<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</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, Music, & 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> Cheering on the authoritarian dictatorship under which of yourself live is like being in a prison cell with a tiger and cheering just because the tiger ate the other guy first. <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/future-people" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Future People</a> <img src="{att_link}future_people.webp" href="{att_link}future_people.webp" align="none" caption="SMBC - Future People" scale="75%"> <bq>God, what will future people think of our time? Hold on. Let me check. The people of the future are very different. They are made only of bones. Their shadows are of ash. They appear to like ruins and tiny fires. Not too upset about the past, though.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/01/big-oil-venezuela-trump-war" source="Jacobin" author="Antonia Juhasz">Big Oil’s Motives Behind the US Attack on Venezuela</a> <bq>So I think when they protest publicly, one, it’s to distance themselves from Trump’s extremism, but two, it’s a great public negotiating tactic. They’re basically saying publicly, and the media is repeating it, <b>“We wouldn’t want to operate in Venezuela. Oh, my God, it’s expensive, it’s technologically complex.” I actually think those are ridiculous things if you look where else they operate.</b> It helps their negotiating position with Venezuela, because ultimately, what this is about is: <b>Will there be terms that will make it worth their while to go to Venezuela</b>, and can those trust that those terms will carry into the future? Things like the cost of starting up Venezuela production, which is something that gets cited a lot.</bq> <bq>That’s what happens: <b>the promise of production in the future entices governments to front-end the expenses for the wealthiest oil companies in the world</b> at the start. Chevron has already said that they hope to help guide the development of the new era of Venezuela’s oil production.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/grand-illusion" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Grand Illusion</a> <bq>Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. <b>The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.</b></bq> <bq>I believe that <b>to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship</b> or its civilian equivalent,</bq><b>Chalmers Johnson</b> wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.” He warned:<bq>The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government — a republic — that would prevent this from occurring. But <b>the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency.</b> We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play — isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. <b>Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=144389" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Sevim Dağdelen">Nächster Halt: Grönland</a> <bq>Das Ziel ist nicht eine Aufteilung der Welt in exklusive Einflusszonen, in denen Russland und China in ihrem Umfeld entsprechend handeln könnten, sondern <b>die Schaffung einer Plattform, von der aus die USA ihren Imperialismus erneuern können, um den Konflikt mit Russland, vor allem aber mit dem Hauptrivalen China, aufzunehmen.</b></bq> <bq><b>Die USA haben darüber hinaus demonstriert, dass das Völkerrecht für sie nicht mehr gilt.</b> Damit haben sie der seit 1945 gültigen internationalen Rechtsordnung eine Beerdigung erster Klasse bereitet. Washington beruft sich de facto auf <b>das Recht des Stärkeren mit dem Anspruch, weltweit Ordnung zu schaffen</b>, und entlarvt damit zugleich aber die westliche Hegemonie.</bq> <bq>Während der globale Süden in Teilen versucht, die Gelegenheit zu nutzen, sich von den USA zu emanzipieren und eine neutrale Position einzunehmen, <b>begnügen sich die Europäer mit der geostrategischen Rolle als Brückenkopf der USA in Eurasien.</b> Dies umfasst nicht nur die Stationierung der bis zu 100 000 US-Soldaten in Europa und die US-Raketenstationierungspläne in Deutschland 2026, die russische Kommandozentralen ausschalten könnten, sondern auch <b>die zunehmende Dominanz bedeutender europäischer Unternehmen durch US-Investmentfonds wie BlackRock</b> sowie die jahrzehntelange Formung transatlantischer Eliten in Politik, Wirtschaft und Medien.</bq> <bq><b>Wer ein Signal für die eigene demokratische Souveränität setzen möchte, muss nun den Abzug der US-Truppen und die Schließung der US-Basen fordern.</b> Die NATO, die weder ein Werte- noch ein Verteidigungsbündnis darstellt, sondern die US-Hegemonie in Europa sichern hilft, muss verlassen werden, will man noch einen Rest an Selbstachtung wahren.</bq> <bq><b>Der NATO-Vertrag – so die offizielle Fiktion – schützt das Bündnisgebiet, nicht jedoch die Mitgliedstaaten voreinander</b>; das haben bereits Griechenland und die Türkei in ihren Konflikten erfahren müssen. Sollten US-Truppen in größerer Zahl nach Grönland verlegt werden, wird niemand eingreifen. Die etwa 60 dänischen Soldaten inklusive des Verbindungsoffiziers auf der US-Militärbasis in Grönland und die rund 70 dänischen Polizisten wären sicherlich schlecht beraten, auf die Idee zu kommen, Widerstand leisten zu wollen. <b>Die Europäer jedenfalls werden gar nichts tun, so wie bei Venezuela,</b> [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/venezuela-vs-the-empire/" source="ZNetwork" author="Jack Rasmus">Venezuela Vs. the Empire</a> <bq>Before 2025, the two political parties engaged in a crescendo of lawfare actions against each other, employing the FBI, the courts and even the CIA behind the scene to destroy each other. <b>Both parties engaged in abuse of the rule of law, pardoning family, rich friends, and business partners to protect themselves and their personal relations, rendering a travesty of the fiction that in America no one is above the law.</b> Senior politicians of both enriched themselves, becoming multi-millionaires after leaving office after arranging special deals while in.</bq> <bq><b>US imperialism has never given up on regime change in Venezuela for the past quarter century. Just like it has never with Iran for nearly half a century. Nor Cuba for the past 65 years.</b></bq> <bq>The US imperialists want that oil. <b>The US pumps 13m barrels a day, the most in the world, and is sucking its own fracking wells dry in the next decade.</b> Moreover, it needs more oil to sell to its European allies since the US chased the Russians out of Europe. Where to get it? Next door Venezuela of course.</bq> <bq>In the first year of Trump’s term in office, the US threatened Mexico with US drones and special ops; in response <b>Mexico canceled its EV deal with China.</b> It threatened Panama with a repeat of the US 1989 invasion; <b>Panama canceled its projects with China and US private equity took over its ports.</b> It threatened Ecuador and Peru. Propped up its client in Argentina with a new $40 billion loan, supported recent right wing government shifts in Chile and Boliva, threatened Brazil if it prosecuted Trump’s buddy, Bolsonaro</bq> <bq><b>Trump’s ridiculing of Canada has been about forcing that country to develop an arctic military presence and strategy</b>—along with the US in Greenland and Alaska. Trump wants Canada to pay part of the US cost. Canada’s new prime minister, in his first visit to the White House earlier in 2025, pledged to do so. The Trump ridicule and intimidation immediately stopped.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/06/venezuela-and-congresss-duty-to-act/" source="CounterPunch" author="Karl Grossman - Harvey Wasserman">Venezuela and Congress’s Duty to Act</a> <bq>“The Minority Report” ran a piece Sunday on Substack headed: “The Real Reason Why the U.S. Overthrew Venezuela. And why it all started in China in November 2025.” The article explained:<bq>In November 2025, something extraordinary happened in Hong Kong that most people missed entirely….<b>Chinese bonds began trading at ‘lower yields’ than United States Treasury bonds</b>….In the hierarchy of global finance, this is roughly equivalent to a challenger brand outselling Coca-Cola at a higher price. It simply doesn’t happen. Until it did. <b>One month later, the United States began mobilizing for potential intervention in Venezuela.</b> If you think these events are unrelated, you’re missing the most important geopolitical story of our generation. <b>This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency.</b> And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it…. [...] Here’s what makes this particularly dangerous from Washington’s perspective: Venezuela isn’t just surviving outside the dollar system; it’s functioning. Despite what the U.S. Treasury Department characterizes as ‘unprecedented sanctions,’ <b>Venezuela has maintained oil production, secured financing, and sustained trade relationships. It’s become a living, breathing advertisement that the dollar system is optional, not mandatory….</b></bq></bq> <bq>“The timing of U.S. military mobilization; just one month after China’s Hong Kong bond proved the viability of dollar alternatives; is no accident. It’s <b>the empire’s immune system responding to a pathogen it recognizes as lethal.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/09/roaming-charges-125/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: In ICE Cold Blood</a> <bq>Speaking of Reich fantasies, is the soundtrack for this post from Trump’s Labor Department meant to be the Horst Wessel song or Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at full-blast?</bq> <img src="{att_link}restore_american_greatness.webp" href="{att_link}restore_american_greatness.webp" align="none" caption="Restore American Greatness" scale="50%"> This is Starship Troopers-level satire, right? The U.S. Department of Labor, ladies and gentlemen. 🤦 <bq author="Stellan Skarsgård">My father told me something when I was very small to instill confidence in me: ‘Nobody in the world is worth more than you, but nobody’s worth less.’ It is an egalitarian view that I’ve carried around in my life. That’s why <b>I am for free schools, free universities, free health care, and free babysitting. Because our society could afford it. In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism. They think capitalism is freedom. It’s not. It’s only freedom to exploit people.</b></bq> <bq author="C. Wright Mills">The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. <b>We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.</b> Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. <b>We sense the cultural mediocrity around us</b>-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; <b>atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/1q8l776/to_give_excuses/" author="" source="Reddit">[There was an attempt] To give excuses</a> <img src="{att_link}what_is_the_nuremberg_defense.webp" href="{att_link}what_is_the_nuremberg_defense.webp" align="none" caption="'Slaps buzzer' - 'What is the Nuremberg Defense'" scale="70%"> <bq>ICE agents complain about Nazi comparisons, say they're only enforcing the laws. 'Slaps buzzer' − 'What is the Nuremberg Defense'</bq> <hr> <a href="https://serendipity.li/wot/parenti_fascism.htm" author="Michael Parenti" source="Serendipity" date="January 18, 2000">Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit</a> <img src="{att_link}michael_parent_-_fascism_in_a_pin-striped_suit.webp" href="{att_link}michael_parent_-_fascism_in_a_pin-striped_suit.webp" align="none" caption="Michael Parent - Fascism in a Pin-striped Suit" scale="55%"> <bq>The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. <b>All the "good Germans" had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared.</b> <b>Since many "middle Americans" already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state</b> — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/01/trump-venezuela-oil-power-economics/" author="Matt Huber" source="Jacobin">Trump’s Venezuela Actions Are About More Than Oil</a> <bq>Trump even floated the idea that US oil companies could get “reimbursed” for their investments. I wonder how the US Congress will approach the idea of US taxpayers paying for the reconstruction of Venezuela’s dilapidated oil sector? What is more disturbing is how Trump’s “gangster imperialist” ploy will affect <b>Chinese companies who have already invested some $2.1 billion since 2016.</b> This all said, there are some fractions of capital apart from the major oil companies who might have some interest in profiting off this invasion. <b>Certainly the share prices of many oil firms have increased</b>, but my reading is that this is based on the expectation they may now <b>receive compensation for expropriated property and investments</b> in the wave of nationalizations in the 1970s and again under Hugo Chávez in the 2000s. There is also interest among some financial firms like hedge funds — particularly because of Venezuela’s distressed debt situation — but these companies aim to profit off existing assets and debts, not embark on major new investments in oil production. It is also clear some US refiners can make use of Venezuela’s heavy oil. But <b>these refiners already had plenty of that oil from the Canadian oil sands.</b> The entrance of Venezuelan heavy crude into this market might reduce the price such refiners pay by a few dollars, but this is not a game changer for their profitability.</bq> Just because it doesn't make <i>sense</i> doesn't mean it's not the <i>plan</i>. Of course, of course, don't underestimate people but also don't <i>overestimate</i> them either. They may have legitimately thought it all the way through and the temporary bump to the stock market might be the only thing they reap from this. Or maybe Trump really was just mad at his dancing. Who knows? What you cannot deny is that it happened, and that they are making a whole bunch of other statements. They might be lying. They might be just dumb. Or they might mean it. So far, we're trapped in the madhouse with <i>them</i>. <bq>Adam Tooze’s description that Trump is more interested in <b>“feckless reality TV Cosplay resource imperialism”</b> seems much more [sic] closer to the mark. The fact that after the invasion, the White House posted a meme with the term “FAFO” (“Fuck Around and Find Out”) illustrates how interested <b>he and the administration are in the depraved theatrics of it all.