Links and Notes for August 23rd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

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Public Policy & Politics

Zelensky’s Misadventures in Kursk by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Western correspondents are having a fine old time reporting that klutzy, clumsy Moscow is once again stumbling, but I buy none of it. In my view this is probably another case of Russian restraint: The AFU is using U.S. — and NATO — supplied weapons, and the Kremlin has all along been acutely sensitive to the risk of escalation against Kiev’s Western sponsors.”

“The best explanation they have come up with so far is that Kiev’s plan was to draw Russian forces away from the front on the Ukrainian side of the border. That has plainly not happened, however much The Times indulges in denial on this point. “And now Moscow has begun withdrawing some troops from Ukraine in an effort to repel Kyiv’s offensive into western Russia, Constant Méthuet reported Aug. 14 — before adding “according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.” Crapulous journalism. Simply crapulous. There is no evidence of this whatsoever—only of further Russian gains as noted above.”

“Inversely, the Kursk adventure required a lot of Ukrainian units to get going and more now to sustain. It is Kiev that is wasting resources on what is bound to end in retreat. The Russian military has not marshaled anything approaching its full force. This is likely to end when Moscow decides it should, and in the meantime the Russians appear to wage the same wearing war of attrition that has reduced the AFU to something close to a desperate force on the home front.”

“While the U.S. almost certainly had advance knowledge of the Kursk incursion and, tacitly or otherwise, may have approved it, there are indications some officials think Volodymyr Zelensky has outgrown his usefulness to the Biden regime—which has, after all, nursed a long-running dislike of the Kiev regime’s president as obstructionist, difficult to work with, excessively corrupt even by the Biden regime’s standards, and a clod in matters of statecraft.”

“[…] the Kursk operation, among its other consequences, scotched a plan for Ukrainian and Russian delegations to meet in Qatar this month to negotiate a partial ceasefire covering strikes on energy and power-related infrastructure. The shared hope was that these talks would amount to an opening to a more comprehensive settlement. While factions in Washington have for months sought to move the Ukraine crisis toward the mahogany table, this proposition is now dead. Not to simplify the case, but the Biden regime has, in effect, another Netanyahu on its hands.”

“Zelensky is a desperate man. The war is lost, martial law has made him deeply unpopular — Ukrainians are beginning to protest as army recruiters kidnap draft-age men from the streets — and the West, as is well-known, is losing faith in the AFU’s war.”

“The Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht at Kursk, in 1943, was the largest battle in the history of warfare and left roughly 1.7 million Russians dead, wounded, or missing. Along with Stalingrad, it marked a decisive moment in the Allied victory over the Reich. Russians do not forget this kind of thing, especially when German weapons are part of the AFU’s arsenal.”

Was wären die Folgen einer russischen Niederlage? by Hannes Hofbauer (NachDenkSeiten)

“Eine Niederlage Russlands könnte – im schlimmsten Fall – zum Auseinanderbrechen des Staates führen. Spätestens seit dem Einmarsch in die Ukraine nimmt der russische Nationalismus zu und ersetzt Schritt für Schritt die von der Sowjetunion geerbte russländische Identität, die den Staat nicht ethnisch, sondern territorial definiert. Das inkludiert zunehmende Fremdenfeindlichkeit gegen Menschen nicht-russischer Herkunft, insbesondere gegen Muslime.”

“Wie diese dann mit vorhersehbaren Migrationswellen umgehen, dazu sind verschiedene Szenarien denkbar. Die jahrelang aufgebaute Russophobie wird Flüchtlingen aus Russland mutmaßlich gänzlich anders begegnen, als dies mit jenen aus der Ukraine geschah, wiewohl auch bei diesen mittlerweile die Willkommenskultur zu Ende geht. Kriegerische Szenarien entlang von Migrationsrouten können jedenfalls nicht ausgeschlossen werden.”

Kamala is Still a Cop by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“But never fear fellow marginalized people, Kamala the caramel avenger is here to save us all from Satan’s powers, and the MAGA maniacs are running scared. With her carefully choreographed stadium tour of star-studded blowouts complete with dance marathons and teleprompter recitations of Hopelandish gobbledygook, Kamala Harris seems to be selling herself as a Barack Obama style messiah and the public appears to be just desperate enough to get fooled again.”

“The Republicans, for their part, seem to be reprising their circa-2008 roles as well, dusting off Tea Party era tropes about crazed Black Marxists queering your kids with open borders and free healthcare. These pea-brained hummunculoids don’t seem to grasp the fact that these tired hysterics just play directly into the Democratic party’s hands by creating the illusion that Kamala is something different enough from the mainstream to make old white guys shit their Depends.”

“You see, sweet babies, Kamala Harris is neither an inspirational angel of mercy in very mean times nor a wild-eyed Black lesbian communist. To be perfectly honest with you, the latter actually sounds a lot more like the kind of chick I could split a spliff with, but both of these narratives are equally bogus, and it really doesn’t take a tenured professor of political science to tell you who the real Kamala Harris is.”

“The sharper kids in Black Lives Matter actually put it best during that woman’s last presidential run in 2020. Kamala is a cop. She may have spent one term in the Senate as a squishy feel-good progressive and one primary kissing up to a country still reeling from the George Floyd Uprisings, but Officer Harris spent thirty years as a loyal power broker for the prison industrial complex and that record speaks for itself.”

“Even back then, Kamala would campaign as some kind of progressive but the moment she successfully suckered the hippies into voting for her again she would trample over every campaign promise she made and start cracking skulls.”

“She never once failed to fight ferociously for stiffer sentences, heftier bail requirements and longer prison terms, all too often for rinky-dink offenses like petty theft, panhandling, prostitution, graffiti, vagrancy, loitering and especially non-violent drug offenses. She oversaw California’s notoriously racist three strikes law, instituted mandatory minimums for misdemeanor gun charges, worked to shutter drug courts and defended the sanctity of the gas chamber.”

“As both a DA and an AG, Kamala Harris went out of her way to use the police state to fix this problem, first with a $450,000 anti-truancy initiative in San Francisco launched with then-mayor Gavin Newsom and then with a statewide program that literally made it a criminal misdemeanor just to be the parent of a truant child.”

“District Attorney Harris stepped up the heat by increasing police raids on her city’s massage parlors and ramping up stings on immigrant communities in a blatant fit of racial profiling against the Bay Area’s Asian community. Kamala Harris would also lead the charge on using the boogeyman of human trafficking to suck the federal government into her crusade with legally redundant legislation that led to nearly zero prosecutions for trafficking but fed legions of mostly Black and brown transwomen to the prison industrial complex for the mortal sin of trading sex for survival.”

“This is the real Kamala Harris, a duplicitous, double speaking, snake who speaks fluent progressive and then uses any influence she can grasp to juice the police state that made her a millionaire, and she continued this twisted MO well into her tenure as the second most liberal senator in Washington. Kamala was a leading force behind FOSTA-SESTA, a gargantuan prison industrial boondoggle that made it a felony to simply advertise sex work online.”

“[…] this woman is nothing less than a menace to civil liberties in this country but neither side will call her out on it because the truth is an inconvenience to both of their delusional narratives.

“The Democrats are terrified that their voters will figure out that they’re still the same fucking racists they were when Joe Biden was still vital enough to commit sexual assault. They only use identity politics to protect their precious police state from the only thing about Donald Trump that truly threatens them and that’s poor management.

“The Republicans on the other hand seem to be afraid that Kamala might do what Obama did and prove to be a far more affective [sic] white supremacist than any of the white boys in the locker room. After all, the only reason Orange-Man-Bad was able to lock up all those brown children was because a Black man built the camps.”

“In 2024, this increasingly cantankerous machine really only has two choices to market its horrors to the masses. It can either double down on the evil with openly despotic gangsters like Donald Trump or it can conceal its true nature by putting compliant minorities in charge of the podium and nothing else. Either way, the results are the same and I refuse to be complicit.”

“I will not sit silently by while my culture is hijacked by cackling quislings in savior drag. Kamala is still a fucking cop, and a cop will never be an ally to any individual.”

Israel Is Holding Thousands of Palestinians Captive — Including Children by Arvind Dilawar (Scheer Post)

““The so-called ‘evidence’ that the Israeli prosecutor in military court claims that they do have is kept in a secret file that the detainee or their lawyer don’t have access to,” said Hsana. “So ultimately, [administrative detention] is just an order given to only Palestinians that allows the occupation to withhold and detain them for an indefinite period of time. Their order can be from three to six months. Then, once the initial time period of the first order was given, a review will take place in military court in which their order can either be renewed or the detainee can be released. However, most commonly, the order is renewed and then the detainee is given another three to six months of detention.””

