Links and Notes for June 3rd, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

Shanghai reopens after suppressing COVID: A triumph for science and public health by Patrick Martin & Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“The example of China proves that zero-COVID is effective, even against the most infectious variant of coronavirus to emerge so far. The outbreak in Shanghai apparently had two causes: infections brought from outside China, inevitable given the city’s role in the world economy, and lax enforcement of the zero-COVID policy by officials in the city, which was overturned by Beijing after the number of infections began to skyrocket.”

“More broadly, in the course of the pandemic, life expectancy in China for the first time surpassed that in the United States. Despite the US being richer and with a more technically proficient medical infrastructure, the inequalities in access to health care, the deepening social crisis expressed in “deaths of despair” (opioid deaths, suicides, other drug and alcohol-related deaths) and above all, the loss of 1 million lives to a pandemic that was completely preventable, have led to an unprecedented decline in life expectancy, one of the benchmarks of the viability of any society. ”

“Times reporters even found one Shanghai graduate student who told them, “I feel like that harm from the pandemic measures is worse than the harm of the virus itself.” The reporters were apparently tasked to find at least one person out of a billion in China to echo the words of Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who inaugurated the US campaign against lockdowns two years ago by warning “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.””

That is really adorable, considering that the student is espousing the views more likely to be held by the much-hated right-ring white-supremacists that the NYT otherwise can’t stop writing about than by any of the readers of the NYT.

“The corporate media response is driven entirely by the interests of Wall Street and American imperialism. They wanted China to suffer a collapse in the face of Omicron, both to bring to an end the policy of zero-COVID which constitutes a standing indictment of the indifference of the imperialist governments to mass death of their citizens, and to inflict a significant material blow against China, which Washington views as its greatest strategic threat.”

That’s true. If the west could have convinced China to give up Zero-COVID, then they would have gotten China to destroy itself in the name of slightly increased economic advantage for a select few in China—right before everything collapsed, dragging the west down with it.

“The WSWS has explained the necessity for a strategy of elimination. China, a country of 1.4 billion people has demonstrated that with initiative, even these highly contagious pathogens can be contained and eliminated. Yet, given the rest of the world’s complete disregard of the long-term threat posed by SARS-Cov-2, China will face even more pressures to abandon its defenses.”

Janet Yellen Admits She Didn’t See Later Rounds of Covid and the War in Ukraine by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“There is a point here on which the Biden administration certainly can be criticized, although not one mentioned by Politico. If the Biden administration had made vaccinating the world a top priority, it is likely that we would not have seen the development of the omicron variant and quite possibly also have prevented the delta variant.

“The number of mutations of a virus will depends on the extent of its spread. If we had worked aggressively with other countries to produce and distribute as many doses of the vaccine as quickly as possible, overriding patent monopolies and other protections, we could have prevented hundreds of millions of cases, along with the resulting sicknesses and death.”

Economy & Finance

Crypto, Clearing and Credit by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“[…] knows where you live; the blockchain does not. Still, credit is kind of an important part of a financial system? People want to borrow money to do stuff. Sometimes this is normal business or personal stuff: People want to borrow money to start a business or build a factory or buy a house or whatever. If crypto is going to displace or compete with the traditional financial system, it will need to find ways to do that sort of lending. This seems to me like a hard and rather unsolved problem in crypto, and I don’t think a lot of people are taking out mortgages from the blockchain.”

“In the traditional system, if the price of corn drops at midnight, and your broker calls you up for more margin, and you don’t post more margin, your broker thinks “aha you are asleep” and waits until the morning to call you again. But “humans are asleep at midnight” is the sort of off-chain information that a purely algorithmic approach would ignore.”

“I am also bullish on crypto, for plaintiffs’ lawyers. For one thing it is pretty obvious that there are lots of large frauds, Ponzis and pump-and-dumps in the crypto space; even crypto’s most ardent boosters would agree with that. “Sure 99% of crypto projects are scams, but mine is in the 1%,” 75% of crypto promoters say; the other 25% are like “oh yeah this is a Ponzi, come on in.””

“One day, the thinking goes, all of your information will be on the blockchain, and a bank will be able to decide to make you a loan based on information in your blockchain profile about your previous financial transactions and your educational history and your driving record and how often you floss your teeth. Needless to say this does not exist now, and to some extent it assumes “a blockchain” that collates all of this information, rather than the actually-existing system of different competing blockchain systems that are all pretty much for financial speculation.”

Russia Has Some Dollars Somewhere by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Here’s another workaround. Roughly speaking, Russia still has its frozen US dollars. It can’t make its US banks transfer them, but I suppose it could issue transferable claims on them. For instance, if Russia’s government holds $1 billion in an account at a Russian bank, and that Russian bank in turn holds that $1 billion in a US correspondent bank, then in some sense the $1 billion in the correspondent bank’s accounts are “real dollars” and the $1 billion in the Russian bank’s accounts are “indirect claims on dollars.” If Russia’s government called up the correspondent bank to say “hey send that $1 billion to our bondholders,” the correspondent bank, being US-regulated, would say no. But if it called up the Russian bank and said “hey send that $1 billion to our bondholders,” the Russian bank, being Russia-regulated, would say yes. It couldn’t use the US banking system to do that, but it could open accounts for the bondholders at the Russian bank, and move dollars into their accounts, and then the bondholders would “have” the dollars.”

