Links and Notes for October 4th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

‘Who Do You Want to Win?’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] a pernicious perspective that seems nearly ubiquitous in the Western post-democracies, especially but not only in the Anglosphere. We are everywhere encouraged to eschew the complexity that always, no exceptions, informs human affairs. We cannot, in consequence, see others as they are—precisely the condition preferred by those in power. And so we resort to gross, often juvenile simplifications, just as we are meant to do.”

“John Kirby doesn’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah. This is a very striking assertion. Many, many thousands of people in Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, and as far away as Pakistan and India have publicly mourned Nasrallah’s death since last Friday. But these people must not count as “anyone.” They are “no one.” Can you think of a clearer assumption, altogether unconscious, of the West’s superiority over those of the non–West — of those who count over those who do not? I can’t. As striking as this primitive thought is the extent, so far as I can tell complete, to which this kind of talk goes unnoted. This is what I mean by the narcissism abroad in the West.”

“The murder of Nasrallah was good for the region and the world, was it? This is brutishly insensitive, the very inverse of insightful. But the American government calls Hezbollah a terrorist organization and, as John Kirby asserted plainly and very simply, its leader was a terrorist, and so the judgment holds. Atop this, there is the imagery. Nasrallah had a full beard and wore the traditional turban of Shi`ite officials. The photographs of the reaction in various West Asian cities as featured in Western newspapers: Most showed distressed people in disorderly gatherings. These people live beyond the boundaries of “civilization,” we are meant to conclude. “Progress” left them behind.”

“In November 2009 Nasrallah advanced a new party manifesto that was perfectly forthright as to dangers of American hegemony and the hostility of the Zionist state, while also moving the organization in a decidedly pluralistic direction. “People evolve. The whole world changed over the past 24 years. Lebanon changed. The world order changed,” Nasrallah said as he read out the new document during a national broadcast. Hezbollah’s objection to the Israelis, he said, “is not that they are Jews, but that they are occupiers who are raping our land and holy places.””

“As they exemplify, the complexities of politics and culture in the Islamic world are almost entirely invisible in the West, so thoroughly are these nations fenced off from view. The nuanced relationships between church and state, the mosque as an institution—religious, social, political, economic—around which much of life is arranged: There is no room for any of this in the wholesale simplifications people such as Kirby and Syed urge upon us.”

““We can’t afford to doubt the West’s moral legitimacy,” Matthew Syed writes in his comment for The Times. “It is the steel we need to face down enemies of liberty.””

He’s right about that. That’s the linchpin keeping the grotesque circus of empire going.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Speaks at 2024 UN General Assembly by Sergey Lavrov (Scheer Post)

“In 2015, the UN Summit on Sustainable Development adopted grandiose plans to fight poverty and inequality. In the end, they turned out to be empty promises in the face of the unwillingness of Western countries to give up their neo-colonial practices of siphoning off the riches of the world for their own benefit. You can simply look at the statistics to see how many promises to fund development in the global south and transfer environmentally friendly technologies have actually been kept.”

“The Secretary-General speaks of global cooperation at the very moment when the countries of the West have unleashed a veritable war of sanctions against more than half, if not the majority, of the countries of the world, and the US dollar, promoted as an asset and a good for all humanity, has been crudely turned into a weapon.”

“[…] the trust is undermined, including through actions by the West to create its subordinate narrow formats to resolve crucial issues bypassing the UN such as control over the Internet or determination of legal frameworks to use AI technologies. These issues touch upon the future of the entire humanity and they have to be considered on a universal basis, without discrimination and aspiration to achieve unilateral benefits. Thus, everything has to be agreed on a fair basis involving all UN members,”

“Acts of terrorism which Israelis fell victim to on October 7, 2023 cannot be justified. But all those who are still capable of compassion resent the fact that the October tragedy is being used for a massive collective punishment of the Palestinians, which has turned out to be an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. The murder of Palestinian civilians by US weapons must stop. The delivery of humanitarian cargoes to the enclave must be ensured, the restoration of infrastructure must be arranged and, most importantly, the implementation of the legitimate right of self-determination of the Palestinians must be guaranteed, and they must be allowed to establish a territorially integral and viable state within the borders of 1967 with its capital in East Jerusalem, not in words but in deeds, “on the ground”.”

“The UN Secretariat cannot remain aloof from efforts to establish the truth in situations that directly affect global security and must act impartially in accordance with Art. 100 of the Charter, acting impartially and avoiding the temptation to play into the hands of certain states, especially those who openly call for the world to be divided into a flowering garden and a jungle, or for a democratic table to be set for dinner and those on the menu instead of cooperation.”

“The West is to blame for concealing the truth about the organisers of many other heinous crimes, including a bloody provocation in Bucha, a city in the Kiev region, in 2022, and a series of poisonings of Russian citizens in the UK and Germany.”

I had never considered the possibility that Russia would be interested in having an investigation of the massacre at Bucha. They are universally blamed for having perpetrated it, although it was completely counterproductive to their aims and goals. Similarly, the poisonings of Russian citizens have continuously been blamed on Russia itself. It’s interesting to think of it from their point of view: trying to figure out who’s killing its citizens abroad.

“We urge all those who care about the future of their countries and people to be extremely cautious about the new plots of the inventors of these very rules.”

“[…] security can either be equal and inseparable for all, or there will be no security for anyone. For years, Russia has been trying to make Washington, London and Brussels, overwhelmed by their own complexes of exclusivity and impunity, understand this seemingly simple truth in the context of European security.”

“The unprecedented level of hypocrisy and aggressiveness of the western policy against Russia not only brings to naught the idea of global cooperation promoted by the Secretary General but even more so blocks the functioning of the entire global control systems, including the Security Council. This is not our choice, we are not to be blamed for the consequences of such a dangerous course. But everyone will feel the high cost if the West does not stop.”

“It is possible to resolve the most complicated issues which the entire humanity faced only in cooperation, with due account of each other’s interests. The West must realise this and break its neo-colonial habits.”

Life, Pre-empted/ by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Most scenarios being bandied about in the western mainstream media that involve a nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States have Russia initiating the exchange by using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in response to deteriorating military, economic, and/or political conditions brought on by the US and NATO successfully leveraging Ukraine as a proxy to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia. Understand, this is what both Ukraine and the Biden administration mean when they speak of Ukraine “winning the war.””

“[…] policymakers in both the US and Europe are undertaking increasingly brazen acts of escalation designed to bring Russia to the breaking point, all premised on the assumption that all so-called “red lines” established by Russia regarding escalation are illusionary—Russia, they believe, is bluffing.”

“Once again, US nuclear war planners believe that Russia is bluffing.”

So the U.S. thinks it can take over Russia because it is not immoral enough to use its nukes. In which case, it will have won over its enemy. But who’s the baddie?

The Making of a Wider War by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Sayyed Abdullah, head of Civil Defence in southern Lebanon, told the press on Thursday: “We are definitely coming under specific attack,” Sayyed Abdullah told a group of mainly foreign media. We have had 40 ambulances, which have been completely destroyed. On top of that, 24 rescue stations have been hit – just in this area. They were all targeted directly, and I’m just speaking about our organization.””

“Karim Makdisi: “This is not an Israeli-Hezbollah war. This is an Israeli war on Lebanon. They are hitting all the civilians and civilian infrastructure…The international community, especially in the West, has totally abandoned Lebanon.””

Man, the west just really, really, really loves Israel. Or maybe it just doesn’t want it to release all of those incriminating pictures it has of top officials.

“CBS’s debate moderators, Margaret Brennan and Nora O’Donnell, described Iran’s attacks on Israel as “failed”–without explaining what the strategic objectives might have been. In their minds, if Iran didn’t kill a bunch of Israeli civilians, the strike had to be a failure, even though it degraded Israel’s military. It’s apparently inconceivable to them that Iran (the terror state) could have launched retaliatory airstrikes designed to minimize civilian casualties by targeting only military and intelligence sites.”

“According to a DoD briefing by Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh: “A certain number of units already deployed to the Middle East…will be extended, and the forces due to rotate into theater to replace them will now instead augment the in-place forces. I won’t talk specific timelines or numbers for OpSec reasons, but I can tell you these augmented forces include F-16, F-15E, A-10, F-22 fighter aircraft and associated personnel.””

Find someone who loves you as much as the U.S. loves Israel.

“Irish novelist Dan Sheehan writing in LitHub: “Palestinian lives are so cheap that American journalists will watch a limbless child die screaming on the filthy floor of a bombed-out hospital, and then talk about Joe Biden’s impressive foreign policy record.””

This is the narrative that matters. Joe BidenKamala Harris must be reelected.

“In an October 13 email to Biden’s top aides, Dana Stroul, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, described the contents of an assessment of Israeli military actions in Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone.” Stroul wrote: “ICRC is not ready to say this in public, but is raising private alarm that Israel is close to committing war crimes. Their main line is that it is impossible for one million civilians to move this fast.” A Biden official on the email chain replied that it would be impossible to carry out such an evacuation without creating a “humanitarian catastrophe.””

Is is only a war crime to kill people? Is it not a war crime to uproot them for no reason other than that you want their land and resources? Is that not ethnic cleansing? How are they all still calling these things “evacuations”? The point is to kill people. Israel is watching Palestine run with a full bucket from one end of the country to the other. The once-full bucket is now half-empty. That is the point of the exercise.

“Lina Monzour: “Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.””

Edward Said had documented it thoroughly decades prior.

“It’s a measure of the cognitive dissonance it takes to be a Democrat these days to expect people to rally around a Campaign of Joy when the 1/3 of the country has been whacked by a climate-fueled hurricane, a genocide has metastasized into a regional war & a game of nuclear brinksmanship is playing out in eastern Europe.”

And $16.5B just went to Zelensky and Netanyahu while people’s own state governors in the path of devastation of the hurricane are arguing that there is no need for aid. Just like they did in New Orleans almost 20 years ago.

“Emmanuel Todd, one of France’s most prominent living intellectuals, said this week during an interview about his new book, Defeat of the West, on France’s Radio Sud: “After a long life of reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that the destruction of American power will be the beginning of peace for the planet.””

