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Links and Notes for August 30th, 2024

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</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="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/YesAmericaBad/comments/1f76joo/semantics/" author="" source="Reddit" date="April 6, 2020">Fight it at home</a> <img src="{att_link}fight_it_at_home.webp" href="{att_link}fight_it_at_home.webp" align="none" caption="Fight it at home" scale="50%"> <bq>We have gulags, we just call it "prison labor". We have secret police, we just call it "undercover cops". We have brutal crackdowns on dissent, we just call it "riot control". Everything they tell you to hate about other countries we have right here, right now. Fight it at home.</bq> A commentator added: <iq>they have corruption, we call it lobbyism.</iq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/kamala-touched-me" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">“Kamala touched me!”</a> <bq>[...] standing behind one of those California families that flies to Paris to go to guidebook-recommended restaurants where everyone is speaking English and who order a crème brûlée with the pre-decided intention of declaring it “divine” [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/30/the-venezuela-elections-of-28-july-2024-what-and-whom-to-believe/" source="CounterPunch" author="Alfred de Zayas">The Venezuela Elections of 28 July 2024: What and Whom to Believe?</a> <bq>A relentless manipulation of public opinion followed in the early 2000s with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq. In the 2010s, media bias was persistent in most reporting on Libya, Syria, Russia and Ukraine. Today we are witnessing the same with regard to Belarus, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Palestine and so forth.</bq> <bq>We are told what and whom to believe, whom to praise and whom to hate. It is about a certain epistemology, a cognitive structure, a belief template — and people do want to believe. As Julius Caesar wrote: – “quae volumus, ea credimus libenter” — « We believe what we want to believe ».²</bq> <bq>Causes and consequences are reversed. Since 1999, the Venezuelan government has had to cope with this kind of h ybrid warfare, an Orwellian “fake news” battalion and a “hate speech” machine that applies double standards, works teleologically and distorts reality.</bq> <bq>I documented how the Venezuelan government tried to fill the gaps caused by US sanctions, launched a vast food-distribution program known as CLAP, and endeavoured to offer shelves full of meat, fish and canned goods, even though the unilateral coercive measures by the USA had caused colossal damage to the Venezuelan economy.</bq> <bq>This is precisely why the Venezuelan parliament has recently approved a bill to review the funding of all NGOs, since some of them can be considered “foreign agents” – not unlike those Russian and Chinese foreign organizations that fall under the American Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938.³ Yet, as we all know, quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi – what is permitted to the hegemon is not permitted to the rest of us.⁴</bq> <bq>Venezuela is an enormously rich country, has the largest oil reserves in the world, as well as gold and a number of important minerals. If Maduro’s government is overthrown, economic opportunities will open up for American corporations, as we have heard from Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. All the social reforms in Venezuela will be quickly abolished and the history of Chávez and Maduro will be erased.</bq> <bq>The USA does not want to allow a socialist system to succeed in Latin America under any circumstances. It would be a “bad example” for other states in the region that would also like to guarantee their citizens economic and social rights. Salvador Allende tried it in Chile in 1970 and was overthrown in 1973. Manuel Zelaya tried it in Honduras and was ousted in a coup in 2009, Evo Morales tried it in Bolivia and was chased out of office in 2019. Pedro Castillo tried it in Peru.. He has been in prison since December 2022.</bq> <bq>These illegal unilateral coercive measures (UCMs) also forced millions of people to leave the country. These are not political refugees who reject the reforms of Chávez/Maduro, but economic migrants who are directly or indirectly affected by the UCMs made in USA.</bq> <ol> The media screams for sanctions against a so-called dictator. The sanctions cause miserable and desperate people to migrate to the U.S. The media screams about immigrants and demands regime change and intervention. </ol> The ruling elite's only goal is the resources. The media's strings are also being expertly plucked because something still exists that the U.S. oligarchs don't have. So they lazily put their miserable machine in motion to expend a miniscule fraction of their wealth and power to acquire much more, shoveling the resources of another country into their insatiable maw. They don't need it as they already have so much but they don't want anyone else to have it either. It's pure evil. It's pure control. It's mindless acquisition. It will be judged harshly by the hopefully more enlightened society that follows ours. <bq>On August 22, the Supreme Court issued its ruling, confirming that Maduro was indeed re-elected with 52 percent of the popular vote. The opposition and the US media promptly rejected the court’s ruling. But the Supreme Court is the final authority.</bq> <bq>What we are witnessing is reminiscent of various so-called “colour revolutions”, a euphemism for coup d’état. This was the case in Georgia in 2003, in Moldova in 2009, in 2014 with “Euromaidan” in Ukraine, and in early 2022 in Kazakhstan (albeit unsuccessfully) – all with the help of the USA and the EU.</bq> <bq>What is at stake is the principle of State sovereignty – not just Venezuela’s sovereignty and the Venezuelan people’s right of self-determination, but the sovereignty of other States in Latin America, Africa and Asia. What is crucial is our recognition of the need to apply international law uniformly and not à la carte, in the spirit of US “exceptionalism”.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/29/patrick-lawrence-the-sound-of-enforced-silence/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Sound of Enforced Silence</a> <bq>[...] they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it. Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5.</bq> <bq>I have been, since the Russiagate years, perfectly comfortable with the term “Deep State.” And here it comes again, reliant as always upon its appendages in the Big Tech social media platforms and the more repellant quadrants of corporate media as they attempt to extinguish all other-than-approved opinions and perspectives.</bq> <bq>Narwani now stands accused of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.” This ruling came without warning. All Narwani got was this:<bq>Your account, or activity on it, does not follow our community guidelines. No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request a review of this decision.</bq></bq> Always keep copies. <bq>Narwani, who earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in international affairs before joining the Great Craft, writes forthrightly and without regard for however much her reporting may shock the comfortably misinformed. Hers is not the stuff of beach reading, which is where its strength lies. Narwani’s investigations at the height of the CIA’s covert operation in Syria were especially distinguished but proved simply too honest for American media — The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon, and so on — to continue taking. When Huffington Post stopped accepting her work, it scrubbed her entire archive.</bq> Always keep copies. <bq>We lose all such density of understanding when power—political power, media power, Big Tech power—affixes the label “terrorist” to an organization, a person or a group of people. All are thenceforth rendered two-dimensional, while we are rendered ignorant—precisely the intended state. And in this new wave of censorship, the drift is that journalists, too, can be accused as terrorists or of acting as their accomplices.</bq> <bq>I will take this opportunity to assert that the notion of “hate speech” and all efforts to outlaw it are wholly objectionable in any society purporting to be democratic and come to, at the horizon, nothing short of thought control. Contempt may be a nobler sentiment, but hatred is an altogether human emotion and we all have a right to it. The Germans, who are way ahead of Americans in this line, are a good indicator of where the suppression of “hate speech” leads: It leads to a polity that no longer knows itself because its people, fearful of prison or fines, no longer live their lives, so to say, publicly. All becomes furtive.