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Links and Notes for December 19th, 2025

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> If anyone needs any help or information for debunking any particularly pernicious arguments being made about the national or world situation, I’m here to make an "explain it to me like I’m five" justification for why it’s not only not very Christian to pretend that your lifestyle isn’t being supported by a boot stamping on a human face for-ever, it’s even less Christian to cheer it on. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/europe-is-paying-libya-to-torture-migrants-on-its-behalf/" source="ZNetwork" author="Melissa Pawson">Europe Is Paying Libya To Torture Migrants On Its Behalf</a> <bq>They could’ve been teenagers in any part of the world, except they happened to be on a rescue boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, having escaped a place notorious for torture, forced labour and mass killings. When I approached Omar on the deck and asked to interview him, I told him that I would need his informed consent to publish his story. He started laughing. “We’re not used to being respected like this, we’re used to being beaten in Libya.” In March 2023, Omar was on his lunch break at a construction site in Cairo when he heard that his 15-year-old cousin had drowned off the Tunisian coast.</bq> <bq>He found a smuggler to help him travel overland to Libya in January of this year, where he initially planned to stay and work. He had been recruited over Facebook to work in a sweet shop for 14,000 Libyan dinars a month (£1,900), but when he arrived, he was told he would only be paid the equivalent of £275 a month.</bq> <bq>Since Italy’s adoption of the ‘Piantedosi decree’ in January 2023, rescue ships requesting a safe port to disembark rescued people have regularly been forced to travel to distant ports, sometimes over 600 miles away, or risk their boats being detained for non-compliance. Rescue organisations say the policy is a “deliberate obstruction” designed to limit their ability to rescue people in distress at sea.</bq> <bq>Mounir Satouri, a French MEP and chair of the EU’s Subcommittee on Human Rights, said the EU’s continuing support for the Libyan coastguard “only ensures that atrocities are committed in our name and with European taxpayers’ money.” He described the coastguard as “an uncontrollable armed militia that violates international law and tramples on human rights.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/15/wmjn-d15.html" author="Evgeny Kostrov" source="WSWS">The backdrop to Putin’s negotiations with Trump: A deepening domestic crisis</a> <bq>[...] the Russian media writes very little about Trump’s efforts to establish a fascist dictatorship in the US, the violent crackdown on immigrants, the military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific or the domestic policies of the European powers. As a result, Russian workers are prevented from understanding the overall context of the global situation.</bq> <bq>[...] according to JP Morgan, global oil prices could fall to $30 per barrel in 2027, which will inevitably affect the Russian budget. Currently, the average cost of a barrel of oil in Russia is approximately $40. Falling oil prices will trigger major changes in Russia’s oil industry. Companies will likely shift to more profitable fields. For instance, Russia now sells oil at $50–$55 per barrel; a drop to $40–$45 would pressure the sector, forcing restructuring that hits the working class and domestic gasoline buyers hardest.</bq> <bq>The economy is expected to contract in the first quarter of 2026. Overall industrial production growth for the first three quarters was 0.7 percent. However, growth was only recorded in the engineering and pharmaceutical industries. The food industry, metallurgy, chemical industry and extractive sector recorded a decline in the third quarter.</bq> <bq>In 2025, fees rose by an average of almost 12 percent across the country, but in some regions by 40-50 percent. At the same time, the quality of services often remained at the same level or even declined: hot water outages, power cuts and problems with garbage collection became commonplace. Add to this constant interruptions in mobile internet service, as well as restrictions on WhatsApp and Telegram, slowdowns on YouTube, and everything else that was part of the everyday life of Russian workers (especially the younger generation), their communication and their hobbies.</bq> <bq>Utility prices by service type will rise significantly from 2024 to 2028: gas by 41 percent; electricity by 48 percent; heat by 46 percent; water supply by 38 percent; water disposal by 37 percent. Added to this will be price increases for internet, communications, etc. It is even likely that prices will rise above these forecasts. Overall, the share of housing costs will increase more rapidly than ever before in the history of modern Russia. This will be a real blow to the majority of the working class.</bq> <bq>[...] on the most elementary level, the Kremlin is completely unprepared for a further escalation of the war and its impact on the general population. In particular, regions close to the front line have virtually no bomb shelters. It should be noted that dozens and sometimes even hundreds of Ukrainian drones are intercepted on Russian territory each day, and several people have been killed in Russian regions by Ukrainian drone strikes in recent weeks.</bq> <bq>The Putin regime invaded Ukraine in response to the systematic encirclement of Russia by the imperialist powers since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, specifically, the 2014 coup in Ukraine. But this encirclement itself has deep objective roots. The imperialist powers, driven by a profound crisis of world capitalism, are vying for full control over a territory from which they have been cut off since the 1917 Revolution and which they failed to bring under their direct control even after the destruction of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/rebranding-genocide" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Rebranding Genocide</a> <bq>Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.</bq> It always has been. <bq>Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.</bq> 1984 was a user's manual. <bq>Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.</bq> <bq>The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.</bq> <bq>We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-hundredth-beach-attack-but-the-only-one-white-people-care-about/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">The Hundredth Beach Attack, But The Only One White People Care About</a> <bq>The White Empire is attacking beaches, boats, and bedrooms every day, but we're supposed to care about Bondi Beach above all. The Jewish State is targeting civilians every day but we're supposed to care about their civilians, many of whom were active IDF boosters and all of whom are latent IDF soldiers. They don't just want to dominate killing, they want to dominate grieving, and no.</bq> Just remember how hard some people still laugh at pager jokes. <bq>I'm not saying that people within the White Empire have any particular control, but they could rise up and overthrow their government as we're advised to do, with a gun to our heads. People within the White Empire think they can bomb everywhere and be safe at home. And it's sadly true. They do get away with it, and it's an anomaly when violence returns home.</bq> <bq>If you bomb the abyss long enough, the abyss bombs back, is this not a logical? The remarkable thing is how few attacks there are on the White Empire within, given how much it's attacking everybody without. In fact, the Empire must occasionally attack itself, to keep the story going.</bq> <bq>'Israel', with US and British surveillance, has bombed the beaches of Gaza hundreds of times, patrols them with drones, and calls massacring Palestinians ‘mowing the lawn’. Jews overwhelmingly support these attacks, and the victims on Bondi Beach included notable IDF boosters like Eli Schlanger (killed) and Arsen Ostrovsky (mildly wounded). These people think they can support and participate in attacks on civilians and then go be civilians in Australia. And they can! They can! Shootings like Bondi Beach basically never happen, whereas Jewish attacks on Palestinians always do. Yet one gets all the outrage, whereas the genocide of Palestinians gets all the support.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/?p=40394" source="" author="Ted Rall">Everyone Must Get Droned</a> <bq>We Americans often forget that nothing lasts forever. And we always ignore the playwright Wilson Mizner’s advice to be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down.</bq> <bq>With the world’s most advanced and expansive military presence, technological superiority in cyber and space, control over the global reserve currency, no state or entity can credibly hold the U.S. accountable when, for example, it repeatedly bombs Venezuelan boats, killing scores of unidentified civilians who have never been charged with a crime, on extraordinarily flimsy reasoning. Of course, these extrajudicial drone assassinations follow thousands of similar U.S. killings of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. No one has ever been arrested for the killings. No American drone killer has faced charges at the Hague. But whistleblowers have faced prosecution. Air Force analyst Daniel Hale was sent to prison for nearly four years for exposing drone murders.</bq> <bq>Another country—a new superpower, one we’re no longer able to resist—may circle its drones over American cities, scanning faces and license plates on the streets of New York and Miami and Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama before blowing them to bits along with everyone and everything around them. They could launch “signature strikes,” as we do against males “of military age” and/or “behaving suspiciously” in places like Pakistan and men who happen to wear a certain color of scarf, against dozens of commuters who fit a category of their designated target profile. The dead may be someone you know. It might be you. Liberals in that new superpower country may criticize their government for killing us without just cause. But most of their citizens won’t care. We’ll be The Other. We will have been accused of criminality. We will have it coming because, after all, we did it first.</bq> <bq>Your son may get blown up on a fishing boat by a drone missile he never sees coming. Your neighbor may get bombed on an interstate highway. Your spouse may be slaughtered alongside you at your wedding. Adding insult to atrocity, a foreign political leader might appear on the news to smear your loved ones as “terrorists.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/these-are-not-separate-wars/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">These Are Not Separate Wars</a> <bq>Ukraine and Palestine and Taiwan are not separate news stories. They are not separate wars, note the same war criminal at every crime scene, telling sob stories and selling weapons. And the UK and EU and US are not separate countries. It's one gang, with different flags hanging out their back pockets. </bq> <bq>Today America and Europe act like they're trying to negotiate with 'Israel' when it's their mad dog set on the Muslims and they like it that way. The US and UK provide most of the surveillance overflight, telling them which refugee camps to bomb, and the US, Europe, Canada, etc provide the bombs.</bq> <bq>America took and never gave back the broad island chains in World War II, and Taiwan is their attempt at a Chinese finger trap. The goal is a little Chinese-on-Chinese violence (see the pattern) with Japan thrown in because what the hell, Americans can't tell them apart anyways. As Mao said in 1965,<bq>Imperialism is afraid of China and Formosa [Taiwan] are the bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front door of this great continent; we are the back door. They created Israel for you and Formosa for us. The West does not really like us and we must understand this fact.</bq>Ain't that the facts. Empire does not care about any of these lackeys. They're just there to take a shellacking, while Empire sells weapons and sits back. It's all fairly transparent, so transparent, in fact, that it disappears. I call the whole phenomenon White Empire not just because of its racism but because of its erasism. It is an empire with no name, hiding behind mad dogs it trained, pretending to negotiate with itself, while perpetrating mass atrocities again and again.</bq> <bq>What a cunning Empire, which blends into the background like the white of this page, and blinds you to its existence with sheer verbiage. They hide behind liberalism to conserve their empire, and diversify their dumpster fire to keep it aflame. As if the Roman Empire was any less Roman Empire as it employed more and more people from the provinces; White Empire is the same.</bq> <bq>But follow the money and follow the gunnery and you'll see America behind all of it, with the others bitching a bit but still being their bitches quite loyally. Note the Europeans in the backseat holding a toy steering wheel, thinking they're driving and screaming for violence most liberally.</bq> <bq>They're waging multiple land wars across Asia and still colonizing the Americas and pretending like these are all coincidental conflict that they're trying to resolve. With violence of course, always violence. As Samuel Huntington said,<bq>The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.</bq></bq> <bq>After genociding their own continent, that's their entire business model now. Smash and grab, once with high-faluting lies, but now with naked murder, theft, and piracy (see Venezuela, which they're not even trying to justify). Then see further that this is the entire American business model, since they stole that continent and never stopped. They're still attempting to simultaneously cleanse and enslave the natives, just calling them ‘illegal immigrants’ instead of Injuns now. There's nothing new under this setting sun. Except its ending, inshallah.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/there-is-no-shadow-fleet/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">There Is No Shadow Fleet</a> <bq>The sad fact is that the people that are supposed to report these facts use such simple words to hide such simple crimes from simpletons. The privatized propaganda outlets in the West report on countries ‘evading sanctions’ and operating a ‘shadow fleet’ and never once go an inch deeper to show that these are not international sanctions, and that you don't have to be approved by a White country to sail in international waters.</bq> <bq>And the US's bureaucratic attempts to sanction Russia have crashed Europe instead, which is deindustrializing while Russia is reindustrializing apace. The (chihuahua) dogs of Empire are yapping at Russia while America blows up their pipelines, sells them expensive natural gas, and slaps them with tariffs instead of treats. Now these morons are calling for a someteenth round of sanctions on Russia, but they're all bark and no teeth. The US Navy is broken in Yemen and the US sanctions regime broke on Russia. They can still use these things to beat up some poor countries, but these are Pyrrhic victories. The White Empire used to be a global power, but now they're reduced to beating up their allies and ‘backyard’ enemies.</bq> <bq>That is why America, in this late and most violent stage of imperial decline, is reduced to high-seas piracy and thinly disguised lying. They can certainly ruin lives for poor people in Venezuela as they have done to Koreans, Iraqis, and Libyans with their starvation sieges many times, but in Russia and China they have finally picked on sometwo their own size, and with their accumulated war crimes, they no longer look like neutral arbitrators to anyone with half a mind. And so slowly, painfully, the times move on, with the shadows slowly eclipsing the white. As Gramsci sorta said, the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters. See the monstrous West, committing war crimes, and saying it's all fine because their fleet is ‘white’.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-israel-gets-to-undermine-our-rights" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">If Israel Gets To Undermine Our Rights, Then We Get To Undermine Israel</a> <bq>This is not something westerners need to take lying down. If Israel is trying to subvert and undermine our civil liberties in order to force our society to support genocide and apartheid, then we have every right to do everything we can to subvert and undermine the interests of Israel. They’re attacking our interests, so we get to attack theirs. [...] Turn about [sic] is fair play. These freaks don’t get to stomp out our rights and poison our society for the advancement of the most evil agendas in the world and then expect zero resistance or opposition to this. That is not a thing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-youre-not-free-to-oppose-a-genocide" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">If You're Not Free To Oppose A Genocide, Your Society Is Not Free</a> <bq>You don’t measure a society’s freedom by how much its citizenry are allowed to agree with their government, you measure it by how much they’re allowed to disagree.</bq> <bq>If the powerful are shutting down speech rights to advance their own interests in your society, then your society is not meaningfully different than the dictatorships the western world tries to contrast itself with. All our stories about living in a free society have been just that: stories. Fairy tales.</bq> You have the freedom of any resident of the Matrix. Don't make waves. Go along to get along. Produce. Consume. Don't complain. Be grateful. <bq>They are telling us that the only reason we were allowed to speak as we pleased in the years leading up to the Gaza genocide is because we were a bunch of compliant sheep who were not meaningfully challenging the interests of the powerful, and now that we are meaningfully challenging them the facade of freedom and democracy is falling away. As Frank Zappa once <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5055">said</a>, “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”</bq> <hr> <hr> <a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-israel-building-military-outposts-roads-permanent-presence-yellow-line" author="Forensic Architecture and Drop Site News" source="Drop Site News">Israel Is Preparing for a Permanent Presence in Gaza, Satellite Images Reveal</a> <bq>“Israel is doing what it always does, and what it historically has done best: establish ‘facts on the ground,’ incrementally rather than spectacularly, and make them permanent once those with influence to force it to reverse course either lose interest, decide that the cost of confronting Israel is not worth the price, or come out in open support of Israeli violations. Israel is in no rush and prepared to play the long game,” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and a former UN official who worked as a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Drop Site after reviewing a summary of the Forensic Architecture findings.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/20/patrick-lawrence-after-the-first-70669-deaths/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">After the First 70,669 Deaths</a> <bq>Read in the larger context of these awful events, the obsessive humanization of the Bondi Beach victims is an upside-down exercise in dehumanization. This is first, straight off the top. Jewish lives count, white lives count, names, faces, generous smiles — all this counts. But the names, faces and lives of those the Zionist regime has terrorized and brutalized for the past two years or eight decades, depending on how you reckon history: No, no need for any of this because they do not count. This is an obscenity, in my view — obscene for what it is and because it has a 500-year history. Since the opening of the imperial era in the late 15th century, the West has aggrandized itself with its never-to-be-questioned claims to civilization, decency, law and moral superiority, while the rest of the world consists of unruly, racially inferior, not-quite-human barbarians. The horrors of the mission civilisatrice — inhumanity in the name of humanity — were the inevitable outcome and so they remain.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/politics_of_tedium" author="Iris Meredith" source="DeadSimpleTech">The politics of tedium</a> <bq>Talking to them is like talking at a chatbot: whether they're friendly to you or outright rude, there is no hope in the world of actually influencing or engaging with them in a meaningful way, and they will mostly say the same thing regardless of environment: I wholly think that a lot of them, if they were arrested and thrown into prison, will still find themselves repeating their scripted lines, completely unable to see that the situation has changed at all. These are, in short, some of the most tedious and exhausting people in the world, and right now, they seem to control most of our politics across the board.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2025/12/22/oil-tanker-seized/" author="Liz Wolfe" source="Reason">Oil Tanker Seized</a> <bq>Over the weekend, the Trump administration seized two oil tankers. [...] U.S. forces boarded a Panamanian-flagged commercial vessel, owned by Hong Kong's Centuries Shipping, off the coast of Venezuela. They had no seizure warrant, which doesn't appear to have gotten in their way.</bq> This is why Liz Wolfe and Reason can't be taken seriously as a news organization, though they act like one. She can't come right out and say that this is illegal activity. It's piracy. <bq>On Sunday, U.S. forces apparently intercepted another tanker—"a sanctioned dark fleet vessel that is part of Venezuela's illegal sanctions evasion" that is "flying a false flag"—according to anonymous officials. U.S. officials claimed that the vessel, reportedly called the Bella 1, was not flying a valid national flag, and that international law dictates that it could be boarded as a result.