No shit. I’ve been saying this for 25 years. Just read two books by William Blum (Killing Hope and Rogue State) and you’ll come to the same conclusion. You just have to read actual history and you’ll see very clearly what the driving force behind all of this violent madness is. No-one else comes even close.

“Let’s give Gideon Levy, Israel’s greatest journalist, the last word this week: “If we are the ‘chosen people,’ who are you, who is the international community to tell Israel what to do? International law? Wonderful thing. It doesn’t apply to us. It applies to every other place on Earth, just not to Israel. Because we are the Chosen People. Don’t you understand? The second, deeply rooted value is obviously the value of ‘We are the victims,’ not only the biggest victims but the only victims around. I know many occupations that were longer than the Israeli occupation. Some were even more brutal, even though it’s getting harder and harder to be more brutal than the Israeli occupation. I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier presents themselves as the victim, not only the victim but the only victim. We have to quote the late Golda Meir here. She once said, ‘We will never forgive the Arabs forcing us to kill their children.’ We are the victims. We are forced to kill their children. Poor us. And the only victim in History. Again, it enables us the right to do whatever we want, and nobody is going to tell us what to do because we are the only victims. There is a third, very deeply rooted value. And this is the very deep belief (which everyone will deny, but if you scratch under the skin of almost every Israeli, you’ll find it there) that the Palestinians are not equal human beings like us. They are not like us. They don’t love their children like us. They don’t love life like us. They were born to kill. They are cruel. They have no values. No manners. Look how they kill us. This is very, very deeply rooted in Israeli society and maybe that’s the key issue. Because as long as this continues, nothing will move. As long as most Israelis don’t perceive the Palestinians as equal human beings. We are so much better than them. We are so much more developed than them. We are so much more human than them. As long as this is the case, then all our dreams–and we still have some dreams–will never come true as long as this core issue will not change.””

Never Let Your Government Tell You Who Your Enemies Are by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“It’s not the fault of middle eastern people that they live on top of a bunch of oil near crucial trade routes in a region which bridges three continents. And that’s all this has ever been about. Not fighting “terrorism”. Not spreading freedom and democracy. Not even protecting Israel. It’s ultimately about controlling what happens in a geostrategically crucial and resource-rich stretch of land.

“The people who live in that part of the world never did you any harm. They pose no threat to you. You’re only being told to hate them because the world’s most powerful people need to dominate west Asia in order to dominate the planet, and they need to inflict immense amounts of violence in order to do so. That’s all this is.”

“They’ll feed you whatever lines you need to hear in order to dupe you into thinking that disobedient populations in the middle east need military explosives dropped on them. That’s all they care about.”

“Our rulers use their propagandists in the mainstream news media and their narrative managers in Silicon Valley to manipulate public perception toward these murderous agendas using half-truths, lies by omission, distortions, misleading headlines, reversing the victim and the aggressor, starting the timeline of events at convenient points, and uncritically repeating unproven allegations from untrustworthy sources. These manipulators are as critical to the operation of the imperial war machine as the actual people who drop the bombs.”

“Our real enemies are not the Arabs and the Iranians, they’re the managers of empire who are ruining our world, destroying our biosphere, siphoning our wealth and our resources, threatening us with nuclear brinkmanship, and making sure we stay too poor, sick, busy and brainwashed to figure out what’s going on and take a stand against them.”

My Enemy Is Not Iran. My Enemy Is The Western Empire. by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Democrats spent the Trump administration yelling about the threat of Nazis and fascism, and then spent the Biden administration arguing that it’s fine and good to commit genocide in Gaza and arm Nazis in Ukraine.”

The Looming Catastrophe in the Middle East (w/ Gideon Levy) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

This was a fantastic interview, well-worth the 54 minutes.

Investigating war crimes in Gaza I Al Jazeera Investigations by Al Jazeera English (YouTube)

Also well-worth the 81 minutes. An incredible documentary of the Gazan invasion.

Where Olive Trees Weep: Processing the Trauma of Occupation | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

A great interview about the film of the same name. Chris interviews three people: Ashira Darwish, and the films producer’s Zaya Ralitza Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo. Well-worth the 45 minutes.

Voting for DEMOCRATS is WASTING Your Vote: Green Party VP Butch Ware by Bad Faith (YouTube)

“These are people that will never ever vote for a Democrat again. Ever. At any point in their life, ever. Never, ever. And the reason is the same reason that a Jew will never vote for the Nazis. It’s never going to happen. They’re dead. They’re done. They are going the way of the Whigs. They cannot survive what they have done to themselves. That party is going to be in shambles, broken and shattered in November. There is no surviving what their hands have wrought.

“And as I said on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman: anyone that tries to shield them from accountability for the evil that they themselves have done is complicit in the evil. You are the silencer at the end of their gun. So, all of these people in mainstream media—they’re going to be remembered the way that the Vichy regime is remembered in France. They are going to be remembered as collaborating with Nazis, except it is worse because we are actually the ones driving the genocide.

“This is our weapons, our policy. This is American imperialism being laundered through Israel so that it can have an anti-semitic tag sticking to it. And it doesn’t stick to the emperor, who’s stark naked. And the emperor that’s stark naked is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Team Blue, Team Red. All the same genocides.

“In this election, we actually have an opportunity to consolidate power.”

Slaughter In Gaza And Lebanon As War With Iran Approaches by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“In an interview with 60 Minutes, Vice President Kamala Harris defended the Biden administration’s genocidal support for Israel, saying the weapons it has been giving them “allow Israel to defend itself.” She also named Iran as the number one enemy of the United States.

“In an appearance on The View, Harris was asked what she would have done differently from President Biden, and she said “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Then later she added, “You asked me what is the difference between Joe Biden and me, that will be one of the differences: I’m going to have a Republican in my Cabinet.”

“And lest you make the mistake of thinking Trump would be any better, last week the former president said that Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently aggressive on this front.

““They asked [Biden], what do you think about Iran, would you hit Iran?” Trump said at a campaign event on Friday. “And he goes, ‘As long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff.’ That’s the thing you want to hit, right? I said I think he’s got that one wrong.”

“Anyone who still says Trump is a peacemaker is a damn fool. Statements like this are in full alignment with the absolute worst warmongers in Washington like John Bolton or Lindsey Graham.

“Anyway, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s the trajectory the US empire has us on. An active genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the threat of another extermination campaign in Lebanon, and acceleration toward a direct war of unimaginable horror with Iran.”

Extended episode: Norman Finkelstein Isn't Giving Up by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

At 51:00,

“There’s no war in Gaza. The moment Israel, the moment the media reported, each day, the conflict under the subheadline…it would be the main headline, and the sub headline everywhere was the ‘Israel Hamas War’. The Israel Hamas War. The moment they got that sub headline, Israel won the propaganda war because they were depicting it as a war. There was no war in Gaza. There are no battles in Gaza. You search your memory, 365 days, do you remember one day when a battle was reported? What they do is they just flatten everything in their path. Pulverize it. And then, they move in, in order to blow up—they don’t even go into the tunnels, they blow up the shafts of the tunnels.

“There was no war in Gaza. It’s all a myth. That’s why you know, when you hear the talk…Israel says ‘we killed 18,000 fighters—Hamas terrorists.’ How would they know? How would they know who they killed? Gaza’s Ministry of Health doesn’t know. Because Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms. They don’t carry around IDs saying Hamas terrorist. So, the Ministry of Health hasn’t a clue whether this young male in front of them is Hamas or just was a young male who was walking in the street or in a building. So how would Israel know? It never actually fights Hamas militants. It may see some dead bodies on the ground but it doesn’t have a clue whether it’s a militant.

“Every time you see the Israeli figures…I could predict every figure Israel will produce from now till next year. You know how you know how many are produced? What numbers they’ll use? It’s very simple: whatever number Israel, excuse me, whatever number the Ministry of Health releases as total deaths…let’s say now they’re saying 42,000 right? So Israel is going to say we killed 21,000 Hamas terrorists. With this, they want to show the one-to-one ratio to prove they’re the most moral army in the world. Because other places, it’s 3-1 or 4-1, but here it’s 1-1, so all they do is take the total number killed, divide it in half, and say that’s the number of militants we killed, or terrorists that we killed. They don’t have a clue. There’s no fighting going on in Gaza. It’s a genocide.”

At 57:00,

“The South Africans, they went to the ICJ to say: ‘this is a genocide. It’s not a war.‘ And, if you read their application, they never use language like ‘a disproportionate attack’. They don’t use language like ‘disproportionate’. They don’t use the language like even ‘indiscriminate’. They use the language, ‘they’re targeting the civilians.‘ Do you know what a disproportionate attack means? It means you have a military target and you cause what’s called ‘excessive damage’ to civilians and civilian infrastructure.

“So, let’s say you want to attack Nala. You want to kill Nala. Does that justify killing 300 civilians? Or is it disproportionate? But a disproportionate attack presumes you are targeting a military site or combatants. But that’s not what’s been happening in Gaza. They’re not attacking military targets. If they hit a military target, it’s just by accident. It’s a statistical error if they hit—it’s the equivalent of a statistical error.”

From the accompanying article, Norman Finkelstein Isn’t Giving Up by Useful Idiots (Substack),

““I read this letter,” he tells us, “from sixty-five physicians from around the world who gave testimony as to what they observed. And every one of the physicians testified that the children who were coming into the hospital had bullet wounds to the skull or to the chest. No shrapnel. It wasn’t bombs and shrapnel. It was targeted bullet wounds to the skull and to the chest of children. What does that have to do with war?”

““There were fifty-four disabled children who used the school in the convent complex. They fired two shells at it. What does that have to do with war?”

“Norman also recalls meeting Hezbollah members, and shares what he got wrong about the organization. “Israel, he says, “is willing to kill for material benefit, and Hezbollah and Hamas are willing to die for survival” He also recounts his time meeting Hamas leaders, and explains Israel’s unfair advantage:

““Israel is the entrenched, concentrated manifestation of Western imperialism. It’s got deep roots. It’s got the whole Western system behind it, that Western system which won’t let go. It will nuke China before it lets go of its global dominance. And in order to defeat it, it requires a very long-term struggle and intense calculation.”

“[…] Norman explains this despair, and the generational hopelessness which lacks historical precedent.

