|<<>>|5 of 289 Show listMobile Mode

Links and Notes for April 17th, 2026

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩

Table of Contents

Public Policy & Politics

Trump says “I’m hungry,” then, a minute later, he’s in the kitchen, f@&king a watermelon. His supporters call this “4D chess.”

Sent to me via Signal by a good friend.

Pete Hegseth prays for death

Lunacy. Utter lunacy. A runaway train of stupid. They are a high colonic for empire. Things will be better afterward, but it’s deeply, deeply uncomfortable now. Well, not right now. But it will be. The tide’s going out because the tsunami’s coming in.

Empire Or Bust: The Ceasefire Becomes Deceased Fire by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Iran seems to really care about something entirely foreign to Western politics. Public opinion. They do not attack until attacked (a Quranic injunction) and try to desist if they desist (also Quranic). This translates outside the Muslim World as almost absurd (why would you not do your worst?) but it is actually moral.”
“[…] as Khamenei the Elder said (before the Islamic Revolution, in 1974, mind you),”
“Moral duties are not just for religious seasons. They are not for sometimes. They do not apply one day but not another. They do not apply to one person but not another. Duties are perpetual, universal and eternal.”
“[…] violence in the Quran is strictly defensive (to the point that you can get hit with obvious attacks), restrictively proportional (to the point that it ties your hands), and constrictively negotiable (to the point that you have to hold back). You have to negotiate even with Satan not cause you trust Satan, but because you trust God. As Khamenei the Elder also said (2014),”
“We had announced previously that on certain issues, if we deem it proper we would negotiate with this #Satan to deter its evil.”
“None of this makes any sense within capitalist self-interest theory or game theory, but the Islamic Revolution ain’t playing and they aren’t craven capitalists.”
“To me, moral behavior is in your self-interest in the long run, especially if you believe in a hereafter, or at least a reputation. I could go to a restaurant right now and leave without paying, this is actually easier, but I live in a community and in continuity and so I don’t. Moral behavior is social behavior, but capitalism has elevated sociopathy to its central value. Greed is good,”
“In our short human lives, doing the right thing often gets us killed and almost always leaves us poorer. This is why all religions have some concept of an afterlife, to make the moral math work.”
“Even in the face of death, and even in the face of obviously wicked people getting away with it, there has to be faith in the right thing that goes beyond one’s current skin. And the Islamic Resistance is, I think, living proof of this.”
“Genocidal states like those of the White Empire cannot understand this—their founding ethos is cheat to win—but civilizational states know this instinctively. The root of civilization is cooperation whereas the root of capitalism is competition.”
“I’ll leave you with the words of Ali Khamenei (the Elder), who died for this dharma. As he said in 2024,”

“Those who support the Palestinian people are fulfilling their duty. No one based on any international law has the right to object to the people of Lebanon and Hezbollah supporting Gaza and the uprising of the Palestinians. It is their duty, and they should have done this. This is both an Islamic ruling, a rational law, and based on internationally accepted reasoning. The Palestinians are defending their own land. Their defense is legitimate and supporting them is also legitimate. So all these attacks, including Operation Al-Aqsa Flood which took place around this time last year, were internationally legal, logical correct moves. And the Palestinians had this right.

“The Lebanese people’s vigorous defense of the Palestinian people falls under this same ruling. It is legal, reasonable, logical, and legitimate. No one has the right to criticize them for helping this defense. The brilliant work of our armed forces a few nights ago was also completely legal and legitimate. What our armed forces did was to inflict the minimum punishment on that usurping Zionist regime in response to its appalling crimes. It’s a bloodthirsty regime, a wolf-like regime, and the US’s rabid dog in the region. The Islamic Republic will carry out any duty it has in this regard with power, firmness, and decisiveness.

“In fulfilling this duty, we will neither hesitate nor act hastily. We won’t hesitate, neglect our duty, or act hastily. What is logical, reasonable, and correct according to military and political decision-makers will be carried out at the appropriate time, just as this has been done in the past. And if necessary, this will be done again in the future.”

Dumbkirk: Retreat Disguised As Rescue by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“As Bikrum Gill has said, this is perhaps the first anti-imperial war (as opposed to anti-colonial). Iran is not decolonizing Iran here. They did that in 1979. They are de-imperializing the White Empire itself, which is a very different proposition. White Empire has certainly lost before but, geopolitically, nobody else has won. Korea and Vietnam were able to decolonize their own land (ish), but the imperial war machine marched on.”
“‘America’ lost their own bases on day one, their aircraft carriers by week three, and now have supply lines stretching back to Old Blighty, the indignity. Their aging planes cannot fly over Iran reliably and their even more ancient refuelers get caught sleeping. ‘America’ loses embarrassing amounts of irreplaceable machinery every time they venture out and have nowhere to park anyways. All their base are belong to us.”
“They are facing the “tyranny of geography” as one 2024 internal report said. That JINSA report said their fancy planes might be stealthy in the air but, “on the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun.””
“At some level none of us can know the mind Don Tzu, whose Shart of War is”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing, the enemy doesn’t either.”
“At some level, no one knows what this idiot is doing, least of all him. His only military experience is watching Hollywood movies about daring raids to keep colored people from getting nukes and he probably just thought he’d try one on.”
“Forget corresponding with external reality, these correspondents from Washington are not even internally coherent. They say that the airman “sustained injuries” but also “hiked up a 7,000-foot ridgeline.” They say “the commandos fired their weapons ferociously… But they did not engage in a firefight.” They say that the airman was surrounded by hostiles, but also that these Iranians were friendlies, “strongly opposed to the Iranian regime.””

7000ft. Is no joke. I’m sure he didn’t climb from sea level but most people would have trouble with 3500ft even if they weren’t injured.

“The NYCrimes said Iranians are ‘strongly opposed to the Iranian regime,’ but then the Joint Chief said “the Jolly Green Flight was engaged by every single person in Iran who had a small arms weapon.” Honestly, I don’t even understand the words I’m typing but it’s all happening.”
“The Dumbkirk ‘rescue’ of one man covered up the retreat of everyone from Bahrain. The entire Fifth Fleet got cooked, while nobody looked.”

Lebanon, Iran, and the Forgotten Plight of the Shia “Infidel” by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Israel has released official statements reassuring the regions Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli occupied rubble but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that regions Shiite majority who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return. There is a word for this, and it start with a ‘G’ but even the most progressive First World observers don’t seem to want to use it.”
“More often than not it has been western imperialists fueling the bigotry too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind too.”
“The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan.”

We Are Doomed and Our Leaders Are Insane by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Bill Clinton celebrated Cold War victory by promising a shift away from “making armaments” toward a domestic windfall. Almost immediately he junked the “peace dividend” plan in favor of investing in a more activist military to fight wars of boredom, pitched to us as “humanitarian” interventions. That soured enough voters on Democrats that in 2000, a half-literate goof in George W. Bush was elected after insisting, “I don’t want to be the world’s policeman.””
“His win over McCain by ten billion votes or whatever had every reporter on earth (including me) kissing his ass, while foreigners hurled plaudits and unearned Nobel Prizes into a White House still prosecuting two major wars. Like the rest, Obama began reversing every promise right after election, expanding extrajudicial assassinations to Americans while saying things like “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.” He brought Hillary in as Secretary of State. She promptly birthed a giant new shit-ball in Libya and advocated for at least one more regime change war in Syria before leaving to gorge on bank cash and prepare for the 2016 Faceplant.”
“Trump in his second term is no longer an affront to the system. He is the system, a crazy person merged with the crazy institution, our worst nightmare. Now we are just more unrestrainedly ourselves. It turns out that the phony gravitas that attended previous presidencies was useful. It offered some restraint. We took more time to bomb places. We at least pretended to have reasons, even though they melted under the faintest scrutiny,”

“I Felt Like a Monster”: Israeli Soldiers Break Silence on Gaza—and the System Behind It by Joshua Scheer (ZNetwork)

“none of this unfolds in a vacuum. The bombs, the cover, the diplomatic protection—all of it flows, in part, from Washington. The United States continues to fund, arm, and politically defend the very system these soldiers are now describing from within.

“The facts are no longer hidden. The voices are no longer external critics. They are coming from inside the system itself.

“So the question is no longer whether the world knows.

“The question is whether it is willing to act—or whether it will choose, again, to look away.

“Because when even the perpetrators are telling the truth, silence is no longer ignorance.

“It is complicity.”

It’s nicely written and it feels like a powerful statement. Maybe it is, in some circles. For those of us who’ve been paying attention to the full scale of the genocides perpetrated by the IDF—first in Gaza, then in the West Bank, now in Lebanon as well—silence hasn’t been ignorance for a long time.

Europe has been complicit for a long time. Decades.

The U.S. is not only complicit—it is the driving force of these genocides. It provides the weapons, the international diplomatic cover, and the blueprints found in the myriad genocides of its own. Read about any of the wars in which the U.S. has fought and you will see that Israel’s savagery, it’s barbarity, its vicious racism are not unique. The U.S. has done it all before.

We see how the U.S. indiscriminately bombs civilian infrastructure, cheerfully destroying people’s lives, people who have nothing to do with the military. Israel commits dozens of war crimes a day; so does the U.S. Neither of them gives a tinker’s damn for international law.

They spit, piss, and shit on the opinions of supposed peers; they don’t care about people, not even their own citizens. They are all demons, burning everything to the ground in order for them to build their wealth or to be able to dream sweet dreams of children burning.

We Should Not Fear The Tyrants; The Tyrants Should Fear Us by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“If there were a thousand people living on an island, and one of them began making life miserable for everyone else, there would soon be 999 people living on the island.”

Facts. I use the “100-person-island” analogy all the time—sometimes its a rocketship—because I find that it helps people see the utter stupidity of what we’re doing here.

“How strange, then, that a few oligarchs and empire managers get to push around an entire planet full of humans.

“I mean, right now we’re all sitting around hoping a few sociopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv don’t collapse the global economy with their reckless warmongering against Iran. There are so many of us and so few of them, and yet everyone’s sitting around going “Golly gosh I sure hope I’ll be able to afford food in the next few months, hopefully the orange guy acts sane and normal for a while so my family gets to eat.”

“These are not gods sitting on Mount Olympus exerting omnipotent control over our fate from on high. These are ordinary men with ordinary flesh and bone bodies, walking upon the same earth we walk on. They have soft skin and internal organs. Their heads must remain firmly attached to their necks if they’re to continue to draw breath.

“And yet they are permitted to terrorize the people with whom they share a planet.

“I am reminded of a quote from Scientific American about an Inuit tribe’s perspective on the problem of psychopathy:”

“In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe ‘a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women — someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.’ When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, ‘Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.’”
“In our society, we do not push psychopaths off the ice when nobody is looking. In our society, we let them rule the world.”

A Utah Phillips said, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

“We can have revolutionary change whenever we want to. We already have the numbers. All we need is the will.”

Roaming Charges: the Jesus of Uncool by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Dean Baker: “We really do need to celebrate the humiliation of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Orbán had done all the undemocratic things Trump is starting to do here. He gerrymandered election districts. He took over the media. He took over the universities. And he took over the courts. He gave government money to his cronies and blacklisted his political enemies. Despite all these efforts to tilt the playing field, which he has been doing for 16 years, the people of Hungary still threw him out on his ass.””

