<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <img src="{att_link}vigilantism_appeals_when_nothing_else_is_working.jpeg" href="{att_link}vigilantism_appeals_when_nothing_else_is_working.jpeg" align="none" caption="Vigilantism appeals when nothing else is working" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/01/in-2025-we-must-all-fight-like-few.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">In 2025 We Must All Fight Like the Few People Who Didn't Suck in 2024</a> <bq><b>If this really is the end of the world as we know it, then we must go down swinging wild because that is the only way to build a new one.</b> We must fight like we don’t suck because we all deserve better. <b>See you fuckers in the Thunderdome.</b> Drop the goddamn microphone.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=126950" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Florian Warweg">Wieso fordert Baerbock den Abzug der russischen, aber nicht der US-Militärbasen in Syrien?</a> <bq><b>Die Präsenz der russischen Militärbasen beruht auf Verträgen mit dem Staat Syrien und diese gelten daher als völkerrechtlich umfassend legitimiert.</b> Solange diese Verträge nicht aufgekündigt werden, gilt dies auch unter den neuen, mit Waffengewalt an die „Regierung“ gekommenen dschihadistisch geprägten HTS-Vertretern (zuvor Al-Kaida Syrien).</bq> <bq><b>Die Etablierung der genannten fünf US-Militärbasen zwischen 2016 und 2018 auf dem Staatsgebiet Syriens erfolgte ohne Einladung der syrischen Regierung oder irgendeine andere völkerrechtliche Legitimation.</b> Diese Basen sind folglich unter völliger Missachtung geltenden Völkerrechts dort erbaut und mit US-Soldaten besetzt worden.</bq> <bq>Aber der Punkt ist ja: Die Russen, die Sie genannt haben, haben seit über 50 Jahren – zum Beispiel im Fall von Tartus – völkerrechtliche Verträge mit der Syrischen Republik. <b>Die US-Amerikaner sind einfach nach Syrien reingegangen und haben da ihre Militärbasis etabliert.</b> Das hat unter Umständen ja auch einen Vorbildcharakter für andere Länder. Deswegen wäre es doch durchaus relevant, <b>dass die Bundesregierung sich zu der Frage positioniert, ob sie so ein Vorgehen legitimiert oder nicht.</b></bq> Die Antworten auf seine Frage Seiten der Bundesregierung waren peinlich und haben keinerlei etwas beantwortet. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/will-section-12-die-of-shame/" source="Z Network" author="Craig Murray">Will Section 12 Die of Shame?</a> <bq><b>There was absolutely nothing stopping them, but not one single member of Western mainstream media ever visited a bomb site in Lebanon to verify whether Israeli claims it was a Hezbollah base or missile site were true.</b> Because they knew the answer is negative, as I found across dozens of bomb sites, and that is not the narrative they are paid to promote. But when a narrative they are paid to promote came to the fore, they flocked to Damascus – <b>driving right past the bombed civilian homes, ambulance centres and schools of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to get there</b> – to promote Syria’s new Israel-, USA- and Turkey-sponsored “democratic” government of entirely “reformed” HTS Wahhabists.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>you can acknowledge Assad’s human rights abuses without subscribing to the ludicrous atrocity propaganda that spewed out of the mainstream media</b> – 150,000 prisoners in one jail, 100,000 people in a mass grave, the “body press” whose plywood-pressing surfaces were peculiarly unstained, the suntanned American prisoner who had been “locked in a room for seven months”, the splendidly groomed dissident prisoner “rescued” by CNN . <b>Atrocity propaganda is as old as warfare.</b> Like the “60 beheaded babies” of 7 October, or the 100,000 prisoners in a mass grave, it will doubtless recur indefinitely despite being nonsense.</bq> <bq>[...] the “democratic revolution” will start to think about an election only in four years’ time, that women judges have all been dismissed, that starting yesterday there are official Sharia patrols on the streets of Damascus “advising” women to cover their hair, and that for the first time, also starting yesterday, the hijab is official compulsory uniform in most Syrian state schools.</bq> <bq><b>HTS has done nothing whatsoever to oppose the Israeli invasion of Southern Syria, which as of today controls the dams that supply 40% of Syria’s potable and agricultural water.</b> Israel is constructing 13 permanent military bases in the newly occupied Syrian territories, putting in concrete emplacements and building or improving fenced roads between them. <b>It is building gun emplacements around dams.</b></bq> That is 100% how Israel rolls. They won't share any of that water with Syria. Fuck those Arabs, ammirite? <bq>A further interesting question is why the flag is upside down on the makeshift staff. <b>If somebody cared enough about the cause to kill and die for it, presumably they would know which way up the flag goes?</b> It is worth noting that the official story is that Jabbar was “inspired by ISIS”, not that he actually had any form of contact with anyone from ISIS. Maybe nobody told him which way the flag goes. But <b>it also transpires he had Arabic language books, including the Koran, at home, so he plainly would have known the writing was upside down.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>it is all delightfully perfect – the Koran is open at a page about fighting and being killed</b>, and the camera lingers on a helpfully hung Palestinian keffiyeh, while there are lots of chemicals and apparent bomb-making areas. I am not positing a theory as to what happened. <b>I am saying that the package of information being presented is remarkably full and neat.</b></bq> <bq>Livelsberger was not a toy soldier: he was an active service member of special forces with substantial combat experience. <b>He would certainly have been able to make a more viable bomb, as his family suggested.</b> Perhaps more to the point, Livelsberger would certainly have known that what was in the truck was not a viable bomb.</bq> <bq>What we have here, if we believe the official narrative, is <b>a highly proficient active combat veteran who shot himself before his non-viable IED went off.</b> This too strikes me as a most peculiar narrative. To which I will add that, in the great tradition of terrorist attacks, <b>while Livelsberger’s body was burnt beyond recognition, his passport survived in the cab, next to him.</b></bq> <bq>[...] in practice, there is nothing to prevent the massive hypocrisy of the Terrorism Police harassing, and <b>the CPS prosecuting, people for very tangential “support” of Hamas and Hezbollah, while much more blatant and open support of HTS goes unpunished.</b> But it is not a good look and juries are likely to be unhappy.</bq> <bq>If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. <b>I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.</b></bq> I just wanted to note that this is a very nice request for contribution. <hr> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/oligarch-farmers-and-the-fires-in" source="Weaponized Immigrant" author="Yasha Levine">Oligarch farmers and the fires in Los Angeles</a> <bq><b>The Resnicks control a huge amount of water. They use to irrigate their vast holdings of pistachios and almonds and citrus fruit.</b> And their holdings are vast — somewhere around 300 square miles of land spread around the Central Valley. That’s ten times the size of Manhattan. But the problem with the Resnicks is not that they’re hoarding water.</bq> <bq>I’m talking about the terraforming system that has been built over the last century in California. This system, which involves massive dams and thousands of miles of aqueducts, moves water from the north of the state to the south. It is nominally owned by the public and run by a democratic process. But that’s mostly a ruse. The truth is that from the very beginning, this system has been under the control of a local California oligarchy made up mostly of billionaire farmers and real estate speculators. <b>The basic function of this terraforming system is to move water from California’s mountains to California’s semi-arid valleys and coastal areas in order to fuel speculative agriculture and suburban development.</b></bq> <bq>[...] that’s what the terraforming system has always been about. It has put a dam on every major river and redirected their flows to the lowlands where the cityland and farmland is, <b>allowing insiders to buy land on the cheap, hooking it up to water, and then make a huge profit.</b> This has been the engine of California’s oligarchy from the Gold Rush to today, creating a civilization of cars and endless suburbs. <b>This is what Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is about.</b></bq> <bq>A lot of real development has happened in the hills and mountains of Los Angeles and Southern California. These are areas that are supposed to go through natural cycles of fire. But now they’ve been packed with houses…just ready for the right conditions to burn. To put it another way, <b>this terraforming-water system has subsidized the creation of housing in places where it should not exist. It helped create the perfect matchbox.</b> And this matchbox is burning right now in Los Angeles.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/lifeboat-capitalism" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Lifeboat Capitalism</a> <bq>[...] human nature in our society is to save yourself and your own loved ones, and as disasters intensify, this tendency multiplied by an entire nation will manifest itself as <b>rich people desperately bidding up the price of salvation until it is not affordable for anyone else.</b></bq> <bq>We can either work to build more lifeboats, and to make humane rules about who gets on them, <b>or we can just let the strong people toss the weaker people into the water and sail away.</b> Either by action or by inaction, our government is going to effectively choose one or the other.</bq> <bq>Two days ago, our outgoing president signed an order banning offshore oil drilling across most of America’s coastlines. Yesterday, at about the same time that the fierce California winds were whipping up the fire that is still eating through the golden city, the incoming president said of the drilling ban, “It’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately.” <b>America, poised to burn, poised to drown, poised to blow away in storms fueled by carbon emissions, chose as its leader the “Drill, baby drill!” guy. What can you say?</b></bq> What can I say? I can say that I don't think even you believe your little just-so story. I can wonder how someone who seems so intelligent, and not one week after he wrote a devastating critique about Biden, the Democrats, and moral bankruptcy, can now write something as stupid as lauding Biden for banning something that he <i>knows</i> will be repealed, less than a week before he leaves office <i>rather than when he took office four years ago.</i> If it was so important to him, then why didn't he do it four years ago? He actually did exactly the opposite for four years, opening more public, federal land and resources to fossil-fuel exploration than any other president before him. I'm going to go ahead and answer my question for you: because he doesn't actually give a shit about it, other than to use it to score a few political points for himself and his team. It's so they can legitimately write things like, "when Biden banned offshore drilling," with a straight face and not getting called out by a fact-checker. Because he did ban it! Look! For five whole days. It's just like when he "normalized relations with Cuba" by executive fiat---rather than working toward legislation---again, five days before leaving office, in the full knowledge that Little Marco Rubio will be taking the post of Secretary of State and that he will <i>fucking flatten</i> Cuba if at all possible. So, that's what I can say. I can say that Trump taking office doesn't suddenly make things shitty. They were shitty. And you, Hamilton Nolan, trying to make some of us feel guilty for not lining up to give Joe Biden a hand-job for being such a remarkable president is beneath you. Stop pretending there was a good guy; you're wasting everybody's time. <bq>If the term “crime against humanity” has any meaning, it must apply to very wealthy people who—knowing that their actions are causing a climate change crisis that will devastate future generations and destroy hundreds of millions of lives—<b>chose not to stop those actions, but instead to undertake a systematic campaign of lies and propaganda in order to continue making themselves money.</b></bq> <bq><b>At this moment, it is enough to say, “we need to make some reasonable rules about how we are going to get everyone through the disasters, because we are all in this together.”</b> This low bar, I promise, is too much to expect from the federal government that is set to come to power. We will watch them hand out oil drilling permits and pass bills to protect gas stoves and swagger around in big trucks and pose in campaign ads with guns and banners that say “Come and Take It” and go on hunting trips with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute.</bq> Yes, the incoming administration will be bad. That was always going to be the case. However, it's also <i>currently</i> the case. Remember that, just two months ago, the Democrats lost the election because they've carved out an economic niche for themselves that is so insulated that they couldn't even remember to acknowledge that what Hamilton is describing is exactly what has already happened and has been happening for decades because they were no longer even aware it. <bq>These are the villains. There they are. They will help your house burn down and send cops to crack your head if you get angry about it and then ask you to vote for them. <b>They have a lifeboat. You can’t get on. They’re sure they will get away with it.</b></bq> You're so close, Hamilton. But you managed to paint a picture of villains that magically excludes the members of the political party you only occasionally remember is a very large part of the problem too. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=126887" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Warum befindet sich die westliche Demokratie in der Krise?</a> <bq>Ganz düster sieht es indes in anderen „Musterdemokratien“ aus. Das Schlusslicht bildet der putschende Südkoreaner Yoon Suk-Yeol mit 15 Prozent Zustimmung, aber <b>auch Petr Fiala (Tschechien), Emmanuel Macron (Frankreich) und unser Olaf Scholz können mit 17 Prozent, 18 Prozent und 19 Prozent nur Zustimmungswerte vorweisen, die man eigentlich nur als katastrophal bezeichnen kann.</b></bq> <bq>Auch wenn es keine direkt vergleichbaren Zahlen für Russland gibt, kann man die Daten des als seriös geltenden Lewada Centers durchaus heranziehen. Diesen methodisch ähnlich erhobenen Daten zufolge liegt <b>die Zustimmungsrate für Wladimir Putin derzeit bei 87 Prozent und die Zustimmung für die gesamte russische Regierung bei 72 Prozent.</b> Einzig für China gibt es keine methodisch vergleichbaren Daten.</bq> <bq>[...] auch in Deutschland wird es auf absehbare Zeit keine beliebte Regierung geben. Wenn im Februar vorgezogen gewählt wird, <b>treten zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte drei Kanzlerkandidaten an, die allesamt im Politbarometer negative Beliebtheitswerte haben</b> – also von einem Großteil der Befragten negativ gesehen werden.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/07/chris-hedges-genocide-the-new-normal/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Genocide: The New Normal</a> <bq>Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive . Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. <b>Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed.</b> Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.</bq> <bq>The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. <b>The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away</b>, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024.</bq> <bq>The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is <b>a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless.</b> We will not even pay lip service to it. This will be a Hobbesian world where nations that have the most advanced industrial weapons make the rules. Those who are poor and vulnerable will kneel in subjugation. <b>The genocide in Gaza is the template for the future. And those in the Global South know it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/07/the-banana-road-from-south-america-to-china/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Banana Road From South America to China</a> <bq>Grupo Noboa was formed out of Bananera Noboa S.A. set up in 1947 by Luis Noboa Naranjo, the grandfather of the current president. Bananera Noboa expanded, thanks to Álvaro, into the <b>Exportadora Bananera Noboa, which is the heart of the Group’s billion-dollar empire in Ecuador (population 18 million, a third of whom live below an abysmally low poverty line).</b></bq> <bq><b>Ecuador</b>, which only produces a little over 5 percent of the world’s banana produce, <b>exports 95 percent of its production, making up 36 percent of the world’s exported bananas</b> (Costa Rica is next at 15 percent). Grupo Noboa is Ecuador’s largest banana firm, and therefore one of the most important companies in the export of bananas globally. <b>The largest importers of bananas are the European Union (5.1 million tons), the United States (4.1 million tons), and China (1.8 million tons).</b></bq> <bq>Between 2022 and 2023, Ecuador’s exports of bananas to China increased by 33 percent. However, the problem with Ecuadorian bananas is that the journey from South America to China has increased the average import unit value to $690 per ton. This means that <b>for the Chinese market bananas from Ecuador are 41 times more expensive than bananas from Vietnam.</b></bq> <bq>Meanwhile, the Colombian government and the Chinese government are considering the expansion of the port of Buenaventura and the building of <b>a “dry canal” to link the Pacific (Buenaventura) and Atlantic (Cartagena) ports by a rail link; this would be a direct challenge to the Panama Canal,</b></bq> <bq>The story seems to end where it always ends. Unable to compete on commercial grounds, the United States brings its cavalry to bear. <b>President Noboa gave the U. S. permission to use the environmentally fragile Galapagos Islands as a military base to conduct surveillance in the area.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/we-have-to-act-taxpayers-suing-congressmembers-for-funding-genocide-speak-out/" source="Z Network" author="Marjorie Cohn">“We Have to Act”: Taxpayers Suing Congressmembers for Funding Genocide Speak Out</a> <bq>The complaint alleges violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits aid to foreign security forces that have committed a gross violation of human rights. In addition, it charges that the congressmembers violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibit U.S. assistance to countries whose governments engage in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. Lastly, <b>the complaint alleges violation of the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which prohibits U.S. weapons transfers if they risk facilitating human rights violations.</b></bq> <bq>“We see it quite clearly that there are legal and constitutional limits on what U.S. tax dollars can be used for, and our congressmen have broken the law,” Barakat told Truthout. <b>“Our eyes are wide open about the federal courts. It’s an uphill climb, but we have to act. We are responsible to act.