● 12.23.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/12/2022: Catching Up With General News and Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• A nice little bonus before the holidays, Intel have made public work on their brand new Xe driver for the future of Intel graphics on Linux. Found via Collabora developer Jason Ekstrand on Mastodon, who previously started off this work, this is quite exciting.

Applications

• The GPU-Viewer 2.0 is a graphical user interface (GUI) tool for Linux that provides information about the graphics processing unit (GPU) and graphics drivers on a computer. It combines the functionality of glxinfo, vulkaninfo, and clinfo, command line tools for displaying information about the GPU and graphics drivers, into a single GUI application.

• Written in Python, the GPU-Viewer 2.0 app is a Christmas present for all Linux enthusiasts who want the most detailed information about graphics accelerators on their Linux systems.

Instructionals/Technical

• Google Chrome is a most popular, fast, secure, and easy-to-use free cross-platform web browser developed by Google, and was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, later versions were released to Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android.

• Most of Chrome’s source code is taken from Google’s open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware, which means you can download and use it for free, but you cannot decompile, reverse engineer, or use the source code to build other programs or projects.

Games

• Some of you might have noticed over December our little friendly Penguin logo gained a fancy hat to keep warm, it’s that time of the year again.

• Valve has put up their huge Winter Sale 2022 with tens of thousands of games that are discounted, plus you can now vote for the winners of the Steam Awards. This is a great time to stock up on games ready for the holiday season, or to just fill up your Steam Library ready to play through 2023 because I’m sure you don’t have many games you haven’t played yet right?

• Sail Forth looks like a wonderful ocean adventure on the more chilled side of things (in a way), and if it’s anything like the earlier versions I tried a while back, it would be an easy recommendation. Has quite a mixture of things from peaceful exploration and building up a fleet to various combat encounters too.

• Chinese accessory brand JSAUX have officially put up their transparent backplate for the Steam Deck.

• Here’s one missed from a week ago, Valve are testing another update to the stable version of Proton with Proton 7.0-6 needing some more eyes on it for testing. I don’t imagine it to be released soon, given it’s about to be holiday time.

• New Super Lucky’s Tale appears to be one that somewhat flew under the radar. Originally released in 2020, it looks quite wonderful and after an update it became Steam Deck Verified.

• X-Plane 12 from Laminar Research is a realistic and powerful flight simulator with real-world physics, accurate aircraft systems / behaviour and an immersive simulation of the world.

• [Sebastian] had a tricky problem to solve. Competitors in a Tetris tournament needed to stream video of their Game Boy screens, but no solution readily existed. For reasons of fairness, emulators were right out, and no modifications could be made to the Game Boys, either. Thus, [Sebastian] created the GB Interceptor, a Game Boy capture cartridge.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Devices/Embedded

• There are quite a number of companies seeking to replicate the success of the Raspberry Pi Foundation with offerings for the consumer and industrial markets. However, few are as notable as Pine64. In August 2022, this company announced the Star64 RISC-V single-board computer, a low-cost minicomputer with a RISC-V processor and eMMC module capability.

• With the right kind of push, this board could very well present a considerable challenge to the Raspberry Pi. The product isn’t available for purchase at the time of writing, but it has a number of exciting features which we will take a look at.

• The PoESP32 is a compact module from M5Stack that is equipped with a RJ45 port with PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) support. The device can be used in applications that involve HTTP, MQTT and similar communication protocols.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Leftovers

• 1. The growth of Latin America’s “Pink Tide.” Continuing the wave of progressive wins in 2021, Latin America saw two new critical electoral victories: Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil.  When President Biden’s June Summit of the Americas excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, several Latin American leaders declined to attend, while others used the opportunity to push the United States to respect the sovereignty of the countries in the region. (Stay tuned for CODEPINK’s spring forum “In Search of a New U.S. Policy for a New Latin America.”)

• 2. The U.S. labor movement caught fire. In 2022 we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks reached nearly 7,000 unionized workers and close to 300 unionized stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58% in the first eight months of 2022.  Labor is back and fighting the good fight.

• Bob Buzzanco (BB):…. We’re going to talk today mostly, I think, about organized labor unions, where they were, where they are, maybe why so many people in unions supported Donald Trump in 2016. You’ve been in Youngstown for quite some time. You’ve been involved in Youngstown politics for quite some time. You were there in 1977 when things really turned badly. Just a little bit . . . What I don’t think people nowadays, the union membership is at 10%, I don’t think people really know what labor was like, especially in the post-World War Two era, its strength and some of the concessions it made in order to get to that economic position.

• Irvin Jim, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), told us that his country “is sitting on a tinderbox.” A series of crises are wracking South Africa presently: an unemployment crisis, an electricity crisis, and a crisis of xenophobia. The context behind the ANC national conference is stark. “The situation is brutal and harsh,” Irvin Jim said. “The social illness that people experience each day is terrible. The rate of crime has become very high. The gender-based violence experienced by women is very high. The statistics show us that basically people are fighting for crumbs.”

• At the ANC conference, five of the top seven posts—from the president to treasurer general—went to Ramaphosa’s supporters. With the Ramaphosa team in place, and with Ramaphosa himself to be the presidential candidate in 2024, it is unlikely that the ANC will propose dramatic changes to its policy orientation or provide a new outlook for the country’s future to the South African people. The ANC has governed the country for almost 30 years beginning in 1994 after apartheid ended, and the party has won a commanding 62.65 percent of the total vote share since then before the 2014 general elections. In the last general election in 2019, Ramaphosa won with 57.5 percent of the vote, still ahead of any of its opponents. This grip on electoral power has created a sense of complacency in the upper ranks of the ANC. However, at the grassroots, there is anxiety. In the municipal elections of 2021, the ANC support fell below 50 percent for the first time. A national opinion poll in August 2022 showed that the ANC would get 42 percent of the vote in the 2024 elections if they were held then.

• To our way of thinking, the whole purpose behind robotic vacuum cleaners is their autonomy. They’re not particularly good at vacuuming, but they are persistent about it, and eventually get the job done with as little human intervention as possible. So why in the world would you want to convert a robotic vacuum to radio control?

• The soul of a rock band is its rhythm section, usually consisting of a drummer and bass player. If you don’t believe that, try listening to a band where these two can’t keep proper time. Bands can often get away with sloppy guitars and vocals (this is how punk became a genre), but without that foundation you’ll be hard pressed to score any gigs at all. Unfortunately drums are bulky and expensive, and good drummers hard to find, so if you’re an aspiring bassist looking to practice laying down a solid groove on your own check out this drum machine designed by [Duncan McIntyre].

• Emmanuel Carrère does not write happy books. The uncategorizable “nonfiction novels” for which Carrère has become best-known are about, respectively, a man who killed his family (The Adversary); Eastern European Schmerz (My Life as a Russian Novel); the intertwined tragedies of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and the death of his sister-in-law (Lives Other Than My Own); and the mysteries of the Christian faith (The Kingdom). Along the way, he’s written partially fictionalized biographies of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (I Am Alive and You Are Dead) and a Russian avant-gardiste turned ultra-right-wing politician (Limonov), as well as countless reported essays (some collected in 97,196 Words) on politics, culture, and, often, crime.

