Links and Notes for January 16th, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
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• Medicine & Disease
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• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
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Public Policy & Politics

Violence is never the answer (we are being watched)

Why Not to Mourn NATO, Volume II: The Bush-Putin Files by Matt Bivens, M.D. and Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“By the mid-2000s the U.S. and NATO were pursuing advanced new offensive and defensive systems that Putin reportedly told Bush were forcing Russia to keep pace with a “barbaric” new arms race, one that “horrified” even Putin himself.”

“Putin: A missile launch from a submarine in Northern Europe will only take six minutes to reach Moscow.

“Bush: I understand.

“Putin: And we have established a set of response measures — there’s nothing good about it. Within a few minutes our entire nuclear response capability will be in the sky.

“Bush: I know.”

“The Oreshnik moves at Mach 10 — only Tom Cruise’s experimental Darkstar, a plane that is not real in a movie about fake places, can compete with it. Thanks to these declassified documents, we now know that while it was on the drawing board, Putin begged us not to push them in the direction of building it, but we blew him off.”

The Lesson, Again: We Look Away When People Are Hors de Combat by Wim Laven (CounterPunch)

“Across the globe, it was recognized that certain spaces and people — hospitals, schools, civilian populations, or the sick and wounded who could no longer fight — deserved protection. The concept of hors de combat, or “out of combat,” is one such distinction. Everyone has seen some version of this, even in cartoons: weapons are laid down, hands are raised, or a white flag signals surrender. These symbols, simple as they may seem, codify the principle that even in war, some protections are inviolable.”

“A former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has argued that these air strikes would constitute crimes against humanity: “These are criminals, not soldiers. Criminals are civilians.” Civilians are, by definition, hors de combat. It is unlawful to relabel an extrajudicial execution as a military strike.”

“Whatever one thinks of Maduro’s legitimacy or alleged crimes, a sitting head of state and his spouse are not combatants by default, nor does criminal accusation transform civilians into lawful military targets. The operation was framed as a hybrid act—part arrest, part strike—yet it relied on military force rather than extradition, judicial process, or international mandate. In doing so, it bypassed the very distinctions that humanitarian law exists to preserve. Hors de combat protections are not limited to the wounded on a battlefield; they reflect a broader principle that force must cease when individuals are not actively engaged in hostilities.”

If You Want Freedom and Democracy For Iranian People and All Peoples, You Must Start By Admitting What America Is and Does by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Trump is a sublimely evil person, just a complete moral failure in every respect, but it’s ultimately good that we can be adults and discuss what’s happening in Venezuela honestly. We don’t care about Venezuelan democracy, we’re going to run the country as long as we want, we’ll never allow a government hostile to the United States or its monetary interests to rule no matter how popular, and we’re doing it for the oil. At least we can have honesty, for once, about why this country does what it does. We don’t care about democracy and human rights, we never have, and we’re not about to start now.”

“And what fries my noodle, what I find just gobsmacking, is the number of people from all across the political spectrum who believe mere weeks after the Venezuela intervention that the United States is going to intervene in Iran in a way that leads to authentic and real Iranian democracy.”

“Mossadegh immediately moved to end British exploitation of Iranian oil, and for good reason: the status quo was, simply, a terrible ripoff, exploitative by any definition and a legacy of British colonialism. Iran was a poor country with large reserves of the world’s most important resource, and they needed to get a better return on that resource in order to stop being poor. But the British preferred for the ripping off to continue, thank you, so they asked the CIA to depose Mossadegh and reinstall the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. The CIA cheerfully complied. Mossadegh was imprisoned for “treason” and confined to house arrest for the last years of his life − he was literally buried under the floorboards of his house to avoid any political blowback − and the Shah reigned as a cruel and authoritarian dictator. Notably, in terms of illegitimately enriching himself, [the Shah] might have been the single most corrupt leader in world history.”

“This decision to protect Pahlavi enflamed the Iranian people who had so recently fought for justice against the Shah’s regime and had demanded his extradition to serve trial for his crimes. America’s decision to shelter [the Shah] led directly to the Iranian embassy takeover and hostage crisis, a detail that Americans often ignore when discussing that event.”

“I think you should understand: there’s nothing lefty or idealistic or unfair about understanding that the United States does not liberate oppressed peoples. That is not what this country does and that is not who we are.”

“[…] the idea that to reject the idea of American intervention in a foreign country’s domestic conflict must necessarily amount to support for an established regime and must necessarily constitute rejection of internal protest movements. The logic, such as it is, treats geopolitics as a moral binary in which the only alternatives are endorsement of U.S. power or complicity with tyranny. It assumes that political agency belongs exclusively to Washington, erasing the possibility that people within those countries might oppose both their rulers and foreign domination at the same time. That this crude logic has been revived, apparently by people unembarrassed by their rejection of history and experience, feels like a depressing regression. I thought we were past this. I thought we were past post-9/11 naivete about freedom and justice growing from the impact craters of cruise missiles. I thought anyone who lived through the last quarter-century would understand why “You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” reasoning is so obviously toxic. But maybe not. Maybe not.”

Why would we be past it? People are actively encouraged to think exactly this by every media source to which they have access. This fairy tale benefitted a handful of people of people mightily. These are the same people who are still in charge. They own nearly the totality of the media to which most people have access.

“You’re eager to ignore the fact that the parts of the Venezuelan opposition approved of by Washington have always had far more support among Western elites than among Venezuelans; you’ll rationalize the fact that Iran is absolutely stuffed with Mossad and CIA agents who have absolutely no intention of letting the country determine its own next leader. You just want to feel righteous and to beat your chest about freedom and democracy.”

“[…] the Iraqi government has exhibited increasingly authoritarian tendencies, particularly through using the judiciary and restrictive legislation to stifle dissent. The political landscape has been defined by what’s sometimes called “nonviolent repression,” especially through the tactical use of court rulings to disqualify political opponents and the passage of vague “decency” laws to arrest activists and journalists. This is a kind of 21st century, postmodern authoritarianism: the government creates structures that are formally legal within the system but which are clearly antithetical to real personal liberty and self-governance by the people.”

This is in no way unique to Iraq. This is SOP.

The Flotillas to Gaza Are the World’s Conscience by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“There will be a new flotilla in April 2026 that will attempt to break the 18-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza. The mission is expected to be the largest maritime action for Palestine to date, involving more than 3,000 activists from 100 countries on 100 boats, including a medical fleet of 1,000 health care workers to deliver 500 tons of life-saving aid, equipment and medical supplies that Israel has blocked from entering Gaza.”

““For all the years I’ve been an activist, I have, every day, lost more and more hope — if I even had any — in the institutions and our so-called leaders, corporations, elected officials, banks, whatever it is, to come to our rescue,” Thunberg said. “They are the ones who have put us in this situation. The system is not flawed. It is designed to be destructive. It is designed, in my view, to have unequal power structures. It is designed to keep some people oppressed. It is designed to keep nature as a distant, separate entity that is not a part of us in order to exploit it. In order to oppress people, we have to dehumanize them. The only way out is to reclaim power, which is one of the main reasons why I’m here supporting the striking workers in Italy. This is such a clear, textbook example of what it looks like when people take back power and show where the real power is.””

““Whenever we are in the context of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the final victory is not a click of the button,” Ávila continued. “It’s a process. We never know when the system will collapse. When it does, we will not be intercepted. We need to be the ones that keep on coming until Zionism does not exist, then we will be able to pass. Or at least when it’s weak enough and we are able to pass. Then we will understand it’s gone. We need to keep on going until the day when the political cost for them to intercept us is too high for them to pay and they need to stay out of our way.””

Renee Good and the Rage that Fuels State Violence by Ruth Fowler (CounterPunch)

“What chills me is not whether a jury will find Ross legally justified. It’s that the system seems uninterested in whether rage itself should disqualify someone from holding lethal authority. The state has taught its agents that they should defend reflexively. They have taught law enforcement for years that civilian death, particularly of young black civilian lives, will be litigated as a PR problem rather than a moral one.”

“Renee Good’s death is being processed by the right as an isolated incident, and by the left as a symbol of the horrors of Trump’s America. It isn’t. It is part of a decades-long continuum in which state violence has increasingly resembles the dynamics survivors recognize from private life for: domination framed as protection, punishment framed as necessity, rage framed as fear. Trump was only able to achieve this because America was already rotten before he arrived.”

Zohran Mamdani Is Right to Stand By Cea Weaver by Ben Burgis (Jacobin)

“[…] socialist scholar Adolph Reed, who described a frustrating argument with a black nationalist radio host who told him that, even though many white people are poor, the important point is that there’s so much more white “collective” wealth than black “collective” wealth. Reed asked his readers to imagine “a white nurse down on her luck and in danger of eviction trying to dip into the collective pot of white wealth for a subsidy, or maybe texting Elon Musk to pitch in.””

