reading
Sunday, 2 January 2022 - 11:33am
As numbers on the calendar ticked over, I was mostly reading:
- Oh Great They’re Putting Guns On Robodogs Now —Caitlin Johnstone:
So hey they’ve started mounting sniper rifles on robodogs, which is great news for anyone who was hoping they’d start mounting sniper rifles on robodogs. At an exhibit booth in the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exhibition, Ghost Robotics (the military-friendly competitor to the better-known Boston Dynamics) proudly showed off a weapon that is designed to attach to its quadruped bots made by a company called SWORD Defense Systems. “The SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) was specifically designed to offer precision fire from unmanned platforms such as the Ghost Robotics Vision-60 quadruped,” SWORD proclaims on its website. “Chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor allows for precision fire out to 1200m, the SPUR can similarly utilize 7.62×51 NATO cartridge for ammunition availability. Due to its highly capable sensors the SPUR can operate in a magnitude of conditions, both day and night. The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now.”
- Nurdles: The Worst Toxic Waste You’ve Probably Never Heard Of — Karen McVeigh at Mother Jones:
Nurdles, the colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets,” are the little-known building block for all our plastic products. The tiny beads can be made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other plastics. Released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories, they will sink or float, depending on the density of the pellets and if they are in freshwater or saltwater. They are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. In the environment, they fragment into nanoparticles whose hazards are more complex. They are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, after tire dust. An astounding 230,000 tons of nurdles end up in oceans every year. Like crude oil, nurdles are highly persistent pollutants, and will continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades. They are also “toxic sponges,” which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants on to their surfaces.
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda — Caitlin Johnstone:
The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.” […] I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.
- David Graeber’s Final Challenge — Giulio Ongaro in Tribune reviews The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow:
More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom—freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences—that appear to have been simply assumed among our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: ‘The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared,’ they suggest, ‘but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.’
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- Soft-wars — Blair Fix:
Political economist Chris Mouré has a new paper out in the Review of Capital as Power. It’s called ‘Soft-wars’, and it is a fascinating case study of the behavior of big tech. The story starts in 2011, when Microsoft led a $4.5 billion consortium purchase of Nortel and Novel. Later than year, Google responded by buying Motorola for $12.9 billion. The funny thing is that Google then proceeded to sell off what it had just bought. By 2014, almost nothing was left of Google-owned Motorola. Nothing except patents. And that, Mouré thinks, was the whole point. Mouré argues that this acquisition war was ultimately a battle over intellectual property. Google and Microsoft were competing to control the mobile market. And the way to do that was not to ‘produce’ anything. It was to command property rights.[…] Mouré’s analysis nicely illustrates a truism in economics: big corporations behave nothing like economics textbooks say they should. The textbooks say that profits should stem from productivity. But the reality is that what big companies care about most is restriction. The battle for profits is a battle over property rights — the legal right to restrict.
Sunday, 19 December 2021 - 7:59pm
This month, I have been mostly drinking too much, but I also read a few things:
- Cuba’s Vaccine Could End up Saving Millions of Lives — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin:
After a dire twelve months, when a too hasty reopening sent the pandemic surging, deaths peaking, and the country back into a crippling shutdown, a successful vaccination program has turned the pandemic around in the country. Cuba is now one of the few lower-income countries to have not only vaccinated a majority of its population, but the only one to have done so with a vaccine it developed on its own. The saga suggests a path forward for the developing world as it continues struggling with the pandemic in the face of ongoing corporate-driven vaccine apartheid, and points more broadly to what’s possible when medical science is decoupled from private profit. According to Johns Hopkins University, as of the time of writing, Cuba has fully vaccinated 78 percent of its people, putting it ninth in the world, above wealthy countries like Denmark, China, and Australia (the United States, with a little below 60 percent of its population vaccinated, is ranked fifty-sixth). The turnaround since the vaccination campaign began in May has revived the country’s fortunes in the face of the twin shocks of the pandemic and an intensifying US blockade.
