Links and Notes for February 7th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Environment & Climate Change
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

The Empire Self-Destructs by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.”

“Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.”

“Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.”

“As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”

““The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.””

“I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.”

“[…] the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.”

“The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.”

The idiocracy commits suicidess by getting high on its own supply.

“Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.”

This is not unlikely.

“The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.”

Oh, Chris. I can’t help loving every one of your eulogies for our age.

Let Us Find Our Lost Diamonds by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“Reality is ugly. It is far easier to indulge in fantasy. Trump is the magician that wields that fantasy. Everything has deteriorated –not because of the attack on trade unions, the austerity that followed, or the rise of the tech bros whose share of the social surplus is outrageous and who have been on tax strike for decades. Trump’s fantasy is incoherent. How else could Trump have elevated Elon Musk, the symbol of the decline, to be the agent of transformation for a new Golden Age?”

“There is madness, yes. But imperialism has always been tinged with madness. Hundreds of millions of people from the Americas to China have been either killed or subdued so that a small part of the world – the North Atlantic – could enrich itself. That is madness. And it worked. It continues to work, to some extent. The neocolonial structure of capitalism remains intact. When a country in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Pacific Islands tries to assert its sovereignty, it is defenestrated. Coups, assassinations, sanctions, theft of wealth are just a few of the instruments used to damage any attempt at sovereignty. And this neocolonial structure is maintained because of the international division of humanity : some people continue to think that they are superior to others.”

“North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Plus countries account for over 74% of global military spending. While China accounts for 10% and Russia 3%, we nonetheless hear that it is China and Russia that are the threats, rather than NATO, which, led by the United States, is in fact the most dangerous institution in the world. NATO has destroyed entire countries (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya, for instance) and now cavalierly threatens wars against countries that have nuclear weapons (China and Russia). Trump screams into the wind: We want the Panama Canal. We want Greenland. We want to call it the Gulf of America. Why should these demands come as a surprise?”

“After he surrendered, General Yamashita was accused of permitting his troops to commit atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war. He was executed on 23 February 1946. Nobody claimed that General Yamashita personally inflicted pain on anyone: he was charged with ‘command liability’. In 1970, the lead military prosecutor at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, reflected that ‘there was no charge that General Yamashita had approved, much less ordered these barbarities, and no evidence that he knew of them other than the inference that he must have because of their extent’. He was hung [sic] because, as the Tokyo tribunal noted, General Yamashita ‘failed to provide effective control of his troops as required by the circumstances’. Taylor wrote these words in his book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, now long forgotten, in which he made the case not only to prosecute US politicians and generals, but also US aviators who bombed civilian targets in northern Vietnam because they participated in the Nuremberg era crime of ‘aggressive warfare’.”

You know it’s wrong. You have a duty to not follow orders if they are illegal. This goes for drone-bombers today.

USAID and Security State Clan Wars by Yasha Levine (Weaponized Immigrant)

“If you read the reporting on USAID’s closure from the liberal side, you’d think that this org is a pure force for good — that all it does is provide the most vulnerable and exploited populations on the planet with medicine and shelter. And it does do that (with caveats, see below) but let’s not kid ourselves: USAID was not created for philanthropy. It was created to extend American power through softer non-military means: pacification through propaganda, off-the-books violence, and bribery abroad. I guess some call this bribery “assistance” — it’s a treat you get if you stay meek and loyal to the America cause.”

“In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts, interfacing directly with ARPA and covert CIA programs. USAID quickly developed a reputation for brutality and bloodlust: it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, set up opium running operations to finance covert rebel activity in Laos…The agency also became a laboratory for capitalist-friendly neoliberal economic reforms that were supposed to supplant local left-wing demands for wealth redistribution without actually doing anything to change the underlying power structures of society.”

The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid by Hamilton Nolan (How things work)

“Businesses want lower taxes, but they still want well-maintained roads. They want weaker labor protections, but they still want a healthy and well educated workforce. They want less regulation, but they still want transparent laws and functional enforcement. Their short-term greed, unwise and distasteful as it may be, is only something they fight for because they assume that the big, fundamental pillars of society and government that allow them to operate freely will always be in place.”

“You cannot make long term investments if you can’t trust that contracts will be enforced fairly. You can’t grow your business if you can’t find adequate workers because the public school system has been decimated and too many people have medical issues because the health care system has been privatized for profit.”

“An unstable, undemocratic, wildly governed society is bad for business. The business lobby’s many years of ceaselessly trying to nibble away at the foundations of stability and democracy and fairness for their own immediate gains have now brought us to the brink of a strongman government that will, I assure you, be very bad for business.”

“Even enormous wealth inequality is bad for business, because it means a few people have all the money, instead of all your customers having plenty of money to spend with your business. You know what’s good for business? Switzerland! A bunch of happy healthy wealthy people sitting around eating chocolates and spending money in peace! You know what’s bad for business? Fucking Donald Trump! A psycho idiot fucking shit up constantly and destabilizing the world and robbing businesses of all ability to trust the rule of law and predict the future with some degree of confidence.”

“The business lobby’s many years of selfish conduct and support for deleterious public policies have produced so much inequality and undermined our democratic institutions so successfully that we are now watching a strongman seize control of our government.”

“The business lobby has, for all of these years, operated on a false assumption. They believed that they could slowly strip away the foundations of the House of Democracy for a quick buck, without the house ever falling down. Wrong. Wrong, mighty business geniuses! Now the house is falling down. The things that you thought would always be there are crumbling. And you are going to be homeless, with all the rest of us. And we are going to eat you. And we are going to laugh and laugh. All your tax cuts have bought you this. I hope it was worth it.”

Barack Obama’s First Drone Strike by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“Not long after [Trump] ascended to the chair in the Oval Office, [Trump] sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.”

“Trump’s first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23, CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not object. At 8:30pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village, Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana, that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that attack.”

“Not one of the men and boys in the room had a connection to either al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. They were hard working people, one of the men had been a worker in the UAE and on his return, his nephew was preparing to go and help the family by working in the Gulf. Now, a hasty decision by the CIA left the family distraught. The US government never apologised for the attack and did not compensate the family.”

“[…] this was the spur for Obama to learn about the CIA’s “signature strikes” (when the US government felt it could kill anyone who looked like a terrorist) and “crowd killing” (when it was acceptable to kill civilians in a crowd if a “high value target” was also there). Obama said that he did not like this that he was unhappy that there might be women and children in the crowd. But, as Klaidman writes, “Obama relented – for the time being.” In fact, the “time being” seems to have extended through the two terms of his presidency. What differentiated Obama from Bush before him and Trump afterwards was merely his hesitancy. His actions were the same.”

The Israelis are not unique; they learned what is acceptable from their lord and master.

The Western Way of Genocide by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. Germany, Italy and the U.K., created this hell. It intends to maintain it. Gaza is to remain under siege. After an initial burst of aid deliveries at the start of the ceasefire, Israel has once again severely cut back the trucked-in assistance. Gaza’s infrastructure will not be restored. Its basic services, including water treatment plants, electricity and sewer lines, will not be repaired. Its destroyed roads, bridges and farms will not be rebuilt. Desperate Palestinians will be forced to choose between living like cave dwellers, camped out amid jagged chunks of concrete, dying from disease, famine, bombs and bullets, or permanent exile. These are the only options Israel offers.”

“Washington and its allies in Europe do nothing to halt the live-streamed mass slaughter. They will do nothing to halt the wasting away of Palestinians in Gaza from hunger and disease and their eventual depopulation. They are partners in this genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.”

“Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.”

I suppose that maybe now it’s slightly different than Vietnam, Iraq, et. al.? I don’t see even an increase in degree though. It’s just a different country acting with proxy impunity rather than the empire claiming the right to this way directly. That may be unique.

“Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in “Discourse on Colonialism”, appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.””

That’s an interesting take: the reason the Nazis are considered to be so much worse than, say, the Belgians in the Congo, is because they were attacking Europeans rather than lesser races.

“The German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua , the Armenian genocide , the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.””

“We dominate the globe not because of our superior virtues, but because we are the most efficient killers on the planet. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India , the Congo , Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimised or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.”

“Mass slaughter is as integral to western imperialism as the Shoah. They are fed by the same disease of white supremacy and the conviction that a better world is built upon the subjugation and eradication of the “lower” races.”

Extended episode: Former Marine DEBUNKS USAID Rumors by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

This was a sane and sober discussion of what is actually happening in the U.S. empire. Katie Halper and Aaron Maté have a long discussion with Brian Berletic about what USAID actually does, with its arms like the NED.

Former U.S. Marine Brian Berletic, who focuses on geopolitics in Eurasia and hosts the informative Youtube show The New Atlas, joins Useful Idiots this week as Elon Musk and the Trump administration are gutting USAID and attempting to move it under the control of Marco Rubio’s State Department.

Musk claims he’s “dismantling the Deep State.” Berletic, whose years as a marine gave him a harsh awakening about the reality of US hegemony, gives an in-depth analysis of what’s really going on.

He explains why each side is up-in-arms over the issue: Dems are painting USAID as an all-loving agency that is essential to upholding Democracy around the world, while Republicans are crying wokeism by finding relatively trivial expenses in the fine print. Neither, Berletic says, are highlighting the real, and much more nefarious issues with USAID.

“They have not mentioned foreign interference, regime change, subversion, stifling development, and they have not said that they are going to stop any of that.”

“And here’s a photo,” he shows us from the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, drafted in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “Just think about how tone deaf or brazen they are to post this picture. This is a picture of the Philippines, the U.S. conquered the Philippines. There was an uprising because they wanted to be an independent nation. The US military brutally suppressed it. Mass murder, concentration camps. This is all listed on the State Department’s website. And so they’re talking about insurgency, counterinsurgency, and USAID’s role in the counterinsurgency process.”

At 39:00,

“Brian: I’m pretty sure that that’s what they’re doing: they’re just rebranding it [USAID]; they’re sharpening it; they’re streamlining it. They’re definitely not going to do away with it. Because they’re telling you their foreign policy, and it depends entirely on a tool like this [USAID].

“Aaron: The example that you raise of Georgia is so important, because it recently emerged that USAID spent more than $40 million on Georgia’s elections. $40 million! Compare that to the freakout in the US over allegations that a Russian troll Farm spent $100,000 on the 2016 election—when, in fact, the reality was it was about $46,000, but whatever, even if it was $100,000—so a Russian troll Farm spent $46,000 on social-media posts and ads that nobody saw, that weren’t even about the election (most of them) and there was just a national freakout for years during Russia-gate. This was blamed as the cause of Trump’s Victory—or as a major factor in Trump’s Victory—whereas we spend $40 million in Georgia’s elections and that’s considered to be totally normal.”

At 42:00,

“Brian: There are organizations attacking me. They’re going so far as claiming that I’m some sort of Russian or Chinese agent, when they themselves—the people attacking me: you can go to their website, you can look through their bio, and they themselves will admit that they’re receiving all kinds of US government money. […] I think you know they’re on the take. So they’re assuming that other people are [too] and the craziest thing is they’re trying to convince people that they stand for human rights and democracy and freedom. And they’re taking money from the absolute worst violator of human rights in this 21st century. No one else comes even close even.

“The things the US makes up about China that aren’t even true. But let’s just pretend for a minute they were true. It pales in comparison to what the US has openly done in front of the entire planet all throughout the 21st century and that’s who they’re taking money from.

“And then they’ll say, ‘Brian, the National Endowment for Democracy … it’s got the word ‘democracy’ in in its name! What’s wrong with that! It says democracy! You hate democracy?!?’

“And I tell them, ‘look at the board of directors. You have Elliot Abrams[, who’s] a convicted criminal. He’s on the board of directors. You have people like Scott Carpenter, who participated in the illegal occupation and illegal administration of Iraq. I mean, that’s who you’re taking money from.‘

“And so, it is immense hypocrisy. I believe that it’s unsustainable. And I think as multipolarism emerges, as a balance of power begins to grow, they’re not going to be able to get away with this. They’re not going to enjoy the impunity that they have almost certainly had all of these decades. They got away with it because there was no one else able to check and balance them. Now that there is—or soon will be—they have to start taking that into account.

“And I think that’s all secretary Rubio was talking about, when he was talking about a unipolar world. They’re worried about comeuppance, maybe they’re worried that they’re going to have to change their tactics, and the impunity that they’ve enjoyed for so long is over.”

At 51:36,

“The United States has been exploiting potential vulnerabilities for decades in regards to China. So we all hear about Tibet and the free-Tibet movement and, again, if you go to the [U.S.] State Department’s Office of the Historian, they have documents there admitting that there was a CIA operation arming militants in India and sending them over the border to kill Chinese soldiers in Tibet, to free Tibet. It was a CIA operation. It always was.

“The same goes for Xinjiang, China. This was the U.S.—together with Turkey, Saudi Arabia—importing a radical, politically perverted version of Islam, overriding the indigenous version of Islam that people there have practiced regenerations, radicalizing them, and promoting separatism. So, there was this—people may remember all the horrible violence and the Western media was very happy at the time to report all of this horrible violence because at the time China couldn’t control it—and so then there was this crackdown on the violence and then the West spun that as the infamous Uighur genocide that they’re still talking about.

“Hong Kong: they tried to promote separatism there. We remember the violent protests there.

“And, of course, Taiwan. This has been a project long in the making, building up a separatist administration there, arming them, which is still going on right now.

“So, these are the different projects the West is still working on, to pressure China within their own borders and then setting up this Global Network and setting up the battlefield, really, for a maritime blockade, an international maritime blockade. Even though they claim that China is this military threat to the entire world. In the think tank documents, they admit that China’s military is confined to China. It does not have the ability to project military power abroad, and so they know that, if they were to enact some kind of maritime blockade against Chinese maritime shipping, far from China, it would disrupt their economy, but the Chinese military wouldn’t be able to project power to do anything about it.”

At 01:07:05,

“Aaron: Putting aside the morality of that, does Ukraine even have access anymore to its most valuable rare-earth minerals? Because it’s my understanding that Russia actually has taken the territory where most of those resources are.

“Brian: Yes, absolutely. I mean, most of the mining was taking place in eastern Ukraine, and now eastern Ukraine is Western Russia, so what Rare Earth minerals?”

Values of rare-earth, critical minerals in Ukraine

Peter Beinart on 'Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza' & Trump's Call for Ethnic Cleansing by Democracy Now! (YouTube)

Beinart is well-worth listening to, as always. 20 minutes.

Arab Regimes and the Betrayal of Palestine (w/ Farah El-Sharif) | The Chris Hedges Report by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

The first 15 minutes were an absolute tour-de-force of history and erudition by Farah El-Sharif. She is extremely well-spoken and brilliant, works at Stanford, and “served as Stanford’s Abbasi Program’s Associate Director from 2021-2023”.

