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Links and Notes for September 6th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#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> This is how 99% of my conversations go. <img src="{att_link}wake-up_call.jpeg" href="{att_link}wake-up_call.jpeg" align="none" caption="Wake-up Call" scale="50%"> <bq>The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/barnier-premier-france-le-pen/" source="Jacobin" author="David Broder">Michel Barnier Is in Office, Marine Le Pen Will Hold Power</a> <bq>While the president last week ruled out a government led by the left-wing alliance, his consultations with Le Pen in effect sought her approval before a new broad-right administration could form. Le Pen threatened “no-confidence” votes on potential candidates who might make deals with the center-left, or even a right-winger hated by her party like Xavier Bertrand . But she told Macron that she would not immediately no-confidence a Barnier government, instead publicly demanding that it should “respect” her RN’s agenda and its over ten million voters.</bq> <bq>With the Rassemblement National easily topping preelection polls, its victory appeared to be the most likely outcome. The second-round results on July 7, seemed to subvert such prognoses. Yet ultimately, they were right all along. Barnier, from France’s fourth-largest political bloc, is now to be premier, both allied to Macronites and dependent on Le Pen’s favor.</bq> <bq>The Left is denouncing a betrayal of the Nouveau Front Populaire’s electoral success. For Mélenchon, the president is “denying the result of the election that he himself called.” France Insoumise’s leader in the European Parliament, Manon Aubry, likewise said that the “results from the ballot box have been erased” and spoke of “Barnier [being] appointed prime minister with the far right’s blessing.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/what-i-got-wrong-about-shock-therapy" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">What I Got Wrong About "Shock Therapy"</a> <bq>An aphorism-spewing figure whose unique place in Russian lore is like a cross of Yogi Berra and Spiro Agnew, Chernomyrdin said one of the most purely Russian things of all time: “Hoped for better, turned out as always .”</bq> <bq>At the eXile , I spent years traveling Russia working various jobs, trying to document what the New York Times called Russia’s “costly and painful, if good, progressive and necessary” transition to capitalism. I saw nothing that resembled capitalism or democracy in my travels. Competition was managed by politicians who doled out zones of commercial operation like racketeers, there was no labor presence (anyone trying to organize in an oligarch-owned business got a bullet in the ear), workers were often paid in products or chits for company-owned commissaries, and assassination was the country’s only functioning regulatory mechanism.</bq> <bq>I thought it was intentional: Harvard economists designed mass privatizations creating oligarchs overnight, oligarchs funded Boris Yeltsin’s election campaigns, and Yeltsin allowed American-trained politicians to run his government. Essentially, we helped Yeltsin rob his people so that we could have a co-pilot seat in a conquered vassal state. I was criticized for writing it that way back then, but eventually this became conventional wisdom.</bq> <bq>The gist of the Sachs essay was not that U.S. economic policies toward Russia were misguided or poorly executed, or even that he’s been misunderstood. Rather, he described an American strategy in which economics were subservient at all times — and crucially, from the start — to a security mission. Led by military and security agencies that believed “the Cold War never ended,” the U.S. viewed subjugation of Russia and NATO expansion as primary goals from the very beginning.</bq> Duh? <bq>The premise was the oligarchs who got the privatization cheddar fed it right back to Yeltsin’s campaign, which was far behind the communists in fifth place at 8% in presidential election polls at the start of 1996. He made a mysteriously heroic comeback that year, which was celebrated in a “Yanks to the Rescue” Time magazine cover and a Hollywood movie called Spinning Boris.</bq> <bq>“They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient,” Sachs writes.</bq> This is not really news, but OK. <bq>It turns out, we too are like the Russians: “Hoped for better, turned out as always.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-sachs-a-front-row-seat-to" source="Dropsite News" author="Jeffrey Sachs / Ryan Grim">A Front Row Seat to the Cold War That Never Ended</a> <bq>My third core conviction was practicality. Provide real help, not theoretical help. I advocated urgent financial assistance for Poland, the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine. My advice was heeded by the U.S. government in the case of Poland, but firmly rejected by the U.S. government in the case of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s Russia. At the time I couldn’t understand why. After all, my advice worked in Poland. Only many years later did I appreciate better that while I was discussing the “right” kind of economics, my interlocutors in the U.S. government were the early neoconservatives. They were not after Russia’s economic recovery. They were after U.S. hegemony.</bq> <bq>The proposal for large-scale Western support for the Soviet Union was flatly rejected by the Cold Warriors in the White House. Gorbachev came to the G7 Summit in London in July 1991 asking for financial assistance, but left empty-handed. Upon his return to Moscow, he was abducted in the coup attempt of August 1991. At that point, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, assumed effective leadership of the crisis-ridden Soviet Union. By December, under the weight of decisions by Russia and other Soviet republics, the Soviet Union was dissolved with the emergence of 15 newly independent nations.</bq> <bq>In November 1991, Gaidar met with the G7 Deputies (the deputy finance ministers of the G7 countries) and requested a standstill on debt servicing. This request was flatly denied. To the contrary, Gaidar was told that unless Russia continued to service every last dollar as it came due, emergency food aid on the high seas heading to Russia would be immediately turned around and sent back to the home ports.</bq> The goal has always been obvious: annihilation of the enemy, for profit. <bq>Indeed, from 1991 to 1994, I would advocate nonstop but without success for large-scale Western support for Russia’s crisis-ridden economy and support for the other 14 newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. I made these appeals in countless speeches, meetings, conferences, op-eds, and academic articles. Mine was a lonely voice in the U.S. in calling for such support.</bq> <bq>I opposed the various kinds of measures that Russia was undertaking, believing them to be rife with unfairness and corruption. I said as much in both the public and in private to Clinton officials, but they were not listening to me on that account either.</bq> <bq>In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections. In 2003, the U.S. and NATO allies repudiated the United Nations Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses. In 2004, the U.S. continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic states and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans. In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the U.S. pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. In 2011, the U.S. tasked the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia. In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. In 2014, the U.S. conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In 2015, the U.S. began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Romania, a short distance from Russia. From 2016 to 2020, the U.S. supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council. In 2021, the new Biden administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine. In April 2022, the U.S. called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.</bq> <bq>The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia. They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic U.S., in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.</bq> As Putin put it, "The U.S. does not have allies; it has vassals." <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/05/eastern-germanys-election-trimmings/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Eastern Germany’s Election Trimmings</a> <bq>Will the two leftist parties damage or complement one another? Is it possible, singly or doubly, to revive a struggle against the millionaires and billionaires in Germany and beyond, against war-hungry generals, manufacturers and corrupted politicians, and to promote new thinking and above all new action in the direction of a social system without greedy profiteering, without further exploitation of the poor and hungry – and, above all, without further war or threat of war.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/03/patrick-lawrence-gaza-kamala-harris-and-the-disgrace-of-denial/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Gaza: Kamala Harris and the Disgrace of Denial</a> <bq>Holy St. Jamoli. What ethical abyss is this? To go by this comment thread, a good enough measure in my read, a great many Americans have no more idea of right and wrong than an Israel Defense Forces grunt machine-gunning a crowd of starving Gazans lining up for aid. Can there be any hope for a nation whose people—and these are the educated, we can assume—have retreated this far from the Age of Reason?</bq> <bq>It’s hard to abide the passive framing of Palestinian death in the same speech that reasserts a nuclear power’s right to defend itself — a “defense” that in the past few months has included both American and Israeli representatives calling to level Gaza, mobs rioting to defend the rights of soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner, and bombs shredding hundreds of starving children in refugee camps.</bq> <bq>I have never in my days come across such a collection of misinformed vulgarians in one place.</bq> Citing Hala Alyan: <bq>It is maddening how people advocating the freedom of Palestinians are spoken about, as though their invocation of the genocide were the real problem, the downer, the Trump enabler. It implies that mentioning this administration’s material support to massacre Palestinian civilians is what ruins the vibes, not the act of sending billions of dollars in unconditional military aid to Israel. It is an obnoxious magic trick that makes naming the crime the crime.</bq> <bq>[...] this is exactly what the party elite wanted when they conjured the various frenzies associated with Russiagate to explain their failure in 2016: people who come to prefer lies to the truth, just as Arendt, shortly before she died in 1975, warned those subjected to constant deceit are bound to do.</bq> <bq>Emmanuel Todd, the celebrated French historian (The Defeat of the West, 2024; After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, 2006), argues that we now live amid “an anthropological rupture.” Humanity—humanity in the Western post-democracies, Todd means—has altogether lost its way. We are living through a civilizational collapse, in Toynbee’s terms. Those purporting to lead us are unserious people. A world-historical disorder defines us, for their capacity and ours for rational thought and action, to say nothing of moral principle and empathy, has comprehensively lapsed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/02/us-press-loses-interest-as-winners-of-french-election-arent-allowed-to-take-power/" source="Scheer Post" author="Paul Hedreen">US Press Loses Interest as Winners of French Election Aren’t Allowed to Take Power</a> <bq>One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.</bq> <bq>These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party. Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.</bq> <bq>Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.</bq> The final coalition will somehow omit the party that won the election. How is that even possible? <bq>The New York Times ’ reporting ( 8/23/24 ) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.” Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”</bq> They're neither capable nor interested in hiding their bias. <bq>In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=120626" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Im Osten nichts Neues</a> <bq>Eine Zäsur ist das nicht und wenn die sich selbst als liberal verortenden Parteien den Wink mit dem Zaunspfahl nicht verstehen, wird sich an dieser neuen Normalität auch so bald nichts ändern.</bq> <bq>Dass es ein Widerspruch ist, dass eine im Kern klar neoliberale Partei als Interessenvertreterin der Arbeiter und finanziell Unterprivilegierten wahrgenommen wird, ist klar. Damit könnte man die Analyse eigentlich bereits abschließen. Die AfD hat es – mit Hilfe der politischen Konkurrenz und der Medien – erfolgreich geschafft, Migration und Kriminalität gerade in diesen Wählerschichten zu den subjektiv wichtigsten Themen beim Wahlentscheid zu machen, und da die traditionellen Parteien und auch die Linkspartei ihr sozioökonomisches Profil seit längerem erfolgreich abgeschliffen haben, muss man sich auch nicht darüber wundern, wenn die Wähler sich von ihnen abwenden.</bq> Genau wie die Republikaner mit Hilfe von FOX News in den USA gemacht haben. <bq>Wer sich also darüber wundern sollte, dass das BSW vor allen im Thüringen ein durchaus respektables Ergebnis erzielen konnte, findet hier die Antwort. Die Kriegs- und Rüstungspolitik der Ampel wird von immer mehr Menschen kritisch gesehen und die CDU wird verständlicherweise gerade in diesem Punkt auch nicht als Alternative wahrgenommen.</bq> <bq>Beim Themenkomplex Kriminalität und Migration scheinen die Wähler das Original AfD den Kopien der CDU und der Ampelparteien vorzuziehen, beim Themenkomplex Krieg und Frieden hat das BSW zurzeit ein echtes Alleinstellungsmerkmal und auch bei den sozioökonomischen Ängsten sind die Antworten des BSW im Osten von den Wählern offenbar überzeugender als die der politischen Konkurrenz empfunden worden.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/01/demystifying-how-the-hamas-leadership-works/" source="Scheer Post" author="Hanna Alshaikh">Demystifying How the Hamas Leadership Works</a> <bq>The assumption that Sinwar’s leadership is a rupture with the past follows a tendency in Western analysis to view Palestinian leaders through vague, simplistic binaries like “hawk vs. dove” or “moderate vs. hardliner.” These labels conceal more than they reveal. Compounding this analytic flaw is the sensationalized fixation on Yahya Sinwar’s psychology. This approach reduces complex politics to personalities and assumes that Hamas’s decision-making is largely personality-driven rather than the product of robust internal debates and elections, complex deliberation and consultation, and institutional accountability.</bq> <bq>None of this is to deny that there are sometimes disagreements between leaders within the Movement. This has been a factor at play since the organization’s founding in 1987. However, Hamas is also a Movement of institutions, procedures, and accountability mechanisms. The overarching rule has been consultation, accumulation, and the balancing of the needs of various constituencies. The evidence for this has been public and consistent in the messaging of the organization’s leadership, not just throughout this ongoing genocidal war, but for all of its 37-year history.</bq> <bq>There is no credible evidence to suggest that Sinwar has totally overhauled the structure of the Movement and centralized power around himself. There is, however, plenty of evidence that Sinwar is not just a product of the Movement but someone who spent decades building it and is unlikely to have disregarded the people he grew up with politically and the processes he helped establish.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/kamala-and-the-self-deluding-left" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="The Floutist">'Kamala' and the self-deluding 'left.'</a> Ask yourself this: are you really stupid enough to fall for this kind of blatant manipulation? Will you be able to respect yourself? Just remember: this is how stupid they think you are. <bq>Just glance at it for now: This is how some Democratic voters, and I suspect many, want to imagine a candidate who supports and advances, among various other late-imperial crimes, a genocide of world-historical significance. The imagery seems, somehow, an almost criminal violation of human intelligence.</bq> An intellectual eminence no less than Katrina vanden Heuvel thought it was just ducky. She was so over the moon about how delightful it was that she tweeted it to the world. Lawrence goes into tremendous and painful detail to prove his point but the conclusion is: This is what the U.S. American left is. Nothing more. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/09/opposing-war-should-not-be-a-partisan-issue/" author="Nicky Reid" source="CounterPunch / Exile in Happy Valley">Opposing War Should Not Be a Partisan Issue</a> <bq>Both of these conflicts are the result of America’s vampiric imperial foreign policy. Both of these conflicts are pretty much guaranteed to drag the world deep into Dr. Strangelove country if they haven’t already. And both of these conflicts would end in a week if Uncle Sam simply closed his checkbook. Where the fuck is the antiwar movement? Well, they’re busy going to war with each other at your local diner over which candidate is a marginally less repulsive sack of shit and which nuclear Armageddon is worth being more freaked out about.