“[…] the Right was going after a tenant organizer because she is extremely good at organizing tenants. The good news is that the campaign to embarrass Mamdani with Weaver’s old posts and pressure him to drop her fell flat. Last Wednesday, the mayor was asked about the controversy while he was announcing another appointment. Instead of entertaining any insinuation that Weaver would somehow use her office to go after white landlords while leaving nonwhite landlords alone, Mamdani stood by his appointee. “Cea Weaver is someone that we hired to stand up for tenants across the city,” he told reporters, “based on the track record that she had of standing up for tenants across the city and the state.””

“Mamdani understands that this won’t be the last time right-wing media tries to undermine his affordability agenda with manufactured controversies. Such attacks will be incessant. Given that the mayor himself and many key members of his administration came of age politically at a moment when counterproductive identitarian rhetoric was everywhere on the Left, we’ll probably even see repetitions of this particular script — where in a neat inversion of woke logic, Mamdani-aligned figures are canceled over their wokest tweets from 2020. As he did with the campaign against Weaver, Mayor Mamdani will need to again brush these attacks aside. The betterment of millions of working-class New Yorkers’ lives will depend on it.”

The Machinery of Terror by Chris Hedges (Substack)

““Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.””

“The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.”

““The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!” Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over. These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.”

The Last Word in Russia’s Courts by Anna Narinskaya (The Ideas Letter)

“And here is a less publicized account from 2019 by the Ingush activist Zarifa Sautieva (“participation in an extremist community”; seven and a half years): “I was put in a cell where there was a woman with a child. The child was almost 11 months old then and he was basically born in jail, in the pretrial detention center—meaning he’d spent his whole life in that cell. Such cells are supposed to have better living conditions: like a washing machine, an iron, an ironing board, a drying rack, a rug, a decent crib, so the child can grow up in decent conditions. These are all laws of the Russian Federation; I’m not making anything up. But all I saw when I walked into that cell were hordes of cockroaches crawling over that baby.””

“Our play “The Last Word,” based on speeches made in court by female Russian political prisoners, premiered in December 2022 on the stage of Berlin’s Gorki Theater. It ran for several months. A few times, I came to the lobby at the end of the performance to hear what the audience was saying. The play was in English; the spectators were almost all Berliners. The playbill had my photo, and people occasionally recognized me as the “playwright,” the one who had put together this collage of last words. They would come up and ask which of the speeches were fiction, which had been stylized. “All of them can’t be real, can they?” “The one about Sasha Skochilenko being starved—that can’t be true, can it?” At first, it was very hard for me to answer. The sadistic cruelty of Putin’s regime seemed so obvious, and the notion that anything would have to be created to illustrate that seemed absurd. Then I adjusted, and I explained.”

The War On Free Speech In Australia Is Getting Cartoonishly Absurd by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Australians are being asked to trust a system that would take a woman with an intellectual disability to prosecution in a court of law over an accidental butt-dial to a person of Jewish faith with the authority to send people to prison for years over their political speech. And this is happening after we just spent years watching Australian authorities roll out authoritarian measures to stomp out criticism of Israel and quash protests against an active genocide.

“This is madness, and it needs to be brought to a screeching halt. Immediately. This entire country has lost its damn mind.

“The Bondi attack isn’t the reason, it’s the excuse. All these laws being rolled out to stomp out criticism of Israel in Australia were sought for years before the shooting occurred.”

“Israel’s supporters need to use propaganda, deception, censorship and oppression to promote their agendas, because it’s all they have. They don’t have truth. They don’t have arguments. They don’t have morality. All they have is brute force. They are shoving support for Israel and its atrocities down our throats whether we like it or not, and if we refuse what we’re being force-fed they will punish us. That’s the only tool in their toolbox.”

Australian government exploits Bondi shootings to launch historic attack on free speech by Mike Head (WSWS)

“Even if broken into parts, Labor’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 goes even further, however. It is one of the most serious assaults on democratic rights and political dissent since the right-wing Menzies government outlawed the Communist Party in 1950, only to be defeated in a referendum the next year after the High Court ruled the ban to be unconstitutional.

“Labor’s bill contains arbitrary powers for the federal government to not only criminalise targeted political opinion—branded as “hate crimes”—but to declare political parties or organisations to be “prohibited hate groups.” Their members and supporters face up to 15 years’ imprisonment. That effectively overturns the outcome of the 1951 referendum to deny governments such political banning powers.

“Only unveiled at short notice last Monday night, the more than 450 pages of legislation and its explanatory memorandum also create powers to jail people for displaying symbols opposing such prohibitions, as well as to revoke visas and deport non-citizens who have any alleged “association” with such groups and to ramp up surveillance powers.

“Without defining “antisemitism,” the legislation labels it as a “hate crime.” That effectively paves the way for opponents of the genocide in Gaza, or of the underlying racist ideology of Zionism, to be jailed for up to five years.”

“For example, punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment could be imposed for opposing, whether on social media or in public demonstrations, acts of violence, terrorism, war crimes or atrocities that have been perpetrated by any government supposedly representing people of a particular race, national or ethnic origin.

“Any communication of what crimes had been committed, even if completely accurate, could be accused of being likely to “promote” or “incite” hatred, offense, insult, humiliation or intimidation against that group, causing any supposed “reasonable” member of the group to fear for their safety.

“As an example, the bill states: “Inciting antisemitic hatred against Jews in a public place where a reasonable member of the Jewish community would be intimidated or fear violence.””

Ah, the elusive “reasonable” member of a community, by which is nearly always meant the most sensitive and extreme member of a community who interprets a gnat’s fart at 50 meters to be attempted homicide.

“Once a party or group is outlawed, anyone convicted of recruiting, training, donating or “materially supporting” the organisation faces up to 15 years’ imprisonment, or 10 years if they are even “reckless” as to knowing the risk they are doing so. Any member, formal or “informal” or anyone who has sought membership of the party or group, can be jailed for seven years.”

Madness. Demons. This is the complete and utter dismantling of civil society, of anything resembling a republic. This is thoughtcrime made flesh.

“The Albanese government’s legislation deepens the attack on fundamental democratic rights initiated by the New South Wales state Labor government when it similarly rammed through laws just before Christmas that overturn the right to protest and hand extensive powers to the police to crack down on all forms of political dissent. The Greens assisted Labor by abstaining on that bill, helping it pass the state’s upper house of parliament.

“This a wider Labor-led offensive. The Bondi Beach terrorist attack is being cynically exploited to not only ban anti-genocide demonstrations, but suppress mounting opposition among workers and young people to the plunge into war, social austerity, climate catastrophe and authoritarian forms of rule.”

The Midwest Bank feat. Maryam Mohamad by Chapo Trap House (YouTube)

Excellent interview about ICE in Minnesota and the complete collapse of constitutional law that it implies.

As World Economic Forum in Davos opens, a major shift in Swiss security policy underway by Marianne Arens (WSWS)

“Points 42 to 44 state, among other things, that an “international exchange of air situation data” is to take place, and that the Swiss army is to participate in urban warfare exercises. “Switzerland will increasingly participate in multinational exercises and conduct joint training with partners abroad, particularly to train combat in built-up areas and the combined arms battle.” Point 18 states: “Switzerland implements all sanctions of the UN Security Council and, whenever appropriate, aligns itself with the sanctions of its most important trade and value partners.””

“Switzerland’s much-vaunted “neutrality” is increasingly being eroded. The strategy states: “An increasing number of NATO exercises are defence exercises, so-called Article 5 exercises. Participation in such exercises is compatible with neutrality, since Switzerland does not simulate alliance membership, but exercises its real role as a partner that depending on the scenario, is directly or indirectly challenged in defence-policy terms.” And in Point 16, on so-called “military peace support”: “Through deployments for military peace support, Switzerland contributes to international stability and security. The army gains operational experience in the process.””

This does not bode well, because they think they can get away with it. They have wound themselves up into an anti-Russian hysteria…and also smell so much personal profit for themselves.

“[…] the particularly controversial Air2030 project, which envisages the purchase of 36 F-35A fighter jets from the US. A referendum in 2020 approved this by a very narrow margin (50.1 percent), but since then the US arms manufacturer Lockheed has massively increased the price of these aircraft. Nevertheless, the government wants to stick with the purchase.”

“These defence policy measures do not serve to defend the population, but to secure profits on global markets, whether through the arms industry or Swiss big business and banks. How strongly the interests of the banks dominate the Swiss government was recently demonstrated by the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, which the government in Bern financially underwrote, thereby tying the fate of the entire country to that of its largest bank.”