• The Rev. Madison Shockley discusses the historical, political and controversial misconceptions of the Christmas story.

• That is, either the friends – seminary grads like me – chose not to engage with us on the matter of our political difference or they are not personally offended by scurrilous talk about Biden – either way, something about it really bothered me. I am familiar with this politics without passion; who isn’t? Politics reduced to “Of course I’m a Democrat, what other possibility can there be, unless – and I know you don’t want that – we concede victory to the Trumpies?” The predicament I was in too, was wearyingly familiar – trying to – liberal that I am – accept my friends on their own terms without obliterating my me! What this feels like, in relation to that passionlessness, is that my reality – in which, whatever it is or is not, passion is a constitutive ingredient – is totally eclipsed in liberal reality, The real pain and suffering this causes me – my desire being to keep an inner fire burning, not to pariah myself! – ought to tell me something.

• It does, actually. I know this sounds melodramatic to the naked ear. But hear me, I am trying to explain my despair – for which I can blame only myself – without blaming myself too much! The pain of such an experience of social “self-snuffing” tells me that I, too, can receive history’s grace if I would give up my soul. The demand in neoliberal America to give up the soul is real, and it is never mentioned. Really, few people are aware of the deal that was struck in some smoke-filled room to look the other way when they shoot the hostages! The fact I – chicken-heart that I am – refuse the demand to abandon my soul keeps me with the only claim I have to a political identity, which is “anarchist” before it is anything else. Although “socialist” would sound better and make more friends, socialism’s pragmatic working within the system, worthy and admirable, is a rebuke to anarchist passion.

• In the 1980s I certainly made any number of critical judgments that I now regret, or at least would retract. And I have made occasional errors of fact, which perhaps are inevitable in writing that has to be done and then edited quickly. They are easily corrected in on-line publications. Galleries or museums that don’t otherwise acknowledge reviews complain if you make a seemingly minor factual error. As they should, for the critical record matters. What’s more interesting to me, however, are philosophical misconceptions. Here, then, I look at the mistakes involved in two of my projects, one in a book that I did publish and another in an account that I ultimately failed to finish.

• When I was a graduate student in philosophy, half a century ago!, I devoted part of my doctoral thesis to E. H. Gombrich’s classic Art and Illusion, the theory accompanying his Euro-centric art history The Story of Art. Then within a couple of decades, when art historians looked at art from elsewhere and at modernism, it became clear that Gombrich’s account needed to be dramatically expanded. Because I had taught in China, and reviewed exhibitions of Chinese art both there and in the West, I was particularly interested in a Gombrichian account of art from China. And, also, because I had studied some of the literature on ornamentation, including Gombrich’s book on that subject, The Sense of Order: A study in the psychology of decorative art (1994), I was aware that Islamic art posed enchanting conceptual issues. And so when in 2006 I published A World Art History And Its Objects I attempted to extend Gombrich’s basic model to include some non-Western artistic traditions. Whether or not that project can succeed is, I believe, still an open question. Still, two things happened that changed my sense of the project and made me aware of basic problems.

Science

• Other astronauts have experienced the Overview Effect, a cognitive shift when viewing the planet from outer space, an awe-inspiring transcendental state, overwhelming, often overpowering emotions sometimes accompanied by an ingenious realization of a surging connectiveness of people, the planet, the universe, all pulled together at its origin, a molecule.

• This essay discusses Mitchell’s State of the Planet message as well as his tireless efforts to understand universal connectiveness and including special mention of the reality, or not, of UFOs, as described in his book: From Outer Space To Inner Space (New Page Books, 2022).

Education

• Last Thursday, five weeks into the largest strike in US academic labor history—with some 48,000 workers participating—bargaining teams representing graduate workers across the University of California system signed tentative agreements with the institution. The occasion was, however, not marked only by celebration or relief. Instead, tensions coursing through the body of union membership burst into the open. For weeks, discontent with union leadership’s concessionary approach had simmered; that discontent has now galvanized a campaign to reject the tentative agreements and continue striking.

• They never got the help they needed with learning disabilities. Or they came to this country without the ability to read English. Or they graduated from schools that failed to teach them the most crucial skills.

• For a number of sometimes overlapping reasons, 48 million American adults struggle to read basic English, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That may leave them unable to find and keep a decent job, navigate the signage on city streets, follow medical instructions and vote. They’re vulnerable to scams and face stigma and shame.

• This vampire state of things is general all over, we opined. Rents are far too high for what’s left of goods and services to even bother in these parts, which is quite intentional. Like Patty Hearst, the hostage is entirely willing. Lots yield more profit as empty shells, and no middle manager troubles about hiring, no boss suffers the pain of minimum wage hikes. Chicago has ferociously embraced rentier extravagance, a new vacuous Valley of Kings where Zilch and Nawt rule alone in their ghastly grandeur. As the last few Columbian Expo-era store fronts are demolished, in their place crappy yawning glass windows display bags of Quikrete and empty front desks in bone white voids—institutional waystations that might be essential oil superstores, psych ward admissions, or dog wellness clinics. These lonesome nouveau squats await new clients who will stay a month or two, then evaporate in stupor. Somewhere, a great landfill of metal acronym signs slowly rises… a useless library of obscure characters, relics of forgotten organs of janky sales and wellness outlets.

• Though dropouts all, we paused for education. Looking around us, we realized that the text was not impenetrable. The lesson plan seemed opaque but it was easily pieced together from the glaring evidence, and the help of a good book. We were wandering in a museum devoted to the puzzling religious celebrations of Neoliberalism. The curse of Set had hit this quadrant of Clark after 2008, a commercial dead zone that is manna for unproductive capitals. In the final analysis, nothing is hidden but everything is transformed. How does this Pa Ubu theory of commerce function? Luckily for us, Marcel Bealu’s The Impersonal Adventure has just been translated and published by Wakefield Press. First published in France in 1954, it imagines the most ridiculous of production apocalypses. It’s not a big leap from glut to dearth, all else—deathwise—being relative.

Hardware

• FPV can be a daunting hobby to get into. Screens, cameras, and other equipment can be expensive, and there’s a huge range of hardware to choose from. [JP Gleyzes] has been involved with RC vehicles for many years, and decided to leverage that experience to do FPV on a budget.

• Ferrofluid is a wonderous substance. It’s a liquid goop that responds to magnetic fields in exciting and interesting ways. It’s actually possible to make it yourself, and it’s cheap, too! The key is to get yourself some old VHS tapes.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• On a chilly November morning in 2019, Lutrice Williams, a patient at a state-run mental health center in southern Illinois, was surprised by a visit from a sheriff’s deputy. He served Williams a summons ordering her to report to criminal court on a felony battery charge.

