<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#covid">COVID-19</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h><span id="covid">COVID-19</span></h> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/bitcoin-plunges-to-lowest-price-since-2020-amid-broader-sell-off/" author="Timothy B. Lee" source="Ars Technica">Bitcoin plunges to lowest price since 2020 amid broader sell-off</a> <bq>Perhaps most alarming for the cryptocurrency world: The "stablecoin" Tether lost its peg to the US dollar early Thursday, briefly dipping to 96 cents. Tether is now trading at $1 once again. Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of Bitfinex, the company that created Tether, tweeted on Thursday morning that the company had redeemed $300 million worth of Tether to defend the peg "without a sweat drop." <b>He vowed to redeem as much as necessary to keep its price at par with the dollar.</b></bq> I.e. he's committed to the scam. <bq>Tesla stock has fallen by 40 percent since last November. Two of its rivals, Lucid and Canoo, are down 71 and 76 percent, respectively, since their November peaks. Canoo recently warned it could run out of money before producing its first car. The last six months have been brutal for "meme stocks." GameStop stock is down 63 percent from last November, while AMC is down 77 percent over the same period.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://web3isgoinggreat.com/single/tether-loses-peg-drops-below-095" author="" source="Web3 is going just great">Tether loses peg, drops below $0.95</a> <bq>Tether began to recover somewhat as the day progressed, gradually returning to above $0.99. However, the de-peg has clearly shaken the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The heavy reliance on Tether means that a substantial or protracted loss of its peg would be devastating, and <b>the open secret that Tether does not have the backing assets it once claimed has intensified fears about a possible run on Tether.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-116-the-end-of-cryptos?s=r" source="Chartbook" author="Adam Tooze">Chartbook #116: The end of crypto's "Wild West"? The battle to shape the future of digital assets in US-UK-EU.</a> <bq>China has taken the lead by going a long way towards banning both the use of crypto as a means of payment and bitcoin mining. <b>Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Nepal have followed China’s lead.</b></bq> Sensible! Crypto's a disease. <bq>Countries that have restricted the ability of banks to deal with crypto-assets or <b>prohibited their use for payment transactions include Nigeria, Namibia, Colombia, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam and Russia.</b></bq> <bq>Gensler is amongst the most important voices warning of the false promise of stability offered by so-called stablecoins like Tether. The two largest stablecoins, Tether and USD Coin, are now worth a combined $133bn. <b>They have attracted increased scrutiny from regulators because it is unclear whether they can really offer the backing in dollars and Treasuries that they promise to their clientele.</b> Were that clientele to lose confidence it would not simply inflict losses, as would be the case with bitcoin. <b>In the case of stable coins it would unleash a chain reaction akin to a bank run.</b></bq> <bq>Not coincidentally, at the same time as the Clinton administration was defining the legal parameters of the internet boom, it was also unleashing a wave of financial deregulation, which contributed to the growth of market-based finance and the crash of 2008. <b>The congruence between neoliberal tech and financial deregulation in the 1990s is far too rarely noted.</b></bq> <bq>The UK Treasury recently made headlines when it asked the Royal Mint, the agency responsible for creating British currency, to mint an NFT. “We want this country to be a global hub — the very best place in the world to start and scale crypto companies,” <b>City Minister John Glen said. “If there is one message I want you to leave here today with, it is that the UK is open for business, open for crypto businesses.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-04/someone-hacked-a-merger" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Someone Hacked a Merger</a> <bq>So if you own stock in a margin account, and you are playing this game, you might switch to a cash account to reduce the amount of stock borrow available. Or you might tell your friends on Reddit: “If we buy all the stock from institutional investors, and don’t lend it, then the short sellers will get squeezed. <b>They’ll have to buy back the stock, the stock will go up, they will lose and we will win, diamond hands rocket rocket.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>I love it. The last trade was $32,000, the bid is $210 and the offer is $25,500,000. It is either up 80,000% or down 99%.