</bq> <bq>My mind drifts back to the Democratic National Convention as I consider these events. I think of all those dreamy, worshipful faces, eyes uplifted, to which the cameras turned in the course of the speeches delivered by various party elites, and, of course, Kamala Harris when she formally accepted her nomination last Thursday evening. How innocently eager they seemed to have something, someone, they can believe in. How lost they were to the world as it is all around them. And how cynical the illiberal liberals who run the party as they manipulate the emotions of these people while condemning them to ignorance of the imperium the party is committed to sustaining.</bq> <bq>When you hear Harris say, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” as she stated last Thursday, it is the recipient of AIPAC funds speaking in the code the Israel lobby understands: Worry not. You will get what you have paid for.</bq> <bq>if Harris is elected in November, getting her through the following four years will require an escalated version of the censorship regime the national-security state and Big Tech imposed on dissenting voices during the Trump years, but with one difference: The objective then was to take down our forty-fifth president; this time it will be to sustain our stunningly unqualified forty-seventh.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/23/as-i-lay-coughing-watching-the-dnc-with-covid-and-faulkner/" source="CounterPunch" author=" Jeffrey St. Clair">As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner</a> <bq>Of course, if Faulkner had told this story straight what he called his “tour de force” would have been purged off the shelves in schools and libraries from Tallahassee to Tulsa. He understood that America holds itself in too high regard to talk straight about the things that matter most: the harm you suffer and the harm you cause, the deaths that afflict you and the deaths you inflict. This is even truer in politics than it is in literature.</bq> <bq>This is a story about poor people who become poorer when things they can’t control make them do things they can’t afford, like bury a wife and mother. It’s 30 miles to Jefferson but the Bundrens take 9 days to get there. They spend much of that time going back and forth over the same ground, reversing the progress they’d made the day before, a kind of incrementalism most Americans are familiar with in the time of neoliberalism.</bq> <bq>[...] whatever was in the casket that the Bundrens were trying to keep a lid on was more than just the decaying corpse of Addie Bundren, rotting in the July heat like the fish Vardaman is sure she’s been transformed into. It’s a burden of history, a burden of those lost in war, a burden of an economy that works for the owners and the confidence artists but works almost everybody else to an early grave, even if some of them can afford a scrap of earth to be planted in.<bq>Any old fool should be able to dig a hole.</bq>The question for America is: When do you stop digging? When have you dug yourself in so deep that you can’t dig yourself out?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/russia-lenin-putin-ukraine-dugin/" source="Jacobin" author="Patrick Lempges & Armen Aramyan">In Russia, They Don’t Read Lenin Anymore</a> <bq>[...] a professor who attends an international conference can be declared a foreign agent. Patrick Lempges It also implies that the “real” Russians are one united bloc, and any dissent is instigated from the outside. It’s them against us. Armen Aramyan Yes, definitely. Especially since the beginning of the war, the “foreign agent” narrative has done a lot of harm to political discourse in Russia. A lot of people, even in my own circles, have started policing each other: “Oh, you are on American grants,” “You are on European grants,” and so on. It’s really terrifying. This notion of foreign spies and agents is very influential in Russia, even among people who think of themselves as anti-Putin.</bq> This sounds very much like what is going on in the U.S. as well. <bq>The West really pushed Russians into Putin’s arms and into this whole ideology of Russia versus the West, so that even anti-Putin Russians started thinking, “Okay, the West doesn’t want us either. Nobody likes us, so we might as well stand with Russia.”</bq> <bq>Yet even if Russia is supposedly this great anti-fascist country, that coexists with Russian nationalism and xenophobia toward Muslims and people from Central Asia. Migrant laborers especially face that. It’s incomparable to what migrants endure in European cities — they are treated as subhuman. There is a joke in Russia that says we defeated the Nazis only to become them.</bq> <bq>I think Navalny stands out among the Russian liberal opposition. His investigations showed how oligarchs and government officials enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of the country. He bravely announced his opposition to the war despite being imprisoned and became a martyr upon his death in February this year. This is why he is widely respected by political activists from my generation regardless of his political views, which could be summarized as anti-corruption populism.</bq> This sounds a lot like Trumpism. He had the right and important message but it came for suspicious reasons, and thus from the "wrong" person. You can support the ideas without supporting the person. <bq>Navalny began to criticize all of the liberals from the 1990s whose radical privatization schemes took everything from so many people, alienating them from politics altogether. He showed that those liberals who shed crocodile tears about Russia’s stolen democratic revolution actually destroyed Russian democracy themselves and gave birth to the status quo that allowed Putin to emerge in the first place.</bq> <bq>This critique was eye-opening for many young people and helped them understand how the privatizations of the 1990s created the class of oligarchs, ruined chances for democracy in Russia, and why so many older Russians are so distrustful toward democratic politics.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/31/gxmp-a31.html" author="Jacob Crosse" source="WSWS">Kamala Harris pledges no letup in genocide, war, attacks on immigrants in CNN interview</a> Author Jacob Crosse is always to be taken with a grain of salt, as he often veers into outright spittle-throwing idiocy, but the summary in this article is quite reasonable. <ul>Harris promulgates the original myths of October 7th, conceived on or soon after that day, as if the Israelis have not failed to find evidence for the wildest claims or even adjusted the numbers downward as they discovered that they'd killed a lot of their own people. She unabashedly lies about October 7th, mentioning unsubstantiated rapes very prominently, just like Biden. She at least didn't mention the beheaded babies, which are Biden's favorite. Russia/Ukraine was not worth mentioning. German tanks in Russia was not worth mentioning. Harris is very proud of having closed the borders to filthy, criminal immigrants. Harris would not ban fracking, or probably even reduce it. </ul> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/stop-doing-genocide-is-the-most-reasonable" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">"Stop Doing Genocide" Is The Most Reasonable Political Demand Ever</a> <bq>It’s maddening how liberals are acting like those who want an arms embargo against a regime that’s presently committing genocide are making some kind of outlandish demand. It was freakish enough in 2016 and 2020 when they did this to progressives who wanted basic things like universal healthcare that everyone has in normal countries, but now they’re actually taking the same “well you’ve got to be reasonable with your demands” tone over people who want an end to GENOCIDE.</bq> <bq>We need a word that’s stronger than “dystopian” for this. Democrats finally learn that they need energy and enthusiasm in order to win elections, so they start squealing about “joy” and “fun” and making memes and flower power posters… but they do it during an active genocide that’s being perpetrated by the same administration they’re feigning all this “joy” about.</bq> It's absolutely ghoulish and history will judge them harshly. <bq>I mean, seriously, what the fuck kind of crazed civilization does something like this? What a demented, maniacal way to behave. These freaks are dancing on the graves of mutilated children. They are laughing in the face of screaming parents clutching tiny bloody body parts to their chests in the most anguish any human being can possibly experience. Lunatics. Bunch of deranged fucking lunatics.