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Links and Notes for September 12th, 2025

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1nfo51n/what_happened_maga/" author="" source="Reddit">What happened MAGA?</a> <img src="{att_link}civil_war_cancelled_due_to_shooter_being_demographically_uncooperative.webp" align="none" caption="Civil War cancelled due to shooter being demographically uncooperative"> <hr> <a href="https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/09/inside-the-upstate-ny-immigration-raid-secrecy-deception-and-a-rush-to-deport-dozens-of-workers.html" source="Syracuse.com" author="Marnie Eisenstadt">Inside the Upstate NY immigration raid: Secrecy, deception and a rush to deport dozens of workers</a> <bq>Acting U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III said all of the deported workers waived their legal rights to due process here.</bq> Is it possible to waive your rights to due process? Like, if it's a right, how can you waive it? <bq>Witnesses described chaos. Agents streamed in through the side doors they had pried open. They swarmed the hallways, ran into bathrooms. Sylvia Valacios was on the toilet with her pants down when a male agent burst in and barked at her to follow him, she told syracuse.com.</bq> Animals. Just empathy-free beasts. <bq>The warrant also authorized agents to take all of the business’s records and computers, which they did.</bq> <bq>“It very much seems like they’re doing an end-run around the Fourth Amendment in order to try to deport as many people as they can,” said Daniel Lambright, a NYCLU attorney.</bq> How many years of law education does it take to figure that out? The law clearly no longer matters and you're still dancing around the topic as if that weren't the case. <bq>“I really think what we’re seeing now are our new tactics for enforcement,” Lurf said. “It feels like they’re trying to move people out of touch of attorneys, you know … make the detainees inaccessible to us.”</bq> It's incredible how they pussyfoot around accusations of actual criminality. What are they afraid of? Being disbarred from a justice system that no longer has anything to do with justice? <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-billionaire-class-want-you-thinking-israel-controls-the-west/" source="ZNetwork" author="Jonathan Cook">The Billionaire Class Want You Thinking Israel Controls The West</a> <bq>This surface politics is what we are encouraged to see as “real politics”. It is not. Elections, as the saying goes, would not be allowed if they made any real difference. The so-called right and left in western political systems share the same basic assumptions about foreign policy: continuing western control of global resources. Questioning the purpose of Nato, and the neo-colonialism it embodies, is itself enough of a red flag to get you designated as Public Enemy No 1, as former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn soon found out. As will the new UK leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, if he starts making significant electoral inroads. Mainstream political parties have the freedom to bicker over the details of domestic policy. That is what we are encouraged to focus on. Whether we should support extreme austerity that benefits wealth elites, or slightly less extreme austerity that also benefits wealth elites but slightly less so. Whether we support a Brexit that benefits one set of oligarchs, or a Remain that benefits another set of oligarchs.</bq> <bq>[...] the mistake is to think that we, the people, control the political system but that corrupt politicians have failed us.</bq> <bq>[...] the answer is to elect a Donald Trump in the US or a Nigel Farage in the UK who claim – in direct contradiction of their own histories positioned within western elites – to be outsiders who champion ordinary people. Not surprisingly, they want you scapegoating “illegal immigrants”, “benefit scroungers” and “the traitorous left”, not taking on the billionaire class they really represent.</bq> <bq>[...] these futile chases after illusory political change simply buy more time for the billionaire class and their discredited power structures, ones pushing our and other species to the brink of extinction, to continue business as usual.</bq> <bq>The truth is that we live in a bubble of political make-believe. The media and Hollywood – the public relations arms of the billionaire class – create fairy-tale narratives designed to keep us ignorant, divided and squabbling. They don’t care what you think or say so long as you don’t notice that the billionaire class is making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=138743" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Israels Krieg – es ist hoffnungslos</a> <bq>Nachdem Israel gestern einen Luftangriff auf das Hamas-Verhandlungsteam in Katar ausgeführt hat, haben sowohl im Westen als auch in der arabischen Welt einmal mehr altbekannte Rituale eingesetzt. Man vergießt Krokodilstränen und tut so, als sei man empört – Schlafwandler und Phrasendrescher. Israels ewige Schutzmächte USA und Deutschland sowie arabische Staatschefs, denen das Schicksal der Palästinenser herzlich egal ist, gehören zum festen Repertoire der einstudierten Empörung.</bq> <bq>Die Herren Merz und Wadephul sind erstaunt. Der Angriff auf Katar sei nicht vom Völkerrecht gedeckt gewesen! Ei der Daus! Waren Israels Angriffe auf iranischen, libanesischen, syrischen, jemenitischen und erst gestern vermeintlich auch auf tunesischen Boden etwa durch das Völkerrecht gedeckt? Ist der Völkermord in Gaza durch das Völkerrecht gedeckt? Man muss diese rhetorischen Fragen nicht ernsthaft diskutieren, sondern sollte erstaunt sein, dass ein deutscher Kanzler und ein deutscher Außenminister mit ihren gespielten wie absurden Erstaunensäußerungen überhaupt durchkommen.</bq> <bq>Ganze 49 Mal haben die USA bereits im UN-Sicherheitsrat durch ihr Veto eine ansonsten einstimmige Resolution gegen Israel verhindert. Da kann UN-Generalsekretär Guterres den Angriff auf Katar noch so oft eine „flagrante Verletzung der Souveränität und territorialen Integrität Katars” nennen und da können Staaten wie Algerien und Pakistan noch so oft den UN-Sicherheitsrat wegen des Angriffs anrufen – Folgen wird dies ohnehin nicht haben, da die USA wieder einmal ihr Veto einlegen und Israel vor den Folgen seiner Verbrechen beschützen werden.</bq> <bq>Auch die arabischen Staats- und Regierungschefs geben sich im Ticker von Al-Jazeera mal wieder ganz empört. Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier. Werden dieser Empörung irgendwelche Taten folgen? Natürlich nicht. Die Palästinenser sind den arabischen Regierungen mittlerweile herzlich egal.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/09/10/patrick-lawrence-a-nation-of-narcissists/" source="Scheer Post / Consortium News" author="Patrick Lawrence">A Nation of Narcissists</a> <bq>How dare the Chinese president organize an elaborate military parade to celebrate China’s role in the historical defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army. How dare he stir pride in the People’s Republic’s determination to defend its sovereignty while refuting the revisionism — nonsensical but prevalent — that airbrushes the Chinese Communist Party out of the Second World War’s history.</bq> <bq>Then along came Donald Trump, who addressed Xi on his Truth Social platform with this, referencing the Russian and North Korean leaders as he watched the proceedings live: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against the United States of America.” There is no beating the Trumpster when it comes to stating the case forthrightly. The mainstream press can strike the pose of objectivity all it likes, but Trump, the id of the late-phase imperium, comes right out and says it: The non–West is against us. Anti–American animosity is its sole motivation, its very raison d’être.</bq> Thats why China builds all that stuff: bridges, cars, solar, wind, hydro---just to spite the U.S. <bq>[...] the press and the president are merely exhibits, symptoms of a national failing that transcends either of these. This is the problem of America’s self-absorption, the pervasive narcissism that, it now becomes evident, is a primary cause of our troubled republic’s increasingly hostile relations with others and, so, its swift descent into isolation.</bq> <bq>Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. They see only themselves when they look abroad at others. And they are utterly incapable of seeing themselves as they are or their country as it is.</bq> <bq>It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, Henry Kissinger once remarked in an often-quoted comment, but it is fatal to be America’s friend. This is the United States as run by the narcissistic cliques who set the imperium’s course. Nothing and no one matters beyond their own power.</bq> <bq>Read a few of these pieces carefully, I urge. You find correspondents in this or that bureau abroad who rarely quote Chinese or Russian or even European sources in support of the reporting. No, they call reliably conformist scholars or think tank denizens back in the States to tell them how to think about what is going on in China or Russia or wherever it may be.</bq> <bq>And so long as American power was hegemonic this did not matter. Diplomacy, as Boutros Boutros–Ghali memorably remarked after the United States forced him as out as the U.N.’s sec-gen, is for the weaker nations; the strong have no need of it.</bq> <bq>Washington’s prevalent narcissism renders proper statecraft more or less impossible, as there has been, just as Boutros–Ghali astutely observed, no need of it for most of the past eight decades. And we cannot put this down to Donald Trump alone: This has been less obviously but just as true of the administrations that preceded his.</bq> <bq>At this point the late-phase imperium is more or less entirely dependent on force as its mode of expression in the community of nations.</bq> <bq>The emergence of the non–West as a bloc of nations has not a shred of anti–Americanism in it. These nations would indeed welcome the United States, with its capital, its technologies, and so on, to participate fulsomely in building the new world order to which they are dedicated. Only hegemons are unwelcome in this decidedly ecumenical undertaking. Only narcissists. Whether or not America can at last stop staring at its own reflection to see the world around it will determine its fate in our evolving century.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/death-of-the-holocaust-industry" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Death of the Holocaust Industry</a> <bq>Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians. Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature, the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of the crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as a vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.</bq> <bq>Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”</bq> <bq>Holocaust studies, which exploded in the 1970s and were epitomized by the deification of the Holocaust survivor and fervent Zionist Elie Wiesel — literary critic Alfred Kazin called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust” — have now surrendered any claim to championing universal truths. These Holocaust scholars use a benchmark evil, as Norman Finkelstein points out, “not as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club.” The mantra “Do not compare,” Finkelstein writes, “is the mantra of moral blackmailers.”</bq> <bq>Holocaust studies are based on the fallacy that unique suffering confers unique entitlement. This was always the purpose of what Finkelstein calls “The Holocaust Industry.”</bq> <bq>What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians in the Bengal famine by the British or the Soviet-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Manifest Destiny any different from the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of Lebensraum? These too were holocausts, fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlusts.</bq> <bq>Genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”</bq> <bq>The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended. The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth — barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Hate the player AND the game</a> <bq>The wellspring of enshittification isn't poor consumption choices, it's poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn't their personal moral failings, it's the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:</bq> <bq>The people who made these policy choices did so in living memory. They were warned at the time about the foreseeable consequences of their choices. They made those choices anyway. They faced zero consequences for doing so, even after every one of the prophesied horrors came to pass. Not only were they spared consequences for their actions, but they prospered as a result – they are revered as statesmen, lawyers, scholars and titans of economics.</bq> <bq>[...] the curse of being a leftist is that you have object permanence – you actually remember the stuff that happened and how it happened. You don't live in an eternal now that has no causal relationship to the past.</bq> <bq>If Elon Musk OD'ed on ketamine tomorrow, there'd be ten Big Balls who'd tear each others' throats out in the ensuing succession fight, and the next guy would be just as stupid, racist, and authoritarian. Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai, Nadella, Larry Ellison – they're just filling the monster-shaped holes that policy-makers installed in our society.</bq> <bq>These monopolies did not arise because of the iron laws of economics. They are not the product of the great forces of history. They are the direct and undeniable consequence of Robert Bork convincing the world's governments to embrace his bullshit, pro-monopoly policies. Satan took Bork to hell in 2012, but you know who's still with us? Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was Bill Clinton's copyright czar, the man who, in his own words, "did an end-run around Congress" by getting an UN treaty passed that obliged its signatories to ban reverse engineering:</bq> <bq>Bruce Lehman is why farmers can't fix their own tractors, hospitals can't fix their own ventilators, and your mechanic can't fix your car. He's why, when the manufacturer of your artificial eyes bricks a computer that is permanently wired to your nervous system, no one else can revive it:</bq> <bq>Pai – and his co-conspirators – are the umps who rigged the game. Hate Thomas Rutledge to be sure, but to prevent people like Rutledge from gaining power over your digital life in future, you must remember Ajit Pai with the special form of white-hot rage that keeps people like him from ever making policy decisions again.