</bq> <bq>An unprecedented amount [sic] of red meat rural Americans in flyover country are sick to death over seeing huge gobs of their tax dollars going to blow shit up in Ukraine but most of these same nouveau-isolationists have also been deluded into believing that we should send even bigger gobs of their hard-earned cash over to Israel so they can blow up orphanages and maternity wards in Gaza. On the flipside, kids on the left have never been more willing to confront the sacred cow of the Israel lobby on behalf of one of the most marginalized populations on the planet and yet they are still too terrified of being labeled as a Putin puppet to take down their Ukrainian flags and hold Volodymir Zelensky to the same standard. Once again, dearest motherfuckers, we have come to the part of my weekly diatribe where I inform you that this is no coincidence. This is in fact the entire point of the two-party system, to divide and conquer, to sic poor people on poor people, to chop the country into color coordinated warring parties like the Crips and the Bloods so that you rubes are all too busy ripping each other’s throats out and riding dirty on drive-byes to realize that the same oligarchs win no matter who’s left standing because they supply the TEC-9s.</bq> <bq>Everything that conservatives hate about Ukraine they should hate about Israel. After all, what is Israel but the original Ukraine? A toxic, tax sucking, moocher state with about as much regard for the sanctity of human life as your garden variety back-alley abortionist. Israel slurps down $3.8 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars a year so they can build condos for Ashkenazi atheists on the ruins of Jesus Christ’s tomb.</bq> <bq>None of this justifies Russia’s own sickening behavior but Russia’s sickening behavior hardly justifies Zelensky’s either. A man popularly elected to end the savagery in the Donbas is now sending Ukrainian conscripts to die in Russia in an insane scheme to take it back by force. All the while this little Putin has used his unlimited war powers to nationalize Ukraine’s tv news, lock up journalists, ban 11 opposition parties, shutter his nation’s largest Orthodox church, and hold off presidential elections indefinitely. Does that honestly sound like the kind of “democracy” that you’re willing to blow up the world to preserve?</bq> <bq>America is an antiwar nation with a war machine that has grown into the greatest threat to humanity in recorded history. If we can’t drop our tribal bullshit for five fucking minutes to keep this psychotic duopoly from blowing up the world then maybe that’s the fate we deserve, but our kids deserve better.</bq> This is my probably with otherwise intelligent people who pick one side or the other. They're wasting their energy---and generally feeling so smug and morally superior about their choice. It's frustrating and sad. <bq>Fuck both parties and all their proxies. Opposing war should not be a partisan issue. We should all be a part of the same antiwar movement and that starts with us throwing these war parties beneath the treads of their own tanks before they can blow us all to kingdom come.</bq> Amen, Nicky. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-big-business-of-electing-war.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">The Big Business of Electing War Junkies, From Trump and Kamala to Zelensky and Bibi</a> <bq>Donald Trump seems to be attempting to make avoiding nuclear apocalypse in Ukraine a cornerstone of his barely coherent campaign platform while simultaneously calling the Democrats Marxist pussies for not murdering more children in Gaza. Meanwhile, Kamala seems to be running a campaign devoid of even the pretense of a platform beyond some Disneyfied reimagining of her biography that carefully excludes the fact that she was a pampered Berkley brat who grew up to be a glorified prison warden. But, in the few cases where her Clintonian handlers actually let her speak, Kamala, she-wolf of Pelican Bay, tends to lean heavy on vague calls for a ceasefire in Palestine snuck between proclamations of the sanctity of Israel's right to defend itself from infants and pregnant women.</bq> <bq>Basically, the Atlantic Empire, represented by the US, the UK, the EU, and NATO, made Volodymyr Zelensky a counteroffer to Putin's latest ham-fisted peace proposal; fight this fucker forever and we'll foot the bill. Flash forward a couple years and Zelensky is the one launching his own insane special operation inside Russia's Kursk Oblast. Nothing about this operation makes any rational sense from a purely strategic standpoint. At a time when Ukraine is getting pulverized by Russia on the frontlines of the Donbas, they decide to send more than a thousand of their best armed and best equipped men over the border to occupy 1,000 square kilometers of strategically irrelevant territory where they are being quite predictably decimated as we speak.</bq> <bq>[...] Zelensky has stated that it will involve a proposition to increase his crumbling nation's participation in "the global security infrastructure", signaling even further integration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the for-profit western defense industry. This proposition mirrors one that Vlod made just last year when he invited 250 international defense companies from 30 countries to participate in Ukraine's First International Defense Industries Forum where a former comedian who once ran as a peace candidate promised to establish a "special economic regime for the defense industrial complex" while turning his country into one "Big Israel." </bq> <bq>Both Bibi and Zelensky perform their heinous stunts with the full cooperation of American military intelligence. In fact, we have "advisors" on the ground in both of these countries providing them with everything from satellite imagery to detailed logistics on how many children they can expect to kill with our bombs. Why would any superpower behave so despicably? Because war is a racket, and America has built an empire to corner the market. Look no further than the Pentagon if you still don't believe me.</bq> <bq>Raytheon also just happens to be the corporation that manufactures Israel's Iron Dome rocket defense system, which might explain why a Zionist isolationist like Donald Trump hired Lloyd Austin's predecessor, Raytheon super-lobbyist Mark Esper, to serve as his last Secretary of Defense.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/07/ewym-s07.html" author="Andrea Lobo" source="WSWS">Washington presses regional governments to secure Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela</a> <bq>Five weeks after the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela, the fascistic leader of the US-backed opposition, Maria Corina Machado, demanded on Thursday that the Biden administration “do more” to oust President Nicolas Maduro from power. Speaking to reporters from an undisclosed location, Machado argued that this was a matter of strategic importance for US interests globally and concluded: “I am partial to maximum pressure.” She then repeated her appeals for the Venezuelan military to overthrow Maduro.</bq> Hooray! This is just what the world needs: another maniac to add to Zelensky and Netanyahu. There are so many people rubbing the hands together for a similarly tragic situation in Venezuela. It's not like it's going great there now, but the U.S. is looking to make things so much worse. <bq>[...] having already failed to oust Maduro by simply recognizing another self-anointed “president” like Juan Guaidó in 2019, Washington has continued to support talks with Caracas for a negotiated handover of power. If possible, the Biden administration hopes for a regime change without a prolonged civil war or a more catastrophic economic disruption that could affect oil production or provoke a further exodus of migrants [...]</bq> They will make sure to delay everything until after November 5th---although there are neocons and MIC members who will want to move forward beforehand, so as not to miss the opportunity. <bq>The Biden administration, however, has made clear that in the context of an emerging world war against Russia and China, nothing will suffice but total domination of Venezuelan oil and other key natural resources and cheap labor platforms in US imperialism’s “backyard.”</bq> Good boy, Biden. Very good. You're a good dog. <bq>That same night, Argentine President Javier Milei hosted a summit of the fascist Madrid Forum that Machado belongs to. There, this cheerleader for the Zionist genocide in Gaza lamented that “the free world is crossing its arms” while Maduro turns Venezuela into a “human cemetery.”</bq> Good boy, Milei. Very good. You're a good dog. <bq>[...] the elections were conceived of from the outset as a mechanism to press forward for regime change and secure US geopolitical interests in the context of brutal economic sanctions. All demands for an inquiry on election data from these governments are aimed at furthering the drive to bring to power the CIA “assets” who comprise the right-wing opposition.</bq> <bq>[...] in Honduras and a media and political campaign calling for the overthrow of Castro herself similar to that preceding the US-backed military coup in 2009 that ousted Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya.</bq> Obama and Hillary ousted her husband and now Biden and Blinken are working on another coup in Honduras. You would think they would have their hands full but too much is never enough. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qz_qKWFIaM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0qz_qKWFIaM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Breakthrough News / The Socialist Program" caption="Imperialism’s Non-Stop War Against Venezuela"> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/rainbow-flag-genocide-vs-maga-hat" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Rainbow Flag Genocide Vs MAGA Hat Genocide</a> <bq>The degree of comfort US liberals have with men like Cheney is more evidence that they don’t view people in the global south as fully human. If they did, his endorsement would be rejected with the same revulsion they’d show endorsements from NAMBLA or neo-Nazis. [...] Any political worldview that’s worth a damn necessarily includes a deep and visceral hatred of Dick Cheney, and an abhorrence toward any ideology which sympathizes with him.</bq> <bq>So long as Americans are looking to their electoral system to address the murderousness, tyranny and injustice of their government, that murderousness, tyranny and injustice will continue. The first step to escaping from a burning building is to stop pushing on the fake fire exit that’s been painted on the wall. These fake elections are there to keep you trapped in the burning building. The real exit lies elsewhere.</bq> <bq>The existence of Donald Trump allows both Republicans AND Democrats to drag the political spectrum far to the right of where it used to be. Now instead of "healthcare please" Americans are arguing over which genocidal tyrant might murder fewer people.</bq> <bq>A new poll says 70 percent of Jewish Israelis think it should be forbidden to express any sympathy for civilians in Gaza on social media platforms. Israelis will murder, oppress and steal from an ethnic group they’ve designated as less than human for 75 years, cry victim when that group retaliates, commit genocide in response to the retaliation, and then say you should be forcefully banned from criticizing them for this.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/10/bcxu-s10.html" author="Eric London" source="WSWS">Jacobin, DSA and Sanders promote lie that Harris is progressive</a> <bq>Asked directly whether he thought Harris was “progressive,” he said, “yeah, her views are not mine, but I do consider her progressive.” When pressed as to why he and Dick Cheney support the same candidate, Sanders delivered gushing praise of the former vice president and architect of the stolen 2000 election, saying, “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy.”</bq> <bq>[...] the only agenda Sanders is laying out is full support for the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. Meyer is forced to acknowledge in the article that “Gone are his references to Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. What’s there instead is a more limited platform of demands,” most of which are “in the Democrats’ 2024 platform.” In other words, Sanders has dropped all but the most meaningless and minuscule calls for reform and has fallen in line behind the leadership he once paid lip service to opposing.</bq> <bq>[...] a potential Harris administration will introduce no significant social reforms and Meyer’s claim to the contrary is nothing but an attempt to foster illusions. The Democrats have completely abandoned social reform to such a degree that fascist blowhard Trump can falsely present the Republican Party as the party of the working class.</bq> <bq>The party which Meyer claims is simply waiting for a little nudge to enact a left-wing agenda is currently waging a genocidal war of extermination against the people of Gaza, killing 200,000 people and cutting millions off from food and water. He downplays this, writing that “many in the Democratic Party’s political class are at least privately uncomfortable with Israel’s genocidal war,” as though the (non-existent) private pangs of conscience of Capitol Hill staffers are any consolation to those residents of Gaza and the West Bank who remain alive. Meyer does not even mention the Biden-Harris administration’s role in the escalating war against nuclear-armed Russia. He admits that Harris is “tacking right on immigration,” noting without critical comment that Democrats believe this may “win back disgruntled working-class voters.” The sycophancy of the DSA, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez exposes their role as cogs in the machine of imperialist politics. They attempt to promote the Democratic Party as a catchment area to trap social opposition and direct it behind right-wing candidates of war and inequality. This is combined with efforts to prohibit rank-and-file workers from overthrowing the trade union bureaucracies that suffocate their struggles.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuFLYfZi9Dk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/AuFLYfZi9Dk" caption="Dems Applaud Dick Cheney's Endorsement of Kamala" author="Glenn Greenwald" width="560px" source="YouTube"> <bq>Liz Cheney is saying what I've been saying forever, which is that this idea that the only reason people like this support the Democratic party is not because they hate Trump, it's because they have now far more in common with the core policy---foreign policy, domestic policy, world view---of these liberal interventionists in the Democratic party---of these warmongers in the Democratic party, wanting to fuel the war in Ukraine, wanting to constantly expand NATO to dominate the world through military force, spend trillions of dollars on our military while our cities fall apart. That has always been the Cheneys' worldview. Always. Since as long as I have heard of Dick Cheney---going back into the 70s, to say nothing of when he was vice president---these people haven't changed their views at all. The Democratic party has transformed. That's why there's a realignment. That's why the working-class voters---not just the white working class but increasingly the Latino working class, the black working class---are migrating away from the the Democratic party to the Republican party. And the working class in general has done so in droves since Trump came to be the representative, the face of the Republican party. It's why the only place that you hear contempt for neocons or skepticism of the US security state is in the Republican Party. The only place you hear opposition to the war in Ukraine is in the Republican party because these parties have transformed their ideology, mostly as a result of Trump. And here Liz Cheney is telling you, in as clear of a voice as she can, that she's endorsing Kamala Harris, not only through opposition to Donald Trump but because, increasingly, she believes more in the worldview and the foreign policy of the Democratic party than in the Republican Party, even though neither Dick Cheney nor Liz Cheney have changed a single one of their views. It's not that they've moved further left---whatever that means---and now find more alignment in the Democratic party. They're exactly where they've always been. I defy anyone to tell me a single view that Liz Cheney or Dick Cheney advocated---not just central but an ancillary view---or that Bill Kristol or David Frum or Nicole Wallace---any of these people who are core Bush/Cheney operatives who are now Democrats---I defy anyone to describe [or] identify a single view that they've changed. They've not changed a single view. The Democratic party has moved toward them---aligned far more with their foreign policy---and that is what Liz Cheney is here to tell you while she explains on ABC News why she and her father both endorse Kamala Harris.