abelian surfaces than anyone thought possible. But first, the team will have to extend their result to non-ordinary abelian surfaces. They’ve teamed up with Pan to continue the hunt. “Ten years from now, I’d be surprised if we haven’t found almost all of them,” Gee said. The work has also allowed mathematicians to formulate new conjectures — such as an analogue of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture that involves abelian surfaces instead of elliptic curves. “Now we at least know that the analogue makes sense” for these ordinary surfaces, said Andrew Sutherland (opens a new tab), a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Previously we did not know that.”</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/08/please-ensure-that-the-planet-does-not-burn/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">Please Ensure That the Planet Does Not Burn</a> <bq>It is important to emphasise the fact that environmental degradation has not been caused by humans in general, but by a certain system of organising society which we call capitalism.</bq> <bq>If everyone lived like an average person in the United States, then we would need five Earths. If everyone lived like an average person in the European Union, we would need three Earths. If everyone lived like an Indian, we would need 0.8 Earths. If everyone lived like a person from Yemen, we would need 0.3 Earths. An undifferentiated concept of humanity disguises the great differences across the world and suppresses the need of some peoples – such as in Yemen – to increase their consumption in order to have a dignified life.</bq> <bq>Over the past quarter century, the Amazon region has suffered from terrible deforestation, with the Brazilian Amazon alone experiencing total forest loss of 264,000 square kilometres from 2000 to 2023 – equivalent to the combined area of New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s intensive programme of conservation has made considerable advances in reversing this trend, but it needs to go further.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/brian-wilson-1942-2025" source="Hinternet" author="Mary Cadwalladr">Brian Wilson (1942-2025)</a> <bq>No one could possibly misinterpret the stunning use of “Loco-Motion” in the closing credits of Inland Empire (2006) as an encouragement to, well, do the Loco-Motion. This was, obviously, a send-up and a sublimation of 20th-century America, not to mention a final send-off of cinema to the graveyard of extinct art-forms. Its aesthetic effect is to drive home to us just how strange all of this has been all along — all the fragments and signals of the pop-culture to which we have anchored our nostalgia and through which we orient our lives.</bq> I believe that this statement sorely underestimates most people's capability to miss the point. <bq>[...] microgenres as vaporwave, and mallsoft, and Japanese Shibuya-kei.</bq> TIL that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya-kei" author="" source="Wikipedia">Shibuya-kei (渋谷系)</a> is, <bq>[...] a microgenre of pop music or a general aesthetic[8] that flourished in Japan in the mid-to-late 1990s. The music genre is distinguished by a "cut-and-paste" approach that was inspired by the kitsch, fusion, and artifice from certain music styles of the past.[9] The most common reference points were 1960s culture and Western pop music, especially the work of Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and Serge Gainsbourg.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/introducing-maria-teresa" source="Hinternet" author="Sam Jennings">Introducing Maria Theresa</a> <bq>I take off my bra and let it sun my stupid breasts,</bq> <bq>Yes, but in America, one must imagine Sisyphus plucky. Look at him: daily scaling skyscrapers with nothing but wires and cables in his claw-like hands.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/redneck-cosmopolitanism" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu / Molly Sweeney">Redneck Cosmopolitanism</a> <bq>I often think about one of his lines describing a Winchester dive bar, frequented by retirees on social security, slumped on their stools, all pear-shaped, pudding-like, pre-diabetic, or worse: around here, Joe wrote, everyone past 50 has the body they deserve.</bq> This is what Empire produces with its filthy lucre, with its nearly unimaginably immorally won plunder: bodies distended by a mindless gluttony, and minds dulled. All cranked up to 11 by the exhortations of a likewise mindlessly shrieking growth economy powered by monopolies that already have everything but lust for more, always more. Feed it billions of poor people and it spits out infinity pools for a handful. What a worthy, noble endeavor. <bq>Sometimes illness makes ghosts of men even before they are dead.</bq> <bq>Ken relates: The central subject of Joe’s writing was the class system in the United States, and the tens of millions of whites ignored by coastal liberals in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In his online essays and books, and also in conversations over beer or bourbon, Joe would rail against the elite class who looked down on his people — poor whites, the underclass, rednecks. Joe was amused that a New York book editor once said to him, “It’s as if your people were some sort of exotic and foreign culture, as if you were from Yemen or something.”