““Our generation,” he laments, “has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. That we have the force of justice behind us. Our generation believes there’s a good chance we’ll be defeated. There’s a good chance we’re not going to win.”

“But that doesn’t mean we should give up.

““The only thing I can say as a conclusion is you never know. You can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse.”

“It’s that certainty that he says keeps him going. “If you resist, there are moments where it looks very grim. And then there’s that folk song, it’s always darkest before the dawn. It’s this hope that keeps me carrying on. It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

““There’s another reality. There’s something in the human constitution that simply can’t do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can’t.””

Kamala Harris Isn’t Listening to U.S. Intelligence on Iran by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

Just answering the title of the article: I don’t think that the either party cares at all what the actual world situation is. Kamala Harris hasn’t demonstrated that she’s capable of understanding anything about foreign policy. She does what she’s told.

“Who is “America’s greatest adversary?”

“That is the question 60 Minutes asked Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think there’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran,” was her answer. She gave two reasons for her verdict: “Iran has American blood on their hands” and “what we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities.””

That is Israel’s greatest enemy. It is, apparently, Ms. Harris and the Democrat Party’s primary concern now, as well.

“That Iran is America’s greatest adversary comes as a surprise after the U.S. has spent the past two and a half years comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler and painting him as bent on the conquest of Europe. The U.S. has spent in the neighborhood of $175 billion helping Ukraine fight Russia.

“As early as 2018, the U.S. National Defense Strategy ranked China as the “primary concern in US national strategy.” Throughout the Biden-Harris administration, the focus has been on “growing rivalry with China [and] Russia,” as the Interim National Security Guidance of 2021 put it.”

I don’t agree that the U.S. should have a rivalry with any of these countries but this sudden shift to Iran as the primary enemy sounds like it came from Netanyahu. But Netanyahu is the rising star in charge of U.S. foreign policy whereas Zelensky’s star is waning.

Ember of Rage by Henry Rollins (YouTube)

The video was posted 17 years ago, so it’s most likely from around that time. Rollins is in Israel. He spends the first ¾ of the segment discusses his visits with wounded, American veterans. He segues, at the end, to giving the Israeli audience a noble mission.

A good friend sent me this link recently, with the comment, “I don’t think they listened.” The video already had my thumbs-up on it, but I can’t remember when I’d already watched it.

Yeah, I don’t think they listened. They weren’t even listening at the time, if you look at the audience. There’s sullen resentment that this American thinks he can tell them what to think. Some of them looked moved by his words, but not even close to half. The standing ovation was very ragged—only a smattering jumped up.

“I know, here in Israel, all of you have a friend, have seen this, have smelled it, have walked by it, this happens in this country: people blow up, people don’t stop killing. I beg of you to right the wrongs. I would not dare to insult you or the situation by saying, ‘sit down with someone over yonder you’re having a dispute with, and hug and kiss and play Ramones albums, would all be better.‘ Because, if it was that simple, it would have been done 50 years ago.

“All I’m saying is this—not trying to lay a guilt trip on you, but I think I’m right about this—you have a problem with Palestine or Lebanon and I’m not trying to, like, tie it up into a little tiny bundle and go yeah. I’m just saying there’s problems and kids keep dying and people keep getting blown up and it’s just awful. It’s ghastly, you know?

“I’m not saying it’s your fault. All I’m saying is, if you do not stop it, all of you will have beautiful children—some of you have them already—they will inherit the war you did not stop and, when they become soldiers and they go into combat and they come home with some awful story, they’re going to say, ‘yeah, I saw my buddy get vaporized. Why are we doing this?’

“And the only honest answer you’ll really be able to say is, ‘because I didn’t stop this. Because I didn’t stop this on my watch. It should have been me and my generation who stopped this, so you would not have to endure this horror your parents gave you.‘

“Don’t give it to your kids, is all I’m saying. Real substantive change comes from citizens, from private citizens going ‘not on my watch you don’t’. And I’m not saying to get up and do something. I’m begging you to get up and do something, cuz if you don’t get up and do something, it doesn’t get done.

“[…]

“I think if you really love your country and you really love humanity, you got to be pissed about something. It’s like going through the ashes, trying to find the ember. It’s in there, and you have to dig down deep inside to find it and extract that jewel of rage and use it for civic good. I have found mine.

“If you have not found yours yet, please find it before it’s too late. No big pressure here. Either get eaten by a crocodile or save the world.

“Shalom and good night.”

”Never Again!” Cried The Israeli While Doing It Again by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“We are led by the absolute worst of us. This past year has been a nonstop reminder of this. When western governments support and defend a live-streamed genocide, you know for certain that we are led by the very cruelest and most psychopathically deranged people in our society.

“The individuals who are making the most consequential decisions about the direction that human civilization will take on this planet are the individuals who are the least qualified to do so. The absolute least qualified. Any random person walking by you on the sidewalk would be more likely to make decisions which benefit humanity if given control over our world than the people who currently have control over it.”

“It isn’t just our right to overthrow such a system, it is our duty. We owe it to the world. We owe it to the people of the global south who are constantly being butchered, brutalized and exploited by the perverse, unwholesome will of our rulers. We owe it to all the nonhuman organisms with whom we share this planet who are being driven to extinction by the ecocidal economic and political systems our rulers keep in place.”

And here’s a good example of the kind of people who keep voting for these awful, awful people.

Theory − Palestinians stole IDF weapons and shot their own children in their heads

I don’t even know whether to believe that this isn’t a troll, though. No-one could seriously suggest that Palestinians are shooting their own children in the head to make the IDF look bad…could they?

The poster doesn’t dispute that the bullet wounds are real. He doesn’t suggest that the healthcare workers might be lying. He even seems to assume that the weapons used to inflict the wounds were IDF—probably because he also kind of knows that Hamas doesn’t really have guns, or at least not sniper rifles.

With all of that accepted, though, he suggests the least-likely hypothesis and accuses the NYT—of all newspapers!—of antisemitism for not having considered the possibility that it’s all a frame-up of Israel by Hamas.

Meanwhile, off to the side, is the entire IDF command structure and the whole civil governing hierarchy of Israel, nodding and saying, ‘yeah, we totally did that shit. Gotta get ‘em while they’re young, before they can start trouble.‘ Even they would be taken aback by this utter lunatic trying to drum up charges of antisemitism for something that Israel is proud to have done and gladly takes credit for.

As much fun as it was to write that, though…I still 50/50 believe the guy was trolling. I refuse to check his tweet history, which would bring me plummeting back down to Earth.

“It speaks to the power of narrative control that anyone can be persuaded to believe dropping massive military explosives on areas that are densely populated with children is good and acceptable. It is only by weaving a tapestry of stories about October 7 atrocities and anti-semitism and self-defense and terrorism that anyone can think something so self-evidently evil is actually fine.”

Barack Obama’s racialist lecture to black workers in Pittsburgh by Eric London (WSWS)

“Obama began his stump speech:”

“This election is going to be tight because many Americans are still struggling, striving to make life better for themselves, their families, and their kids. We’ve been through a lot these last few years. A historic pandemic wreaked havoc on communities and businesses, causing prices to spike and straining family budgets. It’s felt like the aspirations of working people have taken a backseat to the priorities of the rich and powerful.”

“The former president is, of course, not among those struggling to get by.

“[…] In 2017 he was paid $2 million to give three speeches, and in 2018 he signed a $50 million deal to make movies for Netflix.”

No, no, he is not. They should have thrown him out for saying shit like that. What arrogance.

“[…] he launched into a patronizing denunciation of working class black men, implying that they are misogynistic for not voting for Harris in sufficient numbers:

“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. This seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.

“Addressing black men, Obama said: “You come up with all kinds of reasons and excuses”—an oblique reference to complaints over economic conditions—“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.””

Even more arrogance. They should have beaten him, tied him up in a bag, and dumped him in a river. He’s there to tell them if they don’t vote for Harris, it’s only because they are too afraid to vote for a woman. He doesn’t acknowledge any other reason for not voting for her: she enthusiastically supports genocide, especially of children, she doesn’t seem to be aware that not everyone is doing fine in the economy, or that she’s stupid, a total dingbat. None of those reasons are legitimate. It’s her identity that matters.

“What Obama disparages as “excuses” are actually legitimate grievances over burning social needs felt within the entire working class. The top 10 percent of households owns 67 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns just 2.5 percent. Over 20 million people have died of COVID-19 globally, and life expectancy is falling in the United States for the first time in its history.

“As for black men, only 27 percent have college degrees. One-fifth of African American men live below the federal poverty line, and one in 15 are currently incarcerated. The former prosecutor Harris has not even commented on Missouri’s execution of Marcellus Williams, an innocent African American man.”

Zelensky tours Europe for arms in Ukraine war as NATO cancels Ramstein summit by Alex Lantier, Robert Stevens (WSWS)

“Over the nearly three years of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, the European powers have drained their economies of hundreds of billions of euros wasted on a devastating war. It is increasingly admitted even by top NATO officials that Ukraine now cannot win the war in its current form—that is, unless the NATO powers commit to a massive use of their own forces in Ukraine that would trigger an enormous escalation of the conflict.”

“Calling to escalate fighting so that Zelensky’s government can “sit down down with the Russians and get something which is acceptable . . . something where they survive as an independent nation,” Stoltenberg proposed a parallel with the 1939 Soviet-Finnish war: “The war ended with [Finland] giving up 10 percent of the territory. But they got a secure border.””

F@&k you, Stoltenberg, for taking almost three years to see this outcome. You had to watch hundreds of thousands die, and millions suffer, first.

Hezbollah is Not Hamas by Nicky Reid (exile in happy valley)

“Israel had to drop an American-made doomsday device the size of an elephant and reduce six apartment blocks to rubble just to kill one man. Had the IDF attempted to enter the suburban Hezbollah stronghold known as Haret Hreik on the ground they would still be attempting to bushwack their way to a retreat through a concrete jungle of hardened Shia guerrillas as we speak.

“You see, dearest motherfuckers, Israel is terrified of Hezbollah, and they should be. They have never won a single ground campaign against the outfit even though they have consistently outgunned them, and the reason why should be painfully clear to any casual student of recent Middle Eastern history. To put it simply, Hezbollah is not Hamas.