• Williams has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her personal story consists of one upheaval after another. At age 23, in a state of crisis, Williams had sought help at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. She’d never been charged with a crime before. But four months before the deputy showed up, a Choate employee who claimed Williams had forcefully shoved her asked her employer to pursue charges against the patient.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• We’ve pushed hard this year and won many hard-fought battles. And in the battles we have not won, we continue on, because it’s important to stand up for what’s right, even if the road is long and rocky.

• In 2022, we looked into the apps used by daycare centers that collect and share information about the children in their care with their parents. It turned out that not only are the apps dangerously insecure, but the companies that make them were uninterested in making them safer. We responded by giving parents information that they can use to bring their own pressure, including basic recommendations for these applications like implementing two-factor authentication to ensure that this sensitive information about our kids stays in the right hands.

• We won big in security this year. After years of pressure, Apple has finally implemented one of our longstanding demands: that cloud backups be encrypted. Apple also announced the final death of its dangerous plan to scan your phone.

• Normally, our student privacy work focuses on those in elementary or middle school at the youngest. But EFF goes where the security risks are, so we decided to dig into these concerns further.

• First, our technologists investigated the apps to identify privacy and security flaws. Next, our legal experts identified gaps in the law and highlighted the need for regulatory action in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”). And finally, our advocacy team reiterated our concerns in comments submitted to the FTC, in response to its request for public input on commercial surveillance.

• EFF’s technologists, led by Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock, investigated several popular daycare apps and quickly uncovered dangerous security and privacy flaws in the way these apps function.

Defence/Aggression

• Unfortunately, the Times continues to mythologize the nature of U.S.-Israeli relations, ignoring the anti-Americanism of Netanyahu as well as the various Israeli attacks on U.S. interests and even forces over the past six decades.  In the 1950s, in order to prevent the United States from improving relations with Egypt, Israeli agents bombed a United States Information Agency library in Egypt and tried to make it appear to be an Egyptian act of violence.  This false-flag operation was conducted by Egyptian Jews who were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside American-owned assets.  Typically for the Israelis, after five decades of denying involvement in the attack, the Israeli president awarded certificates of appreciation to the surviving agents.

• In the 1960s, the Israelis told the United States at the highest levels that it would not conduct a pre-emptive attack against the Arab states; that is exactly what they did in starting the Six-Day War.  In the war’s opening days, Israeli fighter planes bombed the USS Liberty, leading to the deaths of 34 American sailors.  The Israelis claimed it was an accident.  At the time, I was a CIA analyst working on the Middle East, and the intelligence indicated that this was an extremely well-planned “accident.”  The Israelis still claim that they thought the attack was against an Egyptian ship, and the National Security Agency refuses to declassify documents that would detail Israeli culpability.

• However, diaspora supporters of Israel often disregard these historical facts. That they do so is testimony to the power of the propaganda-generated myth of a liberal, democratic Israel—the idealized Israel that so many just know in their hearts, could be and should be the real Israel. One of those who seems to mistake the ideal for the real is Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, who often writes about Israel.

• In a recent column entitled The Israel We Knew is Gone, Friedman writes as if the imminent Netanyahu government will be unique: “a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics.” Friedman mentions “Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by an Israeli court in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization” as well as “Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, who has long advocated outright Israeli annexation of the West Bank” and defended settler violence against Palestinians.

• The Russian State Duma passed a new law regulating the work of taxi drivers on Thursday. The new legislation requires drivers and the companies that employ them to store information on all rides they’ve completed for up to six months, and to provide the information to law enforcement upon request.

• Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Army’s General Staff, said Thursday that the Russian army has struck more than 1,300 critical facilities in Ukraine during the course of its “special military operation” (Kremlin parlance for the war) so far.

• For the first time in history, a committee of Congress recommended to the DOJ that it prosecute a former U.S. president.

• We want urgent, good-faith diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, not more U.S. weapons, advisors, and endless war.

• The Ukrainian leader told Congress Ukraine doesn’t have ‘enough’ artillery.

• One human rights campaigner said the military’s failure to provide a timely response to Democratic lawmakers’ questions “does not bode well for the U.S. government’s expressed commitment to transparency and accountability.”

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has wrapped up a one-day visit to Washington, D.C., where he called on the Biden administration and lawmakers to provide more military and financial aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia. This was Zelensky’s first overseas trip in nearly a year, since the war began. Ahead of the trip, over 1,000 faith leaders in the United States called for a Christmas truce in Ukraine. For more on the war and hopes for peace, we speak with CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, theologian Cornel West and Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler, senior adviser to the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

• Not far from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, a crowded line of cars take turns crossing Aliso and Alameda streets.  In front of the Metropolitan Detention Center, many sit in their cars, oblivious […]

• The deliberate “failure” of a Vallejo, California police officer to respect the rights of a Marine veteran filming him from his own porch will cost city residents $300,000. And that’s on top of the money the city spent defending Officer David McLaughlin from the lawsuit filed by the victim of his brutality, Adrian Burrell. Here’s how that interaction went down, as summarized by C.J. Ciaramella for Reason.

• Juan Cole compares the annexation of parts of Ukraine by Russia’s Vladimir Putin to the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights.

• The federal states have adopted some new measures on the „Middle East conflict“

• As Lions’ Den insignias are now appearing in every Palestinian neighborhood throughout the Occupied Territories, the group has succeeded in branching out from a specific Nablus neighborhood – Al Qasaba – to become a collective Palestinian experience.

• ***

• Fair warning: this is a seriously misguided and disorienting book, even though useful in a certain sense. It’s useful for some background material it presents, but (as we’ll see) in a severely one-sided way – and important for what it reveals of the impasse of a U.S. peace movement in facing a tragic war in which “our own” side is not the main imperial aggressor.

• Moscow has natural incentives to provoke the crisis. An unraveling of regional security would create more obstacles for Serbia’s EU aspirations, optimistically slated for 2025. The West’s support for Kosovo has historically undermined Serbia’s European integration effort, and 51 percent of Serbs polled by Belgrade-based pollster Demostat in June 2022 said they would vote against EU membership in a national referendum.

• But by escalating tensions, Russia can also prevent further EU and NATO expansion in the region, and potentially reduce Western pressure on Russian forces in Ukraine by diverging resources from Kyiv to the Balkans.

• It began as an inquiry about a missing person, involving four officers from Tara sent to a Wieambilla property in the Western Downs region, some 270km west of the Queensland capital, Brisbane.  According to Ian Leavers, President of the Queensland Police Union, two officers, constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, were shot on arrival around 4.45pm in “a ruthless, calculated and targeted execution of our colleagues”. Of the two remaining officers, one was wounded, while the other escaped.  A neighbour, Alan Dare, in going to assist, was also killed.

• The three individuals accused of perpetrating the shootings were brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train, and Gareth’s wife Stacey Train.  They were subsequently killed by specialist police forces at the site.

Environment

• The agreed rules will cover the entire battery life cycle, from design to end-of-life and apply to all types of batteries sold in the EU: portable batteries, SLI batteries (supplying power for starting, lighting or ignition of vehicles), light means of transport (LMT) batteries (providing power for the traction to wheeled vehicles such as electric scooters and bikes), electric vehicle (EV) batteries and industrial batteries.