“They would have numbers in their accounts at the Russian bank, and those numbers would have dollar signs in front of them, and those numbers would represent claims on dollars in US bank accounts even if they are not exactly interchangeable with those dollars.”

Domestic Crude Oil Peaked at $145 a Barrel in 2008. It Closed Yesterday at $118.50. So Why Is Gas at the Pump at All-Time Highs? by Russ & Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“Although the overall consumption of Russian crude oil in the United States is relatively small, the loss of Russian feedstocks and gasoline blending components will have effects in the United States. The challenge is that feedstocks are needed to supplement some grades of crude oil and are part of refinery secondary units along the U.S. Gulf Coast, where they are upgraded to gasoline and diesel. Alternatives to some Russian feedstocks are very limited and in high demand. Refinery production of gasoline and diesel will reduce with the loss of Russian feedstocks and become more economically challenging as refiners compete for a limited pool of alternatives.”

Do We Have to Give the Rich All of Our Money? Enforcing the Estate Tax by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Just to be clear, the only people who owe any money at all under the estate tax are very rich. The current tax has a $12.06 million dollar exemption, per person. That means a couple can pass along $24.12 million to their kids without paying a dime in estate tax.

“This is not a tax paid by small business owners or successful lawyers. It is a tax paid by the very rich: full stop. A successful small business owner would be extremely lucky to have accumulated $5 to $10 million in their business over their lifetime, less than half the cutoff for a couple to owe any estate tax at all.

“It’s also important to remember that, like the income tax, the estate tax is a marginal tax where it is only paid on the increment above the cutoff. So, let’s suppose our “small” business owning couple has accumulated $24.2 million over their lifetime, $80,000 over the cutoff.

“This means they will have to pay the 40 percent estate tax rate on the $80,000 over the cutoff, not the full $24,200,000. Their tax will be in this case would be $32,000 or 0.13 percent of the value of their estate. Can we find the world’s smallest violin?

“Let’s not waste time with foolishness, the estate tax is a tax paid by a tiny number of rich people. That is who were talking about.”

“In 1980, estates larger than $500,000 (in 2022 dollars) were subject to the tax. There were a set of marginal estate tax rates, but the top rate paid by the largest estates was 70 percent. This meant that a person with a $1 billion estate would pay close to $700 million in taxes to the government.”

“ To my mind, the estate tax should be far higher. Rates of 60 or 70 percent would still allow the Elon Musks and Bill Gates’s of the country to pass on vast fortunes to their kids that will allow them to live in total luxury without working a day in their life. I also would not be troubled if the rich, say couples with $5 million in their estate, had to pay some tax, and not just the super-rich. (Remember, it is a marginal tax.)”

Public Policy & Politics

David Crosby Gives an Interview—To a High School Journalism Class (Best Classic Bands)

“How did you feel that the political climate concerning the Vietnam War affected your life as a musician and the music overall? Very strongly. It was a bad war; it was a bullshit war and after a while we could tell that it was a bullshit war. We weren’t there to accomplish anything. We were there trying to exercise and expand our influence, and keep them from expanding theirs. We had this whole vision of the world as being divided between them and us and we were all just out there trying to sell our ideas […]”

Yeah, at the end of a gun.

“I think the Warren Commission was a lie. [President John F.] Kennedy was killed by, shot at, by at least two people, and I think it was definitely a conspiracy…It’s unfortunate that they managed to squash it, but there’s no way it would’ve been done another way. The story that they sold us is absolutely ludicrous.”

“Explain your disdain for Spotify. They don’t pay us, that simple. If they sold your stuff and they didn’t pay you, you would be pissed. That’s what they’re doing to me. They are selling my stuff and the stuff I made and they are taking all the money. That’s not fair. If I had millions of plays, I could buy a coffee. That’s not fair. They are making billions and giving me pennies and that’s not right.””

“I’ve been making records at a startling rate. I’ve made five albums in six, seven years. It’s an absurd rate to be cranking albums out. The reason being is that I’m gonna die. I mean, we all… everybody dies. I’m sure someone told you. And I want to crank out all the music I possibly can before I do. Now I’m 80 years old so I’m gonna die fairly soon. That’s how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it’s really good…”

‘Slippery Slope… Just Got a Lot Steeper’: US to Send Ukraine Advanced Missiles as Russia Holds Nuke Drills by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)

““We will continue providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, powerful artillery and precision rocket systems, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles, Mi-17 helicopters, and ammunition,” Biden wrote, arguing that continued U.S. weapons shipments put Ukraine in the “strongest possible position at the negotiating table.””

What an asshole. He’s lying about negotiations.

The Power of Lies by Craig Murray (Scheer Post)

“On behalf of the group Eric Schmitt of the NYT had been speaking to the White House and he had sent an email identifying 15,000 documents the White House did not want published to prevent harm to individuals or to American interests. It was agreed not to publish these documents and they were not published. Summers asked Goetz if he was aware of any names that slipped through, and he replied not.”

“Yet there is no public awareness that this careful editing and redaction process took place at all. That is plain from those comments under The Guardian article. This is because people are simply regurgitating the propaganda that the media has given them.”