This is just completely arbitrary: you can be incarcerated at any time, for any reason, for any length of time.

“In contravention of international law defining adulthood as beginning at age 18 — including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory — Israeli authorities charge children 12 and older as adults, and their cases are adjudicated in military courts, making Israel the only country in the world where children automatically face military trials. According to DCIP, 75 percent of those children experience physical violence from Israeli forces and 80 percent are strip-searched. They are then typically placed in solitary confinement for an average of 16 days to extract a confession establishing their guilt, for which their families are often forced to pay a fine of several hundred dollars — in a region where the average daily wage is $37, according to the U.S. Department of State”

It’s unclear why they even bother going through the motions extracting confessions or holding “trials”. Who is all of this theater for? Maybe to instill a hope that the in-reality inevitable conclusion might be avoided? Or maybe as a moral fig-leaf that only works on themselves or people who want to believe the fantasy?

Harris’s concluding speech at DNC embraces agenda of global war by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“As a whole, the convention consisted of an endless series of inane speeches, hosannahs to Harris that completely falsified her right-wing career as a prosecutor, declarations from billionaires that Harris would be a “president of joy” and constant invocations of the “historic” character of elevating a (multi-millionaire) African American and Asian American woman to the presidency.”

“Harris declared, “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” As for whom this force will be fighting, Harris left little doubt, going on to refer to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, the same countries that the Biden-Harris administration has targeted in a new document outlining American strategy for a future nuclear world war.”

I heard that snippet on FOX News. I’m sure the word “lethal” was discussed to death; and then they went with it, deciding that it was the best expression of their intent, and what they think the American people want to hear. Is there really any wonder that the governments of the U.S. and Israel are such bosom buddies? They both couldn’t care one whit about the deaths of anyone not in their elites. They not only don’t care about anyone who’s not in their tribe (American or Jewish-Israeli), they also don’t care about their “lesser” citizens, who they cheerily use as cannon fodder for their own purposes and profit.

The comment went unremarked even though it would have been an opportunity to castigate Harris for wholly nonconstructive belligerence. Methinks they all doth protest too much about the power and strength and destructive—“lethal”—capability of the U.S. military. No, Harris didn’t mention what economic boon the U.S. could bring to the world. She didn’t mention how the U.S. could lead the world in assuaging and mitigating the already-prominent effects of climate change. It’s all stick and no carrot from the dying empire. Harris will not change any of that, not has she even promised to. The Democrats have realized that no-one cares about that anymore.

“As in any major address by an American capitalist politician, Harris’s acceptance speech was directed to two audiences. For Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, the real base of the Democratic Party, Harris pledged to continue the militaristic foreign policy of the Biden administration to defend the global interests of the American financial aristocracy.”

This is a succinct summary of what happened in that four days. The RNC convention was the same. 80% of the song and dance is to attract votes from moron who have been convinced that an election is the same as a meme war, that it’s about picking the winner of The Voice, about deciding who gets kicked off the island, about who gets the rose. The pomp, excitement, celebrities, and idiotic speeches were all about firing up the fans of the team. They’re building a crew of hard-core fans who will support the team no matter what, through corruption, shocking mendacity, and even outright betrayal. It won’t matter because their team won. That is all that matters now. People are no longer voting for issues, progress, or to address grievous ills or injustices—they’re voting to win. No-one in the U.S. is looking past November 5th. The future does not exist and is not being planned for.

“[…] she flatly reiterated an uncompromising pledge to provide unlimited US military aid to Israel: “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”

“In other words, more bombs and missiles to kill tens of thousands more in Gaza and potentially in the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and other countries in the region targeted by imperialism.”

It’s like a religious mantra at this point. The phraseology will never change because it would immediately arouse suspicion and wild haranguing from Israel.

“Her promises of social improvement are cynical election rhetoric to be discarded on November 6, if not earlier.”

“Kishore wrote: “Under conditions in which Trump and the Republican Party are plotting dictatorship, the appeal from Harris and the Democrats is for unity within the ruling class in defense of its common class interests, above all, the prosecution of war abroad, which requires an escalation of the war on the working class at home.””

“Throughout the speech, Harris was at pains to use right-wing language that would reassure and appeal to sections of the Republican Party establishment. The crowd responded in kind, breaking out in chants of “USA, USA” whenever Harris paused for breath.

“As a Washington Post columnist noted, “In many ways, it was a speech a Republican of years gone by could have delivered: heavy on crime-fighting, securing the border, promising an ‘opportunity society,’ keeping America’s military the ‘most lethal’ in the world and standing up to dictators, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.””

This is the speech that so many have hailed as “really good” and “great”. Expressing such a sentiment says so very much about the speaker. They are either members of the elite, very aware that they are fighting a class war against the poor and working class, or they are useful idiots who didn’t even listen to what she said. I bet there are a lot of people in the second group: they are the same people who don’t read articles but like and forward them anyway.

The Problem Isn’t The US Having The Wrong President, The Problem Is The US Empire’s Existence by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The reason I find myself fighting with both Harris supporters and Trump supporters is because they see the other party as the problem while I see the US empire itself as the problem. They seek to make things better by ensuring that the empire is under the correct management, while I seek the end of the empire.”

“Stein shows up as a presidential candidate because she’s the most popular candidate in a political party Americans created because they wanted that party to exist. Your argument isn’t with Jill Stein, it’s with Americans who don’t like your shitty imperialist political party. Either convince them that war and injustice are awesome or stop being such murderous tyrants.”

Meet the New Boss, Worse Than the Old? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Despite four days of airy rhetoric about unity, diversity and freedom of speech, Harris’ team imposed an effective “Muslim ban” on the convention stage, refusing not only to give a prime-time speaking slot to a Palestinian-American or Uncommitted delegate, but to any Arab-Americans at all. It took the first Black female presidential candidate to return the Democratic Party to its segregationist roots. Welcome to the New New Jim Crow.”

“The Democrats put Mike Pence’s former National Security Advisor, several cops, the CEO of American Express, one of Trump’s former press secretaries, a border guard, the family of an Israeli hostage and the former director of the CIA on stage but not one Palestinian or Uncommitted delegate opposed to genocide.”

“Tariq Ali: “The mask is off in the sense that no one, who’s intelligent, even though they may be on the right, they know it secretly that the United States today runs the world, that it disregards all the institutions it itself has created in order to protect and preserve what it claims to be its interests and that human rights, democracy, etc. have very little to do with this.”

“The testimony of former hostage Noa Argamani was widely covered in the Israeli media saying she was abused by Hamas guards during her captivity. Argamani had to take to Social Media to set the record straight.”

“I cannot ignore what the Israeli media has been doing to me over the past 24 hours, taking my statements out of context.

“I was not beaten by Al-Qassam members in captivity nor was my hair cut; rather, I sustained injuries from a wall collapse due to an Israeli airstrike.

“I emphasize that no one beat me in captivity, but I was injured all over my body after the airstrike.

“I am a victim of the October 7th attack, and I cannot be a victim again to the Israeli media.”

Democrats deploy Bernie Sanders to con workers and youth into supporting Harris-Walz campaign by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“He added that, “in all fairness to the vice president, you know, she’s been the candidate for all of one month… So, they are still working through their policies.”

“Sanders disdain for viewers and his supporters is palpable. To claim that Harris is “too busy” to have articulated a policy on the genocide in Gaza is an obvious lie. The reality is, the Harris war policy will be the same, if not even more aggressive, than Biden’s. This is the reason why not a single Palestinian was allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention, while dozens of Republicans, “former” military-intelligence officials and corporate CEOs were given ample opportunity to tout their support for Israel/Harris.”

It is very telling that they talk about people as if, when they’re nominated to be a candidate for public office, they had no opinions or principles before that. This tells us that it doesn’t matter what the candidate believes. The candidate is an empty vessel into which opinions are poured by a committee. Sanders reveals this when he says that “they are still working through their policies.”

The author (admittedly not nearly one of the best working at the WSWS) considers this to be proof that Sanders is lying about Harris not having an opinion about Gaza. She does has one; it’s just the same horrific one that nearly every politician in the U.S.—and the west—has. Where Sanders is lying is in suggesting that she might change this opinion. Nobody in the Democratic party is going to hold the opinion that Israel should stop killing civilians to achieve its military goals. That is not an available policy position for them (or for the Republicans, for that matter).

The deeper insight, though, if that the Democrats, at least, don’t think that a presidential nominee has any opinions that aren’t given to her by a Democratic committee.

