This is a great discussion. At 26.5 minutes, it’s relatively compact. They discuss, among other things, Vivek Ramaswamy’s having come down to Earth to realize that his party will not accept him as a real person.

Millennial White Men DISCRIMINATED Against? (w/ Vijay Prashad) by Briahna Joy Gray (YouTube)

At about 18:00,

“I mean, there’s real racism but also for political reasons. It’s very useful to believe that groups rise or fall because of their kinds of intrinsic ability, because then they don’t have to spend money on any policies to try to create any kind of equality. Right?... [More]”

Unraveling the Rot: Doug Henwood on America’s Economic Elites and the Fight for a Just Future (Scheer Post) was a fantastic interview. Highly, highly recommended. The summary from the show writes,

“[…] discuss the deep decay—“the rot”—within America’s ruling class. Henwood argues today’s political and economic elites are short-sighted, unimaginative, and corrupted by money. While Trump is an obvious symptom, Henwood stresses that the Democratic establishment, Ivy League elite, and corporate... [More]”

This isn’t exactly my musical style—metal is great but scream/growl metal has yet to grow on me—but I love the commitment in this video. Like, imagine they’re spitballing what the video’s going to be like and someone says,

“Let’s dub our song to what looks like an earnest but kinda lame, four-piece, mariachi-looking band.”

“Is that us? Is the band us?”

“Yeah, of course. Who else is gonna do it?”

“OK. Cool. But what if, and bear with me, aliens start abducting and replacing band... [More]

Avatar: Fire and AshI don’t trust the Critical Drinker (link below) that much, but his review for the second Avatar movie rings absolutely true, so I can imagine that there’s a good chance that it applies to this one as well. I can’t remember anything about Avatar 2. I can’t remember a single character’s name.

I would fail a quiz on the Avatar films with a 0/10. I’ve seen both Avatars. I might have seen the first one twice. I honestly can’t remember. My notes reveal that, even for the first one, which I saw in 2012... [More]

This documentary was originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English.

The Net − the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck in 2003 (YouTube)

In a way, the people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones I’d just seen in Cybertopia. They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The... [More]

Not a single person in this video is self-aware. They are completely unaware of how ironically terrible everything that they say is. Even the producers of the video thought that this was a good thing, a world of rich people deciding for everyone else how the world was going to look.

But they’re all morons, shallow—so shallow!—and so convinced that they’re right, that there’s nothing more to discuss, that they’ve missed nothing. They are incurious because they’ve got it all figured out.
... [More]

The article Walz Pulls Out: Score Another Another One for Racism, Coupled with Democratic Party and Media Ineptitude by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) is yet another well-written lament in a long list of laments about the utter lack of resistance to the grinding propaganda machine buoying the Trump administration.

I don’t really care about Tim Walz. He’s an empty suit. For God’s sake, he was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate to the even emptier suite of Kamala Harris. That he’s bowing out of a re-election campaign... [More]

OCaml LogoI don’t program with OCaml. I never have. I have a good colleague who does, occasionally, write stuff in OCaml, and he sent me a bunch of links about OCaml Effects, starting with a discussion asking Are we rational? About exceptions and effects by olleharstedt (OCaml Community).

The author writes,

“I was thinking about the fact that there’s no consensus about exceptions and whether to include them or not in a programming language. Think about Go. They decided to not add support for exceptions. Did they cite any study to... [More]”

I recently had some time off at the end of the year. What to do?

I decided I wanted to catch up on my movie and series reviews and notes.

I (briefly) considered whether to “declare bankruptcy”—just give up on the unfinished drafts and start fresh, or maybe just make quick, short notes, or maybe just publish whatever I had, in whatever form it happened to be in.

But then I remembered how happy it makes me when I search for and find my notes for a show or movie I look up. They remind me of... [More]

A good reminder:

1. Remember what you’ve learned and what you know.

   • Carry your own context into battle.
   • Do not accept the illegitimate, mendacious, and bad-faith framing of the enemy.
2. Do not let them run the conversation.

   • Waste as little time as possible refuting lies that it’s obvious even they don’t believe.
   • Stay focused on important topics; do not be distracted by their chaff.

Be the white cat

This video of a discussion between Anand Giridharadas and Chris Hedges is worth the hour you’ll invest in it.

The segment starting around 40:00 was fantastic. It’s about how we don’t appreciate the heroic amount of work required to keep civilization going—work done by states, despite corporations—so that many of us don’t have to think about survival at all, and can focus on thriving.

