Links and Notes for June 14th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

US Senator Says Ukraine Is ‘Gold Mine’ with $12 Trillion of Minerals ‘We Can’t Afford to Lose’ by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)

““If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of”, Graham continued. “That $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China”.”

Do these resources even exist? Or is Graham just an old victim of a scam being run by Zelensky?

“The major media outlet referred to Ukraine as “a raw-material mother lode”, that is “home to 117 of the 120 most widely used minerals and metals, and a major source of fossil fuels”. According to the Post, at least $12.4 trillion of natural resources are located in the eastern part of Ukraine, where most of the fighting has happened in the war.”

Yeah, how convenient.

“The Joe Biden White House warned that “China controls most of the market for processing and refining for cobalt, lithium, rare earths and other critical minerals”. Biden signed an executive order soon after coming to power in 2021 to try to limit China’s involvement in the global supply chain.”

What a f@&king joke.

““Here’s what he [Zelensky] wanted most of all, for us to go after the Russian assets all over the world”, the US senator said. “Take the money from the sovereign wealth funds of Russia and give it to Ukraine”, Graham insisted. “There’s $300 billion sitting in Europe from Russian sovereign wealth assets that we should seize and give to Ukraine.” “We have Russian money in America we should seize”, he added.”

Pure plunder.

“Numerous Western officials have suggested that they will seize these assets from Russia and use them to fund Ukraine, in violation of international law. Such an action would further accelerate the global drive toward de-dollarization”

The EU recently announced that it is going to grab a $50B tranche.

The Afterlives of Lies by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders, along with the reporters who clerk for them, were in Normandy busily airbrushing out the Red Army’s heroism in defeating the Reich 80 years ago, […]”

“[…] the significance of The Times piece extends well beyond its quality as first-rate work. Mainstream media have at last reported on the monstrous propaganda operation that has fabricated lurid allegations of sexual abuse on the part of Hamas militias. The surface of silence has finally been disturbed. The historians will have a record with which to work.”

“From here on out, those who continue to peddle the junk conjured by the Israeli propaganda machine will merely expose themselves as unserious buffoons in the service of an apartheid state. Let them.”

The Forgotten Faces on the Uranium Trail by Linda Pentz Gunter (CounterPunch)

“When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering. When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.”

“We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe. Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.”

“It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement”

It doesn’t have to be…but our system kind of dictates that it does.

“Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty. So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.”

“Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.”

Again, this is not the only way, but it’s the only way in a world run by oligarchs, a world where every city is Omelas.

“The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.”

“At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history.”

Biden Admin Endorses Trump’s Saudi Foreign Policy by As`ad AbuKhalil (Scheer Post)

“The security agreement that the U.S. is negotiating has been modified to take into consideration an important fact: that Israel is not willing to accept, even in principle, a Palestinian state in return for full normalization with Saudi Arabia. All factions in Israel are united in rejecting the Arab peace initiative which was engineered by Saudi Arabia in 2002. Even Yitzhak Rabin, who is lauded in the West as a real champion of peace despite his war criminal record, never uttered the words “Palestinian state.””

“The Biden administration will also be agreeing to the installation of a nuclear reactor in Saudi Arabia without conditions. It will be agreeing to the sale of advanced military technology to Saudi Arabia, which the U.A.E. regime had asked for itself when it agreed to the Abraham Accords.”

Just to note: this is the regime that was almost certainly actively involved, if not spearheading the financing and planning 9-11.

Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.”

Give New York To The Mormons by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

This is an essay along this lines of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, i.e., a reductio ad absurdum.

“The state of New York should be given to the Mormons, since that’s where Joseph Smith founded Mormonism. All other faiths in the new nation which shall be known as Mormonland must either leave or accept the fact that their homes and property will be taken by Mormons, that they will be displaced to undesirable parts of Mormonland, and that they will be treated as second-class citizens at best and as vermin in need of extermination at worst.

“I’m sure this would be accepted by all the other groups who made their home in New York over the years, since it’s a perfectly reasonable and appropriate thing to do. After all, the Mormons deserve a homeland, and they deserve for that homeland to be the one their religion’s predecessors once inhabited.

“One could argue that the Mormons already have places like Utah where they have made a home in which they are thriving and perfectly safe, but making such arguments would make one an evil Nazi who is guilty of religious persecution.”

Countdown to Zelensky’s ‘Peace Summit’ by John Zavales (Antiwar.com)

“Elements of the Ukraine crisis remind me of the early stages of the Syrian civil war. About ten years ago I worked on the humanitarian assistance response to the Syria crisis, at a time when many in the US interagency were enthusiastically riding the regime change express. I don’t want to stretch the analogy too much, because obviously Ukraine’s position of defending its sovereignty is vastly stronger under international law than our attempt to overthrow the Assad regime. The similarity I see is the complete refusal of both our chosen allies to face the reality of facts on the ground. The Western educated Syrian activists with whom we sipped tea in Istanbul made completely outlandish negotiation demands, such as insisting that Assad and his government would have no role in any future Syria. Of course the Syrian opposition (excepting the jihadists) had zero military or political capability to enforce such demands, and simply assumed the US and its allies would do so on their behalf. Zelensky, with his Ten Point peace plan, embodies the same delusional approach. He’s like a poker player holding a pair of threes, while adamantly insisting he has a full house. Regardless of the legality of his cause, he simply lacks the military capacity or diplomatic leverage to back up his demands.”

Gaza Ceasefire Proposal: Diplomacy or Magic Trick? by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Then continuing the sleight of hand that Israel has clearly accepted and Hamas has clearly rejected, Blinken said, “It was a deal that Israel accepted and the world was behind. Hamas could have answered with a single word: ‘yes’… As a result, the war will go on and more people will suffer.”

“It is not entirely clear whether Israel or Hamas has entirely accepted the ceasefire proposal. What seems clear is that U.S. redirection is making it look like Israel has and that it is now all up to Hamas. This American performance raises the possibility that what looks like transparent diplomacy has deceptive elements of sleight of hand.

“So far, Hamas has offered an, at least partially, positive response – what Blinken called a “hopeful sign” – and Israel has, so far, not offered a clear publicly response. Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and an expert on the Middle East Stephen Zunes, told me that “The Biden administration is spinning it to make it look like it’s just the opposite.””

Snider analyzes what is actually being said and done and comes to the conclusion that there is more than a bit of subterfuge. That’s my interpretation of his interpretation of what he’s written; my own interpretation would be that Israel is grudgingly but only partially lying about its intentions in order for the Biden administration to register a “win” before the DNC this summer. He and his party cohort don’t really understand how this will backfire on them because they still don’t think that voters might possibly have minds of their own. Why would they? They’ve never shown this before.

At any rate, Israel has very clearly said that this is not their proposal but that they agree to a ceasefire after they’ve eliminated Hamas and any other Palestinian military capability. Then Blinken says that Hamas rejected this generous and utterly realistic and applicable deal, so they’re obviously the ones who are responsible for the continued war and slaughter and starvation of civilians. Shrug. We tried.

The 20 minutes newspaper in Switzerland simply inhales and regurgitates the official narrative to calmly and competently brainwash the Swiss public—especially the youth, which draws a lot of its news from this commuter newspaper—into believing that one, single person is responsible for all of the death and destruction that they see on Tik Tok: Jihia al-Sinwar, head of Hamas. The people providing or dropping the bombs are in no way responsible for the death and destruction. He is. Neat trick, huh?

The article is titled Seine Nachrichten zeigen das kaltblütige Kalkül des Hamas-Führers by Ann Guenter (20 Minuten). The story cites the right-wing, neoliberal, war-loving, U.S. business-and-propaganda rag The Wall Street Journal nearly exclusively. In this way, the propaganda tentacles of the U.S. empire extend into supposedly neutral Switzerland, to manufacture consent among its citizens for the narrative that the U.S. is selling on Israel’s behalf. The Swiss accept this willingly and happily—because they can fill their newspapers with data that looks like information while happily selling their advertising alongside it. This, all without having to spend a dime on reporting! The WSJ does all of the heavy lifting! Ann Guenter just has to copy/paste a few things into ChatGPT, then into DeepL and Bob’s your uncle—she can go to the Badi early that afternoon. Good job, Ann!

