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Links and Notes for September 19th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/09/corrupt-democracy-makes-fascism.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Corrupt "Democracy" Makes Fascism Inevitable</a> <bq>I do feel that it is extremely important to point out that the people who made this possible aren’t trailer park proud boys or even those mutant millionaires in the Christian Right. Donald Trump was transformed from a charismatically unconfident, soiled rodeo clown into a totally viable Hitler reenactor by the billionaires of Silicon Valley.</bq> <bq>This is why even though Donald Trump has become an unprecedented threat who needs to be stopped, his mainstream “resistance” funded by neocon Never Trumpers and the neoliberal DNC need to be thrown out with him for making his reign of terror possible by being only marginally less despotic than Orange-Man-Bad while daring to call their proto-fascistic shell game woke.</bq> <bq>My point is that fascism lurks behind every ideology that shelters an untouchable elite and that free people tend to embrace authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems when democracy is reduced to a shroud used to conceal the true source of those problems. If you send Middle America’s children off to die in the Middle East in the name of democracy and gut main street in the name of the free market, you can’t exactly be shocked when they reject both for any asshole promising to make their empty lives great again by any means necessary.</bq> <bq>We cannot confront the threat posed by Donald Trump until we confront the fact that, just like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump is the product of a morally bankrupt neoliberal plutocracy that dared to call itself a democracy, and we cannot confront the threat still posed by fascism until we confront the fact that time and time again, this phantom is merely the last stage of every state on the brink of collapse.</bq> <bq>I’ve said it before, and I’ll be shot saying it ten more times, anarchism is the only order that affords the full consent of the governed necessary for true democracy to thrive and any form of democracy not administered directly through popular consensus is just another lie for phantoms to hide behind.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=138874" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Wolfgang Bittner">Die Unterwanderung der Demokratie: USA – NATO – WEF</a> <bq>Kriminell wird die Zielsetzung, wenn das WEF in seinem „Global Redesign”-Bericht aus dem Jahr 2010 fordert, „dass eine globalisierte Welt am besten von einer Koalition aus multinationalen Unternehmen, Regierungen (auch über das System der Vereinten Nationen (UN)) und ausgewählten zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen (CSOs) gesteuert wird”. Regierungen seien nicht mehr „die überwältigend dominierenden Akteure auf der Weltbühne”, sodass „die Zeit für ein neues Stakeholder-Paradigma der internationalen Governance gekommen ist”. Demnach plant das WEF, demokratische Organisationsformen, in denen die Macht im Staat vom Volk mittels gewählter Vertreter ausgehen soll, durch ein Herrschaftssystem zu ersetzen, in dem eine Gruppe von „Stakeholdern”, also „führenden Persönlichkeiten”, ein globales Entscheidungsgremium bildet. Das bedeutet also eine plutokratische Diktatur in einer grenzenfreien, übernationalen Welt. Eine selbst ernannte „Elite” würde die Macht übernehmen und eine Art Weltregierung bilden.</bq> <bq>Kommunikationsforscher Nick Buxton, der sich eingehend mit den Absichten des WEF befasst hat, kommt zu dem Ergebnis, „dass wir zunehmend in eine Welt eintreten, in der Zusammenkünfte wie Davos keine lächerlichen Milliardärsspielplätze sind, sondern die Zukunft der Global Governance”. Es sei „nichts weniger als ein stiller Staatsstreich”.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=138898" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Michael Holmes">Schmutzige Kriege und endlose Lügen: Scott Hortons erschütternde Geschichte des War on Terror</a> <bq>Wer verstehen will, warum Washington nach dem 11. September systematisch Kriege geführt hat, die seine eigenen Feinde gestärkt haben, kommt an diesem Buch nicht vorbei. Es ist eine Anklage von unerbittlicher moralischer Kraft, die sich wie eine Beweisaufnahme der Staatsanwaltschaft liest. Hortons zentrale These ist ebenso einfach wie vernichtend: Die schmutzigen Kriege im Irak, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syrien, Jemen, Libyen und Somalia haben die terroristische Bedrohung verstärkt, die dann als Vorwand für weitere Interventionen diente. Hortons Verdienst ist es, die verstreuten Fragmente dieser blutigen Geschichte in einer Erzählung zusammenzufassen: die geheimen Abkommen, die Stellvertreterkriege, die Folterprogramme, die Sanktionsregime und die Bombardierungen,</bq> <bq>Er macht deutlich, dass die eigentliche Kontinuität in der US-Politik nicht Demokratie oder Menschenrechte waren, sondern die Partnerschaft mit der Besatzung Israels, brutalen Diktaturen in Saudi-Arabien und den anderen Golfstaaten, Ägypten, Jordanien, der Türkei und Pakistan sowie mit Warlords und Milizen, deren Verbrechen denen unserer offiziellen Feinde in nichts nachstanden. Das Ergebnis war ein Kreislauf der Gewalt, der mehr Feinde hervorbrachte, als er vernichtete. Nirgendwo ist dies deutlicher zu sehen als im Irak und in Syrien, wo ein Krieg in den nächsten überging und wo die amerikanische Macht nicht nur den Terrorismus nicht besiegen konnte, sondern sogar dessen monströseste Inkarnation in Form des IS hervorbrachte.</bq> Keinen von den Regierenden hatten jemals der Absicht terror zu besiegen. Die wollten ausschliesslich zu Macht und Geld kommen. Diese war eine gute Masche dafür, die gerade zur Hand liegte. Mehr nichts. Der Hebel war gross und das Geld floss schnell und zuverlässig. <bq>Immer wieder bewaffneten, finanzierten und legitimierten die Vereinigten Staaten und ihre Verbündeten genau die extremistischen Fraktionen und Diktaturen, deren Verbrechen dann als Rechtfertigung für den nächsten Krieg herangezogen wurden.</bq> <bq>Der erste Irakkrieg legte das Muster für die folgenden Jahrzehnte fest. Horton zeigt, dass Saddams Invasion in Kuwait wahrscheinlich durch Verhandlungen hätte rückgängig gemacht werden können – Bagdad bot einen Rückzug im Austausch für Gespräche über Ölstreitigkeiten an –, aber Washington, beflügelt vom Ende des Kalten Krieges, entschied sich dafür, den Krieg zu einem Spektakel der neuen imperialen Macht zu machen. Die Kampagne wurde im Inland als klarer Sieg verkauft. In Wirklichkeit war sie alles andere als das.</bq> <bq>Der Krieg endete nicht 1991. Er verwandelte sich in eine jahrzehntelange Belagerung. Das von den Vereinten Nationen verhängte, aber auf Drängen Washingtons durchgesetzte Sanktionsregime war laut Horton eine Form der kollektiven Bestrafung von beispiellosem Ausmaß. Lebenswichtige Medikamente, Chemikalien zur Wasseraufbereitung und sogar Bleistifte wurden als „doppelt verwendbar“ eingestuft und blockiert.</bq> Das Vorbild Israels. <bq>Als Außenministerin Madeleine Albright erklärte, dass „der Preis es wert ist”, offenbarte sie die moralische Bankrotterklärung eines Systems, das bereit war, eine Generation von Kindern geopolitischen Kalkülen zu opfern. Es war eine Belagerungskriegsführung unter dem Banner des Völkerrechts, die den Boden für den nächsten Krieg bereitete, indem sie den Irak gebrochen, gedemütigt und verzweifelt zurückließ.</bq> <bq>Falludscha wurde zum Symbol für die Brutalität der Besatzung. Zweimal im Jahr 2004 belagerten US-Streitkräfte die Stadt. Beim zweiten Angriff, der „Operation Phantom Fury“, regneten Artillerie, Luftangriffe und weißer Phosphor auf die Stadtviertel. Krankenhäuser wurden angegriffen, Krankenwagen blockiert und Familien in ihren Häusern verbrannt aufgefunden. Die Stadt lag in Trümmern, vergiftet durch abgereichertes Uran und andere Munition, und die Einwohner litten noch Jahre später unter steigenden Krebsraten.</bq> Israel may be doing worse, but they're not unique. They're following a well-worn path. <bq>Bagdad wurde durch Sprengschutzwände und Kontrollpunkte in konfessionelle Kantone aufgeteilt. Eine einst gemischte Stadt wurde durch Angst und Blut geteilt. Dies war kein Kollateralschaden, sondern die Architektur der Besatzung, die mit US-amerikanischer Finanzierung und Aufsicht errichtet wurde.</bq> <bq>Das Schreckliche an Syrien war nicht nur das Ausmaß des Krieges – eine halbe Million Tote, Millionen Vertriebene –, sondern auch die Tatsache, dass die Politik des Westens mit seinen brutalsten Elementen verflochten war. Al-Nusra führte in Idlib eine Herrschaft nach Taliban-Art ein, amputierte Hände, richtete Gefangene hin und zerstörte christliche und alawitische Dörfer. Der IS, der im Chaos des Irak und Syriens entstanden war, rief ein Kalifat aus und filmte Enthauptungen. Doch diese Gruppen wuchsen gerade deshalb, weil die USA und ihre Verbündeten Syrien mit Waffen überschütteten und die Übernahme der Rebellion durch die Dschihadisten ignorierten.</bq> <bq>Im Namen der Terrorismusbekämpfung hatte Washington den mächtigsten Terrorstaat der modernen Geschichte ins Leben gerufen. Syrien beweist mehr als jeder andere Schauplatz seine These, dass der Krieg gegen den Terror allzu oft ein Krieg für den Terror war.</bq> Staatsterror natürlich wie immer ausgeschlossen. Immer schön im eigenen Spur bleiben, sicher nicht den Rahmen sprengen <bq>Als Saudi-Arabien 2015 seinen Krieg zur Zerschlagung der Huthi-Bewegung begann, führte es keinen Verteidigungskrieg, sondern eine aggressive Intervention gegen eines der ärmsten Länder der arabischen Welt. Von Anfang an wurde der Krieg mit völkermörderischen Methoden geführt. Die von Saudi-Arabien angeführte Koalition bombardierte Märkte, Krankenhäuser, Schulen, Wasseraufbereitungsanlagen und sogar Beerdigungen und Hochzeiten. Streumunition und von den USA gelieferte Bomben verwandelten ganze Dörfer in Schutt und Asche. Häfen wurden blockiert, sodass keine Lebensmittel und Medikamente mehr ins Land gelangen konnten.</bq> Standard Operating Procedure for the empire and its vassals. <bq>Der Krieg gegen den Terror hatte erneut mehr Terror hervorgebracht, während die wahren Opfer die Kinder des Jemen waren, die in Krankenhäusern ausgemergelt lagen und deren Leben für die strategische Eitelkeit Saudi-Arabiens und der USA geopfert wurde. Das Ergebnis war die größte humanitäre Katastrophe der Welt zu dieser Zeit. Libyen: Vom Wiederaufbau zum Ruin Libyen veranschaulicht Hortons These im Kleinen. In den 1980er-Jahren wurde Muammar Gaddafi als Terrorismusunterstützer verteufelt. Nach 2003 wurde er wieder in die Gemeinschaft aufgenommen und von westlichen Staats- und Regierungschefs dafür gelobt, dass er seine Massenvernichtungswaffenprogramme aufgegeben und bei der Auslieferung und Folterung islamistischer Verdächtiger kooperiert hatte. Dann, im Jahr 2011, mit den Aufständen des Arabischen Frühlings, war er wieder „der tollwütige Hund“, der von NATO-Bomben ins Visier genommen wurde. Die Intervention wurde als humanitäre Mission zur Verhinderung von Massakern gerechtfertigt. In der Praxis wurde sie jedoch schnell zu einer Operation zum Regimewechsel. NATO-Flugzeuge zerstörten libysche Panzer, Kommandoposten und Gaddafis Konvoi. Der Diktator wurde auf offener Straße gelyncht, seine Leiche geschändet. Hillary Clinton lachte: „Wir kamen, wir sahen, er starb.“ Was folgte, war jedoch keine Demokratie, sondern Anarchie.</bq> <bq>Aus dieser Verwüstung heraus entstand die Union Islamischer Gerichte, eine breite und überwiegend moderate islamistische Bewegung, die schließlich ein gewisses Maß an Stabilität und Entwicklung in Mogadischu wiederherstellte. Ihre Popularität spiegelte das Verlangen der Somalier nach Ordnung nach Jahren der Ausbeutung durch die Kriegsherren wider. Nach dem 11. September 2001 fixierte sich die USA jedoch auf die Vorstellung, dass Al-Qaida in Somalia einen Zufluchtsort finden könnte. Im Jahr 2006 unterstützte Washington Äthiopien, den historischen Erzfeind Somalias, bei der Invasion. Äthiopische Truppen, bewaffnet und unterstützt von den USA, verübten Gräueltaten: Massaker, Gruppenvergewaltigungen und wahllose Beschießungen von Wohngebieten. Die Invasion zerstörte die Union der Islamischen Gerichte und radikalisierte deren Jugendflügel, al-Shabaab, der bald darauf Al-Qaida die Treue schwor.</bq> <bq>Horton betont, dass dies kein Nebeneffekt war, sondern die eigentliche Logik der amerikanischen Strategie: Die Stabilität des Imperiums wurde erkauft, indem Millionen Menschen unter autoritärer Herrschaft gehalten wurden. Tatsächlich unterstützte der Westen die große Mehrheit der Diktaturen im Nahen und Mittleren Osten.</bq> <bq>Horton betont: Dies war nicht das Werk einzelner skrupelloser Agenten. Es war Politik, die auf höchster Ebene gebilligt wurde und bis heute ungestraft bleibt.</bq> <bq>Horton betont unerbittlich die menschlichen Opfer: Kindern wurde die Chemotherapie verweigert, Krankenhäuser hatten keinen Strom, Eltern konnten ihre Familien nicht ernähren. Sanktionen wurden als „intelligente“ Instrumente verkauft, aber in der Praxis trafen sie die Schwachen, während die Eliten Wege fanden, sie zu umgehen. Sie waren Belagerungskriege unter einem anderen Namen, Instrumente der Grausamkeit, die sich als Diplomatie tarnten.</bq> <bq>Was Horton in „Enough Already“ leistet, ist mehr als eine Geschichte der Kriege nach dem 11. September. Es ist eine Demontage des zentralen Mythos, dass die Vereinigten Staaten und ihre Verbündeten für Sicherheit und Demokratie gekämpft hätten.</bq> <bq>Die menschlichen und finanziellen Kosten sind erschütternd. Horton zitiert Untersuchungen, wonach diese Kriege mindestens 6,4 Billionen Dollar gekostet haben – Geld, das zum Wiederaufbau der amerikanischen Gesellschaft hätte verwendet werden können, stattdessen aber für Zerstörungen im Ausland ausgegeben wurde. Die direkte Zahl der Todesopfer an allen Fronten des Krieges gegen den Terror beträgt mindestens zwei Millionen Menschen – eine Zahl, die noch viel höher ausfällt, wenn man die indirekten Opfer von Hunger, Krankheiten und zusammenbrechender Infrastruktur miteinbezieht. Inzwischen wurden mindestens 37 Millionen Menschen aus ihrer Heimat vertrieben, was zu Flüchtlingskrisen von Afghanistan bis Libyen geführt hat. Das sind keine abstrakten Zahlen: Sie stehen für Millionen zerstörter Leben, ganze Gesellschaften, die auseinandergerissen wurden, und Generationen, die zu Trauma und Exil verdammt sind. Horton zwingt die Leser, sich mit dieser erschütternden Arithmetik des Imperiums auseinanderzusetzen.</bq> <bq>Die wahren Kriegsverbrecher des 21. Jahrhunderts sitzen nicht in Höhlen in Tora Bora, sondern in den polierten Büros von Washington, London und Riad. Der Krieg gegen den Terror war ein Krieg der Wahl, ein Krieg der Lügen und vor allem ein Krieg für den Terror. Um ihn zu verstehen, muss man nicht nur die jüngste Geschichte Revue passieren lassen, sondern sich auch mit der blutigen Architektur unserer heutigen Welt auseinandersetzen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/getting-yelled-at-by-dumbasses" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses</a> <bq>Stalin. Hitler. Mussolini. Trump. All sort of buffoonish men, genuinely disturbed and disturbing men whose own lack of human empathy was capitalized upon by surrounding hordes of enablers, grifters, and sociopaths. The authoritarian strongman figure at the heart of awful regimes may possess some unique and interesting, if horrifying, characteristics, but the regimes themselves are built, always, of mean and damaged dumbasses who see in the breakdown of society a chance to finally let their own stupid voices be heard. (There are, too, always a class of smart, calculating, and completely amoral men who believe that they can cynically exploit the strongman for their own ends. Historically most of these people end up in a ditch.) The good news, my friends, is that long experience shows us that while dumbasses are capable of wreaking great havoc, they are not capable of sustaining their supremacy over time. The President is a reality TV star, the vice president is an aspiring podcaster, and the security state is run by a collection of bumbling media figures whose incompetence cannot be concealed by the largest budgets in the world. The same mastery of noisemaking which allowed these people to ascend to their current positions will, soon enough, drag them right back down. These dumbasses, you see, know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to do things. If they did, they would not have adapted so well to the troll’s lifestyle in the first place. The empty, sweaty idiocy at their core leaves them comically ill-equipped to carry out their current duties, like kids who played a lot of jet fighter video games being asked to pilot a 747 with one engine out. Sure, their ineptitude will kill many people. But after five or ten or a hundred crashes, they probably won’t be asked to continue as our chosen pilots. Well well well, look who it is. The gestapo. Finally come to get me, have you? Let me tell you something, fellas—I know who you really are. Dumbasses. Those masks can’t hide it. That tactical gear will never make you cool. That badge will never make you right. You may snatch me up and send me to the gulag, but you will never, ever escape your true nature. Big, stupid, idiots. So if you really think about it, the real winner here is going to be… well. I guess it kind of sucks for everyone.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/a-comment-on-the-new-un-report-on" author="Norman Finkelstein" source="Substack">A Comment on the New UN Report on Gaza</a> <bq>If Israel didn’t outright nuke Gaza, that’s because, functioning as Israel must within the constraints, albeit feeble, imposed by the vicissitudes of international public opinion, it couldn’t. But even as Israel’s overarching objective was not to annihilate but rather to ethnically cleanse Gazans, [23] it was also prepared to kill off as many civilians and pulverize as much infrastructure as was politically feasible in order to “persuade” the population to leave or “persuade” the international community to take it in. This is not idle speculation, it’s a fait accompli: Israel has already committed genocide in Gaza. Absent external political constraints, and if Gazans prove unwilling or unable to leave, then Israel, its leadership as well as Israeli Jewish society en masse—this was a national project—won’t recoil at totally annihilating Gaza’s population. Far from it. If need be, Israel won’t just be “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” Gaza’s population, it will be positively gleeful and relish the prospect. Whereas Heinrich Himmler, cognizant at some level of his criminality, feigned anguish in his infamous Posen speech at the onerous burden placed by History on the shoulders of Germany to rid the world of the Jews, Israeli security forces danced the hora and then flaunted their foul deeds on social media. It was the giddiness of a child, magnifying glass in hand, burning ants.