Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

The Joe Biden administration pledged Ukraine $39.87 billion in military aid between February and August 2022, for an average of $228 million per day, fueling a brutal proxy war causing tens of thousands of deaths. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sGQFTwvHM_4 SOURCES: https://multipolarista.com/2022/08/30/us-ukraine-military-aid-proxy Credit to researcher Stephen Semler: https://stephensemler.substack.com/p/how-much-military-aid-has-biden-sent CIA and Western special ops commandos are in Ukraine, directing proxy war on Russia: https://multipolarista.com/2022/06/26/cia-special-ops-ukraine-proxy-war-russia

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If you think you know everything you need to know about the Inflation Reduction Act, I hate to tell you: You're wrong. Few people know more about the procedural maneuvers that keep Americans docile than The Lever's David Sirota. On today's episode, he explains aspects of the parliamentarian maneuver that were new even to Brie, and unpacks the side agreement between Manchin & Schumer that secured Manchin's vote, but which might also spell climate doom.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. The story of neoliberalism’s Geneva School—including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke—and their vision for a new global order to protect the market from democratic forces in the metropole and across the decolonizing world. An interview from archives first conducted in November 2018.

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Check out these Haymarket titles:

Keywords for Capitalism by John Patrick Leary haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism

Struggle Makes Us Human by Vijay Prashad haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human

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France’s President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, warned "we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance." Western wars and sanctions are boomeranging back at home. The neoliberal phase of capitalism is collapsing. Neoliberalism has lost the key pillars it was built on: cheap energy and raw materials from Russia, cheap labor and consumer goods from China, an unsustainable bubble of household debt, low to zero interest rates, and Washington's ability to organize regime-change operations in any country where a government tried a socialistic or state-led economic model. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dw84vwYS8YE SOURCES: https://multipolarista.com/2022/08/27/west-end-neoliberalism-abundance

Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July 2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911, but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outside actors like Cloudflare which seem to point at an internal BGP failure.

Its impact on the economy has yet to be measured, but it probably cost millions of dollars in wasted time and possibly lead to life-threatening situations. Apart from holding Rogers (criminally?) responsible for this, what should be done in the future to avoid such problems?

It's not the first time something like this has happened: it happened to Bell Canada as well. The Rogers outage is also strangely similar to the Facebook outage last year, but, to its credit, Facebook did post a fairly detailed explanation only a day later.

The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted. The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized.

I believe the solution to the problem of large, private, centralised telcos and ISPs is to replace them with smaller, public, decentralised service providers. The only way to ensure that works is to make sure that public money ends up creating infrastructure controlled by the public, which means treating ISPs as a public utility. This has been implemented elsewhere: it works, it's cheaper, and provides better service.

A modest proposal

Global wireless services (like phone services) and home internet inevitably grow into monopolies. They are public utilities, just like water, power, railways, and roads. The question of how they should be managed is therefore inherently political, yet people don't seem to question the idea that only the market (i.e. "competition") can solve this problem. I disagree.

10 years ago (in french), I suggested we, in Québec, should nationalize large telcos and internet service providers. I no longer believe is a realistic approach: most of those companies have crap copper-based networks (at least for the last mile), yet are worth billions of dollars. It would be prohibitive, and a waste, to buy them out.

Back then, I called this idea "Réseau-Québec", a reference to the already nationalized power company, Hydro-Québec. (This idea, incidentally, made it into the plan of a political party.)

Now, I think we should instead build our own, public internet. Start setting up municipal internet services, fiber to the home in all cities, progressively. Then interconnect cities with fiber, and build peering agreements with other providers. This also includes a bid on wireless spectrum to start competing with phone providers as well.

And while that sounds really ambitious, I think it's possible to take this one step at a time.

Municipal broadband

In many parts of the world, municipal broadband is an elegant solution to the problem, with solutions ranging from Stockholm's city-owned fiber network (dark fiber, layer 1) to Utah's UTOPIA network (fiber to the premises, layer 2) and municipal wireless networks like Guifi.net which connects about 40,000 nodes in Catalonia.

A good first step would be for cities to start providing broadband services to its residents, directly. Cities normally own sewage and water systems that interconnect most residences and therefore have direct physical access everywhere. In Montréal, in particular, there is an ongoing project to replace a lot of old lead-based plumbing which would give an opportunity to lay down a wired fiber network across the city.

This is a wild guess, but I suspect this would be much less expensive than one would think. Some people agree with me and quote this as low as 1000$ per household. There is about 800,000 households in the city of Montréal, so we're talking about a 800 million dollars investment here, to connect every household in Montréal with fiber and incidentally a quarter of the province's population. And this is not an up-front cost: this can be built progressively, with expenses amortized over many years.

(We should not, however, connect Montréal first: it's used as an example here because it's a large number of households to connect.)

Such a network should be built with a redundant topology. I leave it as an open question whether we should adopt Stockholm's more minimalist approach or provide direct IP connectivity. I would tend to favor the latter, because then you can immediately start to offer the service to households and generate revenues to compensate for the capital expenditures.

Given the ridiculous profit margins telcos currently have — 8 billion $CAD net income for BCE (2019), 2 billion $CAD for Rogers (2020) — I also believe this would actually turn into a profitable revenue stream for the city, the same way Hydro-Québec is more and more considered as a revenue stream for the state. (I personally believe that's actually wrong and we should treat those resources as human rights and not money cows, but I digress. The point is: this is not a cost point, it's a revenue.)

The other major challenge here is that the city will need competent engineers to drive this project forward. But this is not different from the way other public utilities run: we have electrical engineers at Hydro, sewer and water engineers at the city, this is just another profession. If anything, the computing science sector might be more at fault than the city here in its failure to provide competent and accountable engineers to society...

Right now, most of the network in Canada is copper: we are hitting the limits of that technology with DSL, and while cable has some life left to it (DOCSIS 4.0 does 4Gbps), that is nowhere near the capacity of fiber. Take the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee: in 2010, the city-owned ISP EPB finished deploying a fiber network to the entire town and provided gigabit internet to everyone. Now, 12 years later, they are using this same network to provide the mind-boggling speed of 25 gigabit to the home. To give you an idea, Chattanooga is roughly the size and density of Sherbrooke.

