Will talks to Betsy and Gloria, two LA public school teachers, ahead of the three-day teachers’ strike planned to begin this Tuesday. They discuss their demands, the conditions in the schools, engaging the local community, and challenges from the LA school district superintendent.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

print("Hello, World!")

#!/usr/bin/python3

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Hello, World!")

$ python3 /path/to/your/script.py
Hello, World!

$ /path/to/your/script.py
Hello, World!

#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Grüß Gott")

>>> "Grüß Gott".encode("unicode_escape")
b'Gr\\xfc\\xdf Gott'

$ /usr/bin/python3 -c 'print("Hello, World!")'
Hello, World!

$ python3 -c 'print("Hello, World!")'
Hello, World!

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-shebang/ »

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump's claims that he will be arrested on Tuesday, Lawyer Bradley Moss (@BradMossEsq) joins to give his legal opinion on Trump's legal scenario, MAGA demands Desantis block arrest of Trump, Pence is frozen on Trump criticism, Credit Suisse rescued on brink, Biden Sec confirms small banks won't receive same treatment, Putin tours Ukraine Warzone, US infuriated by China's Ukraine Peace Deal, the 20 year anniversary of Iraq, Saagar looks into the insane Anti Lab Leak propaganda, and Krystal looks into Jon Stewart's interview with Larry Summers on Socialism for the Rich.

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For more than 60 years, John Cale has continued to make exciting, challenging and culturally relevant music, including his most recent release, Mercy. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with the Velvet Underground legend about his new music, collaborations and legacy. Plus, the hosts share some of their favorite spy songs and bid farewell to jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

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Featured Songs:

John Cale, "STORY OF BLOOD feat. Weyes Blood," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol, 1967
John Cale, "EVERLASTING DAYS feat. Animal Collective," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
John Cale, "MARILYN MONROE'S LEGS (beauty elsewhere) feat. Actress," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
John Cale, "TIME STANDS STILL feat. Sylvan Esso," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
John Cale, "NIGHT CRAWLING," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
John Cale, "MOONSTRUCK (Nico's Song)," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
The Velvet Underground and Nico, "Femme Fatale," The Velvet Underground & Nico, Verve, 1967
The Velvet Underground and Nico, "I'm Waiting for the Man," The Velvet Underground & Nico, Verve, 1967
John Cale, "Dying On the Vine (Fragments)," Artificial Intelligence, PVC, 1985
John Cale, "MERCY," Mercy, Double Six, 2023
Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man," ...And I Know You Wanna Dance, Imperial, 1966
Tony Allen, "Secret Agent," Secret Agent, World Circuit, 2009
The Fugs, "CIA Man," Virgin Fugs, ESP-Disk, 1967
Gene Vincent, "Private Detective (feat. The Shouts)," Private Detective (feat. The Shouts) (Single), Columbia, 1964
Rockwell, "Somebody's Watching Me," Somebody's Watching Me, Motown, 1984
The Untouchables, "I Spy (For the F.B.I.)," Wild Child, MCA, 1985
Lori & The Chameleons, "The Lonely Spy," To the Shores of Lake Placid, Zoo, 1982
Desmond Dekker & the Aces, "007 (Shanty Town)," Action!, Lagoon, 1968
The dB's, "A Spy In the House of Love," Like This, Bearsville, 1984
Big Boys, "Detectives," The Skinny Elvis, Touch and Go, 1993
Steely Dan & Tom Scott, "Aja," Aja, ABC, 1977
Wayne Shorter, "Speak No Evil," Speak No Evil, Blue Note, 1966
Poster Children, "She Walks," Flower Plower, Limited Potential, 1989

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“Why has the Left turned its back on free speech?” asks Christian Parenti, professor of economics and author of Radical Hamilton.

As Democrats censor Matt Taibbi over the Twitter Files, smear journalists Seymour Hersh and Jeff Gerth for reporting facts they don’t like, bury coverage on the Ohio train derailment, and vote for censorship bills in the name of stopping Putin, Parenti recalls a time when it was the Left who were the defenders of the First Amendment.