</bq> <img src="{att_link}no_self-awareness_whatsoever.jpg" href="{att_link}no_self-awareness_whatsoever.jpg" align="none" caption="No self-awareness whatsoever" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/democrats-have-decided-to-just-ignore" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Democrats Have Decided To Just Ignore American Muslims This Election Cycle</a> <bq>Which, just like the destruction of Gaza itself, says so much about where the real values of mainstream western liberalism actually lie. It’s not about being good, it’s about feeling good. It’s not about being moral, it’s about feeling moral. It’s not about fighting for justice and equality, it’s about fighting for electoral wins and emotional comfort. While people who actually care are trying to wake everyone up to the reality of the nightmare in Gaza, American liberals are trying to get everyone to shut up and stop shaking the bed so everyone can go back to sleep. What’s happening in Gaza should radicalize you against status quo politics, and if you are a good person, it will. The fact that Democrats of all levels are so completely incurious and indifferent toward what Muslims in their country have been saying since October shows they are not good people, and shows they are not what they pretend to be.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}threat_to_democracy.webp" href="{att_link}threat_to_democracy.webp" align="none" caption="Threat to Democracy" scale="50%"> <bq>We've reached the point in American democracy where making demands to candidates is "helping the other side win" and voting for other parties is a threat to democracy.</bq> This is correct but it's not new. It's been happening for a long, long time. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-debate-was-two-assholes-bragging" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Debate Was Two Assholes Bragging About What Murderous Empire Sluts They Are</a> <bq>If you missed the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, this was pretty much the tone of it: Trump: She’s a communist. She’s literally a Marxist. Harris: Actually Goldman Sachs loves me. Trump: I saw her eat a cat. It was on the TV. Harris: Dick Cheney loves me too. Trump: She won’t kill any Palestinians at all. Harris: I’ll kill way more Palestinians than he’ll kill. Trump: I will kill the most Palestinians. I’ll kill more Palestinians than anyone. Harris: You couldn’t kill even one Palestinian. You are weak. Trump: I am not weak I am strong. I am the strongest. Harris: You’re a weak little girl and you’ll let China win. Trump: She’s gonna start a nuclear war with Russia. Harris: I will invade Russia myself and I’ll kill Putin with my bare hands. I am the strongest and you are the weakest. Trump: It’s not true. It’s not true. Harris: I will also do the most fracking and drill the most oil. Many Republicans have said I’m the strongest. Trump: No. No. She’s weak on immigration. Harris: I kick immigrants in the balls for fun.</bq> <bq>She showed that she’s a Republican with pronouns in her bio, talking about how tough she’s going to be on China and how much she loves fracking and oil and Israel and how many Republicans have endorsed her and her policies.</bq> <bq>I don’t support Trump because I spent four years of my life staring right at the administration he was running and writing about what I saw unfiltered by the lens of party politics instead of letting a bunch of asshole pundits confirm my biases for me like you did. That’s the one and only reason we see him differently. Democrats said if Trump was re-elected in 2020 he’d unleash hell on earth, then Biden was elected and he unleashed hell on earth. Democrats will blame everyone but themselves if they lose in November, but it will be nobody’s fault but their own.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-west-is-a-dystopian-wasteland" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The West Is A Dystopian Wasteland Of Moral Degeneracy</a> <bq>The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world’s most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution. The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.</bq> <bq>Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob. Something terrible is happening, and everyone’s going along with it and telling you it’s fine and it’s normal, and even if you’re able to figure out that what they’re doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. So you just move to the fringes of the mob and share your objections with the few people who will listen to you.</bq> <bq>We live out our lives sedated by entertainment and social media and food and pharmaceuticals while genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide unfold all around us, thinking ourselves good and virtuous if we are kind to our pets and hold the correct opinions about racial justice and vaccines.</bq> <bq>There is much wealth to be gained by exploiting labor and extracting resources around the world. There is much power to be secured by murdering, starving and terrorizing any population which refuses to bow to the interests of the western empire. This is why the western empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised: because so much wealth and power depends on ensuring the west remains in a state of moral degeneracy, and that westerners do not regard the citizenry of the global south as fully human.</bq> <bq>The type of civilization which would allow its government to do things like this necessarily has a collective conscience that has been so warped and twisted by propaganda and self-interest that it’s the same as not having a conscience at all. If you can’t regard the vast majority of the population of this planet as fully human and equal to yourself, then morally speaking you’re no better than the perpetrators of slavery and genocide we’ve been taught to judge negatively in history class.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/13/ietp-s13.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Authorizing NATO weapons strikes in Russia, US prepares major escalation of global war</a> <bq>Within the Russian political establishment, there are growing demands for Russia to retaliate against the NATO powers, including with nuclear weapons.</bq> <bq>The US and its NATO allies are acting with staggering recklessness. The NATO powers have justified their actions by baldly asserting that Putin will not retaliate in kind to US actions. On Monday, a group of leading House Republicans published a letter to President Joe Biden calling for the lifting of all remaining restrictions on the use of NATO-provided weapons by Ukraine. The letter declared that “concerns about escalation” have been “consistently invalidated since Day One of the war.” It asserted, “Neither Ukraine’s use of US-provided weapons in Russia nor its military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region – the first foreign occupation of Russian territory since World War II – has triggered a Russian escalatory response.” These arguments do not stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Why would the fact that Russia has not retaliated against lesser provocations in the past mean that it will not respond to greater ones in the future? In fact, the failure to respond in the past could raise the pressure on Putin to escalate in kind.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/beyond-the-law" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Beyond the Law</a> Taibbi starts by noting that the Biden administration just extended the "national emergency" begun on September 11th, 2001. You know the one: it purports to give lawmakers all sorts of leeway in flouting the laws of the nation because of "terrorism". The GWOT (Global War On Terror) rages on, even though no-one knows it except for those who benefit from it. <bq>Along with 200 other Republicans, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez just endorsed Kamala Harris. Gonzalez, who as George W. Bush’s counsel received and signed the infamous torture memos and dismissed the Geneva conventions as “quaint,” said in a Politico essay his reason was that Donald Trump represented a “threat to the rule of law.”</bq> Taibbi goes on to outline the level of monstrousness, mendacity, and malice represented by people like Gonzalez and Cheney. <bq>We find permission to commit torture in the teachings of Gandhi was among the first expressions of the Orwellian mania destined to overtake American political thought. Posner also argued that because “consciences will not be shocked at the use of torture when it will ward off a great evil,” the question arises whether “we should relax the prohibition against torture in such a case, or trust public officers to perceive and act on a moral duty that is higher than their legal duty. I favor the latter course.” In other words, torture should remain prohibited, but “public officers” should be encouraged to act on their “higher” moral duty when needed. Posner acknowledged allowing leaders to break the law this risked bringing it into “disrepute,” so he advocated defining torture narrowly. This would allow “necessary violations of law” while keeping those from becoming “routine.” The notion that torture should remain illegal but necessary became conventional wisdom. As Cornell’s Martin Sheffer put it, “during an emergency, the law of necessity supersedes the law of the Constitution.”</bq> These are the people who think that Trump is the most dangerous and mendacious thing that could happen to the U.S. And they all wholeheartedly agree with the policies of the Democrat Party. How could they not? They're both completely absorbed with rebuilding the laws of the U.S. to benefit themselves and no-one else. The laws of the nation don't apply to them. <bq>From the moment the public knew the government was engaging in torture, the Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment turned to plucked fruit, ripening to absurdity. Same with the right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Once NSA mass surveillance was exposed, source Edward Snowden was right to declare, “The Fourth Amendment… no longer exists.” (Snowden’s continued exile underscores the point v.) The Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process has been rotting since Barack Obama’s government wrote memos giving itself permission to ignore it to drone American Anwar al-Aulaqi. More recently the Twitter and Facebook files, and admissions like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter complaining of being “repeatedly pressured… to censor,” let citizens know the First Amendment has become a federal pissoir.</bq> <bq>A government that openly proclaims the right to ignore restrictions on its power will inspire a protest movement. It could be led by Trump or a Trotsky, but it must happen. At that point, the “law of necessity” either has to be abandoned or formalized. We’re at that moment now, it seems. Either the emergency ends, or it becomes permanent.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoPoUx6iX9Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ZoPoUx6iX9Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Judge Andrew J. Napolitano" caption="AMB Charles Freeman: Why Is the US Navy in the South China Sea?"> Another brilliant interview with Charles "Chaz" Freeman. He explains in detail the actual international law surrounding islands, promontories, and atolls. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/" source="Wired" author="Steven Brill">You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programmatic Advertising</a> <n>Note to both my future self and anyone reading the notes for this article: I had remembered him as being the author of an extremely long and detailed screed against HMOs called <a href="https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/" author="" source="Time Magazine">Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us</a> (a 122-minute read). He has since become a shill for his company NewGuard, which has made a name for itself lending authority to the official narrative of the bought-and-paid-for media. He absolutely hates Russia and finds a way to blame nearly everything in the media environment on it.</n> <bq>Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company’s ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News’ sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others.</bq> Jesus. Go hard on the anti-Russian thing, why don't you? These people are insane. <bq>However, humans do not decide which publisher—the local newspaper website, or a website posing as a local news site but publishing Russian propaganda—gets the ad.</bq> Pick a lane, you idiot. I should have known when I read that he'd founded NewsGuard that Brill had wandered pretty far from the path he'd trod when he was covering medicare fraud for Time magazine. He has RDS: Russia Derangement Syndrome. I can't tell if his only problem with this system is that Russia might be earning a buck. <bq>Unless the advertiser uses special tools, such as what are called exclusion or inclusion lists, the publishers and content around which the ad appears, and which the ad is financing, are no longer part of the decision.</bq> <iq>Special tools.</iq> What's special about white- and black-lists? What a buffoon. <bq>Trevor’s targeting choices start with obvious variables and then can become almost infinitely granular, offering a stunning display of the depth of data that has been collected about all of us:</bq> Obvious. Infinitely. Stunning. So many superlatives. <bq>There are hundreds of such categories of intent signals. And there are “next” boxes that Trevor can click on to go still more granular, such as picking the brand of car that the person has shown an interest in buying. Or he might click only a few or none of them, and move on to the next set of variables if, for example, the brand is a widely used consumer product, such as Coca-Cola, for which some of this granular targeting may not be relevant.</bq> This doesn't mean any of this is accurate...but it looks good to the advertisers that you're suckering. This guy is lending way more credence to this system than it deserves. <bq>A caveat: A major activity of NewsGuard has to do with selling itself as an alternative to blocking words and artificial intelligence when it comes to helping advertisers avoid having their programmatic ads run on egregious disinformation and misinformation websites, streaming television channels, or podcasts. Instead they can license our data, which identifies those meeting our criteria for adhering to the basic standards of journalistic practice, and then make informed decisions about how to use the data. Accordingly, I have a self-interest in persuading readers that NewsGuard offers a better “brand safety” alternative: human intelligence—actually reading and assessing news and information providers—rather than artificial intelligence.</bq> There it is. The admission that he's selling a competing product. Ironically, the whole article is an ad. <bq>From when the Covid pandemic became a global headline in February 2020 through July 2021, 4,315 brands representing every kind of product bought more than 42,000 unique ads on websites flagged by NewsGuard for publishing Covid falsehoods.</bq> And if NewsGuard flagged it, you know it's not government-approved. Anyone these days still flogging that they know "the truth" about COVID in the States is probably trying to snow you about something. Almost no media in the U.S. got anywhere close to a measured take during those few years. <bq>As one senior executive at a major ad agency holding company explained, “We’ve created this giant multibillion-dollar machine. It produces higher margins for us than anything we could ever do differently, and our clients have no idea how or if it works, but they think it saves them money. Why would we ever ask hard questions about it, if our clients are mesmerized by the technology and never stop to ask, ‘Why do we assume that every available ad impression on even the worst website is worth being monetized if the price is low enough?’”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/embracing-the-joy" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Embracing the Joy</a> <bq>Again, there’s no allegation that anyone in this case engaged in “disinformation.” The Justice Department has been tracking this case for nearly two years, almost certainly using tools like FISA, likely allowing spying on virtually every unorthodox media voice in America. Yet the most Attorney General Merrick Garland could say in annoucing the case was that videos of figures paid like Pool and Rubin were “consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”</bq> None of which is illegal in any way. Just because Russia agrees with you doesn't mean you're wrong. <bq>The government needs us to believe these figures must have engaged in “disinformation,” but there’s a big reason that’s not true. As was the case with RT in its pre-ban years, when it employed everyone from Thom Hartmann to Chris Hedges to Larry King, Russians didn’t need to issue guidelines to get American press figures to talk about “alleged greed” or “corruption.” RT’s American hosts “advertised third party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,” not because they were induced, but because those parties have legitimate gripes and are massively undercovered.</bq> Exactly. The justice department is doing the work of the mainstream media and its bosses in both parties in clearing out any dissenting voices. There will be ideological and message purity. The U.S. government will enforce it on behalf of themselves via the media. <bq>The Times called their takes “blunt attempts to influence November’s election” and said vaguely the government was “focused on individuals intentionally spreading disinformation.”