</bq> <bq>I like this anecdote because it illustrates how comfortable Joe was with working people, no matter what language they spoke. This ease of meeting and befriending working people was repeated in Mexico, where shopkeepers, gardeners, and taxi drivers would soon treat Joe as a long-lost brother.</bq> <bq>There are, as I have suggested, several million similar American men who might find something to relate to in this story. The vast majority of them, I likewise suspect, voted for Trump in 2024.</bq> They voted for Trump because they inhabit the liminal space between being astute enough to notice that something is deeply wrong but still brainwashed enough to think that if these guys are wrong, then those guys must be right. People seek power, even when they know it is evil and will betray them. <bq>There are, again, millions of American men like Ken and Joe, who instinctively see right through that trick, but at the same time have no patience at all for the rhetoric of white privilege, or for the idea that they themselves, as individuals, are vectors of America’s original sin of racism.</bq> Because that kind of bullshit is deeply unhelpful when class consciousness is already there. If you can get them to fight the rich, you don't need them to be in on your stupid land acknowledgments and empty gestures. <bq>Writers, like philosophers, have the truth as their ultimate concern, but they pursue it by other means, and with a different sensibility. If I may for just a split second appeal to Heidegger, I would say that the great difference is this: our stock in trade is not argument, but disconcealment.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.citationneeded.news/it-matters-i-care/" source="citation needed" author="Molly White">It matters. I care.</a> <bq>Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.</bq> <bq>[...] giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.</bq> <bq>Major news outlets have bowed to Trump rather than defend their reporting. They depict Trump’s outright lies as mere misstatements and spin his illegal actions as “controversies”. They engage in reflexive bothsidesism, desperately seeking to present “balance” even when one side is demonstrably false. They describe attacks on human rights as mere policy differences. They uncritically repeat government statements that plainly don’t reflect reality. In so doing, they’re not just betraying their fundamental purpose and abandoning their essential role in democracy. They’re helping ensure a world where truth becomes whatever power says it is, and undermining our collective power to build a better world.</bq> <bq>So yes, I care. I care desperately. I care because not caring isn’t an option. I care because the moment we accept that truth and morality are meaningless is the moment we guarantee they’ll never matter again. I care because somebody fucking has to.</bq> <bq>That’s why I keep documenting corruption and abuse, the erosion of norms, and each step away from democracy. Not because I expect immediate consequences, but because documenting the truth will matter later even if it doesn’t seem to matter now. Because caring isn’t naive. Because documentation isn’t pointless. Because hope isn’t for fools.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-lie-its" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It</a> <bq>If, instead of saying the true similar thing, you say a different false thing, then that denies me the opportunity to examine the true similar thing in detail, ask you questions about it, or challenge it directly. Which was plausibly your point all along, because there must have been some reason it was worth your time to lie.</bq> <bq>You should obviously remain kind and sensitive in contexts where that’s relevant. If Joe Criminal was 5% less psychopathic than the rumors say, you can correct some unrelated tough-on-crime advocate about it, but I wouldn’t bother his victims.</bq> <bq>I’m not saying you’re required to correct every little trivial falsehood. Nobody has time for that. But I think if you want to correct it, people don’t get to call you “cringe” or describe it as “well acktually”. What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/becoming-an-asshole/" author="Jim Nielsen" source="">Becoming an Asshole</a> <bq>Taking advantage of people is normalized in business on account of it being existential, i.e. “If we don’t act like assholes — or have someone on our team who will on our behalf[1] — we will not survive!” In other words: All’s fair in self-defense. But what’s the point of survival if you become an asshole in the process? What else is there in life if not what you become in the process? It’s almost comedically twisted how easy it is for us to become the very thing we abhor if it means our survival.