<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#design">Design</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/VLbWnJGlyMU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="A Bug's Life" caption="'Then they ALL might stand up to us'"> <bq>Let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us 100 to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life. <b>It's not about food it's about keeping those ants in line.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/679" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">The Story of Democracy</a> <img src="{att_link}existential_comics_-_thestoryofdemocracy.webp" href="{att_link}existential_comics_-_thestoryofdemocracy.webp" align="none" caption="Existential Comics - TheStoryofDemocracy" scale="55%"> How it started: <bq quote-style="none">In order for it to be fair and just, <b>all the citizens would be educated, and there would be no inequality.</b> No man could buy another, or have the need to sell himself. <b>Citizen #1:</b> What policies are you voting for? <b>Citizen #2:</b> Due to the fact that I have been rigorously educated in philosophy and virtue from a young age, I am voting in the general interest, not my own. <b>Citizen #1:</b> Nice. Same.</bq> How it's going: <bq quote-style="none">Unfortunately, <b>we forgot to eliminate inequality and educate everyone properly</b>, so it didn't really work out. Sorry Rousseau. We tried. Just not that hard. <b>Citizen #2:</b> What did you vote for? <b>Citizen #1:</b> Facebook told me to be afraid. So I voted based on that. <b>Citizen #2:</b> Nice. Same.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/florida/comments/1xne63j/yay/" source="Reddit">Yay,,,</a> <img src="{att_link}florida_is_happy_for_you_all.webp" href="{att_link}florida_is_happy_for_you_all.webp" align="none" caption="Florida is happy for you all" scale="75%"> (The joke is that, where Georgia and Texas tacked pretty historically left-ish<fn> in the midterms, Florida aggressively continued its tack to the right.) <hr> <ft>I read somewhere that Talarico had said, <iq>I want to be a senator for Texans who can't afford one.</iq> That's a pretty good line.</ft> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/10/reed-fascism-trump-class-universalism" source="Jacobin" author="Selcuk Gultasli">Adolph Reed on What It Will Take to Defeat Trumpism</a> <bq>Partly because Trump insists on surrounding himself with incompetent sycophants, I don’t think the movement, Trumpism, has institutional constituents so much as <b>a gaggle of free-rider billionaires and hustlers who share with him a mean-spirited take on the world in general</b>, along with no shortage of avarice and a propensity for corruption.</bq> <bq>[...] if my postal worker was raised Catholic and I was raised Catholic, then we’re Catholics with each other. Or if someone has family in Cuba and I have family in Cuba, then we’re Cubans together. What’s especially powerful is his argument that ethnic identities, or particular ethnic identities, are likely to come to the foreground when <b>mobilized by political entrepreneurs who want to pursue agendas that require the support of a population substantially larger than the number of people who would benefit concretely from the realization of those agendas.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the wounded Southern planter-merchant capitalist class, weakened by the Populist insurgency from below in the early 1890s, regrouped, <b>self-consciously constructed a white supremacist ideology, imposed it institutionally through the deployment of as much violence, fraud, and intimidation as necessary, and established it as the hegemonic ideology.</b> Because it’s clear that while white supremacists in the Jim Crow–era South were certainly committed to racial hierarchy and the establishment of a racist regime, and I would never challenge the sincerity of that commitment, white supremacy was simultaneously a discourse of mobilization. <b>It helped divide the potential electorate and the forces that had been arrayed against that dominant class, while deploying scapegoating in much the same way that the Trumpists do now.</b> The commitment to a white supremacist ideology was genuine, but it was simultaneously a technique for <b>imposing a dominant order that was skewed toward representing only the interests of the upper class.</b></bq> <bq>We’ve now reached a point where <b>capitalist class rule is so dominant that it’s not even possible for most people to imagine a genuinely egalitarian way of organizing society</b> that’s actually different from what currently exists. I don’t know why I’m trying to be quiet about this, but that’s what I think the ultimate problem is. But if you’ll pardon the plug, an online academic journal I’m associated with, nonsite.org, is publishing a three-part symposium called Capitalism 1996–2026. The first installment came out [earlier in October], and I <b>strongly encourage all your readers and listeners to take a look at it. There are four really strong articles.</b></bq> <bq>Let’s assume a white female nurse loses her job, has no independent source of funds, and is on the verge of being evicted from her apartment. <b>Where is the pot of white wealth she gets to go to?</b> Where is the teacup, presumably, from which she can get her rent money? <b>When you think of it that way, the idea of racial wealth seems all the more preposterous.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sPoQ2CEM1s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1sPoQ2CEM1s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="THE ISRAELI ELECTIONS ARE INSANE"> <bq>That's the attitude, by the way, of the Israeli youth. Okay, she's not so special in her Nazi sentiment. <b>The attitude from the Israeli youth is they're babies today, tomorrow they are Hamas.</b> It disgusts me that the American media has basically tried to actively silence people who shed light to these atrocities and the attitude from the Israeli population overall. <b>It's always varying degrees of Jewish supremacist attitude, varying degrees of exterminationism towards Palestinians. That's what comprises Israeli society.</b> [sic] That's what moves Israeli politics.</bq> <bq>This is Israeli society, broadly speaking. And the only way that they just like completely get away with the violence that Palestinians are subjected to, is because <b>they have puppies in American media, in advocacy organizations, that ask 'how high' when Israel says 'jump'.</b> <b>And Americans, for the longest time, were completely blinded to this reality. Of course, they are no longer as blinded to this reality.</b> There are many Americans whose eyes were opened after October 7 and the genocide that Israel subjected the Palestinians to. And now we arrive at our current predicament. That is precisely the reason why so many in American media come after me with the wrath of a thousand suns because they foolishly think I'm responsible for it, when they don't realize that Israel is responsible for this enmity because <b>people have now seen what they have seen about Israeli cruelty and they can no longer unsee it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/31/burn-berne/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Formalities</a> <bq>This is the uncontroversial and universally accepted legal understanding of copyright: all the copyright in the world for creative acts, no copyright at all for mere acts of labor. <b>The "sweat of the brow" has nothing to do with a work's eligibility for copyright.</b> But no media boss believes this. For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property right, designed and operated to protect their bottom line. <b>The point of copyright isn't to incentivize creativity, but rather investment.</b> There's obviously a relationship between creative acts and acts of investment, but <b>it's possible to create without investment (see: your haiku) and it's possible to invest without creativity (see: your phone book).</b></bq> <bq>This is the basis for the US Copyright Office's repeated decision to refuse to extend copyright to AI-generated works. An algorithm is even less human than a monkey, so <b>if you can't get copyright over a monkey selfie, you definitely can't copyright your chatbot's slop.</b> The US Copyright Office has successfully defended this position in multiple courts, triumphing over plaintiffs who were so persistent that they even got the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue (the Supremes decided the case didn't warrant their attention)</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.infosperber.ch/gesellschaft/die-zuercher-krawalle-sind-ein-erfolg-fuer-die-stadtpolizei/" author="Daniel Ryser" source="InfoSperber">Die Zürcher «Krawalle» sind ein Erfolg für die Stadtpolizei</a> <bq><b>Die brennenden Container stören die Banken nicht und Schweiz Tourismus stören sie auch nicht, sie stören die Ruag sowieso nicht und deren Waffengeschäfte und McDonalds und Uber stören sie nicht und die KI-Rechenzentren auch nicht.