Links and Notes for July 5th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports

Public Policy & Politics

The State Failed to Break Assange by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The Biden regime has managed at last to drop a hot potato, but it is a stretch to assume it has not burned its fingers. As others have remarked, it could have vacated its case entirely and, indeed, gone so far as to offer Assange compensation for his suffering while facing unjust charges. That would have marked a dramatic redemption. Instead, it leaves the door still wide open to pursuing cases such as Assange’s whenever a reporter’s truths are similarly inconvenient. This is self-inflicted damage atop years of self-inflicted damage, in my read. The Biden government’s exit from this case more or less mutilates any claim it will henceforth assert to respect press freedom and First Amendment rights.”

“There is only one way to account for this, and it sickens, to be bluntly honest. We see here in the full light of day the scars the Russiagate years have left and the extent to which these have disfigured not only American discourse but so many American minds. There is no truth to speak of in our liberal circles. There is but Democratic truth, and this truth must always, one way or another, explain Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. Of what use are these people? They have surrendered their very ability to think.”

Kenyan President Ruto imposes savage austerity as High Court upholds military deployment by Kipchumba Ochieng (WSWS)

“The Kenyan political establishment is determined to impose the diktats of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Kenya’s workers and toilers by any means necessary. The goal of the IMF is to place the full burden of Kenya’s unprecedented debt crisis onto the masses. This includes further tax and levy hikes, social expenditure cuts, and privatizations—and all with the aim of repaying outstanding foreign debts and boosting corporate profits.”

“The Azimio la Umoja coalition has no fundamental differences with the Ruto government’s economic programme and defends the same reactionary class interests. Odinga, like Ruto, is a millionaire, living streets away from each other in the affluent neighborhood of Karen in Nairobi. They are part of the 0.1 percent of the Kenyan population (8,300 people) which, according to Oxfam, owns more wealth than the bottom 99.9 percent (more than 48 million people).”

“In neighboring Tanzania, Kiswahili-speaking like Kenya, traders at Dar es Salaam’s Kariako district, a popular market area in the country and one of the busiest in the whole region, went on strike against increased taxes last week. On the other side of the continent, in Nigeria, oil workers are threatening an indefinite strike over wages and the privatisation plans of the country’s largest oil refinery; construction workers are threatening to strike due to the layoff of 30,000 workers; and health workers are embarking on a seven-day strike. Social media reactions from Uganda , Tanzania , Nigeria , Ghana, South Africa , and South Sudan are expressing admiration for the mass upheaval in Kenya and drawing parallels to their governments’ similar IMF-austerity measures, attacks on democratic rights, and use of state repression.”

Italy’s Far-Right Government Is Rewriting the Constitution by Gabriele Di Donfrancesco (Jacobin)

“Under the proposed model, the premier would also have the power to dissolve parliament — today a prerogative of the president of the Republic — select a second premier from the same majority in the case of a cabinet crisis, or call for new elections. The proposal is, in fact, a mess: “90 percent of constitutionalists have criticized the reform, even some of those closer to the government,” Roberta Calvano, constitutional law professor at Rome’s Unitelma Sapienza University, told Jacobin”

“In the seventy-eight years since the Republic was founded in 1946, Italy has seen sixty-eight governments. Admittedly, many were just cabinet reshuffles of the same parliamentary majority or even the same parties, usually Christian Democracy and its allies, without new elections.”

“Since the 2022 election the RAI public TV network has been pressured by the Meloni government to broadcast positive coverage of the coalition parties. Rai journalists went on strike for media freedom in May, after episodes of blatant censorship and propaganda and purges of nonaligned journalists. The network even accused its own journalists of “spreading fake news.” RAI has received the title of “Tele-Meloni” given its lack of independence.”

Chevron Ran Out of Gas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“The notion was that Congress would craft vague and broad enabling legislation with a salutary goal in mind, and then pass it off to an Executive Branch administrative agency to be managed by bureaucrats who would be chosen for expertise in whatever specific field the agency addressed to do the nuts and bolts work of making Congress’ deliberately vague mandate come to life. There were two key aspects to the concept that, when Chevron was decided, were relatively uncontroversial. First, agencies took their mandate to staff with qualified people, “experts” to a fairly decent extent as today’s hysterics decry, seriously. Second, agencies had humility, the modesty to appreciate that they were not Congress and existed to serve the limited purpose and exercise the limited authority Congress imposed on them. Congress gave them a purpose and they sought to fulfill that purpose, but not abuse their authority by straying beyond”

“[…] times change, and people, being what they are, saw the opportunity to take use Chevron Deference for their own purposes. Beyond Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy, industry used the opportunity to “capture” government agencies by either using its people to staff them or using the agency’s people to staff industry, shifting the agency’s goal from serving Congress to serving industry.”

“Then there was the “expertise” problem, where second-rate bureaucrats had the power of “experts” but not the knowledge and skills of real experts. Government didn’t pay as well as private industry, and once employed, little was demanded of agency staffers of dubious qualifications, who could use bureaucratic fiat to dictate to far more qualified experts. Bureaucrats could smugly sniff yes or no, and there was essentially nothing to be done about it.”

“What the Court did was shift the final decision on the scope of an agency’s reach where the enabling law was either vague or silent from the agency, which tended to be ever-expanding to grab greater turf within its control, to the courts to decide whether the agency’s authority-grab was an abuse of the authority given it be Congress.”