None of what Orbán built will be dismantled by Magyar or the people who promoted and supported him. After 16 years, Orbán had gotten too old, and the powers-that-be in Hungary moved in a younger version. The people of Hungary did as they were told, and elected a different autocrat, a younger, more handsome, and more appealing one. Magyar isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, for God’s sake.

This is what liberals always do. They’re so easily manipulated. You can get them to cheer the election of a right-wing, autocratic candidate as long as he’s portrayed to have defeated an even-more right-wing, autocratic candidate. These people probably still believe in the Easter Bunny.

“Edward Luce: “People will be closely studying how Hungary’s opposition pulled off their win in such a pro-incumbent system. Important to note that the theme was corruption. Democrats need to get much better at calling out Trump’s corruption.””

Democrats like what Trump is doing. They are not in any way opposed to his wars of choice. They just watch “number go up” like everyone else. They only represent their own interests. Stop pretending that there is a viable alternative without revolution.

How Cops Became Soldiers by Some More News | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

This is an absolute tour-de-force. John Oliver’s show is a sad shadow of this show. Cody Johnston’s writing and delivery is incredibly good. No fat on it.

00:00 − Introduction
03:37 − How Cops Became Soldiers… But Worse!
06:52 − It’s All Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s Fault
26:37 − It’s All 9/11’s Fault
43:35 − It’s All 2020’s Fault 
57:22 − It’s All Capitalism’s Fault
“But it sure seems that when private corporations and foreign countries are allowed to pay the police millions of dollars, it’s almost like those police forces are no longer incentivized to serve and protect their citizens, but rather the interests of those corporations and foreign countries instead.”

“Imagine a garden, a lush, beautiful marijuana garden. But for some reason, not all the plants are growing strong. You’re getting a lot of ditch-weed-looking turds, you know, snicklefritz.

“And what you want to do is troubleshoot the soil, open access to resources like sunlight and water, nurture the plants so they can grow strong. But imagine instead of that, you hired a landscaper who just kept coming over and yanking out the bad plants and spraying your precious weed with chemicals and shit.

“And you never solved the problem. You just kept hiring this landscaper to come back every week.

“Now, this analogy may seem crass because we’re comparing people to weeds and whatnot, and I understand and agree, but incidentally, this is somewhat similar to a tactic employed in Gaza by our collaborator and training buddy, Israel, and they literally call it mowing the [lawn].

“That’s essentially what we’re doing with the police. But more sinisterly, it’s as if that hypothetical landscaper kept asking for billions of dollars in order to buy elaborate equipment while secretly funding and supporting political efforts to keep your plants unhealthy in order to perpetuate the cycle and, as a result, ultimately brutalize your entire garden until all your precious marijuana’s gone.

“I’m sorry for calling criminals ditch-weed. Again, it’s hard to build a perfect metaphor, but that is basically the problem: a fundamental misunderstanding of how to prevent crime thanks to decades of propaganda. While it began with real fears, crime has since gone way down since the days of Lyndon Johnson, and it is still down, which, as we noted before, doesn’t have much to do with our increasing police budgets.

“As it stands, of the millions of arrests made in America each year, roughly 5% involve violent crimes at all. And at the same time, our fear of this perceived crime just keeps going up. All the while, we’ve never once bothered to explore the root causes of that fear of crime. And this is of course, in tandem with decades of television and movies and video games depicting cops as action heroes and loose cannons, traversing scum-filled cities like they were war zones.”

“From 1987's “Police Quest” to 2005's “SWAT 4,” we were gradually fear-mongered into allowing our police forces to get bigger and bigger and bigger.—mainly with the help of Daryl Gates, I guess, until they began to work in tandem with our military, adopting the same imperialist mindset and forming a symbiotic relationship, invading other countries, creating refugees who we would then demonize and terrorize here at home, all to continue this self-perpetuating cycle of money being fed into law enforcement, to exist in service of themselves and the wealthy people in charge.

“It’s wrong. It’s not what police are supposed to be. As was beautifully and gruffly articulated by Commander Bill Adama,”

“There’s a reason why you separate military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both and the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

“And here we are with the police, treating the people like the enemy of the people.

“Now we have this big grotesque machine with talons deep in our foundation. It’s hard to imagine how to dislodge that, but it starts with fear. It starts with everyday people realizing that the way we think about crime and the causes and solutions to crime are fundamentally incorrect. And that taking even just a little bit of law enforcement’s staggering budget of over $100 billion per year from state and local funding alone and redirecting it towards other programs or social services could be very useful.

“Drug treatment, affordable housing, work programs. Maybe instead of paying to put cops in schools, we just fund the schools, you know? And this isn’t even getting into the ever-increasing budget of our actual military. The military.”

A Second Blockade Has Hit The Strait by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“You can’t get outsmarted if you don’t think.”

“The whole reason why he wanted to open the Strait of Hormuz was because of what’s going on in the oil markets.

“Okay, so that’s an incredible, incredible move by JD Pondon. Brilliant sir.

“He is truly the real revolutionary, the real green-energy champion that this world needed. Many of you don’t understand. He doesn’t think in decades. He thinks in generations. He thinks in centuries. The Trumpian mind cannot be comprehended. He is Mr. Ecoterrorism. It turns out some of y’all have only watched movies about how to blow up a pipeline. Trump is quite literally doing that. Okay. So who’s the real woker now?

“Donald Trump is forcibly creating an environment for that renewable energy transition for every country. Respect. Put some respect on his name. He is the goat. Don Tzu.”

“They literally went from, ”
“Trump is going to reopen the blockade, reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He’s going to do it with our military might. We got our hardest-dicked Marines coming in. How are we going to do this? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll take Kargh Island. Maybe we’ll take other islands. How will we do that? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We’ll do it somehow. Okay. Their dicks are hard. They’re ready to go. They’re locked and loaded. They’ve been eating the best crayons that are readily available, not available to regular commercial consumers. These crayons that these hard-dicked marines are eating are basically blue crayons. Their dicks are hard. Their weapons are locked and loaded. They’re ready to rape and pillage.”

“Except that hasn’t happened because it’s virtually impossible to pull through on an operation like that without suffering significant casualties, tremendous casualties. So much so that even Donald Trump is not, you know, pushing for it. He’s saying that he wants to do this, but he’s clearly hasn’t, you know, done it, right?

“And instead, this is the new meta. Oh, you put a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Well, guess what? I’mma put a blockade on your blockade. Leaning into the offense to begin with, leaning into the damage that the blockade is doing to the global energy markets, and only worsening that crisis in our own hands.

“I’m gonna piss off every single fucker. I’m going to make the Gulf scream. I am going to make it so that the Gulf never deals with the United States of America again. I’m going to make it so that all of the Asian countries that we have developed security cooperative agreements with suffer energy-grid collapses and they will lean into China and they will also never work with the United States of America again.

“Absolutely gutting the the security umbrella and the defensive perimeter that we’ve created around China. We’re going to render that into nothing. Okay? We’re going to turn it into dust. I’m going to do that shit cuz I’m fucking crazy. That’s what Dan Tzu is doing. That’s what JD Pondon is doing. Respect JD Pondon. He is a Maoist third-worldist.”

Did the Iranians Capture America’s Most Expensive Drone?
 by Rainer Rupp | Pascal Lottaz (Neutrality Studies)

“The US Navy currently operates approximately 20 of these aircraft, with seven more on order. The original programme of 70 units was cut to 27 due to cost overruns, meaning a loss of this magnitude is far from trivial: it creates a gap in global surveillance coverage, particularly across the Indo-Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Replacement is not a near-term option, as production is winding down and scheduled to end in 2028. To maintain surveillance coverage of the Persian Gulf, the Navy would need to redeploy a Triton from another region of the world, creating a corresponding gap elsewhere.

“Yet the material loss is not what is generating the most anxiety in the Pentagon. The real question being asked is whether Iran has managed the seemingly impossible: either detecting and shooting down a stealth-equipped drone at extreme altitude, or — far more alarming — electronically hijacking the aircraft and forcing it to land intact. Either scenario would effectively rule out any further Triton operations in Iranian airspace.”

How The Gulf Is Boiling The Oceans by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“You can observe this metaphor for yourself by watching a pot boil. It seems like it won’t start, but then it can’t stop. For most of the degrees it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, but once it crosses 100℃, liquid rules are overthrown and a gas state takes power. This is what Iran has done. They have turned up the heat on the imperial economy and people will be like ha ha, nothing happened, until it does. Don’t believe me, just watch.”
“[…] this government [Sri Lanka] just paid $286 for a barrel of landed diesel not because they’re dumb, but because they’re scared, given hard experience. Fear is the lesson pain teaches you, but if you haven’t learned (and you refuse to be educated), there’s only one way to find out. Sri Lanka’s among the first bubbles to run for the gas, but believe me, we won’t be the last one. It’s a burbling, burbling pot.”

“When the tsunami hit, the joke was that the government thought it was a Japanese guy they had to pick up from the airport (‘Eh, who is this T. Sunami sir?’). We literally did not know the word. Thus, when the ocean first receded, as tsunamis do, people went out to see, and got swept away forever. At least 35,000 people died that day, the coastline was shocked. Pain is the greatest teacher, and now if we see any pertubation in the ocean, people know what to do. Don’t just stand there. Run, or in case of oil suddenly receding, queue.

“When I see the slow motion shock spreading across the world oceans, I remember that it took hours for the tsunami to wrap around my island. There was time for Trinco to call Galle and time for Galle to call Colombo but it didn’t matter cause whatever message got through was incomprehensible. People died anyway, though the information was there from morning. This is what I see happening across the world, as the Al Aqsa Flood wraps around every continent. Even though the oil shock has already hit the Indian Ocean, the Atlanticists can’t understand it because A) they’re racist and B) simply inexperienced. Me explaining this to White people is like Lassie barking that a Black kid fell down the well, to which the town responds ‘oh well,’ and gets on with whatever they were doing.”

“The pump is broken and the ships are backed up. Even if that all stops tomorrow, which it won’t, production won’t recover for years, and shipping won’t recover for months. Remember that water resists changing its temperature and the iron is not cooling down. ‘America’ is now hijacking Iranian boats in the Indian Ocean and Iran is fast-attacking anything imperial that floats. This is what the ‘Americans’ call a Mexican Stand-Off and what the imperial economy can call adios, amigos.”
“Even if ‘America’ conceded defeat tomorrow, a lot of energy is just lost. It’s already boiled off into the ether, and you cannot unboil a pot. A lot of infrastructure is physically damaged and will take years to repair, a process that hasn’t even started. To make things just ‘snap back’ we’d need more tankers than currently exist and existing tankers to be in places they are not. The futures markets cannot just magic up oil which isn’t pumped and on ships already. My opinion is that the White economy has already collapsed, and your elites are just stealing the silver and plates from the Titanic.”
“Speaking from the Dirty South, we’ve been in the soup for years, we’re well seasoned by now. But Americans are not used to even a little loss of exorbitant privilege, which to them will feel like great oppression. What’s coming will feel, for them, like the end of their world. Which it is, inshallah. God willing, this is the big one. A rising flood to lift all shorts.”
“You really have to boil the oceans to get the White Empire to notice anything. Their only prophet is the profit, that’s all they follow, and they can make that golden calf moo by just blowing bullshit through it. But it’s a false god, as they’ll find when the goods stop being delivered. It’s important to remember that the boiling of the ocean didn’t start with Hormuz, they’ve been suppressing economic farts since 2008 at least (the 1970s, really), and now they’re going to soil themselves in the public markets.”