</b> “Someone is wrong here,” is the obvious conclusion, but I am tempted by the only slightly less obvious “everyone and everything is wrong here and I wish I had never heard of any of it.” Fischer Black famously defined “an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of value, i.e., the price is more than half of value and less than twice value.” <b>For NFT markets, if the price is within two orders of magnitude of value — that is, the price is more than 1% of value and less than 10,000% — then that’s pretty good.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/05/citigroups-role-in-flash-crash-in-europe-yesterday-is-reminiscent-of-its-dr-evil-trade-in-2004/" source="Wall Street on Parade" author="Pam & Russ Martens">Citigroup’s Role in “Flash Crash” in Europe Yesterday Is Reminiscent of Its “Dr. Evil” Trade in 2004</a> <bq>Beginning in December 2007 and lasting through at least June of 2010, Citigroup received the following in bailouts: <b>$2.5 trillion in secret cumulative loans from the Federal Reserve; $45 billion in capital injections from the U.S. Treasury;</b> the Federal government guaranteed over $300 billion of Citigroup’s assets; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed $5.75 billion of its senior unsecured debt and $26 billion of its commercial paper and interbank deposits.</bq> <bq>[...] every time Weill exercised one set of stock options, he received a reload of approximately the same number of options. <b>By the time Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003, he had received over $1 billion in compensation</b>, the majority of it coming from his reloading stock options. (Weill remained as Chairman of Citigroup until 2006.)</bq> <bq>Citigroup did a 1-for-10 reverse stock split on May 9, 2011. (For each 100 shares of stock, the shareholder was left with just 10 shares.) <b>At Citigroup’s closing stock price of $48.71 yesterday (actually $4.87 had it not done a 1-for-10 reverse stock split), long-term shareholders are still down 90 percent from where the stock traded in 2007.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-03/citi-did-a-flash-crash" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Citi Did a Flash Crash</a> <bq>There is something a little weird, though, about broadly marketing rollover equity in Musk Twitter to shareholders of Existing Twitter. Eventually there is going to be a proxy statement for this merger, and in effect Twitter’s board will say to shareholders “you should take this deal because $54.20 in cash is more than Twitter’s stock is worth.” Meanwhile Musk is going out to potential equity investors and saying the opposite: “Chip in some money because this thing is worth more than $54.20.” <b>If a select few of Twitter’s existing big shareholders — perhaps including Jack Dorsey, a board member who ran Twitter for years and voted for the deal — are offered the chance to stick around, and take it, then that undermines the logic of the deal.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://ralphnaderradiohour.libsyn.com/ethical-markets-w-hazel-henderson" author="" source="Ralph Nader Radio Hour">Ethical Markets w Hazel Henderson</a> Get citation at top of show. At <b>3:45</b>, Hazel says, <bq>The golden rule: 'do as you would be done by' was really the rule that everybody lived by, an acknowledgement of mutual interdependence and mutual respect. And that, basically, was the way everything was for centuries. [...] and then, fast forward, we humans made another step, at the year 1215, in England, and that was the first time that we acknowledged that the king didn't own our bodies. It was the write of Habeus Corpus. And that was another huge step forward. [...] [...] when the sixteen principles of the Earth charter were announced, and they are the sixteen principles of human responsibilities. And, as we all know now, we can't have rights without responsibilities. [...] The planet is testing us, to see if we are going to make sufficient progress, to avoid being part of the sixth great extinction, which we are causing, but may also end up being eliminated from the Earth. Because the planet is always in charge and, eventually, the planet wins.</bq> The go on to a discussion of how a society run by and measured by GDP has no chance of ever achieving a single non-economic principle and is doomed to immorality. At <b>42:00</b>, Hazel says, <bq>Now, what do we do with our greedy billionaires? We put them on the cover of <i>Time Magazine</i>. In China, the Communist Party says: guess what? Here are the new rules. You, Jack Ma, are going to sit down and shut up. You're not going bring ANT public. We want you to spend more in your public community and give more money to your workers. [...] guess what? The new rule is that housing is for people to live in, not for speculation or for market purposes, so just deal with it.</bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/06/for-the-love-of-olof-palme-dont-let-swedish-neutrality-die-in-vain/" source="CounterPunch" author="Nicky Reid">For the Love of Olof Palme, Don’t Let Swedish Neutrality Die in Vain</a> <bq>[...] <b>the only thing Putin has to show for his crimes are skyrocketing sales for Raytheon and a readymade PR campaign for NATO</b> that Madeline Albright would have joyfully clubbed half a million Iraqi babies for, Satan rest her soul.