Frank McDonough discusses the second volume in his history of the Third Reich, The Hitler Years, which details how Nazi Germany fell from the peak of its power in 1940 to disastrous defeat five years later.

 

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Stephen Baxter discusses the latest insights revealed by a new study of the 11th-century survey of England 

 

Professor Stephen Baxter discusses the latest insights revealed by a new study of Domesday Book, which suggests that William the Conqueror’s survey of England in the mid-1080s was more efficient, complex, and sophisticated than previously thought.

 

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The Emacs’ kill ring is a brilliant and extremely useful concept. It has some drawbacks, too, though. Probably the biggest one is that the entries there persist for quite some time. This is, after all, what it’s for – but sometimes you explicitly want some entry to disappear. This is of course the case when you have some password or a similar thing you copy to e.g. config files.

Behind the News, 1/7/21 - guests: Vijoo Krishnan on Indian farmer strikes, Yannet Lathrop on minimum wages, Alex Peterson on the Alphabet union - Doug Henwood

Following today's mob violence at the U.S. capitol building, we break down how, once again, American media would rather ignore homegrown currents of white supremacist vigilantism and their buddy buddy relationship with law enforcement and focus instead on how an anomalous President Trump makes us like those horrible poor people of the Global South.

Matt and Katie discuss the latest on the debate over Covid stimulus negotiations, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller talks academic freedom.

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For the first time, OPCW chief Fernando Arias was asked a series of direct questions at the United Nations about the cover-up of a Syria chemical weapons probe. Arias answered none of them. Russia's UN ambassador asked Arias about several damning leaks, some revealed by The Grayzone, as well as ongoing deceptive attacks on the veteran scientists who challenged the censorship of their investigation. Arias refused to answer in public session, and gave vague, non-substantive answers in private. Aaron Maté recaps the unanswered questions to Arias, as well as recent attacks on the OPCW whistleblowers via Western state-funded outlets Bellingcat and the BBC.

Emma Griffin tackles internet search queries and questions submitted by listeners about Britain’s Industrial Revolution

Emma Griffin tackles internet search queries and questions submitted by listeners about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, from the key inventions and cultural impact to workers’ rights and child labour.

 

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Behind the News, 12/31/20 - guests: Vijay Prashad; Sarah Leonard and Natalie Adler - Doug Henwood

Despite the XDG base directory specification, configuration files are still stored all over our file systems. If you have a single machine, maintaining those files is not too much trouble—they’re almost all “set it and forget it”—but when you have multiple machines, especially if you frequently have to setup new machines, it can be a pain. A neat idea for dealing with this is to keep your dotfiles in an Org file and tangle them to their proper place. I wrote about that here and here.

The basic idea is that you put the contents of each config file into an Org source block and then tangle either a single block or all of them to write each config file to its proper place. That allows you to have a single source of truth for your dotfiles and makes setting up new machines—or even just updating a single config file—a snap.

NapoleonWils0n has an excellent video on implementing the idea. He used to keep all his dotfiles in a Git repository but that’s fairly difficult to set up and maintain. His Org based method handles both cases: it writes the dotfiles to their proper places but also builds a file for a Git repository. NapoleonWils0n doesn’t make clear the utility of maintaining a separate Git repository except to say it provides a further backup. Of course, you can put the Org file under version control and be done with it. Still, his process makes it clear how flexible the method is.

The video is 19 minutes, 23 seconds so plan accordingly. There’s a copy of the Org file he uses in his Github repository so don’t worry about trying to take in everything from the video.

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world. Hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. A lot of us are feeling cold, isolated, and depressed right now, so what better time to revisit Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT (1963)? We discuss crises of various kinds of faith, and the personal and political implications of the silence of God. PLUS: Why won't the pundit class (and specifically Paul Krugman) get behind a $2000 stimulus?

Regular readers know that I’m very taken with the Zettelkasten idea and have implemented my own (sort of) Zettelkasten with Org-mode. My homegrown solution is not very featureful or convenient so I installed org-roam (a FOSS alternative to the popular Roam application) to provide myself with a “real Zettelkasten.” Sadly, I’ve been too busy (lazy, really) to configure it or figure out how to use it. That’s made me feel vaguely guilty.