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/nations-are-exiting-a-secretive-system-that-protects-corporations-one-countrys-story-shows-how-hard-that-can-be/" source="Z Network" author="Katie Surma">Nations Are Exiting a Secretive System That Protects Corporations. One Country’s Story Shows How Hard That Can Be</a> <bq>These tribunals have awarded hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to companies, even in cases where they flouted national laws, polluted the environment or were accused of violating human rights. <b>Most of these cases have been filed by companies from wealthy nations against developing countries</b>, prompting critics to say <b>ISDS acts like a form of modern-day colonialism.</b></bq> <bq>The system has also emerged as a hurdle for climate action: Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States have collectively <b>faced billions of dollars in claims prompted by policies to limit fossil fuels or promote renewable energy.</b> “ISDS is highly problematic, to put it mildly,” said Surya Deva, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to development. <b>“An investor telling a government, ‘We will bring an arbitration case if you try to protect a local community or give them access to water or limit our mining operations,’ that is crippling.”</b></bq> It's obviously completely retarded that we even have to waste time considering this as a real issue. This is a prima facie waste of everyone's time. It's like the bullies in the biggest gang in the prison yard making you fill out paperwork allowing them to beat the shit out of you. They're going to do what they want anyway. What they want is you to ask them to do it. One wouldn't even give this argument the time of day, if the power balance weren't so out of whack. The prisoner has to put up with whatever the jailer wants. Strangely enough, this is the same argument that the article <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/david-lynch-is-dead-but-his-ethics" author="Slavoj Žižek" source="Žižek goads and prods">DAVID LYNCH IS DEAD, BUT HIS ETHICS IS MORE ALIVE THAN EVER</a> makes about the movie <i>Wild at Heart</i>, where Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru forces Laura Dern's Lula ask him to fuck her before he refuses. <bq>The uneasiness of this scene resides in the fact that Dafoe's unexpected rejection of Dern's forcefully extorted offer delivers the ultimate humiliation. His refusal becomes his triumph, degrading her even more than direct rape might have. <b>He achieves what he truly desires—not the act itself but her consent to it, symbolizing her humiliation.</b></bq> Anyway, back to the article. <bq>The policies brought down inflation and stabilized the economy. But they did little to improve people’s standards of living or reduce inequality. <b>For the majority of Bolivians still living on less than $2 a day, prosperity never came.</b> It was those Bolivians’ formidable social movements that in 2005 propelled an outsider to the presidency who promised to <b>“end the colonial state and the neoliberal model.”</b> Evo Morales, a former coca farmer who’d stood with water protestors in Cochabamba years earlier, <b>pledged to renationalize natural resources and disentangle the country from Washington, D.C.</b></bq> <bq><b>“We want partners, not bosses,” became his tagline.</b> The government took control of oil and gas and other industries.</bq> <bq>Cases can only be initiated by transnational investors against states, and not the other way around. Proceedings are conducted behind closed doors despite having public consequences. And <b>there is no binding code of ethics for arbitrators, who can act as both judges and counsel within the system.</b></bq> <bq>Most of these agreements contain <b>“sunset clauses,” which allow companies who invested before termination to bring new claims for five to 20 years afterward</b> unless all parties to the treaties agree to abolish the provision. Nearly all of Bolivia’s treaty partners, including the United States, did not consent.</bq> Monstrous. Colonialism is like one nation having other nations as slaves. <bq>[...] just because a country’s justice system may be deficient, said Deva, the U.N. special rapporteur, <b>that doesn’t mean foreign corporations should be given exclusive rights to bypass them.</b></bq> <bq>Even if ISDS is not a decisive factor in driving investment, he said, removing it would create one more roadblock to drawing the trillions of dollars needed to build renewable energy systems across the globe.</bq> Because they can't conceive of a system that fixes a problem that is not as a side-effect of making money for themselves. It's literally inconceivable. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/tears-of-our-children/" source="Z Network" author="Vijay Prashad">Tears of Our Children</a> <bq><ol><b>24 million children in Sudan – nearly half of the country’s total population of 50 million – are at risk of ‘generational catastrophe’.</b> 19 million children are out of school. 4 million children are displaced. 3.7 million children are acutely malnourished.</ol></bq> <bq>[...] the children of Sudan will not recover from the ordeal that the war has inflicted upon them. <b>It will take generations before anything resembling normality returns to the country.</b></bq> <hr> The following episodes of TrueAnon were excellent. One of them is from July 2014 but still very entertaining and informative. <ul> <div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-426-118290921" source="Patreon" date="Dec 19, 2024">#426 Palestine... Legal?</a> <bq>We’re joined by Dylan Saba of Palestine Legal to talk about terror designations, state repressions, Project Esther, and the anti-BDS laws that 38 states have adopted. Special guest Abby Martin joins us at the end to talk about her court case.</bq></div> <div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-425-blue-118079355" source="Patreon" date="Dec 16, 2024">#425 Blue Light Killer</a> <bq>Joshua Citarella joins us to wildly speculate on the possible motives, politics, and ideological architecture of Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.</bq></div> <div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-395-of-108861237" source="Patreon" date="Jul 26, 2024">#395 House of Tards</a> <bq>We’re back with our 2024 Election coverage discussing the fall of the House of Biden, the rise of Kamala, the near-assassination of Donald Trump, JD Vance’s extremely online issues, and everything else we missed during an absurdly eventful couple weeks in American politics.</bq></div> </ul> <hr> <a href="https://blowback.show/" author="Noah Colwin & Brendan James" source="">Blowback Podcast</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(podcast)" author="" source="Wikipedia">Blowback (podcast)</a> I discovered this historical podcast early last year, when I listened to season 4, which was about Afghanistan. I then listened to season 1 (Iraq), season 2 (Cuba), and season 3 (Korea). All are excellent. this year, I subscribed and was able to listen to season 5 (Cambodia) already. The episodes are slowly coming out on their non-subscriber feed, though, if you don't feel that you can swing $25 for it. Season five, like the others before it, includes ten episodes of bonus content, mostly original interviews with correspondents or contributors from the season, but in extended form. People who know too little about the actual history of U.S. foreign policy sometimes say things like, <box>🤨 How could the U.S. let something so bad like this fill-in-the-blank-horrific-thing happen? 🤷🏼‍♂️</box> and <box>🤨 And they don't even seem to just be letting fill-in-the-blank-horrific-thing happen, but are actively funding and/or perpetrating it? 🫤</box> and <box>🤨 What is happening? Fill-in-the-blank-horrific-thing isn't how the U.S. behaves. 😪</box> and <box>🤨 This fill-in-the-blank-horrific-thing is such a change from how the U.S. usually operates. <i>Things are getting worse.</i> 🥺</box> What they should instead be thinking is, <box>🤬 How can we still be putting up with fill-in-the-blank-horrific-things, since they've been doing them for at least 70 or 80 years?</box> Season five of Blowback is yet another installment that will hopefully not only keep you from saying silly things like those listed above but will also keep you from even thinking them. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pJhUiboAQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/D8pJhUiboAQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Blowback Season 5 TRAILER"> In Cambodia, it went from terrible to worse. The U.S. bombed the living hell out of them for <i>reasons</i> and <i>then</i> Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge kills 1/4 of the population. The U.S. bombing was called a <i>secret war</i>. It was secret from one side but was most definitely not a secret from the Cambodians. Many of the people interviewed in this season point out that a lot of the damage can be traced back not to the Khmer Rouge but to the old bombings. Their infrastructure was already gone before the Khmer Rouge came up with the brilliant idea of dismantling their society back to a purely agrarian one without (A) a plan for doing so or (B) knowledge of how to actually farm. They ended up starving people working 18 hours per day and saw no problem with it. It's truly mind-boggling what happened there. Great-power games between the USSR, China, and the U.S. led to carving up affiliations in the region, leading to communist and USSR-backed Vietnam invading supposedly socialist/communist Kampuchea (Cambodia), where the U.S. and China teamed up to support the Khmer Rouge. There was so much poisonous spillover from Cambodia---including horrific floods of refugees---and Vietnam was so strapped after being (A) sanctioned by the U.S. for being (a) communist and (b) allied with the USSR and (B) having sent whatever it could possibly spare in food supplies to Cambodia and then watching much of the population left to starve anyway. So Vietnam invaded to scourge the Khmer Rouge. Together with China, they lost shocking numbers of troops and then left within 30 days. It was disgusting enough when the U.S. was flattening an agrarian society in the 60s in Vietnam. It got worse when it couldn't accept its military loss and continued to economically strangle Vietnam, struggling to get out from under the burden of having lost <i>millions of acres of arable land</i>. The U.S. immediately sanctioned them, not allowing the export of any raw materials to Vietnam by anyone. Just pure savagery. This type of strangling of recalcitrant vassals is not something that Israel invented. The U.S. blazed that trail long ago. They couldn't have cared less about how many people suffered and starved. Instead, they focused on themselves---also something that Israel didn't invent. The U.S. immediately fabricated the myth of MIAs to make sure that the U.S. population would continue to hold a grudge against Vietnam when it should have been feeling ashamed of what it had done to the country. Instead, the U.S. waited for Vietnam to apologize for having kidnapped completely fictitious soldiers during the U.S. invasion. There are no MIAs. There never were. It doesn't matter how many black flags you see everywhere (upstate NY is <i>plastered</i> with them) nor how vehemently bewhiskered Harley-riding people defend their decals and cause. The whole series was great but I have no quotes from it other than from the <a href="https://blowback.supportingcast.fm/listen/blowback-podcast-premium/s5-bonus-5-marv-truhe-and-perry-pettus">bonus episode 5</a>, <bq><b>Brendan James:</b> You were improperly detained at one point? <b>Airman Perry Pettus:</b> I got my ass beat, if that's what you mean.</bq> 😂 😂 😂 <hr> <a href="https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S241114" author="Doug Henwood" source="Left Business Observer">November 14, 2024: Anatol Lieven / Alex Vitale</a> Vitale said that the Democrats can’t conceive of a world in which they <iq>cannot imagine a politics that isn't rooted in the electoral and legal processes</iq>, but that’s not their problem actually. Their problem is that they can’t conceive of a world in which the laws they pass are used against themselves. Vitaly also talks about how Republican voters are, and that the people on <i>the right</i> believe in a whole bunch of things that are patently untrue because of <i>right-wing media</i>. Yes, their media convince them of things that are untrue or, at best, only partially true, even when those things are wildly inconsistent with other things that they believe or with the evidence of their own eyes. However, I never hear any of these commentators discuss how many things the other side---the liberals---completely believe in, that are also wildly untrue. For example, there was just a huge election---according to them, the most important in history---in which their candidate (Kamala Harris) was supposed to win. Before her, they all believed that Joe Biden was going to win. They also believed fervently that Joe Biden wasn't senile. They believed all of those things, and they were not true at all. According to data released now, long after the election, internal polling showed that Harris was never ahead at any point---ever. They've probably also not read the news in the Wall Street Journal that Biden has been lost to the world for at least four years now. Democrats on the ground continue to believe these fairy tale, cheering each other up with post-mortem stories about how everything else in the world was to blame except anything about themselves. It's not just Republicans who live in a fantasy world. Democrats also completely believed that the economy was doing absolutely fine and that it wasn’t an issue and that there was gonna be no blowback from that. They made it very obvious that they were either unaware that 80-90% of the country doesn't live in the nice part of the economy, with them, or they didn't care. This is another huge untruth about the world that they all believed, and nobody talks about it. They can’t own it. They don’t see it and they’ll never get past it. Why would they? It's in their best interest to believe these fairy tales. It's in everyone's best interests to believe in these fairy tales. They're rewarded for it. Another example comes from <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1784-francis-northwood" author="Francis Northwood" source="This is Hell!">Betting on US Elections</a>, where host Chuck Mertz wonders why the media is falling for the scam of Nate Silvers being in an advisor role for PolyMarket. It's obvious that Silver is taking care of business and honestly couldn't care less about delivering useful predictive information. The media aren't really falling for this scam. They're just lazy and will do the least amount of work possible to secure their jobs and their own personal security. They are not interested in actually doing journalistic work for the most part---that's just where they ended up earning money. They are interested in having a psychic cure in which they put in minimal effort for maximum gain as long as the gain outweighs the potential loss, which it almost always does. Even when PolyMarket turns out to be another scam. none of them will be fired for having talked it up. Nate Silver will also be fine, no matter how wrong he is. <hr> I don't know many revolutionaries. Some talk a bit, but they also largely play by the rules. They buy a house, they invest, etc. People largely have no principles. They don't even think to question a system that has benefitted them so greatly. Instead, they constantly think that they are falling behind, that they have to invest even harder into the system to benefit more from it, in order to ensure their own safety and security. They think to themselves, how could anyone help anyone else when they themselves aren't secure yet? They never wonder whether that's the point of the system. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znScT97B_P0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/znScT97B_P0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith / Briahna Joy Gray" caption="Fatal BEATING of Prisoner Goes Viral (w/ Michael Bloch & Ben White)"> This is an excellent conversation about crime waves that don't exist but also about how the dehumanization of criminals and prisoners leads to outright murder by unrepentant state authorities that goes unpunished. At <b>00:03:12</b>, <bq><b>Briahna:</b> Are you surprised that this sort of behavior happened while cameras were rolling? <b>Michael:</b> So, the short answer to your question is no, given the culture of brutality that exists within prisons. But I think the point you make is really really important. That is, that it happened while cameras were rolling with 13 other corrections officers standing around that were either participating or certainly doing nothing to prevent it. <b>Michael:</b> So, no, I'm not surprised because the incidents of abuse and brutality to prisoners in this country is pervasive. But, I think it's really really important to realize that there is absolutely no [...] shame on the part of any of the officers that took that took part in this. And I think it's important to recognize that the fact that they must have been aware that this at least could have been and probably would have been captured on camera did not stop a single one of them or incentivize a single one of them to try to stop this murder. <b>Michael:</b> And I think what that shows is, number one: the utter dehumanization of incarcerated people in this country. Not a single person that participated in this murder cared about Mr. Brooks enough to stop this and also---we can talk a lot more I think about the the dehumanization of incarcerated people---but also the utter total lack of any accountability there is. <b>Michael:</b> I think what we see on this video is a function of the fact that nobody was disincentivized by morals, nobody was disincentivized by peer pressure, they were all happy to do this in front of 13 of their colleagues. Nobody was worried about discipline from their employer because that doesn't happen within prisons for these sorts of incidents. Nobody was worried about civil-legal consequences, criminal-legal consequences. <b>Michael:</b> All of the incentives that we think motivate people to act properly and not abuse people---none of those were effective in stopping 13 people within the prison from lynching somebody. And I think, as you point out, the fact that this was all done in broad daylight, on camera, shows the combination of the dehumanization of incarcerated people---nobody cares, and nobody was particularly worried that anything bad would happen to them.</bq> At <b>00:07:06</b>, responding to the fact that no-one has been charged with a crime after beating a prisoner to death, <bq><b>Ben:</b> It's not remarkable in the sense that, it's par for the course in terms of criminal accountability for Corrections Officers. It's remarkable relative to anybody else that encounters the criminal legal system. For it to be nearly a month since this happened, and it is on video, and for there to be no criminal charges...I mean most most people who, if you're not law enforcement and you are captured on a viral video committing a murder, it doesn't take nearly 30 days to to bring criminal charges.</bq> At <b>00:53:25</b> <bq>What is the Democratic equivalent? The Democratic equivalent is to flee. It's to say, we're going to run away from these criminal-justice issues. We're not going to highlight all of the benefits of bail reform, we're not going to even talk from a fiscally responsible perspective about the cost-saving measures and how much it costs to lock someone up instead of letting them out on their own recognizance, we're not going to talk about the class issues of saying that your ability to fight your case from outside of jail versus within is contingent on your family's resources and not how dangerous you are, what a flight risk you are---any of those other kinds of factors---but purely how wealthy you are. [...] No one's interested in foregrounding that conversation, even as we're talking about Donald Trump being someone who's a convicted felon and something Democrats like to talk about, but only in the way that further vilifies and stigmatizes people with felony convictions, not in a way that says, well, if Donald Trump is able to be out and free and have all of these privileges as a billionaire and convicted felon, why are there such different standards for poor, incarcerated people? All of these kinds of things could be conversations that Democrats are having and foregrounding and they're not. I can't remember the last time anybody even said the words 'bail reform', frankly.