Links and Notes for August 12th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

The Media Loves the “Terrible Economy” Story by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The major news outlets seem determined to tell everyone how terrible the economy is, even as unemployment is at a 50-year low and workers at the bottom end of the income distribution are seeing wage gains that outstrip inflation. We saw endless stories about how high gas prices were making it impossible for families to make ends meet as gas prices were going up. With gas prices plunging the last month and a half, the media apparently don’t think the price of gas is that important.”

Dean, what the fuck are you talking about? You should probably look up from your actuarial tables once in a while and talk to actual human beings and go into actual communities to see if what you’re reading gibes with what people are experiencing. “Plunging” gas prices? Where the fuck is that? I’ve been in the states for about 4 weeks and the gas prices are dead-steady at $4.50 per gallon in central NY. No change at all, no matter how often the TV says that they’re below $4.00, they’re not.

Or what do you mean that “wage gains outstrip inflation”? I know several teachers in this area who all got increased workloads because of other teachers that quit from burnout and they don’t even get a cost-of-living increase, to say nothing of a raise for doing extra work. These teachers are all ostensibly in a union. It’s laughable.

Food prices are out of control here. Dining out costs as much as it does in canton Zürich in Switzerland, where salaries are at least twice as high, on average. I just paid $40.- for two dinners from a food truck in the worst part of town. 10 chicken wings cost $18.-. Dean Baker, I love you but you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You’re getting smoke blown up your ass. It’s rough out here, in the real world, where prices are wildly higher than the official rate of inflation. Food in the grocery stores has also risen much more than just a few percent—some staples, like potatoes, cost 2 or 3 times more than they did six months ago.

“For whatever reason, the media have decided the economy is terrible and they are not going to let the data get in the way.”

I’ve been hanging out with a whole town full of people who would like to tell you to fuck right off.

Thomas Edsall Can’t Even Consider That the Way We Structure Markets Creates Inequality by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The framing that we somehow need government intervention to give people a shot makes it hugely more difficult to address the problems of inequality. In reality, the government shapes just about every aspect of the economy, and in the last four decades it has shaped the economy in ways to redistribute income upward.”

“There are many other ways we structure the market to ensure that income flows up. Steel and textile workers are forced to compete with low-paid workers in developing countries. Our doctors and dentists are largely protected from this competition. We structure the financial sector in ways that allow people to make millions and billions ripping off ordinary workers.”

Public Policy & Politics

Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation About China? by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“US President Jimmy Carter signed the Taiwan Relations Act (1979), which allowed US officials to maintain intimate contact with Taiwan, including through the sale of weapons. This decision is noteworthy as Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 to 1987, requiring a regular weapons supplier.”

“China did not use its military power to prevent Pelosi and other US congressional leaders from travelling to Taipei. But, when they left, the Chinese government announced that it would halt eight key areas of cooperation with the US, including cancelling military exchanges and suspending civil cooperation on a range of issues, such as climate change. That is what Pelosi’s trip accomplished: more confrontation, less cooperation.”

“A new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity. The general malady that ensues is a deep suspicion and hatred of China, not just of its current leadership or even the Chinese political system, but hatred of the entire country and of Chinese civilisation – hatred of just about anything to do with China.”

“Rather than seeing China for both its successes and contradictions, this madness of our times seeks to reduce China to an Orientalist caricature – an authoritarian state with a genocidal agenda that seeks global domination.”

“Western countries with a long history of brutal colonialism in Africa, for instance, now regularly decry what they call Chinese colonialism in Africa without any acknowledgment of their own past or the entrenched French and US military presence across the continent.”

“The International Criminal Court, steeped in Eurocentrism, indicts one African leader after another for crimes against humanity but has never indicted a Western leader for their endless wars of aggression.”

“Despite the fact that Bloomberg ’s entire story on this loan was built on a lie, they were not tarred with the slur of ‘carrying water for Washington’. That is the power of the information war.”

“The US is provoking a conflict due to its own anxieties about China’s economic advances: we should not be drawn in as useful idiots. We need to have an adult conversation about China, not one imposed upon us by powerful interests that are not our own.”