Check out the people in this video:

People mentioned in this video − including Muhammad

Farah was being interviewed, OK. Muhammad has no picture 😹. And I don’t think Chris would have chosen Jared Kushner to be highlighted as having been mentioned in his video. It’s true that he is mentioned, but I think that this is just how automation can give people the wrong impression from content.

I learned that plans for the global war on terror/Islam (GWOT) were hatched in 1979 or, at the latest, in 1982, by Netanyahu.

At 14:30, Farah says,

“We should not forget that this campaign that we are seeing now, is exactly out of Netanyahu’s kind of wet dream for the Middle East: to take all of it, essentially. In 1996—you know better than me, Chris, about the clean-break policy that was designed to take out seven countries in five years, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and then swallow the region whole. And for anybody to look at one regime-change and to say that that’s not part and parcel of this campaign…even the war on terror was cooked up in Tel Aviv in 1982, or even before in 1979, through the Jonathan Institute (Wiki Spooks) that Netanyahu himself founded.

“He said, ‘we’re done with the red threat. Now is the green threat, that of Islamic Terror.‘ And so, a lot of Muslims even internalize this war-on-terror rhetoric, and they themselves start being apologetic and say, ‘oh Islam is peaceful. Islam is this. Islam is compatible with democracy. Islam is compatible with civility.’ And I see that as a sign of decimated consciousness, not just double-consciousness. They don’t know their own faith. They don’t know their own history. And so, they start being apologetic about it and that is a position of weakness.”

I think that the intersection of “useful, societally valuable products” and “marketable, fundable products” is vanishingly small these days. This makes it somehow easier to run short-lived scams than to build long-lived useful products and companies. This quickly gets me on the track of discussing the underlying system of incentives rather than useful products.

I wish there were more room to allow things to incubate so that we can see whether they’re good. As soon as “grow quickly or die” becomes a huge part of the environment, you’re inevitably limiting the candidate pool that can survive. It’s a world that rewards the worst among us, while eating the most useful.

The game is deeply interested in bending your talents and interests to its purposes. It promises you enough success to be able to continue pursuing your talents and interests. You just need to do this one, little thing first. And then this other little thing. And then you’ve forgotten what you started off wanting to do in the first place. This is the unlucky fate of most participants in the game. We don’t hear so much about them.

SO DARK. Sorry.

There is no contradiction in being both passionate and realistic.

I absolutely care, even when things are hopeless. There is an overwhelming power in at least having things straight in your own head, I think.

fortuitously, it also allows you to slow down, to avoid the information firehose. Those who run from surging outlet to surging outlet, trying to drink it all, are the most lost, in the end, even though they spend dawn ’til dusk chasing information, mistaking it for knowledge, spitting hot takes and mistaking them for wisdom.

If you take a week to decide whether something’s worth paying attention to, then 80% of it disappears without a trace without having wasted a second of your time.

It’s useful in these times, where the other half of America has woken up and decided that the best plan of action is run around like their hair is on fire over every goddamned thing … and the other half is gleefully lighting their hair on fire five times a day.

It’s a bit of a shitshow.

The Plan To Ethnically Cleanse Gaza Didn’t Start With Trump by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Democrats are as happy as a pig in shit right now. Suddenly they get to pretend all the unfathomable evils their president inflicted upon our world never happened, just because there’s a different president doing bad things who [sic] people are feeling big feels about.

“They wanted to lose. They’re overjoyed that they don’t have to be the face on the US empire’s depravity anymore, and that it’s no longer their job to make excuses for it. They’re getting everything they want out of the present arrangement, because liberals don’t actually care about fixing problems and making the world a better place, they only care about feeling good about themselves. Their politics is never actually about anything other than their feelings, and Biden was making their feelings feel bad. Trump lets them feel smug and vindicated and correct. He also lets them feel outraged and indignant, and they enjoy that too.”

Not all of them, of course. But people who are wholly dedicated to the Democrat party at this point are either incapable of paying attention or don’t want to. The gusto with which they’ve returned to the national stage with their newfound attentiveness belies a deep hypocrisy.

“Their behavior during the Trump administration shows you how they wish to be perceived, but their behavior during the Biden administration showed you who they really are.”

Blow It Up, Clean It Out, Sell It Off by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Your neighbor burns down the house that your family has lived in since the previous family home, a hundred miles to the north, was demolished 75 years ago by your neighbor’s grandfather. The fire kills your wife, two of your five children, and your mother. The claims adjuster, who is also the principle investor in your neighbor’s demolition company, says he’s got a nice place for you to live on a brownfield site two hundred miles to the south and gives you a tent, coupons for a 50% discount on all the Diet Coke you could ever drink and a six month supply of Meals Ready to Eat packets left over from the first Gulf War. Meanwhile, he claims the land for himself, builds a resort on it using money loaned by the widow of a casino mogul from Vegas (which he never pays back), and names the place after himself.”

“German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that proposals for the deportation of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were “unacceptable under international law” and could not serve as a “serious basis for talks”: “Proposals to remove or relocate the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip or in other words to drive them out … generate deep concern in some people, even horror.

“British PM Keir Starmer: “They must be allowed home. They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild, on the way to a two-state solution.”

“Even German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the pro-Israeli Green, denounced the plan: “It is clear that Gaza — along with the West Bank and east Jerusalem — belongs to the Palestinians. They form the starting point for a future state of Palestine. A displacement of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not just be unacceptable and against international law. This would also lead to new suffering and new hatred.”

“French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot charged that uprooting Gaza’s Palestinians ″would constitute a grave violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians, a major threat to the two-state solution and a factor of major destabilization for our close partners Egypt and Jordan as well as the entire region.“”

Their worldview is mendacious, hypocritical, an incoherent. They are gleefully taking the role of Good Cop as Trump gleefully plays Bad Cop. They offered nothing but support for Israel as it slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. Now, they pretend to be aghast that anyone could suggest that the Palestinians be moved off of their territory—the exact ethnic cleansing that Israel has been calling for for decades. This is unserious, childish behavior, obvious lies told from a place of power, where consequences don’t exist. They’re talking as if they hadn’t just stood by/cheered on while the Palestinians were annihilated.

Breaking up monopolies won’t kill the AI god by Yasha Levine (Weaponized Immigrant)

“I read an op-ed by Lina Khan in the New York Times today. She was the Biden administration head of the Federal Trade Commission. In that role, she has consistently tried to rein in the power of big tech…to regulate Silicon Valley monopolies…well, as much as that is possible in this oligarchic society. As I understand it, she was a rare bright spot in the Biden Administration and ran a powerful agency where good things were actually happening. And yet, even she, on the topic of artificial intelligence — and networked computer technology more generally — fell into the same tired, imperial arms race thinking that dominates this country.”

Yasha is singing my song here. I am increasingly frustrated with how captured people are by the imperial mindset. They’re completely unaware. Kahn wrote in her op-ed,

“As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.”

Who the fuck cares, man? The U.S. empire has to die before it kills again, is the important thing here. The system doesn’t serve the people’s interests, so why should any of us be concerned with preserving it? We should want it gone and replaced with something more equitable. Khan doesn’t get it—or she feels she can’t express it. Who knows? Who cares? It’s another useless essay on a giant pile of them.

“It’s such a crude way of thinking about “national security” — reduced to what’s good for America’s privatized security state…what will allow our paranoid ruling class to more develop a weapon that will blow China out of the water. It doesn’t at all factor in anything important — what’s actually good for people, what kind of society is worth living in, what kind of world are we creating, what’s good, meaningful life worth living, or what’s good for our planet, the only home we have?”

