<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</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="#sports">Sports</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2026/06/us-cements-political-capture-of-armenia.html" source="Land Destroyer" author="Brian Berletic">US Cements Political Capture of Armenia as it Advances “Extending Russia” Strategy</a> <bq>For Russia specifically, the RAND Corporation’s 2019 paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” lays out <b>policy options the US has clearly pursued for years leading up to its publication and ever since.</b> These options targeting Russia include those of an economic dimension such as, <b>“hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” as well as geopolitical measures like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine,”</b> “increase support to the Syrian rebels,” “promote regime change in Belarus,” “exploit tensions in the south Caucasus,” “reduce Russian influence in Central Asia,” and “challenge Russian presence in Moldova.”</bq> <bq><b>By “corrupt and autocratic” the NED means a government that does not answer to Washington at the expense of its own national interests</b>, and by “accountable and effective ministries,” the NED means accountable to and effective at serving Washington - even at the cost of Armenia’s own interests.</bq> <bq>[...] the NED and its subsidiaries and European counterparts are not just funding protests, opposition parties, and placing into power client regimes, but are <b>creating a much wider pipeline for transforming young people into pro-Western, pro-American, pro-NATA and pro-EU cadres</b> and manipulate public sentiment into serving US interests at the cost of their own, objective best interests. <b>The political capture of Armenia by the United States mirrors that of Georgia and Serbia in the early 2000s and the more recent political capture of Ukraine in 2014.</b></bq> <bq>The London Guardian in its 2004 article, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” admitted <b>the protests in Ukraine that year were, “an American creation</b>, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to <b>salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes,”</b> that “the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box,” and that “Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia.”</bq> <bq><b>The admitted election interference and political capture of these nations by the United States spanning the entire 21st century has changed the global geopolitical map in Washington’s favor.</b> Yet this process still remains a poorly understood, under-reported, yet an incredibly powerful US tool in its pursuit of primacy and its “insuring no rivals develop.”</bq> <bq>Nations must create educational and training pipelines within their own borders to produce the human resources required to both administer the nation and inform the public of national affairs through the media. <b>Sending young people abroad to the West to study “journalism” or “political science” only ensures their indoctrination by the West</b> and their likely lifelong service to the West when they return home.</bq> <bq>Infrastructure essential to this process such as <b>social media platforms are as important to be controlled within a nation’s borders as are physical roads, borders, shores, and airspace.</b> In the 21st century, allowing US-based social media platforms to dominate any other nation’s information space would be like allowing US troops to mind another nation’s roads, borders, shores, and airspace. If the latter is unthinkable, why is the former still the norm?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-suicidal-rupture-with-the" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Israel’s Suicidal Rupture with the U.S.</a> <bq><b>Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence. It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority.</b> It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests. It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use. <b>It is a menace to the region. It is a menace to itself. And it is a menace to us.</b></bq> <bq>The game is up. <b>The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end.</b> Israel’s inability to read U.S. and global opinion — or its own population, where over 90 percent believe Israel lost its war against Iran — along with its stubborn belief that its old levers of power can still work, illustrate a leadership that has rendered itself deaf, dumb and blind. <b>It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-joke-is-on-us" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Joke is on Us</a> <bq>There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. <b>This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions</b>, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. <b>It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass.</b> It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.</bq> <bq>There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. <b>They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.</b></bq> <bq author="Ece Temelkuran">Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. <b>The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.</b></bq> <bq><b>It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history.</b> It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.</bq> <hr> The U.S. is quite literally Lucy from Peanuts: constantly tricking its friends into kicking a football that it pulls away at the last second, and then selling them psychiatric counseling for the trauma this causes. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/were-expected-to-remember-october" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">We're Expected To Remember October 7 But Never Ask Questions About It</a> <bq><b>Everyone who’s been watching Israel’s behavior since October 7 now understands why Palestinian resistance fighters carried out October 7</b> in the first place.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/29/iran-j29.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US strikes Iran again, as Trump threatens the country “will no longer exist”</a> <bq>Over the weekend, as the bombing resumed, the demands across the political establishment for an escalation of the war only sharpened. On Sunday the editorial board of <b>the Wall Street Journal</b>, a major voice of American finance, declared in its headline that “Iran Is Winning the Battle of Hormuz” and called on Trump to escalate. It <b>dismissed the renewed US strikes as “love taps.”</b> The regime, the board concluded, “is leaving the President a choice: surrender Hormuz to Iranian terror or fight for it, like he always should have once he started the war, and <b>reopen the Strait by force.</b>”</bq> Trump's financial handlers have spoken. <bq>A US official told CBS News on Sunday that no Iranian missile or drone had reached its target and that there were “no U.S. injuries or impacts on U.S. assets.” The statement is in line with earlier US denials about the extent of US military casualties. Two days earlier <b>the Wall Street Journal had published satellite evidence that Iran’s strikes over the four-month war devastated the Fifth Fleet’s home base far beyond anything the Pentagon had admitted.</b> The Fifth Fleet headquarters, a $200 million building, was left “no longer usable”; a dozen other buildings, two satellite communications terminals, the barracks and the main dining hall were hit; and rebuilding the Bahrain base alone, the paper estimated, would cost some $400 million. <b>Across the region more than 20 US sites had been struck, with damage running into the billions.</b> The Pentagon sought to cover up the scale of the damage. The Trump administration <b>pressed commercial satellite companies to restrict access to images of the destruction and declined to give Congress the cost.</b> By mid-March the Navy had quietly evacuated 1,500 sailors and their families from Bahrain to Norfolk, Virginia, and <b>the military is now weighing whether to rebuild the base, move its command centers underground or withdraw from the Gulf altogether.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BJq5XYzpW/" author="Dr. Roy Casagranda" source="Facebook">Did Trump Accidentally Strengthen Iran?</a> The clip talks about how Trump's bungling brought Iran back from the brink of financial and societal collapse. We will build statues to Trump as the guy who not only finally put a fork in U.S.-American empire but also as the guy who finally forced the transition away from fossil fuels. We experience him as a grifter-idiot. Fifty years of sanitizing will work its wonders. You know, like people giving Nixon credit for the EPA these days. They just stopped talking about how vociferously and vocally he hated the Jews and the Blacks. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BLnM-gxj-o" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5BLnM-gxj-o" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Geopolitical Economy Report | Ben Norton" caption="The REAL reason the US fears China"> <bq>[...] <b>big tech corporations from Silicon Valley are paying influencers on social media to spread disinformation against China and to spread propaganda in support of US AI companies.</b> This report reveals that Silicon Valley oligarchs from corporations like OpenAI and Palunteer are funding a super PAC, a political action committee called Leading the Future, which is working with a dark money group called Build American AI. And they are funding influencers on social media to spread this propaganda.</bq> <bq>[...] tech corporations are working closely with the US government to try to criminalize protests and opposition and dissent. <b>They're literally arguing that if you oppose these corporate monopolies in Silicon Valley from destroying your community and destroying the economy, then you are a so-called national security threat and you are supposedly helping China in this new cold war.</b> If you don't believe me, here's another shocking report, or maybe not so shocking report, that was published by the major British newspaper, The Guardian, that reveals how the US Department of Justice is working with Elon Musk, the first trillionaire in history, in order to pollute impoverished communities in the US. This article notes <b>the Trump administration is coming to the defense of Elon Musk in a lawsuit over claims that his artificial intelligence company XAI is polluting residential neighborhoods in North Mississippi.</b> The lawsuit was filed by the NAACP, which is a civil rights organization led by black Americans. And they alleged that XAI and its subsidiary MZXT set up dozens of methane gas turbines to power its data center in Mississippi without air permits. <b>These turbines are emitting toxic pollutants in violation of the Clean Air Act in a low-income majority black community in Mississippi.</b> So the US government is supporting these oligarchs from Silicon Valley as they are polluting impoverished communities. <b>The Department of Justice says this data center is being used to train and develop AI models that are quote critical to the economy and the Department of War end quote.</b> And the deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department said, quote, <b>"The Department of Justice will not sit idly by while private organizations use environmental laws to undermine our national security."