<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-corruption-complex/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">The Corruption Complex</a> <bq>The last British Prime Minister just cycled back into employment at Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Prime Minister went into PR at Facebook, reminding us of the oligarchs that actually run the shack that was once the seat of White Empire. <b>The once vaunted British Premiership is now just an internship for more important corporate jobs.</b></bq> <bq>Hence the marketing campaign to Americans is always that Zelensky is asking for money or we're helping Netanyahu, but follow the money, not the media. <b>Most of the money cycles back into third houses and second yachts for the genteel ghouls of Bethesda, Maryland. The Beltway Bandits ride again.</b> This ain't their first radio, as Ghani, or Diệm, or Park, could tell you. They've propped up numerous paragons of democracy, in order to tear down their countries behind the scenes. <b>As Scarface said, “You need people like me so you can point your fuckin' fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So... what that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie.”</b> Ain't it the truth, from the eponymous bad guy.</bq> <bq><b>America's military is now too corrupt to fight grown-ups, their media is too corrupt to fool the people, and their politicians are too corrupt to even rape grown-ups, flying the Lolita Express into oblivion instead.</b> Corruption works as long as it's insidious and White Empire worked best when [sic] long as it was invisible, but neither condition holds anymore. The center cannot hold, things fall apart, and so on. <b>The corruption is increasingly obvious and the Empire is increasingly preposterous. It lumbers on in the news, but historically, they're done. Not soon enough for the people of Gaza, but sooner than we thought because of the people of Gaza, God bless them.</b></bq> <bq><b>Empire has now lost military control of the periphery, deindustrialized the semi-periphery (Europe) in a blind fury, and are just one big market crash away from collapsing centrally.</b> As Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin said in 1999, before they blew him out of his wheelchair, “<b>Any entity founded on injustice and plunder is destined to be destroyed.</b>” He was talking about 'Israel' (DOA by 2027), but that's really <b>the final horcrux of White Empire.</b> The Carbon Crusaders won't be long for the world once they lose Jerusalem (inshallah).</bq> <bq>[...] <b>godspeed to the Resistance and God damn the Empire.</b> They spread corruption in the land and called it peace, but soon (not soon enough) they'll be deceased. I won't say Rest In Peace, cause they never gave us any.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/15/rosy-skies-are-rare/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Rosy Skies Are Rare</a> <bq>[...] an impossible 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GMP) on war preparations. That seems a low sum, but would mean <b>over €215 billion for Germany alone. 1,5% would be for “infra-structure”- with a stress on re-enforcing highways and bridges, ports and rail lines to carry tons of tanks and artillery, all heading eastward, openly aimed at Russia!</b> Dilapidated schools, too few pre-K facilities to teach kids good German or swimming pools to teach them to swim, shutting down hospitals and clinics, miserly care for the elderly, cuts in aid to music schools, theaters, youth clubs? Oh, let them wrangle over what each can squeeze out of tight budgets! <b>For Merz & Co. – first things first! Defense, Security, Safeguarding Freedom and Democracy from Putin!</b></bq> <bq>With the Ukraine war [Rheinmetall] is now Germany’s biggest weapons-maker. <b>Share-holders’ value jumped from €4 billion in 2022 to more than €91 billion today.</b> Orders for its tanks and other weapons surpass €55 billion, and its CEO, Armin Papperger, boasts: “With 50% sales growth in defense, Rheinmetall is transitioning from a European systems supplier to a global leader.” <b>It plans new factories in the Ukraine, one for armored vehicles, one for munition.</b> The last time we checked Papperger’s salary stood at €8,000,000 a year. We do not know how he feels about a cease-fire and peace in the Ukraine. But we can guess. Possibly sharing such feelings in a happy swarm is an even bigger fish. BlackRock, with 70 offices in 30 countries, is the world’s largest manager of assets, now worth over $10 trillion. Its sharp fangs bite into economic innards everywhere, from Exxon Mobil and Fox Broadcasting to the Deutsche Bank. <b>In May 2024, after a clearly well-informed insider deal, BlackRock became the biggest stockholder and influencer of Rheinmetall! And who was Asset Management Chairman for BlackRock in Germany at the time? None other than Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz, today Germany’s chancellor!</b></bq> <bq><b>Most leading politicians blame Germany’s growing woes</b> not on horrendous military spending or gaping loop-holes in taxing such as Rheinmetall and Blackrock – and definitely not on “the system” -but rather <b>on refugees greedily storming the gates of “our Europe” or the children and grandchildren of those who once made it across “overly porous” frontiers.</b></bq> <bq>[...] speculation on the life of Sahra’s <b>BSW</b>. After an impressive upward start last year, above all in the eastern states, its ratings sank lower and lower, even in the east, where for some it has become part of the establishment. Nationally, a heart-breaking result of 4.95 % in February left them less than 9600 votes short of 5% (with 60 million voters) and not one single seat in the Bundestag. The result seemed falsified, but now, <b>nearly six months later, they seem all but glued to 4% in the national polls. Despite brave words, their future looks far from rosy.</b></bq> <bq>Is the Federal Republic in danger of being attacked or is the current alarm campaign really the ideological basis for rearmament and militarization of all fields of society worse than ever since 1945? <b>Does German membership in NATO and leadership in militarizing the European Union represent a growing menace to world peace?</b> Would a military draft – now being planned – and military units stationed outside Germany – long since in practice – improve or endanger peace?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/07/greece-africa-refugees-eu-borders/" source="Jacobin" author="Moira Lavelle">Greece Is Shutting the Door to Refugees</a> <bq><b>Greece’s refugee camps are infamously inhabitable, in a constant state of emergency: they have been left without running water for weeks at a time</b>; and adults and even children are packed on top of each other in conditions so tight that avoiding illnesses becomes miraculous. <b>Doctors and translators are provided only rarely, if at all.</b></bq> <bq>“<b>The Greek ban on people arriving from North Africa from claiming asylum is a policy as illegal and failed as its 2020 iteration for refugees arriving from Turkey</b>,” said Minos Mouzourakis, a lawyer at Refugee Support Aegean. “International law allows no derogation from the right to seek asylum. Deportation to countries where people face torture and ill-treatment is never permitted and never realistic. <b>Greece is only unnecessarily delaying access to protection for thousands of people, and dismantling the rule of law in the process.</b>”</bq> <bq>If this law is passed too, this would essentially mark the end of asylum in Greece. This country does not have a refugee program that allows people to apply for international protection from beyond its borders. <b>People must arrive in Greece to seek asylum. Most of them cannot get a visa to arrive, and so they board rickety boats or take to their feet.</b> Soon those people will simply be imprisoned and deported. <b>They will not have access to asylum or international protection.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>von der Leyen herself has stated that the EU needs to focus on “effectively streamlin[ing] the process of returns,”</b> and the bloc is considering permitting “deportation hubs” in third countries — that is, <b>immediately sending asylum seekers out of the EU before they are then subjected to removal proceedings.</b></bq> This sounds exactly like the Trump administration's due-process-free ICE policy of deporting first and asking questions later. Or just not asking questions at all. I mean, who cares? The U.S. doesn't need more latino cockroaches infesting its cupboards. And Europe wholeheartedly agrees, but is too chicken to go as far as the Trump administration, since they're not deporting actual residents. They will have to continue to put up with the filthy Roma and Africans until they grow a strong and crooked backbone like their big brother across the pond. Instead, Europe hot-potatoes potential immigrants out before they can "take root" in any fashion that might be considered legally protected. If you get rid of people fast enough, even the courts can't keep up. In this, the rabid, xenophobic, and clinically pinheaded fascists in both Europe and the U.S. are in agreement. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/07/its-time-for-left-to-embrace-small.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">It's Time for the Left to Embrace Small Government Again</a> <bq>Whereas the glutinous missile hockers in the old GOP used to at least pay lip service to notions of states' rights and fiscal responsibility, <b>the Dutch elm disease infecting the Tree of Liberty known as Christian nationalism openly celebrates the use of sweeping executive powers to fortify our toxic union beneath a narrow interpretation of a million-year-old compilation of Middle Eastern fairy tales</b> and even the Supreme Court seems to be in on the grift.</bq> <bq>This is the danger inherent to any form of big government. <b>The state is a tool designed to give a select few the power to do things that your average citizen would be jailed for doing</b>, whether this means robbing the poor at gunpoint to build a bridge or throwing them into concentration camps for refusing to kick up their taxes. Regardless of what the intentions are of those who erect such systems, sooner or later, <b>they will all be abused because they quite simply afford far too much power to far too few people.</b></bq> <bq>Abe Lincoln turned the Abolitionist Movement into a bloody excuse to consolidate power in the hands of the <b>Northern industrial elites who simply replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery.</b> <b>The Women's Movement was hijacked by progressive bats like Margaret Sanger who quickly converted it into a vehicle for compulsory temperance and population control.</b> And the seemingly endless revolutionary potential of the Labor Movement was murdered by FDR's Mussolini-inspired New Deal which <b>neutered wildcats into mobbed-up union fat cats.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the forbidden fruit of secession should at the very least remain on the table as a viable bargaining chip if not an outright solution to a nation clearly too big to fail without a goddamn apocalypse.</b></bq> <bq>With the tools of the liberal-progressive welfare state being rapidly converted into weapons by an increasingly desperate and zealous police state, <b>the left's only hope is to convert every village into a fortress against tyranny because the only way to take care of these fuckers is to take care of each other first</b> and there is no state substitute for community.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/19/medicaid-is-giving-ice-access-to-data-of-79m-enrollees-including-ethnicity/" author="Sharon Zhang" source="Scheer Post">Medicaid Is Giving ICE Access to Data of 79M Enrollees, Including Ethnicity</a> <bq>[...] undocumented immigrants are not allowed to enroll in Medicaid, and other immigrants in the U.S. have to meet certain qualifications in order to be eligible. <b>Conservatives have long made claims of widespread fraud within Medicaid and other welfare programs, but there is no evidence to back them up.</b> Further, there is no reason to give ICE access to the data to investigate fraud, as <b>there are already Medicaid fraud investigators in every state and territory tasked with doing just that.</b> But, using fraud and unauthorized immigration as excuses, Trump administration officials have worked relentlessly to expand the police state — <b>replacing public services meant to help working class Americans with law enforcement officers who enjoy anonymity and impunity.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-white-empire-is-starving-people-to-death/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">The White Empire Is Starving People To Death</a> <bq><b>One of the first phrases I learned in Tamil (my wife's language) was ‘have you eaten?’ It's basically a greeting</b>, and if the person hasn't, you need to do something about it.</bq> <bq><b>It doesn't make the headlines, but the deadline is nigh.</b> 'Israel' has cut off food for over months now, bodies are just shutting down and people are falling down and dying. Almost everyone is nearing the point of irreversible malnutrition. Every child is somehow stunted for life, not to mention traumatized. This is obviously a plan, executed, strategized, and timed. <b>They're checking the days off a calendar, trying to drain years, centuries out of Palestinian life.</b> As the 'Israeli' general (retired Giora Eiland said) “Israel must therefore not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life” and “<b>severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.</b>” This is called the general's plan and they're executing it with full imperial support. Of course they are, <b>this is how America was ‘won’ and Europe was unimpoverished. It's Colonialism 101.</b></bq> <bq>This is it, in the end, at their end, inshallah. <b>They are killing children to stop the future from coming. It won't work in the long run, but in the short run, people are dying.</b> The future comes unbidden, but with a million people as human sacrifice, that didn't have to die. <b>They cannot kill the future, but they can certainly kill the children now.