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udSUbBhA8I0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/udSUbBhA8I0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul" caption="Jesse Ventura on Minneapolis ICE shooting: 'We're a 3rd world country now'"> <bq>We're a country of the Constitution. <b>We have a leadership now that has destroyed the Constitution. They don't follow it. They could care less about it.</b> Am I right or wrong? I took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I view, after January 6th, the Republican party is a domestic enemy to our Constitution. I can't get any bolder than that, can I?</bq> <bq>I just came here today to show my support as a graduate of Roosevelt and <b>tell them how proud I was of what they did of keeping ICE off of this campus. This is a place of learning</b> and you learn and you learn things like the Constitution. You learn about warrants. You learn about things of that nature. And what we're getting right now is violating all that what kids are being taught. You want to know something? I'll give you a quote. We're a third world country now. You want to know why? I'm an expert. I been to them. I spent 17 months in Southeast Asia while the draft dodger was playing golf. Right? <b>You know how I know we're a third world country? Because in third world countries, they have the military doing their police work in the cities.</b> When you walk around, I was in the Philippines the day Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and went under dictatorship. <b>We went from nobody to a guy with a machine gun on every corner. That's what happens in a dictatorship. In comes the military.</b> That's what's happening here. and and people better wake up to it. You want to read something, then read your history of Germany and start comparing the tactics of what happened in 1930s Germany to what's happening here.</bq> <bq><b>It undermines the entire Constitution.</b> The military cannot be turned loose unless it's a national emergency. They're going to tell me this is a national emergency.</bq> <bq>You mean the draft-dodging coward? I don't saw call him by name. He's the draft-dodging coward who, <b>when it was his time to serve his country, he did what all rich white boys did.</b> I wasn't a rich white boy. I grew up in South Minneapolis. <b>Most of me and all my friends are Vietnam veterans. We had to go. But the rich white boys never had to go, did they?</b> And he didn't have to go, did he? And yet he's going to tell me what courage is.</bq> <bq>[...] good for these people that stood up. They're teaching their students something that we are a country that we have to be a country of law and a country of the Constitution. <b>They're all forgetting about the Constitution of the United States of America. We don't even have it anymore</b> after January 6th. Are you kidding me? And then they all get turned loose and now they're in charge. <b>I gave up on this country when this guy got elected.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>somebody needs to clean up what the Democrats and Republicans constantly wreck. And you notice I lump them together.</b> You know, I should use my old name for them, the Democrips and the Republoodlicans, which my apologies to the Crips and Bloods for using their name in that way.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXSIeJwWCzY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/RXSIeJwWCzY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Minneapolis ICE Shooting: Glenn Shares His Thoughts"> This analysis is nearly 30 minutes and it's all 100% worth watching. It's a very well-thought-through and well-presented analysis of the culture of violence in the U.S. Glenn discusses the sickness of a society that cheers violence, that celebrates death. He being talking about Renee Nicole Good's utterly senseless death, which, for the sake of argument, we won't even call an alleged murder, because nothing has been officially alleged yet. He compares the right's celebratory reaction---Fuck around and Find out! Talk shit, get hit!---to the reaction of very online people after Charlie Kirk was murdered. He notes that one difference is, that those who trashed Charlie Kirk were nearly entirely online, and nearly entirely non-significant. In the case of Ms. Good, the reprehensible lying and celebratory comments come from the very top and goes right now the ladder. He discusses the attitude toward violence in the U.S., in general, using the example of when the U.S. extra-judicially executed Osama bin Laden, sending people into the streets to celebrate in writhing ecstasy. Other peoples in other countries that don't share U.S. bloodlust look at this and wonder what kind of demons are we? This made me think of the my youth in that country, where the won't-someone-please-think-of-the-children crowd kept searching about for a <i>reason</i> why young people seemed to be so violent. They blamed rock music, then heavy-metal music, then rap ... just music by non-whites, by non-mainstream, by anyone with an unwelcome political opinion. Look at the lyrics to so many heavy-metal songs: the sound is violent but the lyrics are often anti-war and anti-imperialism. Once video games became good enough to mimic reality reasonably well, those became the next target. Obviously violent video games breeds violence. But they were, of course, disingenuous, because they were never going to look within, to see the culture of hate, division, and alienation that the U.S. pounds into everyone's head. They wouldn't look to the military budget that's larger than the next 10 nations combined. They wouldn't look at anything that flowed money into their own coffers. Anyway, that's just my additional thoughts. Glenn didn't talk about blaming music or video games for violence in the U.S. but he did discuss the deliberate alienation in the culture. Finally, he talked about the January 6th riot. He continues to maintain wasn't even close to a viable insurrection---I agree; they had no plan; it grew organically; the functioning of the state was never in any danger whatsoever---but that's not the point he was making. What he said was that, if people support the State's being able to mow down a women for <i>disobeying orders</i> (even if they were conflicting or unjustified orders), then the capitol police would have been justified in killing dozens, if not hundreds of people on that day in January, instead of just Ashli Babbitt. But people decide whether they consider violence to be justified based on politics, which leads them to espouse wildly perverted and hypocritical opinions. They'll defend to their death the 100% pardoning of everyone involved in January 6th---some of them had committed serious crimes; some of them had gotten railroaded into sentences that were far too long for what they'd done (but that's just justice in the U.S. of A. for most people)---while also being 100% convinced that a suburban mother has to know and understand how to follow orders in a tense situation on a suburban street in America. They think that the burden of remaining calm is on the non-professional person. They think that the person with the gun is justified in being on the hair-trigger of fearing for his life and, should he assassinate someone, he should suffer absolutely no consequences for it. He shouldn't even lose his job. This is the madness and deep sickness of too many people in U.S. society. They celebrate death and murder like savages. Or demons. The article <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/think-you-saw-state-sanctioned-murder-you-failed-medias-rorschach-test/" author="Janine Jackson" source="ZNetwork">Think You Saw State-Sanctioned Murder? You Failed Media’s ‘Rorschach Test’</a> writes, <bq>In the 13th paragraph, we get the mayor of Minneapolis: “Frey said of the self-defense explanation, ‘Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody that is bullshit.’” Did the NPR reporters see the video themselves? Can they tell us whether or not this is bullshit? How exactly do they define the job of reporting?</bq> <bq>That piece explained that you can’t really know what you saw, or what it means, because “in a polarized country, high-ranking officials were offering definitive, and starkly contrasting, accounts long before the facts could be established.” The Times sees its role as telling you that whether or not you believe Renee Good deserved to be murdered depends on whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.</bq> Here's a short video with examples of hateful, hateful people but also those who deeply thank HasanAbi for having shown them the error of their ways. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7IJJ-HTRdA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/L7IJJ-HTRdA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="'my loved ones would never get shot by ICE'"> The title says it all: this is, deep down, how people think. It won't happen to me. Martin Niemöller covered all of this already, back in 1946 with his poem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came" author="" source="Wikipedia">First They Came</a> that starts out, <bq>First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist [...]</bq> Look it up if you don't believe me (or look at the German version below), but stanza about the Jews is last in the list. The poem talks about the Germans having come for the communists, socialist, and trade unionists first. Adorably, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum <i>skips the first stanza</i> because <i>fuck communists, that's why.</i> I would not be surprised to hear that they've also elided the second and third stanzas by now, leaving just two stanzas, with the oppression of the Jews leading off a much, much shorter poem. There is no German version of the Wikipedia page but the English-language version includes the whole poem in German. <bq>Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.</bq> I only recently realized that a metaphor that I'd been using for what seems to be happening to people who have been historically untouched by the vagaries and violence of empire---that "the umbrella is shrinking"---is just a more visual metaphor of what the poem was saying. I think of what's been happening over the last ten years, but perhaps more in the last year, is that the "umbrella is shrinking" and "more people are getting wet" who hadn't been out in the rain before. Some of them are just noticing that they're getting drops on their sleeves. But that's never happened before. The billionaires and other elites are shrinking the umbrella. <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5540">You're not in the club anymore</a>. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/you-cant-cheer-for-regime-change" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">You Can't Cheer For Regime Change In Iran Without Also Cheering For The US Empire</a> <bq>I find it so offensive when I see anarkiddies and NATO progressives supporting the regime change agendas of the CIA and the Pentagon like it somehow makes the world less tyrannical when <b>yet another nation gets absorbed into the folds of the imperial blob.</b> If they do get their wish and Tehran is toppled, all that will happen is that the US-centralized empire will gain that much more power and <b>the worst people on earth will get big smiles on their faces.</b> It gives the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth <b>even more control over the fate of our species, and these infantile human livestock are clapping along with it</b> and pretending they’re sticking it to the man.</bq> <bq>I don’t know what’s going to happen in Iran, but I hope the empire fails its regime change operation. <b>I hope the western empire gets weaker, not stronger</b>, because it is only getting more and more despotic and deadly as the years go on, and <b>the last thing we need is for it to shore up even more control over our planet.</b> Humanity won’t have a shot at real freedom until that power structure has been thoroughly dismantled.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-imperial-crosshairs-move-to-cuba" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Imperial Crosshairs Move To Cuba, And Other Notes</a> <bq><b>There is at this time no way Tehran can be toppled without the US-centralized empire inserting its rapey fingers into whatever power structure would emerge from the wreckage.</b> When you overthrow a government you leave a power vacuum, and somebody’s going to step into it. There is no clear movement, faction, or successor in Iran that is strong enough to secure power against whichever group the empire throws its support behind, besides the government that presently exists. This means <b>the US empire would necessarily have a very prominent seat at the table in whatever system of government might replace the current one.</b> <b>If you are a western imperialist then this is no problem for you</b>; if you believe the US and its allies should rule the world then there is no contradiction in your desiring regime change in Iran. <b>If you identify as a leftist, an anarchist, or an anti-imperialist however, there is no way to reconcile your worldview with a desire to fulfill the wildest regime change fantasies of every sociopathic intelligence agency and warmongering think tank in the western world.</b></bq> <bq><b>I am not suggesting that Iranians do not have legitimate and organic grievances against their government, nor am I suggesting that they should not desire a different system of government for themselves, nor am I suggesting that they should refrain from doing whatever they think is best in their own country.</b> What I am saying is that the westerners who are cheerleading for regime change in Iran are cheerleading for the advancement of the power structure under which they live, which also happens to be <b>the most powerful empire that has ever existed, which also happens to be the most murderous and destructive power structure on earth.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/eu-sanctions-trump/" author="Eldar Mamedov" source="Responsible Statecraft">Sorry, the EU has no right to cry 'McCarthyism'</a> <bq>Beyond generic professions of support for the ICC, <b>the EU failed to enact a powerful legal instrument it designed in 1990s to nullify the extraterritorial effect of such third-country sanctions — the "Blocking Statute."