Provincial public internet

As part of building a municipal network, the question of getting access to "the internet" will immediately come up. Naturally, this will first be solved by using already existing commercial providers to hook up residents to the rest of the global network.

But eventually, networks should inter-connect: Montréal should connect with Laval, and then ">">Trois-Rivières, then Québec City. This will require long haul fiber runs, but those links are not actually that expensive, and many of those already exist as a public resource at RISQ and CANARIE, which cross-connects universities and colleges across the province and the country. Those networks might not have the capacity to cover the needs of the entire province right now, but that is a router upgrade away, thanks to the amazing capacity of fiber.

There are two crucial mistakes to avoid at this point. First, the network needs to remain decentralised. Long haul links should be IP links with BGP sessions, and each city (or MRC) should have its own independent network, to avoid Rogers-class catastrophic failures.

Second, skill needs to remain in-house: RISQ has already made that mistake, to a certain extent, by selling its neutral datacenter. Tellingly, MetroOptic, probably the largest commercial dark fiber provider in the province, now operates the QIX, the second largest "public" internet exchange in Canada.

Still, we have a lot of infrastructure we can leverage here. If RISQ or CANARIE cannot be up to the task, Hydro-Québec has power lines running into every house in the province, with high voltage power lines running hundreds of kilometers far north. The logistics of long distance maintenance are already solved by that institution.

In fact, Hydro already has fiber all over the province, but it is a private network, separate from the internet for security reasons (and that should probably remain so). But this only shows they already have the expertise to lay down fiber: they would just need to lay down a parallel network to the existing one.

In that architecture, Hydro would be a "dark fiber" provider.

International public internet

None of the above solves the problem for the entire population of Québec, which is notoriously dispersed, with an area three times the size of France, but with only an eight of its population (8 million vs 67). More specifically, Canada was originally a french colony, a land violently stolen from native people who have lived here for thousands of years. Some of those people now live in reservations, sometimes far from urban centers (but definitely not always). So the idea of leveraging the Hydro-Québec infrastructure doesn't always work to solve this, because while Hydro will happily flood a traditional hunting territory for an electric dam, they don't bother running power lines to the village they forcibly moved, powering it instead with noisy and polluting diesel generators. So before giving me fiber to the home, we should give power (and potable water, for that matter), to those communities first.

So we need to discuss international connectivity. (How else could we consider those communities than peer nations anyways?c) Québec has virtually zero international links. Even in Montréal, which likes to style itself a major player in gaming, AI, and technology, most peering goes through either Toronto or New York.

That's a problem that we must fix, regardless of the other problems stated here. Looking at the submarine cable map, we see very few international links actually landing in Canada. There is the Greenland connect which connects Newfoundland to Iceland through Greenland. There's the EXA which lands in Ireland, the UK and the US, and Google has the Topaz link on the west coast. That's about it, and none of those land anywhere near any major urban center in Québec.

We should have a cable running from France up to Saint-Félicien. There should be a cable from Vancouver to China. Heck, there should be a fiber cable running all the way from the end of the great lakes through Québec, then up around the northern passage and back down to British Columbia. Those cables are expensive, and the idea might sound ludicrous, but Russia is actually planning such a project for 2026. The US has cables running all the way up (and around!) Alaska, neatly bypassing all of Canada in the process. We just look ridiculous on that map.

(Addendum: I somehow forgot to talk about Teleglobe here was founded as publicly owned company in 1950, growing international phone and (later) data links all over the world. It was privatized by the conservatives in 1984, along with rails and other "crown corporations". So that's one major risk to any effort to make public utilities work properly: some government might be elected and promptly sell it out to its friends for peanuts.)

Wireless networks

I know most people will have rolled their eyes so far back their heads have exploded. But I'm not done yet. I want wireless too. And by wireless, I don't mean a bunch of geeks setting up OpenWRT routers on rooftops. I tried that, and while it was fun and educational, it didn't scale.

A public networking utility wouldn't be complete without providing cellular phone service. This involves bidding for frequencies at the federal level, and deploying a rather large amount of infrastructure, but it could be a later phase, when the engineers and politicians have proven their worth.

At least part of the Rogers fiasco would have been averted if such a decentralized network backend existed. One might even want to argue that a separate institution should be setup to provide phone services, independently from the regular wired networking, if only for reliability.

Because remember here: the problem we're trying to solve is not just technical, it's about political boundaries, centralisation, and automation. If everything is ran by this one organisation again, we will have failed.

However, I must admit that phone services is where my ideas fall a little short. I can't help but think it's also an accessible goal — maybe starting with a virtual operator — but it seems slightly less so than the others, especially considering how closed the phone ecosystem is.

Counter points

In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

I don't want the state to control my internet

One legitimate concern I have about the idea of the state running the internet is the potential it would have to censor or control the content running over the wires.

But I don't think there is necessarily a direct relationship between resource ownership and control of content. Sure, China has strong censorship in place, partly implemented through state-controlled businesses. But Russia also has strong censorship in place, based on regulatory tools: they force private service providers to install back-doors in their networks to control content and surveil their users.

Besides, the USA have been doing warrantless wiretapping since at least 2003 (and yes, that's 10 years before the Snowden revelations) so a commercial internet is no assurance that we have a free internet. Quite the contrary in fact: if anything, the commercial internet goes hand in hand with the neo-colonial internet, just like businesses did in the "good old colonial days".

Large media companies are the primary censors of content here. In Canada, the media cartel requested the first site-blocking order in 2018. The plaintiffs (including Québecor, Rogers, and Bell Canada) are both content providers and internet service providers, an obvious conflict of interest.

Nevertheless, there are some strong arguments against having a centralised, state-owned monopoly on internet service providers. FDN makes a good point on this. But this is not what I am suggesting: at the provincial level, the network would be purely physical, and regional entities (which could include private companies) would peer over that physical network, ensuring decentralization. Delegating the management of that infrastructure to an independent non-profit or cooperative (but owned by the state) would also ensure some level of independence.

Isn't the government incompetent and corrupt?

Also known as "private enterprise is better skilled at handling this, the state can't do anything right"

I don't think this is a "fait accomplit". If anything, I have found publicly ran utilities to be spectacularly reliable here. I rarely have trouble with sewage, water, or power, and keep in mind I live in a city where we receive about 2 meters of snow a year, which tend to create lots of trouble with power lines. Unless there's a major weather event, power just runs here.

