Links and Notes for November 15th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

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

Public Policy & Politics

Kremlsprecher Peskow im Interview: Dialogmöglichkeiten mit Russland, die Wahl Trumps und der Krieg in der Ukraine by Gábor Stier (NachDenkSeiten)

“Trump hat während seiner vorherigen Präsidentschaft viel gesagt, aber wir haben nichts davon in Bezug auf Russland gesehen. Es ist ihm jedoch hoch anzurechnen, dass es einen Dialog zwischen den beiden Ländern gegeben hat. Diese Gespräche waren zwar ziemlich angespannt, trotzdem können wir von einem Dialog sprechen. Darin unterscheidet sich die Präsidentschaft von Trump grundlegend von der Biden-Regierung.”

“Noch eine letzte Frage: Wenn dieser Krieg zu lange dauert, sagen wir fünf Jahre, wird zwar Russland überleben können, aber das entspricht eher den Interessen der USA, Russland zu schwächen. Dieses Szenario ähnelt sehr dem, was die Sowjetunion schließlich in die Knie gezwungen hat. Stimmen Sie also zu, dass es im Interesse Russlands ist, den Krieg so schnell wie möglich zu beenden?

“Ja, das ist richtig. Russland hatte kein Interesse an diesem Krieg. Es wollte ihn nicht beginnen. Krieg ist immer das letzte Mittel bei der Durchsetzung von Interessen.”

And the U.S.‘s endless money and power supply is drying up.

Blaming the Voters Gets You Nowhere by Brett Warnke (CounterPunch)

“[…] the only places Harris did diverge from Biden were regarding the best parts of his labor-friendly administration: antitrust and regulation.”

“Lesser known than the embarrassing “I have a glock” comments, or the disgusting bearhug of Liz Cheney, the Financial Times detailed a “charm offensive” with Wall Street. Harris hosted several chief executives at her own home in D.C. including Visa CEO Ryan McInerney and CVS CEO Karen Lynch. Both were involved in federal antitrust lawsuits and were accused of paying off rivals to maintain monopoly power and of inflating insulin rates and drug prices. The victories against Google weren’t even mentioned at the DNC!”

“When visiting Michigan last month, after hearing the wrenching stories of people who had family members killed in Gaza, candidate Harris decided to remind those families that the real tragedy was October 7th. She sent Bill Clinton, who referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Sumeria,” and even the loveless madman of X, Ritchie Torres, who campaigned in a state with the only Arab-majority city in the U.S.”

“[…] at the convention, in a moment that made me gasp, Harris repeated Israeli lies about systemic rape, ignoring the real rape of Palestinian detainees by the IDF.”

“Shore writes, “The horrible truth is that some 72 million Americans voted for Trump not in spite of the fact that he’s a sadistic narcissist, but because of that. There was nothing subtle about his campaign. We cannot say we Americans did not and do not understand who he is: he has told us exactly who he is every single day. Today I feel ashamed of being American and human alike.””

That’s what is known as being wildly uninformed, then being wrong, then doubling down. Harris and the Democrats are just as ignorant and evil as their purported enemies.

“[…] is the Democratic Party a weak political organization? Is it better described as a protection racket better suited to squashing internal progressive opposition than winning popular elections?”

“Rather than offering claims essentializing this election as a referendum on the human species, what if liberals and professionals argued it was time to replace a Democratic leadership that failed catastrophically with a new alternative. There is a clear mandate for change, why not take it? Because it is inconvenient, challenges power, and easier to blame voters.”

“Today, the figures on poverty refer to the Supplemental Poverty Measure: US food insecurity increased 40% since 2021. Poverty in the US increased 67% since 2021. Build Back Better, the liberal alternative to The Green New Deal and left-populism, was killed by Democrat rent-a-villains in the Senate in 2022. Filibuster reform was dropped. Court expansion was never considered by the “institutionalist” Biden. And universal childcare, debt relief, minimum wage hikes, a public option, and job guarantees were a mirage, if ever even considered by the Democrats. Instead, in addition to assisting a genocide and sloppily leaving Afghanistan, Biden deported more people than Trump and sprinted to the right.”

“We must instead remember the sacrifice of John Brown and Frederick Douglass and the suffragettes and King’s Riverside Address—in my mind, America’s first opposition to the fast-approaching neoliberal America. It is an imperishable speech most Americans have not read, one renouncing the triplets of materialism, militarism, and racism and calling for fellowship and enduring love. Finally, we must remember Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Harry Bridges and Joe Hill, a man put up against the wall by the corrupt courts on behalf of big corporations. Before his death, his advice was necessary and simple: Don’t mourn, organize.[3]”

The article Joe Hill (Wikipedia) (born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden) writes,

“Just prior to his execution, Hill had written to Bill Haywood, an IWW leader, saying, “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize … Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.” Hunter S. Thompson asserted that Joe’s last words were “Don’t mourn. Organize.””

I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life by Kelly Lambert (The Conversation)

“Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?”

“While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case. Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination.”

While adorable, this is a disturbing parallel to human behavior.

“Neuroscientist Curt Richter also made the case for rats having hope . In a study that wouldn’t be permitted today, rats swam in glass cylinders filled with water, eventually drowning from exhaustion if they weren’t rescued. Lab rats frequently handled by humans swam for hours to days. Wild rats gave up after just a few minutes. If the wild rats were briefly rescued, however, their survival time extended dramatically, sometimes by days. It seemed that being rescued gave the rats hope and spurred them on.”

Is China Winning Hearts and Minds among Global South Students? by Yue Hou (Made in China Journal)

“[…] half a million international students in China. Although not traditionally known for international education, China has recently overtaken the United States and the United Kingdom as the top destination for anglophone students from Africa, even though the number might be declining since Covid (Breeze and Moore 2017). According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, in 2018 China welcomed 492,000 foreign students from 196 countries, about 12.8 per of whom received some form of financial support from the Chinese Government”

“Lina Benabdallah (2020) notes in her book that China has successfully positioned itself as a peer rather than a superior power, particularly in its interactions with African states. By presenting itself as a developing country on equal footing with its African counterparts, China has made power dynamics less overt, which contributes to its success in these engagements.”

Zionists in Amsterdam by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Israel as now constituted, and arguably from the start, I mean to say, is not an acceptable presence in the community of nations.”

Nor are several other countries that throw their weight around on the world stage, like the U.S. and Russia. Countries like Saudi Arabia or U.A.E., which treat women and minorities horribly should also earn opprobrium but that seems to depend on their usefulness.

