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Links and Notes for May 3rd, 2024

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<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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTKxG3qZdLI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zTKxG3qZdLI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="GleichheitTV" caption="Wahlspot Europawahl 2024: „Stimmt gegen Krieg!“ ● Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP)"> <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/parting-waters-gold" source="The Baffler" author="Hannah Gold">Parting Waters</a> <bq>[...] what the students are modeling is the power of escalating disruption, a refusal for things to continue as normal during mass death. Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions, or BDS, campaigns are decades-old, as are other anti-Zionist efforts, but the students have now created a sustained and previously unimaginable spectacle in support of Palestine.</bq> <bq>[...] the students’ leadership, bravery, and moral clarity, as well as their organization and tactics, were to be replicated more broadly, if more Americans were shutting down business as usual, those in solidarity with Palestine might gain actual leverage. It could force the United States to legitimately pressure Israel to end its genocidal campaign.</bq> <bq>Last fall, Arielle Angel, the editor in chief of Jewish Currents , invoked the Exodus story to think through October 7, effectively aligning the Palestinian liberation struggle with that of the enslaved Jews. In turn, this placed Israelis in the position of Egyptians—the oppressing country will suffer casualties of militants and civilians alike. “It seems that hiding in our liberation myth is a recognition that violence will visit the oppressor society indiscriminately,” Angel writes.</bq> <bq>Last week, videos of Shai Davidai—a Columbia Business School professor who has made a name for himself as a tantrum-prone, student-endangering Zionist—attempting to enter Columbia’s campus went viral. Davidai discovers that his ID has been deactivated and his access to campus revoked. In the footage, he performs for the cameras, announcing that Columbia has banned him from campus because the university can’t guarantee his safety. Davidai is stuck in his own victim narrative; he can’t conceptualize that he may have been banned from campus because he is the aggressor.</bq> <bq>They described an approaching “sea” of officers so thick they couldn’t “see a speck of street.” They observed batons drawn, the human barricade outside Hamilton Hall singing “your people are my people” as the police descended, then students being thrown from the barricade. Within hours, armed officers had cleared Hamilton Hall and the surrounding grounds. Just a few blocks uptown, more than a hundred students at CCNY were also arrested. The youth are no longer asking. They are demanding. They are putting their own bodies on the line; they are walking into the water.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/30/patrick-lawrence-this-isnt-fascism/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">This Isn’t Fascism</a> <bq>An apparently capable man, by all accounts a compassionate man, died dreading an imminent Fascist takeover in America. This makes me very angry. To go straight to my point: A human life is wasted in consequence of a ridiculous, paranoiac idea that has for some time circulated among us either out of foolishness or for the most cynical of political motives.</bq> <bq>There are so many misnomers abroad among us, amid the panic on our sinking ship, one sometimes grows weary of language altogether. Russia is an aggressor, China is an imperialist power, Israel is a democracy, and so on through the Orwellian lexicon: War is peace, etc.</bq> <bq>I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively. What we face has no precedent in our history, it seems to me. It is a thoroughly decadent form of democracy — elite, Hamiltonian democracy as against popular, Jeffersonian democracy. Nothing too exotic here.</bq> <bq>Wolf might have engaged, for instance, the extreme over-corporatization of America’s political economy and the near-impossibility of finding where the Fortune 500 ends and the U.S. government begins. But this would have implicated liberals as well as conservatism in the soft despotism that, indeed, besets the United States.</bq> <bq>Considering Max Azzarello’s placard one more time — “Trump is with Biden”– he seems to have got that right. How sad that he mistook what he thought he saw for fascism. He would otherwise still be with us.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=114565" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">China und britische Versicherer glauben nicht an die offizielle Version zur Sprengung von Nord Stream</a> <bq>Diesen Ergebnisstand finden die Chinesen „enttäuschend“. Man könne „keine konkreten Fortschritte [bei den Ermittlungen] erkennen“, so der stellvertretende chinesische UN-Botschafter Gen Shuang am Freitag im UN-Sicherheitsrat. „In dieser Situation kann man nur vermuten“, so Shuang, „dass sich hinter dem Widerstand gegen eine internationale Untersuchung eine versteckte Absicht verbirgt, während man gleichzeitig die mögliche Vertuschung und den Verlust einer großen Menge zwingender Beweise beklagt.“</bq> <bq>Auch für die Bundesregierung hätte dies politische Folgen, da sowohl die Bundesrepublik selbst als auch zahlreiche deutsche Firmen in einem solchen Fall Ansprüche an ihre Versicherungen geltend machen könnten. An Nord Stream 1 waren beispielsweise auch die deutschen Konzerne E.On und Wintershall DEA beteiligt, auch wenn sie ihre Anteile mittlerweile abgeschrieben haben. Wenn diese Konzerne einen überzeugenden Rechtsanspruch an die Versicherungen haben und ihn aus politischen Gründen nicht geltend machen, würde dies den Tatbestand der Untreue gegenüber den Aktionären erfüllen.</bq> <bq>Auch wenn die westliche Politik gerne möglichst schnell Gras über die Sache wachsen lassen und ebenso wie die Medien die gesamte Thematik am liebsten totschweigen würde, wird – so viel ist jetzt schon klar – die Sprengung noch einige Gerichte beschäftigen. Und ob diese ebenso leichtgläubig wie die deutschen Medien der offiziellen Arbeitshypothese folgen werden, ist unwahrscheinlich. Es bleibt also spannend.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.aaronmate.net/p/how-10-years-of-us-meddling-in-ukraine" source="Substack" author="Aaron Maté">How 10 years of US meddling in Ukraine undermined democracy and fueled war</a> <bq>Ukraine has become a source of foreign interference in the U.S. political system – with questions of unsavory dealings arising in the 2016 and 2020 elections as well as the first impeachment of Donald Trump. After years of secrecy, CIA sources have only recently confirmed that Ukrainian intelligence helped generate the Russian interference allegations that engulfed Trump’s presidency. House Democrats' initial attempt to impeach Trump, undertaken in the fall of 2019, came in response to his efforts to scrutinize Ukraine’s Russiagate connection.</bq> <bq>Although he once welcomed Washington’s influence in Ukraine, Telizhenko now takes a different view. “I'm a Ukrainian who knew how Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today,” he says. “For me, it's a total failed state.” In his view, Ukraine has been “used directly by the United States to fight a [proxy] war with Russia” and “as a rag to make money for people like Biden and his family.”</bq> <bq>As the International Crisis Group noted , these Yanukovych-supporting Ukrainians feared that the EU terms “would hurt their livelihoods, a large number of which were tied to trade and close relations with Russia.” Despite claims that the Maidan movement represented a “popular revolution,” polls from that period showed that Ukrainians were evenly split on it, or even majority opposed.</bq> <bq>“The goal was to overthrow the government,” Telizhenko says. “That was the first goal. And it was all green-lighted by the U.S. Embassy. They basically supported all this, because they did not tell them to stop. If they told them [Maidan leaders] to stop, they would stop.”</bq> <bq>While denying any role in Yanukovich’s ouster, the Obama administration immediately endorsed it, as Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “strong support” for the new government.</bq> <bq>Weeks after vowing to bring about a “transition” in Ukraine, Sen. Murphy openly took credit for it. “I really think that the clear position of the United States has in part been what has helped lead to this change in regime,” Murphy said. “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office.”</bq> <bq>Just days after the Ukrainian president fled to Moscow, Russian special forces stormed Crimea’s local parliament. The following month, Russia annexed Crimea following a hasty, militarized referendum denounced by Ukraine, the U.S., and much of the world. While these objections were well-founded, Western surveys of Crimeans nonetheless found majority support for Russian annexation.</bq> <bq>Perhaps mindful of the optics of flooding Ukraine with military hardware at a time when the Obama administration was claiming to support to a peace agreement, Nuland offered a public relations suggestion. “I would like to urge you to use the word ‘defensive system’ to describe what we would be delivering against Putin’s offensive systems,” Nuland told the gathering. The Munich meeting underscored that while President Obama may have publicly supported a peace deal in Ukraine, a bipartisan alliance of powerful Washington actors – including his own principals – was determined to stop it. As Foreign Policy magazine reported , “the takeaway for many Europeans ... was that Nuland gave short shrift to their concerns about provoking an escalation with Russia and was confusingly out of sync with Obama.”</bq> <bq>In a 2016 congressional appearance, Nuland touted the extensive U.S. role in Ukraine. “Since the start of the crisis, the United States has provided over $760 million in assistance to Ukraine, in addition to two $1 billion loan guarantees,” Nuland said. U.S. advisers “serve in almost a dozen Ukrainian ministries,” and were helping “modernize Ukraine’s institutions” of state-owned industries.</bq> Good thing Ukraine didn't fall to Russian influence. Dodged that bullet. <bq>“Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process,” Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky observed in November 2015 . “The U.S. embassy in Kyiv is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.”</bq> <bq>According to a November 2015 email sent to Hunter by Vadym Pozharsky, a Burisma adviser, the energy firm’s desired “deliverables” included visits from “influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine.” The “ultimate purpose” of these visits would be “to close down” any legal cases against the company’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. One month after that email, Joe Biden visited Ukraine and demanded Shokin’s firing.</bq> <bq>Leshchenko was not an impartial source: He made no effort to hide his efforts to help elect Clinton. “A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy,” Leshchenko told the Financial Times. For him, “it was important to show ... that [Trump] is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” Accordingly, he added, most of Ukraine’s politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”</bq> <bq>A recent account in the New York Times revealed that Ukrainian intelligence played a vital role in generating CIA allegations that would become a foundation of the Russiagate hoax – that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and released them via WikiLeaks in a bid to help elect Trump. Once again, CIA chief Brennan played a critical role.</bq> <bq>Trump’s infamous July 2019 phone call with Zelensky was not primarily focused on the Bidens. Instead, according to the transcript, Trump asked Zelensky to do him “a favor” and cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the origins of Russiagate, which, he asserted, had Ukrainian links. Trump specifically invoked CrowdStrike, the Clinton campaign contractor that had generated the allegation that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party emails. CrowdStrike’s allegation of Russian interference, Trump told Zelensky, had somehow “started with Ukraine.”</bq> <bq>Zelensky’s crackdown drew harsh criticism, including from close allies. “This is an illegal mechanism that contradicts the Constitution,” Dmytro Razumkov, the speaker of the parliament and a manager of Zelensky’s presidential campaign, complained. Yet Zelensky won praise from the newly inaugurated Biden White House, while hailed his effort to “counter Russia’s malign influence.”