I think the same can happen with an internet service provider. But it would certainly need to have higher standards to what we're used to, because frankly Internet is kind of janky.

A single monopoly will be less reliable

I actually agree with that, but that is not what I am proposing anyways. Current commercial or non-profit entities will be free to offer their services on top of the public network.

And besides, the current "ha! diversity is great" approach is exactly what we have now, and it's not working. The pretense that we can have competition over a single network is what led the US into the ridiculous situation where they also pretend to have competition over the power utility market. This led to massive forest fires in California and major power outages in Texas. It doesn't work.

Wouldn't this create an isolated network?

One theory is that this new network would be so hostile to incumbent telcos and ISPs that they would simply refuse to network with the public utility. And while it is true that the telcos currently do also act as a kind of "tier one" provider in some places, I strongly feel this is also a problem that needs to be solved, regardless of ownership of networking infrastructure.

Right now, telcos often hold both ends of the stick: they are the gateway to users, the "last mile", but they also provide peering to the larger internet in some locations. In at least one datacenter in downtown Montréal, I've seen traffic go through Bell Canada that was not directly targeted at Bell customers. So in effect, they are in a position of charging twice for the same traffic, and that's not only ridiculous, it should just be plain illegal.

And besides, this is not a big problem: there are other providers out there. As bad as the market is in Québec, there is still some diversity in Tier one providers that could allow for some exits to the wider network (e.g. yes, Cogent is here too).

What about Google and Facebook?

Nationalization of other service providers like Google and Facebook is out of scope of this discussion.

That said, I am not sure the state should get into the business of organising the web or providing content services however, but I will point out it already does do some of that through its own websites. It should probably keep itself to this, and also consider providing normal services for people who don't or can't access the internet.

(And I would also be ready to argue that Google and Facebook already act as extensions of the state: certainly if Facebook didn't exist, the CIA or the NSA would like to create it at this point. And Google has lucrative business with the US department of defense.)

What does not work

So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet.

But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

Legal pressure and regulation

In 1984 (of all years), the US Department of Justice finally broke up AT&T in half a dozen corporations, after a 10 year legal battle. Yet a decades later, we're back to only three large providers doing essentially what AT&T was doing back then, and those are regional monopolies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (not counting T-Mobile that is from a different breed). So the legal approach really didn't work that well, especially considering the political landscape changed in the US, and the FTC seems perfectly happy to let those major mergers continue.

In Canada, we never even pretended we would solve this problem at all: Bell Canada (the literal "father" of AT&T) is in the same situation now. We have either a regional monopoly (e.g. Videotron for cable in Québec) or an oligopoly (Bell, Rogers, and Telus controlling more than 90% of the market). Telus does have one competitor in the west of Canada, Shaw, but Rogers has been trying to buy it out. The competition bureau seems to have blocked the merger for now, but it didn't stop other recent mergers like Bell's acquisition one of its main competitors in Québec, eBox.

Regulation doesn't seem capable of ensuring those profitable corporations provide us with decent pricing, which makes Canada one of the most expensive countries (research) for mobile data on the planet. The recent failure of the CRTC to properly protect smaller providers has even lead to price hikes. Meanwhile the oligopoly is actually agreeing on their own price hikes therefore becoming a real cartel, complete with price fixing and reductions in output.

There are actually regulations in Canada supposed to keep the worst of the Rogers outage from happening at all. According to CBC:

Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.

I could personally confirm that my phone couldn't reach 911 services, because all calls would fail: the problem was that towers were still up, so your phone wouldn't fall back to alternative service providers (which could have resolved the issue). I can only speculate as to why Rogers didn't take cell phone towers out of the network to let phones work properly for 911 service, but it seems like a dangerous game to play.

Hilariously, the CRTC itself didn't have a reliable phone service due to the service outage:

Please note that our phone lines are affected by the Rogers network outage. Our website is still available: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/

https://mobile.twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041

I wonder if they will file a complaint against Rogers themselves about this. I probably should.

It seems the federal government is thinking more of the same medicine will fix the problem and has told companies should "help" each other in an emergency. I doubt this will fix anything, and could actually make things worse if the competitors actually interoperate more, as it could cause multi-provider, cascading failures.

Subsidies

The absurd price we pay for data does not actually mean everyone gets high speed internet at home. Large swathes of the Québec countryside don't get broadband at all, and it can be difficult or expensive, even in large urban centers like Montréal, to get high speed internet.

That is despite having a series of subsidies that all avoided investing in our own infrastructure. We had the "fonds de l'autoroute de l'information", "information highway fund" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) and "branchez les familles", "connecting families" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) which subsidized the development of a copper network. In 2014, more of the same: the federal government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called connecting Canadians to connect 280 000 households to "high speed internet". And now, the federal and provincial governments are proudly announcing that "everyone is now connected to high speed internet", after pouring more than 1.1 billion dollars to connect, guess what, another 380 000 homes, right in time for the provincial election.

Of course, technically, the deadline won't actually be met until 2023. Québec is a big area to cover, and you can guess what happens next: the telcos threw up their hand and said some areas just can't be connected. (Or they connect their CEO but not the poor folks across the lake.) The story then takes the predictable twist of giving more money out to billionaires, subsidizing now Musk's Starlink system to connect those remote areas.

To give a concrete example: a friend who lives about 1000km away from Montréal, 4km from a small, 2500 habitant village, has recently got symmetric 100 mbps fiber at home from Telus, thanks to those subsidies. But I can't get that service in Montréal at all, presumably because Telus and Bell colluded to split that market. Bell doesn't provide me with such a service either: they tell me they have "fiber to my neighborhood", and only offer me a 25/10 mbps ADSL service. (There is Vidéotron offering 400mbps, but that's copper cable, again a dead technology, and asymmetric.)

Conclusion

Remember Chattanooga? Back in 2010, they funded the development of a fiber network, and now they have deployed a network roughly a thousand times faster than what we have just funded with a billion dollars. In 2010, I was paying Bell Canada 60$/mth for 20mbps and a 125GB cap, and now, I'm still (indirectly) paying Bell for roughly the same speed (25mbps). Back then, Bell was throttling their competitors networks until 2009, when they were forced by the CRTC to stop throttling. Both Bell and Vidéotron still explicitly forbid you from running your own servers at home, Vidéotron charges prohibitive prices which make it near impossible for resellers to sell uncapped services. Those companies are not spurring innovation: they are blocking it.

