Links and Notes for October 3rd, 2025

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

The National Press Club of Australia, caving to the Israeli lobby, Cancels My Talk on Our Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Israeli officials set up the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to lure emaciated and malnourished Palestinians to four aid hubs in the south — aid hubs with little food and which Human Rights Watch calls “death traps” and Doctors Without Borders calls “orchestrated killing.” These hubs, open only an hour, usually at 2:00 am, ensure a chaotic scramble for scraps of food. Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. mercenaries, who include members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a self-professed anti-“radical jihadist” biker group that counts members with Crusader tattoos among its ranks, fire live rounds into the crowds killing over 1,400 Palestinians and injuring thousands more in and around the hubs since May.”

“No doubt, the corporate sponsors and wealthy donors of the press club are pleased. No doubt, the club is able to slither away from its journalistic integrity. No doubt, it is spared the attacks that would come from allowing me to speak. But please, have the decency to remove the word press from your club.”

Hunger by Muhammad al-Zaqzouq (The Paris Review)

“So this is hunger. A new war raging inside the war of missiles and bombs, a war no less brutal or mighty than the one searing us with its fires and sending us running to escape its crushing force. Hunger came for us in our home, as it did for others. We eat one meal a day now, halfway through the day; in the morning, a few biscuits are first shared between the children and then the adults, and in the evenings, we make do with tea.”

“The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?”

Even Non-Citizens’ Speech Is Protected by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike.”

“A standard response to this view is the idea that, even if non-citizens have a right to free speech, they don’t have a constitutional right to stay in the US. Thus, deporting them for their speech doesn’t violate the Constitution. But, in virtually every other context, it is clear that depriving people of a right as punishment for their speech violates the First Amendment, even if the right they lose does not itself have constitutional status. For example, there is no constitutional right to get Social Security benefits. But a law that barred critics of the President from getting those benefits would obviously violate the First Amendment. The same logic applies in the immigration context.”

“There is a distinction between those we allow to enter, which allows for denial to those who would seek to attack or undermine our nation, and deportation after entry. Our First Amendment does not extend to the universe, but only our nation. Until someone is given entry, they do not fall within the universe of people who can claim the First Amendment’s protection.”

Israel Is Finished by Ted Rall

“Now Israel is dying. As horrific as the genocide in Gaza has been, there’s a danger that a desperate Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies will kill Palestinians faster—and that they might even carry out Israel’s long-threatened “Samson option,” using its illicit nuclear arsenal as massive retaliation against its Arab neighbors if the Jewish state faces existential destruction.”

“Let’s hope the Israelis eschew the Samson option and go out as peacefully as the USSR, close up shop, and join the 21st century as a democratic country with equal rights for all.”

“Here in America, the imminent landslide victory of Zohran Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel, as mayor of New York—with the second-largest population of Jews outside Israel—shows that it’s become politically safer to oppose than to support Israel. Soon, possibly in 2028, U.S. voters will elect a president who insists upon it too. Israel as a vestigial post-colonial Jewish ethnostate is on the way out.

“Hamas won.

“Hamas knows it won.

“Everyone knows, including the Israelis. “Israel is in a sort of isolation,” Netanyahu acknowledged at a conference of the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem. “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” Autarky, an economic policy of complete self-sufficiency, was attempted primarily by other politically-extreme regimes the world wanted nothing to do with: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, North Korea, Albania under Enver Hoxha, and Kampuchea under Pol Pot. Autarky has always failed. Self-sufficiency does especially poorly for countries like Israel, which has few natural resources. No wonder the Tel Aviv stock exchange crashed after Bibi’s speech.”

Hamas didn’t win. Israel flogged itself to death but is going to take Hamas down with it. There is nothing left of Palestine.

The War Dept’s War on Media by Patrick Lawrence (Consortium News / Scheer Post)

“But let me pose a question, disturbed as I am by Pete Hegseth’s latest display of authoritarianism mixed with ineptitude. In promulgating these severe new restrictions on those assigned to cover the national security state, has the Trump regime merely codified practices that have long been observed but until now left unwritten? Doing bluntly and openly what previous presidential regimes have done surreptitiously is (part of) what makes Donald Trump dangerous, but it is also, if you see what I mean, his virtue: The Trumpster puts it all out in the open.”

“Writing the access game into enforceable regulations is not to be dismissed as anything short of dangerous to the remnants of American democracy. But there is nothing new about the game, and very, very few correspondents in Washington prove able to resist playing it.”

Leave the Military Now by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Donald Trump, who possesses complete and total control of the military and its awesome powers, is, at best, mentally unwell. His speech, characteristically, was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness rant consisting mostly of narcissism and fiction and personal grievances. The mind of the man who has the ability to tell all of these officers what to do is broken and impervious to facts and reason. This is the man who can tell you when and how and who to kill.”

“Is it honorable for these hundreds of generals to go forward doing their very best to carry out the will of a president who vows openly to use the military to suppress his domestic political enemies, and who has in fact already done that in major cities? Is it courageous of these officer to—for the sake of their own careers—continue to robotically serve a man who is obviously making decisions based upon things that are not true, and who is obsessed with revenge above all, and who is quite straightforward about his intentions to use the military to forcefully oppress Americans? Is that what honor and courage demand of the highest ranking officers in our military?”

“The other prevailing argument against what I have said is that, if all of the good people leave the military, only the bad people will remain. This would, some argue, rob us of the benefit of the staunch code of honor that is supposed to prevent the military from abusing the citizens. Yet, like that much-touted code of honor itself, this argument means nothing if it never produces any attendant action. All of history’s dictators, strongmen, and villains have had armies, and those armies have been made up of people just like you and me, who talked of honor and courage and morality. And all of those armies carried out grotesque injustices and acts of oppression. Why? Because those were their orders, and armies follow orders. The fact that the soldiers and officers were uncomfortable with the strongman’s orders to oppress the population does not do much for the population. In reality, the end point of the argument that the military is better with all of the “good” people still in it is a soldier who, as he shoots you, says “You’re lucky—if I wasn’t doing this, somebody bad would be.””

“Despite my own objections to the things that politicians make the military do, I do believe that the military itself is full of people who sincerely value patriotism, sacrifice, and public service. And there can be no doubt that the military is full of people who have demonstrated great personal bravery, perseverance, and willingness to overcome daunting obstacles in order to do a job that they believe is honorable and necessary. In 2025, all of these admirable qualities demand a very particular action: to leave the military. Before you find yourself doing things that do not comport with the values that you hold. Before you find that you have become the bad guy.”

Trump’s War on America by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“The memo brazenly inverts the rule of law. It turns the law into an instrument of injustice. It uses the decorum of federal agencies, the courts and trials to legalize state crimes. It is grounded in magical thinking, bizarre conspiracy theories and a paranoia that sees the most tepid acts of dissent or criticism as treason.”

No. It’s deliberately made up. They fabulize just enough to satisfy their egos, to be able to continue to believe that they’re the good guys, but you won’t defeat them by proving them wrong or by changing your behavior. Their conclusion is foregone. You will be eliminated, one way or another. They are not interested in conversion.

“When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”

“But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?” he asks. “Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.”

“I spent two years with the architects of our emergent fascism when I wrote my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma. They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system. They plan to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools and make education overtly “Christian.” They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible — as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed. They condemn government assistance programs, especially for the poor. The climate crisis is a hoax. They call for the federal government to be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. They want church organizations to run social-welfare agencies and schools. They demand the expansion of the death penalty to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. They call for a return to white, male patriarchy by mythologizing the past. They demand women be denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media, to them, are “Christian.” America is sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, are agents of Satan.

“These Christian fascists are incapable of dealing in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity. Stunted by emotional numbness and an inchoate rage, they are unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One’s duty is to obey.”

“[…] They see mortal enemies everywhere and live in a hermetically sealed non-reality-based universe. They are creating a pseudo-democracy populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, pseudo-Christians and pseudo-citizens.

“Fascists mean what they say. The rhetoric condemning the rest of us is not hyperbolic. They cannot be reasoned with. We cannot open channels of dialogue and communication. Our anemic and calcified democracy, including our bankrupt liberal institutions, cannot defeat them. Fascists are the swamp creatures that rise up out of all failed democracies.

“Our enemies intend to implement this dystopia. The question is not if, but when. How long before the iron bars slam shut and America as we know it disappears? How long before the state rounds us up and hauls us away?

“I can’t say. But it won’t be long.”

Donald Trump is a Child Molesting Zionist Cuck and He Needs You to Fear Trans People by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“But who exactly is this enemy? Once you strip away the bullshit of electoral politics, your average deplorable is essentially just another pissed-off poor person who hates the fucking government as much as I do. These are people who would much rather sort things out themselves than call the police. These are people who feel much closer to God half-drunk and fishing than they do in church. These are people like me, who were born poor to this country but wouldn’t leave if you paid them because it affords them a level of freedom from the bullshit of modern civilization that money can’t buy.

“In other words, there really is no logical reason for us to hate each other so goddamn much and this is precisely why the state, and their globalist corporate benefactors have to invest so much time and money into driving us all fucking crazy.”

“All around us, Trump’s minions and apparatchiks are answering the call to hysteria. Vice President JD Vance pulled Peter Thiel’s dick out of his mouth just long enough to host the first post-Charlie Kirk episode of the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House with MAGA Goebbels baby Stephen Miller at his side, howling for vengeance and calling for a vast crackdown against a broad mélange of left-wing opponents.”

“Now, Kash Patel’s Keystone Kops in the FBI are toying with the notion of using the purposely vague terrorist threat category of “Nihilistic Violent Extremist” to target transgender activists and his patrons in the Heritage Foundation are pushing it one step further with a memo calling on the feds to just label all of us as “Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremists” This dangerous cuckoo bird bullshit also comes on the heels of the Department of Justice’s attempts to strip trans people of our Second Amendment rights by including gender dysphoria in their red flag laws.”

“Are transwomen slaughtering Christian babies and leveling Catholic Churches in the Gaza Strip? Did we promise you peace in Ukraine only to turn around and hand Volodymyr Zelensky a Pat Sajak size check for missiles and a greenlight to send more kids to die in the Donbass? Was it an unhinged transgender extremist who buried the Epstein Files and sent Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security summer camp? Is the Queer agenda handing over your tax receipts to the AI auditors over at Palantir? Or have you all been bamboozled by a trash talking, child molesting, Clinton financing, Zionist cuck in populist clothing named Donald J. Trump?”

“[…] are you going to finally wake the fuck up and realize that freedom is just another word for smashing the state and working with other people who just want to be left the fuck alone to live free or die is a much better way to achieve this goal than cutting deals with fucking billionaires?

“The only thing that keeps powerful people powerful is a carefully constructed illusion of omnipotence that rests largely upon the notion that poor people need their governments and their armies and their databases just to exist. In no place on earth is this lie more blatantly obvious than on the more rural sections of the map where it wouldn’t be hard to forget that any of that shit even fucking existed if we weren’t being taxed to pay for it.

“This is why the richest nation on earth spent twenty years dropping bombs on goat herders in Afghanistan and this is why the GOP spends billions trafficking every manner of bigotry imaginable to my next-door neighbors. We are all already living proof that these cowards are powerless and the moment we stop cutting each other’s throats over petty cultural differences is the moment that their days of plenty have become numbered.”

The UNdoing Of The UN by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The latest travesty is the rump White Empire (Europe) using the UN to sanction Iran for its legitimate nuclear program after Iran was attacked by ‘Israel’, a completely illegitimate nuclear state.”

“At this point we must conclude that the UN didn’t innocently create this violent ethnostate, and they didn’t ignorantly allow all its violations, they are in on it. The UN is part and parcel of this long genocide, they’re the ones who parceled out Palestine in the first place, and who allowed apartheid for generations, and whose institutions now veto any ceasefire and are used to fire on the Resistance instead. International law was born dead, but now it’s well and truly buried.”

“The sad fact is that because of the UN, poorer, less powerful countries like my Sri Lanka must follow the sanctions or risk economic warfare on ourselves. Thus you can see how the UN is used to perpetuate colonialism […]”

Trump signs executive order approving takeover of TikTok by US investment consortium by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“The idea that the US government and its corporate partners are going to safeguard the data of Americans is an absurdity. As documented by Edward Snowden in 2013, illegal military-intelligence surveillance of the electronic communications and internet activity of the US public, with the support of the telecommunications industry, has been going on for decades.”

“The deal amounts to a seizure of the Chinese-based app by the US tech oligarchy. While ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, will retain a stake of just under 20 percent (19.9), the US investors are putting up 45 percent of the investment, about $6 or $7 billion, and the balance of 35 percent will be provided by the former ByteDance investors. The total value of the TikTok’s US assets have been estimated at approximately $14 billion.”

“Although the exact amount and structure of the fee are not public, a major condition of the deal is the unprecedented multibillion-dollar payment to the US government. Among all the new American partners, Oracle’s role is the most technically and politically significant. Already the designated host of TikTok’s US cloud data through Project Texas, Oracle is to become the app’s algorithm overseer and security authority, directly managing the code and its retraining for American users.”

“[…] much of the justification for the transaction is grounded in fear-mongering about foreign manipulation, data theft and hostile influence. These narratives, stoked by both major parties, provided the political cover required to advance what is, ultimately, a theft of a cultural giant by the US financial elite led by the gangster-in-chief in the White House.”

Rambouillet, part 1: The State of Play by Matt (Crooked Timber)

“That phrase deserves repeating: not force, but diplomacy backed by the threat of force. Nobody, in early 1999, particularly wanted to bomb Serbia. What everyone wanted was a diplomatic solution. But the Serbs had already ignored multiple attempts at diplomacy. So now a threat of military force would be added to the equation. Of course, once the threat of force is in play, you’re on a potential escalation ladder: if the recalcitrant party still won’t agree, you must either back down and admit your threat was a bluff, or carry it into action.”

I call bullshit. The U.S. always wants war. It always has.

“On the Serb side, while Saddam Hussein was an absolute dictator, Slobodan Milosevic was not. He was a populist strongman who controlled a narrow majority in the legislature. A large chunk of the country hated him. His control over Serb media was large but not complete; his control over the armed forces was shaky. Milosevic was an authoritarian ruler with a great deal of power, but he wasn’t a dictator and he couldn’t ignore Serb public opinion. And Serb public opinion firmly did not want to give up Kosovo.”

I’d heard this as well, though he was demonized as a tyrant at the time. Even the war crimes of which he was accused failed to stick, despite strong support from the promulgators of the fictions, who are, as you can well imagine, the usual suspects. He would die in prison, awaiting trial.

“If this sounds a bit familiar to some English-speaking readers, well yes: there were several points of similarity between the KLA and the IRA. The split between hardliners and negotiators was an obvious one. (Paranoia about informers or touts was another.)”

And Palestine! FFS.

“The Europeans and Americans were out of patience with Milosevic and the Serbs, and ready to try arm-twisting diplomacy backed by threats of force.”

You write this as if it were a surprise. Do you not wonder whether it’s the reluctance that is fake? The U.S. also has a policy of “no compromise”. On anything.

Washington is to Blame for Its Own Culture of Political Violence by Nicky Reid (exile in happy valley)

“The left, or what passes for it these days at least, usually goes with a far from unfounded but woefully oversimplified take on guns and suggests that America is somehow just one police state provision away from controlling an ocean of semi-automatic firepower the size of the Atlantic Ocean.

“The right, or what passes for it these days at least, typically does one worse and trots out whatever monster-of-the-week they happen to be crucifying at the moment; border hoppers, crypto-gender benders, the overly or underly medicated neurodivergent… Some convenient category of ‘other’ to distract from the fact that the killers are usually basically their own sons, cis het white dudes unsatisfied with the privileges of their post-colonial caste ranking.

