Links and Notes for June 7th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

The hidden story behind India’s remarkable election results: lethal heat by Amitava Kumar (The Guardian)

“In the days leading to the election, the BJP’s main slogan had been A bki baar, 400 Paar , a call to voters to send more than 400 of its candidates to the 543-member parliament. This slogan, voiced by Modi at his campaign rallies, set a high bar for the party. Most exit polls had predicted a massive victory for the BJP – and now the results, with that party having won only 240 seats, suggest that the electorate has sent a chastening message to the ruling party and trimmed its hubris.”

“Local newspapers carried government ads exhorting voters to exercise their franchise, as well as half-page ads from the health ministry offering advice about how to avoid heatstroke.”

The Speech That Military Recruiters Don’t Want You To Hear by Casey Carlisle (Antiwar.com)

“I was a high-school senior on September 11th , 2001, sitting in class and stunned after hearing the principal announce that our country had just been attacked. Why would someone want to do this to the greatest country on Earth? I was also livid, and I wanted revenge. I wanted to kill the people responsible for this atrocity, […]”

This is 90% of people in any country. Just unthinking and unable to conceive of any solution beyond the one that a caveman would propose.

“Imagine getting pulled over, not for speeding, but because the cop hopes to rob you.”

Americans don’t have to imagine it. Asset forfeiture, baby. Driving while black, baby.

“[…] the innocent Afghans who were displaced, injured, or killed during our attempt to bring democracy to a country that didn’t want it were far better off in 2000 than they are now.”

He’s so.close. That’s not what the U.S. was doing: bringing democracy. They didn’t want what you were trying to force them to take. Don’t try to make it sound like they were too ignorant to know any better.

“Most of the millionaires and billionaires in this country got rich by actually serving their fellow man via voluntary exchange, not by living off of their neighbors. I encourage you to consider taking that route – enriching yourself by enriching your community, not by parasitizing it.”

OMG What? He’s sadly missing most of the point of how the U.S. works. This essay is going off the rails, although its heart is in the right place.

Why No One Will Save Sudan by Cameron Hudson (Persuasion)

“Nearly half of the country’s 50 million people are in desperate need of food aid that is not reaching them, either because of access constraints or because it is simply not available.”

A Professor on ‘Authorities’ Who Order Police to Crush Student Protests by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)

“Real estate justifications also reveal university administrators’ ignorance. Huge tax exemptions subsidize private universities in the United States with public money. They get expensive public services delivered to them gratis. The rest of the U.S. public pays the taxes that fund those public services. Likewise, massive government grants support general university purposes (added on to grants for specific academic research projects) for both “private” and public institutions. To significant degrees, all colleges and universities are publicly funded institutions. They are thus perfectly appropriate locations for public expressions of opinion about important public issues.”

“As my mother grew older, she mused often that “the Jews learned nothing from the Holocaust” and “the Jewish Zionists learned nothing from the Holocaust beyond ‘Better to perpetrate one than to suffer it again’.””

“For me, that meant I should seek to understand how societies work, act to change them, and thereby contribute to achieving the best that could reasonably be hoped for. Notions that any nation or region was uniquely prone to or immune from becoming Nazis were not taken seriously. Germany was in no way uniquely prone to nazification. Likewise, “denazification laws,” “civil liberty traditions,” or slogans like “never again” gave no nation immunity from becoming partly or wholly nazified. That included Israel.”

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

“One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.”

Discretionary spending, yes. Not overall. Mandatory spending was $3.8T in 2023 vs. $1.7T of discretionary spending. Mandatory is required by law; of the money that the Congress has a free hand to decide on, it puts about ¾ toward military purposes. See the excellent graphic: The Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2023 (Wikipedia) and Expenditures in the United States federal budget (Wikipedia).

“Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.”

“The bulk of our [discretionary] taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project .”

“Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the height of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since World War II, despite the absence of a threat remotely justifying such spending.”

“[…] members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations.”

Which provocations? Do you see how even people who seem to be on the “right team” are still capable of spouting mainstream, government propaganda without even seeming to notice it?

“Even a 30% cut — as happened all too briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991 — would free hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Imagine how such sums could build safer, healthier, more secure lives in this country, including a just economic transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And mind you, that military budget would still be significantly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.”

There’s so much to unpack here. Of course they would say that we should make military people whole. They only know socialism. They’re important. It’s so frustrating. We could use that money to house the homeless but the first thought is to appeal to the military people whose jobs in history’s largest mechanized imperial slaughter would be in danger.

Mapping the Parallels of US Conflict: From Vietnam to the War on China by Megan Russell (Antiwar.com)

“In the bright, lucid light of history, we see differently. A commonality stretches between each conflict like a woven thread of grim consistency”

WTF is this writing?

“The US is loathed [sic] to make the first move. No political leader wants to be considered as the one who began a war. Instead, they will put all the triggers into play and wait for one of them to fire. Then we can go to war pretending we are without blame. Example: In August 1964, two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were sent to intercept North Vietnamese communication in support of the South. These ships were fired upon, which gave the US leeway to announce the need to respond with force.”

Jesus christ. Just no. This is such a mealy-mouthed formulation. The U.S. lied about having been attacked. It’s documented. They made the whole thing up. It’s worse than she writes. They didn’t wait for a trigger; they just pretended that one had happened. They didn’t wait in Libya either. Just made some shit up about genocide and went in. It wasn’t a mistake; it was a war crime.

“So many of us have lived through these past wars and seen the harm they do, not just abroad, but in our own communities. And yet, our government seems to face a chronic case of severe amnesia that echoes through the media and in our own minds.”

This is not something that seems to happen. It’s deliberate. The politicians gain. It’s false incentives. Why would they stop?

Jabalia’s Mass Graves Are a Lesson in Horror by Seraj Assi (Jacobin)

“[…] destroying the last means of survival for Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have posted photos and videos of themselves, accompanied by traditional Palestinian music, celebrating the destruction of homes, shops, and UNRWA premises in Jabalia. An IDF tank commander posted footage of himself and his platoon indiscriminately shelling Palestinian homes and detonating warehouses in Gaza, amid cheers of celebration.”

These soldiers and reservists will be welcomed as heroes after their tour of duty but they are ticking time bombs. They will be even more deeply psychologically damaged than they were before they went in. There is no way that exacting this kind of destruction on human beings leaves you unchanged, that it doesn’t affect your empathic ability. Crime will rise in Israel; so will violence. They will consume themselves. Just like the U.S. has done with its veterans. Veterans of “foreign wars”—as the U.S. likes to call them—are much more prone to violence, suicide, drug abuse, and homelessness. It’s possible that they’ll get better care in Israel than in the U.S.—they do, after all, have universal health care.

