Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment, collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
...Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Computer is a fascinating account of the decades-long effort by linguists, computer scientists and engineers to incorporate Chinese characters into the digital age.
...Mullaney makes a case that the speed of the new Chinese input methods is due to an increasingly common mode of digital-age writing that he calls "hypography." Simply put, hypography is "writing-by-retrieval." That is, the sequence of alphanumeric symbols inputted do not directly represent the output text, and those input symbols are then used to retrieve the intended characters as visible text on the screen. This mode of writing is in contrast to the direct "what-you-type-is-what-you-get" principle of inputting alphanumeric symbols on the keyboard."
...The vast majority of Chinese syllables are morphemes, and each written character corresponds to a single-syllable morpheme. Because Chinese has so many homophones, the number of possible spellings is relatively small, and forms a closed set. English, by contrast, has a much more complex morphological system, with morphemes of different syllable length and inconsistent spelling. Thus the possible spellings for each morpheme is enormous.
...For us, the upper speed constraint of QWERTY keyboards is the clumsiness of human hands, not the layout of the keyboard. In the present era, most users cannot even achieve the theoretical speeds of existing input methods, much less the more hypographic ones that promise even faster performance.
...What sets Chinese computing apart, then, is not the existence of hypography, but the scale and intensity of its usage. In English, hypography remains a hyperspecialized practice, reserved for specific domains of work (court stenography, for example), or in cases when practical limitations or physical abilities make the use of "conventional" QWERTY-style typing untenable or unattractive (as with the Palm Pilot and other small electronic devices). In Chinese, by contrast, hypography is ubiquitous. (p. 222)
Donald Trump famously hates stupid wars and claims to have set the record for ending wars in a presidential term. It's not the worst idea to wonder if he's starting the former so he can keep resetting the latter. If you're already a great fake businessman, you might as well be a great fake statesman. Smarter people than Trump would realize that, having come this far, you might as well fake the war too. In this respect, we bear witness to the rare instance of Iran, Greenland and Minnesota all having the same defense policy.
...Whether the enemy is Cuba, Minneapolis or a transgender person, the war is the purpose of the war. Its prizes are nihilism and hatred at best. No greater project awaits an armistice. There are only enemies, victories and different enemies. There is no strategy, because realizing the ostensible macro purpose of each war, besides having it, requires committing to an absurd and criminal totality, because their own rhetorical stakes have demonstrated that nothing less than an American Iran, an American Cuba, a transgender-free nation or a Minnesota with only the correct voters will be acceptable. Carried to their conclusions, you can do one of two things: exterminate the enemy or the treasury and destroy yourself as a nation.
...The prevailing wisdom thus far is that Trump is operating a protection racket disguised as a foreign policy — and, in a twist, as a domestic foreign policy. That's certainly part of it, as is the fascist need to obscure its incompetency by feeding its followers an illusion of constant action meeting an illusion of constant, variegated threats. The tempting term for the hegemony he seems to wish to impose is something like "vassalage," because it sounds like government instead of extortion. But vassalage was a reciprocally binding contract, which both sides were entitled to rescind in response to the other's broken faith, and it represents a degree of accountability that Trump's career of lawfare says does not apply to him.
In his gut, Trump is the preteen bully on the playground — more big bones and huskiness than muscle — who gets his snack freebies at recess by rearing back an arm, cocking a fist and letting everyone's imagination do the work for him. He has neither the first clue what to do if swinging becomes necessary, nor the slightest desire to find out, because it might hurt. He hasn't thought for a second about how he would maintain dominance day after day. The menacing fist exists to express the hate he thinks he's entitled to unleash and to generate the fear that he is owed. But the work ends there. Snacks are treats he gets as a reward for being his worst self, and it's hard to tell which is more satisfying, but this is also all that there is.
...Of the many forces sustaining Trumpism all this time, one of the strongest and most enduring is that everything is too stupid and humiliating to be real. The sheer effrontery of such a clownish machine is enough to keep the horror of what it does in abeyance until it starts to roll over the bodies.
...After the repetition of the war's pretexts has created space for the possible, after the easier lies are spent, after Trump the Scamp and his greedy feints at war stop paying off, the only thing left is the original cause, the long-awaited victims. All that is left then is the demented demand for the impossible and the criminal, one that must be met by total measures, and for which there is a waiting library of techniques of colonialism and repression and deprivation and, ultimately, extermination. When each runs out of lies to destroy, what is left is only ourselves, and what is lost of America in their application is total too.
...Serafini has an explanation for how the 360-page book came together: a stray white cat wandered into his studio and telepathically guided the whole thing. He now claims the cat was the real author.