Abolish life sentences by Sam Dresser (Aeon)

“The US dispenses life sentences at a rate of 50 per 100,000, about the same as the entire incarceration rate for countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark. One in seven prisoners in the US is serving a life sentence: more than 200,000 people, a greater number than were incarcerated for all crimes in 1970.”

“The number of people in the US serving life without parole (LWOP) sentences has increased 66 per cent since 2003. Germany outlawed LWOP in 1977, and in 2013 the European Court of Human Rights decided that Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights prohibited LWOP as a form of ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Because of the barriers to getting parole, many life sentences are in fact LWOP sentences. Moreover, ‘virtual life sentences’ – those greater than 50 years – effectively condemn almost all those serving them to a life in prison. In 2016, more than 44,000 people in the US were serving virtual life sentences.”

“[…] deterrability varies. People suffering from severe mental illness or those acting impulsively or in the heat of passion may not be at all deterrable. Different people have different attitudes toward risk. Few perform cost-benefit analyses when contemplating a crime; those who do may do so poorly. Second, people are often ignorant of the penalties attaching to different crimes, and tend to underestimate their severity. Perhaps most important are the many steps between crime and punishment – being caught, accused, tried, convicted, and sentenced – which greatly reduce the likelihood of punishment. All these factors give us reason to doubt the deterrent effect of life sentences.”

“The journalist Dana Goldstein writes : ‘Homicide and drug-arrest rates peak at age 19, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while arrest rates for forcible rape peak at 18 … For most of the crimes the FBI tracks, more than half of all offenders will be arrested by the time they are 30.’ And, she continues, criminal careers are short-lived: ‘for the eight serious crimes tracked by the FBI … five to 10 years is the typical duration that adults commit these crimes, as measured by arrests.’ As the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky put it in an interview: ‘The greatest crime-fighting event on Earth is the 30th birthday.’”

“Those aged 18 to 25 – although around 10 per cent of the US population – comprise 25 per cent of arrests and 19 per cent of admissions to adult prisons. The young brain is not fully developed, with less impulse control and greater dependence on peer approval than adults have.”

“Black people make up almost half of lifers, despite comprising only 13 per cent of the US population. Of course, this in itself demonstrates bias only if these sentences are out of proportion to the involvement of people of colour in criminal activities. They are.”

“[…] people of colour tend to be poorer, and poorer people are more likely to commit crimes than rich ones; they are also less likely to receive adequate legal representation.”

But the rich ones commit bigger crimes and get away with them all the time. Poor people get run the fuck over. Everyone hates the poor. People think that they deserve their loser fate.

“While the US criminal justice system treats Black and brown people worse than it treats whites, it seems plausible that the treatment of white people adheres more closely to our society’s views of justice, since white people are thought to represent the ‘normal’ or the default. People of colour, then, are subject to a surplus penalty rather than white people being let off easy. If that is so, reducing the penalties Black people pay rather than increasing those of whites would bring us closer to justice.”

“In the law, responsibility is best understood by what it excludes. One who is not responsible (liable) for their criminal act has a partial or complete excuse. A complete excuse, making one wholly nonculpable, has required, since at least the 19th century, that one not know what one is doing, not know it is wrong, or not be able to control one’s actions (be under the influence of an irresistible impulse). Under these definitions, most people serving life sentences are probably responsible for their acts.”

“By some reports, almost 40 per cent of prisoners in state and federal facilities suffer from some form of diagnosed mental illness.”

“It’s clear that growing up in environments with certain kinds of deprivation – high poverty, neglect or abuse, poor schools, prevalence of guns and drugs, non-intact families, inadequate access to decent employment – greatly increases the likelihood that a person will go on to commit crimes. For example, if you happen to grow up in the city of Baltimore, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is more than five times greater than for residents of the US as a whole.”

“Baltimore’s rate of violent crime is more than 30 times that of Frederick, Maryland, a small city about an hour west of Baltimore. We cannot ignore such disparities in judging lawbreakers’ responsibility.”

“Leaving aside the morality of continued punishment, we may question its rationality. What’s the point of continuing to punish a person who recognises the wrongness of what they have done, who no longer identifies with it, and who bears little resemblance to the person he was years earlier? It is tempting to say that he is no longer the same person.”