“For many lawyers of a certain age, our appreciation of Chevron Deference waned as agency expertise and modesty gave way to bureaucratic power plays and ideological abuse. Chevron Deference played an important role in the functioning of our complex nation. But as Jerry Pournelle predicted, it would eventually forget its limited purpose and serve only to perpetuate the power of the bureaucracy. It was time for Chevron Deference to go.”

Saying Democracy Is In Jeopardy In America Is Like Saying Beaches Are In Jeopardy In Wyoming by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The main arguments for supporting Democrats these days all revolve around pretending really really hard that the capitalist warmongering ecocidal tyranny of mainstream liberalism is significantly different from the capitalist warmongering ecocidal tyranny of Trumpism.”

“To be a Democrat in 2024 is to spend half your time praying November gets here before Israel starts a full scale war with Lebanon and the other half praying November gets here before your president’s brains start visibly leaking out his ears.”

“The central political argument of the mainstream so-called “moderate” is that we can solve our problems by working collaboratively with the giant corporations, banks and imperialist interests who are causing all our problems.”

“The gibbering, shrieking hysteria that Israel apologists have demonstrated toward one set of rape allegations while ignoring much more well-evidenced ones perpetrated by Israel suggests there’s a lot more going on there besides one narrative being more favorable to one side than another. It points to something deeply unwholesome lurking just below the surface in our society, and the fact that it’s being knowingly inflamed and exploited by Israel’s supporters shows how deeply depraved these people are.”

Extended episode: Israel is heading for 'national suicide' says Jewish Arab Israeli by Useful Idiots / Alon Mizrahi (YouTube)

This is a very interesting conversation, in which Alon tells us a lot about his experience living in Israel.

At 1:02:15, Alon says,

“They are not suicidal. They know that the war with Lebanon in Iran means the end of Israel. And I also think this means the end of Israel. If Israel goes to war with Iran, there’s no more Israel after that. Israel is destroyed. So, I think they are aware of it, and they can’t lead to this … as like professional military or spies. They can’t do it. It’s too deranged. It’s a religious quest; it’s not a military. Not that the genocide is like normal military objective, but what Netanyahu has in mind is even a few steps beyond that.”

At 1:04:30, Alon says,

“I see no—and you can see what’s going on in the West Bank, as well—you see no sense of someone weighing their steps, saying “Okay. I can’t do this. I’m
not going to do that. This is too much.” There’s no sense of it. This is just a wild push across all fronts and all areas. This tells me this is going to be a lot crazier and bigger and more violent and, if you ask me about the war with Lebanon, I think that it is almost 100% happening. Yeah. Yeah, it’s going there.

“For Netanyahu, there’s no alternative to a big war. I mean, what can it do if he doesn’t go to war with Lebanon and Hezbollah and Iran. What are his options? Like, going back and handling the downfall from all this?”

At 1:05:30, Alon says,

“[…] they know that this is the coming apocalypse. So, they have to unleash everything. This is not a tactical game anymore. It’s a binary, a winner-takes-all. Either we all die or you all die. This is the mentality.”

At 1:09:00, Alon says,

“This is like the rosy scenario. What can also happen is Israel deciding to use, for instance, nukes. Israel deciding to go actually, really all the way into Apocalypse, in the end of days and Armageddon, along with all the crazy evangelicals from the States, who will applaud this. They will call Netanyahu and tell him push the red button. We’re behind you! Do it! Do it!”

At 1:10:30, Alon says,

“I really hope to talk to you guys in a few months or a year and laugh about this crazy scenario that I hysterically made up. I so hope for this day but very large and serious forces are at play now. And this is even bigger than Israel and Hezbollah or even Iran. This is where the globe is going—who’s going to lead into the next century. This is the big struggle, so let’s pray for a miracle and let’s hope something positive comes up of the election in the US. Let’s hope not for Armageddon.”

Florida’s right-wing governor DeSantis eliminates all state funding for the arts by Matthew Taylor (WSWS)

“Throughout the course of much of DeSantis’ second term as governor his central goal was to elevate his national profile among the far right in a bid to unseat former president Trump as the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. He was selected for this role by sections of the media and donor class who saw in him a potential candidate who could enact the fascistic agenda of the Republican party minus the theatricality and unreliability of Trump. His main qualification for this role, from the perspective of his backers, was his dismantling of all public safety measures in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a policy subsequently adopted by the ruling class as a whole.

“Now, after DeSantis’ primary defeat at the hands of Trump—in which process the governor failed to draw any substantial national support—he has returned to Florida to plot his political future. DeSantis, a reactionary ignoramus, aiming to maintain his status as a standard-bearer of the far-right and seeking new sources of political capital, has now turned his guns on the arts.

“In general, the avaricious US ruling elite views anything that does not feed it immediate gains in terms of profits as useless and worse. Moreover, the recent protests by tens of thousands of artists against the Gaza genocide have only encouraged the view within the upper echelons that artists are a species they could happily do without.”

Power for the Sake of Power by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“We have now seen firsthand who Biden has been the whole of his political career. For every made-up version of who he has been or is—civil rights marcher, anti-apartheid hero, driver of an 18–wheeler for heaven’s sake—there is an implicit denial, a refusal simply to admit or let us see who he actually is. Biden, out of some buried sense of inferiority, has spent his life proving himself—to himself as well as others. Viewed one way, what we witness now is a long-time-coming comeuppance. He stands before us as he is.

““I took on Big Pharma. I beat them,” Biden told his interlocutor. And later: “I’m the guy that shut Putin down.” And further on: “Who’s going to be able to be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we’re—we’re at least checkmating China now? Who’s going to—who’s going to do that? Who has that reach?”