We have spent all this money for the private sector to build us a private internet, over decades, without any assurance of quality, equity or reliability. And while in some locations, ISPs did deploy fiber to the home, they certainly didn't upgrade their entire network to follow suit, and even less allowed resellers to compete on that network.

In 10 years, when 100mbps will be laughable, I bet those service providers will again punt the ball in the public courtyard and tell us they don't have the money to upgrade everyone's equipment.

We got screwed. It's time to try something new.

Have You Heard heads to New Orleans, home to the first all-charter-school system in the country. In a provocative new book, Tulane University political scientist Celeste Lay argues that New Orleans' charter school experiment has undermined democracy, disenfranchising the very parents it was meant to empower. With school privatization on the march across the country, Lay’s account offers an urgent and timely warning. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast or donate on PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/haveyouheardpodcast

In a bit of bonus content, Will interviews legendary author and screenwriter Jerry Stahl about his extremely funny and extremely dark, new book of gonzo reporting and personal memoir: Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust. Jerry relates his surreal experience of visiting Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau by tour bus rather than train, reviews the cafeteria and gift shop selections available at these historical sites, the friends he made along the way, and muses on moments in human history that fall in between chops of the axe.

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/nein-nein-nein/"

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We discuss the good and bad of Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, as well as the amazing constellation of whining and bad takes it’s produced. We also take a look at the deplatforming of Andrew Tate, which we don’t care about, and his many crimes and in-home wizard, which we do care about. But mostly, this an ep about jacking off.

New merch store! Tons of hot new merch! Get it, wear it, do NOT answer anyone’s questions about it: https://chapotraphouse.shop/

And, all our tour dates + tickets over at https://www.chapotraphouse.com/live

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Mario Jason Braganza has a useful post that considers moving a headline node from one org file to another. His use case is moving items from his TODO file to his current task file as he acts on TODO items.

Org mode, of course, has an easy way of doing that. You can move nodes to another location from within the current file or to another file altogether using the org-refile command. It’s bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+w so it’s easy to invoke.

The problem is that it can be a bit fiddly to set up. The reason for that is that you have to specify potential targets for the refiling. There are two aspects to that:

1. Possible files to contain the refiled node
2. Headings within the target file to contain the refiled node

Braganza explains how to set all this up. Oddly, he arrives at the exact configuration I have except that I consider more subheadings in the target file than he does. I’ve had it set up for so long I no longer remember configuring it. Lately, I’ve been using it more and more instead of just cutting and pasting nodes.

If you sometimes move nodes from your Org files and want to something move sensible than cutting and pasting, take a look at Braganza’s post to see how to set up org-refile.

Some time ago there was a discussion on the Emacs mailing list about making screenshots from Emacs. From one of the posts there I learned about the x-export-frames function, whose existence is fascinating for me. It basically allows you to make a screenshot of your Emacs frame without ay external program, in one of several formats (including pdf and png). Jean Louis provided some simple code in that post which I reproduce here (with minor changes). The frameshot command takes a picture of your current Emacs frame, puts is in the frameshot-directory directory and moves the point to its line.

Click here for the full episode, including the extended interview in which Noam Chomsky explains his worst fear if the Republicans took control of Congress, calls out politicians against forgiving student loans, and attacks the US response to climate change.

Professor Noam Chomsky has a stark prediction for the future of humanity if the US refuses to cooperate with other countries:

“It is absolutely necessary for the great powers to cooperate if there’s going to be any hope for survival,” he explains. “China, the US, Russia, they have to be cooperating on the major issues of the day: climate, nuclear war, pandemics. You work on them together or you all fall over the cliff together.”

And while cooperation sounds like a smart idea, Chomsky doubts the US will go along.

“The US orders allies to follow its rules-based international order while China calls for the UN-based international order. And the US doesn’t accept that for a very good reason: the UN rules out US foreign policy explicitly. The UN charter bans the threat or use of force in international affairs. Can you think of a US president who hasn’t engaged in a threat or use of force?”

This sparks an analysis of US censorship and how the government can suppress the truth without throwing us in gulags.

“Read things carefully that do come out: the Washington Post had a long, comprehensive article in which they reviewed in great detail the background for the war. Nothing in it about possible negotiations. They don’t want it on the agenda.”

Plus, subscribe for the extended interview in which Noam Chomsky explains his worst fear if the Republicans take control of Congress, calls out politicians who oppose forgiving student loans, and criticizes the underwhelming US response to climate change.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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I noticed a pattern during work video calls: I found myself regularly sharing my screen and opening Notepad to capture notes and for use as a team whiteboard. While useful during the call, the result was a jumble of files with notes.txt somewhere in the name.

It occurred to me that I needed a better system. I wanted an effortless way to capture notes that had archival organization baked in. With a bit of elisp I was able to get emacs to tackle this job.

Let's walk through my solution.

I set up a new keyboard mapping for Control-x t that invokes the function project-notes-find-file-today. This function visits a file that's relevant to what I'm currently working on within emacs. Here's the code to set up the keyboard shortcut:

(defun my-minimal-dev-keys-hook ()
  (local-set-key (kbd "C-x t p") 'browse-project-resource-url)
  (local-set-key (kbd "C-x t n") 'project-notes-find-file-today)
  (local-set-key (kbd "C-x t s") 'ag-project-regexp)
  (local-set-key (kbd "C-x t D") 'define-word-at-point))

Here's the definition of project-notes-find-file-today. It starts by figuring out a few key facts:

• What's the base note taking directory?
• What's today's date in YYYY-MM-DDD format?
• What's the name of the source code branch that I'm currently looking at?
• What's the name of the customer associated with these files?

Once I know this information, it's straightforward to call find-file on a path that looks like so:

  [Notes Directory]/[Customer]/[Branch]/[Today's Date].md

This arrangements organizes my notes by customer, project and date and seems like a reasonable balance between creating too many and too few files.

