Links and Notes for May 31st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
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Public Policy & Politics

John Kirby lying his face off

I thought to myself: that’s an ugly tie, too. Is no-one going to ask him about his ugly tie? Waitaminnit. Is John Kirby low-key wearing Israel’s flag as a tie? Could it be? I can’t believe that they don’t have someone to vet his haberdashery. Is this a low, low dog-whistle to ensure Israel?

US Endgame in Ukraine — War Without End, Amen by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Let us pause for a sec to bring to mind all those who have died in the war that erupted in Ukraine a year and a few months after Joe Biden refused, even mocked, Vladimir Putin’s honorable diplomatic démarche. All the maimed and displaced, all the towns and cities destroyed, all the farmland turned into moonscape. And the all-but-complete peace accord, negotiated in Istanbul a few weeks into the war that the U.S. and Britain rushed to scuttle. And of course all the billions of dollars, somewhere north of $100 billion now, not spent on improving Americans’ lives but spent instead on arming a regime in Kiev that steals aid extravagantly while fielding an army with professed neo–Nazis.”

“If we keep recent history in mind, we will be able to see that the viscously irresponsible decisions of a couple of year ago, so wasteful of human life and common resources, are now repeated such that it is now certain the brutalities and waste will continue indefinitely even as their pointlessness is now way, way, way beyond denying.”

“Brigades average 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers each and can run to 8,000 or even more. Hersh’s report suggests that a considerable number of Ukrainian troops, and maybe a very considerable number, are now effectively in mutiny against the AFU’s high command.”

“I am beginning to take offense, honestly. If I am going to be subjected to incessant propaganda, I demand, I absolutely demand that it is sufficiently sophisticated to be at least entertaining.”

“Let us all declare we feel unsafe as we realize what these people are talking about and what they are risking. Any allowance for expanded use of U.S.–made weapons against Russian targets, which will require American personnel on the ground in Ukraine, will unambiguously escalate the proxy war into a direct conflict between the U.S. and the Russian Federation.”

“Reuters filed an impressive, equation-changing exclusive last week featuring unmistakably intentional leaks from the Kremlin signaling President Putin’s desire to stop the war in Ukraine and negotiate a ceasefire. Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn cited interviews with “five people who work with or have worked with Putin at a senior level in the political and business worlds.””

“They then quoted one of their sources, “a senior Russian source who has worked with Putin and has knowledge of top-level conversations in the Kremlin,” as asserting, “‘Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire—to freeze the war.’””

“As Faulconbridge and Osborn report, Putin continues to reject the Zelensky regime’s insistence that no talks can begin until Ukraine regains all territory it has surrendered since the war began in 2014, including Crimea. “Let them resume,” they quote Putin as saying Friday, “[but] not on the basis of what one side wants.””

“Via his leaky confidants, who were almost certainly authorized, Putin proposes what amounts to an armistice. Both sides would stop shooting, and territorial dominion would remain as it is—not necessarily etched into the earth, but until both sides can negotiate on to another step toward a lasting settlement.”

“There is a legal principle here that goes back to the Romans. Qui tenet teneat —“he who holds may go on holding,” roughly — is often a feature of Asian diplomacy, which is more accepting of fluidity and temporary uncertainties that Westerners are usually not prepared to accept. Chas Freeman, the noted diplomat, taught me this years ago via the complex disputes over maritime jurisdictions in the South China Sea.”

““A frozen conflict, such as those in Kashmir, Korea and Cyprus,” John Whitbeck a noted international attorney, said in a privately circulated memo the other day, “while not ideal, would be far better than more war and very much in the interests of mankind.” This brings us back to… to December 2021, actually.”

This was what that brilliant Chinese-American diplomat Carl Zha was arguing for two years ago. A line of actual control. See an interview with him that I documented in Carl Zha on the Chinese Summit (Behind the Headlines).

“This is a reference to a conference Zelensky and his ministers have organized for two days in mid–June. The Swiss have agreed to host it at a resort owned by the Qatari government near Lake Lucerne, and the Swiss Foreign Ministry, buying into the Ukrainians’ pretensions, is calling it “a peace summit.” A peace summit? Please tell me how this works. The Russians are not even invited. What it amounts to is a Ukrainian attempt to get the world to line up behind it as it continues to wage a war it has already lost. As a former Swiss official said to me over dinner Saturday evening, “It’s about money. Kiev needs money.””

“Maybe Putin is serious about his proposed armistice, maybe there is less in it than it seems. But no one on the opposing side wants even to explore the idea of ending the war? The net response to the new Russian advances toward Kharkiv and the Kremlin’s artful leaks last week is to launch a new phase in a proxy war the West has already lost — a phase that also seems to have little chance of success, but holds more danger than any truly responsible statesman would ever risk.”

“[…] what happens when a powerful nation cannot lose a war it has already lost?”

Mushroom clouds.

Toeing The Trump Line by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“That the jury convicted has absolutely no bearing on the question of whether the legal theory upon which the enhancement of the case from misdemeanor to felony was sound. That the evidence was strong and more than sufficient that Trump falsified business records is one thing, but the conclusion that it was done with “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof” is quite another.

“That the state of New York law does not require the jury to be unanimous on what the “another crime” must be is one issue. Much as I think the law is wrong and deprives the defense of notice of what the prosecution is alleging such that he can prepare an adequate defense, I recognize that it is the current state of the law. Justice Juan Merchan has no authority to rule or charge anything other than the law of New York as it currently stands.”

“[…] the strong evidence proffered in support of the primary charge, falsifying business records, does not suffice to prove the enhancement of “another crime.” Was it proven? Was the evidence sufficient[?] That’s subsumed in the gushing praise for the conviction, the jury’s fortitude and the prosecution’s acumen.

“The problem, however, is that going all in for Trump’s conviction, or against Trump’s conviction, has become a test of tribal loyalty. If you persist in raising questions about the case, you must be a Trumpkin because loyal Trump haters cheer the conviction and never utter a word that provides aid and comfort to the enemy […]”

“[…] my feelings toward [Trump] have nothing to do with my thoughts against the legal issues in the case. I can defend murderers while hating murder. Even more importantly, if the law can be twisted to get one defendant, it can be twisted to get others. That’s how the law goes terribly wrong.”

Prosecutors Got Trump — But They Contorted the Law by Elie Honig (NYMag)

“So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) — and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations — the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed “with intent to commit another crime.” Here, according to prosecutors, the “another crime” is a New York State election-law violation, which in turn incorporates three separate “unlawful means”: federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of still more documents. Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)

“In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.”

“Trump will appeal, as is his right, and he’s certain to contest the inventive charges constructed by the DA. I won’t go so far as to say an appeals court is likely to overturn a conviction — New York law is broad and hazy enough to (potentially) allow such machinations — but he’s going to have a decent shot at a reversal.

““No man is above the law.” It’s become cliché, but it’s an important point, and it’s worth pausing to reflect on the importance of this core principle. But it’s also meaningless pablum if we unquestioningly tolerate (or worse, celebrate) deviations from ordinary process and principle to get there.”