“The waste of human lives condemned to prison for life, or even for decades, is tragic as well as irrational, and can be justified only by some powerful offsetting benefits. As we have seen, there is scant evidence that long sentences have either general or specific deterrent value. Incarceration is very expensive, and becomes more so as prisoners age.”

“Goethe proclaimed that ‘if we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.’ It sounds nice, of course, but is it too nice to be true? No. There is good social scientific evidence showing, for example, that people tend to internalize others’ view of them, and that when people have certain expectations of others’ behavior they may send subtle signals to which those others then conform.”

“Preston-Roedder argues that faith in humanity is also good for one’s own well-being. That alone is not sufficient to recommend it. But we can count this trait as a virtue if we agree that on balance it benefits those who possess it as well as others. A world in which we do not give up on people who have done terrible things, and aim to facilitate their journey to a different place, is a better world than the alternative.”

So Far As I Can Make Out by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“All correspondents bring their politics with them, as I did in Portugal. This is a natural thing, a good thing, an affirmation of their engaged, civic selves not at all to be regretted. The task is to manage your politics in accord with your professional responsibilities, the unique place correspondents occupy in public space. There can be no confusing journalism and activism. You do your best to keep your biases, political proclivities, prejudices, and what have you out of the files you send your foreign desk. It takes discipline and ordered priorities.”

“The truth here is that almost all mainstream journalists reporting from Ukraine are guilty of this—and I am this far from editing out my “almost.” They are effectively activists in the cause of the American national security state, its campaign against Russia, and Washington’s latter-day effort to defend its primacy.”

“They are not allowed to cover this conflict at close range. Their foreign editors do not want them to and the Ukrainians will not let them. Neither wants daily reports of a slow march to defeat. Better to keep it broad and blurry and spotty. Lots of anecdotes featuring helpless victims, and Russian atrocities by the bale–none of which the correspondents reporting them actually witnessed.”

“One day last week we read that Russian forces are cynically sheltering in the plant on the thought that the Ukrainians cannot send rockets into it—too dangerous. The next day we read that the Russians are themselves shelling the power plant they were, one day earlier, reported to be sheltering in. There is only one plausible explanation for this: The correspondents reporting this logically impossible junk are not there and rely on Ukrainian accounts; these accounts differ one day to the next, one official to the next.”

Short Take: The New State of Confusion by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Do they want anyone’s approval? Are they asking anything of California or the United States, or are they just deciding whether to fly solo and, short of an armed invasion to force them to remain a portion of a state with which they no longer care to belong or a nation to which they are no longer devoted, really don’t give a damn whether it’s good with them or not.”

“Will they get two senators? Not without the federal government’s permission and blessing. Then again, if they go independent, they won’t have to send tax money to Washington either. Will DC put up with such insolence? The optics of the military invading San Berdoo could make for an interesting Netflix docudrama, but could turn ugly.”

“An awful lot of folks these days fail to connect up the voluntariness of this association. They have their ideas of right and wrong, and are so certain of their correctness that they are prepared to ram it down the throat of anyone who thinks differently. More to the point, they want laws to do their dirty work, whether to force people to do what they don’t want to do or prevent them from doing what they do.”

In Actual Russia, No Sign of Sanctions by Ted Rall

“I’ve spent the last two weeks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia’s two biggest cities. Stores are bustling, people are spending, unemployment is low and still falling , there are lines at ATMs and whatever else is happening, the economy is anything but bad. The Galeria Mall across the busy street from my hotel in Saint Petersburg has a few closed stores shut down by Western chains but the majority remain and consumers are shopping like mad. European and American tourists are few and far between, but it’s exactly the same here in sanctions-free Istanbul where I’m writing this. Westerners stopped coming at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown two years ago and still haven’t returned. If Russians are unhappy with Putin—and they’re not —it’s not because of the economy.”

Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Exposes Foolishness of Interventionism by Ron Paul (Antiwar.com)

“The US fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Nancy Pelosi provoking China nearly to the point of war over Taiwan is meant to show the world how tough we are. In reality, it demonstrates the opposite. The drunken man in a bar challenging everyone to a fight is not tough. He’s foolish. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose from his display of bravado.”

