This week, a current events episode on the leadup and immediate aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Note: this episode is intended to be a continuation of Episode 364 (our last episode on Abe).
VERY EXCELLENT deepdive into Iraq political economy c1980-2011 but esp from the 2003 US invasion
Dina Khoury joins Long Reads for a two-part conversation about Iraq since the US occupation. Dina is a historian of the Middle East, and her books include Iraq in Wartime.
Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.
Under Ukrainian government pressure, CBS News censored its own documentary “Arming Ukraine,” which showed that just around 30% of the weapons Western governments have sent actually go to the frontlines, with widespread corruption and black markets.
VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4MQNjmbDadg
Read more here: https://multipolarista.com/2022/08/10/cbs-censors-report-ukraine-weapons-corruption
VERY EXCELLENT esp last-half "reading series": Peggy Noonan goes full-frontal boomer-brain despairing the demise of onsite office work beneath the jackboots of work-from-home wokists
The boys discuss the FBI raid of Mar a Lago, as well Trump’s desire for Hitlerian loyalty from his generals. Then, we contemplate what America will do without the burble and thrum of office life.
More-excellent-than-usual UI (the Biden Stoned Moments and 1 of the 'Food Groups of News' segments were weak but listenable), featuring the astonishingly-consistently VERY EXCELLENT Vijay Prashad on 'global NATO' as the latest phase in (the decline of) US empire as it goes to war not just with Russia but also China, but Africa decides to sit this out
Click here for the full episode, including the extended interview with Vijay Prashad on the US expanding control over South America and why Jordan Peterson needs a hug.
“The jaws of Hell have opened wide.”
Historian and author Vijay Prashad is worried about the next war that the US will provoke. Nukes in Ukraine, a new missile crisis in Taiwan, destabilizing sovereign South American nations, asserting control in Africa. All in the name of US hegemony.
He focuses in on China: what if Xi Jinping flew to Guam like Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan? What would the US do?
There are 29 US military bases in Africa. How many Chinese military bases are there? None.
The US is expanding NATO to bypass the UN treaty in an attempt to rule the world. Is China to blame?
Prashad, who has a new book co-authored by Noam Chomsky, analyzes the US’s increasingly dictatorial role in the world from Russia to China to Cuba to South America:
Colombia just elected a new left president. One of Gustavo Petro’s first moves was to call for an end to the US-led, so-called “war on drugs.”
Subscribe for the extended episode to hear Vijay discuss all of that, plus how capitalism has destroyed the ability of people to control their own lives; the nonsensical decision to place Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list; and why Jordan Peterson needs a hug.
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.
excellent: I've never heard about this Megarika game, but (at least here) it's funny and informative
Live recording from Podfest this year where Nick, Rob and Ciarán do three megarikas and then talk about the connection between Himmler and Ancient Aliens
consistently EXCELLENT live Chapo (3 guys plus 2 partners plus Bill Oakley): - Portland history c1850-1930 - Paul and Nancy Pelosi shenanigans (insider trading, car-crashing, starting WW3 via self-promotion) - Alex Jones loses bank to Sandy Hook parents in civil suit - Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) et al die in car accident - Kansas abortion vote (plus US politics esp CorpDems bankruptcy) - podcaster payola - reading series: [Jennifer Miller in NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/realestate/investing-self-care-real-estate-women.html) (archived [here](https://archive.ph/zNl7Z)) on real estate investment as feminist selfcare ... and not as pinkwashing scumbag landlords (and pimping the allegedly-self-empowering "Real Estate InvestHER" selfhelp scam), which of course it actually is - with Chapo partners Kath Krueger (Will) and Amber Rollo (Matt) - Bill Oakley on treats - best restaurant food in Portland - best fastfood "regionally" (all in Portland) and nationally - the Undead Question: is America burger? - predict evolution of US fastfood - shameless plug for [Steamed Hams Society](https://www.steamedhamssociety.com) - ditto for Oakley's new {SF, alternate history} /Space: 1969/ - ending with Chapo pitching ideas for new Simpsons episodes to Oakley (despite his being a /former/ Simpsons writer)
Live from the Aladdin Theater in beautiful Portland, Oregon! Chapo is joined by our Women’s Auxiliary Unit of Kath Krueger & Amber Rollo and America’s #1 treats connoisseur Bill Oakley to discuss the issues of the day. Topics include: Portland’s phallocentric history, Alex Jones’ legal losses, Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, and the recent victory for abortion rights in Kansas. Plus: can women find true fulfillment through becoming landlords? AND: a roundtable discussion of fast food culture in America featuring a tasting menu of local Portland delicacies selected by Mr. Oakley himself. Truly a value sized show!