This is not the only problem with Sanders, though. He just generally seems to hold pretty abhorrent and illiberal opinions, despite his supporting several liberal pillars like universal health care, etc.

“Asked to comment on Harris’s “transformation,” Sanders metaphorically put on his red MAGA hat. “We have a crisis at the border,” he replied. “We’ve got to make sure that fentanyl does not get into this country. We have to crack down on illegal immigration.””

Caution: Red Line Crossing by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Zelensky says that two things should be learned from the Ukrainian armed forces incursion into Russia. The first is that the West must remove its restrictions on the use of long-range weapons into Russian territory. Had Ukraine been able to fire into Russia, Ukraine would not need to have marched into Russia: “If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter… the Kursk region.””

I read something recently that the U.S. had two Netanyahus on its hands. That is, that both Netanyahu and Zelensky pretend that they live in fantasy worlds in which their countries’ militaries are perfectly capable of defeating their enemies more-or-less on their own. In reality, they would not be able to attack their enemies were it not for nearly all of their military hardware and training coming from the U.S. and/or NATO.

On top of that, they nearly never acknowledge that their enemies are exercising restraint and holding back to avoid a greater conflagration. In Russia’s case, they have constructed their side of their invasion in a way that destroys considerably less of Ukraine than the U.S. or Israel do when they attack a country. Ukraine’s incursion doesn’t mean that they could suddenly march to Moscow unless they have truly determined that Russia is bluffing and is not willing to fight any harder in Ukraine than it is already doing.

“Russia has invaded Ukraine and twice annexed large portions of the country, and yet, Zelensky argues to a receptive West that Putin has not enforced his red lines. What’s worse is that Zelensky’s argument does not even face the reality of the current invasion of Kursk. As spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told the press, “just because Russia hasn’t responded to something doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t in the future.””

It is similar with Iran’s reactions (drone attacks) to Israel’s provocations (assassinations in Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut). Hezbollah has, to date, been exercising restraint. Having spoken to Israeli colleagues, this restraint is more unnerving than actual attacks: they fear the retaliation every day…but it never comes. Psychically, this is almost worse than an actual attack, which they are almost certain won’t affect themselves directly, at any rate. But the threat looms over them, day after day.

The article Israel launches major attack on southern Lebanon by Andre Damon (WSWS) describes how Israel was finally driven by this psychic anguish to strike again, finally provoking the direct response that they’d been hoping for.

“Israel launched its largest attack on southern Lebanon since 2006 on Sunday, involving over 100 air force fighter jets. The Israel Defence Forces claimed that the attacks involved over 40 targets.

“Shortly afterward, the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon announced that it was beginning an attack on Israeli military positions in retaliation for the assassination of Fuad Shukr, its senior military commander, in an attack on Beirut last month.”

Both Trumpism And Anti-Trumpism Are Fake, Decoy Revolutions by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“As Gore Vidal once said:”

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”

Franco-Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram app, arrested in Paris by Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“[…] the arrest and jailing of Durov is transparently politically motivated, reactionary and lacks any substantial legal foundation. It aims to assist the NATO powers in their war with Russia in Ukraine and pave the way for escalated attacks on democratic rights, including Internet privacy and freedom of information, in the countries where Telegram’s 900 million users are located. These include above all countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and India.

“In particular, officials of NATO governments and of the far-right Ukrainian regime have repeatedly called to ban the app, which is very popular in Ukraine, accusing it of being a conduit for “Russian propaganda” that cuts across their war against Russia.

“Durov is a Russian citizen who left Russia in 2014 to live in Dubai and acquired French citizenship after coming into conflict with the Kremlin over his refusal to hand over information from the VKontakte social network to Russian state authorities.”

So Russia didn’t arrest him but France did? Neat.

Hat Libanon das Recht auf Selbstverteidigung gegen israelische Luftangriffe? by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)

“Frage Towfigh Nia (freier Journalist): Herr Wagner, Israel hat Libanon am Wochenende massiv bombardiert. Es gab viele Tote, darunter auch Zivilisten. Dazu hätte ich gern eine Reaktion.

“Wagner (AA): Wir haben am Wochenende vor allen Dingen erst einmal eine Eskalationsdrohung durch die Hisbollah gesehen, die schon im Vorfeld massiv gedroht hatte und dann mit Raketen und Beschuss auf Israel vorangegangen ist. In der Tat hat die israelische Regierung im Lichte dieser Bedrohung Gebrauch von ihrem Recht auf Selbstverteidigung gemacht und hat Israel eine Operation im Süden Libanons durchgeführt.”

Antwort in kurzem: Israel greift nie an. Jede militärische Aktion von Israel ist de facto eine Verteidigung. In allen anderen Medien—inklusive FOX News et al.—wurde diese Aktion als einen Israelischen Angriff mit einer Reaktion von Hisbollah rapportiert. Nur dieser Minister findest, dass Bedrohungen eine sogenannte präventive Verteidigung auslösen kann. Quatsch.

Siehe mal:

“Wagner (AA): Noch einmal: Die israelische Regierung sagt sehr explizit, sie habe auf ein Bedrohungsszenario aus Südlibanon durch die Hisbollah reagiert, das sich dann ja auch umgehend durch den massiven Beschuss mit Raketen gezeigt hat.”

• Israel hatte sich aus Libanon bedroht gefüllt.
• Israel hat mit hundert Kampfjets Libanon angegriffen.
• Libanon hat mit Raketen reagiert.
• Diese Reaktion begründet im Nachhinein den vorherige Angriff.
• Deutschland interpretiert eine solche Situation als “Hisbollah hat Israel angegriffen.”

Mit solchen Leuten kann man effektiv nichts diskutieren.

To whit:

When Offense is Defined as Defense—Kursk Version by Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch)

“So, let me get this straight. When Kyiv sends its military into Russia, occupying territory and killing residents, it’s a defensive move. When Israel sends its military into Gaza and the West Bank, it’s also a defensive move. When the United States occupies countries around the world, sails its warships off the coast of China and Iran, those are defensive moves. Yet, When Russia sends its military into Ukraine, it’s an offensive move. ”

They’re all offensive moves.

This is what an active genocide looks like. Israeli officials nearly all claim that they are committing genocide. They want to eliminate or remove all Palestinians from what they consider to be their territory. The only question at this point is whether you consider this to be a justified or approved genocide.

Consider UN forced to suspend food distribution as Israel places 89 percent of Gaza under evacuation orders by Andre Damon (WSWS), which writes,

“Gaza’s population, which stood at over 2 million before the start of the genocide, is now crammed into an area that is just 41 square kilometers, or 11 percent of Gaza’s total area, with the remaining 89 percent being placed on evacuation orders by the Israeli Defense Forces.”

“According to the World Food Program, 96 percent of Gaza’s population face acute food insecurity, and nine out of 10 have spent 24 hours or more without food.”

Is that like the Warsaw ghetto now? Or is it even worse?

Searching for Monsters by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Recent congressional legislation extends the authority of federal courts to cover crimes committed by foreign persons in foreign countries against foreign victims or property. By removing the American harm nexus, Congress has permitted the feds to charge whomever they please for foreign crimes committed elsewhere against foreign victims, and it has directed federal courts to hear these cases.

“This will open the floodgates to more U.S. government kidnappings and expand radically the power of American presidents to seize political or journalist adversaries abroad just to silence them. It also gives American presidents another tool for war below the radar as they can now legally – but not constitutionally – send small armies of federal agents dressed in military garb and possessing military gear into any countries the president chooses in order to extract someone the president hates or fears.”

“If it is lawful for the U.S. government to enter Mexico and kidnap a Mexican physician for prescribing drugs, is it lawful for the Chinese government to enter Hawaii and kidnap an American tech executive for bribing Chinese officials? Can the U.S. kidnap Benjamin Netanyahu and try him here for murder and genocide committed in Gaza? Yes, but don’t hold your breath. He’s America’s monster.”

With US support, Israel extends Gaza genocide to the West Bank by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Israel has launched a new phase of its ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine targeting the West Bank.

“On Tuesday and Wednesday, hundreds of Israeli troops, along with armored vehicles and bulldozers, supported by drones and helicopters, launched the largest raid into the occupied West Bank in two decades, targeting the cities and camps of Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarem.

“The city of Jenin, with a population of 39,000, has been surrounded and sealed, and Israeli forces have blocked access to hospitals throughout the West Bank. Israeli media have reported that the attack on the West Bank will last for several days, with the death toll expected to continue to rise.

“Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz made clear that the goal is the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank: “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents.”

