Tom Roche

Professor Kaldellis' new history of Byzantium is out now in the USA and on Kindle everywhere.

In our second conversation we discuss the adoption of Christianity as the Roman religion. How much did Roman society change as a result? Why was early Christianity so riven with disputes?

We also talk about the function of the law in Roman society. How did it help define individual rights and responsibilities beyond criminal behaviour? 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Kaldellis' new history of Byzantium is out now in the USA and on Kindle everywhere. He has kindly agreed to talk to us about it across 4 episodes!

In this first conversation we discuss the new Roman government that Constantine established in 330AD. What was the 'personality' of government? How did it achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the people? Was it really a Republican Monarchy? 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ryan and Emily discuss abortion and weed winning in Ohio, McConnell ally goes down in Kentucky, Youngkin humiliated in Virginia, Rashida Tlaib censured over pro-Palestine statements, Zelensky begs for credit promising to pay back the US, shocking poll has RFK surging in swing states, and Ryan and Emily preview the third GOP debate tonight. 

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Krystal and Saagar discuss the 3rd GOP Debate's Winners and Losers, Biden endorses Gaza occupation, Insane Combat footage from Gaza, Republicans cope over lost elections, and Tucker is shocked by the right wing hypocrisy over free speech with Palestine.

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all know about Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election. This is of course laughable, there is nothing in the real world to support Trump’s fantasies of massive voter fraud.

However, there is arguably an even bigger lie that enjoys near universal acceptance in intellectual circles. It is the claim the huge rise in inequality over the last half century was due to market forces.

The usually insightful Peter Coy plays along with this Big Lie in his New York Times column today. Coy lays out the argument of a new NBER paper, by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx, and Suresh Naidu, that the Democrats have been hurt politically because they adopted a strategy, beginning in the seventies, of compensating losers from market outcomes.

The model of this story is that removing protectionist barriers in a movement towards free trade invariably creates winners and losers. According to standard theory, the winners are supposed to get more than the losers lose, so in principle we can tax the winners and pay the losers and make everyone better off.

The paper argues that this strategy is a political loser because people don’t want to see themselves as beneficiaries of government handouts. It’s also the case that there were never any serious proposals to tax the winners within an order of magnitude of what would be needed to compensate the losers.

However, the more important point, ignored by Coy, is that how we chose to move to “free trade” was itself a political choice. We could have moved to free trade by radically reducing the barriers that prevent doctors and dentists trained in India and other developing countries (or even rich countries) from practicing medicine in the United States. This could have still involved meeting U.S. standards, but medical students could train and test in other countries rather than the United States.

If we had gone this route, our doctors and dentists would likely be paid more in line with what they get in other rich countries, (e.g. around $150,000 a year rather than $350,000 a year) saving us close to $200 billion a year in health care expenses ($1,600 a family). We could have aggressively applied the quest for free trade to all highly paid professions, making highly paid professionals losers and blue collar workers winners.

The same story applies to patent and copyright monopolies. We have made these government-granted monopolies longer and stronger in the last half-century. Our elites have turned language and logic on its head and called these protections “free-trade.” They redistribute massive amounts of income upward, more than $400 billion a year ($3,200 per family) in the case of prescription drugs alone. Democrats have been fully complicit in making these protections longer and stronger, having supported the Bayh-Dole Act (approved under Carter) and a variety of other measures that meant greater protection both domestically and internationally.   

In short, the issue is not just that the Democrats have supported a regime where the winners are supposed to compensate the losers from a “free market.” They have supported structuring the free market in ways that make the working-class losers.  (Yes, this is my book, Rigged [it’s free.])

This means the working-class has very good reasons for not liking the modern Democratic Party, even if the Republicans are no better on this score. But, they won’t let you make these points in the New York Times, it hits too close to home.

The post Democrats Did Not Embark on a Strategy of Compensating the Losers, They Embarked on a Strategy of Making the Working-Class Losers appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

With the death toll climbing by the hour in Gaza, including over 1000 children, the whole world is wondering if there will be a ceasefire or if a larger war is likely. Rania Khalek asked Osama Hamdan, a senior representative of Hamas located in Lebanon, about what happens next. 

Watch the full interview for free on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hamas-rep-will-91415177

Listen to the extended version of this interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/audio-genocidal-91798227

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the entire world, with an endless flow of videos and images of Palestinian children cut into pieces by American bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population. Despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of Israeli officials, Western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” But this war on Gaza is different from past wars, not only in the level of Israeli aggression, but in the reaction on the street, from the Middle East to the United States. Israel is losing the narrative war. Most people want to see a ceasefire and tens of thousands have protested across the US to demonstrate their opposition to Biden’s unconditional support for this genocide. 

To discuss Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza ahead of a looming ground invasion and how it has the potential to snowball into a catastrophic regional war, Rania Khalek was joined by journalist Abby Martin, creator and host of The Empire Files. 

Watch the extended version of this interview on our Patreon. Become a member at https://www.Patreon.com/BreakthroughNews to access the full episode and other exclusive content.

Watch Abby’s documentary “Gaza Fights For Freedom”:

https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s?si=deHf3iQYlMetgPy7 

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tiny drifting organisms in the oceans that sustain the food chain for all the lifeforms in the water and so for the billions of people who, in turn, depend on the seas for their diet. In Earth's development, the plant-like ones among them, the phytoplankton, produced so much oxygen through photosynthesis that around half the oxygen we breathe today originated there. And each day as the sun rises, the animal ones, the zooplankton, sink to the depths of the seas to avoid predators in such density that they appear on ship sonars like a new seabed, only to rise again at night in the largest migration of life on this planet.

With

Carol Robinson Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of East Anglia

Abigail McQuatters-Gollop Associate Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth

And

Christopher Lowe Lecturer in Marine Biology at Swansea University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Juli Berwald, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone (Riverhead Books, 2018)

Sir Alister Hardy, The Open Sea: The World of Plankton (first published 1959; Collins New Naturalist Library, 2009)

Richard Kirby, Ocean Drifters: A Secret World Beneath the Waves (Studio Cactus Ltd, 2010)

Robert Kunzig, Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science (Sort Of Books, 2000)

Christian Sardet, Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022)

Chief Foreign Policy correspondent Derek Davison returns to the show for updates on Palestine, including discussion of recent videos of Palestinian arms and tactics, the Biden administration’s response to the war, the potential for further regional conflict, and where the new American focus on Israel leaves Ukraine.