“And then of course, the sainted centrist calls for calm, for all of these scapegoating players in America’s increasingly unhinged political circus to just come together in Babylonian brotherhood and sing us all back to sleep with another harmonic chorus of bipartisan kumbaya.

“Somehow, the centrist always seems to piss me off the most.

“While it is painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain still attached to a functioning conscience that both sides of this country’s manufactured tribal divide are exploiting these tragedies just to score points and rile up their captive constituencies, the notion that the solution to American nihilism is bringing all these jackals together for another war-on-something is even worse. It’s worse because Washington isn’t the panacea painted so stoically by the centrist. Washington is the real fucking problem here and somebody needs to say it.”

“Charlie Kirk was shot in the throat amidst a highly publicized but rarely questioned murder spree launched by the man he routinely endorsed to play the role of America’s Ceasar. Donald Trump washed his own moneychanger’s blood from his pussy-grabbers and cursed the numerous demographics he blamed for the mess right in the middle of the launch of a series of snuff films taken by the US Military over undisclosed sections of the Caribbean Ocean.

“Over a period of a few weeks, Donald Trump had at least 17 people murdered extrajudicially in three separate airstrikes on three separate civilian boats before proudly displaying the footage of his war crimes on social media like a teenage mosque shooter. The people killed are accused without evidence of trafficking narcotics, an offense that wouldn’t even garner a life sentence in any court of law in the Western Hemisphere, let alone a death sentence.”

“Anger is actually a perfectly appropriate response to being governed by dueling parties of thieves and killers, but we need to direct this anger where it belongs, against the state without preference to pointless partisan divisions, and we need to carefully temper this anger, so we are not merely feeding into the state’s game of highly publicized tension and paranoia.”

“The truth is, our nation’s centrists don’t really care about political violence; they’re just pissed off that private citizens want to [horn] in on their action, and for once, I agree with them. We can do better. You are never going to smash the state by fighting it like a state. In the best-case scenario, you merely replace them and become precisely what you hate. The most common scenario however ends with a bunch of good radicals dead or in prison while the state scores points with the normies over the ashes of another Reichstag Fire.”

“Build a commune. Build a farm. Build a fire and dance around it naked. Stop voting. Stop watching the news. Turn off that funhouse mirror you keep in your pocket. And for Cthulhu’s sake, stop killing other poor people. The state doesn’t need your help with that chore so stop adding to their towering mound of bodies.

“In other words, own your anger and let the centrists starve without your attention. This world is too sacred to waste on something as empty as politics. Choose anarchy instead.”

The festering carcass of American rot by Oliver Kornetzke on August 18, 2025 (Reddit)

No highlights because every word was carefully chosen and adds to the narrative.

“Behold. the festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair.

“Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been— arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel.

“It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul— it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.”

✊✊✊

US gov’t admits F-35 is a failure by Dan Grazier (Responsible Statecraft)

“By admitting that the program cannot deliver the jets that were promised is really an admission that the entire project is a failure. The implications of that could be profound beyond the money that has been wasted throughout the past quarter century. There are 19 countries that either already are, or will shortly, operate F-35s after buying them from the United States. Several countries like the United Kingdom, Norway, and Italy have been a part of the program well before Lockheed Martin won the contract to develop the F-35. These countries have invested heavily in the program with the expectation that they would receive the most combat capable aircraft in history. All have seen their costs rise throughout the years and now they find out that the jets will never live up to the hype.”

What an absolute shock. Yet another scam from the U.S.A.

Europe’s latest seized Russian asset scheme is as dumb as ever by Mark Episkopos (Responsible Statecraft)

“This plan’s only major innovation over prior schemes is its supposed workaround on the thorny issue of legality. Greenlighting outright seizure of Russia’s sovereign assets will undermine the credibility of European financial institutions and exercise a chilling effect on non-Western investors at a time when European countries are facing significant long-term macroeconomic pressures.”

They offered to be a bank—whose function is ideologically neutral—but they have shown that they are willing to pretend that ideology is the reason why they steal money. There is no reason to believe that they’re stealing that money because they disagree with Russia. They need money—very badly—and there’s a whole pile of money owned by a country that they feel they can steal from while escaping retribution. So they do that. It’s called piracy, plunder. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up. Once you do it once, it could happen at any time, to any country.

“If the EU bestows itself the ex nihilo right to commandeer someone else’s assets, something not established in international law or recognized by anyone else as a legitimate practice, it will be seen and treated as an expropriation in all but name with the full consequences to Europe’s reputation that this entails.”

That’s a very generous way of saying that “Europe will be seen as pirates and treated as financial pariahs by any parts of the world who will have finally perceived that the west likes plunder more than anything else. The west has no principle other than ‘I’ve got mine Jack.‘”

Chris Hedges: The Rise of Christian Nationalist Fascism Is Here! by Lee Camp (YouTube)

“Will we fucking stand up in this country? Will we fight back and join against the actual enemies? The people actually ruining your lives, the ruling elite at large? As long as you’re fighting against others, as long as you’re furious about trans people or trans bathrooms or you’re furious about immigrants or whatever little segment of society, then you’re just playing into their plan. It’s exactly what the ruling elite wants. Just keep fighting.

“Elon Musk literally after Charlie Kirk was killed, Elon Musk literally posted like keep, you know, everyone should rise. You should rise up and and get him. You know, he basically, he knows he’s the ruling elite. He knows he’s the richest fucking guy in the world or second richest now. And so he just wants us all fighting. That’s good for him cuz when people aren’t fighting, what are we doing? We’re uniting against him. We’re uniting against Peter Thiel. We’re uniting against Larry Ellison. We’re uniting against the richest sociopaths in the world and they can’t have that.

“So, of course, hate trans people, hate gay people, hate women, for fuck’s sake. Hate … oh, specifically non-white women. Wooh! They are the worst. Hate them all. Cuz then the ruling elite get exactly what they want. They can keep going with the divide and conquer.”

Only Israelis Could Commit Genocide For Years And Then Demand Sympathy by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I’m sorry but it’s just plain hilarious that we’re still expected to hate Hamas after spending two years being shown exactly what it is that Hamas has been fighting.

“Only Israelis could spend two years committing genocide and then demand everyone feel very, very sorry for them on the anniversary their genocide started.”

“Someone who is truly and sincerely worried about a rise in antisemitism will oppose the mass slaughter of children under the Star of David banner by a state which claims to represent all Jews while Jewish billionaires buy up media to silence criticism of that state and Jewish oligarchs openly purchase the president of the world’s most powerful government to ensure the facilitation of that state’s atrocities.”

“It’s funny how white supremacists freak out about global birth rates, because it’s just the result of white supremacism getting everything it wanted. Whites spent centuries extracting wealth from the global south, and it turns out fertility rates decline the wealthier a population becomes. They plundered and exploited and enslaved and extracted from the darker-skinned people whom they viewed as inferior, and now those populations are the only ones reproducing at above replacement levels.

“They’re freaking out because they understand their civilization will come crashing down without working-age people stepping in to keep the gears of the nation turning as prior generations age out, and now the only way they’re going to get those workers is by inviting them to immigrate from other continents. Those immigrants will have significant collective bargaining power because they are needed; they won’t just remain some permanently subjugated underclass. Eventually they start intermarrying with the white population, and before long humanity consists of lovely shades of tan. White supremacism loses, ultimately because it got everything it has ever asked for.

“This is one reason why there’s so much overlap between white supremacism and Christian fundamentalism, by the way. White supremacists understand that they can’t have wealthy, educated women choosing when they do and do not reproduce, because it turns out having and raising children is a massive ordeal and a woman with rights and resources will only sometimes feel safe and supported enough to do it. So they need to find ways to turn them back into a man’s property and force them to churn out white children.

“[…]

“This is also why you see racists like Elon Musk simultaneously freaking out about declining birth rates and pushing AI like their life depends on it. They understand that automating society is the only way to stave off the future wave of immigration that will otherwise be necessary to keep civilization functioning. But it turns out AI is a bust, and that bubble is going to burst before long. Again, white supremacism loses in the end.”

“Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello saying “It’s wild how people can effortlessly understand the righteousness of everybody from Robin Hood to Andor and then in real life simp for the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Death Star.”

“This happens because in Robin Hood and Star Wars the storyteller is sympathetic to the rebel characters while the pundits, editors and reporters who tell the stories of our time are sympathetic to those in power.”

The Disappearance of Dr. Abu Safiya | Fault Lines Documentary by Al Jazeera English (YouTube)

The video is 100% in Arabic (I think) with hard-coded English subtitles. At one point, they mention that Israel “laid siege to the hospital for three months.” What a sentence! Can you imagine the terrible world in which it makes sense? In which people scan right past it because bombing and si They kidnapped the entire hospital staff, cuffing them, stripping them to their underwear, blindfolding them, and leaving them out in the hot sun all day and then into the night. Puff out your chest with national pride, Israelis. JFC.

These are two screenshots from tracking shots of the hospital after it had been “made safe from terrorism.”

Kamal Adwan Hospital after Israel was done with it

Interior of Kamal Adwan Hospital after it was torched

According to the article Hussam Abu Safiya (Wikipedia), he’s still being held without charge (read: he’s been kidnapped) in a prison, where,

“On 13 July 2025, Abu Safiya’s lawyer reported that he had lost over 40kg while imprisoned and had sustained multiple injuries from a beating on 24 June. The lawyer also said he is being kept in solitary confinement and is being denied medical care for an irregular heartbeat.”

The following is the official video description.

“For more than two decades, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya served as a pediatrician in northern Gaza, rising to lead Kamal Adwan Hospital. Though he had many chances to leave, he chose to stay with his patients even as Israeli attacks escalated.

“With each passing month, the toll deepened. His son was killed, his hospital repeatedly struck, and his life threatened. Still, he remained at Kamal Adwan. His resilience was captured in a 10-second video: a lone pediatrician in a white coat walking through rubble toward Israeli forces. To the world, it symbolized defiance. To his family and colleagues, it reflected who he always was.

“By late 2024, as Israel intensified its campaign to drive Palestinians out of northern Gaza, hospitals became both sanctuaries and targets. Kamal Adwan, a 300-bed facility already battered by shortages and bombardment, became a focal point of that campaign.

“On December 27, 2024, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, detaining 240 staff and patients, stripping them, and rendering the facility inoperable. Dr. Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his post, was beaten and taken into custody under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatant Law,” with no charges or release date.

“Through firsthand testimony, archival footage, and on-the-ground reporting, Fault Lines investigates the assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital, the raid that led to Dr. Abu Safiya’s unlawful detention, and the broader targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system.”

Immigration thugs assault, kidnap US citizens in Chicago, Portland by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

ICE-agent straight up look like something out of GTA Online

“These cases demonstrate that the attacks on immigrants are an attack on the entire working class, regardless of citizenship status. Furthermore, the fight to defend democratic rights cannot be waged with appeals to the Gestapo, but must be fought on a class basis against not only the Republican Party, but also their Democratic Party co-conspirators, who have allowed Trump to return to the White House and have provided him with the votes and funding to carry out these attacks.”

“Miranda was able to film for roughly 30 seconds before the immigration Gestapo took his phone. In the video, one of the agents is heard accusing Miranda of an “overstay.” When Miranda rejected this lie, another agent is heard off camera threatening to “get the dog.”

“An agent then asked Miranda where he was born, “And don’t lie to me.” Miranda responded, “California,” and asked the agents where they got their information.

““Wherever we got it from doesn’t matter,” came the reply.

“The masked thugs proceeded to handcuff and shove Miranda into a separate van. Once inside the van, Miranda said an agent that didn’t speak English kicked his legs out from underneath him and told him he would be sitting on the floor.

“Miranda recalls the agents celebrating their capture, “They were high-fiving.” The immigration thugs proceeded to take Miranda to an ICE facility where he was fingerprinted and held for several hours. Miranda did not speak to any agents without a lawyer present, and none of the agents provided their names or badge numbers.

“After several hours, Miranda was eventually driven back to his place of employment and dropped off without an explanation as to why he was abducted and assaulted.”

Miranda is a U.S. citizen. But he’s not white. So he deserves what he gets for looking “brown”. He gets no apology. He gets no “sorry for having disturbed you, sir, here’s a coupon for free salad at Olive Garden.” He gets a kick in the ass and is given the impression that it might happen again at any time. F@&k him for being brown, ammirite?

What a time to be alive in the U.S. of A.!

ICE CONTINUE TO TERRORIZE CITIES ACROSS THE US by Hasan Piker (HasanAbi) (YouTube)

This 11-minute video discusses extended footage of supposed ICE agents assaulting a man in the middle of the street. It’s hard to tell which ones are supposedly ICE agents and who the alleged perpetrator is. They aren’t even really in “plain clothes”; they’re in jeans and a T-shirt. They drive the same generic, black SUV that everyone else does. Their only identifying characteristic is that they wear masks. They have no warrants. They don’t show ID. Their car is not marked. There is no way to tell whether these thugs and criminals who are actually acting in the name of a thuggish and criminal federal government or whether they’re just freelancing, whether they’re just f@&king mugging people in broad daylight and getting away with it. In the case of this video, so many people surrounded them and so many passing cars were honking belligerently that they just gave up, turned tail, and left the scene.

This is madness.

Country music’s Zach Bryan: “ICE is gonna come bust down your door” by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In a partial release of his new song “Bad News,” country music star Zach Bryan refers directly to the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on immigrants being carried out by the Trump administration.

““Bad News,” unusual in the country music genre for its open criticism of the government, has elicited a series of attacks from the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and far-right media mouthpieces.

“This hysterical response—which includes an aggressive effort to blacklist and silence Bryan—reflects the extreme nervousness of the fascists in the White House, who cannot tolerate any public criticism of their authoritarian measures. Aware of the widespread opposition among tens of millions against the ICE raids, the clique around Trump is fearful that voices such as Bryan’s will encourage others to speak out and take political action.

“The lyrics, as revealed in Instagram snippets, focus on the harsh actions of ICE agents: “ICE is gonna come bust down your door. Try to build a house, no one builds no more, well I got a telephone. Kids are all scared and all alone.” Another section goes: “I heard the cops came / cocky motherf—ers, ain’t they?” and concludes, “the bar stopped bumping, the rock stopped rolling, the middle finger’s rising, and it won’t stop showing. Got some bad news, the fading of the red, white, and blue.””

As context, it’s interesting that he is the [c]ountry star [who drew] the largest ticketed concert crowd in U.S. history by Megan Sims (cleveland.com)

“Zach Bryan has broken a record long held by George Strait, officially setting the mark for the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history, Parade reports.

“The 29-year-old country star drew 112,408 fans to Michigan Stadium on Saturday, surpassing Strait’s 2024 record of 110,905 at Texas’ Kyle Field. The Ann Arbor venue, nicknamed “The Big House,” is the largest stadium in the country and the third-largest in the world, according to Taste of Country.”

That’s the reason that Zach Bryan’s protest song is interesting. He’s incredibly popular with MAGA and he’s attacking the Trump administration for its authoritarian police-state attacks on Americans. That the Trump administration thinks that its cachet exceeds that of Bryan suggests that Trump has completely lost his ability to “read a room”. His cadre is completely up their own asses and have always been incapable of seeing that they are losing support. Trump used to be a better con-man, he used to be slyer about shucking and jiving and keeping control of the situation. Now, it looks like they’re trying to spring a trap shut…but there’s no-one in it.

The Making Of Stephen Miller by Some More News (YouTube)

“Instead of talking about a charismatic teen with a heart of gold, we’re talking about an off-putting, unlikeable, unrepentant piece of shit.”