(defun project-notes-find-file-today ()
  (interactive)
  "Quickly open up a notes file or create one for today."
  (let* ((base "~/dt/i2x/project-notes/src/main")
         (timestamp (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d"))
         (branch (current-vc-branch))
         (customer (current-customer))
         (dir (cond
               ((and branch customer)
                (format "%s/%s/%s" base customer branch))
               (customer
                (format "%s/%s/misc" base customer))
               (t (format "%s/internal/misc" base)))))
    (unless (file-accessible-directory-p dir)
      (mkdir dir t))
    (find-file (format "%s/%s.md" dir timestamp))))

All that remains is to define current-customer and current-vc-branch. current-customer is pretty straightforward because I use the following convention:

  dt/i2x/[Customer Name]/src/...

If I can find dt/i2x then I know the next directory name is the customer.

(defun current-customer ()
  "Guess the customer we are looking at by looking at our path"
  (let ((d default-directory))
    (if (string-match "dt/i2x/\\(.*?\\)/" d)
        (match-string 1 d)
      nil)))

current-vc-branch is a tiny bit more sophisticated. For one thing, some of my projects use Git while others use Subversion. I was surprised that there wasn't an existing elisp function to tell me which version control system managed an existing directory. Fortunately, both Git and Subversion use a well know directory I can search for to figure out which tool is active.

From there, I was able to use the built in vc-git function vc-git--symbolic-ref to find out the current git branch name. I derive the Subversion branch name by using dsvn's svn-current-url function.

(defun current-vc-branch ()
  "Guess the current branch or return nil if aren't on one"
  (require 'dsvn)
  (let ((d default-directory))
    (cond
     ((locate-dominating-file d ".git")
      (vc-git--symbolic-ref default-directory))
     ((locate-dominating-file d ".svn")
      (let ((url (svn-current-url)))
        (cond ((string-match "/trunk\\(/\\|$\\)" url) "trunk")
              ((string-match "/branches/\\(.*?\\)\\(/\\|$\\)" url)
               (match-string 1 url))
              (t nil))))
     (t nil))))

When I run Control-x t a file is ultimately visited under dt/i2x/project-notes/main. I've arranged for that directory to be a Git repository. After my meeting or other session that inspired me to capture notes, I commit any new or modified files and do a push a remote repository. The result is that my project notes are saved in the cloud and accessible from all the devices I develop on.

And just like that, tracking on-demand project notes went from a chore to a joy.

The "série noire" continues. I ordered my first Purism Librem 13v4 laptop in April 2019 and it arrived, unsurprisingly, more than three weeks later. But more surprisingly, it did not work at all: a problem eerily similar to this post talking about a bricked Purism laptop. Thankfully, Purism was graceful enough to cross-ship a replacement, and once I paid the extra (gulp) 190$ Fedex fee, I had my new elite laptop read.

Less than a year later, the right USB-A port breaks: it would deliver power, but no data signal (nothing in dmesg or lsusb). Two months later, the laptop short-circuits and completely dies. And here goes another RMA, this time without a shipping label or cross shipping, so I had to pay shipping fees.

Now the third laptop in as many years is as good as dead. The left hinge basically broke off. Earlier this year, I had noticed something was off with the lid: it was wobbly. I figured that it was just the way that laptop was, "they don't make it as sturdy as they did in the good old days, do they". But it was probably a signal of some much worse problem. Eventually, the bottom panel actually cracked open, and I realized that some internal mechanism had basically exploded.

The hinges of the Librem are screwed into little golden sprockets that are fitted in plastic shims of the laptop casing. The shims had exploded: after opening the back lid, they litterally fell off (alongside the tiny golden sprocket). Support confirmed that I needed a case replacement, but unfortunately they were "out of stock" of replacement cases for the Librem 13, and have been for a while. I am 13 on the waiting list, apparently.

So this laptop is basically dead for me right now: it's my travel laptop. It's primary purpose is to sit at home until I go to a conference or a meeting or a cafe or upstairs or wherever to do some work. I take the laptop, pop the lid, tap-tap some work, close the lid. Had I used that laptop as my primary device, I would probably have closed and opened that lid thousands of times. But because it's a travel laptop, that number is probably in the hundreds, which means this laptop is not designed to withstand prolonged use.

I have now ordered a framework laptop, 12th generation. I have some questions about their compatibility with Debian (and Linux in general), and concerns about power usage, but it certainly can't be worse than the Purism, in any case. And it can only get better over time: the main board is fully replaceable, and they have replacement hinges on stock, although the laptop itself is currently in pre-order (slated for September). I will probably post a full review when I actually lay my hand on this device.

In the meantime, I strongly discourage anyone from buying Purism products, as I previously did. You can the full maintenance history of the laptop in the review page as well.

With only one episode left to go, the boys are joined by the hosts of one of the very great Citations Needed to enjoy the cast's bout with senior-itis. Will CJ stay on at the White House or go on to make a fortune helping a billionaire whitewash his reputation? And will he or won't he? Time is running out for Bartlett to pardon Toby.

Plus - Havinq vanquished the K-Hive, we turn our attention to Ana Kasparian.

Our Superdelegate patron tier was mad as hell that we hadn't yet discussed Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky's NETWORK (1976) and wasn't going to take it anymore. We watched an American classic and discovered that Howard Beale's famous speech isn't even the most important speech in the movie.

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

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As tensions rise over China and Taiwan, we look at how and why Australia has decided to go to war in the past.Text max 200 characters

