Links and Notes for October 18th, 2024

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩

[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩

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Public Policy & Politics

Photo by Onur Burak Akın − Lebanon

Leveling a whole village in Lebanon

Ethnic Cleansing in Jabalia 2024

Imagine if that were your neighborhood.

Imagine if those were you and your neighbors, herded into the streets, made to stand in the sun with all of your worldly belongings in a torn bag, held in one hand, while, in the other, you brandish an ID issued by your oppressor, because the oppressor demands it.

You stand for hours.

Can you imagine it?

Of course not. Because things like that don’t happen to good people.

It only happens to those who deserve it, who aren’t even really people, when you think about it. They’re terrorists. Vermin. Better dead than alive.

It’s only the namby-pamby guilt-mongers whose opinions the oppressor is somehow and somewhat still beholden to that have this utopian notion that all people are equal and that everything that looks like a human actually is a human.

How naive.

The oppressor knows better.

It knows that some pigs are better than others. When the bad pigs get too shirty about their lot—when they start to talk about fairness and justice—then they just have to be put down, to lessen the danger for the good pigs, to keep the good pigs happy, so that they don’t have to hear distracting things.

Any good pig will still be able to sleep at night. Easily and deeply.

The Choice this Election is between Corporate and Oligarchic Power by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.”

“Private equity firms such as Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, buy up and plunder businesses. They pile on debt. They refuse to reinvest. They slash staff. They willfully drive companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain businesses but to harvest them for assets, to make short-term profit. Those who run these firms, such as Leon Black , Henry Kravis , Stephen Schwarzman and David Rubenstein, have amassed personal fortunes in the billions of dollars.”

“Private equity firms are an invasive species. They are also ubiquitous. They have acquired educational institutions, utility companies, and retail chains, while bleeding taxpayers hundreds of billions in subsidies which are made possible by bought-and-paid-for prosecutors, politicians, and regulators. What is particularly galling is that many of the industries seized by private equity firms — water, sanitation, electrical grids, hospitals — were paid for out of public funds. They cannibalize the nation, leaving behind shuttered and bankrupt industries.”

““These men are America’s modern-age robber barons. But unlike many of their predecessors in the nineteenth century, who amassed stupefying riches by extracting a young nation’s natural resources, today’s barons mine their wealth from the poor and middle class through complex financial dealings.””

“Meanwhile, it piled up massive deficits — the federal budget deficit rose to $1.8 trillion in 2024, with total national debt approaching $36 trillion — and neglected our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, while spending more on our military than all the other major powers on Earth combined.”

Where the hell did that deficit come from? Almost $2T? What did they spend it on?

“The Weimarization of the American working class is by design. It is about creating a world of masters and serfs, of empowered oligarchic and corporate elites and a disempowered public. And it is not only our wealth that is taken from us. It is our liberty. The so-called self-regulating market, as the economist Karl Polanyi writes in “The Great Transformation,” always ends with mafia capitalism and a mafia political system. A system of self-regulation, Polanyi warns, leads to “the demolition of society.””

“Trump, for now, is the figurehead of warlord capitalism. But he did not create it, does not control it and can easily be replaced. Harris, whose nonsensical ramblings can make Biden look focused and coherent, is the vacuous, empty suit the technocrats adore. Pick your poison. Destruction by corporate power or destruction by oligarchy. The end result is the same. That is what the two ruling parties offer in November. Nothing else.”

”Text Me You Haven’t Died” − My Sister was the 166th Doctor to Be Murdered in Gaza by Ramzy Baroud (Mint Press News)

“Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter? The news of her murder – or, more accurately, assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.”

““If I could only find the remains of Hamdi so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.”

“[…] her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month. “My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote. “This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. No matter how long I write or speak, it is a story that cannot be fully told. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.”

“My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt somewhere in Khan Yunis. No more messages from her.”

War on Gaza: Israel Wants To Finish the Job Washington Started After 9/11 by Jonathan Cook (Antiwar.com)

“The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line? The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line. A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel’s erasure of Gaza, it sounds utterly prophetic. There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been.”

“The day marks the start of what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded amounts to a “plausible genocide” – one that Israel has barred foreign correspondents from covering in person. Instead, the slaughter has been live-streamed for 12 months variously by the population under attack, and by the Israeli soldiers committing war crimes in plain view.”

“Israel has shown that it will not abide by any of the legal red lines once insisted upon by the West to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War. And western powers have demonstrated that not only do they have no intention of restraining Israel, they will assist in its violations.”

“To make Israelis feel safe again, Israel needs to reassert its military deterrence by crushing Hamas and its supporters in Gaza. To do so, Israel must also take on those in the wider region who refuse to submit to Israel’s – and by extension the West’s – civilizational superiority. The mantra of Israel and its apologists is “de-escalation through escalation”. In blunter language, the policy is an updated colonial one of “beat the savages into submission”.”

“None of this is new. Just as Israel is currently grasping the pretext of 7 October to justify its rampage, the neoconservatives earlier seized on al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 as their opportunity to “remake the Middle East”. In 2007, former NATO commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him : “We are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.””

“As I documented in my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washington’s post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war. This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”. The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya.”

“The western-Israeli goal, as before, is to destroy Lebanon and Iran, just as Gaza has been destroyed. The aim is to smash the infrastructure of Lebanon and Iran, their governing institutions, and their social structures. It is to plunge the Lebanese and Iranian people into a primaeval state, where they can cohere only into simple, tribal units and fight among themselves for the bare essentials.”

This is not hyperbole. It is the clearly stated desired outcome. Like Libya and Syria. Iraq is also not doing so well.