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ID0LbzdQI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/C8ID0LbzdQI" source="YouTube" author="Chris Hedges" width="560px" caption="GHF Contractor Tells All On Genocidal Israeli 'Aid' Plan (w/ Tony Aguilar)"> This is a sobering, 70-minute report by Tony Aguilar of how the GHF "food" sites actually functioned, how they were armed with fully automatic rifles by Israel (something the U.S. military hasn't done since Vietnam), and on and on, in excruciating detail. Well-worth a listen. He's extremely well-spoken and clearly very accustomed to giving briefings like this. <hr> <img src="{att_link}you_have_given_the_gift_of_laughter_to_the_people.webp" href="{att_link}you_have_given_the_gift_of_laughter_to_the_people.webp" align="none" caption="You have given the gift of laughter to the people" scale="75%"> <bq>When the Smothers Brothers sent an apology to President Lyndon B. Johnson for their satirical jokes, Johnson responded with this memorable quote: "It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.'</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}and_magda_goebbels_made_a_great_strudel.webp" href="{att_link}and_magda_goebbels_made_a_great_strudel.webp" align="none" caption="And Magda Goebbels made a great strudel" scale="75%"> <bq>My grandfather used to say "and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel" and I never knew what it meant until after he died my grandmother explained some magazine did a fluff interview with Magda Goebbels a few years before WW2 that included her strudel recipe and my grandfather, who hated the Nazis with the passion of 10,000 suns, thought it was an example of the media sanitizing evil people and he would use the phrase when someone asked him to overlook a bad person doing bad things and focus on the good.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/26/roaming-charges-whats-the-frequency-donald/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: What’s the Frequency, Donald?</a> The author cited Trump's entire hour-long rant at the U.N. and refuted him point by point. He has more energy and patience than I do; I could only skim it and marvel at the utter madness, the thoroughgoing narcissism, the unhinging from reality. There is no need to spend so much precious time refuting the ravings of a madman. The following is the only citation about it I'll make, summing things up quite nicely. <bq>Ishaan Tharoor, foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post: “A senior foreign diplomat posted at the UN texts me: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”</bq> <bq>New York State Assembly member Robert Carroll urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to shut off the electricity at 26 Federal Plaza as a way to shut down ICE kidnappings & detainments. Carroll said that if ICE is going to escalate, then people need to escalate against ICE as well: “We need to change the script. We need to escalate this. Because clearly what we’re doing right now is not stopping the inhumane, un-American and illegal activity that is happening in this building.”</bq> <bq>Look, Tom Homan has not had a trial and has never been proven guilty. So let's all take a step back and do what he would do - send him to a secret prison in El Salvador until we can figure this out.</bq> <bq>Kristi the Puppy Killer appointed 28-year-old Madison Sheahan as Deputy Director of ICE. When asked whether she thought she was qualified for the job, Sheehan responded: “I absolutely think I’m qualified for the job. Because at the end of the day, what really makes anybody qualified for any job?”</bq> That country is not going to be able to get out of its own way soon. It can't happen quickly enough. Imagine the attitude of this lady multiplied by all of the people building weapons for the military. May a million misfires bloom. <bq>Can’t forgive college loan debt of American students or medical debt of sick Americans, but can bail out an Argentina bankrupted by the gonzo libertarian, political weirdo and now welfare queen Javier Milei: “The Trump administration is also willing to provide Argentina with credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund and to buy Argentina’s dollar bonds, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Wednesday on X.</bq> <bq>Matthew Segal (Civil Rights litigator): “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”</bq> <bq>Does anyone recall this statement by Trump on January 20? “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”</bq> It's just a thing he said. It was part of his breathing. He lies like he breathes. He says things that he thinks that people want to hear and then he moves on to another adulation-collecting occasion. He is president, so he is immensely powerful. He is also a mirror. Having surrounded himself with awful, hateful people, he begins to reflect that. I wonder whether he's more amoral and the people he's surrounded himself with are immoral. <bq author="W. E. B. Du Bois" source="Black Reconstruction in America" date="1935">The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question that was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued to be in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as expands and touches all races and nations.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7t09OI9Bik" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/D7t09OI9Bik" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="India & Global Left" caption="Carl Zha: China’s Victory Day & SCO Summit Reveal a Global Power Shift"> This is a great interview with Carl Zha. It remind me that I haven't listened to the Silk & Steel podcast in a while. He's a brilliant and well-informed analyst. Near the end of the interview, at about 1:19:00, he says, <bq>That's the progress that China has made in the last 50 years. I like to say, it's not that China is living in the future. It's that China is living in 2025 but the U.S. is still stuck living in 1995. I feel like there hasn't been a lot of material improvement in the U.S. since that time.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9hNZrBxfQI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/D9hNZrBxfQI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="India & Global Left" caption="Will the U.S. Empire Collapse or Retreat? Lawrence Wilkerson Weighs In"> Even in this discussion, Lawrence Wilkerson goes on and on about visiting China, the high-speed trains, the electric-car charging stations---<iq>China has 1M of them! That's 60x as many as the U.S.!</iq>---something has definitely gone sideways in the West. Now, granted, China also has 4x as many people as the U.S., but they didn't used to be the country with "a car in every garage", so per-capita car-ownership is still probably higher in the States. Still, even were to grant, for simplicity's sake, one car per person, 15x as many car-charging stations is clearly a much stronger dedication to the future of personal, fossil-fuel-free motoring. The West is living in the past. At about 31:00, <bq>If we were smart, if we were intelligent, and we had good leadership, they would pursue strategies that, not necessarily tried to resurrect that good feeling about America that existed in '45 and '46, but they would at least start to live up to and do it globally, things like international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, the institutions we've formed, put some more oomph into the Security Council and the UN, quit using it exclusively for our place to vouchsafe and and say how sacred Israel is to us. I know domestically how hard that is to do, but I think that's changing right now. I don't know if we'll take advantage of it, but there is a way not to resurrect the empire, not to save the empire even, but to step down from imperialism in a way that is not only conducive to our own health and security, but to the world's. And to accommodate the shift of power and the other side, because they seem to want accommodating. They don't seem to want---I mean, tell me how many wars China's in, tell me how many countries China has sanctions on. It's just not their way of life. To me, it's not. And I've been in and out of China for 30 years. First time there was in '84 and very different country then, of course. It's stunning now when I go back. So, and I don't think India wants that either. I don't think India's in too many wars and it's just settled its problems, I think, or it appears to with China. And the only thing left is that nasty little piece called Kashmir. And maybe a little ruckus with Bangladesh every now and then, but basically this is an ASEAN type community. I remember vividly when we were trying so hard to get ASEAN to get a security component. We wanted them to have a security component. We wanted ASEAN to turn into NATO East. And they rebuffed us. Repeatedly, they rebuffed us because they did not want to have a security component. Good for them, good for them. I think that sort of the attitude, even though we saw the most incredible display of military precision and might a few days ago by the Chinese and before that by the Russians. And those were not just done for celebration. They were done essentially to say to the empire in the West: We can take you, but we don't want to.</bq> At about 35:00, <bq>What we have in this country is a whole mass of people who are just well enough off to not be really angry. That's what we have. Even though the wealth disparity is the worst it's ever been in our history, the maldistribution of wealth, we still have that, and I'm not even gonna say the lower 50%, I'm not gonna say the lower 75%, 'cause the other 25% and the top 0.001 or so, God-blessedly rich that you can hardly contemplate. I mean, Elon Musk, a South African, by God, just went over apparently being a trillionaire [this is not even close to true; he was musing about becoming one]. But there's so many people who have just enough to exist and to exist in front of that TV and eat that food and drink those Coca-Colas that they don't get angry. So we have this mass of people in America who were drugged. who are content to the to an extent, who may be living from paycheck to paycheck, who can't even afford a home, whatever it might be, but their life is not deteriorated to the point where they would really get angry. And that's a sad situation because that's what our version of liberal democracy has done. And the rich people, the 0.001% are the ones who did it and are still doing it and like it that way. And they would really love to take AI, robotics, and other associated technologies and make it permanent. Make it permanent. That's what disgusts me about the domestic situation. You can't stir Americans up.</bq> At about 47:00, <bq>But I think it's a more complex situation than many people recognize with regard to our domestic situation. And that religious component is something that I was totally ignorant of until about 10 years ago when it started impacting the armed forces. We have in the armed forces now of the United States of America, as Trump said, the most powerful armed forces in the world. We have almost totally evangelical chaplains. Now you think that might not be much of a statement, but what does that do to Hegseth's accessibility, for example, which he is implementing right now, to have Christian prayer meetings in the Pentagon every week to bring pastors into the Pentagon to speak to the rank and file of the military about how women---now women constitute about 20% of my army now---how women shouldn't have the right to vote, how women are only good for having babies. These meetings are taking place weekly in the Pentagon, religious meetings. They want Christianity to be the national religion. This is a huge movement in the United States that most scholars and others just poo-poo. They don't know that much about it, but it is happening. And I've been immersed in it with regard to the military ranks because we're trying to stop it and make sure that separation of church and state remains a fabric of the military. It's dangerous within the military to do this because you also have a lot of people who don't subscribe to this, who are being oppressed really by this having to go to Christian prayer meetings and such. Dangerous thing to be happening in the in the armed forces. We do not need Christianity as a national religion enforced by the United States military. And that's where these people want to head. And Hegseth is accommodating them as far as I can tell.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1nhr4rv/hm/" author="" source="Reddit">Hm.</a> <img src="{att_link}if_quoting_someone_s_own_words_feels_like_an_attack_on_them,_then_they_weren_t_a_good_person_(1).webp" href="{att_link}if_quoting_someone_s_own_words_feels_like_an_attack_on_them,_then_they_weren_t_a_good_person_(1).webp" align="none" caption="If quoting someone's own words feels like an attack on them, then they weren't a good person" scale="60%"> From the comments: <bq>How you die doesn’t redeem how you lived.</bq> This is similar to something else I heard, along the lines of <iq>I can regret someone's death without celebrating how they lived.</iq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/joncstone/status/1269961630940631041" author="Jon Stone" source="Twitter">Use the Proper Channels</a> <bq>One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/recognizing-the-rubble-of-palestine" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">"Recognizing" The Rubble Of Palestine</a> <bq>I saw a video where two Australian doctors described how they had to deliver a baby via emergency c-section because the baby’s mother had been decapitated by an Israeli airstrike. Information like this always reminds me of that period last year when all the western politicians and media outlets were telling us that the worst people in the entire world were the university students who were protesting against this genocide.</bq> <bq>Remember that time we spent two years watching a horrific live-streamed genocide and then everyone tried to tell us we’re supposed to cry and express our deepest condolences when one of the propagandists for that genocide got shot? That was weird, right? When Biden finally fucking dies I’m going to be much more insensitive and hostile than I ever was about Charlie Kirk, because he was objectively more murderous and destructive. And when I do, right wingers won’t be shrieking at me about how evil it is to speak ill of the dead. These people have no principles; they’re just herd-minded NPCs trying to canonize a horrible man because he has the same ideology as them.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/imagine-there-was-a-violent-cult" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Imagine There Was A Violent Cult Committing Atrocities With Impunity</a> <bq>A nuclear-armed death cult just murdering and massacring mountains of human beings with total impunity, backed by the most powerful people on earth? That would be an unfathomable madness.</bq> <bq>If someone made a movie about such a thing I’d stop watching halfway through, because I would find it too unbelievable. I’d be like, come on man. Come up with a more realistic plot line. And come up with a more believable antagonist; nobody is that evil. I’d be like come on Hollywood, you seriously expect me to maintain my suspension of disbelief when you’re putting out a movie about these cartoonishly evil bad guys who blow up hospitals and assassinate journalists and murder humanitarian workers and deliberately massacre starving civilians seeking food? I’d be like, you really expect me to believe a violent cult could get all this power and do all these evil things and get away with it, just by lying about it all the time? Eventually people would stop believing their lies! I’d be like, somebody would stop them. Not only does this movie have unbelievable antagonists, it also lacks any believable protagonists. Basic human decency would compel the world to stop all these atrocities being committed right out in the open. Where are the heroes in this story? And then I’d storm out of the movie theater, glad to be outside that horrible fictional world where such freakish absurdities were taking place. And then I’d stand in the parking lot and look up at the sky, and thank God I’m back in reality again.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/bernie-sanders-is-a-ghoulish-zionist" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Bernie Sanders Is A Ghoulish Zionist</a> <bq>There’s another report from Haaretz about the horrific things Israeli soldiers say they’ve been doing to civilians in Gaza, including descriptions of the murders of children. Whenever I read these accounts I can’t help thinking about how there are westerners joining the IDF to participate in this genocide. People travel to Israel to massacre civilians and then fly back home to their real countries and resume their lives as though nothing happened, like they went backpacking in Europe or something. And now they walk among us in our communities, and we’re supposed to be fine with it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/things-are-real-bad-folks" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Things Are Really Bad</a> <bq>Consider the recent scandal involving Tom Homan, who is serving as the Trump administration’s “border czar.” Homan was caught red-handed in a undercover FBI sting accepting $50,000 in cash from agents posing as businessmen seeking government immigration-contracts under a potential second Trump presidency. The meeting was recorded, and Homan appeared to agree to help them secure those contracts after the election. However, when Trump returned to office, the Justice Department closed the investigation. This is life in a country where the government is both corrupt and increasingly authoritarian: they steal whatever isn’t nailed down, then they use their power to make sure there are no consequences for doing so. What if a cable news channel that investigates the Homan case is deemed to be violating its obligation to act in the public interest? What if a reporter finds themselves pulled in for questioning by Trump’s lawless, faceless immigration Stasi? These are no longer fanciful questions. Yes, I do believe that my long-held critiques are still relevant. Among other things, the progressive left in this country created an environment of censorship in the last decade which has helped erode commitment to the cherished ideal of free expression. I’m not so naive as to think that the right would hesitate to censor themselves were it not for the recent history of liberal censoriousness, nothing so crude. But it’s true to say that many of the same people who are outraged by Trump's censorship of Kimmel have, for years, cheered on the deplatforming and ostracization of voices they dislike, all in the name of political purity. And, yes, I believe that norms like free speech (for free speech is a norm even more than it is a legal right) are supported by continuity of practice and undermined by inconsistent application. Liberals have dismissed freedom of speech as a reactionary concept and now find themselves, as all petty censors eventually do, on the wrong side of the speech code. Their past willingness to abandon core principles for the sake of in-group status makes their current outrage seem hypocritical and partisan.