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Links and Notes for June 20th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> Dear Israel: As a U.S.-American, I can sympathize with being a citizen of a country that is in the grips of a self-interested criminal organization with no grasp of history or basic human psychology, with no morals or principles except a deep desire to plunder, to grasp for more, to take what others have, to subjugate, to dehumanize, to kill, kill, kill. All of this led by a coterie---not a cabal, as they have no shame and do nothing in secret---of the worst that humanity has to offer fronted by a loudmouthed, despicable, and endlessly perfidious maniac, endlessly frothing and spitting nonsense and lies and inhumanity. It doesn't get better on its own. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/nuclear-options/" source="ZNetwork" author="Tariq Ali">Nuclear Options</a> <bq>The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out.</bq> <bq>[...] a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.</bq> <bq>To this day, Iraq has not returned to the social and economic stability that it had before ‘regime-change’. A million plus casualties and five million orphans was the price it was forced to pay after its government was mendaciously accused of harbouring WMDs. Western companies now siphon off the bulk of Iraqi oil.</bq> <bq>As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation . . . This is what a rogue state looks like.</bq> <bq>The country that urgently needs regime change is Israel.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-america-goes-to-war-iraq-ukraine-now-iran/" source="ZNetwork" author="Jack Rasmus">How America Goes to War: Iraq, Ukraine & Now Iran</a> <bq>War plans are developed and the funding sources identified and earmarked months, and sometimes years, before military action is initiated. Once the decision is made what remains is mostly the timing, i.e. when is it best to pull the trigger. That timing depends on getting the necessary military assets in place, lining up agreement to go to war with key players in Congress and US allies, preparing public opinion by creating an imminent threat image with the US public, and, if time and conditions permit, staging a ‘false flag’ event to give credibility to the imminent threat.</bq> <bq>UN and US inspectors found no evidence of WMDs in the run up to the war. And after the war it was confirmed there were none. That didn’t matter at the time. The US War train had left the station months before. Assets and allies, Congress and public opinion, were already prepared and in place. In negotiations on the eve of war, Iraq agreed to US initial demands. The US just moved the goalposts. It demanded instead of UN IAEA inspectors the Iraqi armed forces submit to the occupation of Iraq by US/NATO forces to ensure there were no WMDs. In other words, agree to de facto unconditional surrender. The WMD issue was just a cover. The real US demand was regime change in Iraq.</bq> <bq>When the US goes to war it is always about regime change. The manufactured threat issue is always just a cover. Negotiations are never intended to reach a compromise. They are just a tactic.</bq> <bq>In the weeks just prior to the Iraq war erupting, Saddam offered UN and US inspectors free access to all sites, including military, in Iraq to determine there were no WMDs. The US ignored Saddam’s offers. WMDs were just the pretext. It was always about regime change. It always is.</bq> <bq>And then when all assets are in place, the war hammer drops. An attack is launched by surprise with no prior indication or warning.</bq> <bq>Israel’s surprise attack not only neutralized many of Iran’s air defense facilities but Israel simultaneously carried out assassinations of high ranking Iranian military, government officials as well as civilian Iranian scientists. Israel thus included a ‘decapitation’ strategy, which had previously proved successful with Hamas in GAZA and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Purposely targeting and decapitating civilians is considered a war crime. So is targeting civilian nuclear facilities. In the initial attack Israel bombed several, with reported nuclear radiation fallout occurring in several locations in the country.</bq> <bq>Neither WMDs or a nuclear bomb are ever the real issue or objectives. They are the excuse to launch a massive military air strike to wreck the economy and create political instability and engineer regime change. And negotiations in the run up to war are a tactic, not a step in a process to reach a compromise and a deal to avert war. Their purpose is to lull the opponent into thinking a deal is possible when it isn’t.</bq> <bq>The US/NATO decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine was made by US president Biden around June 2021 when he met with Putin for the first, and last time. The US plans for the Ukraine war date back to 2015. They were shelved when Trump won in 2016 and thereafter quickly dusted off by Biden when he took office in January 2021. Biden in August 2021 ‘cleared the decks’ in Afghanistan by pulling out. US advisors and weapons thereafter began pouring into Ukraine. Putin attempted to ‘negotiate’ with the US from afar during the rest of 2021 without any progress. The US-Ukraine plan called for a major Ukraine offensive in February 2022 to defeat what remained of the local Russian ethnic resistance in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, Lughansk and Donetsk. But the Russians pre-empted that and invaded first in late February.</bq> <bq>As in the cases of Iraq and now Iran, from the outset the US playbook in Ukraine proxy sought the ultimate objective of regime change in Russia. The admitted strategy was a military conflict in Ukraine, financed and provided with weapons by NATO, which the plan envisioned would lead to a collapse of the Russian economy, political instability, and the deposing of Putin by Russian oligarchs and military.</bq> <bq>Looking back in the months to come, the USA proxy war in Ukraine may be understood as the dress rehearsal to World War III. But a US-Israel war on Iran will be understood as the actual start of a global conflict.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/war-deja-vu" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">War Deja Vu</a> <bq>We heard these canards leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq. Twenty-two years later they have been resurrected. Anyone who advocates for negotiations, for diplomacy and peace, is a stooge for terrorists. Did we learn any lessons from the fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, not to mention Ukraine? All the ghouls who sold us these past wars on false pretenses, such as conservative talk show host Mark Levin, Max Boot — who writes, “that strategic imperative argues for bombing Fordow,” where Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is buried underground — David Frum, John Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Thomas Friedman, have returned to saturate the airwaves with breathless fearmongering.</bq> <bq>Never mind the sheer idiocy of their arguments. Their megaphones are secure. They are dutiful shills for the war industry, brain dead neoconservatives and genocidal Zionists, who believe in the magical regeneration of the world through violence, ignoring catastrophe after catstrophe.</bq> <bq>Forget that the preemptive attack on Iran by Israel is a war crime, not to mention the bombings of a hospital, ambulance and journalists. Forget the hundreds of Iranian civilians Israel has slaughtered in its waves of airstrikes. Forget that Israel launched its attack on Iran as the sixth round of negotiations on nuclear enrichment between the U.S. and Iran were set to take place in Oman. Forget that it is the Israeli Prime Minister, not the leader of Iran, who is subject to an arrest warrant, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Forget that Israel, in the midst of carrying out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians, possesses at least 90 nuclear weapons — built in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — and blocks inspections by the IAEA.</bq> <bq>[...] another cabal, dominated by Israel-firsters, is concocting bogus intelligence assessments to justify a war with Iran. These wars are not prosecuted in good faith. They are not based on a careful and rational assessment of verifiable intelligence. They are utopian visions severed from reality where our own intelligence agencies are ignored along with international bodies such as the United Nations, WMD inspectors or the IAEA.</bq> <bq>The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos have risen once again from the crypt. They migrate like zombies from administration to administration. They are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Research Initiative, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations, the Israel lobby and the war industry. They are puppets jerked up and down by their masters, given megaphones by a bankrupt media, urging us forward from one quagmire to the next. The old faces and the old lies are back, exhorting us into another nightmare.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/16/patrick-lawrence-the-worlds-most-dangerous-man-and-his-enabler/" source="ScheerPost" author="Patrick Lawrence">The World’s Most Dangerous Man and His Enabler</a> <bq>There is indeed an existential threat abroad as of last Friday. But it extends well beyond Iran and, indeed, West Asia. As the self-defined Jewish state’s long, dreadful record makes plain, it appears to recognize no limits to the violence it will inflict on others, its breaches of international law and the norms of the human cause, and the risks it will inflict on the world in the name of what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination.</bq> Is all of this worse than the danger posed by the U.S.? It is not. It is horrible. It is an incredibly concentrated poison emanating from the government of Israel. But it is nowhere near as capable of causing as much damage as the U.S. has. Israel provides a nice distraction from the evil of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. portrays itself as being barely able to constrain its attack dog, when they are working hand-in-glove. <bq>[...] the obsessed leader of a nuclear-armed nation never subjected to the terms of the Non–Proliferation Treaty has just attacked a non-nuclear nation it calls a mortal danger to Israel’s survival because of the nuclear weapons it does not possess.