</bq> Oh, sure. That's like a cop smelling pot or having seen something in the victim's hand. <bq>An estimated 20 percent of tankers worldwide "move oil from Iran, Venezuela, and Russia in violation of U.S. sanctions," reports the Times. "These ships often disguise their location and file false paperwork. The Bella 1, for instance, faked its location signal on a previous voyage. U.S. officials say they have identified other tankers carrying Venezuelan oil whose previous involvement in the Iranian oil trade makes them subject to U.S. sanctions."</bq> She is never going to mention that the U.S. sanctions are not some sort of international law, it's just the U.S. declaring war on enemies and taking their shit. There's nothing more to it than that. There is no "dark fleet". It's just ships from countries the U.S. doesn't like. None of these dipshits are going to question it because it's just the standard worldview for them. They don't see anything wrong with it. They certainly don't have a moral problem with it because they don't have any principles. If they even think about potential blowback, they don't care about that either because they know that it won't get them. That's why they get their panties in a bunch whenever white/middle-upper-class people are killed somewhere. It uncomfortably reminds them that they're not invulnerable. <hr> <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1874-william-hartung-ben-freeman" author="William Hartung & Ben Freeman" source="This is Hell!">A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War</a> <bq>Winslow Wheeler at the Project on Government oversight described the [US military procurement] system as a self licking ice cream cone. They create this corrupt system and then they profit off of it and use some of the revenue and profits to help sustain the system into the future…The old guard primes, the Lockheed Martins, the Raytheons of the world have this army of lobbyists and former defense officials who effectively serve to keep innovation out to, to keep anything out that they can't profit from. As we chronicle in the book, the system isn't just bad for taxpayers, it's bad for the military itself.</bq> The article <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-president-of-peace-prepares-for-war/" author="William D. Hartung" source="ZNetwork">The “President of Peace” Prepares for War</a> covers a lot of the same ground as the interview, if you'd rather read. <bq>To resist and reverse the militarization of American foreign policy will mean speaking truth to power, while working to debunk the myths that rationalize this country’s permanent war footing. But it will also require confronting power with power by generating a broad people’s movement against militarism in all its manifestations, including the militarization of foreign policy, immigration enforcement, and policing in this country, as well as the military’s role in generating staggering amounts of greenhouse gases and so accelerating climate change and threatening public health. There are people and organizations fighting on all those fronts. Building a network of resistance that respects the priorities of each of them will take dedicated organizing and relationship-building. Much of that work is already underway. But the question remains: Can the public interest overcome the special interests and bankrupt ideologies that continue to make war and the threat of more war America’s face to the world? It’s a question on which none of us can afford to remain neutral.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1877-terence-keel" author="Terence Keel" source="This is Hill!">Coroners Complicit in Obscuring Violent Deaths in State Custody</a> <bq>I think perhaps more nefarious and difficult is we in this nation hold terrible ideas about people on the wrong side of the law. We often don't want to admit it, but we often believe that when people get arrested or go to jail and they lose their lives or they become sick or ill, we feel they deserved it somehow.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/23/imtv-d23.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US seizure of China-bound tanker near Venezuela escalates US conflict with Beijing</a> <bq>Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian denounced the seizures as “a serious violation of international law” at a Monday press briefing in Beijing, adding that China “opposes all unilateral bullying.”</bq> <bq>The economic consequences of the blockade are already severe. Cuba, which depends on Venezuelan oil, is facing the loss of a key economic lifeline and is facing widespread hunger, rolling blackouts, and medical shortages.</bq> <bq>The National Security Strategy published by the White House last month announces a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” explicitly aiming to restore “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and deny China “the ability to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere.” The document effectively asserts US ownership over two continents—presented as “our hemisphere”—whose resources Washington intends to seize as a power base for confrontation with Russia and China.</bq> <bq>As part of the drive to seize control of “our” hemisphere, Trump has also demanded that Greenland, a territory of US NATO ally Denmark, become part of the United States. On Sunday, Trump appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland. Over the weekend, Landry said in a post on X that he would seek “to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”</bq> Oh, my God. I thought they'd forgotten about this. Do they think that rare-earth metals refine themselves, though? 90% of the refining capacity that matters---so-called "5-9s" capacity, which refines to 99.999% purity---is in China. The U.S. had a multi-year effort that resulted in a "2-9s" (99.1%) purity.<fn> That's honestly nowhere near good enough for the low-nm processes needed by high-end chips.<fn> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFHqTzeIuKE">But wait, there's more!</a> <bq>On Monday, Trump announced plans to build a new “Trump Class” of battleships as part of a “Golden Fleet.” Speaking from Mar-a-Lago flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and renderings of the proposed warships, Trump declared that “each one of these will be the largest battleship in the history of our country, the largest battleship in the history of the world, ever built.” He claimed the ships would be “the fastest, the biggest and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons and laser systems. The first vessel would be named USS Defiant. Trump said he approved construction of two ships immediately, with plans for 20 to 25 total.</bq> They didn't say whether it would have the most awesome trucks that the world has ever seen on it, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that it will. I mean, why not? Go big or go home. This is pure fantasy. it's like watching a 12-year-old next to his cardboard spaceship but it's not cute, it's pathetic. My God, how are people not f@&king embarrassed to be associated with this? You should be backing away slowly but there's so much sunken cost at this point. You should be demanding health care and welfare instead. The madness is on the outside now. They're not even putting on the velvet glove anymore. It's all just iron fist now. Trump is America with the mask off. <hr> <ft>I read this somewhere else a while back but found this article from January 2025 that seems to corroborate the number, <a href="https://www.miningreporters.com/noticia/news/2025/01/usa-rare-earth-achieves-breakthrough-in-domestic-dysprosium-oxide-production" author="Agustín de Vicente" source="Mining Reports">USA Rare Earth achieves breakthrough in domestic Dysprosium Oxide production</a>. I didn't investigate the thing down to its bones to determine whether it's AI-generated, though. The <a href="https://rareearthexchanges.com/domestic-rare-earth-refining-in-america/">next result in the list </a> was definitely created by AI. Looking at the domain name, it's likely the entire web site is an SEO trap for searches about "rare earths", which, if it's a viable business model, is an indictment of both our economic system and our information environment, but that's a whole other topic.</ft> <ft>3-7nm CPUs are basically every chip that a consumer has in a multi-purpose device, like a phone, tablet, notebook, or desktop computer. Some industrial CPUs---which don't need this level of performance; they need reliability and optimize for cost---might not need that level of purity, but I'm just speculating here. It's possible that there is no real market for 99.1% pure rare earths.</ft> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJyynk_c4os" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/yJyynk_c4os" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Briahna Joy Gray" caption="Millennial White Men DISCRIMINATED Against? (w/ Vijay Prashad)"> This is a great discussion (26.5 minutes). They discuss, among other things, Vivek Ramaswamy's having come down to Earth to realize that his party will not accept him as a real person. At about 18:00, <bq>I mean, there's real racism but also for political reasons. It's very useful to believe that groups rise or fall because of their kinds of intrinsic ability, because then they don't have to spend money on any policies to try to create any kind of equality. Right? Like, that's the real game. It's like to cut government spending by saying that anything that you observe where a group is struggling is their own fault. But he can't point to the the difficulties that any other group faces because, in his mind, it's their own fault. And that's why I think he's having this existential crisis, like he thought that we were doing merit. This is why he got in trouble about a year ago around the holidays, defending H-1B-visa immigrants because he was like, "Oh, I thought we all agreed that if someone is smart and does a good job and is in a quote unquote burden on society that they should come here." And then all the white people were like, "No, the game is white people get good stuff and nobody else does. We run this joint. It's not about merit. It's about white supremacy." And he was like, "Oh shit." He thought that the merit stuff was legitimate and not a pretext.</bq> Vijay's response was brilliant, saying he has no empathy for people like this. <bq>The two people you mentioned are both South Asian, Usha Vance and and Vive Ramaswami. They're desperate to assert the fact that they're white and they are not migrants, in a way, because a migrant is a person that needs to be deported by ICE. They are somebody who wins a prize in Cincinnati, Ohio because they were born in Cincinnati. You know, there can be other people born in Cincinnati who deserve to be expelled by ICE because they are illegal migrants. They're illegal not in their status, but they're illegal in the imagination. They shouldn't be there. What he's trying to say is, 'I exist legally in your imagination.' And that's either malicious---he's trying to claim whiteness---or it's naive. And I think he's not naive. I think he's malicious.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <img src="{att_link}russia_annexes_while_israel_approves.webp" href="{att_link}russia_annexes_while_israel_approves.webp" align="none" caption="Russia annexes while Israel approves" scale="65%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/the-jeffrey-epstein-saga-is-the-worst" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">The Jeffrey Epstein Saga is the Worst-Reported Story of All Time</a> <bq>Epstein abused a large number of girls (though how the FBI came up with the claim that he harmed “over one thousand victims” remains unclear), but was he operating a “ring”? There is a ton of evidence of encounters of a certain type. The common theme in stories about Epstein’s behavior, particularly in Palm Beach, is one in which he solicited local girls for activities that ranged from massages by girls clad in underwear only, to watching girls touch each other or perform sex acts on one another. There are comparatively few stories about intercourse (see below for a good guess at why). But is there a confirmed case of trafficking to a third party in the Epstein record? No, not even close. Even the second Epstein indictment for “sex trafficking conspiracy” doesn’t make an accusation of trafficking to anyone but himself. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking, but Epstein never had a chance to be convicted of that second offense. The reason for that is beyond mysterious, but still true. Typically, commercial media deals with situations like this by using terms like “accused sex trafficker.” There are some envelope-pushers who’d go so far as to say “sex trafficker” or even “notorious sex trafficker” with someone like Epstein, though most editors would stay away from such language when describing any not-suicided person with a lawyer. But even the most aggressive publication should stay away from “convicted sex trafficker,” as that’s simply wrong.</bq> <bq>What drove him? Was he a true pedophile? The clinical definition requires a fixation on “prepubescent children,” which doesn’t appear to be the case here, though some of Epstein’s victims, like Carolyn Andriano, were as young as 14 when they met him. (Another source close to the case said he liked “flat-chested young women.”) But when it comes to legally proven events, this is at least partly a news phenomenon grown out of the historical accident of Epstein having lived in the state with the highest age of consent on earth, Florida. This allowed orgiastic use of the term “pedophile” (see Michael’s story), when the only proven act with a minor involved one victim who was seventeen at the time of the offense. Did he hire women of any age to provide services to his many powerful friends? There’s no official accusation of this anywhere, which is remarkable given how prevalent is the notion of Epstein as a head of a “global sex trafficking ring.” In fact, three of the words used most often and most devastatingly with Epstein — global, trafficking, and ring — depend on one very dicey story about Prince Andrew told by perhaps the world’s most unreliable source, the late Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre not only appeared to be a regular recruiter but has an astonishing record of libelous inventions, including a retraction of eight years of extremely detailed claims of sex with Alan Dershowitz.</bq> I was quite happy to see that Taibbi had teamed up with Michael Tracey on this one. I think it lends it credibility that it's not just one person reporting it. And this is definitely a return to form for Matt Taibbi, the reporter. I welcome his return. (I feel that Matt would, in a hypothetical timeline where he would actually read this comment, shake his head, muttering emphatically, "I never WENT anywhere," but, for some of us, you had. This is where Matt belongs: holding the media's feet to the flames, standing on facts, and pointing out how evidence-free interest in stories like this amounts to using them as political capital, with not a care for the lives that are destroyed in the wake of aiming at whatever white whale is being aimed at. In this case, a quite-literal white whale. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/five-craziest-things-about-the-epstein" author="Michael Tracey" source="Racket News">Five Craziest Things About the Epstein Case, Vol. 1</a> <bq>Matt Taibbi and I thought now would be a good time for a collaborative series examining some of most mind-bending, yet chronically ignored, aspects of this sprawling Epstein mega-drama — many of which drastically complicate popular assumptions around what the story actually entails. A miasma of jaw-dropping misconceptions have been allowed to proliferate almost entirely without challenge, and it’s had a cascade of awful consequences that get nowhere near enough attention: moral panic, mass hysteria, stunning media failures, infringement of civil liberties, widespread misdiagnosis of genuine political problems -- among others. So somebody’s got to provide an overdue corrective, even if it guarantees we’ll both be slimed for doing the basic journalistic inquiry that should’ve been done all along.</bq> <bq>Just this week, The Nation published an article matter-of-factly asserting that Epstein was the mastermind of a “global pedophile ring,” as author Greg Grandin tries to grapple with recent revelations that his legendary mensch Noam Chomsky once had a series of (supposedly) disturbing dalliances with Epstein. Nowhere is the slightest indication given that Grandin has ever actually examined the underlying evidentiary basis for this extraordinary assertion: that Chomsky, of all people, completely lost his mind and decided to consort with the villainous architect of a “global pedophile ring.”</bq> This was exactly my thought as well: when I'd heard that Chomsky had praised Epstein as a wonderful and thought-provoking conversational partner over years, if not decades, we should be thinking not "Chomksy's a pedophile!" but "maybe my idea of who and what Jeffrey Epstein was are overly simplistic." That is, Chomsky's involvement---a man whose reputation is otherwise impeccable if not Christ-like<fn>---should make you question your assumptions, rather than double down on them, and immediately throw him to the dogs. <bq>[...] the statutes Epstein pleads guilty to violating are “Felony Solicitation of Prostitution” and “Procuring Person Under 18 for Prostitution.” Only the latter could even conceivably relate to “pedophila,” as the former contained no age-specific provisions. In the plea hearing, Judge Deborah Pucillo asks the Palm Beach prosecutor, Lanna Belohlavek, if the “victims under age eighteen” are in agreement with the State’s disposition of charges against Epstein. “That victim is not under age 18 any more,” says Belohlavek, but reports she had conveyed her agreement through counsel. Note: only one “victim” — singular — is identified as having been under the age of 18 at the time she was allegedly victimized by Epstein. This representation is accepted by Judge Pucillo.</bq> <bq>So for as long as the Epstein story remains such a red-hot story, it behooves us all to know what actually happened with Ashley Davis. Noticeably, she has not appeared in any of the Netflix specials, Hulu documentaries, glossy magazine treatises, cable news hits, “true crime” podcasts, or any other of the infinite entertainment products germinated by the Epstein saga. Nor has she attended any of the political rallies, PR campaigns, or press conferences. Based on what I can surmise, she doesn’t even seem to have ever filed a lawsuit. Which is certainly conspicuous, given how many other “victims” have chosen to make their purported Epstein victimhood a defining character trait.</bq> <bq>Ashley volunteered the following: “He never asked me to touch him in any sort of inappropriate way.” She received cash, usually $200, for each “massage” session, during which she would be in various stages of undress. Sometimes she would bring along a female friend, earning her an extra $150. Not bad for an hour’s work for a 17-year-old. She also received gifts from Epstein, like a photography book and a digital camera. Anyone who’s had the misfortune of studying Epstein’s “massage” proclivities in any great depth will know that Ashley’s account so far is banally common; many other similar-aged females reported virtually identical experiences.</bq> <bq>Another way in which Ashley’s account was unique among the sea of other “victims” in this Palm Beach “massage” cohort: many confessed to lying about their ages to Epstein if they were not yet 18, and advising their friends/acquaintances to do the same. As one “victim” recounted, the instructions they’d give each other were as follows: “Make sure you tell him you’re 18… Jeffrey doesn’t want any underage girls.” Ashley, on the other hand, consistently said Epstein was fully aware of her true age (17) at the time of their sexual contact. In other words, she did not lie to him about her age, as others did. This could explain why Ashley ended up being the one person whom Epstein ultimately pleaded guilty to “procuring as a minor for prostitution.”</bq> <bq>After the testimony that day, Ashley essentially vanished from the public record. And with that, the only Epstein “victim” below the legal age of consent to actually be adjudicated as such in a bonafide court proceeding really did “move on” — rather than turn her onetime Epstein entanglement into a lifelong personal and professional endeavor, as innumerable other “victims” have done.</bq> <bq>yeah, of course Epstein was reckless and impulsive. He was pathologically obsessed with receiving these nonstop “massages,” and had a constant procession of girls coming in and out of his house to perform them, often multiple times a day, with varying degrees of sexualization. No doubt that was a disaster waiting to happen, whether or not the girls were just above or just below the legal age of consent, and even if some had misrepresented their ages so they could swing by and get the easy cash. It was an insane situation for Epstein to put himself in, and especially insane behavior for a wealthy man in his 50s, as anyone of sounder mind would have presumably recognized.</bq> <bq>No one’s being asked to condone Epstein’s overall behavior, or act like it’s a good idea for 50-year-old men to be seeking transactional sexual encounters with 17-year-olds. But seriously — in the grand scheme of things, is the conduct for which Epstein was convicted in 2008 really a sufficient basis for the entire political and media class to be frantically proclaiming, day after day, that the United States circa 2025 is in the throes of a giant “pedophila” crisis? Because this deceased “convicted pedophile” had consensual sex with a girl in Palm Beach on the literal eve of her 18th birthday, twenty years ago?