Patrick Henningsen: Hezbollah JUST Fired Back at Israel − Iran Vows to 'Crush' All Attacks by Dialogue Works | Nima Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“We’re talking about a post-US Persian Gulf. There’s no place for the US there and no nobody has admitted this in the Trump administration. They’re talking like things are as they were a year ago. They’re not. This is not the same Persian Gulf. This is not the same Middle East. It will never be the same.

“So, their inability to kind of confront and accept these realities and their own sort of incompetence of their negotiators—of their Secretary of State, who’s basically AWOL. Marco Rubio is not even like—nobody knows where he is, what he’s doing. I guess he’s planning the invasion of Cuba at the moment. another illegal war. They’re planning to invade Cuba. So, that’s what Rubio’s busy doing, stealing oil and imposing illegal blockades on US neighbors. So, he can’t even be bothered to even show up or do, you know, even weigh in on this war.

“So, it shows you this this is a dysfunctional government. They have one choice, which is they have to double down. They can’t admit they’re wrong and they have to double down.

“And you know, as far as Israel goes, Israel is not able to defend itself right now. That’s pretty clear. If hostilities start, there’s going to be big problems for Israel physically, politically, militarily, economically. It’s all going to continue to get worse. So, this also opens the door for there’s a lot of talk about the deployment of nuclear weapons. And I find this to be very disconcerting and quite shocking and frightening that people are talking about this in such a casual way, as if that’s some kind of a justifiable solution to a war that the US and Israel started.

“So it’s lies upon lies. You hear from the west—from the western side—now, lies upon lies. They’re piling it on now, because they don’t want people to look at the root causes of how this began.”

“The global economy is already hitting the wall. You’re already seeing Southeast-Asian fuel shortages, business shutdowns. You’re going to start seeing bankruptcies, liquidations. There’s whole manufacturing sectors that are shut down. It’s like COVID-level, system-level perturbations. Okay, that’s already happening. That will eventually come west now because the the paper market of futures-trading and derivatives and all this stuff—it’s now converging with the material reality on the ground, because all of the reserves are expended—in terms of oil, floating gas reserves, and so forth.

“So pretty much, you know, the the real price is going to emerge and the market will do its corrections. And right now, you know, jet fuel shortages globally. I mean, this is going to be everything from transportation, delivery, employment. So we’re looking at a global recession right now, as of this week. And, if this continues, if they keep messing around with this unwinnable war, this disaster, then we’re looking at a global depression, which will begin, well and truly, probably a lot quicker than people think, but it will start hitting hard in June and July.

“Maybe they have a month, the month of May, to sort of, you know, stay in La La Land. Everybody in America can go to their barbecues and pretend that nothing’s happening because the US is energy-independent. Okay, but that’s not going to save all the supply chains that are right now being absolutely obliterated by what the United States and Israel have done to the world, which is to start this war.”

Israel Apologists Lie About Their Feelings And Beliefs, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The food and fuel crisis that’s about to hit is the fault of the US and Israel. All US and Israeli allies should end the alliances and collaborate with nations around the world to establish a new order of international power.

“I’ll keep repeating this as life gets harder for us all.”

Piers Morgan Controversy: Marandi Calls Out “Censorship” by India & Global Left | Jyotishman (YouTube)

This clip is mostly mis-titled; they talk about Piers Morgan in the last couple of minutes. Mostly, Marandi discussed other issues, like the one outlined below.

“[…] the point is that we are dealing with a dying but vicious and sinister empire and we will quite possibly see very dark times ahead. And of course, the Iranians have said that if if critical infrastructure is targeted, then we will destroy the critical infrastructure of the Israeli regime and its coalition allies and partners in the Persian Gulf because, without them, the United States would not be able to wage this war. And without the United States waging this war, the Israeli regime could not wage this war.

“So if so if we we do have a new wave of fighting then I think that a global economic depression is assured it’s it will definitely happen. The IEA has already said that the impact of the rise in oil prices and the breakdown of the supply chain may be at least for 2 years at least for prices like LNG. It would be very very high for at least 2 years.”

Journalism & Media

Public Stonings are Not “Accountability” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Punishing one person faster to make up for perceived slowness in other cases is the opposite of justice, which by definition has to be particularized. It’s the type of thinking Nuremberg prosecutors worked to avoid, and what Arthur Miller riffed on in The Crucible when he had his Judge Danforth say, “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.” Searching around for logs to feed the heat of public frustration is justice in reverse.”
“During this first peak of #MeToo, there was, seemingly by design, no process for differentiating between a pol who says something creepy or is “awkward,” and a forcible rapist like Weinstein. The behaviors are understood to be on the same spectrum.”

The Cowardice of Qualification: When Anti-War Voices Speak the Language of Empire by Ramzy Baroud (ZNetwork)

“By qualifying their condemnation, these voices neutralize their own position. They suggest, whether intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance—it is paralysis.

“Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself.

“This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Western political discourse. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was justified as a necessary act to save lives, to the Cold War military interventions in places like Guatemala in 1954, where regime change was framed as a defense against communism, the language of morality has consistently been used to legitimize violence.”

“Many of us recognize this pattern, yet instead of exposing its fallacies, some continue to operate within it, searching for a “balanced” position while still presenting themselves as anti-war or even pro-Palestinian. They acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.”

“For many Western activists, this qualification functions as a form of protection. It allows them to maintain a sense of moral authority within their own societies without risking their professional or social standing. By condemning violence while simultaneously distancing themselves from the victims, they occupy a safe middle ground—one that appears principled but ultimately changes nothing.

“This is not merely a question of rhetoric; it reflects a deeper structural problem. Even those who oppose war often do so within a framework shaped by the very systems of power they claim to challenge. Their language, however critical it may sound, still echoes the moral grammar of empire.”

I’ve been catching up on my TrueAnon episodes and, as usual, I’m so glad I did. Liz is on maternity leave and Brace Belden and Yung Chomsky have hit the road.

TrueAnon Episode 526: Observations by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)
Wall-to-wall great information and analysis 5 days after the most-recent war on Iran began. Absolute worth the price of admission.
TrueAnon Episode 532: Cuba 1 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

The boys went to Cuba. They describe the dire situation there, about what it’s like to live without power, with a society ground to a halt but persevering.

“We talk about the effects of the American blockade in Cuba and interview Cuban journalist Daniel Montero from Belly of the Beast.”

One of the comments sums it up quite well,

“This shit just makes me so sad. The amount of effort the US govt expends to prevent people from making a better world is maddening and unfathomable. the case of Cuba makes it so starkly clear that their enemy is healthcare, education, human life. Thank you for this great episode and solidarity with the Cuban people ”
TrueAnon Episode 533: Cuba 2 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)
“We sit down with Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, the director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience. We talk about Cuba’s research sector, Alzheimer’s medication, and his research into Havana Syndrome.”

Both of these interviews—this one and the one above with Daniel Montero—are required listening for every goddamned American so that they can hear what their demonic country is doing to one of the few good ones. The U.S. is fighting against doctors, against medicine, trying to kill anything that doesn’t generate profit its oligarchs.

The U.S. has started sanctioning countries that host Cuban doctors. Cuban doctors are being sent home. Cuba has more doctors working in foreign countries than the rest of the world combined. Tiny Cuba. No-one else helps like they do, despite their poverty, despite the 800-pound gorilla on their neck.

They live their principles and hope to persevere.

Things are looking dire. They are bending under the weight of heretofore unseen levels of brutality and sanctions. And now the U.S. is threatening to bomb them. When will this madness end? Senseless.

TrueAnon Episode 534: Dallas 1 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)
“We head West to CPAC at Gaylord’s to discover “DL Trade” and related issues. Featuring advice from Ben Mora.”

I love how Yung Chomsky easily carries his weight here, even up against Brace’s madness. Love how he says “Ok” to Brace when he’s getting on a tear. Just accepting the premise, knowing it will lead to a pot of gold.

TrueAnon Episode 535: Dallas 2 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)
“We try—and fail—to find a single person carrying the flame for Charlie at CPAC.”

CPAC is a wasteland, apparently. It’s over. It’s done. It’s cooked.

TrueAnon Episode 536: Dallas 3 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

The official description of this show is,

“We succumb to the malignant spirit of the Gaylord Hotel.”

But I think the following line from it was much better,

“At CPAC, heaven’s about to get crowded because of Father Time.”

This is a short one because even the boys have to admit that there’s no more gold to mine there. Making it three shows, though, makes us truly feel how hopeless it must have felt to be there. These two are truly genius reporters on life, culture, and politics. I cannot recommend this podcast enough.

TrueAnon Episode 538: More Observations by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)
“Abandoning analysis entirely, the podcast assembles a huge amount useless facts and figures and, so burdened, hobbles towards a hateful future.”

It ends with,

“It beggars belief that somebody would think that the U.S. is the good guys in this war. And you see this really half-hearted from some people—“Oh, I don’t like Trump, but, you know, taking out these mullahs, it’s still a good thing, right?”—says you? Says some dumb, fucking cocksucker from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, or whatever organization that is essentially exactly the same as FDD? Says whatever unregistered FARA agent who works for the Daily Wire? […]

“I don’t understand how much of this people can take—that is hyperbolic because people can take essentially an infinite amount of this—people will, American people, will eat shit like it is the last thing on Earth and they are hungry. It bothers me, and then I don’t let it bother me, and then it bothers me again…because I do try to love everybody. I try to love each and every American but it’s getting quite difficult. […]

“It doesn’t seem like there is anybody who is adult enough, serious enough, to say ‘stop this.’ You fucking mutant freaks. Fucking Steve Cheung. Fucking Pete Hegseth. Donald Trump. JD Vance. All these malformed, mutated, ugly—and you can tell them smell like shit—all these people, who are dragging this country to—and it is a country that has a lot of blood on its hands, but still, I live here, I’m from here, it’s a beautiful country, I don’t wanna see these people drag it down any further, but they are. And they’re gonna. And they’re gonna have the support of a lot of people while they do it. And the people who come in after them aren’t gonna fix it […]

“I hate these people. I hate the government that they make up. And I hate the world that they’re making.

“[…]

“It drives me crazy. How much more of this are people willing to put up with? How many more days or months or years are we willing the world’s future, this country’s future, your family’s future, be in the hands of these people […] who hate on a level that I could not even dream of.

“Donald Trump. JD Vance. All these people. They are pieces of shit. They are irredeemable. They are crazy. And they are ruining the fucking world and I am sick of it.”

America is the Bad Guy in This Movie by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“For nearly a century, mainstream American cinema has regurgitated, devoured, and re-regurgitated the same foaming popcorn mythology in which it is presented as basic common sense that America is always the good guy and that every foreigner with a funny accent who stands in his way is a totally otherized human bowling pin who exists for the sole purpose of being obliterated again and again and again in a voluptuous bacchanalia of endless machine gun barrages and bottomless stacks of bloodless corpses.”
“Since its inception as a republic largely defined by genocide and slavery, the United States has engaged in nearly 500 foreign military interventions with over half of them occurring after our victory in World War 2 and about 25% of them occurring after the demise of our only real rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union. In other words, the more America “wins”, the more violent it gets. The weaker America’s opponents become, the higher the body count reaches.”