“It is telling that in The Guardian itself, scores of commenters on Oborne’s article reference the release of un-redacted files, but nobody seems to know that it was The Guardian that was actually responsible, or rather, massively irresponsible. The gulf between public perception and the truth is deeply troubling.”

“[…] the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has published an article with that attribution about the “Russiagate” hoax around the 2016 election, which is stunning: “The Russia-Trump narrative that Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country. It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three year investigation to nowhere. Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.” The problem is The Wall Street Journal has one thing wrong. The press is not humiliated – like Boris Johnson, it is entirely brazen and has no capacity for humiliation. The press has not been found out, because most of the country still believes the lies they were told and have not seen corrected.”

“Modern society is not really much more rational than the Middle Ages. Myth is still extremely potent. Only the means of myth dissemination are more sophisticated.”

The Ukraine War: a Colloquy by Noam Chomsky (CounterPunch)

“Yet, censorship is also dangerous as it removes capacities to critically engage arguments states use to justify aggression. In short, we can debate the merits of context and to what degree, if any, it plays in understanding a conflict. But, taking the next step to either dismiss out of hand as false, statements that are demonstrably true, or asserting that one is not allowed to provide context out of concern that it somehow supports Putin, goes too far. In short, what defines totalitarianism is the idea that some truths are inadmissible, given threats they pose to some larger cause.”

“It may be desirable for the Ukrainian government to make concessions, but the relative desirability of diplomacy is not an absolute statement of what one prefers to be preferable.”

“In any case, the Ukrainian government may have all the “agency” in the world regarding their willingness to detach from Russia’s sphere of influence, but they could not attempt to do so in the matter they have done so (to date) without the U.S.’s influence and encouragement.”

“if Ukraine has the right to be independent, they are still a pawn in a U.S. government gambit aimed at Russia.”

“[…] neither Chomsky nor I argue that Ukraine does not have the right to defend itself. Rather, the larger consideration is factors that might motivate certain parties to act in certain ways, with these ways having consequences for negotiations or the course of the war itself.”

That’s what diplomacy sounds like.

“Presented as a common-sense response to Russian aggression, the shift, in fact, amounts to a significant escalation. By expanding support to Ukraine across the board and shelving any diplomatic effort to stop the fighting, the United States and its allies have greatly increased the danger of an even larger conflict. They are taking a risk far out of step with any realistic strategic gain.””

“Negotiations without the U.S.’s active and constructive input are unlikely to lead anywhere. Such constructive input requires concessions. All diplomacy requires concessions and peace often requires sacrifice. In contrast, keeping your autonomy going at all costs is another way to keep a war going despite its costs.”

“According to those documents, the U.S., the UK and Germany signaled to the Kremlin that a NATO membership of countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was out of the question. In March 1991, British Prime Minister John Major promised during a visit to Moscow that ‘nothing of the sort will happen.’ Yeltsin expressed significant displeasure when the step was ultimately taken. He gave his approval for NATO’s eastward expansion in 1997, but complained that he was only doing so because the West had forced him to.””

You cannot trust the word of the west, especially over decades, where people come along willing to take advantage of ethical shortcuts. It’s not their word they’re breaking so who cares?

Get it in writing when dealing with hyper-militaristic, hyper-capitalist, avowedly amoral sociopaths. Even then, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.

“The critics conflate sociological legitimacy (how Putin could utilize NATO expansion as part of his realist if not militarist project) with philosophical legitimacy (whether it is morally justifiable to attack another state when fearing NATO expansion). Some will argue that NATO expansion or Ukraine’s actions in Donbass justify Russia’s actions. Chomsky has not made that argument. A key problem, however, is that a party to a conflict may be a victim of unwarranted aggression but still take specific actions that increase the probability that they will be a victim of such aggression. One can argue against the wisdom or virtue of these specific actions without justifying the aggression.”

“They go on to say that “not bringing Putin up on war crime charges at the International Criminal Court in the Hague just because some past leader did not receive similar treatment would be the wrong conclusion to draw from any historical analogy.” They see great advantage in “prosecuting Putin for the war crimes that are being deliberately committed in Ukraine” as that “would set an international precedent for the world leaders attempting to do the same in the future.””

It’s just a happy coincidence that we always want to set precedence with everyone else’s war crimes rather than our own.

“If the opportunity cost of failing to negotiate (assuming success is possible) is greater than the cost of letting a world leader off the hook, then prosecuting a single leader is potentially a limited symbolic gesture. To prosecute just Russian war criminals and not U.S. ones would reduce war crime prosecution to a political gesture as opposed to a moral (lesson advancing) gesture in my view.”

It’s not a principle if it’s only applied for political gain.

“a unilateral prosecution of Putin could be leveraged as a propaganda victory to bolster the U.S. position of not supporting negotiations.”

“Chomsky and others have discussed neutrality as part of a diplomatic solution to the conflict, with the potential gains of neutrality being an end to Russian attacks on Ukraine. Peace negotiations usually require concessions by both sides, not one side. Disarmament (and arms control) treaties are based on mutually sanctioned negotiations about military disengagement involving the various parties to the treaties.”

“Nina Khrushcheva. She stated in the aforementioned interview: “when the negotiations were seemingly doing OK, the Russians withdrew from the areas of Kyiv. And that was — you know, for the Russians, they say it was the idea that they’re just going to help negotiations, but it was taken by the Ukrainian side and the American side as the Russian defeat, and then the more weapons went into Ukraine.” So, one scenario is that the Russians have considered negotiating, not simply destroying all of Ukraine.”