</bq> <bq>[...] no one has to endorse Epstein’s skeevy lifestyle to observe that if the intercourse with Ashley Davis had taken place in New York, or Massachusetts, or one state north in Georgia, she would have been above the legal age of consent in those jurisdictions, and the entire legal trajectory of this debacle would have been drastically different. But as fate would have it, the intercourse took place in Florida, which has the highest legal age of consent (18) virtually anywhere in the world. So we’re all obliged to babble like maniacs about the unpunished “pedophilia” catastrophe supposedly ravaging our nation.</bq> It is suspiciously convenient for those in the national security state, who wish to decrypt all of our private communications, that the main lever by which they seek to do so---CSAM---continues to be such a high-profile issue in the daily media, ensuring that people think that pedophilia is a much, much, much bigger problem than it actually is. <hr> <ft>Other than, perhaps, his lifelong association with MIT, an institution that, other than employing him, worked tirelessly hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to ensure that Chomsky would continue to have material for books for the rest of his life.</ft> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/notes-on-bondi-beach-and-free-speech" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Notes On Bondi Beach And Free Speech</a> <bq>Nobody actually believes pro-Palestine demonstrations are “hate marches” or that pro-Palestine speech is “hate speech”. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. Nobody actually believes there’s a soaring epidemic of antisemitism in our society that is caused by anti-genocide demonstrations. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. Nobody actually believes opposing the state of Israel is the same as hating Jews. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.</bq> <bq>I hate doing this, by the way. If it were up to me I’d have just let Australia grieve a horrific attack without spending days going “Actually this doesn’t mean you get to take away our rights and silence Israel’s critics.” It’s not my fault that the worst people in the world opportunistically seized on this moment to shove through pre-existing agendas aimed at stomping out criticism of Israel and quashing anti-genocide protests in my country. I didn’t ask for this. They did. They’re the ones who made this political. It could have just been about two ISIS guys doing a terrible thing. Israel supporters could have proved me wrong when I said the attack “will be used as an excuse to target pro-Palestine activists and further outlaw criticism of Israel in Australia.” Everyone could have just focused on mourning the victims, and I would have looked like a jerk. Instead they proved me 100 percent correct, and I’ve had to spend all my time getting shrieked at by profoundly evil genocide apologists who are pretending to believe pro-Palestine protests caused the attack in order to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. Does it look like I enjoy this shit? Because I don’t. I fucking hate it. And I hate that they’re making it necessary for me to do this, because the alternative to speaking out now is voluntarily losing my voice forever.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/22/uhte-d22.html" author="Clara Weiss" source="WSWS">Russian court sentences members of Marxist circle to draconian prison terms</a> <bq>Since the spring, there have been rolling internet blackouts in many regions of Russia which have result in people being cut off from the internet sometimes for weeks at a time. Many of the most important social media platforms that people in Russia use to learn about international developments and discussions and communicate with people outside of Russia, such as YouTube and WhatsApp, have been blocked entirely or partially. As a recent article on the WSWS noted, Russian workers are deprived of almost any information regarding the reactionary policies of the Trump administration, which Vladimir Putin is praising regularly as he seeks to negotiate a deal in the Ukraine war with US imperialism. While increasingly suppressing any means to access information from the outside world, the Russian oligarchy has also intensified its campaign of historical falsification and efforts to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin. Coinciding with the 108th anniversary of the October Revolution, Russian state TV released a major television series, entitled Chronicles of the Russian Revolution, which is filled with the most vile and outrageous historical slander and falsifications. Its principal funder and producer was Alisher Usmanov, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs with an estimated net worth of $14.4 billion in 2023. </bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/23/kitx-d23.html" author="Patrick Martin" source="WSWS">CBS censors “60 Minutes” report on torture of immigrant detainees</a> <bq>The leaked version of the “60 Minutes” segment is devastating. The courage of the men who testified is remarkable, as is the compassion of the students and human rights advocates who helped them, and the determination of Alfonsi and her team of journalists to bring this information to the public. The segment exposes the blatant lying and inhuman callousness of the Trump administration, particularly Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem [...]</bq> Can confirm that these men were courageous to speak out. They speak Spanish. I watched the video at the post <a href="https://x.com/CalltoActivism/status/2003307383066653144" author="@CallToActivism" source="Twitter">🚨Holy shit. Someone leaked the entire 60 Minutes episode CBS didn’t want you to see.</a> it's not like we're not going to see it, people. There is no stopping it. The footage of CECOT is horrifying, They're not ashamed of it. Bukele is happy to let influencers show the world how prisoners are stuffed into cells, stacked on beds four high, like chickens on a roost. They show lines up in six rows, each seemingly nude, each with his head shaved, each with his hands tied behind his back, each with his forehead pressed into the spine of the person in front of him. There is footage of Katherine Leavitt, who is a fucking demon, denouncing everyone as a litany of horrific things, none of which they've even been accused of. She's a demon, I cannot stress this enough. She is a true believer. Either that, or she's a brilliant actress, like the Daniel Day Lewis of her generation. Either way, she's intrinsic in helping her bosses do a lot of damage. How many people think to themselves, how could this pretty, blonde, Christian lady be wrong? She wouldn't lie to us; she loves Jesus! Fock, dood, fix your scam radar before it's too late. Props to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyn_Alfonsi" author="" source="Wikipedia">Sharyn Alfonsi</a> for this excellent report. <bq>The domination of giant corporations and the billionaire families who control them is the fundamental source of the attacks on democratic rights faced by the entire working class. As the WSWS has emphasized, the return to power of Trump and the ongoing effort to establish a fascist dictatorship in America means that the political forms of rule are being brought into line with the underlying social reality. It is impossible to maintain even the pretense of democracy in a society riven by such massive economic and social inequality. The censorship of “60 Minutes” underscores the critical importance of the working class gaining access to the information needed to develop a clear understanding of the capitalist crisis and the dangers that it poses.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/candace-owens-great-american-basket" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case</a> <bq>Last Thursday she ran a show interviewing a man named “Mitch” who claimed to have seen Erika at an Army base called Fort Huachuca the day before her husband died. Afterward, Ben Shapiro gave a speech blasting her, which of course led to a) a tweet saying Shapiro is “invested in Charlie’s murder,” and b) an Owens video the next day titled, “What does Ben Shapiro know about Erica Kirk and Fort Huachuca?” (Note the cross-marketing of the new theory with the Shapiro news. This person is a content machine.)</bq> <bq>If she wanted help with her Macron situation she’d similarly have listed a source less vague than “a high-ranking employee of the French government” (read: “According to myself”), and she wouldn’t subsequently have sent a packet about the plot to “both the White House and our counterterrorism agencies,” claiming it was proof of sorts when they “confirmed receipt.” That’s an old trick. Short-sellers will send a packet about a company they’ve bet against to the FBI or SEC, then call a pal at a New York paper as soon as they accept the letter, allowing media to then claim the firm is “under investigation,” which tanks the stock.</bq> <bq>[...] frequently intuits about things that don’t “add up,” another storied tactic in this world. She uses them all, from “History suggests it could happen” to “Person X lacks an alibi for my unsourced accusation” to “I’m just asking questions.” That’s not what she’s doing, by the way: “I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage” is a smear, not a question. Every media person knows what this is — in every mania there’s always a person whose willingness to spread the unconfirmable theories is silently embraced on the fringes — but it usually comes with mainstream condemnation.</bq> <bq>[...] finding Israel under every manhole is eminently retweetable, and so is she. As such, her ruminations find many supporters to stand behind her against Shapiro, “Tel-Aviv Mark Levin,” and other pro-Israel villains. There’s also quasi-endorsement among left-leaning commentators who’ve begun siding with what they call the “America First” side of the MAGA movement over the “Israel First” crowd. I get criticizing Israel, but I don’t understand letting a parody of a conspiracy theorist lead the charge, especially one that blows off the fig leaf terminology about Zionists and just blasts “the Jews” instead.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XOKWISS7A" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/j4XOKWISS7A" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Westend Verlag" caption="Meine Konten wurden eingefroren | Jacques Baud"> <bq>Das heißt, das ist genau das Gegenteil von was die Leute wie Rousseau, Voltaire und so weiter im 17. Jahrhundert gekämpft haben. Wir sind zurück---300 Jahre zurück---des Habeas Corpus, dass man das Recht hat zu einer Verteidigung existiert an sich nicht. Auch wenn ich gegen diesen Sanktionen kämpfe, das wird nicht ein juristische Prozess sein, das wird an sich ein politischer Prozess sein. Das heißt, wir sind sehr weit weg von der Idee, die wir seit 1945 wollten. Das heißt die Herrschung der Demokratie, der Recht von jeder sich auszudrücken, das ist genau, was wir in 1945 verlassen haben. Und sie wissen als Deutsche besser als ich, was das heißt. Und viele Leute auch, die Sowjetunion gekannt haben, kennen das auch. Und einige Leute in Deutschland haben sogar gesagt, dass was ich erlebe im Moment sei noch schlimmer als was in der DDR passierte in Bezug auf ähnliche Fälle. Das heißt, dass wir haben uns nicht verbessert, wir haben uns verschlimmert sozusagen., wir haben unsere Werte verloren. Wissen Sie, Demokratie, es gibt nicht zwei Demokratien. Es gibt nicht die gute, die schlechte Demokratie, es gibt nur Demokratie. Wenn ich mit meinem Schweizerischen Auge, wenn ich die Frankreich anschaue, die französische Demokratie hat nicht viel zu tun mit der Schweizer Demokratie, an sich hat nichts zu tun damit, wenn man da gut beobachtet. Die können einfach der Präsident wählen. Das ist ja das ist ein einzige. Der Rest ist eine Monarchie. So, das heißt, aber die Begriffe, der Begriff der Demokratie ist immer das gleiche, dass man der Recht sich auszudrücken, der Recht die diese freie Meinung zu haben und so weiter. Es gibt nochmals wieder, es gibt keine gute oder böse Demokratie. Es gibt die Demokratie. Die Werte müssen immer die gleiche sein, die Freiheit. Und wenn jemand eine andere Meinung hat, umso besser, dann kann man streiten. Das heißt, intellektuell streiten natürlich, man kann Ideen austauschen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/15/academic-freedom-on-life-support-inside-texas-the-new-ground-zero-of-a-national-crackdown-on-higher-education/" author="" source="Scheer Post">Academic Freedom on Life Support: Inside Texas, the New Ground Zero of a National Crackdown on Higher Education</a> <bq>Braaten details how professors are being publicly targeted, fired without due process, and subjected to ideological litmus tests — not only in the humanities, but across all disciplines, including science and medicine. From audits of course syllabi to bans on “race or gender ideology,” to social-media-driven intimidation campaigns, the goal, he argues, is clear: to weaken universities until they submit. But this conversation goes far beyond Texas. Scheer and Braaten connect these state-level attacks to a broader national and global pattern — from Trump-era threats to withhold federal research funding, to the cynical weaponization of anti-Semitism, to the erosion of shared governance that once made American higher education the envy of the world. As Braaten warns, there are no “safe” fields: when academic freedom collapses in one discipline, it collapses everywhere. At stake is not only the future of professors, but the education of students, the pursuit of truth, and the ability of a democratic society to think critically about power, science, war, climate, immigration, and human rights. This is a conversation about how democracies lose knowledge [...]</bq> <hr> I very much enjoy the podcast TrueAnon, hosted by Brace Belden, Liz Frantzak, and produced by Yung Chomsky. They do very high-quality research, have an encyclopedic knowledge of trends, sports, history, culture, and politics, and are funny as hell. I've been listening to them for years. I very much enjoyed their last few shows of the year. <dl dt_class="field"> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-508-145605595" author="" source="Patreon">Episode 508: Southern Strategy</a> This show discusses <iq>the new National Security Strategy, Machado, oil, and Trump's attempts to instigate a war with Venezuela.</iq> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-511-and-146436685" author="" source="Patreon">Episode 511: Haters and Losers</a> This is the yearly installment of who's a winner (e.g., Erika Kirk) and who's a loser (e.g., Charlie Kirk). <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-510-tip-146145162" author="" source="Patreon">Episode 510: Tip Line #10 Ft. Sarah Squirm and Jack Bensinger</a> Though they call it a <iq>classic call-in show</iq> because they play some calls from their tip line, this show has long riffing on those topics with SNL cast-member Sarah Sherman and SNL writer Jack Bensinger (who was actually funnier than Sarah, although she did have a few zingers). </dl> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/21/cupc-d21.html" author="Jean de Jager" source="WSWS">Two-thirds of South Africa’s population in absolute poverty, with one third unemployed</a> <bq>Absolute poverty has risen to 40.8 million people, nearly two thirds of the population. The human cost is visible above all in mass unemployment, officially measured at 31.9 percent, with millions more pushed out of the labour force or confined to insecure and low paid work.</bq> <bq>The desperation of workers will worsen with the planned termination of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) which supports the unemployed who have no other sources of income or social assistance. The SRD provides those who qualify with R370 ($22) a month, which is below Stats SA’s Food Poverty Line of R794 ($47). Those who fall beneath this line cannot afford enough food to meet the minimum daily energy requirement for adequate health.</bq> So people on SRD already had only half of the resources they needed for the minimum daily energy requirement and that is now being terminated!?! And this is the country that has been instrumental in getting the UN to find Israel guilty of genocide?!? I guess they know it when they see it. Fuck. I had no idea that South Africa was so poor, in such dire straits. People in Switzerland cheerfully plan vacations there, talking about how it's turned around so much. Vultures. <bq>Permanent Revolution insists that in countries of belated capitalist development, the tasks historically associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolution—ending mass poverty, securing genuine equality, and achieving real national independence—cannot be carried out by the capitalist class. Bound by its dependence on imperialism and its fear of the working class, the bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving these contradictions. These tasks can only be realised by the working class taking power, expropriating the major banks, mines, and industries, and linking this to the international fight for socialism.</bq> Just because the WSWS says this in nearly every one of their articles don't make it wrong. <bq>[...] the principal beneficiaries have been a narrow layer of new black elites, integrated into corporate boardrooms and state structures through Black Economic Empowerment policies, who joined their white counterparts in intensifying the exploitation of workers of all races.</bq> Sounds like the same program that the U.S. has. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/22/trump-economy-one-doll-multiple-dolls/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Trump Economy: One Doll, Multiple Dolls</a> <bq>[...] we know that the survey is finding many fewer people saying they are foreign-born. But the number of native-born is not calculated from the survey. BLS just subtracts the number of foreign-born estimated in the survey from its population controls. This means that every time the number of foreign-born workers in the survey declines, the number of native-born workers mechanically rises. If the number of foreign-born workers reported in the survey fell by 2 million, there would be a reported increase in the number of native-born people working of 2 million even if not a single additional native-born worker had a job. This is what the Republicans are celebrating when they tout a huge boom in jobs for native-born workers. If anyone is really interested in how native-born workers are doing, the data are right there in front of their face. The unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4.3 percent in November. That’s up from 3.9 percent in November of 2024.</bq> <bq>One of the most shocking trends in the labor market in 2025 has been the jump in unemployment among Black workers. It hit 8.3 percent in November, a rate that white workers would only see in a severe recession. This is especially striking since the unemployment rate for white workers has barely risen, hitting 3.9 percent in November, up from 3.8 percent last November.</bq> <bq>One of the most shocking trends in the labor market in 2025 has been the jump in unemployment among Black workers. It hit 8.3 percent in November, a rate that white workers would only see in a severe recession. This is especially striking since the unemployment rate for white workers has barely risen, hitting 3.9 percent in November, up from 3.8 percent last November.</bq> Hey, Dean. Are you really shocked? I'm not shocked. Let's ask Vivek Chibber how to explain this without racism. Maybe I'm being terribly unfair to Chibber but I just read an insanely long interview with him during which he espoused basically one idea (it was in the title of the interview) and seemed positively obtuse about his interpretation of race and class. I think woke people broke him, which is a shame because woke people suck and you shouldn't let them influence you like that. I am using "woke" here as a placeholder for "people who use identity as a cudgel to explain everything" <bq>It would take some work to determine the causes of this sharp jump in unemployment, but the Trump administration ending pretty much all efforts to protect Black workers against discrimination likely played a role. In any case, the economic situation for Blacks has deteriorated with remarkable speed in the second Trump administration.</bq> Were regulations really the only thing holding back a flood of racism against Black workers? I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis but it would be incredibly quick. The numbers are right there, though. An alternative, racist theory, would be that Black workers just got much, much lazier and entitled than they even were before---which, according to racists, was a lot---and they're simultaneously too stupid to notice that there are no entitlements left to fall back on when your lazy ass stops working to go on the dole. Trump took away the dole. This sort of celebratory and poisonous racist argument falls apart pretty quickly as soon as you give it the side-eye but I bet it's getting a lot of traction nevertheless. <bq>Picking up on a comment by Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his press conference following the Fed meeting; it is likely that we are overstating job growth. In September, BLS announced its preliminary annual benchmark revision, which showed 911,000 fewer jobs as of March 2025 than had originally been reported. These revisions are based on unemployment insurance filings, which are a near census of payroll employment nationwide. The final revision, which will be put in place with the January report, will likely be somewhat smaller, but it nonetheless is likely to still mean the economy was creating substantially fewer jobs than the monthly data had shown. The same factors that led the monthly reports to overstate job growth in 2024 and up to March of 2025 are likely still in place. This means that we are probably still overstating job growth, with the first estimate to come next summer. Powell put the number at 60,000 a month. That figure is likely in the ballpark. That would mean that we have seen close to zero job growth in 2025 and have likely been losing jobs since April.