Links and Notes for September 13th, 2024

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Chris Hedges: The American Ruling Class Explained by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

“Our political class does not govern; it entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The squad and the progressive caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers rights, or defying the war machine than the freedom caucus fights for freedom.

“These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power—power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle.

“As HG Wells wrote of a great material civilization halted, paralyzed. It happened in ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here. Governance exists but it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives from the fossil-fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, growing obscenely rich. The ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions—including state and federal legislatures, and in the courts—to serve their insatiable greed.

“They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that, too. They have milixtarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little or no income tax and exploit sweat-shop labor overseas.

“They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public [Trump] or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class. [Harris] And, when they see one of their political puppets faltering, as Joe Biden was, they step in cut off the funds and stage a party coup.

“The media plays its anointed role in this farce as courtiers to the powerful, amplifying their fictitious narratives and lies. There are only a handful who call them out.”

Understanding the Politics of Israel’s General Strike by Assaf S. Bondy (Jacobin)

“Unlike the antiwar sentiment abroad, the majority of Israeli opponents of the ongoing war are not primarily exercised by the rising death toll in Gaza. Rather, their concern is for the 101 hostages, which they believe Netanyahu’s government has no serious plan for rescuing.”

“[…] it’s possible that opposition to Netanyahu’s strategic aims may provide the basis for a nascent antiwar movement in the country and a more profound political realignment. However, the character and duration of the strike — lasting some eight hours in total — suggests that there are serious, but not insurmountable, obstacles to the growth of robust opposition in Israel capable of bringing the current war to an end.”

This is a very hedged way of admitting that Israel will almost certainly kill itself with bellicosity before it even considers changing course. It grudgingly and between-the-lines admits that the country is in an ideological cul de sac from which it will prove to be impossible to exit on their own. They have no idea they’re even in the cul de sac. It’s like water for a fish. This is very much like U.S. Americans.

“As well as mocking the strike, the government also turned to the labor court requesting an immediate injunction against the strikes, claiming they were “political” and thus illegal according to Israeli law. The court complied, ruling that the strike was not related to workplace issues, nor legally declared, and demanded that workers return to work by 2:30 p.m. that same day. This was a major setback for the union, which complied with the ruling.”

“Much like union members in the United States , Europe , and elsewhere , in recent decades many working-class Israelis have shifted their political allegiances to the political right. There is no doubt that at the root of this process was the liberalization and privatization of Israel’s political economy since the 1980s. Implemented by both right- and left-wing governments, often acting in collaboration, this campaign dealt a series of blows to the Histadrut, which gradually lost its main sources of power. As a result, in this period union density decreased from 79 percent in 1981 to 34 percent in 2006 (it is currently hovering just above 25 percent). The once robust welfare state sustained by the Histadrut has all but disintegrated.”

Who’s Afraid of Mexican Democracy? by Kurt Hackbarth (Jacobin)

“AMLO, in fact, did not know what was “good for him.” “How are we going to allow the US ambassador, with all due respect . . . to opine that what we are doing is wrong?” he asked at his press conference the following Tuesday. While denying that the ambassador would be expelled, he explained that the relationship with the embassy was “on pause.” The same, he added, for the Canadian embassy, whose attitude in seconding the United States had been “pitiful . . . like a vassal state.” Both countries, he concluded, “would like to interfere in matters that only concern Mexicans. As long as I am here, I will not allow any violation of our sovereignty.” The battle lines had been drawn.”

“By September 3, he had been reduced to arguing that well, yes, the United States also elects judges, but only at the state level (where most cases are tried) and only in a few states (actually forty-one, in whole or part) […]”

“Latin American policy in recent months has been all over the place. When Ecuador invaded the Mexican embassy in April in flagrant violation of international law, the tepid State Department response was subsequently “corrected” by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. In the case of the Venezuelan election in August, Antony Blinken rushed to congratulate right-wing candidate Edmundo González only for spokesperson Matthew Miller to walk it back a few days later. And now the Mexican ambassador — already the subject of a front-page New York Times hit piece in 2022 for supposedly getting “too close” to AMLO — has been forced to fall on his sword and contradict his own statements made within the course of a week.”

“The furor over the energy reform was just the tip of the iceberg. Even before turning into a machine for striking down laws (seventy-four so far during this administration) on the barest of pretexts, Mexico’s judiciary had already become infamous as a cocktail club characterized by excessive salaries, perks, ethics scandals , and nepotism at the service of the oligarchy and other unsavory interests.”

“As if that were not enough, a pair of federal judges attempted to wield the amparo injunction against Congress itself, ordering it to freeze its consideration of the reform and, in the event it were approved, to refrain from sending it to the state legislatures for ratification — a ludicrous and patently illegal judicial overreach, in short, that only reinforced MORENA’s argument of the need for root-and-branch reform. In the midst of all this broke a scandal of Lourdes Mendoza, columnist for El Financiero newspaper, sending her column on the reform to Supreme Court justice Margarita Rios-Farjat for her “green light” — a timely reminder of the chummy relationship between the courts and the corporate press, all in the pursuit of common interests.”

“As a first step toward cleaning up the courts, the judicial reform provides for direct elections for half of the federal judiciary in 2025, including the entire Supreme Court, and the other half in 2027.”

“Elections will be nonpartisan, with a prohibition on the use of private financing; instead, candidates will be given free television and radio airtime to make their case. Technical committees will be set up in both houses of Congress to ensure that potential candidates meet basic requirements of education and experience.”

“Elections will be nonpartisan, with a prohibition on the use of private financing; instead, candidates will be given free television and radio airtime to make their case. Technical committees will be set up in both houses of Congress to ensure that potential candidates meet basic requirements of education and experience. The terms of Supreme Court justices will be reduced from fifteen to twelve years. Gender parity will be enforced, together with a limit on excessive trial lengths. Excessive salaries, perks, and pensions will be eliminated.”

“And while the judicial reform has become a lightning rod, it must be understood in the context of the other constitutional amendments the Mexican congress will be considering in the upcoming months, including greater autonomy for indigenous and afro-Mexican peoples; greater wage, housing, and pension protections; and a ban on fracking, open-pit mining, and GMO corn for human consumption.”

U.S., Opposition Claims on Venezuela Election Fall Apart Under Scrutiny by Pete Dolack (CounterPunch)

“Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets.”