</bq> What's interesting, though, is that this is 100% not the take that the people over at FOX News have on it. They are, of course, 100% for the genocide, so they can't go after the Democrats for being unfathomably ghoulish. Either that, or they legitimately don't see the disconnect because they don't believe in the genocide. It's kind of an own-goal, though, because the first team that comes out against the genocide is going to win the election. Right now, all the maneuvering we're seeing is to somehow win the election without pissing off Israel and bringing the wrath of AIPAC down on every representative's head. <bq>Trump isn’t evil because he’s another Hitler, he’s evil because he’s another Obama. So much emphasis gets placed on how different Trump is from other US presidents, when all the evidence of his actual presidency showed the most evil thing about him is how similar he is to them. And both sides do this. Both Trump’s supporters and detractors frame him as some radical deviation from the norm, with his supporters not recognizing how fully aligned with the establishment swamp he is, and his detractors not realizing how depraved the norm actually is.</bq> <bq>Whichever side loses the US election will claim it was “rigged”, either by Russia or the Deep State or someone else. Of course it was rigged; the only two viable presidential candidates are both backed by billionaire oligarchs and warmongering swamp monsters. It was rigged right out in the open from the very beginning by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, both with campaign funding and with the billionaire media who normalize and manufacture consent for the fake two-party scam. But neither side will talk about that very real election rigging.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/02/xbnb-s02.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Biden and Harris call for escalation of Gaza genocide following death of six Israeli hostages</a> <bq>The killing of the six hostages dominated US news media coverage all day on Sunday, the same media that largely ignores the far greater daily death toll from Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. These reports uncritically echoed the statements of the Israeli military about the details of the deaths, although such statements have repeatedly been proven false in the past.</bq> <bq>A mass protest of more than 500,000 people erupted in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening demanding that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu end the war in Gaza. News organizations reported that this is the largest demonstration in Israel since the genocide began eleven months ago.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ov-ORwMjo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/s_ov-ORwMjo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="What Interest Does the U.S. Have in Who Governs Venezuela?"> Greenwald discusses how the U.S. is completely uninterested in Venezuela's elections and much more interested in its continued resistance to becoming a vassal state. <bq>Does anyone ever talk about the need to democratize Saudi Arabia or object to the lack of democracy in Egypt or the United Arab Emirates? No, of course not. Nobody does. Or in Jordan or in Kuwait? Because we have no interest in changing the governments there. We're very happy with the governments there. So we don't care at all about whether there's democracy.</bq> Don't ever forget that pretty much everything you hear in the U.S. media about Venezuela is a manipulative lie intended to make you not only support the U.S. continuing crippling economic sanctions but also any upcoming military (including the CIA) incursions to gain control of that country's resources. These propaganda are designed to make you cheer coups as "victories for democracy" because they will now put an end to the completely fictitious waves of Venezuelan criminal rapists that are flooding the U.S. Thanks FOX News! <bq>So, how is it that you can have U.S. officials openly admitting---boasting---that the reason there's a change in government in a country from a democratically elected leader to one that's imposed on those people undemocratically was because the United States helped engineer the subversion of democracy? How can you hear things like that, on the one hand, or know that the United States embraces the most tyrannical despots on the planet in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and then believe, on the other hand, that the reason we're so concerned about the integrity of democracy and elections in Venezuela is because we're just so benevolent---we just care so much about democracy, we just want to spread freedom all over the world? It's something that will never stop being confounding and bewildering to me, generally. I understand that propaganda often is designed to work well based on studies of how the human mind functions. It's a science developed over many decades but sometimes it's so blatant---the falsehoods on which it's based---that I do think it's worth documenting. But it's still something that I don't understand how it isn't just immediately visible as the obvious fraud that it is.</bq> The clip he showed where the U.S. official was boasting about a coup was from CSPAN. No-one watches that. If neither silo promoted it, then people don't "know" that this happened or was admitted. The NY Times isn't going to tell them. Also, people don't "know" that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are dictatorships. They are not described as such when mentioned, unlike Venezuela where Maduro---and Chavez before him---are continually described as dictators, even though they're actually elected. Ghaddafi as well. Putin as well. People don't "know" what Glenn assumes that they know so there's no paradox by which he should be bewildered. His context is that, whenever he hears about Egypt or Saudi Arabia, he thinks about them as dictatorships, not as the loving, democratic, open, economic partners that they're described by the mainstream media. His context is that, when he hears about Russia or Venezuela or Iran or North Korea or China, he wonders why the focus is on their often fictitious crimes and not on the real crimes of vassal nations. People don't think like that because they don't "know" these things. They know them when you tell them and they will temporarily agree with you during a discussion but it will all quickly fade from memory and be replaced with the avalanche of propaganda that they hear all day, every day. They claim not to listen to it but it worms its way in nevertheless. All of the subtle---or even quite overt---phrases that have no anchor in reality or truth. All of the descriptions and characterizations, which, while not outright falsities, leave out so much context and detail and countervailing information that they amount to lies intended to manipulate people and produce a particular mindset. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knJIu1uVx1A" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/knJIu1uVx1A" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom" caption="Scott Ritter : The Evil That Netanyahu Has Wrought"> This is a very good interview. It starts with about 10 minutes of analyzing the prisoner exchange between Russia and the U.S., including details about both Evan Gershkovich (almost certainly a NOC for the CIA and definitely aware that he was contravening Russia law) and Paul Whelan (an ex-Marine, yes, but dishonorably discharged for larceny and identity theft, so probably just doing crime in Russia). He discusses the depravity of Israelis wanting to gain access to Palestinian prisoners in order to exercise their God-given right to rape anyone who's not Jewish, in which case it's not rape. It's...something else. Finally, Ritter discusses Iran's approach to the Israeli provocations and possible nuclear scenarios. Does Iran have a nuclear weapon? <bq>I believe they do not. I believe they have the ability to enrich uranium of sufficient enrichment that could be used in a nuclear device. Is it going to be a uranium weapon or a plutonium weapon? If it's a uranium weapon, then they've got to convert it into metal. They could make a simple gun design. That's not that complex but an implosion device requires work on high explosives that the Iranians haven't, to my best of my knowledge, completed yet. It's also something that the Iranians said that they weren't going to do. I'm more worried, to be honest, about a Pakistani weapon than I am about an Iranian weapon. That the Pakistanis would deliver a nuclear weapon at a target that Iran picked. [...] If there's a general war between Israel and Iran, it's very likely that Israel would use some sort of nuclear device. It would be necessary to, for instance, penetrate into the FDOS nuclear facility, which is underground. It can't be penetrated by any conventional weapons; Israel would have to use a nuclear penetrator to get to it. If Israel used a nuclear weapon against Iran, it's inevitable that an Islamic weapon will hit Israel. It's inevitable. I'm just trying to be as clear as I can be about this: it's inevitable that an Islamic weapon will hit Israel---probably destroy Israel---and the Pakistanis have made it clear that that weapon probably will have "made in Pakistan" on it. Whether the Pakistanis deliver it themselves or give it to Iran to deliver, that's a question for the future to decide. But Israel needs to know that there is no free pass: that they don't get to use a nuclear weapon and nothing happens. Eventually, if Israel uses a nuclear weapon, Israel will be destroyed by nuclear weapons.