nothing here but elephant names

issue 259 - 23rd June, 2024

MJW: Hello, I’m filling in for CJW as she cavorts in the hinterlands. We’re back this fortnight with more highlights of the hectic world, carefully selected and smashed into your faces like so many soft cream cakes, but far less enjoyable or delicious. HAVE AT IT, READERS.

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The latest bonus issue is ‘Come Out With Your Hands Up’, a reintroduction from the shiny, new Corey Jae.

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Concerningly anaemic middle-aged goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, super duper party person.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Pacific Indigenous leaders have a new plan to protect whales. Treat them as people - Jared Formanek at CNN

For Māori conservationist Mere Takoko, “losing one whale is like losing an ancestor.” The animals “taught our people about navigation across the Pacific, particularly across the Milky Way… And this is information that was given to our ancestors.”
The environmental activist from the small town of Rangitukia, on New Zealand’s east coast, is spearheading a movement of Indigenous groups in the Pacific pushing to protect the magnificent marine mammals, inking a groundbreaking treaty to make them legal persons with inherent rights.
The document is part of a multi-pronged effort to safeguard whales, which also includes quantifying their monetary value as carbon-depleting “bioengineers of our oceans”, and deploying the latest tech to track boats that harm them.

This looks to be a really important initiative/movement.

DCH: Our human minds hold us back from truly understanding the many brilliant ways that other creatures solve their problems by Abigail Desmond at Aeon

"Moreover, when we describe other animals or things as having intelligence, we may inadvertently impute them with other human-like qualities. If a sea otter can use tools, we might unconsciously assume that it is like us in other ways; maybe it has counting skills, thinks abstractly, plans ahead, or knows its reflection in a mirror. If it’s intelligent, how could it not? But that is an unwarranted leap, emerging from the way we have built self-centred definitions of intelligence."

A good rundown on how human ego has obfuscated the study of other animal intelligence.

“The secret to saving the deep sea, Proctor says, is to prioritize systems that focus on the materials we already have—establishing right to repair laws, improving recycling capabilities, and rethinking how we use tech after the end of its useful life cycle. These are all systems we have in place now that don’t require tearing up new lands thousands of feet below the ocean.” - Instead of Mining the Deep Sea, Maybe People Should Just Fix Stuff - Boone Ashworth at Wired.
"Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis." The Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recycling by Lisa Song at ProPublic

Just the headlines:

How Myanmar’s Wood Funds Its Brutal Military by Audrey Thill at Foreign Policy

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Israel’s Horrific Attack on a Refugee School in Gaza - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

The massacre was carried out by Israel without prior warning, and despite knowledge that the school was crowded with displaced families, including sleeping children. According to UNRWA, over six thousand people were taking shelter.
It was a deliberate attack on the UN-run school, which had been declared a safe area for civilians. Israeli military spokesperson Peter Lerner told reporters yesterday that Israel intentionally bombed the school, adding that the military was not “aware of any civilian casualties.”

Israel is no longer pretending they aren't the ones attacking hospitals and schools, they just needed plausible deniability early on…

Israel Has Carried Out Another Civilian Massacre in Gaza - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

In a chilling testimony, Rasha Matar recounts how Israeli special units killed her twelve-year-old son, Yamen, right in front of her: “We did nothing wrong; they executed my son before my eyes.” Her surviving son, Ahmad, claimed that his brother was killed by US soldiers: “Biden’s army killed my brother. These were American special forces.”
Other children were also executed, including three young sisters: Rital, Mayar, and Mariam Abu Yousef. Hanan Aqel, a ten-year old girl, had her face erased by a bomb. One heartbreaking video features a child shielding his slain baby brother from the sun with his bare hands moments before he was buried.

Unconfirmed reports of this and that, but at this point what person with a conscience would doubt the capability for Israel and the US to commit (or at the very least support) these atrocities.