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zYgSrlqNMs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8zYgSrlqNMs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Professor Asma" caption="Dreamwork (Ft. Paul Giamatti)"> Prof Asma: Here is, low-key, a cool and fascinating discussion between a professor of philosophy and an award-winning actor Paul f'ing Giamatti discussing "premonitory dreaming" with the nearly ethereally gorgeous Eleanor Parker as subject, colloquially (swearing, etc.) and approachably discussed with some cool AI-generated videos as background. The algorithm: Meh. Here's a thousand views, bro. Random TikToker: watch me eat only food coloring for two weeks. The algorithm: The entire world must know of you immediately. Humanity has hit a local maximum. The only way up ... is out and down first. Let us enjoy our bubble of culture as long as we can. From 15:00, <bq>You ever have that dream, where you're having a dream and you, all of a sudden, there's a guy with a jackhammer nearby. And you wake up and your alarm's been going off for just like a couple of seconds. But it's this huge story---long thing---where you've been, like, it just happened to me with something but that's really weird because it's that thing of where it's like the split second of you hearing something, it's assimilated. I guess it shouldn't be surprising because our brains work so fast, that it shouldn't be, but it's really strange. Yeah, the sense of time is different. Was your dream anticipating the sound coming from outside? It feels like, is the sound coming into it and changing it? It's weird.</bq> At the end: <bq>Asma: There's something that's changed about the dynamic now. Like now you have this kind of like, I don't want to say professionalization, but there's this sort of yuppification, where people are micro-dosing and still getting down to their high-tech jobs and trading on the stock market. I'm like you motherfuckers need to take enough so that you like ... lose Giamatti: ... not going to the stock market at all. Stop this bullshit. No. This isn't supposed to make you better at being an asshole. Like, you have to take this shit and drop the fuck out and stop fucking everything up for the rest of us. That's really funny though. That it's like "No you assholes. This is supposed to make you stop being guys who work at a hedge fund. It isn't that supposed to make you better at it?" Asma: Yeah, exactly. You need to dismantle the whole self ... Giamatti: We're supposed to rebuild the system, you assholes. You found a way to fucking hijack that. ... It's so true.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/12/23/fooled/" author="" source="Quote Investigator">Quote Origin: It’s Easier To Fool People Than To Convince Them That They’ve Been Fooled</a> <bq>In 1647 Baltasar Gracián wrote “Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia” (“The Art of Worldly Wisdom”) which included a germane discussion of fools stubbornly clinging to incorrect beliefs. Here is a translation of <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/12/22/every-fool/">Baltasar’s Spanish remarks</a><fn> into English:<bq>Every blockhead is thoroughly persuaded that he is in the right, and every one who is all too firmly persuaded is a blockhead, and the more erroneous is his judgment the greater is the tenacity with which he holds it.</bq></bq> In 1906, Twain did say this, <bq>How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!</bq> And this, <bq>They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment—until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather.</bq> <hr> <ft>The original Spanish: <bq>No aprender fuertemente. Todo necio es persuadido, y todo persuadido necio, y quanto mas erroneo su dictamen, es mayor su tenacidad: aun en caso de evidencia es ingenuidad el ceder, que no se ignora la razon que tuvo, y se conoce la galanteria que tiene.</bq></ft> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJiwovX3mNA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/RJiwovX3mNA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Jesse Wells" caption="The Great Caucasian God"> <bq>Upon a missile rode the Lord Roaring justice is the sword He was melting off the faces of the damned You have heard of Noah's flood That tale will pale against the blood Pouring out and boiling in uranium sands Don't you know atomic power Is just God's celestial shower There are those that he has chosen And those that he has not There are many who will die In the Lord's plan by and by But it won't be you or I Thanks to the great Caucasian God I said Lord be thou near Blot out everything that's changed to me Everything that's queer I said Lord don't be poor I am in need of a friend indeed The great Caucasian God</bq> Chills. The combination of dark satire and acoustic guitar reminded me of Geldof's Great Song of Indifference from 1990. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CfxkFj8iAg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/6CfxkFj8iAg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bob Geldof" caption="The Great Song Of Indifference"> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/" source="Where's Your Ed At" author="Edward Zitron">Never Forget What They've Done</a> <bq>There was a time this didn’t suck, when it wasn’t a struggle to do basic things, when my world was not a constant war with my god damn apps, when things weren’t necessarily turn-key but my phone wasn’t randomly burning through half of its battery life in an hour and a half because one app on the App Store is poorly configured. I swear to god, back in like, 2019, Zoom just fucking connected. I remember things being better, and on top of that, I see how much better things could be.