How China and the US Threaten Each Other by Chas Freeman

“China has developed a uniquely competitive form of entrepreneurial capitalism, a convincing deterrent capacity against foreign attack, an unmeddlesome approach to working with foreign countries regardless of their ideologies, social systems, and other idiosyncrasies, and identification with the post-World War II world order defined by the United Nations Charter and international law.”

“American politicians have little to no understanding of how China is governed, but they now clearly presume that peaceful coexistence with Beijing will be impossible without regime change.”

“[…] while continuing to urge cooperation with America, Beijing is now actively seeking to reduce or eliminate dependence on goods and services from the United States, arming itself against the US, and becoming more and more strident in its condemnations of American racism, social disorder, global ideological pretensions, and foreign policy unilateralism.”

“[…] the competition between China and the United States is not so much military as it is about which society can best meet the aspirations of its people for prosperity, domestic tranquility, justice, and personal advance while inspiring other countries with its example.”

I wonder how America thinks it’s doing.

“Innovation flourishes in an intellectual and entrepreneurial ecology that incentivizes adventurous exploration and development of novel ways of meeting the demand for more effective products and services. It requires persistent investment in education and research and a socioeconomic culture that facilitates the commercialization of inventions. Scientific and technological achievement is a cumulative process that is invigorated and accelerated by openness to transnational cooperation and exchanges of ideas. It is hamstrung, not secured, by restrictions on transnational communication and collaboration.”

“The United States has the capacity to out-compete China if it puts its money where its mouth is. It can’t seem to do so. Nineteen of the world’s twenty fastest growing semiconductor companies are now in mainland China. None are in the United States.”

“China is on track to educate twice as many PhDs in STEM by 2025. In that year, it will have more workers in STEM fields than the thirty-eight member countries of the OECD combined. Many will be world class. Some will be returnees driven from positions in the United States by racial prejudice and xenophobic bureaucratic restrictions on their freedom to pursue their research interests. Their departure will undermine the excellence of US universities and laboratories as well as reduce the number of US high tech startups but will result in plenty in China.”

“Einstein was not driven by the profit motive. Nor was the invention of the internet. The missile and jet plane debuted in Nazi Germany. The first man in earth orbit was Soviet. Many examples from history refute the complacent American presupposition that only private companies in liberal democracies with free speech on political matters can be inventive. China is doing nothing startling in once again proving this assumption wrong.”

“Chinese no longer see the United States as worthy of emulation. Presumed national security threats from China and other rising and resurgent powers are taken to justify the curtailment of American civil liberties. Like China, the United States is becoming more xenophobic, doctrinaire, and intolerant of dissent. In both countries, those who speak well of the other or argue for better relations can expect to be smeared by political correctness vigilantes. Even those most committed to engagement no longer dare advocate it. They either walk away or just do what’s in their interest without talking about it.”

How the Communist Party of China Renews and Improves Itself by Huáng Píng (Scheer Post / 经济导刊 (Economic Herald))

“Many people in the West believe that sooner or later the CCP will become the kind of party they imagine it to be. They are too ignorant about China and the CCP, behind which there is too much arrogance and ideological bias. They always think that their system is the only paradigm, and that sooner or later China will have to learn from and lean on them.”

“[…] viable political system must be open and inclusive, not stagnant. Keep learning, keep reviewing, and keep absorbing new things, and the road will get wider and wider. This is one of the “secrets” of China’s rapid development. The CCP is always learning and summing up experiences and lessons from both positive and negative aspects, and is always ready to uphold the truth and correct mistakes.”

Is this as true of China as if I’d read the same smoke from a U.S. government lackey?

“[…] at that time, we saw that many places in Europe and America were blue sky, clean air and beautiful environment, but we did not see the cruel side of the capitalist mode of production.”

“From a worldwide perspective, the logic of the pursuit of excessive profits by capital based on inequality has not only not changed, but has even intensified because capital knows no borders. The miserable production and living conditions of workers can be seen everywhere in many developing countries, and such a situation is fundamentally brought about by the unequal relationship between the Western and non-Western worlds.”