MJW: Running Amok - Mary Turfah at The Baffler

People ask what’s wrong with the Israelis because, I suspect, they find the depravity difficult to believe, let alone comprehend. Attempts to ascribe motive are met with visceral revulsion, an affront to something fundamental and big, like morality. I wonder how a person gets here. And I know our responsibility is not to find a way to psychologically accommodate it, but rather to work to stop it. Still, with every snuff video I find myself back at that same question. In strictly political terms I can appreciate the clarity it allows. Watching these soldiers, I do not feel concern, or anything at all, for them. Instead, the feeling is that of looking at a person, and where you expect recognition you find its inverse—a stunned alienation.

There’s no point to asking how or why right now, we just need to make it stop.

Israel Is Waging Genocide in Open Defiance of the ICJ - Chip Gibbons at Jacobin
"An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed — sometimes four generations from the same bloodline — in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war." - The war in Gaza has wiped out entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more - Sarah El Deeb at AP
"In clear and deliberate violation of international law, Israel intended to commit these crimes: to murder civilians en masse, inflict wide-scale civilian destruction, and collectively punish and dehumanize Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinians were murdered. They didn’t die as collateral damage or as unintended victims of Israeli military operations, but as Israel’s deliberate targets." UN Commission Finds Israel Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity by Bashir Abu-Manneh at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccines - Chris Bing and Joel Schectman at Reuters
UN Commission Finds Israel Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity - Bashir Abu-Manneh at Jacobin
The right could win big in Europe – thanks to young people - BBC
Rwanda’s Rigged Election by Nosmot Gbadamosi at Foreign Policy
How Africa’s War on Disinformation Can Save Democracies Everywhere by Abdullahi Alim at Foreign Policy
Colombia’s Coal Embargo on Israel Is a Model to Follow by Rula Jamal at Jacobin
McKinsey Pulls the Strings Behind Justin Trudeau’s Curtain by Jeremy Appel at Jacobin

Science & Space

CJW: Elephants have names — and they use them with each other - Celia Ford at Vox

Wild African elephants call each other by their names, according to a study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution — making them the only nonhuman animals known to use language like this.
If elephants are intelligent enough to learn each other’s names, they may also have deep social bonds, complex thoughts, and a desire to connect with others — just like us. Findings like this pile onto mountains of evidence suggesting that we should rethink our current relationships with animals like elephants.

This story has been spread far and wide so you might have seen it, but it's the kind of thing I live for, so I'm sharing it anyway.

Personally, I have no doubts that elephants are both intelligent and have consciousness - they communicate, they have deep social bonds, they mourn their dead, and they take revenge on people who have wronged them. What more proof is needed?

Related: Abracadabra! How Magic Can Help Us Understand Animal Minds - Betsy Mason at Nautilus

More on animal intelligence, including some fun magic experiments.

Tech & Design

MJW: The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined - at Wired

David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)
Will Kohnen also couldn’t forget about Titan, and the foreboding he had about the whole enterprise. “We have a rogue element within the submersible industry,” he remembers thinking. If something went wrong with Titan, it might scare people off deep-sea exploration more widely. In March 2018, he drafted a letter, signed by more than 30 crewed submersible experts, urging Rush to test the vessel with an accredited outside group.

Less the hubris of man and more like the willful stupidity.

DCH: ChatGPT is bullshit by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater at Springer

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005)

An excellent new original paper. Paired well with these other reads: The Great AI Retrenchment has begun by Gary Marcus and I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again by Ludicity. When even the WSJ ($) is calling it a day on the AI parade because the innovations have slowed, the usefulness is minimal, and the costs are too high…

“The tech industry has craved a messiah since the death of Steve Jobs, but in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman they’ve discovered more of a false prophet — a seedy grifter that uses his remarkable ability to impress and manipulate Silicon Valley’s elite to mask a total lack of technical or business acumen.” Silicon Valley's False Prophet by Edward Zitron
"Neurotargeting is prized by political campaigns, marketers, and others in the business of persuasion because they understand, from centuries of experience, that provoking strong emotional responses is one of the most reliable ways to get people to change their behavior." How Data-Fueled Neurotargeting Could Kill Democracy by Aram Sinnreich at MIT Press Reader