“Even if Russia has failed to negotiate in good faith, so has the United States. To reach a diplomatic solution, which is always preferable to war, requires doing more than identifying who does not negotiate in good faith. Diplomatic agreements are supported by verification systems which are designed to see if parties cheat, lie or violate terms of an agreement.”

“Chomsky, like others, tries to understand what might motivate Russia so as to promote a diplomatic solution. The risks of not pursuing such a solution might be ignored by the critics because the authors conveniently assume that diplomacy is impossible. Meanwhile we see that one default move is that Russia and Ukraine both try to resolve the conflict with weapons and territorial conquests.”

“Even if we were to assume that Putin is presently disinclined to negotiate (or negotiates in bad faith), what will Ukraine and Zelensky do after the United States decides to stop paying billions to keep the war going, growing tired of the costs of its militaristic solidarity?”

Well, that’s highly unlikely.

Joe Biden Fights White Supremacy With More White Supremacy by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“An 18-year-old white kid, a fucking child, traveled 200 miles and three and a half hours from his predominantly white small town on the Pennsylvania border, armed with an AR-15 littered with racist graffiti, just to kill people he never met because he was terrified that somehow, they would replace him in America’s twisted caste system. Something isn’t wrong with this picture, everything is, and we should all be able to agree that something needs to be done to reshape the paradigm of this nation’s entrenched race relations to end this madness.”

““I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial, I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.” These were the racially loaded words that Joe Biden growled from the Senate floor like George Wallace on a bender to justify a bill that would devastate generations of Black and brown people in this country by redesignating their children federally as super predators.”

“Senator Biden attempted to use the Oklahoma City Bombing to justify a bill that influences might be even more devastating. Joe’s 1995 Omnibus Counterterrorism Act would have granted the federal government nearly endless powers in the name of combatting domestic terrorism. Those so much as even charged with acts deemed by the police state to be “terrorism” would automatically be stripped of their constitutional rights and detained indefinitely without bail before a show trial in which the federal government would be free to use “evidence” collected from anonymous sources before shipping you off to be buried alive beneath Florence Supermax.”

“You see, dearest motherfuckers, it’s all one big hustle. The Republicans blame Islam, the Democrats blame the militia movement, either way, the same pigs get fed at the troth of an ever-expanding white supremacist police state and the same marginalized people get sold into slavery in the Prison Industrial Complex. It really doesn’t matter who the target is, when it comes to empowering the state, the disenfranchised will always get fucked.”

Comrade Thomas Piketty, Welcome to the Socialist Movement by Eric Blanc (Jacobin)

“Piketty’s vision is not reducible to rebuilding robust welfare states. For true equality, we need to rethink the “whole range of relationships of power and domination.” At the core of his conception of the transition to socialism is radical redistribution of wealth combined with an extension of employee influence within private firms.”

“Despite neoliberalism’s ravages, the welfare state has not been dismantled even in places like the United States and the UK — current and future struggles for decommodification are thus being waged on a significantly higher social baseline than they were in, say, the 1930s. As such, the most pertinent criticism of social democrats — one shared by Piketty — is not that they were gradualists, but rather that they eventually proved incapable of being effective gradualists.”

Biden’s Taiwan Talk by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“No one with a hand in American foreign policy, so far as I can make out, is the slightest bit interested in the one thing, above all others, that the 21st century requires of competent statecraft. This is the desire and ability to understand the perspectives of others. Have you ever heard anyone in the Washington policy cliques state, or even wonder, what China’s legitimate interests are in East Asia, first of all on the question of sovereignty over Taiwan? I haven’t either.”

“Last summer he equated Taiwan with Japan and South Korea, two nations with which the U.S. has security alliances providing for mutual defense. Taiwan is not a nation, however many times The New York Times errs in calling it one, and has no such treaty with Washington.”

“Mastro is a fellow in Chinese security studies at Stanford and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is what we’re seeing these days on the Taiwan question: What grounded thinking there is to be found is as often as not coming from conservatives as against the liberal “antiwar” warmongers who crowd our national discourse.”

“What we are going to see in Taiwan is likely to prove exactly what we already see in Ukraine. We will salami-slice increasing support for the independence-minded government in Taipei, arm the island to its very teeth, provoke China as we have Russia, and hope the mess escalates. Then we will watch, as true heroes do.”

Our Culture of Violence Comes from the White House by Ted Rall

“Conservative politicians call attention to America’s worsening epidemic of mental illness. They have a point too. Most mass shooters have untreated psychiatric disorders; most are suicidal.”

“For Americans, violence is the go-to solution to many foreign crises even when there are better alternatives. Bin Laden, for example, could have been put on trial, with 9/11 treated as a law-enforcement issue. It would have elevated us, provided answers to the victims’ families and diminished the prestige of the terrorists.”

UN Human Rights High Commissioner condemned over China trip by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“In broad outline, Bachelet voiced the anti-China “human rights” agenda that the US and its allies have been advancing for years. The public attacks on her trip for not being sufficiently strident and condemning reflect the advanced character of the US-led confrontation with China. Even as it is pursuing a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US is escalating its efforts to isolate, encircle and weaken China in preparation for conflict.”