</b> Sie stören vielleicht die Beamtinnen und Beamten der Stadtpolizei, die noch mehr Überstunden anhäufen, aber sie stören Big Business nicht und Apple und Google und die anderen Milliarden-Tech-Konzerne stören sie auch nicht, im Gegenteil, die Aufrufe und Bilder und Videos von solchen brennenden Containern verschaffen höchstens Traffic auf Instagram und X und Traffic schafft Werbung und Werbung schafft Konsum. <b>Was wir am Wochenende beobachtet haben, ist nicht wirklich ein Krawall oder ein Protest, der das System erschüttert, es ist ein eigentümliches Zürcher Quartierfest</b>, das zu dieser Stadt und zum Lauf der Dinge gehört wie das Sechseläuten im Frühling.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/iranian-strength-is-what-killed-the" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Iranian Strength Is What Killed The Republicans</a> <bq>The United States didn’t retreat from Vietnam because the Americans suddenly developed a conscience, it retreated because the Vietnamese fought like lions and kept sending home coffins draped in red, white and blue. <b>The Republicans didn’t lose the midterms because Americans dislike war, they lost because the Iranians beat the shit out of them.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3h9n_GZuVA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/t3h9n_GZuVA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="Abdul El-Sayed did it. He beat AIPAC."> <bq>We built a movement, government of the people by the people and for the people. We showed that <b>in a battle between the money and the many that the many really can win.</b> And so, to all the kids who watched this last month, to all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, <b>let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost.</b> Let them know. I want you to let them know. Let them know that we together fighting for something bigger. We won. So Mike, enjoy your retirement. I know you got a house in Florida and two yachts. <b>See, you chose hate and Michigan chose hope.</b> May we never have to see the likes of you in the state again. J.D. Habibi. There is this delicious irony in the fact that <b>you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.</b> [...] Donald, look, I know you struggled with my name. So, after JD swears me in in January, you could just go on and <b>call me Senator.</b> To the super-PACs and special interests who tried to beat us, we are coming for your system of politics. To AIPAC, who spent $42 million against us, <b>thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/06/mjin-n06.html" author="Andrea Peters" source="WSWS">Russian government axes social spending</a> <bq>The austerity measures target subsidies for large families, childbirth benefits, education, healthcare, housing and utilities, sports and physical culture, and the entire basket of services that fall under the label “social policy” in the federal budget, according to an analysis just released by the National Institute of Economic Forecasting at the Russian Academy of Sciences (INP-RAN). Based on the Ministry of Finance’s figures, <b>social spending will fall by 15.2 percent next year.</b> The Kremlin is preparing to <b>simultaneously spend 4.4 trillion rubles ($55 billion) more in 2027 on defense, security, law enforcement and paying off the national debt than it originally planned</b>, an increase of about 1.39 trillion rubles ($17 billion) compared to 2026. This is on top of years of massive increases in war spending. In 2026, <b>defense and security accounted for 42 percent of Russia’s federal budget.</b></bq> <bq>The Russian state is also axing the amount of money it transfers to the country’s Social Fund, which finances pensions, maternity and child benefits, paid sick leave, support payments for people with disabilities, veterans and others. <b>Contributions from the federal budget to the Social Fund in 2027 will drop by 15 percent</b>, about 721 billion rubles ($9 billion), compared to 2026. They will remain well below 2026 levels through 2029.</bq> Every state is the same. Money for war but not for people. <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/melania-trump-ukraine/" author="Almut Rochowanski" source="Responsible Statecraft">Three cheers for Melania Trump-led ceasefire in Ukraine</a> <bq><b>The Oleshky ceasefire is an example of people-centered peacemaking, wherein the process of transforming a conflict is guided by the needs of the people affected by it and what they require to be safe, to survive and lead full lives.</b> People-centered peace-making flips the normal logic of war — of power, violence, the demands of armies and desires of states as determined by the powerful — on its head. <b>Diplomacy becomes about bedridden villagers and their cats, not NATO</b>, neutrality or Europe’s security architecture. Peace deals that have come about through this kind of approach tend to be sturdier and allow for stronger post-conflict rebuilding. Since completing the mission, <b>Commissioners Lubinets and Lantratova have both asked that First Lady Melania Trump help broker more ceasefires</b>, so they can together build on the successful experience of Oleshky. On November 5, hosting Russian and Ukrainian officials in the White House to recognize them for their joint achievement at Oleshky, the first lady called for turning “modest beginnings” into “something extraordinary” and finding common ground “through a shared concern for the suffering of innocent people” to “brighten a path toward lasting peace.” Those who genuinely want to end this war should take note.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/unsere-scheindemokratie/" author="Marco Diener" source="InfoSperber">Unsere Scheindemokratie</a> <bq>Die Stadtberner Stimmberechtigten bekamen dieser Tage <b>ein Abstimmungsbüchlein zugeschickt, das 44 Seiten stark ist, obwohl es nur um zwei Vorlagen geht.</b></bq> In diesem Fall muss ich mutmassen, dass die das mit KI geschrieben haben. Auch die von Bund geschriebenen 15 Seiten, die sich immer wieder wiederholen---und, dass mit leicht unterschiedlichen Zahlen---deuten darauf hin, dass alles mit KI entweder vollständig geschrieben oder zumindest aufgepeppt wird. <bq><b>Wenn sich Behörden keine Mühe geben, verständliche und leicht lesbare Abstimmungsbotschaften vorzulegen, dann leben wir nicht in einer Demokratie, sondern in einer Scheindemokratie.</b> Und wenn wir über Vorlagen abstimmen, ohne sie verstanden zu haben, dann erst recht. Noch verstärkt wird dieser Eindruck von der Scheindemokratie nach gewissen Abstimmungen. Die Unternehmenssteuerreform oder die F-35-Beschaffung sind Beispiele dafür. <b>Da wurden wir Stimmberechtigten – absichtlich oder nicht – regelrecht hinters Licht geführt.</b></bq> Wenn <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1xjmd8h/so_say_we_all/" author="SkullLeader" source="Reddit">So say we all</a> <img src="{att_link}he_despised_you_and_everything_you_stood_for.webp" href="{att_link}he_despised_you_and_everything_you_stood_for.webp" align="none" caption="He despised you and everything you stood for" scale="55%"> <bq>Stephen Miller, on behalf of Star Trek, and everyone who knew and loved him, keep my Captain's name<fn> out of your fucking Nazi mouth. He despised you, and everything you stand for.</bq> <ul> Wil Wheaton played Ensign Wesley Crusher on <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i>. The phrase "so say we all" is from <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>, so kudos to SkullLeader for choosing that title. </ul> <hr> <ft>For future readers, the context is that Patrick Stewart, who'd played Captain Jean-Luc Picard alongside Wesley Crusher, had recently died.</ft> <hr> <img src="{att_link}orphan-crushing_machine_origin_story.webp" href="{att_link}orphan-crushing_machine_origin_story.webp" align="none" caption="Orphan-crushing machine origin story" scale="90%"> <bq>Every heartwarming human-interest story in [the U.S. of] America is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-war-propaganda-is-even-dumber" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The War Propaganda Is Even Dumber This Time — And Other Notes</a> <bq>Fox News is running stories about an Iranian “plot” to kill US military personnel in the middle east, <b>as though a country planning ways to defend itself from hostile attackers is some sinister new development.</b> <b>CBC ran a completely evidence-free report alleging that Iran has been paying gunmen to shoot bullets into empty buildings in Toronto, Canada.</b> One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Iran is that it keeps taking time away from defending itself against US-Israeli aggressions in order to orchestrate random acts of arson and vandalism in mid-power western states for no discernible benefit to its strategic interests.</bq> <bq><b>Calling one of the world’s oldest civilizations an “artificial state” from inside a country that’s younger than Mick Jagger</b> and has been propped up by nonstop western military aggression throughout 100 percent of its existence <b>is, uh, certainly a choice.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-claims-it-had-nothing-to-do" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel Claims It Had Nothing To Do With Trump's Decision To Attack Iran, And Other Notes</a> <bq>This is the “antisemitism” we’ve been hearing so much about. It’s <b>grown adults whining that anti-genocide sentiments hurt their feelings.</b> It’s people disliking a genocidal apartheid state and its supporters, and then some members of a religious group claiming those opinions shouldn’t be allowed to exist because it upsets their feelings.