</bq> <bq>Israel is now entering this [fight with Hezbollah] exhausted by nearly nine months of war in Gaza that has diminished it, depleted it. The troops are physically and morally exhausted---psychologically worn out. Their tanks no longer work. They don't have spare parts for their tanks. They're running out of ammunition. Their leadership is frayed. The morale of the men is low. And now they expect them to be thrown into battle against a highly trained fanatical force like Hezbollah that is ready for this fight, has been preparing for this fight for over a decade and will take this fight to Israel. Israel thinks that this fight's going to be fought in southern Lebanon as they seek to push the Hezbollah back to the Lani River. This fight will be fought in Galilee as Hezbollah comes in with tens of thousands of highly trained troops who are prepared to take the fight to Israeli towns, Israeli villages. Israel can't win this fight. They will lose this fight.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR7eHsFwQDY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/hR7eHsFwQDY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Smart Cookies Podcast" caption="'Israel's soul died a long time ago...' | Norman Finkelstein on the current state of Israeli society"> <bq>There is no fundamental disagreement with Netanyahu, not only in the Israeli elite, but [...] we have to be clear: Israeli Society is completely lunatic. It is. It's the entire society. If you look at the polls, only 4% of Israeli Jewish society believes Israel is using too much force in Gaza. 4%. And 40% think it's using too little force. That's a completely lunatic society. To try to impose or burden prime minister Netanyahu with all the sins of Israel: it's completely ridiculous. Netanyahu is Israel. He's an obnoxious Jewish supremacist. [...] I left out an important element: an obnoxious narcissistic Jewish supremacist. Those are the three characteristics that is Israel: obnoxious beyond belief; narcissistic beyond calculation; and Jewish supremacist. [...] When they see Netanyahu, they see themselves. That's why they vote for him.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1f9msqd/one_had_a_toy_gun_and_the_other_had_a_ar15_rifle/" author="" source="Reddit">One had a toy gun and the other had a AR-15 rifle Tamir Rice should still be alive</a> <img src="{att_link}tamir_rice_vs._colt_gray.webp" href="{att_link}tamir_rice_vs._colt_gray.webp" align="none" caption="Tamir Rice vs. Colt Gray" scale="75%"> <bq>Tamir Rice, a 12 year old Black boy, was playing with a TOY gun in a PARK in Cleveland when police shot and MURDERED him within TWO SECONDS upon arrival. Colt Gray, a 14 year old white teen, is ALIVE and was ARRESTED after he shot and killed four people at a Georgia high school.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZzcquhDcN0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/AZzcquhDcN0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Vijay Prashad - Iran, Israel & Venezuela and the Context Missing in the Media"> <bq>The Israelis are playing a very reckless game here and I don't understand why Europe doesn't recognize this.</bq> Vijay Prashad offers an in-depth analysis of the history of Hezbollah, as well as the more recent history in the region. He particularly emphasizes that Israel is, by all reasonable definitions, the terrorist state, as it routinely crosses international borders to assassinate people. These murders are then completely forgotten by the NATO nations as they all wonder when an enemy like Hizbollah or Iran will "attack out of the blue", simply because they hate Israel so much---and for no known reason. At about 16:00, Prashad corroborates Finkelstein's more provocative formulation that Netanyahu is Israel since the <iq>Israeli voting public, one way or the other, find him to be a good leader.</iq> All of the things that we find appalling---like torture camps---don't seem to bother the voting public at all. It's just like the U.S. though---when Obama said <iq>we tortured some folks</iq>, it actually improved his popularity. The U.S. public is at least vaguely aware of how the country works---and they don't care. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/kamala-half-measures-gaza-israel" author="Ted Rall" source="">The Gaza War Is a Pass-Fail Course</a> <img src="{att_link}ted_rall_-_9-6-24.jpg" href="{att_link}ted_rall_-_9-6-24.jpg" align="none" caption="Ted Rall - 9-6-24" scale="60%"> <bq>Without a total arms embargo against Israel, my family and I will be dead. But I'm reasonable. I'll settle for Kamala feeling badly about it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/three-important-questions-you-wont-hear-asked-in-the-presidential-debates/" author="Tom Valovic" source="CounterPunch">Three Important Questions You Won’t Hear Asked in the Presidential Debates</a> <bq><ul>Question 1: The Role of AI in the Economy and the Job Market Question 2: Privatizing the Healthcare System Question 3: Out-of-Control Corporate Influence in U.S. Politics</ul></bq> These would be good questions and I bet they won't be addressed or answered in anything approaching a serious manner during the entire campaign, to say nothing of whether they come up during the so-called debate. A couple of other burning topics that won't be addressed in a serious manner: <ul> Sanctions and ramping up war against China. The morality or validity of economic war against the rest of the world. The increasing likelihood and utter madness of nuclear war and having nuclear weapons without treaties. Constant escalation of the war with Russia that was basically started in 1990 and has escalated seriously since 2014, 2022, and now 2024 where Russian territory is being attacked. The genocide in Gaza and unquestioned support of unhinged ally Israel, which will cause a regional, if not global war. Climate change and how to rebuild society to not only accommodate it but to avoid exacerbating it. The continued erosion of the working and middle classes. The continued erosion of quality of life for a large part of America. The psychological and mental-health crisis alongside the drug-abuse crisis that it causes. How is this society so unhealthy and what are you going to do about it? The increasing inequality and how money only funnels upward: "trickle-up economics". </ul> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNYc3qq6g0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/6rNYc3qq6g0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Dems Desperately Revive Russian Interference Hysteria Ahead of Election"> <bq>Here you have a group of people---black Americans---who are very charismatic. They're real activists. They believe in the things that they've been saying for decades and they're now facing prison because of their opposition to the war in Ukraine and the allegation that they received tiny amounts of money from people connected to the Russian government. And that was what Jill Stein is supporting. I support them too. I think it's a great violation of free speech. That's what Tucker Carlson said as well. A lot of civil Libertarians believe that. And simply because Jill Stein is supporting this group and opposing the prosecution and intends to attend their trial, the Democrats released a statement saying 'oh look here's Jill Stein yet again keeping company with Russian agents.' Do you see what scumbags these people are?! How sinister that is?! None of them have been convicted, by the way. These are all just allegations. The trial starts this week. We had on their lawyer. We had them on as well. We're definitely going to have them on again. But the very idea that, now, if you even oppose U.S. prosecution on free-speech grounds, you somehow become under suspicion for being an agent of a foreign power, even though you've never been charged with that, is a core tactic of the Democratic government for criminalizing free speech. And it's exactly what they're trying to do to Jill Stein. And they've been doing it to Jill Stein for years going back to 2016, when she committed the crime of attending a peace conference in Moscow with dozens, if not hundreds, of prominent peace activists from around the world. But because it was in Moscow, because Putin was there for about 10 minutes, they used that to accuse her of being a Russian agent---even though Jill Stein is someone, like those black socialists, who has been advocating for ideas her entire life that have never changed.