“For Israel and the US, there are no red lines. The same holds true in European capitals. They appear ready to continue this to the bitter end.”

People don’t care about Palestinians at all. You get more sympathy for an inconvenienced waterfowl species. People have been trained not to care and they defend the viewpoint with great gusto, as if they weren’t revealing an utterly unethical, immoral, and depraved opinion. They cheerfully parrot that Israel must defend itself or perish, as if that opinion were their own, as if the inhumanity jells at all with the other opinions they profess. Like, have you watched the real news at all since October 7, 2023? Just read Israeli news: they’re 100 times more honest than Europe and the U.S. .. at least Haaretz is. And the others are more honest than the western press, too, as they report the slaughter, but with pride.

Russische Sabotage: Wollen unsere Geheimdienste uns eigentlich für dumm verkaufen? by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)

“Eine Motivation für die hier beschriebenen Dramatisierungen könnte die Forderung nach mehr Befugnissen sein, die sowohl MAD-Chefin Martina Rosenberg als auch BND-Chef Bruno Kahl formulierten. So sagte Kahl, er mache sich ernsthafte Sorgen angesichts der starken Einschränkung der Befugnisse der deutschen Nachrichtendienste. Der BND brauche „deutlich mehr operative Beinfreiheit“, um seinen Auftrag effektiv erfüllen zu können.”

Das sagen sie immer. Auch wenn sie weitere Befugnisse bekommen, kommen sie am nächsten Tag schon wieder, um noch weitere zu bekommen.

The Badly Tarnished Nobel Peace Prize is Finally Awarded to a Group that Truly Deserves It by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch)

“In 2016, President Obama became the first and only president to attend a memorial of the atomic bombings in Japan, but while a controversial Nobel Peace Laureate himself, with the added obligation, it would seem, to emphasize the need to end 79 years of nuclear madness, he did not apologize for America’s two atomic bombings. Instead, he simply expressed his “sympathy” for the deaths caused by those two bombs.”

“Japan’s navy and air force by Aug. 6 when Hiroshima was bombed had been totally destroyed, most of Japan’s cities, as well as its energy and transport systems destroyed, and its main army trapped in China, Manchuria and Korea with no resupply possible and no way to reach Japan. The government was at that point predicting massive starvation in the coming winter if the country were laid siege to and blockaded, making surrender only a matter or time.”

“[…] with the example of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender as a precedent, President Truman and his foreign policy advisers demanded the same thing from Japan (and in fact this has become the US’s approach to all wars —a demand for unconditional surrender rather than a negotiated end).”

“Ted Hall, a teenage physicist at Los Alamos who worked on the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test and on Nagasaki, but also gave all the plans for that bomb to the Soviet Union, enabling the USSR to successfully test a copy in 1949. My book Spy for No Country: The story of Ted Hall, the teenage atomic spy who may have saved the world , published earlier this year, explains that amazing story.)”

Extermination Works. At First. by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.”

“In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.”

“Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.””

But they didn’t themselves believe their own bullshit. They said it because it’s what the world wanted to hear. The world isn’t principled; it just needed a sop so that it could not only forgive itself for allowing it to happen, but convince itself that it could never have forgiven itself if it hadn’t.

“Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.”

“Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.”

“We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military. Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.

“We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “ Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam ” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.”

“Many of the Vietnamese — like Palestinians — who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found — again like Israel — that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.””

““After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities.”

“There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own.”

“Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have signed their own death warrants.”

Oh, I wish I could share even this glimmer of dark hope. Many millions will suffer and die—again—but they will drag the Balrog to its death along with them. I don’t know, Chris. Look at the list of crimes that you cited from Turse: the U.S. has done all this and more and is more powerful than it ever has been. We tell ourselves stories of how it’s wobbling—of how these are death throes—but it’s really hard to believe when you see the unswerving and hagiographic support from OECD and NATO allies.

Interview with Rashid Khalidi: “Israel Is Acting With Full US Approval” by Daniel Finn (Jacobin)

“The first thing we have to do is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the United States has any reservations about what Israel is doing. Israel is doing what it is doing in careful and close coordination with Washington, and with its full approval. The United States does not just arm and diplomatically protect what Israel does; it shares Israel’s goals and approves of Israel’s methods.”

“At a certain point, the United States reined in Israel because those objectives had been achieved. The Syrian army had been defeated in Lebanon, a puppet government was about to be installed, and the PLO had agreed to withdraw from Lebanon. Israel had achieved the objectives on which the two parties agreed — it was now simply bombarding Lebanon out of sheer sadism, and Ronald Reagan stopped it.”

“The Iraq War was fought by an elite that had lost the support of the public within a year of the war. The Vietnam War was fought for years and years after public opinion had shifted against it. It’s not unusual in American history for undemocratic leaders to act in opposition to the views of their constituents for years and years, and that will continue, I’m afraid.”

“The United States has taken a sledgehammer to any idea of a rules-based international order. It has taken a sledgehammer to international humanitarian law, and to the rules of war. If you can kill hundreds of civilians to take out one leader, then the whole idea of international humanitarian law and the laws of war based on proportionality and discrimination goes right out the window.”

It’s pure state terror, same as it always was. Having read so much of the history of this empire, it’s hard to really say that it’s gotten worse. It’s kind of always been this way. For some reason, more people think that this is the straw that will break the camel’s back, but I’m skeptical.

“If there’s no proportionality and no discrimination in the use of force, you can slaughter any number of people and claim that they were human shields for some monstrous, evil person who we had to kill. There are no limits.”

