Leveling a whole village in LebanonEthnic Cleansing in Jabalia 2024

Photo by Onur Burak Akın − Lebanon

Imagine if that were your neighborhood.

Imagine if those were you and your neighbors, herded into the streets, made to stand in the sun with all of your worldly belongings in a torn bag, held in one hand, while, in the other, you brandish an ID issued by your oppressor, because the oppressor demands it.

You stand for hours.

Can you imagine it?

Of course not. Because things like that don’t happen to good people.

It only happens to those who deserve it, who aren’t even really people, when... [More]

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

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

William Gibson 'The Peripheral' by Politics and Prose (YouTube)

The PeripheralAt about 38:40 or so, someone asked about his process,

“Lady: Do you know where you’re going when you set out?

“Gibson: No, I don’t. And it’s when you ask me now, you’re asking somebody who’s been doing it for like 30 years or a little bit more, and I no longer know how I’m doing it. I just don’t. I don’t think of it. It’s like the story of the the old fiddle-maker and people said, ‘how do you make those fiddles?’ and he said, ‘I start with this block of wood and I take off everything that’s... [More]”

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

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

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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... [More]

Chris Hedges: The American Ruling Class Explained by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

A partial transcript from the 2-minute video.

“Our political class does not govern; it entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The squad and the progressive caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers rights, or defying the war machine than the freedom caucus fights for freedom.

“These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry cynically... [More]”

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

Table of Contents

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

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... [More]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

Did they, though? Clash?

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

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

The very first paragraph writes,

“Venezuelan migrants... [More]”

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

Table of Contents

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

The final document of What’s new in C# 13 (Microsoft Learn) is available. There are no major changes for most end users; the changes listed are interested for library and framework developers—especially those interested in writing highly performant code, e.g., Microsoft in its BCL and ASP.NET.

1. Completely unsurprisingly, the params keyword now also applies to IEnumerable<T> (as well as many descendants) as well as Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T>.
2. There’s now an official Lock object that, when used instead of the... [More]

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

Table of Contents

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

“[…] ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.[1]”

“[…] a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

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... [More]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

Table of Contents

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

For the last couple of years, I have been keeping track of books that were potentially written by AI that my Kindle saw fit to advertise to me on the lock-screen page. As I wrote at the top of each installment of Kindle Books Written by AIs,

“[…] This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog.”

Until recently, it was kind of interesting because the provenance of the content could have gone either way:... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

Access... [More]

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

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

Lina KhanI’ve heard the argument that Lina Khan at the FTC is really good and making good guidelines. Fair enough. She’s not an elected official. She could work for any administration. The argument is, of course, that Trump wouldn’t hire her, so we therefore need to get Biden or Harris back in there, so that she can continue her good work. This is ridiculous. We have to put up with Biden or Harris so we can have a working FTC? That’s the argument?

That’s getting toward the bottom of the barrel of the... [More]

The following Slavoj Žižek video is only one minute long. In it, he explains that we need another system simply because the one we have is so utterly inadequate to the tasks before it.

…on why he is a communist, but not a socialist by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

“I remain a communist. In what sense? My good friend told me he was there, as part of some delegation, two days after Fukushima. He told me that, for a couple of hours, the Japanese government was in total panic. It looked that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area: 30 million people. Then, maybe,... [More]”

The work journal 2024-03-27T16:03:51 conversation: 01ht0afgwryks5fepkvvm0kn28 by Simon Willison (GitHub) describes the author’s process of using AI prompting to write a console text-wrapping algorithm.

He prompted with “JavaScript that takes a big string of text and word wraps it at the specified width, adding newlines where necessary.” The answers meandered around a solution space that seemed over-engineered and not particularly fruitful—the answers all used regular expressions, which seems kind of like overkill, when... [More]

The video linked below is a great 1-hour documentary[1] about one guy—Karel Sabbe—who finished the Barkley Marathon (Wikipedia), which is,

“[…] an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee, United States. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles.”

The video is named #17 because he’s only the 17th person to have finished the race in its 40-year history. And people... [More]

The article Prefer test-doubles over mocking frameworks by Steve Dunn writes,

“This is testing implementation and not behaviour. Your SUT called something and there is likely an observable side-effect of that. Test the side-effect and not that a particular method was called. If the code is refactored (e.g. you change the implementation but not the behaviour), then your test that checked that a method was called will likely break, but your test that tested the behaviour should remain unchanged and should... [More]”