Let Danny and Derek’s labor guide you into the holiday weekend newly informed. This week: Israel and Hezbollah exchange fire (0:29), an IDF operation in the West Bank (8:31), in Gaza, the IDF attacks Deir al-Balah and shrinks more protected zones (11:06) while Palestinians in Gaza also struggle to obtain a polio vaccine amid an outbreak (14:07); Yemen’s Houthi/Ansar Allah forces allow the recovery of a damaged oil tanker (17:15); Jake Sullivan is in Beijing and meets with Xi (19:14); Sudan ceasefire talks end without an agreement (21:23); Libya’s Government of National Unity (or “Eastern Government”) shuts down oil facilities (23:41); in Russia-Ukraine, concerns over the Kursk nuclear plant while Russia bombards Ukraine again (26:11); in France, Emmanuel Macron blocks the leftist prime minister from taking power (30:12); in Mexico, President AMLO “freezes” contact with the American and Canadian embassies (33:30); Honduras pulls out of its extradition treaty with the US (35:50); and the police intervention in Haiti is off to a shaky start (37:32).

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Danny and Derek speak with Séamus Malekafzali, a Beirut-based journalist focusing on the Middle East, about his recent piece for The Nation, “The Rotten Partnership Between the US Media and the Israeli Military.” They check in about the current atmosphere in Beirut amid exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah, the Biden administration and US media’s current narrative around Hamas and Iran, the violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinian journalists, the double standards of their portrayal in the US media, and whether there might be any meaningful difference in a Trump or Harris presidency with regards to America’s support for Israel.

Recorded Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Further reading:

• Séamus Malafzali on Substack

• Séamus’s piece "Do You Want Total War?"

• Follow Séamus on Twitter/X @Seamus_Malek

Danny will be talking on a panel at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft at 10am PST/1pm EST on ‘Trump vs. Harris: Whose Foreign Policy Will Win the 2024 Election?’. Here’s the link if you’re interested.

No time to read the news? Catherine Bohart does it for you in TL;DR.

Scott was disappointed there was nobody waiting for him when he died. In this episode he ponders whether someone was in fact watching over him and tells the most unbelievable funeral story of all time. With an unexpected apology from his mum, a trip to get measured for a suit and rolling down a hill chased by a bunch of OAPs - this is an episode packed with anecdotes and revelations.

The final episode in a trilogy of tales that gets into the gritty and grim goings on that nearly saw Scott pushing up the daisies. Each episode is far from a forlorn fable, but rather is bursting with colourful, lively stories of the people who have shaped Scott's life and helped him along the way. This is more than just a life story, this is Scott's death story.

A stand up series, written and performed by Scott Agnew Produced by Lauren Mackay Audio recorded by Chris Currie and Niall Young

Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, is now radically changing his international strategy and foreign policy by applying to join the BRICS group of non-aligned nations.

While the opposition has been trying to keep the focus on Gaza the government has pushed a number of key bills through the Senate -  on aged care, changes to the NDIS and putting the CFMEU into administration.  

Guest: Laura Tingle, Chief Political Correspondent, 7.30

Germany deindustrialized, taps out of Ukraine

Collapsing Ukraine in hopes of removing Putin The Duran: Episode 1991

European leaders escalate war rhetoric with Iran

Ryan and Emily discuss Tulsi joining Trump's campaign, swing states keep RFK on ballots, Israel launches massive West Bank attack, Zuckerberg admits Biden Facebook censorship, France erupts over Macron election result refusal, and Dan Osborn joins to discuss his independent run in Nebraska. 

 

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Headlines for August 27, 2024; Palestinian Healthcare Workers Chained, Starved, Sexually Abused: New HRW Report on Israeli Prisons; What Is RealPage? DOJ Sues Software Firm Using Algorithm Enabling Landlords to Fix High Rents

A celebrated feature of Emacs is its rich ecosystem of packages to extend its behavior. A curated versioned set of these packages are included in the distribution of each Emacs release. These packages are referred to as “built-in” and significant consideration is made by the core Emacs development team to ensure their stability and interoperability for that release. But that consideration does not stop there. Although a built-in package can have updates after an Emacs release, the default policy of the Emacs package manager (package.el) is to avoid upgrading built-in packages. However, this policy can be overridden as of Emacs 29.1 with the customizable variable package-install-upgrade-built-in. If this variable is set to t, then built-in packages can be updated. As this change is relatively recent in the overall history of Emacs, this might be news to a number of readers. For such readers, consider yourselves informed. That said, I was definitely surprised by this policy. The rest of this post is a reflection on why I thought that way.