</bq> <bq>These commentators and others now place much weight on a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency charging that Iran has been in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non–Proliferation Treaty. Some facts: The agency is an organ of the United Nations and has 35 members. It convened to vote on a resolution that was advanced by the United States, Britain, France and Germany. This resolution was presented Thursday, June 12, a day before Israel began attacking Iran. It passed with a vote of 19 board members in favor, three against (Russia, China, Burkina Faso) and 11 abstentions; two board members did not vote.</bq> <hr> <bq href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/24/truth-revolutionary/#e3c81f0f-bf46-4c96-a818-6193c83b6a4c-link" author="Antonio Gramsci" date="1919" source="L’Ordine Nuovo">But the concrete and complete solution to the problems of socialist living can only arise from communist practice: collective discussion, which sympathetically alters men’s consciousness, unifies them and inspires them to industrious enthusiasm. To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.</bq> This is the original citation from which the misattribution to George Orwell of <iq>In a Time of Universal Deceit — Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act.</iq> As a friend recently asked me: why rage against the world? Why not just enjoy the wonderful corner of it we've been given? I do enjoy it but, for the sake of those who cannot, I am willing to sacrifice my personal peace of mind to identify our common enemies and to try to protect this world from them. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/roaming-charges-neo-conned-again/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Neo-Conned Again!</a> <img src="{att_link}parniaabbasi.jpg" href="{att_link}parniaabbasi.jpg" align="none" caption="Parnia Abbasi - Killed in Iran by an Israeli Airstrike" scale="50%"> <bq>She dreamed of seeing Coldplay live. She loved trying new foods and was learning Italian. She wrote poetry constantly and shared it w/friends. She was so proud of having summited Iran's highest peak, Mount Damavand, that she made sure to mention that fact to everyone she met.</bq> <bq>Parnia Abbasi holds a sunflower, her favorite flower, in Tehran. Abbasi, 23, was killed by an Israeli strike at her apartment building in the Sattarkhan neighborhood on Friday morning. (Arvin Abedi)</bq> Why am including this? Well, because I'm not a monster and I think that we shouldn't be killing people. I think we shouldn't be at war. Being at war for purely venal reasons is even worse. Calling wars of aggression "preemptive wars" is even worse. My brother-in-law's first wife's father had immigrated to the U.S. from Iran. The girl in this photo looks more than a little like my niece, who's only a couple of years younger. When the bombs start flying indiscriminately, that's exactly what it means: it could hit anyone. <bq>German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to ZDF network at the G7 summit: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.” Macron in Canada at the G7: “Does anyone think that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was a good idea? Does anyone think that what was done in Libya the previous decade was a good idea? No. I think the biggest mistake today is to use military means to bring about regime change in Iran, because that would mean chaos.” Looks like it’s down to the G2: “It’s absolutely unacceptable that military means were used amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution” to the Iranian nuclear issue, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters while at the G7 meeting in Canada. “This is extremely regrettable, and we strongly condemn it.”</bq> It looks like Germany has taken an enthusiastic lead in the race to choose an immoral, ahistorical moron to lead them. <img src="{att_link}icemasked.webp" href="{att_link}icemasked.webp" align="none" caption="Four masked and plainclothes ICE shock troops near their black van" scale="50%"> <bq>DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: “There’s no safe harbor, whether it be a church or a courthouse or a worksite. We will come for you. We will arrest you. You will be deported.”</bq> Anyone who thinks that there is no problem with Homeland Security's ICE troops trawling the nation for "criminal" should know that they are ardent supporters of vanloads of people who look like this, sweeping up people without warrants or id in hand. These are state-sanctioned kidnappers who look the part. Madness. <bq>You want to know what kind of people work for ICE, they’re the type that mocks and laughs at a mother, sobbing on the street outside her house while holding her infant son in her arms as masked men haul away her husband for no explicable reason: When Roberto Diego Alvarez left for work in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he was seized by ICE officers, thrown to the ground, then hauled away in handcuffs, while his wife Nicole, a 35-year-old US citizen, watched and cried as she clutched their 8-month-old son. Nicole later told Newsweek: “I learned from Diego that they were laughing at me in the car before leaving, pointing and saying, ‘I bet she is recording.’ I was hysterical. I had our son, Denver, who is 8 months old, in my arms. I couldn’t stop crying.”</bq> <bq>Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo was detained by Texas cops, who asked if he had tattoos. Salazar-Cuervo told the cops he didn’t, and in fact, he had none. Then the cops searched his phone and found a photo of Salazar-Cuervo standing next to a man who did have a tattoo. That was enough for ICE to label him a Tren de Aragua and have him deported to Bukele’s concentration camp prison in El Salvador without any trial or hearing. This week, a Texas judge agreed that he must be returned to stand trial in August for trespassing on private property, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. The Trump administration has not indicated whether it will act on the court’s order.</bq> <img src="{att_link}tim_marchman.webp" href="{att_link}tim_marchman.webp" align="none" caption="Tim Marchman on Police and ICE" scale="50%"> <bq>Having a bit of a hard time with the concept that if a guy in a police uniform who has a police vehicle shows up I should lock the doors and call 911, but if a guy in a ski mask with an HGH gut appears to be kidnapping my neighbor, I shouldn't ask who he is if I don't want federal charges.</bq> Today I learned that an HGH Gut is a thing. It's the distended-looking abdominal region common to bodybuilders who abuse HGH (Human Growth Hormone). When you determine the value of a society, you just need to see which people have power in it. Who are its leaders? Who is allowed to act with impunity? The worst people? Yes? Then it's the worst society. These aspects may be hidden from you but, if they are, that means that you are benefitting from them and you are part of the problem. They will eventually come for anyone who raises a word or a finger against their continued arrogation of power. This is what much more fascist societies like Israel already look like. Soldiers and police everywhere. This is what the U.S. has exported for decades. It has come home. Colonialism always comes home. These people live amongst you. They are sitting next to you in restaurants, in meetings. They look normal, sipping their coffee. Not 24 hours ago, they were laughing as they tore a family apart---because they don't view some people as human, because they're cruel, because they are missing something that would prevent them from doing the same to you, were they ordered---or convinced by propaganda---that you were now their enemy, part of their problem. These people permeate U.S. society. These monsters are legion. They look and act perfectly normal but they have the most appalling, primitive, and immoral tenets. They believe that war and violence are the only way to solve all of their problems because they themselves could only be convinced to stop pillaging that way. And it's not just these storm troopers, at this level. The people are the same at every level of society, arguably more cruel, rapacious, and immoral the higher the echelon. There are very few actually good people in power. The worse you are, the higher you go, and the more secure your position. <bq>Lennon keeps trying to persuade Dylan to join him on a tour of the country where the proceeds from their concerts would be used to fund bail for black people in county and city jails. Dylan, whose retreat from politics is nearly complete by this point, is absolutely horrified by the idea. [...] A tour raising money to bail out people who are stuck in jail only because they are poor is still a great idea, though perhaps the only living artist with the stature, balls and heart to do it is 90-year-old Willie Nelson.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-supporters-will-be-despised" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel Supporters Will Be Despised For The Rest of Their Lives</a> <bq>Do Israel’s supporters know it’s over for them? Like, they know they’re going to be despised for the rest of their lives, right? That they will never, ever live down the fact that they supported a live-streamed genocide? And that it will only get worse for them as history clarifies things? Surely they must realize this by now. Surely they must realize that nothing they do for the rest of their lives will ever be as significant as the fact that they played cheerleader for genocide and all of Israel’s demented warmongering, long after normal people realized it was the wrong thing to do. That in the eyes of the world they will all always be first and foremost someone who supported and defended history’s first live-streamed genocide. I wonder what that’s like, knowing that about yourself? If that was me maybe I’d be pushing for World War Three as well, I dunno. Maybe I’d hope we could turn the whole world into Gaza and let the flames wash away human memory of the things we had done. That enough death and destruction spread out across enough of the earth would make my crimes look small in comparison or something. It won’t work, though. Everyone’s always going to remember what they did. Their grandchildren will be disgusted by them. Their families will carry their shame for generations. What a terrible way to be.