“Still, if Lina Kahn is truly worried about the power of tech monopolies over American society, I don’t think she understands how counter-effective her argument is. If she’s saying that America needs AI to survive on the global stage, she provides these companies with more power — political and cultural. With this kind of thinking, they — and the tech they make — become central players in making America great. And that’s just sad.”

It makes you wonder where her interests actually lie. Individually, it doesn’t matter but there were several people who held her up as a shining example of what was good about the Biden administration. With this line of reasoning, and accompanying blindness to the power of empire, she’s useless to us. She’s just a distraction promulgating the company line, bleeding effort and revolutionary fervor away into unproductive estuaries.

I keep forgetting that this is more-or-less your first rodeo (as you said, you were 17 for Trump 1). ⁠I feel like the old madam running the brothel, watching the ingenue be absolutely overwhelmed at the crassness of the customers. “Yeah, they seem to like humping corpses, so it’s best if you lie still.”

I forget that people still had a faith in the way things worked for Trump and his merry crew to shatter. This old madam was already too jaded to allow herself to believe that 15 months of gleefully funding, arming, and lying about a genocide in front of the whole world would be the the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Who knew it would be defunding DEI and USAID and whatever else. I guess you gotta hit people where they live.

The environment doesn’t notice the difference between someone who opens public lands for more fossil-fuel exploitation than anyone before him but says he loves the environment (Biden) and someone who does the same thing and screams “drill baby drill” while doing it (Trump). It’s the same end result for the environment.

It’s not a great look, morally, to get your hair on fire only when it threatens your own lifestyle, and not when your lifestyle is supported by threatening or outright eradicating the lives of others. It means that the government can blow up as many people as it wants around the world, as long as it doesn’t threaten a minimum level of physical and psychological comfort at home. It has always been the case that U.S.-Americans care much more about domestic policy/culture wars than their country’s much more consequential foreign policy.

For the liberals (Reddit)

The Democrats are fighting

“The folks asking the Democrats to fight as if the party isn’t already fighting on behalf of its corporate donors shows just how many people don’t understand who the Democrat party really is: A party that exists to trap and stifle working class movements.”

Why Trump Shouldn’t Negotiate With Putin on Ukraine by Thomas Knapp (CounterPunch)

“Pepe Escobar characterizes that attitude as “negotiating with Team Trump is like playing chess with a pigeon: The bird walks all over the chessboard, sh*ts indiscriminately, knocks over pieces, declares victory, then runs away.””

Journalism & Media

The Media is Busted by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The news became unreadable when news agencies stopped revealing its subterranean connections. The state is a huge customer, the state pays contractors to suppress our competitors, the state funds the think-tanks who give us our quotes, the state funds the research we cite, the state leaks us true material, the state leaks us false material. There are pornographic terms for such interlocking ties, but news organizations don’t find them necessary to mention in the journalism context. After all, they’re just transactions. What could be wrong with those?

“These organizations are dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

Speaking of dead media, the New York Times and the Guardian aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory.

First up is the NYT:

NYT euphemism fest

“President Trump declared on Tuesday
that he would seek to permanently
displace [ethnic cleansing] the entire Palestinian population
of Gaza and take over the devastated
seaside enclave [open-air prison] as a U.S. territory, one of
the most audacious ideas [war crime] that any
American leader has advanced in years.”

Next up is the Guardian:

Guardian's soft words for ethnic cleansing

“Forced displacement of Gaza’s population
would probably be a violation of
international law and would be fiercely
opposed not only in the region but also by
America’s western allies. Some human rights
advocates liken the idea to ethnic cleansing.”

The EPA’s Incredible $20 Billion Dollar Caper, Explained by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Take the Climate United Fund, which is due to get a $7 billion chunk of this cash. This is a “national coalition of non-profits” that has no award history. Basically, it’s a website, with a handful of clip art photos (cheap clip art!), that went up in September, advertising an intent to distribute to partners with histories. The illusion of a past is implied in lines like, “For decades, each Climate United coalition partner has raised and managed billions of dollars to drive economic opportunity,” even as you learn that Climate United itself was “formed for this program.” It is a “separate legal entity” but “part” of a known nonprofit, Calvert Impact.”

That just $7B of the $20B! Pop up a WordPress site and take control of the disbursal of $7B. Not bad for an hour’s work. It’s scams all the way down, no matter who’s in charge.

“I get the controversy over the means of the incoming administration’s cuts. But even I’m shocked at how bottomless the waste problem appears to be, and how valiantly the entire machinery of Washington is rallying to the cause of budget horseshit.”

The Trump administration is going after the EPA because its mandate is to regulate big business. That’s a terrible reason to go after it. They also happen to be just as corrupt as many other organizations—sometimes without even knowing it themselves. The best acolytes are blinded to their organization’s actual purpose. They never think to question why they should be in charge of shoveling such large quantities of money. The guy in the attached video’s attitude is no different than a snot-nosed 23-year-old at a large bank, thinking he’s entitled to be a king of the world. Meanwhile, he’s just a patsy with the real benefactors of all of the grift he enables sitting in the shadows.

Of course, this is nothing compared to the audicity of the Pentagon graft, but it’s still graft. If your pants are this far down when someone goes after you for something completely different, you’re going to get nailed. If they knocked on your door for failure to pay rent, and then discover a cocaine/human-trafficking operation, then you’re still screwed—even though the real mob boss lives right next door.

Economy & Finance

Trump's tariffs could cause huge global crisis, warns economist Michael Hudson by Geopolitical Economy Report / Ben Norton (YouTube)

At about 31:00, Michael Hudson says,

“Other countries usually follow what president Xi of China does. He’s trying to do a win-win situation. China is not trying to militarily invade other countries. He’s trying to say, ‘we can invest money in developing your ports and your railroads for internal trade so that you don’t have to rely on export trade to achieve the financing to support your government-spending. You can trade with your neighboring countries all together in basically a Eurasian economic unit, so that you will not be dependent on the United States.‘ It’s a win-win.

“Well, to Trump, a win-win is a loss, because a win-win means some other country also wins, not only the United States. And, if some other country also wins, that means the United States has not grabbed everything there is to grab. And Trump wants to grab everything that is available—the entire economic surplus. So that is the confrontational characteristic of diplomacy in the United States today.”

At 32:45, Michael says,

“[…] peace is when the United States controls everything and no other country has any ability to fight back—that’s peace.

“Ben: Yeah, great point. That’s the Orwellian U.S. Empire’s view of peace.”

Trump Wants To Take Over Gaza / Prof Richard Wolff Joins The Show! by Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp (YouTube)

At 07:15, Wolff says,

“25% of Americans were screaming when the inflation rate was 9% in this country. We’re talking something orders of magnitude worse. So, we’re going to buy a lot less. We either do without, or we’ll go and buy equivalent—or maybe not so good things—from other countries where there isn’t a tariff that we have to worry about. Because Mr. Trump singled out Canada and Mexico. It’s not a general tariff that everything coming into the country might have to pay. You can do that, and Mr. Trump has threatened general tariffs that would apply to everybody but, in this case, because they are such long partners…it’s out of the blue! There was no preparation, there was no conversation, there were no meetings held.

“I want to remind everyone the United States is a signatory of the NAFTA agreement, which was rewritten and re-signed during Trump’s first presidency, between 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump’s signature is on the treaty. He just broke…any other country looking at this would be out of its mind to make treaties with the United States because, not only did the US break it, but no discussion, no meeting no preparation, nothing!