I don’t think he’s being forceful enough here. What does it even mean to say that no man is above the law when the law doesn’t apply equally to everyone? That a manipulation of the “law” is overwhelmingly used to snare the poor in no way justifies snaring the rich with the same means. That’s no different than vigilantism. When it’s done in an attempt to sideline political opponents, it’s incredible that anyone can cheer it. That they do is much more a reflection of the moral debasement and utter depravity of most people. Most people seem to be utterly unaware of the underpinnings of civil society that actually keep them safe and will cheer the blowing of the airlock that throws out Trump—not thinking at all that they now have a giant hole in the side of their spaceship out of which others will soon fly. Perhaps it’s because they know that bulkheads are in place to protect them. Perhaps it’s because they’re just a bunch of brainwashed simpletons. Perhaps because the whole thing is just too damned complex for most people to even both making heads of tails of.

I dunno, though. I’d completely ignored the case—except for perhaps one or two short articles—and have read a few summaries since the decision. It’s not complicated and thinking and informed people across the political spectrum agree that it was a railroading. The U.S. is, once again, not covering itself in glory.

The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.

“This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation.”

“Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense. You won’t understand why military operations are being waged which don’t seem to benefit the American people in any way, and which if anything actually harm the national security interests of the United States. You won’t understand why US foreign policy remains the same no matter who’s in office, regardless of party or platform.”

“There’s the nonstop worldwide military operation, and then there’s the theatrical set pieces of an official government slapped together in the foreground which we’re all meant to pretend has something to do with all the wars and militarism we are seeing. In reality the war machine just does what it’s going to do while the official elected suits in Washington put on these performances where they argue about abortion and Donald Trump to make it look like the US has a real government that’s making real decisions.”

“It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine. The local inhabitants of the hub of the globe-spanning empire are kept too propagandized, entertained, distracted, busy, poor, and sick to have a truth-based relationship with what’s being done in their name around the world, and if they do make some space in their life to become politically engaged they are herded into a kayfabe two-party system where both factions support war, militarism, imperialism, plutocracy and ecocidal capitalism but put immense amounts of energy into empty culture warring over issues that nobody with any real power cares about.”

This seems to be representative of the type of gloating that Greenfield is talking about above. Will they ever understand? (Reddit)

The text of the screenshotted tweet—I hate even writing that—reads:

“For MAGAs who still can’t understand.

“Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments made to women during the 2016 election. These payments aimed to prevent damaging stories from surfacing and thus influence the election outcome. This included using shell companies and disguising transactions to conceal the true nature of the payments, which is considered election interference by deceiving voters”

Almost nothing about this comment is correct. The payments were not made during the election. They were made long before that. The falsifications came after the election, in 2017 and 2018. The second sentence makes no chronological sense, as payments had been made long before the election and couldn’t reasonably be considered to be hush money for it. The third sentence is a complete mishmash, which almost seems like someone asked ChatGPT what it thinks happened.

The comments are a hallelujah chorus, as expected. None of them really understand what happened either, or why anyone interested in real justice should be worried about how it happened. A lot of goodwill and trust was burned to make these charges stick. No-one seems to care.

The comments are only interesting insofar as they are completely irony- and introspection-free. The ones I cite below are basically a mirror for the commentator, should they be willing to look into it.

“You can lead a person to information, but you can’t make them think.”

“They won’t understand, MAGAts simply don’t have the capacity or ability to understand much of anything.”

“This is not monosyllabic, they still won’t get it.”

“The only thing they understand is power. It’s past time to stop trying to reason with them and time to start putting our boots on their fucking necks. Bring charges, prosecute them, and put these shit heels in prison where they belong.”

This one might be my favorite. Utterly unaware.

“They made up their minds on what reality is long before this trial ever started and there’s nothing you or I can do to change that.”

And this person is probably going to sprint to the polling station to vote for Biden.

“They line up on their knees to suck his dick, and he would just piss on their faces and say you’re welcome”

This is how I feel about most of the “siloed”.

“If you can’t explain it so a toddler can understand, you can’t explain it to MAGAs.”

There’s a lot more where that came from. I had to scroll down a long, long, long way before I found anything approaching a voice of reason. I tried to contribute there, but it’s a drop in the ocean.

The commentator to whom I responded wrote the following.

“I don’t think which of three eligible crimes he was trying to conceal makes a big difference on the significance of the conviction.”

This is pretty blatantly a call for vigilante justice, for witch trials, no? It doesn’t matter that his defense didn’t know which of the crimes they were even defending against? It doesn’t matter whether the jury agrees on which charges they think he’s guilty of? It doesn’t feel a bit “railroad-y” to you?

It’s apparently legal in NYS to do something like this and, since it was used on Trump, a lot of people are OK with it. Essentially, you don’t have a real capacity to defend against an unnamed crime and the jury doesn’t even have to agree on which crime they think the defendant is guilty of. I’m not going to try to further paraphrase a lawyer, so here’s the link [Toeing The Trump Line](https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/06/01/toeing-the-trump-line/#more-52524): and the citation.

“That the state of New York law does not require the jury to be unanimous on what the “another crime” must be is one issue. Much as I think the law is wrong and deprives the defense of notice of what the prosecution is alleging such that he can prepare an adequate defense, I recognize that it is the current state of the law. Justice Juan Merchan has no authority to rule or charge anything other than the law of New York as it currently stands.”

If this hadn’t been Trump, but a more defendable defendant, then probably a lot more people would be *concerned* about how it went down. But, it was Trump, so it’s victory-lap time. And don’t look to closely at how it was done.

I don’t think they changed the statute of limitations. It’s that they had to figure out some fancy way to lever up what would ordinarily be a misdemeanor to be a felony because the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor had expired whereas that for a felony had not.

That they split one charge into 34 and then levered them all up to individual felonies using any one of three, but not specifically named charges is what makes the whole thing so hinky. There were a lot of pretty unprecedented moving parts, making it bespoke law to make sure Trump could get gotten. It shouldn’t be sitting well with anyone that this kind of thing can happen, much less be celebrated. Undermining the law to get someone may be good for that someone’s enemies, but it’s terrible for the rest of us in the long run.

You really don’t have to listen to Trump’s formulation of it. As usual, he’s only a little-bit right. The way I understood it, though, is that the charges on which he was convicted would have been misdemeanors. They were levered up to felonies because they were supposedly done to enable another crime, which was not explicitly named. It was just suggested that there were three possibilities. That he was charged with felonies was only possible because the jury wasn’t required to name or even agree on the crime that they considered to be the lever. This doesn’t sound great. It doesn’t seem quite kosher. Trump and his legal team should have been able to beat it, but he’s Trump, so he couldn’t get out of his own way.

A Sham Case, and Everyone Knows It by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Trump has so altered American consciousness that detractors feel comfortable publicly supporting the idea of slapping 34 felony convictions on the man as punishment for alleged earlier offenses. Dowd’s slip (if it was one) wasn’t rare. Editorial pages, broadcast panels, even political mailers in the past days implored readers to focus on Trump’s overall history, not this particular case”

People do not believe in the rule of law. Not really. They believe in vigilante justice against their enemies. Almost no-one even pretends to apply the same standards to their enemies as to their friends. They have no principles.

“[…] of all the things Donald Trump has been accused of, none are as serious or system-imperiling as abusing the courts to dispose of a political rival. If Trump was caught buggering a corpse while smoking joints rolled in rubles, it wouldn’t approach the offense of “concocting” a charge to put away someone you want to “nail” for “something.””

You would think that there would be some concern…but no. Why not? Because politics is a team sport and the only thing that matters is winning—putting points on the board. It doesn’t matter how. If the referee doesn’t catch you, then it’s OK when you do it. That’s how sports fans are.