- In Praise of One-Size-Fits-All — Lawrence B. Glickman in the Boston Review:
In his second inaugural address, FDR celebrated government as an institution that “has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable.” For decades after he died in 1945, the federal government showed itself to be capable of promoting the general welfare not only via programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and through ambitious infrastructure programs (such as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956), but in its promotion of civil and voting rights, which, for the first time since Reconstruction, made the United States a true democracy in which all adult citizens had “one-size-fits-all” rights. But as the New Deal order waned, a new ethic emerged that privileged individual choice, denigrated society, denounced public spending, and critiqued the government as sclerotic and increasingly incapable of serving citizens—now often figured as “customers,” “taxpayers,” or “entrepreneurs.” In the process, “one size fits all” migrated from a selling point of modern fabrics to a derogatory term connoting the straitjacket of the autocratic, bureaucratic welfare state. It entered into our political language just as the reigning paradigms of economics (mass production/consumption) and politics (New Dealism) were sputtering. If the phrase signified expansiveness in marketing, it came to stand for constraint in politics. The changing valence of the phrase marks a political transformation with which we are still wrestling.
- Call Corporate Crime Corporate Crime — by the Anonymous (what are they afraid of?) editor of Corporate Crime Reporter:
The section of the Wall Street Journal that covers corporate crime doesn’t use the term. Instead, it’s called Risk & Compliance Journal. NYU Law School has a program to study and report on corporate crime. But they call it the NYU Law Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement. The New York Times prefers the term white collar crime. As does the American Bar Association, which has a White Collar Crime Division. Primary topic of discussion? Corporate crime. Why white collar crime instead of corporate crime? White collar crime includes not just the corporate crime of the bank stealing from millions of customers, but bank tellers stealing from the bank. The implication? Hey, it’s not just corporations. Everybody does it!
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- What living with COVID would really mean for Australia — John Quiggin in Independent Australia:
What most people who talk about “living with COVID” in Australia seem to have in mind is something different: a situation where there is a steady but manageable flow of cases, say 1,000 per day in Australia and where a limited set of restrictions is maintained indefinitely. […] Unfortunately, this version of “living with COVID” represents a mathematical impossibility. The reason this is that infections diseases display exponential growth, or contraction, measured by the (effective) reproduction rate — R. If R>1, the pandemic spreads until it runs out of people to infect and if R<1, it contracts until the number of cases dwindles to zero, or there is some new introduction. […] What this means is that a stable number of cases can only be maintained with an unstable policy, involving repeated tightenings and relaxations, just as we have seen in all countries that have chosen to “live with COVID”.
Sunday, 31 October 2021 - 12:36pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes — Olivia Little & Abbie Richards at Media Matters for America:
TikTok’s “For You” page (FYP) recommendation algorithm appears to be leading users down far-right rabbit holes. By analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content, Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content. TikTok has long been scrutinized for its dangerous algorithm, viral misinformation, and hateful video recommendations, yet this new research demonstrates how the company’s recommendation algorithm can quickly radicalize a user’s FYP. Transphobia is deeply intertwined with other kinds of far-right extremism, and TikTok’s algorithm only reinforces this connection. Our research suggests that transphobia can be a gateway prejudice, leading to further far-right radicalization.
- Pru Goward AFR column on ‘underclass’ condemned as disturbing and abusive — Amanda Meade in the Guardian:
An article by the former New South Wales Liberal minister Pru Goward which portrayed lower socio-economic Australians as dysfunctional and lazy “proles” has been condemned as disturbing, abusive and inaccurate by anti-poverty advocates. The opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by the former NSW families minister argues there is an “underclass” of Australians who are “appalling” housekeepers and neglectful parents and “almost entirely lacking [in] discipline”. […] “Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day,” Goward wrote in Wednesday’s AFR.
- Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations — Caitlin Johnstone:
After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange. For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.
- Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? — Judith Butler in the Guardian:
Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims. […] In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations. They feast off the very instability they promise to contain, and their own discourse only delivers more chaos. Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, they concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship. […] This form of fascism manifests instability even as it seeks to ward off the “destabilization” of the social order brought about by progressive politics. The opposition to “gender” often merges with anti-migrant furor and fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia. Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”, engaging in “criminal” acts even as they exercise their rights of passage under international law. In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off. It mixes right and left discourses at will.
- Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action — Todd Miller, Nick Buxton, and Mark Akkerman, the Transnational Institute (TNI):
Seven of the biggest emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Canada spent 15 times more ($1.5 billion compared to around $100 million); Australia 13 times more ($2.7 billion compared to $200 million); the US almost 11 times more ($19.6 billion compared to $1.8 billion); and the UK nearly two times more ($2.7 billion compared to $1.4 billion).
