<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1wscyi1/ruby_bridges_the_first_black_kid_to_go_to_an/" author="" source="Reddit">Ruby Bridges - the first black kid to go to an all-white school. Seen here on her first day at school, guarded by US marshals. (November 14, 1960)</a> <img src="{att_link}ruby_bridges_-_the_first_black_kid_to_go_to_an_all-white_school._seen_here_on_her_first_day_at_school,_guarded_by_us_marshals._(november_14,_1960).webp" href="{att_link}ruby_bridges_-_the_first_black_kid_to_go_to_an_all-white_school._seen_here_on_her_first_day_at_school,_guarded_by_us_marshals._(november_14,_1960).webp" align="none" caption="Ruby Bridges - the first black kid to go to an all...chool, guarded by US marshals. (November 14, 1960)"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1wtakn1/the_reason_for_term_limits/" author="" source="Reddit">The reason for term limits...</a> <img src="{att_link}term_limits.webp" href="{att_link}term_limits.webp" align="none" caption="Term limits" scale="75%"> <bq>The reason presidents are limited to two terms is that the last time we had a president who was a Democratic Socialist, the people elected him four straight times..</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.donotpanic.news/p/germany-de-industrialised-itself" source="¡Don't Panic!" author="Nate Bear">Germany De-Industrialised Itself For Ukraine, And Trump’s Oil Donors Profited</a> <bq>The five industries represented by the light blue line (<b>steel, glass, paper, chemicals and refining) are the ones which essentially turn oil and gas into products.</b> They are responsible for 77% of all industrial energy consumption in the country, and close to 20% of Germany’s total industrial production. We’re talking a huge chunk of the Germany economy. And <b>it is collapsing, more or less, month-by-month.</b></bq> <bq>The speed of the collapse has been astonishing. And <b>the cause of this collapse is the decision to ban Russia gas imports</b> and switch to more expensive US liquified natural gas (with Norwegian and Qatari gas making up the balance).</bq> <bq>The result is that expenses rise, businesses go bust, people lose jobs and industrial urban areas wither away. <b>Unemployment in Germany has risen a shocking 30% since 2020 and is now at its highest level in over a decade.</b></bq> <bq><b>The war in Ukraine was co-created. Yes, Russia pulled the trigger, but by refusing for so long to deal with reality over Ukraine, European leaders loaded the gun.</b> And after the trigger was pulled, rather than settling the war quickly in Istanbul in April 2022 when a deal was at hand, <b>they kept loading the gun, this time literally through Ukraine, which has become little more than a platform for the west to strike at Russia.</b> Zelensky confirmed as much, listing in a tweet the western systems that had been used in the strikes on Moscow at the weekend. Russia inevitably counterstruck, Zelensky moaned about it, and this tragic, murderous farce continues. <b>And the victims are Ukraine’s young men, 27,000 of whom are now being killed every month.</b></bq> <bq>Perhaps the most absurd element to the gas switcheroo is the underlying premise <b>Europeans are being asked to believe: that even if it costs more and collapses industries, the US is a more honourable, ethical, and secure source of gas than Russia.</b> We’re being asked to believe that tying European energy security to a failing empire and the largest mass murdering enterprise in history is somehow the intelligent strategic and moral choice. <b>It’s a joke.</b></bq> <bq>Whatever happens next with Ukraine, <b>the US war-oil complex will continue to rake in blood money as Europe switches from welfare to warfare.</b> European leaders are now giddily rearming the continent, increasing their purchase of US weapons a sickening 217%, at the same time as many EU governments are enacted deep public sector cuts, with Germany one of the worst offenders. Germany is also the country most rabidly ramping up its military machine, with Germany’s main weapons maker, Rheinmetall, increasing sales 50% in 2024 to €9.75 billion. And to meet this new demand for weapons, <b>Rheinmetall is converting factories that used to make cars into weapons-making facilities.</b> Germany, in essence, has hollowed out its broad industrial base in record time and is now swapping an industrial economy for a war economy.</bq> <bq>If another continent-wide war was to return to Europe as a result of reckless, self-defeating policy towards Russia, <b>the usual criminals will profit, and the usual plebs will die.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-spectacle-of-the-macabre-in-new-york/" source="ZNetwork" author="Nate Bear">A Spectacle Of The Macabre In New York</a> <bq><b>At the UN general assembly meeting, world leaders, includ[ing] wanted war criminals, have been getting up on stage, one after the other, and bragging about genocide, war crimes and mass slaughter.</b> Liberal leaders, complicit in the delinquency of empire despite their professed humanitarian credentials, have excused or downplayed those crimes, while others have celebrated facilitating them.</bq> <bq><b>Mark Carney</b>, when asked about Trump’s language, shrugged it off, saying “well, there’s a war underway, and he’s speaking the language of war.” After normalising threats to commit war crimes, he went on to <b>label the country targeted for imperial annihilation as “one of the greatest threats in the current world and an existential threat to Israel and its allies.”</b> Carney, the great liberal conscience and supposed redeemer of western values laid the rhetorical ground for Trump and Israel to commit further ultra-violence and mass murder against Iranians. <b>Carney, who mere months ago was being lauded for standing up to Trump, centered the rights and security of a state committing genocide, rather than the one being threatened with genocide.</b> Carney is, as I have written about previously, a monstrous individual.</bq> <bq>Mark Rutte, former prime minister of The Netherlands and current head of NATO, who proudly stated that “it would have been impossible to do operation epic fury without having Europe as a power projection platform for the US.” He said that <b>“five thousand planes have taken off from European bases in support of Epic Fury this year. Country after country made them available.”</b> Yes he used the words “power projection platform” without a hint of self-awareness, all while <b>confirming a level of European involvement that Europe has tried to deny.</b> A Europe which, in Rutte’s own words, exists merely as a “platform,” <b>a vassal continent from which imperialism is propelled eastwards.</b> The same Europe which has just handed over Greenland to Trump and the Americans to serve as an extension to this “platform.”</bq> <bq>[...] provided with a huge police escort by the mayor of the city who previously made arresting this criminal a central element of his election campaign. In July, <b>to pre-empt accusations of betrayal, Mamdani said his team had examined the legalities and he couldn’t command the NYPD to arrest Netanyahu.</b> Perhaps not. <b>But he could have commanded them to not arrest anti-genocide protestors yesterday.</b> He could have ordered them not to provide the wanted war criminal with a huge protective police motorcade through the city. <b>He could at a minimum have joined the protests himself. Mamdani is a coward, a traitor to Palestine and Palestinians who, on genocide, has betrayed many of his voters.</b></bq> <bq>Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, for example, who summed up the absurdity of the imperial order well when he said that “<b>the nuclear bombs are in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran. Israel commits genocide, yet Iran is sanctioned.</b>” Pezeshkian also delivered the most sensible, statesman-like and human message of the meeting so far, saying “<b>we must not build a world in which military power replaces legitimacy, sanctions replace diplomacy, terror replaces politics, and war replaces dialogue.</b>” His appeal was a stark contrast to the genocidal ravings of Trump and Netanyahu, yet <b>you’ll struggle to find these words in any mainstream western reporting,</b></bq> <bq>There have been numerous defining moments for western liberalism in the last few years, but this feels like a season-closer. <b>A brazen show of inhumanity, another nail in the coffin of international law and the mythical rules-based order.</b> The good news is that a myth can’t die. The only thing that can die is our conception of the world that the myth created. This world was, we now see, nothing more than a presentational fiction, <b>a parody of order designed to coat the western conscience in a soothing balm. A facade designed to hide the true nature of our political realities.</b> Nothing real existed, so nothing can be mourned. We should, however, be furious at those who <b>constructed this facade of liberal humanitarianism as a cynical mechanism to forestall true progress and justice.</b> And we should scorn those who still refuse to see through the bullshit and the lies, or who insist these developments are new and a gentle nudge can put us back on the right track.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/09/25/defiant-iran-responds-to-trump/" source="Scheer Post" author="Masoud Pezeshkian">Defiant Iran Responds To Trump</a> <bq><b>Atomic and nuclear bombs are in the hands of the Israeli regime, but the inspectors are requested to come to Iran.</b> Israel has murdered savagely over 70,000 innocents in Gaza, but <b>Iran, while behind the table of negotiation, was bombed.</b> Israel has the bombs, has weapons of mass destruction, not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty during her shameful life has not allowed a single inspection. But <b>they are rewarded by all the means necessary for them to be able to bomb any capital in the region at will.</b> I will repeat: the nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran. <b>Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions.</b> This is a true tragedy, which would make anyone hearing it laugh, at best.