Links and Notes for April 26th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Chris Hedges: US, Iran, Israel, Gaza, Assange, NYT, internet, religion, New Atheists, US elections by India & Global Left (YouTube)

At about 30:00, Hedges goes on at length about how journalism works, with examples from the New York Times.

“The big nemesis for those of us who were reporting overseas was the Washington Bureau, because the reporters in Washington, they have sources within the power structure that leak them materials—often wrong—and they don’t want those sources alienated. So you’re often, if you’re reporting out of the war in Salvador, if you’re reporting out of Gaza, you’re in conflict directly with the Washington Bureau.

“I mean, my favorite story was, I covered Ron Brown’s plane crash, and I was actually got to the crash site very soon. It was pouring rain up in the mountains, and everyone was dead. And I called it into the New York Times, and the foreign desk said, oh, well—his name was Johnny Apple—his sources in the Pentagon say it crashed in the sea and people survived. And I go, no, no, I just was at the crash. But the first edition, they ran with his story. So he wasn’t even there. So that was kind of classic.

“The power of the Mandarin’s political class, intelligence community in Washington to influence the coverage of the paper is quite pronounced. And you would often have reports that I would write out of the field, and then to ‘balance’ it out, you’d have reports based on administration officials that said the direct opposite. So it was a way to kind of neutralize the reporting, but all the good foreign correspondents were in constant conflict, and the nemesis was Washington. It wasn’t the editorial board.

“In terms of the influence, I mean, the shareholders, not so much, because the publisher and the senior editors will have direct contact with the highest levels of government. And what they will do is then mount a campaign against an individual reporter—which happened to me in Bosnia through the Clinton administration—that they will attempt to discredit. And they will do that by having meetings with the executive editor or with the publisher.

“And this is how good reporters who won’t bend finally get driven out, David Halberstam in Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera. That’s how it works. Sidney Schanberg, who was a friend of mine, covered Cambodia, won the Pulitzer, came back, and they put him as the editor on the Metro desk, and he started writing about all the real estate firms and developers who were driving out the working and middle class from Manhattan. And then all these real estate developers, of course, were friends with the publisher, and he was pushed out. So that’s how it is.

“Not so much the shareholders and the influence of the money classes is opaque. You don’t see it directly. It’s not like the way the rich Zionist donors will get rid of the president of Harvard. That’s all very public. This is all very quiet, because of course it would tarnish their journalistic credibility, but that’s how it works internally.

“And I would just say at the end, most reporters who get to the Times are careerists. They understand internally how the system works, and they’re not about to damage their careers. So the primary form of censorship is self-censorship. And then it’s those few reporters like myself who are management headaches who they eventually get rid of.”

If you’ve not heard much Chris Hedges, he goes through many of his most powerful points in what the interviewer calls a “conversation”, but which is really more like a lecture.

Here are the chapters in this 80-minute talk.

00:00 Highlight 
02:19 The ongoing crisis in Gaza and the global divide
07:51 The influence of popular protests in the US on the Biden administration’s position on Israel-Palestine
10:13 The role of the Israel lobby in shaping US foreign policy
14:04 Israel’s attempts to provoke conflict with Iran
21:14 The case of Julian Assange and the US-UK extradition battle
26:51 Hedges’s experience as a correspondent for the New York Times
28:35 Hedges’s experiences as a foreign correspondent and the challenges of reporting
31:02 The dynamics within the New York Times newsroom
35:23 The changing economic model of the New York Times
42:32 The rise of the Internet as a media space
49:39 Hedges’s perspective on the differences between Republican and Democratic foreign policy
56:10 Hedges’s critique of the Democratic Party and its betrayal of the working class
57:52 Hedges’s analysis of the US prison system as a form of social control
01:05:07 Hedges’s critique of the “New Atheist” movement and its role in justifying Islamophobia
01:13:34 Hedges’s perspective on the relationship between religion, spirituality, and the left

Of these, I found not only the section cited above but also everything from 49:39 onward to be deeply illuminating.

The Olympic Flame Scam: a Wonderful Idea From Dr. Goebbels! by Giorgos Mitralias (CounterPunch)

“it was only natural that, shortly afterwards, Chancellor Hitler should nominate de Coubertin for… the Nobel Peace Prize!”

This Is a Golden Age of Censorship by Ted Rall

“[…] a group of pro-genocide corporate CEOs is organizing a blacklist of pro-Palestine college students to distribute to major companies so these young people won’t be able to find a job after graduation. (Student activists have taken to wearing masks and scarves to avoid being doxxed by reactionary supporters of Israel’s war.)”

Why? So they can get jobs at these companies once they’re done protesting? Or are they really worried about hunted at home?

The Impotence of Antony Blinken by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel. And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.”

“[…] let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.”

“I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.””

““It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.””

“Blinken’s assertion Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021.”

“[…] given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?”

“[…] the Biden regime does not have a China policy. Think carefully about this: In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th.”

Revolt in the Universities by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.”

“Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children”

“Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.””

“There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.”

Killing the Constitution by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“This Orwellian tangle resulted, of course, in many false reports of crimes. It also resulted in many prosecutions for failing to report crimes or for warning others that they were being spied upon. As of this past weekend, we in America are headed to the same authoritarian place. Thanks to legislation that fell one vote short of demise in each house of Congress last weekend, America in 2024 will soon resemble East Germany in the late 1980s, where nearly everyone was a spy and no one could talk about it.”

“The quintessential American right is the right to be left alone. Justice Louis Brandeis called it the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized persons. It presumes that you can think as you wish and say what you think and read what you want and publish what you say, that you can exclude whomever you wish – including the government – from your property and from your thoughts; and that you can do all this without a government permission slip or fear of government reprisal.”

“When the courageous Edward Snowden, who had been both a CIA and an NSA agent, revealed the warrantless spying, instead of curtailing it, Congress made it lawful; unconstitutional, but lawful.”

“Hence, if you email your cousin in Europe, the feds can warrantlessly capture all the fiber-optic traffic you generate, as well as all the traffic of all persons in the U.S. to whom you communicate, as well as all the traffic generated by all persons to whom they communicate. If you do the math, you will see that these numbers of victims – Americans spied upon without suspicion, probable cause or warrants – can quickly reach into the hundreds of millions.”

“[…] the new 702 requires that any person in the U.S. who installs, maintains or repairs any fiber-optic system must assist the feds in using that system to spy on the person’s own customers. It also prohibits that person from speaking about this.”

Leftovers of the American Century by Tom Engelhardt (CounterPunch)

“Yes, there’s also the reputed wisdom of old age — and it might indeed make Joe Biden a more thoughtful president, were he to get a second term;”

Just zero evidence of wisdom. None. I think it’s so sad how many people I otherwise respect have bought into the “lesser evil” dynamic so much that they equate Joe Biden with wise, good, good-hearted, mentally present, etc. He is none of those things. He is a snake in a pit of vipers. That he has survived for so many decades, that he has become president, though obviously and wildly unqualified for it, suggests much more that he is a king snake, not to be trusted. This doesn’t make him worse than Trump but it doesn’t make him better, either. Stop pretending that Biden is things that he is not. He an old man trapped in a dementia-addled brain. He deserves this fate. He is not “wise”.

“[…] if Donald Trump (“ drill, drill, drill “) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.”

Biden is also drill drill drill, though! And Engelhardt knows it!

The Hobbesian World of “Multipolarity” by Boris Kagarlitsky (Jacobin)

“[…] particularly like [Andrei] Norkin’s “Meeting Place” show on the NTV channel. Here you have it explained to you, intelligently, calmly, and without the hysterics you hear on the other programs, why it is correct and necessary to kill people, to seize other people’s land, and to deprive them of their property, while restricting the rights of everyone who disagrees with the existing authorities. Everything is very good-natured, offered with a pleasant smile, politely and amiably.”

“In reality, as we know perfectly well, the leading powers that take on themselves the tasks of maintaining order and ensuring its observance breach it constantly, while dreaming up all sorts of hypocritical excuses. Nevertheless, having rules that are broken from time to time is better than having no rules at all. This seems obvious and has been recognized by everyone.”

“[…] various types of revolutionaries who have pledged to tear down the old “world of coercion” in order to construct a new world. As we know, this has not always turned out well. This is not so much due to the destruction of the old world but rather because the new world that is being constructed has proven time and again to be suspiciously like the old.”

The Last Thing Haiti Needs is Your Liberal Guilt by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“For nearly thirty years, between 1957 and 1986, Haiti was a hostage of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jeane-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who terrorized Louverture’s dream with a nightmare gestapo force of American trained psychopaths known as the Tonton Macoute.”

“Catholic Priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached a pretty tepid genre of social democracy based on the left-wing Christian school of Liberation Theology. Naturally, Reagan hated the holy man and ordered the CIA to fund rival candidates in every election he ran in. When this campaign of electoral sabotage finally failed, and Aristide was elected president in 1991, the US simply went old school and overthrew him in a fascist coup before spending the next 3 years funding the junta that replaced him in a blatant violation of international sanctions.”

“UN troops were sent in this time to calm the island down, but they ultimately proved to be little more than a different flavor of pig, with a 13-year occupation pock marked by routine acts of sexual savagery and a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians. When a devastating earthquake added another quarter million bodies to that mass grave, the US decided to send in more troops of their own and rig more elections, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervening to get a millionaire thug named Michel Martelly elected in 2011 and Barack Obama helping his replacement, Jovenel Moise, to take the Palace in 2016 with a meager 21% voter turnout.”

“God help me but this kind of sounds like a modern-day slave revolt to me. So, maybe we should just sit this one out and focus on losing one of our other stupid fucking wars instead. Just a dangerous thought from an uppity white bitch. But either way, the last thing Haiti needs is your liberal guilt.”

Why is it illegal in parts of U.S. to boycott ‘Israel’? (Reddit)

American Students in 2030 being executed for refusing to join the Israeli Army

The War Comes Home by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“This violent crackdown on non-violent students is happening under a Democratic president, in Democratic-controlled cities, on some of the most elite campuses in the US, while being indulged, rationalized & sometimes cheered on by the guardians of liberal morality in the press.”

“White House thoroughly denounces Columbia University protests: ‘blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous.’”

