excellent on (2nd segment) Ziklag and (4th/final) Venezuela
Headlines for July 30, 2024; Biden Proposes Major SCOTUS Reforms, Including Ending Lifetime Appointments & Enforcing Ethics Code; Ziklag Exposed: Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge Voters in Battleground States; It’s Not Just “Childless Cat Ladies”: JD Vance Once Described Childless People as “Sociopathic”; Venezuela: Maduro Claims Victory, Accuses Opposition of Coup Attempt Following Disputed Election
General Allenby, Sharif Hussein and his son Feisal, and their handler TE Lawrence array the forces of the British Empire and the Arab Revolt against the Turco-German forces in Palestine. The battle starts in Gaza and ends with Allenby walking into the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem. The story of the fateful campaign that brought British … Continue reading "World War Civ 40: How Britain Took Palestine in 1917"
excellent closer (episode 6 of 6) to another excellent season of MSIT
Mark Steel's In Town - Coleraine
"...Coleraine is a big town and is ready for City status..."
This week Mark visits the town of Coleraine in Northern Ireland.
This is the 13th series of Mark's award-winning show where he travels around the country visiting towns that have nothing in common but their uniqueness. After thoroughly researching each town, Mark writes and performs a bespoke evening of comedy for a local audience.
As well as Coleraine, in this series Mark be will also be popping to Margate, Malvern, East Grinstead, Stoke-on-Trent, and Nether Edge in Sheffield.
There will also be extended versions of each episode available on BBC sounds.
Written and performed by Mark Steel
Additional material by Pete Sinclair
Production co-ordinator Katie Baum
Sound Manager Jerry Peal
Producer Carl Cooper
excellent as usual--Steel always at his best taking the piss from the posh
Mark Steel's In Town - Nether Edge
“...a place where all the baristas know your name..."
This week, Mark is in Nether Edge, a leafy suburb of Sheffield which wants to become a village. Here he samples the local honey, visits the local shops and cafes, a rum keg, the bowls club that once threw out Ronnie Wood for inappropriate behaviour, and he talks to the passionate locals about a campaign by the council to make the area less leafy by cutting down half of the trees.
This is the 13th series of Mark's award-winning show where he travels around the country visiting towns that have nothing in common but their uniqueness. After thoroughly researching each town, Mark writes and performs a bespoke evening of comedy for a local audience.
As well as Nether Edge, in this series, Mark be will also be popping to Margate, Malvern, East Grinstead, Stoke-on-Trent and Coleraine in Northern Ireland.
There will also be extended versions of each episode available on BBC sounds.
Written and performed by Mark Steel
Additional material by Pete Sinclair
Production co-ordinator Katie Baum
Sound Manager Jerry Peal
Producer Carl Cooper
VERY EXCELLENT. Note that the 80+ minutes of this episode is composed of ~3 parts, following not in order:
0. ads before, after, and in middle of content 1. ~40 min (after 42:03 in audio, before closing ads) is an interview (in Spanish, uninterpreted) by José Olivares (formerly @ Intercept, now moved to DSN='Drop Site News') of former President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009) on political economy and empire in Honduras, US, Latin America, and beyond, and especially on * the 2009 US (Obama-Hillary) coup that ousted him * the narcoregime that ruled Honduras 2009-2022 with support from the Obama and Trump regimes * Honduras during and after the 2022 election of his wife Xiomara Castro 2. ~40 min (0:33-42:03) interview (in English, uninterpreted) by Ryan Grim (also {formerly @ Intercept, now moved to DSN}) of José Olivares regarding Olivares' interview of Zelaya
On June 28, 2009, democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a military coup. In response to Zelaya's push for a poll to gauge public interest in constitutional changes, the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest him. He was then sent to Costa Rica in his pajamas.
The coup led to nearly 13 years of right-wing rule, marked by collusion with drug trafficking organizations, widespread privatization, violence, repression, and a significant migrant exodus. During this period, the Honduran left organized a strong resistance movement. In 2022, Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife and a leader of the anti-coup resistance, was elected president, signaling a major shift in the country's history.
In this episode of Deconstructed, Zelaya sits down for an exclusive interview with journalist José Olivares to discuss the 15th anniversary of the coup, the ensuing resistance movement, the right-wing and drug trafficking organizations' control, and the U.S. government's role and influence. Host Ryan Grim and Olivares delve into Zelaya's interview, recent developments in Honduran history, and present the full Spanish-language interview with Zelaya.
Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site News. This program was brought to you by a grant from The Intercept.
To read the full English-language transcript of Zelaya's interview, visit DropSiteNews.com or TheIntercept.com.
pullquote: > a good first approximation is that any `require` for a package should be replaced with `use-package`. It simplifies your `init.el` and, as I said before, can reduce your startup time with no effort on your part.
Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has an excellent video on the fundamentals of the use-package macro. If you’re new to Emacs or are one of the few Emacs users who isn’t constantly tweaking your init.el, use-package is a macro you use in your configuration files that makes it easier to configure packages. One of it’s major features is that it automatically defers loading packages under several circumstances resulting in a decreased load time. That feature is especially useful for packages that you seldom use: they won’t be loaded until you actually need them.
The rules are a bit more complicated than you might think. Prot goes through several examples that illustrate how use-package decides what to load, when to load it, and how and when to configure it.
As of Emacs 29, use-package is builtin. Before that, it was a package from John Wiegley that lived on ELPA. Now that it’s builtin there’s no longer a need for special hacks to get it loaded before the rest of your configuration is processed.
When I converted my configuration to use-package, I simply searched for every instance of the require command and replaced it and the subsequent package configuration with a use-package call. There are doubtless exceptions but a good first approximation is that any require for a package should be replaced with use-package. It simplifies your init.el and, as I said before, can reduce your startup time with no effort on your part. Take a look at Prot’s video for the details.
The video is 35 minutes, 44 seconds long so you’ll have to schedule some time but it’s definitely worth your while. Now that it’s builtin, there’s no reason for not using it.
Geoff Norcott examines modern masculinity in this stand-up series for Radio 4, by creating the safe space of a working men’s club so he can speak freely about the problems men are facing and how we might go about fixing them in a way that benefits everyone.
This week, Geoff looks at men’s reluctance to put on sunscreen. Why not take a simple, basic precaution against the hottest and largest thing in the entire solar system? Vanity? Bravado? Or something else? With the help of his studio audience, Geoff looks at whether this is connected to men’s reluctance to seek medical advice and their habit of dying early.
Written and presented by Geoff Norcott
Recorded by Richard Biddulph
Production manager: Sarah Wright
Executive producer: Caroline Raphael
Producer: Ed Morrish
Bessner and (mostly) Davison global week-in-review EXCELLENT as usual
On the eve of the XXXIII Olympiad, the world remains complicated. This week: Joe Biden suspends his 2024 presidential campaign (0:32); in Palestine/Israel news, Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a fawning US Congress (2:26), the ICJ rules on the legality of Israel’s occupation (6:13), the IDF shrinks the “protected zone” around Khan Younis in Gaza (9:13), China brokers a Palestinian “national unity” agreement (11:19); Houthi/Ansar Allah carry out a drone strike on Tel Aviv (13:48); in Bangladesh, a pause for the protests primarily aimed against a government job quota system (17:21); the US opens an embassy in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu (20:01); a new round of ceasefire talks are scheduled for Sudan (21:18); in Russia, the Gershkovich and Kurmasheva trials are wrapped up quickly (23:09); in another diplomatic move, China hosts Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba in a prelude to potential peace talks (25:03); a preview of Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela (26:54); and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that Sunday was the hottest recorded day ever, a record only to be broken on Monday (28:48).
Orígenes returns! not much about Cuba in this episode, but a great short political-economy-focused analysis of 16c Europe
In this episode we jump back to Europe in order to understand how the change of Spanish dynasties, from Trastámara to Habsburg, radically changed the trajectory of world history and foreshadowed the profound structural problems that would hamstring Cuba's colonial development for centuries to come.
Music for the episode is by Cuban musician Yaxx Castillo and art is by Cuban artist Raupa.
VERY EXCELLENT, esp bits (too short, toward mid-audio) on Zionism's use of apartheid, pinkwashing, and ... forestry!
Saree Makdisi argues Israel has long presented itself as a bastion of tolerance and democracy in the heart of the Middle East. But he says the war in Gaza is seeing support among progressive voters, particularly in the United States, collapse, and that the Netanyahu regime is lifting the veil of denial over a story of cultural and ethnic dispossession.
Bibi Netanyahu brings his dirty laundry to congress, and we discuss how the rapidly coagulating Kamala campaign will define itself on the moral red-line of Gaza in the coming days and weeks. And: JD Vance continues to humiliate himself, Jordan Peterson conducts an expert interview of Elon Musk, and RFK will command the masses to go to the country.