“I invite into the comment thread anyone who can find a single true thing in these quotations. The best that can be said is that it is a matter of time, and one hopes not much, before the American public will no longer have to put up with the relentless stream of fabrications on which Biden has traveled for half a century in public life.”

And then we’ll get the relentless stream of fabrications from Trump but, at least, the media will call them out for what they are, rather than covering them up. Perhaps their hatred of Trump will lead them to impinge on the efficacy of the empire.

“The best president of our time? A good man and a good president? This is tap-dancing to Yankee Doodle Dandy—standard stuff for the media whenever a president is about to depart the stage, but in this case, it is a disgraceful use of the considerable influence these people wield. Let us be clear as to what they are doing, and in my read, with full intent: This is how those paid well to comment in mainstream media deflect from the public’s view the record of—I shall say it—the worst president to serve in my lifetime, and I am aware of the competition for this distinction.”

The U.S. economy increasingly only works for 1% of the population. Everyone else is perplexed about how to to proceed, about how to survive longer than a year. The U.S. is essentially already at war with Russia, but lying about it. Ditto for China. It enthusiastically supports blowing up the Middle East. It could not care less about dead people that don’t support it. This is, very arguably, the most dangerous president—the most dangerous administration, in my lifetime as well. The others have done horrible, horrible things. None of them have tap-danced up to nuclear armageddon, seemingly without being aware that they are doing so.

“This inventory of mistakes and failures should lead sensible, uncompromised minds to two conclusions. One, Joe Biden should not be this nation’s next president; he should be removed from politics as quickly as possible, and two, Joe Biden should never have been this nation’s president in the first place. Dishonest hacks such as Paul Krugman, and these are legion, have no business now glossing the extensive damage this man has done to America, to Americans and to the world.”

“It seems to me Joe Biden’s dramatic fall from political favor gives us an unusually clear view of a goodly part of these densely woven interests. Those who de facto run the United States—liberal authoritarians in the Democratic Party, the ever-present, ever-unseen Deep State, and “the donor class,” as mainstream media refer to the people who buy candidates and elections—are startlingly visible now, operating in the open as they determine what is next. It is remarkable how casually this process is reported, as if there is nothing wrong, nothing amiss, nothing that should disturb us.”

“Stop worrying about Russia’s oligarchs, for heaven’s sake. They are none of our concern. Let us now forthrightly address the presence of our own atop us.”

“[…] this insistence on total control of the nominating process reflects the Democrats’ determination to hold the White House at whatever cost this exacts on the democratic process. I find this very worrisome. We have already seen the Democrats’ willingness to corrupt the judicial system, state and federal, in this cause. We have seen them purposely pollute public discourse, to the point they more or less destroyed it, during the Russiagate years. And more recently there are the internal corruptions David Sirota notes. Does this make you confident the party will enter this election come November altogether cleanly? I have no such confidence, cursed as I am with that regrettably rare faculty called memory.”

“I do not hear anyone in the media or the upper reaches of the power elite even raising these questions. The narcissism is beyond belief. If this country needs to take Joe Biden’s keys away for him, it will be wrenchingly obvious there is no one there to whom it is sensible to hand them.

“I come to the case of Kamala Harris. I am astonished there is any such thing as the case of Kamala Harris, to be honest. A woman and a woman of color and an Asian–American woman all in one: This is where “identity politics” leads, I say to those who fell or still fall for it. It leads to a political mannequin who is by all appearances visionless. She so far gives no indication she harbors even a single conviction not subject to opportunistic change or abandonment.”

Running on Empty by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The radical pragmatism of Jean-Luc Melanchon: “I’m not saying we will create a paradise from one day to the next, but we will put an end to Hell.”

“After the election, France’s left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) called for a 90% tax on all income above €400,000 and immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood.”

Carpe f@&king diem.

“Just four companies control nearly all of the fertilizer in America. Since 1980, prices have tripled for farmers and it’s about to get worse with further consolidation in the works.”

“According to an analysis in the Economist, ”Russia’s losses in Ukraine since 2022 dwarf the number of casualties from all its wars since the Second World War combined.” Many of the more than 500,000 Russians killed or wounded have been conscripts.”

Journalism & Media

OMG Haaretz Is Hamas Propaganda Now! by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The report says that as a “conservative” estimate of four such indirect deaths for every one direct death, a direct death count of 37,396 could wind up placing the actual total death count as a result of this onslaught at around 186,000. This would be about eight percent of the total population of Gaza.

“The Lancet notes that the number of reported direct deaths is “likely an underestimate” since thousands of bodies remain uncounted beneath the rubble in Gaza, and since Israel has destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure for counting the dead. So the real number of direct deaths is almost certainly much higher than 37,396, which means the real number of indirect deaths which could be conservatively inferred from this number would sit well into the hundreds of thousands.”

Even Ralph Nader’s 200,000 of a couple of months ago will seem like an undercount. With the real number of direct deaths being much higher, let’s take 40k × 1.5 = 60x and then use 10x (instead of 15x, being less conservative, but not taking the extreme), we end up with 600,000 dead out of a population of 2M. That’s about 30% of the population killed, directly or indirectly, since the beginning of October. The rest are mostly unhoused. There is little to no food, little to no water, no plumbing, no hospitals, no medical care, little housing. This is just the beginning. We can only hope that’s wrong, but that would line up with Israel’s goals. Let’s hope they’ve not been that competent.

“It’s so surreal how Americans watched undeniable evidence that the president doesn’t run America during the first presidential debate, and then went right back to arguing about who should be president as though this never happened.