Dates + Tickets for OUR live shows (including the Ft. Lauderdale show now rescheduled to 10/30) are here: https://www.chapotraphouse.com/live
short (~15 min) piece of moderately amusing UK social humor: probably worth the listen time, but probably more if you're outside UK.
Jayde Adams and guest James Acaster dive into the feisty world of community apps and messageboards, sifting through the angry neighbourhood bins to find disgruntled comedy gold.
From biggest beefs to weirdest news, Jayde discovers a hotbed of (largely unintentional) hilarity with graffiti-daubed wheelie bins, stray cats, e-scooters and more.
Jayde and the production team would like to hear about what's riling up the neighbours around Britain. Are your groups kicking off? Listeners can submit screenshots of the funniest and freakiest posts and threads to welcometotheneighbourhood@bbc.co.uk.
Presenter: Jayde Adams
Producer: Cornelius Mendez
An unusual production for BBC Radio 4
both segments VERY EXCELLENT: 1st on Tories at Oxford c1990, 2nd on Starmer and the Blairist coup in Labour
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
August 4, 2022Simon Kuper, Financial Times columnist and author of Chums, on the upper-class caste that’s been ruling Britain for a decade • James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum, on the dispiriting economics of the leader of the Labour Party, the drab Kier Starmer
EXCELLENT deepdive not just into the Trump raid (and associated horserace--not my thing, but undeniably entertaining) but (*much* more importantly) actual US law regarding document handling (archiving, de- and classification, etc)
Krystal and Saagar break down the FBI's raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound, the GOP reaction, Dark Brandon memes, Maddow's next steps, 'stop the steal' backfiring, GOP ignoring mainstream media, and the legal implications of the FBI raid!
Koustuv Sinha is a PhD student in machine learning and natural language processing. Because much of his time is devoted to reading research papers in his field, he’s devoted significant effort into optimizing his workflow.
The TL;DR is that he’s used Emacs and Org-mode to develop an efficient method of discovering and curating interesting papers. It starts with the discovery. For this he uses Elfeed to subscribe to various Arxiv feeds in his areas of interest. He uses the elfeed-score package to rank these papers in the approximate order of his interest in them.
When he reads an abstract in the Elfeed results that seems interesting, he fires off a process that captures the paper’s metadata to his bibliography file; grabs a copy of the paper, renaming it to the bibtext key, and storing it in a central repository; and adds it to an Org file listing the papers we wants to read.
A lot of this is accomplished by leveraging John Kitchin’s org-ref. He calls org-ref functions directly to get and store the paper’s data. It’s a nice example of reusing someone else’s codebase in your own.
Sinha provides a huge number of details in his post so be sure to take a look. If you have similar needs, this is an excellent starting point for your own workflow or even something worth stealing wholesale.
excellent: not the best BP ever, but consistently strong (notably, more *policy* politics than "horserace" politics)
Krystal and Saagar report on Democrats legislation, China tensions rising, weapons flowing to Ukraine, gay marriage vote, Dick Cheney's ad for Liz, Monkeypox hypocrisy, & media fawning!
