<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> </ul> <h><span id="covid">COVID-19</span></h> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-25/nyse-forgot-to-open-yesterday" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">NYSE Forgot to Open Yesterday</a> <bq>I put in my order to buy 1,000 shares, and some electronic market maker instantly sells to me at $45.01 per share; five minutes later, you put in your order to sell 1,000 shares, and the electronic market maker instantly buys from you at $44.99. <b>We have each effectively paid a penny per share for “immediacy,” the service that the market maker provided of letting us trade instantly instead of waiting to find each other.</b></bq> <bq>The point is that <b>the limit order book</b> does not represent the true economic supply and demand for a stock. It just <b>represents the supply and demand for the stock right now</b>, mainly from risk-averse high-frequency electronic market makers. If you want to sell 100,000 shares, you break that up into smaller orders so as not to scare off the market makers, you do it over some period of time, and eventually enough people will want to buy that you’ll be able to sell at a reasonable price. <b>There will be some price impact of your trading — you can’t sell 100,000 shares at $44.99; supply and demand matter — but you won’t sell at $20, either.</b></bq> <bq>[...] every so often a trader at a big institutional investing firm will put in an order to sell 100,000 shares, and instead of hitting the “break this into small orders and sell over 8 hours” button she will hit the “put in a market order to sell all of this immediately” button, and <b>the stock will briefly crash as her trade eats through the entire order book and ends up printing at ridiculous prices. And then the stock will recover, because its value hasn’t really changed; it’s just that there were not enough orders resting on the book to execute that trade sensibly.</b> This is sometimes called a “fat finger” error, because the only excuse for it is that your finger is too big to hit the right button.</bq> <bq>[...] market makers probably don’t want to trade in the opening auction. <b>A market maker does not have a deeply informed view about the fundamental value of a stock</b>; it just tries to turn over inventory quickly and do trades at pretty close to the previous trade.</bq> <bq>If there is no auction, and your 10,000-share market order gets sent to the regular order book instead, then NYSE has effectively fat-fingered you. <b>It sent your unusually large order into an unusually thin order book.</b> And so the stock crashes, or soars, depending on whether you are buying or selling.</bq> <bq><b>You could imagine NYSE looking at its list of orders, seeing a market sell order, executing it against the few resting limit buy orders, crashing the price down, looking at the next order, seeing a market buy order, and executing it against the few resting limit sell orders</b>, shooting the price right back up again. And that’s how you get “sharp price swings, triggering trading halts.”</bq> <bq>NYSE has a sensible market structure for its 9:30:00 a.m. trading, and a sensible market structure for its 9:30:01 a.m. trading, and <b>they are very different, and if you mix them up you get a mess.</b></bq> <bq>One rough way to think about the “everything is securities fraud” theory is that, once upon a time, most sorts of corporate behavior fell into these categories — investors were presumed not to care about them, they weren’t discussed in filings, etc. — and <b>the only area that mattered was, like, financial results. “Securities fraud” meant lying about earnings.</b> And then over time various areas of corporate behavior — executive ethics, cybersecurity, etc. — became things that companies disclosed and investors were presumed to care about, and so <b>now shareholders can sue companies if bad things happen in those areas.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://lithub.com/debunking-the-coconut-myth-an-economist-breaks-down-a-fundamental-misunderstanding-of-the-cause-of-poverty-in-poor-countries/" source="Literary Hub" author="Ha-Joon Chang">Debunking the Coconut Myth: An Economist Breaks Down a Fundamental Misunderstanding of the Cause of Poverty in Poor Countries</a> <bq><b>A common assumption in rich countries is that poor countries are poor because their people do not work hard.</b> And given that most, if not all, poor countries are in the tropics, they often attribute the lack of work ethic of the people in poor countries to the easy living that they supposedly get thanks to the bounty of the tropics. In the tropics, it is said, food grows everywhere (bananas, coconuts, mangoes—the usual imagery goes), while the high temperature means that people don’t need sturdy shelter or much clothing.</bq> <bq>However, what is clear is that <b>poor people in poor countries are poor largely because of historical, political and technological forces that are beyond their control</b>, rather than because of their individual shortcomings, least of all their unwillingness to work hard. The fundamental misunderstanding of the cause of poverty in poor countries, represented by the false imagery built around the coconut, has <b>helped the global elites, both from the rich countries and the poor ones themselves, blame the poor individuals in poor countries for their poverty.</b></bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/the-arestovych-case-and-the-question" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">The Arestovych Case and the Question of Power</a> <bq><b>The Arestovich case shows that although hostilities are not yet over, the struggle for the post-war structure of Ukraine is now unfolding.</b> The same struggle is quietly stirring in Russia. Putin’s imminent defeat marks the beginning of a new era for both countries. And it doesn’t look like the wait is too long.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-west-is-incentivizing-russia" source="SubStack" author="Caitlin Johnstone">The West Is Incentivizing Russia To Hit Back</a> <bq>Marcetic drives home a very important point which needs more attention: that <b>the western alliance has established a policy of continually escalating every time Russia doesn't react forcefully to a previous western escalation</b>, which necessarily means Russia is being actively incentivized to react forcefully to those escalations.</bq> NATO is at war with Russia. Russia understands that. Ukraine cannot fight without NATO. NATO enables Ukraine to fight without even having to consider engaging in diplomacy. NATO is the driver behind everything that happens, even implicitly---because NATO could prevent anything from happening. It could end it all right now. Today. It just doesn't want to. Russia could end it, too, but its future would be more uncertain. NATO could end it without any risk to its own security. Russia has to be careful of how this ends because, depending on how it ends, NATO might chase them home. NATO smells weakness and pounces like a shark smells blood in the water. <bq>"Moscow keeps saying escalatory arms transfers are unacceptable and could mean wider war; US officials say since Moscow hasn't acted on those threats, they can freely escalate. <b>Russia is effectively told it has to escalate to show it's serious about lines," Marcetic added on Twitter.</b></bq> <bq>[...] as Dave DeCamp explained at the time, that's not even true; <b>Russia did significantly escalate its aggressions in response to strikes on Crimea</b>, beginning to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure in ways it previously had not.</bq> <bq>As long as Russia is only escalating in ways that hurt Ukrainians, the US-centralized power structure does not regard them as real escalations. <b>The take-home message to Moscow being that they're going to get squeezed harder and harder until they attack NATO itself.</b> And of course that won't de-escalate things either; it will be seized on and spun as evidence that Putin is a reckless madman who is attacking the free world completely unprovoked and must be stopped at all cost, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon. Russia would of course be aware of this obvious reality, so <b>the only way it takes the bait is if the pain of not reacting gets to a point where it is perceived as outweighing the pain of reacting.</b> But judging by its actions the empire seems determined to push them to that point.