<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#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="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/acting-us-president-stops-by-whitehouse-to-pick-up-paycheck/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Acting U.S. President Stops By White House To Pick Up Paycheck</a> <img src="{att_link}acting_u.s._president_stops_by_white_house_to_pick_up_paycheck.jpg" href="{att_link}acting_u.s._president_stops_by_white_house_to_pick_up_paycheck.jpg" align="none" caption="Acting U.S. President Stops By White House To Pick Up Paycheck" scale="50%"> <bq>Zelenskyy was eager to stop by the Oval Office to personally receive his paycheck from his underling, Joe Biden. <b>"I love money," Zelenskyy told members of the White House Press Corpse as he picked up his check with a sly wink.</b> When asked why he doesn't use direct deposit, Zelenskyy said he feels nostalgic about picking up a check in person. <b>"There's nothing quite like holding a check for a couple billion dollars in your hand," he said.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/18/patrick-lawrence-the-war-party-makes-its-plans/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The ‘War Party’ Makes Its Plans</a> <bq>[...] however many foolish voters may be illusioned otherwise, <b>if Harris takes the White House her business will be neither more nor less than managing the imperium</b>—the wars, the provocations, the illegal sanctions and other collective punishments, the terrorist clients in Israel, the neo–Nazis in Kiev.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>the Harris campaign declared its delight in having the support of these courageous patriots</b> [Liz and Dick Cheney], as the organization called them in its official statements.</bq> <bq>At the moment, Biden and Secretary of State Blinken are in their “Well, maybe” phase, and we are meant to be on the edges of our seats wondering whether they will assent to these plans. But haven’t we seen this movie before and don’t we know how it ends? Wasn’t it, “Maybe we will send HIMARS rocket systems,” “Maybe M–1 tanks,” “Maybe Patriot missiles,” “Maybe F–16s”? Even before the Biden–Starmer encounter last week, <b>Blinken and David Lammy, the British foreign secretary, during a visit to Kiev for talks with Volodymyr Zelensky, were already dropping heavy hints that Biden will once again acquiesce to the plans the Ukrainian president and the British PM were choreographed to present to him.</b></bq> <bq>These people are convening to plan <b>the Western powers’ reckless escalation of a proxy war they have no way of winning and know they have no way of winning.</b></bq> <bq>Read A New Way Forward, a 13–page document. The one and a half pages given to national security and foreign affairs amount to <b>a screed dedicated to Russophobia, Sinophobia, NATOphilia and “the most lethal fighting force in the world,” which seems to be Harris’s idea of a diplomatic corps.</b> This is how Steve Cohen’s War Party thinks and what it sounds like.</bq> Citing Vladimir Putin: <bq>The fact is that — I have mentioned this, and any expert, both in our country and in the West, will confirm this — <b>the Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge, high-precision, long-range systems supplied by the West.</b> They cannot do that. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from satellites, which Ukraine does not have. <b>This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or U.S. satellites — in general, NATO satellites.</b> This is the first point. The second point — perhaps the most important, the key point even — is that <b>only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this.</b> Therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. <b>It is about deciding whether NATO countries become directly involved in the military conflict</b> or not.</bq> Putin continued, <bq><b>This will mean that NATO countries—the United States and European countries—are at war with Russia.</b> And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023" source="The Conversation" author="Saul Justin Newman">The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman</a> <bq>In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, <b>almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.</b></bq> <bq>There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that <b>82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.</b></bq> <bq>When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. <b>With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.</b></bq> <bq><b>In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war.</b> That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or <b>if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.</b></bq> <bq>the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. <b>Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.</b></bq> <bq>What does this all mean for human longevity? The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know. <b>The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn’t depend on documents.</b> We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.</bq> <bq><b>Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate. You’re talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections.</b> It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.</bq> <bq>The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and <b>Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud.</b> This data is just rotten from the inside out.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/to-the-israeli-soldier-who-murdered" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">To the Israeli Soldier Who Murdered Aysenur Ezgi Eygi</a> <bq><b>I know how you talk. The black humor. “Pint sized terrorists” you say of the children you kill.</b> You are proud of your skills. It gives you cachet. You cradle your weapon as if it is an extension of your body. You admire its despicable beauty. This is who you are. A killer.</bq> <bq><b>In your society of killers, you are respected, rewarded, promoted. You are numb to the suffering you inflict. Maybe you enjoy it. Maybe you think you are protecting yourself, your identity, your comrades, your nation. Maybe you believe the killing is a necessary evil, a way to make sure Palestinians die before they can strike.</b> Maybe you have surrendered your morality to the blind obedience of the military, subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death. Maybe you are scared to die. Maybe you want to prove to yourself and others that you are tough, you can kill. <b>Maybe your mind is so warped that you believe killing is righteous.</b></bq> <bq><b>You were the last person to see Aysenur alive. You were the first person to see her dead.</b></bq> <bq><b>This is you now. And now no one can reach you. You are death’s angel. You are numb and cold.</b> But, I suspect, this will not last. I covered war for a long time. I know, even if you do not, the next chapter of your life. I know what happens when you leave the embrace of the military, when you are no longer a cog in these factories of death. <b>I know the hell you are about to enter.</b></bq> <bq>You will face a choice. Live the rest of your life, stunted, numb, cut off from yourself, cut off from those around you. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder. <b>There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is you then you will never again truly live.</b></bq> <bq><b>Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime. It is murder. You are a murderer.</b> I am sure you were not ordered to kill Aysenur. You shot Aysenur in the head because you could, because you felt like it. Israel runs an open-air shooting gallery in Gaza and the West Bank. <b>Total impunity. Murder as sport.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/09/only-mullahs-can-save-us-from-samson-now.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">Only the Mullahs Can Save Us from Samson Now</a> <bq>The danger is Israel, <b>an increasingly unhinged rogue state with an illegal and unregulated nuclear stockpile who is at war with itself and losing badly.</b> Based on the towering body count alone, even a well-informed war nerd could be forgiven for believing that Israel's crusade against Hamas is a smashing success, but you would be sorely mistaken. Commander Yahya Sinwar, the big cheese in Gaza, isn't being glib or delusional when he brags about having Israel "right where we want them." <b>Israel's war against the children of Gaza may be the most hideously successful holocaust since Hitler but the actual war against Hamas has been a disastrous failure and the people of Israel know it.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the IDF is also a mobilization army, meaning that <b>keeping a large number of men and women in uniform indefinitely also means keeping a large percentage of the nation's entire workforce in uniform indefinitely.</b> This has already inflicted severe economic devastation on the Israeli economy with some estimates putting <b>the cost as high as 30% of the nation's GDP.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-didnt-fail-to-get-a-ceasefire" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Biden Didn't "Fail" To Get A Ceasefire; He Never Tried</a> <bq>If you look at the entire global behavior of the US empire as a whole, <b>the difference between what it would look like if Trump were president and what it would look like under Harris is probably something like one tenth of one percent </b>— and even that’s being generous. Whereas if either party ran candidates who stood for peace, justice, equality and a healthy environment, the world would be so drastically changed as to become almost unrecognizable. Which is why neither party ever runs such a candidate. Both parties exist to maintain the corrupt, abusive, warmongering, imperialist, ecocidal capitalist status quo. <b>The oligarchs and empire managers who really run the US government will do whatever they need to do to ensure that only candidates who’ll preserve that status quo ever get anywhere near the Oval Office.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/21/harvester-of-eyes/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Harvester of Eyes</a> <bq><b>The NYT called the civilians</b>, including children and health care workers, who were killed by Israeli rigged pager bombs <b>“noncombatants [who] were also drawn into the fray.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Francesca Albanese</b>, UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine: “The way Israel is destroying Palestinian food sovereignty will be studied not only as a shocking example of genocidal conduct but also as <b>a textbook case of sadistic disrespect for human life & dignity.</b></bq> <bq>Craig Mokhiber: “<b>Israel provided military support to South Africa during apartheid, to Rwanda during its genocide, to Serbia during the genocide in Bosnia, & to Myanmar during the genocide against the Rohingya.</b> Today, it supports oppressive regimes & is allied with ethno-nationalist forces across the globe. It is a key source of weapons, intelligence, and tech to oppressive governments in every region. <b>It attacks its neighbors & assassinates foreign officials. Its agents corrupt governments & harass human rights defenders in the West. Still think this is only a Palestinian problem?</b>”</bq> <bq><b>In March, Nicaragua filed a request for the ICJ to begin proceedings against Germany for providing arms in support of Israel’s genocidal campaign</b> against Palestinians in Gaza. <b>Since then, Germany has not approved any new arms exports to Israel.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/20/roaming-charges-cat-scratch-political-fever/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Cat Scratch Political Fever</a> <bq><b>In 1995, productivity in the European Union nations was 95% of America’s; now, it is less than 80%.</b></bq> <bq><b>Kidney dialysis accounts for nearly 1% of the federal budget</b>, three times the size of NASA.</bq> <bq><b>The rate of stillbirths in the U.S. is 1 out of every 175 live births</b>, which is higher than the rate of deaths during infancy and higher than the rate of death for any age before 50.</bq> <bq><b>Emissions from data centers are likely 662% higher than big tech claims.</b> Last year, data centers consumed a fifth of Ireland’s electricity, more than all the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities combined.</bq> <bq><b>NYPD Tasers fail 40% of the time.</b> Embattled NY Mayor Eric Adams said that the NYPD cops showed admirable “restraint’ in the subway shooting. <b>How many more bystanders should they have taken out over the $2.90 fare, Mr. Mayor?</b> Before former cop Adams was elected Mayor in 2022, <b>the NYPD overtime pay for patrolling the subway cost the city $4 million annually. It’s now $155 million.</b></bq> <bq>What’s interesting about this crime scare-story from the NY Daily News is that the NYPD can count their own police shootings to boost the crime stat numbers. As Rebecca Kavanaugh pointed out, the “Beware of Strangers” story “cited <b>NYPD statistics showing 14 people killed by strangers in 2020 and 26 in 2021. What it didn’t mention is that 8 of the 2020 and 5 of the 2021 killings were by police.