</bq> <bq>Zionists are like, “No no, it’s not true that antisemitism means criticism of Israel. You’re allowed to criticize Israel, you just need to <b>memorize a very long list of rules you must follow and circumstances under which criticism is acceptable</b>, make sure you’re only criticizing the current sitting government rather than the Zionist state itself, and be careful not to invoke any of the <b>ten thousand obscure Tropes you’ve never heard of</b>, or else you will lose your job and possibly go to prison. So go on ahead, criticize Israel all you want. It’s a free country.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/nation-watches-helplessly-as-2028-election-cycle-begins/" author="" source="The Onion">Nation Watches Helplessly As 2028 Election Cycle Begins</a> <bq>Oh fuck—I just got an email asking me to donate to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/trump-to-cut-off-aid-to-israel/" author="" source="The Onion">Trump To Cut Off Aid To Israel</a> <bq>We can put that $4 billion towards building more arches.</bq> <bq>But obviously we’ll still be supporting the genocide emotionally.</bq> <bq>We need that money to commit atrocities of our own.</bq> <i>Volltreffer bei allen drei.</i> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/why-americans-dont-just-do-something-a-letter-to-everyone-in-the-blast-radius/" source="ZNetwork" author="S.L.’Errance">Why Americans Don’t Just ‘Do Something’: A Letter to Everyone in the Blast Radius</a> <bq>The end result is that <b>we live in a world that's deeply hostile to people who insist on thinking while demanding that they pretend to think.</b></bq> That's a pretty good one. Even it was AI. <bq>[...] <b>this country has spent decades making collective political action geographically unnatural, economically dangerous, socially isolating, politically disorienting, and — whenever it starts to become effective — punishable through job loss, criminal prosecution and imprisonment, or death.</b> The business class, the media apparatus, the donor class, the party system, the state, and the state’s enforcement classes have all worked to build a public that is <b>fragmented and atomized, exhausted and broke, frightened and paranoid, unimaginably misinformed and confused</b>, and thus, nearly impossible to organize into any force capable of threatening their entrenched structures.</bq> Look, it's obvious that this author is LLM-assisted, right? They have exactly one article at ZNetwork, and they've apparently never, ever written anything before. It's a good summary but the prose is also very obviously LLM-heavy. It has "AI voice". The long lists are a sign. The LLM doesn't just choose one thing when it can choose them all. And the author's name is "S.L.", which may very well be a play on <i>since loco</i>, which means "without place" in Latin. And "Errance" seems to be a play on "errant" or "wandering". Sooo....this seems like a <i>nom de plume</i> for an AI. <bq>Liberalism is the left hand at the controls: it takes fights over power and turns them into <b>tone, civility, representation, process, panels, donor memos, nonprofit management, party advocacy, and professionally supervised and surveilled and wholly safe critique.</b> It does not have to crush every movement by force if it can first <b>moralize it, professionalize it, proceduralize it, strip it of strategic teeth, and send it back</b> into public life as something harmless to power. Or often worse still, beneficial to the order it was initially formed to change.</bq> My God, but AIs love long lists of adjectives or nouns. They're just so comma-happy. The point is a good one but you really should read what has been written for you and pare down the list of similar things, even though they might all sound equally good to you. <bq><b>Civil rights activist Fred Hampton was murdered in a police raid directed by the FBI.</b> Black Panthers and other Black radicals were locked away in prison for decades after civil rights were won at their hands — their families carrying the cost in absence, grief, and slow social erasure.</bq> <bq>Level 3 is where real civic competence starts: reading denser texts, synthesizing information, making stronger inferences, and judging whether a source is lying to you. Against that, a newspaper readability study found local news articles averaging an 11.63 grade reading level. In other words, <b>a large share of the public is being asked to interpret a political world written above the level at which many can comfortably process it.</b></bq> This is very obviously true. And most people pretend that they "get" everything they read. They're larping political participation. <bq>[...] this propaganda environment is not built around one clean lie repeated until everyone believes it. It is built around the firehose of bullshit. Bannon’s own phrase was “flood the zone with shit.” RAND’s “firehose of falsehood” model describes the cleaner academic version of the same tactic: high volume, multichannel, rapid, continuous, repetitive, and indifferent to truth or consistency. The point is not to win one argument cleanly. <b>The point is for propagandists, politicians, media operators, and their amplifiers to flood the field with so many stories, outrages, counterclaims, half-truths, distractions, and emotional triggers that verification cannot keep up, contradictions stop mattering, and people either retreat into tribal loyalty or give up on the possibility of reality itself.</b> Exhaustion does the political work that persuasion used to do. The machine does not need your assent. It needs your surrender.</bq> Such long lists of adjectives, my robotic friend. It's a good sentence, though. <bq>[...] people do not stay rooted in communities long enough to build the trust, memory, and reciprocal obligation movements need to survive repression. <b>A society built around long commutes, atomized households, and thin local ties does not easily produce publics.</b> It produces isolated units that consume politics as media while living it alone. <b>The suburb pacifies through geography what the hard hand could never achieve through force alone.</b></bq> I don't care if that's AI. That's good. <bq>In 2024, the average premium for employer-sponsored family coverage was $25,572, with workers themselves paying thousands of that out of pocket. Child care is another machine for eating political capacity: <b>Child Care Aware of America found a 2024 national average price of $13,128, about 10% of a married couple’s median income and 35% of a single parent’s.</b></bq> <bq>The empire does not just brutalize people abroad. It overwhelms the people at home with so many simultaneous emergencies that <b>sustained concentration starts to feel like a luxury item you cannot afford.</b> The machine wins by exhaustion.</bq> <bq>It is custodial politics: alternating managers of the same order, <b>each preserving the system that is killing people at home and abroad while demanding loyalty because the other manager would be worse.</b> You get to choose which hand of the machine controls you.</bq> <bq>Liberalism is useful here because it teaches people to mistake participation for power, visibility for leverage, statements for organization, and moral posture for collective force. It teaches them to <b>confuse being recognized by institutions with having the capacity to coerce them.</b> The machine converts your anger into its own perpetuation.</bq> Here we have the common AI-style list of pairs of things. The final sentence is a not untypical <i>jarring juxtaposition</i>. <bq>[...] activists are smeared in their own communities, treated as liabilities at work, marked as unserious, dangerous, or unstable in their own families, pushed out of institutions, and forgotten as soon as the next outrage arrives. <b>The country does not just repress dissidents. It withholds the social world that would allow dissidence to reproduce itself. You can resist alone. The machine wants you alone.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the United States has spent decades engineering a population that is easier to lie to, easier to isolate, easier to overwork, easier to frighten, easier to turn against its own dissidents</b>, and harder to organize into any force capable of threatening the people who run the country. Then it <b>calls the resulting paralysis freedom.</b></bq> This is pretty nicely written but it also smacks of AI...there are too many "easier to..." parts. <bq>The machine is counting on exactly this: your exhaustion, your isolation, your surrender to its logic. Do not give it that. <b>You owe your neighbors and the world the same thing: your energy and your resistance.</b></bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1xp7cha/new_senator_just_said_what_no_democrat_dares_to/" author="" source="Reddit">New Senator just said what no Democrat dares to say on CNN: We're losing because we're bought by the same billionaires as the GOP</a> <img src="{att_link}can_we_actually_cut_the_cord_to_corporate_money_and_start_to_govern_like_we_give_a_damn_about_working_people.webp" href="{att_link}can_we_actually_cut_the_cord_to_corporate_money_and_start_to_govern_like_we_give_a_damn_about_working_people.webp" align="none" caption="Can we actually cut the cord to corporate money an...to govern like we give a damn about working people" scale="80%"> <bq>People don't trust our party because too often we're funded by the very same people who fund Republicans. Can we actually cut the cord that we've had to corporate money and start governing like we give a damn about working people?