Energy

• “Fusion is theoretically supposed to get its power from fusing nuclei together,” I continued. “This would be the opposite of fission, which blasts the nuclei apart. But to start the process, extremely high temperatures are required—100 million degrees Centigrade, more than six times the estimated temperature of the sun’s interior.”

• “Although Dwight Eisenhower, when he was President, suggested that the AEC keep the public ‘confused about fission and fusion,’ fusion is a dirty, radioactive process, too.

• This “landmark achievement,” as U.S. energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, described it, now means that what had been forever decades away — the delivery of electricity powered by fusion — was now……still decades away.

• The Washington Post aptly summed up all the hype in a single sentence: “This was a science experiment more than a demonstration of a practical technology.” The New Statesman echoed the hype angle.

• But in truth, generating electrical power from fusion commercially or at an industrial scale is likely unattainable in any realistic sense, at least within the lifetimes of most readers of this article. At the same time, this experiment will contribute far more to US efforts to further develop its terrifyingly destructive nuclear weapons arsenal.

• Over the last decade or so, there have been many similar announcements featuring breathless language about breakthroughs, milestones, and advances. These statements have come with unfailing regularity from NIF (for example, in 2013) and the larger set of laboratories and commercial firms pursuing the idea of nuclear fusion. Apart from the United States, similar announcements have come from Germany,  China and the United Kingdom. France is expected to take its turn once the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) starts operating. The reactor is currently being built in Cadarache, France, at an estimated cost of somewhere between $25 billion to as high as $65 billion, much higher than the original estimate of $5.6 billion.

• In a separate news release, however, the SEC alleged that Bankman-Fried and his colleagues planned to manipulate the price of FTT, an exchange [cryptocutrency] security token that was integral to FTX.

• Austin, Texas-based Core Scientific attributed its bankruptcy to slumping bitcoin prices, rising energy costs for bitcoin mining and a $7 million unpaid debt from U.S. crypto lender Celsius Network, one of its biggest customers.

• On the same day that the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office reached a plea agreement with an energy company on charges of environmental crimes dating back more than a decade in the town of Dimock, state regulators quietly signed a consent order allowing the company to drill beneath an area that had been subject to a 12-year moratorium on such activity. The decision has outraged residents who’ve lived with the pollution tied to Coterra Energy’s previous fracking activity and endured over a decade in which they’ve lacked access to clean water for their homes.

Wildlife/Nature

• Every year, scores of species disappear into the oblivion of extinction, stamped out, in one way or another, by us humans. Sadly, 2022, was no different. This year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species—the gold standard, sine qua non, most reliable source of such sorrowful information—added 66 new species to its roster of no-longer-extant creatures. With the following obituaries, we honor four of them.1

• Isn’t it all just harmless fun? Comets striking the earth, cataclysmic floods, a surviving vanguard of wise sages who taught ordinary people science, architecture, and astronomy; a warning from the deep past, encoded in otherwise mysterious monuments, about some similar catastrophe in the future? I am talking about Ancient Apocalypse, which Netflix calls a “docuseries,” but the Society for American Archaeology, in a long letter of complaint, has requested be reclassified as “science fiction.” In fact, the series invokes a strangely rigid and unimaginative world, one in which early humanity’s most striking architectural achievements—from the megalithic temples of prehistoric Malta to the huge geometric earthworks of Poverty Point, La.—must all be subject to a single interpretation. One message, one explanation, one decipherer: journalist Graham Hancock.

• You cannot get more iconic than Yosemite National Park. In three Yosemite Valley projects for the National Park Service (NPS), Roberts was tasked with restoring the balance between the ecological and built environments, as what we usually think of as urban issues had developed with the ever-increasing public use of the park’s wildlands. A tall order, as the improvements to visitor accommodations requested by the NPS also needed to protect the Merced River, wetlands, granite cliffs, meadows and forests while increasing ease of access to those grand views. Two of the locations were the Yosemite Village Day Use Area, the primary destination location for visitors and the park’s center of operations, and Yosemite Lodge, built in the 1950s as a destination motel near Yosemite Falls. Roberts was directed to find ways to relieve traffic congestion, realign dangerous road crossings, reposition and expand parking lots, install adequate signage, build new restrooms, and provide a pleasant arrival plaza with orientation and interpretive displays which Roberts situated so as to screen the parking area from visitors’ view. And at the third Yosemite site, Bridalveil Fall, where waters cascading down 600 feet of granite rock make it a favorite first stop for park visitors, many similar restoration requirements had to be addressed. Here the project team was also tasked with constructing new boardwalks to discourage visitors from treading off established trails, thereby disturbing the surrounding wetlands. Another intention was to make it safe for everyone to access the upper overlook at the Fall’s base, as the existing trail’s steep incline was difficult for many people to navigate, especially anyone with mobility issues. Roberts’ team proposed an ecologically responsible solution as it would not require heavy equipment to install and would thus minimize intrusion on the wetlands. He describes this structure as an elevated “self-supporting metal bridging system, tied to boulders for support, to climb at a gentle, accessible gradient.” The Yosemite Conservancy, a partner of the NPS, and NPS trails staff ruled against accepting this plan, considering the technology too radical a departure from park traditions. They eventually settled on what Roberts describes as “an intermediate-level lookout offering a good photo opportunity.” Roberts says the decision was made despite “a years-long consensus-based design process.” It exemplifies how differing concerns within communities can play a significant part in shaping environments.

• Most landscape architects would regard these Yosemite projects as the pinnacle of their career, but for John Northmore Roberts, they are among many highlights of his ongoing professional history. For over fifty years, he has been active as a practitioner and college educator in the field of landscape architecture. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area, Roberts’ landscape architecture work has been centered in Northern California. Roberts seeks ways to live with nature rather than dominating it. He addresses our ever-more pressing need to conserve the earth’s urban and rural communities and all their life forms, finding creative solutions to serve the 21st century and beyond. He takes full advantage of technological advances not available to Frederick Law Olmsted, widely considered the founder of American landscape architecture.

Overpopulation

• Famiglietti and other scientists found in their study, which was published this month in the journal Nature Communications, that since 2019, the rate of groundwater depletion has been 31% greater than during the last two droughts.

• They also found that groundwater losses in the Central Valley since 2003 have totaled about 36 million acre-feet, or about 1.3 times the full water-storing capacity of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, the country’s largest reservoir.

• Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority passed a non-binding resolution this week in support of a large desalination plant in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, Arizona Central reported. The idea was initially pitched to the state board by Israeli desalination specialists from IDE Technologies, who claimed that a desalination plant could replace water that flows from the Colorado River through the Central Arizona Project canal. The project would focus on getting water to Pinal, Pima, and Maricopa counties.

• Arizona is leasing farmland to a Saudi water company, straining aquifers, and threatening future water supply in Phoenix. Fondomonte, a Saudi company, exports the alfalfa to feed its cows in the Middle East. The country has practically exhausted its own underground aquifers there. In Arizona, Fondomonte can pump as much water as it wants at no cost.