“A letter signed by nearly 300 members of Yale’s faculty condemned the criminalization of Yale students engaged in acts of peaceful protest and demanded that the university administration drop all charges, take no disciplinary action against those arrested, and respect peaceable speech and assembly on campus.

“54 Columbia Law professors sent a letter to President Shafik, the board of trustees, and deans condemning the mass arrest and suspension of students.”

“Deploying the very Israeli tactics your students are protesting against on your campus is a helluva way to confirm their argument…”

“Jonathan Greenblatt: “Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace.” To which Windy Isser replied with devastating precision: “You’re a disgusting liar @JGreenblattADL. I grew up in a conservative synagogue, participated in USY [United Synagogue Youth], went to a Jewish summer camp. I’m a US-born and bred Jew and those values are what propelled me to join JVP. You’re a monster, you should be ashamed.””

“Mike Johnson: “They [Columbia students] deny that infants were placed into ovens and burnt alive.” Yeah, because it never happened, Mike, which is what good students are meant to do.”

“Vijay Prashad: “The absolutely vacuous political leadership in the US – from Biden to Trump – is mirrored in the cowardice of the presidential offices from Columbia to Pomona. The US ruling class is so very pathetic. They hide their idiocy behind the police batons & mumble about democracy.””

From the “US State Department’s 2023 Country Report on Israel:”

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government officials; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; serious abuses in a conflict by Hamas and Israel, including unlawful or widespread civilian deaths and harm, enforced disappearances or abductions, torture, physical abuses, and conflict-related sexual violence or punishment; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecution of journalists, and censorship; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; restrictions on freedom of movement and residence; serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations; and crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of national, racial, or ethnic minority groups.”

That’s just the executive summary. The document is 59 pages long and includes excruciating detail. The U.S. State Department knows exactly what’s going on.

“Harari Yuval […]: ”The younger generations in the United States, and around the world now see Israel as a racist and violent country that expels millions from their homes, starves entire populations, and kills many thousands of civilians for no better reason than revenge. The results will be felt not only in the coming days and months, but for decades into the future.””

“It’s been 50 days since Biden promised to build a floating pier off the coast of Gaza to facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid within 2 months. This week the Pentagon admitted there’s been no “physical construction of the pier or the causeway.”

“Hamas has repeated its offer to lay down its arms, abolish its military wing and recognize Israel within its pre-1967 borders. But Netanyahu wants war, and ever-expanding settlements and totally rejects a two-state solution. Khalil al-Hayya, a top Hamas leader who has been a key figure in the hostage negotiations, told the Associated Press this week that Hamas would accept “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions.”

“After Israel failed to prove its allegations against UNRWA, even Germany decided to resume funding for the only agency capable of getting aid to starving and sick Palestinians in Gaza. The US is now the only major funder that continues to withhold money from UNWRA based on unproven, if not completely fabricated, allegations.”

The U.S. and Switzerland have not resumed yet because Ignazio Cassis is a fool and a criminal.

“The epidemic of academic crackdowns has now infected Switzerland, where instead of simply gagging or firing professors who object to genocide the Executive Board of the University of Bern decided to disband the entire Institute for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies.”

“Jason Hickle: “It’s incredible how quickly liberals are willing to trash values they claim to uphold – freedom of speech, human rights, international law, etc – the minute these conflict with the objectives of Western hegemony and capital accumulation in the world economy.””

It’s not incredible at all. It’s banal and predictable. It’s basic.

“Badour Hassan, a researcher for Amnesty International: ‘[…] the international community has proven desperately unwilling and incapable of upholding these norms and potentially, worryingly, maybe even signing a death sentence to a whole international order, I’m afraid.’”

Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War or: How American imperialism learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Andre Damon (WSWS)

This article is a review of what sounds like yet another Netflix documentary that’s an utter waste of time. I knew that without even watching it, but Andre Damon did the work and actually watched it to be sure. It is. It is a waste of time. It’s almost certainly a CIA-sponsored work of propaganda. It’s basically the Condaleeza Rice show.

He ended with this:

“American capitalism is bankrupt. Awash in debt, running the economy with the throttle wide open to build weapons, wage wars and operate its Ponzi schemes, US imperialism is headed for a catastrophe from which no acts of violence will save it, and which will see its revolutionary overthrow and replacement with socialism.”

US Secretary of State’s visit to China: An exercise in confrontation and bullying by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“At the top of Blinken’s list was the demand that Beijing end its sale of so-called dual-use items to Moscow […] now insisting that Beijing assist the US and its allies in crippling the Russian economy, particularly its war industries.

“[…]

“After accusing China of “supporting the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War,” Blinken added: “In our discussions today, I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.” While he did not spell out the details, the Biden administration has made clear that it is considering a new round of punitive sanctions targeting Chinese banks that facilitate trade with Russia.”

The tone-deaf arrogance is breathtaking.

“Washington provoked the war with the aim of destabilising and breaking up the Russian Federation in preparation for conflict with China, which US imperialism regards as the chief threat to its global domination.”

“Chinese President Xi appealed to Blinken for a defusing of tensions, saying that the two countries “should be partners rather than rivals” and calling for “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” Beijing, however, is well aware of the dangers posed by Washington’s provocative actions.”

“Blinken’s visit, like that of Yellen earlier this month, was an exercise in confrontation, provocation and threats aimed at bullying China into making concessions even as the US escalates its military preparations to open up a third front in the Indo-Pacific in the emerging global conflict underway in Europe and the Middle East.”

Blinken helping prove to the Chinese that the U.S. is run by incompetent lunatics with almost no grasp on reality.

Two Brain Teasers for the Pod Save America Crowd by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“As Jim Hightower pointed out at the time of the election, in his 1992 campaign against George HW Bush, 62% of voters who made less than $50,000 a year voted for Bill Clinton. When Gore ran, he captured only 43% of that demographic. And that’s your election, right there, that’s an actual structural cause of Gore’s defeat − his inability to rally support from poorer voters.”

“Hightower chalked this erosion up to “four more years of income stagnation and decline for these families under the regime of the Clinton-Gore ‘New Democrats,’” which sounds right to me. Establishment Democrats have tended to hate this type of messaging because it suggests that they have to actually do something economically, which would entail raising taxes and in so doing risk alienating the wealthy donors who have captured the party.”

Remember, All This Fascism Would Feel Way More Fascismy Under Trump by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)

“Okay, yes, police are currently in the process of violently stomping out political dissent on university campuses across America following multiple statements from President Biden attacking the protesters as “antisemitic” for opposing the genocide he’s been enthusiastically facilitating in Gaza. And okay, fine, bands of right wing thugs are currently going around terrorizing students who don’t align with the US government’s support for the state of Israel.

“But before any of my fellow liberals get any wild ideas about ceasing their support for Biden during an election year just because of a little tyranny and genocide, I think it’s important to remind everyone that all this fascism would feel way more fascisty if Trump was president.”

“After all, if Trump was allowing these things to happen in the United States it would be because he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler, but when Biden does it it’s because he’s walking a fine line of nuance and diplomacy and something something political pragmatism. Whatever, my point is we don’t have to think about it too hard or feel too bad about it.”

The Bizarre Gymnastics Of The Gaza Aid Pier by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“In a speech on Thursday Biden defended the violent nationwide police crackdowns on university protests against his genocide in Gaza, saying “dissent must never lead to disorder”.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, even the Wall Street Journal is admitting that no-one knows how many people have died, that the 30K+ or 40K+ number people have been bandying about for months is almost certainly a criminal undercount.

“The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “In Gaza, Authorities Lose Count of the Dead,” which confirms what’s been obvious for months: the Gaza health ministry doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep track of how many people Israel is killing. This means the official death toll from the Israeli onslaught is almost certainly a massive undercount.”

“The US war machine views Palestinians as an inconvenient obstacle to its military agendas in the middle east, in the same way it views the local flora and fauna as an inconvenient obstacle when it’s constructing a new military base […]. Palestinians are just viewed as an annoying indigenous animal that gets in the way of the imperial war machinery, and they’d be more than happy for that nuisance to be eliminated completely.”

“The lesson is that no matter who you vote for you get surging authoritarianism at home [,…] war, military expansionism and brinkmanship abroad, and that this system has got to go. ”

Retaliatory Counter-Protesters Were Criminally Wrong by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

Whereas Eugene Volokh took a wait-and-see attitude, Greenfield is right out of the gate condemning the criminal attacks of so-called counter-protestors.

“A retaliatory attack by a group of students who came prepared to do battle is another.

“To add insult to injury, this went on for hours while the police did nothing.”

It’s actually quite shocking to see the footage of hundreds of police around to arrest protesters, but then, at night, there’s no security whatsoever when the counterprotestors—vitriolic supporters of the Israeli state—attacked the encampment for hours, at least some with clear intent to harm. The reality-distortion effect of propaganda surrounding Israel has not only people attacking other people, but the police allowing it to happen. Madness. These kinds of attacks are either ignored by the media, or deliberately misrepresented as completely reversed of what happened.

Congresspeople like Mike Johnson—as well as Biden—announce daily that this is all done in the name of preventing antisemitism. They make up things that are happening out of whole cloth. They tell stories of posters that they’ve never seen—exactly like those of 1930s Germany, as Mike Johnson said—or of slogans and slurs that somehow no-one’s ever recorded, either on audio or video. They never offer any proof of the acts that they claim are the justification for the complete upending of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s madness. Not only is there no antisemitism on the part of the victims but they’re allowed to be antisemitic if they want. They’re allowed to be pro-Hamas if they want. It’s a free fucking country, you giant pile of giant assholes. The message is clear: it is not a free country. It never has been.

Are you saying the U.S. isn't a free country?

Greenfield went on,

“While some will argue that the visceral desire to engage in violence is understandable, that in no way justifies the violence. Just because the encampments were unlawful, as was the preclusion of students from campus, responding by engaging in criminal conduct is illegal. If it’s accurate that a student who tried to enter the encampment was beaten, then only violence to the extent necessary to defend that person finds any justification, and then only to the extent of protecting the beaten student. It is not the trigger that permits counter-violence because “they had it coming.”

“As for the police not immediately intervening to prevent the violence, to stop criminal conduct regardless of whether it was perpetrated by protesters or counter-protesters, this is a massive dereliction of duty.”