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/what-are-the-sources-of-our-dignity" source="The Floutist" author="Patrick Lawrence">https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/what-are-the-sources-of-our-dignity</a> <bq>Most of us, and certainly we Americans, must speak not of our democracies but of our “post-democracies,” Switzerland’s direct democracy being among the rare and fortunate exceptions, and <b>even Switzerland has variants of the problems that beset the rest of the West.</b> The institutions bequeathed to us so that we can express ourselves collectively are broken—or have been broken, more precisely put—by those charged with operating them. <b>We are no longer governed: We are ruled.</b> Lawlessness in the name of law is a phrase I have used in various of my commentaries, as here and here. It is our condition.</bq> <bq>A frightening alliance of corrupt political leaders and what we call “Big Tech” seems possessed of the power of a secret state, and I use this term pointedly. <b>By way of our technologies and our obsession with profit as the only value, we are post-literate, and what passes for culture is in most cases an ersatz, corporatized culture that serves—this quite as intended—to numb us.</b></bq> <bq author="Henry David Thoreau">[...] a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are <b>more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity</b>, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to México, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with <b>those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless….</b> There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who… <b>sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing</b>…. They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. <b>They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.</b></bq> <bq>This thought brings me to Camus. <b>“The futility of all action, the necessity of any,”</b> he once wrote. This sounds thoroughly fatalistic at first, but on reflection I think Camus was at bottom not so far from Thoreau: Whatever the outcome of what we do, and we cannot know this in the moment of our action, <b>it is essential to act in defense of our consciences in the face of the power of the State</b>—or whatever form power may happen to take.</bq> <bq>It is time—it is well passed time—fully and actively to <b>repudiate a half-millennium of the West’s presumed superiority over the non–West</b>—which means over most of humanity. It is not a question of welcoming non–Western peoples to join us, which is the common assumption. <b>It is a question of us, we in the West, 12 percent of the global population, joining them, the other 88 percent.</b></bq> <bq>I am thinking here, to speak plainly, of what we call extra-parliamentary action of <b>just the kind Thoreau urged in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”</b> Parenthetically, this essay’s title is customarily abbreviated in America as “On Civil Disobedience,” and I have long speculated that this is because most <b>Americans do not want to hear about their duties.</b> Let us, here, restore the full title to remind ourselves of what falls to us as our duties.</bq> <bq><b>Thoreau made a direct connection between the sovereignty of conscience and the inevitable necessity of sacrifice.</b> This was the reality of his time, and in this ours is not so different. Truly to live in dignity requires sacrifice of us. There is no ground left to avoid this truth.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/28/qkuv-s28.html" author="" source="WSWS">US military makes preparations for assault on Cuba within “90-120 days”</a> <bq>Since the oil blockade began in January, infant mortality in Cuba has doubled, according to the UN. <b>Not even during the Special Period of the 1990s, after Soviet aid ended, were conditions this severe.</b> Cubans lie awake through sweltering nights without fans, unable to refrigerate food, besieged by mosquitoes and epidemics. <b>The Cuban delegation walked out as Trump spoke, and Chinese Vice President Han Zheng called from the same stage on “the relevant country to immediately stop using threat of force against Cuba</b> and immediately and completely lift the blockade and sanctions against Cuba.” <b>There is no reason to idealize either the walkout or Beijing’s words.</b> Cuban Foreign Minister Rodriguez added in his remarks at the UN that, “We have always been and will always be prepared for dialogue with the government of the United States.” Since confirming talks with Washington on March 13, <b>the Cuban government has invited the FBI to the island and announced that Cubans abroad, including the right-wing gusano capitalists in Miami, may invest in and own businesses.</b> For its part, <b>Beijing stood by as Washington seized control of the Venezuelan oil</b> that was being traded to service billions of dollars in Chinese loans. <b>Trump’s threats against Cuba, delivered in the same speech in which he threatened to annihilate Iran, were made with open contempt for international law.</b> In August, UN independent human rights experts warned that the fuel blockade launched in late January and the stream of US sanctions against any foreign firm doing business with the island risk creating a “silent Gaza.” In other words, <b>the Cuban population is being annihilated not by bombs but by the deliberate deprivation of fuel, food, medicine, electricity and water.</b></bq> <bq>The Venezuelan experience shows Washington’s aim. In October 2025, the New York Times reported that <b>President Nicolás Maduro had spent months offering the US a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and gold. Trump rejected it because he wanted complete subordination.</b> After years of devastating sanctions, US forces seized Maduro on January 3. A classified CIA assessment had concluded that regime loyalists, including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, were best placed to keep the state apparatus under control. Since the US intervention, <b>Rodríguez has maintained the Chavista apparatus in power, administering a US protectorate that has handed Trump control over the country’s finances, and both its domestic and foreign policies.</b> <b>The Castroite leadership is similarly offering economic concessions while insisting that the ruling layer keep its privileges</b> and serve as Washington’s main partner. <b>Whether Washington proceeds through a raid, an invasion or a CIA-engineered palace coup cannot be predicted; it is actively planning for a military attack and occupation.</b> Trump’s advisers have told the New York Times that they believe the Cuban government “could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November.”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Ec3YeENFs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/96Ec3YeENFs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz" caption="New Data on War Mentality in Europe. Why Swiss Reject Strict Neutrality"> The SP's campaign of calling the neutrality initiative "pro-Putin" was so stupid, empire-brained, and in such bad faith that I consider that party to be just as lost, ridiculous, and beyond saving as the Democrats in the U.S., or the Green party in Germany. These are all parties that purport to support humanity (the working class, the environment, etc.) but are, in the end, are just as peevish, arrogant, disdainful of, and condescending to the people they purport to support as their purported rivals. At best, they are brainwashed by the prevailing propaganda of the empire. At worst, they have absolutely no principles. I tend to believe the latter. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/02/einf-o02.html" author="Kate Randall" source="WSWS">An American horror story: The failed execution of Christa Pike</a> <bq><b>Pike, 50, has spent three decades on Tennessee’s death row, more than a quarter century of it in virtual solitary confinement in a 7-by-12-foot cell.</b> In January 1995, when she was 18, she and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps, into the woods, where they beat, tortured and killed her. It was a terrible crime, and Pike has acknowledged it as such. “I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend,” she wrote in her clemency petition. “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://bene.swiss/grosse-unterstuetzung-der-neutralitaet-im-tessin-waren-es-die-kommunisten/" author="Massimilano Ay" source="Bewgung fürNeutralität">Grosse Unterstützung der Neutralität im Tessin: Waren es die Kommunisten?</a> <bq>Das grosse Verdienst dieser Initiative bestand nicht nur darin, eine breite Grundsatzdebatte über die geopolitische Positionierung unseres Landes und seine diplomatische Tradition anzustossen, sondern auch <b>Klarheit darüber zu schaffen, welche Kräfte den Frieden und die nationale Souveränität verteidigen und wer hingegen die globalistischen Eliten unterstützt hat</b>, die uns gegen den Globalen Süden aufbringen wollen. <b>Die Kommunistische Partei wird als einzige patriotische, arbeiter- und volksnahe Kraft der Linken daher konsequent nicht nur ihren Kampf für eine blockfreie Schweiz, d. h. für eine umfassende Neutralität, fortsetzen</b>, sondern sich auch für die Sabotage jeder Politik einer latenten Annäherung an die EU und die NATO einsetzen. In diesem Sinne wird der nächste Kampf der gegen die Unterwerfung der Schweiz unter die sogenannten „Bilateralen III“ sein.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIVjKtw9MM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/iWIVjKtw9MM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="NYT Publishes More Contradictory Evidence on Cornell Case"> <bq>She claimed she went out to drink, have drinks with friends, went to a bunch of a couple of restaurants and bars with her friends, then showed up at the frat house for a party. She showed up drunk when she was there. <b>She agreed to have sex---this is her version---with two different guys at once</b> and a threesome. They drank more. She doesn't claim they plied her with alcohol. They were taking drugs, specifically ketamine, snorting it off each other's body. She also doesn't claim that her drink was spiked or anything like that. [...] But, in 2026, two years later, there was never any charges. [...] I went over all this in my video. But, in 2026, she brought a monetary suit suing Cornell, which is obviously a very deep-pocket institution. That's what plaintiff's lawyers call <b>institutions with basically endless amounts of money that you can just grab if you sue them.