The same goes for the U.S. Its people are just as indoctrinated in exceptionalism as Israelis—and their military causes a lot more suffering and death.

“The Amsterdam events were something else. They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it. This is what makes the mess in Amsterdam significant. And it is why it is important that it turned out to be, indeed, a mess. Israeli terror did badly when it put its show on the road in the Netherlands last week.”

“In this case, to praise gang rape and the slaughter of children amounts to an inverted, perverted admission that one’s psyche has been grotesquely disfigured at the hands of manipulating ideologues desperate to make a nation out of a diaspora that, as various Jews have argued over the years, ought to have remained a diaspora.”

“It was inevitable that the riot of Zionist excess the Netanyahu government set in motion a year ago last month would spill well beyond Gaza and the rest of West Asia, given the Western powers’ enthusiasm for it.”

“[…] here you see how the major media in the West are trying to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves without being seen to be climbing. This is likely to prove as far they will go in the direction of honesty.”

“Zionist Israel lost, lost big in Amsterdam. The horror it has made of itself is now plain for the world to see. The apologist pols, already hanging on for dear life in the post-democracies, lost. Mainstream media lost. Annnet de Graaf, all the Annnet de Graafs — they won. They spoke the word and spoke for many. They said, “No!””

Der „kleine Marco“ wird Außenminister? Das war’s dann wohl mit der Hoffnung auf eine friedlichere US-Außenpolitik by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die NeoCons verschwanden aus der ersten Reihe, nun übernahmen die „Transatlantiker“ das Ruder – sie waren zwar nahezu genauso interventionistisch, nur bombten sie nicht für „Gott, Öl und die Überlegenheit der USA“, sondern für „Menschenrechte, freien Marktzugang und die Überlegenheit westlicher Werte“; was oft das Gleiche meinte, sich aber moderner anhörte.”

What’s Really Going On In the South China Sea Between the Philippines and China by Tina Antonis (Antiwar.com)

“While 60 Minutes did state that “in 2016, an international tribunal at The Hague ruled the Philippines has exclusive economic rights in a 200-mile zone that includes Sabina Shoal” and that “China does not recognize the ruling”, their statements were misleading. The South China Sea Arbitration did not rule on sovereignty, and China does not recognize it because the Arbitral Tribunal lacked jurisdiction. “The Arbitral Tribunal violated the principle of state consent, exercised its jurisdiction ultra vires and rendered an award in disregard of the law. This is a grave violation of UNCLOS and general international law, Wang said.” The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is an international treaty that establishes a legal framework for all marine and maritime activities.”

The Tibet-Aid Project and Settler Colonialism in China’s Borderlands by James Leibold (Made in China Journal)

“Amid the propaganda for the thirtieth anniversary celebrations, a Han saviour complex emerges, reminiscent of settler-colonial projects throughout history. Tibetans, like Indigenous Australians or Native Americans, are portrayed as indolent residents of a resource-rich land who lack the ability to unlock its potential. That task falls to the more capable Han people. And this ‘Han man’s burden’ is one of not only mettle and self-sacrifice but also hardship, illness, and even death. Yang Miaoyan (2020) notes that Han officials involved in aiding Tibet often struggle with balancing altruism and self-interest.”

“In CCP propaganda, Tibet-Aid cadres are celebrated as a new generation of ‘constructors’ (建设者)—a noble class of pioneers, colonists, and engineers committed to transforming the physical and human ‘wasteland’ while securing the nation’s borders and bringing ‘civilisation’ to the borderlands (Cliff 2016b: 27–49). Only the strongest of constructors can endure the unique and challenging geography of the Tibetan Plateau.”

“Han settlers like Zhang Yinbo are better placed (in terms of networks, capital, language, and cultural skills) to exploit what Tom Cliff (2016a) calls the ‘lucrative chaos’ of aid-dependent frontier regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, ultimately dispossessing the very minorities they are supposedly there to aid.”

“China’s mega-infrastructure building in the TAR—roads, airports, railways, power and telecommunication lines, etcetera—serves as conduits for Han mobility, allowing colonial subjects to move more comfortably and smoothly through ‘harsh’ Tibetan spaces while imprinting the landscape with Han norms that ultimately efface Tibetan sovereignty.”

“Israel does ‘the wet work.’” by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“We witness, to make this point another way, a West Asian version of “the international rules-based order” the U.S. will continue to impose upon the world until it is forced, one or another way, to stop. Zionist extremism is useful in this cause, just as the neoconservatives once found al–Qaeda useful and the Islamic State after it. Bibi Netanyahu is effectively a surfer, riding the wave neoconservatives and their allies set in motion decades ago. Remember when he addressed a joint session of Congress , last July, for the fourth time? He got 72 ovations, 60–odd of them standing: I know, I counted. Let us understand that moment as it was. Congress was not applauding a leader. It was applauding a loyal servant. As the Biden regime departs and Trump’s arrives, it is important to be perfectly clear on this point.”

Der Westen, die BRICS, Donald Trump und das Elend der deutschen Berichterstattung by Alexander Neu (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die Äußerungen reichten von übelster Beschimpfung gegenüber dem UN-Generalsekretär über Forderungen seiner Absetzung bis hin zu Überlegungen, Deutschland solle darüber nachdenken, seine Zahlungen an die UNO zu reduzieren, einzustellen oder direkt aus der UNO auszutreten. Bei all dem Schaum vor dem Mund wurde überaus deutlich, welches Verständnis die politisierenden Medien und so mancher deutsche Politiker von der UNO und dem von ihr verkörperten UN-Völkerrecht haben.”

“So hat die NATO 1999 mit ihrem rechtswidrigen Angriffskrieg auf Jugoslawien die UNO zum ohnmächtigen Zaungast degradiert. Der Irak-Krieg der „Koalition der Willigen“ unter US-Führung hat diese Marginalisierung der UNO zementiert. Auch die regionale Regierungsorganisation EU pflegt ein eigentümliches Selbstverständnis, über den eigenen Mitgliederraum hinaus wirken zu wollen (beispielsweise das Projekt der europäischen Nachbarschaftspolitik, das trotz euphemistischer Sprache eine klare Machtpolitik darstellt).”

“Eine „gegen den Westen“ gerichtete Sichtweise lässt sich nur dann herbeihalluzinieren, wenn man die Emanzipation der BRICSplus-Staaten von dem Anspruch auf westliche und von der Praxis der westlichen Globaldominanz als „gegen den Westen gerichtet“ interpretiert; also Bündnisse und multilaterale Treffen ohne den Westen, die Abkopplung vom US-Dollar als Weltleitwährung, die Nichtbeteiligung an unilateralen westlichen Sanktionen gegen Drittstaaten sowie das Ignorieren oder das Umgehen von Sekundärsanktionen, militärische Zusammenarbeit nichtwestlicher Staaten etc.”

