Links and Notes for February 9th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

I don’t like to make comparisons to Nazi Germany, but the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about how great the economy is while their foreign policy lays waste to other countries. Hell, they’re unquestioningly helping their closest ally get more Lebensraum.

Let Them Eat Dirt by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.”

“Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread . Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars.”

“Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb.”

“Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.”

“I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.”

“The precursor to starvation − undernourishment − already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.”

“It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.”

“I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.”

“[…] when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.”

What They Were Hiding: Increased Solitary Confinement in Immigrant Detention Facilities by Kevin Gosztola (ScheerPost / The Dissenter)

“Records obtained showed that nearly half of the detained immigrants placed in solitary confinement were held in isolation for longer than 15 days. Documents indicated that 682 immigrant were held in solitary for 90 days. Forty-two immigrants were held in solitary for over a year.”

“Records reflected how ICE arbitrarily imposes solitary confinement. One immigrant was put in isolation for 29 days because they used profanity. Two other immigrants were put in solitary for a “consensual kiss.” Another allegedly “refused” to get out of their “bunk during count.” A contract facility in Denver, Colorado, put one immigrant in solitary confinement for “eating too slowly.” That same immigrnat was placed in isolation 10 more times.”

“At least 14,264 solitary confinement placements in the past five years from 2018 to 2023 were identified in the documents that were provided by DHS and ICE, but according to Physicians for Human Rights, that number is “likely an undercount due to ICE’s documented underreporting and misrepresentation of its use of solitary.””

Lost & Fearful in The Middle East by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] the Iranians, who continue to abide by a longstanding policy of “strategic patience,” as Muhammad Sahimi, a prominent commentator on Iranian affairs, argued in a piece published Saturday in The Floutist .”

“All the recent attacks on U.S. ships, ground facilities and personnel have unexpectedly exposed this weakness. And this brings us to what most fundamentally motivates Biden and the instant peaceniks who faithfully repeat what he says. (Or does he faithfully repeat what they tell him to say?)”

This was published before the recent report on Biden’s mental incapacity.

“There are more “ifs” and qualifiers in these two pieces than you’ve had hot dinners. “If the administration can pull this together — a huge if,” Friedman writes. There are so many “significant obstacles,” “divisive issues” and “long shots” that you have to wonder why these pieces were written and published.”

“No such entity is any longer possible — nor was one, in my view , ever desirable. The Israelis, in any event, will never agree to an independent Palestine: The Netanyahu regime makes this clear every chance it gets.”

You might have to get them out of there to save them from Israel, but how? And would that mean that Israel would be a pariah state? The international community has no authority. The Palestinians, after most of them were herded into Rafah, are now being herded into Egypt.

“The Gaza crisis is a text in which we can read that genuine diplomacy, based on knowledge of the perspectives of others, will come to define our century more than mere power. It tells us, too, that Washington, as of now, has neither the intention nor ability to live and act well in this new time.”

That’s good, but i’m not looking forward to the death throes that will precede such an era.

Pakistan’s People Will Vote Under a Cloud of Repression by Ayyaz Mallick (Jacobin)

“[…] it is the proportion of short-term and highly onerous debt held by foreign, private, commercial banks that is most alarming. This burden has grown almost sevenfold over the last decade and now accounts for almost 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual debt servicing, although it only represents 23 percent of total foreign debt. Foreign debt servicing accounted for close to 35 percent of Pakistan’s export earnings last year, and debt servicing amounts are set to double in the next five years. Combined foreign and domestic debt servicing takes up almost all the revenue generated by the Pakistani state through taxation.”

“In the last year alone, cuts in subsidies and currency devaluation have led to a tenfold increase in gas prices and a doubling in the cost of many basic food items. Unemployment among young graduates stands at 33 percent, in addition to a full 23 percent working in “unpaid jobs.” Meanwhile, the corporate sector registered its highest ever quarterly earnings between July and September last year, with the banking sector being the biggest beneficiary.”

“During the 2010s, the number of Afghans in Pakistan went down from a high point of eight million to less than half that figure, in what Human Rights Watch described in 2017 as “the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times.” This process has now accelerated, with authorities even attempting to charge those seeking refuge in Western countries a fine of over $800 to leave Pakistan.”

“Pakistan’s burgeoning youth population had its hopes and aspirations raised by Imran Khan’s ambiguous populism and fiery rhetoric over the last decade. It now sees a situation with no escape, except for settlement abroad.”

“This has prompted a desperate search for opportunities to emigrate to increasingly hostile Gulf or Euro-American destinations. A record eight hundred thousand people left Pakistan in the first half of 2023 alone, while the caretaker prime minister declared this massive brain drain to be an “asset” for the country. Almost three hundred such “assets” recently became victims of Fortress Europe and the treacherous Mediterranean sea.”

“Such then is the terrain of society and polity in Pakistan on the eve of February’s election. There is a ruling bloc in desperate need of imperial and social moorings, at odds with Pakistani society, and reliant on repression that grows wider and deeper. It faces a citizenry who have been mostly demobilized and held in coercive thrall by praetorian overlords, yet capable of generating uneven levels of mass protest and deep organizing in response to such suppression and dispossession.”

What Yemen’s Houthis Want: An interview with Helen Lackner by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“[…] the Huthis have been very, very explicit. They have said very clearly that the ships they object to, or that they will target, are ships that have any connection with Israel. So, whether that’s a connection of delivering goods, picking up goods, transit, ownership, whatever, those are ships that they are targeting. They are not targeting others. They’ve also explicitly announced that, for any other ship, all they need to do is respond to Huthis’ calls and say that they have no Israeli connection. They will then not be attacked.”

“[…] when the Huthis threaten something, they mean it. And at the same time, when the Huthis generally make agreements, they tend not to mean it. So, one has to have a clear differential between the different circumstances that you get when dealing with the Huthis.”

“[…] because certainly within Yemen — within the area that the Huthis control, i.e., two-thirds of the population of the country — they are not popular. And they are generally considerably disliked because their rule is not what you’d call democratic or friendly or showing any respect for basic human rights. The Yemeni population, alongside the population in most Arab countries, and many others, is pro-Palestinian. And therefore, what they are doing in the Red Sea has enormously increased their popularity in the area that they rule.”

“[…] they are not wonderful. What they’re doing with respect to the Red Sea and Palestine is definitely a good thing, in my view. But the rest of their activities are by no means things that anybody on the Left should support.”

“[…] the Huthi fundamental slogan has three negative items, which are: death to America, death to Israel, and curse on the Jews. So, I mean, being anti-American comes even before being anti-Israeli. So having the Americans attack them is a highly ideologically desirable situation from their point of view.”

“[…] the Huthis are not a tribe. The Huthis are a movement that is named after its leading family, who are called “Huthi.” They come from the far north of Yemen, and they are Zaydis. Now, if you look at Yemen’s religious situation, you have two main Islamic groups within Yemen. You have the Zaydis — who are a form of Shia, which is different from the Iranian Twelver Shia — on the one hand, and they control most of the northern highlands. And if you look at a map of the territory of what the Huthis control, they control that area plus I’d say a sort of band around it. So, they control more than just the Zaydi area. And the other religious group are Shafi’is, who [follow] a form of Sunnism, and they live in the rest of the country. And there’s a few tiny groups of Ismailis.”

“[…] their belief that the descendants of the prophet have an innate right to rule — and not only just a right, but a duty to rule the country and hopefully beyond. Those people in Yemen are normally known as Sadah in the plural and Sayyid in the singular, and they are the same people that in other areas are known as either Ashraf or Hashemites. A belief that this social group should be ruling the country is really the main ideological element.”

“[…] the Huthis are ruling in an extremely autocratic and authoritarian system. They give no space for freedom of expression. They are particularly oppressive of women, as are most fundamentalist movements of any religion to my knowledge. And they basically do not accept any form of dissent; anything that looks like dissent is very severely repressed.”

“[…] the truce started and lasted from April to October 2022. So, what it meant is that the fighting reduced very, very considerably. Since the truce ended in October 2022, up to now, there’s been very, very limited military activity on all the usual fronts within Yemen. And it has been almost exclusively between the Yemeni sides, though on the immediate border to Saudi Arabia, there have been a few strikes across the border from Yemen. And recently, in the last few months, the Huthis managed to kill a few Bahrainis who were fighting there. Mainly what there hasn’t been at all, until this last week, has been any air strikes on Yemen, full stop. Up to that period, any air strikes that took place were mainly from what is officially known as the Saudi-led coalition.”

“[…] as we’ve explained, the Huthis are authoritarian and unpleasant. Unfortunately, most of the factions on the other side are at least as authoritarian and unpleasant. So, in terms of solving the internal Yemeni crisis in favor of a regime that would respond to the needs, ambitions, hopes of the thirty-plus million Yemenis who are trying to live, the prospects are not very good.”

“[…] the Balfour Declaration was something that was regarded with great hostility throughout the Arab world. It wasn’t a matter of being anti-Zionist so much as being anti the British creating a Jewish state on Arab land, if you see the difference. I mean, basically, they objected to the land being taken over by someone else. If it had been a bunch of Catholics from Ecuador, it would have been the same thing. It was this stealing and removal of Arab lands.”

“Yeah, the PDRY regime is, of course, blamed and described as a horrible bunch of dreadful communists who were out to do all kinds of horrible things to everybody everywhere, which is not what they were. The reality of it is that, in terms of governance for the population, they did a lot more than was technically possible thanks to the financial means of the regime. Basically, they took over in November 1967 at a time when the main two sources of income of Aden had disappeared. The Suez Canal was closed; therefore, [there was] no more income from the port. And the British base, which had been the other main source of income, also closed, obviously. So, they were left with a disastrous economic situation and no obvious sources of income. The subsistence agriculture of most of the country was not going to keep them afloat. So, what they did in those circumstances is that they raised money, partly from international aid, a lot of it from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also from local resources by setting up various attempts at industry, et cetera. I mean, there was the famous Chinese weaving factory and such. But mainly what they provided was a regime in which people could live on their salaries. There was almost no unemployment. Education was massively increased. There had been hardly any education services in the British period. Health services were provided, a lot of them through help from Cuba and China. But by the mid-’70s, they had their own medical school. And that was operational, and they produced their own doctors. And so, they provided basic living standards that were actually above the real financial means of the state. So that’s the very positive element of the PDRY rule.”

“[…] they were dreadfully worried about external opposition, which was quite realistic and true. Because the Saudis were against them, the YAR was against them, the United States was obviously against them, and the Brits were against them. I mean, there was no diplomatic relation with the United States at all. They did feel besieged. And one can rationally say they were besieged. And then of course there’s Amman. So, they were besieged, and I think that probably increased and worsened the level of concern, or one could even say paranoia, among the leadership, which helps to explain, to some extent, the internecine warfare or disagreements. But on the other hand, if they managed to stay united, they would probably have done a lot better.”