But now, as US leaders move deeper and darker into warmongering and censorship, lying to us at every turn to grow their power and wealth, Parenti instead asks: “When will the Left stand up to the deep state?”

The most recent move by the rich and powerful is the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank. “This is triage,” Parenti explains. “This is a tourniquet on a shattered leg, and that has to happen. You cannot let the US financial system collapse and not bring down the rest of the economy.” But while he agrees that the bailout is necessary in the short run, Parenti explains that the collapse is the fault of the capitalist system itself. Hear his analysis on how to fix it.

Plus, listen to the full interview on how the FBI intervened in the election, why liberal media is against free speech, and Christian and Aaron’s debate on Trump’s anti-war message.

Check out this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Democrats’ Matt Taibbi Meltdown where Useful Idiot Matt Taibbi goes to Congress.

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

Watch the full interview here:

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Unlocked for Paddy's Day! Ciarán shows the Irish classic sitcom Father Ted to the class

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In January 2015, as Islamic State militants were waging an offensive across Iraq and Syria, an Iranian intelligence officer known among his colleagues by the code name Boroujerdi sat down for a meeting with an important official: then-Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

The meeting, held at Abadi’s office in Iraq’s presidential palace in Baghdad, took place “without the presence of a secretary or a third person,” according to a report about the discussion contained in a leaked archive of cables from Iran’s shadowy Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

Abadi was a member of Iraq’s exiled political class, mostly Shia, who had returned to take power following the U.S. invasion. The two men discussed a range of topics, including the threat of ISIS to the Iraqi state, the role of foreign powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the region, and, finally, the position of the West. On at least one point, they agreed: Despite the threat of ISIS and other regional powers, the political conditions wrought by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein had created an opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allied Iraqi elites to “take advantage of this situation,” according to the Ministry of Intelligence and Security report.

Twenty years after U.S. troops first invaded Iraq, the classified Iranian intelligence documents, which were leaked to The Intercept and first reported in a series of stories that were published beginning in 2019, shed light on the important question of who actually won the war. One victor emerges clearly from the hundreds of pages of classified documents: Iran.

Today, Iran enjoys privileged access to Iraq’s political system and economy, while the United States has been reduced to a minor player. Iraqis themselves remain fractiously divided; many of their own political elites are close allies of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security cables, which were written between 2013 and 2015, the peak of the international campaign against ISIS, provide no shortage of examples of the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq. While helping train and organize Iraqi security forces who are ideologically tied to the Islamic Republic, activities documented at length in the cables, Iranian officials had also been routinely involved in promoting favored Iraqi politicians to important roles in the Iraqi government to protect Iran’s economic and political interests. One classified 2014 report contained in the trove of Iranian cables described then-future Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi as having a “special relationship” with Iran and named a laundry list of other Iraqi cabinet members who were close with the Islamic Republic — often people who had spent years exiled in Iran. The cables discuss how these close relationships have benefitted Iran, including by having sympathetic Iraqi officials give Iran access to Iraqi airspace and vital transportation connections with their allies in Syria.

The privileged conversation between Boroujerdi and Abadi was being replicated at that time at many levels of Iraqi government and society. In the cables, Iranian officials documented their work to solidify business and security interests in Iraq while obtaining oil and development contracts in the northern Kurdish regions and water purification projects in the south, the latter won with the help of a $16 million bribe paid to an Iraqi member of Parliament, according to one of the documents. The cables also show how former Iraqi military officials, including individuals trained or supported by the U.S. during the occupation, had been pressed into the service of Iranian intelligence, with one typical operative described as being forced to “collaborate to save himself.”

The war’s benefits to Iran were not solely political or security based either. Iraq is home to many sacred sites of Shia Islam, which, as the cables note, have opened up to Iranian tourism and influence. The documents in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive mostly provide individual reports of conversations and intelligence activities carried out by Iranian operatives inside Iraq. Yet overall, they depict Iran’s far-reaching political, security, and even cultural influence over Iraqi society in the vacuum left by the U.S. invasion.

