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.
(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.
Donald Trump's illegal, immoral, and unjustified war will cost taxpayers billions and put upward pressure on energy prices and inflation more generally. Purely from an economic standpoint, the war is a disaster. And the inflation picture even before Trump's war was ominous.
In short, inflation is back, despite Trump's preposterous assertions in his rant last Tuesday night. He insisted inflation is "plummeting." Well, if that is "plummeting," then the word has lost all meaning.
...Maybe it was just a coincidence, but the day before Trump and Israel ignited a regional war, a horrible inflation report dropped. With little to no oil going through the Straits of Hormuz, oil went to $80 per barrel (perhaps heading for $100). When that price hike turns up at the pump, Americans will be paying Trump's war tax.
..."The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly," Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who'd been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He'd been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
"After I released the papers," he vividly remembered, "some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me." Three years later, his takeaway was: "Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity."
...By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. "Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence," he wrote that year, "is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated."
...Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator's head.
But maybe that's part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.
Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it's the overarching theme of Pirsig's entire life's work
...he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretē, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma. He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig's worldview, but because it's invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretē (or Quality), they fall far short.
In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig's novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC: The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality... The names that can be given it are not Absolute names. It is the origin of heaven and earth. When named it is the mother of all things... He declares: "Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.
...In many cases, Europeans leveraged their shipborne weaponry and navigational technologies to act as nautical bandits who demanded a ransom from merchant ships in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific but did not exert meaningful territorial force over more than small outposts that they essentially rented from local sovereigns who were perfectly capable of thwarting any attempt at territorial conquest. We collapse the end of this period of European expansion, when there were accelerating territorial inroads, when early industrialization began to be a force multiplier, when New World settlements were fully given over to slavery and the plantation complex, with the long centuries prior to that, when European sovereigns faced many regimes that were their peers as well as many smaller polities that were capable of thwarting most intrusions into their territory.
...The empire of the air that Trump and his people have now unleashed against Venezuela and Iran and doubtless wish to uncork elsewhere cannot exert any kind of direct administrative power within those territories. It is not empire in any old sense, even if some of them think it is, even if the news analysts see it as such. It is banditry. It is the demanding of tribute without even the offer of future protection.
...Trump's form of empire is decapitationist. You pay him, you get to live, your palace still stands, your major city doesn't get a light dusting of random munitions, and maybe a few fishermen get to come home with their catch. Venezuela was, under Maduro, more or less a gatekeeper state, though relatively little came through its gates in either direction. You can claim a tribute through decapitating Venezuela's regime because its structure of rule is effectively personalist, its sovereign cares relatively little for its people.
It won't be much of a tribute: if the mafioso really wants that oil, it's going to have to go in and rebuild a system for extracting it. The big corporations aren't going to do that because helping a decapitationist regime is all risk, no reward for them. They know how to pay their steady rents to a gatekeeper, but putting a lot of money into helping an unstable gangster collect his payday—particularly one known for not paying people who do him a service—is for small fry, not for multi-bazillion dollar multinationals. Maybe there's a mere multimillionaire hick who owns a couple of oil wells who might be interested, good luck.
Iran is not a state you can easily decapitate, by comparison. It's an ideological state. It has built its deepest bunkers not in the form of hardened concrete but in terms of loyalists: judges, police, soldiers, theocratic militia. It is not a personalist state, no matter what the org chart might seem to say.
...You cannot run a decapitationist empire on a hydra. Nor, paradoxically, can you easily collect tribute from a wealthy target. Iran has a lot of oil, but Iran's oil production matters to many other actors besides Iran, and most of them wouldn't stand for a mafioso saying it all belongs to him now. Trump can have Venezuela's oil if he can con his way into getting someone to rebuild the capacity, because nobody except Cuba is all that dependent on it. China has other places to buy from.
...Susan Glasser took a stab at listing the ever-fluctuating reasons for sending men and women to die, while spending billions of dollars:
[O]utright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of "the ability to project power outside its borders," stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preemptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preemptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preemptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program that Trump had, as recently as last week, claimed was "obliterated." Many of these explanations are based on false premises; some already seem to have been abandoned.
...Our power company — Dominion Energy — had just called to ask if they could walk our property, to show us where they were going to put a 185-ft pole for a 500-kv aboveground power pole in the middle of our backyard for the Golden to Mars project, in order to power Amazon's newest data center
Climate change–related extreme events during the mid-late Holocene, especially around 3000 years before the present (yr B.P.), severely threatened human survival and cultural development at various locations. However, although marked social change during this period in China have also been reported to coincide with extreme disasters, the causes and impacts of these events remain unclear. Here, we aligned paleoclimate reconstructions with quantitative analyses of archeological evidence, including oracle bone scripts, together with artificial intelligence— and physics-based model simulations to uncover the causes. We found that intensified typhoon activities exerted considerable impacts on climate extremes and social change in inland China around 3000 yr B.P. These findings underscore the urgent need to improve preparedness for today's typhoon-induced disasters in the context of accelerating climate change.
...Haftar has spent 50 years closely studying how power works: beside Gaddafi as the dictator governed through committees and councils while claiming no title, in a Chadian prison camp where he made himself indispensable to captors and captives alike, as a CIA asset in Virginia who later played the CIA against the Gaddafi regime, as a failed commander in a revolution that rejected him until he outlasted everyone who did. Each experience taught him the same truth: power does not require a throne. The space between what everyone knows and what no one can say, that is where he rules.
...while TerraPower's Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor can now at least be constructed, it won't put power into the Wyoming energy grid without high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is only made in commercial quantities by a company called Techsnabexport, which is a subsidiary of another company called Rosatom, which is owned by the Russian state.
...Rubisco—or ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO)—sis the basis of Earth's life support system (1). Found in all green plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, this enzyme converts inorganic carbon dioxide (CO2) to organic carbon during photosynthesis. As such, it has shaped past and present climates and provides food and energy for the world's burgeoning populations. In aquatic environments, dissolved CO2 is usually scarce, and to compensate, diverse CO2-concentrating mechanisms have evolved to corral Rubisco into efficient working clusters. In cyanobacteria, Rubisco is encapsulated by proteinaceous shells called carboxysomes (2). In algae, it is packaged into pyrenoids, which are liquid-like organelles (3). Among the earliest of land plants (4), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) are the only species known to have pyrenoids.
...In aquatic environments, dissolved CO2 is usually scarce, and to compensate, diverse CO2-concentrating mechanisms have evolved to corral Rubisco into efficient working clusters. In cyanobacteria, Rubisco is encapsulated by proteinaceous shells called carboxysomes (2). In algae, it is packaged into pyrenoids, which are liquid-like organelles (3). Among the earliest of land plants (4), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) are the only species known to have pyrenoids. On page 1070 of this issue, Robison et al. (5) reveal that the mechanism by which hornworts aggregate Rubisco is unlike anything previously reported. The discovery points to a new potential pathway for engineering crops with improved photosynthetic efficiency.