“This is the template that every state will now be able to use in waging war on its enemies. All limits have now been removed. We’ve gone back to where things stood before World War II.”

“On the one hand, you’re going to have people who will try to maintain or restore an international legal order — what the Americans keep calling a rules-based international order — while on the other hand, you have the greatest power on Earth and its client state busy demolishing that order and establishing the actual parameters in which they and others will be allowed to operate.”

“It also gave us the attacks on the US Marines and the US embassy, because many Lebanese felt that the United States had participated in Israel’s butchery of nineteen thousand Palestinians during the 1982 war. They believed that the United States had promised to protect civilians who were left behind when the PLO left Beirut in August 1982, yet those people were then slaughtered in Sabra and Chatila.”

“[…] it should be said that Israel and the United States have acted in ways that raise fundamental questions about the possibility of the continuation of Israel’s approach, and the approach of the Israeli people, since they now seem to approve in large measure of what their government is doing to their region.”

“[…] the people leading this enterprise have no answers, except to say that if force is insufficient, you should use more force. That’s the only thing they understand. That’s how they see politics, but that’s not politics — it’s as if Carl von Clausewitz never existed.”

“I would say the future is quite grim for the Palestinians, but I don’t think it looks any better for Israel. In fact, in some respects, it may even be worse in the long term for Israel as it is currently configured.”

“The repressive measures mandated by Congress and implemented with extraordinary zeal by compliant, craven, and despicable university administrators have been very successful. There has been almost no disruptive activism of the level that we saw last year.”

What’s Happening In Northern Gaza Proves Israel Lied About Everything by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Sinwar’s death will have no meaningful bearing on how Hamas or Israel conduct themselves, […] Israel is going to keep bombing hospitals, shooting kids in the head, intentionally starving civilians, and working to steal Palestinian land just like it was doing yesterday, and Palestinians are going to keep resisting this just like they were doing yesterday.”

“If Israel were actually killing all these people with the goal of destroying Hamas then Sinwar’s death might be significant, but Israel’s goal is not destroying Hamas. Israel’s goal is the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza. This is public knowledge at this point, and is not seriously debatable.”

“That’s the kind of nightmare Palestinians are facing in Gaza. One where a child injured by a flying robot could be being used as bait to draw rescuers to the scene in order to bomb them. One where people have to watch their family members burn alive right in front of them. One where they have to listen to their disabled loved one get ripped apart by dogs in the next room while they’re held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers. One where they have to watch everything they’ve ever known incinerated all around them while the world watches and yawns.”

This Mass Atrocity Is Made Possible By The Systematic Dehumanization Of Palestinians by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“It’s gotten to the point where the only advantage to sharing your coordinates with the IDF as an aid worker in Gaza is that it will allow the historical records to show that they knew exactly what they were doing when they used those coordinates to kill you.

“Israeli forces found and killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by accident while they were just randomly destroying parts of Gaza, and then they methodically targeted and killed four water engineers on purpose. These two facts alone tell you everything you need to know about what Israel is really doing in Gaza.”

“[…] slave owners all harbored dehumanizing beliefs about people of African descent, and taught those beliefs to their children. If you don’t believe that people with dark skin are fundamentally different from people with pale skin, then there’s no way to reconcile the fact that they’re receiving vastly different treatment in your society in a way that makes logical and moral sense. Phrenology and other pseudosciences were geared toward squaring these circles in people’s minds.”

“Palestinian deaths are a statistic, while Israeli deaths are personal. Palestinians die in numbers, while Israelis die with names. Palestinians die in a terrible humanitarian disaster of unspecified nature, while Israelis are butchered in a sadistic act of terrorism. Palestinians perish in Israel’s war of self-defense, while Israelis are killed by monsters who hate Jews.”

Inquiry into Salisbury poisonings set to repeat official “Russian assassins” narrative by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)

“[…] “novichok” was eventually officially described as among the most lethal nerve agents on the planet. The inquiry repeats this claim, suggesting that the small perfume bottle could have killed thousands.

“Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who according to the official story came into direct contact with the nerve agent, spent three hours over lunch before it took effect at the same time for both of them, leaving them slumped on a park bench. They were then discovered by the Chief Nurse of the British Army, Colonel Alison McCourt, and taken to hospital. Both survived and have since been spirited away with new identities.

“As part of the police investigation, officer Nick Bailey was sent to the Skripals’ house, apparently becoming contaminated in the same way. He was hospitalised (also surviving) but not before returning home and allegedly leaving traces of the nerve agent around his house, which somehow left his family members unscathed.”

This reminds me a bit of the myth about Fentanyl killing on contact. It’s mostly to keep funds running into police departments, while blaming China. This situation is similar, in that it blames Russia for assassinations where no-one died and where there is no evidence that the Russians did it.

Ralph Nader: “Goodbye Lebanon” – High Israeli Official. Biden Says OK, So Far by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)

“Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands – whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque – and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”

“Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political Party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.”

Leaked US Intelligence Documents Outline Israeli Preparations to Strike Iran by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post)

“Washington is expected to be involved with the Iran assault either by providing intelligence support to Israel, or less likely by pursuing direct military action. Earlier this week, the US bombed Houthi targets in Yemen using B-2 long-range stealth bombers, which haven’t seen combat since 2017, in a message to the Islamic Republic.

“Israel’s attack is being framed as retaliation against Tehran for Iran’s October 1 barrage of roughly 200 ballistic missiles which targeted Israeli military sites. That missile attack came in response to a litany of Israeli provocations, amidst its genocidal war against the Palestinians, including the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh while he was visiting the Iranian capital this summer.”