“This is why Hillary Clinton’s similar records SNAFU is more than a gotcha! factoid. Her campaign and the DNC were fined $113,000 for labeling ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier “legal and compliance consulting.” These reports came out in pre-election stories in 2016 accusing Trump of being vulnerable to “blackmail” and of having a “back channel” to the Kremlin, but more importantly were used to prop up bogus FISA surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page.”

This is the most damning information, actually. Hillary actually did falsify records about having purchased a concocted dossier that she used during the election and she got away with a fine. Trump falsified records after the election—with no possibility of levering those actions to win an election he’d already won the year before—but was given 34 felonies, while Hillary is probably interviewing on show after show, cackling about his having gotten what he deserved. It’s pretty black and white.

Freedom isn’t free (Reddit)

We are being led down the path of moral rot and spiritial abyss

“From Sandy Hook and Uvalde — to Gaza/Rafah, America is led by soulless, brutal men who tell us the price of “freedom” and “security” is to accept the slaughter of babies and children.

“We are being led down the path of moral rot and spiritual abyss.”

Biden Unveils Israeli Ceasefire Offer by Will Porter (Scheer Post)

“In a statement issued soon after Biden’s address, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that negotiators were cleared to “present an outline” to Hamas. Still, it insisted “the war will not end until all of [Israel’s] goals are achieved, including the return of all our hostages and the elimination of Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities.””

Those are not terms of a ceasefire. Those are terms of surrender. I don’t believe that either Biden or Netanyahu even understand what “ceasefire” means. They are also quite murky on the word “compromise”, as they’re utterly unaccustomed to doing so.

It’s Coming From Within the House by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Here’s Irish politician Thomas Gould’s searing speech on the floor of the Dáil Éireann in support of Ireland’s recognition of Palestinian statehood:”

“The photographs and the pictures and the videos that come from there [Gaza} and you hear the screams of people, screaming as the Israeli government burned men, women and children alive. They burned them alive. And the world stands by while 15,000 children are being slaughtered, 35,000 men, women and children. It’s unbelievable, the genocide that’s happening. A child with no head? A child with no head? And the Israeli government says, it’s a mistake? A mistake? I hope that Benjamin Netanyahu burns in hell, the same way those children and their families burned. I hope he and his generals and the government in Israel, dear God, finally bring him to the resting place that he deserves, to burn in Hell. Because what is happening now, not alone is it apartheid, not alone is it atrocity and war crimes. It’s just horrific. It’s just horrific what they’re doing. Where is their soul? Where is the soul of the Israeli people that allows their government to do this to children? Where is their humanity? The Israeli people, the Jewish people, after everything the Jewish people have suffered down over the decades, that they’d allow their government to do this to human beings. Human beings. But in the eyes of Netanyahu, and his far-right Israeli government, Palestinians aren’t human beings. But today, here, the Irish people say, We recognize Palestine. We recognize that they are human beings, just like every one of us. Shame on Israel. Shame on what you’ve done. It will never be forgotten.”

“In a flagrant violation of international law, the Israeli military is now using the Noura Kaabi Dialysis Hospital in the Jabalia Refugee Camp as a military base and operational center amid the ongoing invasion. This is at least the second hospital that the IDF has taken over.”

“Keir Starmer continues the political cleansing of New Labour, this week block[ing] the campaign for Parliament [of] one of its rising stars, Faiza Shaheen, for liking a Jon Stewart video on the power of the Israel lobby, which the New Labourites claimed was, you guessed it, antisemitic.”

“On May 7th, Hesen Jabr, a nurse at NYU-Langone Hospital, was given an award for her work with bereaved mothers. During the awards ceremony, she briefly mentioned Palestine in her remarks. Two weeks later, on Jabr’s first day back at work following the ceremony, NYU-Langone fired her.”

“Dr. Anne D’Aquino, adjunct professor of health sciences, was fired from her position at DePaul University, after offering an optional assignment to her students in which she asked them to explore the biological and health impacts Israel’s war in Gaza has on Palestinians.”

“Pollster Evan Smith: “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.” Has anyone proved them wrong?”

Collapse of Atlanta water system continues for third day by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In the case of Atlanta, the original water infrastructure dates to 1875 when the city had 22,000 people. The 36-inch water mains were first installed in 1907, and the 48-inch mains were built in 1924. According to a report published in 2018 on Atlanta’s aging water infrastructure, “the city’s water mains were renewed with a cement liner in the 1950s,” but they have “far exceeded their design life.””

“As the water system has continued to crumble over decades, Atlanta has become a destination for the financial elite. Atlanta is among a handful of US cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Dallas, where billionaires live.”

“The collapse of the water system is part of the aging infrastructure throughout the US. According to statistics in a 2023 study from Utah State University, 260,000 water main breaks in the US and Canada cost $2.6 billion each year. The study said that 33 percent of US and Canadian water mains are more than 50 years old.”

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All by David Vine and Theresa (Isa) Arriola (Scheer Post)

“When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.” [See Address “The Chance for Peace” Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. by Dwight D. Eisenhower (The American Presidency Project)]”

Why I Don’t Condemn Hamas For October 7 by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“In 1999, a woman named Cindy Hendy was stabbed in the neck with an ice pick by a woman named Cynthia Vigil inside a trailer home in New Mexico. Vigil then fled the scene to a nearby residence, whose owner promptly called the police.

“She was never charged with any crime.

“The reason Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime despite having stabbed Cindy Hendy in the neck with an ice pick was because Hendy was an accomplice of the serial killer David Parker Ray, also known as the Toy Box Killer. Vigil’s escape from the trailer where Ray and Hendy had been imprisoning and torturing her led to the pair’s subsequent arrest. Ray died in prison three years later, the full extent of his murder spree still unknown. Hendy served 19 years and was released in 2019.

“Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime because anyone could see that violent force was an entirely understandable and legitimate response to having been kidnapped and subjected to horrific treatment. It never at any time occurred to anyone to say that she should have acted differently, and it most certainly never occurred to anyone to make her single act of desperate violence the major story instead of the fact that there was a serial killer who’d been abducting women and torturing them in his murder dungeon.

“And, I mean, imagine how absurd it would have been if they’d done that. Imagine if, after the Toy Box Killer story broke, all the major headlines were about a woman stabbing another woman with an ice pick. Imagine if the ice pick stabbing was all the press ever wanted to talk about, for month after month after month, instead of the fact that people had been imprisoned and subjected to savage abuse by a cruel serial murderer.

“Imagine how absurd it would’ve been if, any time someone was interviewed about this case in the news, they were asked if they condemned Cynthia Vigil for her brutal, evil, sadistic ice pick stabbing of Cindy Hendy.

“Imagine how absurd it would’ve been if the press kept framing the incident as though Hendy was just standing around, innocently minding her own business, and was then victimized by a barbaric and unprovoked attack by Vigil.

“Imagine how absurd it would’ve been if everyone kept the story focused on the ice pick stabbing, and any time anyone tried to point out that the stabbing only occurred because Cynthia Vigil was being imprisoned by a deranged serial killer and his female accomplice they were hysterically denounced as Vigil apologists and supporters of neck-stabbing, and told that nothing — absolutely nothing — could ever excuse or justify the violence that Vigil inflicted upon Hendy on that terrible day.