“I mean, they watched it happen. Right in front of their faces. They saw clear, unequivocal evidence that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots in their country has a brain which does not work, which means the shots are necessarily being called by someone else. And yet here they are, still arguing over who should be president as though they didn’t just see the very premise of this argument exposed as complete nonsense.

“It’s like if a wife was talking to her husband, and then he told her “I’m not actually your husband, I’m a space alien,” and then he took off his mask and showed her his flying saucer, and then after he put his mask back on she asks him what he wants for dinner and reminds him they’re having drinks with the Millers on Friday.”

Illa in Manila: Will History Demand Trump-Hillary II? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“If those names sound familiar, it’s the list of every Wall Street approved hack who couldn’t poll above lint in the 2020 cycle despite hurricanes of adoring free media at their backs. The ingenious “mini-primary” idea therefore boils down to clearing decks so the same clutch of decomposing aristocrats who put Biden in office in the first place can roll out the same slate of interchangeably unelectable neoliberal fuckwits Democratic voters rejected in 2020 in favor of a clear dementia sufferer, a list that conspicuously includes the current Vice President.”

“Over time, though, commentators not only tossed the broader civics reason for avoiding such outbursts — “Like it or not, they too are America,” was how Psychology Today described Trump voters — but denounced the idea of trying to win such support or even recognize the humanity of disfavored demographics, arguing that in Trump’s America this is pointless, immoral even.

“This never made sense as electoral strategy, but it makes a ton of sense as an emotional imperative for a party that would rather spot Donald Trump 70-plus million votes than admit it screwed up even once. The Los Angeles Times just doubled down on the idea, saying “roughly half the country” has “settled willingly into white nationalism, which runs not on facts but on emotion.” As for polls showing Trump and Biden nearly tied among Hispanic survey respondents and black support for Trump rising by as much as 20 points since 2020, voters are just wrong.”

Nothing in the U.S. political process runs on facts. Anyone from either of the two major parties runs purely on emotion. They all believe things that are blatantly untrue.

“[…] insiders act like the stubborn unpopularity of Harris is a plus, and the irony there is that attitude is just like MAGA voters who embrace Trump because he horrifies the right people, like the pseudo-intellectual neighbor with blue-haired kids and a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign. Bill Clinton in 1992 swept West Virginia, but his wife proudly lost by 40 points, and Biden did the same after scolding miners to “learn to program.” This iteration of Democrats is not primarily interested in winning, especially if it requires talking to anyone who’s voted for Trump. They are in a punitive mood, wanting to win and Bobbitize the disloyal electorate.”

“[…] officials spent the next eight years trying everything from censorship to canceling primaries to criminally prosecuting opponents in the belief that if they could just find the right democratic loophole to close, proles would be deprived of the option of betrayal and forced to embrace what Carville calls a “staggeringly talented new generation of leaders.” Since this remains more or less the official position of the Democratic Party, Hillary might as well be the one to argue it.”

The Mainstream Worldview Is A Mass-Produced Artificial Psychosis by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist. The only difference is that their delusions are much more widely shared, and that the mechanisms used to brainwash them are much more high-budget and sophisticated. The mainstream worldview is really just a mass-produced artificial psychosis.

“It’s actually difficult to wrap your mind around the scale and pervasiveness of the mountain of lies upon which this dystopian civilization is built. You think you’re starting to get a read on things, then you gain more knowledge and insight and realize it goes so much further than you thought. You start pulling on one thread, maybe some obvious lie about Iraq or Palestine or whatever, and the whole thing just keeps unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Before you know it you’re staring at a society that is not just riddled with untruth, but actually woven entirely from the fabric of untruth.”

“You can tell someone’s still playing in the shallow end of the pool of political insight based on how much time they spend freaking out about a dark dystopian future, because it shows the extent to which they fail to perceive how profoundly unfree we are right here and now. Right wingers, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that what they’re experiencing under capitalism isn’t real freedom, spend their time freaking out about a neo-Marxist future where everyone’s trapped in 15-minute cities and forced to take poisonous vaccines and eat bugs. Western liberals, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility they live under the world’s most tyrannical power structure and that everything they were taught is a lie, spend their time freaking out about a future under a horrible Trumpian dictatorship.”

“As a collective we’re always thinking, speaking, laboring, spending, living, acting and voting exactly as the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society want us to, our entire lives completely dedicated to the service of their continued power and profit while our information systems keep pummeling us with the message that we are free.”

““We are free!” we cry. “Free to sell our labor at extortionate rates to the capitalist class. Free to pay rent to professional land-hoarders or mortgage payments to banks for the privilege of having shelter on the planet we were born on. Free to choose between ten thousand different kinds of toothpaste and two warmongering capitalist political parties. Free to vote in fake elections for fake candidates who will never change anything. Free to think however we were trained to think and say anything we’ve been trained to say. Free to live exactly how we’ve been programmed to live by our owners.””

“The empire is a house of cards resting on a closed pair of eyelids, and at some point those eyelids are going to flutter open. At some point everyone’s going to start noticing the loose threads in the fabric of all this, and keep pulling and pulling until they see through the entire scam.”

Labor

Jonathan Pie: 'It's 50 Shades of Beige.' Meet Britain's New Prime Minister. by NY Times (YouTube)

I put this in this section, not because it’s correct, but because it’s punny.

At 01:41, he says,

“This morning’s Labour landslide bucks an international trend, a resounding rejection of right-wing populism…kind of. Yes. Whilst countries like Italy, Hungary, France, and Germany are having passionate love affairs with right-wing populism, and in America, you’re seriously considering a second helping, here in the U.K., we’ve been in an abusive relationship with it for some years.”