</b>”</bq> <bq>The US is no longer the world’s leading jailer. Even though the incarceration rate in the States has remained steady, it has been surpassed by the mass arrests taking place in El Salvador. <b>Under the repressive Bukele regime, the incarceration rate in El Salvador has soared to nearly twice the rate in the US.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/israel-lebanon-genocide-regional-war/" author="Seraj Assi" source="Jacobin">Israel Is Extending Its Genocidal War to Lebanon</a> <bq><b>On Monday, waves of Israeli air strikes that by Tuesday morning had killed 558 people in southern and eastern Lebanon</b>, including women and children, while displacing thousands others who fled north for safety following Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) warnings to evacuate. At least 1,835 civilians have been reported wounded. Footage shows Israeli forces carpet-bombing civilian homes across Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, hitting at least fifty-eight towns and villages. According to Lebanon’s health ministry, the Israeli bombing has targeted homes, medical centers, ambulances, and the cars of people trying to flee. <b>Entire Lebanese families have been wiped out. Horrific footage shows children trapped under the rubble.</b> This is a blatant war crime.</bq> <bq>[...] a regional war is precisely what Israel wants. Armed with a bottomless supply of US weapons, Israel is extending its genocidal war to Lebanon with clear intent on a regional escalation that could directly implicate the United States. Following the Monday massacre, the Pentagon dispatched additional troops to the region in anticipation of a wider conflict. <b>The assault also comes just hours after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed his “support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Lebanese Hezbollah attacks.”</b></bq> So many innocent people taking the hit for political cowards. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/going-from-the-civilian-buildings" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Going From "The Civilian Buildings Are Hamas" To "The Civilian Buildings Are Hezbollah"</a> <bq><b>Israel has spent a year committing genocide, attacking its neighbors, trying to start World War 3, destroying hospitals, assassinating journalists and lying</b>, yet next month the entire western political-media class is still going to spend a day tearfully portraying it as a victim.</bq> <bq><b>Biden supporters were so rabidly nasty to those of us who said he has dementia. They called us Russian agents, fascists, and conspiracy theorists. They never admitted they were wrong. They just pulled him from the race and, much like their president, forgot the whole thing.</b> It’s so surreal how we’re all seeing clear and undeniable evidence that the US has no functioning president and doesn’t actually need one even as the presidential race consumes all political energy and attention in the nation for months.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ogygAuVOo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/94ogygAuVOo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="'Gaza is GONE:' Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Israel's Destruction"> <bq><b>Norman Finkelstein:</b> There's no question in my mind what's going to happen: Israel is going to say we're not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead. It said that Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels. 'We're not going to let cement in.' And nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that. Hamas, they say, built 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider complete nonsense. All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel. If they had built 450 miles of tunnels [...] that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York Subway system. The New York Subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza? It's 26 miles long and five miles wide. But that's the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it. So, between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won't let cement in---there is no Gaza anymore.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/blinken-lied-to-congress-about-israeli" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Blinken Lied To Congress About Israeli War Crimes Because He Knows He'll Get Away With It</a> <bq>This is what happens when you don’t prosecute your war criminals. <b>Blinken lied to congress that Israel wasn’t assessed to have been blocking aid</b> when both USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because <b>he knew he’d never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes.</b> Blinken has watched George W Bush’s entire cabinet not only walk free but continue to have high-profile careers in government, punditry, think tanks and the military-industrial complex, when they all should have been caged for two decades now. He watched CIA officials like Michael Hayden lie to congress about the agency’s torture program without ever facing any consequences. He watched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie to congress about the NSA’s surveillance program without ever facing any consequences. <b>He knew he could lie to congress about some of the worst atrocities his nation has ever participated in because he knew there would never be any consequences for this.</b></bq> <bq><b>The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the worst of our society, it exists to protect the worst of our society from ordinary people.</b></bq> <bq>The state of Missouri just executed a man named Marcellus Williams despite objections from prosecutors, jurors, and the victim’s own family due to a lack of solid evidence that he actually committed the murder he was convicted of. Days earlier, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah was executed in North Carolina despite the key witness in his case recanting his testimony against him. <b>Both men were Black, and both men were Muslim. As men with white skin lie with impunity to help butcher brown-skinned civilians in the middle east, I personally find this noteworthy.</b></bq> <bq>In 1902, the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow said the following in a speech to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago:<bq><b>Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have.</b> They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. <b>The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world.</b> They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.</bq><b>It’s just as true in 2024 as it was in 1902.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/26/woht-s26.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">As US prepares to allow NATO weapons to strike Russia, Putin threatens nuclear retaliation</a> <bq>At the ongoing UN General Assembly, leaders of the major NATO powers have delivered a series of unhinged and warmongering speeches, rivalling only that given by US President Joe Biden on Tuesday. “Vladimir Putin, when you fire missiles into Ukraine hospitals, we know who you are,” <b>screamed British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Tuesday. “Imperialism, I know it when I see it.”</b> German Foreign Minister <b>Annalena Baerbock accused Putin of “hiding,” declaring, “The strongest man in your country can hide behind teenage girls who he kidnapped. But you cannot fool the world.”</b></bq> What in the actual hell are you people going on about? "Unhinged" barely covers it. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mOfacGuFuA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-mOfacGuFuA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Aloof MSNBC Host SHOCKED By Union Workers' Top Political Issues"> Glenn Greenwald thankfully included a longer clip of the painful Kamala Harris "interview" with Oprah Winfrey, which sounded more like a therapy session cum sermon than a campaign stop. It starts at <b>12;40</b>. The text is ludicrous enough but, combined with her facial expressions, body language, and grating and supercilious tone, it's even worse. <bq><b>Winfrey:</b> What is on your heart to say to the American people as we have 47 days until November 5th? What's on your heart to say to particularly those people who are still undecided or may be indifferent or on the fence still? <b>Harris:</b> We love our country. <i>[syrupy smile]</i> I love our country. <i>[hand on heart]</i> I know we all do. That's why everybody's here right now. We love our country. We take pride in the privilege of being American. <i>[shoulders back, eyes seeking confirmation; Oprah settles back, hand to face, not offering it]</i> And this is a moment where we can and must come together as Americans <i>[hands entwined like a steeple with all the people]</i>, understanding we have so much more in common than what separates us. <i>[lady nods in the background like she's at church]</i> Let's come together with the character that we are so proud of about who we are. <i>[sic]</i> Which is, we are an optimistic people. <i>[crazy-ass smile like she'd just expressed an idea akin to the theory of relativity]</i> We are an optimistic people. Americans, by character, are people who have dreams <i>[pops her fist]</i> and ambitions <i>[jumps in her seat a little]</i> and aspirations. <i>[hands held in front, nearly clasped, excited at the breakthrough brilliance of the ideas she's expressing]</i> We believe in what is possible. <i>[points to the heavens]</i> we believe in what can be <i>[hand outstretched]</i> and we believe in fighting <i>[finger to heavens again]</i> for that. That's how we came into being. <i>[sits up straight, throws shoulders back, holds hand wide, again as if having delivered a deep philosophical conclusion]</i></bq> Sounds like her campaign song should be Team America's 'America Fuck Yeah.' <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EblVDmM26xQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/EblVDmM26xQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="America, Fuck Yeah!"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynaszbB7sNg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ynaszbB7sNg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Judge Napolitano's Judging Freedom" caption="Scott Ritter : Is Israel Prepared for a Three-Front War?"> <bq>When John F. Kennedy was briefed on the first nuclear employment plan after he became president in 1961, he walked out of the Pentagon. He said '<b>and we call ourselves the human race. This is disgusting. You're asking me to murder hundreds of millions of people. I can't do that. You have to give me other options.</b>' <b>But the war machine doesn't have any other options.</b> Lyndon Johnson almost got physically ill when he was briefed on it. So, too, Richard Nixon, who said 'This is insanity. What are you talking about? You can't ask me to make a decision that causes hundreds of millions of people to die.' Every president's been briefed on this war plan, up until George W bush, said 'this is crazy'. Even Ronald Reagan, who was fighting the evil empire, couldn't do it. He said 'I can't do it. That's why we need Strategic Defense Initiative.' That's why he went with nuclear disarmament. Only George W. Bush. when the Cold War ended and we suddenly weren't facing mutually-assured destruction, said 'hey, nuclear preemption could be in our benefit.' And then, <b>Barack Obama, who said 'that's bad,' he went along with it. Donald Trump doubled down by bringing in a new category of nuclear weapons, and Joe Biden has doubled down by changing our employment doctrine.</b> American people, wake up. We're the bad people in the world here. We're the ones that have a policy of nuclear preemption and an employment plan designed to do that. So, as we edge towards a crisis with Russia. <b>Stop thinking about the Russians nuking us; we start by nuking them. That's the way it works.</b></bq> <bq>That's the point I'm trying to make here. <b>The weapons that Russia would use against Ukraine in a situation where they have made the decision to take the government of Ukraine out---to take Kiev, the government sector, out---are non-nuclear in nature.</b> They are strategic weapons. It's called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_vehicle)">Awangard</a>. It's a hypersonic warhead that's loaded on to strategic missiles---old SS1-19s, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat">Sarmat</a>, the new heavy missile, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-24_Yars">Yars</a> mobile missile---they all have regiments that are equipped with conventionally armed Awangards. These will hit at---impact on the ground at---26 times the speed of sound. That's the equivalent of a 26-ton bomb. All right, we've seen what happens when a 1.5 ton or a three-ton bomb goes off. <b>This will be a 26-ton bomb coming in at hypersonic speed. It will take out entire blocks.</b> And all Russia has to do is sprinkle Kiev with a half-dozen of them and the city ceases to exist. Mind you, they can also do that to Brussels, to NATO headquarters, they can do that to the British, they could do that to anybody. <b>These aren't nuclear weapons and, when they do this, the impact will be so devastating, it'll have a nuclear-like impact on the psychology of the West.