“Hamas is a grubby, thuggish little Frankenstein that never would have even escaped the laboratory without Israel’s support. Bibi and his bros in the Likud intelligentsia have openly bragged about this, […]

“Hezbollah however is no Zionist Frankenstein monster. If anything, they are much more like an anti-colonialist Van Helsing, born in the fires of Israel’s vampiric foreign policy and hardened by every new bomb they’ve thrown their way.”

“Hezbollah didn’t just replace the Lebanese Military in its region, it replaced the state itself with a successful network of welfare and infrastructure projects that have made that state virtually irrelevant and ingrained Hezbollah into the very fabric of South Lebanese society. Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Iraq’s Sadrists have similarly followed suit, and I believe that this is what Israel and its western sponsors are truly afraid of, a No-State Solution.”

“[…] as the Nazis learned the hard way at Stalingrad, modern technology alone cannot save an invader surrounded by a decentralized population. Hitler wasn’t defeated by the United States or even the Soviet Union. He had his ass kicked by starving Jewish girls with bolt-action rifles built before he was born.

“This same fate will fall upon Benjamin Netanyahu and his stormtroopers who seem to have learned nothing from the Holocaust other than how to exploit its memory in order to repeat its crimes.

“Had they paid better attention to the wisdom of their ancestors, they might know that Hell hath no fury like a stateless people scorned.”

The preferred face of Wall Street: Harris campaign raises $1 billion in less than three months by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“The Times did not report an exact figure and the paper noted that the Harris campaign did not want to announce its September fundraising haul “partly out of concern that bragging about the gush of donations could diminish donor interest in the race’s final weeks, people briefed on the strategy said.””

How much more money do they need? How will they even spend it before the election? That money is just war-chest funding for the Democrat party—pure bribes.

“There is no question that larger sections of Wall Street and corporate America are opening up their wallets for the Harris campaign as she sheds any pretense that her campaign would infringe on the unearned wealth and extravagant lifestyle of the ultra rich. Harris has already walked back Biden’s previous proposals on raising capital gains tax and is openly courting millionaire and billionaire support.”

“In addition to chumming up with Wall Street financiers, FT reported that Harris had recently hosted “chief executives” at her home in Washington, including “Karen Lynch of CVS, Ryan McInerney of Visa, Charles Phillips of Infor and Greg Brown of Motorola.””

“Open Secrets found that the top 10 individual donors had contributed nearly $600 million to the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, accounting for 7 percent of all the money raised so far. The organization found that the top 100 donors accounted for “16 percent of all fundraising” while the top 1 percent of donors “accounts for a full 50 percent of all money raised.””

Journalism & Media

‘I’m Free Because I Pled Guilty to Journalism’ by Julian Assange (Scheer Post)

“In February this year, the alleged source of some of our C.I.A. revelations, former C.I.A. officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to 40 years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation. His windows are blacked out and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it. These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.”

This is how they punish disobedience: with extrajudicial and contra-constitutional torture, cruel and unusual.

“If the situation were not already bad enough, in my case, the U.S. government asserted a dangerous, dangerous new global legal position. Only U.S. citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights, but the U.S. claims its Espionage Act still applies to them, regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey the U.S. secrecy law with no defenses at all.”

LIVE: Julian Assange speaks at the Council of Europe | REUTERS by Reuters (YouTube)

At 01:25:00,

“The US-UK Expedition treaty is one-sided. Nine times more people are extradited to the United States from the UK than the other way around. The protections for US citizens being extradited to the UK are stronger. There is no need to show a primary case or reasonable suspicion, even when the United States seeks to extradite from the UK. It’s an allegation-extradition system. The allegation is alleged; you do not even have a chance to argue that it is not true. All the arguments are based simply upon: ‘is it the right person? Does it breach human rights?’ That’s it.

“That said, I do not think in any way that UK judges are compelled to extradite most people, and particularly journalists, to the United States. Some judges in the UK found in my favor at different stages in that process. Other judges did not. But all judges, whether they are finding in my favor or not, in the United Kingdom, showed extraordinary deference to the United States, engaged in astonishing intellectual back-flips to allow the United States to have its way on my extradition and, in relation to setting precedence that occurred in my case more broadly.

“That’s, to my mind, a function of the selection of UK judges, the narrow section of British Society from which they come, their deep engagement with the UK establishment, and the UK establishment’s deep engagement with the United States. Whether that’s in the intelligence sector, BAE—which is now the largest arms [actually] the largest manufacturer in the United Kingdom—a weapons company—BP, Shell, and some of the major banks. The United Kingdom’s establishment is made up out of people who have benefited from that system for a long period of time. And almost all judges are from it. They don’t need to be told explicitly what to do. They understand what is good for that cohort and what is good for that cohort is keeping a good relationship with the United States government.”

On a side note, all videos on YouTube now have an automatic transcription, which is a decent start—but it’s just wrong enough to require a bunch of cleanup anyway. His diction is so clear, but it doesn’t understand his Australian accent, which is pathetic, to be honest. It kept writing “difference” instead of “deference” and “expedition” instead of “extradition”.

At 01:40:00,

“I was a computer scientist / programmer from a young age, studied mathematics and physics, … cryptography.”

He’s singing my song.

Man, am I just so happy to see this guy out of prison, still alive, still cogent, still incisive, seemingly mentally well and balanced, strong, and still fighting the good fight.

He concluded with:

“Just a few final words. In 2010, I was living in Paris. I went to the United Kingdom and never came back until now. It’s good to be back. It’s good to be amongst people who, as we say in Australia, who give a damn. It’s good to be amongst friends. And I would just like to thank all the people who have fought for my liberation and who have understood importantly that my liberation was coupled to their own liberation. That the basic fundamental liberties, which sustain us all, have to be fought for, and that, when one of us falls through the cracks, soon enough, those cracks will widen and take the rest of us down. So, thank you for your thoughts, your courage in this and other settings, and keep up the fight. Thank you.”

How eloquent.

What a refreshingly happy end to this chapter. The Empire did not get its way. He lives. He speaks. He is loved.[3]

My Speech in Washington: “Rescue the Republic” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“In February our European allies began observing the Digital Services Act, which requires Internet platforms to enforce judgments of state-appointed content reviewers called “ trusted flaggers .” Everything we found in the Twitter Files fits in a sentence: an alphabet soup of enforcement agencies informally is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe’s draconian new law.”

“WE IGNORE LAWS. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.”

“The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.”

“[…] millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.””

“The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.”

“To all those Snoops and Nosey Parkers sitting in their Homeland Security-funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation: Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror. I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem. You’re the problem. YOU SUCK.”

Nord Stream 'Mystery' SOLVED? by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

At 01:15,

“Let’s remember that the US, even before the war in Ukraine, wanted that pipeline gone. In fact, it was Trump, despite always being accused of being a Russian agent, who led the way in trying to badger the Germans and Western Europeans [into] not using, not buying natural gas from Russia, by saying, ‘we pay for your defense, why should you buy gas from Russia instead of from us?’ and their answer was, ‘well, it’s much cheaper to buy it from Russia. Russia is much closer. Their natural gas is produced more cheaply.‘ But Trump said, ‘we don’t care. We’re paying for your defense. You should buy it from us, even if it’s more expensive.‘ So, the US hated this pipeline for a while. When Biden got into office on this wave of anti-Russian hatred, and then the war in Ukraine started, they basically explicitly—Biden and Victoria Nuland came out and said, ‘if the Russians invade Ukraine, you can say goodbye to the Nordstream 2 pipeline.’ So, the US threatened repeatedly, in public, to blow it up. And then, nine months later, when it was blown up, the Western media was like, ‘Oh my God! Who might have done this? A gigantic mystery! Could be anybody.’”

At 04:20,

“[…] it was the Danish conducting the investigation. And, up until now, the Danish have refused to release the findings of that investigation. I wonder why? Probably not because they found that Putin did it …”

At 06:30,

“The harbor master claimed he, ‘wasn’t allowed to say a word.‘ But, today, John Anker Nielsen can reveal that four or five days before the Nordstream explosion, he was with the rescue service from Christiansø because there were some ships there with their radios turned off. It turned out that they US Navy ships. When the rescue service approached them, he was asked by the naval command to turn back. Therefore the harbor master leans toward the theory, as suggested by, among others, the American star journalist Seymour Hirsch, although without evidence, that the US was behind the sabotage.”

NYT propaganda

“NYT does it again. A barely-English sentence about Israel bombing another country that doesn’t mention Israel.”

“Israeli Airstrikes In Beirut’s Once-Bustling Suburbs, Leaves Smoking Rubble and Eerie Quiet

“IsraeliAirstrikes targeting members of Hezbollah have brought the Dahiya neighborhoods south of Beirtu to a standstill, its residents feleing and businesses shuttering.”

Labor

Your Money Is On the Table by Hamilton Nolan (How Stuff Works)

“You can think of the entire project of left wing economics as trying to get regular people to look up at the top of the economy and say, “It’s outrageous how much those rich people are stealing!” Instead, America has quite successfully trained the median person to look down the economic ladder and sneer at those below them. The biggest outrage is not the CEO in the mansion, but rather the working person who is trying to earn as much money as you despite not possessing what you think of as the proper credentials for doing so.”

“The most efficient way to earn a lot of money is to start with a lot of money, and get paid interest on it. This is banking, this is finance, this is investing, in a nutshell. If you have a hundred million dollars and you invest it at 10%, you are earning ten million dollars a year without doing any work at all. And this is, in fact, a description of how truly rich people live!”

“Anyone who is being honest can easily see that there is very little connection between hard work and wealth, under American capitalism. Every Horatio Alger-style story trotted out to illustrate the possibility of a rags-to-riches rise is mostly just evidence that such stories are rare enough to become legends.”

“If you think of a business as “something that one guy owns,” it naturally paves the way for acceptance of the idea that it is natural that the one guy who owns it will earn most of the money, and all of the rest of us will just earn what he gives us. But if you think of a business as “the collective effort of everyone who works for it,” it makes much more sense for everyone to earn a fair share of the proceeds of that business.”