“Imagine how absurd it would’ve been if, rather than coming to Vigil’s rescue and arresting those who’d victimized her, the police had returned Vigil to her captors and helped David Parker Ray resume his murderous lifestyle.

“Imagine if, while helping David Parker Ray re-establish his status quo lifestyle of kidnapping, torture and murder, arguments were made by law enforcement and the media that Ray’s murder dungeon has a right to exist, and that Ray and his accomplices have a right to defend their home and their way of life.

“Imagine if Ray had greatly escalated his murderousness and sadism in full view of the entire world following Cynthia Vigil’s attempted escape, and people defended this by solemnly invoking the horrible, awful day when Vigil launched an unprovoked ice pick attack on Cindy Hendy’s neck.”

The Reckless Brinkmanship With Russia Just Keeps On Escalating by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“This cavalier attitude toward nuclear brinkmanship that empire managers have been demonstrating lately was addressed on Monday by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who said the US is close to making a “fatal” miscalculation.

““I would like to caution American officials against miscalculations which may have fatal consequences. For some unknown reason, they underestimate the seriousness of the rebuff they may receive,” Ryabkov reportedly said.

““I am urging these officials who seemingly are not bothered by anything, to take some time away from playing computer games, which is apparently what they are doing, given their light-hearted approach to serious issues, and take a closer look at what Putin said,” Ryabkov added.”

“There is a limit to how many escalations Russia will tolerate before taking drastic action against NATO to re-establish deterrence credibility, and nobody really knows exactly where that limit is. They seem bound and determined to find it however, and when they do we may already be on an irreversible free fall toward nuclear armageddon.”

“[…] that’s why it’s very disturbing that these tensions are being ramped up so casually by the empire with no resistance from anybody — not from western governments, not from the media, and not even from ordinary people in any meaningful numbers.

“These freaks are playing chicken with armageddon weapons, and nobody’s got a foot anywhere near the brake pedal. They’re not even looking at it. They’re not even thinking about it.

“At the very least we’ve got to find some way to get people thinking about this. This would be such a damn stupid way for humanity to annihilate itself.”

It would be an entirely predictable and appropriate way for humanity to annihilate itself.

Israel has dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, far surpassing the combined total dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II (Reddit)

Number of Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza easily surpasses World War II

Journalism & Media

The Race to Year Zero by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Even “unhoused” is a towering mountain of sense compared to many proposed improvements dumped on the lexicon in recent years. If I seem a little hot on the topic, I apologize; it’s a pet peeve. Reading the language in news reports and even pop-culture entertainments now is like going to a concert and hearing musicians sharping and flatting all over the place. Everything sounds ugly and wrong, even before you can work through why.”

“Thus we begin down the road to the paradise of conditional vocabulary, where we take the temperature of both the person we’re addressing and society before choosing words.”

Be honest, Matt: we already have this. Die you ever say the word “fuck” in front of your parents before a certain age? You already use different vocabularies to avoid making waves in certain situations.

They Can’t Control The Gaza Narrative Because Too Much Has Been Seen by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“A lot of mainstream-adjacent progressives act like Gaza is some radical deviation from normal US behavior, which is infantile nonsense. The US inflicts similar horrors on the world all the time […]”

“Gaza is really illustrating how much the US empire benefits from moving through its foreign military violence relatively quickly. When it can move from propagandizing the population about Evil Dictatorship X to destroying the country in question to moving on to its next war in the span of a few short years, there’s not enough time for public awareness to grow of exactly how evil the empire is being. It was years before a mainstream consensus developed that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, and it will probably be decades before there’s mainstream consensus about the evil shit the empire did in Syria from 2011 onwards.”

“The light of awareness makes it very difficult for an empire which is fueled by human blood to operate, which is why so much effort has been going into shutting off the lights. Shutting off the lights here looks like circulating lies and propaganda, killing Palestinian journalists in record numbers, blocking western journalists from entering Gaza, banning TikTok, stomping out student protests, and smearing everyone who tries to spread awareness of Gaza as an anti-semite.”

Everything About Israel Is Fake by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Israel is not a country, it’s like a fake movie set version of a country. A movie set where the set pieces won’t even stand up on their own, so people are always running around in a constant state of construction trying to prop things up and nail things down, and scrambling to pick up things that are falling over, and rotating the set pieces so that they look like real buildings in front of the camera. Without this constant hustle and bustle of propagandizing, lobbying, online influence ops, and nonstop mass military violence, the whole movie set would fall over, and people would see all the film crew members and actors and cameras for what they are.

“Clearly, no part of this is sustainable. Clearly, something’s going to have to give. Those set pieces are going to come toppling down sooner or later; it’s just a question of when, and of how high the pile of human corpses needs to be before it happens.”

it’s harsh but there’s a grain of truth to it. It’s what every country does, though. The U.S. isn’t very much different—just way, way, way more powerful.

Labor

Labors make everything not any ….ISM. (Reddit)

Labor made your iPhone

““Capitalism made your iPhone”

“No, LABOR made your iPhone. Labor makes things under any -ism. The -isms just determine who gets paid.”

The top comment is good:

“Capitalism deliberately made your iPhone not as good as it could be, so capitalists can sell you another one next year. Capitalism is doing massive damage to the environment through inefficient use of materials.”

There is a ton of inefficiency built into a system that uses the profit motive for anything. Think of how much more expensive and inefficient medicine distribution is because of patents. People who could benefit from something have no access to it. That’s capitalism’s modus operandi. Money regulates everything, like a universal utility.

Another person included the following quote from Puddlehead (I think this is self-published; I’d never heard of it before):

““I study those in power,” Leon said. “Communism, capitalism… so long as food rots while stomachs growl, these are just marketing buzzwords to relieve full bellies of any guilt, no?””

A Bug's Life − 'Then they ALL might stand up to us' (YouTube)

“You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. And, if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life. It’s not about food; it’s about keeping those ants in line.”

That’s Kevin Spacey voicing the grasshopper.

Economy & Finance

90% of People Alive are Poor (Reddit)

Global Wealth Distribution 2022

You should remember this whenever you hear about some amazing innovation that society is now able to offer its citizens. Most of them will never, ever, ever benefit from it. Crypto, AI, Ozempic, Netflix, etc. All of the scams and trends and services and benefits—they’re reserved for very, very few citizens of the world. And there’s absolutely no plan or intention on sharing with everybody. We’re not even trained to think about it, about why we can wonder whether we can afford when 90% of humanity doesn’t ever even hear about it.

Why? Why does it work this way? Why is so self-evident to so many that money determines access?

There are new drugs that drastically improve your body’s ability to accept donor organs, like bone marrow. 99% of humanity will never, ever get this, even if they need it. If someone in Ghana could benefit from it, humanity has no plan for how to get it to them. They can’t afford it, so our hands are tied.

Does anyone consider this to be cruel? Immoral? Does anyone ask why they can’t afford it?

It’s always just assumed that they deserve their impoverished lot because of moral failing. And that, subsequently, those who do benefit from weight-loss miracle drugs, vaccines, blindingly fast and powerful smartphones, leisurely lifestyles buoyed by rewarding labor, etc. etc. etc. — that they deserve these things because they’re entitled to them … because of what? Because they haven’t morally failed? Or has the world rewarded them for the moral failure that allows them to take advantage of the weak? Or to ignore how their success depends on someone else doing so in their name?