Israel has Taken Human Shields to a Whole New Criminal Level by Neve Gordon (CounterPunch)

“Haaretz published an entire expose about how Israeli troops have abducted Palestinian civilians, dressed them in military uniforms, attached cameras to their bodies, and sent them into underground tunnels as well as buildings in order to shield Israeli troops.

““[I]t’s hard to recognize them. They’re usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they’re always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks,” the Haaretz article notes. But if you look more closely, “you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear.””

Blinken gives US stamp of approval for Netanyahu’s war of extermination in Gaza by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Populated areas of the Soviet Union under Nazi control were subjected to the “Hunger Plan” devised by SS Senior Group Leader Herbert Backe, with Nazi officials concluding that “millions of people will die of starvation” as a result of the plan. The Third Reich’s agriculture minister declared that “many tens of millions of people in this country will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.” As a result of this plan, 3.3 million people in the Soviet Union were deliberately starved.”

“In remarks this month, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a leading member of the Green Party, openly defended attacks on civilians. She said:”
“When Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools, then we end up in very difficult waters. But we’re not shying away from this. This is why I made it clear at the United Nations that civilian sites could lose their protected status if terrorists abuse this status. That’s what Germany stands for—and that’s what we mean when we refer to Israel’s security.”

This woman ran as a peace candidate. It could never have been anything but a lie.

Is killing civilians really what Germany stands for? Perhaps! It is certainly what the its greatest ally the U.S. stands for.

“This declaration, in its own way, is a restatement of what Eiland has been saying for over a year, that “the ‘poor’ women of Gaza … are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers” and should be killed alongside those engaging in armed resistance. The imperialist powers are declaring that civilians are fair game for extermination.”

They always have—for themselves. To their enemies, they declare that not just civilians but also soldiers on military bases are off-limits. Killing anyone on “our” side is a moral crime whereas literally anyone on “their” side is fair game. These are the rules of children. They are insipid and not worth of consideration and certainly not worth wasting breath or time over.

“the imperialist powers are saying that a new world war has begun. The lead essay in this month’s edition of Foreign Affairs declares:”
“An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called “total war,” in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.”
“To declare that this new era of global warfare allows countries to “attack a broad variety of targets” is a colloquial way of saying that international law is being suspended, and civilians, hospitals, humanitarian organizations are all fair game. The “Israeli model” is to be the standard for waging war in the future.”

The useful idiots will swallow this hook, line, and sinker and will dutifully repeat these phrases as if they were their own opinions, doe-eyed and unflappable in their conviction that they are on the side of justice. They don’t read the words; they just repeat them.

Journalism & Media

’Scared’ System of a Down Singer Says He Was Tracked by Turkish Intelligence by Ryan Smith (Newsweek)

This is happening more frequently and publicly in other countries as well. They went from canceling people (getting them fired) to just outright arresting them. The UK has very publicly started rounding up journalists with the wrong opinions lately. I’m not sure why they don’t just take the same tack as the U.S. and turn down their volume until no-one ever hears them. That way, you get the same effect, but no bad publicity.

Apple Music is part of the media. It constrains what we can see and hear. I searched the album “Natural Born Killers” and it told me “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” If I search for “Natural Born”, it’s fine. How am I going to find the soundtrack I’m looking for, which is almost certainly in the library? I am an adult, paying money per month for my Apple Music subscription. For how much longer, I can’t say.

I can search for the word “killers”, though.

George Carlin on Colonizers pr (Reddit)

“Israeli murderers are called commandos. Arab commandos are called terrorists. Contract killers are called freedom fighters. The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore; they neutralize people. Or they depopulate the area. The government doesn’t lie; it engages in disinformation. Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.”

From the Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics (album) (Wikipedia), from 1990, which was—checks notes—34 years ago. How has this stayed current? Why does nothing change in this area?

Biden/Harris, Fascist Media Censors by Ted Rall

“But the Biden-Harris Administration is just as bad. In fact, they have already engaged in the kind of vicious censorship and suppression typically deployed by the world’s most repressive and dictatorial regimes—actions that go beyond anything Trump did or threatens to do.

“The president is fascist. I know, because I’m a victim of one of his fascist actions.

“On October 15 Sputnik News, where I co-hosted a radio talk show and for whom I had drawn political cartoons, was shut down.”

“Biden and his fellow fascists—including Vice President Kamala Harris, whose silence here speaks as loudly as her tacit support for Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon—are the big winners. Shutting down Sputnik sends a chilling message to any reporter or commentator who dares to oppose official narratives. We can and will keep you quiet, First Amendment be damned.”

Labor

What It Means to Be “A Tad Radical” by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“[…] you shouldn’t eliminate an economic benefit from any peaceable people in this country, any location in this country, unless you’ve got what they all say they want: a just transition. Where are our jobs that we have demanded?”

“Mother Jones looking at this crowd. And this is what she said: “Sure you lost. Sure you lost. But they had bayonets. And all you had was the Constitution of the United States. And let me assure you that any contest between bayonets and the Constitution, the bayonets will win every time.” “But. But. You must fight. You must fight and win. You must fight and lose. But beyond all else, you must fight.

““You must fight.”

““You must fight.””

Economy & Finance

Right 🤷‍♂️

George and Jerry explain how to get rich

“George:Why do billionaires care if they lose all their money? They’ll just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make it all back with their unbelievable work ethic.

“Jerry: Plus, if they’re poor, all the money will trickle back down to them, making them rich again.”

Merry-Go-Rounds by Barry Goldman (3 Quarks Daily)

“Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that people who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer and flying people to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.”