Find Derek’s podcast American Prestige at:

Americanprestigepod.com

And find Derek’s newsletter Foreign Exchanges at:

Foreignexchanges.new

fx.substack.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Apparently you can get the cops called on you for sieg heiling too loud with your mates...

Donation: https://www.map.org.uk/

HOW TO SUPPORT US:
https://www.patreon.com/cornerspaeti

HOW TO REACH US:
Corner Späti https://twitter.com/cornerspaeti
Julia https://twitter.com/KMarxiana
Rob https://twitter.com/leninkraft
Nick https://twitter.com/sternburgpapi
Uma https://twitter.com/umawrnkl
Ciarán https://twitter.com/CiaranDold

Support Corner Späti

Bryce Green and Aaron review the excellent fourth season of Blowback.

Get Blowback Season 4 at the Blowback homepage.

Check out the four classic 9/11 articles from Peter Dale Scott, Aaron Good, and Ben Howard:

• Prequel to Terror: The 9/9 Massoud Assassination
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It

Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for producing the episode!

Music: "Feel it Now” by Mock Orange

Andy Zaltzman quizzes the week's news. With him to find the answers to all our problems Daliso Chaponda, Susie McCabe, Bethany Black, and Hugo Rifkind

This week, Andy and the panel discuss the cancellation of the world's most delayed train, a very awkward work event, and the most patient guide dog (such a good boy).

Written by Andy Zaltzman

With additional material by Alice Fraser Cody Dahler and Caroline Mabey

Producer: Sam Holmes Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Co-ordinator: Dan Marchini Sound Editor: Giles Aspen

A BBC Studios Production

The ICA writing season is now behind me. I can write about how I write my ICA papers, again. Previously, I wrote about how I prepare ICA papers in 2021. In that post, I said I wrote my ICA papers in RMarkdown over trackdown. Basically, putting the RMarkdown source code on Google Doc.

Now, it’s 2023 and I have another job. I think it’s time to give you an update.

First, I abandon trackdown; and it also means I partially abandon RMarkdown. The new kid Quarto actually has the same problem. Collaboratively writing a Markdown file on Google Doc is simply unnatural. And the workflow actually introduces many issues, for example, Google Doc converts all double quotes to some weird shit like Microsoft Word. It is also the worse of both worlds: It does not have preview of how the paper would look like and it does not run any embedded R code. Both tech and non-tech people are unhappy. For one time, I tried to write one Markdown paper collaboratively on HackMD. HedgeMD/HackMD open source politics aside, writing RMarkdown paper on HackMD was significantly better than trackdown because of the HTML preview. But still, HackMD was worse of one world: It won’t run R code.

To many people, writing paper locally and submitting patches via Git and editing a file via pull requests are just unnatural. There is only one super techie and R savvy person (my team lead David Schoch) who can write papers with me this way (we wrote two papers this way so far). I just can’t nudge my other collaborators to write papers this way. My e-mails about “the paper is available on GitHub too” were usually just a not useful sidenote.

There should be a RMarkdown / Quarto collaborative writing environment that supports code execution. But the fact that RMarkdown formats have been available for almost a decade but no one sees this as a business opportunity bothers me. Look at all those Notebook environments!

I talked to my collaborator Nathan Teblunthuis previously about his writing setup. His advice is “always write in \(\LaTeX\).” Although it sounds like the so-called Atwood’s Law, he has his point. It likes the mantra of Choose Boring Technology. Yeah, \(\LaTeX\) is not as flashy and trendy as any new shit. But it has been available since 1984. You know, the year when the perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was still going on and that running lady with a hammer did not smash the Telescreen of the Big Brother.

Of course, another reason is Overleaf. It has been the de facto \(\LaTeX\) environment for many fields, including my neighboring field Political Science. So, I decided to write all my ICA papers this year in pure \(\LaTeX\) on Overleaf with my coauthors. And this decision was also opportunistic because all of my coauthors this time are (I believe) tech-savvy.

Overleaf is fine. Of course it is a freemium service ¹. But it is probably the best of two ordinary worlds. At least it has instant rendering and some form of literate programming. Here are the tricks:

Literate programming on Overleaf

Actually, Overleaf supports literate programming in some way. Of course, I can upload my data files to my Overleaf project. If one wants to use literate programming, the \(\LaTeX\) file needs to be in .Rtex file extension. So, just rename my \(\LaTeX\) files to *.Rtex and Overleaf will allow code execution.

The next question is: How the heck can I embed code in those *.Rtex files? Well, I need to use the Sweave…-inspired knitr notation. Isn’t knitr just for RMarkdown / Quarto? Well, it supports \(\LaTeX\) as well.

Inserting a code chunk and inline R code look like this:

<<test, echo = FALSE >>=
mod <- lm(Sepal.Length~Sepal.Width, data = iris)
@

The regression coefficient is \Sexpr{round(coef(mod)[2], 2)}

For this code, I can just render the project and I will get the result. And complex things like ggplot2 also work. The problem, however, is that I cannot install any R package. I must use the ones preinstalled. I recommend running this to get a list of all preinstalled R packages.

<<listpackages, echo = TRUE >>=
dimnames(installed.packages())[1]
@

Actually, there are many packages. Notably, all tidyverse packages and rio (thank you) are available. Even some which I think are potentially dangerous are available too, e.g. fs, ps, and curl. But unfortunately, some packages I like are not available, e.g. here. The point is to be mindful about the limited set of R packages available. For packages not available, I recommend running the analysis locally, saving the output as RDS. And then upload the RDS files and use the literate programming interface to unpack the output in the \(\LaTeX\) source. I would add the R scripts for generating those RDS files to the project too.