</bq> <bq>[....] you can’t defeat the fascists unless you give the people something better to believe in; Democrats can’t beat Republicans without giving voters something to vote for. For so long, they haven’t. The gravity of the moment cannot be overstated, and the only way out is political. We are facing a genuinely authoritarian movement that has successfully co-opted corporate interests and is systematically dismantling the institutions that protect us. The only way to defeat this is to get serious. Yes, we must abandon the performative purity tests, the insular cultural battles, and the self-defeating hypocrisy that have been a hallmark of liberalism for too long. We need to focus on what matters: building a mass movement capable of wielding real political power to improve the material lives of working people. The goal is to defeat a genuinely dangerous threat and to build a better world. That requires political seriousness, strategic thinking, and a recognition that the work of politics is just about the opposite of forming a moral aristocracy.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}what_is_up_with_ben_shapiro_s_eyebrows.webp" align="none" caption="What is up with Ben Shapiro's eyebrows"> This is Ben Shapiro. Not only does it look like he painted his eyebrows on crookedly but it sorta kinda looks like he briefly considered painting himself a Hitler mustache before thinking better of it. The picture is blurry because I took a screenshot from a Hasan Piker video, who was unfairly forcing his viewers to not only look at Shapiro but also listen to him for a few minutes. It was painful but it's good to listen every once in a while to verify that the guy who millions seem to worship is still just as immoral, venal, illogical, and dumb a person as he was when you last stopped listening to him. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-real-violent-extremists-are-the" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Real Violent Extremists Are The Freaks Who Run The US Empire</a> <bq>These are the violent extremists. The only reason they are able to claim that some kid wearing a keffiyeh or a balaclava is a violent extremist while they themselves are not is because they control the narrative. The plutocrats who benefit from the imperial status quo own and control the media platforms and information systems which people use to learn about the world, and they use this narrative control to frame the imperial status quo as normal and any opposition to it as freakish extremism. That’s the only reason a westerner who supports genocide, warmongering, militarism and imperialism gets to call themselves a “centrist” or a “moderate”. They live in an empire whose propagandists actively normalize imperial abuses while spinning any deviation from this violent madness as abnormalities on the radical political fringe.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/no-things-arent-worse-now-on-speech" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">No, Things Aren't Worse Now on Speech. It's Not Even Close</a> <bq>Along with the Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s admission about Biden officials who would “scream” or “curse” about removing content, the Google letter caps the trifecta of major Internet platforms who’ve admitted to partnering with the government in systematic censorship in the pre-Trump period. YouTube removed thousands of people from its platform at the government’s behest during the pandemic. Tens of thousands more were deamplified or labeled, often incorrectly. Even before letters like the one above, this was no secret. When reporters like me called to ask YouTube, Meta, or Twitter why this or that person had been sanctioned during the pandemic, they told us flat-out they were following parameters laid out by government.</bq> <bq>The FBI and Department of Homeland Security were having monthly (in some cases weekly) meetings with upwards of two dozen Internet companies, funneling “guidance” on content on a range of topics, from Covid to Russia to Iran to “U.S. Elections.” Like a parolee, Facebook had to send a “bi-weekly Covid content report” to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Whether you blame this on the administration of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or the first term of Donald Trump (during which some of these bodies flourished), it’s now undeniable that federal pressure or “jawboning” to suppress dissent was systematic long before Jimmy Kimmel got a few days off. How did politicians and the U.S. media respond to confirmation that the last administration engaged in wholesale censorship not of one jerkwad talk show host, but the entire world? They pretended it didn’t happen.</bq> <bq>The sheer scale of the last Administration’s ambitions was breathtaking in this respect, and it’s only through a few lucky breaks (and the work of politicians like Jim Jordan) that we even know about the extent of it. For Tapper, ostensibly a news person, to look beyond such a vast amount of organized misconduct to pronounce the Kimmel episode the Worst Thing Ever is nuts.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/27/czsz-s27.html" author="Martin Nowak" source="WSWS">War propaganda and militarism on children’s TV in Germany</a> <bq>The moderator’s rhetorical tricks were reminiscent of the repulsive methods with which conscientious objectors were confronted in the past. With a focus on emotional appeals, the causes of war, rearmament and Bundeswehr deployments were completely left out. In the end, Rizkallah staged an apparent compromise: everyone would agree that one should give something back to one’s country—whether militarily or otherwise.</bq> This article is about a short video from German kids TV that was browbeating/indoctrinating kids into thinking that obligatory military service is a good idea because "wanting to live in a country without being willing to defend it is egoistic." Cool, cool, cool. Be happy that the U.S. isn’t the only western country hurtling toward full-blown military authoritarianism. We are all North Korea now I guess. Here's the video. The kids defend themselves quite well, most especially the young women (brunette; lots of makeup) but all of them were reasonably well-spoken and pretty much anti-war. The guy had a lot of work to do but he was willing to do it. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVeooGkavBs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/cVeooGkavBs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="logo!" caption="Sollte es wieder einen verpflichtenden Wehrdienst geben? | logo! no.front | Schüler-Debatte"> <hr> <a href="State law requires Tennessee public school teachers to teach gun safety starting in kindergarten" author="Milo Stevens" source="WSWS">State law requires Tennessee public school teachers to teach gun safety starting in kindergarten</a> <bq>The manual itself divides instruction into three distinct grade ranges: K-2; 3-5; 6-12. The first two grade groupings primarily focus on familiarizing children with firearm nomenclature, identifying the difference between a toy and a real firearm, and the importance of telling an adult if a child finds a firearm. The third grade grouping focuses on teaching “All family members” “safe gun handling” and including the proper storage of firearms and ammunition.</bq> The U.S. military needs your sons and daughters too. There's lots of work to do. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1nq9y80/they_see_me_rollin/" author="Razaberry" source="Reddit">They see me rollin</a> <img src="{att_link}they_see_me_rollin_.webp" align="none" caption="They see me rollin'"> <bq>Some rich guy in a power suit carrying the cross with support wheels is a perfect metaphor for the entire cult that is the evangelical church</bq> <bq>Imagining Bansky throwing down his hat in frustration.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/starwarsmemes/comments/1nqczbq/damn/" author="" source="Reddit">Damn</a> <img src="{att_link}same_fascism_again,_but_stupider.webp" href="{att_link}same_fascism_again,_but_stupider.webp" align="none" caption="Same fascism again, but stupider" scale="65%"> <bq>I still dislike the Star Wars sequels but I can't no longer fault them for running with the premise of '20 years after fascism, same fascism again, but stupider' bc I iust lived through that.</bq> As a comment corrected: <bq>Currently living through* It's not over yet.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Snorkblot/comments/1nq7z9r/are_generally_regarded/" author="" source="Reddit">are generally regarded…</a> <img src="{att_link}the_greatest_lie_the_gerontocracy_ever_told.webp" href="{att_link}the_greatest_lie_the_gerontocracy_ever_told.webp" align="none" caption="The greatest lie the gerontocracy ever told" scale="75%"> <bq>What aren't people talking enough about?</bq> <bq>How 70-80 year olds are generally regarded as unemployable due to mental decline / skill mismatch - yet they're exclusively running the country</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1nq9dhy/do_u_agree/" author="" source="Reddit">Du u agree?</a> <img src="{att_link}usa_in_movies_vs._usa_in_real_life.webp" href="{att_link}usa_in_movies_vs._usa_in_real_life.webp" align="none" caption="USA in movies vs. USA in real life" scale="75%"> For those who don't know, the one on the right is Homelander, the utterly sociopathic version of Superman<fn> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_(comics)" author="" source="Wikipedia">The Boys</a> universe In the comments, someone added Cricket from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as another pair of images that would be fitting to use. <img src="{att_link}the_downfall_of_cricket_in_iasip.webp" href="{att_link}the_downfall_of_cricket_in_iasip.webp" align="none" caption="The downfall of Cricket in IASIP" scale="50%"> Even further down, someone included a comment that reminded me of just how dark this show was. <bq source="It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 6">Dennis: So, uh, Dennis and Dee Reynolds here, we are talking about the homeless issue here in Philly, that's a big issue these days and we're here with our friend Cricket, he is a homeless man. Cricket, walk us through a day in your life. Rickety Cricket: A day in the life-- well, the other morning, I wake up and I find a dog sniffin' at my wound. He's fully aroused - mind you - so I'm thinking "oh great, what does this jerk want?" Of course I know what he wants, he's looking at me right in the eyes, he does not have to say it - not that he could. [Starts sucking on a lemon] Urrggghhhh that is- that is tart! That is really tart. I mean does my scar look like a dog's vagina? You know, maybe, I don't know, I'm not going to sit here and try to get inside the mind of a dog! I mean that's God's work. Well, not that I believe in God, I don't. Not since that chinaman stole my kidney.</bq> <hr> <ft>The one on the left is Superman, though if you need help with that one, there is absolutely no way you waste a single further second trying to figure out why people think that this meme is funny.</ft> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/1nqc0y2/fbi_director_kash_patel_has_released_the_private/" author="" source="Reddit">FBI Director Kash Patel has released the private messages of the Dallas immigrant shooter. </a> <img src="{att_link}fbi_director_kash_patel_has_released_the_private_messages_of_the_dallas_immigrant_shooter._.webp" href="{att_link}fbi_director_kash_patel_has_released_the_private_messages_of_the_dallas_immigrant_shooter._.webp" align="none" caption="FBI Director Kash Patel has released the private messages of the Dallas immigrant shooter." scale="75%"> <bq quote-style="none"><div style="float: right; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">Hey, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have radicalized me to do violence against ICE</div> <div style="float: left; clear: both; background-color: #333; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">I remember you mentioning this at our last Antifa meeting</div> <div style="float: left; background-color: #333; color: white; clear: both; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">Will you be committing the act in solidarity with the Democrat party?</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">I'll be aiming at ICE officers, but I'm cross-eyed so wish me luck</div> <div style="float: left; clear: both; background-color: #333; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">Sounds good</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">Also I'm trans, as you know</div> </bq> <clear><hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/27/hbew-s27.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Trump signs executive order approving takeover of TikTok by US investment consortium</a> <bq>The deal amounts to a seizure of the Chinese-based app by the US tech oligarchy. While ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, will retain a stake of just under 20 percent (19.9), the US investors are putting up 45 percent of the investment, about $6 or $7 billion, and the balance of 35 percent will be provided by the former ByteDance investors. The total value of the TikTok’s US assets have been estimated at approximately $14 billion. The agreement, portions of which were made public last week, would see ownership of TikTok’s technical platform, infrastructure and recommendation algorithm transition to the US consortium. Cloud and business software giant Oracle (stock market value of $828 billion), private equity giant Silver Lake ($104 billion in assets under management), the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ($46 billion in committed capital) are taking ownership alongside anticipated additions, such as Fox Corp. and technology magnates Michael Dell and Lachlan Murdoch, as well as the Abu Dhabi-based MGX. The participation of the wide range of partners in the deal is a measure of the capitalist feeding frenzy underway. All the participants in the project, whether they are part of the technical aspects of the takeover or not, are expecting a significant return on their investment. The platform’s powerful recommendation algorithm, which is credited with driving the app’s explosive popularity, will be transferred in code form and re-engineered in the US. The US consortium will have exclusive control over retraining and deploying the algorithm for American users. While ByteDance maintains a substantial minority interest, it loses all access and oversight of user data and algorithm modifications in the US.</bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/cause-and-effect/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Conspiratorialism’s causal chain</a> <bq>[...] the Sackler family flagrantly lied about the safety of their opioids. They bribed doctors to over-prescribe their drugs. They paid pharmacists bonuses for not asking nosy questions about people filling endless, gigantic refills. They reaped billions. They hired FDA officials and paid them to lobby their ex-colleagues to turn a blind eye, even as the country's morgues filled with the corpses of their victims. They made more billions, and they abused the justice system and got to stay disgustingly, dynastically rich, even as more than one million Americans died in the overdose epidemic they started.</bq> <bq>The hucksters and grifters peddling anti-vax conspiracies are pushing on an open door. The existence of real, high-stakes, mass-casualty conspiracies, right there in the open, make traumatized people easy marks for con artists selling horse-paste and taint-tanning.</bq> <bq>Why do our institutions fail? Because they have been neutered, deliberately made weaker than the processes and companies they are meant to oversee. Starve the FAA of resources and eventually it's going to run out of money to inspect airplane factories. When that happened, Boeing got to hire its own inspectors. The FAA let Boeing mark its own homework, and then planes started falling out of the sky.</bq> <bq>The reason Google – which has a 90% market share in Search – sucks so bad is that they decided to make their product worse so that you would have to repeatedly search to get the information you're seeking, which creates more opportunities to show you ads:</bq> <bq>The reason your glasses are so expensive is that one company, a French-Italian consortium called Essilor-Luxotica, bought and merged all the retailers, manufacturers, optical labs and insurers and then raised the price of glasses by 1,000%.</bq> <bq>Hundreds of companies are a rabble, a mob. They compete. They poach each others' best customers and best workers. They hate each other. They can't agree on anything, especially what lie they should be telling their regulators. Forced into "wasteful competition" (-P. Thiel), they must lower prices and raise wages, which leaves them with less money to spend lobbying. They can't capture their regulators. But: stage an orgy of incestuous mergers, shrink the industry to five companies whose C-suites have all known each other all their lives, who are executors of one another's estates and godparents to one another's children, and the collective action problem vanishes. Nominal competitors suddenly start singing with one voice, demanding a unified set of privileges and exemptions from their regulators.</bq> <bq>Robert Bork claimed that monopolies were "efficient." He said that monopolies in the wild were almost never the result of cheating – rather, if a company managed to get all of us to buy its products, that was evidence that its products were the best. Bork insisted that it would be perverse to enlist the government to punish companies for making the most pleasing and successful products.</bq> <bq>If we want to armor the people we love against conspiratorial cults, it's not enough to argue over the implausibility of their belief that elite cabals are abusing the rest of us for fun and profit – we have to actually address the real elite cabals that really do abuse us for fun and profit.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/16/bcjr-s16.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">Collapse of car lender Tricolor sends out a tremor</a> <bq>A report in the Financial Times entitled “Car lender’s failure hints at what’s under the hood in private credit” drew attention to the wider significance of the Tricolor collapse. It said that because of the rise in so-called shadow banking—the growth of non-bank private credit institutions—what is called a “mini-drama” involving a company little known outside a few states in the US, had “maxi-implications for banks everywhere.” While the amounts involved at Tricolor were small in relation to the overall financial system, they were still significant. The underlying process was part of a wider trend. “So-called asset-based lending, which involves slicing and dicing things such as auto debt, student debt, airplane leases, and mortgages, is a linchpin of the private credit revolution sweeping Wall Street.