</b> Not to mention the elders, the adults, and the land itself. As well as their own souls for what that's worth to them, which is apparently nothing. <b>What does it profit a man to sell his soul and gain the world? A lot, actually, but not for long.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/iron-dome-is-not-a-defensive-system" author="Dylan Saba" source="Jewish Currents">Iron Dome Is Not a Defensive System</a> <bq><b>The Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian humanity.</b></bq> <bq>[...] this narrow view reflects the total devaluation of Palestinian life endemic to US foreign policy. By almost entirely negating the ability of militant groups in Gaza to respond to Israel’s incursions, <b>the purportedly defensive Iron Dome allows Israel to strike without fear of repercussion.</b> And because the cost is so low when measured in Israeli casualties, Israel can wage perpetual war without suffering domestic political consequences, and is <b>under negligible pressure to pursue diplomacy with the Palestinians.</b> “In theory, a weapon like Iron Dome could be used only defensively. But in practice it doesn’t work that way,” analyst Nathan Thrall told Jewish Currents. “Iron Dome facilitates greater Israeli offensive measures, because it <b>lowers the perceived cost to Israel of escalating or extending or initiating attacks.</b>” In other words, while the Iron Dome may prevent the deaths of Israeli non-combatants, it has made it easier for Israel to engage in deadly operations that take Palestinian lives.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/aoc-is-a-genocidal-con-artist" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">AOC Is A Genocidal Con Artist</a> <bq><b>The Iron Dome isn’t for protecting civilians, it’s for protecting the Israeli regime from deterrence. We see this in the comfort the regime displays in waging constant military violence on its neighbors knowing they can’t retaliate.</b> That’s why Israel cut a ceasefire deal with Iran so fast. Iran’s advanced missiles can’t be reliably stopped by the Iron Dome, so Iran was able to smash Israel and force it to cease its unprovoked aggressions. <b>If Israel had had a missile defense system which could casually swat those missiles out of the sky at a high rate of success, Israel would still be bombing Iran today,</b> and would continue doing so until Tehran looked like Gaza. Israel’s war-horny population would have supported this, because they’d have no skin in the game.</bq> <bq>Saying you support funding Israel’s “defensive weapons” while opposing sending it “offensive weapons” is as nonsensical as saying you would never give a mass shooter guns and ammunition, but you would give him body armor to keep him safe from the police. You’re helping him commit mass murder just as much as you would be if you gave him guns and ammo. <b>Kings didn’t arm their knights with shields and armor so that they could live long and fulfilling lives, they did it so the knights would live long enough to kill the people the kings wanted killed.</b></bq> <bq>People who say you should criticize AOC less because there are way worse members of congress act like she’s just passively sitting there being a mediocre lawmaker. She’s not. <b>She’s actively anchoring the leftmost edge of the Overton window of US politics to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and genocide. She’s actively stopping American politics from moving any further left than the nightmare we see before us.</b> Leftists shouldn’t hate AOC less than the politicians to her right, they should hate her much more. <b>It isn’t Mike Johnson’s responsibility to move the US government to the left, and it’s not Nancy Pelosi’s job. It’s hers. That’s what she was elected to do. That’s what she framed the goals of her entire political career as being.</b> And she’s taking her stand firmly bracing against any leftward movement from America’s genocidal, warmongering, unjust, exploitative, tyrannical status quo.</bq> <bq>That’s why people who seek leftward movement in the US political machine <b>see AOC as one of their main enemies.</b> It’s for the exact same reason you’d see someone actively <b>blocking the fire exit as your enemy when trying to escape from a burning building.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-youre-still-supporting-israel" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">If You're Still Supporting Israel In 2025, There's Something Wrong With You As A Person</a> <bq>If you’re still supporting Israel in the year 2025, there’s something seriously wrong with you as a person. <b>You do not have a normal, healthy sense of empathy and morality.</b> It’s 2025. <b>Israeli soldiers are telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians trying to obtain food from aid centers.</b> Countless doctors have been telling the world that Israeli snipers are routinely, <b>deliberately shooting children in the head and chest</b> throughout the Gaza Strip. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and all the leading genocide experts and human rights authorities are saying that a genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza. <b>The New York fucking Times just published an op-ed by a Zionist genocide scholar who’s finally admitting that it’s a genocide.</b> <b>There’s no way to deny what this is anymore.</b> If you still support Israel in the year 2025, it’s not because you don’t believe Israel is committing horrific atrocities. It’s because <b>you believe those horrific atrocities are good, and you want to see more of them.</b> Most Israel supporters will deny that this is the case, because they lie. They lie constantly. They have no moral problem with lying. <b>They have no moral problem with burning children alive, so of course they have no problem with lying.</b></bq> <bq>Of course they’d try to silence our speech. Of course they’d try to send our kids off to war with Iran. Of course they’d work to manipulate our government. <b>Of course they’d pollute the information ecosystem with mountains of lies. They support a live-streamed genocide. They’re bad people.</b> Supporting Israel and its actions is not some political opinion like your position on property taxes or marijuana legalization. It’s not just some people having a point of view we need to respect and treat as equal to our own view on the matter. <b>They’re working to make it possible to conduct an extermination campaign of unfathomable horror. That’s as political as a gang rape, and just as worthy of respect.</b> There’s not really anything you can put past Israel’s supporters at this point. <b>They will lie. They will manipulate. They will pretend to believe things they do not believe. They will pretend to feel things they do not feel. And they will do these things to facilitate some of the worst atrocities you can possibly imagine.</b> This is who Israel’s supporters are. They’re showing you who they are every single day.</bq> This is only one example. It's the most obviously easy one to oppose. But there are supporters of the fossil-fuel industry, of the opioid industry, of the military-industrial complex, of the financial-services industry, of any of the myriad large-scale scams that people are pushing for their own personal profit, no matter how much damage it causes to no matter how many others. Even if you don't personally profit, if someone is gung-ho for "cracking down" on "immigrants" or watch squads of overmilitarized goons roving the country with glee, when they know full well that most of those people are, at the very least, being harassed and terrorized for no reason whatsoever and, at worst, they're having their lives utterly ruined for no reason. The essay above applies to all of these people just as well as it does for people who continue to unreservedly support Israel. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/18/roaming-charges-masked-and-anonymous/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous</a> <bq><b>A 35-year-old Irish tourist to the US had overstayed his visa by three days, when he was arrested by ICE, in the closing weeks of the Biden administration.</b> Although he’d agreed to immediate deportation, he somehow he got buried in the system or lack thereof and was moved around to three different facilities after Trump took office. Because the detention centers were now overflowing, <b>Trump’s ICE made a deal to lease prison beds from the Bureau of Prisons in Atlanta, where he was sent with dozens of other unfortunate souls abducted by the masked secret police.</b> He languished there for more than three months in conditions he described as inhumane. Bunkbeds lacked ladders, the cells were teeming with mice and cockroaches, the prison clothes he was given were stained with shit and blood. <b>The toilets didn’t flush, he was denied medication and doctor visits and fed “disgusting slop.”</b> When he finally got his medicine, the prison guards threw it on the ground instead of handing it to him. “We were treated less than human.” After finally being released <b>in March, he was deported to Ireland and banned from entering the US (where he’d come to visit his girlfriend) for 10 years.</b></bq> Filthy immigrant. Serves him right. Ammirite? <bq>A man posing as a bondsman rang the doorbell of a house in Arlington, Virginia near midnight. He began asking strange and misleading questions about the residents’ mother before <b>pulling out a gun and forcing his way into the house. The man flashed a letter from ICE, but showed no ID or badge.</b> He rummaged through the house, broke into a bedroom, threw a young woman and her uncle Orlando on the bed and asked for ID. He then <b>handcuffed Orlando, who had been living in the US working construction for 20 years, marched him to his car, sedated him, and drove him around for several hours until the ICE office in Chantilly, Virginia to open. Orlando was deported a couple of days later</b> to Honduras before the family could even contact a lawyer.</bq> Price of freedom. Justice in action. Gettin' rid of those criminals. It's nice to see the militia taking matters into their own hands. And you see how Bondi and Noem were right? How tedious would <i>habeas corpus</i> and <i>due process</i> have been in this case? My God, just imagine! Justice would never have been served. <bq>Until the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, <b>Tennessee</b>, like most southern states, made it a crime to help runaway slaves. Now it <b>is going to criminally charge anyone who provides shelter to noncitizens.</b> The law, which into effect on July 1, bans anyone from providing “shelter” to undocumented immigrants. Churches are even prohibited from providing services to noncitizens. The law also makes it a felony for local government officials to cast votes for “sanctuary cities,” with a penalty of up 6 <i>years</i> in state prison. <b>One woman told CBS News: “My husband is undocumented, and together we have built a life in Tennessee. This bill criminalizes me just for living with him.”</b></bq> Serves you right, you immigrant-lover. They should disenfranchise you, too, and throw your ass in CECOT to pass around. Who cares because these aren't real people anyway, ammirite? <bq>Neither the state of Florida nor the Trump administration are releasing the names of the detainees locked up in cages at Alligator Auschwitz. But the Miami Herald got the list and published it today so that <b>families and their lawyers at least know where their loved ones and clients are.</b> In addition, the Herald’s reporters were able to document that <b>100s of detainees being held in these wretched conditions have no criminal record</b>, despite the slanders made against them by Trump, Noem and DeSantis, who claimed the concentration camp in the Glades was for “vicious…deranged psychopaths”…Nearly 1/3 of the detainees have no criminal record and <b>many of those who do have a record committed nothing more serious than driving and parking violations.</b></bq> Thank God that we're already past the tedious discussion of where there should even <i>be</i> concentration camps in the U.S. and we've moved on to squabbling about who should be in them. Maybe you shouldn't have been an immigrant---did you ever think about that? Also, learn to drive, dipshit. Also, stop parking like an asshole. America: love it or leave it. Or stay indefinitely in a concentration camp! At least that will make a lot of money for the best kind of people, who bravely run the private prisons with medieval conditions, running at enormous profit margins on the government teat. That's honestly the American way, isn't it? We finally brought the colonies home. We don't really care, as long as we don't have to see your brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking faces. Speaking of people that no-one really cares about... <bq>On Israel’s Channel 13 last weekend, <b>former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert explained what’s happening in the West Bank: “In the West Bank, war crimes are occurring daily.</b> Jews are murdering Palestinians. Burning them. When the Israeli government is responsible for them, the Israeli police are present there. It shuts its eyes. The IDF doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.” The host of the show replied angrily that the real murders are committed by Palestinians, and a small minority of Israeli commit the attacks Olmert is talking about. Olmert responded with derision, “You are making fraudulent and misleading claims. <b>Every day, hilltop youth. Youths of horror, attack by the hundreds, and Palestinians are assaulted and run off their lands. Their fields are burned. Their homes are burned.</b> Yesterday, a fellow, an American citizen, was walloped on the head with a club and killed.” [...] <b>Several of Israel’s leading international law scholars write in an open letter to the Minister of Defense and the IDF’s Chief of Staff that Israel’s latest plans in Gaza to confine the entire population to the ruins of Rafah “may be interpreted” as genocidal.</b> They include Eyal Benvenisti who defended Israel at the ICJ and Yuval Shany who earlier argued that Amnesty International was wrong to call Gaza a genocide.