</bq> Oh, I can feel that pain. <bq>It’s not enough to have your data, your work, your art, your posts, your friends, the things you’ve taken photos of, and the things you’ve searched for. The industry must have that of your children, and their children, as early as possible, even if it means helping them cheat on their homework so that they too can live a life where they’ve skipped having any responsibility or learning anything about the world other than how one can extract as much as possible without having to give anything in return.</bq> <bq>Big tech is sociopathic and directionless, swinging wildly to try and find new ways to drag any kind of interaction out of a customer they’ve grown to loathe for their unwillingness to be more profitable.</bq> <bq>What’s particularly horrifying about the AI bubble is that it’s shown that when they decide to, big tech can put hundreds of billions behind whatever the fuck they want. They are able to mobilize incredible amounts of capital and the industrial might of multiple companies with multi-trillion dollar market capitalisations to build entire infrastructure dedicated to one thing, and the one thing they are choosing is generative AI. They’re all fully capable of uniting around an ideal — it’s just that said ideal exists entirely to automate human beings out of the picture, and even more offensively, it doesn’t seem to be able to do so, and the more obvious that becomes, the more obvious the powerful’s hunger becomes for a world where they never see or talk to us, and they get all of our money and attention.</bq> The goal was never going to be to stop the climate crisis or feed the hungry or get to fully automated luxury communism for more than a handful. <bq>And it’s not just their greed — it’s how obviously they love the idea of automating human beings away, and creating a world where we’re increasingly disconnected and beholden to technology that they entirely control. No creators, no connections, and best of all, no customers — just people cranking a giant, energy-guzzling slot machine and maybe getting the thing they wanted at the end. Except it doesn’t work. It obviously doesn’t work. It hasn’t ever worked, and there’s never really been a sign of it working other than people very confidently saying “this will eventually work.”</bq> <bq>They need this to be the single biggest consumer tech phenomenon ever while also being the panacea to the dwindling growth of the Software as a Service and enterprise IT markets, and it needs to start doing that within the next 12 months, without fail, if it even has that long.</bq> <bq>Imagine if they’d have decided to unite around something other than the idea that they needed to continue growing. Imagine, because right now that’s the closest you’re going to fucking get.</bq> <bq>There is nothing making Mark Zuckerberg force algorithmic Instagram and Facebook feeds upon people by default other than sheer, unadulterated greed and the growth-at-all-costs rot economics that have made him a multi-billionaire.</bq> <bq>Notice how none of this — from the media to the executive sect — is about you or me. None of this is about products, or the future, or even the present, just whatever “the next big thing” might be that will keep the Rot Economy’s growth-at-all-costs party going. Nowhere along the line did anyone actually see an opportunity to sell people something they wanted or needed.</bq> <bq>Over the last decade we’ve watched — and while I’m talking about the tech industry, I think we can all say it’s been everywhere else too — the things we love get distanced from us so that somebody else can get unbelievably rich, the things we used to do easily made more difficult, confusing and/or expensive, and the ways we used to connect with people become increasingly abstracted and exploitative.</bq> <bq>It starts with people knowing who these people are and what they have done. I can give you their names. Mark Zuckerberg. Sam Altman. Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella. Tim Cook. Sheryl Sandberg. Adam Mosseri. Prabhakar Raghavan. There are others, many others, and they are fully responsible for how broken everything feels. And some of the guilty aren’t tech CEOs, or fabulously wealthy, but rather their collaborators in the tech media that have carried water for the sociopaths ruining our digital — and, often, physical — world. The reason I am so hard on my peers in the media is that it has never been more urgent that we hold these people accountable. Their ability to act both unburdened by regulation and true criticism has emboldened them to cause harm to billions of people so that they may continue to make billions of dollars, in part because the media continually congratulates them for doing so.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-world-without-iphones/" source="ZNetwork" author="Frida Berrigan">A World Without iPhones?</a> <bq>A few years ago, an artist named Simon Weckert borrowed a few dozen iPhones from friends, put them in a red wagon and took a walk through the streets of Berlin. With just an hour or so of lag time, Google Maps showed all the streets and roads he had walked on bottlenecked in traffic jams. Video of his mobile art piece shows him strolling down the center of empty roads. It’s absorbing to watch that video, a split screen of him in a yellow jacket with the jaunty gait of a wagon puller and those red-lined Google Maps. Weckert’s performance demonstrates how our sense of reality is mediated by, filtered through, and dependent on a technology we simply don’t fully grasp or understand.