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/09/israel-war-economy-reservist-compensation/" source="Jacobin" author="Assaf Bondy">How Israel’s War Economy Defied Economic Predictions</a> <bq>This is not military spending in any traditional sense but direct payment for participation in documented violations of international humanitarian law. The system has transformed military service from a civic obligation into economic opportunity. Reservists receive an average of nearly $8,000 per month — almost double Israel’s average salary and five times the minimum wage, supplemented by generous bonus payments and social services free of charge.</bq> Holy shit! That's a very, very comfortable salary! Their cost of living isn't even that high. And, like they note, "social services" include health care, which is a giant expense and doesn't come off the top of that $8000. <bq>Many can maintain civilian employment part-time while receiving full military compensation for participation in operations that include deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, forced displacement of populations, and systematic destruction of Gaza’s basic services.</bq> Holy shit! You keep your regular job on top of working as a stormtrooper! I guess it's such a small country that you can just roll out on weekends to slaughter some innocents and be back filling TPS reports on Monday morning. That is fucking wild. What must society even be like there right now? You're in the grocery store, side-eyeing people, wondering which ones actually participated in murder the last week. Yeah, there's no way that will result in any sort of negative blowback. <bq>It is important to note that the money the state transfers into the private accounts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is spent within the Israeli economy on daily needs such as food, clothing, mortgages, entertainment, and more. In this sense, we are talking about billions of shekels that help drive the Israeli economy, even while the country is at war. As the Keynesian multiplier suggests, these household “expenses” generate additional spending within the economy, leading to higher overall income and increased aggregate demand.</bq> See? They're all just shopping in local stores when they get back from their "boys' weekends". <hr> <a href="https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter4.html" source="Fintech Dystopia" author="Hilary Allen"> Chapter 4: There’s a Blockchain for That</a> <bq>Blockchain applications are extremely constrained by the technology’s real-world limitations, according to more than 1500 independent computer scientists, software engineers, and other technologists who signed on to a letter to US Congressional leaders in 2022. Here’s the money quote: By its very design, blockchain technology is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit.</bq> <bq>In 2016, for example, the Australian Stock Exchange announced with great fanfare that it was partnering with the firm Digital Asset Holdings to replace its existing clearing and settlement system with blockchain technology. The ASX ultimately ended up with egg on its face, though, abandoning the project in 2022 after spending years and the equivalent of about USD$164 million on it. Why wasn’t it a good solution for the ASX? Well, the scaling and complexity challenges associated with blockchain technology were reportedly a big part of it. Fun fact: the CEO of Digital Asset Holdings at the time the ASX signed up was none other than Blythe Masters, the woman credited with inventing the credit default swap, a.k.a. the derivative contract that was at the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s no laughing matter that bitcoin ATMs have sprung up alongside payday lending and check cashing operations in lower-income US neighborhoods. Although they’re often marketed with the typical “democratizing finance” BS, these ATMs accept cash and turn it into crypto but rarely work the other way. Not only do users face challenges cashing out any crypto gains, the machines also charge exorbitant fees (often hidden in the USD-bitcoin exchange rate). Scammers have also been capitalizing on these bitcoin ATMs as a way to separate marks from their cash.</bq> <bq>Wall-E was intended as a cautionary tale, but it sometimes seems like our overly optimistic friends in Silicon Valley miss the subtext and react to dystopian fictions with the response “coooooool - what if we actually did that?!”</bq> <bq>[...] we’re supposed to believe that a blockchain-based system will allow users, simply by operating a single node in that system, to wrest control away from those who have invested more time and money in it? This is magical thinking, and blockchains aren’t magic. As technology publishing guru Tim O’Reilly observed, “history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized.” He then noted that “blockchain turned out to be the most rapid recentralization of a decentralized technology that I've seen in my lifetime.”</bq> <bq>Having a hierarchy of control streamlines things in the face of uncertainty, and makes life easier for people who don’t want to invest heavily in learning the intricate workings of something. And when there are opportunities to make money from hierarchy and streamlining, the evolution of centralized intermediaries seems inevitable – someone will always rush to fill a profitable power vacuum. This is, of course, how our current internet became intermediated by Big Tech platforms like Google (now Alphabet) and Facebook (now Meta): they made the internet easy to use for those who didn’t understand how internet protocols actually worked, and became some of the largest companies in the world as a result. These tendencies towards centralization of profit and power have implications for the (in)ability of the blockchain, and the things built upon it, to make things more efficient, more competitive, and more secure.</bq> <bq>A techno-solutionist mindset encourages us to look at problems and view them as things that are easily solvable with technologies. We tend to think of technology as being particularly good at making things more efficient, and so it’s not surprising that Silicon Valley encourages us to frame so many complex problems as simple inefficiencies that technology can streamline [...]</bq> Things like climate change, identification, community, and trust. <bq>As sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman has chronicled in her book Thinking Like an Economist, the rise of “efficiency” as a policy goal – which dethroned previous generations of policy goals framed around things like rights and equality – has also been driven by the prominence of economists and economic thinking among the policymakers charged with fixing our most stubborn social problems. Popp Berman notes that while it wasn’t always this way, we’ve by now been conditioned to think that “more efficient” is always an improvement without thinking too hard about what “efficiency” actually means.</bq> <bq>That word, however, means different things to, and even among, economists, technologists, and other kinds of experts. Different people will also view the tradeoffs involved in generating different kinds of efficiencies differently depending on their individual position and values. As soon as we start going down the rabbit hole of trying to define “efficiency,” the notion that it is a single coherent concept, or in any way a neutral concept, falls apart pretty quickly.</bq> <bq>Does efficiency just mean “eliminating wastefulness” in the colloquial sense? If so, wastefulness from whose perspective?</bq> <bq>[...] might eliminating frictions sometimes limit our ability to interject human values into how technological solutions work?</bq> <bq>Complexity scientists tend to think of efficiency as one of several attributes of a complex system – an attribute that can make that system more fragile overall. Which begs questions about which kinds of tradeoffs are appropriate between efficiency and redundancy to keep the systems we need going, and who benefits from particular choices about those tradeoffs.</bq> <bq>[...] what is considered efficient in a particular context will always depend on that context and need to be measured against other goals. Solving for “efficiency” as a universally shared value – as so many techno-solutions purport to do – can therefore hide a multitude of sins.</bq> <bq>The environmental costs of bitcoin mining, for example, are borne by all of us. Global efforts to combat climate change are being undercut by bitcoin mining businesses devoting a small nation’s worth of energy to the intentionally inefficient activity of guessing a random number. But those impacts are not distributed evenly: the profits for mining companies outweigh their interest in our environment and so mining is worth it for them; many of us who will eventually be impacted by climate change don’t even realize that bitcoin mining imposes such steep environmental costs.</bq> <bq>We’ve had the technology for that kind of instantaneous settlement for years” (and he wasn’t talking about a blockchain). “We just don’t use it because no one wants to get rid of the efficiencies of netting!”</bq> <bq>If a crypto exchange like Coinbase doesn’t think that the blockchain works for its own internal record-keeping purposes, then that seems like a pretty strong indictment of the technology to me. I told you in Chapter 2 that I’m not a fan of gambling, but if I had to wager, I would say that the reason the parties involved want to use the blockchain as the settlement layer is that they spy some efficiencies that can be wrung from carrying on business away from the watchful eye of financial authorities.</bq> <bq>Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think we should be cheering for businesses to profit by avoiding laws that were designed to protect the rest of us. I also don’t think it’s desirable for those law-dodging efficiencies to provide the basis of a business’ competitive edge. We saw in Chapters 2 and 3 that many fintech business models – including the blockchain-based crypto industry – trade on their ability to skirt rules that incumbent financial institutions have to play by. While we tend to assume that Silicon Valley startups disrupt existing businesses with their technological superiority, if their edge lies instead in exploiting legal loopholes to get a leg up over less sexy incumbents, then the disruptor is not really making the market more competitive.</bq> <bq>If we go back about a century, competition policy in the United States had multiple goals ranging from improving equity to limiting concentrations of corporate power in order to prevent the subversion of our democracy. But an intellectual takeover of the antitrust field in the 1960s and 70s by those who viewed our friend “efficiency” as the only appropriate goal of antitrust policy ensured that bigger concerns about concentrated market power fell by the wayside. “Efficiency” in this context was translated into a narrow “consumer welfare standard” that led to mergers and other business activities being judged (in the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission) only by their impact on the prices that consumers pay for goods and services.</bq> <bq>The result of this Borkian intellectual takeover was that competition law in the United States lay pretty inert for decades, even as tech platforms like Google and Amazon built up extraordinary market power (measured not just in terms of the money they make and their ability to snuff out fledgling competitors but also in terms of the data they collect about us and their ability to dictate the information we receive).</bq> <bq>He was particularly bothered by the concerns I expressed about blockchain’s YOLO approach to maintenance and cybersecurity. He told me that my comments were misleading, and so I asked him who BlackRock relied upon to get comfortable that the Ethereum blockchain would keep functioning. He made it pretty clear that he thought this was an idiotic question, and responded something along the lines of “I don’t need to worry about that. There are thousands of nodes hosting the Ethereum blockchain.”</bq> You want to host financial transactions? Where's your runbook? "We don't need one. We're distributed on the blockchain." Get the f@&k out of here. Amateur hour. <bq>The current drive for tokenization seems to be less about improving finance’s technological plumbing and more about avoiding the securities laws and “feed[ing] into the perpetual motion machine that is crypto trading,” as one Financial Times article put it.</bq> people aren't going to scam themselves. And the turnips are just sitting there, ripe for the picking. <bq>In traditional finance, obligations are written up in long legal documents, but they are not self-enforcing. This means that the parties (or regulators, or courts) can waive or forgive those obligations in low-probability but high-stakes situations – the kinds of situations Nassim Nicholas Taleb has popularized as “black swans.” The problem is that some techno-solutionists have such faith in computer software to address all possible eventualities that they don’t see the need for this kind of flexibility or forgiveness.</bq> <bq>There may also be uncertainties about who actually owns blockchain-based assets, which can further complicate valuation and add to the general panic. Despite claims that blockchains makes everything transparent, we know that lots of blockchain intermediaries manage assets on their own books and off the blockchain – Robinhood, for example, currently uses the Arbitrum database to process tokenization transactions, and plans to launch its own “Layer 2” database in the future. Transactions are ultimately settled on the Ethereum blockchain, but if there is a possibility of discrepancies between blockchain and off-chain records when it comes to asset ownership, buyers will want further discounts on those assets to compensate them for the uncertainty.</bq> <bq>What I really want to emphasize here is that the efficiency gains that blockchain-based finance can manage – through automating transactions, always-on markets, and unlimited asset proliferation – may not be in the best interests of society at large. These kinds of efficiencies make our financial system more fragile and therefore make our economy less secure. This may not be the same kind of security that techno-libertarians value, but it’s valuable to most of us.</bq> <bq>The versions of efficiency, competition, and security that technological solutions do solve for are typically the versions that will most benefit those developing or funding those solutions. This is a key reason why we should be skeptical about the technologies that Silicon Valley delivers. Although win-wins are possible, it is by no means guaranteed or even the norm that Silicon Valley technologies will be a net positive for society. And yet, we so rarely dig that deep. It’s not just the blockchain – in so many spheres, we simply accept technological solutions without question.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/why-does-openai-need-six-giant-data-centers/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Why does OpenAI need six giant data centers?</a> <bq>The financial structure of these deals between OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia has drawn scrutiny from industry observers. Earlier this week, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $100 billion as OpenAI deploys Nvidia systems. As Bryn Talkington of Requisite Capital Management told CNBC: "Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia." Oracle's arrangement follows a similar pattern, with a reported $30 billion-per-year deal where Oracle builds facilities that OpenAI pays to use. This circular flow, which involves infrastructure providers investing in AI companies that become their biggest customers, has raised eyebrows about whether these represent genuine economic investments or elaborate accounting maneuvers. The arrangements are becoming even more convoluted. The Information reported this week that Nvidia is discussing leasing its chips to OpenAI rather than selling them outright. Under this structure, Nvidia would create a separate entity to purchase its own GPUs, then lease them to OpenAI, which adds yet another layer of circular financial engineering to this complicated relationship. "NVIDIA seeds companies and gives them the guaranteed contracts necessary to raise debt to buy GPUs from NVIDIA, even though these companies are horribly unprofitable and will eventually die from a lack of any real demand," wrote tech critic Ed Zitron on Bluesky last week about the unusual flow of AI infrastructure investments. Zitron was referring to companies like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, which have raised billions in debt to buy Nvidia GPUs based partly on contracts from Nvidia itself. It's a pattern that mirrors OpenAI's arrangements with Oracle and Nvidia.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/amazon-agrees-to-make-canceling-prime-easy-will-refund-customers-1-5b/" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">Amazon agrees to make canceling Prime easy, will refund customers $1.5B</a> <bq>Amazon has agreed to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit accusing the e-commerce giants of tricking customers into signing up for Prime and then making it frustratingly hard to cancel. In a press release Thursday, the FTC confirmed that, pending court approval, Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty and provide $1.5 billion in refunds to an estimated 35 million customers "harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices." Former FTC chair Lina Khan initiated the lawsuit, accusing customers of trapping customers in a “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process the company named after Homer’s Iliad. The civil penalty, the FTC noted, is "the largest ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation," and the refunds to customers are "the second-highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC action." Amazon also agreed to stop "unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime," meaning it will soon be easier than ever to unsubscribe.</bq> Good. Very good. 