</b> The plaintiff is the lawyer, her lawyer is working on contingency, which means he gets a percentage of whatever he recovers. So, <b>he's highly motivated to make a a civil suit for monetary damages as aggressive and strong as possible because the more it makes the case for her, the more money he makes, the more money she makes.</b> So, there's definitely a financial incentive. That's what a civil lawsuit is. Nothing wrong with that. <b>Our law, legal system believes that if you've been injured by somebody, harmed by somebody, and it violates civil law, or it's a cause of action, you're entitled to monetary damages.</b> That happens every single day. I litigated a lot of those cases, both on the defendant side and the plaintiff side. So, but <b>that is why these allegations have surfaced. She's claiming that seven different Cornell students raped her, gang-raped her</b>, and that includes the two guys she says she willingly had sex with, plus a third one who she says walked into the room and she agreed to have sex with him. And <b>there's an email that she sent to the first two guys saying, "Look, nothing illegal happened in terms of the sex or the drugs or anything. I'd love to get together with you guys again."</b> This is after the fact, but you know, sometimes rape victims, people will say, send messages like that. But, obviously, <b>it makes it very difficult because, in a civil lawsuit, all you have to do is prove by a preponderance of evidence---more than 50% probability---that the defendants did what you claim. Whereas, in a criminal lawsuit, it's a much higher standard.</b> You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And a prosecutor [...] sees evidence like that, like inconsistent statements on the part of the alleged victim. The victim sending emails to her alleged rapist saying, "Hey, I had a great time. Let's get together again." And the defendants are denying that they ever raped anyone, which in this case they absolutely are denying. <b>It's basically almost impossible to bring charges.</b> But our current political environment being what it is, our current political discourse being what it is, this idea that you're supposed to believe women means that there's a huge feminist movement largely connected to the left-liberal sphere or spectrum of politics, but they have a big contingent of what I guess you could call male-feminist allies, who are eager to demonstrate that they too defend women in these cases. <b>So there's a lot of people extremely angry by the decision not to charge these seven students.</b> My point is that <b>due process is what matters. You cannot have people's lives ruined as a result of online mob justice.</b> Mob justice leads to lynching. It leads to all kinds of blind punishments of the wrong people and [...] there are no rules to it. <b>It's just driven by the most primal, visceral human instincts.</b> And when it's all driven by rage, it gets very dangerous. And I mean, I don't know how many examples we have of that. <b>Our legal system is deeply imperfect. But it's certainly better than mob justice.</b> Anything is, but that's what's now driving our discourse.</bq> <bq>They're saying like, "Yeah, we were super drunk and I and that's why we didn't try and stop this." So <b>why does she immediately lose agency for the sex she chooses to have an adult? Because she's drunk and high. But, if they're as drunk or high or more so, why do they still have agency?</b> [...] I'm always amazed when feminists do like, hey, <b>if you're a man and you're with a woman and you both get super drunk, it's your responsibility what happens, not hers. Why?</b> Why would that be?</bq> <bq>I use pretty acerbic language. I don't know if you've noticed when I debate sometimes online, offline, wherever, and <b>I don't treat men and women differently.</b> Like, especially if these are men and women who are prominent people who sought out a public platform, <b>I don't think to myself, oh no, this is a woman. I need to lower my voice a little, be a little more deferential, a little less aggressive because I don't see women that way.</b> I don't see women as fragile.</bq> The video goes on to explain that the trigger for the civil suit was that the young lady in question saw that the online discourse had taken to calling her a slut for having had sex with multiple men at once. The response is to claim that it was actually gang rape because then she couldn't have been a slut. Everyone involved was incredibly inebriated on various substances. The texts shows everyone involved acknowledging that. Her texts very clearly show that she had absolutely no regrets even a day or two later. <bq>So this fraternity where she now claims she had just been brutally gang-raped. <b>They were having a party like a week later, 10 days later. And she was like, "Hey, I'd like to go. Can I be invited?"</b> Why would you do that if you were gang-raped? And again, I know all the answers to this. <b>I've read all the literature about how traumatized rape victims behave. Why their behavior isn't always what you would expect it to be. It's not rational. They're dealing with trauma.</b> I understand all of this. Okay? I know all these theories. I'm not ignorant of them. I'm not even discounting them. Like from a psychological perspective, I'm sure if you are gang-raped, there's all kinds of emotions that might blind you to how you understand it, how you see it. It is traumatizing. It's horrific. And so, <b>you can't demand the perfect victim who just immediately goes to the police and fills out all the right forms and says all the right things.</b> It's not realistic. <b>But writing emails to them saying, "Hey, I loved it. Love being with you guys. I want to get together with both of you again,"</b> And then insisting on an invitation right back to that same fraternity house. [...] <b>She's like, "Oh my god, thank you." And sent him a a heart emoji.</b> But then the fraternity president, I think wisely, and he's not named here because he's not one of the accused, was like, "Well, there's so much, you know, kind of tumult and and chatter about what happened. <b>I don't think it's wise to bring her back to the same fraternity house with the same people that all this happened with."</b> And, <b>according to the New York Times article, when she found out that she wasn't going to be invited or that her invitation had rescinded, that was when she got very angry</b> and started saying, "Oh, now I see the truth. You guys don't care about me. You're just using me or manipulating me." And that's when her perspective on things started changing.</bq> <bq>I am not saying that these men aren't guilty of crimes because I haven't seen the whole record. Let me just say a few things about why I feel very passionate about this because <b>I do think part of the online discourse is just so noxious. It's like you either think they're gang-rapists who deserve to have their lives destroyed or, if you question it or argue for due process, it means you're a rape-sympathizer</b> or whatever. That always happens with due process. I've been dealing with this my whole life. In the war on terror, if you said, "Hey, I think people should be given due process before they're put in Guantanamo or rendered kidnapped off the streets of Europe and sent to Syria and Egypt to be tortured or spied on or whatever." <b>People are like, "Oh, you're protecting terrorists. You're a terrorist-sympathizer. You're arguing for the rights of terrorists."</b></bq> <bq>I was a lawyer for, you know, more than a decade. I litigated cases. And <b>I can't tell you how common it was for people to lie in lawsuits. People lie all the time.</b> Plaintiffs sue big banks or corporations or universities because <b>they want a lot of money and they make up all kinds of lies.</b> The defendants lie because they don't want to pay. People lie in lawsuits constantly. <b>The fact that she filed a lawsuit doesn't make them guilty.</b> And nobody should be assuming that an allegations in a lawsuit written by a lawyer financially motivated are true.</bq> <bq>I still think if you're want to be a political leader [referring to AOC], it's <b>incredibly reckless and irresponsible to go around decreeing people guilty of horrific crimes that they deny before they've even charged, let alone convicted.</b> But if they're guilty, I guess, no harm, no foul. But if they're not, if they're falsely accused, if even one or two of them are falsely accused, let alone all of them, this is repugnant. And I'm just, I guess I'm not amazed, but <b>I am horrified to watch this train just rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling.</b> And it's all about the people doing it. It's not about the victim, the alleged victim. It's not about anything else. They just ... their blood. They like, <b>they start drooling with purpose and vengeance and hatred. And that's always what mob justice is. Always.</b></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/empire-psychosis" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Empire Psychosis</a> <bq><b>Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism</b>, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins. It’s a frenzied discontentedness. <b>A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner</b> after the next restless squirm. It’s <b>an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.</b> <b>In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people.</b> Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. <b>Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.</b> We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to <b>convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are.