We are being encouraged to dismantle these things because those who have benefitted greatly —and... [More]

The post this poster at work (reddit) included an alphabet poster, presumably generated by an LLM.

The longer you look at it, the worse it gets. The letters H, J, P, and Y are missing. V and N appear twice. Several letters are out of order.

Imagine a kid who’s trying to learn the alphabet, though. How would they know that it’s wrong? How confused would they be?

O is penguin

1. A is for ak
2. B is for
3. C is foreah (picture of a cheetah?)
4. D is foer
5. E is elephant (got one!)
6. F is fox (got two!)
7. G is gorilla (three in a... [More]

Lee Camp’s show Unredacted Tonight is getting better and better with each episode. This was a brilliant report, tightly reported, chock-full of excellent information, hilarious. No notes.

UNREDACTED: The Crazy Truth of US Coups in Latin America / US Police Kill More People Than You Think by Unredacted Tonight | Lee Camp (YouTube)

From the show description:

“In this episode of Unredacted Tonight, Lee Camp traces a modern history of U.S. intervention in Latin America—covering major regime-change operations, covert actions, and military interventions from the 1950s onward. With sharp political comedy and rapid-fire historical... [More]”

The article We’re all just content for ICE by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) writes[1],

“They are tightening the noose and there is very little room left for any kind of meaningful protest. Minnesotans over the weekend organized massive demonstrations, with thousands of people marching through the south side of Minneapolis several days in a row. But there was no law enforcement there, nor were there any ICE officers (at least in uniform). No one to whom they could direct their anger at. As for local leaders, Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke... [More]”

Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good is nearly 30 minutes and it’s all 100% worth watching. It’s a very well-thought-through and well-presented analysis of the culture of violence in the U.S.[1]

Minneapolis ICE Shooting: Glenn Shares His Thoughts by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

Glenn discusses the sickness of a society that cheers violence, that celebrates death. He begins by talking about Renee Nicole Good’s utterly senseless death, which, for the sake of argument, we won’t even call an alleged murder, because nothing has been officially alleged... [More]

FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul grabbed him for an interview as he was exiting a small, local event at his high-school alma mater. He exuded a calm fury, the same passion he’s always had against injustice.

I’ve included a partial transcript of the following ~8:00 video below. He made the following chilling, if obvious point about halfway through.

“I spent 17 months in Southeast Asia while the draft dodger was playing golf. Right? You know how I know we’re a third world country? Because in third... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

“You are at the mercy of these faceless bureaucrats.”

This hits a little too close to home. How long before someone finds this blog and puts me on a list? Will my bank in Switzerland freeze my account as well? Granted, I’m not a black woman like poor Nathalie, so I have more rights.

This is just a public-service announcement that the reason they want you to do everything on your phone, on-line, and in the cloud is so that they can then track every last little thing you do.

And then they will... [More]

So it all started with the following line of code in the Startup.cs of a WPF application,

locator.GetInstance<IAuthenticationService>().LogInBasedOnGeneralSettings();

It was to be replaced with these lines of code.

#if DEBUG
    locator.GetInstance<IAuthenticationService>().LogInBasedOnGeneralSettings();
#else 
    locator.GetInstance<LoginViewModel>().Show();
#endif

Reduce startup complexity

Going by the single-responsibility principle, the startup should be responsible for starting the... [More]

The official response in the U.S. to the shooting of Renee Nicole Good is exactly the one you expect from an authoritarian state. No pity. No remorse. No empathy. They slander and lie and smear.

People crawl out of the woodwork to parse the event, proving that she was a terrorist.

It’s monstrous.

It is the sign of a deeply sick society, a broken culture.

These people exhibit such a deep lack of empathy, and such a disinterest in ensuring that this never happens again.

They need—and kind... [More]

The article C# 14 Extension Members: Complete Guide to Properties, Operators, and Static Extensions by Laurent Kempe writes,

“Perhaps the most powerful C# 14 capability is extension operators. You can now add user-defined operators to types you don’t control, enabling natural mathematical operations.”

When I first saw this, I thought it was kind of gimmick-y. But I just realized why it’s very nice that you can declare operators separately—optionally—from the type. Adding operators by default is a heavy... [More]

Think of trickle-down economics like this: imagine that two people have just dug up a big pile of money.