</bq> <bq>In Europe, there's Axel Voss, the man behind 2019's "filternet" proposal, which requires tech platforms to spend hundreds of millions of euros for copyright filters that use AI to process everything posted to the public internet in Europe and block anything the AI thinks is "copyrighted"</bq> <bq>Ed Zitron is right to hate the people who implement the Rot Economy for what they did to the computer. But those people are only doing what policymakers let them do. Corporate monsters thrive in an enshittogenic environment.</bq> What they've bribed policymakers to let them do. <bq>They're the ones who are terraforming our planet to sideline human life and replace it with the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.aaronmate.net/p/opcw-whistleblower-calls-out-next" source="" author="Aaron Maté / Ian Henderson">OPCW whistleblower calls out next phase of Syria's chemical weapons deception</a> <bq>The OPCW has refused to meet with the veteran inspectors who challenged the cover-up, and establishment media has widely ignored their story. The resounding silence on the OPCW scandal has helped sustain a propaganda narrative integral to the years-long, US-led regime change campaign to overthrow the Syrian government: that Bashar al-Assad was guilty of “gassing his own people.” In December 2025, that campaign finally succeeded with the ouster of Assad and the takeover of Syria by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, a direct offshoot of Al Qaeda in Syria.</bq> <bq>The widely disseminated narrative that Bashar al-Assad “gassed his own people” was essential for justifying the isolation and delegitimation of the former Syrian government, underpinning the United States and its allies’ ultimately successful policy of regime change. Therefore, the narrative still needs the fanfare of a tidy closeout.</bq> <bq>It is important to recognise that before Douma, the FFM never went into Syria to get to the site of an alleged chemical attack. After the social media postings that in each case triggered allegations of an attack, all the later “evidence” was handed over to the FFM, usually in Turkey, by the same militant enemies of the Syrian government that had filmed and reported the allegation. Most cases were littered with mysterious contradictions or uncertainties that were ignored or glossed over in FFM and IIT reports.</bq> <bq>Adding to the profile of Douma is the retaliatory air and missile strikes that were conducted by the US, UK and France, before the OPCW investigators even got to the incident locations in Douma. It gets worse. The main target of the airstrikes was a facility the OPCW had inspected twice and reported as fully compliant with the CWC. I led the inspections and wrote the reports.</bq> Would they have bombed if they really thought that there were chemical weapons there? <bq>Well-informed readers will be aware of the glaring inconsistencies in the official Douma story; the conflicting witness accounts, the early (disproved) accounts of nerve agent, the ruling-out of chlorine by NATO toxicologists (before this line of reporting was shut down) and the results of engineering studies that raised doubts about the appearance of two supposedly weaponized chlorine cylinders found at the scenes. Equally damaging was questionable management involvement, in particular the secret rewriting of the Douma Interim Report without the team’s knowledge or consent, after it had been submitted for release. </bq> <bq>Independent specialists, with credibility and a willingness to be identified, will then undertake a deeper scientific look into the Douma case. That’s where the Douma case will collapse, with the mainstream media no longer able to provide effective cover. Trust me, I know it will collapse. And the OPCW’s reputation will be irreparably tarnished.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/they-lowered-the-mcdonalds-flag-half" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They Lowered The McDonald's Flag Half-Mast At Guantanamo</a> <bq>I have no idea how much of what we’re being told about this case is true and how much we are being lied to. All I know is at the moment it all fits very nicely into the pre-existing plans of the powerful. White House lackey Stephen Miller is saying that Charlie Kirk’s assassination means “radical left organizations” need to be targeted and dismantled in the United States, because it’s what Charlie would have wanted. “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us. And we are gonna do that under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller told Fox News.</bq> Sure he did, you vampire ghoul, sure he did. <bq>And meanwhile the nightmare in west Asia continues to blaze on with the backing of the empire Kirk spent his life supporting. [...] Israel killed at least 30 journalists in an attack on a press office in Yemen on Wednesday, because the only thing the Israelis love more than bombing hospitals is assassinating news reporters, and the only thing they hate more than Palestinians is the truth. On Thursday the IDF abducted over a thousand Palestinians at random in the West Bank following an explosion which wounded two Israeli soldiers, marching them through the streets in a public display of humiliation.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znV919udYz8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/znV919udYz8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith / Briahna Joy Gray" caption="Israeli Scholar EXPOSES The Israeli Mind (w/ Shir Hever)"> This was a great 90-minute conversation between two eminently reasonable, well-informed, and non-polemical people. At the end, they watch a clip of David Mamet---an ostensibly classically left-liberal Hollywood playwright---go ballistic---he didn't yell but he all but called the host a genocidal antisemite and then walked out---in an interview. Israel is a mind-virus for so many people. It reveals those who have no principles, who have managed to fake it so far, pretending that they do have principles, just because they've never really been challenged. When the chips are down and something they consider to be valuable is threatened, they flip to a regressive, burn-the-ground-and-salt-the-Earth, Conan-style, plunder-and-pillage-and-eradicate-the-enemy attitude that belongs thousands of years in the past. David Mamet would be a loser in an actual civilization. Luckily for him, he lives in an anti-intellectual society that values ignorant assholes, irrational fools, and unprincipled idiots, so he will continue to do extremely well. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/09/14/israeli-strikes-on-media-offices-kill-at-least-25-journalists-in-yemen/" author="Kyle Anzalone" source="Scheer Post / Antiwar.com">Israeli Strikes on Media Offices Kill At Least 25 Journalists in Yemen</a> <bq>An Israeli attack on Yemen hit the offices of two newspapers in Sanaa, killing dozens of journalists and civilians. The Yemeni Journalists Union condemned the attack, labeling it a heinous war crime. According to the Yemeni Health Ministry, the Israeli strikes hit the offices of the 26 September newspaper and Al-Yemen newspaper, killing at least 25 journalists. 26 September is the military’s media outlet, and Al-Yemen is one of the most read newspapers in the country. </bq> Israel is just straight-up murdering civilians in any country it pleases. There is literally no international law to speak of anymore. This would send the signal that anyone can bomb anybody without repercussions but everyone knows that only Israel and the U.S. can just murder journalists (presumably who are writing stuff that they don't like) and other civilians whenever they like, without explanation. What explanation could possibly suffice? There is no justification for murder. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/09/political-speech-antisemitism-universities-mccarthyism/" author="Corey Robin" source="Jacobin">All of This Because of Political Speech</a> <bq>In my book on fear, I argued that regimes of fear critically depend on two types of individuals: careerists and collaborators. Today the word we hear is “complicity.” What all of these words are meant to suggest is that regimes of fear are never simply top-down affairs. They have a strong bottom-up component as well. Unfortunately, in our discourse today, including on the Left, that bottom-up element is often construed to be a mob of racist randos on social media or rubes in the red states. But that’s a comfort and a conceit. The truth is that collaborators are particular agents, trusted with discrete responsibility and concrete power at various levels, in multiple institutions, making choices, sometimes for the best of reasons, with consequences that they may not intend but that are likely to result anyway.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/suppressed_news/comments/1nist4o/why_are_250_us_state_legislators_currently_in" author="" source="Reddit">Why are 250 US state legislators currently in Israel?</a> Because Israel's dick isn't going to suck itself? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_States_One_Israel" author="" source="Wikipedia">50 States One Israel</a> was mentioned in the comments. <bq>[...] a conference being held in Israel from September 14, 2025 to September 18, 2025 for state legislators from the United States and members of the Israeli government. Hosted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the conference was described as the largest delegation of elected officials to visit Israel. According to Lior Haiat, Deputy Director for North America at the Foreign Ministry, lawmakers including state legislators from all 50 states were in attendance.</bq> What great timing, though. A perfect time to go. Was this like a time-share thing? You know, for condos on the Gaza Coast? <hr> <a href="https://www.kunstler.com/p/the-power-of-god-compels-you" author="James Howard Kunstler" source="Clusterfuck Nation">The Power of God Compels You!</a> Let's take a peek at what the lunatic fringe is talking about. <bq>He was about as fine a young man as you could have dreamed up in a country so busy disgracing itself, Jesus-like in quality, if not in exact manner. Jesus, after all, was not a family man. But then there was nothing supernatural about Charlie Kirk. He was vividly of this time and place on earth. Now, in death, you can imagine him up on a mural in the post office. They’ve gone and turned him into legend, like Davy Crockett, Joseph Smith, Abe Lincoln. Yeah, it goes that deep. The Woke-Jacobin Left broke into a happy-dance when they heard the news, and I bet 90-percent of them didn’t even know what Charlie was about, except that their minders had painted a bullseye on him and somebody hit it. They have forgotten what their country is about, too. They have unwittingly acted-out Biblical-grade wickedness. Jimmy Kimmel didn’t just tell a bad joke about the president — “This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish" — he made a Judas of himself. He demonstrated exactly what it means to betray whatever remains of goodness in this land.</bq> Oh holy fuck, you sanctimonious, overblown idiot. My goodness, he really takes himself and his ilk seriously, doesn't he? This used to be quite an interesting author, with a reasonable head on his shoulders. He would write about horrible architectural practices, about what the world might look like after the end times have knocked several hundred years of advancement off of civilization, and two non-fiction books about how realistic the world's plans are for saving itself from the various ills that face it. Now, his brain has been turned into pudding by a relentless onslaught of the most insipid possible media one could possibly take one's lead from. This pudding-head actually believes the following fairy tale that he wrote. <bq>If Mr. Trump had any qualms about turning the full force of the law on this party and its demonic confederates in government and the old news media, then you can safely assume that after Charlie Kirk’s murder every lever of power will be used to get them all into courtrooms under fair and correct proceedings with the basic aim of laying out the truth of what has happened to our country, so that everyone can see what it was.</bq> No-one sane or halfway observant could believe anything like this fairy tale. You'd have to ignore every single thing that Trump has done in the last eight months to believe that he would bring anyone to court. This is fan-fiction for the Trump administration. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0BtDwtvzpU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/D0BtDwtvzpU" source="YouTube" width="560px" caption="The Obscenity of India's Wealthy | पी साईनाथ यांचं संपूर्ण भाषण" author="P Sainath | Indie Journal"> An excellent talk that brings the point home that we're all suffering under the same kind of regime, that the the working class (and journalists, who should be working class) have more in common with each other, regardless of nation, than we do with the elites in our respective nations. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-is-committing-genocide-this" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel Is Committing Genocide. This Is A Fact, Not An Opinion.</a> <bq>It is not okay to treat the fact that Israel is committing genocide like it’s a matter of opinion. Every relevant human rights institution on earth says it’s a genocide. Zero equivalent institutions say it’s not. This is a settled matter. People who deny that it’s a genocide deserve to be taken exactly as seriously as flat earthers. They’re just an extremely evil and destructive version of the thing flat earthers are. You don’t see news articles about NASA with journalists adding “an agency which many believe is a government hoax designed to trick us into accepting ball earth theory” to their reporting. If a guest mentions Antarctica on the BBC, the news anchor doesn’t interrupt them to say “and we should say here that flat earth theorists deny the existence of that continent, maintaining that it is actually a wall of ice holding the oceans in place.” You also don’t see reporting which treats accepted science about space and our planet like it’s an opinion held by some. You never see “which many scientists claim exists” when a report discusses outer space, or mentions of the horizon mitigated with words like “which some hold is due to the curvature of the earth rather than laws of perspective and light refraction”. They’re just treated as established facts, and those who disagree with the established facts are not taken seriously. The genocide in Gaza should be no different. As the old adage goes, if one side says it’s raining and the other says it isn’t, your job isn’t to quote both sides, your job is to look out the window. The window’s right there, western media. And it’s pouring genocide.