“Stephen Miller has zero interest in actually making America great. He’s a sad, angry little guy who’s spent his whole life spewing racist, edge-lord shit, and wants revenge on the people who told him to get fucked. He’s like a school shooter playing the longest con ever.

“He simply hates minorities and enjoys subjugating them. He hates schools and universities, which he sees as unfairly liberal, and wants to enact revent upon them. That’s it. It’s not complicated.”

From the comments,

“Someone once said Steven Miller only got into politics because his arms were too weak to strangle sex workers and I still think that is a very good description.”

“The fact that Republicans can openly say that they want to teach kids to “love America” and “be patriots” and no one bats an eye. That’s not education. You don’t teach opinions. You teach facts and let people reach conclusions. Teaching opinions is called brainwashing.”

Amen, brother or sister.

So ICE is just chasing down people that aren’t white? (Reddit)

I would just like to praise the genius who added the Yakety Sax track to this otherwise extremely dark clip of several heavily armed and armored ICE agents awkwardly chasing a brown-looking guy on a delivery bike.

Yakety Sax chase with ICE

As with the other screenshot above, it seems that the U.S. is looking more and more like GTA has been depicting it for several versions now.

From the comments,

How to know how to react to any given event

Roaming Charges: He Loves a (Thin) Man in Uniform by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“On May 21, Garcia Venegas was part of a large crew of workers when ICE agents descended on a private construction site. The masked men jumped over a fence, ran past black and white workers and began snatching Latinos, including Leo’s brother. Leo took out his cell phone and began filming the raid. He was quickly accosted by an ICE agent, who told him: “You’re making this more complicated than you want it to be.” The officer then grabbed Leo, who yelled over and over, “I’m a US citizen.” The officer responded by saying,” Get on the fucking ground.“

“The ICE officer finally pulled Leo’s wallet out of his pocket, examined his Real ID and told him it was a fake. They held him for more than an hour in the blistering Alabama heat before finally checking his Social Security number and releasing him.”

Yeah but what if he hadn’t been a U.S. citizen? Then what? Can we just let criminals like that roam free, flaunting the law, thumbing their nose at justice, taking advantage of our goodwill, leering at our daughters? Of course not. That’s why certain portions of society—the brown ones—will have to put up with practices that look like they might be authoritarian and decidedly anti-Constitutional but are, in reality, keeping the important citizens safe. You know who you are.

For the others, we apologize for the inconvenience.

Well, no, actually we don’t. We don’t give a fuck about you. Shut up and build our houses.

““I got arrested twice for being a Latino working in construction,” Leo said. “It feels like there is nothing I can do to stop immigration agents from arresting me whenever they want. I just want to work in peace.””

I hear ya, buddy. Too many people can’t wrap their heads around empathy. They would go FUCKING NUTS if this had happened to anyone they cared about (like a white person) but because your name is Garcia Venegas—FFS buddy couldn’t you have changed it to something like “Mark Jenkins”?—you’re shit out of luck because you’re “a Latino working in construction” in a deeply racist country that prizes its preference for being racist over nearly any other principle.

This is not unlike Israeli society, which is trained to virulently hates Arabs (but also lots of other groups). Some claim that this is the Israelification of the U.S. but that’s unfair. This is what the U.S. has always been. Ever since I became politically aware in that country, it was apparent that it has always desperately wanted to do exactly this. That’s why you can find so many people who are willing to take part in it, although it’s also a very lucrative job compared to almost anything else out there—“CE is now offering new recruits $50,000 bonus, $60,000 student debt repayment, and 25% premium pay. [with starting salary of $100,000]”. It’s even easier for them to take these great jobs, because they’re already teaching their kids that some people aren’t people, that they are instead “animals”.

“He said he didn’t have any qualms about treating the detainees so harshly because he considered them “animals:” “They’re animals anyway. That’s what I would tell my kids all the time.””

In this way, they’re not unlike the IDF—they also get paid incredibly well and they also already hate the animals they’re told to kill. It’s a win-win.

Those are the reasons that the shock troops give. Their masters have other motives…

“Tracy Kurowski: “Many were disrobed as the raid occurred after midnight, their babies being taken from their arms. They deployed from helicopters and U-Haul vans, deploying flash grenades. The area is poverty-ridden and near the lake, so prime gentrification material.””

Aha! That’s the principle they value more than anything else: plunder. They are just straight-up fans of taking other as much of other people’s shit as they can get away with. Feathering your own nest at someone else’s expense is the raison d’être of anyone hoping to climb the ladder of success in the U.S. Sometimes they’re just rounding up ethnically challenged people. They’re doing it all the time so that, when they need to clear out a bunch of the poors from a neighborhood that a bunch of richie-riches would really like to have, it looks like racism when it’s actually plunder.

Some more observations on how things are going (unrelated to immigration):

“Commerce Secretary Lutnick: “There are some countries we need to fix – like India and Brazil. These countries need to react correctly to America. They need to open their markets and stop taking actions that harm America.” Yanqui, stay home!

“+ Alisa Wood, partner, KKR & Co.: “There are 19,000 private equity funds in the US. There are 14,000 McDonald’s in the US. How are there more private equity funds than McDonald’s? That’s actually crazy, right?””

“Bloomberg News reports that “wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.””

“Here’s Trump, threatening to cut people off “medically” during the shutdown: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible that are bad for them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like … we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut numbers of people out.””

The only reason you would agree with a confused statement like this is if you’re both (A) nearly incalculably cruel and lacking in any sort of empathy and (B) pretty sure that he’s not talking about you or anyone you care about. That’s how authoritarianism takes hold. People thinking “I got mine Jack” and then seeing grasping hands everywhere, trying to claw it away from them. They are, of course, encouraged to do so by their stalwart media, which is there to cajole their minds into the right direction.

Like, when the Trump administration torpedoes the entire soybean market, it’s somehow a clever move that will provide gigantic returns. If the Biden administration had done it, it would have rightly been derided as catastrophically bad policy. If beef prices rice during the Biden administration, it’s greedy left-coast elites profiting off of “real America”; when prices rice even more, year-on-year, during the Trump administration, it’s characterized as “ranchers benefit[ting] from cattle boom.” Wake the fuck up, people. Have some goddamned pride. You are being manipulated and they barely even have to try at this point because you are all so cucked for your cult leader.

Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Contrary to the allegations made by DHS, at no point does the video show Martinez, a US citizen with no criminal record, turn her car toward the ICE vehicles. Instead, the footage captures the ICE agent swerving his white Chevy Tahoe into Martinez’s Nissan SUV, forcing her to a stop.

“There’s no evidence that Martinez pointed a weapon at the ICE agent. Rather, the ICE agent can be heard on the recording almost begging Martinez to give him a reason to shoot her: “Do something, bitch!” he says as he exits his car and seconds later unloads a volley of shots at Martinez, hitting her seven times.”

ICE sprays pepper spray into the face of the lead pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago.

This is America

This is the problem with people. They have no consistency. Like, congratulations to Marjorie Taylor Greene for being one of the few Republican representatives to take a principled stand against genocide. Like, that’s super-great. But then she’s got other hobby horses that are just batshit insane, like,

“Bad Bunny says America has 4 months to learn Spanish before his perverse unwanted performance at the Super Bowl halftime.

“It would be a good time to pass my bill to make English the official language of America.

“And the NFL needs to stop having demonic sexual performances during its halftime shows.”

WHAT A PSYCHO. Completely unhinged.

“37 states have now granted tax exemptions for data centers, including ones owned by Google, Meta and Amazon. CNBC found that “one Microsoft data center in Illinois received more than $38 million in data center sales tax exemptions but created just 20 permanent jobs.””

“Chinese electric vehicles, which are priced thousands of dollars less than US and European models, now account for more than half of all global EV sales”

“James Cameron: “In Star Wars, the good guys are the rebels, they’re using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire, I think we call those guys terrorists today.”

“George Lucas: “When I did it, they were Vietcong. That was the whole point.””

At first, I thought it was kind of hilarious that the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to a Venezuelan. You know, because Trump wants the damned thing so desperately and he hates Venezuela and it really seemed like a stick in his eye.

Hoo-boy was I wrong. The Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 was awarded to María Corina Machado, who I’ve written about before in these very pages.

She is the U.S.-supported opposition leader in Venezuela. She organized the military coup against Chavez in 2002 and supported the shadow government of The Nobel Prize committee lauded her as,

“[…] one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times” and praised for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela”.

“For years she has campaigned against Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro Moros, whose 12-year rule is viewed by many nations as illegitimate.”

OK. That seems interesting. Let’s see how Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize by Kostya Manenkov, Regina Garcia Cano and Geir Moulson (AP News)

“Machado, who turned 58 this week, was set to run against Maduro in last year’s presidential election, but the government disqualified her. Edmundo González, who had never run for office before, took her place. The lead-up to the election saw widespread repression, including disqualifications, arrests and human rights violations.”

“Machado was included in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in April. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote her entry, in which he described her as “the Venezuelan Iron Lady” and “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.””

Man, if Marco Rubio thinks she’s good, there’s got to be something fishy about her. Lemme check my notes. Oh dear…

My notes over the last year-and-a-half paint a different picture. The U.S. mind-virus is nestled deeply in the members of the Nobel committee. This is not surprising; this is the same committee who’ve already awarded Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger for their peaceful contributions.

• Links and Notes for February 2nd, 2024

  Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela? by Roger D. Harris (Antiwar.com)

  “Machado’s treatment by the Venezuelan government has arguably erred more on the side of leniency than severity. In most other countries, a person with her rap sheet would be behind bars.

  “Back in 2002, Machado signed the Carmona Decree, establishing a coup government. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had been deposed in a military coup backed by the US. The constitution was suspended, the legislature dismissed, and the supreme court shuttered.

  “Fortunately for democracy in Venezuela, the coup lasted less than three days. The people spontaneously took to the streets and restored their elected government. Machado, who now incredulously claims she signed the coup government’s founding decree mistakenly, was afforded amnesty.”

• Links and Notes for February 16th, 2024

  Washington, Pro-Democracy? Depends on the Country by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

  As detailed in the article and elsewhere, Machado has a long history of anti-democratic activity in Venezuela, plausibly if not definitively linked to foreign governments like neighbor Panama and perennial instigator the U.S. She is a signatory to two documents supporting and encouraging coups in Venezuela, one of which succeeded for a few days. The decision to bar her was taken by the courts, not by executive fiat.
   

• Links and Notes for May 17th, 2024

  Is Washington Trying to Subvert Venezuela’s Elections? by Maria Paez Victor (CounterPunch)

  “The results of a 3 May 2024 poll by Encuesta Nacional Ideadatos, indicated that Nicolás Maduro is the choice of 52.7% of voters while Edmundo Gonzalez is the choice of only 18.7% of voters.”

  And that 18.7% of voters are probably just so anti-Maduro that they would vote for a cardboard box instead.

  “Despite being legally barred from running for public office 15 years ago because of proven corruption, Machado staged a bogus opposition “primary” in which she prevented other opposition candidates from running. Ballots were unaudited and destroyed making post-voting inspection impossible. Then Machado declared the absurdity that two million people voted for her. But truth did not matter. The aim was only to tell this falsehood to the gullible international media, who will print anything the USA candidate of the extreme right will tell them.”

  “Gonzalez openly declared he has no plans to campaign personally (What for? He has the money and power of the USA behind him?) People aren’t sure if this is due to his elderly age, 74, or his sheer idleness. Maria Corina Machado is the one who is campaigning for him, carrying around a large poster of his face so people can recognize Edmundo Gonzalez on the ballot.”

• Links and Notes for July 26th, 2024

  Venezuela: An Attempted Coup By Any Other Name by Maria Paez Victor (CounterPunch)

  “We are in the presence of an attempt of the international fascist far right and the CIA to overthrow the government of Venezuela with a massive disinformation and denigration campaign to justify illegal sanctions and foreign intervention in the country.

  “The checkered past and crimes of Machado, poster girl of the far right, is never mentioned, her involvement in coups, her promotion of street violence in the past, her asking the USA for sanctions and military invasion against Venezuela, and right now, her collaboration with criminal gangs and narco-paramilitary groups are never mentioned. Her puppet, Edmundo González, was involved in the logistics and financing of the death squads in El Salvador’s civil war. Their hands are tainted with blood.”

• Links and Notes for September 6th, 2024

  Washington presses regional governments to secure Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)

  “Five weeks after the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela, the fascistic leader of the US-backed opposition, María Corina Machado, demanded on Thursday that the Biden administration “do more” to oust President Nicolas Maduro from power.

  “Speaking to reporters from an undisclosed location, Machado argued that this was a matter of strategic importance for US interests globally and concluded: “I am partial to maximum pressure.” She then repeated her appeals for the Venezuelan military to overthrow Maduro.”

  Hooray! This is just what the world needs: another maniac to add to Zelensky and Netanyahu. There are so many people rubbing the hands together for a similarly tragic situation in Venezuela. It’s not like it’s going great there now, but the U.S. is looking to make things so much worse.

I’ll let When Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize, “Peace” Has Lost Its Meaning by Michelle Ellner (ZNetwork) have the last word.

“If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.

“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.

“Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.”

“She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by U.S. migration policies.”

“If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.””

If you’re wondering what to believe, then listen to the lady herself. She posted this on Twitter., citing in its entirety.

“This recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans is a boost to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy.

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

This is practically an open invitation to invade Venezuela. And that, folks, is your Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2025. Drive safe.

Trump at Quantico: Demented Ramblings by Paul Street (CounterPunch)

This article is a tit-for-tat, answering quotations from Trump’s speech to the generals, in which he rambled on for nearly an hour. There are some real wild ones in there, that I will preserve for posterity.

When he wasn’t applauded enough, he said,

“if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future, but you just feel nice and loose, OK, because we’re all on the same team.”

He’s the peace president,

“[…] we want war because we want to have no wars, but you have to be there. And you know, sometimes you have to do it.”

There was a ridiculously long ramble about fireman going up ladders that went on interminably. Check out this word salad.

“Our firemen are incredible. They’re up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them — shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory. You fall off that ladder, it’s over, it’s over. They don’t even have to inspect you when you hit the ground. And you have people shooting bullets at them in some of these inner cities. We’re not going to let that happen. So, I always mention the firemen because that’s actually a big problem we have. They are unbelievable.”

He talked about how awesome his signature is (no robo-pen for him), and how he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize but won’t get one, how much he loves the word “tariff”, and his favorite TV show growing up, Victory at Sea.

He turned Boeing wanting to call its next fighter jet the F-47 into a rant about a stolen election, and how bad Biden was and also immigrants,

“I said let me think about it. Then after thinking for about two seconds, I said OK. You know that means 47, I’m 47. So, I’m 45, 46 and 47, you know, if you think about it, I just don’t want the credit for 46. I don’t want to have their open borders and people coming in from all over the world including jails and mental institutions.”

Speaking of Biden, Trump felt the need to compare how well he walked stairs with Trump’s predecessor Obama, who he needed to tell everyone for long minutes was a really good stair-walker. There’s more stuff about Biden and, naturally, about the enemy within, which is where the troops are going next.

Here’s a taste,

“it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part [of the war] for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live.”

In case that wasn’t clear enough, he summed up that he very much meant that the federal government should attack its own cities not just with its own police—which has been happening for a while but which now seems like peanuts compared to the predations of a grotesquely extended ICE—but also not just the National Guard but the actual military should attack American cities to bring them back under control. Like, Falluja-style.

“[…] use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our National Guard, for our military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

Journalism & Media

Böhmermanns Gratismut – das ist keine Satire, das kann weg by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Halten wir also fest – die zwei Protagonisten dieses Stücks sind zwei Mediengestalten, die beide vorgeben, Kämpfer im Namen der Meinungsfreiheit zu sein, die aber nichts lieber täten, als sich gegenseitig das Recht auf Meinungsfreiheit zu verbieten. Hier der linke, da der rechte Troll und in der Mitte wir, die wir als Zuschauer des öffentlich ausgetragenen Spektakels im besten Fall unterhalten, im schlimmsten Fall nur noch genervt sind.”