...Robison et al. also show how synthetic biology can be used to build an enzyme with enhanced kinetic properties. Using the SynBio platform, the authors successfully assembled functional, native-like hornwort Rubisco enzymes in Escherichia coli by coexpressing essential assembly factors and incorporating RbcS-STAR with canonical RbcS at a ratio of ˜2:6 per enzyme. This synthetic approach should enable high-throughput mutagenesis and directed evolution to identify Rubisco variants that have the potential to aggregate or demonstrate improved catalytic efficiency. Such variants can now be tested directly in a higher plant system without interference from the native Rubisco
...Some higher plants already have a mechanism to boost photosynthesis, known as the C4 pathway, which is found in maize and sugar cane. Efforts are being made to engineer the biochemical C4 mechanism used to concentrate CO2 into crops such as rice to increase yield (14). This is complicated by the different metabolic functions of mesophyll cells and specialized internal bundle sheath cells, where Rubisco is packaged in C4 plants. Given these structural complexities, could a pyrenoid be installed in the chloroplast of every green cell?
...The SynBio approaches raise the possibility of developing different Rubisco isoforms with kinetic properties that are tuned to local conditions of light, shade, or seasonal drought (14)
PLANT SYMBIOSIS
Shared formin function across symbioses
Plant-fungal symbioses are widespread, but bacterial rhizobia only form nodulating relationships with legume plants. Qiao et al.. found an actin-nucleating protein, SYFO2, which is part of the formin protein family and is involved in both types of symbiotic relationships. SYFO2 is required for entry of symbionts into root hairs in both the legume Medicago and the nonlegume tomato. By interacting with remorin proteins in membrane nanodomains, SYFO2 forms condensates to organize the cytoskeleton in preparation for microbe colonization. The legume symbiosis regulator NIN upregulates SYFO2 in both species despite tomato being unable to form nodulating rhizobial symbioses. This discovery may aid in the engineering of bacterial symbiosis in non-nodulating species. —Madeleine Seale
concludes: ...My read: rather than just a heartfelt attempt at redistribution, this is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gambit by the SEIU. If Governor Newsom offers them enough concessions and bribes, they'll drop the initiative. If not, they'll carry it through, maybe win, and get $100 billion in extra health care spending, some of which will flow through to their members. Either way, whatever happens to the rest of the state isn't their concern.
One critique of capitalism argues that, although in theory it aligns incentives perfectly so that companies should produce things that people want, in practice it also incentivizes the hunt for loopholes: addictive products that can take advantage of seemingly-tiny wedges between what people will buy and what's good for them. Cigarettes, casinos, payday loans, and social media all demonstrate that these wedges collectively form a multi-trillion dollar niche.
In the same way, SEIU seems to have found a bug in direct democracy: it incentivizes interest groups to search for the most destructive possible ballot initiative that might nevertheless get approved by low-information voters, since this gives them leverage over anyone willing to bribe them into withdrawing their poison pill. Seems like an ignominious end for California's ballot proposition system.
I do think we have to think of generative AI this way: as a bicycle of the mind. Just like computers were when they came out. "It is a personal amplifier, not a generic one. It's my bicycle, and I'm the one riding it, going further because of the amplification. I still have to pedal! The bicycle goes in the direction I choose! But I'm going further and more efficiently than I could on foot."
I think jargon is getting thicker with each passing day, but where are people learning it? Perhaps they are actually being taught it in business schools. It's so pervasive, nauseating, and suffocating that it must be somebody's job to produce it.
To put the new wave / avant garde jargon in perspective, I turned to this consummate collection compiled by WSJ from the complaints of actual endurers:
‘Leverage.' ‘Reach Out.' ‘Circle Back.' The Corporate Jargon We Hate the Most.
We pinged our readers for the terms that really annoy them. The list is long.
This text is not written to explain death.
Nor to predict what happens after it.
It is written for moments when everything you rely on dissolves —
whether at the end of life,
in a crisis,
or in the quiet collapse of an identity you can no longer sustain.
The Bardo Thödol speaks in images.
This script speaks in reminders.
You hear the phrase "the cruelty is the point" a lot these days, but the war in Iran is revealing the darkest iteration of it. The proof is in a smirking Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth saying, in an on-camera interview, "The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they're gonna live."
The phrasing is from the heart (as twisted and rotted as it is) and deliberate. Not "who think" but "that think”" like they are less than human. Not "Iranian forces" but "Iranians" because he doesn't care if they are combatants or citizens; this isn't even a sort-of-pragmatic "collateral damage is inevitable" but rather a desire to kill anyone in Iran.
Petey is a damn psychopath. He's loving the power and authority to deal out death at will.
He is telling us that "politically correct" rules of warfare won't be utilized (in other words, violating the Geneva Convention and committing war crimes in general are now standard operating procedure) and gleefully using words like "death from the skies" and "complete destruction without mercy."
The president smiles on camera like a man savoring the notion of a soon-to-occur steamy sexual liaison as he says, "I have to go back and look at the war; there's a lot going on."
...EMPLOYMENT
Assassination is an extreme measure, and it should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. headquarters, though officials may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service.
No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, though the act will usually be properly covered by news services.
JUSTIFICATION
Murder is not morally justifiable. Assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.
"I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us," said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley's military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped ICE accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company's products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, "if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections." (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures.") Yet Karp's speculation hasn't led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
...Under international law, aggression is not just another war crime—it is the gravest crime of all. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called aggression "the supreme international crime," because it "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Those convicted of launching aggressive war were held responsible for all the horrors that followed. For that reason, the Nuremberg tribunal reserved its harshest punishment—death by hanging—for the defendants convicted of planning and waging aggressive war, while those found guilty only of war crimes or crimes against humanity received lesser sentences.
...The role of the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf sheikdoms in global finance means that financial markets will be further impacted as they dip into those funds to make up for the lost revenue from the disruption of their oil and gas exports.
...Israel and Iran face an existential choice between gradually destroying each other and accepting that they must learn to co-exist in the same region of the world. The United States government must decide which of those choices it will support.
"Everyone saw this coming except the President." An "unmitigated disaster of epic proportions." Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former president Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, "It's a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated."
Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump's minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.
Story after story has documented Americans scared, stranded, and left to find their own transportation out of countries made dangerous by his careless whims. Many have expressed their understandably fury that their government could be so derelict. The State Department has failed spectacularly in one of its essential missions — protecting Americans around the world.
The Trump regime's level of recklessness and indifference to human life and international order should appall all Americans. Trump's excuse for making no evacuation plans — "Well, because it happened all very quickly" — is ludicrous, considering the U.S. and Israel apparently spent months planning the military assault. His jaw-dropping admission that Iran's bombardment of neighboring countries in retaliation was "probably the biggest surprise" reflects how little thought he put into a war with global ramifications.