VERY EXCELLENT: 1st 2 of the 4 food groups, but esp Ukraine Truthing
Lindsey Snell, journalist at ishgal.com, crossed the Ukraine border to talk to soldiers and civilians. What she found surprised her:
There are Ukrainian forces who are “openly Neonazis, and we’re still giving them weapons and calling them something that they’re not.” All across the frontlines Lindsey found swastikas, SS symbols, and Wolfsangels. But negative news in Ukraine undermines the West’s mission to bleed Russia and sell more weapons, so corporate US media paints over it.
Lindsey also found that while the western mercenaries who flew over to kill Russians are loving the war, most of the Ukrainians she spoke to, both soldiers and citizens, want it to end.
“The corruption and lack of equipment is worse in Ukraine than anywhere I’ve been, Syria, Iraq, Libya. It’s just so bad.” And for the Ukrainians who are starving, losing their homes, and dying, “there’s no end in sight.”
What’s worse — as is the norm with guests on Useful Idiots — no one in western media will report on Lindsey’s story. “Journalists come and see how corrupt everything is and that the soldiers have nothing, but none of is is reflected in mainstream reporting. It’s very well known but it’s just not getting past the filter of western media.”
Plus, subscribe for the full interview, where Lindsey shares the story of getting kidnapped in Syria, how the war is hurting Europeans, and Turkey’s potential invasion of Syria (that you probably won’t hear about).
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.
excellent: just Christman and just history, but well done (excepting some appalling mispronounciations--Pinyin is not so difficult, dude!)
Matt discusses the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a rebel state that existed in China from 1851-1864. The rebellion was organized around the landless Hakka people by Hong Xiuquan who, after failing his bureaucratic entrance exams, had a nervous breakdown that led him to believe he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Matt tracks the rise and fall of the kingdom, and how it fits in other proto-socialist movements, and the resonances with the Mormon history he laid out on the last two episodes of the Inebriated Past. Get bonus content on Patreon
EXCELLENT: BBC finally drops the Dead Ringer episode from the week of BoJo's resignation (after BBC Sounds delay), and the DR crew cheerfully sodomize the Tory bastards over and over :-)
Topical satire show, featuring characters drawn from the worlds of celebrity and politics.
Click here for the extended episode, including the full interview where Claire and Mick discuss abortion rights in Ireland and the US, mainstream media’s constant attacks and misinformation about them, and why our government and media are too afraid to talk about Assange, the realities of the Ukraine proxy war, and US hegemony.
“Democracy is about having a say in how your country is run. Right now, that’s not happening. The way the system works, the politicians don’t feel under pressure to answer to the majority of the people.”
Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, members of the European Parliament, are Irish progressives. This means they speak out against the proxy war in Ukraine, Julian Assange’s torture, and the Syria dirty war. Elected progressives in the US are quite different.
“From what we can see,” they tell us. “You don’t have any left politics in the US. The Democrats are indistinguishable from the Republicans and Bernie would be seen as just right of center in Europe.”
And what does it take to get actual progressives like Clare and Mick in office?
“Until people take to the streets, it’s going to be very hard for any left wing party to show its head in America.”
Plus, subscribe for the extended interview where Claire and Mick discuss abortion rights in Ireland and the US, mainstream media’s constant attacks and misinformation about them, and why our government and media are too afraid to talk about Assange, the realities of the Ukraine proxy war, and US hegemony.
As Mick always says, “democracy means you can say what you like, but you’ll do what you’re told.”
And that’s this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.
EXCELLENT: not much politics, just lots (funny) content from GodzillaWorld
In 1984, Godzilla rose from Tokyo Bay for the first time in nine years for THE RETURN OF GODZILLA. In 1985, an American distributor dramatically recut the movie into GODZILLA 1985. We're joined at long last by Important Cinema Club co-host Justin Decloux to discuss the many structural and ideological changes that were imposed upon Godzilla's big comeback.
Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.
We’re joined by special investigator Brace Belden to look into the increasingly bizarre saga of the Black Hammer group, which recently made news as subject of a police raid, a suspicious death among their group members, criminal accusations against their leader, and now accusations of being part of a foreign influence operation. We discuss all this as well as the political value of Being Normal.