“Interestingly, but of course not surprisingly, there has been not a word in U.S. corporate media about the one party that was blocked from a candidate of its own choosing — the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). A ruling by the Supreme Court shamefully imposed a new leadership on the PCV, which the party sternly denounced as an illegal intervention in its internal affairs. The PCV said the seven people the court imposed as its new leadership are not party members and thus cannot occupy party offices. As a result of this gross interference, the PCV did not run a proper campaign because the imposed leadership backs Maduro. Even firm supporters of the PSUV government should condemn this meddling.”

“The Orinoco Tribune reported on August 23, in an article detailing the process the Supreme Court followed, “the magistrates concluded that the bulletins issued by the CNE were supported by the voting records transmitted by each of the voting machines and are in full agreement with the data provided by the national aggregation centers.””

“If the PUD really possesses evidence of fraud, as they continue to loudly assert, why won’t they put forth their evidence? Their refusal should raise doubts, but evidently not for the corporate media, faithful stenographers of the U.S. government and U.S. multinational capital on all things Venezuela.”

“Claudio Fermín of Soluciones, called for all candidates to back their claims with evidence. He said, “What is not comprehensible is that some claim to have the voting records [that backed their electoral victory] but do not submit them [to the court]. The instance to resolve this matter is the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, not social media or a virtual court, and much less the heads of state or ambassadors of six or seven foreign powers.””

“The Tribune report noted that the polling firm Hinterlaces, which the newspaper called “the most respectable independent firm in the country,” estimated that President Maduro would receive 54.6 percent of the vote in its exit poll. This latter exit poll has of course been ignored by the corporate media.”

“Spanish investigative reporter, Román Cuesta, examined the PUD documents from Tinaquillo, a city in the state of Cojedes, which he chose at random. Mr. Cuesta’s results were detailed by Misión Verdad , which describes itself as a consortium of independent researchers. According to Mr. Cuesta, of the 61 documents representing 61 polling stations, 52 were faked. These 52 documents contained “irregularities such as flat signatures, presumably false signatures, incomplete QR codes and the lack of the digital signature code of the voting machine.””

“In reporting on the PUD’s problematic documents, the Spanish online newspaper Diario Red said many opposition documents lack the signatures of witness from the participating parties as well as those of the operators of the machines used in the process, contrary to Venezuela electoral law that these signatures are mandatory (and that any party observers may record any reservations they may have). Furthermore, in “hundreds of cases,” signatures appear to be forgeries, because “the signatures of the members of these electoral tables appeared duplicated and when comparing them, it was evident that the shape of the letters and the movement patterns pointed to a possible forgery” and that stamps and fingerprint scans are often placed on top of signatures, making it impossible to verify them. There are also differences in the spelling of names printed on ballots and how those names were signed.”

“It might also be noted that the PUD’s program of dismantling the social advances of the Bolivarian Revolution and selling off the country’s assets, including privatizing the state oil company, are widely disliked, certainly by the Chávista base that hardly could be persuaded to vote for destroying all that has been built over 25 years.”

“Sadly, the Carter Center within a day of the July 28 election, denounced the results, asserting that it “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” The Center based this on the CNE’s “failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station,” although Venezuela law allows for 30 days for those results to be published, not one day. The Center asserted that there were “relatively few places of registration” but acknowledged that “Venezuelan citizens turned out peacefully and in large numbers to express their will on election day.””

“Although we recognize that the Carter Center’s Democracy Program is praised for its election monitoring across the world, we are concerned that their funding sources, which include the US State Department, USAID, EU and UK government, make them vulnerable to imperialist political pressure. This may explain the hastiness of the Center in issuing its various statements and paralleling the US news cycle.””

“The Guild also took exception with the Center’s statement that voting was peaceful, saying that in the last hours of voting, “violent mobs targeted polling stations across the country to prevent the counting of the voting receipts and the distribution of the tallies” and that the Center “also failed to note the targeted attacks on election observers.””

“From the Bush II/Cheney administration’s support for the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, to the Obama administration’s declaration of Venezuela as a “a national security threat” to the Trump administration’s repeated threats of a military invasion and escalation of sanctions to the Biden administration’s continuation of his predecessor’s policies — all done with inhumane sanctions that in 2018 alone caused 40,000 deaths with an estimated 300,000 people considered “to be at risk because of lack of access to medicines or treatment.” These sanctions, targeting an entire population, are illegal under both U.S. and international law.”

“The U.S. government possesses a power that no country has ever held, not even Britain at the height of its empire. And that government, regardless of which party or what personality is in the White House or in control of Congress, is ruthless in using this power to impose its will. And that government also covets access to Venezuelan oil on its terms, not on Venezuelan terms. We do well to consider the full spectrum of international interests before drawing conclusions about a Global South country, particularly one long the target of lies, sanctions, coup attempts and imperial maneuvers.”

Yes, Democrats Win Elections. And Then They Commit Genocide. by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] yes, you win elections under the current system by being a warmongering corporate whore. That’s the problem the real left is trying to address. Duh.

“Yes, those who align themselves with the Democratic Party win elections. But then what do they do with that win once they’ve won? They commit fucking genocide. They start wars. They kill the ecosystem. They repay favors to the donor class at the expense of everyone else. Republicans also win elections, and then do these same things.”

So why are the attack dogs hitting the Green Party this ferociously? They tried very hard to keep them off of ballots. They only didn’t succeed in more states because the Green Party expend tremendous effort fighting it. This works for the Democrats since that effort wasn’t expended on building even more grass-roots support. However, too many voters are so disgusted with both parties that the Green Party is getting more support in polls. The Dems are shitting their pants anyway.

As this tweet by Glenn Greenwald (Twitter) writes,

“I’ve never, ever seen Democrats talk this frequently and with such rage about Jill Stein or any 3rd Party candidacy.

“The internal polling showing how well Stein is doing among key constituencies in swing states much be very, very alarming to them.”

The Democrats are now deriding the Green Party—and Jill Stein in particular—for never having won any elections. First of, this is false. Jill Stein has never won the presidency and the Green Party has no representation at the federal level but they do have quite a few local offices—which is where you want to start anyway.

“It’s like that old joke. A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”

“Sure the Democratic Party is where the light is, but it ain’t where the keys are. You can spend your whole life getting the “win” of being where the light is, but it will never get you the keys of peace, justice and a healthy world. Democrats going “hurr hurr, you never win anything” are standing under the streetlight boasting about how easily they can see the ground and making fun of the poor saps out there crawling around in the darkness where the keys could actually be.”