It almost seems as if people are taking their cues on how to behave from Israel itself. Vigilante justice. Cops not only looking the other way, but actively helping one group beat another. The notion that anything is justified in “self-defense” where self-defense is any attack you choose to perpetrate because of the “fear” you have of your victim. The notion that you can just attack—and try to kill—anyone who disagrees with you because they might convince people that’s they’re right instead of you. The notion that there’s no such thing as an innocent civilian.

Greenfield continues to chastise the cops, “when people are being beaten with sticks and clubs, their duty to prevent the violence was as clear as could be.”

“Self-defense may be lawful, but retaliatory attacks are not. This violent engagement was criminal and the students who did so deserve to be arrested and prosecuted for their actions.”

It’s sad that we have to be celebrating a lawyer who thinks that assault is actually illegal as if it were worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize but that’s where the narrative is right now. The U.S. media hasn’t caught up yet. Neither have Greenfield’s commentators, some of whom daydream about starving the students out—sound familiar?

Extended episode: Jill Stein on getting assaulted by cops & campus crackdown by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

The interviews and coverage are very good. Jill Stein is a voice of reason. Aaron and Katie include a lot of footage from the campus occupations, so you can see for yourself in which direction violence is directed. They show a video of a lady walking her dog, who called the police to report that she was being detained by protesters. The students calmly filmed her to show that she was in no way being detained as she filed a false police report.

“Best-case” UN assessment says rebuilding Gaza homes destroyed by Israel’s genocidal onslaught will take close to two decades by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)

“Rebuilding the approximately 80,000 housing units […] would take until 2040, according to an assessment by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released Wednesday. The “best-case” projection […] is based on the highly improbable assumptions that the war ends now and the Zionist regime allows a five-fold increase of construction material imports into Gaza.”

“The estimate does not include performing any repairs to an additional 290,000 homes damaged in the incessant air bombardments and shelling […]”

Meanwhile, the reality is Gaza is being ignored by the U.S. media, as all eyes are on the distraction in American universities. I talked to a couple of Israeli colleagues yesterday and they said that the mood in Israel is pretty good and back to normal, that the war’s been over for a month, as far as they hear on their news. They mentioned Columbia, though, so the propaganda mission is accomplished for Israelis as well. They feel terrified of being anywhere but Israel! Because of the rampant anti-semitism that they’re convinced exists everywhere in Europe and the U.S. I wonder to what degree that propaganda serves the Israeli state to stem the tide of emigration that has afflicted it over the last year. See Israel’s emigration rate jumps as it learns to count by Dror Marmor (Globes) and Report: Nearly 0.5m Israelis left Israel after 7 October (Middle East Monitor).

University Students: Exercising their Rights must be supported and protected, by Prof. Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work (YouTube)

Roaming Charges: Tin Cops and Biden Coming… by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn’t changed. In fact, he’s gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.

“In contrast to Biden’s reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW:”

“The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting the war.”

“Columbia University has an endowment of $13.6 billion and still charges students $60-70,000 a year to attend what has become an academic panopticon and debt trap, where every political statement is monitored, every threat to the ever-swelling endowment punished.”

“In 1970, Richard Nixon famously made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial to actually talk with anti-war protesters for more than two hours. Biden sneers at them, encourages the liberal press to smear them and university presidents to send in riot squads to clear them off campus…”

“Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “We must obliterate Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat. The memory of the Amalekites must be erased. No partial destruction will suffice; only absolute and complete devastation.””

For a day or so, I was wondering how “imminent” the invasion of Rafah could be, as it’s been imminent for weeks. As has been the famine, which is also always impending. This is a weakness, I think. For some. it feels like they need these bad things to happen in order to justify their strong feelings about preventing them.

And then a highly placed Israeli minister like Smotrich says something like this about Rafah and I understand why people are trying desperately to break through the criminal indifference of the Biden administration to try to save a whole population.

“Yousef Munayyer: “No one asks how Palestinian students are supposed to “feel safe” at institutions who invest in and profit off of the murder of their relatives.””

“Prem Thakker: “The dilemma for American college students is that their tax and tuition dollars are helping fund a plausible genocide; if they protest that fact, their tax and tuition dollars are then used to beat and arrest them & their teachers.””

“At Dartmouth, the police threw to the ground Professor Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old head of the university’s Jewish Studies program. […] Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from riot police.”

“From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.””

“Ralph Nader: “The enforcer president of Columbia University— Minouche Shafik—is one of the wealthiest people in America. As president, she makes over $2000 an hour every weekday. In three days, she makes more than many blue-collar workers at Columbia make in a year.””

“Professor Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “At the hospital, the nurse took photos ‘in case you want to file a report.’ Report to whom? The very people who strangled me at work in broad daylight with cameras rolling? Those people?””

“Two days after the raid, Adams was still being pushed to name how many “outside agitators” had been arrested by the NYPD. Adams had no answers, because there weren’t any and shrugged off the questions, saying: “I don’t think that matters…One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as bad as 50.””

Eric Adams is nothing but a stupid thug.

“Adams justifying the police raids: “These are our children and we can’t allow them to be radicalized.” Adams and the Democrats have done more damage to academic freedom than Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo.”

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

“Marisa Kabas: “For years conservatives derided college kids as liberal snowflakes… Now that their power is clear, universities are trying to shut them down, and cops are beating the shit out of them. You don’t beat the shit out of snowflakes.””

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

“Columbia doctoral candidate Rachel H H: “Insane that Columbia has locked down campus to everyone. No research, no books, no labs. No libraries, no medical services appointments, no studio or practice space. No lectures, no concerts. Just the pure administrative university and its disciplinary power.””

The institution is there to protect its endowment and to protect those in power. It is serving its primary purpose. Its students and faculty should take note—and let their feet do the talking.

“Texas city refuses to give people hurricane aid unless they pledge not to boycott Israel. […]

“This country has lost its friggin’ mind.”

Amen. There’s not a cogent thought coming out of anyone in charge in that place…

“A senior at Columbia: “There are so many cameras on campus my mom is going to find out I vape on the cover of the New York Times.””

“The Miami mother of a mentally ill son who was fatally shot by a cop is jailed simply for sharing news stories about the cop, without comment, on Facebook.”

“The last growth industry in America: “Florida is charging formerly incarcerated people $50 a day even if they’re no longer in prison. The “pay to stay” fee is based on the length of the original sentence, so even when they’re released they must keep paying for a prison bed they’re not using.””

Liberals Must Resist the New McCarthyism Over Israel Criticism by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Corbyn’s enemies jumped on and blew up every allegation, twisted the words of activists and the meaning of phrases, invented and distorted entire incidents, and simply asserted over and over again that Labour was plunged in an “antisemitism crisis,” even that Corbyn himself was secretly sympathetic to antisemites, if not a virulent antisemite himself. It worked.

“After years of what looked like everyone across the political spectrum in both politics and the media incessantly repeating this lie, many people assumed there must be at least some truth to it. After all, what was more likely: that there was some “there” there to the accusations of antisemitism, or that a broad swath of politicians, journalists, and celebrities had been engaged in a yearslong, colossal, brazen fraud entirely motivated by their own political interests?

“To this day, the incident remains one of the more frightening demonstrations of the power of the media and politicians to destroy an individual and a movement’s reputation. And we’re now seeing the same strategy playing out in the United States — one that shows signs of spiraling into a full-on Red Scare.”

“To this end, this anti-left, anti-Palestinian coalition has spent the past seven months, and the last few weeks in particular, manufacturing an entire alternate reality where the United States is in the grip of a hate movement akin to Nazi Germany that must be urgently stamped out.”

“What’s followed the Republican hearings last month that hauled university administrators in front of Congress and accused them of enabling antisemitism has been a concerted campaign to paint colleges as hotbeds of virulent antisemitism and genocidal incitement, directed by terrorist groups, and which are poised to erupt any moment into full-scale pogroms.”

“Just look at a small sampling of the fantastical claims and unhinged rhetoric of lawmakers in recent weeks. Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that “many in the crowd” were “calling for the extermination of a race of people,” “using Hamas talking points,” and using the “actual imagery that the Nazis used in the 1930s, literally the same symbols and messages.” Senator Tom Cotton has called them “little Gazas” that are “disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks.” (Elsewhere, he called them “nascent pogroms.”)

“Senator Marco Rubio called protesters “violent, anti-Israel, antisemitic mobs” who “want to destroy America” and are “out there chanting ‘Death to America’ in the streets of American cities,” charging that they are being directed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terror groups as “part of their strategy to intimidate American leaders to support policies that will help destroy Israel.””

All made up out of whole cloth. Just a complete fever dream. This might actually be religious mania because I’m not sure they can even figure out how they’re personally benefitting from this obvious bullshit anymore. They should all be ashamed of themselves. Fucking pogroms! What in the actual hell are you talking about?!? Keep your pants on and try to man the fuck up for a half-a-second before you collapse into a blubbering heap of self-pity and cowering terror.

“To call these claims of rampant antisemitism a mischaracterization doesn’t go far enough. It is a disturbing fantasy, a collective fever dream cooked up with the flimsiest of evidence.”

“Two days ago, the House overwhelmingly passed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill effectively outlawing a variety of criticisms of Israel on campus, which the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, is promising to “look for the best way to move forward” on.”

“They should do it [fight back] because like every Red Scare in the country’s history, the bounds of this witch hunt won’t stop at the far edges of the Left, but will creep further and further toward the center until it ends up enveloping them, too.”

No. They should do it because it’s the right thing to do. This is stupid madness. The kids with a lot more to lose are fighting it. Everyone has a duty to say “enough”. But nobody ever won a political battle in the U.S. expecting people to do the right thing, even if it’s not in their own personal best interests, even if it goes against what all of their little, trusted talking heads are telling them hundreds of times per day.

We don’t need AI to make up stupid shit for us. We’re more than good enough at producing and believing outright and utterly fantastical fabrications without any evidence whatsoever. What’s the point of wasting any time deep-faking anything when people believe the most horrible and outlandish things without a photograph, video, or audio providing it ever happened? It’s a lot less work to just lie effortlessly and continuously and just watch as the idiots march to your tune.