👌👏 However... <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/09/26/drop-in-the-bucket-lina-khan-rips-trump-ftc-for-giving-amazon-a-wrist-slap-settlement/" author="Brad Reed" source="Scheer Post / Common Dreams">‘Drop in the Bucket’: Lina Khan Rips Trump FTC for Giving Amazon a Wrist-Slap Settlement</a> <bq>However, former FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan accused the agency of letting Amazon off easy, while describing the $2.5 billion settlement as a “drop in the bucket” for the tech giant. “In 2023, we sued Amazon and several top executives for tricking people into Prime subscriptions and then making it absurdly difficult to cancel,” she explained in a post on X. “This week marked the start of a historic jury trial, where American citizens would hear details of Amazon’s business practices and determine if it had broken the law. A couple of days into trial, FTC announces it has settled all charges, rescuing Amazon from likely being found liable for having violated the law and allowing it to pay its way out.” Khan added that the settlement was “no doubt, a big relief for the executives who knowingly harmed their customers.” Amazon currently has a market cap of over $2.3 trillion, meaning the $2.5 billion settlement represents a little more than one-tenth of 1% of its total worth. Its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is among the richest people on Earth, with an estimated net worth of nearly $240 billion. Matthew Stoller, an antitrust advocate and researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project, faulted the FTC for letting Amazon settle without any admission of wrongdoing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/apple-demands-eu-repeal-the-digital-markets-act/" author="Barbara Moens" source="Ars Technica">Apple demands EU repeal the Digital Markets Act</a> <bq>“Despite our concerns with the DMA, teams across Apple are spending thousands of hours to bring new features to the European Union while meeting the law’s requirements. But it’s become clear that we can’t solve every problem the DMA creates,” [Apple] said.</bq> 😭😭😭 We can hardly make any money! How will we ever survive!?! What about those poor European citizens, whose ability to bask in our beneficence is threatened by their authoritarian, anti-business, and well-nigh communist governments? What about those poor souls? <bq>A European Commission spokesperson said it was normal that companies sometimes “need more time to make their products compliant” and that the commission was helping companies to do so. The spokesperson also said that “DMA compliance is not optional, it’s an obligation.”</bq> 😹😹😹 Boo hoo. Quit yer bitchin'. Oh, and, um, also: fuck you. Also: Good. Very good. 👌👏 <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_(unit)" author="" source="Wikipedia">Knot (unit)</a> I would keep hearing people say things like "knots per hour," which I was pretty sure is wrong. According to this article, it is wrong. The unit "knot" is defined as a speed, which is distance / time. Specifically, it is <iq>equal to one nautical mile per hour, exactly 1.852 km/h (approximately 1.151 mph or 0.514 m/s).</iq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/15/xhuc-s15.html" source="WSWS" author="Jean Shaoul">Abiy opens Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam amid escalating tensions in Horn of Africa</a> <bq>On September 11, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed officially opened the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a $5 billion megaproject that has been under construction since 2011. Operations started in February 2002, with the reservoir gradually filling behind the massive concrete dam. The 1.8km wide and 145 metres high dam across a section of the Blue Nile in western Ethiopia, 30km from the border with Sudan, contains nearly double the volume of water in China’s Three Gorges Dam.</bq> <bq>The reduction in the Nile flow makes water-intensive crops like rice, a staple food in Egypt, uneconomic and has increased the cost of irrigation, threatening Egypt’s food security.</bq> <bq>As the world’s most populous landlocked country, Ethiopia is reliant on neighbouring countries to provide trade access, with 95 percent of its trade by volume going through Djibouti, following Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year war. Two years ago, Abiy declared that Ethiopia wanted greater access to a seaport, calling it an “existential matter” to avoid over-reliance on Djibouti which has refused Ethiopia’s requests for a naval base while granting a similar request from Egypt.</bq> <bq>Around one million people remain displaced, and tens of thousands of refugees have still not been able to return home since the war ended in 2022. It marks the unravelling of the 2018 peace accord between Ethiopia and Eritrea that won the Nobel Peace Prize for Abiy.</bq> <bq>In January 2024, Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia in 1991, with a long coastline on the Red Sea, promising to recognise it as an independent state in exchange for the lease of a 20km section of its coastline near the port of Berbera for 50 years to set up a naval base. This sparked uproar in Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea, who viewed it as an aggressive move and responded with diplomatic countermeasures. Egypt seized the opportunity to find allies against Ethiopia and offered to replace Ethiopian troops in the new African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia, while joining Eritrea and Somalia in a pledge to safeguard Somalia’s sovereignty and collaborate on Red Sea issues—tantamount to a hostile encirclement of Ethiopia.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/what-climate-targets-top-fossil-fuel-producing-nations-keep-boosting-output/" author="Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News" source="Ars Technica">What climate targets? Top fossil fuel producing nations keep boosting output</a> <img src="{att_link}global_fossil_fuel_emissions,_historical_and_projected.webp" href="{att_link}global_fossil_fuel_emissions,_historical_and_projected.webp" align="none" caption="Global Fossil Fuel Emissions, historical and projected" scale="75%"> The graph speaks for itself. 1.5º is gone. So is 2.0º. The pledges aren't happening. Smoke 'em if you got 'em; this plane's going down. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/CxVXvFOPIyQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Veritasium" caption="Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds"> This is a great and informative video. Although most of it should be reasonably familiar, there are a lot of interesting details, in particular the description of how the chemicals work. For example, the chemicals work against plants, fungi, and bacteria, which have a particular amino-acid pathway that mammals and insects don't. Some of the science starts to get so derived---i.e., needing a lot of background information and training to really understand---that I could forgive people from wondering how this gobbledygook is different from people babbling about vaccines and acetaminophen causing autism or those who advocate for the healing power of crystals. <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/16/cfel-s16.html" source="WSWS" author="Benjamin Mateus">As over 1 million Americans are infected with COVID daily, Trump administration plans further cutoff of vaccines</a> <bq>On average, each American has now been infected 4.2 times, and nearly half the population has contracted the virus at least once in 2025 alone. The PMC estimates 1,300 to 2,100 excess deaths per week, totaling 50,000 to 60,000 annual deaths from COVID-19 and related complications. Meanwhile, Long COVID remains a mass disabling event, affecting an estimated 6 percent of those infected, which can have consequences comparable to stroke, rheumatoid arthritis or Parkinson’s disease in severe instances. The current wave alone is projected to produce up to 720,000 new Long COVID cases in the months ahead.</bq> <bq>Among children and adolescents aged 6 months to 17 years who were hospitalized with COVID-19 between October 2024 and March 2025, 89 percent had not received the most recently recommended vaccines.</bq> <bq>This pattern is applicable to adults. Most who are hospitalized had not received a single COVID-19 vaccine dose since July 2023. Among adults aged 65 and older, 65 percent of those hospitalized had no record of receiving the 2024–2025 recommended vaccine. Pregnant individuals were even more unprotected, with 92 percent of those hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 symptoms having not received any vaccine dose since July 2023.</bq> <bq>Overall, the data show that one in four children under 18 years old hospitalized for COVID-19 required ICU-level care, a stark indicator of how severe the disease can be, even in children with no recognized risk factors. These findings dismantle the myth that healthy children are largely safe from the worst outcomes of infection and should not receive COVID vaccines. Instead, they demonstrate that COVID-19 remains a serious and unpredictable threat to pediatric health, capable of causing critical illness in previously well children with no medical vulnerabilities.</bq> <bq>By narrowing or removing vaccine recommendations, including for COVID-19 in healthy children and pregnant women, and reportedly reviewing long-standing childhood immunizations like Hepatitis B and MMRV, the administration is directly undermining the legal and scientific guarantees that ensure no-cost vaccine coverage for millions of Americans through private insurance, Medicaid, and the Vaccines for Children Program.</bq> <bq>As principled health experts have repeatedly warned, this erosion of institutional credibility extends far beyond current vaccination efforts, threatening future public health initiatives, medical innovation, and global pandemic preparedness. The implications are profound. They are dismantling a century’s worth of scientific progress to advance a radical political agenda, endangering both the current generation and the future capacity of society to protect itself from infectious disease.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/09/pharma-patent-expiration-mergers-acquisitions/" author="Veronica Riccobene" source="Jacobin">Big Pharma Is About to Lose Billions on Expired Patents</a> <bq>When patents expire, low-priced generics and biosimilars enter the market and drive drug prices down. According to Deloitte analysts, Big Pharma could see $236 billion in revenue disappear by 2030, as exclusive patents for 190 high-earning drugs developed in the early 2000s hit their expiration date — including sixty-nine “blockbuster” medications generating over $1 billion each annually. Meanwhile profits from new drugs hitting the market are only expected to make up for about a third of those losses. The developments could result in a whopping 46 percent decline in US revenue for the world’s top ten pharma firms over the next decade.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/09/orson-welles-south-of-the-border/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones">Orson Welles, South of the Border</a> <bq>Corrupt US authority polices violence on the border in a way that only begets more violence. Its representative figure is a big, gimpy, candy-bar-gobbling former alcoholic police captain, Hank Quinlan, played by Welles himself. Quinlan is a monster, a corpulent, beady-eyed toad of a man who seems to exude toxins from his pores. He polices through “hunches,” intuitive guesses about suspects’ guilt that he feels in a typically gross way — through an old bullet wound in his leg. He’s spent thirty years planting phony evidence to justify these hunches. His suspiciously unbroken record of convictions has made him a locally celebrated cop, with the unwitting aid of his credulous and worshipful underling, Sergeant Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-shitpost-of-the-deed" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Shitpost of the Deed</a> <bq>[...] confirm what you already know — that if you are over forty or so you were substantially shaped in a world that can now only be accessed by means of archeology.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2025/09/arvo-part-the-holy-minimalist-who-defied-the-soviets" source="New Statesman" author="Ian Thomson">Arvo Pärt: the holy minimalist who defied the Soviets</a> <bq>Pärt lives nearby in a house facing the Gulf of Finland. He is the world’s most-performed living composer after John Williams but is said to care little for his fame.</bq> <bq>Pärt’s music, unlike theirs, carries a sense of pain, lamentation and sorrow; listeners find a spirit-lifting beauty in its sparse, stilled quality and minor-key tonalities. Its slow-moving atmospherics spring from a monastical absorption in the word of God and is not (as Pärt’s detractors sometimes claim) a New Age ambient sound wash. “Modern man has plenty to wail about,” Pärt says, who should know.</bq> <bq>Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.</bq> <bq>[...] his masterworks Te Deum, Miserere and Litany while in Berlin. His 1984 album Tabula Rasa crossed over into jazz and alternative rock audiences and became a cult bestseller. Pärt found himself at the vanguard of the New Simplicity movement in music.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://laphamsquarterly.substack.com/p/of-a-dreamy-sabbath-afternoon-ddb" author="" source="Lapham's Quarterly">Of a Dreamy Sabbath Afternoon</a> <bq>Although my father is a man of science, before going to medical school, he’d aspired to become a trombonist in a symphony orchestra, and his mind is theological as well as musical and scientific. He agrees with Emil Cioran’s famous declaration: “Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.” Among the sicknesses afflicting my father’s spirit is the regret that, as he keeps telling me, he did not spend more time with his children when they were young, and so I have been assuring him, in utter sincerity, that when it comes to parental attention, I am of the belief that quality not quantity matters most.</bq> <bq>Whether or not they were Pacific tree frogs, the ones I found on a school field trip at age nine were abundant and surprisingly easy to catch, and I’d carried some of them home—perhaps a dozen, or half-dozen—in some sort of improvised specimen jar—perhaps a thermos the lid of which I’d taken care to keep loose. They’d survived the trip, and I had improvised a habitat, a miniature pond inside a plastic terrarium. There were a few inches of water and a nice rock for the frogs to rest on, and twice daily I lifted the lid to sprinkle fish food onto this little amphibian world, which resided on a cadenza in the dining room for a week or two until, one by one, the frogs, instead of profiting from my affections, began to die. Another parent might have flushed the survivors, but my father, attuned to his nine-year-old son’s imaginative life, proposed a release. He’d driven me to San Francisco’s Lake Merced. There, with ceremonial gravity, I carried my terrarium to the rocky shallows and set its surviving inhabitants free. I doubt they lasted long in those strange waters. A toilet flush might have been more merciful. But I was able to imagine them living happy if brief froggy lives among the mossy rocks, and after the release, my father, keeping to the day’s theme, had taken me to see The Great Muppet Caper, in which Kermit the Frog rides a bicycle. I asked my father yesterday afternoon if he remembered these events that had transpired forty-four years ago. He did not. He’d forgotten all about my frogs. I might as well have made them up. We do not get to choose what about us those who know us best will remember. We should perhaps live accordingly.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-chinese-religious-traditions-shape-corporate-generosity" source="Aeon" author="Sam Haselby">How Chinese religious traditions shape corporate generosity</a> <bq>Buddhism frames ethical leadership as a form of stewardship; wealth is transient, and to hoard it selfishly is spiritually foolish. As Confucius (whose philosophy intermingled with Chinese Buddhism) put it, ‘Wealth and rank attained through immoral means are nothing but drifting clouds’ – in other words, ill-gotten gains are ephemeral. Little wonder, then, that a company CEO mindful of such teachings might prioritise fair dealing and honourable distribution of profit over short-term enrichment. Taoism, on the other hand, takes a more subtle route toward virtue. The Taoist worldview prizes naturalness, balance and simplicity. The ideal Taoist sage leads by non-assertion (wu-wei), doing only what is necessary and in harmony with the Tao (the way of nature). In the realm of wealth, Taoist texts often warn against excess and competition. ‘The sage does not hoard,’ says the classic Tao Te Ching. ‘Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still.’ This paradoxical line suggests that, by not clinging to wealth, one actually gains – a concept not far from the Buddhist idea of karmic returns. Taoism thus encourages a kind of detached generosity and contentment with ‘enough’.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2025/09/16/on-the-philosophical-moral-implications-of-a-1989-honda-civic/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Russell Arben Fox">On the philosophical – moral implications of a 1989 Honda Civic</a> <bq>Objectively, as a green-ish person, I should feel mild disapproval. Passenger cars aren’t great, right? One young man using a passenger car to drive thousands of kilometers around Europe, just so he can walk up and down some mountains, is objectively wasteful. The personal is political, right? It’s not a sin or a crime, but it’s probably makruh. This is at best a self-indulgent luxury, and Jack shouldn’t be doing this. Okay, so I can recognize this intellectually. But I absolutely don’t feel it. What I feel is not disapproval, but a mixture of amusement, love and pride. And when I probe my feelings, it feels like someone is trying to force me into one of those gotcha trolley problems. I mean, objectively you should kill that one dude to save five, right? Right?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-think-men-are-just-like-this" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">I Think Men Are Just Like This</a> <bq>I care much less about the abstract norm of whether men should be attracted to young women than I do about the very material rule we have against them acting on those impulses with underage women. And I think there’s an approach progressive media takes to these issues that fixates so much on that ultimately unprosecutable sin of attraction that it actually hurts the effort to enforce the rule.</bq> <bq>But I also think that tons and tons of men are attracted to young women, and it does appear to be a gendered phenomenon. (There is, after all, a whole discourse about the sometimes troubled role of youth in gay male sexual culture.) I think as a species men are just like that, exceptions aside. What’s most important is engendering a society where men don’t act on those feelings. Getting to a future where they don’t have those feelings seems quixotic and unachievable, sorry to say. But honestly, if we stop actual illegality or exploitation… who cares?</bq> <bq>The is refers to the world as it actually exists. It is descriptive, empirical, neutral. The ought refers to the moral universe, to judgement, to what we think should be. David Hume pointed out centuries ago that the two are separate domains, and though it’s the kind of point that seems boringly obvious when a professor spells it out, I promise you that almost no one remembers it when the conversation gets uncomfortable.