Sunday, March 23, 2025

Resolutions, Kafka - Victoria Canal at Kennedy Centre

 

Spanish-American singer-songwriter, Victoria Canal, displays her opinion of Trump at the end of her Kennedy Center performance



Resolutions, Kafka


To lift yourself out of a miserable mood, even if you have to do it by strength of will, should be easy. I force myself out of my chair, stride around the table, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them. Defy my own feelings, welcome 

A. enthusiastically supposing he comes to see me, amiably tolerate 

B. in my room, swallow all that is said at 

C.’s, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts.

Yet even if I manage that, one single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.

So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are being carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.

A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows.

Cold War Rivers: Remembering The CIA’s Elaborate World War II Book Smuggling Operation

 NAZI-HUNTING IN MOVIES AND TV THRILLERS, OVER THE DECADES Pop culture will never get tired of watching people travel to South America to track down Nazi fugitives.



When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us More than a half-century after Mel Brooks made “The Producers,” mocking Hitler isn’t what it used to be


Remembering The CIA’s Elaborate World War II Book Smuggling Operation

What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program.” - The Guardian


Self-Publishing Is Having A Moment

"They want to do things in a time frame that suits them, rather than hope that they will find an agent, and that the agent finds a publisher, and at some point, in the future, that book is published. New writers are saying: ‘I can do something relatively quickly and learn how to be an entrepreneurial, self-starting author.’”  -...


The Far-Right and the Crypto Scam

How Trump and his allies use crypto to rig the rules of the game in their favor and fleece rubes.


The Rare Conductor: Anthony Pappano

Pappano, 65, is a rarity in classical music: a maestro who never went to a music school. Born in England to Italian immigrant parents, then transplanted to Connecticut at 13, he learned through experience (and came away with an accent that remains charmingly jumbled to this day). - The New York Times

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Why We’re So Obsessed With Tales Of True Crime

 Water the root, not the fruit!


Eight ways to reduce your stroke risk – no matter what age you are


Tiny lightning bolts discovered in water droplets—and it might explain how life began on Earth StudyFinds


The Limits Of Language: Is There Really A Word For That?

Exploring this material—the work of philosophers, poets, and theoreticians who grappled with what it means to speak and to understand speech—can help us understand more deeply what exactly is at stake. - Boston Review

Why We’re So Obsessed With Tales Of True Crime

“Feito turns up the volume in the new novel, ‘because it was fun, but also because they did drip belladonna into their eyeballs!’ (A poisonous Victorian beauty hack to make your pupils dilate.)” - The Guardian (UK)

How To Spot A Fake Masterpiece? Little Things Count

The divergence of opinion between the museum's experts and those who doubt the work's authenticity opens a curious space in which to reflect on intriguing questions of artistic value and merit. Is there ever legitimacy in forgery? Can fakes be masterpieces? 

We’ve Been Missing The Point Of “The Great Gatsby” For A Century

“Gatsby is a more complicated book than its pop-culture footprint suggests. It’s big enough to survive all those turgid high school essays about color symbolism and the American dream, … all those mediocre movies and bad plays. Here’s the story of how The Great Gatsby has endured — and why we keep misreading it.” - Vox

TV Actors’ Secrets For Convincingly Pretending To Be Drunk And/Or Drugged

Yes, there have certainly been cases of what one might describe as method acting, but being intoxicated on set is never good for actors who want to control their own performances, and these days especially it’s frowned on. Here’s how some actors handle the challenges of playing a character who’s sozzled. - The Guardian


Glaurung was the first of the dragons 🐉 🐉 and one of the foremost lieutenants of Morgoth during the First Age. He had four legs, and a fiery breath, but no wings and could not fly. He was sentient and could talk and understand speech.

History

The forces of Fingon against Glaurung by David Greset

Exactly when Glaurung was created is not known, but he first emerged from Angband in F.A. 260, during the Siege of Angband. Although he was still young according to the long life of Dragons, and not grown to his full strength, his initial assault pushed the Noldorfrom Ard-galen, which he took and defiled, to Dorthonion and the Ered Wethrin.

This victory was short-lived, however, and Glaurung was forced back to Angband when Fingon rode against him with a company of mounted archers. Morgoth was not pleased that Glaurung had revealed himself while still immature, and did not allow any more forays from Angband for some two hundred years.