From online to offline

The Overleaf project can be brought offline to my computer via Git (a premium feature). Click on the Main Menu and there are GitHub, Git, and Dropbox integration. The Git option gives you the command to clone the current project offline, something like

git clone https://git.overleaf.com/xxxxxxxxxxx

On my local machine, there would be questions about how to render those files like I did online. Suppose the file is called wonderful.Rtex.

Rscript -e "knitr::knit(\"wonderful.Rtex\", output = \"wonderful.tex\")"

Like Rmarkdown, knitr::knit() executes the code chunks and inline R code and generates a clean \(\LaTeX\) file. And that \(\LaTeX\) file can be render by my favorite \(\LaTeX\) renderer. These days, I am getting lazy and I just use latexmk. I usually write a Makefile like this:

appendix:
	Rscript -e "knitr::knit(\"wonderful.Rtex\", output = \"wonderful.tex\")"
	latexmk online_wonderful.tex -pdf
	rm -f *.out *aux *bbl *blg *log *toc *.ptb *.tod *.fls *.fdb_latexmk *.lof *.fff *.run.xml *.bcf *.ttt
	rm wonderful.tex

Another issue is how to edit those .Rtex files offline. RStudio is just a matter of double click. On emacs, I just need to associate the file extension .Rtex to the poly-noweb+r-mode.

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.Rtex" . poly-noweb+r-mode))

From offline to online

Actually, the Git integration allows me to edit the files offline and then push my edits back to Overleaf. However, this can be problematic because my collaborators might have edited the files via the web interface. And my edits via Git might overwrite my collaborators’ edits.

So, most of the time I just use the web interface. The emacs keybinding on the Overleaf web interface is a joke, don’t use it. Previously, I wrote about using GhostText with Overleaf and edit the text with emacs. Now, It works unreliably. I really hope that it can work again.

For writing from zero, I usually just write my text offline on emacs and then paste it into the file on Overleaf. For editing existing text, I use the web interface.

Conclusion

Despite all these limitations, it is still a usable literature programming online platform. If Overleaf can serve as a gateway drug to nudge people away from using Microsoft Word / Google Doc and all these US big-tech path-dependency bullshit, and embrace open source and computational reproducibility, it is already a good service. I also like the fact that my files are not locked in the platform. So, I think I will support this little uncomfy service. But, dear Overleaf: Please don’t sell your damn company to an evil conglomerate like Elsevier or Springer Nature. Thank you!

After her “solidarity mission” following the October 7 Hamas surprise attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul initially declined to say who covered the cost for the journey to Israel. Her administration would only say it was a “nonprofit that works with the Jewish community.”

Last week, Hochul’s office relented, telling reporters that the funder was the UJA-Federation of New York, a Jewish philanthropy that has supported dozens of similar trips for elected officials, including, recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Citing a delay in a state ethics office review, Hochul’s office said it would cover the $12,000 cost after all. 

UJA-Federation of New York belongs to a sprawling network of tax-exempt charities under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America, or JFNA. In addition to funding Jewish community groups, federation chapters have also been accused of sending millions in tax-exempt dollars to organizations that support Israel’s illegal settlement program in the occupied West Bank. According to published reports and an Intercept review of recent tax filings, UJA itself has provided more than half a million dollars since 2018 to groups that support Israeli settlements. 

The arrangement has come under scrutiny in recent years for funneling publicly subsidized money to settlements in Israel that are considered to be illegal under international law, part of Israel’s increasingly successful efforts to foreclose the possibility of a contiguous future Palestinian state.

Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for the American Jewish anti-occupation group IfNotNow, said that funding settlements diminishes hopes for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. 

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution.”

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution, instead deepening a violent apartheid reality for Palestinians with no end in sight,” Borgwardt told The Intercept. While funding groups operating in settlements, UJA has not supported efforts to de-escalate the current war, Borgwardt said: “If the UJA and Governor Hochul are concerned about safety for Israelis and hostage returns, they should join us in calling for an immediate ceasefire, release of the hostages, a de-escalation, and an end to the conditions of occupation, apartheid and siege that led to the current nightmare.”

In response to questions about the trip and UJA’s funding of groups operating in or supporting settlements, Hochul’s office sent a statement shared with reporters last week. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment or questions about the payment arrangement for the trip. 

While JFNA, the umbrella group, has in the past said it has a policy not to fund investments in the occupied Palestinian territories, individual federations have said they don’t have guidelines for distinguishing grants made over the so-called Green Line that demarcates Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

“Jewish Federations’ long-standing policy is that we do not allocate funds for capital investments beyond the Green Line,” JFNA, the umbrella group, said in a statement. “We are also adamant that the incredible support we provide for humanitarian aid, medical assistance, helping victims of terror, and building a stronger, more tolerant, and more accepting civil society should not be denied to those who may need it based on their address.”

In many cases, the cash goes to groups that carry out activities on both sides of the so-called Green Line, including groups that do humanitarian work, with the destination of funds sometimes reported in tax filings and other times not. Grants to groups that work on both sides of the Green Line defray other costs, enabling greater resources to flow into settlements or supporting their expansion.

UJA has directed funds to a wide array of groups in Israel. Among them are organizations promoting Arab–Israeli cooperation and supporting Arab inclusion in Israeli society. The group has also given to Zionist educational and policy organizations. Many recipients of UJA cash are not involved in the settlements, but the group has also donated money to organizations, both in Israel and stateside, that support and participate in the settlement project. (UJA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since 2018, UJA has given sums totaling in the six figures to groups supporting settlement activity in the West Bank, according to media reports, UJA reports, and tax filings. Through JFNA, New York’s UJA gave nearly $23,000 last year to Ohr Torah Stone, a modern Orthodox Jewish movement founded in the West Bank settlement of Efrat and operates schools in settlements.

The group gave at least $105,000 to Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that promotes American immigration to Israel and has encouraged migrants to move to the West Bank. American Friends of Or National Missions, a New York-based nonprofit that helps expand existing settlements in Israel and establish new ones in the West Bank, received $45,000 from UJA, earmarked for information centers in the Negev and Galilee, areas inside the Green Line. And, in 2019, the group gave $10,000 to the Jewish National Fund, which has financed settlement activity for decades and purchased land from Palestinians to hand it to settlers.

