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Links and Notes for August 21st, 2026

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#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="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/our-entire-civilization-is-run-by" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Our Entire Civilization Is Run By Oligarchs And Empire Managers — And Other Notes</a> <bq>I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to like Israel.</bq> <bq>The Guardian has published an open letter addressed “to Iran’s political prisoners” from big-name western leftists including Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello. Their screed frames Iran as being equally immoral as the US empire and criticizes anti-imperialists who refuse to condemn Iran in the middle of an imperialist war of aggression against the Islamic Republic.</bq> <bq>I don’t care who you are, if your “anti-imperialism” leads you to attack the same governments as the CIA and the US State Department, then you’re just another imperialist.</bq> I think that this is essentially correct. Of course you should condemn Iran's continued persecution of political opposition and use of capital punishment. But the timing is odd. You don't have to suspend your condemnation indefinitely or even temporarily but you do have to read the room. There is a far worse evil being perpetrated on that country and its people from the outside that from the inside. FFS. <bq>It’s so obnoxious and disgusting to be an American and accuse empire-targeted countries of tyranny. This is like being a German in 1940 and spending your energy decrying human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. You live in the heart of the empire, and yet you’re moving your crosshairs away from the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth to denounce one of the few remaining nations who’ve resisted being absorbed into its power umbrella? Fuck off. Shut the fuck up you ridiculous wanker. I cannot stand all these western “leftists” and “anarchists” who insist on placing the western empire on equal or near-equal footing with the governments it targets. All they do is nullify anti-war sentiment and help grease the wheels for the imperial propaganda machine by legitimizing militarist narratives about how the people need rescuing from the evil regime and giving uninformed leftists the false impression that we’re watching two equally evil forces battling it out. Stop being pro bono Pentagon propagandists and get your shit together, assholes.</bq> <bq>The answer to the question “Why is that terrible thing happening?” is usually “Because it makes some rich white guys wealthier” or “Because it helps shore up US planetary domination” or “Because Israel wants it,” and it’s often some combination of all three.</bq> <bq>Genocidal apartheid states should not exist and do not have a right to exist. I said this on Twitter the other day and someone yelled at me for saying terrible things about Israel. I replied, “How did you know I was talking about Israel?”</bq> <bq>We live in a highly controlled and indoctrinated society where people are aggressively propagandized by the powerful to believe things which benefit the powerful. It is not safe to vote with the majority in such a civilization. The mainstream worldviews we are given to choose from are made of pure power-serving bullshit. This isn’t a comment on religion itself; I personally couldn’t care less if you are religious. I’m just saying in an insane society like the one we live in, you’ve got to have the courage to stand on your own and rely on your own reasoning. You might make mistakes, but figuring it out on your own has a much higher probability of finding the truth than following the herd while trapped inside a mind-controlled dystopia.</bq> Or, if not the truth, at the very least, finding a moral path. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/22/why-so-many-countries-around-the-world-quietly-root-for-iran/" author="Trita Parsi" source="Scheer Post">Why So Many Countries Around The World Quietly Root For Iran</a> <bq>There is relief that aggression and violations of international law did not pay off for the US and Israel in Iran, just as they didn’t for Russia in Ukraine. Venezuela was, in the eyes of many, a terrifying case. Regardless of one’s views of Maduro, the idea that a superpower could surgically kidnap the head of state of another country, install its favored ruler—who must now get her social media posts approved by the US Secretary of State—and gleefully announce that Venezuela is now American territory was petrifying to a lot of countries. So was the fact that European leaders praised the regime-change operation while dismissing concerns about its legality.</bq> <bq>We saw a variation of this in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The vast majority of countries in the Global South sympathized with Ukraine for obvious reasons, even if they also placed some blame on NATO. But they did not see Russia as a threat to themselves, because Russia lacked the capacity to replicate its invasion of Ukraine in Africa, for instance. Then Washington cut Russia off from the international financial system within five days, and alarm bells rang in capitals around the world. Not because they sympathized with Russia or believed the sanctions were unwarranted, but because the US had demonstrated that it could devastate economies around the world within days, given their dependence on the dollar for trade. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed no comparable vulnerability of Global South states to Russian designs. Washington’s swift sanctions response, however, revealed a massive vulnerability to American whims and capabilities.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/28/paob-a28.html" author="Jacob Crosse" source="WSWS">Trump sends second deportation flight to Haiti as ICE kidnaps nearly 50,000 in July</a> <bq>Thursday’s flight was the second from the United States to Haiti in seven days. Last Thursday, 161 people were sent to the impoverished Caribbean nation, including individuals who had never lived there and were designated Haitian solely through their parentage. Many concealed their faces after leaving the plane out of fear that they or their relatives could be identified and targeted by armed gangs. Until now, US deportation flights to Haiti had occurred roughly once a month. Documents obtained by the New York Times show that the Trump administration plans to begin operating them weekly in order to “more quickly expel thousands of Haitians” whose legal status was eliminated this summer.</bq> <bq>Newly released federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project confirm that ICE kidnapped 49,571 people in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term and a 15 percent increase over June. A majority of those arrested, 51 percent, had neither a criminal conviction nor a pending charge. Only about 4 percent had previously been convicted of a violent crime. The same data show that nearly 34,000 people were deported during July, an average of approximately 1,100 every day. Rather than retreating after the mass opposition provoked by its murderous occupation of Minneapolis, the administration has shifted toward less visible arrests at traffic stops, immigration appointments, airports and workplaces. Local police increasingly carry out these kidnappings through the rapidly expanding 287(g) program.</bq> <bq>The Castro case is a classic example of class justice. Immigrants and even US citizens who have committed no crime are violently assaulted, kidnapped, imprisoned for months or gunned down in the streets. The agents responsible for these crimes are shielded from accountability. Even in the exceptional case in which an agent faces state charges supported by overwhelming evidence, the political and judicial apparatus intervenes to set him free.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/all-mainstream-comedy-helps-trump" author="Lee Camp" source="Daily Dose of Sanity">The Corporate Comedy That Mocks Trump Actually Solidifies US Imperial Aims</a> <bq>Hedges points to Gramsci’s alternative to our modern corporate-supported satire:<bq>Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell.</bq>Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Maher, SNL, the Daily Show, and the few stand-up comics with million-dollar comedy specials who occasionally address America’s socioeconomic or geopolitical realities — none of them tear apart the core “myths and ideologies” that allow our sociopathic system to operate. The comedians I looked up to as a young comic and continue to learn from today (even though they’re gone) did just that. George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, etc.</bq> <bq>[...] most censorship against anti-corporate comedy takes the form of a quiet, backroom shadow-banning. For example, the only reason we know about Bill Hicks’ Letterman appearance censorship is that Hicks had already filmed the segment before it was blacked out. In most cases, late-night show bookers tell the comics to cut out the offending material long before it’s ever filmed. As an anti-capitalist anti-imperialist comedian, I’ve never been welcome on the prime late-night shows to begin with. They didn’t need to ban me because they would never allow my type near their stage.</bq> <bq>[...] those TV shows lead liberal Americans to believe all will be right with the United States once the offending characters are removed or term-limited. Of course, this is laughable. Of the roughly 6 million innocent people killed by America’s Global War on Terror, as many were murdered during the Obama presidency as the Bush presidency. The fascist dumpster fire of America’s police state was nearly as strong and unhinged under Biden as under Trump. Famously, Biden helped craft and push through the 1994 crime bill that destroyed the lives of millions of Americans and made the US the world’s largest prison state. We still proudly hold that title.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/right-wingers-want-every-woman-to-be-a-mom-and-also-hate-moms-now" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Right-wingers want every woman to be a mom and also hate moms now</a> <bq>I’ve been waiting for a company to finally connect all the dots here. I’ve written before that the end point of consumer social media is a permanent flow, or goon, state. Time-on-site metrics have led every major platform to simultaneously morph into basically Keno, a TV screen that hypnotizes you into gambling.. Or, I suppose, it’s like if you put slot machines in a strip club that was also cable news or Bravo or whatever. Anyways, I’ve started calling this murky netherworld of livestreaming and gambling apps “Chudtech” — Kick, Kalshi, Polymarket, Pump Fun Go, Duel. Infinite slop feeds the country’s vast population of sweatpants men can stare at in their goon caves all day long. And, finally, a company has bundled it all together.