</bq> The Democrats are scumbags. AOC is a scumbag, an absolute partisan shill. She's not been anything else for years. It's a mystery why people keep expecting different behavior from her. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/liberalism-removes-its-mask" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Liberalism Removes its Mask</a> <bq>The true outrage was in the stops, harassment, and worst of all, the political monopolies in cities that made it impossible to fix solvable problems like the rooting out of bad officers, or COMPSTAT-type programs that pre-mandated tickets and arrests. This out-of-sight, out-of-mind policing program was a product of the weird paternalistic bigotry of America’s intellectual class, which wants to appear enlightened while avoiding contact with minorities. By the end of I Can’t Breathe I came to believe the extraordinary willingness to support Constitution-flouting enforcement tactics was rooted in a psychological need of rich voters to avoid facing their own racial views, while keeping working-class cops the symbols of racism.</bq> <bq>Rich urbanites didn’t want to hear about all those poor people they voted to stop, frisk, ticket, strip-search en masse, arrest on bullshit crimes, and send north to all those prisons built by Mario Cuomo. But they’ll gush over prosecutions of J6 protesters, surveillance of “DVEs” and terrifying aviation threats like Tulsi Gabbard, and censorship of “far-right” Internet users who spread “disinformation” or disobey federal lockdown or vaccine policies. This is all freeing for white liberals. In the age of Trump, there’s no longer need to pretend to care about people on the business end of unconstitutional crackdowns, who can and must be painted as deserving all of upscale America’s most aggressive enforcement plans.</bq> <bq>[...] they can barely restrain their glee at using institutional power to go after unwelcome visitors to what they consider their political neighborhood, i.e. earth. They’ll keep painting shutdowns and arrests as blows against “unaccountable” billionaires, but make no mistake, the real targets of their anger are the millions of ordinary slobs refusing their advice and calling them names online. In cities they arranged it so the riff-raff were neither seen nor heard (and those who disobeyed went upstate, fast). Until they get the same service everywhere else, well, aristocrats gonna aristocrat. They just don’t feel like hiding it anymore.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}i_hate_it_when_russia_interferes_in_our_elections.webp" href="{att_link}i_hate_it_when_russia_interferes_in_our_elections.webp" align="none" caption="I hate it when Russia interferes in our elections" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/revolution-is-now" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Revolution Is Now</a> <bq>An effective solution that we can all begin applying in the here and now is working to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist by spreading awareness of the depravity and deceit of the empire. The primary obstacle to real change is the fact that far too many people are far too brainwashed by propaganda to rise up against our rulers, so our first task is to begin working to wake people up out of that propaganda-induced coma so they can see how desperately real change is needed. The tyrants won’t end their tyranny until they are forced to, and they can’t be forced to as long as enough people are propagandized into believing things are fine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/venezuelan-president-declares-christmas-in-october/" author="" source="The Onion">Venezuelan President Declares Christmas In October</a> <bq>Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro decreed that Christmas will start Oct. 1 in the country, the announcement coming as Venezuela grapples with the fallout from a July presidential election that saw Maduro claim a third term despite global skepticism and outcry from the country’s opposition movement.</bq> This is The Onion, completely in the tank for the narrative surrounding Venezuela. <iq>authoritarian leader</iq> (he's the elected president), <iq>global skepticism</iq> (only the U.S and its vassals doubt the results), <iq>opposition movement</iq> (a group that has already tried to coup the government twice and is largely funded by the CIA). <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/trump-workers-trade-populism-rhetoric/" source="Jacobin" author="Jared Abbott">Why Do So Many Workers Love Trump?</a> <bq>After identifying and empathizing with the economic struggles facing working Americans, Trump consistently put the blame for “a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs” squarely on the shoulders of large corporations and “elites in Washington”:<bq>The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs. . . . Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan — and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.</bq></bq> Trump is nowhere near this eloquent eight years later. <hr> <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/years-saved-lives-rural-america-173725861.html" author="Christopher Maag" source="New York Times">For Years, He Has Saved Lives in Rural America. Who Will Take His Place?</a> <img src="{att_link}conversation_with_rob_about_emts_in_upstate_ny.jpg" href="{att_link}conversation_with_rob_about_emts_in_upstate_ny.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> I got this link from a good friend with the message: <bq>Two things I take from this: what a warrior this guy is, and wow is rural medical care hanging by a thread.</bq> <bq>[...] the vast distances an ambulance must travel from patients’ homes to the nearest hospital increase the risk that patients will die before they reach an emergency room.</bq> We're not all living in the same future. Some of are much more subject to the exigencies of physics and Mother Nature than others. We could narrow the gap if we lived in a society that kept medical facilities open because they're necessary and useful even if they're unprofitable. <bq>VanCoughnett, for all his experience and professionalism as an emergency medical technician, is not paid. Nor were his three assistants in the ambulance. And neither are most emergency responders across much of New York; of the 989 emergency medical providers in the state, 80% rely in part or entirely on volunteers [...]</bq> Holy sweet God, that is an awesome example of taking advantage of the best of us. People in NYC are double-billing their hours at $600 per hour for absolute bullshit and this guy is saving poor people's lives for free. My friend, who sent me the link, wrote this in response: <bq>Old Forge ambulance put out an announcement for recruiting and got exactly zero responses. That house of free cards is going to topple in the next decade, if not sooner.</bq> I like that the article was originally published in the New York Times, where they can write things like <iq>The result is a staffing crisis that imperils ambulance corps across the country.</iq> ...and then not spend a sentence wondering why they can make front-page headlines arguing that CEOs are definitely worth $25M per year while somehow simultaneously believing that EMTs are worth $0 per year. My sardonic friend writes: <bq>They don't vacation in rural areas very often.</bq> The article continues: <bq>[...] rural population decline was causing a shortage of emergency workers.</bq> NO. Being compensated for a huge emotional and time investment with only "feeling good about yourself" is the problem. It's nice but it doesn't pay your $13K ACA yearly deductible. My friend summarized wonderfully: <bq>Yeah they glossed over that and moved on real quick. The whole article could have been based around the fact that these people pay for the training to do free shit and the only non altruistic thing they might get out of it is slightly better chance of landing a taxpayer funded state employee job.</bq> I wrote: Very well-put. We've solved the problem once again. A pity no-one listens to us. This is what always happens when I read the NYT: I appreciate that they're even covering the issue! But then I get mad at how tone-deaf and elitist that coverage is. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/03/jmth-s03.html" author="Andrea Peters" source="WSWS">Racial inequality among the working poor shrinks in America</a> <bq>Using data drawn from multiple census years, federal income tax returns and the Social Security Administration, the researchers analyzed information from about 57 million children born between 1978 and 1992 and their parents. The scholars conclude that a key indicator of class inequality shows that racial gaps between poor, working class blacks and whites are falling. Meanwhile, class gaps are growing among whites.</bq> <bq>Working with these definitions, the researchers find that economic mobility has changed rapidly in the last 15 years. “Between 1978 and 1992,” note the authors, “household incomes in adulthood fell sharply for white children growing up in low-income families. At the same time, incomes increased for white children growing up in high-income families.” The gap in average earnings between adults born into poorer white families and those born into better-off white families in 1978 was $17,720. By the time those born in 1992 were 27 years old, that number had grown to $20,950. The cause of this increasing gap was primarily that whites from households toward the bottom saw their incomes decline during that period.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/06/nmsq-s06.html" author="Jacob Crosse" source="WSWS">Harris and Trump compete for support from billionaires</a> <bq>Harris’s walk-back on Biden’s meager tax proposal was greeted warmly by the ultra-wealthy in her corner. After Harris’ speech, billionaire Mark Cuban wrote on X that Harris “is listening to business people and getting their feedback on what’s fair and what will lead to more investment in business. She is Pro Business. More supportive of entrepreneurs than any candidate in a long time. It’s only going to get better.”</bq> <bq>A recent report from Forbes analyzing fiscal filings through July found that at least 28 billionaires are supporting Harris, to the tune of $116 million so far. Forbes found that the billionaires backing Harris have a net worth of $280 billion and had each given at least $1 million to groups supporting the Democratic nominee. Harris’ largest donors include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, each of whom have funneled over $20 million to groups supporting Harris.</bq> <bq>As for Trump, Forbes found that as of the end of July, 26 billionaires had already given groups backing Trump-Vance more than $1 million. Trump’s largest backer, Timothy Mellon, has given Trump-supporting groups $125 million so far this cycle, more than all the billionaires backing Harris combined.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/the-us-made-the-dutch-an-offer-they-couldnt-refuse/" author="Eugene Doyle" source="CounterPunch">The US Made the Dutch an Offer They Couldn’t Refuse</a> <bq>The moves are part of a broader – ultimately doomed – effort to cut China off from advanced technology. It is just another example of how the US has weaponized the global supply chain. Sanctions, secondary sanctions, chokeholds on the SWIFT trading system and other coercive measures are pushing the global system towards a great reckoning. Microchips are more important than oil in driving business in the digital age. The US strategy is to constrain China’s development by kneecapping some of the US’s own allies who supply goods to China. It’s a bit like the Nord Stream pipeline being blown up (who do you think did that?) – it hurt Russia and screwed Germany but has done wonders for the US which now supplies Germany with 80% of its liquified natural gas at prices that make the Germans’ eyes bleed.</bq> <bq>Beijing isn’t without countermeasures and we have yet to see China push back really hard against US bullying. In August last year China fired a warning shot across the bow: limiting export of two rare earth metals – germanium and gallium – both used in semiconductor manufacturing and in both of which China holds near-monopolies. They are critical to your phone and the digital networks it connects to. According to the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) the “short-term damage is small, but the West must wake up.” CEPA’s proposed solution to the germanium issue, however, is reflexively American: “Chinese control of germanium production in southeast Asia must be loosened. Sanctions should be imposed on Chinese companies that control bauxite refining in Southeast Asia – with the aim of forcing them to relinquish ownership,” it said in its online platform. This is, yet again, gangster capitalism [...]</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/roaming-charges-116/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Ain’t That America, Something to See, Baby?</a> <bq>Bidenmentalism in a nutshell: “On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs – without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.” Sorry, Joe, you haven’t and you can’t…</bq> Don't be sorry, Jeffrey. Joe's a lying sack of shit. Or, perhaps, rather: the Biden administration is a lying sack of shit. They both are. <bq>The Global temperature in August 2024 tied with August 2023 for the warmest of any August on record. Up in Svalbard at 78° north latitude in the Arctic Ocean, the average temperature for August was a hitherto unfathomable 51.8 F (11 C)…</bq> <bq>For three months, the temperature in Phoenix averaged 99F…On Wednesday, the temperature in Phoenix reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a record 100th straight day.</bq> <bq>US gasoline demand, the world’s single largest pool of oil consumption, has almost certainly peaked for good [...]</bq> Wait ... that's good news? Right? <bq>[...] solar prices are falling. Solar module price falls to a record low of $0.096/W, according to Bloomberg’s Global Solar Market Report. The record low prices drove global installations to a new high in 2024. The report says 592 GW will be installed in 2024, an increase of 33% from last year’s record high.</bq> That's also good news, right? Even if it's probably too little too late... <bq>A study out of UC Davis shows that ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are luring people from using more sustainable modes of travel, like walking, cycling and public transport: “More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles.”</bq> <hr> <bq>In an attempt to track plastic recycling in Houston, Brandy Deason, now dubbed the James Bond of Plastic, dropped Apple AirTags in her recycling bin, which led her to find out that the city of Houston has collected 250 tons of plastic since 2022 and not recycled any of it. Most of it hasn’t even gone to the recycling center.</bq> <bq>They call it car bloat. While vehicles across most of the world are getting smaller and more efficient, the reverse is true in the US, where the size and weight of cars, trucks and SUVs are growing with lethal consequences on the highways. According to the Economist, “For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.”</bq> <bq>“We have become a civilization based on work itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It’s as if we’ve collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.” – David Graeber</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/fall-respiratory-season-is-around" author="Katelyn Jetelina" source="Your Local Epidemiologist">Fall respiratory season is around the corner</a> <bq>Nationally, wastewater levels for Covid-19 are still very high. All states, except Michigan, have “high” or “very high” levels. Michigan had a sudden drop in wastewater levels this week, so I expect this to be due to unstable data instead of a reflection of “true” levels. Time will tell. While the West has peaked (notably at the same levels as last winter; this was no small wave), the other regions are still rising.</bq> <bq>Hospitalizations continue to rise. For the third week in a row, more than 1,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/05/xrph-s05.html" author="Benjamin Mateus, Bill Shaw" source="WSWS">Metformin and COVID-19: An old drug with compelling anti-viral properties</a> <bq>The analysis of the impact of metformin on Long COVID was published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, showing that the drug metformin lowered one’s risk of developing Long COVID by 41.3 percent>, while no such reduction was seen with ivermectin or fluvoxamine. The overall incidence of Long COVID in the metformin group nearly one year out from their initial infection was 6.3 percent compared to 10.6 percent in the placebo group. Earlier initiation of metformin during acute COVID-19 resulted in a greater reduction in risk. Initiating metformin within four days of symptom onset reduced risk by 63 percent versus 36 percent for initiation after. The strain of the virus did not affect the incidence of Long COVID. Vaccination status also did not impact the results [...]