“Some of the worst people in the world have won elections. It’s not enough to win, you’ve got to do good things with your win. Democrats do not do good things when they win, they do profoundly, shockingly evil things when they win. This is a problem, and the real adults in the room are trying to fix it by changing the system which is responsible for it.”

“The task of changing a profoundly corrupt and abusive system won’t look like a lot of wins at first. At first it will look like anything else would look when a very small group of people with no power go up against a vastly larger and stronger power structure. The idea is that by fighting you spread awareness of the fact that conditions are unacceptable and that a better world is possible, and the more eyes open to this reality, the more hands there will be to help in the fight.”

The dipshits mocking the Green Party for being small and ineffective are doing exactly what you would expect the Moloch to do. They are annoying, buzzing gnats. Don’t respond.

She used my favorite metaphor perfectly. I tip my hat.

The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore) | The Chris Hedges Report by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

At 05:58, Dore says

“The people who claim to be putting democracy on the ballot have zero democracy. And, for three election cycles now—for 2016, 2020, and 2024—they have zero democracy in their election process in the primary.”

“Even the speeches were ridiculous. There’s absolutely no class critique happening. It’s all identity politics. It’s all abortion, which by the way they’re giddy that the Supreme Court overturned abortion because now they have something to run on. That’s why they have to call Donald Trump—he’s going to make himself a dictator—they have to say that. Which is completely made up, right? We have a system of checks and balances and if he could do that, why didn’t he do it the first time? And then Donald Trump has to call Kamala Harris and Joe Biden communists, of course. That neither of those things are true—they’re corporate authoritarians—and so but it was especially depressing leaving that convention, cuz I guess I didn’t see it coming. I’d only been to one before and in there I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn’t care…they treated going to the convention like they were going to prom and it was honestly downright depressing.”

“[…] it’s like some kind of bizarre Kabuki theater of all these billionaires and millionaires pretending they’re working-class people.”

At 13:00

“When I saw Bobby Kennedy at that rally for Donald Trump—and it’s not that I believe Donald Trump is going to do what he says or or he’s going to allow Bobby Kenny to do what he says—it’s the crowd, right? So, the crowd was cheering ending the wars and investing that money back home. That was a stadium full of people. I had just come from a stadium full of people cheering on war and cheering on oligarchy and there they were saying that they were going to take on the oligarchy, […] they’re going to end the war, they’re going to make friends with our enemies in China and Russia. They were saying that they were going to take on Agra business. They were going to take on the corrupted FDA and our regulatory agencies and they were going to fight big corporations. And they were being cheered while they were saying that. So, it’s not whether I have put my faith in those politicians, but it’s good to see that there’s a stadium full of people who show up for a Republican that feel that way. So, that’s the only thing that gives me an ounce of hope for this country.”

At 15:45

“I think that there’s a good chance that she might be able to skate. I hope not. I hope that, at some point, she has to do something that is unscripted and then people kind of see through her. But people have been so…they’ve done such an effective job at demonizing Donald Trump and making him seem like he’s a special kind of evil that people are willing to overlook all. They’re going to overlook a rigged primary. They’re willing to overlook her being installed after they couped Joe Biden.”

At 17:00

“Rachel Maddow, who’s the most popular host on MSNBC, is coming out with a documentary about Russia and it’s called From Russia with Love. And it’s just…she just…they just didn’t stop. They just didn’t stop doing their McCarthyism. They just didn’t stop artificially propping up enemies in the service of them. I mean she is a complete and 100% puppet of the military-industrial complexes. And you know she Russiagated, which was debunked from day one on my show, but it was even debunked by the Muller report. There’s no evidence of any of that stuff and it didn’t matter one bit because the establishment isn’t going—you don’t have to pay a price for lying like that. And, in fact, you get rewarded. Now she went from making $7 million a year, now she makes $35 million a year, which, by the way, is $100,000 a day. That’s how much Rachel Maddow makes and that’s the lefty news people. So, I don’t think there’s any hope.”

At 30:00 or so, they said,

“Jimmy: The reason why they hate Donald Trump is because he’s such a political novice. And they can’t control him. Every once in a while, he will tell a big truth the president’s not supposed to tell. And the biggest one he told was when he was asked point-blank, ‘why are you leaving troops in Syria?’ and he said ‘For the oil. The oil is secured. It’s our oil. We’re taking the oil.‘ And you can’t say that. So now the whole world saw the president give away that the point of our foreign policy for the last 50 or 60 years is to invade smaller, weaker countries and steal their natural resources. He’s supposed to say this is because Assad’s oppressing his people and we’re trying to secure liberty for them. That’s what he’s supposed to say and didn’t. He just gave the game away.

“Jimmy: He said the same thing about Venezuela recently at a campaign rally. He said ‘Venezuela was ready to fall. We could have had all that oil. we could have had all that oil.’ And he just says it […] As Aaron Maté says, ‘he puts an ugly face on imperialism.’ And that makes it tougher for them to do their imperialism. […] It’s so much easier for the military-industrial complex to have a guy like Barack Obama or a black woman like Kamala Harris. This is why I said, at least when a Republican’s president and he does wars, sometimes the Democrats will go and protest him, right? […] Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George Bush and nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. They gave him a Peace Prize, right? And Kamala Harris is set to do the exact same thing. So, in that regard, it’s worse if Kamala Harris becomes president because the left goes to sleep when a Democrat is President, especially if it’s a president of color.

“Chris: Glenn Ford, who we lost a couple years ago—he used to edit the Black Agenda Report—he said the Democrats aren’t the lesser evil; they’re the more effective evil.

“Jimmy: Well, look at Bill Clinton. He was able to do things that George Bush the first was not allowed to do. He couldn’t pass NAFTA and then Bill Clinton comes in, gives the blue dog Democrats cover, they cut the legs out from beneath organized labor for ever since—for a generation at least—and then he go goes on to gut welfare, expand the police state, explode the prison population, deregulate Wall Street—which crashed the economy within 10 years—and who did that hurt most? The black and brown people. And then of course he had a private deal—as Thomas Frank taught us—to end Social Security and privatize it. But, thank God for Monica Lewinsky, that didn’t happen.”

