Saturday Commentary and Review #93
Investigating COVID-19's Origins, Crypto as 2008 Redux? Orban and American Right Wingers, France's Crumbling New Left Coalition NUPES, Terry Davis and TempleOS
The steep decline of journalistic standards and journalism as a whole in the West these past two decades have negatively impacted the general public, while serving to not only buttress the power of the elites, but to expand them as well.
Objectivity, once a core principle of the profession, is becoming increasingly vilified as ‘advocacy journalism’ takes hold. To strain to be as objective as possible in reporting is equated to de facto support of whoever the current ‘bad guys’ are. The tendency now is for the answers to come first, and the rest of the story to be built around this pre-conceived argument. “I go where the facts take me” is retrograde, reactionary, hateful, and fascist.
When the media outlet that you work for is controlled by billionaires in a country where corporate and political power are increasingly centralized and more difficult to separate from one another, reporting actual facts can be a career-killer. It’s much better for your own personal development to report on the outrage of the day, but it’s even of greater benefit to act as a stenographer for the powers-that-be. Just take a look at the Epstein case: society has agreed that human trafficking and exploitation of women, especially underage females, is wrong and criminal. All the mainstream reporting has gone in this direction. But what about the client list? And what about the national security/Intel angle?
Investigative journalism has taken the biggest hit these past twenty years thanks to budget cuts and dictates from on high. It’s not completely dead (the first name that pops into my head when I think ‘excellent investigative journalism’ is The Intercept’s Lee Fang), but the Priest’s number is on speed dial just in case he needs to rush over to perform Last Rites. Without investigative journalism, the public is left at the mercy of the elites, as no one is able to draw the curtain open and see just what is going on in behind it.
Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Sustainable Development Center at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network sounds like your standard fare plugged-in elite player. He is. In fact, he is the author of the economic shock therapy that destroyed Russia’s economy in the 1990s when he served as advisor to several Russian governments that decade. Therefore, it’s very, very interesting that he has gone public in his calls for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Is he being altruistic? Or does he have a hidden agenda? I certainly don’t know, but I do appreciate that he is taking this public stance that stems from his time as the Chair of the COVID-19 Commission for Lancet Magazine (a world-leading medical publication). He recently sat for an interview with that absolute dork, Nathan J. Robinson, to discuss why he questions the present narrative and why he insists that an investigation take place.
Nathan Robinson:
I want to quote something that you said recently:
“I chaired the commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I’m pretty convinced it came out of U.S. lab biotechnology, not out of nature, just to mention. After two years of intensive work on this. So it’s a blunder in my view of biotech, not an accident of a natural spillover. We don’t know for sure, I should be absolutely clear. But there’s enough evidence that it should be looked into. And it’s not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere. And I think for real reasons that they don’t want to look underneath the rug, the statement.”
Sachs elaborates on his position:
Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, the funny thing is those scientists who are saying that said the same thing on February 4, 2020, before they had done any research at all. And they published the same statement in March 2020, before they had any facts at all. So they’re creating a narrative. And they’re denying the alternative hypothesis without looking closely at it. That’s the basic point.
Now, what is the alternative hypothesis? The alternative hypothesis is quite straightforward. And that is that there was a lot of research underway in the United States and China on taking SARS-like viruses, manipulating them in the laboratory, and creating potentially far more dangerous viruses. And the particular virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-Cov-2, is notable because it has a piece of its genetic makeup that makes the virus more dangerous. And that piece of the genome is called the “furin cleavage site.” Now, what’s interesting, and concerning if I may say so, is that the research that was underway very actively and being promoted, was to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses to see what would happen. Oops!
Well, that is what may have happened. And what has been true from the start is that that very real possibility, which a lot of scientists know, has not been looked at closely, even though it’s absolutely clear that it could have happened that way. They’re not looking. They just keep telling us, “Look at the market, look at the market, look at the market!” But they don’t address this alternative. They don’t even look at the data. They don’t even ask questions. And the truth is from the beginning, they haven’t asked the real questions.