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/19/peace-and-development-are-better-than-austerity-and-war/" author="Vijay Prashad" source="Scheer Post">Peace and Development Are Better Than Austerity and War</a> <bq>Reason seems to have been gradually abolished by the language of bombs. As weapons systems get ‘smarter’ and ‘smarter’, the range of diplomatic instruments used by the Global North states becomes blunter and blunter. US and European diplomats have returned to the old colonial habit of speaking loudly and brusquely, lecturing the natives about what they should or should not do while they themselves do whatever they want. <b>If the natives do not agree, then the old colonial rulers simply threaten to cut off their hands or bomb their homes.</b></bq> <bq>[...] as the FACTS graphic above shows, NATO states currently spend $2.7 trillion on war making. <b>As they move to increase military spending to 5% of their GDP, that number will rise to $3.8 trillion – a good $1 trillion more than in previous years.</b> <b>What else could be done with $1 trillion? For one, global hunger could be eradicated in twenty to twenty-five years</b>, hunger among children could be eradicated immediately, or the entire $11.4 trillion external debt of developing countries could be paid off in just over a decade.</bq> <bq>The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that, absent major inflation shocks or geopolitical and geological disruptions, <b>it would take an extra $40 to $50 billion per year to end global hunger. Instead, that money is being spent to blow up food systems rather than build them.</b> In 2024, global military expenditure reached $3.7 trillion. That same year, the United Nations approved an annual budget of just $3.72 billion (which includes peacekeeping). <b>The UN budget, therefore, is only 0.1% of the global arms budget. It is difficult to look at these figures and not feel the futility of advancing an agenda for peace between peoples and diplomacy between states.</b></bq> <bq>That is the choice: iron or peace, bullets or development. <b>There is no peace through guns, no development through bullets.</b> This is a choice. <b>You must participate in making this choice. Your silence leads to guns and bullets and war</b>; your voice, if it is loud enough alongside the voices of others, might take us to peace and development, the laughter of children as they play without fear in the dusk.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUH1ZvLcXeI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/kUH1ZvLcXeI" source="YouTube" author="Bad Faith / Briahna Gray Joy" width="560px" caption="Will Zohran Repeat Bernie's FAILURES? (w/ Norm Finkelstein)"> The conversation is not only respectful but genuinely interesting and clarifying, with different points of view on details being discussed in truly edifying ways. I very much look forward to these conversations. And I'm very close to subscribing to this podcast for the full versions of these conversations. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/14/attention-is-all-you-need/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Kevin Munger">Attention is All You Need</a> <bq>it’s equally obvious to today’s young people that this is no longer the case, that they will not need to spend all this time and effort learning to read long texts in order to communicate. They are, after all, communicating all the time, online, without essentially zero formal instruction on how to do so. <b>Just as children learn to talk just by being around people talking, they learn to communicate online just by doing so.</b></bq> <bq><b>Our political culture is unable to comprehend the depth of the problem posed by changing media technology.</b></bq> <bq>Analogically, we can understand the role of reading in human cognition. <b>Paying attention to an extended narrative requires us to hold a lot in our head; tracing complicated historical accounts requires paying attention to many simultaneous forces.</b> In contrast, scrolling a feed means shortening our context window. Short-form video like on TikTok, Reels or Shorts makes our attention less important. <b>We are turning ourselves into these simple stimulus-response algorithms—content zombies</b>, as Sam Kriss describes with characteristic cruelty.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israels-depravity-will-always-find" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel's Depravity Will Always Find New Ways To Shock You</a> <bq>Possibly the single <b>dumbest thing</b> Israel and its apologists ask us to believe is <b>that Israel has been systematically demolishing Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure</b> because the healthcare infrastructure is <b>full of terrorists, and not because they want to commit genocide.</b></bq> <img src="{att_link}bake_sales_for_gaza_are_antisemitic.webp" href="{att_link}bake_sales_for_gaza_are_antisemitic.webp" align="none" caption="Bake Sales for Gaza are antisemitic" scale="75%"> <bq>Bake sales for Gaza could stoke Jew hatred, EU warns <b>Fundraisers for Gaza make 'Jews feel uncomfortable', says Europe's antiSemitism tsar</b></bq> Hallucinatory. <bq>I’ll never get used to the way I’m watching my own government and its allies support the most nightmarish shit I’ve ever seen in my life every single day in the middle east and yet <b>people keep trying to convince me to be really fearful and hateful toward Muslims.</b></bq> <bq>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been having a public tantrum on Bluesky because of the leftist backlash from her vote against an amendment which would have blocked funding for Israel’s missile defense system and her garbage justification of that move, <b>angrily proclaiming that her “record on Palestine speaks for itself” and claiming that the opposition has created a “threat environment” that is “scary”.</b> That <b>AOC chose to throw this fit on Bluesky</b> rather than Twitter is telling; she got so mad that she ran to the liberal echo chamber where she’s adored <b>in order to complain about how the left won’t even let her support just a little bit of genocide as a treat.</b></bq> AOC is a whiny asshole. <hr> Speaking of whiny assholes... <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NexOrW0uew" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3NexOrW0uew" source="YouTube" author="Tracy Harmoush : What They Don't Tell Us Podcast" width="560px" caption="'Everything Is My Fault' — Andrew Tate on Masculinity, Politics, Family, Allegations & The Matrix"> Disclaimer: a friend sent this to me for an opinion. I'd never listened to anything that Andrew Tate had said before so this is really my first direct exposure to him. <ul> His diction is unusually precise. He enunciates for an international audience. He's pretty lowbrow, heading right out of the gate with a whine about how people like him, but the media hates him, so, what's up with that? He's priming the audience and framing the topic of himself right from the get-go. <iq>If you have a brain, you like me; if you don't, you don't.</iq> OMG what the hell, bro? This is in the <i>first two minutes</i>. The interviewer is possibly even dumber than he is, though. She reminds me of the "liberals" they used to have on FOX News (I don't know if they do it anymore), If you can remember Alan Colmes, he was there to pretend to be representing a liberal view but he was really there to show how the liberal view gets easily bitch-slapped all over the place by people like Sean Hannity. She's there to show how right Andrew Tate is, even when a "strong woman" interviews him. He sounds a bit like Alex Jones for me, in the pacing and cadence, if not in the elocution (where Jones is much hoarser and "shoutier"). Look, this guy is a typical elitist whiner. He's super-popular online; he's wealthy; he's definitely in the elite. He can't stop whining about how no-one likes him. This is a classic narcissist, not unlike a Trump or Musk. He is a product of a poisoned system, a poisoned culture. This is the predictable dross that will rise to the top of what we've built. <bq>I don't think many people misunderstand me. I think everybody understands me and some people are just jealous of me and refuse to like me because they were picked on in school and I remind them of someone who probably picked on them a little bit. [misplaced modifier; 'a little bit' refers to the phrase 'remind them of someone']</bq> <div>This dude's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tate#Criminal_investigations_and_civil_cases">Criminal investigations and civil cases</a> is over a decade long and contains delectable phrases like, <iq>seize £2.8 million worth of unpaid taxes from the Tate brothers' online businesses,</iq> <iq>Romanian police expanded their investigation against Tate to include trafficking minors, sex with a minor, money laundering and attempting to influence witnesses</iq>, and <iq>Tate allegedly performed an erotic asphyxiation on Brianna Stern who was later diagnosed "post concussive" at hospital</iq>. Of course, you can dismiss a bunch of this as allegations, but these are <i>legally filed and tested</i> allegations and of that kind that I can't think of a single person I know who would even possibly be credibly accused of things like this. This isn't just people online slandering him but actual police from several countries investigating him and his family, as well as courts striking down his lawsuits and finding the allegations credible enough to continue pursuing the cases. He responds to all of this with, <bq>[...] my brother and I walk around now like the Gambino crime family we didn't have to kill anybody it's kind of cool [...]</bq> So, like, a <i>super</i> guy. He reminds me more and more of Trump.</div> <div><bq>[...] to be obnoxious with an opinion in general is a masculine trait to sit and say "I've said it this way and that offends you but I said it this way anyway because I'm not afraid of what you're going to do about what I've said." That's the masculine imperative in the first place to sit and say "I'm going to talk this way and all 20 of them will get mad but I can fight all 20 of them so I don't care." That's the masculine imperative so a lot of people men understand it and go "Yeah he pissed everyone off with the way he said it but that's actually a masculine way to do it it's very feminine to sit and go "Well I don't want to make you mad but I think that maybe there could be." Yeah and and that's how they're trying to neuter men in general across the entire Western Hemisphere but they want us to talk and think and act that way and I refuse to do it, which is why they hate me so much.</bq> No, no, no. People hate you because you're a fucking moron with a poisonous view of society that is dragging us down rather than building us up, and you seem to have a power and wealth outsize to your value to society. I'm not surprised that he's super-popular with teenaged boys and young men because his thoughtless and very superficial recipe for success is exactly what they want to hear. Although he denies it vehemently several times---even though no-one has said anything---that he doesn't care what people think, it feels like he cares very much that people agree with him, even if his cult is built up of people just like him, who don't think about stuff too hard and want simple answers. It's depressing how our society lifts people like this up, one cult leader after another, one quasi-illiterate asshole after another. That's the topic of discussion that would be interesting: what is the sickness at the core of our society that people like this earn enormous followings rather than being laughed out of the room like buffoons? <bq>so why do I talk the way I talk well if I walk in a room and I say something and seven people end up emotionally affected well then I know they're dipshits. I'm trying very hard at my stage in life to avoid dipshits, so I don't really see any of the negative from speaking the way I speak because I don't really need to be liked [...]</bq> I could see my 23--25-year-old self having said something like this. But I <i>evolved</i>. I <i>learned</i>. He thinks he's enlightened but he has achieved at best a foothill of a local maximum amongst the people with whom he chooses to associate. I think he suffers from being the smartest in a gang of doofuses. Joe Rogan is a similar phenomenon. His surrounding himself with cucks has made him think he's a king. He sounds laughable, though. His life philosophy doesn't scale. He's just as trapped by the consumerist, growth-economy mindset as every other chimp. A Buddhist wouldn't even bother laughing him out of the room. They would feel sorry for him. And then, perhaps, try to help. I honestly don't know if I can get through a whole half-an-hour of this. There are so many, much-more-intelligent people to whom I could be listening discussing this topic of "what makes someone obnoxious or dangerous?" There is much nuance left on the table with this guy. He focuses laser-like on obsolete definitions of gender and masculinity, with his cave-man caricature that is contingent on either not comprehending a bigger picture or not being able to. I don't think he has any idea that the level of obnoxiousness he evinces is perfectly possible in people far more powerful than him, and people who are, at the same time, equipped with other gonads and also much shorter (which he seems to think is also an overriding characteristic). There is something to be dug out of this argument that humans are biological machines and driven by immanent and extremely simple mechanisms---skin color, gender, height, etc.---but this doofus is absolutely not the one to be making them because he is simply not equipped for the task. He's just a scammer, leveraging his schtick to personal power and wealth. He's neither a philosopher nor a sociologist---not because he's not formally educated as such, but because he's not even slightly informally educated in these topics. He's seemingly completely unfamiliar with any explanations that a five-year-old could tell you in a sandbox about why he took a toy from Susie.