Links and Notes for July 1st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

Latest COVID-19 surge deepens across Europe and globally, fueled by Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“The repeated mantra that the coronavirus only causes mild disease is increasingly belied by objective reality, in which mass infections and long-term debilitation have profoundly destabilized the global economy and led to mounting labor shortages internationally. The most visible manifestation of this at present is the huge number of flight cancellations due to staffing shortages at airports and airlines. The aviation consultancy Cirium reported that June, the start of summer season in Europe, saw 7,870 flights canceled for departures from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain alone.”

“Additionally, funding and research into pan-coronavirus and intranasal vaccines are urgently needed. However, these must be coordinated through a strategy that also ensures non-pharmaceutical measures are taken to end the perpetual community transmission of the virus and prevent the development of newer coronavirus strains.”

Economy & Finance

The Supreme Court’s EPA Decision Is One More Win for Charles Koch’s Dystopian America by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“Legal scholars believe the decision may have the broader impact of limiting the authority of other federal agencies to take regulatory action without specific congressional approval.”

Yes, and this correct. Regulatory agencies should not have power to enact law. They are not elected. Just because Congress is useless doesn’t mean we accept it and confer de-facto legislative power on unelected and unanswerable bureaucrats.

Say No to YES by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“[…] if you are a financial adviser at a big brokerage, you want to give them a lot of financial advice, both because you will endear yourself to (some) clients by selling them lots of whizz-bang stuff that they can’t get anywhere else, and because you will endear yourself to your employer by selling stuff that makes a lot of money for your employer. And doing that tends to be easier if you don’t understand the nuances of the product. If your understanding of a product is limited to “this thing is called YES and it never goes down,” then you will be excited to sell it.”

“[…] in real life it is not always the case that a liquidity crisis is just, or primarily, a liquidity crisis. If some firm runs into a liquidity crisis and can’t pay back its short-term debt and calls up a big well-capitalized firm for help, the big well-capitalized firm has to go look at its assets and see what’s going on. Sometimes the big firm will crack open the books and conclude “yes, these assets are great, your lenders are spooked for no reason, it’s an amazing buying opportunity for us” and buy them. Other times the big firm will crack open the books and find a crayon drawing of a billion-dollar bill and say “ah, yes, that’s your problem right there” and walk away. Sometimes the liquidity crisis is well deserved.”

Public Policy & Politics

In Deep Water: Shipping in the Global Economy by Joseph Grosso (CounterPunch)

“According to U.S. Census Bureau data, e-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020, and 50.5 percent since 2019. Overall, online sales now account for 19 percent of retail. Given the $400 billion in government stimulus and much of the outdoor service economy locked down (i.e. restaurants, movies, sports events, etc.), Americans spent nearly $1 trillion more in goods in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic times.”

“By the end of 2021 the cost of shipping from Asia to the west coast of the U.S. had risen 330 percent in one year.”

“According to the Freightos Baltic Index, as of June 22nd the average global price to ship a 40-foot container was $7261, down from a peak of over $11,000 in September 2021, but still five times higher than before the pandemic.”

“Step back further though and a fuller picture emerges, one featuring globalization, exploitation, and deindustrialization. It is no secret that the U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the past generation- about 7.5 million since 1980.”

“Nothing exemplifies the supply chain crisis quite like the sight of cargo ships backed up by the dozens outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Containerships transport 90 percent of global trade and these two ports handle about 40 percent of U.S. imports. A ship from China takes 15-20 day journey to an American port. The process of turning a ship around from China to the U.S. typically takes around 60 days.”

“In a perfectly surreal example of built-in absurdity, the price hike made a trip from Asia to the U.S. 20 times more expensive than a trip going the other way. Therefore through the pandemic there were reports of ships returning to Asia with many of their containers empty. The shippers have been rejecting U.S. agricultural exports. It is more profitable to simply return to Asia and refill there rather than wait for food to be loaded and carried back.”