Sunday, 17 October 2021 - 12:01pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years? — Caitlin Johnstone:
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed. […] Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had.
- A line in the water — Peter Mares, Inside Story:
With the world watching in horror as the window closes on evacuation efforts at Kabul airport, it’s hard to avoid the comparison with another drama, twenty years ago, involving Afghans fleeing a Taliban regime. The window to safety was blocked back then, too, but it was closer to home, on the waters around Christmas Island.
- Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
- Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks — Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff for Yahoo! News:
In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
- Jeff Bezos’s date with Boris Johnson didn’t prove all that taxing — David Mitchell in the Guardian:
The New York meeting with Bezos was extensively trailed in advance as an occasion when the prime minister would confront the world’s richest man on the issue of taxation. “Boris Johnson to address Amazon’s tax record with Jeff Bezos,” promised the Guardian; “Johnson’s taxing questions for Amazon,” warned the Times. Brace yourselves, Manhattan, the straight-talking Etonian is on his way! It didn’t quite work out like that. For a start, Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, were late. Was it gamesmanship or traffic? Traffic was blamed and there will have been traffic, but there’s always traffic. And the lateness played well in two ways: first Johnson was left waiting so seemed junior, and second Bezos showed himself vulnerable to traffic so seemed human. Despite his stratospheric wealth, he hadn’t arrived punctually, borne by chopper or drone or sewer crocodile. For the man whose stylist appears to have last worked with Donald Pleasence on You Only Live Twice, this was a refreshingly normal look.
Sunday, 10 October 2021 - 3:31pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Where Has All the Money Gone? — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:
But in his Treatise on Money, Keynes provided a more realistic account based on the “speculative demand for money.” During a sharp economic downturn, he argued, money is not necessarily hoarded, but flows from “industrial” to “financial” circulation. Money in industrial circulation supports the normal processes of producing output, but in financial circulation it is used for “the business of holding and exchanging existing titles to wealth, including stock exchange and money market transactions.” A depression is marked by a transfer of money from industrial to financial circulation – from investment to speculation. So, the reason why QE has had hardly any effect on the general price level may be that a large part of the new money has fueled asset speculation, thus creating financial bubbles, while prices and output as a whole remained stable. One implication of this is that QE generates its own boom-and-bust cycles.
- On The Cusp — George Monbiot:
If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual. Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift. Yet everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual. Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they’re less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.
- US government rights in patents on Molnupiravir, based upon funding of R&D at Emory University — Luis Gil Abinader at Knowledge Ecology International:
Molnupiravir, the oral pill that is showing promising results as a potential treatment for covid-19, was invented at Emory University with U.S. government funds. After more than six years of non-clinical testing, Emory licensed molnupiravir to Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to continue its development as a potential treatment for covid-19. The discovery and further research efforts made at Emory between 2013 and 2020 benefited from an estimate of $35 million dollars in government support. As a consequence of these investments, the U.S. government has rights in key molnupiravir patents. […] Perhaps one of the reasons why Ridgeback is minimizing the role of the U.S. government in the development of molnupiravir is to avoid demands to make the drug available at a reasonable price. That kind of move has worked for companies like Novartis in the past. Yet, as a promising oral pill with many potential generic suppliers, the availability and affordability of molnupiravir will likely face intense scrutiny in the upcoming months. Harvard and King’s College researchers Melissa Barber and Dzintars Gotham recently estimated the cost of production for molnupiravir. Based on a previously developed algorithm and public information they concluded that the cost of producing molnupiravir’s active pharmaceutical ingredients, including a 10% profit margin, is $19.99 a course. In June 2021, Merck announced an agreement to supply the U.S. government approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir for approximately $1.2 billion. KEI has obtained a copy of this contract, which is discussed in another blog published today. According to the contract, the U.S. government will pay $712 dollars per unit of molnupiravir, about 35 times the cost of production as estimated by Barber and Gotham.