“In this respect, Switzerland differs little from the US and other countries that are in the process of discarding democratic norms. […] The issue confronting millions of workers and young people is the most fundamental: socialism or barbarism.” This assessment now also applies equally to Switzerland.

“To escape barbarism, it is necessary to mobilise the Swiss working class as part of the international class struggle against war and capitalism. This requires the building of independent rank-and-file action committees in all workplaces and industries, and the construction of a Swiss section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.”

Australia’s Frightening New “Hate Speech” Laws Are Clearly Aimed At Pro-Palestine Groups by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Under the new laws we can expect to see the Israel lobby crying about Jewish Australians feeling threatened and unsafe by every pro-Palestine group under the sun, and then from there all it takes is the thumbs-up from ASIO to put the group on the banned list and cage anyone who continues associating with it for up to 15 years.”

“[…] we can expect the Australian Israel lobby to both (A) push to get pro-Palestine groups classified as “hate groups” under the new laws and (B) keep pushing to make it illegal for individuals to criticize Israel in the form of new “racial vilification” laws. They’ll keep trying over and over again, from government to government to government, until they get their way.”

“It’s so creepy knowing I share a country with people who want to destroy my right to normal political speech. It would never occur to me to try to kill Zionists’ right to free speech, but they very openly want to kill mine. They want to permanently silence me and anyone like me. I find that profoundly disturbing.”

All Unquiet on the Ukrainian Front by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“the missile that hit Lviv seemed to have more to say to the regime in Kiev and its Western backers, notably all those supercilious Europeans. Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital, has been a safe haven these past four years of conflict. Not to be missed, it lies roughly 45 miles from the border with Poland.

“Russia’s declared intent in launching its second Oreshnik was to respond to the Dec. 29 drone attack the Ukrainians, with the usual assistance of the Americans and Brits, launched on President Vladimir Putin’s secondary residence in Valdai, northwest of Moscow.

“Parenthetically, Kiev and the C.I.A., two famous truth-tellers, deny any such attack took place, but let us not waste any time with this silliness. The Russians have reportedly presented Western officials with evidence of the event.”

ICE Claims To Be Exempt From The Fourth Amendment by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Being a bit more practical than an academic, it would appear that the ICE memo instructing its officers to enter people’s homes without a warrant is, to be a bit of a traditionalist, completely and flagrantly unconstitutional. And it doesn’t matter because there is nothing either an alien or an American citizen whose home was violated can effectively do about it.

“[…]

“It’s not that ICE is right or has any lawful authority to break into you home, but it’s that the Supreme Court has effectively killed any remedy for doing so. They win by default.”

Wolves Crying Wolf (Canada, Denmark, etc) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“People like Canada’s Mark Carney are crying foul about the demise of the ‘rules-based order’ now, over fucking Greenland, and not over the whole Palestinian genocide he just merrily supplied and supported, or any number of atrocities Canada has been involved in, including Canada. White people really want to do crime and high-fives for confessing. I hope America does take Canada, to cure them of their delusion of being the ‘good guys’ of colonialism. I say this as a passport-carrying Canadian.

“Carney’s ‘speech of the century’ isn’t worth the dust on a Palestinian fighter’s sandals. His resistance isn’t worth a drop of sweat from the actual resistance, which Canada still condemns as terrorists. Canada is still on America’s side in every imperial war, they’re not on our side at all. Remember that Canada is a card-carrying member of the White Empire and is only complaining now that its white privileges are being threatened. Remember that Carney was Central Banker for the UK also, he’s a ripe example of how Canada is not a real country and how the White Empire is one.

“What he’s complaining about here is not a loss of human rights but white privilege. The privilege to invade other people but to keep your own stolen home. Even within the speech, Carney is proudly talking about funding the corrupt Ukrainian dictatorship, all to further American interests. He’s only complaining now that America is interested in his territory, he has no actual principles.”

“[The king of Denmark is] seriously saying we helped you occupy non-Europeans, why would you do it to us? Their Ambassador is fondly remembering the murder tour they took of Afghanistan together, and wondering where the bromance has gone. These people are not mourning the loss of the ‘rules-based order’ here, they’re bemoaning the fact that the actual rules might apply to them. That they might be invaded because they’re weak, despite their White skin.”

“All of these countries have been occupied by America since World War II and only got to participate in further wars like a kid in the back of the car, tooting on a toy steering wheel while running poor Muslims over. Now they’re confused that ‘Daddy’ is yelling at them, when they used to have so much fun killing pedestrians together. As NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte pathetically said about Trump, “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.””

“[…] let us be historically specific, America is cannibalizing the Greater White Empire because it has lost the world. The great game is Asia, which America is retreating from, tail slung. They’re losing a land war to Russia, lost a naval war to Yemen, lost air supremacy to Iran, and lost a trade war to China. L after L abroad requires a few Ws at home. That’s why they’re turtling up in the Americas and biting Europe in the ass now. The great game is already lost and they’re going after consolation prizes closer to home.”

America deserved this… by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Surprisingly, I find myself agreeing with Nick: the U.S. should be cracking down on all types of fraud.

The fraud he and his acolytes in Congress are laser-like focused on is, of course (and as ever) penny-ante fraud, often committed by the poor and the desperate. Some grow fat on their fraud, but most hustle for years and end up barely staying ahead of the game. Think of most participants in an MLM, for example. But let’s stay focused on fraud that directly appropriates taxpayer money.

I think we should root out and end high-level forms of government fraud, which is a million times worse. Literally. Where low-level fraudsters steal hundreds or thousands, the real criminals steal billions. There is no comparison. No-one in Congress is interested in talking about this fraud because they directly benefit from it.

Those who steal billions are delighted when their loyal minions foreground people like Shirley. Their minions hope to get a few crumbs from the real, high-powered fraud perpetrated by those who already have so much.

The American Police State Has Arrived by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“By recognizing natural rights by name in the first eight amendments and by recognizing the existence of human rights too numerous to name in the Ninth Amendment — and by requiring the government to protect them — the Framers and ratifiers advanced a government, the essential purpose of which was unambiguously to preserve personal freedom; not government order or power, but personal freedom. The Revolutionary War was fought, Jefferson argued, to craft a government here that would protect natural rights, not assault them.

“A police state is the antithesis of the constitutional scheme advanced by Jefferson and Madison. In a police state, the laws are written so as to appear to defend freedom; but they are enforced and interpreted so as to enhance the power of the government.

“When the government tries to intimidate people into silence, when it brutalizes people who shake their fists at its agents, when it threatens to criminalize speech by public officials critical of it, when it terrorizes those who speak their minds — and gets away with these unconstitutional and stomach-churning acts — the American police state has arrived.”

‘The Fourth Amendment Literally Exists to Prevent This’: Memo Claims ICE Can Forcibly Enter Homes Without Judicial Warrants by Jessica Corbett (Scheer Post)

““Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “It is a legally and morally abhorrent policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time.”

““In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without a judge giving a green light,” he continued. “Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire. I am deeply grateful to brave whistleblowers who have come forward and put the rights of their fellow Americans first.”

““My Republican colleagues who claim to value personal rights against government overreach now have an opportunity and obligation to prove that rhetoric is real,” the senator added. “They must hold hearings and join me in demanding the Trump administration answer for this lawless policy.””

Jan 21, 2026 post by Radley Balko (BlueSky)

“They just make up bullshit, bad-faith legal theories, do what they want until a court stops them, then lather, rinse, and repeat.

“In the meantime, they get to terrorize people. And nothing will happen to any of those responsible.

“Our courts are not equipped to deal with this.”

Outside the immigration law firm downtown… [Seattle] (Reddit)

Lady Liberty shot dead

ICE Tells Legal Observer, ‘We Have a Nice Little Database, and Now You’re Considered a Domestic Terrorist’ by C.J. Ciaramella (Reason)

“The video is the latest example of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) labeling anyone who engages in First Amendment–protected activity opposing the Trump administration’s mass deportation program as a “domestic terrorist” and suggesting they’ll be subject to federal investigations.

“The DHS did not immediately respond to request for comment on the scope of the database mentioned by the officer or whether it considers protected First Amendment activity to be conduct that warrants inclusion on the database.

“Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported today that an unnamed federal law enforcement official told him that DHS “has ordered immigration officers to gather identifying information about anyone filming them.””

DHS didn’t even exist 25 years ago. Neither did ICE. And now they seem to be in charge of how people’s lives run in that country. The actual governments—federal, state, and local—are completely subordinate to them.