Fortunately, abo-abo has come to the rescue with his own post on org-roam. I say, “come to the rescue” because he, too, spent a lot of time getting around to actually using it. He’s been using it for less than a month but already loves it and considers it an upgrade to his previous way of taking notes. Take a look at his post to see a comparison between his old and new methods.

Being abo-abo, he’s tweaked things a bit with some wrapper code but he gives a pointer to org-roam configuration so you can use it as a starting point. That’s exactly what I intend to do. On the one hand, I was happy to find out that I’m not the only one who’s been sitting on org-roam for months. On the other hand, abo-abo has inspired me to get moving on what I’m sure will be an improvement to my notetaking. Feel free to excoriate me in the comments if I don’t report some progress in the near future.

At the end of abo-abo’s post, he shows a nice trick for automating a search for notes needing further action using the listify-key-sequence command and unread-command-events variable. I didn’t know about that but will add it to my toolkit.

Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate Veteran US diplomat Chas Freeman says that despite talk of a New Cold War between the US and China, the US in reality is reacting aggressively to a rising Chinese power whose economic gains threaten US global supremacy. Freeman, who served in top State Department positions and as Richard Nixon's chief interpreter on his historic 1972 visit to China, discusses the state of US-China relations and flashpoints such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. "Since around 1870, we have been the preeminent society on the planet -- the wealthiest and technologically most advanced, the most influential. And China's overtaking us," Freeman says. "So there's a psychological issue here. The good deal of what we're doing is better explained by psychology than by statecraft. China does threaten American economic supremacy, may have already passed us in many ways... Whether that's a threat or not depends on your perceptions. We've chosen to treat it as a national security or a military threat. It'll be very good for the military industrial complex for a while." Guest: Chas Freeman. Veteran U.S. diplomat and public servant who has served in many senior positions, including as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, and as the principal US interpreter during President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972.

In this special bonus episode of Intercepted, we take an in-depth look at one of the most consequential eras of modern history, the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan came to an end, thanks in no small part to the covert and overt involvement of the United States. Bill Clinton brought an end to 12 years of Republican rule, defeating the former CIA director George HW Bush. And with Clinton’s two terms in office came a new spin on US militarism across the world, the notion of liberal so-called humanitarian intervention. The propaganda pitch was that the United States would use its military force as a sort of global police officer whose violent actions were wrapped in the justification that US missiles and bombs and troop deployments were serving a greater good. Nowhere was this more boldly asserted than in the wars in Yugoslavia, which stretched from the early 1990s all the way through 2008 when the US officially recognized the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo. The years that ushered in the declaration of the end of the Cold War would have a significant impact on global relations and warmaking to this day. University of Chicago scholar Daryl Li has written a meticulously documented book that seeks to understand the trends that emerged from this era, with a focus on putting into context the movement of foreign fighters from country to country. The book is called “The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity.” Li highlights the parallels between transnational jihadists, UN peacekeeping missions and socialist non-alignment and he examines the relationship between jihad and US empire.

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I finally decided to follow the recent trend towards using straight.el for package management instead of the built-in package.el. I made the switch because there was community interest in a package I’m working on (after my talk about it at EmacsConf), but which isn’t yet on a package archive such as MELPA. I wanted to make the package available to install in a convenient way, but without the level of commitment to backwards compatibility of design that a MELPA release might warrant. There was also the possibility that some folks might just want to use my Emacs configuration wholesale, and I wanted to support that possibility as well. Straight.el seemed like just the ticket.

Straight.el bills itself as a way to manage Emacs packages that’s declarative, explicit and reproducible. As someone who has attempted to set up new Emacs users with my own .emacs.d in the past, I’ve run into some of the issues that straight.el takes aim at, including implicit or “magical” config not present anywhere in your init files. Although there are ways to mitigate this using use-package (such as remembering to include explicit use-package declarations for any packages you install locally, or using :ensure t to install packages when they are missing), these still cannot guarantee 100% reproducibility. In a sense there’s a big difference between 99% and 100% — it’s the difference between uncertain and certain.