</bq> <bq>It should have been obvious to anyone with their head separated from their lower intestines that this is exactly what America wanted. <b>Why else would they dump so much treasure into a money pit like Ukraine and give a bunch of swastika festooned antisemites rocket launchers</b> that they’ll probably aim at El Al the week after Mariupol stops burning? Love? No, because it’s a trap you moron.</bq> <bq><b>Olof Palme proved that neutrality had nothing to do with cowardice</b>, quite the contrary, it was about <b>taking a principled stand against empire in any form</b> and I’m not the only one who believes that this may have gotten him killed.</bq> <bq><b>Olof wasn’t just a pacifist; he was a fucking pacifist with attitude who wasn’t afraid to flip off both Washington and Moscow at the same damn time.</b> He railed against Brezhnev for crushing the Prague Spring in 1968 and then turned around and pissed off Nixon bad enough to have him recall America’s ambassador in 1972 after the young prime minister marched shoulder to shoulder with North Vietnam’s ambassador against the bombing of Hanoi and publicly compared America’s savagery in Indochina to that of the Nazis in Treblinka.</bq> <bq>You see, America didn’t win the Second World War. The Soviet Union didn’t either for that matter. <b>Fascism was put in its proper place in hell by a ragtag coalition of civilian communist partisans across Europe</b> and after jumping in at the last minute to take credit for their victory, America devoted itself entirely to their extinction. <b>This was the real reason NATO was created</b>, not to block the invasion of the continent by the battered Soviet Union that could barely stand after Stalingrad, but <b>to colonize Europe by crushing the leftists who saved it.</b></bq> <bq>Even if they weren’t directly responsible for the assassination, does this sound like an organization that you would want to be a part of? Does this sound like an alliance worth flushing a two-hundred-year legacy of anti-imperialism down the fucking shitter for? As a committed anarchist, I have plenty of reasons to disdain Olof Palme myself. I generally see his brand of social democracy as doing little to correct the power imbalance which keeps the poor subservient to the upper class. But goddammit if I don’t admire the man’s devotion to world peace, a devotion he was willing to die for. <b>The man deserves better than to see his nation sold into prostitution to the sick creatures who may very well have had him killed,</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2022/05/04/the-bill-of-temporary-privileges/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Andrew P. Napolitano">The Bill of Temporary Privileges</a> <bq>[...] <b>in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans.</b> This is a direct and profound violation of the right to privacy in "persons, houses, papers, and effects" guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.</bq> <bq>Today, if you call your cousin in London, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can authorize the NSA to spy on you. <b>And if you then call your sister-in-law in Kansas, FISC can allow the NSA to spy on her and on the folks she calls and the folks they call.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the new law, Section 702 of FISA, which expires in 20 months, <b>required all telecom and computer service providers to give the NSA unfettered access to their computers whenever the feds came calling</b> – with or without FISA warrants – and also allowed the FBI access to the body of raw intelligence data that the NSA acquired.</bq> <bq>FBI spying is lawful because a statute authorizes it, but unconstitutional because the statute violates the Fourth Amendment.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/05/04/five-reasons-to-be-increasingly-worried-about-the-war-in-ukraine/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Snider">Five Reasons To Be Increasingly Worried About the War in Ukraine</a> <bq>US lack of participation in and interference in diplomacy has strengthened that awareness as has US intransigence in refusing to speak to Russia. <b>Blinken hasn’t spoken to his Russian counterpart since the war began</b>, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell walked out of a G20 meeting when the Russian representative starting speaking and <b>Russia’s ambassador to the US says that neither the White House nor the State Department will speak to him.</b></bq> A bunch of children. This is how adults behave today. Encouraging. <bq>British Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, James Heappey, said at the end of April that it would be acceptable for Ukrainian forces to use British weapons to attack military targets on Russian soil. So, the UK is training Ukrainian soldiers to use UK weapons to kill Russians. <b>At the same time, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss declared that the "time has now passed" for supplying Ukraine only with defensive weapons.