This picture of Iranian ascendance is not only reflected in that country’s own intelligence documents. A massive two-volume study published in 2019 by the U.S. Army War College came to a similar conclusion, stating that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the conflict. The study is the most comprehensive look yet at the costs and consequences of the war from a U.S. military perspective. Some of those costs are obvious and well known: Thousands of Americans were killed in combat after an ill-defined mission to find weapons of mass destruction devolved into a counterinsurgency campaign and civil war. But although most of the burden of the war was borne by the relatively small number of Americans who directly took part, the war had broader impacts on American society that continue to be felt today.

“In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most consequential conflicts in American history. It shattered a long-standing political tradition against pre-emptive wars,” the War College authors wrote. “In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

Iraqis themselves have suffered greatly from the war; millions have been killed, wounded, or displaced as a result of the invasion and the subsequent civil conflict. The emergence of the Sunni Islamist extremist group ISIS, which Iran’s intelligence documents discuss at length, was itself the product of the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including abuses by rogue Iranian-backed militias. In the same 2015 conversation between Boroujerdi and former Prime Minister Abadi, the Iranian intelligence officer opined that “today, the Sunnis find themselves in the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” adding that they “are vagrants, their cities are destroyed, and an unclear future awaits them.”

The miserable condition of Iraqi Sunnis had worried others within Iran’s intelligence establishment, who warned that many Sunnis, reeling from massacres by Iraqi government security forces and militias, had been driven not merely to welcome ISIS, but also other Iranian enemies as well.

“The policies of Iran inside Iraq have given legitimacy for the Americans to return to Iraq,” one Iranian intelligence officer lamented. “People and parties who were fighting against America from the Sunni side now are wishing that not only America, but even Israel could come and rescue them from Iran.”

In the end, ISIS was destroyed as the result of a tacit coalition between the Iraqi government, the United States, Iran, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which combined to fight the group and regain control of its territories. Today, Iran remains the most powerful outside player inside Iraq. Although it has achieved a goal longed for since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s — to wield power in Iraq and incorporate its Shia-majority areas into Iran’s sphere of influence — Iran’s victory has proven, in many ways, an unhappy one.

During protests against government corruption in Iraq in 2019, Iraqis often blamed Iran and its allies, along with the United States, for the parlous state of the country. In 2020, Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a major architect of Iran’s policy in Iraq whose role is documented at length in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive, was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s airport, following tit-for-tat attacks between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. troops in the country.

Despite relative peace following the defeat of ISIS, Iraq today remains a powder keg with widespread unemployment, environmental degradation, and poverty that its ruling elites, widely denounced by Iraqis as kleptocrats and puppets of foreign countries, have been unable or unwilling to address. Two decades after the first U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Iran is facing its own challenges with internal instability and the economic impact of a U.S.-led international sanctions campaign that has destroyed its economy.

Yet when it comes to the shadow war between Iran and the United States in Iraq, Iranian elites likely view themselves as having prevailed — at a steep price to themselves, Americans, and Iraqis alike.

The post How Iran Won the U.S. War in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Zoe Lyons, Angela Barnes, Hugo Rifkind and Nish Kumar. On the agenda this week is Nicola Sturgeon's surprise resignation, Jeremy Corbyn being barred as a Labour candidate and the case of 200,000 stolen Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Hosted and written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Catherine Brinkworth, Eleanor Morton, Peter Tellouche and Cameron Loxdale.

Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Production

In this episode we discuss Jon Stewart giving push back to Mark Cuban's takes on SVB bailout in a recent interview, an independent test in East Palestine, Ohio detected deadly carcinogens in the water, a Roger Waters concert was cancelled due to his past statements on Israel, Lieutenant Governor McNally is caught with embarrassing social media posts flirting with a young man, Snapchat rolls out out a new AI to their app that goes haywire, and Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) from The Intercept joins to talk about Governor Gavin Newsom's personal financial connections to the SVB bailout.

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Commonwealth, Restoration, Glorious Revolution: we complete England’s cycle of political instability and, with a little help from our old friends the Dutch, birth a new order into the world.