</bq> It also serves as yet another reminder that the map is not the territory. Models are useful but they can be hacked, sometimes very easily. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://nikoheikkila.fi/blog/my-ai-agents-are-all-nuts/" source="" author="Niko Heikkilä">My AI Agents Are All Nuts</a> <bq>I don't write a lot of code. As a TDDer, I write only the minimal code to make my tests pass. Naturally, many others don't, and I regularly see them either write or copy huge chunks of code, then run their tests and wonder why their code broke. This, by the way, is precisely how agents work, too.</bq> <bq>[...] we must also consider that agents are optimised to deliver more rather than less code. More code is always more challenging to review, and humans are terrible at code review. Review fatigue is an actual problem in our industry, and for most of us, it hits even after reviewing a handful of modified source files.</bq> <bq>[...] the agent is also a cab driver without a license steering a NASCAR car along a busy street while taking the wrong turn nine out of ten times before ultimately crashing into a wall and congratulating themselves on winning the race.</bq> <bq>Imagine searching for an explanation for an error and then discovering hundreds of GitHub Issues that are, in fact, about a completely different problem than you're having. That's how it is with AI.</bq> <bq>I'd like to ask you, dear reader, to take this list and provide reputable counterarguments to it—not childish rants about how I'm nuts, standing still, swimming against the tide, or being left behind. That is how we help AI become the genuine game changer influencers are selling it now.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-agents" source="" author="David Crawshaw">How I program with Agents</a> <bq>In daily life you get feedback from a compiler if you make a mistake, you can look up a specification of UTF-8, and best of all you can write your program and sprinkle some printfs in it to see what you got wrong.</bq> Wrong. Write tests. FFS. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/new-apple-study-challenges-whether-ai-models-truly-reason-through-problems/" source="Ars Technica" author="">New Apple study challenges whether AI models truly “reason” through problems</a> <bq>"It is truly embarrassing that LLMs cannot reliably solve Hanoi," Marcus wrote, noting that AI researcher Herb Simon solved the puzzle in 1957 and many algorithmic solutions are available on the web. Marcus pointed out that even when researchers provided explicit algorithms for solving Tower of Hanoi, model performance did not improve—a finding that study co-lead Iman Mirzadeh argued shows "their process is not logical and intelligent."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/with-the-launch-of-o3-pro-lets-talk-about-what-ai-reasoning-actually-does/" source="Ars Technica" author="Benj Edwards">With the launch of o3-pro, let’s talk about what AI “reasoning” actually does</a> <bq>Ars Technica continues to use the term "simulated reasoning" (SR) to describe these models. They are simulating a human-style reasoning process that does not necessarily produce the same results as human reasoning when faced with novel challenges. While simulated reasoning models like o3-pro often show measurable improvements over general-purpose models on analytical tasks, research suggests these gains come from allocating more computational resources to traverse their neural networks in smaller, more directed steps. The answer lies in what researchers call "inference-time compute" scaling. When these models use what are called "chain-of-thought" techniques, they dedicate more computational resources to exploring connections between concepts in their neural network data.</bq> <bq>[...] fundamentally, all Transformer-based AI models are pattern-matching marvels. They borrow reasoning patterns from examples in the training data that researchers use to create them. Recent studies on Math Olympiad problems reveal that SR models still function as sophisticated pattern-matching machines—they cannot catch their own mistakes or adjust failing approaches, often producing confidently incorrect solutions without any "awareness" of errors.</bq> <bq>[...] understanding these limitations doesn't diminish the genuine utility of SR models. For many real-world applications—debugging code, solving math problems, or analyzing structured data—pattern matching from vast training sets is enough to be useful. But as we consider the industry's stated trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and even superintelligence, the evidence so far suggests that simply scaling up current approaches or adding more "thinking" tokens may not bridge the gap between statistical pattern recognition and what might be called generalist algorithmic reasoning.</bq> <bq>[...] o3-pro is a better, cheaper version of what OpenAI previously provided. It's good at solving familiar problems, struggles with truly new ones, and still makes confident mistakes. If you understand its limitations, it can be a powerful tool, but always double-check the results.