Just the headlines:

Cheap and Lethal: The Pentagon’s Plan for the Next Drone War by Nick Turse at The Intercept

Society & The Culture

“Our conversations with Ursula and her family began in 2017,” the executive director of Literary Arts, Andrew Proctor, said in a statement. “She had a clear vision for her home to become a creative space for writers and a beacon for the broader literary community.” - Ursula K. Le Guin's home will become a writers residency - Hillel Italie at AP News - CJW: This is beautiful, and I wish I could write there one day.
The Age of the Drone Police Is Here - Dhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx at Wired
“Nature, nurture, network.” - 2024 Commencement Address for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art - Kevin Slavin - CJW: It’s a commencement speech, so you already know what the tone is going to be like (fairly cringe, to be honest), but there are still some interesting ideas in here.

Just the headlines:

The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline by Tallulah Trezevant at Working Classicists
These conspiracy theory believers went deep down the rabbit hole — then found a way out by Anna Kelsey-Sugg at ABC
The Invention of Heterosexual Culture by Louis-Georges Tin at MIT Press Reader

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: GOP States Double Down on Fighting Medication Abortion After Supreme Court Keeps It Legal by Jordan Smith The Intercept

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s 24-year-old approval of mifepristone, a common gynecological drug also used for medication abortion, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to bring the suit in the first place. The ruling keeps mifepristone legal across the country — at least for now.

Even the outrageous and openly corrupt dirtbags on SCOTUS did the right thing in this ruling…

Infectious diseases skyrocket worldwide fueled by COVID-19 pandemic - Benjamin Mateus at wsws.org
“On New Year’s Day 2020, I was zipping up my fleece to head outside when the phone in the kitchen rang. I picked it up to find a reporter on the line. “Dr. Fauci,” he said, “there’s something strange going on in Central China. I’m hearing that a bunch of people have some kind of pneumonia. I’m wondering, have you heard anything?” The First Three Months by Anthony Fauci at The Atlantic

Just the headlines:

No evidence sperm counts are dropping, researchers find - University of Manchester
How is France dodging the global obesity trend? by Frank Jacobs at Big Think
Dengue Surge Grips Latin America by Catherine Osborn Foreign Policy

Labour & Economics

DCH: The Supreme Court Struck a Blow Against Workers’ Rights by Alex N. Press jacobin

It just got easier for employers to get away with firing workers for organizing a union.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with Starbucks in a decision against Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that continues to organize Starbucks locations across the country. The union has organized more than 440 stores representing some ten thousand workers since the campaign began in December 2021.

…but not in this ruling. 8 out of 9 justices voted in favour of Starbucks. Shameful.

DCH: AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human at BBC

”Mostly, it was just about cleaning things up and making the writing sound less awkward, cutting out weirdly formal or over-enthusiastic language," Miller says. "It was more editing than I had to do with human writers, but it was always the exact same kinds of edits. The real problem was it was just so repetitive and boring. It started to feel like I was the robot."

Wither copywriters?

DCH: AI can't fix everything automation already broke by Brian Merchant at Blood in The Machine

If this showed up in the b-plot of a Black Mirror episode, we’d consider it a bit much. But it’s not just the deeply insipid nature of the AI “solution” being touted here that gnaws at me, though it does, or even the fact that it’s a comically cynical effort to paper over a problem that could be solved by, you know, giving workers a little actual time off when they are stressed to the point of “losing it”, though that does too. It’s the fact that this high tech cost-saving solution is being used to try to fix a whole raft of problems created by automation in the first place.

Brian gets it. Easily one of the best and most considered writers working at the intersection of tech and labour.