“Measuring just over 1300 feet (about the size of the Empire State Building) with a capacity of nearly 24,000 TEU (23,992 to be exact), Ever Ace took the title from the HMM Algeciras (23,964 TEU) which took its maiden voyage hardly a year earlier. Both ships are just part of expanding fleets of mega-ships of that size soon to be sailing. For perspective, the largest ships today are 15 times what they were in the late 1960s around the time when containerization was standardized.”

“In the midst of all this came the economic crash of 2008. The downturn meant there wasn’t enough freight to fill the growing ship capacity. With shipping prices at rock bottom the remaining large carriers formed alliances. The Top 10 shipping companies had 40 percent of the market in 1998. Today it is over 80 percent. All ten companies are part of one of the three company alliances that dominate the industry- 2M, Oceans Alliance, and The Alliance. The megaships also keep up a nice barrier to entry.”

“In September 2020, as 300,000 workers were stranded on ships, a Bloomberg report found dozens of labor violations. Of the 40 seafarers interviewed for the story, half didn’t have current contracts and others hadn’t been paid for months, meeting the ILO’s definition of forced labor. Shipping lines and staffing agencies (as in other industries such as meatpacking, shippers often outsource hiring to agencies), determine when and how workers return home, even holding their passports. In an industry rife with middlemen, including networks of owners, operators, and employment agencies, it is difficult to hold parties accountable.”

Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Scheer Post)

“Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.”

They do a lot of damage, but don’t achieve their stated objectives. It’s lose-lose, except for the war industry, which at-least accomplishes its objectives, when it does not supersede them.

“Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s. Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.”

“The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions.”

The Power of Images by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“You know there is trouble on the way when the Beeb gives a byline to “Reality Check Team.” What follows is sure to be a fun combination of preposterous and delightful. “There’s mounting evidence” is another sign of the abracadabra to come. The simple translation here is, We cannot prove anything we are about to tell you but we are going to present this as if it is proven.”

NATO Scribes vs. Russian Artillery and Rockets by Ray McGovern (Antiwar.com)

“I might note that in all of Putin’s public statements during the months leading up to the war, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he was contemplating conquering Ukraine and making it part of Russia, much less attacking additional countries in eastern Europe. Other Russian leaders – including the defense minister, the foreign minister, the deputy foreign minister, and the Russian ambassador to Washington – also emphasized the centrality of NATO expansion for causing the Ukraine crisis. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the point succinctly at a press conference on January 14, 2022, when he said, “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.””

Textilkonzerne missbrauchen Afrika als Müllkippe by Susanne Aigner (Infosperber)

“Bei der schlechten, unverkäuflichen Ware handelt es sich um getarnte Textilmüllexporte aus dem Ausland: Die Industrienationen im globalen Norden exportieren ihren Kleidermüll in die armen Länder des Südens, wobei sie ihr Privileg und ihre wirtschaftliche Macht ausnutzen, ist Textilexpertin Viola Wohlgemuth überzeugt. Damit untergraben sie das Recht auf saubere und sichere Lebensbedingungen von Menschen mit geringem Einkommen. Mit dem Export von Altkleidern werden die Probleme der Überproduktion und des Überkonsums auf den globalen Süden abgewälzt.”

“Mit dem Export von Altkleidern werden die Probleme der Überproduktion und des Überkonsums auf den globalen Süden abgewälzt. Im Grunde sind die Kleiderspenden für die Armen nichts anderes als ein Alibi für die Müllentsorgung der Reichen.”

“In Chile, einem der Hauptimporteure für Altkleider, belastet der Kleidermüll Boden, Flüsse, Ozeane und Wüsten. So kamen in der Freihandelszone der Hafenstadt Iquique im Norden des Landes im vergangenen Jahr 29‘000 Tonnen Altkleider an. Die Importeure verkauften die besten Stücke daraus. Rund 40 Prozent wurde als Müll aussortiert. Dieser wird auf riesigen Deponien in die Atacama-Wüste verfrachtet: Jedes Jahr landen in dem einzigartigen Naturparadies knapp 60‘000 Tonnen Textilien auf gigantischen Kleiderbergen.”