“[…] the level of expectations of the population was really unreasonable, because a lot of the population had gone to Saudi Arabia, or the Emirates after the Emirates were created, or to Kuwait, or Bahrain, and expected the same level and quality of services as existed for nationals in those countries. And I had lots of arguments with people in the late ’70s, when oil had not been discovered. But even if oil was discovered, the issue was that what you ended up with in Yemen was a few hundred thousand barrels of oil per day for twenty to thirty million people. Whereas, in Saudi Arabia, you had eleven million barrels of oil per day for the same population or even fewer. So, the actual relationship between what was realistically possible and what was expected was not rationally determined.”

“[…] there is the probably true story that there were times when you’d have the Americans training the air force on one end of the runway in Sana’a Airport and the Russians training the air force at the other end of the runway of the same airport. So, they tried to keep a balance. And the YAR regime, although it was very straightforwardly capitalist and one could even say kleptocratic, particularly in the ’80s and maybe not so much in the ’70s, was part of the Western camp. But only to a marginal extent, I would say.”

“The concept of Yemeni unity, I think, is something that made and still makes a lot of sense. I mean, personally, I always thought that the talk of Arab unity was a joke and it was completely unlikely and that couldn’t happen. But Yemenis do form a nation. And there’s a very clear, instantly recognizable difference between a Yemeni and a Saudi, or a Yemeni and an Omani, let alone a Yemeni and an Egyptian, or whatever. And there are what I’d call the basic elements of a joint culture. The language varies within Yemen, of course, as all Arabic dialects vary even within the country. But there are more cultural elements that keep Yemenis together than separate them. Although they’re not all the same, and it would be very difficult to do a matrix or a map. But it could be done.”

Switzerland is the same. So, I hear, is Slovakia. It’s not uncommon.

“You had this flourishing, for two or three years, of enthusiasm and belief in the wonders of democracy, and the openness, and freedom of expression, and enthusiasm for a new regime, despite the underlying economic crisis. Let’s not forget, not only did the eight hundred thousand come back from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but the World Bank cut its funds, the USA cut its funds, everybody cut funds. So, the place was in desperate financial straits at that time. But you had this great political enthusiasm and a great openness at all levels, which really lasted roughly until ’93, ’94. And then what happened is that, during that period already, Ali Abdullah Saleh started to tighten his control over everything and everybody.”

“What I can say is that it is indeed worth remembering that sectarianism basically does not enter into any of this. The Saudis supported whom they considered to be good for them. In other words, they supported the monarchy, however Shia it might have been, versus the republicans, however Sunni they might have been. I think that’s one element. So today, they’re anti-Huthi not because the Huthis are Zaydis, they’re anti-Huthi because the Huthis threaten their ideological position. Partly because, of course, the Huthis believe that descendants of the Prophet have the right to rule and the Saudis are tribal. So, they don’t fit into that description. That’s one of the many points of disagreement you have.”

“[…] it’s not the Zaydis who were having problems with the Sana’a regime, it was the Sadah, the descendants of the Prophet. And you can’t say that they were being oppressed. What you can say is that they didn’t have the high level of privileges that they’d had prior, under the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. In other words, they were not, for example, more or less automatically given the best jobs, which is now again the case with the Huthis. With the Huthis, the Sadah get the best jobs, regardless of their capacity. And they have access to all kinds of things that other people don’t have access to. For example, the new zakat law specifically says that it’s to help poor Sadah, not everybody.”

“[…] this perception, that you’re not getting what you’re entitled to and other people are getting it, is something that you found everywhere in Yemen. Everybody thought everyone else was doing better than they were doing. I mean, basically what was happening is that the cronies and friends of Ali Abdullah Saleh were doing well and everybody else was not doing well. So, the people in Sa’ada are thinking that they were being discriminated against by comparison with those in Raymah or someplace else, [but that was] simply not true. What was true was that, if you were a friend of Ali Abdullah Saleh, regardless of where you came from, you did okay. And if you weren’t, you didn’t.”

“[…] the Yemeni economy has collapsed. There’s almost nothing left of it. People are dependent on humanitarian aid, imports, on bits and pieces of unclear economic activities, and on remittances, et cetera. So, the humanitarian situation, although by no means comparable to the absolute nightmare of what’s going on in Gaza now, is extremely serious. And the UN’s humanitarian response plan, which was financed at 55 percent in 2022, was financed at 38 percent in 2023. Now, that’s not particularly a discrimination against Yemen, because, internationally, the humanitarian response plan in 2023 has been financed about 37 percent, or 37.5 percent. So, this is part of the overall demands on the humanitarian sector increasing, combined with decreasing funding.​”

“The World Food Program has reduced its rations to millions of people to a fraction of what they were two or three years ago. And many of these people don’t have any alternatives. So, the humanitarian situation is something that really needs to be addressed, and which is very severe, and continues regardless of whether you’re living in Huthi land or in internationally recognized government land.”

“I think what is clear is that, unless some extraordinary military activity takes place that actually defeats them, and it would be difficult to imagine what it would be, because I can’t imagine that a US land invasion would have a different result in Yemen from what it had in Afghanistan eventually, the Huthis are there to stay. They may be a highly undesirable set of people to live under, but they remain the most relevant and important political force in the country. And I think that’s not a particularly cheerful way to end our conversation, but I suspect that it is the way things are and are likely to be. I haven’t come across anybody in recent times who suggested that there’s any likelihood of the Huthis not being around for a long time to come.”

White Man’s Justice Is Black People’s Grief: A Black History Month Truth by Kevin Cooper (Scheer Post)

“In fact, it wasn’t until President Biden finally signed into law an anti-lynching bill named after 14-year-old Emmett Till, who suffered white man’s justice by being abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store. President Biden signed this bill into law in 2022; it took over a century to do this. Ida B. Wells and others tried to get it signed into law in the early 1900s.”

“With all the deception that is ongoing in the institutions that run and control this country, how can anyone actually have faith and confidence in the capital punishment system that hasn’t really changed since it first started centuries ago? The same people who do the executing, for the most part the white man, and the same people who always have been the executed — Black and other minority people — are still in those roles. When are Americans as a whole going to wake up and see that all of our professed humanity is at stake in this?”

The Alabama State Government’s Killing of Kenneth Smith by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“According to Alabama’s State Attorney General, Steve Marshall, it was a “textbook” case of execution. Who wrote the textbook, Dr. Mengele? Marshall bragged about the execution as if Alabama had been the first state to land a man on Mars: “As of last night, nitrogen epoxy as a means of execution is no longer an untested method; it is a proven one.” Marshall sounded like a pitchman for an execution franchise.”

“The US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But Kenneth Smith’s execution proves these words have lost all meaning. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to kill Smith. But the cowardly court couldn’t even be bothered to put their reasoning in writing as to why an experimental method of execution didn’t qualify as “unusual” and how a second attempt to kill a man wasn’t considered “cruel.””

“Kenneth Smith was put to death for a murder for hire that took place in 1988. What was gained by his execution? Was he a threat to kill again? By all accounts, he’d been a model prisoner for 35 years.”

“Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the method used to kill him was experimental and had been banned by veterinarians for use on mammals.”

Cutting aid to refugees, US advances Israel’s war on Palestinian existence by Aaron Maté

“Days after the Times’ report, the Wall Street Journal followed up with an article even more subservient to the Israeli narrative. According to Israeli intelligence, the Journal declared, “around 10% of all of [UNRWA’s] Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups,” including “23% of Unrwa’s male employees… indicating a higher politicization of the agency than the population at large.””

US bases military “trainers” permanently in Taiwan by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“Under Trump and now Biden, the US has torn up longstanding diplomatic protocols limiting contact between Taipei and Washington, boosted arms sales, including of offensive weaponry, and now stationed US trainers in Taiwan.”

“The expansion of US trainers in Taiwan is partly in preparation for this year’s extension of compulsory military service for young men on the island from four to 12 months as a component of its military build-up against China. Washington, which is seeking to weaken and destabilise China in any conflict, has pressed Taipei to adopt a “porcupine” strategy aimed at inflicting maximum damage on Chinese military forces.”

“While the reported numbers of US troops on Taiwan are still comparatively small, their activities and increasing size indicate that Washington is intent on preparing the island as a military trap for China in the not-too-distant future—not decades down the track. Already at war with Russia in Ukraine, backing Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and widening the conflict in the Middle East, the US is deliberately drawing China into a global war with catastrophic consequences.”

As it supports Gaza genocide, UK government wages war on democratic rights by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)

“Announcing initial measures targeting the use of flares and fireworks on demonstrations, face coverings and climbing on war memorials, he concluded, “Those who abuse their freedom to protest undermine public safety and our democratic values. And I will give the police the powers they need to crack down on this intimidating and appalling behaviour.”

“These are comments worthy of a police state. They signal a further assault on democratic rights in the UK”

“The intention is to outlaw opposition to British imperialism and its support for the genocide in Gaza, criminalising opinions held by millions by making an example of selected individuals and organisations. A key part of this campaign is to brand left-wing politics as “extremist,” subjecting activists to surveillance, harassment, censorship and arrest with the use of deeply anti-democratic counter-terror legislation.”

Israel announces plans for ethnic cleansing of Rafah by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“On Friday, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement asserting that the prime minister had ordered the Israeli military to submit a plan for the forced evacuation of the southern town of Rafah, where one million refugees from other areas of Gaza have been driven.”

“Given that Israel has ordered the people of Gaza to evacuate effectively all other areas of the region, the clear implication is that the population will be expelled into the Sinai Desert, with or without the permission of Egypt.”

“[…] approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people—are internally displaced, with the majority of those sheltering in Rafah. The trapped refugees are facing famine and lack access to clean water, hygiene and medical care.”

“[…] this is precisely the plan of the Israeli government, operating with the full military and logistical support of the Biden administration and the European governments. Having seized upon the October 7 attacks as a pretext, Israel has moved to implement a long-term plan to render Gaza uninhabitable and either kill or expel its population. The assault on Rafah will mark a new stage in this vast crime.”

White House in crisis after special counsel report on classified documents slams Biden’s “limited” memory by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“In his report, Hur, a former prosecutor in the Trump administration, repeatedly emphasized that part of his reasoning in not charging Biden was due to the president’s “hazy” and “limited memory.””

“Hur referred to Biden’s diminished memory nine separate times. Citing recorded interviews, Hur wrote that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interviews with our office in 2023.”

“Hur described Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017 as “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.””

“[…] the Republicans charged that a “man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.””

They’re not wrong. We’ve been here before, with Ronnie.

“Despite his best attempts to refute Hur’s charges, later on in the brief press conference Biden confused the countries of Mexico and Egypt and claimed that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was the president of Mexico.”

Pushing Gazans Into Rafah And Then Attacking Rafah, Killing UNRWA Funding Without Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Empire managers are now openly admitting they suspended aid to Gaza without having seen evidence of the claims that call was based on; they cut the aid because they were told to, then waited for narratives to be provided to them as to why this was a good and righteous decision.”