• Three-rail shot: a Saudi water company leases pieces of Arizona, and at cut-rate prices. So the Saudi water company can grow alfalfa for Saudi cows while draining the aquifers that serve Arizonans. The Saudi water company is raiding Arizona’s groundwater because Saudi Arabia has nearly exhausted its own supply—an exchange that ought to put other states on high alert.

• Treating water like a revenue source is a terrible idea on its face, but charging bargain-basement prices for a terrible idea is an even more terrible idea. Water cannot be a commodity. It’s not pork bellies or cotton futures. Without it, all life dies.

• That’s right. Arizona is giving away its groundwater for nothing to one of the richest nations on Earth – and to the severe detriment of Arizonans.

• On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry.

• The Uncompahgre Valley, stretching 34 miles from Delta through the town of Montrose, is, and always has been, an arid place. Most of the water comes from the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado, which courses out of the peaks of the Elk Range through the cavernous and sun-starved depths of the Black Canyon, one rocky and inaccessible valley to the east. In 1903, the federal government backed a plan hatched by Uncompahgre farmers to breach the ridge with an enormous tunnel and then in the 1960s to build one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs above the Black Canyon called Blue Mesa. Now that tunnel feeds a neural system of water: 782 miles worth of successively smaller canals and then dirt ditches, laterals and drains that turn 83,000 Western Colorado acres into farmland. Today, the farm association in this valley is one of the largest single users of Colorado River water outside of California.

Finance

• The House Ways and Means Committee voted on Wednesday to publicly release six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns. The vote to release the documents, which proceeded along party lines in the Democratic-controlled committee, ends a years-long legal battle over the former president’s tax returns.

• Underpaid and overworked, workers of the UK’s National Health Service are demanding a wage hike on par with inflation. Both nurses and ambulance workers went on strike in recent days.

• This has led to widespread applause on the left for aspects of President Biden’s agenda that can be considered industrial policy, like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the infrastructure package approved last year. While these bills have considerable merit, they miss the boat in terms of reducing income inequality in important ways.

• First, the idea that we had not been doing industrial policy before Biden, in the sense of favoring specific sectors, is just wrong. We have been dishing out more than $50 billion a year to support biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. If that isn’t supporting our pharmaceutical industry, what would be?

• Salaries in the U.S. aren’t keeping up with inflation, despite pandemic-related increases in some sectors. That’s a major threat to the future for all working Americans – especially the youngest.

• As Americans scramble to make their year-end charitable contributions, they may have to do so without a key tool for understanding how those charities spend their money: their most recent tax forms.

• According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies.

• The Oswald residence at a distance from the others was 4905 Magazine Street, in the neighborhood known as Uptown/Carrollton. In a real estate ad for the area, one webpage listed its assets as “tree-lined residential,” “classical revival mansions,” and “boutique shopping,” not exactly what I might have associated with drifter Oswald when he went searching for lodgings to rent in summer 1963. Most of his other addresses in New Orleans were either on the east side of the city in the Upper Ninth Ward or in downtown on the edge of the French Quarter.

• There may be a perfectly innocent reason why he chose to move to Uptown in summer 1963 (heard about the place from a friend, answered a newspaper ad, etc.), but it’s also possible he looked five miles out of the city just so that he would not be recognized in his old haunts, although he didn’t mind being shown on local television handing out pro-Castro literature.

• This is the story of a deadbeat banker. His name is Allen Stanford and he was once known as the $7 billion man. Now, he faces federal indictments that charge him with running a vast Ponzi scheme that bilked depositors out of billions.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Elon Musk keeps trying to tell people that he’s saving Twitter. But, he may have just accidentally admitted how much he’s screwed it up. In yet another Twitter Spaces where he spoke about things happening at the site, he actually provided some numerical details, as covered by the Financial Times.

• Still, for all this welcome new activity on the long-dormant battlefronts of antitrust, the package now before Congress is also noteworthy for two bills it doesn’t include, which specifically targeted the monopoly practices of Big Tech. Both bills—intended to prevent companies from giving preferential treatment to their own services and subsidiaries on their platforms and from strong-arming third-party market players to ensure unilateral platform control of the apps market—emerged out of extensive congressional hearings, and both were dropped from the omnibus at the behest of Senate majority leader Charles Schumer. Also left on the cutting-room floor was a third bill that would insulate local journalism outlets from the practices of Big Tech predation. “The reason that these bills didn’t pass is Chuck Schumer,” Stoller says. “He just lied about a lot of things. He said he’d allow a vote and then he didn’t.”

• Most of the reinstated accounts were deeply partisan — often vocal supporters of Mr. Trump — and they appeared eager to bring their fiery takes back to the social network. It was not clear from the data why the users were originally suspended or why they were reinstated, though their post histories suggest many were banned as Twitter cracked down on Covid-19 and election-related misinformation.

• This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).

• Now it seems our Minister of Finance has also suffered the same fate with his Twitter account. It no longer has a profile picture and is retweeting [cryptocurrency] content and whatever the account Cyber Kong posts. In fact, the last time the Finance Minister’s account tweeted Zimbabwean relevant content was on the 29th of November 2022.

• The FTC case is being called unusual in that this acquisition is in a market that is currently not very established. The challenge has been laid down because the FTC says it doesn’t want Meta to become too powerful in the market before it really gets off the ground. What was also unusual is the fact that Zuckerberg himself was testifying.

• The Washington Post (12/16/22) had a recent headline: “Can Politics Kill You? Research Says the Answer Increasingly Is Yes.” And the lead of the article, by Akilah Johnson, told readers of two studies that reveal what it calls “an uncomfortable truth”:

• In its December 22 morning digest, the General Staff of Ukraine reported that Russia lost 100,000 military personnel since the start of the invasion. Its other losses include 3,000 tanks and 6,000 armored equipment units.

• We speak with Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer and theologian Cornel West about the January 6 committee’s recommendation that former President Donald Trump and his allies be criminally charged for their role in the insurrection and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “Just because it’s unprecedented doesn’t mean that we can’t have prosecutions,” says Greer. She also responds to recent news reports that New York Congressmember-elect George Santos fabricated much of his political biography.

• There was never anything going for it, except political mileage and the desire for crude retribution.  The putting to death of another human being by the legal sanction of a state has always been another way of justifying murder, effectively assassination by judicial fiat.  Such policies remain terrifying features of […]

• On 9 December, China’s President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to discuss deepening ties between the Gulf countries and China. At the top of the agenda was increased trade between China and the GCC, with […]

• As the deadline for Tatarstan to amend its regional constitution to align with federal law draws near, the republic’s State Council Committee on State Construction and Local Self-Government has recommended withdrawing the draft amendments that would provide for changing the title of “President of the Republic” to “Head of the Republic.”

• The Russian Attorney General’s Office has declared the Stockholm-based Russians Against War Committee an “undesirable organization,” making its activities illegal in Russia and subject to criminal prosecution. Under Russian law, collaborating with an “undesirable organization” may also lead to criminal charges.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin told the journalists that Russia’s aim is to finish the war with Ukraine as quickly as possible.