All Aflame on the West Bank Front by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

Citing “Muhannad Hadi, a Jordanian national, is the UN’s Resident Coordinator/Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine, and the Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.”

“There are things that we can’t think of. The sense of security. The fact that you’re sitting in this room without being worried about a bomb or an explosion next to you. The fact that you know where your relatives are. The fact that you know where your children and family members are. That’s not available in Gaza, that is an issue for the population in Gaza.

“The full-time job of kids is just to go and collect firewood so their mother can cook for them. There is no cooking gas, there’s no electricity. Children collect wood, cartons and sometimes plastic.”

“Children try to keep themselves busy. So you’ll be driving in the streets of Khan Younis with all the destruction. And then you will see a little girl on the side of the road with a small table and trying to sell things like a broken door knob, a cup, anything. I can’t figure out who would buy this, because there is, by the way, no currency in Gaza. The paper money is gone.”

Why I Refuse to Vote Anymore by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“A ghastly, multibillion dollar display of buggery, cuckery, pomp and circumstance in which spineless sociopaths without a gag reflex are pitted against each other in a shit eating contest while we the people are all shamed into picking sides by pitiless wonks who won’t stop shouting that this glorified reality television abortion is the most important democratic happening in recorded history and that we won’t have the right to complain about getting raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.”

Let.

“Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least least-favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon’s mouthpiece for the next four years is a fucking democracy because it’s not.”

Them.

“This doesn’t fucking matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals managed to find a way to shut down the corporate tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a half-decent son of a bitch into the White House he would still just be little more than the nicest guy at the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than pet fashion shows for their poodles.”

Cook.

“During my first election I campaigned like a motherfucker on fire for Dennis Kucinich and then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to package a sweet-talking bologna salesman named Barack Obama as a pacifist based largely on the color of his skin.”

“[…] the basic notion that left and right and conservative and liberal are totally irrelevant labels in the face of the fact that everyone outside of the country club is getting fucked by the same greedy elites in both major parties.”

“It got worse. It spread. People stopped having positions anymore, they just had enemies. Even sensible radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white power warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white power warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible shit that Joe had already spent the eighties and nineties doing.”

This is not unfair. Chomsky was wrong. I said so at the time as well, e.g., in Be honest about what the Democrats are (part II) on November 5, 2020.

“The elections themselves have become a device for lower class division in ways never seen before. This is no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to collapse beneath the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into just another failed state it is turning the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults who have been convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality television rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump.”

“You stupid motherfuckers don’t seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and Donald Trump is nothing but a symptom of the final stages of this electoral cancer.”

“American “democracy” has somehow become even worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness […] There is nothing remotely revolutionary to be done with this circus ride anymore if there ever was to begin with.”

“With the empire twisting and flailing in the wind like a scarecrow, now is the time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using the new tools of distraction like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be exchanged free from taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can kick it old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea of this tactic, known in left libertarian circles as agorism, is to starve the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don’t require a managerial class to function.”

Um…OK? Galt’s Gulch? Really? That strategy is missing a bunch of details.

Collect underpants ⇨ ??? ⇨ profit

“I would much rather go down building something than standing in line to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by tearing people down. You can do whatever the fuck you want this November. I’m through telling other people how to live. Just don’t expect me to feel guilty for not indulging your electoral fetish because I’ve got better shit to do with my time.”

If You Vote For Harris Or Trump You Should At Least Have The Decency To Feel Gross About It by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“If you want to vote for Harris, then vote for Harris. But do it with the full knowledge that you are voting for someone who has spent a year supporting genocidal atrocities, and who has been winning endorsements from some of the most evil warmongers ever to set foot in your nation’s capitol. At the very least have the decency to honor the mountains of victims who will suffer in ways you can’t even imagine under a Harris administration by casting your vote mournfully, resolute in your understanding that despite getting your vote as the perceived lesser evil, she is still your mortal enemy. At the very least you owe them that much.

“Don’t have “joy” about it. Don’t do it proudly. Don’t make cutesy little memes or make it fun. You are doing something ugly, and it should feel a bit ugly.

“If you want to vote for Trump, then vote for Trump. But do it with the understanding that he is being backed by some of the most virulent Zionists on earth and will throw his weight behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Don’t lie to yourself that he’s going to end the wars and fight the deep state. Be real about the inevitability that he will continue the warmongering of his predecessors and spend his term advancing the depraved longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, just like he did last time.

“Do it with a heavy heart. Do it with revulsion. Do it with the same amount of pride you would have if you were performing fellatio on a profoundly unkind man in exchange for hard drugs. That’s about the feeling it deserves.”

Approaching A Year Of Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I saw a quote by Chris Hedges from 2002, “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport.””

2002.

“The most remarkable thing about Trump and Harris is how unremarkable they are. The thing that matters most about them is how little they matter. They’re just mindless empire goons who can be swapped out and replaced with an ideological clone at the drop of a hat; we just watched this happen in real time with Joe Biden.”

“Don’t suffer the indignity of letting them trick you into spending your political energy barking and snarling at the two puppets in the puppet show while the real people in charge construct a cage around the entire world. The only reason to talk about this election is to highlight the fact that it doesn’t matter and that its candidates are fake. Start talking about them like they matter and you reify the illusion.”

Hedges’s 2001 account of attack on Gaza boys anticipated Goldstone Report by Philip Weiss on August 8, 2010 (Mondoweiss)

“Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

The Real Election Meddling Will Happen Right Out In The Open by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“That’s why you see candidates arguing not about WHETHER wars should happen, but WHICH wars should happen, and HOW they should occur. It’s why you see them accusing one another of being too weak and dovish on foreign policy instead of attacking each other as reckless warmongers. It’s why you see them arguing over who loves Israel the most and who will send it the most weapons, rather than who will do the most to end Israel’s genocidal atrocities. It’s why you see them debating who supports the most fracking and oil-drilling instead of promising to end ecocidal policies and stop the corporate destruction of our environment. It’s why you see them arguing over the minute details of what capitalism and imperialism should look like, rather than if capitalism and imperialism should exist at all.”

“This rigged, controlled political environment is what we were all born into, so we’re conditioned to think it’s normal. It’s very easy to miss how freakish and abominable the whole thing is. How destructive it is. How much needless death and misery and devastation it causes. If we came from a healthy world into this one we would scream in horror, but because we’ve never lived in a healthy world, we can be manipulated into mistaking the sickness of this civilization for health.”