Fascists In Our Midst by Chris Hedges (Chris Hedges Report)

““There is no dialogue with those who deny your legitimate right to be,” I said, looking pointedly at the LGBTQ students. “At that point it is a fight for survival.””

“All those tasked in our society with interpreting the world around us forgot, as philosopher Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies, that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.””

“In the end, even the liberal class will choose fascism over empowering the left-wing and organized labor. The only thing the ruling oligarchy truly cares about is unfettered exploitation and profit. They, like the industrialists in Nazi Germany, will happily make an alliance with the Christian fascists, no matter how bizarre and buffoonish, and embrace the blood sacrifices of the condemned.”

Forever Prisoners by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Two such cases are making their way through the courts – and in both cases, the Trump administration and the Biden administration argued that somehow, under the Constitution, the government can lawfully confine convicted felons even after they have served their full prison terms and can even confine dangerous persons without filing charges. These arguments are chilling. The arguments are also immoral, un-American and unconstitutional, and their effects are exquisitely unlawful. Yet the feds – under both political parties – continue to get away with trashing the Constitution that, to a person, they have all sworn to uphold.”

“If the government can decide on its own to confine prisoners after they have served their terms or to confine them without filing charges, then no one’s liberty is safe and the guarantees of the Constitution are toothless and meaningless.”

US announces plans to flood Europe with troops and weapons by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“The NATO summit also marked a significant shift in the use of the war in Ukraine to more aggressively target China. On Wednesday, the White House added five Chinese companies to a blacklist for allegedly helping the Russian war effort.”

“Warning that this was only the beginning, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Alan Estevez said, “Today’s action sends a powerful message to entities and individuals across the globe that if they seek to support Russia, the United States will cut them off as well.””

They just declare war on everyone.

“In other words, the “strategic” goal of the United States in provoking Russia to invade Ukraine was to create the conditions for a massive rearmament of Europe, under American Aegis.”

Germany’s Left Party declares support for war with Russia at Erfurt party congress by Johannes Stern (WSWS)

“A group of young Left Party members from the Left Party Youth Solid group was especially aggressive in spreading war hysteria and “#MeToo” allegations at the congress. For example, 19-year-old Sofia Fellinger described all previous contributions that had not explicitly spoken out in favour of arms deliveries as “intolerable” in an angry speech.”

Unsurprising. The young are easily swayed because they’ve never seen this before. Still, what are you doing at a Linke demo? Pro-war left is … Khmer rouge?

“Provocatively, Slobbodian asserted: “The Ukrainian women are very disappointed by the attitude of Germany’s ruling circles, which are in every respect evading practical support for Ukraine.” The “so-called German military aid for Ukraine” was “so meagre that it can only provoke a sad smile and sarcastic jokes in Ukraine,” she added.”

Negging! It’s What guys do to get things. Lovely to see in a Ukrainian woman.

“While Russia is described as a “geostrategic center of power in fossil capitalism,” which “uses a nationalist, militaristic and autocratic great power ideology,””

That’s also an incredibly accurate way of describing the U.S. Peas in a pod, I guess?

Rubles, Sanctions, and Oil by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“Reducing the use of petroleum products and fossil fuels has been a strategic goal of the ruling circles of the European Union long before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. This is motivated not only by a concern for the environment and an eagerness to fight global warming, but also by a desire to revive the world economy through massive investment in new technology. This is only coincidentally a sop to the demands of environmentalists; its real purpose is to justify the inevitable and necessary return of state oversight to the economy while avoiding an outright ideological rejection of the principles of the free market and of neoliberalism.”