...This display of incompetence should not surprise us, given that the MAGA crew harbors such contempt for government. The massive cuts and loss of scores of foreign policy professionals (collectively representing centuries of experience) mean institutional knowledge is scarce. DOGE cuts conducted by know-nothing twenty year olds, partisan witch hunts, early retirements, and mass resignations have hollowed out the State Department, leaving it in the hands of a skeletal staff retained for their political loyalty — not expertise and experience. (Rubio also slashed staff at the National Security Council, which is supposed to oversee interagency planning.) In any other administration, the secretary of state/national security adviser would get canned or forced to resign in disgrace after such management malpractice.
...Congress must rouse itself to focus on a foreign policy disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a masterstroke. Rubio and other top officials under oath and in public should answer for their lapses, account for every dime spent, and give Congress some basic information. (What is the plan to extract Americans? When does the war end? Are we now targeting civilians?) The last thing Congress should do is agree to any request, as the Trump team is reportedly contemplating, to shovel more money into the coffers of this gang of bumblers.
Unfortunately, we know how this will play out. Trump and his arrogant yes-men will never admit error, let alone apologize; Republicans on the Hill will not stir themselves to do their jobs. It will be up to the voters to throw out every elected Republican and force removal of the architects of this catastrophe. Until that happens, Americans here and abroad will needlessly suffer and die.
At quite uncertain times and places,
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
And though they seem to cling together,
And form 'associations' here,
Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,
And through the depths of space career.
...We've become incredibly good at optimizing individual components while losing our ability to understand the systems that connect them. And I think I know why.
...why maintain expensive cross-functional research when R&D can be distributed directly into business units? Why fund exploration when every project should deliver immediate operational value?
..."Your skills are highly interesting... but we have no positions where you won't be bored."
"It was a polite way of saying: there's no place for someone trained to think across domains. I had the knowledge and experience, but the organizational structures to apply them no longer existed for me."
..."What disappeared wasn't just a research center. It was organizational memory — the institutional capacity to recognize patterns that span domains, to understand how local optimizations can create global problems, to see opportunities that emerge only at the intersections between established disciplines."
..."Our capacity to address them systematically has diminished in current organization.The irony is profound: as our systems become more interconnected and complex, we've eliminated the organizational structures designed to understand interconnection and complexity."
...These aren't technical problems requiring better algorithms. They're systems problems requiring the ability to see relationships, dependencies, and emergent properties across domains — without drowning in the complexity of massive diagram management.
...We need systems thinkers embedded in operational teams, not isolated from them. We need meta-level analysis tools available during real project execution. We need recognition that operational excellence actually requires systems perspective.
Models show that as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation gets weaker, the Gulf Stream will drift northwards. There are signs that this is already happening, and a more abrupt shift could warn of more severe climate impacts
...this study provides more evidence the AMOC is already slowing, says Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam in Germany.
"This slowing is occurring earlier than in the global warming scenarios," he says. "Climate models appear to underestimate the problem and thus potentially how soon an AMOC tipping point will be reached."
At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and saw that it was covered in tiny openings. At the time, they didn't know what to make of these structures, but as microscopy improved, something grand came into focus: what we now call "nuclear pore complexes," some of the largest and most marvelous molecular machines ever formed.
Every nuclear pore complex is constructed from hundreds of proteins, of around 30 different types. From the front, it looks like an eight-petaled flower; from the side, like a flying saucer. Its center opening spills over with spaghetti-like proteins tethered to the inner walls of the complex.
...This machine has a vital job: directing molecular traffic into and out of the nucleus. More than an open door, the protein complex recognizes different molecules as they approach — and lets only some through. "The nuclear pore complex is ultimately the gatekeeper for the nucleus," said Roderick Lim (opens a new tab), a biophysicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. "Everything that has to get in and out of the nucleus has to go through these pores."
...I've long held that there are two temporal flows for culture. The "weather" which is pop-culture, trends in the aesthetics (arts, music, fashion, literature etc.), mash-ups between cultures, experimentation. Then there's the climate of culture. Our deeply rooted and held beliefs, rituals, customs and norms. They can take decades or generations to change. Now, I'm sensing turbulence in both at the same time. This is rather unusual.
...I think this is because we are lacking resonance culturally and our ability to react is being proven quite challenging at best. Resonance and reactivity. And the digital world, our info sphere, has a lot to do with it. Social media, Generative AI, screens everywhere, global connectivity. Always on. Living out our days in shorts, reels, clips. Rage bait. Clickbait. Misinformation and disinformation at scale. Geopolitical shakeups, a re-aligning of the world order, inflation, economic disparity. Populism. Algorithms.
Making cord and string has been around since the time of the Neanderthals. Modern humans probably learned this skill, along with sewing with a needle and thread, from them or the Denisovans hundreds of thousands of years ago. The first fibers were plant based and twined rather than spun, but it wasn't relatively long before someone figured out how to spin fiber into thread using a stick, and then if a weight is added, the stick will spin faster and longer. As a creative species, we were on our way.
...When we think of early ships, we naturally think of the woodwork that goes into building them. We rarely consider the sails that are needed to sail, rather than row, the ship.
That means months of spinning and weaving, not to mention preparing the fiber for spinning beforehand. Wool must be sorted, washed, and either carded or combed. Plant fibers need even more processing.
Early sails were made from the wool of primitive breeds of sheep. These sheep were double coated, meaning they had a coarse outer coat and a fluffier inner coat. Rather than being shorn, these sheep shed their coats in the early summer.
They were also much smaller than modern sheep breeds. A primitive breed weighs 27–32 kg or 60–70 lb, while a modern merino sheep weighs 56–107 kg or 125 to 235 lb. A single sail of 9×10 meters needed the wool from over 150 sheep.
This means that the process of making a sail began in the early summer when the wool was gathered, washed, and prepared for spinning. Then thousands of hours of spinning were required to make the thread that would be woven to make the sail.
...In the early part of the 11th century, hand cranked spinning wheels called charkhas appeared in India, China, and the Middle East. These were small wheels that sat on a low table or on the ground. The spinner cranked a larger wheel that had a band that connected to a smaller wheel with a spindle coming out of the central shaft. The spinner then spun the fibre off the tip of the spindle while continuing to crank the wheel. The difference in the size of the wheels meant that the smaller wheel rotated much faster than the one being cranked. It sped up the process of spinning, but the spindles were still small, and the spinner had to stop spinning periodically to wind the thread onto the spindle. When the spindle was full, it was taken off and replaced by an empty one, and the process started again.
...In 1533 the first treadle spinning wheels with flyer assemblies were invented. These are what most people imagine when they think of a spinning wheel. The spinner sits at the wheel and guides the wool in through a flyer system that simultaneously twists the thread and winds it onto a bobbin while the spinner rotates the wheel using a foot treadle. The process is extremely fast. The spinner no longer needed to stop to wind the thread onto the spindle, since the winding process was automatic. The bobbin was easily removed from the flyer assembly, and an empty one put in its place in seconds. Meanwhile, the bobbin of finished thread could be mounted on a rack to be made ready for weaving.