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/podcast/2025/09/18/freddie-deboer-charlie-kirks-murder-reveals-a-cultural-sickness/" author="Liz Wolfe" source="Reason">Freddie deBoer: Charlie Kirk's Murder Reveals a Cultural Sickness</a> <bq>DeBoer is a proud man of the left, and we ask him whether the pathology that led to Kirk's assassination is particularly characteristic of the left in an era where unapologetic celebrations of this murder and the murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson late last year have appeared on social media with disturbing frequency. It's a conversation that we hope inspires you as it did us to reflect on what it is that's meaningful to you, what the effect of an increasingly digital and disembodied world has on that meaning, and how to avoid pushing our culture any further in the direction of one that produces rampant celebration and dehumanization of a father and husband who was killed for the words he spoke.</bq> I really like Freddie deBoer's writing and I think his heart is in the right place on many topics. He is a strong thinker with a strong moral core. He is a proud socialist. He knows how to think like a socialist. He is definitely of the left. But my God, I can't imagine why he would go on a podcast hosted by Liz Wolfe, who is an unapologetic troll of Reason magazine. I subscribe to this magazine. I follow the newsfeed. I do not subscribe to most of their philosophy but there is some good reading there. Liz Wolfe's "daily updates" are not among those good writings. The description's laser-like focus on so-called leftist violence isn't promising. I don't even understand why that's a topic. There were no leftist killings. I suppose you could call Kirk's murder an assassination if you wanted to be hyperbolic. But it's weird when she also called Brian Thompson's death a "murder" in the same few paragraphs. And then there's the hagiography about Kirk's being just a <iq>father and a husband who was killed for the words he spoke.</iq> I can't recall her giving a flying fuck about anyone else who's been killed or punished or canceled for speaking out, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She couldn't spare a single word for any Palestinian journalist. So there's this fantasy that the shooter of Kirk was a leftist, which is obvious lies, and then there's a complete erasure of any right-wing violence. There is no equivalence drawn between canceling that was heartily and rightly booed in the last 10 years and the bloodthirsty calls for canceling when it's going in the other direction. There is no acknowledgment about the shocking lack of principle for nearly all concerned. Most of the former free-speech absolutists are running for the hills. This includes Matt Taibbi, who couldn't be bothered to express an iota of outrage at the egregious behavior of the Trump administration. Just like Liz can't really bring herself to come out against anything they're doing, preferring, like Taibbi, to tsk tsk tsk. I don't know why you would want to have this conversation with this obviously intellectually and morally impaired person, the person who would write this summary. It's possible that the conversation in the podcast is good but I will never know because I can't imagine wanting to waste an hour of my life trying to find out. Liz Wolfe is, at best, a useful idiot. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/new-york-socialist-city" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">New York Socialist City</a> <bq>As in all discussions of popular politics, the useful definition lies at some reasonable midpoint between What a Textbook Says and What Idiots Think It Means. The meaning of the word has to be easy enough for anyone to understand, without falling into the trap of allowing itself to be defined strictly from the perspective of its enemies.</bq> <bq>So what socialism really means in the context of US politics is public services for the public good. Using government to socialize the things that can help everyone, rather than allowing the private market to run everything in a way that preys on the public for private gain. As a practical matter, this is what most people trying to Do Socialism in American politics are trying to do.</bq> <bq>Social Security is socialist. 401ks are not. Public schools are socialist. Private schools are not. Public roads are socialist. Private toll roads are not. Public parks are socialist. Private playgrounds are not. The fire department is socialist. Private firefighters protecting the mansions of the rich are not. Public health care would be socialist. The awful private health insurance system we have is not.</bq> <bq>People tend to love the socialist things that already exist as much as they claim to despise the idea of any socialist thing that does not yet exist. If the general public were just a little less susceptible to red-baiting, they could have a ton of nice things. Our unstated national agreement is to all stop calling the socialist parts of our country “socialist” as soon as they are established.</bq> <bq>If you cannot tolerate other people, you cannot live here. If you want other people to be tolerable, you want them to be living tolerable lives. Giving everyone a decent standard of living is mutually beneficial in New York City, because everyone else is right here, next to you, and if they are having a bad time, you soon will be too.</bq> <bq>Is this socialism? Who fucking cares? Have you ever tried to take your child in a stroller on a city bus to their expensive day care so you can get to your low wage job that barely pays your high rent? It sucks! To see a politician who is, at least, trying to directly solve some of those problems get characterized as some sort of threat has to make you laugh. Threat to who? To your landlord, to your landlord’s banker, to Uber and DoorDash and other multibillion-dollar companies that want to pay you less and make your life suck more so some rich person who never has to take the bus can get richer?</bq> <bq>Normal socialism. That is the most important thing that Zohran represents to me. A socialism that means “It’s easier to take the bus and the subway and pay the rent and take care of your kids and generally live a decent life.” A socialism that means that the government is a thing that works on behalf of the public to make the public’s life better. That’s all! That’s it! Can we not try this? Are we to believe this is a foolish dream—for the bus to be free and on time? For it to be possible for a normal person to live a normal life in the biggest city in America?</bq> <bq>[...] Bill Ackman will always be a clown with no swag who probably has never even been to a fruit stand on Kings Highway. Your loss, Bill Ackman. There are many more of us in big brick apartment buildings in Brooklyn than there are billionaires on 57th Street. The city is ours. We are going to make it suck less, through socialism, whether you like it or not. If that makes you run away, I’m not surprised. New York City might be a little too fast for a small mind.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Fingerspitzengefühl</a> <bq>This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make recipes, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual stuff, in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water. This was quite a switch! At the founding of the American republic, the US refused to extend patent protection to foreign inventors. The inventions of foreigners would be fair game for Americans, who could follow their recipes without paying a cent, and so improve the productivity of the new nation without paying rent to old empires over the sea. It was only once America found itself exporting as much as it imported that it saw fit to recognize the prerogatives of foreign inventors, as part of reciprocal agreements that required foreigners to seek permission and pay royalties to American patent-holders. But by the end of the 20th Century, America's ruling class was no longer interested in exporting things; they wanted to export ideas, and receive things in return. You can see why: America has a limited supply of things, but there's an infinite supply of ideas (in theory, anyway). There was one problem: why wouldn't the poor-but-striving nations abroad copy the American Method for successful industrialization? If ignoring Europeans' patents allowed America to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world, why wouldn't, say, China just copy all that American "IP"? If seizing foreigners' inventions without permission was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not Jiang Zemin? America solved this problem with the promise of "free trade." The World Trade Organization divided the world into two blocs: countries that could trade with one another without paying tariffs, and the rabble without who had to navigate a complex O(^2) problem of different tariff schedules between every pair of nations. To join the WTO club, countries had to sign up to a side-treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the TRIPS, the Jeffersonian plan for industrialization (taking foreigners' ideas without permission) was declared a one-off, a scheme only the US got to try and no other country could benefit from. For China to join the WTO and gain tariff-free access to the world's markets, it would have to agree to respect foreign patents, copyrights, trademarks and other "IP." We know the story of what followed over the next quarter-century: China became the world's factory, and became so structurally important that even if it violated its obligations under the TRIPS, "stealing the IP" of rich nations, no one could afford to close their borders to Chinese imports, because every country except China had forgotten how to make things.</bq> <bq>Process knowledge is everything from "Here's how to decant feedstock into this gadget so it doesn't jam," to "here's how to adjust the flow of this precursor on humid days to account for the changes in viscosity" to "if you can't get the normal tech to show up and calibrate the part, here's the phone number of the guy who retired last year and will do it for time-and-a-half."</bq> <bq>This process is so esoteric, and has so many figurative and literal moving parts, that it needs to be closely overseen and continuously adjusted by someone with a PhD in electrical engineering. That overseer needs to wear a clean-room suit, and they have to work an eight-hour shift without a bathroom, food or water break (because getting out of the suit means going through an airlock means shutting down the system means long delays and wastage). That PhD EENG is making $50k/year.</bq> <bq>America's vicious cycle was China's virtuous cycle. The process knowledge that drained out of America accumulated in China. Years of experience solving problems in earlier versions of new equipment and processes gives workers a conceptual framework to debug the current version – they know about the raw mechanisms subsumed in abstraction layers and sealed packages and can visualize what's going on inside those black boxes.</bq> <bq>[...] while "IP" can be bought and sold by the capital classes, process knowledge is inseparably vested in the minds and muscle-memory of their workers. People who own the instructions are constitutionally prone to assuming that making the recipe is the important part, while following the recipe is donkey-work you can assign to any freestanding oaf who can take instruction.</bq> <bq>The exaltation of "IP" over process knowledge is part of the ancient practice of bosses denigrating their workers' contribution to the bottom line. It's key to the myth that workers can be replaced by AI: an AI can consume all the "IP" produced by workers, but it doesn't have their process knowledge. It can't, because process knowledge is embodied and enmeshed, it is relational and physical. It doesn't appear in training data. In other words, elevating "IP" over process knowledge is a form of class war.</bq> <bq>Bosses would love it if process knowledge didn't matter, because then workers could finally be tamed by industry. We could just move the "IP" around to the highest bidders with the cheapest workforces. But Wang's book makes a forceful argument that it's easier to build up a powerful, resilient society based on process knowledge than it is to do so with IP. What good is a bunch of really cool recipes if no one can follow them?</bq> <bq>[...] bosses are, psychoanalytically speaking, haunted by the idea that their workers own the process knowledge that is at the heart of their profits. That's why bosses are so obsessed with noncompete "agreements." If you can't own your workers' expertise, then you must own your workers.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/08/the-shanghai-cooperation-organization-and-brics-2025-eurasias-re-alignment-in-the-face-of-late-stage-barbarism/" source="CounterPunch" author="Michael Hudson">The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS 2025: Eurasia’s Re-alignment in the face of Late Stage Barbarism</a> <bq>It really should not be surprising that not a word of these principles or their motivation has appeared in the mainstream Western press. The New York Times depicted the meetings in China as a plan of aggression against the United States, not as a response to U.S. acts. President Donald Trump summarized this attitude most succinctly in a Truth Social post: “President Xi, Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.” U.S. press coverage of the SCO meetings in China presents a foreshortened perspective that reminds me of the famous Hokusai etching of a close-up tree in the foreground completely overshadowing the distant city in the background. Whatever the international topic is, it’s all about the United States. The basic model is a foreign government’s adversity toward the United States, with no mention of such policies being a defensive response against U.S. belligerence toward the foreigner.</bq> <bq>The U.S. and European treatment of the SCO meetings as shaped entirely by antipathy toward the West is not merely an expression of Western narcissism. It was a deliberately censorial policy of not discussing the ways in which an alternative to U.S.-sponsored neoliberal economic order are being developed. NATO head Mark Rutte made it clear that there was to be no thought that there even was such a thing as a policy by countries to create an alternative and more productive economic order when he complained that Putin was getting too much attention. That meant not to discuss what really has happened in the last few days in China – and how it is a landmark in introducing a new economic order, but not one that includes the West.