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/05/gpxp-m05.html" source="WSWS" author="Alex Lantier, Johannes Stern">European Union calls for embargo on Russian oil</a> <bq>She finally called for an “ambitious recovery package” of economic reconstruction to “pave the way for Ukraine's future inside the European Union.” <b>She ended by calling out “Slava Ukraini,”</b></bq> <bq>Berlin plans to deliver Howitzer-2000s to Ukraine. German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said Berlin has “made the decision” to train Ukrainian fighters on these howitzers, which the Netherlands are supplying. <b>A March 16 expert report from the Bundestag's Scientific Service found that training Ukrainian soldiers on German soil constitutes war participation under international law.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/05/taking-aim-at-ukraine-how-john-mearsheimer-and-stephen-cohen-challenged-the-dominant-narrative/" source="CounterPunch" author="Michael Welton">Taking Aim at Ukraine: How John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen Challenged the Dominant Narrative</a> <bq>[...] in eminent Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen’s analysis (in War with Russia: from Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate [2022], <b>since the “end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington had treated post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation with inferior legitimate rights at home and abroad.</b> The triumphalist, winner-take-all approach has been spearheaded by the expansion of NATO—accompanied by non-reciprocal zones of national security while excluding Moscow from Europe’s security systems. Early on, Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Georgia were Washington’s ‘great prize’” (p. 16).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2022/05/04/do-americans-who-support-roe-v-wade-understand-its-implications/" source="Reason" author="Jacob Sullum">Do Americans Who Support <i>Roe v. Wade</i> Understand Its Implications?</a> <bq><b>The key question for the Supreme Court, of course, is not what most Americans think about abortion. It is whether the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion</b>—or, to put it another way, whether the Constitution imposes limits on state regulation of abortion. Judging not only from the leaked opinion but also from the oral arguments, most of the justices think it does not.</bq> Correct. It's not the legislative branch. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/04/241569/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">War, Peace and Ukraine</a> <bq><b>I must also despair at the incalculable political damage unleashed by the February 24th invasion, enabling eager rightists to crawl from the woodwork of media desks</b> or political armchairs and crow triumphantly, louder than for many years, denouncing any who dare to even question their hard-core decisions, croaking hatred at all those they label as deluded fools, suspicious “Putin-friends”, or malevolent traitors. They can now glory in their bigoted ignorance,</bq> <bq>But Putin is not Russia, a country which has almost always been on the defensive. And many decades of observing the ways of the world force me, despite my own emotions and huge pressure from all sides, to recall important facts and lessons I have learned, even when they contradict majority views. I have observed that since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 the key forces managing US foreign policy – with their <b>presidents, Secretaries of State, Pentagon brass, CIA, AID and all the rest – were single-mindedly devoted to achieving US world leadership, indeed, world hegemony – though always dressed in handsome words about freedom and democracy.</b></bq> <bq><b>The goal, therefore, was always regime change, in Russia and in China.</b> The US marionette Boris Yeltsin was installed for almost a decade after the USSR was buried; the goal seemed within reach. Indeed, much was grabbed up while Russia was reduced to a tragic, poverty-stricken mess. But in 2000 <b>Putin</b> took over. Never a saint in any way, he was not a marionette either and, regardless of his later actions, in that aspect he <b>became a rescuer who, by clipping controlling strings from abroad, just barely managed to salvage his country from total degradation and started up work to rebuild it.</b></bq> <bq>Leadership foibles, like excessive vodka drinking or sawing up one’s opponents, can be tolerated, but not rebuilding a barrier to world hegemony!</bq> <bq>In 1998 Friedman spoke with old George Kennan, a former ambassador to Moscow and often called America’s greatest expert on Russia. Speaking of NATO eastward expansion, he said:<bq>“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war…I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else… <b>Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”</b> <i>(Feb. 21, 2022)</i></bq></bq> <bq><b>The Greens, once seen as a left-leaning party, are now led by the sharpest of Russia-haters, who spouted incendiary statements long before Putin sent in the troops.