</bq> That's rich, coming from the NYT. Their entire raison d'être is to influence November's election. That's literally all any media outlet in the U.S. has been doing for the last two years. There is nothing wrong with Americans speaking their minds to whatever audience they can find. Even if it's wrong! That's what "freedom of speech" means, FFS. Hell, the NYT and FOX are wrong 99 times for ever time that they're right---and no-one ever suggests that Merrick Garland move in to cut off their operations. This is a media war, fought on behalf of the Democratic party's need to keep its people unequivocally brainwashed until November 5th. <bq>There was no any explanation of why this should concern the FBI, since being wrong isn’t against the law.</bq> Correct. <bq>It didn’t escape the attention of anyone on the non-bootlicking side of the media aisle that the Justice Department used the term “heterodox” in its indictment. Between that and Garland’s “divisions” comment, the state is saying it wants an information landscape peopled by orthodox promoters of unity, and will use any means to secure it.</bq> They're not even trying to hide it anymore. They don't have to. Because no-one will report it in this way in anything approaching a news source that anything approaching a majority of people will hear. The message will be "we stopped those dastardly Russians from influencing the elections again. BUT STAY VIGILANT." instead of "we drummed up a weak excuse to nail two dipshit podcasters after two years of waste time and money so that we can pretend that Russiagate II is also a thing." <bq>The idea is to see who salutes the crazy thing sent up the flagpole, and who flinches. The adult willing to proclaim JOY over the Vice President he or she just spent three years ignoring is one who’ll also buy a Mueller votive candle or wear a mask during coitus. You can decline that sensibility (most of us can’t help it), but then you go on the list. You become a “disinformation” risk, with all that entails, which increasingly is a lot.</bq> <img src="{att_link}kamala_vote_joy_2024.webp" href="{att_link}kamala_vote_joy_2024.webp" align="none" caption="Kamala Vote Joy" scale="25%"> Jesus wept. Actual adults fall for this. On the other hand, they also fall for these things: <div style="display: grid; grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr; gap: 15px"><img src="{att_link}america_s_first_freedom_-_nra_magazine.jpg" href="{att_link}america_s_first_freedom_-_nra_magazine.jpg" align="none" caption="America's First Freedom - NRA Magazine" scale="25%"><img src="{att_link}this_is_soap_for_adults,_apparently.jpg" href="{att_link}this_is_soap_for_adults,_apparently.jpg" align="none" caption="This is soap for adults, apparently" scale="25%"></div> The NRA magazine is called "America's 1st Freedom" when it's the 2nd amendment they can't shut up about. The 1st freedom is actually a combination of speech, religion, the press, redressing grievances, and assembly. It's all just advertising to sell a product. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/YesAmericaBad/comments/1fbbewm/blatant/" author="" source="Reddit">Blatant</a> <img src="{att_link}who_whot_and_killed_her_motherfucker_.webp" href="{att_link}who_whot_and_killed_her_motherfucker_.webp" align="none" caption="Who shot and killed her motherfucker?" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/07/bullets-to-the-head/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Bullets to the Head</a> <bq>Haaretz’s lead editorial on the killing of Israeli hostages by Hamas: “It was Hamas terrorists who pulled the trigger, but it was Netanyahu who sealed their fate. The prime minister likes to think of himself as Mr. Security, but he will go down in history as Mr. Death and Mr. Abandonment .” Israeli news anchor Yaron Avraham: “I’m not supposed to say this on the air, but each one of the recovered hostages who were murdered had one bullet in their head, and one in the back of their neck…A senior official whom I trust said to me unequivocally that the military pressure as it is right now causes hostages to be killed. It’s difficult for me to say this, but that is the truth.”</bq> The Israeli press as well as IDF press contacts have far less message-conformity than the U.S. press. They freely admit to obvious facts that the U.S. media will either not report or will outright deny. <bq>Craig Mokhiber: “U.S. policy in Gaza is not a “failure.” It is a terrible success. Washington’s real policy has always been to support Israel in the destruction of Gaza, to render it unlivable, and to lay the ground for its ethnic cleansing. The ceasefire negotiation charade, the fake pier, the airdrop theater, the trickle of aid, the crocodile tears for civilian loss, the movable red lines, and the arguments with Israel on the pace of the destruction are all fig leaves designed to create diplomatic and political space for genocide. The U.S. is a successful co-perpetrator in Genocide.”</bq> <bq>The WHO reports that only 124 patients and 137 accompaniers have been evacuated from Gaza on four separate occasions since May 7, while an estimated 12,000 patients have been unable to leave and receive urgently needed medical care abroad.</bq> <bq>Ilan Pappe on why the ceasefire talks are doomed: “It’s funny how we sort of think that we are hearing some dramatic news, when actually we see the repeat of the same news, again and again. And I’m afraid this [ceasefire talks] is going to be the same. Netanyahu is going to reject the American proposal, whatever it is. He doesn’t think the Americans are in any position to really pose a danger to his own position in the government because we are 60 days before the [US presidential] elections. Therefore, this is all going to be a lot of talk but very little action on the ground. I’m afraid we need something far more drastic than an American proposal that tries to satisfy Netanyahu’s demands that keep changing because he doesn’t want a deal and he doesn’t want to end the fighting.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/07/emys-s07.html" author="Jacob Crosse" source="WSWS">Trial of “Uhuru 3” begins in Florida as US government accelerates anti-Russia campaign, war drive</a> <bq>On Tuesday, September 3, the US government put four Americans citizens, all of whom are currently, or were formerly members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and/or the Uhuru Movement, on trial for “illegally” spreading “pro-Russian propaganda” in order to “cause dissension in the United States and to promote secessionist ideologies.”</bq> <bq>According to the indictment, from 2014-2022, the accused are charged with receiving nearly $10,000 from alleged Russian security agents without registering as “foreign agents.” The accused are alleged to have taken this money to plan protests against the US-NATO war in Ukraine, police violence, “African genocide” and even run for the St. Petersburg City Council in 2017 and 2019 (losing both times).</bq> The U.S. government is sending a very stern message: do not even stray a millimeter from the narrative or we will drum up some charges and put you away forever. <bq>Coinciding with the trial, the US government, with the corporate media in tow, has launched a new anti-Russia censorship campaign alleging that several official enemies of US imperialism are engaging in “malign activity” aimed at “sowing discord” ahead of the 2024 election.</bq> This would be tiresome if it weren't so deadly earnest for the targets. The current administration is purifying the message environment. <bq>When a foreign power is advancing US imperialist objectives they are more than free to spread “propaganda.” More than three months ago, the New York Times reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a $2 million operation to carry out an online influence campaign targeting US lawmakers and the American public with “pro-Israel messaging” in order to gin up support for the Gaza genocide and a $15 billion military package. The Department of Justice has yet to announce any indictments.</bq> There is absolutely no reason to expect consistency or respect for any rule-of-law other than than "my rules are your law." Is it even hypocritical if they barely even pretend to believe in the principle that they espouse? <bq>The DoJ accuses the company, which was later identified as Tenet Media, of paying fascist and conservative commentators such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin $400,000 a month to produce four videos a month that are indistinguishable from their usual right-wing drivel. Over the last 10 months, Tenet media has produced hundreds of videos, but almost none of them have accumulated more than 10,000 views. YouTube has suspended the Tenet account and deleted all of their videos.</bq> Of course they have. Good boy, YouTube. Very good. You're a good dog. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-have-to-be-an-absolute-lunatic" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">You Have to Be an Absolute Lunatic to Believe That the Trump Assassination Attempt Was an "Op"</a> <bq>The most widespread BlueMAGA behavior, currently, is an absolutely rabid dedication to the idea that any polling that does not show a decisive lead for Harris is the product of Russian disinformation or the evil of Nate Silver or the machinations of The New York Times, which is alleged to be a dedicated anti-Kamala publication despite publishing five pieces a day with headlines like “How a Kamala Harris Victory Could Create a Time Loop That Would Prevent the Assassination of Medgar Evers.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/boom-dnc-talking-points-become-instant" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines</a> <bq>We just lived through a remarkable succession of memory-holed events, from lockdowns to Nord Stream to the stunning developments surrounding the end of the Biden campaign, in which reality was briefly allowed to surface before quickly being wallpapered over with a new face. Earlier manipulations already taxed the brain, but memory-holing a presidency? That’s a lot to ask of a population, mentally. Trump was flummoxed when Harris said, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” as if that settled that. How do you answer a general agreement that a cipher with a two-day-old policy paper is the real new face of government?</bq> <bq>Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo. “Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president,” he asked about Biden. “They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don’t even know, is he our president?” He looked around as if to say, What the fuck? Later, about Putin, he brought up the old saw, World War III. “He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that!” He brought up Nord Stream, the pandemic, the weird voteless nomination of Harris, and was met with bemused stares each time. ABC’s David Muir got flak for hostile questioning, but his subtler act was policing the topics. The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc31Vi1h4rk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Bc31Vi1h4rk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="George Carlin" caption="You have owners} (It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.)"> This is an excerpt from his 2006 special <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Worth_Losing" source="Wikipedia">Life Is Worth Losing</a>. Spitting truth almost 20 years ago. Carlin was hands-down one of the best ever. Absolutely no fat on that set. The article <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/george-carlin-american-radical/" author="John Nichols" source="The Nation">George Carlin: American Radical</a> quotes a large part of it. <bq>This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'”</bq> <bq>Fuck the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.</bq> From an interview cited in the article above: <bq>That’s what welfare was about. There are people who really just don’t have the tools, for whatever reason. Yes, there are lazy people. Yes, there are slackers. Yes, there’s all of that. But there are also people who can’t cut it, for any given reason, whether it’s racism, or an educational opportunity, or poverty, or a fuckin’ horrible home life, or a history of a horrible family life going back three generations, or whatever it is. They’re crippled and they can’t make it, and they deserve to rest at the commonweal. That’s where my fuckin’ passion lies.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/12/dlnf-s12.html" author="Eric London" source="WSWS">The Harris-Trump debate: A degraded exhibition of political reaction</a> <bq>That Trump can even conduct a campaign, let alone garner significant support, testifies to the complete political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is hostile to making any broad appeal to the social aspirations of masses of people and subordinates everything to the war aims of American imperialism. This is not merely an erroneous tactic, it is an expression of the class character of the Democratic Party, which represents the banks and corporations no less than Trump and the Republicans.</bq> <bq>Harris’s imperialist saber-rattling provided Trump with the opportunity to make a demagogic appeal to growing opposition to the US war against Russia. “We don’t have any idea what’s going on,” he said, noting that casualties on both sides are far higher than what is reported in the media. “We have wars going on in the Middle East. We have wars going on with Russia and Ukraine. We’re going to end up in a third World War. And it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry.” The fact that Trump, a vicious imperialist politician himself, could posture as a “peace” candidate speaks to a dangerous dynamic in the two-party system as the election approaches.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNJtigWuJ8U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/mNJtigWuJ8U" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="'Free' U.S. Suppresses and Censors Alternative 9/11 Narratives for Decades"> An excellent analysis of 9/11 with clips from a 2008 presidential debate where Ron Paul talked about 9/11 in terms of blowback. He was 100% right. He still is. Rudy Giuliani was wrong. As always. Ron Paul was talking about the overthrow of the Shah, about the sanctions on Iraq that started in the 90s, and so on. You quickly see why other candidates are no longer allowed on the stage. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7jrWYm1Jh8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/B7jrWYm1Jh8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Presidential Debate Reaction: Glenn Reacts to ABC News Debate Between Kamala and Trump"> <bq>David Muir, the ABC correspondent and host and moderater of the debate, arguing directly with Donald Trump, constantly saying after Donald Trump was finished speaking, 'that is not true. What you said is inaccurate. What you said is false.' Donald Trump would then respond. They would get into an argument and, never once---not a single time---did the moderators ever tell Kamala Harris that anything she said was out of context, was misleading, was deceitful, was exaggerated, or was false. And it's not because Kamala Harris spoke for 90 minutes without uttering false statements. She had an endless number of false statements that she uttered that could easily and should easily have been subject to factchecking.</bq> They were false statements that are accepted as true by the narrative. There is no way that either moderator could have even come upon the idea of fact-checking Harris because she was only saying things that they also know to be true. That they are pure fiction doesn't matter. They are incapable of seeing that what she is saying is false because they don't recognize it as false. It is far easier for them to recognize "people are kidnapping and eating pets" as a falsehood. The moderators were obviously not impartial but how could you even expect them to be? They came from ABC News. They are very obviously both going to vote Democrat in the upcoming election. They have no doubts in their minds that Kamala is a sterling candidate. Why would they fact-check her? She spits pure truth. Only if the debate were moderated by someone like Glenn Greenwald or Norman Finkelstein or Briahna Joy Gray (or dozens of other possibilities) would there have been an even-handed fact-checking. Glenn very astutely says that any honest debate would have included questions to Harris asking "why should people trust you?" Given her constant changing of positions and policies, given the fact that her entire record belies things she claims to stand for, given that she was in on the massive cover-up of Biden's dementia---why should anyone trust you? <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/week-of-wonders-henwood" source="The Baffler" author="Doug Henwood">Week of Wonders</a> <bq>There was quite an array of dissident actors in the Seattle convocation: big environmental groups, more left NGOs like Global Exchange, labor unions, a contingent of anarchists who formed the Direct Action Network (DAN), and the infamous black bloc, who by most accounts numbered around thirty or forty but garnered a lot of attention for smashing windows. The event was often described in the media as violent, and still is in retrospect, but aside from that small group of dedicated window-breakers, most of the violence came from the cops.</bq> <bq>As the anarchist Murray Bookchin writes, when large groups “try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted—precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue.” In other words, consensus may work well for small groups that know each other well, but it’s no model for running a larger movement, much less a society.