</bq> <bq>This great split is best epitomized by the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. This gas was planned to go to Europe, feeding into Nordstream 1. That has all ended. Siberian gas will now go to Mongolia and China. It powered European industry in the past; now it will do the same for China and Mongolia, leaving Europe to depend on U.S. LNG exports and declining North Sea supplies at much higher prices.</bq> <bq>[...] the BRICS and Global Majority are trying to defend themselves against US/NATO economic aggression, and to de-dollarize their economies so as to minimize trade dependence on the U.S. market. That saves them from the U.S. weaponizing its foreign trade and monetary system from blocking their access to supply chains that have been put in place, and thereby disrupting their economies.</bq> <bq>This socialism is the logical extension of the dynamic of early industrial capitalism, seeking to rationalize production and minimize waste and unnecessary costs imposed by rent-seeking classes demanding income without playing a productive role – landlords, monopolists and the financial sector.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-attacks-europe-korea-japan-forcing-them-to-subsidize-move-industry-to-us/" author="Michael Hudson" source="ZNetwork">Trump Attacks Europe, Korea, Japan, Forcing Them To Subsidize & Move Industry to US</a> <bq>Washington’s cold warriors have been unable to stop SCO members from moving forward and becoming independent from U.S. influence. Recognizing that they are unable to prevent this, U.S. policy is focusing now on how to prevent Europe (especially Germany), Japan, and South Korea from becoming industrial rivals and hence threats — while also targeting China and BRICS. The solution by the U.S. deep state is to turn these longtime allies into neo-colonial dependencies. The U.S. can’t de-industrialize the SCO or install leaders in Eurasia who put U.S. demands above those of their own economics. But U.S. diplomacy can arm-twist Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other dependencies (such as the ruling DPP party in Taiwan) to relocate their industry to the United States. These governments are still suffering from Stockholm syndrome after wars that ended in 1945 and 1953.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tgBUbbTF5Sg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Geopolitical Economy Report / Michael Hudson" caption="How the world can free itself from US financial colonialism"> Michael Hudson and Ben Norton is brilliant, as always. The sections on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=917s">Trump's tariff war</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=994s">Neoliberalism</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1098s">Debt</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2653s">Odious debt</a> are very succinct and illuminating. Norton neatly summarizes how the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1753s">US empire [is destroying the] global system it created</a>. But the entire talk is chock-full of extremely valuable information about world history and how the global economy works, in what can be termed "succinctly" even though the video is almost an hour long. <ol> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg">0:00</a>: The global order is changing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=190s">3:10</a>: Introduction to Michael Hudson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=278s">4:38</a>: Highlight <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=384s">6:24</a>: Interview starts <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=405s">6:45</a>: History of financial colonialism <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=786s">13:06</a>: Core-periphery divide <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=917s">15:17</a>: Trump's tariff war <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=994s">16:34</a>: Neoliberalism <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1098s">18:18</a>: Debt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1319s">21:59</a>: Neocolonialism <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1654s">27:34</a>: Socialism <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=1753s">29:13</a>: US empire destroys global system it created <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2106s">35:06</a>: Need for new international orgs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2420s">40:20</a>: BRICS <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2502s">41:42</a>: Global South debt default <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2577s">42:57</a>: Hudson: BRICS needs new economic philosophy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2653s">44:13</a>: Odious debt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2885s">48:05</a>: Fight against rentier capitalists <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=2988s">49:48</a>: Discussion will continue in part 2 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBUbbTF5Sg&t=3069s">51:09</a>: Outro </ol> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8avSepk1qxw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8avSepk1qxw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Michael Hudson: The Economics of a Civilizational Conflict"> Hudson again, this time explaining in eloquent detail how the U.S. has declared economic war on its allies, demanding that any profit or advantage---in the form of tax income or trade imbalance---be paid to the U.S. (or else). He explains how even in the BRICS countries, but especially in Europe (e.g., Merz), the entire elite and ruling class comprises mostly people beholden to the U.S. for their personal wealth and education, who will not hesitate to heed the U.S.'s orders, even if it leads to ruin for their home countries, as long as their personal wealth will continue to grow. The U.S. has declared war on everyone. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/16/bcjr-s16.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Collapse of car lender Tricolor sends out a tremor</a> <bq>a report from Fitch Ratings, which said that US banks currently had $1.2 trillion outstanding in loans to non-bank financial institutions. This was a 20 percent jump in a year, compared to an increase of less than 2 percent in commercial loans over the same period. Two “worrying possibilities” to emerge from the demise of Tricolor were that the “American consumer, notably the lower-income segment that Tricolor served, is in rougher shape than imagined” and that lenders who dole out auto loans and the like have not been careful in their underwriting choices, and their bank backers have not been asking the right questions. It expressed the hope that Tricolor might be a “helpful spur” to step up scrutiny “rather than a sign that it is already too late.” History, particularly that of the subprime mortgage crisis, suggests it could well be the latter.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR8xTmvh_Z0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/eR8xTmvh_Z0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Mark Blyth | Rapid Response" caption="The old economic order is dead"> From 06:00 <bq>The imagery here is actually quite amazing. It is a bunch of old white dudes and basically they don't like a lot of stuff that happened culturally, politically, economically in the past 10 to 15 years. You very much get this with Bannon and others, that we need an economy whereby one dude can work in manufacturing and get paid enough money that his wife doesn't have to work. She can then have more kids. That's why we don't need immigrants. We can strengthen the family and then what we'll have is this 19th-century foreign policy as spheres of influence where we run this giant carbon-based economy that goes from Greenland to Canada all the way down to our satraps in Argentina and Brazil and the rest of the world can go do the hell they want. So I think there very is a kind of regressive modernization built into this and that's its weak point right nobody's asking women in the United States, 'hey how do you feel about the kitchen and more babies, right?' There's nothing in place to make this work. So that's where the tensions start to come out on this the idea, that sort of globalization can be stopped or reversed or whatever.</bq> From 17:00, <bq>This one is a kind of form of kind of petulance that really troubles people in markets, right? If you're pressuring Powell, if they know that he's going to be out 18 months from now, if they understand that what they're going to get is not some gold bug, but somebody who's more aligned with the president's goals, but at the same time will respect certain things, the market can adjust all its expectations. When you basically start saying, "We're not producing any climate data anymore, and we're going to make up the jobs numbers." That's deeply troubling, right? Because you can't price things. You The whole purpose of markets is pricing. No information, no prices, bad. If you don't trust the data and the numbers that you're getting, then you know, how do you assess where we're where we are? Well, you don't. You just have to take the word for it, which is exactly what they want. The people putting together these stats are dedicated career people. They're mathematicians and statisticians. They're not political actors. And that's why the markets trust it, even if it's imperfect, right? We know it's imperfect. But when it becomes: you don't like the number, make it up and fill in anything you like. That's qualitatively different.</bq> At 23:30, <bq>The Democrats don't seem to have a particularly cohesive story of their own. Isn't that telling? Right? Because if everything that these guys [Republicans] are doing are is so wrong, you can pick them up individually on why they're wrong, right? So tariffs are wrong because immigration is wrong. All right, fine. But simply pointing at the error of their ways is not to posit an alternative. And the reason it's difficult for them to do this and Henry Farrell---who's a very smart guy uh who writes a blog called Programmable Mutter which I recommend---made this point about a year ago now, which is that the Democrats have become the party of the status quo. The Democrats are essentially the party of people who go to Whole Foods, right? It's the people who are in the top 20%. As Bannon derisively calls them, the managerial professional globalist class. And for us, everything's going great. It's fabulous, right? Our wages are through the roof. We're the ones that own all the stocks. I mean, don't stop this. We're really sorry we hollowed out the Midwest and all these people are on Medicare and like there's no future for them, etc. But get with the program, this is the future. It's just technology! As if technology [were] given to us by God and dictates what we do with it. Right. So, no, these guys have got a very powerful set of rhetorical weapons and the Democrats are just completely unable to handle it.</bq> At 33:00, <bq>So there are busts which harm the companies and harm the investors, right? Downside risk. That's why you get reward on the other side. But the good there are busts that leave behind good stuff. Busts that drive out the old and bring in the new and it's really productive. The worst type of busts are financial busts because not only do you bail out the people that really should be paying the cost at the expense of everybody else. This is the book on austerity I wrote a decade ago, right? What you're also doing is you're licensing ever increasing risk taking.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle" author="" source="Wikipedia">Valeriepieris circle</a> <bq>[...] a figure drawn on the Earth's surface such that the majority of the human population lives within its interior. The concept was originally popularized by a map posted on Reddit in 2013, made by an American ESL teacher named Ken Myers, whose username on the site gave the figure its name.[4] Myers's original circle covers only about 10% of the Earth's total surface area, with a radius of around 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles), centered in the South China Sea and covers more than half of Asia.</bq> I encountered the term while reading the poem <a href="https://indi.ca/continental-grift/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Continental Grift</a> <bq quote-style="none">Europe is not a continent, America is incontinent, and Asia is predominant. Remember, Europe was just an act of god-tier hating,   drawing a racist line across Asia   and calling it a continent. It was a continental grift.</bq> <bq quote-style="none">Europe was never a continent, America has gotten incontinent, And now Asia is predominant. Welcome to the Asian century. Built on the back of China, The balls of Yemen, The arms of Russia, and the blood of Palestinians.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/09/trump-epa-plastic-recycling-deregulation/" source="Jacobin" author="Schuyler Mitchell">Plastic Recycling Is Mostly Fictional. Trump’s EPA Approves.</a> <bq>More than one hundred nations called for legally binding production caps on plastics, and many countries demanded increased restrictions on the toxic chemicals used to produce them. But the United States, alongside wealthy oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, opposed banning chemical additives or reducing plastic production. Instead, these countries pushed for chemical recycling and greater plastic “circularity.”</bq> <bq>“The oil and plastic industries plan to increase plastic and petrochemical production by 300 [percent] by 2060. Even if recycling infrastructure increased by 300 [percent], only 5 to 10 [percent] of plastics would be recycled.” The American Chemistry Council, for its part, appeared jubilant that the talks had failed.</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1733" source="BMJ Group" author="Nick Tsergas">Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2</a> <bq>Reactivation of viruses, including Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and varicella zoster virus (VZV), has been commonly observed after covid-19. A 2023 study reported EBV reactivation in covid positive patients at more than double the rate seen in covid negative patients. As for VZV, a 2022 analysis of US insurance records found that people over 50 were 15% more likely to develop herpes zoster after a covid-19 diagnosis. Jeimy says, “There’s a pathophysiology that already exists for other viruses like EBV or measles. The plausibility is there. The precedent is there.” Brazilian researchers found that covid-19 triggered a sharp rise in T cell exhaustion and cellular ageing. Although the comparator group was limited, the strongest effects were seen in CD8+ T cells, which suppress latent viruses such as EBV and VZV. These effects were seen even after mild infections.