“Biden is a spent piece of Beltway flotsam with a swiss cheese brain being used as a ventriloquist dummy by DC swamp monsters to commit genocide, expand the US war machine, and play nuclear chicken with Russia. This is the face of the US empire, folks. This is as good as it gets.

“I’ll never forget how obnoxious and condescending Democrats were when telling me how wrong I am about Biden obviously having dementia. These people will look you right in the eye and tell you up is down and that if you disagree you’re a Russian agent.

““Biden is too senile to be president” is the wrong lesson to take from this. Replacing Biden with someone less senile won’t change the behavior of the US government, it’ll just lend false credibility to the illusion that the official elected government is calling the shots in DC.”

Man Ruled Too Senile To Stand Trial Still Fine To Run Country (Babylon Bee)

Biden Calls For The President To Step Down (Babylon Bee)

A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn’t Matter Who The President Is by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“So it turns out the dementia symptoms Biden’s supporters have long dismissed as a “stutter” are actually exactly what they look like.

“The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”

“Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile.

““We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.””

I can’t tell who engineered this release, though. The report was too friendly to Biden to really be a hatchet job, but the conclusion that he’s mentally unfit to stand trial is a death-blow for his campaign, I would think. No-one wants to throw him out because you-know-who would replace him. Maybe the Democrats wanted to engineer an excuse for dumping him as his support numbers plummet.

“During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice.”

“If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.”

We knew before. But now we know.

“Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.”

“The fact that the US president has dementia exposes the uncomfortable truth that the functioning of the empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it.”

“Voting in western “democracies” is done to give us the illusion of control, like letting a toddler play with a toy steering wheel while you drive so they can feel like they’re participating.”

The American voter is Maggie pretending to drive

“But we’ve got to stop hanging all our hopes on the electoral system first. Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote. But don’t let that performative ritual distract you from the real project: to wake up our fellow humans and begin forcing real change.”

I listened to the The Vladimir Putin Interview by Tucker Carlson (127 minutes), which is also available as Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview (Twitter). The article Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson (Scheer Post) includes a transcript found on the Kremlin’s website. You have to subscribe to Tucker Carlson to get the transcript from him. Those dirty commies in the Kremlin just gave it away for free.

The interview was over two hours. What follows are just some longer quotes I took from the transcript, with a few notes of my own. I’ve cherry-picked the stuff that Putin said that I broadly—or even sometimes very specifically—agree that he expressed in a realistic and historically accurate way. Where I disagreed with something that he said, I’ve noted it. I may have missed something; it’s a long interview.

He spoke completely extemporaneously, without notes or a teleprompter. It was clear that he was expressing how her personally sees these topics of international import. He didn’t seem to be playing to his western audience in any way. Much of what he said he’s already formulated in similar—if not occasionally identical ways—in essays and in other speeches I’ve read from him.

This is not to say that he’s a hero, but only to say that, as the leader of a foreign power with no small amount of influence—even if, as he acknowledges, it’s not even close to that of the U.S. or China—there seems to be a lot of opening for reasonably working with Russia, under Putin. The country only asks that it not be treated as a vassal. If that cannot be guaranteed, then there is no need for negotiation and the chips will fall where they may. Putin clearly indicates that he doesn’t think that Russia is holding such bad cards. Their economy seems to be impervious to U.S. machinations. As in the U.S., Putin speaks of the economy that is working for himself and other elites, but doesn’t speak at all of the troubles on the ground that affect the large majority of Russia’s population.

At any rate, Germany could have its natural gas and Ukraine could have peace. Russia has some conditions, but they seem eminently reasonable.

Putin starts off with a bald-faced lie.

“if you don’t mind I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time for giving you a little historical background.”

Why was that a lie? Because it wasn’t just “30 seconds or one minute”. He proceeds to recite a Russian history lesson with a focus on “Where does Ukraine come from?” that starts with “[t]he Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862.” It went on for about the first thirty minutes.

After a few minutes, Tucker interrupts with “I am losing track of where in history we are?”

“It was in the 13th century.”

He then positively leaps forward in time to 1654. After several more minutes, Putin says “[t]his briefing is coming to an end. It might be boring, but it explains many things.”

The discussion begins in earnest after that, with Tucker asking Putin why, if he believes that Ukraine is such a hodge-podge of cobbled-together lands that are really mostly Russian and Hungarian, didn’t he just take it back at the beginning of his presidency, 22 years ago?

The answer is obvious: because it wasn’t causing trouble then. Ukraine means “border”; even its name derives from being Russia’s border to Europe. Russia had let go of so many other territories—their aim wasn’t to regain territory, it was to guarantee a modicum of regional stability and security for Russia itself.

With NATO pushing right up to Russia’s borders—through the hand-puppet of Ukraine—that was no longer possible. That, and the nearly decade-long civil war that had been fomented in eastern Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, made it long-term impossible for Russia to just stand by and watch NATO—the U.S.—militarize its border. The U.S. was braying about how it not only had the right to take up Ukraine as its ally, but also to move some of its own nuclear weapons there.

It was utter madness to anyone who wasn’t 100% in the tank for NATO’s—and primarily the U.S.‘s—view of how the world works.

“I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: ”Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?“ You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.”

Deep breath. We’re up to 1991 now. He finishes up the history lesson. Tucker asks,

“But we have a strong China that the West doesn’t seem to be very afraid of. What about Russia, what do you think convinced the policymakers to take it down?”

This is ludicrous on its face. How can anyone think that the U.S. is not afraid of China? They’re sanctioning them to death and encircling them with bases. Putin answers,

“The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds — over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismark once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous — it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip.

“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom, let’s not reason in such terms. And let’s get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of ”civilized nations,“ nothing like this happened. You tricked us.”

We move on from there to the underpinnings of the current conflict in Ukraine. Putin reiterates the history of the Minsk agreement up until the end of 2021 and mentions, not for the last time, how the west just lies about everything, that they “simply led us by the nose,” which, well, he’s not wrong. The U.S.—and Europe in its wake—sees itself always as on the right side of history and in the moral role in anything that it does, so it sees no problem with simply lying to get what it wants. The ends justify the means, if Russia is to be vanquished.

“[…] the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk Agreements, which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014, in Minsk, where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbass was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, Foreign Minister, all other officials and then President himself said that they don’t like anything about the Minsk Agreements. In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole world that they indeed signed the Minsk Agreements but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose.”

With the next treaty on the table in March/April of 2022—nearly immediately after the initial Russian invasion—he describes why the Russian troops left Kiev. It was not, as detailed in the western press, because they had turned tail and run.

“My counterparts in France and Germany said, ”How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. ‘I said, ‘All right.’ We withdrew the troops from Kiev.

“As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed. And that is how it looks now.”

When Tucker asks him what he thinks of possible U.S. participation in the war, with actual boots on the ground, Putin responds,

“This is a provocation, and a cheap provocation at that.

“I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. There are mercenaries from the United States there. The biggest number of mercenaries comes from Poland, with mercenaries from the United States in second place, and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity on the brink of a very serious, global conflict. This is obvious.

“Do the United States need this? What for? Thousands of miles away from your national territory! Don’t you have anything better to do?

“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt – more than 33 trillion dollars. You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine? Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end. And, realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions. It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational.”

Tucker asks Putin why he doesn’t just tell the world what the U.S. did to the Nordstream pipeline if he has, as he says, proof that the U.S. secret services blew it up. Putin chuckles and responds,

“In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don’t you know that?”

Tucker acknowledges that Russia would probably not make much headway in the western press with their allegations, but wonders then why Germany doesn’t defends itself and its interests. The destruction of the pipeline put it directly in thrall to the U.S., paying four times the price that any other nation pays for its natural gas.

“Tucker Carlson: Yes. But here is a question you may be able to answer. You worked in Germany, famously. The Germans clearly know that their NATO partner did this, that they damaged their economy greatly – it may never recover. Why are they being silent about it? That is very confusing to me. Why wouldn’t the Germans say something about it?

“Vladimir Putin: This also confuses me. But today’s German leadership is guided by the interests of the collective West rather than its national interests, otherwise it is difficult to explain the logic of their action or inaction. After all, it is not only about Nord Stream-1, which was blown up, and Nord Stream-2 was damaged, but one pipe is safe and sound, and gas can be supplied to Europe through it, but Germany does not open it. We are ready, please.”

Putin mentions the “golden billion”, a phrase I understand immediately, but that I’d never heard before. I’m not sure if he understands the unstated irony that he and his cronies are very much in the golden billion, but that probably most of the populace over which rules is not. Perhaps he is appealing to them? Or to the other nations of the BRICS, like Indonesia and India? It’s unclear, but it’s hard to believe that he truly believes that the world would be better if wealth was divided in a more egalitarian manner.

Perhaps he does, as long as he personally doesn’t have to give anything up. At any rate, it is safe to say that he thinks that wealth and power should accrue to the nations to which it naturally falls, either by resources or by sheer hard work, rather to the nations that manage to take what they want. Russia and China have that in common: they are not seeking empire in the way that the U.S. very aggressively does.

“The world should be a single whole, security should be shared, rather than meant for the ”golden billion“. That is the only scenario where the world could be stable, sustainable and predictable. Until then, while the head is split into two parts, it is an illness, a serious adverse condition. It is a period of a severe disease that the world is now going through.”

Putin probably has no idea how ironic it is for him to be lauding journalism, a field that he has decimated during his rule.

“I think that, thanks to honest journalism — this work is akin to work of the doctors, this could somehow be remedied.”

They quickly move on—though the subject of journalism would reappear at the end again—to the insanity of the U.S. wielding its more important asset as a weapon that damages the U.S. more than it does its intended targets. Putin talks about the US. Dollar and economic sanctions.

“As soon as the political leadership decided to use the US dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power. I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do, and a grave mistake.

“Look at what is going on in the world. Even the United States’ allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves. Seeing this, everyone starts looking for ways to protect themselves. But the fact that the United States applies restrictive measures to certain countries, such as placing restrictions on transactions, freezing assets, etc., causes grave concern and sends a signal to the whole world.

“What did we have here? Until 2022, about 80 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade transactions were made in US dollars and euros. US dollars accounted for approximately 50 per cent of our transactions with third countries, while currently it is down to 13 per cent. It was not us who banned the use of the US dollar, we had no such intention. It was the decision of the United States to restrict our transactions in US dollars. I think it is a complete foolishness from the point of view of the interests of the United States itself and its tax payers, as it damages the US economy, undermines the power of the United States across the world.

“By the way, our transactions in Yuan accounted for about 3 per cent. Today, 34 per cent of our transactions are made in Rubles, and about as much, a little over 34 per cent, in Yuan.

“Why did the United States do this? My only guess is self-conceit. They probably thought it would lead to a full collapse, but nothing collapsed. Moreover, other countries, including oil producers, are thinking of and already accepting payments for oil in yuan. Do you even realize what is going on or not? Does anyone in the United States realize this? What are you doing? You are cutting yourself off… all experts say this. Ask any intelligent and thinking person in the United States what the dollar means for the US? You are killing it with your own hands.