Fully reproducible configuration is compelling for reasons beyond just convenience, since an .emacs.d configuration that’s fully reproducible could be treated as a flavor or distribution of Emacs in its own right, on the same playing field as Spacemacs, Doom Emacs, Prelude, Scimax, and others (except without the dedicated fans!).

So if you want to turn your .emacs.d into a “flavor” of Emacs that can be used by others, whether that’s people in a certain specialized field, or friends that you’ve introduced to Emacs for whom your config would be a convenient starting point, or people following along in a blog tutorial that you’ve prepared, then read on for a reliable way to do this using straight.el.

First of all, this post is excellent. Start there, follow the directions, and you’re almost done, especially if you’ve already been diligent about using use-package. Then follow these steps:

1. If you’re using a recent version of Emacs (>= 27), you’ll need to manually disable package.el (in previous versions of Emacs, straight was able to do this automatically). You will want to do this since it could otherwise lead to undefined behavior; in particular, implicit locally-installed packages (e.g. in the /elpa folder) may allow your local Emacs to work, without your configuration actually being reproducible. To disable package.el, edit (or create) the ~/.emacs.d/early-init.el file and add this line to it:

(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)

2. For any local .el files that you have somewhere in your “load path” that are to be included in your config:
   • If these are simply modules grouping related configuration (e.g. if they contain use-package declarations), then just load these modules directly.
     (load "my-module-name.el")
     
   • On the other hand, if they provide distinct functionality on their own (e.g. third party modules that you downloaded at some point), then these should be treated as individual package repositories for the purposes of straight.el. Here are the instructions on how to do that. Essentially, move every such file into a new subdirectory of the same name, and then use:

(use-package my-package-name
 :straight
 (my-package-name
  :local-repo "~/.emacs.d/path/to/my-package"
  :type nil))

Note that such packages should be committed into your .emacs.d git repo if they are to be part of your “distribution.”

3. For any packages for which you want to use a local Git repository (e.g. if you’re actively developing these packages, or if you’re using a custom version including your own modifications), use:

(use-package my-package-name
 :straight
 (my-package-name
  :local-repo "~/.emacs.d/path/to/my-package"
  :type git))

These files are present in their own git repositories, so do not commit these into your .emacs.d repo.

4. If you’ve got a package installed whose “feature name” happens to be different from its “package name” (this is rare, but I encountered this case with TeX/auctex), you’ll need something like this:

(use-package tex
 :defer t
 :straight auctex)

5. Restart Emacs, adding any missing use-package declarations as needed until it works.

Now commit everything and you should hopefully be in good shape. Except for one thing: any local repos you’re using (item 3 above) are not guaranteed to be (and likely won’t be) present on any system other than your own [if this doesn’t apply to you, skip ahead to step 8]. To truly turn your .emacs.d into a distribution, you’ll need to address this. On the one hand, you’d like to continue to use the local repos on your system for ease of development. On the other, you’d like your users to be able to use your configuration out of the box without any extra steps.

Here’s what I recommend: create a separate git branch in your .emacs.d repo as the “public” version of your config. In this branch, all Elisp repos in step 3 will point to the public versions of those repos instead of the ones locally on your system.

6. Create the new “public” git branch

git checkout -b public

7. Change all use-package declarations in step 3 (not step 2, leave those as they are) to look more like this:

(use-package my-package
 :straight
 (my-package
  :type git
  :host github
  :repo "my-github-name/my-package"))

In other words, point them to publicly visible repositories (e.g. hosted on GitHub or GitLab). Commit these changes into the public branch and push it to a public location. Now you can use the master branch on your system but your users can use the public branch (which you can periodically rebase onto master to keep it up to date), and everyone is happy. There’s just one other thing:

8. If you have any packages that have external dependencies that you installed outside of Emacs, you should defer or even disable these packages in the public branch, because otherwise any config at init time that relies on these dependencies being present would fail. If this is a major part of your configuration, you might consider using a system-wide package manager like Nix or Guix to manage these external dependencies. While these come with benefits of their own, this option would require that your users install these as well, and as a result relying on them may mean that your distribution would not be platform-independent [1].