</div> OMG I just realized that this could go on for 2.5 hours. My friend said that he'd gotten through the first thirty minutes with his wife. I don't think I can do it. I don't feel like writing an article that long. As noted above You can hear him slipping into a British accent every once in a while, dropping the 't' in <iq>eigh'ies and nine'ies</iq> or in <iq>reali'y</iq> or <iq>ma''er</iq>. Wikipedia says that he's British, U.S.-American, and Vanuatan (he purchased it). He generally sounds U.S.-American because he grew up in the States. I have no idea where would have picked up the <a href="https://helenslanguagehome.com/my-language-blog/the-missing-t-in-spoken-english/">T-elision</a>. I don't think he's at all accustomed to speaking with anyone who doesn't already agree with him. The interviewer certainly doesn't offer him any challenges on any of his opinions. <iq>I think it is easy for winners to win.</iq> JFC. <div>It's interesting to clinically observe a scammer at work: the liar must never know that he's lying. He must, at best, consider himself to be exaggerating or, at worst, wrong. <iq>I mean, I could make $300M in a week if I wanted to scam people. I won't do it because I believe that you'll pay the price for that.</iq> Do you see how he uses a single sentence to remind his acolytes how potent his ability to earn is? How incredibly successful he could be by the measure of the world if he didn't have principles which prevented him from breaking a moral code against taking that which he has not earned? His entire career is currently scamming. As outlined above, he has very credibly been accused of trafficking woman for personal gain. But his acolytes will scream fake news and tell you that he doesn't scam anyone---otherwise he'd be king of the world.</div> <div>And here comes the Libertarian horseshit kicker, <bq>I think that every single person watching this has exactly what they deserve. I think everything good in your life, you deserve it. Everything bad in your life, you deserve it if you're important and famous you deserve that if you don't you don't deserve it you have exactly what you deserve where you are and who you are is what you should be and if you wanted to be something else you would be something else</bq> Yawn. It's such a pity that people find this kind of tripe insightful or intellectually stimulating or, I don't know, <i>alluring</i>. This is a neoliberal mindset. Anything you don't like about your situation is your own fault. There is nothing to see here. This baboon is not saying anything the rich aren't already screaming at you six ways to Sunday through every educational and media channel. You're not living in your car because your landlord is an asshole to whom society has given too much power over others. You're a loser and he's a winner. You both <i>chose</i> this. He's a go-getter and you're lazy. Seriously, go fuck yourself with this childish mindset. It's not even worth arguing against. It's not worth arguing against because it <i>has already won.</i> Nothing short of a revolution will dislodge this poisonous mindset from the top of the societal heap because it is self-promulgating. It controls the media and the media controls how people think and people will then think with this mindset. Good luck dislodging any of that when believing in this mindset---that you are privileged due to immanent quality rather than external factors---results in reward for those who benefit from external factors the most. How nice that they're ignoring this and ascribing their success to themselves. No arrogance there! Even if you're smart, you should be happy that you were born into a society that values intelligence. You would have been poor and lost and hungry 500 years ago.</div> I am only 20 minutes into this debacle. <div><bq>If she ends up in that hotel room no what I am saying is that the world's not a perfect place and people do bad things and her as an adult should have enough personal responsibility to not put herself in a position where it's easy to allow bad things to happen to her.</bq> This is an argument for how to behave in an unjust world. Nowhere does he even begin to discuss <i>why</i> we should accept a world in which a 6'3" goomba should stride the world without fear while women should be in self-imposed <i>purdah</i> in order to keep themselves safe. No-one reasonable is saying that a women <i>should</i> wear seductive clothes while walking a dark street full of drunk men but that we should talk about why she isn't able to in our society. We should talk about what the goal of our society is. What level of safety are we hoping for? Does that level depend on gender? Does it have to? Men are happy with the status quo because <i>it favors them tremendously</i>. That's not philosophically or sociologically interesting. It's boring. It's like billionaires (and their cucks) being absolutely happy with the economy the way it is. I mean, <i>of course they are.</i> Unless they had principles about everyone sharing in the wealth, then why wouldn't they be? Tate's explanation will inevitably end up telling women to learn Krav Maga or some stupid shit like that, instead of thinking about how we could make the world safer. Blame the victim. Stop predation not by restricting or reforming predators but by teaching the prey how to hide better. It's a very Hobbesian view. Very simplistic and self-serving. That doesn't stop this dude from whining from the top of his pedestal about how he's the victim, <bq>The world is now skewed and we live in this very unfair dichotomy of this double standard which is applied to men in this matriarchal matrix system where women are girl bosses and better than us at everything and beat us up on Netflix shows while at the same time anything that happens to them wasn't their fault [...]</bq> He can, in the same breath, tell women to suck it up and see to their own safety, while whining on behalf of 17-year-old boys who are forced to watch shows on Netflix that feature women beating up people he thinks they shouldn’t be able to best up. Good talk, you absolute pinhead. <i>All</i> the fights are fake bro, even the male ones. Jesus, what a pinhead. If you had any real friends, they'd have made you shut up by now. He talks like a drunk guy braying in a bar. On what planet are women in charge? Is he crying because of unrealistic fights on Netflix? Or course those suck. Just don't watch them. I don't watch Hallmark holiday movies either. The <iq>matriarchal matrix system</iq>! LMAO. 😂 GTFOOH with that bullshit. <bq>Imagine you're a 17-year-old boy. You're going to school. You're watching Netflix. You're watching TV. You're watching these things. They're telling you women are better than you at everything. They're trying to make you into a girl---they're trying to make you talk like a girl, think like a girl, be a girl---you turn on Netflix: the mom is smart; the dad is dumb. There's a little woman beating up 55 men on every single TV show. <b>Your masculinity is permanently under attack.</b></bq> He is describing the world as lived by a 17-year-old girl with the other 95% of the content available. Look, I notice how laughable some of these things are, but I don't make it my life-philosophy. He whipsaws from "take personal responsibility" to whining like a little woke bitch about how there's content on Netflix that offends him. Fuck right off.</div> <div>Unfortunately for Tate, I'm reading <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> by <i>Ursula K. Le Guin</i>, in which she posits a world populated by humans who only express gender when they're in "kemmer" (a form of being "in heat" or "rutting") and she must more eloquently and intelligently examines gender than this guy ever could or would. <bq>There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.</bq></div> And who is this lady with the smooth, expressionless, botoxed face who just nods a long to every stupid thing he says, framing her questions in the form of testimonials to the thing that he just said? She has 65k followers on her YouTube channel and she's nothing but an empty shell. Or, perhaps, more accurately, she's a <i>mirror</i> because what else would Andrew Tate spend 150 minutes talking to if not a mirror? <div>I can't make it to 30 minutes. He's not misunderstood; he's exhausting. He thinks that anyone who doesn't agree with him hasn't understand the depth of brilliance that he's bringing to the table. I weep for a society that listens to this guy. Fighting straw-man battles with other idiots online does not make you a philosopher. It does make you a successful life coach, though, I guess, in this twisted, fucked-up society that we have.</div> </ul> After a long discussion with friends about some of these topics, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that people agree with Andrew Tate because they don't have enough life experience to have empathy for different lifestyles. Anyone who says women are women and men are men is just trying to extrapolate and force what works for them onto everyone else. They take what feels right for them and assume that it would feel right for everyone else, and that people's biggest problem is that they're being given a choice about something that's anchored in nature and that the choices they end up making make them miserable.

This is pretty arrogant, for several reasons. People's biggest problem isn't that they've been confused about their gender roles by <i>wokeness</i>. Most people's biggest problem is that other people who have arrogated an overwhelming amount of all resources on this planet to themselves are stealing even more from them every single day. Most people's main problem is that they have to spend so much time and mental capacity fighting for things that could easily just be available for everybody if a smaller segment of the population weren't busy forcing everyone else into slavery to make sure that the machine that produces their luxury goods keeps churning. That plane ain't flying to Madrid for CHF200.- without a lot of people coming up short. Most people's biggest problem isn't that they feel bad because they're not helping with the diapers enough. Or that they're helping too much. Their biggest problem isn't that they're stressed because someone <i>has</i> to help put on diapers after they've already exhausted themselves at work. Their biggest problem is that putting on diapers isn't <i>considered work</i> by a greedy society that is eager to steal as much labor as it can get away with. Their gender roles are not the problem. Their problem is that both partners work and commute far too much of the day---because everyone in the family <i>has</i> to work these days---and the goddamned day-care closes too early. And the poor people at the day-care have to constantly keep it open longer because people can't get there on time to pick up their kids. And then those poor people have to turn into hardened assholes who hate their customers for being late, and hate the people that they started off wanting to help. And everyone gets hardened and callous because no-one has any extra psychic energy left over because the vampires that run society are eating everything, even though they can't possibly be hungry anymore. They're just eating it <i>so no-one else can.</i> The problem of gender roles that fly in the face of nature is so far down the list of priorities of things that are making people miserable that I don't even know why we're talking about it. People think that they can <i>start there</i> and that "fixing" gender roles will result in better lives for people. This is typically conservative magical thinking, of the kind that doesn't even notice all of the other things wrong in the world, typically because they're benefitting from them and they absolutely don't want to rock the boat in a way that will cause their lifestyle to change for the worse. So, why not tell everyone that their problem is that they don't live their best lives as MAN and WOMAN because if it makes some people happy, why wouldn't it make everyone happy? It's biology, baby! This is, of course, bullshit. Why? Because you can't eat the fruits of a biologically aligned life. You will be man and wife, living under a rock because the world is still stealing the fruits of your labor every step of the way. If we want to start with male and female roles, let's get some awareness of what a patriarchy we still live in. Those who whine that we're living in a matriarchy now are absolutely insane and completely unaware of reality. They're just butt-hurt because some people disagree with them and their widdle-baby-boy feelings are hurt when people don't think that their idea of how the world works or how biology works is <i>correct</i>. They feel attacked when they feel like someone might think that their worldview is superficial or that they've deliberately or unconsciously oversimplified things for their own benefit or they're just plain wrong and/or immoral. So they play the victim and pretend that men aren't even in charge anymore. Rounded up, all of the billionaires are men. Most of the world's most powerful leaders are men. If they're women, then they're even more hardened assholes than men would be. I mean, Macron's a flower child compared to Van de Leyen, Baerbock, Kaja Kallas, or Meloni. Or Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Condaleeza Rice, or any of the other savage, bloodthirsty, and utterly despicably mendacious warmongers who've emerged from the octagon of U.S.