</bq> Schön wäre es. (It would be nice.) But that's almost certainly not what's going to happen. Just like the Nazis smoothly entered into American society, welcomed with open arms, just like the fascists smoothly took over after WWII, quickly convincing the world that it was the evil Bolsheviks who were the problem, those who are responsible for the world's suffering will never, ever, ever get their comeuppance. They will stay at the top of the heap, cheerily writing the history that others will slavishly repeat, hoping desperately for a bit of reflected glory from their murdering, psychopathic betters. There will be no reckoning. This is pure fantasy. <bq>It says a lot about how backwards and diseased western civilization has become when peace activists are designated as terrorists for trying to stop the world’s worst acts of terrorism.</bq> Up is down. Black is white. <bq>Friendly reminder that last year the official Democratic Party platform <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08/21/democrats-release-insanely-hawkish-middle-east-policy-platform/">slammed Trump</a> for choosing not to go to war with Iran in 2018, 2019 and 2020 during his last presidency. Americans aren’t allowed to vote against war.</bq> The linked article is from August 2024 and discusses how the Democrats had chastised Trump in their platform as having been too soft on Iran. I guess he's listening? <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/21/trump-advisor-admits-war-on-iran-targets-china-seeking-us-global-dominance/" author="Ben Norton" source="Scheer Post">Trump Advisor Admits: War on Iran Targets China, Seeking ‘US Global Dominance’</a> <bq>Mike Flynn argued that Israel is “protecting Western civilization” in its war on Iran. “Israel is fighting their war, and we are in fact supporting it. And it’s really protecting Western civilization”, he insisted in his interview with Steve Bannon. Flynn is a very extreme political figure. He is a Christian nationalist who has proudly declared that US conservatives are waging a “spiritual war”. This is an idea that is shared by Pete Hegseth, who serves as defense secretary in Donald Trump’s second term. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, is a fellow Christian nationalist. In 2020, he published a book titled “American Crusade”, in which he wrote that the US right is waging a “holy war” against China, the international left, and Islam — and in particular the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although these top figures in the Trump administration have far-right political views, they share many of the policies of the neoliberal centrists in Europe. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz has strongly supported the war on Iran, stating with approval that Israel is doing the “dirty work” of the West.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/tulsi-gabbard-is-a-warmongering-asshole" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Tulsi Gabbard Is A Warmongering Asshole</a> <bq>Tulsi Gabbard is a warmongering asshole, and a liar. She is helping to deceive the world into yet another horrible middle eastern war, and if she and her fellow warmongers succeed her words will go down in history as among the most depraved lies ever told. This is the same person who tweeted back in March, “President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East.” This is also the person who attacked Trump’s hawkishness on Iran constantly while campaigning for president as a Democrat in the 2020 primary race. “Intel officials & politicians led us into Iraq war,” Gabbard tweeted in 2019. “Now Trump’s using the same playbook to lead our country into war with Iran. The cost in lives & treasure will be infinitely greater than the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, & Syria, and will undermine our ntnl security.” “The main responsibility of the president is to keep Americans safe. Trump has failed — undermining our national security by tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, threatening military action, bringing us closer to war with Iran that will be far worse than war in Iraq,” reads another 2019 tweet. “They are setting the stage for a war with Iran that would prove to be far more costly, far more devastating and dangerous than anything that we saw in the Iraq War,” Gabbard said of the Trump administration during a 2019 interview on ABC.</bq> <bq>This fraudster has built an entire political career out of pretending to oppose war and militarism in order to win the support of Americans who are sick of pouring blood and treasure into the US slaughter machine, opportunistically drifting to whatever corner of the political spectrum would offer her the most power, and then when she got as high as she can go she sold all her stated principles to the furthest extent possible at the earliest opportunity.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-has-bombed-iran-what-happens" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Trump Has Bombed Iran. What Happens Next Is His Fault.</a> And ... there it is. Good morning and fuck you from the Trump administration. Sooooo predictable. It couldn’t really have gone any other way. The U.S. has attacked Iran in what the UN Charter and Nuremberg call a "war of aggression". That’s an illegal act "six ways to Sunday" (as we like to say). It’s interesting that there was no false flag. The WMD talk was half-hearted at best. They don’t even bother justifying it beyond "WE WANT WHAT THEY HAVE. THEY CANNOT EXIST." Plunder as policy, with no mask. They’re not even pretending anymore that international law exists. It was terrible before but they pretended to care. I don’t know which way is better. I guess we'll find out. Maybe now some sane countries will rally against the U.S. I doubt it, though. All of Europe will rally around the U.S. (and the fig leaf of NATO), egging it on to destroy Iran as it destroyed Libya and Syria. This will be the first proxy war between China and the U.S. though. So … hang on to your hat (brace yourself). <bq>I am really not looking forward to all the melodramatic victim-LARPing if and when Iran kills US military personnel stationed in west Asia. The US is the only nation on earth that can rival Israel in its ability to play the victim when the ball they’ve thrown at the wall bounces back.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktrYjMP75Mk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ktrYjMP75Mk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Middle East Eye" caption="Iran, Israel, USA and World War 3 | Chris Hedges | UNAPOLOGETIC"> From the conclusion, <bq>I think the the big change is that this really severs the global north from the global south. That these industrialized nations in the global north have been exposed for who they are. There's no going back. We can't argue that we care about human rights or democracy or can act as the world's policemen or all these tropes that are fed to justify empire and foreign intervention. They won't work anymore. And I think many in the global south---who, to be clear, have suffered holocausts of their own, whether that's in Kenya, whether that's in India, the Armenian genocide---and, of course, these holocausts were never recognized. The discourse on colonialism points out the reason: the Jewish holocaust. The holocaust by the Nazis is held up because it was all of the mechanisms that were used by colonists against, in his words, 'the Koli in India and the blacks in Africa and the Algerians by the French in Algeria,' were used on white people. But they're not new. But those holocausts are, at best, a footnote they're not even acknowledged by their perpetrators. I mean, the Germans in Namibia, for instance, with Herrera and Nama. And I think, with the breakdown of the climate and with increasing numbers of climate refugees, the message that the genocide in Gaza imparts---in particular to the global south---is that we can do this to you. We will stop at nothing. And, as the climate breaks down, as these countries in the global north become climate fortresses, I think many in the global south correctly see the genocide as a kind of template for what will be done to them. And I don't think, at this point, there's any going back. I don't think Israel or the United States---or, for that matter, the UK or Germany---can resurrect themselves. The visage, the mask, has been ripped off and we are seen for who we are. I mean, that's not a surprise, of course, to Native Americans in the United States or African-Americans, who, of course, suffered their own holocausts and genocides. But I think now that's self-evident throughout the whole world.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH51O9gPxZ8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xH51O9gPxZ8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chris Hedges" caption="'WE WOULD LOSE' War with Iran (w/ Col. Lawrence Wilkerson)"> Wilkerson describes the degree of readiness of the U.S. military, especially when compared to the weaponry provided by Russia and China. He says that Israel's attacks have been repulsed to a greater degree than we know, mostly because Russia-provided air-defense systems were able to target their jets much more effectively than they'd expected, causing them to dump their missiles and then turn tail and run. It's a very interesting 16-minute discussion of the military details underlying such a conflict. At least 10 years and $10T, in the best-case scenario for the Empire. The best case for the Empire has never happened. That $10T though. The wealthy elites of the world can't wait to get that for themselves. Maybe all of the world's tech companies should stop farting around with AI and just sell military tech to the U.S. government. Oh, wait. They already do. It's hard to see how this doesn't break the back of the Empire, but I don't think that those running it care at all about that. They're just going to suck the host dry and then see what happens. Golgafrinchans just stuffing their tracksuits full of leaves. Halfway through, Wilkerson talks about the number of IOF who've been killed in Lebanon---he's heard 4000---but he says that the WIA (Wounded In Action) is even more significant because those are an even greater burden on the invaders. At 11:30, <bq>If Israel were to really be attacked by the full weight of Iran it would be a nightmare for Israel. It's becoming that way just with Hezbollah. You're not ever going to get those Israelis to go back to their homes [in the North]. They're going to evacuate Israel eventually. I was told the other day by a friend in Tel Aviv that already, by his count, a million Jewish Israelis have departed.