“But in the big picture, the business will make X amount of profits thanks to the work of all of the people there, and then those profits can be divided among the people who do the work in a way that is reasonable.”

“Strikes, for the most part, are caused by employers, not workers. The employers want to check and see if the workers are still willing to fight for their share. Then you have to show them. It’s all part of the process.”

“If there is one single fact that I could magically make every working person in America understand, it is this: Without a union, without the ability to negotiate with your employer collectively, you are always leaving money on the table. Always. If you and your coworkers are not united into a single group you cannot negotiate as a single group and you cannot go on strike as a single group and therefore you lack the leverage to force your employer to pay you what you are worth and you enable them to instead pay you a lower amount, which you are forced to accept because you cannot impose a meaningful penalty on them for doing so. You have no union? You get less. This is a law of the workplace.”

“There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.”

Economy & Finance

Automation is Called “Productivity Growth” by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“It is more than a bit bizarre reading pieces that talk about automation or job-killing AI as something new and alien. These are forms of productivity growth. They allow more goods and services to be produced for each hour of human labor.

“Productivity growth is usually thought of as a good thing. It’s the reason that we don’t have half the U.S. workforce employed in agriculture growing our food. Instead, it is around 1.0 percent of the U.S. workforce, and we grow enough to be huge food exporters.”

Dean, let me stop you right there. I know that you’re going to end up proposing reasonable things like “working shorter hours” or “universal basic income”, which are things that productivity gains could absolutely usher in. Just not in the U.S. Dean, you would probably get a lot more support if you showed some empathy with people who have skipped over the part where productivity gains might go to everyone rather than to just the richest. you have to understand that, when you write that “the most rapid productivity growth was in the post-war boom from 1947 to 1973” that that was fifty f@&king years ago. That is two generations since anyone has seen productivity growth go to anyone but rich assholes. You of course write that “real wage gains […] have not kept pace with productivity growth”, but fail to note that this is a giant f@&king understatement. They utterly failed to do so for four whole decades, digging a giant hole, into which a few shovelfuls have been thrown in the last eight years or so, give or take.

Then you write “If we run a high employment economy, as is now the case, workers are well-positioned to secure wage gains in line with productivity growth.” I find this to be so highly speculative and utterly belied by the evidence of the last few high-employment years that I just don’t quite know what to do with you. You surely must know that there is no hope within the current system and political stranglehold by both parties that anything about the upwards-shooting money funnel is going to change for the better. I know that you wrote a great book called Rigged but, my brother in Christ, you have to at least pretend to understand that those things are simply never, ever, ever going to happen unless literally everything about how the U.S. works changes.

So, stop chastising people for equating productivity growth with more inequality and workers getting screwed. It’s what the world has taught them. And they’re right. That’s absolutely what will happen when more automation eliminates jobs. There is no hope that a social safety net will be there to help the eliminated workers find new ways of contributing to society. There never were after NAFTA, were there? NOPE. At least half of the country knows exactly how it will go—and there is literally no evidence belying their expectation—and literally no evidence supporting your pie-in-the-sky ideas about “work[ing] shorter hours” or “hav[ing] the government send out checks to increase demand”. You should at least mention that you understand how people might be a bit hesitant to believe that anything like that will ever happen. They know that when productivity goes up, their jobs disappear and they’re left high and dry, on their own. That’s how the U.S. works. Pretend you understand that before you start chiding people for not believing that they living in a socialist paradise.

The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 05:00

“The three pillars of capitalism—commodified labor, commodified land, and commodified money—all came together simultaneously. And they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor, with unprecedented speed, created a great deal of profit, and then ecological collapse, followed by abandonment. And that then became the model which was followed.

“The Portuguese moved from Madiera to Santo, did exactly the same on the coast of Brazil, worked their way up through the ecosystems of coastal Brazil, trashing them one after another, destroying huge numbers of lives through slavery, through murder, moved into the Caribbean, started doing something very similar there, whereupon they’d been joined by other European nations doing the same thing.

“This is the thing called capitalism. What capitalism is often mistaken for—commerce—which is just buying and selling things, and sure there are elements of commerce in capitalism, but it is absolutely not the same thing. Commerce goes back thousands of years, capitalism goes back hundreds of years, and it is a an extremely coercive, destructive, exploitative mode of economic organization. And then, about 150 years ago, it runs into a problem, which is that larger numbers of adults got the vote.

“And, when adults get the vote, they have the temerity to say, ‘actually we don’t want to just be commodified labor anymore. We’d like to have some labor rights. We want to be able to organize our own labor. We want to get a bigger share of the value that we create. We want outrageous things like the weekend. Oh, and, by the way, we quite like nice homes as well. And we don’t want our air to be polluted and our rivers to be poisoned. We’d like to eat better food.‘

“Whatever it might be—all the demands are inimical to capitalism. So, ever since adults began to get the vote in large numbers, capital’s sought to solve that problem. And one means of solving it is fascism. And fascism can be a highly effective means of solving the problem of democracy. But, then, when fascism collapsed in Europe in 1945, they had to find another means. And that means was neoliberalism. And neoliberalism turns out to be a highly effective way of solving the problem of democracy.”

At 09:00

“Hayek then went on to embrace his new sponsors because that book The Road to Serfdom, I mean, you can see its obvious flaws. I mean, it’s one gigantic, slippery-slope fallacy. It’s effectively saying, you know, if there’s any move towards protecting population as a whole, towards the redistribution of wealth, towards the creation of robust public services and an economic safety net, that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism. You’ll end up with Stalin. You’ll end up with Hitler. I mean, it’s just logical fallacies the whole way through. It’s a philosophical nonsense. But, they were very happy to embrace it, because it served them.

“But then, what was really interesting, was the way that that process happened in reverse, where Hayek then embraced the demands of his super-rich sponsors and, by the time he came to write The Constitution of Liberty, his book published in 1960, his doctrine had really gone from a flawed-if-honest discourse on economics and politics to an absolute confidence trick. It was just a scam. I mean, The Constitution of Liberty is completely mad. I mean, it’s a totally crazy book. You cannot read it without worrying for the guy’s mental state.

“But, actually, what’s happened is not that Hayek had lost it. It is that he was telling these very rich people exactly what they wanted to hear. And what he was saying was, ‘it doesn’t matter how you made your wealth because you are rich. You are a fantastic guy. You are a brilliant person.‘ And the people who have become rich, whether they inherited it, whether they stole it—however they acquired that money—they are the scouts whom the rest of society should follow because, wherever they go, that is going to be a fantastic route to take. And we must go down that path, whatever it may be.

“And he dropped his opposition to things like monopolies. He overtly said, ‘we just got to exploit and destroy the natural world, extract as much money as we can from it, and then reinvest it elsewhere. And it doesn’t matter what damage we do.‘ I mean…crazy proposition after crazy proposition…”

At 30:00

“Chris: What it does, is essentially create monopolies. Silicon Valley, Amazon. And then, these people, the last thing they want is free enterprise.

“George: Yeah, they want total control. And they get it. I mean, two very indicative trends we’ve seen during the neoliberal era is, one, the destruction of antitrust laws, so that we see mergers and acquisitions making companies bigger and bigger and bigger, with very dangerous consequences for society. You know, as we saw in the financial crisis, where banks that were too big fail actually failed. It could be even worse: if food companies go down the same route, because if they go down, well you can’t just create food out of quantitative easing. There’s enormous hazards in this.

“But, at the same time, as they ripped down the antitrust laws, they raised massive intellectual property barriers. So, in other words, they granted to corporations huge and sweeping intellectual property rights—far, far greater than they had before. Now, what’s interesting about that, is that it’s completely against their whole claim to be supporting free-market economics.

“But neoliberalism has got nothing whatever to do with free-market economics. It’s all about monopolization and capture. And sweeping intellectual-property rights is all about monopolization. That’s completely the opposite of freedom.”

Mad ladrade (Reddit)

Instead of saying 'as a Libertarian'…

Instead of saying “as a Libertarian,” just make your point without a preamble. People will know you’re libertarian by noticing that what you say is wrong.

Science & Nature

The Nobel Prize for Peace has long since jumped the shark. At the very latest, when they made Henry Kissinger a recipient, but possibly even before. Barack “drone bomber” Obama got one. The ship has sailed on that prize.

The science prizes have seemed to be a bit more serious. Until this year, when the prize in physics was awarded to two computer scientists specializing in ML and AI and, now, the chemistry prize includes a 48-year-old computer scientist for his work in AI and protein-folding.

Look, I’m not in a place to judge on the merits. Maybe there really is something to the justification that the committee gives for their selections, some depth that I can’t even begin to understand. But I also can’t help throwing a glance at how the peace-prize winners are selected and then wondering whether the science-prize winners are also now being selected for their marketability or value to the Empire. AI is huge right now and, lo and behold, three basic-science winners are suddenly computer scientists working in AI. It feels a bit too convenient.

Environment & Climate Change

Bad Climate Socialism by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“We are not going to follow either of these paths. Instead, due to the nature of our political system, which rewards cowardice and punishes anyone who might dare to tell coastal homeowners that they are fucked, we are going to get a blend of the worst aspects of both options. Politicians will demand federal bailouts of the costs associated with each disaster, and they will introduce various regulations and financial schemes to artificially hold down the price of insurance—well below its true price, meaning a price that would allow insurance companies to fully pay for all of the costs that climate change will impose. These costs will continually increase. Eventually, the costs to the nation of subsidizing the ability of people to live in unwise locations will be so enormous that all the rest of the citizens will revolt. “Save our homes!” one side will cry. “Why should I pay for you to live at the beach?” everyone else will cry. A vicious political war will ensue. It will be brutal. All the while, climate change will continue apace. The only real question is how long we will spend dithering on our unproductive and childish bickering before we are forced by nature to address the root causes of this problem. Knowing America, I suspect that we can dither deeper into disastrous territory than you might imagine.”

