Yesterday [1] Luke asked me to have lunch with him, which I almost never eat upstairs because I prefer the lake but the weather was not great and I haven’t chatted with him in a while and kind of missed him so we had lunch and were joined by Jack and this new embedded SW engineer Karl so, once they sat down and Karl’s German not being so solid yet and his Swiss German being nonexistent and with Jack smiling to himself as he eavesdropped on our conversation, we switched to English and I’m just tearing through conversational topics that I consider to be 100% normal, like what do we really know about the whole Epstein boondoggle versus what do we think we know or what have we just assumed from sources whose provenance is not only questionable but is outright invalidated by pretty much everything else they’ve reported on but hey, we’re here to cherry-pick and perform our virtue about being against pedophiles I guess but why do we have to care about people being pedophiles when those same people are in charge of mass murder around the world and are running several starvation campaigns, like, right now, so it’s a bit weird that we’re obsessed about also proving that they might have slept with some underaged girls two decades ago (or whatever) when we have them not only dead to rights about crimes of global proportion but they’re kinda bragging about it all the time, and like starting a war in Iran right now (or pretty soon anyway) [2] and we were walking back downstairs and Carl asks “are lunch conversations always this intense?” and Jack and Luke both said “only when Marco’s around” and I had to smile because I find small talk to be a waste of time.

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.

Episode 508: Southern Strategy (Patreon)

This show discusses “the new National Security Strategy, Machado, oil, and Trump’s attempts to instigate a war with Venezuela.”

Episode 510: Tip Line #10 Ft. Sarah Squirm and Jack Bensinger (Patreon)

Though they call it a “classic call-in show” 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. Sarah did have a few zingers but Jack, Brace, and Liz were noticeably more quick-witted.

Episode 511: Haters and Losers (Patreon)

This is the yearly installment of who’s a winner (e.g., Erika Kirk) and who’s a loser (e.g., Charlie Kirk).

Episode 512: Old Saint Dick (Patreon)

Struwwelpeter − Die Geschichte vom DaumenlutscherThis show was released on Christmas. Brace and Liz read stories from the Bible, without skipping the weird parts. They discuss the logistics of the birth of Christ and his ensuing circumcision. “Brace: I think we have to accept the possibility that Baby Jesus had a missile.”

Citing the show notes,

“We discuss the amazing birth of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, and discuss at length the mystery of his foreskin.”

This may sound bizarre but it’s because history is bizarre. They talk about the Holy Prepuce (Wikipedia), which is a relic that is Jesus’s foreskin and which was banned by the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In Calcata, Italy (Wikipedia), it “was paraded through the streets as recently as 1983.” They did this on the first day of the year because that honest-to-God used to be called the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ (Wikipedia) until Vatican II (Wikipedia) put the kibosh on that. Yum.

The short Crutches by Amy X. Wang (The Baffler) was surprisingly good. There is no good way to cite it to give you a flavor of it. It is unique. It is raw. It is unflinching. It is kind of about love. There are dogs in it. There are misunderstood and psychotic friends. There is devotion. It’s weird but good.

B the three-legged Chihuahua

“At the animal shelter I said, Give me the worst dog available, which turned out to be an oafish, fecal-brown Vizsla missing a back leg. But of course B doted on him. She found endless excuses to come over. She took a hundred pictures of Tokyo expelling sludge in the yard, balanced on his three legs, prism-like.”

The post A pronounced issue by the-mothermayhem (Reddit) is a Reddit repost of a Tumblr “essay” that describes the painful fallout of having taught an entire generation without phonetics, with only the “whole language” approach, which—checks notes—involves a whole lot of wild guessing because you have no tools with which to analyze—in the strictest sense of the word: i.e., “break down”, or “parse” in the case of sentences, words, and phonemes—unfamiliar words.

The title is play on the once-popular Bushism (Wikipedia): “Is our children learning?”

Below, I’ve included the images from the original re-posting on Reddit from a post whose origins are lost in the mists of time. Below that, I’ve included a transcript—using the Live Text feature by copy/pasting text from the image in Preview—because reading text in pictures is so non-Gen-X-coded that … I can’t even.

Whole Learning Page 1Whole Learning Page 2Whole Learning Page 3

I used to be mad about “whole language” reading approaches in theory but now I work with school-age kids and I am mad about it in practice.

me: the word is “commute”
kid: complete?
me: do you see a P in that word?
kid: uh…. compare?
me: where are you getting a P??? sound it out.
kid: com… complete?
me: is that a P after the M? sound it out.
kid: *stares blankly*
me: [oh right, nobody taught them how to do this. fucking hell…] okay, we’ll do this together [like it’s kindergarden even though you’re thirteen years old…]. what sound does C make?

I am not a reading teacher or a dyslexia specialist but I’m having to do remedial phonics instruction for middle schoolers because nobody ever taught them how SO THEY CAN’T FUCKING READ

I cannot overstate how much these kids are just making wild guesses when I ask them to read something. Because that’s what they were taught to do. If you don’t know a word, use context clues and make a guess at what you think the word might be.

Which is a fucking insane approach to reading, by the way, and I could rant about this forever because this makes absolutely no sense and I cannot figure out how the entire educational field was duped into thinking that this makes a lick of sense.

But I also want to emphasize that even kids who are decent readers have this problem. I work with some kids who straight-up can’t read, but even my kids who absolutely can read will just guess wildly at an unfamiliar word. Those kids will go back and sound it out if I force them to, because they can read, so they have the necessary decoding skills. But they have to be pushed to do it and reminded several times to quit fucking guessing and read the actual letters on the page, Jason.

For example. I have a kid who is actually a pretty strong reader − probably one of my best. The word was “disagreement.”

He made a couple of guesses − some nonsensical, but after pushing him to sound out the word, he got closer. He kept saying “dis-age-ment” and “dis-argue-ment.”

And I said okay, let’s break this word down.

Me: Is there anything in here you recognize?
Jason: “The beginning is ‘dis’ and the end is ‘ment’ like argument, but I don’t know the middle.”
Me: Great! Let’s pull the middle out. I wrote the word “agree” on the page.
Me: Do you know this word?
Jason: “Age? Argue?”
Me: SOUND. IT. OUT.
Jason: “Ag… agriculture?”
Me: Jason the love of god. I drew a line in the middle. Ag/ree. Sound out each part.
Jason: “I don’t know.”
Me: JASON. I wrote them out on opposite sides of the paper. Ag……….ree. What sound does ag make?
Jason: “Ag?”
Me: YES GREAT FANTASTIC. Now come all the way over here. Ree. Sound it out.
Jason: “Are?”
Me: JASON. R. E. E.
Jason: “Rey? Ree?”
Me: Yes, thank you, it’s Ree. Put it together.
Jason: “Ag…ree? Oh! It’s disagreement!”
Me: YES. EXCELLENT. THANK YOU. WHY WAS THIS SO HARD?

#however the situation is better in liberal states that invest substantially more money into education than conservative states

As much as I wish that was [sic] the case, “Jason” and all of his classmates are students in a strongly blue state with some of the highest educational spending per student in the country.

I’m not saying the situation is better in red states − I’ve seen what my friends who are teaching in Texas are dealing with and the situation is dire. I’m just saying it’s less of a red/blue or funding issue than you might imagine.

I thought of an analogy: Can you imagine seeing a color and being so helpless that you can’t even begin to describe it? Do we just start yelling out sounds, in the vague hope that we’ll get it? Of course not. We learn words for some colors by rote and then we start combining them. We’ll say “reddish-brown” or “yellowish-green” or something sensible.

We do the same thing for odors—and numbers and musical notes, and, like, everything man. I am mystified how an entire nation thought that they could stop doing this—just throw out the most battle-tested didactic tool I can think of because learning is hard and it should be easy.

Sure, combinations don’t always work and then maybe you’ll then learn a new word like mauve, taupe, chartreuse, vermillion, verdigris, lavender, or fuchsia, which there’s no way you could have guessed. But your approximation will not have been completely off-base. It will be adequate for a lot of purposes.

The “whole language” approach is what it looks like when you don’t give people the tools to bootstrap, to be autodidacts. Do accomplished readers sound out words? No. They don’t They know all of the words intuitively.

Is there a way to skip the tedious part of learning a language and just jump right to the fluency of an accomplished reader? No. No, there isn’t.

This “whole language” approach feels very much like the AI-assisted approach to coding now being promoted for juniors and beginners. It will end in the same tragic mess that “whole language” has.

No wonder people are home-schooling their kids. 🤦‍♂️

Saying “I want to make content every day” is shorthand for “I am remunerated for obtaining and holding attention, so I have to generate it. Content is a means to that end.”

I think very few people enjoy what they’re doing once they get on that treadmill. There’s one guy whose first couple of videos about “1 day in Germany vs. 10 years in Germany” were funny. He’s now produced dozens of them—the algorithm is diligent in surfacing them for me—and I’ve long since stopped watching them, though the algorithm hasn’t yet given up hope.

Inspired by this video:

Spotify's Algorithm Sucks by Etymology Nerd (YouTube)

This is also neat. I looked up “der Gruppe” vs. “die Gruppe” and learned that, while some people think they’re interchangeable, others think that they mean subtly different things.

Grammatik: …in die Gruppe… oder …in der Gruppe… ? (Narkive)

“ist es weniger klar als “in die Gruppe”. Denn die reine Ortsangabe kann auch bedeuten, daß er innerhalb der Gruppe in etwas Kleineres integriert ist.

““Ich habe mich in der Stadt eingelebt” ist schon erfüllt, wenn ich mich in meiner Wohnung wohl fühle. Um mich aber “in die Stadt” einzuleben, muß ich mich in der Stadt generell wohlfühlen.”

The article Lean Prinzip (LinkedIn) is in German and discusses how the need for speed endangers innovation. It is written very much from a “leave me alone to be brilliant” style of engineering that argues that innovation can only happen if the engineers are allowed to ignore prosaic concerns like profitability. Something good will come of their work, trust them. It disparages the notion of “efficiency” espoused by managerial layers. It’s not necessarily wrong but it’s also not really interested in a solution that addresses the realities of the system under which many of us live.

I wrote the following to a group conversation:

Efficiency is not a goal in itself, but a means of achieving the goal of productivity. When a resource becomes more efficient, then it generates the same value as before but with less effort, then it’s more productive. However, you could also increase productivity without increasing efficiency by adding resources. It’s more cost-effective to increase efficiency, which is why there’s generally a focus on that.

I guess effectiveness measures whether the generated value takes us somewhere useful? That is, becoming more efficient at generating ineffective value might feel good but is ultimately not useful.

How can something have value but also not be useful? I think of a farmer who’s grown a field of food that no-one wants to eat—or that no-one is desperate enough to eat. They invested effort to generate value but it’s useless.

Addressing the article, I can’t really argue with most of it. It reflects my beliefs about sustainability and quality, and my experience in building products. It is, however, “preaching to the choir” (with me, at least).

To play devil’s advocate, though, I wonder which environment the author thinks we’re living and working in.

Sometimes slow-but-steady (the process the author proposes) will eventually end up with the better product but the market either isn’t willing to wait or doesn’t think it has to.

That is, if the market sees that it can externalize the costs of deciding to grab the product that is first to market rather than waiting for the quality product, then it will happily do so.

Here’s a completely made-up and perhaps too-contrived example:

If it takes a company five years to develop a device that lasts twenty years, but a competitor takes two years to develop one that costs 20% as much but only lasts four years, then there will be no market available by the time the “better” product comes to market.

The customer will cheerily buy five of the devices over twenty years, amortizing the cost with a much-smaller upfront investment, while completely externalizing the cost of discarding four extra devices because they will just shove their E-waste somewhere for free.

We want to be living and working in a world that rewards slow-but-steady quality, but we have to figure out how to deliver that in the world we have, one that seems to—at least sometimes, if not often—prefer quick-and-dirty. Can we figure out how to not allow hastily and poorly developed products from being cheaper by externalizing their costs? The incentives in our world push the other way.

An interlocutor responded:

“I see a conflict between innovation and serving the (immediate) market needs:

“Referring to the farmer, he has grown food that no one wants to buy, but at the same time he learned how to grow that food and he also learned that this food has no market (assuming he did not know that before). With this additional knowledge (compared to his competitors) he is able to grow another plant now superior to existing ones and successful on the market.

“I think, what the authors of the post mean by requiring time and free space (of thinking) that this is an important enabler for future innovation. Of course, there is a chance for failing and “wasting” resources because it is very difficult to anticipate later market success. But it is an established rule that innovation needs freedom and time to try things out without the “pressure to market”.

“In our vision, we had the term “taking bold risks to keep technological leadership” (probably “regain” would be more correct here). I am wondering, if this is still valid…”

InnovationI agree that innovation is about learning, and that learning takes time. Innovation is as much about learning what not to do as getting it right the first time—it is arguably much more about learning from mistakes. The famous quote from Thomas Edison describes the process as “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

In an ideal world, the farmer who’d raised a bad crop would be given the opportunity to let society profit from the experience they’d gained. Society would have to trust that the farmer is capable of improving—sometimes a bad year is just the first of many because the farmer is just not competent.

That’s possibly a roundabout way of saying/asking: how do we tell the difference between useful and wasteful failures? Who should get another chance to learn from experience? How many changes? For how long?

To stretch the metaphor even further: Even given that the farmer were good and in a process of valuable learning, what if the farmer who’d failed were not allowed to be a farmer anymore? I.e., they go out of business?

A common answer today would be that society would be preventing a proven loser from wasting precious resources. That is a not uncommon economic answer: that the market will ruthlessly decide.

It’s also very likely a net loss for society because this level of ruthlessness means that we don’t give ourselves time to learn from our mistakes. Instead, we’re told that the “market” will let someone else learn from them. This might be good sometimes, but it is often wasteful. The new innovator doesn’t necessarily benefit from the experience of their predecessor.

We may know how to innovate, and may have the right people, but we can’t ignore the context in which we’re doing it. We want to make sure that we give ourselves a fighting chance of surviving and being able to bring our delightful innovations to a world that seems to be want to strangle anything that thinks farther ahead than the end-of-quarter numbers.

As I noted in my previous comment, we don’t want to capitulate to quick-and-dirty—because we know that’s a dead-end long-term—but we have to acknowledge that quick-and-dirty is a competitor in the short-term and make sure we’re set up to outlast them.

We’re trying to compete by convincing our market that we’re worth the wait. Can we do that by getting our innovation out there more quickly? Is there a way of innovating that is more iterative? So that we move toward the quality product that we want to achieve without losing our audience’s attention?

The hope is that such a process would not only be better-suited to the world we have, but might also help us let valuable outside feedback flow more quickly into our products. Easier said than done but it’s something we have to seriously come to grips with, I think.

C-suite reading stuffI had the dubious pleasure of reading through MASTERING R&D COMPETITIVENESS IN 2030+ by Lea Thomas Smith, Denis Trost, Moritz Krogmann, Janina Pohl, Felix Prem (3dSE Management Consultants), which is a document about how to chart the roiling waters of the business climate of 2025. The following are some stream-of-consciousness notes I took while reading through it.

Being a bit obvious

The presentation is fast out of the gate: The executive summary screams at you to PANIC because YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

No. Stop doing that. FOMO is be resisted and coolly evaluated. You only need to “rethink radically” if you’re doing something wrong. Just because you’re moving, doesn’t mean you’re improving.

The most important thing is to know where you are relative to where you want to be. “focusing specifically on high-impact projects” is kind of a no-brainer. Who “vaguely works on low-impact projects”? With statements like that, you have to be careful not to equate “high-impact” with “only focus on the short-term”.

“Manage your resources in a very efficient manner” is classic “easier said than done” and also incredibly obvious advice.

OMG we should be totally not wasting time! Who knew?!?

Thanks for your deep and wise insight, 3dSE!

Be pragmatic

The hard part is in determining what “wasting time” means.

The statement “speed beats perfection” is quite dangerous, especially when completely unqualified or framed. This is equating “disruption” with “good”. Remember Chesterton’s Fence. Always.

What does speed even mean? I think a much better way of formulating the advice would be to be pragmatic. Pursue perfection but be prepared to temporarily accept intervening milestones. Always be ready to accept an intermediate milestone as ‘final’ if your customers are satisfied.

Always be ready to accept an intermediate milestone as ‘final’ if your customers are satisfied.

Evaluate whether perfecting a “good” product is higher priority than making a different, but just as good product in a different field or for a different purpose. Moving from one milestone to another shouldn’t be considered a foregone conclusion. You have to reevaluate the whole plan to see where resources are best invested. Don’t be fooled by sunken cost, but also be willing to see that you’ve built something useful that is worth improving.

Once you have this mindset, you will automatically design useful milestones that are “basecamps” on the way to a “peak”. You may never get to the peak, but you can train your people to enjoy the journey. Wait, why is that important? Because your want to keep people inspired and engaged with work that has many potential outcomes. We want to harness the power of perfectionism for good. Perfectionists are great! They’re only a problem when you can’t change what they think “perfect” is, … and it’s not what you want it to be.

Know what “good enough” means to you

When a paper like this writes, “companies that fail to drastically shorten…”, then this is consulting speak for “hire us or you’ll be driven out of business by a competitor that did hire us.”

Take a deep breath and think about what a reasonable time-to-market is and whether it can be shortened. This document assumes that companies have the feeling that they’re leaving efficiency and, therefore, profits, on the table. Therefore, when you read it, you’re meant to feel like you’re inadequate.

Instead, think of it as a checklist of practices that you should consider: Are you already doing them? Are you doing them enough? Did you used to need to do them more than you do now? Could you tone it down now?

The document is written as a marketing document for consulting services. It will not admit that the reader might not need 3dSE’s advice. That would be beside—or against—the point.

Just imagine that you’d already read this document and had followed its advice. On a second reading, you’ll still feel like a failure because it doesn’t discuss when you’re good enough. Remember what the point of this document is: to sell 3dSE’s services. And remember what you’re trying to get out of it: benefitting from the sage advice of business-consulting experts who’ve published a free document online to entice you into finding out more. If you treat it as a checklist and determine that your company is already in a position to evaluate its position on the efficiency and effectiveness spectrum, then the document on its own is quite useful.

The death of layout

Just on a side note, what kind of maniac makes a document like this landscape mode? For God’s sake, there are reams of research that say that 70-80 characters is the optimal reading width and this bloody document is twice that. Throw me a bone, man.

Move fast and…?

“fast, autonomous decision-making”: Hmmmm. This is so much easier said than done. You don’t want to be a control freak, but man there’s a lot of wiggle room here. Autonomous decision-making might also just be startup-like, pivoting, diva-driven “planning”.

This document is, so far, kind of an empty buzzword-salad.

Change the mindset

Any use of AI-based tools necessitates a change in mindset, a change in attitude toward testing. Because these tools are capable of producing so much information, we must engender a mindset where people are constantly thinking: is this what I wanted? Is it good enough? How do I know? Which test do I use to verify the output? Am I eyeballing it? If I don’t have a test or I have a weak one, can I justify that? What if I’m wrong? What’s the risk?

We need to increase frustration with inefficiency, engender an affinity for efficiency. Always be annoyed by your process and tools when they “fail” you, instead of just accepting it. People need to change their mindset to be active participants in the configuration of tooling and process. This is not just advice for developers! Everyone should learn to think this way.

A good front-office example that is very salient to working in Switzerland (or any multi-lingual context) is: is the spelling and grammar-checking in your most commonly used tools configured to support your in all languages? Even when you switch languages line-by-line? Did you know that this is already possible? That you should, in fact, demand that this works, as an absolute minimum?

Compliance and security

“Electronics & high-tech devices: Stricter ethical and legal requirements and the pressure to leverage AI technologies, pose challenges in maintaining compliance while integrating new technologies in products or processes.”

I’m honestly not sure how “entrepreneurial culture” is going to address this type of problem. It seems more like it might exacerbate it.

“Ensuring cybersecurity has become a critical challenge as machinery becomes more connected.”

Well, yes.

A while back, I spotted the follow cross-post Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks by Azra Raza (3 Quarks Daily). The screenshot below shows what this article looked like. This is an article that the main editor of 3QuarksDaily felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, The New York Times, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney.

Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks

This is, of course, mind-boggling if you’re not part of this world.

• Did this article appear above or below the one about Palestinian children running into stray bullets and rockets?
• Or of Columbia University cooperating with the U.S. government persecuting its legal-resident students for being “antisemitic”?
• Or do we just not report on that stuff now?
• Or wait … do we report on it now, now that it’s Donald Trump doing it but not before, when Biden was doing it?

It’s all so confusing.

What’s a newspaper to do?

It wants to pretend that it’s doing journalism, but wants to lose neither access nor prestige nor subscribers nor advertisers.

It know which side its bread is buttered on.

So, it writes instead about how George likes to smoke but shouldn’t.

Amid all of the snark in this article Did you even notice 4chan’s gone? by Ryan Broderick & Adam Bumas (Garbage Day), which doesn’t even try to pretend to have an any objectivity about what the author very clearly considers an unsavory place, was at least an admission that 4Chan was,

“[…] a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.”

A plea for an NC-17 Internet

I never used 4Chan. I didn’t have an account there. I would occasionally see flashes of brilliance and dark humor cross-posted to Reddit, though. It wasn’t nearly as surprisingly good as Tumblr but it had its moments. Not everyone on that forum was a frothing racist fool. There were a lot of clever people who very clearly enjoyed the anonymity of the place, and the fact that it was a chaotic space where you could push nonexistent limits. It was, in a way, the NC-17 internet that I wish we had more of.

Just yesterday, I was writing to a friend on Signal, from an iPhone and was making joke about how the Wordle is running out of words—we trade Wordle scores as a bit of a daily touchstone—and I joked that they might need to open things up to include words like “penis”. But, I couldn’t swipe-type “penis” because it’s a naughty word. It first converted it to “permits”, then “pennies”. This is so stupid. So mind-numbingly stupid. It’s a part of the body. About half of the planet has one. Is there an R-rated version of the Internet? Or are we doomed to be trapped in a child’s sandbox, playing with plastic toys provided by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies trying to keep us docile and quiet?

Does no-one else notice this? Does no-one else care? You know, people in the U.S. are either completely ignorant of or literally munching popcorn while the U.S.‘s closest ally Israel slaughters hundreds of children per day on purpose and as part of a genocide but we are safe and sound because no-one can write shit, fuck, vagina, or penis on their phones. What in the holy hell is going on?

Insightful commentary from 4Chan

Anyway, 4Chan was a place where adults could interact with adults and be as horrible as they wanted to be. It was also a place where people posted incisive commentary that was much more clever and insightful than anything you’d find in the New York Times. For example, here’s a long post from 4Chan, which just shows that every public forum is multi-dimensional and has intelligent potential allies on it. Painting a site like 4Chan with a broad brush is stupid.

Hey guys, wanna buy some magic?

It very neatly describes the way liberals see the world and political struggle. It’s from 2017, about six months in to the first Trump regime. I have transcribed it below.

“Lots of people complain about the anti-climactic ending, but really I don’t think it could [have gone] any other way. I’d like to imagine that there’s some alternate universe where Rowling actually believed in something and Harry was actually built up as the anti-Voldemort he was only hinted as being in the beginning of the books. Where he[…] opposes all the many injustices of the wizarding world and determines to change their frequently backwards, insular, contradictory society for the better, and forms his own faction antithetical to the Death Eaters. And, when he finally has his showdown with Voldy, Harry surpasses by adopting new methods, breaking the rules and embracing change and the progression of history. While Voldemort clings to an idyllic imaging of the past and the greatest extent of his dreams is to become the self-appointed god of an eternally stagnant Neverland, Harry has embraced the possibility of a shining future and so can overcome the self-imposed limits Voldemort could never cross, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated by this.

“But that would require a Harry that believed in something, and since Rowling is a liberal centrist Blairite that doesn’t really believe in anything, Harry can’t believe in anything. Harry lives in a world drought [sic] with conflict and injustice, a stratified class society, slavery of sentient magical creatures, the absurd charade the wizarding world puts up to enforce their own self-segregation, a corrupted and bureaucracy-choked government, rampant racism, so on and so forth. But Harry is little more than a passive observer for most of it, only the racism really bothers him (and then, really only racism against half-bloods). In fact, when Hermione stands up against the slavery of elves, she’s treated as some kind of ridiculous Soapbox Sadie. For opposing chattel slavery! In the end, the biggest force for change is Voldemort and Harry and friends only ever fight for the preservation and reproduction of the status quo. The very height of Harry’s dreams is to join the aurors, a sort of wizard FBI and the ultimate defenders of the wizarding status quo. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the big instigators of change and Harry never quite gets to Voldy’s level. Harry doesn’t even beat Voldemort, Voldemort accidentally kills himself because he violated some obscure technicality that causes one of his spells to bounce back at him.

“And this is really the struggle of liberals, they live in a world fraught with conflict, but aren’t particularly bothered by any of it except those bit that threaten multicultural pluralism [or their own comfort and security; ed.]. They see change, and the force behind that change, as a wholly negative phenomenon. Even then, they can only act within the legal and ideological framework of their society. So, for instance, instead of organizing insurrectionary and disruptive activity against Trump and the far-right, all they can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot he is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout. It won’t work, it will never work, but that’s the limit of liberalism just as it was the limit of Harry Potter.”

Pretty good, right? It hits the nail right on the head. Liberals are conservative: they are terrified of change because they know that it would impair their ability to live lives far more lavish than any sane remuneration for their contributions to society would entail. In that sense, Trump is much more radical than the Progressives, who can’t even come out against an obvious genocide because they’re afraid that it would end their political careers—and probably their revolving-door post-political careers.

Everyone else is lying

Anyway, Broderick continues, writing obvious mendacities that his filters would never allow him to see as such. 4Chan was a cesspool of lies, whereas his newsletter and the liberal news media that he frequently cites are sources of capital-T truth.

“[…] fitting for a website that has distorted reality more than any other, the hack this week unleashed a tidal wave of misinformation. […]”

COME ON…REALLY? You can’t think of any other web site in the world that spreads more misinformation and has a wider reach than 4chan? Are you really, as a purported media researcher, so blind to your own side’s propaganda? That is PATHETIC. Like, it’s complete capitulation, on the scale described just above in the 4Chan post that Broderick himself cited. The irony is quite thick but it’s invisible to Broderick. This is why I’ve almost stopped reading this guy. He’s so far up his own team’s ass that he doesn’t even understand the irony of it.

An example of non-4Chan propaganda

A couple of front pages of the Swiss 20 Minutes propaganda rag

I can think of so many easy targets. For example, the propaganda I’ve seen in major Swiss newspapers this week about having Switzerland move closer to NATO and for Switzerland to send weapons to Ukraine and for Switzerland to hate China, and to hate Russia, and about Chinese soldiers fighting for Russia.

Although the top headlines are pushing young Swiss people to WAR, the mid-third of the front page is viciously brainwashing young women in Switzerland to sacrifice their entire lives to spend 17 hours of each day being a financefluencer., celebrating how awesome it is to be a mindless cog in the orphan-crushing machine.

Just make you stay on top and you’re a winner. Who cares about the losers? Only losers. And communists who hate money anyway. You don’t hate money, do you? Of course you don’t. You need lots of money to buy that CHF40K.- Birkin Bag the previous day’s edition (not shown) was telling you’re a fool and a loser for not having, or at least willing to mortgage your future to have.

And since women can never be brainwashed enough, let’s plaster the next day’s newspaper with a picture of a bleached-blonde young woman sucking her CHF200.- replacement for the ludicrously stupid craze from last year, in which women were buying entire closets full of Stanley Cups. Well, you can throw those all away because the Bink Bottle is the new “must have”.

These media do all this while burying articles about Israel not allowing Palestinians to eat for going on 60 days now in a tiny, tiny, tiny box on the eighth page, near the bottom—all of those things are far more damaging and far-reaching propaganda than trying to rig the name of the next Mountain Dew flavor to be “Hitler did nothing wrong.”

4Chan was not influential

It is utterly insipid to claim that 4chan had anything approaching the influence of F@&KING RUSSIAGATE on human history. The U.S. is literally right-now engaged in a war with Russia that they have only recently revealed hasn’t been a proxy war for over two years—a historical fact of which the Russian have been aware the whole time.

It is largely the animosity constantly engendered and reinforced by propaganda like Russiagate that allows people to shrug and decide that they suppose they support a world war between nuclear powers. How couldn’t they? They’ve been brainwashed to deeply believe that Russia and China are irredeemable evils that cannot be reasoned with [1] and that are constantly seeking to not only to undermine our way of life, but probably take us over militarily in what we are led to imagine would look something like The Man in the High Castle. [2]

“[…] yes, we did lose something this week. And it is almost certainly a better world without it. But it’s also possible we look back one day and wish the internet still felt as messy and, more importantly, human as it did when 4chan ruled the world.”

4chan never ruled the world, FFS. It’s a tragedy that so many people are celebrating the destruction of an online community. That celebration reflects more poorly on them than the light they attempt to shine on 4 chan’s sins. It reveals how badly they want to put on the chains thrown to them by their masters.

This explanation of an experience that this guy had is a bit overwrought but damn if his enthusiasm isn’t infectious.

Cabel Sasser, Panic − XOXO Festival (2024) by XOXO Festival (YouTube)

Skip forward to about 4:00 for the in-depth analysis of artist Wes Cook’s ouevre. Cabel Sasser is a bit of an acquired taste but his enthusiasm is infectious.

Look at this mural, though. It’s amazing. This was on a wall in the children’s seating area in a McDonald’s in Centralia, Washington. It was painted in 1980. Wes went on to do a lot of other work, mostly in theme parks.

Wes Cook McDonald's Mural in Centralia, Washington

The piece that Cabel is still trying to get is,

“Wes Cook was working on what he called a triptych satire. [A depiction of] the baptism, crucifixion, and ascension of Christ told through Ronald McDonald.”

The “origin of the toolbar” reveal was pretty cool. He saw in a photo of Wes Cook’s workspace that he had his tools clipped to a twine line above his desk. It looked for all the world like a toolbar in a design app.

The big reveal at the end was worth the wait. 👏 👏 👏

Chengyu (Wikipedia)

“Chengyu (traditional Chinese: 成語; simplified Chinese: 成语; pinyin: chéngyǔ; trans. “set phrase”) are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Literary Chinese and are still common in written vernacular Chinese writing and in the spoken language today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over 20,000. Chengyu are considered the collected wisdom of the Chinese culture, and contain the experiences, moral concepts, and admonishments from previous generations of Chinese speakers.”

huà shé tiān zú

• 井底之蛙 (jǐng dǐ zhī wā): a frog in the bottom of the well / a person with limited outlook
• 三人成虎 (sān rén chéng hǔ): Three men make a tiger / repeated rumor becomes a fact
• 紙上談兵 (zhǐ shàng tán bīng): talk about military tactics on paper / theoretical discussion useless in practice (I like our “armchair generals” or “armchair quarterbacks” idiom better.)
• 畫蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú): to add feet when drawing a snake / to improve something unnecessarily
• 易如反掌 (yì rú fǎn zhǎng): as easy as turning over one’s hand / for something to be very easy (This one’s the same in German: Handumdrehen)

I like some of these because they’re more intuitive than something like bikeshedding (performing a seemingly endless series of small tasks to avoid more complex steps that would actually move the project forward) or yak-shaving (spending most of your time discussing the simple but trivial issues rather than focusing your time on discussions around the bigger but harder tasks at hand) because you honestly don’t have to explain it to anyone who knows what a snake is.

“Putting lipstick on a pig”

Now there’s an English idiom I can get behind.

I was pleasantly surprised at this 23-minute video even though, as I outline below, I don’t think it went far enough.

Critic Stephanie Lange EXPOSES Disturbing Teen Plastic Surgery Trend by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“I don’t think that fillers, especially, were half as popular, as they are now, if it weren’t for Kylie Jenner. She has had such a huge influence, especially for the younger generation. And people want to look like the Kardashians because they basically epitomize the beauty standard right now. They’ve got the big bum, the tiny waist, the big boobs, the perfect faces that look like they walk around with a filter 24/7, and women are told that, if we get BBLs [Brazilian Butt Lifts] and liposuction and botox and fillers and plastic surgery, then we can be as beautiful as the Kardashians. And, if you’re as beautiful as the Kardashians, you might also be as successful as the Kardashians. You might be able to live in a mansion and buy the latest designer handbag.

“Stephanie LangeI agree with you, it is destroying everything about us that makes us look unique. And that’s such a shame, because there is beauty in every single person. And that doesn’t mean that we all have to subscribe to the exact same beauty standard. […] You are being told that this is what you are supposed to look like as a women in 2024, if you want to be beautiful and have a good life and be successful. And, if you don’t look like that, I can see why women go down this route—because I did it myself. It takes a huge toll on your self-esteem and your self-worth.”

This is a good analysis but it doesn’t go the extra mile to say that the real problem is defining yourself by your appearance rather than by your…self. This isn’t a new problem nor is it a new solution, but perhaps a longer show would have analyzed how the push to consider yourself as only a shell without an interior is part of the push to consume. The point is to buy stuff. This is just one of the routes to that goal. The slavering maw of the economy doesn’t care that women’s self-esteem and health is damaged, or that people are dying, because people are buying fillers and surgery and designer handbags.

Every discussion that starts like this should end in a criticism of our system.

If not for our system—unreasonable incentives coupled with a complete lack of ethical standards and a rapacious focus on accumulation and consumption—none of this would be happening. You wouldn’t find surgeons willing to give 16-year-olds boob jobs if the system hadn’t indoctrinated a veritable army of people all wanting more, and more, and more money, no matter what the cost to others.

None of this would be happening if the system weren’t training people to value inordinate wealth and power over basic human decency and ethics, if it weren’t making the argument “if I don’t so it, someone else will, so I might as well get that cheddar” the leading justification for doing anything that might otherwise be considered unsavory.