</bq> <bq>A 2025 study published in the Lancet tracked more than 830 000 US veterans and found that even non-admitted patients who tested positive for covid-19 had higher rates of bacterial, viral, and fungal infections in the year that followed.</bq> <bq>Jeimy thinks that people who are unwilling to consider the possibility of immune damage are perhaps driven by a fear of what those answers might mean. “Nobody wants to be the one that says, ‘Yes, covid-19 causes disability’ [beyond long covid],” she says, alluding to the health and economic implications of such a conclusion.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/16/cfel-s16.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">As over 1 million Americans are infected with COVID daily, Trump administration plans further cutoff of vaccines</a> <bq>As the United States enters the peak of its 11th wave of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 1 million new infections per day, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to dismantle the nation’s public health system. At the center of this attack on science is the upcoming September 18–19 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), whose agenda and composition now reflect Kennedy’s long-standing promotion of anti-vaccine disinformation. The stage was set for this war on vaccines with the abrupt firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who, just weeks into her tenure, reportedly refused to “rubber-stamp” Kennedy’s diktats. Her dismissal was immediately followed by the appointment of new ACIP members, many of whom lack formal immunization expertise and have publicly echoed Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. With this move, a once-critical scientific advisory body is being recast as a partisan instrument, undermining decades of immunization policy at a moment when viral transmission of COVID, and for that matter, other pathogens, are once more accelerating across the country.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/denmark-close-wiping-out-leading-cancer-causing-hpv-strains-after-vaccine-roll-out" source="Gavi: Vaccines Work" author="Linda Geddes">Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out</a> <bq>The research found that infection with the high-risk HPV types (HPV16/18) covered by the vaccine has been almost eliminated.<bq>'Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV16/18 was between 15 and 17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to less than one percent by 2021,' the researchers said.</bq>In addition, prevalence of HPV types 16 and 18 in women who had not been vaccinated against HPV was five percent. This strongly suggests that the vaccine has reduced the circulation of these HPV types in general population, to the extent that even unvaccinated women are now less likely to be infected with them – so called “population immunity” – the researchers said.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://coreyrobin.com/2025/09/07/leni-riefenstahl-the-politics-of-narcissism" source="" author="Corey Robin">Leni Riefenstahl: The Politics of Narcissism</a> <bq>What the film brings out is how a politics of shame over the past is countered, in someone like Riefenstahl, by an invocation of beauty based on a romance of reality. That that beauty is something that people believe has been shat upon by all the leftists and workers and immigrants and such, makes it all the more beautiful in their eyes. It’s the elusiveness of a beauty that’s been lost that they are moved by. The fact that it doesn’t correspond to any kind of reality, in the present or the past, doesn’t matter. It’s the very fact that it is an image, that it does not exist, that matters. It’s the lover’s longing glance at the beloved who is no more, Narcissus reaching out for his image in the water, that’s the guiding gesture of the whole thing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-substack-age" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Substack Age</a> <bq>If you want to be an English-language writer you do need to have an opinion of Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, or, The Quincunciall Lozenge (1658), and of course that opinion should be, must be: this is fucking awesome. You must master all that man’s vocables, let them heat up and melt inside of you, come back out in strange new shapes.</bq> <bq>[...] the best way to fight their profit-driven philistinism is not to make the case that they are wrong, but to make the case that they are no longer needed, and the best way to do that is to write a completely unpublishable Quincunciall Lozenge for the 21st century and to publish it on Substack. It’s strange to me that anyone would come over to this new place mostly to pass their time griping about the culture that continues to prevail in the old place [...]</bq> <bq>Most of the time I am happy to have undertaken this interdimensional voyage, even as it becomes clearer all the time that there is no going back. Oh well. Every determination is a negation, as Spinoza said.</bq> <bq>I am so grateful that over the past years I have learned to stop doing that, for good, often holding forth on matters way beyond my competence, sometimes saying stupid things, while always aspiring to that sort of universality and opsimathesis that in fact honors Leibniz far more than simply declaring that one “works on” him.</bq> <bq>I’ve never written anything that’s gone properly viral, yet most of the time I feel as if the work I do is, independently of that sort of measure, a success. It is successful in part because of who is reading it —honestly, the absolute best readers in all Anglophony!—, and because of what they say about it. I am ever more convinced that the possibility of this sort of success, real success, is directly connected to Substack’s use of a subscription-based rather than an advertising-based financial model.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pzIzOgIGyg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0pzIzOgIGyg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="NPR Music" caption="Harold López-Nussa Trio: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbFKplwHY2c" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/AbFKplwHY2c" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="CinemaStix" caption="dude the movie was so bad, they tried to buy it back and burn all the footage"> This is a wonderful 15-minute video about the movie John Rambo and what we must recognize as the genius of Sylvester Stallone who, with this film and Rocky, made two films about the desperation of the working-class man trapped in a society that essentially hates him. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/BxrkyfSDrSQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The House of Tabula" caption="The Ultimate Guide to Composition"> This is a 54-minute video discussing composition. It is visually rich and provides so many wonderful examples of paintings, movies, and photos that illustrate the discussion. I learned about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Nihei" source="Wikipedia">Tsutomu Nihei</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takehiko_Inoue" source="Wikipedia">Takehiko Inoue</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentaro_Miura" source="Wikipedia">Kentaro Miura</a> all of whom look to be absolutely amazing manga artists. Or there's Tarem Singh, who's movie <a href="https://mubi.com/en/ch/films/the-fall">The Fall</a> has been on my Mubi watchlist for a while. <img src="{att_link}from_the_fall_-_tarem_singh_.webp" href="{att_link}from_the_fall_-_tarem_singh_.webp" align="none" caption="From 'The Fall' by Tarem Singh" scale="35%"> The list of topics looks overwhelming and it is all a bit overwhelming after a bit. Maybe watch it in two or three pieces, so you can really drink in and research the images. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ">0:00</a> Intro <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=283s">4:43</a> Henri Cartier-Bresson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=488s">8:08</a> Stanley Kubrick <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=611s">10:11</a> Framing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=633s">10:33</a> Tsutomu Nihei <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=723s">12:03</a> Paul Strand - Architecture and Framing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=788s">13:08</a> Geometry <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=827s">13:47</a> Alexander Rodchenko <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=907s">15:07</a> Painting / Compositional Grids <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=987s">16:27</a> Caravaggio/ Diagonal Compositions / Baroque Line <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1056s">17:36</a> Philip-Lorca diCorcia <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1087s">18:07</a> Gregory Crewdson / Arthur Tress <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1152s">19:12</a> Krzysztof Kieślowski <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1241s">20:41</a> Design the frame <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1296s">21:36</a> Invisible vs Visible Composition / Neutral vs Stylised Composition <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1359s">22:39</a> Wes Anderson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1409s">23:29</a> Edward Yang <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1460s">24:20</a> The Importance of Interdisciplinary Studies for Visual Storytelling <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1498s">24:58</a> Video Games - Compositing for Interactivity <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1512s">25:12</a> Resident Evil <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1529s">25:29</a> Resident Evil 4 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1560s">26:00</a> Composing for Pacing - Takehiko Inoue <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1604s">26:44</a> Kentaro Miura <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1633s">27:13</a> Notan <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1734s">28:54</a> Vilhelm Hammershøi <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1780s">29:40</a> Distance - Moving In or Out? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1824s">30:24</a> Ingmar Bergman <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1874s">31:14</a> Withheld Composition <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1893s">31:33</a> Michael Haneke <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=1976s">32:56</a> Robert Bresson / Carl Theodor Dreyer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2015s">33:35</a> Negative Space / Andrew Wyeth <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2107s">35:07</a> Terrence Mallick / Spatial Tension <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2133s">35:33</a> Andrei Tarkovsky <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2171s">36:11</a> Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroids <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2203s">36:43</a> The Artifice of Composition <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2235s">37:15</a> Manipulating Spatial Logic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2289s">38:09</a> F.W. Murnau <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2377s">39:37</a> Sergei Parajanov <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2444s">40:44</a> Depth vs Flatness / Graphic Clarity <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2478s">41:18</a> Dynamic Symmetry <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2520s">42:00</a> Yasujirō Ozu <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2595s">43:15</a> Aesthetic Totality <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2627s">43:47</a> Shinya Tsukamoto <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2700s">45:00</a> Shūji Terayama <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2744s">45:44</a> Fragmentation vs Structure <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2782s">46:22</a> Daido Moriyama <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2820s">47:00</a> Satoshi Kon <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2860s">47:40</a> Why to Compose for Clarity <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2918s">48:38</a> Visual Clarity <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=2978s">49:38</a> Disney Renaissance <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=3020s">50:20</a> Hayao Miyazaki <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=3039s">50:39</a> Mamoru Oshii <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxrkyfSDrSQ&t=3084s">51:24</a> Outro <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <bq author="Eugene O'Neill">There is no present or future---only the past, happening over and over again---now.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/jef-raskins-cul-de-sac-and-the-quest-for-the-humane-computer/" source="Ars Technica" author="Cameron Kaiser">Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer</a> <bq>Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well. What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know. The man was Jef Raskin, and this is his cul-de-sac.</bq> <bq>Finding female codenames sexist, he changed Annie to Macintosh after his favorite variety of apple, though using a variant spelling to avoid a lawsuit with the previously existing McIntosh Laboratory.</bq> <bq>Instead of Pascal or assembly language, Swyft's ROM operating system was primarily written in Forth. To reduce the size of the compiled code, developer Terry Holmes created a “tokenized” version that embedded smaller tokens instead of execution addresses into Forth word definitions, trading the overhead of an additional lookup step (which was written in hand-coded assembly and made very quick) for a smaller binary size.</bq> <bq>Raskin thus conceived of a unified workspace in which everything was stored, accessed through one single interface appearing to the user as a text editor editing one single massive document. The editor was intelligent and could handle different types of text according to its context, and the user could subdivide the large document workspace into multiple subdocuments, all kept together. (This even included Forth code, which the user could write and evaluate in place to expand the system as they wished.) Data received from the serial port was automatically “typed” into the same document, and any or all text could be sent over the serial port or to a printer. Instead of function keys, a USE FRONT key acted like an Option or Command key to access special features.