Journalism & Media

Permanently Banned From Instagram by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

“So look guys, I think you know as well as I do, that I’ve been taken down, not because I’m a dangerous individual or anything like that, but because I’ve criticized empire. I’ve criticized the purveyors, the paragons of free speech.

“Zuckerberg stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump at his inauguration. He’s now siding with the Trump administration publicly, and they’re the free speech absolutists. He presumably supports JD Vance, scolding Europe for being too tough on free speech. And yet, when I criticize Empire, when I criticize the cheeky monkeys, the Israelis, I’m nuked.

“So, I just want to let you know, whether you’re on the left or you’re on the right or you’re interested in politics at all, tech totalitarianism is not coming, guys. It’s here right now.

“As long as you play by their rules and do what they want you to do and allow your data to be extracted by them, allow them to surveil you to the ends of the earth and sell you all their tat, then they’re okay with you.

“But if you criticize, if you push back, you are cancelled.”

Zionist Billionaires Openly Acknowledge Manipulating The US Government by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Some people will look at these clips and claim it’s antisemitic to even share them. Others will look at them and cite them as evidence that the world is ruled by Jews. For me they’re just evidence that the world is ruled by wealthy sociopaths, and that western democracy is an illusion.

“I mean, you really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the sham of American democracy than this. Two billionaires from supposedly opposite political parties publicly admitting that they use their obscene wealth to manipulate US politics to advance the military and geopolitical agendas of a foreign state on the other side of the planet.”

“Corruption is legal in the United States of America. Plutocrats are allowed to leverage their fortunes to manipulate the US government using campaign funding and lobbying for the advancement of their personal, financial, and ideological agendas. If you have a few million dollars to spare you can use them to make criminal charges go away, to roll back environmental regulations or worker protections which hurt the profit margins of your business, or even to get military explosives shipped to a foreign government for use in an ongoing genocide.

“And it’s all being done with complete disregard for the will of the electorate. The American people have no control over what their government does under the current political system. They vote for one oligarchic puppet, then they vote for the oligarchic puppet in the other party when that doesn’t work out, going back and forth without realizing that at no point are they changing the actual power structure under which they live.

“That power structure is called plutocracy. That’s [the] only real political system the United States has.”

Labor

”What Is Going to Happen?” by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“[…] The Trump administration came in and tore up federal union contracts and carelessly fired hundreds of thousands of unionized workers and shut down the NLRB, which enforces labor laws, and in a matter of months carried out the most devastating program of union-busting that we have seen in a century. And guess what? In an objective, good-faith sense, almost all of these actions were illegal, or at the very least in gross violation of the spirit of the law. And guess what else? Trump did not care about that fact, while his opponents—big labor unions—did. As they ran to court over and over again, he simply carried out his will. Though some courts rolled back some portions of what he has done, the overall effect after one year is a drastically weakened labor movement whose institutions have been mostly futile in the face of what is happening to us all.

“They believe too much in the rules. That can be useful when your opponent also believes in the rules. But when your opponent is in charge and doesn’t care about the rules, then the rules become nothing but a weight around your neck. For example: It is illegal for federal workers to strike. When Trump tore up their union contracts, they should have gone on strike anyhow, because it is a form of direct power independent of mutual agreement on the rules, which did not exist. That proposition is not something that the institutions of organized labor as currently constituted were able to wrap their heads around with the necessary speed. So, the unions were smashed in the real world. They continue to complain about the rules being broken.”

Cold City, Hot Heart by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“We made it to the clinic and they took her in and gave her a cup of coffee and then everyone sort of went on their way as if things were normal. The whole thing seemed preposterous and I wanted to say “Can you fucking believe this shit?” to somebody, but there was nobody out there to say it to. Imagine being poor and having no health insurance so you have to go to the clinic and you have no car so you have to take public transportation and the elevator is out and you have no cell phone and you can’t roll your wheelchair up the hill because a homeless person is snowed in on the sidewalk so you just sit there and freeze to death. Right there in the middle of Minneapolis. Meanwhile the government is telling us too many people want to come here. What a country.”

“JD Vance came here today and pontificated in his particular smug way. “We have so many people here that we do not want to have here. I do not want so many ICE officers in Minneapolis. I mean, good lord, it’s really, really friggin cold outside. But they’re here not even to enforce immigration laws, but to protect the people from the rioters.”

“Unfortunately, the thugs I sent to kidnap you have provoked you into anger that has forced me to send even more thugs. Why do you make me hurt you like this?

“It will be -15 degrees in Minneapolis tomorrow. The people are going to shut down the city because they are sick of injustice. Let’s watch and admire them and walk beside them. If they can do it here, you can do it too. It’s warmer where you are.”

Economy & Finance

China trade surplus hits historic record by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“In response to criticism of the surplus from the major economic powers, particularly the European Union, which has complained that it is being flooded with cheap Chinese imports, the Chinese government sought to turn the tables.

“The vice minister of the General Administration of Customs of China, Wang Jun, said the export controls of China’s partners were preventing China from importing more.

“And then directing remarks at the US, without directly naming it, he continued: “It should be pointed out that some countries politicise economic and trade issues, issuing various pretexts to restrict exports of high-tech products to China; otherwise, we would import more. There is vast room for import growth.”

“But such calls for the freeing up of trade and the lifting of export controls will not bring about a lessening of restrictions. Rather, they are likely to be intensified. Foreshadowing moves by the EU, French President Emmanual Marcon has called the flood of goods coming out of China “unbearable.””

This whole sordid chain of events lays bare the lie that western nations believe in competition and fair play and common good. They made up a bunch of rules for running the economy that benefitted them and sounded good to those who weren’t immediately benefitted. They sounded good to those who were subjugated because they thought that, if they were to follow the rules, they would get to benefit as much as those who’d set up the system. That was always a lie. China has exposed it by absolutely dominating the game. Now we watch as the empire and its vassals flip the table in a tantrum, take their ball and go home.

Yes, China has its own problems of unsustainable growth, of oligarchs within pushing the country in a direction that benefits them. This is always going to happen.

“The refusal to take measures to advance growth within China is leading to problems as the government continues to grapple with stagnant consumption spending, falling investment apart from high-tech and export sectors and the drag on the economy as a result of the collapse of the property boom.

“As for social services, like capitalist governments around the world, the Xi regime, despite its “socialist” pretensions, is hostile to the expansion of welfare measures to the aged and the working class more broadly.

“Back in 2021, Xi declared: “Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot easily be brought down. Engaging in ‘welfarism’ beyond our capacity is unsustainable and will inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems.”

“In words that could have come out of the mouth of any “free market” capitalist politician in the West, Xi is on record as saying: “We must resolutely avoid falling into the trap of ‘welfarism’ that breeds idleness.””

Huh. Today I learned.

“Successive US governments, beginning well before Trump, have used every economic measure at their disposal—tariffs, export controls, bans on the use of Chinese technology in the US and globally—to try to hold back Chinese growth and technological development, regarding it as the chief threat to the global dominance of the US.

“But as the trade numbers reveal, these efforts are manifestly failing.

“[…]

“This means the increasing turn to imperialist war by the US as it strives to maintain its economic dominance.”

Can the AI Folks Save Democracy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

Dean’s idea is for people who are driving AI forward right now to stop thinking of their own personal gain and to just … not. Just stop pushing, and let the soufflé collapse, sooner rather than later. There will be more than enough to do after the fall, when these same people can help pick the valuable pieces out of the wreckage.

“AI workers may have the power to do something very important in the present, […] or not so distant future. They can save democracy.

“Their route to saving democracy is by not doing AI, or at least not doing AI with their current employers.”

“[…] in my view this is not an issue of doing something bad to the economy. I have written before on how it would be good if the AI bubble bursts sooner rather than later. The same was true for the 1990s tech bubble and the housing bubble in the 00s. In all these cases we would have been much better off if the bubbles had burst years earlier.

“Huge amounts of resources were being misallocated. The larger the bubble, the more painful the readjustment process. And to be clear, an economy where all the consumption growth is coming from the richest 20 percent of the population is not a healthy one. Bringing that pattern of growth to an end soon looks pretty good in my book.

“We know the top people in tech, folks like Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, are just fine with Trump’s destruction of democracy. But these are not the people who make their companies economic powerhouses. If the people who actually do the work step forward, they really can change the world. The rest of us will keep trying too.”

Time for Europe to Use the Nuclear Option: Attack U.S. Patent and Copyright Monopolies by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Not only will the patent/copyright route inflict far more pain on the big actors in Donald Trump’s America, in contrast to the tariff route, it will offer real gains for the people of Europe. Imagine everyone being able to get iPhones at less than half their current price, free or near free Microsoft software, and the latest Disney and Paramount productions at zero cost. This is genuinely a case where everyone can gain from free trade: eliminating patent and copyright monopolies.