-American politics to feast at the very top. Medicine is for men. No-one cares about menopause, something that affects 50% of the population and is an extremely stressful, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous experience that drags on for years. No-one cares about how invasive birth control is for women. Instead, they spend all of their time whining about condoms and how they don't "feel right". See how women's birth control "feels", you utter poltroon. Or let's compare how much money is spent on researching women's health issues---or general health issues from a woman's perspective, or even <i>figuring out which dose of a drug would be appropriate for a woman</i>---versus how much money is spent on making sure that men's erections still feel as firm at 55 or 60 as they did at 18. It's not even close. The only reason that this is a discussion is because most people are utterly and blissfully unaware of the gross and continually enforced unfairness of the world in favor of men, and have built up their whole worldview around a perceived destruction of a natural hegemony when anyone even tries to crumble away even a tiny little bit of it. It's a not unexpected reaction from the ruling class, but it's not a particularly philosophically interesting one. Of course they'll dress up an attack on their overwhelming power as an attack on them. Of course they'll consider any change to the status quo that benefits them so greatly to be immoral and a crime against nature. There is no chance that men will just say, of yes, of course, fairly played, you got us. We've been taking advantage of half of the population of the planet for centuries, if not millennia, but the jig is up. Elon Musk is a perfectly grotesque example: he views women as birthing vessels. He pays them large amounts of money to be artificially inseminated to produce his children. None of these people really know anything about the world and yet they will cheerily use their positions of relative power to dictate how everyone else should run their lives because it works for them. <i>Of course</i> it works for them: it was absolutely designed to! You're the ones in charge of everything. But you don't know anything, so if you want to help, just keep quiet until you figure out how to show empathy with the lived experience of the 95% of the population of which you are blissfully unaware---because their problems are not what you think they are. Their problems can be solved with a more equitable distribution of society's value much more than they can be solved by bringing down a matriarchy that doesn't exist. For fuck's sake. And with this constant droning on about male and female roles, we are really going in the direction of biological determinism. The given in this equation is that people are only here to breed more people. The entire argument above doesn't address homosexuality <i>at all</i>. In fact, the worldview of an Andrew Tate doesn't seem to accommodate or acknowledge queerness in all its forms in any way. A family is a man and a wife and their children. This is such a painfully myopic view. And it's boring and stupid to talk about it as if it were a solution to anything that actually exists and is a priority. People want to feel important, so they declare that all problems can be easily solved because they never really had any problems. None of this foolishness is getting us any closer to enlightenment. The people on Letterkenny are more fully developed than this. And what if certain jobs are meant more for men and some are more for women. You have some jobs that seem to distribute themselves along a pattern that is somewhat biologically determined. But then, by a glorious coincidence, the jobs that men tend to take are the ones that are remunerated the highest. And the jobs that women tend to have are remunerated at barely a living wage---or with absolutely no wage at all! If we consider housework and child-rearing to be real work that society values, then why isn't it paid? In just these cases, society values this particular work with appreciation---at <i>best</i>---but sometimes not even that. It’s just assumed that this is what women do, so one has to neither remunerate nor appreciate it. So convenient for everyone who doesn't do that labor. It’s actually quite convenient for men to arrange for a world where everything is remunerated with money and then to wonder why everyone is being so greedy, why should all value be remunerated with money? That's so crass, isn't it? (They wonder aloud.) This is extremely convenient and extremely hypocritical. We should start paying people for everything or at least remunerating everything society values in an equal way rather than just favoring certain jobs like CEO or software programmer. This is a laughably unfair system. And stop saying, "life isn't fair," when you <i>started out ahead</i> and you've <i>basically already won</i> (or, at least, it would be very difficult for you to fail so miserably now that you would even begin to have an inkling of how bad most people have it.) It’s not like we can just change the system quickly or perhaps even at all, but if we don’t even know to make the demand, it will absolutely never happen and as <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=717">Frederick Douglas said</a>, <iq>power concedes nothing without a demand it never has and it never will.</iq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/financing-our-own-destruction" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">Financing Our Own Destruction</a> <bq>This dynamic is well known. It is all part of capitalism’s washing machine, the process by which <b>the wealth of working people is invested in ways antithetical to the interests of working people</b>, with the explanation that doing so is necessary or even good because the proceeds will fund those workers’ retirements. I have written before about <b>how perverse and self-defeating this dynamic is, particularly in the case of union pension money, which often directly fuels the forces bent on destroying unions.</b></bq> <bq>I am, modestly, just asking for a little action here. Some agitation. Union members can agitate to be informed about what your pension funds are invested in. So can public employees of all stripes. We are not even talking about a major ideological divestment campaign here. We are not even talking about “divest from Israel” (which should be done) or “divest from fossil fuels” (which should be done). <b>We are talking about, you know, “let’s take a look and make sure that we’re not investing with the guy who fired all of our federal employee colleagues illegally, haha. Let’s make sure we’re not unintentionally helping to fund the secret police who will soon come to arrest us, haha.” Small stuff.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-14/musk-has-money-and-xai-wants-some" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Musk Has Money and xAI Wants Some</a> <bq>Windsurf had been in talks to sell itself to OpenAI for $3 billion, but those fell apart and it went with Google. The deal is apparently: Google will pay $2.4 billion. For that money, it will get (1) 0% of Windsurf, which will stick around as an independent company, (2) some of Windsurf’s top staff, who will go work at Google and (3) a nonexclusive license to the technology, why not. The founders and employees who are going to Google will presumably get a big chunk of that money. The venture capitalists who put in $240 million will also get a chunk of it; Kleiner Perkins “is expected to receive around three times its investment.” <b>As far as I can tell, OpenAI wanted to buy 100% of Windsurf for $3 billion; Google bought 0% of Windsurf for a 20% discount to the price of the full company. Seems right.</b></bq> What an absolute shitshow. There is nearly no societal value for the movement of all of these sums of money and this capture of intellectual capacity. <bq>I argued above that, if Google could just hire away the founders without paying the investors, why would anyone invest in startups? But a similar argument can be made about employees: <b>If Google could just hire away the founders and abandon the employees, why would anyone go work for startups? The ecosystem might be breaking down for employees.</b></bq> Let's all continue to pretend to be surprised at the pathological outcomes of a world of pure self-interest and no principles. Some of our jobs depend on it. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/07/economic-monetary-policy-dollar-trade-currency-dollar" source="Jacobin" author="Mona Ali & John-Baptiste Oduor">Who Benefits From the Dollar’s Dominance?</a> <bq>The dollar’s dominance is often attributed to its status as the key international reserve asset. This shorthand lends the impression that money is a commodity (a thing), when in fact <b>for the most part money is credit (a social relation).</b> While it is true that trillions of dollars are held as safe assets by investors and governments around the world, <b>the bulk of these dollars in countries’ foreign reserves are credit contracts — predominantly US Treasuries.</b></bq> <bq>Crisis interventions reveal the inner workings of the international monetary hierarchy. <b>While rich countries with access to the Fed’s backstop enjoy ease of access to dollar liquidity, low- and middle-income countries, which do not have easy access to the Fed’s dollar swap lines and other liquidity facilities must face discipline and punishment by international bond markets.</b></bq> <bq><b>It should be clear that the markets that comprise the dollar system aren’t just prone to volatility; they are dysfunctional.</b> Rather than raising capital for factories or infrastructure, dollar funding markets are largely in the business of refinancing debt contracts. (Three out of every four transactions in financial markets involve refinancing of some sort.) Given their anarchic tendencies, <b>some central banking experts have called the dollar-centered international financial regime a nonsystem.</b></bq> <bq>American exceptionalism is usually understood in purely financial terms, rooted in the power of the dollar, yet it also derives from the fact that <b>US corporations capture the lion’s share of profits across a host of far-flung supply chains.</b> Reduced costs from economies of scale and cheaper labor involved in overseas production redound to US firms and consumers. <b>The ensuing US trade deficit is correlated with rising corporate profits.</b></bq> <bq>[...] what the next four years of on-and-off presidential decrees will do to the dollar’s status will ultimately be decided by how financial markets — whose size vastly outweighs global trade — digest forthcoming shocks. <b>While market volatility hurts households and Main Street, trading volatility has proven hugely beneficial for the big global banks</b> such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, whose trading revenues have been at a decade high.</bq> <bq>While trade wars disrupt supply chains, financial disruption can be orders of magnitude larger. Law is interwoven into the fabric of the dollar system. <b>Swap lines are legal instruments, as are sanctions. The former are as political as the latter.</b> And there has been an increased use of both.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy</a> <bq>[...] <b>by spending GDP-moving amounts of money on GPUs and such, it is not, by definition, being spent on something else.</b> Some examples:<ul>Non- life science venture capitalists are mostly only doing AI right now. Have something else needing funding? Good luck with that. Cloud compute companies are diverting spending from cloud offering to GPU-centric data centers. Amazon's recent cloud layoff announcement is being driven by this; <b>Microsoft's recent layoffs are better understood in this light than as being driven by AI taking jobs, as some argued.</b> Price-earnings multiples on public AI "plays" are soaring, reflection <b>disproportionate investor allocation to these companies</b>, and less to others, who can no longer obtain capital as cheaply. <b>Manufacturing and other infrastructure are, to a degree, starved for capital as it increasingly gets re-routed to datacenters.</b></ul>All of this has consequences, or will. <b>The telecom capex bubble lead [sic] to a sharp decline in "other" infrastructure spending, one that is still playing out. The datacenter spending frenzy will almost certainly do the same, starving other infrastructure for money.</b></bq> <bq>We are in a historically anomalous moment. Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, <b>the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable.</b> These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. <b>AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.</b> And this surge has unintended consequences. Capital is being aggressively reallocated—from venture funding to internal budgets—at the expense of other sectors. Entire categories are being starved of investment, and large-scale layoffs are already happening. <b>The irony: AI is driving mass job losses well before it has been widely deployed.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/18/roaming-charges-masked-and-anonymous/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous</a> <bq><b>Astra Taylor: “Supreme Court says the president can’t abolish student debt, but he CAN abolish the Department of Education.</b> This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s end times fascism—a fatalistic politics willing to torch the government and incinerate the future to maintain hierarchy and subvert democracy.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/monster-3" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Monster 3</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_monster_3.webp" href="{att_link}smbc_monster_3.webp" align="none" caption="SMBC Monster 3" scale="75%"> <bq quote-style="none"><b>Father:</b> Oh my God! A monster under the bed! And you ate our kids?! <b>Monster:</b> To be clear, the accountability does not lie with me. I'm part of <b>a multinational corporation grown so large its own goals are inscrutable to itself.</b> I have no idea why im here and nobody else does either! <b>You can sue, but blameworthiness is so widely distributed that in seeking redress you will only exhaust your health and wealth multiplying the already vast injustice</b>, while gaining no redress for future victims! <b>Father:</b> I'll show you! I'll complain to one of the inscrutably vast public sector bureaucracies! <b>Monster:</b> Say hi to our former executives!</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://xkcd.com/3117/" author="Randall Munroe" source="xkcd">Replication Crisis</a> <img src="{att_link}replication_crisis_solved_.png" href="{att_link}replication_crisis_solved_.png" align="none" caption="Replication crisis solved!" scale="50%"> <bq>In the early 2010s, researchers found that many major scientific results couldn't be reproduced. Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today's studies have become more robust. Unfortunately, our replication analysis has found exactly the same problems that those 2010s researchers did. <b>Replication crisis solved</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-data-centers-are-deepening-the-water-crisis-2025-6" source="Business Insider" author="Dakin Campbell">As drought deepens, big tech has put nearly half of its data centers in water-scarce regions</a> <bq>Business Insider found that <b>40% of the nation's planned and existing data centers are in areas</b> that the nonprofit World Resources Institute, which focuses on sustainability research, has <b>characterized as experiencing "extremely high" or "high" water scarcity.</b> The share is even larger, 43%, for the biggest centers, those that use 40 megawatt-hours or more of electricity each hour. Two companies stood out in BI's analysis as having the most data centers in high or extremely high water-stressed areas: <b>Amazon, with 81, and Microsoft, with 23. As a share of their data centers, Microsoft ranks first with 52% in such arid spots.</b></bq> <bq><b>Use of less water-reliant cooling techniques is growing but remains much less common.</b> Amazon still prefers water-intensive evaporative cooling technologies, though not all its data centers use that method, said a company spokesperson. <b>Unlike farmers or golf courses that have learned to make do with recycled water, data centers that do use water for cooling overwhelmingly rely on fresh supplies.</b></bq> <bq>It can be difficult to determine exactly how much water any given data center uses. Hundreds of water districts control the taps, and many decline to disclose customer usage data. The companies closely guard the secrecy of their projects, often using limited liability companies and nondisclosure agreements with local officials. Business Insider <b>records requests were often blocked in water districts in Western states experiencing acute water scarcity.</b> In Colorado, for example, Denver Water asked data centers in its service area whether they would give permission to release their records. All but one said no.</bq> <bq>Even those numbers understate the total impact. The 2021 research paper, which was done by scholars at Virginia Tech and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that <b>only about a quarter of data centers' water use was direct, through cooling. The other 75% was used indirectly, through the electricity generation data centers depend on.</b></bq> <bq>In Denver, the data center developer CoreSite withdrew its request for a $9 million tax break in October after the city council questioned the company's plan to use up to 805,000 gallons of water a day, or enough for 16,000 homes, The Denver Post reported. "<b>I am very concerned about a tax incentive for a company that is using some of our most valuable resources</b>," Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said at an August council committee meeting.</bq> She's <iq>concerned.</iq> She should be apoplectic. <bq>In 1980, the state passed the Groundwater Management Act requiring cities and developers in some of the most populous areas to prove they had enough water for the next 100 years before they could break ground on a new project. Since then, the battle for water has only grown more intense. <b>Gov. Katie Hobbs recently limited residential housing growth in an area outside Phoenix that failed to prove it had enough groundwater.</b></bq> <bq>If all permitted Arizona data centers Business Insider identified go online, it will be the country's second-largest market after Virginia in terms of energy consumption and the sixth in terms of number of facilities, with 52. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, features one of the nation's largest data center clusters, with 48 campuses. <b>Robust tax incentives, passed by state lawmakers in 2013, have propelled that growth. Companies flocked to the desert to take advantage of the free money, cheap and plentiful electricity, and affordable land. In 2021, lawmakers extended the breaks through 2033.</b></bq> <bq><b>Google's data centers consumed 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, a 17% increase over the previous year, of which the vast majority was potable.</b> In a 2024 report, Google said its data centers used the same amount of water needed for 41 golf courses in the Southwest. Ren, the UC Riverside researcher, calls the comparison "unfair at best," as many <b>golf courses use wastewater, not drinking water, for irrigation.</b></bq> <bq>With less water-intensive cooling technologies still rare, companies have turned to a strategy known as "corporate water stewardship" to meet their goals. <b>This involves paying other people to conserve water and then using a standard calculation to earn credits to offset the company's use.</b></bq> Just stop. It's obvious bullshit, just like the carbon-credits market. You're insulting our intelligence by trying to make us celebrate you while you're robbing us and destroying our environment. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/18/roaming-charges-masked-and-anonymous/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous</a> <bq quote-style="none"><b>Indonesia announced plans to transition to 100% renewables by 2035 instead of 2040, largely through solar.</b> + Last month, solar was the leading source of electric power in Europe for the first time. + Share of global off-shore wind power installations… <b>China: 50.3% Europe: 44.2%</b> Rest of Asia Pacific: 5.3% <b>USA: 0.2%</b> + The top 13 fastest warming countries in the world are all in Europe… <ol> Norway +3.47°C Belarus +2.45° Lithuania +2.35° Russia +2.34° Austria +2.31° Slovenia +2.31° Latvia +2.31° Ukraine +2.29° Czechia +2.28° Estonia +2.28° <b>Switzerland +2.28°</b> Poland +2.25° Moldova +2.25"</ol></bq> <bq>An update from the Age of Barbarity: <b>More than 10,000 black bears are lured by bait (often pizza, meat scraps, jelly donuts and grease stuffed into a barrel) then shot in the back by hunters with arrows and bullets. Every year.</b> On public lands, including units of managed by the National Park Service. Even many hunters are disgusted by this slaughter. Lifelong hunter Dave Petersen, editor of A Hunter’s Heart: “<b>Baiting orphans cubs.</b> Baiting is not hunting at all as it requires no woodsmanship skills and no empathy for the game. <b>Baiting is a crutch for fakers and losers.</b> Baiting gives honorable hunting a bad name.” This week U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) introduced the Don’t Feed the Bears Act of 2025 (H.R. 4422), a federal bill to prohibit bear baiting on public lands managed by federal agencies, including the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, the BLM and the National Wildlife Service.</bq> F@&cking serves those bears right for being so greedy. They probably wandered in from Canada. Immigrant bears deserve to be shot. Why you gotta make so many laws? Because people are absolute <i>demons</i>. Man, every time you think that no-one could be that cruel, you realize that you are just <i>surrounded</i> by a crowd of people who could be that cruel, who celebrate the cruelty, who revel in it, who bathe in the blood. And just think about how you reacted to this snippet vis á vis the snippets above that documented similar, if not worse, cruelty to humans. <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/14/fpjl-j14.html" author="Isaac de Vries" source="WSWS">US child health plummets amid austerity and inequality</a> <bq><b>Between 2007 and 2022, mortality rates for infants under one year old in the US were consistently 1.78 times higher than in comparable OECD countries.</b> The main drivers of these excess deaths were prematurity, which was 2.22 times more likely, and <b>sudden unexpected infant death, at 2.39 times the OECD average.</b> Additionally, <b>among children and youth aged 1–19, the mortality rate was 1.80 times higher</b>, with firearm-related deaths an alarming 15.34 times more likely, and motor vehicle crash deaths 2.45 times more likely in the US than in the OECD average.</bq> <bq>Across the Obama, Trump, Biden and second Trump administrations, <b>both major political parties have overseen and intensified the subordination of healthcare policy to the demands of capital.</b> While the Affordable Care Act (<b>ACA</b>), passed under Obama, was touted as a historic reform, it ultimately reinforced the private insurance model and <b>left tens of millions of working class families with inadequate coverage, high deductibles and limited access to pediatric care.</b></bq> <bq><b>The worsening health of American children is not a blameless state of affairs but the direct result of a society governed by a financial oligarchy that subordinates every aspect of life to the pursuit of private profit.</b> Over the past several decades, both capitalist parties have overseen the systematic dismantling of the social programs—housing assistance, public education, food security and healthcare—that form the foundation of childhood development. <b>As corporate profits have soared, investment in these critical services has stagnated or declined, leading to rising rates of disease, disability and inequality among working class youth.</b></bq> <bq>While the ruling class enjoys massive tax breaks and government handouts, the working class is left to bear the costs of social collapse: crumbling schools, vanishing nutrition programs, unaffordable healthcare and deteriorating public infrastructure. <b>It would be wrong to characterize this as a policy failure: it is a deliberate strategy to deepen exploitation and preserve the wealth of the ruling elite at the expense of workers and their families.</b></bq> <bq>While capital devalues and discards older, costlier workers, a desperate new generation are exploited anew. <b>This ruthless logic governs capitalist public health policy, which is methodically designed to protect profit.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="http://www.thelastquestion.net/" source="" author="Isaac Asimov">The Last Question</a> <bq>One by one Man fused with AC, <b>each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.</b> Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero. Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?" AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." <b>Man's last mind fused and only AC existed -- and that in hyperspace.</b> Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even <b>AC existed only for the sake of the one last question.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/she-makes-me-nervous" source="Hinternet" author="Mary Cadwalladr">“She makes me nervous”</a> <bq><b>It was in September, 1955, that Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti”, at J & M Studio in New Orleans</b>, after having sent a demo tape to Specialty Records in February. Both the demo and the familiar recorded version are extreme bowdlerizations of the version that Little Richard had already been performing for years in New Orleans drag clubs. <b>The original lyrics</b>, as he sang them there, had to do not with the many varieties of ice-cream flavors one might enjoy, but rather, quite unambiguously, with the <b>celebration of anal sex: “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy”, and so on.</b></bq> <bq><b>We tend to forget that before Elvis recorded “Tutti Frutti”, in March, 1956, the much-hated Pat Boone had already released his own version.</b> And we forget, too, that for a good part of the late 1950s, Boone consistently outperformed Elvis on the charts. But <b>why was this right-wing Floridian</b>, this devout parishioner of the Church of Christ, this peer of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, out there <b>singing an only lightly euphemized paean to sodomy?</b> Boone’s intervention might best be understood not so much as an appropriation, but as a containment operation. <b>Little Richard’s power was such as to be able to sing his true meanings right through the euphemisms</b>; Boone’s work was to complete the neutralizing effect that LaBostrie’s bowdlerization was meant, unsuccessfully, to have.</bq> <bq><b>Already with country-western radio variety shows as early as the 1930s</b>, we find a remarkable layering of spontaneous folk forms with a commercial savvy that was surely absent at any frontier hoedown of a century before. When you listen to Hank on the “Mother’s Best Flour” show, you’re getting gospel hymns, and square dances, and the interspersed ads for fertilizer might easily seem to be of a pair with all of this. But think harder — <b>you’re hearing ads for industrial chemical by-products, of the sort German scientists had developed just a few decades earlier in the initial aim of making war that much nastier, with only the collateral effect of outperforming manure in the fields and of fucking up the planet’s nitrogen cycle; and you’re hearing it on the radio.</b> Even the poor rural folks, by the early 1950s, were fully integrated into the new industrial economy,</bq> <bq>In 1964 <b>Brenda Lee</b> is back in London, 20 years old, already a veteran in the business. She <b>connects with Jimmy Page, long pre-Zeppelin, and records with him a version of Ray Charles’s 1959 “What’d I Say”</b>, a key work in the emerging canon of rock-and-roll standards, even if Ray himself never had any great investment in this musical form.</bq> <bq>The great shift from rock and roll to country in the late 1960s is one of the most important, and least understood, processes in the history of postwar American culture. Why did it happen? <b>There is a common view that it represents a recoil from the métissage that came so naturally to white Southern children like Brenda Lee — by a simple shift away from the blues scale, the idea goes, a generation of maturing white musical artists sought to undo the careless race-mixing of their earlier careers.</b></bq> <bq><b>That world is gone, but curiously at least three of the performers of the gospel number are still alive.</b> And all three —Dolly, Willie, and Brenda— are noteworthy for the exceptional character of their aging. <b>Willie has been old forever; Dolly has been young forever. But Brenda’s life-cycle is the most peculiar of all.