This madness for plastic surgery is bad, but it’s just a symptom of something much more insidious.

A good friend of mine sent this link to me. I hadn’t listened to an interview since Tim Dillon and Alex Jones and Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU way back in the spring of 2021. I’ve had fun with this friends links before (see Robert Edward Grant: King of Gobbledygook), so I gave it chance. I couldn’t recommend that anyone else listen to these three hours … but YMMV. It has 26M views and almost 500K likes on YouTube. Check out my notes below and decide for yourself.

Joe Rogan Experience #2111 − Katt Williams by Joe Rogan (YouTube)

I’m almost an hour in and I feel like Katt Williams thinks that the plots of Independence Day (all tech came from analyzing the attack ship from Roswell) and Transformers (all tech came from analyzing Megatron) are real, historical artifacts. He thinks humanity got advanced tech from space aliens.

Brother Katt: just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean nobody understands it. I just listened to a tech talk from a guy at work about ASIC (Wikipedia) that was incredible. Just incredible. He understands circuits on a deep level in a way that I almost certainly never will.

OK, now, I’m at 90 minutes into this thing. Katt is drifting hard sometimes. People underestimate Rogan’s ability to keep a conversation going for 3 hours, how he steers his guests into areas that might be interesting. He’s kind of a moron, but he’s not without talent.

How many times has Rogan said, “Yeaaah, … uh, that makes sense…” when Williams just vomited up another word salad?

From, like, the Sirius star system?

“Rogan: I’ve always wondered whether alchemy wasn’t just a way to regain lost knowledge.

“Williams: [speaks so slowly that I feel like his battery is dying.]”

They are both so stoned but Katt’s like those alcoholics who can drive a car better than you or I can, even when they’re at a stratospheric BAC. He has so much practice at being stoned. I kept expecting him to just *slide* out of his chair, but he always rallied.

I mean, most of what he’s saying is useless trash if you look at it too closely, but it sounds good. It sounds wise. Stoner wisdom. Joe Rogan is the perfect interviewer for him.

Also, Katt talks about how much he reads—20 books per week!—or how much he read when he was younger, or … whatever. It’s all bullshit! Either that or he’s reading Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. If he actually read serious works—he says he reads (or read! Who can tell what year he thinks it is?) classics—then how could he be this misguided and spacey? If he actually spends all of that time reading all of that incredible content, then it’s a shame that he comes out thinking and expressing himself like this.

Williams mentioned several times that he thought he would be canceled for some of his utterances—and then said something relatively banal. But then he also said,

“You know, the Jewish people [UH OH] are powerful people on this planet [OMG STOP] and a lot of that has to do with the process that they have in instilling in their young people a certain amount of information and wherewithal and conversation that does not happen with other cultures, let’s say […] and um that exists only in a few places around the world but they’re always important um especially if you look at things from a nonreligious point of view.”

Dude. WTF are you talking about? Are you talking about the Torah? No-one knows. And how does it not worry you to talk about one of the most sensitive ethnic communities when you worried about a dozen, other, relatively innocuous statements? Absolutely wild.

Joe Rogan soon after: “What do you think ghosts are? Do you think they’re real.”

Good call, Joe. Steer him away from the Jews. JFC.

Katt Williams, after visibly gathering himself, “You either believe in the supernatural or you don’t.”

Well…yeah.

There are just some notes I made for a recent documentation review.

• A shepherd named Shepard shepherds data parameters

• Use “said” when you’re referring back to one or more items that you don’t want to list again. It’s a sort of fancy neutral pronoun to refer to the subject. E.g., say you have the sentence

  “The parameters A, B, C, and D are shown to the user; after the user has chosen values for them, the application submits them.”

  Here, we’ve used “them” twice, which feels a touch awkward. We could instead spice things up with,

  “The parameters A, B, C, and D are shown to the user; after the user has chosen values for said parameters, the application submits them.”

• Use “respectively” when you’re applying multiple values to previously named items. E.g.,

  “The user will calibrate A and B, setting them to appropriate input and output values, respectively.”

  You can also use “corresponding”, as in

  “The user will calibrate A and B, setting them to their corresponding input and output values.”

I was sent this article by my vast network of correspondents: Chicago gangs clash with Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members: ‘Blacks against migrants’ by Michael Lee (FOX News).

Let’s do some fun and quick and pretty easy analysis here.

The title slug is pretty provocative: “GANGS CLASH”.

Did they, though? Clash?

Let’s see what the article has to say! They spent time writing it, so let’s do them the honor of reading it.

Don’t worry, we don’t have to read far.

The very first paragraph writes,

“Venezuelan migrants moving into Chicago’s South Side have caught the attention of the city’s gangs, with some fearing an impending turf war between local gangs and their Venezuelan counterparts.”

Oho!

No clashes.

Instead, there’s “fear of an impending turf war” just because people moved into a neighborhood.

Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to get our feathers ruffled over this?

GIVE ME SOME BLOOD, BABY. I WANNA SEE SOME GOOD CLASHIN’.

The article does helpfully include this image, though:

Gang graffiti is scribbled on a sign in the Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago

Oooo…scary graffiti! LOOK AT IT IT”S HORRIFYING.

Dude, my train station in Switzerland has more graffiti with idiotic supporters of FCZ and GCZ having a “turf war” over whose soccer team is the most awesomest. Maybe FOX News should be covering that impending gang war.

Anybody else interested in some good clashin’ is going to walk away from this article with empty hands. It’s all hypotheticals. Literally nothing has happened yet.

I checked, even though an article that contradicts its headline IN THE VERY FIRST PARAGRAPH doesn’t really deserve to be read in full.

But my buddy sent it and, man, I can’t just ignore them.

Sincerely,

Your friendly neighborhood newsreader.
 

The article Bang-and-Whimper by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) from a few months ago outlined the mindless and morally unhinged argument promulgated by people all across the political spectrum in the U.S. and Europe.

“The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to forget about now. They still hold and torture hostages, you know.”

James Howard KunstlerLet’s see how Captain Kunstler is doing. Well, he’s an upstate hater of all that is downstate, but he sees eye-to-eye with Scott Greenfield, whom Kunstler would no doubt refer to a “Jew lawyer” in a moment of weakness or if he were in his cups. Kunstler himself is also Jewish, which goes a ways toward explaining his blind devotion to Israel, but is still a bit mysterious, if you’ve read other things he’s written. Still, a lot of the more interesting stuff he’s written is quite a ways in the past now. He’s been on a different track for a while now.

Both Kunstler and Greenfield acknowledge the “brutal occupation”, but also don’t think that one thing has anything to do with the other. Hamas does hold hostages, but there is no evidence at all that they are torturing them. Those that have been returned report that they’ve been treated as well as is possible within the strict confines of the mass-bombing and starvation campaign in Gaza. But Kunstler and Greenfield think that anyone who’s against Israel’s policies is a whiny idiot who’s too young and stupid to have an opinion worth respecting. The only people worth listening to are those who know you’ve got to “torture some folks”, as Obama once said.

Am I being unfair? Let’s see what else he has to say.

“I doubt that Israel wants to exterminate the Gazans, but at this point they would probably like to export them to other nations that share their Arab culture.”

Yup. Just “export” them to “other nations”. That would be ethnic cleansing. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up, Jim. Jim goes on to rehash that hoary old chestnut that the Palestinians won’t be happy until Israel has been wiped from the map—as if the Palestinians have anything approaching any leverage in this situation. He doesn’t seem to notice the irony that his preferred solution is to, wholeheartedly support the genocide of the Palestinians as the only via solution for Israel while accusing the Palestinians of being interested in a genocide that they have to hope of perpetrating. He’s accepted the calculus that it’s either one side or the other, so the Jews should have Israel, as far as Jim is concerned. His words, not mine.

Anything else, Jim?

“They might have turned their 40 kilometers of Mediterranean beach-front into a world-beating resort, but instead they spent billions in international aid building a tunnel network and purchasing arms to wage war against Israel.”

Oh, yes, this one! Scott Greenfield also likes this one: that the Palestinians were utterly free to build a paradise but instead used all of their energy to work toward their only goal: eliminating all Jews. That is, they neglected their own society and people, all for the overarching goal of eliminating all Jews from Israel. Pure fantasy. It utterly ignores what he stated at the top, which is the “brutal occupation”, which prevents anything from happening in Palestine that isn’t approved by Israel. And Israel approves of nothing. This argument is so spectacularly ignorant, mean-spirited, and self-serving that it takes your breath a way, just a bit.

“And what if Mr. Netanyahu launches a peremptory attack against southern Lebanon to destroy those bases?”

Well, one thing’s for sure, Jim. I know that you will think that it’s everyone’s fault but Israel’s when the world fries. Jim is nothing if not a good Republican, though. He’s 100% for Israel, against Hamas, but also against the war in Ukraine. To whit:

“[…] the stark reality is that Russia is in control of the tactical situation on the ground. The WEF syndicate’s project — fronted by NATO — to weaken Russia and eventually loot its resources is a flop.”

So why do I read Jim still? Well, you have to peek over the fence every once in a while. He’s still capable of quite cogent analysis when he’s not being a raging anti-Muslim, anti-woke racist.

“The hidden truth now is that the USA war blob needs to cut its losses in Ukraine and wants to bug out. The trouble is: how to do that in a way that does not amount to another gross American strategic humiliation? That’s Russia’s problem, too: how to adroitly work the conclusion of this fiasco in a way that doesn’t humiliate the USA to the degree that we resort to some new act of geopolitical insanity in compensation.”

See? That wasn’t so hard.

I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentators are still MIA on November 6, 2023, Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023, and Strawman battles: rape is never OK! on December 30, 2023. Just in case you think I’m picking on him, here’s part of his last post of 2023 Inflection Point 2023 by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice).

“[…] the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation and the swell of simplistic authoritarianism of the young.

“Others in my position have adopted the woke view of the world, some because they needed the validation that comes from espousing the popular views of progressives, and others because they were never quite as serious as I thought. Or hoped. But how many more marches by the young and unduly passionate who justify terrorism and suddenly find rape and murder acceptable when done by those their tribe tells them to favor?”

He’s now just going to be part of the “old guard” defending “liberal democracy” from authoritarianism. Who do you see as being on your side? Who is for liberal democracy in the current political climate? Chuck Schumer? You might want to check carefully there. He’s certainly on your side in the current phase of the long Israeli war against Palestine, but he can’t seriously be said to be a supporter of liberal democracy. He can’t seriously be considered non-authoritarian.

That goes for pretty much anyone in that party, from Nancy Pelosi on down. I’m almost certain he’s not looking for sanity from the leading lights of the Republican party.

And he makes sure to mention again that everyone seems to love rape as long it’s Jews and/or Israelis being raped. He thinks that these students are protesting for no other reason than to show their support of terrorism against Israelis. He thinks that every last one of them is happy that Israelis were killed and raped and hope that it happens more.

Did I perhaps misread what he wrote? Am I not being generous enough to what he thinks?

“I never would have believed in my old man head that we would be back to open Jew hatred again. Yet here we are, and tens of thousands of people who would claim the mantle of progress fully embrace the end of Jews. Never in its wildest dreams would Hamas have believed that raping and beheading Jews would turn them into progressive darlings, but here we are.”

Nope. He’s pretty clear. Most progressives hate Jews and love rape and terrorism. Black on white.

Want more? He’s not done.

“Will this cause young progressives to recognize the error of their ideology? Will they realize that their sudden existential concern for Palestinians when they cared nothing about them until it meant they could openly hate Jews.”

Who hurt him? I mean personally? He used to be so level-headed. Now he’s completely derailed.

I don’t know how he could sanely come to that conclusion, but this is his go-to topic now. He’s not letting go. How will he possibly reconcile with anyone outside of a pretty tiny circle of people who are going to agree with that extreme viewpoint? Does he care? Probably not.

But this is the slippery slope to grumpy, old, out-of-touch-man territory. He’s basically the same as any person who watches FOX News and unquestioningly agrees with their wildest ideas about what’s happening.

You poor, lost guy. I wish you the best of luck in 2024.

I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.

I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of the hellish topics that we have to address before we’re no longer in hell.

In no particular order, here are the ones I liked, with some citations to provide context and pique interest.

Best of 2023: The Long Land War / Jo Guldi

“I think it is so vital right now that we embrace the utopianism that was present in the 1940s and 1950s with land redistribution and use it as a way to guide us in this moment when we have a lot of grassroots voices saying we are in trouble. There is a gun to our head, and yet we seem to be in a moment of paralysis, institutional paralyzes where little seems to shift.”

Best of 2023: American Agriculture Is about Money, not Food / Alan Guebert

“This system will collapse under its own weight because it’s not now and never has, and therefore can’t supply what’s really required: healthy, vibrant, growing community. Agriculture should be about what it says it’s about. It’s a compound word: agri-culture. It should be about food communities. When we get away from that, we are slowly getting away from what’s sustainable or even regenerative. In the way of rural America, regenerative and sustainable used to be the way those communities grew and the way they supplied the world, especially your neighbors, your local communities with high quality, low cost food. And after, or maybe hopefully before the collapse is complete, we’ll get that message.”

Best of 2023: Secret Power: Wikileaks and its Enemies / Stefania Maurizi

“At the moment, I’m sure the moment he leaves the European soil, the moment he leaves London, he’s gone, Julian Assange is gone. I’m sure the moment he gets extradited to the U. S. is a dead man. Politically, professionally, he’s dead.”

Best of 2023: Big Pharma Rigs the Game / Julia Rock

“These are the companies that, that at the end of the day have, have provided us with lifesaving treatments like the government funded, government subsidized COVID vaccine. Companies like modern and Pfizer are jacking up prices on it. There’s lots of evil stuff happening…It’s difficult to hold those two things in our head at the same time.”

Best of 2023: “Luxury Emissions” Doom Us All / Christopher Ketcham

“Under Neoliberalism, the poor, the working class, the lower middle classes, THEY all have to practice personal responsibility, you see, but corporations, and the wealthy who are served by corporations, and the wealthy who are subsidized by government in collusion with corporations: not so much personal responsibility, right? So I think we’re just looking at the hypocrisy of the class system, right? So these social obligations apply, you know, to the lower classes, but not to the upper classes.”

At 32:20, he talks about technophilic solutions to climate change,

“Climate change is just one part, one part of the world problematique, which is overshoot, the global overshoot of population and the overshoot of human economies, right? Beyond the biological carrying capacity of Mother Earth.

“And so that overshoot, you know, it can be seen in multiple ways: ozone depletion, loss of tropical rain forest and woodlands, the massive and continuing expansion of domesticated land, the massive die-off of wildlife, the domination of the planet by homo sapiens and our domesticated animals, coastal nitrogen expansion, the fisheries fully exploited, biodiversity crash due to, again, the total domination by homo sapiens—the almost-total domination by homo sapiens—of the Earth, desertification, soil loss, chemical/nuclear waste, freshwater shortages, and on and on and on.

“But, mainstream environmentalists say ‘our only problem is climate change; everything else is fine.’ Nope, we’re not overpopulated, we’re not overconsuming, we’re not overshooting the limits to growth on planet Earth. No, that’s not an issue.

“So, instead, what is offered to the public is a bright, creamy, green dream that technology is going to save us. There’s literally goes to be a deus ex machina of solar and wind power and lithium-ion batteries that is going to somehow subsidize—or continue to subsidize—our profligate lifestyles and our deranged growth system—our economic and population growth system—at the same time that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

“These are all lies. But, again, they are widespread lies. And they lies given the imprimatur of authority by major newspapers and major environmental groups.”

At 34:00 he says (about Extinction Rebellion’s announcement that they will no longer be doing as much their “annoying citizens” kind of protests),

“What they’re ceasing are the preeminently stupid tactics of laying down in highways, pissing off motorists, who are trapped in the techno-industrial system. This is the system we live in. We drive cars. There are motorways. Our public transit has been eviscerated by the trucking industry (at least in the U.S.) There are many communities that are dependent on cars. If you lay down in the street, all you’re doing is pissing off average citizens, who might be in your corner.”

At 1:00:00, he responds to Chuck’s question about how we don’t discuss climate change in terms of class,

“100%. That is the issue that we’re not talking about. Remember, there’s no classes in the United States, man. We’re all equal. It’s all equal opportunity. [chuckles] Lies, lies, lies. Yes, absolutely. If we don’t address class and the implications of class bifurcation and the extreme inequality and the rule by the wealthy and the oligarchy, we’re never going to get to a sustainable society.

“As I mentioned earlier, elites are buffered by their money from the negative consequences of environmental change. They will resist altering the system—the system of growth, the system of capital accumulation, the system of constantly expanding ecological footprint—they will resist altering that system that has benefitted them so greatly, right up to the very end.

“So that, effectively, to change such a society, you’ve got to rid of the elites. And then we’re talking about revolution.”

Best of 2023: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy / Claire Provost & Matt Kennard

“The corporation is a devilish economic instrument that has gone out of control. The problem is the instrument itself.”

This one was informative, but wasn’t as full of AHA! moments as the ones above.

Best of 2023: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O’Brien

I started off not really liking this interview, but warmed up completely when I realized that we’re on the same wavelength. They came out so strongly against traditional families that I reacted negatively, thinking “the families and couples I know aren’t dysfunctional, and they’re all pretty traditional.”

But, then, I slowly realized that they’re not pretty traditional. They live in very traditional communities, but several of the strongest families/couples I know are definitely not “male-dominated”. Each partner has their strengths, but only some chores/tasks are traditionally assigned. But that’s the point! The point is that my family is healthy and strong because it’s not aligned along traditional, capitalistic needs and lines. It’s already quite communal. The parts of it that are the least communal are the most dysfunctional, actually.

At 23:00, they say,

“Private households aren’t something we all choose because we’re all brainwashed or we can’t think of anything better. But we pursue private households—finding a partner to age with, raising children within a private household—because that is a necessary survival strategy [sic; should be “tactic”] in racial capitalism.

“That in the dynamics of labor markets, state policy, of what it takes to survive and reproduce in the world, we form private households that we’re then really dependent on. That the private household is a major dimension of reproduction.

“And that we, that in our efforts to form alternative families—better families, chosen families—they often end up reproducing many of the problems that we are trying to get away from.

“That the contradictions of trying to survive in a capitalist society put tremendous pressures on people, that end up fragmenting chosen relationships, and reproducing all sorts of gender inequality and class inequality within chose family structures, and end up putting a lot of pressure on people, reimposing, in some cases, traditional gender roles.”

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over prescriptivism. It cites example of usage from Twitter FFS, then shows how even F. Scott Fitzgerald used “were” and “was” interchangeably.

English Motherfucker. Do you speak it?OK, fine. But, do we really not draw a distinction between “technically correct, but understandable only for those who actually know the language and potentially confusing for those who don’t?” and “technically wrong, but understandable to more people who don’t know the language, and places the burden of interpretation on the listener or reader, who has to adduce from context that which is not present in the text?”

Nope! An official source like Merriam Webster happily prescribes “YOU DO YOU BUDDY” as its official advice for how to write the subjunctive mood. Incredible. I am appalled. Is that not a complete dereliction of duty for a dictionary? Descriptivist trash. We are flying in the direction of a lowest-common-denominator language whose level of expressiveness will be determined by those who demand the least of it. Hooray.

Yeah, no. I’m going to die on this hill of grammatical rigor, spouting my sermon in a language become completely incomprehensible to everyone else. As with so much else, Idiocracy saw this coming.

Idiocracy: Your Shit's All Retarded (long version) (YouTube)

Amazing. The video is age-restricted because it uses the word “fag”. The same country that can’t stop killing thousands of people per day with its war machine—to say nothing of what it aids and abets with arms sales—gets its panties in a bunch about the word “fag”, whose intent has literally nothing to do with homosexuality in the context in which it was used. Priorities.

The article The Russel Brand Conspiracy by Tony McKenna (CounterPunch) writes the following about the allegations against Russell Brand,

“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means no’ to which he responded by saying he was ‘very sorry’. In addition, the rape crisis center she went to the next day logged her visit.”

I can’t help but agree that what I’ve heard of the allegations seems to be credible. It doesn’t seem too surprising because Brand has a reputation for sex addiction and “getting around”. That gut feeling, though, is tantamount to how we used to prosecute witches. My gut feeling may just be based on wild allegations that I’ve already internalized without verification from elsewhere.

I was never quite able to square this reputation with what Brand says when I’ve watched his show—which I haven’t done in quite a while, I admit—or when I’ve seen him in interviews. He’s coherent, well-spoken, and almost overwhelmingly empathetic in his worldview.

At any rate, this article is in no way a litigation of Russell Brand’s case, one way or another. The rest of this article should in no way be considered to be a judgment or opinion on the details of Brand’s specific case.

It’s more of a musing—perhaps, a prosecution—of the current authorial style of lurid hinting and manipulation of circumstantial evidence for … what? Internet points? I suppose it differs from person to person, but trial-by-media is increasingly the go-to method for punishing the wicked. Perhaps Twitter should introduce an A [1] to be meted out by a public majority.

What is evidence?

I am not a lawyer, but a lot—if not all—of the evidence the author listed above does seem to be circumstantial. I am well-aware of how difficult it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that sexual harassment or rape has taken place, but that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards of evidence,.

Or does it? I think a lot of people think that it does—especially when it means that you can nail people that you find distasteful. This has been happening more and more lately—the weaponizing of stigma. It’s honestly very hard to know what to believe—but after the last decade of bullshit stories, I, for one, have become much more careful in believing what I hear from so-called reliable and mainstream sources. Their agenda is not my agenda—and their agenda colors everything they communicate.

The Panorama program is a TV show, with a to-me unknown repute. I can’t say what weight I should give to their any evidence they present. Let’s assume it’s all true, and is as the author laid out. Brand’s responding that he’s “very sorry” is not necessarily an admission of guilt, He may just have been sorry that he’d so wildly misinterpreted the situation.

Even the rape-crisis-center visit is circumstantial, no? What did she do there? Did she report a rape? Did she seek counseling? Did she ask whether they thought she’d been raped? The center’s not just there to record rapes, but to counsel women who’ve been traumatized and to help them process their trauma, whatever may have caused it. This process doesn’t always end in corroboration, does it? It is the journalist’s job to discover these things before just filling a segment or article with circumstantial evidence, then rounding up.

If the center thinks that a person’s story doesn’t amount to rape, wouldn’t it help the person work through what amounted to a combination of horrible circumstance, bad decisions, and others taking advantage [2] and help them avoid them in the future? What is counseling for, if not that?

Or is a center like this just considered a rubber-stamp machine to validate the rape claims of every single person who walks through the door? Doesn’t it do more damage to an already traumatized person to round their experience up to rape, turning them into a victim, a survivor, where they might have been able to leave the experience behind them instead? Who would such a policy serve?

I can’t imagine that’s the case, so I have to assume that a visit to a rape crisis center implies only that the woman was far more traumatized the day after a “date” than she should have been, but cannot conclude that a rape has occurred.

Perhaps with enough circumstantial evidence, it becomes damning evidence, but, again, I am not a lawyer. I’d hope it doesn’t work like that. One piece of evidence that, taken alone, amounts to nothing, can be combined with other pieces of similar evidence and, instead of adding several nothings and getting nothing, you get … something. You get proof…somehow.

Everyone else is a conspiracy theorist

The author continues,

“The accusation is a persuasive one, the victim’s account is supported by objective and documented evidence. But for the conspiracy theorist, such persuasive evidence does not speak to the likelihood of Brand’s guilt, instead it speaks to the power of the conspiracy set in motion against him.”

To counter that, for the conspiracy theorist intent on prosecution, circumstantial evidence becomes “credible” and “persuasive”, which gets rounded up to “damning” and “incriminating”, and should end in a prison sentence. Anything else is a gross miscarriage of justice that serves as evidence of the patriarchy’s chokehold on the system.

I don’t claim to know anything about Brand’s specific case. I don’t really care. There are other, far more serious, things to think about, to be perfectly honest.

It was just interesting to start skimming an article about how conspiracy theorists can’t be convinced by any evidence, in which the author is seemingly convinced by … any evidence, no matter how circumstantial. The author is clearly putting Brand on trial here. Look at the photo he included of Brand, where he’s half-lying on a bed, gazing with what seems to be lasciviously into the camera. I’m sure that wasn’t the first picture the author found. He searched for it—because he was on a mission.

With that kind of rigor, you can expect that the evidence lines up nicely. I’m just trying to figure out why more people don’t question things when the evidence lines up so nicely? You don’t even have to doubt the evidence you’ve seen—but maybe you could wonder whether you’re seeing only part of the picture? Is it possible you’ve not seen exonerating evidence?

Maybe sit this one out?

And that, in a nutshell, is what actual trials are for.

Even when a case does go to trial, you still sometimes have people being railroaded into a conviction, with suppressed evidence galore. In this case, Brand’s history of sex addiction should have nothing to do with the case at hand, but would almost definitely be used to prime a jury anyway. It might even be salient. As I said, I am not a lawyer, and know what I know of law in the U.S. from TV shows and books, if I’m honest.

Still, the general rule seems to be, if the accused is your friend, you’ll stand by them; if the accuser is your friend, you’ll stand by them. That’s what friends do. Friends nod and agree that everyone at your office a bitch but you. Friends nod and agree that “she was asking for it.” It’s not always pretty—it can be quite ugly, in fact—but that’s what friends are for. For better or worse, they lend a sympathetic ear.

As for the rest of us, we have no obligation to lean in any direction but where the evidence points us. What’s the advantage to you of publicly voicing an opinion on something not even the lawyers know enough about to decide?

Still, if you feel we’ve gotten enough of the picture to have an opinion, go for it. Have an opinion. But don’t set the bar too low. You don’t need to look like an idiot when it turns out you didn’t wait for enough evidence to turn up. You probably don’t want to write an entire article about it until you’re a bit more certain. Or maybe you do! Maybe you can make a bunch of money casting aspersions. That’s good old capitalism for you.

People gonna think what they wanna think

Having enough evidence or not having evidence is sometimes not sufficient to guarantee justice is served. Even if it does go to court, there are so many cases where the evidence didn’t hold up, but the accused is still considered to have done whatever they’d been accused of.

Even just considering cases involving famous people: Michael Jackson is just assumed to have been a child-diddler, even though he was exonerated on all 14 counts (Wikipedia). OJ Simpson is still considered by many to have been a murderer, even though he was exonerated on both counts (Wikipedia). Kevin Spacey still can’t get a job and he’s the frequent butt of rape jokes on SNL, but he was found not guilty on 12 counts against him (Wikipedia). Matt Gaetz, too, is the frequent butt of jokes about raping minors, but charges have never even been brought against him (Wikipedia).

You may have your opinions about whether these people purchased influence or cheated at trial. That’s fine. But you’re being a conspiracy theorist. You believe that there was a conspiracy to hijack the courts of the U.S. to render injustice.

If you think “corruption” every time you don’t get the conviction you want, and think the courts are great when they decide “your way”, then you have no faith in the justice system. You should own that and consider its implications.

There are further implications if you prefer evidence-free trials-by-social-media to a sometimes-broken, but official criminal-justice system.

As for non-famous people, check out the Innocence Project for a list of people who are on death row after having been railroaded through sentencing and often spent decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit—and which the police and prosecution knew they hadn’t committed, but they needed a warm body—just waiting for the state to murder them.

But a kook believes me!

“In a well-researched and vigorous piece, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot scrutinizes these kinds of claims.”

Look, I liked Monbiot’s book Heat, but in the thirteen intervening years since I’ve read it, I’ve found him to be increasingly unreadable. He’s unhinged and makes wild accusations, kind of like Russell Brand, to be honest. I consider neither one of them to be reliable sources because they see demons everywhere.

I only noticed at the end that Tony McKenna (the author whose article I’ve cited) wrote a 13-page piece about Russell Brand—and he can’t even spell his name correctly. How seriously should I even take this kind of tripe?

I wish these people could see the irony of them accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist, all the while writing long screeds about other conspiracy theorists’ inability to admit to the allegations against them, while citing other conspiracy theorists, and while not even spellchecking the name of the target of their derision.

Ah, but one never thinks of oneself as a conspiracy theorist, nor of one’s sources. Hell, I’m probably guilty of this sometimes—or maybe even all the time! How would I know?! Hell, I might even be doing it right now. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

I recently read the headline Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica). What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.

How about:

Original

Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety

Add punctuation

Vacuum-suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Remove redundancy

Vacuum-Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Restore phrase

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety off faulty walls to safety.

Use preposition

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety from faulty walls.

Precise condition

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety if wall fails.

The interview The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!) is quite an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the word snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase “fractaling forward”, which I don’t understand what that even means.

Still, he makes an interesting point about the categories we currently use to delineate genders and sexual preference being arbitrary. That is, just because we’ve had certain categories for 100 years doesn’t lend them any scientific verisimilitude. The conditions that led to the current list of categories were diverse, and kind of arbitrary. Intervening research has been largely ignored, largely for wholly unscientific and arbitrary reasons.

At about 35:00. Hugh says,

“Suddenly we have to break apart the queer idea of the 19th century, which was generally called ‘the invert’, which was kind of like the idea of what we think of trans and intersex mixed together. Well, now we know that there are people who desire other people of the same sex who are not trans or intersex. So, sexologists freak out, and they start to define all of these different categories. We end up picking out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex as the ones we’ll move forward with, but these people are also defining things like ‘the identity of the woman who likes to be sexually aroused with hatpins.’ That was considered a standalone identity. Pickpockets in the nineteen-teens were considered a biological class the way we might think about homosexuals. Right?”

Now, your instinct might be to say, ‘yeah, but that was stupid. We know better now.“

Do we, though? Are we sure we’ve got it all right now? That we’ve accounted for all of the nuance of human experience with our handful of categories?

I’m not saying we put litterboxes into classrooms—because nobody shits in the classrom, you goddamned idiots, whether you identify as a cat or a human. No shitting in the classroom. A relatively easy rule to impose, I would say.

So, Hugh’s point is that this has all happened before, and that it was all bullshit based on prejudices and arbitrary choices before—and that’s all it is this time. Humans love to make arbitrary choices for no known rhyme or reason—or for spectacularly stupid, petty, or racist/discriminatory reasons—and then completely forget that they’ve done so. Stir, wait a few decades, and everyone is utterly convinced that it wouldn’t be the way that it is without good reason.

Which takes us to pronouns and identifies and sexual/gender identification. Look, science is screaming from its desk that there are only two genders as far as gametes are concerned. There are people who are both genders. There are people who don’t feel like either gender. There are people who have the biological equipment for one gender, but are genetically the other gender. It’s not like it happens all the time, but it can happen. There are people who are one biological gender, but absolutely feel like the other one.

Leave them all be.

Honestly, there are so many ways to be an awful human being and huge detriment to society—and absolutely none of those things listed above are any of those ways. If the worst thing you can find about a person is that they are acting like other than their biological gender, then you’ve found an incredibly good person. For Christ’s sake.

If a person looks very much like a man to you and they ask to be addressed as “she” and “her”, then you be polite and do your best to accommodate them. Their job is to not jump down your throat if you don’t get it right the first few times. It’s just as if someone named Robert asks to be called “Rob” or “Bob”—if you keep calling them Robert, you’re just being an asshole. Or you don’t care what they think. That’s a perfectly good reason to not call people by the monikers they prefer—but be aware that you’re burning bridges.

So, we have to clean up some terminology and we have to make sure the people do stay focused on solving actual societal problems—instead of focusing all of their energy on helping trans or intersex people and then calling it a day, which is also not cool because we really do have a list of things to do, in priority order, and it would be absolutely awesome if helping a handful of people and children feel more at home in their own skins were at the top of the list, but it’s just not. It’s just not even close.

Just in the same price range, there are children who are hungry every damned day and we’re not doing enough yet to make sure they’re fed, to say nothing of whether they feel OK in their own heads. They can’t think straight because they’re hungry. Let’s solve that one and then see how they feel.

They’ll probably feel that they’d like fresh air and fresh water and less climate change and a fuckload fewer billionaires sucking all of the value out of humanity like an engorged tick. So, yeah, priorities.

But I’m getting off course again here. Even with cleaning up terminology: this is not the first time we’re dealing with pronouns, FFS. Most of the people complaining about pronouns barely even know what one is—and they’re not even close to mentally equipped to examine the linguistic environment that we already inhabit and notice that there already is a framework of pronouns and titles, some of which is based on biological gender, and some of which is just cultural baggage.

There are languages that don’t recognize gender as much as English—e.g., Turkish—and there are others that have a neutral form—e.g., German and Russian—and those are languages that are relatively close to the European family of languages. I have no idea what’s going on in Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the thousands of other languages used on this planet.

What I’m saying is that there is no God-given way of addressing someone. There is only the way that that person prefers to be addressed. In programming circles that don’t suck, people are incredibly concerned with making forms that stop asking for “first name” and “last name” because it’s incredibly culturally myopic. It barely even works in Europe anymore, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Instead, you should just ask for a person’s “official name”—where they fill out as many names as they want—and their “preferred name”—where they, again, fill out as many names as they want.

In fact, we still have so many forms that ask for gender—MALE or FEMALE PLEASE—or that ask for title, chosen from a dropdown list—Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.—because everyone has one of those, right? What about Dr.? What about someone who doesn’t want to reveal their marital status with their name? Oh, then use “Ms.”. What if you’re a guy? Oh, then just … use “Mr.” What about if you’re a woman who identifies as a guy? Oh, FUCK IT, just stop asking for that information.

'Mrs.' is my preferred way of being addressed

Hell, we still have standardized tests that ask for “race”. Yikes. When I took the SAT, I told them I was a “Pacific Islander” because I knew, even then, that it absolutely does not matter.