One more bit before reflection: Users who are uncomfortable with allowing the package manager to aggressively upgrade built-in packages can avoid configuration of package-install-upgrade-built-in and instead use the prefix C-u before invoking package-install. The prefix will “special case” behavior as if package-install-upgrade-built-in was set to t for a specific package update.

What led to surprise

My recent work on a Casual feature required a more recent version of Transient ( > 0.6.0) than what was built-in (0.4.3). I had coded the package dependency specification correctly, but there was confusion when a different user tried to actually install and run it, as package.el avoided updating the user’s local install of Transient by design.

Reflecting on User Expectations

Reflecting on the above, I’ve come to some observations about why I felt such surprise on package.el’s default behavior. It comes down to different expectations of trust:

• Lay users (such as yours truly) in 2024 have been conditioned to extend a lot of trust to software updates.
  • Presumption is that diligent software providers use practices to uphold that trust.
• The Emacs core team in designing package.el does not trust the third party package ecosystem.
  • Presumption is that software providers are not diligent in using best practices.

The divide in the expectations of trust by the provider (in this case the Emacs core team) and the consumers (Emacs users) only gets exacerbated as more built-in packages such as Org and Transient have a higher frequency update schedule than that of Emacs releases. Developers such as myself building packages that require updated versions of built-in packages will only become more pronounced over time.

I claim no monopoly on having an answer to resolving these different expectations. But I do think the Emacs community as a whole needs to advance their conversation on what its package ecosystem should look like in the 21st century. Should it evolve to be more like OS and programming language library package managers? Or should it stay ad-hoc and adversarial in trust? (Are those even the right questions?)

Closing Thoughts

Meditating on software ecosystems, the one that I’m most familiar with is developing for mobile app distribution, particularly Apple’s flavor of it. If we think of Emacs core as an OS and the built-in packages as pre-installed software (apps), we see a striking similarity to the update schedule as illustrated in the table below.

	GNU	Apple	Update Schedule
OS	Emacs core	iOS, iPadOS	OS Release
Pre-installed Software	Built-in Packages	Mail, Weather, Calendar	OS Release
Third Party Software Distribution	ELPA (GNU/nonGNU), MELPA	App Store, Alternate	Publisher Release

All the concerns Apple has faced in building its ecosystem I see are the same ones facing Emacs with its package ecosystem. This is not to say Emacs must mimic Apple here, but rather the questions of trust are the same. It will be interesting to see how the Emacs community answers them.

We have on Séamus on to talk about the reaction to Germany's repression of pro-Palestinian voices and undying support of Israel in the region as well as the idea of regional war, Israel Katz's videos and Eurovision. Also you can hear the exact moment Ciarán dies of embarrassment.

FIND OUR GUEST:
https://x.com/Seamus_Malek
https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/

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Rob https://twitter.com/leninkraft
Nick
Uma https://twitter.com/umawrnkl
Ciarán https://twitter.com/Ciaranxo

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While EU leaders push to escalate the proxy war on Russia, and Ukraine invades Kursk region, polls show many Europeans want peace talks for a negotiated settlement, and oppose sending more weapons. Ben Norton looks at the evidence. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTVawAEUoDQ Topics 0:00 Intro 0:30 Ukraine is desperate 1:37 Ukraine invades Russia's Kursk region 4:11 People in US & EU want negotiated settlement 6:19 Most likely outcome of Ukraine war: compromise settlement 7:42 What should Europe do in Ukraine war? Peace deal 8:58 Europeans' view of Ukraine war, by country 10:00 Should Europe send arms & ammo to Ukraine? 11:18 Ukraine losing war would be "end of Western hegemony" 12:34 Outro