“This issue, more than any other I can think of, combines almost all of America’s systemic flaws into a single toxic stew that we will all be forced to choke down. The flaws in our electoral system ensure that politicians who tell voters the hard truths about the changes that will be necessary to deal with this problem are defeated by those willing to tell voters cheap lies about easy fixes that allow everyone to maintain their current lifestyles. The flaws in our cutthroat economic system ensure that the needs of rich people in expensive beach houses will drive this discussion far more than the needs of poorer people who live in disaster-prone areas. The flaws in our hysterical post-Cold War attitudes about the evils of socialism ensure that no adult conversation can be had about what a responsible solution will look like. ”

“Imagine pouring all of the political attack ads around welfare and billionaires and red state bastards and blue state commies into a blender and mixing it with the tears of a million people whose homes have been washed away and the outrage of a hundred million other people who are struggling to make a living and believe that they are being asked to pay for some asshole to live in a mansion on Miami Beach. And then allow the entire conversation to be led by, you know, Ron DeSantis. It will be terrible.”

“It is clear that climate change’s disastrous cost will have to get much, much higher before Americans begin to genuinely consider the idea that we will have to change the way that we live. A big truck and a big house on the beach with a big air conditioner is still seen as a birthright in this country. The indignation that will accompany the increasingly loud demands for the federal government to defend this birthright will be incredible to behold.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Surprising Origins and Politics of Equality by Samuel Moyn (The Nation)

“Plato may have been committed to notions of natural difference, but he was also anxious, Williams observes, about the consequences of too much money concentrated in too few hands and the threats posed by too much poverty to political stability. Rousseau vividly stressed the political costs of economic inequality—especially wealth passed from generation to generation, which established a permanent form of privilege.”

They Still Won’t Say That They’re Sorry by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The amount of human devastation in the deindustrialized spaces in the United States has been unthinkable. Entire communities where the most common source of personal income is disability payments, fentanyl addiction rates in the double digits, 60+% unemployment rates among workers aged 18-25, collapsing municipal services, a doom loop of people fleeing all of that destruction which in turn devastates the tax base even more. At an extreme, you have a place like Gary, Indiana, where the population is lower than it was in 1927, where the violent crime rate is 318% higher than the national average, where residents live scandalously short lives, where fully a third of all residents live below the poverty line…. You could do the same kind of analysis in Detroit or Youngstown or Akron. These social problems are often dismissed as being a problem for white people, which is absurd given the demographics of these regions; arguably, no group suffered more from deindustrialization than the Black middle class. It’s a scandal that such terrible conditions exist anywhere in the United States for any reason. That the policy effort was made to benefit huge corporations and the wealthy only makes the whole situation more inexcusable.”

“The implicit notion that people who lose jobs in one industry in one part of the country can simply get a different one in a different industry in a different part of the country is absurd. That’s how you get these ludicrous fables about how laid off uneducated machinists in their 50s, who worked the same job for 30 years, are going to learn to code and go work for Google. If you think all of this pain was necessary, be a fierce and, yes, unapologetic supporter of robust public spending to ameliorate the economic devastation these people could not possible control!”

“Unsurprisingly, standing by in indifference accelerated the erosion of white working class support for Democrats. This should have caused every alarm bell to ring, since white working class support was crucial for Obama’s electoral victories. But his administration didn’t appear to notice, seemingly content to become more and more thoroughly a vehicle of wealthy urban liberals who supported faux-radical social and cultural politics while quietly preferring the economic conservatism that would benefit them.”

“The states most associated with deindustrialization − Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin − went for Trump. That was a bad decision on the parts of those voters, but I understand even while I don’t approve; when the National Honors Society members that ran Obama’s administration governed with total indifference for the suffering happening in these states, they guaranteed a backlash, and it’s our bad luck that that backlash came in the form of Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter if the choice to vote for Trump was a good or bad decision. It was a consequence of the supposedly progressive party forgetting the most central and sacred duty of progressivism: to make sure no one is left behind.”

“I think the Democratic donor class, as well as the policy apparatus, as well as the people who do all the ground work in the various offices, are all people from a very particular slice of the American population, a self-regarding elite slice. And it seems like Democratic leadership was more than happy to say “Sayonara!” to the blue collar voters that Schumer disdained, eager to be the party of Lena Dunham and HR professionals, of architects and higher ed bureaucrats.”

“[…] still the people left behind were given just about zero organized assistance of any kind, told to adapt, lectured to about “creative destruction,” treated like they were just grievance-mongering racists despite the fact that very many of them were Black.”

„Das tötet die Neugier“ by Gunter Dueck (Heise.de)

This was a really interesting and worthwhile interview. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall. I thought the following particularly insightful:

“Genau, das ist das, was unsere Gesellschaft jetzt tragt. Es gibt Gewinner und Verlierer, und die Kultur verlangt. dass die Loser ihr Schicksal klaglos ertragen. Sie sind selbst schuld. Denn jeder kann Winner sein, wenn er sich nur anständig anstrengt. Wir haben das den Amerikanern nachgemacht und gehen da jetzt deutsch gründlich weiter.

“Die Theorie sagt, dass wir uns zu so etwas wie “Schweden” entwickeln sollten, in ein eher egalitäres Gemeinschaftssystem. Farbe Grün. Man lässt dort möglichst keinen als Loser zurück. Beispiel: Wir beklagen, nehmen es aber hin, dass hierzulande ca. 30 Prozent der Viertklässler nicht richtig schreiben, lesen und rechnen können. Damit sind die Loser von morgen schon weitgehend markiert. In Schweden und Finnland bekommen Schüler so lange nachmittags Nachhilfe, bis es klappt. Das rettet nicht jeden, man kann nicht alle zu Genies machen, aber das ist viel egalitärer als bei uns.”

1964: The KID who WOULDN’T CONFORM | The Long Journey | Voice of the People | BBC Archive by BBC Archive (YouTube)

“A tree is completely alien in the city, but it helps to break the monotony of buildings, houses, streets, roads, cars, people. It’s like gardens. The idea of a semi-detached house with its little back garden and its front garden—it’s sort of almost an apology to nature: ‘we’re sorry we’re building this horrible square little building. Here’s a garden to make up for it.‘”

From a comment by “turboslag”:

“Life for most is pretty mundane, which is why alcohol and drugs are so prevalent. Break it down into the fundamentals and most work their life away from 16 to around 70, earning just enough to survive, if they’re lucky. Then a gradual decline into the “care” system, where they’re stripped of dignity and any money and assets they managed to scrape together to pay for the state to suffer their last years of existence. It’s life Jim, but not as it could be.”

They were very confused. (Reddit)

Which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves

“With its cowboys and guns and steam train rides. America became known as the land for the free.

“Which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves.”

Technology

The Ghostly Radio Station That No One Claims to Run by Zaria Gorvett (BBC)

Interesting. I’d never heard of this one. The article comes from the BBC but reads a bit like the kind of stuff that Gary forwards me every once in a while: nearly pure allegation with titillating “what if the Russians are sandbagging us?” combined with “what if it’s aliens?”, concluding with “there’s no reason to believe that anyone can derive any sense out of this data, but the Russians are probably doing it anyway because they a genetically devious folk, bent on the destruction of the west, now as ever.”

LLMs & AI

Programming

A Local-First Case Study by Jake Lazaroff

“That’s why this kind of app is called local-first. If you have the app and you have your data, you can still work on it — even if you’re not connected to the Internet or the developer has gone out of business.”

“You can think of Y-Sweet as a “cloud peer”. Under the hood, it runs plain old stock Yjs — the exact same code that runs on the client. If you connected Waypoint to your own Y-Sweet server, there would be no discernible difference. To borrow Ink & Switch’s parlance: it’s “simple, generic, and fungible”.”

Safe C++ by Sean Baxter & Christian Mazakas

“In ISO C++, soundness bugs often occur because caller and callee don’t know who should enforce preconditions, so neither of them do. In Safe C++, there’s a convention backed up by the compiler, eliminating this confusion and improving software quality.”

“Pattern matching and choice types aren’t just a qualify-of-life improvement. They’re a critical part of the memory safety puzzle.”

“This is lifetime safety with an additional level of indirection compared to the previous borrow checker violation. The beauty of borrow checking is that, unlike lifetime safety based on heuristics, it’s robust for any complicated set of constraints and control flow. The thread safety it enables is superior concurrency technology than what Standard C++ provides.”

“The Rust ecosystem was built from the bottom-up prioritizing safe code. Consequently, there’s so little unsafe code that the unsafe-block is generally sufficient for interfacing with it.”

That’s an odd thing to write. I was under the impression that a lot of the core library is unsafe, for performance reasons.

“Garbage collection requires storing objects on the heap . But C++ is about manual memory management . We need to track references to objects on the stack as well as on the heap. As the stack unwinds objects are destroyed. We can’t extend their duration beyond their lexical scopes.”

it would have been interesting to hear about stackalloc in C#, which was introduced to bring stack-based allocation to a managed language. It is now used extensively throughout the base library (e.g., with spans).

“Callers don’t look inside function definitions during borrow checking. Both the caller and callee agree on the function’s lifetime contracts, entirely from information in the function declaration. This establishes a chain of constraints that relate all uses of a reference back to its original loan.”

“Unlike previous attempts at lifetime safety [ P1179R1 ], borrow checking is absolutely robust. It does not rely on heuristics that can fail. It allows for any distance between the use of a borrow and an invalidating action on an originating loan, with any amount of complex control flow between. MIR analysis will solve the constraint equation, run the borrow checker, and issue a diagnostic.”

“[…] the program is printing uncontrollably from some arbitrary place in memory. This is the kind of safety defect that the NSA and corporate researchers have been warning industry about. The defect is perplexing because the string objects s and t are still in scope ! This is a use-after-free bug, but not with any object that the user declared. It’s a use-after-free of implicit backing stores that C++ generates when lowering initializer list expressions.”

“Live analysis is a reverse dataflow computation. Start at the return instruction of the control flow graph and work your way up to the entry point. When you encounter a load instruction, that variable becomes live. When you encounter a store instruction, that variable is marked dead.”

“Liveness is a different property than scope, but they’re often confused: end users speak of lifetime to mean initialization or scope, while backend engineers speak of lifetime to mean liveness. Borrow checking is concerned with liveness. That’s the set of points where the value stored in a variable (i.e. a specific bit pattern) is subsequently used.”

“The liveness property is useful in register allocation: you only care about representing a variable in register while it’s holding a value that has an upcoming use. But we’re solving lifetime safety, we’re not doing code generation.”