“[…] this can hardly be surprising for anyone who’s history education didn’t end with Rocky IV. This whole fucking horror show is merely the natural result of Manifest Destiny; the cult of the omnipotent good guy that has long governed the zeitgeist of Western Civilization.

“Super creeps like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are merely the first cracks in the facade big enough to frighten the neighbors. Our fellow NATOcrats have ridden Robin on every Batman drive-by the US has orchestrated over the last century.”

UNREDACTED: The Final Episode! by Lee Camp (YouTube)

The Gaza Genocide is Changing America | Norman Finkelstein by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

Norman Finkelstein is fascinating and on-point as always. He hits the same points he always hits and they’re all still relevant: The UN is dead. The UN gave Donald Trump the title to Gaza. Almost no country mentioned Trump or the U.S. when talking about Venezuela. Most heartily approved. The UN blames the Iran war on Iran; it doesn’t mention the U.S. or Israel. The European countries are the most shameful vassals. Nothing new to see, but also there is not need to mention anything else when these giant inconsistencies exist. There is not international rule of law. There never has been.

The other guy Félix Marquardt wanted to talk about the Kennedy assassination. It is fascinating how much time people want to spend on discussing whether Israel was involved in the Kennedy assassination when that country is and has been slaughtering dozens of thousands of civilians with impunity. The Kennedy assassination just doesn’t matter. It is a tiny detail. If they did or didn’t does not matter relative to the enormity of that country’s other crimes. It’s like people talking about whether Epstein files contain proof that Trump is a pedophile. It’s a horrific crime but it doesn’t matter relative to the enormity of the war crimes he is committing literally right now. Focus.

Trump backs down… by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Trump’s already done this ‘you can’t fire me because I quit’ thing several times now.”

He spent several minutes discussing the degree of destruction in the U.S. bases in the GCC because the American Enterprise Institute has published a report—which means that official sources are finally acknowledging what those of us who listen to independent, non-empire sources have known for a while now—and the U.S. media can finally admit that the U.S. has no bases left anywhere near Iran and that Iran is flying over U.S. bases with impunity—even with 1950s-era planes like F5s.

“Piker News Service: for tomorrow’s news today.”
“[…] in the initial days of the war, an Iranian F5 fighter jet bombed the US base in Camp Beering in Kuwait. An F5. I don’t know what’s more disrespectful. $7,000 lawnmowers with propellers flying over the Straight of Hormuz and hitting these Gulf bases and taking out billions of dollars worth of equipment. or a F5 fighter jet.”

Labor

Wall Street Journal announces the era of the “mega layoff” by Tom Hall (WSWS)

““Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once,” the paper notes. “That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.””

“That one of the chief motivators of mass layoffs is the instant increase in share values is a sign of the extreme shortsightedness and recklessness which dominates corporate strategy. But Wall Street’s response reflects a more basic decision made by finance capital: whole swathes of less productive capital must be eliminated, along with the workers employed by them.

“This is expressed in the growing series of mass layoffs. There were 1.2 million layoffs last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the highest toll since the first year of the COVID pandemic. This month alone, layoffs were announced at Snap (1,000 jobs), Disney (1,000), Morgan Stanley (2,500) and Citigroup (1,000). Thirty thousand layoffs each are under way at Amazon and Oracle.

“Nor is this confined to white-collar jobs. UPS is eliminating more jobs than any other employer in the country. Thousands of layoffs are taking place in auto, including GM’s shutdown of what had been presented as its new flagship EV plant. At the United States Postal Service, as the result of a manufactured financial crisis, management has stopped payments into the pension plan and is preparing vast cuts. Almost every major school district and transit authority in America is eyeing layoffs to close major deficits.

“This is not only an American phenomenon. Lufthansa is closing its subsidiary CityLine. As a result of the expanding war against Iran, Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left,” according to the International Energy Agency. The BBC is eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, some 2,000 jobs. Canada Post is planning to slash 30,000 jobs, more than half of its workforce, while ending door-to-door delivery.”

“The cost of their attempts to sustain these levels of debt and avoid economic collapse, while also financing the massive cost to society of the corporate oligarchy itself, can under capitalism only be carved out of the working class.”
“The corporate elite dreams of creating profit out of profit by removing human labor from the equation entirely, both through financial bubbles and through AI. But it cannot extricate itself from dependence on the working class, which is the source of all value.”

“The vast improvements in productivity made possible by AI and automation must be used to fund a sharp decrease in the length of the working day with no loss of pay, along with high-quality education, healthcare and other public programs, rather than financing out-of-control inequality.

“AI itself, harnessed to a workers’ government, could become a key planning and organizing tool, opening up new possibilities for the direct, democratic administration of society by the masses themselves.

“The ruling class is making revolutionary struggles inevitable. The central task is to arm them with a socialist program: the seizure of the productive forces from the financial oligarchy and their reorganization for human need, not private profit.”

This is where our views diverge: I don’t see a tremendous amount of potential in the “AI” that is on offer right now. Its usefulness is much more limited than the paragraphs above suggest. The tools generate so much bullshit data, it’s hard to know where to begin.

People don’t notice how terrible the summaries are, how wrong the numbers are, and, even when the errors are pointed out, they start defending the “AI” as if it were their best friend. I guess, in a way, that it is: it’s the thing that allows them to pretend to do their job with a lot less effort, and the repercussions of intellectual laziness lie somewhere in a vague future, where their mistakes have blended in with the myriad mistakes of others to leave us with wasted effort, wasted time, and missed opportunities—but no-one to blame.

We all did our best and it wasn’t good enough. I guess we have to learn how to prompt better. Shame on us.

steal from the poor you become rich, steal from the rich you go to prison by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Well, the rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison.

“So, there’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There’s an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this sort of behavior.

“It’s a cliche at this point, but like wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.

“A similar invisibility exists in structural violence as opposed to individual acts of violence as well.

“If it’s a police officer engaging someone violently, the automatic assumption from the average person is, “Oh, that was probably a criminal. They probably deserved it.” But if there’s any circumstance where someone else is fighting back against police, like in a normal protest environment, for example, most people assume that that is chaotic, that there’s a chaotic situation and that it is born out of the escalations from the protesters themselves. Even if, as regular citizens, we’re infinitely closer to those exercising their First Amendment rights than those with the power stamping out people exercising their free speech rights.

“We never look at systemic forms of violence and we don’t look at systemic forms of theft in the same way that we do individuals breaking that social contract.”

There’s an excellent, longer follow-up here:

BIG DRAMA Over Shoplifting by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“I literally can’t even steal a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that, you know, getting drunk, going to the gas station, five-finger discount. I would never participate in it and I still can’t to this day participate in it. I’m just saying that I personally don’t really care. If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”

It’s blindingly obvious when Hasan is kidding and when he’s being serious. He includes a lot of clips of him providing serious answers, like this,

“In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Often times anarchists will say this is a propaganda of the deed. The action itself, no matter how violent or how disruptive it is, is justifiable because the disruption is the point. I believe in the power of organized labor and labor militancy and building these structures of power so that we can actually make more effective change, more long-standing change.

“So, concepts such as micro-looting indicate that there is an energy there, just like you said. And yet, many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language. They lack the political education. They lack the class-consciousness to recognize their position in society and lack the capacity unfortunately to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.”

One of his OG community members “Miss Metafan” wrote in the chat,

“People are just being dumb. What they see is the tax-the-rich-shirt douchebag with just two women with valley accents. People viewed you as you’re being out of touch without actually listening to what’s being said.”

More quotes from the video,

“This discourse that’s going on right now is not actually about me at all. This discourse is 100% about signaling to other elites, signaling to other gatekeepers in mainstream media to stay the f@&k away. They’ve been trying to kick him off Twitch and YouTube for years. It hasn’t worked. So, they’re trying to make him toxic so that nobody in politics wants to go on a show so that it can’t serve as a launchpad for a rising crop of left populists, particularly critics of Israel.

“The Israel-Trump war on Iran has only served to make this feel urgent or existential for them. Their power base is in terminal decline when it comes to public opinion. It’s not surprising that everyone trading in this Hasan-dumping represents a zombie politics on its way out.”

“I wasn’t being like particularly radical in my commentary here at all. But what I find strange—I guess it’s not so strange, it’s very commonplace—is the handshake between right-wing reactionaries from Ben Shapiro to Fox News commentariat to all of the right flank of the liberal Democratic party, people in positions of power within the party structure doing the exact same analysis, right? Like, I hope people can see exactly what’s going on here. This is a rehashing of the exact same ridiculous outrage that was manufactured towards Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in 2020 as well. They’re doing it right now.”

”IF UNITED EUROPE IS DEAD, EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED” by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

Citing Raphael E. Alvarenga,

“Rather than choosing between social chaos and top-down crisis management, we should embrace bottom-up, democratic, grassroots internationalism in the form of migrant mutual aid networks, urban solidarity initiatives, and cross-border labor struggles. /…/ Anti-colonial struggles were not doomed because their vision was necessarily flawed or naïve; for the most part, they were crushed, contained, or co-opted because imperialist powers, acting in defense of the global capitalist order, could not tolerate successful experiments in economic sovereignty and redistribution. Whenever anticolonial movements had room to maneuver – as in early Tanzania (Ujamaa era), Burkina Faso under Sankara, Kerala’s left governments, or the Mozambican and Vietnamese experiments – they achieved tangible egalitarian gains. Where these projects were rolled back, the causes were overwhelmingly geopolitical rather than cultural.”

I don’t think people have a coherent idea of what immigration even is or how it’s being used to manipulate them.

There are people who bristle—to put it mildly—at being called racists when they say they’re against immigration who will also cheerfully invite actual immigrants over for family events, as long as those immigrants are white.

But also, my in-laws will say that they’re anti-immigration because they’ve been well-trained to be anti-immigration by their indoctrination system—thanks, all of U.S. mainstream media!—but also three out of six of the parents of their children’s spouses are/were[3] first-generation immigrants. One of them is even very much not white. They accepted them all with open arms and not a second of thought for their immigration status.

Immigration is not a coherent issue. It is paper-thin and yet so powerful. This is a country of people who cannot shut up about how proud they are to be Americans but also cannot shut up about their foreign ancestry. Like, they hate immigrants but they want to have been immigrants.

“I’m Irish on my mother’s side.”

Pretty much everyone in the country has eagerly done 23&me to find out what kind of extra-national roots they really have. I suppose that also means that they’re super-likely to fall for scams of all kinds, not just the “wedge issue” of immigration.

My mom was a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. from Switzerland who would breezily disparage “Europeans” as if she hadn’t spent her first and formative 30 years there. This is the power of framing and propaganda.