</bq> The U.S. does not care at all about the rule of law. <bq>Zelensky's first national security adviser, Oleksandr Danyliuk, later revealed to Time Magazine that the TV stations' shuttering was “conceived as a welcome gift to the Biden Administration.” Targeting those stations, Danyliuk explained, “was calculated to fit in with the U.S. agenda.” And the U.S. was a happy recipient. “He turned out to be a doer,” a State Department official approvingly said of Zelensky . “He got it done.”</bq> <bq>The Hunter Biden laptop emails pointed to the very kind of influence-peddling that the Biden campaign and Democrats routinely accused Trump of. But rather than allow voters to read the reporting and judge for themselves, the Post’s journalism was subjected to a smear campaign and a censorship campaign unparalleled in modern American history.</bq> <bq>In August 2019, the FEC initially sided with Telizhenko and informed Alexandra Chalupa – the DNC operative whom he outed for targeting Paul Manafort – that she plausibly violated the Federal Election Campaign Act by having “the Ukrainian Embassy... [perform] opposition research on the Trump campaign at no charge to the DNC.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/28/chris-hedges-sermon-for-gaza/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Sermon for Gaza</a> <bq>Ruling institutions — the state, the press, the church, the courts, universities — mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. All of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. This was true during the genocide we committed against native Americans, slavery, the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the fight against the apartheid regime of South Africa. The most courageous are purged and turned into pariahs.</bq> <bq>[...] a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make.</bq> <bq>Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”</bq> <bq>This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you will be treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.</bq> <bq>As Hannah Arendt wrote, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.</bq> <bq>Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.</bq> <bq>The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.</bq> <bq>The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.</bq> <bq>“Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.”</bq> <bq>This is what kills revolution every time. This is what leads to people supporting evil by looking away from it.</bq> <bq>Bearing the cross is not about the pursuit of happiness. It does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress. It is not about achieving status, wealth, celebrity or power. It entails sacrifice. It is about our neighbor. The organs of state security monitor and harass you. They amass huge files on your activities. They disrupt your life.</bq> <bq>I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same.</bq> <bq>[...] the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”</bq> <bq>Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”</bq> <bq>Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”</bq> <bq>War, [Smedley Butler] said, is a racket in which subjugated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed.</bq> <bq>Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”</bq> <bq>Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.”.</bq> <bq>Martin Luther King, who said: “On some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take a stand because it is right.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/04/embracing-possibilities-of-second.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">Embracing the Possibilities of a Second Golden Age of Piracy</a> <bq>Meanwhile, neoliberal globalism has turned every ocean on the planet into a thousand lane highway too jam packed with ill-gotten booty to ever be sustainably policed, and the imperial powerhouse of America's Atlantic cartel is rapidly losing control of increasingly reckless colonies like Israel while our bloated naval forces are busy trying to sabotage Asia's assent [sic] to economic dominance with so-called freedom of navigation drills in the South China Sea.</bq> <bq>The Houthis launched their daring maritime spree on Israeli linked vessels during a time in which the rest of the leadership of the Muslim world seemed content to just sit on their hands as the Zionist State carried out the most brazen genocide of the twenty-first century.</bq> <bq>The very fabric of globalism seems to be under siege and every Navy on earth appears to be at the mercy of what essentially amounts to a bunch of toothless peasants with old fishing boats and nothing left to lose.</bq> <bq>It is a corrupt and totalitarian system operated from the top down by a conspiracy of multinational conglomerates and nuclear armed navies who have all but invited piracy by conducting their own crime spree on the high seas defined by acts of mass violence and brazen thievery.</bq> <bq>Between 2015 and 2022, the Houthi controlled nation of Yemen was bombarded by a genocidal onslaught at the hands of America's proxies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Over 377,000 people were slaughtered and more than half of them died from starvation and disease as a result of a blockade made possible by America's rules-based order.</bq> <bq>Somalia has similarly been decimated both economically and ecologically by the Western Mafia's fixed trade practices which have aloud [sic] massive corporate naval behemoths to deplete their fisheries with industrial trawlers and render the remains toxic by treating the Indian Ocean like a giant toilet for their industrial waste. Under these circumstances, it's hard not to see modern piracy as an act of self-defense by a largely unaffiliated coalition of people under siege by a pirate empire in decline [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/04/israel-gives-hamas-one-week-to-accept-hostage-deal/" author="Kyle Anzalone" source="Scheer Post">Israel Gives Hamas One Week To Accept Hostage Deal</a> <bq>Israel has informed Egyptian mediators that Hamas has one week to agree to a hostage deal or Tel Aviv will begin the invasion of Rafah. The Israeli proposal does not offer a permanent ceasefire, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared the attack on the city will occur with or without the release of hostages.</bq> This reminded me of <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Groove" author="Yzma" source="Wikiquote">The Emperor's New Groove</a> <bq>Yzma: Alright, I've had enough of this. Tell us where the talking llama is, and we'll burn your house to the ground. Kronk: Uh, don't you mean "or"? Yzma: Tell us where the talking llama is, OR we'll burn your house to the ground. Chaca: Well, which is it? That seems like a pretty crucial conjunction. Yzma: That's it! Kronk, break the door down! Kronk: Break it down? Are you kidding me? This is hand-carved mahogany. Yzma: I don't care, you fool! Get out of my way! I'll break it down myself.</bq> <img src="{att_link}yzma_56-1214803337.jpg" href="{att_link}yzma_56-1214803337.jpg" align="none" caption="Yzma" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/04/rachels-children/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Rachel’s Children</a> <bq>This was the week a Democratic President of the United States described unarmed, non-violent students who were brutally attacked by ultra-violent cops and pro-Israel gangs armed with mace, tear gas, clubs, fireworks and rubber bullets for protesting his genocidal war as the “violent ones.”</bq> <bq>Norman Finkelstein: “By seizing control of Hamilton Hall, students at Columbia University have anchored in historical memory the nexus between the horrors inflicted in Vietnam that was the hallmark of my generation with the horrors inflicted in Gaza that is the hallmark of the new generation. It is a testament to the majesty of these young people that they have risked their futures for the sake of a poor, powerless people halfway around the world in order to uphold that sacred principle that every life is worthy and the murder of none shall pass in silence. As Abraham Lincoln famously quoted, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ The right of the people of Gaza to live is an eternal truth. May the young soldiers in Hamilton Hall be honored and blessed for not countenancing, come what may, its extinguishment.”</bq> <bq>Mouin Rabbani: “Perhaps if Biden stopped systsematically violating both international law and US legislation his lectures to university students about “the rule of law” wouldn’t be so completely laughable.”</bq> <bq>Sam Attar, a Chicago physician, on the images that haunt him after his three trips to volunteer in Gaza’s hospitals. One of his patients was a man in his 50s, who’d just had both of his legs amputated: “He had lost his kids, his grandkids, his home and he’s alone in the corner of this dark hospital, maggots going out of his wounds, and he was screaming: ‘The worms are eating me alive please help me.’”</bq> <bq>Bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus–an unambiguous war crime, designed to instigate an Iranian response–turned everything around for Netanyahu, both in Israel and in the US.</bq> <bq>Rashid Khalidi, speaking at the locked gates of Columbia University the morning after the police raids: I’m the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. I have been teaching here for a total of 22 years. When I was a student, back in the sixties, we were told we were led by a bunch of outside agitators, by politicians nobody remembers the name of today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism. Back in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. The Vietnam War stopped because the people opposed it. The people who led that were students. [...] What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is but a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years: the kettling, the checkpoints, the blockades, the dragging students out–many of them were injured last night. The lies: “outside agitators.” Wait until the numbers come out from One Police Plaza. They were all students! They were our students! [...] This is not about safety and comfort. This is about a genocide being carried on with American money and American weapons against a people that have been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation. That’s what it’s really about. That’s what the students were about and that’s what faculty and staff for Justice in Palestine were about. We are faculty and staff who believe that our students should be safe–all of them. But the right to protest. The right to free speech and academic freedom which are being infringed as we speak. University Chronicles, the arrangement which this university made to deal with these things, was swept aside in an arbitrary fashion by this administration in response to external pressure. Shame on this university. [...] This is the conscience of a nation, speaking through your kids, through young people, who are risking their futures, suspensions, expulsions, and criminal arrests in order to wake people up in this country.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/05/the-consequences-of-capitulation/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Consequences of Capitulation</a> <bq>He goes on to explain why reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on protest are constitutional, and that the students knowingly violated them. While Northwestern is a private institution, and hence the First Amendment does not apply, what the students did would have been wrong regardless. They knew, or should have known, that wrapping up their actions in the rhetoric of protest didn’t give them carte blanche to lawfully do as they pleased. They didn’t care. As far as the students were concerned, they were passionate, they were moral, they were on the right side of history. That meant they were entitled.