...Vonnegut's fears about automation and employment were, in fact, largely right if we focus only on employment in manufacturing. In 1950 around 30 percent of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing; it's less than 10 percent now. Trade deficits explain some of that decline, but mostly it reflects technological progress that made it possible to satisfy demand for manufactured goods with many fewer workers — just as we can now feed ourselves with only a small fraction of the work force employed on farms.
...The rise of information technology, however, created a new kind of monopoly power and a new class of robber barons. Where Standard Oil's market power rested on its control of physical infrastructure, mainly refineries, many of today's most valuable companies — Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Meta (Facebook) — are de facto monopolies or near-monopolies thanks to “network externalities.” So are somewhat smaller but still big players like Uber or DoorDash (which dominates food delivery in much of the country, but not where I live.) What the term network externalities means is that these companies offer products that many people use because so many other people use them. Few people love Word, PowerPoint or Excel, but most people, myself included, use them because they're so widely used that it's hard to do anything different. I am also to some extent a prisoner of the Apple and Amazon ecosystems. Network externalities create "moats" around a number of companies, which have allowed them to retain customers even when they charge high prices and degrade their product's quality. In 2023 the American Dialect Society named Cory Doctorow's term "enshittification" the word of the year.
(quoting Baudrillard) ...What characterizes consumer society is the universality of the news item [Ie fait divers] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same - at once anodyne and miraculous — form of the news item. It is entirely actualized — i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode — and entirely deactualized — i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs. The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology.
That mythology is buttressed by the all the more voracious demand for reality, for ‘truth', for ‘objectivity'. Everywhere we find 'cinema-verite', live reporting, the newsflash, the high-impact photo, the eye-witness report, etc. Everywhere what is sought is the 'heart of the event', the ‘heart of the battle', the 'live', the 'face to face' - the dizzy sense of a total presence at the event, the Great Thrill of Lived Reality — i.e. the miracle once again, since the truth of the media report, televised and taped, is precisely that I was not there. But it is the truer than true which counts or, in other words, the fact of being there without being there. Or, to put it yet another way, the fantasy.
What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [Ie vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this 'Heart' which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message — all these things we 'consume' — represent our tranquillity consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
<.p>(Tooze resumes) ...Do we live in a world in which the question of popular legitimation for war, or the legality of Trump's actions — the classic questions still posed by war-making in the period between Vietnam and Iraq and implicitly answered by Baudrillard — still matter very much any more?
As Stephen Wertheim points out, there was zero preparation of the American public for this conflict. What is by any stretch of the imagination a major military action seems entirely divorced from American politics in any conventional sense.
...Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator. No one in the Trump administration is a reliable narrator. Plus the U.S. these days cannot be understood, even as shorthand, to be a unitary actor with coherent objectives. It is chaos monkeys all the way down.
Trump has offered no endgame: there are no articulated conditions for success beyond the fall of the regime, no explanation of what follows if Iran fragments or descends into civil war, and no domestic debate rallying support comparable to 2002–03. <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/>. Every sortie, carrier deployment, and Patriot battery shifted to the Gulf is something not available for deterring Russia in Eastern Europe or China in the Western Pacific. How big will the strain be on U.S. readiness in Asia ? This war is a gamble, taken with incomplete information and in the teeth of historical experience that suggests such gambles often go badly—above all for the people living under the bombs.
... The war is now a multi‑node regional air and missile war. Inside Iran, the regime has moved—remarkably quickly, given the shock—to institutionalize succession.
...Pause for the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. 1000 miles to the west-southwest, the Houthis succeeded in their operational aim: closing the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea and convincing the U.S. Navy that continued retaliatory strikes attrit the U.S. Navy more than Houthi capabilities. They did this for nearly two years until the October 2025 ceasefire. They exploited the asymmetry between how much it cost them to keep shooting, how much it cost the U.S. Navy to suppress their capabilities, and how much it costs everyone else to keep sailing. The Houthis are now doing again, as MAERSK reroutes away from the Suez Canal to the Cape of Good Hope. Only a sliver of the 20 mb/d of oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz has pipeline alternatives. An Omani-via-land bridge is OK for high-value but not for bulk commodities. Thus adding enough stochastic risk to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz may be possible even for a substantially degraded Islamic Republic military.
...Since the 1970s, US administrations have progressively opted for illegal wars and unilateralism at the expense of international law and multilateralism. What is new is that today all gloves are off. The deployment of brutal force is open, blatant and unapologetic. Since might is right, any criticism must be regarded as potential subversion.
Moreover, these strikes against Iran are not just about the Middle East. They are a prelude – a demonstration effect toward China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine theaters.