</b> This instrument was introduced to protect the EU against extraterritorial overreach. Since the ICC is located in The Hague, Netherlands, it would be effectively deployable in this case. <b>The statute forbids EU entities from complying with listed foreign sanctions. It was first activated against extra-territorial U.S. sanctions on Libya and Cuba in 1996</b>, proving its utility as a shield for European economic and foreign policy interests. The contrast is not an oversight; it is the issue’s core. It exposes the EU’s highly selective commitment to sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom from foreign coercion. <b>It is invoked when European elites feel targeted, yet abandoned when the cost of defending those same principles, such as angering the U.S. government, becomes inconvenient.</b></bq> <bq><b>By casting entire communities and schools of thought as inherently suspect</b> and vulnerable to foreign manipulation, the <b>EU is constructing the censorship complex designed to surveil, denounce, pressure, stigmatize, and now, ultimately, also sanction dissent.</b> By making an example of the likes of Jacques Baud, the EU sends a chilling message: <b>anyone who disagrees with whatever happens to be the mainstream EU consensus of the day is potentially vulnerable to having their livelihoods and reputations destroyed.</b> <b>Policing thought is a tragic symptom of the current European trajectory.</b> It speaks of a political elite so insecure in its own policies and frightened of dissent that it must criminalize debate. The blunt weapons, like <b>sanctions, initially limited for foreign adversaries, are now deployed against domestic critics.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69TWxOt2AH0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/69TWxOt2AH0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="Things are getting worse..."> This is an excellent round-up of what's happening out there, on the streets, in the U.S. <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/we-re-all-just-content-for-ice" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">We're all just content for ICE</a> <bq>With tensions inflamed in the city — and following pressure from Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and FBI Director Kash Patel, who all shared Shirley’s video — ICE ramped up their presence. <b>There are more agents in Minnesota than there are local police in both of the state’s major cities.</b> An escalation that directly led to the murder of Good last Wednesday. And now, in response to that, <b>ICE has effectively taken control of the city.</b> Rumors swirl about Trump sending in the National Guard or declaring martial law next. </bq> <bq><b>ICE agents are, simply put, fucking clowns.</b> According to The Atlantic, <b>they receive 47 days of training — in honor of Trump, the 47th president, naturally.</b> Many of them, also, can barely read or write, apparently. The ones I spent the weekend following around didn’t even have proper uniforms, with some <b>wearing sneakers.</b> In Minnesota. In January. These dipshits are also <b>wearing camo in the snow.</b> They clearly do not have any training when it comes to their own weapons either. Multiple times over the last few days, I watched officers fire pepper spray balls at the feet of protestors barely a few inches away from them. These weapons are basically paintball guns full of concentrated pepper spray. So when they hit a target, they explode into the air. Which meant <b>ICE agents regularly ended up poisoning themselves with their own weapons.</b> I also watched two agents ask each other if a canister they were about to fire at the crowd was tear gas or a stun grenade. (It ended up being <b>a stun grenade that then ignited the tear gas they had already shot at us, which started a fire in the street that a protestor had to help them put out.</b>)</bq> <bq>According to The Washington Post, <b>the agency is under pressure from The White House to create as much content as possible.</b> Which is why <b>ICE agents have a phone in one hand and a gun in the other</b>. But it goes beyond that. During a showdown with protestors at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, <b>I watched as one ICE officer fist-bumped a pro-Trump content creator once he learned he was there to support them.</b> I also watched as a gang of groyper livestreamers, led by January 6th insurrectionist Jake Lang, rile up a crowd of protestors, creating the perfect pretext for ICE agents to fire pepper spray balls and tear gas at the crowd. To say nothing of the other right-wing media networks like OAN, NewsNation, and The Daily Wire, that sent video crews to the city, all of them <b>running their own version of Libs Of TikTok. Singling out protestors and ridiculing them on social media.</b> Olivia Reingold, one of Weiss’ Substack squad, spent the weekend on <b>a state-sanctioned ride-along with ICE agents, posting selfies to her Instagram Stories.</b></bq> <bq>It’s hard to overstate how efficient Trump’s shock tactics are and <b>how existentially terrifying they are to oppose.</b> Thanks to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), <b>any form of anti-ICE protest can be labeled as terrorism, including filming them.</b> And Attorney General Pam Bondi has added additional protections for ICE, in a memorandum titled, “Ending Political Violence Against ICE.” You can’t dox agents and <b>you’ll get hit with federal charges if you post anything that’s deemed to be threatening them.</b></bq> <bq>This morning, Secretary of Homeland Security <b>Kristi Noem announced that DHS plans to launch its own drone program next.</b> <b>They are tightening the noose and there is very little room left for any kind of meaningful protest.</b> Minnesotans over the weekend organized massive demonstrations, with thousands of people marching through the south side of Minneapolis several days in a row. But there was no law enforcement there, nor were there any ICE officers (at least in uniform). No one to whom they could direct their anger at. As for local leaders, Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke to the crowd on Saturday, but even she looked shaken. A few hours before the march, <b>ICE agents blocked Omar from inspecting the federal building and even threatened her with pepper spray. Right after Good was killed last week, Noem created a policy that blocks congressional visits without a seven-day notice.</b></bq> So much national policy is created by unelected madwomen, overriding and local law. How to get away from this? Secession. <bq>[...] it won’t be long until a much darker, far more unpredictable form of opposition replaces that.</bq> Yes, these fools are so arrogant that they think that, if they stifle the protest of desperate people, that those people will submit to the lash. They will not. If you give them no other outlet, than violence, then they will resort to violence. It is completely predictable and understandable. These people are terrorizing everyone. They sow fear, they will reap the whirlwind. Where are those boasting militias when you need them? Oh, yeah, posting "liberal ownage" videos on Twitter and joining ICE. <bq><b>The lesson here is clear: We’re on our own now.</b> They have guns and drones and they can hack our phones and smear our names online and <b>arrest us without a warrant and charge us with terrorism.</b> And all we have are whistles and protests and TikTok and group chats and maybe some journalism. Our local leaders are admitting they can’t help us. So we’re left with nothing but hope that all of that will be enough. But it’s impossible to shake the profoundly unsettling feeling that we have clearly stepped across the threshold into a very different political reality. And <b>it’s not a matter of if it arrives in your town, but when.</b></bq> No. They want us to feel isolated. But we see that, when the community shows up, ICE melts away. They have no power against numbers. The local, state, and federal governments are the enemy; they always have been. It's time for real anarchy to bubble up. It's time to self-organize. It's time to stop paying your subscriptions, your taxes. Starve the beast. Forget the midterms. They are, as always, a distraction. They are 10.5 months away. It's not even the middle of January and look at what's going on. You won't be able to go outside to vote by November, bro. Face reality. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/13/patrick-lawrence-imperial-boomerang/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">Imperial Boomerang</a> <bq><b>Look at the body language at the start of the incident — aggressive, predatory</b> — as one of these ICE primitives approaches Good’s vehicle. “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car,” he commands. <b>This is not someone who is enforcing the law in a sound, disinterested manner.</b> No, this guy, <b>seething with animosity</b>, has nothing to do with law enforcement or legitimate authority. He is a straight-out <b>expression of the ressentiment abroad among the rightist constituencies now running riot</b> in our no-longer-fair land.</bq> <bq>Was it anything other than a matter of time before <b>what the American empire has long done abroad would eventually turn out to be what the empire would have to do at home to preserve itself?</b></bq> <bq><b>ICE is at bottom a paramilitary force</b> — precisely of the kind the United States has supported abroad in numerous cases over the past 80 years. Now <b>the managers of the imperium impose one on Americans. Any understanding of this new moment must begin with this reality.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/were-always-told-that-everyone-in" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">We're Always Told That Everyone In The Empire-Targeted Nation Hates Their Government</a> <bq>That’s what they’re saying when they tell you “Talk to Iranians”, you know. <b>They’re actually telling you to speak to a very specific faction of Iranians, and are generally referring to the English-speaking diaspora whose family left the country for a reason, who stand nothing to lose from American bombs landing on Tehran.</b> They frame it like it’s the unanimous consensus of all Iranians, but in actuality they’re only talking about one specific political faction in one specific demographic. Unlike the regime change fanatics, I personally do not presume to speak for all Iranians. I see it as none of my business what they do in their own country with regard to their own government, and trust them to sort out their own affairs. <b>I absolutely do see it as my business when my fellow westerners start clapping along with the war drums and regurgitating justifications for western bombs to land on a foreign country</b> [...]</bq> <bq>You might claim you’re just “expressing solidarity” with Iranian protesters or whatever phrasing makes you feel good about yourself, but <b>what you are actually doing is greasing the wheels of a propaganda campaign for military action</b> of potentially catastrophic consequence. There is no getting around this. <b>Them’s the facts, cupcake.</b> <b>You don’t get to uncouple your actions from their inevitable results just because you don’t personally identify as a neoconservative warmonger.</b> You don’t get to separate your personal pro-regime change sentiments from the regime change interventionism of your own government and its allies just because it makes you feel like you’re a nice person. You’re a westerner, so <b>your job is to oppose the western interventionism that you know for a fact is in the works in Iran.</b> That is what truth and morality call us to do at this point in history.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-russian-cargo-ships/" author="Anatol Lieven" source="Responsible Statecraft">If Europe starts attacking Russian cargo ships, all bets are off</a> <bq>[...] <b>it is now the U.S. and U.K. that are threatening to violate the laws and rules of international trade</b>, and set a disastrous precedent for other states to follow. If, God forbid, our governments proceed further down this path then they <b>will have only themselves to blame if more and more countries come to see China as a better representative of international order and legality.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5WFMi_SlgM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/U5WFMi_SlgM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Some More News" caption="They're Still Doing Project 2025 and It's All Bad"> <bq>Because <b>even if they can see a problem, their solution still has to be something that sucks and is stupid and usually helps rich people more than it helps anyone else.</b> Oh, healthcare is bad. People can't afford rent or child care. Well, let's think of a way to fix that. As long as it also benefits the wealthiest people we personally know. Oh, right. Helping rich people. We should talk about that. Helping the rich be more rich so they can get rich. Specifically, <b>helping those defenseless corporations do crimes.</b> Project 2025 says that while the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network 'makes a significant contribution to law enforcement efforts, it also does demonstrable, substantial, and widespread economic harm', right? <b>Why don't they think of all the precious money they are hurting by stopping these financial crimes?</b> That's certainly something other law enforcement agencies take into account. It also advocates for Congress to repeal the Corporate Transparency Act, which is meant to make sure businesses report accurate information about ownership in order to <b>help curtail money-laundering and tax evasion, which are surely our president's least favorite crimes.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbK21xS8GsQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/cbK21xS8GsQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Unredacted Tonight | Lee Camp" caption="UNREDACTED: The Crazy Truth of US Coups in Latin America / US Police Kill More People Than You Think"> From the show description: <bq>In this episode of Unredacted Tonight, Lee Camp traces a modern history of U.S. intervention in Latin America—covering major regime-change operations, covert actions, and military interventions from the 1950s onward. With sharp political comedy and rapid-fire historical references, the segment <b>connects well-known flashpoints (Guatemala, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela and more) to the broader mechanics of power: intelligence operations, economic pressure, political manipulation, and the strategic interests that often sit behind public messaging.