Interactive atlas, bibliography and credits for the series can be found at: hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com

This is the end of the narrative portion of our series, thank you all so much for listening. But fear not: There’s more Hell to come. We have seven (7) bonus episodes coming up featuring interviews with guest experts on specific thematic topics we wanted to dive into more. Release schedule will remain weekly on Wednesdays through mid-April, with Will’s Movie Mindset series debuting right after.

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Sr. Foreign Correspondent Derek Davison stops by to take us around the world: China brokers mid-east diplomatic deal, Australia gets nuclear subs, porno mercenary recruitment, Russia drops drone, Ukraine exports grain…everything you could need in your Chapo Daily Brief.

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And listen to American Prestige here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-prestige/id1574741668

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Uma and Ciarán talk about Nickelback's Funk Song, Zadar's Snake Museum, Anti-migrant demos in Ireland but most importantly, we try to understand Cyprus.

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Democracy Now! 2023-03-16 Thursday

• Headlines for March 16, 2023
• Blinken Visits Niger, Home to U.S. Drone Base, as Biden Moves to Counter China & Russia in Africa
• Will Peace Hold in Tigray? Blinken Visits Ethiopia Four Months After Truce Reached to End War
• Death, Destruction & Resilience: Nadje Al-Ali on the 20th Anniversary of U.S. Invasion of Iraq

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Another mystery man, nicknamed Red, comes to town. He’s Mickey’s so-called “outlaw biker buddy.” Red takes activist Bryce Shelby for a drive to scope out the home of Colorado’s attorney general as part of a budding assassination plot. But Red lets something slip that makes Bryce suspicious.

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Ryan and Emily discuss a Russian jet shooting down an American drone, Desantis gives statements on Ukraine similar to Trump but receives more backlash, Tucker ridicules what Trump got done during his term and calls him "autistic", Is SVB the sign of another 2008 like collapse?, Biden approves a controversial fossil fuel drilling, ChatGPT 4.0 is unveiled, Emily looks at Women in the workforce, and Ryan looks into the origins of Ebola and how that outbreak's response may have effected our response to the possible Covid lab leak.

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Democracy Now! 2023-03-15 Wednesday

• Headlines for March 15, 2023
• Jeremy Scahill on Growing Proxy War Between U.S. and Russia & Downing of U.S. Drone in Black Sea
• The Nord Stream Bombing: Jeremy Scahill on Why U.S. Remains Most Likely Culprit in Pipeline Sabotage
• "Catastrophic": Trump-Appointed Judge in Texas May Restrict Abortion Pill Mifepristone Nationwide
• Mexico's Missing: 100,000+ Cases Unsolved as Leaked Military Docs Shed New Light on Ayotzinapa 43

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Democracy Now! 2023-03-14 Tuesday

• Headlines for March 14, 2023
• How Silicon Valley Bank & Signature Bank Lobbied to Weaken Regulations That Could Have Prevented Collapse
• Autopsy Suggests "Cop City" Protester Sitting Cross-Legged, Hands Up, When Shot 14 Times by Police

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Krystal and Saagar discuss the massive SVB bailout propping up the banking sector, Romney and Mark Cuban demand bailouts, Crypto Bank Signature collapses amid tech fallout, SVB Executives sold millions in stock and took bonuses before collapse, Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) from the GridNews joins us to talk about how all banks are being considered "Too Big to Fail", JD Vance rips Republicans opposing Norfolk Southern Regulation, Pence blasts Trump and Tucker for January 6th, and Desantis blames Wokeness for Bank collapse, and Fauci is flustered when asked about calls for his prosecution.

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Customers in line outside the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., on March 13, 2023.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images

For everyone who’s fought and bled for years to get Medicare for All in the United States, I’ve got some great news: The government just created it on Sunday!

Yes, this is Medicare for All Bank Deposits, rather than Medicare for All People. But if we think this through, we’ll see that both these things are great ideas and make sense for the same reasons — and there’s no reason that if we have one, we can’t have the other.

First of all, it’s important to understand what happened yesterday. Banks are intrinsically vulnerable to runs. They accept deposits from regular people and businesses, which is good, so we don’t have to keep sacks full of cash in our closet and pay armed men to guard them.