WaPo’s Glimpse of the Battlefield by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)

“In the children’s crayon drawing version of this war that lives in the heads of Western so-called centrists, this is a team of heroic Good Guys righteously beating the tar out of hordes of Bad Guys because that’s what happens in the movies and on TV. But this is not the movies, and this is not TV. People are dying in a U.S. proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the U.S.-centralized empire, and behind all the narratives and spin they are ultimately doing so for nothing more noble than the agenda to secure U.S. unipolar hegemony. Many of the blue-and-yellow flag wavers are well-intentioned, and really do think they are advocating for Ukrainian freedom and sovereignty.”

How to Defeat the Billionaire Class by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“If the agenda for a living wage adjusted for inflation, for Medicare for All, for canceling student debt, for a real Green New Deal policy agenda, if all of this were put forward by the Democrats, they would be able to win over a big section of the voting population that ends up either staying out of the elections or voting for Republicans and the right wing. There is a genuinely dangerous and reactionary current on every continent, but to the degree to which they get traction, that entirely depends on what else is on offer.””

Why expect anything from Democrats?

“Politicians, even self-identified progressive politicians, she says, have “made peace with the capitalist system.” They falsely believe that they can negotiate with the billionaire class and barter for a few progressive reforms. This tactic, she says, has failed. “The Biden administration is in shambles precisely because that approach does not work. And it also calls into question how far are we going to aim to change society?””

““We would not have won our elections had we not mobilized a whole section of the population that is typically disenfranchised. Not because they don’t have the legal right to vote, but because there’s nothing for them to vote for.””

“Everything is gone”: Russian business hit hard by tech sanctions by Anna Gross & Max Seddon (Ars Technica/Financial Times)

“With the country unable to export much of its raw materials, import critical goods, or access global financial markets, economists expect Russia’s gross domestic product to contract by as much as 15 percent this year.”

Obviously, this is to be celebrated, right? Just shattering a country’s economy without even giving a single idea of what that country should do to make the pain stop is a great idea. Absolutely principled and morally upstanding. The West should be proud of itself.

This is terrible, of course. None of this is moving toward a peaceful resolution to anything. The West is positively giddy with delight at being able to break its own patting itself on the back for punishing the worst country that has ever graced the planet ever. It’s allied with that shining beacon of morality, the United States, which, with its military alliance, NATO, can do no wrong. No-one can blame them for letting loose their bloodlust to utterly destroy a country that they have all inexplicably loathed for decades. They can finally show their true colors and just fucking kill Russia. I saw a stupid article in a stupid Swiss newspaper today about a stupid man who tried to teach children at a school that Russia was the real victim. He was only half-right. Ukraine is a victim of Russia (and will suffer much more from NATO’s actions before this is over), but Russia is very much a victim of NATO and the holier-than-thou, self-sanctifying west.

“In response, the Kremlin is having to get creative. Russia this month introduced an import scheme whereby companies are allowed to “parallel import” hardware—including servers, cars, phones, and semiconductors—from a long list of companies without the consent of the trademark or copyright holder.”

I mean, obviously, right? Once everyone has condemned you as the ultimate evil, it’s quite freeing. You don’t have to follow any laws anymore. Fuck it, right? If you were to play nice, you would still get kicked in the teeth and then starve. This way, you get kicked in the teeth, but you don’t starve. It’s not a tough choice. It’s the obvious one.

Top Economist WARNS of collapse of American Civilization | The Weekend Show by MeidasTouch (YouTube)

A 75-minute talk about the rot at the heart of U.S. culture.

Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter on Ukraine, Russia, China (ScheerPost)

A really informative 30-minute talk.

Roaming Charges: Tears of Rage, Tears of Grief by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“George Galloway in a debate with Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq war: “But you’re not ashamed of yourself at all. It’s true, I praised you. You were a butterfly. You’re now a slug. You did write like an angel, but you’re now working for the Devil, and damn you and all your works.””

“More than 1-in-3 Americans earning at least $250,000 annually say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck.”

Oh fuck right off.

“ince March, Russia has risen from ninth to sixth place in the ranking of the largest oil suppliers to the United States, almost doubling supplies in monthly terms – up to 4.218 million barrels, according to the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy (EIA).”

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Watch the hands, not the lips.

Mother of Buffalo Shooting Victim Says “This Is Exactly Who We Are” by SP Staff (Scheer Post)

““We have to change the curriculum in schools across the country so that we may adequately educate our children,” Everhart declared. “Reading about history is crucial to the future of this country. Learning about other cultures, ethnicities, and religions in schools should not be something that’s up for debate…our differences should make us curious, not angry. At the end of the day, I bleed, you bleed, we are all human.””

Roaming Charges: The Politics of Limbo by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Why are gas prices so high? This might explain at least part of the problem…

“2022 Q1 profits:

“ExxonMobil – $5,480,000,000 (a 100% increase compared to 2021 Q1)
BP – $6,200,000,000 (highest quarterly profit in a decade)
Chevron – $6,260,000,000 (a 400% increase compared to 2021 Q1)”

Journalism & Media

The Incredible Political and Media Journey of Jesse and Tyrel Ventura by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Media writers meanwhile were told Donahue was fired for “poor ratings,” even though he anchored MSNBC’s highest-rated show, beating even the heavily promoted Hardball With Chris Matthews. Both Donahue and Ventura insisted at the time that pressure from outside the network led to their dismissals. “It came from far above,” Donahue said. “This was not some assistant program director.””