In the near term, we can see that a major cause of the job downturn is Trump's mass deportation scheme. "The latest numbers show that net migration into the United States fell by more than half, and that reality is now reflected in the latest employment report," the Center for American Progress found. Moreover, "native-born workers haven't seen their wages or employment prospects rise under this new immigration approach." CAP explained: "Immigration is the driving force behind America's labor supply growth, accounting for about half of labor force growth each year for the past three decades and an even larger share in recent years." When you have declining birth rates and choke off immigrants, who have higher job participation, then "negative job growth could become the new normal, according to some estimates."
...Now, Trump has launched an unnecessary, open-ended war that threatens to shock the entire global economy. "Any event that extends the conflict or threatens sources of oil and gas is likely to lift energy prices to levels that would sow inflation. That could prompt central banks worldwide to raise interest rates, pushing up the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other borrowing," the New York Times reported. "And that would choke off consumer spending and business investment — a classic pathway to a downturn." In a written statement, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) explained, "Already under strain from the President's disastrous trade war and anti-immigrant crusade, our economy is extremely ill-prepared to deal with yet another wave of Trump-induced chaos, this time in the form of an illegal war of choice in the Middle East which is rapidly driving up energy prices across the globe." But Trump seems incapable of doing anything other than making matters worse. His ever-changing rationale for the war and lengthening timeline create more volatility. His inane comment that we would accept only "unconditional surrender" (are we planning a land invasion to take by force a country of over 90 million people?) spooked the oil markets. Perhaps when oil prices soar above $150 per barrel, his party will revolt.
Britons stranded abroad when war breaks out can usually expect a dose of sympathy from their countrymen. When Iranian drones and missiles started to crash into Dubai, Britain instead let out a collective cackle. Had British expats not consulted a map before they extolled Dubai as the safest city in the world? "Extraordinary images here of an expat in Dubai having their first ever geopolitical thought," read one cartoon in the Guardian, "the dawning realisation that there might be something in the world beyond his dickhead self."
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader with a knack for the kind of populism that will not have you kicked out of a dinner party, questioned whether British armed forces should bring home "washed-up old footballers who mock ordinary people who stay in the uk and pay our taxes here". Dubai infects the British psyche in a way no other place can match. It is a land in which Britain's neuroses about decline, class and money can run free.
Only a few hundred thousand Britons live in the United Arab Emirates. A million visit each year, a fraction of the numbers that visit Spain. Yet its grip on elite discourse is near-total. High-flyers from finance, pinkie-ringed pr people and crypto grifters now call the city home; English footballers enjoy midseason breaks and long retirements there. A scroll through Instagram is, at times, a wall of British influencers who swapped 45% tax rates and wet weather for 0% income tax and a balmy 26 degrees in March and want people to know.
...Our paradox is that we are the pattern-seeking animal — a kind of superpower conferred upon us by our complex consciousness — but we are always paying the price of consciousness: Like the hero of the Greek myths always bedeviled by his tragic flaw, we pay for our power with our vulnerability. The patterns we discover — fractals, the harmonic scale, the laws of planetary motion — give us a firmer foothold on reality, set us free to know the world as it really is, in all its fearsome unknowns. But the patterns we invent — in our habits, in our relationships, in our myths and power structures and organizing principles of civilization — cage us, stiffen us with certainty until we grow too ossified to change.
...In recent weeks, large Kelvin waves have been sliding eastward across the Pacific, pushing warmer subsurface water toward the surface. These waves sometimes stall. They sometimes dissipate. This one has been reinforced by strong westerly wind bursts, unusual surges that disrupt the trade winds and help tip the system.
...Hotter days mean the air can hold more water vapor, making everything feel more oppressive and creating more atmospheric instability. Colder snaps happen because warming disrupts the jet stream (the river of air that normally keeps cold air locked up north), causing it to meander and dump Arctic air where it doesn't belong. Heavy rainfall intensifies because warmer air is like a bigger sponge soaking up more moisture, then wrings it all out at once in concentrated downpours. Droughts worsen because higher temperatures cause water to evaporate faster than nature can replace it.
...Another El Niño in the second half of 2026 will not simply add a few tenths of a degree to a chart. It will test political narratives that insist warming has plateaued. It will test energy models built on gradual curves. It will test the patience of populations already tired of hearing about collapse, harvests, water systems, and grids beyond thresholds, and the growing temptation to try risky technological fixes like geoengineering because nothing else seems to be working.
...Many of the fragments spreading through the digital panopticon comprise real footage of real events, but their cumulative effect is far from a cogent portrait. Instead, it's something like what the French philosopher Paul Virilio, in his 1998 book "The Information Bomb,' labelled a coming "visual crash": a "real-time globalization of telecommunications" in which any significant event in the world is live-streamed and broadcast, and the overflow of detail causes a "defeat of facts" and a "disorientation of our relation to reality."
...Virilio's information-bomb concept applies beyond warfare. Online, every day, we are inundated with evidence of emergencies, crimes, and conspiracies that seem to elude comprehension. A driverless Waymo vehicle blocks an ambulance headed to the site of a mass shooting in Austin. Bill Clinton seems to laugh while paging through documents during his recent deposition on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Meanwhile, anyone online can browse Epstein's correspondence on Jmail, a site that emulates the experience of browsing his Gmail inbox. Early this month, zoomed-in press cameras captured a creeping rash on President Trump's neck, adding to a growing archive of his unexplained medical symptoms or injuries. Once the information bomb has detonated, even reality takes on the feeling of conspiracy.
...As American journalistic institutions are consolidated and politicized by tech billionaires seeking to dominate the industry, those who consume news on the internet are increasingly left to assemble the disparate pieces on their own. Thankfully, there's a meme to describe that, too: "Monitoring the situation," an ironic phrase popularized on X and elsewhere during Trump's strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It describes the social-media user's manic scramble to follow every update at once, as if each of us might have a role to play in shaping outcomes, if only we knew enough about what was going on. We monitor the situation out of a deluded belief that we are more than just passive, confused bystanders to a spray of digital shrapnel.
...In late January, Stewart, Minor and 91 other distant relatives of Disfarmer had celebrated the settlement of a six-year legal dispute that pitted them against the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation to determine who controls the archive and copyright, and ultimately the legacy, of the artist, who died without a will.
...the agreement between the family and museum left the heirs in apparent possession of the copyright and of about 3,000 of Disfarmer's glass-plate negatives and hundreds of posthumous prints made from them.
...I can remember when we first started talking, there were alarmist reports that all of our media was controlled by eight corporations. We may be going towards one. We've become more and more of an oligarchy, both with regard to socioeconomic affairs and with regard to media. When we started talking, Facebook didn't yet exist, and Twitter has now become X, with algorithms that suppress things they don't like — they suppress news, they suppress controversial postings. The media landscape is very murky. Back in the Iraq war days, I could go on the internet and look at local Iraqi newspapers from towns in Iraq. I find it difficult to do that in Iran because they're also highly controlled. It is a very different situation, and I think it's because our politics has shifted so heavily towards oligarchy.