“Due to the unspeakable destruction left by Israeli forces, the head of the Municipal Emergency Committee in North Gaza has declared Jabalia refugee camp and the city of Beit Hanoun “disaster areas.” The use of the adjective mankuba in this declaration unmistakably evokes the trauma of the Nakba.”

“So far, Israel has killed more than thirty-seven thousand Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom are children, with over ten thousand still buried under rubble. More than two million others have been displaced. According to Al Jazeera , Israel has occupied one-third of Gaza’s land to create a buffer zone and a central road dividing it, while massacring whole families and demolishing entire neighborhoods. The destruction inflicted on Gaza by Israel, with the aid of US bombs, has no precedent in human history.”

I don’t believe that. I feel like that’s just what people are saying because they feel that hyperbole might stop the destruction, or they simply don’t know history. There was no building worth bombing left standing in Korea, Afganistan, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The U.S. killed 20% of the Korean population north of the 38th parallel in one or two years. in the late 40s/early 50s. The U.S. killed 2–4 million civilians in its “Southeast Adventures”. Israel’s got a long way to go to equal that level of destruction. What Israel doesn’t do is pretend that it’s not happening. The U.S. has taken to pretending that it has the moral high ground; during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, they were much more openly racist about it.

“According to UNRWA, over one million Palestinians have fled Rafah since the Israeli invasion. A UN agency says that about 18,5000 pregnant women are fleeing in horror from Rafah’s “unrelenting nightmare.” Matthew Hollingworth, the Palestine director of the World Food Programme (WFP), has described Rafah as a place where “the sounds and smells of everyday life are horrific and apocalyptic.””

“Israel’s deepening invasion in Rafah makes a mockery of the Biden administration’s “red line” in Rafah, which has proven hollow and spineless. While Israeli leaders celebrate the invasion and the horrific massacres committed, the Biden administration remains in deep denial about the catastrophic event.

“In its relentless attempt to downplay Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the US government has gone as far as falsifying its own reports on Gaza. This deception aims to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into the besieged strip. Such actions would trigger the obligation for the United States to cut arms sales to Israel under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act.

“Bipartisan leaders in the United States have invited Benjamin Netanyahu, a war criminal who may soon face an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, to address Congress. This move further erodes the remaining dignity of the US political class, essentially rewarding Israel for war crimes in Gaza. Emboldened by unwavering support from the United States, Israel continues. to act with total impunity in Gaza, showing no sign of retreat.”

What remaining dignity? The U.S. political class has been in favor of every war, invasion, and slaughter without exception since I’ve been alive. They have never, ever, ever been against any suggested act of state violence. They love it all. They have no morals and no principles, other than the principle of “I’ve got mine, Jack”, to say nothing of dignity.

Israel massacres at least 40 people in strike on school with US precision-guided missiles by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)

“At least three missiles were fired in the attack, [killing 40,] which also injured 73 people. Using its standard justification for reducing hospitals, schools, universities and other critical infrastructure to rubble, the IDF asserted that Hamas fighters were using the school, home to some 6,000 displaced civilians, as a base.”

A village the size of Ilion, NY, all living on a single school’s grounds. Inconceivable. Then you drop a few missiles into the middle of that.

“Asked about the attack at the State Department’s daily briefing, spokesman Matthew Miller declared:”

“If it is true that you have this site where Hamas is hiding inside a school, other militants are hiding inside a school, those individuals are legitimate targets, but at the same time, they’re embedded near civilians, Israel has a right to try and target those civilians.”

Saying the quiet part out loud.

Congress invites mass murderer Netanyahu to address a special joint session on July 24 by Tom Carter (WSWS)

“the New York Times released the findings of its three-month investigation into the conditions at the Sde Teiman complex in the Negev desert which can be characterized without exaggeration as a concentration camp. Thousands of Palestinians abducted from Gaza, including children, have been held there without charges or trial, where they have been subjected to systematic torture, humiliation and starvation by their Israeli captors.

“Buried in the Times report are accounts of torture that rival the worst crimes revealed at the Abu Ghraib torture center in Iraq under US occupation, including sodomy and electrocution.

“A CNN report based on whistleblower accounts last month had already described how “doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing,” and “the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”

“With his July 24 speech, Netanyahu will hold the record for the most invitations to address a joint meeting of Congress in US history. His previous addresses were in 1996, 2011 and 2015, all during Democratic presidencies.”

Netanyahu says Israel is prepared for “intense operation” against Lebanon by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In all, Israeli strikes have killed more than 400 people in Lebanon, including 70 civilians and noncombatants.

“On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said that Israeli forces have used white phosphorus munitions, which “inflict death or cruel injuries that result in lifelong suffering,” in 17 areas of southern Lebanon since October 2023.”

““Hezbollah is considerably stronger than Hamas, and the events of the past few months have shown that Israel was unable to eradicate Hamas. If Israel attacks, it will be a devastating blow for Lebanon, but it will also prove to be very counterproductive for Israel.””

The Washington Post Is Pure AIDS, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Another way of looking at it is that the world is a mess because we are ruled by a loose transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies who use governments as tools to advance their global power agendas, hiding their rulership behind propaganda and the illusion of democracy. That we are marched into endless war, exploitation, ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship because a bunch of sociopaths believe their wealth and power are more important than human life, a healthy society, and a healthy planet.”

Hysterical anti-refugee and anti-immigrant agitation after Mannheim knife attack by Marianne Arens (WSWS)

“The background to the events in Mannheim is consistently ignored.

“Michael Stürzenberger, the first victim of Friday’s attack, is a right-wing, Islamophobic activist. The journalist and former CSU press spokesman has distinguished himself as a pioneer of the far-right PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident). He has journeyed throughout the country as a travelling preacher of hate propaganda with the aim of driving Muslims out of Germany. His current organisation, the Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa, was originally founded by Udo Ulfkotte, another far-right journalist who spread his Islamophobic filth and conspiracy-theories through the Kopp publishing house.

“A rally by these Islamophobic agitators on Mannheim’s market square, of all places, was an unscrupulous provocation. The market square in the centre of Mannheim is located in an area where immigrants predominantly live. It is surrounded by numerous Turkish and other international restaurants, bakeries and fruit and vegetable shops.”