Right before people disappear beneath the waves of war propaganda, they are anti-war, and crave the truth.

“Jesse gets into some weird stuff on air, and I disagree with him about a lot of things, but he has a pair of qualities that helped make him a unique figure in the history of American populist politics. One, he’s honest. Two, his sympathies in politics clearly lay with voters, not donors.”

“Politics doesn’t need to be hard, but our two reigning parties insist on making it so. “If you have common sense today, that makes you a genius,” Ventura says.”

“[Trump] did it differently than me. See, and I can’t argue with the way he did it. He took on the Republicans and defeated them first, and then took on the Democrats and defeated them. I like to say he took on the Bushes and he destroyed the Bush dynasty, then he took on the Clinton dynasty and destroyed the Clinton dynasty. Where I would’ve taken them both on at the same time and I might not have been successful doing it that way. You can’t argue with Trump’s success.”

”The buzzsaw of fandom” by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Anyways, regardless of how you felt about the whole thing, I would recommend not making the same mistake Tucker Carlson did. He dedicated a segment to attacking the band’s visit. I don’t know what Fox News’ various emails, mailrooms, and phone lines are like right now, but I’m going to guess that not even Fox News is able to defend themselves against the sentient DDOS attack that is K-Pop stans.”

“You know what would be a much better use of $2 million? Instead of paying someone to search “site:4chan.org Connecticut” four times a day, what if the state just invested all of that money in easily searchable and navigable government websites and social pages that all worked on mobile, updated frequently, and contained pertinent information written clearly and published in timely fashion? Revolutionary, right? And, you know what? If they had extra money after that, maybe they could give out some grants to jumpstart some local news sites so people wouldn’t have to rely on QAnonMom1776 on Telegram for news about their community anymore.”

”Anti-crypto media personality” by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“The truth is that the flaws in blockchain technology are just simply unavoidable. Using a crypto wallet is awful. (To say nothing of how dumb calculating gas fees is.) Using trading exchanges is a mess. NFT Discords are constantly being targeted by phishing scams. NFT video games are expensive, slow, ugly, and routinely rugpull their own players. None of this is good for anyone except for the folks who think they’re going to make a bunch of money out of it. Which leads me to one real conclusion here: Anyone who is breathlessly telling you Web3 is the future of anything has either never used any of the technology they’re promoting, doesn’t understand how it works on a fundamental level, is lying to themselves, is lying to you, or all of the above.”

“Admittedly, I was so distracted by the implications of an open source 4chan-trained A.I. that I hadn’t actually also considered the ethics of testing this out on 4chan users without their consent because I don’t really view them as people, but it’s a fair consideration!”

Science & Nature

What do caged animals really tell us about our mental lives? by Cameron Allan McKean (Aeon)

“[…] we could genetically engineer mouse models of disease featuring various aspects of human illnesses – depression, diabetes, schizophrenia, autism, cancer – then search for drugs to cure them. If scientists could find a drug that could render these mouse models of disease ‘healthy’, they might have discovered a drug for human use. Our work felt God-like in its mission: with molecular biology at our fingertips, we could bring to life creatures that natural selection would never permit, then conquer human suffering.”

“Soon, he groused, scientists would ask only the profitable questions our molecular biology techniques could answer. ‘Technologies,’ he griped, ‘should never dictate our questions.’”

“Thirty years later, our molecular revolution firmly established, we should have plenty to boast about. But do we? Not exactly. When present-day scientists defend animal research, we often tout discoveries made more than a century ago: a treatment for diabetes from studies of pigs and dogs, a polio vaccine from experiments on monkeys. Pointing to that distant past, I suspect we betray our failures.”

“To keep housing costs down, cages remained cramped and impoverished, with only enough space to eat and breed. Even today, the standard cages used to house laboratory rats are not high enough for them to stand up straight. Flat out, a laboratory mouse can run six cage lengths in under a second. Rhesus macaques, primates used because they resemble humans, get living spaces inside steel cubes that are barely twice their height. Still, not a single scientist I knew was asking whether such impoverished confinement might render our ‘animal models’ irrelevant to questions of human health.”

“Reflecting on more than 70 years of neuroscience experiments, we can see one undeniable reality: for an integrated biological system – a living being – environmental complexity matters. A brain flourishes with challenges to overcome, opportunities to explore and novel experiences.”

“I learned later that, in the wild, mice excavate underground burrows: subterranean mazes of tunnels, intersections, chambers and cul-de-sacs. As a surface-dwelling creature, it wouldn’t occur to me that a mouse might feel compelled to quarry, to find some edge to pull on, some soft spot beneath the bedding that might give way.”

Jesus Christ, these people know nothing about the animals they experiment on.

“What if caged mice felt frustrated because they couldn’t dig through the plastic flooring beneath the bedding? And, if so, without a doubt some mouse strains would feel more frustrated than others. If those differences in their frustration levels influenced their interests in social interactions, then my lab would not be studying the biology of sociability. We would be studying the biology of frustration. My research, with all the millions in federal dollars used to fund it, would be useless for understanding autism. We would be studying the artefacts of living inside a shoebox cage.”