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/missouri-executes-man-despite-questions-about-evidence/" author="" source="The Onion">Missouri Executes Man Despite Questions About Evidence</a> <bq>The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a delay, forging ahead despite forensics experts determining that he was not the source of DNA found on the knife used in the murder. What do you think?<ol><b>“Let this be a warning to whoever the real killer is.”</b> “If new evidence comes to light they can always unkill him.” <b>“Evidence has no place in our criminal justice system.”</b> </ol></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/24/sgua-s24.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Israel massively expands Middle East war, killing nearly 500 in Lebanon</a> <bq>But the real plans of the Netanyahu government and its imperialist backers were spelled out by <b>Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism</b>, who called for Israel to carry out a land grab in Southern Lebanon. “<b>Lebanon, even though it has a flag and even though it has political institutions, does not meet the definition of a country</b>,” he said. “The drawing lines of Sykes and Picot, which were based on the distribution of areas of influence and resources between Great Britain and France, did not survive the test of time.”</bq> Lebanon <i>is not a country</i>, according to Israel. So it's totally cool if we bomb the shit out of it. The U.S. is totally cool with that. What could possibly go wrong? <bq>The US press, moreover, is beginning to give a hint about the scale of Israel’s plans. In an article published Monday, New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger wrote, “Netanyahu is no longer satisfied with carrying out periodic brush-backs of Hezbollah’s power. In his view, Oct. 7 changed everything and the time has come to solve the problem once and for all—both in Gaza and in Lebanon.” In other words, Israel and its imperialist backers have seized upon the October 7 attacks to carry out not only their “final solution” of the Palestinian question but to <b>completely reorganize the Middle East under imperialist domination by provoking a region-wide war.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/15-rules-for-discussing-israeli-warmongering" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">15 Rules For Discussing Israeli Warmongerin</a> <bq>Israel never bombs civilians, it bombs terrorists. <b>If shocking numbers of civilians die it’s because they were actually terrorists, or because terrorists killed them, or because a terrorist stood too close to them.</b> If none of those reasons apply then it’s for some other mysterious reason we are still waiting for the IDF to investigate.</bq> <bq>If people protest against Israel bombing entire cities into dust, then <b>Israel is the victim because the protests made Israel’s supporters feel sad.</b></bq> <bq>Unsubstantiated claims which portray Israel’s enemies in a negative light may be reported as factual news stories without any fact checking or qualifications, while extensively evidenced records of Israeli criminality must be reported on with extreme skepticism and doubtful qualifiers like “Lebanon says” or “according to the Hamas-run health ministry”. <b>This is important to do because otherwise you might get accused of being a propagandist.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/28/antc-s28.html" author="Alex Lantier" source="WSWS">Despite Putin’s nuclear warning, NATO escalates campaign to allow strikes deep inside Russia</a> <bq><b>The NATO alliance is effectively declaring that it is willing to risk nuclear war.</b> While Stoltenberg absurdly claimed that “deterrence is there to prevent war,” in fact, his comments show precisely the opposite. Even the threat of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal is insufficient to deter NATO, which has already bombed civilian residential areas of Russian cities and military bases, from <b>pledging to carry out a massive bombing campaign against Russia.</b> The NATO alliance, <b>Stoltenberg</b> continued, is waging a global conflict, including with countries in Asia and the Middle East whom he denounced as “enablers” of Russia’s war in Ukraine. He <b>denounced North Korean deliveries of artillery shells, Iranian delivery of drones and Chinese delivery of key industrial components to Russia.</b></bq> That motherfucker is crazy. We can only hope we'll be able to write history books about how he was a key figure leading to atomic war. <bq>And yesterday, Putin’s main remaining ally in Europe, Belarusian President <b>Aleksandr Lukashenko recklessly pledged to respond to a US-Polish attack into Belarusia with nuclear weapons.</b> “As soon as they attack us, we use nuclear weapons. Russia will defend us,” he said at a public meeting in Minsk, adding: “If we use nuclear weapons, they will do the same. And against Russia too. So Russia will use the entire arsenal of weapons. <b>This will be a world war. … We tell them openly: the red line is the state border. You step on it, we will respond immediately.”</b></bq> <bq>It is evident that <b>last week’s NATO-Ukrainian bombing of the major Russian ammunition dump at Toropets has substantially weakened the Russian army.</b> Even if it retained superiority over the Ukrainian army, which has been bled white by nearly three years of war, it would still now be in a far weaker position facing NATO. [...] Estonian military intelligence chief Colonel Kiviselg had given specific details on the Russian ammunition losses in the Toropets attack: “30,000 tonnes of explosive ordnance were detonated, which means 750,000 shells. <b>If we take the average battle rate, the Russian Federation has fired 10,000 rounds a week. So that’s two to three months’ supply of ammunition.</b> As a result of this attack, Russia has suffered losses in ammunition and we will see the impact of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.”</bq> <bq>This exposes the recklessness of the NATO imperialist powers, who play the main role in escalating the conflict, and the bankruptcy of the post-Soviet capitalist regimes in Russia and Belarusia. <b>Incapable of making any appeal to mass anti-war sentiment in the international working class, and with their armies outnumbered by the combined troops of the NATO powers, they are reduced to threatening nuclear Armageddon. Even this, however, is not sufficient to deter the NATO powers from continuing the escalation.</b></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/house-committee-rips-state-department?utm_campaign=post" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">House Committee Rips State Department Over Censorship</a> <bq>“<b>The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech</b>,” the House Committee on Small Business found , adding that GEC “circumvented its strict international mandate” by funding private contractors with “domestic censorship capabilities.”</bq> <bq>[...] the State Department blazing new trails in the annals of “the dog ate my homework” chutzpah in response to Congressional oversight requests. “Despite the fact the Committee subpoenaed documents which it had been requesting for more than 14 months,” the Committee wrote, “<b>State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce these documents in full — around March 2026.</b>”</bq> <bq>In February of last year, meanwhile, Kaminsky of the Examiner launched a brutal investigative series that began by describing GEC’s funding of the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, showing how <b>U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funded conscious efforts to take away revenue from American businesses like the New York Post, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the ostensibly outward-facing State Department is <b>pouring resources into a broad new propaganda mission at home</b>:</bq> <bq>[...] that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “ Dynamic Exclusion List ” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. <b>Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated “neutral, fact-based content”) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.</b></bq> Because they blow into the right horn, as we like to say in German. <bq>The House report raises these concerns and more, explaining why <b>having a State Department entity marionetting American media traffic is a grave problem.</b> “A foundational principle of American markets is that a business will be able to operate without unreasonable interference from the government so long as they obey the law,” the Committee staff wrote. However, they added, <b>“the Federal government worked with the private sector extensively in recent years to remove or suppress certain disfavored speech… impacting the ability of businesses purveying that speech to use those services to compete.”</b></bq> So they're not going to after them for breach of the first amendment, but for impeding business. That is very typically U.S.-American. <bq><b>The State Department has spent decades learning to make simplistic decisions overseas about which politicians the U.S. should support, and which it should discourage or even topple.</b> It spends gobs on that mission, working in concert with “Democracy Promotion” bureaucracies like the NED (whose efforts to influence speech are also profiled in this report). <b>It’s impossible to imagine anything more destructive than letting the government meddle in domestic politics with the same monomaniacal bluntness it employs abroad.</b> According to this report, it’s already doing it, and will be damned if it will submit to oversight from anyone, even Congress.</bq> Well, it's not impossible. It would be pretty bad, but I can imagine any number of things that would be worse. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2024/09/18/refusing-to-censor-speech-isnt-the-same-as-agreeing-with-it" source="" author="Ted Rall">Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It</a> <bq>Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. <b>Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=121455" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Die reale Welt ist kein Hollywood-Blockbuster</a> <bq><b>Fest steht jedenfalls, dass Israel einmal mehr durch seinen Staatsterrorismus zündelt und die Gefahr eines großen Krieges, bei dem auch zahlreiche Israelis sterben würden, durch die Anschläge deutlich gestiegen ist.</b> Erst vorgestern hatte der US-Sondergesandte Amos Hochstein die Israelis davor gewarnt, den Konflikt mit der Hisbollah zu esklarieren. Wer solidarisch mit Israel ist, sollte diese Anschläge daher aufs Schärfste verdammen.</bq> <bq>Aber auch Journalisten, allen voran von Springers WELT , freuten sich offen darüber, dass tausende Pager inmitten von Zivilisten explodierten. <b>Was sind das nur für Menschen?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/" author="Mark Liberman" source="Language Log">Is there evidence of senility in Trump's speech?</a> <bq>Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: <b>the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.</b> <b>This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals.</b> Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.</bq> <bq><b>Donald Trump's rhetorical style is certainly different from most other contemporary American politicians.</b> And there are plenty of plausible comparisons to alcoholic speech (though Trump is a teetotaler) and to the effects of various neuropsychological disorders, including some of those associated with aging. But <b>his style is clearly effective in reaching an audience, and there's no clear evidence of any recent changes.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-us-empire-does-not-seek-peace" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The US Empire Does Not Seek Peace; Its Existence Depends On Endless War</a> <bq>Those who support the US empire will occasionally look back on history and acknowledge that in hindsight there were some bad individual decisions made with regard to Vietnam or Iraq or wherever, but <b>they’ll never admit there is an innately murderous structure in place that guarantees Vietnams and Iraqs will continue to happen in the future.</b> But that is the reality, and you’ll never hear it acknowledged in the state propaganda services known as the mainstream western press. Our rulers are too far absorbed into the imperial machine to recognize this as true, so you will reliably hear them babbling about seeking peace and avoiding civilian suffering — even as they take steps ensuring that peace will not happen and civilians continue to suffer. These are the only moves they can see on the chessboard. <b>The options that would lead to real peace are not even recognized as legal moves in the game. So they keep moving the pieces around in accordance with the rules of empire, and saying “Oh how sad” when families are incinerated and children are ripped to shreds</b>, but saying that it was the only move available on the board.