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/06/asni-n06.html" author="WSWS reporters" source="WSWS">One-day public sector strike hits France amid mass student, “yellow vest” protests</a> <bq>While the unions billed November 5 as a general strike, it remained largely confined to the public sector, notably education and the railways. The unions did not call out key industries that have seen militant strikes in recent years—such as refineries, trucking and airlines. This shows that, <b>while social anger is mounting towards a general strike in France and across Europe, such a strike must be prepared by a conscious, independent movement in the working class, organized in committees of action. It cannot be left to the union bureaucracies.</b></bq> <bq>Nine of 10 TGV high-speed trains ran, as did the metro, buses and trams in Paris, where strikes were felt mainly on regional and suburban rail. On some regional lines, every second train was canceled. The strike halted the metro in Lyon, and in Bordeaux the public transport network was largely paralyzed. <b>Nuclear power output fell by 2.4 gigawatts, and France had to import electricity for several hours.</b> The government prepared for the day of action as if for an uprising, mobilizing 70,000 police and gendarmes nationwide. The Paris police prefecture banned the march initially proposed by the unions but authorized a march from Republic to Nation squares, while <b>protesters in Toulouse gathered on Saint-Cyprien Square in defiance of a police ban.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1xp7rcd/get_ready_bois/" author="" source="Reddit">get ready bois</a> <img src="{att_link}anthropic_ipo_is_imminent.webp" href="{att_link}anthropic_ipo_is_imminent.webp" align="none" caption="Anthropic IPO is imminent" scale="80%"> Top-quality meme and post title. <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/double-bubble-energy-and-ai/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Double Bubble: Energy and AI</a> <bq>If the White Empire is run not by humans with political interests but corporations with financial interests you can understand the motivation. While a human might think in terms of human lifespans (and human lives) and a politician might think in terms of national interest (and national timelines), why would a corporation care about any of this except as marketing? <b>Corporations are encoded to live in a virtual market, not the real world, and to think in terms of the next quarter, not quarter century. By this perception, things can be going swimmingly at the corporate level while the political entity drowns.</b> Which is precisely what's happening. Corporations are making money hand over fist, or one over zero, or whatever it is. Oil burning in the Persian Gulf? Great, if you're selling oil, line go up. <b>Refineries burning in Russia? Great, if you're refining oil, line go up. Children buried under tonnes of bombs? Great, if you're selling bombs, line go up.</b> You can understand the pulse of Empire this way, not as a human one, but just a predatory artificial market that feeds on natural life, and <b>spits out some dividends to keep a few humans (shareholders) dividing and conquering.</b> And the market has never been better. So read the news this way, as a double-entry account, with two sides to the ledge. All the 'bad' headlines are very good if you turn to the business pages. Oil increases, weapons losses, death and destruction, that's all making money for somebody or, more accurately, something. <b>This leads you to the real rulers of White Empire, which isn't the network of pedos blackmailing each other, it's the inhuman Corporate AI that's had legal personhood for centuries now.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/02/agjp-n02.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Cracks start to widen in AI boom</a> <bq>The tech-heavy NASDAQ index closed 3.5 percent lower and <b>briefly entered so-called “correction” territory, down 10 percent from its high on October 6.</b> The sell off began on Thursday when <b>shares in Alphabet (the owner of Google) dropped 13 percent</b> and its market value fell by $500 billion—its largest ever one-day loss and one of the largest in Wall Street history. <b>Shares in Intel, one of the long-time leaders in chip production for PCs, plunged 29 percent</b> on Friday after significant earlier falls cut $140 billion from the company’s market value. It was the biggest decline since August 1974. <b>The big tech companies were hit hard, losing a total of $900 billion after announcing plans to increase spending on the AI buildout.</b> The major concern is that they will not be able to generate sufficient revenue and are going deeper into debt.</bq> The major concern is that they are burning giant piles of cash with no plan and the <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4037#footnote_DRAFTABLE_ENTRY_4037_1_body">Golgafrinchans</a> have finally looked up from stuffing their tracksuits with leaves. <bq>Sentiments in Asia are even more downbeat than in the US. Japan’s tech-heavy Nikkei 225 index closed down 2.1 percent. Leading the way was the major OpenAI investor <b>SoftBank whose shares fell 6 percent. Since its June peak, its shares have fallen 48 percent.</b></bq> <bq>[...] a recent analysis by Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the major US asset management firm Apollo [...]<bq>The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7 and so far <b>there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.</b></bq>That does not deny the enormous increase in productivity of human labour, knowledge and capacity which AI has the potential to bring. But the capitalist system functions on the extraction of profit—<b>a sufficient rate of return on the enormous outlays that have been made and which are to come. And that is increasingly being called into question.</b> The worsening situation has been underscored by a report from the consultancy firm <b>Gartner</b>. It estimated that to cover their capital and financing costs, data centre owners would <b>need to generate $8.5 trillion in revenue by the end of 2030.</b> But it projected the consumer and corporate spending on AI would provide <b>“no more than $3.6 trillion.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/06/gvob-n06.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Wall Street plunge wipes off $3.2 trillion in market value</a> <bq><b>Alphabet (the owner of Google) which lost nearly $500 billion in the market last week “could be the canary in the coal mine.”</b> “With Alphabet’s net debt issuance in excess of $75 billion in the first nine months of 2026 versus a little more than $11 billion over the comparable period of 2025, there can be no mistaking the ominous turn in the AI leveraging cycle.” Yesterday’s market events are a confirmation of that warning.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/11/03/chinas-ai-bubble-burst-will-this-be-another-export-to-the-united-states/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">China’s AI Bubble Burst: Will This be Another Export to the United States?</a> <bq><b>If the U.S. companies were selling cars for $50k a piece, and Chinese models were pretty much as good and selling for $5k, who is going to buy the U.S. cars?</b> And it doesn’t really matter if the U.S. AI models have a small edge in performance. Suppose the U.S. car has a maximum speed of 120 MPH, while the Chinese car maxes out at 110. Since almost no one is ever going to want to push their car that far, the higher speed really doesn’t matter. It’s the same story with AI. The overwhelming majority of uses will not require frontier capabilities. <b>Businesses and people will go with the versions that save them money. This will either be the Chinese models or U.S. models selling at sharp discounts to be competitive.</b> A final takeaway is that China’s AI companies are continuing to move forward and produce new high-quality models despite the crash. This is a key point. The crazy stock prices that we see for AI-related companies are not needed for companies to make progress developing AI. <b>A crash might slow the frenzy to build data centers everywhere, but it will not be the end of AI. With luck, it will get the companies and country to think more carefully about what they are doing.</b> That would be a very good development.</bq> No, Dean, they won't. Because they don't care about AI or technology. They care about collecting rent for themselves. If the business becomes low-margin, then they will disappear and pop up elsewhere. Because they're not going to go away until we have a society that stops rewarding their selfishness with money and power. <hr> <a href="https://www.infosperber.ch/wirtschaft/kapitalmarkt/eine-bankrotte-schattenbank-kann-eine-kettenreaktion-ausloesen/" author="Marc Chesney" source="Info Sperber">«Eine bankrotte Schattenbank kann eine Kettenreaktion auslösen»</a> <bq>Warum begegnet man dem Russland-Risiko mit Hunderten Milliarden zum Aufrüsten, während <b>man einem Finanzcrash entgegensieht, ohne einen Finger zu rühren?