</bq> I'd heard 600,000 since October 7th but it's still a significant proportion of the population. <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Nations Are People</a> <bq>In China, teenagers shyly ask their crushes on dates. In Russia, families gather for a grandmother’s birthday party. In Yemen, harried mothers decide what to make for dinner. In Ukraine, men get excited for their favorite sports team. In Iran, kids dream about what they want to be when they grow up. A nation is a place where people live their lives. The people are just like you and me.</bq> <bq>When you visit another country, and tell them that you are American, you might add, “But don’t judge me!” You would not want to be branded with the weight of the various stupid and despicable actions of your own government. You understand, first, that you do not agree with those things, and second, that you as a regular person have little power to affect those things. You are just living your life. You want to be respected as a human being. Unfortunately, this simple and intuitive understanding of the difference between the government and the people of your own country often evaporates—or gets erased—when the discussion turns to foreign countries. When someone says “Russia,” you probably think of Putin, not of the teenage girl dreaming of what she will do after graduation. When someone says “Iran,” you probably think of something that is often referred to as “the regime,” rather than of the laughing family gathering for a holiday meal. This mental mistake, this unwitting juxtaposition of one thing for a different thing, is like a steamroller that paves the way for you to accept unacceptable things. You would never nod sagely and agree that a bomb should be dropped on a child. But air strikes to “cripple” the “command and control” of a “hostile regime?” Well, of course, serious people understand that this may be necessary in the grand chessboard that is geopolitics. Wars are waged against people. Yet we judge them by their impact on governments. This is a profound moral error. It causes you and your friends and neighbors, nice normal loving people, to countenance the most grotesque violence on earth with little more than a momentary shake of the head at “unfortunate civilian casualties.” Governments, of course, work to create this conflation of enemies in public opinion. We do not have to give into it, though.</bq> <bq>If you are a progressive, says Van Jones (a progressive), you should be offended by various policies of Iran’s government, and therefore you should accept the need to drop bombs on Iran. At no point on this smoothly paved highway to hell does Van Jones stop to marvel at his own mental transition between a nation’s people and its government. Nor does he stop to ask himself whether the proposition, “If a nation’s government and some of its people hold ideas that you disagree with, you should go to war with them” may be flawed. Nor does he end this speech by volunteering to have his own home blown up by Iranian soldiers as penance for the various detestable beliefs of the Trump administration. Odd.</bq> <bq>Are you willing to be killed for your own government’s sins? Are you willing to have your house destroyed and your child hit by shrapnel and your elderly parents lose access to medicine because of the policies of the latest president? If that seems unfair for you, it is unfair for anyone, anywhere.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/chris-hedges-war-with-iran" author="Chris Hedges" source="Substack">War With Iran: We are opening Pandora's box</a> <bq>The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began. Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/ceasefire-or-frying-pan/" author="Indirajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Ceasefire Or Frying Pan?</a> <bq>Iran hammered Be'er Shaba (site of the recent Microsoft reprisal). The scene looked like what 'Israel' did to its own people on October 7th (under the Hannibal Directive). You can see an impact here. Looks hypersonic. The damage was dramatic and 'Israel' was apoplectic. The normal run of a ceasefire is that they [Israel] call it, violate it, and then everyone else has to eat shit. But Iran launched missiles just before a nominal ceasefire, to get the last word in. And 'Israel' had to just take it, or get hit again.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzzxDIxKA8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/MSzzxDIxKA8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Hasan Piker" caption="Zohran Mamdani is exactly what the Democrats need"> This is a great example of an eloquent and media-savvy plea to New Yorkers. 80 seconds. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUXjEgsduU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/nZUXjEgsduU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Man Carrying Thing" caption="guys. we're not at war."> Absolutely devastating, accurate, and heart-breaking genius. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARUZQfmb8Wo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ARUZQfmb8Wo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Hasan Piker" caption="Zohran responds to the threats on his life"> Hasan discusses what it's like to be Muslim---or even to "look" Muslim---in the U.S. <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/if-you-re-normal-people-will-vote-for-you-actually" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">If you're normal, people will vote for you actually</a> <bq>Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman put all this best, writing, “He never condescended. He did not dumb things down into meaninglessness, do shallowly self deprecating ‘I’m uncool but doing a TikTok meme’ hits, or any of the billion other things voters find nauseating. He demonstrated real trust!” (He, also, it should be noted, did not throw trans people under the bus.) So expect to hear a million reasons why Mamdani won today and what it means for Democrats across the country going forward, but, from where I’m sitting, it’s pretty simple. Social media does not turn a bad candidate into a viable one. It’s just amplification. And the same platforms that can amplify the ugliness and hatred and resentment of someone like Trump can amplify the joy and earnestness and seemingly genuine conviction of a candidate like Mamdani. It cannot, however, make voters forget that a candidate like Cuomo killed their grandparents during COVID or that current New York Mayor Eric Adams is a genuine maniac. There’s no magic trick. Mamdani ran a regular ass campaign where he spoke clearly about what he cared about and was normal about it and it worked. Revolutionary! And I understand why this would all be very threatening to Democrats, seeing as how most of them do not seem to care about anything.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-nyc-mayoral-election-speech/" author="Zohran Mamdani" source="Jacobin">“We Can Demand What We Deserve”</a> <bq>I will be the mayor for every New Yorker. Whether you voted for me for Governor Cuomo or felt too disillusioned by a long-broken political system to vote at all, I will fight for a city that works for you, that is affordable for you, that is safe for you. I will work to be a mayor you will be proud to call your own. I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you. If you are hurting, I will try to heal you. If you feel misunderstood, I will strive to understand. Your concerns will always be mine. And I will put your hopes before my own.</bq> <bq>[...] our democracy has been attacked from within. For too long, New Yorkers have strained to find a leader who represents us, who puts us first. And we have been betrayed, time and again. After so many disappointments, the heart hardens, belief becomes elusive. And when we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth. For billionaires to convince us that they must always lead. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations. Not because the people dislike democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.” New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election/" author="Liza Featherstone" source="Jacobin">At a Bleak Political Moment, Zohran Mamdani Offers Hope</a> <bq>Mamdani’s campaign shows that much of the canned conventional wisdom that consultants serve up to the Democratic Party is nonsense. Conventional politics decrees that door-knocking doesn’t work, that young people won’t vote no matter how hard you try to turn them out, that certain demographics (white men, very religious voters) are immutably conservative. And ever since Bernie Sanders inspired so many but did not become president, centrist Democratic leadership has insisted that improving people’s material conditions cannot form the basis of a winning politics. Mamdani’s victory shows they’re wrong about everything.</bq> <bq>Mamdani’s victory also proved the Democratic establishment spectacularly wrong on Israel. The candidate who vowed to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he came to New York, who wouldn’t agree to visit Israel if elected, beat Netanyahu’s lawyer. For his commitment to solidarity with Palestinians and opposition to the genocide, the candidate was constantly tarred as an antisemite by Israel’s apologists.</bq> <bq>If Mamdani does become mayor, the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure. He will face much more pressure to succeed than ordinary mayors, to be able to stand up against backlash; he will need to appoint the most experienced team, drawing on the existing rich expertise of the city’s most dedicated civil servants. He will need to work tirelessly not only on fulfilling his campaign promises but on issues that matter to the middle class, like K-12 education and cleanliness. Under austerity mayor Adams, we have had to step nimbly over human excrement on the stairs as we exit subway stations. Under a Mayor Mamdani, that same pile of excrement could easily become a symbol of why socialism doesn’t work. He needs to demonstrate that socialism — much more so than neoliberalism — can keep the shit off the steps. Mamdani, NYC-DSA, and the broad New York City left have accomplished the hardest thing in American politics: convincing people that change is possible. When you talk to most people about socialist or social democratic ideas — from single-payer health care to free buses — they usually don’t dislike those ideas, they just don’t believe any of that can happen. This campaign showed that it can.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-nyc-mayoral-election-win/" author="Nick French" source="Jacobin">In Zohran Mamdani’s Win, Socialism Beat the Status Quo</a> <bq>[...] on policing and public safety, Mamdani rejected the language of “defund” and “abolition,” arguing that police had a “crucial role to play” in public safety but that police are currently expected to do the work of social workers and mental health professionals, work that they are not trained or well-suited to do.