GameStop stock influencer Roaring Kitty may lose access to E-Trade, report says by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“E-Trade is concerned, according to The Journal’s insider sources, that on the one hand, Gill’s social media posts are potentially illegally manipulating the market—and possibly putting others’ investments at risk. But on the other, the platform worries that restricting Gill’s trading could incite a boycott fueled by his “meme army” closing their accounts “in solidarity.” That could also sharply impact trading on the platform, sources said.

“It’s unclear what gamble E-Trade, which is owned by Morgan Stanley, might be willing to make. The platform could decide to take no action at all, the WSJ reported, but through its client agreement has the right to restrict or close Gill’s account “at any time.”

“As of late Monday, Gill’s account was still active, the WSJ reported, apparently showing total gains of $85 million over the past three weeks. After Monday’s close, Gill’s GameStop positions “were valued at more than $289 million,” the WSJ reported.”

“But it seems complicated to conclude that Gill’s intent is misleading anyone by posting memes on X, mostly because Gill isn’t misrepresenting GameStop’s business in inciting what presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently dubbed the “apes’ retail rebellion.” Any sensible investor could see that GameStop’s shares were tanking earlier this year amid job cuts.”

Science & Nature

The Lunacy of Artemis by Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words)

“[…] where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3 billion (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10 billion). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission’s scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven’t been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.”

“[…] took NASA eight years to go from nothing to a moon landing at the dawn of the Space Age. But today, twenty years and $93 billion after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever.”

“It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T. When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.”

I can’t wait to find out how it’s all China’s fault when they, despite heavy technological sanctions, set up a moonbase before a single American walks the moon in the 21st century

“NASA insists that astronauts fly SLS. And SLS is a “one and done” rocket, artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad. The rocket can only launch once every two years at a cost of about four billion dollars.”

“The SLS core stage recycles Space Shuttle main engines, actual veterans of old Shuttle flights called out of retirement for one last job. Refurbishing a single such engine to work on SLS costs NASA $40 million, or a bit more than SpaceX spends on all 33 engines on its Superheavy booster. And though the Shuttle engines are designed to be fully reusable (the main reason they’re so expensive), every SLS launch throws four of them away.”

“Each SLS booster is now projected to cost $266 million, or about twice the launch cost of a Falcon Heavy. Just replacing the asbestos lining in the boosters with a greener material, a project budgeted at $4.4M, has now cost NASA a quarter of a billion dollars. And once the leftover segments run out seven rockets from now, SLS will need a brand new booster design, opening up fertile new vistas of overspending.”

“To hear NASA tell it, NRHO is so full of advantages that it’s a wonder we stay on Earth.”

“NASA has struggled to lay out a technical rationale for Gateway. The space station adds both cost and complexity to Artemis, a program not particularly lacking in either. Requiring moon-bound astronauts to stop at Gateway also makes missions riskier (by adding docking operations) while imposing a big propellant tax. Aerospace engineer and pundit Robert Zubrin has aptly called the station a tollbooth in space.”

“in the end this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Using Starship to land two astronauts on the moon is like delivering a pizza with an aircraft carrier.”

“Other, less daring lander designs reduce their appetite for propellant by using a detachable landing stage. This arrangement also shields the ascent rocket from hypervelocity debris that gets kicked up during landing. But HLS is a one-piece rocket; the same engines that get sandblasted on their way down to the moon must relight without fail a week later.”

“The record for heavy rocket launch cadence belongs to the Space Shuttle, which flew nine times in the calendar year before the Challenger disaster. Second place belongs to the Saturn V, which launched three times during a four and a half month period in 1969. In third place is Falcon Heavy, which flew six times in a 13 month period beginning in November 2022. For the refueling plan to work, Starship will have to break this record by a factor of ten, launching every six days or so across multiple launch facilities. The refueling program can tolerate a few launch failures, as long as none of them damages a launch pad.”

“SpaceX has to land an unmanned HLS prototype on the moon in early 2026. That means tanker flights to fill an orbiting depot would start in late 2025. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for the company to invent orbital refueling, get it working at scale, make it efficient, deal with boil-off, get Starship launching reliably, begin recovering booster stages, set up additional launch facilities, achieve a weekly cadence, and at the same time design and test all the other systems that need to go into HLS.”

“Particularly striking is the contrast between the ambition of the HLS designs and the extreme conservatism and glacial pace of SLS/Orion. The same organization that spent 23 years and 20 billion dollars building the world’s most vanilla spacecraft demands that SpaceX darken the sky with Starships within four years of signing the initial HLS contract.”

“Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-cost basis. If SpaceX or Blue Origin figure out how to make cryogenic refueling practical, it will mean a big step forward for space exploration, exactly the thing NASA should be encouraging. And if the technology doesn’t pan out, we’ll have found that out mostly by spending Musk’s and Bezos’s money.”

“What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win, there’s not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The two strategies don’t make sense together.”

Boeing’s Starliner test flight scrubbed again after hold in final countdown by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)

“The mission has one launch opportunity every one-to-two days, when the International Space Station’s orbital track moves back into proper alignment with the Atlas V rocket’s launch pad in Florida.

“Wilmore and Williams will take the Starliner spacecraft on its first crew flight into low-Earth orbit. The capsule will dock with the International Space Station around a day after launch, spend at least a week there, then return to a parachute-assisted landing at one of two landing zones in New Mexico or Arizona. Once operational, Boeing’s Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to give NASA two independent human-rated spacecraft for transporting astronauts to and from the space station.”

China lands Chang’e 6 sample-return probe on far side of the moon, a lunar success (video) by Mike Wall (Space)

Unsurprisingly, the article doesn’t actually include a video, but this purports to be the onboard camera view on landing. It’s a bit … abrupt? I’m not sure what I’m looking at.

Chang’e-6 landing (Onboard Camera View) (YouTube)

“And all of this robotic work will lead to something even bigger, if all goes according to plan: crewed missions to the moon, which China aims to start launching by 2030. The nation wants to build an astronaut outpost near the south pole called the International Lunar Research Station later in the 2030s, with help from partners such as Russia, Belarus and Pakistan.

“The United States has similar aims with its Artemis program, which is targeting late 2026 for its first crewed lunar landing. The U.S. is also building a moon-exploration coalition via a diplomatic framework called the Artemis Accords; more than 40 nations have signed on to date.”

I’ve recently read about the clusterfuck that is Artemis in The Lunacy of Artemis by Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words). NASA is not getting to the moon by 2026. I wonder to what degree the Chinese program is a castle in the sky?

Art & Literature

How Actors Remember Their Lines by Elspeth Kirkman (The MIT Reader)

“[…] actor Michael Caine described this process well:”

“You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.”

“This same process of learning and remembering lines by deep understanding enabled a septuagenarian actor to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” At the age of 58, John Basinger began studying this poem as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical activity at the gym, each time adding more lines to what he had already learned.”

“Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known. [sic] Retention is enhanced because elaboration produces more meaningful associations than does shallow processing — links that can serve as potential cues for later remembering.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Double-Edged Sword of Modernisation by Ye Yang (Made in China Journal)

“Although employers prefer to hire young female Yi workers because they are perceived as easier to manage, male workers remain the majority. This is because an increasing number of young Yi women are turning to the entertainment industry, such as nightclubs and massage parlours, which is far more profitable. A young woman working in this industry usually earns six to 10 times the hourly wage of a factory worker. Among the Yi, this trend often leads to family problems as there is a strong moral critique against women who participate in this industry and the ability of women to generate comparatively high incomes challenges the established mechanisms of male dominance in traditional Yi relationships.”