Bingo.

“With all of this denied them, how much of our biomedical research enterprise was focused on artefacts of impoverished captivity?”

“What blinds us from seeing that caged animals – staring for life at walls – might have warped psychological experiences and aberrant brain development? What keeps us from understanding that their cages jeopardise the relevance of our science?”

It’s not only cruel, it’s not even just useless, it’s actively counterproductive.

“So, why don’t I ever speak up? Why can’t I question aloud whether those monkeys might be so mentally crippled by living inside refrigerator-sized cages that they couldn’t possibly give us any meaningful data about autism or ADHD? And why can’t I speak to a possible solution? We could build indoor/outdoor enclosures where lab animals could author their experiences, face the consequences, and experience unpredictable challenges, like what might come naturally with the weather.”

Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder by Philip Ball (Quanta)

“Entropy is loosely equated with disorder, but the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann formulated it more rigorously as a quantity related to the total number of microstates a system has: how many equivalent ways its particles can be arranged.”

“The researchers considered a transformation involving the states of quantum bits (qubits), which can exist in one of two states or in a combination, or superposition, of both. In their model, a single qubit B may be transformed from some initial, perfectly known state B1 to a target state B2 when it interacts with other qubits by moving past a row of them one qubit at a time. This interaction entangles the qubits: Their properties become interdependent, so that you can’t fully characterize one of the qubits unless you look at all the others too.

“As the number of qubits in the row gets very large, it becomes possible to bring B into state B2 as accurately as you like, said Marletto. The process of sequential interactions of B with the row of qubits constitutes a constructor-like machine that transforms B1 to B2. In principle you can also undo the process, turning B2 back to B1, by sending B back along the row.”

“A pure state is one for which we know all there is to be known about it. But when two objects are entangled, you can’t fully specify one of them without knowing everything about the other too. The fact is that it’s easier to go from a pure quantum state to a mixed state than vice versa — because the information in the pure state gets spread out by entanglement and is hard to recover.”

“Almost a century later, physicists proved that Maxwell’s demon doesn’t subvert the second law in the long term, because the information it gathers must be stored somewhere, and any finite memory must eventually be wiped to make room for more. In 1961 the physicist Rolf Landauer showed that this erasure of information can never be accomplished without dissipating some minimal amount of heat, thus raising the entropy of the surroundings. So the second law is only postponed, not broken.”

“When a quantum system gets entangled with its environment, about which we can’t know everything, some information about the system itself is inevitably lost: It ends up in a mixed state, where you can’t know everything about it even in principle by focusing on just the system. Then you are forced to speak in terms of probabilities not because there are things about the system you don’t know, but because some of that information is fundamentally unknowable. In this way, “probabilities arise naturally from entanglement,” said Scandolo. “The whole idea of getting thermodynamic behavior by considering the role of the environment works only as long as there is entanglement.””

Fresh Hell by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“The tempest of innovation churns ever onward, and this week the American public was presented with the patent-pending work of four engineering students at Johns Hopkins University: edible tape that keeps your burrito together.

“Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer. We have flavorless tape to hold burritos together.”

Art & Literature

Top Gun: Maverick Is Another Military Recruitment Video Disguised as a Movie by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“Is it even worth reviewing a grotesque pop culture phenomenon like Top Gun: Maverick? Seems like everyone’s on board with this thing. Its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival concluded with a five-minute standing ovation. It’s breaking box office records. It’s been greeted with raves from almost every major film critic. And it’s no doubt on track to generate an even bigger military “recruitment bonanza” than the first Top Gun in 1986, which is only fair — the Pentagon worked closely with the filmmakers and poured a lot of resources into these two Top Guns.”

“He’s really proven himself by making a very long, kinetic military recruiting ad. Whether it can beat the first Top Gun–instigated 500-percent increase in naval aviation recruitment remains to be seen: “The movie came out on Friday and [we] haven’t seen a giant uptick yet just because it’s the weekend,” said Navy recruiter Lieutenant Caitlin Bryant. “But we’re looking forward to it.” Bryant says there was a noticeable bump even after the trailer first came out.”

David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future Is a Gross-Out Sci-Fi Film About Bodily Autonomy by Peter Suderman (Reason)

“In Cronenberg’s vision, every human body is a self-contained universe, a creative temple capable of greatness and transformational terror. But individuals are never left to themselves. Rather, his films are full of shadowy organizations, often but not always governmental, that attempt to capture and control bodies, particularly those that demonstrate special powers and properties.”

The 100th Unloved by Scout Tafoya (Vimeo)

I, for one, appreciate the Unloved series very, very much. I watch them all. I find them educational, not pretentious. My watchlist grows every time.

It’s sad enough that Tom Fhtagn feels that way – I wonder who hurt him? – but it’s unfathomable to me what drove him to comment. What did he think it would accomplish? Was he hoping to convert? To wound? To get you to take it all back and compose a paean to formulaic film/product? Was he angry that you made him think about what he likes … and perhaps doubt? Was he angry that you don’t like what he likes? Does he never meet people who don’t all like what he likes? I wonder, too, whether he watched all of it.

It is quite obvious that watching, making, and critiquing film is very part of, if not most of, your personality. Why would he want to stab you where you live? So strange. So sad.