“[…] it is increasingly difficult for the Western world to conceal its hypocrisy if it talks about freedom, democracy, human rights, etc., not to mention repeatedly using it as a diplomatic and political tool to accuse and suppress other countries and regions for no reason. This is particularly evident in the “black lives are lives” controversy in the United States in 2020 and the U.S. government’s disrespect for life in the whole process of preventing and fighting the epidemic.”

“China’s socialism is neither a simple copy of the early theses of Marx and Engels, nor a copy of the Soviet model, nor can it be cut from the Nordic “socialism”. The practical development of China’s revolutionary construction since modern times, and the increasingly smooth path China has taken, is due to the fact that it did not engage in dogmatic essentialism, but took its own path from the practical point of view.”

“China’s way of carrying out economic and social construction and national governance for decades – it is both a socialist and a Chinese concrete practice. Its path, system, experience, and achievements have become inseparable from the production, life, interactions, and thinking of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. It is the result of the painstaking practice and relentless pursuit of hundreds of millions of people, and it is the choice of hundreds of millions of people themselves.”

“Q: So you are against some of the criticisms of China, such as “bureaucratic monopoly capitalism”.

“Huang Ping: The only “usefulness” of these claims is to remind us to prevent Chinese socialism from becoming deformed and degenerating, regardless of the intentions of the claimants. Objectively speaking, China is the most viable socialism in the world today, the most likely to bring human society beyond the confines of capitalism,”

“In his view, letting some people and regions get rich first was only a necessary way and process. Therefore, Comrade Xiaoping clearly said: “The purpose of socialism is to achieve common prosperity for the whole country, not polarization. If our policy leads to polarization, we have failed; if any new bourgeoisie arises, then we have really taken the evil road.””

“After solving the absolute poverty, then we have to solve the relative poverty and other problems. If these problems are not solved or not solved well, as the pillars of society, the youth may not have the strength. The new generation of young people are ardent patriots, all want to fight for socialist modernization and national rejuvenation. But if their practical problems are not solved, or if they are not solved in a timely and secure manner, it will not only affect their own development and progress, but also hinder the progress of our country from the first century to the second.”

“Globalization has a very prominent contradiction, that is, the separation of economy and politics. The economy is becoming more and more globalized, but politics is still based on the sovereign state as the basic unit.”

“The “order” imposed by the West in the interests of Western countries is becoming less and less effective. Not to mention that the “jungle rules” and “zero-sum game” of international relations formed over the centuries is not the way out for mankind.”

“[…] the major Western countries, led by the United States, either focus on their own interests or stick to their original “rule-based order,” which is actually an “order” based on the rules they set and in line with their interests, without any regulation for big […] capital and monopolistic transnational capital, nor is there any restriction on the hegemonic practices of the powerful.”

Everyone Has Already Lost the War in Ukraine but Raytheon by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“I have never seen a war more horrifically insane than the rapidly expanding mess in Ukraine. There have been plenty of wars that are more violent. There’s about a dozen raging in Africa as we speak that make the carnage of Bucha look downright quaint by comparison, but I’ve never in my lifetime seen a war that is more pointlessly dangerous.”

“A savage proxy war between two disintegrating nuclear superpowers that somehow combines the Mad Max-style barbaric warlordism of Afghanistan with the almost casual disregard for mankind of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every fucking second that that Slavic dumpster fire keeps burning brings us another step closer to a nuclear apocalypse and literally everybody has already lost this war months ago, at least in any way that counts.”

“Zelensky rejected diplomacy at a time when he held all the cards and doubled down on America’s twisted dream of destroying Vladimir Putin with a tidal wave of Ukrainian corpses.”

“The end result of this suicide circus isn’t just thousands of dead bodies but a war without victors. There is no one left alive who can leave this battlefield with their head held high and there is absolutely zero prospect of things getting any better for either side. It didn’t have to be this way. There were multiple clearly marked off-ramps to peace on this highway to hell but everyone involved just kept blasting past them with their pedal to the metal. And now we are left with a battlefield governed by broken losers.”