Man, there ain’t much new under the sun. Are they really so different from us? Europe imports easter Europeans. The U.S. imports South Americans. The Chinese exploit their indigenous populations. Pimpin’ ain’t easy, but it’s the same everywhere.

“Between 2010 and 2015, there were about 100,000 Yi migrant long-term workers in Xinjiang’s cotton fields each year (Luo 2021a: 90). However, starting in about 2017, this seasonal migration of Yi workers was significantly limited by local governments’ perception of Yi as troublemakers and by the reduced demand for temporary workers due to the automation of cotton-picking (Luo 2021b).”

“Compared with jobs in manufacturing, farm work is accessible to all rural Yi people, allowing many unemployed and underemployed Yi migrants to find work. Among them, middle-aged women are the largest group, followed by older migrant workers, most of whom are illiterate and can barely speak Mandarin.”

“Unlike in manufacturing, large groups of Yi workers are not seen as problematic by employers in Xinjiang, whose primary objective is to get the work on their vast plantations done as quickly as possible when the time is right. Therefore, Yi workers in Xinjiang usually live and work together, in a group comprising several small clusters of relatives under the leadership of one or more Yi labour brokers.”

“It is also more difficult for workers to work independently of labour brokers in Xinjiang because the workplaces are remote, far from each other, and employment information is almost inaccessible without the extensive informal networks available to labour brokers. This combination of workers’ dependence, information gaps, and lack of supervision creates favourable conditions for brokers to increase their profits at the expense of their workers.”

“[…] the greater disappointment for workers is the realisation that the wages they were promised by the brokers—usually between RMB300 and RMB500 per day—were often exaggerated. Even when they realise they have been tricked, they cannot easily leave. In addition to the foremen’s attempts to prevent them from leaving, the high travel costs for the 4,000-kilometre journey from Xinjiang to Liangshan leaves them no choice but to accept the unsatisfactory conditions.”

“While the Yi are gradually leaving behind the abyss of misery caused by heroin and AIDS brought back by the Yi pioneers migrating to China’s urban areas in the 1980s (Liu 2010), the younger generation finds that they are still trapped between the yearning for adventure in the metropolis and the pain of homesickness (ꉌꂵꁏ)—a common feeling expressed by the Yi migrant workers I interviewed, trapped as they are between reverence for their ancestors and the promises of modernity.”

Against “Euthanasia” by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Many of those who turn to the MAID program are poor, many are Indigenous, many lack the social support and financial standing that would make a condition of future thriving seem even remotely possible. And the Canadian state, rather than investing in their well-being, whether through initiatives to buttress community ties or simply to give them cash pay-outs that might help them to turn their lives around, prefers instead to green-light their execution. I take this to be nothing less than genocidal.”

“Now, there may well be real-world cases where a prisoner is withholding information about some diabolical plot to blow up the world, and the only way to stop this plot is to pull out his fingernails — even if this strikes you as implausible, let us just suppose that it could happen for the sake of argument. What should an interrogator do in such a situation? In my view, he should break the law. If the matter is really so important as in this hypothetical, then plainly the particular code of ethics of your profession goes out the window: you will not have a profession if the world blows up. If you, as the interrogator, turn out to be wrong, if your belief that the prisoner had such information was based on false leads, then you will likely also be out of a profession, but at least that professional community itself will not have been debased and delegitimized along with you.”

“If instead you follow Dershowitz’s plan, and you normalize the violation of the taboo by introducing bureaucratic procedures to officially suspend the taboo status of torture, very quickly you will end up with a routinized system for torturing pretty much anyone who finds themselves on the wrong side of the law.”

“[…] brought us to a point where the ad-hoc identification of historically contingent conditions can be mobilized to eliminate the very people who had hoped to gain some sort of security in this chaotic world by claiming these conditions for themselves. The world gives you no obvious tradition or value system through which to gain your bearings, but the internet tells you that you are, say, on the autism spectrum. Then the state tells you in turn that it is now providing euthanasia for people just like you.”

“[…] we could soon find ourselves in a situation where, in the aim of assuaging the harms of racial inequality, the state will begin killing off racial minorities. With the recourse of poor Indigenous people to MAID, in fact I think Canada is already there.”

“In the 20th century the Nazis accounted for their violence openly in terms of a desire to eliminate racial impurities and other harmful extraneous contaminations. In the 21st century Canada and the Netherlands account for their violence in pseudo-therapeutic terms of care for the weak. But either way, whatever the agents of these regimes tell themselves about what they’re doing as they go along, one might have some reason to fear that the arc of the modern state, in all its ideological expressions, naturally bends towards extermination camps.”

“I love freedom, and as a matter of principle I will continue to defend your right to lead a frivolous life. But I will also continue to bemoan the economic and ideological forces that channel you into such a life in the false belief that what you are doing is realizing your freedom’s full potential.”

Žižek’s Left-Wing Case for Christian Atheism by Matt McManus (Jacobin)

“[…] in the full quotation from which that famous phrase comes, Marx describes religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” He held that the emergence of religion can be understood socially as a kind of psychic compensation for the alienation and suffering human beings endured on Earth. So long as oppressive social conditions persisted, we could expect people to hold onto religious “illusions.””

“Materialist criticism of religion, on Marx’s view, is therefore not only or even primarily about condemning religious faith — but instead about understanding the social conditions that make it necessary and transforming them. Only when such a revolutionary change takes place will the feelings of estrangement that necessitated religion disappear, as human beings become able to resolve their problems directly and rationally.”

OMG HAHAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, OK, sure. Let’s wait for that.

Most people only know the beginning of the Emperor’s surrender speech. Take a look at the whole thing, its brutal. (Reddit)

Emperor Hirohito speech

“Despite the best that has been done by everyone, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

Everyone Into The Grinder by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it.”

“It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.”

By definition, we don’t have the power to do so, though.

I would take it a step farther and say that any inequality on the level that we’re seeing now is untenable.

“The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

“They will object that it infringes upon their rights. Because the right in question is the right to pretend that the rights of others are not as important as their own, it is not a right that we should be too bothered about violating.”

More precisely: the more money you have, the more rights you have. This is how the system works now.

The funny thing is that, as well as this post started, it was inspired by this man’s hatred for Donald Trump.

“The sight of the very same people who routinely demand more police and harsher criminal sentences competing to scream the loudest about the injustice of convicting a blatant crook for a blatant crime does not really require any ornamentation from me.”

Instead of taking that extra step and seeing that the trial of Donald J. Trump was his thesis from above in action, he characterizes it as the conviction of a “blatant crook for a blatant crime,” even though I’m almost certain that he’s in the 99.9% of people celebrating Trump’s conviction who actually have no idea what he was convicted of. That is, they think they know, but they’re wrong.

It’s sad. Still, the premise stands: why should some people be able to buy their way out of misery while others have no choice but to endure it? The author stumbles when he enjoys watching Trump endure the misery. That’s not the point. The point is to get people to try to fix things for everyone rather than simply rejoicing that they can make things better for themselves—and stopping there.

Technology

I view bookmarks as a subset of the Internet. The use case is “I remember reading something about XYZ”.