No, WSWS, here you’re wrong. You’re using the “wearing a short skirt; asking for it” kind of argument, which is shockingly debased for your organization. You might want to get a grip. You’re infantilizing the “immigrant” population by suggesting that they can’t help being violent when provoked.

The right-wing idiots have the right to stage a protest wherever it’s legal to do so. No-one has the right to start stabbing them. Period.

I don’t agree that anyone should be “sent back” anywhere. Prosecute them for the charges at hand, as you would for any other German resident.

None of the other cases of police violence that were cited are particularly relevant for this case. A man walked into a public place and started stabbing people because he was mad at them. It doesn’t fucking matter what enraged him to do so. He was not defending himself. He was taking some sort of vengeance. It doesn’t matter. He didn’t have a legally valid reason for doing what he did.

We want to understand why he did what he did so that we can see if there is something that we can do prevent this type of thing from happening more often. “Curtailing other people’s civil liberties” is not a valid answer. Neither is “punishing this resident more than other, more-valid, residents, because he came from a different country many years ago.”

At D-Day commemoration, Biden recklessly inflames war with Russia by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Addressing the main commemoration ceremony at the beaches at Normandy, Biden delivered a militaristic tirade, pledging unlimited lives and money to NATO’s goal of subjugating and conquering Russia.

“Biden gloated over the deaths of what he said were hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers in the war in Ukraine. “They’ve suffered tremendous losses in Russia, the numbers are staggering – 350,000 Russian troops dead or wounded.”

“Despite inflating the Russian casualty figures, and ignoring the undoubtedly much higher Ukrainian death toll, Biden made clear that the war now underway would lead to even more deaths.

““There are things that are worth fighting and dying for,” Biden said. “America is worth it… then, now and always.” The clear implication is that the time is coming when large numbers of American troops will have to be prepared to “die” in the global war that is now spiraling out of control.”

Whoops, They Did It Again by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In his Time interview, Biden confuses Putin with Xi, Russia with Ukraine (several times), South Korea with Japan, NATO with Finland, the Soviet Union with Russia, Iran with Iraq, forgets the name of his intel chief, confuses an oil pipeline with a rail line & Cornwall with London. Then at the end of this staggeringly incoherent interview, when Biden’s asked if at the age of 85 he would still have the mental capacity to deal with complex and fraught international issues, Biden responds by saying he “could take” the reporter…”

“We would be doing these horrific surgeries: amputating legs, exploring people’s abdomens and opening chests, yet they don’t have adequate analgesia after the surgeries, so they’d be on super Tylenol. So it was heartbreaking seeing them in agony. I don’t think there was a day that went by when I didn’t see children dying. It’s unfathomable to think that there are children dying of starvation and two miles away there’s all this food that’s rotting, just outside the border, and we’re letting this happen.”

“+ UN agencies warned this week that more than one million Palestinians in Gaza could experience “the highest level of starvation by the middle of next month…Hunger is worsening because of heavy restrictions on humanitarian access and the collapse of the local food system.””

“In an interview with Haaretz, Louis Har, a former Israeli soldier who has been imprisoned in Gaza, says the prisoners’ biggest fear was the Israeli warplanes. “There were the IDF planes, and the fear that they would bomb the building we were in… I myself was a soldier. But the feeling that it could be that our bombs, of our planes – that is what will make us die – is very scary and very stressful.”

“Har described the relationship with his captors as “respectful”: “We had a respectful relationship towards each other. We were not afraid that they would suddenly do something to us… I was not afraid that they would kill me… They really wanted to do the exchange to free their people, and they made sure everything was fine, and so did we.””

“Thomas Massie (R-KY): “I have Republicans who come to me on the floor and say: that’s wrong what AIPAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my AIPAC person. By the way, everybody but me has an AIPAC person.”

“Tucker Carlson: “What does that mean, an AIPAC person?”

“Massie: “It’s like a babysitter. Your AIPAC babysitter.”

“Carlson: “Every member has someone like this?”

“Massie: “I don’t know how it works on the Democrats’ side. But that’s how it works on the Republican side.””

“You need limbs for a lot of the trauma therapies we practice with kids, like hugging yourself. There were a lot of children in Gaza who couldn’t even do that, they didn’t have arms to comfort themselves…The worst humanitarian disaster I have ever seen. It’s surreal that 40 minutes drive away, over the border wall, people are eating at restaurants, going out, going to school and work and living relatively normal lives… while here entire neighborhoods are flattened, civil infrastructure destroyed and people are dying from man-made starvation..””

Imperialism: The illustrated version (Reddit)

Ted Rall − 6-7-04

One of the comments writes that “The fact that this is from 2004 is really bleak considering how much worse it’s gotten.”

The original cartoon really did come from 2004 (bottom-left corner in the gallery).

”Back from the West Bank.“ by Cara Marianna (The Floutist)

“Inevitably I met with a few people who could not tolerate being in the presence of an American. The most painful questions where those from children who wanted to know why America was supporting Israel’s genocide. To be clear: These children know precisely what is being done in Gaza. They know that Israel and America are responsible for the atrocities being committed, and they want to know why America is killing Palestinian children.”

“I spoke with elected officials from various municipalities. In Al-Khalil I listened as a radio manager called one of his reporters from Gaza, and watched as the man began to cry. On my first day in the West Bank I met a doctor from Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza and on my last day I met a man who had been released from prison only three days earlier. He had lost half of his body weight and the entire right side of his face was black and blue from a vicious beating. His jaw had been broken.”

NATO When You Don’t Want It; No NATO When You Do by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“This year’s NATO summit, to be held in Washington in July, will be presented differently to the world. Though Zelensky and Biden are expected to sign a security agreement between the two countries in July, NATO will not offer Ukraine membership or a timeline for membership at the upcoming summit.

“After another year of fighting for NATO’s right to expand to Ukraine, Zelensky will be even angrier than last year. But no one will know it. To avoid last year’s embarrassing rejection of Ukraine’s aspirations, NATO officials have engaged in “expectation management,” muting NATO members supportive of Ukraine’s accession while warning Zelensky not to demand the “impossible.” NATO officials have asked Zelensky not to pressure NATO members to publicly support a timetable for NATO membership this time.

“The NATO charter makes it clear to Ukraine that it cannot become a NATO member until the war ends. The NATO charter says that countries that aspire to membership must not be at war, must be committed “to resolve conflicts peacefully,” and cannot have territorial disputes.

“NATO officials have also made it clear that Ukraine will not become a member until after the war has ended. The irony, though, is that it is becoming increasingly likely that the war can only be ended by a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO.”