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/26/patrick-lawrence-bidens-secret-stash/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Biden's Secret Stash</a> <bq>The WikiLeaks founder was early to recognize that our political culture’s infinitely elaborated structures of secrecy are “where civilization is going,” as he once put it. And <b>[Assange] understood that these structures must be penetrated if authentic forms of democracy are to survive and prosper.</b></bq> <bq>What stirs me is the extent to which secrecy is the norm and, more specifically, <b>the extent to which secrecy makes possible the conduct of the imperialists who run our hegemonic foreign policies.</b></bq> <bq>Here’s my reply to this: If this log-rolling liar didn’t know he was in possession of classified documents, in some cases for more than a decade, <b>he simply cannot be counted qualified to be president or hold any public office allowing him such access.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/26/caitlin-johnstone-us-constantly-provoking-china/" source="Scheer Post" author="Caitlin Johnstone">US Constantly Provoking China</a> <bq>None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the U.S.” If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the Western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the U.S. for defensive purposes. But that’s exactly what happens with U.S. aggressions against China. <b>It’s just taken as matter of fact when the U.S. says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression.</b></bq> <bq>Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear, <b>“No bro, the U.S. is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”</b></bq> <bq>“The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be ‘the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation,’ a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous,” Jackson writes.</bq> This is chilling. What the hell are they planning on doing with their $1T? <bq>“There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will <b>cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible.</b>”</bq> <bq>This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous U.S. official cited in a November article by Bloomberg, who said that “the hawkish tone in D.C. has contributed to <b>a cycle where the U.S. makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.</b>” It’s the U.S. making the first move every time.</bq> <bq>I don’t know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint, but if it does it seems a safe bet that it will be because the U.S. empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations <b>until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action.</b> And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/navalny-deputy-maria-pevchikh-putin-opposition-corruption-foundation" source="The Guardian" author="Carole Cadwalladr">‘We do our work because we are angry’: Navalny’s right-hand woman Maria Pevchikh on taking on Putin</a> <bq>Navalny, the most influential Russian politician for a generation, is currently serving two separately imposed prison sentences – two and a half years for a parole violation and nine for fraud and contempt – <b>in a maximum-security penal colony four hours east of Moscow.</b></bq> Repetition makes it true. The West has prisons; Russia has penal colonies. The term is supposed to make you think they're extra barbaric and primitive. We're supposed to think of Russia as the carceral state, never the U.S. <bq>Even Navalny himself, though he has condemned Putin’s war in Ukraine, has been accused of equivocating over whether Crimea should be returned to Ukraine.</bq> Hahahahaha! Navalny fails the Guardian's purity test! These people are just incredible. Now, I almost feel sorry for Navalny. They will chew him up and spit him out. God help him when they rediscover his right-wing social views---his right-wing economic views are just fine, of course. <bq>And in the west, they’re doing it via a documentary, Navalny, an independent feature released last year that’s been nominated for a Bafta and shortlisted for an Oscar. Awards season is in full swing and for months Pevchikh and Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, have been flying back and forth to America to talk and appear on panels and meet the great and the good. <b>“I honestly don’t know where we would be without the documentary,” Pevchikh says. “It’s mentioned in every meeting I have with ministers or their staff. Everybody knows who he is because of it. And who I am.”</b></bq> JFC that paragraph. I don't believe for a minute that "great and good" was meant ironically. A one-sided documentary is changing people's minds! Striking a blow for the great and the good! <bq>Afterwards, he’s shown uploading a new film about the investigation to his social media channels, “Privyet!” he says. “Eto Navalny.” “Hi, it’s Navalny.” It’s his signature phrase.</bq> <iq>It's his signature phrase.</iq> C'mon. It's literally how you introduce yourself in Russian. JFC get a clue fangirl. He's answering a phone call. <bq><b>It was Bellingcat that brought the investigation to Navalny.</b> But it was Pevchikh who checked it out and did the due diligence not just on the facts, but also on Grozev and the film-makers.</bq> There we go. Bellingcat. The most reliable source in news, right behind Hamilton 68. <bq>[...] there was no doubt that she was the boss in this a roomful of slightly dishevelled men, a rather fabulous boss with coiffed hair, perfectly applied red lipstick, red nails and an inscrutable expression.</bq> Christ am I completely unaccustomed to mainstream reporting. Grrrrl power ammirite!?!? <bq><b>Anne Applebaum, the American author and academic</b>, has been on the foundation’s advisory board since it relaunched last year as an international group and she describes it as “a really innovative form of opposition politics”.</bq> Aw Jesus. This one too. Now I know it's all crap. Applebaum is a cold-warrior and a Russia-gater, a dyed-in-the-wool neocon. She's on the boards of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy AKA the CIA's foreign-policy arm) and CFR (Council of Foreign Relations, who've never seen an imperial war that they didn't like). <bq>He was innovative in crowdfunding and he made a very important move from blogging to YouTube which made his anti-corruption content more and more readily available and in an entertaining form. It’s a political party created off the back of a media organisation.”</bq> Fantastic. You literally just said that he's great at propaganda. <bq>On the phone a couple of weeks ago, Pevchikh tells me about a new Bellingcat discovery and suddenly it feels like the risks she’s taken have become all too real: <b>Christo Grozev had found evidence that the FSB poisoning team had also visited her hotel in Tomsk.</b></bq> Of course they did. Bellingcat has the easiest job in the world because no-one ever expects any supporting evidence for their "journalism". They just have to write what their audience wants to hear. In their case, the audience is powerful neocons. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/25/gdof-j25.html" source="WSWS" author="Jason Melanovski, Clara Weiss">Zelensky government shaken by political crisis as NATO prepares escalation of war with Russia</a> <bq>Whatever the fraudulent nature of Zelensky’s claims to be fighting corruption, the revelations indicate that the crisis of the Zelensky government is not least of all fueled by growing social discontent within the population. They leave no doubt that the corrupt oligarchy that has emerged out of the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy is <b>shamelessly using a significant portion of the tens of billions of dollars that are flooding the country for NATO’s war against Russia in order to further enrich itself.</b></bq> <bq><b>8 million out of Ukraine’s pre-war population of 39 million have fled the country and another 8 million have been internally displaced.</b> Within Ukraine, 11.4 million have only “insufficient food consumption,” an increase of over 3 million over the the past three months, according to the World Food Program. <b>Over one in five children (22.9 percent) in the country are now suffering from chronic malnutrition.</b></bq> Jesus Christ. End it. Only the elites benefit. <bq>On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a bill into law that <b>imposes draconian penalties on soldiers for deserting and disobeying military orders</b>, and significantly undermines their right to legal defense.</bq> <bq>Following his dismissal, Arestovych stated publicly that, in his view, Ukraine was unlikely to win the war and <b>acknowledged that as a government official he had purposely misrepresented the real state of the war</b> as going in Ukraine’s favor.