</b> End quote. This is absolutely dystopian. The US government is portraying civil rights organizations that are trying to represent average working-class Americans in impoverished communities as national security threats because they don't want impoverished communities to be polluted by these Silicon Valley oligarchs who are a trillionaire now or they have hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth. <b>The US government is literally supporting the richest people in the world against the poorest people in American society.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/29/abundance-jumps-the-shark/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Abundance Jumps the Shark</a> <bq>It is easy to find cases where seemingly pointless regulations blocked projects that most of us would consider good. <b>The problem is figuring out which regulations are pointless.</b> <b>The abundance authors also show little interest in widely abused regulations that benefit the rich.</b> At the top of this list would be the government-granted patent monopolies that make prescription drugs and medical equipment expensive. In almost all cases, drugs and medical equipment would be cheap if sold in a free market, but for whatever reason, <b>“abundance” apparently doesn’t mean cheap drugs.</b> There is a similar story with <b>bankruptcy laws that benefit private equity companies.</b> Under current law, a private equity company can buy a restaurant, retail, or hospital chain, sell off all their assets and then have the chain declare bankruptcy. This leaves the creditors, such as landlords, suppliers, and often workers, out of luck. Meanwhile, the private equity partners can walk away with their money. The bankruptcy law doesn’t hold them liable for the debts they impose on the companies they purchase. <b>These sorts of bankruptcies are a total waste from an economic perspective.</b> And they can redistribute an enormous amount of money to private equity partners, many of whom are very rich. But <b>eliminating this waste, along with other waste in the financial sector, plays no role in abundance.</b></bq> <bq><b>If Vancouver has a problem with high housing costs, it’s that it is an incredibly desirable place to live, and people keep moving there.</b> The population of the city itself grew more than 40 percent from 1991 to 2021. The metro area grew even more rapidly, with growth topping 60 percent. That sort of rapid growth will put upward pressure on housing costs even with very liberal zoning rules. Perhaps if the city had no zoning restrictions, it could make it a less pleasant place to live, and then housing costs would fall. But <b>it seems hard to contend that a city that accommodated a 40 percent increase in its population over three decades has excessively restrictive zoning.</b></bq> <hr> Billionaire cucks are the worst. They’ll get their front half ruined by rape one evening, and show up the next morning begging for the same treatment behind. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-diners-guide-to-mars" source="Mars For The Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">A Diner's Guide to Mars</a> <bq><b>The ISS smells vaguely like a bus station toilet, the ambient noise level is high, there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, and things in general taste different in space.</b> Researchers have known for a while that flavors are altered even aboard commercial airplane flights. <b>Sweet foods in an airline meal will taste less sweet, while umami flavors are enhanced</b>, so passengers order more tomato juice and bloody marys in flight than they would ever consume in the airport lounge.</bq> <bq>[...] the global problem remains unsolved. <b>Short of feeding a crew canned beans and ship’s biscuit, there is no known food system that can keep food unspoiled, nutritionally complete, and palatable for the five years necessary to sustain a Mars-bound crew.</b> What makes the problem especially thorny is the requirement for variety. If we could create a single balanced food (call it Soylent Mars) to meet the necessary nutritional and taste requirements, and feed a crew off of it, it would be one thing. But outside the world of software development, <b>dietary variety seems to be a basic human need</b>, with menu fatigue and concomitant undereating setting in quickly when an adequate selection of foods isn’t available.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <img src="{att_link}img_5375.webp" href="{att_link}img_5375.webp" align="none" caption="The Wallensee in summer of 2026" scale="65%"> The Wallensee is supposed to be deeper than this. You're not supposed to be able to see structures on the bottom of it, as if it were a tropical lagoon. It's pretty ... but there's not enough water. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=153054" author="Jens Berger" source="NachDenkSeiten">Und nun zum Wetter</a> <bq><b>Als ich Kind war, galt bei uns die Niedersachsen die Regel, dass es in der Schule hitzefrei gibt, wenn um 11.00 Uhr morgens mehr als 25 Grad sind.</b> Das war so ungefähr drei oder viermal während meiner Schulzeit der Fall. Am Wochenende fiel mein Außenthermometer auch nachts nicht unter 26 Grad. Es mag ja sein, dass es irgendwann im Paläozoikum tatsächlich in Deutschland wärmer war als heute – aber so alt sind die Boomer, die heute auf Facebook davon überzeugt sind, dass es früher genau so warm war, ja auch noch nicht.</bq> <bq>Sicher, wenn man Rentner ist und ein schönes schattiges Einfamilienhaus, vielleicht ja sogar mit Planschbecken bzw. Pool, besitzt, kann man auch 40 Grad mal über ein paar Tage gut aushalten. <b>Was aber ist mit den Rentnern, die in den kleinen Dachgeschosswohnungen der oft auch schlecht isolierten Mietskasernen leben.