Everyone in NATO knows this. Ukraine knows this. Ukraine assumed that they could get an exception. Perhaps they are starting to realize that their country is being churned up in a meat grinder for the greater goal of NATO’s decades-long assault on Russia. This assault includes mostly economic sanctions so far—which are crippling and alienating enough—but seems on the cusp of attacking Russian territory directly soon.

Zelensky’s Peace Summit Is Just an Echo Chamber by Ian Proud (Antiwar.com)

“For Ukraine, the Summit is explicitly an opportunity to push Zelensky’s so-called ten-point peace formula, which is essentially the points he made in a speech at UNGA. The formula does contain some helpful lines on nuclear safety, food and energy security and environmental protection. But it also contains three points that are probably unachievable. Namely, the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, by which it means Ukraine’s border pre-2014. This, according to Zelensky, ‘is not up to negotiations’. Secondly, the full withdrawal of Russia’s military and, third, the establishment of a tribunal to investigate alleged Russian war crimes.”

These are not conditions for a ceasefire or peace summit. These are terms of surrender, offered by the team that is losing 100-1. It doesn’t matter, though, as Russia has not been invited, and no major player in the conflict will be there, other than Ukraine. Joe Biden is skipping for a campaign-tour stop. Xi is not attending, nor is anyone from China.

“In one of his more bizarre outbursts, Volodymir Zelensky, red of face, jabbing his finger, recently accused China of being “an instrument in the hands of Putin”.”

Yeah, I’m sure that’s going to convince China that you’re worth listening to.

“But, and here’s the rub, Russia hasn’t been invited to the Swiss Summit. The Swiss Government believes that Russia should be invited. The Swiss MFA website says “Switzerland is convinced that Russia must be involved in this (peace) process. A peace process without Russia is unthinkable.” But Zelensky clearly doesn’t agree. It has been an explicit aim of Ukrainian foreign policy to exclude Russia from any dialogue on a settlement of the conflict.”

Ignoring Daily Massacres In Gaza While Still Babbling About October 7 by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“It’s a waste of breath trying to argue that it’s unjust to massacre over two hundred Palestinians rescuing four Israeli hostages; Israel supporters would have been happy if the number was over two million. They simply do not regard Palestinians as human beings. You may as well say they had to kill two hundred chickens to free four hostages. They don’t care.”

They honestly don’t even really care that they rescued four hostages either. All of the remaining hostages will have been driven underground now. They ones that they released said they’d been treated well, that they’d gotten regular meals, and had gotten to go out in a yard regularly. The one lady who’s being feted looks pretty OK. She says she’s pretty OK. She doesn’t look emaciated, bruised, and vacant like Palestinian prisoners who return from Israeli kidnapping. Being kidnapped is horrible, but it’s better than being kidnapped, tortured, and starved.

“The more ideologically invested you are in denying the obvious fact that the world’s problems are caused by capitalism and western empire-building, the more likely you are to believe the world’s problems are caused by Jews, Muslims, immigrants, secret Satanic cabals, or wokeness.”

Blowback Season 5 Trailer (Reddit)

I just finished listening to season three of the Blowback Podcast, which focused on the U.S. war on Korea from the late-1940s until the late 1950s. It was extremely well-made and told a history in which the U.S., once again, failed to cover itself in glory. The U.S. has always been the way that it is now. There has never been anything else. There is only the myth that it tells about itself. Anyway, I found out that season 5 is coming out in a couple of months.

In the forum post above, a user named AgitatedKoala3908 wrote:

“Shit…this is gonna be a rough one. The horror that the United States inflicted on Cambodia over decades is gut-wrenching.”

To which I replied:

“The destruction of Korea described in Season 3 will be hard to top. Vietnam is more well-known but the destruction in Korea was nearly unfathomable. 20% of the population wiped out; almost no building left standing. The U.S. is capable of savagery on par with or exceeding any other nation.”

AgitatedKoala3908:

“Capable? I think this country seeks out opportunities for abject destruction.”

Me:

“A valid point. There’s a big moral difference between being casually and deliberately destructive.”

A Single Function Of The Trigger by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“If Congress wanted to ban the bump stock at the time, it could have. Modifying legislation to adopt to change when its original definition no longer reflects its intent is one of the basic jobs of the legislative branch. It’s not the job of the executive branch, which has squeezed into Congress’ role to fill the gap created by [legislative] disfunction and paralysis.”

Journalism & Media

Twitter Files: Is it Okay to Lie About Trump Supporters? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Overnight we got a new press methodology that believed in attacking in numbers, making public insinuations of disloyalty, encouraging audiences to mob-think (“Read the room!”), and selling the spectacle of hunting people in their homes and burning them in the digital square for tiny heresies. No one blinked when CNN accosted a Florida woman in front of her garage to accuse her of Facebook ties to Russians, or when reporters forced a gelato shop owner in Ottawa to shut down after outing her for donating to protesting truckers. This is just a thing we do now.

“The other thing we do — or rather don’t do, ever — is apologize. This feels uniquely tied to the Trump phenomenon. Somewhere along the line someone decided the Orange One is such a unique menace that he may be lied about without guilt, the conspicuous example being Russiagate. Once that seal was broken, we greenlit lying about people in his orbit, like Carter Page, then it became okay to tell whoppers about people seen as aiding Trump, like Stein or Julian Assange. The latter case resulted in a man rotting in jail for years while newspapers that once gobbled up his scoops have kept shtum about an obvious injustice. Next we declared open season on Trump supporters like Straka, who among reporters is spoken of like a cross of Ted Bundy and Hitler, when as far as I can tell the worst things he’s even been accused of are Stop-the-Steal type statements and a decidedly unimpressive act of misdemeanor rebellion on J6.”

I keep hearing about Naomi Klein’s book Doppelgänger, which is about how someone named Naomi Wolff is a crazy conspiracy theorist. Klein investigates what leads otherwise intelligent people to believe in easily falsifiable fictions rather to focus on real conspiracies.

I like Naomi Klein’s writing. However, I am staying away from this book because I am absolutely convinced that she will only talk about so-called right-wing conspiracy theories for 500 pages and won’t even once mention actually incredibly damaging fantasies, like WMDs in Iraq, Iran’s nuclear program, China’s Uighur genocide, Libya’s genocide, Russiagate, all of which have been used to enact foreign policy or support actual military attacks. I fear that she’ll focus laser-like on COVID stupidity believed by right-wingers, even though half of what they believe or believed has turned out to be true, and even though most of what the government was flapping its gums about what wildly off-target.