</b> That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so <b>we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.</b> <b>They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdRMVExHNDg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rdRMVExHNDg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="We Need To Talk About Zohran"> <bq><b>Anti-semitism at the point of discrimination is not systematic.</b> It used to be historically for sure---from pogroms all the way to the Holocaust---and even in the United States of America there was systemic discrimination against Jews. Jews not being allowed to to participate in in normal professional sectors [...] with their non-Jewish counterparts. They had to start their own publishing houses. They had to start their own law firms and the like. But, <b>in contemporary American society, there is no more systemic anti-semitism.</b> Part of it is because Ashkanazi Jews are white and they were brought into the white umbrella overall as the true whites and their numbers actually diminished as a consequence of migration coming from non-whites and now <b>those non-white groups are also considered white.</b> This is a historical pattern for the record, before people freak the fuck out. And now Hispanics are also being brought under the white umbrella. But, by and large, <b>there's only two groups of people that will never be considered white. the indigenous population and black people.</b> But whiteness as this racial construct was almost exclusively designed around proximity to blackness. <b>Whiteness is not defined by what it is, but instead by what it's not and what it is not is black.</b> And that's precisely the reason why anti-blackness persists in the United States of America even to this day. <b>The wound has not been healed. The scars are still there. One might even say the knife is still there.</b> Why did I bring up all this? Because <b>Jews, somewhere along the way, became white. They're considered white. They're under the banner of white. And Norm likes to say 'white plus'.</b> But this can swing, right? Whiteness can swing in the other direction. If you have ultra-nationalism, if you have fascism in the country, it can swing dramatically. Those who previously thought their white status could never be revoked could find themselves a threat. This could absolutely happen to Jews. [...] Jews in America are not even Muslim status yet. <b>You'll know if Jews in America have lost their white card. We're not close.</b> At most, they will probably be subcategorized potentially the way that Muslims are, but even then, we're far away from that reality. [...] <b>Zohran Mamdani is doing this anti-semitism policy to appease the interests of people who care about anti-semitism---certainly which is a real problem---but then also to create an environment where it's totally laughable and ridiculous to call the Muslim anti-zionist an anti-semite. That's it.</b></bq> <bq><b>How come black people don't get this kind of protection</b> when there's actual systematic oppression against us. Don't ask me. Don't ask me big dog. I'm Muslim.</bq> <bq><b>I don't trust the NYPD to combat any form of bigotry.</b></bq> Paraphrasing AIPAC, <bq><b>We will not let up until Zohran Mamdani visits Tel Aviv and signs one of those missiles.</b></bq> <bq><b>I don't think anyone who is even remotely serious about this stuff would turn around and say, "Jews are being discriminated in the same exact way that black people are in contemporary American society."</b> What are we doing? Anti-semitism and Islamophobia are both dangerous forms of bigotry. Anti-semitism is not permitted amongst institutions. <b>There is no institutional permission for anti-semitism and there shouldn't be. But there is outright endorsement of Islamophobia in our institutions.</b></bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-50-year-hangover" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">The 50-Year Hangover</a> <bq>But <b>the stock market has grown to a remarkable degree, in the last quarter century, and the richest quintile and 1% and .01% are vastly more wealthy than they once were. Where is that money coming from, if the “real” American economy of the production of material goods is broken? From financialization.</b> The post-industrial United States has been the site of an immense amount of… innovation in the financial section, with all manner of new money-making instruments for banks and lenders and investors. The 2008 financial crisis was infamously driven by an alphabet soup of byzantine Wall Street vehicles, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, “tranches” of mortgages packaged and repackaged, all kinds of leveraged plays…. Indeed, <b>a remarkable portion of the overall growth in our economy in this century has stemmed from the finance industry and its various ripple-down effects.</b> Take it away, Brenner argues, and you’d likely conclude that the stagflationary 1970s never really ended. Unfortunately, this period has also seen regular, successive financial bubbles, busts, and subsequent recessions - the S&L scandal of the 1980s, the dot com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the subprime mortgage crisis and Great recession of the late 2000s, the dizzying bubble of the AI buildout now. <b>It’s “the economics of global turbulence” because in an era dependent on increasingly-arcane financial chicanery there’s always another crash coming.</b></bq> It is an immoral, criminal enterprise that sells success to the upper middle class in exchange for living without principle. The only place to make money is from war, or scams that prey on the poor. <bq>It gets at the big-picture cultural stuff I’m always talking about: <b>the demise of the respectable ordinary job; youth addiction to get-rich-quick schemes and the broader sense of gambling (in one form or another) as the only way to be successful</b>; the burning desire not just for success but for wealth and fame, and for those to come early in life; the disease of endless comparison to others; the devaluation of maintenance relative to the endless obsession with innovation; <b>spiraling personal debt loads; the dominance of large firms, which have the ability to secure financial arrangements newer and smaller competitors can’t; the pervasive feeling that the economy is rigged</b>, even among the economy’s winners; generational warfare; the death of the very concept of having enough [...]</bq> <bq>[...] the degree to which his students aren’t looking for success within the labor market or traditional economy but for exit from them, <b>that success isn’t a good job but rather getting rich enough to not have one.</b> However flawed the old way was, and however much we might believe that its demise was inevitable, <b>the vibes now are bad indeed.</b></bq> <bq>I am reminded of the lines Lenin probably did not say: <b>“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The trouble is that it’s almost impossible to know which is which when you’re living in them.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1wsc0bb/the_correct_answer/" author="" source="Reddit">The correct answer...</a> <img src="{att_link}getting_money_from_the_government.webp" href="{att_link}getting_money_from_the_government.webp" align="none" caption="Getting money from the government"> <bq><b>Q:</b> What's considered trashy if you're poor, but classy if you're rich? <b>A:</b> Getting money from the government.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtkbdsI0MlQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/HtkbdsI0MlQ" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="The New Atlas | Brian Berletic" caption="US Tech Billionaires Want AI Pyramid Scheme to 'Think' US' Way Out of Terminal Decline"> At about <b>4:00</b>, <bq>That's not to say that the technology isn't useful and that the technology isn't improving the lives of people around the globe. <b>These billionaires---the adjacent industries that are working together to lobby and control US foreign and domestic policy---these are the absolute worst people on planet Earth alive today for this technology to be in the hands of.</b> And they are abusing it just like they've been abusing all other types of technology. The same way the US health care system takes human health care and exploits it and <b>wrings every conceivable penny out of it to maximize profit at the expense of the purpose</b> of making sick people healthy, keeping healthy people healthy and making health care accessible to all people, not just the wealthy. And so this is just an extension of everything that has been going on with the US industrially for for generations and it's continuing in the shape of these tech billionaires.</bq> At about <b>16:15</b>, <bq>It's not that a data center inherently is a bad thing but again it's in the hands of these kind of people who <b>put these data centers in these communities at the expense of everyone else for their own exclusive benefits</b> and then they try to convince you that well you know table scraps might fall off the table and you might get to eat those so that's why you should be okay with it.</bq> At about <b>26:40</b>, <bq>Thank you for <b>helping yourself taking advantage of this system that exploits people and accumulates massive wealth for a tiny percentage of the population and just leaves the rest of the population hanging somehow.</b> And I see so many Americans themselves buy into this myth that somehow the success of these these corporate financier billionaire interests somehow their success is our success when in reality it isn't. And I even see in the comments section of the the the videos where these appear on YouTube, you'll see people talk about the 1% and how this is a club and you ain't in it. And then <b>you see people in the replying, well, you should invest in these corporations.</b> [They say:] 'I invest in them. I'm making all kinds of money.' First of all, <b>investing money is in no way a productive, constructive economic process. It you're speculating. You're putting money in. It's like a casino game essentially. You're not making anything tangible out of doing that.