Let’s see what she managed to squeeze in.

“Al-Sinwar sei nicht der erste Palästinenserführer, der Blutvergiessen als Druckmittel gegen Israel einsetze. Aber das Ausmass der Kollateralschäden in diesem Krieg – getötete Zivilisten und angerichtete Zerstörung […]”

“Al-Sinwar habe die Terrorangriffe der Hamas vom 7. Oktober im israelischen Grenzgebiet, die den derzeitigen Gaza-Krieg auslösten, geplant.”

Delicious red meat for the faithful.

Does the Constitution Apply to Biden’s War in Ukraine? by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Congress cannot legally declare war on Russia, since there is no militarily grounded reason for doing so. Russia poses no threat to American national security or American persons or property. Moreover, the U.S. has no treaty with Ukraine that triggers an American military defense. But Congress spends money on war nevertheless.

“Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war on a nation or group. The last time it did so was to initiate American involvement in World War II. But Congress has given away limited authority to presidents and permitted them to fight undeclared wars.”

“Congress has only authorized weapons and cash to be sent to Ukraine, but Biden has sent troops as well. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam began the same way: No declaration of war, no authorization for the use of military force, yet a gradual buildup of American troops as advisers and instructors, and then a congressionally supported war that saw half a million American troops deployed, 10% of whom came home in body bags.”

“The various treaties to which the U.S. is a party limit its war-making to that which is defensive, proportional and reasonable. So, if a foreign power is about to strike – like on 9/11, while the government slept – the president can strike first in order to protect the U.S. Beyond an imminent attack, the basis for war must be real, the adversary’s anti-U.S. military behavior must be grave, the objective of war must be clear and attainable, and the means must be proportionate to the threat.

“Has Russia threatened the U.S.? No. What grave acts has the Russian military committed against the U.S.? None. What is Biden’s objective? He won’t say.”

Europe’s Elections as a Mirror by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The E.U. is as it has long been—an undemocratic institution atop which sit neoliberal ideologues and austerian central bankers, technocrats who take no interest in the democratic process or the wishes of the E.U.’s citizenry. Readers may recall the brutality with which Brussels and Frankfurt had Athenians eating out of garbage cans nine years ago to protect the interests of bond investors holding Greek sovereign debt. That was the E.U. in action, the E.U. that has perverted the worthy vision of its postwar founders.”

“Greater national sovereignty in reply to the high-handed arrogance of unelected technocrats and market-worshippers in Brussels and Frankfurt, an independent Europe that rejects its leaders’ subservience to Washington, peaceable relations with Russia and an end to the economically ruinous sanctions regime the U.S. has forced on Europe, an end, also, to financial, material, and political support for the thieving, neo–Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war waged at great human cost: These are among the major positions of the parties that just gained in the E.U. elections. Tell me, please, what is “far-right” or inducing of “havoc” in any of this.”

What’s a Palestinian Life Worth? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Gideon Levy on the Nuseirat massacre: “A society that ignores so blatantly the price paid by tens of thousands of people for the rescue of four of its hostages and a moment of joy for its members, is a society that is missing something vital.””

As suddenly such a strong emphasis is placed by the mainstream media on rescuing hostages, it’s worth noting, once again, that Israel does not hold the moral high ground here. It’s not that Hamas has hostages and Israel does not. Israel has dozens of times as many hostages as Hamas does. The main reason that Hamas took hostages was as leverage to bargain for the release of Israel’s Palestinian hostages.

“Hamas issued its response to the proposed ceasefire deal to Egyptian and Qatari mediators on Tuesday, including a few amendments to the initial draft. Hamas’s changes included advancing Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the beginning of the reconstruction works to the first phase of the ceasefire, not the third phase, as in the U.S. draft. Hamas also wants to add Russia, China, and Turkey as guarantors to the deal, in addition to the U.S.–a change Israel considers unacceptable, according to Israeli media reports.”

“Craig Mokhiber: “This bizarre dance by the US around the ceasefire (non)agreement seems to be a cynical effort to (1) shift blame away from Israel’s breach of the binding order of the ICJ over to Hamas instead, (2) wrest control of the process away from the UN back to the US & (3) distract the world from Israel’s ongoing atrocities. It’s not working.””

Oh, it is working among the power elites, whose opinions matter. Or maybe, given the EU elections, … it’s not working? Is no-one listening to these power elites anymore? Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched.

“The Pentagon has already spent about $1 billion fighting the Houthis to support Israel’s Gaza War. It has conducted more than 450 strikes and intercepted 200 drones and missiles. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that the conflict isn’t sustainable: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive and our logistics tails are long. We are playing whack-a-mole, and they are playing a long game.”

“Houthis for the win!”

Encouraging War in Ukraine, New York Times Misses the Point by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Russia’s peace proposal sets out that Ukraine must guarantee that it will be a non-nuclear, non-aligned neutral nation that will not join NATO. It must completely withdraw from the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions that existed before the war. They must agree to limits on the size of their armed forces, and they must ensure the rights of the Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine. “Immediately,” Putin says, “literally at that moment, an order will be given to cease fire and begin negotiations.””

“Without such an agreement, “the realities on the ground… will continue to change not in favor of the Kiev regime. And the conditions for starting negotiations will be different.” If these terms are not agreed to now, the war will go on, the reality on the ground will change, and the terms, reflecting those new realities, will grow harder for Ukraine to accept.

“Ukraine immediately rejected the Russian conditions for peace.”

Device Partner Registration

This page starts with the following banner:

Microsoft is blocking Russia and Belarus

Never forget that Microsoft may be a giant, multinational conglomerate—with currently the highest market-capitalization in the world—but it still knows who its master is. They have a lot of lucrative contracts with the U.S. government. When the U.S. yanks on the leash, Microsoft heels. Note that Israel is not on the list.

Roaming Charges: The Man From Quiet Room 4 by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Al-Hadi seems genuinely remorseful about the carnage his fighters inflicted during the cruel war in Afghanistan. During his testimony, he told the father of one of the US soldiers killed in an IED attack, “I know what it is to watch another soldier die or get wounded, I know this feeling and I am sorry. I know you suffered too much. I know what it is to be a father of a son. To lose your son — your sadness must be overwhelming. I am sorry. As the commander, I take responsibility for what my men did. I want you to know I do not have any hate in my heart for anyone. I thought I was doing right. I wasn’t. I am sorry.”

“Ultimately, Al-Hadi’s contrition, remorse and failing body, crippled by years of torture and confinement, did little to sway an 11-member, anonymous U.S. military jury, which on Thursday handed down the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for committing the same kind of war crimes the US and its allies have committed with impunity for decades, including crimes against Al-Hadi himself.”

“China’s solar module production, which has tripled since 2021, hit 1,000 GW last year, nearly five times the rest of the world combined.”

“Worldwide the average price for photovoltaic panels is 11 cents per watt, a global price largely based on the market of the leading producer, China. The average price for panels in the United States was 31 cents per watt.”

“Even though federal funds for testing dairy milk for avian flu are available, not a single farm has signed up for voluntary on-site milk testing, according to the USDA, and less than a dozen farms have applied for separate financial aid in exchange for boosting biosecurity measures.”

It’s going well!

“If teachers were compensated for their unpaid overtime they would collectively earn $77.5 billion more, according to a new analysis from My eLearning World. The average US teacher works 540 hours more than they’re contracted for. That’s 1.74 billion hours of unpaid overtime. If teachers worked the amount they were contracted for, they would earn $42 an hour. Instead, because they’re working more unpaid hours than they contracted for they only earn an average of $31 per hour.”

