<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#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="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/indian-election-how-modi-has-stacked-the-deck-by-debasish-roy-chowdhury-2024-05" source="Project Syndicate" author="Debasish Roy Chowdhury">India’s Despotic Election</a> <bq>From Russia and Hungary to Turkey and (until recently) Poland, a common pattern of the twenty-first-century autocratizers is that, unlike textbook authoritarians, the new despots cunningly stop short of destroying or fully dismantling democracy. Recognizing the legitimizing power of democracy, they use its processes to rise to power, often through polarizing identity politics. <b>Once in office, they then move to capture or hollow out democratic institutions – including the judiciary and independent media – that otherwise might serve as a check on their majoritarianism.</b> Modi’s decade in power has offered a masterclass in this process.</bq> The U.S. as well. The regulatory and electoral capture is legendary, with people fighting their elected officials to get things done that everyone but the corporations want. Legislators are reelected nearly without fail, and there is practically only a single party. <bq>In a functioning democracy, the media would have shone a spotlight on such grievous violations of democratic governance. But the media is among the institutions that Modi has tamed the most. Once a riotous lot that aimed to outdo one another in exposing government failures, <b>much of the mainstream media – especially national-level news channels – now compete for the government’s affections.</b></bq> Are you describing India or the U.S.? <bq>Known collectively as the godi (“lapdog”) media, <b>these outlets have ceased to be a watchdog, and instead dutifully churn out pro-government messages.</b> The smallest of Modi’s events are broadcast live, while the biggest opposition rallies sometimes receive no coverage at all.</bq> <bq><b>Mainstream outlets also enthusiastically spread hate against Modi’s chosen enemies</b> – Muslims, the opposition, and liberals. They mock opposition figures, heap praise on Modi’s every act and utterance, and <b>cheer whenever non-violent dissenters are thrown in jail.</b></bq> This all sounds super-familiar. Julian Assange, Jill stein, university protesters,... <bq><b>India has become what Thomas Jefferson would call an “elective despotism.”</b> Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the (technically) elected political executive.</bq> <bq>Last December, <b>BJP-nominated House speakers</b> suspended 141 opposition lawmakers from both chambers of Parliament and then <b>legislated unopposed for the remainder of the session.</b></bq> Well, the U.S. doesn't have that. Yet. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/09/patrick-lawrence-university-an-attack-on-intelligence/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">University—An Attack on Intelligence</a> <bq>America’s decline and fall—<b>a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but unreservedly ignores.</b></bq> <bq>On May 2 the House passed a bill that, broadly speaking, defines as “antisemitic” any criticism of Israel, or—heaven forbid!—disapproval of Israel as a “Jewish state.” The kookier House members have been trying to get this rationally disconnected piece of legislation to the floor for eight years. <b>The House now sends the Antisemitism Awareness Act to the Senate on a 320–to–19 vote.</b></bq> <bq>Michael Massing, the writer and journalist, published “How to Cover the One Percent,” a brilliant piece on the fraud of “disinterested philanthropy,” in The New York Review of Books back in 2016. There is no such thing as disinterested giving, he argued with plenty of evidence. <b>Leaving private wealth to support institutions in the public sphere—universities, museums, public broadcasting, what have you—is at bottom a way of controlling public discourse—and so a method of political, social and (most of all) ideological control.</b> This is what Massing meant.</bq> <bq>“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically,” Bertrand Russell wrote in a wonderful essay, 102 years ago, called “Free Thought and Official Propaganda.” <b>“It is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/09/us-politicians-threaten-to-invade-intl-criminal-court-if-israel-faces-war-crimes-charges/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">US Politicians Threaten To Invade Int’l Criminal Court If Israel Faces War Crimes Charges</a> <bq>Smotrich cited the Biblical nation of Amalek – a genocidal reference also made by far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These invocations of Amalek are clear calls for genocide. In the Book of Samuel, God orders King Saul, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. <b>Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”.</b></bq> It's neat how this is cited totally seriously by the western press, but if you cite something far more inoccuous from the Koran, you're an inscrutably medieval terrorist. If it's from the Old Testament and said by an Israeli, it's plausible and well-founded research and militarily actionable. <bq><b>Secretary of State Blinken urged ICC member states to arrest Putin if he entered their territory. But a year later, he is aggressively pressuring the ICC to stop it from charging Israeli officials.</b></bq> This is not unexpected. It's not a court of justice, but a weapon. The U.S. doesn't recognize its authority to prosecute the U.S., why would it do so for Israel? <bq>Global South leaders have long denounced the ICC as a colonial institution. <b>Until 2016, only Africans had been tried for the worst crimes at the Court.</b></bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}soldiers_advancing_on_students.webp" href="{att_link}soldiers_advancing_on_students.webp" align="none" caption="Soldiers advancing on students" scale="50%"> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-nations-conscience" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Nation’s Conscience</a> <bq>New York City Police, stationed inside and outside the gates of the campus, have placed the campus on lockdown. There are barricades blocking streets. No one, unless they live in a residence hall on campus, is allowed to enter. <b>The siege means that students cannot go to class. Students cannot go to the library. Students cannot enter the labs. Students cannot visit the university health services.</b> Students cannot get to studios to practice. Students cannot attend lectures. Students cannot walk across the campus lawns.</bq> <bq><b>Columbia is a Potemkin university, a playground for corporate administrators.</b> The president of the university — a British-Egyptian baroness who built her career at institutions such as the Bank of England, World Bank and International Monetary Fund — called in police in riot gear, with guns drawn , to clear the school’s encampment, forcibly evict students who occupied a campus hall and beat and arrest over 100 of them. <b>They were arrested for “ criminal trespassing ” on their own campus.</b></bq> <bq><b>These administrators demand, like all who manage corporate systems of power, total obedience.</b> Dissent. Freedom of expression. Critical thought. Moral outrage. These have no place in our corporate-indentured universities.</bq> <bq><b>The mandarins who run Columbia and other universities, corporatists who make salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, oversee academic plantations.</b> They treat their poorly paid adjunct faculty, who often lack health insurance and benefits, like serfs. <b>They slavishly serve the interests of wealthy donors and corporations.</b></bq> <bq>We are told that we need a state that is based on ethnicity in the 21st century and that’s the only way Jewish people can be safe. But it is really for Britain and America and other imperialist states to have a presence in the Middle East. <b>I’ve no idea why people still believe this narrative. It makes no sense to have a place for Jewish people that requires other people to suffer and die.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>Student activists waited months before setting up encampments. They tried repeatedly to have their voices heard and their concerns addressed. But they were rebuffed, ignored and harassed.</b> In November, the students presented a petition to the university calling for divestment from Israeli corporations that facilitate the genocide. No one bothered to respond.</bq> <bq>On April 25, during Columbia’s senior boat cruise, <b>Muslim students and those identified as supporting the protests had alcohol poured on their heads and clothes by jeering Zionists.</b></bq> Did this actually happen? I'd not heard of it before. Hedges usually checks his sources, though he very rarely links anything. <bq><b>“The administration doesn’t care about the wellbeing, health or safety of their students,” Khan tells me. “We have tried to get at least tents out at night. Since we are on a 24-hour liquid fast, not eating anything, our bodies are working overtime to stay resilient. Our immune systems are not as strong. Yet the university tells us we can’t pitch up tents to keep ourselves safe at night from the cold and the winds.</b> It’s abhorrent for me. I feel a lot more physical weakness. My headaches are worse. There is an inability to even climb up stairs now. It made me realize that for the past seven months what Gazans have been facing is a million times worse. You can’t understand their plight unless you experience that kind of starvation that they’re experiencing, although I’m not experiencing the atrocities they’re experiencing.”</bq> <bq>“Since the genocide, the university has failed to reach out to Arab students, to Muslim students and to Palestinian students to offer support,” he tells me. <b>“The university claims it is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but we don’t feel we belong here.”</b></bq> <bq>The struggle against Zionist occupation is viewed accurately by Zionists both within the United States and Israel, as sort of the last dying gasp of imperialism. They’re trying to hold onto it. That’s why it’s scary. <b>The liberation of Palestine would mean a radically different world, a world that moves past exploitation and injustice. That’s why so many people who aren’t Palestinian and aren’t Arab and aren’t Muslim are so invested in this struggle. They see its significance.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>The protest movements</b> - which have spread around the globe - are not built around the single issue of the apartheid state in Israel or its genocide against Palestinians. They <b>are built around the awareness that the old world order, the one of settler colonialism, western imperialism and militarism used by the countries in the Global North to dominate the Global South, must end.</b></bq> <bq>These protests are built around a vision of a world of equality, dignity and independence. This vision, and the commitment to it, will make this movement not only hard to defeat, but <b>presages a wider struggle beyond the genocide in Gaza. The genocide has awakened a sleeping giant. Let us pray the giant prevails.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=114896" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Deutschland zeigt Zähne? Kanonenbootpolitik, Größenwahn und Selbstbesoffenheit</a> <bq>Der extra nach Wilhelmshaven angereiste Verteidigungsminister Pistorius beruhigt – es ginge nur um die Sicherung deutscher Handelswege. Für so einen Spruch musste Bundespräsident Köhler vor gerade einmal 14 Jahren zurücktreten. Wie schnell sich die Zeiten doch geändert haben. <b>Dass ausgerechnet Deutschland nun wie ein Zwerg auf Steroiden unter Größenwahn leidet und im Indopazifik eine Kanonenbootpolitik probt, ist jedoch kaum mehr als eine bittere Farce.</b></bq> <bq>Es ist fraglich, ob Deutschlands Seestreitkräfte überhaupt über der Wahrnehmungsschwelle Chinas liegen. Neben den 120 Fregatten verfügt China auch noch über 52 Zerstörer und Kreuzer und drei Flugzeugträger – Deutschland hat keines dieser Waffensysteme. <b>Es ist so, als „drohe“ ein Dreijähriger einem Schwergewichtsboxer. Doch so absurd die ganze Sache ist, so überzeugt wird sie vom SPIEGEL vorgetragen.</b></bq> <bq><b>Was damals noch ein Tabubruch war, ist heute nicht nur Normalität, sondern wird sogar als diplomatische Ausrede</b> für eine – vollkommen mit dem Grundgesetz inkompatible – Kriegspolitik im indopazifischen Raum gegen unseren wichtigsten Handelspartner China missbraucht.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/norman-finkelstein-student-protests-gaza-free-speech/" source="Jacobin" author="Norman Finkelstein">Build a Majority for Palestine</a> <bq>I’ll say — not as a point of pride or egotism or to say “I told you so,” but just as a factual matter — in the last book I wrote, I explicitly said that <b>if you use the standard of hurt feelings as a ground to stifle or repress speech</b>, when Palestinians protest this, that, or the other, <b>Israeli students are going to use the claim of hurt feelings, pained emotions, and that whole language and vocabulary</b>, which is so easily turned against those who have been using it in the name of their own cause. That was a disaster waiting to happen. I wrote about it because I knew what would happen, though obviously I could not have predicted the scale after October 7. <b>But it was perfectly obvious what was going to happen.</b></bq> <bq><b>You should never create a situation where you can be silenced on the grounds of feelings and emotions.</b> If you listened to [Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s] remarks, it was all about hurt feelings, feeling afraid. That whole language has <b>completely corrupted the notion of free speech and academic freedom.</b></bq> <bq>The only reason there is an argument about that slogan — even though, as I said, I disagree with it, but that’s a separate matter whether I agree or disagree — is because <b>we have legitimized this notion that hurt feelings are grounds for stifling speech. That to me is totally unacceptable;</b> it’s wholly alien to the notion of academic freedom.</bq> <bq>I remember during the anti–Vietnam War movement, there were young people who wanted to go to medical school — and if you got arrested, you weren’t going to medical school. <b>Many people struggled with the choice between getting arrested for the cause. It wasn’t an abstract cause — by the end of the war, the estimate was that between two and three million Vietnamese had been killed. It was an unfolding horror show every day. People struggled with whether they would risk their entire futures.</b> Many of you come from backgrounds where it was a real struggle to get to where you are today, to Columbia University. So I deeply respect your courage, your conviction, and every opportunity I have I acknowledge the incredible conviction and tenacity of your generation, which in many ways is more impressive than my own, for the reason that, <b>in my generation, you can’t deny that an aspect of the antiwar movement was the fact that the draft lay on a lot of people.</b> You could get the student deferment for the four years that you’re in college, but once the deferment passed, <b>there was a good chance you were going over there and you were coming back in a body bag.</b></bq> <bq><b>So there was an element of self-concern. Whereas you young people, you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the world.</b> That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply inspiring.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>there’s a very big difference when you’re essentially a political cult and you can shout any slogan that you like, because it has no public repercussions or reverberations. You’re essentially talking to yourself.</b> You’re setting up a table on campus, giving out literature for Palestine; you might get five people who are interested. There’s a big difference between that situation and <b>the situation you’re in today, where you have a very large constituency that you could potentially and realistically reach.