...I think the overall picture of what's going on is not so hard to discern. The United States and Israel are bombing the bejesus out of Iran. They are attempting to inflict attrition on Iranian drone and missile launchers in order to make the country helpless, and they haven't succeeded. Moreover, Iran has figured out a strategy — it may be somewhat self-defeating, but also an effective one — of not only hitting at Israel or at US bases, but of interfering with the commerce in petroleum and gas that comes out of the Persian Gulf, which could throw the whole world into a deep recession.
...The Israelis think in ethnic terms and they hope to break Iran up ethnically, as they hoped to break Iraq up ethnically. But 90% of the country is Shiite, and it's unlikely that appealing to small Sunni ethnicities like the Kurds or the Baluch is going to do more than cause some local turbulence of a minor sort. Doing that also brings in the neighbors, because Turkey is not going to be happy with a Kurdish resurgence in Iran, and Pakistan is petrified of the Baluch rising up because they'll rise up on both sides of the border. All you're doing is giving Iran allies if you take that approach.
...In Iran, attacks on civilian infrastructure have created environmental disasters of catastrophic proportions. The bombing of oil storage facilities in Tehran and other Iranian cities has unleashed environmental crises that will affect generations. These attacks on civilian infrastructure — desalination plants, oil facilities, media outlets, public utilities, among many others — represent clear violations of international humanitarian law and are also met with little repercussions on the aggressors.
Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, including foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations, and irrigation works.
...What we are witnessing is not just the escalation of conflict; it is the death of international law as a meaningful constraint, however limited, on powerful states. When war crimes are announced in advance and committed openly, when civilian displacement becomes a stated objective, and when environmental destruction is treated as collateral damage, we have moved beyond the realm of legal gray areas into a world where might makes right.
...The normalization of these war crimes has created a dangerous precedent — or return to a tradition of brutal colonialism — that could be applied anywhere, anytime, yet again. When powerful states can act with impunity, when they can announce their intentions to commit atrocities and then follow through without consequence, the entire framework of international law becomes meaningless, even as a smokescreen.
...No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. And the future is not much better. The UK will presumably go ahead with the Sizewell C project, duplicating Hinkley, but that will only replace retirements of existing plants. In France, sites for six reactors have been identified, but no investment decision has been made. And in the US, even the announced restart of reactors closed as uneconomic in recent years is looking doubtful.
Just let your minds become void and
environmental phenomena will void themselves;
let principles cease to stir and events
will cease stirring of themselves.
...
Ordinary people look to their surroundings,
while followers of the Way look to Mind,
but the true Dharma is to forget them both.
...
I assure you that one who comprehends
the truth of 'nothing to be attained' is
already seated in the sanctuary where
he will gain his Enlightenment.
The Zen Teaching of Huang-Po:
On the Transmission of Mind
...the most fascinating thing about hornworts, Robinson explains, has to do with their remarkable ability to concentrate carbon dioxide—a trait that allows them to photosynthesize more efficiently than most other plants. All photosynthetic organisms rely on Rubisco, the most abundant enzyme on Earth, to convert carbon dioxide to sugar. But even though Rubisco is essential to the process of photosynthesis, it isn't particularly efficient. Many species of algae get around this problem using specialized compartments called pyrenoids, which are chock-full of Rubisco and saturated with concentrated carbon dioxide.
Why are pyrenoids so important?
Rubisco is considered a flawed enzyme. The first big flaw is that it only catalyzes between three and 10 reactions per second. That doesn't sound so bad, but when you compare it to something like carbonic anhydrase, which is one of the speedier guys out there and catalyzes about a million reactions per second, it's definitely slow.
The other problem is that Rubisco actually has a hard time distinguishing between O2 and CO2. When it reacts with O2, it produces a type of sugar that can't be used by the plant and has to be recycled. That recycling process requires energy and also results in the loss of previously fixed CO2.
In environments where CO2 is especially limited, you often find organisms that have evolved some sort of carbon-concentrating mechanism. Virtually everything in the ocean—all the cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae—has pyrenoids, for example, because CO2 diffuses really slowly in water.
...Modern humans do get to write (tell stories about) history (until they can't), but modern humans are reality blind, are not a credible source of information about how the world system works, much less about how the human socioeconomic-political system works due to an overwhelming need to believe in the necessary primacy of the modern human enterprise.
If you want to be free, get to know your real self. It has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode, but is lively and buoyant. It responds with versatile facility, but its function cannot be located. Therefore when you look for it you become further from it, when you seek it you turn away from it all the more.
...As usual, the success of the coinage has depended on several forces driving semantic drift. There's flying, making a buzzing noise, defending the nest or attacking invaders, flying in swarms, not doing regular or creative work, ...
...Imperia is the house always wins. Imperia is a gacha game. Imperia is vendor lock-in. Imperia is our fossil fuel addiction. Imperia is the algorithm that, based on our choices, limits our choices. She's the Love Island franchise. She lifts us up — and leaves us impotent or frustrated. Imperia is closing down all the newspapers and killing the high streets. She's all of us knowing what we want, and getting it, good and hard. If you're workin' for the Man every night and day, it's probably Imperia you're working for. When all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life? He'll look upwards to meet Imperia's concrete smile.
...How we group things together (or separate them) says a lot about how we think about problems. What we choose to see as similar or different is highly contextual, if not merely spurious, but when we try to make sense of something we are trying to justify those decisions. We sometimes refer to "namespaces" in IT to refer to independent "chapters" of a system, where different rules apply. In databases and programming, we create "tables" or "classes" of data, with a pretence of universal meaning. In books, we classify ideas by subject category, by fact or fiction, etc. But in knowledge graphs, we throw away a lot of those classifications and let everything float in a single space of ideas. There is both freedom and chaos in this that allows lateral thinking to join distinct areas
...The vertebrate immune system is, in fact, a highly sophisticated and distributed system: a diverse battery of cell types forming a vast ecology of processes that is deviously complex. It isn't a solid lump of neural connections—it exists in a largely fluid state. It is a simple instance of what people are calling "agentic AI" today. Collectively, it has memory and enough discriminating chops to identify dangerous pathogens, then manufacture antidotes (even for substances that have never previously existed in the history of the planet), and bring us back to a state of "health". However, in spite of this apparent expertise, no single cell has any intelligence nor even a notion of what it's doing. It works, as the entire biosphere works, by the smallest of language models: recognition of patterns, supporting complex ecological interactions that seek out stable equilibria.
...The function of a knowledge graph, in such a process, is not to act as a database of memories, but to encapsulate many fragmentary episodic experiences in such a way as to allow us to make cross connections when they might occur. Yet, our familiar strategies for knowledge management are based on a taxonomic separation of concerns and the subdivision into authoritative hierarchies.
...The two culprits of classification are taxonomy and ontology. They are ultimately self-defeating attempts to regulate and legalize the boxes of our thought, and offer short term relief from the chaos of having too much to know—by basically fencing off the freedom to explore analogies and associations that give knowledge depth.
...The great conceit of a branching hierarchy representation of knowledge is that the world is a simple unfolding of ordered states. But we know that it isn't. Whenever we come up with a rule that fits some exterior characteristic, it turns out to have an exception, because it is merely a spurious correlation—not a causal explanation.