- GOP Lawmaker Pushes Insane Claim ‘Octopus-Like Creatures’ Are in Vax — Zoe Richards in the Daily Beast:
The email from the legislator contained a 52-page “report” with disinformation on COVID-19, including claims that “unknown, octopus-like creatures are being injected into millions of children worldwide.” The report also made claims that 5G technology had somehow been inserted into the vaccine to control people’s thoughts and called the pope and others “at the top” of the Roman Catholic Church “satanists” and “luciferans” for backing public health measures. The report additionally made the wild suggestion that the babies of vaccinated parents in Mexico were “transhuman”—born with “pitch-black eyes” and undergoing accelerated aging.
Sunday, 3 October 2021 - 1:43pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans — Monica Chin in the Verge:
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question. Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
- The 'fetal heartbeat' that defines Texas' new abortion laws doesn't exist, say doctors — Bethany Dawson, Business Insider:
Heartbeats in humans produce thump-thump sounds caused by the opening and closing of the heart's valves. However, in conversation with NPR, Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says that that heartbeat doesn't exist in 6-week old fetuses. "At six weeks of gestation, those valves don't exist," she told the news site. In fact, it takes about 9-10 weeks for these valves to form.
- America dumbs down freedom, with disastrous consequences — Rob Schofield at NC Policy Watch:
There are obviously many factors at play in the pandemic of gun violence that plagues our nation, but at the heart of the matter is the simple fact that we are drowning in an ocean of poorly regulated, easy-to-access firearms. And this fact, in turn, is the undeniable byproduct of the modern gun lobby’s huge success in muddling and altering American understandings of “freedom,” so that a concept that traditionally connoted and implicated important ideas like responsibility and citizenship in addition to personal liberty, now for many means little more than “license” – the right to do pretty much whatever the hell one wants. A similar pattern is clearly at play in the COVID-19 pandemic. A half century ago, the idea of mass resistance to public health vaccinations was largely unthinkable and rightfully dismissed by most Americans as akin to the paranoid claims of the lunatic fringe in equating water fluoridation with totalitarianism. This acceptance did not arise because vaccination was risk-free. While most people were thankful for the personal health benefits they and their children would likely enjoy from vaccination, there was also a common understanding that vaccination was a public duty – a small sacrifice that one made as an act of citizenship in a free society. Today, after decades of well-funded, anti-government propaganda from the far right, a sizable chunk of the population rejects the citizenship component of freedom and our morgues and hospital ICU’s offer stark testimony to the impact of the shift.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows — Karen Hao in MIT Technology Review:
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm. […] “Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach,” wrote the report’s author, Jeff Allen, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook.
- Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation — Joseph Bernstein in Harpers:
The content giants—Facebook, Twitter, Google—have tried for years to leverage the credibility and expertise of certain forms of journalism through fact-checking and media-literacy initiatives. In this context, the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations. Indeed, over the past few years, some journalists have started to grouse that their jobs now consist of fact-checking the very same social platforms that are vaporizing their industry. Ironically, to the extent that this work creates undue alarm about disinformation, it supports Facebook’s sales pitch. What could be more appealing to an advertiser, after all, than a machine that can persuade anyone of anything? This understanding benefits Facebook, which spreads more bad information, which creates more alarm. Legacy outlets with usefully prestigious brands are taken on board as trusted partners, to determine when the levels of contamination in the information ecosystem (from which they have magically detached themselves) get too high. For the old media institutions, it’s a bid for relevance, a form of self-preservation. For the tech platforms, it’s a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions. A trusted disinformation field is, in this sense, a very useful thing for Mark Zuckerberg.
Sunday, 26 September 2021 - 10:57am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The experts weigh in — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
- National Self-Sufficiency — John Maynard Keynes:
The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short "the financial results," as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant's nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid," whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"--though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. Even to-day I spend my time--half vainly, but also, I must admit, half successfully--in trying to persuade my countrymen that the nation as a whole will assuredly be richer if unemployed men and machines are used to build much needed houses than if they are supported in idleness. For the minds of this generation are still so beclouded by bogus calculations that they distrust conclusions which should be obvious, out of a reliance on a system of financial accounting which casts doubt on whether such an operation will "pay." We have to remain poor because it does not "pay" to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces but because we cannot "afford" them.