“Capitalist wars will reliably find a way to justify government intervention in the market, and the events of recent months have created many happy opportunities for this. Before the beginning of the events in Ukraine, there was still a question as to who would be left holding the bag, but now everything has been decided. The costs associated with structural changes in the Western and world economy will be borne by Russia.”

“It is clear that now that irreversible changes have been set in motion, and that the Russian economy that has been built over the last 30 years has been nullified. We have to create a new economy. But don’t dream that you can do it under the existing political and social order. If the Russian elites truly wanted to change anything in the country, they would have to nullify themselves first.”

A Cold War with China, Global Warming, and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Dean Baker (CEPR)

“The basic story is that if we get into a situation where China perceives the United States to be threatening its national security interests, there can be little doubt it can and would radically ramp up its military spending. If we then get into an arms race, the burden on our economy could be enormous. And, it would almost certainly require massive reductions in non-military spending, including spending on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. If we have a new Cold War with China, we can forget about a major commitment of resources to deal with climate change,”

So that’s what’s already happening, if we’re at all honest with ourselves.

“Just to be clear, choosing a path of selective cooperation does not imply approval of China’s government. China is not a democracy and it does not respect human rights. Critics of the government face serious risks of persecution and imprisonment. It has engaged in large-scale abuses against minority populations in Tibet and the Uygur population in Xinjiang. It also is reversing commitments it made to respect the autonomy of Hong Kong. Saying that we should not be engaging in a Cold War with China does not imply approval of these actions.”

First of all, most of that applies to the U.S., but no-one ever feels compelled to mention it the way they do with China or Russia. I find these apologia annoying, because they waste time defending against imaginary attacks from brainless critics on Twitter. News flash: they’re going to attack you anyway. Just ignore it and stop prefacing each essay with “I don’t support human-rights abuses”. It’s stupid and demeaning and lowers the discourse.

“First, many of the people who are most vigorous in denouncing abuses in China seem just fine with serious abuses in US allies.”

“To put it simply, we do not have a consistent policy of supporting democracy and human rights around the world. Perhaps it would be good if we did, but we don’t. There are plenty of places elsewhere in the world where we support undemocratic regimes that abuse human rights. Clearly the complaints against human rights abuses in China are not the result of a deep and universal commitment to protecting these rights.”

“If we assume, for the moment, that the human rights critics don’t intend to go to war to overthrow China’s current government, and then install a regime that will respect human rights, we should ask how we think a stance of growing hostility to China will improve the prospects for the people who we hope to help? If there was good reason to believe that building up military forces against China, and curtailing economic relations, would improve the human rights situation in China and move the regime towards democracy, there would be a good argument for pursuing this route. But that hardly seems likely given the current situation in China. In this context, confrontation is at best a feel-good policy for the people pushing it.”

“Suppose that, instead of wasting resources in military competition, and bottling up technologies in trying to gain economic advantage, we followed a path where we tried to maximize cooperation between the superpowers, bringing in most of the rest of the world in the process.”

“The idea of sharing knowledge, rather than locking it down for private profit with patents, copyrights, and related protections, goes in the exact opposite direction of public policy for the last four decades. Nonetheless, it is important to get it on the table as a pole in public debate.”

“[…] the biggest gain from having open-sourced the technology would have been that manufacturers around the world would have been able to produce all the vaccines. We likely could have had enough vaccines for the whole world by the first half of 2021. This could have saved millions of lives and prevented hundreds of millions of infections. A more rapid pace of vaccination might have even slowed the spread enough to prevent the development of the delta and omicron variants, which would have saved the world from an enormous amount of suffering.”

“This logic applies to health care more generally. Why would we not want every researcher in the world to have full access to the latest developments in the areas where they work? Are we worried that a researcher in China or Turkey might develop an effective treatment for a particular cancer or liver disease before researchers in the United States? There doesn’t seem an obvious downside to going this route.”