</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8T1LPtS4-A" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/O8T1LPtS4-A" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Critical Drinker" caption="Rings Of Power - The Ultimate Insult To Tolkien"> <bq>[...] overwrought performances by a cast of effeminate gen Z pussies that ticks almost every diversity box except acting ability, to the hamfisted direction and oversaturated cinematography that's so dark you literally can't see what the fuck is even going on half the time, it all adds up to a billion-dollar slab of arse cancer that shames the legacy of Lord of the Rings and makes a complete mockery out of everything that Tolkien stood for. Put another way: the Rings of Power Season 2 fucking sucks.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441041#41442229" source="Hacker News">Interviewing Tim Sweeney and Neal Stephenson</a> For me it was Termination Shock that finally convinced me to stop reading his books. He just likes to write really long, repetitive and wildly overly detailed books. I was entertained by SevenEves and Reamde but I'm open to the possibility that I might very well react as I did to Termination Shock if I tried rereading them. I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/YesAmericaBad/comments/1f6tmt9/what_is_the_states_monopoly_on_violence/" author="" source="Reddit">What is "the states monopoly on violence"</a> [sic] <img src="{att_link}violence_is_never_the_solution.jpg" href="{att_link}violence_is_never_the_solution.jpg" align="none" caption="Violence is never the solution" scale="60%"> <bq>[...] or did you mean that violence is only a solution when it helps maintain the status quo?</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <img src="{att_link}uptime_of_101_days.jpg" href="{att_link}uptime_of_101_days.jpg" align="none" caption="MacOS uptime of 101 days" scale="50%"> I was just away from my backup drive for 32 days. I had my laptop with me on vacation. For the last few weeks, there's been an OS update waiting but I delayed it until I could run a backup first. By the time I finally applied the update, my laptop had been running for 101 days. I didn't notice any slowdown or degradation at all. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/09/australian-government-trial-finds-ai-is-much-worse-than-humans-at-summarizing/" author="Kyle Orland" source="Ars Technica">Australian government trial finds AI is much worse than humans at summarizing</a> <bq>ASIC used five "business representatives" to evaluate the LLM's summaries of five submitted documents against summaries prepared by a subject matter expert (the evaluators were not aware of the source of each summary). The AI summaries were judged significantly weaker across all five metrics used by the evaluators, including coherency/consistency, length, and focus on ASIC references. Across the five documents, the AI summaries scored an average total of seven points (on ASIC's five-category, 15-point scale), compared to 12.2 points for the human summaries.</bq> <bq>One evaluator highlighted this problem by calling out an AI summary for being "wordy and pointless—just repeating what was in the submission."</bq> <bq>"What we found was that in general terms... the summaries were quite generic, and the nuance about how ASIC had been referenced wasn't coming through in the AI-generated summary in the way that it was when an ASIC employee was doing the summary work," Graham Jefferson, ASIC’s digital and transformation lead, told an Australian Senate committee regarding the results. The evaluators also called out the AI summaries for including incorrect information, missing relevant information, or highlighting irrelevant information. The presence of AI hallucinations also meant that "the model generated text that was grammatically correct, but on occasion factually inaccurate."</bq> This has absolutely been my experience as well. Just this week, I was researching some technologies and search results are already a minefield of AI-generated slop that is grammatically correct but doesn't actually say anything. Each paragraph looks more or less the same. An example of an article to avoid is <a href="https://blog.mirkopeters.com/azure-traffic-manager-vs-front-door-decoding-microsoft-azures-traffic-routing-solutions-f1363494703c">Azure Traffic Manager vs. Front Door: Decoding Microsoft Azure’s Traffic Routing Solutions</a>. It's 43 minutes long and requires a Medium account. It is chock-full of endless paragraphs that all sound more-or-less alike. This is the AI-generated future: a future of time wasted reading articles that aren't worth it. Just grabbing a paragraph at random, <bq>The strategic use of Azure Traffic Manager in conjunction with Azure services provides a robust foundation for managing complex application ecosystems. This integration ensures that businesses can effectively handle traffic surges, distribute loads evenly, and maintain optimal performance across all components of their digital infrastructure. With Azure Traffic Manager at the helm, organizations can confidently navigate the challenges of application management, leveraging the full potential of Azure’s cloud computing capabilities to achieve outstanding results.</bq> This doesn't tell me anything about the service except that it's good. There's a gigantic FAQ at the end of the article, if you're interested. The answers don't look any different than the rest of the content above. Let's look at the last one for "Is it complicated to migrate from Azure Traffic Manager to Azure Front Door?": <bq>Migrating from Azure Traffic Manager to Azure Front Door involves planning and understanding the differences in capabilities between the two services. While it’s not inherently complicated, it requires a careful approach to ensure that your routing rules, performance objectives, and security considerations are accurately reflected in Front Door. Microsoft provides documentation and support to help with the transition, emphasizing a smooth migration process that leverages Front Door’s advanced features for improved application delivery.</bq> Thanks for nothing. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.meziantou.net/automated-tests.htm" source="" author="Gérald Barré">Automated tests</a> <bq>[...] if you write an ASP.NET Core application, you should not test a <c>Controller</c> directly. Instead, use a <c>WebApplicationFactory</c> to configure and start the server, then send a request to the server and assert the response. This way, you test the application as a whole, including the routing, model binding, filters, middlewares, Dependency Injection, etc. Also, you can refactor the application to handle requests using Minimal API, a custom middleware, or a static file without updating the tests.</bq> <bq>Starting docker containers of the services you need to test: TestContainers or .NET Aspire can be useful. If starting a docker container is slow, you can reuse it between multiple test runs. Note that .NET Aspire can also provision resources in the Cloud (Azure, AWS, etc.). Using emulators provided by the service provider. For instance, Azure provides an emulator for Azure Storage.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/09/02/keeping-cross-cutting-concerns-out-of-application-code/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">Keeping cross-cutting concerns out of application code</a> <bq>Why is it important to decouple application code from Polly? First, keep in mind that in this discussion Polly is just a stand-in for any third-party dependency. It's up to you as a software architect to decide how you'll structure your code, but third-party dependencies are one of the first things I look for. A third-party component changes with time, and often independently of your base platform. You may have to deal with breaking changes or security patches at inopportune times. The organization that maintains the component may cease to operate. This happens to commercial entities and open-source contributors alike, although for different reasons. Second, even a top-tier library like Polly will undergo changes. If your time horizon is five to ten years, you'll be surprised how much things change. You may protest that no-one designs software systems with such a long view, but I think that if you ask the business people involved with your software, they most certainly expect your system to last a long time. I believe that I heard on a podcast that some Microsoft teams had taken a dependency on Polly. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true, while we may not wish to depend on some random open-source component, depending on Polly is safe, right? In the long run, it isn't. Five years ago, you had the same situation with Json.NET, but then Microsoft hired James Newton-King and had him make a JSON API as part of the .NET base library. While Json.NET isn't dead by any means, now you have two competing JSON libraries, and Microsoft uses their own in the frameworks and libraries that they release. Deciding to decouple your application code from a third-party component is ultimately a question of risk management. It's up to you to make the bet. Do you pay the up-front cost of decoupling, or do you postpone it, hoping it'll never be necessary? I usually do the former, because the cost is low, and there are other benefits as well. As I've already touched on, unit testing becomes easier.</bq> <bq>Cross-cutting concerns, like caching, logging, security, or, in this case, fault tolerance, are usually best addressed with the Decorator pattern.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/3/python-developers-survey-2023/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Python Developers Survey 2023 Results</a> <bq>25% of survey respondents had been programming in Python for less than a year, and 33% had less than a year of professional experience.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.heise.de/blog/Scrum-XP-Co-warum-keiner-mehr-agil-arbeiten-will-9846824.html" author="Golo Roden" source="Heise.de">Scrum, XP & Co. – warum keiner mehr agil arbeiten will</a> Golo Roden trifft das Mal ziemlich ins Schwarze. 👏 Vor allem, "[...] ich bin der festen Überzeugung, dass Scrum deutlich überbewertet ist" und "Dass Scrum und Agilität heute oft gleichgesetzt werden, ist problematisch." In seinem Abschnitt namens "Agilität als Cargo-Kult" torkelt er ab und zu in Richtung der Argumentationsform <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman" source="Wikipedia">No True Scotsman</a> bzw. wenn Scrum in einem Team nicht funktioniert, denn machen sie nicht echt Scrum bzw. Scrum not working? Do more of it. Roden wirft "der agil-industrielle Komplex" vor, genau das zu machen. Für mich ist aber schwer zu erkennen wie genau das Bangen um eine Zertifizierung (agil-industrielle Komplex) sich unterscheidet von einen Prozess als "Fake Agile" zu bezeichnen (Roden). Zum Glück präzisiert er im Fazit seine Argumentation. Der "agil-industrielle Komplex" wird vom <a href="https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html" author="Jerry Pournelle">Iron Law of Bureaucracy</a> vorgesehen: "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.< Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." (Wenn man etwas lustiges über Agile lesen will, denn leite ich euch an <a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-haymaker-you-if-you-mention-agile-again/" source="Ludicity">I Will F*@&ing Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again</a> weiter; trigger warning: der Author flucht ständig.) A buddy of mine summarized that article as: <bq>If you are dumb, scrum does not help, if you are smart, you don't need scrum...</bq> That's perhaps a bit cynical but it's hard to disagree. The structure of Scrum is generally helpful when you're trying to herd people into doing work for which they're not really qualified. He then mentioned a medium-to-large-sized team in our organization that seemed to be doing well with Scrum, to which I replied: But they might be doing great without all of the Scrum ceremony as well. I think the point is that organized people are going to succeed because they're already doing all of the stuff that helps them achieve their goals. Imposing the structure of Scrum helps the most when people didn't really have much of a structure to begin with. Some will understand that having a structure that helps them achieve goals is what's important (and will adjust Scrum to help them meet their goals); others will simply learn that they have to do Scrum, but not understand the deeper reason why it helped. Those are the ones to watch out for. For example, Scrum postulates daily standups because, while "have sync meetings when necessary" is more efficient and appropriate, it's also too vague for teams that can't figure out what "when necessary" means. <hr> <a href="https://auth0.com/blog/the-backend-for-frontend-pattern-bff/" source="Auth0" author="Andrea Chiarelli">The Backend for Frontend Pattern</a> The problem that this pattern addresses is that the SPA has too much access to too many tokens. <bq>The SPA interacts with the authorization server to get the ID, access, and refresh tokens. Then, the SPA uses the ID token to get data about the user, the access token to call an API, and the refresh token to get a new access token once it expires.</bq> The solution offered by BFF is to set up a proxy web application that mediates all access to the actual web server by providing session-cookie-based access only through a proxying web server called the "Backend". <img src="{att_link}bff-architecture.png" href="{att_link}bff-architecture.png" align="none" caption="BFF Architecture" scale="75%"> The advantage seems to be that actual authorization keys never make it to the SPA or "public" client. But that public client still has a session cookie that grants it access to the keys on the "Backend". So...what's the difference? Where's the increase in security? It's an extra level of indirection, yes. But, instead of having access to the API or the Authorization server, the client has access to those things through the "Backend". Maybe the API surface is smaller? But doesn't the SPA need access to all of the APIs? Otherwise, why would they exist? <bq>While the BFF pattern solves the main security concerns of token exchange and storage for SPAs, some developers are concerned about performance issues. Specifically, the mediation run by the backend as a proxy API can be a bottleneck in some contexts. There is an alternative to the BFF pattern that meets this need, but it comes at the cost of reduced security. This alternative is the Token-Mediating Backend pattern, which allows the backend to negotiate the tokens as in the BFF pattern but provides the access token to the SPA. This way, the SPA can directly call the protected API using the access token. While this pattern keeps token negotiation secure by always relying on the backend as a confidential client, it leaves the issue of storing and protecting the access token open. To overcome this issue, you can consider using OAuth 2.0 with DPoP, which binds an access token to the client, making it no longer a bearer token. In this case, you need a DPoP-enabled authorization server, of course.</bq> I'm honestly not quite convinced yet that this is better than what it replaces. <hr> <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/display-contents/" author="Ahmad Shadeed" source="">CSS display contents</a> <bq>CSS <c>display: contents</c> is a useful feature when you don’t have control over some parts of the HTML and can make you achieve things that aren’t possible without markup change. That’s being said, it’s important to make sure that you test for accessbility when using it with HTML elements like <nav>, for example.</bq> This is another fantastic, interactive article about a useful feature of CSS that illustrates a ton of use cases. I especially like <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/display-contents/#a-grid-of-photos">A Grid of Photos</a> and <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/display-contents/#alternating-columns">Alternating Columns</a>. Shadeed is an absolute treasure. I did find myself wondering how much of what he's done with <c>display: contents</c> could also have been achieved with <c>display: subgrid</c> but I'm honestly not the expert. I'd have to try it out to see whether it would work. And then I got to the <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/display-contents/#subgrid-alternative">Subgrid alternative</a> section and all of my questions were answered. <h id="sports">Sports</h> I'm going to do the Bodensee Radmarathon tomorrow. I was discussing what the average speed was likely to be with one friend who's accompanying me and one who's not. Here's the graphic I sent to explain why I thought 28km/h was too low and that 30km/h was achievable. <img src="{att_link}bodensee_radmarathon_zusammenfassung.jpg" href="{att_link}bodensee_radmarathon_zusammenfassung.jpg" align="none" caption="Bodensee Radmarathon Zusammenfassung" scale="30%"> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/roaming-charges-116/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Ain’t That America, Something to See, Baby?</a> Still the greatest correction note of all time… <img src="{att_link}ladydicorrection.jpeg" align="none" caption="DI GOES SEX MAD"> <bq caption="Statement published by the National Enquirer, August 31, 1997">We apologise for the Princess Diana page one headline DI GOES SEX MAD, which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: A FAREWELL TO THE PRINCESS WE ALL LOVED</bq> <h id="games">Video Games</h>