</b> The show then shifts into a “Dystopia Report” focused on policing and accountability in the United States, <b>examining how deaths in custody and police-involved fatalities are tracked, classified, and prosecuted.</b> Using headline examples and research-based discussion, the segment explores the gap between official reporting and independent estimates, and what that gap suggests about <b>transparency, oversight, and the real-world incentives inside the system.</b></bq> At about <b>11:30</b>, <bq>Man, do we love kidnapping presidents. Love it! <b>Some people like fly fishing or knitting or bestiality or whatever, but the US empire loves kidnapping democratically elected presidents</b> ... and also killing them.</bq> At about <b>15:45</b>, <bq>A few years ago, the Department of Justice released a report about the numbers of people who die in law enforcement custody, and they said they have no idea how many people die in law enforcement custody. Oh, great. So that 1,292 number is just the victims we actually bothered to count. Well, <b>I always say the only thing harming American exceptionalism is truth. If we could just keep truth at bay, we'll be fine.</b></bq> At about <b>18:30</b>, <bq>So, if the government has failed to count a lot of deaths, exactly how many are we talking here? According to a large-scope study by the highly respected Lancet Medical Journal, police killings in America have been under-counted by more than half over the past four decades. According to a new study ... half! half! Jesus. About 55% of fatal encounters with the police between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death. Another cause of death. Like what? Taser-to-face syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. He, you know, he came down with a bad case of boot-throat. Yep. Lot of folks in prison picking up the boot-throat. They are usually the ones talking back to us or saying negative things commenting on my haircut. Yeah. It's very very contagious. Yeah. So if police killings are under-counted by 55%, how many would that be during, say, last year? Well, if 1,292 is the official count, then the actual number is 2,871 people murdered by police in America last year.</bq> <bq>So if we assume, as the Lancet medical journal just told us, that there's roughly 2,871 police killings a year, a likely undercount, times 15 years, that's 43,065 people killed by cops. Then, three convictions [in 15 years] would be 0.007%. <b>One conviction of a police officer for every 14,355 murders. I don't know what to say to that.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAmBFMwp-rU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/WAmBFMwp-rU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="DiEM25 | Yanis Varoufakis" caption="Greek Police Go Full Trump on Yanis Varoufakis Over a 36-Year-Old Ecstasy Anecdote"> <bq>Here in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality, and freedom, which no one can take away from us. We don't. Dark forces are at work pushing us into a postmodern version of the dark ages. So people: beware. They are out there, to take away from us the last remnants of autonomy and freedom that we have. Resistance is literally existence.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/16/roaming-charges-126/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: What a Fool Believes</a> <bq>Meagan Day: “If Renee Good’s car posed an actual threat to Jonathan Ross’s life, he would be dead. We know this because <b>shooting her in the face had no effect on the immediate course of the car.</b>” + Kristi Noem: Renee Good had been harassing ICE “all day.” (<b>Renee Good was murdered at 9:37 AM, shortly after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.</b>) + It’s revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also <b>thinks it’s entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for “disobeying” confusing commands from her ICE agents.</b></bq> <bq>How to tell if you’re living in a police state: <b>there are currently more than TWICE as many federal agents (3000) in Minneapolis as there are city cops, county sheriff’s deputies and state police (1400).</b></bq> <bq>A big reason CBP issued policies instructing officers not to stand in front of vehicles is that <b>internal reports showed that CBP officers were deliberately [standing in front of cars] to have an excuse to open fire.</b></bq> <bq>After being shot, Rummler collapses to the pavement, hands to his face. <b>The ICE man who shot him grabs the hood of Rummler’s jacket and drags him across the ground.</b> As the hood tightens around his throat, Rummler heaves for breath. It looks like he’s being strangled. <b>Blood seeps from his left eye, which has been permanently damaged by shards of plastic, metal and glass.</b> Other ICE officers start firing pepper balls at a man’s throat and head as he tries to film the encounter with his cell phone. Inside the building, the ICE shooter leaves Rummler on the ground, still bleeding. <b>Two agents press his face down into the pool of blood. One agent hisses: “You’re going to lose your eye.” They wait several minutes before calling paramedics.</b> <b>What set the ICE officers off on this rampage? Someone tossed an orange traffic cone in their direction.</b> Meanwhile, Rummler is lucky to be alive. After six hours in surgery, doctors saved his eye, but it will be <b>permanently blind</b>. The surgeons <b>didn’t remove the shard of metal from his neck, fearing it might sever his carotid artery</b> and cause him to bleed to death.</bq> <bq><b>Is anyone really considering traveling to the US for the World Cup?</b> Trump, the FIFA Peace Prize winner, just <b>imposed a visa ban on 70 FIFA countries, including 5-time World Cup Champion Brazil, 2-time World Cup Champion Uruguay, 11th-ranked Morocco, 15th-ranked Colombia, 19-ranked Senegal</b>, 20th-ranked Iran, 33rd-ranked Russian and 35th-ranked Egypt, Africa’s oldest FIFA member. Daniel Koh: “<b>Trump has now spent $30 billion from the last bill for 10,000 more I.C.E. Agents</b> that are going to be on the streets. I find it ironic that we’re having this conversation amidst the health care debate—that <b>$30 billion would cover all the ACA subsidies for a year. It would eliminate all co-pays for prescription drugs for people for a year, and eliminate all medical debt.</b> It’s like he’s making it easier to kill people than to keep people alive.”</bq> <bq>Joyce Carol Oates is throwing lightning bolts:<bq>So, the drill is: ICE shouts contradictory orders; you try to follow one of these orders; <b>you are shot dead & denounced by the US government as a ‘domestic terrorist.’ Quite a future for America’s youth to look forward to.</b> They began the Civil War with little notice: except it’s the US government with an anonymous ICE army waging warfare on citizens. Focus now is on brown- & Black-skinned persons in Minneapolis & their white defenders/friends (like Rene Good); but will probably soon spread, with new ICE agents swarming into urban areas in Democratic states. In this Civil War, <b>ICE has all the weapons & the “law” on its side; the rest of us, unarmed, unorganized, unprepared, quixotically committed to US laws.</b></bq></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/americans-are-irredeemable/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">'Americans' Are Irredeemable</a> <bq><b>I accidentally flipped to CNN and they're at it again. Trying to color revolution Iran, painting riots as rebellion.</b> CNN, which incites genocide, is trying to overthrow the only country to do its duty under the genocide convention. <b>The only independent country in the region, suffering under sanctions (White word for sieges), which are then used as a lever to sow chaos within. And CNN is in on it.</b> They even had on former Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, because what is CNN but a privatized propaganda outlet? It's one military-industrial-media complex, and their goals are blood simple. <b>Sow chaos and reap the whirlwind.</b> I opened an old metablog I used to love (MetaFilter) and they're at it again. I left MetaFilter when they started censoring any comments about Russia, jumping on that war bandwagon, and they're still on the overthrow Iran bandwagon as well. <b>These people, who are just ordinary people, still think they're the good guys and that the White Empire they're in is right this time, that this time will do it, this war, this overthrow is just, and they're so arrogant about it.</b> These people <b>still talk about overthrowing other countries and installing puppets like they're king of the world</b>, and not merely stowage on the Titanic. It's nauseating, <b>how callous they are with entire countries, these casual citizens, repeating rank propaganda like they just thought of it.</b></bq> <bq><b>'Americans' still think they're the good guys merely doing bad things</b>, oopsying their way around continents [...]</bq> <bq><b>The whole 'American' identity is founded on genocide on theft, it's not some modern aberration</b> which can be redeemed by appealing to some slaver documentation. <b>The identity 'American' is no more redeemable than Nazi</b>, or German if we look at it seriously. We should have never put Germany back together and <b>'America' needs to break up, not wake up. This is not a nightmare that will pass, this is them.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvq5uYsDYrI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bvq5uYsDYrI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="Yep! Homeschooling Should Be Illegal"> <bq>This is a unique instance where someone is too dumb to get owned in a conversation. <b>I'm not kidding when I say he's medically stupid.</b> The questions Andrew's asking are all the same questions that I asked when I first watched the video, right? Where I was like when we were looking through the the the Department of Human Services' licensing reports and we found that like every single one of these day-cares had been audited as a part of the routine licensing process, and they actually had some instances of---not fraud but some issues, right? Like, substandard conditions and things like that. But <b>all of that actually proved that there were kids there. There were obviously children there, right?</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPFFSOxsYio" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PPFFSOxsYio" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="how do you fix a country where 20% of the population is in a cult?"> <bq>I don't think we can live normally in a country where 20% of the population operates like this. <b>We need cult deprogramming.</b> Like, you can't really have a country if 20% of the population straight up thinks like, yeah, no, all the commies deserve it, including my own children. This is once again something that I talk about all the time. This is a byproduct of <b>creating a malleable population because you pay-walled education.</b> The public schooling system is completely in a dire state of disrepair. <b>There is a massive class disparity in educational attainment and educational outcomes in general. And that creates an environment where there's a lot of people who are just not very intelligent.</b> People who are stupid are malleable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/everyone-wants-peace-until-they-get" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Everyone Wants Peace Until They Get Hit With The War Propaganda</a> <bq>The mass-scale psychological manipulation worms its way into western minds without their having any idea that it’s happening. Then all of a sudden you’ve got Trump supporters who just spent ten years proudly proclaiming that their man is going to end all the wars and bring about world peace enthusiastically cheerleading for decapitation strikes in Tehran. <b>They think they came up with the idea all on their own, but in reality they were skillfully manipulated into that position by the most powerful people in the world.</b></bq> <bq>We think we live in a free society, but in reality we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where <b>people are systematically psychologically conditioned to support the world’s ugliest agendas driven by the most powerful and depraved individuals</b> on our planet.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/16/revealed-the-cia-backed-think-tanks-fueling-the-iran-protests/" author="Alan MacLeod" source="Scheer Post / MintPress News">Revealed: The CIA-Backed Think Tanks Fueling The Iran Protests</a> <bq>Established in 2006, <b>Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia, just a stone’s throw away from CIA headquarters in Langley.</b> It describes itself as a “non-political” association of activists dedicated to advancing freedom and rights in Iran. On its website, it notes that, “because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from neither political groups nor governments.” Yet, in the same paragraph, it notes that <b>“HRAI has also been accepting donations from National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States of America.”</b> The level of NED investment into HRAI has been substantial, to say the least; journalist Michael Tracey found that, <b>in 2024 alone, the NED had apportioned well over $900,000</b> towards the organization.</bq> <bq><b>The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA</b>. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants. Technically a private entity, although <b>receiving virtually all its funding from the federal government and being staffed by ex-spooks</b>, the NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, the NED’s longtime president, said in 1986. <b>NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,”</b> he told The Washington Post.</bq> <bq>Six years later, the NED provided both the finances and the brains for a briefly successful coup d’état against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. <b>The NED spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying coup leaders (such as Marina Corina Machado) back and forth to Washington, D.C.