...We can roughly divide the active elements of our experiences into three kinds of "happenings": events, things, and concepts (forming the convenient mnemonic "etc").
...one can say that biology is an application of linguistics to chemistry
...Knowledge management might not quite deserve the status that has been thrust upon it in recent times by hungry financial sponsors of "AI", but it is surely one of the most important topics for humanity to address. The information age has made that easier than at any time in history to forgo our own personal development, so we need to be ever more vigilant in approaching knowledge and how we use it.
...Noem, who'd been willing to do virtually anything in the role to boost her standing, was a product of the White House agenda, never a shaper of it. Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump's immigration policies, and there's little reason to think that Noem's ouster will change Miller's approach. It may even serve to embolden it, by giving him fresh cover.
...D.H.S. is now detaining some seventy thousand people in jails across the country, more than at any other point since the department was founded, in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody in the current fiscal year, putting it on pace to surpass the previous one, which had the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump's second term, the Administration has opened new facilities, repurposed others closed by previous Administrations, and converted temporary holding cells at federal buildings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York into spaces for longer-term detention.
...A major reason that so many immigrants are being locked up is a government policy to deny them bond. Last July, the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, issued a memo in which he claimed, in a radical and dubious reinterpretation of a twenty-nine-year-old statute, that the agency can automatically detain people who are in the country unlawfully and keep them in detention while they fight their cases. Ordinarily, unless a detained person had very recently entered the U.S., he could post bond if an immigration judge found that he didn't pose a threat to public safety or represent a flight risk.
The fundamental rule of improv theater is "Yes, and...". Making something good happen always starts with agreement.
...Decisions that others often characterized as risky or brave seemed more a function of being willing to say "yes, and.." to life in general. I haven't been following some master plan or overriding dream. I do think Pasteur was on to something with his observation that “"hance favors the prepared mind."
There are always forces that want to channel that preparation. Sometimes those forces are internal (or at least internalized) and you find those souls who always knew they were meant to be doctors or athletes or writers. There was some compulsion to travel a particular path. And the world is often a better place for all of us because of those individuals. Sometimes they benefit from a support environment that helps to reinforce and focus their focus.
My internal curiosity has never had that degree of sustained focus. And my external environment had enough other things to worry about that there was little external pressure to walk a specific path. As long as I was doing well enough, I had free rein to follow my curiosities wherever they led.
...When I complain about addressing the mess, I think what I really need to acknowledge is that the mess is where those opportunities lie. I suppose you can craft plans that avoid much of the mess. And, there's a lot of advice committed in support of the value of plans over flexibility. Scripts are fine. But improv works too.
...The kill line is a dangerous place to be. In gaming, the term refers to the point at which a player's strength is so depleted that one more blow could lead to total wipeout. In China, the term refers to the risks that come with daily life in the US. In recent months, the Chinese media has been flooded with discussion of the so-called "kill line" that exists in US society. The social media posts, news articles, podcasts and blogs describe a vision of the US as a dystopian capitalist hell.
...When I was working on my PhD thesis, I was determined to track down every Bronze Age hammer in Britain. I travelled from Inverness in Scotland to the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England and visited the National Museum of Ireland. No one had ever thought to look at Bronze Age hammers as metalsmithing tools before, but I had noticed that hammers held clues to interpreting Bronze Age hoards.
...Many of the hoards found in the area around Colchester contain hammers, and the Grays Thurrock Hoard contains three that would have been used for different phases of metalwork: hammering out sheet metal, planishing (hammering metal to give it a smooth surface), and riveting. There were also chisels included in the hoard. No sheet metal shears have been found from the Bronze Age. Instead, sheet metal would have been cut using chisels. The combination of the hammers and chisels with other pieces of metal found in the hoard could indicate the process of manufacturing objects made of sheet metal.
...And this brings us back to the idea of now. The QBists and enactivists are reaching for a reality that wasn't created in one long-ago big bang and then left to run. It is continually coming into existence, as Wheeler once suggested, in "billions upon billions" of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us. It is a vision in which we aren't simply observing reality; we are immersed within it. Through our choices and actions, moment by moment, we influence what exists –—and what comes next.
...People are literally experiencing different worlds," agrees Di Paolo. "But, of course, that doesn't mean we cannot share." We are all forging a path within an evolving "meshwork" of possibility. When we interact and communicate, we can bring our perspectives closer together. And through this process, we can build shared realities, whether they are cultural myths and stories or the rigorous universe of physics.
In this view, science becomes another kind of shared perspective. This conflicts with conventional notions of science, which have always strived for an objective God's-eye view of reality. "That has been the dream of science," says Di Paolo. But if you take away all perspective, "then you wouldn't be able to say anything meaningful". From scientific models of cells and molecules to supernovae and black holes, he argues, our understanding of the universe isn't a pre-existing, external landscape, but a particularly rigorous and far-reaching guide to experience. Perhaps it is physical reality that is the hallucination.
William Gibson is one of history's most quotable sf writers: "The future is here, it's not evenly distributed"; "Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you"; "Cyberspace is everting"; and the immortal: "The street finds its own uses for things"
..."The street finds its own uses" is a statement about technopolitics. It acknowledges that yes, there are politics embedded in our technology, the blood in the machine, but these politics are neither simple, nor are they immutable. The fact that a technology was born in sin does not preclude it from being put to virtuous ends. A technology's politics are up for grabs.
In other words, it's the opposite of Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It's an assertion that, in fact, the master's tools have all the driver-bits, hex-keys, and socket sets needed to completely dismantle the master's house, and, moreover, to build something better with the resulting pile of materials.
And of course the street finds its own uses for things. Things — technology — don't appear out of nowhere. Everything is in a lineage, made from the things that came before it, destined to be transformed by the things that come later. Things can't come into existence until other things already exist.
...When radical technologists scheme to liberate technology, they're not hoping to redeem the gadget, they're trying to liberate people. Information doesn't want to be free, because information doesn't and can't want anything. But people want to be free, and liberated access to information technology is a precondition for human liberation itself.
...The claim that introspection is a modern pathology serves a specific rhetorical function by delegitimizing an entire mode of engagement with human experience, clearing it off the table, and leaving only external action as the proper response to —being alive.
...The social media platforms built by people who believed behavioral data was a reliable substitute for understanding human psychology produced a decade of engagement metrics while user wellbeing declined and our entire social order decayed. The engineers who built these systems weren't malicious; they were optimizing for things they could measure, because they'd implicitly accepted the view that measurable outputs were a sufficient model of human flourishing
...Andreessen's model of human beings is thin. He can observe behavior. He can track preferences as expressed through market choices. He can measure what people click on and buy and use. What he can't do, without something like introspection, is understand why, and the why is where most of the important information lives.