But not quite the beginning. Because at the beginning, which we could date from the first phone call of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a group of virologists on February 1, 2020, the virologists said “Oh my god, that is strange, that could well be a laboratory creation. What is that furin cleavage site doing in there?” Because scientists knew that was part of an active ongoing research program. And yet, by February 3, the same group is saying “No, no, it’s natural, it’s natural.” By February 4, they start to draft the papers that are telling the public, “Don’t worry, it’s natural.” By March, they write a paper—totally spurious, in my view—called the proximal origins paper that is the most cited bio paper in 2020. It said: it is absolutely natural. [Note: the paper’s conclusion is “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”] But they didn’t have any of the data that you read about in the New York Times. They didn’t have any of this. They just said the labs weren’t working on this alternative. But you know what, they don’t know what the labs were working on, because they never asked, and NIH hasn’t told us.
Was this research actually going on?
We have enormous reason to believe that it was. And clearly, we haven’t even asked that question. But we have a lot of reason to believe that it was, because the scientists that were doing that research loved that research. And they explained to us publicly why it’s so important. And they wrote editorials about why this research must continue. And they made grant proposals saying that it should continue. And for those of us in the business of writing grant proposals, the fact that a particular grant proposal that’s deeply troubling was turned down doesn’t mean that it wasn’t carried out afterwards. But where is NIH saying, “Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Why don’t we get the evidence?” It doesn’t even ask that question.
And the scientists like those that talk about the Huanan market, they don’t even discuss that research that was underway. That is just misdirection, to my mind. It’s like sleight of hand art. Don’t look over there. Look over here. But we know that there was a tremendous amount of this research underway. We have interviews by the lead scientists. We have these research proposals. I know the intention of doing this research from discussions. I’ve read so many studies of the importance of this research claimed by the scientists. And yet I see NIH with its head in the ground. “Oh, no, nothing here to look at.” And then I see the scientists. “Oh, nothing here to look at. We know it’s the market. Did we find an animal? No. Do we have an explanation of where that furin cleavage site came in? No. We don’t have an explanation of the timing, which doesn’t quite look right. Oh, but don’t look over there, because there’s nothing there,” they keep telling us. Well, that’s a little silly.
So my point is, there is a huge amount of reason to believe that that research was underway. Because there are published papers on this. There are interviews on this. There are research proposals. But NIH isn’t talking. It’s not asking. And these scientists have never asked either. From the very first day, they have kept hidden from view the alternative. And when they discuss the alternative, they don’t discuss the research program. They discuss complete straw men about the lab, not the actual kind of research that was underway, which was to stick furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in a way that could have created SARS-Cov-2.
What I’m calling for is not the conclusion. I’m calling for the investigation. Finally, after two and a half years of this, it’s time to fess up that it might have come out of a lab and here’s the data that we need to know to find out whether it did.
On the Wuhan Lab:
We know that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the scientists there had been trained by American scientists to use advanced bioengineering methodologies. And in particular, we have scientists in North Carolina, Texas, and so forth who do this kind of research, believe in it, argue for it, and say that they don’t want any regulations on it and so on. And they were in close contact with Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they were part of a joint research group that was stitched together by something called EcoHealth Alliance. And EcoHealth Alliance was the kind of marriage maker between the American scientists and the Chinese scientists. That was the vehicle for funding from the U.S. government, especially from the National Institutes of Health, and especially from Tony Fauci’s unit, the NIAID. There were years of grants, there were grant proposals. We don’t know exactly what was done. But we have enough reason to know that we should be asking exactly what was done. And we know definitively that from the beginning, NIH has been running from telling us what has been done. They’re not telling us the truth, that they had reason to fear from the start that this came out of a lab. And that to this day, they have reason to suspect it, but they’re not talking.