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/11/dead-consciences/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Dead Consciences</a> <bq>Let’s give the last word this week to former Columbia University Law Professor Kathleen Franke…<bq>I have…come to regard Columbia University as having lost its commitment to its unique and important mission. Rather than defend the role of a university in a democracy, in fostering critical debate, research, and learning around matters of vital public concern, and in educating the next generation with the tools to become engaged citizens, Columbia University’s leadership has demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the very enemies of our academic mission. In a time when assaults on higher education are the most acute since the McCarthyite assaults of the 1950s, the University’s leadership and trustees have abandoned any duty to protect the university’s most precious resources: its faculty, students, and academic mission. <b>As Columbia’s Board of Trustees has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists, the university has become more of a real estate holding concern than a non-profit educational institution.</b> With this degradation of the university’s leadership has come, in some cases, an inability to resist pressures placed on the university by outside entities carrying a brief for the destruction of higher education, and in other cases, a shared commitment to a right-wing, and pro-Israel, ideology.</bq></bq> The real estate is less valuable than the spectacularly sized endowments, which make universities more akin to large hedge funds with a minor school attached to them. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-not-the-responsibility-of-the" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">It's Not The Responsibility Of The Global South To Bring Down The Empire. It's Ours.</a> <bq><b>We vastly outnumber our rulers. They rule solely by our consent. The empire requires not only our docility and obedience but our labor and our continued purchasing behavior as well.</b> If enough of us refuse to consent to giving them any of these things, we can force the end of our corrupt, murderous governments and systems, and replace them with something far healthier. <b>Everything in our civilization is geared toward making us forget</b> that we can do this at any time. Everything about our civilization is designed to eclipse the possibility of real revolution from our consciousness. Our politics. Our schooling. Our news media. Our entertainment. Our mainstream culture. It’s all <b>designed to trick us into ignoring the colossal elephant in the room</b> that we don’t actually need to put up with the way things are if we don’t want to. It is our responsibility to help our fellow westerners notice the elephant, using every means at our disposal. <b>Help everyone around us see how fucked things are, how fucked over we’re all being by allowing things to continue in this way, and how we don’t need to allow it to.</b> The empire of lies is built upon a closed set of eyelids. Once those eyes snap open, the whole thing comes tumbling down.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/15/outgoing-cia-director-says-no-sign-iran-developing-nuclear-weapons/" author="The Cradle" source="Scheer Post">Outgoing CIA Director Says ‘No Sign’ Iran Developing Nuclear Weapons</a> <bq>Burns answered that “the Iranian regime could decide in the face of that weakness that it needs to restore its deterrence as it sees it and, you know, reverse the decision made at the end of 2003 (an oral fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) to suspend their weaponization program.” However, Burns clarified, “<b>We do not see any sign today that any such decision has been made, but we obviously watch it intently.</b>“</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/01/biden-cuba-terrorism-list-trump/" author="Reed Lindsay, Daniel Montero" source="Jacobin">Is Joe Biden’s Cuba Move Too Little, Too Late?</a> <bq>In a surprise move, President Joe Biden announced yesterday that his administration will remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List. In addition, Biden suspended Title III, a controversial law that had stifled foreign investment to Cuba, and he eliminated a “restricted list” of Cuban entities that included dozens of hotels. <b>The moves, which would have been momentous for US-Cuba relations if they had come four years earlier, could soon be rendered meaningless.</b></bq> Secretary of State Rubio is going to undo that so hard. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/finally-seeing-movement-toward-a" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Finally Seeing Movement Toward A Gaza Ceasefire As Biden Moves Out Of The Way</a> <bq>Trita Parsi wrote months ago that Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of every Israeli demand is historically the exception rather than the norm under US presidencies. <b>If Trump does in fact wind up presiding over a de-escalation in the genocidal atrocities in Gaza, this will have been officially confirmed. It will be a proven fact that a Biden presidency was the worst thing that could possibly have happened for the Palestinian people.</b> That for 15 months a psychopathic apartheid state was essentially left unsupervised to do what it has always wanted to do to the Palestinians in ways it never could have under any other circumstances, resulting in unfathomable horrors we’ll still be learning details of for years to come. <b>I am still not sold on the idea that Trump will bring even a relative amount of peace to Gaza. I will need to see this reflected by the facts on the ground throughout his term.</b> But if those facts prove what it seems they might prove, it means that <b>Biden was an even bigger monster than anyone realized</b>, and that anyone who supported his election was indisputably wrong to do so.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/thoughts-on-the-ceasefire-deal" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Thoughts On The Ceasefire Deal</a> <bq>The Times of Israel reports that <b>according to two unnamed Arab officials, the middle east envoy for the incoming Trump administration did more to sway Netanyahu in one day than the Biden administration did all year.</b> The Trump camp’s pivotal role in securing the deal has been acknowledged by pretty much everyone at this point, including Biden’s State Department. <b>So it looks like Trump winning ended up being the better result for the people of Gaza, as weird as that sounds. Not because he’s a fantastic peacemaker, but because he did something instead of doing nothing.</b> Which would mean that everyone who said a Trump win will make things worse for Gaza was objectively wrong, and that Biden-Harris were undeniably the greater evil. Cool. Lesson learned.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-deal" author="Jeremy Scahill" source="Drop Site News">The Trump Factor: Gaza Ceasefire Deal Appears Close</a> <bq>“Many of the obstacles have been ironed out,” said <b>Majed al-Ansari, the spokesperson for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry</b>, in a press conference in Doha where the negotiations are taking place. “There are many pending issues, part of which is related to the implementation. We believe we have minimized many of the disagreements between both parties, and current discussions are focused on final details.” <b>“We are the closest than at any time in the past to a deal,” Ansari added. “This war should have been over a long time ago.”</b></bq> <bq>What is different this time, however, is that <b>President-elect Donald Trump has made very clear his demand that a deal be reached before his inauguration</b> on January 20.</bq> <bq>For weeks, Trump’s new Middle East special envoy, real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, has participated directly in the negotiations. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that last weekend, <b>Witkoff forced Netanyahu to meet with him on Shabbat despite objections from the prime minister’s aides. “Witkoff's blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him.</b></bq> <bq>Throughout this first phase of the potential ceasefire, Israeli military forces would gradually withdraw from various positions in Gaza and forcibly displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to their neighborhoods and, if still standing, their homes. <b>“From the first day, significant amounts of humanitarian aid, relief supplies, and fuel will enter Gaza (600 trucks daily, including fuel trucks). This includes fuel for electricity generation, trade, rubble removal, and operating hospitals, clinics, and bakeries,” the draft states.</b></bq> What bakeries? What hospitals? What clinics? Where are they going to use that fuel? <bq>After 42 days, a second phase would begin, with the release of Israeli soldiers held in Gaza in exchange for more Palestinian captives, including hundreds of political prisoners—some of whom are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons. It is during this period that, the draft agreement states, <b>“A permanent ceasefire will take effect before further prisoner exchanges” and “Israeli forces will fully withdraw from Gaza.”</b></bq> Cautiously optimistic. A lot can happen. Israel doesn't honor cease-fires but we'll see if the Trump administration lays down the law as administrations prior to the Biden administration have. If it does...the Democrats will have disgraced themselves even more than they could ever have imagined. <bq>The current draft of the agreement calls for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and does not demand the dismantling of Hamas or its exclusion from Palestinian politics. Nor does it permit the open-ended presence of Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. Netanyahu had proclaimed he was fighting an “existential war” that would not cease until “total victory” was achieved. On paper, this deal represents a major rebuke of some of Netanyahu’s stated goals.</bq> Yeah, we'll see if he signs it and sticks to it. Netanyahu---the Israeli government---lies. Agreements aren't worth the paper they're written on. Granted, one could argue that they learned it from their sponsor, the U.S. Still, we'll see if the Trump administration threatens to turn off the weapons firehose. <bq>“Trump is very ardent and very Zionist and very supportive of the Israeli enterprise, the Israeli project. But <b>I think he wants to help them in different ways rather than achieve what they call total victory over something that he could see it's not attainable in the near future,” said Al-Arian.</b> “Netanyahu could go back to his old tricks and again he could make up some excuses to resume his war so that he can stay more in power and basically shuffle the deck again, hoping that Trump would be exhausted and let him do what he wants.” <b>Al-Arian also believes that if the Gaza war remains stalled, Netanyahu will intensify his focus on the West Bank.</b> Since the October 7, 2023 attacks, Israel has waged a smaller scale war in the West Bank, engaging in limited ground invasions and mass arrests. “<b>There will possibly be an end to the Gaza war, but there will be now another war in the West Bank</b>,” Al-Arian said. “It may not be on the same scale, but it would be as vicious from the settlers, from the Netanyahu government.”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FU4GpGA1bk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5FU4GpGA1bk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom" caption="Pepe Escobar : I’m gonna MAGA you, baby!"> An interesting discussion about how Turmp's talk of annexing Canada, Greenland, and Panama for security are an unspoken confirmation of Russia's reasoning behind wanting to establish a neutral Ukraine, and finally invading when it became obvious that that wasn't going to happen. It's just another case where, when Russia does it, the trained lap-dog of international media barks and growls and bites, whereas when the U.S. does it, it is considered to be a reasonable thing to do. Escobar also points out how the proposed annexations are because of the resources in those countries, that would essentially make the U.S. an equivalent to Russia in terms of land-based resources (ores, tar sands, gas fields, etc.). Not only that, but Greenland borders on the Northern Sea Route, which, as Escobar points out, the Chinese call the "Northern Silk Road." It is well-known that, with accelerating climate-change, the sea ice in the north is no longer the insurmountable barrier that it was, leaving a potentially very lucrative and much shorter shipping lane open for the taking. It largely falls under the aegis of Russia now, which either borders or outright includes it by historical right and international law. Russia has the only nuclear ice-breakers to make this corridor viable, and the Chinese are eager to use it, as it would be faster and cheaper than the Suez Canal. And it's not only the sea route, of course. The land in Canada that borders the Arctic also contains a lot of resources that climate change is making increasingly more available, and thus, economically exploitable. It's a virtuous circle as, the more of these resources that are plundered and burned, the more climate change accelerates, the more new resources become available. The dovetails nicely with humanity's express goal of generating profit for a handful of people while everyone else pays what they can in obeisance to these exacted elites while suffering horribly and then expiring quietly. At the end, they discuss the upcoming ceasefire in Gaza, with its attendant shakiness, the complicity of the Arab world, the moral bankruptcy of the Biden administration for not having done it sooner, and how both Trump and Biden are claiming credit---although Biden has no legitimacy here---but who, as Napolitano points out, <iq>will take the blame when Bibi inevitably goes back on his word and breaks the ceasefire</iq>? And what will the U.S. be willing to do to Israel to force it to keep to its word? Almost certainly nothing. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/17/cease-fires-walk-with-me/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Cease Fires Walk With Me</a> <bq>Former Sanders foreign policy advisor, Matt Duss: “In 2021, I never imagined I would write this, but by the end of his presidency, <b>Biden will have done more damage to the ‘rules–based order’ than Trump did.”</b> I‘d argue that Biden‘s most important (though unintentional) contribution to US political history was to <b>reveal that there never was a “rules–based order.”</b></bq> <bq>Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in LA (so far): <b>20,000</b> <b>Population of LA County: 10 million</b> Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in Gaza (so far): <b>80,000</b> <b>Population of Gaza: 2.1 million</b></bq> <bq>More than 1000 incarcerated people are out fighting LA’s fires, but <b>their families aren’t allowed to contact them to see if they’re safe.</b></bq> <bq><b>Potential insurance exposure to the Los Angeles fires is $458 billion. The state’s FAIR insurance program only has $700 million cash</b> on hand to pay claims. From Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism: “Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. <b>Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>Staging the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles–for all its promise to bring LA international attention–was always going to be hard. But the fires are what one city leader called the “nightmare scenario”</b> for a beleaguered city.” Few cities have ever needed “international attention” less than LA. LA needs affordable housing, public transport, a buffering of the urban-wildland interface and a de-militarized police force</bq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1879926469633487204" author="Max Blumenthal" source="X / Twitter">You smirked your way through a genocide</a> This is a link to a one-minute video of Max addressing Antony Blinken at his last press conference as Secretary of State, <bq>300 reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing, when we had a deal in May? We all knew we had a deal. Everyone in this room knows we had a deal, Tony, and you kept the bombs flowing. Why did you sacrifice the rules-based order on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism? Why did you allow my friends to be massacred? Why did you allow my friend's homes in Gaza to be destroyed when we had a deal in May? You helped destroyed our religion---Judaism---by associating it with fascism. You waved the white flag before Netanyahu. You waved the white flag before Israeli fascism. Your father-in-law was an Israel lobbyist; your grandfather was an Israel lobbyist; are you compromised by Israel? Why did you allow the holocaust of our time to happen? How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide? [addressing Matt Miller] You too, Matt. <b>You smirked through the whole thing. Every day. You smirked through a genocide.</b></bq> The U.S. mainstream media reported on Max's speech but in a wholly negative manner because they found him to be rude. The article <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/none-of-these-war-criminals-will" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">None Of These War Criminals Will Face Justice While The US Empire Exists</a> writes, <bq>This is western liberalism in a nutshell. <b>The problem isn’t the genocide, the problem is people being insufficiently polite about the genocide.</b> Western officials feeling inconvenienced and insulted is a greater concern than children being shredded and burned by US military explosives.</bq> <bq>This is after all the “rules-based international order,” is it not? Surely when you’ve got mainstream human rights organizations asserting that genocidal atrocities are being committed with the facilitation of the government which purports to uphold that order, <b>some legal repercussions should be seen as at least within the realm of possibility, should they not?</b> And yet we all know this won’t be happening any time in the foreseeable future. <b>We all know that as long as the US empire exists in the way that it exists, Tony Blinken and Matt Miller will enjoy prosperous free lives</b> after their time with the Biden administration draws to a close.</bq> <bq>This world can have justice when it finds a way to end the US empire. Until then <b>the world will be ruled by tyrants who do exactly as they please, and anyone who questions them will be removed from the room by any force necessary.</b></bq> To be clear: this applies to <i>any</i> Empire top-down, even partially autocratic ruling structure. Russian and Chinese members of the media do no better in their respective milieus. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/01/black-book-communism-courtois-history/" source="Jacobin" author="Stefan Gužvica">The Black Book of Communism Is a Shoddy Work of History</a> <bq>These claims ultimately rest upon a highly influential collection of essays titled The Black Book of Communism that was put together under the direction of French academic Stéphane Courtois. Originally published in French, the Black Book has been translated into multiple languages. Yet <b>far from representing the established consensus among historians, the claims that Courtois made in the book’s introduction were not even accepted by all of his own contributors</b>, some of whom were harshly critical of their editor after seeing the final product.