Oh, Jonathan. I want to like your opinions more but what you’ve done is very similar to the what the U.S. has done—pushed your so-called left-ish party so far to the right that it’s now considered electable by the powers-that-be. It’s so easy to contrast the awfulness of the Conservatives/Tories with the blander awfulness of New Labour. In fact, isn’t that a marketing technique? You make a model that’s so expensive and stupid that no-one would buy it, but it’s just there to make the also stupidly expensive model more palatable. People positively flock to overpay for the second-most-expensive model.

But it’s not like Pie doesn’t know that. At 04:45, he says,

“So whilst Keir Starmer may be as charismatic as a lukewarm block of unseasoned tofu, going back to a centrist, socially-left-of-center, fiscally-right-of-center party run by a potato, feels like a radical shift.

“Boring is the new radical. Unradical is the new radical.

“The truth is that Starmer can’t be radical. There’s no money left.

“But not promising things you know you can’t deliver is in itself a rejection of populism. Unfortunately, Labour are promising nothing. Reading Labour’s manifesto is about as inspiring as when you forget to take your phone with you and you have to take a dump whilst reading the back of a bottle of bleach.”

“When the system fails the people, the people support politicians who promise to burn the system to the ground.”

Economy & Finance

Central Banking and its Discontents: The Role of Monetary Policy in Contemporary Capitalism (2/5) by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung / Mark Blyth (YouTube)

At about 46:30, Blyth says,

“[…] the U.S., to me, is basically, it’s a frat-boy keg-party and it’s six in the morning and they’ve just found the last two kegs of beer and they’re gonna go for it. And the hangover from that, two electoral cycles from now, is that’s—I’ve always been very sort of, you know, bullish on the U.S. hegemony question, right? You know: it’s not disappearing anytime soon, the dollar is super ordinary. This is what’s going to do it in. This is ultimately what’s going to do it in, in about a decade.”

At 58:20, Blyth talks about combating climate change,

“You have three choices: you have markets, which won’t do it. You have nudges, which won’t do it. And, you have a big green state.

“Big state doesn’t necessarily say democracy to me, right? And, in fact, if you want to see the
most successful example of how to do this stuff, it’s China, right? So, last year, China installed more
wind than the rest of the world has, because they can, right? And, in a few years time, they’ll say diesel engines: done next Tuesday. And everyone will go ‘okay’ because that’s the way you do things.

“But it’s not at all democratic. And that’s why I think that if there is—and I think there is this real dependence that the EU’s transition is going to have on China—that’s a very problematic relationship for a bunch of democracies to have. So, then, we’ll start to do exceptional politics and those exceptions will become normalized and then there’ll be more state and less democracy.

“So, the way to avoid that is to become much more politically active—democratically active—but I also think it means different forms of politics. Maybe many publics. Maybe randomly drawn representative assemblies alongside of parliaments. Actually giving people voice and taking that voice seriously and constitutionally mandating those types of forums may be a way to energize some form of democratic input into these things because the tendencies are pooling in very anti-democratic directions even when we’re trying to do the right thing.”

At 1:21:10, Blyth says,

“One of the reasons that China’s taking climate change so seriously is the last IPCC report basically did estimates for what they call wet-bulb temperatures in particular regions of the world and if we just keep going exactly in the business-as-usual scenario, then the northern Chinese cities will have wet-bulb temperatures and they won’t be able to cool them because they’ll be burning so much coal to run the air conditioners. It’s just a disaster loop and they know this and they have to break it. And that’s why they’re serious about doing something about it.

“That’s not going to help North India. That’s not going to help trans-Caucasia. That’s not going to help parts of the Maghrib. So, the migration pressures that Europe finds itself in at the moment are not even the Vorspeise. These are going to be huge and that’s just baked into the cake.”

At 1:23:00, Blyth says,

“What are the only industries that are going to matter going forward? They’re going to be basically adaptation technologies. If you spend the next 10 years basically going on the last great carbon binge and pretending that nothing else is—that all this is all crap and woke capitalism—China and Europe are going to continue apace. They’re going to develop all these industries. That’s the only thing that’s going to matter.

“And 10 years from now, when the United States kind of finally sobers up from the great carbon binge, after two electoral cycles, they’re going to have to just buy all that stuff from everyone else. Because they will have no capacity to produce their own at scale. And the fact that they already sent most of the productive plant and equipment away in the first place doesn’t really help this.

“So Jonas Nahm’s great book on this, I think it’s really really good. That, essentially, if you look at China and the EU—why would you bet on them for green tech? Because they both have large export sectors and those export sectors have coalitionable politics that would actually make it possible to bind those workers into the green transition. And one of the examples Jonas uses is that, by his estimates, 40 percent of the Mittelstand’s output already goes into green tech. They don’t care where the ball bearing goes right? It can be in a diesel engine; it can be in a windmill. If that’s going to be the growth of the future, we’ll go with the windmills.

“The United States doesn’t have that capacity. It doesn’t have the vision. And it has an anti-politics that’s allergic to it. So I think that when you go through that—the short-term ROI on the carbon binge is going to be incredible, right? Europe’s going to suffer food shortages. It’s going to have migrant problems. It’s going to have security problems. It’s going to have all this over the next 10 years. But it’s going to continue to decarbonize. That’s going to happen. I really believe that’s going to happen.

“The United States is self-sufficient in food, self-sufficient in fuel. They’re a net exporter in both. They’re going to double down on the old business model. The dollar will rally. It will be super strong. Consequently, the imports which flood into the country […] will power the rest of the the rest of the global economy. Everything will look great. Except there’s one thing that’s going on: the only industries that matter are the ones that you will never develop. That’s when you lose hegemony. That’s how you lose it by degree.”