“Tucker Carlson: I think that is a fair assessment. The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power? Is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese economy? In a way that is not good for their sovereignty. Do you worry about that?

“Vladimir Putin: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story. We are neighbours with China. You cannot choose neighbours, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of 1000 kilometers with them. This is number one.

“Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence, we are used to it.

“Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive, its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that.”

Putin expands on the topic of the shifting global economic picture, citing figures about the relative share of the G7 countries—it was the G8 until Russia was expelled in 2014!—versus the BRICS nations. The BRICS nations now account for more of the global economy, and certainly a large majority of manufacturing. The G7 have a much larger proportion of their share coming from banking and other financialized services.

“Look, if memory serves me right, back in 1992, the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 per cent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 per cent. The BRICS countries accounted for only 16 per cent in 1992, but now their share is greater than that of the G7. It has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine. This is due to the trends of global development and world economy that I mentioned just now, and this is inevitable. This will keep happening, it is like the rise of the sun — you cannot prevent the sun from rising, you have to adapt to it. How do the United States adapt? With the help of force: sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces.”

Tucker asks about whether a change in U.S. leadership would help? Does Putin think that the Biden administration is particularly intractable?

“It is not about the personality of the leader, it is about the elites’ mindset. If the idea of domination at any cost, based also on forceful actions, dominates the American society, nothing will change, it will only get worse. But if, in the end, one comes to the awareness that the world has been changing due to objective circumstances, and that one should be able to adapt to them in time, using the advantages that the U.S. still has today, then, perhaps, something may change.”

Putin returns to the topic of the global economy, specifically with China’s and Russia’s role in it.

“Look, China’s economy has become the first economy in the world in purchasing power parity; in terms of volume it overtook the US a long time ago. The USA comes second, then India (one and a half billion people), and then Japan, with Russia in the fifth place. Russia was the first economy in Europe last year, despite all the sanctions and restrictions. Is this normal, from your point of view: sanctions, restrictions, impossibility of payments in dollars, being cut off from SWIFT services, sanctions against our ships carrying oil, sanctions against airplanes, sanctions in everything, everywhere? The largest number of sanctions in the world which are applied – are applied against Russia. And we have become Europe’s first economy during this time.”

Tucker asked Putin about the potential for change in the U.S. through electoral action, for fresh ideas of the sort Putin thinks that the U.S. needs in order to better fit into the global order that is emerging, whether it likes it or not.

“America is a complex country, conservative on the one hand, rapidly changing on the other. It’s not easy for us to sort it all out.

“Who makes decisions in the elections – is it possible to understand this, when each state has its own legislation, each state regulates itself, someone can be excluded from the elections at the state level. It is a two-stage electoral system, it is very difficult for us to understand it.

“Certainly there are two parties that are dominant, the Republicans and the Democrats, and within this party system, the centers that make decisions, that prepare decisions.”

Putin questions not only the wisdom, but also the morality, of trying to beat down any possible competitors on the global level. These competitors will exist by sheer force of numbers, no matter what. He cites Indonesia as a rising player, just by the sheer size of is population and the accompanying manufacturing power.

“[…] it is necessary to continue ”chiseling“ Russia, to try to break it up, to create on this territory several quasi-state entities and to subdue them in a divided form, to use their combined potential for the future struggle with China. This is a mistake, including the excessive potential of those who worked for the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It is necessary to get rid of this, there should be new, fresh forces, people who look into the future and understand what is happening in the world.

“Look at how Indonesia is developing? 600 million people. Where can we get away from that? Nowhere, we just have to assume that Indonesia will enter (it is already in) the club of the world’s leading economies, no matter who likes or dislikes it.”

Back to Ukraine, with specifics about why Zelensky was elected and how he’s betrayed the people who voted for him, who’d elected him to make peace, to end the civil war. Instead, he expanded the civil war and provoked Russia into invasion. There were many, many ways to avoid the invasion. They would have required relinquishing some power to federalist territories in the east—as outlined in the Minsk agreements—but that seems eminently preferable to where Zelensky is steering the ship of state of Ukraine now.

“[Zelensky] came to power on the expectations of Ukrainian people that he would lead Ukraine to peace. He talked about this, it was thanks to this that he won the election overwhelmingly. But then, when he came to power, in my opinion, he realized two things: firstly, it is better not to clash with neo-Nazis and nationalists, because they are aggressive and very active, you can expect anything from them, and secondly, the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize with Russia – it is beneficial and safe. So he took the relevant position, despite promising his people to end the war in Ukraine. He deceived his voters.”

Tucker asks why Putin doesn’t try harder to get negotiations going again? If he wants peace, then why doesn’t he go to the table with Ukraine. Putin responds that it is because Ukraine refuses to talk, that Russia has always been ready to negotiate—before the invasion and war, soon after the invasion, and ever since.

“President of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting negotiations with us. Let him cancel that decree and that’s it. We have never refused negotiations indeed. We hear all the time: is Russia ready? Yes, we have not refused! It was them who publicly refused. Well, let him cancel his decree and enter into negotiations. We have never refused.”

At 01:50:00, he draws a comparison between the threat imposed on the world by a failure to control the production of nuclear weapons with that posed by AI. It’s impossible to stop it like we couldn’t stop gunpowder. There will come a time when we would need to regulate this internationally.

“Humanity has to consider what is going to happen due to the newest developments in genetics or in AI. One can make an approximate prediction of what will happen. Once mankind felt an existential threat coming from nuclear weapons, all nuclear nations began to come to terms with one another since they realized that negligent use of nuclear weaponry could drive humanity to extinction.

“It is impossible to stop research in genetics or AI today, just as it was impossible to stop the use of gunpowder back in the day. But as soon as we realize that the threat comes from unbridled and uncontrolled development of AI, or genetics, or any other fields, the time will come to reach an international agreement on how to regulate these things.”

Tucker asks about the NYT journalist who’s serving time in a Russian prison for espionage. Putin basically says: you have many cards to trade for him. Do so, and he’s yours. The only reason that Gershkovich is still in prison in Russia is because the U.S. refuses to negotiate and just wants him returned “for free”, when the U.S. has many prisoners that Russia would like back, people that they’ve similarly accused of spying for Russia while in the U.S. They traded for the basketball player (Griner?); they can trade for the journalist.

“I do not rule out that the person you referred to, Mister Gershkovich, may return to his motherland. By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. We are ready to talk. Moreover, the talks are underway, and there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well, but we have to come to an agreement.”

Back to Ukraine and a potential settlement/peace agreement.

“Tucker Carlson: So, I just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding what you are saying — and I don’t think that I am — I think you are saying you want a negotiated settlement to what’s happening in Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin: Right. And we made it, we prepared a huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, not to all of it. He put his signature and then he himself said: “We were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance.” Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them get back to that, that is all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?

“I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?”

One commentator reflected my reaction to the juxtaposition of this interview coming out and the “diagnosis” the Joe Biden is mentally unfit to stand trial,

“Vladimir Putin just spent 30 minutes going over the last 1,000 years history of Russia and Ukraine in detail without notes.

“Joe Biden can’t remember when his son died.

“God help us all”

Egypt building camps to host Palestinians expelled from Gaza as Israel prepares for Rafah onslaught by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)

“If Israel and its imperialist sponsors get away with the mass expulsion of the Palestinians to Egypt, it will go down in history as one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes and represent a major step towards a bloodbath engulfing the entire Middle East.”

“[…] will go down in history as one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes […]” so far.

Journalism & Media

”In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“One under-appreciated moment from Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin came after Putin implied that NATO powers were behind the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. Carlson responded by asking why Putin wouldn’t present evidence of this to the world, so as to “win a propaganda victory.”

““In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media,” Putin replied, adding, “The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.””

Politico Europe—when did Politico get so big that they now have a European arm?—shot that down with the help of a Russian ex-pat reporter who said that it’s obvious: U.S. media is free, while Russia’s media is state-sponsored. But, read the following analysis.

“At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”

“EU4FreeMedia is a European Union narrative management operation set up to help integrate “Russian journalists in exile” into leading European publications, ie to provide maximum media amplification to Russian expats who have a bone to pick with the current government in Moscow. It is run with participation from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded media op under the umbrella of the US propaganda services umbrella USAGM.

“I really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in the west.”

“ There’s an old joke that goes like this:

“A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.

““Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.
“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.
“What American propaganda?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.”

I really like this formulation. I’d heard it differently:

A Soviet diplomat visited the U.S. with his colleague, a U.S. diplomat. The U.S. American took him to all of the highlights, showing him everything that made the U.S.A. great, showing him television and the free press, etc. At the end, the Soviet thanked him for really opening his eyes to how amazingly well propaganda can be made to work. The U.S. American was confused: “but, you Soviets have a huge propaganda system yourselves! What do you need to learn from us?” The Soviet replied, “Yes, we have propaganda. But we don’t believe it.”

“[…] anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end.”

“Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.”

For example,

Laila Al-Arian cites the Intercept

“According to @theintercept analysis of US media, the term “slaughter” was used to describe the killing of Israelis v Palestinians 60 to 1, “massacre” was used to describe killing of Israelis v Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis 36 to 4.”

Jeffrey St. Clair cites CNN headline

“If you’re like most people and don’t read past the headline, you’d never know from the imperial media headlines that the child was killed by Israel, and you’d certainly never know about her terrified phone call for help while trapped by IDF fire and surrounded by the bodies of her dead relatives.”

“Last month the BBC published an article titled “Record number of civilians hurt by explosives in 2023”, as though they were mishandling fireworks or something instead of being actively killed by Israeli bombs. The BBC later revised their atrocious headline, but revised it in the opposite direction, replacing “Record number” with “High number” to further minimize the impact.”

“In Ukraine people die from bombs because Russia launched Russian airstrikes and killed them very Russianly, whereas in Gaza people get hurt by explosions because they got too close to some type of explosive material.”

“[…] these little manipulations fly under the radar if you’re not on the lookout for them. Such is the brilliance of the US empire’s invisible propaganda machine. That’s why it’s very difficult to win a propaganda war against the United States, that’s why westerners have been so successfully manipulated into accepting a status quo of endless war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, and that’s why the world looks the way it looks right now.”

Israel Weaponizes Sympathy And Victimhood by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of this personality type taken to the extreme. People hate her because she’s a phony, egomaniacal sadist who has spent her entire political career pushing for mass military bloodshed at every opportunity, but she then frames this hatred as evidence of widespread misogyny and far-right extremism, which is why the world desperately needs Hillary Clinton to help fight those things.

“Any remotely normal person who was both as wealthy and as despised as Hillary Clinton would have simply retired from public life to enjoy their hundreds of millions of dollars, blissfully sheltered from the vitriol and condemnation of the common riff raff. But Clinton keeps showing up, adamantly refusing to go away, because the hatred she receives is actually what fuels her entire personal dynamic.”