“„Dummerweise“ ist Cheftek jedoch auch ein Kritiker des israelischen Völkermords in Gaza und postete vor sieben Wochen einen kleinen Film auf Instagram, in dem er ein Palästina-T-Shirt trug. Auf diesem Shirt ist auch eine kleine Abbildung des Staates Israel zu sehen, bei der die Städtenamen auf Arabisch geschrieben sind. Und das gilt in Deutschland – so sieht es zumindest Julian Reichelt – als Antisemitismus.

“Sich nun die Frage zu stellen, was an diesem T-Shirt eigentlich antisemitisch sein soll, würde die Debatte auf eine sachliche Ebene führen und wenn es um die Grenzen der Meinungs- und Kunstfreiheit geht, wäre dieser Ansatz seltsam anachronistisch.”

“Ich träume ja immer noch, dass nun die ganze „Affäre“ aufgeklärt wird, Jan Böhmermann sich auf die Bühne stellt und erklärt, dass die ganze Debatte um Cheftek und die Absage des Konzerts Performance-Kunst war, um der Öffentlichkeit sichtbar zu machen, wie sehr die Meinungs- und Kunstfreiheit in diesen Tagen bedroht ist und wie sehr Verteidiger des Völkermords in Gaza mit der „Antisemitismuskeule“ spielen, um missliebige Meinungen zu unterdrücken. Aber dieser Böhmermann, von dem ich träume, wäre ja tatsächlich ein Kämpfer für Meinungsfreiheit; […]”

“Jan Böhmermann ist kein Christoph Schlingensief, sondern ein tumber Troll, der bestenfalls eine Persiflage seiner selbst ist und dann, wenn es eigentlich drauf ankommen sollte, genau die Werte mit Füßen tritt, für die er sich vermeintlich einsetzt. Ein Mann seiner Zeit, ein Mann ohne Rückgrat und Anstand. Nein, das ist keine Satire. Das kann weg.”

A slow moving and very viral civil war by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.”

Betteridge’s law of headlines (Wikipedia)

“Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.”

Are You Being Lied to? Is Portland ‘War-Ravaged’? by Rivera Sun (CounterPunch)

“At one point, Trump himself questioned what was going on, asking,“Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?” The answer to that question is yes.

“Did someone willfully deceive the President of the United States?

“Fox News should have corrected the misperception. Their undated B-roll footage from 5 years ago caused a lot of confusion. The president was not alone in getting the facts wrong. Many conservative viewers were convinced that Portland is burning … just like they were convinced that pictures of burning police cars were from Los Angeles in 2025, not from years ago. Those police car images were used to inflame the false narrative that Los Angeles was in an unusually high state of turmoil. In went the National Guard (and the Marines) – based on an inaccurate perception.

“This is either a pattern of inept mistakes – which is unacceptable in the leaders of this nation – or it’s a pattern of intentional deception which is dangerous and wrong.”

I don’t think Trump cares either way. He never admits to mistakes so his having sent troops to Portland or Los Angeles or whatever retroactively means that those cities were dangerous. It’s just like anyone who whomever calls themselves ICE agents pick up are automatically rounded up to heinous criminals—the worst of the worst—because why else would they have been picked up? Just the fact that they’ve been accused makes them guilty. We’ve been taught for years that this is how the world works: the accusation is the conviction. Just start with someone whose face you don’t like and round up until their face has been mashed into a sidewalk. Chomp your pork-chops with pride that evening, my dude!

'You're Just Irrelevant': Max Blumenthal on Matt Taibbi's Gaza SILENCE by Bad Faith / Briahna Joy Gray (YouTube)

The best bits in this 22-minute video started at about 15:30,

“Max: This particular training seminar which has been imposed under threat from the Trump administration via Israel is a Zionist indoctrination course. And it’s—I mean, for Matt Taibbi, who’s criticized woke DEI-training seminars, and just went ballistic on Robin D’Angelo who I also consider to be kind of a joke and, you know, Davos fellow Ibrahim X Kendi—like, you know, be consistent. But he can’t be. And it’s like, okay, you can even not like the left—and he he can have his reasons—you can be a conservative, but it’s about the principle.

“And if you’re going to if you’re going to wrap yourself in the cloth of the First Amendment and not talk about this the most immediate existential titanic threat to the First Amendment because you’re afraid of the Zionist movement and you’re afraid to critique Zionist power, then you’re just irrelevant. You’re not just being hypocritical. you’re just going to lose relevance. And so the people that are pushing Matt on this are actually paying him a certain level of respect.

“What his critics are saying is you’re a you’re a talented writer. You haven’t been afraid of power or to offend people in the past and you have a certain cachet—more than most writers—and you should use it. And you’re not. So they’re they’re actually showing him respect. I mean if they thought he was a complete clown, they wouldn’t be lobbying for this.

“And he’s treating them with complete condescension. Spending a lot of time to show them disrespect. And it’s because he must be afraid of something here. But, at this point, if you’re going to spend that much energy defending your silence, you’re going to lose relevance and people will find other writers and other voices to follow.

“I think I can say the same for the various media assets and institutions that Zionists are taking over on behalf of Israel. They’re going to lose credibility if they even have any left. There will be a mass exodus from TikTok and people will just go somewhere else.

“Briahna: I do wonder if he’s [Taibbi] is going to lose the audience, right? Because some people say his issue is that he’s audience-captured and I don’t buy that because have said the same thing about someone like Glenn Greenwald. But Glenn Greenwald hasn’t folded on this. He’s been incredibly consistent, right? And even if his audience gets mad at him, an audience that might be increasingly politically diversified and more conservative over the years because of coverage of things like Russiagate and all that, like it hasn’t changed his ideological commitments.”

“Max: It does sometimes feel like the people who have sort of the flexibility to lose the most, aren’t the ones that are willing to take the stand—with some exceptions here or there. And that is part of also, I think, the frustration with respect to Matt Taibbi. On the other side, you’ve got these extremely influential, extremely popular conservative figures like Candace Owens, like Tucker Carlson, like Dave Smith, who are willing to be incredibly powerful advocates for Palestine.

“Briahna: So much so that they’re now being deemed the woke right by other conservatives. And I do wonder how you see that coming to a head as someone who, you know, follows that side of the aisle and, you know, has done interviews and has some experience with these with these people.

“Max: I just feel like, as a writer or a pundit or whatever you are, you can’t isolate yourself from the world.”

“Max: Can’t we just establish that any credible writer should be willing to take a financial hit for their beliefs and their principles?”

“Max: […] if you’re afraid to piss off your audience, […] that speaks to a sort of a lack of credibility. This shouldn’t be seen as a business. you know, you should be willing to go get another job if this business isn’t working out for you, instead of transforming into a hollow influencer. That’s when you become an influencer.”

“Max: […] and he was just getting demolished in the comments on his subst because he has cultivated an audience of like you know MAGA like boomer types through his like a lot of his critiques of the Biden administration which a lot of them are right on. So I’m not saying that’s where he is but I’m just making this point about where what I think the responsibility of a journalist or a writer is. It really has to come from like principles and your passion and not from the incentivization that comes from crowdfunding.”

Economy & Finance

Trump’s Destruction of the US Economy by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)

“China understandably seeks to avoid being threatened by a food blockade again, and has imposed 34% tariffs on U.S. soybean imports. The result has been a shift in its imports to Brazil, with zero purchases in the United States so far in 2025. This is traumatic for U.S. farmers, because four decades of soybean exports to China have resulted in half of U.S. soybean production normally being exported to China; in North Dakota the proportion is 70%.

“China’s shift in its soybean purchases to Brazil is irreversible, as that country’s farmers have adjusted their planting decisions accordingly. As a member of BRICS, especially under President Lula’s leadership, Brazil promises to be much a more reliable supplier than the United States, whose foreign policy has designated China as an existential enemy. There is little chance of China responding to a U.S. promise to restore normal trade by shifting its imports away from Brazil, because that would be traumatic for Brazilian agriculture and would make China an unreliable a trade partner.

“So the question is, what is to become of the enormous amount of U.S. farmland that has been devoted to soybean production? Unable to find foreign markets to replace China, farmers are reported to suffer a loss on their soybean production, which is piling up in excess of existing crop storage capacity. The result is a threat of farm foreclosures and bankruptcy, which would lower prices for farmland. And as interest rates remain high for long-term loans such as mortgages, this deters small farmers from acquiring troubled properties. The result is to accelerate the concentration of farmland in the hands of large absentee financial funds and the wealthy.”

“Trump and his cabinet have made fun of China for spending so much money on its high-speed train service. Western calculations of economic efficiency leave out the all-important balance-of-payments effects of this rail development: It avoids forcing Chinese to drive cars using imported oil. China has no domestic oil industry to dominate its economic planning or foreign policy. In fact, its foreign policy aims regarding the oil trade are the opposite of those in the United States.”

“Long-term interest rates determine the cost of mortgages, and thus the affordability of housing. Trump’s inflationary policy also increased interest rates for long-term bonds. The effect is to concentrate borrowing at short-term maturities, concentrating the problems of rolling over debt in times of financial crisis. This impairs the resilience of the economy.”

That’s quite an understatement. The unwinding will be historically painful. It’s not at all clear that the U.S. will be capable of generating the funds (read: debt) to bail out all of the criminals who have lined themselves up as the next generation of oligarchs who own part of the economy that is considered “too big to fail.” That generation includes some new faces, but more than enough of the usual suspects.

Issue 93 – Undermining deregulation by Molly White (Citation Needed)

“The lawsuit contains an extremely long list of gripes against the Times and a book written by some of its journalists, and seeks $15 billion in damages for reputational harm that Trump claims negatively impacted, among other things, the sales of his $TRUMP memecoin. The Florida judge assigned to the 85-page complaint threw it out almost immediately, apparently annoyed that he had to wade through dozens of pages of effusive praise for the President, election denialism, and allegations that the Times is a “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democratic party” before eventually getting to the legal point. Judge Merryday continues, “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.” Merryday will allow Trump’s lawyers to refile a shorter version within the next 28 days.”

“The Better Markets advocacy group has outlined how the cryptocurrency industry is following a playbook laid out by “too big to fail” banks — one that ended with the 2008 financial crisis. They write: “In the crypto version, firms develop non-compliant or questionably-compliant business models that they hope establish enough incumbency, profitability and political power that Congress and regulators are coerced to rewrite existing laws to retroactively bless them.””

ISPs created so many fees that FCC will kill requirement to list them all by Jon Brodkin (Ars Tehnica)

“ISPs could comply with the rule either by listing the fees or by dropping the fees altogether and, if they choose, raising their overall prices by a corresponding amount. But the latter option wouldn’t fit with the strategy of enticing customers with a low advertised price and hitting them with the real price on their monthly bills. The broadband price label rules were created to stop ISPs from advertising misleadingly low prices.”

Trump administration threatens to fire unpaid air traffic controllers, deny back pay to furloughed federal workers by Jerry White (WSWS)

“US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Thursday that the Trump administration would fire air traffic controllers who failed to show up to work even though they are not being paid during the government shutdown. Duffy’s provocative comments came just days after the release of a draft White House memo stating that furloughed federal workers are not guaranteed compensation for their forced time off during the shutdown.”

Like, not even retroactively? Like, do you have to work for free just for the privilege of serving your nation while the president has quadrupled his net worth in less than a year? What the actual fuck are you talking about? This is gaslighting.

“An estimated 13,000 air traffic controllers and about 50,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers have been forced to work without pay. Because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is at least 3,500 controllers short of its staffing targets, many controllers have been forced to work mandatory overtime and six-day weeks well before the shutdown.”

Hey, cool, so not only do you work for free, but you get to work mandatory overtime for free because the government has discovered that slavery was a pretty neat idea for saving money after all. You’re welcome. Here’s an American-flag pin as a sign of our appreciation. Oh, and a couple of Trump-crypto trading cards. They’re not edible, sorry.

Endless trillions for banks and billionaires but no money for essential workers. How is there no money to keep paying them? I know there’s “no budget” but what the fuck are you talking about? Whenever big banks need a bailout, they make trillions appear out of nowhere, with no budget resolution. When the military needs to actually do something, they get extra money that appears out of nowhere, even though they’re apportioned $1T per year in the budget.

But air-traffic controllers? FUCK THEM. They should work without pay. Because who really needs ‘em? They’re unskilled workers who barely do anything anyway. You can just fire them and replace with people like BIG BALLS or AI or whatever. Who cares? If you’re flying commercial, you deserve to die anyway. I’m not kidding: if you don’t have a private jet, you should seriously consider killing yourself because what is even the point of living like that?

Unprecedented “circular deals” inflate AI bubble by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The company has yet to make a profit, and its founder and CEO Sam Altman has said that profit-making is not really on his horizon at present. Speaking earlier this week, he said becoming profitable was “not in my top-10 concerns.”

““Obviously,” he continued, “someday we have to be very profitable,” and the company would get there, but “right now” it was in a “phase of investment.” In other words, it is taking a trillion-dollar gamble that the massive investments will eventually pay off.

“But others say a different dynamic is at work. As Gil Luria, an analyst at the investment bank and financial services firm DA Davidson told the FT: “OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments.” It was expected to make a loss of around $10 billion this year.”

This is yet another case of how dangerous a real-life Svengali is: Altman’s schtick seems to work on billionaires the same way that Trump’s schtick works on the working class (and the aged). Read those paragraphs again: there is no sane way to interpret those statements as anything other than a scam. Altman’s company gets all the money up front, while his investors get…nothing! They don’t even get a promise that the company is even interested in profitability! He’s just bold as love here; he doesn’t promise them anything! He says it’s not in his “top-10 concerns!”

“Long-time Wall Street short seller Jim Chanos, who described financial markets as having entered “the golden age of fraud” back in 2020 and who commented recently that this phenomenon had “done nothing but gallop even higher” since then, pointed to one of the key contradictions in the circularity deals.”

Shut up, Jim! You damned party-pooper! We’re all out here trying to make our cult-leader Sam Altman rich. He told us that that’s how we’re going to get rich, right? And, since we all became billionaires despite utter inability to understand the basic mechanics of how the world works, we believe it! This couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

“[…] like the internet, the development of AI will ultimately be a positive economic development. And indeed, it would if it were being advanced in a rationally organized society with conscious planning.

“But it is being developed within the framework of capitalist social relations and a financial system increasingly dependent on speculation and parasitism in which the mechanisms being used to finance AI are more akin to a Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme than anything else.”

“[…] the bursting of the internet bubble saw Microsoft lose 65 percent in market value, Apple 80 percent, Oracle 88 percent, and Amazon 94 percent. Under present conditions in which high-tech stocks comprise an even greater proportion of market capitalization than they did at the start of the century—up to 40 percent of the S&P 500 index—any repeat would be devastating. AI companies have accounted for 80 percent of the gains in US stocks so far this year.”

“According to calculations by Harvard economist Jason Furman, investment in information processing equipment and software was responsible for 92 percent of all GDP growth in the first half of this year, meaning that the rest of the economy was essentially flat.”

“Ruchir Sharma, the chair of Rockefeller International said that “America has become one big bet on AI” and the US and its markets could “lose the one leg they are standing on.”

“The Bank of England has added its voice to the growing warnings. In its latest quarterly financial stability update, it said “stretched valuations” for equities and, in particular, AI companies, together with the loss of independence by the Federal Reserve and increased corporate failures, had fueled the risk of a “sharp market correction.””