“Here’s Nathaniel St. Clair standing in front of the Alexander Cockburn Memorial Tree in the small rancher cemetery where Alex’s remains were planted, which local grandees–to the extent Petrolia has them–wanted to cut down because the giant eucalyptus sheds its bark–making it look “unkempt” and in need of, as every MAGAmoron knows, occasional “raking” A radical uprising of Alex’s friends has saved this beauty–so far…”

Alexander Cockburn Memorial Tree

Absolutely magnificent.

“George Harrison on the Beatles after LSD: “A big change happened in 1966, particularly for John and myself, because a dentist we were having dinner with put this LSD in our coffee. Now people who’ve taken that will know what I’m talking about and people who haven’t taken it won’t have a clue because it transforms you. After that, I didn’t need it ever again. The thing about LSD is you don’t need it twice. Oh, I took it lots of times, but I only needed it once.””

Interesting.

Journalism & Media

Spreading The Fiction Of An Antisemitism Epidemic On The Left by Caitlin Johnstone

“The vast, vast number of people who have been entirely failed by the system — or who have been directly victimized by it — are left without a voice, because in a capitalist system the ones who control the capital control who gets to have a voice. The wealthy people who control our society’s largest and most influential platforms universally refuse to platform anyone who attacks the status quo systems upon which their wealth is premised, and they handsomely compensate the reliable stewards of the status quo whom they do choose to elevate, so the only people who get elevated to immensely influential platforms are those handsomely compensated empire supporters for whom the system is working perfectly.

“This creates the illusion that the system really IS working perfectly, since everything in mainstream culture tells you that it is. Therefore if you are one of the majority of individuals who have been abused and exploited by the system, you will look at all this information being artificially placed in front of you and conclude that the failure must be with you as a person and not with the system.”

And, conversely, if you’re one of the minority of individuals who benefit from the system as it is, you may also be largely or completely unaware of how many kids are being tortured in the basement on your behalf, á la The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. People who benefit from the system are just as likely to have been brainwashed into believing that they deserve what they have—that they’re entitled to it—because of how hard they’ve worked.

The Day the West Defined ‘Success’ as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians by Jonathan (Cook)

“In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.

“Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.

“For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.

“But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on UNRWA, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.

“By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.”

“As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.

“The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.

“Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.”

“The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.

“It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.

“The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.”

“The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.

“He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”

“Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.”

Miller is just out-and-out promoting collective punishment. He doesn’t even seem to be aware that this is illegal. He doesn’t care. It’s not illegal to kill vermin.

Making October 7 About Antisemitism To Hide Israel’s Abuses by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Arguing that anti-Zionism is antisemitism because most Jews are Zionists is exactly the same as arguing that because most westerners have been propagandized into accepting western warmongering, opposing western warmongering means you must have a seething fascistic hatred of western people.

“Jews get indoctrinated just like everyone else throughout the western empire. Their being Jewish doesn’t magically exempt them from the fact that the human mind is easily manipulated, and that the western empire pours more energy into mass-scale manipulation than any other power structure in history. Saying it’s hateful to oppose the imperial depravity that people were indoctrinated into accepting in the middle east is like saying it’s hateful to oppose the warmongering against China that the public is currently being indoctrinated into supporting here in Australia.

“Most people in our society are deeply indoctrinated into supporting the agendas of the massive globe-spanning power structure we live under. This is true regardless of what religion they happen to belong to.”

Our Propagandized Society Is Like A Sick Man Who Doesn’t Know He’s Sick by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Right now our society is like a sick man who (A) doesn’t know he’s sick, (B) refuses to believe he is sick, (C) believes the medicine is poison, (D) has no health insurance and can’t afford the medicine anyway, and (E) also has no means of transportation to get to the doctor. The very first step in that long list of obstacles to his health is to get him to understand that he is sick. That’s why I spend so much energy showing evidence that the media are lying to us, that we are ruled by psychopaths, and that our status quo systems are driving us toward annihilation.”

Scott Ritter and the Liberal Authoritarians by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] the confiscation of Scott Ritter’s passport on the instructions of Antony Blinken’s State Department seems to me a radical step too far. The liberal authoritarians now in command of the nation’s major institutions, the House of Representatives among the only exceptions, have just signaled they are quite prepared to act at least as undemocratically as the House Un–American Activities crowd, the FBI and the rest of the national-security state did during the 1950s to preserve their political hegemony.”

“Why Scott Ritter, I have wondered these past few days. Of all the dissident commentators of too many stripes to count, why Scott? I reply to myself, “Because Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, a former U.N. arms monitor in Iraq and he enjoys big-time credibility as a patriotic American.” His voice, in short, is the sort that can carry weight in sectors of the voting public that may well prove key in determining the outcome in the Trump–Biden election this Nov. 5.”

“Liberals had assumed an uncompromising ideological righteousness such that we can now legitimately call them authoritarians—soft despots in de Tocqueville’s terminology, apple-pie authoritarians in mine. The cause is upside-down to the Cold War cause, but these people are at least as dangerous as the McCarthyites, and, as I have suggested, maybe more so.”

Economy & Finance

“Banking-as-a-Service” Firms Can Evaporate Your Life Savings by Freddy Brewster (Jacobin)

““I wanted to make sure I was getting the best interest for my money,” Buckler, a forty-three-year-old high school computer science teacher in Abingdon, Maryland, told the Lever . “I think I knew that [Juno] wasn’t necessarily a bank, but I saw that they were working with Evolve Bank & Trust and I did some research, and [Evolve is] a bank that’s been in business for a long time.””

And…it’s gone. What? It’s gone. It’s all gone. What’s all gone? Your money. It’s gone. Poof.

And it's gone (original) by South Park (YouTube)

“More than a billion users worldwide have money in “neobanks” like Juno that offer online banking and various rewards to users, according to one analysis by an industry consulting group. Here in the United States, smaller banks and financial institutions have been advocating for more partnerships with middleware companies like Synapse, which make it easier for them to partner with fintech apps so they can better compete with larger banks.”

Notice how they wrote “users”, not “customers”.

““The regulatory piece needs attention, like big time,” Buckler said. “This is a major black hole in regulation, and it needs to be closed. The federal government was so quick to jump on Silicon Valley Bank and bail out the rich venture capitalists there, and yet, people of lower income who are going through this, it’s crickets from all levels of the government, just nothing.” Synapse did not respond to a request for comment.”

“[…] the consumer watchdog agency’s oversight is limited: it can only supervise banks and financial institutions with more than $10 billion in assets as well as other companies that it defines as “larger participants” in a given consumer market. The agency has estimated that only seventeen fintech companies — which it said would cover about 9 percent of consumers using banking alternatives — would be under its supervision. That leaves a patchwork of regulations from federal banking regulators and states to govern the smaller companies.”

““It’s basically going to require a little bit more continued financial sacrifice and discipline to rebuild my reserves back up,” he said. “I guess at this point, the regulators aren’t terribly willing to do anything to help us out. So we just have to wait for this to play out.””

I feel bad for you, buddy. I really do. I’m glad you’ve found peace with it and are moving on, moving forward. But, man … are you going to stop falling for scams? Don’t pretend you did any due diligence this time. You just went for higher interest rates. Someone said “number go up” and you threw all of your money at them. What is that even like?

Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly by Pam Martens and Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“Interestingly, JPMorgan has shelled out $250 million in fines to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; $98.2 million to the Federal Reserve and $100 million (netted down from $200 million) to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since March for failing to provide proper surveillance of “billions” of trades. The regulators were deafeningly silent on whether JPMorgan’s Dark Pools were involved in these infractions.”

““A pool, according to stock exchange officials, is an agreement between several people, usually more than three, to actively trade in a single security. The investigation has shown that the purpose of a pool generally is to raise the price of a security by concerted activity on the part of the pool members, and thereby to enable them to unload their holdings at a profit upon the public attracted by the activity or by information disseminated about the stock. Pool operations for such a purpose are incompatible with the maintenance of a free and uncontrolled market.””