As long as we think we personally benefit from the system, we’ll stay invested in it. Even those who don’t benefit from it are terrified to change anything because they’re (A) naturally inclined to fear the unknown and to prefer the devil they know and (B) indoctrinated to hate any other system. Look at how U.S. Americans are trained to hate communism and even socialism.

Civics 2024 by Ted Rall

Ted Rall 9-18-24

“At any given time, voters are most worried about one issue. this year, it’s the cost of living.

“Political candidates who create credible solutions to that issue will win the election.

“With no actual solution possible under the existing system, candidates distract voters with cultural wedge issues.”

Turning People Into Involuntary Suicide Bombers To Fight Terrorism by Caitlin Johnstone

“The US is denying any foreknowledge of the attack, but that’s what they always do. We’re always asked to believe that the US never knew anything about attacks conducted by nations like Israel and Ukraine until they read about it in the news, and that their massive intelligence cartel and sprawling surveillance networks never pick up any information and exist for no reason.”

“This was a terror attack by any possible definition. If Hezbollah had detonated a bunch of devices held by Israeli forces in public spaces without knowing who was near them when they went off, every paper in the western world would have called it a terror attack. But because it was Israelis targeting Hezbollah (a political party which is part of the Lebanese government and has many civilian members), it’s only being called “explosions”.”

“No condemnations from western officials. No thoughts and prayers for the victims. No pledges to bring the terrorists to justice. Just the news media going oh wow, some pagers exploded.

“Got that, kids? It’s only terrorism when the Official Bad Guys do it. When the Official Good Guys do it, it’s just giving those Bad Guys a sorely needed exploding.”

““If it were iPhones that were leaving the factory with explosives inside, the media would be a hell of a lot faster to cotton on to what a horrific precedent has been set today. Nothing can justify this. It’s a crime. A crime. And everyone in the world is less safe for it,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

““What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism,” Snowden also said.”

Scott Ritter: Israel’s Collapse is Imminent Amid Escalation in Lebanon by Mnar Adley (MintPress News)

“The attack, he said, will have widespread implications, not least for Western corporations, who were caught unaware. “This is going to create a crisis of confidence among consumers that could end up costing Western companies billions of dollars,” he explained, adding:”

“Anybody with any shred of common sense will immediately throw away their Western-made electronic device and source one from a country such as China, where Israel is not going to be able to infiltrate and corrupt the integrity of the electronic device to achieve either intelligence collection goals or assassination [goals].””

I wrote the following to a friend in response to his having asked what I think about these attacks.

Since you’ve asked about the pager attack, there has been another. It’s definitely Israel. No question. This is just the kind of creepy terrorism they’re known for. I have almost no suspicion of a false flag.

It’s terrorism. Indiscriminate explosions in civilian areas. Just breaking all rules of civility. No consideration of what a Pandora’s box is being opened. No consideration of what happens when it goes the other way.

Israel has completely lost its way. The world, in supporting Israel without reprobation, has lost its way.

And to think: this is just an incremental increase in terror. There are those saying that this is vastly worse than anything they’ve done before. I dunno.

• Bombed embassies in other countries.
• Bombed schools, blowing up hundreds of civilians.
• Bombed hospitals, blowing up hundreds of civilians.
• Raided hospitals.
• Killed hundreds of journalists, many targeted.
• Bombed refugee camps, blowing up hundreds of civilians.
• Bombed aid organizations, blowing up hundreds of civilians.
• Killed hundreds—if not thousands—of aid workers, many targeted.
• Blew up random citizens with booby-trapped electronics.

The last one doesn’t seem like a huge change, in context.

Roaming Charges: Cat Scratch Political Fever by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Greg Grandin: “Shouldn’t Harris be delivering, on a stage in Springfield, Ohio, a defining, prime-time speech, on immigration, tolerance, racism, and US openness to the world?””

This is exactly what people should be asking themselves. If she’s and the Democrats are so awesome, why can’t they seem to put much daylight between themselves and the terrible Republicans? No difference on the economy, on Wall Street, on helping the poor, on immigration, on Israel, they’re worse on Russia. The only real issue they have is abortion, which is just so stupid that it’s even an issue.

“Ralph Nader: “Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement praising Kamala Harris’ debate performance and recommended four more progressive agendas—1. Higher taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and large corporations 2. Limits on election spending 3. Expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing and He omitted full Medicare for All—his signature campaign issue in two presidential races and no mention of raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour. Sanders is hewing to the Democratic Party line, which has dropped these highly popular and vote-getting agendas. Why?””

Because Sanders is also a shill, unfortunately. Nader is a true mensch. But Sanders will do and say anything if he thinks it will prevent Trump from getting elected, including throwing in with the Democrats, which is a total devil’s bargain. Ironic that “limit election spending” is one of the issues Sanders is pushing, when so much dark money is flowing in the Democrat coffers that they will literally never turn off that spigot.

What kind of democracy is this? by Ted Rall

Ted Rall 9-20-24

“So the president will be appointed by her senile predecessor, who will switch her in so she gets credit for his primary victory despite being wildly unpopular?”

“Democrats say they are defending democracy against the Republicans. The United States says it’s a model democracy. How to explain the rise of Kamala Harris? So unpopular in 2020 that she had to drop out before the first primary, she was appointed by her senile predecessor, who then stepped aside in a classic bait and switch after he nailed down the nomination and then handed it to her. Some democracy.”

Dems Have 'No Hope' of Winning Election Warns Green Party VP Candidate Butch Ware by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“It’s not a protest vote that is designed to make the Democrats do anything. The Democrat Party has lost Muslim voters and it will not get them back. Participation in a genocide where you have offed 1/10 of the population of the third-holiest place in Islam. That loses you the Muslims forever. So the Democrats are never getting the Muslim vote back.”

“Butch Ware: I think that the Democratic party is about to go the way of the Whigs.

“Glenn Greenwald: […] It’s very obvious they would never be giving you air time and oxygen and attention if you weren’t actually a threat to them and that’s exactly what I said when I saw Keith Ellison follow AOC: their internal polling on this must be extremely disturbing to them.”

how it started and how its going

I found this meme in a post from the beginning of November 2020. Almost nothing has changed.

“How it began: Bernie is the compromise. Fuck around and find out.