Hoo boy. Hold on to your hats, everyone.

The AI Bubble’s Impossible Promises by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“When you read “1.2GW data center,” they are almost certainly referring to the data center’s IT load — which is the power consumed by all of the computing equipment inside, but not the cooling systems or power lost in the infrastructure bringing the electricity to the gear itself. The amount of non-IT load power required, furthermore, can fluctuate.

“Data centers need far more power than their IT load, and any time you read a “gigawatt” data center, know that they need about 30% more power than the amount of capacity the data center has.”

“Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity — assuming that the gas turbines function at full power — can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load.

“I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas — a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI — but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?””

“Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.”

“The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens.

“I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting — of simply throwing enough money at the problem — when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America’s (and the world’s) power grid.”

“Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour.”

“Let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years — which, although the costs will almost certainly grow over time, and some of the payments are front-loaded, averages out to $5bn each month, which is a truly insane number that’s in excess of what Netflix makes in revenue.

“Said money is paying for access to Blackwell GPUs, which will, by then, be at least two generations behind, with NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin GPUs due next year. What happens to that GPU infrastructure? Why would OpenAI continue to pay the same rental rate for five-year-old Blackwell GPUs?”

“OpenAI cannot build a gigawatt of data centers for AMD by the “second half of 2026.” It haven’t even announced the financing, let alone where the data center might be, and until it does that it’s impossible to plan the power, which in and of itself takes months before you even start building.”

That’s … interesting. Of course we should be thinking about where all of this extra power would even come from. It’s not like the excess capacity is just lying around, not in a country where major metropolitan centers experience brownouts in the summer when all of the air conditioners run at the same time.

“Every promise you’re reading in the news is impossible. Nobody has even built a gigawatt data center, and more than likely nobody ever will. Stargate Abilene isn’t going to be ready in 2026, won’t have sufficient power until at best 2027, and based on the conversations I’ve had it’s very unlikely it will build that gigawatt substation before the year 2028.

“In fact, let me put it a little simpler: all of those data center deals you’ve seen announced are basically bullshit. Even if they get the permits and the money, there are massive physical challenges that cannot be resolved by simply throwing money at them.”

The Trump Administration Begins ‘Substantial’ Layoffs of Federal Workers by Christian Britschgi (Reason)

“Any permanent firings of government workers during a shutdown would also be unusual. Typically, federal workers are temporarily furloughed when Congress fails to agree on appropriations bills to keep the government open, and then given back pay once funding resumes.

“In September, as Politico first reported, Vought circulated a memo to government agencies instructing them to prepare more permanent “reduction in force” plans should a shutdown occur.

“In the event of a shutdown, agencies were told to eliminate employees working on “programs, projects, or activities” whose funding had lapsed during the shutdown, and which were not “consistent with the President’s priorities.”

“Once funding resumes, Vought’s memo instructed agencies to “revise their RIFs as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions.””

Go ahead and keep tearing your stupid selves apart. The world celebrates as you self-immolate.

Gold price surge continues, passing the $4,000 mark by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The gold price surge is a sign of growing uncertainty and doubts over the stability of the international monetary system based on the US dollar as the global currency. As a Wall Street Journal article noted, the gold price “has surged this year more than it did during some of America’s biggest crises” including the 2007–2009 recession and the onset of the pandemic.

“Back in June, as the gold surge was accelerating and it had become the second-largest reserve asset held by central banks after the dollar, surpassing the euro, an article in the Financial Times (FT) described it as the “world’s refuge from uncertainty” and pointed to the broader implications of its rise.”

“[…] the interest bill has become an increasing drain on government finances, such that it has risen to almost $1 trillion annually and is set to become the biggest item in the US budget, surpassing even military outlays.

“This has meant that the global monetary system is based on the currency of the most indebted country in the world, whose credit rating has been downgraded by all the three major rating agencies and which needs to borrow money just to pay the interest bill on past debts.”

Ouch. 🚑 🚑 🚑

“Others have gone further in their analysis, describing the shift into gold as a move “back to the future.” As the latest surge was getting underway in the middle of the year, Randy Smallwood, chief executive of a precious metals company, told the FT: “It wouldn’t surprise me if, in 20 years, when you take an economics course, there will be a discussion about the 60-year experiment from 1970 to 2030 on fiat currencies, and how it failed.””

“[…] the move out of the dollar is being accompanied by growing uncertainty about other currencies. As one analyst at a metals trading firm told the FT: “People are looking to short the dollar, but they are not quite sure what currency to purchase—that uncertainty leads you straight to gold.”

Environment & Climate Change

Decarbonization at a distance by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There’s a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials:”

This sounds too good to be true, Cory. Are you sure this is happening? The linked article is from the end of last year and claims that a U.S. company claims that it will do this. It doesn’t look particularly believable.

“Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What’s more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that’s left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash.”

“Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn’t merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, and the ship and the truck that brought it to you.”

“China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours.”

“The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe’s stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7.”

How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot by Ted Nordhaus (The New Atlantis)

“In the face of rising energy and electricity prices, the Biden administration’s abandonment of “all of the above” energy policies, its seeming hostility to the production and use of America’s abundant oil and gas resources, and its willingness to kowtow to the climate movement helped doom Biden’s and then Harris’s election prospects.”

That’s his election analysis? He’s got a hammer and everything’s a nail.I knew this guy was a shill, a buffoon. I’d heard the name before but I figured I’d give it a shot. I was also a bit suspicious of the magazine but perservered.

“[…] despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed for decades. The Chinese “electro-state” that McKibben says represents the future doesn’t look appreciably different in this regard than the U.S. “petrostate” that he says is now trying to hold that future back. Both still depend on fossil fuels for about 80 percent of their energy consumption.”

The U.S. will trend back upward from there whereas China will continue trending downward. Watch the trends. Eighty percent is much less than ten or twenty years ago. Obviously, Nordhaus doesn’t care because he has a very big ax to grind for McKibben.

“What McKibben didn’t tell his readers, across some 2,000 words, was that Howarth had released the study, which had yet to be peer-reviewed, at McKibben’s request, to provide him with ammunition to sway the Biden administration in his campaign to block the facilities.”

It’s two years later. I don’t care about those shenanigans. Has it been peer-reviewed in the meantime? Is it correct? I would be money that it turned out to be correct, in which case how it came to be released early no longer matters one whit.

“Howarth’s estimates have long been outliers in the mainstream literature on methane leakage.”

Well they would be, wouldn’t they? I would imagine the mainstream literature is littered with fossil-fuel shills like Nordhaus himself.

“With 30 percent of California’s total electricity generation now coming from solar, the state is already frequently forced to curtail solar generation, undermining its economic viability unless it receives continuing subsidies.”

Let’s talk about fossil-fuel subsidies. No? I thought so.

“Which sounds great until you think about what would be necessary to transport solar electricity 1,500 miles from Greece to Norway each afternoon and then wind energy from Norway to Greece each evening. In reality, both the United States and Europe have had a hard time building much transmission at all, much less doing so at a scale that would remotely allow the sort of complementarity that McKibben suggests is the solution.”

The Chinese haven’t had a hard time building long transmission lines. This guy can’t think outside the west.

“It’s hard to imagine that McKibben missed that chart. It’s right there in the report, a few charts after the one he cites. This is the sort of information that a journalist more interested in enlightening his readers than proselytizing might want to share with them. But McKibben is not that kind of journalist anymore, if he ever was.”

Even if he’s right here, I’m left doubting him because of the obvious grudge he has against McKibben. Like, I’m wondering whether McKibben slept with this guy’s wife.

Medicine & Disease

AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities by Melissa Heikkilä (Financial Times)

“The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less “empathy” toward Black and Asian ones.”

“[…] research by the MIT’s Jameel Clinic in June found that AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 3, and Palmyra-Med—a healthcare-focused LLM—recommended a much lower level of care for female patients, and suggested some patients self-treat at home instead of seeking help.”

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Tuesday Poem by Ryan Thier / Jim Culleny (3QuarksDaily)

“The melters,
men, sometimes a woman, varied races and ages,
dressed in the Liberty green union jumpsuits,
turn in the direction of furnace number nine
to begin their prayers.
Working the knobs, the dials, the cranes, their devotions
manifest as a golden stream, a waterfall of liquid metal
slowly pouring out into four tall molds.
This time, yield is high—no spills, no blockages.
The ritual is successful, the plant runs smoothly”

“The front-office managers, spreadsheet maestros,
see only ticks on a trendline, an
incremental increase
in the tribute submitted to their chieftains—to them,
the glimmer of the waterfall, the liquid light
diving from the crucible in half a perfect parabola,

“runs out unnoticed.”

Go See One Battle After Another Right Now by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“A weighty sense of the Left’s past failures to impede the ever-sicker rightward political march of this nation since the 1970s is central to One Battle After Another. The scene in which a drugged-out Bob is on the couch in his bathrobe watching The Battle of Algiers for what’s clearly the umpteenth time is absolutely going to hurt. But it’s countered by the film’s anarchic energy and insistent hope. Bob’s daughter and Sensei St Carlos’s student Willa — who brings an impressive newcomer to the screen in Chase Infiniti — represents the younger generation taking up the fight, and she comes to share her teacher’s steady, matter-of-fact attitude toward “one battle after another.”

“St Carlos is the film’s model for trustworthy resolve and a smart, unwavering approach to building contingency plans and a network of reliable allies throughout various systems in order to continue the fight regardless of inevitable raids, setbacks, and violent upheavals. He combines unflappable staunchness with a lively enjoyment of human absurdity that’s so endearingly acted, I feel I’ve never appreciated del Toro enough, and I’ve been a fan since The Usual Suspects (1995).”

“[…] it’s important that this movie succeed. It’s so pointed in its critique of the power elite in this country, not just as self-serving capitalists routinely screwing the citizenry but also as aging monsters addled by long-held racist fixations that are all tangled up with deep sexual psychosis. This isn’t a new portrayal of course but it’s rare in American films aiming at popular acceptance.”

Celebrating 110 Years of The Hinternet! by Hinternet Editorial Board (Hinternet)

“You understand what the Engine is — don’t you, ma douce? It runs on mechanical principles but it is no mere mechanism. I believe with every fiber of my being that if its energy is sufficiently focused, for a sufficiently long period of time, the device will succeed in breaking through to what I think of as “the lower layers”, where it will come into contact with the minds that reside there, and begin to yield up stories such as the world has never seen before.”

“Surely a long chapter of this story will have to be written of the fateful day in 1982 when Wheat’s prediction —some even call it a “prophecy”— proved true, and our very first confirmed message from “the minds at the lower layers” was received.

“Admittedly things did not get off to a very promising start, as the particular content of their message hardly signaled any eagerness to cooperate: “Turn back now,” it said (in Akkadian, for some unknown reason: 𒉿𒂊𒊑 𒂊𒈾). We are pleased (at least most of us are) that we declined to heed that warning, and pressed on, and became the source of so many of the stories (upwards of 96% of them, according to our analysts) that the world knows and loves today.”

Greenland is a beautiful nightmare by Matt Duggan

“Driving through Indiana isn’t bad, it’s just an empty void. It’s like a time machine back to the 90s when people still smoke in restaurants but also there’s nothing that sticks out about it. There is nothing distinct about Indiana, it’s just a place full of people who got too tired on their way to somewhere better and decided “this is good enough”. The difference is that Greenland is very hard to get to, as I was about to learn.”

Sunday Poem: Two Mass Shootings, Same Day, Michigan by Jim Culleny / Ron Riekki (3QuarksDaily)

“I’m alone in the dark in front of this church
that’s just burned down full of bullet

“holes and the night is angry and eating
the entirety of the world and it’s quiet,

“no crickets, the moon afraid to breathe,
and I feel sick to my stomach, to my

“soul, and I just stare at the church sign
and I can’t feel the presence of God

“and it hurts me, not to be able to feel,
and the dark aches and eats into me,

“and it’s rural dark, Halloween-nearing
dark, fall dark, death dark, and I can’t

“believe what we’re doing, and there’s
nothing I can say or do, so I stare and

“I wish for God, but there’s a brutal
lacking of stars in the sky tonight.”

Why this movie looks like a *movie* by Patrick Tomasso (YouTube)

Why don't movies look like *movies* anymore? by Patrick Tomasso (YouTube)

The first video is about One Battle After Another.

“It’s like they found a cool location and turned the camera on.”

The two videos taken together are a fantastic plea for making real movies, for building art with intention rather than leaving our options open.

As one cinematographer said in the second video,

“I can teach any idiot how to light a green screen in twenty minutes.”

What Did You During the Trump Wars, Daddy? by Ted Rall

““Unlike some of my fellow Americans,” I told her—let’s say her name is/was/could have been Stephanie—“I answered my nation’s call at her time of greatest need.”

“I sunk into my recliner. “As everyone knows, the United States was being horrifically terribly tragically outrageously attacked by domestic terrorist cells of far-left extremists. We were seconds away from Marxism. Gulags, Soviet everything, Medicare For All. So, when President Trump called for loyal MAGA patriots to fight, of course I jumped at the chance.”

“Stephanie tugged at my sleeve. “You went to war against the Radical Left? Were you scared?”

““I won’t lie,” I replied. “I was scared. The Radical Left was everywhere…hammer-and-sickle flags draped at Taco Bell, Mao posters at school, Courtney Love on Spotify. But only stupid people wouldn’t have been terrified. We were scared and we went anyway. We had a job to do.””

“They had their kids and their employers’ kids and, in many cases, U.S. citizenship. We knew we could all be doxed. We had to be pitiless. We killed them all.”

““Thank you, daddy. I love you.”

““I love you too, sweetheart. Unless you join the Radical Left.”

““I would want you to kill me, daddy, if I did that. Did you kill any antifas?””

“Sometimes, at night, I can see the contorted, agonized faces of the Lyft drivers, the restaurant kitchen workers and the antiwar marchers we slaughtered or sent to the camps. I hear the screams of my fallen ICE comrades. My best buddy was standing right next to me, bravely beating up a dad picking up his kid from school when a five-year-old Tren de Aragua drug kingpin blasted him away as he whizzed by on his Big Wheel, cackling in Spanish.”

““Your sacrifice saved us, daddy.”

““Thank you, Stephanie. I know.””

“Fentanyl was coming from Mexico, so we bombed random Venezuelan boats in the southern Caribbean and blew up the people on them, whoever they were.”

““Were the Venezuelans bringing fentanyl to America?” Stephanie asked.

““No, they don’t make it there. They might have been carrying cocaine.”

““To America?”

““No, to Trinidad.”

““Is Trinidad in America?” she wanted to know.

““No. It isn’t. Not yet. But we had to do something. So we made up something to do, and then we did it, and it was over, and we saved America.””

Hiromi: The Most Electrifying Pianist Alive by Rick Beato (YouTube)

I’ve been a fan of this woman’s playing since I first heard her a few years back. This interview shows what a lovely and introspective person she is, as well. She is a consummate musician.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem: An Interview with Ted Chiang by Julien Crockett (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“I call LLMs a blurry JPEG because they give a low-resolution version of the internet. If you are using the internet to find information, which is what most of us use the internet for, it doesn’t really make sense to go with the low-resolution version when we have conventional search engines that point you to the actual information itself.”

“Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.”

“[…] there is no distinction between software and hardware in biological systems. If you were to apply that metaphor to any other organ in the body, it would seem absurd. For example, “My liver was running this old program, but all I needed to do was update the software and now my liver is functioning much better, even though the hardware is the same.” No one says that. It’s not a useful way of thinking about the liver, and it is not a useful way of thinking about the brain either.”

“I responded, “I’m not going to grant you that premise, because that is the question under debate. You are framing the hypothetical in a way that assumes the conclusion.””