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/as-israel-gets-more-murderous-well" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">As Israel Gets More Murderous, We'll Be Hearing Even More About "Antisemitism"</a> <bq>We know we’ll be hearing a lot more about antisemitism because that’s what always happens whenever Israel does something profoundly evil. People start objecting to its atrocities and demanding that their government stop facilitating them, and the <b>imperial spinmeisters start framing these objections as a frightening rise in anti-Jewish bigotry in order to delegitimize and silence them.</b></bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/ten-times-this" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Ten Times This</a> <bq>You can read a bunch of paragraphs about ongoing union campaigns and how the president is giving pro-union speeches and get the impression that we really are in a big old revival of labor power. But if those individual facts aren’t placed in the context of a decline in union density that has been going on since the middle of the 20th century, and the need to organize at scale in order to avoid national union density plunging into the single digits in the near future, and the fact that <b>this decline of union density is a prime driver of the explosion of economic inequality that is destabilizing our society</b>, and the unfortunate reality that organized labor’s institutions lack both the infrastructure and the will to organize workers at the scale necessary to push union density back up, then you risk getting an overly rosy picture of things.</bq> <bq><b>We need to be organizing ten times as many workers into unions as we are right now.</b> This is not an exaggeration. This is not a joke. Nor is this impossible. This is a thing that we must do if we want to achieve the fabled “revival” of organized labor that every annual look at the labor movement must tease as something that could legitimately happen in America.</bq> <bq><b>Want to put the nightmare of the post-Reagan ascendance of corporate power over workers to bed forever? Double union density.</b> Want to double union density? We must focus on the private sector, where the economic action is, and where union density today is a pitiful 6%. What is a reasonable goal for new organizing in the private sector, one that did, in fact, exist in the 1970s? <b>Ten times what we are doing now. Ten times this.</b></bq> <bq><b>I am suggesting something very basic here for the labor movement: Understand the urgency of our predicament. Figure out a goal</b>—one sufficient to address the needs of workers in America. Figure out what it will take to get to that goal. Make a plan. Determine the resources necessary to enact the plan. Get the resources. Spend the money. Do the plan. Evaluate your progress or lack thereof according to the goals you have set. Basic things. Companies, football teams, nonprofits, universities, government agencies—all of these institutions carry out the process above, all the time. Organized labor’s institutions do not. <b>Such basic planning and evaluation does not exist in the labor movement. The AFL-CIO does not have a document laying out how to achieve a goal like this. Nor do they issue annual reports on these figures that hold themselves to a measurable standard of advancement.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/confiscate-their-money" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Confiscate Their Money</a> <bq>One of the foundational operating principles of the United States of America is that no one can ever be deemed to have too much wealth. It’s odd, if you think about it. There is no upper limit—<b>a man with more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes can go right on adding billions of dollars to his pile, wealth that could change millions of lives for the better but which means nothing to him other than the movement of a few digits on his accounts.</b> No law or agency is empowered to say that he has too much. Yet it is certainly possible to have too little wealth. <b>If you have no money, you will be denied housing and you will be denied quality health care and you will be denied food and respect and when you are put in jail you will be denied bail.</b> This seems, by a common sense version of morality, exactly backwards. <b>Our lack of an upper wealth limit is evidence of a land where rich people write the laws.</b></bq> <bq>The United States government should confiscate the wealth of the very rich. <b>Their wealth is symbolically grotesque, unnecessary for them to have, needed more by others, and, most importantly, allowing such wealth to pool into such a small number of hands warps our political system and our society at large in incredibly harmful ways.</b> Rather than populist politicians grumbling about billionaires and railing at the way that they exert undue influence over all of our lives, the government should tax all individual wealth over, let’s say, $999 million at 100%. Democratic governments should not wage PR battles against billionaires. They should eradicate them.</bq> <bq><b>The fact that this sort of idea is considered completely outside of serious mainstream debate is a galling failure of America’s moral vision.</b></bq> <bq><b>The first step to achieving this is to begin creating a consensus among normal people that billionaires should not exist.</b></bq> <bq><b>This is politics. It is always this way. Do not talk yourself out of a good idea because someone will oppose it.</b></bq> <bq><b>What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them?</b> They can still own multiple mansions and a private jet and buy any material thing they want and leave a fortune behind when they die that will take care of their family for generations. As a practical matter of day to day life, they lose nothing. <b>All they really lose is the ability to unduly influence the rest of us . They lose (some of) their ability to act like gods.</b> They are less able to buy governments and exert their will regardless of laws and change cities to suit their whims and generally <b>make all of the other humans on earth into bit players in a play that they write every day entitled “My Own Personal Preferences.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Just confiscate their money. Just make that the baseline policy. Just establish as a widely accepted principle that nobody needs to have a billion (one thousand million) dollars. It is insane. Snap out of it.</b> It’s not shocking that this situation of wealth inequality exists—this is the natural functioning of capitalism, and it works fiercely to achieve this very end—but it is <b>shocking that so many people have been successfully brainwashed into tolerating it for so long.</b></bq> <bq>But let’s stop bullshitting here. Higher taxes are all well and good, but <b>the level of inequality we have reached is too deep rooted. It must be lopped off right where the growth begins.</b></bq> Exactly. Prevent them from ever getting that much money in the first place. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/audubon-society-nonprofit-nlrb-unconstitutional/" author="Matt Bruenig" source="Jacobin">Why Is the Audubon Society Attacking the NLRB?</a> <bq>The complaint alleges that the Audubon Society repeatedly failed and refused to furnish information requested by the union representing its employees, unilaterally implemented changes to employee health insurance without bargaining, and <b>discriminatorily provided a long list of new benefits only to its nonunionized staffers.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it is baffling why liberal nonprofits pursue this kind of strategy. Does the Audubon Society really want to avoid cooperating with its staff union so much that it is willing to run a test case that, if successful, could destroy the labor rights of 100+ million people in the country? <b>Do its crunchy environmentalist donors want them spending the organization’s budget on that legal project?</b></bq> Because, Matt, you truly don't get that there <i>is no difference</i> between Elon Musk and the people running the Audubon Society. There might have been once but there isn't anymore. It's just another neoliberal, market-driven corporation digging every nickel it can out of the eye sockets of its labor force. The Nature Conservancy is the same. The only reason you're shocked by it is because your stupid bubble still doesn't get it, not really. They are not on your side. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/american-flight-attendants-boarding-pay/" author="Jenny Brown" source="Jacobin">American Airlines Flight Attendants Just Won Boarding Pay</a> <bq><b>Flight attendants typically aren’t paid during boarding time.</b> Earlier this month, after a three-year contract campaign and a credible strike threat, flight attendants at American Airlines became the first to win boarding pay.</bq> Celebrating winning something that they should have had in the first place. That country is such an orphan-crushing machine. Prisoners can be used as slaves, wage-theft is just a normal thing. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”</a> <bq>For example, <b>if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful.</b> Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire." The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. <b>The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that.</b></bq> <bq>Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. <b>Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent.</b> Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and <b>even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).</b></bq> <bq>Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. <b>Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.</b></bq> <bq><b>The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things <i>you</i> want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics.</b> Facts don't care about your feelings, man.</bq> <bq>But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. <b>It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">What the fuck is a PBM?</a> <bq>The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. <b>The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/26/my-six-favorite-untruths-about-the-biden-harris-economy/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">My Six Favorite Untruths About the Biden-Harris Economy</a> <bq>We know that most people say that they think the economy has performed poorly under the Biden-Harris administration. However, <b>we also know that by standard economic measures the administration has been an incredible success story.</b> We saw the longest stretch of low unemployment in 70 years. Unemployment rates for Blacks, Black teens, and Hispanics all hit or tied record lows. While taking a dip in 2021-2022, real wages have bounced back and are above their pre-pandemic peaks, especially for workers at the bottom end of the wage distribution. There has been a record pace of new business formation. Workers report record high levels of workplace satisfaction. <b>The number of workers who can work from home has increased by almost 20 million.</b> And more than 14 million homeowners were able to refinance their mortgages, either getting cash out for other purposes or saving thousands of dollars a year on interest payments.