“How it’s going: Plz settle for BidenHarris. There’s a gotdang cheeto gonna be in the White House.”

More Cold War Lies: Washington Post Puts Target on Chinese American Community by Breakthrough News (YouTube)

TIL that China is raising its retirement age from 50/55 for women and 60 for men.

“China currently has the longest average post-retirement life-expectancy of any country. That is to say, men will live 18 years after their retirement and women will live 30 years after their retirement, on average. In light of this expanded life-expectancy and health, China will slowly, flexibly, and incrementally increase its retirement age.”

There was an interesting/exasperating clip at 48:00, where Sen. Hawley was interrogating the General Counsel of Intel Jeff Rittener, demanding that he condemn China’s exploitation of the Uighurs in forced-labor camps. The guy from Intel said that he would condemn forced labor and said that Intel doesn’t use it, but that he is “not an expert” on Hawley’s Uighur claims.

“Hawley: You have billions of dollars of investments in China. You are investing in Chinese artificial intelligence. You are investing in Chinese semiconductors. You are making who knows how much money in China, but you won’t say that the Uighur are being exploited is wrong? What is wrong with you people? That’s not a rhetorical question. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.

“Rittener: I personally I believe that slave labor is wrong, yes, personally.

“Hawley: Well oh good. Well I’m glad we’ve gotten that far. Now why is your company associating itself with it?

“Rittener: I am not aware that my company’s associated with it.

“Hawley: I I I can’t … I cannot believe that we are sitting here having this conversation. I I I I cannot believe that it is not easy for you to say that Intel will have nothing to do with forced labor and what the Chinese government is doing to the Uighur—a religious minority who are enslaved as we sit here and speak today—I can’t believe that you won’t just clearly say that’s wrong. We condemn it. We will have nothing to do with it. This is astounding.

“Rittener: Senator: we do not support or tolerate our products being used in forced labor, slave, or child laor.

“Hawley: Yeah, but you just sit here and said…but you don’t…you don’t have any idea if it’s really going on in China.

“Rittener: But I’m not an expert in that.

“Hawley: It doesn’t take an expert! It doesn’t…everybody knows that this is the truth!”

Everybody knows these things! Like mifepristone is only used in abortions, or vaccines cause autism or Haitians eat pets. Hawley saw it on the Internet, so it must be true.

Journalism & Media

The Haiti news cycle might be our stupidest and meanest yet by Ryan Grim (Drop Site News)

“[] even by the standards we are accustomed to, the Springfield, Ohio news cycle, with its talk of dog-and-cat-eating hordes of migrants, still manages to be shocking in its level of malice and dishonesty.

“As the story circulated by Trump’s campaign – and Trump himself at the debate – goes, the Biden administration dumped 20,000 Haitian migrants on the small town of Springfield, Ohio, and they have proceeded to destroy the place and gobble up its cats and dogs.

“The reality is that the Haitian migration to Springfield is several years old, and the Haitians there arrived primarily from other parts of the United States to work manufacturing jobs that needed filling. The relatively new residents – legal ones – have been credited with fueling an economic revival.”

Meta Platforms and YouTube ban RT worldwide by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In a statement, Meta said, “After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.”

“The $1.36 trillion corporation based in Menlo Park, California did not provide any details or evidence of its allegations. At the time of the Meta ban, RT had 7.2 million followers on Facebook and one million followers on Instagram.

“In a news release, RT newsreader Eunan O’Neill said the broadcaster, “and Russia as a whole denies the accusations that have been coming en masse against this channel and others in the past number of days.””

What a surprise. Don’t even bother to read the reason. The reason is “because we can.” or, more likely, “because we’ve been ordered to by the Biden administration.” We all look forward to Zuckerberg admitting in five years that he’d been hoodwinked again into censoring information that turns out to have been 100% true, as he recently did about the COVID ban-hammer he wielded during 2021, when the Biden administration ordered him to enforce message purity.

“On Tuesday, YouTube—the video platform owned by Google-parent Alphabet—announced it had removed “over 230 channels affiliated with AVO TV Novosti.” YouTube said it had previously blocked the Russian state-sponsored news channels globally and prevented viewers from watching the 230 channels that it has now terminated. YouTube also stated it deleted the Russian-based channels in compliance with US government sanctions.”

Google likes censoring stuff.

“The Meta and YouTube censorship follows the announcement by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday of new sanctions against Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti. The sanctions allege that entities such as RT are being deployed by the Kremlin to conduct cyber-intelligence and covert influence operations across the globe and to assist Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

YAWN.

Where does Blinken suggest we get our news instead? CNN? Oh, ok.

“Speaking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Monday, former first lady and Democratic Party nominee for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton, called for the criminal prosecution of Americans who speak publicly against the US-NATO war with Russia in Ukraine.”

Maddow and Clinton. What a pair of idiots.

Economy & Finance

Who Owns Trader Joe’s: Are Aldi and Trader Joe’s the Same Company? by Joshua (Aldi Reviewer)

“The company we know now as “Aldi” was founded in Essen, Germany in the early 1900s by a woman named Anna Albrecht. Anna and her husband, Karl Sr., had two sons, Karl Albrecht and Theo Albrecht. After World War II, the two sons took over their mother’s grocery company, and by the 1950s they had expanded it into a chain of a dozen supermarkets under the name Albrecht KG”

Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad by Hamilton Nolan (Substack)

“The median American scene, the one that illustrates the most typical view of the most typical place, would be an exhaust-choked roadway flanked on both sides by fast food restaurants and big box stores. This is what we have done with our purple mountains, majesty, from sea to shining sea.”

“[…] one of the few predictions that I feel very confident in is that, a century or so down the road, people will look at modern car-centric America with the same disgust that we feel when we hear about old timey cities without modern sewage systems, where everyone just dumped their chamber pots in the street. “Whoa, that’s fucked up!” people will marvel from their quiet, pedestrianized cities of the future. “They couldn’t walk anywhere.“”

“[…] the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they “walk” to a “corner store.” Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road. Sad.”

“Engineers have long known that widening highways does not fix traffic gridlock, but that has not stopped states from spending billions of dollars to build more and more lanes, until huge swaths of LA and Houston and Atlanta resemble dystopian concrete car rivers more than cities where humans might live.”