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/25/scott-ritter-the-nightmare-of-nato-equipment-being-sent-to-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">The Nightmare of NATO Equipment Being Sent to Ukraine</a> <bq>Two days prior, <b>soldiers from the 150th Rifle Division, part of the Soviet 5th Shock Army, had raised the victory banner of the Red Army over the Reichstag.</b> An hour after the banner went up, Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his study inside the Furhrerbunker.</bq> <bq>In honor of this accomplishment, and the sacrifice it entailed, the Soviet Army inaugurated, in November 1945, a commemorative monument along the Tiergarten. Constructed from red marble and granite stripped away from the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s Neue Reichskanzlei (New Imperial Chancellery), <b>the monument, consisting of a concave colonnade of six joined axes flanked by Red Army artillery and a pair of T-34 tanks</b>, with a giant bronze statue of a victorious Red Army soldier standing watch from the center pylon.</bq> I have pictures of this monument. We walked through it at night, in the rain. <bq>[...] to properly operate the five battalion-equivalents of infantry fighting vehicles being supplied their NATO partners, <b>Ukraine will need to train its maintenance troops on four completely different systems</b>, each with its own unique set of problems and separate logistical/spare part support requirements.</bq> <bq>This, more than anything else, is the true expression of the Ramstein effect, a cause-effect relationship that the West does not seem either able or willing to discern before it is too late for <b>the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers whose lives are about to be sacrificed on an altar of national hubris and ignorance.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/01/a-horror-show-of-technological-and-moral-failure.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Ashutosh Jogalekar">A horror show of technological and moral failure</a> <bq>On the night of March 9, 1945, almost 300 B-29 bombers took off from Tinian Island near Japan. <b>Over the next six hours, 100,000 civilians in Tokyo were burnt to death, more possibly than in any six-hour period in history.</b></bq> <bq>As the old saying goes, <b>in principle there is no difference between principle and practice but in practice there is.</b> The best laid theories of strategic bombing winning wars crashed and burned against reality because of fundamental technological issues. The B-29 was supposed to bomb from high up using a wondrous invention, the Norden bombsight. The Norden bombsight would presumably adjust for drift in a bombardier’s calculations. What the bombardiers over Japan had not known was the jet stream, a massive current of air which was known to the Japanese but not the Americans. <b>Pilots over Japan suddenly discovered tail winds of up to 100 miles per hour which could buffet and toss their planes and throw them off course. In such cases, even the top-secret Norden bombsight could not prevent them from dropping their bombs way off target.</b></bq> <bq>But the war was going badly. As 1944 gave way to 1945, the Japanese were increasingly putting up desperate resistance. Their kamikaze pilots were launching suicidal attacks against naval ships, killing thousands. And inside the homeland, <b>a starved, battered nation was teaching high school girls to fight with bamboo spears in anticipation of an invasion, an invasion that according to some U.S. plans could cost up to a million casualties.</b> The American people were tired of war, the Japanese people were not planning to give up anytime soon. Haywood Hansell’s strategy was no working.</bq> <bq>[Curtis LeMay's] philosophy in life was simple – never give up. That philosophy metamorphosed into a very different philosophy for winning wars – <b>“The way to win wars is to kill people. And if you kill enough of them, they give up.”</b> Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the war against Japan reached a crescendo, Curtis LeMay replaced Haywood Hansell.</bq> <bq>In a moment of inspiration he had an idea: take the B-29, strip it of unnecessary antiaircraft defenses, <b>drop it down from 30,000 feet to 5000 feet and load it up to its gills with incendiary bombs containing napalm</b>, a substance discovered by a Harvard chemist in 1942. Napalm burns with a demon-like ferocity and resists attempts to put it out. LeMay knew the damage it could do, but he knew something more important. <b>He knew that more than 90% of the houses in downtown Tokyo were made out of wood.</b></bq> <bq>An hour into the raid, Tokyo’s feeble fire defense abandoned efforts to try to put out the fire, instead trying to guide people to safety. But it was to no avail. The unprecedented fires from the wooden structures created a firestorm, starting winds exceeding 50 miles an hour. <b>People’s clothes were ripped from their backs, their hair caught on fire, the very ground on which they had been walking melted.</b></bq> <bq>Public and official reaction in the United States was muted.</bq> Plus ça change. <bq>As far as Curtis LeMay’s reaction was concerned, while he had no moral qualms, he well understood the consequences: <b>“If we had lost”, he said in a speech a few years later, “we would have been hung as war criminals.”</b> Perhaps without meaning it, LeMay was saying that the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg were acts of sheer, wanton terror and murder that <b>equalled the war crimes that the Allies prosecuted at Nuremberg and at the Japanese war tribunal.</b></bq> What goes for thee, but not for me. <bq>Bombing only made the populations who had to bear the brunt of it more resilient; <b>it is a point of particular irony that the British who had seen how little a difference the Blitz made to the resolve of the population of London</b> somehow thought that the same tactics would work against the populations of Dresden and Hamburg.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-border-is-ponzi-scheme.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Border is a Ponzi Scheme</a> <bq>First off, these people aren't rushing the ramparts of the world's biggest police state because they're just jonesing for our superior brand name of freedom. <b>They are fleeing for their fucking lives from the flaming shitholes that our superior brand name of freedom has reduced their homelands into after we failed to outsource it by the barrel of an M-60.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we chained their countries up in strangling economic sanctions and kicked them into the bottomless well of human misery</b> that tends to come with that sort of economic terrorism and Haiti has been fucked over so many times by Uncle Sam that we all lost count about a century ago. <b>These people are refugees of American violence flocking to the land where all their wealth is being hoarded</b> by a bunch of lazy fucking gringos with sharing issues.</bq> <bq>The jagged little reality that <b>neither species of partisan Washington sewer mutant can seem to swallow is that the border is not open</b>, it has simply collapsed beneath the weight of an insatiably massive police state that both parties have consistently conspired with their shared corporate overlords to construct.</bq> <bq><b>Donald Trump simply took what Obama had quietly erected and swung it around over his head like a coked-out berserker slathered in virgin calf's blood.</b> He definitely ramped up the cruelty and turned what had been a largely covert war into a blatant act of terrorism by advertising it like a goddamn monster truck rally. But <b>every single weapon at that raving orange supremacist's disposal was provided to him gift-wrapped by the same bleeding-heart liberals who wagged their fingers at the bad man</b> and consoled his victims before the cameras with warm blankets, hot cocoa and Sarah McGlocklin jams.</bq> <bq>[...] the decades of military machinery, the jackbooted shock troops and Skynet-grade technology, haven't done a goddamn thing to slow the relentless tide of desperate people crossing these trillion-dollar trenches. That's probably because <b>none of this shit was actually designed to keep poor people out of this country. It was designed to control poor people inside of it and make powerful people very rich.</b></bq> <bq>Whereas in your typical Ponzi scheme, a fraudster pays existing investors with the funds of new investors while promising high returns and pocketing the money instead, <b>the border Ponzi scheme promises last year's immigrants protection from next year's immigrants but actually just invests this money in a fascistic police state that only benefits the fraudsters pulling its strings.