“Inequality caused by wealth extraction is especially dangerous and divisive. That’s not just because the poor and middle classes feel increasingly left out, and have less and less to lose, but also because the billionaire classes need to distract us away from focusing on how they got rich. So they revert to the old political formula: using their control over the media to direct popular fury in other directions, towards people with the wrong skin color or the wrong sexual orientation, or from the wrong religious groups. The world has seen this hate-filled formula before.”

“So, let’s review. The financial economy is not the real economy. The big money isn’t in the world of goods and services, even banking services. It’s in things like STIRT, short term interest rate trading, that have almost nothing to do with the real world. The fantastic sums paid to the winners in that world have to come from somewhere. They are extracted from the real economy. And when the financial world collapses periodically from its own weight and its own contradictions, money from the real world is used to prop it up. Why? Because, as Dylan said, “money doesn’t talk, it screams.” It corrupts our politics, distorts our economy, diverts our talent, and corrodes our society.”

Of course we can tax billionaires by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Dressing up a demand (“stop trying to think of alternatives”) as a scientific truth (“there is no alternative”) sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you’re doing science.”

“Piketty argued that unless we taxed the rich, we would attain the same political instability that provoked the World Wars, but in a nuclear-tipped world that was poised on the brink of ecological collapse. He even laid out a program for this taxation, one that took accord of all the things rich people would try to hide their assets. Today, the destruction that Piketty prophesied is on our doorstep, and all over the world, political will is gathering to do something about our billionaire problem. The debate rages from France to dozen-plus US states that are planning wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.”

“Piketty has an answer to the liquidity crisis of our poormouthing billionaires: If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes. If necessary, it could then sell these shares through various methods, such as offering employees to purchase them, which would increase their stake in the company.”

“Governments that can’t exercise their sovereign power to tax the wealthy end up taxing the poor, eroding their legitimacy and hence their power. Taxing the rich – a wildly popular move – will make governments more powerful, not less.”

“The US ended Swiss banking secrecy and manages to tax Americans living abroad.”

Super-cool that you don’t question the implementation. They tax people who don’t benefit at all from their taxes. It never ends. You just get to keep paying fealty to the empire as long as you live.

“France has repeatedly levied wealth taxes, as long ago as 1789 and as recently as 1945.”

Switzerland levies one right now, although it’s quite low.

“The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. These was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history.”

As detailed in Monbiot’s latest book Invisible Doctrine, though, much of this expansion came from plundering the Global South more efficiently than ever.

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024) by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.”

“[…] advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

“The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

“Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

“For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

“For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

“For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

“And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook,”

“The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.”

“There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses. First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices. Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.”

“[…] all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

“Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with ‘predatory pricing’ that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.”

“We don’t want competition in commercial surveillance. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.”

“Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany’s data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.”

“[…] every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them , that’s piracy. Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.”

“‘IP’ is just a euphemism for ‘a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.’ And ‘app’ is just a euphemism for ‘a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.’”

“Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays. And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.”

“[…] the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.”

“The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.”

“Martin Luther King said ‘It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important, also.‘ And it may be true that the law can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it. And I think that’s pretty important, also.”

Abolish Rent / Tracy Rosenthal by Chuck Mertz (This is Hell!)

“Rent is a power relationship. We pay rent at the peril of our need, and at the barrel of a gun. So, let’s talk about that gun. Let’s talk about, that our landlords can call on the agents of state violence to kick us out of our homes, with physical force, if we can’t pay rent. And then, if we find ourselves living without a home, they can criminalize us, jail us, harass us, fine us, incarcerate us, put us in a cage because we have noplace else to go. Right? We don’t just pay rent because we need housing. We pay rent because it is a crime not to have it. It is a crime not to be exploited by a landlord.”

Excellent summary. Housing and healthcare are human rights. The state can decide what it can afford to define as the minimum level but its only purpose should be to lift the level of that minimum if its people are suffering or deprived. These are the kinds of goals that can only really work internationally because otherwise states will very quickly determine to raise the minimum level of services offered to its citizens at the expense of the citizens of other states.

Science & Nature

We’ve Never Really Studied the Female Body by Rebecca Baumgartner (3 Quarks Daily)

“I came across “The Trouble with Expertise” in The Philosophers’ Magazine. In it, clinical ethicist Jamie Watson says: “Medical researchers have exploited people of colour, obstetricians have ignored medical decisions from women in labour, pharmaceutical corporations have conspired to increase addiction, and trans patients are routinely stigmatised or refused care. There are lots of reasons to be sceptical about experts. But it’s important to note that those reasons have nothing to do with expertise”

“An individual expert is only trustworthy to the extent that they live up to the standards imposed on them by their system of expertise.”

“[…] even though premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and period pain (dysmenorrhea) affect 90% of all women, there are around five times as many studies on erectile dysfunction (ED) as there are on PMS, even though only 18% of men have ED. There are also far fewer treatment options for severe PMS and dysmenorrhea than there are for ED.”

“In her book Invisible Women, Perez cites data showing that only 9 out of 95 medical schools in the U.S. include a course that could be described as a women’s health course, and in medical textbooks, male bodies are used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate body parts that aren’t sex-specific.”

““In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cut the recommended dose of Ambien (zolpidem) in half for women after numerous instances of women exhibiting bizarre behavior like sleepwalking, sleep-eating and even sleep-driving. How is it that it took 20 years after the drug was first approved to figure out women were taking twice the necessary dose? Even after this happened, the FDA declined to review the recommended dosage of other drugs. If women metabolize Ambien differently, do we metabolize statins differently? Antidepressants? These are all crucial questions, and we don’t have the much-needed answers.””