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/22/dsbu-a22.html" author="Tom Hall" source="WSWS">The US bond market crisis and the coming eruption of class struggle</a> <bq>Federal debt crossed $40 trillion this week, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000—and up from $38 trillion as recently as last October. Interest payments reached $963 billion during the first 10 months of the fiscal year, about $200 billion more than military spending and slightly more than Medicare. As yields rise, the government must pay more to refinance maturing debt. That increases the interest bill, requires still more borrowing and places still greater pressure on the bond market. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations accumulated the debt through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, decades of unending war and repeated rescues of the banks and financial markets. After the crashes of 2008 and 2020, the government and Federal Reserve supplied trillions of dollars to protect the fortunes of the oligarchy and fuel another surge in stock prices, corporate debt and speculation.</bq> <bq>Those supposedly modest measures will take more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program and $187 billion from food assistance over the next decade. Food stamp enrollment fell by more than 4.5 million people—11 percent, the steepest decline since 1997—between the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025 and April, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. After enhanced health insurance subsidies expired on January 1, market place enrollment fell by more than a million, and the average monthly premium paid by enrollees rose from $113 to $178. If these are “modest,” then it means that Wall Street regards them as only a down payment on wholesale attacks on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.</bq> <bq>The wealth of America’s 977 billionaires rose by $2.2 trillion in the year to June, reaching $9.24 trillion, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness. But it goes without saying that any solution to the debt crisis which threatens the wealth of the oligarchy will not be considered. The demands for austerity are determined not merely by subjective greed but by the deep crisis of American and world capitalism. The financial oligarchy can defend the immense mass of fictitious wealth only by continuously driving down the living standards of the working class at home and seizing foreign markets, resources and supply chains abroad.</bq> <bq>The [choice] confronting humanity is socialism or barbarism. The fight to defend jobs, living standards and social rights leads directly to the question of which class controls society and whose interests govern economic life. The working class must take control of the banks and major corporations, expropriate the oligarchy and reorganize production to meet human need rather than private profit. That is the program of socialism.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/" author="Jennifer Ouellette" source="Ars Technica"></a> <bq>They tracked a third cube to Harvard University, where it regularly gets passed around to students in introductory physics classes as a curiosity. (The cubes are only slightly radioactive and don’t pose a health concern, according to Koeth. Since uranium is so dense, “It winds up shielding itself,” he said. “The radiation you measure from it is only coming from the surface.”)</bq> <bq>Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum. That’s where the group built the B-VIII reactor. It resembled an “ominous chandelier,” per Koeth, because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure.</bq> <bq>Germany’s secretive, isolationist approach actually hampered their nuclear program, because the two groups weren’t sharing information or resources.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/27/rotu-a27.html" author="Rohantha De Silva" source="WSWS">Nepal suffers devastating flooding</a> <bq>A significant portion of a glacier’s lower end broke away at an elevation of around 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), dropping 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) onto the valley floor and accumulating rock and debris as it fell. The resulting mudslide traveled at about 50 metres (164 feet) per second. The collapsing mass appears to have swept into the Lhende Khola, which feeds into the Bhote Koshi and then the Trishuli River, producing a destructive surge downstream across the Nepal–Tibet border.</bq> <bq>The scale of the death and destruction cannot be explained by geology or weather alone. It is the product of climate change, decades of state neglect and the subordination of public safety to profit and the budgetary demands of capitalism. Nature does not pay attention to the nation-state system created by capitalism. The tragedy, originating on the Chinese side but devastating Nepal downstream, highlights the irrationality of the nation-state system, which must be abolished to build an effective defense against such tragedies. </bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9D1nf1p_Y" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/6v9D1nf1p_Y" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="NPRMusic" caption="'Weird Al' Yankovic: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert From The Archives"> The man is a genius. He just did another one recently but this one from 16 years ago is so much better. The set list is inspired. CNR is so good acoustic. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI8njtbPwdk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/BI8njtbPwdk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Between the Buried and Me" caption="Bicycle Race"> This is an awesome cover. However, the original by Queen has one of the world's greatest videos that is somehow and mysteriously uncensored. It featured dozens of naked women riding bicycles. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt0V0_1MS0Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xt0V0_1MS0Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Queen" caption="Bicycle Race (Official Video)"> Fuck, the 70s were cool. Look at how happy and healthy everyone looks. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/bai-lan-a-refusal-to-live-like-a" author="Žižek Goads and Prods" source="Slavoj Žižek">BAI LAN: A REFUSAL TO LIVE LIKE A TURTLE ON ITS BACK</a> <bq>[...] a Jewish joke from just before Hitler took power.<bq>Two Jews meet and discuss what newspapers they read. The first says: “I read a pro-Jewish liberal daily, which informs me of the dangers facing Jews today in Germany: we are beaten, thrown out of places, boycotted …” The other replies: “I much prefer to read Streicher’s Der Stürmer.” “Why? Are you crazy? It is full of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda …” “Yes, but I like to hear some good news. The pro-Jewish daily brings only bad news about us—how we are persecuted, beaten, harassed—but Der Stürmer repeats again and again that we Jews really control the world, manipulate others and exploit them!”</bq>The parallel is clear: the majority of my critics present me as a pseudo-leftist, a slave of big capital, claiming that Soros came to Ljubljana to give me orders, while Mauro presents me as a secret master visited by Soros so that I could give him and Mamdani orders on how to act.</bq> <bq>Consider another phenomenon: in July 2024, the media reported on a growing number of Chinese workers swapping high-pressure office jobs for flexible blue-collar work. Li, 27, from Wuhan, said:<bq>“I like cleaning up. As living standards improve across the country, the demand for housekeeping services is also surging, with an ever-expanding market. The change it brings is that my head no longer feels dizzy. I feel less mental pressure. And I am full of energy every day.”</bq>Such a stance presents itself as apolitical: it rejects both violent resistance to the institutions of power and dialogue with those in power.</bq> <bq>There is a recent film that perfectly depicts the stance of such a post-political, disengaged individual: Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023), a Japanese-German co-production, in which Kōji Yakusho plays Hirayama, who works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo and is fully content with his simple life. Following a ritualised daily rhythm, he repeats the same routine from dawn onwards and dedicates his free time to his passions: music in his van on the way to and from work, and books each night before bed.</bq> <bq>What should worry us about this focus on stability and happiness is that it points towards an ultimate form: “enforced welfare,” the term for a series of measures that represent a dark chapter in the history of Swiss social welfare. The victims of these measures included child labourers, children in homes, forced adoptees, and people committed to secure institutions—so-called “administrative wards.” Some were also forced to undergo abortion, sterilisation and castration. The same practice was widespread in many other countries. An especially well-known case is that of Canada, where children were taken from Native families and placed in institutions, mostly Catholic, where up to 80% of them were sexually abused. But what interests me is the expression “enforced welfare”: the paradox that resonates in it, if we take “welfare” in its common meaning. Imagine that I am a poor, homeless man and the state decides to give me a modest regular income so that I can survive and lead a decent life. My reaction is: “No thanks, you will not compel me to accept this!” This paradox is part of our reality now. The US and Israel have again proposed a plan to construct a “safety zone” in southern Gaza: a limited space where Palestinians who are not on the list of Hamas terrorists could freely enter, but not exit back into Gaza. Once they are in, they will be safe and properly fed, but they will be allowed to leave neither the zone nor Gaza itself. Is this not a perfect case of enforced welfare? First, foreigners ruin your country; then they establish a closed “welfare” zone that is, in reality, a concentration camp.