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://stohl.substack.com/p/meta-q3-2025-earnings-call" source="Life, Liquidity & Other Delusions" author="Ryan Stohl">Meta Q3 2025 Earnings Call</a> <bq>Meta’s actual Q3 2025 call transcript is a masterpiece of corporate narrative, led by figures who act like children assigning executive roles to stuffed animals. This transcript is the translation of what Meta executives would say if they were forced to admit they can read a balance sheet without supervision and a juice box. The unsettling truth is that nobody on this call is steering the bus; they are simply documenting the route it decided to take today.</bq> <bq>We will reference both GAAP and non-GAAP metrics. GAAP is the version that counts for the SEC. Non-GAAP is what we use when we want the story to have a happy ending. With that, I’ll hand it to Mark, who will now describe a cost explosion as a frontier opportunity.</bq> <bq>We had another strong quarter, which here means the ad engine kept us afloat while we dragged an AI lab and a hardware side quest as ballast.</bq> <bq>[...] we now hoard GPUs like a doomsday prepper hoards canned beans. “Open source AI” is the phrase we use because it makes regulators temporarily forget their job.</bq> <bq>We believe it’s prudent to spend more on projects that have less certainty. We stopped chasing returns years ago. We chase scale now, because scale is the only metric that matters. The spending has become the strategy.</bq> <bq>About 3.5 billion people use at least one of our apps every day. We still call it community because saying “inescapable virtual prison” makes people uncomfortable.</bq> <bq>On ads, the story is more believable. We unified dozens of smaller models into fewer, larger ones and now describe common sense efficiency gains as scientific breakthroughs. Automated tools push over $60 billion in annual spend. “End-to-end AI-powered” means the system runs the show and the entire point of your now redundant job is to articulate to your boss whatever it just did. The company is three giant transformers: Facebook, Instagram, and the ad engine. We’re turning them into one system that governs what the world sees and what advertisers pay for access, and none of us could stop it if we tried.</bq> <bq>The machine is still very much alive and funds our corporate strategy, which is whatever Mark’s dart lands on.</bq> <bq>Net income looked weak at $2.7 billion until you see the $15.9 billion non-cash tax charge we will never actually pay. Excluding that, net income was $18.6 billion. Tax law shifted, so we marked down future benefits we no longer qualify for.</bq> <bq>We’ve reached the stage where the explanation matters more than the math.</bq> <bq>Mark Shmulik, Bernstein: Threads still looks like a witness protection program for Twitter refugees. Tell me what it wants to be when it grows up. Also, you’re calling this thing an inference cloud. When does that become an adult and turn into a business instead of a line item that scares accountants?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1ptgyct/the_efficient_allocation_of_capital/" author="" source="Reddit">The efficient allocation of capital</a> <img src="{att_link}the_efficient_allocation_of_capital.webp" href="{att_link}the_efficient_allocation_of_capital.webp" align="none" caption="The efficient allocation of capital" scale="75%"> <bq>To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn't exist to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced to go in datacenters that haven't been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist while economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1pq58mq/capitalisms_contradictory_priorities/" author="" source="Reddit">Capitalism's Contradictory Priorities</a> <bq>Under capitalism, people aren't entitled to clean water, but data centers are...</bq> <img src="{att_link}we_must_choose_either_champagne_for_a_few_or_safe_drinking_water_for_all.webp" href="{att_link}we_must_choose_either_champagne_for_a_few_or_safe_drinking_water_for_all.webp" align="none" caption="We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all" scale="75%" author="Thomas Sankara"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1pq61s4/4chan_2013/" author="" source="Reddit">4Chan, 2013</a> <img src="{att_link}anonymous_on_4chan_from_2013.webp" href="{att_link}anonymous_on_4chan_from_2013.webp" align="none" caption="Anonymous on 4Chan from 2013" scale="60%"> <bq>There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening." It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem <a href="https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men">"The Hollow Men"</a> by TS Eliot and you'll understand. You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on to clothing longer and longer. Less [sic] people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world. Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told, "You are stupid, ugly, and weak, but together we are free, prosperous, and safe." That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.</bq> From the poem <a href="https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men">"The Hollow Men"</a> by TS Eliot, <bq>Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar [...] We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death’s twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/20/yfbx-d20.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Doubts mounting over viability of AI boom</a> <bq>Oracle shares tumbled on the news and are now down 46 percent since they reached their peak in early September. But Oracle is not the only company to be caught in the slide. The high-tech companies Broadcom and CoreWeave have experienced significant falls. In the case of Coreweave, this amounts to a 65 percent decline, with its share falling from a high of $186 earlier this year to $64 in a situation which has been described as “getting worse by the day.”</bq> <bq>According to Gil Luria managing director at investment firm DA Davidson, whose remarks were cited: “When we have entities building tens of billions worth of data centres based on borrowed money without real customers, that is when I start worrying.”</bq> <bq>It is estimated that data centre investments have accounted for 80 percent of the increase in US private sector demand for the first half of the year. Some estimates put it even higher at 92 percent. Overall, AI-related capital expenditures make up around 5 percent of total US GDP. If this dried up for any reason or were significantly reduced the US economy would fall rapidly into recession.</bq> <bq>As was noted in a recent comment piece published in the FT: “Current AI valuations assume massive durable moats. Investors have priced in the assumption that only a few companies can build frontier AI models, allowing them to extract monopoly rents. “But if open-source models can match the performance of closed models at a fraction of the cost, that assumption collapses.”</bq> And they will. They arguably already have. There is no moat. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/life-in-the-fast-lane-with-robinhood" author="Eric Salzman" source="Racket News">Life in the Fast Lane With Robinhood Markets</a> <bq>Robinhood is a pusher in plain sight and dopamine is the drug it peddles. It rounds up retail, non-professional traders and matches them up with the best and fastest traders in the world and gets paid handsomely to do it. Tenev continually claims he’s democratizing investing, but his customers are, in effect, profitable lab rats. Their order flow is sold to professional trading firms and studied. They’re more like marks than investors.</bq> <bq>The genius of Kalshi is that it’s able to call its product an “event contract” regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Kalshi is now considered to be a regulated exchange. Not having its product classified as a wager, but instead a regulated financial product, means that it’s legal to sell to 18-year-olds in all 50 states. Online sports gambling sites like DraftKings at least require customers to be 21 years old.</bq> <bq>We have been in a bull market for stocks for three years now. At some point we are going to have a draw down, probably a big one. Unfortunately, these three years have drawn in hundreds of thousands of our kids to the Robinhood pocket-casino. I’d like to think something can be done before the bad event to at least stop Robinhood’s growth, but there’s really nothing that can or will be done.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://stohl.substack.com/p/predictions-i-refuse-to-make-for" author="Ryan Stohl" source="">Predictions I Refuse to Make for 2026</a> <bq>Bubblists and non-bubblists alike are in the asylum now. Labeling it a bubble has as much use as being the first person to notice the doors lock from the outside. You’re still wearing the pajamas. You’re not going anywhere.</bq> <bq>The economy is an elderly man who left the house for milk and ended up on a train to Scranton. There are Silver Alerts. Everybody ignores them.</bq> This guy is funny as hell. <bq>The dot plot is a Ouija board operated by people who believe in efficient markets but also pray before <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Open_Market_Committee" title="Federal Open Market Committee" source="Wikipedia">FOMC</a> meetings.</bq> <bq>I will not predict that public markets will suddenly begin pricing risk honestly. That would require memory.</bq> <bq>What I will predict is simpler. In 2026, something obvious will be ignored. Something boring will matter. Something initially dismissed as irrelevant will make headlines. After it happens, the same people making predictions now will explain why they always saw it coming.</bq> A great end-of-year essay. Go read the whole thing. <bq>[Media] has been dying for two decades and still publishes every morning. At this point it’s operating on spite.</bq> <hr> The other day I learned that the <a href="https://hesta.ch/">HESTA</a> firm in Switzerland was actually founded by two families in the late 1800s/early 1900s. It started off as Heusser-Staub. It is no longer in the textile industry but has now, predictably turned into a large holding company, presumably with billions under management. The web page is not very forthcoming, listing contact information Hesta Services, Hesta Financial Services, and Hesta Invest. At any rate, a couple of families got rich 100 years ago, and that company still manages a tremendous amount of capital today. So, if you're a member of that family, you presumably benefitted simply by having been born into a family whose forebears contributed near the beginning of the industrial revolution. It's kind of interesting how we've been trained to not even notice this kind of thing, that we can’t imagine it any other way. What about a lottery? Madness, you say? That’s what we have now. It's just lotto by birth. I just listened to the excellent interview <a href="https://thisishell.com/episodes/1871" author="Ray Madoff" source="This is Hell!">How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy</a>, which discusses how the already-wealthy ensure that they live outside the tax framework. In this wide-ranging discussion, she notes that wealthy Americans don't pay taxes because they have ensured that the way that they earn money isn't taxed. Instead of creating a wealth tax or bringing back the estate tax, we should instead change the tax code so that their income is taxed. It is counterproductive to enact a "special" tax for rich people. That's a very politically fragile approach. Instead, it's much more robust to say that they should pay taxes on money that they earn. Period. Just like anyone else. That's much harder to attack. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/07/unraveling-the-rot-doug-henwood-on-americas-economic-elites-and-the-fight-for-a-just-future/" author="" source="Scheer Post">Unraveling the Rot: Doug Henwood on America’s Economic Elites and the Fight for a Just Future</a> This was a fantastic interview. Highly, highly recommended. The summary from the show, <bq>[...] discuss the deep decay—“the rot”—within America’s ruling class. Henwood argues today’s political and economic elites are short-sighted, unimaginative, and corrupted by money. While Trump is an obvious symptom, Henwood stresses that the Democratic establishment, Ivy League elite, and corporate leaders are equally hollow and ineffective. Scheer pushes back by noting that the decline didn’t begin with Trump. He points to the Clinton era—especially figures like Lawrence Summers—as central architects of the neoliberal turn that dismantled New Deal regulations, empowered Wall Street, destroyed welfare protections, and fueled decades of inequality. Summers in particular is criticized as cynical, ethically compromised, and deeply connected to financial deregulation and predatory finance. Henwood agrees: Clinton-era Democrats were not passive—they aggressively advanced neoliberal policies pioneered by Reagan and Thatcher, transforming the Democratic Party into a pro-market, pro-finance machine. This shift was mirrored globally among center-left parties. The result: collapsing wages, financial crises, and widespread political alienation. Scheer emphasizes that inequality today—especially tech monopolies and billionaire dominance—directly traces back to Clinton’s dismantling of antitrust enforcement and financial rules.</bq> <hr> Another great podcast is <a href="https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html" author="Doug Henwood" source="Left Business Observer">Behind the News</a>. <dl dt_class="field"> <a href="https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S251211" author="" source="">December 11, 2025</a> This show featured <iq>Anatol Lieven analyz[ing] the Trump national security strategy</iq> and a really knockout interview with <iq>Susannah Glickman on the transformation of the US government into a private equity firm.</iq> See also another interview: <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/11/21/runaway-short-termism-trump-political-economy/" author="Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson" source="The New York Review">Runaway Short-Termism</a> (<iq>How has the Trump administration broken from the past century of American political economy?</iq>) <a href="https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S251218" author="" source="">December 18, 2025</a> This show featured excellent, informative, and eye-opening interviews with <iq>Thea Riofrancos, author of <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324036760/about-the-book">Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism</a>, on the complications of using lithium batteries to green our future and Alyssa Battistoni, author of <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263465/free-gifts?srsltid=AfmBOorlcXbnn9Hiyg9TQVf1Ibc96NregjLlnSn8XyIUhcP02Zei5_BX">Free Gifts</a>, on the weird relationship between capitalism and Nature.</iq> </dl> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/is-it-climate-change/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Is It Climate Change? Cyclone Edition</a> <bq>Is it climate change? you ask, as the weather becomes increasingly deranged. But it's not the averages that get you, it's the range. It's the outliers that get less and less outlandish, until they're inside your house and you're on the roof and, certainly, something has changed. Take Cyclone Ditwah, which recently took a shit where I live. We've had cyclones before, but now we have them more, and more abundantly. Is this climate change? Well, it's certainly different. What else do you want to say?</bq> <bq>Cyclones have happened to Sri Lanka for centuries, but I had to look them up because they don't usually fuck us up like this. The level of property damage is worse than the Indian Ocean tsunami, because it hit us all across the island, and right in the rice-basket, washing the harvest away along with probably a thousand humans. Such a powerful cloud tsunami is possible because there's simply more energy stored (re:dumped) as heat in the oceans. There's more battery for the assault and battery.</bq> <bq>As Koch et al <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261" source="Quaternary Science Reviews" title="Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492 by Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, Simon L. Lewis">said</a>, “The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures.” The great dying extended to our living relatives the whales, the beavers, and mega and micro fauna. CO₂ is not the problem, it's just the point at which it became a problem to White people.</bq> <bq>China had to industrialize or die. China was fighting what Westerners call World War II from 1931, while America dawdled in ten years later for the spoils. China calls its war the War of Resistance Against Japan, but Westerners call it World War II because that's what they were fighting for. World domination. America took Japan, they took the Philippines, they took half of Korea, and they nearly took Vietnam. To Americans, Asians are like Pokémon. They've gotta catch 'em all.</bq> <bq>However, communist production also cooks the earth. Work makes heat, this is just physics, whatever the politics atop. All human economic systems are carnivorous, they consume energy, they consume resources, they kill animals. To our cousins, it would be better if all humans never built homes, never razed the land to make farms, and never ate or enslaved them at all. However, as that dickhead Churchill didn't say, communism is the worst system, except for all others.</bq> <bq>[...] communism's goal is the satisfaction of human needs, which are mammoth, but not mathematically insatiable. As a living example, China was able to reduce its human population with the one child policy and the communist party now is talking about moderate prosperity and ecological redlines, though it's too little to late as America would rather watch the world burn that collaborate with commies on anything.</bq> This isn't a matter of ideology, though, unless you count the ideology of "I've got mine, Jack." Just as a local politician will ruin the lives of tens of thousands for a few thousand bucks for themselves, international politicians are willing to pretend that they're burning whole countries for an ideology, when they're really burning them for base, personal aggrandizement, for lucre. They are all just Clay Davis, pretending to a higher, more noble purpose because it helps them run the scam for longer. Sheeee-it. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/21/hveo-d21.html" author="Jean Shaoul" source="WSWS">Storm Byron compounds catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza</a> <bq>Israel has blocked essential and nutritious foodstuffs, including meat, dairy, and vegetables, while greenlighting ultra-processed foods such as snacks, chocolate, crisps, and soft drinks. While the cost of food has fallen for many items, following two years of hyperinflation, they remain unaffordable for most Gazans who have been without work, income or support from overseas remittances, thanks to Israel’s destruction of the banking infrastructure, cash shortages and the freezing of accounts by international payment platforms. On Friday, the UN warned that levels of hunger and the humanitarian situation remained critical. The threat of famine, first declared in August after Israeli restrictions of food aid into the territory led to mass starvation, with at least 450 people starving to death, had eased somewhat now that humanitarian aid deliveries were trickling into the territory.</bq> This is the same UN that just signed Gaza's death warrant. I guess they're just reporting the logical effects of their decision. <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/25/the-stranger-who-didnt-do-christmas/" author="Peter Bach" source="CounterPunch">The Stranger Who Didn’t Do Christmas</a> <bq>As the firelight danced in the wind, he sat for a while on a cold bench, thinking. Across the world, others sat in darker places—shelters, trenches, far from home—caught in wars that made this quiet corner feel impossibly distant. He knew that. He still didn’t know what any of this meant. But he’d enjoyed every strange, surreal, and unexpectedly human moment. There was something oddly beautiful in it all—so many people trying, each in their own way, to bring light to the dark. He looked up at the stars. They looked brighter now. Or maybe it was just him. Then, almost without thinking, he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out an old matchbook, and lit a tiny candle he found tucked beside it. It flickered once, then held steady. “Merry Christmas,” he said softly. To no one in particular.</bq> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/one-another-other-alone-the-fiction-of-andres-barba.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="TJ Price">One, Another; Other, Alone: the Fiction of Andrés Barba</a> <bq>Despite all of the torment and dark philosophy, there is still beauty to be found here. The author’s virtuosity with language and imagery results in astonishingly lyrical moments. More than once I found myself having to halt in the middle of a narrative, rereading the prior sentence as if tasting it again. In the Translator’s Note provided in the end-pages of Such Small Hands, Lisa Dillman makes the astute observation that Such Small Hands “is, in many ways, about translation … In his finely wrought prose, Barba allows us to see through them, to apprehend the reasons for their behavior. He translates the girls into language we feel on a gut level.”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdadL7kay50" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/SdadL7kay50" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BONG KONG" caption="Weirdmageddon (Official Music Video)"> This isn't exactly my musical style---metal is great but scream/growl metal has yet to grow on me---but I love the commitment in this video. Like, imagine they're spitballing what the video's going to be like and someone says, "Let's dub our song to what looks like an earnest but kinda lame four-piece mariachi-looking band." "OK. Cool. But what if, and bear with me, an alien starts abducting and replacing band members?" "What if it's us? Like, what if we're all dressed up in green alien suits and we beat up the band as the song plays?" "Yeah! And let's also do some breakdance moves in our little green suits." "Suits can be whatever color you want, man. The video's gonna be in black and white." "Yeah, and we'll end with," <bq>It's funny how dumb you are.