</bq> No, Scott. They were willing to risk the consequences to get out their message. There's a difference. I don't think most of the students thought that they should be able to do what they want just because they're right. You're getting the wrong message and your way of doing things---being quiet protesters, as your precious Biden would have it---is just another way of saying that, once there's a police state in place, to protest it is illegal, so no-one should do it. It's moronic, unless you're 100% invested in maintaining the status quo that grants you such outsized privilege in society, for no other reason than that you happen to have been born near the top of the food chain instead of the bottom. Scott's premise is always that he is the voice of wisdom and anyone who is younger and disagrees with him is a "baby". Sometimes the protest is to do something illegal and annoying and inconveniencing so that you call the police state's bluff. You make it act on its promise of violence and suppression so that everyone can see that the fairy tales it tells about itself are lies. While that's not enough, it's sometimes the best that you can hope for. The world can now watch as the supposed world's greatest democracy uses police to violently suppress people who are asking/telling their university to stop supporting a the "Middle East's only democracy" from actively and passively extinguishing an ethnic population it sees as dangerous and inconvenient and vile. It's a wonderful example, as well, of how to distract the populace from thinking about the mass graves filled with patients and medical staff found outside of destroyed hospitals---every part of that sentence having been nearly inconceivable six months ago, so kudos to Israel for having re-opened our horizons to what is possible when you really put your back into it---and instead focus on whether outside agitators from Hamas or Russia are responsible for brainwashing "our" youth or whether it's those dastardly Chinese with their TikTok. At any rate, no-one need spend a single second fretting about what the kids are actually saying---because they're babies and have been manipulated into hating their own country's policies (or hating their own country, as the narrative has it), since there's no way that what they're saying that they believe could have anything to do with reality, as that reflects pretty poorly on the aforementioned "greatest democracies". Since the conclusion is impossible within the ideology, it is the facts that must change. And change they do, in the experienced hands of so many who purport to report and opine on these events. Or, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOh3GJxes28" author="Glenn Greenwald" source="YouTube">Daily Wire Sought and Obtained Gag Order While Publicly Negotiating Debate</a> says at 2:55, <iq>they believe that the priority of protecting Israel from criticism is higher than the priority of protecting free speech.</iq> In another video, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgmQWRXNwFc" author="Glenn Greenwald" source="YouTube">2024 or 2004?: The War on Terror Mindset Returns</a> at about 10:00, we hear Senator Tom Cotton say, <bq>[...] we're here to discuss "little Gazas" that have risen up across America and the liberal college administrators and politicians who refuse to restore law and order and to protect other students. These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of anti-Semitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks. The terrorist sympathizers in these little Gazas aren't "peacefully protesting" Israel's conduct of the war. They're violently and illegally demanding death for Israel, just like their ideological twins the Ayatollah in Iran.</bq> As Greenwald says afterwards, <iq>to call that rhetoric unhinged and hysterical is to Gravely understate the case.</iq> A short while later, at about 12:30, Greenwald says, <bq>[...] even if everything Tom Cotton said there was not a lie, but were true, protestors in the United States have every right to express those opinions. They're allowed to argue that Israel is an illegitimate state. That's allowed---as political speech in the United States. They're allowed to engage in hate speech. That's been a cause of the American Right for at least a decade, that censoring political speech on college campuses and the name of stopping hate speech is repressive and tyrannical.</bq> In a video chock-full of amazingly unhinged clips, he saves the best for last. At about 15:00, Tulsi Gabbard says, <bq>There's a few layers of issues here, Brian. Obviously, it is first and foremost maintaining the peace. Law and order enforcing the law as we're seeing our police officers do every single day today. But the underlying issue that I hope everyone is paying attention to is the violence, anti-Semitism, and the pro-Hamas calls. You hear some of the calls that these kids are doing on these campuses saying 'we hope October 7th happens 10,000 times over'. They are pairing this radical-islamist, terrorist ideology that Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Isis---all of these organizations---are trying to perpetuate around the world, which is the extermination of Jewish people and a propagation of their radical Islamist rule. They want to establish Sharia law and a caliphate around the world. And that's the short-term and long-term threat that these groups pose to freedom-loving people and civilization everywhere.</bq> This is just absolutely psychotic and unhinged. It's hard to imagine more fantastical allegations but this is what passes for a "good take" in U.S. media circles. I can imagine that most Democrats---including Joe Biden---would find themselves nodding along in agreement with Gabbard. This is the story they want to hear! The Caliphate is trying to set up Sharia law in the U.S.! Students don't have any legitimate beef with the ruling elites! No! They just hate Jews. But it's not their fault because it's Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and Isis that have brainwashed U.S. kids. Gabbard suggests we may have to wipe them out in order to save them. This is the kind of thing that can bring the silos together! Picture elites holding hands across the aisle to agree that the youth---whose opinions differ so wildly from their own---are damaged goods who must be punished until morale improves. I can't wait to hear how deeply most of my family has internalized this entire line of reasoning. They've patiently explained to me that I don't know how bad the crime waves are in the U.S. Now they can patiently explain to me how all educational institutions are propaganda arms of Islamic terrorists. It's a wealth of targets that must make them clench up a bit, though. Do we blame the Arabs/Muslims? Or Russia? Or China? Can we blame all three somehow? Of course! It's Russian-fueled propaganda trying to weaken the U.S. resolve for supporting Israel and Ukraine using that dastardly Chinese TikTok to brainwash kids into wishing for Sharia law so that they can wipe out the jews. It's a fever dream worthy of the most dedicated methhead. They don't even listen to themselves anymore. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-stabbed-in" author="Matt Orfalea" source="Racket News">Orf vs. The Memory Hole: "Stabbed in the Eye"</a> Now this is the kind of student that people like Scott Greenfield can get behind, right? Because she's not a baby. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTKJus4bUxw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zTKJus4bUxw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Matt Orfalea" caption="Hate Crime Hoax: Stabbed with a Palestinian Flag for Being a Jew"> This 7-minute video is really well-done. I particularly like the juxtaposition of her claims with gratuitously embellished dives taken by NBA players. <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-365-up-2-101236988" author="TrueAnon" source="Patreon">Episode 365: What's Up With Germany: Part 2</a> I had higher hopes for Brace and Liz's analysis but they ended up being completely blind to the parallels between Germany's crimes and the U.S.'s. Liz talks about how damning it was for the German people that they didn't like how Willy Brandt kneeled in front of the Warsaw memorial---but she doesn't even think to mention that there are parallels in how the U.S. has never apologized for anything it's ever done---from the Native American genocide to slavery to to Hiroshima to Vietnam. If an apology came, it was half-hearted and suppressed and not considered to be "real" by most "real" Americans. I know that this pair of podcasts was about Germany, but it was just spectacularly tone-deaf to discuss Germany for 3 hours without drawing a single parallel to the American philosemitic policies or to U.S. war crimes. Their German pronunciation is particularly atrocious, unfortunately. Like, they don't even pronounce the words phonetically sometimes, eliding or inserting extra letters to make the words even more incomprehensible. Liz in particular is quite a bit more pretentious and "besserwisserisch" than usual, saying nonsensical things like "German and the romance languages have more words than English," which is patently false. German has some words that English doesn't, but English is much, much richer in synonyms than German. They could have done some basic education, like learning that the "V" in German is pronounced as "F". The "W" is pronounced as "V". <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-destruction-of-gaza-should-be" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">The Destruction Of Gaza SHOULD Be Radicalizing People</a> <bq>After police violently shut down anti-genocide campus demonstrations in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams said “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done… I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York,” as though preventing the spread of radical political opinions is something a mayor is elected to do in the United States. NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry ominously told the press that there is “some organization” who is “radicalizing our students,” and that the New York police force intends to “find out who that is.” Again, the implication being that it is the job of the police to control the spread of unauthorized political opinions.</bq> <bq>All to shut down something that absolutely should be happening. Young people should be cultivating radical political positions in response to an active genocide that’s supported by their government. An antiwar movement should be forming against the imperial murder machine as its murderousness gets more and more insane. People should be aggressively rejecting the political status quo that has allowed this nightmare to be unleashed upon humanity.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/07/btrx-m07.html" author="Andrea Peters" source="WSWS">US intelligence agencies say Putin “didn’t order” murder of Alexei Navalny, Wall Street Journal reports</a> <bq>With the war against Russia in Ukraine resulting in little more than failed “counteroffensives,” massive body counts and societies on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly disgusted by violence, Washington and its allies seized upon Navalny’s death this winter to try to breathe new life into their fight for “democracy” in Russia. They are now working to elevate his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, as the heir to his legacy. Time magazine included her in its just-published list of the 100 most influential people of 2024. The blurb written about her was authored by Vice President Kamala Harris.</bq> <bq>Top NATO officials are publicly talking about resorting to missile strikes and ground war against Russia, while Russian officials are warning they may launch counter-strikes on NATO countries.</bq> <bq>[...] Macron says NATO aims not to seek a negotiated peace, but to force the Russian military to assume that NATO may adopt the most aggressive possible policy. This includes possibly launching not only a large-scale land invasion of Russia, but also—since France, Britain and the United States all refuse to rule out initiating the use of nuclear weapons in a war—a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russian forces in Ukraine or on Russian cities.</bq> <bq>Yesterday, the Kremlin announced that it would hold military exercises simulating the use of nuclear weapons. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov called the nuclear exercises a response to an “unprecedented stage in the escalation of tensions initiated by the French president and the British foreign secretary,” including “an intention to send armed contingents to Ukraine—that is, to actually put NATO soldiers in front of Russian troops.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/israel-palestine-cease-fire-us-media/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">Israel Rejected a Cease-Fire. The Media Isn’t Telling Us.</a> <bq>These are the plain facts of the situation: a deal was on the table that would have freed Israeli hostages, Hamas agreed to it, but Israeli leadership rejected it because those leaders oppose ending the war under any circumstances that don’t lead to Hamas’s destruction, leading it to promptly attack Rafah.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/israel-rafah-invasion-gaza-genocide/" author="Seraj Assi" source="Jacobin">Israel Is Carrying Out a Horrific Ground Invasion of Rafah</a> <bq>Israel now occupies the two main crossings into southern Gaza, Rafah and Kerem Shalom, virtually sealing Gaza off from the outside world. Palestinians in Gaza are now caged, with no way in or out, while aid is completely blocked. International aid agencies have said the closing of the two crossings, the lifelines for over two million people in Gaza, amounts to forced starvation.