“Borrow checking is easiest to understand when applied to a single function. The function is lowered to a control flow graph, the compiler assigns regions to loans and borrow variables, emits lifetime constraints where there are assignments, iteratively grows regions until the constraints are solved, and walks the instructions, checking for invalidating actions on loans in scope. Within the definition of the function, there’s nothing it can’t analyze. The complexity arises when passing and receiving borrows through function calls.”

“Permitting dangling references in a drop use is a crucial feature. Without it, objects may squabble over destruction order, resulting in code that fights the borrow checker.”

“We don’t want to instantiate class templates for every lifetime argument on a template argument type. That would be an incredible waste of compute and result in enormous code bloat. Those lifetime arguments don’t carry data in the same way as integer or string types do. Instead, lifetime arguments define constraints on region variables between different function parameters and result objects. Those constraints are an external concern to the class template being specialized.”

“Reference binding convention is important in the context of borrow checking. Const and non-const borrows differ by more than just constness. By the law of exclusivity, users are allowed multiple live shared borrows, but only one live mutable borrow. C++’s convention of always preferring non-const references would tie the borrow checker into knots, as mutable borrows don’t permit aliasing. This is one reason why there’s no way to borrow check existing C++ code: standard conversions are too permissive and contribute to mutable aliasing.”

“Rather than binding the mutable overload of functions by default, Safe C++ prefers binding const overloads. It prefers binding shared borrows to mutable borrows. Shared borrows are less likely to bring borrow checker errors. To improve reference binding precision, the relocation object model takes a new approach to references. Standard conversions bind const borrows and const lvalue references to lvalues of the same type, as they always have. But standard conversions won’t bind mutable borrows and mutable lvalue references. Those require an opt-in.”

“A core enabling feature of Safe C++ is its new object model. It supports relocation/destructive move of local objects, which is necessary for satisfying . In Rust, objects are relocated by default . Implicit relocation is too surprising for C++ users. We’re more likely to have raw pointers and legacy references tracking objects, and you don’t want to pull the storage out from under them, at least not without some clear token in the source code. That’s why Safe C++ includes rel-expression and cpy-expression .”

“You’ve noticed the nonsense spellings for some of these keywords. Why not call them relocate, copy and drop? Alternative token spelling avoids shadowing these common identifiers and improves results when searching code or the web.”

“If we can’t relocate through a reference, how do we relocate through elements of std::tuple, std::array or std::variant? Unless those become magic types with special compiler support, you can’t. Those standard containers only provide access to their elements through accessor functions which return references. Subobjects behind references are not owned places. We address the defects in C++’s algebraic types by including new first-class tuple, array and types. Safe C++ is still compatible with legacy types, but due to their non-local element access, relocation from their subobjects is not currently implemented.”

“Since most types are send by construction, we can safely mutate shared state over multiple threads as long as its wrapped in a std2::mutex and that’s owned by an std2::arc. The arc provides shared ownership. The mutex provides shared mutation.”

class thread {
public:
  template<class F+, class …Args+>
  thread/(where F: static, Args…: static)(F f, Args… args) safe
  requires(
    F~is_send &&
    (Args~is_send && …) &&
    safe(mut f(rel args…)))
    : unsafe t_()
  { … }
  …
};

“The send property is enforced by std2::thread’s constructor. If all the thread arguments are send , the requires-clause evaluates true and the constructor may be called. If any argument is send=false, the program is ill-formed. Data races are a runtime phenomenon, but our protection is guaranteed at compile time.”

“It’s the responsibility of a safe library to think through all possible scenarios of use and prevent execution that could result in soundness defects. After all, the library author is a specialist in that domain. This is a friendlier system than Standard C++, which places the all the weight of writing thread safe code on the shoulders of users.”

“To evaluate the implied constraints of the outlives expression, we have to lower the expression to MIR, create new region variables for the locals, generate constraints, solve the constraint equation, and propagate region end points up to the function’s lifetime parameters.”

“In Rust, every function call is potentially throwing, including destructors. In some builds, panics are throwing, allowing array subscript operations to exit a function on the cleanup path. In debug builds, integer arithmetic may panic to protect against overflow. There are many non-return paths out functions, and unlike C++, Rust lacks a noexcept-specifier to disable cleanup. Matsakis suggests that relocating out of references is not implemented because its use would be severely limited by the many unwind paths out of a function, making it rather uneconomical to support.”

“The US Government is telling industry to stop using C++ for reasons of national security. Academia is turning away in favor of languages like Rust and Swift which are built on modern technology. Tech executives are pushing their organizations to move to Rust. All this dilutes the language’s value to novices. That’s trouble for companies which rely on a pipeline of new C++ developers to continue their operations.”

“The Rust community has spent a decade generating soundness knowledge , which is the tactics and strategies (interior mutability, send/sync, borrow checking, and so on) for achieving memory safety without the overhead of garbage collection. Their investment in soundness knowledge informs our design of Safe C++. Adopting the same ownership and borrowing safety model that security professionals have been pointing to is the sensible and timely way to keep C++ viable for another generation.”

“[…] users aren’t compelled to switch everything over at once. If you need to stick with some legacy types, that’s fine. The compiler can’t enforce sound usage of that code, but that’s always been the case. As developers incorporate more of the safe standard library, their safety coverage increases. This is not an all-or-nothing system. Some unsafe code doesn’t mean that your whole project is unsafe.”

“Rather than focusing on the long tail of difficult use cases, we encourage developers to think about the bulk of code that is amenable to the safety improvements that a mature Safe C++ toolchain will offer.”

This is the same principle as with automated testing. Some tests are better than no tests. Some guaranteed safety is better than none.

A friend ranted about his phone provider’s support page:

“every time you change your option in the first combo box it has to do a slow web request to get the options for you to see for the second combo box. Cache it – nooo. Hard code –gasp! prithy say you not such a thing. Make the user wait 3 seconds for the whole UI to rerender every time for an action that amounts to swapping some strings around – ah yes but of course!!”

⁠Every time I hear about the next software savior (NSS) brought to us by a monopolist (or a heavily VC-funded startup trying to become one), I think of how unutterably shitty all of our software is right now, and cynically wonder whether this NSS could possibly escape the black hole into which all of our software has fallen. Usually, the designers and developers are just not good at their jobs, or they don’t have enough money or time, or the POs are imbeciles, in which case the designer’s vision and developer’s implementation will be perverted by market incentives until the original idea is unrecognizable behind a plethora of upselling and junk. The interdependent combo boxes described above seem to fall into the “just not good at their jobs” category.

Demystifying Concurrency by Timon Jucker (Zühlke Software Engineering Corner)

It's just a bit out of sync

async await adoption in several languages

End-to-end integration testing with .NET Aspire by dotnet / Aaron Powell (YouTube)

The concept is very nice and seems to greatly simplify building integration tests. Kudos and thanks for the introduction.

My hair was standing on end with some of the “fast and loose” programming in this video, though. I know that people will argue that you have to take a direct path to get it working quickly, but I feel that this degrades programming practice, especially when it comes from an “official” source like Microsoft.

Things like:

• Defining the service-initialization code in the tests, then explaining that it’s to ensure that it’s the “same as that used by the server”. You know how else to do that? Use common initialization code in static helper methods (or whatever).
• Copy/pasting the service-initialization code from test to test
• Copy/pasting the HTTPClient code
• Copy/pasting the record definition, as if that won’t ever bite you in the butt.
• Manually adding “usings” (Can’t you just get the IDE to do that?)

These integration tests could have been a lot simpler than they looked if he’d first explained how to set up some common code. Or, perhaps even better, if he’d taken a couple of minutes afterwards to show how to refactor the common code to helper methods (one of which could even be used in the main application so that the app setup is shared with the tests). If he’d used a few more IDE features to speed up coding, he might even have gotten it all in in the same amount of time.

On .NET Live: Supercharge .NET with IAsyncEnumerables: Efficient Data Streams by dotnet / Chase Aucoin (YouTube)

Maybe I’m just super-smart but I can’t understand why so many of Microsoft’s .NET videos spend time discussing the _ separators in numbers. Hanselmann always points it out whenever Toub uses them in e.g. a longer constant like 10_000_000. Whereas it seems blindingly f”&king obvious what they’re for, Cam Soper in this video just had to ask about them, presumably because, even though he almost certainly knows what they are, he thinks that the audience for a video about IAsyncEnumerables would also be unable to intuit what those symbols might be. So, they get three people involved in a discussion about thousands separators. It’s a waste of time. OMG, I started writing this rant at what I thought was the end of the “basic C# syntax” discussion but I was wrong. They continued for thirty more seconds, with a fourth person chiming in. “C# 7; I just verified.”

Now, they’re using Task Manager to do memory profiling. Have these guys never heard of Benchmark.Net? Or are they just trying to make other developers feel better about themselves?

I am fascinated that they don’t explain the mechanism behind the IAsyncEnumerable at all. Chase just talks about it as it were magic rather than an enumerable that returns a sequence of Tasks. The magic is in the enumerable part, which allows an algorithm to avoid creating all of the data in memory at once.

The example at 57:00 with System.IO.Pipes, System.Text.Json, and IAsyncEnumerable was quite nice, though. It shows the power of the piping abstraction (which lies below streams).

Deep .NET − Ahead of Time Compilation (Native AOT) with Eric Erhardt by dotnet / Scott Hanselmann (YouTube)

Get Me Out Of Data Hell by Nikhil Suresh (Ludicity)

“At the small scale we operate at, with little loss of detail, a data warehouse platform simply means that we copy a bunch of text files from different systems into a single place every morning.

“The word enterprise means that we do this in a way that makes people say “Dear God, why would anyone ever design it that way?”, “But that doesn’t even help with security” and “Everyone involved should be fired for the sake of all that is holy and pure.””

“We’ve been writing total nonsense to half the logs for over a year and no one noticed? We only have two jobs. Get the data and log that we got the data. But the logs are nonsense, so we aren’t doing the second thing, and because the logs are nonsense I don’t know if we’ve been doing the first thing.”