Danny and Derek welcome John Washington, staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, to catch us up to date on the state of play in the United States’ policies toward the southern border and asylum. They explore the extremism in the Biden administration’s recent decisions, how the current policies continue a thread going back to the 90s’ “Prevention Through Dete…

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The Prestigehead Convention at the Ho-Ho-Kus Inn has drawn a record crowd, but Danny and Derek still find time for your news roundup. This week: in Russia-Ukraine, an update on Ukraine’s Kursk invasion (0:29), reports of cancelled peace talks (3:57), and a continued Russian advance in Donbas (6:32); in Palestine-Israel, an update on Gaza ceasefire talks (9:34), the IDF is moving into the last Gaza “safe zones” (15:14), an Israeli strike kills a Fatah commander in Lebanon (17:04), and the status of the long-anticipated Iranian retaliation (18:52); Afghanistan sends its ambassador the to United Arab Emirates (20:43); a new Philippine-Chinese confrontation in the South China Sea (22:29); failed ceasefire talks in Sudan plus a cholera outbreak (24:39); troubles for the Central Bank of Libya suggest a further deteriorating political situation (26:56); and the Biden administration prepares new sanctions for Venezuela (29:58).

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AP champion Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, returns for a discussion of his recent piece for Carnegie, “Strategic Change in U.S. Foreign Policy.” The group muses on the difficulty of altering established foreign policy paradigms before delving into several case studies such as NSC-68, Nixon's Vietnam Withdrawal, Carter's Failed Korea Withdrawal, NATO Enlargement, and the Global War on Terror, emphasizing the need for foresight, strategic planning, and a willingness to incur political costs to make such change possible.

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Check out the companion piece to this episode, Rethinking U.S. World Power w/ Michael Brenes and Stephen Wertheim.

The Chapo Trap House x TrueAnon live show from Aug 21 with special guest Hasan Piker. Musical intro from Yung Chomsky. Reviews of nights one and two of the DNC, TrueAnon shoe leather reporting from around the convention, oppo dump on Kamala Harris, and a reading series from Chicago legend John Kass. We also nominate the President of Podcasts.

Special thanks to all our Podcast Delegates!

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Is the United States backing the Mexican opposition via the NED and the US Embassy’s funding of the NGO “Mexicanos Contra la Corruption y la Impunidad”? A new report from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggests the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy says Mexico is “major target country for infiltration” and US funding bothered President Andres Manuel López Obrador so much that he sent a diplomatic letter to Joe Biden. Soberanía co-hosts José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth breakdown how the US uses NGOs to promote regime change against leftist governments. Plus an update on constitutional reforms that will see fracking and open-pit mining banned in Mexico and of course news on the hotly debated judicial reform. Kurt and also José Luis also have a discussion on the attempted illegal detention of former Chihuahua Governor Javier Corral. Finally, in our Losers and Haters section, we look at Andrés Oppenheimer’s rehashed column on Claudia Sheinbaum’s upcoming inauguration.

Alex back on the pod today as we touch briefly on cranks from the past and Ye’s nitrous fixation. Then, Biden and his team continue to seethe about being kicked off the ticket, while Tim Waltz’s midwestern diet sends the right into some sort of race-based rage. Then, despite his possible PTSD, Trump is still able to toss off some casual insults to cherished American institutions that would get any other politicians run out of town and Bolsonaro attacked by bees. Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week we're joined by Hussein Kesvani of Trash Future and 10k Posts to discuss the far-right riots across Britain and Ireland, the role of media and the internet in it all. Also, I was serious, someone who can do Frieza's voice should read some Telegraph articles.

FIND OUR GUEST:
https://x.com/HKesvani
https://hkesvani.substack.com
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https://x.com/trashfuturepod

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HOW TO REACH US:
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Julia https://twitter.com/KMarxiana
Rob https://twitter.com/leninkraft
Nick
Uma https://twitter.com/umawrnkl
Ciarán https://twitter.com/Ciaranxo

Support Corner Späti

It's their big break, and the Lovely Boys are determined to be successful, no matter what it takes. Expect life coaching and alpha instructions from Branch Power, an Uber ride from the greatest sideman in videogame history, and Benny's fashion choices pushing Willy one step too far.