On trying to get answers:
The most interesting things that I got as chair of the Lancet commission came from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and whistleblower leaks from inside the U.S. government. Isn’t that terrible? NIH was actually asked at one point: give us your research program on SARS-like viruses. And you know what they did? They released the cover page and redacted 290 pages. They gave us a cover page and 290 blank pages! That’s NIH, for heaven’s sake. That’s not some corporation. That is the U.S. government charged with keeping us healthy.
What I found is that we have a lot of data which we’re not finding right now. And I don’t want to have to rely on FOIA and leaks, though those can be incredibly informative. I want clear, independent scientific investigation and transparency. One way to do this would be a bipartisan congressional oversight investigation that had subpoena power. Give us your lab records, your notebooks, your data files of virus strains, and so forth. There are many questions that we need independent scientists to define, to tell us exactly the kinds of information. But we know right now we’re operating in an environment in which the government is working to hide the data that we need to make a real assessment.
Sachs may have a hidden agenda in bringing this up. Only time will tell for certain. But this does bring up interesting questions regarding Russian accusations of US-backed laboratory research in Ukraine, for example.
I gladly admit to being a novice when it comes to the world of cryptocurrencies and all the various platforms, instruments, etc. associated with them. Thankfully, I have a smart brother who is well-versed in these subjects. He and I have a division of labour whereby we focus on different areas of knowledge, and then consult one another regarding those outside of each other’s scope of study.
Over these past few years, I’ve met quite a few people who have done well (in many cases, really, really well) in this new world of crypto. Being a bit of a chicken shit when it comes to investment and risk (Real Estate Master Race), the feeling that I got was that I was too late to the party by the time I found out that there was an actual party happening. When people that I know start talking to me about investment and financial opportunities outside of those areas of interest that I am known to them for, I feel like Joseph P. Kennedy listening to his shoeshine boy talk about his investment portfolio.
The beating that the crypto market has taken recently has naturally led to schadenfreude from “no-coiners” (those who were never into the market in the first place, and are envious of those who did well), and from those who see right-wing conspiracies in the digital economy. The “nyah, nyah, nyah” taunting was helped by various scandals that have plagued this sector, alongside many bad choices and strategies that were made by players and companies, not to mention the army of celebrities who eschewed due diligence in favour of easy money in touting all sorts of shady products.
Matt Taibbi, one of the greatest journalists still working today, did an incredible job in translating the murky world of Wall Street Finance back in the post-2008 era when he took on Goldman Sachs (“The Squid”) and others, helping us understand the arcane world of “credit-default swaps”, derivatives, and so on. He recently decided to poke around the world of crypto to see just what is going on there:
That wasn’t the only factor. Just days after TerraUSD lost its “peg” and started its freefall in early May, financial observers found an eyebrow-raising passage in the already-disappointing quarterly 10-Q report of a crypto market leader, Coinbase. In addition to reporting a $430 million loss and a 19% drop in users, the company stated:
In the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors.
Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the United States. When a customer stores cryptocurrency in a Coinbase wallet, those funds in theory can only be accessed with a cryptography-protected key, making it, again in theory, the unique property of the customer.
This type of protection is supposedly what’s at the heart of the crypto revolution, powered by its underlying Blockchain technology. The new method for storing data creates unique, timestamped “chains” of information visible to everyone in a digital community. In a theoretical Blockchain world all financial history would be visible, instantly recallable, and set in stone, making customers immune to the kind of non-transparent, triple-dealing corruption that ruined those who placed their trust in infamous black boxes like Lehman Brothers prior to 2008.
The Coinbase disclosure however brought back some of these memories. In the event of a bankruptcy, the firm’s 10-K release said, risk existed that people with funds in Coinbase wallets could find themselves fighting with other Coinbase creditors in a legal proceeding to decide who was owed first. No matter how sound a company it was or is, Coinbase posed the same theoretical problems that all financial institutions posed to customers in the pre-crypto world, forcing users to put trust in those opaque institutions known as “centralized” ledgers.