</b></bq> <bq>[...] you have to <b>figure out the right balance between the spirit that you want to inspire in your movement and the audience or the constituency</b> out there that’s not part of the movement <b>that you want to reach.</b></bq> <bq>I believe one has to exercise — not in a conservative sense, but a radical sense — in a moment like this, <b>maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/07/noam-chomsky-a-middle-east-peace-that-could-happen-but-wont/" source="Scheer Post" author="Noam Chomsky">A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t)</a> <info>👉 Note: a lot of this information is very useful but it's also cited from sources from the end of the Obama administration in 2016 and earlier. While that might seem old---it's eight years ago---it's even worse to realize that absolutely nothing has changed saliently. Other than to get even worse.</info> <bq><b>The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas).</b> A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states. Israel refused to attend the session. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.</bq> <bq>Meanwhile in the West Bank, always with firm U.S. backing, Israel has been carrying forward longstanding programs to <b>take the valuable land and resources of the Palestinians and leave them in unviable cantons, mostly out of sight. Israeli commentators frankly refer to these goals as “neocolonial.”</b> Ariel Sharon, the main architect of the settlement programs, called these cantons “Bantustans,” though the term is misleading: South Africa needed the majority black workforce, while <b>Israel would be happy if the Palestinians disappeared, and its policies are directed to that end.</b></bq> See? Israel is nothing if not very open about its policies and plans---and it's unwaveringly consistent. It only ever pretends to think something different when it's feigning being indignant and <i>shocked</i> on the public stage for the benefit of Europeans or U.S. Americans. <bq>The leading academic specialist on Gaza, Harvard scholar Sara Roy, adds: “<b>Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers</b>.… Gaza’s subjection began long before Israel’s recent war against it [December 2008]. The Israeli occupation — now largely forgotten or denied by the international community — has devastated Gaza’s economy and people, especially since 2006…. <b>After Israel’s December [2008] assault, Gaza’s already compromised conditions have become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes, and public infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israel Defense Forces admitted was indefensible.</b></bq> They do now, baby! 16 years later, it's so much worse. They've done an even better job of eradicating the viability of Gaza <i>and</i> they are absolutely defending it this time. Their boldness has grown, rather than their shame. Why be ashamed of killing animals or blowing up and burning their burrows? <bq>“In Gaza today, there is no private sector to speak of and no industry. <b>80 percent of Gaza’s agricultural crops were destroyed and Israel continues to snipe at farmers attempting to plant and tend fields</b> near the well-fenced and patrolled border. Most productive activity has been extinguished.… Today, <b>96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs.</b></bq> That was 16 years ago! A couple of years after Israel officially pulled out of Gaza---but kept it locked down like a prison. Hence the need for humanitarian aid to keep the prisoners alive. <bq><b>The pillage of what could become a major source of income [oil/gas fields off the coast] for Gaza is surely known to U.S. authorities.</b> It is only reasonable to suppose that the intention to appropriate these limited resources, either by Israel alone or together with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority, is <b>the motive for preventing Gazan fishing boats from entering Gaza’s territorial waters.</b></bq> <bq>There are some instructive precedents. In 1989, <b>Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas granting Australia rights to the substantial oil reserves in “the Indonesian Province of East Timor.”</b> The Indonesia-Australia Timor Gap Treaty, which <b>offered not a crumb to the people whose oil was being stolen</b>, “is the only legal agreement anywhere in the world that effectively recognises Indonesia’s right to rule East Timor,” the Australian press reported.</bq> All nice and legal. What's to complain about, ammirite? <bq>Asked about his willingness to recognize the Indonesian conquest and to rob the sole resource of the conquered territory, which had been subjected to near-genocidal slaughter by the Indonesian invader with the strong support of Australia (along with the U.S., the U.K., and some others), <b>Evans explained that “there is no binding legal obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force,”</b> adding that “the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force.” <b>It should, then, be unproblematic for Israel to follow suit in Gaza.</b></bq> <bq><b>Though a “protected population” under international law, Gazans do not fall under the jurisdiction of the “responsibility to protect,”</b> joining other unfortunates, in accord with the maxim of Thucydides — that <b>the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must</b> — which holds with its customary precision.</bq> <bq>These systematic programs over more than 40 years aim to establish <b>Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s</b> recommendation to his colleagues shortly after Israel’s <b>1967</b> conquests that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories: <b>“We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”</b></bq> <bq><b>The term “legal” in U.S.-Israeli parlance means “illegal, but authorized by the government of Israel with a wink from Washington.”</b> In this usage, unauthorized outposts are termed “illegal,” though apart from the dictates of the powerful, they are no more illegal than the settlements granted to Israel under Bush’s “vision” and Obama’s scrupulous omission.</bq> <bq>The convention is understandable on the doctrinal principle that though the U.S. government sometimes makes mistakes, its intentions are by definition benign, even noble. In the world of attractive imagery, <b>Washington has always sought desperately to be an honest broker, yearning to advance peace and justice.</b> The doctrine trumps truth, of which there is little hint.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/06/gaza-and-humboldt/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Gaza and Humboldt</a> <bq><b>The mayor, the authorities claimed that forbidden Hamas slogans were called out, justifying their brutal cuffing and arrests.</b> It is possible that some Arab participants, emotionally moved by news and the pictures from Gaza, may have generalized these feelings. Who knows? And does it matter?</bq> It wouldn't matter what they were saying---in a country with free speech. You know how much people value the second amendment in the U.S.? I value the first <i>even more</i>. <bq>[...] <b>was directed against destruction worse than any since 1945</b>, of homes, mosques, churches, libraries, schools and universities in Gaza and against the killing of over 35,000 human beings, a majority of them women and children, and the physical and psychical maiming of so many more.</bq> Worse destruction <i>in Europe</i>, at any rate. <bq>The author was none other than Karl Marx. The words were: “<b>Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-free-palestine-movement-could.html" source="Exile In Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Free Palestine Movement Could Finally Make the American Left Dangerous Again</a> <bq>I've been left with little other choice but to gasp in horror as the left that once inspired a weird teenager not to slit her wrists seems to have mutated into a censorious cult of Herbert Humphrey-style softcore social democrats <b>willing to nail Rosa Luxemburg to the cross themselves as long as the Freikorps purge Trump from their ranks and hang a rainbow flag over the caskets of less compliant former comrades.</b></bq> <bq>I look to YouTube footage of the anti-Zionist swarms now engulfing college campuses from coast to coast with <b>a level of cautious hope that my broken bleeding heart hasn't experienced in years.</b></bq> <bq>They are jamming up traffic. They are occupying buildings. They are literally ruining parades by supergluing their bodies to the fucking blacktop. They are shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge. They are trolling Joe Biden on the campaign trail at every corner with jeers of "Genocide Joe!" <b>They are relentless, furious, shameless, and absolutely fucking obnoxious and I couldn't love them more if they were my own goddamn children.</b> All of this chaos is being raised not on behalf of some woke cause celebre, but <b>on behalf of the most marginalized people on the planet</b>, the 34,000+ Palestinians slaughtered in cold blood with American weapons by every liberal's favorite racist apartheid state in Israel.</bq> <bq><b>The only reason why any politician or media personality is even paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire to this holocaust is because these beautiful obnoxious brats have gotten up in their fucking faces</b> and refused to behave until the adults in the room address the mass grave of bodies decomposing in the backyard.</bq> They have shown that they may be the closest thing we have to adults. What they lack in experience, they make for in moral clarity. <bq>[...] a bipartisan effort in the House of Representatives is being waged to <b>send government "antisemitism monitors" to every college campus funded by the federal government</b> as part of their College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigation and Accountability or COLUMBIA Act, which would essentially turn the Department of Education into a veritable police force in charge of <b>stamping out anything certain racists like Joe Biden and Mike Johnson deem antisemitic.</b></bq> <bq>This is what the radical left really needs right now to become truly radical again, not politics, but a culture defined by resistance to colonialism. This is what turned me on and turned me dangerous because <b>it made the fight for peace in far-off places deeply personal.</b> To put another long rant short: <b>if we can convince Generation Z that smashing the American Empire is woke, then Babylon is officially fucked.</b> Maybe that's a big 'if' but what else do we have to lose but bodies at this point? <b>We've got the momentum, freaky people, so let's make it fucking happen. Let's finally make the American left dangerous again.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/outside-agitators-columbia-palestine-civil-rights/" source="Jacobin" author="Astra Taylor">We Need “Outside Agitators”</a> <bq>No one has sounded the alarm louder than New York City’s compulsive liar mayor, Eric Adams, who has complained that “outside agitators” are out to “radicalize our children” — <b>the implication being that young people would be quiescent in the face of mass starvation and bombardment if not for some nefarious external influence.</b></bq> <bq><b>The “outside agitator” charge is a way to isolate individuals and create social separation</b>, when the reality is that injustice of any kind, but especially war, necessarily concerns us all. On the issue of genocide, there should be no outside.</bq> <bq>In every instance, the powerful have insisted that, without such meddling by strangers, local people would have remained complacent and content — or, <b>in Eric Adams’s terminology, the children would not be radicalized.</b></bq> <bq>Adams’s hostility echoes a long-standing reactionary refrain. In the twentieth century’s early decades, <b>anarchism and socialism were portrayed as dangerous imports from Eastern and Southern Europe.</b> As Red Scare tactics evolved, movements for peace, labor rights, and racial equality were figured as Soviet plots. <b>Simply holding left-wing ideas made one a subversive, un-American presence — an “outside agitator” subject to forcible separation and removal.</b></bq> <bq>USA Today did an analysis of protesters’ social media data and arrest records and found the overwhelming majority of them were, in fact, from the region. As for those other 20 percent, good for them. <b>In the immortal words of Bernie Sanders, they traveled to fight for someone they did not know.</b></bq> <bq>“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King mused. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. <b>Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/04/rewind-remembering-the-shock-of-reporting-on-kent-state/" source="Scheer Post" author="Larry Bensky">[Rewind] Remembering the Shock of Reporting on Kent State</a> <info>I'm including the following citations from this article because I found them historically informative. Overall, though, I didn't like the tone of the article. It stems from 2020 and is virulently anti-Trump, as if that were the only thing wrong with the U.S.</info> <bq author="California Gov. Ronald Reagan">If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.</bq> <bq>Thus spoke then California Governor Ronald Reagan to a 1970 farm owner’s convention in Yosemite. <b>He was talking about the “mess” caused by protestors against the Vietnam War in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.</b></bq> He was president ten years later. That says everything you need to know about the U.S. It's always been this way. <bq><b>It’s the thuggish fact-free ways Trump et al are dividing the country to preserve their electoral viability.</b> Pure Nixon. And how Trump-Pence-McConnell resemble Nixon-Kissinger-Westmoreland is also obvious. As is the search for scapegoats through xenophobia and ideology.</bq> And now, completely unsurprisingly, Biden. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/11/despised-defendant-makes-bad-ny-law/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Despised Defendant Makes Bad NY Law</a> <bq>Had this been limited to prior convictions, it would still be bad law, but this includes “prior bad acts,” which means that at a trial for the commission of Act 1, random accusers can testify about uncharged, untested, unconvicted prior acts, without limit as to number or evidentiary proof beyond the witnesses’ accusation. <b>The purpose is clear, to taint the defendant as a sexual predator who is disgusting, has gotten away with it many times before, and deserves to be convicted now, if not for the crime with which he’s charged, then for the crimes for which he was never charged.</b></bq> <bq>Over the years, it has become clear that the same nice folks who would reform the criminal legal system for some would make it as difficult, and harsh, for others. The others are men accused of sex offenses. <b>Murder and assorted mayhem is one thing. Rape is another. Blackstone’s ratio applies to the former. Lhamon’s ration applies to the latter. Let no one accused of rape walk free.</b></bq> <bq><b>Each time, we’ve come to learn after bad law is established</b> and shrugged off because of the peculiar evil and its related panic <b>that we made a mistake.</b> A grievous mistake. And yet we keep making the same mistake over and over, because <b>this time it’s special.</b> If New York changes the law to make propensity evidence admissable to serve the very purposes for which it’s excluded. It will be another grievous mistake. And yet <b>the Democratic legislators supporting the bill feel all righteous because it would have meant Harvey Weinstein’s conviction might not have been reversed.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/10/kvmt-m10.html" author="Johannes Stern" source="WSWS">The danger of nuclear escalation: What would be the impact of dropping atom bombs on Germany?</a> <bq>Kremlin spokesman <b>Dmitry Peskov called the planned exercises a reaction to an “unprecedented level of escalation of tensions initiated by the French President and the British Foreign Secretary,”</b> including “the intention to send armed contingents to Ukraine, i.e., to actually place NATO soldiers in front of Russian troops.” With the NATO-armed troops in Ukraine having their backs to the wall, and the leading nuclear powers within NATO not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in the event of war, <b>Moscow even has to reckon with a possible pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russian targets.</b> Despite the acute danger of a nuclear escalation, the <b>imperialist powers continue to intensify their war offensive.</b></bq> Moscow has a no-first-strike policy. It will only strike if either the state of Russia itself is in danger, or if it was struck first (or if a strike is in the air and, therefore, imminent). See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#Countries_pledging_no-first-use" author="" source="Wikipedia">No first use</a>. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/using-a-fictional-antisemitism-crisis" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Using A Fictional Antisemitism Crisis To Support A Real Genocide</a> <bq><b>Their crime isn’t that they have an abusive hatred of Jews, it’s that they don’t share Israel’s abusive hatred of Palestinians.</b></bq> <bq>To be clear, <b>nobody on planet Earth believes what Aaron Bean just said, including Aaron Bean. There is not one single person anywhere in this universe who sincerely believes that there is an epidemic of second graders across America being brainwashed to spout Nazi propaganda. It is not happening, and we all know it’s not happening.</b> But people like Aaron Bean pretend to believe this complete work of fiction is an actual real-life occurrence in order to defend the very real atrocities that are being committed by their favorite apartheid state.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-your-rulers-ignore-voters-but" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something</a> <bq>The difference between liberals and rightists on middle east policy is that <b>rightists openly believe middle easterners are apelike savages who should be beaten into submission or eliminated, whereas liberals believe exactly the same thing but have the decency to lie about it.</b></bq> <bq>It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, <b>in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it controls us to a greater degree than overt tyranny ever could while at the same time <b>giving us the collective delusion that we are free.</b> We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from. <b>The news media are controlled by wealthy oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised.</b></bq> <bq>In our society people think, speak, vote, shop, work and behave exactly how the powerful want them to, <b>mindlessly regurgitating political opinions that were inserted into their brains by their rulers and sincerely believing they came up with it themselves.</b></bq> <bq>A quote from <b>Chomsky</b>:<bq>Any dictator would admire <b>the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.</b></bq>Another quote from Chomsky:<bq>The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. <b>That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.</b></bq>Another:<bq><b>Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.</b></bq></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_G2nB62Ems" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8_G2nB62Ems" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News / Jon Elmer" caption="Tunnels, Weapons and Guerrilla Tactics: How Palestine’s Armed Forces Survived"> At <b>20:15</b>, he says: <bq>That's why Israel is in a strategic bind within their own country. Their government doesn't want to get their people back. They don't want to have a prisoner exchange which would release thousands of Palestinian prisoners. <b>And so we're just literally watching them let their people die day by day rather than a reasonable prisoner exchange and a diplomatic solution that would get Israel out of this war</b>, that would end the war with Hezbollah in the north, that might allow their abandoned settlements in the North and the South to return back home. All of these things are very far down the line from a victory. There's not going to be an Israeli victory. There wouldn't be one if they opened a war with Hezbollah either. And so <b>Israel needs a diplomatic solution to get out of this but they're just incapable of it right now.</b> And the entire society is just gripped by this revenge, as if what happened on October 7th was the worst thing that any human can imagine and any response to that is legitimate. It's insanity. <b>It's national insanity. And it's difficult to see how Israel comes back from that.</b></bq> Rania is pretty giddy about Hezbollah's firepower, which feels a bit jarring. You have to remember that she lives in Beirut, so she lives under the imminence of an Israeli attack. Someone whose country has been constantly attacked over the last decades would understandably be biased against her attacker. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/12/oh-how-violent-hollywood-usc-and-the-sickness-of-denial/" author="Ruth Fowler" source="CounterPunch">Oh, How Violent: Hollywood, USC, and the Sickness of Denial</a> <bq>To be a fully functioning member of society, a respected one, a revered one – a Carol Folt, the hopeless Dean of USC, or a Zadie Smith, the mediocre darling of white liberal media. <b>Their inaction and their painfully inadequate verbiage all display clearly that one must have perfected the art of moving in and of this world as if it did not exist in order to function, thrive, and succeed in American society today.</b> The pain, the inequality, the unfairness, the degradation, the humiliation, the cruelty – don’t talk about that. Please open your bag and step through the metal detector.</bq> <bq>One must follow clear, ineffable rules in any industry to succeed. Still, <b>I convinced myself that educational institutions are one of the last bastions of free speech in the USA.</b> In this place, those rules must be learned by young adults who have the luxury of not yet being sullied by the world and being allowed to fuck up in a supportive environment. <b>My first clear indication that I was categorically wrong might have been the price tag.</b></bq> <bq>President Folt displayed an incredible acumen for cruelty with her refusal to even acknowledge the reality of the encampment and the students, <b>instead telling the world it was a ‘disturbance’ that needed ‘clearing’ and posed a ’security risk.’</b> Very few acts of violence can compare to the brutality of being deliberately unseen and unheard [...]</bq> <bq>We are living in an era when the presence of screens and lightning-fast communication makes the denial of violence an impossibility. Instead <b>our solution has been to retreat into fiction and word salads, into lies and delusions, to plant flowers and a greenhouse next to the concrete wall, to light incense to cover the stench of burning bodies.</b> The banal and flattened language, emotionless, euphemistic, and bleak, becomes the modern liberal’s way of participating in and sustaining genocide. Safety measures. Significant activity. Your safety. These safety measures, a necessity, are what makes commencement an impossibility. Not the racism. Not the deliberate targeting. <b>Carol Folt’s idiocy was highlighted by a small, pathetic patch of grass, which she designated a ‘free speech zone’ on campus, illuminating to those who did not realize that there was nowhere else on campus one could speak their mind.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/i-criticize-the-us-power-alliance" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">I Criticize The US Power Alliance Because It's The Most Destructive Force On Earth</a> <bq>It’s hilarious how imperial spinmeisters keep trying to convince young people that it will be those who <i><b>opposed</b></i> a genocide who will have to worry about their futures. Israel apologists are aggressively hammering this line “If you protest against Israel employers won’t hire you!” <b>You idiots, young people <i><b>know</b></i> they live in a world where opposing a genocide can hurt your job prospects. That’s why they’ve decided to change the world.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/05/15/whats-going-on-with-gazas-fatality-numbers/" author="Liz Wolfe" source="">What's Going on With Gaza's Fatality Numbers?</a> What a surprise that days after everyone who matters has acknowledged that the giant bubble of stupidity and casuistry that started with Joe Scarborough's tweet would end up on utter fool-in-chief Liz Wolfe and that she would be blissfully unaware that she's parroting talking points that even Israel considers to be long-dead. She's willing to ride that hobby-horse for them, though. Reason really has some shockingly stupid people working for them---and very prominently publishing several times per week. It's unfortunate. Luckily for her, she was able to copy/paste the article together from Israeli talking points, so it was probably no trouble at all. <bq>All the numbers we're getting out of Gaza are from offices run by Hamas, the terrorist group that perpetrated the October 7 attack and runs the government (if you consider the government to be functional at all there).</bq> <bq>David Adesnik, the director of research for the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies.</bq> Whenever someone like Liz is at pains to mention that an institute is non-partisan, it almost most certainly is very partisan. <bq>If you're noticing that it sure seems like the GMO inflated numbers of dead women and children, which was then parroted by the U.N.'s OCHA and the news media, you would be correct: Hamas-run government agencies seem to grasp that it's the killing of women and children that strikes international audiences as especially heinous.</bq> There it is. It's unclear why she spent so much time parsing the numbers in the paragraphs above this one since she was just going to claim in the end that the numbers were all made up anyway, by terrorists who all deserve to die, including their children, wives, and grandmothers, who are also all terrorists, or animals, or both. A scourge on real humanity, at any rate. She could have saved herself a lot of time, really. I guess she figures if she pads it out to a bunch of paragraphs that her article will <i>fee</i> truer. Just like pretty much every other source, she fails to wonder how there is so little food going in, there are nearly no hospitals left, Israel is merrily dropping hundreds of bombs per day, there are ground troops everywhere, and, yet, the number of dead has stagnated at about 35,000 for months. I don't know what people like Wolfe are bitching about, really. Is she trying to pretend that, really, no-one's been killed so far? Or is she just trying to fudge the number downward until it's more acceptable to her red-meat fans? I think they would be happier with much-higher numbers, no? <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/gaza-un-death-toll-misinformation-fake-news/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">US Officials and Media Keep Spreading False Gaza Death Info</a> <bq>[...] the supposedly revised death toll wasn’t actually a revised death toll. As anyone who had looked at the documents in question can plainly read, the “halved” figures in the May 8 OCHA update were not referring to the total number of women and kids killed, but were part of a smaller figure within the overall death toll: the number of those killed who had been “identified as of 30 April,” as the text makes clear. <b>Of the nearly thirty-five thousand killed, the UN was saying, here is the number of people who were able to be definitively identified, and here’s how that breaks down by age and sex.</b></bq> They have the bodies. They've only been able to identify about half of them so far. It's not surprising that this task has been made more difficult by the situation in Gaza. <bq>Only a few news outlets reported the UN’s denials at the time and <b>pushed back on the misinformation, including Reuters, CNN, Haaretz, and the Guardian.</b></bq> <bq>In any case, <b>the Palestinian death toll is very likely a vast undercount.</b> Not only are there thousands trapped under the rubble in Gaza who are not included in the OCHA death toll, but <b>Israel’s systematic destruction of the territory’s hospitals and periodic communication blackouts have led to large gaps in the reporting of deaths.</b> <b>This is why</b>, despite the fact that Israel has continued regularly wiping out whole Palestinian families, despite the spread of disease and collapse of the health sector, and despite the territory now being engulfed in “full-blown famine” — so that a perfectly healthy US doctor who has only been in Gaza briefly is already on an IV drip to prevent dehydration — <b>“only” five thousand Palestinians have officially died in the two and a half months since the end of February.</b></bq> And those people that were trapped under the rubble six months ago are almost certainly dead. If they are, though, it's Hamas's fault. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/15/why-does-cy-vance-pander/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Why Does Cy Vance Pander?</a> <bq>But neither Cy nor the very progressive New York legislature is willing to accept the premise that defendants should only be convicted when the evidence is sufficient to sustain their burden of proof as to the crimes actually charged. And so Cy holds hands with legislators who want to undermine basic evidentiary law and due process to <b>craft a system that will convict the accused not merely based on evidence of the crimes charged, but evidence that he has a propensity to commit the crimes and, well, deserves convicting anyway. But only for sex crimes.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io0yuH1CiA0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Io0yuH1CiA0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="LastWeekTonight" caption="Opioid Settlements: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)"> <hr> <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/09/politics/video/joe-biden-erin-burnett-full-interview-ebof-digvid" source="CNN">President Biden discusses the economy, Trump and the war in Gaza (Full Interview with Erin Burnett)</a> He looked exhausted before he even started. He sounds exhausted. His voice is a breathy whisper. He sounds like he's barely pushing out the words. He slurs. He says <iq>'minstration</iq> instead of "Administration." His body language is resigned and exhausted. He wastes no motion. He sits, slumped in the chair. His face barely moves. He can't even get excited. Look at how Bernie Sanders talks and gesticulates. Biden doesn't gesticulate. By seven minutes in, he was done. He started to produce even more of a word salad than he'd done at the beginning, where he was reasonably coherent. I can't imagine what other world leaders---or anyone!---thinks when they meet with this man. He doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. You would just kind of feel sorry for him if you didn't know what a monster he is. Burnett actually pushed back reasonably well, that the economy bounces back <iq>because they think that they're going to get a rate-cut.</iq> She didn't push back on Biden when he questioned polls whose results he doesn't like, even though they both know that the administration is only too excited to trumpet poll numbers that they do agree with. The angry way he glares at her when she dares to raise the issue of Israel is interesting, if only because he was unable to control the flash of anger. He just promotes his bullshit conspiracy theories, <iq>1,200 kids murdered</iq>, <iq>Lady tied up with rope, covered in kerosene and burned</iq> (that's a new one for me...I think he might have made it up on the spot. He's also redefined the mission as capturing a single Hamas leader. He doesn't care. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/17/stuck-on-stupid-biden-and-the-democrats-face-disaster-in-november/" author="Stewart Lawrence" source="CounterPunch">Stuck on Stupid, Biden and the Democrats Face Disaster in November</a> <bq>Burnett’s willingness to challenge Biden on his administration’s economic performance is just one of the many <b>signs that the mainstream media is unlikely to continue fronting for an administration that keeps gas-lighting voters with misleading data on jobs and GDP growth</b> while a growing number of metrics point to the country’s continuing descent into full-blown stagflation.</bq> <bq>[...] they hardly credit Biden for putting America back on a solid footing. Unemployment at 3.9%? Perhaps, but many Americans are working two jobs that still don’t pay enough to feed their families, while a record number of those without jobs are homeless – with an increase of 12% between 2022 and 2023 alone.</bq> <bq>Another staunch Biden supporter, CNN’s Farid Zakaria, also took to the airwaves to issue his own stern warning about Biden’s rapidly diminishing prospects. In a blistering six minute review, he listed one area after another where Trump’s political resurrection and standing with voters is exceeding expectations, <b>noting that a landslide win – including a popular vote victory – by Trump in November was looming.</b> Zakaria even broke with the party line on Trump’s presumed “criminality.” suggesting that the <b>four legal trials aimed at discrediting the former president were largely motivated by simple politics, not a concern for justice. “I doubt a criminal indictment in New York would have been brought against a defendant whose name wasn’t Donald Trump,”</b> he deadpanned.</bq> Fareed Zakaria is a hack but the Dems listen to him. The interesting thing is that he's not just saying "we need another candidate," he's exposing the bankruptcy of the party for how it's going after Trump. I'm not sure that he would see it that way but it's clear as day, if you're not in the Democratic tank. <bq><b>Democrats, it seems, are destined to soldier on. They missed their chance to replace Biden painlessly months ago, and are now stuck on stupid.</b> Barring a miracle, the price for their cowardice and lack of vision is likely to be severe.</bq> It's hard to disagree with any of that. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/16/education-if-the-union-permits/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Education, If The Union Permits</a> <bq>Having realized that the power to strike to wreak havoc on a university can enable a union to push whatever trendy cause strikes its fancy, there is really no limit to what it can demand of the administration at the expense of the students, administration and taxpayers. But that’s the nature of public sector unions, particularly in the hands of children.</bq> This is just another way of saying I'm an old man yelling at unions. This time Scott's mad at unions because they're striking for the right to criticize Israel. His line of reasoning is that if the service provided by workers is essential enough---like university faculty---then they really shouldn't be able to strike. It's not fair to the students. A strike is the last resort. Asking nicely is the first one. If workers are so essential, then that means they have more leverage, no? Nope. In the common logic of the rulers of society, those people have <i>less</i> leverage. Instead of having the leverage to get more for themselves, they're actually considered to be morally obligated to sit down, shut up, and take what they're offered, lest the children not be educated, or the patients not be cared for. It's inane logic, based on the clear view that some people have the right to a good job, whereas others do not. For good measure, Greenfield calls them all children, because they're incapable of understanding how the world works. He says "jump" and everyone he considers to be beneath him should ask "how high?" They should very much not be able to exercise leverage over <i>him</i>, for God's sake. That's just inconceivable for him. It's the height of insolence. <bq>Of course, “peacefully” demonstrating is a disingenuous characterization. While it was mostly peaceful, it was also blatantly unlawful, as they not only seized a portion of the campus but denied access to others who had as much right to be there.</bq> He takes a swipe at the protestors by putting ironic quotes around <i>peacefully</i>. Just like nearly everyone else who's against the protests, he claims that he would be for protests if they just didn't have any effect or if they didn't bother, annoy, or inconvenience anyone. This is just stupid. I mean, really. What he's saying is: you have the right to free speech, but not the right to be heard. Of course, of course. You can also just do illegal stuff and suffer the consequences. That's what the protestors are doing. If the laws are made so that only anodyne protest is supported---e.g., you have to get permits; you have to stand in free-speech zones far from events; you can't talk to anyone directly; you can't interrupt anyone---then people will break the law to protest. You've all but made protest illegal. When everything's illegal but subordination, then anything but subordination can be punished. That can't be what Greenfield considers a free society. I don't believe that. It doesn't jibe with his other two decades of writing. I think he's letting his emotions get away from him here. So people will break the law, even in minor ways, like "preventing students from getting to class along their favored path across a specific quad." I mean, I've seen people complaining about this, like making you use a different door on a building is a Hiroshima-level crime. Get a grip, people. Sure, you shouldn't be blocking or interfering with civilians, but ... get a grip. I don't like the megaphones either. Still ... get a grip. These are peaceful protests because these people are just sitting and yelling. It might make you uncomfortable, but it's a bit rich hearing this complaint coming from an old NY lawyer who's spent the last 15 years quite rightly calling everyone snowflakes for thinking that anything that hurts their feelings should be outlawed. Campers on universities are not legal. They don't intend to be. They are doing something to draw attention to their opinion that we are focusing on the wrong things. How can we continue to go about our daily business when this Gaza invasion is going on? The mainstream media has been using their megaphone for two years now to do the same---draw our attention---to the war in Ukraine. Those who argue for the illegality of it are deliberately missing the point. Everyone knows it's illegal. The laws or rules are perfectly fine. No camping. The protesters are not pushing the boundaries to have a stupid law changed. They're not trying to make camping in a quad legal. They're pushing for their universities to change their priorities vis á vis Israel. They know what they're doing is technically illegal. They're engaging in civil disobedience. The hope is always that there's too many of them to arrest or prosecute. If the state decides to arrest them all or prosecute them all for breaking a silly law---it will make the state look petty and bad. When we say they should be let go, we mean it’s a bad look when students, at sometimes high personal cost, are trying to draw attention to a genocide. Instead of a dialogue, police drum them from their own campus. It’s the “you can’t arrest everyone” gambit. Of course you can. The protestors are forcing the state to reveal something about itself. When it does that, it forces the state to admit that it will suppress speech and arrest peaceful protestors in order to continue business as usual. It forces the state to show its priorities in a way that it can’t lie about, as usual. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/may/04/youre-going-to-call-me-a-holocaust-denier-now-are-you-george-monbiot-comes-face-to-face-with-his-local-conspiracy-theorist" source="The Guardian" author="George Monbiot">‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist</a> <bq>All these are conspiracies in the true sense: hidden machinations that advance particular interests while causing harm to others. A theory is a rational explanation, subject to disproof. <b>If you accept these scandals are the result of hidden machinations, which they evidently are, you are a conspiracy theorist.</b></bq> <bq>We need better terms, that distinguish wacky and often malign fairytales from the very essence of democracy: the reasoned suspicion of those who exercise power over us. <b>I prefer to call the fairytales “conspiracy fictions” and those who peddle them “conspiracy fantasists”.</b> An extraordinary aspect of this issue is that there’s so little overlap between conspiracy fantasists and conspiracy theorists. <b>Those who believe unevidenced stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations tend to display no interest in well-documented stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations.</b></bq> <bq><b>This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism. The spread and development of this ideology was quietly funded by some of the richest people on Earth.</b> Their campaign of persuasion was so successful that this ideology now dominates political life. It has delivered the privatisation of public services; the degradation of public health and education; rising inequality; rampant child poverty; offshoring and the erosion of the tax base; the 2008 financial crash; the rise of modern-day demagogues; our ecological and environmental emergencies.</bq> <bq>One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, <b>distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating.</b></bq> <bq>Some make astonishing fortunes by promoting fictions on Substack, Spotify and Rumble. Certain influencers have made tens of millions this way [...]</bq> Or YouTube or Instagram or the NYT. The f&#king Guardian, for God's sake---where you work, George, you absolute prat. He just chirpily condemns the sources that the neoliberal media wants him to trash, leaving all of the real problems alone. He just leaves off the most influential fantasists---all while complaining about other people being unable to see where the real conspiracies are. Look at how easily he avoids naming the sites that snipe and defund any dissenting opinions, while slandering the site that he almost certainly refers to as "right-wing." <bq>In her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. <b>Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, “but often get the feelings right”.</b></bq> <bq><b>Jason Liosatos and I have the same desire for a better world, the same anger towards those who thwart it.</b> What differentiates us, I think, is rigour. I think he is insufficiently rigorous in choosing what to believe. <b>As a result of this lack of rigour, his instinct for justice and his potent sense of his own persecution have taken him to a very dark place.</b> This has led someone trying to be good to spread great harms. It’s a warning to us all.</bq> Exactly, George. Look at how easily you ignore the trash your own paper peddles about Russia (for example), which is deadlier than anything Jason has to say about "the Jews". Your newspaper has done way more damage peddling its lies, lies that benefit the ruling classes. But you can't bring yourself to say it <i>because you'll lose your platform there if you do.</i> Just admit it. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/12/from-propornot-to-new-lines-how-washington-is-weaponizing-media/" author="Alan Macleod" source="Scheer Post">From PropOrNot to New Lines: How Washington is Weaponizing Media</a> <bq>With their quiet admission of U.S. government funding, <b>New Lines joins an ever-growing list of organizations like Graphika and Bellingcat that present themselves as independent but are funded by the U.S. government.</b> Former U.S. state and intelligence officials staff them and dutifully repeat U.S. government narratives and talking points. Through their reports and studies, groups like New Lines launder Washington’s narratives into the public domain, smuggled in under the guise of objectivity. Worse still, <b>New Lines has been at the forefront of attacking and demonizing the few dissenting voices left in American society</b>, their reports being used to further marginalize alternative media – the only place where serious domestic critique of U.S. foreign policy can occur. It is, therefore, doubly crucial that <b>organizations like New Lines are understood for precisely what they are: the State Department’s attack dogs.</b></bq> You can see that places like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone" source="Wikipedia">the Grayzone</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News" source="Wikipedia">MintPress News</a> are essentially libeled on what is supposed to be a reliable source. The second paragraph describes MintPress News as follows, <bq>MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria.[3][4] It opposes the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia,[5] and reports geopolitical events from an anti-Western perspective.[6] In one article, MintPress News falsely asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government.[4]</bq> This is a nearly a complete fiction. The last sentence is actually a true thing that MintPress is said to "believe". The next paragraph is similarly filled with evidence-free allegations, <bq>Described as a conspiratorial website,[7][8] MintPress News publishes disinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to researchers at Rutgers University and others.[9][10] MintPress News was a major media domain that spread disinformation about the White Helmets, a Syrian volunteer organization.[11] The site has been accused of regularly publishing pro-Russian propaganda.</bq> Naturally, there is no warning at the top to let readers know that this entire entry has been written by detractors. The Grayzone, meanwhile, is described as follows, <bq>Most contemporary media coverage of The Grayzone has focused on its criticism of American foreign policy,[1][4] its misleading reporting,[25][26] and its sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes, including those of Syria, Russia, and China.[4][21][27][28] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government's human rights abuses against Uyghurs,[32] published conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions,[33][34] and published disinformation about Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some have described as pro-Russian propaganda.</bq> Once again, all of the links are to mainstream sources that smear with allegations rather than evidence. This is all designed to dissuade anyone from associating with either of these news sources and to stick with mainstream propaganda sources. <bq>The English Wikipedia formally deprecated the use of The Grayzone as a source for facts in its articles in March 2020, citing issues with the website's factual reliability.</bq> Of course it did. Mainstream sources remain, as they are unimpeachable. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/17/no-ones-neutral-come-eurovision-time/" author="David Yearsley" source="CounterPunch">No One’s Neutral Come Eurovision Time</a> <bq>Switzerland is by any geographical definition in the heart of Europe, though not in the European Union or NATO. Hallowed Swiss traditions of neutrality can in many vital respects be seen as an exercise in semantics and public relations. For centuries Switzerland dispatched mercenaries to fight in European wars. The Swiss have long known that neutrality is a lucrative business.</bq> Opinions are like assholes. It's always lovely to see yet another someone explain how neutrality is impossible, that non-alignment is a pipe dream, that everyone has to <i>choose sides</i>. Shut up, chump. <bq>The government asserts that the Swiss people overwhelmingly favor the male-female dichotomy—and not just on their official documents. Even as Nemo pushes for a new kind of neutrality within Switzerland, here’s betting that, in spite of unwavering pronouncements that the country will never join NATO, the welcome to Eurovision 2025 in Zurich by Swiss President Viola Amherd will include the biggest geopolitical surprise of the night.</bq> What the fuck is wrong with you Yearsley? Are you a suffering Brit, so you want everyone to fuck up their country as badly as you all have? I will fight with every iota of my being to prevent Switzerland from joining NATO. Sweden is already regretting it, as is Finland. Those idiots have no idea that the U.S. does not have friends---they have vassals. The British are vassals of the U.S.---embarrassingly so. The Swiss should not follow suit. Don't take sides. Non-align. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/17/the-problem-with-electric-vehicles/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">The Problem With Electric Vehicles</a> <bq>After worrying for decades that the price of EVs was too high, we now have a different problem, the price is too low. China is now producing over ten million electric cars a year, some carrying price tags of under $10k. <b>This has prompted terror here, with politicians tripping over themselves to find ways to keep people from buying them.</b> The concern is that it will wipe out the domestic U.S. auto industry. After telling us for decades that Americans don’t want to buy electric cars, <b>people like Donald Trump are yelling about how we have to take strong measures, like 100 percent tariffs, to prevent them from buying electric cars.</b></bq> You're 100% right here, Dean, but you still might want to have that TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) looked at. While you're shaking your fist at Trump---who's not, please remember, currently in elected office or in any position of power---for wanting 100% tariffs, the Biden administration just <i>this week</i> levied exactly that tariff on Chinese EV imports. Or proposed to do so. Or whatever. The point is: why wouldn't you mention that? It's just another case of Biden and Trump wanting the exact same bad thing but your conclusion is to perceive that bad thing as further proof that Trump is bad---which he is!---while your support for Biden doesn't waver. <bq>First, <b>if China wants to export cheap EVs to the world, we should see that as a good thing, not an act of war.</b> The flat-earth society may not believe in global warming, but the rest of us don’t have that luxury. Tens of millions of low-cost EVs being sold around the world in the next few years would hugely help advance the effort to slow emissions. <b>If China wants to subsidize this process, we should be thanking them.</b></bq> This is all correct, except perhaps for the "hugely" part, because PV emissions aren't really that hugely significant, relative to other industrial emissions. We'll have to wait a good while longer before we actually see a reduction in fossil-fuel-generated emissions due to, e.g., a reduction in fossil-fuel-production because of reduced demand. <bq>[...] <b>the major Japanese manufacturers were each allowed to export a certain number of cars each year to the United States.</b> These restrictions gave the U.S. industry breathing space to adjust to changing conditions in the auto market and adopt more efficient manufacturing techniques. It also encouraged Japanese manufacturers to establish operations in the United States, where they now directly and indirectly support hundreds of thousands of jobs. We could adopt a similar approach with China.</bq> The difference is that Japan was and is a vassal nation, at best a duke or earl in the U.S. empire, whereas China is a competitor. China is the devil, whereas Japan was a defeated enemy who'd we'd <i>nuked</i>. <bq>This would be a great way to work with China to further our common goal of slowing global warming.</bq> This is f&#king adorable. The U.S. doesn't share "slowing global warming" as a "common goal." The U.S. wants world domination. The U.S. doesn't care what the shitheap it's sitting on top of looks like---as long it's the one sitting on top of it and no-one else. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/divvying-up-the-pie-between-you-me" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Divvying Up the Pie Between You, Me, & AI</a> <bq>Noah is probably correct to surmise, though, that the Fed internally sees wage growth as a problem, <b>given how much wage growth fuels price increases.</b> But getting an economy where more people make more money is pretty close to the primary goal of modern economic politics! And given that recent wage growth has finally redounded to the benefit of people at the bottom of the wage scale, the optics of trying to stop this growth for the sake of reducing price pressure get even worse.</bq> I'm honestly still not very convinced that wage growth necessarily has to fuel price increases. It does <i>right now</i>, in our utterly broken economy. Companies have a fixed idea of what they deem to be an acceptable profit. If they were to miss those targets, then they've failed their shareholders. Their targets for themselves grow each year. If wages were to grow during a business year, then they would miss their targets. Easy solution: raise prices. Another solution, of course, would be to miss the utterly fictitious targets that they've set. Another solution would be to set targets that include taking care of rather than fighting their employees. If there's still a profit margin, then there's room for wages to grow without raising prices. There are businesses that are much more sensitive to costs, where the profit margins are quite slim. But there are others---those that dominate the economy---that earn <i>billions</i> in profits and spend <i>billions</i> on buybacks and are essentially hedge funds with a sort of services or manufacturing tumor attached to it so that it can pretend it actually does something other than just pure financialization. It doesn't really make sense to talk about wage-growth pressure negatively affecting the local restaurant---which is something we should empathize with and try to figure out how to solve <i>with</i> the owner---in the same sentence as the way that we're all supposed to cry over how wage growth affects Amazon or Wal-Mart. These are not at all the same thing. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/outrageously-priced-weight-loss-drugs-could-bankrupt-us-health-care/" author="Beth Mole" source="Ars Technica">“Outrageously” priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care</a> <bq><b>If just half of the adults in the US with obesity start taking a new weight-loss drug, such as Wegovy, the collective cost would total an estimated $411 billion per year</b>, the analysis found. That's more than the $406 billion Americans spent in 2022 on all prescription drugs combined.</bq> That's a lot of money. But wait until you hear why it's worth it: <bq>[...] with their high effectiveness, the drugs will improve people's health in wide-ranging ways, including controlling diabetes, improving cardiovascular health, and potentially more. And, with those improvements, people won't need as much health care, generally, lowering health care costs across the board.</bq> Isn't that a lovely argument? Pay the company making the drug obscene amounts and you'll end up <i>saving</i> money! Trust us! This is not a scam! So, we've come up with a drug that seems to be overall positive for a lot of people, but we can't for the life of us figure out how to get it to people---because we're ideologically blinkered into believing that the company that came up with the drug 100% determines how it will be distributed. It doesn't matter how useful it is, or how beneficial it is for people's lives, if it determines that it should get obscene profits first, then our hands are utterly tied. It's quite incredible. It's like a hostage situation. One answer would be to just not use the drug---but that's easy for me to say because I don't need it. People who could lose 20--30% of their weight and avoid diabetes type 2 would consider the drug to be essential. <bq>The HELP committee report offered a relatively simple solution to the problem: <b>Drugmakers should set their US prices to match the relatively low prices they've set in other countries.</b> The report focused on Wegovy because it currently accounts for the most US prescriptions in the new class of weight-loss drugs (GLP-1 drugs). Wegovy is made by Denmark-based Novo Nordisk. <b>In the US, the estimated net price (after rebates) of Wegovy is $809 per month. In Denmark, the price is $186 per month. A study by researchers at Yale estimated that drugs like Wegovy can be profitably manufactured for less than $5 per month.</b></bq> None of that is going to happen, of course. What will instead happen is that the U.S. legislature will load up their stock portfolios with Novo Nordisk shares and then will claim that their hands are tied by the invisible hand of the market. They will chirpily launder hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars through a Danish company if a few dozen million end up in their own fat portfolios. Another alternative would be to just start manufacturing a generic version and help people get healthier. Fuck capitalism. <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.monbiot.com/2024/05/10/the-one-reliable-pipeline/" source="" author="George Monbiot">The One Reliable Pipeline</a> <bq>We confront the central paradox of a system we bizarrely call democracy : to achieve what almost everyone wants, we have to fight almost everyone in power. <b>The Conservatives who privatised water and the Labour governments that failed to renationalise it were not responding to the demands of the people, but to the interests of predatory capital.</b></bq> <bq>Now that the debt sewer has backed up, and Thames Water is drowning in its own financial waste products , anyone can see what needs to be done, except those in a position to do it. <b>Both Conservatives and Labour will try every imaginable scheme for addressing this crisis bar the obvious one: bringing it, and, soon afterwards, the rest of the shitshow, permanently back into public ownership.</b></bq> <bq>[...] that Cryer was right and Thatcher was wrong. But, as with energy privatisation, Brexit and many other disasters, no one in power or with a prospect of power can bring themselves to say it. Why? Because <b>they live in fear</b>. Not <b>of</b> the electorate, which overwhelmingly wants renationalisation , but of the forces they will not name: <b>the billionaire media, party donors and the rest of the unelected infrastructure of economic power. Some democracy, this.</b></bq> <bq>If the government temporarily renationalises it , it is likely to acquire most of the company’s £18bn debt . Yet <b>Thames still plans to issue more dividends to its shareholders, while raising bills for its customers by 40%.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the whole system has been deregulated by stealth.</b> No minister has announced that the rules governing water pollution have been scrapped. Instead, the agencies supposed to enforce them are now so underfunded, understaffed, de-organised and demoralised that <b>the rules might as well not exist.</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://undark.org/2024/05/09/opinion-disease-free-world/" source="Undark" author="Joanna Thompson">The Impossible Goal of a Disease-Free World</a> <bq>Vaccination led to the global eradication of smallpox in 1980.</bq> <bq><b>In the history of medicine, scientists have only been able to successfully eradicate smallpox and the cattle virus rinderpest.</b> Both of these illnesses have a relatively narrow range of hosts — and crucially, they don’t infect additional vector or reservoir species, animals that can carry and transmit the disease without dying from it.</bq> <bq>[...] for Jones, such language gestures toward an underlying issue with the way society tends to conceptualize its own relationship to the environment. Humans often draw a line between ourselves and nature, <b>separating “civilization” from “the wild.” But that dichotomy is an illusion, she said. “We are members of the biological community.”</b></bq> <bq>Such precautions don’t have to be fancy. For example, <b>wearing long pants, tight sleeves, and bug spray to prevent tick bites is far from foolproof, but it is a low-cost way to avoid Lyme disease.</b></bq> <bq>“It’s not like we need to develop a whole lot of new technology or anything like that,” she said. “We just need to put our money where our mouth is.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/a-deep-dive-into-the-opioid-crisis" source="Racket News" author="Matt Bivens, M.D.">A Deep Dive into the Opioid Crisis</a> <bq><b>President Teddy Roosevelt appointed an “Opium Commissioner,” who looked around and saw track marks on the arms of everyone from aging Army of the Potomac vets to high society ladies, and declared, “Americans have become the greatest drug fiends in the world.” It was our first Opioid Crisis.</b> It had been driven by genuine ignorance and a lack of good alternatives — but tellingly, also by the inappropriate use of heavily marketed and physician-endorsed treatments.</bq> <bq><b>We rewrote the Constitution to outlaw alcohol.</b> That we once went so far suggests how bad things had gotten.</bq> It shows how little we want anything now. We can't even <i>imagine</i> a constitutional amendment, even for something as unimaginative and obvious as "equal rights for everyone," which is, like, duh. Maybe we'll get an amendment against antisemitism or against criticizing Israel? <bq>That should have been peak “Opioid Crisis.” But it was only 2007. Heck, George W. Bush was still president. <b>The Sacklers were never contrite. They’d been raking in about $1 billion a year for more than a decade.</b> The $600 million fine sounded impressive — but the Sacklers shrugged, cut the government in to the tune of less than 5% of the cash rolling in, and <b>got right back to slinging opioids. And in the 17 years since, everything has gotten terribly worse.</b></bq> <bq>Back when Purdue Pharma had to pay $600 million, that was big news. Today, judgments are handed down left and right for billions , without much comment or public excitement, against everyone involved in making, distributing or selling opioids: <b>$17.3 billion from CVS, Walmart and Walgreens, $5 billion from Johnson & Johnson, $21 billion from opioid distribution companies McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, $4.25 billion from Teva Pharmaceuticals, $2 billion from Allergan.</b></bq> Not a deterrent? Hmmm...are they making more money than that? <bq>Perhaps none of those other corporations would have dared try to convince physicians and nurse practitioners to hand out opioids like candy. But <b>the Sacklers dared and met with success — instant success, shocking success, in perhaps the most shameful episode in the history of medicine.</b> The other companies might have been surprised, but they all fell eagerly in line behind. <b>Each of them drafted in the turbulent wake of Purdue opioid marketing — some just coasting and enjoying the free money</b>, others so excited they would at times sprint out ahead to briefly take the lead in this Olympics of Sociopathy.</bq> <bq>For example, it may have been the Sacklers who first decided to target returning veterans (who have good health insurance) as an opioid growth market — <b>veterans, by the way, are three times more likely to overdose and die than other Americans.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it took a Johnson & Johnson-backed organization, the “Imagine the Possibilities Pain Coalition”, to spitball in 2011 about targeting elementary school students. After all, third graders have pain, too! <b>A PowerPoint presentation from this group noted we could start marketing opioids to kids “via respected channels, e.g., coaches.”</b></bq> <bq><b>I can’t argue against expanded use of buprenorphine. The data clearly shows that it prevents death and disability. People really do get control of their lives again. Of course, it is also addictive.</b> So, the plan we confidently propose is to treat opioid addiction with this admittedly ingenious and excellent medication, for <b>a monthly price tag, depending on the formulation, ranging from $196 to $1,136… forever. What’s not to like?</b></bq> <bq>When it comes to the Opioid Crisis — this massive, deadly pandemic of addiction we’ve unleashed — we stroll past whistling and look guiltily away, then whirl back around, whip out the Braindead Megaphone , and <b>loudly announce that we expect to be paid handsomely to provide additional addictive opioids to treat this same pandemic.</b> We declare this with wide-eyed innocence, and get indignant if anyone questions this plan — even as internal corporate communications now available show <b>Big Pharma corporations rubbing their hands gleefully at the thought of all of that buprenorphine cash.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/paul-robeson-london-socialism-internationalism/" source="Jacobin" author="Taylor Dorrell">How Paul Robeson Became a Socialist</a> <bq>The part of this monumental life conducted in London, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, would stir Robeson personally, professionally, and above all politically. As the twentieth century progressed, he would become one of the most outspoken advocates for socialism — <b>a politics that would result in the United States revoking his passport, blacklisting him, and purging his name from the history books.</b></bq> <bq>Robeson played an unemployed African American seaman embraced by miners after choir leaders heard him sing. Of his numerous provoking film roles — in Show Boat, The Emperor Jones , and King Solomon’s Mines — his role in The Proud Valley remains one of the few characters that Robeson was proud of politically. <b>In the prime of his acting career, the radicalized Robeson had begun turning down degrading, shallow, and stereotypical roles, instead seeking out chances to “depict the Negro as he really is — not the caricature he is always represented to be on the screen.”</b></bq> <bq>Robeson heard an aristocrat angrily talking to a chauffeur as one might a dog. It was a far smaller event, one probably reflected in similar scenes happening across the city at that moment, but it shook Robeson. <b>“I realized that the fight of my Negro people in America and the fight of the oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle,”</b> he reflected. “That incident made me very sad for a year.”</bq> <bq>In London, both Robeson and Jones could actually enjoy press coverage that reflected their work and their achievements, Horne also observes, <b>whereas American journalists only cared to sensationalize their connections to the Communist Party.</b></bq> <bq>Robeson starred in a number of interwar British films and plays before permanently moving back to the United States in the lead-up to World War II, where <b>his fame and radical politics saw him blacklisted and stripped of his right to travel abroad.</b> As it happened, he had also been watched by MI5 while in England, with one 1943 report complaining he was “rather strongly anti-white.”</bq> <hr> <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/905573/caravaggio-made-darkness-visible/" source="Hyperallergic" author="Ed Simon">Caravaggio Made Darkness Visible</a> <bq>[...] chiaroscuro can be deployed for Caravaggio in a biographical sense as well. <b>Those rough, calloused, cuticle-split hands stained with red and black oil were also hands that grasped a rapier as it fatally slashed the femoral artery of a local gangster and pimp named Ranuccio Tomassoni.</b> The two dueled not over Lena, but another sex worker named Fillide Melandroni, a slight strawberry blonde who’d modeled for Caravaggio numerous times, most notably in his “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” made around 1599 and now held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome. In that painting, <b>Judith’s delicate, ivory-colored hand grasps at a tangle of her victim’s matted, greasy hair while the sword bisects Holoferne’s screaming trachea in the second before a swift turn would complete the decapitation. A spray of crimson, red as the backdropped curtain, stains the bed’s sumptuous white sheets.</b> The model for Holofernes was Caravaggio himself.</bq> <bq><b>There is always a risk in imparting a contemporary political sensibility onto an artist like Caravaggio, whose life is so alien to us.</b> Yet the decision to render himself as the monster to be slayed — by a biblical woman associated with determination and power, no less — can’t be incidental either.</bq> <bq>Maybe it’s more all-encompassing to say that <b>Caravaggio was obsessed with physical in extremis not just in terms of what’s excruciating, but with its antonym of ecstasy</b>, which nonetheless mirrors the former in intensity.</bq> <bq>The question of how we understand great art created by bad people isn’t commensurate with Caravaggio’s pained ecstasies, for <b>part of the miracle of his entire corpus is that such work could come from a hand that murdered, so that a fallen angel is still an angel after all.</b> What do we do with such work? We’re moved by it, seduced by it, enlightened by it, entranced by it, saved by it. <b>Like Caravaggio himself, we must find the profane in paradise and the divine in the dross</b> — a lesson true whether in his biography or his work. In such gardens, even dead trees can grow the sweetest of fruit.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/we-are-the-winners-of-eurovision/en" source="European Review of Books" author="Justina Buskaitė">« We are the winners of Eurovision »</a> <bq><b>The song contest rules demand that participating countries leave « political agendas » out of Eurovision completely.</b> Pop music, pure and unpolluted.</bq> <bq>Eurovision’s organizers announced that they would deploy « anti-booing technology ». <b>Anti-booing technology meant that viewers at home would hear pre-recorded audience cheers instead of the boos.</b> Anti-booing technology was also installed into the performer’s earpieces, so the performer in the arena couldn’t hear any booing before or after their performance.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42xZB80sZaI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/42xZB80sZaI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1ZarHa7O0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/SU1ZarHa7O0" author="Eye of the Storm Podcast" caption="Gabor Maté and Yanis Varoufakis | HOW TO HEAL FROM THIS TOXIC CULTURE | Podcast 4" source="YouTube" width="560px"> <hr> We were on our way home and had just turned onto Kreuzackerstrasse when we saw a hedgehog scuttle across the sidewalk from the Altersheim. It started into the road, but there was an SUV coming. "No, Igel!" shouted my partner. But the SUV stopped in time and went around. A little white car buzzed up behind it, braking hard, clearly wondering why the SUV had stopped. The SUV turned its wheels slightly to go around the Igel. The white car behind it paused, then drove straight over it. We hoped that it had managed to tuck itself away from the wheel, but alas. It did not. Its insides were squirted outside and across the road. The driver of the white car hadn't seen it. At least it ended quickly. I felt horrid. I wished I'd run up to stop the white car, but it went so quickly. And, just like that, the little animal was gone. Who knows where it had been headed? Was it a mother out foraging for its children? Is there a nest of hedgehogs starving right now? Our giant machines cause so damage. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> The comments on the post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40363135" source="Hacker News">AI is the reason interviews are harder now</a> are illuminating about where we're headed. People don't question AI. They don't question whether we should use it. They just explain how to leverage it for themselves. <bq>Mostly because it is pretty easy to use AI to cheat and if you aren’t leveraging new tools, you are falling behind. You should be using AI for interviews, AI for cover letters, bots to mass spam every remote job on LinkedIn (most of the jobs I have “applied” for in the past few weeks aren’t even dev jobs, but an application costs nothing so better safe than sorry), and all manner of other tools to play this game.</bq> Ouch. Someone responded with: <bq>This is horrible abusive behaviour people like you are the reason we can't have nice things.</bq> To which the original commentator responded: <bq>It is the reason you can’t have nice things. I have nice things. If I stay ahead of the scamming curve, I will always have nice things. And that’s the problem. My action, your collective bill. Tragedy of the commons is very much an unsolved problem and the winning play has consistently been to destroy the commons through max exploitation.</bq> This is a really astute comment: the system encourages sociopaths to bubble to the top. Further down, someone asked what was meant by this being "immoral" behavior. I answered: I think the morality he's speaking to is the scalability of using that strategy. If everyone does it, then the system overloads and breaks. If only a few individuals do it, then those individuals willing to arrogate more resources to themselves "win". What makes those individuals so special to society? I'm using the word "morality" to mean what is beneficial to society, within reasonable definitions. Please allow me to just hand-wave that away for now. It's thinking about what are the ramifications of your actions on others? Why should you benefit and not others? Because you thought of it first? Because you're better at using this technique? Is this the kind of behavior that society wants to promote to achieve its goals? We tend to use "morality" as a shortcut for meaning "not actively destructive to others." ... or something like that. I know we have to agree on which goals does society have, does society actually have goals, etc. Or can we just let individuals pursue what they think are their own goals and hope for the best? And what best are we hoping for? Are we hoping that the system stays the same enough so that you personally will move toward your own goals? What if this pursuits prevents others from achieving theirs? What mechanisms do we have for changing things if we detect pathological behavior that will lead too far toward a place that everyone would consider to be "bad" (e.g., no food being produced). Dog eat dog OK with everyone? What if this behavior ends up being so destructive that it affects even those who were initially excelling? What obligation do we have to others to keep the system working for them? Do we only think about that in terms of the eventual benefit to ourselves? Morality's a big topic. I've probably mucked it up, but I'll leave it there. Also: Apparently big tech companies are rarely doing in-person interviews anymore. Incredible. What is the point of hiring someone who doesn't really know how to code? How sure are you that you only need someone who can replace a car battery using a manual rather than someone who can notice that the battery doesn't need to be replaced at all? The argument being made here is that the second type of person is not needed. It is being made the first type of person. I would be suspicious. Should I try to be a doctor? I can just ask WebMD, no problem. No, because being a doctor is important. Whereas being a programmer is not? It's possible! It's possible that there are a ton of jobs that can be done by factory-line workers. In that case, we should be asking ourselves why this isn't being automated further, why are we boring people to death with this kind of work. Or maybe we're not boring anyone! Maybe they like it! Maybe we need to keep those kinds of jobs so we can keep people busy and happy. But then, how do we pay for it? That's a different question. BGE. "full luxury space communism", Whatever. The first question is, though, can we really afford to take the gamble that's being offered? What do we stand to gain by having AI-assisted people who don't know their area of expertise in the "classic" way? What do we stand to lose? How do those balance? The mechanism isn't difficult but perhaps coming up with the lists is. It's not necessarily the case that the old way is clearly bad and should be replaced with any possible new way. We have to do something! This is something! Let's do this. To reiterate: always be away of the incentives of the interested parties. The incentive of people using AI to do their jobs isn't necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. There may very well be a lot of people who simply want to win the hand they've been dealt, no matter how. This is how we are taught, is it not? The game is to accumulate wealth, not to provide value or to seek fulfillment. They're trying to win that game, not the one you think they are. If a useful product comes out of their job, that's OK. Their primary purpose is to make money. Getting hired at a tech giant is good in itself, but it's really just a doorway to being able to secure employment later without having to work as hard (i.e., your resume speaks for you, rather than you intellect or ability). It's nice for these people that interviews are going away, so that they don't have to be revealed as useless until long after they've extracted the value that they want (status or money or both). After a while, the hope is that their life just rolls along, without effort or erudition. One guy was still fighting the windmills. <bq>I wish more companies would have interviewees conduct code reviews. Code reviews as an interview show a number of things you wouldn’t get from a typical interview—what opinions they have, what are the things they call out vs what they don’t waste time on, how they might communicate with another teammate, and more. And if we’re going to a world where AIs do much of the work and we just need to check that they implemented what we intended, those code review skill will still be highly relevant.</bq> The only answer he received was: <bq>gpt-4 is at least as good as i am at code reviews</bq> I didn't have the heart to point out that this might not mean what the commentator thinks it means. To me, it means that the commentator sucks at reviewing. Or there was this person: <bq>[...] the candidate was able to come up with an answer, why does it matter how they did it?</bq> I can explain it but I have the feeling that you don't really want to understand. See the example above of the mechanic who knows how to replace a battery versus the one who knows it doesn't need to be replaced. As soon as you automate something, you generally take the thinking out of it. You fix so many parameters in place that it makes it very difficult to change anything. If you have too many people doing a job that they don't understand without a ton of support, then you're not likely to have anyone who notices when mistakes are being made, or when the process has become inefficient. Which type of person do you want to be? Or...don't you care, as long as you're making money? <hr> <a href="https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/search-is-dead-long-live-curation/" author="Cory Dransfeldt" source="">Search is dead — long live curation</a> <bq>Looking for something on the web? Type into that same box — <b>here's a wall of text, it was made by magic. Is it right? Who knows?</b> Who cares when you can't use the service we've replaced with an LLM to check?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/" author="Casey Newton" source="Platformer">Google’s broken link to the web</a> <bq>But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. <b>A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/google-unveils-veo-a-high-definition-ai-video-generator-that-may-rival-sora/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Google unveils Veo, a high-definition AI video generator that may rival Sora</a> Drain the entire tech industry's brains for a year and a half and all OpenAI and Google can come up with is three-legged cats, a horse a fucked-up foot that swings way out for a second, or a stuffed elephant walking on a blurry plain that flickers at least once in an eight-second video. Fantastic. <hr> <a href="https://blog.plover.com/2024/05/13/#blue-rubies" author="Mark Dominus" source="The Universe of Discourse">ChatGPT opines on cruciferous vegetables, Decameron, and Scheherazade</a> This is a conversation with ChatGPT that includes questions like: <ul> <iq>Can you give me a rhymed couplet about apples?</iq> <iq>The first line is at least reasonably metric, although it is trochaic and not iambic. The second line isn't really anything.</iq> </ul> Does this strike you as unfair? I don't believe that it is. These machines are being sold to us a replacement for everything. They're to replace <i>search</i>. They're supposed to be able to generate poetry, text, music, and Lord knows what else. But they don't even know the difference between trochaic and iambic pentameter. They're just as shitty at writing poetry as we are! It's just that they're faster at it, and more confident. It looks like poetry and we're in no position to judge. That's why we asked a machine to do it. It doesn't do it right either, but we'll chirpily pass it on. This conversation very much reminded me of <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/my-dinners-with-gpt-4" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu" source="Hinternet">My Dinners with GPT-4</a>, in which the machine can't tell the difference between the Sakha and Mongolian languages and can't keep French, German, and English apart with a simple rule or two. Because it doesn't know simple rules. It not only can't remember them, <i>it has no capacity for doing so.</i> This video shows that pigeons are smarter than we think they are. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYV39SKIiM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/LfYV39SKIiM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Ze Frank" caption="True Facts: Pigeons Aren't Mindless Peckers"> Pigeons seem to be able to identify nonsense words from actual English words---<i>even for words they've never seen before.</i> This is pretty amazing actually. They seem to have set up a pattern for what "English" is, and are evaluating new candidates against that basis. Incredible! But their intelligence isn't in any way especially useful to <i>us</i>, as a tool. Don't get me wrong: It doesn't have to be! What I'm instead getting at is that <i>neither is whatever these LLMs have</i>. What people are doing with LLMs these days is the equivalent of asking a pigeon to tell you about Decameron's Bocaccio. <ul> <iq>Have you heard of Bocaccio's book Decameron?</iq> <iq>In Decameron the 100 tales are told by ten different characters. Do you remember any of their names?</iq> <iq>Does the name Pampinea ring any bells?</iq> <iq>Ordinary Google search knows who Pampinea was.</iq> </ul> You see? The pigeon also would have no idea who any of the main characters in <i>Decameron</i> are. We have to cool our jets, slow our roll, and figure out where we can actually use these tools that makes sense. We can't replace search with them. That's ludicrous. <iq>When ChatGPT says “As a large language model…” it is saying the same thing as when ADVENT says “I don't understand that” or “I see no TREAS here.”</iq> <ul> <iq>What are some adjectives that could be used to describe Scheherazade?</iq> <iq>What is her sister's name?</iq> <iq>Scheherazade's sister is very important to the narrative of One Thousand and One Nights.</iq> <iq>Wouldn't you say that all of the stories are told by Scheherazade?</iq> </ul> <bq>This is an interesting question to ask someone, such as a first-year undergraduate, who claims to have understood the Thousand and One Nights. The stories are told by a variety of different characters, but, famously, they are also told by Scheherazade. For example, Scheherazade tells the story of a fisherman who releases a malevolent djinn, in the course of which the fisherman tells the djinn the story of the Greek king and the physician Douban, during which the fisherman tells how the king told his vizier the story of the husband and the parrot. So the right answer to this question is “Well, yes”.</bq> They keep saying that these things can pass bar exams and such but so what? What's the point? The point of a human passing the bar exam is the same as the brown M&Ms in Van Halen's rider: to make sure that they've read and made themselves familiar with the rest of the material. If you just get the questions right, that doesn't mean that you can answer anything off of the exam---which is the point of the exam. To make a good lawyer, not to pass the exam. People forget the purpose of these things. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://buttondown.email/geoffreylitt/archive/towards-universal-version-control-with-patchwork/" source="Buttondown" author="Geoffrey Litt">Towards universal version control with Patchwork</a> <bq><b>Google Docs' beloved "suggestion mode" helps writers easily make tentative edits, but doesn't let users push further into more powerful functionality like branching and merging whole documents.</b> Perhaps most frustratingly of all, each app has its own approach to history and branching—<b>for anything beyond basic undo, we're forced to learn new metaphors within the bounds of each application.</b></bq> <bq>[...] we've found that <b>adding even basic branching and versioning concepts to a writing tool can be incredibly useful</b> for navigating the collaborative process of drafting and editing.</bq> <bq>In Patchwork, so far we've prototyped a simple way for an AI bot to propose a branch on your writing and leave suggestions which you can review and accept/reject, just like a human-created branch. We think this works quite nicely in some cases—for example, <b>I made a bot which edits using our lab style guide and explains its underlying reasoning in terms of the style guide.</b></bq> <bq>This idea of universal version control fits the shape of our goals at Ink & Switch: we're not shipping a commercial application as a startup, but rather <b>exploring platform primitives for computing that might have a general impact on a longer time scale.</b> You know, ideas like: a powerful version control system embedded in a cross-application collaborative data layer.</bq> <bq>This was one thing I learned from working on Embark : <b>coordinating hover, selection and focus state across components through a shared data substrate</b> is an unreasonably powerful technique for creating a sense of unity in an interface.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/120fps" source="Zed Blog" author="Nathan Sobo & Antonio Scandurra">Optimizing the Metal pipeline to maintain 120 FPS in GPUI</a> <bq><b>What stood out immediately was that Zed was running in direct mode on his M2, whereas on our M1s it was running in composited mode.</b> In composited mode, rather than writing directly to the display's primary frame buffer, applications write into intermediate surfaces that <b>the Quartz compositor combines together into the final scene.</b> We recently learned that to enable direct mode on M1s, you have to run the app full screen. We rarely enable that mode, but as soon as we did, we immediately reproduced Theo's issues. <b>The compositor introduces latency, so you would think bypassing it would make Zed perform better, yet we observed the opposite.</b></bq> <bq>By default, presenting to a <c>CAMetalLayer</c> does not block drawing of the window by the OS, <b>forcing the system to interpolate the windows contents from the previous frame by stretching them until the contents arrive on the next frame.</b> This might be good enough for a video game, but it wasn't a good fit for a desktop app.</bq> <bq>[...] we enabled <c>presentsWithTransaction</c> on the <c>CAMetalLayer</c> that backs the root view of every GPUI window, which coordinates the presentation of the layer's contents with the current CoreAnimation transaction. We also blocked the main thread on the presentation of the new window contents by calling <c>waitUntilCompleted</c> on the command buffer. <b>This ensured the main thread couldn't finish drawing the window until we finished presenting its contents.</b></bq> <bq>The solution was to retain our synchronization, but relax it somewhat by calling <c>wait_until_scheduled</c> instead of <c>wait_until_completed</c>. <b>This ensures the windows contents are scheduled to be delivered in sync with the window itself</b>, while avoiding an unnecessarily long blocking period.</bq> <bq>[...] we replaced the single instance buffer that worked when rendering was fully synchronous with a pool of multiple instance buffers. <b>We acquire an instance buffer from the pool at the start of the frame and release it asynchronously once the command buffer has completed.</b></bq> <bq><b>So we now render repeated frames for 1 second after the last input event to ensure max responsiveness.</b> This allows the display to downclock after a period of inactivity to save power, but ensures it doesn't do so while we're interacting with Zed. Now, when you're actively editing, we ensure the display is ready to respond to your input with minimal latency.</bq> Not sure this shouldn't be optional. Only in full-screen mode though, right? <hr> <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/" author="Niki Tonsky" source="">Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things</a> <bq>STOP. USING. FONTS. FOR. ICONS. Use normal image format. The one with dimensions, you know? Width and height?</bq> <bq>We, developers, can only mathematically align perfect rectangles. So for anything that requires manual compensation, please wrap it in a big enough rectangle and visually balance your icon inside.</bq> <hr> In <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/gist-that-keeps-giving/" author="Jim Nielsen" source="">The Gist That Keeps On Giving</a>, he writes, <bq><c>git reflog</c> Idk what that is, but yes, I should be flogging myself after what I just did.</bq> I think developers should know what the <c>git reflog</c> is or, at least, to be aware of how they can use it. <ul> The <c>log</c> is a list of commits that are either directly referenced by a tag or branch, or that are part of the history of one of those commits. I.e., they are indirectly referenced by a tag or branch. The reflog is a log of all commits in a repository, regardless of whether they are directly or indirectly referenced by a branch or tag. </ul> You have to understand a bit about how Git works. It maintains a tree of commits. It maintains branches and tags that are like <i>bookmarks</i> to certain commits. There are potentially commits in any repository that cannot be reached from a tag or branch. You can only find these commits in the <c>reflog</c>. The <c>reflog</c> is what can save you if you're deleted a branch or committed an unwanted rebase. All of the commits from the deleted branch are still in Git (for now). All of the original commits from before the rebase are still available. You just have to know how to find them. You also have to know to go look for them. That's why it's good to know about the <c>reflog</c>. You don't have to know everything about it, but it's good to know that it <i>exists</i>. As described in <a href="https://gist.github.com/umayr/b95e11d5f22c24a872ef95d215ba2ab1" source="GitHub">the Gist</a>, you can use the <c>reflog</c> to search for the lost commit (or head commit of a lost branch) and just <i>check it out by commit ID</i>. Voila! You're back in business. This is the simplest case, of course. If you've edited the commit message several times, or have a few rebases or cherry-picks that you've applied and thrown away, then the <c>reflog</c> is considerably messier. There way be several commits with the "correct" message and you'd have to know which one to take. You can format the <c>reflog</c> to show some hierarchy, I think, but your better bet is to visualize the log with a tool like SmartGit, which lets you toggle including the reflog in the log visualization. This allows you to see the lost commits chronologically and hierarchically, which can make it somewhat easier to find the correct, lost commit to restore. If commits aren't reachable by regular means, they why keep them? That's a good question. If you're sure that you don't have any "lost" commits in your repository, you can run <c>git gc</c> to run the <i>garbage collection</i> to clean up any unreferenced commits. <hr> <a href="https://matklad.github.io/2024/01/03/of-rats-and-ratchets.html" author="matklad">Of Rats and Ratchets</a> <bq>Let’s say you lack documentation, and want to ensure that every file in the code-base has a top-level comment explaining the relevant context. A good way to approach this problem is to write a test that reads every file in the project, computes the set of poorly documented files, and xors that against the hard-coded naughty list. This test is then committed to the project with the naughty list encompassing all the existing files. <b>Although no new docs are added, the ratchet is in place — all new files are guaranteed to be documented. And its easier to move a notch up the ratchet by documenting a single file and crossing it out from the naughty list.</b> More generally, <b>widen your view of tests — a test is a program that checks a property of a repository of code at a particular commit.</b> Any property — <b>code style, absence of warnings, licenses of dependencies</b>, the maximum size of any binary file committed into the repository, presence of unwanted merge commits, average assertion density.</bq> <bq>Only when X is written down in a markdown document inside a repository it might becomes a durable practice. But beware — <b>document what <i>is</i>, rather than what <i>should</i> be.</b></bq> ⁠He spoke of "ratchets" in the other article as well. I really like the concept, which gives you a pragmatic tool not only for defining where you want to be, but how to get there. I'd just like to add that "developer discipline" can fill the cracks until automation is available.   You notice how he says that you can "just scan all source documents for an appropriate comment...etc." Sure, you can. But you do have to balance the amount of time you put into maintaining the tools that will verify the quality of your code versus actually writing code. Like, you should keep in mind what the goal is and not get lost in the weeds of becoming a tool developer.   Sometimes, it's better to start off small and gradually increase. Like, you could also just make it the mission to add a comment whenever you see a missing one, and to make sure that the review checklist includes checking for a comment. It might even be enough. Or you may eventually have to write the tool.   I'm just saying that's it's sometimes hard to get buy-in for these fully automated systems because they're hard to get right and because they do actually cost something. Starting off small lets you ... actually get started, rather than waiting for the tool to show up.   I've just seen way too much overautomated stuff that is wrong just often enough that it's less useful than manual checking would have been and overgeneralized enough that no-one trusts themselves to/knows how to fix them. I, too, like the idea of the tests defining the product, rather than the code. It's kind of utopic, but it's a good goal. I've never seen a project get there. My colleague responded with the following astute response. <bq><b>This is a pitfall for those of us who like programming more than programs.</b> It's in the tools and the definition of these things that you get to be "utopic". Re: an azure workflow tool that finds TODOs: it just hasn't been a priority in making the program that I'm suppose to be writing. But I know that the programming that it will take to make that workflow will be fun. Me and a fellow nerd at my last job called this stuff "candy" and we'd keep a "candy list" lol.   Largely I agree with your sentiment. As I've been getting further out of school -- I'm learning more about Software Engineering vs. Computer Science. And less so from a perspective of DS&A vs Architecture (a clear difference between SWE and CS) and more about the attitude & habits that you carry in your day to day. Like, <b>something that is, in a way, admirable is that [some (most?) programmers] don't care about switch expressions. Whereas I find a way to get tangled up in idioms like that.</b> While that doesn't tell the whole story, it does shine light on my weaknesses as an engineer. I think I can work a lot on being someone who ships things instead plays with fairy dust in the optimal way.</bq> I'm not sure I'd agree that it's a <iq>weakness</iq> necessarily. I think you just need to learn how to balance curiosity with delayed gratification. Sometimes you'll find that the thing you need to do immediately didn't even need to be done. Sometimes you can skip steps. It's nice to look forward to things and to build up a system for keeping track of those things, as well as their priorities. You can't do everything at once, and the feeling of spiraling out of control as you work more and more, and always find more and more cool things to do, that have to be done now, ... it's not a great feeling either. <bq author="Frederick P. Brooks">The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.</bq> <bq>That's my favorite quote. However, it's about a programmer -- not an engineer. Regardless of what I do in my free time, <b>I recognize that "shippers" work must less removed from reality than castles in the sky.</b></bq> Most of a skilled programmer's/architect's/engineer's time will be spent balancing what needs to be done for the product and which parts of the process will get you there the most efficiently. Which parts are not needed now, or before, and which parts are needed before because, otherwise, everything else will be slowed down. E.g., writing the tests themselves takes longer, but you can verify your changes faster. But maybe developer documentation that no-one reads can be left off. Until, years later, no-one remembers why something was built the way it was and they break something essential, or change it to satisfy a new requirement, while ditching another implicit one. It's always a bit of a gamble that feels a lot more tenuous the more honest you are about it. Those who feel the most confidence are the ones with the strongest opinions that there is only one right way to do everything. They will feel that they their one way of doing things applies to all software all the time for all teams at all stages of development. I'm always a bit leery of these people and their recommendations. I think about the thing that I discussed with my friend where, although we know how best to write programs, we can each recall that we've also written some absolutely bulletproof software without a single test. <hr> The question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/886822/what-is-a-method-group-in-c" source="StackOverflow">What is a method group in C#?</a> includes several pretty good answers, but the real question is: is there a difference between calling <c>items.Select(b.M)</c> and <c>items.Select(x => b.M(x))</c>? This <a href="https://sharplab.io/#v2:EYLgtghglgdgNAExAagD4AEBMBGAsAKHQAYACdbAOgBlYBHAbgIPQGYzMSAhEgbwJIFk2wAPYiANiQCyAClgAXEhACUvfoIHoA7EpIA+EtnoD1AgL4aCZpoTZYSAYTX5LLwazIAWEgDkZy02cNDQA3CAAnEih5AFMwAGcSAF4SAFEYAFcwGPCIYHEYigAlCBgAcxiZIjhDImVGN0FA0IiSYGSSGBiAdy5/BuCmxuDouPiKAGUYgoBjeRlgCil65qHBgVGEyemYuZkAD2SDRdl95RXh63wzIA">example on Sharplab</a> shows simulates this call with a minimum of code. <code>using System; using System.Linq; public class B { public bool M(int a) => a > 1; } public class C { public void N() { var items = Enumerable.Range(0, 10); var b = new B(); items.Select(b.M); items.Select(x => b.M(x)); } }</code> Even the low-powered editor on SharpLab highlights the second formulation and indicates that <iq>Lambda expression can be removed</iq>. <img src="{att_link}lambda_expression_can_be_removed.png" href="{att_link}lambda_expression_can_be_removed.png" align="none" caption="Lambda expression can be removed" scale="75%"> If you ignore the siren song of the optimizer, you can see the generated code. <code>public class B { public bool M(int a) { return a > 1; } } public class C { [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class <>c__DisplayClass0_0 { public B b; internal bool b__0(int x) { return b.M(x); } } public void N() { <>c__DisplayClass0_0 <>c__DisplayClass0_ = new <>c__DisplayClass0_0(); IEnumerable<int> source = Enumerable.Range(0, 10); <>c__DisplayClass0_.b = new B(); Enumerable.Select(source, new Func<int,>(<>c__DisplayClass0_.b.M)); Enumerable.Select(source, new Func<int,>(<>c__DisplayClass0_.b__0)); } }</code> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KdICNWOfEQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5KdICNWOfEQ" caption="A Complete .NET Developer's Guide to Span with Stephen Toub" author="dotnet / Scott Hanselmann" source="YouTube" width="560px"> I think Scott is an essential part of the formula, making this level more accessible to many more developers than a handful of hardcore .NET nerds. He generally keeps his interjections short and reminds Toub to explain a couple of things that aren't obvious if you haven't been over the material a dozen times already. Also, he makes Toub zoom in. :-) It's a pretty good combination and they get through a tremendous amount of material in just an hour. Really good stuff. At about <b>25:00</b>, he mentions again---he's done it in previous videos---that you should use <c>List<t></c> where you can---e.g., in private methods---to allow the jitter to optimize a call on that target without an indirection into the VMT. If the class is concrete and the jitter can determine that it's not a derived class, then it can optimize. If it's an interface, then it won't be able to do so. I mean, with enough analysis, I suppose it could optimize certain calls, but Toub says that it does not do so right now. So, if you need to write a tight loop and you already have a <c>List</c>, then make sure that the type is also recognized as such. One way to do that is to pass that <c>List</c> to an easily inlined private method. At about <b>28:00</b>, he talks about how so much more of the code base used to use <c>unsafe</c> and pointers for optimization. This turns off array-bounds checks and means that the code doesn't benefit from being managed. At <b>36:00</b>, Toub mentions that in the latest version of .NET, there are only one or two uses of points. Everything else has been replaced with <c>Span<t></c> and <c>ReadOnlySpan<t></c>---which have now also been exposed in external APIs to allow all code to auto-magically benefit from performance optimization. How? Careful definition of function overloads and return values ensure that when APIs are used in common patterns, that the optimized overloads are chosen. In some cases, an outer API accepts a <c>string</c> and then defers to <c>Span<t></c>-based APIs internally. At <b>42:30</b>, he shows a lovely example of a string-creation API that is optimized to <iq>temporarily allow access to the backing buffer</iq> in a way that you get the benefit of setting up a string super-efficiently without using <c>unsafe</c> or pointers. This isn't something that everyone needs, but it's super-good to have for frameworks and libraries. At <b>50:00</b>, he defines <c>Span<t></c>, as found in the <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/8f3c687784a33aafe642368c28492244fa2f2c7f/src/libraries/System.Private.CoreLib/src/System/Span.cs#L28" source="GitHub">.NET source</a>. <code>public readonly ref struct Span<t> { internal readonly ref T _reference; private readonly int _length; }</code> That's it. Of course, there are a lot of custom equality- an comparison-operators, as well as constructors and helper methods, but that, in a nutshell, is it. <hr> <a href="https://gobyexample.com/interfaces" source="Go by Example">Interfaces</a> At the urging of a good colleague, I looked up Go's interfaces and found this lovely example. <code>package main import ( "fmt" "math" ) type geometry interface { area() float64 perim() float64 } type rect struct { width, height float64 } type circle struct { radius float64 } func (r rect) area() float64 { return r.width * r.height } func (r rect) perim() float64 { return 2*r.width + 2*r.height } func (c circle) area() float64 { return math.Pi * c.radius * c.radius } func (c circle) perim() float64 { return 2 * math.Pi * c.radius } func measure(g geometry) { fmt.Println(g) fmt.Println(g.area()) fmt.Println(g.perim()) } func main() { r := rect{width: 3, height: 4} c := circle{radius: 5} measure(r) <macro convert="-all">measure(c)<macro convert="+all"> }</code> Go's <c>interfaces</c> are definitely looser than Swift's <c>protocols</c>. Even Swift's <c>extensions</c> are targeted to a specific <c>protocol</c>. I kind of like this in Go, if I'm honest. It's a statically typed sort of duck-typing. Neat. <hr> <a href="https://github.com/sl-sh-dev/sl-sh" source="GitHub">Simple Lisp Shell (pronounced slosh)</a> <bq>Simple Lisp SHell (slosh) is a lisp based shell written in Rust. It is not POSIX compliant and makes no effort to be. Sl-sh should run on any *nix platform as well as macOS (CI currently only tests against ubuntu and macOS). <b>It is a Lisp-1 that is heavily inspired by Clojure and Common Lisp. It is a shell, it is a scripting language, and it is a REPL.</b></bq> ⁠On the subject of Lisp, I've been reading a lot about Rama recently, a top-to-bottom backend framework for building highly scalable applications of all stripes. It's written in a dialect of Clojure (i.e., an extension of Clojure that is definitely Clojure, but extended). They just had a blog post about it. <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>Rama’s language is Turing-complete and defined largely via Clojure macros. So it’s still Clojure, but its semantics are different in many fundamental ways. At its core, Rama generalizes the concept of a function into something called a “fragment”. 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. <b>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.</b></bq> There's a blog post from about half a year ago that <a href="https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/10/11/introducing-ramas-clojure-api/" author="Nathan Marz" source="Red Planet Labs">⁠announced the API</a>, which is ⁠<a href="https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/clj-defining-modules.html#gsc.tab=0" source="Red Planet Labs Documentation">here</a>. To prove Rama's applicability, they built <a href="https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/">a ⁠1-1-scale Twitter clone</a> (disclosure: the lead tech on Rama is Nathan Marz, who was one of the original architects at Twitter). <hr> I just looked up NeoVIM for Rider/ReSharper and found nothing (as you probably already have). This page was pretty funny, though. According to page <a href="https://www.slant.co/versus/62/12046/~neovim_vs_jetbrains-rider" source="Slant">NeoVim vs. Rider</a>, it's a mystery why anyone would use Rider, as there are over 30 better editors for C# apparently, whereas NeoVim is hands-down the #1 text editor in the world. This reminds me of my students this week "proving" to me how popular the Flutter framework is. Flutter uses the Dart programming language, which you can't use anywhere else. I know about it, but was pretty convinced that it had died since I don't even hear Google writing anything about it in my multitudinous info channels. But there it was, in black and white: Flutter is actually more popular than Angular and almost as popular as React. It's not true, of course, but hey, on the Internet, you can write anything you like and use SEO to push it to the top of search results. Is VIM better? <img src="{att_link}vim_is_the_suck.png" href="{att_link}vim_is_the_suck.png" align="none" caption="VIM is the suck" scale="75%"> I disagree with that. Any muscle memory is OK. It's a matter of efficiency. Some people can't conceive of deleting lines by saying how many lines you want to delete, but once you get used to it, it's not any less efficient than selecting text with other key commands, or than using the mouse. There are so many strong and evidence-free opinions online ... it's tiring. <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240513-00/?p=109750" author="Raymond Chen" source="">Before you try to change something, make sure you can change nothing</a> <bq><b>This step of building the unchanged component (perhaps I should call it “step negative one”) makes sure that your development environment is properly set up</b>: Are the build tools installed? Are the correct build tools installed? Did you install all the necessary libraries? Maybe the component retrieves a NuGet package from a NuGet feed: Can you authenticate to that feed? <b>After you build the component, can you deploy and run it?</b> Did you set your test system into an appropriate developer mode so you can install your component onto it? Do the unit tests pass? After you’ve gained comfort with a component, you can start skipping these steps, but these are important steps to undertake before writing a single line of code: <b>If you can’t get the component to build, deploy, and run as-is, you’ll certainly never get it to do those things after you make your changes!</b></bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012352377" source="Antiwar.com" author="Rick Sterling">NYTimes Ignites China Doping Controversy Leading Into the Olympics</a> <bq>The NYTimes and ARD are the same two media that precipitated the accusations of “state sponsored doping” in Russia. It did enormous damage to thousands of Russian athletes and resulted in different levels of banning starting with the Rio Olympics in 2016. <b>Although widely accepted as “truth” in the West, the claims of widespread Russian doping were weak when evidence was required. Most Russian athletes who challenged their banning were exonerated.</b></bq> <bq><b>NYT and ARD, and their anonymous informants, may be seeking to do something similar to China.</b> USADA has issued a response in which they say China may be engaging in “systematic doping” under a “coordinated doping regime”. On May 6 USADA’s Tygart escalated his attacks . He implies the Paris Olympics will be a “train wreck” because of WADA complicity in China’s “cheating”. He hopes the US government will “step in and help lead and fix this.” Surely a recipe for success.</bq> <bq>WADA has responded that Tygart’s comments seem “politically motivated”. They say <b>CHINADA followed the rules, investigated and reported as required. They say China did NOT have to announce it to the world, or name the individual athletes for the very good reason that false accusations of doping can destroy a career.</b> WADA regulations say the names of athletes should NOT be publicized until or unless it is confirmed they have an Anti Doping Rule Violation.</bq> <bq>This raises the question: <b>How did the TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and into the food being served to these Chinese athletes?</b> In February 2022, accusations of intentional doping were heaped on the <b>Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva . A trace amount of trimetazadine (TMZ) was detected in a drug test taken seven weeks before the Beijing Olympics. There are similarities to the Chinese case: same drug, same trace amount detected, same mystery as to how it was ingested.</b> Because she could not explain how it got there, Valieva was condemned in the West and ultimately had her international career destroyed. The Russian figure skating sweep was prevented and the Russian team lost their gold medals. <b>The controversy distracted and partially ruined the Beijing Olympics. The “intelligence community” undoubtedly considers this a success.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://gelio.livejournal.com/295171.html" author="Gelio | Степанов Слава" source="LiveJournal">Самая северная железная дорога в мире</a> The northernmost railroad in the world. Amazing pictures.