This is what Redditors on WallStreetBets are kind of doing—and the same people who are doing it on a level orders of magnitude bigger are screaming for regulators to put an end to the miniature retail version. They truly have no shame.

“U.S. regulators are not only allowing these quasi stock exchanges to operate in darkness, they are allowing Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and others to trade their own publicly-traded bank stocks in their own Dark Pools.”

Liberal Democracy (Reddit)

The tragic and predictable cycle of so-called liberal democracies

1. Uninspiring centrist refuses to tackle the underlying social problems that led to the rise of the far-right.
2. Uninspiring centrist defeats far-right with a promise of change
3. Stagnating living standard creates fertile ground for fascism. Far-right win elections.
4. Far-right drives economy off a cliff, lowers standards of public life & generally makes everything objectively worse.
5. GOTO 1

Hello sunshine: We test McLaren’s drop-top hybrid Artura Spider by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)

Look, it’s a nice-looking car. It’s probably a lot of fun to drive. It is not reasonable, though, by any stretch of the imagination. The author understates its 680HP as “healthy”. He describes the $273,800 price tag as “[…] not inconsiderable.” He finishes the article by admitting that “it’s a little less practical for everyday use than, say, a Porsche 911”. I don’t think he was being tongue-in-cheek. He and the people he’s writing for are not even living on the same planet as 99.99% of the rest of the population.

media: lets talk about how bad evo is instead (Reddit)

maybe the economy is doing too well

“Chileans: we are protesting against neoliberalism

“Bourgeois media: here are some theories on why Chileans are protesting

“Chileans: i just told you we are protesting against neoliberalism

“Bourgois media: maybe the economy is doing too well”

Social banditry: Oligarch Elon Musk takes record $45 billion payout by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“Musk’s payout is larger than what is estimated that it would cost to eliminate homelessness ($20 billion) and hunger ($25 billion) in the US. It is equivalent to what is made, before taxes, by 1.2 million workers who earn the median income in the US ($37,500) in an entire year.

“According to the latest Forbes list of the top 10 richest people, Elon Musk is already the wealthiest individual on the planet, with a net worth of $208.4 billion. Along with others in this group, including Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook) and Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Musk’s wealth is greater than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of three-quarters of the world’s countries (156 out of 212).”

“The wealth accumulated by the billionaire elites is bound up with the decades-long rise of the stock market, a mechanism for funneling society’s wealth into the hands of the corporate and financial oligarchy. The $45 billion going to Musk is in the form of Tesla stock options, a “reward” for the rapid increase of the company’s share values since 2018 from $50 billion to $558 billion today.”

Science & Nature

John A. Paulos — Avoiding Innumeracy | Episode 219 by Infinite Loops (YouTube)

Paulos provides a lot of interesting examples of common innumeracy traps. He discussed concepts like the Kelly Criterion, which so many people take to be a mathematical gospel that somehow guarantees winnings when betting, and Apophenia, which is “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.”

Environment & Climate Change

Biden Should End the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Secret Weapon by Sonali Kolhatkar (CounterPunch)

“Country A decides to transition away from the oil and gas industry toward green, renewable energy. However, an oil company based in Country B sues via an ISDS agreement to extract its lost profits. That’s precisely what is happening, to the tune of $327 billion, according to the Global ISDS Tracker . “[F]ossil fuel cases… can devastate public budgets or even bankrupt a country.””

The obvious answer is “go f@&k yourselves.”

“Nigeria is currently facing a massive set of damages determined by an ISDS tribunal to be paid to a UK-based company for a gas project to the tune of 30 percent of the entire nation’s foreign exchange reserves. And, foreign mining companies are demanding $30 billion from the Republic of Congo using ISDS tribunals.”

Pirates. Plunder. Perfidy.

“Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration explained in the context of the 2016 free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that “ISDS is specifically designed to protect American investors abroad from discrimination and denial of justice,” and that it is a “more peaceful, better way to resolve trade conflicts” compared to the “gunboat diplomacy” of earlier eras.”

Fuck you sideways with a chainsaw, Obama. May you drown slowly in a riptide off of Martha’s Vineyard.

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning media outlet Inside Climate News prefers to call ISDS “economic colonialism,” especially given that “the majority of cases have been filed by corporations from the United States, Europe, and Canada against developing nations.” Colonialism is a fitting descriptor.”

“It’s troubling that multinational corporations from the U.S. launched the highest number of ISDS cases worldwide. The U.S. is currently the top producer of crude oil in the world. U.S. oil and gas companies are reaping extraordinarily high profits while taking advantage of billions of dollars of public subsidies in the form of tax breaks. The least Biden can do to curb a deadly industry that is threatening our entire species is to take action against ISDS provisions in existing trade agreements.”

C’mon, man. That’s not even close to the “least” that he could do. Biden can—and will—do much, much less than that. It’s not “troubling”, it’s Empire. But dream your little dream. Blue no matter who, right?

Medicine & Disease

The National Academy of Sciences issues a damning report on Long COVID in the United States by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Fatigue remains the dominant symptom, affecting upwards to three-quarters of those with Long COVID. Post-exertional malaise, or fatigue after minor physical or mental exertion, is insidious and may impact a significant majority of long haulers. They are unable to exercise, work or return to their daily activities.

“Cognitive impairments mean that those affected do not have the ability to think normally. They can’t recall information easily, process information or pay attention, or problem-solve and use executive functions to multitask. There are also conditions under the heading of autonomic dysfunction, which means problems like brain fog, lightheadedness and rapid heart rates.”

“The NAS committee wrote, “As with other complex multisystem conditions, management of Long COVID relies on techniques for controlling symptoms and improving functional ability, such as pacing (i.e., balancing periods of activity and rest in daily life), mobility support, social support, diet modulation, pharmacological treatment of secondary health effects, cognitive behavioral therapy, and rehabilitation. Management often requires a multidisciplinary team.”

“Given how heavily COVID has impacted workers, in particular low-income wage earners who faced the brunt of COVID with limited access to healthcare and subjected to strict work demands without any meaningful paid sick leave, for them the forever COVID policy also means forever Long COVID. The notion that masses of workers will be able to engage in “pacing” or have a multidisciplinary healthcare team that can care for them is laughable.”

“This honest and in-depth report by the National Academies is exemplary and long overdue. It amounts to an indictment of the willful negligence of the state in addressing the pandemic, and gives a glimpse of the long-term impact the promotion of COVID by the capitalist ruling elite will have for the future welfare and health of Americans and the population of the entire planet.”

Infectious diseases skyrocket worldwide fueled by COVID-19 pandemic by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Even a mild or asymptomatic infection can harm the immune system. It can make you susceptible to new diseases that might not have bothered you before, but now, with your weakened immune system, these new diseases can find a foothold and attack you. Also, conditions that may have been dormant or held in check in your body by your immune system could resurface now that it’s weakened—things like shingles, HIV, or a resurgence of herpes. We’re seeing resurgences of all those things in the general population. We’re also seeing a resurgence in measles, whooping cough, and polio—all these things that we thought we’d gotten rid of.”

“Presently, on average, every American has experienced three bouts of COVID-19, a figure now estimated to more than double by next year at the current pace.”

“He added, “We see kids missing school, being unable to participate in sports, we see social isolation. Long COVID is a lot more complicated and more brutal for young people. Adults tend to be better able to navigate the medical intricacies and politics of their illness. I don’t like comparative suffering as a concept, but I do know that kids are having a harder time with it because people seem to be less understanding of it.””

global anti-vaccine disinformation campaign against China by John Malvar (WSWS)

“An investigative report published by Reuters on June 14 revealed that the Pentagon conducted a secret anti-vaccine disinformation campaign during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of massive psychological warfare operations waged by Washington against China. Targeting the Philippines in particular, the lies and disinformation spread by the US military at the peak of the pandemic contributed to keeping the country’s vaccination rate at the lowest in Asia and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.”