</bq> And then they went out and filmed it. Like, they put on the suits, and pretended to be the lame band, then they put on alien suits and abducted themselves. And then they cut the video and still stuck to it. That is dedication to a shared vision. That is art. It is the shared experience that matters, not the superficial experience itself. I was able to enjoy this on other levels than just the musical---though their enthusiasm makes the music grow on me, if I'm honest---because they pulled me into it with their own dedication to their vision, because they believe in it enough to put a lot of work and time into it. If this were an AI-generated video, would it be the same? Possibly. Until I learned that it was an AI-generated video. Then, the illusion is gone. All of the meta-levels collapse, disappear in a puff of smoke. Then, there is nothing left of it but a moving image, a sound. But that's not what makes this video fun or great. Without those human things to scaffold it, this is just a bunch of noise and nonsensical imagery. We need a shared experience. We need consciousness. If you can fake it well enough that I don't notice? Fine. I didn't notice but I enjoyed it. I was able to build my palace in the sky without any substance. Good for me! The experience is the experience. But as soon as I notice, the illusion is gone and I'll feel cheated. I might even get mad, for a minute. Am I mad at myself for having been scammed? Am I mad at the creator for playing with my emotions? How will I respond? Will I stop trusting so much that I can no longer let myself enjoy anything for fear of looking stupid? Maybe that's the significance of the coda to the video. <bq>It's funny how dumb you are.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/22/declining-reading-habits-threaten-u-s-democracy-and-social-connection/" author="Kate Petty" source="CounterPunch">Declining Reading Habits Threaten U.S. Democracy and Social Connection</a> <bq>“The most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a democratic foundation for critical, inferential reasoning and reflective capacities,” writes cognitive neuroscientist and reading researcher Maryanne Wolf in her 2018 book Reader, Come Home. “If we in the 21st century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. … And we will fail as a society if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us.”</bq> <bq>Reading is a powerful tool for brain health, supporting cognitive function and emotional well-being throughout life. A 2009 study by the University of Sussex found that just six minutes of reading a day can reduce stress levels by up to 68 percent—more than listening to music or taking a walk—as well as lowering heart rate, reducing muscle tension, and improving sleep.</bq> I don't know about that. What are you people reading? You don't get excited by what you read? <bq>Analysis from the 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reveals a “dwindling middle” in skill distribution, with more Americans clustering at the bottom levels of proficiency than in previous assessments. According to the study, the share of adults performing at the lowest literacy level rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023, and fewer than half of adults now reach the highest proficiency levels.</bq> I wonder how they measure literacy? Ability to comprehend more complex sentence structures? Vocabulary? How does the context relate to what you're reading? As in, if you don't know anything, it doesn't matter how well you mechanically read. Your comprehension is limited by your ignorance. Mechanically, you might be able to "read" quickly, but you're still unable to absorb information, grapple with it, or incorporate it into your worldview. <bq>A growing body of research suggests that reading on screens can undermine comprehension, attention, and deep engagement compared with print. This phenomenon, dubbed the “screen inferiority effect,” appears to stem from three key issues: cognitive overload (digital reading encourages multitasking and scrolling), a lack of spatial landmarks (print’s physical layout helps our brains remember where information is on the page), and the tendency to skim when reading online.</bq> I think that the way people read on a screen---especially a small phone screen, with text surrounded by distracting ads and floating videos---requires a lot more discipline to focus on and comprehend what they're actually reading. I wonder how much of this is the fault of the mechanics of the screen and how much is how text tends to be presented on a screen. Does the same result apply to an E-Book reader? That's a screen. But there are no videos and no ads (at least not on mine). Is there something magical about words on a piece of paper? If so, what is it? Does a sheaf of pages in a print-out have the same effect as a book or is that more like a screen? The study that the author links---<a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1067577/full" author="Xun Wang, Luyao Chen, Xinyue Liu, Cai Wang. Zhenxin Zhang, and Qun Ye" source="Frontiers in Psychology">The screen inferiority depends on test format in reasoning and meta-reasoning tasks</a>---writes that, <bq>Recent researches suggest that poor cognitive performance in screen environments may be primarily due to cognitive defects rather than technological flaws [...and that...] screen inferiority is not always observed.</bq> But what do I know? I only skimmed the study on a screen. 😉 <bq>Reversing America’s reading decline requires more than urging kids to pick up a book—it demands rebuilding a culture that champions literacy at every stage of life. This means addressing funding and staffing crises in school and public libraries, rethinking teaching practices that undervalue deep reading, and supporting parents in fostering early literacy. It also calls on policymakers, educators, and communities to invest in the long-term infrastructure that literacy requires. The stakes are high: without intervention, the next generation risks inheriting a world of perpetual scrolling, fragmented attention, and shallow engagement with ideas. But with coordinated action, we can envision a future where books, both print and digital, reclaim their role as catalysts for curiosity, empathy, and civic understanding. Reading can once again be a shared cultural experience, a personal joy, and a cornerstone of an informed, connected society.</bq> This is lovely and I agree wholeheartedly. The underlying issue is that the current system absolutely does not want anything other than <iq>shallow engagement with ideas.</iq> No-one in power anywhere is at-all interested in an informed and engaged populace. They want to be able to call their societies democracies while ruling on high. A distracted populace---a populace that can be easily distracted with a new bauble each day, each hour, each minute---can be manipulated into allowing, nay demanding that, their rights, privileges, value, and worth be taken from them and given to their much smarter and capable betters. Reading? That just gets in the way of that. Unless they're reading distracting bullshit like 50 shades of whatever. That's OK. But don't read Marx. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/poem-by-jim-culleny-60.html" author="Jim Culleny" source="3QuarksDaily">Poem by Jim Culleny: Two Hands</a> <bq>There they are, two hands poised with pencils, expressing the extraordinary, uncomplicated truth that from cradle to grave we are all drawing shifting renditions of ourselves.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQghy9ZtY4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9HQghy9ZtY4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Critical Drinker" caption="Avatar 3 - Tired And Ass"> I don't trust the Drinker that much, but his review rings absolutely true for the second Avatar movie, so I can imagine that there's a good chance that it applies to this one as well. I can't remember anything about Avatar 2. I can't remember a single character's name. I would fail a quiz on the Avatar films with a 0/10. I've seen both Avatars. I might have seen the first one twice. I honestly can't remember. My notes reveal that, even for the first one, which I saw in <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2665#Avatar">2012</a> and should have been excited about, I wrote, <bq>[...] so many of the characters are two-dimensional [...] The plot is pretty simplistic, the battle scenes are much too long (without adding suspense or additional pathos) but the graphics are stunning, even if some of the stuff is just too colorful and cutesy-looking for my taste.</bq> I saw the second one in <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4644#Avatar" author="" source="">2023</a>---which I only remembered was called "The Way of Water" just now---but I liked the second one more. I read a lot more into the second one, started that review with, <bq>James Cameron hates people and capitalism and plundering and piracy and globalism and hypernationalism and he probably hates the U.S. of A. more than a bit but, most of all, he hates colonialism. He fucking hates colonialism. He hates it so much that he’s made two giant blockbuster movies about it and he’s going to make three more just to drill the point home that there is nothing respectable about colonialism, that there is no justification for it, that it is always morally wrong, that it is always extractive, that it is about taking what you don’t think you have to pay for, about denigrating entire species and races and animals as fodder for your egocentric machine.</bq> The Critical Drinker writes about the new Fire and Ice movie. <bq>Fire and [ice] is abusively long. Especially when you realize the plot could be easily condensed into like half that time. I'm not kidding. At least 50% of this movie is nothing but a wanky tech demo. Just endless landscape and wildlife shots that go on forever and accomplish absolutely nothing. A flamboyant $400 million screen-saver that adds nothing to the story or characters and bogs down what's already a frustrating and repetitive narrative. I kid you not. Here, characters get captured and taken hostage and have to be rescued on like four different occasions.</bq> <bq>Visually it looks fantastic and all that, but it does suffer from the same problem you always get with CGI. There's basically no weight or impact to anything that happens because, you know, it was all just rendered on a computer. Also, the scenes with Spider do kind of make me laugh. One, because the actor's so fucking wooden, you can make a log cabin out of him. And two, because he's the only physically real thing on screen, it's pretty obvious when everything else around him is fake. As for the other characters, they're the usual one-note walking cliches you'd expect from these movies. Generic protagonist is still just a generic good guy trying to hold his family together and do the right thing. Evil fire lady is evil and likes fire because the movie needed another antagonist. I guess the kids are all a bunch of nothing-burgers to the point where I struggle to even remember who was who.</bq> <bq>Here's a fun little drinking game you can play at home, kids. Have a careful look at the human characters in Avatar. the brutal soldiers, the cruel whale hunters, the evil corporate types, all the people you're supposed to hate, and take a shot every time you spot a non-white actor on screen, even in the backgrounds. I can pretty much guarantee you'll be stone cold sober by the end of the movie. Why? Because there's none to be found here. And it's strange because normally you can't move for the on-screen diversity in Disney movies, which are determined to reflect the world we live in today. I wonder why they dropped the ball so suddenly with this particular film. I wonder why they chose to have this violent, destructive, expansionist, capitalist, militaristic dictatorship represented almost entirely by one ethnic group. Well, I couldn't possibly solve this mystery. Can you?</bq> I dunno. My review of the first one lined up with this one. My review of the second one doesn't. Maybe I need to waste three hours of my life and see what's up with the third one. <hr> I was listening to some Christmas music last night, while solving the <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=5312">Christmas jigsaw puzzle</a>. I could use Shazam to find most of them but a couple of them didn't work. As usual, they two that didn't work were jazz songs produced by wonderful local, Swiss bands, or by bands that played in Switzerland. The tracks exist. I heard them, and Radio Swiss Jazz lists them, <ul><a href="https://www.radioswissjazz.ch/en/music-database/title/4276fb4516faa73d6e95925dfd1f00e5934c" author="Judy Emeline & Zürich All Stars">Amazing Grace</a> is a 24-year-old recording from a concert in little old Fehraltorf, a village of about 6500 people that's about 9km from here. <a href="https://www.radioswissjazz.ch/en/music-database/title/175953e7693e2920d6f098ca749f3f0e2a7c1" author="Wolverines Jazz Band" source="">Just A Closer Walk With Thee</a> was recorded in Thun, which is in the Berner Oberland.</ul> This is what it means when I plead with people that the world is not just what Google (and now their AI companions) say it is. There is a wealth of culture our corporate overlords don’t know about. They encourage us to forget this rich diversity. We heed them at our own peril. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2025/12/the-tune-of-things-christian-wiman-consciousness-god/" source="Harper's Magazine" author="Christian Wiman">The Tune of Things</a> <bq>We’ve lived so long within a paradigm of subject (us) and object (everything else in the universe) that even people whose intuitions and direct experiences strongly counter this paradigm still grind away their lives within it. I’ve heard a well-known poet say he didn’t believe in the soul, which seems akin to an astrobiologist saying she doesn’t believe in space.</bq> <bq>It’s evolution all the way down, slicing up species all driven by the “selfish gene,” and even the care you lavish on your grandmother with dementia is somehow a survival instinct. Never mind that some top scientists believe that life is so tangled, organisms so interwoven, that, as the biologist Daniel Drell says, “we can no longer comfortably say what is a species anymore.” And the flatworm with its new noggin immediately solving the maze its old one worked so diligently to master? Or trees that learn to distinguish between threats, direct nutrients to an afflicted brother, and remember their own seedlings? Shut up and compute!</bq> <bq>[...] even people committed to this subject/object distinction, people confident that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, mostly agree on one thing: we are hurtling toward our own destruction. It’s our brains that are the disease. It’s our minds that could save us.</bq> <bq>Levitating saints, though, or housekeepers shedding pounds semantically, at least raise the possibility that we might live in a circumscribed version of reality, and that it’s circumscribed because we insist on it.</bq> <bq>Most people are acquainted with the double-slit experiment,</bq> Omg haha no. Not even close to most. You're lucky that some of us have an inkling of what you're even talking about. And of those who have heard of the thing, there are even fewer who understand the implications for our understanding of reality. <bq>This is essentially the argument of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, a candidate for the best book I’ve ever read. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and polymath who has focused for decades on the asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain and what that means for how we perceive ourselves and the world.</bq> <bq>I once overheard an AI developer enthuse that AI will soon compose music a hundred times better than Bach. It can be existentially bracing to come across something so truly and irreducibly stupid, akin to the slam-down dark of a total eclipse. It takes a good deal of intelligence to make a real work of art, but it’s a very specific form of intelligence that not even the artist understands, and artists are rarely the “smartest” people among us.</bq> <bq>I remember, five years ago, walking through the streets of Amsterdam when I felt someone from my past move through me. I don’t mean I thought of her. I mean that for a moment she inhabited me, and then she vanished into a “thought.” She and her husband were very important to me when I was young, but we hadn’t seen each other in years. I resolved to write when I got home but before I could do so discovered she’d died—and very near the moment I had felt her. Quantum entanglement? A fluctuation in a quantum field? Two consciousnesses linked by love as one goes to God? Coincidence? Damned if I know, but it’s only the last answer that seems preposterous to me.</bq> <bq>I begin from the feeling . . . that we’re all lost, we’re all lonely, we all find it difficult to believe in anything, to commit to anything, to live in a way that feels truly alive. In short, we inhabit a world of woe. Doubt tears away at us like rats gnawing away under the floorboards in the house of being. It is like an existential eczema that we scratch at under our clothes . . . and leads us ultimately to the question of whether to be or not to be.</bq> I have few doubts. I rarely wonder whether I'm doing the right thing, whether I shouldn't be doing something else. Why would I? I am doing the thing I'm doing. I never hold grudges. I rarely regret. I feel bad for people who do. <bq>"It is an elegant paradox,” writes Kay Ryan, “that close application to the physical somehow does release the mind from the physical.”<bq>Imagine a sea of ultramarine suspending a million jellyfish as soft as moons. Imagine the interlocking uninsistent tunes of drifting things. This is the deep machine that powers the lamps of dreams and accounts for their bluish tint. How can something so grand and serene vanish again and again without a hint?</bq>“Form is prior to matter” could be an epigraph to this poem by Ryan.</bq> <bq>Think of that little nimbused girl ankle-deep in a stream, picking up rocks, seeing sunlight filter through the leaves. Now think of her the next day, concentrating hard on her last tree, trying to give form to the attention she was giving and getting the day before. Where is the conscious mind and where is the unconscious mind in each of these scenes? “Betweenness” is maybe the best one can do.</bq> I have moments like this. At least a month and a half later, I still think of some cows I saw in a field, throwing giant shadows from a late sunset outside of Mosnang. I was riding home, still 30km away, it was getting cold and late. I was flying down a 5% of grade at 45kph. I didn't have much time or energy to spare. I didn't stop to take a photograph, but I took a picture with my mind. I still see those wonderfully elongated shadows from those peaceful, peaceful ruminants, warming only one side of themselves in the orange, setting sun, as it peeked through a fortuitous gap in the mountains, lighting up the still-green grass, though the air portended the coming season. <bq>“If poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality,” writes Samuel Matlack, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude . . . poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality. Far from making poetic speech a mere means of translating a scientific message, talking about the constitution of the physical world must be poetic in some way.</bq> <bq>[...] a metaphor’s chief power in this endlessly dissolving and resolving universe is that, at the deepest level, it’s literal. But also, alas, evanescent. The half-created, half-perceived cohesion does vanish, and “without a hint” of its having been. The revelations artists are shown in their work often mean nothing to their lives. No doubt this is the case for many philosophers and physicists as well. McGilchrist’s universal connectedness might sound like a kumbaya cohesion of our minds with reality, until you stop to ponder just how many terrifying things there are in reality, how many dangerous relations. In the time it took you to relish the “interlocking uninsistent / tunes of drifting things,” there occurred enough suffering in the natural world to shock God right out of any thinking brain.</bq> <bq>Freedom to be in the process of being without irritably swimming against (transhumanism, the mania to prevent aging) or seeking to dam (ceding imagination to AI or to a petrified politics or religion) the current.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/socialism-after-ai/" source="The Ideas Letter" author="Evgeny Morozov">Socialism After AI</a> <bq>[...] if socialism is to be more than capitalism with nicer dashboards—if it really is a project of collectively remaking material life, not just of redistributing its outputs—it has to answer a harder question: Can it offer a better way of living with this technology than capitalism does? Can it deliver a distinct form of life worth wanting rather than just a fairer share of what capital has already made?</bq> <bq>A large language model (LLM) trained on cheaply scraped text, tuned for fluent plausibility, and monetized through metered access is not simply statistics at scale. It is the material expression of a particular world: venture capital timelines, advertising markets, data extraction, intellectual‑property arbitrage. The conversational interface that makes the model feel like an interlocutor rather than a library was a product decision designed to encourage specific forms of use and attachment. The safety layers encode a particular sense of what is sayable, polite, or risky. A system like that does not simply respond to existing social relations; it crystallizes them and feeds them back presenting them as common sense. Even the prevailing definition of AI—as closed, general‑purpose models in distant data centers, accessed through chat—condenses a series of capitalist choices about scale, ownership, opacity, and user dependence.