“The goal of this operation, like that of the Gaza genocide, is the killing of as many Palestinians as possible, their displacement from their homes and villages, with the aim of formally annexing the land Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. In July, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, is illegal.”

A Sober Citizen’s Right To Be Armed by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“The problem is how would anyone know whether the line was crossed? Where is the line? How high do you have to be? How soon after getting high is a person entitled to exercise her Second Amendment right?”

“[…] when did she smoke weed, as she admitted, and the guns were still in her home, just as possessed as here, the violation of § 922 would have been just fine? Was this an invitation by the circuit for the cops to raid her house at bedtime when she both smoked pot and possessed guns, when she wasn’t a sober person but the guns didn’t magically disappear from her home?”

You Don’t Get To Vote On Any Of Your Government’s Most Consequential Actions by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The functioning of a globe-spanning empire is seen as too important to be left in the hands of the voting public — so it isn’t. Nothing that is critical to the empire’s operation is ever on the ballot. They only let voters control a few superficial details about their society which make no difference to the powerful, while placing tremendous significance on elections and their outcomes so that voters really feel like they are making a difference.

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Until you really understand that quote and how far it goes, you can’t understand anything about mainstream western politics and political discourse.”

The Military Tried To Hide Evidence of a Massacre. A Lawsuit Just Exposed It. by Matthew Petti (Reason)

“For the rest of us, the release of the photos should be a chance to reflect on the Iraq War. Americans often think of that war as a mistake to walk away from. But the desire to move on has allowed American leaders to sweep a lot of deceptive and dangerous behavior under the rug. And forgetting how bad the last big war was is perhaps making it too easy to sell the next one.”

What they talk about when they talk about war by Seymour Hersh (Substack)

“What about America’s role in the current Israeli war with Hezbollah? Are our generals providing intelligence and other forms of help, including additional weaponry, to Israel?”

“Is Harris, once elected and in office, committed to Biden’s disastrous support of what clearly is an unwinnable war against Russia in the Ukraine? Is she also committed to spending billions of American dollars on munitions and other aid to Israel, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoids a ceasefire in Gaza and pursues a war against Hamas that is less and less winnable while killing and maiming tens of thousands of Gazans?”

“There is a lot of explaining for the Democrats to do between now and the election in November. I also think it’s fair to ask if the White House is as involved in the planning and execution of the current Israeli war with Hezbollah as it was during the Bush administration. It is our bombs and other munitions that are being fired.”

Although still couched in some mealy-mouthed equivocation, Hersh seems to have put the brakes on the unquestioning Israeli support he evinced in the first six months of the attack on Gaza.

Roaming Charges: Genocide With a Smile by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In his book The Viral Underclass, Steven Thrasher revealed how when Kamala Harris was AG of California she exploited the use of enslaved prison labor to fight wildfires in California: “In 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that California had to reduce its dangerously overcrowded prisons by granting early release to people convicted of nonviolent offenses. Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris sued in 2014 to stop these court-mandated releases. By using cheaply paid, enslaved firefighters, California was saving one hundred million dollars a year and Harris’s office argued that it would be too “dangerous” to let these firefighters go–not because they would pose a danger to their communities, but because it would be “a difficult fire season” without enslaved labor.””

“Ralph Nader: “Take the promises ‘for the people’ by Kamala Harris with a grain of salt. Even if sincere, she knows the realities of a corporate Congress and a corporate Supreme Court. Consider the emphatic promise by Joe Biden in 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.” Now, the Washington Post reports: “The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands.” Period!””

It’s not just that they get blocked. They just don’t care enough to expend any political capital on it. They will not risk an iota of their own career’s potential to earn millions for themselves for something like this. How else do you explain it? Biden said no more drilling. His own administration approved more drilling than Trump. Why? Blackmail? What else explains it better than that he was lying his face off in the first place?

“At least six infants have been abandoned in Houston since June. The state’s abortion ban seems to working as planned…”

“This week police in Nassau County on Long Island made their first arrest under a new law banning face masks, because of the backlash against anti-genocide protests and rightwing hysteria about COVID-era mandates. The arrestee? An 18-year-old Latino boy.”

“Ain’t no justice: A judge dropped charges against some of the Louisville cops involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor, saying that Taylor’s boyfriend was largest responsible for her killing: “There is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death.””

“For the first time in more than 10 years, the Democratic Party platform included no mention of eliminating the death penalty.”

Well, duh. Harris has always been for the death penalty. The Democratic Party has finally gotten honest about it. They also know that pretty much no-one cares. And no-one reads the platform. They’re too busy admiring idiocy like 60s-style posters of “Joy”.

Exposing and opposing Zionism: A conversation with Ilan Pappé by Chris Marsden (WSWS)

“Ilan Pappé: There was there was a funny moment when one of the Homeland Security Officers wanted to tell me what he thought were the historical roots of the conflict and I said, “Stop! I’m not telling you how to run the security of the United States. Don’t teach me about history. That would be the final indignity.””

“The gap between civil society, including the global North and even the United States, the gap between what position people think everybody should take towards the genocide, on the one hand, and the policies the governments are pursuing, on the other hand, the gap is so wide and so illogical. That the only way to narrow it is by force and intimidation.”

“[…] there is a moment where you feel that you know enough and you understand enough and you have heard enough to challenge fundamentally the narrative of your own society, of your own state. You understand the cowardice or conformist nature of your academic colleagues, of a community to which you once belonged. And it’s at one point that you understand you have a choice.

“You can either leave the topic, or the country, or try to challenge it and understand that this is not going to be received very well. And there’s a moment where you are at peace with yourself. You know, you’re OK with yourself. You’re OK with what you have done. And you don’t look back anymore.”

“I was very naive at the beginning when I came back from my doctorate, when I received my doctorate in 1984 and came back to Israel, and I really believed that all I would have to do is just tell the Israelis, especially the younger ones, what happened. And when you understand what really happened that should change our whole attitude towards the current situation.

“But I was shocked to learn that the narrative that I brought back with me was not challenged as a lie, or a fabrication. It was dismissed because it does not serve the State of Israel. And I said, why should I, as an academic, serve the State of Israel? I should say the truth of what I know. Isn’t that what academics are supposed to do?

“And I learned my lesson. This is not how the world works. There was a loss of naiveté, of waking up to realities, understanding the price that might be attached to such a journey.”

““You cannot be a Zionist, a leftist Zionist, just as you cannot be a progressive ethnic cleanser.” And you cannot be a leftist genocider, and you cannot be a socialist occupier. What matters is that you are an occupier, an ethnic cleanser or a genocider, that’s what matters. And if you are one of those things then you’re not part of the left.”

“[…] not everything can be rectified. You cannot turn the clock backwards for sure. That’s fine. And there’s already a third generation of settlers and everybody, most of the Palestinians and most of the people in the Arab world, accept it, say, “OK, you’re here. But you cannot be here as a super military Sparta that alienates and endangers the region as a whole and most importantly, continues by force to oppress the colonised people.” Not in the 21st century. This is not going to work.”

“[…] I think the left sometimes misunderstands the importance of group identities for people like the Azeris, the Alawites and so on. They can be very good communists and they can be very great believers in social equality and the working class. But their collective identities are still important to them and will be important to them. So in order to make this revolution successful, all these affiliations also have to be taken into account.”

This is the same everywhere. When you talk to most people who aren’t independently wealthy or benefitting reasonably well to massively from the oppressive status quo, they very instinctively understand that socialist and communist solutions are really the only fair and workable way forward—but they’re stuck in their ingrained ideologies that pull them in the other direction. The main place where this doesn’t work is for the immediately families, friends, and, sometimes, communities. They will donate generously and help, even when they understand very clearly that it’s not been earned or that it’s not “deserved”…just because that’s what you do for those you care about. This is a great starting point; it needs to be extended to a wider community, buoyed by chipping away at the near-constant alienation and other-ization of anyone who’s not in their tribe. At this point, some people have gained a wider allegiance but it’s to a political party that operates much more like a sports team. They also have unreasonable fealty to actual sports teams, to corporations (e,g,, Amazon)—and to their billionaire owners.

Journalism & Media

Strong, Capable Woman Asks Man To Come With Her To Job Interview In Case They Ask Any Hard Questions (Babylon Bee)

I honestly can’t understand how the campaign staff doesn’t see that this is how most people are going to see this interview. It’s so cynical: the Democrats know that Kamala rubs people the wrong way when she’s on her own. They know that they need people to vote for her who are actually voting for the old white guy on the ticket. So they send both. This is treated as an event, that the presidential candidate will actually speak to the public six weeks after the non-official and four weeks after the official nomination. It’s absolutely wild how people are so easily convinced that this is perfectly normal behavior.