The problem is that we want to be able to come get our money out of the bank at any time. However, banks don’t keep sacks of all our cash in their vaults waiting for us. They loan deposits out and make other investments with them, leaving just a fraction of their deposits available to be withdrawn at any time. In the past, in the U.S., this meant that if rumors got going that a bank was insolvent, it didn’t actually matter whether or not the bank was healthy or not. Everyone would show up and try to get their money out first, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: The very fact that people were scared a bank was insolvent could make it insolvent. (In fact, Silicon Valley Bank, whose failure led to Sunday’s swift government action, may have been accidentally destroyed by its own clients telling each other scary stories in a group chat.)

As a company called American Deposit Management cheerily informs us on its website, “The history of bank failures in the U.S. begins just over 40 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.” From then until the Great Depression, America saw constant, catastrophic bank panics that destroyed individual fortunes and the economy overall.

Until the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, Wall Street had been able to fend off most democratic oversight. Partly, they did this by overtly arguing that the government would stifle crucial financial innovations and partly by covertly engaging in every form of corruption imaginable. But by 1933, there was enough popular anger at a recent cascade of bank runs and failures to overwhelm the industry’s power. The government was forced to do something about it, and part of the something was the creation of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

One of the main things the FDIC has done ever since is insure deposits, mostly savings and checking accounts, up to a certain limit. Originally, the limit was the equivalent of about $50,000 today. The idea was that this would cover most Americans, and people with more money were big boys and girls able to take care of themselves. It was last raised in 2008 to $250,000. Crucially, the funding for the insurance comes from an assessment on the banks themselves.

But the insurance created a new problem: With deposits insured by the government, depositors would naturally be tempted to place their money with banks making risky investments that promised high returns, knowing that if the bank lost their money, the government would step in and make them whole. Roosevelt was concerned about this at the time, telling reporters off the record, “We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.” The only solution was what banks hated most: regulation, government oversight of what they were doing with their depositors’ money.

This was the basic background to what happened last week, when Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, previously the 16th-largest bank in America and the favorite bank of the valley’s venture capitalists, experienced a bank run. This was alarming to many of its largest depositors, given that they apparently have the financial sophistication of a chicken. For instance, Roku revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was holding “approximately $487 million” at SVB. This suggests that $486,750,000 of Roku’s money was uninsured — and as the filing said, “the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB.”

It is not, in fact, impossible for corporations to manage their money safely. Indeed, some do it every day. But apparently, it can be a challenge for chickens, which have brains the size of two shelled peanuts.

The mass financial incompetence by SVB’s depositors set off shrieking and caterwauling from the valley’s venture capitalists and angel investors that could be heard on Neptune:

YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW — THAT IS THE PROPER REACTION TO A BANK RUN & CONTAGION @POTUS & @SecYellen MUST GET ON TV TOMORROW AND GUARANTEE ALL DEPOSITS UP TO $10M OR THIS WILL SPIRAL INTO CHAOS

— @jason (@Jason) March 12, 2023

On the one hand, this is hilarious. Silicon Valley’s libertarianism is apparently based on one clear, firm principle: It’s illegal for them and their friends to lose money.

But on the other hand, the financial system is so complex that literally no one on Earth can say for sure how it will behave under stress. Again, remember that banks can experience runs not because they’re insolvent, but because people come to believe they are or just that other people will believe that they are, perhaps because someone prominent is SCREAMING AT THEM IN ALL CAPS TO PANIC.

And society at large has a genuine interest in preventing bank runs. So the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC jointly announced on Sunday that the government would guarantee all deposits at SVB (and another big bank called Signature), no matter the size. In other words, it turns out Roku will be getting back all of its $487 million.

This might be the right call overall. But then again, it’s gratingly unfair. SVB’s big depositors are suddenly getting financial backing from the government — i.e., everyone else in America.

Most importantly, the entire financial system now understands that, if push comes to shove, the government will guarantee all deposits of any amount. The $250,000 limit turns out to be no limit at all.