</bq> <bq>This especially crops up when people make simple evolutionary explanations for why this attraction is so prevalent - our genes want only to propagate, and the average 15 year old can bear children. This inevitably gets treated as a justification, but it isn’t; there’s all sorts of elements of our animal sides that we as individuals in a society have to overcome. Evolution is never an excuse for any particular behavior. It can, however, sometimes help explain why behaviors are common. The point is that it doesn’t seem to help anyone to pretend that an attraction to adolescent women is some sort of rare, extreme phenomenon.</bq> <bq>Men’s desire for adolescent women is not a new phenomenon created by the porn industry or social media; it’s as old as men themselves. We now recognize as a culture that teenagers can be old enough to physically desire sex themselves without having the emotional or psychological maturity to knowingly, effectively consent to sex with adults. I hope that moral wisdom is plain enough. But let’s be real. Those laws exist because the desire is common enough that, absent a rule, it would be acted upon. If nobody wanted to sleep with teenagers, there would be no need to pass laws against it. You don’t need a statute outlawing people from sticking forks in electrical sockets, because nobody wants to do that.</bq> <bq>This is the mature way to think about sex and ethics: you don’t get to decide what you are physiologically attracted to, but you absolutely decide how you act in response. This is also where public dialogue matters. It’s not enough to say “don’t.” We have to explain why. Young people are not ready for adult relationships, not emotionally, psychologically, or socially. Gaps in power and maturity make consent impossible in any meaningful sense. An adolescent under the age of consent may think that she wants to date an adult man, but she has no real capacity to weigh the consequences, to understand the manipulation, to protect herself. That’s why we draw a legal line and why we must defend it.</bq> <bq>I think the whole age gap discourse has exploded recently because it represents a ubiquitous modern impulse: the urge to say “save me from my own bad decisions.” A 22-year-old consensually dating a 45-year-old really might be in trouble, for obvious reasons, but ultimately the only person who can save her from that trouble is herself, by making the adult decision to get out of that relationship. Her friends should advise her, but no one can ultimately make her decisions for her, not her friends, not the law, and certainly not strangers screaming on the internet. Frankly, I think a lot of contemporary young adult culture is built on this desire, to be protected from everything, including from one’s own bad choices,</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/constituent-parts-of-a-theory-of" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence</a> <bq>The act of violence itself is not the product of a coherent belief system; it is the chaotic process by which the individual attempts to construct one. The “antifascist” label and the video game tropes are not the cause of the violence, they are the disorganized, post-hoc rationalizations for a pre-existing state of violent kinetic energy. They are the cognitive debris that has been pulled into the orbit of the strange attractor. This individual is not driven by conviction, but by a profound lack of it. They have been starved of clear, socially-sanctioned purpose and, in that vacuum, have latched onto whatever ambient signals - political noise, digital fantasies, the uniquely dehumanizing meme cultures that men have built online around their shared hobbies - they can find to justify a self-selected purpose: destruction.</bq> <bq>The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.</bq> <bq>The violence is the inevitable result of a system that cannot tolerate either a lack of purpose or its oppressive abundance and so perpetually oscillates between them. We are caught now in one of the liminal moments when the violent search for purposes rises into a vacuum of purposelessness, to repetitively bloody effect.</bq> <bq>The grim certainty of a positive Lyapunov exponent means that the system is no longer governed by its grandest political narratives, but by its lowest-level noise. We are entering a state where the societal trajectory is not defined by policy or ideology, but by which random, unanchored individual next provides the minuscule perturbation that will send the entire manifold spiraling into a new, unknowable orbit. The signal is no longer at the top, but is rather buried in the entropic static of the digital substrate, waiting for a low-inertia vessel to broadcast it to the world and in doing so spread this empty, bloody gospel.</bq> <bq>Self-organizing criticality is a state in which a complex system naturally evolves to a critical point, a tipping point, in which the tiniest, most insignificant event can trigger a cascade of consequences of all sizes. It’s the law governing the sand pile: you add grain after grain of sand, seemingly with no effect, until one final grain (no more important than any other, inherently) triggers an avalanche that can consume the entire pile. The “propaganda of the deed” is not a political act; it is the addition of a grain of sand to an already-critical social system. The system's violence is not an isolated incident but an avalanche waiting to happen, a statistical inevitability.</bq> <bq>Propaganda of the deed is a concept rooted in 19th-century anarchist thought, referring to direct violent action that’s intended to inspire broader revolutionary change. Rather than relying on speeches or pamphlets, proponents believed that dramatic acts like assassinations, bombings, or sabotage could serve as powerful symbols, demonstrating that the state and ruling classes were vulnerable; once the masses saw how easy it was to kill the nobility and upper classes, they would be inspired to do so, the aura of impregnability of establishment power snapped.`</bq> <hr> <a href="https://laphamsquarterly.substack.com/p/extracts-6c7" author="Christo Hays" source="Lapham's Quarterly">Extracts on Eros</a> <bq author="Marlene Dietrich" date="1962">Sex: in America, an obsession; in other parts of the world, a fact.</bq> <bq author="Alfred Kinsey" date="1948">Among the several thousand portrayals of human coitus in the art left by ancient civilizations, there is hardly a single portrayal of the English-American position.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/more-attacks-on-the-gaza-aid-flotilla" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">More Attacks On The Gaza Aid Flotilla, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix</a> <bq>“Judeo-Christian” just means Zionist. Anyone who uses it these days is generally just referring broadly to white people who love Israel and hate Muslims. It’s a term used to distinguish the people we kill in our wars from the people who do the killing. There’s nothing wrong with the word “Abrahamic”; it’s a perfectly good term for the major monotheistic religions which trace their roots back to Judaism. The only reason “Judeo-Christian” gets used instead is because Abrahamic religions include Islam. Judaism and Christianity expanded westward, while Islam has remained most popular among the darker-skinned people of the global south. So they needed to popularize a special term to separate the religions of the white western imperialists from the religion of the brown people those imperialists like to kill.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-technological-generation-gap/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">The Technological Generation Gap</a> <bq>The grandparents and grandchildren are at about the same level of technical sophistication, the former because they matured before the technology, the latter because the technology matured before them. I'm stuck in the middle doing tech support for both of them. I wonder if the knowledge of how computers actually worked will one day be reduced to the generation that grew up with them. As the cyborg said, someday all of this knowledge will be lost, like tears in the rain.</bq> <bq>I can fix a computer, sure, but my father-in-law can fix a house, and my grandparents generation could run farms, and go far enough back and they understood nature on a much deeper level than we can imagine. What we call progress has really made babies of us all.</bq> <bq>I challenge you to get a coherent explanation of how electricity works or what WiFi is from many adults. We just get angry if it doesn't work and expect someone else to do something about it. If you look closer the answers are A) magic rocks and B) magic spells, if you really get down to it.</bq> <bq>If you're using an app, the app is using you, forming some distributed intelligence linked from phone to cell tower to server, with your brain being the dumbest part. Our wetware is just the regret where a soul used to be. We have mistaken connectivity for connection, photographs for seeing, and maps for the territory. So we're just part of one big bulldozer destroying the forest, and calling it progress, regrettably.</bq> <bq>You can certainly still meet people that know how can build a house, fix an engine, and feed an army, but this used to be much more common knowledge. As it became commodified, however, it became specialized, so more people could take it easy. And thus what one generation makes the next-generation takes for granted, and so on, until degeneration becomes complete, the whole thing collapses and no one knows how to rebuild the thing because the Internet is down and there's no YouTube.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://gist.github.com/avestura/ce2aa6e55dad783b1aba946161d5fef4"><c>DELETE FROM users WHERE location = 'IRAN';</c></a> <bq>I woke up to the news that GitHub has removed the access of Iranians to their private repositories. Well, that was not good. I tried to launch my own self-hosted instance of Gitea to reduce the damage. However, later, GitHub announced that github is now available in Iran by securing a license from the US government, and we're now good. You see? The weather is good, the birds are singing, GitHub is free again. Fantastic!</bq> Eye-opening. Remember to always have a plan for backing up your data and that you regularly do so. <bq>[...] did you know you could return 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons instead of 403 Forbidden when you're going to ban me next time?</bq> From the comments: <bq>This issue isn’t only about geography or location. Even after leaving Iran, you still face many similar problems. Even when it comes to basic life necessities—like having a bank account or simply opening a personal account on different services—you’ll encounter problems. Of course, there are workarounds, but with my Iranian identity, I’ve still experienced the same difficulties. While others can access basic services with just a few clicks, Iranians often have to struggle for days or even months and still look for ways to bypass restrictions.</bq> This hits home as a Swiss/U.S. dual citizen permanently living in Switzerland who has two letters from the bank on his desk right now, one of them offering to continue the relationship only if I pay an extra fee and the other demanding extra information. <hr> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115259943398316677" source="Mathstadon" author="Terence Tao">Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist.</a> Terence Tao is a mathematician. If not the preeminent mathematician of our time, he's up there. This post is him using a terrible, terrible blogging format to derive anarchism from first principles, as you would expect a mathematician to do. <bq>I think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots organizations, both in providing "softer" benefits to individuals (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an organization to a larger one (or component of a larger organization).</bq> I am not quite sure that he understands the conclusion at which he's arrived because he gives no indication that his loosely organized thoughts mirror well-worn paths in the philosophical oeuvre. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/lgs-1800-tv-for-seniors-comes-with-an-upcharge-and-ai-button/" author="Scharon Harding" source="Ars Technica">LG’s $1,800 TV for seniors makes misguided assumptions</a> <bq>If OEMs really want to make TVs feel simpler and more familiar to older crowds, they should sell more dumb TVs. [...] With a dumb TV, you don’t have to learn how to operate software that varies among TV brands, think about updates, or worry about privacy. Smart TVs introduced concerns about snooping that today's older TV viewers lived without for years. Dumb TVs could help protect the less informed without them having to decipher lengthy terms written in tiny print.</bq> <bq>Seniors could benefit more from TVs with familiar interfaces, affordability, and privacy than from a mildly tweaked TV with an upcharge. However, with the amount of money being made through TV software ads and tracking, those traits are of waning interest for OEMs.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://jenson.org/hype/" source="" author="Scott Jenson">Hype is a Business Tool</a> <bq>The reason this peak consistently happens is simple: hype is a business tool. Companies like Theranos, Udacity, Tesla, and now OpenAI understand that the money will eventually run out. They know they’re running on borrowed time. They pump things up, pushing and promising, to secure as much funding as possible before the inevitable bubble bursts. This is why they make outlandish claims like “we are afraid of GPT-5” or “most jobs will disappear.” These are manipulative comments intended to freak you out, and they exist only to keep the money flowing for as long as possible.</bq> <bq>I’m not saying LLMs are doomed, I’m saying don’t freak out. It is VERY likely there is going to be a trough of disillusionment with LLMs. Will it be followed by an even bigger peak like mobile or crash like Crypto? That’s impossible for anyone to predict. But the technology is clearly being naively used and multiple studies have shown that many companies are having a hard time making their LLM projects actually work. This mirrors what happened with early mobile web pages and mobile apps. It takes a lot of mistakes to figure out what really works.</bq> <bq>The path to genuine progress comes from building from the bottom up, not from hype down.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jenson.org/timmy/" source="" author="Scott Jenson">The Timmy Trap</a> <bq>We don’t just treat LLMs like they’re alive; we also see their actions as intelligent. For instance, we say they can “summarize” a document. But LLMs don’t summarize, they shorten, and this is a critical distinction. A true summary, the kind a human makes, requires outside context and reference points. Shortening just reworks the information already in the text.</bq> <bq>The exact same thing happened in the 1990s when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess. People assumed it was intelligent and that computers would soon surpass humanity. However, Deep Blue wasn’t intelligent. It simply predicted the next move by brute force, using an exhaustive search to find the best option. This created an illusion of intelligence because only really smart humans can play chess at that level. LLMs operate in a similar way, trading what we would call intelligence for a vast memory of nearly everything humans have ever written. It’s nearly impossible to grasp how much context this gives them to play with. ChatGPT didn’t summarize The Matrix; it shortened the commentaries other people wrote about it online. In the same way, when I asked about the issues with LLMs shortening instead of summarizing, it just collected and shortened other articles on that topic. It’s just a more serious version of Pirate Poetry. This is why LLMs appear to summarize well-known books, papers, and movies so well. They aren’t summarizing the source material. Instead, they are synthesizing an answer from hundreds of articles written by other humans. But this is why they perform so poorly when summarizing unknown or academic PDFs. With no web articles for support, an LLM can ONLY look at the text within the document itself, which results in the equivalent of “a computer hacker finds out reality is fake and learns kung fu.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jenson.org/boring/" author="Scott Jenson">Boring is good</a> <bq>This downsizing of LLMs is mostly being pushed by the open-source community, which is creating a wide variety of models that challenge this assumption that we need bigger, centralized models. These smaller forms of LLM are called SLMs (Small Language Models) that are trained on much smaller sets of data, with far fewer parameters, and reduced quantization. Microsoft’s Phi3 model is very reasonable for small tasks and runs on my 8 year old PC without using more than 10% of the CPU. But I can understand why you’d be skeptical. These smaller open-source models, while very good, usually don’t score as well as the big foundational models by OpenAI and Google which makes them feel second-class. That perception is a mistake. I’m not saying they perform better; I’m saying it doesn’t matter. We’re asking them the wrong questions. We don’t need models to take the bar exam. Several companies are experimenting with better questions, using SLMs for smaller, even invisible tasks. For example, performing query rewrites behind the scenes. This is a vastly simpler task. The user has no idea an LLM is even involved; they just get better results. By sticking to lower level syntactic tasks, they’re not asking LLMs to pretend to be human which generates no hallucinations! What’s even more exciting about this use case is that the company could likely use a very small, bespoke, and local LLM for this.</bq> <bq>Whenever there is hype, we shuffled into the easy path, forcing the tech into the product without understanding its weaknesses. We are more worried about being left behind than actually doing something of value. We get there eventually, but only after understanding that we were asking the wrong questions. So many companies fail figuring this out.</bq> <bq>LLMs are not intelligent and they never will be. We keep asking them to do “intelligent things” and find out a) they really aren’t that good at it, and b) replacing that human task is far more complex than we originally thought. This has made people use LLMs backwards, desperately trying to automate from the top down when they should be augmenting from the bottom up.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-ai-bubble/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">The AI Bubble</a> <bq>All the complaints about the South Sea Bubble, of course, are about the White people that lost their money, and not the Black people that lost everything. As Helen J. Paul said, “[The South Sea Company] was also a trading concern and its trade was in slaves.” The South Sea and Mississippi Companies were slavers and thieves, and the greed to get in on it made their market caps the #2 and #3 companies in history. The bet here was that colonial companies would swallow everything.