That’s being a bit naive. The obvious downside isn’t a moral one: it’s that U.S. corporations use their lobbying power to get the U.S. government to pass laws that maximize the likelihood that they will make the important discoveries so that they can benefit and profit from them, extracting as much rent as they possibly can, with no interest whatsoever in what the societal benefit is—or could be. They don’t care. The only reason they’re in the business of medical research is that they think it will make them a lot of money, not that they will actually help people. That’s how the incentives are. That’s the reason why they’re not interested in maximizing distribution of knowledge in order to help the most people for the least amount of energy investment: because that would less money for them personally. So, it doesn’t happen in our system, because making money personally is the only incentive allowed in this system.

“[…] at the very least, health care and climate are two major areas of research where both China and the US, as well as the rest of the world, can benefit from having shared and open research. And, if we can successfully implement a system of cooperative technology development in these two areas, we should be able to find other areas of the economy where we can adopt similar systems.”

“[…] is plausible that having relatively privileged actors in its economy, in regular contact with their counterparts in the West, could have a positive impact on the country’s politics from the standpoint of promoting liberal democratic values.”

“In short, going the route of cooperative development of technology with China is likely to not only reduce tensions between the world’s two superpowers, but can be a major factor in reversing the upward redistribution of the last four decades. It can very directly lead to less money going to those at the top end of the income distribution and increased real wages for those at the middle and the bottom.”

Hahahaha! Which is exactly why it’s never going to happen.

“This means that winning back manufacturing jobs from China, or other countries, is not likely to produce any substantial gains for ordinary workers. The jobs that we gain back are not likely to pay any substantial wage premium over other jobs in the economy, nor are they any more likely to be union jobs.”

This has also been the trend, of late. There are only a handful of jobs, available only to the upper classes, that offer higher—or even adequate—wages. Everyone else gets a subsistence or sub-subsistence salary and is told not to bitch about it because they should be happy that they even have a job. They should be grateful to slave away at a difficult—if not actively terrible—job, while their betters get ridiculous benefits and overwhelmingly high salaries at sinecures—and never have to pay for many things that poor people do, like health care or education for their kids (included in many high-end jobs that the elite reserve for themselves).

“It would be truly ironic if we were to transfer still more income upward, with increased subsidies for research and development, with the gains locked down by a small elite with their patent and copyright monopolies. And, the compensation for these gains was a modest increase in manufacturing jobs, which no longer pay a substantial wage premium over other jobs in the economy.”

This is literally the most likely outcome. It is what is happening, and what will most likely continue happening, unless drastic change is undertaken.

Taking the Neither Pill by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“The Democrats between 2016 and 2020 not only lost my vote, but reveled in the idea that they didn’t need or want it, denouncing critics in all directions as traitors, white supremacists, and terrorists, no different from the “deplorables” who voted for Donald Trump. In that time they perfected an attitude of imperious condescension and entitlement so grating that at least half of America wouldn’t piss on someone like Adam Schiff if he were on fire.”

“Like, I suspect, a lot of America, I feel politically homeless. Life in this country increasingly is like watching a ping-pong match between the two most unhinged people in the institution.”

“Before 2016 the choices were distasteful but clear. The “transactional” Democrats represented by Clinton and Obama were vile two-faced cynics, but the pre-Trump Republicans were an even worse joke. The old GOP was a crude political heart-lung machine, in which the interests of job-exporting manufacturers, energy executives, and weapons makers were carried to Washington atop the votes of middle- and working-class conservatives.”

“Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut—the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.”

“The Bush-era Republicans talked about “real Americans” and the current Democrats talk about “allies,” but it’s the same thing, an exclusive club you can be booted out of for any of a hundred reasons. At the very moment Democrats are claiming they need every last vote to defend the country against a fascist takeover, they’re hurling masses of people over the edge as heretics who otherwise would have been loyal voters. It’s a different species of madness from the one infecting Trump, but madness it is, nonetheless.”