• The idea seemed simple centuries ago when governments began to deploy a different kind of diplomat to advance their cultural and economic interests in outposts around the world.

• The deal to pay off the treasurer of Detroit was forged in a booth at a strip club named Bouzouki.

• “You’re basically paying all these other guys. … You should be paying me,” the city’s treasurer told local business owner Robert Shumake that day in 2007 during a conversation that Shumake would later recount to federal prosecutors.

• Nikita Yuferev, a deputy of the St. Petersburg Smolninskoye Municipal District, asked Russia’s Prosecutor General and Ministry of Internal Affairs to open a criminal case against Vladimir Putin in connection with the law on spreading “fakes” about the Russian army.

• The beautiful and the good are at the core of the Cosmos and democracy in Greek thought and civilization. The natural philosopher Anaximander added equality and justice to natural phenomena for a harmonious Cosmos. Anaximander invented the apeiron or the boundless creator of everything in the Cosmos, including the Sun and the Earth and the almighty natural world.

• Anaximander lived in late seventh to mid sixth century BCE in Miletos of Ionia, Asia Minor. This was his hometown. Miletos nourished Greek thought, especially in cosmology and astronomy.

• I have also seen how in the human rights system some victims are deemed “politically correct” and garner all the attention, whereas other victims are safely ignored and forgotten – worse still, they can be defamed as “terrorists”, so that no one feels any compassion for them.  The hapless Palestinians are similarly defamed as “terrorists” and their human rights are systematically violated, but at least we know about them and many international lawyers like Professors Richard Falk and Francis Boyle defend their rights.

• There are some 70 million Tamils living in the southern tip of India. 5.9% of India’s population, residing particularly in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. In colonial times many Tamils were taken from India to South Africa as cheap labour, among them the parents of Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014).

• After harassing him for months, Peru’s rightwing-dominated unicameral Congress recently ordered Castillo’s removal from office. The authorities arrested him and now he is in prison.  Replacing Castillo was Vice President Dina Boluarte.

• Protesters have mobilized throughout Peru, blockaded over 100 highways, occupied five airports, and held rallies in various cities. The new government has instituted a 30-day state of emergency and imposed a strong police and military presence throughout the country. Security forces have killed almost 30 protesters and wounded hundreds.

• First, they lost the House of Representatives to the worst Republican Party in history. The GOP is corrupt, lying, and violence-prone. It opposes policies supporting labor, consumers, patients, and children. It favors the greed of its corporate paymasters over vital community protections and necessities. A GOP House means the end of any Biden-proposed legislation for the next two years.

• The narrow margin (GOP 222 Dems 213) between the House Democrats and the House Republicans was provided by two debacles – the election of two GOP candidates who were part of the partisan crowd rushing Congress on January 6, 2021, and the boomeranging of the New York State Democratic Party’s redistricting plan.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Despite obvious differences, Qatar and China have something in common: disinformation, myths and lack of information surround these two countries. Looking at data instead of anecdotes discloses surprising facts and enables a better understanding of these countries’ demographic policies. It also sheds light on how population policies can drive unbalanced sex-ratios.

• Following on from the CIA’s early removal of themselves from psi-research in the mid-seventies, throughout the early 1980s one of the central characters in overseeing the US militaries excitable remote reviewing experiments was the late Brigadier General Albert Stubblebine III (1930-2017) – a man who was the commanding general of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command from 1981 to 1984. Although he retired from active service in 1984, Stubblebine achieved global notoriety after the release of George Clooney’s Hollywood blockbuster The Men Who Stared at Goats (2009) in which he starred as the General who tried, but ultimately failed, to manifest the ability to walk through walls. In addition to promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories, delusional thinking always defined General Stubblebine’s life, and so it makes sense that his wife, Dr. Rima Laibow, remains a keen promoter of the health freedom movement’s nonsense concerning the allegedly sinister globalist agenda revolving around Codex Alimentarius. Such darkly paranoid views echo those of the president of the decidedly right-wing National Health Federation, whose president, Scott Tips, edited the movement’s now keystone text Codex Alimentarius – Global Food Imperialism (2007). For the record, Tips’ forerunner at the head of the National Health Federation was the late Maureen Salaman, whose longstanding activism with the John Birch Society was rounded off when she helped found the Populist Party with Holocaust denier Willis Carto and then stood as their vice-presidential candidate for the 1984 elections.

• In 1990, General Stubblebine became chairman of the civilian remote viewing company Psi Tech, which had been set up the year before by Major Ed Dames. Major Dames being one of the four initial US Army Officers to be trained in psychic travel by Ingo Swann in the 1980s. One other trainee of the Armies fledgling program, whose work will be discussed later, was Captain Paul Smith, who went on to work as a consultant for Psi Tech, as did many other former and current remote viewers from the government’s psi scheme. With this work now in the private sector the dubious wonders of remote viewing were now on the free market for those who can afford to waste money. Thus, one of Psi Tech’s early missions involved locating Iraq’s hidden biological warfare stockpiles for the United Nations. Such lucrative and pointless contracts, which included investigating the crop circle phenomena, proved too much to resist for those seeking to cash in on their so-called magical powers, and in 1992 Swann was finally persuaded to join the company as a consultant, while Colonel John Alexander also joined Psi Tech’s board room around this time.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Commentators were quick to interpret the meaning of the “white-paper protests.” A blank sign is both a symbol and a tactic. It is a passive-aggressive protest against censorship, a sarcastic performance of compliance that signals defiance. Its power rests in a shared understanding, by both the public and the authorities, of the unwritten message; it rests also in the awareness that to say anything at all is to run afoul of a government that brooks no opposition, suppressing even the suggestion of an intention to speak. A tweet posted days after the fire showed a photo of a man, apparently in a Shanghai mall, holding a sign reading, “You know what I want to say.” According to the tweet, he was taken away by the police.

• This video simplifies Iran’s power structure to focus on the elements relevant to our story and the ongoing protests. There’s a lot more to learn about — to explore the full power structure of Iran and all its branches, we recommend this guide from the United States Institute of Peace.

• For these reasons, NCAC has suggested that Frisco Independent School District follow its review policy and review books on a case-by-case basis instead of implementing blanket bans.

• Downranking—sometimes unofficially referred to as “shadowbanning”—occurs when Instagram prevents a post from being recommended to other users via the platform’s Feed, Explore, and Search functions. It applies to posts that meet Instagram’s Community Guidelines (which determine what content is allowed on the app), but which do not comply with the platform’s lesser known Recommendation Guidelines. These restrictions are much broader, and are unfamiliar to most users because their implementation has been invisible.

• This is an unwelcome development. The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court is already the home of Rights Roulette. Everyone is free to take it for a spin, but should be aware the odds heavily favor the house. The government comes out a winner more often than not, no matter how long the odds may seem when the Fifth’s judicial croupiers start spinning the wheel.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.