Honestly, we’re past it and it never mattered in the first place. It only mattered as long as we had laws that discriminated against certain genders, skin colors, races, countries of origin, marital statuses, etc.. Now that we’ve cleared out a bunch of that juristic detritus, we’re faced with the possibility of just building a set of rules that make sense [1], rather than whatever bullshit we’ve cargo-culted from our more overtly colonial age. [2]

A good friend of mine sent the following video to me, telling me “just lean back, relax, and let it flow over you.” Excellent advice, my friend.

Robert Edward Grant: NEW EVIDENCE! Mysterious Inscriptions & Encodings INSIDE the Pyramids! by Next Level Soul Podcast (YouTube)

The following are some notes and comments I sent to him as I was watching it.

(A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You’re right; just let it flow over you. (C) Terrified that this is how I sound to other people.

“The Great Pyramid is 11/7, which is the base to the height. So 117 and 11.7 squared is 137 and that’s the number of times the sarcophagus will fit in the King’s chamber.”

OMG BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

That was a really good one. He had me going for a bit, but that numerology just went way off the deep end. Good times! Loving it.

🤯🤯🤯

And then you have the guys in another video (that my friend had sent to me), who are intelligent, but believe the most fantastical things. Or have a weird idea of how physics works. “100 years ago, put light through celluloid, you got an image. And sound.”

Wait. What? I was with him up to the “And sound” part. The sound is not encoded into celluloid AFAIK.

It’s a great thing to discuss, though! How to preserve culture/knowledge/information in a format that the future can read?

This Grant guy, though! Goddamn I can’t imagine how many people who are stoned out of their minds think that he is a GOD.

“If you’re a mountain climber, then you’re not going to want to climb the hill behind your house. You’re going to climb Everest, or Kilimanjaro, something significant.”

No. This is exactly wrong. This is how we *think* we should act, but it’s destructive and counter-productive and psychological poison. Stop thinking that the hill behind your house isn’t good enough. No-one cares. No-one is paying attention to you. Just be happy. Walk in the woods. Climb a big hill. It’s enough. You’ll be tired. Forget Everest.

“Grant: […] every action must have an equal opposite reaction.
Interlocutor: Yeah.
Grant: So, for some people who are expanding into the fifth dimension, one over five is two, so some people are gonna go into the flat dimension.
Interlocutor: Mmhmm.
Grant: Like, literally, there is an expansion of consciousness happening concomitant to a contraction of it. You cannot have it any other way! Look at any any movie. LORD OF THE RINGS.”

This guy is hilarious. I pray that he’s just putting us on, because it would be lovely. But, I fear that he believes that he is spitting truth, hard as nails.

Still, he left off with this,

“Just love and be loved and relax. Don’t take the journey too seriously. Have fun with it. You know, I think that’s the biggest thing. I don’t think the world is a difficult place because people hate each other. I think it can be a difficult place because we hate ourselves. But it is through the process of learning to accept and love ourselves, that we will learn to accept and love the world around us, and then your entire experience and world around you, will totally transform. And this is what it means to be the change you want to see in the world.”

Once again, a smart guy who believes that individual agency can conquer any sort of external influences. No food? No clean water? Be the change you want to see in the world. This kind of philosophy only works for people who already live in a post-Communist utopian luxury where material needs are satisfied to a degree and reliability that you can focus exclusively on your mind and your feelings.

It’s great for selling books and seminars, but it’s just not applicable for 90% of the world’s population. People in other parts of the world can’t even think about stuff like this because they are either malnourished now or were malnourished during their formative years. They haven’t been able to live in nine countries and learn eight languages and sail on their father’s boat (as Grant has).

This is, in a nutshell, a horseshit philosophy that is extremely dangerous to sell to people to whom it cannot possibly apply. They will use it as a hammer and see everything as a nail. They will not blame the philosophy, but will double down, and blame themselves. The blame is baked in. If the approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough. If your boat already floats, this might help keep you on course. If your boat is sinking or halfway underwater, it’s worse than useless—because you will expend energy on “thinking your way to success” instead of investing it somewhere that might actually help you.

I had the following video in my queue recently,

Why is it overflowing? by Google Chrome Developers: Una Kravets & Adam Argyle (YouTube)

The following is not a comment on the usefulness of the information in these videos, but on the presentation, which I found so distracting as to make me stop watching. If the poster for it has changed, then here’s what it used to look like.

I dunno, it’s just too many colors and too much extra content and … too much stuff before I get to find out the answer to the question posed in the title.

The backgrounds of Una and Adam’s offices look like an AI-generated background prompted by “cool gen-z office yolo”.

Una and Adam looking like they're in PeeWee's playhouse

I mean, Adam is always a bit over the top, but he positively looks like a cartoon character here. I’m wondering how many filters they’re using.

Adam looking like he's an AI-generated cartoon character

Anyway, these people are fine. They’re smart. They’re absolutely professionals in their field. They also look like they’re characters in a Saturday Morning cartoon—for those of you who even remember what that was.

I watched the first round of the semifinals but didn’t take notes. I was inspired to take notes for the second semifinals. It was a dumpster fire.

The legend

• 👎 = Go Home
• 🫳 = Could be identified as music
• 👍 = Grudgingly granted to a couple of bands

Second semifinals

There were 16 contestants, but I’ve only reviewed fifteen below. Sue me.

Denmark 🇩🇰

Jesus fucking Christ go home. What was that? A 13-year-old waif with a stupid voice; just him on stage. Denmark is embarrassing itself in shocking fashion in the Eurovision Song Contest semifinals. This contest is all about bad music, but it’s supposed to be kitschy, not actively malevolent.👎

Armenia 🇦🇲

Just a woman on stage; porn star, wearing not much; lying on stage for most of the time; just yelling; same bullshit half-song; lots of light effects; frenetic dancing, obviously without training. Not good. Go home.👎

Romania 🇷🇴

Lone guy on stage, with guitar, singing in Romanian. Dude’s dressed like Marge Simpson in her Anne Taylor suit. The first part was better; now he’s prowling around the stage, rapping, at least partly in English. Voice is decent, though. 🫳

Estonia 🇪🇪

Young woman on stage; not a porn star. Singing breathily in English to her own piano accompaniment. Oh, wait, she stood up and the piano is still playing. Whoops. This is not very good. I don’t like this song. 👎

Belgium 🇧🇪

Lone guy on stage singing in English. Nope, wait, there are a few dancers; lots of video graphics. I have no idea how these people get selected. He’s not even good flamboyant. He has no moves of physical flair. His voice is vanilla. The song is shit. 👎

Cyprus 🇨🇾

Woman lying on the stage, by herself. Doing some untrained dancing. Also vaguely androgynous, like a few of the others. I guess riding the trans wave. Song is shit. Dance moves are embarrassing. Guy showed up and started howling at some point. 👎

Greece 🇬🇷

A 16-year-old YouTuber, singing in English, sitting alone on the stage, dressed in safari khakis. Awful. Dance moves are pathetic. He’s hopping around, grabbing his jacket lapels. 👎

This whole palette is awful so far.

Poland 🇵🇱

Porn star singer with a weak voice. Booty-short dancers. Two men, though. The dancing doesn’t even have much to do with the beat. They just kind of jerk around while music plays. They are no on the beat. I cannot emphasize enough how jarring this is. Dancers disappeared and now she’s dancing alone. More Shakira-violent moves. Singing in English. Utterly generic. 👎

Slovenia 🇸🇮

An actual band, with actual instruments, singing in Slovenian. Not a porn star in sight. A bit weird, but some recognizable signs of stage presence. They’re a band. It’s a song. Puts them streets ahead of the others. 👍

Georgia 🇬🇪

Woman on stage, by herself, yelling barely comprehensible English into a microphone. Not a porn-star look. Belly free, but looking more like a forest nymph in a white, long dress. The song is generic AF. The music can barely be called that. If this is the bar that AI has to hurdle, then I suppose it’s already producing music. No epilepsy warning, though it needed one. 👎

San Marino 🇸🇲

Also a band. Singing in English. Maroon-five-ish, rockish. Band members are enthusiastic, but spread all over the stage. Now, the singer’s lying on the stage. This is a thing this year. Some of them just lay there for the whole song. 🫳

Austria 🇦🇹

Two women singing, with four dancers. Rap-talking their lyrics in English. No instruments in evidence. Techno-ish. They’re not very mobile. Moves seem self-taught; vocals also. I can’t imagine ever wanting to hear this song again. 👎

Albania 🇦🇱

Woman singing Albanian. Five backup singers. Everything is red and black, of course. Two of the backup singers are actually over forty. Music is generic AF. But it’s still one of the better ones tonight. That is not saying much, though. No band, but a chorus. It’s music, at least.🫳

Lithuania 🇱🇹

Young woman in an orange dress singing slowly to an unseen piano in English. This is one of the generic types of songs allowed a the ESC. Some large, black, female singers just showed up, presumably in the name of identity because the lead singer is way too white and blonde and also too-clearly female, which is minus points in this semifinal. 👎

Australia 🇦🇺

Honorary EU-member starts off the show in a Honda ZRX on a stage. There are actually instruments and an actual band, with a pretty heavy sound in the chorus. But it’s really kind of Duran Duran? These guys should easily make it through. They’re generic, of course. And they’re too chicken to throw in a guitar solo, but the guy’s voice is decent. I take it back, the female guitarist did a five-note guitar solo, but then the lead singer followed it up with a slightly longer keytar solo.👍

The Finals

This part had 26 contestants, listed below. Some of the repeats reference the reviews above. I was too lazy to copy/paste it. Sue me. Just scroll. Or search in the page. Whatever. Oh, you’re on a phone? Sucks to be you.

Austria 🇦🇹

These two ladies seemed a bit better on second viewing. They get points for slagging on Spotify’s low rate of 0.003 per stream and for singing an entire song about Edgar Allen Poe. It wasn’t a great song, but it wasn’t terrible. It was a song, and it was singing. 🫳

Portugal 🇵🇹

A woman sings in portugese with a few backup singers. Her song is snappy and has actual instruments, although no-one is playing them on stage. It’s a fun song. There is no overtly pornographic play for votes. The lady can sing. This one is pretty good. 👍

Switzerland 🇨🇭

Remo and his background dancers look a bit stiff. The song is not my thing. It’s kind of boring. I guess it’s kind of bold for him to be singing “I don’t want to be a soldier” because I can pretend that he’s pleading for Switzerland to retain its neutrality in the face of a broadside by NATO, Europe, and Ukraine. It’s a generic song. His costume is a total failure. 🫳

Poland 🇵🇱

Documented above. No change. 👎

Serbia 🇷🇸

The song is kind of like a pop NIN song. The guy’s voice sounds a bit like Trent Reznor, if I’m honest. They have some pretty cool costumes and graphics floating around. It’s not a bad song. They all have pretty good stage presence. I suppose having a master’s in music counts for something. 👍

France 🇫🇷

Lone woman standing on an extremely tall dress/ladder, singing in French. It’s got a bit of a beat to it and it’s not terrible. It’s a bit of a generic dance beat and it never gets very exciting, although it hints at wanting to. Her voice is quite good. The stage theatrics—driving up and down—limit her motion considerably, which felt a bit stilted.🫳

Cyprus 🇨🇾

A song even more generic than Switzerland’s. Just a guy standing on stage, singing. He doesn’t even dance around much. Not much stage presence. He’s barefoot. He falsettos sometimes. “You can break a broken heart.” Deep, bro. 👎

Spain 🇪🇸

A woman singing in Spanish, with accompanying dancers and harmonizing chorus. It’s actually not bad—at least it sounds like it comes from the country she’s from instead of like generic world-pop. There’s a lot of clapping to the beat.🫳

Sweden 🇸🇪

A woman with very long nails crawling stiffly and moving like she’s been in a car accident—it’s not dancing—sings a generic Europop song while looking very fit and making a three-minute song feel eight minutes long. 👎

Albania 🇦🇱

Documented above. No change. 🫳

Italy 🇮🇹

A man stands alone on stage, singing in Italian. There are a couple of people climbing stairs behind him, bouncing into a trampoline. He is a very pretty man, with a very fancy tank-top. The song is utterly generic, with no band in sight, with a beat and melody that we’ve heard a million times before. It’s noot actively pestilent, though. I mean, the chorus is something about this being the last song and then the moon will explode, so that’s something. 🫳

Estonia 🇪🇪

Documented above. No change. 👎

Finland 🇫🇮

A guy in a large-shouldered green leather shirt singing in what I think is Finish, with a bunch of neon-pink background singers. The beat is driving, the chorus is infectious, and it’s not a terrible song. The bridge is a bit generic and poppy, but then he’s singing it while human-centipeding his two male and two female dancers. Very enthusiastic and fun. 👍

Czechia 🇨🇿

Six ladies dressed in light link costumes, with very, very long braids and very sparkly eye makeup. They all sing together, with a lot of chorus—with repetition, it sounds kind of like religious chanting—in at least Czech and English. There’s a rap section in the middle. Their dancing is not great—more Tik-Tok-trained dancing rather than anything classically trained or choreographed. 🫳

Australia 🇦🇺

Documented above. No change. 👍

Belgium 🇧🇪

Documented above. No change. 👎

Armenia 🇦🇲

Documented above. No change. 👎

Moldova 🇲🇩

A bearded, top-knotted guy with a couple of backup singers (ladies) wearing very tall hats. They’re singing in what I can only assume is Armenian. The guy is wearing hammer-pants and a kimono. There are two drummers, pretending to drum. There is also a little person with an elaborate helmet/mask playing a flute for the bridge. The beat is pretty driving and it’s not bad. I wouldn’t change it if it came on the radio, but I probably wouldn’t go looking for it either. 🫳

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Their lead singer is Nigerian-born and sings/raps in English. He has a bunch of black-clad dancers who are pretty decent. It was pretty generic hip-hop that said nothing about Ukraine. I could not have told you the country of origin with a gun to my head. I would have guessed Great Britain, maybe. Not terrible. 🫳

Norway 🇳🇴

This lady sings quite operatically, in English. She is alone on stage and repeats the chorus a lot. The beat is kind of generic dance music. Her costume looks straight out of a comic book. Backup dancers show up halfway through as the chorus is repeated several times. Girl power. 🫳

Germany 🇩🇪

Thrash metal band with elaborate and Hellraiser-style costumes. They’re singing in English, with the band spread over a pyramid behind the singer. The metal is a bit generic and they manage to water down the initial thrash chords—other than on the chorus. Everything is so audience-tested and sanded down. There’s no real energy, no authenticity. They look like they’re doing a Vegas show. 🫳

Lithuania 🇱🇹

Documented above. No change. 👎

Israel 🇮🇱

Like Poland and Sweden, Israel sent a generic-sounding model with a generic beat. She stands on stage alone, singing about unicorns in English. Some dancers show up. The dancing becomes increasingly aggressive. She yells at the audience “Do you want to see me dance?” then starts throwing herself around like she’s having a fit. I am mystified about the angry energy. 👎

Slovenia 🇸🇮

Documented above. No change. 👍

Croatia 🇭🇷

Five cross-dressing soldiers singing in what I assume is Croatian. They are definitely unique and fill the bill for being an ESC act, but the song is not very good. It is apparently an anti-war song, so I’m sympathetic. The Swiss moderator said something about being against dictators who exert their power against the world, but I can imagine they don’t mean any NATO nation. It’s not a good song, really. 👎

United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Porn-star vibe with four background dancers. Utterly generic europop beat and lyrics. She is, apparently, quite famous on TikTok and instagram. It doesn’t matter. This song is terrible. I don’t ever need to hear it again. I don’t know how people inflict this stuff on their ears voluntarily. I console myself with the explanation that men follow her because she fulfills their definition of hotness and children follow her because shiny. Her backup dancers are pretty good. 👎

The article Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News) described something I’d been only vaguely aware of.

“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”

Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the incredible multitude of stories .

Jesus, it’s one thing for a celebrity like Scarlett Johansson, but can you imagine if schoolteachers have to worry about their students viewing them through the lens of the hardcore pornography they’ve been faked into? The boys and girls pool their money and get Ms. Jenkins on her own highlight reel. An AI facilitates the whole operation.

Everyone knows that this can’t be stopped. They will try. They will shut down access for everyone, they will make up sweeping rules that are far too broad, that stifle reasonable expression and creativity. But they will try to stop this from happening—and it absolutely cannot, not without turning society into an authoritarian hellscape. And, even then, they will find a way, they will just have been criminalized for doing what they absolutely are going to find a way to do, which is to see Ms. Jenkins engaged in enthusiastic intercourse.

And you might say, well, Ms. Jenkins should have known what she was getting into because she’s a middle-school 8 or 9 and she became a teacher anyway. But this also means that anyone can make porn of anyone. Maybe if they have more video, it helps make it more convincing, but even if they only have a picture or two, have a look online to see how well they can make that picture match up to an animated face or the face in a video. People who don’t look too carefully will believe it. And someone will pay to make it because someone will think it’s hilarious.

““More and more people are targeted,” said Martin, who was targeted with deepfake sexual abuse herself. “We’ll actually hear a lot more victims of this who are ordinary people, everyday people, who are being targeted.””

Can you imagine a job interview where the interviewer has watched fake porn of the interviewee, but they would naturally have their opinion influenced despite knowing it’s fake. Porn is embarrassing, but can be explained away as too “ridiculous” to be true, but what about faking mugshots or arrests or trials? How long until there’s a service for people to torpedo rivals by generating FUD that HR will believe, or that HR AI will believe? Powerful tools. Completely irresponsible herd into which they’re being released.

““It’s not a porn site. It’s a predatory website that doesn’t rely on the consent of the people on the actual website,” Martin said about MrDeepFakes. “The fact that it’s even allowed to operate and is known is a complete indictment of every regulator in the space, of all law enforcement, of the entire system, that this is even allowed to exist.””

I understand the angry reaction, but I don’t think regulation can possibly stop this. I think people will have to get less sensitive and society has to be less trusting that all content is real. Maybe a Light of Other Days quantum leap is needed. We kind of have this already with ubiquitous public filming and facial recognition. We tried to avoid it, but the relentless march of authoritarianism coupled with purely-for-profit capitalism has created surveillance states everywhere that they can afford them.

Or maybe a de-pruding of society is needed, where nobody cares if you’ve done porn just like nobody cares if you’ve played softball.

“Martin successfully campaigned to outlaw nonconsensual deepfakes and image-based sexual abuse, but, she said, law enforcement and regulators are limited by jurisdiction, because the deepfakes can be made and published online from anywhere in the world.”

You won’t be able to stop this unfortunately. Only an ethical increase in the worldwide population would devalue this business model, whereby people would refuse to consume faked data, which obviously isn’t going to happen. Maybe we’ll get something like organic-content labels?

Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon by Nerdwriter (YouTube)

Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says

“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women, all being of one complexion, it’s likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population. This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s advertising—and the 80s in general—but that’s a topic for another video.”

What should Nagel have done instead? He was painting for a market. Even if that market would have wanted paintings of all sorts of complexions, is he a racist if he only paints white women? Is that the intimation? Does it matter what he likes to paint?

I never once drew a picture of a black woman growing up. Was I a racist child, then teenager? I drew a lot of women, none of them anything but white. I never drew an asian, nor black, not latina. Does that make me racist?

How much obligation does one have when creating artwork? Does it matter if you wouldn’t be able to sell it? Should you still have to create artwork that you neither want to create nor does anyone want to buy, just to be ethical and moral? What kind of logic is that?

And what if he had painted black women? Wouldn’t he have then been accused of commodifying them? Or trying to make them be slimmer than they naturally are? Or getting their hair wrong? Or culturally appropriating them somehow? Who does he think he is—a white man—drawing black women?

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, it seems.

Would you like to buy a used Mercedes with 558HP for only CHF130K?

This car was sitting on a tiny, used-car lot near our home. They usually have only 3-5 cars on offer, usually more high-end stuff. This was much, much higher-end than usual, but I’m sure it will be snatched up by some eager young man who needs 558HP to get around town.

Whenever I think that I can reach anybody with the power of my arguments and evidence, with my sophistry, with my charm ,.. I will now think of this guy.

If it has tits or tires, I can make it squeal

I received a request to interview for a job in wealth-management some time back. I’ve been responding to every request, just to be polite (recruiters are people, man), and usually I send a boilerplate text. Usually “the job sounds like it would be a great fit, but I’m not looking” is honest enough, but for this position, that wasn’t true. So I wrote the following instead,

Instead of just writing “No”, I’ll give you my reasons.

1. I am very happy with my current position.
2. I am not interested in working in wealth management. My personal philosophy is that I wish that such a thing didn’t exist and/or wasn’t so lucrative. I’m hoping that, maybe, as a job consultant, it would be good for you to hear feedback that these kinds of jobs aren’t appealing to all of us just because they might promise a lot of money. I’d rather apply my skills to something more useful, if possible. I currently have the luxury of sticking to that principle. If the wealth managers of the world succeed in their wealth-consolidation, then maybe I’ll have to consider working for them just to put bread on the table. Until then, though, I hope to avoid supporting them. 😒

I’ll let you know if anything changes in that regard. I very much appreciate the inquiry, though!

I actually heard back. The mail started with,

“Thanks so much for getting back to me, much appreciated!

“And thank you for describing your point of view! I totally understand, moreover, maybe I’d have the same opinion if I were you. The idea of being useful to the whole planet is something that has its own place in my heart.”

Recently, we’ve heard that Ukraine is getting a lot of weapons from all over the world, primarily from NATO. NATO weapons are industrial machines that have to be configured and maintained over time. They almost certainly leave some room for interpretation. They require training and experience to use efficiently and to be able to actually configure a working machine.

The instructions are in English.

If you don’t speak another language, then you probably assume, hey, sure, they speak English. But they don’t. They speak some English, but their reading comprehension probably isn’t great. It’s probably not all that great in Ukrainian. Think about the people you went to High School with: how many of them would be able to follow instructions in their mother tongue and get things right within a dozen tries? That’s why you have to practice for a long time to gain experience

I work in industry in Switzerland, a country that prides itself on being multilingual. Most people can speak two or three languages. But they can really only work well and efficiently and error-free in their mother tongue. If the instructions are not crystal clear, they will make mistakes. So, we write all of the instructions for the production floor in German, not the company language of English.

Mistakes are costly for us, but probably not nearly as costly as for Ukrainian soldiers.

The DevOps AnalemmaI received an invitation to interview for a DevOps position at a large, well-known Swiss firm that was very well-written and also happened to describe what I do at Uster Technologies quite well. As a few colleagues with whom I’ve spoken about what I do have said: “that sounds like much more than standard DevOps.”

My job certainly is more than what most people would consider to be standard DevOps—but I think that might be because most people think of the implementors of DevOps rather than the designers or architects of it. My role is very much about helping departments and teams figure out how they can integrate, benefit from, and leverage the services available from DevOps and the synergies they get from working more openly and more closely with other teams.

The Position Description

I’ve highlighted a few of the phrases that stuck out to me as especially relevant for what I do, but also perhaps not what people typically think of when they think of the DevOps role.

The perfect candidate

The position we are looking for is a DevOps Engineer with a deep understanding of CI/CD, automation, source control systems, packaging and deployments. […] The software in this area is written in C#/C++, therefore being able to read and understand code is needed. The candidate has to be communicative, engaged and shall be able to drive individual tasks to successful completion.

Tasks & Responsibilities

• Independent delivery of complex, broadly defined DevOps assignments Specification, planning, implementation, testing, and documentation of these assignments and drafting/definition of tasks for others
• Independent planning and implementation of complex internal and external sub-projects by involving several employees, or responsible for an area of technological activity
• Executes with high accountability to schedule and quality
• Participates actively in detailed design, code reviews, bug/issue triage, and supports well-informed decisions towards business and engineering goals
• Review expert for other project groups
• Internal and external knowledge transfer
• Defines overarching concepts for the entire product area
• Responsible for driving new technology inputs in the projects

Must Haves

• Min. Bachelor degree in Computer Sciences or similar
• Min. 5+ years of experience as DevOps Engineer, preferred in [a] regulated industry
• Hands-on experience of DevOps, CI/CD, automation (pipeline, infrastructure), source control systems, packaging and deployment
• Hands-on experience and strong knowledge of Docker and GIT
• C# experience from the last two years (recently)
• Experience in Microsoft Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, LxC and LxD / IaC, Linux experience (Debian or Ubuntu) and Debian packaging and Debian configuration management
• Fluency in English (spoken and written)
• Proactive personality
• Solution-oriented and ability to work in a team

The article The European Union Is Deliberately Leaving Migrants Abandoned at Sea recounts some horrifying behavior on the part of the people tasked with patrolling the EU borders, especially the southern maritime border in the Mediterranean. According to a surviving witness,

“[…] the waves were generated deliberately, thrown up by the maneuvering wake of a Greek coast guard boat at the borders of the European Union (EU). “They intended to kill us,” says Jeancy. Even in the most generous interpretation, the coast guards were indifferent to the deadly danger their actions posed to the men, women, children, and baby on board the dinghy. Jeancy recalls the guards watching in amusement as his friends drowned. Their laughter may have been the last thing he heard. The guards made no attempt to retrieve the body.”

The survivors were packed into a dinghy with nearly no maneuverability and basically left to die on the high seas. After having been abandoned by the Greeks (the EU), they were eventually rescued by Turkey.

It shouldn’t be surprising that this happens, of course. It’s far, far away from view.

Europe is an oasis of wealth amid a desert of inhospitable climates, of regions on which the scars of colonialism, far from having faded, still glow lividly.

The article Roaming Charges: Up in Smoke, Down in Mirrors by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) writes,

“Meanwhile, Bangladesh suffered its worst blackout in 8 years, when half of the country (nearly 100 million people) lost power. The country, like Pakistan and India, has been struggling to import enough LNG to keep its power plants running, after getting priced out by European nations.”

Small wonder that people want to flee wherever they live and go to Europe, a place whose propaganda about being a bastion of moral rectitude had well-preceded it. Not only that, but Europe is also the place that continues to “price out” nations on essential supplies, like food and energy. You can either get angry about it and try to get them to stop doing it—leaving your own country without food and electricity—or you can just accept that that’s how it’s going to be, and try to go live where the bounty of wealth is.

It’s piracy, pure and simple. You can call it the globalized market, if you like. You can pretend that it’s fair to have countries with vastly different buying power all competing for the same resources in the same market. But it’s not. The countries with the most buying power have that buying power because of all of the resources that they stole from those who have little buying power. This is the way of the world and so has it always been.

The U.S. mid-term elections are coming up next Tuesday, on November 8th. Of course it’s being called the most important election. The U.S. is more poorly run and broken each time there’s an election, but I’m not sure whether that makes each one more important because there’s more to fix or less important because it’s obvious that it doesn’t really matter who gets elected.

I’m not even going to bother naming any of the issues because this article is not about that. Instead, it was inspired by the post Vote for democracy (please!) by John Quiggin (Crooked Timber). That post is pretty short and includes the following plea,

“There is still a slim chance that this disaster can be staved off but, even if it isn’t, it will be a shameful memory to have abstained, or voted for a third party with no chance, in this last real election. That’s true whether the decision is out of laziness, hopelessness or a pseudo-left (in reality, aristocratic) view that both sides are equally bad. If you fall into one of these categories, (or if you actually want a Trumpist dictatorship), please don’t comment on this post, or interact with me in any way from now on.”

This dude is not even American. He’s Australian. His panties are bunched up so tight about anyone who disagrees with him about the futility of voting in America that he’s willing to just burn them all. You do you, John Quiggin, but Australia has more than enough problems of its own that you could focus on before you start castigating any American who doesn’t vote or votes wrong.

His use of the phrase “this last real election” means that the poor guy has probably been inundated with emails and tweets and other propaganda from the ruling party about the absolutely dire state of democracy. Sure, sure. I’ve heard it all before. It is absolutely breathtaking when, in a two-party system, one party declares that their loss would mean the end of the whole system. And people like this chump Quiggin swallow it hook, line, and sinker and then start yelling at all of their friends and readers.

Honestly? I would welcome an end to the system as it is now. It’s not been a democracy for a long time, if you’ve actually been paying attention. Citizens United was the nail in the coffin, but it was a long time coming. Quiggin’s just an Australian economist, a dilettante who dabbles in American politics and thinks he knows what’s actually going on. A vote for either party is a vote for the continued corporate rule. Neither one of the parties seems to believe that the populace can influence their power in any real way.

Not understanding what democracy is

He ended with,

“Everyone in the world will be affected by the end of American democracy, but the great majority of us have no vote. All we can do is appeal to those who do to make the right choice, as I am doing here.”

There is no right choice, you dipshit. That’s the problem. You’ve told us that we’re not allowed to hate both parties and we’re not allowed to even try to vote for a third party because we have to destroy democracy in order to save it [1] and because now’s not the time. It never is, is it? That’s how those two shitty, shitty, shitty parties remain in power.

Quiggin screams about “voting for democracy (please!)” then orders people how to vote. Because he’s not self-aware, he then accuses anyone with an alternate opinion of being “aristocratic”, a glorious hypocrisy and case of pot-calling-the-kettle-black at the same time. For good measure, he then tells everyone that in his democratic world, he’s not even willing to listen to anyone with a different opinion.

An Australian ordering Americans to vote a certain way in order to save democracy—NO DISCUSSION—is deliciously ironic. Even more so because “shut up. your opinion doesn’t matter. do what I say” is exactly the attitude that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s not going to work particularly well on anyone I know in America. It tends to make them vote the other way, really.

What did I do?

I decided not to vote in the midterms for the first time in as long as I can remember because I had the choice between an absolute criminal of a Democrat and two Republican idiots.

I decided that my vote wasn’t worth the price of a stamp from Switzerland.

I vote in New York State. I suppose Mr. Quiggin above simply cannot understand how I would be unable to bring myself to vote for Chuck Fucking Schumer.

What are the choices?

The country could go in two directions:

One is, possibly, toward a less-democratic future, but it remains to be seen if what the Republicans campaign on is what the Republicans do. They rarely have before. Instead, they’re more likely to increase corporatization of the state, which is quite a coincidence, considering their competition.

The other direction is whatever Chuck Schumer’s agenda is, which is the increased corporatization of the state. He campaigns on something completely different, like anti-racism and rainbows and sunshine—or, more recently, just anti-Republican—but he’s laser-like focused on helping the rich get richer. He always has been. I honestly don’t know how he’s not a Republican. He’s almost certainly delighted that Netanyahu is back in Israel. Also, he’d just love to start another war in Iran. And Taiwan.

But, yeah, Quiggin, you’re right. You, as an Australian, know better than any American how to handle this situation. You order everyone you know to vote Democrat or you’ll never speak to them again. It must be nice being your friend.

What could you do?

People of America: vote your hearts. Your (0ur) country has been fucked up for such a long time and has been going in the wrong direction for such a long time, that there’s really no saving it as it is currently constructed. The silver lining here is that you also can’t really make anything worse.

It’s honestly hard to imagine how incremental change would bring about the necessary course correction. Maybe a horrific intermezzo of Republican Ayatollahs is what it will take to wake people up. Who the fuck knows? I’ve been wrestling with that question for decades. I don’t have any simple answers, unlike Australian economics professors.

Not an hour after I posted this, I saw the article The Politicians Who Destroyed Our Democracy Want Us to Vote for Them to Save It by Chris Hedges (SubStack), which sums itself up as,

Whenever I see an article about Chinese tonality or stress, I usually think about whether it also applies to my mother tongue, English. [1]

The article The importance of stress in Chinese utterances by Victor Mair (Language Log) describes a “a single sentence of seven morphosyllables spoken in seven different ways according to what the speaker wishes to emphasize.”

“Wǒ méi shuō tā tōu wǒ qián.

“我沒說她偷我錢。

““I didn’t say that she stole my money”.”

The article lists all of the ways that you can change stress in Chinese and create a different meaning. He rewords the English sentence and indicates the stress word in English as well.

However, the stressing in English can be applied to the original sentence without changing it at all.

Read the sentences out loud or in your head with stress on the bold word. The first version is unstressed and neutral, simply expressing a single thought. The subsequent sentences prioritize a different meaning by stressing a word.

• I didn’t say that she stole my money.
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (someone else said it)
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (I indicated it some other way)
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (someone else stole my money)
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (she did something else with my money)
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (she stole someone else’s money)
• I didn’t say that she stole my money. (she stole something else)

Huh. Seven different meanings, all without changing a single letter.

The article Europe Commits Suicide-by-Sanctions by Ron Paul (Antiwar.com) contains a perfect example of the quality of reporting you get when someone reports on a country they know little about.

“According to the Swiss newspaper Blick, those who violate the 66 degree heating limit could face as many as three years in prison!”

The Blick is about as reliable as The New York Post: sometimes, but not nearly always. There is no prison sentence for heating your apartment.

He gets all wound up:

“Prison time for heating your home? In the “free” world? How is it possible in 2022, when Switzerland and the rest of the political west have achieved the greatest economic success in history, that the European continent faces a winter like something out of the dark ages?”

And we’re off to the races.

I can’t wait for my father-in-law to ask me about how many sweaters I’m wearing at home to avoid going to prison.

The video Intentionally knocking over water to impress friends shows a group of tween or teen girls assaulting a mascot at a theme park by dousing them with water. A friend sent it to me in a group chat. I wrote back:

I would have to work much harder than I’m willing to do right now to express my disdain for nearly everyone in that video. Those girls with their stupid phones in the air, each starring in their own movie, are just older versions of the 8- or 9-year-old kid I saw on the train yesterday, listening to a Japanese anime cartoon synchronized in German, without headphones, just on for the whole train to hear, slouched in his seat with a bag of chips open to his side, shoving a handful in every few seconds, loudly crunching and smacking, mouth never fully closing, oblivious to the world, oversized baseball cap crushed over greasy hair. Across from him sat a teen-aged version who was bent nearly double over his phone, watching a footie match. At least he had headphones in. My only solace was the wide smile and fervent head-nod I got from the African guy sitting across from me as I told my friend in a combination of English and Swiss-German about how scenes like that always bring the phrase and movie “Decline and Fall of Western Civilization” to mind. My wife would have defenestrated the little one without blinking an eye.