How Microsoft names threat actors by diannegali & Dansimp (Microsoft)

“Microsoft shifted to a new naming taxonomy for threat actors aligned with the theme of weather. We intend to bring better clarity to customers and other security researchers with the nex taxonomy. We offer a more organized, articulate, and easy way to reference threat actors so that organizations can better prioritize and protect themselves and aid security researchers already confronted with an overwhelming amount of threat intelligence data.”

Where Microsoft is utterly unwilling to help you is if the threat actor comes from any country other than official enemies of the U.S. or, basically, NATO. The only threat actors for which they have a taxonomy are:

• China
• Iran
• Lebanon
• North Korea
• Russia
• South Korea
• Turkey
• Vietnam

As Sapir-Worf would say: since we don’t have a word for it, it doesn’t exist. That, or Microsoft just categorizes any threat from the NSA, CIA, or Mossad—just a few examples among myriad others—as being from Russia, North Korea, or Iran anyway. They probably have a special die that they role to pick a scapegoat.

So, yeah, it’s neat to see that otherwise-serious researchers kind of just pretend that two of the biggest hacking nations in the world just don’t exist in that sense. Microsoft is an international company. International customers should be pissed off that they prioritize sucking up to the Empire more than taking their job seriously in the name of customers who aren’t in the U.S. Even U.S. customers would be interested in knowing when the CIA or NSA is putting trojans on their servers, but they’ll never hear it from Microsoft. I guess U.S. and Israeli trojans are just gentle, digital kisses—homeopathic balms that delicately lift your data from your data stores for your own good. They’re not really threats at all, in that sense, which is why they don’t exist in the threat-actor taxonomy. It’s just logic.

Israel Raids Hospital by Liz Wolfe (Reason)

This is how you write about war crimes when you wholeheartedly support them. It hits all the standard notes:

• Attacking a hospital is a normal thing.
• It’s perfectly reasonable to tell everyone in a hospital to evacuate.
• The hospital is a Hamas headquarters (this time it’s true!).
• Hamas uses human shields.
• The purpose of the attack is not to destroy the hospital, but to find hostages.
• None of this is Israel’s fault. It’s been forced to do this by Hamas.

Check it out.

“News broke this morning that the Israeli military is beginning its raid of Khan Younis’ Nasser Hospital, in the Gaza Strip. The BBC reported that one trauma surgeon said, from inside the building, that “tanks and snipers” currently surround the hospital from “all directions.”

“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have told all people inside the hospital to evacuate immediately so that it can begin its raid.

“The Israeli military reports that it has intelligence—including testimony from now-released hostages—that indicates that Hamas is using Nasser Hospital as an important spot for its military operations, which would be in keeping with the well-established pattern of Hamas using civilians, including the sick and wounded, as human shields. There is some belief among the Israeli military that either living captives or the bodies of hostages might be located at Nasser Hospital.

“Meanwhile, Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry officials claim that the IDF’s operation has destroyed critical areas of the hospital, crippling its operations and harming displaced people who were sheltering there.

“Both could be true, and Israel must continue weighing whether raids like these are worth the cost—a situation it’s been forced into in part due to Hamas’ callous disregard for human life.”

I can’t believe that this is the kind of stuff that people regularly consume, believe, and then just go about their day, chirpily supporting whatever Israel needs to do in order to keep itself alive for one more day. You don’t even think about the fact that Israel has essentially normalized attacking hospitals as if that’s not a high crime of the Geneva Conventions. Of course these kinds of attacks all make sense when you’re literally fighting for your existence every day, when any reluctance or hesitation or mercy would result in the eradication of Israel and the extinguishing of the entire Jewish faith literally overnight.

Biden is Right to Grant Temporary Refuge to Palestinian Migrants Already in US, but Should go Further by Ilya Somin (Reason)

Ilya Somin is a fool, but I scanned his short article anyway. He cited another fool, then wrote that he agreed with it. He starts off by saying that he agrees with the Biden administration that 6,000 Palestinians shouldn’t be forced to return to Palestine just because their visas have technically run out.

“[…] the Biden administration granted temporary refuge to Palestinian migrants currently in the United States, who might otherwise be subject to deportation. The grant of Deferred Enforced Departure status (known as DED) allows about 6000 Palestinians to remain in the US for an additional 18 months.”

“As the White House statement on the subject puts it, because of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, “humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian territories, and primarily Gaza, have significantly deteriorated.” That surely understates the point: thousands of people have been killed, and much of Gaza leveled. There is less extensive, but still significant, violence on the West Bank. In addition, Gaza Palestinians are subject to Hamas’s brutal tyranny, which is awful, even aside from the war.”

While he acknowledges the destruction in Gaza and “violence on the West Bank”—I like how he writes “on” rather than “in” because he thinks the West Bank is literally the bank of a river—he doesn’t assign any agency to the violence until he attributes “tyranny” to “Hamas”. These people are shockingly brainwashed.

Don’t worry. I didn’t judge him prematurely or harshly. He goes on.

“In my view, the primary blame for this situation falls on Hamas for using Gaza as a base for its horrific terrorist attacks, and then using the civilian population as human shields. But, regardless of the blame, it would be wrong to force Palestinian migrants (or anyone) to return to a deadly war zone—or to live under a system of quasi-medieval oppression.”

Israel doesn’t enter into this. It’s all Hamas. Israel has nothing to do with the destruction in Gaza, which he, to his credit, at least doesn’t pretend to not exist.

“In a previous post, I explained why opening the door to Gaza refugees is the right thing to do on both moral and strategic grounds: it can save thousands of people from needless suffering and death, while also making it easier for Israel to defeat Hamas.”

It’s also 100% the goal of Israel to throw out all Palestinians and not let them back in. Not a single one of them is going to “go back” after all of this. Israel will not allow it and there’s nowhere to go.

“Why would anyone other than Hamas—especially the U.S.—support locking Gazans in like North Korea does? Since 1948, Arab states and the U.N. have refused to treat Palestinians like ordinary refugees, keeping them in a unique intergenerational limbo to provide a reservoir of resentment against Israel.”

What the fuck are you talking about? Most Palestinians live in neighboring countries already. It’s interesting to see how Somin and co. portray themselves as humanitarians who care about the plight of Palestinians, but treat the Israeli violence as completely without human agency, as if they’re fleeing an earthquake.

“Letting Gazans leave not only would reduce human suffering; it would provide a test and incentive for postwar governance. Refugees often return to their home countries when governance stabilizes after a conflict. For this to happen, the new civilian administration would have to make it a place where Gazans want to live, not where they are prevented from leaving.”

“[…] suggest the US use its large-scale aid to Egypt as leverage to pressure the Egyptian government to let Gaza refugees leave.”

Did you get that?

1. Literally everything that’s wrong with Gaza is Hamas’s, if not the Gazans’ own fault.
2. Israel has nothing to do with it, as it’s just defending itself from Hamas’s violence.
3. Egypt is primarily at fault for the massacre and suffering for not letting Palestinians leave.

Nowhere there does Somin address the expressed and stated fact that any Palestinian who leaves Gaza or the West Bank now will never go back.

It’s kind of fascinating to read a few of these, but it’s tiring.

They’re starting so early. The article How Bad It Was by Richard Farr (3 Quarks Daily) writes about the Bush years. It’s essentially an essay that is a campaign ad for choosing the lesser evil, which is clearly Biden-Harris, and to choose now, and to start donating at least $25 regularly, even thought that’s a “pathetic” amount. How much money do these dopes need from regular people?

The next article on the site was Catspeak by Brooks Riley (3 Quarks Daily)

It’s two cats talking to each other:

“Hillary called Tucker Carlson a ‘useful idiot’!

“It’s the ‘useful’ part that bothers me.”

A real knee-slapper.

The next article after that is called Orange Creamsicles: Facing the Idiotic Within our Borders by Mark Harvey (3 Quarks Daily). I didn’t even bother reading that one as it is festooned with a bit picture of Trump supporters, who surely come under the wheels of the author’s incisive wit and political-analytical acumen. It probably also ends with an exhortation to send money to the Democrats.

I suppose it will be easier weeding out the news when a normally reliable source of essays has decided to function as an arm of the Democratic party for the next 10 months or so.

United Nations Warns Israeli Attack On Rafah Could Lead To More Hostages Being Rescued (Babylon Bee)

This is on a site that considers itself to be a Christian Satirical Online Magazine. It has fully bought—hook, line, and sinker—the Israeli narrative. It literally doesn’t care about Palestinians. Christian charity doesn’t enter into it.

Or, they have no idea what’s really going on. They either don’t know, or they don’t care. Both are bad; the second is worse.

If you don’t know, then you’re in a majority of people living inside a carefully engineered media bubble that keeps out reality and maintains a sphere that allows you to go about your day without harshly judging literally everyone in your government and media.

The death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny by Alex Lantier, Joseph Kishore (WSWS)

“The death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison on Friday has been immediately integrated into a massive anti-Russia propaganda campaign by the Biden administration and its NATO allies, along with their associated media outlets. Without an autopsy, let alone a fact-grounded analysis of the circumstances of Navalny’s death, the unified position from the NATO powers is: “Putin killed Navalny.”

“US President Joe Biden declared on Friday that “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny is a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed that it “underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.””

That’s the president—Biden—and the top diplomat—Blinken—from the U.S. We’ve become so indoctrinated that no-one is at-all surprised anymore when the the highest levels of the U.S. government no longer measure their words, then they just say evidence-free, horrible, threatening, and hostile things about other countries, all day, every day.

“Amidst this propaganda offensive, it is first necessary to stress that there is no precise knowledge as to how Navalny died. Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny lost consciousness after a walk, and efforts to revive him were not successful. Navalny, according to these reports, may have died of a blood clot.

“This would not absolve the Russian government of culpability. Navalny died in a Russian prison, and the Putin regime was responsible for his well-being and safety. This, however, does not warrant the claim, in the absence of evidence, that Navalny was murdered.”

Well, yeah, but they also would report it like that. Israel reports that children walk into bullets. U.S. cops report all the time about how people walk into really dangerous obstacles. I suppose Russians, though, would also have been instructed that nothing is to happen to Navalvy. It’s hard to believe that it was on purpose—and the timing is completely bizarre, if it was.

“The immediate demand from the Biden administration, the Democrats and sections of the Republican Party is for the passage by Congress of a bill containing tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has seized on Navalny’s death to call for more military assistance, amidst an intensifying crisis of the far-right government, which has been bled white by the imperialist-backed war against Russia.”

Never let an opportunity to profit from tragedy go to waste.

“Here, what is most striking is the staggering hypocrisy of the imperialist powers. Biden and his NATO allies furiously denounce the Putin regime’s treatment of Navalny, while subjecting Julian Assange, a genuine champion of human rights, to the most brutal and life-threatening conditions.

“And what of the many prisoners still rotting in Guantanamo Bay, after decades of brutal detention and torture?