</bq> <bq>Some of the coauthors of the book were enraged by the preface Courtois had composed. <b>Werth, who independently wrote nearly a third of the book, and Margolin, the author of over 160 pages on communism in East Asia, tried to retract their contributions altogether.</b> They gave up only because their lawyers told them it was impossible. However, they immediately distanced themselves in public from both Courtois and the book.</bq> <bq><b>The book’s treatment of communism in Latin America is so one-sided that it might as well be plucked from a US State Department report.</b> We are given the total count of war victims in Sandinista Nicaragua, but we are not told that most of those deaths were caused by the US-funded contras, referred to here as the “anti-Sandinista resistance.”</bq> <bq>Although in scholarly circles you will rarely find the Black Book cited in the footnotes, <b>the specter of that book has been haunting politicians identified with the Left for the past twenty-five years.</b> Therein lies the nature of the book’s victory and the key to its enduring popularity.</bq> I see some of the fools at Reason magazine celebrating Black Ribbon Day and conveniently forgetting that it's for victims of Stalinism <i>and</i> Nazism. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/11/dead-consciences/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Dead Consciences</a> <bq>Most of what we know about what’s happening in Gaza–and much of what Western journalists have re-reported–comes from Palestinian reporters, photographers, and videographers. <b>Israel has blocked Gaza to outside reporters, and very, very few have challenged this information embargo, and even fewer have tried to covertly enter Gaza the way reporters have done in other war zones.</b> There aren’t many Martha Gellhorns in today’s hyper-educated pack of laptop journalists, who seem more than content to <b>cover the war either through the press releases of the IDF or crib from the dispatches of Palestinian reporters who are being stalked by quadcopters and AI-programmed drones.</b> <b>The Western media can’t stomach the reality of what is taking place in Gaza</b>: the daily dismemberments of children, the enforced starvation, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the mass misery, the disappearances of doctors, the ethnic cleansing, in a word, the genocide. How do you justify to yourself that you didn’t report on a genocide happening in real-time on your beat? You must have to deny to yourself the reality of the images you’ve seen, the stories you’ve read. So you demean the messenger. <b>You degrade the journalist who’s done at great risk to themselves what you didn’t have the guts to do from behind a terminal. So you diminish them in life and ignore them in death.</b></bq> <bq>No war has ever seen such a targeted slaughter of journalists. More than 210 journalists have been killed in Gaza in a little more than a year–<b>roughly 10 times the number of journalists who died in Vietnam of all causes in more than a decade.</b> These killings aren’t accidental.</bq> <bq author="Abubaker Abed">There are no words to describe what we’ve been going through. Because you’ve seen our bodies: how they have become fragile, skinny and fatigued. But we never stopped. <b>We never stopped trying to tell you the truth, to narrate our stories and to tell you that we are being genocided, to move your dead consciences</b>, to help a population that has seen every sort of torture and tasted every type of death. How many journalists must be killed, before you act and stop Israel’s impunity against us? [...] Even the “press” vests we’re wearing now mark us as a target. They do not protect us at all, because we are Palestinians. <b>Maybe if we were Ukrainians or any other citizenship, with blonde hair and blue eyes the world would rage and rant for us.</b> But because we are Palestinians, we have only one right, which is to die and be maimed.</bq> Nah, buddy. This isn't exactly a racist thing. Look at how the West easily supports Syria's new Al-Qaeda leader! You're just on the wrong end of the empire's political strategy. It's nothing personal. Well, not for all of them. For some of them, it's personal. But even for them, it's only personal because they've had to brainwash themselves into being rabidly anti-<i>you</i> for <i>good and moral and righteous reasons</i> so that they don't even have to excuse themselves for killing you all and taking all of your stuff because it's what a just God would want. You see? They had to put in a lot of work in order to transform themselves into the base, unprincipled and ethically unmoored beings that now kill you with impunity. It wasn't easy for them either, bro. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkYNtJub3Fs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tkYNtJub3Fs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="Extended episode – Dave Smith: A Jewish Libertarian Comedian Walks Into a Lefty Podcast"> At <b>01:09:41</b>, <bq>I don't like this kind of woke game of, you have to publicly denounce people. Why can't it just be that I tell you how I feel? I tell you what I think about the situation and then I'm allowed to have conversations with whoever I want to. And why on Earth would I ever accept the framing that somehow Jake Shields is off limits to have a conversation with but somebody who supporting Israel's assault on genocide isn't? That I could go and have a conversation with somebody who's supporting this [genocide]? That, to me, seems all, I'm sorry but if you're not doing anything to them, not liking a group of people is not the most heinous crime in the world. But slaughtering them by the tens or hundreds of thousands? That really is. And so I will have my own hierarchy of outrages that don't need to be informed by what I would say. And you know I've said this for years: I'll just wrap on this because I'm rambling a bit, but the dynamic under the kind of establishment, under their the US-dominant culture over let's say at least the last 25 years---probably much more than that---but if Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Barack Obama were to, let's say, one day, they were to drone bomb a wedding in Yemen, which is something they tend to do. And they kill children and 14 adults were killed and a couple hundred others were wounded. And then, that same day, they gave a press conference and they said I don't believe you can change your gender; if you're born a boy, then you're a boy. What would be the big outrage of the day? Of course, we all know that the major outrage of the day would be that they said this thing about trans people and that, down like 12th on the list would be that they just murdered all these children. And, to me, that's insane. I don't agree with that and so I'm not going to live my life as if those are the outrages. I've talked to lots of people who have views that I don't agree with, and I wish they didn't, but I get to choose what I want to condemn and what I want to focus on. And I will argue with anyone that I think what I'm focused on matters more than that. And, finally---I promise I won't say anything else after this, but the other thing is that just---I also do think as much as I don't like the anti-Jew stuff, I think it's kind of a predictable outcome. And for all these people going, 'over the last year, we've seen this ramp-up in anti-Semitism,' like, yeah, I think that's true, and also, I think it's for a reason. And you can't count on everybody to be an individualist scholar. If you lived in a neighborhood and, all of a sudden, there was a real rise in black people coming into the neighborhood and beating people up and mugging them, okay? You're in a white neighborhood, and the black people from the neighborhood next door are coming in and beating people up and they do that for a full year. At the end of the year, do you think there's going to be more anti-black racism or less anti-black racism? My guess is more. Now, that's not fair. That doesn't mean it's the correct response. And it's certainly wrong if you're blaming some black dude who had nothing to do with mugging and beating people up. But, at the same time, if I was a black leader in that community, I don't know that my first thought would be, 'everybody must condemn this rise in racism.' I think my first thought would be, 'hey, guys, we gotta stop beating up and mugging people or they're all going to hate us.'</bq> At <b>01:16:00</b>, <bq>There's the weird dynamic of: you're brought on a show, and you're asked to condemn that [protests]. You're like, well, okay, I don't really want to start with condemning the protest against this stuff, but I would just say---look, I don't think you're wrong to be concerned with any of this---I've been talking about this since last October---or two Octobers ago, I should say---for the whole stated worldview that so many of these Zionists claim that, we're in this very precarious position and they tried to exterminate us in the early 40s and they will do it again. And, look: Israel is this little dot and it's surrounded by this sea of Muslims who hate their guts, and anti-Semitism is this shape-shifting virus that's always right under the surface and it could rise again and there could be another Holocaust. And it's like, okay, but if that's the case, what are you guys doing?!? I mean, then doesn't this make Netanyahu's genocide seem so dangerous here? I mean, you're going to be trying to ruin, not only doing this to the people in Gaza, but then also demanding that the US pay for it and fund and give logistical support to the whole thing and then you're going to be lecturing the Americans who are against that, while you're trying to blackmail our politicians, while you're trying to ruin the lives of American citizens who speak up against this stuff? Like, what if that is the case that this is a real danger? Which okay I'll concede it, it could be. Then what on Earth are you thinking?!? Then it just makes this policy that much more reckless and just pure madness.</bq> At <b>01:20:52</b>, <bq>Dude, you're allowed to have whatever opinion you want to have and it sure is an outrage what they're doing to you and and I think you're better off with that tactic but, again, I don't really care. What I care about is: who has the power and who's being abused? I care about wars and government corruption and militarized police and incarceration rates and the War on Drugs and and government policies---inflation and things that are destroying people's lives---that's what I focus on all the time. And so if you're telling me, 'well, you shouldn't focus on that and you should really focus on people are saying mean stuff on Twitter,' it's just not very compelling to me.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QqmubSeR10" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-QqmubSeR10" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="LA Wildfires Livestream W/ Adam McKay David Sirota, Natali Segovia, Yasha Levine, Steven Donziger"> At <b>02:17:55</b>, David Sirota says, <bq>I grant you that there are always going to be obstacles. But the Democratic party treats power as something to conserve and hoard. They treat holding office as a trophy rather than a job. And the job of the democratic party is not to tell us that Donald Trump prevents them from doing what they allegedly want to do. The job of the Democratic Party is to figure out how to do the job of passing good policies regardless of what the obstacles may be. This idea that we as voters, as citizens, have to be specialists in how the hell Chuck Schumer negotiates with the parliamentarian is a bunch of nonsense. The job of Chuck Schumer, the job of Joe Biden, the job of the democratic leaders in Congress: they have one job. Their job is to be the experts in getting done the promises that they made. That's their job. Our job is to demand they make those promises and hold those promises and keep those promises. So, you hear the Democrats, 'oh what are we going to do about the parliamentarian?' and you hear their sycophants say, 'oh you know Obama couldn't have done anything because of this Senator or that,' ... that's nonsense. That's Stockholm syndrome. The correct---in my view---attitude is we elected these people. They've been given great power. With great power comes great responsibility. The one responsibility they have is to fulfill the promises they made to the voters and figure out---with their giant amount of staff and resources---figure out how to deal with the obstacles they face. That's their job. [...] Democrats always pretend to be incompetent, but it's really---or powerless---but it's actually like an unwillingness [...] and the reason they pretend to be powerless is because they rely on the fact---or they rely on the assumption---that their core supporters will believe them. I mean [...] I just think about it in my life: if somebody makes a promise to me and knowing what the obstacles are going to be and then I come back to them and say hey what's up with that promise? What's up with that deal that we made, right? It's a deal. I give you my vote; you make promises. I give you my vote, then they come back hey what's up with that deal? Oh I couldn't get that done because the obstacle I knew was going to be in front of me, ended up being an obstacle. Me, on the other end of the deal is, well, you betrayed me; you sold me out; you lied to me. Because you knew what that obstacle was going to be and, if you don't have the skill or the will---and that's the key part: it's not skill; it's will---if you don't have the will to figure it out, then get the hell out of here. Like, you're the problem; you're the obstacle.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/01/15/the-corruption-of-jack-smiths-report/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Corruption Of Jack Smith’s Report</a> <bq>During Trump’s first term, a phenomenon arose called “Trumplaw,” a perversion of a host of legal principles that were long held to be of critical importance to a functioning constitutional legal system. Suddenly, <b>basic legal principles from free speech to presumption of innocence went out the window because “getting Trump” mattered far more than integrity.</b> The very same arguments that would have been deemed laughable had they been posited against anyone else were now argued to be beyond question if they served to condemn Trump. <b>The problem, at least for anyone who believed that the legal principles applied to those we despise as well as those we adore, was that the public was being taught that foundational doctrines and rights were now wrong and bad and should be rejected.</b> Mind you, most of the public had, and has, little interest in law except to the extent they become suddenly obsessed, such as the Trump “resistance.” They may know a few of the generic mantras, although they have no clue how or why they exist and, too often, get them wrong, such as those First Amendment geniuses who argue you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.</bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> Labor is in shambles. The capitalist fortress seems unassailable. And yet. There are cracks in the façade. For example, the post <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1h850ur/black_ops_6_loading_screen_look_at_the_hand/" author="" source="Reddit">Black Ops 6 loading screen (Look at the hand).</a> shows the image of the loading screen. <img src="{att_link}six-fingered_zombie_claus_drawn_by_an_ai_scab.jpg" href="{att_link}six-fingered_zombie_claus_drawn_by_an_ai_scab.jpg" align="none" caption="Six-fingered Zombie Claus drawn by an AI scab" scale="60%"> The figure has six fingers. Instead of supposing that this zombie might just have six fingers, the group of redditors quickly assume that Activision, the giant video-game company that produces the game, farmed out work to AI to save money. These comments followed, <bq>Imagine selling as many copies of call of duty and they can’t even pay $500 to an artist to paint a loading screen</bq> <bq style="margin-inline-start: 1em">You don't become filthy rich by having a conscience.</bq> <bq style="margin-inline-start: 2em">This feels like a quote that 100% describes our current timeline.</bq> <bq style="margin-inline-start: 3em">If by current timeline you mean "throughout all of witnessed and observed history including the times in which it was not described that way, because <b>the only histories that survive their respective centuries are ones approved by the usurping power structure that comes after</b>", then yes.</bq> Now <i>this</i> is the kind of "woke" I can get behind. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <box>Just as Trump is a very good, if not perfect, embodiment of the shittiness, venality, and greed of U.S. empire, Bitcoin is a very good, if not perfect, embodiment of the shittness, venality, and greed of the neoliberal economy.</box> <hr> You'll often hear people discussing things that are "not that expensive," relative to other things, or that have gotten "10x cheaper," or whatever. A lot of times, it's from people who should actually know better, because they spend at least some of their time talking about how heavily subsidized certain parts of the economy are, which throws true price-finding right out the window. That is, you may have heard that startups in El Segundo are thinking about sending raw materials into orbit in order to manufacture them there, and then shipping the finished goods back down, and that this is all "cheaper than you would think." It's just ludicrous to take that at face value. You need evidence that something obviously so much more expensive could <i>possibly</i> be economical. But people have the <i>opposite</i> instinct, in which, while they believe that truckers getting paid $0.50 per hour would completely destroy the economy, <i>manufacturing in space</i> is obviously cheaper. How could that possibly be? It's obviously a scam to convert venture capital into personal Lamborghinis and infinity pools that will be confiscated when everything blows up months later. While probably <i>no-one</i> could make this make economic sense---or even make it technically feasible---the people running <i>these particular companies</i> have <i>no chance</i> of making it work, nor are they particularly interested in doing so. Their actual business is farming VC capital, whose actual business, in turn, is farming government contracts. This is just a money funnel that everyone pretends to believe in because it personally benefits them. Stop pretending that these prices are real. In an economy that places a tremendous amount of value on things that don't do anything for anyone, and which ignores things of actual value because they can't figure out how to farm high-margin rent off of it, there is no reason to then believe the numbers that they use to describe themselves. The whole thing is a lie, based on a lie, and built to benefit liars. That society manages to keep limping along is a side-effect about which they couldn't care less, other than the fig leaf of usefulness it offers, which lets them keep the con running even longer. <hr> Occasionally, I feel like I'm disagreeing with people because they're trying to win a different battle. For example, they're trying to figure out how to profit from crypto, while I'm shooting for a world where it doesn't exist. They're trying to help one side defeat another in a war, while I'm trying to rid the world of war. They're trying to win what, in the end, is a battle to confirm their world-view: some awful things are important and must be done. The unacknowledged part is that they view these awful things as necessary because their lifestyle depends up on doing so. Sure, crypto is a pyramid scheme, but if we get rich off of it, we can do something important with that money. Sure, AI is probably also a scam, but if we figure out how to leverage it, we can make the world a better place. Sure, war is bad, but we've got to keep those enemies at bay. Everything has been a scam, including each get-rich-quick scheme and every war. Everything serves someone's empire. These people, with their more limited scope, are constantly hedging their bets, setting their sights on lower goals. In doing so, they're ensuring that, should they fail in their lofty political goal, then they'll at least end up personally well-off enough to continue fighting the good fight. They fail to notice that their "good fight" doesn't end up achieving anything for anyone other than the ones who always win anyway. Well, and the people with these <i>flexible</i> political goals also usually end up doing just fine, strangely enough. In a lot of cases, it's probably not even sociopathy or mendacity; they're really and truly managed to fool themselves into believing that they're working in everyone's best interests, when, because they're unwilling to risk their own personal success, they've only ever really been working in their own. <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing</a> <bq>Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, <b>price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data.