</b> After the coup was overturned and the plot was exposed, NED funding to Machado and her allies actually increased, and <b>the organization has continued to fund her and her political organizations.</b></bq> <bq>The CIA (the NED’s parent organization), infiltrated Iranian media, paying them to run hysterical anti-Mossadegh content, carried out terror attacks inside Iran, bribed officials to turn against the president, <b>cultivated ties with reactionary elements within the military, and paid protestors to flood the streets at anti-Mossadegh rallies.</b> <b>The shah reigned for 26 bloody years between 1953 and 1979</b>, until he was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution. <b>The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who almost immediately invaded Iran, leading to a bitter, eight-year long conflict that killed at least half a million people.</b> Washington supplied Hussein with a wide range of weapons, including components for <b>chemical weapons used on Iranians</b>, as well as other weapons of mass destruction. <b>Since 1979, Iran has also been under restrictive American economic sanctions</b>, measures that have severely hindered the country’s development.</bq> <bq>What started as a demonstration about the cost of living has spiralled into a huge, openly insurrectionist movement, backed and fomented by the U.S. and Israel. Iranians, of course, have every right to protest, but <b>a wealth of factors have raised the very real possibility that much of the anti-government movement is an inorganic, U.S.-orchestrated attempt at regime change.</b> While Iranians can argue about how they wish to express themselves and what sort of government they want, what is undebatable is that <b>so many of the think tanks and NGOs called upon to provide supposed expert evidence and commentary about these protests are tools of the National Endowment for Democracy.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://kottke.org/26/01/0048191-how-russias-children-got-" author="Jason Kottke" source="">How Russia’s Children Got So Violent</a> <bq>How Russia’s Children Got So Violent. “There is no positive ideology for children in a country fighting a murderous war.” Ultranationalist & xenophobic violence is encouraged by Putin’s regime.</bq> The original link is to an article in the Atlantic, which I am absolutely not going to read, because there is no way that I would be able to get through it without having an aneurysm caused by the author's inability to detect any irony in reporting on something like violence from the heart of the most violent empire the world has ever seen. Kottke doesn't seem to have noticed the irony either, which is completely unsurprising. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/08/after-the-moneys-gone/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Where did the money go?</a> <bq>Broadly, <b>these are the two industries in America now: scammers who put Americans into debt, and industries who torment Americans into paying the debt.</b> And while these two industries represent a moral crisis for the nation, they also represent an economic crisis, because they are <b>at irreconcilable odds with one another.</b></bq> <bq>Say you want to go into business renting hotel rooms to people at reasonable rates. You're an honest sort, so you list your room prices right there on your site. But <b>the scumbags you're competing with want to rip people off, so they list a lower price than yours, and then whack the customer with junk fees at check-in that make their room more expensive than yours.</b> What's more, the scumbags make so much money that they can bribe the handful of dominant travel sites (which are all owned by one of two massive private-equity backed rollups) to list their hotels ahead of yours. They might not like paying bribes – in fact, they probably hate it – but they're willing to part with some of that hard-won ripoff money to keep the money-machine going. <b>Besides, they can make up the difference with more junk fees. Whaddya gonna do, walk away from your nonrefundable, prepaid reservation and try and get a last-minute booking in a strange city?</b></bq> <bq>Looking at America, it's hard not to ask, "Where did all the money go?" Where did free state college tuition, excellent public libraries, public housing, transit, fully staffed national parks and air-traffic control towers all go? Why can't we fix the potholes? <b>How is it that a country that once electrified itself from top to bottom and sea to sea can't figure out how to run fiber lines to the same roofs where all those power lines connect?</b></bq> <bq>Smart people keep asking how Trump plans on stealing Venezuela's oil when the country is in a state of shambolic collapse and its people are starving? Who will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new equipment when every dollar spent on capital will require a dollar for a gunman to keep it from being stolen and sold for food? <b>You could ask the same question about America. In a country where we've literally legalized bribery, who wants to invest in productive businesses?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/13/xccv-j13.html" author="Patrick Martin" source="WSWS">Political war breaks out between White House and Federal Reserve</a> <bq>The real motive for the investigation, as Powell pointed out, was Trump’s insistence that the Fed should slash interest rates more quickly than it judged prudent. This is a dispute within the capitalist ruling elite, in which <b>Trump speaks for the hedge funds, crypto swindlers and other speculators and conmen, who clamor for lower interest rates in order to sustain their debt-fueled operations.</b> Powell speaks for the more traditional Wall Street interests, including the major banks and investment firms, who fear a resurgence of inflation which would both <b>undermine the global domination of the US dollar and threaten to trigger a movement from the working class seeking wage increases to offset rising prices.</b> The issue goes beyond the level of interest rates, as Wall Street Journal economics correspondent Greg Ip acknowledged: “The criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell isn’t ultimately about the Fed’s headquarters, or Powell, or even interest rates. <b>It’s about power. President Trump intends to take control of the central bank, no matter what the law or the courts say.</b>”</bq> <bq>Trump had previously targeted one of Powell’s key allies on the Board of Governors, Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee, using concocted allegations of mortgage fraud to give him the “cause” required by law for him to remove her from the board. <b>Cook refused to step down, filed suit against Trump and won her case at the district and appeals court levels. She has continued to participate in the Board’s actions</b>, including setting interest rates, but the Supreme Court is set to hear the Trump administration’s appeal of the lower court rulings on January 21.</bq> <bq><b>The so-called independence of the Fed does not mean political neutrality; it means that the Fed will be guided solely by the fundamental interests of the capitalist class</b>, without regard to the electoral calendar or the immediate concerns of particular politicians. In the past, this led to conflicts when presidents feared they would pay a political price for Fed actions that resulted in mass unemployment. Trump’s intervention against Powell goes far beyond this. <b>He is asserting dictatorial authority over all the institutions of the capitalist state.</b> His opponents within the ruling class, for their part, fear that blatant political manipulation of US interest rates will undermine global confidence in the dollar, which has long functioned as the world’s principal reserve currency.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcQPAZP7-sE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JcQPAZP7-sE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sixty Symbols" caption="A.I. Takes Physics Exam"> <hr> <a href="https://investinglive.com/news/the-500000-ton-typo-why-data-center-copper-math-doesnt-add-up-20260113/" source="Investing Live" author="Adam Button">The 500,000-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn’t add up</a> <bq><b>If the "half a million tons" figure were accurate, a single 1 GW data center would consume 1.7% of the world's annual copper supply.</b> If we built 30 GW of capacity—a reasonable projection for the AI build-out—that sector alone would theoretically absorb almost half of all the copper mined on Earth.</bq> <bq>When you even look at the Nvidia report itself, the error becomes clear with some simple math. It says <b>standard rack architectures use approximately 200kg of copper per megawatt.</b><ul>1 GW (1,000 MW) x 200kg = 200,000kg 200,000kg = 200 Metric Tons.</ul>The <b>discrepancy between 200 tons (the reality) and 500,000 tons (the claim) is a factor of 2,500x.</b> It is almost certain that the original document intended to say "half a million pounds"—which equates to roughly 226 tons—and <b>a simple unit conversion error.</b></bq> A simple unit-conversion error that has led to a bull market because an authority like NVidia said that the data-center demand for copper is going to be 2500x larger than it truly will be. <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration" author="" source="Wikipedia">Trilateration</a> <bq><b>Trilateration in three-dimensional geometry</b> Trilateration is the use of distances (or "ranges") for determining the unknown position coordinates of a point of interest When more than three distances are involved, it may also be called multilateration, for emphasis. The point of interest is often around Earth (geopositioning). The distances or ranges might be ordinary Euclidean distances (slant ranges) or spherical distances (scaled central angles), as in true-range multilateration; or biased distances (pseudo-ranges), as in pseudo-range multilateration. <b>Trilateration or multilateration should not be confused with triangulation, which uses angles for positioning; and direction finding, which determines the line of sight direction to a target without determining the radial distance.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/the-oceans-just-keep-getting-hotter/" author="Holly Taft" source="Ars Technica | Wired">The oceans just keep getting hotter</a> <bq>The <b>2025 warming</b>, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or <b>more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.</b>)</bq> <bq>[...] because <b>so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures</b> [than those on land].”</bq> <bq>A key tool that revolutionized our understanding of deeper ocean temperatures is the <b>international network of Argo floats, with more than 3,500 robotic buoys that were first deployed in the early 2000s</b> to collect data on oceans around the world. In addition to the Argo floats, the study pulls data from a variety of other sources, including data measured from buoys, ship hulls, satellites—and animals. (“<b>We actually put instruments on mammals that swim under ice, and so we can measure temperatures while they swim</b>,” Abraham says. “They can take measurements where our robots can’t go.”)</bq> <bq>“What people often don’t grasp is that it’s taken 100 years to get the oceans that warm at depth,” he says. “<b>Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it’s going to take hundreds of years for that to circulate through the ocean.</b> We’re going to pay this <b>cost for a very, very long time</b>, because we’ve already put the heat in the ocean.”</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://mattbivens.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-tupperware-party" source="The first 100 days" author="Matt Bivens, M.D.">Welcome to the Tupperware Party</a> <bq>[...] the just-approved Purdue bankruptcy deal, which may surpass even the case of Lehman Brothers as America’s all-time example of <b>“fraudulent conveyance,” the practice of moving money out of the reach of creditors. At least in terms of shamelessness, Purdue has no peer.</b></bq> <bq><b>That slide celebrated how a savings card up-front made it far more likely the patient would be stuck on OxyContin® three months later. That may be bad for the patient, but it’s good for Purdue.</b> Never mind that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that patients still on prescription opioids after 90 days were four times more likely to die of an opioid overdose in the next year, and <b>30 times more likely to die of an overdose in the next five years.</b> From Purdue’s point of view, if the patient’s on OxyContin® after 90 days, that’s some fine work.</bq> <bq>OxyContin® tablets, usually taken twice daily, start at 10 mg and rise up to 80 mg. (There was even briefly a 160 mg tablet, for about nine months, back in 2000-2001. Purdue “voluntarily” stopped marketing it. <b>It’s incredible to think of such dosing — the equivalent of taking an entire bottle of 64 standard Percocet® pills every day.</b>)</bq> <bq><b>A patient kept on the highest dose of OxyContin® for a year, per the Massachusetts attorney general, brought in $10,959.25.</b> Which sounds like better business: earning a one-time $38 from a patient with back pain, or $10,959 every year from that same patient’s back pain? Exactly. So, the business goal was clear: Push doctors (and other prescribers) to titrate toward higher OxyContin® doses, supposedly in a search of that sweet spot for symptom control, but actually <b>because daily, high-dose opioid exposure turns people into <s>opioid addicts</s> loyal customers.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/free-healing-lincoln" source="The Baffler" author="Astra Lincoln">Free Healing</a> <bq>All of this was a racist insult on top of the inherent injury that is America’s medical system, where care is rationed and cruelty is abundant, and where <b>some of the most vulnerable moments of a person’s life—hurting and healing—are surveilled and weaponized.</b></bq> <bq>A few days after the clinic had ended, Love Heals’ executive director Caitlin Barnard ran the numbers. Relative to the BSU-based clinic they ran last year, <b>they’d actually treated 40 percent more people</b> than they usually see in a single day, and had provided $208,038 worth of care. <b>The problem wasn’t that they’d had fewer patients; they had just had a larger number of volunteers.