“Well, it turns out that we’re embedding a huge amount of metadata in filenames, and the Lambda functions that produce all of this — of course, we’re serverless, because how can you hurt yourself without a cutting-edge? — use lots of regex to extract data. Unfortunately, because we don’t have any tests, someone eventually wrote some code to download data that passed a big JSON blob instead of a filename to the logging function, and that function happily went “Great, I’ll just regex out the source system from the file name!” Except it wasn’t a filename, so it has instead spewed garbage into the system for months.”

“Okay, we can write a regular expression to identify all Twitter sources that came from 11/03/2023. This is very stupid, but compared to minimum wage in my home country, I am being compensated spectacularly to deal with this particular brand of stupidity.”

“How have we been running things like this for two years? Millions of dollars were spent on this system. Our CTO, who has never written code themselves, gets on stages every few months and just lies to people about things that the CTO can’t possibly understand, pretending that any of this works and that they’re a leader in the space. Then their friends buy the same software — I know because recruiters keep calling to ask me if I’ll help lead the efforts. Almost every large business in Melbourne is rushing to purchase our tooling, tools like Snowflake and Databricks, because the industry is pretending that any of this is more important than hiring competent people and treating them well. I could build something superior to this with an ancient laptop, an internet connection, and spreadsheets. It would take me a month tops.”

“As an afterthought, the person who just informed us that we have no way to associate logs to their respective ingestion events adds:”

“By the way, I think that there’s a chance some of the logs don’t actually report the right things. Like the ones that say Validated: True are actually just hardcoded strings in the Lambda functions, and the people that wrote them may have meant to type in things like File Landed: True but made mistakes.”

“I am dumbstruck. The other senior is laughing hysterically.

“It is 11:30 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. The wind is a vortex of ghost-knives sending birds careening from the sky. I glance down at my tea, and it is liquid hatred. I take a sip and savor it.

““Hey, are you still there?”, my pairing partner replies.

““Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I’m done. I’m out today.”

““What? What about December?”

““I could get the entire terrible first draft of a whole book out by December if I wasn’t wasting time on this.”

““… Fair.””

“Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.”

The Watermelon Operator by Alex Kladov (matklad)

“I’ve re-written the JavaScript version to be syntactically isomorphic to the Rust one. The difference is on the semantic level: JavaScript promises are eager, they start executing as soon as a promise is created. In contrast, Rust futures are lazy — they do nothing until polled. And this I think is the fundamental difference, it is lazy vs. eager “futures” (thread::spawn is an eager “future” while rayon::join a lazy one).”

“In JavaScript, forgetting an await is a common, and very hard to spot problem — without await, code still works, but is sometimes wrong (if the async operation doesn’t finish quite as fast as usual). Imagine JS with lazy promises — there, forgetting an await would always consistently break.”

Further on, I’m pretty sure that Kladov’s watermelon operator is actually an IAsyncEnumerable from Rust. With all of the emphasis on Go’s and Rust’s concurrency models, I wonder if Kladov’s ever looked at the runtime underlying the grand-daddy inventor of async/await, C#?

Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement (Gov.UK)

“All government services must follow progressive enhancement, even if part of the service or a parent service needs JavaScript.”

“If you believe your service can only be built using JavaScript, you should think about using simpler solutions that are built using HTML and CSS and will meet user needs.”

“If your service is mostly built using components from the GOV.UK Design System and doesn’t have a complex user interface, you do not need to use a client-side JavaScript framework.”

“Do not build your service as a single-page application (SPA). This is where the loading of pages within your service is handled by JavaScript, rather than the browser.

“Single page applications rarely bring benefits and can make the service inaccessible.”

Sports

Sports Betting Will Do to America What It’s Done to Australia by Mike Meehall Wood (Jacobin)

“The incessant nature of the commercials form part of what one might call the gambling-industrial complex. It is a status quo that benefits several key stakeholders in society at the expense of some of the most vulnerable. Australians lose more on gambling than any other nation on Earth, around US$22 billion per year, or over a thousand dollars per person. That’s twice what it is per capita in the United States or United Kingdom.”

Caitlin Clark FINALLY SPEAKS And REVEALS Her WNBA Future – THIS Is HUGE! by Basketball Top Stories (YouTube)

A friend of mine who thinks that I don’t appreciate Caitlin Clark enough sent me this video. It is pure clickbait. Caitlin Clark just finished up her rookie season in the WNBA. She put some of the best numbers the league has ever seen and has, nearly single-handedly, significantly boosted her not only her own team but the status of the WNBA, in general.

The video breathlessly speculates whether she will come back for another season.

I kid you not: that’s the hypothesis that they start with. For two long minutes, they talk about her social media feeds being “silent” while the world waited to find out whether a tremendously successful, 22-year–old athlete is going to retire from basketball or whether she will “try another sport.”

I am not kidding. This is the trash that people listen to. The video is 17½ minutes long. I didn’t listen past the first two minutes because I couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s just hot garbage, just noise posing as information. They make up a facially ludicrous proposition, get their listeners invested in the tragedy of it, then dispel it, providing relief from a notion that they hadn’t believed in five minutes before. It’s pure dopamine-manipulation.

It worked on my friend, who’s more than a little susceptible.

Fun

The Cube by Tool_Tips (YouTube)

The story starts in Let’s see that by David Malki (Wondermark)

I have no verve left for peacocking

“BEHOLD MY CREATION! THE LANTERNSPRING! FINEST EVER WROUGHT! AND I AM ITS CREATOR!

“LOOKS PRETTY COOL. I’LL CHECK OUT YOUR PROCESS VIDEO LATER.

“PROCESS VIDEO? THERE IS NOTHING OF THAT SORT. YOU THINK AS I WAS BUILDING THIS, I SHOULD HAVE BEEN SETTING UP CAMERAS? WHAT A LABOR THAT WOULD HAVE ADDED TO THE ENORMOUS TOIL OF CRAFTING THE ‘SPRING ITSELF!
BUT THEN PEOPLE COULD’VE WATCHED YOU CRAFT IT IN NINETY SECONDS! EDITED TO A COOL TRENDING SONG!

“I’M A SPRINGWRIGHT! I’VE NO EXPERTISE IN VIDEO EDITOLOGY OR WHATEVER THE DEVIL! THE FINE CRAFTSMANSHIP OF THE WORK IS SELF-EVIDENT.
OH, FOR SURE, IT’S JuST…NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW ABOUT YOUR SPRINGTHINGY IF YOU DON’T POST A REEL IN WHICH YOU DESCRIBE THE PROCESS IN A BREATHLESS MONOTONE!

“THE EFFORT OF THE SPRINGCRAFTING ITSELF HAS TAXED ME FULLY! I HAVE NO VERVE LEFT FOR PEACOCKING! AND I RESENT THAT IT SEEMS I MUST!

“WHATEVER, MAN. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING! JUST KNOW THAT THERE’S DEFINITELY A SPRINGFLUENCER OUT THERE EATING YOUR LUNCH!”

Then, there’s brighten up at by David Malki (Wondermark)

Spy you not its faintish gleam

“YOU CREATIVES ARE HAPPY TO BIRTH YOUR ARTISTIC CHILDREN – STRUGGLE THROUGH THE MONTHS OF LABOR AND SO ON – BUT THEN YOU DON’T WANT TO RAISE THEM! PROMOTE THEM! LEAD THEM INTO THE WORLD BY THE HAND! GIVE THEM A FIGHTING CHANCE TO FLOURISH!

“ARE YOU LABELING ME A DEADBEAT DAD? TO MY LANTERNSPRING?

“THIS IS BRAYDEY. HE’LL HELP YOU MAKE SOME REELS. HIS CONTENT GAME IS FIRE.

“YO SKIBIDI

“WHAT’S YOUR TAKE SO FAR? VIBESWISE? TO ME IT’S GIVING SPRINGCORE.

“PERIODT

“CAN YOU MAKE ANOTHER ONE REAL QUICK? WE IN OUR B-ROLL ERA.

“MAKE…ANOTHER?! SPRINGCRAFTING IS A LENGTHY AND EXPENSIVE PROCESS! LUMENLOOPS, ONCE CAST, WILL ONLY CURE IN TOTAL DARKNESS AND STILLNESS!

“A’IGHT, BET. I’LL MAKE THIS ONE LOOK HYPE WITH SWOOPING SPEED-RAMP SHOTS.

“TURN IT ON!

“IT IS ON! SPY YOU NOT ITS FAINTISH GLEAM? NOW THAT IT’S BEEN ACTIVATED, IT CAN NEVER NOT BE ON, UNTIL ITS INTERNAL COIL DEGRADES TO EXHAUSTION. ONCE EXHAUSTED, IT WILL FAIL AS IT CRUMBLES INTERNALLY.

“SO, LIKE YOUR CAREER?

“BRUH 💀”

And, finallly, there’s well on our way by David Malki (Wondermark)

The Algo? She Hongry

“SO, DID YOU PEEP THE REEL BRAYDEY POSTED?

“I DID, I WAS ABLE TO VIEW “TIKTOK” THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE CELLULAR TELEPHONE EMPORIUM. I HAVE JUST A FEW QUESTIONS.

“THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE ENTIRE VIDEO WAS UNRELATED FOOTAGE OF WHAT I AM TOLD IS “CALL OF DUTY”

“TOTALLY NORMAL.

“SHOWING OFF YOUR OWN WORK BY ITSELF IS PRETTY TRYHARD, Y’KNOW?

“WHO WAS THE WOMAN SPEAKING OVER IT ALL?

“THAT’S JUST THE TEXT-TO-SPEECH LADY. SHE’S MOMMY.

“THE SUBTITLES WERE FRANTIC, BUT NOT PARTICULARLY ACCURATE…

“NO ONE CARES! PROOFREADING IS SO MILLENNIAL-CODED.

“FINALLY – AND I’M SORRY TO HARP ON THIS MINOR POINT – WHAT WAS THIS INTENDED TO ACCOMPLISH? I’VE HAD NO INQUIRIES, NO SALES. NO ONE HAS RESERVED THE LANTERNSPRING FOR THEIR BLOODMOON BAPTISM, THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH IT IS INTENDED.

“NOT FROM JUST ONE VIDEO, NO!

“DOES IT SOMETIMES TAKE TWO VIDEOS?

“LET’S JUST SAY…THE ALGO? SHE HONGRY.”