Two major battles

The siege of Angband was broken in F.A. 455 in the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame. Glaurung, now grown to his full might, led the largest army of balrogs and orcs yet assembled against the leaguer of the Noldor and overthrew it. He then pressed against the people of Fëanor and, defeating a contingent of their riders upon the plain of Lothlann and forcing Maglor's Gap, burned all the land between the arms of Gelion.

The counter-attack came in F.A. 472, when the Union of Maedhros marched in force against Angband in the decisive battle of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Unnumbered Tears. Glaurung and his brood entered the battle in the early hours of the third morning, when Morgoth loosed his last strength against the combined forces of FingonTurgon and Maedhros:

The strength and terror of the Great Worm were now great indeed, and Elves and Men withered before him; and he came between the hosts of Maedhros and Fingon and swept them apart. 

But the Dwarves of Belegost with their great war masks withstood him. Surrounded and hewed at by their axes, Glaurung was driven into a rage and slew Azaghâl the Lord of Belegost. But with his last stroke the Dwarf-lord dealt Glaurung a grievous wound to the belly and the dragon and his brood fled back to Angband, leaving the final victory over the Union to Gothmog and his balrogs.

Friday, March 21, 2025

Dostoevsky’s (And Our) Struggle With Faith

 Skywriter takes Bluesky threads and makes webpages out of them


The truth behind Adolescence, the new series exploring incels and Andrew-Tate-style misogyny



Adolescence: What's the song at the end of the series? And what does it mean?


WSJ Op-Ed: Dostoevsky’s (And Our) Struggle With Faith


Poland’s Previous Government Pushed Museums To The Right. This New Museum Is Pushing Only To The Middle.

Under the Law and Justice Party, officials fired many museum directors, replacing them with conservatives whose exhibitions promoted traditional social and artistic values. The current ruling coalition is working on reversing the politicization, and the director of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art says she’s aiming straight for the center. - The New York Times

A Fully-Funded BBC World Service Is The Only Way To Counter Disinformation, Argue BBC Execs

“Amid concerns about the scale of state-backed content after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, senior BBC figures believe it is ‘undeniable’ that the government should shoulder the costs of championing ‘western values’ via the financially strained World Service.” - The Guardian

How On Earth Did Reddit Become One Of The Nicest Places On The Internet?

For its first decade, Reddit was widely considered just a notch above 4chan: full of rage-filled prejudice, vicious verbal abuse and creepy sex stuff. Now Reddit's full of (mostly) civil discussion, advice and support on topics from popular to extremely niche to silly. And there are good reasons for that. - The Atlantic (MSN)

It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE

WIRED [ublocked] talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the first six weeks of the new Trump administration turning the federal government upside down. It has moved from agency to agency, accessing sensitive data and payment systems, all on a supposed crusade to audit the government and stop fraud, waste, and abuse. DOGE has posted some of its “findings” on its website, many of which have been revealed to be errors.

But two federal auditors with years of experience, who have both worked on financial and technical audits for the government, say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like. Both asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press. “Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” says one of the auditors who spoke to WIRED. “None of them are auditors.”…

“An audit that follows Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), also known as a Yellow Book audit, is conducted in accordance with the standards issued by the US Government Accountability Office,” says the first auditor. Audits can focus on the finances, compliance, or performance of an agency. “That is the gold standard for how you audit the government.”
There are generally five phases of a GAGAS audit, the auditors tell WIRED: planning, evidence gathering, evaluation, reporting, and follow up. Auditors work to define the scope of an audit, identify all the applicable laws and standards, and come up with an audit plan. Next, auditors conduct interviews with staff, review financial records, and comb through data, reports, and transactions, documenting all the way. From there, auditors will assess that information against policies or procedures to figure out if there’s been some kind of alleged waste, fraud, or abuse and issue a report detailing their findings and offering recommendations. Often, those reports are made available to the public. After an audit, the auditors can follow up with the agency to ensure changes are being made…”

How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

 On this day 27 years ago, on March 14, 1998, I started this here website. I’m not sure what there is to say about the ridiculous length of time that I’ve spent doing this “moderately anachronistic thing” that I haven’t already said before:

A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.