Search your bookmarks for XYZ. See a few hits? Ah, there’s the one I remember. It’s even better if the bookmark takes a snapshot of the page / logo and maybe even keeps a copy of he page’s text.
Search online. Maybe you’ll find the original article but sometimes it’s difficult because XYZ will have too many hits.
I actually use Instapaper this way, as well. I view my reading history there as also a sort of “bookmarking”. I can search there for XYZ in article that I know I’ve read.

Watch history and “liked” playlist in YouTube is another “set of bookmarks” that I find useful.

Using bookmarks like this reduces your reliance on increasingly shaky search engines to find things again that you know you’ve already seen and liked.

LLMs & AI

AI Is a False God by Navneet Alang (The Walrus)

“In Arthur C. Clarke’s famous short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” a sect of monks in Tibet believes humanity has a divinely inspired purpose: inscribing all the various names of God. Once the list was complete, they thought, He would bring the universe to an end. Having worked at it by hand for centuries, the monks decide to employ some modern technology. Two skeptical engineers arrive in the Himalayas, powerful computers in tow. Instead of 15,000 years to write out all the permutations of God’s name, the job gets done in three months. As the engineers ride ponies down the mountainside, Clarke’s tale ends with one of literature’s most economical final lines: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.””

“Before we do, in fact, cede any more ground to our tech overlords, it’s worth casting one’s mind back to the mid-1990s and the arrival of the World Wide Web. That, too, came with profound assertions of a new utopia, a connected world in which borders, difference, and privation would end. Today, you would be hard pressed to argue that the internet has been some sort of unproblematic good.”

“It’s not that one should simply resist technology; it can, after all, also have liberating effects. Rather, when big tech comes bearing gifts, you should probably look closely at what’s in the box.”

“New York University professor Leif Weatherby suggests that the models are processing so many permutations of data that it is impossible for a single person to wrap their head around it. The mysticism of AI isn’t a hidden or inscrutable mind behind the curtain; it’s to do with scale and brute power.”

“Some of the things we saw were genuinely inspiring, such as the presentation by Saqib Shaikh, who is blind and has spent years working on SeeingAI. It’s an app that is getting better and better at labelling objects in a field of view in real time. Point it at a desk with a can and it will say, “A red soda can, on a green desk.” Similarly optimistic was the idea that AI could be used to preserve dying languages, more accurately scan for tumours, or more efficiently predict where to deploy disaster response resources—usually by processing large amounts of data and then recognizing and analyzing patterns within it.”

Our society values none of these things because they will make no-one who matters to society any money. Monetizing them will ruin them. Stop pretending we have communism. Stop believing that companies care. I wish they did. But we’re not going to get to a place where they have to—or whatever replaces them has to—actually serve us rather than the other way around.

“What that emphasis on day-to-day tasks suggested is that AI isn’t so much going to produce a grand new world as, depending on your perspective, make what exists now slightly more efficient—or, rather, intensify and solidify the structure of the present. Yes, some parts of your job might be easier, but what seems likely is that those automated tasks will in turn simply be part of more work.”

“[…] the problems preventing, say, the deployment of solar power in India aren’t simply due to a lack of knowledge. There are instead the issues around resources, will, entrenched interests, and, more plainly, money. This is what the utopian vision of the future so often misses: if and when change happens, the questions at play will be about if and how certain technology gets distributed, deployed, taken up. It will be about how governments decide to allocate resources, how the interests of various parties affected will be balanced, how an idea is sold and promulgated, and more.”

“The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.”

Capitalism without mercy or empathy. Letting the worst people decide what is valuable as they hoard it.

“[…] tech solutionism, a term coined a decade ago by Evgeny Morozov, the progressive Belarusian writer who has taken it upon himself to ruthlessly criticize big tech. He was among the first to point to how Silicon Valley tended to see tech as the answer to everything.”

“Andreessen has been on the board of Facebook/Meta—a company that has allowed mis- and disinformation to wreak havoc on democratic institutions—since 2008. However, he insists, apparently without a trace of irony, that experts are “playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.””

“AI occupies a strange position, in that it likely represents one of those sea changes in technology but is at the same time overhyped. The idea that AI will lead us to some grand utopia is deeply flawed.”

“An AI model can be trained on billions of data points, but it can’t tell you if any of those things is good, or if it has value to us, and there’s no reason to believe it will. We arrive at moral evaluations not through logical puzzles but through consideration of what is irreducible in us: subjectivity, dignity, interiority, desire—all the things AI doesn’t have.”

“Already, Google is becoming increasingly unusable because the web is being flooded with AI-crafted content designed to get clicks. There is a mutually constitutive problem here—digital tech has produced a world full of so much data and complexity that, in some cases, we now need tech to sift through it. Whether one considers this cycle vicious or virtuous likely depends on whether you stand to gain from it or if you are left to trudge through the sludge.”

And search engines were/are useful.

“It’s thus hard for them to avoid existing biases, both of the past and the present. Williams points to how, if asked to reproduce, say, a doctor yelling at a nurse, AI will make the doctor a man and the nurse a woman.”

““Can AI be used to make cars drive themselves?” is an interesting question. But whether we should allow self-driving cars on the road, under what conditions, embedded in what systems—or indeed, whether we should deprioritize the car altogether—are the more important questions, and they are ones that an AI system cannot answer for us.”

“When we look to artificial intelligence to make sense of the world—when we ask it questions about reality or history or expect it to represent the world as it is—are we not already bound up in the logic of AI? We are awash with digital detritus, with the cacophony of the present, and in response, we seek out a superhuman assistant to draw out what is true from the morass of the false and the misleading—often to only be misled ourselves when AI gets it wrong.”

“We are living in a time where truth is unstable, shifting, constantly in contestation. Think of the embrace of conspiracy theories, the rise of the anti-vax movement, or the mainstreaming of racist pseudoscience.”

OR RUSSIAGATE FFS, which led to one war so far. You people are so bright and you’re all so blue-pilled that you keep listing the exact conspiracy theories that the biggest promulgators of conspiracy theories want you to believe are the worst ones.

“[…] social figures, from politicians to celebrities to public intellectuals, seem to be subject, more than ever, to the pull of fame, ideological blinkers, and plainly untrue ideas.”

We should ask why we have and continue to endure a system that elevates gullible and sociopathic simpletons.

“What is missing, says McGowan, is what psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan called “the subject supposed to know.” Society is supposed to be filled with those who are supposed to know: teachers, the clergy, leaders, experts, all of whom function as figures of authority who give stability to structures of meaning and ways of thinking. But when the systems that give shape to things start to fade or come under doubt, as has happened to religion, liberalism, democracy, and more, one is left looking for a new God.”

“Artificial intelligence may keep growing in scope, power, and capability, but the assumptions underlying our faith in it—that, so to speak, it might bring us closer to God—may only lead us further away from Him.”

“if I’m lucky enough to be around, I’ll step out of my home with my AI assistant whispering in my ear. There will still be cracks in the sidewalk. The city in which I live will still be under construction. Traffic will probably still be a mess, even if the cars drive themselves.”

What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news? by Dr Richard Fletcher (Reuters)

“[…] frequent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA. Many of those who say they have used generative AI have used it just once or twice, and it is yet to become part of people’s routine internet use.”

“While there is widespread awareness of generative AI overall, a sizable minority of the public – between 20% and 30% of the online population in the six countries surveyed – have not heard of any of the most popular AI tools.”

“Averaging across all six countries, 56% of 18–24s say they have used ChatGPT at least once, compared to 16% of those aged 55 and over.”