Written and performed by Ben Cohen and Will Robbins

Sound Design: Peter Duffy Theme Music Composer: Matty Hutson Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Producer: Rajiv Karia

A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4.

Fritz Bartel, assistant professor at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University, is back for one final episode on his book The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. They explore Paul Volcker's monetarism in the 70s and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in the Global South and commu…

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The dir-config.el Emacs package automatically loads and evaluates Elisp code from a .dir-config.el file found in the buffer’s current directory or its closest parent directory. This facilitates adjusting settings or executing functions specific to the directory structure of each buffer.

For instance, you can use the dir-config package to:

• Configure project-specific settings: Automatically set up environment variables, keybindings, or modes unique to each project.
• Apply directory-specific customizations: Set specific behaviors or preferences for files in different directories, such as enabling or disabling certain minor modes based on security considerations. For example, you might disable linters that execute code in directories where you handle untrusted code.
• Manage multiple environments: Switch between different coding environments or workflows by loading environment-specific configurations.

Installation

To install the dir-config using straight.el:

1. If you haven’t already done so, add the straight.el bootstrap code to your init file.
2. Add the following code to your Emacs init file:

(use-package dir-config
  :ensure t
  :straight (dir-config
             :type git
             :host github
             :repo "jamescherti/dir-config.el")
  :custom
  (dir-config-file-names '(".dir-config.el"))
  (dir-config-allowed-directories '("~/src" "~/projects"))
  :config
  (dir-config-mode))

More information about dir-config.el

• More information (usage, frequently asked questions, etc.): dir-config.el @GitHub

Danny and Derek are just two guys who, unfortunately, pay their taxes. This week: conditions in Gaza continue to worsen under Israel (1:14), “ceasefire talks” continue to amble along (7:58), the US again to send massive amounts of weapons to Israel (12:59), and the IDF is again reported to be using Palestinians as human shields (17:18); the US lifts its ban on “offensive weapons” sales to Saudi Arabia (19:57); new attacks on Myanmar’s Rohingya people (22:51); a surprise resignation from Japan’s PM Kishida Fumio (24:29); ceasefire talks begin for Sudan’s conflict (26:08); trouble in South Sudan’s political transition (29:14); an update on Ukraine’s invasion into Russia while Russia continues its advance toward Pokrovsk (31:02); the Wall Street Journal makes a big claim about the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabatoge (35:49); and the Biden administration offers Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro “amnesty” (38:42).

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Check out Danny and Derek on the Only One AirPod podcast this week!

Our now Ohio-dwelling Canada correspondent Dan Boeckner stops by for an update on the Great White North. But first, some commentary on the Trump/Musk Twitter space debacle, and a new batch of gaffes from JD Vance. Then to Canada: a smattering of bad takes from Canada’s media class, Iranian bot nets causing campus activism, gender transformative mine clearance in Ukraine, Chinese “elicitations” of op-ed writers, and the eternal saga of Canadian “anti-communist” memorials being proposed, funded and dedicated to actual Nazis.

Check out Dan’s fantastic solo album Boeckner! here: https://boeckner.bandcamp.com/album/boeckner

And check out our new Movie Mindset merch available now on the merch store: https://chapotraphouse.store/

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Ryan and Emily discuss Tim Walz attacks Trump union betrayal, US sends $20 billion to Israel, IDF shoots American in West Bank, new inflation numbers, Colbert accidentally humiliates CNN host. 

 

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Headlines for August 14, 2024; How Elon Musk Broke with the Democrats to Spend Millions on Donald Trump’s Reelection Campaign; How Amazon “Lied, Spied, Cheated Its Way to the Top”: WSJ Reporter Dana Mattioli; Palestinian Reverend Munther Isaac to Faith Leaders in U.S.: If You Are Silent, You Approve of Genocide

I am excited to announce the Forge releases v0.4.0, consisting of 699 commits since the last release two years ago, and v0.4.1, just six days later.