</bq> <bq>OpenAI just pledged 300 billion in money it doesn't have to buy infrastructure Oracle doesn't have and their shares rise because it's a bubble. Any noises you make are acceptable except pop. They're just making shit up about the future and people are eating it up because it makes money now.</bq> Perfect summary. <bq>It's important to note that this fraud isn't just companies like OpenAI, it's the entire corporate casino that we call the US economy. OpenAI is really just a the shell company for the Big 7 companies and the big government that are using this bubble to fill their own sails for one last round of plunder and profiteering before the whole thing goes Titanic.</bq> ✊ <bq>Today the US government is out-invested by just seven companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) all of whom are in a Satanic circle jerk with each other. A lot of value generated in this economy is just pledges passed between these few companies, and the rest is government money printing. Microsoft will buy GPUs from Nvidia, put them in racks, and sell it for stacks to OpenAI, their shell company. Then they'll rely on a corrupt media (which they don't even have to buy) to breathlessly report on successes that basic math would reveal as a lie.</bq> <bq>Like the South Sea Company, OpenAI is just doing table stakes in the tech casino, but the buzz around them is used to inflate the whole operation. How is a company with a merely alleged $12 billion in annual revenue (not profit!) committing to $300 billion in future contracts with Oracle? It's only because the whole US economy is a bubble, and they're all in it. The US statistics department just revised jobs numbers nearly 1 million down after investors had already cashed in on the false ones, and they're doing this regularly now.</bq> You just gotta keep hopping to that next lily pad before the one you're on sinks beneath the surface. <bq>The US government is run by a failed casino operator (how?) overseen by a Congress of insider traders. It's wheeler-dealers within wheeler-dealers, douchebag ex machina. If you take speculative AI spending out of the US economy, congratulations, you've gutted the American economy. The US economy today is basically just a multilevel marketing scheme.</bq> <bq>As Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs (deep in the butt crack of capitalism) said in 2024, “What $1tn problem will AI solve? Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry.” Covello asked this roughly two years into the AI boom (if we date it from ChatGPT 3.5) and there were no profitable companies then. And there still aren't now, two more years along. The only people making money (NVIDIA, Oracle) are selling shovels to speculators, and the hucksters shovelling this shit to dumb investors. It's a gold rush with fool's gold. And yet you're almost a fool to not be in on it.</bq> <bq>As Karl Marx, who called everything, said,<bq>Capital, which has such ‘good reasons’ for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.</bq></bq> <bq>Whereas slaves were immediately used for mining and growing precious resources, virtual slaves are used for vaporous bullshit. As the MIT report says, “only two industries (Tech and Media) show clear signs of structural disruption,” but these are bullshit industries where a bullshit generator makes sense. But in the real world, AI simply isn't that big a deal and isn't cost-effective to apply everywhere. You can see this in China, which is investing in AI, but not building its whole economy around it.</bq> <bq>As Matthew McConaughey said in Wolf Of Wall Street, explaining the whole carnivorous history, coincidentally,<bq>You have a client who bought stock at 8 and later announced it's at 16 and he's all happy he wants to cash in, liquidate, take his book, take his money and run home. You don't let him do that, okay, 'cause that would make it real, right? No. What do you do? You get another brilliant idea, a special idea, another situation, another stock to reinvest his earnings and entice him, and he will, every single time, 'cause they're addicted. You just keep doing this again and again and again. Meanwhile, he thinks he's getting rich (which he is, on paper), but you and me, the brokers, we're taking home cold hard cash via commission.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">AI psychosis and the warped mirror</a> <bq>There's many examples of harmful delusions being worsened through online community reinforcement: there's pro-anorexia forums, incel forums, bitcoin, and "race realism" and other all-consuming junk science. That's where LLMs come in. While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won't generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds. In other words, there's one job that an AI can absolutely do better than a human: it can reinforce our delusions more efficiently, more quickly, and more effectively than a community of sufferers can.</bq> <bq>[...] the chatbot's conception of gang stalking delusion is being informed, tuned and shaped by you. It's an improv partner, "yes-and"ing you into a life of paranoid terror. In the Greek legend, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in a stream and is rooted to the spot, captured by his own regard. People who prompt a chatbot to reinforce their delusions are catching sight of their own reflection in the LLM and terrifying themselves into a spiral of self-destruction.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/09/experts-urge-caution-about-using-chatgpt-to-pick-stocks/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Experts urge caution about using ChatGPT to pick stocks</a> I have nothing to add or cite. The headline speaks for itself. Jesus wept. <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/26/how-to-stop-ais-lethal-trifecta/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">How to stop AI’s “lethal trifecta”</a> <bq>As I've said several times before, In application security, 99% is a failing grade. If there's a 1% chance of an attack getting through, an adversarial attacker will find that attack. The whole point of the lethal trifecta framing is that the only way to reliably prevent that class of attacks is to cut off one of the three legs! Generally the easiest leg to remove is the exfiltration vectors - the ability for the LLM agent to transmit stolen data back to the attacker.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-onetrillion/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years</a> <bq>OpenAI has now committed to building 10 Gigawatts of data center capacity at a non-specific location with a non-specific partner, so that it can unlock $10 billion of funding per gigawatt installed. I also want to be clear that it has not explained where these data centers are, or who will build them, or, crucially, who will actually fund them.</bq> <bq>Based on current reports, it’s taking Oracle and Crusoe around 2.5 years per gigawatt of data center capacity. Crusoe’s 1.2GW of compute for OpenAI is a $15 billion joint venture, which means a gigawatt of compute runs about $12.5 billion. Abilene’s 8 buildings are meant to hold 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs and their associated networking infrastructure, so let’s say a gigawatt is around 333,333 Blackwell GPUs at $60,000 a piece, so about $20 billion a gigawatt. So, each gigawatt is about $32.5 billion. For OpenAI to actually receive its $100 billion in funding from NVIDIA will require them to spend roughly $325 billion — consisting of $125 billion in data center infrastructure costs and $200 billion in GPUs.</bq> <bq>According to the New York Times, OpenAI has “agreements in place to build more than $400 billion in data center infrastructure” but also has now promised to spend $400 billion with Oracle over the next five years. What the fuck is going on? Are we just reporting any old shit that somebody says? Oracle hasn’t even got the money to pay for those data centers! Oracle is currently raising $15 billion in bonds to get a start on…something, even though $15 billion is a drop in the bucket for the sheer scale and cost of these data centers.</bq> <bq>Sam Altman, a career liar who somehow believes he can mobilize nearly a trillion dollars and have the media print anything he says, mostly because they will print anything he says, even when he says he wants to build 1 Gigawatt of AI infrastructure a week.</bq> That is---checks numbers above---125x (12,500%) faster than its currently being built out right now. But, hey, maybe no-one else wants it enough. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://susam.net/my-lobsters-interview.html" source="" author="Susam Pal">My Lobsters Interview</a> <bq>And if we dive all the way down from the CPU to the level of transistors, we encounter continuous mathematics as well, with non-linear voltage-current relationships and analogue behaviour that make digital computing possible. It is fascinating how, as a relatively new species on this planet, we have managed to take sand and find a way to use continuous voltages and currents in electronic circuits built with silicon, and convert them into the discrete operations of digital logic.</bq> <bq>[...] new domains and problems do require new functions and extensions to an API, but I think it is very important to not give in to the temptation of enhancing the existing functions by making them more complicated with optional parameters, keyword arguments, nested branches, and so on. Personally, I have found that it is much better to implement new functions that are small, orthogonal, and flexible, each doing one thing and doing it well.</bq> <bq>Too often I see collaborators on software projects jump straight into writing functions that take some input and produce some desired effect, with variable names and function names decided on the fly. To me, this feels backwards. I prefer the opposite approach. Define the terms first, and let the code follow from them.</bq> <bq>I also prefer developing software in a layered manner, where complex functionality is built from simpler, well-named building blocks. It is especially important to avoid layer violations, where one complex function invokes another complex function. That creates tight coupling between two complex functions. If one function changes in the future, we have to reason carefully about how it affects the other. Since both are already complex, the cognitive burden is high. A better approach, I think, is to identify the common functionality they share and factor that out into smaller, simpler functions.</bq> <bq>The only viable way to develop software in Forth is to start with a small set of words that represent the important notions of the problem domain, test them immediately, and then compose higher-level words from the lower-level ones. Forth naturally encourages a layered style of development, where the programmer thinks carefully about the domain, invents vocabulary, and expresses complex ideas in terms of simpler ones, almost in a mathematical fashion. In my experience, this kind of deliberate design produces software that remains easy to understand and reason about even years after it was written.</bq> <bq>when I was developing Bloom filter-based indexing and querying for a network events database, again, probability theory was crucial in determining the parameters of the Bloom filters (such as the number of hash functions, bits per filter, and elements per filter) to ensure that the false positive rate remained below a certain threshold. Subsequent testing with randomly sampled network events confirmed that the observed</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/09/22/its-striking-so-quickly-the-industry-forgets-that-lines-of-code-isnt-a-measure-of-productivity/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">It's striking so quickly the industry forgets that lines of code isn't a measure of productivity</a> <bq>It's not a new idea that the more source code you have, the greater the maintenance burden. Dijkstra already touched on this topic in his Turing Award lecture in 1972, and later wrote in On the cruelty of really teaching computing science in 1988,<bq>if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent"</bq>He went on to note that<bq>the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.</bq>The use of the word ledger suggests an accounting perspective that was later also adopted by Tim Ottinger, who observed that Code is a Liability.</bq> From the referenced article <a href="https://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2007/04/16/code-is-a-liability" author="Tim Ottinger" source="Object Mentor">Code is a Liability</a> <bq>Our bosses and clients will pay good money to get the functionality they want, and they want it right now! If we could give them what they want without writing a line, it would be a tremendous win. If we could do it with one line or two lines of well-considered code, we would be heroes! Why is doing less so valuable if code is an asset? Clearly less code is better. Sadly, most companies have to deal with heaping, shaggy mounds of code. Code takes up time and space. It has to be managed. It has to be versioned. It hast to be tracked, and planned. It has to be updated, and packaged, and revised. It needs backup to save us from having to reproduce it by hand. It has to be reviewed (hopefully in an efficient way like pairing). It often drives companies to expand staff and dedicate people to manage it (version control administrators, managers, build czars, consultants, contractors, metric-gathering tool specialists, etc). Old code gets in the way of new code. Having more code will typically slow development, and will certainly reduce your ability to incorporate new programmers. Of course you’ll need more programmers because you have all this code to deal with. Size has a cost.</bq> <bq>The problem doesn’t go away if you artificially reduce the code. Folding a lot of effects into few lines of code makes the code worse. Adding voluminous documentation makes the code worse. Moving it into metadata and models and other forms doesn’t make it any smaller, and often makes it worse. Hand-crafted code is almost always more readable, smaller, more optimal, more focused, more literary in its style than generated code or funky data tables. Since there has to be code, it might as well be the best code we can write. Coding well takes human beings who value minimalism.</bq> <bq>Shallow is good. Short is good. Less code is good. More code is a liability. This isn’t about typing less, it’s about owning less. This is the point of view that makes test-first (TDD) so important. TDD/BDD has us encode the functionality (the asset) first, and then write minimal code to realize the specified feature. If code is a liability, and function is an asset, this is exactly the right way to do things.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ayende.com/blog/203203-B/scheduling-with-ravendb?Key=bec80bdd-3afc-4a81-97ab-c83f0c0e4955" author="Oren Eini" source="RavenDB">Scheduling with RavenDB</a> <bq>The idea is that whenever a server contacts us, we’ll update the @refresh field to the maximum duration we are willing to miss updates from the server. If that time expires, RavenDB will remove the @refresh field, and the RabbitMQ ETL script will send an alert to the RabbitMQ exchange. You’ll note that this is actually reacting to inaction, which is a surprisingly hard thing to actually do, usually. You’ll notice that, like many things in RavenDB, most features tend to be small and focused. The idea is that they compose well together and let you build the behavior you need with a very low complexity threshold.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell" author="Ruud van Asseldonk" date="11 January 2023">The yaml document from hell</a> <bq>You may have noticed that none of my examples have syntax highlighting enabled. Maybe I am being unfair to yaml, because syntax highlighting would highlight special constructs, so you can at least see that some values are not normal strings. However, due to multiple yaml versions being prevalent, and highlighters having different levels of sophistication, you can’t rely on this. I’m not trying to nitpick here: Vim, my blog generator, GitHub, and Codeberg, all have a unique way to highlight the example document from this post. No two of them pick out the same subset of values as non-strings!</bq> <bq>Yaml aims to be a more human-friendly alternative to json, but with all of its features, it became such a complex format with so many bizarre and unexpected behaviors, that it is difficult for humans to predict how a given yaml document will parse. If you are looking for a configuration format, toml is a friendly format without yaml’s footguns. For cases where you are stuck with yaml, generating json from a more suitable language can be a viable approach. Generating json also opens up the possibility for abstraction and reuse, in a way that is difficult to achieve safely by templating yaml.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtAcpV6TAGM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PtAcpV6TAGM" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="Kevin Powell" caption="It might be time to rethink box-sizing: border-box"> Kevin shows us how he <c>box-sizing: border-box</c> that has been with us since before the Bootstrap days, when elements were set to fixed sizes. He argues that very few elements are set to fixed sizes these days, since most are content-sized or container-sized within grids. With everything responsive, the <c>box-sizing</c> property no longer matters nearly as much---if at all---for most layouts. He even shows how, when he was transferring a design from Figma, and he thought he had to set a fixed width, it turned out that the width in the design was actually hug, which corresponds to the <c>fit-content</c> property in CSS. Once again, <c>box-sizing</c> doesn't come into play. <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250925-00/?p=111627" author="Raymond Chen" source="The Old New Thing">Samples note: Use comments to describe what code does, not what you wish the code would do</a> <bq>Sometimes the team says, “Well, if we added to the sample all the code needed for dealing with edge cases and proper error handling, then the sample would have been too complicated.” This tells us that your API is already too complicated because the only way to use it correctly is to write code that is so complex, not even the team that wrote the API wants to do it! (In extreme cases, the API is so complex that there is no way to use it correctly.)