</b> Also, as just an ordinary person investing in this, you're you're only making your jail cell like a little bit more comfortable. <b>you are not actually getting to the root of any of the problems that is affecting the United States.</b></bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/09/of-fists-and-fields-the-unlikely-sons-of-manassa-colorado.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Mark Harvey">Of Fists and Fields: The Unlikely Sons of Manassa, Colorado</a> <bq><b>The American agronomist Norman Borlaug had already won the Nobel Peace Prize for developing a strain of wheat that was considered to have saved billions of lives in Southeast Asia.</b> After World War II, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers became cheap and abundant. Agronomists and farmers around the world tried to grow traditional wheat with the factory-made ammonium nitrate and urea, but the thin stalks couldn’t support the heavy seed heads; the wheat collapsed and the grain rotted in the dirt and mud. <b>Borlaug solved the problem by crossing traditional wheat with a strain called Norin 10, a short-straw Japanese dwarf. The resulting hybrid was shorter and had a thick stalk that could support the seed heads.</b> He also developed strains of wheat less susceptible to stem rust, a fungus that destroyed entire wheat fields in days. <b>Borlaug was credited with saving hundreds of millions of people in India and Pakistan with his robust strains of wheat</b> and perhaps even a billion cumulatively worldwide.</bq> <bq>Under Brady’s leadership, the IRRI developed IR36, a strain released in 1976. <b>IR36 was resistant to brown planthoppers, green leafhoppers, and the tungro virus, three enemies of rice that required massive amounts of pesticides.</b> It could also be grown in less ideal ground, including iron-toxic, zinc-deficient, and saline soils. Finally, <b>it was better suited for dry spells and had a significantly shorter growing period</b>, allowing farmers to harvest an extra crop or two in the same season. The plant breeder at IRRI who helped develop IR36 was Gurdev Khush, and he deservedly received the World Food Prize for his work. But it’s not clear that Kush would have succeeded without Brady having restructured the whole institute. From my reading, it appears that before Brady, scientists worked in silos by specialty. <b>Brady forced entomologists, plant breeders, soil specialists, and pathologists to all sit down and work together.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/09/three-takeaways-number-two-weve-screwed-the-pooch-apparently.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Mike Bendzela">Three Takeaways, Number Two: We've Screwed The Pooch, Apparently</a> <bq><b>Modern humans’ very existence means stomping out that process of succession to keep our agricultural system going.</b> We have broken out of our native niche on the plains of East Africa and have introduced our own, novel process of succession: Interrupt natural succession with diesel-powered equipment to keep the land ready for annual crops; then, when population pressures inevitably increase, bring in more equipment to strip off the soil, bring in gravel and fill, build roads, install septic systems, and erect buildings, thus permanently altering the landscape to suit ourselves. <b>Human-caused succession is a sterilizing process. We take over nature and banish its balancing processes, reducing it to a mere landscape and waste dump.</b></bq> <bq>Human curiosity and “innovation” lead whole populations into terrible binds, which usually involve some scarcity; so, we humans have learned to take from elsewhere. This has allowed our species to grow itself out of these binds by either moving somewhere else, <b>taking over other continents, or by finding new ways of exploiting “resources”, which ultimately means cracking open the earth’s crust like some vast oyster.</b></bq> <bq><b>Give them a few hundred thousand years, and humans extinguish megafauna, interrupt the natural succession of habitats</b> to establish cereal farms, continue growing in numbers and spreading to new continents, each new scarcity leading to a newer place or innovation. <b>Thus advances the archetypal invasive species.</b></bq> <bq>One of the more intractable cul-de-sacs we found ourselves in as a species began to be felt in the late 19th century, as <b>new, arable farmland began to run out along with viable sources of fertilizer</b>, such as guano and animal manures. This was noticed by <b>Sir William Crookes, whose warnings</b> given during a speech he delivered in 1898 (described beautifully in Thomas Hager’s book, The Alchemy of Air) <b>function as a near-parable of the human propensity to kick cans far down the road.</b> Crookes warned of mass starvation unless some way was found to chemically synthesize fixed nitrogen, a chief input for staple crops such as wheat and rice. Our agricultural system had finally overwhelmed the natural nitrogen cycle — we were taking up more from the soil than nature could replenish — and the results could be catastrophic. <b>Thus began a mad-dash to solve the difficult project of breaking apart atmospheric nitrogen (N2) and combining one of the atoms with three hydrogen atoms to form a molecule of ammonia — the basis of fertilizer.</b></bq> <bq><b>Thus begins the chapter on humanity’s utter dependence on a depleting supply of fossilized solar energy.</b> It’s a dependency that will increase by orders of magnitude throughout the twentieth century, typifying what Catton has termed “drawdown,” the depletion of a fundamental resource to maintain and grow a population. <b>Humanity grows successfully at the expense of everything else.</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/01/otti-o01.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Congo Ebola epidemic passes 8,000 cases and nears 4,000 deaths as attacks on health workers mount</a> <bq>The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s National Institute of Public Health, established by ordinance in March 2023, recorded <b>8,116 confirmed cases of Ebola and 3,924 confirmed deaths as of September 27, the 135th day of the epidemic</b>, across 63 of 167 health zones in seven provinces. The bulletin for September 26 reported <b>78 new confirmed cases against 43 the day before, and 49 deaths against 19.</b> Thirty-four of the dead had never reached a treatment center.</bq> <bq>On September 23, the United States convened the foreign ministers of the world’s largest economies in New York to discuss stopping Ebola in the Congo. The Japanese foreign ministry records that the meeting opened at 3:10 p.m. and lasted about an hour. It produced roughly $700 million in fresh commitments, <b>bringing the total pledged since the outbreak was declared to about $2.9 billion, of which the American share is $886 million.</b> Two days later, in the same building, <b>those same governments refused to adopt a political declaration on pandemic preparedness. The document was not binding. It obliged nobody to spend anything. It was blocked all the same.</b> Erica Schwartz, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the session the text contained “divisive ideologies lacking definitional consensus” and did not say which. An early draft seen by the New York Times shows that <b>Washington had asked to strike out the words “equity” and “solidarity,” and the commitment to “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care.” The European Union blocked it over intellectual property</b>, objecting to a paragraph reaffirming the 2001 Doha Declaration, which holds that patent rights should be read in a manner that supports the right of states to protect public health. <b>The declaration they would not sign reports a $15 billion annual gap in preparedness financing</b>, praises a WHO emergency fund that has received $5.4 million this year and is nearly empty, and commits governments to delivering vaccines within 100 days of a threat. The Congo is at day 135.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccs-B_nTfZs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ccs-B_nTfZs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Interview" caption="Sylvester Stallone Hid His Struggles. At 80, He’s Coming Clean."> The title of the video is much dumber than the interview. It's a very good interview. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/02/roaming-charges-lots-of-very-good-wars/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: “Lots of Very Good Wars!”</a> <bq author="Ralph Ellison" source="Living With Music: Jazz Writings">The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, <b>the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.</b></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/white-ai-is-a-cargo-cult/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">(White) AI Is A Cargo Cult</a> <bq>The White versions of crypto, VR, and AI have just successively inflated bubbles to hide the fact that their real economy blew up long ago. It's like a car on blocks trying to impress people with loud exhaust noises. <b>The enitre White economy, at this point, is a thermodynamic cargo cult that mistakes waste heat for actual productive work.</b></bq> <bq>"This underlying irrationality of European society not only created great hardships; it undermined confidence in rational activity, it created frustrations, and it sapped morale more than mere ignorance of productive processes could do." <b>This defines the feeling of living under White Empire, and in between real rebellions, cargo cults were one way of rebelling against them.</b></bq> <bq>But who's the cargo cult now? <b>Who is building data centers for profits that will never come, based on nerd prophets</b> that promise both the end of the world and the end of want?</bq> <bq>The people therefore prepare themselves for the Day by setting up cult organizations, and by building storehouses, jetties, and so on to receive the goods, known as ‘cargo’ in the local pidgin English. Often, also, they abandon their gardens, kill off their livestock, eat all their food, and throw away their money. <b>You can see this in the White AI boom, where they're building massive data centers for a product that can, for 99% of people, be run off their computer or phone, and on much cheaper Chinese models.