One of them says,

‘I’m gonna take all of this money and I’m gonna go make more money with it and then I’m gonna come back here and give you some of it’

And the other guy goes,

‘OK I guess I’ll wait here then.’

The first guy doesn’t believe in trickle-down economics. He just said whatever he thought he needed to say in order to get away with the money right now.

It’s the other... [More]

This is another cover-up of a shooting by federal military deployed in the U.S. Being white does not protect you. Historical privilege does not protect you. Only obeisance to the regime might protect you.

The umbrella has gotten smaller. You used to be standing under the umbrella, watching it rain on black and brown people. Now, It’s raining on people who have the right skin color, but the wrong thoughts, maybe the wrong gender.

This is Gaza.

NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS TRUTH BEHIND ICE SHOOTING by HasanAbi (YouTube)

The cop shot her because she was an uppity... [More]

Lesson 1: Resistance is futile

The lesson Switzerland can learn from the attack on Venezuela is that it can just stop investing in the military because its military is useless in this day and age.

It’s wasted money.

While there are theories that Caracas didn’t use any of its anti-aircraft missile batteries because they were paid off, it’s also just as likely that they realized that they can’t use them without dying.

What are you gonna do when those Chinooks drop into your national... [More]

This is yet another excellent interview, this one with John Kiriakou, who, like Ben Norton, is extraordinarily well-informed and extremely capable of imparting his knowledge. Lee Camp does a very good job of feeding him questions and topics.

LIVE: Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou on Venezuela, 9/11 & More! by Lee Camp − Unredacted Tonight (YouTube)

I learned the following about the mission to kidnap Maduro,

• The U.S. had zero casualties. Kiriakou says that that wouldn’t have been possible without complicity on the part of at least some Venezuelans, who were almost certainly on the CIA payroll.[1]
• He... [More]

Ben NortonThe following video is an excellent interview with Ben Norton, a fluent Spanish-speaker who has spent a lot of time in Venezuela, reporting and investigating economics and politics. He knows a lot of people there, and has many friends there. He says that the opposition in Venezuela, which on the tip of everyone’s tongue in the U.S., is negligible in Venezuela. They have no real presence, not even online. They are very marginal.

Those are the two parts of the narrative that are being pushed... [More]

Vijay Prashad is brilliant, and he’s brilliant in this video. He discusses how he knows Maduro personally, that the guy was a bus driver and union leader before he was asked to step in for him by Chavez, who was dying of cancer. Maduro’s wife is in the general assembly, as well.

Venezuela: What Just Happened? With Vijay Prashad, Andreína Chávez and José Luis Granados Ceja 📱 by Katie Halper (YouTube)

Maduor was elected president. The Wikipedia on the 2024 Venezuelan national election is one of the longest ones I’ve ever seen, and is filled with wishy-washy language that lets the reader believe that there is cold,... [More]

At least it’s easier to stay on top of things this time. You don’t have to dig down to get to the truth. The press conferences are more open and to the point. You don’t have to ask yourself what they’re really saying. They’re saying it. What they’re saying is horrible enough. If they’re lying to cover up something even more horrible and illegal, it almost doesn’t even matter.

Try and stop us

The U.S. President just says that the U.S. owns other countries, like Venezuela. It’s not true in... [More]

Renato KaiserIn September of 2023, I saw “s’läbä isch geil” by Renato Kaiser. It was a solid two hours. He had no notes. He delivered a two-hour show from memory. He is incredibly eloquent, introspective, insightful, poetic, and very, very funny.

These are the “chapters” of that nearly two-hour show

• Life is good
• Severin
• What about immortality?
• Would we want that? Why not?
• Just for ourselves? Or for everyone?
• Swiss Lotto / Win4Llife
• Cats; Altersheim
• Flossing
• Gendering in speech
• Serial killers... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Zurück in die Zukunft II (1989) — 7/10
2. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) — 8/10
3. Zurück in die Zukunft III (1990) — 7/10
4. Rambo: Last Blood (2019) — 6/10
5. Non c’è più religione (2016) — 6/10
6. King Arthur (2004) — 6/10
7. Triangle of Sadness (2022) — 6/10
8. A Knight’s Tale (2001) — 9/10
9. El Verdugo / 100 Rifles (1969) — 6/10
10. Paddington in Peru (2024) — 6/10
11. The End of the Tour (2015) — 9/10

Zurück in die Zukunft... [More]