“The California Labor Commissioner cited Amazon nearly $6 million for failing to provide warehouse workers with written quotas they were required to meet, the commissioner’s office announced Tuesday.” California Fines Amazon $6 Million for 59,017 Separate Warehouse Violations by Jules Roscoe at 404 Media.
The US government is suing Adobe for allegedly hiding expensive fees and making it difficult to cancel a subscription. In the complaint filed on Monday, the Department of Justice claims Adobe “has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.” US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel by Alex Castro The Verge

Just the headlines:

California lawmakers are trying to regulate AI before it’s too late. Here’s how by Wendy Lee Los Angeles Times
Opinion: As AI is embraced, what happens to the artists whose work was stolen to build it? by Mary Rasenberger at The Los Angeles Times
Microsoft QA Contractors Say They Were Laid Off for Attempting to Unionize by Jules Roscoe at 404 Media
Over 27,000 K-12 Educators Just Unionized in Virginia by Joe DeManuelle-Hall at Jacobin (DCH: this happened in Fairfax, Va not too far away from where I grew up. This is one of those local stories I like to keep an eye on. Curious if the alt-right politics that brew at school council levels in places like this had something to do with it.)
Blue Bottle Coffee Workers in Boston Are Now Unionized by Sara Wexler at Jacobin

Comics

DCH: Grass of Parnassus by Kathryn Immonen & Stuart Immonen. Published by AdHouse Books

Join a huge cast including angry space techs, anxious energy workers, obsequious ramen robots, suspicious arcade owners, snack-driven vat-grown bears and correspondence school druids in this backstage adventure aboard a malfunctioning flying space rock. Grass of Parnassus is the legendary Immonens (RUSSIAN OLIVE TO RED KING, MOVING PICTURES, HELLCAT, STAR WARS) at their breakneck best.

Grass of Parnassus was originally published every Monday on Instagram by the Immonen’s at the height of the pandemic. It became must-read comics for me. I loved the experimentation of the form, the way they took full advantage of the limitations of Instagram as an experience, and the behind the scenes explanations of how much sheer effort they were pouring into the design of this thing.

But more than all that I loved the absurdity of the story itself. SCTV / KiTH like humour delivered in a bande dessinée style.

The other day I went back to look at the account they hosted on IG and sadly it was gone. I then found that the whole thing was published in book form and I just had to have it. This story was one of the few bright points I remembered during the worst of the pandemic and I needed it in my life.

I was really curious how the whole thing would convert to a traditional form factor and I’m genuinely impressed with how they’ve used page breaks/flips and their approach to the layout of the whole thing to preserve the feel that swiping on IG gave it.

Anyway… go read this comic. It’s great.

Podcasts

DCH: The Case Against Chiquita by Cameron Abadi at Foreign Policy

Last week, a jury in South Florida ordered that $38.3 million should be paid to 16 family members of farmers and other civilians who were killed in separate incidents by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was active in Colombia for parts of the 1990s and 2000s. The party that is obliged to pay that money is Chiquita, a produce company known in the United States and around the world for producing bananas. Chiquita was found guilty of bankrolling this paramilitary group—a groundbreaking instance of a company being held liable in a U.S. court for human rights violations elsewhere in the world.

Long overdue justice in the case of Chiquita’s death squad at the violence and horror they inflicted in South America. And hopefully the first in a long line of victorious cases seeking to bring American corporate violence to heel.

Art

MJW: I’m loving Sasha Gordon’s soft bodies and dreamy landscapes in these pieces.

CJW: Fractured Ice Drifts Atop a Frosty Baltic Sea in Bernhard Lang's Stunning New Photos - Colossal

[alt text: A red ship travels through a passage of churned, dirty ice, with solid ice forming to port and starboard.]

Massive ice floes crush like pebbles in a frosty series by Bernhard Lang. Known for his stunning aerial photos that capture the intricate textures found around the globe, Lang recently flew above the Baltic Sea to glimpse the wintry conditions. Awash in snow and ice, the photos create a compelling tapestry of life from Estonia to Finland that includes traversing the frozen Peipsi Lake on foot and watching crystalline structures form on the water’s surface.

Some absolutely stunning photos. As you may have guessed from previous photos I’ve shared, the juxtaposition of the natural environment and man-made objects always grabs me for some reason, hence my sharing the above.