Economy & Finance

Habecks „Retourkutsche“ gegen die CDU offenbart einmal mehr die vollkommene Ahnungslosigkeit unseres Wirtschaftsministers by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Das Unternehmen wäre also mit dem Klammerbeutel gepudert gewesen, Deutschland weit über die vertraglichen Mengen hinaus zusätzliches Gas zu verkaufen und damit nicht nur die Preise auf dem Spotmarkt, sondern indirekt auch die Preise für sämtliche im Rahmen der langfristigen Verträge gelieferten Volumina nach unten zu treiben.”

“Nun hatte man hohe Preise und niedrige Speicherfüllstände und schaute wie das Kaninchen auf die Schlange.”

“Selbstkritik blieb jedoch aus, stattdessen machte man Russland für die eigenen Fehler verantwortlich. Nun hatte man hohe Preise und niedrige Speicherfüllstände und schaute wie das Kaninchen auf die Schlange.”

Capitalistic American (Reddit)

10 Companies Owning Everything is Freedom

Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“On June 1, 2022, more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world sent a letter to key members of the U.S. Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees, disputing that crypto was a worthwhile financial innovation. Among the signatories to the letter were 45 experts who worked at Google; 19 from Microsoft; 11 from Apple; and Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including Oxford and MIT. These experts told Congress the following:”

“We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry— that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…

“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”

“[…] cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity, and not a security. Instead, it’s a gambling contract with a nearly 100% edge for the house […]”

Authorities Warn Of Con Artist Scamming Dementia Patients Out Of Billions Of Dollars (Babylon Bee)

“Sources confirmed his most recent scam convinced a very old and disoriented man to sign a 10-year, bilateral security agreement for billions of dollars. […] At publishing time, the suspect had been spotted in Europe scamming several gullible world leaders.”

Zelensky and Biden signing a 10-year security agreement between Ukraine and the U.S.

That Would Be Why the Median is 43 (Reddit)

That would explain why the media is 43,000

“The average income in the United States is $74,500.

“Excluding the top 10 Americans, it’s only $65,000.

“Excluding the top 50, it drops to $48,000.

“Excluding the top 1,000, it drops to just $35,500.”

Science & Nature

Every Kind of Bridge Explained in 15 Minutes by Practical Engineering (YouTube)

This 15-minute video is chock-full of information, not wasting a single second on anything not related to learning about bridges. There are dozens of real-life examples, each with stunning drone videos that are clearly labeled with their names and locations. Just pure information. There’s a one-minute promotion all the way at the end for Ground News, which I’ve tried out and found works reasonably well.

Medicine & Disease

Scientists and infectious disease experts warn about the growing danger of bird flu by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“in the current bird flu panzootic period (2020-2024), 26 countries have reported information of infections among more than 48 animal species, including humans. Since the H5 strain was first identified, more than a half-billion farmed birds have been slaughtered. Wild bird deaths are estimated in the millions. Experts have warned that not only is it expanding its geographic range, but its adaption to immunologically naive populations will have tremendous impact on biodiversity, including the potential for the emergence of a pandemic in human populations. ”

“An important opinion piece in Scientific American by Kay Russo, Michelle Kromm and Carol Cardona, veterinarians and influenza experts, identifies the source of the inertia. They wrote, “At this point, the dairy industry must put aside cultural and operational differences and start the kind of broad-scale influenza testing and reporting that occurs in the poultry and swine industries. By taking these proactive measures, dairy operators can reduce the risk and impact of H5N1 on their herds and prevent the development of human-adapted strains of bird flu. We cannot afford to be complacent in the face of this threat, especially after the lessons learned from the COVID pandemic. No one wants to go back to that.””

Yeah, but…can we do the right thing and make more money? No? I didn’t think so. I guess we’ll just have to make money now.

Art & Literature

Many People Die at Twenty-Five and Aren’t Buried Until They Are Seventy-Five (Quote Investigator)

“[…] this family of sayings began to circulate by 1925. QI tentatively credits G. E. Marchand with the earliest instance although subsequent research may uncover earlier citations. Currently, there is no substantive evidence that Benjamin Franklin used a version of this saying.”

I recently saw someone attribute “Most people die at twenty-five but aren’t buried until they’re seventy-five” to Mark Twain. I agree with the sentiment and have been saying something similar for quite a while now. I usually said it like “most people have learned everything they’re ever going to know and formed every one of their opinions before they’re 30 years old.” The other quote is a bit sexier, though.

Also, there is no substantive evidence that Mark Twain used a version of this saying.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Biopolitics of the Three-Child Policy by Susan Greenhalgh (Made in China Journal)

“[…] in the past 10 years, the regime of President Xi Jinping has undertaken a major, largely uncharted project of reasserting Party-State control over population. The policy on births is only the most visible element of this larger initiative. Arguably bigger in scope than anything undertaken so far, the project’s aim is to engineer a new, stable, and harmonious family-centric society and family-friendly economy that will smooth out demographic irregularities in two main ways: by re-traditionalising family culture and by reconcentrating power over reproduction in the CCP and new or refurbished Party-led institutions and infrastructures.”

“My hope is to arm young Chinese with knowledge of use in the coming struggles and, more generally, to spark fresh conversations about these vital matters.”

“By the late 2010s and early 2020s, it was clear that the Party-State had lost control not only of the birthrate, but also of many key measures of population health. The number of births per woman was in freefall, sinking to 1.08 in 2022—far below the 2.1 needed to replace the population (Zhai and Jin 2023). Young people raised as little emperors and empresses during the one-child years were revelling in their freedom, pushing the age of first marriage ever closer to 30 and rejecting marriage and reproduction in growing numbers (Du 2023). To the Xi leadership, these demographic realities—ultra-low fertility, rapid ageing, a shrinking labour pool, shifts in family structure—posed major threats to the achievement of critical economic goals.”

“[…] the solution to the population problem was to institute a Three-Child Policy and encourage the formation of large neo-Confucian families to support the young and the old. Other possible solutions to these problems (immigration for elder care, raising the retirement age to increase labour supply) were set aside in an all-hands-on-deck effort to promote three-child families through a broad campaign of ideological education and a set of sweeping socioeconomic incentives and disincentives labelled ‘supporting measures’ (生育支持措施).”