Overnight, the Trump administration, once again without an exit strategy, managed to drag the international community ever closer to a Cold War escalation.
...I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I'd be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on.
...Despite this ever eerier present we're now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we've gone through so far, don't count on it not happening either.
And, of course, we're not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we're talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren.
...In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was "erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet... a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather." And count on this: for the next three years, that's only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health "a scam."
...in 1978 Iran didn't account for a large share of world oil production either. So why did world oil prices rise 165 percent after the Iranian Revolution? Fears of disruption in other Middle Eastern nations led to speculative hoarding, followed by Saudi production cuts that kept prices high. The lesson for today is that when assessing the impact of events in Iran on world oil markets, we need to consider the impact on exports from Iran's neighbors.
...As of this morning, oil prices were about $10 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February. That will add approximately 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. So far markets are in effect betting on a short, not-too-disruptive war, although that could change.
...one point I haven't seen many observers emphasize is that the modern Middle East now plays an important role in the world economy that goes beyond its status as a major source of oil. Dubai in particular is an important node in the global financial system, as well as playing host to many extremely rich people who thought they had found a safe haven. One indicator of that changing status is the transformation of Dubai International Airport into one of the world's most important travel hubs.
...World Sense is a kind of intelligence trained on the real world, instead of being trained on text descriptions of the real world. These are sometimes called world models, or Spatial Intelligence, because this kind of cognition is based on (and trained on) how physical objects behave in the 3-dimensional world of space and time, and not just the immaterial world of words talking about the world. This species of cognition knows how things bounce, or flow, or how proteins fold, or molecules vibrate, or light bends. It incorporates a recognition of gravity, an awareness of continuity, a sense of matter's physicality, an intimate knowledge of how mass and energy are conserved.
The United States Secretary of "War," Whiskey Pete Hegseth, has proudly declared that this war will not be "politically correct." The United States will adhere to "no stupid rules of engagement." No "nation-building quagmire." This is not a "democracy building exercise." Just "winning," in the most Charlie Sheen interpretation possible. America is unburdened by complexity or morality. What they are calling "Operation Epic Fury" is really just "Operation F Things Up."
...This is a war being run as a content pipeline. You don't articulate objectives. You declare vibes. There is no defined victory. The promise to "fight to win" may sound tough to Whiskey Pete, but it provides no calm for worried families of service members sent into this quagmire. Just say you have "generals" and take the next question.
Rules of engagement aren't "stupid." They exist because war has terrible consequences: civilian casualties, retaliatory strikes, regional spillover, international law, and the small matter of US armed service people getting sucked into endless cycles of retaliation. Discarding long-accepted RoE isn't a show of strength. It's branding. It's dangerous and opens the doors to all sorts of awful behavior.
"No nation building," he says. What replaces it? Containment? Deterrence? Regime change? Strategic degradation? Negotiation leverage? The doctrine is literally and only: break things loudly.
...Now, if you have any experience with politics, your first six thoughts upon seeing this document can almost certainly be summarized as follows:
OMG!
WTF?
The Minister himself actually wrote that?
And his officials let him circulate it?
AND NO ONE THOUGHT TO MAKE SURE NO COPIES LEFT THE ROOM?
So, it's a total amateur hour, huh?
I spent an hour or so on the first issue (1911) of Sarawak Museum Journal, which has the text of two 'Sea Dyak'/Iban dirges, impelled by the arrival in today's post of Howell and Bailey's A Sea Dyak Dictionary (1900)
...and that led to a passing curiosity about dialects in Javanese, and if there are maps of...
...I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I'd been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.
Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we're ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.
And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.
Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.
...I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who genuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn't have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.
...I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don't think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don't know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can't figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it's still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.
And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won't stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It's all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn't matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.
Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq's and Afghanistan's combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives. His launching of hostilities (with the embarrassingly bro-themed name "Operation Epic Fury") is the culmination of decades of expanding presidential powers over national-security issues, and Trump has now taken that expansion to its extreme conclusion, launching wars and using military power as he sees fit.
Many of his critics are focused on the claim that the war is illegal under both U.S. and international law—and they are probably right about that. But Trump has already floored the accelerator and driven off the cliff. What are the options for Congress and the American people—the majority of whom do not support this conflict—to regain some control over a president conducting a war as if he were a medieval prince?
Unfortunately, the few legal options available are laden with their own risks. Congress could decide to cut off funding for the war, which at this point could be as reckless an act as starting one. Men and women overseas did not choose to go, and they should at least be allowed to conduct their operations without worrying that Congress will simply turn off all funding. It could pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to hostilities—aalso a risky move.