</bq> <bq>On an island without humans, researchers discovered a group of large turtles which, as part of their survival strategy, had to walk a short path from a slightly elevated plateau to the nearby beach. Between the plateau and the beach, however, the surface suddenly, rather than gradually, dropped. Many turtles consequently fell onto their backs and, since they were unable to turn themselves over, suffered a long and agonising death. The researchers, of course, intervened to prevent this useless suffering. They turned over the turtles lying helplessly on their backs, and even levelled the ground a little. The success was immediate. But then the true tragedy struck: the number of turtles multiplied rapidly, and this change destroyed the environmental balance of that small region. The final result was the desolation of the place. The sad lesson of this horrible story is that what the researchers took for a dysfunction causing useless suffering was actually a key moment in the stable and balanced reproduction of life on that island. True thinking compels us to accept that what appears to us as a stable environment may rely on a great deal of terrible suffering. Something similar holds for our “rich” societies, which is why we should be very careful with social engineering.</bq> But we should also be brutally honest about the amount of social engineering on which our world already relies. Simply stopping now and acknowledging the status quo as a balanced environment is not the conclusion to which one must come, based on this parable. It is simply that one should consider second- and third-order effects when implementing what seems like an obvious improvement to society. This goes especially for changes that will benefit the already wealthy class. <bq>The bai lan people do not strive for better social engineering, as dissidents do. My point is not that we should all strive to follow bai lan. What we should do is undergo the radical experience of the meaninglessness of social engagement that grounds bai lan. Only in this way might we arrive at a social order that no longer needs turtles on their backs in order to reproduce itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/08/ai-is-the-latest-and-best-financed-cult-to-emerge-from-california.html" author="David Hoyt" source="3QuarksDaily">AI is the Latest and Best-Financed Cult to Emerge from California</a> <bq>Like Scientology before it (and like the animated television series The Jetsons, ca. 1962), the superintelligence singularity puts a smiley face on the future, ignores political conflict and diversity of all sorts, draws from a mash-up of science fiction at the level of a mediocre sophomore essay, and has the side benefit of helping a few folks make a lot of money.</bq> <bq>In Ali Riza Taşkale’s recent essay, The Looting of Science Fiction, he looks at the uses of classic science fiction texts made by tech founders from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos. The influence of sci-fi in its post-pulp era has been broad and acknowledged, but less so the liberties taken by tech founders with the more critical political and economic levels of the corpus. Across the board the tendency has been to keep the tech and mute the social critique of authoritarianism or inequality. What is presented in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, or Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner as speculative dystopia is repackaged as the objective present for which tech wielded by genius founders is the solution. As Taşkale writes,<bq>Science fiction in the 1950’s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritize speed over safety…The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.</bq>From The Lord of the Rings to Palantir, or from Star Trek to the US Space Force, imaginative fiction that critiqued power or imagined an egalitarian, multi-racial society is appropriated in ways that endorse their opposites.</bq> <bq>What makes the cult of AI different in tone and in worldview is its origin within a tech industry which sits at an epicenter of unregulated flows of global capital, its profound, longstanding, and growing links to the US security state, and the certainty that on the basis of these pillars it can build the future it wants here on earth right now, and that no one should be able to stop them.</bq> <bq>More than ever before, giant pots of money are sloshing around the planet, motivated by historically low interest rates over a relatively long period to search out the Next Big Thing. This money is mostly exempt from national regimes of control or taxation, is managed outside the traditional banking system, and is therefore more free to move around. The second is the chronic and by now widely acknowledged slow-down of economic growth in the advanced economies, dating back nearly half a century. What the hype typically fails to register is that investors don’t seek out technology and AI firms because they are the best bets on future returns – they seek them out because they are the only bets around.</bq> <bq>Overall capital spending on AI in the United States is at roughly 2% of GDP, and expected to reach 3-4% in 2027. This is equal to and slightly exceeding the US defense budget. This is a lot of investment, but in what, precisely? As it stands right now, AI is an all-purpose everything enhancer, like the patent cure-all medicines of the nineteenth century. No one knows exactly what it is for. Given that it’s not at all clear what “intelligence” is, let alone human intelligence, it’s not surprising that “artificial intelligence” is a rather catch-all category (of a distinctly old-school, Cartesian sort) that can mean everything from the technology used in self-driving cars or a chatbot whispering sweet nothings or Nazi propaganda. [...] none of these capabilities are invested in directly. What’s invested in is compute, which means data centers, which means steel and cement and copper and chips and routers, and all of the various ancillary industries that support AI infrastructure.