Get your fresh merch restocks at: https://chapotraphouse.store/
Ciaran and Nick run down some recent news including ICC issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas leadership, and Ciaran has a few of the dumbest MEPs to share with the class.
Felix+Will+guest amusing /and/ insightful. You will not unforget Rod Dreher's depiction of J.D. Vance as 'Frodo of the hollers' :-)
We’re joined by streamer Hasan Piker for an honestly unprecedented news round-up. Joe Biden is OUT of the Presidential race (and possibly dead??), and Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee. Mere days after avoiding getting his head blown off by millimeters, it appears Donald Trump has LOST the mandate of heaven. And Trump’s VP pick, as recently as last week a symbolic football-spike in a race presumed already won, is rapidly deflating when put in front of real people. All that plus Lord of the Rings and Aarons Sorkin reading series inside!
Watch Hasan daily on Twitch at: https://www.twitch.tv/hasanabi
warning: AI ~= discourse mining. pullquote, slightly edited: > [Jakhar et al. (2024)](https://doi.org/10.1029/2023MS003874) demonstrate that common [AI/machine learning] equation discovery algorithms tend to rediscover well-known closure models, such as the [nonlinear gradient model (NGM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent#Solution_of_a_non-linear_system) or other models derivable by Taylor expansions. While the NGM fits data of subgrid-scale fluctuations well, it leads to unstable simulations because it fails to accurately represent the transfer of energy across scales.
Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling EarthSystems
Equation discovery methods, a type of machine learning through which equations are learned from dictionaries of plausible equation terms, offer a promising avenue for learning interpretable and often easy-to-implement closures for subgrid-scale fluctuations. Subgrid-scale closure models are crucial in weather and climate simulations, as well as other computational fluid dynamics problems, where small-scale processes cannot be fully resolved due to computational constraints.
Jakhar et al. [2024] demonstrate that common equation discovery algorithms tend to rediscover well-known closure models, such as the nonlinear gradient model (NGM) or other models derivable by Taylor expansions. While the NGM fits data of subgrid-scale fluctuations well, it leads to unstable simulations because it fails to accurately represent the transfer of energy across scales. This highlights a key challenge in current equation discovery methods: the need to incorporate physical knowledge into the learning process.
The authors suggest that including energy transfer constraints in loss functions can improve the accuracy and stability of the discovered models by forcing the inclusion of higher-order terms in closure equations even though they do not strongly affect mean-square errors in representing fluctuations. This research underscores the importance of combining data-driven approaches with physical insights to develop effective closure models for complex systems.
Citation: Jakhar, K., Guan, Y., Mojgani, R., Chattopadhyay, A., & Hassanzadeh, P. (2024). Learning closed-form equations for subgrid-scale closures from high-fidelity data: Promises and challenges. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 16, e2023MS003874. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023MS003874
It’s Listeners’ Week! Host Chloe Slack (Sian Clifford) is listening to the listeners who have suggested things to listen to, including vaping, the maths of parenting and murder.
Sian Clifford stars as self-important journalist Chloe Slack in this comedy series parodying women’s current affairs and talk shows, surrounded by an ensemble cast of character comedians.
Chloe Slack - Sian Clifford
Ensemble cast:
Ada Player
Alice Cockayne
Aruhan Galieva
Em Prendergast
Jodie Mitchell
Jonathan Oldfield
Lorna Rose Treen
Mofé Akàndé
Sara Segovia
Additional voice: Etta Treen
Created by Lorna Rose Treen and Jonathan Oldfield
Writing team:
Alice Cockayne
Catherine Brinkworth
Jodie Mitchell
Jonathan Oldfield
Lorna Rose Treen
Priya Hall
Will Hughes
Script Editor - Catherine Brinkworth
Photographer - Will Hearle
Production Coordinator - Katie Sayer
Producer - Ben Walker
Aziz Rana, the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., professor of law and government at Boston College, once again joins Danny and Derek to continue the discussion about Americans’ relationship with the Constitution. The conversation picks up in the postwar period, exploring how the document became an economic document as well as a political one, the rise of …
Bessner and (mostly) Davison global week-in-review EXCELLENT as usual
Danny and Derek are back with a news update after two weeks, and it appears that events continued to transpire despite their absence. This week: in Gaza, another round of fledgling ceasefire talks (0:35), the Knesset officially rejects Palestinian statehood (6:05), The Lancet journal publishes a study on the likely number of Palestinian casualties thus far (10:30), Haaretz publishes a piece about the Hannibal Doctrine’s use on 10/7 (14:07), and Biden’s “aid pier” is officially kaput (17:27); the results of Iran’s presidential election (20:49); violence in Bangladesh over government job quotas (24:06); a new UN report on civilian displacement within Sudan (26:37); the respective junta governments of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso form a “confederation” (28:29); the Ukrainian military is losing its foothold on the eastern side of the Dnipro River (30:46); the results of the French election (34:37); the results of the UK election (38:32); Kenyan police begin arriving in Haiti as an intervention force (40:35); a New Cold War update featuring China suspending nuclear talks with the US (42:34), Russia and the US starting up a new arms race in Europe (44:21), and accused spy Evan Gershkovich’s trial moved up in Russia amid negotiations with the US (46:23).