</b> In dieser zynischen Weltordnung ist Krieg ein Business, <b>Blut verwandelt sich in Dollar. Zerstörungen führen zu finanziellen Renditen.</b> Aktionäre und Direktoren der Rüstungs- und «Verteidigungs»-Unternehmen lassen die Champagnerkorken knallen. <b>Kriegsrisiken – ob real oder mit Absicht übertrieben – erzeugen Gewinne.</b> Im Finanzsektor gibt es Interessengruppen, die der Gesellschaft und vielen Politikern ihre Sicht aufzwingen können. Diese Lobbygruppen wollen von ernsthaften Regulierungen nichts wissen. Denn Grossbanken gehen gerne Risiken ein, um riesige Gewinne zu erzielen. Sie wissen, dass – im Fall von Bankrotten oder Zahlungsausfällen – die Steuerzahler die Rechnung zahlen werden.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/05/nokz-n05.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Tightening credit hitting AI boom amid a “bloodbath” for junk bonds</a> <bq>The major AI firms continue to spend money on the AI buildout and the development of computing power, running up larger debts even <b>as financial conditions become more difficult and risky.</b> But they cannot call a halt, because to do so would mean falling behind in the race to grab a portion of the profit bonanza they have gambled on securing, even as analysis shows that <b>the revenue generated by AI will fall short of that needed to cover all the capital spending and secure a sufficient return.</b> Diseases of the human body often manifest themselves at its extremities before striking at the essential organs. There is a parallel in the financial system. Earlier this week the Financial Times (FT) pointed to what has been characterized as <b>a “bloodbath” in the so-called junk bond market, particularly in Europe.</b></bq> <bq>The free cash flow is what remains on hand after paying the costs of the business and capital expenditure. Initially this remained positive as <b>companies such as Amazon, Google and others were able to finance their capital spending out of their cash holdings.</b> That has now ended. It was one of the issues which <b>led to the fall in the shares of Alphabet</b> (parent of Google) last week, following the revelation that its free cash flow had come in at minus $9.1 billion in the September quarter compared to minus $5.9 billion for the June quarter. All told, the four largest hyperscalers—Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon—had <b>negative cash flows of $45 billion in the quarter compared to positive cash flow of $36 billion a year before.</b> This means AI development must increasingly be funded by debt or the issuing of new shares. But a turn to debt financing takes place in <b>very different conditions from those which prevailed for almost a decade and a half after the crash of 2008, when interest rates were at historic lows.</b></bq> <bq>Doubts have already started to emerge with the private capital giant <b>Blackstone, a major anchor for the IPO, telling investors Anthropic may not receive investment grade status on going public</b>, contrary to what was said previously. The rating is important because if it receives anything less than investment grade, Anthropic will be cut off from important sections of capital because <b>many pension and insurance funds would not be allowed to make large investments in it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/11/05/ai-bubble-monitor-who-gets-hit/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">AI Bubble Monitor: Who Gets Hit?</a> <bq>There is a reason we have bankruptcy law. The companies that got themselves in too deeply — in debt and lease commitments — and can’t pay their bills can go into bankruptcy. <b>The shareholders get wiped out, but the companies, insofar as they have useful lines of business, keep operating.</b> There could be cases where some of the companies facing bankruptcy are insurers, where they lent the money that was supposed to provide annuities to their customers. There are guarantee funds at the state level, many of which are grossly inadequate. In this story, the insurers need to go bankrupt, and their top executives should look for new jobs, but <b>the federal government should be prepared to step in to ensure that most of these annuities are paid in full.</b> Of course, some banks may go under in the crash story, but this is why we have deposit insurance. <b>The bank can be restructured, with the shareholders wiped out, the top management removed, and customers can get access to their money as though nothing had happened.</b> The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has done such restructuring numerous times and should be prepared to do it on a large scale following a collapse of the AI bubble.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://マリウス.com/on-honor-based-value-transfer/" source="マリウス" author="">On Honor-Based Value Transfer</a> <bq>Suppose you are working in, let’s say, Dubai, and you want to send money home to your family in a village in Pakistan. <b>You walk into a shop, the kind of small place that might also sell phone cards or groceries, and you hand the man behind the counter your cash.</b> He is a Hawaladar, a Hawala broker. The two of you agree on a password, some word or number, and you then call your family and pass it along to them. The Hawaladar in Dubai contacts a counterpart of his in the town nearest your village. <b>Your family walks into that shop, says the password, and walks out with the money in local currency, minus a small commission.</b> And the whole thing takes maye a few hours, or sometimes only minutes.</bq> <bq><b>There is no account waiting to be frozen, no form demanding to know the purpose of the payment, no “AI” algorithm flagging the transaction as suspicious</b>, merely because it did not fit the profile some model has built of you, and no permanent record handed over to a government that doesn’t ever ask for your permission to have it. You also don’t need to confirm that your data is still up to date every few months and it certainly won’t require you to hand over utility bills <b>just to be allowed to work with your own money.</b></bq> <bq>We have arrived, more or less without noticing, at a point where <b>moving your own money has become a privilege that the financial system grants you on fairly arbitrary and ever-changing conditions, and that it can revoke at any moment.</b> To open an account you must submit to Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. To keep it, you must continuously re-verify the data and avoid tripping any tripwires, which are calibrated by people who do not know you and who are <b>under no obligation to explain themselves to you.</b></bq> <bq>[...] now disclosure is the mandate and privacy is treated as inherently suspect, the sort of thing only a person with something to hide could possibly want. Held up against that backdrop, <b>an honor-based network that lets ordinary people move value to one another without first asking anyone’s permission</b> starts to look less like a grey area, and instead more like a relic of <b>a saner arrangement, in which your money was actually yours.</b></bq> <bq>A wealthy man in China wants to move money out of the country, past the $50,000 annual limit that the state imposes on capital leaving its borders. A Mexican cartel, meanwhile, has a pile of drug cash sitting in Chicago that it needs to get back to Mexico. A Chinese broker in the United States sits in the middle of the two. <b>The wealthy man’s money never actually leaves China, the cartel’s cash never crosses a border, and through a series of so-called mirror transactions the two needs cancel one another out.</b> The brokers square up afterwards, very often by over- or under-invoicing real shipments of goods (e.g. refrigerators, electronics, …) that <b>move through entirely legitimate global trade and leave next to no trail behind them.</b></bq> <bq>Blaming the plumbing for the sewage is convenient, because plumbing is so much easier to regulate than human nature is, but it is also a mistake, and it happens to be <b>the very same error that gets wheeled out to justify surveilling everyone’s perfectly lawful transactions</b> on the off chance of catching the handful of unlawful ones.</bq> <bq>What I would actually like to see, is ordinary people, acting on entirely ordinary motives, making up the bulk of the traffic. <b>People who simply believe, quite correctly in my view, that a payment between two consenting adults is nobody’s business but their own.</b> People who would rather not have every coffee, every donation, every gift recorded and assembled into a profile, then sold, leaked, or held in reserve to be used against them later when the political weather has changed. <b>The more such people there are in the network, the less it resembles a criminal artifact and the more it resembles what it has been all along, which is ordinary financial privacy, exercised by ordinary people.</b></bq> <bq>An entire society that treats financial privacy as the norm, however, makes it unremarkable, and in doing so turns the surveillance back into the aberration it ought to have remained. After all, <b>the way you protect the migrant worker and the dissident is by standing in the crowd next to them</b>, not by leaving them to be the only two faces in it.</bq> Amen Eugene Debs. <bq>None of these people are doing anything remotely wrong, and <b>not one of them owes anybody an explanation.