• The investigation was initiated after an article was published by Forbes, and the inquiry confirms part of that report and acknowledges the privacy and security risks associated with TikTok that U.S. lawmakers, state governors and the Trump and Biden administrations have raised for more than two years. More than a dozen states have banned TikTok from government-issued devices, and the company has been in prolonged negotiations with the administration on security and privacy measures that would block any potential access of U.S. user data by ByteDance and the Chinese government.

• ByteDance’s general counsel, Erich Andersen, revealed the findings of the investigation, which was conducted by an outside law firm, in an email to employees on Thursday.

• Ellsberg’s bombshell followed on some other key news about Assange. Finally, on November 28, mainstream newspapers located, after an arduous search, the elusive courage to do what they should have done years ago: denounce the illegal detention and deliberate, combined U.S. and U.K. assault on publisher Assange. Nota bene – these newspapers all published the national security scoops for which Assange has been persecuted, scoops that his organization, Wikileaks, first aired. Yet as President Trump, then next President Biden worked to crush the obstreperous journalist and thus to toss a free press into its grave, these brave news outlets – paramount among them the New York Times and the Guardian – sat on their hands. At last, in late November, they moved their rearends off their hands and demanded the bogus charges against Assange be dropped. As at least two journalists noted on twitter, these press organizations must have learned that Biden wanted to end the Assange prosecution. If only!

• Meanwhile, related to Assange’s predicament, few things would be better for justice than for the CIA to be brought to heel, because of its many crimes. Few things would be better for good in the world than for this organization to pay for its abuses. And nothing could be less likely. So, barring such enormously just outcomes, you’ll have to settle for something smaller. That something arrived in early November.

• One of the world’s most courageous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg challenged U.S. prosecutors on December 6 to come after him, as they have pursued Julian Assange. The 91-year-old Ellsberg, whom the U.S. security state decades ago possibly hoped to drive to suicide, announced that he too had received leaked materials containing […]

• We seek to render the invisible visible and bring clarity to the intentionally complex.

• We strive to capture the experiences of those hurt by broken systems and the dignity they display in the face of the most difficult circumstances.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Since September, there have been protests in Iran for more freedom and women’s rights, during which people have been killed time and again. The regime in Iran is cracking down on the movement, arresting demonstrators and sentencing some to death.

• Two people have already been executed in this context.

• “It is never too late to work to restore faith and trust,” Herman Shaw said in 1997 when the United States apologized for the study. U.S. President Joe Biden echoed these words during a November 30 event acknowledging the 50th anniversary of the end of the study: “Restoring faith and trust is the work of our time.”

• The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a bill that would require reasonable workplace accommodations to allow pregnant workers to safely stay on the job, is poised to become law after 10 years of advocacy. On Thursday the Senate voted overwhelmingly, 73-24, to add it as an amendment to the must-pass omnibus government spending package, and the House is set to take it up soon. If both pass the omnibus as expected, the PWFA will soon arrive on President Joe Biden’s desk.

• It makes sense. Humans are wired to want connection. Our neurobiology craves those moments. When we feel rejected or disconnected, we sense a threat akin to being stalked by a lion. Social connection is hugely important to our mental, emotional, and even physical health. When the United Kingdom created the position of Minister for Loneliness in 2018, the government cited evidence that loneliness can be as bad for health as obesity or smoking. More recent studies have shown we sleep better when we are with someone. In this country, we’re awash in studies about how pandemic isolation wreaked havoc on our health and our social organization.

• During this holiday season we can use the science of our social nature to renew old connections and forge new ones. We’ve known for a long time that social ties to family and friends are good for us. We’re now learning that positive interaction with strangers is beneficial. Chatting with the person in line at the store makes us more happy and healthy, more connected to our community, more trustful and optimistic, and even mentally more astute.

• After decades in prison, they were paroled and organized for immigrant rights. Pardons would prevent their deportation.

• Democracy Now (also) interviewed Yale University students painfully impacted by forced expulsion due to signs of mental illness. Interviewed students spoke of being forced to leave Yale, given two hours to pack up, and losing medical coverage, accommodations, housing, forfeiting part of their tuition, and barred from stepping foot on campus at a time when they most needed help. At other universities, criteria for expulsion include “so-called community disruption, including help-seeking behaviors.” “If a student with suicidal thoughts tells their friends, and that can be upsetting to roommates and friends, that can be construed as community disruption and can have a leave of absence imposed on them…. If a parent, for example, requests that the campus security do a wellness check to make sure that their child in the dorm is okay, that has been construed as community disruption.”

• In a recent article, I quoted Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka on “a world gone haywire”, about the world completely transformed in the way people are understood and treated. Fortunately, many people have not gone haywire, but explaining people by behavior traits leaves out the individual psychology of personal memories, feelings, needs, values and is a far cry from the psychologies of Freud, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. Seeing people as ‘products’ is concerning: quantifying people and life, people as products of conditioning or the system, of neural networks and DNA and biochemistry, of mathematically-determined game constructs, of manufactured consent. And at the opposite pole: people as inexplicably subjective and unknowable. Generalizations about human nature are belied by the range and complexity of what individual people say in their own words as reported in a wealth of good research.Hannah Arendt listened very carefully to Adolf Eichmann and had many helpful insights about him, but then she generalized his psychology to all perpetrators of these crimes. [1]

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Much has changed in the world of cyberspace since Jan. 1, 1983, the date often called “the birthday of the internet.” Yet the internet’s fundamental architecture—the communications protocol that allows computer networks all over the world to talk to each other—remains essentially the same. This is largely thanks to a design that Vint Cerf sketched on the back of an envelope while holed up with fellow computer scientist Robert Kahn in a Palo Alto cabana nearly 50 years ago.

• This debate has captured attention from the European Commission. They’re analyzing policy options, including one of the most dangerous regulations, sender-party-pays, which leads to poorer user experience and may lead to Internet fragmentation. The current situation in South Korea, the only country that has enacted this regulation, is clear evidence of its harm, and European policymakers should take good note of it.

• With information security such a complex and fast-moving field, how can companies gather enough information to make informed decisions about what is right for their networks? What criteria should you look for, how do you evaluate systems, and how can you determine which methods will scale most effectively?

• This is the second in a series of blog posts on security by diversity: here we will focus on some of the key issues with the business of security today, especially the problems of quality uncertainty and the scaling of different forms of security.

• By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

• Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

• Andy Kroll shares what he learned from exploring the dark web for research for his investigative political thriller.

• In order to devote closer attention to these issues which impact user autonomy and competition online, this year EFF hired a Senior Fellow of Decentralization, Ross Schulman. Among other projects, Ross spearheaded EFF’s involvement in DWeb Camp and Unfinished Live. In the wider world, the cryptocurrency markets have continued their dramatic volatility in 2022, which, combined with ongoing allegations of large scale fraud, has led legislators both at the federal and state levels to explore regulations in the space.