Democracy Now! 2022-08-23 Tuesday

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• "A Crime of the State": Mexico's Attorney General Arrested in Case of 43 Missing Ayotzinapa Students
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A sitcom, written by Moray Hunter and starring Angus Deayton, Abigail Cruttenden, Pearce Quigley, Kate Isitt and Bennett Arron, about five, mainly single, middle aged neighbours living in flats in a converted house in North London. Mitch (Angus Deayton) is a widower and part-time therapist who is looking to put his life back together now that he is single and living with Will (Pearce Quigley), his younger, more volatile half-brother. Mitch is currently in a new relationship with Ellie (Abigail Cruttenden) who is a somewhat shy, nervous and sensitive schoolteacher. Overly honest, frustrated actress Louisa (Kate Isitt), and socially inept IT nerd Morris (Bennett Arron) complete the line-up of mis-matched neighbours. In the series opener, Best Upstairs Neighbour Ever, Mitch and Ellie are trying to work out ground rules for their relationship, with matters such as the frequency of present-giving, meeting up and overnight stays on the agenda. Morris meanwhile fancies a group Sunday roast, if someone else will cook it, and Will and Louisa are just trying to get used to the fact that Mitch and Ellie are now a thing. Cast: Angus Deayton - Mitch Abigail Cruttenden - Ellie Pearce Quigley - Will Kate Isitt - Louisa Bennett Arron - Morris Written by Moray Hunter Directed by Moray Hunter and Gordon Kennedy Script Edited by Ian Brown and James Hendrie Edited and Studio Managed by Jerry Peal Production Manager - Sarah Tombling Production Runner - Kareem Elshehawy Recorded at The Shaw Theatre, London Based on an original idea developed in association with Dandy Productions Producer - Gordon Kennedy An Absolutely production for BBC Radio 4

The occupation of Palestine continues with no end in sight, and this remains the primary political struggle in the region as America’s client states normalize with Israel. But now there’s a new backdrop: the war in Ukraine exposing Western double standards alongside the US-China New Cold War. 

Fundamental to US geostrategic aims in the region is taming the “axis of resistance” stretching from Iraq to Iran to Syria to Lebanon and Palestine. This played out in yet another Israeli bombing campaign against the besieged Gaza Strip. 

Here to help us understand the state of the resistance in Palestine and beyond, and the shifting regional alliances in the Middle East is Ali Abunimah, executive director of the Electronic Intifada and author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine.”

Follow the Electronic Intifada on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/electronicintifada

Listen to every episode of Rania Khalek Dispatches anywhere you get podcasts.

Apple: https://apple.co/3zeYpeW 

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TIME CODES

0:00 Intro

2:11 Palestine as central to anti-imperialist resistance 

5:15 Why does Israel keep killing Palestinians? “Mowing the lawn” 

15:33 Why is Israel attacking the West Bank?

23:49 Armed resistance & Ukraine double standards

34:26 What is the right to resist?  

45:06 Iran backs the resistance Resistance Axis stronger than ever 

47:54 Potential war? Hezbollah warns Israel not to steal Lebanon’s offshore gas

59:23 Salman Rushdie

1:08:50 The Edward Said & Obama photo: Have progressives learned their lesson? 

Maybe you’ve heard of the new, vibrant philosophy called “longtermism.” It’s beloved by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and many other Silicon Valley winners who are funding its development and promulgation.

I can’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on longtermism. However, I have read two articles and almost a dozen tweets about it, and so am qualified to have an opinion on the internet. Here’s what it’s about:

Longtermists believe that Future Lives Matter. And if humanity doesn’t completely obliterate itself, there are going to be lots of us in the eons to come. One longtermist estimate is that “the lower bound of the number of biological human life-years … is 10³⁴ years.”

If I remember the two weeks in sixth grade when we covered exponents, these 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 future human life years are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than the puny 1,000,000,000,000 life years of the 8,000,000,000 people currently alive (if we assume we’ll all die at 125).

The natural conclusion here is that if we are morally serious, we must carry out mass slaughter undreamed of by Hitler if there’s even the tiniest chance that it will prevent the extinction of humanity. As one prominent longtermist puts it, “the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least ten times the value of a billion human lives” (italics in the original, to show that he truly means it).

Longtermists generally see three key existential risks that could cause humanity to go extinct: artificial intelligence, bioengineered plagues, and an asteroid strike. By contrast, nuclear war might or might not count, and runaway global warming wouldn’t, because at least a few people would survive it and bounce back.

You can see how this perspective would appeal to Musk in particular: If you’re contributing to getting humans off Earth to Mars (and from there across the universe), you should receive a get-out-of-jail-free card for any other deeds, no matter how hideous.

In any case, no one can deny that this kind of thought experiment is fun, especially if you’re super high. On the other hand, the entire edifice of longtermism is built on a foundation that is largely arbitrary and highly disputable, and with other starting points, you can derive pretty much any philosophy you want. So let’s do it! Here are seven other moral codes that all rational people must adopt:

Yum, Zebra-ism

Let’s say there’s a 1 in a quadrillion chance that the human life span will increase by a factor of a quintillion if the only food we eat is living zebras. Is this true? Who knows, but it could be, since this subject has not been fully explored by science. Logically, we must therefore devote all our efforts to breeding enough struggling, shrieking zebras for us to consume as our sole source of nutrition. Yes, we will live our long lives drenched in zebra blood and viscera. But this is the price of seeing the world clearly.

To Serve Man-ism

Conversely, imagine there’s a 1 in a quadrillion chance that there’s an intelligent alien species out there with the potential to breed a quintillion times more prodigiously than us. But they will only be able to do this if they find and eat us. This means we must immediately start broadcasting a beacon out into space with video of all of us happily sitting in a huge soup pot until we are tender and delicious. “Can’t wait to meat you!” we will say, as we point to especially succulent parts of our bodies.

Bees-ism

There are currently more than 2 trillion bees alive on earth. Research shows that bees enjoy being alive 1 septillion times more than humans do. (This research is funded by bees.) A little simple math proves that billions of us must work ourselves to death to enhance the lives of the bees — the glorious, buzzing bees.

Ocean Spray-ism

It is possible that we are living in a simulation. If so, it is also possible that our creator will get bored with us and shut our simulation down. Maybe the only thing that has prevented this from happening so far is the TikTok of that guy drinking Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice on a skateboard and lip-syncing to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. I know that if I were an adolescent in another dimension who’d bought The Sims: Milky Way with my allowance, I’d wait a little bit to see if humanity comes up with something that entertaining again. Let’s get all our greatest minds on this ASAP before we’re unplugged.

Paperclip-ism

The danger of artificial intelligence is not just that it could be actively hostile toward us; it could destroy us even if it were simply indifferent. The classic example is the Paperclip Maximizer, an AI that concludes that the highest value in the universe is creating paper clips. It might therefore monopolize all resources and devote them to carrying out its mission, leaving us to starve in the dark, surrounded by paper clips. (The most painful irony is that such an AI wouldn’t even produce paper to clip together.) But we must accept that there’s a chance making paper clips actually is the highest value in the universe, and therefore we should build such an AI and see what happens.