</b></bq> <bq><b>You can only join a Hawala network if someone already inside it is willing to vouch for you.</b> You can only place your trust in a Hawaladar if your family has trusted his for a generation or two. The system runs on relationships, and relationships, by their nature, do not scale to a planet full of strangers who share no clan, no village, and no name in common.</bq> <bq>It keeps nearly everything that made the old system so attractive in the first place, the speed, the low cost, the reach into the places banks ignore, the freedom from any gatekeeper’s permission, and <b>it discards the single thing that kept the old system confined to tight-knit communities, namely the requirement that you have to belong to one.</b> You no longer need a cousin somewhere in the network, and you also no longer need anyone to vouch for you.</bq> <bq>With the icky gross humanity of it extracted. Also, a public, traceable ledger.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/03/nobody-is-home/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Separable</a> <bq>One way to understand Tao is as a "centaur," the automation theory term for a worker who is assisted by a machine. For all that Tao describes Chatgpt as his collaborator, <b>it's clear from reading the chat-logs that it's Tao who drives the research agenda.</b> He sets the questions and the direction of the answers. Chatgpt doesn't give him orders – it's the other way around.</bq> <bq>[...] a thought experiment in which we wake up one day and discover an American flag on the surface of Mars. <b>Without knowing how that flag got to Mars, the mere fact of its existence doesn't help us get any closer to an actual Mars mission.</b> <b>The output of mathematical models is a series of faits accomplis, often accomplished through brute-force</b>, or sometimes through opaque methods that lack the "scaffolding" that bridges these outcomes into the broader field of mathematics.</bq> <bq>So far, we've figured out how to get a model to either rule out the possibility of taking that each-bridge-only-once walk or to give us the route map. <b>What this computer-generated "mathematics" is not doing is advancing the field.</b> Tanswell points out that a world in which chatbots "solve" these problems is one where the role of mathematicians is reduced to being reverse centaurs, assistants to the machine whose job is to clean up after the chatbot's research agenda. But there's nothing about knowing that there's no route map for a seven-bridge walking tour that makes it easier to invent graph theory, and <b>a mathematician might spend years working on the computer's "answer" to that problem only to conclude that the computer's solution didn't add any theoretical insight to the field.</b> In other words, in a world where mathematicians and mathematics are inseparable, every solution to a longstanding problem heralds an accompanying theoretical insight. <b>Once we separate mathematics from mathematicians, we start to get solutions without insights.</b></bq> <bq>That's the catastrophic outcome that both Scarciotti and Tanswell warn us of: <b>if we convince people that we're heading into a world of mathematics without mathematicians, that's exactly what we'll get, because no one will try to become a mathematician.</b> But because mathematics without mathematicians is a set of guide maps for crossing Königsberg's bridges (but not graph theory), then <b>mathematics without mathematicians is also mathematics without mathematics.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/02/ysau-n02.html" author="César Uco" source="WSWS">As Super El Niño threatens 10 million Peruvians, Senate grants Fujimori emergency powers</a> <bq>Heat and humidity are already spreading disease. <b>By October, Peru had recorded 76,784 cases of dengue, more than double the 32,372 for all of 2025,</b> and 81 deaths. Public health specialist Omar Neyra told Infobae that there are “no recent antecedents” for the current number of leptospirosis cases, with Lima recording high mortality. Pointing to the combination of epidemics, flooding, avalanches and the collapse of the healthcare system, <b>Neyra added: “The COVID-19 pandemic caused 250,000 deaths in Peru. This is going to be worse than the COVID-19 pandemic; it will be unprecedented.”</b> Neyra pointed out that of the 8 billion soles (about $2.4 billion) in supplementary funds approved to confront El Niño and other priorities, <b>barely 300 million soles (about $90 million) would go to healthcare.</b> Neyra also recalled the El Niño of 1876–78, whose droughts were followed by famines that killed tens of millions in India, China and Brazil. As the historian Mike Davis documented in Late Victorian Holocausts, British India kept exporting grain to Europe while millions starved. <b>The climate determined where the blow fell. Social relations determined how many died.</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/30/buvu-o30.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Ebola cases exceed 10,000 with case fatality approaching 50 percent</a> <bq>At a virtual summit of African health ministers on October 28, Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya conceded that <b>the continent is “not winning” the fight against Ebola.</b> <b>Of the 7,758 confirmed patients whose illness has ended, 4,992 have died and 2,766 have recovered (about two in three fatalities.)</b> That is the same rate recorded among confirmed patients in West Africa in 2014–2016, 62.9 percent, 12 years after that epidemic was supposed to have taught the world its lessons. The ministry’s headline ratio of 48.6 percent is lower only because it still counts some 2,500 patients who are ill or whose outcome has not been recorded. At the start, the ratio was artificially low. On May 24 the bulletin counted 10 deaths among 105 confirmed cases, while listing 223 suspected deaths that were never tested. <b>Many patients are still confirmed only after death, from a swab of the body. On October 9, 25 of the 47 new positives in Ituri came from the dead. These are people the response never reached while they were alive.</b></bq> <bq>The Nigerian case shows what is mobilized for a patient of a different social standing. <b>A 42-year-old Ugandan woman married to a Swiss diplomat</b> returned to Abuja from Uganda on October 3 and sought care for malaria-like symptoms three days later, according to the New York Times. <b>She was not tested for Ebola until October 20, after 17 days in a capital with daily flights to Europe, the United States and the rest of Africa.</b> Nigerian teams treated her through the acute phase, and on October 26 she and her husband were flown by air ambulance to Switzerland. WHO’s Africa director, <b>Mohamed Janabi, said the evacuation was arranged because the couple are Swiss citizens.</b></bq> Yes, and because they probably have insurance (REGA) that includes repatriation. <bq>When outbreaks occur, the disparities they expose in who is tested, who is treated and who survives reveal far more about the social character of a society than about the virus. In this epidemic, survival has depended on citizenship and class, while the response in the Congo runs short of blood, beds and wages. Nothing it needs is beyond reach. The money has been disbursed and the vaccine doses manufactured. <b>That none of it has reached the people of Ituri and North Kivu reflects the priorities of a capitalist order that treats the lives of Congolese workers and peasants as expendable.</b></bq> There are enough "the world is too full" people in the elite who almost certainly find this outcome very desirable. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/06/mgzl-n06.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">The latest COVID surge, the bird flu death and the fabrication of vaccine injury</a> <bq><b>Each week at this level produces, by PMC’s estimate, between 389,000 and 1.56 million new cases of Long COVID and between 1,900 and 3,300 excess deaths</b>, the latter through complications that rarely appear in any COVID tally; the CDC’s own National Vital Statistics System recorded about 127 COVID deaths a week in the four weeks ending October 10. Some 21 million American adults have had Long COVID, more than a million are kept out of work by it, and there is no treatment for it approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Research increasingly finds the virus persisting in tissue and keeping the immune system inflamed long after infection, so that <b>a single infection can leave lasting damage and each reinfection compounds it, dissolving the old line between acute and chronic disease.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/reading-ulysses-at-the-martello-tower" source="" author="Chris Hedges">Reading Ulysses at the Martello Tower</a> <bq>There is much in this world, from the genocide in Gaza to the consolidation of fascism in the U.S., which warrants despair. But when it becomes overwhelming, there is the reassuring comfort of novels like “Ulysses,” which is set on one day, June 16, 1904. <b>It improbably casts a Jewish advertising salesman as a hero, as a modern Odysseus, struggling to hold on to goodness and kindness in a world where the cruel and heartless triumph.