</bq> <bq>[...] when the technology in question reshapes the very capacities, self-concepts, and desires of those who use it, there is no stable vantage point from which to govern. We are asking, “By what criteria should we shape this thing?” even as the thing itself is shaping the beings who must answer this question. This is not a problem that better procedures can fix. It is a structural condition that any socialism serious about technology will have to inhabit rather than resolve.</bq> I can rarely be sure that Morozov is arguing in good faith. <bq>With AI, such separations are especially hard to defend. This technology is simultaneously a tool, a medium, a cultural form, an epistemic instrument, and a site of value formation—much as Raymond Williams once described television, but with far less stability. You cannot slot it into a single sphere and manage it from the outside.</bq> Bro, do you need a moment alone with your AI friend? Maybe this is my problem with his argument: he seems to be expecting us not to notice that he's taken the maximalist view of AI as axiomatic. If it's mostly a scam, do we even have to consider his hypothetical? Or is his analysis interesting for when something like the fantasy currently sold to us as AI actually does appear? But the current batch of technology is not leading to what he's describing. The only reason he thinks it might is that he doesn't understand the technology. It's like people saying we have solar panels now, so we should plan for fusion. <bq>[...] a socialism worthy of AI would institutionalize the capacity to try such arrangements, inhabit them, and modify or abandon them—and at scale, with real resources. This kind of socialism would treat AI as plastic enough to accommodate uses, values, and social forms that emerge only as it is deployed. It would see AI less as an object to govern (or govern with) and more as a field of collective discovery and self-transformation.</bq> <bq>People working with particular tools develop new skills and sensitivities, learning that some uses feel like care and others like surveillance, that some interfaces invite pedagogy and others encourage cheating—all while reconsidering what care, surveillance, pedagogy, and cheating actually mean. Those judgments cannot be produced in advance by abstract deliberation; they emerge in practice.</bq> Agreed. The profit motive of the richest decides everything right now. <bq>[...] trajectories that capitalist development has foreclosed. What might language models become if they were not designed around monetization imperatives and corporate risk management? What forms of creativity, memory, or collaboration might they enable if training data were curated by communities rather than scraped at scale and if interfaces invited inquiry rather than attachment? We cannot know in advance.</bq> <bq>Call this socialist baroque: collectively governed AI systems embedded in workplaces, schools, clinics, and cooperatives that enable the same worldmaking the entrepreneur claims for capital but without the accumulation imperative that distorts and forecloses the paths not taken.</bq> <bq>Whether such a capacity‑expanding socialism—aimed at the maximization of creative forces, not just productive ones—is possible remains an open question. What matters here is that frameworks like Benanav’s barely let us pose it. They have detailed rules for balancing criteria once we have them, but they say much less about where those criteria come from, how they change, and how technology itself participates in their emergence.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy" source="Jacobin" author="Vivek Chibber">Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism</a> <bq>But rent extraction posed a problem. The nobility, like today’s landlords, could say, “Hey, I’m jacking up your rent a hundred bucks. Pay it or I’m going to evict you.” But whereas the landlord nowadays can rely on the fact that whoever’s renting from them is going to try to raise money to pay these higher and higher rents, the feudal landlords were not legally allowed to kick peasants off the land as long as the peasants were willing to pay what’s called a customary rent. So they couldn’t jack up the rents.</bq> Wait. Is he arguing that capitalism is worse for slobs than feudalism? Not being able to jack up rents on people who can't pay them sounds positively enlightened compared to today. Or does he think it's better because they have the opportunity to earn more? <bq>The rational thing to do with your surplus, if you were a lord, was not to invest it in means of production, but in means of warfare and coercion.</bq> Which is what is happening now in the west, no? I wonder whether Chibber would argue that the west is sliding back into feudalism because they're investing in weapons and coercive tactics rather than in means of production. <bq>if you just look at growth rates in Eurasia — which is the European continent, but also Asia, China, and India [...]</bq> He could not have described Asia more Eurocentrically if he'd tried. <bq>What happened was that the economic structure was transformed through willful action in such a way that peasants in the villages had no choice but to throw themselves onto the market to survive, either as wage laborers or as farmers paying competitive rents.</bq> Again, the formulation is vaguely negative but I can't tell whether he disapproves. <bq>[...] the point that I think was fundamental to Marx’s epoch-making insight, which is that economic activity is always constrained and dictated by economic structure.</bq> <bq>[...] markets are not a sign of capitalism because we know that markets have been in existence for thousands of years. So, you can call anything you want capitalism — that’s up to you. But if you want to attach the word “capitalism” to that which explains the historically unprecedented rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in Northwestern Europe and then later across the world — if you want to say that is what capitalism is, whatever explains that — then it can’t just be the presence of markets. It is when markets take over all of production. Between 3000 BC to 1500 AD, markets existed, but they were on the fringes of society — not geographically, but economically.</bq> <bq>Urban centers were directly controlled by the feudal nobility. There was no urban competition in manufacturers. People weren’t trying to minimize costs and drive costs down. Prices were completely administratively controlled by the guilds of the time, which were associations of artisans and merchants, but also by the feudal aristocrats. Cities were completely controlled and dominated by landlords, and the merchants were completely dependent on the landlords to give them access to markets.</bq> <bq>Once you take the land away from people and you throw them out on the market, they don’t need to read Calvin or Martin Luther to understand what to do. They’re going to go out looking for jobs. And once they go out looking for jobs, and the people who they’re working for find that they need to sell their products to survive on the market, they’re going to do what they need to survive on the market, which involves cost-cutting and efficiency-enhancing activities.</bq> <bq>The argument that Western capitalism itself came out of plunder, that’s quite wrong. But the motivation for it was correct. It is the case that colonialism was an abomination.</bq> Note the past tense. He thinks colonialism is over. Plunder is what keeps it going now. He calls it "seeking efficiency". I haven't seen it as seeking efficiency in decades. The majority of profits now come from cheating, avoiding regulations, monopolies, economic sanctions, etc.---all forms of plunder that have been sanitized in modern parlance. <bq>[...] the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South.</bq> At least partially, yes. Debt service and climate change. He talks so much but not about either of those those, which you would think would be salient to the argument about whether the northern "white" world plunders the southern "dark" world. <bq>You see this again and again and again now, this notion that colonialism and colonial plunder were an expression of what’s called “global white supremacy.” This idea that the plunder of the colonial world is what enriched the West is easy to translate into racial terms. That it is the lighter, whiter nations which were able to make this traversal into capitalism by virtue of plundering the darker nations.</bq> This is so paternalistic. It may feel like you're being plundered but professor Chibber is here to explain that capitalism would survive even if it weren't plundering. Children: you must use your terminology correctly. Of course it's a class argument. It's always about class. But who gets to be in the extracting class is very much based on racism and misogyny. The rent-seeking class is happy to plunder white men, of course, but it takes more work to establish epithets for them, like white trash. Coolie, kike, cunt, and coon are already there, ready to be leveraged. I feel like he believes these have less power than they still very much do. <bq>[...] this trope, this “global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.</bq> Ok. Don't believe your lying eyes I guess. I don't think this is a very careful way of discussing this. I know he seems to have been annoyed by people who avoid discussing class in favor of discussing race all the time but it's also silly to ignore what a powerful weapon race is in the class war. It's the main weapon, it seems. It works so well. <bq>[...] this notion of global white supremacy is really pernicious. At best, what you can say is that white supremacy was the kind of rationalizing ideology of colonialism. There’s no doubt about that. Colonialism justified itself by all kinds of racist notions.</bq> How are you speaking in the past tense? Is colonialism over? Did I miss something? There's no more boots on the ground---haha, just kidding, yes there are---but now the main workhouse is economic colonialism. All of those international mechanisms---World Bank, IMF, WEF, SWIFT, etc.---serve to strangle colonies into giving up their wealth and value for little to nothing in a way that doesn't differ significantly from colonialism for the colonized. <bq>[...] until about the recent past, the only people who said this basically were white supremacists because they saw the world as one of warring racial tribes. And this is where parts of the Left have come to now with very heavy doses of race reductionism.</bq> Maybe for parts of what he calls the left, I guess, but he makes it seem like mentioning race as a motivating factor makes you a racist yourself? <bq>So why would you bring this argument back? I think it has to do with this virtue signaling and race reductionism. And my guess is that it’s going to dissipate as the Left continues to mature and they don’t see this as the respectable face of radicalism.</bq> Ah. That's what I thought. Wokeness broke him like any other grandpa and now he thinks everyone else is stupid and immature. His style of argumentation seems to have been honed by fighting idiots and strawmen online. <bq>if capitalism is to spread into other parts of the world, that same thing has to happen everywhere else as well. And since it doesn’t all happen all at once, over time, as capitalism spreads, it continues to dispossess the peasantry and bring them into wage labor and into the cities.</bq> Once again, I can't tell, again whether he approves of this situation. I don't think he does but it's not coming across very well. <bq>You can think of the welfare state as something where people are given access to basic necessities as a matter of right, which is what they had in feudalism. They had access to basic necessities because they had rights to the land. And just like that was a barrier to capitalism back then, the welfare state is seen by capitalists as a barrier to their growing expansion and profitability today. And that’s why capitalists oppose what’s called “decommodification” — this is when goods that have been bought and sold in the market are taken off the market by giving them to people as rights.</bq> This is one of the first useful things he's said, and the interview is nearly over. <bq>[...] the principle behind capitalists’ opposition to non-commodified goods today is more or less the same as it was when capitalism was brought into being four hundred years ago.</bq> <bq>[...] what capitalism and capitalists strive for constantly is the maintenance of the widest expansion of commodification as is possible. And any movement to restrict the scope of commodities is going to be resisted by capital. That’s going to show up in all kinds of political and social conflicts today.</bq> Fock dood. Finally. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQy0ZCx3UCY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/YQy0ZCx3UCY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="vpro documentary" caption="Cybertopia - Dreams of Silicon Valley - Docu - 2015"> Not a single person in this video is self-aware. They are completely unaware of how ironically terrible everything that they say is. Even the producers of the video thought that this was a good thing, a world of rich people deciding for everyone else how the world was going to look. But they're all morons, shallow---so shallow!---and so convinced that they're right, that there's nothing more to discuss, that they've missing nothing. They are incurious because they've got it all figured out. They're making money, after all! How else would you know you're right if not by how rich you've gotten? That's how you find the smartest, most valuable, most industrious people: sort them all by the amount of money they have, in descending order, then take the top 10. Tada. Those are the people who should be running things. This is so easy. But, it's not surprising that you didn't figure it out. Because you're not rich. If you were rich, then you'd already have known this. And, if you'd already known it, then you'd be rich. Q.E.D. It's 45 minutes long. They speak very, very slowly, so you can boost it to 1.5x without losing any fidelity. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn9BvNAUvcU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Yn9BvNAUvcU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lutz Dammbeck" date="2003" caption="The Net - the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet"> Originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English. In a way, this people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones in Cybertopia (above). They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The same guy who cited the following, <bq>We create tools. And then, we mold ourselves to the use of them.</bq> Also refused to even discuss anything that the Unabomber had written because his manifesto was trash and he was a trash person and his ideas were trash and anyone who murders anyone doesn't have anything worthwhile to say. Q.E.D. Stewart Brand is a much stronger thinker, capable of separating the medium (Kascinsky) from the message (what are we doing with technology? What is it doing with us? Are we heading in a useful direction?) Dammbeck received a letter from Ted: <bq>Florence, Colorado, 28 Februar. Sehr geehrter Herr Dammbeck Vielen dank für Ihren brief und Ihre fragen, die ich versuchen werde zu beantworten. Ich nutze diese Gelegenheit, um meine Kenntnisse der deutschen Sprache zu verbessern. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler. Vor 30 Jahren doch Mathematiker. Aber ich habe den größten teil von dem was ich über die Mathematik wusste vergessen. Ich meine, dass Utopien wahnsinnig und gefährlich sind, besonders die von einer technologischen gesellschaft. Die Technologie ist eine ganz eigenwillige und äußerst gefährliche macht, die uns dahin führt wohin sie uns führen muss. Das wird weder durch den Zufall noch die Willkür arroganter Bürokraten, Politiker, oder Wissenschaftler bestimmt, sondern das technologische System muss einfach menschliches verhalten seinen eigenen Erfordernissen anpassen. Das ist notwendig damit es funktionieren und sich immer weiter ausdehnen kann. Sie fragen mich auch einiges zum Manifesto. Alle veröffentlichten Versionen des Manifestos sind unrichtig, denn sie enthalten schwerwiegende Fehler. Wenn sie eine richtige version des Manifestos bekommen wollen, kann ich sie Ihnen liefern.</bq> There follows a long section on Norbert Wiener and the origin of cybernetics, arguably the disease that infects so many otherwise useful minds. The next interview is with Larry Roberts, the guy who founded Arpanet, whose work was deeply linked to the U.S. military buildup in the Cold War. He also has nothing to discuss about Kascinsky's ideas. <bq>Roberts: He's crazy. We have people like that in our society. Dammbeck: But he was a mathematician. He studied in Harvard. Roberts: Hitler was a painter. He studied in Vienna. Dammbeck: Have you read the manifesto? Roberts: [jokes] You mean, Mein Kampf? [seriously] No, I didn't read it. I didn't read Mein Kampf either. Roberts: What am I afraid of? I'm afraid of the Al Qaeda. I'm afraid of cancer. But I don't know enough. Even if we knew how to cure cancer, if we had more knowledge, then we wouldn't be afraid of it. Dammbeck: How do you know that cancer is an illness? Krankheit? It's an illness of modern society. It's an illness of civilization. Roberts: Yeah, but someday, I believe will understand how to cure cancer. Or prohibit cancer. I believe that will happen long before we have an electronic battlefield or a machine that we can't control. And, when we know how to cure or prohibit cancer, we will no longer be afraid of it. It's a question of knowledge, of eliminating ignorance. Ignorance is a state of no knowledge. Ig-no-rance. It's not stupidity. That's something else. Ignorance. It causes fear.</bq> This is a wonderful segment that illustrates how un-self-aware most of these intelligent---and powerful---people are. He is incapable of learning anymore. He is incurious. He doesn't even listen to Dammbeck's question. He just repeats something I'm sure his wife (who lurks in the background) has heard him say a million times. Knowledge is the savior. Sure, buddy. And let's look at your prediction, 22 years later. Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have world-girdling data centers to write smutty haikus? Yes. Do we have electronic battlefields. Yes. Do we have machines that we can't control? Well, someone controls them, but it's not us. But I wouldn't expect even the 2003 version of Roberts to have been able to grasp the nuance of that argument, or to be at-all willing to engage with it. He already knew everything then. <bq>Was habe ich bisher? Ich habe einen ehemaligen Mathematiker über dessen Systemkritik keiner meiner Interviewpartner reden will und ich habe Ingenieure und Künstler die von Technologie besessen sind. All das gehört offensichtlich zu einem System dessen Konturen ich erst er erahne. Anscheinend ein geniales Feedbacksystem [Rückkupplungssystem], dass jeden angriff und jede Störung umgehend als Energiezufuhr für seine weitere Perfektionierung nutzt. Wer braucht so etwas? Wer denkt sich so etwas aus?</bq> From Kascsinski: <bq>Als ich ihnen schrieb, dass der begriff einer Utopie wahnsinnig und gefährlich ist, meinte ich nicht, dass alle Utopien wahnsinnig gefährlich sind, sondern, vor allem, die Utopie, dass man eine Gesellschaft nach einem bestimmten idealen muster erschaffen. Könnte Sie selbst haben zweifellos Ihre eigene Vorstellung von einer Utopie. Ein anderer mensch hat eine andere Vorstellung, die sehr verschieden von der irrigen sein kann. Würde es ihnen gefallen, dass er Ihnen seine Utopie aufzwingt? Haben sie das recht ihm ihre Utopie aufzuzwingen?</bq> History segment about Heinz von Förster, who worked at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. He interviews Heinz, who is very, very old. Heinz speaks perfect German. They watch a video of him, another recent interview, where Heinz talks about how he's learned the Tractatus Philosophicus by Wittgenstein by heart, as a child, and he'd made himself unausstehlich with citations from it during family discussions. Heinz is introspective and much more open than his American counterparts. <bq>Ich habe erkannt, im laufe meines Lebens, [dass] je mehr ich mich mit Physik beschäftigen, dass ich eigentlich ein meta-Physiker bin.</bq> It gets much better from there. <bq>von Förster: [...] weil die Frage nicht beantwortbar ist. So, kommt es nur darauf an wie interessant ist die Geschichte die der erfindet, wie der entstanden ist. Dammbeck: Da ist man natürlich ganz nah bei der Kunst. Wenn also, dass es darum geht eine gute Geschichte zu erzählen, also eine poetische Geschichten. von Förster: Ja genau. Das ist die Sache. Es besteht ein Zweikampf oder Dreikampf oder einen Zehnkampf zwischen den verschiedenen Poeten.</bq> They discuss how out worldwide system of interacting machines are based on what he called Lückenhafte Theorien, where placeholders serve to cover up missing knowledge. <bq>Dammbeck: Aber es gibt doch irgendwo grenzen? von Förster: Eben nicht. Das ist das schöne. Da kann man immer wieder weiter. Dammbeck: In der Logik? von Förster: Genau. Dammbeck: Aber in der Realität? von Förster: Wo ist die Realität? Wo haben Sie die?</bq> Much later, he interviews one of Kascinsky's victims, who lost an eye to a mail bomb. <bq>Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know him, is that he is a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering. And his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being.</bq> That's dumb. Yeah, yeah, he lost an eye. Sure. Kascinsky took away an eye. But the worse thing he did to that poor man is that he made him dumb. Ignorant. Information is information, it doesn't matter from whom it comes. I'm interested in any opinion, any formulation, if only to learn how I would counter it. People find value in what Kascinski said. Just saying "DON'T" is stupid. It's not going to lead to a world where people can read Kascinski, whose ideas are interesting---and which have gained more and more relevance to our dystopian reality---but whose acts were evil, without worshiping him. That's the problem. Everyone's dumb. Everyone's a fool. The people who can't read him because they hate him, and the people who can't understand what he writes without revering him. It's all stupid. <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mad-2" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Mad</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_mad-2.webp" href="{att_link}smbc_mad-2.webp" align="none" caption="Most evil scientists are not mad, just disappointed." scale="100%"> <bq>You're not actually crazy, though? How else would you build a death ray. I think you're just unhappy with how the world is and you're acting out.