“The people of the Donbass have repeatedly made it violently clear that they have absolutely no interest in being part of the post-Maidan Ukrainian experiment. Regardless of Russia’s manipulations, what Ukraine did to those people for years is no different than what Putin has done to Ukraine for months.”

“This whole stupid fucking war could have been avoided had Putin simply taken back the Nazi occupied sections of the Donbass to begin with and left NATO to bitch about a region no one who doesn’t use the Cyrillic Alphabet even gives a fuck about.”

“America declared war on the Russian people for his actions with a sweeping sanctions regime that has only resulted in strengthening the Ruble and making gasoline more expensive than cocaine. The entire Western World is on the brink of a massive recession and the entire Third World is on the brink of starvation. All because two empires decided to play battleship with Ukraine and the only people who have anything to show for it are the jackals who make the game pieces.”

“The Military Industrial Complex is raking in the dough, selling Stinger missiles faster than Putin can blow them up at the airport and footing taxpayers with the bill.”

America This Week: August 8-14, 2022 by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Despite a spate of unconvincing reassurances to the contrary, evidence of approaching disaster continues to accumulate. Americans (particularly those under 25) are overwhelmed by basic costs and spent spring and summer digging bigger holes for themselves via record levels of consumer borrowing. Federal Reserve stats this week showed a staggering 233 million credit card accounts were opened in the second quarter, the most since 2008, while a just-as-staggering $46 billion was added to credit card balances during that same period. Household debt passed $16 trillion for the first time, while overall credit card debt has jumped $100 billion this calendar year.”

“Mullen in 2012 helped found Pretium, whose subsidiaries now own 80,000 properties (double their 2021 number). New York Magazine commented of Mullen that “a guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.” That’s capitalism, one supposes, but the new report shows Pretium and other firms also accepted millions in state Paycheck Protection loans, debt in many cases forgiven, inexplicably — all four were profitable in the pandemic years.”

“The U.S.-Chinese messaging war is heating, as an NGO called the China Society for Human Rights Studies issued a report accusing the U.S. of sweeping human rights abuses in the Middle East, including “war crimes, crimes against humanity, arbitrary detention… torture of prisoners, and indiscriminate unilateral sanctions,” as well as “warmongering” by launching military operations in 40% of earth’s nations since 2001. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are portrayed as abused subject populations using language remarkably similar to U.S. NGO reports about, say, Uighurs.”

The Espionage Act Gets An Instant Makeover by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Katie Halper and I asked Ellsberg about the Act around then:”

“They’ve learned to wield the Espionage Act, to criminalize whistleblowing… 9/11 comes along, and it’s ‘Constitution be damned.’ Since then we’ve had total surveillance of everybody, totally unconstitutionally… We’re not a police state, but we could be a police state almost from one day to the next… They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not… We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month.”

“When CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou revealed details about the program, what law was used to charge him? The Espionage Act. What “espionage” did he commit? Did he sell secrets to Russia, China, al-Qaeda? No. He talked to American journalists, including a network TV pair named Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito (remember those names).

“Even as the government defined talking to American reporters as espionage, and even as Kiriakou went to jail for two years (the only CIA person ever to be jailed in connection with the torture program), the press backed the concept.”

“That’s the problem with this law. “Information relating to the national defense” can essentially be anything the government decides, and they can put you in jail a long time for “mishandling” it, which in Assange’s case included merely having it. Trump or no Trump, if you think that’s okay, you’re an asshole. It’s totally un-American, which is why Robert Reich shouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump acts proud of being investigated for it. This law is more infamous than he is, and everyone but a handful of blue checks can see it.”

Railroaders furious after Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board issues recommendations on national contract, siding with rail corporations on all major points by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“My initial response is, who the hell is representing us?” one Iowa railroader said. “We need people that actually know what the f*** is happening out here in the real world. This contract will be voted down. The Democratic Party just lost most of their support from rail workers … I’m pretty sure this is gonna lead to another wave of mass resignations. Apparently our union representatives have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA of our working conditions.””