Final episode of this series (114th!) is ... average for News Quiz, which is to say, amusing and well worth your half hour. Though recorded in Nottingham, there is almost no local-oriented contact (after the opening gag); OTOH,
+ Susie McCabe delivers a worthy/funny beatdown on Hugo Rifkind (who is /definitely/ No True Scotsman). + some excellent takes on the Biden-Trump contest, and US politics in general
Topical panel quiz show, taking its questions from the week's news stories.
I’ve noticed that my Emacs blog is now almost 2 years old!
Is there something absurd about writing about a text editor in that very text editor for such a long period? - I think the answer to this is clearly…, no!
My first post was on 2022-07-15 and this will be blog number 97.
And yes before you ask, how do I know this to be true?, well I found out the Emacs way!
I recorded its inception date in org-agenda, so I saw this date creep up this week :
** blog anni :james:web:
<2022-07-15 .+1y>
The date of my first post is in an org drawer in my single Emacs blog org file:
:EXPORT_HUGO_LASTMOD: 2022-07-15
and the blog number?, well, I org-copy-visible’d my org blog file of all the top level org headers, pasted into the scratch buffer, flush-line’d out all the TODO entries, then finally entered (display-line-numbers-mode) to get the number of lines (I suspect there might be an easier way to do this 😀)
I also wrote this post ahead of time and to remind me when to post I created an org schedule entry as follows:
** TODO post 2 yr emacs blog post
SCHEDULED: <2024-07-15 Mon>
and appeared in the agenda as :
Monday 15 July 2024 W29
aab--calendar:Scheduled: TODO post 2 yr emacs blog post
and in (cfw:open-org-calendar) as :
+-------------------------+
| 15 (3) |
| TODO post 2 yr emacs |
| blog anni |
| |
| |
| |
+-------------------------+
Living an Emacs life and especially partially through org means that any and all information can be easily extracted let alone initially logged, the basic text format is so simple and uniform that all the data items above were pretty much extracted using the same mechanism through Emacs.
Anyway enough of all that, in celebration of being able to maintain some level of blogging discipline for 2 years, I decided to revisit my very first post, which was on how to create an offline version of the major Emacs repositories, namely:
ELPA
MELPA
ORG
As it turns out this post is still quite relevant as from time to time, I need an offline version for an Emacs setup without an internet connection.
So lets re-post!, just for fun!, including the bash script that I still use:
Steps to locally download emacs packages for offline installation.
EXCELLENT, quite heterogeneous episode with 3 (or 2.1) very different parts: in order:
1. The usual RWN brief banty opener, this time on big winds: tornados from Rochester to East Bay (et al), dust devils from US west to Arabia 2. less-brief but still short interview segment:Trita Parsi (of QIRS, etc) on Iran politics, especially the 6 Jul 2024 presidential runoff, and its winner, Masoud Pezeshkian 3. main event: mostly about Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) * LFC as (Nerd favorite) writer, especially his novels * LFC as yet another bad person who produced great work (with shoutout to recent announcements re Alice Munro) * LFC long-suppressed work (actually stolen, by scumbags) released in original/French after 2019 death of widow, newly-translated into English, esp... * novel-manuscript (probably written c1934, probably not fully edited) on LFC's WW1, newly released as 'War'
Mark Steel’s award-winning show where he travels around the UK visiting towns with nothing in common but their uniqueness.
After thoroughly researching each town, Mark writes and performs a bespoke evening of comedy for a local audience.
This week, Mark visits the city of Stoke-on-Trent, part of the industrial area know as The Potteries. Mark chats to the locals about their town, hears about how friendly people are and some the famous people associated with Stoke.