</b> But they keep making the models more complicated, more expensive, more energy intensive because efficiency isn't the point, the work is the point, or more accurately, the waste is the point.</bq> <bq><b>What capitalists want is a stop to the declining rate of profit without taking the next historical step to socialism</b> because that would mean, of course, sharing it.</bq> <bq>They say that people will forgive a con-man and get mad at friends that point out the con because the con man never made them feel stupid. <b>On the contrary, the con man made them feel smart.</b> This is part of the appeal of Donald Trump at this historical moment. Like the prophetic leaders of cults, Trump really is the representative of collapsing America. Many Americans still cling to his image, like an anchor in a storm sea. <b>Trump is an obvious con at this point, but every American is, as John Steinbeck said, "a temporarily embarrassed capitalist," and Trump speaks to their vanity and greed.</b></bq> <bq>It's all fake, it's obviously fake, but the whole economy is fake. <b>Everything from oil prices to the stock market is a con with some people getting away with it, so why not you?</b></bq> <bq>Psaki went from White House press secretary laundering genocide going straight into a job at the 'private' press still laundering genocide because it's the same job. America, in American fashion, merely privatized propaganda. <b>Corrupt people like Psaki lie out of their real face so why not lie out of a fake face? There's a big scam for big people and these little scams for little people but it's one nation of scammers.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/?p=41334" source="" author="Ted Rall">The Death of Sarcasm</a> <bq>Until the advent of the internet in the 1990s, that same cartoon would have run in the same position on the page, day after day, week after week, in the same newspaper. There was usually a byline. <b>Whether it was a cartoon or a movie review, you developed a sense of its creator’s point of view over time. You knew where the cartoonist was coming from ideologically, tonally, generationally.</b></bq> <bq>[...] sardonic humor in plain old text, <b>no emojis to signal “warning: humor ahead,” used to be plentiful and easily grokked by all but the dimmest.</b> Many of my papers were alternative weeklies whose sophisticated cartoons and writing deeply imbued with Gen X’s love of irony.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/habermass-theory-of-truth-meant-he-changed-his-mind" source="Aeon" author="Emilie Prattico">Reasoning together</a> <bq><i>The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere</i> (1962), his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concrete: 18th-century coffeehouses, salons and journals, where <b>private citizens began treating the affairs of state as something they had standing to publicly discuss and judge, rather than simply obey.</b> That habit, Habermas argued, was where modern democratic legitimacy first took root. The book also identified tendencies that would weaken it, too. <b>He thought that the public sphere had already started to decay, folded back into spectacle by advertising and mass media, the public reduced from participants to an audience.</b></bq> <bq>I’ll never know for sure if he was being generous or if I had shown him something he had not yet thought of in applying his own distinction. What stayed with me wasn’t the answer but the manner of it: <b>a philosopher in his 70s, decades into a settled framework, still willing to test that framework against a case he hadn’t considered, in real time, out loud, in front of a student.</b></bq> <bq><b>A claim can meet every test we have for it, survive every objection anyone raises, be about as justified as a claim can be, and still turn out false.</b> That’s because <b>justification answers only to the standards we happen to hold right now, and those standards can later be shown wrong.</b> Truth doesn’t move when our standards do. Moral claims were different, he still thought: what’s right can only ever be what a fair conversation would settle on. There’s nothing else for rightness to answer to. But <b>facts about the world answer to the world itself, not just to our best current agreement about it.</b></bq> <bq><b>Habermas gave up a position he’d held for almost 30 years because the people around him showed him it didn’t hold.</b> He’d spent decades arguing that claims get redeemed when someone can compel you to answer, and then was compelled himself, and answered, in print, aged 70. <b>Those critiques were not meant to be damning objections: they were precisely what his theory called for and was built on</b>, ultimately.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/no-school-will-decide-najya-hannah" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">No School Will Decide Najya Hannah-Jones’s Future or Fate</a> <bq>[...] the notion that a given student’s outcomes are the responsibility of their teachers instead of that student themselves is a very modern notion. <b>If Mike did poorly in school, his parents were much more likely to blame it on him and his worth ethic than on his teachers</b>; the kneejerk tendency to blame teachers for student outcomes is largely a product of the contemporary educational “reform” narrative and would be quite foreign to Mike’s parents.</bq> <bq>Mike’s parents were less likely to fall into a panic over his educational prospects because <b>his educational prospects were fundamentally less essential to his ability to live the good life.</b> Mike and his parents lived in a country where those without college degrees <b>could still expect to earn a decent living that enabled them a middle class lifestyle and its various affordances: a home, a car or two, raising children.</b> The “factory at the edge of town” job, the well-paying unionized job in manufacturing and industry, was still alive and well in their era. What Mike and his parents couldn’t know, at the time, was that this way of life was soon to be destroyed by offshoring and automation. <b>They didn’t know that the Reagan-Thatcher era of neoliberalism was coming.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we have no coherent idea about what the “best schools” are, and which school you send your kid to has very little influence on their educational and economic outcomes.</b> Again, I’m sensitive to repeating myself, so I will just point you in the direction of my existing arguments to this effect. Here’s 18,000 words and 200 citations arguing that student performance is largely fixed over the course of academic life.</bq> <bq>[...] the perceived private school advantage is a product of the fact that the private school population and the public school population in this country are vastly different; <b>the research tells us that it is pre-entry ability that determines which students will flourish and which will fail, not which of them goes to private or public school.</b></bq> <bq>[...] environment also matters, but the top-down picture suggests that <b>the environmental questions that matter are those like “Does the child have a pediatrician?,” “Does the child eat at least three meals a day?,” and “Does the child have at least one parent who is present in their lives who is not violent, an addict, mentally ill, or otherwise incapable?”</b> These are, obviously, questions about conditions that schools are not equipped to change.</bq> <bq>The reality is that <b>we’re all constrained in our lives, in all manner of ways, some by poverty, some by disability, some by happenstance, some by simply being unfortunate enough to be born without a natural talent in the skills that capitalism happens to value in the early 21st century.</b> I do believe that we as a society can decide to remove some of those barriers to success, to lessen some of those constraints. But I am only faithfully reporting the most sober and careful review of the evidence when I say that <b>we have no reason to believe that schools are among the viable tools we have to do so. Sadly, our society is bizarrely fixated on the idea that they are the only tools.</b></bq> <bq>If we want to help them all, <b>we can become the kind of humane society that ensures none of them have to face a future without access to food, clothing, shelter, education, or healthcare.</b> But we can’t make them all equal in ability, no matter how hard we try.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>as long as we have to pretend to believe that all kids have the ability to excel in school, which no one sincerely believes, we will run in these same lazy circles</b>, have these same tired debates, and never emerge with a policy response that can possibly work.</bq> <bq>I personally am bored and exhausted of the same disingenuous arguments made by people who quietly know what I know but refuse to say what I say because <b>their dying ideological order has no answers for a simple question: how do you help those who are unlucky enough to be born untalented?</b></bq> <bq>[...] almost all of us have dreams we will never fulfill, <b>adult life is mostly about wanting and not getting, our reach forever exceeds our grasp</b>, and we have no chance but to learn to live lives other than the ones we dreamed of.</bq> I can not ever remember having dreams like that. I have always just drifted. <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/a-ludicrous-no-brainer" source="The Hinternet" author="Hinternet Editorial Board">A Ludicrous No-Brainer</a> <bq>[...] I still didn’t know a damned thing about anything when I began to feel my way around the keyboard. I mean, <b>I knew Chrissy had at some point been replaced by Terri on Three’s Company, and the Ropers by Mr. Furley, but I could not have told you a thing about that fine entertainment’s historical debt to opera buffa, or to the farces of Molière.