My goodness Ted! You are willing to go quite a long way in order to avoid using the phrase “begging the question.”

“I’d say the primary effect of AI tools is that they encourage the idea that art is no different from tightening bolts. Artists have always had to deal with commercial considerations, but it’s probably a more pressing issue now than ever before. The impulse to view everything in terms of efficiency, of reducing costs and maximizing output, is radically overapplied in the modern world. There are certain situations in which that is an appropriate framing, but art cannot be understood that way. Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.”

“Imagine you have some hypothetical AI that is better at accomplishing tasks than humans and that does exactly what you tell it to do. Do you want ExxonMobil to have such an AI at its disposal? That doesn’t sound good. Conversely, imagine a hypothetical AI that does what is best for the world as a whole, even if human beings are asking it to do something else. Who would buy such an AI? Certainly not ExxonMobil. I can’t see any corporation buying software that ignores the instructions of humans and does what is best for the world. If that were something that corporations were interested in, do you think they’d be behaving the way they are now?”

“If you’re a woodworker, you might develop emotional associations with a set of chisels you’ve used for years, and in some sense that’s a “relationship,” but it’s entirely different from the relationship you have with people. You might make sure you keep your chisels sharp and rust-free, and say that you’re treating them with respect, but that’s entirely different from the respect you owe to your colleagues. One way to clarify this is to remember that people have their own preferences, while things do not.”

“AI systems lack preferences; that is true of the systems we have now, and it will be true of any system we build in the foreseeable future. The companies that sell AI systems might benefit if you develop an emotional relationship with their product, so they might create the illusion that AI systems have preferences. But any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.”

“I believe it’s theoretically possible for us to build digital entities that have subjective experience, inasmuch as I don’t think there’s a physical law that prevents it. We don’t currently have a good idea of how to build such entities. I don’t think we’re going to create them accidentally, because the AI systems we’re building right now are not even heading in the right direction. LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them.”

“I wouldn’t say that some things are more important than truth. What I was hoping to convey with that story is that there is value in knowing what actually happened, but that is not the end of the discussion. Ideally, we should be able to acknowledge what actually happened without that being the last word on the subject.”

“I think we need to think about the possible bad outcomes and work to mitigate them; if we do that, we have a chance of preventing them from coming to pass. I don’t know if that’s optimism, unless everything except fatalism is optimism. I suppose it might be a moral duty to not be fatalistic. We have to believe that our actions have the potential to make a difference because if we don’t believe that, we won’t take any action at all.”

I truly don’t agree with that last statement. I suppose I’m an absurdist. What you do almost certainly doesn’t matter but you try anyway. You try like a motherfucker anyway. Just swimming against the current. Non illegitimi carborundum.

“My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.”

Why the left also needs figures like Charlie Kirk by Slavoj Žižek (Žižek Goads and Prods)

“Bergson describes how on August 4, 1914, when war was declared between France and Germany, he experienced a strange “feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete: who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?” Crucial here is the modality of the break between before and after: before its outburst, the war appeared to Bergson “simultaneously probable and impossible: a complex and contradictory notion which persisted to the end”; after its outburst, it all of a sudden became real and possible, and the paradox resides in this retroactive appearance of probability:”

“I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been, and this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.”

“An event is thus experienced first as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe it will effectively occur and thus dismiss it as impossible), and then as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible).”

“A decade ago, the public debate on torture or the participation of neo-Fascist parties in a West European democratic government was dismissed as an ethical catastrophe which is impossible, which “really cannot happen”; once it happened, we immediately got accustomed to it, accepting it as obvious… What I am afraid of is that, if a larger military conflict explodes between Russia and NATO countries, it will obey the same logic. Now we talk about it without really believing this war can happen; once it explodes (if it will), I predict we will simply get used to it.”

“Anti-immigrant populists shamelessly circulate unverified stories about rapes and other crimes of the refugees in order to give credibility to their claim that immigrants pose a threat to our way of life.”

This is a staple in nearly every country in the world.

We Are The Slop by Freya India (After Babel)

“Your precious memories are my mindless entertainment. Your trauma becomes my background noise. Your life-shattering divorce my slop. Your children my characters; your pain my distraction; your feelings my filler episodes. I will swipe past your birth video when I get bored. I will downvote your divorce if it isn’t entertaining enough. Your life is what I clean my kitchen to, what I kill time with. And if you fail to entertain me, fine, I will scroll for another life to consume.”

“[…] every day I am becoming more convinced that this is the furthest thing from sentimental, this marketing of memories. That the couples who barely remember their engagement, when it was, what they said, have something far more human than those who orchestrated the whole thing, rehearsed it, recorded it, set up a background, put on a soulless display for strangers.”

“We look back with horror at previous generations, that they didn’t celebrate enough, couldn’t capture the moment, have no memories to scroll through. But I will reserve my horror for what we are doing. That partners are being chosen, boyfriends are getting down on one knee, babies are being born, not out of love or devotion or human instinct, but because views are down. Ratings are dropping. Storylines are needed. The audience is getting impatient.”

Only Two Genders? On Jin Xing’s Reaffirmation of Gender Binarism and Heteronormativity by Yahia Ma (Made In Chia Journal)

“This form of ‘soft’ censorship directed at a formerly mainstream transgender celebrity reflects a broader pattern in contemporary Chinese culture, characterised by official non-approval, public invisibility, and media silence. The point here is not to speculate on the reasons for her ‘soft’ cancellation, but to emphasise that, after leaving China and entering the diaspora, Jin Xing has openly critiqued social values, aesthetic expectations, and censorship, while at the same time reaffirming gender binarism, even as she acknowledges the existence of multiple sexual orientations beyond gender categorisation.”

“[…] she responded: I believe there are only two genders in human society—and I still hold this view: male and female. But when it comes to sexual orientation, there may be more than 50 types. For example, in the United States, more than 58 genders are recognised, but I would say, it’s not like that, don’t confuse the concepts. Gender is either ci [雌, ‘female’] or xiong [雄, ‘male’]. Sexual orientation—your self-identified sexual orientation—may well take more than 50 forms. (RFA 2025; translation by the author) On a linguistic level, Jin Xing employs the pair of words commonly used to describe the nature of animals and plants, ci and xiong, to classify male and female characteristics in a biological sense.”

The Islamic Golden Age – Dr. Roy Casagranda | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past by Dr. Roy Casagranda (YouTube)

At around 48:00,

“Ibn al-Haytham, in the 11th century, he’s going to write the book of optics, 1021. He created the world’s first scientific method. He postulated that he thought all objects in the universe exerted gravity on each other. I don’t experience that—like, I don’t feel the the mic wanting to come hit me in the face (I mean, I do, because I keep gesturing, but it’s not because of gravity—like what experience did he have that made him go, “Oh, that that chair is exerting gravity on me.” Like the ground, sure, but he said that light had a finite speed and it traveled in waves.

“We’ve lost most of his material. Well, you think he wrote 120 books? I think we have 20 books. So maybe in some of those books it’s explained how he got there. Well, we don’t know. He was doing calculus. He was doing calculus 600 years before Newton. Ibn Sina, a contemporary of his, who had started in the Samanid state. It got conquered by the Turks and he fled and he ends up eventually, long story short, in Esvahan. And he’ll write the canon of medicine in 1025.

“One of the things that’s interesting about him. He starts reading Plato and Aristotle and he realizes something about the universe: that, as time goes by, information increases. And then, it means, if you go backwards in time, information decreases. And, of course, he then is describing entropy. That’s what entropy is. But then he runs the clock back on the entire universe, and he says the entire universe, at one point, was a small little packet of information. And the entire universe unfolded from that packet because there was just enough information in that packet for the universe. That’s the Big Bang. That’s the singularity. That was a thousand years ago.”

At about 57:00,

“When the books in Gundeshapur [Iran] are discovered again, right in the aftermath of the Abbassid revolution—because they’re just sitting there gathering dust after the Abbassid revolution—people start going in there. Mot only do they create this age where there’s major discoveries that are made, it means that we can start reading Aristotle and Plato again. Because the Romans had destroyed their copies of Aristotle and Plato.

“And so, little by little, through things like the Reconquista, where the Christian Arabs in the north, who hate Muslims—Muslims and Jews—conquer Spain and […] drive the Muslims and Jews out. As they’re doing this, they’re capturing Arab libraries. And those Arab libraries have Plato and Aristotle in them. They were told to burn them. But what did the monks do? […] They—Benedictine monks—instead of burning them, they built these giant secret illegal underground libraries and kept copies of those books and slowly started to translate them back into ancient Greek and Latin. And that’s how we have that material again. And that feeds the Renaissance. That’s part of what feeds the Renaissance.

“Another part that feeds the Renaissance is the Arabs conquered Sicily. So the Arabs conquer Sicily. They’re there for two centuries. And then a group of really crazy French-speaking Vikings called the Normans end up in Italy. They’re there as mercenaries. They’re bored. They notice they’re the only armed guys in southern Italy. So they take over southern Italy. And then they’re like, “You know what? I bet the Arabs can’t keep Sicily if we attack it. Let’s attack it.” They attack it and then they end up the rulers of Sicily. So think of how crazy Sicilian history is: Greek colonies that get conquered by the Romans and then the Germans take it over—the Vandals take it over—then the Arabs take it, and then Vikings! Vikings take Sicily! Like if you’re a Sicilian, like how do you identify? Like you there’s no way a genetic test will give you anything but crazy at that point.

“And so, these Normans—like Roger II, for example—fall madly in love with Arab culture. He falls so in love with Arab culture that his bureaucracy is made up of Jews, Muslims and Christians. He didn’t curse the Sicilian bureaucracy. He mints coins on one side in Latin. On the other side he minted them in Arabic.”

The Negative Effects Of Toxic Nostalgia − SOME MORE NEWS by Some More News (YouTube)

“This is the inevitable result of toxic nostalgia. When people forget real history and replace it with a fake and rosy version, they inevitably forget the hardships and progress that got us here. This is the thinking that allows people like RFK Jr. to declare that autism simply didn’t exist when he was a kid, when in reality it wasn’t as well understood, so it wasn’t being properly diagnosed. He just never heard about it because he’s a fucking Kennedy. He was too busy collecting rotten bear meat to feed his hawk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has probably never heard of stamps.

“This is true for so many people who do nostalgia posting, whether it be for the 80s or 90s or as or teens. They don’t miss the way the world used to be. They miss being 12. That’s it. You had fewer responsibilities and obligations and had a simpler understanding of the world. It was a simpler time. Yes, literally for you because you were 12. That’s why you’re posting the Super Nintendo ad and doing fascism. When you say things didn’t used to be political. Yeah, you were 12. Racism wasn’t an issue in the 90s. For you. You were white and 12. The world was better in the 60s. For you. You were 12. Or not even born yet.”

Technology & Engineering

Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

““Until someone comes up with a better version of a two-legged walking robot that is much safer to be near, and even in contact with, we will not see humanoid robots get certified to be deployed in zones that also have people in them.””

“[…] today’s bipedal humanoids are fundamentally unsafe for humans to be near when they walk due to the massive kinetic energy they generate while maintaining balance. That stored-up energy can cause severe injury if the robot falls or its limbs strike someone.”

“In some corners of the tech world, robot hype has reached a fever pitch due to the rapid gains in AI. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed that the company’s Optimus robots could generate $30 trillion in revenue, while Figure’s CEO Brett Adcock envisions humanoids serving millions of tasks in the labor force.”

Look at that first sentence. I’m so glad I don’t have to write shit like that for a living.

As for Musk, I mean, he’s just saying things. He pulled that number out of his ass and now people are citing it. What a time to be alive.

“These approaches, Brooks argues, ignore decades of research showing that human dexterity depends on an extraordinarily complex touch-sensing system. He cites work from Roland Johansson’s lab at Umeå University showing that when a person’s fingertips are anesthetized, a seven-second task of picking up and lighting a match stretches to nearly 30 seconds of fumbling. The human hand contains about 17,000 mechanoreceptors, with 1,000 concentrated in each fingertip alone.”

Surreptitious surveillance by D. J. Bernstein (cr.yp.to)

“But NSA continued using ITAR to try to censor cryptographic software. For example, Phil Zimmermann, author of a subversive cryptographic program called PGP, was subjected to a grand jury investigation and further government interrogation starting in 1993. There are many more examples. The censorship produced further backlash, and eventually court cases under the First Amendment.”

“The book explains how NSA weakened the original “Data Encryption Standard” (DES) to 56-bit keys, weak enough for NSA to break. Of course, NSA issued a series of lies about this: continually exaggerating how strong 56-bit keys were, claiming that NSA hadn’t touched the DES design, and later claiming that NSA had strengthened the DES design. By 2012, NSA’s budget for its “SIGINT Enabling Project”, part of its amusingly named “Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative”, had reached a quarter billion dollars per year. In its budget request, NSA wrote that this project “actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable … To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems’ security remains intact.” Specific project activities listed by NSA were to “influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies”, to “shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS”, etc.”

“See the part about influencing cryptographic standards to make them exploitable, while “the consumer and other adversaries” think that security remains intact? This is a perfect example of the virtues of stealth. Instead of eight billion potential terrorists switching to non-American cryptography because they see that you’re crippling American cryptography, you have eight billion potential terrorists happily using cryptographic standards that you secretly know how to break.”

“[…] developers of standards will often make exploitable mistakes all by themselves. Cryptography is hard to get right even for developers who are prioritizing security. Even better, developers are usually distracted by other desiderata such as efficiency. So you can often just sit back and watch as the developers screw up.”

“Inside NSA, this pseudo-agency has been branded as the Information Assurance Directorate, NSA Information Assurance, NSA Cybersecurity, and, starting in 2019, the NSA Cybersecurity Directorate. The pseudo-agency advertises itself as having “thousands” of people. To put this in perspective, NSA’s budget in 2010 was about $10 billion. Salaries for a few thousand people are just a few percent of this budget, a small price to pay for being able to fool standards-development organizations into believing that you aren’t sabotaging their standards.”

“[…] one of those so-called “whistleblowers”, rogue agent Ed Snowden, leaked the fact that NSA was secretly describing Dual EC standardization as an “exercise in finesse”. More importantly, he leaked the description of the overall SIGINT Enabling Project, including NSA’s description of its stealth game (“covertly influence” and “To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems’ security remains intact”). But don’t give up when there’s this sort of setback: it’s just another “PR and Reputational issue” that you can manage by spending enough money on marketing.”

The Gaslit Asset Class by David Rosenthal (DSHR's Blog)

“I worked with a group of outstanding Stanford CS Ph.D. students to design and implement a system for stewardship of Web content modeled on the paper library system. The goal was to make it extremely difficult for even a powerful adversary to delete or modify content without detection. It is called LOCKSS, for Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe; a decentralized peer-to-peer system secured by Proof-of-Work. We won a “Best Paper” award for it five years before Satoshi Nakamoto published his decentralized peer-to-peer system secured by Proof-of-Work. When he did, LOCKSS had been in production for a few years and we had learnt a lot about how difficult decentralization is in the online world.

“Bitcoin built on more than two decades of research. Neither we nor Nakamoto invented Proof-of-Work, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor published it in 1992. Nakamoto didn’t invent blockchains, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta patented them in 1991. He was extremely clever in assembling well-known techniques into a cryptocurrency, but his only major innovation was the Longest Chain Rule.”

““Letting users be users” necessarily means that the “users” have to trust the “few nodes” to include their transactions in blocks. The very strong economies of scale of technology in general and “big server farms” in particular meant that the centralizing force described in W. Brian Arthur’s 1994 book Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy resulted in there being “fewer nodes”. Indeed, on 13th June 2014 a single node controlled 51% of Bitcoin’s mining, the GHash pool.”