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/myschoolbucks-school-lunch-junk-fees/" source="Jacobin" author="Katya Schwenk">Families Are Paying Millions in School Lunch Junk Fees</a> <bq>“This is the first case of its kind,” she added. “No one has successfully sued a K-12 payment processor company for this type of fraud.”</bq> Why sue them? Take away their contract, take away their monopoly. <bq>“[The fees] are way above industry standards,” said Varnell. “The amount they are charging to parents for school lunch is several times more than whatever they’d be charged in virtually any other part of the market.”</bq> Transaction fees for brokers are still 0%. Funny that. The Tobin tax is still not a reality in the U.S. Great Britain and the EU have one. But poor people always have to pay transaction taxes. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=120760" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Autoland ist abgebrannt</a> <bq>Sie könnte die Mobilitätswende samt Verbrennerverbot abschwächen oder einen realistischeren zeitlichen Rahmen definieren, der die Marktreife alternativer Brennstoffe und Antriebskonzepte als Alternative zur reinen E-Mobilität vorsieht. Das wird ohnehin kommen, da 2035 ein viel zu ambitioniertes Ziel ist, und die offenen Probleme mit der Infrastruktur und den Lieferketten eine Verschiebung sehr wahrscheinlich machen.</bq> <bq>Die Politik könnte auch auf der Kostenseite Hilfestellung bieten – indem sie dafür sorgt, dass die Energiekosten sinken. Das wäre problemlos möglich, wenn man die Sanktionen gegen Russland aufhebt und wieder preiswertes Erdgas importiert, wodurch auch der Strompreis deutlich sinken würde.</bq> <bq>[...] wird die Bundesregierung heute beschließen, Steuervorteile von mehr als 600 Millionen Euro als Subventionen an Unternehmen auszuschütten, die E-Autos als Dienstwagen einsetzen. Hinzu kommt eine Anhebung des Preisdeckels bei der Dienstwagenbesteuerung für E-Autos – hier wird der alte Listenpreis von 70.000 auf 95.000 Euro angehoben. So kommen nun auch Manager und leitende Angestellte in den Genuss von Steuererleichterungen, die sich von ihrem Arbeitgeber ein besonders hochpreisiges E-Auto spendieren lassen. Bezahlt werden diese Subventionen vom Steuerzahler. Der Hilfsarbeiter mit seinem alten Diesel zahlt, der Manager mit seinem Tesla kassiert – so sieht es wohl aus, wenn Grüne und FDP zu einem Kompromiss kommen.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMFhvHxi2NQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/QMFhvHxi2NQ" caption="Economic Update: Yanis Varoufakis on the Changing World Economy" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Democracy At Work / Richard Wolff"> <bq>Always maintain an internationalist approach. It's not America versus China. It's a class war. The trade wars are class wars. What is good for the working class in China is good for the working class in America and Britain. And the opposite holds: what is good for capitalists in Shenzhen and in Shanghai is music to the ears of rentiers in Miami, in Wall Street, in Switzerland, in Davos.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/12/prgr-s12.html" author="Gabriel Black" source="WSWS">Mounting concerns in US-NATO circles over critical minerals and war with China</a> <bq>[...] the projects that they are trying to start—new multibillion-dollar mines, refiners and manufacturing processes—are massive, long-term investments that oftentimes take at least a decade to begin production. Constructing these large projects requires time and assurance that the costs will be paid back. Second, China has major cost advantages over these expensive new projects. New processors of minerals will have a very challenging time competing with China when it has been the epicenter of mineral refining for several decades, and generally it has lower wages and environmental regulations. Most recently this cost advantage has been reflected in the significant decline in the price of many critical minerals in 2023 and 2024. For example, lithium has dropped more than 80 percent.</bq> <bq>China put in place restrictions on antimony, a largely unknown critical mineral that is used in armor-piercing ammunition, military optics and solar panels. Last year, Beijing launched similar restrictive measures on gallium, germanium and graphite—all of which it controls most of their global supply. These measures were put in place in response to US restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China – a ban which it seems Chinese business have largely been able to work around. The restrictions on antimony, put in place earlier this month, has led to a doubling of its price on global markets.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/13/zmkm-s13.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Total capitulation by US Federal Reserve on bank regulation</a> <bq>Barr announced on Tuesday that the key element of the proposal, known as Basel III Endgame, had been halved. Instead of a capital requirement of 19 percent, the rate was cut to 9 percent. For the six largest US banks this meant freeing up around $100 billion for profitable investment. Under the new proposal they would now be required to add around $80 billion to capital, compared to $180 billion. In addition, it was decided that the new rules would not apply to banks with less than $250 billion—a not inconsiderable portion of the US banking system. Other proposed regulations were also scrapped. Among them banks will now be able to use their own models to assess market risks, one of their key demands.</bq> <bq>There are two political lessons to be drawn from this experience. First, the enormous power of finance capital and its domination over every aspect of the economic and political system. And second, the complete unviability of “reformist” solutions which leave it intact, and the necessity of a socialist program based on the taking of the financial system into public ownership under democratic control.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/how-the-opiate-conspiracy-widened" source="Racket News" author="Matt Bivens, M.D.">How the Opiate Conspiracy Widened</a> <bq>When COVID-19 arrived, we shut down the entire planet, and the virus would go on to kill an average of 400,000 Americans a year for three years. Smoking has been here all along — glamorized, marketed to kids — cheerfully killing 500,000 Americans a year, every year, forever.</bq> <bq>[...] more people are killed each year by tobacco than by opioids — six times more. Smokers die 10 years younger on average than non-smokers, and even that understates it, because smokers don’t go out easily. Their later years are often needlessly miserable. In the emergency department, I see patients addicted to opioids, including many we have revived after life-threatening overdoses and some we have pronounced dead. But I see far more who have destroyed their lungs. I’ve known many of the longest-suffering smokers for years. They routinely arrive by ambulance struggling to breathe. And many, even those dependent on oxygen, still smoke.</bq> <bq>[...] the opioid manufacturers achieved an entirely new level of immorality. They used actual doctors to sell their wares — not a few avuncular, smoking actors in white coats, but tens of thousands of doctors and nurse practitioners. Opioids were not offered as a luxury item or a lifestyle choice, but as solemn and necessary medicine. This was a prescribed addiction. (In one study, four out of five people newly addicted to heroin started with a physician’s prescription.) And those who eagerly took cash to help sell this were not sleazy movie studios or soulless social media “influencers”, but the most trusted institutions of the House of Medicine.</bq> <bq>Most of this is happening years and years after Purdue had already pled guilty (in 2007) to fraud and intentional deception aimed at creating a world of recklessly liberal opioid prescribing. Purdue admitted it did that, cut the government a check for about 5 percent, and then, as we will see, doubled down on even more egregious fraud and deception — some of that rolled out in these AMA courses.</bq> <bq>[...] opioid manufacturers also wrote most of this FSMB booklet. (The Wall Street Journal reports Purdue’s Dr. David Haddox was particularly active.) Companies including Cephalon, Endo and Purdue then paid the FSMB more than $250,000 to distribute 163,000 copies to physicians. For context, there are about 1 million licensed physicians nationwide — so that’s one booklet for every six physicians.</bq> <bq>[...] opioid manufacturer sales reps marched door to door, hand-delivering these booklets to doctors and nurse practitioners at primary care offices.</bq> <bq>[...] says that “studies” — more accurately, “fake studies created by marketing departments that mostly cite a decades-old five-sentence letter to the editor called Porter & Jick” — “show that addiction is unlikely. Let’s talk about your fears.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/02/sanitation-in-namibia-is-a-catastrophe-for-its-people-and-environment/" source="CounterPunch" author="Freddie Clayton and Sonja Smith">Sanitation in Namibia Is a Catastrophe for Its People and Environment</a> <bq>According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) 2020 data, Namibia ranked sixth for the highest rate of open defecation in the world at 47 percent. Less than half of the country’s 2.5 million citizens use facilities that safely separate waste from human contact, while some 5 percent use inadequate facilities such as open pits, buckets, and hanging latrines.</bq> <bq>“Everybody over the years has just been centralizing into Windhoek,” said Archie Benjamin, SWAPO member and CEO for the municipality of Swakopmund. “The intention of the government at independence was to develop the rural areas to such an extent that people don’t feel the need to relocate, but that has not really worked out.”</bq> <bq>The consequences of insufficient governance are evident in surveying the Namibian landscape. Damaged, disused, and derelict government toilets can be found across the country. Often, they are filthy beyond use, blocked by newspapers, or filled with excrement, and many no longer function.</bq> <bq>[...] vast sums of money have been allocated to the ministries responsible for sanitation. Whether those funds are actually spent on sanitation is a matter of priority, and in 2022, MAWLR cut its water supply and sanitation coordination budget by 72.7 percent. Ngurare admitted that “most funding earmarked for water and sanitation in the last couple of years had unfortunately been redirected to the Neckartal Dam,” Namibia’s largest dam that supports a large irrigation scheme in the south.</bq> <bq>Van der Linden said she has encountered the same stubborn obsession with flush toilets and markets her toilets as a sustainable “in the meantime solution” for people who will one day, ideally, have access to flush toilets. Her Enviro Loos are not the cheapest on the market, but she thinks that instead of investing larger amounts in the best dry toilets, the government would rather wait to score points with flush toilets. “They do not see any benefits in dry sanitation,” she added.</bq> <bq>In a country where almost a quarter of citizens face high levels of acute food insecurity, many can scarcely afford the 16,000 liters of extra water it costs to flush a toilet per person each year.</bq> <bq>“Wet sanitation risks making unaffordable water even more unaffordable,” said de Albuquerque, the UN’s former special rapporteur, in a press statement in 2011. She urged Namibia to promote dry toilets, warning that if people continue to perceive them as inferior, they will never embrace them. However, she advised that no one size fits all and that “communities and households must have choices about which sanitation technology suits their needs best.”</bq> We know how that will end: flush toilets financed by 98% of the public funds for sanitation for a handful of rich people with the remaining 2% spent on pit toilets for everyone else---with no training on how to maintain their pit toilets. <bq>In the absence of government-backed sanitation services and information campaigns, schemes like these have helped transform informal settlements and rural communities by creating a demand for sanitation and motivating residents to invest in solutions. However, as of 2024, only 16 areas in Namibia are currently ODF.</bq> <bq>a dry toilet—a type of toilet that uses no water or chemicals to move waste. Instead, excrement drops into a tank or bag that must be emptied and cleaned. Dry toilets’ lifetime costs are lower than flush toilets, as they save on water, and some even produce fertilizer from the dried waste. In southern Africa’s driest country, where sewage connections reach just 35 percent of citizens, they are vital to ensuring sanitation.</bq> <bq>But dry toilets do require more work. There’s no water seal to protect from the smell, so things can get ugly quickly without daily cleaning and good ventilation. Every so often, the tank must be emptied. If the toilet is a pit latrine, then one must dig another hole and move the pot before its subsequent use. There are also things you can’t always put down the hole—such as water—and, like all toilets, sometimes they need fixing.</bq> <bq>For many others, especially women, the risks of using the bush at night are far too high, and they must defecate inside their own homes instead. Janet Gaes, 34, lives with her four children in Windhoek’s Otjomuise 8ste Laan informal settlement. Her shack sits on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed overflowing with toilet paper. During the day, she takes her children to the riverbed, but they share a bucket at home at night.</bq> <bq>“We are a family of eight in a shack in a community that has no water points or toilets,” said Shaanika, who resides in Swakopmund’s DRC. Some 20,000 people live without running water or sewage in the DRC.</bq> <bq>These conditions mean Shaanika and her siblings suffer from frequent infections and bouts of diarrhea, along with the thousands of other men, women, and children who use the same and other similar strips of wasteland as toilets in the DRC.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qYwUn9mLKU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5qYwUn9mLKU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="ProcessX / Violin Workshop Cremona" caption="The Process of Making a Cello. A High-End Japanese Cello Crafted by One Artisan in Six Months."> <hr> <a href="https://www.citationneeded.news/hachette-v-internet-archive/" author="Molly White" source="[citation needed]">Big publishers think libraries are the enemy</a> <bq>My beliefs are simple, and hardly radical: Libraries are critical infrastructure. Access to information is a human right. When you buy a book you should truly own it. When a library buys a book, they should be able to lend it. Readers should be able to read without any third parties spying over their shoulders, or preventing them from accessing the materials they have legally obtained.</bq> <bq>Hachette and the other plaintiff publishers have argued that, by lending out one-to-one digital copies of books they have legally purchased, the Internet Archive’s Open Library is infringing upon the publishers’ copyright and damaging their sales. And, without any evidence of actual harm to the publishers, the Second Circuit went right along with it. They also went a step further, again without evidence, to suggest that libraries are inherently detrimental to society.</bq> <bq>While the Open Library program offers similar benefits to library e-book programs, and digital scans of physical books share some similarities to e-books, these things are crucially not the same. For one, there are no geographical or institutional requirements to access materials offered through the Open Library, unlike regional public libraries that typically require proof of residency within that library’s territory, or academic libraries that require university affiliation. There is also, critically, no large-scale surveillance of readers akin to what is happening via many traditional e-book providers. Secondly, the Open Library makes it possible to link directly to a book: something perhaps dismissed as trivial, but which is truly invaluable when it comes to providing verifiable references that you expect people to widely be able to verify. Thirdly, although it was overlooked by the court in this decision, the scanned books are not one-to-one replacements for e-books, which tend to be much easier to read, and come with bells and whistles that allow you to do things like adjust the appearance (font size, color scheme, etc.), navigate throughout the book from a table of contents, view endnotes inline, and navigate to links from the book text.</bq> These are scans of books. You can't easily copy/paste text---well, on MacOS you can---and you can't keep a copy. <bq>Today’s e-book lending is a system created by the publishers, for the publishers, and it is one which those publishers are now working hard to codify and protect. This e-book lending model is also nothing like the model for physical booklending in the United States, where a library can lend out any book they want, whether they purchased it new directly from a publisher or bookseller, purchased it used, received it as a donation, or, hell, found it on the side of the road. They own the book, they can lend the book, no further discussion necessary.