“This move also exposes the Big Lie of economic policy of the last half century. There has been a massive upward redistribution of income over this period. There is more the case in the United States than in Europe, but income has also shifted upward there as well. That has contributed to the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.

“The Big Lie is that the upward redistribution was the natural workings of the market. The claim is that the course of technology and globalization just turned out to benefit the more educated segments of the population, and especially those at the very top.

“That is a lie since there is nothing natural about the government-granted patent and copyright monopolies that play a huge role in this upward redistribution. Governments could have made these monopolies shorter and weaker rather than longer and stronger, or even relied more on other mechanisms to support innovation and creative work.”

Stock Watch by WKUK: Whitest Kids U' Know (YouTube)

This is meant as satire but it must sound exactly the same as CNBC to most people.

Science & Nature

NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)

“When a planet passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight shines through its atmosphere. Webb has the sensitivity to detect the filtered starlight and break it apart into its spectral components, telling astronomers about the composition of clouds and hazes in the planet’s atmosphere.”

“Pandora will point and stare at 20 preselected exoplanets 10 times during its one-year prime mission, collecting 24 hours of visible and infrared observations with each visit. This will capture short-term and longer-term changes in each star’s behavior. SpaceX launched Pandora into a so-called “twilight orbit” that follows the boundary between day and night on Earth, allowing the satellite to keep its solar panels illuminated by the Sun while performing its observations.

““We can send this small telescope out, sit on a star for a really long time, and sort of map all the star spots, and really disentangle the star and planet signals,” Quintana said in a recent panel discussion at NASA Goddard. “It’s filling a really nice gap in helping us to sort of calibrate all these stars that James Webb is going to look at, so we can be really confident that all of these molecules that we’re detecting in planets are real.””

““It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].””

Imagine this statement coming from the mouth of a military contractor. The incentives are completely different. See the article about the over $1T that has flowed into the F-35 program and the returns on it.

This is perfectly encapsulated by one of my favorite stickers of all time. 25 years after I first bought it—and 46 years after it was printed—it still describes all you need to know about the U.S., or any authoritarian, militaristic country.

The Air Force should have to hold bake sales to raise money

“it will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”

Environment & Climate Change

From a comment on the article “California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years” by kens (Hacker News)

Dangerous Winter Conditions Cause 100-plus Vehicle Pileup In Michigan by FOX Weather (YouTube)

This is a high-quality drone video of a pileup. I watched carefully to see whether I could detect AI provenance. I couldn’t so I guess it’s real?

Hard to digest: we still live in Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (The Guardian)

“Today, four companies control 56% of the worldwide market for seeds and 61% of the market for pesticides. Five companies control about 70% to 90% of the worldwide trade in grains. Four companies control more than 80% of the US supply of beef, 70% of its pork and 60% of its market for chicken. Four companies control about 75% of the US market for yoghurt, 79% of its market for beer. Three firms control 93% of its market for carbonated soft drinks. Factory farming has extended monopoly power even to commercial-livestock genetics. Two companies provide the breeding stock for more than 90% of the world’s egg-laying hens and turkeys.”

Medicine & Disease

US officially out of WHO, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unpaid
by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“[…] the US owed the WHO $278 million in dues, which are a percentage of each member state’s gross domestic product. That dues payment covered the country’s 2024–2025 membership, as WHO runs on a two-year budget cycle.

“In the past, such payments were made through the State Department’s international agencies bureau. A spokesperson for the department told Stat that there was no way the US would pay its debt.”

“In addition, the US had also promised to provide $490 million in voluntary contributions for those two years. The funding would have gone toward efforts such as the WHO’s health emergency program, tuberculosis control, and the polio eradication effort, Stat reports. Two anonymous sources told Stat that some of that money was paid, but they couldn’t provide an estimate of how much.”

There are thousands of Trump creditors out there, ruefully shaking their heads in cynical sympathy.

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Little Addie’s Last Fight by Steve Szilagyi (3QuarksDailly)

“Addie shows his confidence by offering to let Nelson fight him with horseshoes in his gloves. The standard boxing glove of that time is something like the padded mittens skiers wear today. The glove is not so much intended to soften blows, as to prevent a fighter’s knuckles from being flensed by the other man’s jaw and forcing an early end to the entertainment.”

“What follows is still remembered as one of the longest, most primitive and brutal fights in the history of modern boxing.”

“Nelson’s lip splits early. Soon after, Wolgast’s nose cracks audibly under a counterblow, but the younger man never slackens. By the seventh round Nelson is staggering, though he finds strength enough to land a blow to Wolgast’s head that looses a torrent of blood from the challenger’s cauliflower ear.”

“By the thirteenth round Nelson’s face and chest are smeared with his own blood, and it appears only a matter of moments before Wolgast will finish him. But, as one boxing writer later observes, it is “a battle between two egotists”—two men resolved to die on their feet rather than fall at the other’s.”

“In the twenty-second round Nelson catches Wolgast flush on the jaw and sends him to the canvas “as if felled by an axe.” For an instant the end seems at hand. But the Michigan Wildcat staggers to his feet, shakes his head clear, and goes back at the champion with renewed fury, carrying the battle for eighteen more rounds.”

“By the thirty-ninth Nelson can scarcely lift his arms. His mouth is grotesquely swollen, his eyes narrowed to slits, and the battered side of his face has lost all human contour. Blood spatters the ringside seats. Hundreds of spectators have already left, disgusted by the brutality of the spectacle.”

“It is estimated that he fights 40-45 times over the next seven years – a number for which the word staggering is appropriate in every sense.”

“The accumulated effect of the hundreds of blows Addie receives to the head (or inflicts on himself by using his head as an offensive weapon) before and after the fight with Nelson has turned his brains to mush. Amazingly, even after 1917, there are promoters and managers crass enough to put the former champion on fight cards – and audiences sit back to watch whatever is left of Addie’s brain get turned from mush to milkshake. Over his lifetime, he fights some 123 bouts.”

“By the time Addie dies in 1955, he is blind, weak, and barely sentient. He receives an obituary in Time. One newspaper writes that after the Nelson fight, Addie spent fifty years on “Dream Street.” No. It was much worse than that.”

“[…] highly recommend Arne K. Lang’s book, “The Nelson-Wolgast Fight and the San Francisco Boxing Scene, 1900-1914””

Word Collision by Richard E. Maltby Jr., Roddy Howland Jackson (Harper's Magazine)

“In music, the structure of a sentence is given in advance: where the accents are, what the rhythm is. If I have a thought I want to express in that sentence, I have to use the vast arsenal of the English language to find a way to express that thought while fulfilling the music’s rhythmic and tonal demands. It is often very hard. Something perfect in spoken language has to give way to the musical constraints. But when it succeeds, it is a creative thrill.”

“Here’s a clue from one puzzle: “By coating finish, you get working supply? (5).” It reads like a sentence from an instruction manual. But in the world of cryptic clues, a solver would know to mentally repunctuate the first half of the clue to tell you how to spell the five-letter answer. If BY “coats” END (a synonym for “finish”), you get BENDY. It might take a moment to realize that “supply” in the clue isn’t a noun, but rather an adverb.”

“Try this one: “Sign for and take $100 off recreational vehicle on beach (9).” Take C (one hundred in Roman numerals) off CAMPER (“recreational vehicle”) on SAND (“beach”). Do you see the definition? “Sign for and.” AMPERSAND. Could it be more obvious?”

“RM: “The definitive manifestation of the human comedy is a crime (12).””

your reality is someone’s content by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd)

“These videos, which have dramatically increased online in recent years, fundamentally erode the magic of places like Washington Square Park by farming real-life interactions for digital content.”

“This rise in clip farming culture cannibalizes present moments for the future, turning our reality more transactional.”

“The more we rely on the transmission view of communication, the less incentive there is to treat other people with care. […] If the point is distribution above connection, it’s okay to hurt other people as long as your message gets across.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

American Capernaum by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“An American influencer like the 20-year-old iShowSpeed is perfectly happy to follow Ronaldo from Manchester to Riyadh. Neither the player nor the fan, it turns out, had any real commitment to the particular sort of “beauty” that could once be found in the working-class popular spirit of the game, a spirit historically forged in Europe and reproduced organically in Latin America and Africa, but only imported in a pre-fab and top-down way, once it became a massive global financial enterprise, into the simulacral societies of the Gulf petro-states. Ronaldo follows the money to Felix Arabia, and the hearts of young Speed and of old Trump, filled with nothing but pure thoughtless heat-seeking instinct, follow in his train.”