</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRwV7CeLsKM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/wRwV7CeLsKM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="dotnet" caption="On .NET Live - Hanselman, Unscripted"> This is a pretty interesting walk through the actual, real backend that Hanselman uses for his various web sites. At around 36:00 minutes, they got into a code-style discussion, where a commenter asked why he was using a variable in the following code snippet. <code>Func<task>>> showobjectFactory = () => PopulateShowsCache(); var retVal = await _cache.GetOrAddAsync ("shows", showobjectFactory, DateTimeOffset.Now.AddHours(8)); return retVal;</code> I was wondering the same thing because I would have written that method body as follows, <code> return _cache.GetOrAddAsync ("shows", PopulateShowsCache, DateTimeOffset.Now.AddHours(8));</code> He argued that it was because he <iq>likes to teach</iq> and that the first version was <iq>easier to read</iq>. He also said something about the types being clear. Who cares what the types are? I can see that there is a method passed in that will populate the cache of shows if the key <c>shows</c> can't be found. I don't need to know the type. If I want to know the type, then I can look at the very next line in the code is the definition of the <c>PopulateShowsCache()</c> method, which is written as: <code>private async Task<list>> PopulateShowsCache() { ... }</code> You'll note that I was also able to remove the <c>await</c>, which is unnecessary when it's the last line of the method and there were no other awaits. In my version, the compiler doesn't even bother building the state machine for the asynchronous interaction and you can remove the <c>async</c> keyword from the method signature. I think Hanselman was defending an older coding style that even his friend Stephen Toub would have shaken his head at. Now, if we were writing this all in Swift, then the typed result of the <c>PopulateShowsCache</c> method would be optional, making it increasingly difficult to figure out the type without hovering over the identifier. Again; who cares? Are you ever looking at code not in an IDE? Oh, wait. PRs on the web. Those are the devil anyway. You should be reading and reviewing code in an environment with syntax-highlighting, type hint <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/inlay-hints.html">inlays</a> (either always on, or with press-to-show), and navigation (so you can quickly look up types, methods, etc.) More embarrassingly, Hanselman doubled down at 38:00 where he had something like <c>List<v2show> shows = shows = await Something(...)</c>. He was fighting with Copilot for a little while, claiming that there was a good reason for having done this bizarre thing. I suppose it's a local variable shadowing the instance variable? WTF? After having gotten up on a soapbox about readable code just two minutes before? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uRcB34Hhsw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8uRcB34Hhsw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Posit PBC" caption="Introducing Positron, a new data science IDE - posit conf 2024"> This is a talk about the Positron IDE, a successor to R-Studio that runs in Visual Studio Code. It supports R and Python as input languages. It's definitely for programming beginners (the lady introducing the product explains what "IDE" stands for), so it's a good introductory talk that also covers some more advanced stuff. Still, the stuff that they choose to talk about illuminates for me where we are with apps and programming them. We are still fighting the same problems we were fighting 30, 20, and 10 years ago. We have to build components from scratch; we don't virtualize them; etc. This is a data-scientist programming studio. It is built to manipulate data, sometimes large amounts of data. They explain with pride at 22:00 how the grid is now <iq>clever about caching</iq> so that you can quickly zoom around a grid with 30M rows in it. We knew how to do this a quarter-century ago. He also proudly talks about multi-sort as if it were alchemy. From there, he moves on to proudly talking about using fixed-width fonts so that numbers line up. Bro, (A) duh, your app is for displaying numbers and (B) no, actually, proportional fonts also provide excellent support for choosing numbers that line up. I supposed supporting decimal tabs will be the next major feature. Don't get me wrong: all of these are very useful things that apps should have. It would just be nice if we could have a world where this kind of stuff was available in every tool by default rather than something that we build again and again and again---and then crow about as quasi-revolutionary because none of the competitors can even get to that minimum level of functionality. The section at about 35:00 about integration with <a href="https://github.com/posit-dev/ark">Ark</a>, in particular the support for Jupyter Notebooks (which I learned are named for being multi-language: Julia, Python, and R). They discuss integration with not only Positron, Jupyter Notebooks, and Zed. At a few times, I was brought up short by the low bar that the audience was expected to present. Like at 45:00, when the Ark team was presenting the debugger---and had to explain what it was first. But then, in the example, he was talking about mixing R with C++ code (he's a <a href="https://www.tidyverse.org/">Tidyverse</a> developer), mentioning that his team ends up writing a lot more C++ to keep things fast. So you're trying to tell people about an awesome tool that helps you debug C++ code but you're doing it for people who don't even know what debugging is? Like, shouldn't you be showing them how to write specs and test suites first?!? Wait! At 1:00:00, a lady (Jenny Bryan?) shows the Positron test pane (which is the Visual Studio Code testing pane). It's well-integrated, of course, and her test pane is well-populated with tests over the data. One of the other questions was about the Git integration, which one of the primary developers of the Tidyverse libraries admitted was an amazing upgrade in Positron (it inherits the VSC Git UI one-to-one). While the VSC Git experience has gotten better, it's still very weak sauce compared to something like SmartGit, though. It's kind of shocking to hear someone who basically codes all day talking about how primitive his approach to source-control is. I guess as long as it works (or maybe I misunderstood what he meant when he said <iq>I didn't really use Git a lot in R-Studio</iq>). There is a six-minute, follow-up video that shows the Positron editor in action. Most of the demonstrated functionality---Copilot integration, choosing an interpreter, the console, code editors, Git integration, etc.---are taken directly from Visual Studio Code and will be very familiar to most of us. The Variables pane is data-science-specific and a nicely integrated addition. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ir_HX4riHw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/4Ir_HX4riHw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Posit PBC / Sara Altman" caption="A quick tour of Positron"> The latter video shows Copilot integration whereas the first, longer, and older video says that Copilot is not available in Positron. I don't know whether they re-enabled this support or whether what looked like the Copilot panel was just a copy implemented by another extension developer (perhaps Positron itself) or whether Microsoft changed its mind about allowing Copilot integration into VSC clones, or whether they allow that for certain products that they don't consider competitors. I remember reading that they blocked certain support for Cursor because they were eating into their business cases (i.e., Cursor was basically riding on the incredible development velocity of VSC that is largely the product of MS employees to make a ton of money). <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250926-00/?p=111629" author="Raymond Chen" source="The Old New Thing">Why didn’t Windows 95 setup install a miniature Windows 95 so that it could be written as a 32-bit program?</a> <bq>I noted some time ago that Windows 95 Setup was actually three programs running under three different operating systems. The first part was an MS-DOS program, which was used if you installed Windows 95 from MS-DOS. It installed a miniature version of Windows 3.1 and then used it for the next part. The second part was a 16-bit Windows program, which was the starting point if you installed Windows 95 from Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. This second part did most of the work. The third part was a 32-bit Windows program, which ran inside the newly-installed Windows 95 to carry out some final steps that must be done inside the installed operating system.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1nruw70" author="" source="Reddit">Fuck it, close enough. Welcome back Comrade Tito.</a> This is a conversation about someone who thinks it would be a great idea to form "Balkania" in Eastern Europe. He's obviously joking because he even notes that, even if those 12 countries were to be combined, then they would still only be the seventh largest economy in Europe. They have probably never heard of Yugoslavia. Commenters jump in to call it "Newgoslavia" and "True Yugoslavia" but my favorite was the last one. <img src="{att_link}twogoslavia_electricboogoloogoslavia.webp" align="none" caption="Twogoslavia Electricboogoloogoslavia"> <hr> <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers" author="Colin Nissan" source="McSweeney's">It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers</a> <bq>I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash. I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I’m going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?” And I’m just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.”</bq> <bq>Because it’s not summer, it’s not winter, and it’s not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it’s fall, fuckers.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRvmskh6ZX0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/nRvmskh6ZX0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lee Camp" caption="Unredacted Tonight: Top 10 Suspicious Whistleblower Deaths"> <bq>Number three on our list, Gary Webb was an investigative journalist known for his Dark Alliance series in which he revealed the CIA's connections to the drug trade, collecting millions in profit and then funneling it to the Contras in Nicaragua. He revealed that in 1996 and thus began the destruction of his life, culminating in his suicide with not one but two gunshots to the head. Sounds rather difficult, doesn't it? But hey, it wasn't easy for Jeffrey Epstein to off himself with a paper t-shirt, but he was a real go-getter, you know? Never say quit, kids. If you have a dream, you have to fight for it.</bq> <bq>On top of that, almost all of the CCTV cameras in his apartment building had been unplugged or weren't working. That's funny. Almost none of the cameras outside of Epstein's cell were working either. There were 11 and two of them were work. Should should we believe these are unnatural deaths and someone cut the cameras? Or should we believe that CCTV cameras are just allergic to traumatic events? All the AI cameras are just like, 'I can't even watch this. I just...you tell me when it's over. I'm not looking. I'm not looking.'</bq> <bq>The question, if you'll recall, was do you want humanity to survive? I'm going to take that as a no. If you run a Pentagon contractor company and you're asked if humans should be on the planet anymore and at any point during the answer you find yourself saying penis and vagina or transform your soul then you done fucked up. Okay? You should not be in control of that company ever again. You shouldn't be in control of a fucking tricycle. Honestly, what is wrong with our culture? Maniacs like this can not only walk the streets, but run things. And meanwhile, we're arresting the guy who screws bolts on at the Honda plant. </bq> Lee Camp is on fire lately. God bless that guy. <hr> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103434/" author="" source="IMDb">Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten</a> <img src="{att_link}gute_zeiten_schlechte_zeiten_-_8373_episodes.webp" href="{att_link}gute_zeiten_schlechte_zeiten_-_8373_episodes.webp" align="none" caption="Gute Zeiten Schlechte Zeiten - 8373 Episodes" scale="75%"> I was zapping around the TV, looking for a movie. When I turned on the box, it was tuned to a German channel showing some cheesy-looking show. It turns out that it's a German soap opera that's been running since 1992. 8373 episodes is 250 episodes per year for 33 years. It's just incredible what manages to survive. <hr> <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/they-pump-so-much-stuff-into-those-beautiful-little-babies" author="Donald J. Trump" source="McSweeney's">They Pump So Much Stuff Into Those Beautiful Little Babies</a> This is the second McSweeney's reference in one week, after a long, long hiatus. Instead of writing something of their own, they simply transcribed Trump's beat-poet scatting at a conference with RFK Jr. Here's a taste. He said this. Word for word. <bq>There’s never been anything like this. Just a few decades ago, one in ten thousand children had autism. So that’s not a long time. And I’ve always heard, you know, they say a few, but I think it’s a lot less time than that. It used to be one in twenty thousand, then one in ten thousand. And I would say that’s probably eighteen years ago. And now it’s one in thirty-one. But in some areas, it’s much worse than that, if you can believe it. One in thirty-one. And I gave numbers yesterday for boys. It’s one in twelve. I was told that’s in California, where they have, for some reason, a more severe problem. But whether it’s one in twelve or one in thirty-one, can you imagine? That’s down from one in twenty thousand, then one in ten thousand. And now we’re at the level of one in twelve, in some cases, for boys. One in thirty-one overall.</bq> The video below should start at about 2:12:00. If it doesn't, scrub forward manually. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u50vaz7iiDU?t=7993" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/u50vaz7iiDU?t=7993" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="FOX 32 Chicago" caption="LIVE: White House, RFK Jr. make announcement on autism and Tylenol"> This is different from the rambling, one-hour speech at the U.N. that came a couple of days later, commemorated in <a href="https://www.der-postillon.com/2025/09/un-trump.html" author="" source="Der Postillon">Verwirrter alter Mann stürmt UN-Podium und pöbelt eine Stunde lang herum</a> (Confused old man storms a podium at the UN and babbled rudely for an hour.) <bq>"Wir haben gehofft, dass er nach einer Weile von selbst wieder aufhört oder dass die Security einschreitet", erzählt ein UN-Diplomat. "Aber das trat nicht ein." Im Gegenteil: Der sonderbare Mann steigerte sich immer mehr in seine wirren Fantasien hinein. So bezeichnete er den Klimawandel als "den größten Betrug aller Zeiten" und behauptete, "Klimaschützer wollten alle Kühe töten". Dann wieder prahlte er, er habe im Alleingang sieben Kriege beendet und erfreue sich größter Beliebtheit. Auch von steckenbleibenden Rolltreppen, defekten Telepromptern und Marmorböden im UN-Hauptquartier handelten seine wirren Ausführungen.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}my_conversation_with_my_wife_about_shopping_for_a_weather_station.webp" align="none" caption="My conversation with my wife about shopping for a weather station"> <bq quote-style="none"><div style="float: left; background-color: #333; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">Now I see it. The Hama weather station isn't as well-organized as the ADE.</div> <div style="float: right; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">You are correct. ADE all the way.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">The layout of the HAMA is a war crime</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">It's offensive.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">The more I look at it, the more painful it gets.</div> <div style="float: left; background-color: #333; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">It didn't look as bad in the store next to all the technicolor weather stations.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">ADE FTW.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">HY LFG</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">The funniest part is that I'm sitting over here, knowing that the picture is a link, and still knowing that I have < 5% of successfully ordering it.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">We have to do it as a team.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">My part was confirming the HAMA as eye- searingly awful.</div> <div style="float: right; clear: both; background-color: #29F; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">You're up.</div> <div style="float: left; clear: both; background-color: #333; color: white; border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px; margin: 2px">I'm up.</div></bq> <clear> <hr> <a href="https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/" author="" source="Neal.Fun">🤖 I'm not a robot</a> This series of captchas were a lot more fun solve than they had any right to be. A couple of my favorites were Level 12: Muffins? and Level 17: Perfect Circle. <img src="{att_link}level_12_of_i_m_not_a_robot_-_muffins.webp" href="{att_link}level_12_of_i_m_not_a_robot_-_muffins.webp" align="none" caption="Level 12 of I'm Not a Robot - Muffins" scale="75%"> <img src="{att_link}level_17_of_i_m_not_a_robot_-_perfect_circle.webp" href="{att_link}level_17_of_i_m_not_a_robot_-_perfect_circle.webp" align="none" caption="Level 17 of I'm Not a Robot - Perfect Circle" scale="75%"> I'm stuck on Level 19 right now, which is called "In the Dark" and makes you use a flashlight to find blurry letters scattered on a wall. You not only have to guess them, but you have to guess the order. I got it! The next one was easy. Hilarious but easy. <img src="{att_link}level_20_of_i_m_not_a_robot_rorschach.webp" href="{att_link}level_20_of_i_m_not_a_robot_rorschach.webp" align="none" caption="Level 20 of I’m Not a Robot − Rorschach" scale="50%"> Now I'm on this one. <img src="{att_link}level_21_of_i_m_not_a_robot_craftcha.webp" href="{att_link}level_21_of_i_m_not_a_robot_craftcha.webp" align="none" caption="Level 21 of I’m Not a Robot − Craftcha" scale="50%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t1HLv3IXMM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5t1HLv3IXMM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Brick Technology" caption="Lego Vehicles Climb Walls"> <bq>[...] a series of remote-controlled LEGO vehicles designed to climb over walls. Each vehicle must be able to drive both before and after climbing the wall. As the wall gets taller, the vehicles become more complex. None of the vehicles have steering.</bq> <bq quote-style="none">00:00 Car 01:07 Tank 02:26 Articulated Tank 04:09 Ladder 05:52 Propeler 06:39 Hook</bq> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-dressed" author="" source="Wikipedia">All-dressed</a> I just learned from an episode S11E02 of Letterkenny ("Chips") that Canadians eat something called "All-dressed" chips, which have <iq>a combination of several different flavors: ketchup, BBQ, sour cream and onion, and salt and vinegar.</iq> The chips are translated in the article as toute garnie but were translated on the bag in the show as assaisonnés.