[3] Divorce and death necessitates the past tense.↩

Economy & Finance

The Persian Gulf Between Markets And Reality by Indrajit Samarajiva (indica)

“This has been the reality in Asia for a while, but I mention Europe because White people don’t seem to believe in Asia as something connected to them. If you look at jet fuel prices across the world, you can see that prices are already up about 150% (from last year) in Asia and the Middle East and about 125% in Africa and Europe. Only North America is still living in last year (prices are actually 2.4% less) but oil is a liquid market and prices will slosh around until settling. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
“As some oil dude on Twitter says, “If Dated Brent remains at $120-130/bbl leading into the expiration of the front-month ICE Brent futures contract (currently around $100/bbl), the futures contract must converge toward the physical price. The convergence is not optional; it is mathematically enforced by the exchange’s settlement rules and market arbitrage.” The jaws of this oily delta can be prised open by market and media manipulation for the carnival barker to put his head in and shout, but at some point the delta will snap shut.”
“[…] his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning—

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“The promise of imperialism, even to its most impoverished denizens, were that you could get some share of the spoils. Even as public goods got worse, the ‘American’ poor could still get cheap consumer goods via colonies like Japan and Korea and communist economies like China.”
“The American Enterprise Institute graphed this, though they didn’t quite get it. You can see that capitalism made everything more expensive and worse (healthcare, education) while imperialism let them get the benefits of socialist production elsewhere (cheap clothing, cars, toys). This is the spoils delta that’s long been opening in the heart of White Empire but people didn’t feel it going rotten because their TVs got bigger every year.”

Price Changes − January 2000 to June 2022 − Selected US Consumer Goods and Services, Wages

“The rich got richer but the poor at least got stuff. But now that stuff is going to stop coming in so cheaply, because of both tariffs and also a giant oil shock. The delta between rich and poor is going to become obvious as distractions dry up.”
“Now the Standard & Poor stock market index (SPX) is nearing record highs while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (UMCSENT) has hit its greatest depression. Consumer sentiment is at the lowest level ever measured, in 70 years of this account. You can see the delta here.”

Wall Street vs. Main Street

“‘Americans’ act like the Strait of Hormuz only affects Asia or Europe or Africa but that’s your empire. That’s your factory, your clothes, your gadgets, your toys, and much of your food. That was the spoils of forever war and as ‘America’ loses this war, they’re actually losing something. A spoils delta is opening up within ‘America’, as the poor lose their treats.”
“As Gramsci said in the more full quote from above,”
“That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a “wave of materialism” is related to what is called the “crisis of authority”. If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Oil Markets Are About To Get Mugged By Reality by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Whoever said markets were good for processing information was obviously selling something. At least a quarter of the global economy has blown out and ‘the market’ is like this is fine. As Karl Marx said, in Capital,”
“In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.”
“All trading is insider trading in the US now. They may report on facts, boringly, but nobody acts accordingly. They just look at how other traders react, and pat each others’ backs. As long as no one spooks, everyone can cook the books, so the charade continues.”
“As Isabella Weber, who wrote the great book How China Escaped Shock Therapy, said to ‘American’ state media recently,”
“Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at UMass Amherst, worked on a paper that found that in 2022, after Russia launched its full- scale invasion of Ukraine, the global oil industry brought in some $916 billion in profits. The U.S. was the chief beneficiary, raking in $301 billion, some seven times the pre- COVID average annual profits for U.S.-headquartered oil and gas companies. Weber says this money, through shareholder payouts, disproportionately flowed to the very wealthy. “We find that 50% of the profits in the oil and gas industry went to the top 1% richest Americans, whereas only 1% of those profits went to the bottom 50%, she says.”
“Look under the tags of the clothes people in the Empire wear, or the gadgets that make their miserable lives disappear, none of it is made there. These treats are the only things that keep they distracted and meek, while everything they have to get locally (healthcare, education) has inflated beyond reach. Even if America has its own oil, it does not have its own economy. It is an Empire, and cannibalizing that empire has consequences.”
“Markets have ceased to be people betting against each other to better estimate reality and have become algorithms and index funds colluding to keep the looting going. As one example, from another Goldman Satanists report on AI, they call the whole thing bubble, but then say to stay invested in the bubble, because everyone else is doing it.”
“Jim Covello says “Over-building things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly,” but in the same breath also says, “That said, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past three decades is that bubbles can take a long time to burst. That’s why I recommend remaining invested in AI infrastructure providers.” Can you imagine? The tooth fairy isn’t real, but everyone believes in her, so pull out your teeth as well.”

Where there’s money to be made…

“When this hits North America is just a timing difference. Even if you have your own oil, oil will go where the money is, and prices will rise everywhere. North Americans just have more time to prepare, but in their typical fashion, waste it without a care.”

Amazon to merge with Globalstar, become iPhone’s primary satellite provider by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

“Amazon recently filed a petition asking the FCC to deny SpaceX’s request to launch up to 1 million satellites, which led Carr to issue a blistering criticism of Amazon. “Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of meeting its upcoming deployment milestone, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit,” Carr wrote at the time.”

Brendan Carr is a fucking idiot. That he has so much power over the allocation of shared global resources is proof that God hates humanity.

1M satellites. All owned by SpaceX. Jesus wept. We deserve whatever is coming to us.

Austerity creates fascism by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“I’m worried about the psychosis that makes our “capital allocators” spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That’s some next-level underpants-gnomery.”
“[…] what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.”
“Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe’s house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin’s house, the reality is that 95% of US workers have $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers’ pockets.”
“Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he “foamed the runways” with everyday Americans’ mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country’s worst slumlords.”
“Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.””
“[…] the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.”
“Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called ‘organized loneliness’ – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.”

IMF spells it out: Workers must pay for the cost of war by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The global attack on the working class is not going to be a passing storm. The Fiscal Monitor report made clear it must be at the very heart of every government’s economic agenda.

“In the words of the blog post: “The nature of today’s fiscal challenges has shifted. Weaknesses are longer mainly cyclical or the result of temporary emergencies, but are structural: security spending [a euphemism for the vast increase in military outlays], climate and energy transition costs, and rising interest bills are placing persistent demands on budgets, whole revenues have not kept pace.”

“All the reports from the IMF this week have pointed to the inextricable connection between war and the state of the global economy, the increasing fragility of the global financial system and have been summed up in the Fiscal Monitor report declaring war against the working class at home.”

New IMF agreement requires Sri Lankan government to complete austerity program by Saman Gunadasa (WSWS)

“[…] the release of the fund, with the approval of the IMF Executive Board, will be contingent on “the restoration of cost-recovery electricity and fuel pricing” and the completion of the financing assurances review so as to confirm multilateral partners’ financing contributions and adequate debt restructuring progress.

“The restoration of the price recovery mechanism for electricity and fuel are code words for strictly implementing price increases in these two sectors so as to eliminate the debts of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. From February 2022 to April 1 this year, the country’s electricity tariff has increased by around 125 percent.

“Though Papageorgiou did not say so publicly, the IMF is demanding the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) proceed.”

“The IMF’s expression of sympathy for working people in Sri Lanka is utterly bogus. Its only concern is to ensure the repayment of defaulted foreign debts and to boost investors’ profits. When announcing the IMF bailout in 2023, former mission head Peter Breuer said the program was in fact a “brutal experiment” for Sri Lanka.”

S13 E08: Iran, The Pope & Prediction Markets: 4/19/26 by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (YouTube)

“Hey, quick question. What exact stage of capitalism are we in when the child CEO of an offshore gambling platform refers to betting odds on bombings as an undeniable value proposition?”

“CoinBase CEO Brian Armstrong: I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and web 3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.
John Oliver: Yeah, he saw people’s bets online and just rattled off words that they bet on him saying. And it really feels like manipulating betting outcomes should be more difficult than that. In the old days, you at least had to sneak cocaine to a racehorse, not just rattle off a list of the most punchable words in the English language.”

The CEO of PolyMarket is one of the more punchable people I’ve seen in a while. Someone should start a prediction for him being hit by a car, then make it come true.

Science & Nature

Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing. by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead. This isn’t true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026.”
“Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.”
“Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it. And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases, few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents.”
“Cringe doesn’t mean wrong! Continental drift was cringe. Germ theory was cringe. Smallpox vaccination was cringe. All of them went from mortifying to undeniable. Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit.”
“Max Planck famously quipped that science advances one funeral at a time, but that’s not quite right, because nothing changes if everyone at the funeral vows to continue the legacy of the dead. It seems to me that science actually advances one young person’s decision at a time.”

Let’s talk space toilets! by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“Everyone agrees that the sanitary conditions aboard Apollo were barbarous. Going to the Moon in the tiny capsule was like living in a three-man port-a-potty, made worse by the fact that doing the deed took the best part of an hour, with much of that time spent kneading antimicrobial powder through the contents of the collection bag.”
“The third task, sequestering waste and controlling odor, is tricky. Urine can be collected in a funnel, where it gets mixed with an antimicrobial agent before being sucked into a storage tank. The state of the art for fecal collection is single-use porous bags that allow airflow but retain solids and water. These are tied off after use and placed in a collection cylinder, along with any gloves and wipes that the astronaut used for cleanup.”
“Designing for quiescence takes this problem to the next level. We need to build a space station, leave it empty for two years, then demonstrate that the toilet is not filled with cosmic horrors, and that all the life support systems can function for the six months it takes the crew to get back to Earth.”
“NASA has set itself the design goal of keeping astronaut waste sequestered for fifty years, and is in the early stages of testing vents and filters that can equalize pressure without getting rapidly clogged by dust. But this goal seems a little wild to me. NASA has trouble building structures that can last 50 years on Earth, let alone getting a level-4 biohazard storage shed on Mars right on the first try.”

Why So Many Asian Languages Have Tones by Julesy (YouTube)

TIL about Tonogenesis (Wikipedia)

Medicine & Disease

Mexico Is Going All In for Universal Health Care by Kurt Hackbarth (ZNetwork)

“At her morning press conference on April 7, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the credencialización process, or enrollment, for Mexico’s new universal health care service was set to begin. The goal, she explained, was unambiguous: “By the time we leave office, any Mexican will be able to go to any public health institution and receive care for any condition.”

“To be phased in over the next four years, the reforms represent, in her words, “a historic step.””

“In 2026, all citizens will be given their credencial, or health ID card, which will also serve as an official means of identification. The card, which will gradually replace the health booklets currently in use, will be linked to an app containing each individual’s medical records, appointments, and available services. In 2027, portability will begin for an initial set of services: universal emergency care (currently patients are stabilized at the hospital of arrival before being transferred to a hospital in their system); high-risk pregnancies and other obstetric emergencies; heart attacks and strokes; breast cancer; universal vaccination; and basic consultations such as flu, diarrhea, and preventive care.

“Patients will not only receive care at any health center but will also have the option of remaining there for the duration of care, eliminating situations where forced transferals lead to truncated treatments. Then, in 2028, portability of care will be extended to chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension; cross-institution specialist consultations and hospitalizations; and the ability to fill prescriptions at any institution.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

A Tribute to Iran’s Soulful and Revolutionary Cinema by Eileen Jones (ZNetwork)

“In making the film, Makhmalbaf recreates his attempt to make amends twenty years later by finding the actual policeman he injured and involving him in the lengthy process of reenacting the long-ago stabbing and the circumstances surrounding it. Together they cast their youthful alter egos and codirect the film performances. In the process, they arrive at a sometimes devastating, sometimes tender series of epiphanies about their youthful selves, their motivations and misunderstandings, and the directions their lives have taken since.”
“Just these few descriptions of key Iranian New Wave films illustrate how rare, wise, and humane a cinema arose from the culture now threatened by war. Our hearts go out to the great Iranian filmmakers struggling to preserve and pursue their art, and we long for reports that Jafar Panahi is alive, well, and still free, somewhere in Iran.”