How many users of Coinbase were aware of this stipulation?
The damage was done:
The incident triggered headlines like, “Coinbase admits users could lose crypto” and “Coinbase admits risk to investor fund,” and caused market mayhem. $200 billion vanished from the valuation of crypto companies within 24 hours as, among other things, the share price of Bitcoin, the leading crypto product, fell on the news.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong insisted the passage had been inserted at the insistence of the S.E.C., and that while it was “possible, however unlikely,” that there could be fight over who’s owed what in a Coinbase bankruptcy, “your funds are safe with Coinbase.” However, the damage was done. More serious problems that popped up later at companies like Vauld, Celsius, and others continued the plunge, raising a general level of panic where just a year ago, euphoria reigned.
Echoes of 2008:
If a stablecoin firm is taking your dollar and trying to make money lending it somewhere, they’re just “unregulated, uninsured, unaudited banks,” as one financial analyst puts it.
………
“It’s 2008 on crack.”
On March 18, 2008, two days after the collapse of the legendary Wall Street firm Bear Stearns, another member of what was then known as the “Big Five” group of top investment banks, Lehman Brothers, made a dramatic announcement. The CNN headline said it all:
Bear had just imploded after short sellers pounced on rumors it was overwhelmed with mortgage debt, causing a massive run to the exits that ended with a state-aided sale of the bank to J.P. Morgan Chase. In a desperate attempt to avoid the same fate, Lehman had its Chief Financial Officer, Erin Callan, make a series of announcements designed to publicly dispel notions it was broke. Saying the bank is in a “strong liquidity position,” Callan announced that Lehman was sitting atop a liquidity “pool” that included “$34 billion and $64 billion in assets.”
For Matthew Lee, at the time a Senior Vice President in Lehman’s finance division, the “liquidity pool” stunt was staggering to behold, and one of the last straws on his journey to blowing the whistle on the firm to auditor Ernst & Young. The way he saw it, Lehman was trying “by hook or crook” to do anything to avoid having its credit downgraded by ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Such a move would have triggered a series of losses leading to a financial death-spiral, similar to the one that destroyed Bear. So the firm simply lied about how much money it had.
…….
Lehman didn’t have $34 billion. The bank turned out to have put collateral it had already pledged to other actors in its “pool.” Chase, for instance, had already accepted at least $5 billion of the “collateral” Lehman said it had available. This is like saying you’ve got $500 in the bank, when you’ve already mailed a check for at least $100 of that to pay your phone bill. Investigators later determined the “pool” in reality contained no more than $1-$2 billion.
Of course, Lehman’s condition soon became clear, and the bank would collapse, leading to one of the most extraordinary months in the history of finance. In September, 2008, the world learned that not just Bear and Lehman were bust, but also AIG, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and a long list of other titans.
The collapse of firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the tsunami of losses that followed in September and October of 2008, wiping out as much as 40% of the world’s wealth according to some estimates, underscored a basic problem in the global financial system. How can you tell when a systemically crucial firm, or even a government, is lying? How can anyone feel safe in a system full of black boxes run by ethically challenged millionaires and billionaires?
Theory vs. Reality:
In theory, Blockchain really could break the grip powerful insiders have had on money and political power since time immemorial. The potential benefits even reach into areas like speech. If you can rely on a vast digital community to confirm you’re good for your dinner bill instead of a third-party guarantor like, say, the Visa corporation, then there would be no inaccessible, unaccountable payment processors to hold Internet speech or book sales hostage. As the former CEO of a major Internet company put it, commenting on a recent episode involving the freezing of PayPal accounts for alt-media firms, “Bitcoin is the only answer.”