“Biden cannot contain himself over the death of Navalny, and yet he is overseeing, arming, financially supporting and continuing to defend mass murder carried out by Israel. Those praising Navalny’s memory are political criminals whose invocations of morality deserve nothing but contempt. They are indignant at the alleged murder of Navalny, while arming the Israeli armed forces for the genocidal campaign against defenseless men, women and children huddled in hospitals, bombed-out homes and tent cities across Gaza.

“The only purpose of the propaganda campaign over Navalny’s death is to justify the further escalation of war against Russia.”

Crocodile Tears Over Navalny While Ignoring Assange by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“I really could not have a lower opinion of people who would rather talk about Navalny’s persecution in a far away country that has nothing to do with them than Julian Assange being persecuted at the hands of their own government. It’s the most pathetic, bootlicking behavior imaginable.”

“I really could not have a lower opinion of people who would rather talk about Navalny’s persecution in a far away country that has nothing to do with them than Julian Assange being persecuted at the hands of their own government. It’s the most pathetic, bootlicking behavior imaginable.”

“If you’re in a country whose government has had a hand in the persecution of Julian Assange, then you can go ahead and shut the fuck up about Navalny. Whenever I see people screaming about the persecution of journalists and political prisoners in other countries when they themselves live in a nation whose government is persecuting Julian Assange, I can’t help but think of Matthew 7:4–5,”

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

“What could be Assange’s final appeal effort against US extradition happens February 20th and 21st in London. Free Julian Assange.”

Labor

Worker misclassification is a competition issue by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“The argument goes, “Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn’t, then the agency isn’t allowed to act.” This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they’re experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don’t even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.”

“One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance. What’s more, misclassified workers can’t form unions, because their bosses’ fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can’t join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.”

“But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn’t pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.

“This lead [sic] to an [sic] terrible decline in Talavera’s working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!

“Talavera’s take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera’s truck needed repairs he couldn’t afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he’d paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.”

This guy doesn’t show up at all in the employment statistics that we get to see. And this guy is not a rarity. He’s not the majority, but it’s a scandal to say that things are going well, when part of the reason it’s going well for others is because guys like this are taking it on the chin so hard. I feel like Dean Baker needs to read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and ask himself why he’s not walking away.

Economy & Finance

Americans Have Many Good Reasons to Be Unhappy With This Economy by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Around the country, demand for food banks is soaring. Minnesota saw a record number of food-shelf visits in 2023, a more than 30 percent increase on what had already been a record-setting number the year before .”

“These charities also consistently point to the same culprits: high grocery prices, unaffordable housing, and the gradual disappearance of pandemic-era federal aid, including cuts to the food-stamp program Biden made in his much celebrated 2023 budget deal.”

“2022 saw the first rise in food insecurity in a little more than a decade, having been gently declining in all the years since 2011. That meant forty-four million people were living in households where they struggled to get the food they needed because they lacked money and other resources, including thirteen million kids.”

“With federal money drying up and housing getting pricier, the number of homeless people in the United States soared 12 percent last year to more than 653,000 people. That’s both the highest number and the largest increase on record; before that, excluding the pandemic, the biggest spike in homelessness had been 2.7 percent in 2019.”

“The most recent figure recorded by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) for how many renters are cost burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities) is 22.4 million as of 2022, an all-time high. Just over twelve million of those were “severely” burdened, or spending more than half their income on housing costs, also an all-time high.”

“For one, the already twenty-year-high level of credit card debt just went up again the last quarter of 2023, putting it at $1.13 trillion by the end of the year. Credit card balances, after plummeting during the pandemic when many paid down debt and bills, have steadily grown to well past their prepandemic level since late 2021, just as inflation was on the march.”

“It’s not surprising that many commentators who want the president to prevail this year would jump on the consumer confidence news to wave all of this away. But it’s also not surprising if hectoring people to feel better about the economy, and offering nothing to alleviate their financial stresses, doesn’t change their minds come November.”

real (Reddit)

How much sawdust can you put in a Rice Krispy Treat before people notice?

A revealing comment on the Boeing crisis by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Clark told the FT the airline would now send its own engineers to observe production processes at Boeing and its supplier Sprit AeroSystems.

““The fact that we’re having to do this is testament to what has happened,” he said. “This would not have happened in the old days. You know, we trusted these people implicitly to get it done.”

“The fact that his remarks and actions were directed at Boeing, at one time an icon of American manufacturing prowess, points to deeper historical processes.”

“[…] Aengus Kelly, the chief executive of Aercap, the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, said last month that Boeing needed to put aside financial targets and focus solely on the quality and safety of its planes.

“Both men expressed the hope that Boeing would undertake the necessary refocus away from finance to the production of high quality and safe planes.”

And what incentive structure would lead to that? That Boeing would go out of business? What do those executives care? They will golden-parachute their way out of the corpse of Boeing and fly upward into a probably even-more-lucrative C-Suite job at another company that they fill pick apart for lucre. As long as that is rewarded, that is what the system will produce.

No-one in any position of power indicates that quality, morality, ethics, or anything except money is of importance. Money is assumed to be a surrogate for all of these things. This oversimplification is useful only for those without morality, ethics, for those who don’t care about quality as a good, who don’t care about sustainability, who don’t have anything to offer a society that values actual work.

“Over the past 40 years these forces have led to the rise and rise of financialisation—that is the ever-increasing shift towards the accumulation of profit, not by production as such, but through what is known as “financial engineering.””

“Rather than having to wait for the company to spend money on developing a new product that will keep profits flowing in and face the risk that, because of market conditions or the development of a better product by a rival it may not, they obtain an immediate boost from the increased stock price that share buybacks bring.”

And then they skedaddle, leaving a husk that flounders.

“Boeing facing the obsolescence of its 737 planes, could have created an entirely new airplane from scratch with fully modern technology. Instead, the company decided to re-engineer the older model, name it the 737 MAX, and save $7 billion. Perhaps not coincidentally, the $7 billion ‘saved’ is the amount of stock buybacks Boeing made each year between 2013 and 2019.”

“The aim and driving force of capitalist production is not material wealth as such—the production of commodities—but the accumulation of money. The circuit of capital begins with money and ends with an expanded quantity of money, which then resumes the circuit. It is its alpha and omega of the capitalist system.

“As Karl Marx noted: “The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money making.”

“And as Frederick Engels commented, this explained why all nations were periodically seized by “fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish money making without the mediations of the production process.””

We are in a decades-long “fit of giddiness”.

“To facilitate this kind of systematic looting vast changes were made to the legal system so that practices considered criminal in the past could be carried out.

“Share buybacks are a case in point. Up until 1982 they were regarded as unlawful manipulation of the stock market, but were legalised under the Reagan administration as one of the first of many legislative changes to meet the new demands of finance capital.”

Of course it started with that guy. Too bad Hinckley wasn’t a better shot.

China is now the 'world's sole manufacturing superpower'. How did it develop so fast? by Geopolitical Economy Report (Ben Norton) (YouTube)

This is an excellent and well-resourced and -researched disquisition on China’s development (as well as on Japan’s, in comparison, as another strongly state-supported economy). He cites Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder (an absolutely excellent book), as well as Chalmers Johson, who wrote several works on Japan’s economy (as well as the famous and excellent Blowback series).

It contrasts the makeup of the U.S. economy—which is primarily FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and service—with the Chinese economy, which is primarily manufacturing and industry, with its own FIRE sector largely state-owned.

Science & Nature

Alternate qubit design does error correction in hardware by John Timmer (Ars Technica)

“The devices are structured much like a transmon, the form of qubit favored by tech heavyweights like IBM and Google. There, the quantum information is stored in a loop of superconducting wire and is controlled by what’s called a microwave resonator—a small bit of material where microwave photons will reflect back and forth for a while before being lost.”

“A bosonic qubit turns that situation on its head. In this hardware, the quantum information is held in the photons, while the superconducting wire and resonator control the system. These are both hooked up to a coaxial cavity (think of a structure that, while microscopic, looks a bit like the end of a cable connector).”

““A very simple and basic idea behind quantum error correction is redundancy,” co-founder and CTO Julien Camirand Lemyre told Ars. “One thing about resonators and oscillators in superconducting circuits is that you can put a lot of photons inside the resonators. And for us, the redundancy comes from there.””

“This process doesn’t correct all possible errors, so it doesn’t eliminate the need for logical qubits made from multiple underlying hardware qubits.”

“The company is counting on its hardware’s ability to handle error correction to reduce the number of qubits needed for useful calculations. But if its competitors can scale up the number of qubits fast enough while maintaining the control and error rates needed, that may not ultimately matter.”

Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED by Veritasium (YouTube)

This was a wonderful story of Nakamura, the iconoclastic and brilliant engineer who cracked the code on blue LEDs.

Art & Literature

My Favorite Books by J.G. Ballard

“Looking back on my childhood reading, I’m struck by how frightening most of it was, and I’m glad that my own children were never exposed to those gruesome tales and eerie colored plates with their airless Pre-Raphaelite gloom, unearthly complexions and haunted infants with almost autistic stares. The overbearing moralistic tone was explicit in Charles Kingsley’s “The Water-Babies,” a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read before or since. The same tone could be heard through so much of children’s fiction, as if childhood itself and the child’s imagination were maladies to be repressed and punished.”

“I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination.”

• The Day of the Locust: Nathanael West
• Collected Short Stories: Ernest Hemingway
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Annotated Alice: ed. Martin Gardner
• The World through Blunted Sight: Patrick Trevor-Roper
• The Naked Lunch: William Burroughs
• The Black Box: ed. Malcolm MacPherson
• America: Jean Baudrillard
• The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: by Da

What’s a book that you’re curious about but that you know you will never, ever read? (Reddit)

Comment on Mein Kampf

The first comment wrote “Honestly, Mein Kampf,” to which another replied,

“t’s so boring. Hitler’s favorite rhetorical device is to go on a multilayered tangent and never return back to the original point. Barely coherent 1920s German neckbeard rambling. I can’t believe anyone ever took this book seriously, it just goes to show the quality of German culture at the time I guess.”

I answered,

And it’s not like it lost anything in translation. The writing style is very tangential and stilted, even in the original German.

I would be a bit more careful about throwing shade at Germans specifically, though. Lots of populations seem quite susceptible to utterly irrational and stupid movements, seemingly based on nothing. It’s kind of the definition of mania and cultish behavior.

If you’re not on the inside, it appears that only a fool could believe it. If you’re on the inside, it appears that only a fool couldn’t.

Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction by Matteo Wong (The Atlantic)

“Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we’d describe today as Bluetooth earbuds.”

It’s not surprising to learn that earbuds is what the Atlantic thinks Fahrenheit 451 predicted best about today’s world. You know, not the whole “knowledge-management through destruction” theme, in which they are active participants.