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/gillibrand-mamdani-islamophobia-gaza-intifada/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">Kirsten Gillibrand Doesn’t Seem Bothered by Palestinian Deaths</a> While some writers at the WSWS never tire of calling everyone and anyone "fascist" and "extreme right-wing" (looking at you, Joseph Kishore and David North), even Jacobin's top columnists, like the usually more-incisive author of this piece, tend toward the overly hedged argument. This article was very good and chock-full of information about Kirsten Gillibrand. She is a racist asshole, a preening, stupid, venal, and money-grubbing stooge for Israel. Her entire worldview seems to be "Jews are the only important people on the planet and everyone else can go to hell." Jewish feelings and misinterpretations of statements trump actual, violent reality. It's bullshit. It's manipulation to get political leverage. She knows it's all bullshit. She's been paid off to do this. There is nothing special about her. She's just like all the others. She is a bog-standard moron, a knee-jerk supporter of whatever Israel says reality is. She's not even worth talking about. She's just as stupid as Elise Stepanik---who I heard is going to run for governor of New York State!---and just as evil and venal as Hochul. She fits well into the shoes of warmongering and amoral Hillary Clinton, who preceded her in the post. She is well-paired with Chuck Schumer, the other senator from New York. There is nothing nuanced or special about any of these people worth paying attention to. We can lament that these immoral and unprincipled assholes are in positions of power but we should stop treating their statements and positions as worthy of analysis. It's like trying to pick apart Jeffrey Dahmer's explanations about how he chooses which victims to eat. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/uh-oh-political-antisemitism-smears" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Uh-Oh! Political Antisemitism Smears Have Stopped Working!</a> <bq>I’m seeing some intensely rabid Islamophobia throughout public discourse in response to Mamdani’s win, the likes of which I haven’t seen since 9/11. All this hatred we’re now seeing directed toward Muslims is going to look pretty weird after the imperial crosshairs shift to Beijing and all these same people start acting super duper concerned about the plight of Muslims in Xinjiang.</bq> You would think so, but they won't even blink. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four">We have always been at war with Eastasia.</a> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf3wEg9tsCY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Sf3wEg9tsCY" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="NY Times | Op-Docs" caption="Can You Believe Your Own Eyes? Not With A.I."> This video is great but the NY Times title is catastrophically misrepresentative. The real title is "Death of a Fantastic Machine." Only the last 90 seconds of the 17-minute video features any AI. It's actually just a sequence of AI-generated videos and images at the end of a discussion of how media has been there to manipulate us from the very beginning into buying things. The first 15 minutes is quite good, discussing how we should never believe---or have believed---anything we saw. He brings an example of a photo that shows soldiers shooting from under a helicopter. Who took the picture? Oh, a dozen photographers were spread out in front of them. It was not a battle shot. It was a photo op. YOU'VE BEEN MANIPULATED. The best questions you can ask are "why were they filming?" and "who took this photo?". Nearly everything you see online is staged. That doesn't make it bad---it can still be quite enjoyable---but it's telling a story and it's up to you to figure out what that story is. It's usually "do something that ends up with that author getting money." Adam Curtis covered everything in much more detail in his four-hour "Century of the Self". I documented my impressions of it in <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5276#curtis">Links and Notes for November 29th, 2024</a>. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/eJ3RzGoQC4s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Adam Curtis / David Lessig (uploader)" caption="The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)"> If you're interested in an actual report on actual AI, then check out the following video. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1RmzAbc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/TWpg1RmzAbc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)" caption="AI Slop"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/28/mpfk-j28.html" author="Jacob Crosse" source="WSWS">Republicans incite fascist threats, demand investigation and deportation of Zohran Mamdani after NYC primary win</a> This article quotes people like Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, in which Trump calling Mamdani a communist is least-wrong and least-criminal statement of the bunch. The others call him a terrorist and a communist and describe how he should be removed from the country because he doesn't think the right things. Giuliani muses about how communists should be allowed to vote or run for office. Proud Americans, all of them. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/sic/" source="Where your Ed At?" author="Edward Zitron">Sincerity Wins The War</a> <bq>It is, by the way, easy to cover this ethically, as proven by Allison Morrow of CNN, who, engaging her critical thinking, correctly stated that “Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate,” that “Amodei is a salesman, and it’s in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it’s scary,” and that “little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic’s work.”</bq> <bq>It’s all so deeply insincere, and all so deeply ugly — a view from nowhere, one that seeks not to tell anyone anything other than that whatever the rich or powerful is worried or excited about is true, and that the evidence, no matter how flimsy, always points in the way they want it to. It’s lazy, brainless, and suggests either a complete rot in the top of editorial across the entire business and tech media or a consistent failure by writers to do basic journalism, and as forgiving I want to be, there are enough of these egregious issues that I have to begin asking if anybody is actually fucking trying.</bq> <bq>The cycle repeats because our society — and yes, our editorial class too — is controlled by people who don’t actually interact with it. They have beliefs that they want affirmed, ideas that they want spread, and they don’t even need to work that hard to do so, because the editorial rails are already in place to accept whatever the next big idea is.</bq> <bq>It’s a sexy headline, one that scares the reader into clicking, and when you’re doing a half-assed job at covering a study, you can very easily just say “there’s evidence this is happening.” It’s scary. People are scared, and want to know more about the scary subject, so reporters keep covering it again and again, repeating a blatant lie sourced using flimsy data, pandering to those fears rather than addressing them with reality.</bq> <bq>I’m not even being facetious: show me something! Show me something that actually matters. Show me the thing that will replace white collar workers — or even, honestly, “reduce the need for them.” Find me someone who said “with a tool like this I won’t need this many people” who actually fired them and then replaced them with the tool and the business keeps functioning. Then find me two or three more. Actually, make it ten, because this is apparently replacing half the white collar workforce.</bq> <bq>Generative AI chatbots are driving people insane by providing them an endlessly-configurable pseudo-conversation too, though that’s less of a “use case” and more of a “text-based video game launched at scale without anybody thinking about what might happen.” Let’s be real: none of this is transformative. None of this is futuristic. It’s stuff we already do, done faster, though “faster” doesn’t mean better, or even that the task is done properly, and obviously, it doesn’t mean removing the human from the picture. Generative AI is best at, it seems, doing very specific things in a very generic way, none of which are truly life-changing.</bq> <bq>He just sort of notices whatever is happening and cheerfully announces that it is very exciting and that he is here for it. The slugline for his blog at CNN—it is, in a typical moment of uncanny poker-faced maybe-trolling, called The Point—is “Politics, Explained.” That is definitely not accurate, but it does look better than the more accurate “Politics, Noticed.”</bq> <bq>[...] I believe that this paragraph applies to a great deal of modern journalism. Oh! Anthropic launched a new model! Delightful. What does it do? Oh they told me, great, I can write it down. It’s even better at coding now! Wow! Also, Anthropic’s CEO said something, which I will also write down. The end!</bq> <bq>[...] there are so many more people who will simply hear that there’s a guy who said a thing, and that guy is rich and runs a company people respect, and thus that statement is now news to be reported without commentary or consideration.</bq> <bq>It’s actually pretty nefarious to continually refer to this stuff as “powerful,” because you know their public justification is how this stuff uses a bunch of GPUs, and you know their private justification is that they have never checked and don’t really care to. It’s much easier to follow the pack, because everybody “needs to cover AI” and AI stories, I assume, get clicks.</bq> <bq>The problem, ultimately, is that everybody is aware that they’re being constantly conned, but they can’t always see where and why. Their news oscillates from aggressively dogmatic to a kind of sludge-like objectivity, and oftentimes feels entirely disconnected from their own experiences other than in the most tangential sense, giving them the feeling that their actual lives don’t really matter to the world at large.</bq> <bq>[...] when you cram a bunch of fucking money into something it tends to get big, and if that thing you create is a big boring piece of shit that’s clearly built to be — and even signposted in the news as built to be — manipulative, it is in and of itself sickening.