</bq> As usual, the first benefits of digitization go to the rentiers that already own everything. <bq>[...] although around 500,000 books have been removed from the Open Library’s lending program (including 1,300 banned books) at publishers’ request, many still remain. The Internet Archive is still able to make the removed books available via programs including interlibrary loan and their project to provide access to those with qualified print disabilities. The Archive is also still able to display short previews of removed books, such as where Wikipedia citations reference a specific book page. Finally, the decision does not impact the lending of books that do not have e-book versions offered for sale.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/09/the-decline-of-the-u-s-empire-where-is-it-taking-us-all/" author="Richard D. Wolff" source="CounterPunch">The Decline of the U.S. Empire: Where Is It Taking Us All?</a> <bq>Empire confers special advantages that translate into extraordinary profits for firms located in the country that dominates the empire. The 19th century was remarkable for its endless confrontations and struggles among empires competing for territory to dominate and thus for their industries’ higher profits. Declines of any one empire could enhance opportunities for competing empires. If the latter grabbed those opportunities, the former’s decline could worsen. One set of competing empires delivered two world wars in the last century. Another set seems increasingly driven to deliver worse, possibly nuclear world wars in this century.</bq> What people don't seem to realize is that, when they ignore the obvious---that the world is run by an Empire with vassal states and multiple "enemy states"---they are capitulating to the framing demanded by that empire. Just because you were born in the empire---either you're a U.S. citizen or you're a member of a nation that falls favorably under the aegis of its empire---doesn't mean you have to support the empire. It doesn't mean you have to support a world that is run by an empire. Just because you live in the town where the team plays doesn't mean you have to root for that team. You should, instead, root against the fact that there are criminal/mafia countries that gain their privileges, benefits, and sumptuous lifestyles by extracting value from other, less-fortunate countries. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge this reality is implicitly benefitting from it nonetheless. They're rooting for their team as "the good guys" because they've bought the propaganda that the eternally subjugated countries are the ones who are trying to do evil to them. You're not obligated to like the home team, especially when they suck. <bq>Why not suggest a similar trajectory for U.S.-China relations over the next generation? Except for ideologues detached from reality, the world would prefer it over the nuclear alternative. Dealing with the two massive, unwanted consequences of capitalism—climate change and unequal distributions of wealth and income—offers projects for a U.S.-China partnership that the world will applaud. Capitalism changed dramatically in both Britain and the United States after 1815. It will likely do so again after 2025. The opportunities are attractively open-ended.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/why-should-i-care-about-gaza" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">"Why Should I Care About Gaza?"</a> <bq>The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbors can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.</bq> <bq>They destabilize entire regions in the global south with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the global north into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.</bq> I think some people are subconsciously aware of this...but they're also very aware that their level of lifestyle depends on exploitation of others. Or they think it does. Or they've been told it does. It doesn't really matter. Most people aren't going to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas">walk away from Omelas</a>. For example, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/americans-misunderstand-their-contribution-to-deteriorating-environment/" author="Katie Surma," source="Ars Technica">Americans misunderstand their contribution to deteriorating environment</a> writes, <bq>Americans also largely believe they do not bear responsibility for global environmental problems. Only about 15 percent of US respondents said that high- and middle-income Americans share responsibility for climate change and natural destruction. Instead, they attribute the most blame to businesses and governments of wealthy countries.</bq> You see? It's so easy to see your success as wholly disconnected from the wake of destruction they system that enabled that success leaves behind. It works even better if the system is whispering with its wormtongue in your ear all day long. <bq>Translating concern about the environment to actual change requires people to believe they have something at stake, Dabelko said. “It’s troubling that Americans aren’t making that connection.”</bq> No shit. This is 100% by design. Literally no-one in America is thinking about the climate. It's just mysteriously devolving weather patterns. God is mad or something. The percentage of people thinking about climate change or, heaven forbid, combatting it, is a rounding error. Everyone else has been told by their betters, again and again and again, that there is nothing to be done because it's not our fault. Everyone else either subconsciously knows that their lifestyle depends on the continued pillaging of the environment, or they've been convinced to ignore the problem by those who absolutely and consciously know that the environment is being destroyed---and other people's lives ruined---for the benefit of a handful of self-selected elites---perhaps the top 10%---in western countries. Am I exaggerating? From the article, <bq>The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half the world’s carbon emissions, along with ecosystem destruction and related social impacts</bq> These are also people who pretty much don't care about any non-curated nature. They don't go outside. When outside gets shitty, it doesn't affect their lives at all. They have no idea where food comes from. They don't have to care. Who are these people? Remember that it's not that hard to be in the global 1% when you live in the heart of the empire---or in one of its compliant and loyal vassal nations. <bq>Americans without children earning more than $60,000 a year after tax, and families of three with an after-tax household income above $130,000, are in the richest 1 percent of the world’s population.</bq> That's also why you won't see climate change as an issue in U.S. politics. It's pretty much nonexistent. <bq>“Environmental issues are not a major voting issue, so there is no reason for the politicians to respond to those issues if they are a peripheral concern to the population,” Brulle said. Other experts suggested that the disconnect between some environmental poll results and political action could be partially attributed to the sway that polluting industries hold over the US political system. That sway, they say, has largely come from corporations’ ability to make unlimited political donations and run campaigns aimed at deceiving politicians and the public about the environmental impacts of their products.</bq> No kidding. The U.S. system is corrupt? You don't say. I guess we'll all just get to watch as the current winners at the game of capitalism extract the last bit of personal value out of the existing system, then blow it up against a hard wall. They'll then blame up for it---and charge us to fix it. It's a lot of fun, really. <bq>Discussions have since bubbled up among governments about incorporating a version of the [ecocide] proposal into the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court.</bq> That would be quite an accomplishment: another clause in a group of laws that the worst offenders are completely ignoring anyway. The U.S. and its closest vassal nations don't adhere to international law anyway. Do you think that they will care in the slightest if you make something else that they love doing---because it brings them massive profits---illegal? Criminal don't care about laws. Like...by definition. Back to Caitlin's article: <bq>They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.</bq> <bq>It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise. Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.</bq> It's only because we have no principles or morals when there is enough distance that all of this works so well. We're not even talking about saving a Palestinian child. We're talking about no longer supporting the enabling of a war machine that is intent on killing Palestinian children. And people can't even do that. They can't even give up the gossamer thread of logical steps it takes to justify providing 2000-pound bombs to Israel because otherwise every Jew in the world would be in mortal danger. You know what else would be in mortal danger if you spoke up? Your job. Ammirite? I think a lot of people keep their mouths shut because they know which side their bread is buttered on. Same as it ever was. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-the-trump-party-vs-the-cheney" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">It's The Trump Party Vs The Cheney Party</a> <bq>Progressives who want healthcare and a ceasefire in Gaza are being dismissed and ignored while alliances are being made with the world’s most blood-soaked imperialists. Things have been shoved so far to the right that this election is now a showdown between the Trump Party against the Cheney Party, and no matter who wins, the empire wins. A lot of fuss will probably be made about election-rigging after the results are announced in November, with the loser declaring that the results are the result of Russian interference or Deep State vote tampering depending on who that loser happens to be. But remember this: the worst election rigging is happening right out in the open, to ensure that oligarchs and empire managers are happy with either outcome.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <img attachment="140_hours_on_battery.png" align="none" caption="140 hours on battery"> After nearly 3 years, my MacBook Pro is going strong, able to be there when I need it, without constant charging. Still very, very happy with this piece of hardware and software. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art" source="New Yorker" author="Ted Chiang">Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art</a> <bq>If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.</bq> <bq>We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist.</bq> <bq>The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.</bq> <bq>What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.</bq> <bq>Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”</bq> <bq>[...] most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.</bq> The writer used the expressive power of the language to convey an idea in a manner that minimized the burden of interpretation imposed on the reader. Language changes, unclear grammar, misspelling, and automation all shift the burden of communication from the writer to the reader. <bq>The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.</bq> <bq>Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting.</bq> <bq>There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.</bq> <bq>Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.</bq> <bq>As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.</bq> <bq>[...] is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become.</bq> <bq>The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is.</bq> <bq>Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent.</bq> <bq>The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.</bq> <bq>[...] most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.</bq> It's irrelevant because the argument isn't that what LLMs produce isn't novel, it's that there's no intent behind it, which dilutes already-fraught human communication. It's not helping; it's harming. <bq>We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/software-misadventures/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Notes from my appearance on the Software Misadventures Podcast</a> <bq>It's like taking a brand new computer user and dumping them in a Linux machine with a terminal prompt and say, "There you go, figure it out." It's an absolute joke that we've got this incredibly sophisticated software and we've given it a command line interface and launched it to a hundred million people.</bq> In other words: it's not a product. <bq>For people who don’t speak English or have English as a second language, this stuff is incredible. We live in a society where having really good spoken and written English puts you at a huge advantage. The street light outside your house is broken and you need to write a letter to the council to get it fixed? That used to be a significant barrier. It’s not anymore. ChatGPT will write a formal letter to the council complaining about a broken street light that is absolutely flawless. And you can prompt it in any language.</bq> <bq>I think more companies start commissioning custom software because the cost of developing custom software goes down, which I think increases the demand for engineers who know what they’re doing.</bq> That's a possibility. But it's also very possible that the expectations of what something like that will cost will also go down by a lot, squeezing developers even more. <bq>I don’t feel threatened as a senior engineer, because I know that if you sit down somebody who doesn’t know how to program with an LLM, and you sit me with an LLM, and ask us to build the same thing, I will build better software than they will.</bq> <bq>[...] market forces come into play, and the demand is there for software that actually works, and is fast and reliable. And so people who can build software that’s fast and reliable, often with LLM assistance, used responsibly, benefit from that.</bq> Market forces have not emphasized fast, reliable, functional software. These forces have instead emphasized monopolies that don't have to care about any of that. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/why-not-comments/" source="Computer Things" author="Hillel Wayne">Why Not Comments</a> <bq>The negative comment tells me that I knew this was slow code, looked into the alternatives, and decided against optimizing. I don't have to spend a bunch of time reinvestigating only to come to the same conclusion.</bq> <bq>The core problem is that function and variable identifiers can only contain one clause of information. I can't store "what the function does" and "what tradeoffs it makes" in the same identifier.</bq> A <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41506182">comment on Hacker News</a> wrote: <bq><ul>A junior engineer writes comments that explain what the code does. A mid-level engineer writes comments that explain why the code does what it does. A senior engineer writes comments that explain why the code isn't written in another way.</ul></bq> <hr> <a href="https://thedailywtf.com/articles/enumerated-science" author="Remy Porter" source="Daily WTF">Enumerated Science</a> The example in this article suitably illustrates why we really have to question whether scientists should really be writing code with so little training. If they wrote text this poorly, they'd be laughed out of their profession. Somehow, it's perfectly fine to write code like this. <bq><code>index = 0 for index, fname in enumerate(img_list): data = np.load(img_list[index]) img = data[0][:,:] img_title 'img'+str(index).zfill(4)+'.jpg' cv2. imwrite(img_title, img) index = index + 1</code></bq> The article points out all of the mistakes but I'll summarize them here. <ul> Why does the code ignore the iteration item declared in <c>fname</c>? Instead, the code re-indexes into the array being iterated with <c>img_list[index]</c>. Like, why bro? You already had it! You know what <c>img_list[index]</c> is? It's <c>fname</c>, bro. Why does the code bother calculating a complicated new filename that has nothing to do with the original filename? Why is the filename called <c>img_title</c>? It's not a title; it's a filename. Why does the code increment the <c>index</c>? It has no effect. Honestly, why does Python even allow modification of the iterator variables? They should be <c>const</c>/immutable exactly so you can avoid doing something distracting like this. </ul> <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvements-in-net-9/" author="Stephen Toub" source=".NET Blog">Performance Improvements in .NET 9</a> <h level="3">Tier 0</h> <bq>Another tier 0 boxing example is dotnet/runtime#90496. There’s a hot path method in the async/await machinery: <c>AsyncTaskMethodBuilder<tresult>.AwaitUnsafeOnCompleted</c> (see <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-async-await-really-works/">How Async/Await Really Works in C#</a> for all the details). It’s really important that this method be optimized well, but it performs various type tests that can end up boxing in tier 0. In a previous release, that boxing was deemed too impactful to startup for async methods invoked early in an application’s lifetime, so <c>[MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.AggressiveOptimization)]</c> was used to opt the method out of tiering, such that it gets optimized from the get-go. But that itself has downsides, because if it skips tiering up, it also skips dynamic PGO, and thus the optimized code isn’t as good as it possibly could be. So, this PR specifically addresses those type tests patterns that box, removing the boxing in tier 0, enabling removing that <c>AggressiveOptimization</c> from <c>AwaitUnsafeOnCompleted</c>, and thereby enabling better optimized code generation for it.