</b></bq> <bq>Every tribe has some right to define their own boundaries, but this includes the right for me and my tribe to defend ourselves from the real fucking predators of a fanged deep state that none of us actually voted for. <b>It should also include the right for me to invite whoever the hell I want over to dinner, regardless of which fanged deep state claims the soil on their boots.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/01/bureau-of-labor-statistics-2022-report-union-density-decline-organizing/" source="Jacobin" author="Jonah Furman">A New Report Shows the US Labor Movement Hasn’t Yet Reversed Its Decline</a> <bq>Union density has been falling since the 1950s, and in absolute numbers since the 1980s, despite continued population (and job) growth. <b>At its peak, around one in three US workers were union members; that number is now one in ten.</b> In 1979, there were around twenty-one million workers with union cards; there are now around fourteen million.</bq> <bq>The Starbucks union campaign has been a ray of sunshine amid dark clouds, but <b>union growth is still coming primarily through the expansion of already-unionized jobs.</b></bq> <bq>The United Auto Workers alone has shed three hundred thousand members since Y2K, suffering huge blows in manufacturing. Around two hundred thousand union construction jobs are gone, with density likewise cut nearly in half. And <b>it’s not just hardhats and factory workers: around three hundred thousand jobs at the post office have been slashed, most of them union</b> [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/21/patrick-lawrence-japan-reenlists-as-washingtons-spear-carrier/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Japan Reenlists as Washington's Spear-Carrier</a> <bq>Kishi proved a salesman, all right. Three years later he used armed police to clear the Diet of opposition legislators and force ratification of the Anpo treaty, as the Japanese call it, with members of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the only ones present to vote on it. <b>“A 134–pound body packed with pride, power and passion—a perfect embodiment of his country’s amazing resurgence,” TIME wrote of the man who ought to have been hanged a decade earlier.</b></bq> <bq>There is a long history here. American New Dealers wrote Japan’s pacifist constitution shortly after the August 1945 surrender. But since the Truman administration set the Cold War in motion in 1947, Washington has incessantly, diabolically pressed the Japanese to breach it. “Do more” was the common exhortation during my years in Tokyo. Now Kishida obliges. <b>If he is the perfect embodiment of anything, it is the obsequious pandering with which Japan’s conservative and nationalist political cliques have conducted relations with the U.S. since the August 1945 defeat.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the U.S. insists on compelling it and the capitulation of yet another nation previously capable of a mediating role between East and West, between Global South and Global North, between the U.S. imperium and its designated enemies, China and Russia chief among them. <b>Sweden, Finland and Germany have already abandoned this admirable place in the global order in the name of supporting the regime in Ukraine. Japan now follows suit.</b></bq> <bq>Tokyo will now count itself a fully committed member of the Western alliance, signing on to all that animates it.</bq> <bq>And now the Oval Office summit, during which the two leaders pledged, as the government-supervised New York Times put it, <b>“to work together to transform Japan into a potent military power to help counterbalance China</b> and to bolster the alliance between the two nations so that it becomes the linchpin for their security interests in Asia.”</bq> <bq>He has also set Japan on course to become the world’s third-largest military power after the U.S. and China and ahead of France. <b>A lot of the new spending on defense will go to missile systems and warships that will project Japanese power far beyond the home islands and maritime zones over which Tokyo claims jurisdiction.</b> The missiles, which are to include U.S.–made Tomahawks, will be capable of hitting targets on the Chinese mainland.</bq> <bq>Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day <b>the U.S. has never looked straight across the Pacific at eye level.</b> Subtly or otherwise, it knows only how to look down.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/21/when-the-people-have-nothing-more-to-eat-they-will-eat-the-rich/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich</a> <bq>The unruly nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the ‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, <b>symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest rollback of neoliberal austerity.</b></bq> <bq><b>Most countries around the world fell victim to both the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology</b>, which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. <b>The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that belied the argument that politics had ended.</b></bq> <bq>Today, wealth inequality is as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on average, <b>the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns $771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth.</b> Income inequality is equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world income.</bq> <bq>As central banks in the richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. <b>Roughly one in five of these countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from one in fifteen in 2019.</b></bq> <bq><b>If a leader of the centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states.</b> When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by <b>the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency</b> and fund the dangerous forces of the far right,</bq> <bq>On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to which he sent many others, quoted <b>these fine words from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/01/28/the-hundreds-who-will-follow-tyre-nichols/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Hundreds Who Will Follow Tyre Nichols</a> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0M8uu65Epw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/d0M8uu65Epw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="MSNBC" caption="Full video: Multiple camera angles capture fatal Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols"> See also the <a href="https://vimeo.com/CityofMemphis" source="Vimeo">City of Memphis</a> channel, which contains four videos, three from body-cams and one from a nearby pole camera. I've watched some of the footage. It's horrific to watch them hunt down a man and beat him to a pulp. And yet, they bleeped out all of the profanity. What. A. Country. Then, after they'd beaten him senseless, they accused him of being <iq>high as a kite, bro.</iq> They just leave him, lying against a car door, then on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, his neck broken, his face beaten to a pulp. <bq>As there always are, there will be apologists who will try to explain away a murder. They didn’t mean to kill him, but only beat him to a pulp to show him who’s boss? <b>He should complied harder and then they wouldn’t have killed him? Don’t lie to yourself.</b> <b>Tyre Nichols ran because his options were try to survive or die. When that’s the only option given a person, he has every right to try to survive.</b> No one is going to willingly sacrifice his life to [...] whatever sick compulsion you have to use your force for whatever twisted needs of power you suffer.</bq> <bq>Expect violence. Expect non-compliance. Expect someone to get hurt, and expect that’s going to be a cop <b>when that guy you stopped believes he’s about to be murdered and he doesn’t plan to die that day.</b> You brought this on yourself. You could have changed this. You still can change this. <b>You can tell the brass who the violent cops are who enjoy the beating too much.</b> You can stop your “brothers” from committing crimes against their fellow citizens. You can take a breath when the guy pisses you off and act like a cop instead of a thug. <b>You can approach your fellow citizens with the assumption of respect rather than fear or anger.