“Wenn diese abstruse Sichtweise tatsächlich vorherrscht, ja politikbestimmend in Berlin, Paris, Brüssel und Washington sein sollte, dann wird der bereits konfliktbeladende Weg zu einer ohnehin unvermeidlichen multipolaren Weltordnung möglicherweise noch viel Blut und Eisen zeitigen.”

Notes of a Non-Voter by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“America is now what it has been for a long time. To suggest there was some great shift this week is simply to demonstrate the extent to which one has stood at a distance from what America is. To assert that Trumpism has been normalized is to tell roughly 75 million Americans, not quite 51% of those who voted, that they have not heretofore been normal, and that they will now undergo a process of normalization. This normalization is not, by plain implication, a desirable thing. America would be better off if these people remained not-normal.”

“This is simply the sound of people who do not know what America is made of, have not been interested for some time in understanding what America is made of, or maybe they know what America is made of and wish to pretend it is something else but claim the right to govern it as it is because they are made of superior stuff.”

“Complacency, arrogance, hubris, a certain kind of mistreatment, the political blackmail of “lesser evilism”: These things are bound to provoke a desire to see the complacent and arrogant knocked off their mounts.”

“They lost interest in the working class, especially the Southern working class, because they had no relationship with it. They lost interest in Black Americans, too, but figured they would keep the Black vote because there was no alternative. At the other end of this line you get Biden’s remark, in May 2020, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

“I will miss Biden’s artless vulgarity, I have to say. On the other hand, a variant is likely to be in plentiful supply these next four years.”

“In this connection, forcing a candidate as plainly unqualified and incapable as Harris—Joy? Vibes? Say what?—was simply too extravagantly complacent—an insult too far, let’s say. And it is injury atop insult, in my estimation, to display shock on discovering that working Americans—Yes, Virginia, there is a working class in America—identify as working class and are not much taken up with the pronoun wars and all the other signifiers of identity politics.”

“Can the Democrats recover themselves? This is the question now. But it is not so interesting because of course they can. Will they is the better line of inquiry. I don’t see this. What just happened has too much to do with character, and those running the Democratic Party have too little. A recovery, a new direction: This would require an acceptance of failure and humiliation that seems to me beyond these people. There are not enough Mack trucks in America to haul away their hubris.”

“On the eastern side of the Atlantic, Keir Starmer poses as a Labourite and turns the Labour Party into something resembling the Tories’ centrist factions; Emmanuel Macron loses elections, refuses to name a premier for two months, then appoints a neoliberal at odds with the parties that won the elections; the Scholz government in Germany—if it survives, which is unlikely as of this week—proposes to keep ascendant parties out of government by outlawing them. The approval ratings in all these cases could scarcely be lower. But this is what we call the liberal order these days.

“The American case resembles Germany’s: Democracy must be defended against those who win the electorate’s support.”

“At the most profound level of their contempt, liberals cannot abide Trump because they recognize in him what they cannot admit they are—intolerant, given to violence, ungenerous toward others, incapable of complexity and prone to simplification, and so on. They see in Trump an American, and they cannot bear it. He is one of them and they, so to say, have Trump within themselves.”

“The imperium that now blights the world is nothing if not a bipartisan affair.”

“the Western powers covertly sabotaged Minsk I and II, so betraying the Russians. I don’t see either Paris or Berlin, to say nothing of Washington or London, repairing this breach of trust. Any thought of a Minsk III is mere fantasy.

“This suggests strongly that negotiations, when they begin, are most likely to proceed in some large measure on Russia’s terms. Don’t give me a lot of infantile junk to the effect that Trump or J.D. Vance, as Kremlin stooges, are talking about a deal that matches Moscow’s terms. But exactly. I do not see how anyone with a clear-eyed view of the Ukraine mess can proceed any differently. The Western powers have made a 30–year mess of their relations with post–Soviet Russia, and the game is up.

“It will be bitter indeed for those who have overseen Ukraine’s ruination to accept the consequences of their indifference and deceit, but however long this takes, they will eventually be forced to do so.”

“Blinken and Sullivan had this nonsensical notion of competition in some spheres, cooperation in others, and confrontation in yet others. Beijing never took this seriously.”

“I have ever since argued that Trump’s White House was the most opaque in my lifetime. Understanding it required one to distinguish between what Trump did or proposed and what those around him did to undermine him when his plans ran counter to the Deep State’s interests. I mentioned the North Korea talks. Bolton’s subterfuge in Hanoi is a singularly graphic case in point.”

Democrats Welcome the Fascist by Ted Rall

“Biden and then Harris, her surrogates and the liberal press called Trump a fascist, a wannabe dictator and an authoritarian. They warned that, if he won, there might never again be another election. They said he’d send his enemies to camps. The choice on the ballot, they said, came down to Harris or tyranny. Even if he lost, liberals worried, Trump might launch a violent coup.

“If Little Adolf is planning to kill Anne Frank all over again, if he’s going to tear down Old Glory and run the swastika flag up the pole and force us all to salute, why are you Vichy Democrats inviting him over for tea? Now that the ravening wolf is chomping at the door, why is the president who called Trump’s supporters “garbage” and accused Trump of speaking “Hitler’s language” pledging to do “everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated?”

“When it’s 1933 all over again, does it not follow that morality and historical precedent require you to launch a fierce proto-AntiFa Resistance, to stop the son-of-a-bitch by any means necessary—even by use of force?

“If Trump is a fascist—like you said over and over—why are you attending his swearing-in? If you believe he’s plotting to suspend the Constitution and jail his enemies of which you are now one, why are you exchanging transition team liaisons rather than flooring it up I-87 to Canada?

“The uncomfortable logical conclusion is that Democrats are liars.

“When Harris called Trump a fascist, she didn’t believe it. Not really. That, or she did believe it and she doesn’t mind enabling and validating a fascist regime or living under one. One of these things has to be true.”

When he wrote “uncomfortable”, I’m sure he meant to write “obvious”.

“One underappreciated side effect of 2024 is that voters of the future will be less likely to listen the next time they’re warned that a candidate represents a grave threat to their freedoms.”