</b></bq> <bq>Joyce, who lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, did not socialize with the literary grandees and fashionable denizens who congregated in the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain salons. <b>His intimate circle encompassed waiters, fruit vendors, bank clerks and hotel concierges.</b> The salons entranced Marcel Proust until Proust confronted their cruelty and hypocrisy in the final volume of “In Search of Lost Time.”</bq> <bq><b>Marxist critics, like many of Joyce’s contemporaries, recoiled at his depiction of our irrevocably flawed human nature and his disdain for the myth of human progress.</b> For Joyce, we are not headed toward a classless utopia, or any utopia. “I don’t know why they attack me,” Joyce said to his friend Eugene Jolas. “Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds.” He understands that <b>national myths are used to obscure our looming mortality, to create meaning out of chaos and to fool us into thinking we are bigger than ourselves.</b></bq> <bq>Novels such as “Ulysses,” as Dedalus says, provide “the eternal affirmation” of the human spirit. They remind us why we were put on this earth. <b>They make us feel less alone. They sustain our souls.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/10/china-mieville-rouse-ghosts-cold-war" source="Jacobin" author="Jon Repetti">China Miéville’s The Rouse Is a Haunting Magnum Opus</a> <bq>[...] he has developed the most ambitious and successful synthesis of genre fiction, formal experimentation, leftist political commitment, and metaphysical inquiry produced in English since Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.</bq> <bq><b>Like the masterworks from which Miéville has clearly taken inspiration — Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Libra, Dennis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke — The Rouse flirts with but ultimately resists making history into a conspiracy.</b> One can easily imagine a less serious (or a less Marxist) writer casting all the great atrocities of the later twentieth century, from the Malayan Emergency to the Bosnian Genocide, as mere cover for the real war beneath the surface: a battle between cadres of warring spiritualists in which the rest of us are mere pawns. <b>Though his characters might slip into such narratives to justify themselves, Miéville refuses to let us off so easily.</b></bq> <bq>Old Pal is less like George R. R. Martin’s White Walkers than it is like the atomic bomb or climate change, which are almost never mentioned in The Rouse but hang over its events <b>like the shadow of a shadow: possibilities woven into the fabric of reality, but only actualized once capital made the technological advancements necessary to discover them.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the members of R Unit are faced with a similar problem of linguistic excess — the enormous catalogue of myths, rituals, and terms they have pilfered from history books and indigenous tribes — and are also driven to impose abstract order on the field. <b>Like pop structuralists, they want to boil down all competing stories into a coherent monomyth</b>, to read each as the expression of a single phenomenon experienced across times and cultures, which would be the key to all mythologies.</bq> <bq>This is a book in which “<b>everyone who knows something knows less than they think, and none of them can be trusted</b>,” as Mark Bould puts it in Boston Review.</bq> <bq>A Uniteer puts the matter like this: “If you ask a question and you don’t hear an answer, and I don’t mean you you, I mean anyone, <b>you have to work out if nothing said anything or if something didn’t say anything or if something said nothing.</b> And if it’s the last, how to make sense of it.” How to read the signs without the cipher key, without even knowing if a sign is present or absent, or if this absence is its own kind of sign? How to maintain a state of absolute expectancy without concrete expectations? This is <b>the dilemma of the spiritualist in a scientific age, but it is also the predicament of the revolutionary subject in a nonrevolutionary time.</b> Like the protagonists of The Rouse, we have no choice but to wait for some tremors from beyond our circumscribed present — for some cracks to peer through, if not to crawl out of.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/s-and-m-and-bible-studies" source="The Hinternet" author="Sam Jennings">S&M and Bible Studies</a> <bq>[...] it’s all key to <b>the brilliance of those two records — emerging out of near-anonymity, with that peculiar name, a few iconic album covers, a growing cult following, and these impeccable pop songs about kids wandering around a depressed literary Glasgow, in the final years of the century</b> (though, really, outside of time whatsoever). As Murdoch has attested, he wanted the records to be free of the normal music industry packaging, wanted them to seem like the dream of “a fictional hipster couple” making this music in a kind of storybook world, just adjacent to ours. Tigermilk is especially this way, overflowing with fucked-up outcasts, freaks, and kids on the edge — <b>more like a suite of short stories than any album I’ve ever heard.</b></bq> <bq>[...] they all have that tender, miniature perfection, like the thoughts young people think they’re jotting down in their private journals, only to look back on later in life, realizing they thought the same things every young person everywhere has always thought. And from moment to moment, that’s often exactly what <i>If You’re Feeling Sinister</i> is: <b>the transcription of the world’s own cringy teenage diary, taken to its most exquisite, ultimate expression. Because it’s being written by an older man, with years of loss and hard-won wisdom behind him, it never stoops to bad high school poetry, but makes those sentiments something timeless.</b></bq> <bq>People like to moan a lot about nostalgia these days. But this is, I suspect, mostly because <b>they don’t actually listen to the music they claim to love anymore — they take it for granted, and put it on in the background, turn it into wallpaper.</b></bq> <bq>Go back and listen — it’s not as if you’ll travel into some dusty, forgotten Glasgow of yesteryear. <b>You’ll travel to a real place, alive and waiting, only out of time, within the imagination</b> — the imagination of a young Glawswegian at the end of the last century, which somehow lit the imaginations of people all over the world, and keeps doing so.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-grindhouse-is-opera-of-oppressed.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Grindhouse is the Opera of the Oppressed</a> <bq>The biggest problem with radical cinema is the biggest problem with radical anything and that is a severe lack of populism. I love the latest five-hour Dogma diatribe as much as the next pretentious asshole, and I mean every word of that sentence with all my heart, but <b>there is no denying that the avante garde pretty consistently fires its ammunition a mile above your average post-working-class door dasher's head.</b></bq> <bq>Thus, you had sex worker turned feminist academic Virginie Despentes' and porn star Coralie Trinh Thi's 2000 shocker Baise-Moi (French for 'Fuck Me'), based on Despentes' novel of the same name, in which not only are the protagonists brutally abused sex workers, but <b>they carry out their revenge using the sexual violence of their attackers against largely random men before ending up drowning in a bottomless abyss of nihilism as the camera lingers with an unflinchingly sadistic female gaze.</b></bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}dostoevskyletter_about_his_three-month-old_daughter_sonya.webp" href="{att_link}dostoevskyletter_about_his_three-month-old_daughter_sonya.webp" align="none" caption="dostoevskyletter about his three-month-old daughter Sonya" scale="55%"> <bq quote-style="none"><div style="text-align: right"><i>Geneva, 18 May 1868</i></div> My Sonya is dead; we buried her the day before yesterday. I did not know, two hours before her death, that she was to die. Three hours before, the doctor told us that she was better and would live. She was ill only a week; she died of inflammation of the lungs. Ah, my dear Apollon Nikolayevitch, my love for my first child was probably comical; I daresay I expressed it most comically in my letters to all who congratulated me. I have doubtless been ridiculous in everybody's eyes, but to you, to you, I am not ashamed to say anything. That poor little darling creature, scarcely three months old, was already an individual and a person for me. She was just beginning to know me and love me, and smiled when I went near. When I sang to her in my ridiculous voice, she liked to listen. She did not cry or frown when I kissed her; she stopped crying when I went to her. And <b>now people say to comfort me that I shall have other children.