SCOTUS Said Ambitious Climate Regulations Need To Come From Congress. Lawmakers Are Furious. by Christian Britschgi (Reason)

““Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” wrote Roberts. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in [the Clean Air Act]. A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself.

“The decision turns everything back over to the democratically elected branches of government to decide.”

Science & Nature

Where do James Webb’s unique “spikes” come from? by Ethan Siegel (The Big Think)

“The goal is to have each of these 18 segments form a single plane, together, that has a parabolic shape. At some 6.5 meters (around 21 feet) across, the variations in the plane, both across each segment and from segment-to-segment, should be right around ~20 nanometers for optimal performance. That’s an incredible precision, by the way; if the surface of the entire Earth were as smooth as Webb’s precision needs to be for its optics, then the highest mountain and the deepest ocean trench would only depart from sea level by about 2 centimeters (less than one inch), total.”

“However, you shouldn’t assume that every telescope, or even every reflecting telescope, will always be stuck with this “diffraction spike” problem. Right now, on the first sets of images we’re seeing from James Webb, there are many more spikes and features than we should see when calibration is complete. At that point, there should be only the six major spikes and nothing else; the additional features should be absolutely minimized. The only reason a star should appear larger than a single point, excepting the spikes, should be if it’s bright enough to saturate the detector itself.”

“The 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope is currently under construction, and will be the greatest new ground-based observatory on Earth. The spidar arms, seen holding the secondary mirror in place, are specially designed so that their line-of-sight falls directly between the narrow gaps in the GMT mirrors.”

Amazing.

Art & Literature

Despite All His Cage by J.W. McCormack (The Baffler)

“From manic character actor to Hollywood star, from I-will-punch-your-dad-for-money B-movie prolificacy to living internet meme, Coppola—that is, the actor Nicolas Cage—has adhered to such a strange muse that we wonder not only if his movies are any good, but if any movies are any good, and what is a movie anyway? Perhaps Nicolas Cage is not even an actor. Perhaps he is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: an ennobled apprentice who renounces the world in search of infinite resignation to an absurdity only he can facilitate.”

“His is not only a career in celluloid, but a joke at the expense of the audience that fails to recognize their own pretensions in his wish to be regarded as a Nouveau Shamanic thespian instead of a mediocre, if memorable, movie star. Whichever rendition you subscribe to, the last laugh belongs to Cage.”

“This [is] the Cage who famously shout-sung the alphabet in Vampire’s Kiss, who tells a man in a pharmacy he’ll make him piss blood in Matchstick Men, who downs a bottle of vodka in his underpants, on the toilet, in Mandy. This is the vaunted Cage Rage, and knowing that it’s in the chamber means not having to use it all the time. It’s not what he does, it’s knowing what he’s capable of.”

Roaming Charges: Whatd’Ya Expect Us to Do About It? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Richard Fortey on the Natural History Museum: “Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.” (Dry Store Room #1: the Secret Life of the Natural History Museum)”

Scenes from an Open Marriage by Jean Garnett (The Paris Review)

“Maybe, I thought, the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until, with a final ragged pant, it expires. Could it expire so early? Or perhaps it was taking a breather postpartum—understandable, surely, given how a six-and-a half-pound human body had been slither-pulled out of the place I get fucked, or one of the places.”

“Finally I asked my husband, “Which scenario endangers us more: You sleeping with other women, or you not sleeping with other women?” I told him to think about it, assess, and render a verdict; I would do whatever gave us the best chance.”

“It is romantic in a way that culturally underscripted moments often are.”

I like that phrase.

Philosophy & Sociology

Your Fitbit has stolen your soul by Justin E.H. Smith (Unherd)

“Effectively, in the age of the photograph, the Xerox, or the screenshot, all art becomes “allographic” — to see a copy of a work is for most purposes as good as seeing the real thing. Though there may be some qualities in the brushstrokes that only the original canvas can reveal, it is by now a plain social fact that the added value in the work itself, as when tourists leap over one another to take an iPhone photo of the Mona Lisa, is pure aura.”