A Second Trump Term is the Beginning of the End and That’s Not All Bad by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“The woman had all the warmed-over charm of a Rust Belt ghost mall renovated into a cut-rate casino. She had virtually no ideology to speak of other than being just slightly more animated than the dead man from Delaware that the Democrats tried shove down our throats until July.”

“The Democrats made the rise and return of Donald Trump inevitable the same way that every centrist bourgeoise liberal government has made fascism inevitable going back to Weimar Germany; by tainting anything to the left of Genghis Khan with their own clueless venality while transforming the nation state into a juggernaut. The Democrats have always been frauds, but their scam began to get sickeningly obvious under the reign of the Clintons when every crony capitalist atrocity from outsourcing the middle class to expanding NATO to the Kremlin gates got stamped “liberal.””

It often physically hurts to witness the ignorance (Reddit)

Peru is U.S. backyard, while Ukraine is none of Russia's business

“American exceptionalism is a mental disorder cultivated by the ruling class to keep themselves in power.”

The Democratic Senate Must Hold These Public Hearings Before January 3, 2025 by Ralph Nader (CounterPunch)

Oh, Ralph, you’re putting your faith in the wrong people. They aren’t going to do any of that. They’re not going to raise the federal minimum wage. They’ve had 12 of the last 16 years to do it and they never gave enough of a shit.

You know what they are going to do, Ralph? They said that they’re going on vacation earlier this year, to lick their wounds and recharge in their mansions. They don’t care, Ralph. They never did.

Put your political energy elsewhere.

Scott Ritter : Biden Suddenly Relevant as He Begins WWIII. by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

This was excellent analysis. At 26:00, they showed 2.5 minutes of a Nov. 18th statement by President-elect Donald Trump where he says that the greatest danger to the world is not Russia, but … wait for it … the U.S. He seemed absolutely not demented at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp0q6KB_Dcs by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

At about 20:00,

“The only thing that will change [the U.S.] is a punch in the nose. You know, in some respects, the United States is a lot like Mike Tyson, going into the ring […] the Mike Tyson that fought a few nights ago yeah. The United States still thinks that we’re the Mike Tyson 30 years ago, okay? All lean and buff. And [Tyson] got beat by a younger man that a lot of people didn’t think it could happen. Well that’s going to happen to the United States. The United States keeps underestimating Russia. We keep underestimating Iran. We keep underestimating China. And we keep overestimating our own ability to go out and make things happen because we’re again this indispensable country. And people ask me, ‘why do you hate America?’ I don’t hate America. I just wish we’d mind our own business.”

Who Is Authorizing Biden’s Nuclear Brinkmanship While The President’s Brain Is Missing? by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“People who say you get more conservative as you get older are just projecting their own personal shittiness onto everyone else. I get more radicalized by the year. It’s not even about older people having more wealth to protect; I’m making more money than ever before and I still want to obliterate capitalism.

“You get more conservative and right wing as you get older if you fail to grow as you age. It just means you’ve been wasting your time on this planet and allowing yourself to become intellectually lazy and morally stagnant.”

Feel the Love by Ted Rall

“Many swing voters who opted for Donald Trump told pollsters that they felt that Democratic coastal elites looked down upon them and that they were reacting against the feeling that they were viewed with contempt. After the election, as if to confirm their suspicions, Democrats repeatedly said that people who voted Republican were stupid.”

Today In Imperial Recklessness And Insanity by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Tom Cotton, who proclaimed that the US would invade The Hague if the ICC tries to enforce its arrest warrants.

““The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic,” Cotton said. “Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.”

“This is as psychotic a public statement as anything you’ll see from the most far-right extremists in the Knesset. The United States is run by demented zealots with nukes, just like Israel.

“The “Hague Invasion Act”, formally known as the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, is a US federal law passed during the warmongering frenzy of the early Bush administration which authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.”

“That “or allied personnel” bit is why Cotton is able to cite this law in reference to an arrest warrant for Israelis.”

“Russia hits Ukraine with a new type of hypersonic missile, which Putin went out of his way to mention could easily have been equipped with a nuclear warhead. This attack was a warning to Ukraine for using long-range missiles supplied by the US and UK to strike targets inside Russia, and occurs as Moscow revises its nuclear doctrine lowering the threshold for when nuclear weapons may be used.”

The point is that Russia doesn’t have to equip it with a nuclear payload to make it incredibly destructive. As detailed in the videos Scott Ritter : Russia fires first ICBM in combat for the first time in history!!! by Judge Napolitano (YouTube) and Vijay Prashad – US-UK cruise missiles fired at Russia, ICC warrant for Netanyahu & Trump’s victory by acTVism Munich (YouTube), Russia could have been using these missiles the entire time but—although much has been destroyed—its interest has always been in achieving its military and political aims with as little destruction as possible. It flattened a factory with conventional but incredibly powerful munitions. It worked. They have demonstrated that they could do the same to anywhere military installation closer to Kiev, any in Germany or even France and Great Britain. The escalation continues. The bluff has been called.

The Emperor Has No Brains by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Our just-commenced sixty days of nuclear chicken appear also to include this week’s cutting of an undersea Internet cable linking Finland and Germany, an act German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius called “sabotage.” Another Baltic Sea cable linking Lithuania and Sweden was cut the day before. CNN’s Jim Sciutto said American officials are “extremely concerned” about both incidents, though the Pentagon insisted, “We are not at war with Russia.” Finally there was today, Thursday, when the Ukrainian Air Force released word that Russia fired the first ICBM in the history of war, from the Astrakhan region of Russia to the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.”

“In the last 30-40 years the major political controversies in America have mostly been marked by the same unease over a leadership class that’s seemed more interested in expanding imperial influence than governing a country. From NAFTA to the Battle in Seattle to Iraq to Trump’s election (a mirror of the Brexit/Leave movement) to Covid and this new pair of dangerous and unpopular wars, the schism kept widening. The battle lines have been between those who want elected officials focused at home, and those more interested in making sure America remains a world leader at the helm of international institutions like NATO, the UN, the IMF, the WTO and WHO, etc.

“Who makes up that latter group? TED talkers, Davos visitors, CEOs, politicians, Hollywood stars. The rich, basically. Wealth is a nation unto itself now, and the major problem of the last 25-30 years in America is how easy it’s become for people with money to live in archipelagoes where national problems don’t reach. […] The Hamptons barely noticed inflation because residents were too busy enjoying record volumes of takeover deals during the pandemic. For the “able to work remotely” set, lockdowns meant more time with the kids and many of those people never returned to work at all, allowing the high-earners who did go back to enjoy shorter commute times, and so on.”