The Treasury Department doesn’t want to admit this, of course, but they also can’t deny it. So when Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein asked about it yesterday, a Treasury official responded, “Well, you see, mmfrrffm rmmm blrf.”

I asked Treasury this question on a call with reporters this evening. This was their response pic.twitter.com/LeM9clLzmT

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 12, 2023

But whatever cloud of words is emitted by the government, depositors will be incentivized to put their money in banks taking wild swings, knowing that if there’s an upside, they’ll pocket some of it, while if things go wrong, the government will step in.

Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, there’s only one rational path forward: If the government is going to guarantee all bank deposits, then much of the banking industry is parasitical and should be euthanized.

The logic here is largely the same as with health care, where logic likewise inexorably points to universal insurance funded and supervised by the government.

Individuals have a strong interest in both their health costs and their basic banking deposits being covered by insurance. The conservative perspective is that everyone should buy private insurance based on a constant, never-ending series of Monte Carlo simulations about what your individual future holds.

But this is impossible for human beings. The future is unknowable. You may live your entire life with few health care costs, or you might suddenly face $1 million in costs next year. Your bank might putter along indefinitely, or it might explode tomorrow.

Likewise, society has a powerful interest in everyone being covered by these kinds of insurance. In the case of SVB, we don’t want the depositors to go without insurance but then be able to blackmail everyone else into bailing them out because we’re scared their miscalculations will infect the rest of the system. Analogously, we don’t want people, especially powerful ones, to avoid health insurance and then demand we pay for their treatment if they get a dangerous infectious disease.

In both cases, universal insurance is also necessary for more subtle reasons. Everyone knows that both the U.S. health insurance system and the banking system are unbearably unjust. If they’re not dealt with in an equitable way, the anger Americans rightfully feel about both will continue to be harvested by reactionary politicians.

The clear answer for health care is Medicare for All. With banking, it may plausibly be something like Banking for All — i.e., the Federal Reserve giving every person and corporation an account that no bank run could ever take away. In both cases, the solution is simple and obvious, with the only obstacle being the extraordinary power of wealthy corporations that serve no purpose whatsoever.

The post Hooray, We Now Have Medicare for All (Bank Deposits)! appeared first on The Intercept.

After needing to do a deep dive on the venv module (which I will explain later in this blog post as to why), I thought I would explain how virtual environments work to help demystify them.

Why do virtual environments exist?

Back in my the day, there was no concept of environments in Python: all you had was your Python installation and the current directory. That meant when you installed something you either installed it globally into your Python interpreter or you just dumped it into the current directory. Both of these approaches had their drawbacks.

Installing globally meant you didn&apost have any isolation between your projects. This led to issues like version conflicts between what one of your projects might need compared to another one. It also meant you had no idea what requirements your project actually had since you had no way of actually testing your assumptions of what you needed. This was an issue if you needed to share you code with someone else as you didn&apost have a way to test that you weren&apost accidentally wrong about what your dependencies were.

Installing into your local directory didn&apost isolate your installs based on Python version or interpreter version (or even interpreter build type, back when you had to compile your extension modules differently for debug and release builds of Python). So while you could install everything into the same directory as your own code (which you did, and thus didn&apost use src directory layouts for simplicity), there wasn&apost a way to install different wheels for each Python interpreter you had on your machine so you could have multiple environments per project (I&aposm glossing over the fact that back in my the day you also didn&apost have wheels or editable installs).

Enter virtual environments. Suddenly you had a way to install projects as a group that was tied to a specific Python interpreter. That got us the isolation/separation of only installing things you depend on (and being able to verify that through your testing), as well has having as many environments as you want to go with your projects (e.g. an environment for each version of Python that you support). So all sorts of wins! It&aposs an important feature to have while doing development (which is why it can be rather frustrating for users when Python distributors leave venv out).

How do virtual environments work?

Their structure

There are two parts to virtual environments: their directories and their configuration file. As a running example, I&aposm going to assume you ran the command py -m venv --without-pip .venv in some directory on a Unix-based OS (you can substitute py with whatever Python interpreter you want, including the Python Launcher for Unix).