</b> You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it <i>for</i>; and who it does it <i>to</i>."</bq> <bq>This is Wilhoit's Law in action:<bq>Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: <b>There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.</b></bq></bq> <bq>Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. <b>They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation.</b></bq> <bq>Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. <b>The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing.</b> Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-multitasking-drains-your-brain/" source="MIT Press" author="James Rilling">How Multitasking Drains Your Brain</a> <bq>Despite marketing claims, your computer does not multitask, and neither does your brain. The latter simply cannot, whereas a computer’s processor divvies up each clock cycle and apportions a slice of time — <b>200 milliseconds</b>, say — to each task. Round and round it goes until everything is done. <b>The inherent inefficiency of having to split up processor time is why your computer bogs down the more you ask it to do.</b></bq> Instead of highlighting the bits I've found interesting, as I usually do, I've highlighted the bits that are questionable if not flat-out incorrect. The computer does not "bog down" because it's multi-tasking. It bogs down because it's forced to access data from slower storage media like HDDs or SSDs. Multi-tasking does lead to cache eviction---and switching stacks and clearing caches certainly takes time---but it's not really noticeable for most users. Also, a timeslice on a processor isn't 200ms. It's much, much shorter. Nice try, though. As always, I'm stunned to see the poor level of writing and lackluster attention to detail in the MIT press. <bq>We lack the energy to do two things at once effectively, let alone three or five. Try it, and <b>you will do each task less well than if you had given each one your full attention and executed them sequentially.</b></bq> I think that depends on the type of tasks you're doing. Some thing I would never finish at all if I had to focus only on that one task. I'm multi-tasking right now on two low-level tasks. I'm collecting my links while an interview is running the background. I'm only half-paying attention to it but I would never finish watching the interview if I had to just watch it with full concentration. Some things aren't worth it. <bq>As a person loses consciousness, their brain activity gradually shuts down until it reaches <b>the “isoelectric condition,” the point at which half the calories burned simply go toward housekeeping — the pumping of sodium and potassium ions across cell membranes to maintain the resting electrical charge that keeps the brain’s physical structure intact.</b> This never-ending pumping means that the brain must be an energy hog.</bq> <bq>What evolution did discover by way of natural selection was the optimum proportion of cells a brain can keep active at any given instant. That number depends on the ratio between a resting neuron’s housekeeping cost and the additional cost of sending a signal down its axon. <b>For maximum efficiency, it turns out that between 1 and 16 percent of cells should be active at any given moment . We do use 100 percent of our brain, just not all of it at the same instant.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-reality-check-on-our-energy-transition/" source="Z Network" author="Andrew Nikiforuk">A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’</a> <bq>Despite all the talk of “decarbonization,” global coal production reached a record high in 2023. The dirtiest of fuels accounts for 26 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption. And <b>despite all the promises of a green revolution, oil, gas and coal still account for 82 per cent of the global energy mix.</b></bq> <bq>A green energy transition on the scale promised by global power brokers simply won’t happen, Fressoz says in his new book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy . In fact, <b>he refuses to endorse the term green energy transition, calling the phrase a delusion and “a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use.”</b></bq> <bq>Transition is just “the wrong way to frame it,” says Fressoz. He has a different phrase to describe our dynamic energy state. He calls it “symbiotic expansion.” It’s the basic idea that <b>technological society exploits different forms of energy to accelerate flows of material goods. In the process, society adds more energy sources than it ever subtracts.</b></bq> <bq>As the demand for coal increased, nations built more coal mines. And all of these new mines needed timbers to support the roofs and walls from caving in. Here’s a stunning fact: <b>Fressoz calculates that coal mines actually used more timber for roof support in the 19th century than England burned in the 18th century.</b></bq> <bq>[...] petroleum didn’t suppress the whale trade at all. It found new uses for whales (from corsets to lubricants) and actually <b>accelerated the slaughter of whales thanks to fossil-fuel-powered ships that could catch more and larger whales more rapidly.</b> As Fressoz notes, three times more whales were slaughtered in the 20th century than in the 19th century.</bq> <bq>The U.S. sociologist Richard York stated in a 2018 paper that the term “energy transition” is entirely misleading and counterproductive because <b>history shows only a constant addition of energy sources over time.</b> “It is entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.”</bq> <bq>[...] industry cannot maintain current oil extraction rates for more than a decade due to depletion rates, and <b>the increasing energy costs of producing poorer and poorer quality resources such as bitumen and fracked oil.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/inaugurious" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Inaugurious</a> <bq>Neither of these men ever wrote “inaugurious”, as I briefly hoped they might have — but if they had, with the intention of making it mean “not auguring well”, it would have been another beautiful case, of the sort we see most plainly in a word like “impregnable”, of the superposition of two opposite meanings in that humble prefix in -: where <b>to “inaugurate” something is generally understood as bringing that thing into good augury</b>, but can also play the part of what in Greek-rooted words is performed by <b>the so-called alpha-privative — marking something out as lacking in good augury</b>, as wanting of all hope, as, for example, <b>a “most inaugurious inauguration”</b>, such as the one scheduled for January 20.</bq> <bq>The Reagans were “American”, as Joan Didion well established in her inventory of the country-western-themed tchotchkes and the Louis L’Amour paperbacks decorating the bookcases of the new Reagan governor’s mansion, completed in 1967 in Carmichael, a few miles downriver from the old Victorian one in downtown Sacramento. But <b>there was a thread of the “alternative” in their way of being American, one that could only come from California.</b> When Josiah Royce wrote in 1878 that there is no philosophy in this state, he was, already, paving the way for philosophy’s bastard twin metaphysics — not in the sense of a reflection on the possibility of a priori synthetic knowledge and 𝔴𝔦𝔢 𝔢𝔰 ü𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔥𝔞𝔲𝔭𝔱 𝔪ö𝔤𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔦𝔰𝔱, but <b>in the sense of unhinged and freewheeling discovery of “higher” modes of consciousness and “deeper” explanations of the causal order of the world.</b> Having banished the high-church rigorous stuff, as unsuited to our climate and our vibe, <b>the kooky stuff was inadvertently given carte blanche.</b></bq> <bq>The weirdness was built into the conquest itself — <b>we managed to slaughter our way across a continent</b>, and to secure a nice bicoastal perch from which to rule the world, but <b>we were never quite right in the head after that.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>this has not been enough to change fact that there is nothing Californian about Trump. He is not a diviner but a gambler</b>; his preferred methods for “fixing the future” are captured far more successfully by <b>the synechdoche of the roulette wheel than of the lay of sticks or tea leaves or ocelot viscera</b> or any other such random outcome that might seem to afford some limited glimpse of what is to come.</bq> <bq>Then again, historians of science know very well that these two activities, divining and gambling, are only two faces of the same coin. Both involve rule-bound cultural uptake of the results of aleatoric processes. <b>If you really want to understand the emergence of probability theory, you have to know something about the history of trick-taking card games.</b></bq> <bq>Then again, historians of science know very well that these two activities, <b>divining and gambling, are only two faces of the same coin. Both involve rule-bound cultural uptake of the results of aleatoric processes.</b> If you really want to understand the emergence of probability theory, you have to know something about the history of trick-taking card games. <b>Some such games, notably tarot, have both a ludic and a divinatory variant.</b> Gambling, you might say, is what is left over when all the “metaphysics” is removed from the way we process our aleatoric drive through culture, leaving nothing but future-shaping outcomes, without allowing any of the phantoms of our alternative accounts of reality to linger.</bq> <bq>[...] even if nativist isolationism is hardly my thing, when it comes down to a choice between reckless foreign wars on the one hand, and on the other the paleo-conservative Buchananite call to let other countries resolve their own conflicts as they wish or can, then old Pat no longer seems so unacceptably crusty to me. And <b>this is something liberal Americans will never be able to see: from the point of view of the rest of the world, it really does not matter where an American president positions himself in the domestic culture wars.</b></bq> <bq>Liberal administrations have consistently been as hawkish as conservative ones, though unlike the conservatives we might fear that the <b>liberal hawks are even more dangerous, to the extent that they simply cannot see themselves as anything other than the good guys</b>, cannot do otherwise than to <b>believe their own euphemisms.</b></bq> <bq>Call me out of touch, but I sincerely think I’d rather see wars prosecuted by people who know what grave transgressions they are committing or facilitating, than managed by <b>people who seem to have convinced themselves that the US military is something like an NGO</b> with no other purpose than to improve the lives of the colorful tribespeople they encounter.</bq> <bq>It is indeed a strange twist of history that has left Greenland, nominally at least, in the sphere of influence of that well-defined ethnic nation-state of Denmark, never among the top-tier imperial powers even if its holdings did once spread to “both the Indies”. To this extent I personally don’t think it’s all that unreasonable to revisit the viability of devolved parliamentary monarchy on that great land mass with some guy named King Frederik X as sovereign. But <b>the only fitting change from here would be full sovereignty for the Greenlandic Inuit, perhaps in confederation with the Inuit of Nunavut and elsewhere.</b></bq> <bq>It would indeed be “cosmopolitan” to go and take Greenland, in the old-school way that <b>Immanuel Kant</b> envisioned cosmopolitanism, often with explicit reference to Greenland, alongside Lapland, Yakutia, etc.: <b>enfolding more of the uncivilized world into civilization, thereby bringing the gift of reason and duty to people who prior to being colonized had been living for nothing, like sheep.</b></bq> <bq>Catholicism just isn’t like that — for one thing, it’s 2000 years old, and far predates the Westphalian order that in the past few centuries <b>has got people into the gauche and pedestrian habit of listing their citizenship at the very top of the descriptors</b> that might help to make sense, for themselves and others, of who they are.</bq> Yeesh, no kidding. Are you Swiss or American? What do you do? No, I mean for a living. <i>I am a renaissance man.</i> Pay attention for two seconds, please. And stop pigeonholing. <bq>I am not the sort of writer who always finds it needful to resolve mysteries; <b>for some mysteries, in fact, I much prefer just to sit with them, and to adorn them with possible explanations</b> that come very close in their spirit to those superadditions upon reality that we call tall tales.</bq> No kidding, buddy. I've been reading you for a long, long time. The first reference I can find to Justin's writing is in <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=2614">On the topic of sites which barely appeal to me</a> (it discusses not Justin's site, but his article about having quit Facebook). <hr> <a href="http://patricklawrence.us/cia-tricked-worlds-best-writers/" source="" author="Patrick Lawrence">How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers</a> <bq>“The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened <i>The Go–Between</i>. There is a pretty tristesse in the line, as Hartley intended, and it holds if the topic is lost love, the joys and errors of youth, all the roads not traveled. But anyone who thinks the thought applies to our institutions, ideologies, and policies, as we are incessantly encouraged to assume, needs to think again. <b>In the political context we must revert to the other noted <i>mot</i> (Faulkner’s) on the topic: The past is not even past.</b></bq> <bq>Whitney’s stylish narrative explores <b>the CIA’s covert Cold War program, through which it created dozens of magazines and corrupted many others already publishing.</b> The star of the show is The Paris Review, and some of the names Whitney names caused my jaw to hit the edge of my desk.</bq> <bq>These guys would see <b>the soldiers from the Allied section of Berlin going over to the Soviet quarter, and they were going over for culture—a movie would be screening, or a symphony orchestra.</b> And some of these guys quickly understood that the United States wasn’t known for its high culture; it was known mostly for its Hollywood movies and maybe Cadillacs and tanks and hamburgers.</bq> <bq>By creating a political test for writers, which is essentially what was happening, by letting them winkingly know and tell each other that they were being paid when they were more pro-American and anti-Communist, by letting the regime of secrecy rule over even a small corner of the Fourth Estate, it grows. It will grow. <b>Secrecy and the transparency that’s required of journalists are not compatible. It’s just that simple.</b></bq> <bq>[Patrick speaking] “Be hard on institutions and soft on people.” I tend to take a hard position on institutions and also a hard position on people. Look, <b>the CCF tried to co-opt Sartre at the time of the Hungarian crisis in ’56. They would have done better to read Sartre. If they had, they would have understood: We are all individually responsible for the things we do.</b> I feel strongly about this, as you will notice, because of what’s going on out the window. Former colleagues, people I knew, people I knew of, are writing the most repellent stuff these days. I understand that they have bills to pay and summer houses and condos with mortgages and school fees—middle-class overheads. This is not an excuse for their conduct. If these sorts of material considerations drive you, there are other professions. <b>Journalism brings in a paycheck, but a lot of professions bring in paychecks. Journalism has other responsibilities. You have a civic responsibility and a place in public space that others don’t.</b> This is why I depart on this point.</bq> <bq>As we just discussed, the idea that culture lives separately from politics or history—I hope anyone who hears that notion will be suspicious of it.</bq> <bq><b>Culture is a sibling to politics. It’s not a separate niche category. And it’s not a luxury. It’s not something that only the privileged deserve and it’s not something that only the rich countries produce.</b> I’ve always been suspicious of the idea that x country or x culture doesn’t have these traditions that we have in the West. That idea has always been automatically suspicious to me because, by definition, we don’t know what x culture has. <b>We have to go and look and ask their experts and their indigenous groups, “What is it that you offer and can we share it with you?”</b></bq> <bq>[Question from Patrick] We sent Pollock’s paintings overseas as exemplary of American individualism. We gave the world Joe Friday on Dragnet and 17 Hiltons and John Ford westerns, and <b>I suppose we fooled a lot of people as to what and how great America is. But didn’t we fool ourselves most of all?</b> Here’s what I mean: <b>Are we not captivated by our own manufactured imagery?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="http://patricklawrence.us/writers-media-corruptions-power/" source="" author="Patrick Lawrence">On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power</a> <bq>Money as speech and Citizens United, overturning key parts of the Voting Rights Act through ideological interpretations of the law on the Supreme Court last summer, redistricting, bumping minorities who vote Democrat with the most common names from the voting rolls to shrink the blue majority—<b>all this is more alarming to me than Russian hacking. It wasn’t rigged in the way Trump shouted; instead, his shouting was itself part of the diversion.</b></bq> <bq>I read the obsession with Russian hacking as a distraction from that. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any Russian interference. There may have been. But <b>the influence of Russia on the election struck me as negligible, while people being bumped or otherwise disenfranchised struck me as much more serious.</b></bq> <bq>[Patrick speaking] Theodore Postol, the MIT scientist, wrote this in his open letter reporting his findings: “<b>The critical function of the mainstream media in the current situation should be to report the facts that clearly and unambiguously contradict government claims.</b> This has so far not occurred, and this is perhaps the biggest indicator of how incapacitated the mechanisms for democratic governance of the United States have become.”