“Sweet Leilani” by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“The Greyhound went past signs that said “Correctional Facilities — Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers”, and then it went past the promised facilities, and then there was nothing for a while, and then some more signs and then another prison. I pressed my face to the glass and sang, I hoped inaudibly: “Nature fashioned roses kissed with dew” etc. At Jacksonville the lady who had sat next to me, and who wore an actual unironic beehive, held over, one might imagine, from her 1969 yearbook photo at the Pensacola College of Nursing, said: “You sing pretty.” The happiness of that moment is still with me, as if it only occurred a moment ago.”

“First among these achievements was the opening of the Panama Canal the year before, but the presence of a Hawaiian Pavilion also celebrated the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and the establishment of a US territory there two years later, and the many delights of cultural syncretism that had flowed, and had yet to flow, from this new alignment.

“Inside the Pavilion you could hear Joseph Kekuku, on steel lap guitar. Born Joseph Kekuku’upenakana’iaupuniokamehameha Apuakehau in 1874, his performances seem to have played a significant and greatly underacknowledged role in shaping the general sound of American popular music for most of the rest of the 20th century.”

“This wide purview enabled him to participate, as a country artist, in what we might call the “musical Monroe Doctrine”, where mid-century American artists (often low-key Canadian), celebrated the fruit-hats and the rum and the relatively more sensual women to which their de-facto hemispheric sovereignty gave them easy access.”
“Today, the Reagan revolution against the spirit of the civil rights era survives on both the right and the left. On the left it takes the form of a taboo on “appropriation”. However the enforcers of this taboo may understand it, willy-nilly it is a demand for ignorance, segregation, and crude essentialism. It is, no doubt, often motivated by a sincere, yet hopelessly naive, reading of such mid-century cultural artifacts as Waikiki Wedding, which seem to demand of us that we replace any memory of the settler-colonial history of a place like Hawaii and reimagine it, along rigidly ideological lines, as an ahistorical paradise, as a place of endless leisure for active seniors.”
“There was a time when Bing offended traditional sensibilities for being too sensual and raw, though for as long as more or less anyone’s living memory extends today, he has offended in the opposite way: for being too old, too corny, and far too invested in the work of projecting American imperial soft-power propaganda. I take it that all of this is entirely irrelevant to any serious critical engagement with Bing the artist.”

Drunk, Interrupted by Peter Welch (Still Drinking)

“Socialization in general was a valid practical reason, especially for the wilting penitent I felt my peers had branded me. Loosening the tongue cures a measure of stutter and drinking rituals more egalitarian than any church service. How else was I going to make friends? Especially the kind of friends I want, who need something to do when they don’t like doing many things. Drinking around a bar or table is actively doing nothing with a glass of plausible deniability.”
“Once I have a drink, I’m finished. Can’t drive, won’t work, won’t be able to metaphorically focus on reading until long after I can’t physically focus on words well enough to read. The day has come to a close, a demarcation between Doing Life Well Enough and Watching Law and Order Reruns.”

Norm. by Aron Fromm (YouTube)

“Kinison told me there’s two ways to write a joke. One, […] you take a little thing like cornflakes and you make it big and treat it with the utmost importance.

“Oh, no, this is much bigger than that. This is life, I tell you.

“But the other way to do it—the better way—is you take a very, very important thing and do the opposite.

“Either way, it juxtaposes the absurd with the profound. And that dissonance…is art.”

The other day, after work on a Saturday (thesis presentations for two of my students), I rode my bike 28km and 700m of climbing over the Hulftegg and up to the Iddaburg for an espresso and a Schlorzifladen. Iddaburg is great. There’s a beautiful old church at the end of a dead-end road, with a lovely, old restaurant right next to it. There’s seating in a lovely garden. You can see a lot of northern Switzerland from there. On a good day, you can catch a glimpse of the Bodensee and parts of Germany.

I wrote to a friend to tell him how lovely it was, not to brag but because I know he’d appreciate it. He asked me to describe it. I wrote,

So Swiss. And rural. The church is ringing away right now and this guy just pulled up on a big old Harley actually it’s a Yamaha but he looks like he would ride a Harley. And when the guy came to take his order, he couldn’t hear him so the waiter goes should I turn off the church bells and then they both laughed and I thought to myself this is such a wonderfully bucolic place that I call home. I don’t know that I could ever live in the city again. I think it would literally kill me. Perhaps that’s being melodramatic, so let’s instead say that I fear that I might lose a part of me that has become quite important to me. The body would live on, but my soul would wither.

when the devil owns the rights to your movie by CinemaStix (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

I personally find it pathetic that so much public discourse is still strongly influenced if not actively driven by the presence or absence of exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics.

Somebody just posted “Love ❤️ you all” into a group chat, like, completely out of the blue, and I found myself wondering whether something had happened or what was going on but then I thought wait a minute why do I find it so odd for someone to be arbitrarily and without prodding expressing love in a group chat? Why do I search for any more justification than an affirmative one, of just calling and perhaps hoping for a response?

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit by JA Westenberg

“In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia − the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time.

“He had no coherent supply plan for feeding them, he had no realistic timeline for when, exactly, the Russians would agree to fight a decisive battle on his terms, and he couldn’t even articulate a coherent goal for his gamble, beyond ~beat the Russians in some vague way.

“He had been warned by multiple advisors, including his own foreign minister Talleyrand, that invading Russia was a catastrophic idea − and he did it anyway.

“By December, roughly 400,000 of his soldiers were dead, mostly from starvation and exposure and the consequences of field surgery, and another 100,000 had been captured. The Grande Armée, the most feared fighting force on the continent, clawed its way back across the Niemen River as a frozen, shattered remnant of itself. It was the beginning of the end for Napoleon, who would never again be able to field an army of the size // quality he squandered on his pointless excursion into Russia.”

“This is how cults of personality sustain themselves − through interpretation, and through a community of believers who will do the intellectual labor of making sense of the nonsensical, who treat confusion as evidence of their own limited understanding rather than evidence that the thing they’re looking at is, in fact, confused.”
“The more successful they become, the more they start to believe that their success came from skill rather than from some volatile, unrepeatable cocktail of skill, timing, luck, and other people’s labor.”

Born on third; thinks he hit a triple.

What is Left of “Believe Women”? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“There is simply no objective way to suggest that the allegations against Allen are remotely as convincing as those against Tyson. And yet the latter gets to serve as a cuddly symbol of 1980s athletic excellence and 21st-century comedy, while the former lost his Amazon deal, saw his films removed from several streaming services, was denounced by dozens or hundreds of eminent Hollywood figures, and in general was made persona non grata in polite society. The contrast, to me, does not compute in basic moral or procedural terms.”
“[…] less than a decade after the explosion of interest in MeToo, one of its champions is in the pages of our most celebrated magazine, very much not believing a woman. Based on what principles? According to which playbook? When did things change so much in this arena, and who got that memo?”
“This is what bothers me so much about this and the other crumbling vestiges of the social justice movement’s period of institutional dominance in American life: not so much that the rules are bad rules, or that they are the wrong rules, or that they apply to the wrong people, but that there appear to be no rules at all.”

The rule is that the one with all the gold makes the rules.

“Annie Altman has made allegations that are, by any measure, at least as serious as those leveled against figures whose names became synonymous with MeToo’s cultural moment. She has repeated them consistently, pursued them through legal channels, and given interviews to prominent journalists. Her claims seem dubious, but so have other allegations that have been rabidly supported by the usual suspects. Yet, now, the response from the progressive media ecosystem that once treated every such allegation as an occasion for collective reckoning has essentially been silence, or worse, a paragraph of dismissal tucked inside a piece whose real concern is Altman’s management style and his rivalry with the board of OpenAI. What changed? The cynical answer, the one that is uncomfortable precisely because it’s so difficult to refute, is that Altman is powerful and useful to people who also happen to be powerful, and that MeToo’s enforcement mechanism was always less about principle than about which targets were convenient. Harvey Weinstein was powerful too, but he had spent decades accumulating enemies in an industry that had quietly suffered his behavior,”
“The Altman situation, it might surprise you to hear, is not of particular interest to me. What is of interest to me, again, is the collapse of rule. What this all reveals is something more corrosive than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy at least implies a standard that someone is failing to live up to, a gap between the stated rule and the practiced one. What we’re dealing with here looks more like the complete absence of a rule, replaced by a set of aesthetic and tribal signals that masquerade as moral commitments. “Believe women” was never, in its most honest formulation, a legal standard or an epistemological claim; it was a corrective impulse, born from the entirely legitimate observation that women who reported sexual violence were routinely disbelieved, shamed, and institutionally failed.”
“[…] when you spend all your time lecturing the world about how it fails to live up to your exacting moral demands, the world will eventually realize that there is no there there, that the ethical stitching beneath your sanctimony is frayed and full of holes.”
“These are not the outcomes of a movement with principles. They are the outcomes of a movement that had a moment, and then, like so many movements before it, found that its energy was more reliably sustained by solidarity with the powerful than by fidelity to the vulnerable.”
“[…] the women who most needed MeToo to mean something durable − the ones whose alleged abusers are celebrated, connected, and very rich − are precisely the women for whom it has come to do the least.”

Why wank wins by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

📝 “Wank” here is defined as bad-faith argumentation i.e., deliberately misinterpreting words, not reading counterarguments, cherry-picking terms, and disregarding context.

“[…] we can now observe that despite how much of a problem using the Bayesian interpretation for everything is, a striking number of people in our society function entirely in the Bayesian mode.”

Understanding reality is not only unnecessary for survival but often detrimental to success.

“[…] the people who demand that communication says something valid in the Grammatical interpretation are few and far between and can mostly be ignored. This isn’t always bad: after all, as well as bullshit, small talk and phatic conversation of the type that we use for social bonding fall into this category as well, and if you insist on everything that’s said having a grammatically-encoded communicative payload, you will not be much fun at parties. That said, I’m not sure that this is the way to run countries or build nuclear reactors, so I think there’s some value to perhaps stopping this from happening so much.”
“[…] and agree for the sake of getting along. If you don’t, I can go tell the rest of the group that you think uranium’s actually fine, relying on the fact that much of the group will adopt the Bayesian interpretation and those who don’t will shut up to stay a part of the group, and they’ll most likely line up behind me, either expelling you from the group or marginalising you within it. I manage to boost my status, get the language I want into the platform, and I get to protect my feelings and not admit that I was wrong about the uranium: in fact, everyone will agree that I’m right about it being a radiological hazard in order to avoid any more messes.”
“[…] the claim about the properties of depleted uranium is expected to be treated as materially true because it has the right vibes, but if challenged it’s treated as though the challenger doesn’t share your deeply held values and in fact believes them to be wrong. This line of attack is usually used in groups where people are generally expected to have similar values and similar sentiments about words and the things in the world that they refer to, and in this cases wank can actually be a very effective form of coercion.”
“The threat of social exclusion and ostracism that comes with that makes it even worse: if you know that other people will believe those things about you if you don’t assent to the Bayesian reading of the claim, that’s an extremely strong incentive to go along with it however false it might be in the Grammatical reading.”
“[…] an environment where some people are only capable of seeing the Bayesian interpretation of a text and an even wider group of people are being coerced or deceived into admitting that interpretation even when a Grammatical one is available and makes more sense, having certain forms of knowledge becomes suspect (and thus inadmissible) in itself.”
“Even if you’re on-side in the general sense and the Grammatical interpretation of what you’ve written contains sensible and useful information, the language used and the sign that you know something has the wrong vibes and invalidates the statement in a Bayesian sense. The end consequence is that in a space where wank has taken root, only people who know nothing about certain subjects are held to be qualified to talk about them.”
“[…] the people setting policy almost definitionally wind up being the ones that know basically nothing about the tools: they’re easily persuaded by performance that even a more informed enthusiast will dismiss, and when trying to encourage use of the tools they’ll do things like set token quotas for workers that simply make no sense to speak of. In short, they make bad policy that gets them in trouble.”
“On a social level, interventions pushing improved literacy could do a lot to help. This is probably something that we should be doing anyway given the somewhat parlous state of literacy in the world at the moment and how important it is for general human function, but it would also help reduce the amount of wank we have to field. Literacy-favouring interventions are relatively cheap, we know how to do them effectively and they’re implementable without a great deal of state or corporate support: in short, we should be investing in them in volume. In professional settings, formal training in reading and writing would be well-worth investing in and would help reduce overall levels of wank a lot, leading to better decisions.”
“[…] wank is, when it’s safe, an important thing to be able to do. Wank relies on not being noticed as such to be effective: if you can actively point out “hey, this person is blatantly misreading this text and is trying to push you to do the same because the misreading’s better for them”, that is beneficial to us.”