“The last election was an obvious referendum on Wealthistan residents. At some point America’s rich decided noblesse oblige was a net minus and seceded both from the cities Trump called “shitholes” (exodus of the affluent exploded after the pandemic) and the rural areas where “white rage” was said to live. They settled in dots of exclusive suburbs that use creative zoning to keep multi-family housing out and single-family prices high. They then planted “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on lawns and sent their kids to preposterously expensive resort-like colleges, with giant natatoriums and jargon-packed goofball curricula designed to further alienate offspring from the rabble. As a Victorian gentleman had more in common with a Tsarist prince than a Yorkshire miner, Americans from this bubble feel more at home in Geneva than Tulsa or Deland.”

“With the election over, Wealthistan culture is finally free of any obligation to pretend to care about mass appeal. Now it can be the exclusivity religion it always was. Members believed in moving power from nations to corporations and international bureaucracies like the Fed/ECB, the G20, the WTO, the Five Eyes, the EU, while mostly paying lip service to national governance. Now they can stop bothering with the lip service. Biden’s blank stare in this sense is a powerful symbol. They kept this helpless mannequin in office as a message, as an expression of contempt for our desire to be kept in the loop. You want to know what’s going on? Go ahead, ask Joe. Or check the sky for missiles. Also, fuck you! And Happy Indigenous Conquest Day.”

Journalism & Media

How America’s Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

To no-one’s surprise at all, the side that keeps losing elections that they absolutely thought that they would handily win are lying to themselves, even inside their own echo chamber. Golgafrinchans to the core. Useless. You can’t get anything done that way.

Economy & Finance

The Other Great Depression by Kristen Ghodsee (Z Network)

“Of course, the demolition of the centrally planned economy also ended employment guarantees and a society which endeavoured to provide a social safety net that met the basic needs of all, but citizens were assured that all would be fine. In a televised address on 1 July 1990 – the day that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic unified their currencies – German chancellor Helmut Kohl promised that ‘No one will be worse off than before, and many will be better off’.”

“Using data from a variety of official sources for 27 post-communist countries, Mitchell A Orenstein and I have shown that during the first ten years of the transition from socialism to capitalism, 47% of the population of Eastern Europe and Eurasia fell below the established World Bank poverty line for this region: $5.50 per day. By 1999, roughly 191 million men, women and children suffered severe material deprivation. The overall poverty rate remained higher than 1990 levels until 2005, when the global financial crisis slammed the region with a second round of pain. Between 1990 and 1998, the per capita GDP in the successor republics of the Soviet Union sank by nearly 7% per year.

“One might doubt the quality of the statistical data from the Soviet bloc countries prior to 1990, but when populations are living through severe economic hardship, social scientists can look to evidence about sudden changes in fertility, mortality, and morbidity as well as profound shifts in life choices and social attitudes. In 2017, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development found that children born in the early 1990s are on average one centimetre shorter than the birth cohorts before or after them, reflecting the physical effects of micronutrient deficiencies and psycho-social stress. The height differential is similar to what researchers find for babies birthed in war zones.”

“Millions of people in the former eastern bloc found themselves thrown out of work or pushed into early retirement as liberalised prices, macroeconomic instability and hyperinflation devoured their life savings. Ordinary people observed with horror the rise in crime and corruption as former party elites morphed overnight into a new predatory class of oligarchs. Hitherto unknown levels of inequality divided societies into a small handful of super-rich haves and vast armies of destitute have-nots.”

“Not only did people in Eastern Europe suffer the worse economic calamity since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but they were told that it wasn’t happening. A textbook case of gaslighting.”

“In his 2023 book The East: A West German Invention, Dirk Oschmann explains that despite the many good things they experienced after reunification, many East Germans still look back today at ‘a 30-year history of individual and collective defamation, discrediting, ridicule and ice-cold exclusion’.”

“[…] when you create wastelands known to produce monsters, you should not feign surprise when those monsters appear.”

Science & Nature

Testing A Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Consciousness-Spawning Theory Of Reality by Andréa Morris (Forbes)

“The measurement problem has led many physicists and philosophers to believe that a conscious observer is somehow acting on quantum particles. One proposal is that a conscious observer causes collapse. Another theory is that a conscious observer causes the universe to split apart, spiraling out alternate realities. These worlds would be parallel yet inaccessible to us so that we only ever see things in one single state in whatever possible world we’re stuck in.”

Great description of the basic outlines.

“Penrose demurs. He politely but unequivocally waves off the idea that a conscious observer collapses wave functions by looking at them. Likewise, he dismisses the view that a conscious observer spins off near infinite universes with a glance. “That’s making consciousness do the job of collapsing the wave function without having a theory of consciousness,” says Penrose. “I’m turning it around and I’m saying whatever consciousness is, for quite different reasons, I think it does depend on the collapse of the wave function. On that physical process.””

“According to Penrose, gravity-induced wave function collapse involves a process that jumps the particle back in time, retroactively killing off possible quantum realities in under a second. This reality-annihilating backward-jumping makes it as though only one, fixed classical reality ever existed.”

“In his 1989 pioneering book on consciousness, Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose first proposed the idea of a retroactive effect. In the book, he cautions that we may err when applying the physics of time to our conscious perception of time. He writes that consciousness is the only phenomenon in modern physics that requires time to flow at all.”

“Retrocausality is the proposal that a measurement in the present can change a particle’s properties even before the measurement was made. “You need this distinction between the two realities,” says Penrose. Classical reality and quantum reality are fundamentally different realities. He adds that even the notion of before and after may be incoherent in quantum reality.”

““The argument is that there would be something in quantum superposition between this action and that action—somewhere at the earlier stage in the brain when these two procedures are in quantum superposition,” says Penrose. “So the quantum state would contain both those alternatives. And then, when you decide to do one, it retroactively goes back.” Jumping back and overwriting multiple quantum choices makes it as if there was only ever one, fixed classical choice. “Conscious experience happens in quantum reality. And classical reality is retroactively determined by that,” says Penrose.”

“Penrose recalls giving a talk at the California Institute of Technology on his heterodox ideas in cosmology. Physicist Richard Feynman attended so he could heckle Penrose. Over the course of the talk, Feynman grew intrigued by what Penrose was saying. When another physicist heckled Penrose, Feynman turned in his seat and told the heckler to shut it and let the man speak.”