</bq> <bq>There’s been no serious accountability. There’s no truth and reconciliation. It’s always the people who are involved who get to preside over the verdict of what it did and how it should be dealt with. <b>You see this when the CIA conducts its own investigations into its own scandals. If they can’t quite conduct it themselves, then they’ll spy on the people who [do].</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/17/cease-fires-walk-with-me/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Cease Fires Walk With Me</a> The title is an elegant riff on the LA fires as well as the name of David Lynch's final chapter in the <i>Twin Peaks</i> saga. David Lynch died yesterday, at the age of 17. <bq>Film critic David Ehrlich: “David Lynch gave us the language we needed to better articulate the indescribable strangeness of our shared reality. <b>‘Lynchian’ is so overused because it’s a viscerally understandable word without any known synonyms. I can’t imagine a more beautiful artistic legacy than that.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://dpikeasuprep.weebly.com/uploads/8/3/1/2/83123144/the_complete_stories_of_evelyn_waugh.pdf" author="Evelyn Waugh" source="The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh">On Guard</a> The story begins on page 118 and ends on page 127. <bq>[Hector the dog]] had on the whole an easy task, for Millicent’s naturally capricious nature could, as a rule, be relied upon, unaided, to drive her lovers into extremes of irritation. Moreover she had come to love the dog. She received very regular letters from Hector [the former fiancé], written weekly and arriving in batches of three or four according to the mails. She always opened them; often she read them to the end, but their contents made little impression upon her mind and gradually their writer drifted into oblivion so that <b>when people said to her “How is darling Hector?” it came naturally to her to reply, “He doesn’t like the hot weather much I’m afraid, and his coat is in a very poor state. I’m thinking of having him plucked,” instead of, “He had a go of malaria and there is black worm in his tobacco crop.”</b></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/k-pop-piepenbring" source="The Baffler" author="Dan Piepenbring">The K-Hole of History</a> <bq>Among the major players, there’s PCP (or angel dust), which makes you feel like you’re walking on the moon if you dose it right, though in the 1970s a few psychotic users ensured that it became better known for making people jump through windows and kill babies. <b>There’s DXM, an active ingredient in Robitussin and other cough suppressants—it dissociates you just enough that you forget to cough.</b> And there are ether and nitrous oxide, the favorite anesthetics of the nineteenth century. The latter remains a strong presence at dentists’ offices and parking lots outside of Phish shows, where intimidating men called the Nitrous Mafia—many of them from Philadelphia for some reason—will sell you three frosty, gassy balloons of pure euphoria for around twenty bucks. <b>I once heard an editor of this magazine describe nitrous, accurately, as “a delay pedal for your brain.”</b></bq> <bq>This was the heart of Blood’s pamphlet, published at his own expense: <b>the notion that anesthesia conferred an arcane knowledge of nothing and everything, a gauzy hidden architecture that, once glimpsed, could never be conveyed in waking life.</b> All that survived was the sense of having fallen into “this thick net of space containing all worlds.”</bq> <bq>The revelation was perfectly circular, but Blood kept trying to square it: <b>Was it telling him that the universe had an at-oneness, or that it was various and sundry?</b> Beguiled by the mystery, he hammered out his metaphysics in a second book, Pluriverse , whose construction busied him until his death in 1919. It’s strange to realize that its many hundreds of pages issued from one life-changing encounter with a dentist nearly sixty years earlier. “The universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing,” he once wrote. “There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.”</bq> <bq>Like Henry Beecher, I think that ketamine therapy, whether you practice it with a doctor or on a dance floor at 5 a.m., is an extension of Blood’s “mumbling and mouthing mystery of the cosmos.” His style describes dissociatives more richly than anyone else because it feels like chemical dissociation on the page: <b>it takes that much excess, and that much punctuation, to capture its creamy, noetic messages, its powerful indifference, its dizzying gusts of cerebration</b>—and its tendency to wrest back whatever wisdom chemicals impart, leaving only a few fine hairs from the godhead.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/01/12/effort-matters-but-its-not-mastery/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Effort Matters, But It’s Not Mastery</a> <bq>Wharton School organizational psychologist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/opinion/school-grades-a-quantity-quality.html" source="NY Times">Adam Grant wrote a controversial op-ed</a> about effort and mastery. Meritocracy has become a dirty word, both because of rationalizations that it doesn’t exist and contentions that it’s a mask for discrimination against the less able.<bq>High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, <b>many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge.</b> In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and <b>a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.</b></bq></bq> <bq><bq>More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. <b>Praising kids for their <i>abilities</i> undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks.</b> They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set: They thought that success depended on innate talent and that they didn’t have the right stuff. <b>To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable.</b> And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.</bq>To be fair, there is merit to this argument, particularly for younger students in grade school. <b>For some kids, reading and writing comes naturally. For others, a great deal of effort is needed, but if they put in the effort, they too will be able to master reading and writing. That’s a good thing.</b><bq>Psychologists have long found that rewarding effort cultivates a strong work ethic and reinforces learning. That’s especially important in a world that often favors naturals over strivers — and <b>for students who weren’t born into comfort or don’t have a record of achievement.</b> (And it’s far preferable to the other corrective: participation trophy culture, which celebrates kids for just showing up.)</bq>Unmentioned is that <b>even innately intelligent students may reach a plateau, where their innate abilities aren’t enough to get them over the hurdle. But never having learned to work hard, they lack the grit to push through to the next level.</b> To divide students into naturals and strivers is too simplistic. Even naturals have limits where striving atop innate intelligence is needed to achieve excellence.<bq>The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. <b>We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself.</b> We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that <b>working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person).</b> And that does students a disservice.</bq></bq> Yeah, your hard work has to be <i>useful</i>. If you're not a useful software developer, then <i>try something else.</i> The world needs caregivers. Try that. You're rewarded for being a good person there. <bq>For the third grader, excellence is ahead of him in a great many ventures, from reading and writing to mathematics. And <b>with effort, a student of modest intellect can still read, write and cipher with sufficient mastery to lay claim to a high school education.</b> <b>But if that student wants to be a physicist, an architect, a surgeon, that’s where effort is needed, but only in conjunction with excellence.</b> Indeed, the student who works hard, very hard, and still can’t achieve excellence is in the awkward position of being on the cusp of realizing that he or she just hasn’t got it. He’s never going to be good enough, no matter how hard he strives. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as <b>not everyone can be Einstein. Nor do we need everyone to be Einstein. But we do need Einstein to be Einstein.</b></bq> And we need to cultivate a culture and economy that rewards people who <i>aren't</i> Einstein. That's an important little piece that I think Greenfield failed to emphasize. But it's a great essay. Congrats. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia6m3pIIS2k" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Ia6m3pIIS2k" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Doomscroll / Joshua Citarella" caption="Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites"> At about <b>12:00</b>, Catherine says, <bq>I was like what are you doing girl? Like, how are you like assimilating your sexual assault, which is really bad a private thing---you haven't even told members of your family and your closest friends---and this political situation? Like, why are you doing this? And I realize young people, who are media-savvy in a certain way---and I admired her political instincts always---are understanding, it's like clickbait; it's like drawing you in. [...] What I would say is it's almost a pass key to authenticity, that you get when you say 'this has happened to me.' When I saw this---I've had a pretty like crazy childhood---and I when I saw this and I saw the look on her face, I was like, one: you really did go through something; and two: you should not be doing this on Instagram Live. It does not help you therapeutically. If I were a Mom, I'd be like 'what are you doing?' you know? I mean, she's fine; she survived it. But I think that there's a kind of online, massive, social-media convention about leveraging and instrumentalizing your suffering to accentuate your brand. I hate to be so crude about it but that's what it has become. And one of the things about all of these women---Winfrey, AOC---is they say 'I'm telling my story so that other women don't feel alone.' And they say 'me too' ... like this can become a movement and this can be healing. You know what? Telling your story as a billionaire, in Oprah's case, does not heal anybody. But you're selling a narrative of trauma and recovery. Where does actual recovery take place? Maybe actually in real life suffering, not through an app, not through broadcast. The real hard work of therapy---that fewer and fewer people want to do or and fewer and fewer therapists know how to do [...]</bq> At about <b>23:30</b>, they say, <bq><b>Joshua:</b> There also seems to be a rising class resentment towards the PMC, particularly among working people---but kind of from everyone---and to certain degree I don't blame them. I don't like people who are richer than me. Like, I want their stuff, too. <b>Catherine:</b> Who are bossy. Who are telling you that they're better people than you. <b>Joshua:</b> Telling you how to behave, yeah. And there's a real cultural resentment of this professed moral superiority and that's in the title of your book even---<i>Virtue hoarders</i>---why do they feel the need to have this moral superiority? Why are they hoarding The virtue? what value does that give to them on a really primitive, psychological basis? <b>Catherine:</b> I think it's to disguise the guilt about how much better their lives are than the working class, and the divergence between the lives that you can have you know in a coastal-elite environment and the lives of the great majority of Americans, who are working class who live in the smaller cities and the rural areas. They've been basically abandoned by the public institutions that we live in. [...] So it sucks. It sucks, this inequality. But, if you're a liberal PMC person, you're like, no, you want like, equity, right? You want everything to be rationalized and you want to stop suffering, you know, they're always like, 'raise awareness of suffering,' 'help people,' and so they have this veneer of wanting to help people, but it's very clear that [...] they're protecting their privileges at every single level and how do you justify having such a good life when most Americans are really suffering? You have to put a moral patina on it and this is a very, very Protestant thing. [...] I think Calvin and then John Kelvin and Benjamin Franklin can all be the authors of is this idea: that God rewards the industrious and the virtuous, so if we have more wealth, it's because we work harder and we're more virtuous---and that's how the PMC acts.</bq> <bq>[...] look at their environmentalism: it's all consumption-based; it's not production-based.</bq> At <b>26:44</b>, Catherine says, <bq>The layers of administrative BS, that the average American worker who works in a larger organization has to deal with now, has just expanded exponentially. Even as your work gets shittier, your working conditions get shittier---maybe you're not getting your raises---the HR-like language of liberal sort of self-promotion as enlightened, this is just proliferating in ways that we could not imagine. Even your boss---was always bad but alien---but now your boss wants to care about you. And that's like a different level of like invasion, and evil. Your boss wants to change the way you think about everything.</bq> At <b>46:10</b>, Catherine says, <bq>How do we take down Blackstone? It's very complicated. I don't think the young callow leftist today, the average, even understands the complexity of capitalism and how it needs to be dismantled. So, I think there's actually a lot of boiling discontent among the working classes, but how are we going to translate that into execution, into governmentality. We've been so enamored with anarchism and our bullshit, you know, like, larping politics, that we're like 'yeah let's burn it down! Defund the police.' Like what do you do the day after? We don't have anyone ready for the day after. Because we don't respect work, actually. The left doesn't respect work. It's like a deskilled revolutionary. [...] So, we go back to these professors who have retreated into the institutions and one thing that I would say that what I do agree with you on in terms of the assimilation into their own self-interest is they're really happy about culture wars because it makes them feel really important.</bq> At <b>53:00</b>, she says, <bq>This goes back to what I was going to say about JD Vance and Josh Holly: is that there's enough rural history in their backgrounds or wherever they live to say we just need to give American families that kind of independence again, like homeschooling, charter schools, not help them, but reinvigorate the work ethic. And that the government programs have taken away people's ideas of autonomy and that that is what is destroying the working class. That's actually literally what JD Vance is saying: like, social programs make people lazy and drug-addled. Not the collapse of the industrial economy, or the dumping of 30 million oxycontin pills in West Virginia, Ohio, and Appalachia. No, it's actually dependency. We have a phobia about dependency that really, turned dialectically in a positive way, would be about strengthening independence of mind. But the more these people try to do away with industrialization and go back to this sort of autarkic yeoman ideal, the more they are actually kneeling at the feet of people like Peter Thiel because they're actually captured by the right-wing corporate capitalist. And those right-wing corporate capitalists, they're libertarians. Like this is the heart of American libertarianism. It's like, no government, no dependency, everyone gets their little whatever, their little plot of land, and then you can turn it into Microsoft, or you can, you know, lose it all at the casino. But it's your activity, it's your choice, it's your individual responsibility. So, I'm saying that they come from this historically positive moment, that they've turned into a kind of corruptive version of a kind of nostalgic world, and they're not actually facing the realities of industrial capitalism, because we are so codependent. We're codependent on each other, codependent and interconnected in ways that the yeoman farmer never was. Let's just think about the Interstate Highway Program. Is every libertarian going to build their own highway? No. This is a giant federal project, but when you were a yeoman farmer, you cleared like enough of your forest, so you could get connected to the road of the town, like you made your own road. Like doing your own research, that day is gone.</bq> At <b>55:40</b>, she says, <bq>The Chinese elites---the Chinese PMC---they're so used to having people do everything for them---South Asians and India, too---like, your cook, your driver, there's just so many people, what we call low-wage people, and you---Latin American elites are the same way---it's so freaking corrupting. I'm like, please, I just want to do my own thing. Like, I'll go shop and like carry my bags, and these are my small American gestures like I'm an autarkic human farmer, I don't want you to carry my bags. I know it's, but it makes me not Chinese, right? People are like, oh just call a driver. I'm like, I can rent a car; I'll drive myself. I know how to drive. But this kind of like, farming out to other people, this sense of like other people do my labor for me so I can think clearly, that is very feudal and aristocratic. And we were against that. That's what makes America powerful, great, speaking of that's what makes America great. Again. So let's revive some of that like deep radical egalitarianism.</bq> At <b>01:20:30</b>, <bq><b>Catherine:</b> Mellon supports this kind of like environmental humanities that rebrands nature writing and even landscape painting into environmental art. And environmental humanities. They love that stuff. It's like you can't just be someone who's like doing landscape painting or you can't be someone who's like doing nature writing. Now you're like involved in the anthropocene. I mean, I can laugh and be like really bitter about it, but these are thought leaders. So this is why people might be nostalgic for monarchism, because actually Mellon is king of the humanities. They're just pretending to be a liberal quasi-democratic organization with a board of directors, whatever. And you know, who else is like this? The MacArthur Foundation. The MacArthur prize is---they're trying to dictate the cultural direction and they often do and it's a cabal. So I think the monarchist might be like, let's just make the cabal institutionalized, with crowns and rights and ritual. <b>Joshua:</b> literally, that's what they say is: let's just formalize it. It already works like this, so let's just let's just make it official. <b>Catherine:</b> Maybe I'm a monarchist. <b>Catherine:</b> Nobody will come out and say what I've said about Mellon because everyone's hoping to get a Mellon grant, so I'm just going to say it right now. The people in the professoriat right now, if you want to ascend to higher rank, like, in the court of Mellon, you have to like genuflect, you have to conform to what their program is, you have to look at how they're configuring the humanities and the arts... <b>Joshua:</b> You have to use the language of the Court <b>Catherine:</b> You have to use their language of the court, so this is a court society. And it is so feudal because power has been---and money and capital is concentrated so deeply in One Foundation, right? There are other competing foundations maybe, but none can touch the Mellon at this point. So oftentimes, I feel like people in my class, who have tenure and you know who should be exercising academic freedom, they're taking the knee for Mellon. They may not consciously know this, but there's---in the early oughts, it was transnationalism, it's you know, they're key words that you have to shape your research---and I don't want to be like too cold-war paranoid but it is totally anti-marxist, anti-materialist. Do not talk about labor; talk about identity. [...] I have the sense of my class as a class that's supplicant to the capitalist class stepping on the heads of the working class even as we pretend to be like liberal caring people.