“There was a hilarious moment some years back when a group of Syrian rebels hacked the now-Moscow-exiled Bachar al-Assad’s iTunes account, and revealed to the world that his tastes lean mostly towards O-Zone, and Maroon 5, and shit like that. Now everything is relative, and I’m not claiming there have been no downloads of “Dragostea din tei” or of the odious, disgraceful, civilization-ending “Moves Like Jagger” to IP addresses in Tehran. What I am saying is that our clichés about the culture that was forced underground with the Islamic revolution in 1979 are based on some truth: everything from mid-century Persian graphic design to the practically Jüngerian diagnosis of “Occidentosis” in the work of a mid-century writer such as Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad, evidences a complicated, conflicted, but ultimately serious inheritance of a distinctly European idea of culture, and of the social and political urgency of fostering and preserving a distinctly modern and secular “high” culture. In this respect, the most comparable historical trajectory of a regional neighbor to Iran is not Arabia, but Russia.”

“It is indeed a great irony that the Soviet Bloc would serve as home to the last surviving pockets of people who take it for granted that one must know how to read sheet music, or that little boys should be dressed in sailor suits, swaddled in infancy, given mustard presses, or that men must display otherwise forgotten forms of gallantry towards women in public spaces, while meanwhile in the supposedly non-revolutionary parts of the world young people were turning towards a sort of radical and leveling free-love utopianism that had not been seen in the West since the early years of the Anabaptists.”

“I suppose what I’m trying to say is I am attached to, indeed I love, the ideal of culture as it took shape in high modernity, which I date to the end of the 19th century, and which may be seen as headquartered metonymically in Vienna. I love Russians and Persians and Romanians and every other ethnolinguistic community that has done the hard work of importing, into our current much-decayed age, into our fractured context of no context, at least some memory of why all that once mattered so much.”

“In France, they say, you can while away your day sitting and reading in an old-style café; yet I have never been able to sit more than 15 minutes in such a place before the waiter comes to give me a list of all the rules I’m breaking, to tell me I’ll have to pack up and go because it will soon be the sacrosanct lunch hour — and so inevitably I end up at one of Paris’s many fine Starbucks locations, where I am left in peace, and where I find my students sitting and studying too.”

Boo France! This has never happened to me in Switzerland.

“I have sat through countless lunches and dinners with such ephemeral American Parisians as these. One such visitor —an emeritus Ivy League academic—, upon learning that I live in a traditionally working-class and immigrant arrondissement, asked me how my neighbors must feel about such a case of “gentrification” as he imagined I represent. Brother, I had to explain to him, I am an immigrant, and I live in this arrondissement because it is all we can afford. My neighbors see me, for the most part, as one of them.”

Same.

“Americans know what it’s like to be at odds with their own government; they do not, for the most part, know what it’s like to be afraid of America as such. And unlike the Israelis, this myopia seems to come not from some spirit of Churchillian pluckiness, but from living in a vacuum, from contextlessness, from literal idiocy.”

“One can’t help but wonder whether they in fact would like to be vassalized all over again, or at least to renew and reinvigorate the Pax Americana, which has permitted them to maintain robust state welfare systems while the Americans take care of their defense — which has given them license in turn superciliously to bemoan the US’s failure to see to its own citizens’ health and well-being.”

Yikes, Justin. That’s a really really lazy and dumb argument. I hear someone arguing against a lot of privileged French people in academia but, man, you can’t get sucked into that discussion. He’s making it sound like Europe was only able to build up a social-welfare state because it’s been coddled by Daddy … next I guess he’s going to tell us that Putin could invade at any time. Jesus wept. Please don’t write something like that. Let me continue my illusion that you couldn’t think something like that, Justin.

Why I Try to Be Kind by James McWilliams (The Hedgehog Review)

“Less obvious is where hardworking people direct their anger. Whatever it is that prevents regular people from blaming (much less going after) the billionaires is strange and complex (and worth its own essay). But there’s no denying that, generally speaking, the tech bros have successfully engineered their way around systemic public approbation. Those who have walked away with all the toys remain admired for their toys.”

This is not a mystery. They’ve been ordered to admire billionaires and U.S.-Americans follow orders. Even if they think they don’t, they only think this because they’ve been ordered to view themselves as obstreperous rebels, while only rebelling against targets chosen by their masters.

“[…] as the billionaires build their yachts and sail off into a frictionless paradise, the rest of us turn minor concerns—your place in a line of cars—into high-stakes battles. In short, hardworking people with so much in common are fighting with each other over how to get ahead, how to have a smidge more than the next guy, and how to get the biggest piece of the world’s smallest slice of pie. None of it is surprising. It’s what people do when they feel squeezed by scarcity. It’s a jungle out there. The tech bros designed it that way. And kindness will get you nowhere.”

Life Happens at 1x Speed by Matheus Lima (Terrible Software)

“Life happens at 1x. Every conversation you’ve ever had. Every walk, every meal, every meaningful experience. None of it comes with a speed dial. We’re biological creatures wired for real-time processing. When someone speaks to you in person, you don’t get to fast-forward through the parts you find boring.

“There’s something strange about trying to shortcut how humans communicate. A podcast is just a conversation you’re eavesdropping on. The pauses, the rhythm, the way someone builds to a point. That’s all part of it. Speed it up and you get the words, sure. But you lose the texture.

“Your brain needs empty space too. This is the part we’ve collectively forgotten. Boredom is a feature, not a bug. It’s where our best ideas — like starting this blog! — come from. It’s where you actually process what you’ve learned, make connections, have original thoughts. Constant consumption, even sped up, leaves no room for any of that. You need to be bored.

“The irony is that consuming faster often means processing less. You’re optimizing for throughput when you should be optimizing for understanding. All those 2x podcasts blur together into background noise. What did you actually retain? What changed how you think? It’s empty calories. It’s fake productivity.”

I’ve done this for a long, long time. I often transcribe from videos I listen to. Videos and podcasts very often inspire entire articles. I listen to some episodes at 1.25x because some guests speak quite slowly. The rhythm is still there. I’ve experimented with 1.5x for very, very slow conversations but it feels hyperactive.

Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over “heroes”

“In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk, almost any given test match. There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S. Stephen explained this to me by saying that you cannot make jokes about failure in the States. It’s like cancer, it just isn’t funny at any level. In England, though, for some reason it’s the thing we love most. So Arthur may not seem like much of a hero to Americans – he doesn’t have any stock options, he doesn’t have anything to exchange high fives about round the water-cooler. But to the English, he is a hero. Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him − then calms down and has a cup of tea.”

“I’ve hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining this in Hollywood. I’m often asked ‘Yes, but what are his goals?’ to which I can only respond, well, I think he’d just like all this to stop, really. […] ‘Does Arthur’s presence in the proceedings make a difference to the way things turn out?’ to which I said, slightly puzzled, ‘Well, yes.’ David smiled and said ‘Good. Then he’s a hero.’”

Technology & Engineering

The World's Most Important Machine by Veritasium (YouTube)

This is the story of EUV lithography. You will experience 52 minutes of on-the-edge-of-your-seat excitement learning about how they developed the technology that drives the machine that is capable of creating the chips that are in nearly every computing device on the market.

The military is babying F-35s to hide their true cost to taxpayers by Mike Fredenburg (Responsible Statecraft)

“[…] even as promised capabilities have been delayed by well over a decade, billions poured into fixes haven’t resolved ongoing reliability issues, crippling its operational effectiveness, and rocketing the program cost to over $2 trillion dollars — 400% more in inflation-adjusted dollars than its 2007 Government Accountability Office estimate.

“The plane’s extreme unreliability has resulted in full mission capable rates (FMC) of only 36.4% , 14.9%, and 19.2% for the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C, respectively. For F-35Bs and F-35Cs, only the newest planes have full mission availability rates above 10%.”

“[…] even at 17-years of age, legacy aircraft such as F-16s and F-15s blow away the mission readiness of brand-new F-35s, even though they are flying more hours annually.”

“[…] we do know now that there are very tight limits on how often and how long the F-35B and F-35C are permitted to go supersonic due to the damage done to their stealth coating and perhaps even structure during supersonic flight.”

“[…] in year five and six, it undergoes refits and rework that take it out of service for a total of 12 months. While out of service it is not contributing hours and sorties, but it also is not putting wear on its engine, pushing a multi-million dollar engine overhaul out by another year. This cost shifting makes the program look better than it is.”

“[…] the 2024 CBO report adjusted overall estimated sustainment costs for the F-35 program from $1.1 trillion to $1.58 trillion, while stating F-35s will be flying 21% less hours going forward due to reliability issues.”