“He suggests that the only other good alternative might be a theory that no one has thought of yet. As things stand, he feels that both classical physics and quantum mechanics are extraordinary theories. Both have proven to be extraordinarily precise when tested. So Penrose is writing a chapter in modern physics that he hopes will unite them:”

“[…] remove the Libet clock and there’s nothing in physics preventing retro-activity from jumping even further back in time. So the question remains—if backward time jumps are happening, would it impact how we observe reality? And would that impact psychology studies in unexpected ways?”

“An underlying assumption in perceptual science is that the brain uses sensory input to create mental representations of the world that correspond to what’s actually happening out there. This is referred to as veridical representations —mental pictures that align with reality. Studies like Buehner’s would suggest that either assumptions about the brain might be wrong, or assumptions about reality.”

“Hoffman rejects Orch OR’s depiction of reality along with every other physical theory. He thinks the long-standing barrier between classical physics and quantum mechanics is because we’re assuming space and time are fundamental. “Spacetime—we thought it was the final reality. It turns out it’s just a trivial data structure and there are much deeper and much more fascinating structures entirely outside of spacetime,” says Hoffman.”

“[…] suggests that the underlying assumptions in perceptual science, neurophysiology and psychology are wrong—the brain does not use sensory input to create accurate mental representations of reality. Hoffman ran simulations using evolutionary game theory and observed that evolution selects for fitness over truth. According to Hoffman, we perceive a completely false reality that is far more practical for survival, useful illusions that lead us far afield the truth-seeking path.”

“The alternative theory Hoffman proposes is that conscious entities are fundamental entities that exist beyond spacetime. These entities are us. And we are also avatars of a single conscious entity that Hoffman calls the “conscious aleph infinity agent.” We interact with each other via an interface whose format is spacetime. For Hoffman, what’s really going on outside of conscious awareness is so complex, involving non-spacetime dimensions numbering in the trillions or quadrillions. Our simple human minds created an ultra-compressed version of reality stripped of details that would break our brains—if we actually thought with our brains, which Hoffman sees no convincing evidence for.”

Science is in trouble and it worries me. by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

From the comments:

“In the mid 1960's I heard my favorite science joke…”

“If you make a pile out of copies of published physics papers eventually the rate of growth of the pile will exceed the speed of light. This however is not a problem as no information is conveyed.”

They were already complaining about bullshit research in the 1960s.

Art & Literature

[OVERRIDE] by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“There are, I mean, deceptions and deceptions. When Denis Vrain-Lucas defended himself in a Paris court for having forged some letters not only of René Descartes and Isaac Newton, with which he probably could have got away, but also, later, of Vercingetorix and even Jesus Christ, he argued that the judge and jury should be grateful to him, for having taken what is in the end a rather monotonous history of humanity, and made it more interesting. Vrain-Lucas was just rendering a service, he claimed. We may dispute this specific claim, but what we cannot deny is his incredible ingenuity and creative power. If he did something “wrong”, this has much more to do with the social institutions —the rare-document auctions and the financial transactions that came with these, in particular— than with the “mystifications”, to speak in the language of his contemporaries, that Vrain-Lucas devised.”

This is often an important point to remember: grievances are often based on superficial interpretations based on society as it is rather than as an eternally valid moral plaint. If someone were to take away your job, freeing you to do something else, you would mind much less if the salary you’d earned from the job you hate weren’t the only thing keeping you and your family from freezing and starving in the street. You don’t want the job, you want the security. Similarly, this Vrain-Lucas’s nearly impossibly intricately rendered imitative homages cum performance art would be interpreted as such were it not for the demands of capitalists and rent-seekers, were it not for the requirement that anyone producing art be able to eke out a living by its residual proceeds and therefore the requirement that they assail others producing art in order to protect this income stream. Were it not for sports being a channel to a lucrative career or, at least, a way of sustaining oneself in a world without a social safety net, far fewer people would care if someone were to change their gender and then start sweeping all of the events. And so on.

“You see, the institution I happen to be navigating is none other than the AI-enhanced internet, rife with disinformation, with words of utterly indeterminate authorship, many of which have no genetic link to human thought at all. How will all this transform the norms and conventions of authorship? More interestingly to me, how will all this transform the metaphysics of authorship? While any conjectures here would surely be premature, what is certain is that nothing of what until recently we thought was fixed for all time, in the practices of reading and writing between the era of the print revolution at the one end and the AI revolution at the other, is going to have any relevance at all in the new world, which we have in fact already entered.”

“[…] the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s readers refused to take his word for it when, after perfecting the genre of the epistolary novel, he had repeatedly to insist that his Julie nor her lover never had any flesh-and-blood life to them at all; or indeed, when the “First Bird” of legend flew right into the bunch of grapes Zeuxis had included in his trompe-l’oeil fresco. (Wikipedia)”

“Miguel de Cervantes makes a dazzling metafictional move in Part II of Don Quixote, when he elevates the deceptive powers of El Cid, who now not only makes our protagonist go astray in pursuit of illusions, but also tricks the reader into taking as true what is entirely made up, to wit, Part I of Don Quixote itself.”

I’ve often thought how interesting writing is often abstract, and how utterly inaccessible it is to non-native speakers.

“In the course of writing the Work I came to notice how awfully weakly most readers of internet-specific texts are able to focus their attention, or really to make any effort at all to work through texts that do not immediately and boldly declare what they are trying to do in a way so simple that AI is sure to understand them, and to channel them accordingly down the right algorithmic pathways.”

“To be perfectly blunt, in writing the Work I was given a painful illustration of the inability of many readers to understand anything in a text beyond its “degré zéro” meaning. This was for me a fleeting glimpse into the lives most people pass today in happy ignorance of polyglossy and dialectic, with grossly underdeveloped hermeneutical faculties, and ant-like attention spans.”

Bro. Tell us how you really feel. It’s fair, though.

“I resolved, in the following chapter, to “heighten the contradictions”, as they say, and to make it clear to anyone who could still fog a mirror that what they were witnessing was not entirely as it appeared. I did this by means of an absolutely fantastical “crisis scene”, in which the Editorial Board, led by Hélène Le Goff, effectively staged a putsch, and went ahead and endorsed Kamala Harris over my own protests.”

“Regrettably, most of my American audience, so irremediably infected by the toxins of their political culture, which have by now spread into all domains of their life and effectively stunted any hope for the truly autonomous play of the imagination among them, took this chapter as an on-the-level statement of political opinions. Whose political opinions, exactly? Mine, or Hélène’s? No one could say, but at least this piece served to get a good number of people hooked on the developing story, and eager to see what was to come next.”