Advisors Assure Biden This Will Blow Over Once All Gazans Dead (The Onion)

““Just lie low, let a few thousand more bombs drop on densely populated areas, and you’re golden, Mr. President,” said senior communications advisor Anita Dunn, promising the depleted Biden that in a matter of months, there would hopefully be no one left to protest for in the besieged Palestinian territory. “I know things might seem bleak now, sir, but all you need to do is hold the course giving Israel billions in military aid, and this will most likely all be a distant memory by November. After that, it’s smooth sailing ahead. What are the activists going to be angry about then? A bunch of rubble and mass graves?” Dunn went on to stress that with any luck, there soon wouldn’t be any student protesters left alive, either.”

’I’ve Never Felt So Alive,‘ Thinks Police Officer While Clotheslining Communist Ivy League Student (Babylon Bee)

“After weeks of dealing with unruly and aggravated protestors, a Los Angeles police officer finally felt moments of real joy and euphoria as a line of commie UCLA students charged him with garbage can shields.”

Meanwhile, the Babylon Bee continues to cover itself in glory as it plummets down the slimy, fascist hole it’s found for itself. What does supporting police-state violence have to do with Jesus? You’ll have to ask the editors.

What does pro-Palestine have to do with communism? Nothing, not really. In the fevered, two-neurons-toward-each-other brains of the Babylon Bee editors, though, it’s all part and parcel of stuff that they don’t like. Never mind that Jesus was basically communist. Logic doesn’t enter into it. It’s about speaking power’s truth, rather than speaking truth to power.

Another Boeing whistleblower dies, the second in two months by Bryan Dyne (WSWS)

“The 45-year-old’s death came suddenly—the Seattle Times reported that he began having trouble breathing two weeks ago and was hospitalized and intubated. He reportedly developed pneumonia and a bacterial infection of MRSA. He was ultimately put on machines to circulate and oxygenate his blood in the face of heart and lung failure before he died.”

“Dean’s death comes less than two months after the purported suicide of another Boeing whistleblower, John “Mitch” Barnett. Barnett, who had been fired from Boeing in 2017, was giving a deposition in a lawsuit for Boeing’s retaliation against him for warning about a different set of quality issues, these at Boeing’s 787 plant in Charleston, South Carolina.

“On what was scheduled to be his third consecutive day of providing information about his case, Barnett was found in his rental car in his hotel’s parking lot with an apparent “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” according to the Charleston County Coroner’s Office.”

“The most significant aspect of both deaths, however, is the lack of any significant corporate media attention on either.”

“In the aftermath of Barnett’s death, a family friend told an ABC affiliate that Barnett had warned her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.””

“Dean’s exposures, as well of those of Barnett and the numerous other whistleblowers who have come forward in recent months, must be taken as serious warnings. Boeing’s focus is above all on profits for its executives and shareholders, and to continue its support of the US government’s wars abroad. The safety of the flying public is at best a tertiary concern.”

Der Schweiz drohte am 22. April plötzlich ein Blackout (20 Minuten)

“[…] haben Wetterprognosen zu einer Fehleinschätzung betreffend den Strombedarf bei Versorgern und Produzenten geführt.”

“[…] wurden rund 12'000 Euro pro Megawattstunde bezahlt, um das Defizit auszugleichen. Damit kostete der Strom fast 170-mal mehr als an normalen Tagen an der Strombörse üblich. Die Schweiz kostete das Defizit Schätzungen zufolge rund 30 Millionen Franken. Kosten, die auf die Konsumenten übertragen werden.

“Die nationale Netzgesellschaft Swissgrid, die für den Zukauf von fehlendem Strom zuständig ist, sagt: «Die Situation war nicht besorgniserregend.»”

Ja, klar, natürlich. Privatisierter Gewinn; verstaatlichtes Risiko. Wie immer. Die Firmen, die das verbockt haben, werden sicher nicht dafür zahlen müssen—nur die Kunden.

Journalism & Media

Gen Z Just Might Save The World by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

I gotta admit that my crusty cynicism is starting to thaw a little bit. Two summers ago, stupid protests swept the nation—but they were against racism. And they were all fucked up, with capitalism infecting everything and BLM ending up being a way of funneling money upward like everything else, but a ton of people took part because they were rightly sick of this shit and want it to stop. It doesn’t matter who George Floyd was. It doesn’t matter whether Chauvin actually killed him. None of that matters. All that really matters is that a lot of country was fucking appalled and took to the streets. Everybody knows that this shit happens all the time. We don’t have to prosecute a court case to learn that racism exists in the U.S. and that the police are a protected caste unlike any other in U.S. history. They have a license to commit state violence and they do it with gusto. They don’t give a shit about any constitutional right. And people are not having it anymore.

And now, finally, we have a generation that refuses to have smoke blown up its ass about how the empire comports itself. The hypocrisy is just so galling and so f@&king gobsmacking that people have been shaken out of a stupor. It’s like a quantum state-change. That energy fired that electron up one valence level and there’s no going back to the previous level where everyone just pretends that Israel is not stepping on the neck of its indigenous population. Yes, the U.S. did it. Yes, Australia did it. Yes, other countries are doing it. But Israel is doing it and dangling their balls in our faces, taunting us. We fund that f@&king country. We can end this one.

“Biden does not care whether he gets re-elected, and neither do his empire manager handlers. What matters to them is advancing imperial interests in the middle east, not winning some pretend political puppet show that only exists to entertain and divert the common riff raff. They will happily lose the election and hand the genocidal baton off to Trump and his empire manager handlers who support all the same agendas as Biden’s.”

Biden very much does care that he gets elected. However, Caitlin is right that the empire doesn’t care which ancient psychopath is in charge. The Democrats and so-called liberals are up-in-arms about Trump taking the reins but those of us who’ve been paying attention realize that the march to fascism proceeds apace whether Biden or Trump is president. The Biden administration has done some good things in the regulatory space—e.g., preventing some mergers that would have happened in other adminstrations—but it’s done atrocious things in the foreign-policy and free-speech/constitutional-amendments spaces. Despite the progress that Biden administration has done, the net is that corporations have more power than ever, more money than ever, and labor—though more vocal than in recent decades—is losing ground rather than gaining it. I don’t believe that they’re really trying; I believe that they might try a little, but if it gets in the way of a dozen other priorities—all big-donor wishes—their “trying” falls flat.

“[…] empire managers and propagandists are claiming these campus protests are being fueled by foreign influence from evil regimes, even as the Israeli PM openly influences state governments to crack down on those protests.”

It’s a good point, of course. It’s just another example of people in power not caring about foreign influence per se but pretending that official enemies are causing whatever they want to be able to crack down on. When Israel influences or interferes, it’s to influence the empire to do what it wanted to do anyway. So it’s not even seen as influencing, since it’s Netanyahu is telling the U.S. to do the thing that the empire considers to be the obviously right thing to do anyway.

It’s ironic that Israel had its panties bunched up so hard it got bruises in its undercarriage when Chuck Schumer suggested the Netanyahu was going to have step down. They said: “How dare the U.S. deign to interfere in our affairs? What gives them the right?” A few weeks later, Netanyahu is making an official pronouncement that the U.S. had better start cracking skulls on its university campuses.

“If you’ve been shocked by the lies and propaganda your government and your media have been churning out about Gaza, it would probably be a good idea to take another look at what they’ve been telling you about Ukraine too. And Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Yemen while you’re at it.”

Amen. And about five-dozen other countries.

• Just read William Blum’s (Wikipedia) two main books: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. (1995) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000).
• While you’re at it, check out Smedley Butler’s book War Is a Racket (1935) to learn about interventions before WWII.
• The excellent podcast Blowback (Wikipedia) (seasons 1–4) will get you caught up on interventions in Iraq, Cuba, Korea, and Afghanistan.
• Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent is canonical and shows the way the media supports these interventions.
• For a sweeping indictment that the U.S. was ever a good nation, read Howard Zinn’s (Wikipedia) A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present (1980).
• I would be remiss not to mention the inestimable Robert Fisk’s (Wikipedia) The Great War of Civilization (2005).
• Pressure isn’t always military, as aptly described by John Perkins (Wikipedia) in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)

Meta to face EU probe for not doing enough to stop Russian disinformation by Javier Espinoza (Ars Technica)

I skimmed the article but it doesn’t really matter what it says. The headline made me laugh because, as much I think Meta should go down, I have to feel sorry for any company that’s charged with satisfying any NATO-affiliated country or organization about the lack of Russian propaganda. They see it everywhere. The only way to get out from under this onus is to publish only information that the EU or the U.S. has pre-approved. If anything that they disagree with slips through, then it is, by definition, Russian (or maybe also Chinese) propaganda. You can’t win this game. The only way to win is by not playing at all.

Americans Explain Why We Should Call The National Guard On College Protesters (The Onion)

“We’d call in the real Army, but most of their funding has been diverted to Israel.”

“Frees up the local police to arrest more homeless people.”

“The only way for American Jews to feel safe is the knowledge that state power can be mobilized at a moment’s notice to systemically target a specific population.”

“If they don’t become disillusioned with our country now, they might still waste their lives trying to change it.”

They just kept getting darker and darker.

Gaza Shows Us The Difference Between Evil Autocracies And Free Democracies by Caitlin Johnstone

“In Evil Autocracies the government controls the media and ensures that it only reports information which serves their interests, whereas in Free Democracies it is billionaires who do this.”

“In Evil Autocracies political speech is heavily restricted by the government, whereas in Free Democracies political speech is heavily restricted by Silicon Valley in collaboration with the government.”

“In Evil Autocracies people are kept too brutalized and cowed to rise up against their rulers, whereas in Free Democracies people are kept too propagandized and indoctrinated to rise up against their rulers.

“In Evil Autocracies the media feed the public a nonstop deluge of propaganda and people know it’s propaganda, whereas in Free Democracies the media feed the public a nonstop deluge of propaganda and people think it’s the news.”

Economy & Finance

Allow me to tell you how to run the economy

The U.S. Economy is Not What It’s Cracked Up To Be by Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch)

“How will Biden conceal the inflation rampaging throughout his term? The latest scheme appears to be draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the last drop. It’s already down to 17 percent, because Biden opened the spigot when his idiotic sanctions on Russian energy back in 2022 boosted prices at the pump into the stratosphere, always a terrifying development for homo politicus.”

“Clearly our dear leader is banking on the oil crunch, attendant hyper-inflation and all of us going broke hitting our pocketbooks post-November. Lucky us.”