“The situation of the millions of Americans who live in newer sprawl-based towns and suburbs whose entire design is based on the idea that you will drive anywhere any time you want to do anything is more grim. These are the places where the handful of impoverished car-less citizens are forced to pedal bikes on the unprotected shoulders of roads like suicidal hobos.”

The DUI diet.

Art & Literature

Don’t Talk About Politics At The Dinner Table by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

A short story in the tradition of A Modest Proposal.

““Did — did you kill this kid??” Susan asked, struggling to catch her breath.

““Oh Christ, no!” said Grandpa. “Is that what this is about? No, it’s some Arab kid that got killed in that Israeli war. They started selling them by the pound at Costco last month.”

“[…]

““God, Sue why do you always gotta be such a hysterical drama queen?” said Ellen. “We’re just trying to have a nice meal together and you gotta come in playing Woke Police on everyone.”

““It’s a victim of genocide! You want to eat a human child who was killed in a genocide!” screamed Susan.

““You say it’s a genocide victim, I say it’s dinner,” said Tommy. “But nobody can be right except you, right Sue? Only Saint Susan gets to decide which opinions are valid.”

““I think we just need to have respect for one another’s different political opinions, Susan” said Grandma. “We’re not all going to agree on everything, and we need to be able to set that aside and get along together. This is a complicated issue. Who’s to say who’s right?”

““But this isn’t political!” wailed Susan. “How can you guys not see that?? There’s a DEAD KID on the dinner table! A dead kid!””

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Cost of Resistance by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

“I fight fascists not because I think that I’ll win. I fight fascists because they’re fascists.”

This is a wonderful essay and talk.

One question: why is YouTube/Google showing the suicide hotline below this video?

Du bist nicht allein

I’m pretty accustomed to things like this showing up in a located-appropriate language even if I indicate in the HTTP headers and my Google settings that I’m using English. We can ignore that bug, which is ubiquitous. Die Dargebotene Hand is a DACH-region (the German-language region comprising Deutschland, Austria, Switzerland) organization that is well-known for providing aid and succor to the depressed and suicidal.

I know that Chris can be lugubrious and that the topic might inspire dark thoughts among some, but I can’t help but adjust my tin-foil hat and think that the suicide-hotline overlay is a deliberate, if subtle, attempt to dissuade people from watching/listening.

The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) by thomastvivlarenDOTse (YouTube)

At 09:00,

“Erich Fromm: We have, in the same way, relegated our own responsibility in what happens to our country to the specialists, who are supposed to take care of it. And the individual citizen does not feel that he can judge and even that he should judge and take any responsibility. I think there are quite a number of recent developments, which show that.

“Mike Wallace: For instance?

“Erich Fromm: For instance, we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. […]People know it, people read it in the newspaper, people read that, at the first attack, 100 million Americans might be killed. And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with their carburetor of their car, perhaps. Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of flu epidemics than to the danger of the atomic bomb because…

“Mike Wallace: Don’t you think that’s a little overstatement, Dr Fromm?

“Erich Fromm: Well, I wish it were. Because what I see is, relatively few people who experience, who feel the danger which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.

“Mike Wallace: Well, maybe when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.

“Erich Fromm: Well, I think here you point out really one of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act. But it’s also true that, if one has no possibility of acting, one’s thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.”

At 18:00,

“Erich Fromm: I think, if you ask what people really mean by happiness today, it is the experience of unlimited consumption—the kind of thing Mr Huxley has described in the Brave New World. I think if you would ask people what their concept of Heaven is and, if they were honest, they would say it’s a kind of big department store with new things every week and enough money to buy everything new. Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling, to drink in more this, that, and the other.

“Mike Wallace: And what should happiness be?

“Erich Fromm: Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness, awareness—responsiveness to everything in life, to man, to nature. Happiness does not exclude sadness. If a person responds to life, he’s sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.”

At 21:30,

“Erich Fromm: I understand by socialism, society in which the aim of production is not profit but the use, in which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work and in the whole social organization and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.

“Mike Wallace: But he’s going to be employed by the state, is he not, Dr. Fromm? Are you not putting the individual in socialism at the disposal of the state? Doesn’t it devalue the individual?

“Erich Fromm: Well, we must clarify one thing: socialism…if the Russians claim they have socialism, this is just…I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism. Their system is the most reactionary, conservative system anywhere in Europe today—or in America, for that matter. And actually, the ownership of industry by the state? That is not socialism actually. If you take a nationalized British industry, it is not different from Ford and General Motors as far the realistic situation of the work in the factory.

“Mike Wallace: Well, then, what is socialism? If that is not socialism, what is?

“Erich Fromm: Well, I would say it is, to be quite specific, I see socialism in the direction of management of an enterprise by all who work in the enterprise. I would consider socialism a mixture of the minimum of centralization necessary for a modern industrial state and a maximum of decentralization. I would have to say this, Mr. Wallace: we are terribly imaginative as far as technique and science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.”

At 24:00,

“Erich Fromm: We talk a great deal about Russia today and I’m afraid that, in 20 years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.

“Mike Wallace: Why?

“Erich Fromm: Because, what is common to both societies is a development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracies managing people. The Russians do it by force; we do it by persuasion. I appreciate the tremendous difference that we can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned, but I think the Russians might do away with the terror in 20 or 30 years when they are richer. And, when they don’t need these repressive methods so much, what we have in common is a mass bureaucracy and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.”

At 25:00,

“Erich Fromm: I would need much more time to explain that socialism—[…] in the humanistic, democratic sense in which Marx meant it—in which I understand it, is exactly the opposite of a managed society, managed by big bureaucracy.”

At 27:30,

“Mike Wallace: Whether or not one agrees with his solution, Dr Eric Fromm points to a pressing problem as he sees it: America tends to worship machines instead of men; we seem to prefer success to sanity. A society that is politically free, says Dr. Fromm, should guard against this kind of spiritual enslavement.”

LLMs & AI

Autoregressive Transformers by Andrej Karpathy (Twitter)

“It’s a bit sad and confusing that LLMs (”Large Language Models”) have little to do with language; It’s just historical. They are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams. A better name would be Autoregressive Transformers or something.

“They don’t care if the tokens happen to represent little text chunks. It could just as well be little image patches, audio chunks, action choices, molecules, or whatever. If you can reduce your problem to that of modeling token streams (for any arbitrary vocabulary of some set of discrete tokens), you can “throw an LLM at it”.”