I sent the following quote to a friend:

She wrote back:

“Oooooo interesting.

“Don’t you think thistles are more useful than some people? 😁
🤣
Sorry, it’s Friday. I need another day to become human again.”

She’s a middle-school teacher. She lives in a war zone for five days a week. It makes her deeply cynical, nearly matching my own cynicism, but with much better reason.

I wrote back:

That a thistle is incapable of hypocrisy puts it insurmountably ahead in the race.

And don’t worry about your creeping (or surging?) cynicism. It’s just on the spectrum:

• optimism
• cynicism
• realism
• pessimism
• defeatism

Cynics are still willing to laugh about what realists cry about, and thus are more human. There’s nothing more human than gallows humor.

“I’ll take it!! 🤣🤣”

The less useful the media is for finding out the truth, the less likely it is to be censored.

I noticed that Trevor Noah gave the White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech this year. I only watched a minute of it, the portion that had been posted somewhere to demonstrate how amazing his support of journalism was. He spoke of how tough it was for journalists in Ukraine or Russia, where they are being persecuted and hounded for publishing unpleasant truths. This is unlike the States where you can publish whatever you want, even if it “makes people in power uncomfortable” What a load of hogwash.

On literally the same page, I saw that PayPal had canceled the accounts of MintPressNews and ConsortiumNews, two alternative news sources with high journalistic standards and excellent reporters. They canceled their ability to collect income without warning or explanation. [1] It is assumed that, because these sources don’t toe the established-media line on Ukrainian reporting, PayPal will no longer allow them to monetize their content through it. Presumably VISA/MasterCard will follow—or already have followed—suit.

Google also recently announced new rules demonetizing or canceling any channel that does not similarly toe the corporate-media/US State Department line on Ukraine. Unofficial sources are allowed to publish whatever they want—just not anywhere where someone might read or view it. They also have to be independently wealthy because income models available to those who toe the line are not available to those who do not.

What is Noah talking about? Is he not aware? Is he being disingenuous? Does he not realize that the only reason he doesn’t have to deal with that kind of crap is that he’s so mainstream and milquetoast in his views that he’s not only not dangerous, but actually useful to the State Department? Does he think he would have been giving that speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner if he were in any way controversial?

Chris Hedges had fled from one exploded platform to another. So has Abby Martin. So has Lee Camp. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are no longer welcome anywhere.

Julian Assange has been hounded nearly to death for his journalism. All of these people are acknowledged as being good journalists who generally ask the right questions.

What the fuck is Noah talking about?

According to the article, Verdi’s Macbeth at La Scala in Milan: The opera of the year—an inspirational experience for millions of viewers , the Opera is made for viewing via video:

“Even more significant is the fact that the director employed pioneering multimedia technology to bring the topicality of Verdi’s Macbeth to life and turn it into an inspiring experience for millions via cinema and television outlets.”

In fact, they claim that video is better:

“Only the “distant” audience is up close when Lady Macbeth celebrates her successful murder plot with a vulgar jig in a lift, or when she sneeringly looks down on those assembled at the bottom from a dizzy height. The audience at La Scala in Milan, on the other hand is restricted to what they can see from their seats.”

The whole show is available from Arte here, Giuseppe Verdi: Macbeth: Saisoneröffnung der Mailänder Scala (German and French).

Just the fast that this joke must resonate with a good portion of this site’s audience suggests to me that this actually happens. What kind of a person would actually do this? What kind of society would actually allow this?

Babylon Bee on Leafblowers

For reference, the building where I live here in Switzerland has had a grounds crew for the last couple of years. They do use leafblowers, unfortunately. They never start before 09:00 or 10:00 or so.
 

The article China: Xi’an residents in lockdown trade goods for food amid shortage by Robin Brant (BBC) suggests that the BBC’s standards are perhaps not what they used to be. I read through the article, but it contains nothing but unsourced conjecture and anecdotes. There’s “Social posts show”, “numerous complaints on social media”, and “One video showed a resident appearing to […]”

It’s not that I don’t believe that this is happening to at least some degree. Of course not. In a city of 13 million, anything and everything will happen. It’s that I would have hoped that the BBC would actually hunt down some leads instead of just publishing a bunch of conjecture from the Internet, where we all know that everything is fake until proven real.

The only source they’ve named is Radio Free Asia, which is laughable, as it’s a CIA cutout. It was built by the CIA and there are no signs that they are no longer associated with them. See this 45-year-old article in the NY Times called Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.. They didn’t really pull punches in 1977, I guess.

I’m more sad at how poorly written this BBC article is. For example,

“Netizens were also shocked by an unverified post that went viral on Monday. A Xi’an resident said their father had died after he suffered a heart attack and was turned away from a hospital due to the city’s Covid situation. The hospital has yet to respond.”

Netizens … which ones? Twitter? Or Weibo? Netzikens are always shocked. That’s their jam. “The hospital has yet to respond” to an unsourced and evidence-free allegation. That is not surprising, unless you’ve become accustomed to any entity having to “spin” its way out of crises manufactured by nigh-professional shit-stirrers online who’ll do anything to “get a rise” and pump their own numbers. I am not accusing this resident of having done that; I don’t even accept that the resident has to exist in order to manufacture this “quote”. I’m accusing those who run with it for clicks (e.g. the BBC).

Or look at this sentence:

“China has been wedded to this approach since the beginning because it’s likely the leaders from Xi Jinping down consider anything less would cause illness and death on a scale that would be politically, economically and socially unacceptable.”

That’s just an awful, nearly incomprehensible sentence. Commas, please! It seems to be trying very hard to make it seem like a policy of not allowing “illness and death” is a bad thing that is only politically motivated?

Or this one,

“There is a broad acceptance of this approach, and the stringent restrictions it can bring, among many Chinese who for decades have not felt they can rely much on the public health system. So illness and the prospect of losing your job, let alone your life, are existentially daunting.”

If you’ve going to use run-on sentences, at least use some commas, for God’s sake. Or put them in places that would be meaningful rather than scattered around like parsley flakes. Again with this sentence, it seems to be saying that the Chinese people never trusted their health-care system, but now they do? Or what? There is a “broad acceptance” of China’s COVID policy despite existential fear of the health system otherwise? I don’t get it. How is having a job tied to a public health system? Did the author confuse China and the U.S.? It’s all quite difficult to follow.

Hot takes are not a good thing for online discourse. They’re occasionally funny, but they tend to kill thought as people start to one-up each other with more hot takes. Or, even worse, “takedowns” of what were obviously meant as hot takes.

Is Anything on the Internet Real? by minutephysics (YouTube)

Listen first. Or read. Ingest.

Pause to think about what you’ve just read or heard. Try to sort out where it might go in your existing knowledge. Does it fit? No? Why not?

Try to imagine why the other person might have written or communicated the thought or information. What was their angle? Are they selling something?

Are they understandably confused? Have they possibly been brainwashed by omnipresent propaganda? Have you?

Are they really literally Hitler?

Pause some more. Let it settle.

Were you actually doing something else when this thing just jumped to the top of your priority queue? Don’t let it. Regain control of your time.

Don’t let yourself be dragged into something that literally wasn’t even on your radar seconds ago and is now the most important thing you have to do.

Hell, go for a walk. Do something else. Let your brain work on it.

Honestly, the Internet can wait. It doesn’t need your brilliant riposte or takedown right now.

Maybe not ever.

Do you need to respond? Do you need to plant your personal flag on every issue you come across?

Probably not.

Don’t be this person: Duty Calls (XKCD) There are already far too many of them.

Duty Calls: XKCD

Are people who say “this year sucked” necessarily spoiled and blind to their own privilege? Or are they extending their moral obligation to mean that, even though they personally benefitted, “this year sucked”—and that things will continue to suck—for a lot of other people?

The article ‘Wow, What A Terrible Year!’ Say People Living At The Absolute Peak Of Human Civilization (Babylon Bee) is intended as satire, but as with all satire, there is supposed to be an underlying truth to it. That’s what give satire its bite.

In one way, this take is kind of funny,

““2021 was just the worst,” said Marley Buchanan while sipping on organic chai tea and munching on fish tacos he had summoned to his house in only 15 minutes using a pocket-sized supercomputer. “It was just a horrible, horrible year. My anxiety disorder and depression have never been worse. I have to see my therapist 3 times a week now.” ”

One thing to note is that someone’s internal trauma is real to them. Psychosomatic effects are real to the people to which they’re happening. They may look ludicrously self-imposed to an outside observer, but saying that doesn’t make the problem magically go away for the other person.

“Suck it up, buttercup” is a perfectly appropriate response for a single instance, but when a large proportion of people seem dissatisfied or disappointed with a system, despite the system’s protestations about how awesome things are, then it’s time to take their complaints seriously.

Maybe it’s just a case of marketing, of people not being able to see how far the Overton Window has shifted on what they expect from life, but maybe its an intrinsic problem with society and how it functions on a base level (spoiler alert: it is).

“Studies have found that lifespans are longer, quality of life is better, infant mortality is lower, air travel is safer, war and violence is lower, and food is more delicious than at any time in mankind’s history. In spite of these and many other amazing facts, humans seem to be getting more miserable.”

It would be funnier if these things were actually true—because otherwise this kind of satire risks sliding into the same part of town as propaganda. It’s interesting how this citation comes from a satire article, but it could have just as well come from the official press release of an authoritarian state.

In reality, lifespans in the U.S. (and several other countries) are shorter for the first time in a very long time, infant mortality in the U.S. is shockingly bad relative to the amount of money that is poured into the health-care system there—and considering how many resources and how much wealth the U.S. arrogates from the rest of the world. It seems that we’re wasting it on … something? Perhaps the money-funnel that benefits the 1%?

War and violence is lower overall (I guess? Those numbers probably don’t include economic war), but there is still so much unnecessary war, especially waged by or supported by the U.S. It’s not that it’s not lower than in e.g. the 20th century, but that we shouldn’t break our arm patting ourselves on the back when we’ve basically done the bare minimum and it could be even more way lower if we would stop being such greedy assholes.

Those things are provably wrong, so the satire hat sits a little crooked, unfortunately. The suggestion is that people are provably whiny bastards if they’re not happy, but it’s actually perfectly reasonable to experience a feeling of malaise, to be uncomfortable with how things are going.

Hell, even just the phrase “fish tacos he had summoned to his house in only 15 minutes using a pocket-sized supercomputer” sounds superficially utopian, but it’s also a reminder that we’ve killed nearly all of the wild fish, that we have an economy that pushes an underclass into an underpaid army of the “self-employed” that spend each day every day running all over urban centers delivering bullshit no-one needs to their spoiled, overpaid overlords, and that pocket-sized supercomputer is totally amazing, but it’s only affordable because it’s built with slave labor and its essential materials are stolen from under the poorest nations on Earth.

We’ve obviously expended a tremendous amount of effort and money on things like COVID and haven’t got as much to show for it as the receipt would suggest. We’re not making any real progress on medium- and long-term planning for climate change. We’re still stirring up shit in places in the world where it’s wholly unnecessary. There seems to be a lot of wealth and productivity and value, but it all ends up in a very few select pockets.

You can really only be happy with how things are going if you’re blissfully ignorant of how it’s actually going. If you’re not dissatisfied, then you’re a dupe or a predator or both.

People with principles and moral fiber (as, ironically, would be expected of followers of a Christian satire web site) should definitely feel that we didn’t do very well at distributing the largesse of a successful society. That it seems that this largesse was created for a select few on the backs of others who do not benefit. That there’s a feeling that the way things are going is down the wrong path and, while things are still temporarily awesome for yourself, it’s not going to last. This could easily lead to a perfectly justified ennui that seems quite at odds with a superficial luxury.

The podcast WTF Happened in 2021? w/ Thomas Frank by Useful Idiots (Apple Podcasts) has the following summary, which would seem, at first, to fall into the “whining about how awesome things are” trap suggested by the satire article above. But, if you look at the description of the show, it suggests that it is basing its judgment on the ways in which we unnecessarily lost ground on several major and important issues. That is, it laments the time we wasted eating caviar on the deck of the Titanic.

“2021 was a shit show […] So what happened in 2021? Democrats and Republicans definitely both sucked. Covid got better and then a lot worse. Dems didn’t do the one thing to ensure they’d never lose another election. And politics turned from policy to pure culture war.

“We go through it all, why it happened, why it sucked, and what it means for 2022.”

It’s not enough for things to be superficially good. That is a distraction to keep you from examining whether the underlying system needs to change. It breeds complacency. So, while some people—maybe everyone you know, if you’re in the right class!—personally did well, it’s not at all spoiled or blind or privileged for them to still consider a year to have been bad for everyone else. It’s called empathy. It’s called foresight. It’s called thinking for yourself.

Hot off the presses of the conspiracy-theory pressure-cooker is the idea that the new movie Don’t Look Up—which is about a world that ignores the dire warnings of scientists about an incoming comet—is “predictive programming”. I suppose that means that it’s not just entertainment, but material intended to train people into acquiescence when something does arrive? Like aliens? The article Looks like that global UFO “attack” may be impending after all by Mark Crispin Miller (News from Underground) includes this quote from a reader,

“I am now officially: seriously impressed—by your prediction that aliens/space-based lunacy would be the Next Big Thing. [1]”

The letter goes on,

“But here it is, with timeline included: Home – NetflixThe movie “Don’t Look Up” [2] with a massive all-star cast, including headliner Leonardo DiCaprio, gives the predictive programming […]”

It is unclear why the writer chose to emphasize Leonardo, but it’s probably because he’s known as an eco-warrior? Because climate-change doesn’t exist? I’m not that far into the scene that I can discern every nuance.

At any rate, the author seems convinced that this entertainment movie is propaganda by the government to soften up the populace for continued subjugation and that it’s “conveniently timed to the midterm elections!”

Wait, what? Those elections are over 11 months away. How does that make this movie’s release “conveniently timed”? That’s the conspiracy mindset, though. Everything’s a sign, man.

I know that it seems like low-hanging fruit to engage this kind of stuff. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel to make it look silly. But it’s important to try to understand what makes these theories—and their promulgators—tick because we do have to live in a society together. We need to understand them and they need to understand us. We have to make our case to them just as much as they need to make their case to us. For that, we need communication. The first step is to listen to what they’re saying.

After 16 years working at Encodo Systems AG, I’m currently between jobs. I’ve been asked a few times, “what do you really want to do?”, to which I usually answer, “what don’t I want to do?”

There are a lot of things I’d like to do that I think would be useful, but for which I’m currently unqualified, or only non-officially qualified. I’m a fast learner, but sometimes that’s not enough. You have to be able to hit the ground running. There’s other stuff for which I’m eminently qualified and for which I have a lot of experience. I’ve heard about a few of those already. Irons in the fire.

Anyway, I usually answer that I’d like to do something useful, something where I can leverage my years of experience and technical expertise to really help a company develop a product or project, where what I can offer is what they’re missing, be it in an organizational, architectural, or programming capacity (or all of them). I think there’s a huge benefit to knowing why you’re building something—and then making sure that it does those things in an automated, repeatable way.

Optimally, I’d like to help save the world or at least make it a better place. I’m currently teaching at a local university, which is a decent start, I guess.

A few days ago, I stumbled across this comment on an article on Ars Technica by Tofleru:

“Currently, I’m a lead engineer on an aviation software project certifying to DO-178C DAL A. (Translation: if our code is buggy, we can lose an aircraft and its occupants.) We document, review, and verify all of our software design and implementation. We test the hell out of it, from high-level integration testing to low-level testing, while achieving 100% statement, branch, complex condition coverage (MCDC). We have 5-20 lines of test code per line of flight code. Expensive, but that’s what good life-critical SW costs!”

That sounds wonderful.

A friend recently sent me this meme to note that they’d missed it when it was still relevant. That got me thinking, naturally.

What word should we use to describe Rush? “Genius” is not inappropriate, is it? I mean, he didn’t just carve out a niche; he carved out an empire. He knew what some people wanted to hear and he figured out how to get more and more people to want to hear it. He knew how to sell it. It seems like his radio persona matched his private persona [1], so it’s not even clear that he was “acting” in order to advance his career and fortune (like many do). But I have no idea, really. Everything I know about Rush is what he told me through things he said in public or that he arranged for his vast media empire to tell me about him.

It’s really important not to forget how prepared our information and entertainment are. We tend to forget that people like Rush are in the acting business, the business of selling a “show”, not of detailing to us how they really are or what they really think—or how things really are. These people show a persona that they think will make money and/or will deliver the message they’re interested in sending, if they’re ideological at all. Some are in it just for the money. Most have at least a kernel of worldview that they want to impart, but not all.

Many big televangelists are like this—they don’t even really believe in God, they believe in Mammon. But friends and foes alike are convinced that they believe what they’re saying. David Koresh didn’t believe in his cult’s precepts; he just made them up because he wanted to sleep with a bunch of different women at once. Dave Chappelle wants America to stop beating on his people. Joe Rogan is more of a blank slate, I think, but probably free speech and legal drugs are his hobby horses.

Rachel Maddow is definitely following in Rush’s footsteps with her rage machine—it’s unclear whether she’s drunk her own Kool-Aid, though. It really seems like it—but maybe that’s part of the show, part of her genius. If her fans could tell she didn’t mean it, then she wouldn’t be as successful as she is. That’s how it for any of these people. You look like a crazed dingbat to your enemies because that’s what works the best. It’s the only way to truly convince your supporters. Those of us on the sidelines have no way of knowing the truth, one way or another.

Trump is another who follows this model and he has no clear agenda outside of “make Donald Trump popular and rich”. I just read a review of a biography of Viktor Orban [2] (leader of Hungary for the last 10 years) that indicates that Orban is pretty much a Hungarian Trump. Given that Orban showed up on the (political) scene first, that makes Trump an American Orban. Orban was better at it, though: he changed the constitution to basically institute a stranglehold for his party. Trump was never that ambitious or politically talented.

With their ability to generate success in this world, these people all geniuses by that definition. Our ideological enemies and allies alike, if we’re being honest. They don’t create anything of lasting value that will help humanity (in my opinion!), but they have certainly figured out the current system to such a degree that they can profit from it immensely.

Rush was kind of a pioneer of the “be loud and be heard” reality/fiction mode of information-dissemination/entertainment that has come to dominate nearly everything these days. I wish he hadn’t done that, but he wasn’t an idiot. And I wasn’t happy to hear he’d died. I just didn’t care one way of the other. I was happy to hear that Donald Rumsfeld died. He’d done real damage. He was in a position of power—for a long time—in a way that Rush really was not.

You could argue that people like Rush enabled Rumsfeld; without a good propagandist, a Rumsfeld is less effective, I guess. But Rush was no Goebbels—his focus was always laser-like on self-aggrandizement, not on anyone else’s agenda. He used their agenda where it served his primary purpose, but he wasn’t married to it. He could turn on a dime when it suited him. That’s all part of the show—sometimes there are continuity issues, but the geniuses forge on and make you forget all about them.

In an online conversation the other day, I wanted to use the word “gull” to describe someone who was easily fooled. The intended recipients had probably never heard that word used in that context, but they generally like to learn new words and usages. As I was wondering whether to use it, I suddenly wondered whether I’d remembered the term incorrectly and looked it up to double-check. I looked up sucker (Merriam Webster) and stumbled upon a delightful collection of synonyms for “sucker”:

“chump, dupe, gull, mug [chiefly British], patsy, pigeon, pushover, sap, soft touch, tool”

That was just the beginning, though. The related words went on for much longer than I could reasonably have expected:

“cat’s-paw, mark, target, victim, schlemiel (also shlemiel), butt, derision, laughingstock, mock, mockery, booby, dodo, fool, goose, half-wit, jackass, lunatic, monkey, nincompoop, ninny, nitwit, simp, simpleton, turkey, yo-yo, loser, blockhead, dolt, dope, dumbbell, dummy, dunce, idiot, imbecile, moron, schlub (also shlub) [slang], schlump [slang], schnook [slang]”

Wonderful.
 

I spotted this box of “lane Ground Biscuits” at the local grocer’s.

lane Ground Biscuits overpromises

It may, on the surface, look like a box containing a bag full of pre-crushed cookies. I assume that that’s what “ground biscuits” are. This box was on the shelf next to other boxes of “biscuits”, with a picture of what looked like…cookies.

So far, so good.

What the company that makes it thinks it is, is

“[…] all you need […] to free your imagination and to enjoy in infinite possibilities to be creative, to have fun and spend quality time with your family.”

The grammar [1] is not that great—it’s missing the Oxford comma, the infinitive before “spend”, and “enjoy in” sounds weird—but it’s so ebullient, so hopeful.

I quite enjoy imagining a people so enlightened that all they need for ultimate happiness is a box full of pre-made cookie crumbs. What a versatile, self-reliant, and imaginative folk they must. be. We are not them.

I read an article called on Matt Taibbi, Gogol, and Cancel Culture by Evgenia Kovda (Immigrants as a Weapon), which I’d gotten to because it’s actually Yasha Levine’s SubStack and his wife is sharing it with him. She wrote about Matt Taibbi,

“Makes one think about all this cancel culture outrage that you’re manically producing these days. You constantly write about how dangerous this new wave of censorship is to art and culture and speech and self-expression, and how stifling it is. But Gogol — your literary hero — proves the exact opposite of your argument: writers have been able to publish radical political novels while under heavy censorship.”

That’s the “art is suffering” argument, I guess? I’m almost certain that the point isn’t that we should stop complaining about censorship because Gogol managed to write sublime texts despite censorship—or is the argument that he was pushed to dizzying heights of sublime prose because of censorship? That it was the barrier of censorship that made him write the way he did? It’s possible, I suppose. I wonder how he would have written without censorship? Would his text have been banal and lazy, formulated in the first way that came to mind, rather than squeezed through several tortured filters designed to evade censors, transforming it into a diamond of wit and erudition?

Her riposte that “proves the exact opposite” doesn’t do that at all. It just shows that censorship isn’t total, which no-one is arguing. Perhaps Gogol could have written even better works if he hadn’t had to expend so much effort evading the censors. Perhaps there were hundreds of other Gogols lurking in Russia at the time who never wrote a word out of fear. That Gogol existed despite the censors doesn’t prove that censors … are good? I’m honestly not sure what the actual point was of the argument—other than Matt Taibbi is wrong and I’m the one to point it out to him.

She even writes that she started off writing a private mail to him, but then thought it more important for her brilliant takedown be published publicly. Perhaps she did it for the same reason Taibbi published his musings: they both need to feed the content beast—at least a little bit—because they have subscribers now. Content that would, in the past, have gone unpublished—or reconsidered—is thrown out as a first draft for the world to see. This, in order to keep up “engagement” and online presence. Far better to let it sit for a day or two or a week and see if you still feel that virulently about it.

I’m not certain why Evgenia has such an axe to grind with Matt Taibbi—she writes at the beginning that she signed up for his newsletter. But she immediately accuses him of “manically producing” his topics—which has, to my ear, negative connotations—instead of, say, “passionately pursuing”, which is, if nothing else, neutral. She calls him “a bourgeois armchair journalist”, which is plainly inaccurate, considering how many decades of his career he spent actually on the road being a journalist. If you’ve read his books, he spends a seemingly inordinate time in courtrooms and not in an armchair.

He may be bourgeois, but that’s just a snarky way of saying “middle class”, which most of us are—or wish we were, if only for the financial security and accompanying peace of mind. Unless she meant one of the other definitions, like “marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity” or “dominated by commercial and industrial interests”, neither of which is, in any way, an accurate description of Matt Taibbi. Bourgeois seems to be a casual and evidence-free smear. even if you choose the most generous definition.

This constant oneupmanship between people who have no reason to be in opposition to one another is tedious—it’s as if they think that the online audience is a zero-sum game or that there is some way of “winning” the act of writing. It seems there is no place in amateur online critique for empathy or trying to gently help one another. There is only “darn the torpedos” and “in for the kill”. It’s a weird and off-putting way of doing things and can’t be very pleasant for anyone involved.

Instead of two people who clearly love Gogol coming together, to the initial plaudit “I really like Gogol for these reasons!”, the riposte is “everything you know about Gogol is wrong and it’s unlikely you’ve even read him in the correct language and, if you have, you misunderstood him to a degree where lobotomization can be the only explanation and you are so bad at writing about these things that you should never try again.”

To recap: she subscribed to Taibbi, but doesn’t want to read about “cancel culture” or his literary pretensions. Does she think that a blog is like a restaurant? That you can just order what you want? Don’t people just write about what comes naturally to them? I know I do, to a large degree. I have projects that I’d like to work on—and I do, when the mood takes me—but mostly my writing consists of screeds inspired by something I’d just read (like this ever-growing essay). But this level of complaining is like subscribing to Glenn Greenwald and then immediately telling him to stop writing in run-on sentences.

I imagine that Matt is the same—and he has a subscriber base to which to cater. When he’s planning on writing something he considers to be salient to the feed, but gets distracted by thoughts of Gogol, then why not just write about Gogol? Perhaps it inspires someone to actually read Gogol—even if, in Evgenia’s opinion, they would be doing so for all the wrong reasons—which would be a nigh-miracle in this age of tweets and clickbait. I don’t think of a SubStack as a newspaper—not really—but more as a blog, where a writer writes. It’s going to be a mixed bag.

Instead of writing “nice try, but…”, she went with a brutal takedown that seems to think that Matt is not only a traitor to everything worth believing in, but also a terrible writer who barely understands anything he reads. Why this scorched-earth approach? Is there no room for actually considering a writer’s oeuvre and not assuming the worst? Not assuming that they’ve capitulated 25 years of writing? Perhaps to assume that you might have missed something? Or that they had a bad day?

I can’t say whether Evgenia is more authoritative than Matt. She makes it sound like it, but that’s the intent of a know-it-all—not to learn or even to impart knowledge, but to do an end-zone dance. There is information in her essay that I found interesting, but you have to look past the tone and past all of the parts that are clambering over the corpse of an unnecessarily slain “enemy” in order to get to it. Writing and discussion really shouldn’t be like Highlander

I came to that website because I’m a long-time fan of Yasha Levine’s writing (Evgenia is, I think, his wife) and I’d just listened to an interview with him on the Moderate Rebels podcast. He’d made some excellent points (and some more-rambling, hand-waving ones about how the app Signal is compromised because “your phone can still be hacked”, but, hey, it was a long interview and he couldn’t go into detail about everything), so I came here to see what else he’s writing. The top of his SubStack is this essay by his wife and birth announcements and, when the first comment on his wife’s screed against Matt Taibbi’s literary pretensions—a rare deviation from his journalistic output—reads as follows: “I’m so… disappointed, I guess, with the direction Matt seems to have taken. Professionally and personally. Meh.”, Levine “liked” it.

The tone, so far, is pretty bitchy and kind of “king of the mountain”. I don’t defend everything Taibbi writes, but it’s kind of a “glass houses” moment when the guy who writes about nothing but government secrets and infiltration into all ways of life (Levine) thinks that the guy who writes about censorship and the class war in books like The Divide or I Can’t Breathe is too obsessed with censorship. It’s a mystery how Yasha and Evgenia manage to produce the distinct impression that there is no common ground between them and Taibbi. I suppose this is how “the man” always manages to drag us down: it’s just way too easy to get clear allies squabbling amongst themselves.

The second comment, by Boris Petrov, expresses the same sentiments I’ve expressed here, though he goes so far as to posit that this tension is due to “a bit of envy to Matt’s success, recognition and his wide span of topics”.

I wouldn’t pretend to know what the reason is, but it’s a shame nonetheless, that this sort of purity test and jostling for position has to occur among what should otherwise be allies, if not friends. Maybe our culture has been broken by the Internet and its latest excrescence “social media” to the point where people really can’t help themselves anymore. It’s nice to see someone like “Boris Petrov” is able to make a balanced and diplomatic plea for sanity.

Maybe Evgenia had a bad day and just had to dump on someone. That’s too bad, but it’s also out there now. Taibbi wrote an essay about a favorite writer of his (which, as a subscriber, I found to be a nice departure from his other work) and she wrote back to tell him that he likes the writer for all the wrong reasons and should himself probably stop writing altogether. Considering he’d done nothing to shoot across anyone else’s bow, it’s hard to see how she’s justified in torpedoing him for that.

The following article explains how I personally organize, consume, and produce information.

Writing Process

I get information from carefully selected sources, combining more narrowly defined streams without the help of an algorithm—or at least not a single one. I defer reading, viewing, and listening—preferring to determine the order that I consume content rather than letting fate decide.

I will sometimes read or watch something immediately—and even then, only if it’s short—but almost always spike it for later, so I can continue doing what I was doing.

I find that pretty much anything can wait. I’m almost always way “behind” (no hot takes), but neither do I have to worry too much about having reacted too quickly and regretted something I’ve written.

I use Tools to obtain Inputs and generate Outputs. Each of these is detailed in its own section below.

I generate content as follows:

1. Add articles to Instapaper
2. Read some immediately, citing and annotating in Apple Notes or starting article drafts on earthli News
3. Download weekly list of unread articles to Kindle
4. Read articles on Kindle, highlighting and annotating
5. Mark articles as Liked and Archived on Instapaper (Instapaper Likes are automatically posted to Twitter)
6. Copy highlights/annotations to Notes on earthli News
7. Start article drafts on earthli News with other content
8. Publish articles on earthli News (also automatically posted to Twitter)

The further down the list I get, the more time I invest in writing and copy-editing.

• A “like” on Instapaper shows up for people who’ve subscribed to the newsfeed or are following me on Twitter, but there’s no context about why I liked it or what I liked about it.
• I just started the Notes as a way to add context without a huge time investment on my part. [1]
• Articles, as ever, require more time and inspiration.

Tools

I use the following tools to retrieve and manage content.

NetNewsWire for Mac

A fast and easy-to-use news reader; I’ve used it for years and years.

Apple Podcasts

This product was spun off from iTunes a few years ago. It’s a decent podcast player with few frills, but it does what it needs to.

Apple Notes

This product is included with MacOS and tracks formatted notes with cloud synchronization.

Amazon Kindle PaperWhite

An E-Reader with highlighting and note-taking functions. I can transfer highlights and notes as a simple text file.

Project Gutenberg

A source of free E-Books for out-of-copyright, older material.

New York Public Library

A source of more current E-Books.

Instapaper

An online tool with browser plugins to which you can add articles to read later. It strips the articles down to the text and can also send “newsletters” to a Kindle.

Inputs

At the beginning of the chain are inputs. I prefer textual input, but I listen to videos and podcasts as well, occasionally transcribing passages I find interesting.

Newsfeeds

The largest amount of information comes from Newsfeeds (RSS and Atom; I don’t really care). I use NetNewsWire for MacOS. I read some right away, but mostly go through them quickly, adding articles to Instapaper.

Hacker News

A tech-heavy web site with a pretty decent algorithm for choosing relevant and interesting articles for the home page. I scan the short home page once per day for a couple of minutes.

Reddit

A news/social-media web site on which I’ve built a few multi-reddits that yield some interesting stuff, but I use it more for fun than research. Lately, the quality of content has dropped, so I use it much less. A couple of minutes per day.

Podcasts

I listen to some podcasts regularly and sometimes transcribe information for articles. I much prefer reading, but there’s lots to learn in long-form interviews.

YouTube

I rely on YouTube nearly exclusively for videos and have a subscription (it came with Google Play Music). I use the main Watch Later list a lot, moving longer videos to custom “Watch Later” lists for Public Policy/Philsophy, Tech, and Music. I sometimes transcribe information for articles.

Books

I read books with no real agenda, going from non-fiction to fiction and back as I please. I have a bunch of wishlists at both the New York Public Library and Amazon, though I prefer to loan digital works from a library than to buy them. Once I’ve read a book, I don’t really need it anymore (mostly because I track citations in Book Reviews).

Outputs

From all of these inputs, I publish to various outputs, ranging from automated lists and feeds to self-authored articles.

This is a hobby; my main interest is to organize information for my future self. Therefore, the publishing schedule isn’t very predictable. I’ve included approximations for the different types of content.

earthli News

earthli is my personal web site, where I publish my blog “earthli News”.

Notes

Citations and quick annotations on articles I’ve read. One per week.

Articles

In-depth essays on various topics, usually including citations from articles, podcasts, or videos. At least one per month.

Movies / Series Reviews

Synopses/impressions of movies or series I’ve watched. I’ll generally collect 10 movies/series reviews per article, so usually about 12 per year.

Book Reviews

Citations and synopses/impressions of books I’ve read; I’ll generally have one article per book and then a big wrap-up article per year. Usually about 24 per year.

Instapaper

• Liked: A running list of all article I’ve liked. Several per week.
• Archived: A running list of all article I’ve read. Several per week.

Twitter

My Twitter consists nearly solely of auto-posted content from my Instapaper Likes and earthli News articles. Several per week.

YouTube

The following are public playlists to which I occasionally save links to videos. Anyone with a YouTube account can subscribe to these.

• Fellow Agitators: Public Policy, generally left-leaning.
• Encodo Suggestions: Technology and Programming, originally created for co-workers at Encodo Systems AG.

The presentation in this video is both unorthodox and well-produced; the information is top-notch and interesting. It discusses justice not as found in courts, but as found online, where it is meted out by the self-nominated and righteous.

Justice (Part 1) by ContraPoints (YouTube)

From the video above,

“I’m not going to comment because I don’t want to be canceled for seeming to take a neutral stance on an issue on which I’m supposed to take sides.”

Speaking of which, I’d only recently discovered ContraPoints when I watched “Canceling”, which was published 9 months ago, before the recent wave of blowback against doxing and brigading people with whom you disagree. Unreasonable and ignorant people band together to ruin the lives of people by making them lose their jobs and positions. It kind of goes in the same direction as the most recent video above. It is is also very interesting, well-produced, and thoughful.