</b></bq> <bq><b>The young children were visibly nervous; many had never seen a dentist before.</b> To comfort one child sobbing uncontrollably in his neon green chair, a dental assistant blew a rubber glove into a makeshift balloon. Later, I saw the boy walk out of the clinic, <b>one hand pressing a wad of bloody gauze against his mouth, the other still cradling the hand-balloon.</b></bq> <bq>Sami could wait until the tooth was bad enough to pull it, as so many of the clinic’s other patients had—more than half of the clinic’s patients are missing at least one tooth—or try to find a different clinic. <b>I asked him what he would do about his tooth if he was still in Afghanistan. He laughed and told me he would have shown up at the neighborhood clinic, waited maybe twenty minutes, and paid the USD-equivalent of “not even five dollars” to have it fixed.</b> This, he said, was the case for many of the people resettled from countries that had free or almost-free health care: they came to America, got sick, and couldn’t access any help. <b>Since arriving in America, Sami had already had four teeth pulled.</b></bq> <bq>Shadduck later told me that, <b>at free clinics for underserved communities, an average of 57 percent of all patients had a history of traumatic brain injuries</b> (including more than half of the homeless and as many as 70 percent of incarcerated people). But Shadduck can’t treat, or even properly diagnose them here—there are virtually no meaningful medical interventions the clinic is actually equipped to address. Shadduck <b>offers these patients the suggestion of a new, potentially life-altering diagnosis, and sends them back into the bright, hot day. It is the best that she can do.</b></bq> <bq>He grabbed my shoulder and turned me to look out at the dwindling crowd of patients. “These people are so desperate,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re not like you and me. Health care, for us, is so normal, it’s like air or water,” he said. “We can’t even imagine what it must be like.” I smiled and nodded. <b>Like many of the clinic’s patients, I had only ever had intermittent health care. I, too, had an outstanding cavity, for which I’d been referred for a filling nearly a year ago. Every month since, I had called my FQHC on the day the next month’s schedule opened; every time, I was told the spots had all already been filled.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/01/social-causes-drug-addiction" source="Jacobin" author="Chandler Dandridge">We’re Thinking About Addiction Entirely Wrong</a> <bq>[...] the conditions these rats were made to endure for the experiment — in effect, being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine — is also a striking metaphor for the life circumstances known to be associated with human addiction — namely, severe adversity, co-morbid mental health problems, and limited socioeconomic opportunities. <b>Although it is of course metaphorical, there is nonetheless something apt about thinking of the life circumstances faced by some people with addiction as like being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine.</b></bq> <bq>The addiction scientist Serge Ahmed had the simple but ingenious idea that, to make the experiment more realistic, we needed to give rats a choice. He therefore ran a series of experiments where he introduced a second lever into the chamber, <b>offering rats a choice between cocaine and saccharin water. He found that even when rats showed every indication of addiction-like behavior, 90 percent of them chose the saccharin water over cocaine.</b></bq> <bq>Ahmed’s experiment was then extended by Marco Venniro and Yavin Shaham by switching the saccharin water reward to a social reward, namely a minute of playtime with another rat. Extraordinarily, <b>virtually 100 percent of the rats in these experiments, even when they showed every indication of addiction-like behavior, chose the minute of playtime over drugs.</b></bq> <bq>What do these experiments show? At least for rats, even when they look to be addicted, <b>if you give them choices — that is, you give them alternative rewards that compete with drugs — they take them.</b> So if we go back and ask why the rats in the early experiment took cocaine to the point of death, it looks like <b>the answer can’t be the power of drugs to hijack the brain and compel use.</b></bq> <bq>[...] we know that addiction is associated with severe adversity, comorbid mental health problems, and extremely limited socioeconomic opportunities. We also know that what has been called “a stake in conventional life” — the phrase comes originally from the sociologists Dan Waldorf, Craig Waldorf, and Sheila Murphy, and is basically the idea that life is experienced as valuable and as having meaning, purpose, and a sense of possibility — is both protective against addiction and often crucial to recovery. <b>Rather than explain addiction simply by appeal to a hijacked brain, we have to think seriously both about the environments in which people live and their inner lives</b> [...]</bq> <bq>Before we talk about a “psychology first” orientation and what it can offer us, I want to say directly and plainly that I think <b>we must recognize and reject the tendency in all of us to moralize drug use.</b></bq> <bq>What I mean by a “psychology first” approach to addiction is that we start by seeing if we can understand why someone might be using drugs in ways that are profoundly counter to their own good by appealing to their psychological states. In other words, we use the psychological tools that are at our disposal, simply in virtue of being human. <b>We imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, what their inner life might be like. And to do so, we contextualize their inner life in relation to their life circumstances.</b></bq> <bq>We tend to think that blame is natural, inevitable, indeed deserved — but this is in effect a choice we make. <b>We could respond differently — without judgment, without hostility — while still holding people responsible and working to help them to change.</b> Indeed, this is exactly what effective clinical care typically demands of clinicians.</bq> <bq>Part of what, for me, was so moving and personally important about the experience of working there for ten years is that we really did see people get better. Their lives improved, as did their sense of self. But the mechanisms underpinning these changes had nothing to do with medication or standard medical interventions. Fundamentally, <b>the mechanisms involved the care, support, respect, and relationships that came from belonging to the group.</b></bq> <bq>Some carried their contracts with them for months, until they were ragged and worn. <b>It was the power of these contracts that first made me question the validity of the brain disease model</b> — at least in those cases where the contract worked — for surely <b>no brain disease of compulsion could be cured by a piece of paper.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/a-unilateral-change-to-childhood" source="Your Local Epidemiologist" author="Katelyn Jetelina">A unilateral change to childhood vaccines: What it means for you</a> <bq><b>Denmark’s health and social system is well organized, well funded, and built for consistency, seamless integration for patients, and to provide a safety net for every family.</b> Prenatal care is reliable. Nearly every child receives care on schedule. Follow-up is immaculate. And families have 46 paid weeks of maternity leave. It’s like <b>a smooth, meticulously maintained highway</b> where a sports car can thrive.</bq> <bq><b>The U.S. health system is more like off-road trails in Utah. It’s fragmented, uneven, expensive, and wildly variable depending on where you live.</b> Access depends on insurance, geography, clinic capacity, transportation, and state policy. This needs a 4-Runner built to handle potholes, steep drop-offs, and unpredictable conditions.</bq> <bq><b>It is beyond time we fix our roads so there are fewer health potholes in the United States. Until then, the U.S. needs a vaccine schedule designed for our messy reality.</b> Now, we will be driving a Porsche (made for smooth roads) through those off-road trails in Utah, which is highly problematic.</bq> <bq>The administration said that all vaccines covered by federal insurance programs—Medicaid, CHIP, and the Vaccines for Children program—remain covered. Private insurance companies have also said they will continue coverage. Whether this continues long-term is uncertain, but <b>for now, your child’s vaccines are covered at no cost, even if your child is not high-risk. If this changes, hold the administration accountable.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/southern-accent-linguistics-speech/685350/" source="The Atlantic" author="Annie Joy Williams">The Last Days of the Southern Drawl</a> <bq>You have to listen closely to hear it, but the accent treats long vowels and short vowels differently. <b>With a long vowel (beat or bait), “you add a little uh sound before the original vowel” (buheat). But with the short vowels (bit or bet), the uh goes after the original vowel. (Can you hear it, just a little biuht?)</b> “That’s where the drawl perception comes from,” she said, “because they kind of stretch out.”</bq> <bq><b>Today the South is the most populous region of the country</b>, and from 2023 to 2024, it gained more residents than all other regions combined, according to the U.S. census.</bq> <bq>“I’ll have a student from eastern Kentucky who tells me, when they got to Lexington, <b>they got made fun of immediately for how they talked.</b> So they started trying to fix it,” she said. “Then it comes to Thanksgiving break, and they go back home. Well, now they’re getting made fun of at home.” <b>Family members will often say things like “you’ve gotten above your raising” or “you’re too good for us now.”</b></bq> Or maybe you should stop hanging out with people who are superficial dicks. In muliti-culti Switzerland, we're just happy to have a common language at all. Some people are dickish snobs about accents but it's usually because they don't have anything else going for them. <bq><b>When she uses a different accent, it’s not about fitting in or being accepted; it’s about clarity.</b> “If you’re not going to accept me because I sound Appalachian, then that’s on you, but it’s on me to be as clear as I can in the message that I’m sending.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/01/295827.html" author="Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Jim Culleny" source="3QuarksDaily">Friday Poem: The World is a Beautiful Place</a> <bq>if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because <b>even in heaven they don’t sing all the time</b> The world is a beautiful place to be born into <b>if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you</b></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> People who say they’re against affirmative action are just against affirmative action for other people. They’re not against the affirmative action in principle. They like affirmative action that benefits them, and they absolutely love affirmative action that’s bequeathed through a genetic lottery. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/01/deepfake-porn-is-not-going-away-so-we-should-find-a-way-to-live-with-that.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Thomas Wells">Deepfake porn is not going away, so we should find a way to live with that</a> <bq>This is <b>a textbook example of social institutions and norms being outdated and no longer fit for purpose in the circumstances of the modern world.</b> Believing anything you see, for example. Or following the aphorism, ‘no smoke without fire’. Or conflating prudishness with professionalism to justify severe though informal punishment for anyone whose sexual being is not kept securely locked in their bedroom.</bq> <bq>The starting point is reconciling us all to the obvious fact that we now live in a deepfake world whether we like it or not. Everyone knows – or should be brought to know – that <b>highly realistic seeming images and videos can now be entirely made up by computers and cannot be distinguished from real recordings without considerable technical expertise.</b> Hence we can no longer rely on what our eyes tell us that a picture says happened. This is not a novel situation – for the overwhelming bulk of humanity’s existence we have had to get by with easily faked words. (And photos were anyway never the solid reliable context-independent evidence we were so willing to taken them for: they were always framed.)</bq> <bq>It should be ‘common knowledge‘ – meaning that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows – that <b>the overwhelmingly most likely explanation for the appearance of sexually explicit images of non-pornstars on the internet is that they are deepfakes.</b></bq> <bq>[...] everyone should also know that <b>everyone knows that being deepfaked is something that can happen to anyone</b> and doesn’t have any wider meaning or implications to be worried about. Employers do not have to worry that the disturbing pictures that turn up when googling [a] candidate [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-be-less-awkward" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">How to be less awkward</a> <bq>This turns out to be a surprisingly high-status move, because <b>when you readily admit your mistakes, you imply that you don’t expect to be seriously harmed by them, and this makes you seem intimidating and cool.</b> You know how when a toddler topples over, they’ll immediately look at you to gauge how upset they should be? Adults do that too. Whenever someone does something unexpected, we check their reaction—if they look embarrassed, then whatever they did must be embarrassing. When that person panics, they look like a putz. When they shrug and go, “Classic me!”, they come off as a lovable doof, or even, somehow, a chill, confident person.</bq> <bq>It’s that nagging thought of “does my sweater look bad” that blossoms into “oh god, everyone is staring at my horrible sweater” and finally arrives at “I need to throw this sweater into a dumpster immediately, preferably with me wearing it”.