Instagram shuts down accounts of anti-genocide student groups before start of fall classes by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“[…] Instagram banned the account of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) without notice or explanation.”

“Columbia SJP said, “As the school year is just about to begin, Columbia SJP has been permanently banned from Instagram. Our account was permanently deleted at 124k followers at the same time as our backup account, and when we made a new page it was deleted within 2 days.””

“The group published a graphic of the message received from Instagram about the ban which said, “We disabled your account. You no longer have access to sjp.columbia.” It also asserted that the action was taken because “Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines.”

“The Instagram message concluded by stating, “All of your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request another review of this decision.””

While Zuckerberg recently confessed that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to control the narrative around COVID in ways that were patently false and manipulative, his company doesn’t seem as concerned about continuing to be on the wrong side of history.

So, how’s it going otherwise? Well, FOX News refers to anyone who fights for Palestinian rights and against the Israeli genocide as “pro-Hamas” or, at best, “anti-Israel” protestors. CNN refers to them as “pro-Iran” protestors. So, you have the wide gamut of public opinion represented in the two major—and only—media silos.

“At Columbia University, encampments have been totally banned, and fencing has been installed on the grassy areas of the campus quad. At NYU, the administration has updated its discrimination and harassment policy to include a ban on criticism of Zionism by conflating the racist and apartheid political ideology of the state of Israel with Jewish identity.”

So, after paying $90K in tuition to attend a university, it turns itself into a little version of Israel, with all of the nice areas fenced-off from your use.

Science & Nature

Failure of Boeing spacecraft strands 2 astronauts on the International Space Station by Bryan Dyne (WSWS)

“Since the US-sponsored Maidan coup in Ukraine and the 2022 US-NATO provoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the US government has been feverishly seeking to divorce itself from extensive ties to the Russian space agency Roscosmos as it prepares for war with Russia and ultimately China.

“Boeing’s Starliner is an integral part of this plan. The more “made in America” rockets that exist, the more secure are the war plans.

“But as both Boeing and US capitalism are discovering, space is an unforgiving mistress. The hard physical realities of orbital mechanics, life support in a vacuum and the dangers of rocketing through Earth’s atmosphere are not overcome by simply throwing more money at the problem. Genuine and precise physics and engineering are required, and shortcuts result in death.”

“[…] for all the claimed innovation of both Boeing and SpaceX, neither are using technology that is particularly novel. They are still based off of the designs of the 1950s and 60s, and even the Starship only has 45 percent the thrust capacity of the Saturn V, the rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.”

“The development of space technology under capitalism has remained stagnant since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. The only real advance has been that the price per pound to launch unmanned vehicles has dropped significantly in the past few decades.”

The Myth of the Math Kid by Shalinee Sharma (Time Magazine)

“a study by Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock, Ph.D., comparing two groups tasked with solving problems under time pressure: one group consisted of physics graduate students and professors, and the other, undergraduates who had completed just one physics class. Researchers assumed that the graduate students and professors would finish more quickly and accurately. To no one’s surprise, the graduate students and professors were much more accurate. They, however, took longer to complete the problems. Their more rigorous approach involved a long, upfront pause to deeply understand the problem and consider the best approach before diving into problem solving.”

“When the preschool mom casually dismissed her daughter’s math ability, she may not have been thinking about these myths, but she was parroting the prevailing narrative of the math kid. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, we can give kids—even preschoolers—the chance to hone their problem-solving skills, to develop deep understanding, and to utilize their inborn ability to think mathematically. Because, in reality, all kids are math kids.”

People do this for many areas of knowledge. Like politics. “I’m not interested or good at politics” is also something people casually say, excluding themselves from participating in or exerting any control over civic life.

Environment & Climate Change

The US Says It Now Supports a More Ambitious Plastics Treaty. Industry Groups Are Furious. by Joseph Winters (Scheer Post)

“A so-called “high-ambition” coalition of countries, supported by many scientists and environmental groups, say the treaty must prevent more plastic from being made in the first place. Some 460 million metric tons are manufactured globally each year — mostly out of fossil fuels — and only 9 percent of it is recycled . Because the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastics contribute to climate change, experts at the nonprofit Pacific Environment have found that the treaty must cut plastic production by 75 percent by 2040 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).”

That ship has sailed, but sure, something similar is probably necessary for hitting the 2ºC target.

“Nearly 40 percent of global plastic production goes toward single-use items like packaging and food service products.”

Medicine & Disease

Tweet about a COVID truth commission by Cornel West (Twitter)

“Brothers and sisters, it’s time we commit to understanding and addressing the role of pharmaceutical influence in public policy. I propose a COVID-19 Truth Commission to explore the disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, seek reparations, and ensure justice and equity in our future responses. We must also challenge the censorship that silences diverse voices in these critical conversations. Additionally, we will establish a Vaccine Safety and Utilization Panel to restore trust in our public health institutions through science, transparency, and community engagement. Together, let’s protect our nation’s health and respect the autonomy of its people.”

This was wildly—but unsurprisingly—misinterpreted by In appeal to far right, Cornel West adopts Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine and bogus censorship platform by Jacob Crosse (WSWS). Nothing in that statement promotes any right-wing agenda. Jacob Crosse is an idiot. West is very clearly talking about voices on all sides that were silenced—including very much the zero-COVID voices at the WSWS. How can the WSWS just partout write that questioning how the large pharmaceutical companies strongly influenced COVID policy to their benefit is a right-wing stance? That’s insane. Stop being insane. West calls everyone “dear brother” or “dear sister.” It doesn’t mean he agrees with them. It’s his way of saying that he respects all human beings as worthy of consideration, something the WSWS might consider more often as part of its so-called socialist platform.

As COVID-19 infection numbers top 1 million a day, the CDC promotes a campaign against public health by Benjamin Mateus, Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“Dr. Cohen was silent on who was responsible for the failure of most Americans to get booster shots or otherwise protect themselves from a disease, which can be fatal for many and cause lifelong debilitation for many more.

“She could have named the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which ended the COVID-19 emergency more than a year ago and treats the pandemic as a thing of the past. She could have named Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the promoter of quack remedies like ivermectin and bleach, who recently welcomed into his campaign the anti-vaxxer and enemy of science and public health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“And if she had been equipped with a mirror—and a conscience—she could have pointed to herself and other top CDC officials, who have collaborated in the anti-scientific rampage to shut down both mitigation efforts and even elementary data collection on cases of illness, hospitalization and death.

“Most importantly (and therefore least likely) she could have acknowledged that within the framework of the capitalist system, the profits of giant banks and corporations are far more important than the lives of human beings. That is the meaning of the incessant claims that schools, factories, public transportation and facilities must be kept open, to save “the economy,” despite the inevitable spread of the infection as a result.”

Art & Literature

2024 Winners (The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest)

This is a contest for various categories of extremely purple prose.

“She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.”

“She was poured into the red latex dress like Jello poured into a balloon, almost bursting at the seams, and her zaftig shape was awesome to behold, but I knew from the look on her face and the .45 she held pointing at me, that this was no standard client of my detective agency, but a new collection agency tactic to get me to pay my long-overdue phone bill.”

“Chardonnay walked in with a swagger that could melt the chrome off a Studebaker (a pre-1954 one prior to the merger with Packard to form the Studebaker-Packard Corporation) and with a hip shrug that told everyone in the room that she meant business (not like the aforementioned failed merger); because she was, after all, the great-great granddaughter of Henry Studebaker (not one of his brothers Clement, John, Peter, or Jacob).”

Washington’s Israel Policy Is Just Feigning Ignorance Of Israeli Depravity by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Most of our art completely ignores the true nature of the freakish hellscape we find ourselves in (or even actually runs cover for it), preferring to make pretty shapes and catchy jingles over actually confronting the giant murder machine right in front of them. Poets write poems about poetry. Hip hop artists rap about rapping. Novelists tell the trillionth story of a budding young romance. Pop artists write songs about what a great time they’re having in this nightmarish freak show and how much cool stuff they own. Screenwriters — the worst of all — type out scripts normalizing the abuses of capitalism and imperialism by depicting everyone doing basically fine under status quo systems and telling heroic stories about western soldiers, cops and spies.