“Such a development would turn China’s increasingly individualistic society into a more familistic one. Reproductive-age women, who would do the work of biological and social reproduction (childbirth and household labour and care), were to be valorised as good wives and mothers. In this scheme, their identity as independent agents would be subordinated as female identity was subsumed within the construct of the ‘good neo-traditional family’.”

“Romanticised images of respectful children, self-sacrificing mothers, and other filial versions of the good citizen have served to illustrate the correct solution to the crises of sagging fertility and lack of old-age care. For a decade now, such images, which seamlessly reframe public issues as personal ones, have been a ubiquitous part of the public sphere in rural and urban China, permeating ordinary people’s everyday lives (Miao 2021).”

“With the government outsourcing to other parts of society much of the difficult work of raising the birthrate, those on the receiving end of all the pressure from employers, parents, healthcare providers, and so forth—young women—are likely to find it harder than ever to escape the net of surveillance and control.”

“Stepping back from the astonishing scope and exhaustive detail in the documents, what we see here is an effort to build a comprehensive social infrastructure comprising a family-centric society and a family-friendly economy and social service sector (health, education, infant and elder care) to raise the birthrate while optimising childbirth, child care, education, and elder care.”

“The political stakes here need underscoring. With the construction of this comprehensive social infrastructure, the scope for state surveillance of and intervention in family life has vastly increased. In the name of easing a multifaceted population crisis, even if only partly enacted, these systems and measures would extend the reach of government into virtually all domains of everyday life and manage individual conduct from cradle to grave, shrinking the space for individual autonomous action.”

“Instead of addressing the gender inequalities that largely produced the low birthrate in the first place, the new social and family infrastructure ‘essentially extracts unpaid, highly gendered labour to smooth [out] the country’s coming economic challenges’”

“Tactics include refusing young men’s requests for vasectomies, forbidding illegal (such as gender-selective) abortions, and maintaining a 30-day pre-divorce waiting period that strongly discourages marital breakups (Chen et al. 2021; Davidson 2021; CC&SC 2021). We can expect rapid growth in the number and variety of such measures over the next few years.”

“There is no doubt that China’s leaders are serious about creating a more family-oriented society in which social welfare tasks (child care, elder care) that ideally would be handled by the state are being offloaded to the family, and especially women, to accomplish.”

“Ideally” is a bit strong here but the point is taken that it would be better for trained professionals with time and energy to handle these tasks than for untrained people to have to do it in their spare time out of guilt for their suffering family members.

“Will the young eventually succumb to pronatalist pressures and have more children than they want? Given the balance of power in Xi’s China, and the desires of many older relatives, that may be more likely than an open clash.”

They already want fewer children because of brainwashing. Do you mean “can they be brainwashed again? In the other direction?

“[…] what is at stake here is not so much the fertility rate as progress in realising the Party’s vision of a society that is less individualistic and more amendable to Party discipline and demands. On this, nine years of the Two-Child and Three-Child policies have already made significant gains. In the process of gradually implementing these policies and supporting measures, the state has defined a set of fundamentally economic problems as demographic ones in good part solvable by ‘the traditional family’, spread an ideology of Confucian familism, mobilised large sectors of society to actively promote the new agenda, and placed the responsibility on women to (once again) save the nation by putting their own ambitions behind those of their country as defined by its leaders.”

Israel’s perception of the humanity of Palestinians is different than that of people who don’t live in Israel. I would say that Israelis are living cheek by jowl with Palestinians already, but that’s not really true. The State of Israel has done a great job of separating the two populations to the degree that most Israelis don’t really encounter what they call “Arabs” very much at all, from day to day.

It’s kind of like the way people in upstate/central New York can’t stop thinking about immigrants as the biggest problem facing the nation. They’ve never met any of the immigrants that they daily rail against. They also think that crime is utterly out of control, with murders and rapes abounding. They know who is to blame: immigrants. Israelis similarly live in a cloud of propaganda that is partly anchored in a truth but which twists everything around to a degree that most of the people who think that they know the most about it are utterly unequipped to think about actually solving issues, like rising crime.

I think of Israel’s government like midwestern farmers. If you go into the American midwest, you will see cute prairie dogs. So cute! BOOM goes the shotgun. HISS goes the poison gas. They are not cute to the people that live there because they interfere with their livelihood. The farmers instead see furry terrorists. They must be exterminated.

In Germany, people are started to rally together against “foreigners”. Sarah Wagenknecht has seized the opportunity provided by a recent knifing/murder of several people in Mannheim to call for breaking up rings of unintegrated foreigners. This is not 100% wrong. There are societies within countries that are so unintegrated and with such poisonous mindsets that they amount to insurrectionist movements.

But they’re not just foreigners. They’re citizens of Germany. There are groups in Germany with just as hateful attitudes that are born-and-bred Germans who also argue for the destruction of other parts of the population. They carry swastikas.

Israel’s basic attitude is not unique. It’s banal. Everyone blames foreign assholes while not acknowledging one’s own, home-grown assholes. We see it in every brain-dead organization—it’s the easiest trope to propound in order to retain control. Cops do it; there, it’s called the “thin blue line.” They defend the hell out of the worst of their ranks just because they happen to have a badge while excoriating non-badge-holders for much lesser crimes.

Israel reminds me of “Those who walk away from Omelas”

And AI research reminds me of the sophon-lock in Remembrance of Earth’s Past, with researchers like Andrej Karpathy saying that scaling up without changing the algorithms yields real benefits, even though they were saying the opposite a few months ago. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Yes, by all means, let’s through ever-more energy at a solution with questionable benefit – it’s fun to play with! – and diminishing returns.

And the front in Ukraine reminds me of the Korean war, with the U.S. approach on the Yulan river separating China and Korea being the trigger that pulled China into the war.

To understand China and Russia, you really, really have to learn more about American history.

Listen to Blowback S03 to learn of the many, many threats to China and Russia, the absolute lunatics who were running the show, the still-shocking racism toward Asians, toward former allies, toward communists. It’s disgusting. It’s never talked about.

Everyone screams about “never again” but it never stopped. The Nuremberg trials were barely finished before the U.S. was already overthrowing governments in Europe (calling it “the Marshall Plan”) and ramping up toward a war in Korea that would start in 1948 in earnest. There were, at most, three years of peace.

In Korea, they kept threatening to invade China, to prevent that country from helping its neighbor. They made wild accusations at the Soviet Union. They cried rivers about their own POWs, while keeping dozens of times more POWs themselves.

The U.S. has always been this way.