</bq> Oh good lord do some people not grow out of this? Like, by the time they turn seventeen at the latest? <bq><b>Paying attention to a human, on the other hand, is like watering a plant: it makes them bloom. People love it when you listen and respond to them</b>, just like babies love it when they turn a crank and Elmo pops out of a box—oh! The joy of having an effect on the world!</bq> <bq>We usually picture narcissists as people with an inflated sense of self worth, and of course many narcissists are like that. But I contend that there is <b>a negative form of narcissism, one where you pay yourself an extravagant amount of attention that just happens to come in the form of scorn.</b> Ultimately, self-love and self-hate are both forms of self-obsession.</bq> <bq><b>That’s the logic behind exposure and response prevention: you sit in the presence of the scary thing without deploying your usual coping mechanisms (scrolling on your phone, fleeing, etc.) and you do this until you get tired of being scared.</b> If you’re an arachnophobe, for instance, you peer at a spider from a safe distance, you wait until your heart rate returns to normal, you take one step closer, and you repeat until you’re so close to the spider that it agrees to officiate your wedding.2</bq> <bq><b>When Todd Posner told me in college that I have a big nose, did he realize he was giving me a lifelong complex? No, he probably went right back to thinking about his own embarrassingly girthy neck</b>, which, combined with his penchant for wearing suits, caused people to refer to him behind his back as “Business Frog” (a fact I kept nobly to myself).</bq> <bq>[...] <b>every time you accept the opportunity to be cruel, you increase the ambient level of cruelty in the world</b>, which makes all of us more likely to end up on the wrong end of a pointed finger.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/from-one-failed-industrial-utopia" source="Nefarious Russian" author="Yasha Levine">From one failed industrial utopia to another</a> <bq>The internet promised to deliver all these things right at the moment that the United States won, as everyone believed, its ideological war against the Soviet Union. The communist dream was dead. And the internet, as promoted by its boosters in the 1990s, was supposed to be the final hammer in that fight. It was going to prove that the American way could deliver <b>The Promise — the promise that industrialism had offered up to the world from the beginning when weaving mill entrepreneurs in England herded orphans into factories and treated them as slaves.</b> This was just a step to a brighter future — a future of where everyone would live like a king.</bq> <bq>The internet and AI are just the latest and newest developments of industrialism, a process that has been going on and gaining speed for centuries and which is now running up against it limits — limits of control and extraction and modification. <b>The system is cracking up, no matter where you are, even if most people are in denial about it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/which-india/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Which India?</a> <bq>Nation states are not the natural state of the subcontinent. Even in Sri Lanka, which is relatively homogenous, being Sri Lankan is an external reference, we identify in other ways within. If you're at a police station (even for something mundane) <b>you have to identify yourself, and saying Sri Lankan doesn't work. They look at you like you said you're from Earth.</b> You have to be Sinhala Buddhist or Tamil Christian or whatever, something more specific. <b>I don't know what that makes my children, a mix of such things, they have yet to need a police report.</b> <b>Subcontinental identities exist in a quantum state like this</b>, only taking a form when you literally have to give a form to the state. For example, I only found out my wife was Malayalee at the marriage registrar. <b>Her father is Mallu (ie, from Kerala) and officially race passes through the father, but she identifies as Sri Lankan Tamil day to day and that's what I thought she was. And that's what she is, once you turn off the state's microscope.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/637" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">The Invention of Anarchism</a> <img src="{att_link}existential_comics_-_the_invention_of_anarchism.webp" href="{att_link}existential_comics_-_the_invention_of_anarchism.webp" align="none" caption="Existential Comics - The Invention of Anarchism" scale="85%"> <bq><b>Kropotkin:</b> You know how <b>polite society is held together by a group of thugs, called the police, who enforce the property rights and maintain the vast stolen wealth of the elite through state violence</b>? <b>Top hat:</b> Of course. everyone knows that. <b>Kropotkin:</b> Well, what if ... we don't do that! <b>Top hat:</b> Don't do that? What do you mean? <b>Kropotkin:</b> What if everyone [were] just treated like equals, [what if] we all cooperated? <b>Top hat:</b> I don't get it. <b>So who beats up the poor?</b> <b>Kropotkin:</b> No one does! there are no poor! that's the whole idea. <b>We'll call it: anarchism.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-dictators-handbook/" source="" author="Sean Goedecke">The Dictator's Handbook and the politics of technical competence</a> <bq>[...] the structure of government does not change the size of the coalition. Rather, changes in the size of the coalition force changes in the structure of government. For instance, a democratic leader may want to shrink the size of their coalition to make it easier to hold onto power (e.g. by empowering state governors to unilaterally decide the outcome of their state’s elections). If successful, the government will thus become a small-coalition government, and will function more like a dictatorship (even if it’s still nominally democratic).</bq> <bq>If your coalition is hundreds of thousands or millions of people (e.g. all the voters in a democracy), you can no longer directly assign rewards to individual people. Instead, it’s more efficient to fund public goods that benefit everybody. That’s why democracies tend to fund many more public goods than dictatorships.</bq> <bq>I think the main difference here is that technical competence matters a lot in engineering organizations. I want a deep bench because it really matters to me whether projects succeed or fail, and <b>having more technically competent people in the loop drastically increases the chances of success.</b> <b>Mesquita and Smith barely write about competence at all. From what I can tell, they assume that leaders don’t care about it</b>, and assume that their administration will be competent enough (a very low bar) to stay in power, no matter what they do.</bq> <bq>I find it hard to believe that governments are that different from tech companies in this sense: <b>surely competence makes a big difference to outcomes, and leaders are thus incentivized to keep competent people in their circle</b>, even if that disrupts their coalition or incurs additional political costs.</bq> Are you blind? You live in the west presumably, no? What does competence have to do with any ruling class? Even in the tech world? <bq>CEOs have tangible ways to reward their coalition. But <b>VPs can only really reward their coalition via accomplishing their boss’s goals, which necessarily requires competence.</b></bq> <bq>[...] for most of us who operate in the middle level, maybe the lesson is that <b>coalition politics dominates at the top, but competence politics dominates in the middle.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://newsletter.dunneinsights.com/p/china-dominated-ces-detroit-stayed" author="Michael Dunne" source="The Dunne Insights Newsletter">China Dominated CES, Detroit Stayed Home</a> <bq>CES has always been global, with attendees showing up from over 150 different countries. But 2026 felt like the Chinese Electronics Show. <b>Nine hundred Chinese firms exhibited at this year’s show. Not ninety. Nine hundred.</b> The competition? <b>Hyundai focused on robotics and industrial automation, but showed no cars.</b> BMW offered test drives of its Neue Klasse via the iX3. Sony Honda Mobility showed the Afeela (again). That was it. <b>I did not see exhibits for GM, Ford, Stellantis, Rivian, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Renault, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, or Subaru.</b> Beyond Chinese brands, the automaker bench was nearly empty. The Chinese lineup: product, pricing, and swagger.</bq> <bq>Xiaomi (means “Rice Millet” in Chinese) went from zero to 500,000 sales in under 20 months. Twenty months.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/" source="" author="Mario Zechner">What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent</a> <bq>The core issue remains: if an LLM has access to tools that can read private data and make network requests, you're playing whack-a-mole with attack vectors. Since we cannot solve this trifecta of capabilities (read data, execute code, network access), pi just gives in. <b>Everybody is running in YOLO mode anyways to get any productive work done</b>, [...]</bq> <bq><c>pi</c> does not and will not support MCP. I've written about this extensively, but the TL;DR is: <b>MCP servers are overkill for most use cases, and they come with significant context overhead.</b> Popular MCP servers like Playwright MCP (21 tools, 13.7k tokens) or Chrome DevTools MCP (26 tools, 18k tokens) <b>dump their entire tool descriptions into your context on every session. That's 7-9% of your context window gone before you even start working.</b> Many of these tools you'll never use in a given session.</bq> <bq>People use sub-agents within a session thinking they're saving context space, which is true. But that's the wrong way to think about sub-agents. Using a sub-agent mid-session for context gathering is a sign you didn't plan ahead. <b>If you need to gather context, do that first in its own session. Create an artifact that you can later use in a fresh session</b> to give your agent all the context it needs without polluting its context window with tool outputs. That artifact can be useful for the next feature too, and you get full observability and steerability, which is important during context gathering.</bq> <bq>I performed a complete run with five trials per task, which makes the results eligible for submission to the leaderboard. I also started a second run that <b>only runs during CET because I found that error rates (and consequently benchmark results) get worse once PST goes online.</b></bq> Performance depends the time of day? Like, that much, and that noticeably? <bq>Also note the ranking of Terminus 2 on the leaderboard. Terminus 2 is the Terminal-Bench team's own minimal agent that just gives the model a tmux session. The model sends commands as text to tmux and parses the terminal output itself. <b>No fancy tools, no file operations, just raw terminal interaction. And it's holding its own against agents with far more sophisticated tooling and works with a diverse set of models.</b> More evidence that a minimal approach can do just as well.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2" source="Financial Times" author="Melissa Heikkilä">Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning”</a> <bq>LeCun has also been vocal about his disdain for large language models (LLMs) and their potential to reach superhuman intelligence, which is the current obsession of Silicon Valley. <b>He argues that LLMs are useful but fundamentally limited and constrained by language. To achieve human-level intelligence, you have to understand how our physical world works too.</b> His solution for achieving that relies on an architecture called V-JEPA, a so-called world model. World models aim to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data, rather than just language. They are also able to plan, reason, and have persistent memory. <b>He calls this kind of intelligence Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/06/from-blue-books-to-chatbots/" source="Scheer Post" author="Nolan Higdon">From Blue Books to Chatbots</a> <bq>Over the past decade or two, handwriting has been largely replaced by corporate for-profit screens and digital media. <b>It is unclear how opponents of blue books demonstrate that today’s corporate shaped society produces smarter and better-educated critical thinkers.</b> While the decline of blue books is not solely responsible,</bq> <bq>[...] waiting decades to make a determination about something like AI in education is a mistake because it <b>allows corporations to shape the process and integrate themselves so that their tools become indispensable by the time people realize the problem.</b></bq> <bq>By moving beyond basic digital navigation and embracing critical media literacy, educators can ensure that the next generation is equipped to dismantle Big-tech oligarchy rather than being consumed by it. <b>Only by prioritizing human connection and rigorous analysis over algorithmic shortcuts can we prevent the idiots from taking over</b>, and preserve the cognitive foundations of our democracy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">Premium: This Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble</a> <bq><b>Three years and $70 billion later, the metaverse is dead, and everybody acts as if it didn’t happen.</b> Whoops! In a sane society, investors, analysts and the media would <b>never trust a single word out of Mark Zuckerberg’s mouth ever again</b>. Instead, the media gleefully covered his mid-2025 “Personal Superintelligence” blog where he promised everybody would have a “personal superintelligence” to “help you achieve your goals.” Do LLMs do that? No. Can they ever do that? No. Doesn’t matter! This is the tech industry. There is <b>no punishment, no consequence, no critique, no cynicism, and no comeuppance</b> — only celebration and consideration, only growth.</bq> <bq><b>Startups were rewarded not for creating real businesses, or having good ideas, or even creating new categories, but for their ability to play “brainwash a venture capitalist,”</b> either through being “a founder to bet on” or appealing to the next bazillion-dollar TAM boondoggle. Perhaps they’d find some sort of product-market fit, or grow a large audience by providing a service at an unsustainable cost, but <b>this was all done with the knowledge of an upcoming bailout via IPO or acquisition.