• In August the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it was placing a cryptocurrency privacy tool called Tornado Cash on one of its sanctions lists due to its use by North Korea, effectively prohibiting its use by people in the US. Many cryptocurrencies pose unique problems when it comes to financial privacy, since all transactions are publicly recorded in the global ledger. Tornado Cash was created to enable private and anonymous financial transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Many people may want or need that privacy to operate, for perfectly lawful reasons, such as when paying for medical care, supporting LGBT groups in repressive regimes, or giving to religious organizations. But as with many technologies, it can also be used for unlawful purposes.

• The OFAC decision was ostensibly intended to address those unlawful uses, but it was far too vague. Publishing these tools implicates core First Amendment rights, because, as EFF made  clear: code is speech. Because OFAC’s order was ambiguous as to whether it was attempting to control the actual code that ran Tornado Cash’s smart contracts, GitHub removed the public code repository of Tornado Cash and disabled the accounts of its primary developers. Courts have held since the late 1990s that computer code is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, and OFAC’s actions could have impacted that freedom. We wrote publicly about that fact and, thankfully, OFAC clarified shortly afterward that they were not including merely hosting or discussing Tornado Cash’s underlying code in the new sanctions, removing that concern.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The subscription video streaming company will pay $55 million for a 292-acre site on the former Fort Monmouth military base in Eatontown and Oceanport.

• The California-based company plans an additional $848 million worth of investments in 12 sound stages and for other uses related to the film industry.

• It’s a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We’re not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we’re not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don’t have enough money to go to the cinema.

• Back in June New York state was the first state in the country to pass “right to repair” legislation taking direct aim at repair monopolies. The bill mandates that hardware manufacturers make diagnostic and repair information available to consumers and independent repair shops at “fair and reasonable terms.”

Monopolies

• “The current trend toward concentration, the lessening of competition, and the tendency to create a monopoly in the video game industry was already harming competition at an alarming rate before the proposed acquisition was announced. Both companies are the products of substantial campaigns to acquire, merge with, and consolidate numerous video game companies to achieve their current stature in the video game industry.”

Trademarks

• You will hopefully recall our ongoing discussions about one of the strangest trademark disputes I’ve ever encountered between Iceland Foods, a grocer in the EU, and Iceland, the country. Way back in 2016, Iceland petitioned to remove a trademark Iceland Foods had for its company name, arguing that the trademark had allowed the company to block Icelandic companies using their own place of origin in their names. Iceland Foods attempted to then play nice, claiming it wouldn’t pursue Icelandic companies aggressively any longer, but it was too late by then. Iceland got the absurd trademark registration revoked. Rather than leaving well enough alone and just going about conducting its business, Iceland Foods decided to keep the absurdity going by appealing the decision to the Grand Board of the EUIPO.

Copyrights

• Online piracy traditionally peaks during the holidays. Extra spare time fuels the search for free entertainment including Christmas movies, which experience their annual surge in demand. An analysis of recent piracy statistics shows that Home Alone is the most popular classic among pirates, followed by The Grinch.

• A new lawsuit filed in the United States claims that Cloudflare and NameSilo are liable for copyright infringements carried out by their customers. Adult entertainment outfit TIR Consulting accuses both companies of providing anonymity to pirate sites and profiting from infringements carried out by so-called ‘repeat infringers’.

• Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek won a major court battle last month against Daftsex.com. In addition to millions of dollars in damages, the court issued an injunction allowing the rightsholder to take over this and other domains. Interestingly, ‘someone’ tried to hijack the process by posing as MindGeek in an email to domain registry Verisign.

• You may have noticed the world getting excited about the capabilities of ChatGPT, a text-based AI chat bot. Similarly, some are getting quite worked up over generative AI systems that can turn text prompts into images, including those mimicking the style of particular artists. But less remarked upon is the use of AI in the world of music. Music Business Worldwide has written two detailed news stories on the topic. The first comes from China:

• In 1976, Patti Smith and her group played three shows in Washington, DC. The first two were at the cozy club on Georgetown’s M Street called the Cellar Door. It seated less than two hundred. Consequently, most of the seats for those shows went to people in the know–reviewers, DJs, industry folks and a couple lucky fans and hangers–on. The shows were also broadcast on the syndicated King Biscuit Radio Hour. Later that year, Smith and her band played at Georgetown University’s McDonough Arena. The latter venue was essentially a basketball court. Bleachers lined the sides, the floors were made of wood and on hot days it smelled like a gym locker room. It was a perfect place to see down and dirty and raw rock and roll. In 1976, the Patti Smith Group played that kind of music. I went to the Georgetown concert with a friend of mine. The opener was a newish group called Bebop Deluxe. To say the least, the pairing was interesting. Most attendees were there to see Patti and her guys. By the midpoint of their set, there were only a handful of folks sitting down. Everyone else was on their feet, shaking their bones and sweating in the overheated gymnasium. Patti’s oversize t-shirt hung off her slender frame, dripping with sweat. So did mine. When the band kicked into the song “Horses”, the crowd sang along on the refrain “Horses, horses, horses….” Lenny Kaye’s guitar crescendoed up, up, up with the vocals of the crowd and Smith jumped like a frenzied wildcat, her fist pumping the air in a challenge to the gods.

• Anyhow, a recording was recently released of the two Cellar Door shows. The energy of the McDonough Arena show is present and barely contained. My guess is this is because of the cramped space the Cellar Door must surely have been that night. This is Patti Smith and her band near its garage band best, wedding three-chord rock with poetry, physical energy and just enough sarcasm (in the best tradition of Bob Dylan) directed at the industry representatives and their money and overpriced haircuts. In other words, it is rock music in the 1970s, with all its contradictions, energy, despair and delight. Punk and poetry. Desire and dollar bills.

• In 2023 the odometer of his Inventions and Sinfonias reaches the 300-year mark. I’m guessing that in the intervening centuries more miles have been put on this collection than on the Well-Tempered Clavier (with the exception of the self-driving Prelude in C Major). Bach was the most committed and productive teacher of his, or perhaps any age, and both of these volumes were crucial components of his pedagogical program. They’ve been essential to the keyboard curriculum ever since.

• Although collated later than the preludes and fugues, the two- and three-part Inventions (Bach called them Sinfonias) likely came earlier in his students’ tuition. The 1722 title page of the Inventions expresses the composer’s intent to instruct and uplift:

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• Tor is network that preserves the anonymity of the users and services.

Games

• While this post is about programming, it also draws an extended analogy to dungeons and dragons, specifically two of its classes, that correspond to two attitudes toward programming.

• In D&D, wizards study magic. They prepare their magic spells ahead of time. While they may learn a large number of magic spells, they need to prepare them ahead of time and can’t just cast them at will.

• Wizard programmers prefer up-front design. They apply reason and logic to divide and conquer a large problem, they rely on building blocks like design patterns and algorithms. Wizards rely on explicit knowledge.

Programming

• It’s almost christmas and our team is tasked with sharing some highlights this year. We thought sharing how much code we’ve written is a good idea. Sure it’s not a good metric for measuring productivity, but good enough for bragging rights. But.. how? `git diff –shortstat` works but I don’t exactly know which commit happened 1 year ago. Hmm..

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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