And UJA has donated at least $350,000 to Kedma, earmarked for “building resilience in the Gaza envelope,” an area inside Israel’s internationally recognized border that abuts the occupied Gaza Strip. Kedma provides housing for gap year students, including in Israeli settlements, and administers scholarship and volunteer programs. Among the volunteering tasks, according to Haaretz, is working security for ranches used by settlers to seize large swaths of land for so-called hilltop settlements — those considered illegal even under Israeli law.

In recent weeks, ideological settlers in the West Bank, emboldened by the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’s deadly surprise attack and armed with state-issued rifles, have killed at least 100 Palestinians and displaced at least 13 entire communities.

The roughly 150 independent U.S. nonprofits under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America came under heightened scrutiny after a 2017 Haaretz investigation revealed that some had sent millions of effectively subsidized dollars to settlements, including to extremist settler groups in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

While most federation funds are spent within the United States, the federations have historically also donated around 10 percent or more of their disbursed funds to Israel, both directly and through other U.S. nonprofits that route the money to Israel. Local federations gave at least $6 million to Israeli settlements between 2012 and 2015, Haaretz reported.

The transfer of millions of tax-exempt dollars to settlements in Palestine through private U.S. foundations has raised questions among nonprofit, legal, and foreign policy experts. The U.S., for its part, officially opposes Israeli settlements and their expansion, though the donations are thought to not run afoul of laws governing tax-exempt charities.

Local leaders have tried to stem the flow of private cash to the settlements. In May, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Jabari Brisport, both Democrats, introduced the Not on Our Dime Act to prohibit nonprofits in New York from supporting Israeli settlement activity. The proposal would empower the state attorney general to impose penalties on violators. The bill was met with stiff opposition from the legislators’ Democratic colleagues.

Overall, charities in the U.S. funneled more than $220 million in tax-exempt money to settler organizations in Israel between 2009 and 2013, another Haaretz investigation found. Funds to Israel were transferred through some 50 U.S.-based organizations, including the Hebron Fund and the New York-based Central Fund of Israel.

Federations under the JFNA umbrella haven’t always been able to support West Bank settlements. In the 2000s, the group changed its rules to allow federations to send humanitarian aid to any Israelis, opening the door for local chapters to funnel millions past the Green Line that separates Israel’s internationally recognized territory from occupied Palestinian lands. Since then, as settlers have forced more and more Palestinians out of their homes and off their land, the JFNA has relaxed other restrictions on operations in the West Bank.

In June, JFNA and the UJA-Federation, among other organizations, co-sponsored a conference in New York City promoting Israeli settlements, The Forward reported. The event featured Israeli ministers, Zionist leaders, and heads of settlement councils, who partook in panels on how to spread the Israeli presence in the West Bank.

In 2016, JFNA’s board voted to allow federation-sponsored trips to visit West Bank settlements. Between 2014 and 2021, UJA-Federation also gave at least $12 million to Birthright programs, which have been criticized for regularly taking participants into Israeli-occupied territories without notifying them, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights, whose annexation from Syria is not internationally recognized. (JFNA told The Forward it had not seen a copy of the conference programming before agreeing to take part.)

During Adams’s UJA-Federation-organized excursion, he met with Yisrael Gantz, chair of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs roughly 50 Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The visit drew criticisms, including from liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization J Street.

The UJA-Federation is a “partner” organization and the primary funder of another Israel excursion-sponsoring organization: the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council has taken over 1,500 public officials on “study tours” to Israel, according to its website. On the trips, Israeli military representatives accompany participants on visits to “strategic locales,” like the West Bank “Security Barrier” and a town near the Gaza Strip. The junkets also frequently venture into the West Bank beyond the wall, including Efrat, a purportedly “liberal” settlement where nearly half of the residents voted for an extremist far-right party last year.

The trips have shaped elected officials’ politics. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. — one of Congress’s most aggressive Israel backers, including strident support of the ongoing Israeli military campaign that has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza — credits his views on Israel–Palestine to a 2015 trip he took as a city council member. The trip was co-organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and UJA-Federation.

“There’s a false narrative that I am pro-Israel because of ‘the Jewish lobby’ or ‘Jewish money’ or whatever antisemitic tropes critics wish to invoke,” Torres, whose top campaign contributor is America’s flagship Israel lobby group, tweeted on Tuesday. “Left unmentioned is the fact that I have been pro-Israel for nearly a decade—long before I ever thought of running for Congress.”

While smearing critics of his pro-Israel positions as antisemitic and racist, Torres cited the trip paid for by the two New York charities.

The post Kathy Hochul’s Israel Trip Bankrolled by Group Funding Illegal Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.

Krystal and Saagar discuss Netanyahu rejecting calls for ceasefire and resignation, Hamas puts out a new hostage video, Leaked docs reveal Israeli plan to empty Gaza strip, New Speaker puts out plan to cut IRS funding for Israel Aid, Ukraine admits to "stealing like there's no tomorrow", Biden admin to unleash surveillance on protests at college campuses, New Polls show Iowans souring on Vivek, the PBD podcast confronts DeSantis over his High Heels, and we're joined in studio by Gili Roman a brother of the Israeli hostages to talk about his story, Netanyahu, Palestinian Rights, and Peace.

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

“Israeli society has always been held together by scotch tape. The scotch tape is falling apart,” says Miko Peled. And he would know. Miko is the son of one of Israel's highest ranking generals and the grandson of a signatory to Israeli independence. He was raised in Israel and served in its army. And he condemns Israel's "savage" attacks on Palestinians.

He answers several questions: How was Hamas able to do what it did? Where was the Israeli army? Is the IDF prioritizing keeping the hostages alive or killing Hamas? And explains the history of Israel’s control over Gaza, how it led to the brutal massacre we’re witnessing today, and the way to end this war.

“That really is the conversation: how we bring this to an end, for real. Not a ceasefire, but a complete end to the blockade, a complete release of Palestinian prisoners, immediate aid to Palestinians. And all this with no conditions.”