“Stephenson’s book, published in 1995, explores a future of seamless, instant digital communication, in which tiny computers with immense capabilities are embedded in everyday life. Corporations are dominant, news and ads are targeted, and screens are omnipresent. It’s a world of stark class and cultural divisions (the novel follows a powerful aristocratic sect that styles itself as the “neo-Victorians”), but it’s nevertheless one in which the Primer is presented as the best of what technology can be.”

That seems pretty predictive, I suppose, but this article is utterly without insight. I didn’t expect much more from The Atlantic.

The Throwaway Scene That Gives Blazing Saddles Its Warm Heart by Matt Zoller Seitz

Blazing Saddles 1974 − People Of The Land (YouTube)

““You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers,” he tells Bart. “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know … morons.” ”

“This is a film that concerns itself with the behavior of bigots and the institutional racism that exploits their insecurity for profit. But the movie isn’t about that. It’s about the friendship between Bart and The Kid, which is the film’s illustration of how life should be. The scene sells the friendship that sells the film. It makes you believe these guys are really friends. A friend is someone who can make you laugh even when you don’t want to.”

“[…] the specific brilliance of “Blazing Saddles” is that it seems to imagine itself as a product of some future popular culture in which there is common agreement not just that prejudice is unacceptable, but that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool.”

You’re damned skippy. 💯 This was one of my favorite movies growing up. My dad and I watched it whenever it came on TV (which was the only way you could watch stuff back then). Cleavon Litte was brilliant in that, but Gene Wilder was brilliant in everything. Man, his movies were formative for me. Willie Wonka, Stir Crazy, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil—which I just realized no-one’s ever tried to remake, which is funny because these days they reboot everything, but they’re terrified of that one, either because of the disabilities or because they know it could never, ever be as good as the original.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Writing Is a Bad Habit by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] even in this crumbling and precarious world young people are still seeking out exposure to timeless and edifying ideas with no obvious utilitarian pay-off.”

“[…] when I walk across a US campus with buildings erected before World War II, with beautiful inscriptions of quotations from Cicero or Emerson chiseled into their stone, they look to me like nothing so much as deconsecrated churches. They were built for a function they no longer serve, and the ghosts that once loomed in them have been expelled.”

“So look, friends: it doesn’t matter what day a famous writer was born, what day they died, where they are buried, or what their daily writing routines were or how much tea or whisky they drank. You shouldn’t care. This is a preoccupation for people who have not really understood for themselves what it is that compels a person to read and write. We are not bobby-soxers sending box-tops in for signed photos of Rudy Vallée. Ideally we are not “fans” in any sense at all of the authors who shape us and whom we channel.”

“[…] writing isn’t a lifestyle; it’s a bad habit, an irrepressible compulsion to squeeze out oily build-up that a very small number of people find they just cannot rid themselves of, and that an even smaller number of people manage to redeem, notwithstanding its intrinsic unseemliness, by conveying to readers a sensibility about the world, social, natural, or transcendental.”

“before the lycanthropic horror of puberty sets in,”

“(I gather philia, the third form of love which I’m not dwelling on much here, can also often connote lack: thus the recent analysis of the original usage of the term philosophos, as we find it in a fragment of Heraclitus, to mean not so much “lover of wisdom” as “wannabe wise person”, i.e., someone who is emphatically not wise but would very much like to be so.)”

“The erotic, again, is an abiding sense of external possibility. When you’re sixteen you can even feel it when, say, you walk into a convenience store: Who is going to be in there? What new prospects might an encounter in there open up? Another way of putting this is that it is a condition of lack or privation. It is because you feel cut off from something that what’s outside of you seems so attractive. But under the reign of Charity you are not cut off from anything. In fact you’re basking, if I can put it that way, in the very force that pervades the world and gives it its moral shape and meaning.”

“This is another possible sense of the meaning of conversion as articulated at Matthew 18:3-5: becoming again as little children.”

“How peculiar, now, to feel nothing but a blend of the avuncular, the fiduciary, the Charitable, in the presence of anyone still progressing towards fullness, anyone still feeling lack, anyone, that is more or less the same as to say, in the prime of life. Coming together with other spirits, now ignorant of the number and quality of the hairs on their legs, but no less unified with them than one had once been through attention to that exquisite detail of their corporeality, no longer wanting anything from them either, but able to share with them something of which anyway there is an infinite supply, like the air around your nose.”

“The old legends of the wise men who die with a joyous smile on their faces do not concern men joyfully reminiscing about this or that “unforgettable” meal they had. They are joyful not because they’ve managed to collect all the right experiences, but because they no longer live in the mode of lack where the project of collecting experiences can make any sense. They are full, and therefore indifferent.”

“I believe that the most powerful piece of ideology to rise over the past several centuries is the one that tells us that human minds are the only inhabitants of the mental or spiritual realm, that we are alone there, and everything else is “mere” physical matter. Such a view is a huge departure from the default world-image of humanity in almost all places and times, according to which the world around us is swarming, everywhere, with spirits.”

“The reduction of the non-human spirit world to matter has been crucial for facilitating our vastly increased power to transform the natural world according to our will, into new forms that we recognise as “technology”. But the unconstrained power to do this —unconstrained, notably, by any concern about the moral status of the “matter” that enters into the transformations— is but a more general instance of the ideological shift by which human beings are able to do what they want to the territories, homes, and bodies, of enemy people, by first dehumanizing them. It is also the same general shift that facilitates the massive slaughter of animals without, for the most part, any awareness of the moral weight of this action, a weight that was previously managed, when slaughter was carried out at a much smaller scale, through the mechanism of ritual sacrifice. Animals are “deanimalized” in order to make factory farming bearable, just as human beings are “dehumanized” in order to quell the consciences of invaders and oppressors.”

This is a much more erudite and perhaps eloquent, but identical message to the Rick and Morty episode That’s Amorte (Wikipedia).

“The world is alive with spirits, and every corner of nature you probe into is as charged up with as much moral relevance as every other. Modern technology, the built environment, airports, highways: all of this is testimony to our false triumph over the world. But it all covers over, with commercial sheen, an immense, almost inconceivable disgrace: the unjust curtailment of natural ends for the satisfaction of manufactured desires.”

“Everyone is onto something —the UFO abductees are onto something, the past-life regressers are onto something, the most cornball and excessive of esotericists are onto something—, and every such vision of our ultimate fate, every effort to glimpse the ultimate contours of reality, is worthy and dignified and beautiful. Everyone is onto something, that is, except for the agents of capitalism, with their grubby and exploitative retirement-policy commercials, with their manufacture of endless new forms of lack, guaranteeing that so many of us will live until the very last minute under the tyranny of FOMO, never realizing that to do so is to accept that the highest ideal as capitalism presents it, not missing out, is one that you will in any case be unable to achieve for more than an infinitesimal sliver of time. To fear missing out in this low sense is really to miss out: to miss out forever and ever.”

There’s Probably Nothing We Can Do About This Awful Deepfake Porn Problem by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors”

“He sometimes worked with a group that sought to address the phenomenon of “jailbait” content on the internet − technically legal images of underaged women that contain no nudity or explicit sexual acts but which are nonetheless clearly shared for a prurient purpose.”

Cast the net wide and you’re bound to catch something. Can you prove the prurient interest? Is it illegal? Can you prosecute? Do you even need to when you can just post someone’s face to all of their friends on Facebook with an allegation?

“Some of the more popular independent sites had been shuttered, often through applying pressure to web hosting companies. Google had made it much more difficult to search for such things by delisting certain terms.”

To me, this sounds like China’s technology, no? Do you really think that they’re using their blocking technology only on “jailbait”? Of course not. There are certain topics you’ll never find on most search engines, unless you really work at it. If this works for “legal but unsavory images”, then there’s nothing stopping someone from taking down your site of legal, but unsavory writings.

“Instagram has in fact had a problem with actual, honest-to-god illegal child pornography, in part because of this very difficulty in having too many holes in the dyke and not enough fingers. At precisely the point in our history that entities like Reddit or various web hosting companies were getting serious about the “jailbait” problem, social networks dedicated to images and video were attracting huge user bases and opening up all kinds of new opportunities for spreading it. The problem had not been solved; it had simply been distributed on a vast scale.”

“As this issue is specifically about images that are legal but indecent, there’s also the problem that indecency is a moving target and difficult to define through policy. How do you write a terms of service that fairly adjudicates what is an appropriately or inappropriately provocative image, and can you possibly adjust that definition depending on the age of the person in the picture?”

“The volume problem comes from another direction, too. My friend told me that what really caused him to despair was the sheer percentage of high school students who seemed to be taking nude or even sexual photos and videos of themselves and sharing them with someone else via their phones, photos and videos which very often end up being shared all over their schools.”

They don’t care about the things they’ve been told to care about. Their hormones and pea-sized brains are telling them to win at sex, to win at hierarchy.

“Does that mean you give up on, in particular, trying to shut down actual child pornography? No, of course not. Just like you don’t stop trying to arrest and prosecute murderers even though we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder. But… we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder, and it’s way, way harder to stop someone from looking at an AI fake porn video of an actress in a WhatsApp chat than it is to prosecute a murder.”

“In less than a century we invented, developed, refined, popularized, and monetized a global information network that enables types of behaviors that are essentially undetectable and unstoppable, and this has consequences. Something that has changed in my adult lifetime, I think, is the degree to which we’ve developed a sense of entitlement regarding those kinds of consequences, feelings of entitlement to justice. (Particularly among progressives, but generally too.) This is, I concede, kind of a weird thing to say − in a moral sense, justice is precisely what we are all entitled to. But as a practical matter, justice has been to one degree or another unobtainable for any and all human beings for the entirety of human history. Life’s not fair. Yet there’s a lot of people in contemporary times who seem to have lost sight of the basic wisdom that we can always do more good, but aren’t entitled to a solution to any particular problem.”

“[…] the inability to accept human limits in the pursuit of the good touches politics in all manner of directions.”

“An academic influence on politics that suggests that accepting less than the ideal is to take the side of the oppressor. Our continuing obsession with youth and desire to occupy an adolescent mindset for our entire lives, which brings with it the teenager’s inflexible righteousness and inability to parse moral limits.”

I wonder why people are so up-in-arms about deep-fake porn? I’ve heard people say that it’s because it’s not of real people, that people are masturbating to something that’s not real, so that’s not healthy. News flash: (nearly) everyone you’ve ever masturbated to is not real, in the sense that you have never seen them, you will never meet them, and they might as well not be real as far as you’re concerned. How will you know the difference?

I suppose it’s porn of real people who are most definitely not associated with pornography and, because of technology and the sheer distributive power of the Internet, people you do know will now be able to masturbate to you, probably doing stuff that you would never do, and of which you’re not proud of being depicted doing. No-one would really complain if there was deep-fake video of them rescuing puppies from a burning building.

The problem kind of comes down to the level of shame that we associated with sex. That’s the only reason this has power over us, right? If it was a video of you jogging somewhere, who cares? It it’s a video of you boxing, no problem. Boxing toddlers and blasting them out of a ring? Nope. Hanging out at on a dinner date? Holding hands on a nighttime stroll? No problem. Smooching? Borderline. Fucking? Nope.