</b> Most prominent are young, virulent Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Vice-Chancellor/Economics-Environment Minister Robert Habeck, both “Atlanticists” with what might better be called “Potomac” positions.</bq> <bq>In February Germany was importing 55% of its gas from Moscow; despite all its haste, developing substitute sources like oil from the Persian Gulf or the Atlantic and gas from American fracking would take time and cause great unemployment, shortages and general misery. <b>The need for Russian energy imports and sales to Russia and China had long been a balancing factor against belligerent Atlanticists and their allies the armament groupies.</b></bq> <bq>All major parties supported the giant new spending decision. Opposed were the AfD delegates, who generally supported Putin in the past but may now be splitting on the issue. They usually vote against the government on everything, in keeping with their hopes of taking over some day. <b>One single Christian Democratic maverick (from East Germany) also voted Nay. And so did the entire caucus of DIE LINKE – The Left, this time united.</b> The party’s caucus co-chairperson, Amira Mohamed Ali (but no relation!), stated: <b>“We from The Left cannot and will not join in such rearmament, such militarization. History teaches us that competition in arms production does not bring security. What is necessary is disarmament and diplomacy.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse?s=r" source="SubStack" author="Glenn Greenwald">The Irrational, Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe v. Wade</a> <bq>[...] the purpose of the Bill of Rights is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian. It bars majorities from enacting laws that infringe on the fundamental rights of minorities. Thus, <b>in the U.S., it does not matter if 80% or 90% of Americans support a law to restrict free speech, or ban the free exercise of a particular religion, or imprison someone without due process, or subject a particularly despised criminal to cruel and unusual punishment.</b> Such laws can never be validly enacted. The Constitution deprives the majority of the power to engage in such acts regardless of how popular they might be.</bq> <bq>When the Court strikes down a law that majorities support, it may be a form of judicial tyranny if the invalidated law does not violate any actual rights enshrined in the Constitution. But <b>the mere judicial act of invalidating a law supported by a majority of citizens — though frequently condemned as “undemocratic" — is, in fact, a fulfillment of one of the Court's prime functions in a republic.</b></bq> <bq>The sole purpose of Roe was to deny citizens the right to enact the anti-abortion laws, no matter how much popular support they commanded.</bq> <bq>Alito's decision, if it becomes the Court's ruling, would not itself ban abortions. It would instead lift the judicial prohibition on the ability of states to enact laws restricting or banning abortions. In other words, <b>it would take this highly controversial question of abortion and remove it from the Court's purview and restore it to federal and state legislatures to decide</b> [...]</bq> <bq>The only way Roe can be defended is through an explicit appeal to the virtues of the anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian principles enshrined in the Constitution: namely, that because the Constitution guarantees the right to have an abortion (though a more generalized right of privacy), then majorities are stripped of the power to enact laws restricting it. <b>Few people like to admit that their preferred views depend upon a denial of the rights of the majority to decide, or that their position is steeped in anti-democratic values.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-age-of-self-delusion" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Age of Self-Delusion</a> <bq>“NATO has been revitalized, the United States has reclaimed a mantle of leadership that some feared had vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the European Union has found a unity and purpose that eluded it for most of its existence,” <b>The New York Times crowed.</b></bq> Just bubbling with excitement. Not afraid of war at all. Disgusting. <bq>The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command, apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days, <b>exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace.</b> Russia’s forty-mile long convoy​ of stalled tanks and trucks, broken down and out of fuel, on the muddy road to Kyiv <b>was not an image of cutting-edge military prowess.</b></bq> <bq>But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. <b>A Russian monster is the raison d'être for increased military spending and the further projection of American power abroad, especially against China.