</bq> <bq>It’s useful to read what Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO and elder statesman of Wall Street, had to say in his widely read Letter of 2022, after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.<bq>Engineers and scientists are working around the clock on how to decarbonize cement, steel, and plastics; shipping, trucking, and aviation; agriculture, energy and construction. I believe the decarbonizing of the global economy is going to create the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime… The next 1,000 unicorns won’t be search engines or social media companies, they’ll be sustainable, scalable innovators – startups that help the world decarbonize and make the energy transition affordable for all consumers.</bq>Fast forward nearly five years, and Oh, how things have changed! BlackRock is no longer nudging corporate opinion on the perils of global warming, though the perils of global warming are making themselves apparent without help from Larry Fink.</bq> <bq>AI is the digital compression of unregulated platform capitalism, the very business model of which is to get big, achieve network effects, and collect rent. It depends on human data amassed with little consent, which is used to modify behavior in a way favorable to the growth of the companies deploying it.</bq> <bq>If Larry Fink no longer sees global warming as an investment opportunity, if Sam Altman thinks AI “may help” solve climate change some day, this is because we now live in a moment where collective decisions affecting the global community and ecological health are not being made at the level of representative governments or executed by public power, but by asset management firms and billionaire CEOs in thrall to the latest growth play or to their particular and occasionally reactionary futurologies. It is no revelation to state that AI is not broadly popular with the American public, that data centers are widely despised, and that there is no love lost for the restricted class of wealthy individuals who are rapidly and without consultation privately terraforming the commons in a moment of ecological crisis. This is because the public, in a rare moment of wisdom, clearly understands what is going on.</bq> <bq>When this bubble bursts, as they always do, we may thus all be left to pay for a whole lot of infrastructure, and a greatly enhanced surveillance state.</bq> Well ... not all of us. Just the vast majority of us who will be left holding the bag. Those promulgating this impending disaster will make out really well---most likely with no negative repercussions---simultaneously justifying and funding their next round of predation. <hr> <a href="https://edwardcurtin.com/hoping-for-smooth-sailing-with-the-sea-gulls-and-thoreau/" author="Edward Curtin" source="Behind the Curtain">Hoping for Smooth Sailing with the Sea Gulls and Thoreau</a> <bq>Thirty-five years ago, Oliver Stone’s movie JFK was sabotaged by the Central Intelligence Agency’s controlled media as a fictional illusion, and its truth is still verboten in the U.S.A.. But Stone was right then and now. JFK was murdered because he was trying to end the Cold War, eliminate nuclear weapons through negotiations with the Soviet Union, withdraw American military advisers from Vietnam, rein in the CIA, and reduce the power of the military industrial complex. This is why he was killed. These are among what Stone calls “conspiracy facts,” and even as I look out at the wild Atlantic and try “to put America behind” me for a short respite, the wind fills my mind with their contemporary importance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://coreyrobin.com/2026/08/27/large-language-mommies-or-the-dreamscape-of-ai/" author="Corey Robin" source="">Large Language Mommies, or the Dreamscape of AI</a> <bq>In Dean’s interpretation, AI—and she shows this through her analysis of the creepy utterances of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg—promises to return us to the world of infancy, when all our needs are met, when there is no need to name our desire because we have no desire, since all our needs are met. This is the dreamscape, the propaganda, of AI; as Dean points out in her post, the reality is quite different. AI is a return to a prelinguistic space. It’s no wonder that AI threatens our ability to read. It’s gunning for something far bigger and more fundamental to what it means to be human: our ability to use language itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jodi7768.substack.com/p/whos-your-mommy" author="Jodi Dean" source="Jodi's Substack">Who’s Your Mommy?</a> <bq>it is maddening that the AI promise is so obviously bullshit: even if work is transformed, there will still be all sorts of difficult, tedious, or pointless tasks, the tasks that make up the fabric of our everyday lives: dusting, weeding the garden, setting up the chairs, figuring out who should be on the guest list, changing diapers, visiting the sick, making funeral arrangements, preparing food, taking out the trash, repairing roads, cleaning up after an earthquake; it’s endless.