Canceling by ContraPoints (YouTube)

For the second time in a year, Joe Rogan interviews Edward Snowden for about three hours. The last time, Snowden was promoting his book Permanent Record; this time, he’s here to drop more knowledge about the U.S. and the world work—just in time for the election. The interview is well-worth the time.

Joe Rogan Experience #1536 − Edward Snowden (YouTube)

The U.S. Department Of Justice had also very recently found that the NSA had acted illegally. This does not exonerate Snowden from the crimes with which he’s accused, but does prove that when he revealed his information, he was revealing evidence of crimes.

Snowden discusses the security state at great length, especially as related to COVID-19 tracing and tracking and lockdowns. He also addresses the possibility of a pardon.

He does admit that he would dearly love to go back to America, but that, even with a pardon, he wouldn’t be safe. Even were he to get a pardon, he would have to legally admit to the crimes with which he’d been charged in order to accept it. It is unclear that he would do so. He is watching very carefully what is happening with poor Julian Assange—and what has already happened to other whistleblowers like Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning, both of whom he fervently hopes get pardons before him.

Snowden is extremely eloquent, expressing himself carefully and well, with impeccable logic. He sees and can convincingly describe connections between topics and policies that others consider disparate. He is prolix to the extreme and Joe gives him a very long leash. Joe comports himself quite well, asking interesting questions and clearly enjoying providing a huge platform to a man who he clearly admires for his intellect and as a hero.

Snowden takes part from Moscow, naturally, where he lives with his wife Lindsey Mills.

The article The Post-Objectivity Era by Matt Taibbi (SubStack) is based on the transcript of a speech he gave. [1] It is an excellent summary of both the history of U.S. media and its current business model.

The basic thrust is that the media has always been in it for the money. There is no golden age of principled objectivity to which to return, in that sense. The news was more objective in olden days, but only because it made more sense to be that way. The media catered to the broadest possible audience for two reasons:

1. The technology and data weren’t yet available to enable them to target audiences more precisely
2. Until 1987, the Fairness Doctrine required balance on public airwaves

After 1987, the Reagan administration released the media’s id and it could finally make a ton of money appealing to the lowest common denominator of market segments. As with any other entertainment, it took some “preparation” of those markets—with advertising and messaging that amount to brainwashing—but the markets were very amenable to having everything boiled down to a satisfying “us vs. them” basis.

It’s just easier that way, isn’t it? And who has the time and energy for anything more complicated?

The conservative media dove much more quickly into this business model—but that was only because the liberal media had some trouble finding reliable bait with which to enrage its own audience. There were a few ideas here and there, but nothing with the staying power to build a powerful, slavering cult as the right side of the aisle had.

That all changed in 2015 when Trump hit the campaign trail.

“Media companies figured out that all they had to do to secure high ratings was wave Trump at people all day long.”

With Trump, the news media emerged from its chrysalis, transformed to what is essentially the WWE—with just as much veracity.

“What’s happened since 2016 is the news landscape has split into news for people who love Trump, and people who hate him.

“The world as represented in news programs is now almost exactly Crossfire. We only see two ideas. These ideas are shown to be in constant combat. There is no pretense of a hope for cooperation or accommodation. (Emphasis added.)”

The final sentence is the crux: there is no hope of reconciliation because neither side offers a reasonable way out for the other side. (A) there are only two sides and (B) each side views the other as irredeemably evil.

This, of course, has a strong effect on people working in the industry, some of whom would have principles, but all of whom have to pay rent. When rent is due, the landlord doesn’t take payment in principle. With media in this state, though, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it attracts employees who know which side their bread is buttered on.

This affects not only the employees, but very much the businesses themselves.

“If you work at Fox, you’re not going to do a climate change or police abuse story. You will do a story about corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If you work at MSNBC, you won’t do a story about problems with NAFTA, or Barack Obama’s drone program.

“This sounds obvious, but most people think this is a matter of politics. It is that in some cases, but it’s also very much about money. Once a company has established an editorial approach, and a political tone, departing from that approach will cost it audience, and lots and lots of money – billions in some cases – as well.”

Understood in this way, the media has painted itself into a corner from which it cannot escape in any meaningful sense—at least under a purely capitalist model. The only escape would be a state-supported media model as we have in Switzerland or the British have with the BBC. There will still be bias, but decoupling the profit imperative from journalism is, at least, a potential escape valve from the worst ravages of it.

Taibbi writes that, as it stands,

“Audiences are completely siloed. A Pew study that just came out showed that of the people who say Fox is their primary news source, 93% describe themselves as Republicans. For MSNBC, the number is 95% Democrats. The New York Times is 91% Democrats. Even NPR is now 87% Democrats.”

That means that most Americans rarely, if ever, hear anything approaching an opposing point of view. They only ever hear information that they a-priori agree with. This is catastrophic and engenders an unthinking, uncritical herd mentality rather than anything approaching individual opinions.

This also makes things so much easier for media companies. Because they have ensured that audience opinion is more-or-less uniform, they no longer run the risk of alienating anyone who matters to their bottom line. In fact, pissing off “the other side” is red meat for its loyal viewers and costs it nothing.

To ensure loyalty and to continue to titillate, though, media companies travel further along the axis they’ve chosen for their audience, ending up at the near-lunatic extremism we have in the U.S. today.

The media landscape in the States,

“[…] creates an enormous risk of the tail wagging the dog. News companies make more money if they pick stories they know will get you upset, and avoid the ones that are confusing to you. They will make sure they wind you up as much as they can not just every day, but every minute. This can be very damaging to your mental health, to say nothing of what it does to society.”

Not only is it unhealthy for the media companies, but news dissemination does exactly the opposite of a what a functioning republic needs for it to do: inform the citizenry. Not only is the citizenry uninformed, it is misinformed—with no heed for how damaging that is for those people.

People end up recklessly endangering their health in a pandemic and actively support measures that impoverish their own neighborhoods, endanger their livelihoods, and destabilize their own lives. They support ideas that make them insecure—financially, if nothing else—and blame the other side for their woe.

This self-destruction among so many citizens is a side-effect of the media wanting to make money. The wealthy wield the media as a weapon to keep the peons in line. They never see the misery they cause, while directly profiting from it.

Taibbi wraps things up with,

“The news is not a public service. First and foremost, it’s a consumer product, like cigarettes or Twinkies. And because we’ve learned that division sells, it can be bad for you, and addicting, in the same way other consumer products can be. We worry about the food we put in our bellies, the air we breathe into our lungs. It’s time to worry about what we put in our brains as well.”

The mainstream media in the U.S. is not serving any useful societal function; it’s a cult.

COVID-19 has made mail-in voting more relevant than ever for US elections. In other countries, this would not be an issue, as mail-in voting doesn’t pose any particular technical, organizational, or bureaucratic hassles or threaten to lead to widespread disenfranchisement. Those are normal countries, like Switzerland, where a majority of the population votes by mail about five times per year.

The US is different: even the simplest tasks become difficult for a nation afraid to commit to spending time or money on anything but elites. The excellent reporting of Greg Palast is the gold standard for electoral malfeasance in the US, a job he’s been doing diligently since before the miscarriage of justice that was the 2000 US presidential election debacle decision, after which he really got down to work. A frequent collaborator of Palast’s, cartoonist Ted Rall (also an excellent author and chronicler of injustice in his own right), recently published Mail-in Balloting, the 12th Amendment and Impending Doom, which summarizes the situation as follows,

“[With a] 16-fold increase [of mail-in ballots] over 2016, [t]he real issue is that the ballots may not be counted on time, triggering the insanity of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“The date to remember is December 14th, when the delegations of the Electoral College meet in their respective states. […] Each delegation can only certify their state’s vote counts if they are 100% complete […] If the state fails to certify on time, its electoral college votes aren’t counted.”

If no candidate gets the required 270 electoral votes, then the 12th Amendment stipulates that the Congress selects the president and the Senate selects the vice president. They must select from the available candidates. The relevant text is

“The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”

The Republicans control the Senate—and are overwhelmingly expected to continue doing so—and will select Trump. The Vice President continues to be irrelevant. It is unlikely that even a strongly oppositional Vice President could influence the President unduly (e.g. by breaking ties in Senate votes). Mitch McConnell will continue to prevent any votes of relevance coming before the Senate in the first place.

Voting in the US is already rife with undemocratic practices, from long lines to closed voting centers to unconstitutional poll taxes and identity checks and throwing people off of the voting rolls. Though mail-in voting avoids some of these problems, it’s hard to feel that the envelope will find its destination and actually be counted.

Actual Mail-in Voting

I’d recently gotten an email from the elections board in Queens (where I’d last declared residence in the States before I moved to Switzerland) with instructions on how to get my “electronic ballot”, which seemed promising. What this meant was that, were I to succeed in identifying myself, I would be able to download PDFs for the ballot and the envelopes.

Envelope OrigamiEnvelope Template

As shown above, the “electronic” mail-in ballots include a PDF for the envelope as well as instructions for performing the origami required to protect this vessel of democracy on its journey across the ocean to NYC. I’d done this a couple of years back and the construction feels pretty shaky—not least because all of the templates are fitted for the LTR format, a paper size found only in the US. These are mail-in ballots meant for people around the world, who have no access to LTR-sized paper.

Happily, a real-life, pre-printed ballot and envelope arrived in the mail today, so I was able to fill out my absolutely ginormous ballot without any printing or origami. The ballot is a long sheet of paper in several of the most-common native languages of Queens: English, Spanish, Chinese, and Bengali.

The paper is quite grandiose considering I am able to choose a presidential candidate—from Donald Trump/Mike Pence (Republican), Joe Biden/Kamala Harris (Democrat), Howie Hawkins/Angela Nicole Walker (Green), and Jo Jorgenson/Jeremy Cohen (Libertarian)—and a single Congressional seat (Grace Meng vs. Thomas Zmich).

Despite it looking foolproof, they still, somehow, managed to make the super-simple instructions conflict with the actual ballot. The instructions, shown below, say to “[m]ark the oval to the left of the name […]”

Instructions

The ballot, though, includes a single oval above the names of the candidates. The oval is to the left of the column, but not to the left of the “nombre de su selección”.

List of presidential candidates

The mailing envelope, shown below, includes “US postage paid”—even though they’re sending these materials all over the world. Presumably, if you’re in the military, whatever base you happen to be on counts as “U.S. Mail” [1], but I had to pay CHF2.- to mail in my ballot.

Mailing envelope

On a final note, from the article above,

“Mail-in ballots are manually opened and signatures must be visually compared, sometimes several times, to Board of Election records.”

It is nearly inconceivable that whatever signature the Board of Election has on record for me—from almost 20 years ago—matches the deteriorated scrawl that my signature has become in an age where I hardly ever pick up a pen.

Still, were my vote to actually make it across the ocean, arrive in Queens by November 3rd (or postmarked before the election and arriving within ten days of election day), actually be opened and counted—they reserve the right to leave absentee ballots uncounted if the result is already “clear” [2]—and were my signature to match whatever they have on file, my vote will be counted in a state (New York) where the result is a foregone conclusion: Joe Biden will win New York State’s electoral votes.

The following is a sample of the response I’ve composed to respond to the increasing numbers of solicitations to advertise on my site that I’ve been receiving of late. I’d ignored them at first, but many followed up, so I felt bad and responded. Two replied immediately and thanked me for taking the time to respond [1] and to wish me well in my future endeavors.

The extra bit about Opera was my helpful tip that the link she’d wanted me to include in my web site contained mostly incorrect information about the browser that I’d written about in the article she’d referenced.

According to What is the origin of the saying “six feet under”,

“The phrase “6 feet under” originated in London, England in 1665. It came about as London was being ravaged by the Bubonic Plague. […]
The mayor of London at the time issued a decree that all plague deaths had to be buried at least “6 feet under” to help halt the spread of infection.”

355 years later, another plague has made the expression “six feet” au courant, at least in those countries still using the imperial system of measurement. Even the nerdy 6-Foot Zone by Randall Munroe (XKCD) does it.

That’s six hours of quarantine time for 1000 pieces. We still have more puzzles of the same size, plus a pretty big lego kit (10242 − Creator: Mini Cooper).

The airline Swiss needs to work on tact in its e-mails. Or they need to work on their QA process.

Instead of a boarding pass, they sent the following mail in response to a check-in attempt.

“Your boarding pass(es) could not be issued because necessary data is missing or because the immigration status does not allow boarding.

“Please note that it is your responsibility to hold all necessary immigration documents for this international trip. Click here to enter or amend your data and receive your boarding pass.

“Alternatively, use our check-in options at the airport instead.

“We wish you a pleasant flight!

“Swiss International Air Lines”

It’s a pretty scary mail if you read it through completely. Instead of being issued a boarding pass for a ticket you thought you’d paid and registered for, you’re being accused of trying to enter the U.S. illegally.

If you’ve already entered all of your information, then you can’t imagine how clicking the link would help. Instead, it sounds much more like the increasingly capricious US immigration process has thrown a monkey wrench into the works. At the very least, Swiss is distancing itself from your shady behavior.

The passive-aggressive “We wish you a pleasant flight!” after telling you that your “immigration status does not allow boarding” is the icing on the cake. Or there’s the helpful advice to “[a]lternatively, use our check-in options at the airport instead”.

So, Swiss is backpedaling like crazy from having anything to do with you and will gladly sell you to the U.S. customs authorities, but go ahead and travel to the airport physically even though your “immigration status does not allow boarding” and it’s just your time they’re wasting, right?

This was clearly a software error. The use case was not properly handled or planned for. My guess is that the system “forgot” that my friend is an American citizen and does not need an ESTA, checked for an did not find an ESTA and then sent that mail instead. It all makes sense to the simplistic logic of Swiss’s systems.

After panicking for a bit (the flight was the next day), my friend was able to re-request a boarding pass half an hour later and everything worked. This is not funny. We have to pay better attention to software systems that affect so many people. There are no repercussions for companies that cut corners like this (other than the vague “workings of the market”).

When you have a country that becomes increasingly restrictive and unpredictable, you should, as an airline, make sure not to unreasonably unsettle your customers.

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote Dear Netflix: Have some respect for your content and your viewers, begging for Netflix to add a setting for adults, one that doesn’t auto-play trailers and content all the time.

Nothing has changed. The UI is still intensely eager to auto-play videos and trailers. It’s an incredibly hyperactive UI, almost afraid that if it stops making noise, it will die.

If you’re using the Samsung TV app, there is almost no way to have Netflix stay silent. The only way is to turn off auto-play and to watch at least one episode of something. Then—and only then—will you be allowed to choose when to start watching the next thing.

When you startNetflix, it will auto-play whatever it has auto-selected for you—usually a new show of theirs that you have not yet had a chance to express disinterest in—within seconds.

If you move the cursor somewhere else, it starts playing that next show, if you’ve already seen some of it.

If you haven’t seen the show, it aggressively plays the trailer. But it doesn’t even hide the chrome all around, showing the trailer with a bunch of text on top. It’s a complete disrespect for the content—it’s like it doesn’t even matter what it looks like, as long as something is playing. As long as something is making noise to drown out the engulfing silence of being alone with your thoughts—or lack thereof.

There is no way to “cue up” content and start it when you like. Netflix always wants to play your content immediately and doesn’t care if you need to go to the bathroom or get a drink or whatever. You have to wait until the content has started and then pause it. Or you have to wait until the unpausable stuff finishes and then pause it.

I’ve resorted to hitting the “back” button on the remote control to make Netflix ask me if I’m sure I want to quit. At least then the modal dialog acts as a sock in its mouth to keep Netflix’s fucking mouth shut.

And speaking of trailers: guess what happens if you’ve watched the 11th of 13 shows in season 3 of Jessica Jones and then you leave the cursor on Jessica Jones?

You guessed it—motherfucking Netflix starts playing the season 3 trailer for you.

Why? On what planet does that make any sense? I’m already watching the show. I don’t need to be enticed into watching it with a trailer.

They just always have to be making noise.

I don’t use the mobile version, but I know that the desktop-website version is also very interested in playing videos. At least in the Samsung TV app, when you click a show, it shows you the details first and waits a few seconds before playing content.

In the web site, all but 5% of the glyph for a show—the little arrow at the bottom, completely outside of the area condoned by Fitt’s Law—starts playing the show immediately. You have to aim carefully if you want to select the show and just add it to your list instead of starting it immediately like the ADHD content-addicted primate that you are.

A lifetime ago, I knew a guy named Chris Jannuzzi. I worked with him at Logicat. I wrote software; he wrote content; we worked together. He was in a band. He was a musician. He might still be. [1] I learned a lot about music from him, his deep love for James Brown and his band, for example. I first heard of Vince Guaraldi from him. Gained an appreciation for vodka gimlets, on the other.

He gave me a song, once, that he and his band had written and recorded in the pretty amazing studio that he had in his basement in his home on Long Island. I don’t know anybody else in the band, other than “Todd”, of whom Jannuzzi told many ripping yarns. Todd was the drummer, a confirmed stoner and an all-around bon vivant and accidental philosopher.

The song is on many of my favorite-song lists, as well as on those of my wife. It’s really good. It’s called “Sea Hag”.

Hello sailor, hello sailor, c’mon and wave your flag. C’mon and dance with, make romance with, a thousand-year–old sea hag.

She was born
when the Earth was young
and solid crusts
were far and few

Scrapin’ barnacles off of
some sea captain’s hull
That’s how her salty
sea-hag legend grew

Hello sailor
Hello sailor
C’mon and wave your flag.
C’mon and dance with,
make romance with,
a thousand-year–old sea hag.

Ponce de Leon,
Captain Hook,
and Columbus
all knew her worth.

On the deck dreamin’
Collectin’ seaman
all over God’s salty Earth

Hello sailor
Hello sailor
C’mon and wave your flag.
C’mon and dance with,
make romance with,
a thousand-year–old sea hag.

Bridge/solo/laughing

Hello sailor
Hello sailor
C’mon and wave your flag.
C’mon and dance with,
make romance with,
a thousand-year–old sea hag.

Hello sailor
Hello sailor
C’mon and wave your flag.
C’mon and dance with,
make romance with,
a thousand-year–old sea hag.

Thousand-year–old sea hag.

I have assiduously followed the writings of Uri Avnery for what feels to me like a long time now—at least 15 years. Those fifteen years were but the coda to Avnery’s extremely long and productive and honorable life. He was an Israeli peace activist with a wicked pen—right up until his death in August of 2018 at 94 years of age. He will be missed.

I include below two encomiums/elegies/obituaries from two other writers whose writings and reporting I respect deeply, Jeffrey St. Clair (editor of CounterPunch magazine and eminently reliable source of information for U.S. domestic environmental policy and politics ) and Robert Fisk (longtime correspondent for the Independent and eminently reliable source of informations for all things related to the Middle East, where he has lived in Lebanon for many decades).

A Mighty Voice for Peace Has Gone Silent: Uri Avnery, 1923-2018 by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Avnery, who was one of the first Israelis to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, was 94. He lived a sprawling life. He was born in Germany in 1923 and his family fled to British Palestine a few months after Hitler came to power. As a young man, he dispersed leaflets for the Irgun, a terrorist Zionist organization, and it haunted him for most of his life. Avnery would later play chess with Yasser Arafat and become one of the PLO’s most ardent Israeli defenders.”

Uri Avnery: One of My Few Heroes in the Middle East by Robert Fisk (CounterPunch)

“It was somehow fitting that first news of Uri Avnery’s plight should reach me from one of Israel’s staunchest enemies, the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. One legend sending sad news of another, you see, a socialist preparing to mourn a fellow socialist, sending his sympathy for the 94-year-old Israeli political philosopher. That same philosopher was once a German Jewish schoolboy, originally called Helmut Ostermann, who refused to give the Hitler salute at school, but who was, when I received Jumblatt’s message – still, just – “an indispensable mind to understand the history of fascism, a major destructive element of the 20th century”. Jumblatt’s words. Avnery, he added, also understood “the history of Zionism, another despicable apartheid theory that is an offshoot of fascism”.”

“I must admit that Uri Avnery was one of my Middle East heroes – there aren’t many – and his story is worthy of a movie, though there will be no Spielbergs to direct it: writer, journalist, leftist, veteran of the Israeli army in the country’s War of Independence – and, as he never forgot, the same war which drove 750,000 Palestinians from their home and lands.”

The following two citations are from Avnery himself, included by Fisk in his article.

“[citing Avnery]: I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism.”

“[Again, citing Avnery]: You are presuming you know what they [Netanyahu’s government] want and you presume they want peace – and therefore that their policy is stupid or insane. But if you assume they don’t give a damn for peace but want a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, then what they are doing makes sense up to a point.”

Finally, I dug back through my as-yet unpublished notes to find some I’d taken from Avnery’s missives from the last couple of years, just to give an idea of what I liked about his writings. I found notes from 2006–2018.

Who’s the dog? Who’s the tail? by Uri Avnery (ZMag)

Two Nights and a Dragon by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“The authors do not call into question the Lobby’s legitimacy. On the contrary, they show that hundreds of lobbies of this kind play an essential role in the American democratic system. The gun and the medical lobbies, for example, are also very powerful political forces. But the pro-Israel lobby has grown out of all proportion. It has unparalleled political power. It can silence all criticism of Israel in Congress and the media, bring about the political demise of anyone who dares to break the taboo, prevent any action that does not conform to the will of the Israeli government.”

“That year, during Black September, I held a press conference in Washington DC, under the auspices of the Quakers. It seemed to be a huge success. The journalists came straight from a press conference with Prime Minister Golda Meir, and showered me with questions. Almost all the important media were represented – TV networks, radio, the major newspapers. After the planned hour was up, they would not let me go and kept me talking for another hour and a half. But the next day, not a single word appeared in any of the media. Thirty-one years later, in October 2001 I held a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, and exactly the same thing happened: many of the media were there, they held me for another hour – and not a word, not a single word, was published.”

A very astute reporter of foreign affairs—in particular, those of Israel and Palestine—discusses Obama in Two Americas by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch).

“The great message of Obama is Obama himself. A person who has roots in three continents (and another half: Hawaii). A person whose education spans the wide world. A person who can see reality from the viewpoints of America, Africa and Asia. A person who is both black and white. A new kind of American, an American of the 21st Century.”

This is lovely prose, but, as with many other Obama supporters, one gets the feeling that more is being said by the supporter than by the supportee—the utopic views expressed so lovingly cannot be provably extrapolated from Obama’s actual, stated policy. However, in the same breath Avnery acknowledges this and justifies it better than any other, to date:

“I am not as naïve as I sound. I realize that in his speeches there is more enthusiasm than content. We can’t know what he will do once elected president. President Obama may disappoint us. But I prefer to take a risk with a man like this than to know in advance what the two routine politicians, his competitors, will do.”

This is an excellent statement of support, which is wholly realistic and accomodating of America’s very limited political spectrum.

Israel in Deadly Denial by Uri Avnery (Rootless Cosmopolitan):

“All this matter of “recognition” is nonsense, a pretext for avoiding a dialogue. We do not need “recognition” from anybody. When the United States started a dialogue with Vietnam, it did not demand to be recognized as an Anglo-Saxon, Christian and capitalist state.”

How Many Divisions? by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com) talks about propaganda in the case of the ongoing attack on Gaza.

“The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.”

“Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war.”

“Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.

“If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

“What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

“In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the state of Israel.”

Ship of Fools 2 by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“The Israeli government rules Washington, D.C., more firmly than ever. The new Congress is even more loyal to Israel than the old one, if that is possible. Just now, the outgoing House unanimously passed a resolution objecting to the declaration of Palestinian statehood. After his resounding defeat in the midterm elections, Obama must start to think about the presidential election in two years’ time. It’s difficult to imagine that in these two years he would dare to provoke the mighty Israel lobby, which can now rely not only on the Jewish organizations and the millions of evangelical Christians, but also on the people of the Tea Party (many of whom are anti-Semites like Nixon, as revealed in the tapes: he despised the Jews and admired the Israelis).

“Obama can say what he wants: in a real test he will have to veto any Security Council resolution which is distasteful to the Israeli government. He will have no choice. And he will also supply Israel with all the airplanes it desires – and more.”

As put so nicely in the article, Bin Laden Is Dead, but What About His Ideas? by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“A new Caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist, were it not for its opponents: the Americans. They needed this dream—or nightmare—more than the Muslims themselves.

“The American Empire always needs an antagonist to keep it together and focus its energies. This has to be a worldwide enemy, a sinister advocate of an evil philosophy.

“[…]

“American freedoms have to be restricted; the U.S. military machine grows by leaps and bounds. Power-hungry intellectuals babble about the Clash of Civilizations and sell their souls for instant celebrity.

“To produce the lurid paint for such a twisted picture of reality, religious Islamic groups are all thrown into the same pot—the Taliban in Afghanistan, the ayatollahs in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Indonesian separatists, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere, whoever. All become al-Qaeda, despite the fact that each has a totally different agenda, focused on its own country, while bin Laden aims to abolish all Muslim states and create one Holy Islamic Empire. Details, details.”

A Putsch Against War by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“For eight years, longer than most of his predecessors, Dagan led the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, comparable to the British MI6.[…] And here, after leaving office, he speaks out in the harshest terms against the government’s plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. Not mincing words, he said: “This is the stupidest idea I have heard in my life.””

“This week he was overshadowed by the recently relieved chief of the Shin Bet [Yuval Diskin]. (Shin Bet and Shabak are different ways of pronouncing the initials of the official Hebrew name “General Security Service.”) It is equivalent to the British MI5, but deals mostly with the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

“According to Diskin – and who would know better? – Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran is leading to a world-wide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, but, on the contrary, it will hasten this effort, this time with the support of the world community.

“Going further than Dagan, he stated that the only factor preventing peace negotiations with the Palestinians is Netanyahu himself. Israel can make peace with Mahmoud Abbas at any time, and missing this historic opportunity will bring disaster upon Israel.”

The New Mandela by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“For some time now, the world has lost much of its interest in Palestine. Everything looks quiet. Netanyahu has succeeded in deflecting world attention from Palestine to Iran. But in this country, nothing is ever static. While it seems that nothing is happening, settlements are growing incessantly, and so is the deep resentment of the Palestinians who see this happening before their eyes.”

Contrast to how Pakistan was treated when it was (illegally) created a nuclear weapon.

A Bird’s-Eye View by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“The settlers assert that not a single settlement has been set up without secret government consent. And indeed, all the “unlawful” settlements have been connected at once to the water and electricity grids, special new roads have been built for them, and the army has rushed to defend them — indeed the Israel Defense Forces have long ago become the Settlements Defense Forces. Lawyers and shysters galore have been employed to expropriate huge tracts of Palestinian land.”

Another Superfluous War by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“Was there an alternative? Obviously, the situation along the Gaza Strip had become intolerable. One cannot send an entire population to the shelters every two or three weeks. Except hitting Hamas on the head, what can you do?

“A lot.

“First of all, you can abstain from “reacting”. Just cut the chain.”

A Lady With a Smile by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“It would cut the ties between the Israeli state and more than 20% of its citizens. Some Israelis may dream of evicting the Arabs altogether from the historical country – all six million of them in Israel proper, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – but that is a pipedream. The world in which this was once possible does not exist any more.”

Trump and Israel’s Anti-Semitic Zionists by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“True, he is sending a rabid Jewish-American ultra-right Zionist as his ambassador to Tel Aviv (or to Jerusalem, we shall see.) A person so right-wing that he makes Netanyahu himself almost look like a leftist. But at the same time Trump has appointed as his closest assistant a radical white racist with full anti-Semitic credentials. Perhaps, as some believe, it depends entirely on Trump’s moods. Who knows what his mood will be on the morning of the first important UN vote on Israel? Will he be Trump the Zionist or Trump the anti-Semite? Actually, he can be both. No problem, really. The avowed aim of Zionism is to ingather all the Jews in the world in the Jewish State. The avowed aim of the anti-Semites is to expel the Jews from all their countries. Both sides want the same. No conflict.”

So tongue in cheek. Keep on truckin’, Uri!

Syria: Cui Bono? by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“[the] day before, Trump was despised by half the American people, including most of the media. Just by launching a few missiles, he has won general admiration as a forceful and wise leader. What does that say about the American people, and about humanity in general?”

Yes, Israel Can Accept the Right of Return by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, there were in the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan about 1.2 million Arabs and 635,000 Jews. By the end of the war that ensued, some 700,000 Arabs had fled and/or were driven out. It was a war of what was (later) called “ethnic cleansing”. Few Arabs were left in the territory conquered by Jewish arms, but it should be remembered that no Jews at all were left in the territory conquered by Arab arms. Fortunately for our side, the Arabs succeeded in occupying only small slices of land inhabited by Jews (such as the Etzion bloc, East Jerusalem et al.), while our side conquered large, inhabited territories.”

Who is the Vassal? Israel, the US and Iran by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)

“The US is still far from war with Iran but we are not. Perhaps we are already in it, without believing it. These days – or should I say, these nights – our brave boys fly over Syria and bomb Iranian army installations there. Until this minute, the Iranians have not reacted, except for a feeble attempt that was quickly answered by a massive Israeli air strike.”

The Brainwashing of the Israelis by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“How is this done? It’s quite simple, really: one has to suppress all other voices. One has to make sure that the citizen hears only one voice. One that repeats a few messages over and over, endlessly. This way the lie becomes truth. In such a situation, the ordinary citizen becomes convinced that the official line is really their own personal opinion. This is an unconscious process. When one tells a citizen that they are brainwashed, they are deeply insulted.”

“The use of these terms, hundreds of times every day, clearly constitute brainwashing, without the citizens noticing it. They are getting used to the fact that all Gazans are terrorists, mekhablim. This is a process of dehumanization, the creation of Untermenschen in the Nazi lexicon. Their killing is allowed, even desirable.”

“There is in the country a tiny band of commentators who are not afraid to tell the truth, even when this is considered treason. Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and a few others. We must ensure that their voice is heard. They must be encouraged.”

Israelis Just Keep Killing People, Stealing Land by Uri Avnery (Antiwar.com)

“It has been said that a clever person is able to extricate himself from a trap into which a wise person would not have fallen in the first place. Stupid people do not extricate themselves. They are not even aware of the trap.”

I watched a brace of pretty rewarding videos from the Oxford Union.

Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union (YouTube)

Yanis talks about the Euro: “It’s like taking the shock absorbers out of your car and then driving into a pothole. […] This is designer idiocy.”

He talks about RussiaGate:

“In the United States, you have the ridiculous situation where the Democratic party is going to the people and saying ‘you were duped by Putin. Putin stole the election through Facebook.’

“My goodness! I mean, what an insult!

“To people who … by the way, most of those people who voted for Trump, had voted for Obama in 2008 … how can you say that to them they are racist and that they were duped by Putin.

“I mean, did Putin try to influence the election of the United States? I’m sure he did. But I did, too.

“I did. I really did. I did my best to influence the election…and failed spectacularly.

“And Putin had, I’m sure, about the same impact that I had.”

When asked about his days as finance minister, he reminds the crowd that Greece was not without leverage:

“You see, if you own your bank £1000, then you’re in trouble. If you our the bank £320 million, then they’re in trouble.”

Another question was from someone asking what will happen if the Euro fails.

“What’s going to happen if Europe now, if the Euro—no matter how terrible it may be—dissolves.

“Well, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. There’s going to be a tectonic shift that divides Europe down the river Rhine and across the Alps. What will happen is Germany will re-create the Deutschmark and Austria, Holland, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltics… they will join the Deutschmark zone. They’re not going to create their own currencies. They’re too integrated with German heavy industry. Volkswagen, IG, Krupp and so on.

“That chunk of Europe— Northeast Europe, Calvinist Europe, call it what you want—is going to have a gigantic current-accounts surplus in relation to the rest of the world. So that means that Deutschmark is going to go through the roof […] That will mean…exports will fall and there will be a substantial increase in unemployment in Germany, Poland and other countries. So, you’re going to have falling prices because the price of the currency goes up—deflation—with unemployment, in Germany. Not good. The only people who will benefit from that situation are the AfD and the various folks who are thinking of the 1930s with glee.

“The rest of Europe. What’s going to happen? The currencies in the rest of Europe will depreciate, which will create inflationary pressures. And you’re going to have a combination of inflation and unemployment in France, Italy, Spain and so on. Is this a Europe we want to live in?”

His summary tells of the greatest myth that people believe about the Eurocrisis. If we continue to swallow it, there’s no way out.

“One of the greatest tragedies of the Eurocrisis is that it was portrayed as a clash between and Greece, between the Netherlands and Italy, between North and South. This is analytically false and politically toxic. In my view, what happened was, is that the grasshoppers of the North—the bankers, like Deutschebank—and the grasshoppers of the South—the Greek oligarchy and the Italian oligarchy—binded together before the crisis to create a gigantic bubble. The bubble burst. Then they gathered together to shift all the pain to the German hardworking people, to the Greek hardworking people and portrayed it as a North/South divide and a North/South clash. We need to overcome this.”

Thomas Piketty

Prof Thomas Piketty | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union (YouTube)

This is a very interesting and wide-ranging talk. One of the first questions is from some genius who thinks it’s productive to explain the difference between correlation and causation to Thomas Piketty. That woman/girl was a perfect example of the Dunning Krueger Effect and the arrogance of unearned confidence in one package. Piketty gave a good answer, which is more than she deserved.

He said many interesting things, but I haven’t gone back to transcribe any of them. Sue me.

Slavoj Žižek

Professor Žižek | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union (YouTube)

Žižek told several jokes, as is his wont. As usual, his jokes highlight the topics he wanted to discuss.

He is a philosopher who many would call a contrarian. I think the reason that he generally sees things differently than others is due to (A) his being extremely widely and well-read and being able to provide a context to topics that others don’t have, as well as an ability to see similarities in topics and themes that are not evident to others and (B) most people not being able to even follow along with (A) and assuming that, because of his dirty jokes and his multitudinous tics that he’s just a showboat preening for attention. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you read any of his books and truly understand it, you’ll be the better for it. To me, his reasoning is clear as a bell. Perhaps that makes me mad, as well.