He’s not stopping at just a reprieve from the bombings: “To the point that at the end of the day we bring the unconditional surrender of the apartheid state. That should be the main goal.”

Subscribe for the full episode to hear Miko’s logical plan for achieving this, and the harsh reality Palestinians face until we do.

“Between now and then, we can be certain that Palestinians are going to continue to pay a heavy price. And the world is silent.”

The world is silent, for the Palestinians at least. In the US, the president, Congress, and media brazenly cheerlead the genocide, lamenting the deaths of only Israeli citizens, understanding that referring to Palestinians as “civilians” will get you in trouble.

“One party explicitly rejects talking about Palestinian civilians and explicitly blames Hamas for whatever happens to them. The other party pays some lip service but doesn’t do anything. And that is American democracy.”

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Senator Chris Murphy (D–CT) believes anything Israel says

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Wilson every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

Watch the full interview here:

Read more

Author Vincent Bevins returns to the show to discuss his new book “If We Burn” covering the “mass protest decade.”  We discuss global protest movements from Brazil to Tunisia to Egypt to Chile, how they’ve affected or failed to affect global politics, and how the last decade of protest and activism relates to the ongoing conflict in Palestine.

 You can find Vincent’s book here: www.ifweburn.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

A critical component of undergraduate STEM education is understanding sets of numbers and how to process, plot, and compare them. However, most programs only scratch the surface of data analysis techniques, data visualization, and uncertainty.

A new book in AGU’s Advanced Textbook Series, Data Analysis for the Geosciences, provides a comprehensive introduction to data analysis, visualization, and data-model comparisons and metrics, within the framework of the uncertainty around the values. We asked the author to give an overview of the textbook and how it can be used.

I’m sure many students grumble about the requirement to take a statistics course. Through your teaching and this textbook, how do you make data analysis interesting and engaging for students?

I introduce this class to students as the broccoli of geoscience. The content is a superfood of analysis and will make you a better scientist, but goes down best with a lot of cheese. In this case, that special sauce is the Earth, atmosphere, space, and planetary examples interspersed throughout the book and the course, not only in the examples we assess in class but also in every homework and exam question. I try to make it real so they see how these obscure statistics concepts could help them with their research projects later in their career.

How is your textbook different from other typical undergraduate statistics and applied statistics textbooks and courses for STEM students?

I focus the content on understanding the scope of when, where, and how each statistical formula should be used. That is, when introducing a concept, I emphasize which analysis situations are best suited for each statistical technique, and how to decide which one to use in each situation. I only include derivations of the equations so that students can understand limitations of these tools.

There are many statistics equations out there for processing a data set or comparing two number sets, so I strive to be clear about the constraints that we should place on using and interpreting the values we get from these formulas.

Why is it important for all STEM students to know many different tools and techniques for data analysis?

In STEM careers, we make many decisions based on the analysis of a number set or the comparison of two number sets. It is difficult for the human brain to comprehend a list of a million numbers, though, or even a hundred numbers, so this assessment requires the use of techniques to distill an overwhelmingly large set down into a few understandable numbers. We have several common formulas that we love to use, but these come with caveats, embedded in their derivation and therefore critical to their interpretation. If the number set violates that underlying assumption, then our interpretation might be wrong. Furthermore, the decision at the end of our assessment might not fit well with the common metrics, and more appropriate ones should be chosen. It is useful to know about these other techniques to know which one to use for your specific purpose.

What role does uncertainty play in data analysis?

We cannot compare two numbers without knowing the uncertainty of each. If I did an analysis of two supposedly similar data sets, and I found two means of 8 and 10, are these close enough to call them equal? You have no idea without uncertainty estimates. If the uncertainties are 5 and 6, respectively, then yes, an initial guess would be that they are the similar. If the uncertainties are 0.5 and 0.6, however, then no, they are clearly different. Essentially everything about statistical analysis requires an uncertainty estimate to provide context and meaning to the base values.

Why is it important for students to have a strong foundation in data analysis, comparison, and visualization?

To make it personal, essentially all of my research involves the analysis of data sets or numerical model output. Often, I am conducting comparisons of various simulation runs against data for a specific real event or compilations of data across long timescales.

The ability to process a number set through plots, basic statistics, and advanced comparative techniques is at the core of scientific research. A class that introduces students to the number set visualization and comparison is not only essential to a successful STEM career but also useful for critically evaluating statistics that we encounter in our daily lives.

Aside from STEM students, who else may find your book useful?

The process of starting with a plot, then moving on to basic analysis, and finally to more specialized comparative approaches is applicable to many disciplines. For example, it is the basis of engineering analysis of systems and of making financial decisions.

I hope that it is appealing to anyone that compares two number sets across any data science purpose, not only across all of the traditional STEM fields but also in medicine, the social sciences, and economics.

I also hope that that students from other fields find the Earth and space science examples throughout the book to be interesting sidebars about the natural world.

Data Analysis for the Geosciences: Essentials of Uncertainty, Comparison, and Visualization, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-119-74789-5. List price: $149.95 (hardcover), $120.00 (e-book)

Chapter 1 is freely available. Visit the book’s page on Wiley.com and click on “Read an Excerpt” below the cover image.

Find out more about this book in this short video.

—Michael W. Liemohn (liemohn@umich.edu, 0000-0002-7039-2631), University of Michigan, United States

Editor’s Note: It is the policy of AGU Publications to invite the authors or editors of newly published books to write a summary for Eos Editors’ Vox.

Citation: Liemohn, M. W. (2023), Foundations in data analysis for undergraduate STEM students, Eos, 104, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EO235031. Published on 31 October 2023.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

In an extended version of the programme that was broadcast, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential book John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 after he resigned in protest from his role at the Paris Peace Conference. There the victors of World War One were deciding the fate of the defeated, especially Germany and Austria-Hungary, and Keynes wanted the world to know his view that the economic consequences would be disastrous for all. Soon Germany used his book to support their claim that the Treaty was grossly unfair, a sentiment that fed into British appeasement in the 1930s and has since prompted debate over whether Keynes had only warned of disaster or somehow contributed to it.