“There is, of course, a vast reserve of other artworks, and an even vaster reserve of human creative potential, that lie outside of that whole bleak nexus — as, for example, the sweet and rough airs that come from an old bard’s broken singing voice, busking for change, as you walk past him in the metro. Such moments provide not only brief access to art in its unmetricised and therefore borderline-outlawed form. They can also have the power to summon us back to ourselves, to our proper selves: grounded only in phenomenal consciousness, and following no rule.”

Do We See Through an Ultrasound? by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“As a general rule about the history of humanity, we may say that people kill people, and they definitely kill animals. We may recognise this, and still find that it offers little instruction as to whether or not it makes sense, now, for humanity to transition to a plant-based diet. Answering this question, on a planet hosting eight billion people and even more cattle, has nothing to do with the pseudo-question of whether “it’s wrong to kill animals” in some timeless way that applies both to those profiteering from factory-farming and to Palaeolithic hunters alike.”

“One particularly regrettable gap in the generally grossly impoverished conflict over abortion is the absence of any discussion of the role of technological change in the transformations of our rituals for the production of personhood. It is not that no one has written about this, of course, just that those who do write about it have trouble getting others to care. The historian of medicine Barbara Duden, notably, has spent a long career arguing that, in its own way, the ultrasound is up there with the microscope, the telescope, and the electron cloud chamber among the instruments that have fundamentally transformed the way we see our place in the world.”

“That is, it is the same technology that both enables you to frame a print-out of the foetus to place on your desk in anticipation, and at the same time to discover the birth-defect that will make you judge, in line with your society’s norms, that any future life for this foetus will not be worth living.”

Brilliant. I’m using this.

“As it happens I think the Roe v. Wade decision was horribly wrong, and yet another symptom of the decline of participatory democracy in the United States. I also think it is wrong to straw-man your opponent’s arguments, as happens whenever a pro-choice person says that the opposite position can only come from a desire to control women’s bodies, rather than from what at least feels like a sincere conviction about the moral status of foetuses; and I especially think it’s wrong to talk past one another, as for example when an abortion-defender says “My body, my choice”, and a pro-life person responds “It’s a child, not a choice”, and so on ad nauseam.”

“But what the Snowden-approved tweet leaves out is that it was already surveillance, in a large sense, that gave us the controversy over abortion in its contemporary form. The simple operation of seeing the foetus in utero, an operation made possible by a prior desire to see that was always as irrepressible as it was taboo, leads inevitably to a system of monitoring, in the name of reproductive health, and in turn to a system of control.”

Life Is Not Short (DKB Show)

“[…] you still have to recognize that your time is finite, and you’re spending it on a path where you only care about the end point and not the journey.”

“You should live your life intentionally, instead of having your time stolen from you little by little. You should organize each day as if it were your last, so that you neither need to long for nor fear the next day. You should avoid spending time on people and things that don’t really matter to you. You should be very thrifty with your time, because you know there’s nothing for which it is worth exchanging.”

Technology

Webstock ‘14: Our Comrade the Electron by Maciej Ceglowski (Vimeo)

“I shouldn’t have to depend on his word and on Google’s corporate motto and on the Magna Carta and on the Treaty of Waitangi to protect me against my thermostat. My old thermostat wasn’t that scary. And no-one could here it scream. But this new thermostat? It’s got privacy policies, it’s got lawyers, it posts blog-posts somewhere. It’s like a roommate now.”

Programming

Design Principles For The Web by Clearleft (Vimeo)

A lot of these design principles are quite nice. He could have put them in a blog post, but he embedded them into a 48-minute video. Among them are, The Priority of Constituencies, as well as,

“in case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.”

“Apply the principle of least power.”