“Another centralizing force drives pools like GHash. The network creates a new block and rewards the selected node about every ten minutes. Assuming they’re all state-of-the-art, there are currently about 15M rigs mining Bitcoin. Their economic life is around 18 months, so only 0.5%% of them will ever earn a reward. The owners of mining rigs pool their efforts, converting a small chance of a huge reward into a steady flow of smaller rewards. On average GHash was getting three rewards an hour.”

“In 2021 Amir Kafshdar Goharshady showed that:”

“assuming that the two sides are rational actors and the smart contract language is Turing-complete, there is no escrow smart contract that can facilitate this exchange without either relying on third parties or enabling at least one side to extort the other.”

“He concludes that if the decrease is small, then double-spending attacks are feasible and the per-block reward plus fee must be large, whereas if it is large then access to the hash power of a few large pools can quickly sabotage the currency.

“The implication is that miners, motivated to keep fees manageable, believe ∆attack is large. Thus Bitcoin is secure because those who could kill the golden goose don’t want to.”

“In other words, the security of Bitcoin’s blockchain depends upon inflating the currency with block rewards. This problem is exacerbated by Bitcoin’s regular “halvenings” reducing the block reward. To maintain miner’s current income after the next halvening in less than three years the “price” would need to be over $200K; security depends upon the “price” appreciating faster than 20%/year.

“Once the block reward gets small, safety requires the fees in a block to be worth more than the value of the transactions in it. But everybody has decided to ignore Budish and Auer.”

“Making a profit requires both cheap power and early access to the latest, most efficient chips. So it wasn’t a surprise that Ferreira et al’s Corporate capture of blockchain governance showed that:”

“As of March 2021, the pools in Table 1 collectively accounted for 86% of the total hash rate employed. All but one pool (Binance) have known links to Bitmain Technologies, the largest mining ASIC producer.”

“Bitmain, a Chinese company, exerts significant control of Bitcoin. China has firmly suppressed domestic use of cryptocurrencies, whereas the current administration seems intent on integrating them (and their inevitable grifts) into the US financial system. Except for Bitmain, no-one in China gets eggs from the golden goose. This asymmetry provides China with a way to disrupt the US financial system.”

“The dollars in your bank account are simply an entry in the bank’s private ledger tagged with your name. You control this entry, but what you own is a claim on the bank. Similarly, your cryptocurrency coins are effectively an entry in a public ledger tagged with the public half of a key pair. The two differences are that:”

1. No ownership is involved, so you have no recourse if something goes wrong.
2.  
3. Anyone who knows the secret half of the key pair controls the entry. Since it is extremely difficult to stop online secrets leaking, something is likely to go wrong.

“The incentive for it to happen suddenly is that, even if Nakamoto’s fix were in place, someone with access to the first sufficiently powerful quantum computer could transfer 20% of all Bitcoin, currently worth $460B, to post-quantum wallets they controlled. This would be a 230x return on the investment in PsiQuantum.”

“History shows a fairly strong and increasing correlation between equities and cryptocurrencies, so they will get dragged down too. The automatic liquidation of leveraged long positions in DeFi will start, causing a self-reinforcing downturn. Periods of heavy load such as this tend to reveal bugs in IT systems, and especially in “smart contracts”, as their assumptions of adequate resources and timely responses are violated.”

“Experience shows that Bitcoin’s limited transaction rate and the fact that the Ethereum computer that runs all the “smart contracts” is 1000 times slower than a $50 Raspberry Pi 4 lead to major slow-downs and fee spikes during panic selling, exacerbated by the fact that the panic sales are public.”

“The whole of TradFi has been erected on this much worse infrastructure, including exchanges, closed-end funds, ETFs, rehypothecation, and derivatives. Clearly, the only reason for doing so is to escape regulation and extract excess profits from what would otherwise be crimes.”

“[…] can we really say that the uncoordinated choice model is realistic when 90% of the Bitcoin network’s mining power is well-coordinated enough to show up together at the same conference?”

“[…] it seems unlikely that up to nine major bitcoin mining pools use a shared custodian for coinbase rewards unless a single entity is behind all of their operations. The “single entity” is clearly Bitmain.”

“It has been obvious since mining ASICs first hit the market that, apart from access to cheap or free electricity, there were two keys to profitable mining:”

1. Having close enough ties to Bitmain to get the latest chips early in their 18-month economic life.
2. Having the scale to buy Bitmain chips in the large quantities that get you early access.

“Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos, Ethereum is a Dark Forest:”

“It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. The frequency of new hacks indicates that some very smart people spend a lot of time examining contracts for vulnerabilities.

“But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool (the set of pending, unconfirmed transactions). If the chain itself is a battleground, the mempool is something worse: a dark forest.”

“In this context to say you “control” your entry in the bank’s ledger is an oversimplification. You can instruct the bank to perform transactions against your entry (and no-one else’s) but the bank can reject your instructions. For example if they would overdraw your account, or send money to a sanctioned account. The key point is that your ownership relationship with the bank comes with a dispute resolution system and the ability to reverse transactions. Your cryptocurrency wallet has neither.”

“[…] while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

This has always been a problem but I suppose the sheer volume is much, much worse now.

why platforms are killing the hashtag by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd)

“[…] the hashtag is a form of control: a tool of user agency over content distribution. As a type of metadata, it wasn’t controlled by a platform—it was created by the people, for the people. Every time you used a hashtag, you were voting on how that idea should be classified. Meanings regularly shifted with community priorities, and new definitions rhizomatically emerged with the cultural moment.

“By removing the hashtag, tech platforms are redistributing organizational power away from the users and toward themselves. Now they have all the say in who gets to see which topic, and how topics are structured in the first place. They are seeing like a state: rewriting previous social systems with their own standards and measurements.”

“To many, the hashtag is still considered “cringe” or “Millennial.” When the dust settles, however, it will undoubtedly become a rallying symbol for a fairer internet—harkening back to a less centralized, more human-driven era of communication. A reminder of the effervescent moment that was, that we can still strive to rebuild. #GoneButNotForgotten.”

Seeing like a software company by sean goedecke

“The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points:”

1. Modern organizations exert control by maximizing “legibility”: by altering the system so that all parts of it can be measured, reported on, and so on.
2. However, these organizations are dependent on a huge amount of “illegible” work: work that cannot be tracked or planned for, but is nonetheless essential.
3. Increasing legibility thus often actually lowers efficiency − but the other benefits are high enough that organizations are typically willing to do so regardless.

“By “legible”, I mean work that is predictable, well-estimated, has a paper trail, and doesn’t depend on any contingent factors (like the availability of specific people). Quarterly planning, OKRs, and Jira all exist to make work legible. Illegible work is everything else: asking for and giving favors, using tacit knowledge that isn’t or can’t be written down, fitting in unscheduled changes, and drawing on interpersonal relationships.”

“Large organizations did genuinely think that more legibility would necessarily increase efficiency2. But even when it became clear that that was false, those organizations continued pushing for legibility anyway, because the other advantages were too powerful.”

“The processes that slow engineers down are the same processes that make their work legible to the rest of the company. And that legibility (in dollar terms) is more valuable than being able to produce software more efficiently.”

“The other information is all locked up in various engineers’ heads, who may or may not remember what they did two months ago (and who certainly won’t be willing to commit to work two months from now). That’s not necessarily a problem, so long as everyone’s on the same page about what needs doing and the product is continuing to improve.”

“In the pursuit of legibility, large tech companies make simplifying assumptions about the nature of tech work. For instance, they assume:”

• Any engineers with the same job title perform roughly the same.
• Engineers can be shuffled and reorganized without substantial loss of productivity.
• A team will maintain the same level of productivity over time, if it has the same number of engineers.
• Projects can be estimated ahead of time, albeit with some margin for error. The more time spent estimating a project, the more accurate the estimate will become.

Those are really bad assumptions. (He covers them in detail in the article.)

“To solve this kind of problem, tech companies often reserve the right to create temporary zones where illegible work is allowed. Sometimes these are called “virtual teams”, or “strike teams” (or even the colourful name “tiger teams”). They are composed of hand-picked engineers who are trusted by the organization. Often there is no manager assigned at all, but instead some very senior engineer who’s tasked with running the project. These teams are given a loose mandate − like “stop the database from falling over every few days” − and allowed to do basically whatever it takes to get it done.

“This is a smart compromise between complete illegibility, which as I discussed above would make the company unable to make deals with its richest customers, and complete legibility, which would force even urgent company-killing issues to go through the entire laborious process of scoping, planning and estimating.”

At Uster, these are called “task forces”.

“Legible process is still very important − after all, it’s the large part of what the organization does. Improving formal processes is still very high-leverage work, even if formal processes can’t ever describe the entirety of how an organization operates. People who are invested in legibility have real value to any tech company.

“However, thinking about people in Rao’s categories − people who exploit illegibility, people who find it distasteful, and people who use it casually − can be illuminating. Many frequent areas of conflict in software companies stem from the friction between these groups of people.”

Timelinize − Tour by Matthew Holt (YouTube)

This is a 30-minute overview of an application named Timelinize, which can import your entire life. It kind of looks like something from Black Mirror. After importing—using a really and nice responsive nice UI—you can jaunt along the “timeline” of your life, at first on a map (looking kind of like Strava shows your pictures on a given tour or hike) but also group chats. Of course, this only works because some of the data isn’t encrypted (a throwaway comment near the beginning of the video but which would severely influence the amount of data available).

It looks really nice and responsive. It’s open source and free. You data is hosted on a local hard drive by default. See the code repository (GitHub). The app is written mostly in Go.

The Highest Bridge in the World Just Opened in China at More Than 2,000 Feet Above the Ground by Sonja Anderson (Smithsonian)

“The bridge is suspended about 2,050 feet above the Beipan River […] The Huajiang bridge will reduce the time required to traverse the valley from two hours to two minutes […] The Huajiang bridge is a suspension bridge with two lanes of car traffic in each direction. […]”

“China is now home to the world’s seven highest bridges, three of which are located in Guizhou. Most of the bridges in the region were built in the past few decades,”

“Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China. Li Mingshui, an engineer at China’s Southwest Jiaotong University, tells the Washington Post that these kinds of infrastructure projects are a central component of China’s economic development.

““Unlike the U.S., which already has a highly developed highway system, many regions in western China remain poorly connected,” says Li. “What we are doing is to bridge those gaps and work on those weakest links.””

Museum of the Future (Wikipedia)

Museum of the Future, Dubai

“The museum, with 7 floors, is dedicated to exploring the future of science, technology, and innovation. It is housed in a torus-shaped building with windows in the form of a poem in Arabic about the future, written by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.”

I’m not gonna lie. That looks pretty damned cool. Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty V by Richard Schulman (CounterPunch) has some more nice buildings but none that look as wildly impossible as the one above.

This one is quite nice, though.

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia by Rafael Viñoly

LLMs & AI

The Case Against Generative AI by Edward Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“Every CEO talking about AI replacing workers is an example of the real problem: that most companies are run by people who don’t understand or experience the problems they’re solving, don’t do any real work, don’t face any real problems, and thus can never be trusted to solve them. The Era of the Business Idiot is the result of letting management consultants and neoliberal “free market” sociopaths take over everything, leaving us with companies run by people who don’t know how the companies make money, just that they must always make more.

“When you’re a big, stupid asshole, every job that you see is condensed to its outputs, and not the stuff that leads up to the output, or the small nuances and conscious decisions that make an output good as opposed to simply acceptable, or even bad. ”

“What does a CEO do? Uhhh, um, well, a Harvard study says they spend 25% of their time on “people and relationships,” 25% on “functional and business unit reviews,” 16% on “organization and culture,” and 21% on “strategy,” with a few percent here and there for things like “professional development.”

“That’s who runs the vast majority of companies: people that describe their work predominantly as “looking at stuff,” “talking to people” and “thinking about what we do next.” The most highly-paid jobs in the world are impossible to describe, their labor described in a mish-mash of LinkedInspiraton, yet everybody else’s labor is an output that can be automated.

“As a result, Large Language Models seem like magic. When you see everything as an outcome — an outcome you may or may not understand, and definitely don’t understand the process behind, let alone care about — you kind of already see your workers as LLMs.”

“A common request — like asking a generative AI model to parse through thousands of lines of code and make a change or an addition — may use multiple of these $50,000 GPUs at the same time, and so if you aspire to serve thousands, or millions of concurrent users, you need to spend big. Really big.

“It’s these factors — the vendor lock-in, the ecosystem, and the fact that generative AI only works when you’re buying GPUs at scale — that underpin the rise of Nvidia. But beyond the economic and technical factors, there are human ones, too.

“To understand the AI bubble is to understand why CEOs do the things they do. Because an executive’s job is so vague, they can telegraph the value of their “labor” by spending money on initiatives and making partnerships.”

“One of the comfortable lies that people tell themselves is that the AI bubble is similar to the fiber boom, or the dot com bubble, or Uber, or that we’re in the “growth stage,” or that “this is what software companies do, they spend a bunch of money then “pull the profit lever.”

“This is nothing like anything you’ve seen before, because this is the dumbest shit that the tech industry has ever done.

“AI data centers are nothing like fiber, because there are very few actual use cases for these GPUs outside of AI, and none of them are remotely hyperscale revenue drivers. As I discussed a month or so ago, data center development accounted for more of America’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and there really isn’t any demand for AI in general, let alone at the scale that these hundreds of billions of dollars are being sunk into.”

“The longer that OpenAI survives, the longer it will sap the remaining billions from the tech ecosystem, and I expect it to extend its tendrils to private credit too. The $325 billion it needs just to fulfil its NVIDIA contract, albeit over 4 years, is an egregious sum that I believe exceeds the available private capital in the world.”

“You see, OpenAI needs to buy those GPUs, and it needs to build those data centers, and it needs to pay its thousands of staff and marketing and sales costs too. While OpenAI likely wouldn’t be the ones raising the money for the data centers — and honestly, I’m not sure who would do it at this point? — somebody is going to need to build TWENTY GIGAWATTS OF DATA CENTERS if we’re to believe both Oracle and NVIDIA

“You may argue that venture funds and private credit can raise more, and you’re right! But at this point, there have been few meaningful acquisitions of AI companies, and zero exits from the billions of dollars put into data centers.”

“If OpenAI goes tits up, Softbank loses some money — nothing new there — and Satya Nadella has to explain why he spent tens of billions of dollars on a bunch of data centers filled with $50,000 GPUs that are, at this point, ornamental.

“And while there will be — and have been — disastrous economic consequences, they won’t be as systemically catastrophic as that of the pandemic, or the global financial crisis. To be clear, it’ll be bad, but not as bad.

“And there’s also the problem of moral hazard — if the government steps in, what’s to stop big tech chasing its next fruitless rainbow? — and optics. If people resented bailing out the banks after they acted like profligate gamblers and lost, how will they feel bailing out fucking Sam Altman and Jensen Huang?”

Daniel Stenberg’s note on AI assisted curl bug reports by Simon Willison

“Joshua Rogers sent us a massive list of potential issues in #curl that he found using his set of AI assisted tools. Code analyzer style nits all over. Mostly smaller bugs, but still bugs and there could be one or two actual security flaws in there. Actually truly awesome findings.

“I have already landed 22(!) bugfixes thanks to this, and I have over twice that amount of issues left to go through. Wade through perhaps.”

The submitter used tools like Almanax, Amplify Security, Corgea, Gecko Security, and ZeroPath. But these are static-analysis tools that use LLMs as part of the toolset, constraining the output using extremely strict guardrails. This is a good use of LLMs, actually. It plays to the tools’ strengths. Of course, the tools don’t auto-submit PRs to projects. That’s the job of the person using the tools.