</b> We knew her first as a child runt (1956-1958), then as a radiant young woman (1958-1964), then, in all the public appearances I have been able to study coming later than the performance of “What’d I Say” in Tokyo, as a proper dame, with rhinestones and an orange bouffant, and only the faintest blush of sex implied in her self-presentation.</bq> <bq>Rock and pop, as I have often emphasized in this space, offer their stars few pathways for aging gracefully; this is a fortiori so for their female stars. <b>Country music has typically been much more accommodating, and, you might say, humane. It wants its stars to look as chewed-up and spit-out by life as its listeners.</b></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/i-support-viewpoint-diversity" source="The Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">I Support Viewpoint Diversity</a> <bq>Whatever job results from this, however, cannot be the job of an intellectual — or, if you think that label is too precious or belongs to another era, <b>any job that results from such algorithmic plotting of the candidate’s pre-settled political views cannot be held by anyone worth listening to.</b> It is no argument to insist that for years the progressive left has been deploying its own strategies for viewpoint-based hiring, by <b>effectively coercing speech from candidates in the form of their “diversity statement”.</b> These statements were odious not because of the particular content of the coerced speech they sought, but because both <b>the First Amendment and the values of academic freedom are incompatible with ideological litmus tests of any sort.</b> That is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to have to say it, as if I’m back giving a class presentation in high-school civics. But, well, here we are.</bq> <bq>It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, <b>AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.</b></bq> <bq>Better yet, though, <b>if you are in a position to circumvent all this shit, and live your life as an actual intellectual without subjecting yourself to the ritual humiliations concocted both by the universities and by the hostile parties besieging them — then by all means do that instead.</b></bq> 🫡 <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism</a> <bq>In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; <b>you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.</b></bq> <bq>It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories. If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. <b>Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful.</b></bq> <bq><b>This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney</b>, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use.</bq> <bq> If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that <b>100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich.</b></bq> <bq>Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr: Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring? <b>Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.</b></bq> This is just so brilliant. Devastating and true. <bq><b>It's the world in which real suffering children</b> (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) <b>don't matter at all, while imaginary children</b> (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) <b>take center stage.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment" source="" author="Niki Tonsky">Software disenchantment</a> <bq>Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. <b>People are often even proud about how inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale.</b> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.</bq> <bq><b>Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long?</b> That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.</bq> <bq>As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. <b>We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features.</b> Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second?</bq> <bq><b>Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that!</b> Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 MB. <b>But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?</b></bq> <bq>Google's keyboard app routinely eats 150 MB. <b>Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95?</b></bq> <bq>What’s worse, nobody has time to stop and figure out what happened. Why bother if you can always buy your way out of it. Spin another AWS instance. Restart process. Drop and restore the whole database. <b>Write a watchdog that will restart your broken app every 20 minutes. Include same resources multiple times, zip and ship. Move fast, don’t fix. That is not engineering. That’s just lazy programming.</b> Engineering is understanding performance, structure, limits of what you build, deeply. Combining poorly written stuff with more poorly written stuff goes strictly against that. To progress, we need to understand what and why are we doing.</bq> <bq>But who has time for that? We haven’t seen new OS kernels in what, 25 years? It’s just too complex to simply rewrite by now. <b>Browsers are so full of edge cases and historical precedents by now that nobody dares to write layout engine from scratch.</b></bq> (A) This has changed in the interim. (B) the interplay of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript standards creates an incredible powerful and flexible platform but a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_engine">browser engine</a> also a very, very challenging piece of software to write with high performance and low resource usage. No-one's writing new layout engines because it's really, really difficult and there's generally no upside, unless you're trying to learn. You're not likely to catch up with or pass any of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines">major implementations</a>, all of which are backed by relatively large foundations or corporations and which have been around for decades. <bq><b>What we have today is not progress. We barely meet business goals with poor tools applied over the top.</b> We’re stuck in local optima and nobody wants to move out. It’s not even a good place, it’s bloated and inefficient. We just somehow got used to it.</bq> Subsidies keep the economic inceptives at bay that would otherwise come into play. <hr> <img src="{att_link}blocking_all_content_from_russia.png" href="{att_link}blocking_all_content_from_russia.png" align="none" caption="Blocking all content from Russia" scale="50%"> The content blocker at work blocks anything that it perceives as having come from Russia, as if there is absolutely nothing of non-criminal value produced in that country. The racism and discrimination is breathtaking. We have truly lost our way. Archive.is is a gem of a service that is actually an Icelandic address (but may be hosted in Russia, I dunno) to which people upload articles from harshly paywalled sites like <i>The Financial Times</i>, <i>The Economist</i>, and others. It's used quite a bit on the more high-minded subreddits as well as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a>. It is not a den of iniquity. <hr> <a href="https://x.com/_dave__white_/status/1947461492783386827" author="Dave White" source="Twitter">Whining about being made obsolete</a> <bq>now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around "is good at math," it's a gut punch. it's a kind of dying.</bq> I can 100% guarantee you that this kind of guy would shout people down at parties in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s whenever anyone mentioned that making people's job's obsolete without offering another way forward was illogical, inefficient and, quite frankly and above all, immoral. Where was all of this rending of clothes and wringing of hands when the entire "rust belt" was being constructed? Oh yes, these people were too busy watching their 401Ks soar as the LBOs (what "private equity" was called in the 80s and 90s) guzzled people's livelihoods into its maw and shat their jobs out in Asia. No-one cared. No-one could be bothered. Because no-one knew anyone who was affected. Well, those people who were affected got their president elected twice and he's delighting in watching an economy completely unfettered by regulation expand the AI bubble to heretofore unseen proportions. Don't worry, buddy: you'll be living in a moth-eaten tent under a dilapidated bridge long before you get replaced by AI. Lucky for you, people will have forgotten all about what math even is, and how to produce electricity, so you'll never be replaced by an AI. You'll have to develop your "open ancient cans of cat food with ad-hoc tools" skills, though. <bq>of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist... over the next few years... it's a slightly bigger story</bq> Buddy, if you're calling yourself a "knowledge worker", then you've lost even before the machines take over. The fact that you describe yourself in such narrow categories makes you highly susceptible to replacement, I guess? <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://blog.korny.info/2025/07/19/clowns-to-the-left-of-me" author="Korny Sietsma" source="Korny's Blog">Clowns to the left of me …</a> <bq>LLMs are wonderful machines that read your data and questions and produce results in a way that feels like intelligence, but is actually just really <b>clever pattern matching and a surrounding ecosystem of context sources and tools.</b> Sometimes the results are amazing, occasionally they are terrible, and you always need to check the results because the process is fundamentally nondeterministic, and <b>just because 99% of the time something worked, there’s always that 1% chance it was confidently wrong.</b></bq> That's pretty fair. <bq>I need this standard disclaimer at the end of any AI post. We must remember the context behind these tools - there are giant tech companies pushing these hard into every corner of our lives. <b>They are run by horrible tech broligarchs3 whose interests are personal power and destabilising democracy, not helping the world.</b> They consume vast amounts of power, which due to our failure to charge for externalities, mean they are burning fossil fuels, consuming scarce water, and accelerating the climate crisis. And there are <b>many signs that the funding for this is an unsustainable bubble and the companies and tools may collapse</b>, or start charging significantly more and/or enshittifying the experience of users.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.korny.info/2025/07/18/a-real-world-ai-coding-case-sample" author="Korny Sietsma" source="Korny's Blog">A real-world AI coding case sample</a> <bq>I wanted to post this example as it’s a good midpoint between “AI can replace developers” and “AI is rubbish and produces junk”. More on that in my next post. This worked, with some human guidance. It needed help - maybe with future improvements and better context it will need less help, but <b>I doubt this kind of thing will “just work” any time in the near future.</b> That test failure, for example, needed a lot of investigation <b>a long way from the context of the code or the tests being written.</b> And I’m working in a similar way, and getting similar benefits, all over the place. Sometimes the LLM actually works first time - I added a feature flag to our application to turn one feature off in some environments, and the code needed no checks at all. And <b>it’s great at writing small simple on-demand scripts - things like “write a python script to graph our git commits over time” or “write a script to generate a Slack message showing our outstanding pull requests”.</b> And sometimes it doesn’t help at all - <b>it’s worth learning when to say “ok, this is too trivial / too hard” and writing it yourself.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-tech-bros-are-making-themselves-sick" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The tech bros are making themselves sick</a> <bq>The first thing you need to know to fully grasp what appears to be happening to Lewis is that <b>large language models absorbed huge amounts of the internet.</b> It’s why they’re good at astrology, predisposed to incel-style body dysmorphia, and oftentimes talk like a redditor. Think of ChatGPT as <b>a big shuffle button of almost everything we’ve ever put online</b> (with a few guardrails to keep it from turning into MechaHitler). <b>The problem is none of that stuff was ever meant to power an artificial brain. We do a lot of things on the internet that don’t make sense without years of context.</b> And the guardrails that a model like ChatGPT has can’t account for every weird quirk the AI might surface from our decades of internet garbage. But <b>if you’ve got a good handle on internet culture you can usually spot what’s happening.</b> Luckily for you, I do have that. And as I was reading through what Lewis has been posting I immediately clocked what was actually going on. <b>He’s accidentally triggered an SCP roleplay.</b> SCP stands for “Secure Contain Protect” and it’s a large-scale creepypasta project, usually organized on The SCP Foundation wiki, as well a few big subreddits. If you’ve never heard of The SCP Foundation, <b>it’s essentially a decades-long fan fiction project where users come up with different “SCPs” that are analyzed and stored, or “contained,” in a fictional facility.</b> These can be anything from Slenderman-style supernatural monsters to a tomato that hurls itself at anyone that cracks a bad joke. Think of it like Archive of Our Own just for user-submitted X-Files storylines. <b>My favorite SCP is one that erases your memory if you look at it, meaning it literally can’t be described.</b> In fact, if you click this link to read about that SCP, known as <a href="https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055">SCP-055</a>, or the “anti-meme,” you’ll see a pretty typically-formatted SCP report, complete with references to numbered documents and addendums from fictitious researchers, etc. Now, after clicking that link, go and click this link to what Lewis <a href="https://x.com/GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945864963374887401">posted on X</a> last week. Pretty similar, right? As X user @tilehopper wrote, <b>“The SCP Foundation unintentionally creating cognitohazard for LLMs and it causes a tech bro to have cyberpsychosis is the most SCP thing that ever happened.”