</bq> <bq>These days virtually nobody worries about AI sentience or consciousness. It’s just spewing out tokens, many of which take the form of answers that are useful or meaningful to those prompting it; many of which are error-filled slop. The current vibe is complacent: it just has to be good enough. Workers in tech and other sectors where they’ve been pushed to figure out how to make AI useful in generating revenue for capital recognize that AI is one tool among others. Sometimes it’s useful.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/" author="Erin Somers" source="Harper's Magazine">Where’s The Beef?</a> <bq>I was enthralled by the story of the meat, which seemed to contain so much of what defined this era of American life: dubious techno-optimism, bombastic culture-war posturing, carnival oddities like the mammoth meatball. It presented a snarl of competing motives, a mix of altruism and cold-blooded striving for capital (nothing can ever exist just for the common good; it has to make someone a billionaire).</bq> <bq>You cannot simply grow a steak—yank it out of the reactor and slap it on the table at Peter Luger—because a steak contains multiple kinds of tissue. At the moment, muscle and fat can only be cultivated separately, and typically they do not form solid matter but a semisolid slurry that must be taken from the reactors, washed, combined with other ingredients for flavor and texture, and extruded or 3D-printed into something you’d recognize as meat: a burger or a nugget or a meatball or a fillet.</bq> <bq>There is a widespread feeling in this country that everything is a hoax or a Ponzi scheme, and this feeling is only reinforced by the news. The news that self-driving taxis, when they become confused, are actually operated remotely from the Philippines. The news that the mysterious invention that could scan your blood for any number of disorders was an era-defining scam. The news that the crypto entrepreneur who pledged to secure the longtime survival of the human race was actually stealing $8 billion of his customers’ money to fund his polycule in the Bahamas. I became paranoid, standing in front of the abandoned parking lot, that cultivated meat was just another lie, or a semi-lie, or a bluff. That the reason the meat was so difficult to get my hands on was that it did not exist. The possible implosion of Believer was disappointing not just because it represented a setback in the quest to reduce our carbon emissions and fortify our food systems against climate collapse, but because it seemed to confirm that we live in a cheap, mendacious world, where what passes for progress almost always turns out to be a confidence game.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-problem" author="Ali Rıza Taşkale" source="Aeon">The looting of science fiction</a> <bq>The [Foundation] novels are genuinely extraordinary works of democratic imagination. Asimov’s central insight – developed across seven books written between 1942 and 1993 – is that civilisational survival depends not on lone geniuses but on collective institutions, distributed knowledge and democratic deliberation. Seldon’s most important act is not his prophecy: it is founding the Second Foundation, a hidden network of scholars working collaboratively across centuries. The novels’ moral architecture is explicitly anti-authoritarian: every time a charismatic individual attempts to seize control of the mission, the story presents it as catastrophe. The series is, at its heart, a sustained argument for the indispensability of checks and balances. What makes the Foundation books so resonant is their emotional generosity toward ordinary people and ordinary institutions. Seldon’s ‘psychohistory’ works not because one man is brilliant but because it models the behaviour of millions of people making small, often anonymous choices in favour of knowledge and community.</bq> <bq>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not a libertarian pamphlet – it is a genuinely complex political novel about what revolution actually costs. Heinlein’s lunar colonists are not entrepreneurs: they are prisoners, deportees and their descendants, people with nothing to lose who have built a fragile community out of shared deprivation. The novel’s most memorable character is Mike, an artificial intelligence who becomes politically conscious through friendship with the human rebels – motivated not by efficiency or profit but by curiosity and the desire to belong. The revolution Heinlein imagines is messy, compromised and pyrrhic; the book ends not in triumph but in exhausted ambivalence about what has been won and lost. Heinlein was genuinely fascinated by the tension between individual freedom and the social bonds that make freedom possible and worth having.</bq> <bq>J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument.</bq> <bq>William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion.</bq> <bq>Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.