Ukraine War Funding and Failed Russian Sanctions by Jack Rasmus (CounterPunch)

“The funds, however, will make little difference to the outcome of the war on the ground as it appears most of the military hardware funded by the $61 billion has already been produced and much of it already shipped. Perhaps no more than $10 billion in additional new weapons and equipment will result from the latest $61 billion passed by Congress”

“One might generously guess perhaps $10 billion at most represents weapons not yet produced, while $25-$30 billion represents weapons already shipped to Ukraine or in the current shipment pipeline.”

“[…] that $13.8 billion is all Ukraine will likely get in new weapons funding for the rest of 2024! Like the $23 billion already in theater, that will likely be burned up in a couple of weeks this summer once Russia’s coming major offensive—its largest of the war—is launched in late May or early June.”

“Biden’s ‘freeze and negotiate’ strategy is dead on arrival, since it is abundantly clear to the Russians it is basically about US and NATO ‘buying time’ and Russia has already been played by that one. As the popular US saying goes: “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”.”

“The 21 st Century Peace Through Strength Act calls for the US to transfer its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion of seized assets in Western banks that were frozen in 2022 at the outset of the Ukraine war. It provides a procedure to hand over the $5 billion to Ukraine to further finance its war efforts!”

“[…] from the sale of oil, gas and other commodities. But Europe holds $260 of the $300 billion, according to European Central Bank chair, Christine Lagarde. A tidy sum which Russia has threatened to retaliate against Europe should the EU follow the US/Biden lead and also begin to transfer its $260 billion to Ukraine.”

“It is clear the seizure & redistribution to Ukraine of the $300 billion via the Ukraine Defense Fund is the means by which the US/NATO plan longer term to continue to finance the Ukraine war after the $61 billion runs out sometime in 2024; and certainly in 2025 and beyond. For the US has no intention of ending its NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine anytime soon.”

“In just the past week it is obvious more US sanctions on China are also coming soon, including possibly an announcement of financial sanctions on China for the first time after US Secretary of State, Blinken’s, most recent visit.”

“Should Europe join the USA in transferring its $260 billion share of Russian assets in European banks (most of which is in Belgium), it’s almost certain that Russia will reply similarly and seize at least an equal amount of European assets still in Russia. The Russian Parliament has officially recently said as much.”

“What countries in the global South will now want to put (or leave) their assets in western banks, especially in Europe, if they think the assets could be seized should they disagree on policies promoted by the empire? It’s clear the US has now begun to impose ‘secondary’ sanctions on countries that don’t abide by its primary sanctions on Russia. Will the US also seize the assets of these ‘secondary’ countries now in western banks if they don’t go along with refusing to trade with Russia?”

“The longer run consequence of the $300 billion transfer and the exiting of the global South from the US empire can only be the decline in the use of the US dollar in global transactions and as a reserve currency. That sets in motion a series of events that in turn undermine the US domestic economy in turn: Less demand for the dollar results in a fall in the dollar’s value. That means less recycling of dollars back to the US, resulting in less purchases of US Treasuries from the Federal Reserve, which in turn will require the Fed to raise long term interest rates for years to come in order to cover rising US budget deficits.”

Are You Feeling It? by Max Kiefel (The Baffler)

“This constant sense of insecurity leads many to conclude, reasonably, that the economy has been engineered by the powerful to the benefit of big corporations. The puzzle is why this translates into support for Trump and not the Democrats,”

“[…] the Democratic Party, structurally speaking, is not set up to understand the subjective nature of economic experience or to speak to mass dissatisfaction. The real Great Disconnect is one between the party and the people.”

“[…] part of Obama’s recovery was the bailout of the auto industry in 2009, which was conditioned on a wage freeze for workers. When the bailout, which saved the industry, ended in 2015 and revenue rebounded, executives declined to reward workers and instead conducted a stock buyback and increased executive pay. For the workers whose wages remained frozen, the car was hardly back on the road.”

“[…] the ranks of the financially distressed expanded by 29 million and the food-insecure population increased by 6 million between September 2021 and September 2022. While a working-class American may have a job that pays slightly more than in 2020, the safety net that improved their economic security during the acute phase of the pandemic proved to be an aberration.”

“Under the politics of technocracy, workers are to be helped but not empowered. In the hollowed-out party, where Democrats flitter between the interests of advocacy groups and corporations, there are few avenues for overworked and insecure Americans to express that they need more than a temporary tax credit.”

Troubling the Water by Yangyang Cheng (Made in China Journal)

“The communist victory in 1949, described by the American intelligentsia as ‘the loss of China’, shattered this plan. China’s entry into the Korean War cemented its enemy status. US authorities barred China-born scientists from returning to their native land for fear of technology transfer (Wang et al. 2013). The Iron Curtain also closed the waterways. Crossing was forbidden.”

The arrogance of calling it the “loss of China” is breathtaking, but that’s how it’s commonly referred to in the west.

“Manhattan Project alumni and member of the Atomic Energy Commission Henry D. Smyth (1951) described scientists as assets of war who must be ‘stockpiled’ and ‘rationed’. When domestic production fell short, authorities looked overseas (Zulueta 2004). Geraldine Fitch (1956), the wife and daughter-in-law of American missionaries in China, exalted Chinese refugee scientists who fled the communist takeover to Hong Kong as ‘brains at a bargain’, who could be resettled ‘in the free world at the amazingly low per capita cost of $91’.”

“Science was no longer hailed as a vehicle for proletarian revolution. Instead, a new generation of technocrats, who took charge after Mao’s death in 1976, embraced the ‘bourgeois’ science the Communist Party had denounced as they steered China towards modernisation and a market economy (Greenhalgh 2008). The alignment of priorities for research and development affirmed many Western scientists’ belief in the universality of their pursuit. For Chinese scientists who had endured waves of brutal persecution, the notion of a depoliticised science was a welcoming refuge from authoritarian control.”

“For years after World War II, results from publicly funded work in the United States generally stayed in the public domain. This changed with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that allows and, indeed, encourages universities to patent research products and license them for profit. The US Supreme Court ruled in the same year in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that life forms ‘made by man’ can be patented. Everything from seeds to pathogens could be considered intellectual property, and the burgeoning field of molecular biology became a particularly lucrative discipline (Lieberwitz 2005). Universities, including public systems in California and Texas, now rival the largest private corporations in the annual number of patent applications, and regularly sue one another for exclusive access to knowledge (WIPO 2023).”

“After the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989, many academic associations in the United States halted collaborations with China. Some scientists called for a sustained boycott, but the engines of capital had little patience for moral deliberation. Lobbying from US businesses helped restore bilateral relations. A report in Science asked: ‘Will Profits Override Political Protests?’ (Marshall 1993).”

Always.

“The STA was renewed in 1991 with added provisions on intellectual property protection (US Department of State 2001). The emphasis on procedural fairness conceals structural injustices. Under a rules-based liberal order, individuals are discreet rights-bearers detached from community and devoid of history, hence equal before the law. But who wrote the laws and to whose benefit? In its early days, the United States was an unabashed thief of advanced technologies and skilled labour from Europe (Andreas 2013). The US Government strengthened intellectual property protection once the country reached a certain level of prosperity and exported its rules as it topped the global economic order. Since 1995, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) has forced all member states of the World Trade Organization (WTO) into a transnational intellectual property regime that disproportionately favours US businesses and burdens the developing world (Sell 2003). The game is rigged, and the house always wins.”

“[…] lengthy congressional investigation produced the Cox Report, which accused academic exchanges with China at US national laboratories of being conduits for espionage, and Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee was charged with stealing nuclear secrets for China (Stober and Hoffman 2001). Scholars have thoroughly refuted the Cox Report’s claims (Johnston et al 1999). Lee—never convicted of spying—eventually won a US$1.6 million settlement in a civil suit against the US Government and the press. The vindication on legal and technical grounds nevertheless left the underlying political motivations unchallenged.”

“Capitalism subsists on a hierarchy; value is extracted from an ever-expanding periphery to satiate the core.”

“In 2023, President Joe Biden declared a national emergency against the threat of ‘advancement by countries of concern in sensitive technologies and products’. The only ‘country of concern’ listed is the People’s Republic of China (The White House 2023).”

“The cataclysms of the twentieth century catapulted the country to the pinnacle of global politics. This inherently unjust and unsustainable position has been normalised by so many whose personal fortunes, professional prospects, and sense of self depend on US hegemony that any change is seen as upsetting the cosmic order.”

“As reported in Science, Democrats ‘think the best way for the United States to prevail is to run faster’ through more research funding, while Republicans, worried about federal spending, favour ‘hobbling China’ by denying it access to US-controlled technologies and tightening capital investment in China’s development (Mervis 2023a).”

This is patently belied by actual policy. The Biden administration piled on the sanctions and is set to enact more. It just rammed through the banning or forced sale of TikTok. Neither side wants to “run faster”. They both would rather punish and collect rent without providing value. They are absolutely not ashamed of this.

“Critics of US–China scientific exchange have pointed to Beijing’s protectionist stance and dictatorial regression as breaking the promise of ‘reciprocity’ (Razdan 2024). The proposed responses from the US side, however, are alarmingly like the restrictions put in place by the Chinese State.”

Duh. They’re the same. They both will protect their own economies. This is reasonable, no? A country wants to protect the stability of its economy in order to ensure security and a modicum of prosperity for its people. The U.S., however, is nearly unparalleled in its focus on protecting the economy for the benefit of a handful of oligarchs. China may be similar, to a degree, but there seems to be more of an additional focus on more than just the top 0.1%.

“What they hope to protect are not the safety and wellbeing of humanity but their own privileges and power. By denying the Chinese people agency, they project their greed and bloodlust on to a faceless other. The national border offers a convenient demarcation and the contours of an enemy. The epithet of ‘communism’ erases the role of global capital as a contributor to and beneficiary of repression in China and elsewhere. The banner of liberal democracy is waved as a shield to excuse similar behaviour from the home team as justified and necessary to defeat the other side.”

They know that they are hypocrites. They don’t care. As long as it gets them what they want. They have no moral core to deteriorate.

“Much more than a nuisance of extra paperwork, the advent of ‘research security’ is an affront to academic freedom. The reporting mechanisms normalise official monitoring of research activity. The risk assessments focus almost exclusively on country of origin and its relationship with the US Government: ‘foreign’ means suspect;”

“[…] if the risks of working with colleagues from a country the US Government does not like are as intrinsic as those from handling corrosive chemicals, a scientist has no choice but to accept the rules of the state as though they are the laws of nature.”