EXCELLENT (at least, after initial banter, which is just OK): if you thought, "no one could ever do a survey of Italian politics that is both accurate and humorous," your belief is hereby empirically negated.
We sit down with Jacobin's Europe editor David Broder to discuss the future of Italy, Meloni, the future of the world and of course we talk shit about Argentina
Marxist historian, commentator, author, and executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Vijay Prasad joins Bad Faith this week to talk about what global revolutions in Sri Lanka, India, Colombia, and other locales around the world can teach Americans trying to cultivate a left revolution here at home. How should the left put pressure on captured union leadership, and how can it hold left politician's accountable? Does the left "eat itself," or is it in a necessary processes of developing a more adversarial theory of change? How does Vijay believe he will see revolution in his lifetime even as he observes the enormous structural barriers to change?
For machine learning projects, I tweaked my workflow so the
interaction with remote server is kept as less as possible. I prefer
to do everything locally on my laptop (M1 Pro) where I have all the
tools for the job to do data analysis, visualisation, debugging etc
and I can do all those without lagging or WI-FI.
The only usage of servers is running computation extensive tasks like
recursive feature selection, hyperparameter tuning etc. For that I ssh
to the server, start tmux, git pull to update the codebase, run a
bash script that I prepared locally to fire hundreds of
experiments. All done in Emacs of course thanks to Lukas Fürmetz’s
vterm.
The only thing left is getting the experiment results back to my
laptop. I used two approaches for copying the data to local: file
manager GUI and rsync tool in CLI.
Recently I discovered dired-rsync that works like a charm - it
combines the two approaches above, providing a interactive way of
running rsync tool in Emacs. What’s more, it is integrated
seamlessly into my current workflow.
They all have their own use case. In this post, I brief describe those
three approaches for coping files with a focus on dired-rsync in
terms of how to use it, how to setup, and my thoughts on how to
enhance it.
Note the RL stands for remote location, i.e. a folder a in remote
server, and LL stands for local location, the RL’s counterpart. The
action in discussion is how to efficiently copying files from RL to
LL.
File Manager GUI
This is the simplest approach requires little technical skills. The RL
is mounted in the file manager which acts as an access point so it can
be used just like a local folder.
I usually have two tabs open side by side, one for RL, and one for LL,
compare the differences, and then copy what are useful and exists in
RL but not in LL.
I used this approach on my Windows work laptop where rsync is not
available so I have to copy files manually.
Rsync Tool in CLI
The rsync tool is similar to cp and scp but it is much more
power:
It copies files incrementally so it can stop at anytime without
losing progress
The output shows what files are copied, what are remaining, copying
speed, overall progress etc
Files and folders can be included/excluded by specifying
patterns
I have a bash function in the project’s script folder as a shorthand
like this
copy_from_debian_to_laptop () {
# first argument to this function
folder_to_sync=$1
# define where the RL is
remote_project_dir=debian:~/Projects/2022-May
# define where the LL is
local_project_dir=~/Projects/2022-May
rsync -avh --progress \
${remote_project_dir}/${folder_to_sync}/ \
${local_project_dir}/${folder_to_sync}
}
To use it, I firstly cd (change directory) to the project directory
in terminal, call copy_from_debian_to_laptop function, and use the
TAB completion to quickly get the directory I want to copy, for
example
This function is called more often from a org-mode file where I kept
track of all the experiments.
Emacs’ Way: dired-rsync
This approach is a blend of the previous two, enable user to enjoy the
benefits of GUI for exploring and the power of rsync.
What’s more, it integrates so well into the current workflow by simply
switching from calling dired-copy to calling dired-rsync, or
pressing r key instead of C key by using the configuration in this
post.
To those who are not familiar with copying files using dired in
Emacs, here is the step by step process:
Open two dired buffer, one at RL and one at LL, either manually
or using bookmarks
Mark the files/folders to copy in the RL dired buffer
Press r key to invoke dired-rsync
It asks for what to copy to. The default destination is LL so press
Enter to confirm.