A virtual environment has 3 directories and potentially a symlink in the virtual environment directory (i.e. within .venv):

1. bin ( Scripts on Windows)
2. include ( Include on Windows)
3. lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages where X.Y is the Python version (Lib/site-packages on Windows)
4. lib64 symlinked to lib if you&aposre using a 64-bit build of Python that&aposs on a POSIX-based OS that&aposs not macOS

The Python executable for the virtual environment ends up in bin as various symlinks back to the original interpreter (e.g. .venv/bin/python is a symlink; Windows has a different story). The site-packages directory is where projects get installed into the virtual environment (including pip if you choose to have it installed into the virtual environment). The include directory is for any header files that might get installed for some reason from a project. The lib64 symlink is for consistency on those Unix OSs where they have such directories.

The configuration file is pyvenv.cfg and it lives at the top of your virtual environment directory (e.v. .venv/pyvenv.cfg). As of Python 3.11, it contains a few entries:

1. home (the directory where the executable used to create the virtual environment lives; os.path.dirname(sys._base_executable))
2. include-system-packages (should the global site-packages be included, effectively turning off isolation?)
3. version (the Python version down to the micro version, but not with the release level, e.g. 3.12.0, but not 3.12.0a6)
4. executable (the executable used to create the virtual environment; os.path.realpath(sys._base_executable))
5. command (the CLI command that could have recreated the virtual environment)

On my machine, the pyvenv.cfg contents are:

home = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/python@3.11/bin
include-system-site-packages = false
version = 3.11.2
executable = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/python@3.11/3.11.2_1/bin/python3.11
command = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/python@3.11/bin/python3.11 -m venv --without-pip /tmp/.venv

One interesting thing to note is pyvenv.cfg is not a valid INI file according to the configparser module due to lacking any sections. To read fields in the file you are expected to use line.partition("=") and to strip the resulting key and value.

And that&aposs all there is to a virtual environment! When you don&apost install pip they are extremely fast to create: 3 files, a symlink, and a single file. And they are simple enough you can probably create one manually.

One point I would like to make is how virtual environments are designed to be disposable and not relocatable. Because of their simplicity, virtual environments are viewed as something you can throw away and recreate quickly (if it takes your OS a long time to create 3 directories, a symlink, and a file consisting of 292 bytes like on my machine, you have bigger problems to worry about than virtual environment relocation 😉). Unfortunately, people tend to conflate environment creation with package installation, when they are in fact two separate things. What projects you choose to install with which installer is actually separate from environment creation and probably influences your "getting started" time the most.

How Python uses a virtual environment

During start-up, Python automatically calls the site.main() function (unless you specify the -S flag). That function calls site.venv() which handles setting up your Python executable to use the virtual environment appropriately. Specifically, the site module:

1. Looks for pyvenv.cfg in either the same or parent directory as the running executable (which is not resolved, so the location of the symlink is used)
2. Looks for include-system-site-packages in pyvenv.cfg to decide whether the system site-packages ends up on sys.path
3. Sets sys._home if home is found in pyvenv.cfg (sys._home is used by sysconfig)

That&aposs it! It&aposs a surprisingly simple mechanism for what it accomplishes.

One thing to notice here about how all of this works is virtual environment activation is optional. Because the site module works off of the symlink to the executable in the virtual environment to resolve everything, activation is just a convenience. Honestly, all the activation scripts do are:

1. Puts the bin/ (or Scripts/) directory at the front of your PATH environment variable
2. Sets VIRTUAL_ENV to the directory containing your virtual environment
3. Tweaks your shell prompt to let you know your PATH has been changed
4. Registers a deactivate shell function which undoes the other steps

In the end, whether you type python after activation or .venv/bin/python makes no difference to Python. Some tooling like the Python extension for VS Code or the Python Launcher for Unix may check for VIRTUAL_ENV to pick up on your intent to use a virtual environment, but it doesn&apost influence Python itself.