However, if the transparency goal isn’t maintained in crypto finance, and risk is allowed to exist that digital assets could end up fought over in something like a bankruptcy court, then you’ve just exchanged one brand of “centralized ledger” for another — maybe even a worse version. “There are so many good things about this industry, right? The micropayments, the cheap transactions, the transparency on chain and so on,” says a high-ranking executive for another oft-criticized crypto firm. “But there is also a ton of centralized behavior still.”
It’s the perhaps-insuperable paradox hanging over this $3 trillion market. Are these firms really beacons of a new form of cryptographically guaranteed transparency, or are they just less-insured, less-regulated, less-audited versions of the same take-our-word-for-it securities and banking operations that melted down the world economy fourteen years ago? “That’s the weird thing about crypto,” says Georgetown professor Adam Levitin, who specializes in bankruptcy and commercial law. “It’s a mix of incredible transparency with incredible opacity.”
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as a “huge red flag”:
Even the ultimate symbols of upper-class financial respectability, the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christies, got in on the act. These companies, whose very names imply frumpy establishment legitimacy, not only began accepting cryptocurrency as payment for properties like an untitled $5.4 million Keith Haring painting, but held auctions for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, a kind of digital currency that at the time was having success as a speculative investment.
Sotheby’s for instance auctioned a set of digital cartoon characters called “CryptoPunks,” seeking as much as $30 million. The houses sold an astonishing $250 million in NFTs in 2021, with the artist Michael Winklemann, who calls himself “Beeple,” selling the “first portrait of a human born in the Metaverse,” a “piece” called HUMAN ONE, for $29 million. Blockchain technology is the reason HUMAN ONE could be uniquely owned, like a Van Gogh. But was this a Van Gogh, or just a boring-ish tweet with 6000 likes? A different Beeple work called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” sold for $69.3 million. Somehow, a technology whose existence in theory imperiled the entire traditional financial establishment became, overnight, the darling fixation of that same establishment.
It should have been a huge red flag, and wasn’t. But an even bigger warning was ignored.
Read the rest here, and let me know if you think Taibbi is right or has gotten something wrong.
I am somewhat ambivalent when it comes to Viktor Orban’s star turn in the USA because a) it’s good to see that some of those in power in the Metropole acknowledge not just the successes of his political tactics and strategies and therefore view Hungary’s path as a valid option (where doable), but also because b) by placing himself and Hungary in the limelight, he risks the Eye of Sauron treatment.
Orban is both eloquent and provocative, with a firm grasp of history that gives his speeches important context that will often not translate well outside of Continental Europe, even when done so objectively. Much like the Vatican throughout the past few decades, he is often misinterpreted on purpose for the sake of domestic political agendas. Gavin Wax gives us an American view on Orban and his recent trip to CPAC:
For critics portraying an inherently multiracial Europe, and denying the reality and legitimacy of peoples, Hungary’s national preferences express an unnatural, even punitive act of racial discrimination. Orbán’s alternative analysis, taking peoples and nations seriously, broaches the topic of race in a manner unapproved by elite opinion-makers in Davos, London, and New York. That by itself is enough to send accusations of racism flying.
European liberals predictably recoiled at Orbán’s now-controversial sentiments. To them, the only white Westerners permitted to talk of race are those who bend the knee to the Left’s racialist creed, convinced the West must purify its blemished past by giving moral authority to movements like Black Lives Matter and to policies like mass immigration from what they had once called the Third World.
American disruptors of Davos consensus:
Trump disturbed Legacy Republican leaders like the Bushes, but an increasingly multi-ethnic base has responded with breakout momentum to the nationalist language of Donald Trump and his political heirs, centered as it is around their families, communities, and prosperity. Outside politics, and over strong opposition in his own industry, Tucker Carlson has laid out an America-First viewpoint more cogently, and with greater control, than Trump and some of his allies.