Biden approves largest oil, gas lease sale in US history, steamrolls eco review with inflation bill by Thomas Catenacci (FOX Business)

“While the Inflation Reduction Act includes several green energy provisions opposed by the fossil fuel industry, the bill also orders the Department of the Interior (DOI) to take a series of steps to boost fossil fuel production on federal lands and waters. The legislation specifically requires the DOI to reinstate Lease Sale 257, a massive offshore oil and gas sale spanning 80.8 million acres across the Gulf of Mexico, within 30 days of enactment.”

Science & Nature

Do volcanoes produce more CO2 than human activity – a look at Ian Plimer's claim by potholer54 (YouTube)

This is an excellent and deeply satisfying 14-minute video examining a common—and, in the end, utterly false, unsourced, and fabricated—claim in the anti-anthropogenic climate-change world.

Lead from gasoline blunted the IQ of about half the U.S. population, study says by Elizabeth Chuck (NBC News)

“Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates.

“The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead.

“[…]

“Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing, the IQ loss was estimated to be up to 6 points and for some, more than 7 points. Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust. ”

Art & Literature

The Xylonet by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“I spent my own childhood without the Internet, nor did I regret or even detect its absence. I cannot say the same for my life after March, 2016, when all airplanes were permanently grounded, telecommunications basically halted (what remained of non-Internet-based telegraphs and telephones was immediately seized by what remained of states), and even electricity suddenly became a luxury product mostly furnished by privately owned generators. It was, in short, an immediate return to the Middle Ages, but because all 7.5 billion of us were so utterly unprepared it was really something more like the Apocalypse that the medievals had lived and died awaiting.”

“if your job is maintaining a stable temperature in a nuclear reactor, you really should commit to staying at it even after the Apocalypse, if you want to avoid further apocalyptic aftershocks. I was warning about this even before 2016, though the pro-nuclear crowd just kept repeating in response that I must either be “addicted to fossil-fuels” or I was “chasing the pipe-dreams of solar and wind”; no, I was just serious about assessing future risk scenarios.”

That is still the best argument against nuclear that I can think of: we are not mature enough as a species to have it. We cannot protect it against climate catastrophe or sabotage. On the other hand, we keep a tremendous number of planes in the air and make extremely safe vehicles.

“We say it all the time but it’s true: it is a miracle of human ingenuity and determination that we managed to restore “the Internet”, using an entirely different technology than the one on which it was first built, just a little over a decade after we thought we had lost it for good.”

Sex Robots by Zack Weinberg (SMBC)

“Literally every sex part comes with a sweaty skinfold perpetually on the verge of fungal infection. You can basically improve anything by making a change at random.

“Expecting sex-bots to be modeled on humans is like expected jets to be modeled on chickens or submarines to look like walruses.”

Sex Robots by SMBC

Philosophy & Sociology

A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement.”

“Outward: All subcultures are, in a sense, status Ponzi schemes. Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later”

“The key to this phase is that no member of the movement has an incentive to compete with any other member. There’s so much open frontier that it would be stupid to waste time backstabbing someone else instead of going off and grabbing the free status lying all around you.”

“In other situations, everyone would lower their expectations and be fine. But the subculture is used to being a status Ponzi scheme. This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed.”

“[…] everything used to be so nice and friendly, and now it’s full of people attacking each other for personal gain. But this doesn’t require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people. Just more desperate.”

Hard Work is Only Sometimes Necessary and Never Sufficient, But What Else Can You Do? by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“[…] you are embedded in a system in which you do not control your own destiny, yet you must work to achieve better outcomes rather than worse regardless. Adult life, very often, consists of recognizing that you can’t control what happens next, and then setting about to try and control it anyway. Because while you may never be able to exceed the potential that is forced on you by chance and parentage and timing and the system, you can certainly fail to meet that potential. If saying that means that I’m guilty of endorsing an unjust system then our standards have truly collapsed. I’m sorry to pull the wise old socialist routine, but I’ve been involved in this political culture my whole life, and being a socialist never entailed a belief that nothing we do matters or that we were exempt from the need to work. The fact that so many people have come to believe that the only options before us are a witless rise-and-grind work fetishism or an utterly fatalistic belief that nothing we do matters… it doesn’t say good things about our culture. Personally, I blame capitalism.”

I’m objective, thee is biased (Appellate Squawk)

This is a good list of logical pitfalls, with succinct descriptions.