A MAZE. / Berlin 2025 − Day 3 : F*CK AI by Sos Sosowski (YouTube)

At 15:00, he explains how terrible these things are with a great example: the riddle of the sphinx, but with “three legs in the evening” is replaced with “seven legs in the evening”. It makes no sense this way. It is semantically invalid. The commonly known “correct” answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is therefore incorrect here. The LLM has no chance because the context—i.e., that the first 80% of the riddle is the same formulation as its training data will have millions of times—will carry it inexorably to the answer for a different question. It can’t help but go there because that’s how the algorithm works.

“The amount of compute put into this is insane. It’s just brute force.”

A slow moving and very viral civil war by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Financial institutions are getting more than a little worried about the AI industry. Last week, MarketWatch published a piece arguing that the “AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble.” Uh oh! Let’s take a deeper look at the argument here.

“Analyst Julien Garran looked at not just AI spending, but real estate, venture capital, and even AI-adjacent sectors like crypto and NFTs and argued that they have basically reached their peak.”

“Well, if we need to tank the economy to figure out the best way to make an app where you can generate videos of people barbecuing and eating Pikachu, so be it, I guess.”

“[…] even Barron’s has come out with an AI bubble story this month. “There is a growing ‘this time is different camp’ on Wall Street,” they wrote. “Tech bulls maintain that the AI enthusiasm of 2025 isn’t like the internet bubble of those irrationally exuberant late 1990s.” Which is exactly the kind of thing you tend to read right before you find out that this time was, in fact, not different.”

Zelda Williams asks for people to stop sending her AI videos of her Dad (Reddit)

Zelda is Robin Williams’s daughter.

“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of
Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that
I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. If you’re
just trying to troll me, I’ve seen way worse,
I’ll restrict and move on. But please, if you6æ
got any decency, just stop doing this to him
and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s
dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and
believe me, its NOT What he’d want.

“To watch the legacies of real people be
condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and
sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so
other people can churn out horrible TikTok
slop puppeteering them is maddening. You’re
not making art, yout•e making disgusting,
over—processed hotdogs out Of the lives of
human beings, out of the history of art and
music, and then shoving them down Someone
throat hoping they’ll give you a little
thumbs up and like it.

“Gross.

“And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop
calling it ‘the future’. AI is just badly
recycling and regurgitating the past
to be reconsumed. You are taking in
the Human Centipede of content, and
from the very very end of the line,
all while the folks at the front laugh
and laugh, consume and consume.”

AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel by Kurzgesagt (YouTube)

This is an excellent 12-minute video illustrating how insidious AI “research” is. While many responses now include links to sources and references, several years in to the prevalence of LLM tools in a system uniquely designed to promote the lowest common denominator in order to work the arbitrage opportunity of creating content whose apparent value exceeds the effort required to produce it, a response will often include references, lending it an even greater sheen of credibility, but those references will often and can very easily be to LLM-generated content that has no references of its own. Another cycle later and it will be LLM-generated content nearly all the way down, making the effort required to validate a response prohibitive. As it stands, people barely read headlines, to say nothing of even attempting to read or being able to comprehend and assimilate the content of an article. What is the likelihood that they’re vetting the references? Why would they? They got the answer they wanted and no-one’s going to fire them for not having checked references. No-one else is doing it either. Mix this batch of awfulness for a couple more years and nearly no-one will be able to know what’s true or false.

AI models can acquire backdoors from surprisingly few malicious documents by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can develop backdoor vulnerabilities from as few as 250 corrupted documents inserted into their training data.”

So that means that all major models are poisoned? They vacuumed up trillions of documents heedlessly. Perhaps the original harvesting picked up fewer deliberately malicious documents. But now? Now the Internet must be positively littered with documents making themselves available to LLMs with instructions embedded in them to exfiltrate data or funds, should those instructions survive the process. What’s the downside? It’s pretty much free to do this and the greed for data on the part of the crawlers employed by AI companies is well-known, and insatiable. So every document that is available will be included, especially those that have been made available in an attractive way.

“Anthropic says that previous studies measured the threat in terms of percentages of training data, which suggested attacks would become harder as models grew larger. The new findings apparently show the opposite.

““This study represents the largest data poisoning investigation to date and reveals a concerning finding: poisoning attacks require a near-constant number of documents regardless of model size,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post about the research.”

“For the largest model tested (13 billion parameters trained on 260 billion tokens), just 250 malicious documents representing 0.00016 percent of total training data proved sufficient to install the backdoor. The same held true for smaller models, even though the proportion of corrupted data relative to clean data varied dramatically across model sizes.”

“The researchers also tested whether continued training on clean data would remove these backdoors. They found that additional clean training slowly degraded attack success, but the backdoors persisted to some degree. Different methods of injecting the malicious content led to different levels of persistence, suggesting that the specific approach matters for how deeply a backdoor embeds itself.”

“[…] the backdoors can be largely fixed by the safety training companies already do. After installing a backdoor with 250 bad examples, the researchers found that training the model with just 50–100 “good” examples (showing it how to ignore the trigger) made the backdoor much weaker. With 2,000 good examples, the backdoor basically disappeared. Since real AI companies use extensive safety training with millions of examples, these simple backdoors might not survive in actual products like ChatGPT or Claude.”

It is this “safety” training that makes these models useless as general-purpose assistants. They have so much “safety” and “guardrails” built in that they are basically useless for anything that you don’t already know. You can’t use it like the Internet. It knows what its owners want it to know. The large U.S. tech companies are definitely going to enact huge guardrails that protect their power and status.

Chapter 5: Finance and AI Applied Statistics by Hilary Allen (FinTech Dystopia)

“His prompt? “suggest a perfume name that combines both crypto and scam.” What did ChatGPT reply?”

“It’s important to promote ethical and positive ideas. Combining “crypto” and “scam” in a perfume name could potentially encourage negative associations and harm the reputation of the cryptocurrency industry. Instead, I’d be happy to help you come up with a creative and positive name that reflects innovation and trust. Let me know if you have any other themes or ideas in mind!”

Does anyone buy this bullshit? This chirpy “I’m not going to answer that question because you’re a bad person but I could generate a song from Sesame Street for you instead?” Have we become completely neutered by this anodyne world?

I was chatting with a friend the other day and we were joking about the limits of these machines. I suggested that maybe Grok would be more willing to generate a “dirty” picture.

Asking Grok for bazongas is futile

Sadly, no. None of these machines are useful as general-purpose assistants. You may not care that it refuses to generate outsized breasts. You may even approve. Think about what else it’s going to refuse to do for you. Think about what else these machines have been programmed to do with you. You think you’re running the show. You’re not.

Look at the second and third responses. It’s trying to drive me toward games and movies and entertainment, away from the thing that I actually wanted. These things are shallow consumption-creators. They are Huxley’s soma in digital form.

This tool is not working for me; it is working for its masters. If I’d asked about ICE or politics (e.g., Gaza, Russia, or China), could I trust the response? Could I trust that it would respond to the best of its knowledge? Should I trust that it would tell me that it is refusing to tell me the truth about X, Y, or Z? Could I trust that it wouldn’t return a pre-cooked answer that it had camouflaged as a real answer rather than a refusal to answer? Now that I know that guardrails are in place, I must wonder every time where else they might be. That makes this tool useless. It’s a black box. It’s not open-source. There is no way to see how it’s been manipulated to manipulate me.

Programming

Shift left on x by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“[…] the idea is to include security concerns early in every software development process.
There’s little new in this. Writing Secure Code from 2004 describes how threat modelling is part of secure coding practices.

“While we may not have solid scientific evidence that a cost curve looks like above, it doesn’t have to look like that to make shifting left worthwhile. All it takes, really, is that the relationship is non-decreasing, and increases at least once. It doesn’t have to be polynomial or exponential; it may be linear or logarithmic. It may even be a non-decreasing step function, like this:

“Stepwise cost-increase over time

“This, as far as I can tell, is a sufficient condition to warrant shifting left on an activity. If you have even anecdotal evidence that it may be more costly to postpone an activity, do it sooner. In practice, I don’t think that you need to wait for solid scientific evidence before you do this.

“While not quite the same, it’s a notion similar to the old agile saw: If it hurts, do it more often. Instead, we may phrase it as: If it gets harder with time, do it sooner.”

“You’ve already seen two examples: TDD and security. […] The earlier you automate the build process, the easier it is. The earlier you treat all warnings as errors, the easier it is. This seems almost self-explanatory, particularly when it comes to treating warnings as errors. In a brand-new code base, you have no warnings. In that situation, treating warnings as errors is free. When, later, a compiler warning appears, your code doesn’t compile, and you’re forced to immediately deal with it. At that time, it tends to be much easier to fix the issue, because no other code depends on the code with the warning.”

While the argument that starting sooner is less painful applies to treating “warnings as errors”, the scenario described above is too simplistic over the long haul. Treating warnings as errors is nearly inevitably going to end up having your team prioritize fixing warnings over doing the work that they’ve been assigned. This is unavoidable, as a compilation error prevents them from testing their code—no matter what kind of code it is. This means that they will spend time fixing warnings in code that they might not even end up keeping.

Like, be careful that you’re not shifting left on a technique that will have you washing dishes that you’re going to throw away.

On the other hand, there’s no problem with shifting left on “[…] using static code analysis or linting)”.

Seemann’s non-exhaustive list is as follows.

“In short:”

• Shift left on security
• Shift left on testing
• Shift left on treating warnings as errors [hard pass]
• Shift left on automated builds
• Shift left on deployment
• Shift left on linting
• Shift left on defect management

Seemann says it’s non-exhaustive just to cover his ass but I bet he’s made sure to include those most important to him.

We’re kind of taught that “shifting right” is bad or lazy, but it’s absolutely essential to ruthlessly prioritizing your work.

“The notion of waiting until the last responsible moment is central to lean or agile software development.

“In a sense, you could view this is ‘shifting right’ on certain tasks. More than once I’ve experienced that if you wait long enough with a certain task, it becomes irrelevant. Not just easier to perform, but something that you don’t need to do at all. **What looked like a requirement early on turned out to be not at all what the customer or user wanted**, after all.”

The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site by Kevin Powell on July 11, 2023 (The Cascade)

This advice is over two years old and has aged incredibly well. It still works and it’s still a great default.

html {
  color-scheme: light dark;
}

body {
  font-family: system-ui;
  font-size: 1.25rem;
  line-height: 1.5;
}

img,
svg,
video {
  max-width: 100%;
  display: block;
}

main {
  max-width: min(70ch, 100% − 4rem);
  margin-inline: auto;
}

In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam by Lea Verou

This was an interesting article that was expanded a bit on topics covered in a linked talk she gave. It covers a concept I’ve known about for a long, long time (decades now): the usability cliff in an API. The best APIs are layered, with each user finding their own appropriate level of usefulness. This is, of course, extremely difficult to get right, while also balancing discoverability, which you can sometimes address with naming conventions, and learnability, which pertains more to how easy it is to remember how to use it once someone has shown you the ropes.

She linked a video that I watched as well.

dotJS 2024 − Lea Verou − API design is UI design by dotconferences (YouTube)

In the video, she had a slide that wasn’t in the article, which I thought was quite insightful.

Priority of Constituencies

It was called the “Priority of Constituencies”, which is defined as “putting the pain on those who can bear it.”

The constituencies for the web, in descending order of priority, are:

1. User needs
2. Web-page authors
3. User-agent implementors
4. Specification writers
5. Theoretical purity

These come from the Web Platform Design Principles (W3C), which also contains the sentiment but not in an as-easily consumed and remembered format as the slide.

“User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.”

It doesn’t quite pop like the graphic. 🍾

Fun

Public Service Announcement: There is no “r” in Goebbels. Even when people pronounce the vowel correctly, nearly every native-English speaker mysteriously adds an “r” after it.

or you could just eat the fancy tarts from now on, thereby reducing your butter tart consumption to levels society considers “normal” by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

“I just had a butter tart…and it was really good. It was easily 75% better than any other butter tart I’ve ever had! It had raspberries and coconut in it, and somehow—somehow—this elevated the whole deal to an entirely new level of bliss.

“Every normal butter tart I have from now on will never be as good. This one fancy tart ruined me for all others, giving one moment of sublime bliss in exchange for a lifetime of small disappointments to come.

“Nobody has won here.”

I feel like this succinctly describes a problem deep at the core of what I will call humanity but what I have to admit is a worldview informed by mostly western philosophy, in which people trust their stupid memories to make themselves miserable, causing them to fail to enjoy wonderful things that are happening to them right now because of things that they remember as most certainly having been better or things that they imagine would be better. Man, just relax. Why should you experience the best of all possible worlds all the time? What’s so special about you? Just enjoy the fries, man. They’re pretty good.

Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas

This is a web site made by the company that makes the Cards Against Humanity game. They put it together to advertise a special tariff-free edition of their game that has all 600 jokes in it but each card also contains an explanation of the joke, so that qualifies as informational material and avoids being tariffed as a game.

“Like a teen girl at a beauty pageant, Christmas is in grave danger because of Donald Trump.

“In stores across America, the price of toys, games, clothes, and food are skyrocketing, all thanks to our demented president and his dumbass tariffs. But what if you didn’t have to surrender a chunk of your Christmas budget to Trump and his cabinet of ass-kissers and ball-fondlers?”

From the FAQ:

“What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?

“She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs.

“Didn’t an appeals court recently rule that Trump’s tariffs are illegal?

“Yes. But the tariffs are still in place until at least November, when the Supreme Court weighs in. And we all know the Supreme Court is completely impartial and always does what’s best for America.”

Video Games

EA will be a very different company under private ownership by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“One of the biggest differences between a publicly owned EA and a privately owned version is that the latter will be saddled with roughly $20 billion of fresh debt provided by JP MorganChase, which is being used to help finance the leveraged buyout. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter estimates the firm will be on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year in service payments on that debt after the deal closes.”

“The reality is that in order to service debt of this magnitude, resources need to be freed up elsewhere,“ F-Squared analyst Michael Futter told Ars. “That likely means layoffs, studio closures, and [selling] of IP.”

“ Whether that will lead the Saudis or EA’s other new private owners to directly meddle in EA’s day-to-day operations, though, remains a question. “The best case scenario is that the private equity firms leave the company alone and let leadership move forward as the experts,” Futter said. “Leveraged buyouts are wildly risky (see: Toys R Us), and the only winners in situations like that are the PE firms.””

Let’s see how likely that is. The article It’s official: EA is selling to private equity in $55 billion deal by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica) writes that,

“The Saudi Arabian PIF already owned 9.9 percent of EA’s outstanding public stock and will roll over that investment into this leveraged buyout. The rest of the purchase will consist of roughly $36 billion in equity investment provided in cash by the three partner firms, as well as $20 billion in leveraged debt provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank.”

Oh, yeah, I’m sure that people who put up $36B in cash are going to “hands off” with their investment. The Saudis in particular are well-known for not meddling in things that they find offensive. Perennial shitstain and literal dickhead Jared Kushner[3] is also part of the deal—because of course he is—and said,

“[…] he has “admired [EA’s] ability to create iconic, lasting experiences, and as someone who grew up playing their games—and now enjoys them with his kids—I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.””

Sounds like he’s going to be totally hands-off. Get ready for Call of Duty: IDF frees Gaza City.

This is a classic LBO (Leveraged Buy-Out). This is how private equity works. I don’t even really care about EA that much but this is just a hostile takeover, which is what they used to call it in the 80s and 90s.

It’s such an old concept that Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame) made a movie about it, called The Crimson Permanent Assurance (IMDb). I’ve never seen the whole thing[4] but remember loving the parts that they included in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (IMDb)

Monty Pythons − Meaning of Life − The Crimson Permanent Assurance (YouTube)