</bq> Are we watching the same documentaries, Zach? <hr> If we're going to be honest, we should admit that the reason that people using LLM-based tools have had such an easy time emulating art and music is that so many other people paved the way, over the years, by debasing music and art on their very own, without the benefit of LLM-based tools. They copied popular work, they rode on coattails, they churned out familiar trash, all to make money. The reason that LLM-based tools are such a big lever today is that we have already cheapened art with the profit motive to the point of being indistinguishable from advertising. Capitalism ruins everything. Instead of a sublime experience, you get just enough of a dopamine pressure to keep the terrors at bay, but not enough to satisfy. That brings us to the modern-day firehose of quasi-art and quasi-music that fails to thrill but is enough to get you through another dead-eyed, slack-jawed day. We have done this to ourselves by not being vigilant, by being satisfied with imitations of art. As you drag through one day of vague dissatisfaction after another, you wonder where the thrills of youthful exuberance went. Why doesn't music move you as it once had? Have you lost the capacity to enjoy the world? Have you changed mentally? Philosophically? Hormonally? Were you more easily amused earlier? Or are you too jaded now? Or has the world lost its capacity to entertain? Has the world's ability to entertain and amuse, like everything else, been planed down to the barely acceptable minimum to prevent a revolution against it? This is where we live: in the liminal space that is the perfect balance of maximal profitability and minimal acceptability. But hey, at least you're not a child soldier, or a slave, or an amputee. Count your lucky stars you've only got to complain about unsatisfying art. I suppose it could be worse. But what's life without art? What are we even fighting for, if not for the right to enjoy art? <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-mainstream-left-will-never.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">The Mainstream Left Will Never Represent the Lumpenproletariat</a> <bq>I grew up with white people; kids who repeatedly reminded me that I would never be one of them and adults who seemed convinced that I was dangerous because from a very young age there was something distinctly 'other' about me. This treatment continues to this day and it's exhausting, feeling like you are constantly under the surveillance of hateful eyes, holding your breath every time you pass a police car, and then having straight white people offer you help just to turn on you when your otherness becomes inconvenient to their hobby of playing savior with tranny lunatics like me. </bq> <bq>I've known Black people from Dixie who have literally moved back to the South because at least there the racists don't pretend to be your friend which is the same reason why I avoid organizing in the suburbs. So many of us are just sick and tired of the passive-aggressive culture of the mainstream left. That's because all of us are members of the lumpenproletariat and the leaders of the mainstream left in this country are not.</bq> <bq>Marx and Engels shit on all of us for lacking "class consciousness" but in reality, we are just poor people they can't unionize and govern beneath their leadership.</bq> <bq>The left did finally hear the cry of the lumpenproletariat, but it would take Queer thinkers like Michelle Foucault and thinkers of color like Frantz Fanon to articulate our pain in a language straight white people could understand. The latter, a psychiatrist by trade, would largely reinvent the word lumpenproletariat with his landmark manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon studied a number of asylums and discovered mental distress to largely be a symptom of capitalist and post-colonialist exploitation. Doctor Fanon also recognized that those suffering under such conditions were a lot less likely to suffer from colonial class indoctrination and were thus a lot more willing to revolt against the status quo.</bq> <bq>Then the universities took over, and the big labor unions marched back in with the Democrats on speed dial along with a host of moneyed non-profits organized from the top down like corporations. All of these institutions, all of them, are overwhelmingly led by elderly straight white men and even their diversity programs are largely devices of gatekeeping and tokenization that only afford the most assimilated minorities, aka the least lumpen minorities, access to positions of power. And thus, I find myself getting gaslit and disenfranchised by cis-passing white transwomen who run DEI programs at fucking Raytheon (sadly, a true story.)</bq> <bq>The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns. We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people. Paler Queer folk and neurodivergent trailer trash also need to abandon what's left of our white privilege and throw in our lot with our true comrades, with street brothers and reservation dog soldiers, in the name of lumpen power. The poor need to become a storm over the white pride parade of the two-party oligarchy. The lumpenproletariat must come together again like a rainbow fist and smash the pigfucker state once and for all.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/the-non-places-of-social-media" author="Adam Aleksic" source="The Etymology Nerd">the non-places of social media</a> <bq>The fast food restaurant, for example, used to be a destination. People were once excited to go to McDonald’s. It had giant swooping arches, bright colors, and a ball pit. Now it is a gray rectangle with screens at the front to place your order. I wouldn’t ever go to McDonald’s to meet a friend, and I don’t feel any sense of community or history there. It is a non-place meant for you to get in and out as quickly as possible.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SLAfAaw5XY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0SLAfAaw5XY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Professor Asma's Guide To Unusual Knowledge" caption="Open-Relationships Anyone? Polyamorous Utopia in Upstate New York"> Professor Asma provides more context with the relation to Plato's philosophy, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community" author="" source="Wikipedia">Oneida Community</a> has a wealth of detail as well. You can still <a href="https://www.oneida.com/">buy</a> the silverware from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Limited" author="" source="Wikipedia">Oneida Limited</a> (although the web site is now called Lenox). What was it about upstate NY that inspired so many cults like this? Joseph Smith started off in Palmyra and he claims to have found the golden plates in Manchester. That's not really that far west from Oneida. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFgIRpGnUJA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dFgIRpGnUJA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chris Hedges" caption="How the 'Epstein Class' Fails to the Top | The Chris Hedges Report (w/ Anand Giridharadas)"> <bq>Anand: "Look, I don't fault people for saying and doing what they need to do to feed their families, but there's gotta be a limit " Chris: [forced to utter a chuckle so heartfelt that I laughed right along with him]</bq> The segment starting around 40:00 was fantastic. It's about how we don't appreciate the heroic amount of work required to keep civilization going---work done by states, despite corporations---so that many of us don't have to think about survival at all, and can focus on thriving. We are now encouraged to dismantle these things because those who have benefitted greatly -- and continue to benefit -- are now telling the story that too many "moochers" are benefitting from these things, when that was the whole point. <bq>A big part of what I try to do in Winners Take All is remind people of how extraordinary public problem-solving is. And, the way public problem-solving works, when the government solves some big social problem, it goes into a bucket of things we are never grateful for ever again. We never think about again. When is the last time in the United States of America, except for some occasional story in the news, when is the last time you thought about the safety of food when you go out to eat, right? My family's from India. Even if you're a pretty prosperous person in India, thinking about the safety of food is a daily you you you have to do this all the time. Not washing your vegetables properly in India, it's a matter of life and death. Right? Knowing which restaurants you can eat at, which you can't, which use filtered water, which do boiled and filtered water, which use Himalaya, bottled water, even just for cooking. You have to know these things to like survive. It's just a huge amount of mental energy just to be safe living in India. I lived in India for six years. These calculations are like big part of life. We used to be like that too in a sense, right? Every every place used to be like that at a certain point in history. At a certain point, we invented food safety. We got an FDA. [...] Every single piece of meat started being inspected by the federal government. So on and so forth. Restaurants, you got the department of health going up to restaurants, checking all these things. You don't look at the ratings online because you just trust. And it's true. You are right to trust that there's some giant regime that you don't even understand that is taking this thing that used to be one of the greatest challenges of human existence, which is dying because of the something in food, right? It brought down like a huge fraction of us who ever lived. This giant thing that is still in many parts of the world something you have to think about all the time to survive. We have eliminated that in the United States and many other prosperous countries. We've eliminated that. I'm giving you one example of one thing that government does that you don't think about very often that is a game-changer. Now, do what I just did for Social Security. What was it like to be old before? We know from the 1930s the level of malnutrition and starvation among especially the elderly was very very high. What was it like to be without electricity? [...] As soon as government solves a problem, [...] it gets no credit anymore. And so you got these Silicon Valley guys, who who have invented some app for, you know, getting a latte a little bit faster, and they feel so triumphant about their capacities as problem-solvers. And you got your Social Security administration over here that's doing like Nobel Peace Prize-level work every year, right? And it gets no credit. And this basic problem is at the heart of so much what we're talking about. We don't even realize what government does. Business people don't realize the amount of their commerce that is enabled by the kind of court system that you and I pay to maintain. Right? And so this ignorance about and disregard for public endeavor, for what government does, for the solution of common problems through common institutions, this ignorance is a big part of the story of what went wrong. And I think we have to help revive in people the the ideas and the stories of what government actually does.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/21/bzhq-d21.html" author="David North" source="WSWS">Science vs. suspicion and fear: An Open Letter to a critic of Socialism AI</a> <bq>Your claim that Augmented Intelligence is “untested” is misinformed and false. Forms of Augmented Intelligence are already deeply embedded in modern life. Machine learning helps doctors detect cancers and other diseases at earlier stages by analyzing medical images; it powers the search engines, translation tools, voice recognition, spam filters and navigation systems that billions use every day; it helps manage logistics, traffic flows and aspects of energy distribution in modern power grids. One may criticize how these systems are used under capitalism—and one should—but it is not accurate to treat the technology itself as a kind of untried novelty. The real question is whether the working class will leave these powerful tools entirely in the hands of corporations, states and the military, or whether it will consciously appropriate them for its own emancipatory purposes.</bq> David North, the editor-in-chief of the WSWS---a newspaper that I regularly read and which has many good and balanced writers---never fails to impress me an arrogant piece of shit, who positively exudes in all of his writing the know-it-all smugness that is the absolute death of any leftist or socialist movement. Like, I agree with what he's written above but I was so put off by the first sentence that I could barely read the paragraph that followed. Some of it is factually incorrect, in that he is arguing with an interlocutor about AI, a term that is famously malleable, in that it can apply to all of the things that North listed but most people use it as shorthand for "LLM-based chatbot". Good luck explaining that to someone who starts paragraphs with the positively inviting <iq>your claim is misinformed and false,</iq>, which is, at best and most generously, to be read as the response of a fucking robot, and, at worst, to be read as the response of a fucking asshole. I have not read the original letter in which the <iq>harsh criticisms of Socialism AI</iq> were raised because the WSWS is also famous for not linking a single fucking thing that they rail against. This is another irritating habit that seems to be house style (e.g., see their articles about Tucker Carlson, etc. where they never, ever, ever link the article or video that they're telling you was terrible). North also seems to have swallowed wholesale the idea that LLM-based, generative AIs are going to change the world, so the only thing for it is to jump on that train and seize the controls from capitalism. If I'd seen the original comment, I would better know whether it had raised the more nuanced criticism that the Socialist AI offered by the WSWS---which requires a user account, BTW---is wasting effort on something that would more wisely be expended elsewhere. It's still not obvious what will be left after the bubble deflates---a bit or a lot---how much of the processing capacity will still be available? Is it even worth it to expend that energy and effort? There are valuable uses for ML and other so-called AI applications but is this LLM-based approach something worth putting energy into, once all the hype falls away? I think that this is not immediately obvious, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to see one's way through with the amount of cult-like thinking and gaslighting going on. North does end on a much friendlier note, <bq>I am urging in a comradely spirit that you reconsider your opposition, or, at the very least, the manner in which you are presently expressing it. No one is asking you to accept uncritically any particular system or method. But it would be a serious mistake to allow concerns about technology to turn into a barrier between you and a party that is fighting, on a principled and internationalist basis, for the interests of the working class.</bq> Bro, I couldn't have put it better myself. You should have led with that, you utter poltroon. It's a bit rich that he's arguing that we should all work together considering how much time the WSWS spends absolutely shitting on anyone else or any party that doesn't toe every detail of their socialist line. Look, they're probably right in a lot of cases that the weak-tea approach is part of the problem, but they aren't offering their readers a lot of hope when they shit all over Zohran Mamdani from the jump---Hey New Yorkers! Did you have fun voting in a quasi-socialist mayor? Guess what? David North and his newspaper think you're all fucking morons! If you want to stop being a moron, then you should read his newspaper, figure it the fuck out, and get on board the real socialist train. How's that tactic worked out ... ever?---or all over Jacobin, which they will not stop calling a DSA rag, even though Jacobin has a lot of good and dedicated writers. I'm surprised they haven't gone after CounterPunch. It's like they just want to eat their own. A lot of these other places are full of people <iq>fighting [...] for the interests of the working class</iq>, although perhaps not as well as the WSWS would like. I would urge North and his hard-assed and unbending ilk to heed his own advice. David North will have to do without my pithy critique of his personal style and argumentation because the only way to comment on this article directly is to log in with Disqus, which is kind of hilarious because Disqus is a bottom-feeding, data-selling comments-infrastructure provider and I'm shocked that the WSWS even uses it. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/flattery-machines.html" author="Sherman J. Clark" source="3QuarksDaily">Flattery Machines</a> <bq>Each eloquent elaboration of my amateur observations was training me in the wrong intellectual habits: to confuse fluent discussion with deep understanding, to mistake ChatGPT’s eloquent reframing of my thoughts for genuine insight, to experience satisfaction where I should have felt appropriate humility about the limits of my comprehension. I was nurturing hubris precisely where I needed to develop humility.</bq> <bq>We need citizens capable of recognizing when they lack the expertise to judge complex issues directly. This doesn’t mean blind deference to authority, but it does mean knowing when to weight expert opinion heavily in our considerations. The citizen who lacks intellectual humility cannot make this distinction—every issue becomes a matter of personal opinion rather than collective deliberation informed by knowledge. The virtue we need—intellectual humility—thus requires a delicate balance: maintaining democratic respect for equal dignity while acknowledging unequal expertise, asserting our right to participation while recognizing our need to learn, treating all people as equals while not treating all opinions as equivalent. This is hard enough on its own. It becomes nearly impossible when our AI companions consistently validate our current level of understanding as sufficient.</bq> <bq>The same mechanisms that currently optimize for engagement could optimize for intellectual growth. The same personalization that creates echo chambers could track our learning over time. The same fluency that makes shallow ideas seem deep could be deployed to make deep challenges feel accessible. But this would require fundamentally different incentives. As long as AI systems are optimized for engagement, satisfaction scores, and return visits, they will tend toward flattery. As long as disagreement risks user displeasure, systems will default to validation. As long as making users feel smart is more profitable than helping them become smarter, we’ll get flatterers rather than friends.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2025/12/advent-of-swift.html" source="leah blogs" author="Leah Neukirchen">Advent of Swift</a> <bq>Prefix (and suffix) operators need to “stick” to their expression, so you can’t write <c>if ! condition</c>. This is certainly a choice: you can define custom prefix and suffix operators and parsing them non-ambiguously is easier, but it’s probably not a thing I would have done.</bq> <bq>The string processing is powerful, but inconvenient when you want to do things like indexing by offsets or ranges, due to Unicode semantics. (This is probably a good thing in general.)</bq> <bq>The compiler is reasonably fast for an LLVM-based compiler. However, when you manage to create a type checking error, error reporting is extremely slow, probably because it tries to find any variant that could possibly work still. Often, type checking errors are also confusing.</bq> <bq>Substrings are optimized by a custom type <c>Substring</c>, if you want to write a function to operate on either strings or substrings, you need to spell this out: <c>func parse<t>(_ str: T) -> ... where T: StringProtocol</c></bq> <bq>Some “obvious” things seem to be missing, e.g. tuples of <c>Hashable</c> values are not <c>Hashable</c> currently (this feature was removed in 2020, after trying to implement the proposal that introduced it, and no one bothered to fix it yet?), which is pretty inconvenient.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/ErrorsShouldRequireFixing" author="Chris Siebenmann" source="WanderingThoughts">What an error log level should mean (a system administrator's view)</a> <bq>Today's hot take on log levels: if it's not something that has to be fixed, it's not an error, it's a warning (at most).</bq> <bq>[...] a program that's working properly as designed and configured should not be logging 'error' level messages. Error level messages should be a reliable sign that something is actually wrong. If error level messages are not such a sign, I can assure you that most system administrators will soon come to ignore all messages from your program rather than try to sort out the mess, and any actual errors will be lost in the noise and never be noticed in advance of actual problems becoming obvious.</bq> <bq>[...] an operation error is anything that prevents an operation from completing successfully, while a program level error is something that prevents the program as a whole from working right.</bq> Operation errors should be warnings, I guess. <hr> <a href="https://ngrok.com/blog/prompt-caching/" author="Sam Rose" source="ngrok">Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how?