Four hundred years ago, the people Andreessen imagines were blissfully unselfconscious were reading Augustine and Montaigne and arguing about Stoic philosophy. They were writing diaries and letters that examined their own motives with considerable care. They were not, in fact, just moving forward without asking where they were going. That habit is not a pathology Freud introduced into an otherwise healthy civilization. It's one of the things that makes civilization possible, and pretending otherwise doesn't make you a builder. It just makes you someone who's never looked at the blueprints.
Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I've been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price — just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This year I tested it. Two AI coding agents, 11,345 receipts. I started with eggs. If you can track one item across 25 years of garbled thermal prints, OCR failures, and folder typos, you can track anything.
...an essay by Seth Godin called The Dip, about that low point when an idea you are convinced is worthy just isn't taking hold. How do you know when to push on in order to break through, and when to fold because it's a dead end?
...So here I am on the other side of The Dip, facing the same question: will the idea take hold? The problem it aims to help people solve is still universally acknowledged to be unsolved, and the solution looks more plausible than ever. Of course I am not the only person spending an unhealthy amount of time directing genies to summon useful software into existence. Some are programmers who savor newfound empowerment. Others are not programmers and they savor it even more. They are systems thinkers. They know what they need and roughly how it should work, and can direct the genies to make it so. If good ideas are a dime a dozen, so now also are good executions of ideas. So I reckon it's a level playing field where, as always, value plus luck may succeed.
...Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux "science" of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others.
...Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.
...Racial genetics is Trump's defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump's views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS), and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.
...Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in U.S. history. He will never acknowledge — or even understand — that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.
...what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump's international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.
One recurrent theme in Trump's economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. "In 12 months," he declared in the State of the Union, "I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe."
Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump's tariffs have been ruled illegal.
...So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he's bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn't it?
And then there's Trump's relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar's gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don't know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.
...Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government's chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
...Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they're better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials' pockets.
Foreign oil money, then, has been central to both the Trump administration's economic schemes and Trump's personal financial schemes. What has that money bought in terms of U.S. policy?
...it's a mistake to look for monocausal explanations of this debacle. But if you want to understand Operation Epic FUBAR, don't forget to follow the oil money.
We are living through a period in which instability is no longer episodic but structural. Energy systems are strained, ecological boundaries are tightening, fiscal buffers are thinning, supply chains are reconfiguring under geopolitical tension, and informational environments are fragmenting. These pressures do not arrive one at a time. They compound. The result is not ordinary volatility but degenerative volatility: a condition in which shocks are chronic, mutually reinforcing, and increasingly expensive to absorb.
Under such conditions, the behaviour of political systems changes. Not because leaders suddenly become more ideological, nor because cultures lose their moral compass, but because the structural incentives embedded in the system shift.
...The first structural drift under degenerative volatility is toward intensified extraction. Industrial states require revenue to service debt, resources to maintain infrastructure, and corporate vitality to sustain their tax base. When growth slows and costs rise, the system faces a dilemma: contraction threatens solvency and legitimacy. To preserve continuity, it intensifies throughput. Natural resource extraction expands. Financial extraction deepens. Labour is compressed. Data and attention are monetised more aggressively. Ecological and social costs are externalised wherever possible. Extraction becomes not a choice but a stabilisation mechanism.
Extraction, however, increases internal tension. Distribution becomes harder. Inequality sharpens. Legitimacy thins. As constraint rises, governing through consent becomes more expensive. Plural veto points slow response time precisely when response time feels critical. Under these conditions, a second drift emerges: authoritarian compression.
Authoritarianism, in this context, need not begin as ideology. It begins as coordination optimisation. Centralising decision authority shortens cycles. Expanding executive discretion reduces negotiation overhead. Increasing surveillance and compliance capacity lowers enforcement costs. Limiting contestation reduces friction. These moves are instrumentally rational when the primary objective is continuity under constraint. They reduce transaction costs in a stressed system.
The third drift, closely linked to the first two, is toward war or war-like mobilisation. War is not only destruction; it is a coordination regime. It aligns industry, labour, finance, and narrative around a dominant objective. It justifies accelerated procurement, industrial steering, and fiscal expansion. It reduces political fragmentation under the banner of survival. Externally, it can redirect instability outward through sanctions, proxy conflicts, trade restrictions, and geopolitical realignment. Internally, it compresses plural aims into a single organising principle.
Under degenerative volatility, war logic becomes attractive because it solves alignment problems quickly. It provides a ready-made template for high-speed coordination. Even absent formal war, states can adopt war-like economic and security postures as a way of minimising breakdown risk.
These three drifts—extraction, authoritarian compression, and war—are mutually reinforcing. Extraction funds security capacity. Security narratives justify expanded control. Control reduces friction for further extraction. War legitimises both extraction and concentration of authority. What appears at first as a series of policy decisions reveals itself as a stabilisation loop.
Degenerative volatility raises coordination costs. Rising coordination costs shift optimisation toward continuity. Continuity optimisation activates control surfaces. Control surfaces intensify extraction and compress authority. Extraction and compression stabilise the apparatus but degrade distributed adaptive capacity—local resilience, civic trust, institutional experimentation. Degraded adaptive capacity amplifies future volatility. Amplified volatility justifies further compression.
...Apple Inc. increased iPhone production in India by about 53% last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company's efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India in 2025, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren't public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India's share of the total increasing rapidly.
...While modern scholarship on wayang kulit emphasizes the artform's rich multisensory nature, early encyclopedias on the tradition focused overwhelmingly on the narrative aspects of its stories, which are often drawn from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Such books gained popularity in the nineteenth century and are still produced today, where they are typically purchased as collector's items for aficionados and as study materials for apprentice puppeteers learning the ropes. As the historian Miguel Escobar Varela has documented, these early encyclopedias were not mere neutral observers of the artform but had a demonstrable real-world effect on their subject matter. European scholars, for instance, likely introduced the notion that each wayang kulit story possessed an authoritative Ur-version, muscling out variants in favor of narrative homogeneity over time.
In Los Angeles, a community fractured by ideology is reckoning with what it means to cheer a war on your homeland and a government that is rounding up your neighbors
...Each weekend, we take one science news article and let the words in it come loose, come alive, arrange themselves into whatever the unconscious wants to say to the mind, then we exchange what emerges: poems, koans, subterranean currents of thought and feeling that over and over surprise us, invite us into deeper conversation with each other and with ourselves, delight us with what staggeringly different things two minds can make of the same material, yet how kindred in underlying spirit.
This free Substack is the record of our weekly adventures in language, wonder, and the secret wisdom of the heart: Every Saturday, we share the divinations we each made of a piece of science news, laid out over a piece of 18th- or 19th-century scientific illustration that shines a sidewise gleam on the subject.
Groundwater depletion poses a challenge to irrigated agriculture and water access. Depleted aquifers can be refilled, but the interventions that have successfully refilled depleted aquifers are rarely reviewed. This work reviews 67 cases of groundwater recovery, where groundwater levels rose after a prolonged period of decline.
...framing the conflict with Iran as a "biblically-sanctioned" mission to trigger Armageddon, God's divine plan for the second coming of Jesus, is clearly the work of religious fanatics. And the hope is? That the collapse of metastatic modernity can be delayed? How could the sooner-the-better future not be the best thing ever?