Switzerland should take a page out of the U.S.‘s book and just ghost the whole contract that they have for F-35s. They should have never made the deal. Viola Amherd (the head of the military department in Switzerland at the time) should be tried for treason.

LLMs & AI

A Software Library with No Code by DBruenig

“Recent advancements in coding agents are stunning. Opus 4.5 coupled with Claude Code isn’t perfect, but its ability to implement tightly specified code is uncanny. Models and their harnesses crossed a threshold in Q4, and everyone I know using Opus 4.5 has felt it. There wasn’t a single language where Claude couldn’t implement whenwords in one shot. These capabilities are raising all sorts of questions, especially: “What does software engineering look like when coding is free?””

This is all so stupid. What does a building look like when laying bricks is free? You still haven’t built a house. You haven’t thought about maintenance. I can’t even make these arguments anymore. The best response to stuff like this is code is a liability. Less is better, not more. Just stop.

“There are many utility libraries that aim to perform similar functions, but exist as language-specific implementations. Do we need them all? Or do we need one, tightly defined set of rules which we implement on demand, according to the specific conventions of a given language and project? For libraries that are simple utilities (as opposed to complex frameworks), I think the answer might be, “Yes.””

Eye roll. He’s arguing for Esperanto here. Apparently society hasn’t squeezed enough of the soul out of people so let’s squeeze some more. Eliminate variety in programming languages. Yikes.

AI optimism is a class privilege by Josh Collinsworth

“[…] “religious” might be a good word to describe how AI optimism feels, from the outside. It has fervent believers, prophecies from prominent figures to be taken on faith, and—of course, as with any religion—a central object of worship which can at all times be offered as The Answer, no matter what the question might happen to be.”

“I mostly only use code completion suggestions in VS Code, even though they’re often hit and miss. I rarely use chat mode, and when I do, it tends to be mostly for rote tasks like format conversion or pattern matching. That’s pretty much it. Every time I’ve tried giving AI more responsibility than that, it’s let me down pretty spectacularly.”

Same.

“I like using my brain. Any passion I have for what I do comes largely from the process of ideating, building, and creatively solving a problem. Having a machine do all that for me and skipping to the result is as unsatisfying as a book full of already-completed sudoku puzzles, or loading up a save file where somebody else already played the first two thirds of a video game. I don’t do these things just because I want the result; I also do them because I want the experience.”

“You probably haven’t watched client dollars funnelled upwards, with the bitter knowledge that this thing eroding your income is only possible because it brazenly plagiarized you and a million other people who do what you do.

“AI optimism probably means you’re in a position where nobody is stealing your work, or bulldozing your entire career field.

“That’s the thing about being bullish on AI: to focus on its benefits to you, you’re forced to ignore its costs to others.”

“AI optimism requires you to believe that, whoever will be impacted by the sprawling data centers, the massive electricity demands, the water consumption, and the other environmental hazards of the AI boom, it won’t be you. Whatever disaster might happen, your neighborhood will be safe from it. Probably far away from it.”

“It’s hard to imagine how one could be optimistic about the technology empowering such horrors, but I suppose knowing it probably won’t affect you must help.

“I doubt I could feel very good about the tech helping me write emails faster if I knew that same tech was helping to make me, or people close to me, a target of violence.”

“Forgive me, but I can’t imagine being excited that this technology which is rapidly accelerating inequality is also helping me save a little time on writing code.”

“AI optimism requires you to see the lives of at least some of your fellow humans as worthwhile sacrifices; bug reports in a backlog.”

“AI isn’t just harmful on its own; it’s a force multiplier for existing harms. The intent behind it, if one even exists, is irrelevant; the impact is the same.

“I think all of this is why so many of us are so pessimistic about AI; we can see very clearly the many ways it represents a threat to us, and to the things we care about.”

“I think so many people are against AI because they see how it functions as a system for taking away from those with the least, to give even more to the already highly privileged.”

“Language and statistics can simply mimic cognition easily, and our human brains are overly eager to anthropomorphize anything that vaguely imitates human behavior. Thinking and reasoning are very different than statistically emulating communication.”

“Tech doesn’t free workers; it forces them to do more in the same amount of time, for the same rate of pay or less.

“If you become twice as productive, you don’t get twice the pay or twice the time off; you just get twice the workload—likely because somebody else doing the same job just got laid off, and now you’re doing their work, too.”

“Finally, let me take a moment to address anyone who might be thinking: sure, AI is being used for some bad things, but I’m not personally using it that way. What’s wrong with me just focusing on the good parts and enjoying the benefits to me?

“My friend, that’s privilege. You are literally describing privilege.”

“AI optimism requires you to see yourself and your loved ones as safe from AI; as the passengers in the self-driving car, and not as the pedestrians it might run over.”

“You might notice the people who argue that AI is sentient tend to be on the tech side of things, and not people who actually study things like cognition, intelligence, etc. as their actual academic career. There are many such experts, across a wide range of fields—neuroscience, for example—and most of them say no, that’s not what thinking is, and for that matter: we don’t even fully understand how brains work yet. But you might also notice it rarely occurs to tech people to even ask a real expert. Most just assume being an expert in code also makes them an expert in everything else, too, and confidently assert they do understand brains, actually, and have made one.”

AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge by Bruce Schneier

“At the time of Swartz’s prosecution, vast amounts of research were funded by taxpayers, conducted at public institutions and intended to advance public understanding. But access to that research was, and still is, locked behind expensive paywalls. People are unable to read work they helped fund without paying private journals and research websites. Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.”

“Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.”

“AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.””

“As AI becomes a larger part of America’s economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?”

“The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.”

This is clear. Because the law does not ensure justice, it enforces hierarchy.

“[…] control over what questions can be asked, what answers are surfaced, and whose expertise is treated as authoritative.”

This is not new to AI but it has been accelerated.

“[…] access to information is no longer governed by democratic norms but by corporate priorities.”

We’re long since there. This is not hypothetical. AI accelerates existing trends.

“Control over data, models and computational infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful tech companies. They will decide who gets access to knowledge, under what conditions and at what price.”

“[…] access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms.”

To those who fired or didn’t hire tech writers because of AI by Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti (passo.uno)

“Marvelous things can happen if you provide your writers with AI tools and training while you protect the quality of your content through an AI policy. I’ve described the ideal end state in My day as an augmented technical writer in 2030, a vision of the future where writers orchestrate, edit, and publish docs together with AI agents. This is already happening before our eyes.”

My week with opencode by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“Dockerfiles and compose files are just as much of a disaster: opencode will consistently choose base images that are outdated or not fit-for purpose (one noteworthy example was when it used an alpine base image for a uv project, not realising that it didn’t include certain system dependencies important for some of the packages I was using), fails to reason effectively about systems dependencies in general and all in all just isn’t as good as it needs to be to deliver DevOps code. The shell scripts that it writes are somewhat better, but still very odd, and given how close the shell is to the system, there’s no way that I’m willingly running a shell script that an LLM generated outside of a sandboxed environment. CI/CD scripts are just as bad: the model really just doesn’t seem to have a grasp on them at all.”

“I can say that I’ll only use opencode for application code and not use it to touch anything DevOps or infrastructure related at all, but believing that other people won’t strains one’s belief to its limits, and quite probably past them. In itself, this means that we really have to treat the use of opencode and similar tools with considerable suspicion, because while the worst that bad application code can do is introduce security breaches, bad systems code can run up massive bills or completely nuke your deployment.”

“Given that unit tests are one of those things that it’s really important to have if you’re letting LLMs anywhere near your code, this means that you spend most of your time writing unit tests rather than actually producing code. While this is generally good XP practice, it somewhat strains credibility to believe that your average developer who uses a coding tool like this for development is suddenly going to drop the tool and write all of their unit tests manually.”

“[…] the first bias, as might be expected from a generative model, is always to generate more code rather than removing code that’s unnecessary. This means that it’s extremely easy to get an application out that’s much larger and more complex than it needs to be, and it’s almost impossible to get the thing to actually tone it down and generate only what’s necessary. This necessitates a lot of reading code to confirm that it does what you expect it to, as well as going through and deleting a lot of superfluous shit fairly often. This behaviour is more or less robust to anything that I tried to do to get it to stop, and it represents a serious issue. After all, the more code it generates, the more I have to review and the more likely a bug is to slip past, which means bugs, security risks, slow loads and a whole lot of other weirdness.”

“I’m probably going to keep the new design as I think, somewhat cynically, that coming across more normie might make me seem less threatening to the kinds of people who actually have money to spend these days (principles, alas, don’t pay the bills), but if you want to do work that’s at all unique or creative, there’s no real option but to keep LLMs as far away from your work as possible.”