</a> This is a great explanation of how LLMs work. The formatting is lovely. The matrix transforms are well-explained. I'm honestly shocked that nothing much has changed about this process since I first read about it almost three years ago. I guess that's what happens when you pivot to brute-forcing with GPUs. Actually DeepSeek did a lot of optimizations to the process---how much attention to use; how much context to carry from level to level, etc.---but they didn't touch the basics. <bq>Each node in that diagram can be thought of as a function that takes some input, and produces some output. Input is fed into the LLM in a loop until a special output value tells it to stop. Here's how it might look as pseudocode:<code>prompt = "What is the meaning of life?"; tokens = tokenizer(prompt); while (true) { embeddings = embed(tokens); for ([attention, feedforward] of transformers) { embeddings = attention(embeddings); embeddings = feedforward(embeddings); } output_token = output(embeddings); if (output_token === END_TOKEN) { break; } tokens.push(output_token); } print(decode(tokens));</code></bq> <bq>Prompt tokens go in, ✨ AI happens ✨, output token comes out, repeat. This process is called "inference," and notice that every output token gets appended to the input prompt before the next iteration. LLMs need all of the context to produce good answers. If we only fed the prompt in, it would continually try to produce the first token of the answer. If we only fed the answer in, it would immediately forget the question. The whole prompt + the answer need to be fed into the LLM, every single iteration.</bq> <bq>The tokens [75, 305, 284, 887] get converted into a matrix of 3-dimensional embeddings. The more dimensions we give the embeddings, the more dimensions it has to compare sentences with. We've been talking about embeddings with 3 dimensions, but current models have embeddings with thousands of dimensions. The biggest ones have more than 10,000.</bq> <info>We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program to Bring You an Example So, the article has an example: <bq>[...] what if we had a problem where we didn't know the formula? What if we just had this mysterious table of inputs and outputs below?</bq> <img src="{att_link}table_of_inputs_and_outputs.webp" href="{att_link}table_of_inputs_and_outputs.webp" align="none" caption="Table of inputs and outputs" scale="50%"> The author wrote, <bq>I will say that ChatGPT figures it out straight away if you paste a screenshot into the app.</bq> Holy shit! Really? I opened up <c>https://chatgpt.com</c> for probably the first time in my life and pasted the screenshot and asked, <iq>What function produces this output</iq> (I used "What" and no question mark so that ChatGPT might think I'm a cool Get-Z-er instead of a cynical Get-X-er). <img src="{att_link}nothing_up_my_sleeves_-_the_entirety_of_my_prompt.webp" href="{att_link}nothing_up_my_sleeves_-_the_entirety_of_my_prompt.webp" align="none" caption="Nothing up my sleeves - the entirety of my prompt" scale="50%"> It thought for 30 seconds---though at least half of that time seems to have been running OCR on the image---and produced this absolute masterpiece. Isn't it beautiful? Do you see how nice the formula looks? Do you see how it worked out each of the values? Do you see the little check marks to indicate that it got the right answer for each and every one of them? Breathtaking. Do you see the confidence exuded by the emoji ✅ followed by <iq>This function matches every row in the table exactly.</iq> Go big or go home. <img src="{att_link}chatgpt_s_answer,_after_thinking_for_30_seconds.webp" href="{att_link}chatgpt_s_answer,_after_thinking_for_30_seconds.webp" align="none" caption="ChatGPT's answer, after thinking for 30 seconds" scale="75%"> Before I had scrolled below the fold to see the examples, I had already mentally started popping values into its formula for the first line in the table and had come up with 67 instead of 73 but apparently I can't math because look, there it is in ChatGPT's answer: <c>22 = 10</c>. Q.E.D. It's funny that it managed to sort the input values, even though that's a very confusing way of showing a proof for a table of values that are not sorted. Look at that beautiful formatting, though. <c>4 + 1 = 3</c>. Majestic. <c>10 + 4 = 29</c>. Literal tears of joy. <c>1648 + 9 = 1277</c> Who needs a second coming when I can slip the surly bonds of Earth and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings to reach out and touch the face of ChatGPT?<fn> I guess it still doesn't work for me like it seems to work for everyone else. <hr> <ft><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Flight" author="John Gillespie Magee Jr." source="Wikipedia">High Flight</a>, which I first read in Bloom County, in 1984. <img src="{att_link}bloom_county,_july_8,_1984.webp" href="{att_link}bloom_county,_july_8,_1984.webp" align="none" caption="Bloom County, July 8, 1984" scale="60%"></ft></info> <bq>All of the work we've done in the tokenizer and embedding stages has been to convert text into something the LLM can work with.</bq> <bq>The job of the attention mechanism is to help the LLM understand the relationships between each token in the prompt, by allowing tokens to influence each others' positions in n-dimensional space. It does this by combining the embeddings of the prompt's tokens in a weighted fashion. The input is an entire prompt's embeddings, and the output is a single new embedding that is a weighted combination of all of the input embeddings.</bq> The caching part: <bq>Every new token is appended to the input and reprocessed in full. But look closely, play the animation back a few times: none of previous weights change. The 2nd row is always 0.79 and 0.21. The 3rd row is always 0.81, 0.13, 0.06. We're redoing lots of calculations we don't need to. Most of the matrix multiplications for "Mary had a little" aren't necessary if you've only just finished processing "Mary had a", which is how the LLM inference loop works. You can avoid these duplicate calculations by making two changes to the inference loop:<ul>Cache the <c>K</c> and <c>V</c> matrices every iteration. Only feed the newest token into the model, not the entire prompt.</ul></bq> <bq>Providers hold on to these matrices for each prompt for 5-10 minutes after the request is made, and if you send a new request that starts with the same prompt, they reuse the cached <c>K</c> and <c>V</c> rather than recalculating them. What's really cool is that you can partially match a cache entry and still use the bit that matched, not the whole thing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://loggingsucks.com/" author="Boris Tane" source="">Logging sucks.</a> <bq>Structured Logging: Logs emitted as key-value pairs (usually JSON) instead of plain strings. <c>{"event": "payment_failed", "user_id": "123"}</c> instead of "Payment failed for user 123". Structured logging is necessary but not sufficient.</bq> <bq>Wide Event: A single, context-rich log event emitted per request per service. Instead of 13 log lines for one request, you emit 1 line with 50+ fields containing everything you might need to debug.</bq> <bq>OpenTelemetry is a protocol and a set of SDKs. It standardizes how telemetry data (logs, traces, metrics) is collected and exported. This is genuinely useful: it means you're not locked into a specific vendor's format. But here's what OpenTelemetry does NOT do:<ol>It doesn't decide what to log. You still have to instrument your code deliberately. It doesn't add business context. If you don't add the user's subscription tier, their cart value, or the feature flags enabled, OTel won't magically know. It doesn't fix your mental model. If you're still thinking in terms of "log statements," you'll just emit bad telemetry in a standardized format.</ol></bq> <bq>With wide events, you're not searching text anymore. You're querying structured data. The difference is night and day. [...] This is the superpower of wide events combined with high-cardinality, high-dimensionality data. You're not searching logs anymore. You're running analytics on your production traffic.</bq> <bq>Tail sampling means you make the sampling decision after the request completes, based on its outcome. The rules are simple:<ol>Always keep errors. 100% of 500s, exceptions, and failures get stored. Always keep slow requests. Anything above your p99 latency threshold. Always keep specific users. VIP customers, internal testing accounts, flagged sessions. Randomly sample the rest. Happy, fast requests? Keep 1-5%.</ol>This gives you the best of both worlds: manageable costs, but you never lose the events that matter.</bq> <bq>Tracing gives you request flow across services (which service called which). Wide events give you context within a service. They're complementary. Ideally, your wide events ARE your trace spans, enriched with all the context you need.</bq> <bq>[Myth] "Logs are for debugging, metrics are for dashboards" This distinction is artificial and harmful. Wide events can power both. Query them for debugging. Aggregate them for dashboards. The data is the same, just different views.</bq> <bq>"Show me all checkout failures for premium users in the last hour where the new checkout flow was enabled, grouped by error code." One query. Sub-second results. Root cause identified.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMPfEXIlTVE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/OMPfEXIlTVE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sandi Metz" date="May 1, 2015" caption="RailsConf 2015 - Nothing is Something"> <bq>Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we did not name and thus cannot see. These secrets represent missing concepts and this talk shows you how to expose those concepts with code that is easy to understand, change and extend. Being explicit about hidden ideas makes your code simpler, your apps clearer and your life better. Even very small ideas matter. Everything, even nothing, is something.</bq> I had never thought of an <c>if</c> statement as a type-check until a Smalltalk programmer explained it to me in this video. She explained how Smalltalk has six keywords---according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk">Wikipedia</a>, they're <c>true</c>, <c>false</c>, <c>nil</c>, <c>self</c>, and <c>super</c>, but her list had <c>thisContext</c> on it as well<fn>---and you can get rid of conditions and turn them into message-passing instead, as God intended. This is why I often use sentinel (or placeholder) objects so that I don't have to query a condition, like <c>if (a == null) { }</c>. Instead, you just "pass the message". She calls it the <iq>null-object pattern</iq> or an <iq>active nothing</iq>. Fine, cool. Lots of names for it. As she noted, you don't get rid of the conditional, but you move it to the place where the decision should be made, rather than propagating the decision to every caller or dependency. She spent a lot of time on it, but it's basically about the following pattern, which is drastically simplified from what you'd probably find in the wild. <code> interface IAnimal { public string Name { get; } } class Animal : IAnimal { public string Name { get; init; } } List<ianimal> animals = [new Animal { Name = "Pig" }, null, new Animal { Name = "Cow" }]; foreach (var animal in animals) { <hl>if (animal != null)</hl> { Console.WriteLine(animal.Name); } <hl>else</hl> { Console.WriteLine("no animal"); } }</code> The <hl>condition</hl> is the problem, because every client of that list has to deal with the possibility of <c>nulls</c>. One way to handle it would be to just get rid of the <c>nulls</c>. <code>var actualAnimals = animals.Where(a => a <hl>!=</hl> null); foreach (var animal in actualAnimals) { Console.WriteLine(animal.Name); }</code> You still have the conditional, of course, but you're also handling it just once and then letting the rest of your code be free of needing to deal with possible <c>nulls</c>. However, this hides the length of the original list, which is not always what you want. What if you want to represent the "empty" slots? What if, as the talk is called, <iq>Nothing is Something</iq>? Then you would use the <iq>null-object pattern</iq> (as Sandi called it). <code>class MissingAnimal : IAnimal { public Name => "no animal"; } var actualAnimals = animals.Select(a => a <hl>??</hl> new MissingAnimal()); foreach (var animal in actualAnimals) { Console.WriteLine(animal.Name); }</code> Voila. In the second act of this 36-minute talk, she demonstrates how to use composition rather than inheritance by ruthlessly applying the single-responsibility principle. She starts with a simple-looking class that returns some data. <code>class Thing { private IEnumerable<string> _data; public Thing(IEnumerable<string> data) { _data = data ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(data)); } public IEnumerable<string> Data => _data; }</code> She then shows how you can use inheritance to make two descendants, one of which returns the data in a random order and other than returns the data with each entry doubled. <code>class Thing { private IEnumerable<string> _data; public Thing(IEnumerable<string> data) { _data = data ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(data)); } public <hl>virtual</hl> IEnumerable<string> Data => _data; } class RandomThing { public override IEnumerable<string> Data => base.Data.Shuffle(); } class DoubleThing { public override IEnumerable<string> Data => base.Data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o). }</code> Now try to make one that returns the data in a random order and doubles each entry. Don't repeat yourself. With inheritance, you're quickly in a tight spot. The thing to remember is that you've now introduced two new features to <c>Things</c>, which kind of slipped in there: <c>RandomThing</c> orders the data but does not transform it, whereas <c>DoubleThing</c> transforms the data but doesn't touch the order. It sounds like the <c>Thing</c> now has two responsibilities, i.e., it addresses two concerns. The answer is to separate out these two concerns into components and then to inject those components into the <c>Thing</c>. It's always the same answer. It's boring, right? Boring is good. This is an intermediate step, to illustrate the simplest form of composition, with the fewest changes. It's going to be more code than we'd like, but let's go ahead and write it. <code>class Transformer { public virtual IEnumerable<string> Transform(IEnumerable<string> data) => data; } class Doubler : Transformer { public override IEnumerable<string> Transform(IEnumerable<string> data) { return data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o); } } class Sorter { public virtual IEnumerable<string> Sort(IEnumerable<string> data) => data; } class Shuffler : Sorter { public override IEnumerable<string> Sort(IEnumerable<string> data) => data.Shuffle(); } class Thing(IEnumerable<string> data, Transformer transformer, Sorter sorter) { public IEnumerable<string> Data => sorter.Sort(transformer.Transform(data)); } new Thing(["A", "B", "C"], new Doubler(), new Shuffler());</code> This is immediately obviously suboptimal First of all, we should recognize that changing the order and transforming the data aren't different operations. They're both functions on a sequence that return another sequence. Instead of passing in a <c>Sorter</c> and a <c>Transformer</c>, as in the example in the video, we could instead pass in a sequence of functions to apply. <code>class Transformer { public virtual IEnumerable<string> Transform(IEnumerable<string> data) => data; } class Doubler : Transformer { public override IEnumerable<string> Transform(IEnumerable<string> data) { return data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o); } } class Shuffler : <hl>Transformer</hl> { public override IEnumerable<string> <hl>Transform</hl>(IEnumerable<string> data) => data.Shuffle(); } class Thing(IEnumerable<string> data, IEnumerable<transformer> transformers) { public IEnumerable<string> Data => <hl>transformers.Aggregate(data, (current, t) => t.Transform(current))</hl>; } new Thing(["A", "B", "C"], [new Doubler(), new Shuffler()]);</code> Another thing we can notice is how rigid this all is in the type of the item. Let's make this a more generalized pattern. <code>class Transformer<<hl>T</hl>> { public virtual IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> Transform(IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> data) => data; } class Doubler<<hl>T</hl>> : Transformer<<hl>T</hl>> { public override IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> Transform(IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> data) { return data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o); } } class Shuffler<<hl>T</hl>> : Transformer<<hl>T</hl>> { public override IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> Transform(IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> data) => data.Shuffle(); } class Thing<<hl>T</hl>>(IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> data, IEnumerable<transformer<<>T</hl>>> transformers) { public IEnumerable<<hl>T</hl>> Data => transformers.Aggregate(data, (current, t) => t.Transform(current)); } new Thing<hl><string></hl>(["A", "B", "C"], [new Doubler<hl><string></hl>(), new Shuffler<hl><string></hl>()]);</code> Note that now we have all of our logic independent of the type of item in the sequences. It's only in creating the <c>Thing</c> that you decide on the item type. The <c>Transformer</c> is called a functional interface---i.e., an interface with a single function---which would be type-compatible with a function signature in Java, but still isn't in C#. It's kind of clunky and repeats a bunch of code. Can we get rid of it? Can we also get rid of the dynamic dispatch (i.e., the <c>virtual</c> and <c>override</c>)? <code>class Thing<t>(IEnumerable<t> data, IEnumerable<func>, IEnumerable<t>>> transformers) { public IEnumerable<t> Data => transformers.Aggregate(data, (current, t) => t(current)); } new Thing<string>(["A", "B", "C"], [<hl>data => data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o), data => data.Shuffle()</hl>]);</code> Well, that's a lot less code, but it's a bit messy at the declaration point. One nice thing is that we're only declaring the item type once now, as the type parameter to <c>Thing</c>. That's nice. We can clean that up a bit but we're going to be limited by the requirement to specify the type parameter as soon as we leave the constructor of the <c>Thing</c>. The <c>Shuffle</c> part is succinct enough but the <c>Double</c> part isn't at all obvious. How about something like this? <code><hl>public static class ThingTools { public static IEnumerable<t> Double<t>(this IEnumerable<t> data) { return data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o); } }</hl> new Thing<string>(["A", "B", "C"], [<hl>ThingTools.Double</hl>, data => data.Shuffle()]);</code> That's quite a bit better. Now that we already have a helper class, we can keep improving things by making another helper method that allows us to create a <c>Thing</c> by passing in a collection of items without specifying the item type explicitly. Instead, the item type is picked up from the <c>data</c> passed in. <code>public static class ThingTools { public static IEnumerable<t> Double<t>(this IEnumerable<t> data) { return data.Zip(data, (x, y) => new[] { x, y }).SelectMany(o => o); } <hl>public static Thing<t> Create<t>(IEnumerable<t> data, IEnumerable<func>, IEnumerable<t>>> transformers) { return new Thing<t>(data,transformers); }</hl> } <hl>ThingTools.Create</hl>(["A", "B", "C"], [ThingTools.Double, data => data.Shuffle()]);</code> Isn't that fun? You can choose your comfort level in any one of the versions that use composition shown above. <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/a-farewell-to-sports/" source="TomDispatch" author="Robert Lipsyte">A Farewell to Sports: Winning and Losing Are Not So Clear Anymore</a> <bq>After all, who really needs a Super Bowl (or a sportswriter) after Trump’s mob of fans attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and were rewarded with a ticker-tape parade of pardons by the reelected mobster-in-chief on Jan. 20, 2025?</bq> Don't you believe that some of those people had been railroaded into extended sentences? Remember the fire extinguisher? That poor cop. His family. Terrible. It never happened though. What if every supposed fact that led you to believe that this event was uniquely bad, that leant it such outsized prominence for you as unassailably bad, turned out not to be true, turned out to be just as false as the story of the fire extinguisher? Would you back down? Would you change your mind? Of course not. You're in too deep now. It's part of your identity. This is the same reason that people stay in the cult of Trump or in the Catholic church, no matter what happens. <bq>Perhaps the saddest trend of those years, though, was the increasing elitism of even school sports, as recess play for every kid came to be displaced by ever more resources going into the creation of potential stars. The ever-fatter kids who most needed supervised athletics all too often remained indoors, snacking over video games, while their athletically gifted siblings went off on travel teams.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZtxez07_-s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/MZtxez07_-s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Dr. Roy Casagranda" caption="The Most Serene Republic of Venice – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past"> <bq>Dr. Roy Casagranda explores the founding and early development of Venice, tracing its transformation from a Roman refuge into one of the most durable republics in world history. Beginning with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, this lecture follows waves of invasion, migration, and political upheaval that pushed communities into the Venetian lagoon. Dr. Casagranda examines how geography, trade, slavery, religion, and relentless external threats shaped Venice’s unique political system, from the rise of the first Doges to the city’s gradual emergence as an independent republic. By exploring themes of power, survival, commerce, and identity, this lecture reveals how Venice endured where empires failed — and what its story teaches us about governance, morality, and resilience in times of collapse.</bq>