“Art can be used to open eyes, but most western artists spend their lives working instead to close them. And of course this is because artists are themselves victimized by the systems under which we live, finding it nearly impossible to make a living doing what they know they were born to do unless they produce very non-confrontational and non-subversive works. In our society it is the wealthy people who benefit from our existing systems that get to decide what art becomes elevated to mainstream attention, so artists look at who’s making a “successful” living at their art and what they’re creating and they model their output on examples which challenge the powerful in no meaningful way.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

C L R James foresaw the crisis of US liberal democracy by Sam Haselby (Aeon Essays)

“In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual C L R James sat down in his residence in Compton, California and, in a burst of creative energy, composed what turned out to be a frightfully prophetic analysis of the historical fate of democracy in the United States. Titled ‘Notes on American Civilization’, the piece was a thick prospectus for a slim book (never started) in which James promised to show how the failed historical promise of its unbridled liberalism had prepared the contemporary republic for a variant of totalitarian rule. ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ explained the then little-known radical. ‘I relate them very carefully to the degradation of human personality under Hitler and under Stalin.’”

“At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross over from popular culture to political rule.”

Well, damn. This is exactly what’s happening with the substance-free, meme-based candidates.

“James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.‘”

Or who says they will do their bidding. Double-damn. Things have gotten even worse. People are now convinced to vote not for someone who is willing to do their bidding but someone who isn’t someone else much worse.

“In North America, the concept of ‘free individuality’ flourished with an uninhibited and consensual character unknown in Europe, making for a political culture that was unphilosophical, unreflective, resistant to probing the intellectual premises of its dominant liberal ideology.”

“James’s argument about the hyper-individualistic and anti-intellectual way of liberal life in the US explains his heavy and explicit debt to Democracy in America ( 1835, 1840 ), the 19th-century classic by the French political sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville. In conceiving the republic’s history, he adopted a framework that essentially combined the insights of Karl Marx and Tocqueville”

“American Civilization sounded an alert that liberal democracy had arrived at a moment of palpable historic crisis. By the mid-20th century , hope in the idea of Americanism as heroic individual freedom was exhausted. Disenchantment with the nationalist liberal creed had been growing over the course of the 19th century, according to James, especially with the rise of corporate capital in the Gilded Age.

“With the Great Depression, however, its fate was sealed. For the masses of Americans, the ‘struggle for happiness’, once real, had become futile. ‘The worker during the last twenty years no longer has any illusions that by energy and ability and thrift or any of the virtues of Horatio Alger, he can rise to anything,’ observed James. Instead, the average American felt demoralised and objectified,”

“Their dreams and aspirations lay strangled by the undemocratic organisation of economic life, which, under corporate capital, ‘imposed a mechanized way of life at work, mechanized forms of living, a mechanized totality which from morning till night, week after week, day after day, crushed the very individuality which tradition nourishes and the abundance of mass-produced goods encourages.’ What most struck James about the masses of working people in the US was the ‘bitterness, the frustration, the accumulated anger’ that lurked within them.”

“The public were entertaining themselves with stories of protagonists with ‘totalitarian tendencies’. In his view, it was their way of negotiating the tensions between the promise of individual freedom and the reality of ‘the endless frustration of being merely a cog in a great machine’.”

“Granting more agency to consumers than most of his Marxist contemporaries, he noted that the paying mass ‘decides what it will see. It will pay to see that.’ And in the materials that the public were electing to see, listen to and read, he concluded, lay evidence of an attraction to a vicious fictional character.”

I would say that this attraction and consequent demand arises more from an unceasing indoctrination than from any immanence unique to U.S. Americans. The indoctrination has only gotten easier and less visible with subsequent generations. By now, it’s like water is to a fish.

“In this way, according to James, the fictions churned out by the entertainment industry served ‘to many millions a sense of active living, and in the bloodshed, the violence, the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play, they have released the bitterness, hate, fear and sadism which simmer just below the surface.’ The American dream was degenerating into the image of the American gangster.”

“Even if we can no longer avoid the antidemocratic predicament about which James warned, we can still turn to James’s writing for some illumination as to how the US ended up here in this darkening place.”

Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it. by Brian J. A. Boyd (The New Atlantis)

“Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow.”

“[…] we often wind up going down technological paths unreflectively, seeking only pleasure and profit — and then are surprised to find things we don’t like. We also sometimes fail to go down technological paths whose ends we would have liked.”

Not strong enough: the author fails to note that where we go is where the masters of profit decide best benefits them. Whether that ends up being true is a separate matter but that is the entirety of the incentive that drives our system: the profit motive of the self-elected elite.

“Now imagine scaling this experiment up from this first test run of 500 participants to the 100 million or more weekly users of ChatGPT. One begins to see the plausibility of calling the resulting AI “superwise,” as it approximates Rawls’s idea of an equilibrium that would “bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives.””

JFC that’s pretty dumb.

“The consumer, the voter, and the individual in general are accorded the right of expressing their preferences for one or more out of the alternatives which they are offered, but the range of possible alternatives is controlled by an elite, and how they are presented is also so controlled.”

“Can we really imagine OpenAI opening itself to the barrage of criticism, gotcha headlines, and business headaches it would inevitably receive if it allowed ChatGPT to give answers like this?”

Just like the author can’t articulate the features of the system that lead to this restriction.

“When corporations and liberal philosophers claim that “we” are everybody, they invariably meet resistance grounded on a basic point: No, you are the elite, the oppressor; “we” are the people, the 99 percent, the unjustly marginalized and excluded. That this rhetorical move remains so effective today suggests the lingering impact of Christianity on our culture.”

What? It’s not “lingering”! It’s the defining characteristic of modern society. Try electing a non-Christian representative or executive officer. Or does the author mean that this recognition is a lingering vestige of resistance that must be ironed out?

“[…] the valorization of strength and success that reigned in antiquity and has been trying for a comeback ever since.”

Trying? What planet are you on? Might makes right to this day and has never even slightly slipped from its first-rank position.

“As AI weaponry expert Paul Scharre has noted , bans on set-it-and-forget-it autonomous drones have precedents in international-law restrictions on chemical weapons, and allowing AI to target war machines like tanks and planes while forbidding it from targeting human beings is something that major world powers should be able to recognize as mutually beneficial.”

Hilarious. What a f@&king pipe dream. Rules don’t work anymore because the empire doesn’t follow them. Discussing how to accommodate AI in warfare must necessarily come after figuring out how they will be enforced. There are proscriptions against phosphorous, cluster bombs, killing civilians, raping prisoners, attacking hospitals and refugee camps, but the Empire and its devoted vassals don’t think that those rules apply to them. Why would it be important to make more rules about AI in warfare when those most likely to misuse it don’t follow rules anyway?

“[…] the U.S. tax code currently favors companies that automate over those that hire human labor: payroll is taxed while investments in software and robotics are not. But “a more symmetric tax structure” is possible.”

But wildly unlikely to happen. U.S. Law hates labor.

Why Burning Man’s Gentrification Was Inevitable by Keith A. Spencer (Jacobin)

“The annual wave of press coverage that accompanies the start of the event in late August has tilted to cover the insane wealth and excess that accompanies it. Burning Man is now a place where start-ups send their employees for free, to which a private jet booking company sells $55,000 round-trip flights, and where “turnkey camps” let the superrich pay five or six figures for an army of “sherpas” to do the labor and set up camp prior to their arrival. (The nonprofit that manages Burning Man has tried to discourage turnkey camps, with limited success.) Now 59 percent of Burning Man’s attendees make over six figures, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year.”

“Burning Man was supposed to be the thing that might upend the world and wake us to the hollowness of life under consumer capitalism. Burners were supposed to leave the playa changed, more giving and generous. Yet that didn’t happen. CEOs attended and didn’t come back giving away their wealth or advocating to redistribute it. Grover Norquist and other conservatives counted themselves as unironic fans. And as the years passed, and the stereotype of a Burner tilted more brogrammer than bohemian, the idea that it had any radical potential at all faded from public consciousness.”

It fades because capitalism demotes anything that detracts from it.

“Because Black Rock City has no real civic regulations — it’s not a “real” city with a charter or an elected city council or propositions to vote on — gentrification was frictionless. The cultural cachet of Burning Man drew in more well-heeled attendees, who eroded the ethos. Ticket prices went up exponentially — from $35 in 1995 to between $575 and $1,400 in 2024. (There are “low-income” tickets, though you have to apply to get them.) The average income of its attendees increased steadily.”

“The last time I went — on a “scholarship” ticket I had to apply for, a program that no longer exists — we spent six hours in a traffic jam in scorching heat waiting to get inside. Food-wise, my friends and I mostly subsisted off of trail mix, warm beer, and canned beans. We camped outside, meaning that in the exposed desert, our tent was frigid the moment the sun set and a greenhouse the moment dawn hit. The tarp walls provided no sound barrier from the 24-7 thrumming of house and techno music from ersatz nightclubs and mutant cars’ stereos.