“It is not a coincidence that the US state and federal legislatures that have pursued prohibitions on academic exchanges with China have also tried to police gender, outlaw abortion, ban books, limit teachings on racism, and halt diversity and inclusion efforts at universities. These exclusionary measures emanate from a shared world view and advance a common aim: to uphold the United States’ position at the imperial core while preserving the myth of its innocence. The nation being secured is a white supremacist patriarchy. In this context, ‘China threat’ is another politically expedient catchphrase, like ‘Critical Race Theory’ or ‘wokeness’, coopted by powerful interests to encroach on the academy and manipulate scholarly inquiry.”

“The task, then, is to commit to the constant struggle, to not become cynical or complacent with power, to be deeply rooted in place and in touch with the local, and to forgo the confines of sovereignty and open one’s eyes to the water. Waves from distant shores bring whispers that a better world is possible—one where the ocean is not a battlefield and fish are not a commodity.”

Climate Change

Roaming Charges: Tin Cops and Biden Coming… by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The two families (Ferrero and Mars) who own the biggest chocolate corporations have more wealth than the combined GDP of the two countries (Ghana and Ivory Coast), which supply the most cocoa beans.”

“In China, EV sales have quadrupled in four years. Chinese EVs now account for about two-thirds of all global EV sales.”

“The US is producing more oil (13 million barrels on average every day in 2023) and exporting more LNG than at any time in history.”

“A new report from the International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2030 1 in 3 cars in China is expected to be electric, while only 1 in 5 in USA/Europe.”

Medicine & Disease

Roaming Charges: Tin Cops and Biden Coming… by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Rick Bright, virologist: Seeing a mutation that confers resistance to flu antivirals is a huge concern actually. If this were to spread, it could render flu drugs in stockpiles less effective. There are not many alternatives in abundant supply…This is not something to minimize; something to watch very closely.

“Why aren’t American chickens vaccinated? […] The US is the only major country that doesn’t have mandatory #H5N1 vaccines for poultry, even though an H5N1 vaccine for day-old chicks has been widely available and regularly updated for newly circulating variants.”

Art & Literature

25 Years Later, Alexander Payne’s Election Remains as Relevant as Ever by Daniel Joyaux (Roger Ebert.com)

“The elephant in the room when talking about “Election” is Hillary Clinton, in that comparing her (and others) to Tracy Flick over the years has become a sort of code for calling a woman a robotic, success-obsessed ambition machine who needs to stay in her lane. Like Jim McCallister, people saw Clinton’s Flick-like ambition as almost an existential threat, something that had to be stopped at all costs. And we see this outsized reaction to female ambition repeated over and over with women who reach the top of American cultural relevance: whether it’s Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, AOC and Beyoncé, Elizabeth Warren and Lady Gaga, or Serena Williams and Anne Hathaway, they all seem subject to constant barrages of scrutiny that men in comparable positions rarely receive. They’re all Tracy Flicks in a world of Jim McCallisters.”

Oh bullshit. Just cmon. Hillary Clinton is a monster. She was criticized not because she was a woman but because she’s a calculating, scheming narcissist asshole. She never cared about anyone more than herself and her career. This is just like Tracey Flick, actually. She very clearly didn’t care about anything but getting elected. For herself. What did she plan to do with her position? Who cares? The important thing is to get into the position. The author completely missed the point of Flick’s character.

“That so many people watch “Election” and not only sympathize with Jim’s viciousness but seem to view it as the correct—even necessary— response to Tracy’s try-hard ambition is, ummm, not great, Bob.”

Neither of them is a good person. Stop defending Flick. Tracy didn’t have a “try-hard ambition”, she had “do-anything-to-get-ahead ambition”. There’s a difference. That the author can’t tell the difference is, in her words, “ummm, not great, Bob.”

“The piece talked about Flick as “a kind of test for American attitudes toward women who dared to aim high,” questioning whether the seemingly inevitable ascendancy of the first female President (one who went to Yale, just like the students that inspired Tom Perotta to create Tracy Flick in the first place) meant “the specter of Tracy Flick was vanquished.””

This is so braindead. Hillary Clinton was a senator from the one of the richest and most power states in the union. She was secretary of state. She destroyed Libya and laughed about it. The whining about lack of regognition is just so incredible. It’s like you can never honor certain people enough—and to call them out on their obvious flaws—if not flat-out evil—is to detract them for purely identitarian reasons. Look at the litany of people she listed above as also unfairly maligned:

Taylor Swift? Really? She’s a billionaire. While Beyoncé might not personally be a billionaire, she’s about halfway there—and her husband is. Elizabeth Warren? Very wealthy, but not as wealthy as her husband. She’s a senator, though. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her because some people say mean things about her? Serena Williams? The poor thing never gets any recognition. How can anyone defend Kamala Harris? Because she’s a woman? Why? She’s a terrible person with terrible ideas who’s always used whatever power she gets to fuck over people with less power. Just like Hillary Clinton, but much less successfully.

“[…] all it took was one more glimpse of her in the flesh for that hatred to return, more powerful than ever.”

What a breathtakingly bad read of the film. Mcallister was angry that this amoral creature was destined for greatness in politics. Just like Clinton. Idiots like this reviewer are so wrapped up in identity that they forget that it’s possible to dislike someone based on substance.

The Cancellation Policy by Justin Smith-Ruiu

“Not all of this was mysterious to me. I mean, I knew perfectly well why Arthur had a score of 9.8. He had long been one of the resisters, not so much out of conscientious objection as out of simple lethargy, and only grudgingly got his first smartphone in late 2024, six months or so after they had become mandatory. Before that he’d lived with a primitive flip-phone from the ‘90s, the kind that sends no pings to the GPS satellites and that is completely useless for tracking and data-harvesting. He preferred cash transactions, and in every way possible continued to live his life sub-rosa.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Nothing on the Internet is real. Even the news isn’t real.

People get paid for attention. This kind of stuff gets attention. Attention gets advertising dollars. These people are actors playing roles. This is entertainment.

Are you not entertained?

Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China − Global China Pulse by Gina Anne Tam (Global China Pulse)

“They are told in numerous direct and indirect ways that Mandarin is the sole representative Chinese language and all others are less important, less powerful, and less alive—significant only as relics of local heritage, not as a living thing people use to communicate and express themselves.”

“As Jacob Mikanowski (2018) writes, English is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.”

“[…] in some regions, particularly in the south, Mandarin speakers who do not speak the local Chinese language can face distrust or discrimination by locals who deem them ‘outsiders’. More broadly, Mandarin hegemony functions differently in the so-called Han heartland—where the most common languages are often other Chinese languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, or Fujianese—compared with how it works in western territories, where a plurality of the population speaks languages that are not Chinese at all.”

“In places like Mongolia, Tibet, and especially Xinjiang, non-Han people who speak their native tongue are often met with suspicions of political disloyalty or subversion […]”

“Expressions of Mandarin hegemony are particularly violent in Xinjiang. There, Mandarin education is used as a tool of violent colonial dominance, as the tens of thousands of detainees in the territory’s extrajudicial detention camps are forced to learn Mandarin and punished for speaking Uyghur. These examples also show us just how racialised is Mandarin hegemony. Its power is enforced differently against those who are Han Chinese than against those who are not.”

“The Academy Award–winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once shows a family who slip in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin (Kwan and Scheinert 2022). A new Netflix show about a family living between Taipei and Los Angeles, The Brothers Sun ,has characters who intermix Taiwanese and Cantonese with Mandarin (Wu and Falchuk 2024). These representations showcase the true multilingualism of the Chinese-speaking community, despite what official rhetoric may present.”

The Modern Curse of Overoptimization by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Getting a restaurant reservation is a good example. Once upon a time, you called a restaurant’s phone number and asked about a specific time and they looked in the book and told you if you could have that slot or not. […] being online means that the reservation system is immediate and automatic, so you can train a bot to grab as many reservations as you want, near-instantaneously, and you can do so in a way that the system doesn’t notice. […] The outcome of all this is that getting a reservation at desirable places is a nightmare and results in a secondary market that, like seemingly everything in American life, is reserved for the rich. The internet has overoptimized getting a restaurant reservation and the result is to make it more aggravating and less egalitarian.”

“As has been much discussed, nearly the exact same scenario has made getting concert tickets a tedious and ludicrously-pricy exercise in frustration.”

“Consider travel. Complaints about traveling have become relentless and unavoidable. In particular, there’s a widespread sense that every place you might want to travel to is stuffed to the brim with tourists (like you), which for many defeats much of the aesthetic and emotional point of traveling.”

Technology

Murky Consent: An Approach to the Fictions of Consent in Privacy Law by Daniel J. Solove (SSRN/Elsevier)

“In the United States, the notice-and-choice approach predominates; organizations post a notice of their privacy practices and people are deemed to consent if they continue to do business with the organization or fail to opt out. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) uses the express consent approach, where people must voluntarily and affirmatively consent.”

LLMs & AI

Quoting Martin Kleppmann by Simon Willison

“I’ve worked out why I don’t get much value out of LLMs. The hardest and most time-consuming parts of my job involve distinguishing between ideas that are correct, and ideas that are plausible-sounding but wrong. Current AI is great at the latter type of ideas, and I don’t need more of those.”

An editorial dialog with GPT-4 by Mark Liberman (Language Log)

“If I give you a link to a Google Doc of about 5000 words, can create a version edited down to 2700 words or less?”

tl;dr: he asked it to do “or less” and it went hog-wild with it, trimming his document from almost 5,000 words to 1,100 words—“well below your target of 2700 words.” He asked it revise again, but sticking between 2,700 and 2,350 words. It “expanded” the document to 647 words, then to 740 words, then 462 words, then 705 words, then 476 words, then 581 words, and, finally, even after being told to add 200 words to the original too-short 1,056-word summary, … 673 words. It utterly failed to provide a summary according to the simplest constraints 8 times. If you know how quickly these things produce text, imagine how long Liberman sat there, watching it laboriously produce one utterly inadequate summary after another.

LLMs suck at numbers. They suck at a lot of things. Almost no-one will notice until it’s too late.