</b></bq> Scott Ritter is more confident. Who's right? Is Hedges misled or Ritter? Chomsky also believes Russia can't lose. I keep reading that Ukraine is just about to win, but then also that they need a ton more weapons. <bq><b>The new Hitler was once Saddam Hussein. Today it is Vladimir Putin. Tomorrow it will be Xi Jinping.</b> You can’t drain and impoverish the nation to feed an insatiable military machine unless you make its people afraid, even of phantoms.</bq> <bq>Triggered by war in Ukraine, soaring energy prices have pushed the US and other countries to call on domestic oil producers to increase fossil fuel extraction and exacerbate the climate crisis. <b>Oil and gas lobbyists are demanding the Biden administration lift prohibitions on offshore drilling and on federal lands.</b></bq> <bq>[...] nations will increasingly use their militaries to hoard diminishing natural resources, including food and water. Russia and Ukraine account for 30 per cent of all wheat traded on world markets. <b>Since the invasion, the price of wheat has gone up by between 50 and 65 per cent in commodities exchanges.</b></bq> <bq><b>War is a spectacular form of social control.</b> It secures a blind, unquestioning mass consent propped up by what Pankaj Mishra calls an <b>“infotainment media” that “works up citizens into a state of paranoid patriotism,”</b> while “a service class of intellectuals talks up the American Revolution and the international liberal order.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/05/01/ralph-nader-the-dems-are-totally-useless-against-the-trumpian-gop-onslaught/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ralph Nader">The Dems Are Totally Useless Against the Trumpian GOP Onslaught</a> <bq>Come September 1948, Truman spent 33 days covering 21,928 miles on the railroad campaign trail, attacking the Republicans and their “big money boys.” In Dexter, Iowa, Kuttner reports, “he told a crowd of some ninety thousand people” (outdoors): <b>“I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you? …These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men…They want a return of the Wall Street dictatorship…I’m not asking you to vote for me. Vote for yourselves.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2022/05/10/study-europes-aggressive-privacy-regulations-are-killing-app-innovation/" author="Scott Shackford" source="Reason">Study: Europe's Aggressive Privacy Regulations Are Killing App Innovation</a> What foolishness. You might as well write, "Study: Europe's Aggressive Child-Labor Laws are Killing Hiring Innovation" or "Europe's Minimum-Wage Laws Lead to Price Increases." <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/jen-psaki-press-secretary-msnbc-corporate-lobbying/" author="Julia Rock" source="Jacobin">Jen Psaki Is the Latest White House Press Secretary to Cash In</a> <bq>Today is Jen Psaki's last day as Joe Biden's press secretary before becoming an MSNBC pundit. She's the latest in a long line of Democratic presidential flacks who have become corporate lackeys and mouthpieces.</bq> The summary of that article makes no sense. She was a corporate lackey and mouthpiece while she was working for the president. <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/elephant-in-the-room-clean-energys-need-for-unsustainable-minerals/" source="Ars Technica" author="Shel Evergreen">“Elephant in the room”: Clean energy’s need for unsustainable minerals</a> <bq>One strategy to deal with this problem is to move to a more circular economy, he said. This might be a system in which elements only need to be extracted once and then get recycled at the end of their life, Raugei said. <b>The circular economy basically means wasting as little as possible and still making a profit.</b> Lithium-ion batteries, for example, contain multiple valuable minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. “This obviously reduces the pressure on the extractive industry because you can keep using the same assets,” he said.</bq> No shit. Easier said than done. <bq>A recent study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that when green energy production grows by 1 percent, it leads to a 0.90 percent growth in greenhouse gas emissions. <b>According to the study, from 2010-2020, the use of permanent magnets in renewable tech resulted in emissions amounting to 32 billion metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions.</b></bq> <bq>Most raw materials for renewable energy are extracted from a few countries outside the US and Europe. Lithium, for example, is mostly extracted from South America, while 70 percent of cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and China in 2019. New mining sites, Kramarz said, often create a “land grab” that can remove people from their livelihoods while degrading human and ecological health. <b>They also result in higher levels of poverty—a well-established correlation for commodity-rich areas known as the “resource curse.”