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> Everything's a scam. Amazon is a scam. People are so accustomed to it that they don't even question it. On Amazon, I just noticed that a book that I added to my list<fn> was only $3 for the Kindle version, so I just bought it with one-click. It's called "one-click", of course, so it's your own fault if you were to not notice that the next page that it sends you to puts another button that looks exactly the same under a different book that you "might be interested in," and tries to lure you into buying a completely unrelated book for a completely unknown quantity by accident because you thought that the button that they put right under your mouse was to confirm sending it to your Kindle or to confirm the transaction ... or whatever. At any rate, it almost fooled me into thinking that I had to click it before I read the text around it. It's a scam. They're hoping that people buy things that they never wanted and are too lazy or incompetent to figure out how to undo the transaction. <hr> <ft>It was Catherine Liu's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Hoarders-Professional-Managerial-Forerunners-ebook/dp/B08VD2MV44?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Di3NFuROJNYFfqDoXr3xJQ821aNuWQZBrXRoyjjMRYCjskX4es10lulpvtt4o1wix6rwu_XdFUMVmitdq0OEAQ.D8bi5UPxSE2UbNplhASnzE2K6rxe8-Q5amG50UlH-eI&dib_tag=se&keywords=Virtue+Hoardersby+Catherine+Liu&link_code=qs&qid=1736923838&sr=8-1"><i>Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class</i></a>, which I'd just heard about from the video linked above.</ft> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">The Brave Little Toaster</a> <bq><b>The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it</b>, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, <b>despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-llms" source="" author="David Crawshaw">How I program with LLMs</a> <bq>If I have a question about a complex environment, say “how do I make a button transparent in CSS” <b>I will get a far better answer asking any consumer-based LLM, o1, sonnet 3.5, etc, than I do using an old fashioned web search engine</b> and trying to parse the details out of whatever page I land on.</bq> This makes me wonder whether he's using search efficiently. Or does he know nothing about CSS? It would be good to have a baseline about the kind of developer this is so we determine the relevance of his experience. <bq>They give me a first draft, with some good ideas, with several of the dependencies I need, and often some mistakes. <b>Often, I find fixing those mistakes is a lot easier than starting from scratch.</b></bq> One problem I see here is that seeing an existing solution will reduce your ability to think of a better one. This is a well-known phenomenon of human psychology. <bq><b>You can ask an LLM to do things you would never ask a human to do.</b> “Rewrite all of your new tests introducing an <intermediate>” is an appalling thing to ask a human, you’re going to have days of tense back-and-forth about whether the cost of the work is worth the benefit. <b>An LLM will do it in 60 seconds and not make you fight to get it done. Take advantage of the fact that redoing work is extremely cheap.</b></bq> <bq>The better LLMs are very good at recovering from their mistakes, <b>often all they need is for you to paste the compiler error or test failure into the chat and they fix the code.</b></bq> <bq>Pasting that error back into the LLM gets it to regenerate the fuzz test such that it is built around a <c>func(t *testing.T, data []byte)</c> function that uses <c>math.Float64frombits</c> to extract floats from the data slice. Interactions like this point us towards automating the feedback from tools: <b>all it needed was the obvious error message to make solid progress towards something useful. I was not needed.</b></bq> <bq>The past 10-15 years has seen a far more tempered approach to writing code, with <b>many programmers understanding it is better to reimplement a concept if the cost of sharing the implementation is higher than the cost of implementing and maintaining separate code.</b> It is far less common for me to write on a code review “this isn’t worth it, separate the implementations.” (Which is fortunate, because people really don’t want to hear things like that after they have done all the work.) Programmers are getting better at tradeoffs.</bq> This is not a strong argument for having multiple separate implementations, each generated by AI, is it? I can't really tell because the argument he's making is a bit muddled, if not self-contradictory. <bq>So <b>I foresee a world with far more specialized code, with fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.</b> Reusable code will continue to thrive around small robust interfaces and otherwise will be pulled apart into specialized code.</bq> Maybe. I dunno yet. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/biden-administration-puts-quotas-on-global-ai-chip-sales/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">US splits world into three tiers for AI chip access</a> <bq>On Monday, the US government announced a new round of regulations on global AI chip exports, dividing the world into roughly three tiers of access. <b>The rules create quotas for about 120 countries and allow unrestricted access for 18 close US allies while maintaining existing bans on China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.</b></bq> A huerä Kindergartä. <bq>The new regulations set specific numerical limits on AI chip exports. While first-tier countries (the 18 key US allies) face no restrictions, countries in the second tier can receive up to 50,000 so-called "advanced computing chips," <b>with the possibility to double that cap to 100,000 if they sign technology security agreements with the US.</b> For most buyers, orders of up to 1,700 advanced chips will not require licenses or count against these national caps—a policy designed to <b>speed up purchases by universities, medical institutions, and research organizations.</b></bq> Insanity. <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/15/geoffrey-litt/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Quoting Geoffrey Litt</a> <bq>The idea of an "app"—a hermetically sealed bundle of functionality built by a team trying to anticipate your needs—will no longer be as relevant. We'll want looser clusters, amenable to change at the edges. <b>Everyone owns their tools, rather than all of us renting cloned ones.</b></bq> Look, I'm all for not renting software in the cloud, where someone else is in charge of when you upgrade, which is not great. But...this is a fucking terrible idea. People suck at specifying and building software. Maintaining a giant pile of AI-produced bespoke applications will be the death of a company. It's like thinking that running your whole business on Excel spreadsheets written and maintained by people who don't know the first thing about technology. We currently have dedicated teams of trained professionals producing the absolute worst software. How will it improve things to let people without any training build software? I guess it can't get any worse? For example, I'm looking at the software running on my TV box. It also supports radio stations. A station I just listened to a couple of days ago is not in my list of recently used stations. It's just gone. I had to scroll through a list of hundreds of radio stations that are not sorted in any discernible fashion, not can you filter them, e.g., by language or name or anything. This is the software we get when we <i>trained professionals try to build software.</i> I am deadly serious that having amateur teams scattered throughout the economy building even shittier software with the assistance of mediocre and mildly retarded AIs is absolutely not going to improve anything. But maybe these people are accelerationists. <h id="programming">Programming</h> Why do I have no faith that algorithms will get better at choosing stuff for us? Because algorithms are written by the same people that can't do simple shit like "when I say shuffle a playlist, can you not select 1-star songs every other song?" <hr> Not for the first time have I typed a word and had it underlined as unrecognized. No suggestions. I look it up in the dictionary. It's there. This is how our tools are making us dumber. How long before I can write Hawk Tuah but not inconscionable? That would be unconscionable. I just spelling "enfilade" as "enfillade" and the silly dictionary couldn't suggest an appropriate replacement. Tragic. Now it doesn't know the word "prise". No suggestions. Even more suspiciously, my iOS no longer recognizes that the word "Russia" exists, which it utterly unsurprising, if bleak. <img src="{att_link}apple_doesn_t_want_to_admit_that_russia_exists2.jpeg" href="{att_link}apple_doesn_t_want_to_admit_that_russia_exists2.jpeg" align="none" caption="Apple doesn't want to admit that Russia exists" scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}it_knows_that_russia_has_a_flag,_though.jpeg" href="{att_link}it_knows_that_russia_has_a_flag,_though.jpeg" align="none" caption="It knows that Russia has a flag, though" scale="50%"> And Google's auto-transcription still refuses to transcribe even the most clearly enunciated "genocide" or "Palestinian", choosing instead to write "g" and "pale" respectively. Every other word in the surrounding text has been transcribed extremely well; you can definitely see a big improvement at this point. A strong hypothesis is that the failure to transcribe certain words is deliberate. <hr> <a href="https://12daysofweb.dev/2024/css-content-visibility/" author="Nathan Knowler" source="12 days of web">CSS content-visibility</a> <bq>In cases where there is no consistent size, but you have a good idea of what the average is, you can set <c>auto</c> before that value, and this will cause the property to remember what its size was if it ever was rendered. Before then, it’ll use the other value as a fallback.<code>li { content-visibility: auto; contain-intrinsic-block-size: auto 2lh; }</code></bq> <bq>When <c>content-visibility</c> is used on elements within a complex layout, it can accidentally trigger undesirable layout reflow, when the content becomes visible again, and the size containment is dropped. This is another case where setting the intrinsic size of the contained element will help.</bq> <bq>While the <c>auto</c> or <c>hidden</c> value can skip rendering the content, this does not prevent resources such as images from downloading eagerly, so it’s a good idea to employ some sort of lazy-loading strategy alongside <c>content-visibility</c>. That could look like using the <c>loading=lazy</c> attribute.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://12daysofweb.dev/2024/declarative-shadow-dom/" author="Schalk Neethling" source="12 days of web">Declarative Shadow DOM</a> <bq>Web components have always promised reusable, isolated, and standards-based solutions for building modern web applications. Yet, challenges like server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), performance, and accessibility have often kept developers reliant on frameworks and custom solutions. <b>Declarative Shadow DOM bridges these gaps, unlocking the full potential of web components for the modern web platform.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://12daysofweb.dev/2024/css-margin-trim-line-height-units/" author="Jen Simmons" source="12 days of CSS">CSS <c>margin-trim</c> and line height units</a> <bq><b>Basically, <c>1lh</c> equals the height of one line of text for the current font at the current line height.</b> “LH” stands for Line Height. The accompanying <c>1rlh</c> unit is the equivalent of one line height at the root, just like how <c>rem</c> is the <c>em</c> at the root. “RLH” stands for Root Line Height.</bq> This means that you can now set a <c>block-margin</c> to be <c>1lh</c> to set exactly one line of spacing between paragraphs---<i>as God intended.</i> <bq><b>Many people with an eye for layout and spacing can immediately see the difference. You might agree that the version on the right just looks more polished.</b> It looks refined. In comparison, the version on the left looks a bit clunky. It looks, well, like everything on the web has looked for decades. Slightly awkward.</bq> So, do something like the following to set the margin correctly and then fall back in the 10% of browsers that don't support the <c>lh</c> unit to be what we've used for decades. <code>article { padding: 1em; /* fallback for browsers lh without support */ padding: 1lh; }</code> <bq>When using <c>:first-child</c> and <c>:last-child</c>, any element that’s the first or last direct child of the container will have its margins trimmed. But any content that either isn’t wrapped in an element or that is nested further deep will not. For example, if the first element is a figure with a top margin, and the figure contains an image that also has a top margin, both of those margins will be trimmed by <c>margin-trim</c>, while only the figure margin will be trimmed by <c>:first-child</c>.</bq> <hr> You still need Babel in order to run Jest with Node and ESM imports. The question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68956636/how-to-use-esm-tests-with-jest" author="" source="StackOverflow" date="August, 2021">How to use ESM tests with jest?</a> has an answer that suggests using an experimental mode, <code>"scripts": { "test": "node --experimental-vm-modules ./node_modules/.bin/jest" }</code> Setting that and the <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/packages.html#type" author="" source="">type</a> in the <c>package.json</c> should get it working, which it did, for the most part. You can read full instructions on the <a href="https://jestjs.io/docs/ecmascript-modules">Jest ECMAScript Modules</a> page. Unfortunately, it ended not working nearly as well as the Babel-based solution because of something related to import maps. You could try to use something like <a href="https://jspm.org/faq" author="" source="">JSPM</a>, which is <iq>is an open source project for working with dependency management via import maps in browsers.</iq> Still, I was looking for a drop-in replacement for the extra complexity of configuring Babel...and this wasn't it. I'm trying to teach JavaScript to people who don't necessarily have a lot of programming experience. Using the experimental mode just made things more confusing than having to explain why Babel was necessary. <hr> When using the <a href="https://github.com/jest-community/vscode-jest" author="" source="GitHub">vscode-jest</a> plugin, you can set the <a href="https://github.com/jest-community/vscode-jest#runmode" source="GitHub">runMode</a> to be on-demand. Although it's nice to have the tests just run in "live" mode, my experience has been that the initial run, just after you've opened the folder, never completes. I tried "on-save" as well, but it didn't reliably run the tests, so I switched to "on-demand." <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0lFyPuH8Zs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/p0lFyPuH8Zs" source="YouTube" author="We Love Speed / Robin Marx" caption="How browsers REALLY load Web pages" width="560px"> <bq>Preload should be applied with <i>surgical precision</i><ul>Specific edge cases (you <b>really</b> know what you're doing) If the resource <b>isn't in the HTML</b><ul>Fonts Dynamic LCP images JS imports</ul></ul></bq> Basically, he said if you're using <c>preload</c>, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. For example, you can use <c>fetchpriority=high</c> on an <c>img</c> instead, and get the same performance benefit in the current crop of browsers. These kinds of optimizations aren't for most web sites. Most web sites have much larger performance problems than can be addressed with <c>fetchpriority</c> and <c>preload</c> optimizations. Although, he says that preloading fonts is a good idea for everyone. While those two settings affect how the browser loads resources during the initial load o a page, setting <c>loading=lazy</c> on a resource takes it out of the initial load, so it puts it into a different part of the page-rendering (it's loaded on demand, only when needed, e.g., when you scroll down to it). <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1i173hd/15_years_as_a_webdev_only_just_found_out_about/">15 years as a web-dev. Only just found out about this today.</a> The developer found out that you can execute <c>document.designMode = "on"</c> into the developer console and then edit any text anywhere on any web page. This is actually a top-level execution of setting the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/contenteditable"><c>contenteditable</c></a> property on any individual element, which allows much finer-grained control of editability. Someone asked <iq>What's an example of a time you would use this?</iq> to which the top answer is <iq>9:33 a.m.</iq> That's a wonderful answer. <img src="{att_link}9_30_am_is_a_good_time.png" href="{att_link}9_30_am_is_a_good_time.png" align="none" caption="9:30 AM is a good time" scale="75%"> In all seriousness, another user provided a real answer, <bq>I'm currently working on a chat platform. <b>This was useful to see how my message containers handle messages of different lengths in regard to height, width and overflow without having to edit the HTML</b> on the IDE or browser inspector.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695547#42705589">FFmpeg by Example</a> The post is about the site <a href="https://ffmpegbyexample.com/">FFmpeg by Example</a>, which looks quite helpful. A bunch of commentators indicate that they have had success getting LLMs to build their command lines for them <bq author="hbn">I've enjoyed using ffmpeg 1000% more since I was able to stop doing manually the tedious task of Googling for Stack Overflow answers and cobbling them into a command and got Chat GPT to write me commands instead.</bq> while others says that, <bq author="resonious">I tried this (though with a different tool called aichat) for extremely simple stuff like just "convert this mov to mp4" and it generated overly complex commands that failed due to missing libraries. When I removed the "crap" from the commands, they worked. So much like code assistance, they still need a fair amount of baby sitting. A good boost for experienced operators but might suck for beginners.</bq> Of course, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/">Simon Willison</a> chimed in to make a pitch for his <a href="https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd" source="GitHub">command-line LLM tool</a>, <bq>I use ffmpeg multiple times a week thanks to LLMs. It's my top use-case for my "llm cmd" tool:<code>uv tool install llm llm install llm-cmd llm cmd use ffmpeg to extract audio from myfile.mov and save that as mp3</code></bq> <hr> <a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/" author="Nikhil Suresh" source="Ludicity">Brainwash An Executive Today!</a> <bq>"Would you say that data observability is an issue?", they inquire with a tone that very clearly implies that this is a leading question. I am immediately deeply worried. For those who are unaware, my specialty is building systems that move large amounts of data through companies, organize them in a way that is at least marginally less of a horrific clusterfuck than what random people without specific training will do when left to their own devices, and sometimes assist with statistics. <b>Data observability is the high-level term that captures the ability of a business to go "Instead of downloading the data, it would appear the computers caught fire this morning. Would you like to fix this or pretend it never happened?"