</bq> <h level="3">Loops</h> <bq>In .NET 8, as part of the work to improve dynamic PGO, a more powerful graph-based loop analyzer was added that was able to recognize many more loops. For .NET 9 with dotnet/runtime#95251, that analyzer was factored out so that it could be used for generalized loop reasoning. And then with PRs like dotnet/runtime#96756 for loop alignment, dotnet/runtime#96754 and dotnet/runtime#96553 for loop cloning, dotnet/runtime#96752 for loop unrolling, dotnet/runtime#96751 for loop canonicalization, and dotnet/runtime#96753 for loop hoisting, many of these loop-related optimizations have now been moved to the better scheme. All of that means that more loops get optimized.</bq> <h level="3">ARM SVE</h> <bq>There are multiple ways such an ISA impacts .NET, and in particular the JIT. The JIT needs to be able to be able to work with the ISA, understand the associated registers and be able to do register allocation, be taught about encoding and emitting the instructions, and so on. The JIT needs to be taught when and where it’s appropriate to use these instructions, so that as part of compiling IL down to assembly, if operating on a machine that supports SVE, the JIT might be able to pick SVE instructions for use in the generated assembly. And the JIT needs to be taught how to represent this data, these vectors, to user code. All of that is a huge amount of work, especially when you consider that there are thousands of operations represented. What makes it even more work is hardware intrinsics.</bq> <bq>Designing and enabling the SVE support is a monstrous, multi-year effort, and while the support is functional and folks are encouraged to take it for a spin, it’s not yet baked enough for us to be 100% confident the shape won’t need to evolve (for .NET 9, it’s also restricted to hardware with a vector width of 128 bits, but that restriction will be removed subsequently). Hence, <c>[Experimental]</c>.</bq> <h level="3">AVX512</h> <bq>So the values are <c>0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0</c>, which we read as the binary <c>0b01101000</c>, which is <c>0x68</c>. That byte is used as a “control code” to the <c>vpternlog</c> instruction to encode which of the 256 possible truth tables that exist for any possible (deterministic) Boolean combination of those inputs is being chosen. This PR then teaches the JIT how to analyze the tree structures produced by the JIT to recognize such sequences of Boolean operations, compute the control code, and substitute in the use of the better instruction. Of course, the JIT isn’t going to do the enumeration I did above; turns out there’s a more efficient way to compute the control code, performing the same sequence of operations but on specific <c>byte</c> values instead of <c>Booleans</c>.</bq> <bq>This is beneficial for a variety of reasons, including less data to store, less data to load, and if the register containing this state needed to be spilled (meaning something else needs to be put into the register, so the value currently in the register is temporarily stored in memory), reloading it is similarly cheaper.</bq> All the considerations are mind-boggling. Does it fit in a cache line? How many registers does it use? Is it colocated with similar data? Is the data aligned on a boundary? <h level="3">Vectorization</h> <bq>Of course, you may then wonder, why wasn’t <c>bool.TryFormat</c> reverted to use the simpler code? The unfortunate answer is that this optimization only currently applies to <c>array</c> targets rather than span targets. That’s because there are alignment requirements for performing these kinds of writes, and whereas the JIT can make certain assumptions about the alignment of arrays, it can’t make those same assumptions about spans, which can represent slices of something else at unaligned boundaries. This is now one of the few cases where arrays are better than spans; typically span is as good or better. But I’m hopeful it will be improved in the future.</bq> <h level="3">Object Stack Allocation</h> <bq>The hardest part of stack allocating objects is ensuring that it’s safe. If a reference to the object were to escape and end up being stored somewhere that outlived the stack frame containing the stack-allocated object, that would be very bad; when the method returned, those outstanding references would be pointing to garbage. So, the JIT needs to perform escape analysis to ensure that never happens, and doing that well is extremely challenging.</bq> This is the case where you have to be exceedingly clever in order to not have to let pessimism kill the feature entirely. That is, if you can't prove enough, then you end up having to assume that escape is possible in too many cases---and the optimization ends up applying much less than you'd hoped it would. <h level="3">VM</h> <bq>The .NET runtime provides many services to managed code. There’s the GC, of course, and the JIT compiler, and then there’s a whole bunch of functionality around things like assembly and type loading, exception handling, configuration management, virtual dispatch, interop infrastructure, stub management, and so on. All of that functionality is generally referred to as being part of the coreclr virtual machine (VM).</bq> <h level="3">Mono</h> <bq>We frequently say “the runtime,” but in reality there are currently multiple runtime implementations in .NET. “coreclr” is the runtime thus far referred to, which is the default runtime used on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and for services and desktop applications, but there’s also “mono,” which is mainly used when the form factor of the target application requires a small runtime: by default, it’s the runtime that’s used when building mobile apps for Android and iOS today, as well as the runtime used for Blazor WASM apps.</bq> <bq>[...] when targeting WASM, the interpreter has a form of PGO where after methods have been invoked some number of times and are deemed important, it’ll generate WASM on-the-fly to optimize those methods. This tiering gets better in .NET 9 with dotnet/runtime#92981, which enables keeping track of which methods tiered up, and if the code is running in a browser, storing that information in the browser’s cache for subsequent runs. When the code then runs subsequently, it can incorporate the previous learnings to tier up better and more quickly.</bq> <h level="3">Threading / <c>Debugger.NotifyOfCrossThreadDependency</c></h> <bq>When you’re debugging a .NET process and you break in the debugger, it pauses all threads in the debuggee process so that nothing is making forward progress while you examine state. However, .NET debuggers, like the one in Visual Studio, support invoking properties and methods in the debuggee while debugging. That can be a big problem if the functionality being invoked relies on one of those paused threads to do something, e.g. if the property you access tries to take a lock that’s held by another thread or tries to <c>Wait</c> on a <c>Task</c>. To mitigate problems here, the <c>Debugger.NotifyOfCrossThreadDependency</c> method exists. Functionality that relies on another thread to do something can call <c>NotifyOfCrossThreadDependency</c>; if there’s no debugger attached, it’s a nop, but if there is a debugger attached, this signals the problem to the debugger, which can then react accordingly. The Visual Studio debugger reacts by stopping the evaluation but then by offering an opt-in option of “slipping” all threads, unpausing all threads until the evaluated operation completes, at which point all threads will be paused again, thereby again trying to mitigate any problems that might occur from the cross-thread dependency.</bq> <h level="3">VM</h> <bq>The <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/specs/Memory-model.md">official .NET memory model</a> has now been documented. However, some of the practices that were being employed in the core libraries (due to defensive coding or uncertainty of the memory model or out-of-date requirements) are no longer necessary. One of the main tools available for folks coding at a level where memory model is relevant is the <c>volatile</c> keyword / the <c>Volatile</c> class.</bq> <bq>Marking fields or operations as <c>volatile</c> can come with an expense, depending on the circumstance and the target platform. For example, it can restrict the C# compiler and the JIT compiler from performing certain optimizations.</bq> <h level="3">Reflection</h> <bq>Delegates in .NET are “multicast,” meaning a single delegate instance might actually represent multiple methods to be invoked; this is how .NET events are implemented. If I invoke a delegate, the delegate implementation handles invoking each constituent method, sequentially, in turn. But what if I want to customize the invocation logic? Maybe I want to wrap each individual method in a <c>try</c>/<c>catch</c>, or maybe I want to track the return values from all of the methods rather than just the last, or some such behavior. To achieve that, delegates expose a way to get an array of delegates, one for each method that’s part of the original.</bq> There are a lot of long chapters on number- and text-processing, which is fascinating but not eminently quotable. You can really see how so many of the various improvements build on each other to finally offer incredible speed improvements (e.g. <c>Quaternion.Cosh()</c>). So many operations have been improved to reduce allocations to zero while reducing time to a few percent of the previous time, all often with even more code defined in C# rather in the JIT as native code (see <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/98623">Move memset/memcpy helpers to managed impl #98623</a> for an extreme example that touched 68 files in 48 commits). I find this to be quite elegant. It shows that the investment in the new C# constructs are paying off because it allows framework developers to build faster and better primitives without escaping to a different language and runtime. This, in turn, allows other skilled developers to benefit from the same. Not only that, but managed code is accessible to the GC whereas native code is not. It's very clear how .NET and C# are being positioned to take over numeric and text processing from Python and C++/C. Everything is being made more generic and funneled to vectorized types, which, in turn, map to the most optimal set of instructions for the myriad supported scenarios, like AOT, ARM, WASM, x64, x86, etc. It's quite an incredible effort. All of these things combine to make your regular expressions and text searches faster, even if you stick to the existing APIs. In some cases, there are new APIs to use, but not too many. Instead, the beauty of .NET 9 is that it will just make everything so much more efficient---faster and with fewer allocations and GC churn---without programmers having to do a thing. A true feat of engineering. <bq>[...] it’s important to recognize that many of the changes discussed thus far implicitly accrue to <c>Regex</c>. <c>Regex</c> already uses <c>SearchValues</c>, and so improvements to <c>SearchValues</c> benefit <c>Regex</c> (it’s one of my favorite things about working at the lowest levels of the stack: improvements there have a multiplicative effect, in that direct use of them improves, but so too does indirect use via intermediate components that instantly get better as the lower level does).</bq> <h level="3">DFA Limits</h> There is a ton of detail about the specifics of regular-expression optimization---enough to make your head spin. Like this: <bq>The non-backtracking implementation works by constructing a finite automata, which can be thought of as a graph, with the implementation walking around the graph as it consumes additional characters from the input and uses those to guide what node(s) it transitions to next. The graph is built out lazily, such that nodes are only added as those states are explored, and the nodes can be one of two kinds: DFA (deterministic) or NFA (non-deterministic). DFA nodes ensure that for any given character that comes next in the input, there’s only ever one possible node to which to transition. Not so for NFA, where at any point in time there’s a list of all the possible nodes the system could be in, and moving to the next state means examining each of the current states, finding all possible transitions out of each, and treating the union of all of those new positions as the next state. DFA is thus much cheaper than NFA in terms of the overheads involved in walking around the graph, and we want to fall back to NFA only when we absolutely have to, which is when the DFA graph would be too large: some patterns have the potential to create massive numbers of DFA nodes. Thus, there’s a threshold where once that number of constructed nodes in the graph is hit, new nodes are constructed as NFA rather than DFA. In .NET 8 and earlier, that limit was somewhat arbitrarily set at 10,000. For .NET 9 as part of this PR, analysis was done to show that a much higher limit was worth the memory trade-offs, and the limit was raised to 125,000, which means many more patterns can fully execute as DFA.</bq> <bq>The inner matching loop is the hot path for a matching operation: read the next character, look up its minterm, follow the corresponding edge to the next node in the graph, rinse and repeat. Performance of the engine is tied to efficiency of this loop. These PRs recognized that there were some checks being performed in that inner loop which were only relevant to a minority of patterns. For the majority, the code could be specialized such that those checks wouldn’t be needed in the hot path.</bq> <h level="3">Span, Span, and more Span</h> <bq>The introduction of <c>Span<t></c> and <c>ReadOnlySpan<t></c> back in .NET Core 2.1 have revolutionized how we write .NET code (especially in the core libraries) and what APIs we expose (see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KdICNWOfEQ">A Complete .NET Developer’s Guide to Span</a> if you’re interested in a deeper dive.) .NET 9 has continued the trend of doubling-down on spans as a great way to both implicitly provide performance boosts and also expose APIs that enables developers to do more for performance in their own code.</bq> <bq>One of the really nice optimizations the C# compiler added several years back was the ability to recognize when a new <c>byte</c>/<c>sbyte</c>/<c>bool</c> array was being constructed, filled with only constants, and directly assigned to a <c>ReadOnlySpan<t></c>. In such a case, it would recognize that the data was all blittable and could never be modified, so rather than allocating an array and wrapping a span around it, it would blit the data into the assembly and then just construct a span around a pointer into the assembly data with the appropriate length.</bq> This is a wonderful optimization. Clever in a way that only a systems programmer would invent. <bq><code>foreach (Range r in clientSecWebSocketProtocol.AsSpan().Split(',')) { if (clientSecWebSocketProtocol.AsSpan(r).Trim().Equals(acceptProtocol, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { return true; } }</code>In doing so, it becomes allocation-free, as this <c>Split</c> doesn’t need to allocate a <c>string[]</c> to hold results and doesn’t need to allocate a string for each segment: instead, it’s returning a <c>ref struct</c> enumerator that yields a <c>Range</c> representing each segment. The caller can then use that <c>Range</c> to slice the input. It’s yielding a <c>Range</c> rather than, say, a <c>ReadOnlySpan<t></c>, to enable the splitting to be used with original sources other than spans and be able to get the segments in the original form.</bq> There is such a strong focus on <c>structs</c> and <c>refs</c> to make allocation-free code. And now we see how they leverage the recently introduced <c>Range</c> to provide indexes into a sequence that the calling code can decide how to extract. This offers maximum flexibility to the caller, as the algorithm isn't making any costly decisions for it. In this case, he's discussing how they've made it relatively easy and intuitive to write code that searches a string without any allocations. The sequence doesn't allocate, examining the chunk as a span doesn't allocate, even the <c>Trim()</c> on a <c>Span</c> doesn't allocate anything. <h level="3">LINQ</h> There is a long chapter on LINQ optimizations that boils down to having cleaned up a ton of internal implementation to consolidate on a common base class for customer iteration-combinations like <c>Where</c>/<c>First</c>, <c>Where</c>/<c>OrderBy</c>, etc. Instead of testing for interfaces, it can now test for a single base class and perform a virtual rather than an interface dispatch (which is cheaper). This massive cleanup has the dual benefit of having made many, many LINQ operations 10, 20, and even 100 times faster---and many of them (if not most) are now completely allocation-free. Reducing allocations reduces churn in the GC, which also makes the app faster. <h level="3">Core Collections</h> There is also a long chapter on dictionary optimizations. In particular, you can now store data in a dictionary with <c>string</c> keys but request an alternate view on the dictionary that lets you work with it as if it used <c>ReadOnlySpan<char></c>, which can drastically reduce allocations as the spans you have don't need to be converted to strings simply in order to do the lookups and stores. The changes apply to <c>HashSets</c> as well. <h level="3">Compression</h> This is less about compression and more about the general philosophy and tactics underlying performance optimization in .NET (and, presumably, any runtime). <bq>It’s an important goal of the core .NET libraries to be as platform-agnostic as possible. Things should generally behave the same way regardless of which operating system or which hardware is being used, excepting things that really are operating system or hardware specific (e.g. we purposefully don’t try to paper over casing differences of different file systems). To that end, we generally implement as much as possible in C#, deferring down to the operating system and native platform libraries only when necessary.