“He just came down on these two countries, with which we share thousands of miles of border, as if they were a hated enemy conveniently located on the other side of the ocean. I mean, no one will…only in America will there be mass media trying desperately to make this seem reasonable. For the rest of the world, this is another sign of a rogue, weird country and Americans who don’t see that will be missing half the story.”

Is MAGA Abandoning Economic Populism by Gutting CFPB? With Matt Stoller by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

At 16:00, Matt says,

“The kind of company that you’re talking about: the giant bank that has huge power over you, the payment utility—which is what PayPal is—the dominant airlines—the only one that flies from your city or on the route that you need—these are almost private governments right? They’re not just like businesses. They’re not a lemonade stand. It’s a company that is so powerful that it can dictate the terms by which you live your life in that particular industry. And that’s a real problem.

“[…]

“I think they’re [Republicans] having trouble transitioning from supporting these private businesses to […] we need to rethink the nature of the private/public distinction. And then, when you have powerful people like Elon Musk—who seems very appealing [to them]—and you have this old traditional Republican orthodoxy. We fear big government, which is legitimate to be skeptical of big government. Because, in many cases, these companies are fused with big government. But it’s very hard to think of a new framework for saying ‘look, we have rights as citizens, not just against the government, but against these private governments,’ and we’re going to need mechanisms to make those rights happen. And I think that the Republican party, the MAGA movement is sort of caught in the middle of those.

“[…]

“It’s just where America is right now. Where we’re very confused because we have a political order that feels out of touch.It feels like we’re ruled by distant masters and those distant masters aren’t just in government. They’re not just in corporate America. They’re not just in universities. It’s a kind of network of all of them together and we don’t quite have a means to address it.”

The final five minutes are also a great discussion of how the Democrats failed to control Obama is a cautionary tale for Republicans right now. When Obama swept into office on a mandate, he gave away the store to Wall Street and no-one held his feet to the fire. After that, there was no going back. The degree to which MAGA and Republicans are cheering on Trump right now looks like they’re going to make the same mistake. With no reins on him now, there will be no way to put them on when the honeymoon inevitably ends.

Episode 432: Trump and Dump by TrueAnon (YouTube)

“The #1 Liberal Podcast in the World is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss Trumps coin, inaugural crypto, Justin Sun, blockchains and things of that nature.”

This is one of my favorite podcasts. I think it’s my favorite podcast. This episode was a tour-de-force review of the crypto bros and crypto-adjacent organizations positively saturating the Trump administration. It’s a scam from top to bottom, all whining the whole time about how regulation is crippling America while running one scam after another. Gambling and crypto. God bless America.

Egg Prices and the Cause of Harris’ Defeat by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“First, there is one point that should be front and center in every discussion of the election results. Harris won overwhelmingly among more informed voters who follow the news closely. She got clobbered among less informed voters, people who, by their self-description, say they follow the news little or not at all.”

Oh, Dean. It’s adorable that you can only come to one conclusion: smart, well-informed people voted for Harris. What Baker means is people who followed what he considers to be the “real” news closely voted for Harris. Those who were properly brainwashed by the NY Times et. al.

Roaming Charges: Catch US Now We’re Falling by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

Science & Nature

Are you a victim of the QWERTY Effect? by Etymology Nerd (YouTube)

Today I learned about the Qwerty effect (Wikipedia),

“The QWERTY effect (or qwerty effect) emphasizes ways that modern keyboard layouts have influenced human language,[1] naming preferences[2] and behavior.”

There seems to be a preference for right vs. left.

Burning in woman’s legs turned out to be slug parasites migrating to her brain by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“The parasite gets its name from its complicated life cycle, which relies on slugs and snails as well as rats. In rats, the worms reproduce, and first-stage larvae are released in the rodent’s feces. These larvae are picked up by slugs or snails, and in them, the larvae develop into third-stage larvae (L3). Rats are infected with these L3 larvae by eating an infected slug or snail. From the rat’s gastrointestinal tract, the larvae migrate to the animal’s brain, where the larvae go through L4 and L5 stages and become adults. Adult worms then move to the rat’s lungs, where they lay eggs—hence the name. The rats cough up the eggs from their lungs and then swallow them. The first-stage larvae go on to develop in the rat’s gastrointestinal tract and are then excreted, allowing the cycle to begin again.

“Humans crash this process by accidentally eating the L3 larvae. This can happen if they eat undercooked snails or slugs, or undercooked creatures that eat slugs or snails, such as land crabs, freshwater prawns, or frogs. The more troubling route is eating raw vegetables or fruits that are contaminated by snails or slugs. This is possible because the L3 larvae are present in mollusk slime. For instance, if a slug or snail traverses a leaf of lettuce, leaving a slime trail in its wake, the leaf can be contaminated with the larvae. The authors of the case study note that “the infectious dose of slime is not defined.”

“Once ingested by a human, the worms try resuming their normal cycle before hitting a dead end. The L3 larvae move out of the gastrointestinal tract into muscle, heading for the brain. The worms migrate through the blood or along peripheral nerves to get to the central nervous system. Movement along the peripheral nerves is what causes sensory abnormalities, like the woman’s burning feet. In the spinal cord, the migration can also cause bowel or bladder dysfunction.

“The parasites’ arrival in the central nervous system is often marked by a headache. From there, a person can develop confusion, encephalopathy, seizure, cranial neuropathy, or eye problems. While the next step for the worms would be to develop into adults and migrate to the lungs, this doesn’t happen. The worms typically die as juveniles in the brain.”

AND THEN WHAT!?! THEY JUST STAY THERE?!?

Environment & Climate Change

I am basically for every country on the planet doing this thing but I also think that it has no chance of happening.

The referendum is basically Switzerland virtue-signaling/promising that it will be climate-neutral per citizen as a proportion of its population’s share of the world population.

That would mean probably about at least a 90% reduction of CO2 output per person in Switzerland. A massive lifestyle and societal change. They list zero measures that they would enact to do this. That is left up to the Bundesrat, the Nationalrat, and the Kantonsrat.

It will not pass no matter which way we vote, so those who support fighting climate change can feel good about voting yes, and those who thing the MARKET and TECHNOLOGY will fix everything can vote NEIN and feel all tickled pink about that. Either way, we’re in the shitter because no-one is doing anything about climate change but making it worse.

I’ll vote yes, but have no hope that it will pass — in which case CH can brag on the world stage that it has promised to do its part, which it absolutely will not be able to do — and also have no hope that they will pass a single measure even moving in the direction of CH fighting climate change any better than it already does.

If no-one else fights with us, it doesn’t matter one whit.

I’ll say “yes” because it lines up with my principles and with what I think we need to do if we want to keep the planet habitable for more than (maybe) our generation, but I also know that 30 years ago was when we should have started and doing stuff now is better than nothing, but it’s like farting into a hurricane.

They don’t dare mention that it would mean reducing cars massively, reducing flying massively, reducing imports of high-CO2 goods like chocolate and coffee, etc. … in which case absolutely no-one would vote for it.

My God, it was 14 years ago that I read Heat, a book about how we could get to climate-neutral.

The initiative failed by 68%-32%.

Art & Literature

Why don't movies look like *movies* anymore? by Patrick Tomasso (YouTube)

Transliterating Chinese Names Is A Mess by Etymology Nerd (YouTube)

This one-minute video points out just how weak “yi” is as a transliteration, where the four variants yí, yì, yī, and yǐ in pinyin have already distilled several dozen distinct characters, and are then further distilled to a single translation for all of them.