Science & Nature

'The most dumb thing' for energy storage: Hydrogen by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

“What does a hydrogen-ready power plant run on if there’s no hydrogen?”

“Communication that sets out a vision for a roadmap to create a framework for an alliance that will develop an agenda.”

Medicine & Disease

Insulin is an abomination: Recent bad news about food by Raghuveer Parthasarathy (Eighteen the Elephant)

“Aside from a general, unsubstantiated squeamishness about genetic modification and an unscientific belief that anything can be “proven safe,” there is no reason for the ban. Opponents of Golden Rice also note that there are ways of obtaining a balanced diet that provides Vitamin A that don’t require Golden Rice. This is true, but it’s also true that diabetics can do a lot to manage blood glucose without injecting insulin; we don’t deny them medicine because of this. (And, presumably, the stunning prevalence of childhood blindness means it’s not easy, in many places, to secure proper nutrition.) As 100 Nobel Laureates noted a few years ago, Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice is a “crime against humanity.””

Eli Lilly Unveils Insulin That Doesn’t Work On Poor People (The Onion)

The Wuhan “lab leak” fraud: A political witch-hunt against science and public health by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Economist Jeffrey Sachs testified before the subcommittee on March 6, 2023, demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of the rules and regulations regarding research with viruses, but providing much of the foundation for the false assertions used by the subcommittee members against EcoHealth. In response, Daszak explained that the work and results of the research conducted by his organization and the WIV were available to the public and shared in annual reports, numerous communications and in peer-reviewed journals.”

“[…] after four years of the COVID-19 pandemic, not one shred of evidence on a lab-leak origin has been produced by any principled scientist who has taken the question seriously. On the contrary, evidence in support of a natural origin has continued to accumulate on a weekly basis including epidemiologic, forensic and zoonotic information that SARS-like and SARS-2-like bat viruses are common in Southeast Asia, and the robust wildlife trade in the region contributed to the development of the COVID pandemic.”

“That the Wuhan Lab conspiracy has acquired the status of a political litmus test was made more evident with the recent deliberate attack on Dr. Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor college of Medicine in Texas. He is also the author of the recent book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science,” chronicling the real fascistic and reactionary development among various social layers. Hotez, who had called “the parading [of] prominent virologists in front of C-SPAN cameras to humiliate them” as “absolutely atrocious” and “is going to have long-term detrimental effects on science, bio-preparedness and virology,” has been ensnared into this political nightmare.”

“Chan’s claims were subjected to a withering critique by Dr. David Gorski, an American surgical oncologist at Wayne State University School of Medicine, in the journal Science-Based Medicine. Laurence Moran also made good use of his pen to warn readers about the outrageous claims made by Chan and the Times . Moran also had previously commented , “The researchers at WIV are highly respected international experts on virology, especially coronaviruses. They published in the best international journals. Since they all deny that they were working with SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis absolutely requires that several hundred researchers are lying and covering up the fact that the virus leaked from their labs. In other words, a conspiracy is an essential part of the lab leak conspiracy theory.””

“Daszak is on record that the scientists working at the WIV are some of the world’s best and highly disciplined and principled. Independent investigations into biosafety issues have not demonstrated any lapses, despite attempts by the likes of ProPublica and Vanity Fair to disparage efforts by the Chinese to advance their research capacity on such critical areas of investigation. Their experiences with SARS in 2002 and with influenza outbreaks, all due to the wild animal trade, necessitated such work. One cannot overstate that international collaboration is equally vital for Chinese researchers as it is for all scientists engaged in such work.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“I ventured the prediction that a Trump restoration might bring with it a new and even more forceful wave of illiberal autophagy on the left. Sam argued that this is unlikely, since the same people who were prostrating themselves and confessing their unconscious racism at struggle sessions throughout the Summer of Floyd have for the most part wandered off so far into individualistic self-care that, like the student Maoists of 1968 who by 1973 or so were wearing crystal pendants in the hope of absorbing their energy and enhancing their erections, so too the great majority of the preening evangelists of the Fifth Great Awakening of 2020 will likely only retreat further inward, or rather sink further downward, into their scented-candle me-time bubble-baths, should we have to endure another round of Trump.”

“I was seeing, in real time rather than in history books, how easy it was for so many people to turn on a dime and to change, in unison, their way of talking and acting, simply in order to continue fitting in.”

“What they should have been saying was: “None of this is helping, in any way. It is a deviation. You are doing nothing to make the world a better place.” Instead, what we got was silence, baldfaced denial and deflection. And even now, when that madness is subsiding, for most there has still been no reckoning, no acknowledgment of the harm done. I concede we never reached anything like the madness of true Maoism. Nothing was so bad that it would merit some sort of truth and reconciliation commission. But a bit of honesty about these excesses would sure be nice. At least a handful of people who got cancelled for absurd reasons did commit suicide, after all. A good number more lost their source of income, and a good number more than that faced social ostracism and alienation for ultimately trivial infractions.”

“As someone who cares in particular about language, it is not surprising that I should be particularly sensitive to efforts of others to curtail my expressive power, to limit what words I can use. If your identity and your happiness are not wrapped up in expressive freedom in this way, you might well honestly be prepared to shrug your shoulders and say: “Fine. If they don’t want me to say ‘unmute’ or ‘seminal’ or ‘Bombay’ anymore, or if they don’t want me to speak Spanish, I can respect that.” But I can’t respect that.”