“Again, if I can return to the set-theoretical worries I’ve introduced, which I might also have rendered simply in terms of the semantic paradox of the man from Crete who claimed that all Cretans are liars, we are faced, undeniably, with a puzzle: if the present piece is part of the Work, then you have no reason to take as true the claim that the Work exists at all, or that it is “hereby formally and legally closed”, etc. But if it is not part of the Work , then you likewise cannot be expected to take the present piece into consideration when you read the chapters purportedly constituting the Work , as any work of artistic or literary creation must, we may all agree, be self-contained. If it requires something outside of itself to confirm its status, then that external thing ipso facto becomes a proper part of it. Thus the present piece both must, and cannot be, included in the work it claims both exhaustively to define and formally to close.”

“In all our eons of storytelling, legends abound of those among us who have, on occasion, found themselves unable to track with any precision what parts of their tales arise from the bare reality of the entities and events that imprinted on their memories, and what parts are superadded by their own irrepressible narrative natures. The result, at least among our most lucid, is a resigned sigh, an indifference some say is born of the wisdom accrued with age (for even angels age), regarding the supposed boundary between the real and the made-up.”

“[…] there is the tale of Morey Katz (1889-1961), a relatively unknown Borscht Belt comedian who had once mentored Soupy Sales. In the late 1940s Katz developed a routine that was supposedly inspired by a chapter of Guillaume de Nîmes’s 1549 book, Characteres quaedam hominum, morum temporumque. The chapter is entitled “An Socrates Iudaeus sit?” [“Whether Socrates Is Jewish”], which serves as the launching point for Katz’s long and elaborate imitation of that philosopher as someone who not only practiced dialectic in the agora, but did so with an unmistakably Yiddish-inflected “schtick”. For greatest effect, Katz would often bring the Characteres quaedam on stage with him, and invite his audience members to come up and inspect its pages. The kicker? Guillaume de Nîmes never existed at all, and Morey Katz was a Voynich-level expert forger, who fabricated this entire volume from scratch, having mastered Latin, learned everything there is to know about Renaissance vellum, parchment, ink, procured for himself all these period-appropriate materials, and invented, down to every last detail, a work of Renaissance Latin literature whose inauthenticity could only be proven with the arrival of carbon-dating techniques decades later. Why did Katz go to all this trouble? Some say it was to parody, after a manner, that other famous forgery of some years before, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Others say it was just his perfectionism as a comedian at work: he needed that book to make the joke land better.”

What are some of the worst things the US has done historically and in recent memory that we should never forget? (Reddit)

The top comment recommended the following books:

• The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
• Killing Hope by William Blum
• Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad
• Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galleano
• The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot
• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

Others recommended Michael Parenti’s lectures. This one is brilliant.

Michael Parenti lecture (1986) by James Thompson (YouTube)

Although the details have changed, the analysis from almost 40 year ago still holds true. Christ, we’re still fighting Russia. It’s insane.

“Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.”

“These countries are NOT underdeveloped; they’re overEXPLOITED.”

“Margaret Thatcher… who as we all know is Reagan in drag.”

“If communists are so hungry for power, why do they side with the powerless?”

“If it [war] was in our nature, why do they have to draft us?”

His answer to the last question:

“Do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read? I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine Power and the Powerless to my father. I gave him a copy of the book. He opened it up, looked at the dedication—he had only gone to the seventh grade; he was a son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian—and he opens the book and he starts looking through it and he gets misty-eyed—very misty-eyed—and I thought it because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up at me and says, ‘I can’t read this kid.‘ I said, ‘that’s okay, Dad; neither can the students.‘ I mean, don’t worry about that. I wrote it for you. I mean, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. You know, it’s very complicated book, an academic book. He says, yeah, I can’t read this book. And he just … and the defeat, the defeat that that man felt … that’s what illiteracy is about. That’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why, in Nicaragua, you got people walking proud now for the first time. They were animals before. They weren’t allowed to read. They weren’t taught to read. So, you compare a country to what it came from, with all its imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection … the day after the revolution, they get up and say, ‘are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they going to be allowed to have their newspapers and their radio programs? Are they going to be able to keep all their farms?’ The passion that some of our liberals feel the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascist, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who were dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now, the revolution has got to be perfect. It’s got to be flawless. Well, that isn’t my criteria. My criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read, what happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger. And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support, not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger … that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition. So, that would be that my answer to you: let’s not judge these countries by some abstract model, but where they’re coming from. So you can judge a socialist country one by what it’s replacing; you can judge it by comparing it to U.S. society.”

Someone dumped the link List of Atrocities committed by US authorities, which is 89 pages of a running log of U.S.-led atrocities around the world, separated into global regions.

If you want to understand how it can be that so many people can condone horrific behavior, you can’t do better than Noam Chomsky. Start with slimmer, more accessible volumes. Don’t jump right to Manufacturing Consent because it is pretty dense with a lot of detail.

I thought The Withdrawal (Wikipedia), which he wrote in 2022 with the also-excellent Vijay Prashad was really, really good.

I’ve also read:

• 2002: Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1999)
• 2002: Manufacturing Consent (1988)
• 2003: Rogue States (2000)
• 2004: Understanding Power: the Indispensible Chomsky (2002)
• 2008: Failed States (2006)
• 2011: Profits Over People (1999)
• 2011: 9-11 (2001, 2002)

Still others recommended the podcast Blowback, to which I responded:

All four seasons are amazing. I highly recommend listening while walking or something where you’re not distracted by anything else. These are podcasts for listening to every word. (I made the mistake of listening while doing other stuff and I realized I’d missed way too much detail, so I had to re-listen to some of them).

Still another recommended the TrueAnon podcast, to which I responded:

This is truly a gem of a podcast. They discuss deep topics but it’s also fun and irreverent. Their pre- and post-election coverage for 2024 was and is top-notch. They do a lot of deep dives into historical topics, which is really all that matters for understanding the present.

I also recommended The Power of Nightmares (Wikipedia) series by Adam Curtis was excellent. Most of his stuff is very informative and thought-provoking. His series on Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (Wikipedia) from 2022 provides a tremendous amount of historical perspective on Russia.

I’m reading The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Wikipedia) right now. It document the brutality of European and then American colonialism (so far; I’m not done reading it). Colonialism much less classic warfare and more a form of ecological warfare, in which the enemy is eliminated by destroying its ability to survive, i.e., feed itself.

For example, there was the time Americans destroyed every last buffalo in order to starve Native Americans. The article Historical photo of mountain of bison skulls documents animals on the brink of extinction (The Conversation) goes into some detail.