Target-driven bias

Working backward from a suspect to the crime scene evidence and thus fitting the evidence to the suspect – akin to shooting an arrow and drawing a target around where it hits. A bull’s eye every time!

Confirmation bias

Focusing on the evidence of guilt while ignoring anything contradictory.

Bias cascade

When bias spills from one part of the investigation to another, such as when the same person who collects the evidence from the crime scene does the laboratory work and is influenced by the emotional impact of the crime scene.

Bias snowball

An echo chamber where beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.

Bias blind spot

They’re biased. We’re objective.

Expert immunity

The belief that being an expert makes a person objective and unaffected by bias.

Technological protection

The belief that the use of technology, such as computerized fingerprint matching, guards against bias.

Bad apples

The belief that bias is a matter of incompetence or bad character.

Illusion of control

The belief that bias can be overcome by sheer act of will

Programming

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog)

The following expands the size of articles that contain images.

article:has(img) {
  grid-column: span 2;
  grid-row: span 2;
}

“Let’s eliminate the bottom margin of all headlines whenever they are followed by paragraphs, captions, code examples and lists.”

:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6):has(+ :is(p, figcaption, pre, dl, ul, ol) {
  margin-bottom: 0;
}

“There are a lot of fantastic pseudo-classes that can be used inside has:(). In fact, it revolutionizes what pseudo-classes can do. Previously, pseudo-classes were only used for styling an element based on a special state — or styling one of its children. Now, pseudo-classes can be used to capture state, without JavaScript, and style anything in the DOM based on that state.”

“[…] not every pseudo-class is currently supported inside :has() in every browser, so do try out your code in multiple browsers. Currently the dynamic media pseudo-classes don’t work — like :playing, :paused, :muted, etc. They very well may work in the future, so if you are reading this in the future, test them out! Also, form invalidation support is currently missing in certain specific situations, so dynamic state changes to those pseudo-classes may not update with :has().”

“The hardest part of :has() will be opening our minds to its possibilities. We’ve become so used to the limits imposed on us by not having a parent selector. Now, we have to break those habits.

“That’s all the more reason to use vanilla CSS, and not limit yourself to the classes defined in a framework. By writing your own CSS, custom for your project, you can fully leverage all the powerful abilities of today’s browsers.”

Microsoft® Open Source Software (OSS) Secure Supply Chain (SSC) Framework Simplified Requirements by Adrian Diglio (GitHub)

“The goal of this paper is to provide a simple framework for the pragmatic inclusion of secure OSS consumption practices in the software development process. It outlines a series of discrete, non-proprietary security development activities that when joined with effective process automation and maturation levels represent the steps necessary for an organization to objectively claim compliance with the Microsoft OSS SSC Framework as defined by the requirements identified in Level 3 of the OSS SSC Framework Maturity Model.”

“Enforcing an effective secure OSS supply chain strategy necessitates standardizing your OSS consumption process across the various developer teams throughout your organization, so all developers consume OSS using governed workflows.”

“For source code artifacts, we require mirroring external source code repositories to an internal location. Mirroring the source in addition to caching packages locally is also useful for many reasons:”

“For packaged artifacts , we require ingestion into an artifact stores – Linux package repositories, artifact stores, OCI registries – to fully support upstream sources , which transparently proxy from the artifact store to an external source and save a copy of everything used from that source.”

“Using tools such as Dependabot to auto-generate Pull Requests (PRs) to update vulnerable OSS become critical capabilities for securing your supply chain.”

“Given the SaltStack incident , where a vulnerability was exploited within 3 days after announcement, every organization should aspire to patch vulnerable OSS packages in under 72 hours so that you patch faster than the adversary can operate. Using tools such as Dependabot to auto-generate Pull Requests (PRs) to update vulnerable OSS become critical capabilities for securing your supply chain.”

“For key artifacts that are business-critical and for all artifacts that are inputs to High Value Assets, this assumption may not be sufficient. Hence, the next step to secure the supply chain is creating a chain of custody from the original source code for every artifact used to create a production service/release.”

“If an organization chooses to take a dependency on open source, they should also find ways to give back to the community.”