With

Margaret MacMillan Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford

Michael Cox Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Founding Director of LSE IDEAS

And

Patricia Clavin Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House, 2020)

Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Patricia Clavin et al (eds.), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Patricia Clavin, ‘Britain and the Making of Global Order after 1919: The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture’ (Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 31:3, 2020)

Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man; The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (William Collins, 2015)

R. F. Harrod, John Maynard Keynes (first published 1951; Pelican, 1972)

Jens Holscher and Matthias Klaes (eds), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace: A Reappraisal (Pickering & Chatto, 2014)

John Maynard Keynes (with an introduction by Michael Cox), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (John Murray Publishers, 2001)

Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1946) D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (Routledge, 1992)

Alan Sharp, Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective (Haus Publishing Ltd, 2018)

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946 (Pan Macmillan, 2004)

Jürgen Tampke, A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Success of the Nazis (Scribe UK, 2017)

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Penguin Books, 2015)

In the 1000th edition of In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most celebrated film of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). It begins with an image that, once seen, stays with you for the rest of your life: the figure of Death playing chess with a Crusader on the rocky Swedish shore. The release of this film in 1957 brought Bergman fame around the world. We see Antonius Block, the Crusader, realising he can’t beat Death but wanting to prolong this final game for one last act, without yet knowing what that act might be. As he goes on a journey through a plague ridden world, his meeting with a family of jesters and their baby offers him some kind of epiphany.

With

Jan Holmberg Director of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, Stockholm

Claire Thomson Professor of Cinema History and Director of the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London

And

Laura Hubner Professor of Film at the University of Winchester

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Alexander Ahndoril (trans. Sarah Death), The Director (Granta, 2008)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Marianne Ruuth), Images: My Life in Film (Faber and Faber, 1995)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (Viking, 1988)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Best Intentions (Vintage, 2018)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Sunday’s Children (Vintage, 2018)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Private Confessions (Vintage, 2018)

Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima (trans. Paul Britten Austin), Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman (Da Capo Press, 1993)

Melvyn Bragg, The Seventh Seal: BFI Film Classics (British Film Institute, 1993)

Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius (eds.), The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Taschen/Max Ström, 2018)

Erik Hedling (ed.), Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy (Lund University Press, 2021)

Laura Hubner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Daniel Humphrey, Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2013)

Maaret Koskinen (ed.), Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema, and the Arts (Wallflower Press, 2008)

Selma Lagerlöf (trans. Peter Graves), The Phantom Carriage (Norvik Press, 2011)

Mariah Larsson and Anders Marklund (eds.), Swedish Film: An Introduction and Reader (Nordic Academic Press, 2010)

Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Birgitta Steene (ed.), Focus on The Seventh Seal (Prentice Hall, 1972)

Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam University Press, 2014)

How important is it for movie producers to get the science right? Brian Cox and Robin Ince discover why some surprising movies have scientific advisers and ask if there is any science in The Simpsons? They question the existence of fictional wormholes, while comedian Ross Noble can’t believe there may be actually be a space time portal shaped like a pair of trousers. Some writers are even accurate by accident, as comic book author Alan Moore discovers when he tells Brian about one of his outlandish planetary plotlines… only to hear it obeys all the laws of physics. And Sir Patrick Stewart wows the panel with a little piece of plastic, but everyone agrees this Star Trek communicator is the stuff of legend.

Episodes featured: Series 12: The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: Los Angeles Series 12: Christmas Special Series 22: Black Holes Series 2: Science Fiction Science Fact Series 7: Space Exploration

New episodes will be released on Wednesdays, but if you’re in the UK, listen to new episodes, a week early , first on BBC Sounds bbc.in/3K3JzyF

Producer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

…if you’re an Emacs user, that is.

You know, it’s funny, because people have opinions on why you don’t need a terminal on entirely different ends of a spectrum. It’s like that IQ chart meme:

Figure 1: *That’s Visual Studio on the left, not VS Code

And yes, I know, there are many people who will disagree with me, probably on everything that I’m going to say next. But hey, it’s OK to agree to disagree. You don’t have to believe me, instead, you should try it for yourself.

I often see how young programmers walk this kind of path:

• Terminals are scary.
• I don’t need a terminal - my IDE does all things for me with a click of a button.
• Well, I needed a terminal for some kind of task in my latest project and it wasn’t so bad.
• GOSH, terminals are so powerful with all these commands available.
• installs Vim
• OMG, Vim is so powerful and it is a Terminal-base program!
• I don’t need a fancy IDE - I’m a power user now!

And many often stop there, which is fine, but a bit sad. I also been there, but somehow moved on. Well, not all - some stay within the comfort zone of their IDE which is fine too, some ditch Vim for something more, or even something less, and really become power users. Mine were:

• Emacs? Eww, what’s that ugly white theme
• Well, Emacs seems interesting, but it starts so slow compared to my 100+ plugins NeoVim setup.
• EVIL mode? Second-floor basement¹? MAGIT?
• Emacs has wrappings for the tools I use?
• Emacs can run any shell command?
• Even remote ones?
• I don’t need a terminal?
• I don’t need a terminal.

Well, I know some people who think alike, so it’s not just me, but I do believe that it’s not a majority of Emacs users. The Vterm package for Emacs has 1.6k stars on GitHub at the point of this article, and Emacs itself has several terminal implementations in its core. So, where I’m coming from with this?

Basically, a few months ago I decided to stop using a terminal emulator. At all. I deleted my Vterm configuration from Emacs, and since I didn’t use terminal outside of Emacs it was pretty much it. I did keep the EAT package still, as it is sometimes useful for things not so related to terminals directly, but more on that later.

Now, today I’m going to describe why terminal emulators aren’t really needed in Emacs specifically, but nothing actually prevents other software from following suit. It just doesn’t happen that often, I guess because most of the time people freak out of non-interactive shells, even though they come with lots of benefits.