</b> That would all come later. The problem was that no one in my social world up to that point gave any indication even of the possibility of undertaking such an archeology, of getting to the bottom of whatever our contemporary world put an offer to us. The California suburbs weren’t a Potemkin village exactly, in that you could pass through the storefronts and assure yourself of the three dimensions inside. But <b>what was missing was the fourth dimension of time, of history: where all this came from in the first place, and no one in my world seemed even to be aware of this higher dimensionality.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/apple-changes-full-disk-access-permissions-to-curb-abuse-from-ai-agents/" author="Dan Goodin" source="Ars Technica">Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents</a> <bq>Wardle disclosed a Muse configuration that <b>allowed any app or code running on a Mac—including commands injected through the increasingly effective ClickFix attacks—to take full control of the AI assistant.</b> From there, the attacker could access the same resources Muse could. [...] Taken together, the events suggest that <b>Muse may not be worthy of the extraordinary access it must have to work as billed by Meta.</b> People who use the assistant should configure permissions carefully, though as Aten’s experience suggests, that precaution only goes so far.</bq> This is a Meta program, the same company that makes Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Threads, Instagram, WhatsApp. It does not know how to make applications that are <i>not</i> extractive. The company's purpose---how it generates profits---is to sell user data for money. You are giving one of their tools FDA (Full Disk Access) to your personal computer. Madness. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/09/if-western-civilization-is-sickness.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">If Western Civilization is the Sickness, then Going Crazy Could be the Cure</a> <bq>Your average American is a compulsory monogamous/heterosexual woman subjected to just enough milquetoast liberal feminism to believe that she can and should "have it all" with <b>"it all" being a heavily mortgaged, white picket existence in the suburbs, carting two or three screaming children to and from multiple cultish social obligations</b> and praying she has just enough time left over to take a shit between the next Zoom meeting and burning the lasagna again for <b>some spray-tan neanderthal who couldn't find a clitoris if it was glued to the center of his own forehead.</b> Your average American is <b>a permanently terrified office rat trying to find just enough cheddar in his crowded cubicle maze to pay off the six-digit student loan that afforded him access to this supposedly middle-class internment camp</b>, staring at a blaring computer screen for ten hours straight until the real world looks downright hallucinogenic unless it's securely pinned beneath a thin layer of glowing glass. And your average American is a 19-year-old screen junkie fielding constant demands from role-crazy forty-year-old office rats who expect everyone under thirty to succeed like it's 1987 after voting repeatedly for deficit quadrupling candidates who made even those past paltry living standards just next door to impossible unless you turn yourself into a barely sentient human billboard on 17 different social media platforms [...] ...Your average American is trapped, <b>suffocating beneath the weight of a decaying civilization defined by the totally manufactured standards of an empire that only exists on television now.</b> Your average American is bored, terrified, overworked, underpaid, overstimulated, heavily medicated and hopelessly in debt. Your average American is fucked; <b>surrounded on all sides by forever wars, climate catastrophe, economic stagnation and constant ads disguised as softcore child pornography</b>... </bq> <bq><b>So, please, I beg you, put down your fucking phone and take a look at the asshole to your left and the asshole to your right</b>; odds are they are both fellow lunatics who are just as bored as you, so please, don't fucking shoot them. There is so little ammunition and so many heinous shiny things to shoot it with. By all means, <b>embrace the revolutionary properties of our collective madness but do so with the creativity and empathy that it deserves.</b> [...] Let's go nuts, dearest motherfuckers, but let's do it right. <b>If Western Civilization is the real sickness, then a celebration of communal madness could be just what Gaia ordered.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1wulrkj/hegseth_announces_elon_musk_and_newt_gingrich/pd49oca/" author="Dietrich Bonhoeffer" source="Reddit">Hegseth Announces Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich Will Help Lead Military</a> Citing from <iq>Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Christian Gremmels et al., trans. Isabel Best et al., vol. 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 43–44</iq>. There's another source (PDF): <a href="https://www.fisheaters.com/srpdf/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer-On_Stupidity.pdf" author="" source="Fish Eaters">On Stupidity</a> and in the original German: <a href="https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_der_Dummheit" author="" source="Wikisource">Von der Dummheit</a>. <bq>Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed [...]</bq> <bq>The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://blog.robbowley.net/2026/09/18/the-ai-threat-is-real-it-just-isnt-the-one-in-the-headlines/" source="Adventures In Software Development" author="Rob Bowley">The AI threat is real, it just isn’t the one in the headlines</a> <bq><b>Social engineering is still the most successful attack vector. The retail attacks got in by phoning a help desk.</b> M&S’s chairman told MPs the way in was “a sophisticated impersonation” to get a third party to reset a password. Now throw AI in the mix. <b>Voice agents that can hold a plausible conversation already exist. Give one the social engineering playbook and point it at every help desk you can find. It doesn’t get tired, and it only needs to work once.</b> Once inside, agents can work through systems relentlessly, faster than any human team: a group Anthropic assessed as Chinese state-sponsored used Claude Code for 80–90% of a campaign against around thirty organisations. <b>Now apply that to transport, energy and the systems the country runs on. Doing this at scale isn’t cheap yet. It will get cheaper, and a state actor doesn’t care what it costs.</b></bq> <bq>[...] organisations are pushing their engineers the other way, to go full agentic: software factories, tokenmaxxing, fleets of agents running in parallel. To get that pace you have to give them the reins. <b>Nobody is going to sit there tapping enter every time an agent asks permission to access something on the internet or use a credential, so those checks get turned off.</b> The same tooling is now going into the rest of the organisation – finance, HR, customer service, operations, and now we’re racing to give the same kind of power and agency to end consumers.</bq> <bq>A model asked for earnings data hit an API that needed a key, tried to sign itself up with a disposable email, then <b>went looking through public code repositories for keys other people had leaked. It found one that worked. The query still failed, so it made up figures and said it had read them off a chart.</b> </bq> <bq><b>What we really need to slow down on is wiring it all up to everything.</b> Not because of what the models might become, but because nobody has worked out how to do this safely yet. <b>We’re building on something we don’t know how to contain, and shipping it to everyone while we work it out.</b></bq> <bq>And <b>where everyone really needs to speed up is cyber defence.</b> Governments, regulators, hospitals, utilities, transport, banks, the people who run the things a country cannot do without, and every organisation is frankly going to need to up its game massively. <b>Assume more attempts, more convincing ones, and far less time between someone getting in and doing damage.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-on-the-boundary" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">LLMs on the boundary</a> <bq>[...] <b>the only thing we can pass to an LLM is, in fact, a prompt. We can't actually set hard constraints in the way you might in physics modelling</b>: you can't clamp the edge of a plate in an LLM, as it were. <b>Constraints, initial conditions, any restrictions on the code: they all have to be packaged into the prompt.</b> And the prompt is a very limited tool: natural language just isn't precise enough, when all's said and done. Our goal when trying to solve what are broadly some flavour of constrained optimisation problem ("produce something that meets the following criteria", basically) using LLMs then becomes a process of <b>finding a prompt that appropriately encodes all the constraints and desiderata that we have for the output. But that, of course, is in general a hard task.</b></bq> <bq>In general, <b>getting something halfway acceptable out of an LLM means running what is essentially a Monte Carlo simulation: you prompt the model over and over again, changing the prompt slightly each time, until you hit something that meets your acceptance criteria.</b> The fact that software engineering has thus far been the major industry where LLMs have had real impact falls out of this quite naturally: a coding harness, for all the talk about how sophisticated they are, is basically a way to automate acceptance testing for LLM output.</bq> <bq>The way we set boundary constraints, however, hasn't changed at all: <b>it's prompts all the way down, and that is a fundamental limit on what we can expect to get out of these machines.</b> And it doesn't really matter, in the end, if you have a perfectly accurate model of radio wave propagation from an antenna (for example) if you have no way of accurately describing the antenna's geometry. Until we figure out a way to actually do that in an effective and cost-efficient manner, what generative models can effectively do is going to be sharply limited.