</b> Was ist mit meiner Frau, die an diesem Wochenende im Krankenhaus ihren Dienst verrichten musste – <b>bei Innentemperaturen über 35 Grad, ohne Klimaanlage, ohne Lüftung?</b></bq> <bq>st der Kulturkampf noch so schrill – es ist ja auch schon fast beruhigend, dass alle größeren Parteien eine „Lösung“ für das Problem haben, die <b>auf den gleichen Mechanismus setzt: Individueller Konsum.</b> Egal ob Wärmepumpe, eAuto, Solaranlage, Klimaanlage oder Notstromaggregat – <b>Hauptsache irgendwas kaufen.</b> Mit welchem Geld bleibt unbeantwortet und <b>die Verantwortung wird dabei mehr oder weniger geschickt von der politischen auf die persönliche Ebene verlagert.</b></bq> <bq>[...] es sollte darum gehen, wie wir durch infrastrukturelle Maßnahmen, wie beispielsweise <b>Aufforstung, Renaturierung versiegelter Flächen, Begrünung städtischer Gebiete und eine zeitgemäße Gebäudetechnik</b>, die im Winter heißen und im Sommer kühlen kann, <b>das Land fit für heiße Tage machen.</b> Denn auch wenn wir davon sicher nicht aussterben – es wird sie künftig häufiger geben.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFTV0U_kV08" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/VFTV0U_kV08" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE"> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/yanis-varoufakiss-technofeudalism-a-review-by-boris-kagarlitsky/" source="ZNetwork" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">Yanis Varoufakis’s ‘Technofeudalism’: A Review by Boris Kagarlitsky</a> <bq><b>When the crisis erupted across the world in 2008</b> (having already struck the US housing market and banking sector in 2007), most analysts, including many liberals, agreed that major structural reforms were inevitable, many of them resembling proposals long advocated by the left. Yet this did not happen. The crisis <b>was “extinguished” simply by flooding the economy with money.</b></bq> <bq>The defining feature of the anti-crisis policies of 2008-2010 was that <b>generous financial support for banks and corporations was accompanied by austerity measures imposed on ordinary citizens.</b> As a result, the rescued companies and financial sector as a whole found themselves sitting on mountains of money with nowhere productive to invest it. <b>Impoverished households and governments preoccupied with saving the banking system were no longer generating sufficient demand for goods.</b></bq> <bq>I am willing to believe that a peasant might have felt a certain satisfaction when looking over a well-ploughed field. Modern users, however, often derive genuine enjoyment from what they do online. More importantly, they themselves decide what to post, what information to seek and how to interact. <b>Anyone familiar with psychology can easily identify manipulation, incentives and subtle mechanisms encouraging people to behave in particular ways. There is certainly no freedom here in any deep existential sense.</b> Yet what matters for our discussion is the absence of direct coercion.</bq> Does it? I guess? The result is the same. It's as if you can get away with ruining society if you just follow tge rules, even if you made them. <bq><b>In Russian history, serfdom fully triumphed only after the abolition of Yuriev Day, which had allowed peasants to transfer from one estate to another.</b> Landowners themselves sometimes took advantage of this mobility, dismissing unsatisfactory workers or luring peasants away from neighbouring estates.</bq> <bq>Soviet scholars Marat Cheshkov and Viktor Krylov argued as early as the late 1970s that the emerging forms of production increasingly draw upon dimensions of human activity that cannot easily be separated into discrete categories of labour and leisure. <b>The object of exploitation is no longer simply labour power but the broader human capacity for communication, creativity, knowledge and self-expression.</b> On the surface, labour appears less alienated. Yet in essence, alienation reaches a new and deeper level.</bq> <bq>[...] whenever someone asks me, “But what would it actually look like?”, I usually suggest that they formulate five or six issues that genuinely concern them and remain unresolved under contemporary society. The list may range from climate change and migration to academic freedom and access to digital platforms. <b>I then explain, one by one, how the left proposes to address these specific problems. If my answers appear reasonable, attractive and, above all, convincing, I simply say: “Now put all of that together.” The picture that emerges is the image of a new society.</b></bq> <bq><b>Fifteenth-century Italy was filled with intellectuals of Byzantine origin, many of whom left behind a rich theoretical legacy that is, unfortunately, largely forgotten today.</b> Why do I mention all this? Not merely to conclude with the banal observation that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Rather, it is to remind us that <b>despite all the conflicts, crises and suffering of that earlier transitional era, humanity eventually emerged into a social order that we now criticise severely, yet which nevertheless opened new possibilities for development and freedom.</b> One may hope that the same will happen again.</bq> <bq><b>The legends of Robin Hood</b> are not primarily about robbing the rich to give to the poor. They describe, in considerable detail, <b>resistance to monetisation and privatisation.</b> This included resistance to the collection of taxes in money, one of the most important instruments of market-oriented reforms promoted by the state. <b>The chronology of the Robin Hood stories is revealing. In earlier versions, the events are set in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. In later retellings, however, they are moved backward to the late 12th and early 13th centuries.