</bq> <bq>SwyftCards didn't sell in massive numbers, but their users loved them, particularly the speed and flexibility the system afforded. David Thornburg (the designer of the KoalaPad tablet), writing for A+ in November 1985, said it “accomplished something that I never knew was possible. It not only outperforms any Apple II word-processing system, but it lets the Apple IIe outperform the Macintosh… Will Rogers was right: it does take genius to make things simple.”</bq> <bq>Even a device as simple as a push-button flashlight is modal, argued Raskin, because “[i]f you do not know the present state of the flashlight, you cannot predict what a press of the flashlight's button will do.” Even if an individual application itself is notionally modeless, Raskin presented the real-world example of Command-N commonly used to open a new document but AOL's client using Command-M for a new E-mail message; the situation “that gives rise to a mode in this example consists of having a particular application active. The problem occurs when users employ the Command-N command habitually,” he wrote.</bq> <bq>Canon management also didn't understand the new machine's design philosophy, treating it as an overgrown word processor (dubbed a “WORK Processor [sic]”) instead of the general-purpose computer Raskin intended, and required its programmability in Forth to be removed. This was unpopular with Raskin's team, so rather than remove it completely, they simply hid it behind an unlikely series of keystrokes and excised it from the manual.</bq> <bq>Computations weren't merely limited to simple figures, though; the Cat also allowed users to store the result of a computation to a variable and reference that variable in other computations. If the variables underlying a particular computation were changed, its result would automatically update.</bq> Is this before <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc">Visicalc</a>? It seems like it was at around the same time. <bq>[...] made it possible to construct simple spreadsheets right in the editor using nothing more than expressions and the TAB key to create rows and columns. Cells can be referred to by expressions in other cells using a special function use() with relative coordinates. Constant values in “cells” can simply be entered as plain text; if recalculation is necessary, USE FRONT-CALC will figure it out. The Cat could also maintain and sort simple line lists, which, when combined with the LEARN macro facility, could be used to automate common tasks like mail merges.</bq> <bq>[...] the Cat beeped to indicate an error, pressing USE FRONT-HELP could also explain why. Errors didn't trigger a modal dialogue or lock out system functions; you could always continue.</bq> <bq>Raskin points out we can use the same principles to also determine the ideal efficiency of such interfaces. An interface that gives the user no choices but still must be interacted with is maximally inefficient because the user must do some non-zero amount of work to communicate absolutely no information. A classic example might be a modal alert box with only one button—asynchronous or transparent notifications could be better used instead. Likewise, an interface with multiple choices will nevertheless become less efficient if certain choices are harder or more improbable to access, such as buttons or click areas being smaller than others, or a particular choice needing more typing to select than other choices.</bq> <bq>In 2002, A2 spun off initially as Active Object System, using an updated dialect called Active Oberon supporting improved scheduling, exception handling, and object-oriented programming with processes and threads able to run within an object's context to make that object “active.” While A2 kept the Oberon System's clickable text metaphor, windows and gadgets can also be zoomed in or out of on an infinitely scrolling desktop, which is best appreciated in action. It is still being developed, and older live CDs are still available. However, the Oberon System has never achieved general market awareness beyond its small niche, and any forks less so, limiting it to a practical curiosity for most users.</bq> <bq>[...] while Raskin's ideas may have few present-day implementations, that doesn't mean the spirit in which they were proposed is dead, too. At the very least, some greater consideration is given to the traditional WIMP paradigm's deficiencies today, particularly with multiple applications and windows, and how it can poorly serve some classes of users, such as those requiring assistive technology. That said, I hold guarded optimism about how much change we'll see in mainstream systems, and Raskin's editor-centric, application-less interface becomes more and more alien the more the current app ecosystem reigns dominant.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/" source="" author="Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR)">Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices</a> <bq>Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices — without compromising our best-in-class device performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.</bq> <bq>In iOS 15, we introduced kalloc_type, a secure memory allocator for the kernel, followed in iOS 17 by its user-level counterpart, xzone malloc. These secure allocators take advantage of knowing the type — or purpose — of allocations so that memory can be organized in a way that makes exploiting most memory corruption vulnerabilities inherently difficult.</bq> <bq>It's crucial that evaluating a tag-checking instruction speculatively doesn’t expose timing differences that would allow an attacker to isolate the valid tag. From the start, we designed the Apple silicon implementation so that tag values can’t influence speculative execution in any way. Recently published security research demonstrates that the MTE implementation on Google’s Pixel devices is vulnerable to this type of attack, allowing MTE to be bypassed in Google Chrome and the Linux kernel.</bq> <bq>Because EMTE tag checking imposes a performance cost, we designed Memory Integrity Enforcement to take advantage of our secure allocators first and use EMTE to protect only smaller individual allocations within a type bucket, which software allocators can’t defend on their own. Then, by knowing where and how we would deploy EMTE, we could accurately model the tag-checking demand of the operating system, and design our silicon to satisfy it. Our hardware implementation influenced additional software design decisions, reducing the overhead of tag checks even further. Importantly, deploying EMTE with this level of precision supports our strategy to provide as many memory safety improvements as possible to users on previous iPhone generations, which don’t support EMTE.</bq> <bq>Although some issues are able to survive MIE — for example, intra-allocation buffer overflows — such issues are extremely rare, and even fewer will lend themselves to a full end-to-end exploit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/former-whatsapp-security-boss-sues-meta-for-systemic-cybersecurity-failures/" source="Ars Technica" author="Dan Goodin">Former WhatsApp security boss in lawsuit likens Meta’s culture to a “cult”</a> <bq>During a red-team exercise designed to find and exploit security vulnerabilities so they can be fixed, Baig said he found that roughly 1,500 engineers inside the messenger division had “unrestricted access to user data, including personal information covered by the FTC Privacy Order, and could move or steal such data without detection or audit trail.”</bq> <bq>The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower protection provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, said that in 2022, roughly 100,000 WhatsApp users had their accounts hacked every day. By last year, the complaint alleged, as many as 400,000 WhatsApp users were getting locked out of their accounts each day as a result of such account takeovers. Baig also allegedly notified superiors that data scraping on the platform was a problem because WhatsApp failed to implement protections that are standard on other messaging platforms such as Signal and Apple Messages. As a result, the former WhatsApp head estimated that pictures and names of some 400 million user profiles were improperly copied every day [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3325066/china-launches-record-smashing-cable-stayed-mega-bridge-over-yangtze-river" author="Ling Xin" source="South China Morning Post">China launches record-smashing cable-stayed mega bridge over Yangtze River</a> <bq>The Changtai Yangtze River Bridge stretches 10.3km (6.4 miles) with a main span of 1,208 metres (3,960 feet). It is the river’s first crossing to carry an expressway, regular road and intercity railway, all on the same structure. [...] took six years to complete</bq> <bq>Because rail systems typically weigh about three times as much as roads, most bridge designs maintain balance by placing the railway in the centre with the roadways split on either side and traffic moving in opposite directions. “But that set-up creates major inconveniences,” Qin said. To rejoin the city road network, lanes must loop around, dipping under the railway and merging again, wasting large areas of valuable urban land. And if lanes are split, emergency vehicles cannot simply cross over if they need to reach an accident. To keep their asymmetrical design balanced, Qin and his team adjusted the cable tensions on the bridge’s railway side in an effort to hold the deck level.</bq> My God, what will China steal from the West next? Have they no shame? <hr> <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/mac-app-flea-market/" author="Jim Nielsen" source="">The Mac App Flea Market</a> <bq>What does that say about the store you’re visiting?</bq> It says that this is a trash heap without any real moderation that almost no-one will be able to navigate without hitting a pitfall (i.e., end up downloading and giving their OpenAI login to some other app developer). <img src="{att_link}icons_for_apps_identified_as_ai_on_the_apple_ios_app_store.webp" href="{att_link}icons_for_apps_identified_as_ai_on_the_apple_ios_app_store.webp" align="none" caption="Icons for apps identified as 'AI' on the Apple ioS App Store" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/samsung-forces-ads-onto-fridges-is-a-bad-sign-for-other-appliances/" author="Scharon Harding " source="Ars Technica">Software update shoves ads onto Samsung’s pricey fridges</a> <bq>Days after someone revealed the news on social media, Samsung confirmed today that it is showing advertisements on some US customers’ smart fridges. Samsung said the ads showing on some Family Hub-series fridges are part of a pilot program, but we suspect that they may become more permanent additions to Samsung fridges and/or other types of screen-equipped smart home appliances. In a statement sent to Ars Technica, Samsung confirmed that it is “conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the US market.”</bq> Samsung confirmed that it's not just that it hates its customers, it's that it has so little respect for them, no matter how much they paid for their goods, that they will milk them for literally every possible penny. If they could figure out a way to pimp out the family's of-age daughters, they would do that too. I want to say that it serves you right for buying a refrigerator with a screen but no-one deserves this. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-sad-sad-world-of-tech-blogging" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">The Sad, Sad World of Tech Blogging During an Era of Technological Stagnation</a> <bq>I don’t even blame the tech companies that much. Apple, Google, Samsung… they’ve got shareholders to appease. Their job is to milk the cow until it dies, not to stage an existential crisis about whether milk itself is boring. What’s remarkable is the embarrassed theater of the tech press. These are smart people. They aren’t naive. They know the score better than I do. They know we’ve plateaued. They know that nothing meaningful has changed in most consumer electronics product categories since around the time Obama left office. But they have mortgages and kids and need to keep the clicks coming, so they overheat their adjectives. You can feel their despair leak through the prose: the desperate attempt to spin a lighter case into a “new era” of design, the half-hearted analogies to car racing or space travel. They don’t believe their own copy, but what choice do they have? They’re beat reporters in a beat that no longer produces news. Apple’s great new innovation is a new visual design that looks like liquid glass, which as many have pointed out was also a development in Windows Vista, released in 2007. As a bonus, it hurts your battery life! This is not another post about AI, but you’re aware of how I feel - LLMs are being pushed as transformative technology, when they are clearly profoundly limited and mundane, precisely because the tech giants know that they’re running out of new product categories. It’s not just stagnating phone sales. Smartwatches saw declining sales for the first time last year. The tech world doggedly insists that VR as a mass interest is coming, but it just keeps not happening. The money-printing cloud services business has finally started to slow. Apple, long the most dominant company in America’s most competitive sector, has lately been perceived to be a company adrift. Google, beset with (very legitimate) monopoly complaints, is facing a future where search is finally a declining phenomenon, in terms of profits, market share, and consumer perception; the company long ago ceased to be the beloved incubator of moonshots and became a relentless profit maximizer. Microsoft has pursued AI in its usual ruthless, consumer-indifferent way. These companies know that they’ve maximized their existing product categories. They need AI to work, and they will insist it does even in the face of all evidence, and unfortunately our gullible press is going along with it.