Good luck with that. I think that ship has sailed. There are a lot of people doing this online. God’s work.

The Importance of Being Idle by Robert Zaretsky (The American Scholar)

“Lafargue exclaims, “the blind passion and perverse murderousness of work have transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings.” The reason workers spend so many hours shackled to their machines, he contended, was not from economic necessity. Instead, it was imposed upon them by their superiors, the captains of industry and finance, who were wedded to “the dogma of work and diabolically drilled the vice of work into the heads of workers.”

“Of course, Lafargue never called for the eradication of work. The necessities of life, after all, would always require the labor of women and men to produce and provide. But he did press for the rationalization of work. Given the efficiency of machines, fewer hours were needed to provide the necessities of life. Maintaining the same excessive number of work hours inevitably flooded the market with superfluities and the era’s repeated economic crises stretching from 1873 to the end of the century.”

“Although Lafargue does not flesh out his notion of a future filled with idleness, my guess is that he meant it would be devoted not to the pleasure of doing a particular hobby or specific activity, painting a landscape or swinging a gold club. Instead, it would be a life given out, quite simply, to the pleasure of faisant rien or doing nothing. As the Czech playwright Karel Capek wrote in an essay called “In Praise of Idleness,” this state is defined as “the absence of everything by which a person is occupied, diverted, distracted, interested, employed, annoyed, pleased, attracted, involved, entertained, bored, enchanted, fatigued, absorbed, or confused.” In a word, idling is the sentiment of being.”

LLMs & AI

On using AI to pass university courses: If it doesn’t matter if you know anything, or if you learned anything, or if you know how to do whatever job you’re going to get with that degree, then that job doesn’t matter.

The work you’re going to do with no knowledge doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you fuck it up because no-one cares whether you’re doing it.

You’re not providing any value with a job into which you put no effort and for which you don’t have to know anything.

You’re a button-pusher.

You’re digging a ditch on the day shift so another zombie can fill it in at night.

Use ChatGPT or we'll hit you

“White collar jobs in 2016: Free cold brew on tap! Conference rooms? Too old school! We’re yoga ball people. We have catered lunch on Wednesdays. If your benefits don’t cover something you need, tell us!

“White collar jobs in 2026: Use Chat GPT or we’ll hit you”

The Agent Stack Bet by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“Peek under the hood of most “production agents” shipping today and you won’t find intelligence. You’ll find custom plumbing, fragile session logic, shared service accounts, and a security model held together by hope. This can be so much better.

“If you’ve spent the last 18 months putting agents into production, you already know the models and tools have gotten dramatically better. You also know the problems that are still burning your on-call rotation are not problems you can prompt your way out of. We are running into a stack ceiling, and it is quietly creating a governance and reliability gap that the next generation of agentic systems cannot grow through.

“Right now the industry is living with what I’d call excessive agency: autonomous systems given broad permissions to get things done, then left to discover − at runtime, in production − that a schema drifted, an API changed, or a downstream service started returning PII it wasn’t supposed to. Agents mark tasks “complete” while leaving a trail of corrupted state behind them. The humans find out on Monday.

“This is not a failure of the people building agents. It is a failure of the stack they’re building on.”

“Every engineer who has shipped agents to production knows this specific flavor of dread: you have agents doing useful work, and effectively zero visibility into which tools they touched, which data they moved, or which credentials they used to do it. I call this governance debt − the silent accumulation of security and audit risk that eventually forces a full rewrite […]”

A possible solution?

“The agent has a distinct, unforgeable identity recognized at the network and platform level, and policy is enforced at the source. If the agent reaches for a database it isn’t cleared for, the connection never opens. No middleware, no vibes.”

How in God’s name did they build these systems without this in place already?

“Teams are burning a huge share of their engineering hours (and tokens) on undifferentiated plumbing − custom serialization, bespoke session stores, hand-rolled memory layers − just to keep an agent from forgetting its mission halfway through a multi-step task.”
“The real value lives in domain reasoning and business logic − the judgment calls that are specific to your company, your customers, your regulatory environment. Everything underneath should be the platform you build on, not the plumbing you build.”

Oh, God, this. This is the exact thing I’ve been telling people: These tools are not ready for the most of us. Anyone using these tools right now aren’t gaining an advantage over those not using them—they’re helping billion-dollar companies build their software, and they’re doing it without any return. It’s not open-source, but they’re volunteering their labor building systems that these tool providers should be building. Remember what your business is. Your business is not building LLM-agent harnesses.

“Teams should be able to prototype on their laptop with the same building blocks they’ll run in production, and cross that boundary without a rewrite.

“That’s the engineering standard that lets teams stop fighting plumbing and get back to the product.”

“The teams that pull ahead in the next five years will not pull ahead by being smarter at writing boilerplate. They’ll pull ahead by choosing the right agent foundation and spending their engineering hours on the problems only they can solve.

“Every month spent rebuilding the common stack − identity, context, persistence, orchestration − is a month not spent on the logic that actually makes your agents worth deploying.

“The agent stack has to become a solved problem. The only real question is whether you want to solve it yourself, again, or build on a foundation that was engineered for agents from the ground up.”

Exclusive: Microsoft To Shift GitHub Copilot Users To Token-Based Billing, Tighten Rate Limits by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“The document says that although token-based billing has been a top priority for Microsoft, it became more urgent in recent months, with the week-over-week cost of running GitHub Copilot nearly doubling since January.

“The move to token-based billing will see GitHub users charged based on their usage of the platform, and how many tokens their prompts consume — and thus, how much compute they use. It’s unclear at this time when this will begin.

“This is a significant move, reflecting the significant cost of running models on any AI product. Much like Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and every other AI company, Microsoft has been subsidizing the cost of compute, allowing users to burn way, way more in tokens than their subscriptions cost.

“The party appears to be ending for subsidized AI products, with Microsoft’s upcoming move following Anthropic’s […] recent changes shifting enterprise users to token-based billing as a means of reducing its costs.”

“According to the documents, Microsoft also intends to tighten rate limits on some Copilot Business and Enterprise plans […]”

“As part of this cost-cutting exercise, Microsoft intends to remove Anthropic’s Opus family of AI models from the $10-per-month GitHub Copilot Pro package altogether.

“Microsoft most recently retired Opus 4.6 Fast at the start of April for GitHub Copilot Pro+ users, although this decision was framed as a way to “further improve service reliability” and “[streamline] our model offerings and focusing resources on the models our users use the most.”

“Other Opus models — namely Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.5 — will be removed from the GitHub Copilot Pro+ tier in the coming weeks, as Microsoft transitions to Anthropic’s latest Opus 4.7 model.

“The move towards Opus 4.7 will likely see GitHub Copilot Pro+ users reach their usage limits faster.”

“The standard version of Claude Opus 4.6 has a premium request multiplier of three — meaning that, even with the promotional pricing, Claude Opus 4.7 is around 250% more expensive to use.

“The announcements for all of these changes are scheduled to take place throughout the week.”

So that means that Claude Opus 4.6 will become unavailable and the only equivalent will be 2.5x more expensive.

It is unclear to what degree Enterprise users are immediately affected, though the GitHub settings for my corporate account now include a “Preview” section called Models, which writes,

Models paid usage is disabled

“If enabled, usage beyond the free tier will be billed per token based on model pricing from our Models budget.

“You currently have free rate limits. Enable paid usage to avoid interruption and add tokens.”

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans by Simon Willison

“It’s easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM users were burning an order of magnitude less tokens. Coding agents consume a lot of compute.”

This is a classic scam:

  1. Demonstrate a modicum of utility in one or two areas.
  2. Get people excited about your product for all areas.
  3. Make the product magical: no-one knows how it works.
  4. Make it the customer’s fault when the product doesn’t work.
  5. Make the compensation model inscrutable: how do tokens relate to output? No-one knows. You can “burn” tokens with no useful result, so you can’t predict your budget.
  6. Set up a monopsony so no-one spoils it.

At this point, people are just expected to throw their money at these companies with no clear correlation to the expected gains. You have no control.

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents (and the Theory Dies Twice) by Christian Ekrem

“The researchers built something called the DELEGATE-52 benchmark. Fifty-two documents across different domains, handed to nineteen different models (including “frontier” ones like Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude 4.6 Opus, and GPT-5.4). Each model gets a document and a series of editing instructions. Twenty interactions. Just twenty. […] About 25% of the document content was degraded.”
“[…] short-term performance doesn’t predict long-term reliability. Two models that looked nearly identical after two interactions (91.5% vs 91.1%) diverged wildly over time (48.3% vs 64.1%). So “it works on my machine” is even less reassuring than usual. The demo always looks fine. It’s the twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth interaction where things fall apart – and by then, who’s still checking?”

“Out of all the domains they tested, only Python code showed what they called “majority readiness.” Seventeen out of nineteen models hit 98% or above. Python! The most structured and mechanically verifiable domain in the whole set.

“Everything else? Documents, prose, data, less structured formats? Corrupted.”

“Boilerplate generation, data formatting, repetitive scaffolding, test setup. The stuff with clear structure and tight constraints. The moment you need judgment, taste, or domain knowledge, you’re on your own. (Or worse: you think you’re not on your own, because the output looks right.)”

“When you delegate document maintenance to an LLM, the theory dies twice. First: you didn’t build the understanding, because you delegated instead of engaging with the material. Second: the LLM silently corrupted the artifact itself. So now you have neither the mental model nor an accurate written representation of it.

“You’ve lost both the map and the territory as it were.”

“The researchers also tested whether giving models tool use capabilities (web search, code execution, that sort of thing) would help. The “agentic” setup that everyone is so excited about.

“But lo and behold: It made things worse. Six percent additional degradation.

““Better tooling” made it worse!

“The models with the most capabilities introduced more errors, not fewer. They had more ways to confidently do the wrong thing.”

No-one notices, though, which confirms my theory that most of what people do is worth literally nothing. No-one’s reading it. No-one’s decisions based on it mean anything. Most people are just spinning their wheels for a paycheck. The massive use of AI in white-collar jobs has revealed the lie that these jobs produce any value at all.