</bq> <bq>Teeming with tents and overcrowded street corners and sandy plots, Rafah is right now the most densely populated place on earth. People sleep in the streets, makeshift shelters, public housing, cemeteries, and whatever empty space available. According to UNICEF, there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people, and one shower for every 3,600 people. Food and water are scarce. Medicine is depleting fast. Orphaned children wander the streets searching for food, barefoot and dusty, with no family or relatives to watch over them; many families can’t even find or afford tents. There are three hospitals serving 1.5 million displaced people.</bq> Israel has started a ground invasion with carpet-bombing air support of this city. <bq>On Monday, the Israeli military dropped leaflets ordering the “evacuation” of Palestinians in eastern Rafah, home to Rafah’s main hospital, Yosef al-Najjar, where 250,000 people are taking shelter in refugee camps.</bq> <bq>In a tragic historical irony, the Rafah invasion is coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is commemorated with the promise of “Never Again.” It also coincides with Nakba Day, where heartbreaking scenes of exodus unfolding from Rafah are horrifically echoing past injustices — a chilling reminder that the Nakba never really ended. The tragedy in Gaza is unfolding in broad daylight, with the United States’ implicit approval and Western complicity more broadly. As UNICEF’s James Elder put it, “Gaza has shattered humanity’s records for its darkest chapters.</bq> There is nothing implicit about U.S. approval. It is loud and enthusiastic. Senators and Representatives are bellowing for Israel to wipe out the Palestinians. They are supporting police-state sweeps of anyone who even suggests not to do that. That is not "implicit" support. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/09/rzrw-m09.html" author="Oscar Grenfell" source="WSWS">Australian chopper and Chinese fighter involved in so-called “near miss”</a> <bq>In a press conference on Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jan said: “What truly happened was an Australian military aircraft deliberately flew within close range of China’s airspace in a provocative move that endangered China’s maritime and air security in the name of enforcing UN security council resolutions.” Denouncing what he described as Australia’s “risky moves,” Lin said China “took necessary measures at the scene to warn and alert the Australian side.”</bq> <img src="{att_link}bohaiseamap2.jpg" href="{att_link}bohaiseamap2.jpg" align="none" caption="Bohai Sea in Wikipedia" scale="75%"> What's odd is that Apple Maps doesn't know that the Yellow Sea exists. <img src="{att_link}no_yellow_sea_in_the_map.jpg" href="{att_link}no_yellow_sea_in_the_map.jpg" align="none" caption="No Yellow Sea in the map" scale="50%"> It's completely unaware of any of the bays or named bodies of water in that region. Is that normal? I'd never really thought about the fact that Apple Maps isn't actually a map of the world, but a map of places that Apple thinks would be of interest to its users. I'd just assumed that, when you make a map, you also just include all of the free information about places, just for completeness. But the top hit for "Yellow Sea" finds a financial-services company in France. <img src="{att_link}no_yellow_sea_in_search.jpg" href="{att_link}no_yellow_sea_in_search.jpg" align="none" caption="No Yellow Sea in search" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/09/qzjq-m09.html" author="Alex Lantier" source="WSWS">In France, Xi rejects Macron’s call for China to pressure Russia in Ukraine war</a> <bq>He called on China to prevent Russia from threatening Europe over Ukraine. “Firstly, we obviously discussed Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” he said, demanding “Chinese authorities to abstain from selling any weapon, any assistance to Moscow” and report to European authorities any Chinese firm violating this rule. He also denounced “Iran, whose uncontrolled nuclear development poses many risks” and called on China to “fully coordinate with us on this issue.”</bq> Macron is a fucking idiot. I wonder how Xi manages to put up with having meetings with leaders of countries who are so unbelievably deluded by their own propaganda. It must be so boring and tedious to have to listen to the ravings of these child-like intelligences who can't grasp what the actual situation is. OMG China, just drop everything and throw yourself at NATO's feet, already. What are you waiting for? Do we have to sanction you more? Dude, nobody gives a flying blue fuck what France thinks. I can't believe Xi actually wasted a trip to Europe to even talk to you. <bq>Macron’s demands were presented, if anything, even more stridently by European Union (EU) Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who had traveled to France for the summit. She demanded Beijing “use all its influence on Russia to end its war of aggression against Ukraine” and help Europe with “de-escalating Russia’s irresponsible nuclear threats.”</bq> And this lady. Man, am I sick to death of her and her flapping gums. Why doesn't Europe put an end to the war? They easily could. They could have brought this shit to an end years ago. They could have stopped it from happening in the first place---by not provoking it. That this war continues isn't because of China. This war will go on as long as the U.S. wants it to go on. Europe and the U.S. and NATO are still super-horny for just getting Russia to capitulate and have to accept the yoke of empire. They think they can browbeat China into doing that for them. Madness. Just completely divorced from reality. Xi must think that they're all stupid---or be incredibly offended that they think that he's stupid enough to believe what they're selling. <bq>And given the existential nature of the threats stemming from this war for both Ukraine and Europe, this does affect EU-China relations.</bq> F&@k you Ushi. I have no more patience for your bullshit. <bq>Denouncing Chinese exports of electric vehicles and other high-technology products as “China’s surplus production,” von der Leyen threatened extensive tariffs on Chinese goods: “Europe will not waver from making tough decisions needed to protect its economy and security.”</bq> Jesus Christ. This is a nightmare. It's so ugly to watch this temper tantrum as the west realizes that no-one has to give a shit what they think anymore. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/08/the-distortion-of-campus-protests-over-gaza/" author="Helen Benedict" source="CounterPunch">The Distortion of Campus Protests over Gaza</a> <bq>Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)</bq> <bq>Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones who attend Barnard were locked out of their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague downstairs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.aaronmate.net/p/on-israel-student-courage-exposes" author="Aaron Maté" source="Substack">On Israel, student courage exposes elite cowardice</a> <bq>Understanding that Biden’s threats are toothless, top Israeli leaders also have no problem mocking him with contempt. In response to Biden telling CNN that he could pause more weapons, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir tweeted out the comment: “Hamas [loves] Biden,” using a heart emoji. Ben Gvir likely understands that not even open ridicule, just like dwindling poll numbers, will alter Biden’s devotion to backing Israel. Indeed, one day after Biden’s CNN interview, the White House walked back his comments. “Everybody keeps talking about pausing weapons shipments,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. “Weapons shipments are still going to Israel. And they're still getting the vast, vast majority of everything that they need to defend themselves.”</bq> <bq>Wednesday was the deadline for the State Department to issue a report determining whether Israel is complying with international law. If Israel were found to be in violation, that could trigger a cut-off of US weaponry. But when the deadline arrived, the Biden administration quietly informed Congress that the report was not ready, without specifying why.</bq> <bq>“On college campuses, Jewish students [have been] blocked, harassed, attacked, while walking to class,” Biden declared. “Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and Oct. 7... It is absolutely despicable, and it must stop.”</bq> None of that is true. It's all a fairy tale that's bouncing around the echo chamber, gaining veracity and power with each bounce it takes. But no-one has any images, audio, or video to back it up. Any purported evidence that has come forth---that I've seen---has often showed the opposite of what is claimed. If any slurs are spoken, it's very, very obvious that they are from agent provocateurs---who usually assist their own identification by wearing Israeli-flag shirts or just carrying Israeli flags while record themselves screaming "kill the Jews" and pretending that it's coming from the protestors. It would be laughable if it weren't going to form the basis of an even wider crackdown. Most people don't need proof---they're already hearing what they want to hear and are ready to believe it. <bq>Biden was joined by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who decided to take the Nazi Holocaust analogy further. “The very campuses that were once the envy of the international economy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus,” Johnson said. “...If you close your eyes in the quiet of your own heart, you can hear the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers.… You can hear screams coming from the gas chambers.”</bq> Mike Johnson showing his true colors here: white and blue, without the red. Listen to that horseshit he's selling. It's incredible and it's going to get students killed. And he's so twisted up in a frenzy of anti-student hatred that he doesn't care one bit. He hopes that they all die. He and his cohorts in the Republican party are working on a bill right now that would simultaneously try to put the arrested students on the no-fly/terrorist list and also to send them all to Gaza so that Netanyahu can have the IOF kill them with American weapons. It's so twisted. Perhaps that bill will die on the floor of the Congress, but the frenzy is real. They've already passed worse things recently. For example, <bq>The House recently approved the bipartisan “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which would criminalize criticism of Israel and threaten the funding of colleges that allow it. This followed Biden’s enactment of another bipartisan censorship measure imposing a federal ban on the popular social platform Tik Tok.</bq> <bq>Biden and his Republican allies have made their priorities clear. Whether it means war-mongering in the name of “world peace,” pretending to pressure Israel, smearing courageous young people, exploiting the memory of Nazi victims, and censoring dissent, the bipartisan message is that when it comes to complicity with Israel, the US government’s mendacity, just like its weaponry, is unlimited.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/02/patrick-lawrence-of-journalists-students-and-power/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Of Journalists, Students and Power</a> <bq>Jost, at bottom a court jester, had already told his audience of narcissists, “Your words speak truth to power. Your words bring light to the darkness.” Yes, believe it, in the spring of 2024 people still say these sorts of things about corporate journalists. And the people so addressed take them to be true. Words. Words. Language, its use and misuse.</bq> <bq>In “The Unconscious Civilization” (House of Anansi, 1995; Free Press, 1997) John Ralston Saul, the Canadian scholar and writer, was early in identifying the disconnection between language, as used in our public discourse, and reality. The expansion of knowledge has not produced an expansion of consciousness, Saul observed. It has instead caused us to take refuge in a universe of illusions wherein clear language becomes a kind of transgression. We render ourselves unconscious. Ideologies substitute for thought.</bq> <bq>This business of anti–Semitism everywhere, or anti–Semitism as “shadowing the demonstrations”—a phrase from The New York Times brimming with mal-intended suggestion but with no discernible meaning—is a case of language misused for the most cynical and corrupt of reasons. This Wednesday we were treated to a House vote on legislation that will define criticism of Israel as anti–Semitic. I blame mainstream media for encouraging over many years this outright abuse of language by pretending the equivalence deserves to be taken even the slightest bit seriously.