Here’s his first joke:

“A group of Jews in a synagogue publicly are admitting their nullity in the eyes of God.

“First, a rabbi stands up and says:

““O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!”

“After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest:

““O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!”

“After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims:

““O God, I am nothing.”

“The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn:

““What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!””

Here’s another joke:

“It’s a very cruel joke and I discovered with wonder and respect that there is a whole tradition of Jewish jokes about Auschwitz. Not making fun of it, but drawing out the paradoxes.

“There is something very deep in this. […] For tragedy to take place, it must happen within certain limits, where the victim maintains his dignity—you know, the tragic victim. When things get really terrifying, a mote of comedy has to enter, which is not comedy where you have to laugh, but horrifying comedy (i.e. gallows humor).

“In Paradise, some Jews who’d been killed at Auschwitz were talking about how they’d been killed. One says to the other,

““Do you remember, Jacob, when they dragged you to the death chamber, you slipped on something and died even before you entered the gas chamber?”

““Oh, yeah, that was so funny!”

“Then God, taking a break, walks by them, listens to their jokes and says:

““Sorry guys, I just don’t get it.”

“[digression explaining background of joke for the young audience [1]]

“One of the Jews goes to God, embraces him in a patronizing way and says,

““Don’t worry, our Lord, you weren’t there, so, of course, you don’t understand.”

“You know what’s the beauty: it’s not that God cannot understand the horror. He can. He’s all-powerful. He cannot understand it’s possible to make a joke out of it. God doesn’t get the joke.”

And what a world it is that we live in, when Slavoj answers the question of what he thinks of the Gilets Jaunes with almost the same wording as Pamela Anderson. Watch the video to see his answer (I don’t feel like transcribing any more), but Anderson’s answer is from Pamela Anderson on Europe’s Turmoil: an Interview with Pamela Anderson and Srecko Horvat by David Broder (Jacobin)

“I agree with Srecko. As I said, when I was commenting on the gilets jaunes, the real question is whether the disobedience can be constructive, what comes the day after: can the progressives in France, and all over the world, use this energy so that instead of violence we see equal and egalitarian societies being built?”

It’s a funny world.

In the article From Bizarre Rage Against James Joyce to MI5 Phone-Bugging: Why I Collect Snippets of Strangers’ Conversations by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch), the illustrious journalist takes a break from writing about the tragedies arising from near-constant, western meddling in the Middle East to relate more uplifting stories on this first day of 2019.

Near the end, there’s a bit that—to my admittedly tinhorn American ears—is one of the most British things I’ve ever read:

“Earlier this month we went for a drink and a meal to the wonderful Shipwright’s Arms, one of Kent’s most attractive pubs, which is located in the Ham marshes between Oare and Faversham, just below a dyke which protects it from the waters of the Swale estuary. We sat down in front of a blazing fire, got a glass of mulled wine […]”

I have no further point other than that that sounds perfectly lovely.

As in so many other lines of business, the online pornography world has seen a tremendous amount of consolidation in recent years. The company MindGeek was founded 14 years ago. as Mansef, a portmanteau of the owner’s names. It has since acquired nearly every significant online pornographic presence: Playboy, YouPorn, RedTube, PornHub and more. They’ve not only cornered the market in free, online pornographic video, but also hoovered up most of the classic producers and distributors, like Digital Playground, Hustler, Vivid Video, Brazzers and more. They are almost certainly a monopoly. Doubtless there are those who have a “favorite” site—but the content all comes from the same distribution company and from the same servers, tailored for different tastes in presentation.

The only report I could find about distribution and numbers was Vampire Porn by David Auerbach on October 23, 2014 (Slate). The “vampire” refers to the fact that they cannibalize their own content by having one arm of the company produce content whose price is killed instantly by it being uploaded online for free by another arm of the company.

“[…] industry workers have been in the difficult situation of seeing their work pirated on sites owned by the same company that pays them—imagine if Warner Brothers also owned the Pirate Bay. The way Siri puts it, it’s as though Walmart drove mom-and-pop stores out of business “and then to top it off, went into the mom-and-pop shops and literally stole all of their products to be resold at Walmart.” It’s a tough time to be a mom-and-pop porn shop.”

Here’s a reading list I put together for a couple of friends, for when it’s dark and cold and boring:

• An old man with a good head on his shoulders tells us how to fix Congress in First Step Post-Election – Open Up the Closed, Secretive Congress by Ralph Nader (CounterPunch).
• Meagan Day interviews Kristin Ghodsee about her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. They talk about life under socialist regimes (DDR lässt grüssen) made men and women both more comfortable and try harder to be good people (i.e. trophy wives couldn’t just be bought) in No Scrubs by Kristin Ghodsee (Jacobin) [1]
• The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing us that plastics are garbage: The plastic backlash: what’s behind our sudden rage – and will it make a difference? by Stephen Buranyi (The Guardian)
• Speaking of tricks. Ricky Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist/genius, has died. Here’s a lovely biographical piece from the New Yorker (1993): Secrets of the Magus by Mark Singer (New Yorker). It’s worth it for the nicely related anecdotes about Jay’s feats. [2]
• And, finally, there’s a long and sobering article on the loss of about 80% of our insect biomass over the last 40 years, The Insect Apocalypse Is Here by Brooke Jarvis (New York Times Magazine). Dontworryaboutitwerefine. [3]

This is another public-service announcement. [1]

I’m a bit of a fanatic about hyphens. Hyphens aren’t really that difficult in English.

With Adverbs

I was recently asked whether an adjective following an adverb needs to be hyphenated. For example, does “This is a fully qualified sentence.” need a hyphen?

It does not. But almost everything else does.

According to the article Adverbs and Hyphens by Maeve Maddox (Daily Writing Tips), the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style agree:

“When a compound modifier–two or more words that express a single concept–precedes a noun, use hyphens to link all the words in the compound except the adverb very and all adverbs that end in -ly.”

Compound Adjectives

Furthermore, I tend to agree with the AP Style, which writes that “[c]ompound adjectives beginning with “well” are hyphenated no matter where they are in the sentence.” The Chicago Manual of Style thinks that “[w]hen such compounds follow the noun they modify, hyphenation is usually unnecessary, even for adjectival compounds that are hyphenated in Webster’s”, which I consider to be blasphemy. If it’s defined in the dictionary, it seems quite arrogant for a style guide to leave hyphenation up to the author and/or editor. They helpfully note that it’s “usually unnecessary”, meaning that the reader will often be able to figure out what’s going on from context, so go ahead and put the burden on the reader. Oxford (American version) muddies the waters even more by opining that the hyphen is required when the adjective comes before the noun but not when it comes after. Madness.

Compound, compound adjectives

Additionally, if you have multiple hyphens, you can emphasize the secondary one (or ones) by using an n-dash rather than a hyphen.

For example, the phrase “a red-jewel–encrusted dagger” needs two hyphens. The n-dash is between “jewel” and “encrusted”.

If you don’t use hyphens at all, you leave the reader swimming in a sea of confusion. They will probably have to take multiple runs at your sentence in order to make sense of it.

• A red-jewel–encrusted dagger (definitely a dagger encrusted with red jewels)
• A red-jewel encrusted dagger (probably a dagger encrusted with red jewels)
• A red, jewel-encrusted dagger (a red dagger encrusted with jewels)
• A red jewel encrusted dagger (an unreadable pileup of words)

Non-hyphenated words [2]

Where things get a bit murkier is when you have two words that form a single word, but have done so for a long time. Eventually, the words agglutinate without a hyphen. For example, the world “hellbent” is written without a hyphen, but it’s unclear why. There are also a lot of words starting with the syllable “re” (redistribution, recycling, etc.) that don’t take a hyphen. When in doubt, look it up in a dictionary. I do it all the time. We have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips [3] and our spelling and grammar is getting worse and worse.

Coda

Two more things:

• The past tense of “lead” is spelled “led”, not “lead”.
• It’s either “whence” or “from where”, It’s never “from whence”, which is redundant.

The book store at the Zürich Airport has a decidedly more diverse assortment of literature than I would have expected. I just expected a ton of Clive Cussler and John Grishman and John LeCarré, but I was pleasantly surprised.

On the first couple of shelves, I noticed three Chomsky books and a Varoufakis [1] book.

Another shelf held Naomi Klein, Chomsky and Varoufakis:

On another shelf, Laurie Penny showed up and, once again, Varoufakis.

Ishiguro’s classic and Arundhati Roy’s latest were on another shelf. I even saw her book on the German shelves, as well. [2]

If I was ever stuck in this airport, I could rest easy that I would find something interesting to read.

The following is composed largely of links, citations and notes that I make on almost everything I read. I’ve expanded my notes slightly and cleaned them up for public consumption. Instead of letting these notes moulder in an unpublished draft (as I’ve done many times), I’ve put together a format that I think might be useful for readers but that doesn’t take as much time as individual articles on each topic would.

Mobiles are Huxley’s Soma

tl;dr: I’m trying out a new format that lets me publish more regularly and that better fits my time constraints.

A friend of mine sent me this video depicting the tragedy of our modern age in the style of early 20-century cartoons. The title’s in German, but there’s no text to understand.

The Warped Lens of Identitarianism

What is happening with the Baffler? They seem to have been invaded by lesser writing talents of late, pushing a considerably different agenda than erstwhile authors like Thomas Frank.

The article The Never-ending Story by Anne Elizabeth Moore (The Baffler) starts off well enough, asking whether we will be able to actually address the giant problem of which Harvey Weinstein’s alleged actions are just a symptom, then goes on to indict anyone and everyone who’s ever worked with him and anyone who would be willing to watch any movie made by his production company, now that we know those movies were produced by a(n alleged) monster. For example

“All this would be egregious enough were it only a labor concern, but the influence of Miramax and the Weinstein Company as media entities must be accounted for, and the cultural products they released reviewed in the context in which they were created. How are we to parse the nuanced gender dynamics of films like Pulp Fiction (1994) and Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) now that we know they were brewed in a cauldron of sexualized violence?”

We absolutely don’t have to parse those movies any differently. That’s a stupid thing to think. You are wasting everyone’s time with such investigations. There are several other avenues more important to pursue. She continues,

“The laughable travails of a woman whose boss takes credit for her labor in Working Girl (1988) makes more sense in a industry that granted virtually no serious power to women; the unacknowledgeable intelligence of the sex worker at the heart of Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (produced by Miramax in 1995) is also, suddenly, explicable (as is the continued ability of Allen to work in the industry).”

Are you trying to say we all just found out about sexism? This lens she’s using through which to view everything distorts too much. Weinstein has been “prosecuted” in the sense that the industry has ejected him now that it no longer has anything to gain from him. I don’t really care about Harvey Weinstein, but I do care about justice. And justice doesn’t just include Weinstein’s alleged victims getting their day in court, but also Weinstein not getting smeared unfairly. Or Woody Allen, though it’s a bit unclear which smear the author is going for, exactly.

“But Weinstein’s legacy—decades of films in which his politics became embedded in our lives—has yet to perish. Here’s hoping I’m proven wrong when I loft this prediction, too: It never will.”

Nor should it be. Why should they? He didn’t make these movies alone. He was barely involved in the creative side of it. Why punish everyone involved in those movies with such a scorched-earth policy? Ah, because that’s how people think justice works near the end of the second decade of the 21st century. What makes us unhappy must be eradicated not only from our vision, but from history. Anyone who does not comply is a thought criminal.

Moving right along to the next article is The Hannah Arendt Center’s Dark Thinking by John Ganz (The Baffler), which writes about German politics,

“In January, AfD state leader in Thuringia Björn Höcke called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which is flanked by Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, a “monument of shame.””

But that’s exactly what it was meant to be, isn’t it? Calling it what it is can hardly be deemed anti-Semitic. Part of its purpose is to remind Germans of what they did—the definition of shame. I can see several reasons for condemning what AfD member think and say, but it’s utterly uninteresting to have to defend them when others take a scorched-earth policy to absolutely every statement they’ve ever made. This is similar to the way that people still pile on absolutely every statement that Trump makes—as if his stupid ones are still particularly interesting as additional evidence of his inadequacy for the office and as if his more salient ones are stupid when they’re not.

While the Baffler seems to be stumbling of late (in my opinion), the article The Weinstein Empire: Extreme as Normal by Barbara Nimri Aziz (CounterPunch) addresses the same issue in a more interesting and historical context, starting off with the following citation,

This is an excellent point to make, especially in light of the Baffler articles above: many people live in a bubble and don’t realize what the rest of the world is doing. That’s not to say that they’re wrong, in principle, but that their tactics are doomed to failure. Aziz offers the following much-more-useful advice for making something lasting out of the Weinstein revelations (even if nothing official ever comes out of it).

“What might help reform the entrenched misogyny that’s been exposed in the Weinstein scandal is this: explore how and why we– young men as well as women– are attracted to power; why our self esteem depends so much on our beauty, being gazed at. Why do we dash after anything that ‘goes viral’? Why do we want far more money than we need to live? Why can we not say “No” to a cleric’s advances, to a sport star’s invitation, to a boss’ wink, to promises of greater success?”

Please don’t jump to the conclusion that Aziz is blaming the victim. That’s a facile interpretation. The interesting point that she’s making is that, instead of protecting the victim from the vagaries of the world, we should change the world so that it no longer creates victims. Take away the power that the world has over such potential victims not by transferring that power, but by banishing it from the world. If you don’t want what abusers have then you’re no longer a potential victim. Instead of trying to beat them at their own game, you can win by not playing at all.

“Camille Paglia boldly took on mainstream feminists. In a sustained series of exchanges, many of which appear in her 1992 collection Sex, Art and American Culture she declares, “Feminists keeps saying the sexes are the same…telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything or wear anything. “No they can’t.” Paglia exclaims. She attacks what she sees as mostly white, educated feminists for their “pie-in-the-sky fantasies about the perfect world (that) keep young women from seeing life as it is.” As a result, she argues, “Women want all the freedoms won, but they don’t want to acknowledge the risk. That’s the problem”.”

Antifa is part of the Problem

Next up is the article The Harmful Effects of Antifa by Diane Johnstone (CounterPunch), which continues Johnstone’s nuanced discussion of the new, young and purported left. She sees a similar problem to the one I point out above with the Baffler articles: this tendency to black-and-white-ism, to espousing Bush Jr.‘s simplistic philosophy of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. To that end, they posit a world in which the thing they’re against is everywhere,

“This fantasy of omnipresent neo-fascism is as necessary to Antifa as the fantasy of omnipresent anti-Semitism is to Israel.”

And then associate everyone who disagrees in any way whatsoever with that evil, delineating “teams”.

“Antifa rhetoric specializes in non sequitur. If you agree with some conservative or libertarian that it was wrong to destroy Libya, then you are not only guilty of association with a pre-fascist, you are a supporter of dictators and thus probably a fascist yourself. This has been happening in France for years and it’s just getting started in the United States.”

Johnstone refers to another article she wrote, Antifa in Theory and Practice by Diane Johnstone (CounterPunch), in which she offered her initial analysis of that movement. The following are citations that I found interesting. The first two point out that the tactics of Antifa play right into the hands of the state.

“I am not suggesting that all, or most, Antifa are agents of the establishment. But they can be manipulated, infiltrated or impersonated precisely because they are self-anointed”

“The moral of this story is simple. Self-appointed radical revolutionaries can be the most useful thought police for the neoliberal war party. I am not suggesting that all, or most, Antifa are agents of the establishment. But they can be manipulated, infiltrated or impersonated precisely because they are self-anointed and usually more or less disguised.”

Johnstone continues, noting that Antifa’s “purity tests” are not only ironically fascist tools, but are highly counterproductive. Establishing a policy of ruthless scouring of contrary opinion will always turn around and bite you.

“[…] even the most justifiable emotional concerns do not necessarily contribute to wise counsel. Violent reactions to fear may seem to be strong and effective when in reality they are morally weak and practically ineffectual. We are in a period of great political confusion. Labeling every manifestation of “political incorrectness” as fascism impedes clarification of debate over issues that very much need to be defined and clarified.”

“In another vein, Antifa follows the trend of current Identity Politics excesses that are squelching free speech in what should be its citadel, academia. Words are considered so dangerous that “safe spaces” must be established to protect people from them. This extreme vulnerability to injury from words is strangely linked to tolerance of real physical violence.”

“In the United States, the worst thing about Antifa is the effort to lead the disoriented American left into a wild goose chase, tracking down imaginary “fascists” instead of getting together openly to work out a coherent positive program.”

Much of this debate is distracting. And the real enemies (hint: those who are and have been happily and cozily in power) are happy to see so many potential party-crashers wasting their time. As Johnstone puts it,

“The truly dangerous people in the United States are safely ensconced in Wall Street, in Washington Think Tanks, in the executive suites of the sprawling military industry, not to mention the editorial offices of some of the mainstream media currently adopting a benevolent attitude toward “anti-fascists” simply because they are useful in focusing on the maverick Trump instead of themselves.”

“The facile use of the term “fascist” gets in the way of thoughtful identification and definition of the real enemy of humanity today. In the contemporary chaos, the greatest and most dangerous upheavals in the world all stem from the same source, which is hard to name, but which we might give the provisional simplified label of Globalized Imperialism. This amounts to a multifaceted project to reshape the world to satisfy the demands of financial capitalism, the military industrial complex, United States ideological vanity and the megalomania of leaders of lesser “Western” powers, notably Israel. It could be called simply “imperialism”, except that it is much vaster and more destructive than the historic imperialism of previous centuries. It is also much more disguised. And since it bears no clear label such as “fascism”, it is difficult to denounce in simple terms. (emphasis added.)”

“The fixation on preventing a form of tyranny that arose over 80 years ago, under very different circumstances, obstructs recognition of the monstrous tyranny of today. Fighting the previous war leads to defeat.”

Johnstone’s characterization is eloquent and not at all hyperbolic. Above, we chastise those wasting their time fighting the wrong enemy, chasing chimeras of suspected heresy in pockets of potential supporters. But those of us who see where the dangers really lie must soberly acknowledge that we are also forced to waste our time. Instead of actually fighting the enemy, we expend nearly all of our energy merely trying to convince anyone other than a tiny minority that the enemy even exists. We face resistance on even this front from all sides, including—sometimes, especially—those we seek to recruit to our cause. We have basically lost this war and must look to the next one, if we’re to be at all honest with ourselves.

And that’s where Johnstone points out the most destructive feature of Antifa:

“Antifa has gone on the offensive against the one weapon still in the hands of the people: the right to free speech and assembly.”

This is more than shooting yourself in the foot—it’s shooting potential insurrection in the head and setting back any potential cause by years, if not decades. How are you supposed to sow dissent and build insurrection if even your supposed ideological compatriots are undermining your right to even discuss possibly subversive topics? A nearly hopelessly difficult slog is made even harder by such tactics.

The Rest of the World

And what of the now-nearly-year-long propaganda push to blame everything on the Russians? As reported in The Anti-Empire Report #152 by William Blum, as recently as June 2017, that opinion is oddly not shared by the Pentagon.

“The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report in June entitled “Russia: Military Power: Building a military to support great power aspirations”. Here’s an excerpt: Moscow seeks to promote a multi-polar world predicated on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in other states’ internal affairs, the primacy of the United Nations, and a careful balance of power preventing one state or group of states from dominating the international order. To support these great power ambitions, Moscow has sought to build a robust military able to project power, add credibility to Russian diplomacy, and ensure that Russian interests can no longer be summarily dismissed without consequence. … Russia also has a deep and abiding distrust of U.S. efforts to promote democracy around the world and what it perceives as a U.S. campaign to impose a single set of global values.”

The Pentagon used quite flowery language, but they are basically saying that Russia’s only mistake is not granting primacy to U.S. interests. For that, they must be eliminated.

The U.S. is stuck in a mindset that will no longer be tenable once we’ve burned out our resources. The climate is shifting already. It will be a different type of society from our soft, privileged and somnambulant one to survive it. The article Making Ourselves Small That We May Be Large by Kim C. Domenico (CounterPunch) discusses the transition from what we have now to what we must become.

“My husband chides the climate activists whose proposals suggest the pending climate disaster can be turned around by tweaking our technology, without giving up our western, “de-sensed” world. These voices are less marginalized than the more radical ones who aren’t inclined to “mince words.” Those who see the catastrophe headed straight for us, those acting as our elders “leaving out flattery and retaining the criticism,” point the way we must go in for the collective good, not for the short term good of those currently profiting/profiteering/plundering. They recognize that everything has to change; our much convenienced way of life must return to its basis in relatedness, for life as we know it is coming to an end.”

“From this perspective, catastrophe is the necessary defeat that can return one to being human, which I am calling “making ourselves small,” or as Powys expressed it, “sinking into ourselves and into Nature.””

The article The Serious Price of the Hyperconvenient Economy by Ralph Nader (CounterPunch) pleads with us to try to control our fates, to not be fooled into wanting that which is offered by our would-be enslavers.

“Technology driven by narrow commercial interests needs to provoke us into asking, “What’s all this convenience doing over the long run? What kind of community and society is coming out of this unassessed marketing?” For a better future, we must mobilize, community by community, for some inconvenient thoughts and organization. Unless, that is, the corporate future doesn’t need us.”

In that sense, other concerns shrink to insignificance. When a handful of tech and media companies control most people’s thoughts from dawn ‘til dusk, elections have become mostly moot and climate catastrophes are piling up, what exactly is the point of something like nation states? Won’t we see an increasing balkanization? It’s hard to care specifically about a single one, like the one in the ostensibly quite-wealthy Catalan. The article Catalan Independence Flounders on the Rocks of Reality by John Wight (CounterPunch) discusses how even that effort is receding into the mists of public memory, much as the various Arab Springs did.

“In politics, as in war, knowing when to retreat is as important as knowing when to advance; with the former often more difficult and requiring of more courage than the latter due to the challenge it brings of managing the unrealistic expectations and demands of some within your own ranks – those for whom any backward step is tantamount to betrayal. With this in mind, it is clear that Puigdemont, faced with the choice of acting sensibly in the face of the aforementioned balance of forces militating against UDI, or succumbing to the pressure exerted against his leadership from within his own movement, opted to succumb.”

It is a shame that we can’t pay enough attention, because there is a deeper battle to be fought: against the poisonous neoliberalism that sucks the remaining life from humanity’s failing husk, feeding a tiny group of the privileged. The longer we let them continue, the more difficult any transition will be. But revolution always comes late, not early and nearly always catastrophic, by definition. The overthrown will burn the world rather than give up their throne.

“Moreover, it bears repeating that its underlying is the same one that has fuelled support for Scottish independence in recent years; the same one that drove Brexit and which is behind the emergence and traction of anti-EU parties across Europe. That cause is an economic model, neoliberalism, whose sustainability was shattered irrevocably by the global financial crash and ensuing recession, starting in 2008. (Emphasis added.)”

“Yet instead of burying the corpse of neoliberalism, as they should have, political elites have for purely ideological reasons extended themselves in trying to breath life back into it with the imposition of austerity programs that have sown even more misery and dislocation in the lives of millions of their own citizens. Thus they are authors of their own demise.”

The key takeaway here is: they are the “authors of their own demise”—and most of them know it, but don’t care. They will fail upwards, as they always have and will suffer little.

The article By Killing ISIS Fighters Instead of Bringing Them to Justice, We Become as Guilty as Our Enemies by Robert Fisk (CounterPunch) discusses the untenable attitude toward justice in modern discussions. Some people just have to die, right?

“When George W Bush talked about bringing the bad guys to justice after 9/11, I wrote that I very much doubted if any justice would be coming Osama bin Laden’s way. And I was right. He was assassinated by the Americans. And nobody, naturally enough, complained about it. Live by the sword, die by the sword. But bin Laden’s death – and the ocean of drone attacks that followed – gave a gently, dark signal that it’s OK to murder these bad guys. Forget about courts, evidence, trials, justice and the rest. Just obliterate them. Who is going to complain?”

This applies just as well to the various pillory-by-media stories we’ve been reading of late. An uncomfortably large number of people seem to be just fine with letting Twitter and Facebook and the media decide who is guilty and deciding which punishment is fitting. This is vigilante justice and no different than witch trials. The initial (and alleged) perpetrators may feel deserving, but we will be ill-equipped to notice—or be able to complain—when the people on trial’s crimes are less clear-cut. The precedent will have been established and the power of judgment will have landed securely in the hands of an unelected, mercurial and extremely vindictive minority.

But the article The End of Empire by Chris Hedges (TruthDig) is much better at describing the way the world looks to the 99% (most of whom do not live in the U.S. or Europe, by the way). Hedges is an inspiring speaker, but his conclusions are often sobering to the point of depressing, even as you find yourself unable to disagree in more than minor details.

“Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia.”

What will happen after the U.S. finally burns itself out in a supernova of hubris and stupidity? The ersatz nation-states called multinationals that were born in the crucible of its neoliberal policies will smoothly take over, with nary a whimper from their pliable and mostly willing citizens. See All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization for a visual overview of how large certain individuals and corporations have become relative to nations and their money supplies.

“[…] perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.””

Our new multinational rulers’ brand of bullshit may have an even shorter half-life than that of the U.S., which has survived for a long time on the inertia of the world’s misplaced gratitude after World War II. It will be painful to be around when it crumbles and the next rulers step in. They are unlikely to be more benevolent, cut as they are from the same cloth as their progenitors. We can already see traces of their power in the ongoing transition from national to corporate power today.

“England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.”

The article The Simulacra Democracy by John Steppling (CounterPunch) is long and somewhat rambling, but included several eminently quotable bits. It discusses the massive propaganda machine that is the mainstream media. It discusses how this media is—and always has been—an arm of the Pentagon and the government’s secret agencies, if not in name, then in spirit. The U.S. government could not have wished for a more supportive and compliant media over the decades.

“[…] a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …” — Morris Berman”

“If one only gets one’s news from MSNBC or FOX or CNN then one will take away mostly pure propaganda. Rachel Maddow has a career based on craven parroting of DNC approved talking points and conclusions. Bill Maher, whose show is on HBO, is of late pimping for war. Sunday news talk shows do not invite radical voices, not ever.”

“But Americans are discouraged from thinking in terms of class. They see individualism and identity. Get me more women directors they cry….which would give us more versions of Zero Dark Thirty, I guess. Gender equality matters, something every single socialist country in history has emphasized. Something Chavez saw fit to write into the Bolivarian constitution on day one. Chavez, who liberal avatar Bernie Sanders dismissed as a “dead communist dictator”. Chavez, who feminist avatar Hillary Clinton worked overtime to oust from power. (Emphasis added.)”

What did Trump say about Chavez? Who cares? Could it have been worse than what the supposed leading lights of liberal democracy said about him? Essentially promulgating state lies? Do they honestly believe it? Or are they cynically repeating what the Pentagon and deep state wants to hear in order to get closer to the nexus of power? Who cares? It doesn’t matter to those of out here, in the cold. To us, they are part of the problem, no matter their reasons.

“Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, recently stated that his agency would become a “much more vicious agency” in fighting its enemies. Its actually hard to imagine what that might look like given CIA history. More vicious than rendition, drone killing and black site torture? Remember it was the U.S. and its School of the Americas that trained those death squads in Central America. Hollywood makes comedies about this. In any event nobody in Hollywood complains. Just as none of the actresses assaulted by Weinstein (and countless others) said anything lest they lose career opportunities. Just as nobody complains about the racism and demonizing of Muslims or Serbs or North Koreans or Russians lest they not get the job. Coercion is silent and a given. It is also absolute. Most actors and directors simply don’t think about it, and most know little beyond what they hear on corporate news or read in the NYTimes. (Emphasis added.)”

“A good rule of thumb is if the U.S. targets a country or leader, then its worth questioning the western-generated propagated propaganda in mainstream media about said country or leader (think Syria, Gadaffi, Aristide, Milosovic, Iran, North Korea). The U.S. does not go after countries who welcome western capital.”

Our national amnesia leads to our doom. Our poor understanding of history—or our internalization of government propaganda as real history—makes us easily manipulated. As Steppling concludes:

“It is a world created by writers under thirty, largely, and certainly under forty. These are worlds created by people who themselves know very little of the world. They know even less about having to work for a living. The entire universe of film is absent any class awareness. History is simplified the better to appeal to a wider audience. Everything feels and sounds the same. And it is stultifying. There are films and TV from Europe, even from the U.K. that have merit, have heterogeneous sensibilities, but not from Hollywood.”

And Hollywood controls a great deal of what people see and hear, when they’re just relaxing and trying get away from news. It is then that they are most pliable, most easily brainwashed. It is then that pick up what they will come to think of as their “own” opinions. It is difficult to think of a way of fighting such an insidious, gigantic and omnipresent machine.

Dear Netflix,

Have some respect for your content. It’s pretty good. Can I just watch it, please?

Why can’t you just relax?

Why do you feel the need to play something all the time?

Your content is good. Your aggressive need to constantly decide for me when to play it is severely annoying.

Did I leave a show selected for more than 5 seconds because I was waiting until I was ready to watch it?

BOOM. Netflix gonna play a trailer that spoils everything.

Or, worse, yet, Netflix just gonna up and start playing the show I selected while I’m getting a drink or waiting for other people to get ready.

Do I get to decide when and how to watch?

No. Netflix decides. If you’d rather wait, you have to drop out of the main menus just so Netflix shuts up and stops telling you what to do.

While it’s nice that there’s a setting to stop auto-playing the next episode when watching a series, did you have to bury it in the web-only settings page? And did you have to set it to on, by default?

Of course you did. Because Netflix is like a shark: if it’s not playing content, it dies. [1]

Did you just watch a moving season-ending episode of Orange is the New Black? Was there an appropriate song chosen for the credits music? Did you want to watch the credits? Did you want to bask in the glow of a season well-ended?

Too fucking bad.

You’re going to see the credits shrunken to an unreadable postage stamp in the top-left corner while a poster for Wet, Hot American Summer takes up ¾ of the screen with a 15-second countdown timer threatening to play the inevitably insipid and mood-destroying trailer.

Instead of relaxing, you’re rearing up from the couch, scrambling for the remote control, trying desperately to figure out how to just keep watching what you were watching, to maintain the relaxed mood.

Too late. It’s already gone.

This is bullshit. Stop treating us all like noise-and-pretty-lights-addicted magpies who can’t even handle a 15-second break from content-consumption. Stop treating all of your content as garbage that doesn’t require any contemplation.

We already paid for the service. What advantage do you gain by cramming as much content as possible down our throats?

Stop treating us all like children.

I want a setting for adults.

• Do not auto-play anything ever.
• Do not shrink what I’m watching to pitch something else.

Get out of my way and let me enjoy the content I already paid for—how I want.

I don’t even care what the new CodeCov (GitHub) tool actually does or whether it does it well.

All I know is that it definitely doesn’t do it seemlessly.

These are notes that I took in June of 2016 as I was sitting around the airports of New York City, trying to get to Baltimore on the same day that a giant thunderstorm was visiting that area. I started taking notes after savoring the dining experience in the LaGuardia airport.

If you thought airports of old were inhospitable, you’re in for a treat. The old food courts have been replaced by faux-upscale eateries. Before each diner stands a tablet with a menu and gambling games. Generic pop music blares overhead. Your dining companion is too far away to hear you, dozens of TVs surround you, spinning fairy tales of propaganda about Isis.

A sad grandma eats a sandwich she couldn’t figure out how to order and which she informs me was misordered for her by a waiter. A dead-eyed gamine sits across from her, nose nearly touching her tablet screen. She ignores food.

A young lady on the other side had taken only one bit of a sandwich and chips before leaving.

The blare of music is mixed with the clinking and jangling of casino games enticing people to play while eating. One hand at each place shovels food while the other works a phone screen. All of the screens spray whitish-blue light everywhere. The same security announcement cuts the noise with imperious exhortations to be afraid. It’s utterly dystopian. And these people all feel that they’re winning. It was awful. The food was quite good. We fled as quickly as possible.

Elsewhere the slack-jawed and glassy-eyed stare into their phones, gabbling into them, either pressed to a cheek or held out in front like an hors d’oeuvre. Myriad tables glitter and glow with phones and charging cables and headphones twined around partially eaten or wholly ignored food and drink while calls are made and screens are swiped.

Consume food, content, drink, propaganda. Giant cupcakes beckon with huge calories and trans-fats. The trash cans open their maws automatically but the bathrooms are shrilly lit nightmares of discomfiting design. The water fountain works but the pressure is sporadic. The sensor on the auto-refiller for bottled water is broken.

The end of the terminal, where three gates converge, is a writhing mass of humanity, most eating upscale food and paying scandalous prices for drinks in the most psychically enervating conditions, standing in various mysterious, snaking and intertwining lines, roller bags filling every available gap not occupied by a tablet screen or a hand holding a phone. Blue-white light washes over everything, the sound of interleaved security and endlessly redundant announcements blare in and out of every aural crevice not already suffused by the chatter of hundreds of screens and dozens of personal telephone conversations. At least CNN and FOX seem to have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

The busses run on no apparent schedule. One appears and the driver says to try our luck with another because he’s having trouble controlling this one. It will have to go to a garage, if he can get it there. You have to wait fifteen minutes to drive ten minutes in the wrong direction around a circle to a destination that was a few hundred meters away but which is inaccessible by walking.

An airport hotel in New York

Fast forward to later that evening, when we had to overnight because all flights were canceled.

It turns out that it’s not that far. People are just terrified of walking here. The hotel is less than a five-minute walk on a broad sidewalk across an overpass.

We were lucky to get a room. The staff was great and very helpful.