</b> But where is Sonya? Where is the little creature for whom I would, believe me, gladly have suffered death upon the cross, if she could have remained alive? But enough of this, my wife is crying. <div style="text-align: right">Your friend, F. Dostoevsky</div></bq> <hr> <a href="https://seangoedecke.com/audience-capture/" author="Sean Godoecke" source="">Audience capture</a> <bq>Views and engagement are valuable to me, but not directly. They are proxy metrics for the things I actually care about:<ul>Having smart, informed people read and consider my ideas Getting feedback from readers who have concrete experience with the topics I write about Joining interesting public conversations about the state of the industry Convincing people to think like me on points I care deeply about Building a reputation as a careful thinker and a good writer</ul></bq> Interesting. None of these points are why I write. He makes it sound like work. I already have a job (where I actually write a significant amount of the time as well). I don't write to engage with people. I prefer offline engagement. I write because I like to write. It makes me happy. I'd rather write than not write. I refine my arguments for myself. I'm happy if someone gets something out of it. At the very least, I know that my future self will appreciate it when he finds it. I can't predict which of my essays or thoughts my future self will find interesting, so I write them all down. I enjoy doing it, so why not? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZNLvD4mds" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PeZNLvD4mds" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kai Lentit" caption="I Go to Olympics of 4KB Coding."> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-apeiron" source="The Hinternet" author="Rawn Riddle and Hinternet Editorial Board">The Apeiron</a> <bq>So the great historical irony here, Edwin-Rainer reflects, indifferent to the conversation taking place right next to him on the question whether “Substack is so over”, is that Mark’s apparent correction of Platonism is itself profoundly Platonic. <b>The allegory of the cave had already demonstrated that bodily eyesight is not true vision, as to see the shadows on the cave wall is to remain blind to the true nature of reality.</b> But Mark is writing before the synthesis effected in the following centuries by the Church Fathers and, later and more decisively, by Augustine, which preserves a consciously Platonic distinction between sensible appearance and intelligible reality, while reimagining the terms of communication between these two realms. <b>The transcendent is no longer something towards which one ascends by cultivation of philosophical reason, but rather something revealed in history to ordinary men and women</b> through the becoming-flesh, or as it were the ἐνσάρκωσις, of Logos itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/dont-think" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">Don't think</a> <bq>[...] <b>we wind up seeing people participate in thinking-like activities without actually thinking</b> (which is both hard and dangerous): they have all the form and shape of real thinking, but the outcomes are predetermined and the substance doesn't actually have to be there. <b>It's a show trial of thought: pre-determined conclusions, pre-determined axioms and premises,</b></bq> <bq>The kind of thinking-adjacent process that our prestige games prioritise relies on reasoning from a conclusion to premises: it <b>relies on knowing what conclusions are useful for gaining status in your particular area and then coming up with a convincing sounding route to getting to them.</b> People already inclined to think, by contrast, reason from premises to conclusion.</bq> <bq>Having those parts of your mind that do your thinking co-opted and turned towards gaining prestige is a lot more painful. You're using the brain channels, you're using the patterns, <b>it feels like you're exercising the thinking parts of the brain, but the output is crap that you really don't agree with at all, and the social pressure isn't to not use the channels, it's to not register that you're misusing them.</b> This feels horrible, and then when you're done doing that kind of work, you've exhausted yourself to the extent that you have no bandwidth left over for your own thinking. <b>Keeping your thinking to yourself isn't an option if you want to compete for work that pays a living wage</b>: you have to sell your ability to think to the highest bidder, using precious capability that you could be using to make the world a better place on playing silly status games, and <b>both doing bad work and being made to explain why the bad work is actually good.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRmp_2IlgdE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/eRmp_2IlgdE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="PHINCOPontiac Holonomy Incubator Network CoDesign" caption="Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman (Interview Adaptation)"> A brilliant discussion. I've reserved her book at the library. I will probably listen to this video again. <bq author="Susan Neiman" source="Evil in Modern Thought">If history, as Bayle wrote [in 1697], is the history of crimes and misfortunes, attempts to make sense of it are doomed not just to falsehood but to ridicule. It's a choice, but not an arbitrary one, to view the Enlightenment as beginning under pressure to prove Bayle wrong.</bq> <bq author="Susan Neiman" source="Evil in Modern Thought">The claim that evil is banal is a claim not about magnitude but proportion: if crimes that great can result from causes that small, there may be hope for overcoming them.</bq> Near the end, there is a wonderful quote by Wittgenstein, <bq author="Ludwig Wittgenstein">The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFkukS4DRA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JAFkukS4DRA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lars Thomson" caption="Die Ingenieure der 2030er-Jahre"> Seine Empfehlungen sind gut. Ich habe es relativ sachlich gefunden. Wie viele anderen auch sagen, wenn von KI gesprochen wird, müssen nicht nur die Anforderungen präzis definiert werden, sondern auch die Validierungsmechanismen, die zudem automatisiert werden müssen, so dass ein Modell selbständig iterieren kann. <ul>Systemisch denken. <ul>Jawohl. Ich bin dabei.</ul> Wir brauchen wieder Leute, die etwas umsetzen können. <ul>Jawohl. Ich bin dabei. 😉</ul> Wir sollen alle von diesen Neuigkeiten (KI, Roboter, erneuerbare Energie) profitieren, statt mit der bisherigen Trägheit weiterzumachen. <ul>Ob das noch möglich ist, weiss ich nicht. Der Druck — die Anreize — kurzfristige Gewinn für die bisherigen Gewinner zu erarbeiten ist noch viel grösser, weil da gibt's noch Geld, auch wenn überhaupt nicht nachhaltig oder langfristig.</ul> Er plädiert, dass wir das trotzdem besser machen müssen. <ul>Leider sehe ich nur, dass die Eliten unseren Ländern weiterhin kurzfristig ausschöpfen werden, bis alles an der Wand gefahren wird. Die Anzeichen, dass etwas anders kommt, sind nicht gut.</ul> Dafür ist die Lösung meine Meinung nach nicht technisch, und nicht mal wirtschaftlich, sondern politisch. <ul>Was er erzählt, wissen die Regierenden und Wirtschaftseliten schon. Die sehen einfach nicht, wo sie selbst weiterhin derart profitieren könnten, wie sie im bisherigen System gemacht haben, nämlich, dass die ein sehr komfortabler Gewinn ohne oder mit geringem Einsatz einräumen. Warum würden sie das freiwillig aufhören? Weil es alle anderen schlechter geht? Andere Menschen gibt's ja gar nicht, wenn einem das Ego gross genug ist.</ul></ul> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2026/11/02/is-ai-the-next-layer-of-abstraction/" author="Mark Seemann" source="ploeh blog">Is AI the next layer of abstraction?</a> <bq author="Edsger W. Dijkstra" source="The Humble Programmer" date="1972">The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.</bq> The article goes on to explain that, <bq>translation from a higher to a lower level of abstraction is<ul>well-defined and deterministic.</ul>LLM-based coding is neither.</bq> <bq>In the words of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Hickey">Rich Hickey</a>, compilers are <i>tools</i>, whereas LLMs offer <i>automation</i>. Tools are predictable once mastered. Automation may or may not be predictable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/10/postgres-19-is-late-and-its-ais-fault.html" author="Robert Haas" source="">Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault</a> <bq>[...] given that <b>we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering</b>, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate? Right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I, and many others, are working really hard to figure it out. I became a PostgreSQL developer partly because <b>the PostgreSQL code base is some of the cleanest and highest-quality code</b> upon which I have ever had the privilege to work. The recent success of AI in finding bugs in that code base does not change my high estimation of it. It is not perfect – no software product is – but <b>if it had more defects visible even to human eyes, the number of things found by LLMs would likely be even greater.</b></bq> <h id="design">Design</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/04/genius-scan-is-neither/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app</a> <bq>This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This <b>gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_cwI1Xj4M" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Fg_cwI1Xj4M" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Patrick Stewart on Extras"> Patrick Stewart's preparation and comedic timing were legendary.