After that, a unique process buffer, named *rsync with a timestamp
suffix, is created to show the rsync output. I can stop the copying by
killing the process buffer.
Setup for dired=rsync
The dired-rsync-options control the output shown in the process
buffer. It defaults to “-az –info=progress2”. It shows the overall
progress in one-line, clean and neat (not in MacOS though, see Issue
36). Sometimes I prefer “-azh –progress” so I can see exactly which
files are copied.
There are other options for showing progress in modeline
(dired-rsync-modeline-status), hooks for sending notifications on
failure/success (dired-rsync-failed-hook and
dired-rsync-success-hook).
Overall the library is well designed, and the default options work for
me, so I can have a bare-minimal configuration as below (borrowed from
ispinfx):
There are two more things to do on the system side:
In macOS, the default rsync is a 2010 version. It does not work
with the latest rsync I have on Debian server so I upgrade it using
brew install rsync.
There no way of typing password as a limitation of using process
buffer so I have to ensure I can rsync without remote server asking
for password. It sounds complicated but fortunately it takes few
steps to do as in Setup Rsync Between Two Servers Without Password.
Enhance dired-rsync with compilation mode
It’s such a great library that makes my life much easier. It can be
improved further to provide greater user experience, for example, keep
the process buffer alive as a log after the coping finished because
the user might want to have a look later.
At the moment, there’s no easy way of changing the arguments send to
rsync. I might want to test a dry-run (adding -n argument) so I can
see exactly what files are going to be copied before running, or I
need to exclude certain files/folders, or rerun the coping if there’s
new files generated on RL.
If you used compilation buffer before, you know where I am
going. That’s right, I am thinking of turning the rsync process buffer
into compilation mode, then it would inherit these two features:
Press g to rerun the rsync command when I know there are new
files generated on the RL
Press C-u g (g with prefix) to change the rsync arguments before
running it for dry-run, inclusion or exclusion
I don’t have much experience in elisp but I had a quick look at source
code, it seems there’s no easy of implementing this idea so something
to add to my ever-growing Emacs wish-list.
EXCELLENT, both funny: Hadidi (one of my favorite comics) does great short bits, Haycock is just stoopid (but in the good way)
Nour Hadidi puts G-O-D into her S-E-T and thy Y-Y-C Comedy festival, and Charles Haycock describes his fondness, and complex relationship with...couches.
Thomas Calnan coaches you through the loss of a "pet"....and Heidi Foss had a few too many at the holiday party again. Recorded at the 905 Comedy Festival in 2019
VERY EXCELLENT (as usual from Norton/Multipolarista) analysis of the explicit plans US-EU-WEF have been and continue to make for whatever remains of Ukraine after their sockpuppet shreds and NATO is forced to move the proxy war with Russia to another front
Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland to plan harsh neoliberal economic policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”
VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbxudlFTN1E
Read more here: https://multipolarista.com/2022/07/28/west-neoliberal-recovery-conference
mostly good: the Jason Kander interview is just listenable, Kyle Kulinski is ... better than usual. I advise abending @ 91:11, thus to skip the last 2 interviews, both by Marshall Kosloff who has gotten quite bad lately)
Krystal, Saagar, and friends talk about Kamala Harris, John Fetterman's campaign, Americans moving to Mexico, Olbermann podcast, PTSD, Instagram changes, Saudis & Biden, Taiwan tension, & more!
VERY EXCELLENT, and funny: not just on "Wag the Dog" the movie, but also today's multipolar world, the evil that the neocon-shitlib complex is doing to prevent losing The Unipolar Moment, US politics, and much, much more
The 1997 Hollywood film "Wag the Dog" perfectly predicted the propaganda tactics the US government and media would use decades later in its wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and beyond.
In this special joint episode, Multipolarista host Benjamin Norton is joined by Sina Rahmani of The East Is a Podcast to discuss the movie and how shockingly relevant it still is today.
VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BIZFAOtD5rM
Support The East Is a Podcast at https://patreon.com/east_podcast
Follow Sina at https://twitter.com/urorientalist