“This was not a rogue unit, operating beyond its instructions. The Reuters report documents that the Trump White House launched the campaign and the Biden White House allowed its continued operation until the middle of 2021. There were National Security Council meetings held to discuss it. Leading US State Department officials stationed at embassies in targeted countries were aware of the campaign and raised objections to it, but they were overridden by the military. The anti-vax campaign of the Pentagon was part of an extensive and ongoing operation of online disinformation whose existence is widely known in official circles.”

“By secretly declaring that the United States was effectively in a state of war with Russia and China, the military gave itself the de facto power to conduct limitless campaigns of disinformation, so-called “influence operations,” around the globe.

“This is funded with billions of dollars. A study published by the Stanford Internet Observatory in 2022 documented some of the US’ “covert influence operations” in the Middle East and Central Asia. The report documented the production of “fake news, fake faces, fake followers,” and “sham media outlets.” Among the many campaigns it reported was the use of a fake persona and a sham media outlet in Central Asia to manufacture accusations against China of committing genocide against the Uyghurs, including “alleged organ trafficking, forced labor, sexual crimes against Muslim women and suspicious disappearances of ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang.””

“The Reuters report reveals the intimate coordination that exists between the giant social media corporations and the US government apparatus of disinformation. Facebook is not only aware of the US operations on its network, it coordinates them with the military and even called a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss it.”

“[…] it is Washington that has launched a blitzkrieg of online lies and propaganda. It is Pentagon trolls who not only peddle disinformation about China, but manufacture mass anti-vaccine sentiment in the midst of a global pandemic. The very social media executives performatively upbraided for allowing Russian trolls to operate are secretly meeting with the National Security Council to discuss the conduct of the US disinformation machine.

“US imperialism operates as if it is already at war with Russia and China. Its machinery of online propaganda and disinformation exists to whip up a public frenzy in support of this war.”

China Just Cured a Patient’s Diabetes for the First Time. Why Haven't You Heard About It? by Breakthrough News / Kei Pritsker (YouTube)

An ounce of prevention: Now is the time to take action on H5N1 avian flu, because the stakes are enormous by Matthew S Miller (The Conversation)

“Pushing back the bird flu will need public buy-in and public resources. Prevention approaches must be sensitive to those most impacted. Farmers, hunters and others who are regularly exposed to potentially infected animals will need good information and education to understand why they must act. Approaches should be evidence-based and offer people options whenever possible. Mandates should be viewed as a last resort.

“People whose livelihoods may be jeopardized by the cost of biosecurity measures will need resources to support them in taking actions that could potentially save millions of lives. All this demands new government policies, and enhanced co-operation and co-ordination between agencies responsible for farm animal, human and wildlife health.”

That is not the world that we have. Where’s the money in it? No-one who matters will benefit, so it won’t get done. Can saving lives improve the stock market? No? The stock market goes down, you say? Then why would we do it? Silly person.

In the U.S., they’ll just blame it on immigrants and call it a day.

Art & Literature

Shackleton died on board the Quest; ship’s wreckage has just been found by Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica)

“The Quest expedition to Antarctica set sail in 1921, but it wasn’t particularly well-equipped for the voyage despite the retrofits. It had a tendency to roll when the seas got heavy, it consumed a lot of fuel, and there were frequent engine problems, so progress south was slow. Shackleton never reached the planned destination, falling ill in late December just as the ship was about to leave Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He had begun drinking heavily to “deaden the pain,” despite not usually allowing alcohol while at sea. The Quest reached south Georgia on January 4, 1922, and Shackleton made his final diary entry before retiring to bed. By 2 am, he was complaining of back pains and requesting painkillers. Ship physician Alexander Macklin suggested Shackleton might try leading a more normal life. Shackleton asked what Macklin thought he should give up. “Chiefly alcohol, boss, I don’t think it agrees with you,” the physician replied. Then Shackleton “had a very severe paroxysm” and died. The official recorded cause of death was coronary thrombosis. His body was buried in a Norwegian cemetery in Grytviken, the grave marked by a rough cross (later replaced by a granite column).”

Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious by Rhian Sasseen (The Baffler)

“This is a story that has something to say about the violence that lurks, always, beneath the surface of relationships between heterosexual men and women.”

What a stupid thing to write. It bespeaks a deeply stupid worldview. Always. 🙄 People think that religion is dead and yet so many believe in received gospel.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

For Unconditional Surrender by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“We tell ourselves different things, as Wittgenstein said. But anyone caught up in the administrative apparatus of the modern world, in any of its local or regional inflections, as a chinovnik, as a fonctionnaire, as a “hero milker”, is always at risk of becoming another Chervyakov. This prospect becomes all the more menacing when Brizzhalov transforms into a robot, as he has by now done for most of us today. Our new AI Brizzhalovs are so vigilant about watching out for “sneezes”, for any sudden irruptions of human weakness, as well as any sympathetic treatment of such weakness, that they now threaten even to prevent the appearance of any future Chekhovs, who, throughout the darkest moments of the 19th and 20th centuries, at least, had been among the small but still perceptible reassurances of the survival of a faint signal of enduring human freedom.”

“The affect here is not shaped by any weighing of the arguments for the justice of this or that military campaign. You don’t need so much as a frontal cortex to take a side in global conflicts, when the side you take is by default the one every single person around you, and every single head on your screens, is also supporting. You don’t need arguments, just a sense of home.”

“We need not exaggerate the sameness of the world’s various regimes. None are exactly the same, of course. But they are increasingly similar at least to the extent that every country in the world is in the process of converting to a system of governance whose most basic mode of operation is a public-private partnership dedicated to AI-driven technocratic surveillance. At this very moment, for example, your insurance rates may be fluctuating as a result of data secretly sent from your car, such as the precise measurement of how fast you accelerate when the light turns green. We are horrified by the specter of Chinese-style “social credit”, but the truth is our system differs from theirs primarily in that it remains committed to the fiction that what is being measured in all this data-collection is a person’s economic value, rather than their more holistic value as a citizen. Can anyone explain why holistic assessment is not preferable?”

“With the preview for Tehachapi still resounding in everyone’s heads, I do not think my wife and I were the only ones expecting the narrator to add: “… to the numerous correctional institutions, confining 549 people per 100,000 California residents, many for non-violent drug offenses, many forced to live in solitary sweat-boxes for minor infractions, and almost all forced to join racialized gangs just to stay alive in that world of non-stop Hobbesian struggle, where any lingering pretense of ‘correction’ has the air of sick mockery about it to anyone with a conscience.” But that part never came. It was literally just an ad encouraging French people to go to Universal Studios or whatever.”

“I insist I am not saying that the US carceral system is “as bad as” the annihilation of the Uighur nation within China (let me go on record here saying I think a Uighur-controlled “Eastern Turkestan” would have just as strong a claim to a right to exist as any nation-state does, including the People’s Republic of China). Sometimes the nastiest things going on in the world happen over there, sometimes they happen here, and sometimes they happen in several spots at once.”

Mealy-mouthed brainwash victim, but I digress. No, wait, I don’t digress. Why does Justin have to take the example of the Uighurs, about which he has read only propaganda promulgated by exactly those who would wish to open yet another front in a global war, this one against China? He doesn’t know anything about that part of the world. How do I know this? The incredibly urgent humanitarian crisis to which he refers has completely dropped off of the radar for the last few years. The people who urged Justing to such urgent action, who have guaranteed that when he digs into his little bag of trite examples of catastrophic human failing qua evil, he comes up with “China” and “Uighurs”, have completely clammed up about this topic for years. They have other fish to fry.

Why wouldn’t Justin come up with, for example, “Israel” as the most blatantly obvious example of human-rights violations to which to compare U.S. prisons? Because he’s been brainwashed to ignore Israel’s transgressions just as he’s been programmed to remember those of which China is accused.