To be clear, yes, my use cases may not cover all of the workflows that involve terminals, however, I think I’m covering most of them. For instance:

• I often SSH to remote servers to browse and edit files;
  • More often I’m SSH’ing to remote servers to run some commands;
    • Sometimes even via multiple hops;
• I update existing and install new system packages;
• I run commands on my local machine. Things like:
  • project compilation;
  • grepping stuff;
  • finding files;
  • using things like AWK, Perl, Sed, etc.;
  • running servers and services in the background.

So, combined, I do both local and remote work, and I don’t need a terminal emulator for that. How?

async-shell-command

Emacs has this command, bound by default to Alt+& (M-&), and what it does is really simple. It runs a given command asynchronously in the background, feeding its output to the *Async Shell Command* buffer. That’s it. Well, in my case, I’m redirecting stderr to the *Shell Command Errors* buffer mostly for cases when stdout is somehow structured. We’ll get to that.

What’s cool about async-shell-command is that it basically is a terminal emulator. Well, not quite, but very close to being that. Thing is, let’s just think about what a terminal emulator is - it’s a prompt reading a line, and text spitted between each prompt. Well, async-shell-command is basically that, except it doesn’t have the prompt in the buffer itself - instead, it’s part of Emacs’ minibuffer.

And, unlike a terminal emulator, the result of each command is put into the dedicated buffer that you can do all of your usual Emacs operations on. Ever wondered why things like Tmux implement things like copy-mode? Because the terminal is interactive by nature and when you need to do non-interactive (by interactive I mean text input and command running) stuff you have to switch to a separate mode. I don’t like separate modes that much.

So async-shell-command gives you all of the properties of a regular terminal - i.e. it displays text output from a command, and you get a prompt with history and stuff like command/file completions. If the command requires some input from the user, Emacs will properly accept it in the said buffer - it is interactive. However, it is not a real terminal emulator still - it can’t do TUI stuff. So if you’ve got anything in your workflow that uses TUI async-shell-command is not the right tool for the job.

I’ll get back to the interactive TUIs in a bit, but I should say that I don’t have any such programs in my workflow. Honestly, if I’m already using Emacs, why do I need something TUI-based, if Emacs probably already has a better graphical interface to it? We’ll get to that.

compile & project-compile

Now let’s get to the non-interactive interactive stuff. Earlier I mentioned that non-interactive shells (again, by interactive I mean text input and command running) have some benefits to them but it’s often hard to describe what are those to a non-Emacs user.

So, compile is very similar to async-shell-command except it doesn’t try to process any user input. Therefore, if you ran something like scp in a compilation buffer, and forgot to place your SSH key to the machine you’re going to copy the file to, you’ll be asked for a password, but you won’t have any ability to insert it. It’s better to use async-shell-command for stuff like that.

project-compile is exactly the same thing as compile, except it automatically detects the current project’s root directory, and runs from there. It’s very handy to run things like make because Makefile is usually located at the project’s root. But, why is it better than async-shell-command?

Well, compilation buffers are pretty specific - they display the log of the compilation process. That’s why we can treat them specially too. And Emacs does it by default, creating file links to every message in the compilation buffer. For example, if I run the M-x compile RET main.c RET with the following main.c:

int main() {
    printf("works\n");
}

We get the following buffer:

As can be seen here, each warning is highlighted with a respectful color, like notes use a teal color, and warnings are yellow. But that can be done by terminals too, you might say. Note, however, that when I hover my mouse over such colored text it shows up as a link that I can click. Upon clicking it, Emacs will open that file and highlight the error.

Well, it might not be as impressive as it sounds, but this is an open interface. You can add support for any kind of language you want, and it will work. I have a post, describing how I’ve added support for Clojure, and went as far as searching for warnings inside dependencies stored as .jar archives in my .m2 cache. It’s nuts how flexible this system is.

Similarly, if you run M-x project-compile RET grep -Rn "something" RET it will create a compilation buffer with the results from grep, and each result will be a clickable link:

You don’t need to click on links either, you can use n or p to go to the next link, and automatically open the file at the link’s specified position. But running grep and other tools through the compilation buffer is a bit cumbersome, as you do have to follow a specific line format that this buffer understands. Instead, you can use Xref.

Xref

Another thing provided by Emacs, mainly for reference navigation purposes, but extensible enough that you can make it do whatever you want. For instance, you can run such things like grep right from Emacs, and get results in the *xref* buffer:

Figure 2: result of calling project-find-regexp which internally uses grep

Similarly to the compilation buffer, you get the same set of shortcuts to move around, but a more readable and categorized output. And this works for many other things, like results from your language servers, tag files, etc. Even more than that, you can do stuff like xref-query-replace-in-results from the *xref* buffer - so it can act like Sed.

And that’s my point - these tools are great, but using them from the terminal is not fun. Emacs acknowledges that these tools are great, and provides a better interface for them without requiring you to run a terminal emulator inside Emacs. To be fair, Emacs isn’t the only one who does this - but I find it to be the most consistent and most flexible in this regard.

But what if you need to do stuff with remote machines?

TRAMP

So, we’ve covered basic tasks involving running various commands on your local machine. The async-shell-command can be used to run arbitrary commands and those which require some level of interactivity. The compile command is for project compilation stuff, and Xref is for navigating references provided by some other tools or Emacs itself. Now imagine we need to run grep on the remote - how would we do that?

TRAMP got you covered. When opening a file in Emacs you can start the path with a forward slash / followed by a protocol, like ssh and Emacs will open a remote file for you. For example /ssh:user@host:/home/user/.bashrc will open the .bashrc file on the remote machine if you have access to that. If not, Emacs will ask for the password, and it is basically the same as the ssh in the terminal.

But now, when you’ve opened a file via the TRAMP, suddenly, you can use all these things I’ve been talking about before - async-shell-command, compile, project-find-regexp and it will do its work on the remote. It’s really transparent.

More than that - if you have a remote machine, and it has something like a language server installed, Emacs will not try to run your local machine’s language server (if it even has one), instead, it will run it on the remote. This means that you can run Emacs on your machine, but have all of the development stuff needed on the remote. And you don’t need to run Emacs remotely, or do X over ssh, or use things like sshfs - just use TRAMP.