</b> The reason that I'm concerned is that <b>the executive in front of me should not be using that term.</b> They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but <b>I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand.</b> This would be like my 96-year-old grandfather asking me about Bitcoin mining—impressive if he had arrived at the question organically, but in practice I'm already dialing the bank to report a massive theft.</bq> <bq><b>A huge amount of the economy is driven by people who are, simply put, highly suggestible.</b> That is to say that it is very, very easy to get them excited and willing to spend money. Consider, for example, what it would take to get <i>you</i> to approach your company's lawyer and suggest software to them, totally unprompted, because you saw an advertisement last night. Scratch that, make it <i>every lawyer at your company</i> as each and every one of them goes "I... have never heard of that". But you <i>just keep going</i> because the next one might tell you that the Shamwow is an awesome product. The answer, in all likelihood, is that <b><i>no possible advertisement</i> could get you to behave in such an embarrassing fashion.</b> You would instead think things like "I am not a lawyer", "What the hell is this program and why do I feel fit to judge it?", and "The shame from this conversation will keep me up at night for the next five years."</bq> This is how I feel about every hyped product that people struggle to make the case for. Like, they'll tell me how awesome AI is but, when I ask them to show me how they use it, how they leverage it, they excitedly show me how they <i>enter the exact prompt they would have put into a search engine two years ago,</i> and then ignore all of the made-up text returned by the LLM to just pluck out the one or two words they would have plucked out from the list of actual search results on which a search would have been based. <bq>There is a massive industry that is built around gathering people that fit the "thinks LinkedIn is studying" profile into rooms, <b>who also have access to organizational money, and then charging sales teams for permission to get into that room.</b></bq> <bq><b>Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later.</b> I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged. Even the pleasant and sufficiently skeptical can feel compelled to attend because the truth is that executive compensation and funding is driven by your relationships to other people, but make no mistake, <b>the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege.</b> They are enormously vulnerable — I know many people who fit this profile, and it is disconcerting to see people put the whammy on them.</bq> <bq>[...] high-level statements like "I led a successful project" mean nothing. <b>The project may not have been successful, or was judged to be a success for political reasons, or was successful for reasons that had nothing to do with management.</b></bq> <bq>Because management in large, dysfunctional (read: typical) companies is a game about promising to ship things to people further up your chain, <b>people are broadly incentivized to say that everything has shipped no matter what has happened unless it is impossible to lie about this easily.</b></bq> <bq>Why would non-technicians be so focused on a database of all things, a concept so dull that it is Effective Communication 101 to try and avoid using the term in front of a lay audience? It's because if you buy Snowflake then you're allowed to get onto stages at large venues and talk about how revolutionary Snowflake was for your business, which on the surface looks like a brag about Snowflake, but <b>is actually a brag about the great decisions you've been making and the wealth you can deploy if someone becomes your friend.</b> And the audience is full of people that are now thinking <b>"If I buy Snowflake, I can be on that stage, and everyone will finally recognize my brilliance".</b> <b>It is a bribe, straight up, and done in such a way that everyone understands that further bribes are available for anyone willing to be enthusiastic about something they don't understand.</b> Matt Stoller has written at some length about how government purchasing is heavily driven by award acquisition, and it all rounds out to "this is discount Illuminati bullshit". The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can't withdraw the money directly, so <b>they have to spend the organization's capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else</b> at a <i>really, really bad exchange rate.</i> It really is embezzling without the charm of efficiency. We'd be <b>better off letting them withdraw $1M instead of forcing them to spend $30M so that your competitor offers them a $1M raise.</b></bq> <bq>They're targeting a demographic that exists — unwilling or unable to attract an audience by strength of quality. <b>Desperate enough for attention to pay £99 instead of just doing some email outreach. Dunce enough to think inserting the word "authentic" makes it so, and gullible enough to think that £99 could actually reach even 1% of 84 million people.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/altman_dunce" source="Dead Simple Tech" author="Iris Meredith">Sam Altman is a dunce</a> <bq><b>Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth.</b> [...] I can only conclude that he simply can't understand the criticism well enough to respond to it effectively, and thus his immediate instinct is to devalue the entire body of work associated with it. <b>This is a truly dunce-worthy piece of thinking: "I can't understand something, therefore there's nothing worth understanding".</b></bq> <bq>As a tool for writing, it's worse than useless, and anyone with even a little experience of making their living from their ideas and their writing knows that. The fact that Altman doesn't thus tells us something very important: the guy has never meaningfully interacted with any kind of worthwhile literature in a serious way. <b>He thinks about literature in the same kind of way that a bourgeois family thinks about a Thomas Kinkade painting: it's something to tie the room together.</b> And when you think of art in that way, automating it is natural: vaguely pretty artistic slop is, after all, just a commodity in this worldview. And AI art generators have a lot in common with Kinkade and 1930's Soviet social realist art, right down to the style. Even down to the faintly Plasticine-like textures. And if all you can imagine art being is "something pretty to tie a room together", AI art and AI literature naturally makes an amount of sense. In short, <b>Sam Altman doesn't understand art, therefore he devalues it, and so he's chosen to incinerate massive volumes of money trying to automate artists away.</b></bq> <bq>Paul Graham's essays are particularly bad for it, with clever verbiage and the aura of the man concealing the fact that <b>he's claiming that some pretty damned stupid and craven people are in fact brilliant because they support him having his money.</b></bq> <bq>First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don't personally understand or agree with. If they don't know something, then that thing clearly isn't worth knowing. Even if the information is clearly and unambiguously communicated to them with supporting evidence, it'll simply slide off their brains. We see this at play in the tech ecosystem, where <b>people persist in attempting to "disrupt" industries that are mostly functional, in large part because the tech-bros in question simply can't stand to see people who aren't like them thriving and doing well.</b> So now we have to deal with AI slop trying to supplant artists, failing miserably at it and still somehow destroying a whole bunch of careers.</bq> I kind of agree with this, except I see the point of disruption as being "people are earning money that rightfully belongs to me." Disruption could be a good thing if it took a process or system that was producing actual value and replaced it with an equivalent or better process or system that is more efficient. That's not what disruption generally means, though. Disruption usually means we will lie about doing that thing described above in order to farm all of the money out of it, while optimally not providing any value at all, but grudgingly providing just enough value to convince dum-dums that they should start using the replacment. Disruption generally involves a ton of marketing (read: brainwashing) and so-called thought-leader buy-in in order to really get the ball rolling, after which point it just sells itself, even without any value at all. <bq>The idea that anything about how we organise our society could be socially constructed simply slides through their brain without sticking. We've seen a remarkable number of examples of this kind of behaviour in the wake of the shooting of the UHC CEO, including <b>some truly spectacular pearl-clutching articles about how the "Brian Thompson was the real working-class hero" of the piece.</b> The reason these articles all fall so flat isn't that the shooting of the CEO was right (I'd certainly not recommend it as a political tactic), but that <b>they come from an underlying assumption that the US healthcare system is the only way that healthcare can be provided: that it's a law of physics.</b> Of course, all you have to do is look outside the country to prove that this simply isn't the case, so the fact that all these columnists just assume as a default that massively inflated medical bills and massive numbers of medical bankruptcies are just the way things have to be really exposes just how dunce-worthy their thinking is. <b>There is no way that someone capable of writing one of these articles is capable of any real insight, and yet these are the people who overwhelmingly write our opinion articles.</b></bq> <bq>It's more important that a piece of work be Agile, Christian or that it be disruptive than that it be good, true or beautiful. But quality, of course, requires sacrifice, and if you do not sacrifice other things to achieve quality, you sacrifice quality to achieve those other things. <b>It's thus no surprise that so much art, writing and software development done in the modern world is just kinda shit: it's more important that it hew to some kind of party line than that it be good.</b></bq> <bq>The dunce, moreover, does not have the aesthetic sense to understand that what they've done is bad: they simply do not have the taste to distinguish good work from bad work. Hence, it doesn't matter how leaden the characters, how slow the SQL or whether the technology in question actually does anything: <b>if what's been produced is <i>ideologically sound</i>, it's good.</b> This, by-the-by, neatly <b>explains the recent obsession with generative AI: it aligns with the ideology of those pushing it, so all of its defects simply <i>don't register.</i></b></bq> <bq>The current New Zealand government that just cut funding for any science that doesn't have immediate economic benefit (which somehow includes agricultural science in a country with a mostly agricultural economy) also fits the bill: <b>they're so stupid, incurious and damaging that they think this is somehow a good idea, and they are utterly unwilling to listen to anyone telling them how stupid it is</b>, while simultaneously they expect everyone whom they criticise to believe what they say as gospel.</bq> This very much reminds me of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. <bq><b>Your average manager is incurious, ill-read, obedient to authority to the point where they basically can't think independently</b> and utterly incapable of understanding that other people sometimes know things better than they do. <b>They don't read, they don't learn, they don't care</b> beyond the simple dictates of the company. They don't even reflect on their behaviour or consider that maybe how they're running things is wrong. They just... do what's expected of them. For those of us who aren't like that, working under people like this is hell. It is, after all, impossible to be at all confident that you're doing well if the person judging it doesn't know what good or bad work looks like. <b>It's impossible to write code that meets the needs of people when the people in question can't articulate what they need and might, in fact, not need anything.</b> It's impossible to fix problems in society when the people holding the purse-strings simply <i>can't perceive that the problems exist or that they might affect people they care about.</i></bq> <bq>Our current leaders, by contrast, are just as autocratic, but have nowhere near the intellectual or emotional agility they'd need to address the pressing issues of the day. <b>Half of them seem entirely incapable of even registering that the problems exist due to them being completely unable to look outside of their own mental framing.</b> Sam Altman simply can't comprehend that the tool he's developed is basically only useful for running propaganda campaigns on social media. <b>Marc Andreessen is stuck in a loop of being completely unable to see how his wealth and power are completely unearned</b>, and consequently keeps shitting himself in print. And I won't even go into what the hell Elon Musk is doing.</bq> <bq>We have a media environment that exalts these very stupid, very unserious people as the pinnacle of wisdom while silencing and marginalising the people doing actual, serious analysis. <b>Our educational system is basically designed for creating uncreative, incurious people, and our workplaces only ever reinforce that.</b></bq> <bq>Our cultural and artistic institutions are crumbling for lack of time, money and interest. Our scientific institutions are absorbed by more and more incuriously "practical" pursuits at the expense of anything else. Our TV and cinema are overwhelmingly shit, and fewer and fewer people read at all. <b>Our politics is increasingly dominated by the very dunces that we so decry. This is a miserable, impoverished, closed-off existence, completely devoid of roses and with not nearly enough bread. Who on earth wants to live this way?</b> The fact that so much of our society is simply willing to do this to us marks it out as a society beneath contempt. <b>It needs to end and be replaced by something more worthy of our time, money and engagement.</b></bq> Christ, I wish I'd thought of that. <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/01/the-begining-of-the-end-for-ant-wireless.html" source="DC Rainmaker" author="Ray Maker">The Begining [sic] of the End for ANT+ Wireless</a> <bq>[...] the <b>Bluetooth SIG</b> side had its own issues. These profiles were coming hot and heavy, but often driven by players that frankly didn’t have any business being part of that profile. We’d see automotive companies involved in the cycling power meter profile, for example. Thus, that <b>profile still suffers plenty of problems to this day as it doesn’t really capture everything that power meters did 10 years ago, let alone today.</b></bq> <bq>Got <b>wireless shifting or Di2? Those too are on ANT.</b> In the case of SRAM/Campagnolo/FSA, that’s broadcasting your gear and battery status on the ANT+ shifting protocol. In the case of Shimano, that’s using their proprietary ANT (but not ANT+) protocol. Of course, that’s resulted in all sorts of messiness. But <b>there is absolutely *zero* Bluetooth alternative for any of these companies right now.</b></bq> <bq>While one might assume Bluetooth SIGs would be the answer going forward, history and current company commentary have very clearly indicated otherwise. <b>I’ve yet to find a single sports tech company that wants to deal with pushing forward new device profiles with the Bluetooth SIG.</b> Companies don’t see that as a viable route to success, and certainly not worth their time and headaches.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/1hzlz9z/meirl/" author="" source="Reddit">Meirl</a> <img src="{att_link}separate_airport.webp" href="{att_link}separate_airport.webp" align="none" caption="Separate Airport" scale="75%"> <bq>They should make a separate airport for people who know how to act like they've been out in public before</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/probable" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Probable</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_probable.jpg" href="{att_link}smbc_probable.jpg" align="none" caption="SMBC Probable" scale="75%"> <bq>God, why is there something and not nothing? Probability. There are infinite possible ways to have something and only one way to have nothing. Here, let me rephrase your question: "God, if I pick a random number from an infinite list of numbers, why isn't there a 50-50 chance of getting zero?"</bq> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <a href="https://30fps.net/pages/pvs-portals-and-quake/" author="Pekka Väänänen" source="30fps.net">Portals and Quake</a> <bq><b>Frustum culling still leaves some performance on the table. Many objects may still be within the field of view of the camera even if they don’t contribute any pixels to the final image.</b> This is not a performance catastrophe if everything is rendered from front to back. GPU’s early-z testing will help here. Still, in large worlds it would be faster to never submit these objects for rendering in the first place. <b>Occlusion culling is a process where you discard objects that you deem to lie behind other objects in the scene.</b> Its purpose is to discard as many occluded objects as possible. It’s not strictly needed, since you’ll get the correct image thanks to the z-buffer anyway. There are a few ways to do this such as the hierarchical z-buffer, occlusion queries, portal culling, and potentially visible sets (PVS).</bq> <bq><b>A straightforward way to test portals for visibility is to intersect their screenspace bounding boxes.</b> Those are shown in white in the picture below. If two bounding boxes overlap, we can see through the respective portals. More accurate tests can be performed with 3D clipping or per-pixel operations.</bq> <bq>in Quake the cells are very small. But no portals are tested at runtime. Instead, <b>each cell gets a precomputed list of other cells that can been seen from it. This is the Potentially Visible Set (PVS)</b> for that cell.</bq> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCRHSIg6zo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/IfCRHSIg6zo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Matt's Ramblings" caption="Quake's PVS: A hidden gem of rendering optimization"> <bq>With the fifth leaf, an exact visibility test would require us to check whether a line exists passes through all four portals. In general, calculating exact visibility for arbitrary numbers of portals is incredibly complex, in terms of computation time, theory, and implementation. Instead, Quake takes a conservative approach. <b>Rather than asking whether a line passes through all four portals, it simply asks whether a line passes through the source portal, the clipped portal from the previous step, and the new target portal</b>, which can be done using the same separator technique from the previous step. Any line that passes through all four portals must necessarily pass through the restricted set of portals, therefore <b>any leaf that is truly visible will always be marked visible by this method.</b> On the other hand, there may exist lines that pass through the restricted set that do not pass through all four portals, meaning that <b>leaves that are invisible may be marked as visible.</b> This process continues repeatedly until an invisible leaf is encountered.</bq>