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ferd.ca/the-gap-through-which-we-praise-the-machine.html" source="My Bad Opinions" author="Fred Hebert">The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine</a> <bq>While we were writing the talk, trying to thread a needle between skepticism and optimism, Charity mentioned one thing I hadn’t yet understood by then but was enlightening: investors in the industry already have divided up companies in two categories, pre-AI and post-AI, and they are asking “what are you going to do to not be beaten by the post-AI companies?” The usefulness and success of using LLMs are axiomatically taken for granted and the mandate for their adoption can often come from above your CEO. Your execs can be as baffled as anyone else having to figure out where to jam AI into their product. Adoption may be forced to keep board members, investors, and analysts happy, regardless of what customers may be needing.</bq> <bq>It does not matter whether LLMs can or cannot deliver on what they promise: people calling the shots assume they can, so it’s gonna happen no matter what. I’m therefore going to bypass any discussion of the desirability, sustainability, and ethics of AI here, and jump directly to “well you gotta build with it anyway or find a new job” as a premise.</bq> <bq>The early frustration I have seen (and felt) seems to be due to hitting these road blocks and sort of going “wow, this sucks and isn’t what was advertised.” If you got more adept users around you, they’ll tell you to try different models, tweak bits of what you do, suggest better prompts, and offer jargon-laden workarounds.</bq> Also because it's still very early days. The interfaces suck. It's not clear that later days will deliver a panacea but the interface should hopefully get better, more stable. <bq>From an objective point of view, asking for the newest version of the component is a very specific instruction: only one version is the newest, and the feature that was specified only existed in that version. There is no ambiguity. Saying “version <c>$X.0</c>” is semantically the same. But my coworker knew, from experience, that a version number would yield better results, and took it on themselves to do better next time.</bq> For now! That's one of the main drawbacks: things that you learn now might be useless or counterproductive next week, next month, or in three months. It's very early days. <bq>That you need to do these things might in fact point at how agentic AI does not behave with cognitive fluency, and instead, the user subtly does it on its behalf in order to be productive.</bq> <bq>[...] we have to ask whether the amount of scaffolding and skill required by coding agents is acceptable. If we think it is, then our agent workflows are on the right track. If we’re a bit baffled by all that’s needed to make it work well, we may rightfully suspect that we’re not being sold the right stuff, or at least stuff with the right design.</bq> <bq>Coding agents require the scaffolding, learning, and often demand more attention than tools, but are built to look like teammates. This makes them both unwieldy tools and lousy teammates. We should either have agents designed to look like a teammate properly act like a teammate, and barring that, have a tool that behaves like a tool.</bq> <bq>The problem is that while the skills are real and important, I would argue that the level of sophistication they demand is an accidental outcome of poor interaction design. Better design, aimed more closely to how real work is done, could drastically reduce the amount of scaffolding and learning required (and the ease with which learning takes place).</bq> <bq>[...] people are adaptable and want the system to succeed. We consequently take on the responsibility for making things work, through ongoing effort and by transforming ourselves in the process. Through that work, we make the technology appear closer to what it promises than what it actually delivers, which in turn reinforces the pressure to adopt it. As we take charge of bridging the gap, the machine claims the praise.</bq> <bq>Moravec’s Paradox. Roughly, this classic AI argument states that we tend to believe higher order reasoning like maths and logic is very difficult because it feels difficult to us, but the actually harder stuff (perception and whatnot) is very easy to us because we’re so optimized for it.</bq> <bq>Law of Fluency states that Well-adapted cognitive work occurs with a facility that belies the difficulty of resolving demands and balancing dilemmas, basically stating that if you’ve gotten good at stuff, you make it look a lot easier than it actually is to do things.</bq> <bq>Other factors here include elements such as how updating models can significantly impact user experience, which may point to a lack of stable feedback that can also make skill acquisition more difficult.