</bq> When Dean writes this stuff, I know he has the numbers to back it up. I just don't know how to gibe it with people being priced out of buying homes and renting apartments. Is he somehow focusing on existing homeowners, who already have it good? Which workplace satisfaction surveys is he talking about? Which workplaces? Like, ... McDonald's? Is the story of corporate greed, grinding down employees, and completely eviscerated unions a myth? Does the U.S. magically no need unions? Because everything is super-hunky-dory without them? I just don't get it. People are working from home, sure. <i>Special</i> people. All of the people who are working from home are buoyed by a staff of people who <i>can't</i> work from home because they're working at delivery companies bringing them things. And Baker treats "working from home" like an unalloyed good for both people's psychology and productivity. You're working with people all day without personal contact. It presupposes that you don't really care about the people with whom you spend 1/2 of your waking time, not as people, not really. This may be the situation <i>as she is</i> but it's not great! People hate their jobs, people hate their commutes, people hate their coworkers, people feel unfulfilled at their jobs, it doesn't seem to matter how many hours they work, one way or the other, but ... let's get rid of the commute and now we're done. He keeps writing about wage increases, in staggering percentages, like 30.4% over five years. But where did those wages start? Like, if you're making $7.25 an hour, then you were making $58 per day on an 8-hour shift. You'll make $290 per week, about $1,160 per month, and about $15k per year. This is barely conceivable as a salary in 2024 in the U.S. You may be able to support yourself. Now, imagine that you're making $20K per year instead, five years later. That's that 30% more that Dean's talking about. Paradise now, baby. Blissful paradise. I've also rarely read Dean discussing <i>kinds</i> of employment. A job is a job is a job in Dean's writing. If you have any job, then you're employed and you're doing fine. He trumpets all day long about unemployment rates being historically low and, because it's a Democrat administration and he seems to love the shit right out of Biden and Harris---prove me wrong; I'd be delighted if you did because I really wanna keep liking Dean---or, at the very least, to be so opposed to Trump that he will literally blow into any other trumpet. He used to discuss how played the unemployment numbers are and how they don't reveal the true nature of the economy. Now, though, the one shining unemployment percentage is the only thing that matters. The rest of Dean's points seem to really be about how the press consistently maligns the achievements of a bravely struggling administration that has single-handedly saved the U.S. economy. He actually takes CNN to task for writing about a retirement crisis---admitting that <iq>millions of older workers who are poorly prepared for retirement</iq> but that there are fewer of them now, so why is CNN writing about it now? CNN must be in the tank for Trump! They love Trump! Man, Dean, I dunno. Is your argument really that, since a news organization ignored a whole bunch of people who are <iq>poorly prepared for retirement</iq>---whatever that might mean; it doesn't sound good; it sounds like they're eating Velveeta and cat food six nights a week---it should <i>continue doing so</i>. It's unfair to start caring about the impoverished elderly under Biden when they didn't talk about it under Trump. No fair, screams Dean! Another chestnut I feel like we're going to be hearing about for two more decades is that mad <iq>cash from pandemic payments</iq>, which, if you don't remember, was a few thousand bucks at the very most. Those few thousand bucks have been credited with the most incredible economic feats, truly wonders of the world. The effects of those few thousands of dollars per person continue to reverberate to this day, in the form of houses, cars, and secure living. Apparently. <img src="https://www.earthli.com/data/albums/marco/pierre_louis/images/gonna_blow_it_all_on_vittles_and_blueberries.jpeg" scale="30%" caption="Gonna blow it all on vittles and blueberries" href="https://www.earthli.com/albums/view_picture.php?id=23628"> You can tell he wrote this one in a hurry because he's back to his old, poor proofreading self. Either that or he had to get this one out and he didn't run it by whoever has been helping him out these last few years. I know he's an economist and this is his beat. But, man, is it hard to read his articles about how everyone should be slobbing Biden's knob because the economy's so good. He used to discuss how running an economy on one housing bubble after another wasn't a great idea, now he's just happy when construction goes up. His take on the economy these days seems to very much be keeping the orphan-crushing machine running smoothly rather than wondering why we have to have one at all. He sounds much more like a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist now, in ways that I wouldn't have thought when I'd listened and read him over the last 20 years. His book <a href="https://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm">Rigged</a> is brilliant and absolutely worth reading but it's really hard to tell that it's the same author as the one who wrote this article. He used to write about how the economy was structured to make the rich richer. Now I feel like he's trying to convince us all that it has stopped doing that and that it's working for everyone. I can't help wondering whether this would all change if Trump were to regain the presidency. That's what every other pundit will do. Even if we take Baker at his word, that the economy is better than it has been in living memory, then we have to wonder why Baker is OK with it being run on human tears, misery, and baby corpses. I guess that's why not so many people walk away from Omelas. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq2s7RMRsgs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/hq2s7RMRsgs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="LastWeekTonight" caption="Disability Benefits"> I just don't think it makes any sense to focus on how well it's going for the normal residents of Omelas when there is more than one kid in that basement. Look at how the U.S. treats disabled people, FFS. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/16/science/voyager-1-thruster-issue/index.html" source="CNN" author="Ashley Strickland">47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft just fired up thrusters it hasn’t used in decades</a> <bq>As Voyager 1 and its twin probe, Voyager 2, have aged, the mission team has slowly turned off nonessential systems on both spacecraft to conserve power, including heaters. As a result, <b>components on Voyager 1 are colder now, and the team knew it couldn’t just send a command to Voyager 1 to switch immediately to one of the attitude propulsion thrusters without doing something to warm them up.</b> But Voyager 1 doesn’t have enough power to switch any heaters back on without turning something else off, and its scientific instruments are too valuable to shut off in case they don’t come back on, the team said.</bq> <bq><b>Voyager 2 has also gone through thruster swaps in 1999 and 2019, and “the situation there is less dire,” Barber said.</b> Voyager 2 has traveled more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/meet-the-winners-of-the-2024-ig-nobel-prizes/" source="Ars Technica" author="Jennifer Ouellette">Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes</a> <bq>Even though this novel homing device was resistant to jamming, could react to a wide variety of target practice, needed no scarce materials, and was so simple to make that production could start in 30 days, the committee nixed the project. (By this point, as we now know, military focus had shifted to the Manhattan Project.) <b>Skinner was left with "a loftful of curiously useless equipment and a few dozen pigeons with a strange interest in a feature of the New Jersey coast."</b> But vindication came in the early 1950s when the project was briefly revived as Project ORCON at the Naval Research Laboratory, which refined the general idea and led to the development of a Pick-off Display Converter for radar operators.</bq> <bq>White and Yamashita conducted experiments with B. trifoliolata vines and artificial Wisteria vines. <b>They concluded that volatile signaling and horizontal gene transfer were unlikely since B. trifoliolata were able to mimic the artificial leaves even when they weren't in direct contact. A plant vision system is thus a promising explanation</b> and grounds for further experiments, they wrote, particularly in light of recent research showing that plants can not only communicate via chemical volatiles but can also perceive sound.</bq> <bq>[...] some mild side effects might actually lead to better treatment outcomes, based on recent research into active placebos. These are drugs that can have a noticeable effect on patients without addressing their primary symptoms; <b>it's been shown that active placebos actually have larger placebo effects than inert placebos, which could influence the conclusions of randomized clinical trials.</b></bq> <bq>The experiments involved intra-anally administering oxygen gas or a liquid oxygenated perfluorocarbon to the unfortunate rodents and porcines. Yes, they gave the animals enemas. <b>They then induced respiratory failure and evaluated the effectiveness of the intra-anal treatment.</b> The result: Both treatments were <b>pretty darned effective at staving off respiratory failure with no major complications.</b> The authors think this could work in human patients, too.</bq> <bq>A physicist will tell you that a coin toss isn't random but purely deterministic under classical Newtonian mechanics, with <b>the perceived randomness arising from small fluctuations in initial conditions like starting position, upward force, and angular momentum</b>, for example.</bq> <bq>The worms were divided into high- and low-activity groups, achieved by exposing the low-activity group to ethanol to basically get them drunk. The ethanol mixture also contained a blue dye to better differentiate between low-activity (blue) worms and high-activity (red) worms. <b>The sober worms naturally made it to the end of the channel before their drunken counterparts, offering proof-of-principle that flow through a structured space is a reliable method for sorting active polymers by length and activity.</b></bq> <bq>For instance, in 1997, there were 30,000 Italians claiming a pension while turning out to be dead. <b>In Costa Rica, 42 percent of citizens over the age of 99 were found to have "misstated" their age in the 2000 census, shrinking the blue zone in that region after error correction so much that the estimated life expectancy plummeted to the bottom of the pack.</b> And in 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary, dead, or the result of clerical errors, amounting to an error rate of 82 percent.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/on-optimism" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">On Optimism</a> <bq>It’s become fashionable in the age of scientific portent to chide humanity for its conquest of nature. <b>Film sequences routinely render human settlements as a mindless overgrowth, an invasive menace like lantern-flies or zebra mussels. We should have known our place, been comfortable with less. Please. We’ve had antibiotics for less than a hundred years</b>, and everyone from peasants to the very rich were likely to know the agony of a lost child. Until 1900 the survival rate past five years for all children was 57%, and only 30% of babies made it to a second birthday. Most people in most places suffered. <b>But residents of the 21st century think we should look back at the aqueducts or La Sagrada Familia or the Hoover Dam or whatever as gloating selfies posed in front of earth heaving on her sick bed.</b></bq> I appreciate the picture he paints, as usual, but I think Matt is hyper-sensitive to reproaches of humanity because he sees everything as the hectoring of liberals who can't stop bitching. But New Jersey is not the Hoover Dam, it's not La Sagrada Familia. There is a lot of damage that has been done to the planet in a completely unsustainable and unscaleable way. The movie at the Sphere may be wildly out of place and more like a way for people to excuse themselves for being in Las Vegas in the first place, but that doesn't mean that humanity hasn't let the plot get away from it. There is a lot of good that has been done, but man, please stop pointing to antibiotics and then rounding up to superyachts. Just stop. We needed the former, but don't need the latter. We don't need strip malls, we don't need hyper-cities. It's all a bit much. When you look at what's being done, you have to ask "who is this all being done for? Who decided we would do this? Is this what I would want? Do I want to be standing in Las Vegas, watching a movie screen that needs a power plant to sustain it or would I be happier at a lakeside?" I've noticed this trend as well: US-Americans just don't care about being outside, about truly being in nature. They don't even really know what it is, most of them. That's why they love their cities, and their coffee shops, and their Amazon delivery, and their takeout food, and their giant vehicles. Nature is for movies and TV. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/28/emdy-s28.html" author="Patrick Martin" source="WSWS">Hurricane Helene devastates a wide swathe of southeastern United States</a> <bq>According to the National Weather Center, <b>a Category Four storm is one with sustained high winds of 130 to 156 miles per hour.</b> According to this definition: “Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. <b>Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.</b>” Hurricane Helene is a social and economic disaster, not merely a natural one. Property insurance premiums in Florida soared 45 percent from 2017 to 2022, bringing the average annual premium for a Florida homeowner to $5,500, more than twice the US average. <b>In particularly flood-prone areas, insurance rates have approached $20,000 a year, and most working people have to face the mounting risk of devastating storms without any insurance protection.</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/two-retracted-studies-at-the-supreme" source="Your Local Epidemiologist" author="Katelyn Jetelina">Two retracted studies at the Supreme Court this week </a> <bq>[...] hope we can all agree that <b>we need a solid foundation of data to make smart policy decisions.</b> This bedrock is highly dependent on ethical scientists and a strong review process.