“Meanwhile, the rich were flying into Burning Man on the temporary airstrip, bypassing the traffic jam. They didn’t have to set up tents, nor would they — an army of laborers was on hand to construct their luxurious digs. And as for climate control? The rich bring in generators, air conditioners, real mattresses in Instagram-worthy yurts with chandeliers. And no canned food — private chefs, food trucks, even lobster are more their speed.”

Technology

“Disenshittify or Die” (17 Aug 2024) by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.”

“[…] sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.”

“But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?”

Yeah but it also lets you opt out. I’m not sure whether it asks, though. I turned it off a long time ago.

“[…] the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.”

“Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you. Except you can’t. Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.”

“Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal. Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.”

“[…] competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.”

“For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary. You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense. It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.”

It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

““The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge. Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.”

LLMs & AI

Gemini Bounding Box Visualization by Simon Willison

“After a lot of fiddling around, I built a tool that I could paste co-ordinates into and select an image and see that image rendered.”

Willison continues to build tools, claiming, as usual, that “[t]he code was almost all written by Claude.” But, if you read closely, you’ll see an admission at the end that,

“I had to manually edit the code to fix some issues with the way the coordinates were interpreted […] Here’s the finished source code, after I tweaked it to store the API key in localStorage and increased the width of the rendered bounding boxes.”

That is, it wasn’t working at all until a programmer intervened. If you’re not a programmer, then you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Willison is probably one of the most expert prompters and AI-whisperers out there—if he couldn’t get working code out of Gemini and Claude, then neither could you.

This isn’t terrible, of course! He got the tools to write a lot of the code for him, then fixed it up. It’s unclear whether this was faster than just writing the code without Gemini, though. Unlike other times, he doesn’t note how long this all took him. Instead, he just writes that he did a “lot of fiddling” without details, which seems like an admission that he might have gone down a rabbit hole for longer than he’d have liked.

If you look at the final source code (GitHub), it’s about 100 lines of source code. It sets up a connection to call Gemini’s API, calls it, and draws the results on a canvas. It’s great that you can write natural-language queries to generate this kind of tool. It could have answered “I like pink ponies.” or just “zxjkjb suiryr7” or even a completely useless sequence of bytes that don’t even correspond to a legible encoding.

However, even though Willison expresses frustration with people who are still “skeptical that AI-assisted programming like this has any value”, this kind of output is really only for rapid prototyping. If that’s all you need, then great! If you’re building an actual product that you need to maintain, then the lack of tests or verification is going to be a problem. If you have the discipline and experience to know what’s missing relative to your requirements, then an LLM can be a boon. If not, then you’re going to be part of a wave of people creating code that’s even less maintainable than the heap of crap that we have now.

AIs on Rs in “strawberry” by Mark Liberman (Language Log) citing The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they’re using AI for anything by Chris PG (BlueSky)

Papa Glitch − how many Rs in strawberry

This is a great story about how LLMs don’t “know” things. You have to know how they work internally or you’ll be fooled by their answer. As one commentator writes, “LLMs do not see letters; they see tokens.” While relevant, it simply explains why LLMs aren’t what they’re being sold as, not that they are what they’re being sold as (a distinction I’m not sure the commentator recognizes). Another commentator answered,

“[…] humans might end up lacking senses but they still have brains. They can recognize why they can’t answer the question and will indicate as much.”

Another offered another example where processing solely by token without understanding led to complete hogwash.

“I accidentally made a typo the other day in my search for when the 26th Amendment was ratified and typed 36th. Google’s AI search function confidently told me it was in 1805.”

It’s worse than that by John Scalzi (Bluesky) followed up with,

“It’s worse than that: You can point out to “AI” that there are three “r”s in Strawberry, and after it disagrees with you, work with it to make it acknowledge the correct number, and then, once it agrees with you, ask it the same question in the same thread and it will give the wrong answer again.”

Strawberry has two Rs redux

Another person responded with a question about the meaning of “single” vs. “married.”

Married not opposite to single

As in the first post, commentators defend the LLM saying that this isn’t a use case for LLMs. This is a neat argument that’s technically true but irrelevant because it is absolutely one of the things that U.S. televisions blared for three weeks straight during the Olympics with Gemini and Copilot ads offering to summarize 150-page documents and so on.

While I personally am very much aware that you can’t expect anything approaching reliable results from an LLM when using it as a search engine, that is exactly what Google and Microsoft are doing by default and what they are actively selling. If you’d asked the question about Colin Dickey in a search engine, then you would have discovered that the initial answer was correct: there is no information easily available about his marital status.

That these machines can be subtly but also wildly wrong in executing such tasks is absolutely relevant because of the hype machine that’s attached to it. While these commentating fools are defending the technology from criticism, everyone else is using it to make money without caring about the quality of the result. If the quality of the result doesn’t matter, then why are you even producing it?

Programming

Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape by Alex Russell (Infrequently Noted)

The following citations are from the article linked above as well as the other four parts, which are linked from that article.

“Billions of cheap phones that always have up-to-date browsers found their CPUs and networks clogged with bloated scripts designed to work around platform warts they don’t have.”

“28% of US adults in households with less than $30K/yr income are smartphone-dependent, falling to only 19% for families making 30-70K/yr.”

“The networks and devices folks use to access public support aren’t latest-generation or top-of-the-line. They’re squarely in the tail of the device price, age, and network performance distributions. Those are the overlapping conditions where the consistently falsified assumptions of frontend’s lost decade have played out disastrously”

“The but-for defense for underperforming frontend frameworks requires us to ignore both the 20 years of web development practice that preceeded these tools and the higher OpEx and CapEx costs associated with React-based stacks. Feckless managers sometimes offer a hireability argument, suggesting they need to adopt these univerally more expensive and harder to operate tools because they need to be able to hire . This was always bullshit, but it’s absolutely laughable in 2024. Some of the best, most talented people I know are looking for work and would leap at the chance to do good things in an organisation that truly put user experience first (including in front of tooling path dependence).”

“Great frontenders can learn any framework and are constantly retraining just to stay on the treadmill. The idea that there are savings to be had in “following the herd” into Nextjs or some other JS-first development cul-de-sac is harebrained.”

“[…] there’s almost always time to do several small prototypes. It’s a damn sight cheaper than the months (or years) of painful remediation work. I’m sick to death of having to hand-hold teams whose products are suffocating under unusably large piles of cruft, slowly nursing their code-bases back to something like health as their management belatedely learns the value of knowing their systems deeply.”

“Managers that do honest, user-focused bakeoffs for their frontend choices can avoid adding their teams to the dozens I’ve consulted with who adopted extremely popular, fundamentally inappropriate technologies that have had disasterous effects on their businesses and team velocity. Discarding popular stacks from consideration through evidence isn’t a career risk; it’s literally the reason to hire engineers and engineering leaders in the first place.”

“Apple’s relative skimpiness on memory and burning desire to keep BOM costs low for parts it doesn’t manufacture are reasons to oppose browser engine choice. If real browsers were allowed, end users might expect phones with decent specs. Apple keeps that in check, in part, by maximising code page reuse across browsers and apps that are forced to use the system WebView. That might dig into margins ever so slightly, and we can’t have that, can we?”

“It took browsers that were originally architected in a desktop-only world many years to digest the radically different hardware that mobile evolved. Not only were CPU speeds and memory budgets cut dramatically — never mind the need to port to ARM, including JS engine JITs that were heavily optimised for x86 — but networks suddenly became intermittent and variable-latency.”

“The web is unattractive to every Big Tech company in a hurry, even the ones that owe their existence to it. The web’s joint custody arrangement rankles. The standards process is inscrutable and frustrating to PMs and engineering managers who have only ever had to build technology inside one company’s walls. Being asked to play on hard mode and taking licks in the process is unappealing to high-achievers who are used to running up the score.”

“The web’s overwhelmingly successful languages present a paradox: for the comfort of the snob, they must simultaneously be unserious toys beneath the elevated palettes of “generalists” and also Gordian Knots too hard for anyone to possibly wield effectively. This dual posture justifies treating frontend as a less-than discipline, and browsers as anything but a serious application platform. This isn’t universal, but it is common, particularly in Google’s C++/Java-pilled upper ranks. [8] Endless budgetary space for projects like the Android Framework, Dart, and Flutter is the result.”

“There’s a lot that could be improved about WI ACCESS’s performance. Fonts are loaded too late, and some of the images are too large. They could benefit from modern formats like WebP or AVIF. JavaScript could be delay-loaded and served from the same origin to reduce connection setup costs. HTTP/2 would left-shift many of the early resources fetched in this trace.”