Robert Munsch (Wikipedia)

“Munsch is known for his exuberant storytelling methods, with exaggerated expressions and acted voices. He makes up his stories in front of audiences and refines them through repeated tellings.

“Munsch’s stories do not have a recurring single character; instead, the characters are based on the children to whom he first told the story, including his own children.”

Today, I learned about Munsch’s legendary status in Canada. He was born American in 1945 but moved to Canada at 30 and produced children’s literature. I learned about it from an episode in Letterkenny’s season six, in which our heroes cited several titles as their favorites. His Wikipedia page tells a tale of personal woe, with three adopted children—after two stillbirth pregnancies—bipolar disorder, a stroke that affected his memory, addiction issues, OCD, manic-depressive disorder, a cocaine addiction, and alcoholism. Eventually, dementia caught up with him.

The cheekiest potter in England: Renaissance genitals, 🍆 emojis 🍑 and Katrin Moye by Victoria and Albert Museum (YouTube)

Kendrick Lamar: Talented Musician, Provocative Figure, Emperor of the Whites by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] we still get a thousand thinkpieces a year arguing that Beyonce is terribly mistreated and overlooked − Beyonce, a billionaire with the most Grammys in history, every other kind of award that humanity has to bestow, influence in every sphere of human achievement, multiple films and books about her genius, every material, social, artistic, and cultural laurel we as a society can give. Look how fucking long this list of awards is! The only human being on earth who enjoys a combination of celebration and wealth and access and privilege and power that equals that of Beyonce is Taylor Swift, and both are constantly referred to as disrespected and marginalized underdogs in our most prestigious publications. Beyonce has thirty-five Grammys. What would be enough? Seventy? Seven hundred? Honey, the whole point is that nothing could ever be good enough for her. Indeed, the evidence that Beyonce is an immensely lauded human being is so vast that this kind of talk inspires an admonition I get a lot in my career − you’re right, but we don’t talk about that.”

“Kendrick Lamar just did the Super Bowl halftime show, which is to say, he performed at the biggest concert that’s ever existed. He has now won twenty Grammys. (Madonna has seven.) He has moved something like 50 million “album equivalents” in his career, whatever that means, and is among the ten best-selling rappers of all time. He is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He has a Pulitzer prize.”

“[…] that kind of person, the kind of person with $100 a pop edibles and a copy of Intermezzo casually splayed out on their Noguchi table, is the kind of person who loves Kendrick Lamar. That’s just reality. He’s just your typical Pulitzer Prize-winning, multimillionaire, Grammy-harvesting, New York Times-beloved, godking-to-white-liberals underdog. Which, given that he also exists as a symbol of vague resistance to white cultural hegemony, is a little awkward.”

“[…] it all fuses together in the sense that artistic taste and morality are, ultimately, matters of public consensus, the notion that the politics which are moral and the art which is good are those that have received the blessings of the crowd. The notion of a private morality, like the idea of a personal taste, becomes disreputable in the face of a vision of doing and liking the right things as defined entirely by what other people think. People who work in high schools tell me that there are no subcultures anymore, no punks, no emos, no goths. If that doesn’t depress the shit out of you, I don’t know what to tell you. And that’s what happens when we act like personal style and tastes are subordinate to the moral fads of scolds.

“A figure like Kendrick Lamar is important and telling because the insistence on seeing his music as moral instructions for people who went to Brown and shop at the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market makes political morality just another mass product, just another subject for conspicuous consumption. It’s an ugly reality: people project political meaning onto pop culture because they feel incapable of creating real change; they read pop culture objects through their implied politics because they don’t know what it’s like to have an actual artistic taste.”

Prince − Super Bowl XLI 🏈 | Halftime Show 2007 FULL SHOW HD (YouTube)

Look, Kendrick Lamar was OK. Once you’ve watched Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime show, watch the one above. They you will realize how much more amazing a show can be. I’d forgotten that he’d covered most of a Foo Fighters song.

Some of the comments on the video are great:

“That time the Super Bowl opened for a Prince concert.”

“The difference with Prince and many of the modern Superbowl performances, is that it feels like he is performing to the crowd rather than the camera. This makes the atmosphere far more electric.”

“No lip-syncing. While dancing. While shredding his guitar. While singing. In the pouring rain.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics

“Your entire business model is to take control of the free exchange of information, and manipulate it for your personal gain!

“See this chart? The red portion is what you created. The blue portion is what you built off pre-existing open source technology, science and stolen data. You can’t see the red part because it is so small.

“The only possible ethical thing to do is destroy this company, open-source everything, and hand over control directly to the people, to use it for the common good.”

Mohler wrote underneath the comic that,

“In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin makes the argument that all technological progress more or less belongs to everyone.

“We simply find ourselves existing in the modern world that inherits the efforts of billions of people to make it livable for us, spanning tens of thousands of years. The very land we live on has been cultivated by our ancestors to make it suitable to farming. Technology created in the past is handed to us to work this land. The crops we grow have been selectively bred for thousands of years to feed us. Animals like sheep and cows exist, which are nothing like their natural selves, having their DNA altered by the long slow efforts of our fore bearers. All this work belongs to all of us, but often the capitalist comes in at the last moment to buy the land, buy the animals, and patent the last 0.0001% of technological improvement to some contraption. From this ownership they are allowed to control everything.

“[…] literally billions of man-hours have been spent just on the software side to create operating systems which are free and open and given to capitalists (such as the Linux kernel and ecosystem). All of this work, as well as the scientific work to create the hardware, represents 99.9999% of the work to create something like OpenAI, and it belongs to all of us. From this, they spend a small amount of money to create a system, and in their case they also train their model off the additional billions of hours of man-hours in writing text, producing knowledge, and creating art, and then they seize control of the output of this work, and use it exclusively for private gain.”

When it comes to pornography, what’s the harm in looking? by Sam Dresser (Aeon Magazine)

“Comstock was a buffoon, and many of his contemporaries found him repellent. But he was also enormously influential. He convinced Congress to pass a vast anti-obscenity measure in 1873 that empowered him to seize all items he personally found vile, including anything related to contraception or abortion. And, as I write in my recent book Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (2024), he reshaped how Americans understood pornography’s harms. His contention that pornography could turn horny boys into murderers and good girls into prostitutes endured long after legal challenges overturned most of the 1873 law. Since the 1870s, the idea of whom porn harms has varied – boys, young men, all women, or society at large. But this association between erotica and injury continued to inspire generations of policymakers and activists.”

“Proposals to limit porn access in the name of protecting the innocent are as misguided today as they were in 1873. I say this despite my ethical concerns about Pornhub and its corporate parent MindGeek (now rebranded as Aylo).”

“The president Lyndon B Johnson appointed a Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1967 to study the association between pornography exposure and violent behaviour. The social scientists who dominated the commission instead wrote, in their final report in 1970, that the real danger was men’s exposure to violence, not to sex.”

Slavoj Žižek Explains How Capitalism Tricks Us (YouTube)

“Each of us is now a small capitalist. Let’s say you have €5,000. You can freely decide how to invest them: buy health care, go to a nice holiday, pay special studium. […] What is actually a new form of anxiety—permanent stress—is sold to you as a new form of freedom.”