Can I think about an illegal picture? Yes. Can I describe it to a friend? Yes. Can I publish that description online? Maybe. Can I draw it? Yes. Can I use photoshop? Yes. Can I use an online llm? No? Can I use a local one? Yes. Maybe?

Distribution is the problem? Our monetization? Or wrongthink?

We Think This Dystopia Is Normal Like People In Abusive Relationships Think It’s Normal by Caitlin Johnstone

“There’s a widespread assumption throughout the western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists. In fact western civilization is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.”

“[…] we are free to choose between 197 flavors of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies. We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labor at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing. We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.”

“The single biggest obstacle to our freedom in the west is our widespread belief that we are free. Until we collectively realize we’re human livestock being continually herded into our respective gear-turning stations to keep the imperial juggernaut trudging ever forward on the world stage, we’ve got no chance to break free and bring the whole abusive system crashing down.”

Technology

Apple to EU: “Go fuck yourself” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“[…] we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.”

“[…] when you’re competing with other countries for the pennies of trillion-dollar tax-dodgers, any wins can be turned into a loss in an instant. After all, any corporation that is footloose enough to establish a Potemkin Headquarters in Dublin and fly the trídhathach can easily up sticks and open another Big Store HQ in some other haven that offers it a sweeter deal. This has created a global race to the bottom among tax-havens to also serve as regulatory havens – and there’s a made-in-the-EU version that sees Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands competing to see who can offer the most impunity for the worst crimes to the most awful corporations in the world.”

“Enter the Digital Markets Act, a new Big Tech specific law that, among other things, bans monopoly app stores and payment processing, through which companies like Apple and Google have levied a 30% tax on the entire app market, while arrogating to themselves the right to decide which software their customers may run on their own devices. Apple has responded to this regulation with a gesture of contempt so naked and broad that it beggars belief. As Proton describes, Apple’s DMA plan is the very definition of malicious compliance:”

“Apple defends this scare screen by saying that it will protect users from the intrinsic unreliability of third-party processors, but as Proton points out, there are plenty of giant corporations who get to use their own payment processors with their iOS apps, because Apple decided they were too big to fuck with. Somehow, Apple can let its customers process payments for Uber, McDonald’s, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon without terrorizing them about existential security risks – but not mom-and-pop software vendors or publishers who don’t want to hand 30% of their income over to a three-trillion-dollar company.”

“All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.”

“Yes, Apple is big enough to run circles around Japan, or South Korea, or the UK. But when those countries join forces with the EU, the USA and other countries that are fed up to the eyeballs with Apple’s bullshit, the company is in serious danger.”

Amoeba wheel by thang010146 (YouTube)

Fixing a base on the floor 1 by thang010146 (YouTube)

Canada declares Flipper Zero public enemy No. 1 in car-theft crackdown by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“The Flipper Zero is also incapable of defeating keyless systems that rely on rolling codes, a protection that’s been in place since the 1990s that essentially transmits a different electronic key signal each time a key is pressed to lock or unlock a door. An attack technique known as a RollJam, known since at least 2015, can bypass rolling code systems, but it works using two radios and a larger processor and higher-powered radio than is available in the Flipper Zero.”

“Stumpf touched on a newer technique for stealing cars using what’s known as a CAN-injection attack. It uses a cable that patches into a vehicle’s CAN (controller area network), usually through the electronic control unit of a headlight. Criminals are already selling what they call “emergency start” devices that perform the attack. Some of them have been disguised as Bluetooth JBL speakers.

““The more common relay attacks used in vehicle thefts are from sophisticated purpose-built tools,” Stumpf said. “Those devices are the real threat—not some kid opening a Tesla charging port with their Flipper Zero.””

“It’s not the first time the hobbyist device has been portrayed as a tool for sophisticated crime. That impression is likely the result of a flood of videos on YouTube and TikTok showing the device used to empty ATMs and unlock cars. In reality, most of those videos were faked, likely by people attempting to drive sales to websites impersonating Flipper Zero vendors.”

“Kulagin said that governments in jurisdictions other than Canada have been much more open-minded about the Flipper Zero. One such body was the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, which contacted the device maker directly following the rash of misleading videos. After investigating, the agency in January 2023 said the Flipper Zero “can be used as a positive, legitimate, and convenient way for pentesters and curious minds to learn about, access, and dissect signals and protocols.””

SunriseTV Login not possible

The night before the Super Bowl, I opened the SunriseTV web page in Opera to set up the recording. I left the page open on the recordings, so I wouldn’t forget the next morning, when I started home office. The next morning, I refreshed the page and was confronted with the dialog box above. I tried logging in again, but was denied again.

Had my account broken overnight? Had my subscription expired? No, of course not. The site opened in a different web browser fine. I had the Super Bowl on in the background for breakfast. But what kind of crappiness is this? How does a web site completely forget that I have a subscription?

Another pet peeve is that SunriseTV is one of the largest and most established television providers in Switzerland. They still only let you record time slots, not shows. If the Super Bowl slot ends at 04:30, then that’s when it stops recording. They seemingly have no idea when a program actually stops streaming. The Super Bowl went into overtime, so my recording did not include the last ten minutes. Did they record the next slot automatically? Why didn’t they include those ten minutes? This happens all the time, with recorded movies. You will often miss the last ten minutes because those are buried in the first ten minutes of the next time slot—and that’s not the one you recorded.

LLMs & AI

February 9, 2024 by François Chollet (Twitter)

“People seem to be falling for two rather thoughtless extremes:

“1. “LLMs are AGI, they work like the human brain, they can reason, etc.”
2. “LLMs are dumb and useless.”

“Reality is that LLMs are not AGI – they’re a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful, if you want to automate a known task that’s a match for its training data distribution.

“Memorization works, as long as you don’t need to adapt to novelty. You don’t *need* intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.”

New GitHub Copilot Research Finds ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality

“The Coding on Copilot whitepaper from GitClear sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. In other words: “Is it more similar to the careful, refined contributions of a Senior Developer, or more akin to the disjointed work of a short-term contractor?””

“The answer to that is summarized in this paragraph from the whitepaper’s abstract:”

“We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn – the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored – is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of ‘added code’ and ‘copy/pasted code’ is increasing in proportion to ‘updated,’ ‘deleted,’ and ‘moved ‘code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don’t repeat yourself] of the repos visited.”

• Less Moved Code Implies Less Refactoring, Less Reuse: “Combined with the growth in code labeled ‘Copy/Pasted,’ there is little room to doubt that the current implementation of AI Assistants discourages code reuse. Instead of refactoring and working to DRY (‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’) code, these Assistants offer a one-keystroke temptation to repeat existing code.”
• More Copy/Pasted Code Implies Future Headaches: “There is perhaps no greater scourge to long-term code maintainability than copy/pasted code. In effect, when a non-keyword line of code is repeated, the code author is admitting ‘I didn’t have the time to evaluate the previous implementation.‘ By re-adding code instead of reusing it, the chore is left to future maintainers to figure out how to consolidate parallel code paths that implement repeatedly-needed functionality.”
• Exploring the Verifiability of Code Generated by GitHub Copilot: “We found evidence which corroborates the current consensus in the literature: Copilot is a powerful tool; however, it should not be ‘flying the plane’ by itself.”

Programming

A Distributed Systems Reading List by Fred Hebert (My Bad Opinions)

“[…] exactly once delivery means that each message is guaranteed to be sent and seen only once. This is a nice theoretical objective but quite impossible in real systems. It ends up being simulated through other means (combining atomic broadcast with specific flags and ordering guarantees, for example)”

“[…] partial order means that some messages can compare with some messages, but not necessarily all of them. For example, I could decide that all the updates to the key k1 can be in a total order regarding each other, but independent from updates to the key k2 . There is therefore a partial order between all updates across all keys, since k1 updates bear no information relative to the k2 updates.”

“Idempotence means that when messages are seen more than once, resent or replayed, they don’t impact the system differently than if they were sent just once.”

“[…] if you want anything to be reliable, you need an end-to-end acknowledgement, usually written by the application layer.”

“Fallacies of Distributed Computing The fallacies are:”

• The network is reliable
• Latency is zero
• Bandwidth is infinite
• The network is secure
• Topology doesn’t change
• There is one administrator
• Transport cost is zero
• The network is homogeneous

“The updates are received transitively across various nodes. For example, a message published by service A on a bus (whether Kafka or RMQ) can end up read, transformed or acted on and re-published by service B, and there is a possibility that service C will read B ‘s update before A ‘s, causing issues in causality.”

“A single backup is kind of easy to handle. Multiple backups run into a problem called consistent cuts (high level view) and distributed snapshots, which means that not all the backups are taken at the same time, and this introduces inconsistencies that can be construed as corrupting data. The good news is there’s no great solution and everyone suffers the same.”

“Eventual Consistency is a kind of special family of consistency measures that say that the system can be inconsistent as long as it eventually becomes consistent again. Causal consistency is an example of eventual consistency. Strong Eventual Consistency is like eventual consistency but demands that no conflicts can happen between concurrent updates. This is usually the land of CRDTs.”

“Interval Tree Clocks attempts to fix the issues of other clock types by requiring less space to store node-specific information and allowing a kind of built-in garbage collection. It also has one of the nicest papers ever.”

“CRDTs essentially are data structures that restrict operations that can be done such that they can never conflict, no matter which order they are done in or how concurrently this takes place.”

“The bible for putting all of these views together is Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. Be advised however that everyone I know who absolutely loves this book are people who had a good foundation in distributed systems from reading a bunch of papers, and greatly appreciated having it all put in one place. Most people I’ve seen read it in book clubs with the aim get better at distributed systems still found it challenging and confusing at times, and benefitted from having someone around to whom they could ask questions in order to bridge some gaps. It is still the clearest source I can imagine for everything in one place.”

Zero to Unmaintainable in 1.2 Commands by Jim Nielsen

“There is such a focus on how quickly you can get going, but so little focus on how you maintain what you just created.”

He cites The time to unmaintainable is very low by Dave Rupert

“[…] a key factor of sustainability is making sure maintainability stays on par with growth. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite – which I am – the ability to fancy copy-paste your way into an unmaintainable situation is higher than ever and that’s a trade-off we should think about.”

Fun

When Landlord says No Cats Allowed

Yelled at him for being on the counter…now he's taunting me

My wife called this cat my “defiant spirit animal.”

Number Anagrams

Today’s Connections puzzle was tricky. Purple was tough: EON, ETHER, NET, TOW, which are anagrams of numbers. I managed to see that link before I put together the final one.

Video Games

Asahi Linux project’s OpenGL support on Apple Silicon officially surpasses Apple’s by Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)

““Regrettably, the M1 doesn’t map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1,” writes Rosenzweig. “While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set… Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on.””

“Rosenzweig’s blog post didn’t give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was “well on the road” to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve’s Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.”