“Menopause in particular is chronically under-studied because it suffers from the double-whammy of only affecting women, and only affecting middle-aged women who no longer offer even the medically interesting possibility of pregnancy to justify their existence.”

“I’ve never had a doctor say anything remotely that humble before – I don’t think I’ve ever even heard a doctor say the words “I don’t know.” I felt instantly validated by his admission, but simultaneously a bit hung out to dry. Why doesn’t a family practice doctor know more about something that will affect half of his patients? To be clear, I don’t see this as a personal failure on his part; on the contrary, I admire his honesty and attention to what I’d said. But there’s no doubt that if I hadn’t pushed back, he would have just fed me misinformation and moved on.”

Art & Literature

Book Review: Deep Utopia by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“Would weightlifting really be a sport anymore? A few people whose genes put them in the 99.999th percentile for potential would compete to see who could follow the training regimen most perfectly. One of them would miss a session for their mother’s funeral and drop out of the running; the other guy would win gold at whatever passed for this society’s Olympics. Doesn’t sound too exciting.”

This is kind of what elite cycling feels like right now.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 by Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize)

“Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

“Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low-intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.”

“The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set.”

“The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

“But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.”

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

“I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner.”

“The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.”

“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.”

“Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.”

“The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.”

“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.”

Han Kang’s Nobel Prize Award is a Cry for Palestine by KJ Noh (CounterPunch)

“The awarding of the Nobel to Han Kang is that oblique acknowledgment. Of the short and long lists, she is the only contemporary writer dedicated to witnessing and inscribing the horrors of historical atrocity and mass slaughter perpetrated by the Imperial powers and their quislings.”

“In Human Acts (“The Boy is Coming”), she wrote about the effects of the US-greenlighted massacres of civilians in the city of Gwangju by a US-quisling military dictatorship. At the time, the US did not want a redux of the fall of the Shah of Iran, where popular protest brought down a US quisling dictator. Instead, the Carter Administration authorized the deployment of South Korean troops (at the time under full US operational control) to fire on and slaughter students and citizens protesting the recent US-backed military coup. And exactly as in the current moment, the US portrayed itself as a hapless bystander to mass murder, enmeshed but incapable of preventing it, when in fact, it was the underwriter and the agent of the massacres.”

“Drawing from an image from a relentless dream, and a line gleaned from a pop song overhead in a taxi, she tells the story of the US-instigated genocide of Jeju Island in 1948, where 20% of population were wiped out, bombed, slaughtered, starved to death under the command of the US military government in Korea. This is Gaza–with snow: Even the infants? Yes, because total annihilation was the goal.”

“After the surrender of Japan in WWII, post-colonial Korea had been assigned to the shared trusteeship of the USSR and the US. On August 15th of 1945, the Korean people declared liberation and the establishment of the Korean People’s Republic, a liberated socialist state consisting of thousands of self-organized workers’ and peasant collectives. The USSR was supportive, but the US declared war on these collectives, banned the Korean People’s Republic, forced a vote in the South against the will of the Koreans who did not want a divided country, and unleashed a campaign of politicide against those who opposed or resisted this. Jeju island was one of the places where the carnage reached genocidal proportions, before cresting into the full-scale omnicide of the Korean war. That genocide was covered up and erased for half a century, where not even a whisper of truth was permitted.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

De-Westernizing Ourselves by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The thought that the West was superior to all those gathered in the name of the non–West, had come to seem to me ridiculous. The Western insistence on the primacy of the individual seemed to me problematic at the very least, especially as Americans thought of the matter.”

“Friedrich Nietzsche wrote somewhere — The Gay Science, perhaps, and I am sorry I cannot be more precise — of “taking off the garb of the West,” a wonderful way of putting it. And somewhere else he wrote of rowing our boats out beyond our shores so we can look back from a useful distance, and see ourselves as we are.”

“To defend the humanity of all humanity requires us to overcome in ourselves all the presumption that our ways of life and our institutions are the superior paradigm to which others aspire, or, if they do not so aspire, they ought to aspire, or at the extreme, they must be taught or made to aspire, and if they do not so aspire it is only because they are primitive and, so, ignorant.”

“It is a question of shedding an ideology within which we have been immersed the whole of our lives. And if you have breathed a certain kind of air or drunk a certain kind of water the whole of your life, it is difficult indeed to imagine any other air or water. But this is what we must do.”

“They entertain no notion whatsoever of inclusion or diversity when it comes to any substantive value. One can be different in all sorts of ways, but not, heaven forbid, different in thought or belief or tradition or culture.”

“[…] the guiding precepts by which modern China conducts itself among others. I am thinking here of Zhou Enlai’s famous Five Principles, formulated in 1954, about which most Westerners know as much as they know of Chinese history — more or less nothing. Respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, noninterference in others’ internal affairs, interacting to mutual benefit, peaceful coexistence: This makes five. These are irrefutably admirable idea, too. And they arise out of China’s long experience throughout its history.”

“A word often associated with [Nietzsche] is “perspectivism.” It means the capacity to see from the perspectives of others, and I have long argued this is paramount among our imperatives if we are to make any kind of success of the 21st century. This is from Twilight of the Idols. It bears more or less directly on our task of de–Westernizing ourselves:”
“The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: Perhaps nothing antagonizes its ‘modern spirit’ so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: Precisely this is called ‘freedom.’ That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: One fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word ‘authority’ is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: Instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.”
“Think about this. These are the remarks of someone who has rowed his boat beyond the shore, turned back, and saw something other than what he was supposed to see.”