</b> It will take time and there will be many in law enforcement who refuse to accept that they are the problem, their culture is the problem. They will make the usual excuses, tell themselves the usual lies, that no one understands their job, no one appreciates the risks they take, the pressure they’re under. <b>There was no risk here. There was no pressure here. There was just a murder and there was no excuse, none, for Tyre Nichols to be beaten to death.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/29/the-murder-of-tyre-nichols-and-the-death-of-police-reform/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">The Murder of Tyre Nichols and the Death of Police Reform</a> Jeffrey St. Clair has a good transcription of what transpires in the video, for those who haven’t watched it in its entirety (I have, and St. Clair gets it right). It starts with a brilliant and appropriate quote from James Baldwin. <bq author="James Baldwin">Black policemen were another matter. We used to say, ‘If you must call a policeman,”–for we hardly ever did–“for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a White one.” A black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a White policeman could and you were without defenses before <b>this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not <i>Black like you</i>.</b></bq> St. Clair has carefully transcribed the action from the video. <bq>One cop described the initial encounter this way: “He pull up to the red light. Stop at the red light. He put his turning signal on. <b>‘So we jump out the car. ‘Shit went from there.’</b>”</bq> <bq>Another cop shoots Nichols with a yellow stun gun, but Nichols, surely fearing for his life now, breaks free and bolts down the street. An officer yells: ‘Taser, taser!” <b>Two cops can be seen running after him, but apparently winded and blinded by their own pepper spray, they soon give up the chase. One cop has lost his glasses. Another tries to wash the chemical agent from his burning eyes.</b></bq> <bq>A couple of minutes later, the cops learn Nichols has been captured. ‘I hope they stomp his ass. <b>I hope they stomp his ass</b>,” one cop blurts.</bq> <bq>Three cops restrain Nichols on the ground, while another kicks him brutally in the face two or three times. Nichols is now on his back, writhing in pain. <b>“Watch out – I’m going to baton the fuck out of you,”</b> a cop shouts, then begins clubbing him. For the next three minutes, Tyre Nichols is punched, kicked, beaten and dragged across the ground before <b>being jerked upright, when he is punched viciously in the head again.</b> Then he collapses. Now prone, Nichols is handcuffed and dragged to a police car. The cops prop him up against the door. He topples over, obviously seriously injured. Another cop yanks him back up. Nichols’ body appears to twitch and shake. <b>Two of the officers near him give each other fist bumps, as Nichols’ life begins to bleed away.</b></bq> We keep hearing about five cops---but there were more than five cops there. There were over a dozen people in the street. Even the EMTs had no sense of urgency, perhaps cowed by the overwhelming number of armored, armed, and adrenalized S.W.A.T. members. <bq>Five of the Scorpions were arrested, charged with second degree homicide, and soon released on bail. (People are sitting in jails across the country because they can’t raise a couple hundred bucks for bail on petty crimes.) All of them were black. There were more than five cops on the scene, several of whom are white (including the one who first tasered Nichols), <b>any one of whom could have stepped in to stop the assault and protect Tyre Nichols’ life. None did.</b> Any one of them could have arrested Nichols’ assailants. None did. Where are these Scorpions now? Back on the streets of Memphis?</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}police_killings_per_10m_people.jpeg" href="{att_link}police_killings_per_10m_people.jpeg" align="none" caption="Police Killings per 10M people" scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}hours_of_police_training_required.jpeg" href="{att_link}hours_of_police_training_required.jpeg" align="none" caption="Hours of Police Training required" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/28/ukraine-expects-to-get-all-the-western-weapons-it-wants/" author="Dave DeCamp" source="Scheer Post">Ukraine Expects to Get All the Western Weapons It Wants</a> <bq>Yury Sak, an advisor to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters that he’s confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. <b>Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he said.</b></bq> But why stop at nuclear weapons? That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't gel with the argument that we must do <i>anything we can</i> to help Ukraine win their war against Russia. How does that not include nuclear weapons? If we're really on Ukraine's side, shouldn't we let them benefit from the deterrent effect of just having nuclear weapons? In the worst case, they would be able to retaliate against a potential Russian attack, no? Or ... do we not support them that way? Do we only support them in a hopeless war of attrition with conventional weapons? If we really believe in them as much as and for the reasons that we say that we do, then we should avail Ukraine of the same weapons that prevent us from invading Russia outright. We did it for Israel, why not Ukraine? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgzX-GsrN0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/nmgzX-GsrN0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Empire Files" caption="Abby Martin & Immortal Technique: Civil War"> This is a powerful interview with Immortal Technique. The entire video is well-worth listening to, but if you only have 8-10 minutes, watch the beginning. It will probably draw you in for the rest. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MfuGSlDRsc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/6MfuGSlDRsc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="DIEM25" caption="Yanis Varoufakis's speech in Cuba on a new Non-Aligned Movement"> <bq>On Friday, January 27, 2023, DiEM25 co-founder and MERA25 leader Yanis Varoufakis gave a speech at the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order, about the need for a new Non-Aligned Movement to <b>"end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe."</b></bq> Yanis Varoufakis has it all figured out. This video is well-worth the 30-minute time-investment. He chains together many harsh truths about our world works now as a way of paving the road to the future. <bq>Just remind the world of <b>what Fidel told the United Nations Assembly in October 1979: That “the din of weapons, threatening language, and arrogance on the international scene must cease.” That “bombs can kill the starving, the diseased and the ignorant but they cannot kill hunger, diseases or ignorance.” That “the international monetary system predominating today is bankrupt. And it must be replaced!”</b> Now, let us not be depressed that we are back at square one. That we need to repeat the same speeches and wage the same campaigns. Remember: Every generation is condemned to fight the same fight! Again. And again. And again. With greater focus every time. And always by learning from the previous generation’s mistakes.</bq> <bq><b>Capitalists in surplus countries like Japan, Germany and later China saw America’s trade deficit as a saviour – as a huge vacuum cleaner that sucked their net exports into the United States.</b> And what did the Japanese, German and later Chinese capitalists do with all their dollars? They sent them back to the United States to buy property yielding them rents: real estate, US government bonds, and the few companies that Washington allowed them to own.</bq> <bq>As for the deficit countries in the Global South – in Asia, Africa and Latin America –, they constantly agonised over a shortage of dollars, <b>which they had to borrow from Wall Street to import medicines, energy and the raw materials necessary to produce their own exports for earning the dollars they needed to repay Wall Street</b>. Inevitably, every now and then, the Global South deficit nations ran out of dollars and could not repay their Wall Street bankers. Then, <b>the West would send its bailiffs in – the International Monetary Fund that would lend the missing dollars on condition that the debtor government handed over the country’s land, water, ports, airports, electricity and telephone networks, even its schools and hospitals</b>, to the local oligarchs who would, once in control of these companies and assets, have no alternative but to channel their earnings into… Wall Street. </bq> <bq>Suppose you could end US hegemony by pressing a button. Who would want to stop you from pressing it? Besides US authorities, the US military, Wall Street, American rentiers, capitalists, etc., <b>a crowd of non-Americans would jump on you to prevent you from pressing the button: German industrialists, Saudi sheikhs, European bankers and, yes, Chinese capitalists.