“I began to notice that the longer term effect of these events on me was a massive, total, irreparable disenchantment with human affairs. I cannot take seriously a world run by men who would like to be taken seriously, yet who are committed to upholding a global order that basically comes down to waiting to see which moody old dotard —thanks for bringing that word back, Kim Jong-Un!— resorts to the “everybody dies” button first. That is insane. It is so insane that anyone who lives under this arrangement and remains sane himself is so out of step with reality that he should rightly be considered, well, insane. If you’re not crazy, I’m sorry but you’re fucking crazy. This arrangement is no better than living under the Mongol yoke, and it’s definitely no better than listening to stories in a Paleolithic cave as the flame sends shadows over the successive traces of a parietal bison that make it appear as though it is running. Things have got no better. No party to the current arrangement deserves our loyalty, our respect, the slightest investment of our natural yearning for identification and belonging.”

Congratulations for spending some time learning stuff about the world, I guess?

“Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine, quod absurdum est, that the Chinese, Russians, et al., suddenly and in total sincerity announced: “You know what? We’ve had it with endless brinksmanship and projection of power. We are unilaterally disarming. Go ahead and do whatever you wish.” What do you think the consequences would be for your average Russian or Chinese person a year from now, a generation from now, a century from now? I’m inclined to think not all that much would change — except that they would no longer be living under constant threat of annihilation.”

Ah. You’ve not read enough, alas. Justin, you think the mad brinkmanship comes from them. 🤦 🤦‍♀️

“If it’s hard for you to imagine the US government ordering massacres, just for the hell of it, of random villages in a US-occupied Russia, it should be hard for you to imagine the reverse scenario. Human beings just don’t behave that way.”

Oh dear. Are you sure you’re paying attention in any way? It’s time to listen to the Blowback podcast. Or, like, any news that isn’t mainstream. Your preferred empire is the baddie, Justin. You’ve backed the wrong horse. You’re about halfway to where you need to be to be morally secure. You’re still mouthing the words to the wrong anthem.

“Believe Putin, in other words, when he reminds the world he has a nuclear arsenal and is willing to use it; and believe him, too, when he says that the reason for this war, from where he stands, is the expansion of NATO into territory he sees as part of the historical sphere of influence of his own empire. You don’t have to agree that this is a casus belli, in order to understand that the Russian regime thinks it is.”

It took you long enough but you got there.

“It is highly unlikely that all Americans, not to mention all Uruguayans, New Guineans, etc., would be in for the same treatment the Uighurs are getting now from China.”

Ah, back to the Uighurs as the singularly oppressed people in the world. Which treatment is that exactly, Justin? Do you have anything other than that the NYT told you a few years back that vaguely genocide-y things are happening? Because they’ve not tooted that horn for a while. Did the genocide stop? Did the NYT stop caring? Or is there more effective propaganda to sell now? I fear the latter. You’re finally awake to the brainwashing about one evil empire but mix propaganda aphorisms – received gospel – about a different one into your analysis.

“The messaging apparatus of the American empire, both to its internal subjects and its external ones, is powerful indeed. I’ve lived outside my home country for well over half of my adult life, and yet it took me until I was almost fifty to see it for what it truly is: an empire,”

At least you’re honest about how long it took. It’s important to know these things so that doesn’t end up supporting the empire unwittingly. You’ve spent a lot of time learning languages only used by 10,000 people but have spent precious little time learning about the workings of the empire that birthed you. You aren’t obligated to do it, but the anti-empire among us are happy to have another incisive mind and excellent writer on our side.

“Once you have seen the US for what it is —an empire—, it is difficult indeed to unsee it, to go back to those inane debates on network television about whether or not the US should continue to be “the global policeman”, for example, and to see them as anything other than the distraction they are.”

“[…] it is increasingly difficult for me to understand how the global balance of power could possibly hang on the question of which sphere of influence a few eastern provinces of Ukraine get sucked into.”

“I am just so tired of hearing Ukraine hawks invoke the notorious case of Chamberlain’s effort to appease Hitler, and contrasting this with Churchill’s brave resolve against the Nazi leader. One wants to say to these people: do you know of anything else, at all, that has ever taken place in the history of humanity? Or is this really it? Do you understand that no two historical events are entirely alike, and that there are complicating factors in some events that render them non-identical to other events to which they are nonetheless analogous? For example, can you sustain a moment of reflection, counterfactually, on how a German nuclear arsenal might have influenced the decisions of both Chamberlain and Churchill? Or do you literally believe that it is 1940 right now, and that Putin and Hitler are the same person?”

Just as an aside, I learned about Monophthongization (The Free Dictionary) from Justin’s article.

“Monophthongization is a sound change by which a diphthong becomes a monophthong, a type of vowel shift. In languages that have undergone monophthongization, digraphs that formerly represented diphthongs now represent monophthongs. The opposite of monophthongization is vowel breaking.”

“Some English sounds that may be perceived by native speakers as single vowels are in fact diphthongs; an example is the vowel sound in pay, pronounced /ˈpeɪ/. However, in some dialects (e.g. Scottish English) /eɪ/ is a monophthong [e].

“Some dialects of English make monophthongs from former diphthongs. For instance, Southern American English tends to realize the diphthong /aɪ/ as in eye as a long monophthong [äː]. Monophthongization is also one of the most widely used and distinguishing feature of African American Vernacular English.”

There’s also a section on German, where they describe how the 11th-century pronunciation had a dipthong, whereas the modern pronunciation does not. E.g., liebe, gute, Brüder. Swiss German has retained the diphthong in all of these words: liäbä, guätä, Brüeder.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein in 1949 (Monthly Review)

“Albert Einstein is the world-famous physicist. This article was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949). It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of MR‘s fiftieth year.”

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

When The Powerful Control Public Opinion, Elections Aren’t Real by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“We are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale from childhood on, our minds continually shaped by people who use their wealth to dominate our shared narratives about how things are going, what’s happening in the world, and what should be done about it. We are taught about our world by deeply indoctrinated parents and deeply indoctrinated teachers who grew up in the same status quo-enforcing information environment as us, and our indoctrination continues through all the screens in our lives until our dying breath.

“You can fix everything else that’s wrong with your political system, but unless you also take away the ability of the capitalist class to psychologically manipulate the public into supporting a political status quo that has been artificially shaped by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, nothing meaningful will change. The wars will continue, the oligarchy will continue, the inequality and injustice will continue, the exploitation and extraction will continue, the ecocide will continue.”

The Art of Helping by Marie Snyder (3 Quarks Daily)

“Reflective listening would be a great start. It’s explicitly thoroughly hearing people out instead of just waiting for a chance to talk. Mirroring what they said back to them to lets them hear themselves, which is so simple and remarkably effective. Letting someone take a whole turn to just speak and be heard can be a mind-blowing experience at a time when we’re all completely distracted by social media. And listening to people without judgment has tons of ramifications that can ripple outward.

“But there’s another aspect that can make cab drivers better at hearing you than your closest friends. It’s easier to listen from a detached perspective when you don’t know all the ins and outs of the people involved in the story. Listening better can definitely improve relationships, but we still sometimes need those impromptu in-depth conversations within a larger community. We seems [sic] to have forgotten how important they can be, but it’s not too late to recognize their value. The alternative can cost $150 an hour.”

Technology

MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5 by Matt Evans (axio.ms)

“I hadn’t really used a Mac 128K much before; a few clicks on a museum machine once. But I knew they ran MacDraw, and MacWrite, and MacPaint. All three of these applications are pretty cool for a 128K machine; a largely WYSIWYG word processor with multiple fonts, and a vector drawing package.

“A great way of playing with early Macintosh system software, and applications of these wonderful machines is via https://infinitemac.org, which has shrink-wrapped running the Mini vMac emulator by emscriptening it to run in the browser. Highly recommended, lots to play with.”

umac_desktop

I have such a soft sport for the old MacOS. I grew up with its look and feel. I would take it back right now.