Jack Off-ism

There’s also a chance that the greatest joy available in the universe is mental masturbation. Certainly we know there’s literally no belief system humans won’t adopt in order to avoid dealing with the obvious problems right in front of them. We should rearrange all society so the maximum number of us can engage in a frenzy of pointless self-gratification.

Death to Heretics-ism

There are 10³⁴ human life years at risk here. If there’s even a 1 in 10³³ chance that the people making jokes about longtermism will prevent its adoption, these jokesters must be hunted down and killed — for the good of our children, and their children after them, and their children’s children’s children’s children’’’’s child’r’e’n’s, etc. (I don’t like this one.)

The post Seven Philosophies Better Than Longtermism appeared first on The Intercept.

In the first episode of Your Place or Mine, comedian and writer Sarah Kendall joins Shaun Keaveny to try and convince him to go on a trip to her hometown, the coal-mining city of Newcastle, Australia. The cafe culture and oceanside bathing pools sound tempting - but will Shaun actually commit to the day-long flight? Your Place Or Mine is the travel podcast that isn’t going anywhere - not until guests can convince Shaun Keaveny it’s worth getting off the sofa for. Each week a familiar face will try to persuade Shaun and resident geographer, historian and comedian Iszi Lawrence that jetting off to their favourite destination is worth the hassle. Across the series listeners will be able to figuratively globe-trot to a new destination, as guests share a personal guide to their favourite place on the planet. Iszi will be on hand to check out the facts during the podcast’s metaphorical tour of its visitors’ much-loved locations. With all the missed travel these past two years, Your Place Or Mine will explore whether getting back on a plane is too much for our wallets and limited carbon budgets, or if seeing the world and experiencing global cultures is something we can’t afford to miss. Your Place or Mine is a BBC Audio production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Producers: Proinsias O’Coinn and Jen Whyntie

Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton responds to smears from a neoconservative think tank funded by Western governments and corporations, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which attacked him over his factual journalism reporting on NATO support for far-right extremists in Ukraine. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cHPKpUJBfZ4 Read the Multipolarista article being attacked: https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/10/nato-arming-training-nazis-ukraine-azov This is a clip from the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast hosted by Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek. Support Unauthorized Disclosure here: https://thedissenter.org/unauthorized-disclosure-podcast

In a Classic Album Dissection, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot examine The Stooges' Fun House record from 1970. The album brought together garage rock, rhythm and blues and free jazz, setting a template for the punk revolution to come. Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton talks about the album as well as producer Don Gallucci, whose unorthodox studio technique is credited with capturing the singular sound of The Stooges. Plus Greg Kot adds a song by Gene Clark to the Desert Island Jukebox.

 

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Featured Songs:

The Stooges, "T.V. Eye," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "Down On The Street," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "Loose," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "Dirt," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "1970," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "Fun House," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

The Stooges, "L.A. Blues," Fun House, Elektra, 1970

Iggy Pop, "Dum Dum Boys," The Idiot, RCA, 1977

The Stooges, "I Wanna Be Your Dog," The Stooges, Elektra, 1969

The Stooges, "Not Right," The Stooges, Elektra, 1969

MC5, "Rocket Reducer N.62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)," Kick Out The James, Elektra, 1969

The Stooges, "No Fun," The Stooges, Elektra, 1969

The Stooges, "Loose (Demo Version)," Fun House (2005 Deluxe Edition), Elektra, 2005

The Stooges, "Slide (Slidin' The Blues)," Fun House (2005 Deluxe Edition), Elektra, 2005

Bread, "It Don't Matter to Me," Bread, Elektra, 1969

The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie," The Kingsmen In Person, Wand, 1963

The Stooges, "T.V. Eye (Takes 7 & 8)," Fun House (2005 Deluxe Edition), Elektra, 2005

The Stooges, "1970 (Take 3)," Fun House (2005 Deluxe Edition), Elektra, 2005

Iggy and The Stooges, "Louie Louie (Live)," Metallic K.O., Jungle, 1976

James Brown & The Famous Flames, "I Feel All Right (Live 1967)," Live at the Apollo, Vol. II, Polydor, 1968

John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme Pt 2 Resolution," A Love Supreme, Impulse!, 1965

The Doors, "Touch Me," The Soft Parade, Elektra, 1969

The Stooges, "1969," The Stooges, Elektra, 1969

Sonic Youth, "Kool Thing," Goo, DGC, 1990

Minutemen, "Maybe Partying Will Help," Double Nickels On The Dime, SST, 1984

Mission of Burma, "The Ballad of Johnny Burma," Vs., Ace of Hearts, 1982

Depeche Mode, "Dirt," Exciter, Mute, 2001

The Damned, "I Feel Alright," Damned Damned Damned, Stiff, 1977

Radio Birdman, "T.V. Eye," Radios Appear, Trafalgar, 1977

Nirvana, "Scentless Apprentice," In Utero, DGC, 1993

Mudhoney, "Touch Me I'm Sick," Touch Me I'm Sick (Single), Sub Pop, 1988

The Stooges, "Down On The Street (Single Mix)," Down On The Street (Single), Elektra, 1970

Gene Clark, "Some Misunderstanding," No Other, Asylum, 1974

David Bowie, "Heroes," "Heroes", RCA, 1977

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

Researchers are increasingly using computational notebooks to share workflows and data analyses with others. They are also used in the classroom setting, being effective tools to teach data science and other topics. Research computing services often highlight their support of notebooks as a method to interact with their services and facilitate collaboration and sharing (e.g., Princeton, Caltech). As a result, notebooks are fast becoming ubiquitous in research workflows.

Jupyter and RStudio, are two prominent development environments in the computational notebooks space. GitHub, a popular platform for collaborating on and sharing code, including notebooks, currently shows 4 Million code results for “.ipynb”, the file extension used for Jupyter, while the “.rmd” R extension used in, for example, RStudio, has 2.7 Million code results. We have seen a progressive growth in the preservation and citation of software primarily via GitHub and Zenodo, a repository maintained by CERN and OpenAire, climbing from roughly 2 Thousand records in 2014 to 73 Thousand in 2021.