</bq> <bq>But no reporter writing stories about the merits or otherwise of laundry detergent, or the importance of Beyoncé washing her hair—yes, I read a piece on this the other day—can claim to be outside the loop of responsibility as to the duties of professional journalists. Those helping to fill newspapers with distracting rubbish to crowd out worthy news reports, especially during a time of crisis such as ours, are also complicit in keeping the public distracted and misinformed in the service of power. This is what soma, that perversely calming drug Huxley imagined in “Brave New World,” looks like. These people administer daily doses of it.</bq> <bq>What has brought them onto the streets and the commons of their universities is a world-historically depraved use of power to exterminate a people. They are exactly where they ought to be. But I hope they understand that the Israeli–U.S. genocide is but one manifestation of a vastly larger question, the question of late-imperial power.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israels-defenders-talk-so-much-about" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel's Defenders Talk So Much About Feelings Because They Can't Talk About Facts</a> <bq>Israel is the only issue where the western political-media class treats people’s feelings as a matter of supreme importance. If you’re a stressed-out single parent struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over your kids’ head, they don’t care about your feelings. If you’re an American who’s been cast into destitution and homelessness by medical bills, they don’t care about your feelings. If you’re a Palestinian whose apartment complex was bombed with your entire family inside, they definitely don’t care about your feelings. But if you’re a western Zionist who doesn’t like the cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering anti-genocide protesters, or even if you’re an Israeli who’s upset about anti-genocide protests in whole other country on the other side of the planet, they’re very, very interested in your feelings.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/opposing-the-war-machine-is-cool" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Opposing The War Machine Is Cool Again, And The Empire's Getting Nervous</a> <bq>The empire can handle being on the wrong side of an issue; it has all the media and mainstream culture-manufacturing institutions on its side, which allows it to frame public perception of that issue in a way that quells dissent. What it absolutely cannot handle is a critical mass of young people deciding the imperial murder machine sucks, and that opposing it is fun and makes you cool. That’s when dissent takes on a momentum of its own. As long as opposing militarism and imperialism is just the morally correct thing to do it will always be a marginal position in an information ecosystem that’s controlled by the powerful, because simply being on the right side of an issue has little natural magnetism of its own. But the instant it moves from being about morality to being fun and cool it suddenly starts crackling with energy and drawing in huge numbers of people who normally wouldn’t be that interested on their own. The empire has no answer to this. Seriously, how can a bunch of boring empire managers in DC and Virginia hope to compete once that happens? What are they going to do, win the young back by writing another Wall Street Journal think piece? Have Netanyahu rap about how Zionism is rad while Tony Blinken plays guitar? They’ve got nothing.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8pn6IqU8Y" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zi8pn6IqU8Y" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bringing Down The Band Music" caption="Macklemore - 'Hind's Hall' (Video | 2024)"> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-opposing-genocide-is-seen-as" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">When Opposing Genocide Is Seen As Radical, Radicalism Becomes A Moral Imperative</a> <bq>Every time I listen to the song Hind’s Hall I get more disdainful of all the worthless, vapid celebrity artists who are refusing to step up and do something real for once in their pathetic lives.</bq> Macklemore is not a saint. But he did publish this song just as Taylor Swift came out with a new album---that she'd written in the last nine months or so, and just as Drake and Kendrick Lamar wasted a week of everyone's time with a "beef" and just as masses of ethereally thin/quasi-anorexic women were swanning and preening on the red carpet at the Met Gala. Macklemore might be a jackass, but he wrote this thing. Roger Waters has had concerts banned around the globe for being even more eloquent and just as forceful. Maybe others can step up? <bq>A new poll from Data for Progress and Zeteo has found that a majority of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that the police crackdown against anti-genocide protesters is wrong, which kind of makes you wonder why they’re still identifying as Democrats. If Biden supporters believe Biden is guilty of genocide, what does that say about Biden supporters?</bq> <bq>House Democrats rescued Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday from Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene’s initiative to oust him over his support for the massive World War 3 spending bill. This was the first time in US history that a minority from either party has ever intervened to stop the majority party from removing their own speaker, because Democrats just love war that much.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/protest-and-dissent-can-absolutely" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="SubStack">Protest And Dissent Can Absolutely Push The Empire To Retreat On Gaza</a> <bq>If too many people realize that their government is psychopathic and their news media and other indoctrination systems have been lying to them about it all their lives, the empire will lose the ability to propagandize them, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. If too many people wake up from the propaganda matrix it won’t have any effect any longer, and without their propaganda our rulers cannot rule, because that’s the entire control system upon which their rule is premised.</bq> <bq>The empire has been walking that line this entire time. Whenever you see it doing things like stepping back from regime change invasions of Cuba or Syria or refraining from going as authoritarian as it could go on a given issue, it isn’t because the empire suddenly evolved a conscience. It’s because it hasn’t yet succeeded in manufacturing public consent for such agendas [...]</bq> <bq>Hopefully one day, maybe even soon, we will see people begin unplugging their brains from the matrix of imperial mind control at so widespread a scale that no amount of retreating and backpedaling can save the empire from the people collectively deciding they’ll have none of its murderous tyranny anymore. From there it will lose its allies and assets abroad, it will succumb to revolutionary sentiments at home, and the people can start working toward building a healthy world together.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/30/comq-a30.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">A significant speech by a central banker</a> <bq>“The number of violent conflicts in 2023,” he said, “was the highest since the Second World War.” These conflicts generated economic risks and hindered international trade and investment “potentially splitting the global economy into opposing blocs. The weaponisation of trade and financial policies exacerbates these risks.” Panetta, no doubt conscious of the need to maintain diplomatic sensibilities, did not name the United States as the chief driver of these policies as part of its global economic and military rampage. However, even the least politically literate member of his audience would have understood that was where he was pointing.</bq> <bq>[...] any political equilibrium, which seemed to provide peace at one point, was always based, in the final analysis, on the set of economic relations that prevailed at the time. Further economic development would inevitably alter the relative strengths of the major powers upsetting the equilibrium and inexorably to another conflict.</bq> <bq>[...] the US was the chief proponent for the integration of China into the international trading system, in the belief that it would benefit from its lower-cost production. And for a limited period that belief was borne out as the surplus value extracted from the labour of the Chinese working class flowed into the sclerotic arteries of American capitalism.</bq> <bq>he said: “At the same time we cannot ignore geopolitical risk and consequences. We must find ways to operate effectively in a less stable and less open world.” This underscores the fact that the capitalist ruling classes have no solution to the crisis which is moving like a wrecking ball through all the institutions and arrangements established in the post-war period.</bq> <bq>The bourgeoisie and its defenders always ascribe the crises of capitalism to external or accidental factors, but they are rooted in the capitalist system itself. US imperialism is seeking to resolve these contradictions by means of war in which it maintains its position as the dominant power, threatening a global conflagration.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital" source="Persuasion" author="Yanis Varoufakis">The Age of Cloud Capital</a> <bq>As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.</bq> <bq>Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets.</bq> <bq>[...] the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/nailed-it" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Nailed It! - Meet James</a> <img src="{att_link}nailed_it_-_racket_news.webp" href="{att_link}nailed_it_-_racket_news.webp" align="none" caption="Nailed it - Racket News" scale="40%"> <bq>I am an economist by education and temperament I have never voted for, and cannot conceive of ever voting for Donald Trump I have never voted for, and cannot conceive of ever voting for Joe Biden To make a decent Cuba Libre, you need good rum, lime and Coca Cola When Donald Trump left office in January, 2021, a 12 pack of CocaCola cost me $4.00 Today a 12 pack of Coca Cola would cost me $8.49 I refuse to pay $8.49 for 12 Cokes, and I refuse to drink indecent Cuba Libres I am usually sober and frequently angry about inflation Paul Krugman is an asshole</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/09/mmde-m09.html" author="Peter Symonds" source="WSWS">New bans on Huawei: Another shot in Biden’s economic war on China</a> <bq>The US has fired another shot in the escalating economic war with China by imposing new bans limiting the sale of semiconductors to Huawei. The Financial Times (FT) revealed this week that the Biden administration had revoked export licences that allow Intel and Qualcomm to sell their chips to the hi-tech Chinese corporation.</bq> <bq>According to a backgrounder report published by the US Council on Foreign Relations last year, Huawei’s R&D budget for 2021 was more than $21 billion—a figure comparable to the top American hi-tech corporations such as Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). As a percentage of sales, its R&D budget was double that of the US companies. The Wall Street Journal noted this week that Huawei was still the world’s top company in 2023 in the number of patent applications filed.</bq> <bq>The economic war on Chinese corporations is not simply restricted to hi-tech telecommunications but is taking place across a broad front. That includes heavy tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods and punitive measures against other hi-tech Chinese products such as electric vehicles (EV). Moreover, it takes place alongside a vast US military build-up and strengthening of military alliances throughout the Indo-Pacific in preparation for war with China.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_captures_iconic_Horsehead_Nebula_in_unprecedented_detail" source="European Space Agency" author="">Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail</a> <bq>The nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows because it is illuminated by a nearby hot star. The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of thick clumps of material that is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead has about five million years left before it too disintegrates.</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/06/covi-m06.