</bq> These descriptions are quite brilliant. <bq>When Gebru co-authored a paper warning that AI systems risk ‘perpetuating dominant viewpoints, increasing power imbalances, and further reifying inequality’, she says that Google fired her. The company had demanded she either retract the paper or remove her name from it. Gebru said that ‘unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate. We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive.’</bq> <bq>[...] other futures are possible, and other science fictions exist. Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) imagines an anarchist Moon colony built on mutual aid rather than extraction. Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993-98) depicts communities surviving collapse through adaptation and care rather than escape to Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-96) shows planetary settlement as collective democratic project, not billionaire venture. These are not naive or utopian texts – they are demanding, difficult and honest about the costs of building anything new. They refuse the consolation of the lone visionary and insist, over and over, that the future is made by people working together.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/25/gammamax/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">The age of disinvention</a> <bq>Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy. That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal. The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers. The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved. That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders [...]</bq> <bq>[...] there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature.</bq> <bq>After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them.</bq> <bq>Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in.</bq> <bq>For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service.</bq> <bq>[...] the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games.</bq> <bq>All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers.</bq> <bq>Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them. A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260826-00/?p=112649" author="Raymond Chen" source="The Old New Thing">In the product end game, every change carries significant risk, episode 2</a> <bq>The developers who were leading the investigation beamed with joy when they identified that most of the crashing systems came from the same manufacturer, and they were all manufactured before a specific date. At this point, it wasn’t too long before a CPU errata was found that was consistent with the manufacturing dates of the affected systems. Now, the compiler they were using had issued an update to avoid the offending code sequence, but the team had locked their toolset before that update became available, and upgrading the compiler while in escrow¹ is not a good idea, because who knows what new bugs would be introduced by switching to a new compiler.² The team wrote a tool to scour their binaries to look for any occurrences of a code sequence that would trigger the CPU erratum.² They found around 150 instances of the troublesome code sequence, but one of the requirements for the CPU bug was that the sequence span a page boundary, and only one of those 150 incidents crossed a page boundary. And their testers found it. To avoid introducing any new problems as a side effect of the fix, the team opted to do a binary patch to the binary to insert a nop into the offending code sequence. This was enough to avoid the CPU erratum without risking regression to any other code.</bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <img src="{att_link}the_ball_passes_cleanly_through_my_skull,_killing_me_instantly.webp" align="none" caption="The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly"> <bq>Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/beyond-2" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Beyond 2</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_-_beyond_2.webp" href="{att_link}smbc_-_beyond_2.webp" align="none" caption="SMBC - Beyond 2" scale="75%"> <bq>Do you think humans will keep expanding the "circle of moral concern" to finally encompass all humans? Nyah. Humans think the circle gets pushed out, but actually it gets pulled. You move beyond self if an outsider threatens your family, beyond family if an outsider threatens your community, beyond community if an outsider threatens your nation. But you only get beyond nations if aliens attack, which we wouldn't because it'd ruin the show called Earth which is very popular on planet Zorblax. I... I guess im glad our suffering brings joy to billions. it's not that popular.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/u-s-national-debt-surpasses-40-trillion/" author="" source="The Onion">U.S. National Debt Surpasses $40 Trillion</a> <bq>Maybe we didn’t need two Dakotas.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/snap-enrollment-drops-by-over-13/" author="" source="The Onion">SNAP Enrollment Drops By Over 13%</a> <bq>If they want food so bad, they can start a crypto pump-and-dump scam like the rest of us.</bq> <bq>Nobody in a county as rich as America should ever get help.</bq> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKX3H1TWfFQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tKX3H1TWfFQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Man Carrying Thing" caption="the internet after the GTA VI gameplay reveal"> <bq>And Alexander wept, for there were no...[world left to conquer.]</bq>