Programming

2.5x better performance: Rama vs. MongoDB and Cassandra by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“[…] not only is Rama in these benchmarks materializing equivalent indexes as MongoDB / Cassandra with great comparable performance, it’s also materializing a durable log. This is a non-trivial amount of additional work Rama is doing, and we weren’t expecting Rama to perform so strongly compared to databases that aren’t doing this additional work.”

“Rama’s throughput stabilized after 50 minutes, and MongoDB’s throughput continued to decrease all the way to the end of the three hour test. By the end, Rama’s throughput was 9x higher.”

“Benchmarks should always be taken with a grain of salt. We only tested on one kind of hardware, with contrived data, with specific access patterns, and with default configs. It’s possible MongoDB and Cassandra perform much better on different kinds of data sets or on different hardware.”

“Rama’s performance is reflective of the amount of work we put into its design and implementation. One of the key techniques we use all over the place in Rama’s implementation is what we call a “trailing flush”. This technique allows all disk and network operations to be batched even though they’re invoked one at a time.”

“[…] since Rama is an integrated system we expect its most impressive performance numbers to be when benchmarked against combinations of tooling (e.g. Kafka + Storm + Cassandra + ElasticSearch). Rama eliminates the overhead inherent when using combinations of tooling like that.”

Borrow checking, RC, GC, and the Eleven (!) Other Memory Safety Approaches by Evan Ovadia (Languages ∩ Architecture)

“Before this, we only had three choices for memory safety, each with it’s own tradeoffs: Garbage collection is easy, flexible, has high throughput, but uses more energy , more memory , and has nondeterministic pauses. Reference counting is simple and uses less memory, but is slow and can leak cycles. Borrow checking is faster and allows for aliasing inline data, but can cause complexity and can’t do patterns like observers , intrusive data structures , many kinds of RAII, etc.”

“Austral takes it a step further: it’s not only safe, but also correct by adding liveness via linear types which any code can use to ensure that some future action will happen. This is a pattern I call Higher RAII in Vale, but I think it naturally occurs in any language with linear types.”

“Arena-only programming is where we never use malloc or free, and always use arenas instead, even for function returns. This is a familiar paradigm to users of C, Ada, Zig, and especially Odin which has a way to automatically decouple code from allocator strategy.”

“Verona then takes this a step further by adding regions, giving the user more fine-grained control over when and where garbage collection might happen, and lets them use a regular bump allocator for a region instead if they wish. If Verona or a new language allowed us to set the maximum memory for a GC’d region, that would make the entire approach completely deterministic, solving the biggest problem for garbage collection (in my opinion). Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I believe that 30 years from now, this blend is going to be the most widely used paradigm for servers.”

“Constraint references is a blend of reference counting and single ownership (in the C++ sense, unrelated to borrow checking). In this approach, every object has a single owner, doesn’t necessarily need to be on the heap, and has a counter for all references to it. When we try to destroy the object, we just assert that there are no other references to this object. This is used surprisingly often. Some game developers have been using this for a long time, and it can be used as the memory safety model for an entire language like in Gel.”

“Mutable value semantics is a very interesting approach. Imagine a Java or Swift where every object has exactly one reference pointing to it at any given time (similar to move-only programming) but that reference can be lent out to a function call. It’s like a Rust with no shared references (&), only unique references (&mut) which can’t be stored in structs. It’s simple, fast, and powerful, though we may have to .clone() more often than even Rust programs.”

“This is an important memory safety concept: Memory unsafety comes not from use-after-free, but use-after-reuse. In fact, even that’s too loose; memory unsafety comes from “use after shape change””

“I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile. In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks. Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said “Of course it leaks”. He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to “support” the leaks. Since the missile will explode when it hits its target or at the end of its flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.”

“We often fall into a mental trap where we optimistically believe that we’ve solved everything there is to solve, and pessimistically believe there’s nothing left to discover. That mental trap is a mind-killer, because we can’t discover new things if we aren’t open to their existence.”

“It’s a tricky topic. When one thinks not just about memory safety but about safety in general, a null-safe functional GC’d language has an edge over other approaches, even over borrow checking which forces long-term-referrable objects into central collections which have their own potential edge cases.”

Fight the Inner Impostor with Just-In-Time Learning by Niko Heikkilä in 2020

“As developers, we are frequently caught in a feeling of incompleteness. Our work is never done. The code we write is far from perfection. There’s always room for improvement by refactoring, or even rewriting complete pieces of the software. Moreover, masses of new frameworks and libraries catch our eyes daily. What about that next certificate or promotion?”

Certificates? Promotions? Wrong reasons.

Why you need a “WTF Notebook” by Nat Bennett (Simpler Machines)

“There’s always stuff that makes me go “wtf” on a new team. The team talks for an hour in retro about a serious problem, and then leaves without making any action items. The tests don’t run locally and no one seems to notice. Big chunks of the build board are always red. Only one person can do some critical, time-sensitive thing.”

“Once I’ve got a nice big list, I start crossing things off. There are four reasons at this point that I might cross off something I’ve put on that list:”

1. There’s actually a good reason for it
2. The team is already working on a fix
3. The team doesn’t care about it
4. It’s really easy to fix

“I’ll ask why things on the list are that way, and how they got to be that way. I’m trying to establish credibility as someone who’s genuinely curious and empathetic, who’s patient, and who respects the expertise of my coworkers. That’s the reputation that’s going to let me make changes later.”

“Generally, I’ll find out that the things that problems I’ve noticed are around for one of a few reasons. The team hasn’t noticed it The team has gotten used to it The problem is relatively new, and the old problem it replaced was much worse They don’t know how to fix the problem They’ve tried to fix the problem before and failed.”

“Before I started keeping this kind of list, I brought up problem I saw immediately, as soon as I noticed it. The reputation I got was, “Nat’s always complaining about things. Nat thinks we’re never doing things right.” People stopped listening to me. I was personally frustrated, and professionally ineffective.”

“There are always so many problems on a team, so many things that could be better, that I’m only ever going to solve a handful of them. Working on problems in the order I noticed them is rarely the most effective order. So the WTF Notebook gives me a place to park the impulse to fix it now, damn it! until I have more context for deciding what to work on first.”

Your moleskin is adorable. I just use work items. But the concept is solid.

Adventures serializing absolutely everything in C# by Isadora Sophia

This is a wonderfully detailed report about migrating a framework and multiple dependent products with highly nontrivial serialization from NewtonSoft.Json to System.Text.Json. The upshot is that C#’s standard library now has feature-parity with NewtonSoft.Json. The author also notes that NewtonSoft.Json is no longer being updated to take advantage of the last two versions of C#’s features (e.g., init and required, which were introduced pretty specifically for serialization).

Although she had to do quite a bit of plumbing to get it working, it’s worth noting that nearly all of the code was in a support and utility classes that are registered with the option passed to the serialization/deserialization calls. For the most part, she did not need to touch the types themselves, keeping the code relatively clean. Only in one part did I see that she used reflection, which won’t play nicely with AOT, but maybe that’s not a goal.

“Again, I need this to work in native AOT. Apparently, it absolutely does not work well to instantiate generic types on the fly in native AOT because of how generic works in native code. Even if you skip trimming your assembly, a generic type that has not existed in compilation will throw an exception if created during runtime.”

Deep Dive on LINQ with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

This is a great interview with the master of performance-optimization in .NET Stephen Toub. Stephen Toub’s the guy who writes the 100+-page release notes on performance. See

• Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (46 pages)
• Performance Improvements in .NET 6 (109 pages)
• Performance Improvements in .NET 7 (170 pages)
• Performance Improvements in .NET 8 (235 pages)
• …more to come.

In this one, at 26:00, Scott flubbed the joke. It doesn’t really matter, but the original saying was:

This was “upgraded” to:

See Two Hard Things by Martin Fowler.

At 33:00, Toub talks about how the Current property of IEnumerable is not checked for nullability because … it can technically always be null, but we also don’t use it that much and we don’t want the compiler yelling at you for possibly-null access when the item type is a value type (for example) or a non-nullable reference type. See the code.

I actually watched this next one first. If you’re relatively well-versed in C#, .NET, and Linq, then you can just jump to the second video. I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

At 49:00, they discuss the use of goto, where Hanselmann says, “there’s the kind that you can see; and there are the kind that are hidden,” which I feel like he fumbled as well. I think what he meant was that there are implicit gotos everywhere. A goto maps to an assembler jmp, so every if has an implicit goto. The break statement inside of a case block of a switch statement jumps (or goes to) the end of the switch block.

You should be careful about using goto—i.e., it’s a code smell—but sometimes it’s the clearest and most concise way of expressing intent. In their case, they used it to “fall through” from one case statement to the next with goto case 2. I feel the same way about the continue keyword in a loop. I like to write all of my loops in a consistent and idiomatic manner. That means I use break. So, for me, using continue is a code smell, but sometimes it’s the most elegant way of expressing the intent.

At about 55:00, Hanselmann shows Toub how to use Winget to install SysInternals and then to use ZoomIt for presentations.

In this presentation, I notice that Toub doesn’t use the “extract variable” refactoring either. I’m not sure whether something like that is available in VS. He also installs packages with the VS NuGet interface rather than just adding the package reference manually in the project file.

An even DEEPER Dive into LINQ with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

At about 22:00, he mentions something interesting that makes me change my opinion about the type to use for private variables. I’d always used interfaces to keep it clear which API my implementations depended on. This included list variables, which I would type as IList<IBase> instead of List<IBase>. Toub says that the second formulation is better for performance because the compiler doesn’t have to deal with virtual dispatch—it can just call the functions of List directly.

This makes me realize that it’s a good reason to use var. When you use var with new, the resulting type of the local variable will automatically be the “right” type for performance. The same goes for target-typed new expressions, which force you to use a non-interface type for fields.

There are inspections that help you shape your private APIs for optimal performance.

At 27:00, they talk about the IDE features for tracking change and inspection states. First of all, Toub doesn’t know left from right, but he’s a genius so we’ll grant him that. Second of all, neither he nor Hanselmann really understands what the file-state markings are. The IDE tracks not only unsaved changes but also uncommitted changes. That’s why there is so much green in the gutter on the left and the right: because Toub had rewritten much of the file since the last commit but he’s been saving the file the entire time. It’s an important distinction to make for understanding what’s going on. The right-hand side of the right-hand gutter shows inspections: suggestions, warnings, and errors.