</b></bq> <bq>Do we want to be true internationalists? Then let’s not forget who are one people with probably the most to gain from the abolition of American neocolonialism: Working class Americans who, decades ago, were condemned to ‘deaths of despair’ in sorry rustbelts. <b>Yes, let us never forget that imperialism’s victims are both in the Colonies and in the Metropolis. That the current international economic order inflicts different types of misery on workers everywhere.</b></bq> <bq>Until recently, this Chinese superhighway was mostly unused. Everyone, including Putin’s favourite oligarchs, and China’s capitalists, preferred the tried and tested US superhighway for their dollars. But then Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and <b>the US retaliated by confiscating at least $300 billion of Russian central bank’s money. Suddenly, there was panic amongst the non-American wealthy</b> and a rush of monies – not just Russian – eager to use the Chinese cloud capital-based superhighway for payments, contracts, data etc. <b>This is why President Biden declared total economic war against China last October. His microchip embargo was a shock-and-awe strike aimed at Chinese Big Tech</b>, with which Biden hopes to wound it critically before it can grow into a fully-fledged beast able to withstand, even to defeat, the combined forces of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.</bq> <bq> But, you may object, is Iran’s regime not resisting US imperialism? Absolutely. However, <b>just because a regime is at loggerheads with US imperialism should not give it a free pass to violate the basic freedoms of our comrades in that country.</b></bq> <bq>This twin democratisation, of capital and of money, sounds like an impossible dream – but not more impossible than the ideas of one-person-one-vote or of ending the divine rights of Kings once sounded. <b>This twin democratisation is nothing short of the precondition for our species’ survival – it is that simple.</b> Those are the tasks of the New Non-Aligned Movement we must now build. Its ultimate purpose? To end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe. <b>Nothing less than the total vanquishing of capital’s authority over human societies can end depravity and save the planet.</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud</a> <bq><b>I asked for comment from a huge range of actors</b> — from the Alliance for Securing Democracy to Watts and McFaul and Podesta and Kristol to editors and news directors at MSNBC, Politico, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Politifact, and others. <b>Not one answered. They’re all going to pretend this didn’t happen.</b> The few reporters who got this right contemporaneously, from Glenn Greenwald to Max Blumenthal to Miriam Elder and Charlie Wurzel of Buzzfeed to sites like can take a victory lap. Almost <b>every other news organization ran these stories and needs to come clean about it.</b></bq> <bq>Each one of these tales explains something new about how companies like Twitter came to lose independence. In the U.S., <b>the door was opened for agencies like the FBI and DHS to press on content moderation after Congress harangued Twitter, Facebook, and Google about Russian “interference,”</b> a phenomenon that had to be seen as an ongoing threat in order to require increased surveillance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/responding-to-hamilton-68" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Responding to Hamilton 68</a> <bq>The plot is simple. <b>A group of not-very-bright people rolled out a “dashboard,” hyped it as a magic Russian influence barometer to a stampede of willing reporters, and basked in every opportunity to speak on TV and to newspapers and at schools and think tanks and even congress</b>, offering themselves as primary witnesses for a tale about ongoing “cyber attacks.” Then, once they caught blowback from Twitter and a reporter or two about the contents of their magic box, they retreated to an “attributable” model, but only <b>after roughly 18 months of outright fakery. Now they’re trying to say they were misunderstood.</b> To quote Yoel Roth, bullshit.</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2212.03551/" source="Arxiv" author="Murray Shanahan">Talking About Large Language Models</a> <bq>The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to <b>seeing the systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they really are.</b></bq> <bq>[...] this paper advocates the practice of repeatedly stepping back to remind ourselves of how LLMs, and the systems of which they form a part, actually work. <b>The hope is that increased scientific precision will encourage more philosophical nuance in the discourse around artificial intelligence, both within the field and in the public sphere.</b></bq> Hahaha OMG fuck no that's absolutely not what's going to happen. <bq>[...] it is a serious mistake to unreflectingly apply to AI systems the same intuitions that we deploy in our dealings with each other, especially when <b>those systems are so profoundly different from humans in their underlying operation.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it is advisable to keep to the fore the way those systems actually work, and thereby to avoid imputing to them capacities they lack, while <b>making the best use of the remarkable capabilities they genuinely possess.</b></bq> <bq><b>LLMs are generative mathematical models of the statistical distribution of tokens in the vast public corpus of human-generated text</b>, where the tokens in question include words, parts of words, or individual characters including punctuation marks.</bq> <bq>[...] the questions are of the following very specific kind. <b>‘‘Here’s a fragment of text. Tell me how this fragment might go on. According to your model of the statistics of human language, what words are likely to come next?’’</b></bq> <bq>Dialogue is just one application of LLMs that can be facilitated by the judicious use of prompt prefixes. In a similar way, LLMs can be adapted to perform numerous tasks without further training (Brown et al., ). This has led to <b>a whole new category of AI research, namely prompt engineering, which will remain relevant until we have better models of the relationship between what we say and what we want.</b></bq> <bq>There are two important takeaways here. First, <b>the basic function of a large language model, namely to generate statistically likely continuations of word sequences, is extraordinarily versatile.</b> Second, notwithstanding this versatility, at the heart of every such application is a model doing just that one thing: <b>generating statistically likely continuations of word sequences.</b></bq> <bq>[...] knowing that the word “Burundi” is likely to succeed the words “The country to the south of Rwanda is” is not the same as knowing that Burundi is to the south of Rwanda. <b>To confuse those two things is to make a profound category mistake.</b></bq> <bq>[...] we know that artificial neural networks can approximate any computable function to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. So whatever mechanisms are needed to enable the formation of beliefs, they probably reside in the parameter space somewhere. Given a big enough model, enough data of the right sort, and enough computing power to train the model, <b>perhaps stochastic gradient descent can discover such mechanisms if they are the best way to optimise the objective of making accurate sequence predictions.</b></bq> No. Perhaps it will become more reliable and useful, but it will not become conscious. <bq>It doesn’t matter what internal mechanisms it uses, <b>a sequence predictor is not, in itself, the kind of thing that could, even in principle, have communicative intent</b>, and simply embedding it in a dialogue management system will not help.</bq> <bq>The real issue here is that, whatever emergent properties it has, <b>the LLM itself has no access to any external reality against which its words might be measured</b>, nor the means to apply any other external criteria of truth, such as agreement with other language-users.</bq> <bq>The point here does not concern any specific belief. It concerns <b>the prerequisites for ascribing any beliefs at all to a system.