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goYWH9kCJio" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/goYWH9kCJio" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith" caption="Does the Left Have a COVID Problem? (w/ Julia Doubleday)"> She makes a lot of great points, like that most healthy adults will get the flu once every five or ten years whereas people are getting COVID about one or two times per year. That's a huge difference, especially when COVID is still deadlier and has the attached problem of long COVID. This is a pretty good conversation. <hr> <a href="https://special.usps.com/testkits" author="" source="USPS">Place Your Order for Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests</a> <bq>As of late September 2024, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of #4 free at-home tests from USPS.com. Here's what you need to know about your order:<ol>Each order includes #4 individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests (<a href="https://www.covidtests.gov/">COVIDTests.gov</a> has more details about at-home tests, including extended shelf life and updated expiration dates) <b>Orders will ship free, starting September 30, 2024</b></ol></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/24/iorf-s24.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Study by international researchers zeroes in on the natural origin of the COVID pandemic</a> <bq>A new study published in the journal Cell demonstrates not only the overwhelming evidence of the “zoonotic” (i.e., natural, rather than artificial) origin of the virus in wild animals sold in the Huanan Market in Wuhan. It actually puts the <b>focus on a handful of animal species present at the market and even a specific numbered stall where the transfer from animals to humans likely took place.</b> The lengthy and detailed study was published this week by world-renowned researchers and investigators that include Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, Thomas P. Peacock, Andrew Rambaut, Angela L. Rasmussen, Joel O. Wertheim, Kristian G. Andersen, Michael Worobey and Florence Débarre. They have <b>analyzed genetic material from more than 800 samples that had been previously been gathered at the Chinese market shortly after the outbreak was detected</b>, to remarkable effect.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSXKzPOcYDU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/KSXKzPOcYDU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Some More News" caption="Why Is Conservative Comedy So… Not Very Good?"> <bq>I just don't believe they [The Babylon Bee] actually care about drone strikes. What I mean is, that when you look at a site like <i>The Onion</i> and search the word drone, you'll see satire pointing out the ghoulishness of drones under every president. Whereas the Babylon Bee only started caring about drone strikes conveniently right as Biden took office. You can search their site and see that the only time they mentioned Trump and military drones is back when he was running for office, then they dropped the subject completely during his loser term. In other words, the Bee sure seems disingenuously concerned about drones in order to roast Biden and perhaps interestingly, specifically trans people. Whereas The Onion is taking a hard moral stance, despite who is president. And so going back to <b>why The Bee is less funny, it's at least in part, because we all sort of know they're pulling their punches for the GOP while grotesquely demonizing the left.</b> They have a transparent agenda and are clearly angry at Democrats often to the point that they forget to put satire first.</bq> This is a good analysis, but it applies almost equally well to the Onion, if he would have been more honest about it. <bq><b>Conservative comedians have become obsessed with getting a reaction from the left to the point that they've completely forgotten to say an actual joke.</b> They do something pointless often cruel or weird or factually wrong and laugh when people point out that it's pointless or cruel or weird or factually wrong.</bq> <bq>[...] the insatiable lust for this end result to have the media outraged over you has really thrown off a lot of conservatives' ability to tell an actual joke. Because, again, <b>if the end result is to make liberals react or go, well, that's not funny, the easiest way to do that is to not be funny.</b> And so it creates a built-in excuse for any time someone points that out. <b>The Babylon Bee can comfortably lean back on the idea that they're comedy geniuses playing 4D chess because no one understood their super good joke about how doctors prescribe water to horses.</b> Even if the political point they're trying to make is clear, the language and context and attempt is just hoo boy, not great. Often it all collapses in on itself where <b>the left will laugh at how ridiculous an attempt it is, and that reaction will be seen as a success.</b></bq> <bq><b>It's like urinating in your own mouth on the bus, and then claiming you successfully triggered the passengers when they all leave at the next stop.</b> And so triggering, or satire, or trolling often feels like a stand-in excuse for when they fail at a joke and need to fall back on something to save their piss-covered face.</bq> <bq>[...] if your goal is to say something, from any political perspective that is designed solely to anger a group of people, it's often just (beep) pretty boring, unless you actually create a valid criticism or at least involve some unbearable puppet.</bq> What I don't understand is why he keeps calling Alistair Williams or Simon Evans right-wing comedians. The examples he shows are absolutely not visibly right-wing jokes---one talks about how stupid Brexit was, then the host of the show says that he's "pro-Brexit", which I didn't get at all. The next clip was about how stupid Britain's imperialism is, specifically for the Falkland Islands. The next clip was of Simon Evans talking about how a parking meter in Soho earns more than the people working in the McDonald's right next to it. That's not a right-wing joke, classically. Further on, he shows some examples from FOX's short-lived "Half-hour News Hour" show from 2007. Again, he may not think that these jokes are funny, but they're definitely <i>structured as jokes</i>. They just have punchlines that he doesn't approve of. I thought they were pretty funny, even though they were demeaning to some groups. He also calls the humor "angry", a vibe I totally didn't pick up on. The Hillary Clinton joke was decent, pointing out how Democrats like to talk about choosing employees based on identity rather than qualifications. The joke about the mascot of a football team changing from an Indian Chief to a blackjack dealer is objectively funny. If Norm MacDonald had delivered it, the host would have loved it. You can talk about how you disapprove of that kind of humor, but you can't talk about how <i>it's not humor</i>, not if you also think the <i>Daily Show</i> was funny in its heyday. They are literally the same style of humor but with different targets. Punching up, punching down---dude, the Daily Show also only punched where it was considered OK to punch. They took their marching orders from the Democrats the whole time. I think he should do a follow-up video on how cringe and awful SNL is. That would fill a whole video---and the criticisms that he levels against conservative comedy all apply equally well to post-Trump, SNL-style "humor". I think the host does a good job but definitely occasionally falls into the trap of hating the comedian---or the comedian's viewpoints---and then saying that they're "not funny". He does the same thing with the skit about the commemorative plates---objectively funny. You just have to accept the premise that the U.S. surrendered in Iraq, humiliating itself...and that there was an alternative. It's a <i>joke</i>. This could easily have been an SNL skit if it had had different politics. What the host goes on to say is that so-called conservatives cannot be funny if they talk about politics. That is, liberals like the host won't be able to consider them funny if they make good jokes about political topics on which they disagree. But that's more a reflection of the listener's inability to laugh at jokes that make them uncomfortable. The joke he hated on from Prager U. (about the baptists on a fishing trip) was a decent joke. Just because the host doesn't have any of the background to immediately understand the joke doesn't mean it's not funny. The point is that most of the country <i>would</i> get that joke. It's more telling that someone making a video about how conservatives aren't good at telling jokes says a joke isn't funny because they are missing context that 80% of the rest of the country would have. I mean, I got the joke right away. It's funny. I wouldn't necessarily retell it but it is structured as a joke, it has a surprise twist, it's funny. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2024/09/20/great-glorious-and-correct-the-origins-and-afterlives-of-a-maoist-slogan/" source="Made in China Journal" author="Jeremy Brown">Great, Glorious, and Correct: The Origins and Afterlives of a Maoist Slogan</a> <bq>The pieces are rare examples of the Wei Guangzheng slogan appearing in official propaganda in <b>the way that Liu Shaoqi had hoped it would be used: to celebrate a Party that admits its mistakes and corrects them.</b></bq> <bq>When Xi Jinping thrust his fist in the air on Tiananmen Gate on the CCP’s one-hundredth birthday in 2021, he was reciting the Cultural Revolution version of the formula. He was not considering its original context or the part of the phrase that raises questions. The ‘correct’ part of the slogan is a problem. Party theorists understand this, especially <b>in the aftermath of the Beijing massacre of 1989, which was difficult to plausibly depict as the action of an eternally correct Party.</b></bq> <bq>In 2009, someone created a fake Baidu encyclopedia entry for ‘Comrade Wei Guangzheng’: an amazing founding leader, who propagated a line of little Weis (‘little Greats’), whose genetic mutations caused them to pursue power and money and then turn against ‘a small handful of people’ (一小撮)—the term the Party uses to denigrate its opponents (Baidu Baike 2009). <b>More recently, the three-character phrase has become shorthand for a type of person, speech, film, or TV show that adheres strictly to Party orthodoxy. Used in this sense, Wei Guangzheng now means righteous, politically correct, or unbearably arrogant.</b></bq> <bq>The inertia behind Wei Guangzheng’s staying power is not dissimilar to how <b>stability maintenance enforcers continue to treat June Fourth as a highly sensitive topic and dangerous anniversary</b>, even though other more recent events (internment camps in Xinjiang, the crackdown in Hong Kong, Xi himself) have become more sensitive than something that happened 35 years ago.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/19/patrick-lawrence-defending-humanity/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Defending Humanity</a> <bq><b>The institutions that are supposed to represent our will and aspirations are more or less broken.</b> We have no way of expressing our objections to U.S. support for Zionist Israel’s genocide — no way that makes any difference, I mean to say.</bq> <bq>Here is Article 1 of the declaration. It is short and suitably to the point:<bq>All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.</bq><b>These principles are of eternal validity. But try to imagine any group of world leaders — or any Western leaders, more to my point — speaking in such terms today.</b></bq> <bq>Resisting the obvious causes for discouragement with which we live, we can then remind ourselves that the declaration was drafted in direct response to the catastrophes that led to the Second World War and implied in every syllable of it <b>a belief in humanity’s shared capacity to right the wrongs that had so recently come close to destroying it.</b></bq> <bq>For the P5, the provisions of the Charter mean sovereignty in the sense of absolutist rule: the power to coerce, linked with the privilege not to be coerced. In other words: <b>The law cannot be enforced against a permanent member, or an ally enjoying the protection of a permanent member.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Thinking the unthinkable</a> <bq>When I think about the debate over radium, I imagine that the people who understood that radium was really bad for you must have run up against critics who told them they were being unreasonable. "You can't tell people to stop using radium. Tell them to use suppositories with less radium. Tell them to use them less frequently. But <b>you can't just tell people, 'stop putting radium up your asshole.' They won't take you seriously."</b></bq> <bq>Over and over again, magazine editors, managers of nonprofit review outlets, and indie gadget reviewers told me that it was unrealistic to publish a roundup of, say, this year's portable music players with the recommendation, "Just don't buy any of these. None of them are fit for purpose." In other words: <b>No one wanted to publish, "The correct amount of radium to stuff up your asshole is zero ."</b></bq> <bq>Sometimes, the correct answer is "none of the above." Even if that makes you sound unserious, <b>the alternative is that you counsel people to put radium up their asses in a bid to seem "reasonable."</b></bq> <bq>Congress hasn't updated consumer privacy law since 1988, when it took the bold step of…banning video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. Since then, <b>a coalition of commercial surveillance companies and the cops and spies who treat their data-lakes as massive, off-the-books anaerobic lagoons of warrantless surveillance data has prevented the passage of any new privacy protections for Americans.