LLMs & AI

Uncensor any LLM with abliteration by Maxime Labonne (Hugging Face)

“In this article, we introduced the concept of abliteration. This technique uses the model’s activations on harmless and harmful prompts to calculate a refusal direction. It then uses this direction to modify the model’s weights and ensure that we stop outputting refusals. This technique also demonstrates the fragility of safety fine-tuning and raises ethical considerations.”

“We applied abliteration to Daredevil-8B to uncensor it, which also degraded the model’s performance. We then healed it using DPO to create the NeuralDaredevil-8B model, a fully uncensored and high-quality 8B LLM. Abliteration is not limited to removing alignment and should be seen as a form of fine-tuning without retraining.”

How Meta trains large language models at scale by Adi Gangidi (Facebook Engineering)

“Once we’ve chosen a GPU and system, the task of placing them in a data center for optimal usage of resources (power, cooling, networking, etc.) requires revisiting trade-offs made for other types of workloads. Data center power and cooling infrastructure cannot be changed quickly (or easily) and we had to find an optimal layout that allowed maximum compute capability within a data hall. This required relocating supporting services such as readers out of the data hall and packing as many GPU racks as possible to maximize the power and network capability for highest compute density with the largest network cluster.”

Al of this to run software that chimes in on conversations between humans, to lie about having children or wanting to buy a used car. Such an efficient use of time, energy, and other resources.

“In the next few years we will be working with hundreds of thousands of GPUs, handling even larger volumes of data, and dealing with longer distances and latencies. We’ll be adopting new hardware technologies—including newer GPU architectures—and evolving our infrastructure.”

To run what? Cancer cures? Nope. To build tools that capture and monetize engagement. What a noble goal.

AI Will Become Mathematicians’ ‘Co-Pilot’ by Christoph Drösser (Scientific American)

“One thing that changed is the development of standard math libraries. Lean, in particular, has this massive project called mathlib. All the basic theorems of undergraduate mathematics, such as calculus and topology, and so forth, have one by one been put in this library. So people have already put in the work to get from the axioms to a reasonably high level. And the dream is to actually get [the libraries] to a graduate level of education. Then it will be much easier to formalize new fields [of mathematics]. There are also better ways to search because if you want to prove something, you have to be able to find the things that it already has confirmed to be true. So also the development of really smart search engines has been a major new development.”

“Right now I think we’re not yet at the point where we routinely formalize everything. You have to pick and choose. You only want to formalize things that actually do something for you, such as teach you to work in Lean, or if other people really care about whether this result is correct or not. But the technology is going to get better. So I think the smarter thing to do in many cases is just to wait until it’s easier. Instead of taking 10 times as long to formalize it, it takes two times as long as the conventional way.”

“Mathematics is already bigger than any one human mind. Mathematicians routinely rely on results that other people have proven. They kind of know why it’s true, they have some intuition, but they can’t break it up all the way down to the axioms. But they know where to look, or maybe they know someone who can. We already have lots of theorems that are only verified by a computer, where some massive computer calculation has checked a million cases. You could verify it by hand, but no one has the time to do it, and it’s not worth it. So I think we will adapt. It is not necessary for one person to check everything. Getting computers to do the checking for us, that’s fine by me.”

“Right now it has a very lousy success rate. It might give you 10 suggestions of which one is interesting and nine are rubbish. It’s actually almost worse than random. But this could change in the future.”

Tao is a mathematician. He should know that 10% is very much worse than random.

“Are mathematicians wasting a lot of time? Oh, very much so. So much knowledge is somehow trapped in the head of individual mathematicians. And only a tiny fraction is made explicit. But the more we formalize, the more of our implicit knowledge becomes explicit. So there’ll be unexpected benefits from that.”

Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications by Ryan Donovan (Stack Overflow)

“There are a lot of possible chunking strategies, so figuring out the optimal one for your use case takes a little work. Some say that chunking strategies need to be custom for every document that you process. You can use multiple strategies at the same time. You can apply them recursively over a document. But ultimately, the goal is to store the semantic meaning of a document and its constituent parts in a way that an LLM can retrieve based on query strings.”

It depends. It’s an art form. Nobody can say. Try everything. See what works for you. Here’s my bill.

Is the Intelligence-Explosion Near? A Reality Check. by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again by Ludic Mataroa (Ludicity)

“The money was phenomenal, but I nonetheless fled for the safer waters of data and software engineering. You see, while hype is nice, it’s only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’.² That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable.”

The footnote after “politics” is:

“I know a few people who genuinely exhibit something I’d call political talent, but most of the time it boils down to promising people things regardless of your ability to deliver. This is not hard if you’re shameless.”

“And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business − not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.”

Oh, God, this is so cathartic. Wonderful.

“Sweet merciful Jesus, stop talking. Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything − or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists.”

“Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem − with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration.”

“Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T. department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

“How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.”

Let ‘im cook.

“[…] if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands).”

“ The only thing you should be doing is improving your operations and culture, and that will give you the ability to use AI if it ever becomes relevant. Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don’t actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.”

“Your business will be disrupted exactly as hard as it would have been if you had done nothing, and much worse than it would have been if you just got your fundamentals right. Teaching your staff that they can get ChatGPT to write emails to stakeholders is not going to allow the business to survive this. If we thread the needle between moderate impact and asteroid-wiping-out-the-dinosaurs impact, everything will be changed forever and your tepid preparations will have all the impact of an ant bracing itself very hard in the shadow of a towering tsunami.”

“If another stupid motherfucker asks me to try and implement LLM-based code review to “raise standards” instead of actually teaching people a shred of discipline, I am going to study enough judo to throw them into the goddamn sun.”

“The crux of my raging hatred is not that I hate LLMs or the generative AI craze. I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider − it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate. Nothing wrong with that, but it did not end up being the crazy productivity booster that I thought it would be, because programming is designing and these tools aren’t good enough (yet) to assist me with this seriously.

“No, what I hate is the people who have latched onto it, like so many trailing leeches, bloated with blood and wriggling blindly.”

“They know exactly what their target market is − people who have been given power of other people’s money because they’ve learned how to smile at everything, and know that you can print money by hitching yourself to the next speculative bandwagon. No competent person in security that I know − that is, working day-to-day cybersecurity as opposed to an institution dedicated to bleeding-edge research − cares about any of this. They’re busy trying to work out if the firewalls are configured correctly, or if the organization is committing passwords to their repositories. Yes, someone needs to figure out what the implications of quantum computing are for cryptography, but I guarantee you that it is not Synergy Greg, who does not have any skill that you can identify other than talking very fast and increasing headcount. Synergy Greg should be not be consulted on any important matters, ranging from machine learning operations to tying shoelaces quickly. The last time I spoke to one of the many avatars of Synergy Greg, he insisted that I should invest most of my money into a cryptocurrency called Monero, because “most of these coins are going to zero but the one is going to one”. This is the face of corporate AI. Behold its ghastly visage and balk, for it has eyes bloodshot as a demon and is pretending to enjoy cigars.”

This guy goes so hard.

“This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They’re an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and are also a bunch of tedious know-nothing bastards that should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail […]”

“[…] flee to the company of the righteous, who contribute to OSS and think that talking about Agile all day is an exercise for aliens that read a book on human productivity.”

“I just got back from a trip to a substantially less developed country, and really living in a country, even for a little bit, where I could see how many lives that money could improve, all being poured down the Microsoft Fabric drain, it just grinds my gears like you wouldn’t believe. I swear to God, I am going to study, write, network, and otherwise apply force to the problem until those resources are going to a place where they’ll accomplish something for society instead of some grinning clown’s wallet.”

Programming

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You by Simon Willison

“It takes a solid seven-plus years to forge a competent software engineer. (Or as most job ladders would call it, a “senior software engineer”.) That’s many years of writing, reviewing, and deploying code every day, on a team alongside more experienced engineers. That’s just how long it seems to take.”