“The pursuit of excellent experiences at the margins is [a] deep teacher about the systems we program, and a frequently humbling experience. If you want to become a better programmer or product manager, I recommend focusing on those cases. You’ll always learn something.”

“I cannot stress this enough: the premise of this entire wing of web development practice is that expensive, complex, hard-to-operate, and wicked-to-maintain JavaScript-based UIs lead to better user experiences. It is more than fair to ask: do they? In the case of BenefitsCal and DTA Connect, the answer is “no”. The contingent claim of potentially improved UI requires dividing any additional up-front latency by the number of interactions, then subtracting the average improvement-per-interaction from that total. It’s almost impossible to imagine any app with sessions long enough to make 30-second up-front waits worthwhile, never mind a benefits application form.”

“JavaScript-based SPAs yank the reins away from the browser while simultaneously frontloading code at the most expensive time. SPA architectures and the frameworks built to support them put total responsibility for all aspects of site performance squarely on the shoulders of the developer. Site owners who are even occasionally less than omniscient can quickly end up in trouble. It’s no wonder many teams I work with are astonished at how quickly these tools lead to disastrous results. SPAs are “YOLO” for web development.”

“Some truly unbelievable bloat is the result of all localized strings for the entire site occurring in the bundle. In every supported language.”

“Macs have 30% share of desktop-class sales in the US, vs 15% worldwide.. The overwhelming predominance of smartphones vs. desktops seals the deal. In 2023, smartphones outsold desktops and laptops by more than 4:1. Browser makers keep Linux ports ticking over because that’s where developers live (including many of their own). It’s also critical for the CI/CD systems that power much of the industry. Those constituencies are vocal and wealthy, giving them outsized influence. But iOS and and macOS aren’t real life; Android and Windows are, particularly their low-end, bloatware-filled expressions. Them’s the breaks.”

“JavaScript-based UIs are fundamentally more challenging to own and operate because the limiting factors on their success are outside the data center and not under the control of procuring teams. The slow, flaky networks and low-end devices that users bring to the party define the envelope of success for client-side rendered UI.”

“[…] any system that puts JavaScript in the critical path starts at a disadvantage. Not only does JavaScript cost 3x more in processing power, byte-for-byte, than HTML and CSS, but it also removes the browser’s ability to parallelise page loading. SPA-oriented stacks also preload much of the functionality needed for future interactions by default. Preventing over-inclusion of ancilliary code generally requires extra effort; work that is not signposted up-front or well-understood in industry.”

“Many approaches to progressive enhancement (rather than “rehydration”) use browser-native Web Components, eliminating both initial and incremental costs of larger, legacy-oriented frameworks.”

“[…] the operational complexity of SPA-based technologies creates new, additive points of poorly monitored system failure — failures like the ones we have explored in this series. This is an industry-wide scandal. Promoters of these technologies have not levelled with their customers. Instead, they continue to flog each new iteration as “the future” despite the widespread failure of these models outside sophisticated organisations. The pitch for SPA-oriented frameworks like React and Angular has always been contingent — we might deliver better experiences if long chains of interactions can be handled faster on the client.”

“Before you know it, you’re fighting with “SSR” and “islands” and “hybrid rendering” and “ISR” to get back to the sorts of results a bit of PHP or Ruby and some CSS deliver for a tenth the price.”

“Ignoring the factual inaccuracies undergirding SPA apologetics, the promised approaches ( “SSR + hydration” , “concurrent mode” , etc.) have not worked. We can definitively see they haven’t worked because the arrival of INP has shocked the body politic. INP has created a disturbance in the JS ecosystem because, for the first time, it sets a price on main-thread excesses backed by real-world data. Teams that adopt all these techniques are still are not achieving minimally good results. This is likely why “React Server Components” exists; it represents a last-ditch effort to smuggle some of the most costly aspects of the SPA-based tech stack back to the server where it always belonged.”

“The JavaScript community’s omertà regarding the consistent failure of frontend frameworks to deliver reasonable results at acceptable cost is likely to be remembered as one of the most shameful aspects of frontend’s lost decade. Had the risks been prominently signposted, dozens of teams I’ve worked with personally could have avoided months of painful remediation, and hundreds more sites I’ve traced could have avoided material revenue losses. Too many engineering leaders have found their teams beached and unproductive for no reason other than the JavaScript community’s dedication to a marketing-over-results ethos of toxic positivity.”

“For chrissake, just look at the CSS-in-JS delusion! This anti-pattern appears in a huge fraction of the traces I look at from new projects today, and that fraction has only gone up since FB hipsters (who were warned directly by browser engineers that it was a terrible idea) finally declared it a terrible idea.”

“Force peers and customers to agree about what actions users will take, in order, on the site most often. Document those flows end-to-end, then automate testing for them end-to-end in something like WebPageTest.org’s scripting system. Then define key metrics around these journeys. Build dashboards to track performance end-to-end.”

“[…] interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic HTML, and Web Components. This is doubly important if your system uses a framework. The push-back to this sort of change comes from many quarters, but I can assure you from deep experience that the folks you want to hire can learn anything, so the framework on top of the platform is the least valuable part of any skills conversation.”

“Users and businesses aren’t choosing apps because they love downloading apps. They’re choosing them because experiences built with these technologies work as advertised as least as often as they fail. The same cannot be said for contemporary web development.”

Sports

George Nellis’ 1887 Cycling Odyssey Across America − New York Almanack (New York Almanack)

“He bicycled ever westward through sleepy villages, farmlands, and growing cities of the rapidly changing nation and trekked across uninhabited stretches of prairies and mountains that marked its shrinking frontier. Following his daily ten-hour rides, Nellis sat down and wrote letters about his adventures to his hometown newspapers and a national cycling magazine to finance his cross-country journey.”

Make Sports Betting Taboo Again by Clark Randall (Jacobin)

“In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), opening the floodgates for states to legalize sports gambling. Seemingly overnight, thirty-eight states passed legislation allowing one or more forms of sports gambling. With little explanation, sports leagues and their media apparatuses — which had for decades fought tooth and nail, in and out of court, to protect PASPA and the integrity of competition — traded faces on this key ethical issue.”

“[…] we might well believe that anyone should be free to throw their money out a car window or wager it on games, if they so please. But this isn’t about throwing money away. It’s about a “heads I win, tails you lose” system where we are made to feel as though we have a chance. It’s about our governments propping up an addictive, predatory taxation regime aimed at young vulnerable men and telling us it’s about their “fan experience.””

“[…] as with the incentivized options trading craze during the first years of COVID-19, sports bettors, too, are being led into the dark alleys of derivatives and futures markets. Up to half of all sports betting today is not a “pick the winner” wager, but rather a labyrinth of parlays and random props that take low entry costs — like the options contracts — and yield disproportionate payouts when they hit. One issue: they almost never hit. Average fans are up against the proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms of multibillion dollar corporations: the result is a wasteland of losers (in one study, 91 percent of all profits were collected by just 1.3 percent of the bettors) who felt “so close” to winning after the first leg or two of their parlay hit.”

“Take Illinois, a run-of-the-mill midwestern state that has embraced the sports betting world. Illinois, as discussed ad nauseum by its residents, has a financial problem: namely a pension-liabilities tsunami and the nation’s most tax-exhausted populus. With some of the nation’s highest property taxes , gas taxes , and sales taxes , the state’s pension system is still only around 50 percent funded. Enter sports betting. What better way to expose a particular population to extreme taxation than to mask it as an additional freedom? Elected officials in Illinois and elsewhere finally found a way to increase tax collections while increasing their electability.”

“In an era of hypernormalized liberalism on any number of formerly taboo subjects, the Left should, at times, draw the moral line somewhere. The trivialization of gambling seems like a good starting point. And on top of the sociofinancial stakes, we are, I believe, simply losing our ability to sit and watch sports; and that should matter, too. Observations are now enmeshed with random calculations, quick clicks, and a quantified experience of athletics. This is supposed to be fun, “enhanced,” and apolitical. If it is to continue, we should at least recognize the folly of the latter claim.”

“For now, could there not, perhaps, be an organized movement toward a decentralized, open-source platform where friends can bet against friends online without enriching corporate monopolies and acting as a pawn to the state’s taxation regimes?”

“A growing number of Gen Z and millennials are rejecting smartphone culture and attempting to recreate a romanticized engagement with life akin to the 1990s. We can see the value in this from a sports fan’s perspective, too. What’s wrong with watching a game with friends, betting a five-spot, a bunch of push-ups, or a bad haircut on the winner — and enjoying the performance?”