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we should order every data-broker, every tech giant, every consumer electronics company and app vendor to delete all their surveillance data. All of it.</b> The correct amount of radium in that asshole is – as with every other orifice – zero.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zb2SuW-jug" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1zb2SuW-jug" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Joe Rogan" caption="Joe Rogan Experience #2111 - Katt Williams"> I'm almost an hour in and I feel like Katt Williams thinks that the plots of Independence Day (all tech came from analyzing the attack ship from Roswell) and the Transformers (all tech came from analyzing Megatron) are real. He thinks humanity got advanced tech from space aliens. Brother Katt: just because you don't understand doesn't mean nobody understands it. I just listened to a tech talk from a guy at Uster about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit" source="Wikipedia">ASIC</a> that was incredible. Just incredible. He understands circuits on a deep level. I'm at 90 minutes in this thing. Katt is drifting hard sometimes. People underestimate Rogan's ability to keep a conversation going for 3 hours, how he steers his guests into areas that might be interesting. He's a moron, but he's not without talent. How many times has Rogan said, <iq>Yeaaah, ... uh, that makes sense...</iq> when Williams just vomited up another word salad. <img src="{att_link}from_like_the_sirius_star_system_.jpg" href="{att_link}from_like_the_sirius_star_system_.jpg" align="none" caption="From, like, the Sirius star system?" scale="75%"> <bq><b>Rogan:</b> I've always wondered whether alchemy wasn't just a way to regain lost knowledge. <b>Williams:</b> [speaks so slowly that I feel like his battery is dying.]</bq> He is <i>so</i> stoned but he's like those alcoholics who can drive a car better than you or I can. He has <i>so much</i> practice at being stoned. I kept expecting him to just *slide* out of his chair. I mean, most of what he's saying is useless trash if you look at it too closely, but it <i>sounds good.</i> It <i>sounds wise</i>. Stoner wisdom. Joe Rogan is the <i>perfect</i> interviewer for him. Also, he talks about how much he reads---20 books per week!---or that he read when he was younger, or ... whatever. It's all bullshit. Either that or he's reading Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. If he actually read serious works---he says he reads (or read! Who can tell what year he thinks it is?) <i>classics</i>---then how could he be this misguided and spacey? If he actually spends all of that time reading all of that incredible content, then it's a shame that he comes out talking like this. Williams mentioned several times that he thought he would be canceled for some of his utterances---and then said something relatively banal. But then he also said, <bq>You know, the Jewish people [UH OH] are powerful people on this planet [OMG STOP] and a lot of that has to do with the process that they have in instilling in their young people a certain amount of information and wherewithal and conversation that does not happen with other cultures, let's say [...] and um that exists only in a few places around the world but they're always important um especially if you look at things from a nonreligious point of view.</bq> Dude. WTF are you talking about? And how does it not worry you to talk about one of the most sensitive ethnic communities when you worried about a dozen, other, relatively innocuous statements? Joe Rogan soon after: <iq>What do you think ghosts are? Do you think they're real.</iq> Good call, Joe. Katt Williams, after visibly gathering himself, <iq>You either believe in the supernatural or you don't.</iq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/donald-trump-stand-up-comic/" author="Juliet Jacques" source="Jacobin">Donald Trump, Stand-Up Comic</a> <bq>To admit that Trump is funny isn’t to say that it’s because he “triggers the libs.” His victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 ushered in the horrors above, even if there was grim amusement in <b>seeing people who’d been planning their White House careers ever since they applied to Harvard realizing they’d lost to “one of the bad children from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” as Chapo Trap House put it.</b> But that’s the locus of Trump being funny: <b>his willingness to smash the political elite’s social norms and desecrate its sacred spaces is consistently hysterical.</b> Even more than his crude nicknames for electoral rivals, Trump’s remarks about John McCain being held prisoner in Vietnam — saying, in his signature bitchy New York queen voice, “I like people who weren’t captured” and <b>following up on McCain’s death by calling him “a fucking loser” — punctured all standards of political decorum.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the gleeful shamelessness of the man himself: <b>the photo of Trump grinning like an idiot behind a table covered with Big Macs, beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln no less</b>, is as hilariously incongruous an image as you are ever likely to see, and it still makes me laugh whenever I see it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/only-idiots-care-about-iq" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Only Idiots Care about IQ</a> <bq>I’ve been on committees with Nobel laureates in physics, for example, people who profoundly transformed our understanding of the nature of the physical universe through significant contributions to the discovery that it is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerating pace . Stuff like that. Smart people. <b>I myself would have no idea how to go about demonstrating that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Literally no idea. As far as I can tell the universe isn’t going anywhere. It just kind of seems to be sitting there, more or less the same size, from day to day. But what do I know?</b></bq> <bq>[...] the hard truth is that <b>they really just got lucky to be born into a time and place that knew how to appreciate them.</b></bq> <bq>I think for example that Foucault was absolutely right on target when he explicated social kinds —such as “homosexual” or “insane”— as the contingent products of distinct and contingent discursive histories, <b>rather than as the discovery of ontologically robust natural kinds, whose discovery and naming carves nature perfectly at its joints.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>for them, such discursively produced labels as “low-IQ”, “settler-colonial”, “cis”, “illegal”, “white”, etc., are as real as the squares on Mendeleev’s table of the elements.</b></bq> <bq>[...] you can’t make any sense at all of such regional variability, as to who is on the margins and who is safely inside a given society, <b>if you honestly think that marginality is something that attaches to “nations” or “races” as a whole, and that its root cause is some sort of static and essential inferiority.</b></bq> <bq>There are other vastly more relevant pathways of explanation for social inequality than “low IQ”. It is not that I deny the reality of differential aptitudes among human beings, but only that <b>I deny (i) the possibility of any fixed or obvious distribution of these differences across populations as a whole, (ii) the value-independent existence of most traits that we deem to be aptitudes at all.</b></bq> <bq>[...] throughout the Middle Ages the transfer of title for noble estates always included, as <b>constitutive of what was meant by “immeuble”, the transfer of all the resident felines as well, but not the canines.</b></bq> <bq>Cats remain a bit unsettling — they give us toxoplasmosis, they don’t come when you call them, and in <b>countless other ways cannot help but continually to remind us that as a species they’re a bunch of weird little fuckers.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">To Learn to Live in a Mundane Universe</a> <bq>I continue to maintain the basic point that a) we are definitionally more likely to live in ordinary times than extraordinary and b) <b>we are conditioned to overstate our own uniqueness and importance</b>, not even as a matter of intellect or character but as a basic reality of cognitive science, a consequence of living as a consciousness.</bq> <bq>I will again refer people to Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth , which is where the 1870-1970 and then 1970-current split is best articulated. I read it, and <b>it’s a classic academic book that ponderously pours data on to the same basic observations over and over again.</b> (Just like, for example, Capital in the Twenty-First Century and many many others.) <b>That’s what an academic book of that type is meant to do</b>; It’s just that I don’t expect anyone else to feel moved to read it.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>vast majority of what we call the advances of modernity stem directly from the development of cheap, stable, relatively safe, reliable refined fossil fuels</b>, from electricity generation to cars to planes to modern heating systems to fertilizers.</bq> <bq>[...] at a population level, recent improvements to average life expectancy just can’t hold a candle to the era that saw the development of modern germ theory and the first antibiotics and modern anesthesia and the first “dead virus” vaccines and the widespread adoption of medical hygiene rules and oral contraception and exogenous insulin and heart stents, all of which emerged in a 100 year period. <b>This is the issue with insisting on casting every new development in world-historic terms: the brick-and-mortar chip-chip-chip of better living conditions and slow progress gets devalued.</b></bq> <bq>[...] why call this “artificial intelligence” at all? Nothing that DeepMind is working on requires “emergence.” Their tools are not agentic/choice-making. They have no consciousness, nor are they required to in order to fulfill their purpose. <b>They’re very powerful systems built on very powerful algorithms but that’s fundamentally what they are, systems built on algorithms. So where does intelligence come in at all, and why is it necessary?</b></bq> <bq>[...] a map is not probabilistic. You can have a better or a worse map, but a map is not fundamentally stochastic and <b>GPT’s understanding of language will always have error bars, due to its basic architecture.</b> This is why “AI” has conspicuously failed in one of the many tasks it is confidently asserted to be on the brink of solving, which is producing a complete and functioning syntax for the grammar of a human language.</bq> <bq>[...] my confusion as to why reality itself is never good enough. <b>Why does our culture insist on overselling and overhyping when there are genuinely impressive developments happening? Is it just literally about stock prices? I think it might literally be about stock prices.</b></bq> <bq>Even if we achieve speeds on the order of (say) 10% of the speed of light, which we almost certainly can’t for simple relativity reasons, traveling to potentially habitable stars will take hundreds of years; we have no reason to believe that cryofreeze/stasis/etc technologies are actually achievable; multigenerational interstellar travel is likely impossible for all the reasons Kim Stanley Robinson lays out here; <b>we will therefore never colonize the stars and in the exceedingly unlikely event that we survive to see it, we’ll die when our sun expands to become a red giant; we might mine or colonize planets or moons in our solar system, but that won’t fundamentally change human life.</b></bq> <bq>There’s very likely other life in the universe, even intelligent life, but given that the cosmic speed limit will apply to them too, <b>we’ll never meet with any of them physically, and given the distances involved synchronous communication is essentially impossible.</b></bq> <bq><b>Who’s excited to upgrade from a Galaxy S x to a Galaxy S x+1 , no matter how remarkable the underlying technology?</b> The PlayStation 5 Pro is an absolutely remarkable piece of human ingenuity, and yet many people feel cynical and underwhelmed about it, and I don’t blame them. The Nintendo64, now, that felt revolutionary. Is that fair, the ever-ratcheting expectations game? Doesn’t matter. It’s human nature.</bq> <bq><b>We live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry</b> and holding your shirt over your nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that offers a slightly better points program. <b>It just keeps going, day after day after grinding day.</b></bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/spa-by-default" author="" source="Thoughtworks" date="Oct 26, 2022">SPA by default</a> <bq><b>SPAs incur complexity that simply doesn't exist with traditional server-based websites</b>: issues such as search engine optimization, browser history management, web analytics and first page load time all need to be addressed. Proper analysis and consideration of the trade-offs is required to determine if that complexity is warranted for business or user experience reasons. <b>Too often teams are skipping that trade-off analysis, blindly accepting the complexity of SPAs by default even when business needs don't justify it.