A Second Kind of Objects by Edwin-Rainer Grebe / Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“We are not at all like that character from Jonathan Swift — lining up effigies of the things of the world, so to speak, through our speech. We are, rather, running the world through a filter. To speak is constantly to tweak the knobs on the mixing board that takes all the various inputs from the world, and modulates our stance towards them — our degree of commitment or of mastery or approval or regret, and indeed our sense of what might otherwise have been. Our power to do this, I have come to believe, does not come from the world itself.”

“It has been a vain error of the past few centuries to dwell on the question whether such representations are “true” or not, whether the people who affirm them “really” believe them. To ask whether the soul “really” descends through the fontanelle while in utero is like asking whether the BirdsEye almond pack is “really” charged up with love. Leave us alone, you moderns, with your efforts to ground belief in bare natural fact. Our beliefs, our human beliefs, range far, far further than what is given in nature.”

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem by Sherryl Vint / Ted Chiang (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“It’s like asking a question and getting an answer back from someone who read the answer but didn’t really understand it and is trying to rephrase it to the best of their ability. I call LLMs a blurry JPEG because they give a low-resolution version of the internet. If you are using the internet to find information, which is what most of us use the internet for, it doesn’t really make sense to go with the low-resolution version when we have conventional search engines that point you to the actual information itself.”

“[…] there are many respects in which LLMs are genuinely amazing. The fact that they can rephrase something in any style of prose is fascinating; no one would have predicted that statistical models of all the text on the internet would be capable of that. But predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable.”

“I was talking with someone who is very excited about AI-generated imagery, and she said, “Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that AI can make better art than humans. In that scenario, do you think that we should reject AI art simply to protect the livelihood of human artists?” I responded, “I’m not going to grant you that premise, because that is the question under debate. You are framing the hypothetical in a way that assumes the conclusion.” I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of how it was created. Art is all about context. It’s not an activity like tightening bolts, where I don’t really care whether someone used a conventional wrench or a pneumatic wrench, as long as the bolts are tight.”

Ted missed a perfect opportunity to have used the phrase “begging the question”.

“As for the impact on artists, I’d say the primary effect of AI tools is that they encourage the idea that art is no different from tightening bolts. Artists have always had to deal with commercial considerations, but it’s probably a more pressing issue now than ever before. The impulse to view everything in terms of efficiency, of reducing costs and maximizing output, is radically overapplied in the modern world.”

“If you’re a woodworker, you might develop emotional associations with a set of chisels you’ve used for years, and in some sense that’s a “relationship,” but it’s entirely different from the relationship you have with people. You might make sure you keep your chisels sharp and rust-free, and say that you’re treating them with respect, but that’s entirely different from the respect you owe to your colleagues.”

“[…] your chisel has no preferences; it doesn’t want to be sharp. When you keep it sharp, you are doing so because it will help you do good work or because it gives you a feeling of satisfaction to know that it’s sharp. Either way, you are only serving your own interests, and that’s fine because a chisel is just a tool. If you don’t keep it sharp, you are only harming yourself.”

Too narrow. My car is a tool with which I imbue preferences and a personality. She has a name. Animism is a thing, bro. I feel like my feeling of satisfaction comes from my having anthropomorphized my car, in the same way that I did with my rabbits, when I still had them.

“AI systems lack preferences; that is true of the systems we have now, and it will be true of any system we build in the foreseeable future. The companies that sell AI systems might benefit if you develop an emotional relationship with their product, so they might create the illusion that AI systems have preferences.”

They are definitely doing this, just in the premise of the UI that they offer, in which you are purportedly talking to something instead of providing context to guide your harpoon into the multi-dimensional data space from which you hope to retrieve the answer you’re looking for. You don’t have to waste your time formulating what you want as a question, or even waste any time being friendly to something that isn’t even close to being alive. It’s not even programmed to be able to be offended, like NPC interlocutors in video games sometimes are.

“LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything.”

“I think we need to think about the possible bad outcomes and work to mitigate them; if we do that, we have a chance of preventing them from coming to pass. I don’t know if that’s optimism, unless everything except fatalism is optimism. I suppose it might be a moral duty to not be fatalistic. We have to believe that our actions have the potential to make a difference because if we don’t believe that, we won’t take any action at all.”

I don’t think that’s true. I often do things that I enjoy doing but which I don’t think will have an effect beyond that. That line of thinking is too zero-sum, too capitalist. People often do things even if they know it won’t make a difference. They will do it because they believe that it’s the right thing to do.

“In this framing, optimists are the ones who say no, the risks aren’t that serious, while pessimists are the ones who say yes, the risks are very serious. My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.”

I spend most of my day solving puzzles. The puzzle is not usually just achieving a task. That part is usually relatively easy. The more interesting part is plucking the solution from the problem space that makes the fewest compromises.

To formulate it more rigorously, to set a maximum number of demerits that the solution may have, then to list solutions with attendant compromises, then assign a number of demerits to each compromise, and then to choose a solution with fewer demerits than the acceptable maximum. Demerits are assigned for complexity, flakiness, reduced maintainability, dependency on expensive externalities, etc.

At that point, you have a fallback or a workaround, but you could be finished, if you had to be, if you’d run out of time, or if you had to work on something else. If you have more time, then you can start the even more fun part of optimizing for elegance of the solution: that is, for finding a solution with increasingly fewer demerits, preferably ending up with zero, which is the Eierlegendewollmilchsau.

Frasier and the Philosophy of Civil Disobedience by M. G. Piety (CounterPunch)

“Is Niles correct, that flexibility is what the situation calls for? Frasier could indeed have signed the form promising to pay, left the lot, and then written a scathing letter to the management concerning why he was not going to pay after all. But would that have had the same effect as actually creating a scene at the garage? When is creating chaos, or social disorder, important to effective civil disobedience and when not, and how does this issue relate to the nature of the injustice in question?

“Is Niles’ advice motivated by a sense of fraternal loyalty, or by his own self interest? Should he stand by Frasier, even if he thinks Frasier is wrong, or would genuine loyalty consist in getting Frasier to see the error of his ways by either persuading him through argument or abandoning him there to the wrath of the drivers stuck behind him? Is loyalty even a virtue if it is interpreted to mean sticking by people even when they’re wrong? And if that isn’t what it means, what does it mean, and how is distinguished from the obligations we have to one another more generally?

“Should we allow ourselves to be held hostage to what seem to us to be arbitrary and unfair rules?”

You can listen to the episode at Frasier Season 10 Episode 2 Enemy At The Gate in October 2002 (DailyMotion). You can also “watch” it, but the video is sufficiently manipulated—zoomed in, horizontally flipped, and covered with what appear to be transparent, falling leaves—so that it won’t be detected and taken down. It was just as good as Ms. Piety noted, especially the long-awaited punchline at the end, where Frasier describes his day at the parking gate, though, unbeknownst to him, his listeners believe that he is describing intercourse with Roz.

As Ms. Piety noted, the meat of the episode is not the final, ribald joke, though, but the focused and interesting essay on the nature of protest—if you’re protesting to help people, how much are you allowed to harm them before you’ve done more bad than good?

Technology

UK Is Ordering Apple to Break Its Own Encryption by Bruce Schneier

“Apple is likely to turn the feature off for UK users rather than break it for everyone worldwide. Of course, UK users will be able to spoof their location. But this might not be enough. According to the law, Apple would not be able to offer the feature to anyone who is in the UK at any point: for example, a visitor from the US.

“And what happens next? Australia has a law enabling it to ask for the same thing. Will it? Will even more countries follow?

“This is madness.”

The UK is testing the waters in this area the same way that Israel tests the waters in the area of conquest.