“[…] being a senior engineer is not primarily a function of your ability to write code. It has far more to do with your ability to understand, maintain, explain, and manage a large body of software in production over time, as well as the ability to translate business needs into technical implementation. So much of the work is around crafting and curating these large, complex sociotechnical systems, and code is just one representation of these systems.”

“Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.”

I don’t know that I agree with the bit at the end, necessarily. Writing code that makes the other parts of the lifecycle easier is actually quite challenging.

Don't Use Polly in .NET Directly. Use this instead! by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is a nice introduction to the Microsoft.Extensions.Resilience and Microsoft.Extensions.Http.Resilience packages, which provide strategies for ensuring that an API call doesn’t fail for intermittent reasons (i.e., these include retry policies, backoff strategies, delays, etc.). He shows how to build a pipeline manually, then how to avoid the cost of building it in the API call itself, then how to register it in the services so that it can be injected and shared among several APIs, then how to set up an API with default resilience handling so that you don’t even have to execute the API logic within the context of the pipeline: it’s just done for you automatically as part of the API call.

Compiler-Driven Development in Rust by No Boilerplate (YouTube)

This is a good introduction to writing code with CDD: Compiler-Driven Development. This is similar to Test-Driven-Development—and can be used in tandem with it, of course—but involves writing code that encapsulates your logic and domain knowledge in a way that prevents you from even being able to compile illogical code. This is a neat approach that is much better supported by richer type systems like those in Haskell or Rust than in C#—although C# is catching up! Without discriminated unions, though, there is a lot of primitive-obsession optimization left on the table. The main example of the typestate pattern by Cliff L. Biffle (Cliffle) is kind of possible in C# but probably doesn’t compile down nearly as efficiently as it does in Rust.

struct Light‹State> {
    state: State,
}
struct On;
struct Off;

impl Light<Off> {
    fn new() -> Self { Light { state: Off} }
    fn turn_on(self) -> Light<On> { Light { state: On } }
}

impl Light<On> {
    fn turn_off(self) -> Light<Off> {
        Light { state: Off }
    }
}

In fairness, the C# version looks very much the same, and provides the same compiler-safety.

interface ILight<TState>
    where TState : struct
{
    static TState State { get; }
}

struct On;
struct Off;

struct OffLight : ILight<Off>
{
    internal static OffLight Create() => new OffLight();

    internal OnLight TurnOn() => new OnLight();
}

struct OnLight : ILight<On>
{
    internal OffLight TurnOff() => new OffLight();
}

Unless you actually use the State, though, it seems like complete overkill. Since it’s a toy example, it’s easy to simple elide the State entirely, but a real-world example would probably provide access to State and also want to access that state generically. Even without the state, though, you can pattern-match on the type.

void DoSomething<T>(ILight<T> light)
    where T : struct
{
    switch (light)
    {
        case OffLight offLight:
            Console.WriteLine("Off");
            break;
        case OnLight onLight:
            Console.WriteLine("On");
            break;
    }
}

It’s not very idiomatic C#. Not yet. But it could be!

Forget Controllers and Minimal APIs in .NET! by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is a good introduction to a new web API in .NET called fast endpoints. I’m not quite sure how much better it is than controllers but it’s interesting. I’ll have to let it digest for a bit. It’s quite scaleable from very simple to very complex. It allows each endpoint to be encapsulated individually. A controller is, by definition, not a single responsibility. And endpoint, by definition, is. Each endpoint indicates exactly which services it needs. It scales better than minimal API as well.

Oren Eini: Building a Database Engine in C# & .NET by JetBrains (YouTube)

This is a code-heavy look at implementing really, really performant code. Eini recaps a lot of stuff that he’s published on his blog but it’s very useful to see it live. He references examples in both the RavenDB code base as well as a Redis clone that he wrote in a couple of hundred lines of code. He discusses how exciting it is to work in C# these days because you can squeeze tremendous performance without sacrificing legibility and high-level concepts. You can still benefit from the garbage collector and simply avoid allocation wherever possible, and wherever it negatively impacts performance. It’s almost always possible. He talks about SIMD, vectorization, optimizing cache lines, etc. He talks about profiling and shows how he quickly fires up DotTrace. “It will never be what you think.”

Naming things just got easier thanks to @scope by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

“He mentioned that the scoped style would be useful “in a componentized world” but that a JS framework would already have a solution for that. I think the scoped style with a style block in a component could replace the JS styling in a component, letting you more easily build web components that include their own styles that apply only to the component.”

Sports

Reggie Jackson on Willie Mays' legacy & emotions of visiting Rickwood Field | MLB on FOX by FOX Sports (YouTube)

“Coming back here is not easy. The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled. Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. People said to me today, I spoke and they said, ‘Do you think you’re a better person, do you think you won when you played here and conquered?’ I said ‘You know, I would never want to do it again.’

“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The nigger can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘The nigger can’t stay here.’ We went to [Oakland Athletics owner] Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the n-word, ‘He can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. Finally, they let me in there. He said ‘We’re going to go the diner and eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.’

“Fortunately, I had a manager in Johnny McNamara that, if I couldn’t eat in the place, nobody would eat. We’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay. Joe and Sharon Rudi, I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out.

“The year I came here, Bull Connor was the sheriff the year before, and they took minor league baseball out of here because in 1963, the Klan murdered four Black girls − children 11, 12, 14 years old − at a church here and never got indicted. The Klan, Life Magazine did a story on them like they were being honored.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. At the same time, had it not been for my white friends, had it not been for a white manager, and Rudi, Fingers and Duncan, and Lee Meyers, I would never have made it. I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight some − I would have got killed here because I would have beat someone’s ass and you would have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”

Fun

meirl. I love Keanu (Reddit)

“I’m at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions.

“Even if you say 1 + 1 = 5, you’re right – have fun.”

I’m kind of at this stage. I don’t want to fight with people, really. I want to learn from them. I want them to get what they need out of a conversation. If they ask “is 1 + 1 = 5?”, I’ll seriously engage them and see where we go from there. I don’t have real conversations with random people, though. It’s usually good colleagues or friends.

You get a lot further by listening and engaging than by just calling someone an idiot because they haven’t learned what you’re pretty sure you know.

Video Games

Serious Engine Networking − Dive-in Analysis by Marko Stanić (GitHub)

“So how does reproduction work? The idea is simple − the Engine assumes everything in the game is completely predictable, and the players are the only ones with the power to change things. So in order to record the demo, the Engine only needs to record the entire game state once, and then only record the actions players perform each tick. In order to perform playback, the Engine deserializes the initial game state from the demo file, and then deserializes and applies player actions each tick as if the player was playing the game.”

“Serious Sam employs a multiplayer model in which every player runs their own simulation and merely receives instructions on what the players have done, much like the demo system. If you glance at the code, you might see function names like CNetworkLibrary::StartPeerToPeer_t , but this is somewhat misleading − Serious Sam’s networking isn’t really peer to peer, even though the logic is processed akin to the old lockstep multiplayer games. Serious Engine’s networking model is actually client-server. The basic idea is that, for a single multiplayer session, there is a single server, and the clients connect to it. The server receives messages from clients, processes them, and relays relevant information to all the clients. The clients then use this information to advance the state of their simulation.”

Riven | Official Launch Trailer | Available June 25th | 4k by Cyan (YouTube)

Ghost of Tsushima − E3 2018 Gameplay Debut | PS4 by Playstation (YouTube)

A friend recommended this game when he said that he wouldn’t bother with Assassin’s Creed in Japan because then he would just play this Ghost of Tsushima instead. It’s absolutely beautiful.

What Remains of Edith Finch Gameplay (PC UHD) [4K60FPS] by Throneful (YouTube)

Same friend: another recommendation of an eerie game with decent graphics and a spectacular story. The way the game writes the narration into the scene is inspired. No wonder they say that this is more art than video game.