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle, CDC scraps COVID reporting for hospitals</a> <bq>There must be in place the complex logistics systems that can address material supplies such as PPE, and medical therapeutics like vaccine research, production, and distribution. Communication networks and collaborative research capabilities must be in place to immediately address any outbreak in any part of the world. Furthermore, these require a coordinated global network that works not at the behest of rival nation-states, but the international working class as a whole. Yet, as evidenced by last week’s bipartisan inquisition of Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, science and truth has become a casualty of the intense geopolitical tensions and rivalry that are rapidly devolving into World War III. Indeed, science and reason, because they insist on an honest inquiry to guide social developments and refuse to obey the diktats of the imperialist warmongers, are seen as threats by these dangerous political buffoons. From their perspective, Daszak’s principled and courageous defense of his work and the science of the pandemic in the service of global populations, must be derided and criminalized as it undermines the imperial aims of the US and EU.</bq> They are more interested in securing short-term gains for themselves than they are in actually governing. <bq>This is more than just a hypothetical scenario that can simply be ignored. The major pandemics of the modern era have been influenza pandemics. Despite the repeated attempts to assure the public, including a crass and objectionable opinion piece from leading COVID minimizer Leana Wen in the Washington Post, health systems are in a worse position four years into the COVID pandemic and are totally unprepared for the next pandemic, whether it is H5N1 or another pathogen. With a case fatality rate of roughly 50 percent, an airborne H5N1 virus spreading quickly among the population would make the COVID-19 pandemic seem like child’s play. Any claim that vaccines and medical therapeutics would find their way into public hands in short order are simply lies.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/h5n1-update-how-concerned-should" author="Katelyn Jetelina" source="Your Local Epidemiologist">H5N1 Update: How concerned should you be?</a> <bq>H5N1 State of Affairs There are 36 known infected herds across 9 states. The last identified herd was on April 25. Is this fizzling out? Could be. Or, more likely, it’s continuing to spread without us knowing. Testing animals and humans is still voluntary, and asymptomatic testing is not happening. We are flying blind.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://blog.plover.com/2024/04/29/#hawat" author="Mark Dominus" source="The Universe of Discourse">Hawat! Hawat! Hawat! A million deaths are not enough for Hawat!</a> <bq>Summary: Thufir Hawat is the real traitor. He set up Yueh to take the fall.</bq> <bq>Here's another question: Where did Yueh get the tooth with the poison gas? The one that somehow wasn't detected by the Baron's poison snooper? The one that conveniently took Piter out of the picture? We aren't told. But surely this wasn't the sort of thing was left lying around the Ducal Residence for anyone to find. It is, however, just the sort of thing that the Master of Assassins of a Great House might be able to procure.</bq> An interesting analysis. <bq>Maybe I should have mentioned that I have not read any of the sequels to Dune, so perhaps this is authoritatively contradicted — or confirmed in detail — in one of the many following books. I wouldn't know.</bq> I've read the books twice, but the last time was about 21/2 decades ago. I don't recall any of the other books having cleared this up. They generally jumped several decades forward---Thufir Hawat was not even in the third book, if I recall correctly, although I think he was in the second one. He does end up in the employ of the Harkonnens but isn't in any way in charge of things. If he had a plan, then it backfired on him tremendously. <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2024/05/06/run-bezos-run/" author="Doug Muir" source="Crooked Timber">Run, Bezos, Run</a> <bq quote-style="none">“I heard that Jeff Bezos could run through the streets every day, throwing hundred dollar bills in the air, and he’d still be making money.” “I wonder if that’s true?” “Okay, how much is Jeff Bezos worth?” “Uh [googling]… wow, it says about $203 billion.” “Okay, so let’s say he can get three percent interest on that. That would be six billion dollars per year, which would be about… [taps on phone] oh, around 17 million dollars a day. So if he runs around throwing money in the air, eight hours a day, he’ll have to throw a little over two million dollars an hour.”</bq> That's just the beginning. They go through how many breaks he gets, how many bills per second he has to throw, whether he's allowed to throw straps, how far he has to run per day, etc. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-new-yorker-on-the-crisis-of-attention" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The New Yorker on the “Crisis of Attention”</a> <bq>The other piece I wanted to share is an interview I did with Jonathan Egid, who is one of the most interesting young scholars of the history of philosophy working today. He wrote his Ph.D. on the (possibly non-existent) 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacub, and learned Ge’ez in order to do so (without that language, pretty much anything anyone says about the existence or non-existence of the philosopher in question is worthless). In the course of his work Jonathan became interested, as I am also interested, in the troubling relationship between philosophy and what I would call the “languages of empire”. That is, it almost seems as if what gets to be called “philosophy” at all is a function not of the content or method of the work in question, so much as its belonging to the linguistic communities of the world’s centers of power. This, I’ll note in passing, is a form of exclusion so comprehensive and total that the vast majority of anglophone philosophers who talk about how much they value “inclusion” don’t even notice it.</bq> <bq>There is a long feature piece in this week’s New Yorker by the excellent Nathan Heller, entitled “ The Battle for Attention ”, which details the various activities of the Order of the Third Bird, and explains how these amount to a form of resistance to our new economic and political order of ubiquitous and incessant attention-fracking [...]</bq> <bq>Humans view a world that is teeming with spirits or animate forces that have wills of their own that need to be placated, and most human energy goes into managing the relationship with these forces. These forces include wild animals, bears and so on, but also of course natural phenomena like lightning. I would go so far as to say that this relationship to the world is our ‘factory setting’, so to speak —that’s the way our brains were configured—, and to appreciate it, to work your way into it, really helps to get a clearer understanding of how the human mind works.</bq> I have named and cherished objects my whole life. I drive a thirty-year-old car named Greta. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/progressive-attitudes-towards-sex" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now</a> <bq>It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument - most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television. This is the sort of thing that many people will reflexively groan about, because I’m embracing a point of view that has been communally mocked and rejected, but I believe the cliche position is correct: many young people these days are afraid of the world generally and of sex particularly, a generalized anxiety in the face of the risk and danger that are endemic elements of human life and without which their is no pleasure and no fulfillment.</bq> <bq>I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex - there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street.</bq> <bq>Recently, when a documentary about Steve Martin was released, we saw a little spasm of age gap discourse about his wife, who is 25 years younger. 25 years is a long time! But, my friends, they got together when she was in her 30s, they’ve been together for 20 years, they have a child together, I think we’re safe. I think she’s safe. I think a woman in her 50s whose been in the same consensual relationship for 20 years and who is married to her partner and shares a child with him is not in fact a sex-trafficking victim. And I think therefore there’s simply nothing left to do, morally. There’s no dilemma there, now, if there ever was. You can, in some theoretical way, disapprove. Knock yourself out. But… why bother? To what end? For what purpose?</bq> <bq>What’s important though is that these dueling positions stem from values, from principle, from argument. In the internet era, I’m afraid, those things are getting rarer and rarer. The way that political attitudes have tended to spread, whether right or left, has been mimetically, via social contagion - you log onto your app of choice and you see what everybody else thinks and you want to think that way too, for fear of being unpopular or uncool.</bq> <bq>[...] there’s also a threshold past which mimetic politics leaves us in an incoherent pile of conflicting attitudes, unable to fitfully grope our way towards meaning. It’s great that Tumblr and TikTok get people radicalized and engaged. But that kind of engagement only matters to the degree that it gets people reading. Yes, I am ableist enough to say that people who do politics should read! But the endlessly-mushrooming sources of political #content and our era’s fake populism contribute to an attitude that suggests that it’s enough to feel more, to judge more, to be politics instead of to do them. To watch someone talk for 90 seconds about bell hooks and declare yourself an educated political leader. Coherence doesn’t stand a chance. And thus you get totalizing fear of sex among people who are simultaneously lobbing sexual photos and videos of themselves around their high schools, without a second thought.</bq> <bq>I don’t think we’re doing them any favors by reflexively defending them just because some people reflexively attack them. They get a lot of dumb and unfounded criticism. They also get a lot of criticism because they’re goofy jamokes who don’t let their ignorance trouble their righteousness. And to state the obvious, if you don’t like sex scenes in movies, don’t watch them.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands</a> <bq>Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result.</bq> <bq>Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority. This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes.</bq> <bq>All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit.</bq> One of the actual reviewing sites wrote a couple of highly detailed and highly illuminating articles about how exactly this all works, including the metrics. See <a href="https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/" author="Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton" source="HouseFresh">How Google is killing independent sites like ours</a> and the follow-up <a href="https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/" author="Gisele Navarro" source="HouseFresh">HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?</a> <bq>All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dDUC-LqVrPU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Computerphile / Dr Mike Pound" caption="Has Generative AI Already Peaked?"> As I've said from the very beginning of this whole journey, when the going gets tough, it's much more likely that profit-driven research will pivot to lowering people's expectations rather to improving the technology. When they hit the wall of diminishing returns, it will be more lucrative to invest money into marketing than into an exponentially flattening curve. <img src="{att_link}exciting,_balanced,_and_evidence-based_llm-growth_scenarios.jpg" href="{att_link}exciting,_balanced,_and_evidence-based_llm-growth_scenarios.jpg" align="none" caption="Exciting, Balanced, and Evidence-based LLM-growth scenarios" scale="50%"> Dr Pound shows the exciting, balanced, and evidence-based curves, then argues that we're currently on the evidence-based curve (according to a very strong meta-study that he was presenting). The buzz and activity around AI is assuming that we're on the exciting or, at least, the balanced track, but the evidence-based track has the most support so far. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/our-dystopian-ai-future-isnt-skynet" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Our Dystopian AI Future Isn't Skynet. It's a "For You" Algorithm Stomping on a Human Face Forever</a> <bq>[...] control not by unaccountable government bureaucrats or parasitic corporate lackeys but by these impossibly complex digital systems, systems which even the technocrats who build them can’t fully explain. The longstanding battle between the individual and the state will come to look quaint in comparison to the battle of the human against the profit-maximizing AI, an entity that is distributed and depersonalized and so can have no personal accountability. And it will all be happening with a populace that has grown used to seeing digital systems as permanent authorities that they have no ability to defy.