“When Nietzsche wrote of taking off the garb of the West he did not mean we had to forget who we are or in any way surrender our identities. Quite the opposite. The exercise was intended as a process of self-discovery, not self-denial. Culture is part of what it means to be human, and as we learn to honor the cultures of others we must also honor our own.”

“Material consumption is an abiding value now. We honor the market as if it always knows best — as if it can do our thinking for us, as if what the market dictates will always yield the right outcome. We have, in other words, more or less lost sight of the ideals of the Enlightenment. We profess to live by them, but as I noted in an earlier lecture, every age professes rather hollowly to honor the values of the preceding age even as it has abandoned them.”

“I am proposing nothing less than the transcendence of the values we inherit from the Age of Materialism and a return to the ideals our societies left behind when, as Western nations industrialized, “progress” acquired aspects of an ideological cult. We have ever since mistaken material progress for progress by way of our values — the progress altogether of humanity. We are left now with all the gadgets we can think of but, as the Zionists grimly remind us, we find our conduct toward one another as barbaric as it ever was.”

We very literally would rather have iPhones than principles.

“The Enlightenment’s ideals are enduring. It is how they were interpreted and applied that produced the failures.”

“But I am talking merely about revaluing — and so living up to —ideals we continue to profess but abjectly fail to honor. Living up to these ideals means, before it means anything else at all, acting according to them while not imposing them on anyone else. You cannot profess liberty — and certainly not democracy — while insisting others accept your version of these.”

Ellsberg and ‘The Process of My Awakening’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“After thinking about all this reading and viewing in so short a time I didn’t want to think about anything for a while. Then I thought of a famous adage of Aeschylus that I used to keep on my desk: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Suffering, pain, despair. Then I thought of something else. Failing in my recall, I thought of whoever it was who said “The truth is like the sun.. It always comes out.””

“This is the truth rising to the surface. Do you think Pillay’s commission would have studied conditions in Gaza and drawn its conclusions without the prompt of the medical people now speaking out, chiefly via independent media? Do you think The Times would have published this piece if circumstances, an accumulation of truths too large to inter or ignore, had not forced it to do so?”

Some Non-Contradictory Statements About Talent, School, and Meritocracy by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The problem with almost everyone in this debate is that they insist that there is no such thing as an intrinsic talent for climbing trees and that the ability to climb trees is totally and permanently malleable, when all data and sense tell us differently. The problem with the school reform movement is that they look at the scenario in the comic and say “We need to fire teachers until everybody gets up that tree at the same speed!” They refuse to understand that teachers simply don’t control how fast their students can climb. In both cases, the mistake is driven by the perceived consequences: because climbing trees is key to getting into college and a good job and the good life, they can’t accept that not everyone is good at climbing trees and that this inequality in ability is a permanent fact of life. So they’re stuck. But I’m not stuck. I’m perfectly happy and willing to say that climbing trees will always be valuable, and people who can do it well will always be rewarded in the market economy, but since everyone can’t, we need to build a society that provides for everyone regardless of their tree-climbing skills. Rather than watching people struggling to climb trees, acting like we can’t do anything to help them, why don’t we build them a ladder?”

Some random thoughts about working in a team:

Wenn jemand dir gegenüber chaotisch wirkt, ist aber in einer anscheinend verantwortungsvolle Rolle, denn muss man sich immer fragen, ob diese Person Informationen hat, welche du nicht hast … oder umgekehrt.

Wenn man miteinander weiter arbeiten kann/soll/möchte, denn muss man davon ausgehen, dass der andere eigentlich nicht chaotisch oder doof ist, sondern, dass er seine Entscheidungen auf andere Informationsbasis trifft: entweder weisst diese Person mehr als du oder es fehlt diese Person Informationen, die seiner Beschluss logischerweise ändern würde.

Man hofft immer auf “Kommunikationsproblem” oder “Unausgeglichene Informationsstand”. Erst, wenn alle Parteien die gleiche Informationen haben und kommen trotzdem zu unterschiedlichen Fazits gibt es eventuell ein Problem. Zumindest bis dann wurde hoffentlich die Entscheidungsbasis explizit ernennt, so dass man später sieht wer einen nicht ganz nachvollziehbaren Entscheid getroffen hat. Die Hoffnung ist aber, dass diese Klarstellung eine vernünftige Person dazu bringt, seinen Entscheid und Bauchgefühl selbst in Frage zu stellen.

Dismantling the American Empire (w/ Cornel West) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 20:45,

“That’s a sign of what it means to be obsessed with success out of careerism, opportunism. And it reflects the distinctive and dominant features of the political and professional class in the American Empire, which is conformity, complacency, and cowardliness…and being well-adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference…and wanting people to only see your success and not the underside…and the precondition of that success, which is all of these lies and crimes. It has nothing to do with moral and spiritual greatness. It has everything to do with narrow worldly success based on opportunism and careerism. You see it in the academy; you see it in journalism; you see it in Hollywood; you see it in the music industry; you see it in our politics. And that’s one of the reasons why the American empire is on its way toward doom or implosion if there’s not a significant counter movement.”

At 36:00,

“if we can’t meet that test, you can rest assured that any leader—any elected official—is nothing but a strategist and a tactician. They don’t have a moral fiber in their backbone. And that’s the problem with our politicians in both major parties in the United States.”

LLMs & AI

There was an attempt…to emulate a high school yearbook (Reddit)

Copilot, may I have an image of a high-school yearbook

iOS 18.1: Here are Apple’s full release notes on what’s new − 9to5Mac (Reddit)

In the comments, someone wrote,

“Last week chatGPT told me that the sq footage of a circle with a diameter of 20 feet is 12,356 square feet. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t love the idea of this technology recording my phone calls and offering a transcript of whatever it thinks I said.”