</b> Nothing can count as a belief about the world we share — in the largest sense of the term — unless it is against the backdrop of the ability to update beliefs appropriately in the light of evidence from that world, <b>an essential aspect of the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood.</b></bq> <bq>Under the licence of the intentional stance, a user might say that a robot knew there was a cup to hand if it stated “I can get you a cup” and proceeded to do so. But if pressed, <b>the wise engineer might demur when asked whether the robot really understood the situation, especially if its repertoire is confined to a handful of simple actions in a carefully controlled environment.</b></bq> I think it would also be important to measure the usefulness of such complex systems by determining whether a much simpler system could indistinguishably emulate it. If so, is it just over-engineered? Or truly just a step on a longer path? I mean, did we build a gigantic machine, using tremendous resources, that will never be able to do more than tell us the wrong digits of pi or give credible-sounding, nicely formatted, and utterly incorrect explanation for homework questions? Did we build Babbage's Difference Engine? I.e. something that does a task, but in such a spectacularly inefficient way that it would never scale up to something useful that won't be superseded by a less literal approach. <bq>However, as always, it’s crucial to keep in mind what LLMs really do. If we prompt an LLM with “All humans are mortal and Socrates is human therefore”, <b>we are not instructing it to carry out deductive inference.</b> Rather, we are asking it the following question. Given the statistical distribution of words in the public corpus, what words are likely to follow the sequence ‘All humans are mortal and Socrates is human therefore”.</bq> <bq>To the extent that a suitably prompted LLM appears to reason correctly, it does so by mimicking well-formed arguments in its training set and / or in the prompt. But <b>could this mimicry ever amount to genuine reasoning? Even if today’s models make occasional mistakes, could further scaling iron these out to the point that a model’s performance was indistinguishable from that of a hard-coded reasoning algorithm, such as we find in a theorem prover, for example?</b> Maybe. But how would we know? How could we come to trust such a model?</bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-clear-learning-styles-theory-doesnt-work" source="Aeon" author="Carl Hendrick & Christian Jarrett">Learning styles don’t exist</a> <bq>For many adults, school was a frustrating experience where they did not learn as much as they could, and their sense of individual agency was negated. <b>Learning styles theory represents a form of retrospective absolution where, if only their teachers had tailored instruction to match their learning style, then they could have achieved their potential.</b></bq> <bq>[...] despite its appeal, <b>there is simply no credible evidence to support the idea that attending to learning styles actually supports learning</b>, regardless of how well-intentioned the teacher might be. To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, <b>not only is it not right, it’s not even wrong.</b></bq> <bq><b>The fact that so many teachers continue to practise and endorse methods that have no discernible beneficial impact on their students is as scandalous as it sounds.</b> How have we reached this point? To answer this question, it is necessary to look beyond the superficial appeal of learning styles, to consider the historical developments that provided the fertile soil into which such a misguided approach has taken root.</bq> <bq><b>Rousseau would provide the inspiration for the Pestalozzian and Montessori principles of schooling</b>, with the former gaining huge traction in the West from the 18th century onwards, and the latter developed in the 20th century. It is in the latter approach in particular that we can see the beginnings of learning styles as not just a progressive movement but also a scientific one.</bq> <bq>Although well intended, such claims would <b>lead to a classroom climate where teachers were working twice as hard as their students</b>, who were learning half as much as they could have been.</bq> <bq>According to Gardner, individuals might have strengths in visual-spatial or linguistic intelligence, <b>which could manifest in fields such as sport or the arts, rather than in traditional academic endeavours.</b></bq> This is true, but it doesn't mean that everyone can be a scientist or an engineer if they could just learn in the style appropriate to them, but rather that we should more highly value people who are extremely societally useful but not intelligent. We should stop putting intelligence on a pedestal as if being smart were a superior way of contributing to society. Intelligence is one the few traits that can be leveraged, so we put all of resources into it, then spin the roulette wheel until we get lucky, ignoring all that is lost by our primitive and simplistic way of improving. An increase of empathy across the board would be better overall and require the same amount of energy, but it takes longer and doesn't privilege anyone for winning a genetic lottery. Smart people are the ones smart enough to fool others into thinking that smartness makes them better people. Doing so requires an utter lack of morals, which, evolution has seen fit to pair consistently with intelligence. <bq>By the end of the 20th century, learning styles had become a pedagogical behemoth that fuelled a whole industry of books, workshops, consultants and even government support. <b>The intentions behind the movement are worthy and understandable when placed in historical context. Yet, along the way, something went badly wrong as the theory took on a life of its own and became detached from science and reality.</b></bq> <bq>The most generous assessment is that what learning style tools measure is not a learning style, but rather a learning preference. It may well be the case that someone prefers to listen to audiobooks as opposed to reading a physical book. The problem is, <b>there is no evidence that using audio will lead such a person to a better understanding of the content or retention of knowledge</b> [...]</bq> <bq>As Stahl observed (in the context of questionnaires focused on visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning): [N]early everybody would agree that one learns more about playing tennis from playing than from watching someone else play. Again, <b>this does not mean that people are tactile/kinaesthetic, but that this is how one learns to play sports.</b></bq> <bq>Lastly and most importantly, <b>does teaching according to the principles of learning styles improve learning and educational outcomes? The answer is a resounding ‘no’.</b> Probably the most authoritative report on the matter was carried out in 2008 by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).</bq> <bq>[A]t present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, <b>limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base</b> [...]</bq> <bq>Among some advocates, there is an almost cultish devotion, with one researcher interviewing a teacher who claimed that ‘even if the research says it doesn’t work, it works.’ This statement is a damning one for a profession in which so much is at stake, and it is <b>emblematic of a wider malaise in education, which is still hugely prone to faddism and pedagogical snake oil.</b></bq> <bq>Part of the reason it has endured is that <b>the movement has the veneer of a more considerate, caring view of education.</b> However, there is little care and consideration in the tragedy of a child not achieving their potential because of pseudoscientific theories of learning.</bq> <bq>The popularity of learning styles theory can also be explained in part by the Shirky principle, which states that <b>institutions will attempt to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.</b></bq> <bq>[...] they make a distinction between learning and performance, where students can <b>give the impression that they are learning by being actively engaged in an activity but with little actual cognitive expenditure.</b></bq> <bq>Secondly, all students need to engage in learning practices that will automate their knowledge and skills in long-term memory. Every time they fully commit something to memory in this way, they are laying the bricks for their future selves to build upon. In that very real sense, students are architects of their own understanding. To return to the example of reading, <b>if a student has to sound out letters and words every time they read something, they will have very little bandwidth to focus on the deeper meaning of what is being read.