</bq> <bq>Outside of podcasting, people’s options for mainstream (and an alarming amount of industry) news are somewhere between “I’m smarter than you,” “something happened!” “sneering contempt,” “a trip to the principal’s office,” or “here’s who you should be mad at,” which I realize also describes the majority of the New York Times opinion page. </bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/24/npma-j24.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Conditions for a financial crisis building up</a> <bq>“The CRE market is illiquid [meaning assets are not easily turned into cash] and, as a consequence, it may be difficult to price assets in times of stress. Book valuations for assets and collateral disclosed by market participants (both banks and non-banks) may recognise losses with delay, and losses may therefore emerge abruptly in a prolonged downturn.”</bq> <bq>The report pointed to the high level of leverage (debt) in the sector which globally was about 45 percent of total assets. The figure is an average and at the extreme was much higher. There was a “tail” of real estate investment and other property funds in the US, Canada, Singapore and Germany that has “large levels of leverage with debt being at least three times equity.”</bq> <bq>The significance of private funds has grown in leaps and bounds since the global financial crisis of 2008 and the introduction of tighter lender standards on the banks. But just as water finds the gaps in any system meant to contain it, finance has managed to fund new ways to get around the restrictions in the search for higher returns that come from riskier loans. The report said that the “opaqueness” of private credit funds and their “role in making the financial network more densely connected mean they could disproportionately amplify a future crisis.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/27/mamdanis-brilliant-campaign/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Mamdani’s Brilliant Campaign</a> <bq>But it was also great to see that Mamdani was elected pushing an explicitly progressive economic agenda. He wants to increase taxes on the rich and corporations, and to use the money for items like free buses and affordable housing. He also wants stronger rent control. He proposes to set up public supermarkets which can compete with the existing chains. Mamdani also recognizes the need for more housing in general and has endorsed the abundance gang’s agenda of removing zoning and other obstacles to building. While I am happy to see Mamdani run and win on this platform, I do worry about the limits on the ability of a single city, even a huge one like NYC, to pursue some of the items on his agenda. This is especially the case with tax and transfer policies. I have long felt that even at the national level tax and transfer policy has limits. Rich people are very creative at finding ways to avoid or evade taxes. At the state and local level, they have even more options, since all they have to do is to move across a city or state line, or at least claim they have. Remember, the people we are most interested in taxing almost all have two or three or even more homes. Proving that their home in New York City is in fact their primary residence, and should be the basis for taxation, is not an easy task.</bq> You gotta start somewhere. Make them be sleazy rather than just threatening to be sleazy. Bring it to the surface. Let people know which people are sucking up all the money and refusing to pay anything to the city that they obviously live in. Let all the people know which people are preventing them from having free busing and affordable groceries. Let a thousand Mangiones bloom (h/t to Liz Franczak of TrueAnon for that one). <bq>Mamdani is a sharp and energetic politician. And he should have valuable assistance from Brad Lander, the current city comptroller and third place finisher in the mayoral race. Lander and Mamdani campaigned together and cross-endorsed in the city’s system of rank-choice voting. He presumably will play a major role in a Mamdani administration. There is a long way between now and November, and the moneyed types will do everything in their power to keep Mamdani from winning. They could succeed, but for now we have a big victory to celebrate.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEo-ykjmHgg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/jEo-ykjmHgg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="National Geographic" caption="This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World | Short Film Showcase"> This is an absolutely lovely short film about the Mauritania Railway, with trains up to three kilometers in length. People ride on top of it, like Fremen riding Shai-Hulud. People depend on the train for their entire livelihood. It is ostensibly there to carry iron ore---17,000 tons at a time, enough to build an Eiffel Tower---but people like fisherman also ride it for two days to bring their catch inland. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/social-media-and-the-collapse-of" author="Adam Aleksic" source="The Etymology Nerd">social media and the collapse of ritual</a> <bq>There’s really no way to fight this. You can’t pretend the algorithms aren’t there. Even off of social media, their audiovisual logic affects the way we see and relate to each other. But you can be aware of what they’re doing, reclaiming micro-rituals where you can and harnessing the platform’s symbols for good.</bq> This is really too fatalistic. Just. Stop. Using. Algorithmic. Feeds. It is possible. I assimilate a tremendous amount of information. I don't use Instagram. I don't use TikTok. I don't use Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I use Reddit very minimally, and there I control my newsfeed very carefully. I don't use the YouTube algorithm. How do I get my news? How do I watch videos? I subscribe to RSS and ATOM newsfeeds. I use NetNewsWire on MacOS to read hundreds of feeds per day. I get about 100-150 items delivered to me, each selected by me. I don't get anything else. I don't get any ads. I just get the information that I requested. This is not difficult. Anyone can do it. You start small, with a handful of newsfeeds. When you see a video by someone you like, subscribe to their channel but also grab their RSS feed and subscribe to that. You'll see everything that they publish without having to hope that the algorithm will bubble it up to you. When you like a writer, you can subscribe to the RSS for that blog or web site. Nearly every web site has an RSS feed. They're often hidden because they'd rather that you subscribed via e-mail, which is a stupid waste of time. Smash <kbd>(-cmd)</kbd> + <kbd>U</kbd> to view the source and search for the word "feed". Copy the link and smash <kbd>(-cmd)</kbd> + <kbd>N</kbd> in NetNewsWire to add it to your collection. Do this to save your sanity. Stop doomscrolling. Stop browsing slop. I read Adam's blog like that. When he publishes an article, it shows up in my newsfeed. I can read it there or I can open the web page. It's super-convenient. I don't see an ads or auto-playing videos in my newsfeed reader. In my browser, Opera's ad-blocker combined with UBlock Origin kills everything. If the page is still too messy, I can turn on reader mode. If the article is longer, I push it into my Instapaper stack. Don't let the immediacy of a publication adjust your priority queue. Maybe you're excited to read Adam's latest article. Maybe it's short, so you can just read it. Maybe it's long and involved. Do you need to read it right now? No? Then put it on a stack and read it when you have time and maybe you'll get more out of it. Stop letting the algorithms determine your content and your priorities. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdss3c5TJzw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/vdss3c5TJzw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="World Science Festival | Brian Greene" caption="Can You Trust Your Memories? (Interview with Paul Bloom)"> This is a two-hour interview with Paul Bloom about topics related to the mind, Freud, and the fallibility of memory. <pre> 0:00:00 - Introduction 0:01:38 - Consciousness & The Hard Problem 0:10:05 - Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness 0:19:25 - Baby Cognition & Development 0:27:10 - Evolution, Altruism & Human Nature 0:32:30 - Intuition in Science & Everyday Life 0:44:09 - Memory, Fallibility & Legal Implications 0:58:24 - Nature vs Nurture 1:05:13 - Freud & Psychological Theories 1:09:11 - Groupthink & Collective Beliefs 1:17:05 - Truth-Seeking in Science 1:23:15 - Empathy & Rational Compassion 1:43:16 - Suffering, Meaning & Purpose 1:58:41 - Closing Remarks & Reflections 1:59:48 - Credits </pre> At 01:11:00, he talks about how people sometimes believe obviously incorrect things because it gives them status in their in-group. His first example is of how many people believed that Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S. He grants that people kind of had to at least pretend to believe that or they'd have been ostracized. They eventually ended up forgetting that it was false. Nearly unbelievably, he actually says that that example is of course one that a <iq>liberal professor from Canada</iq> would mention and then names the liberals who'd believed the most obviously wrong-headed---<iq>manifestly mistaken</iq>---things about COVID because it pleased their in-group. <bq>We're social animals and we want to coordinate with other people. So, take a belief a while ago that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and was not an American citizen. Conspiracy theory. Didn't have much evidence for it. But, if you were in a community where everybody believed that, it's actually really important for you to believe it too. It's very advantageous. If you didn't believe it, nobody would like you and you wouldn't do well. And that's the sort of argument...I'm a liberal professor in Canada, so I'm giving you an argument favors my side. But there's a million cases where liberal people have views, say, over COVID. A lot of liberal people had views that were manifestly mistaken---and proven to be mistaken---later on. But they had these views not because they were true but because it was part of their political alliance, their political belief system. And who am I to say that they were mistaken? They were factually mistaken, but these beliefs were important for their reputation, for their their social status and so on.