Introducing microvenv

In the Python extension for VS Code, we have an issue where Python beginners end up on Debian or a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu and want to create a virtual environment. Due to Debian removing venv from the default Python install and beginners not realizing there was more to install than python3, they often end up failing at creating a virtual environment  (at least initially as you can install python3-venv separately; in the next version of Debian there will be a python3-full package you can install which will include venv and pip, but it will probably take a while for all the instructions online to be updated to suggest that over python3). We believe the lack of venv is a problem as beginners should be using environments, but asking them to install yet more software can be a barrier to getting started (I&aposm also ignoring the fact pip isn&apost installed by default on Debian either which also complicates the getting started experience for beginners).

But venv is not shipped as a separate part of Python&aposs stdlib, so we can&apost simply install it from PyPI somehow or easily ship it as part of the Python extension to work around this. Since venv is in the stdlib, it&aposs developed along with the version of Python it ships with, so there&aposs no single copy which is fully compatible with all maintained versions of Python (e.g. Python 3.11 added support to use sysconfig to get the directories to create for a virtual environment, various fields in pyvenv.cfg have been added over time, use new language features may be used, etc.). While we could ship a copy of venv for every maintained version of Python, we potentially would have to ship for every micro release to guarantee we always had a working copy, and that&aposs a lot of upstream tracking to do. And even if we only shipped copies from minor release of Python, we would still have to track every micro release in case a bug in venv was fixed.

Hence I have created microvenv. It is a project which provides a single .py file which you use to create a minimal virtual environment. You can either execute it as a script or call its create() function that is analogous to venv.create(). It&aposs also compatible with all maintained versions of Python. As I (hopefully) showed above, creating a virtual environment is actually straight-forward, so I was able to replicate the necessary bits in less than 100 lines of Python code (specifically 87 lines in the 2023.1.1 release). That actually makes it small enough to pass in via python -c, which means it could be embedded in a binary as a string constant and passed as an argument when executing a Python executable as a subprocess if you wanted to (directly executing microvenv.py works). Hopefully that means a tool could guarantee it can always construct a virtual environment somehow.

To keep microvenv simple, small, and maintainable, it does not contain any activation scripts. I personally don&apost want to be a shell script expert for multiple shells, nor do I want to track the upstream activation scripts (and they do change in case you were thinking "it shouldn&apost be that hard to track"). Also, in VS Code we are actually working towards implicitly activating virtual environments by updating your environment variables directly instead of executing any activation shell scripts, so the shell scripts aren&apost needed for our use case (we are actively moving away from using any activation scripts where we can as we have run into race condition problems with them when sending the command to the shell; thank goodness of conda run, but we also know people still want an activated terminal).

I&aposm also skipping Windows support because we have found the lack of venv to be a unique problem for Linux in general, and Debian-based distros specifically.

I honestly don&apost expect anyone except tool providers to use microvenv, but since it could be useful to others beyond VS Code, I decided it was worth releasing on its own. I also expect anyone using the project to only use it as a fallback when venv is not available (which you can deduce by running py -c "from importlib.util import find_spec; print(find_spec(&aposvenv&apos) is not None)"). And before anyone asks why we don&apost just use virtualenv, its wheel is 8.7MB compared to microvenv at 3.9KB; 0.05% the size, or 2175x smaller. Granted, a good chunk of what makes up virtualenv&aposs wheel is probably from shipping pip and setuptools in the wheel for fast installation of those projects after virtual environment creation, but we also acknowledge our need for a small, portable, single-file virtual environment creator is rather niche and something virtualenv currently doesn&apost support (for good reason).

Our plan for the Python extension for VS Code is to use microvenv as a fallback mechanism for our Python: Create Environment command (FYI we also plan to bootstrap pip via its pip.pyz file from bootstrap.pypa.io by downloading it on-demand, which is luckily less than 2MB). That way we can start suggesting to users in various UX flows to create and use an environment when one isn&apost already being used (as appropriate, of course). We want beginners to learn about environments if they don&apost already know about them and also remind experienced users when they may have accidentally forgotten to create an environment for their workspace. That way people get the benefit of (virtual) environments with as little friction as possible.