</b> Why? Presumably because by the late 14th century <b>resistance to monetisation had largely been defeated, and these struggles had already become “the tales of a distant past.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/le-bon-coup" author="Hélène Le Goff" source="The Hinternet">Le bon coup!</a> <bq>The reasons for the current slump, now, we believe, are several, but the greatest of them is surely <b>the spread of automatically generated writing, which</b>, even if we do not rely on it ourselves —we at The Hinternet are in fact much more likely to try, for our own idiosyncratic reasons, to pass off human writing as if it were machine writing, than to attempt the opposite and more common sort of legerdemain— <b>has nonetheless degraded the whole environment.</b> It is hard to sell tickets to your garden, no matter how meticulously manicured, when you’re <b>living in kudzu-infested country.</b> We think this great historical transformation is actually rather interesting — even as it is harming us. In fact we have recently developed a habit in our editorial offices of seeking out the very worst Substack operations, and trying to make some sense of what the human factor behind their evidently automated output might be. <b>One thing that strikes us is that many of these sites, while automated, are plainly not intended in a spirit of cynical profiteering or disinformation</b> or anything like that, but rather as <b>the sincere self-expression of people who previously would not have been able to express themselves in written language at all</b>, and are now very happy to do so. We are reminded of a Wall Street Journal article from 2018 about the elderly people in India who were so overjoyed to be able to take to social media to share those kitsch “Good Morning!” memes with sunsets and coffee and roses and so on that they ended up repeatedly crashing the country’s energy infrastructure. <b>One sweet old villager in Tamil Nadu was quoted as saying something like: “Finally I have a way to express the good cheer and optimism that I feel inside me!”</b></bq> <bq>Do this man’s readers tear him apart for being a trite and lazy shirker of our solemn duty to be each the master of our own words? Not at all! Instead <b>we discover, again, hundreds of comments, vastly more comments than any Hinternet piece has ever received, encouraging the “author” to keep up the great work</b>: “Loved reading this!”; “A most charming read, and all the more because my husband and I feel the same way”; “I need to let you know how much I enjoy your posts!”; and so on. This is, for better or worse, just what Substack primarily is now. And it seems to us that while one way of dealing with it, or not dealing with it, is to shrug it off as “slopification”, another way, more rigorously historically informed, is to <b>consider that just as automated printing became the catalyst for aspiration to universal readership over the past centuries, so now automated text-generation might best be understood as having brought about, finally, the conditions for the massification of authorship.</b> And of course those of us who learned the ancient art of writing the hard way, and whose entire identity is wrapped up in writing as a sort of spiritual practice, are <b>not at all happy to find hoi polloi crashing our venues and, via their mechanical prostheses</b>, telling us of all the different things that are “quietly” taking place in their lives. But what is there really to say? Those who wish, or indeed those who must, will continue to find outlets for the more rarefied and hard-won expression of the condition of their souls and so on. But they’re going to have to adapt, <b>we’re going to have to adapt, and not to suppose that even an ancient practice is necessarily an eternal one.</b></bq> <bq>Product “placement” in the minimal sense is really just the beginning — we could for example <b>work your product into a complicated long-developing metafiction, building it into the Hinternet universe in a way that would not even consciously register as “advertising” to our readers at all.</b> We would simply go straight to work on their understanding of reality itself — and <b>your product would come, we expect, over time, to serve as one of the great pillars of that reality.</b></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/recovered-memories-arent-real" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Recovered Memories Aren't Real</a> <bq>What exists instead is something far more ordinary and far more dangerous, a memory system that is reconstructive, suggestible - and, I’m afraid, <b>perfectly capable of manufacturing detailed, emotionally convincing recollections of events that never happened.</b></bq> <bq>It’s in the legal system that recovered memory theory destroyed real families and imprisoned real people for crimes that the available evidence suggests never occurred. These scenarios ruin lives and prompt unjustifiable prison sentences, and they do so <b>based on claims that cannot be subject to critical review and for which there can necessarily be no physical evidence.</b> It’s nightmarish.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>supporting false allegations can never help real victims</b>, and yes, there have been dozens of such allegations that have been proven false. The only way to fight sex crimes, against minors or anyone else, is with a <b>fierce attachment to truth, fairness, and to due process.</b> Recovered memories can’t clear that bar.