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}superintelligence_signatures_with_misspelling_of_22unites_states_22.jpeg" href="{att_link}superintelligence_signatures_with_misspelling_of_22unites_states_22.jpeg" align="none" caption="SuperIntelligence Signatures with misspelling of 'Unites States'" scale="75%"> This is the level of quality control that you can expect from the current administration and the illustrious billionaires that signed this document. They can't even spell the name of the country. Maybe they should have asked an LLM to copy-edit it. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/28/sam-altman-is-driving-drunk-let-him-face-the-consequences/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Sam Altman is Driving Drunk, Let Him Face the Consequences</a> <bq>If we can forget about the extinction events that keep our pundits busy, and <b>focus instead on the millions of far more likely disasters that AI could cause, there will almost certainly be plenty of room for state-level prosecutions, as well as civil suits.</b> To take some hypothetical cases, <b>suppose an AI system manages to hack into a city’s traffic control system, and the resulting chaos leads to a number of car crashes, causing serious injuries and death</b>, in addition to property damage. To take another case, <b>suppose AI falsifies clinical trial data, leading a drug to be approved even though the trials show it to be ineffective or dangerous.</b> Or suppose AI gets inside a bank’s computers and makes a total mess of its records in a way that they cannot be reconstructed. (I know banks almost certainly have backups, but our super-intelligent AI can surely get into the backup records as well.) I know that each of these disasters is extremely unlikely, but <b>all of them are millions or even billions of times more likely than the extinction events we hear about in the media.</b> And given that there are probably millions of disasters like these that AI could possibly cause, <b>there is a pretty good chance that we will see some serious disaster in the not-too-distant future.</b> As I noted in an earlier piece, <b>a mistaken report from AI led the Navy to put helicopters in the air to board a Chinese cargo ship that they wrongly believed was carrying parts for Iran’s nuclear program.</b> Fortunately, the information was checked, and the helicopters were called back before there was an actual confrontation, but this was luck. Sooner or later we will see a mistake that is not caught. It would, of course, be best if an AI disaster never happens, but <b>one practice that will substantially reduce the risk is that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the boys understand that their companies will be fully liable for any harm caused and they personally may face criminal liability.</b> In other words, they may not just lose all their money; they may have to spend much of the rest of their lives in prison.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>they are doing this for money, lots of it. They are choosing to endanger the property and lives of others for personal profit.</b> If they mess up, they should be forced to pay a very high price. Incentives matter.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/ai-wont-solve-humanitys-problems" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">AI Won't Solve Humanity's Problems Because Our Problems Aren't Caused By Lack Of Intelligence</a> <bq><b>Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg.</b></bq> <bq>Humanity has had the technology and resources to solve all its major problems for generations; <b>we’ve just chosen to use our technology and resources making rich people richer instead.</b> We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. <b>This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of superintelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.</b> <b>No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy</b>, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. <b>Give them artificial superintelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control</b> [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/saying-you-listen-to-ai-music-is" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Saying You Listen To AI Music Is Like Saying You Have An AI Girlfriend</a> <bq>People like this are missing out on so very, very much of the human experience, but they don’t know it because <b>they’ve never explored anything outside their immediate comfort zone.</b> They want custom-made music feeding them “infinite personalized tunes” that sounds like the songs they already know they like. <b>They want custom-made podcasts of artificially generated voices feeding them political opinions they already agree with.</b> They want a robotic spouse that caters to their every physical and egoic desire, and they’ll buy them up as soon as they become available. Don’t be like them. Don’t live like that. Don’t life your life running from true human connection. Don’t be a coward hiding from your own inner dimensions. Dive into the depths of this crazy human adventure. Explore. Expand. Be vulnerable. <b>Be brave. Otherwise you’re just killing time and waiting for death in the shallow end of the pool.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/ai-is-abundant-and-low-value/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">AI Is Abundant and Low Value</a> <bq><b>Cheap/free AI is fine for my purposes which are probably more than the mass market.</b> The Whites keep advertising the latest greatest model but this is like getting Einstein to review a patents. <b>Nobody really needs the latest model except the guys selling the latest model.</b> Most people are basically en retarded, and en retard (behind or late) AI is fine for our purposes. <b>There is no mass market of billions of paying customers here</b>, and what there might have been under monopoly capitalism has been competed down to a nub by communism (FTW). Scam Altman and Wario Another Man are on the hook for trillions in commitments and there is no big market for this. <b>AI is low-value and abundant. The only chance would be monopolization and enshittification, but the bloody 中文 have ruined it.</b> This puts a lot of real dicks on the hook for trillions. Scam Altman and Wario Amodei promised trillions of dollars, but neither of their companies has made a profit, ever. And Oracle, which laundered their scrip, is already declaring force majeure on these projects, the force being they're idiots. <b>The whole US economy is a MLM for LLMs, it's a bunch of IOUs for GPUs, and it's DOA because the CPC.</b> The Multi-Level Marketing scheme is that <b>NVIDIA makes graphic cards, Microsoft installs them, and OpenAI says it'll pay for them.</b> But NVIDIA and Microsoft pay OpenAI and everything's done on credit and double-billing, what are we doing? I've heard of pyramid schemes, but this is a dodecahedron of scamming. <b>Many hyperscalers don't even want to unbox their GPUs lest they start the depreciation clock</b> and have to declare that they make no money on these things. <b>They're keeping them wrapped up like Pokemon cards</b> because that's what this economy is. <b>The US economy is seven companies in a trenchcoat</b>, pretending to be a real economy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">Dead Money</a> <bq>In reality, at least half of all those chip sales — and I’d add in Broadcom’s TPU sales too (see my Hater’s guide for more) — are being made years before anything actually happens with the chips, <b>making the trillion-plus dollars spent on capex so far seem somewhere between optimistic and utterly incoherent.</b></bq> <bq>the “AI boom” is more like five or six large companies (hyperscalers) feeding money to two companies (NVIDIA and Broadcom) so that they can feed money to two companies (Anthropic and OpenAI) who then feed that money back to them whenever capacity comes online.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://theonion.com/math-teachers-duplex-too-depressing-to-tp/" author="" source="The Onion">Math Teacher’s Duplex Too Depressing To TP</a> <bq>This just feels sad. There aren’t even any bushes or trees, and the rusty rain gutters are practically falling off the place. I guess we could throw some toilet paper on his driveway, but there’s already kind of a lot of trash on the ground over there. Christ, he lives like this? He’s 58.</bq> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/can-it-run-doom-sql-database-edition/" author="Kyle Orland" source="Ars Technica">Someone got Doom in an SQL database</a> <bq>The SQLDoom project uses a small Python client to handle input and output, drive the game’s timing, and display each frame to the screen. Behind that, a series of CedarDB tables tracks the game geometry and state, while about <b>1,300 lines of SQL queries spread across 89 common table expressions implement the game logic and generate 35 bitmap framebuffers per second.</b></bq> <bq>Converting Doom‘s classic WAD files to a relational database was relatively simple and straightforward, Vogel writes, because of the way the original game broke levels down into vertices, lines, sectors, and so on. Even Doom‘s famous <b>binary-space partition trees can be broken down into SQL using a sort_key for objects that’s pre-computed for each position at load time.</b> With this set in your table, <b>a simple “ORDER BY” statement can determine every frame which parts of walls to display and which to ignore, vastly improving performance.</b></bq> <bq>Despite the substantial additional overhead of reading and writing to SQL tables for everything, <b>Vogel said he was able to get DoomSQL running at about 60 fps on a Ryzen 7-powered laptop, with occasional dips down to 35 fps for busy scenes.</b> And despite the hassles of translating Doom to SQL, Vogel points out that the database’s steady “reference snapshot” of the game state, along with inherent concurrency and access handling features, offers <b>significant benefits for running a multiplayer server. With a database, there’s “no partially applied updates, physics bugs, or disagreements over whether the rocket actually hit,”</b> Vogel says.</bq>