“[…] people tend to expect it to be less trustworthy and less transparent, but more up to date and (by a large margin) cheaper for publishers to produce. Very few people (8%) think that news produced by AI will be more worth paying for compared to news produced by humans.”

Jesus. It’s barely worth reading now.

“There are many powerful interests at play around AI, and much hype – often positive salesmanship, but sometimes wildly pessimistic warnings about possible future risks that might even distract us from already present issues. But there is also a fundamental question of whether and how the public at large will react to the development of this family of products. Will it be like blockchain, virtual reality, and Web3? All promoted with much bombast but little popular uptake so far. Or will it be more like the internet, search, and social media – hyped, yes, but also quickly becoming part of billions of people’s everyday media use.”

“Other evidence suggests that trust among the large part of the public that has not used generative AI is low, meaning overall trust levels are likely to be low”

Yes, but. You have to remember can, at the very same time, both not trust a source and believe it. That’s what people I’ve spoken to do all the time. They chirpily switch from making jokes about how wrong it is sometimes, then grab the next answer and use it without vetting it at all. It’s so easy to be seduced into forgetting that you don’t, or shouldn’t, trust a source. You have to look at how people use the information rather than how they say they feel about it. This can trap anyone, to varying degrees.

How does AI impact my job as a programmer? by Chelsea Troy

“As far as students can tell from the press, their futures depend on them learning to ride the wave of…whatever this is. So far, they’re seeing its supposedly awe-inspiring power neither in my lectures nor in their own forays with the tooling. So they’re assuming user error and imploring me—”What questions, exactly , are we meant to be asking this thing, to pull down our success and riches?””

“Reading, understanding, and fixing code written by others consumes 90+% of the time a programmer spends in an integrated development environment, command line, or observability interface. This is because most programmers work on legacy systems. But it’s also because, even if you’re writing greenfield apps, these days you’re mostly not writing logic from scratch. You are instead grouting together a mosaic of pre-built libraries that each do one of the things your system needs to do.”

“[…] we mostly teach and valorize building skills, but the work of both maintaining and integrating (which, as we have established, constitute most of the job today) requires investigation skills.”

“[…] already, the overwhelming majority of our time in the programming tools goes into tasks that require the investigative skill set rather than the building skill set. Large language models shift even more of that time into investigation, because the moment the team gets a chance to build, they turn around and ask ChatGPT (or Copilot, or Devin, or Gemini) to do it.”

“Then it’s on us to figure out why that integration is not working, because inevitably it isn’t. If we use LLMs all the time, the amount of “fix someone else’s code” we’re doing goes from 90% of the time to 100% of the time.”

“Large language model purveyors and enthusiasts purport to use the tools to help understand code. I’ve tested this claim pretty thoroughly at this point, and my conclusion on the matter is this: much like perusing answers on StackOverflow, this approach saves you time relative to whether you’re already skilled enough to know when to be suspicious, because a large proportion of the answers won’t help you.”

“[…] like an IDE, or a framework, or a test harness, utility here requires skill on the part of the operator—and not just ChatGPT jockeying skill: programming skill. Existing subject matter expertise.”

“[…] each response from both LLMs (we tried ChatGPT and Gemini) made a point of describing top_p and temperature. Every response offered a different description of the two hyperparameters, and none of them were accurate. To quote one participant with 18 years of programming experience, whose comment on the matter garnered about 35 likes: “I mean, we asked it about its own hyperparameters. If you hadn’t just told me right now what those hyperparameters do, I would likely have believed this output.””

“Our relative lack of skill at investigation becomes clear when we look at the accuracy rate of StackOverflow answers. For the amount of sass you see on that platform, you’d expect the programmers to at least be right. Except they aren’t. We have whole jokes about this too. Again, this is what was used to train the LLMs. Models trained on human data can’t outperform the base error rate in that data.”

Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle by Arvind Narayanan (AI Snake Oil)

“A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage — the machine learning version of teaching to the test — was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.

“This post presents an update. In short, we think things will get worse before they get better, although there are glimmers of hope on the horizon.”

“Problems that might lead to irreproducibility include improper comparisons to baselines, unrepresentative samples, results being sensitive to specific modeling choices, and not reporting model uncertainties. There is also the basic problem of researchers failing to publish their code and data, precluding reproducibility. For example, Gabelica et al. examined 333 open-access journals indexed on BioMed Central in January 2019 and found that out of the 1,800 papers that pledged to share data upon request, 93% did not do so.”

“[…] faulty papers are almost never retracted. Peers don’t even seem to notice replication failures — after a paper fails to replicate, only 3% of citing articles cited the replication attempt.1 Science communicators love to claim that science self-corrects, but self-correction is practically nonexistent in our experience.”

Programming

Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL by Matt Bessey

“I just tested this attack against a very popular website’s GraphQL API explorer and got a 500 response back after 10 seconds. I just ate 10 seconds of someone’s CPU time running this (whitespace removed) 128 byte query, and it doesn’t even require me to be logged in.”

“The net effect of all of this is to meaningfully test your application you must extensively test at the integration layer, i.e. by running GraphQL queries. I have found this makes for a painful experience. Any errors encountered are captured by the framework, leading to the fun task of reading stack traces in JSON GraphQL error responses. Since so much around authorisation and Dataloaders happens inside the framework, debugging is often much harder as the breakpoint you want is not in application code.”

“You are probably better off exposing an OpenAPI 3.0+ compliant JSON REST API. If, as in my experience, the main thing your frontend devs like about GraphQL is its self documenting type safe nature, I think this will work well for you. Tooling in this area has improved a lot since GraphQL came on the scene; there are many options for generating typed client code even down to framework specific data fetching libraries. My experience so far is pretty close to “the best parts of what I used GraphQL for, without the complexity Facebook needed”.”

Demystify cloud-native development with .NET Aspire | BRK181 by Microsoft Developer (YouTube)

Damian Edwards and David Fowler do a soup-to-nuts demonstration of Aspire. It basically lets you configure your multi-project, distributed projects with code rather than with YAML (e.g. dockercompose.yml). Instead, it writes the files for you and handles the deployment to Docker. This lets you much more easily create and configure things like email servers (for registration workflows), queues, databases, etc. Some of the resources run in Docker containers, some run on Azure if you want. There is a dashboard with deep telemetry, with very nice graphs showing how each service participates in a given request.

Fun

Zarna Garg Stand-Up | Zarna Garg: One in a Billion | Prime Video by Zarna Garg (YouTube)

The Funniest Moments From Sandhog by Sindhu Vee (YouTube)

'How do WE become NATIVE AMERICAN?' − The Immigrant Experience (HILARIOUS Crowd Work) by Zarna Garg (YouTube)

'SHE LIVES WITH YOU??' − The Immigrant Experience (HILARIOUS Crowd Work) by Zarna Garg (YouTube)

Deaf Satan (Reddit)

Is there a sound when you get an erection?

Should Employees Be Paid? Why People Think It’s Time by McKayley Gourley (Reductress)

““Socialists have taken it too far this time,” one respondent, Jeff B., wrote in. “Wage theft is the constitutional right of every billionaire CEO. Workers requesting a ‘living wage’ is a threat to the American way of life and super scary for those of us who may or may not make our money off the backs of exploited individuals. What’s next? Poor people being able to lead happy and fulfilling lives? I don’t think so.””