- The Great American Science Heist: How the Bayh-Dole Act Wrested Public Science From the People’s Hands — Alexander Zaitchik, the Intercept:
Speaking before the subcommittee, Rickover railed against the proposed policy changes. “Government contractors should not be given title to inventions developed at government expense,” he said. “These inventions are paid for by the public and therefore should be available for any citizen to use or not as he sees fit.” This seemed self-evident to Rickover. After all, he noted, “companies generally claim title to the inventions of their employees on the basis that the company pays their wages.” It befuddled and angered him that the U.S. government would consider giving up its own shop rights to industries that would never do the same. In his decades managing the development of nuclear reactors, Rickover had witnessed the very contest between public interest and private greed so clearly anticipated by mid-century advocates for keeping public science under public control. In the final months of the Carter administration, this position, advocated most forcefully during the wartime birth of today’s federal research establishment, was fading as a Democratic faith.
Sunday, 19 September 2021 - 2:08pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The Paradox of Trumpist Patriotism — Joshua Tait in the Bulwark:
Trumpist writers have worked themselves into such a state that they have stretched their critique to include literally half of the American population. As Michael Anton, a former Trump aide who is now a Claremont Institute senior fellow and a Hillsdale lecturer, puts it, “one side loves America, the other hates it—or can tolerate it only for what it might someday become, were the Left’s entire program to be enacted without exception.” Anton, the articulate id of intellectual Trumpism, cuts America in two on religious, linguistic, and even moral grounds, casting the Biden coalition as speaking a babble of languages, worshipping “wokeness” with “Dionysian abandon,” and conceiving of justice solely through the lens of punishment. In a blunt essay, Glenn Ellmers, another Claremont and Hillsdale associate, claims “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” In part, Ellmers means that “foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens.” But Ellmers’s real target is native-born Americans “who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.” These pretenders “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.” Who are the real Americans then? The 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020.
- We’re all teenagers now — Paul Howe in Aeon:
The real world is also replete with examples of adults acting like adolescents in many aspects of their lives. The phrase ‘unintended consequences’ used at the beginning of this essay usually implies negative effects, but there are notable benefits as well. As a result of the gradual absorption of adolescent qualities, we’ve slowly chipped away at many rigidities of the adult world and grown more free-spirited, open and spontaneous […] These youthful character traits have served to make us more accepting and generous in many respects. Rising tolerance towards marginalised groups can be partly attributed to this emergent youthful mindset – a process normally seen as originating with the dynamic social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, but which actually can be detected much earlier in the shifting attitudes of rising generations from the early 20th century onwards. Traits connected to openness have also made us more creative compared with a century ago – contributing to the long-term rise of what the urban theorist Richard Florida has called the ‘creative class’, people who value creativity and individuality in the workplace and other areas of their lives, and thereby contribute greatly to economic innovation and prosperity. The impact of adolescence on the adult world has played a major, and underappreciated, role in generating these vitally important liberating effects that have transformed life for the better over the long haul. But there is an undeniable downside to the story as well. Many authors have traced the pernicious rise of impulsiveness, incivility and me-first brashness across different sectors of US life – social and cultural, economic and political.
- Why it breaks your brain to take a compliment — The Oatmeal:
- The Most Precious Resource is Agency — Simon Sarris:
Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not. Even for smart children, education endlessly ushers them towards an often far and always abstract future, so far and abstract that some children seem to apprise the opposite of agency, they take on a learned helplessness, and downplay that the future is a reality at all.
Sunday, 12 September 2021 - 7:46am
This fortnight, I have been recovering from surgery, tearing through my RSS backlog, and mostly reading:
- Thought for the day — Digby's Hullabaloo:
- Coming in 2040: No Future, the First Punk Rock Nursing Home — Lisa Borders at McSweeney's:
Do the seniors in your life sneer at the idea of decorum? Spit at the mention of Rupert Murdoch, and go into an anti-Reagan rant like it’s 1984 and they’re canvassing for Mondale? Do they insist that none of the good music in the ’80s was played on the radio, except for college radio? Have you found old photos of Grandma when she was 20 wearing Doc Martens, ripped fishnet stockings, and a miniskirt? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then No Future might be just the place for your elders to rock out their sunset years. Staffed almost entirely by the love children of Henry Rollins, we’re opening our doors in 2040 at this first-of-its-kind facility. From the moment you walk in, you’ll see the difference. Gone are the floral wallpaper borders, the fake oak wainscoting, the lingering scent of Febreze and death you’ll notice in other elder care facilities. We’ve designed No Future to resemble a warehouse squat, the kind in which your loved one likely attended many a gig. Our thin Berber carpeting was custom-ripped, cigarette-burned, and beer-soaked for maximum authenticity.