Jupyter Notebooks started out as IPython, a command shell for interactive computing mainly in Python. Since its initial release in 2001, IPython has now developed into the Project Jupyter community whose goal is to “develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages”. The RStudio integrated development environment for the R statistical programming language was initially released in 2011. Shortly after, R Markdown, an approach to embed R code chunks in Markdown documents, was introduced into the knitr package. Posit (the company previously known as RStudio) recently developed Quarto, the next generation of R Markdown. Quarto is open source with support for code written in R, Python, Julia, and Observable JavaScript.

Notebooks fuse research narratives with data, visualization, and executable code to create an interactive experience.

Notebooks fuse research narratives with data, visualization, and executable code to create an interactive experience that allows others to walk through your computational workflow and analysis. For this reason, notebooks have also been an effective teaching tool in the classroom (e.g. Data8). Advances in notebook development have made it easier to launch a virtual platform, get started with coding, and use them while integrating them into your research workflows (e.g. OpenScapes).

At AGU, we have seen increasing interest in publishing notebooks from groups such as EarthCube, where they feature an annual call to their community to share and publish interactive workflows and analyses of research. Notebooks from the EarthCube calls are published in AGU’s preprint server, Earth and Space Science Open Archive or ESSOAr. In AGU journals, for instance, the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), editors have highlighted the benefits of sharing notebooks to understand the underlying models presented in papers. The Earth and Space Science journal has also seen interest in publishing notebooks as the research paper itself.

AGU will work with the computational notebooks community to design and implement a publishing workflow for computational notebooks.

AGU recently published two brief guides on publishing notebooks, Erdmann et al. (2021a,b). The guidance was co-developed with community members and continues to evolve. It also inspired the recently funded Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to support the advancement of notebooks as a primary research object led by AGU. Guided by a Steering Committee of experts, AGU will work with the computational notebooks community to design and implement a publishing workflow for computational notebooks over the span of 18 months starting in July 2022. Interactive functionality of notebooks is lost during publication, which is primarily still text-based. The project, called Notebooks Now! will look at maintaining the interactivity of notebooks in publishing workflows, effectively documenting reproducible workflows, expanding equitable access to computational research, and extending new forms of contributorship in the wider research community. In addition, this effort includes developing pilot solutions that will elevate notebooks as a format in scholarly publishing. You can learn more about Notebooks Now! at the project website.

In recent years, we have seen the increased use of notebooks in abstracts (presentations and posters) submitted to the AGU’s annual meetings and we are looking at ways to elevate and incentivize their use in our community. Please let us know through this form if you are interested in staying connected with these efforts and/or providing feedback.

—Christopher Erdmann (CErdmann@agu.org, 0000-0003-2554-180X), American Geophysical Union; Shelley Stall; Brooks Hanson; Laura Lyon; Brian Sedora; Matt Giampoala; Mia Ricci; and AGU’s Notebooks Now! Steering Committee

Citation: Erdmann, C., S. Stall, B. Hanson, L. Lyon, B. Sedora, M. Giampoala, and M. Ricci (2022), Notebooks Now! elevating computational notebooks, Eos, 103, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EO225024. Published on 18 August 2022.

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

Text © 2022. 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.

We discuss the equal parts terrifying and stupid possibility that Trump or an associate actually tried to sell nuclear secrets to the Saudis, and all the insane ramifications for domestic and world politics. Then, we’re joined by Tom and Tarence of the Trillbillies to talk about the recent catastrophic flooding in Kentucky, and how the years of government neglect and industrial mining in the region have exacerbated the disaster. Also, prayers up for our boy Salman Rushdie.

Link to the disaster relief mutual aid mentioned in the ep: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeAMXIPoChrCeYk7aMlsa0MuHFguB5CM1Gm-H8zJlYUCcllmw/viewform?fbclid=IwAR1bciEajmf80sYbS8mLDOmSZRk6tEBo1j4_cslNDP2Sggf1DkLekzdLhWU&fs=e&s=cl

Tarence’s piece in the Baffler on the flood: https://thebaffler.com/latest/flooding-in-the-sacrifice-zone-ray

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The US military spends more than the next 9 biggest countries combined. The expected 2023 Pentagon budget is $840 billion. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have spent $220 billion more than even cold warrior Ronald Reagan. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=h0BZso9Yb30 Research by Stephen Semler at https://stephensemler.substack.com

The biggest player in the Scramble for Africa was England. Second place to France, third to Germany. But there were many other European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the plunder of Africa was shared among even the smallest of European countries. Who and how, in this episode of the Scramble for Africa.

With org-mode you can keep data, code, and documentation in one file.

Suppose you have an org-mode file containing the following table.

    #+NAME: mydata
    | Drug | Patients |
    |------+----------|
    |    X |      232 |
    |    Y |      351 |
    |    Z |      117 |

Note that there cannot be a blank line between the NAME header and the beginning of the table.

You can bring this table into Python simply by declaring it to be a variable in the header of a Python code block.

    #+begin_src python :var tbl=mydata :results output
    print(tbl)
    #+end_src

When you evaluate this block, you see that the table is imported as a list of lists.

    [['X', 232], ['Y', 351], ['Z', 117]]

Note that the column headings were not imported into Python. Now suppose you would like to retain the headers, and use them as column names in a pandas data frame.

    #+begin_src python :var tbl=mydata :colnames no :results output
    import pandas as pd
    df = pd.DataFrame(tbl[1:], columns=tbl[0])
    print(df, "\n")
    print(df["Patients"].mean())
    #+end_src

When evaluated, this block produces the following.

      Drug  Patients 
    0    X       232
    1    Y       351
    2    Z       117

    233.33333333333334

Note that in order to import the column names, we told org-mode that there are no column names! We did this with the header option

    :colnames no

This seems backward, but it makes sense. It says do bring in the first row of the table, even though it appears to be a column header that isn’t imported by default. But then we tell pandas that we want to make a data frame out of all but the first row (i.e. tbl[1:]) and we want to use the first row (i.e. tbl[0]) as the column names.

A possible disadvantage to keeping data and code together is that the data could be large. But since org files are naturally in outline mode, you could collapse the part of the outline containing the data so that you don’t have to look at it unless you need to.

Related posts

• Org-mode as a lightweight notebook
• Inline computed content in org-mode
The post Keeping data and code together with org-mode first appeared on John D. Cook.