It was a typical American hotel room: the bathroom door didn’t fit, leaking all light through a 3-cm gap at the bottom. The toilet was good, flushed well. The mirror across from the bathroom door was positioned so that it refocused all the bathroom light directly into the face of a sleeper in the bed. The ceiling above said bed looked like it had suffered a construction mishap that had been papered over. The wainscoting and wallpaper didn’t quite fit, in what seemed like easily avoidable ways. The bed was exquisite.

Still, better than sleeping in the foodcourt, as suggested by the customer-care guy at the airport.

Back very early at Laguardia airport…

For breakfast, we avoided the soul-killing noise palace and got bagels from an actual human being. It was difficult to communicate because of the sheer, uninterrupted noise of some machines that had already been roaring the day before. The noise here doesn’t stop. Various Muzak plays over everything, malfunctioning machines fill in the mid-range. No wonder people wear headphones all the time, muttering to the other end of a call while their noise-canceling mic makes what must be an absolutely heroic effort to block out the shrieks of passing vehicles.

This is Brazil. This is Idiocracy. This is Hell.

The bagel guy gave us a receipt that we had to swipe to self-checkout. The first machine greeted us jarringly and chirpily at 05:30 in the morning, but couldn’t tell us directly that the scanner was broken. At the next machine, we were treated to a (still) PIN-less transaction and a loud voice guiding us through the transaction. Soul. Crushing.

Hieronymous Bosch should have painted this. Perhaps he did.

A business-park hotel in Baltimore

Now we’re at the business hotel on the outskirts of Baltimore.

Our room at the hotel has a roaring AC. The control knobs have been removed. The wall-mounted digital thermostat on the opposite wall shows 64°F. We turn it off. Several hours later, it’s still almost too cool.

The shower is like that at the previous hotel: you can control temperature, not rate. Rate is set at a staggering number of gallons per minute. Don’t need that much water and worry about wasting it? Too bad. The form factor for the tub and soap dishes hasn’t changed since the fifties. The hotel shampoos are nice, but the little bottles fly everywhere because they don’t stay in the curved shelves made for soap bars that nobody uses anymore.

Visiting Baltimore

A really nice driver takes us back to BWI to catch the light rail. We walked to lunch, but the quasi-industrial park where the hotel is located is somewhat green, but not great for walking. Just good enough to get to a much-needed lunch.

Anyway, the late afternoon is warm and unseasonably dry. The train stands waiting, with all doors open. How nice, I think, they’re airing it out naturally. The AC is on full-blast.

I mercifully stopped taking notes at this point. After that, we starting cruisin’ and drinkin’. That certainly helped.

The article Office-Droned Out by Amber A'Lee Frost (The Baffler) is interesting enough and by one of my favorite writers at The Baffler, but she, too, makes the mistake of writing lead as the past tense of lead.

“My inability to pay attention to details or engage in repetitive work ledlead to (or perhaps only exacerbated; it’s a chicken-and-egg thing) an anxious, grinding depression, and the sneaking suspicion I was actually totally unemployable.”

Please stop doing this. It’s confusing. I can put up with other transmogrifications of the grammar and spelling that I learned (oh so long ago) and to which I’ve become accustomed, but this is not an improvement.

It leads the poor reader of English in the wrong direction. It’s a pity because the piece was otherwise well-written and copy-edited. I mention this case because it feels like we now have an entire generation for whom the spelling of the past tense of lead was never led.

I’m not a prescriptivist, but I don’t think everything should be descriptivist, either. It has to make sense and to not conflict with other elements of language. I’m a software programmer and this is more akin to a compiler error than a warning.

It’s become clear that, instead of drawing any useful lessons from several recent defeats, the liberal elite is doubling down on its snobbery vis-à-vis the unwashed masses. Case in point: the unalloyed adoration of Meryl Streep’s single-handed, surgical strike against the greatest enemy that Western civilization has ever known. [1]

I, as usual, didn’t watch it, because I prefer to be persuaded by content rather than presentation. I read the transcript (New York Times), though. Meryl doesn’t take long to cozen to her crowd by identifying them as foreigners, vilified in a nearly identical fashion as their own Mexican gardeners.

“Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie [2] said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.”

Exactly right, Meryl! Where “foreigners” per se have done nothing to earn opprobrium, one could argue that Hollywood and the press are now forced to lie in beds they made. If they are at the point of attack, then maybe they should think about doing something other than kowtowing to power and regurgitating state propaganda in myriad subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

She underscores Hollywood’s diversity by listing the birthplaces and circumstances of a bunch of her friends, many of whom are at least partially non-American. Clearly they can all sympathize with the true target of ideological ire: the illegal immigrant who’s taking jobs from red-blooded Americans.

How could they not? Both groups are “vilified” to an equal degree and can identify so much commonality for a fight against the forces that oppress them. One group has a teensy bit more power, though. One hopes that they don’t stop fighting once they’re sure Trump will leave them alone.

Typically, after identifying falsely with the oppressed—although I’m honestly not sure how much this identification is just spotlight-stealing—Meryl broadsides the deplorables with “And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”

Remember kids: Dame Meryl says that football is stupid and so is MMA, neither of those have any redeeming characteristics or worthwhile entertainment value. You’re welcome. Here’s your free DVD of Mamma Mia! so you can learn you some culture.

I think that fully a quarter of the speech is about that one time that Trump mocked a disabled reporter. Among the list of legitimate grievances against Trump, this doesn’t even really show up on the radar, but that’s the one that the liberal elite feels is the most important. It highlights what a bully Trump is.

It’s nice that Meryl’s paying attention now, but where was her disdain for Clinton and Obama when they spent the last eight years (well, Clinton only 4) bullying the world? if you’re of a liberal and honest mindset, isn’t a bully the perfect figurehead for the U.S.? Clinton blew up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan; Obama droned an American citizen and then his son without a trial and Trump is a dick. But, by all means, let’s focus on the guy who’s not even tasted presidential power yet. Because he’s not on our team.

“We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage.”

Who the fuck is she talking about? The “principled press”? I’m sure she means the New York Times or the Washington Post, both paragons of principle, neither of which has ever seen or heard of a war that they couldn’t support.

But then she asked all of her friends to donate money to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which seems like a good idea, actually. It looks like a decent organization. Their focus seems to be on countries where press freedom is constrained in ways that include torture and death—not just opprobrium or “denial of access” from on high. So one hopes that not a lot of money goes to domestic U.S. sources, which are the ones Streep was talking about.

I just don’t understand why this “speech” is so uplifting and inspiring and worthy of discussing in the same breath as one of Churchill’s or FDR’s. She talks about her friends, obliquely refers to what an asshole Trump is, exhorts her rich friends to support freedom of the press around the world (to reiterate: this is a good thing [3]) and then wraps up with some standard pablum about what a privilege it is to be in acting.

But the Democrats/liberal elite have gone mad for it, breathlessly telling everyone that the simply have to watch it.

This sort of pretentiousness is nothing new in the liberal-Democratic world. The article Withering on the Vine by Thomas Frank (The Baffler) nicely captures how remote these supposed liberal heroes are from the workaday, how isolated they are from the stench of the hoi polloi as they live most of their lives ensconced in the wealth and privilege that they are so convinced that they earned.

“Our Martha’s Vineyard Democrats like to talk about inequality. It makes them sad, but it’s also a problem they have almost no desire to tackle. Not only does it not touch them personally, but their instincts, their inclinations, and their deepest unspoken convictions tell them it isn’t a real problem to begin with. People get what they deserve out of life—or, rather, they will get what they deserve once we have ensured everyone’s equal access to the SAT—and for a person with a grade-school education to complain about the hardships of minimum-wage work is the purest sort of folly.”

Finally, there’s the article Against Meryl Streep by Eileen Jones (Jacobin), which takes much more personal exception to Meryl Streep than I do.

“In America, classiness will get you everywhere, and there’s no better demonstration of it than the teary-eyed adoration generated by every move Streep makes. She strikes me as about the worst possible spokesperson imaginable for the Left in an era of working-class rage, so naturally she’s embraced even more tightly by liberals doubling down on their delusional Clinton Democrat worship.”

Well put, Eileen.

Dear Greg:

I wasn’t going to do a tl;dr, but I thought of one. I offer it as a bone thrown by an incorrigibly garrulous writer to his reader.

Stop being Chris Matthews.

Perhaps that’s too short.

Let me try again.

If I wanted to be yelled at by MSNBC to believe stuff for which they feel no obligation to provide evidence (or provide the “national security” copout), then I could just watch that. I want your opinion, not Rachel Maddow’s [1] shallow press-release regurgitations.

The rest I will not (cannot) boil down to a few pithy sentences. I’ll leave the work of extracting the to-be-casually-dismissed sentences yourself. Or just click the little trash can before that annoyed feeling you already have grows into full-blown irritation.

This letter is intended as constructive criticism; I do not feel responsible should you be unable to interpret it as such. I spent a lot of time because I care. Long-time listener, first-time caller and so on and so forth. [2]

The Crux, long form

Your shows of late have not been very open to criticism or nuance. There is no room anymore in your world for grays, which is ironic since you used to plead so eloquently that we not see things in terms of black and white.

Every white man is the enemy, everyone who didn’t vote for Hillary is a traitor/misogynist. It’s offensive. And more, you’re starting to sound like the people you used to mock, just with a different agenda. You’ll note I didn’t say “exactly like” because you, of course, are still much funnier. But your stridency is strained and approaches demagoguery.

When you read criticism on air, you choose the worst of it in order to dismiss it out of hand. But you haven’t in any way sounded reflective or doubtful, which worries me. You sound like you know everything (viz. your show’s name). You straw-man anyone or anything that disagrees. You deify Barack and Hillary. Are you really like this now? Or are you trying to counterbalance the stridency/stupidity of “the other side” by not giving an inch?

Maybe it’s working for you, but you’re alienating those of us who do have doubts and neither have nor want that level of certitude. I don’t listen to Alex Jones and I don’t want to stop listening to you for the same reasons.

Examples and Supported Evidence

N.B.: The few examples below are pulled from your recent show “Stands”.

The CIA and FBI

By all means, hammer on Trump and his kleptocracy. But I cringe when you promulgate the “Russia-hacked-the-elections” meme without hesitation or any critical thought. You freely cite that 13 or 17 or whatever number of shadowy organizations, including the CIA, have said the Russians definitely did it, but you don’t question the source at all. Or poke fun at it, for God’s sakes!

Wouldn’t that be the opportunity to discuss the shenanigans of the CIA and tell everyone we should take what they say with a grain of salt? [3] I know that Obama made a “big move” recently, but you must remember Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam’s WMDs, Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Shouldn’t that give the smartest man in the world pause instead of plunging head-first into belief because this time Obama says it? Are you so ready to believe it because they’ve wrapped the renewed war on Russians in “election was robbed” gift paper? [4]

Or there’s the notion that the FBI tipped the election, without presenting any evidence. You’re a comedian, not a journalist, I get it. But you’ve blurred the line enough that it would be nice if you at least pretended to care about evidence before conviction. Was the effect even close to enough to have tipped the election? Is it even measurable?

We’re #1!

Now that Trump is President, you’ve regained respect for Obama without acknowledging anymore what he’s done. Maybe you don’t know what his actual record is, but I feel like you’re too well-read not to.

Your bit about Afghanistan, critiquing Obama’s citation of Reagan was good. But then you talk about “stopping communism” without questioning whether China is really communist anymore. Or what it even means to “stop communism” … when the philosophy of communism actually lines up with our espoused views more closely than the rapacious capitalism epitomized by Trump—or even Obama and Hillary.

For whatever reason, your show has become much more pro-American in the waning days of Obama’s administration. You mention that Obama launched a cyber attack on China and Russia without at all questioning America’s right to do so, especially with no evidence or trial or conviction or any form of due process. You jocularly mention an act of war without really even acknowledging it as such.

When I listen to the Smartest Man in the World, I hope for more than knee-jerk American jingoism.

Is Bernie Really his Bros?

Or you absolutely crush Bernie Sanders but have you actually listened to him speak? Look up the video where Bernie talks to Killer Mike and tell me that he doesn’t sound more reasonable than you give him credit for.

Do you really believe that Bernie is just barely better than Trump? That kind of statement is so shockingly vacuous that the humor drops out—not least because your shrieking delivery makes it clear that it was not intended as a joke.

At best, it makes you sound uninformed and, at worst, unhinged. You’re talked about that finger-waving thing Bernie did to Hillary. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not going to look it up. But could Bernie’s attitude toward Hillary perhaps arise from his disdain for her corporatist platform? Or stem from his having served for 40 years while she served for 10? [5]

Of course you’re right when you argue that “we have to fight every case of misogyny, racism, etc. etc.” but I feel like you’re letting yourself be distracted by tempests in teacups. A lot of this kind of news is meant specifically to distract us. [6] I wish it didn’t distract you so much. So fight away, but maybe prioritize? Like maybe make sure you’re actually talking about fascism or Nazism before condemning even minor deviations from your worldview as such?

“From Hell’s heart I stab at thee” is a great quote, but perhaps reflect that you’re citing not Melville himself but rather his character Ahab, a madman whose rage at and hatred for his enemy became his only reason for being, to the exclusion of everything else and the diminution of himself.

What to Do?

I think you’re at your absolute best—and this is why I’ve been listening to the show for years, and have recommended it to others—when you’re very funny, witty, trenchant or “wide, but shallow”, as you yourself have put it. Or, when you’re insightful, but not funny. Both of those Gregs are interesting.

The Greg who browbeats anyone with a different opinion, is mostly wrong about his own and isn’t even funny about it, is not a good Greg. I think you used to be better than this. Maybe that’s me confabulating, but I remember thinking much more often when you deliberately mispronounced or misquoted facts that you were being quite clever…because you were otherwise so spot on. The balance has shifted now so that I spend far too much time wondering whether you meant to be wrong or are just mistaken.

I’m not going to say you’ve lost a listener because you haven’t. Nor do I want you to change if you really don’t want to. But I’ve found that when someone tells me something is wrong with what I’m doing that, in a moment of quiet reflection, I might find that they’re right. Then I start to change it and pretend it was my idea in the first place.

But please don’t think I’m expecting a come-to-Jesus moment from you, as at the end of an intervention. Instead, I hope that you take time to reflect, to wonder whether perhaps I might be a little bit right, and to decide whether who you are on your show right now is who you want to continue to be. I’ve waited several shows to see whether you’d move through the stages of grief at some point. But you seem to have settled in and exchanged a measure of your humor for anger. And I don’t feel it suits you, in the long run.

Signed,
A middle-aged, cisgen, white, heterosexual male.

P.S. There definitely is a Swiss accent, but it differs from North to South. But Swinglish has a clearly identifiable tone to it. You should totally do a show here to see for yourself.

1. No matter how sunny it is or how dry the streets are, 15ºC in February means a windy, windy bike ride. It’s cold somewhere and the warm air is hurrying to get there. Still, awesome to be back outside.
2. The Swiss are not nearly as prone to nationalism as the French. This, despite the obvious fact that Switzerland chose to blow a hole in the middle of the EU with their absence while France joined a union with its age-old enemies Germany, Spain and England. The French have a real problem with nationalism.
3. Likewise, Swiss politicians and companies are far less prone to corruption or dissembling when it comes to gigantic infrastructure projects. Whereas a German or American cannot be trusted as far as one could spit a rat, the word of a Swiss is far more likely to be truthful. Politics is far less likely to be a factor in statements about technical feasibility or budget.
4. Given two companies with highly suspect or even juristically criminal employment practices, the company for which family members work and for which you’d also like to work is less bad, a priori.
5. I am far too sensitive to the topic of prejudicial exclusion or judgment on racial or ethnic grounds. When the first question a Swiss person asks about someone is whether they are a foreigner or not, that’s just friendly curiosity and will not in any way factor into how they will treat that person.
6. For a foreigner to be considered integrated, they need to be inconspicuous, invisible. A person is considered integrated when they have elided that which makes them them, and has instead become the person who expects integration. Each person who expects others to integrate naturally considers themselves to be the average toward which all others should move. This, despite all evidence to the contrary that some people are just societally less desirable (e.g. I consume almost nothing and am supremely shitty for the local economy). Integration can only ever be a goal, though, because the foreigner will not ever be able to ever achieve it. Those damned goalposts just won’t stay put. No-one can define what integration is, but everyone knows what it isn’t and also that we definitely need it.
7. Shockingly, the way that the Swiss discuss their demographic issues differs only in matter of degree from how Israel by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch) does. Where Israel is only now seriously considering getting rid of parliamentary representation for the 1/5 of their population that they don’t consider to be citizens, Switzerland’s ¼ of the population that have never been citizens have never had the possibility of parliamentary representation. This disparity bothers very few because the Swiss will naturally do the right thing because they are morally superior (see points 2 and 3 above).

A friend of mine wrote a long message on Facebook about how censoring the photo below was the exactly the wrong reaction. he expressed concern that his young daughter would grow up in a humorless, intolerant world.

The worst thing to happen anywhere ever

A friend of his wrote that they should “agree to disagree” on the impact that this picture has. I answered with the following comment (lightly edited to change tenses, pronouns and given names):

My first response

I understand that you’ve used a lot of words to say that you’re against censorship. I wholeheartedly agree, but I’m of your generation. The pendulum has long since started swinging the other way.

In my experience, “Agree to disagree” is shorthand for “What I have interpreted to be your viewpoint in the discussion I think we’re having is morally reprehensible but I am not ready to burn the bridge between us for any number of reasons. I’m hoping you will come to your senses and address this obvious deficiency in your character or, failing that, that you will hide it better—for all of our sakes—so that you can play the role in my life you had before you’d revealed this chasm between worldviews in such a crass and (nearly) unforgivable manner.”

This is often expressed in tandem with wonderment at how someone who seemed so well-read, at least moderately intelligent and otherwise capable of intelligently expressing himself, could possibly have such an appalling thought—when the conclusion to the discussion is barely even a matter of opinion, so obvious as to be indistinguishable from fact. How could someone so smart be so stupid?

His clarification

He clarified with the following comment:

“[…] I don’t think any of my friends here felt that censorship was the answer. I think the disagreement amongst us has to do with the depth of the harm this picture really produces and the message it sends. While I see it as harmless, bad-taste fun, others tend to see it is more problematic. But by and large I think we all agree that censorship is not the answer. So while we may ‘agree to disagree’ in this case, it is about the grey area related to the message it is sending and not the more black and white question of should someone be able to send it at all.”

My final response (so far)

I responded with (more or less) the following:

That was very nicely put, especially the last sentence. I appreciate your having taken the time and care to respond. You are right to defend your friends. I realized afterward I’d made an assumption about the deliverer of the phrase. To use the quotidian vernacular (if I may also dig into my thesaurus), I “triggered” on it. [1]

To the topic of the author of this picture: people are generally woefully under-informed, including about how under-informed they are. [2] They are also mostly and blissfully unaware of just how public platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. actually are. Their potential exposure to opprobrium has increased dramatically but their opinions and awareness of potentially offended groups hasn’t changed at all. Most of us are spectacularly under-equipped for this new world, but the rules are that we should all act as if this isn’t the case.

We are very mercurial about to whom we grant the protection of “intent”. The original author’s protestation that he didn’t intend the picture to promote abuse of women is dismissed out of hand. However, when other people post pictures of animal torture in my newsfeed, they are given the benefit of the doubt that they are against said torture rather than for it, even if the post itself doesn’t make that clear. What’s the difference?

Making a tempest in a teacup out of every damned thing that results from this confluence possibly decreases the likelihood of repetition by the targeted individual, but it also increases self-censorship, which is the by-far preferred form of censorship in the U.S. historically.

Instead of agreeing to disagree, we should instead just agree that this kind of shit will just keep on happening and keep ourselves focused on weightier matters. Perhaps matters of our own choosing rather than the chum of the day proffered by the media, both mainstream and social. [3]

If none of your friends truly consider censorship—even just a little bit, around the edges—to be the answer, then they represent a bubble and not the mean. For most, umbrage translates to “get rid of this thing and make sure it never happens again”. This is (almost) never stated so clearly, but neither is it taken off the table.

I wish those with indignation to spare would skip stupid pictures like this and spend it instead on issues of true import, like the recent utter failure of COP21 (say hello to a 3C world) or the war with Russia that the U.S. seems to be so intent on. The only candidate who isn’t? Trump. Hooray. If you think I’m exaggerating, think about how the U.S. would have reacted to the incursions in Ukraine and Syria (both neighbors of Russia) and how lucky we are that Putin is much more circumspect than the lunatic administration in the U.S., as Brezhnev before him exhibited such restraint vis à vis Kennedy.

But I understand that, faced with that sort of dilemma, it’s more immediately satisfying to shoot fish in a barrel—especially when you know your own rights won’t be curtailed or your own content censored.

Fish in a barrel, you say? No! This is important: this picture is the exemplar of the wider pattern of violence and violence against women both immanent and consistently promulgated in American culture. We ignore these seemingly innocuous ways of propagandizing a misogynistic standard at our peril.

While I agree with all of that, I further think that if you’re concerned about violence in American culture, consider this: we are citizens of a country that has, compared to other countries, a very large number of handgun deaths and police shootings per capita, that spends over $1 trillion per year on its military, used almost exclusively for aggression, lauds itself for its massive foreign aid, most of it spent on military assistance, cares so much more about its military than the climate that it excludes said military’s emissions from calculation in its carbon budget and is currently illegally bombing seven countries under the leadership of a Nobel Peace Prize-winner.

But by all means, lets discuss this picture as an emblem of violence because, maybe if we put the author in his place, the culture of violence will be vanquished and we can party like Ewoks. The capacity for self-delusion is breathtaking.

You may think I’m just changing the subject, but I think of it more as voicing the hypothesis that indignation is a limited resource. Waste it on this picture and you’ll have none left for where it really matters.

I think of the daily exhortations in my Facebook newsfeed to keep “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance — an issue of clear and overarching importance that prevents those people from even considering how fascist it is to even have such a pledge in the first place.

You worry about your lovely daughter growing up in a climate of humorless, anti-intellectual neo-Stalinism? Well you should, but more important is just how bloody inhospitable the actual climate will be—especially if there are no nuclear stockpiles left because we used them all. Over-dramatic? Didn’t Ted Cruz just say “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out” a few days ago? He’s a sitting senator. Don’t state officials consistently use the shorthand “nothing is off the table” to refer the U.S. intent to use nuclear weapons if it doesn’t get its way?

In the spirit of wasting indignation, though, try this truly awful video. It’s got something for everyone!

Andrea Diprè − White Christmas (I don't care) (YouTube)

And in the spirit of ending on a good note: with J.J. Abrams at the helm, your daughter at least stands a fighting chance of getting some more good Star Wars movies.

Encodo has never been about maintaining or establishing a monoculture in either operating system, programming language or IDE. Pragmatism drives our technology and environment choices. [1]

Choosing technology

Each project we work on has different requirements and we choose the tools and technologies that fit best. A good fit involves considering:

• What exists in the project already?
• How much work needs to be done?
• What future directions could the project take?
• How maintainable is the solution/are the technologies?
• How appropriate are various technologies?
• What do our developers know how to do best?
• What do the developers who will maintain the project know best? What are they capable of?
• Is there framework code available that would help?

History: Delphi and Java

When we started out in 2005, we’d also spent years writing frameworks and highly generic software. This kind of software is not really a product per se, but more of a highly configurable programmable “engine”, in which other programmers would write their actual end-user applications.

A properly trained team can turn around products very quickly using this kind of approach. It is not without its issues, though: maintaining a framework involves a lot of work, especially producing documentation, examples and providing support. While this is very interesting work, it can be hard to make lucrative, so we decided to move away from this business and focus on creating individual products.

Still, we stuck to the programming environment and platform that we knew best [2] (and that our customers were requesting): we developed software mostly in Delphi for projects that we already had. [3] For new products, we chose Java.

Why did we choose Java as our “next” language? Simply because Java satisfied a lot of the requirements outlined above. We were moving into web development and found Delphi’s offerings lacking, both in the IDE as well as the library support. So we moved on to using Eclipse with Jetty. We evaluated several common Java development libraries and settled on Hibernate for our ORM and Tapestry for our web framework (necessitating HiveMind as our IOC).

History: .NET

A few years later, we were faced with the stark reality that developing web applications on Java (at the time) was fraught with issues, the worst of which was extremely slow development-turnaround times. We found ourselves incapable of properly estimating how long it would take to develop a project. We accept that this may have been our fault, of course, but the reality was that (1 )we were having trouble making money programming Java and (2) we weren’t having any fun anymore.

We’d landed a big project that would be deployed on both the web and Windows desktops, with an emphasis on the Windows desktop clients. At this point, we needed to reëvaluate: such a large project required a development language, runtime and IDE strong on the Windows Desktop. It also, in our view, necessitated a return to highly generic programming, which we’d moved away from for a while.

Our evaluation at the time included Groovy/Grails/Gtk, Python/Django/Gtk, Java/Swing/SWT/Web framekworks, etc. We made the decision based on various factors (tools, platform suitability, etc.) and moved to .NET/C# for developing our metadata framework Quino, upon which we would build the array of applications required for this big project.

Today (2014)

We’re still developing a lot of software in C# and .NET but also have a project that’s built entirely in Python. [4] We’re not at all opposed to a suggestion by a customer that we add services to their Java framework on another project, because that’s what’s best there.

We’ve had some projects that run on a Linux/Mono stack on dedicated hardware. For that project, we made a build-server infrastructure in Linux that created the embedded OS with our software in it.

Most of our infrastructure runs on Linux with a few Windows VMs where needed to host or test software. We use PostgreSql wherever we can and MS-SQL when the customer requires it. [5]

We’ve been doing a lot of web projects lately, which means the usual client-side mix of technology (JS/CSS/HTML). We use jQuery, but prefer Knockout for data-binding. We’ve evaluated the big libraries—Angular, Backbone, Ember—and found them to be too all-encompassing for our needs.

We’ve evaluated both Dart and TypeScript to see if those are useful yet. We’ve since moved to TypeScript for all of our projects but are still keeping an eye on Dart.

We use LESS instead of pure CSS. We’ve used SCSS as well, but prefer LESS. We’re using Bootstrap in some projects but find it to be too restrictive, especially where we can use Flexbox for layout on modern browsers.

And, with the web comes development, support and testing for iOS and other mobile devices, which to some degree necessitates a move from pure .NET/C# and toward a mix.

We constantly reëvaluate our tools, as well. We use JetBrains WebStorm instead of Visual Studio for some tasks: it’s better at finding problems in JavaScript and LESS. We also use PhpStorm for our corporate web site, including these blogs. We used the Java-based Jenkins build server for years but moved to JetBrains TeamCity because it better supports the kind of projects we need to build.

Conclusion

The description above is meant to illustrate flexibility, not chaos. We are quite structured and, again, pragmatic in our approach.

Given the choice, we tend to work in .NET because we have the most experience and supporting frameworks and software for it. We use .NET/C# because it’s the best choice for many of the projects we have, but we are most definitely not a pure Microsoft development shop.

I hope that gives you a better idea of Encodo’s attitude toward software development.

The title sounds like a self-post on Writing Prompts, but it describes quite accurately what I attempted to do when formulating a response to the essay Nobody. Understands. Punctuation. by Peter Welch (Still Drinking).

Below is the text of my mail to him.

I’ve read a few of your essays since you made such a splash with what you are probably aware is your making-it-to-the-big-time essay Programming Sucks by Peter Welch (Still Drinking) and I enjoyed the last one propounding descriptivism over prescriptivism.

A descriptivist is ordinarily well-shielded from any sort of grammatical suggestions because even the most bull-headed of grammar Nazis should know a lost cause when they see one. But I detected more than a whiff of someone who was interested in language and expression and, more than anything else, being *understood*. I liked the description of writing as being a medium through which “writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.” [1]

I read through as you lavished attention on semicolons, the beloved em-dash, colons and commas. But you paid only lip service to the dash or hyphen, leaving it without an example in your essay.

I write because I thought that my dear friend the hyphen could have been more enthusiastically represented in a few other places in your writing. [2] I stumbled only a few times when reading your essay, across what I like to call “speed bumps”, which are where a punctuation choice causes me to read a sentence in an unintended manner until I end up in a dead end of sorts — a parsing error — from which I must back-track until I find the fork in the sentence at which I stopped following the author’s intent. In my experience, these forks often arise from a missing hyphen; that was the case in the following sentence:

“Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath, and as both a long time proponent of using the run on sentence to better communicate the ranting rage in my head over the nonsense that people choose to fight about in this country and a person who is occasionally asked to read his work out loud, I’ve come to value this original function in a visceral way.”

I would have had an easier time reading the sentence above had you included a hyphen between “long” and “time” and, ironically, “run” and “on”. Perhaps it’s just me and my penchant for hyphens. Their absence online and in many otherwise excellent essays by excellent authors occasionally gives me pause and reason to wonder whether my expectation of them is wrong-headed. Perhaps others are much more easily able to read “wrong headed” as a single word without a hyphen, or “back track” or “bull headed”. But, when I look these words up in a dictionary, there they are, defined in the official dictionary as having a hyphen.

I hope you take this missive in the spirit in which it was offered — and also as what it quite clearly also is: just a bit of fun writing on my part. I hope too that you are open-minded enough to consider whether maybe, just maybe, the hyphen could be paid a bit more attention and perhaps even wend its way into your writing where it would not only be grammatically correct but genuinely useful to the task of conveying meaning and fostering understanding on the part of the intended audience.

Cheers and keep up the good work. I follow your blog with pleasure.

What is it worth to wade into a discussion where you are asked to choose a side based on no clear rules of evidence?

I mostly enjoy Woody Allen movies. That he has been with Soon Yi, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife for years doesn’t really weigh on my opinions of his films. I must admit that knowing that Polanski raped a teen-aged girl and fled the country enters into it very little when I’m considering whether to watch one of his movies. Polanski clearly got away with it and wasn’t punished by the world as others, of lower station, would have been. And I still watch some of his movies.

It’s hard to argue that Woody Allen is even in the same league, though, isn’t it? There were no charges for his alleged molestation. Instead, there is a recent open letter—this seems to be the new way to publish these sorts of things—published by Dylan Farrow, under Nick Kristof’s name. I’ll admit I didn’t read it because Nick Kristof is a proven idiot, a douchebag, as it were. This is not in doubt. Simply examine his checkered history of opinions about anything else and you’ll see that we are not dealing with a journalist in any way, but more of a man who’s only too happy to let this evidence-less allegation of child-molestation—re-raised over 20 years later—catapult his name and column into the limelight, if only for a while. He takes his marching orders to garner eyeballs for the NYT quite seriously, apparently.

That was my first thought and then I forgot about it. Because famous and rich people pissing on each other doesn’t serve to hold my attention. I’ve since seen some more reactions, most hyperbolic and divorced from reality, but the post The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast by Robert B. Weide (The Daily Beast) was more reasonable, I felt. He wrote,

“I know I’m treading a delicate path here, and opening myself up to accusations of “blaming the victim.” However, I’m merely floating scenarios to consider, and you can think what you will. But if Mia’s account is true, it means that in the middle of custody and support negotiations, during which Woody needed to be on his best behavior, in a house belonging to his furious ex-girlfriend, and filled with people seething mad at him, Woody, who is a well-known claustrophobic, decided this would be the ideal time and place to take his daughter into an attic and molest her, quickly, before a house full of children and nannies noticed they were both missing.”

That the accusation bases on such an improbable chain of events, events that lacked enough evidence for the police to have even charged Allen at the time, suggests that the whole allegation should be looked at very skeptically. Of course, that doesn’t stop other bloviations like the article Debating Woody Allen On Super Bowl Sunday by Andrew Sullivan (The Dish). Sullivan isn’t really an evidence-based reality guy—he’s really only a level or two higher on the food chain that Kristof, which isn’t saying much—so he feels free to tell us that “[t]he only thing I can infer with absolute certainty from the anguished letter Dylan Farrow has written to the New York Times is that she is expressing incandescent rage”. Yeah, no kidding.

As I said, I didn’t read her open letter, but there is rarely a doubt that the person making the accusation of child abuse believes it wholeheartedly. If nothing else, it helps make the case to others. But we live in a world of “repressed memories” that turn out to have been manufactured ex post facto through endless repetition and reinforcement. We have hundreds of studies showing how easy it to get people to remember things that never were.

I am not making a judgment of this case. I am simply pointing out the shaky basis of evidence for the prosecution. Even without 20 years of confabulation layered over it, there wasn’t enough for police go on when it actually happened. Sullivan concludes his evidence-free musings by intoning “[t]hose with the greatest gifts can get away with the greatest crimes.”

Well, not really. Those with the most money can do that. Those with the most power. One of Sullivan’s favorite people ever, whom he cheerleaded (cheerled?) in his endeavors to lie his way into way with Iraq, is George Bush. Though Sullivan has since admitted that he “seriously misjudged Bush’s sense of morality”, he hasn’t seen fit to condemn Bush in anything approaching the severity that he just condemned Woody Allen.

This, despite the evidence for their respective crimes to be inversely proportional to Sullivan’s judgment. So, let’s just toss Sullivan on the same pile as Kristof, shall we? As yet another inconsistent, judgmental dumbass who feels its OK to prefer the writings of a woman who feels she’s been wronged just because that accusations she’s making are so horrific.

Doesn’t that mean that our requirements for evidence should be even higher? Instead, we hear the word pedophile and give the accuser every benefit of the doubt—just in case. Why would someone make the accusation if it weren’t true? (we ask) I don’t know. But it happens—and not as rarely as we think. And it’s not necessarily lying—often the accuser believes the story wholeheartedly, but that doesn’t make it true.

Given the power that such an accusation has to ruin a person’s life, shouldn’t we muster our best effort to making sure that a person is innocent until proven guilty?

There are things that make us mad in this world. There are various release mechanisms for this. A common—and very effective—one is to curse.