As always, thank you so much for reading and for the membership support. 💞


How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

On Inauguration Day in January, Eliza McLamb wrote about her abstention from social media for a month and the challenge of keeping up with current events “without either turning towards ignorance or overwhelming myself with information”:

I’ve been thinking deeply about this idea recently — how much do I really need to know? I by no means think that I (or anyone) should be exempt from keeping up with the political and social going-ons of the world. Certainly, it’s invaluable to remember that one’s personal life is not reflective of the lives of everyone else. But I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.

Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about. All the information swelled to a terrifying, dizzying checked-out-ed-ness, where I would make my way through a timeline that showed me children missing limbs in Palestine to an influencer’s makeup tutorial to details about Trump’s incoming cabinet to a house tour in the Hamptons. The bizarre, violent juxtaposition of it all started to turn my brain off. It was simply too much information.

I read this essay a few days after it was published and have been thinking about it (and related articles) more or less constantly ever since, not only in terms of what media & information I am consuming, but also in terms of what I’m sharing here.

Every damn day over the past month an a half, the Trump administration has dropped some new horror in their attempt to speed-run the fascist takeover of American democracy.

All of it is relevant and all of it matters. Just two days ago, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with a green card, was detained and imprisoned by DHS agents on some Trumped up nonsense about “[leading] activities aligned to Hamas” (he was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment). This is right out of the fascist playbook; Adam Serwer:

The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan. Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy.

Here’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reported by the New Republic:

You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.”

“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone - left, right, or center - who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.

Trump said he was going to deport his enemies (i.e. people who oppose him) and you’ve read the fucking poem, so I hope that somehow this can be stopped long before it reaches 50-something, white, male bloggers who live in rural Vermont, not at all for my personal sake but for every preceding person they try this shit on, up to and including Mahmoud Khalil.

And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.

So, the question I’ve constantly been asking myself is: How should I be covering all this? What is the best use of your attention and my time, platform, and abilities? For the first couple of weeks, getting good information and analysis out about what was going on seemed most important, along with expert contextualization of events, providing actionable information, focusing on the stakes not the odds, and emphasizing the human stories and costs of the coup.

I believe all those things are still important to highlight. And writing about this still feels like something I have to do. However it feels increasingly unproductive for me to keep up with the “day to day” (even when that means something as consequential as the disappearing of legal residents for political reasons) on KDO. Other people and outlets are better equipped to keep you informed about such events. I do not want to contribute to folks feeling helpless or numb from information overwhelm — that won’t do any of us, or our future prospects for democracy, any good.

So yeah, that’s where I am right now — between the opposite poles of too much and not enough — if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know what the answer is just yet, if there even is one, but I suppose I will figure it out.

(I’m gonna open comments on this because I want to hear what you have to say about How Much You Need to Know or What You Want to Hear From Me, but I’m gonna strongly suggest that your personal opinion on our current political situation is better addressed elsewhere. Thanks.)


Composer Sofia Gubaidulina, 93

“(She) believed that it was Soviet repression which made her so powerful and distinctive a composer, though it was only after the fall of Communism that she became well known in the West, … becoming, in her 70s, one of the most sought-after composers in the world.” - The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)

Trump’s still fighting the media. The Atlantic’s latest story suggests why.

 Anthropic CEO says spies are after $100M AI secrets in a ‘few lines of code’ TechCrunch


Australian Taxation Office rolls out change to online services

Businesses will now need to use a Digital ID to access online services.


Emails Reveal Top IRS Lawyer Warned Trump Firings Were a “Fraud” on the Courts


Trump’s still fighting the media. The Atlantic’s latest story suggests why.

A Hungarian journalist sees a familiar pattern in Trump’s attacks on the media — and a warning for the future of US press freedom



Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Eyal-Cohen Reviews Harpaz's Global Tax Wars In The Digital Era


Scam Operations Relied on Third-Party Marketing Companies for Steady Stream of Potential Victims

Two professional scam call-center operations depended on affiliate marketing firms to supply them with contact details of...



Banned Russian Channel RT Secretly Pays Video Bloggers Who Promote Kremlin Narratives

The bloggers rack up millions of views, promote Russia as a haven for conservatives, glorify the war in Ukraine — and never...


Wired has a big story (150+ sources) that takes a look Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’. “The next step: Unleash the AI.” 


The Science Of Optimism? How, In A Frightening World?

Optimism is, after all, by its nature delusional; ‘realism’ or outright pessimism might seem more justifiable given the troubles of the present and the uncertainties of the future. - Psyche