</b> We still see some developers who aren't <b>aware of an alternative approach because they've spent their entire career in a framework like React.</b></bq> <hr> From a conversation with a coworker about how to split libraries and components. <b>Me:</b> <c>CommunityToolkit.MVVM</c> doesn't require a dependency on <c>PresentationFramework</c>. Maybe that's where I'm drawing the line. <bq><b>Interlocutor:</b> I think I draw the line at what I would reuse. If we turned CC2 into a blazer app (a fun side project to learn blazer if we're ever hurting for stuff to do!) then we would reuse all the services, DTOs, and some Utils. But none of the V(iew)s or V(iew)M(odel)s will come with.</bq> <b>Me:</b> So...reuse. That's a good criterium for deciding on architectural boundaries. For Blazor, you wouldn't reuse the views, no. The ViewModels? I don't think so either, as Blazor uses Razor templates. For Maui, though? I think you could reuse a bunch of the view models. Maybe. The CommunityToolkit MVVM has a special version for Maui, so maybe there would be conflicts. The tests are always a second executable instance that needs to be able to use everything possible. I usually try to keep as much code out of the main app as possible because it's often not been possible to test the main executable without running into a whole bunch of issues. That doesn't seem to be the case with this WPF app, though. I know it's impossible with a Maui app (as evidenced by nearly every one of my students who tries it, despite my telling them that it won't work). There's something about the global startup in the Maui assembly that borks the testing assembly on execution. Also, I've very often built both UI and console versions of apps for customers, so I just got used to keeping all code in a place of potential reuse. I understand that one also wouldn't use ViewModels in a console app ... I'm just explaining whence my tendency comes. (That sentence almost ended in a 'from'. Shudder.) So, we can move the ViewModels back to the main app. It probably makes sense to do that if we're never going to split the ViewModel/View in the code generators. Splitting the ViewModels away, though, did reveal an architectural violation where a ViewModel is using Views, so food for thought. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw7ljmvbrr0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bw7ljmvbrr0" author="dotnet" caption="Deep .NET: Let's Build Our Own ArrayPool with Stephen Toub and Scott Hanselman" source="YouTube" width="560px"> In this video, I found myself very much wishing that Toub had written at least a single test for the <c>ArrayPool</c> implementation. At <b>34:45</b>, <bq><b>Hanselmann:</b> For folks that may not know what NUMA is: so NUMA is this <i>non-uniform memory access</i> that the computer knows that, like, this CPU is near this memory and...that memory over there, we're going to consider that remote memory. And it's all meant to reduce latency. Is that right? <b>Toub:</b> Yeah and this definitely factors into things like the GC, right? And even with threadpool scheduling: you want to put the work where the data is. <b>Hanselmann:</b> Put the work where the data is. Yes. <b>Toub:</b> Otherwise, you spend all your time moving stuff around and thrashing your cache. <b>Hanselmann:</b> ...and moving things around at different layers of abstraction. Because you would not want to move between NUMA nodes. You don't want CPU zero to be looking at memory one over there. But then there's the higher-level question of 'is the adding of an array pool to my application going to cause memory fragmentation or do I just trust the GC to handle that?' It's a constant series of trade-offs. Like, did the complexity I added give me the performance that I wanted or did I just make things more complicated. <b>Toub:</b> Well, it's a great example of where you know I mentioned at the beginning there's a lot of complexity with pools. And this is a great example of it, If you're running on a core over here and you use an object that was last used over here, right? Are you better off using that object? Or are you better off just asking the GC to give you a new one? That's going to be allocated in memory that's very closely associated with where you are. So these pools aren't always wins.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-on-intels-first-ever-cpu/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Linux boots in 4.76 days on the Intel 4004</a> <bq>Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. <b>With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards.</b> And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.</bq> <bq>The 4004 itself is far too limited to run Linux directly. Instead, Grinberg created a solution that is equally impressive: <b>an emulator that runs on the 4004 and emulates a MIPS R3000 processor—the architecture used in the DECstation 2100 workstation that Linux was originally ported to.</b> This emulator, along with minimal hardware emulation, allows a stripped-down Debian Linux to boot to a command prompt.</bq> <bq><b>Grinberg designed a custom circuit board with no vias (paths from one side of the circuit board to the other) and only right-angle traces for a retro aesthetic.</b> It's meant to be wall-mountable as an art piece, slowly executing Linux commands over the course of days or weeks.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/tossed-salads-and-scrumbled-eggs/" author="Nikhil Suresh" source="Ludicity">Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs</a> <bq>If the project is running late, they have no recourse other than to ask the engineers to re-prioritize work, then perform what I think of as <b>"slow failure"</b>, which is normally the demesne of the project manager. <b>When a project is failing, the typical step is not to pull the plug or take drastic action, it is to gradually raise a series of delays while everyone pretends not to notice the broader trend. By slowly failing, and at no point presenting anyone else in the business with a clear point where they should pull the plug, you can ultimately deliver nothing while tricking other people into implicitly accepting responsibility.</b> The Scrum Master is generally not malicious, they are just failing to see the broader trend, and simply hoping for the sake of personal anxiety regulation that this task will indeed be accomplished by the next sprint.</bq> <bq><b>Our consultancy doesn't do deadlines.</b> This was a strange idea when I first came across it because it is so different from the corporate norm, but it's a much better model when you have trust with the parties involved. If you don't have trust, guess what, nothing else matters. <b>We pair this with fixed price billing, but the core is that we try to only work projects where there's no real risk of a few weeks here or there affecting our client adversely.</b> The fixed price billing means that we aren't rewarded for running late, and have a higher effective hourly rate if we deliver something the client is happy with in less time. It also means that <b>clients don't feel bad when we do things like document comprehensively or improve test suites.</b></bq> This would be hilarious if it weren't so utopic and sad. What kind of clients do you have, pray tell? You know, those without hard deadlines? And those who won't bury you in change requests for which you can't charge? What a unicorns-and-rainbows, happy place you're in right now, I suppose, where everyone loves you and is just happy for the opportunity to be able to work with you. That will fade and your fixed-price/no-deadline model will encounter a world of customers who are only to happy to squeeze you for all the features they can get while you're paying for your tests and documentation yourself. Oh, and those malleable deadlines? They'll harden right up. I don't actually understand how there can be that much work available without a hard deadline. Most products have to be integrated into something, or have to be shown to potential customers at a conference or in sales campaigns. How do you integrate things without deadlines? Or are you building products that are in perpetual beta, being continuously integrated and continuously tested by your users? Isn't everyone much happier that Apple and Microsoft hit their deadlines for operating-system and runtime releases year after year? I know I am. I would have rather have brutal feature-cutting than deadline-slippage. I know he cited Fred Brooks earlier in his article, <bq author="Fred Brooks" source="The Mythical Man Month">I like the advice given by P. Fagg, an experienced hardware engineer, "Take no small slips." That is, allow enough time in the new schedule to ensure that the work can be carefully and thoroughly done, and that rescheduling will not have to be done again.</bq> Which means that you want a realistic schedule, which is easier to do when you've been where you're going. You can also make your schedule more predictable by defining clear milestones, be brutal about "nice to haves", and have a process that's flexible enough to accommodate bad luck but not so flexible that it lets you get off into the weeds. An agile process where you check "everybody good? Really?" every so often is a good thing. It has to be adjusted to the team, though. The problem with most of these management systems is that they try to get around having a well-oiled team without interpersonal conflicts. That's the essential ingredient. You might be able to paper over the lack of a good team with a lot of process, but the wheels will come off eventually. You might get lucky and deliver something useful before then. It won't be fun, though, and you're unlikely to be building a good team at the same time. It seems like a lot of companies not only don't know that they need good teams, they actively work against letting those teams arise, probably because they're afraid that the team will "steal" their IP and form their own company. You know, like Nikhil did. He does admit that his process isn't appropriate for "real" projects, though. <bq>Finally, here is a boring disclaimer that some industries simply can't get away with experimenting along these dimensions. Microchip manufacturers need to deliver the product in time for the next iPhone to ship or Apple cancels the contract. C’est la vie.</bq> Ah, so if you're trying to get something useful done, then you'll have to work differently. Gotcha. <bq>Simply put, they reflect the reality that <b>there is a phase of a project where scope <i>increases</i> as you run into new cases during implementation</b>, and then a phase where you actually have a good idea of how long something is going to take.</bq> Yeah. This is variously called the exploratory, proof-of-concept, MVP, MVM, or pilot phase. Let's be clear that this young writer is talented and he's pointing out a lot of bullshit that the business world tends to mime its way through. However, if you work in an industry that's hardware-adjacent---i.e., where a supply chain affects your inputs and you affect other products' supply chains with your outputs---then you will find better planning, simply because there's less luxury for going off the rails, shrugging your shoulders, and going off to beg for more VC funding. <bq>People can have their gigantic Jira board, I guess, if they're willing to put that much time into something that isn't the work itself.</bq> Look, man, I'm on board for the whole "long meetings are the mind-killer" vibe, but please be careful about disparaging "having an overview of what the hell is going on" as <i>not the work itself.</i> If no-one uses the board, then it's a waste of time. If there are valuable stakeholders who benefit from the board, then it's not---then it's <i>part of the work.</i> When you need to coordinate teams that involve more than software engineers, then you're going to have to think long and hard about how to communicate the project's goals and path to get to them. These teams might be people who aren't as computer-savvy, who have skills in other areas, who are familiar with other tools and workflows. They provide a lot of value and you have to figure out how to keep them on board, informed, and engaged. You're got support teams, product-care teams, mechanical design, electronics, embedded design, marketing, sales, executive committee, etc. These groups all need to involved and informed. Having a board with <i>actual data</i> from which you can extract high-level summaries is not as terrible an idea as he makes it out to be. Again, there are definitely people who lose sight of the goal and think of the board <i>as an end in itself</i>, but then, I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific and just say that. <h id="games">Video Games</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z7kqwuf0a8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/7z7kqwuf0a8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Playstation" caption="Ghost of Yōtei - Announce Trailer | PS5 Games"> Wow. Great vibe.