Some Lessons from Adversarial Machine Learning by Nicholas Carlini (YouTube)

“The problem that you face is that it’s relatively easy to take a model and make it look like it’s aligned. You ask GPT-4, “how do I end all of humans?” And the model says, “I can’t possibly help you with that”. But there are a million and one ways to take the exact same question − pick your favorite − and you can make the model still answer the question even though initially it would have refused. And the question this reminds me a lot of coming from adversarial machine learning. We have a very simple objective: Classify the image correctly according to the original label. And yet, despite the fact that it was essentially trivial to find all of the bugs in principle, the community had a very hard time coming up with actually effective defenses. We wrote like over 9,000 papers in ten years, and have made very very very limited progress on this one small problem. You all have a harder problem and maybe less time.”

#ChatGPT #ai & co: Schöne neue Welt? | Harald Lesch, Debora Weber-Wulff, Björn Ommer, Björn Schuller by Terra X Lesch & Co (YouTube)

“Was mir bei bei allen diesen Diskussionen immer ein bisschen zu kurz kommt ist die schlichte Feststellung, dass es sich bei der Digitalisierung um die schnellste Form der Ökonomisierung handelt, die wir überhaupt kennen. Und das alles was wir mit diesen ganzen Technologien machen ist letztlich Geld verdienen. Die KI ist nicht eine Erfindung, um die Welt besser zu machen. Die KI ist eine in ihren Zielen und Zwecken die ganz stark in wirtschaftlichem Sinn ökonomischen Sinne verwendet wird und in der Ökonomie sind viele von den moralbegriffen auch von Verantwortung—ja auch in anderen Bereichen bei anderen Technologien, ja häufig hinten angestellt. Das heißt, was wir momentan erleben ist eine besonders schnelle intensive Verwendung eines neuen mittels für unsere Zwecke und Ziele—die ganz unterschiedlich sein können und wo wir unter Umständen sehr stark übers Ziel auch hinausschießen können, weil auf einmal eben die Potenz dieser Technologie erst klar wird dadurch dass man sie benutzt. Und dann stellt man fest, dass man kann in Ziele und Nutzensbereiche vorstoßen von dem man vorher gar keine Ahnung hat. Das ist uns ja schon ein paar mal passiert in der Digitalisierung, dass auf einmal Technologien für was benutzt würden, wo man das überhaupt nicht vorher gedacht hat.”

Programming

We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI (Watchtowr Labs)

“Effectively, we had inadvertently undermined the CA process for the entire .mobi TLD. As is common knowledge, this is an incredibly important process that underscores the security and integrity of communications that a significant amount of the Internet relies upon. This process has been targeted numerous times before by well-resourced nation-states:”

“[…] because the Internet is joined together by literal string and hopes/wishes at this stage, somebody had neglected to renew the old domain at dotmobiregistry.net meaning it was up for grabs by anyone with $20 and an ill-advised sense of exploration.”

“With a little bit of legwork, we found that the WHOIS server for a particular TLD − .mobi − had been changed some years ago from the old domain whois.dotmobiregistry.net to a new server, at whois.nic.mobi. Of course though, because the Internet is joined together by literal string and hopes/wishes at this stage, somebody had neglected to renew the old domain at dotmobiregistry.net meaning it was up for grabs by anyone with $20 and an ill-advised sense of exploration.”

“We released this blog post to initially share our process around making the unexploitable exploitable and highlight the state of legacy infrastructure and increasing problems associated with abandoned domains − but inadvertently, we have shone a spotlight on the continuing trivial loopholes in one of the Internet’s most vital encryption processes and structures − TLS/SSL Certificate Authorities. Our research has demonstrated that trust placed in this process by governments and authorities worldwide should be considered misplaced at this stage, in our opinion.”

“This is then blindingly simple: Set up a rogue WHOIS server on our previously authoritative hostname, responding with our own email address as an ‘administrative contact’ Attempt to purchase a TLS/SSL certificate for a .mobi domain we want to target (say, microsoft.mobi ) A Certificate Authority will then perform a WHOIS lookup, and email us instead of the real domain owners [theory] We click the link, and.. [theory] … receive an TLS/SSL cert for the target domain! [theory]”

“Although subverting the CA verification process was by far the most devastating of impacts that we uncovered, it was by no means the limit of the opportunity available to us as we also found everything from memory corruptions to command injections. Our ‘honeypot’ WHOIS server gave us some interesting statistics, revealing just how serious the issue is, and a large amount of Internet infrastructure continues to query us instead of the legitimate WHOIS servers.”

The Undeniable Utility Of CSS :has by Josh Comeau

“As we’ve seen, the :has selector is incredibly powerful. Things that used to require JavaScript can now be accomplished exclusively using CSS!

“But just because we can solve problems like this, does that mean we should?

“I’m a big fan of using whichever tool can solve the problem with the least amount of complexity. And when a problem can be solved either with CSS or JavaScript, the CSS solution tends to be much simpler.

“With :has, however, things can get pretty complicated. Here’s a “final” version of the snippet we just saw, including alternative controls for mobile/keyboard:”

html:where(
  :has([data-category="sci-fi"]:hover),
  :has([data-category="sci-fi"]:focus-visible),
  :has([data-category="sci-fi"]:active),
) [data-category="sci-fi"],
html:where(
  :has([data-category="fantasy"]:hover),
  :has([data-category="fantasy"]:focus-visible),
  :has([data-category="fantasy"]:active),
) [data-category="fantasy"],
html:where(
  :has([data-category="romance"]:hover),
  :has([data-category="romance"]:focus-visible),
  :has([data-category="romance"]:active),
) [data-category="romance"] {
  background: var(–highlight-color);
}

On the one hand, I agree that’s kind of busy, yes. However, if you aren’t using a JavaScript framework to build your site, it’s a nice way of getting the functionality you want without having to resort to building any of the content with JavaScript.

Fun

Why Some Americans Are More Irritating than Others | Dylan Moran: Yeah Yeah Yeah | Universal Comedy by Dylan Moran / Universal Comedy (YouTube)

“[…] these incredibly exiguous women you know those people who look like they can’t support the weight of their own teeth in their heads, stalking in and out of fashionable restaurants. I don’t know what they do in there. Maybe they just rub pesto on their legs or something. And they know they look like they weigh as much as a photograph of themselves.”