Another user wrote:

“If you’re asking ChatGPT for math, you’re doing it wrong”

Another user then posed the comment,

“Genuinely curious as to why.”

Very briefly, the underlying technology breaks text into tokens. While taking words apart and then constructing answers in this way seems to work well for text, which is more forgiving to “errors”, it doesn’t work as well for numbers, which are much less forgiving.

The likelihood that a given text token is followed by another appropriate text token in the response (e.g., “like” and “ly”) end up being quite high, given enough input data to guide the probabilities.

There is no similar guarantee for numbers, which don’t have grammatical rules for composition. E.g., if the original number was “12345” and it’s pulled apart to “123” and “45”, it’s also just as likely that the token “89” is tacked on to the end when constructing an answer.

Adding more data doesn’t add “weight” to the “correct” re-construction for numbers as it does for text.

Where a text answer may be still end up being completely wrong in its content, it will still almost always be grammatically correct and it will still be generally in the area of the topic of the question. So, even when it’s wrong, being in the ballpark feels kinda half-right anyway.

When a question about numbers goes similarly awry, it’s more obvious and also feels “more wrong”. A higher degree of precision is required, which the technology is not able to deliver.

When you ask something like “Which country won the 1981 World Cup?” and it answers “Norway”, it’s complete hogwash, but it’s not nonsensical. The expected answer was a country and the actual answer was a country. You might not even notice that it’s “wrong” (which World Cup? Aren’t many world cups in even years?).

When you ask something like “What is the square footage of a 20-foot diameter circle” and it writes “12,000”, the answer is completely useless as well, but in a more obvious way.

Programming

75x faster: optimizing the Ion compiler backend by Jan de Mooij (SpiderMonkey)

“Even though these are great improvements, spending at least 14 seconds (on a fast machine!) to fully compile Adobe Photoshop on background threads still isn’t an amazing user experience. We expect this to only get worse as more large applications are compiled to WebAssembly. To address this, our WebAssembly team is making great progress rearchitecting the Wasm compiler pipeline. This work will make it possible to Ion-compile individual Wasm functions as they warm up instead of compiling everything immediately. It will also unlock exciting new capabilities such as (speculative) inlining.”

Always Measure One Level Deeper by John Ousterhout on July 1, 2018 (Communications of the ACM)

“When my students and I designed our first log-structured file system, we were fairly certain that reference patterns exhibiting locality would result in better performance than those without locality. Fortunately, we decided to measure, to be sure. To our surprise, the workloads with locality behaved worse than those without. It took considerable analysis to understand this behavior. The reasons were subtle, but they exposed important properties of the system and led us to a new policy for garbage collection that improved the system’s performance significantly. If we had trusted our initial guess, we would have missed an important opportunity for performance improvement.”

“Rule 3: Use your intuition to ask questions, not to answer them. Intuition is a wonderful thing. As you accumulate knowledge and experience in an area, you will start having gut-level feelings about a system’s behavior and how to handle certain problems. If used properly, such intuition can save significant time and effort. However, it is easy to become over-confident and assume your intuition is infallible. This leads to Mistake 2 (Guessing instead of measuring).”

“If you are measuring overall latency for remote procedure calls, you could measure deeper by breaking down that latency, determining how much time is spent in the client machine, how much time is spent in the network, and how much time is spent on the server. You could also measure where time is spent on the client and server. If you are measuring the overall throughput of a system, the system probably consists of a pipeline containing several components. Measure the utilization of each component (the fraction of time that component is busy). At least one component should be 100% utilized; if not, it should be possible to achieve a higher throughput.”

“Automate measurements. It should be possible to type a single command line that invokes the full suite of measurements, including not just top-level measurements but also the deeper measurements. Each run should produce a large amount of performance data in an easy-to-read form. It should also be easy to invoke a single benchmark by itself or vary the parameters for a benchmark. Also useful is a tool that can compare two sets of output to identify nontrivial changes in performance.”

“Incrementing a counter is computationally inexpensive enough that a system can include a large number of them without hurting its performance. Make it easy to define new counters and read out all existing counters. For long-running services, it should be possible to sample the counters at regular intervals, and the dashboard should display historical trends for the counters.”

“The keys to good performance evaluation are a keen eye for things that do not make sense and a willingness to measure from many different angles. This takes more time than the quick and shallow measurements that are common today but provides a deeper and more accurate understanding of the system being measured. In addition, if you apply the scientific method, making and testing hypotheses, you will improve your intuition about systems. This will result in both better designs and better performance measurements in the future.”

All we need is Structure by Timon Jucker (Software Engineering Corner by Zühlke engineers)

“Recently, a new pattern called Structured Concurrency emerged, first introduced in the Python community with Trio . It was almost independently adopted by Kotlin and, since Java 21 , also in the main JVM language. Swift seems to put the most effort into it by trying to get the most out of this model, extending it with Actors and Sendable Types.”

fiveMinutes (Reddit)

“Library I am using: Please take 5 minutes and read the documentation.

“Me: ”

Video Games

Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War by Marijam Did (Jacobin)

“By the late 1990s, the US Department of Defense was beginning to sense the power of the games industry over adolescent men — the Department’s main audience — and created a campaign of recruitment and manipulation around gaming. Serious institutional power underwrote the move to tie the global video games industry to the Western military complex. The Pentagon spent more than $150 million on military-themed games or simulations in 1999 alone, with another $70 million injection in 2008 and still more since, all on projects with their own, very particular political agenda.”