</bq> <h level="3">Networking</h> <bq>dotnet/runtime#99364 changes the synchronization mechanism from using a pure lock-based scheme to a more opportunistic concurrency scheme that employs a first-layer of lockless synchronization. There’s now still a lock, but for the hot path it’s avoided as long as there are connections in the pool by using a <c>ConcurrentStack<t></c>, such that renting is a <c>TryPop</c> and returning is a <c>Push</c>. <c>ConcurrentStack<t></c> itself uses a lock-free algorithm, that’s a lot more scalable than a lock.</bq> <bq><c>UrlEncode</c> had a complicated scheme where it would UTF8-encode into a newly-allocated <c>byte[]</c>, percent-encode in place in that (thanks to the ability to reinterpret cast with spans), and then use the resulting chars to create a new string. Instead, <c>string.Create</c> can be used, with all of the work done in-place in the buffer generated for that operation.</bq> <bq>[...] updated <c>UrlEncodeToBytes</c>, using stack space instead of allocation for smaller inputs, and using <c>SearchValues<byte></c> to optimize the search for invalid bytes.</bq> You can really see how the changes made over the last several versions allow a literal horde of open-source programmers to optimize the hell out of hot paths in the .NET library. Use <c>Spans</c> and <c>ReadOnlySpans</c> and <c>ref structs</c> and <c>readonly ref structs</c> to avoid allocations, allocate on the stack wherever you can when you can't avoid allocations, return enumerators instead of allocating array results, use highly optimized building blocks like <c>SearchValues</c> and <c>ConcurrentStack</c>, which employ lock-free algorithms or include custom implementations for common patterns. It all adds up to being able to just write performant code by default, writing in a legible, maintainable, and concise high-level API that is carefully marshaled down to the processor by the compiler and/or the JIT to super-efficient IL and assembler code. You can visualize your code being analyzed and then <a href="https://youtu.be/xw5ErADiuec?t=371">sorted like Plinko chips</a> until it finally lands in the processor cache as instructions. <h level="3">Profiling with Benchmark.Net</h> <bq>There’s another very handy nuget package, Microsoft.VisualStudio.DiagnosticsHub.BenchmarkDotNetDiagnosers, which contains additional “diagnosers” for BenchmarkDotNet. Diagnosers are one of the main extensibility points within BenchmarkDotNet, enabling developers to perform additional tracking and analyses over benchmarks. You’ve already seen me use some, including the built-in <c>[MemoryDiagnoser(false)]</c> and <c>[DisassemblyDiagnoser]</c>; there are other built-in ones we haven’t used in this post but that are helpful in various situations, like <c>[ThreadingDiagnoser]</c> and <c>[ExceptionDiagnoser]</c>, but diagnosers can come from anywhere, and the aforementioned nuget package provides several more. The purpose of those diagnosers is to collect and export performance traces that Visual Studio’s performance tools can then consume. In my case, I want to collect a CPU trace, so as to understand where CPU consumption is going, so I added a [CPUUsageDiagnoser] attribute to my Tests class</bq> <h level="3">Lock-free programming</h> What does lock-free programming look like? You replace a <c>lock</c> with an atomic compare/exchange operation, usually in a loop (that's why they're sometimes called "spin locks"). <bq><code>lock (this) { _delta += value; }</code>it used an interlocked operation to perform the addition atomically. Here <c>_delta</c> is a <c>double</c>, and there’s no Interlocked.Add that works with <c>double</c> values, so instead the standard approach of using a loop around an <c>Interlocked.CompareExchange</c> was employed.<code>double currentValue; do { currentValue = _delta; } while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _delta, currentValue + value, currentValue) != currentValue);</code></bq> <h level="3">Cache lines</h> Finally, an optimization that takes CPU cache lines into account. I hadn't seen anything else that low-level so far. <bq>In this benchmark, one thread is incrementing <c>_values[0]</c> and the other thread is incrementing either <c>_values[1]</c> or <c>_values[31]</c>. That index is the only difference, yet the one accessing <c>_values[31]</c> is several times faster than the one accessing <c>_values[1]</c>. That’s because there’s contention here even if it’s not obvious in the code. The contention comes from the fact that the hardware works with memory in groups of bytes called a “cache line.” Most hardware has caches lines of 64 bytes. In order to update a particular memory location, the hardware will acquire the whole cache line. If another core wants to update that same cache line, it’ll need to acquire it. That back and forth results in a lot of overhead. It doesn’t matter if one core is touching the first of those 64 bytes and another thread is touching the last, from the hardware’s perspective there’s still sharing happening. “False sharing.” Thus, the <c>Counter</c> fix is using padding around the double values to try to space them out more so as to minimize the sharing that limits scalability.</bq> 👏 File that under something I understand but would never have programmed. <bq>In the two benchmarks, we can see that the number of instructions executed is almost the same between when false sharing occurred <c>(Index == 1)</c> and didn’t <c>(Index == 31)</c>, but the number of cache misses is more than three times larger in the false sharing case, and reasonably well correlated with the time increase. When one core performs a write, that invalidates the corresponding cache line in the other core’s cache, such that the other core then needs to reload the cache line, resulting in cache misses.</bq> <h level="3">Conclusion</h> <bq>There are multiple forms of performance improvements covered throughout the post. Some of the improvements you get completely for free just by upgrading the runtime; the implementations in the runtime are better, and so when you run on them, your code just gets better, too. Some of the improvements you get completely for free by upgrading the runtime and recompiling; the C# compiler itself generates better code, often taking advantage of newer surface area exposed in the runtime. And other improvements are new features that, in addition to the runtime and compiler utilizing, you can utilize directly and make your code even faster. Educating about those capabilities and why and where you’d want to utilize them is important to me. But beyond the new features, the techniques employed in making all of the rest of the optimizations throughout the runtime are often more broadly applicable. By learning how these optimizations are applied in the runtime, you can extrapolate and apply similar techniques to your own code, making it that much faster.</bq> And that is much appreciated, Stephen. Having seen the available tools, I feel much better equipped to not only write but be able to advise on writing performant code. <h id="sports">Sports</h> I'm watching Spain play Switzerland with one eye while I'm doing some writing and working on some pictures. There were a couple of early goals for Spain, punctuated by a lovely goal for Switzerland because of an uncalled handball that was detected by the VAR. The next big play was a lovely breakaway by Embolo, which was brought to a brutal halt by manhandling, then a dangerous tackle by Spain's Le Normand. The referee didn't hesitate, running over and showing an immediate red car.d Unfortunately for him, his masters are unseen, staring into the same screens that run everything else in our lives these days. His authority is secondary to the VAR, the real referee. There was a check, whereupon everyone stood around on the field for long minutes, waiting to see if the referee was allowed to be considered correct in this case. It was pathetic and mood-killing. It ruins the flow of the game. It's done to ensure that sports-betting is settled in a manner considered appropriate by everyone making scads of money off of sports-betting. Why else do you think that VAR was finally approved? Did you think it was a coincidence that sports-betting became positively huge at the same time that VAR was finally approved to take the joy and romance out of every single sport? A little bit later, there was an obvious handball in the box by Spain that would have led to a penalty kick. Nothing. No call; no review. Nothing. How odd. How inconsistent. How frustrating for anyone who's a fan of a sport. On another note: I don't understand how Switzerland keeps getting ranked so high in the FIFA rankings. They've had a 11-10-man advantage since the 20th minute and only managed to score one goal. In the 76th and 80th minutes, Spain scored to make it 4--1. They've been playing with only ten men for about an hour at that point---in the pouring rain. Switzerland sucks. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-nfl-medias-hypocrisy-never-quits" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">The NFL Media's Hypocrisy Never Quits</a> <bq>[...] if it’s bigger than football, then it has to be bigger than football all the time. And if we accept that, then there’s no conclusion other than to say that football should be banned, and barring [...] those of us who care about the players should stop watching. Of course, I do still watch. Turns out I don’t have the courage of my convictions. Just like I still eat meat even though I have come to understand that doing so is immoral. (No, I’m not interested in debating that.) I watch the NFL and I enjoy it and every time a game ends I feel like I just bought some conflict diamonds. There is, famously, no ethical living under capitalism, no way to escape the endless moral entanglements of living under a government and in an economy. We’re all hypocrites, especially me. You have to muddle through and decide which things you consume are so immoral that you can’t consume them anymore. But please, spare me the bleating about what’s “bigger than football” hours after you were rooting for giant men to slam their heads together hundreds of times in a row. And don’t tell me that what you care about is the health of the players when that concern is so selective, based on the stardom of the player. It’s unseemly.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzupw564-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/szzupw564-0" caption="Sci-Fi Short Film 'To Err'" author="Derek Romrell / DUST" width="560px" source="YouTube"> <hr> Through a discussion about Muesli with a friend, I learned a lot of things today, starting with <a href="https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-and-trader-joes-are-they-the-same-company/" source="ALDI Reviewer" author="Joshua">Who Owns Trader Joe’s: Are Aldi and Trader Joe’s the Same Company?</a> <bq>That means Aldi does own Trader Joe’s … but not the Aldi that Americans are familiar with. Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe’s and Aldi Süd owns Aldi US.</bq> <img src="{att_link}aldi-company-graphic-700x587.png" href="{att_link}aldi-company-graphic-700x587.png" align="none" caption="Aldi Company hierarchy and countries" scale="50%"> <bq>At Aldi, customers use a quarter to unlock a cart, bag their own groceries, and return their cart to the cart rack when they’re done.</bq> This is almost correct. My experience was that you waved a quarter at someone returning an empty cart and handed it to them in exchange for the cart. Super-friendly, community vibe. Then I found myself looking up what the relative sizes of a U.S. quarter and a CHF2.- coin were. <img src="{att_link}size_of_a_quarter.png" href="{att_link}size_of_a_quarter.png" align="none" caption="Size of a quarter" scale="75%"> <img src="{att_link}size_of_one_and_two_france_pieces.png" href="{att_link}size_of_one_and_two_france_pieces.png" align="none" caption="Size of one- and two-Franc pieces" scale="75%"> On a side note: DuckDuckGo is the bomb. Look at how clean and maximally informative the result for the search "how big is a quarter" is. <img src="{att_link}search_for_how_big_is_a_quarter.png" href="{att_link}search_for_how_big_is_a_quarter.png" align="none" caption="Search for 'how big is a quarter'" scale="75%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj62Gs6MOcg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xj62Gs6MOcg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Akiyuki Brick Channel" caption="Great Ball Contraption (GBC) at Japan Brickfest 2024"> <ul> "Inconstancy of Universal Joint" at 02:03 looks like real industrial robots. So does "Aphex Twin WTmkⅡ2nd" at 02:16. "Strain Wave Gearing" at 04:16 is cool as hell. "Catch and Spin Robots" at 04:31 have little grabby hands. "Five Tilted Rings" at 06:07 is inspired. As is "Invisible Lift" at 06;55. ...there's so much more. Just watch the whole 16 minutes. I have to mention "Orbit Overlap" at 11:40, though. Also pretty much all of "Wave Generator" to "Hybrid Double Lifter ver.4" to "Container Transporter Analogue", starting at 13:07. </ul> This all reminded me a bit of the videos posted to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@thang010146">Thang010146</a> channel. For example, <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_dBeXeb-Y0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/j_dBeXeb-Y0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="thang010146" caption="Translation in square orbit"> <hr> <a href="https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/" author="" source="Modem.IO">How to Monetize a Blog</a> This is a wild ride. It will try to kill your browser. You will hear your CPU fan. Your phone will get hot. It is worth it. It's a lovely piece of art that connects the blasted hellscape that is the modern, ad-supported web to the mad scribblings of a hollowed-out witness to the phantom shadows cast by eldritch monsters as they stride through higher dimensions older than the universe. It is a story of initial rebellion and eventual and inevitable capitulation. <bq>Dive, straight into the deep end, riding gravity all the way to the bottom. Enjoy a few laps around the sink as we circle the drain and call it the scenic route, before we plummet wantingly into the lightless hollows of our making. The slippery, spiralling expressway to the source of this autophagy. [...] reaching with a satiety that is impossible to meet. We invent new gods and we bury them in the same breath. We leave scars on the world like canyons carved from rivers of glass.</bq> <bq>a bed of warping rot, riddled with protrusions: wretched, spindly things, like the gnarled limbs of burnt trees, but with too many knotted and twisting junctions to make a convincing argument for something natural. The canopy suspended over and spattering the walls with the thick oily substance as it thrashes beneath the surface. Coarse barbed tendrils wrap around it, a mesh of creeping vines nearly indistinguishable from the strands of tar arcing out of the pool as it lashes violently pulling the stitches from the seam and allowing the structure to collapse, the catalyst for the subsequent shockwave that ripples across the plane and dissolves everything that is understood.</bq> <bq>Our dreams and ambitions as children forcefully remolded into the shape of commodities. A toybox full of broken components, everything long expired of unfamiliarity. We are our own ghosts that haunt us. I am the phantom in the microwave that keeps pressing the seven seconds button for some reason.</bq> <bq>Driving without a destination on vacant roads and empty boulevards.</bq> <bq>reduced compressed distilled until our bones are broken and our minds SHATTERED so that the pieces can be reassembled and we can finally BECOME</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/rust-in-linux-lead-retires-rather-than-deal-with-more-nontechnical-nonsense/" author="Kevin Purdy" source="Ars Technica">Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”</a> Rust does not have the IDE or tools or support or development speed that is needed to get people on board. It's a religion. As DeVault said, it's also got a ton of fragmentation in basic libraries. C has the same problem! But it's the devil they know. <h id="games">Video Games</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt4XOPiPJHs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Jt4XOPiPJHs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Coffee Stain Studios" caption="Satisfactory 1.0 Launch Trailer"> I played this with a friend co-op a couple of times a couple of years back---man, it's been in early-access for a long time---and it's pretty fun. He was sooooo much better than I was that I ended up just standing around in-game watching him build things. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/1fdj16m/meirl/" author="" source="Reddit">Any Video Game Ever</a> <img src="{att_link}hoard_like_a_dragon,_loud_and_clear.jpeg" href="{att_link}hoard_like_a_dragon,_loud_and_clear.jpeg" align="none" caption="Hoard like a dragon, loud and clear" scale="50%"> <bq>Any Video Game Ever: Here is a limited resource you should be careful not to use too often. Me: Never use it, gotcha. Game: No-- Me: Hoard like a dragon, loud and clear.</bq>