</bq> Sounds like everybody's reading Ed Zitron at this point. The only quibble I have is that Microsoft's approach is not really consumer-indifferent, at least not the developer-facing parts of Copilot. There is a genuine engagement with users here, I think, even if I don't find the number and frequency of changes to be particularly useful myself. <bq>I want to be clear: it’s not that these products are bad. At some things, they’re excellent, and the engineering feat that a modern smartphone represents is truly incredible. They’re refined, durable, absurdly powerful little slabs that can do essentially anything you want. The cameras on these phones! The screens! They’re remarkable. But that’s the point - they were already remarkable. They’re finished! It is accomplished; the strife is over, the battle won. Again, what would you like your phone to do that it can’t already do? No one is sitting around waiting for tremendous innovation in chair design, because the chair is a mature product category that has more or less been figured out. Smartphones aren’t quite there yet, but they are closer to the end of their useful development than the beginning. The marginal improvements are just that, marginal, and the grown-up response would be to accept that fact, treat phones like the appliances they are, and stop expecting a messianic leap every September. But you can’t build a hype economy on stability. You can’t keep the pageviews flowing by telling people “buy last year’s model, it’s fine.” So every year, we’re treated to the spectacle of people who know better breathlessly telling us that orange is the future. And every year, fewer and fewer of us believe them.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/humanely-dealing-with-humungus-crawlers" source="" author="Ted Unangst">humanely dealing with humungus crawlers</a> <bq>[...] these pages get cached by the reverse proxy first, so anticrawl doesn’t even evaluate them. We’ve already done the work to render the page, and we’re trying to shed load, so why would I want to increase load by generating challenges and verifying responses? It annoys me when I click a seemingly popular blog post and immediately get challenged, when I’m 99.9% certain that somebody else clicked it two seconds before me. Why isn’t it in cache? We must have different objectives in what we’re trying to accomplish. Or who we’re trying to irritate.</bq> <bq>I have switched to a much more diabolical challenge. You are asked how many Rs in strawberry. Or maybe something else. To be changed as necessary. But really, the key observation is that any challenge, anything at all, easily sheds like 99.99% of the crawling load.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/pay-per-output-ai-firms-blindsided-by-beefed-up-robots-txt-instructions/" source="Ars Technica" author="Ashley Belanger">Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions.</a> <bq>xAI did not respond, and the other companies declined to comment without further detail about the standard, appearing to have not yet considered how a licensing layer beefing up robots.txt could impact their scraping. Today will likely be the first chance for AI companies to wrap their heads around the idea of paying publishers per output. Leeds confirmed that the RSL Collective did not consult with AI companies when developing the RSL standard.</bq> Like why would ask the guy robbing your house what kind of lock you should buy to stop him the next time? <bq>Leeds noted that a key benefit of the RSL standard is that even small creators will now have an opportunity to generate revenue for helping to train AI. Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, did not mince words when explaining the battle that bloggers face as AI crawlers threaten to divert their traffic without compensating them. "Right now, AI runs on stolen content," Stubblebine said. "Adopting this RSL Standard is how we force those AI companies to either pay for what they use, stop using it, or shut down."</bq> <bq>On the RSL standard site, publishers can find common terms to add templated or customized text to their robots.txt files to adopt the RSL standard today and start protecting their content from unfettered AI scraping.</bq> <bq>Through RSL terms, publishers can automate licensing, with the cloud company Fastly partnering with the collective to provide technical enforcement that Leeds described as tech that acts as a bouncer to keep unapproved bots away from valuable content. It seems likely that Cloudflare, which launched a pay-per-crawl program blocking greedy crawlers in July, could also help enforce the RSL standard.</bq> <bq>Since the RSL Collective is already in talks with lawmakers, Leeds thinks "there's good reason to believe" that AI companies will soon "be forced to acknowledge" the standard.</bq> No they won't, man. None of that is going to happen. They know only plunder. They are not interested in AI as such. They are instead interested in a low-effort, high-margin business that is backstopped by a friendly regulatory environment and the public purse. If any of that changes, they will bail. Good riddance. <bq>That means that not only do AI companies "spend an enormous amount of money on compute costs to do that," but AI tools may also be more prone to hallucination in the process</bq> <bq>Leeds noted that currently, AI outputs don't provide "the best answer" to prompts but instead rely on mashing up answers from different sources to avoid taking too much content from one site. That means that not only do AI companies "spend an enormous amount of money on compute costs to do that," but AI tools may also be more prone to hallucination in the process of "mashing up" source material "to make something that's not the best answer because they don't have the rights to the best answer."</bq> That's not how these models work. That is a pretty drastic misinterpretation of how the models generate responses. <hr> <a href="https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html" author="Anthony Moser" source="moser's frame shop">I Am An AI Hater</a> <bq>To speak politely about AI, you put disclaimers before criticism: of course I’m not against it entirely; perhaps in a few years when; maybe for other purposes, but. You are supposed to debate how and when it should be used. You are supposed to take for granted that it must be useful somewhere, to someone, for something, eventually. People who are rich and smart and respected are saying so, and it would be arrogant to disagree with such people.</bq> He follows up with this incredible summary (all linked in the original article). <bq>Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright, the way AI tech companies further the patterns of empire, how it’s a con that enables fraud and disinformation and harassment and surveillance, the exploitation of workers, as an excuse to fire workers and de-skill work, how they don’t actually reason and probability and association are inadequate to the goal of intelligence, how people think it makes them faster when it makes them slower, how it is inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative, how it is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy, defined not by its technical features but by its political ones.</bq> <bq>If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider.</bq> <bq>Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.</bq> <bq>[...] the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.</bq> <bq>Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.</bq> <bq>You want to know you can use it sometimes without me thinking less of you. You don’t need me to believe it’s useful, you just want me to be polite about it. But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.</bq> <bq>AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hslQzw1GK2s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/hslQzw1GK2s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Glenn Reacts to Tucker's SHOCKING Sam Altman Interview"> Sam Altman lies for money. He's very good at it. That does not mean that he's smart or articulate. Not in this society. Glenn's advice is sound and his fears about the shoddiness of the people who are leading us off of many cliffs are well-founded. However, Glenn also shows why Sam Altman can't stop winning, despite one disastrous misstep after another: Glenn buys and promulgates OpenAI's basic marketing pitch that "these things are already smarter than anyone you know" and "they're only going to get more and more powerful." Sure, I guess, if you never, ever cross-check it, then it's always right about everything. Just make sure you stay in that bubble. <hr> <a href="https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-sam-altman" author="Tucker Carlson">Sam Altman on God, Elon Musk and the Mysterious Death of His Former Employee</a> This interview comprises the following topics about what an LLM should and shouldn't be doing. <ul>What if someone asks for help to kill themselves? What if it's legal in their home country? Who is responsible for the moral direction and guidelines for the answers? Is there one? If yes, then what are they? To what degree are they or even can they be enforced? What happens to the user data? Can it be sold to third parties? What about fair use and plagiarism? What about the guy who complained about plagiarism and then was mysteriously dead? Why was it a suicide? Why wasn't it a murder? Why doesn't Altman seem to know anything at all about this case? Or why is he lying about not knowing more? He is very defensive and tried to accuse Tucker of having an agenda and disrespecting the family's wishes, to which Tucker responded that <iq>I'm asking at the behest of the family. What's up with the Elon Musk feud? What effect is AI going to have on the job market? What are the downsides? How do you feel about the characterization that AI is a religion? What about spoofing or phishing or spamming? Are we at all ready for this? Will there be a universal biometric to uniquely identify people so that AI doesn't fuck up everything? Is there some downside we're unwilling to accept?</iq> </ul> Although he spoke in a reasonable tone---he is a con-man after all---Sam Altman did not have even the germ of a satisfactory or well-thought-through answer to any of these questions. He assumes no responsibility for any of the repercussions of the technology his company is building. It's as if he'd been asked to consider these things for the first time ever in this interview. He even said so several times, that he was coming up with an answer on-the-fly. Tucker can't say ChatGPT. He keeps saying ChatGTP. This is not unique, though. I have several colleagues who do the same thing. Maybe it's just not a great product name. 😒 <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/steal-pay-leave" author="Ted Rall" source="">Steal, Pay, Leave</a> <bq>The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by book authors whose works were used without permission to train its chatbot. The company will compensate authors or publishers approximately $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books included in the settlement. However, Anthropic will be allowed to continue operating and retain the benefits derived from the unauthorized use of the books.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://ravendb.net/articles/a-deep-dive-into-ravendbs-ai-agents" source="RavenDB" author="Oren Eini">A deep dive into RavenDB's AI Agents</a> <bq>We defined an AI Agent inside RavenDB, then we added a few queries and an action. The entire code is here, and it is under 50 lines of C# code. That is sufficient for us to have a really smart agent, including semantic search on the catalog, adding items to the cart, investigating inventory levels and order history, etc. The key is that when we put the agent inside the database, we can easily expose our data to it in a way that makes it easy & approachable to build intelligent systems. At the same time, we aren’t just opening the floodgates, we are able to designate a scope (via the company parameter of the agent) and only allow the model to see the data for that company. Multiple agent instances can run at the same time, each scoped to its own limited view of the world.</bq> <bq>The example showcases a powerful agent built with very little effort. One of the cornerstones of RavenDB’s design philosophy is that the database will take upon itself all the complexities that you’d usually have to deal with, leaving developers free to focus on delivering features and concrete business value.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://css-tip.com/explore/alignment/" author="Temani Afif" source="CSS Tip">The Fundamentals of CSS Alignment</a> <h level="3">Grid</h> <bq><ul>At the “content level”, we align the grid cells within the grid container. At the “item level”, we align a grid item within its grid area. A grid area consists of one or more adjacent grid cells. <c>normal</c> is the default value of the <c>*-content</c> and <c>*-items</c> properties. It behaves the same as <c>stretch</c> (It has no effect if we define fixed sizes). <c>auto</c> is the default value of the <c>*-self</c> properties. It means use the value set on the <c>*-items</c> properties. The use of <c>fr</c> will consume all the free space, disabling any “content level” alignment in the corresponding axis.</ul></bq> <h level="3">Flex</h> <bq>[...] <c>justify-self</c> and <c>justify-items</c> are ignored inside a flex container.</bq> <bq>The “content” in the horizontal axis is the flex items so <c>justify-content</c> will align the flex items.</bq> <bq>The stretch value is still a valid value of <c>justify-content</c>, but it’s the same as <c>start</c>. The <c>normal</c> value will also behaves as <c>start</c> which gives us three different values that do the same thing. Another reason why alignment can be confusing if you don’t understand it correctly.</bq> I think they meant to write the inline axis here. <bq>With a <c>nowrap</c> configuration, we no longer have “content level” alignment vertically. We have only one flex line that always fills all the vertical space (Nothing to align). Now, you know why <c>align-content</c> never works with flexbox!</bq> <bq>When we change to a column direction, everything is flipped. The items are placed from top to bottom, and the flex lines behave like columns. The logic of alignment remains the same, but the axes are switched. For this reason, we typically refer to the main and cross axes in a flexbox layout. When the direction is row, the main axis is the horizontal one and the cross axis the vertical one. When the direction is column, the main axis is the vertical one, and the cross axis is the horizontal one. The <c>justify-content</c> property works on the main axis, and the <c>align-*</c> properties work on the cross axis.</bq> <bq><ul>We have the main and cross axes: row direction: main = horizontal and cross = vertical. column direction: main = vertical and cross = horizontal. In the main axis, we only have “content level” alignment, where we align the flex items. There is no stretch alignment in the main axis (<c>normal</c> and <c>stretch</c> behave as <c>start</c>). In the cross axis: At the “content level”, we align the flex lines within the flex container. At the “item level”, we align a flex item within its flex line,. <c>flex-wrap: nowrap</c> disables the “content level” alignment in the cross axis.