</bq> <bq>Why wouldn’t there be a future where Amazon gets to actually do the buying itself for you? People tell me that this is fanciful and unlikely, but I think they’re underestimating just how inured many people are to giving their lives away to our algorithmic rulers. Younger generations will have little ability to conceptualize an adult life in which they aren’t constantly nudged to do what some corporation wants, with the AI intermediary giving the exchange a veneer of objectivity.</bq> <bq>This system would be opt-in, purely voluntary, of course! At first. And then, sometime down the line, participation in Amazon Predict will be so incentivized by bargains that almost no one still uses Amazon the old way, and then one day choosing your own products is no longer an option. Call me a Cassandra if you want. I think something like that is a plausible future.</bq> <bq>“Freedom inside of a system where one’s choices are always only those allowed by a powerful eternal authority over which one has no influence is not freedom at all,” incidentally, is a pretty good gloss on the Marxist critique of capitalist economics. And yet the forces I’ve been describing suggest that capitalist-socialist divide might not be so salient in the near future. If I’m right, and the algorithms and AIs take control of more and more of the economy, if we seamlessly fall into a world where Amazon goes from aggressively suggesting that you buy things to just buying them for you, it might not be long before such algorithmic decision-making spreads to where you go to college or buy a home or the job you take.</bq> <bq>[...] when so much of the intelligence that powers capitalism is effectively artificial, is it really so hard to believe that these systems become, in effect, central planning? What does market behavior even mean, when our choices are less and less our own, and more and more subject to the whims of systems that may not think, but somehow know us better than we know ourselves? The complaint about central planning was that no bureaucrats can govern the economy as efficiently as markets. But what happens when there’s an AI that actually can?</bq> Or will purport to be able to do so. The goal of such a system will be to generate profits for a small handful of corporations. So the centrally planned economy will be to their benefit, not to society's. They will convince everyone---with the propaganda organs that they also own---that their benefit is also society's benefit, but ... fool me once... <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/04/30/rama-is-a-testament-to-the-power-of-clojure/" source="Red Planet Labs" author="Nathan Marz">Rama is a testament to the power of Clojure</a> <bq>At its core is a new programming language implementing a new programming paradigm, at the same level as the “object-oriented”, “imperative”, “logic”, and “functional” paradigms. Rama’s Clojure API gives access to this new language directly, and Rama’s Java API is a thin wrapper around a subset of this language.</bq> <bq>Whereas a function works by taking in any number of input parameters and then returning a single value as the last thing it does, a fragment can output many times (called “emitting”), can output to multiple “output streams”, and can do more work between or after emitting. A function is just a special case of a fragment. Rama fragments compile to efficient bytecode, and fragments that happen to be functions execute just as efficiently as functions in Java or Clojure.</bq> <bq>With every other language you at least have to conform to their syntax and basic semantics, and you have limited ability to control what happens at compile-time versus runtime. Lisps have great control over what happens at compile-time, which lets you do incredible things.</bq> <bq>Because of the flexibility of Clojure, and the ability to program what happens at compile-time for a Specter callsite, we’re able to utilize the technique at the library level. It’s all done completely behind the scenes, and users of Specter get an expressive and concise API that’s extremely fast.</bq> <bq>Rama tracks a lot of different kinds of state, and we find it much simpler in some cases to use mutability rather than work with state indirectly as you would through something like the State Monad in Haskell. There are also some algorithms that are much simpler to write when they use a volatile internal in the implementation. That said, the vast majority of code in Rama is written in an immutable style. When we use mutability it’s almost always isolated within a single thread. Rather than have concurrent mutability using something like an atom, we use a volatile and send events to its owning thread to interact with it.</bq> <bq>Rama takes things a step further for distributed computation, doing things like scope analysis to determine what vars needs to be transferred across network boundaries. Rama’s loops have similar syntax to Clojure and have the additional capability of being able to be a distributed computation that hops around the cluster during loop iterations.</bq> <bq>Rama provides flexible data storage expressed in terms of data structures, has deployment and monitoring built-in, has first-class features for evolving an application and updating it, is completely fault-tolerant, and is inherently scalable. It does all this while maintaining Clojure’s great principles and functional programming roots.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://sqlite.org/draft/whybytecode.html" source="SQLite.org" author="">Why SQLite Uses Bytecode</a> <bq><ol>Bytecode → The input SQL is translated into a virtual machine language that is then run by a virtual machine interpreter. This is the technique used by SQLite. Tree-Of-Objects → The input SQL is translated in a tree of objects that represent the processing to be done. The SQL is executed by walking this tree. This is the technique used by MySQL and PostgreSQL.</ol></bq> Atlas seems to have been kind of a mix of both of these. It could produce trees (when navigating sub-relations and sub-queries), but many of the commands were quite linear. <bq>[...] the "bytecode" used by SQLite is not so much a set of CPU instructions as it is a list of database primitives that are to be run in a particular order.</bq> This is closer to Atlas. <bq>AST is not a suitable form for a prepared statement. After being generated, an AST first needs to be transformed in various ways before it can executed. Symbols need to be resolved. Semantic rules need to be checked. Optimizations need to be applied that transform input SQL statement into different forms that execute more quickly.</bq> <bq>Dataflow programming is a style of programming in which individual nodes specialize in doing one small part of the overall computation. Each node receives inputs from other nodes and sends its output to other nodes. Thus the nodes form a directed graph that carry inputs into outputs.</bq> Also kind of like Atlas, if I recall correctly. <bq>In a client/server engines [sic], a single SQL statement is sent to the server, then the complete reply comes back over the wire all at once.</bq> This isn't true, though. What about cursors? They are quite common. Quino used cursors for nearly everything. <bq>A tree-of-objects is easier to modify on-the-fly. The query plan is mutable and can be tweaked as it is running, based on the progress of the query. Thus a query can be dynamically self-tuning.</bq> <bq>In a dataflow program, each processing node can be assigned to a different thread. There needs to be some kind of threadsafe queuing mechanism for transferring intermediate results from one node to the next.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/" source="" author="">Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust? ⚡ Zig Programming Language</a> <bq>The purpose of this design decision is to improve readability.</bq> The line above comes after a list detailing the evils of property-accessors, exceptions, and operator-overloading. These are control freaks obsessing over performance that they're probably optimizing worse than a good compiler would. Fine for system stuff, I guess. <bq>Simply put, there are use cases where one must be able to rely on control flow and function calls not to have the side-effect of memory allocation, therefore a programming language can only serve these use cases if it can realistically provide this guarantee.</bq> Bullshit. The guarantee can come from verification outside language constraints. This is, once again, claiming that the best way to encourage something is to ban its opposite. <bq>Custom allocators make manual memory management a breeze. Zig has a debug allocator that maintains memory safety in the face of use-after-free and double-free. It automatically detects and prints stack traces of memory leaks. There is an arena allocator so that you can bundle any number of allocations into one and free them all at once rather than manage each allocation independently. Special-purpose allocators can be used to improve performance or memory usage for any particular application’s needs.</bq> This is nice when you need it, but most programming applications these days do not need it. Almost no software has real-time constraints, so the main drawback of a garbage-collecting memory-reclamation pattern---stop the world---doesn't really matter that much. Sure, we could impose such a restriction on every GUI app, requiring that it run at 120HZ, but that's a nice-to-have, not a requirement. We've had the manual-memory management debate and it was clear that most programmers can't handle it that well. I managed my own memory from 1990 until about 2005, when I switched to Java, then C#. I programmed in C++ and Delphi over the years since, but have primarily worked with garbage-collected languages since. <bq>Zig is designed such that the laziest thing a programmer can do is handle errors correctly, and thus one can be reasonably confident that a library will properly bubble errors up.</bq> That's fine, but you haven't defined the problem space for which you think Zig is the best library. This pattern doesn't necessarily work well for UIs, for example, where you tend to have a ton of entry points and interaction with the outside world. It's not impossible to get it right, but it's also not been historically easy. I totally agree that we should deal with errors, but shrink a bit at the boilerplate. <hr> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/language-extensions-part-1" source="Zed Blog" author="Max Brunsfeld">Extensible Language Support in Zed - Part 1</a> <bq>Tree-sitter parsers are expressed as C code . Grammars are written in JavaScript, and converted into C code by the Tree-sitter CLI. Tree-sitter is designed this way for a variety of reasons. In short, some kind of turing-complete language is needed, and C code has the useful property that it can be consumed from almost any high-level language via C bindings. But sadly, C code is not the most convenient artifact to distribute to end users.</bq> <bq>Like other table-driven parsing frameworks, Tree-sitter's parsing is divided into two parts. The lexing phase processes text character-by-character, producing tokens. Each grammar's lexer is implemented as some auto-generated C functions, and some optional hand-written ones. The parsing phase is more complex, and is where syntax trees are actually constructed. Crucially, parsing is driven entirely by static data.</bq> <bq>We know that the memory allocated by external scanners is only needed for the duration of a single parse, so we implemented our own tiny malloc library that uses a bump-allocation. This allocator has much less overhead than a general-purpose malloc implementation, and requires much less wasm code. Best of all, it makes it impossible for external scanners to cause memory leaks! We can simply reset the entire wasm heap at the beginning of each parse.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-async-rust" source="Zed Blog" author="Thorsten Ball & Antonio Scandurra">Zed Decoded: Async Rust</a> <bq>Zed, as a macOS application, uses macOS' GCD to schedule and execute work. What happens in the snippet above is that Zed turns the <c>Runnable</c> — think of it as a handle to a <c>Task</c> — into a raw pointer and passes it to <c>dispatch_async_f</c> along with a trampoline , which puts it on its <c>main_queue</c>. it pops it off the queue, and calls <c>trampoline</c>, which takes the raw pointer, turns it back into a <c>Runnable</c> and, to poll the <c>Future</c> behind its <c>Task</c>, calls <c>.run()</c> on it. And, as I learned to my big surprise: that's it. That's essentially all the code necessary to use GCD as a "runtime" for async Rust. Where other applications use tokio or smol, Zed uses thin wrappers around GCD and crates such as <c>async_task</c>.</bq> So they have a different async implementation per platform. Neat. <bq>As a writer of application-level Zed code, you should always be mindful of what happens on the main thread and never put too much blocking work on it. If you were to put, say, a blocking <c>sleep(10ms)</c> on the main thread, rendering the UI now has to wait for that <c>sleep()</c> to finish, which means that rendering the next frame would take longer than 8ms — the maximum frame time available if you want to achieve 120 FPS . You'd "drop a frame", as they say.</bq> They wrote the editor like a game engine. <bq>Even though this method can be optimized and the search made a lot faster (we haven't gotten around to that yet), it can already search thousands of files without blocking the main thread, while still using multiple CPU cores.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-rope-sumtree" source="Zed Blog" author="Thorsten Ball, Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra, & Max Brunsfeld">Zed Decoded: Rope & SumTree</a> <bq>[...] the leaves - "This", " is ", "a ", "rope" — are essentially immutable . Instead of modifying strings, you modify the tree. Instead of poking holes in strings and moving parts of it around it memory, you modify the tree to get a new string. And by now, we as programmers have figured out how to efficiently work with trees.</bq> <bq>With a rope, you find the start and end positions of the word you want to delete, then split the tree at these two positions so you have four trees, you throw away the middle two trees (that only contain the deleted word), concatenate the other two, then rebalance the tree. Yes, it does sound like a lot and it does require some algorithmic finesse under the hood, but the memory and performance improvements over strings are very real: instead of moving things around in memory, you only have to update a few pointers.</bq> <bq>[...] the leaf nodes, the ones containing the actual text, aren't fully immutable in Zed's rope implementation. These leaf nodes have a maximum length and if, say, text gets appended to a rope and the new text is short enough to fit into the last leaf node without exceeding its maximum length, then that leaf node will be mutated and the text appended to it.</bq> <bq>[...] for an editor that encourages non-localized edits, or just wants flexibility in that regard, they're a great choice because they always have good performance, whereas gap buffers degrade poorly with unfavorable editing patterns.</bq> <bq>Crop and Ropey [note: both are rope implementations in Rust] support concurrent access from multiple threads. This lets you take snapshots to do asynchronous saves, backups, or multi-user edits. This isn't something you could easily do with a gap buffer.</bq> <bq>A <c>SumTree<t></c> is a B+ tree in which each leaf node contains multiple items of type <c>T</c> and a <c>Summary</c> for each Item. Internal nodes contain a <c>Summary</c> of the items in its subtree.</bq> <bq>The <c>SumTree</c> is a concurrency-friendly B-tree that not only gives us a persistent, copy-on-write data structure to represent text, but through its summaries it also indexes the data in the tree and allows us to traverse the tree along dimensions of the summaries in O(log n) time.</bq> <bq>[...] the <c>SumTree</c>, a thread-safe, snapshot-friendly, copy-on-write B+ tree is very powerful and can be used for more than "just" text, which is why it's everywhere in Zed. Yes, literally.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/01/css-border-image-property/" author="Afif Temani" source="Smashing Magazine">The Complex But Awesome CSS border-image Property</a> This is an incredibly detailed discussion of the <c>border-image</c> CSS property and the many wonderful things it can do with just one line of code. Great stuff by the author of the <a href="https://css-tip.com/" author="" source="">CSS Tip</a> web site. <hr> <a href="https://frontendmasters.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-modern-css-spring-2024-edition/#toc-65" author="Chris Coyier" source="Frontend Masters Boost">What You Need to Know about Modern CSS (Spring 2024 Edition)</a> <bq>My goal with this bookmarkable guide is to provide a list of (frankly: incredible) new additions to CSS lately. There is no hardline criteria for this list other than that these things are all fairly new and my sense is that many people aren’t aware of these things. Or even if they are, they don’t have a great understanding of them and could use a plain language explanation of what it is, why they should care, and a bit of reference code. Maybe that’s you.</bq> The features are as follows. See the article for more information, examples, and links. <ol>Container Queries (Size) Container Queries (Style) Container Units The :has() Pseudo Selector View Transitions Nesting Scroll-Driven Animations Anchor Positioning Scoping Cascade Layers Logical Properties P3 Colors Color Mixing Margin Trim Text Wrapping Subgrid</ol> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opHu7HvFM60" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/opHu7HvFM60" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kevin Powell" caption="23 CSS features you should know (and be using) by now"> In the same vein is a video from Kevin Powell, along with Adam Argyle, where they show quick examples of a lot of these techniques in a 30-minute video. I learned more about: <ul> Using <c>media(hover)</c> to set up styles for devices that support hovering. E.g., if a device doesn't support hovering, then you might always show captions on buttons, rather than on hover. The power of <c>border-image</c> (see also <a href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/01/css-border-image-property/" author="Afif Temani" source="Smashing Magazine">The Complex But Awesome CSS border-image Property</a>) <c>column-span</c> (for making an element within a block with <c>columns</c> span multiple columns, e.g., typically with <c>column-span: all</c>) The difference between <c>box-shadow</c> and <c>filter: drop-shadow</c> A reminder to use <c>backdrop-filters</c> to control blending with the background more finely than just specifying <c>opacity</c>. Selecting links with pseudo-class <c>:any-link</c> instead of with class <c>a</c> to select links that actually go somewhere rather than all links, which may not have <c>href</c> attributes. Using the <c>:empty</c> pseudo-class to avoid showing blocks that have no content, but have padding and background color that would make them weirdly visible anyway. <div>Defining a <c>@counter-style</c> to make custom list-style-types. E.g.,<code>@counterstyle happy-list { system: cyclic; symbols: "🤓" "🤪" "😂" "😀" "😍" "😏"; suffix: " "; }</code> </div> Using <c>inset</c> to control absolute position. Always remembering that <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_logical_properties_and_values">logical properties</a> are available everywhere: use <c>*inline-start</c> and <c>*inline-end</c> rather than <c>left</c> and <c>right</c>, respectively. </ul> <hr> <a href="https://yuanchuan.dev/time-based-css-animations" author="yuan chuan" source="">Time-based CSS Animations</a> <bq>Using time for animation is very common in shader programs and various other places. CSS can not start a timer like JavaScript does, but nowadays it's possible to define a custom variable with the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CSS_Properties_and_Values_API/guide">CSS Houdini API</a> to track time in milliseconds.</bq> This is very, very cool and shows the power of being able to offload so much animation onto a highly optimized rendering engine that knows how to composite filtered (e.g., blurred), drop-shadowed, gradient-encrusted layers with automatic tweening and offloading to the GPU. <hr> <a href="https://cruncher.ch/blog/printing-music-with-css-grid/" author="Stephen Band" source="Cruncher">Printing music with CSS Grid</a> This is a mostly CSS-based JavaScript web component that draws musical notation using a very fine-grained CSS grid. <img src="{att_link}dolphin_dance_by_herbie_hancock.jpg" href="{att_link}dolphin_dance_by_herbie_hancock.jpg" align="none" caption="Dolphin Dance by Herbie Hancock" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.csscade.com/cool-queries" author="" source="The Cascade">Cool queries</a> <bq>you can detect JavaScript support with a media query now:<code>.my-element { @media (scripting: enabled) { } }</code></bq> <bq>it’s possible to use a media query to style an element based on whether it’s overflowing the parent, like this:<code>.parent { max-width: 300px; } .child { width: 500px; @media (overflow-inline) { background: yellow; } }</code></bq> <hr> <a href="https://heydonworks.com/article/testing-html-with-modern-css/" author="Heydon Pickering" source="Heydonworks">Testing HTML With Modern CSS</a> <bq>In a nutshell, the purpose of REVENGE.CSS is to apply visual regressions to any markup anti-patterns. It makes bad HTML look bad, by styling it using a sickly pink color and the infamous Comic Sans MS font. It was provided as a bookmarklet for some time but I zapped that page in a Marie Kondo-inspired re-platforming of this site.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-linux-when" author="Thorsten Ball & Mikayla Maki" source="Zed Industries">Zed Decoded: Linux when?</a> <bq>At Zed, though, we want to use each platform as best as we can to build a high-performance application that is and feels native to the platform. That often means talking directly to the platform, in order to use it to the best of its abilities. On macOS, for example, Zed makes direct use of Metal. We have our own shaders, our own renderer, and we put a lot of effort into understanding macOS APIs to get to 120FPS. Zed on macOS is also a fully-native AppKit NSApplication and we integrated our async Rust runtime with macOS' native application runtime. If you want your application to have this level of depth and control over its platform integration and have it be cross-platform, what you'll need to build is a framework. A framework that allows you to talk directly to the platform whenever you need, but otherwise abstract it away from you so you don't have to worry about it when you write application-level code. That's what Zed did. The framework is called GPUI [...]</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptKjWPC7pqw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ptKjWPC7pqw" source="YouTube" width="560px" caption="Deep Dive into RegEx with Stephen Toub" author="dotnet / Scott Hanselmann"> This is another excellent 1-hour tour of another complex corner of .NET. Toub describes and shows how the source-generated RegEx engine works. <ul>The generated source is human-readable and debuggable. It is well-commented. It updates in real-time as you change the expression. It includes XML documentation that describes the regular expression in plain English. They rewrote the compiler in .NET 7 to not only better support source generators, but also to be able to emit not only IL, but source code. They rebuilt the emitter to allow more leeway in code-generation---the first generation emitted C# that looked very much like IL. They have a gigantic test-suite that they culled from open-source code. 4M expressions deduplicated down to about 20,000 unique expressions that they have in the test suite and that they run against all four RegEx engines to verify that nothing runs pathologically long or with excessive memory. There is an analyzer that tries very hard to eliminate greediness. It seeks atomicity. Fascinating. At 47:00, he shows a great example of a regex that requires backtracking, which can lead to pathological, exponential performance. These engines support back-references, which are powerful. They can be super-fast for matches, but they have very bad worst-case behavior that may end up in DDOS behavior. In .NET, you can set a timeout on your regular-expression evaluation to avoid this. You can also set a global timeout. You can also turn off back-tracking. If it can produce the engine to evaluate the expression, then it will evaluate in linear time. If it cannot, it's probably a compile-time error if you're using source generators, which is quite nice. They also examine an email-address RegEx, which takes Toub into showing how the generated source uses the <c>SearchValues</c> variants, which are a highly-optimized way of searching text, with dozens of algorithms that it chooses by analyzing the input string. They have SIMD/Vector/Arm Intrinsics support where possible and are exactly the kind of optimization that a framework like .NET can offer, but that an app developer would never have time to make.</ul> 💙 Stephen Toub. He's absolutely brilliant. Mad props to Scott Hanselmann for reining him in and providing a great sparring partner. <hr> <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Programming?ref=blog.codinghorror.com" author="" source="Wikiquote">Programming</a> <bq author="Charles Babbage">On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.</bq> <bq author="C.A.R. Hoare">There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.</bq>