And TRAMP isn’t limited to just ssh. You can enter containers as well, e.g. opening a file with /podman:container-name:/path/to/file will give you access to files and programs in a container. And there are many more methods that TRAMP supports, so you’re probably well covered for your particular remote accessing needs. As for me, instead of SSH’ing to a machine I just open it in DIRED via TRAMP, and run commands using async-shell-commands most of the time.

Yes, TRAMP can be slow, but I haven’t noticed that in my practice. It depends on the connection speed, and when I do my work, all remote machines are usually in the same network. Your case may vary.

But I can’t stress this enough - you don’t need a terminal emulator for the task of editing remote files or running commands.

Imagine this - I have to work with remote machines created by other people. They’re set up from an arbitrary Linux image, not all of them even have Vim - only stripped down vi. So if I were to ssh to them and run vi I would probably be bald now, because vi is terrible, and if your terminfo isn’t supported by the remote you get gibberish symbols here and there when interacting with vi or even the shell some times. And believe me, I know how to use vi and Vim, I used them for many years prior to Emacs - I just don’t want to anymore.

So every time I hear things like: “Yeah, Emacs is cool, but I have to SSH to headless remotes and edit files, so Vim is a more fitting choice for me”, I say: “No. No it isn’t”. And even if that’s the case - by SSH’ing to a remote, you lose your Vim configuration - you either get a pure Vim or sometimes even just a plain vi. When I was using Vim, not having my config around was annoying, because I had many handy keybindings, helpful plugins for navigation, and so on. So instead of SSH’ing, I used sshfs to mount the remote. This can work, until you need to execute something on the remote - then you still need to use SSH.

With Emacs - I don’t.

TUIs

Now, let’s get back to the elephant in the room. Running grep and other stuff is fun and all but we can’t leave out programs that use a TUI - Terminal User Interface.

I often see people running mc (Midnight Commander), some use TUI Git clients, and many find fzf very useful. And yeah, neither async-shell-command nor compile can run those. If I try to run mc from the former, I get this message:

Your terminal lacks the ability to clear the screen or position the cursor.

And that’s reasonable, it’s just a text buffer, not a terminal emulator, as I’ve mentioned.

However, why would you run mc if you have DIRED in Emacs? Same with the TUI Git clients - MAGIT blows those out of the water. FZF? Emacs has multiple completion narrowing and filtering frameworks that integrate with the rest of Emacs, so I don’t see why would I need to use fzf specifically. And if you want - you can, there’s a package that integrates with it.

So, my point is - most of the time, there is either a package providing a superior experience to the one that the TUI app provides. And it’s still text - you can use all of your Emacs operations on it, like on a regular buffer, same as in a terminal, just less clunky.

Also, remember how I said that I install system packages from Emacs? Well, package managers usually don’t have a TUI, so I do it from async-shell-command which allows me to interactively use my system’s package manager. But, if I were a GNU Guix user, I could use Emacs to get an interface similar to the one you get with package.el:

So yeah, Emacs is able to give you a better interface to your tools than a terminal emulator. And if not, which I’m yet to see, you can run a shell in Emacs.

Wait, wait, I said you can run a shell, not a terminal emulator. That doesn’t count, right?

Eshell

Emacs has its own shell, written in Emacs lisp, that works across multiple operating systems. It is called eshell and it is great. You can extend it with Emacs Lisp, you can write scripts in Emacs Lisp, and it still has access to all of the other tools you use regularly. But again, it is not a terminal emulator, it is a shell. Like bash.

So if we try to run a program that requires terminal capabilities specifically, Eshell will automatically create a separate buffer that runs an ANSI terminal emulator, also written in Emacs Lisp. Which means that your interactive TUI programs should run fine. In practice, it isn’t always great.

However, recently I’ve found this package: EAT. It is a terminal emulator that can run inside an Eshell buffer - meaning that you don’t have to deal with separate buffers and such if you happen to run a command that requires a proper terminal. Of course, you can use EAT as a terminal emulator by itself, but I don’t find this that useful. Instead, I use it from Eshell, although very rarely too. It’s just a nice backup.

What are the tasks you believe you need a terminal for?

I’m genuinely interested, feel free to contact me and share your thoughts. Or if you tried the ones I’ve provided and it wasn’t better, or if you just think that they won’t work for you - we can chat about that too.

I found myself on this weird path just a few months ago, but these were very busy months. Meaning, I think I have enough experience with this way of doing things to say that it is good. Again, I work with remote machines all the time, and I have to transfer files to them, edit remote files, watch logs live as the services are running, do remote development and more. And I do it from TRAMP with the help of async-shell-command and nothing else. For local tasks, I use project-compile and other project-related functions.

At first, it wasn’t as seamless, but I got adjusted quickly. Yes, I felt the urge to run Vterm, and SSH from there at first - but as time went by I noticed that opening TRAMP is much easier, as it reuses the already familiar Emacs’ file prompt. And the same goes for every other command I do.

It’s a shame that most other software I know doesn’t do this kind of integration. Visual Studio Code just gives you an integrated terminal - which is no different from an ordinary terminal. And in the case of Linux, probably isn’t the greatest terminal either. IntelliJ IDEA does that too, and while their terminal tries to do some smart things, I find it inconsistent.

The same goes for other code editors, like Vim which also now has an integrated terminal. Though running a terminal from a terminal-based editor is weird - you’re one ^Z away from your shell anyway. And for multiplexing needs, you can always use Tmux, which again, is probably better than the integrated terminal.

Kakoune is an interesting case here, they have a similar idea to Emacs - you can run commands and pipe their output to a buffer to later process it. And because there’s no extension language in Kakoune, it’s the primary way of adding features to the editor. E.g. you can’t implement a fuzzy file picker in Kakscript - you gotta use fzf for that. And while that’s a great way of handling this, I would say it’s better than how Vim handles this, I still think that it’s not as good as what Emacs does. But Emacs is an old project, it had time to develop all of that, while Kakoune is still young.

Well, that’s it. Feel free to share your thoughts, disagree with me, or whatnot. I think I’m now a firm believer that terminals need to die off at this point. A superior integration is possible, and already available. Thanks for reading!