Orban’s appeal to this subset of the US right:
These are powerful breaks from the enforced norm, but they are still few. And that is why Orbán cuts such an outsized figure. He has, through free and fair elections, established a degree of legitimate national power and authority no other figure in the West has yet matched. He targeted, and essentially forced out, the subversive Soros-backed NGO network, mere mention of which is, in the U.S., enough to get one’s mic cut off mid-segment. Of all that may be said of Orbán’s government, it is without doubt a people-powered response to the excesses of globalism, multiculturalism, and diversity enforced by the West’s elites—a counterrevolution those elites treat like an existential threat to their hegemony.
And so, when sizing up Hungary’s unlikely prominence, many Americans find a nation that has not lost its will to fight, to preserve itself, and to persist for future generations. From this standpoint, Orbán’s terms in office reflect the strength of his representation of their national values.
Many journalists have been making the critique that these right wingers want to “turn the USA into Hungary”. This is such a ridiculous charge, one that should be obvious to anyone that has even the most casual understanding of just how different the two countries actually are. Orban himself states that what he and Fidesz do work for Hungary because they are done in a Hungarian context. He also knows the limits of Hungary’s power due to it small size.
But there are certain elements to Orban’s work that can be adopted and re-purposed for use elsewhere, which is why more and more foreigners are drawn to what he and Fidesz have successfully managed to do while in office.
Broad electoral coalitions need tight discipline in order to survive any legislative period, lest they fall apart due to the inherent contradictions that arise between the parties that are part of those very same coalitions.
NUPES (New Ecological and Social People’s Union), the left-wing coalition that managed to exceed expectations in the recent French parliamentary elections is another example of this point: strains are already appearing between factions in the coalition, threatening to tear it apart.
Background:
Although all the left-wing factions spent the presidential campaign criticizing each other, the agreement they found at the beginning of May to form the New Popular, Environmental and Social Union (NUPES) allowed them to form a block in the June legislative elections and clinch 151 seats in the Assemblée Nationale. At the end of the first legislative session, an initial assessment reveals the coalition's overall satisfaction with its functioning. "The agreement that we reached in ten days at the national level could seem precarious. But the common policy program has allowed us to form a real coalition," said Julien Bayou, the co-chair of the Green group in the Assemblée.
"Within the cross-party group, extremely different political cultures coexist," said chairman of the Communist group André Chassaigne. These approaches were expressed in three ways when the groups assumed positions on legislation. The Socialists, for example, mostly supported bill on measures against Covid-19, while more radical La France Insoumise (LFI) and the Communists largely voted against, and the Greens abstained. On the purchasing power bill, the Socialist group abstained, while LFI, the Communists and the Greens voted against.
So far, so good.
Parliamentary tactics have produced the first notable crack in the coalition:
This strategy of constant stunts is not supported by parts of the Socialist and Communist groups, who remain dubious about the method's effectiveness. At the beginning of the legislative period, LFI's motion of no confidence against the Borne government caused tension among the Socialists. Six of the group's 31 MPs, including former group chair Valérie Rabault, abstained from the vote, believing there was no point in condemning a government not yet put to the test. For Philippe Brun, his colleagues above all "refused LFI's method of filing this motion without consulting its partners." LFI was especially criticized at the start of the term for taking initiatives in too solitary a manner. "There were some wobbles and things that we forgot to communicate due to a lack of habit. As they say, we learn by doing," said Ugo Bernalicis, who recognizes that he himself made a mistake in filing a motion to censure the health bill without warning the other groups.
A poor track record thus far in Parliament hasn’t helped either:
Even though its voice is now more powerful, the left unanimously regrets having achieved very little during the parliamentary session, with the adoption of only one strong amendment on the budget amendment bill – providing additional financing for local authorities – and the failure of its flagship measures, such as a tax on super-profits or the increase in the minimum wage. "We didn't manage to get many of our proposals adopted. Both because the government only reached out to LR and because we lacked coordination on the preparation of amendments, and perhaps also because sometimes we did not have a constructive approach in the chamber," said Mr. Chassaigne.