- Hayek’s Bastards: The Populist Right’s Neoliberal Roots — Quinn Slobodian in Tribune:
Both neoliberals and the new right scorn egalitarianism, global economic equality, and solidarity beyond the nation. Both see capitalism as inevitable and judge citizens by the standards of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps most strikingly, both draw from the same pantheon of heroes. A case in point is Hayek himself, who is an icon on both sides of the neoliberal-populist divide. Speaking alongside Marine Le Pen at the party congress of the French National Front in 2018, self-described populist Steve Bannon condemned the ‘establishment’ and the ‘globalists’ yet built his speech around Hayek’s own metaphor of the road to serfdom, invoking the authority of the master’s name
- Good Morning, I.. WHOA! Uuh, I'll Come Back - Grant Hojohn — Phil Are Go!:
- The Roots of White Evangelicalism’s Crisis Are in White Evangelical Churches, Not Republican Politics — Jesse Curtis in Religion Dispatches:
Within a decade of Jim Crow’s demise, the hottest trend in white evangelical church startups taught that racial diversity in local churches threatened church growth. An influential cadre of white evangelical professors and mission theorists centered at Fuller Seminary assured a new generation of pastors that homogeneous congregations allowed worshippers to feel at home with “Our Kind of People” —i.e. white people—and facilitated healthy church growth. Race was a matter of pragmatism rather than justice; merely a tool that could be used to expand the evangelical coalition. They insisted this had nothing to do with the bad old days of segregation. They were merely finding the most effective ways to spread the gospel. Black evangelical pastors such as Clarence Hilliard warned that a theology of church growth that focused on homogeneous congregations and a personal ticket to heaven was quietly forming deep habits of selfishness in a racist society. It was 1976, and Hilliard wasn’t critiquing the Christian Right, because it didn’t exist. He was warning about what white evangelicals were learning in their own churches.
- Robodebt: A multi-layered policy failure — Peter Whiteford in Progress in Political Economy (PPE):
The Robodebt fiasco involves policy failures across numerous dimensions. The most obvious – and in many ways the least important failure – is that it failed to achieve the budgetary savings that were its main objective. A more important failure is that the Australian government decided to act unlawfully. This was compounded by the failure of the administrative procedures of government to identify and prevent these unlawful acts. Even more seriously, hundreds of thousands of people were adversely affected. This human cost is difficult to assess and involves much more than financial losses. Just over 2,000 people who had received a Robodebt notice between July 2016 and October 2018 died during that period, although in the absence of an official coroner’s report, no causes can be attributed. However, it has been noted that from January 2017, Centrelink began tweeting the contact number for Lifeline, the national charity providing 24-hour support and suicide prevention services.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- U.S. Military Training Document Says Socialists Represent “Terrorist” Ideology — Ken Klippenstein in the Intercept:
A Navy counterterrorism training document obtained exclusively by The Intercept appears to conflate socialists with terrorists and lists the left-wing ideology alongside “neo-nazis.” A section of the training document subtitled “Study Questions” includes the following: “Anarchists, socialists and neo-nazis represent which terrorist ideological category?” The correct answer is “political terrorists,” a military source briefed on the training told me. The document, titled “Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations,” is part of a longer training manual recently disseminated by the Naval Education Training and Command’s Navy Tactical Training Center in conjunction with the Center for Security Forces. The training is designed for masters-at-arms, the Navy’s internal police, the military source said.
- Essentialism and Traditionalism in Academic Research — Ryan Kyger and Blair Fix:
‘Essentialism’ is the view that behind real-world objects lie ‘essences’ — a type of eternal category that you cannot observe directly but is nonetheless there. Racial categories are a common type of ‘essence’. To be racist is to attribute to different groups universal qualities that define them as people. Given the long history of racism, it’s clear that humans need little impetus to impose categories onto the world. Still, our instinct to categorize is not always bad. In fact, it’s a key part of science. Looking for patterns is how Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table. It’s how John Snow discovered that cholera was water-borne. And it’s how Johannes Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. So if categorizing patterns can be helpful, what makes essentialism bad? To be essentialist, in our view, is to reify a category (or theory) into a ‘higher truth’. By so doing, you don’t use evidence to inform a theory. You use theory to interpret evidence … and you don’t consider that you could be wrong.