</b></bq> <bq>For years, the popular adage has been that the internet has “made people insane.” We believe that social media has rotted many of our brains with a nonstop deluge of memes, conspiracy theories, and algorithmic slop. And that <b>digital slurry is now fueling a very sophisticated app that is absolutely altering the behavior of people who are already predisposed to self-destructive, disordered, or delusional thinking.</b> Which means it’s likely that the spread of consumer-grade generative AI might actually answer one of the foundational questions of the social media age: Exactly how many people out there have quietly been driven insane by the internet? And <b>what happens when a conversational manifestation of that same internet starts telling them that they’re right?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://icml.cc/Conferences/2025/PublicationEthics" author="" source="ICML">Publication Ethics</a> <bq><b>Submitting a paper with a "hidden" prompt is scientific misconduct if that prompt is intended to obtain a favorable review from an LLM.</b> The inclusion of such a prompt is an attempt to subvert the peer-review process. Although ICML 2025 reviewers are forbidden from using LLMs to produce their reviews of paper submissions, this fact does not excuse the attempted subversion. (For an analogous example, consider that an author who tries to bribe a reviewer for a favorable review is engaging in misconduct even though the reviewer is not supposed to accept bribes.) Note that <b>this use of hidden prompts is distinct from those intended to detect if LLMs are being used by reviewers; the latter is an acceptable use of hidden prompts.</b></bq> Oh my sweet Jesus what a tremendous waste of time, effort, and attention. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/20/armin-ronacher/" author="Simon Willison" source="">A quote from Armin Ronacher</a> <bq><b>Every day someone becomes a programmer because they figured out how to make ChatGPT build something. Lucky for us: in many of those cases the AI picks Python.</b> We should treat this as an opportunity and anticipate an expansion in the kinds of people who might want to attend a Python conference. Yet many of these new programmers are not even aware that programming communities and conferences exist. It’s in the Python community’s interest to find ways to pull them in.</bq> Jaysus. This is such a nightmare scenario and Ronacher (author of the Flask web framework for Python) seems to be <i>encouraging</i> it. I am not gatekeeping; I am being realistic about how much work it is to learn how to be a programmer. For F@&K'S sake, people. Just because you can rent a sledgehammer from <i>Home Depot</i> doesn't mean you're a contractor. It just means you're dangerous now. You may be <i>on the way</i> to becoming a programmer but the road is still long. LLMs haven't changed any of that. People selling LLM services are trying desperately to convince you that this is the case, but they are <i>lying</i> for their own benefit because <i>of course they are.</i> And now we've got Ronacher celebrating about LLM programmers using Python---a language that is inappropriate for many of the tasks given to it (think Visual Basic for Applications in Excel)---and trying to figure out how to get a whole bunch of these Potemkin programmers to show up to his conferences because <i>bigger is better</i> and <i>bigger, better, faster, more</i> is a philosophy that has never ever once failed to fulfill its promises. We should be lamenting that people's questions aren't being answered with C# programs. I'm on record---<a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5545">Links and Notes for May 30th, 2025</a>---as having written, <bq>I weep for the many minds we lose to the sloppy expressiveness offered by Python. It’s such a local maximum. So many people stuck on that hill thinking they’re the king of the mountain. It’s a good place to start but one should know when to move on.</bq> <hr> I reviewed a PR the other day, where the code contained the following snippet directly in the XAML for a view. <code><treeview Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="2" Grid.RowSpan="2" ItemsSource="{Binding Categories}" Margin="5"> <treeview.itemtemplate> <hierarchicaldatatemplate DataType="{x:Type dataViewModel:SectionTreeNode}" ItemsSource="{Binding Children}"> <treeviewitem IsSelected="{Binding IsSelected, Mode=TwoWay}"> <treeviewitem.header> <textblock Text="{Binding DisplayName}"> <textblock.inputbindings> <mousebinding Command="{Binding DataContext.SelectCategoryCommand, RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=UserControl}}" CommandParameter="{Binding}" MouseAction="LeftClick"> </textblock.inputbindings> </textblock> </treeviewitem.header> </treeviewitem> </hierarchicaldatatemplate> </treeview.itemtemplate> <treeview.itemcontainerstyle> <style TargetType="TreeViewItem"> <setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"> <setter Property="Focusable" Value="False"> <style.triggers> <trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="True"> <setter Property="Background" Value="LightPink"> </trigger> <trigger Property="IsSelected" Value="True"> <setter Property="Background" Value="SteelBlue"> <setter Property="Foreground" Value="AliceBlue"> </trigger> </style.triggers> </style> </treeview.itemcontainerstyle> </treeview></code> I commented the following, <ul> You <i>could</i> move this style to the application level, but I'm open to not doing that. You <i>should</i> define semantic aliases for the colors.<ul> <c>MouseOverForeground</c> <c>MouseOverBackground</c> (if you set the foreground, you should probably fix the background, unless you're just adjusting opacity or blending something, ... which I don't even know whether you can do that in WPF. You want to make sure you're in control of contrast.) <c>IsSelectedForeground</c> <c>IsSelectedBackground</c> </ul></ul> The update was to add aliases for the colors but to leave the component definition right in the view. The author wrote <iq>I like putting the styles for things closer to its markup (svelte/react)</iq>. Changes are <hl>highlighted</hl>, <code><treeview Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="2" Grid.RowSpan="2" ItemsSource="{Binding Categories}" Margin="5"> <treeview.itemtemplate> <hierarchicaldatatemplate DataType="{x:Type dataViewModel:SectionTreeNode}" ItemsSource="{Binding Children}"> <treeviewitem IsSelected="{Binding IsSelected, Mode=TwoWay}"> <treeviewitem.header> <textblock Text="{Binding DisplayName}"> <textblock.inputbindings> <mousebinding Command="{Binding DataContext.SelectCategoryCommand, RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=UserControl}}" CommandParameter="{Binding}" MouseAction="LeftClick"> </textblock.inputbindings> </textblock> </treeviewitem.header> </treeviewitem> </hierarchicaldatatemplate> </treeview.itemtemplate> <treeview.itemcontainerstyle> <style TargetType="TreeViewItem"> <setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"> <setter Property="Focusable" Value="False"> <style.triggers> <trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="True"> <setter Property="Background" Value="">{StaticResource IsMouseOverBackground}</hl>" /> <hl><setter Property="Foreground" Value="{StaticResource IsMouseOverForeground}"></hl> </trigger> <trigger Property="IsSelected" Value="True"> <setter Property="Background" Value="">{StaticResource IsSelectedBackground}</hl>" /> <setter Property="Foreground" Value="">{StaticResource IsSelectedForeground}</hl>" /> </trigger> </style.triggers> </style> </treeview.itemcontainerstyle> </treeview> </code> I replied, <h level="3">tl;dr</h> I'm fine with that. In smaller apps like this---where the tree control is only in one place---it's actually clearer and more maintainable this way. <h level="3">blog post</h> I'm open to not extracting a component because it feels like overkill (YAGNI). It's not a lot of <i>work</i> to extract the component but it does add complexity that is trivial if you feel component-based/functional, [S]OLID encapsulation in your <i>bones</i> but which may be confusing to a future maintainer who <i>doesn't</i>. However, leaving it this way is very hopeful about the future maintainability of this code, as it presupposes that the next developer is going to realize that you shouldn't just copy-&-paste this tree into another view that needs a tree. The proper approach at that point would be to (1) note that there are now two uses for a component, then (2) extract that component from the current implementation and, finally, (3) use the component from both places. I'm almost laughing too hard to type that sentence at the utter naiveté of hoping that that will ever actually happen. As of mid-2025, a copy/paste is almost the <i>best</i> that you could hope for; more likely is a top-to-bottom rewrite by Copilot in response to the prompt "Ned this tree in the otheer page MyOtherView lol ftw". A more defensive coding approach---one that fights against the dying of the light of software <i>engineering</i> as it is relentlessly replaced with <i>programming</i>---would be to extract the non-view-specific tree-component customization to a separate layer that defines common styles and behavior for tree controls in this app, so that a future user wouldn't be a copy/paster but a consumer of the common component. That is, you do the work now that you're afraid wouldn't be done in the future. This is definitely not YAGNI but it's also hard to argue against, as it's just using patterns that improve the clarity of the code <i>and</i> provide a hedge against maintenance rot. It's technically not DRY, as the repetition is still only <i>potential</i>. That component would then be ready to extract to a common library of components should another <i>app</i> need a tree component with the same behavior. That ship, too, has sailed so far that not even the last wisps from its smokestack are visible on the horizon. The Copilot has taken over from the captain and we don't do component libraries anymore when we can just regenerate components on a whim. Judging by the sheer amount of technical debt we usually end up having, we are generally bad at predicting what's going to come along. We're probably going to be supporting this app for twenty years. A work colleague and friend answered, <bq>Responding here more for the bit that for any hope of outreach with this <i>public</i> forum. Vis a vis "exclusivity assured by obscurity"<fn>. I think it is worthwhile to flesh out some of these points more.<bq>The Copilot has taken over from the captain and we don't do component libraries anymore when we can just regenerate components on a whim.</bq>This gives "old man yells at cloud". Nevertheless, the old man is smart, and the cloud is black and stormy. Why can't we just generate all the components on whims? Well, let me tell you why I love software engineering. I love software engineering for two reasons: 1. I hate doing things that a computer can do better than me 2. I hate solving problems more than once. I hear you, "Generating the components lets the computer be better than you"; good point straw man--thanks for the input. You might naively think that generating a component every time you need saves you from solving the same problem twice. I would assume that you haven't been programming that long. Writing the component is only the first 80% of the job. The <b>second 80%</b> of the job is fixing and validating the component for running in different scenarios. Here is what we are losing. If we keep all these components in a shared library, each time we find a bug we get to invest the work we put into it into the "code that works" bank and reap the dividends. If you generate a component, each time you do so you get a new baby deer fumbling about the code base.</bq> Now that you've made such a nice formulation for why we _should_ use a component library, let me argue the other side. The argument for why we _shouldn't_ use a component library boils down to: <ul>If <b>requirements</b> for the various clients <b>are expected to diverge</b>, the shared component may have to reconcile <b>possibly conflicting requirements</b>, leading to an <b>unwieldy and complex API</b> that's not great for any of the clients.<ul> For a component like a tree-view, this is less fraught, as the requirements are relatively stable.</ul> When code is available in versioned packages, that's great for stability, but <b>slows down the developer-feedback loop for quickly fixing a bug</b>. While it would be nice to fix the bug in one project and have the other projects be able to use it, that's not how it usually works. The component library has its own requirements and solution, so you have to open <i>that</i>, write the test for your bug there, verify that you've not broken anything, and then deploy a new version. You pull the new version from the client that currently interests you and then <b>hope that you didn't break anything for the other clients</b> of the component. Instead of being an app developer and verifying only that it works for <i>you</i>, you're required to <b>put on the "framework-developer's cap" in mid-stream</b>. Debugging external components works quite well but is nowhere near as easy as when running local code. A debugger like the one in Rider or Visual Studio lets you Edit and Continue your way to working tests. This tight feedback loop doesn't work for code in external components (until you've loaded the solution for the component library instead of your app).</ul> <hr> <ft>This is a nice callback to the banner here at earthli, <iq>This is a personal website, run by Marco, that caters to a small community of users. Its <b>exclusivity is almost guaranteed by its obscurity.</b></iq></ft> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <img src="{att_link}textiles_-_strands.png" href="{att_link}textiles_-_strands.png" align="none" caption="Textiles - Strands" scale="50%"> The words for a recent NYT strands puzzle was "textiles".