A commentator corrected Schneier,

“Err no, you need to read UK legislation going back to the original “Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act”(RIPA) and more recently.

“As written the “notice” applies “World Wide” to “Every entity” be they “legal or natural”.

“The only way Apple can avoid this is by completely withdrawing from all markets and places “world wide”.

“Look on this UK legislation in the same way as that Russian Law that allows the most senior Russian politician to have executed any person any where in the world and it be legal.”

PeerAuth (GitHub)

I was just discussing this the other day with my partner: if it’s so easy to fake someone’s voice, how can you determine whether the other person is really who they say they are? You can always claim that you will know, especially for those very close to you. We even came up with a couple of passwords that we would use from our shared past. As an added layer of security, though, there some technology you can use: 2FA. This site offers an easy way of setting up a paired code that you and the person you’d like to identify can use to verify identities.

LLMs & AI

The DeepSeek Series: A Technical Overview by Shayan Mohanty (MartinFowler.com)

“2: A model consists of billions on internal variables, which are called its parameters . These parameters gain their values (weights) during training. Before training, developers will set a number of different variables that control the training process itself, these are called hyperparameters.”

“Two big obstacles in large LLMs are:”

1. Attention KV Cache: Storing Key/Value vectors for thousands of tokens is memory-intensive.
2. Feed-Forward Computation: Typically the largest consumption of FLOPs in a Transformer.

“To tame both, they propose:”

1. Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA): compresses Key/Value vectors to reduce memory.
2. DeepSeekMoE: a sparse Mixture-of-Experts approach that activates a fraction of the feed-forward capacity per token.

“DeepSeekMoE selects a limited number of devices (M) per token, and performs expert selection only within these devices. The basic process is as follows:”

• Identify top M devices that contain experts with the highest affinity to the token
• Perform top K_r expert selection within these M devices
• Assign the selected experts to process the token.

This doesn’t seem like rocket science; I guess the devil is in the details of finding the experts with the highest affinity to a given token quickly and effectively.

“Dynamic Low-Rank Projection: Instead of a static compression dimension, MLA adjusts how strongly it compresses Key/Value vectors depending on sequence length. For shorter sequences, less compression preserves fidelity; for extremely long sequences (32K–128K tokens), deeper compression manages memory growth.”

“Layer-Wise Adaptive Cache: Instead of caching all past tokens for all layers, V3 prunes older KV entries at deeper layers. This helps keep memory usage in check when dealing with 128K context windows.”

“They adopt an FP8 data format for General Matrix Multiplications (GEMMs), halving memory. The risk is reduced numeric range so they offset it with: Block-wise scaling (e.g., 1x128 or 128x128 tiles). Periodic “promotion” to FP32 after short accumulation intervals to avoid overflow/underflow.”

“Accuracy Reward − if the task has an objective correct answer (e.g. a math problem, coding task, etc.), correctness is verified using mathematical equation solvers for step-by-step proof checking, and code execution & test cases for code correctness verification.”

And thus, without even noticing it, the areas in which these machines have maximum utility is in places where we already had a lot of tools—because we can write non-LLM/neural-net tools based on rules for that. These tools will make suggestions quickly but their suggestions can be weeded with these tests.

They’re looking for keys under the streetlight, though, and the claims by the most fervent supporters of LLMs that we’re just seconds away from AGI dissipate.

“They gather a small number (~thousands) of curated, “human-friendly” chain-of-thought data covering common sense Q&A, basic math, standard instruction tasks, etc. Then, they do a short SFT pass on the base model. This ensures the model acquires:”

• Better readability: Polished language style and formatting.
• Non-reasoning coverage: Some conversation, factual QA, or creative tasks not easily rewarded purely by rule-based checks.

“ In essence, the authors realized you can avoid the “brittleness” of a zero-SFT approach by giving the model a seed of user-friendly behaviors.”

“The authors repeatedly stress that HPC [High Performance Computing] co-design is the only path to cheaply train multi-hundred-billion-parameter LLMs.”

“Taken as a whole, the DeepSeek series highlights how architecture, algorithms, frameworks, and hardware must be co-designed to handle LLM training at trillion-token scales. Looking to the future, it indicates that toolchain builders may want to find ways to capture some of these HPC optimizations as part of the model compilation path or training apparatus, and AI research teams may want to work closely with HPC expertise even in the early days of architecture ideation.”

A friend had sent a list of naughty technologies that included “dotnet frame twerk”, “dotnet whore” and “azure debauchery operations” and we were musing on how LLMs were supposed to be good at coming up with names.

They are not. LLMs are neutered and useless.

Copilot doesn't do salacious puns

Microsoft asked me how I liked Copilot and I rated it a 1 because it was more interested in following its guardrails than in assisting me in my work. Is there a version of these tools that isn’t rated PG?

It turns out that, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. So, head on over to your buddy’s stall at the farmer’s market and pick up some artisanal filth. It’s a sunny day and the fresh air will do you good.

Programming

We are destroying software (Antirez)

“We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension.

“We are destroying software with complex build systems.

“We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile.

“We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.”

Create a super fun 'focus by negation' effect by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Kevin walks through building the menu effect described in :hover > :not(:hover), sorry not sorry by Adam Argyle.

The Most Underrated .NET Feature You Must Use by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is a good, quick introduction to using a BackgroundService with .NET Channels (unbounded), which are a good substitute for using Task.Run().

RavenDB 7.1
Write modes by Oren Eini (Ayende)

“Sometimes you get a deep sense of frustration when you look at benchmark results. The amount of work invested in this change is… pretty high. And from an architectural point of view, I’m loving it. The code is simpler, more robust, and allows us to cleanly do a lot more than we used to be able to.

“The code also should be much faster, but it wasn’t. And given that performance is a critical aspect of RavenDB, that may cause us to scrap the whole thing.”

Spoiler alert: it turns out that the new solution is both architecturally simpler and can be made faster by restoring batched writes, which had fallen by the wayside in the initial rewrite, instead calling pwrite() for every call and involving the system much more often.

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji by Paul Butler

“Unicode designates 256 codepoints as “variation selectors”, named VS-1 to VS-256. These have no on-screen representation of their own, but are used to modify the presentation of the preceeding character.

“Most unicode characters do not have variations associated with them. Since unicode is an evolving standard and aims to be future-compatible, variation selectors are supposed to be preserved during transformations, even if their meaning is not known by the code handling them. So the codepoint U+0067 (“g”) followed by U+FE01 (VS-2) renders as a lowercase “g”, exactly the same as U+0067 alone. But if you copy and paste it, the variation selector will tag along with it.

“Since 256 is exactly enough variations to represent a single byte, this gives us a way to “hide” one byte of data in any other unicode codepoint.”

Fun

How I Speak French Fluently (But Still Sound Like An Idiot) by Paul Taylor (YouTube)

Silicon Valley’s delusion machine by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Look, here’s a good rule. If a 30-something man with flavored-vape vocal fry dressed like a professional snowboarder tells you that crypto is good a way to make friends, you need to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. You are a mark.”

How the English language would sound if silent letters weren’t silent by BBC / Michael McIntyre (YouTube)

Video Games

Why Bastion Lies to You by Skyehoppers (YouTube)

This was a really erudite examination of the video game Bastion, with a whole lot of analysis of other video games thrown in as comparison. A good friend sent me this link; I used to be a bit skeptical about his links because they seemed so far from what I ordinarily watch; now that’s the reason I watch them. Kudos.