- Health Drink — xkcd:
- The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories — Caitlin Johnstone:
Two different media watchdog outlets, Media Lens and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation by Icelandic newspaper Stundin that a US superseding indictment in the case against Julian Assange was based on false testimony from diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester Sigurdur Thordarson. […] “We have not found a single report by any ‘serious’ UK broadcaster or newspaper,” says the report by Media Lens. “But in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness — that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution — would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more.”
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
Sunday, 29 August 2021 - 10:35am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- More Money and Fewer Readers: The Paradox of Subscriber Journalism — Jack Shafer at Politico:
Muckraker George Seldes, one of America’s most accomplished independent journalists, built his paper-and-postage newsletter, In fact, into a 176,000-circulation phenomenon in the late 1940s, outpacing the circulation of both the New Republic and the Nation. Every bit as edgy in his journalistic approach as such Substack all-stars as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias or Matt Taibbi, Seldes should have gloried in his triumph. Instead, he was depressed by his lack of mass reach. No matter how hard he tried, he lamented in his final issue that he couldn’t connect very far beyond the “$5 liberals” who subscribed to In fact. He wanted a mass audience that would allow him to keep pace with the big newspapers that reached a million subscribers. He wanted his words to land as hard as theirs. Instead, the elite audience he’d cultivated became too much of an echo chamber.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- Gee, Officer Kristen — Patrick Marlborough in Meanjin:
Have you ever had to explain to somebody that the Holocaust did in fact happen? Maybe a co-worker, or someone on Facebook, or a particularly curious if off-putting child? How about someone who holds your future in their hands? Someone who you’ve watched bully a man with one arm into a job stacking shelves at Coles? Someone who just last week referred to a severely intellectually disabled man as a ‘born slacker’? Have you ever had to turn to that person and explain to them, slowly and delicately, that Hitler was a very real man who did some very bad things and that the Holocaust was not a collective false memory cleverly beamed into our brains by the race of lizard men who secretly run the world? Oh, you haven’t? Well, just imagine you have for a moment. And that at the end of your brief yet exacerbated explanation they turn back to their computer, sniff, and say ‘well, that’s not what I’ve heard’ then tell you there’s a minimum wage job going in a town in the wheat-belt that’s best known for its record breaking suicide statistics—and that you have to take it, or starve.
- The Left Must Take Back Labour — Craig Murray:
If you believe that the Starmer project was a genuine belief that a right wing agenda would get Labour back into power, then the Starmer Project has totally failed on those terms. If you believe that the Starmer project was a scheme to neutralise any threat from Labour to the vast disparity of wealth in the UK and internationally, then it has spectacularly succeeded.
- Bow Down to Me, Pathetic Mortals, For I Have a Loud Engine — Susie Aquilina in McSweeney's:
It has arrived, oh feeble ones, the time for my automobile to barrel through your vicinity and announce my prowess—my vital and irrefutable masculinity. How is it that you know of my unquestioned and eternal virility? I have a vehicle that goes vroom vroom! Oh, how I pity you, you mite of a human, sitting there in silence, with no engine to rev. How you must want for power, that which I possess. The power to irritate everyone within a two-mile radius. This sound that emanates from my swift movement, this amplified mechanical sputtering, exclaims to all my undisputed vigor.
- The Central Banker’s New Clothes — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:
Friedman ignored what John Maynard Keynes called the “speculative demand for money,” which the British economist Ralph Hawtrey had succinctly identified in 1925. “When trade is slack, traders accumulate cash balances because the prospects of profit from any enterprise are slight, and the rate of [return] from any investment is low,” Hawtrey said. “When trade is active, an idle balance is a more serious loss, and traders hasten to use all their resources in their business.” This means that the state of the economy determines the quantity of money in circulation, and not vice versa. Uncertainty about future inflation is only one of many factors affecting business decisions, which reflect firms’ expectations of “customers at the door.” A central bank’s ability to control the price level and the level of economic activity through purely monetary operations is thus very limited. The bottom line is that for money to affect the economy in a predictable way, it must be spent in a predictable way. And that can happen only if the spender is the government.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks — John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain in Columbia Journalism Review:
Our team of researchers at Harvard Law School has undertaken a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a data set provided to us by the Times. […] We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set). Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.