</b></bq> <bq><b>The media covers companies based not on what they do but their potential value</b>, a value that’s largely dictated by the vibes of the company and the amount of money that they’ve raised from investors.</bq> <bq><b>The problem with a system like this is that it naturally rewards grifting</b>, and it was inevitable that a kind of technology would come along that worked against a system that had <b>chased out any good sense or independent thought.</b> Generative AI lowers the barrier of entry for anybody to cobble together a startup that can say all the right things to a venture capitalist. <b>Vibe coding can create a “working prototype” of a product that can’t scale (but can raise money!)</b></bq> <bq><b>AI startups took up 65% of all venture capital funding in Q4 2025.</b> Venture capital’s fundamental disconnection from value-creation (or reality) has led to hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into AI startups that have already-negative margins that get worse as their customer base grows and the cost of inference (creating outputs) is increasing, and <b>at this point it’s obvious that it is impossible to create a foundation lab or LLM-powered service that makes a profit</b>, on top of the fact that it appears that <b>renting the GPUs for AI services is also unprofitable.</b></bq> <bq><b>The AI bubble bursting will be worse, because the investments are larger, the contagion is wider, and the underlying asset — GPUs — are entirely different in their costs,</b> utility and basic value than dark fiber. Furthermore, the basic unit economics of AI — both in its infrastructure and the AI companies themselves — are <b>magnitudes more horrifying than anything we saw in the dot com bubble.</b></bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Code is a liability (not an asset)</a> <bq>Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. <b>The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running.</b> For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn't even wear down.</bq> <bq><b>"Writing code" is about making code that runs well. "Software engineering" is about making code that fails well.</b> It's about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It's about making <b>code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced</b>, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:</bq> <bq>[...] any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. <b>The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed.</b> Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – <b>not because the code changed, but because time marched on.</b></bq> <bq>What if the location for any IP address without a defined location is given as the center of the continental USA and any app that doesn't know where it is reports that it is in <b>a house in Kansas, sending dozens of furious (occasionally armed) strangers to that house, insisting that the owners are in possession of their stolen phones and tablets?</b></bq> <bq>The underlying code – the code that uses some once-harmless default to fudge unknown locations – needs to be updated constantly, because the upstream, downstream and adjacent processes connected to it are changing constantly. <b>The longer that code sits there, the more superannuated its original behaviors become, and the more baroque, crufty and obfuscated the patches layered atop of it become.</b></bq> <bq><b>The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents.</b> The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and <b>wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up.</b></bq> <bq>Software engineering requires a very wide "context window," the thing that AI does not, and cannot have. AI has a very narrow and shallow context window, and <b>linear expansions to AI's context window requires geometric expansions in the amount of computational resources the AI consumes</b>:</bq> <bq><b>Writing code that works, without consideration of how it will fail</b>, is a recipe for catastrophe. It is a way to create tech debt at scale. It <b>is shoveling asbestos into the walls of our technological society.</b></bq> <bq>[...] cultivation of "Fingerspitzengefühl" – the "fingertip feeling" that lets you make reasonable guesses about where never before seen pitfalls might emerge. It's a form of <b>process knowledge. It is ineluctable. It is not latent in even the largest corpus of code that you could use as training data:</b></bq> <bq><b>Microsoft is on record as saying that they will grant the Trump administration secret access to all the data in its cloud</b>:</bq> <bq>[...] the fact that software engineers can sometimes make their work better with AI doesn't invalidate the fact that code is a liability, not an asset, and that <b>AI code represents liability production at scale.</b></bq> <bq>In the years since the AI bubble began inflating, <b>we've heard lots of versions of this: AI would create jobs for "prompt engineers"</b> – or even create jobs that we can't imagine, because they won't exist until AI has changed the world beyond recognition.</bq> I just talked to a data scientist who said a colleague is bored to death at his prompt-engineering job. <bq>if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then <b>our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls.</b> There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." <b>At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://marvinh.dev/blog/signals-vs-query-based-compilers/" author="Marvin Hagemeister" source="">Signals vs Query-Based Compilers</a> <bq>The key shift in compilers is to not think of them as just a pipeline of transformations, but as a thing you can run queries on. When a user is typing in their editor the LSP asks the [compiler] what are the suggestions at this specific cursor position in this file? <b>When you click "Go to Definition" on an identifier you're asking the compiler to return the jump target (if any).</b> Essentially, questions are a bunch of queries that you run against your compiler and <b>the compiler should only focus on answering these as quickly as possible and ignore the rest.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://lea.verou.me/blog/2026/web-deps/" author="Lea Verou" source="">Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them?</a> <bq>In case you were not aware, yes, <b>your browser will redownload every single resource anew for every single website (origin) that requests it. Yes, even if it’s exactly the same.</b> This changed to prevent cross-site leaks: malicious websites could exfiltrate information about your past network activity by measuring how long a resource took to download, and thus infer whether it was cached. Those who have looked into this problem claim that there is no other way to <b>prevent these timing attacks</b> other than to actually redownload the resource. No way for the browser to even fake a download by simply delaying the response. Even requiring resources to opt-in (e.g. via CORS) was ruled out, the concern being that websites could then use it as a third-party tracking mechanism. <b>I personally have trouble accepting that such wasteful bandwidth usage was the best balance of tradeoffs for all Web users</b>, including those in emerging economies and different locales[1]. It’s not that I don’t see the risks — it’s that I am acutely aware of the cost, a cost that is disproportionately borne by those not in the Wealthy Western Web. <b>How likely is it that a Web user in Zimbabwe, where 1 GB of bandwidth costs 17% of the median monthly income, would choose to download React or nine weights of Roboto thousands of times to avoid seeing personalized ads?</b> And how patronizing is it for people in California to be making this decision for them?</bq> <bq>By trying to solve your problem with import maps, you now got multiple problems. To sum up, <b>in their current form, import maps don’t eliminate bundlers — they recreate them in JSON form, while adding an HTML dependency and worse latency.</b></bq> <bq><b>Few things must always be part of a language’s standard library, but dependency management is absolutely one of them.</b> Any cognitive overhead should be going into deciding which library to use, not whether to include it and how. This is also actively harming web platform architecture. <b>Because bundlers are so ubiquitous, we have ended up designing the platform around them, when it should be the opposite.</b> For example, because import.meta.url is unreliable when bundlers are used, components have no robust way to link to other resources (styles, images, icons, etc.) relative to themselves, unless these resources can be part of the module tree. So now we are adding features to the web platform that break any reasonable assumption about what HTML, CSS, and JS are, like JS imports for CSS and HTML, which could have been a simple <c>fetch()</c> if web platform features could be relied on. And <b>because using dependencies is nontrivial, we are adding features to the standard library</b> that could have been userland or even browser-provided dependencies. To reiterate, <b>the problem isn’t that bundlers exist — it’s that they are the only viable way to get first-class dependency management on the web.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://avaloniaui.net/blog/net-maui-is-coming-to-linux-and-the-browser-powered-by-avalonia" author="Mike James">.NET MAUI is Coming to Linux and the Browser, Powered by Avalonia</a> <bq>[...] the Avalonia MAUI Backend enables you to <b>keep your MAUI codebase while replacing the rendering layer with Avalonia.</b> The goal is straightforward: take your existing MAUI applications and extend them to additional platforms, while enhancing desktop performance along the way.</bq> <bq>All of this is possible because we have built a version of MAUI that sits on top of <b>Avalonia’s drawn UI model rather than native controls.</b> Not only do you get more platforms and improved performance, your MAUI applications can look and behave consistently whether they are on <b>Windows, macOS, Linux, mobile or running in a browser tab.</b></bq> <bq>Avalonia already has its own thriving ecosystem. We see strong, sustained growth in our community, so <b>why invest this much effort into making MAUI run on top of Avalonia?</b> The honest answer is that we care about .NET client developers first, and about which on ramp they use second. Many teams have already chosen MAUI, which they like and want more from. <b>If we can provide them with Linux and browser support, along with improved desktop performance, without requiring a rewrite, that aligns with our mission to delight developers and solve complex problems.</b> This is not entirely selfless. Building a MAUI backend is also a way for us to learn. <b>Running MAUI on Avalonia highlights what is missing for Avalonia to feel completely natural on mobile, which APIs are problematic, which tooling gaps matter, and where we need to raise our game to stay competitive.</b> The work we are doing here directly contributes to strengthening Avalonia. There is also a long term benefit in familiarity. By using Avalonia as the backend for their existing MAUI apps, <b>developers gain insight into our renderer, capabilities and way of thinking.</b> Some of those teams will quite reasonably stay with MAUI. Others, when they start a new project or need something lower level, <b>may build directly on Avalonia instead.</b> If this backend becomes a bridge that brings more people into the Avalonia ecosystem over time, that is a win. So this project is not about “saving” MAUI from other frameworks. It is about <b>giving existing MAUI developers more headroom and additional platforms, learning from their needs, and ensuring Avalonia is an obvious, competitive choice</b> for whatever they build next.</bq> <bq>We are <b>collaborating with the Flutter team at Google to bring Impeller, their GPU first renderer, to .NET.</b> That work is already in progress and as it lands, the MAUI backend will inherit those gains. The aim is simple: <b>faster rendering, lower battery usage and smoother animations across desktop, mobile and embedded</b>, using the same underlying technology that is pushing Flutter forward.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/" author="Bogdan Ionescu">Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape</a> <bq>[...] the problem was actually between the seat and the steering wheel the whole time. The first implementation read and wrote a single character at a time, which had a massive overhead associated with it. I previously benchmarked semihosting on this device, and I was getting ~20KiB/s, but uIP’s SLIP implementation was designed for very low memory devices, so it was serialising the data byte by byte. <b>We have a whopping 3kiB of RAM to play with, so I added a ring buffer to cache reads from the host and feed them into the SLIP poll function. I also split writes in batches to allow for escaping.</b> Now this is what I call blazingly fast! <b>Pings now take 20ms, no packet loss and a full page loads in about 160ms.</b> This was using almost all of the RAM, but I could also dial down the sizes of the buffer to have more than enough headroom to run other tasks.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2026-01-14-bitemporality/" author="Alex Kladov" source="Tiger Beetle">One for the Treble, Two for the Time</a> <bq>When we record information, mistakes happen. We thought we knew a fact about the world, but were wrong, or there was something we didn’t know then but know now. <b>The art of modelling information across two timelines at once like this is known as bitemporality</b> [...]</bq> <bq>[...] when we <b>logically separate out recording and reporting</b> into two different layers, we <b>no longer have to choose between the immutability of append-only and the ability to fix mistakes or add information.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toik6plpWS8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Toik6plpWS8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know" caption="🎶 Get a New Daddy! 🎶"> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/childs-blow-into-car-breathalyzer-rewarded-with-dicey-trip-to-ice-cream-shop/" author="" source="The Onion">Child’s Blow Into Car Breathalyzer Rewarded With Dicey Trip To Ice Cream Shop</a>