“[…] those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style, much as a hunter learns to blend in with the exquisite vegetal surroundings of the natural environment.”

“For example, one commenter recently asked me why I haven’t yet “addressed” the issue of Israel’s massacre in Gaza over the past several months. Here’s what I wrote in reply: Why haven’t I “addressed” it? I don’t think you’ve quite understood the nature of my enterprise here at The Hinternet. I haven’t “addressed” it because I’m not an electoral candidate at a press-conference, but a writer who gets to write about whatever the hell he wants. Go harangue Dinty Moore for their shameful silence on Gaza instead.”

“[…] utter shock at the inability of the generation poisoned by social-media to read actual texts, to discern points that are made over the course of one or more paragraphs.”

“They came to these conclusions because they are post-literate fools who only know how to read takes, and do not know how to read essays. I am not a dupe of Putin, and I love my own American way of life so much that of course I would be very unhappy if some foreign conquerors came along and started barking orders at me. That would be terrible! Getting orders barked at me from members of my own culture each time I, say, go through airport security, is already bad enough. Having to endure the same human lupinity from people whose inner lives are that much more unknown to me would be far worse.”

“You go onto the internet and you select from a scroll-down list those things you are interested in and take to define who you are. Sports, perhaps? Business? Travel? Movies and TV? Don’t worry, we’ve got it all covered! You might, if you feel the need, keep scrolling in search of, say, Roman beekeeping practices, or the Bantu noun-class system. But your search will have been in vain.”

“Almost everyone at a similar stage in their academic-humanities careers to mine is either moving into upper administration, or they are off seeking grants for data-driven projects that have little or nothing to do with the research specialization that launched their careers.”

“When I am listening to talks these days, there is a distinct style I can now immediately recognize as what I call “ERC philosophy” — that is, ostensibly philosophical scholarship that is done in order to fulfill the promises made in a grant application tailored to fit the priorities of the European Research Commission. People who used to do, say, philosophy of science, now show you PowerPoint presentations of the results of their bibliometric analyses of keywords in philosophy of science journals.”

“The conversation had been circling throughout the evening around David Graeber’s notion of bullshit jobs, which we ramped up in collectively entertaining the hypothesis that the AI revolution is now bringing about the next phase of the process Graeber analyzed — the transformation of all or most of us into bullshit people.”

Jesse Singal’s July-4-Adjacent Reflections on Modern America by Eugene Volokh (Reason)

Eugene Volokh is a lawyer who occasionally writes interesting things, but also more than occasionally revels what an uphill climb it is to get anything compassionate done in a country where he is part of the most-educated and intellectual of writers and thinkers. Jesse Singal is similarly capable of saying interesting things but also has a strong conservative streak running in him that considerably counters his occasional revolutionary fervor. Jonathan Chait is basically a conservative who is a highly paid member of the so-called liberal media. Here is Volokh citing Singal writing about a conversation he once had with Chait.

“At one point I was complaining about how flawed the U.S. was and how vital it was to fix things, and Chait responded, in his characteristically mild manner something like:”

“Well, a few generations ago our ancestors lived in villages where sometimes other people would come in and just ransack everything and kill everyone. Things aren’t that bad.”

This is such a stupid line of reasoning. I hope it more clearly illustrates that I wasn’t being overly harsh when I condemned these people’s intellectual gravitas. How can you be seduced by these arguments? It’s an utter failure of thinking about goals versus accomplishments. If the goal is to be raped less, then yes, being raped every other day rather than every day is grand. If the goal is to not be raped at all, then no, you’re not done yet. Go ahead and celebrate your achievements but don’t rest on your laurels. In fact, you should be extremely wary of celebrating too hard lest it lull you into thinking you’re done. What Jonathan Chait is saying is that he is making a very comfortable living thank-you-very-much so how bad can things be, really? We have built a world in which it is possible for a select few to be very comfortable so we should be thankful for that rather than bitching about how many people are still wildly uncomfortable or by pointing out that the comfort of the few is provided on the backs of the uncomfortable many.

Great, If Imperfect by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

This article chimes in to comment on the same article by Volokh commenting on an article by Singal, which essentially pats America on the back from having coming so far from where it was. Where it used to be socially acceptable to have lynching parties, we now have to rely on more subtle institutional discrimination to get the job done. Things have gotten a lot better but the wealthy and powerful have circled the wagons and fortified their ramparts in ways that we couldn’t have dreamed of a generation or two ago.

Greenfield cites gay marriage as one of the things that is completely socially acceptable right now, but what about a woman’s right to choose? Completely mainstream thought includes a good near-majority that think that recreational sex is part of the problem—and they have always thought this. America went from prosecuting and jailing homosexuals to merely tolerating them to venerating them as better than heterosexuals. None of these attitudes treats homosexuals as human being, just like everyone else.

The United States, though these commentators are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for how great it is and how far it’s come, is woefully backward, compared to where other cultures are and where we all could be, if we would just focus on not being greedy assholes all the time. Not only that but, though gay marriage is now considered legal and normal, being anti-war is not. There are certain poisonous parts of the American mindset that these kinds of commentators are either not capable of seeing (anymore) or that they have long since given up trying to change. This leaves them in a place where they no longer see the problem as a problem. It’s insoluble, so move on.

“For the most part, Americans are in agreement about most controversial issue. But we are captive to the extremes in reaction to the other side’s extremes, which we are certain will destroy society. But society, despite the shriekers, is doing pretty damn well, even if it still have much room to improve. Society deserves to be protected and defended from the crazies on both sides.”