I’m not sure I need any more examples. We haven’t really changed much since then.

It’s better to know than to not know.

Many inculcate a deliberate ignorance because it benefits them not to know.

They know, but they prefer plausible deniability.

We need more people who don’t do that.

We need more people with principles.

Good luck.

Don’t get discouraged.

Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great? by John Horgan

“It’s a testament to Wallace’s talent that I keep second-guessing my ranking of him below Tolstoy and Joyce. Maybe Wallace isn’t just dumping his big brain’s contents on us. Maybe he knows exactly what’s he’s doing. Maybe he wants us to scrutinize his frantic style rather than looking past it. He’s a painter forcing you to study his brushstrokes, so you don’t forget that art is just art, it’s not reality, whatever that is.

“Maybe Wallace’s hysterical take on existence is more on target than that of the wise old grandmasters. I mean, look around you now. Wallace notices shit that slips past the rest of us, or from which we look away. Maybe that was the upside of his chronic depression, he can’t look away, he’s compelled to pay attention.”

“[…] this novel rubs your face in reality’s cruelty, absurdity, pain. It tells you how hard it is—not impossible, maybe, but really, really hard–to find love, a love that isn’t just another addiction. Wallace beats us over the head with this message because we are sentimental creatures, who resist hard truths.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

BlueSky, Twitter, Celebrity, and the Is/Ought Distinction by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“I guess all I’m getting at today is the banal reality that all kinds of people are now living their lives with an eye towards their adoring public. Twitter seems like a nightmare to me now, especially if you have left-leaning political impulses, and surely that’s partially powering the escape to BlueSky. But another fundamental issue is this endless tension in the desire to be seen and the desire to control how one is seen, the fight to determine how you are perceived by others. In an online world, it’s impossible to ever achieve absolute control, and frankly juvenile to demand it − and yet the alternative, to consciously leave public attention behind and receive no publicity at all, appears to be unthinkable to many.”

LLMs & AI

AI Scaling Hits Wall, Rumours Say. How Serious is it? by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

This is a short and interesting summary of the current situation. Sutskever’s interview snippet is laughable. Sam Altman is a conman. Marc Andreessen is a conman.

Her analogy to weight-lifting at the end was good. The AI people act like exponential growth is a given, as we would have to actively work against it to keep it from happening, as if exponential growth were the natural order of things. But there are so many things in our world that do not grow exponentially. She mentions going to the gym. There is a point of diminishing returns

Stop listening to people whose financial interests are directly contingent on you believing them. Assume that they are scamming you and let verifiable data prove otherwise.

Programming

Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle by David Lattimore (GitHub)

“Debug information tends to be large and linking it slows down linking quite considerably. If you’re like many developers and you generally use println for debugging and rarely or never use an actual debugger, then this is wasted time.”

Wie bitte?!?

Jesus wept. That’s all I have from this post. I think it says enough.

What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres by Hazel Bachrach (ChallahScript)

“It might make sense to instead calculate this amount on a regular interval or whenever the number of hours worked changes. This data can be denormalized within the Postgres database or outside of it (e.g. in a caching layer like Redis). Note that there is almost always a cost to denormalized data, whether that’s possible data inconsistency or increased write complexity.”

She’s not heard of views?

“There’s a big list aptly titled “Don’t do this” on the official Postgres wiki. You may not understand all of the things listed. That’s fine! If you don’t understand, then you probably won’t make the mistake.”

That’s some wishful thinking right there. That’s not been my experience at all. If the abstraction is leaky at all, the foot-gun can be very painful.

“As far as I know, [case-insensitive query text] is not specific to Postgres.”

Unfortunately, no. Setting a database to be case-sensitive in Microsoft Sql Server makes both the data and the query text case-sensitive.

“To make Postgres able to do the basic character-by-character sorting that you need for this sort of prefix matching or pattern matching in general, you need to give it a different “operator class” when defining the index: CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY ON directories (path text_pattern_ops);”

“Postgres has both JSON values (where the text is stored as text) and JSONB where the JSON is converted to an efficient binary format. JSONB has a number of advantages (e.g. you can index it!) to the point where one can consider the JSON format to just be for special cases (in my experience, anyway).”

Center the bottom row when using grid auto-fit by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

This is a bit of a longer video but it takes time to lay out the problem and why the solution works and is probably the minimum amount of code for it. There seems to be a bit of room for variables to reduce the amount of calculation.

AI Building Blocks − A new, unified AI layer by Steve Sanderson (YouTube)

The API looks very approachable and easy to use. I wish that they would stop papering over the inaccurate responses, though. At about 17;45, he writes that the additional pair of socks has been added to the cart and that it’s “gone up in the way that it should.” Except that’s not what they response showed. The response showed the total number of pairs of socks in the cart, yes, but it showed the price only for the additional pair of socks that was added in the last step. It noted that this was the case but it was quite confusing to show the total number of items in the cart and then write “the total price for that pair is”, which would confuse a reader into thinking that it was the total for the cart, unless they read carefully. Using language like “total” for a single item is confusing, if not misleading.

Also, Sanderson had GitHub Copilot running during the entire demo and he pretty much completely ignored all of its suggestions, choosing instead to copy/paste pre-written snippets. This is fine, of course! It’s just that, … why didn’t he just turn off the annoying prompts with completely irrelevant information?

Discover the Latest GitHub Copilot Features for .NET Developers in Visual Studio (YouTube)

I suppose this is future of programming? Asking an AI to add usings because you have no idea what they are and don’t know that the IDE could just add them for you automatically. She described everything as “awesome” and that the interaction loop was super-intuitive and easy to use, as she typed out natural-language command after natural-language command to try to get the machine to do what a programmer could have done in seconds. I suppose if you want to program without knowing anything about the technologies, then this is probably going to get you a little bit further. Maybe. It was pretty painful to watch, though, like someone claiming that they were building a house by throwing wood at bags of cement.

What's new in .NET Aspire by Damian Edwards and Maddy Montaquila (YouTube)

This addition to the .NET ecosystem continues to impress me.

Sports

Raw Run || Race Against the Storm by Josh Neuman (YouTube)

This seems to be somewhere in Italy. He picked a day when there was almost no traffic. He is going incredibly quickly for just being attached to a skateboard with sneakers…but he also seems to be attached to it.

124 km/h Inside of a Tunnel by Diego Poncelet (YouTube)

This video is of a different guy (who’s at least wearing leathers) and it’s somewhere in Switzerland, but I didn’t recognize the pass.