It was interesting to see that, since Toub uses Visual Studio without ReSharper, he instinctively used the mouse to copy/paste the name of the constructor from the class after he’d renamed the class. That is, he’d renamed the class and, in order to fix the constructor being named incorrectly, he copy/pasted with the mouse. With ReSharper, he could have just pressed Alt + Enter and selected the quick-fix called “This is a constructor”, which just renames the method to the name of the containing class.

I could see several places where he used the mouse rather than being able to stay on the keyboard, letting the IDE do his work for him. For example, he also copy/pasted the name of the iterator class again in order to use the more highly specialized version—but he could have just started typing to have the auto-complete suggest the right type. Or he could have used multiple clipboards to paste the type name that he’d just copied before (when he’d fixed the constructor).

When the type of the actual argument no longer matched the formal argument, he copy/pasted again to get the more specific type. Here, he could have also asked ReSharper to show variables in scope with an appropriate type. It would have shown only array and been done with it. No mouse, no copy/pasting, no moving away from the keyboard, no guesswork.

At about 35:00 or so, shit gets real, as Toub starts hand-optimizing the code for his iterator. He does some obvious stuff first, removing iterator complexity that is no longer needed when the iterator has to handle only fixed-length and integer-indexable arrays. Next, though, he does a neat trick with a uint cast that ensures that a check for i < source.Length will never be true, even if i is less than 0 (because (uint)-1 wraps to approximately 2 × int.Max, so it will never be more than Length. After that, he talks about how the jitter can use that condition to avoid the automated bounds-checking that comes with .NET’s managed code by default when indexing the array.

So the cast not only avoids a branch, it also avoids the hidden cost of bounds-checking. Nice! 👏 After running the benchmark again, we can see that he’s rebuilt the optimizations available in C# by default. Very nice! 👏 👏 This is why running against a newer runtime and library may increase the performance ⏱ of your own code. Toub mentions that these types of optimizations are great, but they have to balance the value of the optimization versus the additional code to maintain as well as the size of the runtime assemblies.

At 49:00, he mentions that the size issue also affects Native AOT, since AOT can’t take advantage of PGO or anything else that the jitter has available to eliminate unnecessary code. AOT doesn’t have as much information available, so it can’t optimize away as much code. That is, if it can’t guarantee that only the array-optimized version is called, then it has to keep all of the versions, increasing the binary size. There are also vector-optimizations and SIMD-optimizations that may have to be included. For more information, see AOT, JIT, and PGO in .NET.

The extremely detailed chapter overview.

00:00:00 Deep Dive into Implementing Iteration in Programming
00:01:50 Understanding the Implementation and Functionality of Custom Iterators in Link
00:07:45 Discussing Optimization Strategies and Array Specialization in Programming
00:10:43 Understanding the Use of Sharp Lab and Compiler Optimization in C
00:15:20 Discussing Optimizations in Link Methods in Programming
00:16:39 Understanding SIMD and its Application in Computer Processing
00:20:12 Discussion on Code Analysis and Optimization Techniques in Software Development
00:23:46 Discussing and Implementing Iteration-Based and Manual Arrays in Programming
00:30:30 Exploring Compiler Optimizations and State Management in Programming
00:37:04 Exploring Hyper and Micro Optimization in Programming
00:40:11 Exploring Code Optimizations and Trade-offs in Programming
00:45:41 Discussing the Challenges and Implications of Optimizations in Software Performance
00:47:54 Discussing the Implementation and Optimization of Select in Programming
00:51:49 Discussion on Programming Syntax and Benchmarks
00:54:41 Implementing and Discussing Iteration Code in Programming
00:57:12 Understanding the Functionality and Implementation of C# Compiler Keywords
01:02:42 Improving Functionality and Performance of Manual Implementation of Iteration Methods
01:08:39 Exploring the Optimization and Implementation of Select Operators in Programming
01:12:57 Understanding and Optimizing Iteration Operations in Programming
01:18:09 Implementing and Utilizing LINQ Programming: A Two-Parter

There’s another video that I can only imagine is just as informative:

Writing async/await from scratch in C# with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

At 27:30, they start to discuss about the nomenclature of Task and how it differs from an Action. It’s funny that neither of them mentioned that tasks in .NET are called promises pretty much everywhere else (JavaScript, Java, etc.). Some libraries also use the word future. For more information, see Futures and promises (Wikipedia).

As he’s building everything, it is really astonishing to note that Hanselmann has to tell Toub that you can have Visual Studio generate methods for you. How does he not know that? When he did it, he then used the mouse to select “Find References” from the shortcut menu instead of just pressing F12. When he got to the method, he said “Oh, it didn’t implement it,” as if disappointed that Copilot hadn’t botshit a version in there for him. He was going to write it himself anyway, but it was telling that he’s gotten so accustomed to Copilot just filling in implementation.

A little while later, he’s learned the new tool, telling Hanselmann that he’s going to use his “trick” to create the method.

At around 52:30, he implemented a try/catch to “be a good citizen” and accepted what Copilot had recommended for him, but it didn’t match what he said he was writing. He said “so we always set the task result” but the code that he/Copilot wrote returned from the catch, which means that the task result isn’t going to be set when there is an exception. Now I don’t know which one he meant: what he said he wanted to write (did he misspeak?) or what he actually wrote (which Copilot wrote for him and he might have automatically accepted).

Since he has no tests whatsoever, this is exactly the kind of subtle bug that might go undetected for quite a while, as it’s in the exception-handling code. It might also be quite difficult to diagnose.

When he wrote the exact same thing again at 1:00:00, he seemed to indicate that what it wrote was OK: i.e., it either sets the exception or it sets the result.

At 56:00, he gets to the point of trying to get to the synchronous calling style supported by await and builds his own logic. It works, but it still can’t be used with the await keyword. He quickly implements a TaskAwaiter and voila! 🧙‍♂️ it works! His very own implementation of the Task pattern that integrates with the compiler.

Optimizing INP: A deep dive by Chrome for Developers (YouTube)

The author goes through several optimizations.

• He starts by showing how to turn on the “mid-tier mobile” testing mode, which uses fast 3G and slows the CPU down 4x. This makes it easier to spot problems on a developer-class desktop/laptop.
• He then shows how to set up and use the profiler, zooming in and out of the extremely rich data recorded for every interaction.
• He discovers and removes a polyfill that’s no longer needed. It turns out that that version of polyfill was broken and always active—regardless of whether the feature was supported natively.
• Another fix was to remove the background blur when making an element inert (MDN) because it was engaging the GPU and causing a much longer paint when the browser had to animate the drop-shadow moving across the blurred element.
• Another fix involved simply moving an interaction away from the initial event handler by executing it in a timer instead. He used a dead-simple debouncing technique to ensure that only the most recent task would be executed.
• Another fix was to remove complex logic for avoiding setting the display property on a DOM element. The solution there is to simply let the browser do its thing; it’s much more optimized than you think. The code that was trying to avoid touching the DOM was much slower than actually setting a DOM property.
• Another fix was to defer and chunk appending results as well as setting styling for found terms by using async.

The Only .NET Scheduler You Should Be Using! by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is a great introduction to the Hangfire library. He shows how to use in-memory storage, quickly start a Docker instance with Linux SqlServer, connect to that database from Rider, use the Hangfire dashboard for real-time monitoring, use the recurring job manager, examine the serialization format, and so on. He covers a lot in just 16.5 minutes.

I’ve used Hangfire before, but it looks a lot more well-integrated than when I last used. As the top comment on the video notes, Quartz is another, similar library that I’ve also used quite extensively—and ended up replacing Hangfire with in my framework. Still, Hangfire’s dashboard looks quite nice. Check out The Differences Between Quartz.NET and Hangfire (CodeMaze)

Write Better CSS With Modern CSS by Temani Afif (CSS Tip)

I’m just going to cite the whole article here, because it’s short and it’s really nice.

“A lot of new CSS features can help you optimize your code and reduce redundancy.”

• CSS Nesting
• CSS Variables
• Media Query range features

“Here is an example of a CSS code with a lot of redundancy”

/*
  The same selector 3 times!! 🤮
  max-width? does it mean bigger or smaller?? 🫣
  grid-template-columns everywhere !! 😬
*/
.container {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(3,1fr);
  gap: 10px;
}
@media (max-width: 800px) {
  .container {
    grid-template-columns: repeat(2,1fr);  
  }
}
@media (max-width: 400px) {
  .container {
    grid-template-columns: 1fr;  
  }
}

“It can be optimized like below using the modern features”

/*
  one selector 🤩
  one property 🤩
  clear media queries 🤩
*/
.container {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(var(–n,3),1fr);
  gap: 10px;
  @media (width < 800px) {
    –n: 2;
  }
  @media (width < 400px) {
    –n: 1;
  }
}

Really nice. The nesting and media-query range operators are nice, but the use of the CSS variable -n is quite elegant. It’s 3 equal columns b default, then 2 if the width is smaller than 800px, and only 1 if it’s less than 400px. With container-queries, he could have made it rely on the immediate an arbitrary parent-container’s size rather than the viewport width.

Fun

Oglaf

“To make your passing easier on your loved ones, why not just be an asshole your whole life?”

Has the War Against Palestine Killed Jewish Comedy? by Stephen F. Eisenman (CounterPunch)

“Here another, told by Cohen’s longtime friend, Henny Youngman:”

“I’m in a bar when suddenly the man next to me falls off his stool onto the floor. I pick him up, but it happens again. So. I say to the bartender: ‘This man has had too much to drink, why don’t I take him home?’ I drag the man out onto the street where he falls down. I pick him up; he falls down; I pick him up again. Finally, I get him into my car to take him to his house. When we arrive, I help him out, but he falls down, so I pick him up. At last, we ring the bell, and his wife comes to the door. I say: “Madame, I have brought your husband back.” She says: ‘So, where’s his wheelchair?’”

“The protagonist of the joke thinks he’s a mensch but is actually a schlemiel, always dropping a disabled man. The wife is also Jewish; rather than ask where her husband has been, she cuts to the chase: “So, where’s his wheelchair?””

It’s a good joke, but I would punch it up a bit. The wife cutting to the chase could be better, I think.