“[…] getting decent results out of these coding tools requires that you follow best practice basically everywhere else: architecture, interfaces, tests, documentation… if you slip up on even one thing, the model will take it and find some way to fuck up a perfectly clear instruction. Even when you do get everything right, it still will a bunch of the time.”

This is a good point: the rigor required by the tool is very high. Every other programming trend has been to require less developer discipline. AI coding tools require a higher level of discipline but are marketed to those with lower levels of discipline.

“[…] what I got from this is that LLM-assisted coding is only more flexible and more chill than doing the thing manually if you don’t care about results at all. The moment you start caring about a specific output rather than something vaguely output-shaped, it all of a sudden becomes a whole lot more rigid and finicky than just writing the thing manually. And that’s quite the opposite of what LLM assistants promise.”

“The tools also have some applications in IndieWeb and digital sovereignty spaces that I can’t quite write off. After all, an LLM-coded application could plausibly go a long way towards getting people off American services, or even plausibly helping people set up a personal website who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. These don’t seem like such terrible things.”

Those would be good things but running a web site isn’t the same thing as coding one, especially since most people want to monetize what they create, which binds them further. I don’t monetize my site and I wrote all of the software myself, so I can host it on a bog-standard Swiss hosting service that is quite affordable.

“[…] the conditions to make use of the tools relatively morally acceptable are onerous enough that it is, on the whole, probably not worth it. You need an expert engineer who’s willing to test and document everything meticulously, a strong architecture, lots of unit tests and a fair amount of the codebase already written. You also need an application that is highly useful while not being critical in the sense that accuracy is paramount, and you need a strong disaster recovery plan.”

“I think the likely first targets might actually be the likes of Wordpress and Shopify: commercial software that aims to let people build websites with minimal code. A decent web dev with a model can produce a strictly better website very quickly at this point, and given the quality of your average Wordpress or Shopify site… well, they’re bad enough that the average LLM output might not actually be worse.”

This is nearly grossly negligent advice. The security of such solutions would almost certainly be … lax.

The Biggest AI Coverup Just Got Exposed by Parthknowsai (YouTube)

“Stanford researchers dropped a new research paper where they typed one sentence into a LLM model and pulled out entire books worth of content. Word for word.

“95% of Harry Potter. 97% of The Great Gatsby. Thousands of pages pulled directly from AI models.

“AI companies have been saying the same thing in court − “Our models don’t memorize copyrighted content. They are simply just learning patterns.” But this Sandford and Yale university paper titled Extracting books from production language models tells a different story. ”

It’s hard not to think of this paper when reading something like Scaling long-running autonomous coding by Simon Willison, which talks about how some people had had AI build them a web browser from scratch, and that it actually seemed to work. Well, yeah, if it’s copying as much of Chromium as it does of The Great Gatsby, then what you’re doing is using thousands of hours of processing time and untold amounts of power to end up with what amounts to a fork, for which you’re trying to establish plausible deniability.

KI, hör auf die Welt zu retten by Renato Kaiser (YouTube)

A brilliant and hilarious four-minute commentary on the state of AI, in Swiss German.

Generative AI is an expensive edging machine by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“[…] the answer to those questions boiled down to crypto being a technology that was, on some level, deeply evil or deeply stupid. Depending on how in on the scam you are.

“While I don’t think AI, specifically the generative kind, is a one-to-one with crypto, it has one important similarity: It only succeeds if they can figure out a way to force the entire world to use it. I think there’s a word for that!”

That is pretty much what Satya Nadella (current CEO of Microsoft) just said at WEF.

“Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of that idea that I may have made on my own either. Instead, it simulates the act of brainstorming or creative exploration, turning it into predatory pay-for-play process that, every single time, spits out deeply mediocre garbage. It charges you for the thrill of feeling like you’re building or making something and, just like a casino — or online dating, or pornography, or TikTok — cares more about that monetizable loop of engagement, of progress, than it does the finished product. What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life.”

“If we are to assume that this imagination gap, this life edging, this progress simulator, is a feature and not a bug — and there’s no reason not to, this is how every platform makes money — then the “AI revolution” suddenly starts to feel much more insidious. It is not a revolution in computing, but a revolution in accepting lower standards.”

“if AI succeeds, we will have to live in a world where the joy of making something has turned into something you have to pay for. And if it really succeeds, you won’t even care that what you’re using an AI to make is total dog shit.”

AI is a horse

• It is faster than your feet depending on the terrain
• It is way slower and less reliable than a train but can go more places
• You cannot simply tell it to go to the store for you
• You have to tell it where to turn even if it might guess right sometimes
• You have to keep it on the road even if it usually stays on the road
• You can only lead it to water, you cannot make it drink

10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents. by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“Fifty projects later, I’ll be frank: I have not had this much fun with a computer since I learned BASIC on my Apple II Plus when I was 9 years old.”

This made me think: it’s because you were nine years old and were still capable of enjoying simple things. I’m glad he had fun. But some of us are here for more.

Look at the number of people who go to water parks vs. the number who swim.

Or the number who read tweets vs. those who read books.

Programming

What was the secret sauce that allows for a faster restart of Windows 95 if you hold the shift key? by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)

“A common trick in assembly language back in this era when you counted every byte was to take the memory that holds functions that will no longer be called and reuse them as uninitialized data. It’s free memory!

“In the case of win.com, the original code reused the first bytes of the entry point as a global variable since the entry point executes only once. Once you get past the entry point, it’s dead code, so you can put a global variable there! Fortunately, the “fast-restart” case doesn’t jump all the way back to the entry point, so the fact that those instructions were corrupted is not significant.”

Fun

Mr. Milo by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

“You got some animals in here that are absolutely beggin’ for a beatdown.

“I’m serious. I’ll go to town on ‘em.”

How to Start an F-16 (Bully in the Alley Remix) by Cinema History (YouTube)

“I stole an F16.

“Set the fuel pump. Start the number two.

“I stole an F16.

“Engines whining as the turbines chew.

“I stole an F16.

“Turn the RVR. Power on bright.

“I stole an F16.

“Horizon centered; the line set right.

“I stole an F16.”

I heard this song in a video—Trump is thinking about it… by HasanAbi (YouTube) where he was talking about how, with all of the military troops deployed in the U.S., the U.S. will no longer be in a position to defend its bases. So, now’s the time to go steal some military hardware.

“Find the most autistic guy in your village, who’s got a ton of experience in [some video game], who knows how to drive an Abrams tank and steal it.”

Then he played the video above, and I was dying because it 100% sounds like the old labor songs of the Wobblies or the incomparable Utah Phillips (Wikipedia).

Time to make a decision! Time's running out, Bob! by WKUK: Whitest Kids U' Know (YouTube)

“My name’s Jerry.”

Senator Clint Webb Supports Banning Butterbars, Kid Beer, and Spaghettio’s | Daily WKUK ½2/26 by WKUK: Whitest Kids U' Know (YouTube)

Clint Webb:

“Hi, I’m Clint Webb and I’m running for Senate. I have a short cropped haircut, a pretty enough yet accessible looking wife, and a newborn baby that I’ve dressed in a suit to prove to you that I mean business.

“For the last 15 years, I’ve lived my life in such a bland, uncontroversial, and repressed manner that it’s almost unnatural. Why? Because I’ve been preparing to be your representative since I was a child.

“Most well-adjusted, sane men would be hesitant to take a job where their decisions would so drastically affect the lives of so many. But not me. I possess a sort of sociopathic narcissism that makes me think that I should be in charge of everyone. But all of that needs to start here at home in this beautiful state that I’ve grown to love since I moved here 18 months ago.

“Together, we can piggyback some of our state’s legitimate needs onto my unquenchable lust for self- glorification. And that’s a promise.

“Here’s an unflattering picture of my opponent. Here’s a quote of his taken out of context.

“Oh, and one more thing. I have a dog.

“I enlisted in the military for the minimum amount of time in a position that would never see combat. Why? Well, because it would help me be your senator.

“I don’t make friends. I make acquaintances.

“All of my motives are ulterior.

“I’m self-involved to the point of psychosis.

“My soul is terrifying.

“And that’s leadership.

“So this November, let’s send Washington a message. And what is that message? Hey, … me.”

Butterbars is decent, as well.

Kid Beer is fantastic.

And goddamnit, so is SpaghettiOs.

There was a comment somewhere in the mix,

All my motives are alterior

“All my motives are alterior.”

“Ulterior.”

“[Translate to English]”

Is this not a minimally succinct summary, a microcosm, of where we are with language and technology right now?

“Translate to English” 👩‍🍳😘