</b></bq> Disgusting. We literally can't say that we just steal the resources. Like a mugger would deem his victims as having a "wallet curse". <bq><b>When a company from the US decides to extract cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who do they ask for permission?</b> Kramarz said that answering the question of responsible sourcing has to involve procedural justice—<b>the chance for resource-rich communities to weigh in on decisions before extraction starts.</b></bq> Like that's a morally new concept! We excuse ourselves everything! Companies like that there's no-one to ask and that everyone's poor and defenseless. Then they just steal what they want and call it development. This whole article is so tone-deaf, but it's also so mainstream. <bq>Minerals travel a long way from the time they’re plucked from the Earth to their ultimate destination of a renewable energy technology. Remote mining operations and weak regulation mean the harms along the way are often left unaddressed. <b>For clean energy to overcome its dirty demons, it will likely need widespread government regulation to ensure transparency and incentivize the adoption of green solutions.</b> Advertisement Insufficient data is a major obstacle, Kraslawski said. “We are jumping into the pool without checking if there is any water,” he said, in terms of rushing toward renewables. “We need much more transparency from industry but also from the governments.”</bq> No, an utter lack of ethics is the major hurdle. <bq>Life-cycle researchers like Kraslawski and Raugei rely on information from industry, usually in the form of large databases. “These data sets are often incomplete, not very precise, and are not very accurate in some cases,” Raugei said, noting that <b>there has been little economic incentive for companies to use their time and money to collect detailed information.</b></bq> Also because they would have to admit they're outright stealing resources using slaves. This is what we are supposed to believe is "objective reporting", but it just blatantly ignores what it is reporting on---outright theft and piracy. <bq><b>Government regulation, she said, adds an element of fairness from an economic standpoint</b> because corporations are worried about competitiveness and need to know that standards are being applied to their competitors.</bq> No fucking shit. Like any of this new. Companies have no moral lower bound, and so will do anything to make more money. You have to physically stop them from ruining lives and basing their business model on piracy because they won't stop themselves. They say, "well, if I don't steal from that person, someone else will. And then I'll be out of the stealing business. Where's the sense in that?" <bq><b>Thinking of climate change as a problem to be solved through more markets, she said, means locking us into a high-consumption lifestyle.</b> “That fundamentally has to change," she said.</bq> Use-less. Again: no shit. <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-question-of-david-icke?s=r" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Question of David Icke</a> <bq><b>I don’t allow my students at Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, or any other college I teach at, to engage in class discussions about the assignment unless they have done the reading.</b> They owe the author, and those who have invested time in his or her work, an informed debate. I asked the festival director if she had read the book. She conceded she had not.</bq> <bq>I ordered and read Icke’s book <i>And the truth shall set you free.</i> <b>I found most charges against him inflated, distorted, misinterpreted and, in some cases, patently false.</b> He is careful not to be overtly anti-Semitic but he does embrace conspiracy theories that include Jewish organizations. He claims these organizations are members of the vast conspiracy apparatus waged by extraterrestrials against us. <b>It is wrong to call him anti-Semitic, although there are numerous passages and ideas in the book that are justifiably offensive to many people, including Jews.</b></bq> <bq>Icke is not always a clear writer. His passages carry apparent contradictions, sometimes making his position hard to fathom. But <b>Icke, like anyone, deserves to be critiqued for what he writes, not slandered.</b> Now that he is being used as a bludgeon to censor Walker it is important to elucidate his positions.</bq> <bq><b>Icke blames the Illuminati and Freemasons, front groups for the bad extraterrestrials, for most of the evil in the world.</b> They are behind, he writes, “the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the constant manipulation of the financial system.”</bq> <bq>While he attacks Zionism, he writes on page 81 that “all Jewish people are not Zionists, and all Zionists are not Jewish. Zionism is not a religion or a race; it is a political movement consisting of people, Jews, and non-Jews, who support the claim for a Jewish homeland. If you support that, you are a Zionist, too, no matter what your race or religious belief. <b>To say that Zionism is the Jewish race is like saying the British Labour Party is the English race.