</ul></bq> <h level="3">Block</h> <bq><ul>In a block container, we have only one level of alignment per axis: “content level” alignment vertically and “item level” alignment horizontally. An item is a block element. The content is the smallest rectangle containing all the items. There is no stretch behavior for content A block container can either contain inline elements or block elements. When both are present, the browser will create “anonymous block boxes” to encapsulate the inline elements. We cannot align the “anonymous block boxes”. When a block container contains inline elements, there is no “item level” alignment horizontally. You can use <c>text-align</c> to align the inline elements horizontally.</ul></bq> <h level="3">Auto Margins</h> <bq>The logic is as follows when we process “item level” alignment:<ul>If we have no fixed size and no auto margin, the item is stretched to fill all the available space unless an alignment different from stretch is defined. If we have a fixed size and no auto margin, we have unused free space (no stretch behavior), and the alignment will place the element accordingly. If we have no fixed size and auto margin, the item shrinks to fit its content, and any free space will be used as margin: no stretch behavior and no room for alignment. If we have a fixed size and auto margin, any free space will be used as margin: no stretch behavior and no room for alignment.</ul>It appears that we are aligning using auto margin (which is visually evident) but in reality we are increasing the margin box of an element by transforming the free space into a margin.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/how-modern-browsers-work" author="Addy Osmani" source="">How modern browsers work</a> I speed-read my way through this because (A) Addy Osmani usually writes 40-page paeans to working with AI software-development tools that I strongly suspect are mostly written with the help of LLMs and (B) I've been following browser development, layout engines, etc. for so long that I have already read most of this and internalized it. Osmani writes about AI so much that I was surprised that he was suddenly writing about web browsers in such detail and actually suspected that he's had one or more LLMs pull together as much information about web-browser internals as he could in order to feed the content machine. Browsing through it, though, it seemed actually pretty good: the sections on layout, styling, painting, animating...it all rings pretty true. And there are even a few grammar and spelling errors that show that he really might have written it himself. I quickly looked up Addy Osmani to see why I have him in my list of newsfeeds and remembered that he is a software developer of 25 years and that he works at Google on both the Chromium and Gemini projects. Well, that explains that then. What I'm taking a long time to say is that this is a pretty solid overview of how web browsers do what they do (even if some of the latter sections are kind of thrown in at the end, rather than interleaved throughout the content where they'd be more appropriate). I haven't read it thoroughly but it seems legit. If you're looking for even more detail, he recommends the free, online book <a href="https://browser.engineering/" author="Pavel Panchekha & Chris Harrelson" source="">Web Browser Engineering</a>, written from 2018 to 2023. Here's a taste from the <a href="https://browser.engineering/intro.html">intro</a> to that book, <bq>What makes that all work is the web browser’s implementations of inversion of control, constraint programming, and declarative programming. The web inverts control, with an intermediary—the browser—handling most of the rendering, and the web developer specifying rendering parameters and content to this intermediary.<fn> Further, these parameters usually take the form of constraints between the relative sizes and positions of on-screen elements instead of specifying their values directly;<fn> the browser solves the constraints to find those values. The same idea applies for actions: web pages mostly require that actions take place without specifying when they do. This declarative style means that from the point of view of a developer, changes “apply immediately”, but under the hood, the browser can be lazy and delay applying the changes until they become externally visible, either due to subsequent API calls or because the page has to be displayed to the user.<fn></bq> <hr> <ft>For example, in HTML there are many built-in form control elements that take care of the various ways the user of a web page can provide input. The developer need only specify parameters such as button names, sizing, and look-and-feel, or JavaScript extension points to handle form submission to the server. The rest of the implementation is taken care of by the browser.</ft> <ft>Constraint programming is clearest during web page layout, where font and window sizes, desired positions and sizes, and the relative arrangement of widgets is rarely specified directly.</ft> <ft>For example, when exactly does the browser compute HTML element styles? Any change to the styles is visible to all subsequent API calls, so in that sense it applies “immediately”. But it is better for the browser to delay style recalculation, avoiding redundant work if styles change twice in quick succession. Maximally exploiting the opportunities afforded by declarative programming makes real-world browsers very complex.</ft> <hr> <a href="https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/color-shifting/" author="Josh Comeau" source="">Color Shifting in CSS</a> <bq>Another benefit of using CSS filters is that they tend to be more performant than the alternatives. When we change <c>background-color</c>, the browser has to repaint each particle on every frame. With <c>filter</c> [and <c>hue-rotate</c>], the browser can reuse previous paints and instead apply a lightweight transformation on every frame, tinting the existing pixels rather than recalculating them from scratch.</bq> <bq>One of my little animation secrets is to add small bits of random variation to everything. Each particle defines its own <c>--twinkle-duration</c> and <c>--twinkle-amount</c>, so that they don’t all flicker in lockstep like Christmas-tree lights.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thedailywtf.com/articles/functionally-a-date" author="Remy Porter" source="Daily WTF">Functionally, a date</a> I subscribe to this newsfeed and most of the posts are decent but not repost-worthy. This code example of comparing dates is well-worth preserving, though. <code>/** * compare two dates, rounding them to the day */ private static int compareDates( LocalDateTime date1, LocalDateTime date2 ) { List<bifunction>> criterias = Arrays.asList( (d1,d2) -> d1.getYear() - d2.getYear(), (d1,d2) -> d1.getMonthValue() - d2.getMonthValue(), (d1,d2) -> d1.getDayOfMonth() - d2.getDayOfMonth() ); return criterias.stream() .map( f -> f.apply(date1, date2) ) .filter( r -> r != 0 ) .findFirst() .orElse( 0 ); }</code> A brilliant way of introducing a ton of allocations, unnecessarily slow performance, code that is both illegible for the human reader and illegible for the optimizer in the compiler, and is therefore a maintainability disaster. No-one will ever be sure why it was written this way and almost everyone will be terrified to change it. It almost certainly has no tests and is almost certainly called from everywhere in the app. The submitter replaced this code with: <code>date1.toLocalDate().compareTo(date2.toLocalDate())</code>. <hr> <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/17/2025-09-17-An-impossible-future-for-JS.html" author="Drew DeVault" source="">A better future for JavaScript that won't happen</a> <bq>This could be the moment where npm comes to terms with its broken design, and with a well-funded effort (recall that, ultimately, npm is GitHub is Microsoft, market cap $3 trillion USD), will develop and roll out the next generation of package management for JavaScript. It could incorporate the practices developed and proven in Linux distributions, which rarely suffer from these sorts of attacks, by de-coupling development from packaging and distribution, establishing package maintainers who assemble and distribute curated collections of software libraries. By introducing universal signatures for packages of executable code, smaller channels and webs of trust, reproducible builds, and the many other straightforward, obvious techniques used by responsible package managers.</bq> <bq>Imagine if other large corporations who depend on and profit from this massive pile of recklessly organized software committed their money and resources to it, through putting their engineers to the task of fixing these problems, through coming together to establish and implement new standards, through direct funding of their dependencies and by distributing money through institutions like NLNet, ushering in an era of responsible, sustainable, and secure software development.</bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/16/smjm-s16.html" author="Alejandro López" source="WSWS">Mass pro-Gaza protest blocks final stage of Spanish Vuelta cycling race</a> <bq>On Sunday afternoon, the final stage was cancelled as over 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Madrid; thousands flooded the cyclists’ path as they entered Madrid for the final stretch of the race. Protesters knocked down barriers and marched through the course with banners reading “Boycott Israel Genocide No,” chanting “Boycott, boycott, boycott Israel,” “Free Palestine,” and “total embargo.” Police sprayed tear gas and charged the crowd.</bq> <bq>Demonstrators targeted the race because of the participation of the Israel–Premier Tech cycling team, owned by Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams, a vocal supporter of the Zionist state and personal friend of genocidal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The hypocrisy of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling’s world governing body, was glaring. It expelled Russian and Belarusian teams a month after the Ukraine war began. Riders from these countries can only compete individually, outside their national federations, stripped of their flags. Yet UCI let Israel-Premier Tech participate.</bq> <bq>For weeks, demonstrators had interrupted stages of La Vuelta demanding Israel’s expulsion, but on Sunday, thousands pulled down police barricades and forced the suspension of the Vuelta.</bq> <bq>Lucía Nistal, of the Morenoite Workers Revolutionary Current, echoed this sentiment: “They have sent more than 2,300 police against us, they have tried to repress us, they have tried to criminalise us for refusing to be complicit in the whitewashing of Zionism into which they wanted to turn the cycling tour. But today we have stopped the tour. Now it is time to stop everything. Long live Free Palestine!” This is a dead end for mounting working class anger, in Spain and internationally, against the Gaza genocide. The NATO imperialist powers, including the PSOE-Sumar government, cannot be pressured into halting a genocide they are directly sponsoring and arming. It can be safely predicted that they will continue to arm Israel for the genocide even after the Madrid protest.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <img src="{att_link}how_i_look_at_the_flight_attendant_during_snack_time_so_they_know_i_m_awake_and_would_like_a_cookie.webp" align="none" caption="How I look at the flight attendant during snack time so they know I'm awake and would like a cookie"> A comment: <bq>Oh yeah it's cookie time 🍪 😋👍</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}the_ny_times_thinks_that_baseball_terms_are_difficult.webp" href="{att_link}the_ny_times_thinks_that_baseball_terms_are_difficult.webp" align="none" caption="The NY Times thinks that baseball terms are difficult" scale="75%"> In the NYT Connections game, I like to try to guess the purple one first because it's the most difficult one. Often, I'll figure out the other 12 words and just guess the last four without even knowing how they relate to one another---but trusting that the others are correct and that they're not difficult enough to qualify as purple. So that strategy can backfire when the people at the NYT think that something is difficult that I don't also think is difficult. They pretty consistently think that terms related to sports and science are very, very difficult. I keep forgetting that, leading to a missed opportunity like the one above. <hr> <a href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4379" author="Ryan North" source="Dinosaur Comics">personally i love to chow down on what is effectively just a straight-up bowl of cottage cheese. yeah baby, hop in, we're going full Muffet on our cheesemaking byproducts tonight</a> This comic has a long title and, as a comic, it's OK. However, the description below the comment included the following list, which is possibly even stranger. It purports to list <iq>[...] the first 26 Garfield comics with no text in them (barring bookkeeping text like dates and signatures ofc).</iq> <ul>1978 (Strip #68): The tail ratchet. 1978 (Strip #78): Preparing for the bath. 1978 (Strip #79): The dandelion drying. 1980 (Strip #4): The pin-up posters. 1980 (Strip #48): The tail adjustment. (Sunday) 1980 (Strip #172): Odie ties himself in a knot. 1980 (Strip #180): The door/window prank. (Sunday) 1980 (Strip #198): Sucking the teddy bear's paw. 1980 (Strip #332): Teeth grow into the table. 1981 (Strip #125): The instant rainstorm. 1981 (Strip #147): Fur blown back in the car. 1981 (Strip #175): Paws stuck in the collar. 1981 (Strip #308): Stretching Odie's ear. 1981 (Strip #313): Stuck in the kitty sweater. 1981 (Strip #328): Neck stretches in the window shade. 1982 (Strip #32): Juggling apple cores. 1982 (Strip #39): Slingshot stuck on face. 1982 (Strip #62): Ambushing the hat ornament. 1982 (Strip #64): Devouring the popcorn. 1982 (Strip #73): Swing breaks on head. 1982 (Strip #150): Fishing hook snags tail. 1982 (Strip #151): Garfield becomes Odie's tail. 1982 (Strip #152): Sandwich fillings squish out. 1982 (Strip #167): Cat door hits him in the rear. 1982 (Strip #197): Scale arrow peaks + Garfield's reaction. 1982 (Strip #244): Napkin cape leaves him dangling.</ul> According to the <a href="https://garfield-comic-strips.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Garfield_comics" author="" source="">List of Garfield comics</a>, #68 does not have any text, but it's actually #79 and #80 that have no text, not #78 and #79 as indicated in the list.