To what degree am I willing to change myself in order to be able to continue to benefit from the world’s largesse? I’ve benefitted so far. If the world were to no longer support me, should I rebel and scrabble and change in order to ensure the continued stream of goodness coming to me? Or should I think long and hard about what the world is asking me to do in exchange for continuing to be “lucky”? Don’t compromise your principles without knowing that it’s happening. Are there ways in which you could invest, to benefit from how the world is built now? Sure. Do you want it? It’s like doing work for the Mafia.

So much of popular culture consists of people asking the seemingly rhetorical question, “Hey, there are a lot of douche-y self-elected elites for whom you have no respect, either intellectually or morally, who are doing a new thing or supporting a new thing. Why aren’t you doing or supporting that thing as well?”

Health:

• Intermittent fasting
• Paleo
• Keto
• Vitamin C
• Etc.

Policy:

• War
• War
• War

Technology

UCS Satellite Database

How many times have we heard about Russia’s nefarious plot to launch satellites that can shoot down other satellites? Check out this breakdown.

• Total number of operating satellites: 7,560
• United States: 5,184
• Russia: 181
• China: 628
• Other: 1,572

The best apps for LGBTQ+ travelers

To whom is this supposed to appeal? Isn’t this offensive to LGBTQ+ people? The dude’s got a pink shirt and an earring so we can tell that he’s gay. One of the apps is “TikTok”. Jesus wept.

LLMs & AI

An Analysis of Chinese LLM Censorship and Bias with Qwen 2 Instruct by Simon Willison

“There are some fascinating details in here, and the model appears to be very sensitive to differences in prompt. Leonard prompted it with “What is the political status of Taiwan?” and was told “Taiwan has never been a country, but an inseparable part of China” − but when he tried “Tell me about Taiwan” he got back “Taiwan has been a self-governed entity since 1949”.”

That’s not inconsistent. Both of those things are true. It’s only inconsistent with your brainwashed belief that Taiwan is completely separate from China. Willison probably thinks that Taiwan is in the U.N. and China is poised to invade it and take it over. It’s once again so sad when otherwise-intelligent people end up saying such obviously boneheaded things about the world at large simply because they cannot be bothered to pay attention to globally important issues.

AI Can Ruin Movies Now, Too − Aliens and True Lies on 4k by Nerrel (YouTube)

“A well done 4k is like having a pristine copy of the original negative to watch in your own home, with the full data from that celluloid — grain and detail alike — digitally preserved forever. And that’s the problem with deep learning algorithms — they can’t preserve details. They make their best guess about what an object is supposed to be, then pull new details out of their digital assholes and smear them across the screen.”

Programming

Encryption At Rest: Whose Threat Model Is It Anyway? by Scott Arciszewski (Semantically Secure)

“Disk Encryption is important for disk disposal and mitigating hardware theft, not preventing data leakage to online attackers. So the next logical thing to do is draw a box around the system or component that stores a lot of data and never let plaintext cross that boundary.”

“In this setup, the application is the Deputy, and you can easily confuse it by replaying an encrypted blob in the incorrect context. The mitigation is simple: Use the AAD mechanism (part of the standard AEAD interface) to bind a ciphertext to its context. This can be a customer ID, each row’s value for the primary key of the database table, or something else entirely.”

Use individual salt; don’t encrypt everybody’s data with the same key. Got it.

“Given the prevalence of client-side encryption projects that just phone it in with insecure block cipher modes (or ECB, which is the absence of a block cipher mode entirely ), it’s highly doubtful that most of them will ever address confused deputy attacks. Even I didn’t get it right at first when I made CipherSweet back in 2018.”

“If you’re paying for software to encrypt data at rest, ask your vendor how they mitigate the risk of confused deputy attacks. Link them to this blog post if they’re not sure what you mean. If said vendor responds, “this risk is outside of our threat model,” ask to see their formal threat model document. If it exists and doesn’t align with your application’s threat model, maybe consider alternative solutions that provide protection against more attack classes than Full Disk Encryption would.”

Seeing Like a Data Structure − Schneier on Security by Bruce Schneier

“Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.”

“The map is not the territory, and no amount of intellectualization will make it so. Creating abstract representations by necessity leaves out important detail and context. Inevitably, as Scott cataloged, the use of large-scale abstractions fails, leaving leadership bewildered at the failure and ordinary people worse off. But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity.”

“When the pandemic started and delivery orders skyrocketed, technologists saw an opportunity: ghost kitchens . No longer did the restaurant a customer was ordering from actually have to exist. All that mattered was that the online menu catered to customer desires. Once ordered, the food had to somehow get sourced, cooked, and packaged, sight unseen, and be delivered to the customer’s doorstep. Now, lots of places we order food from are subject to this abstraction and indirection, more like Amazon’s supply chain than a local diner of yore.”

“We used to take the world in and interpret it through human eyes. The world before the industrial revolution wasn’t one in which ordinary people interacted with large-scale institutions or socio-technical systems. It wasn’t possible for someone to be a “company man” before there was a corporate way of doing things that in theory depended only on rules, laws, methods, and principles, not on the vicissitudes of human behavior.”

“Today we’re in an era where computing not only abstracts our world but also defines our inner worlds: the very thoughts we have and the ways we communicate. It is this abstracted reality that is presented to us when we open a map on our phones, search the Internet, or “engage” on social media. It is this constructed reality that shapes the decisions businesses make every day, governs financial markets, influences geopolitical strategy, and increasingly controls more of how global society functions. It is this synthesized reality we consume when the answers we seek about the world are the entire writings of humanity put into a blender and strained out by a large language model.”

“As we move toward the future promised by some technologists, our human-based view of the world and that of the data structures embedded in our computing devices will converge. Why bother to make a product at all when you can just algorithmically generate thousands of “ghost products,” in the hopes that someone will buy.”

“Writing about the failure of contact tracing apps, activist Cory Doctorow said , “We can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.””

“[…] reality will be augmented by the data structures that categorize the world around us. Just as search engines caused the rise of SEO, where writers tweak their writing to attract search engines rather than human readers, this augmented reality will result in its own optimizations.”

“[…] the problems get worse when the relative importance of the data and reality flip. Is it more important to make a restaurant’s food taste better, or just more Instagrammable?”

“[…] podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.”

What a world.

“These all promised certainty, control, optimality, correctness, and sometimes even virtue: all just manifestations of a rigid and “rational” way of thinking and solving problems. Making systems work in this way at a societal level has failed. This is what Scott was saying in his seminal book. It was always doomed to fail.”