</b>”</bq> <bq author="David Icke">The British hierarchy has probably manipulated, exploited, and sent to their deaths multimillions of British people to serve the ‘national interest’ – the interests of the ruling clique; the German hierarchy has done the same to the German people and the American hierarchy to the American population. <b>These ruling cliques have utter contempt for their ‘unwashed masses.’ They see them as cattle to be used and abused as required. Why is it so amazing that the Jewish hierarchy should see the mass of Jewish people in the same terms?</b></bq> Yeah, that sounds different in context. <bq author="David Icke"><b>I stress here that to highlight the part played by the Rothschilds is not to cast aspersions on Jewish people as a whole, the vast majority of whom have no idea what is happening and certainly would not support it if they did know.</b> Many of the members of families I will name, like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and others, do not know the game plan, either. It is those who control those empires that I am seeking to expose, not everyone whose name is Rothschild, Rockefeller, or whatever. <b>I believe that researchers over the years who have blamed the crime conspiracy on the Jewish people as a whole are seriously misguided;</b> similarly, for Jewish organizations to deny that any Jewish person is working for the New World Order conspiracy is equally naïve and allowing dogma or worse to blind them to reality.</bq> <bq>I do not, in any way, want to give credibility to these views. That was not the point of reading and writing about Icke’s work. Rather, I saw that Icke had been successfully weaponized against Walker by her critics. I thought it was important to lay out in detail exactly what it was he has written. <b>However bizarre, conspiratorial, and fanciful, his work is not the anti-Semitic screed those who use it to blacklist Walker claim. Those who distorted Icke’s views knew exactly what they were doing.</b> They were using Icke to shut down one of our finest writers and one of our most committed and courageous champions of Palestinian rights.</bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://www.pzuraq.com/blog/four-eras-of-javascript-frameworks" source="pzuraq" author="">Four Eras of JavaScript Frameworks</a> <bq><b>I don’t think React invented components, but to be honest I’m not quite sure where they first came from.</b> I know there’s prior art going back to at least XAML in .NET, and web components were also beginning to develop as a spec around then. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter - once the idea was out there, every major framework adopted it pretty quickly.</bq> Yikes. Do a little research rather than letting people believe that you think React invented components. SMH. <bq>By the end of this era, some problems still remained. <b>State management and reactivity were (and are) still thorny problems</b>, even though we had much better patterns than before. Performance was still a difficult problem, and even though the situation was improving, there were still many, many bloated SPAs out there. And the accessibility situation had improved, but it was (and is) still oftentimes an afterthought for many engineering orgs. But these changes paved the way for the next generation of frameworks, which I would say we are entering just now.</bq> <bq>I cannot stress enough how amazing this feels. I have, in the past 9 months of working with SvelteKit, sat back more times than I can count and said to myself <b>“this is the way we should have always done it.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.jackfranklin.co.uk/blog/working-with-react-and-the-web-platform/" source="" author="Jack Franklin">Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform</a> <bq>[...] introduce Web Components as the new fundamental building block of all new DevTools features and UI. <b>With the recently launched Recorder panel along with others, there are now large parts of DevTools that are almost exclusively web components.</b></bq> <bq>The same is true of your own code (swap "dependency" for "file"), but crucially you have full control, you presumably are more familiar with its workings as it was written in house, and you are not beholden to others to fix the issue upstream. <b>This is not to say that you should recreate the world on every project; there will always be a fine balancing act of building it yourself versus adding a dependency</b>, and there is no rule that will determine the right outcome every time.</bq> This is written by an engineer for whom there always exists the possibility of writing it themselves. Thats not nearly the common case. Many programmers need the libraries and abstractions in order to get any work done at all. That is not an argument for libraries and dependencies all the time; just pointing out the perspective.