A breakdown in discipline, particularly over foreign policy where divisions between coalition partners were ignored during the electoral campaign:
Less than three weeks after the legislative elections, the apparent unity of the NUPES has begun to crack. On July 16, the day of the Vel'd'Hiv Roundup commemoration, the president of the LFI group, Mathilde Panot, tweeted criticism of both the "crimes of the [Nazi] collaborationists" and Emmanuel Macron, a "president who pays tribute to [French collaborationist leader] Pétain." The message was widely criticized by parts of the NUPES.
At the end of July, a controversy flared up again around a motion for a resolution condemning the "apartheid regime instituted by Israel against the Palestinian people," tabled by Communist MPs and co-signed by 37 MPs. Several NUPES lawmakers, such as Socialist MP Jérôme Guedj, opposed it, believing that their should understand that now they are united, they "are committed to each other". Four of the co-signatories quietly withdrew their names from the proposal: LFI execs Mathilde Panot and Adrien Quatennens and the Socialist MPs Christine Pirès Beaune and Claudia Rouaux.
The fundamental differences of left-wing parties on French foreign policy, deemed irreconcilable during the presidential election but swept under the rug when the time came to reach an agreement for the legislative elections, reappeared during the ratification of the Finnish and Swedish NATO accession protocols on August 2. Socialists and Greens voted in favor; the Communists mostly abstained and LFI opposed it – their presidential program proposed leaving NATO's integrated command.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon's blog post on Taiwan, which reiterated Beijing's position that "there is only one China," further disunited the coalition. His remarks were strongly criticized by many Green and Socialist MPs.
Expectations are that this coalition will most likely not last before the next parliament is to be elected.
Heralded as the return of social-democratic politics to the European continent after a decade of continued wipe outs, the pundits may have spoken too soon.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a look at Terry Davis, the eccentric creator of TempleOS who died four years ago. His stature has only grown since among the ‘very online’, and his legendary status now secured for all time.
In 1996, Terry Davis had a revelation from God. Though he’d lapsed from his Catholic upbringing into atheism, he could not turn away from the mandate handed down to him from Heaven: build the Third Temple, as is prophesied in the Bible. So Terry got to work and a decade later, he had made a new operating system, from scratch, all by himself.
Terry Davis was an American programmer who created the operating system “TempleOS.” He was by no stretch a perfect person. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and later with schizophrenia, which informed his public persona. He courted controversy with spastic episodes and spewing slurs in his thousands of video streams, but despite that, he grew a group of converts who felt passion, or at least intrigue, about his mission. Today marks the anniversary of his tragic death in 2018.
Davis tried to recreate the environment of the old Commodore 64. With a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, with sixteen colors, a single voice audio, with no preemptive multitasking. TempleOS, like many cathedrals built to honor God, could not have been built without religious fervor. This operating system, written in a language that Terry created, “Holy C” similar to C but it has functions that can be invoked without parenthesis or arguments and uses “Just in Time” compilation, which means it also acts as a shell language that can be executed directly from the terminal.This OS is completely encapsulating and isolated from any other system. It has games, a flight simulator, hymns, all the passages from the Bible; and on the technical side: a bootloader, compiler, kernel, window manager and 3D graphics library, which if you’d like you can change by opening the source code and with some lines of Holy C, you can change anything thanks to the file system called “Red Sea” – all created from scratch and it fits in under 100,000 lines of code at 1.4 MB.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already done so.
If you are on Twitter, please follow @FistedFoucault, run by two volunteer readers of this Substack.
Saturday Commentary and Review #93
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you (be nice!), and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already done so.
I am getting a lot of positive feedback for the HIV/AIDS series, especially privately through email, and notably from individuals somewhat put off by the subject at first but who have since come around.
If you are on Twitter, please follow @FistedFoucault (https://twitter.com/FistedFoucault) which is run by two volunteers who are subscribers here.
Good combination of “outside the box” thinkers and thinking.