But sometimes the thing about which we need to curse is so terrible, so skull-fuc&$kingly bad that you have to invent new curses for it. And sometimes, you have to invent entirely new technologies and possible futures in order to envision a situation bad enough to engender the creation of a language that would include language severe enough to appropriately describe the object of your current ire.

That is what the fellow I am about to cite felt needed to be done, in reference to a piece of school-management software called Blackboard.

The following partial citation is from a blog post titled Christ, I hate Blackboard by davenoon (Lawyers, Guns & Money) that, I feel, has some real nuggets of gold, some shining exemplars of the kind of literary genius that can only result from the collision of some (possibly heretofore nascent) writing talent and a particularly aneurysm-inducing piece of software. I have elided some of what I considered to be the more hyperbolic portions that distracted from rather than enhanced the white-hot fury of this man’s rage.

“Hundreds of years from now, after disease and fire and famine have thinned the human herd to a shrunken patchwork of sagging, skeletal bands of […] half-mad wraiths […] a remote spur of humanity will somehow recover the capacity to speak, an ability long since abandoned by their ancestors, who were mute-struck with the unfathomable despair of those cursed to watch everything they love die. […] these distant people will bring forth a new language to survey the boundaries of their pain.

“On the outskirts of this new language, lurking on its crimsoned frontier, will lie words that will themselves have been cast into exile – foul offgassings within a lexicon that itself stands as a towering monument to the boundlessly obscene, words that will curve backward and devour themselves, each one an afflicted universe in the process of total collapse, words that exist for microseconds before streaking, unremembered and unmourned, into the void.

“These are the words, […] that I would use to catalogue the depth of my loathing for [INSERT TARGET OF HATRED HERE]. When I die, I want my whiskey-pickled body larded into a cryonic chamber, then buried deep in the earth. A thousand years from now, I want these loping, crookspined human gargoyles to dig me up and reanimate me. I will learn their language; I will amble to the profane horizon of their blood-gorged vernacular; I will force them at spear-point to build me a time machine; then I will murder them all with my bare hands. I will return to all of you then to bear witness, in a rapturous tornado of filth, to my contempt for that unholy [INSERT SHORT DESCRIPTION OF TARGET OF HATRED HERE]. (Emphasis added.)”

The second paragraph I left untouched for reasons that I hope are obvious. It is gold. The last sentence as well.

Please not that I have also converted the tirade into an easy-to-use template, ready to be directed at targets of similar opprobrium, that have truly earned this level of obloquy.

Hat-tip to Epic software rant by Mark Liberman (Language Log).

The article Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms by Felix Salmon (Reuters) discusses a change in focus in recent years at Netflix—actually since they switched to emphasizing streaming content over DVD delivery.

Netflix has started to position itself more as a television company than a “great movies” company because of purely economic reasons. As Salmon puts it, “Netflix’s big problem, it seems to me, is that it can’t afford the content that its subscribers most want to watch.” The big blockbusters that people actual want to stream aren’t going to be affordable at only $8 a month per subscriber—not when on-demand services from cable companies are asking that same price per movie.

He goes on in more detail,

“Once upon a time, when a movie came out and garnered good reviews, you could add it to your list, long before it was available on DVD, in the knowledge that it would always become available eventually. If you’re a streaming subscriber, however, that’s not possible: if you give Netflix a list of all the movies you want to watch, the proportion available for streaming is going to be so embarrassingly low that the company decided not to even give you that option any more.”

In the good old days, Netflix would use quite a sophisticated algorithm to score its enormous backlog of DVDs to find and suggest movies that you really would end up liking. But that enormous back-catalog is not available as streaming content. Why? Trademark and licensing issues, of course. Economically and ecologically, it would make more sense to stream movies instead of producing DVDs and shipping them around the country, but now is not the time to start arguing IP law. Instead, Salmon explains what Netflix does instead:

“So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.”

OK, now it should be clear that while Netflix has a pedigreed history in quality movie delivery, movies can’t be Netflix’s future. But why the emphasis on television rather than movies? How does that improve matters? Salmon again,

“One huge difference between TV and movies is that audiences have much lower quality thresholds for the former than they do for the latter. […] TV shows are cheaper to license than movies are, and people tend to be much more addicted to their TVs than they are to watching movies […] Netflix […] just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows […]”

The goal is to secure eyeballs and ad revenue, the same as standard television today but with an IP-based content-delivery model. So Netflix retains its name, but not its original purpose. Other services will replace it, I’m sure.

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the SBB automated ticket machines. The online experience is somewhat better but still has some mysterious bugs and omissions—it’s hard to believe that this software has been in use for years—and by millions of users.

Where’s the Zürich Hauptbahnhof?

One example comes from the list of suggestions returned when a user types in the “from” or “to” field in the route finder. One day, I entered what I thought was an easy match, one of the largest and busiest train stations in Switzerland: Zürich main station. In German, it’s called the “Zürich Hauptbahnhof”, which is what I typed, as shown in the screenshot below.

Where's the Zürich Hauptbahnhof?

As you can see, it utterly failed to match that train station (again, the “largest […] in Switzerland” and one of the “busiest […] in the world”, according to Wikipedia). You’ll note that I was using the site in German and I entered German text.

The trick to finding the Zürich main station on the SBB web site is to use the abbreviation “HB” instead, as shown below.

There it is – only under Zürich HB

Only if you use the abbreviation does the list of suggestions contain the Zürich main station. This is totally unacceptable; both should match but, if they had to choose just one, shouldn’t it be the actual name of the station?

Math is hard?

The other example I found occurs once you’ve managed to get a route between two stations. For the route shown, the web site indicates when the train leaves (“ab”) and when it arrives (“an”). It also takes care of the math for you and shows how long it takes, listing it under “Dauer”. In the screenshot below, however, the site seems to have subtracted incorrectly in every instance, mysteriously adding 10 minutes to each result.

Math is hard

I can attest that the ride from Zürich Altstetten really does take only 6-8 minutes. Why is the site adding these incorrectly? I ran the search again today and got the following results:

Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong

Instead of a constant 10 minutes, the site added 10, 0, 11, 10, 11 and 0 minutes respectively. Despite the confusing representation and the SBB’s less-than-stellar reputation, I was still convinced that there must be method to their madness. Curious, I expanded the first of the suggestions, as shown below.

Mystery solved! Walking time is included in 'dauer'.

The times are from when you enter the first train and leave the last one, not for the whole journey. If the trip includes a walk between two trains, then that walking time is included in the “dauer”; if, however, the walk is before the first train or after the last train, that time is not included.

Good to know, I guess.

The following story tells tale of a day spent with the ongoing user-experience (UX) catastrophe that is the interface of the SBB/ZVV automated ticket machines.

While it’s certainly possible that our experiences are unique and that others can easily purchase their perhaps simpler tickets, we have found that veering ever-so-slightly from the beaten path leads into some very deep and dark weeds.

Even were we to accept that the fault for the confusion engendered by the UI lay entirely with us, we can hardly be blamed for the mysterious time-delays and crashes.

In short, SBB/ZVV: give Encodo a call. We can help you fix this.

Prologue

When I renewed my monthly train ticket a month ago, the lady behind the counter told me that I could have gotten it from a machine instead.

She handed me a little pamphlet that explained how to use their ticket machines.

I gave it back. In hindsight, this may have been a bit hasty.

The setup

My monthly pass was about to expire. I didn’t need to get a whole month this time, so I figured that I’d just buy a six-pack of one-day tickets, in order to save money.

How hard could that be?

Initial encounter

Instead of heading back to the human-powered ticket desk, I took the lady’s advice and approached a machine.

I got to the train station about eight minutes before my train, confident that this would be more than enough time for me to exercise my not insignificant technical skills to prise forth a ticket.

On the screen, I poked a smiling SBB stock-photo customer in the eye to begin.

I chose a normal ticket. I entered my destination. Then I elected to change the starting point (I already had a ticket covering part of the trip).

Done. This was too easy.

Now to get a multi-day ticket. Multi-day, multi-ride…what’s the difference?

I touch the info icon on each. A wall of text. Scanning doesn’t elucidate anything.

Tick, tock.

I select multi-ride just to keep moving. [1]

I’m done early. All that remains is to pay for the ticket.

I slide in my card…

It’s blocked. I turn it around and try again.

Blocked.

The card reader’s apparently broken.

The machine is blissfully unaware of this and pops up a helpful message, asking whether it should just forget the whole thing and cancel my transaction.

I tell it not to cancel, but to go back to payment-method selection.

Going back incurs an interminable pause.

Tick, tock.

I’ll pay cash!

The machine gives a maximum of twenty bucks in change. I have no twenties; only fifties.

Can’t pay cash.

Wait! I have some change! What if I get a single-day ticket?

*Type, type, type*

That’s only CHF5.80.

*Scrounge, scrounge*

I have CHF5.60.

Tick, tock.

Can I just tell the conductor that the machines are broken? Does that even work? [2]

I look over at the second ticket machine. There’s a man standing in front of it, looking back and forth between two credit cards in his hands.

Tick, tock.

He seems to be having trouble deciding how he will pay for his … CHF197.– ticket. [3]

Tick, tock.

The dam has broken. He’s decided.

Printing…

Tick, tock.

I jump on the machine after he’s finished.

I type in the same commands as I’d typed in just a minute before on the other machine, my fingers flying over the keys, marveling at the comparative speed of the ZVV machine vs. that of the SBB one.

Wait…why can’t I change the starting point of my journey like on the other machine? Where did that option go?

Start over.

Tick, tock.

Why can’t I choose a multi-ticket from this machine? Where did that option go?

Fine. Get a single ticket. Anything at this point.

Type in both towns again, muscle memory helping me along.

Laaaaagggggg as I type. Why is searching a list of a few thousand items so slow?

Choose a single ticket. Wait, why is it cheaper now? What changed? I could pay for this one with my change now. [4]

No time to think about it.

Tick, tock.

The bell is ringing. The barrier is lowering. The train is coming.

There’s the button for multi-card! It’s on the final screen instead. I barely have time to register that this is a much better place for that button as I punch it.

I can feel the rumble of the approaching train in my heels.

I jam in my credit card. The reader works! Huzzah!

I type my code. Nope, the reader’s still warming up. Please hold…

Tick, tock.

I type in my code. I can hear the train now. Start printing!

Tick, tock.

Oh, the machine wants me to decide whether I want a receipt before it will do anything else.

Yes, I want a receipt! Now start printing!

The printer has started!

I see the flashing light alerting me to the imminent arrival of my hard-won train ticket, still warm from the innards of the machine.

A paper drops into the slot, lying awkwardly in the tray. It looks rather large.

“One of your products could not be printed.”

I reach in and pull out a forty-centimeter–long, curled monstrosity that purports to be my multi-ticket.

In my haste, I assumed that this was a valid ticket. That this hideous thing with ink staining the front of it every which way was the product that my labors had brought into the world. I assumed that the aforementioned product that could not be printed was my receipt. I thought that while I might be in trouble with bookkeeping back at the office for not having a receipt, that at least I had a ticket for the train. [5]

Never mind all of that. I had a multi-ticket. An overlarge and misshapen one, perhaps, but nonetheless a ticket.

Now, one final step to make it valid.

Tick, tock.

The train is gliding into the station

I hurried over and proudly punched my ticket, the ink delineating today’s date mixing illegibly into the mess of ink already printed there. [6] I didn’t care. The ticket had printed. I had paid. And I was getting on that train legally. With a valid ticket.

Whether I could prove it to a conductor or not was another question, but my conscience was clear.

I folded my ticket three times and put it in my backpack—because it wouldn’t fit in my wallet.

Despite my misgivings, no conductor came to make me reveal my shame.

The ride home

I got to the office and somehow the SBB came up in conversation that afternoon. I remembered my ticket and hauled its weighty length out of my backpack.

My colleague laughed and expressed sincere doubt that this was a valid ticket. He thought I might slip by with it, but was almost certain that it had been annulled.

This seemed like a reasonable theory, but I was beyond caring one way or the other.

Still, when I arrived at the station three minutes early for my trip home, I spotted a ZVV machine on my platform.

Brimming with confidence, muscle memory and experience, I staged an assault, fingers flashing as I once again unerringly entered my order.

I was flying along, typing my destination, when…

“Your order encountered an error and could not be completed.”

The screen froze, wiped itself clean and restored the introductory graphic. You know, the one with the people grinning their way through a day made more magical by having been able to purchase their tickets from one of these wonderful machines.

I turned and walked away.

I would take my chances with my malformed freak of a ticket, blissful in the knowledge that the SBB couldn’t hurt me anymore.

I had stopped caring.

I napped on the way home. No conductor dared to disturb my peace.

The ticket purchase. Take #2.

The next morning, I was at the station early again. More level heads had convinced me to try again and a good night’s rest had restored my optimism.

I went straight for the ZVV machine, avoiding the squat and grimly brooding SBB machine with its slow screen and faulty card reader.

*Type, type, type.*

Destination; starting location; multi-card; full days.

Wait. What? CHF70.-? For six days?

A whole month costs CHF119.-

Argghhh. Now what did I do wrong?

Back, back, back.

Tick, tock.

Choose multi-card; 1-hour.

CHF30.- For 6 trips? That’s three days of commuting.

Dammit. This is a waste of money; I might as well just get a month.

Back, back, back.

Tick, tock.

One month. Personal or transferable? Personal is cheaper; personal.

Personal card number?

What? Oh, it’s on my half-fare card.

*Dig half-fare card out of wallet*

Tick, tock.

Train’s a’comin’.

Start typing my half-fare card number.

Crash. “Your order encountered an error and could not be completed.”

Breathe.

Start over. The bell’s ringing. The barrier is lowering. The train’s a’comin’.

Just get a six-pack of 1-hour tickets. It’s the cheapest option that lets me avoid having to buy a ticket again this evening. It’s the least typing I can do.

Tick, tock.

Got it. Sweet Lord almighty, I think have a valid ticket.

No, really. This time I think I have a valid ticket.

*STAMP*

Now it’s valid.

Epilogue

On my way to my destination, I did the math again and realized that I would need another ticket in three days.

A chill ran down my spine.

Time to give up. I would return to the SBB counter and just buy a monthly ticket from a human being.

At the counter, I asked for a renewal on the recently-expired monthly ticket I handed to him, but starting on the next Monday, my hand simultaneously cramping at the thought of how much touchscreen-typing that would have entailed.

In seconds, he renewed it and handed me the new ticket, chirpily telling me,

“You could have bought this ticket on the machine instead. Just three taps and you’d have been done!”

That night, as I lay in bed, I wondered whether his family missed him yet.

It’s been raining a lot in Switzerland this year. The Tobelbach near Wetzikon was bound to be quite swollen with water after this Saturday so, despite the still-pounding rain, we took an evening walk to the Pfäffikersee to see just how drastic things had gotten.

A rainy day in Züri Oberland (YouTube)

It’s Euro-Vision Song Contest time again. Semifinals part II tonight. Don’t judge me. It’s like a traffic accident; you can’t look away. There were a lot of contestants, but here are the ones I found noteworthy.

• Finland: What the hell Finland? A few years ago you win with Death/Gore-Metal band Lordi and now you descend into the depths of bubble-gum pop with Krista (who was literally wearing bubble-gum–colored boots)? How did that number even get off the ground? It was, however, one of the classic Euro-Vision styles: wanna-be Madonna/Material-Girl–style.
• Macedonia: They covered the other classic Euro-Vision style: they sang in their native tongue and included decidely non-standard pop-cast members, like a gigantic operatic singer doing call-and-response with the Macedonian Julio Iglesias.
• Bulgaria: I had no idea that Bulgarians had also invented a bagpipe. Dude was creeping around the stage with it like Angus Young. They were decent, overall.
• Iceland: Way to bring down the mood, Iceland. A crooner with Thor-like locks wailing on in Icelandic. Utterly uninspiring.
• Switzerland: I can’t even poke fun at my Finnish and Icelandic colleagues because the Swiss managed to deliver yet another train wreck in the form of a multi-piece Salvation Army band. Couldn’t wait for that to be over. They might as well have sent a Guggämusigg Band from Lozärn which would have been much more entertaining, if not less embarrassing.
• Azerbaijan: They sent a cross between Tom Cruise and Enrique Iglesias to smolder his way through his song while his buddy tried to get out of a transparent, plastic box behind him. Not as horrible as many of the others.
• Latvia: The Swiss can thank God for Latvia who, with their spangled suits and utterly jarring energy-rock, started off the evening so badly that all of the other bands could relax and stop worrying about ending up dead last.
• Malta: A decent, upbeat song, but the singer was way too weak to carry it. Might not sound bad if somebody with some lungs or a voice with character were to sing it.
• Israel: Do you have friends who can be honest with you? A neckline that plunges to your waist plus vertical stripes stretched uncompromisingly in the horizontal? And the 80s called: they want those glasses and all of your hairstyles back. The whole picture was so distracting, I hardly had time to hate the song.
• Norway: A repeat of Finland, if a lot more subdued. Generic uninspired pop from Scandinavia hoping for some swarthy votes from the south who still can’t believe there are people with blond hair. A transparent ploy.
• Romania: Conceptually the highlight of the evening: a male singer dressed in a black necromancer’s robe, his gigantic self astride the puny, red-lit mountains of Hell. He growled out his first lines and then this Romanian King Diamond launched into an operatic soprano sequence while red-painted/suited, half-naked devils cavorted and performed feats of strength in front of him. His voice proved to not be up to the task, but the piece was nonetheless kinda riveting.

There were a couple of others, but I either missed them or I can’t remember enough about the acts to snark about them.

Penn and Teller have had a TV show on ShowTime for a while now, but I’ve never seen any. Most of them are available on YouTube (see links below) but I have no idea how long those will last there due to copyright issues. As I watched, it was easy to sympathize with the new-agey folks—Penn is ruthless and relentless. Though he’s too self-satisfied at times, he tempers it with explanations for his anger—that he hates to see people preyed upon. Still, you think to yourself, these people seem to be happier, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is the amount of money that flows to the peddler of happy feelings from the purchaser. And it generally costs a lot to avail oneself of these elite services. Whereas I’d have no problem with these feel-good sessions if they were very cheap or free—after all, what else are people going to do with their time?—the prices mean we’re talking about con games—about fraud—especially when the benefit they provide is more along the lines of rent-a-friend/prostitution, which would otherwise be illegal.

List of videos I watched

• Talking to the Dead by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Life Coaching by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Self Helpless by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Death Inc. by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Safety Hysteria by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Alternative Medicine by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• Feng Shuit / Bottled Water by Penn & Teller (YouTube)
• P.E.T.A. by Penn & Teller (YouTube)

I wrote down observations and comments as I watched, included below. These are more impressions than an article with a topic and conclusion.

The interesting thing is that the fools—there really is no other word for it—that attend these seminars (the Self Helpless episode, in particular) are self-selecting. A skeptic can’t imagine being in any of these groups without blowing up and screaming “bullshit!” but, with everyone else in the group nodding away, they all reinforce each other’s belief that they’re being helped. If you’re in a session like this and have doubts, you need only look around to see that no one else has doubts and your own will melt away. As Penn puts it in one of the shows:

“One of the tragic things about this industry is that it attracts those people that are the most vulnerable and the most easily taken-in. You get this rush of adrenalin and this rush of endorphins and you just feel like your whole life is just different.”

But they just feel better without actually being better. Feeling better is important—it can often give you the confidence and courage to actually make things better. But, if your problem is debt or unemployment, your problem is not only still there in the morning, it’s likely been exacerbated by the financial drain of the self-help courses, psychics or life coaches that imparted the fleeting good feeling. A good example is the cost of a coffin from the Death Inc. episode: $24,000 for the top of the line. For a casket that will molder in the ground. Almost required reading for this episode is the ground-breaking The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (originally written in 1963 and updated several decades later).

The main problem isn’t that people believe these treatments—God knows that they’re suckered every day by allopathic cures, as well—it’s that there are so many of these people, all with too much disposable income and too little brains, willing to throw away their money to con men. A prime examples is the reflexology guy who berates his potential student to start using the “science” before she’s taken a single class—in order to pay for the classes he wants to give her. Or the fake “snail facial” in the Alternative Medicine episode: the psychosomatic effect and people’s ability to convince themselves does absolutely all of the work. That and the “tightening”, rejuvenating effect of snail slime drying on your cheeks and forehead.

The first part of Feng Shui/Bottled Water isn’t bad, but you definitely have to check out the bottled water by Penn & Teller (YouTube) part. As you can imagine, the suckers did all of the legwork in praising L’eau de robinet (tap water in French) and Agua de culo (ass water in Spanish) to the high heavens. And, again, this would be funny except that people are convinced to pay a 1000 times markup for tap water.

I thought that the P.E.T.A. episode was the weakest—not because P.E.T.A. is beyond reproach, far from it—but because Penn & Teller only interviewed morons in defense of animal rights. See how well you do against Peter Singer, Penn; your bombast will only take you so far. And then they yell that they discovered that P.E.T.A. believes that “sometimes the only kind option for some animals is to put them to sleep forever”. If you’re halfway enlightened rather than trying to make every last act perpetrated by an enemy organization look bad, you’d ask yourself why euthanasia couldn’t be considered ethical treatment?

It just seems like they went for the easier arguments here rather than digging in to the philosophy of it (and I’m aware that this is Penn & Teller, not a high-minded symposium on animal rights). Inviting Ted Nugent to play the voice of reason on your show? You lose all credibility immediately. And that jackass radio host Dennis Prager, who bloviates that the “stupidity […] and opinions” that he hears could only be the result of “higher education”. That is such a stupid thing to say; I guess that, according to his logic, he must be an educated man.

And then they have him put the final nail in the coffin of anyone who cares about animals: that they don’t have any bigger problems to be worried about. Well, yeah, that may be true but, if so, that fact should be celebrated. And what is the argument there? That people should be thankful for what they’ve got—that life in the 21st century is better than being a Jew in 1930s Germany—and shut their f$&king, whiny mouths? That seems like a typical argument coming from a right-wing radio-show host. So everybody should shut up but him, especially when he’s telling immoral, destitute sluts to stop getting abortions.

Penn & Teller should have chosen their interview subjects more wisely—although there’s a good chance that Penn is a weird mix of indignant liberal and wide-eyed/wild-eyed libertarian. The presence of Ted Nugent is serious warning sign.

Update: Vaccinations

It’s March 2021 and we’re wasting a lot of breath looking a gift horse in the mouth. We have a vaccine that is better than we’d even dared dream it could be and it came 4x faster than we thought it would and we’re worried about post-vaccination symptoms that nearly always clear up. There are 10M vaccinations per day and the new focuses laser-like on the one or two people per week worldwide who have complications.

Bullshit! Vaccinations (90s) by Penn and Teller (YouTube)

Olivia Wilde was on the Daily Show recently (full episode) to promote a film. Jon Stewart was not only bedazzled by her, but also by her having had Christopher Hitchens as a babysitter when she was much younger. They lauded good ol’ Hitch for a while ‘cause he was such a stand-up guy, especially for someone who was a raging alcoholic (their words). When Jon asked her how her family had gotten Hitch as a babysitter, she responded that her family was part of a wonderful group of journalists that all worked together at one point but that they were “unfortunately all dying out”. She was clearly thinking of Hitchens, who’d recently died of cancer but may also have been referring to Alexander Cockburn, her uncle, who was also a heralded writer and who’d also recently died of cancer.

Nicholas KristofThey went on to discuss a recent trip she’d taken to Africa in the company of Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times. Kristof is well-known as a hack and a shill for the elite and those in power. That he recently started paying attention to the plight in Africa and is lauding micro-financing as the way forward, out of poverty—there’s probably a catch where it will benefit his usual clientèle, but I won’t hazard a guess as to what that might be. This recent zag toward something potentially useful to the hoi polloi in no way redeems the decades he spent zigging in the other direction, spewing one power-kowtowing column after another—in what he doubtless considered to be a form of journalism—into the miasma that is the modern American media.

Christopher HitchensNow, here’s the thing. Hitchens gets not only mentioned but posthumously lauded on the Daily Show. This despite having spent his last decade essentially cheer-leading for the neo-conservatives and the Bush administration in every foreign clusterfuck they saw fit to stumble America into in the name of eradicating what Hitchens considered a scourge on the Western way of life, Islam. The only reason people—perhaps Jon Stewart included—even know of Hitchens is that, once he’d made his turn toward a political sun that gelled with America’s tastes, he was invited onto talk shows and news channels to share his erudite opinions in his unquestionably loquacious and vocabularily lush manner. Americans are kind of a sucker for the British accent, even now.

At the time to which Ms. Wilde referred to Hitchens as having been a member of a group of journalists, he was a leftist—a Trotskyist—with dashes of Marxist and anarcho-syndicalism thrown in for good measure. They all were and they fought the good fight for the little guy. He used to write for the Nation (still the preëminent leftist magazine in the States), as did Alexander Cockburn. Her father, Andrew Cockburn, is a regular contributer to CounterPunch, an amazing source of independent—and…wait for it…left-leaning—journalism. Her other uncle, Patrick Cockburn, is also a regular contributor and is one of the best sources of balanced and untainted news about the Middle East available anywhere (perhaps equaled by Nir Rosen or Robert Fisk). She didn’t mention any of these people, even though they are all much better people than the self-serving drunk, Hitchens. [1]

Alexander CockburnAlexander Cockburn’s roots are in Ireland and he’d been living in America for 40 years when he died. He never, ever kowtowed and he never compromised his principles and he was always open to rational argument. This isn’t to say that his shit didn’t stink—some of his views took some nuance and squinting to see where he was not exactly supporting them but supporting their potential rationality—but he believed in science and fact and didn’t buy into the “us vs. them” mentality that gets so many in the end.

He gave amazing interviews and was a nearly peerless writer and would have been an amazing guest on the Daily Show—he had a lovely rhythm to his diction and was easily as erudite as Hitchens (see the links below). Alas, Stewart is a great guy and seems to have his head on straight, but he’s still an American and his show is still run by an American company, which means no out-and-out leftists (although Cockburn claimed that his views had more than a bit of libertarianism thrown in). In fact, leftists can’t be mentioned by name at all. Hitchens and Kristof could be mentioned—and lauded as wonderful chaps—because they know how to align their opinions with the American mainstream. Buck the trend and even your own niece won’t mention your name on TV.

If you’d like to hear Alexander Cockburn at the top of his game, then you can listen to a Tribute to Alexander Cockburn (This is Hell!). This is Hell! is a four-hour radio show that airs on Saturday mornings from the campus of Northwestern University, run by the venerable Chuck Mertz.

Greg PalastThere’s another archival show (This is Hell!) where you can find interviews with the clearly self-enamored Christopher Hitchens (a relatively regular visitor to the show) to which you can compare, if you’d like. That show also features a great interview with Greg Palast, who’s an American journalist but is blackballed because of his relentless efforts to shed light on the corrupt elections process in the States. He’s not doing too badly, though: BBC NewsNight has had him on staff for years now—at least they can still recognize good journalism.

So there you go, Hitchens and Kristof are acceptable because they’re right-wing enough for the American media and don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Greg Palast is working in England because no major U.S. news organization will hire him. Alexander Cockburn is persona non grata because he never compromised and never went over to the dark side, fighting for truth to the bitter end. Ironically, his bitter end came in Germany, where he’d gone for his final cancer treatment—a final implicit ding on the state of things in America, perhaps, a shot over the bow of the American health-care system.

Another American, Noam Chomsky, arguably the leading American moralist/political analyst for decades has been on This is Hell! many times but is utterly ignored by the mainstream media.

Perhaps Cockburn himself summed it up best when he responded to Chuck Mertz’s apologies about not having had him on in a while [2]:

“I know, I know, I know, I hear these things … it saddens me, but what do I care? Man is a fallen creature.”

So it’s another dreary Saturday (weather-wise) and I’m trying to make my way through this article, List of Pardons Included Many Tied to Power by Campbell Robertson (NY Times).

It tells of a traffic accident:

“Scotty Plunk, the driver of the truck, was killed. The driver of the Toyota, 19-year-old Joel Vann, had been drinking so much that he did not remember the accident.”

Plunk killed by teenage drunk driver, Vann. The story is about why Haley Barbour—notoriously corrupt governor of Mississippi—pardoned him.

“It is unclear what persuaded the governor to pardon Mr. Vann; his clemency application contains glowing references and a case study.”

The two parts of this sentence directly contradict each other. I’m almost certain the author meant to write “It is clear”. That’s a pretty major slip-up so early in the article (the part that even the worst editor will actually read). The next couple of sentences are even more mysterious. The letter applying for clemency came from Vann’s father and “traced [young] Vann’s path from rehabilitation through college, marriage and fatherhood”. That seems like a lot of living to pack in to 19 years. Either the guy’s age was given incorrectly at the beginning of the article or Vann did all of that either while pending trial or while in jail.

The article settles down after that and is quite an interesting read about the pardons made by Haley Barbour on his way out the door: “he issued 10 times as many as his four predecessors combined”. The people released were both overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly well-connected. “Many of the applications contain the type of recommendations that a poor person could be hard-pressed to collect: character references from state legislators or local elected officials.” One guy—“serving 33 years in prison for growing eight pounds of marijuana”—spent $1000 he barely had to apply for a pardon and never heard back.

The basic problem is that the law even allows such a sweeping override of the judgments of courts by an official. The problem with executive override also exists at a federal level. “Grants of clemency are solely at the governor’s discretion, and he is not obligated to give his reasoning.” Not only does the governor (or president) have final say, there is no way to prove corruption because he or she has power of fiat.

The photo below is from the first week of the revolution in Tunisia by Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images (Big Picture Blog) and shows a protester taking aim at the police with a baguette [1].

I just couldn’t help thinking that the cops were surprisingly nonchalant considering the guy pretending his bread is a gun is part of a revolution. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what would have happened to this guy had he tried something like this in a real hot zone, like New York City? Amadou Diallo’s family, perhaps?

The video below [1] explains the difference between the various political and geographical entities that are still or have historically been associated with England. Below the video is a summary with links and a screenshot of the final graphic, which is a nice Venn diagram of all of the various entities.

The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained by CGPGrey (YouTube)

• The United Kingdom is a political entity that comprises England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
• Great Britain is a geographical entity and is the largest of the British Isles and is a subset of the United Kingdom that does not include Northern Ireland.
• The island of Ireland comprises Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland.
• The Commonwealth Realm (Wikipedia) comprises Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica and other islands (watch the video or hit the link above for a full list).
• The Crown Dependencies (Wikipedia) include Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man.
• And, finally, the British Overseas Territories (Wikipedia) (also known as the former Crown Colonies) include Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Falkland Islands as well as many more.

Overview of the Various Political and Geographical Entities

Imagine, if you will, that you would like to take a trip from Zürich (to pick an arbitrary starting point) to Copenhagen (to pick an equally random destination).

Imagine further, if you will further indulge, that you would like to take the train in order to see Germany along the way instead of flying over everything. Imagine that you have a vague notion of nobility in doing so because of the ghastly wastefulness of flying, as far as carbon footprint goes.

You will be surprised—and not just once—when you embark on this adventure.

Your first surprise will be to discover just how bloody expensive train travel is, as compared to the seemingly much more costly air travel. Two plane tickets round-trip Zürich–Copenhagen cost about CHF425.–, give or take a Franc or two. Two train tickets round-trip Zürich–Copenhagen cost twice as much.

That it also takes 5 times as long to go by train as to go by plane is entirely expected and will therefore not count as a surprise unless you’re just silly.

Let us continue. It gets worse.

Obviously with such a long journey, you’ll want to reserve seats. On the first, longest leg of the trip (Zürich/Hamburg) all window seats were already reserved. Every last one. I will let you guess as to the seating accommodations on the plane. However, the train that leaves from Zürich at 06:00 has open seats, but is wildly inconvenient to catch (it involves a 30-minute walk to a local train station at 04:45 in order to catch the earliest train).

We are now a good two hours into comparison price-shopping. This primarily takes so long because there is no central dealer like Kayak or CheapTickets or Orbitz in the train world (that we were able to find, mind you … perhaps we’re just a bit too silly for the Internet).

We have decided not to care. We are ignoring the siren song of the airplane and want to travel by train, dammit. We want to see Germany, dammit. We want to stop in Hamburg on the way there and Frankfurt on the way back, dammit. We thought this would be a good deal easier and rewarding.

Let’s just bite the bullet and buy tickets. The first leg will be purchased at the SBB—the Swiss national train system web site.

Tickets are selected.

Reservations are selected.

Credit-card information is entered.

Hold on now.

Something seems a bit fishy.

Can you spot the problem in the screenshot below?

For some reason, the SBB is willing to sell us tickets through a storefront that is completely and entirely unecrypted. That we are using the Opera web browser does not enter into it; if the SBB doesn’t support Opera, then they should NOT…EVER offer to collect credit-card information over an unencrypted connection.

Fine. Let’s check with another browser and start the purchase all over again. Let’s take the most popular browser on the Mac—Safari.

Wow. The SBB is serving up an invalid certificate. Opera probably refused to even chat with that server and was shunted off to the non-secure site. Safari opens the connection but cannot verify the certificate. I’ve seen expired certificates before and it’s unprofessional, but I’ve never seen an unverifiable certificate on such a huge site.

No wonder everyone flies.

Update: the site seems to be encrypted again in both Opera and Safari, so perhaps they were just performing an upgrade. Hat tip for a seamless web-site upgrade, though.

The venerable Plastic.com is closing its doors for good this weekend. I’ve been a member for about a decade and contributed sporadically throughout. I saved my comments from the site before it goes dark and included them below. The context is often not there, but it’s an interesting compendium of issues from the last decade.

My stats were as follows:

• name: dur
• member since: Tue 23 Oct 2001
• karma: 8 (astute scholarly underrated succinct)
• favorite words: countries(16), already(10), country(10), issues(10), though(9), world(9), quite(8), democratic(8), without(8), government(7)

From the article This column will change your life by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian):