<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering</a> <bq><b>America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history.</b> We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And <b>it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.</b> That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. <b>America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.</b></bq> It's just insane that anyone admires that country. <bq>[...] poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). <b>You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.</b></bq> <bq>The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). <b>These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary</b>, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.</bq> <bq>The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that <b>making renters worse off makes homeowners richer.</b></bq> <bq><b>For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible.</b> Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.</bq> <bq>With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. <b>Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet.</b> These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.</bq> <bq><b>Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors.</b> The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to <b>terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.</b></bq> <bq>The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But <b>for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.</b> It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/we-smashed-up-the-world-on-noam-chomsky.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Marie Snyder">We Smashed Up the World: On Noam Chomsky</a> <bq>“Noam hasn’t just pointed to injustice where he saw it, no matter how remote–he has felt it . . . as an affront to his own sensibility. . . . <b>He doesn’t just have educated opinions on a bewildering array of topics and geographical regions–he has real expertise.</b> This is what has made him such a towering figure.”</bq> <bq><b>He has a wealth of knowledge and an astute analysis of events pretty much from the beginning of time to now all in his head and instantaneously available to him, but he’s also very down to earth, of the people.</b> Most importantly, he gives us a framework of the world that’s necessary to understand in order to help us fight the good fight.</bq> <bq>“<b>I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam</b>….it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke”</bq> <bq><b>Typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values</b> – values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed”</bq> <bq><b>The United States is permitted to carry out war crimes, it’s permitted to attack other countries, it’s permitted to ignore international law. On those things there’s a complete consensus.</b></bq> <bq>He acknowledges and details the illegitimate use of power in western governments today as they work towards improving their own lot at the expense of their citizens’. <b>We could have a society in which every mouth is fed, but that would be bad for the government.</b></bq> <bq>“There’s an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they’re not helping you make those dazzling profits – and <b>can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world?</b>“</bq> <bq>“<b>The person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it.</b> And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that” (202).</bq> <bq>[...] what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system…and then present a range of debate within that framework – so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is….Under what’s <b>sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics….make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits – that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored”</b></bq> <bq>He cautions us about getting sucked into the trivia created to distract us from reacting to real problems in the world, what he calls <b>‘de-politicizing’ intelligent people by getting them to track sports statistics and the complex relationships on HBO series.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things</b>….Soap operas…teach people other kinds of passivity and absurdity….These are the types of things which occupy most of the media….This stuff is a major part of the whole indoctrination and propaganda system”</bq> <bq>“<b>The idea is, ‘We smashed up the world and stole everything from it – now we’re not going to let anyone come and take any piece of it back.</b>’ That’s an attitude I see right on the surface all over the place in the West these days”</bq> <bq>Yet, he’s hopeful . He shares myriad examples of how far we’ve come, and how possible it all is. <b>We just need to avoid the red herrings – activities that get us spinning our wheels unproductively – and keep organizing, keep being noisy about it all</b>, and, like every other movement for change, eventually it will come together into something that can’t be ignored.</bq> <bq>“There isn’t ever one great person who leads a movement. It starts with tons of people, and <b>maybe there’s one person who can give a good speech, but they’re not the one who leads – the people lead. It’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless</b>, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them” (189). “The real work is being done by people who are not known, that’s always been true in every popular movement in history. <b>The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave….But the point is, it’s the wave that matters</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=118362" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Ernesto Loll">Gaza und im Westjordanland möglichst in Gänze auslöschen, sondern offenbar</a> <bq>Der israelische “Staat” will also nicht nur die palästinensischen Zivilisten in Gaza und im Westjordanland möglichst in Gänze auslöschen, sondern offenbar die “ultra-orthodoxen” Juden gleich mit. Denn, <b>wie die israelischen und deutschen Medien nicht müde werden zu betonen: die “ultra-orthodoxen” Juden kosten den israelischen Staat viel Geld an Unterhalt und staatlicher Förderung.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/16/j-d-vances-populist-anti-corporate-record-may-surprise-you/" source="ScheerPost" author="Lee Fang">J.D. Vance’s Populist Anti-Corporate Record May Surprise You</a> <bq>During the discussion, <b>Vance scorned the market-based incentives that drive the nation’s best neuroscientists to seek lucrative jobs making “highly addictive predictive algorithms for Facebook” rather than helping to produce a cure for Alzheimer’s, and the best mathematicians to work for quantitative hedge funds rather than developing next-generation fission energy.</b> “The traditional free market response to this is, ‘well, clearly this is what people value more if they’re willing to pay three times as much,” noted Vance. Instead, he said he favors more economic intervention, an “industrial policy” that recognizes “where we need to direct our country’s resources to solving real problems.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/17/patrick-lawrence-brain-dead-and-dangerous-nato-proceeds/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">‘Brain Dead’ and Dangerous, NATO Proceeds</a> <bq><b>We need to think about what it means when NATO members meet and what is on their minds are not the various crises into which they have led the world over the past many years but whether the man whose authority lies effectively beyond question will manage to deliver an address coherently.</b> We can laugh at President Biden’s public displays of ineptitude, and there were some of these, per usual, as he addressed the summit and then gave a press conference afterward. But I didn’t say funny: I said frightening. And this is what NATO has become during Biden’s three and a half years as the alliance’s de facto commander-in-chief.</bq> <bq>NATO summits as performance, as exercises in mass propaganda conducted entirely in the open: I confess <b>I cannot fully register the implications of an organization as powerful as the Atlantic alliance operating this emptily and cynically.</b> NATO has a purpose all right, but its political figureheads, generals, and bureaucrats must make one up for public consumption, its actual purpose—global dominance at whatever cost—being too objectionable to profess.</bq> <bq>NATO in Asia is now to be taken with the utmost seriousness. It is NATO now and the NATO to come—brain dead NATO, NATO everywhere with no legitimate business anywhere. <b>Shortly after Stoltenberg delivered himself of his preposterous tirade, Biden hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/world-history-on-feedback" source="Hinterest" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">World Spirit on Feedback</a> <bq>[...] no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call him a charlatan, to insist that he’s “faking it”, that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. <b>All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal, and unlike in 2016 I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore.</b></bq> <bq>[...] from this strange position in European exile, more than cured of my class anxiety and my desire to climb any higher in this fallen world, I think back and I see them as members of my extended family too. And <b>I feel instinctively the need to defend them, and to bemoan the ruling class’s chronic failure over the past decades to do the same.</b></bq> I can't quite believe that he's coming around to the view I've held for a while. <bq>Vance is also a frightening ideologue, far too certain of the truth of his —evolving— views to merit a place anywhere near the centers of power. And <b>he is also very smart, and will be able to translate Trump’s sentence fragments and sublinguistic gestures into real human language.</b> This is a significant turn in the history of the MAGA movement.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/07/gideon-levy-interview-west-bank-gaza/" source="Jacobin" author="Hanno Hauenstein">Gideon Levy: Getting Rid of Netanyahu Is Not Enough</a> <bq><b>Gideon Levy</b> There is a devoted opposition. They demonstrate every week and even stop the traffic here and there. But they focus only on two things. One is to get rid of Netanyahu. The other is to bring the hostages home. <b>There’s no real opposition to the war, no opposition to Israel’s crimes, no opposition to the mass killing in Gaza. None whatsoever.</b> Therefore, even if Netanyahu were to be replaced, none of the other candidates would change the basic issues, namely the war, the occupation, apartheid. None of them are ready for real change. <b>When it comes to the core issues, Israel will remain the same.</b></bq> <bq>We crossed the point of no return a long time ago. We crossed the point at which there was any room for a Palestinian state, with seven hundred thousand settlers who will not be evacuated, because nobody will have the political power to do so. The West Bank is practically annexed for many, many years. And, therefore, I’m not so shocked by the possibility of de jure annexation. Many times, I even thought that this would be a good thing. Because <b>once Israel annexes the West Bank de jure, it declares itself an apartheid state. Then nobody can deny it. As long as you don’t do that, you can claim that the occupation is temporary. Nobody can take this discourse seriously anymore. But, you know, those who want to believe in it believe in it.</b></bq> <bq>The censorship is very limited. I wouldn’t read too much into this. <b>The main form of censorship that exists in Israel today is self-censorship.</b></bq> <bq><b>Hanno Hauenstein</b> The media plays an important role in this war. In Israel, it seems extra difficult, since there’s military censorship on specific issues. <b>Gideon Levy</b> The censorship is very limited. I wouldn’t read too much into this. The main form of censorship that exists in Israel today is self-censorship. ​"​ What you see today [in Israel] is similar to Russian reporting on the war in Ukraine. ​ <b>Hanno Hauenstein</b> How do you explain this? <b>Gideon Levy</b> Look, <b>for nine months now, we weren’t shown images from Gaza at all. Nobody told the media not to show Gaza. But they know perfectly well that Israelis don’t want to see those images.</b> So they supplied them with this service. And nobody except Haaretz and some smaller online media have the guts to understand that journalism means not to show only what the people expect you to show but to fulfil some kind of social and political mission. <b>Israeli media is totally failing in this. What you see today is similar to Russian reporting on the war in Ukraine.</b></bq> <bq>It’s very hard right now. At times I get some hope from the fact that people who are protesting now at Harvard and Yale and Columbia will be the next generation of American politicians. Hope must come from the outside. <b>When they become secretaries of state and of defense, I hope they will still carry some of what they thought and lived in their university years</b>, that they will at least have some balanced view about what’s going on here.</bq> Noneof that is going to happen in the current system. Look at how progressives all lined up behind Biden, then Kamala, without demanding a thing. They will all be co-opted. Otherwise, they wouldn't be let into positions of power. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-criticizing-israel-is-antisemitic" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The "Criticizing Israel Is Antisemitic" Narrative Reinforces Itself</a> <bq>And the whole thing’s pure bullshit. <b>Trump will spend his next term advancing the longstanding agendas of the worst warmongering imperialists in Washington just like he did throughout his first term, and just as Biden has done throughout his. The actual mechanics of the empire have been deemed too important to be left to the will of the electorate</b>, so measures have been put in place to ensure that the opposition is controlled — and so is the opposition to the controlled opposition. This is true in both so-called “populist” factions in both of the imperial parties.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-is-the-single-defining-feature" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Gaza Is The Single Defining Feature Of This Political Moment In The US</a> <bq>What makes watching the Gaza genocide so much more awful is <b>remembering how nobody suffered any consequences for the invasion of Iraq. Everything just went back to the same dystopian “normal”, despite our just having watched them lie the world into an unforgivable mass atrocity with the full complicity of our news media.</b> It was like a family watching a father casually behead his daughter over Thursday night dinner, and then everyone just returning to their meal and going on as though nothing had happened. And realistically that’s what we can expect to see after this horror as well. Israel will keep all the material gains it made from its crimes in Gaza, just as the US did in Iraq. Biden will die peacefully in his bed surrounded by loved ones, as will Netanyahu, when neither of these monsters have any business dying anywhere outside a prison cell in The Hague. <b>All the war crimes, all the lies, all the mass media propaganda and distortions, will all likely go completely unpunished, and then the empire will go on to its next unfathomable evil.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/netanyahus-speech-was-as-american" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Netanyahu's Speech Was As American As It Gets</a> <bq>This deluge of lies and racist invective received dozens and dozens of standing ovations. <b>The same political class that’s spent the last eight years shrieking about the threat of misinformation, disinformation and foreign propaganda just normalized and applauded a foreign genocidal war criminal as he stood before Congress telling lie after lie after lie.</b> <b>You couldn’t ask for a better example of everything Washington stands for than this. Both houses of Congress rising to feverishly applaud one of history’s worst genocidal monsters dozens of times as he lies over and over again</b> is a much better representation of what the US government is about than anything you’ll see during the presidential race from now until November. <b>This is everything Israel is, and this is everything the US empire is. They’re showing you who they are. Believe them.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/25/patrick-lawrence-the-wreckage-biden-leaves/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">The Wreckage Biden Leaves</a> <bq>Biden will end his days assuming, as he does here, that he can utter the most preposterous bunkum, contradictory to perfectly visible realities, and it will be accepted as true because he has said it. <b>The Man from Scranton, authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire, got away with this chicanery for decades while he served in the Senate.</b></bq> They are all do this. They all lie all the time about everything. They lie like they breathe. Trump does it. Biden does it. Pelosi does it. Kamala does it. Graham does it. Netanyahu does it. <bq>Of the many large truths worth noting about the Biden presidency, the most important in my judgment is that he has turned, error upon error, misjudgment upon misjudgment, stupidity upon stupidity, a gradual but long-evident erosion in American power, prestige and reputation into a precipitous collapse.</bq> Both of the last presidents have done this, but Trump's relatively clear-eyed maliciousness was more in line with tradition, whereas Biden's feebleness muddled the maliciousness of his message. His foreign policy was easily more savage than Trump's but it was also scattered and inchoate. Where Trump said one thing and did another, or said he was doing something for a reason that couldn't possibly be the reason (because it's like saying you're going to the basement to get to the attic)---like discarding the TPP or wanting to disband NATO---Biden was beset by unfocused rage and attempt to fight on all fronts at once, while claiming he was winning them all. He revealed the weakness of the U.S. empire more than Trump did, amazingly enough. <bq>Further in behalf of terrorist Israel, <b>Biden has purposefully instigated a climate of delusional anti–Semitism that resembles nothing so much as the Red-under-every-bed paranoia of the 1950s.</b> Monomanias of this kind have consumed America periodically since the Salem witch trials, and the syndrome proves as destructive now as it has on all previous occasions.</bq> <bq>Biden’s record on the foreign side speaks for itself. <b>He leaves the U.S. stuck in a proxy war with Russia from which there is by design no exit</b>, even as Ukraine is condemned to self-destruction and its people to a criminal, Nazi–infested dictatorship in Kiev. Cold War II now lies before us, by the look of it stretching out for decades. Across the other ocean there is the new Cold War’s second front. <b>Relations with China lie in ruins, having been run into the ground by patently incompetent amateurs whose sole qualification for office is their yes-man loyalty to a leader even stupider than they are.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/25/patrick-lawrence-gaza-we-cannot-remain-silent-any-longer/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">Gaza, We Cannot Remain Silent Any Longer</a> <bq>“Jerusalem will never l be divided,” Netanyahu declared—an assertion he made in just these words when he last addressed Congress nine years ago. “The land of Israel, of Abraham, Jacob, and Issac, has always been our home and it will always be our home.” <b>There you have it, as baldly stated as possible: Zionist Israel has no intention of entering talks of any kind to settle the Palestinian conflict and insists that the Old Testament is the only law it will observe.</b> And here we come to Netanyahu’s true purpose in Washington this week: It is to bind the U.S. fully into the Israeli cause even as it reaches egregious extremes. <b>“We meet today at a crossroads in history,” he said. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between barbarism and civilization.” This is beyond preposterous if you keep Perlmutter and Sidhwa in mind as true witnesses to history.</b> But to go by Netanyahu’s reception Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. will buy his story and invest ever more deeply in it. I counted 72 ovations as this de facto war criminal spoke, all but seven of them of the standing variety.</bq> It's beyond preposterous to consider the U.S. and Israeli states as representing civilization, yes. They are barbarous nations, understanding only the power of the cudgel. <bq>Bibi Netanyahu is what Zionism sounds like in 2024. There is nothing in it to work with, nothing to honor, nothing to respect. If Zionist ideology ever fit into the modern world, and I will leave this an outstanding question, it no longer does. <b>Intent on dehumanizing the Palestinian people, Zionists have succeeded in ennobling them while making themselves deformed creatures, nothing more or less than humans without humanity.</b></bq> Citing Perlmutter from an interview on U.S. television (CBS Sunday Morning): <bq>All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza…. I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the “world’s best sniper.” And they’re dead-center shots.</bq> <bq>It is time to say certain things, readers. It is time to put aside the policing and self-policing of our views of the things we see and hear. Time to make good use of language to say what we mean. It is time to see in ThePryingEye <b>all those “good Germans” who saw what was going on around them during the 1930s but turned the other way and went about their business.</b> Time to say, “<b>Actually, what we need to survive is to utter the truth and determine to act on it.</b>” This is the first thing we can do. <b>Much stands to come of it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/19/gaza-hospitals-surgeons-00167697" author="Mark Perlmutter" source="Feroze Sidhwa">We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.</a> <bq>European Hospital is located at the southeastern edge of Khan Younis; it’s normally one of three hospitals providing elective general, orthopedic, neurosurgical and cardiac surgical services to a city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now <b>it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description.</b> We first noticed the overcrowding: <b>1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12</b>, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the <b>15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital</b> — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp.</bq> <bq>Many staff had no sense of urgency and often no empathy, even for children. We were initially taken aback by this, But we quickly learned that <b>our Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip.</b> Like all Palestinians in Gaza, they had lost family members and their homes. Indeed, <b>almost all of them now lived in and around the hospital with their surviving family.</b> Although they all continued working a full schedule, they had not been paid since October 7; health sector salaries are paid by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and are always cut off during Israeli attacks.</bq> <bq>Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us <b>he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur.</b> During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, <b>he developed osteomyelitis</b> — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and <b>his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him</b> and brought him to European Hospital.</bq> This sounds like a Stephen King novel. <bq>After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was [sic] injured: Her home was [sic] bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was [sic] buried under the rubble of their home. <b>We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.</b> One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.</bq> <bq>Rafif, a keen and bright-eyed <b>13-year-old girl, had a chronic ulcer on her amputated right lower leg, an external fixator on what remained of her right leg and malnutrition that was obvious from her sunken face and recessed eyes.</b> Still, she was without major complications. With access to food, proper wound care and future surgical treatment — none of which is guaranteed, but possible — she could survive. But her brother, 15-year-old Rafiq, was so severely malnourished that he could barely speak. <b>The explosion that ripped his sister’s foot off and killed his mother had also sent shrapnel through his abdomen, tearing his intestines apart. He had open wounds on his buttocks that made it impossible for him to lie on his back or sit upright, and a broken left shoulder that had never healed, leaving it frozen.</b> He screamed in pain with any attempt at examination and was constantly terrified.</bq> <bq><b>On July 2 the Israel Defense Forces ordered Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated.</b> European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/07/25/biden-brags-that-the-united-states-is-not-at-war-as-he-bombs-yemen/" author="Matthew Petti" source="Reason">Biden Brags That 'the United States Is Not at War' As He Bombs Yemen</a> <bq><b>President Joe Biden called himself "the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world"</b> in a speech on Wednesday night. Less than an hour before Biden spoke those words, the U.S. military had announced that it was bombing Yemen again.</bq> See what I mean about lying all the time? Like, bigly? OK, in Biden's case, it's possible he may just have forgotten about all of the wars he's involved in. Or may he just buys his own bullshit about not being "involved in wars" when the U.S. hasn't officially admitted to having boots on the ground. When the U.S. provides all the weapons for one side of a war, it doesn't consider itself to be "involved." <hr> Reddit is positively inundated with pro-Harris propaganda, as is most U.S. and European media, as are most of all but a reliable core of my blog feeds. All I can think when I see someone making the case for Harris is that they're telling me "boy, this particular shit sandwich sure tastes much better than that other one!" They have no idea that they could very likely be chowing down on a completely different shit sandwich in two weeks or two months, if polling doesn't go well. Impossible? Of course not. That's exactly what they were doing two weeks ago, before Biden withdrew from the race. It's possible that this is the shit sandwich that they're going to go with, since they've got their own polls showing Harris neck-and-neck, if not already outright beating Trump in November. And that's about all I'm willing to invest in the election at this point. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PA_kshZh0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/c7PA_kshZh0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Matt Walsh" caption="Am I Racist? | Official Trailer"> It's a non-believer doing a Borat on the Anti-racism world. Without getting into anything else about verifiability and so on, if this movie is half as good as the trailer, I might have to see it. Oh! That's who Matt Walsh is: he hosts the Daily Wire, a show I've heard bad things about, but never personally seen. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> The following offer from Avis for a rental car is, for me, a microcosm of the scamminess of the U.S. economy. The offer you see before you get to this page is for about $200, which seemed like a good rate. Click on through to see that you've also, apparently, opted for almost $100 of "Rental Options"---which is patently not true; I denied everything---and also $133 of "Taxes and Fees". <img src="{att_link}img_8922.jpeg" href="{att_link}img_8922.jpeg" align="none" caption="AVIS rental offer" scale="50%"> This is just scamming, pure and simple. They get you to waste your time getting this far in the form and hope you that you just accept the additional fees before of the sunken cost of the time you've already invested. You're safe in the knowledge that every other part of the rental-car monopsony is going to do the exact same thing to you. This is grinding psychologically, always having to be on the lookout for not getting scammed. This kind of stuff is much easier to do now that there are no human interactions left: you can't just call this company and ask what's going on. There's nowhere you can go to complain. Your only option is to not rent a car, which, in the U.S., is not really an option, as it's huge and there's practically no usable public transportation. <hr> <img src="{att_link}apple_pay_has_some_pretty_fancy_customers.jpg" href="{att_link}apple_pay_has_some_pretty_fancy_customers.jpg" align="none" caption="Apple Pay has some pretty fancy customers" scale="50%"> I noticed this beauty in the Safari release notes: <iq>Fixed arbitrary 8 digit limit on a line item's total amount.</iq> Just take a minute to think about how that bug came up: someone bought something that was at least $10M with a credit card. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> Man, just because you can't hear the music don't mean I'm crazy for dancin'. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/against-nature.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Rafaël Newman">Against Nature</a> <bq>[...] we are never totally in agreement with others, including with those in our own camp, including with our closest friends, including with ourselves. <b>Who has never come home of an evening turning over something they’ve said during the day and wondering, “Now why did I say that?”</b> Since perfect and total agreement is an impossible fantasy, the issue at stake is rather: how can we create a space of disagreements effective, creative? <b>How can the disagreements among La France Insoumise, the Verts and the PS be the point of departure for a more inventive, a more progressive politics?</b></bq> <bq>What Louis is evoking here—the constructive interaction of differences in the name of a greater good—is in effect the basic recipe for politics: <b>bringing together disparate actors with a common stake so that they can work on producing compromise solutions to complex problems. What is also commonly known as collaboration.</b></bq> <hr> I recently watched two videos about different topics---video games and movies---but that expressed a similar attitude toward effort, especially when associated with risk. The philosophy that comes through is that a whole generation seems to be slowly rediscovering that you have to put the time in to get good at something or to get good results. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPnTm8C_OfY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JPnTm8C_OfY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Patrick (H) Willems" caption="The Insane Realism Of The Movie That Changed How Cars Are Filmed"> This is a really good and interesting video. Patrick seems to put a ton of time in to his work. His breadth of knowledge is astounding. His attention to detail as well. He discusses how the racing scenes in <i>Grand Prix</i> were filmed live, with only one shot possible, basically while running a race, which Patrick deems <iq>an insane amount of pressure.</iq> What an odd thing to say. How else were you going to make those scenes in the 1960s? Nowadays, you would just make everything with CGI, digital camerawork, and <i>it would be obviously inferior</i>. You can just tell that it's not real. It never happened. It's like the plane landing at the start of <i>Godzilla Minus One</i>. This looks "real" only for younger people who've never seen a movie older than 30 years. Of course you would try to reduce the risks you're taking: the risk of wasting money, the risk of missing the shot, the risk of not getting your vision in the can. But, once you've reduced the risks, you <i>still go for it.</i> The other video was about video games that actually challenge you beyond button-mashing. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4ATxqprwm0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/z4ATxqprwm0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Daniel Netzel" caption="Rekindling your love of gaming since 2009..."> Here, you follow along with Daniel as he "discovers" that challenge and complexity is more rewarding. He does this in the context of video games, specifically hard games like <i>Dark Souls</i> or <i>Bloodborne</i>, which he'd picked up and fallen in love with because of the incredible aesthetics, but found himself unable to play because you had to ... play strategically. I'm not kidding. He chronicles his journey of being immediately frustrated and dying all the time, then discovering walkthroughs by people who were able to relatively easily defeat the games because they <i>developed skills</i> by <i>practicing</i>. The video goes on to let its viewers know that these tactics can be applied <i>outside of the world of video games.</i> Of course there is such a thing as talent. But training picks up where talent stops. If you want to be good at something---for whatever definition of good brings you joy---then you'll have to fill the gap left by your talent. Maybe you get lucky and you don't have to work very hard at it. But it's much more likely that you can use your talent as a head start to get even farther than everyone does <i>by working and training hard.</i> You've got to put the time in. You can't just become a good programmer by reading a book and having Google, Copilot, and StackOverflow at the ready. You can't just get on your bike and ride 100 miles. You can't just sit down and write an essay in an hour. You'll never learn Chinese. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvf07P7fhu0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/lvf07P7fhu0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="John Hodgson" caption="Stewart Lee: Tornado/Snowflake - 17th March 2022 - Harrogate"> I very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don't really know any other comedian like him. It's impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you'd end up citing half the show. Perhaps he sums it up best in the second hour---<i>Snowflake</i>---with this bit at <b>01:41:00</b> or so. <bq>It's [...] all right [...] but it took him 45 minutes to tell a barely adequate anecdote about an author I'd never heard of.</bq> Which is also not correct, because it's more than all right. I think it's brilliant. This was the punchline to a joke he'd started 30 minutes earlier, with: <bq>So I found myself reading an article in GQ by the 1970s punk-era polemicist and popular 21st century novelist Tony Parsons. Do people know who Tony...? [murmurs of agreement] A lot of you, not everyone, which is a shame, because I'm now going to talk about Tony Parsons for 45 minutes.</bq> Earlier, there was a segment about a relatively stuffy Times reporter named Alan Bennet, who'd given Stewart a great review, but couched it in terms that seemed somewhat backhanded as compliments, as they would almost guarantee to consign him to high-brow think-piece style comedy venues. <bq>He's fearless, undeterred by an audience's failure to respond. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman" source="Wikipedia">Erving Goffman</a> would have liked Stuart Lee. Who's that? Who's Erving Goffman? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? That's a quote for the poster isn't it? That'll pack him in at the Bradford Alhambra! It's austere stuff. Stewart Lee is the J.L. Austin of comedy. What does it mean? J.L. Austin? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? I googled Erving Goffman. Erving Goffman is the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century. His major areas of study include the sociology of everyday life, social construction of self, social organization of experience, and particular elements of social life such as institutions and stigmas---and he would have loved me, wouldn't he? He'd've been flailing around in a tsunami of his own urine by now! Stewart Lee is the J.L Austin of comedy. Right. J.L Austin was a British philosopher of language, perhaps best-known---if at all, Alan---for the theory of speech acts. Austin's work ultimately suggests that all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging on metaphysics of language that would posit propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. And I'm the him of this! I'm the him of this! If you've come along here tonight, hoping to see two-and-a-half hours of the kind of J.L. Austin-influenced that Erving Goffman would have loved, then you can fuck off, cos it's not going to be that, is it? [...] This is the kiss of death, this Alan Bennett review. [...] I hate Alan Bennett.</bq> At <b>02:08:00</b>, <bq>I actually wrote that bit to be like that, to show you who I would be if I was who they say I am. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Right? Yeah. That's right. Listen to that. And that - that's how good I am. I can write jokes that fail in exactly the way I want them to, which is much harder than writing the kind of shit funny jokes that you like.</bq> You can see full transcripts of very similar shows for <a href="https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=stewart-lee-tornado" author="" source="">Tornado</a> and <a href="https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=stewart-lee-snowflake" author="" source="">Snowflake</a>.