[1] As of this writing, Nix is available for GNU/Linux and Mac OS, while Guix is available on GNU/Linux.

(use-package my-package
 :disabled t)

And you’re done, you’ve just created your very own flavor of Emacs. Watch out, Henrik Lissner!

On a side note, as you’re doing all this you may be wondering, if it’s so easy to create your own Emacs distribution, and equally as easy to publicly host your own packages, what does that mean for package repositories like MELPA? Do we even need them?

Having published a package on MELPA in the past, one thing I can safely say is that the quality of packages on MELPA (and of course, ELPA) in general is likely to be high. I received a lot of very useful feedback in the code review process, and learned a great deal about the package development ecosystem in the process of making the submission. I think both the value provided to developers (expertise), as well as the value provided to users (quality) are why we will continue to need something like MELPA, perhaps always. Having more lightweight package distribution options with something like straight.el serves a different, and I think, complementary need.

For reference, here’s my .emac.., I mean, my flavor of Emacs. What’s yours?

Democracy Now! 2020-12-24 Thursday

• Western Sahara: A Rare Look Inside Africa's Last Colony as U.S. Recognizes Moroccan Occupation

Download this show

A bit over one hundred years after the Irish Easter Rising, author Colm Toibin recounts the slow movements for independence that peaked in the rebellion in Dublin in 1916. It was the first armed action of the Irish revolutionary period. The British army suppressed the rebellion. But the high number of civilian casualties and the severe punishment of the Irish leaders let to increased support for Irish independence.

Strangely eventless, yet swelling with high drama, The Archers is the longest-running series in the world. But has this rural soap been teaching Middle England about itself, or inventing it from scratch? By Charlotte Higgins. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg discusses his book, The Doomsday Machine, which chronicles the tremendous threat to humanity that US nuclear war planners deliberately considered and whose plans he was going to leak instead of the Pentagon Papers, had it not been for the Vietnam War.

Frank Zappa redefined what it was to be a composer in our time. But what was his impact on those who worked most closely with him? In this three part-documentary series about the legendary musician, hear from family members, musicians and others who worked with him, as well as excerpts from a CBC interview with Zappa, recorded the year before his death.

Frank Zappa redefined what it was to be a composer in our time. But what was his impact on those who worked most closely with him? In this three part-documentary series about the legendary musician, hear from family members, musicians and others who worked with him, as well as excerpts from a CBC interview with Zappa, recorded the year before his death.

Frank Zappa redefined what it was to be a composer in our time. But what was his impact on those who worked most closely with him? In this three part-documentary series about the legendary musician, hear from family members, musicians and others who worked with him, as well as excerpts from a CBC interview with Zappa, recorded the year before his death.

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world. Hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. For our annual holiday episode, we finally did the inevitable: a deep-dive into the ideology of Disney/Tim Allen joint THE SANTA CLAUSE (1994). We got a little drunk with holiday cheer on this one, folks.

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world. Hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. The '90s brought a wave of movies about divorced or absentee fathers/husbands, and none had more explosions than James Cameron's TRUE LIES (1994). We revisited this action classic to decipher how the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jamie Lee Curtis marriage is a metaphor for America at the "End of History." PLUS: Pete Buttigig at McKinsey, Wong Kar-wai's "restorations," and Tom Cruise yelling about COVID.

Kathryn Smithies discusses the economic and cultural significance of donkeys in the Middle Ages 

 

Kathryn Smithies, author of Introducing the Medieval Ass, discusses the economic and cultural significance of donkeys in the Middle Ages.

 

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages. Pessoa wrote in his own name but mainly in the names of characters he created, each with a distinctive voice and biography, which he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, notably Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and one who was closer to Pessoa's own identity, Bernardo Soares. Most of Pessoa's works were unpublished at his death, discovered in a trunk; as more and more was printed and translated, his fame and status grew. With Cláudia Pazos-Alonso Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford Juliet Perkins Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London And Paulo de Medeiros Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick Producer: Simon Tillotson