</bq> Greene and Bloom go on to discuss about how <iq>we default to the views of our tribe,</iq>, even naming the disastrous support for Joe Biden, long after his cognitive decline had become glaringly obvious. They haven't talked about agency yet, about how the elites use the power for the completely captured media to manipulate this feature of our brains and memories. <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/back-to-work" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Back to Work</a> <bq>[...] I’ll have to follow up, with Hamish or some other associate, about the viability of some kind of “Substack Ed” arrangement, where we might hold a proper seminar-like class. Apparently this is not really possible using the newish “Substack live” option, since that doesn’t fully facilitate frictionless bidirectional communication. But we’ll figure it out somehow. (Thanks again, Hamish, it was all very lovely!)</bq> How about EdMaker for this? <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/ubuntu-disables-intel-gpu-security-mitigations-promises-20-performance-boost/" author="Dan Goodin" source="Ars Technica">Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost</a> <bq>Most of the researchers Ars consulted agreed. They reasoned that the mitigations built into the kernel are likely to protect against most if not all Spectre attack scenarios. They also noted that there are no known reports of Spectre attacks ever being actively used in the wild. “Nobody bothers attacking these vulns because it takes a lot of engineering time to implement attacks against them to any useful level of rigor, and getting any interesting data back outside very targeted scenarios is very unlikely (plus it's noisy due to the number of iterations you need to do on these types of side-channels),” independent researcher Graham Sutherland wrote on Mastodon. “The economics just don't stack up for attackers, especially when there are so many lower-effort higher-reward attack approaches they can throw at stuff.”</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/" source="Ludicity" author="Nikhil Suresh">Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI</a> <bq>Can we all just turn our brains on for ten fucking seconds? Yes, AI shipping code at all, even if sometimes it is slow or doesn't work correctly, is very impressive from a technological standpoint. It is miles ahead of anything that I thought could be accomplished in 2018. The state-of-the-art in 2018 was garbage. That doesn't mean that you aren't having a ton of bullshit marketed to you.</bq> <bq>Do you really think that “These are all real concerns, but counterpoint, fuck off” is anything? A lot of developers like piracy and argue in bad faith about it, therefore it's okay for organizations that are beginning to look increasingly like cyberpunk megacorps, without even the virtue of cool aesthetics, to siphon billions of dollars of wealth from working class people? No, you don't, I think you wrote this because it's fun telling people to shove it — and listen, you will never find a more sympathetic ally on the topic than me. You should just be telling Zuckerberg to shove it instead of the person that has dedicated their lives to ensuring that Postgres continues to support the global economy.</bq> <bq>I actually looked up multiple videos of people doing some live AI programming. And I went hey, this seems okay. It does seem very over-complicated to me, but I will happily concede that everything looks complicated when you're new at it. But it also definitely doesn't look orders of magnitude faster than the work I normally do. It looks like it would be useful for a non-trivial subset of problems that are tedious.</bq> <bq>Is it not, perhaps, a possibility that your friend is excited by a shiny new tool and has failed to introspect adequately as to their true productivity? There are, after all, literally hundreds of thousands of people that think playing Jira Scrabble is an effective use of their time, and they also do not have a reason to lie to me about this. Nonetheless, every year, I must watch sadly as they lead my dejected peers to the Backlog Mines, where they will waste precious hours reciting random components of the Fibonacci sequence.</bq> <bq>[...] the hype I've seen around AI is like, fucking next level, and I want out. We are at Amway-Megachurch-Cult levels of hype. The last time I attended a conference, the room was full of non-technicians paying lip service to the Holy Trinity Of Things They Can't Possibly Understand — blockchain, quantum, AI.</bq> <bq>I wish, oh how I wish that it was like other hype cycles, but presumably not many people were walking around saying that smartphones are going to solve physics and usher in the end of all human labor, real things Sam Altman has said. I</bq> <bq>Good strategy could perhaps be something like gently suggesting people experiment with LLMs in their workflows, buying a bunch of $100 licenses, and maybe paying for some coaching in the effective usage of these tools if you are somehow able to navigate the ten thousand “thought leaders” that were cybersecurity experts a year ago, and real estate agents before that. Then instruct everyone to shut up and go back to doing their jobs.</bq> <bq>The former category of maximalist AI-haters exist on Mastodon, which most executives do not know exists and certainly do not use to guide the allocation of society's funding. The latter category of trembling AI sycophants is literally killing people — I know of a hospital in Australia that is wasting all their time on AI initiatives, which caused them to leave data quality issues unfixed, which caused them to under-report COVID deaths, which caused a premature lifting of masking policies. How many old people go through a major hospital per day? Do the math and riddle me this, Tomahawk: which one of these groups should I be worried about?</bq> <bq>All my hopes of becoming even a mediocre chess player were dashed when I discovered there is an opening called the Hyperaccelerated Dragon, preventing me from ever wanting to do anything else with any enthusiasm.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-polluted-ruined-ai-development" source="Futurism" author="Frank Landymore">ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development</a> <bq>[...] the finite amount of data predating ChatGPT's rise becomes extremely valuable. In a new feature, The Register likens this to the demand for "low-background steel," or steel that was produced before the detonation of the first nuclear bombs, starting in July 1945 with the US's Trinity test. Just as the explosion of AI chatbots has irreversibly polluted the internet, so did the detonation of the atom bomb release radionuclides and other particulates that have seeped into virtually all steel produced thereafter. That makes modern metals unsuitable for use in some highly sensitive scientific and medical equipment. And so, what's old is new: a major source of low-background steel, even today, is WW1 and WW2 era battleships, including a huge naval fleet that was scuttled by German Admiral Ludwig von Reuter in 1919. Maurice Chiodo, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge called the admiral's actions the "greatest contribution to nuclear medicine in the world."</bq> <bq>In 2024, Chiodo co-authored a paper arguing that there needs to be a source of "clean" data not only to stave off model collapse, but to ensure fair competition between AI developers. Otherwise, the early pioneers of the tech, after ruining the internet for everyone else with their AI's refuse, would boast a massive advantage by being the only ones that benefited from a purer source of training data.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/" source="" author="Simon Willison">The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication</a> <bq>Any time you ask an LLM system to summarize a web page, read an email, process a document or even look at an image there’s a chance that the content you are exposing it to might contain additional instructions which cause it to do something you didn’t intend.</bq> <bq>The problem with Model Context Protocol—MCP—is that it encourages users to mix and match tools from different sources that can do different things. Many of those tools provide access to your private data. Many more of them—often the same tools in fact—provide access to places that might host malicious instructions. And ways in which a tool might externally communicate in a way that could exfiltrate private data are almost limitless. If a tool can make an HTTP request—to an API, or to load an image, or even providing a link for a user to click—that tool can be used to pass stolen information back to an attacker.</bq> <bq>As a user of these systems you need to understand this issue. The LLM vendors are not going to save us! We need to avoid the lethal trifecta combination of tools ourselves to stay safe.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://andrewlock.net/working-with-stacked-branches-in-git-part-1/" source="" author="Andrew Lock">Working with stacked branches in git (Part 1)</a> <bq><c>--update-refs</c>: "move" the branch pointers along with the commits they're currently pointing to when doing the rebase. </bq> I don't use the Git command-line very often---especially not for interactive rebases on stacked branches---but I'm happy to know that this option exists. I wonder if it exists in SmartGit? The closest I could find was <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72346336/git-interactive-rebase-how-to-move-other-branches-refs-automatically" source="StackOverflow">Git interactive rebase: how to move other branches (refs) automatically?</a>, which notes that there is a configuration option <c>rebase.updateRefs</c> that will apply to all rebased branches, either globally or per repository. I'm not so sure I'll be setting that right away, but it's good to know it exists. <hr> <a href="https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/06/17/make-worse-software-slower/" source="Red Planet Labs" author="Nathan Marz">Make Worse Software, Slower</a> <bq>Some systems claim to support instant migrations by applying transformation logic on read, transparently converting old records to the new format when they’re accessed, while also migrating data durably in the background. This supposedly means that clients see the new schema immediately, even for a multi-terabyte datastore, without any downtime and without needing to manually engineer anything. Since this sounds too good to be true, that means it must be false. Stick with the tried and true techniques that engineers have been using for decades.