</b></bq> Absolutely. This is where I am with Hebrew right now---and I don't know a single Hebrew word, even though I can phoneticize many letters and sound out words. I can't imagine staying stuck at this level and ever calling what I'm doing "reading". <bq>I don’t blame those who advocated learning styles back then: I don’t believe anyone is actively trying to limit student learning. But to persist with defective approaches, when there is now a huge body of evidence to say that approaches such as learning styles theory do not support learning, is ultimately a dereliction of duty as an educator. <b>Saying ‘this works for me and my students’ – based purely on it feeling good – is not enough. We would not accept that kind of delusion in other fields such as medicine, nor should we accept it in education.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it is all too easy to <b>confuse the notion of students as individual human beings and students as learners.</b> The former has much greater variance than the latter.</bq> <bq>So we arrive at a paradox but one that I find hopeful: we teachers should treat each of our students as individuals, but at the same time we should <b>base our teaching practices on the fundamental aspects of learning that are common to all students.</b></bq> But everyone won't be able to do everything, right? We have to really grasp that basic fact. Some people suck at some things. You'll never be able to learn 'em. You'll only be able to expend a tremendous amount of effort, energy, time, and resources on what will ultimately feel like failure. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-plague-of-social-isolation?publication_id=778851&isFreemail=false" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Plague of Social Isolation</a> <bq>Because you could join the gym for as low as $36 a month, the locker room served as a public bathroom and shower facility for undocumented workers and the unhoused. One portly man, who lived out of his car, came every morning to shave and shower. He cheerily subscribed to every bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory and held forth about them to anyone willing to listen. <b>Where is he now? Has he found another community where he is accepted with all his quirks, where he can shower and shave, or has he been, like so many, cast completely adrift? He was already living on the edge of catastrophe.</b></bq> <bq>I fell for one of the syndicate's more ingenious scams. They promised, promised, promised that if an existing member paid $800, the price of the monthly membership would be locked in for life. A year later, they raised rates and told us the locked-in-for-life rate was no longer valid. <b>When you are constantly on the receiving end of predatory corporate abuse, it is easy to understand the hatred for the politically correct, educated, privileged ruling class.</b></bq> <bq>These ecosystems knit the social bonds that ground us to a community. They give us a sense of place, identity and worth. <b>The economic dislocation of the past few decades, aggravated by the pandemic, have weakened or severed these bonds, leaving us disconnected, atomized, trapped in a debilitating anomie that fosters rage, despair, loneliness and fuels the epidemic of substance abuse, depression and suicidal ideation.</b> Estranged from society, we become estranged from ourselves. This social isolation, exacerbated by social media, is a plague, leaving the vulnerable prey to groups and demagogues that promise a sense of belonging and purpose in return for loyalty to a dogmatic political or religious ideology.</bq> <bq>There are many things I fear about the future, but this unmooring is one of the most ominous.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biNaAbckbrE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/biNaAbckbrE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="How to be a Human Again"> I saw this at about <b>27:00</b>, where they showed a trailer of sorts for a documentary made by Professor Darcia Narvaez, who was the interview subject. <img src="{att_link}six_dimensions_of_child_well-being.jpg" href="{att_link}six_dimensions_of_child_well-being.jpg" align="none" caption="Six Dimensions of Child Well-Being" scale="50%"> I'd like to be able to confirm these numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were more-or-less correct. It's kind of shocking to see Hungary ahead of the U.S. and U.K., but perhaps it's true. I found a PDF document <a href="https://www.oecd.org/social/family/43570328.pdf">Comparative Child Well-being across the OECD</a> from 2009, which includes several charts, one of which I've included below. It shows the U.K. and U.S. at the very bottom of the ranking, with Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Switzerland occupying the top three spots. <img src="{att_link}unicef_shows_high_overall_levels_of_child_well-being_are_achieved_by_the_netherlands_and_sweden_and_low_levels_by_the_united_states_and_the_united_kingdom.jpg" href="{att_link}unicef_shows_high_overall_levels_of_child_well-being_are_achieved_by_the_netherlands_and_sweden_and_low_levels_by_the_united_states_and_the_united_kingdom.jpg" align="none" caption="UNICEF shows high overall levels of child well-being are achieved by the Netherlands and Sweden and low levels by the United States and the United Kingdom" scale="50%"> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="http://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-navigation.html" source="Righto" author="Ken Shirriff">Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight</a> <bq>Although the Globus is mostly mechanical, it has an electronics board with four relays and a transistor, as well as resistors and diodes. I think that most of these relays control the landing location mechanism, driving the motor forward or backward and stopping at the limit switch. <b>The diodes are flyback diodes, two diodes in series across each relay coil to eliminate the inductive kick when the coil is disconnected.</b></bq> <bq><b>The Globus INK is a remarkable piece of machinery, an analog computer that calculates orbits through an intricate system of gears, cams, and differentials.</b> It provided cosmonauts with a high-resolution, full-color display of the spacecraft's position, way beyond what an electronic space computer could provide in the 1960s.</bq> <bq>Although the Globus is an amazing piece of mechanical computation, its functionality is limited. Its parameters must be manually configured: the spacecraft's starting position, the orbital speed, the light/shadow regions, and the landing angle. It doesn't take any external guidance inputs, such as an IMU (inertial measurement unit), so it's not particularly accurate. Finally, it only supports a circular orbit at a fixed angle. <b>While the more modern digital display lacks the physical charm of a rotating globe, the digital solution provides much more capability.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/no-more-export-licenses-us-plans-to-fully-cut-off-huawei-from-chip-suppliers/" author="Ron Amadeo" source="Ars Technica">No more export licenses: US plans to fully cut off Huawei from chip suppliers</a> <bq>As the US tried to balance hurting Huawei without hurting US suppliers that have Huawei as a customer, the decision was made to still allow sales, just not of the latest technology. The cutoff point for this was the always-nebulous moniker of "5G," but now even that is being shut off. Reuters says: "<b>U.S. officials are creating a new formal policy of denial for shipping items to Huawei that would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing and cloud items.</b>" It sounds like that would ban all sales from Intel and Qualcomm.</bq> This entire article doesn't mention once the reason for the sanctions. We just take it for granted that the U.S. can just wage economic warfare against individual companies for no reason other than it wants to make space for its own companies. I looked it up in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#U.S._business_restrictions" source="Wikipedia">Huawei U.S. business restrictions</a> Apparently, it's because Huawei did business in Iran without asking the U.S. government for permission to do so. <bq>[...] citing the company having been indicted for "knowingly and willfully causing the export, re-export, sale and supply, directly and indirectly, of goods, technology and services (banking and other financial services) from the United States to Iran and the government of Iran without obtaining a license from the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)".</bq> This is just gobsmacking.