</bq> <bq>By the late twentieth century it had hardened into something close to common sense: the assumption that buried trauma is not just possible but likely, and that the work of healing means digging it back up, is just one of those social beliefs that you don’t need to justify. <b>Everybody knows that trauma makes us repress memories. Scientific rigor need not apply.</b></bq> <bq>The myth survives not because the evidence is genuinely balanced but because there hasn’t been enough corrective education, particularly in <b>the media, which seems collectively unwilling to acknowledge that recovered memories aren’t real</b> because they fear being screamed at by online advocates.</bq> <bq><b>The recovered-memory movement of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t merely lose a scholarly debate; it ruined lives.</b> As a clinician writing in Psychology Today points out, families were torn apart and people went to prison for decades on the strength of “recovered” memories, while <b>the FBI found no evidence for the supposed organized satanic abuse cults that many such memories described.</b> There are dozens and dozens of legal cases where recovered memories were invoked irresponsibly, including as part of the 1980s Satanic sex abuse panic. And if we look at some of the documented cases, you’ll see how Kafkaesque and contrary to due process this all can be.</bq> <bq>[...] the defense had been wrongly barred from showing that every detail Eileen “remembered” had appeared in contemporary newspaper coverage, and her sister later testified that <b>both daughters had been hypnotized (a technique that can render testimony legally inadmissible) and had lied about it under oath.</b></bq> <hr> I heard two teachers discussing a student on the train on my five minute train ride home this afternoon. And the one lady, she had such a great teacher‘s voice. She was speaking Swiss German, but with like a high German like precision to it that you knew immediately she was a teacher, and she was telling her colleague about a student who was going to fail her class. So she went to him and said look you can do an extra unit and he said oh that would be great and then she said OK and he walks away and she had to like take a few quick steps to catch up to him and say don’t you wanna know what the extra unit is And he didn’t even seem to be too interested in it but she told him anyway because like how is he going to do it if he doesn’t know what it is? A week later, a day before it was due, she saw him and asked him how it was going and he said it’s great. It’s fine. The next day nothing. no assignment. nothing handed in. She didn’t see him for two weeks. when she did see him two weeks later she said hey you know you’re gonna fail this class. you never handed anything in and he goes oh yeah no I forgot about it. I didn’t even start it. and she said yeah but you said you were doing fine when I saw you the day before it was due. you said you didn’t need any help. oh yeah, …. so am I gonna pass the class? She was just stunned into silence. <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> A colleague forwarded me the following response from a product-support team for a product we use. <bq>Thank you for the update and for letting us know that you're still experiencing the issue. We've received your report and are currently investigating this further with our engineering team. Based on the information you've shared, it appears that there may be an additional issue beyond the one addressed in the recent integration update. Our team is actively working on a new solution, and we'll keep you informed as soon as we have more information to share. We appreciate your patience and the time you've taken to report this. Please feel free to continue sharing any observations or details that may help with the investigation.</bq> I wrote back the following, Translation: <ul>We don’t actually have a testing process of our own.
 So, when we found a bug that was shaped like the support issue that you’d filed, we just assumed that it was the only bug in the system.
 Because, you see, when you don’t test, you don’t find bugs, and then, <i>ipso facto</i>, you don’t have bugs. <i>Voila!</i> Anyway, thanks for continuing to pay us to externalize the cost of testing our product.</ul> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> The thing about AI is that there is something useful there but it's not enough for it to be useful because it's not meant to be useful. It's meant to be the next big thing that guarantees 10 years of 5%+ growth for seven companies that have swollen up to multi-trillion-dollar valuations by consuming everything else in the world. There is nowhere left for them to grow, but they cannot stop pretending there is, or they will deflate like a soufflé. So that's why everyone at companies like mine---which ordinarily had no interest in being ahead of the curve on technologies because it was too expensive and much too far outside of their area of expertise---is talking about how to use moar AI. There is no other reason why this would be of burning interest right now, when there are so many other areas to focus on. But the global economy is insisting on it, and the media class has sprung to do the job that they always do, which is to serve the moneyed class's interests. And so, we get a never-ending klaxon that orders everyone to buy AI or die trying. Or rather, if you don't buy AI, then your business is doomed. Look at Oracle, Google, and Microsoft: they're hemorrhaging employees and it's all because they're more efficient now! Or are they just pumping short-term gain to the stock market so that they can borrow more money to pump into the AI con, for which their employee terminations can simultaneously act as marketing? Maybe, right? You can't put it past them, right? Unless you're a dupe and a sap and you believe that they're all just humbly trying to provide value. Is anyone explaining how these companies became more productive? Of course not. They just did. Because AI. However, if you buy AI, then you, too, will benefit from increased productivity, somehow. And, if you don't, it will be your own fault. Get better at prompting, I guess. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GQ2RP-25gM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0GQ2RP-25gM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Computerphile | David Kelly" caption="Why AI is like a (Clever Hans) Horse"> <bq>I suppose the point is---these models---they <i>do</i> work. I mean, the accuracy of this model is very good. But it's not working the way a human wants it to work, or <b>certainly not working in a way that a human understands.</b> I think that's a reasonable assertion. And so, Stearm's [?] paper---when he first looked at it and used it---is fourteen years old. He said, look, the models I'm testing...<b>these are horses; they're not understanding music. Now, it's fourteen years later, and we haven't got any better. If anything, it's probably worse.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/text-ai-watermarks/" author="Sean Goedecke" source="">Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove</a> <bq>Claude Code was definitely doing this to tag suspicious requests from Chinese users (exploiting homoglyphs for the ’ character in “Today’s date”, though they’ve since walked that back). In the last few years, <b>I’ve noticed that when I copy blocks of text from ChatGPT and paste them into VSCode, sometimes VSCode marks some or all of the spaces as unusual Unicode characters.</b> Are OpenAI and Anthropic using homoglyphs as an AI-generated watermark? I’m not sure. But they’re definitely using homoglyphs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-i-was-not-allowed-to-type" author="Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University" source="In Preparation">Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination</a> <bq>I walked into the room. I saw the whiteboard. I saw the markers. And then I placed my laptop on the table, opened a browser window to ChatGPT, and prepared to do what I do every single day in my actual scientific practice: <b>type a prompt and receive a coherent, well-structured response that I would then lightly edit and present as my own thinking.</b> The room went silent. “What are you doing?” asked the search committee chair. “I’m preparing to answer your questions,” I said. “With ChatGPT?” “Yes,” I said. “How else would I do it?” <b>Apparently, “how else would I do it” is “from memory, using only my brain, like some kind of medieval peasant.”</b> This was news to me.</bq> <bq>My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore. When I try to think without a prompt box in front of me, my mind returns only a vague sense of fog and the faint echo of a cursor blinking. <b>My thoughts are not organized into paragraphs. They do not have topic sentences. They are just fragments. Impressions. My job is just… prompt.</b></bq> <bq>Some will say I should have prepared better. To them I ask: prepared how? By memorizing things? By practicing drawing pathways by hand like some kind of monk illuminating a manuscript? <b>The whole point of AI tools is that I no longer need to retain information in my biological memory.</b> My biological memory is for other things now. Important things. Like my Netflix password and the location of my car in parking structures.</bq> <bq>I am now applying to industry positions, where I am told the culture is more accepting of AI-augmented cognition. <b>Several companies have expressed interest in my ability to rapidly generate and synthesize information</b>, which is corporate-speak for “type prompts quickly.” I am <b>optimistic about my prospects.</b></bq> <bq>Dr. Rachel Simmons is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where her research focuses on something to do with gene regulation that <b>she could explain in detail if you would just let her open her laptop for thirty seconds.</b></bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/06/26/at-the-crucible-snookers-world-series/" source="The Paris Review" author="Julian Waddell">At the Crucible: Snooker’s World Series</a> <bq><b>Last year, more people in China watched the final of the World Snooker Championship than Americans watched the Super Bowl.</b></bq> <bq>While a pool table can range from seven to nine feet long, <b>a snooker table spans twelve feet of green baize.</b> In place of five-inch pockets, <b>players aim for targets just three and a half inches wide.</b></bq> <bq>A “maximum” is a score of 147, achievable only when players exclusively pocket the black ball (worth seven points) after each red. <b>After a successful maximum, the referee removes one white glove to shake the player’s hand.</b></bq> <bq>[...] attendance could accurately be described as near geriatric. <b>Snooker fandom has translated poorly across the generations in Britain. Only two British players younger than thirty-four qualified for the World Championship this year.</b> In China, however, the sport has grown exponentially over the past decade. <b>Three hundred thousand snooker halls now line city streets across Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.</b> As attention to the sport shifts across the globe, tournaments now regularly pit a slate of aging UK stars against <b>a flock of young Chinese players that have suddenly begun to dominate the game.</b></bq> <bq>Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. <b>He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler.</b> His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, <b>Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings.</b> During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. <b>He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title.</b></bq> <bq><b>Williams is less uptight. In 2018 he promised that if he won the world championship, he would give the ensuing press conference naked.</b> After defeating Higgins, he followed through. He has been seen closing his eyes before taking a shot or shooting one-handed. <b>Before last year’s World Championship, he revealed that he was dealing with eyesight issues. He finished as runner-up.</b></bq> <bq><b>O’Sullivan, a seven-time world champion, is the greatest snooker player of all time.</b> He is so much more successful and so much more famous than any other player who has ever played. No one approaches the game quite like him. <b>O’Sullivan aggressively takes on shots with such speed that referees sometimes struggle to keep up.</b></bq> <bq>Sheffield remains the destination for any aspiring Chinese star; <b>Junhui has lived there full-time since 2006, running a snooker academy where Chinese players train for the Crucible.</b></bq> <bq><b>Fans are mercenaries, rooting for the game itself.</b></bq> <bq>Higgins overcame a large early deficit against O’Sullivan, ultimately advancing to the semifinals, where he lost in his hundredth Crucible match to Shaun Murphy, a slightly younger Brit who’d last won in 2005. <b>Hossein Vafaei—the only Iranian to ever compete in the tournament—defeated Judd Trump, the number one ranked player, before falling to Wu Yize, a twenty-two-year-old from Lanzhou making his third Crucible appearance.</b> Wu’s semifinal match with Mark Allen featured one of the most shocking missed blacks in tournament history, allowing Wu to emerge victorious.</bq> <hr> A recent conversation with a friend about endurance sports, specifically cycling in the heat. They asked, <bq>Do they even make changes to the Tour de France for the heat?</bq> Sometimes they make changes for the weather, yes. But it's usually for danger related to storms. Probably, they would do something to protect riders from themselves if they had had to ride this week, for example. [For context, Europe had its worst heat wave in recorded history for nine days at the end of June.] <bq>Right crazy</bq> The final stage of the Tour de Suisse in the south on Sunday was very hot. The ladies were more visibly affected but the peloton for the men exploded as well, leaving half-corpses wobbling their (comparatively) slow way up the long HC mountain pass. They were all hump-backed, with ice packs stuffed into the backs of their jerseys. <bq>So hard to even breathe when you bonk out in the heat</bq> You can train it but everyone has their own limit. My tolerance for heat is relatively high. <bq>You really have to look at the heart rate right?</bq> That's a good indicator, yes. Since you sweat more, you have to make sure you keep electrolytes topped up so you don't cramp up on longer rides. <bq>Right</bq> Like my max heart rate on Tuesday's late-afternoon ride was 171, which is quite high for an easy ride out. The heart pumps harder to slough off heat. But I'm not very strict on electrolytes, etc. There are people who go overboard, thinking they can fix everything with tech. As usual, once you've got the basics covered, everything else is up to your fitness / stamina level (also possibly affected by how well you've slept, which other exercise you've done, how well you've eaten) and your mental toughness. Mind over matter answers a lot of questions. Jens Voigt used to have a sticker on his bike's top bar that just read, "shut up legs." <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/video/2026/06/24/mainstream-media-whines-about-europeans-loving-america/" author="Amber Duke, Robby Soave" source="Reason">Mainstream Media Whines About Europeans Loving America</a> <bq>World Cup visitors enjoying America's charms—from Buc-ee's and Big Gulps to air conditioning.</bq> I don't think this is quite the win that they authors think it is. Shitty people love slumming every once in a while. Europeans like slumming it in the colonies. It's like when people go to Vegas or Thailand: you do whatever you want when you're there. I saw the same dynamic in Barcelona: tourists were filthy bastards there in a way that they almost certainly weren't at home. Being the girl who takes it in the behind isn't the long-term win you think it is. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/03/the-empire-loses-the-ball/" author="Troy Nahumko" source="CounterPunch">The Empire Loses the Ball</a> <bq><b>Football escaped because unlike cricket or polo or rowing, it demanded almost nothing.</b> A wall. A street. A beach. A patch of dirt. Two stones for goalposts. Empire exported the rules. Poverty perfected the improvisation. And now the improvisation is winning, which is only a surprise if you spent the last century confusing the ownership of the game with the ownership of the gift. Football was never really beautiful because of tactics or trophies or famous stadiums. It is beautiful because <b>the ball possesses an almost supernatural contempt for hierarchy.</b> It requires almost no infrastructure. It can make a billionaire cry. It can make a shepherd immortal. It can make the descendants of empire spend ninety minutes chasing shadows cast by children whose <b>grandparents were told, clearly and repeatedly, that they belonged only at the margins of the story.</b></bq> A pity that Senegal couldn't hold their late, two-goal lead over Belgium. I can't lament Algeria's inability to put together a plan against a lackluster Switzerland, though. 😅