</bq> Precisely. It's still too early for most users. There will be so much churn. And for what? To satisfy Silicon Valley's appetite for growth? <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ai-hype-and-the-tech-slowdown-are" source="Substack" author="Freddie DeBoer">AI Hype and the Tech Slowdown are Symmetrical</a> <bq>At this point my feelings on AI, or “AI,” are pretty plain. I think that these LLM systems will have some meaningful economic consequences, almost all bad, as well as social consequences, universally bad; some industries will prove to be susceptible to automation even if doing so entails people in power ignoring obvious inefficiencies and problems that come with turning to AI, and a lot of people are going to have whatever remaining ability they have to form meaningful human relationships destroyed. It’s not like there won’t be victims. But in general, I’m quite confident that the impact of these systems will fall vastly short of the relentless hype that our media simply will not stop engaging in, we will not see any of the repetitively-predicted major revolutions in human existence (whether good or bad), and in the long run this type of AI technology will have significantly less impact on human life than the rise of the internet, which itself has not prompted anything like the change to ordinary human life that we’ve seen with advances like electrification, the internal combustion engine, or germ theory.</bq> <bq>[...] the more consumers feel comfortable hanging on to their old phones, buying used, or picking up a mid-range model for a fraction of a price. This sounds healthy to me - I think my family had the same rotary home phone from the late 1970s until we finally got a cordless in 1990 or so - but it’s bad news for companies that have grown used to massive revenues and which have immense expenses that are not easily reduced.</bq> <bq>Widespread disgust with social media has grown and grown, with the migraine-inducing experience of looking at Instagram for five minutes a good indicator of why - it’s impossible to see anything that you actually want to see, as viral bilge and AI slop is forced into your feed while the accounts you follow are almost impossible to find. Self-driving cars remain the future, but the market is broken up, the short-term profitability unclear, and severe problems with serving bad-weather areas ongoing.</bq> <bq>And so now you’ve got AI, which is a story that has been as relentlessly, shamelessly, and irresponsibly hyped as any media narrative has been in my lifetime, with the exception of the threat of terrorism following 9/11. Tech needs AI to be everything that the press is credulously, uncritically insisting it will be.</bq> <bq>[...] the hype is a phenomenon driven by needs that are fundamentally financial in origin. The tech companies need a new suite of products that can restore their eroding profitability and inspire the public the way that the public was inspired in the late 2000s and early 2010s; the financial sector and investors need the tech companies to be the unicorn stocks that they once were. As usual with speculative capitalism, the tail is wagging the dog. When hockey stick growth does not emerge naturally from reality, it will be invented.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/software-craftsmanship-in-the-era-of-vibes" source="Zed Blog" author="Nathan Sobo">The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes</a> <bq>We should feel urgency, but we shouldn't be using urgency as an excuse to cut corners. Short-term gains aren't worth the cost of suboptimal velocity for the lifetime of the company. This is even more true now that a gnarly code base hinders not only our own ability to work in it, but also the ability of AI tools to be effective in it.</bq> <bq>Each of our many decisions may make sense in the moment, but over time they accumulate, and before we know it we find ourselves working in what feels like a legacy codebase—despite trying at every turn to avoid that outcome.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/" source="Ink & Switch" author="Geoffrey Litt, Josh Horowitz, Peter van Hardenberg, and Todd Matthews">Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps</a> <bq>These days, we spend more and more of our time in environments built from code, not atoms. We’ve gained many capabilities in this shift—we can collaborate instantly across continents and search thousands of files in an instant. But we’re also losing something important: the ability to adapt our environments and make them our own. Here’s an example. One of the authors worked on a software team that tracked its work with index cards taped to a wall. The team would constantly evolve the tracker—tape lines moved; checklists appeared; special zones of cards emerged around the main grid. The fluidity of the tool encouraged fluidity of process.</bq> This is great but they could mention how the paper version has little to no querying ability. <bq>The key point was that each customization could be done with the simplest technique possible, leaving full programming only as a last resort when absolutely needed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://stackoverflow.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1MNG2CYTY2AzkAm">2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey</a> <bq>Q. Where do you think that developers will continue to provide value in an AI-enhanced world?</bq> All of the places that have always been valuable: analyzing and understanding complex systems and domains; ascertaining and refining requirements; developing tests and verifying that they actually test the requirements.