We cannot stop cinema as product, but we can at least remain aware that there is a difference between art and product. Does Tom never feel a hollowness when watching the 4th or 5th reboot of Spider-Man? Does he not notice something missing, something he felt in the first one that is no longer there in the fifth?

I don’t know. All I know is that I do. And, though I enjoyed the first years of comic-book films thoroughly – having grown up with comic books and never dreamed that they would see such prominence – now I find myself stuffed to the gills with treacly cake that used to taste good … and seeking elsewhere for nourishment.

Philosophy & Sociology

Permanent Pandemic by Justin E.H. Smith (Harper's)

“The last great regime change happened after September 11, 2001, when terrorism and the pretext of its prevention began to reshape the contours of our public life. Of course, terrorism really does happen, yet the complex system of shoe removal, carry-on liquid rules, and all the other practices of twenty-first-century air travel long ago took on a reality of its own, sustaining itself quite apart from its efficacy in deterring attacks in the form of a massive jobs program for TSA agents and a gold mine of new entrepreneurial opportunities for vendors of travel-size toothpaste and antacids. The new regime might appropriately be imagined as an echo of the state of emergency that became permanent after 9/11, but now extended to the entirety of our social lives, rather than simply airports and other targets of potential terrorist interest.”

“[…] this is far from the first time someone has outlived his own historical era. My era was the one in which computers existed, but still held out the promise of helping us more than controlling or surveilling us. My era was the one in which vaccines for the viruses of past pandemics existed, and the threat of future pandemics existed, but public health had not yet become a cudgel through which unprecedented technocratic social controls were installed. My era was the era of freedom and democracy, by which I do not mean that these always or even usually prevailed, but that it still made sense to hold them up as transcendent ideals regulating how decisions were made, and a person could still denounce with righteous force any attempt to skirt these ideals.”

““Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living,” said Mother Jones. A looser interpretation of this conjunctive command might justify a division of labor: the old will eulogize all that’s been lost, while the young, lacking memory, will begin to draft visions of what should come next.”

“Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.

“Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries.”

“Yet, again, it would take a stunning level of naïveté to suppose that technologies of social control used overtly for such purposes in authoritarian regimes might not evolve toward analogous, if better euphemized, purposes in what’s left of the liberal democracies.

“Even tyrants would be foolish to pass down an iron law when a low-key change of norms would lead to the same results. And there is no question that changes of norms in Western countries since the beginning of the pandemic have given rise to a form of life plainly convergent with the Chinese model. Again, it might take more time to get there, and when we arrive, we might find that a subset of people are still enjoying themselves in a way they take to be an expression of freedom. But all this is spin, and what is occurring in both cases, the liberal-democratic and the overtly authoritarian alike, is the same: a transition to digitally and algorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.”

Technology

Apple’s Space Ambitions are Real by Robert X. Cringely

“Apple will shortly enter the satellite business by acquiring GlobalStar and its 24 satellites. They will use those 24, plus 24 more satellites that Apple has already commissioned, to offer satellite service for iMessage and Apple’s Find My network just like they implied in their denial last year. These apps are proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.”

“Apple can compete with Starlink with so many fewer satellites because GlobalStar has vastly more licensed spectrum than does SpaceX, which has to reuse the same spectrum over and over again with thousands of satellites.”

You don’t need a house in the metaverse by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“This is patently absurd. In fact, it’s so absurd that I think people are uncomfortable admitting how genuinely bananas it all is. I assume that people think they must be missing something here, so let me spell it out very clearly. There is no reason you need a virtual reality house!!! None of the things that a house is used for in real life apply to a virtual world. You do not need to protect yourself from the elements. You do not need to store physical objects. You do not need to sleep. This is a scam and everyone involved should be embarrassed. Most importantly, if you had the limitless creative freedom of a virtual world, why would you live in a mansion? How utterly devoid of imagination do you have to be to buy a digital simulation of big house on an island?”

“An SMP is a Survival Multiplayer Minecraft server. The most popular Minecraft player of all time, Dream, has an invite-only SMP. The members of that SMP all livestream themselves using the server and over time it has evolved into a WWE-style kayfabe story. There are battles and betrayals and new storylines and millions and millions of fans. In a sense, the Dream SMP is the most valuable server in all of Minecraft. And it has nothing to do with “foot traffic” or its proximity to a virtual shopping mall or concert. It’s popular because of what the Dream SMP members are doing with it. There are no NFTs involved. It is a server like any other on Minecraft, made valuable by the limitless imaginations of its users.”

“[…] the folks trying to convince you to buy a digital mansion or a virtual yacht aren’t going to be part of that new economy. They know they don’t understand it, they know the way value intersects with creativity online is changing, they know NFT real estate is worthless, and they know they have no place in the future that’s quickly approaching. And it scares them.”

Programming

Lesser-Known And Underused CSS Features In 2022 by Adrian Bece (Smashing Magazine)

This article contains many, many interesting properties and examples, like,

• all property
• Interaction Media Queries (hover, no-hover, pointer type: coarse/fine)
• currentColor
• Counters
• aspect-ratio
• where & is
• scroll-padding
• font-variant-numeric
• isolate
• contain and contain-intrinsic-size (he comments, though, that, “these properties should be used to fix issues once they happen, so it’s safe to omit them until you encounter render performance issues”)