</bq> <bq>Everyone agrees that global mutable variables are bad. They lead to tangled spaghetti code that nobody wants to touch. But when you wrap that same concept in a network call and call it a “database”, it’s great! Embrace the full power of global mutable state by having all application logic read and write directly to one or more mutable, shared databases like Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, or Cassandra. Ignore any alternative approaches of materializing durable, indexed datastores that aren’t global mutable state.</bq> <bq>Instead of using something with infinite data models, you get to use multiple tools, none of which fully match your domain, all duct-taped together. This is flexibility, not complexity. You get the deep satisfaction of managing many tools and trying to make their incompatible worldviews cooperate.</bq> <hr> Friend: <iq>I'd love to hear your case for an interface with one implementation.</iq> Yikes. Talk about <a href="https://xkcd.com/356/" source="XKCD">nerd-sniping</a>. Very often the sneaky (because somewhat implicit) second implementation is a mock or fake. If there’s no need for that, then it depends on context. Within your own little world (e.g., an app), you can generally go without an interface viz. use the concrete implementation as the interface. I do this a lot in my apps with my students, where we register 90% of the types as concrete types. For example, in these <a href="https://github.com/mvonballmo/HFU_APE/blob/main/src/MLZ2025/MLZ2025.Core/Services/CoreServiceCollectionExtensions.cs" source="GitHub">IOC registrations</a>. I’ve only created a single interface for registrations. Here are <a href="https://github.com/mvonballmo/HFU_APE/blob/main/src/MLZ2025/MLZ2025.Shared/Services/SharedServiceCollectionExtensions.cs#L8" source="GitHub">some more</a>.. However, if the type is part of a library’s API surface, then you should consider whether a consumer of your library will want to create their own second instance for some reason (either the O or L of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID">SOLID</a>; if I’m honest, those occasionally blur together for me, depending on how I look at them). In general, I recommend using interfaces for types of non-trivial/non-data parameters. I think to myself "would I be annoyed that I had to create this type in order to call this method? Would I rather have been able to pass my own object that already implemented that interface instead, had there been one?" Ditto for return types of API-surface methods (e.g., a method in an interface): If it’s a dead-simple type that no other implementation would ever want to extend or enhance, then use a concrete type. If something would want to return a strongly-typed result, then you can use <a href="https://www.thomasclaudiushuber.com/2021/03/11/c-9-0-covariant-return-types/" author="Thomas Claudius Huber">covariant return types</a>. Or you could use — shudder — generic parameters. I love generic parameters while also acknowledging that there are usually better solutions that don’t infect your whole code base. See section 7.13 of my <a href="https://www.earthli.com/data/news/attachments/entry/1817/encodo_c_handbook.pdf">C# handbook</a> for more information about that. In section 2.8, I wrote <iq>Use the least-derived possible type for local variables and method parameters; this makes the expected API as explicit and open as possible.</iq> Sections 2.3 and 2.4 are also relevant. If you do use an interface, then keep it slim. If it’s not slim, then Section 6.6.1 recommends providing an abstract base class to let consumers of your API more easily build their own implementations. Friend: <bq>The first point you make of mocks is one I begrudgingly agree with. I happily agree to the points about library code and api stuff I asked to see if my frustration with nearly every type in the [code at work] being backed by an interface was valid or not. It's seems -- a little.</bq> Yeah, I get it. There’s even a term of art for it called YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it). But following YAGNI also entails being able to make changes when you need them. That’s not always going to be the case. Sometimes it’s better to "cheat in" a bit and anticipate the technical debt you don’t have yet. There is also a benefit to setting up rules that are always applied because it lets you focus on the actual meat of the code. Think of code-style and formatting. In the old days, you’d have to wonder whether a given deviation from a semi-agreed-upon standard was deliberate (for clarity?) or a mistake. That’s noise. So now we set up an auto-formatter that runs whenever you save and no longer have to think about it. When you make an interface for every class, it goes in the same direction: you’re not wasting time thinking about whether this particular class needs an interface. You just auto-generate it and move on. When someone tests the code, they have the interface and don’t have to create it and/or retrofit it. This kind of arrangement can happen when you work on a team with uneven attitudes toward consistency or an ungodly need for consistency where it’s not helping. Or on teams that have to support six products, all of which are very similar. I feel like you and I are blessed to be able to work in bespoke-codebases where we have a lot of autonomy. It takes another kind of developer or team to realize that guidelines are just that: you can deviate where it makes sense. But then you’re also opening things up for possibly non-productive discussions. There are pros and cons, as nearly always. I pick my battles and pick my hills to die on. Friend: <bq>On the topic of interfaces vs abstract classes: How do you feel about the allegation that c# has way too many ways to represent the same idea?</bq> I think that those allegations come from people who fail to notice that C# has the number 13 at the front of its version number. I think C# is remarkably consistently, well-thought-through, and non-redundant considering how many revisions it has gone through and the myriad and diverse use cases that it covers. It’s easy to allege redundancy when you don’t care about any of the other use cases. Sometimes there are two ways because they only thought of the second, better way much later and, by then, it was too late to get rid of the previous way of doing things. Sometimes it was because they had made a decision not to alter the runtime, which constrained the potential solution set to less-elegant solutions. Two versions later, and a runtime update suddenly makes the elegant version possible. One such use case that many developers don’t have to concern themselves with is: evolving public APIs. I can tell you that a lot supposed baggage is there to help developers smoothly transition consumers from one major version to the next. For example, <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/proposals/csharp-8.0/default-interface-methods">default interface methods</a> and, eventually, their static counterparts, are already very, very useful for avoiding the previously very common "breaking an interface by extending it" problem. The previous solution was to create a new interface, inherited from the old one. It was a mess. Swift solves a lot of this with extension protocols but their compiler is dog-slow because of it (and will never get faster because it’s a hard problem to solve that <a href="https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/why-swift-is-slow/">they’ve set up for themselves</a>). C# is going in this direction a bit with their <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5098">new approach to extension-everything</a> Other languages just punt on the problem where C# goes the extra mile, over many versions, to finally address a very common pain point. I can live with having a language that’s more expressive than it needs to be (especially if the reasons are now unavoidable) because I can also use _developer discipline_ to choose the patterns I want to use. I’ll use `int` every time over `Int32` and I’ll let my tools enforce it. I often use/used extensions methods for logic that composed other public methods or properties instead of cluttering the interface with methods that have default implementations. That was limiting in its way, so I’m happy that they added default interface methods that derivations can override. So much better. We still have extension methods, which is kinda/sorta overlapping, but I can stop using them. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://theonion.com/why-im-sending-issues-of-the-onion-to-every-member-of-congress/" author="Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO" source="The Onion">Why I’m Sending Issues of ‘The Onion’ To Every Member Of Congress</a> <bq>Simply put, the inaction of Congress has already made me happier than any legal loophole could. As a titan of business, I find this nation’s descent into corruption and tyranny not simply a balm for my soul, but also a huge benefit to my bottom line. We are on the precipice of a new economic order, one in which affluent men like myself will be able to select their own tax rate from a drop-down menu. It’s a reality I barely dreamed possible just a few months ago.</bq> <bq>As we stand in the smoldering ruins of our democratic government, we at Global Tetrahedron LLC would be doing a disservice to our shareholders, their descendants, and their descendants’ thoroughbred horses if we didn’t take this opportunity to snatch up as much power and money as possible while the getting is good.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/letter-to-congress/" author="" source="The Onion">Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice</a> <bq>Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocket. Now is not the time for listening to your idiotic constituents drone on about what’s happening to their precious democracy. This is the time for getting down on all fours and groveling. Now is not the time to say, “Enough is enough,” and have the tough conversations about resisting the ongoing assaults on American liberty. This is the time to let the wave of apathy and indifference roll over you [...]</bq> <bq>Democracy? Equality? The U.S. Constitution? These are hollow phrases. They mean nothing. But money—delicious money? That is solid. You can hold it in your hands. You know this. We know this, too. Only our infantile citizenry fail to appreciate how much you stand to gain by kissing the ring.</bq> <bq>Think of the members of Congress who turned a blind eye to Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, or the horrors of the Holocaust, all because doing something seemed a little too hard, a little too inconvenient.</bq>