As well as Stoke-on-Trent, in this series, Mark be will also be popping to Margate, Malvern, East Grinstead, Coleraine in Northern Ireland and Nether Edge in Sheffield.
Written and performed by Mark Steel.
Additional material by Pete Sinclair.
Producer: Carl Cooper
A BBC Studios Audio production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in July 2024.
The ink had barely dried on the deal for the French subs that then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had signed when a group of people behind the scenes started the campaign to get out of it. They had concerns that the subs would not meet the requirements that the Americans had for Australia in their role in the Indo-Pacific. Particularly in relation to China.
Guest: Andrew Fowler, author of Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty (Melbourne University Press)
EXCELLENT, argumentative (in the best sense), occasionally heated confrontation between the mostly materialist Bessner (Davison out for this episode) vs the (just my bias here) discourse-centered aestheticist shitlibbery of David Austin Walsh. (Note that Walsh flips out (no lie!) ~60:54 (then just as abruptly reins-in ~minute later) when Bessner skewers Walsh's argument for being fundamentally about aesthetics (which Walsh self-critiques ~59:55), which Bessner (IMHO correctly) calls out (~60:17) as '4th-order at most' in political importance after 'material capabilities' (i.e., policy outcomes), institutions, and coalitions.) That being said, a much better title for this episode would have been something like 'Fascism and liberalism in US politics c1932-2024, esp Trump 2016-2024':
* the central argument for most of this ep is the extent to which the CorpDem/deepstate labeling of Trump as a (literal) fascist is reasonable * the crucial argument (IMHO) at the end of the ep is the extent to which labeling of Trump as a fascist is politically actionable (notably because the Walshian shitlibs are totally opposed to organizing countervailing mass political violence)
In the first of two consecutive non-news Friday releases, Danny sits down for another rigorous academic exchange, this time with David Austin Walsh, historian at Yale’s program for the study of antisemitism and author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. The two dig into the big issues broached by the book, including the “right-wing popular front” opposed to socialism, communism, and New Deal liberalism, the nature of conservatism vs fascism, figures from Pat Buchanan to Richard Spencer to Donald Trump, the advent of the left-right divide, and what, if anything, American liberals and leftists can do to defeat American fascism/semi-fascism/fascistish-ism.
The UK's new Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a pro-war, neoliberal Blairite who is closely linked to British intelligence and the US government. He was backed by big business interests after the corporate media destroyed popular left-wing, anti-imperialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Ben Norton discusses how Britain is an oligarchy, not a democracy.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq7YDNrYsV8
Topics
0:00 UK PM Keir Starmer is Tony Blair 2.0
3:26 Biden & Starmer discuss new cold war on Russia & China
5:00 Keir Starmer's shady US government ties
7:13 CIA-linked Trilateral Commission
11:09 Neoliberalism: a class war
13:13 The coup against Jeremy Corbyn
19:12 Outro
VERY EXCELLENT: NQ once again delivers top-notch political jokes'n'japes
Lucy Porter, Ria Lina, Simon Evans, and Hugo Rifkind join Andy Zaltzman to quiz the news in this post-General Election special.
It's official: Sir Keir Starmer will be the next Prime Minister of the UK. Join The News Quiz for this post-vote episode recorded on the Friday morning after the vote has come in. Covering the exit polls, results, the winners, the losers, the other losers, and the rest.
Written by Andy Zaltzman
With additional material by: Peter Tellouche, Alice Fraser, Cameron Loxdale, Stu Cooper and Christina Riggs
Producer: Sam Holmes
Executive Producer: James Robinson
Production Co-ordinator: Sarah Nicholls
Sound Editor: Chris Maclean
A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4
An Eco-Audio certified Production
DN! continues its damn-near-consistently-excellent run this week:
- 1st segment: Wajahat Ali (@ Daily Beast--so ya know) is obviously getting supplied by the Biden Family crack pipeline, but Norman Solomon delivers the case to dump Genocide Joe's sorry senile ass.
+ 2nd/final segment (45:04 to EOF): VERY EXCELLENT, much too short: Daniel Levy on US-Israel-Hamas peace negotiations in context of Zionist politics.
Headlines for July 11, 2024; Should Biden Step Aside? Wajahat Ali & Norman Solomon Debate Democratic Options for 2024 Race; Fmr. Israeli Peace Negotiator Daniel Levy: Netanyahu Is “Trying to Do Everything to Prevent a Deal”