Is society doing well? I was watching a TV show the other day—Sandman—where a 21-year-old woman who wanted to get her younger brother back out of foster care was asked how she would take care of her brother. Did she have a job? Did she have health care? Could she care for her brother?

These are questions that a cruel society asks, one that would rather keep a young boy in foster care than with his family. One that considers “not having health care” to be a barrier to being able to live your life with your family. There are certain red lines in U.S. political discourse that are shockingly outdated and cruel when you’re outside of that country but that seem like perfectly normal questions to ask when you’re inside it. Imagine if the young woman would have had to fight the current foster parents to the death for the boy’s freedom. Even Americans would consider that to be a wholly primitive and wildly cruel condition, but so is barring her custody because of a lack of funds to provide healthcare.

The U.S. is not “good” or “run well” or “fair” or “just”. It is a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum hyper-consumerist and deeply corrupt oligarchy that uses media and propaganda to convince those whom it is currently benefitting to continue to allow the subjugation those whom it is exploiting and to convince those whom it is exploiting that their exploitation is punishment for personal failing. It’s a giant rat race, a hamster wheel. Only a select few get off. The others race from job to job, driving everywhere in cities that are falling apart and are increasingly unaffordable. Everyone lives in a soup of exploitation and hatred and suspicion of anyone who’s not inside their bubble, as defined by whatever propaganda has most recently influence them.

Greenfield, for example, has only recently stopped constantly writing about it, but he’d just spent about eight months writing about Palestinians as if they were bugs. Everyone has their blind spots. America’s blind spots conceal utter horrors. That is not something to celebrate, even if there are fewer horrors than there used to be. Less-broken is still broken.

Technology

Batteries: how cheap can they get? by Auke Hoekstra (Substack)

“Wind and solar will get an almost constant price during the day because batteries simply absorb the excess electricity they produce when it’s a bit cheaper, to give it back when it’s a bit more expensive. So wind and solar will continue to grow quickly. At the same time these batteries will also make sure that blackouts, voltage fluctuations and grid congestion due to peaks are things of the past on the wider grid. Everywhere the peaks and dips in the grid will be flattened by cheap batteries.”

Yeah, like we’ve had with reservoirs, etc. If we have cheap, clean, safe, and powerful batteries, then we don’t need as much fossil fuel. That’s always been the story, though. This is not news.

“I think I severely underestimated how cheap and ubiquitous stationary batteries could become with the advent of modern sodium batteries. I think they will turn our grid upside down from something that is managed top-down to something that is mostly decentralized and bottom up. You will use batteries to make the electricity in your home dependable and cheaper, your neighborhood will use batteries to share local electricity (that way saving on grid costs and grid construction delays) and all in all the grid will become cheaper, more resilient, and able to deal with massive amounts of solar and wind.”

I hope you’re right. Let’s see how an addiction to purely market-based solutions that overwhelmingly favor criminally entrenched multinationals affect the implementation and rollout.

LLMs & AI

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers by Simon Willison

“My favourite version of our weird new LLM future is one where the pool of people who can use computers to automate things in their life is massively expanded.”

This might be where we end up but then we should be absolutely realistic about where we are headed instead. I think a good analogy is DIY for home repairs and spreadsheets and other productivity software for home and small-business use. Whereas we are being told that there is a revolution in AI/LLMs coming and that there is so much money and big-bucks careers in it, what is really happening is that these tools will help you build and do things that are good enough for you, personally, but which no-one will be willing to pay you for. That is, there is no get-rich-quick path for nearly anyone—other than hucksters—and the AI-enterprise cum tech company is a bubble waiting to pop. This is a tool that will quickly become a commodity for building mediocre but perfectly adequate personal solutions.

Programming

Stop the Flexbox for 1D, Grid for 2D layout nonsense by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

TIL about grid-auto-columns (MDN) and grid-auto-flow (MDN), which can be combined to emulate the auto-column behavior of flexbox but with the additional benefit that the columns don’t resize as freely as in flexbox.

.my-class {
  display: grid;
  gap: 1rem;
  grid-auto-flow: column;
  grid-auto-columns: 1fr;
}

Sports

Die Abgehobenen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Für Mitglieder der Bundesregierung gilt dies offensichtlich nicht. VIP-Karten sind kein Problem und wofür hat man denn die Flugbereitschaft der Bundeswehr, die einen schnell und kostenlos auch zu privaten Spaßterminen wie einem Fußballspiel fliegt? Und wenn das Spiel mal etwas länger dauert? Kein Problem! Für die Fußballtouristen der Ampel wird selbstverständlich auch das Nachtflugverbot ausgesetzt.”

“Um es klar zu sagen: Es gehört nicht zu den hoheitlichen Aufgaben der Bundesregierung, sich Fußballspiele anzuschauen. Das ist ein Privatvergnügen und sollte demzufolge auch privat bezahlt werden – das gilt vor allem für die An- und Abreise. Wofür haben Abgeordnete denn eine Bahncard 100? Wer privat die Flugbereitschaft der Bundeswehr nutzt, nutzt sie wie einen Privatjet – so wie es sonst nur Superreiche tun.”

“Während „die da unten“ den Gürtel enger schnallen und das Klima retten sollen, hat sich bei der politischen Elite ein Lifestyle eingeschlichen, der mit dem Bild eines volksnahen Politikers nicht einmal mehr im Ansatz zu vergleichen ist. Das ist scharf zu kritisieren. Wie soll ein Minister, der selbst wie ein Milliardär lebt, verstehen, wie es den Menschen geht, die er regiert?”