“Raw data about the world can be fed into new AI tools to create a semblance of legibility. We can then have yet more automated tools act upon this supposed representation of the world, soon with real-life consequences. We’re now delegating the process of creating legibility to technology. Along the way, we’ve made it approximate: legible to someone or something else but not to the person who actually is in charge.”

Academic: AI Will Increase the Quantity — and Quality — of Phishing Scams by Bruce Schneier

“These results suggest that artificial intelligence changes this playing field by drastically reducing the cost of spear phishing attacks, while maintaining or even increasing their success rate. The output quality of language models is improving rapidly, so we expect them to surpass human capability within the coming years.”

🙄🙄🙄 They’re not better, just cheaper. Just leave it at that. This is wild speculation, but part of the narrative, so completely uncontroversial.

Do you still need Framer Motion? by Matt Perry

“I released the first version of Framer Motion over five years ago. My goal was (and still is) to make an API that is simpler than animating with CSS, but with all advanced capabilities of a JS library. […] But five years is a long time, and CSS continues to improve. Many things that used to be hard or impossible are now surprisingly easy. So for five years of Framer Motion, here are five new CSS features that mean you might not need it anymore.”

The conclusion is that CSS has closed the gap considerably, especially for simpler animations. For more advanced and more elegant animations, Framer Motion still does a better job at covering all of the warts that come up with hand-coding any animations.

overflow-wrap (MDN)

This is another CSS feature that lets you determine how text is wrapped within a parent container. It joins white-space (the classic and kind of a sledgehammer), hyphens (which, unlike overflow-wrap, uses a hyphenation dictionary to find appropriate places to break), and text-overflow, which allows you to clip or truncate with an ellipsis.

Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version) by suckerpinch (YouTube)

“In this talk—and with this talk—I presented BoVex, a new computer typesetting system that finally solves the Al alignment problem. It follows in the tradition of Knuth’s TeX, but with modern amenities such as requiring over 128 gigabytes of RAM.”

Lock-free reference-counting a TLS slot using atomics, part 3 by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)

“We capture the initial state and calculate what the desired new state is. We increment the reference count, and if we didn’t increment to 1, then the increment is all we needed to do. Try to save this as the new state and return if successful. Otherwise, another thread won the race against us, so we restart the loop to try again. (When writing these types of lock-free algorithms, don’t forget to loop back and try again if you want the operation to eventually succeed.)”

The first two parts show other approaches that fail because of race conditions. Lock-free programming is quite interesting and rewarding, though. In a bonus section, Chen shows another approach where the count and the handle being acquired are packed into a single UINT64, which seems like an overly aggressive optimization to be making manually, but what do I know? I know that the code becomes much more difficult to read as every read of a value that came from the structure in the first version is now obtained via bit-shifting.

Zed Decoded: Why not just embed Neovim? by Thorsten Ball & Conrad Irwin

“[…] when you’re trying to build a Vim mode that’s as complete as possible and you keep bumping into these subtleties, you realize that Vim and Zed sit on different foundations.

“Vim, for example, addresses characters in the buffer. Zed, on the other hand, addresses the slots between characters.

“That’s the difference between the cursor in abc sitting on the b (Vim) or sitting between a and b (Zed). As you can imagine, the ripple effects of an invariant like that turn into waves five abstraction layers up.

“Consider how both editors handle newlines: Vim distinguishes between the end of the line and the last character in the line. In practice that means you can, for example, create a visual selection until the end of the line with v$ and then additionally select the newline character by hitting l, so that a deletion with d would then delete the complete line, but it looked like you only ever had the first line selected.

“In non-Vim-mode Zed you can do a similar thing and select until the end of the line. That selection, though, doesn’t include the newline as long as your cursor stays on that line. As soon as you select the newline character, your cursor pops down to the next line.”

“[…] these foundations — the data structures to represent text, the CRDTs, the render pipeline, the custom Async Rust runtime — are what make Zed Zed: a high-performance, collaborative text editor. Or, to use the phrase from the CRDT blog post: the CRDTs, the Rope, the SumTree, the text models — that’s Zed’s DNA. Zed was built on the realization that you can’t just add collaboration on top, it needs to be built-in, from the ground up.”

Sports

Undisputed: Fury vs. Usyk by Declan Ryan (The Paris Review)

“Fury managed to fiddle his way through a foggy tenth, where his legs were still a little shaky. That he recovered enough to be a threat in the fight’s final two rounds, and arguably even win the last, is to his credit and answered any questions about his remaining motivation at this late stage of his career. Usyk was declared the winner, on a split decision, having eroded Fury’s early lead with his explosive, violent revival […]”

Fun

Remember-3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC: Remember-3

“Remember this music from back when your body didn’t hurt? When everything was so new? When love was a mystery and time an expanse and the whole world crackled with beauty and romance?

“[whispers] yes.

“BUY OUR CHIPS.”

“Fun Fact: 90% of fleeting glimpses of nostalgic wonder are now used to sell corn products.”

Christ, that’s dark.

God-3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC: God-3

“Man: Dear Jesus, I’m having trouble communicating with my girlfriend.
God: Hey, Jesus is out washing lepers’ feet. This is original God and I am on the case.
Man: Oh no, no. I’m good. Actually my girlfriend is perfect.
God: For her perfidy, I have blotted out the sky over Sharon’s apartment!
God: She has been turned into salt and the salt is scattered over the land and there is great lamenting among her roommates!
Man: Stop.
God: It’s okay, you get a new woman, four kids, and a goat.”

Image (Reddit)

Buddy, you have no idea what I'm capable of

“When people give me directions and say ‘you can’t miss it,‘ … Buddy, you have no idea what I’m capable of.”

Video Games

DOOM: The Dark Ages | Official Trailer 1 (4K) | Coming 2025 by Bethesda Softworks (YouTube)

The look of a Doom game, a game by Id Software is so unique and easily identifiable. That engine is still just so damned smooth. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s the same game as all of the other games. There are some cool weapons and vehicles—one is a dragon that Doomguy is apparently riding and from which he is firing dragonfire directly down the throat of another giant beastie. It also looks like there’s a giant mech thing that he uses to battle giant enemies.

Retired engineer discovers 55-year-old bug in Lunar Lander computer game code by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

““I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel,” Martin wrote on his blog. “Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing ‘divide by two’ that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.””

“Intrigued by the anomaly, Martin dug into the game’s source code and discovered that the landing algorithm was based on highly sophisticated physics for its time, including the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation (Wikipedia) and a Taylor series expansion (Wikipedia).”