“They also found that distractor context – irrelevant documents sitting in the context window alongside the one you’re working on – made things worse too. And the effect compounded over time. So the more realistic the setup (long conversations, multiple files, the way people actually use these tools in practice), the worse the results.”

GPT-5.5 prompting guide by Simon Willison

“Also relevant is the Using GPT-5.5 guide, which opens with this warning:”
“To get the most out of GPT-5.5, treat it as a new model family to tune for, not a drop-in replacement for gpt-5.2 or gpt-5.4. Begin migration with a fresh baseline instead of carrying over every instruction from an older prompt stack. Start with the smallest prompt that preserves the product contract, then tune reasoning effort, verbosity, tool descriptions, and output format against representative examples.”
“Interesting to see OpenAI recommend starting from scratch rather than trusting that existing prompts optimized for previous models will continue to work effectively with GPT-5.5.”

😳 😂 Classic cult!

Start over! Throw away everything you’ve learned up until now!

This is incredible. You are paying these companies ever-increasing amounts of money to alpha-test their products, all the while devoting a large amount of effort in fine-tuning the harness you have to build around the product in order to use it in anything approaching a reliable way, all the while taking 100% of the blame when it doesn’t work as advertised.

With this new release, they have the utter gall to tell you: You know that massive investment you’ve made in your system prompts and your skill files and all of that other bullshit you needed for the lower levels? You don’t need it anymore! You need to develop entirely new skills now that you’re an Operating Thetan (Wikipedia).

The AI Question that No AI Person Asks by vlogbrothers (YouTube)

“How will AI help solve the housing crisis? Because to me, the lack of housing that people want where people want it is like one of the big problems that underlies many many other problems in America. And I know that it is worse where I live than other places but it is a very big problem and it underlies a lot of other problems. And on that benchmark, I think AI does very poorly. And it’s strange to me that we don’t even look at this or think about it, but like obviously ask this question. If it’s such a big deal, how does it solve the biggest problems? Maybe it would help like a tiny bit of the margins. Maybe you could do permitting more quickly, maybe cheaper code review or design, but like that’s not what’s blocking housing in America.”
“Those are not the thing that would solve the problem because we have solutions now and doing any of those things or implementing any of those things would still require institutions that want the outcomes and can execute on them. Again it’s the same problem. The people who need the help who need the resource don’t have power over the resources. People who need housing don’t have any sway inside of a community. They don’t live there. They don’t have housing.”

“We live in an intelligence-constrained world. And so, if you have more of it, like a bunch of stuff’s going to get created that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

“But intelligence is separate from what I’m just going to go ahead and call wisdom. And I don’t think that we have a way to mass-produce wisdom. So perhaps we have been moving throughout my lifetime from a world that was intelligence-constrained to one that is wisdom-constrained. Perhaps that transition started a while back, but we are in the midst of it still.

“So for more examples, intelligence would help you get what you want, whereas wisdom would help you want what you should want or the right things. It’s the ability to figure out which problems are worth solving and then to solve them in ways that don’t create worse problems in the process, which is not easy.

“Even the wise fail on that sometimes. But while designing a more effective slot machine is an application of intelligence, I don’t think that you would call it an application of wisdom. And wisdom also has to survive contact with reality and also the other people who make up reality.

“I don’t see any reason to think that making intelligence extremely efficient would change the power dynamics that create an unjust world. It might help. It might hurt. It might do both at the same time or in different situations or at different scales. It is impossible to know, though I certainly see a concentration of power being somewhat inevitable here. But maybe not. I don’t know.

“Oh, a frame that has been resonating with me is that AI is to some extent a technology. It is a tool that already makes like a fairly broad array of tasks easier, probably make more tasks easier in the future. I think that it’s a genuinely a big technological shift. That is sort of how I’m imagining it. There’s a lot of, you know, leaping seven steps down the path that I don’t think is valuable because nobody can predict any of these things. But, as of right now, it is a big technological shift and so has been the internet and so has been personal computing. These things did not solve the housing crisis.

“It’s wild to say this, but it is obviously true that it will be easier for AI to create a cancer drug than it will be to get that cancer drug to all the people who need it. And I think that it is important to recognize that those problems are both problems. The cancer doesn’t care if the drug exists. that is not going to be affected by the existence of a drug that is not being given to a patient.

“So, the question isn’t whether AI is powerful. I think that it clearly is. It’s just that no one can know what its impact will be. Will it allow wisdom to flourish or will it allow the powerful to route around wisdom as they tend to do when given the opportunity?”

Aw man, we both know the answer to that one. Power concedes nothing with a demand; it never has and it never will.

Programming

The peril of laziness lost by Bryan Cantrill

“Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:”
“If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.”
“Laziness drives us to make the system as simple as possible (but no simpler!) — to develop the powerful abstractions that then allow us to do much more, much more easily.”
“[…] when programmers are engaged in the seeming laziness of hammock-driven development, we are in fact turning the problem over and over in our heads. We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us.”
“[…] a consequence of the broadening of software creation over the past two decades is it includes more and more people who are unlikely to call themselves programmers — and for whom the virtue of laziness would lose its intended meaning.”

“[…] should be of little surprise that LLMs have served as anabolic steroids for the brogrammer set.

“Elated with their new-found bulk, they can’t seem to shut up about it.”

“[…] like assessing literature by the pound, its fallacy is clear even to novice programmers.”
“LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.”

Brocards for vulnerability triage by william woodruff

“[…] because the programmer is responsible for maintaining the invariant, there is a potentially legitimate vulnerability when usage of the API violates the invariant. By analogy: free(3) is not considered vulnerable to a double free, but a program that calls free(3) on an already freed pointer is considered vulnerable to a double free.”
“[…] a vulnerability report can be safely dismissed if the behavior described is a direct consequence of the software’s correct adherence to a standard or specification. In these instances the vulnerability (if one exists) is present within the standard itself, and not the implementation.”

I Can’t Look by Mr Fish (Scheer Post)

“Allen also talked about how he preferred the gutsy temerity of the female characters written about in the Bible over the credulous obedience exhibited by their male counterparts. He claimed that anybody too demure or subservient to defy the sanctimonious bullying of a “vain and sadistic Holy Spirit” deserved zero respect and infinite ridicule for the sin of not listening to the existential distress, animalistic passion, irrepressible curiosity, and glorious self-determination of their own heart.”
“[…] a convincing argument could be made that the overwhelming majority of so-called truth-telling artists working as cartoonists, satirists, muralists, and social realists are merely men and women willing to reveal what is already evident to everybody—to, quite literally, expose a pre-existing truism made invisible by those motivated by fear or dread or confusion to simply turn away, claiming that they just can’t look!”

Homer Simpson: He’s saying what we’re all thinking!

“What defect in our supposed higher intelligence insists that we continuously wait for proof before we acknowledge our acquiescence to bad behavior and the wanton destruction of people, places, and things?”

Highlights from Git 2.54 by Taylor Blau (GitHub Blog)

“Git 2.54 introduces a new experimental command that is designed for exactly these simpler cases: git history. The history command currently supports two operations: reword and split.

“git history reword <commit> opens your editor with the specified commit’s message and rewrites it in place, updating any branches that descend from that commit. Unlike git rebase, it doesn’t touch your working tree or index, and it can even operate in a bare repository.

“git history split <commit> lets you interactively split a commit into two by selecting which hunks should be carved out into a new parent commit.”

“Git 2.54 introduces a new way to define hooks: in your configuration files. Instead of placing a script at .git/hooks/pre-commit, you can now write:”
[hook "linter"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/linter –cpp20

“The hook.<name>.command key specifies the command to run, and hook.<name>.event specifies which hook event should trigger it. Since this is just configuration, it can live in your per-user ~/.gitconfig, a system-wide /etc/gitconfig, or in a repository’s local config. That makes it straightforward to define a set of hooks centrally and have them apply everywhere.

“Even better, you can now run multiple hooks for the same event. If you want both a linter and a secrets scanner to run before every commit, you can configure them independently:”

[hook "linter"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/linter –cpp20

[hook "no-leaks"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/leak-detector
“Git’s internal handling of hooks has been modernized. Many built-in hooks that were previously invoked through ad-hoc code paths (like pre-push, post-rewrite, and the various receive-pack hooks) have been migrated to use the new hook API, meaning they all benefit from the new configuration-based hook machinery.”

Removing byte[] allocations in .NET Framework using ReadOnlySpan<T> by Andrew Lock (.NET Escapades)

“When the compiler sees the pattern above, it does the following:”
  1. Embed the byte[] data into the final assembly’s metadata
  2. When ReadOnlySpanProp is invoked, instead of creating a byte[], create a ReadOnlySpan<byte> that points directly to the data in the assembly

“So the returned ReadOnlySpan<byte> isn’t pointing to data that exists on the heap or even on the stack; it’s pointing to data that’s embedded directly in the assembly. That means there’s no allocation at all, which removes that startup overhead and means there’s no pressure at all on the garbage collector 🎉

“It’s worth noting as well that this is a compiler feature, which means that as long as a System.ReadOnlySpan<T> type is available, you can use it. So as long as you add the System.Memory NuGet package to your .NET Framework app, you too can benefit from this zero-allocation technique!”

“The compiler optimizations shown so far can only be applied to byte-sized primitives, i.e. byte, sbyte, and bool. That’s because the constant data would be stored in a little endian format, and needs to be translated to the runtime endian format, e.g. if the application is run on hardware which utilizes big endian numbers.”

This applies to UTF-8–encoded strings, so that’s good.

“The failure path here is understandable, because there’s really no way to do a safe zero-allocation approach when the data needs to be mutable. The big problem is that it’s not obvious that it’s a super-allocatey property instead of a zero-allocation version. If you accidentally fat-finger and write Span<T> instead of ReadOnlySpan<T>, or, you know, Claude does, then it’s really not obvious from simply reviewing the code…

“The only good news is that if you use modern features, namely collection expressions, you might catch the issue!”

Toolchain Horizons: Exploring Rust Dependency-Toolchain Compatibility by Brian Anderson (TigerBeetle)

“The Rust compiler is stable. The Rust crate ecosystem is not. Crate authors have strong incentives to adopt new features and break from the past. Based on this experiment, I estimate a roughly 2-year window in which any particular Rust compiler remains viable for a project that takes dependencies. After that, we’re all forced to upgrade — not by language changes, but by our crate neighbors.

“We can widen that window slowly, but it requires individual crate authors to expand their toolchain horizons.”

Design

Gestalt Principles by Nikita Prokopov

An utter lack of gestalt

“There are many ways to illustrate that things belong together or are related to each other. They are commonly known as “gestalt principles” (top)

“What happens when you ignore them all? You get a UI that is absolutely undecipherable (bottom). Just one hot mess of everything with no indication what applies to what.”

Today I learned about gestalt theory, mostly from Principles of grouping (Wikipedia).

  • Proximity
  • Similarity
  • Enclosure
  • Closure
  • Good continuation
  • Common fate
  • Good form

Fun

Horse Tornado for Children

“My favourite translator said that when she was an ambassador for Hungary she took all these Japanese politicians on a tour and she was trying to circumtranslate merry go round’ cause she didn’t know the Japanese word for it by calling it a ‘horse tornado for children’ and they had no blessed idea what she was saying and she finally started running in circles going up and down and they go ‘ohhhhh, in Japan we call those merry-go-rounds””
Copyright (c) 1999-2026 earthli.com. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by