...President Donald J. Trump may be doing the Gaian system's work of ending a non-viable form of human (modern techno-industrial) sooner, which could involve selecting for a viable form of human.
...What I see more of lately, after 15 years or so of doing this type of work in privateer practice (I am not in academia) is that today, people are increasingly seeking "trust anchors" and "identity anchors", various means of finding what they can hold onto in a world that's gone a bit topsy turvy. The old systems that have been in place for the last 70 or so years are changing. Some are crumbling, others are reorganizing. This is happening globally, at scale as for the first time in our history, we are connected as a species unlike ever before.
Kent Lee Anderson, 78, of Lincoln,NE passed away April 3, 2024 in Omaha, NE. Kent was born to Philiip C. Anderson and Norma Gene Anderson (France) July 7, 1945 in Crete. NE. Survived by brothers Mark (Kim) Anderson, San Francisco, CA, Dale (Mary) Anderson, Sarasota, FL, and Paul, Lincoln, NE. Sisters Sara (Gerry) Velder, Elmwood, NE and Jane, Ames, IA, many nieces, nephews cousins and friends and Shel Anderson (Wilson), Durham, NC.
Kent was hospitalized in Lincoln and then Omaha for 116 days with an unexpected acute case of pneumonia with sepsis.
Kent graduated from Crete High, Crete Nebraska. Class of 1963 (Salutatorian)
Doane College, 1964, undergraduate
Stanford University, graduated 1967
Kent and Shel Wilson were married in May 1966 after she graduated from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. Kent was still a student at Stanford at that time. And shortly after their marriage, Shel was offered the opportunity to attend a special program on the use of statistics in Anthropology for the summer in Massachusetts. Kent agreed, and they drove from Nebraska to MA. After the program was done, they detoured through NYC on the way back to Neb and on to California.
Shel had been admitted to the graduate anthropology program at Stanford, and Kent was finishing up his BA.
In 1967 Kent graduated with a BA from Stanford and was accepted into the graduate program in the Dept. of Communications there.
Shel's work as a grad student in anthropology brought a new opportunity the next summer: field work in Mexico. Kent and Shel drove to the south of Mexico, to Oaxaca, and spent the summer living in a small Zapotec village. Once a week they attended field school back in the city of Oaxaca. They also spent a week in Mexico City exploring the wonderful anthropology museum and other cultural spaces.
Back at Stanford, Kent began to do research on the impact of television on children. His department had access to the Stanford mainframe computer, and he began to learn computer languages like Algol in order to play with programming. Shel was doing research for her dissertation and big exam.
Exam passed, funding secured, the couple began to plan the next big adventure: field research in Bolivia.
Kent and Shel had funding to go to Bolivia for research but it was limited. So for their first stage, they decided to go by train from Palo Alto to Mexico City, where the airfare to Bolivia was much cheaper. So, first stage - train from Palo Alto to Texas, then train to Mexico City, then fly to Bolivia with stopover in Panama.
Arriving La Paz, then direct to Cochabamba. This was where the MNR revolution to take away the forever rights of the landholders to own and direct labor of the Quechua peoples who had lived there for centuries.
First they spent time at the Maryknoll Fathers Instituto de Idiomas. Both Kent and Shel wanted fluency in Spanish. Then Shel spent a couple of months beginning to learn Quechua, the language of the rural folk.
Kent was beginning to look at what was being talked about in newsprint and Shel was learning where the new farmers' markets had sprung up after the big change: how was campesino produce finding its way to cities from the countryside.
This involved traveling all over the high plateaus to attend these markets. Sturdy jeep, bad roads. Kent was a wonderful driver.
Bolivia was a major lesson in Latin American politics. Regular 'golpes de estado' — coups to take over government. One year there were 7 different presidents.
They were there for almost 2 years, returning to Stanford in 1971.
As time in Latin America wound to an end, Kent and Shel made a trjoiolivia to Brazilia, the capital built from bare land to a wonderful modernist design. Then to Rio, where we joined our friend Wallace Higgins to marvel at that wonderful city. New Year's Eve on Copacabana beach!
Kent then went on to employment at:
Feed Service Canada. General Manager, London Ontario
TriCarbon Corporation. Vice President, Crete
Foodsmith Corporation. Vice President, Crete
Farmland Foods, Crete
PSSI-Packers Sanitation Services Inc. Mt. Pleasant Iowa/Lincoln/Omaha/Council Bluffs/Tecumseh, etc.
Jackson Hewitt, Seasonal Tax Preparer, Lincoln
Kent was extremely well read. He loved poetry, fiction, science, social issues, politics, religion, birds, stars, music and all things possible to think about. Every person he met brought a smile to his face, comment to their ear and a deliberate truthful thank you.
His intelligence will be missed. I thank my Brother and Best Friend Kent. —Paul
ADHD
...Before ADHD — to name just one label — was an identity it was a diagnosis, and before it was a meaningful diagnostic category, it was a note sent home from school. The kids who got put on Ritalin in the ‘90s were disproportionately working-class boys at "bad" schools where the fastest way to deal with a kid who couldn't sit still was to medicate him. This was not happening at Dalton, at least not at first. It was happening in places where class sizes were too large, counselors were shared between three schools, and the parents didn't have the resources or the knowledge to push back on a teacher who said their kid needed to be on something. What's interesting is that CDC data still shows that children below the federal poverty line are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than kids above it. What changed is that those kids grew up, found each other online, and reframed the diagnosis as an identity
Healer and psychopomp, the shaman is these because he commands the techniques of ecstasy — that is, because his soul can safely abandon his body and roam at vast distances, can penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky. Through his own ecstatic experience he knows the roads of the extraterrestrial regions. He can go below and above because he has already been there.
Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
...As of March 18 around 3,200 ships were stranded in the Gulf, with only a handful of tankers permitted to pass each day.
...Donald Trump has urged Western allies to help escort tankers through the Strait in an effort to keep prices in check, so far finding no takers; more recently he has threatened to strike Iran's power plants if its government refuses to reopen the waterway. Oil, in this sense, has become a proxy for the war's nearly incalculable costs.
...this image of the Gulf as little more than the world's oil spigot is profoundly outdated. Although oil and gas still underpin the region's wealth, its energy companies are no longer merely producers and exporters of crude. Over the past decade they have become highly diversified industrial giants, anchoring a vast system of production and trade that includes chemical plants, fertilizer complexes, shipping routes, and container ports.
That structural transformation has woven the Gulf much more deeply into the global economy than was the case half a century ago.
...Gulf states took over the "upstream" sector of the industry, the extraction of crude. But a handful of big Western oil multinationals, such as BP, Shell, Chevron, and Exxon, still managed much of the "downstream," meaning everything that happens after crude is pumped from the ground: refining, producing chemicals, overseeing shipping networks, marketing petroleum products to the consumer. When the 1973 embargo got underway, these firms were able to use their command over global transport and distribution infrastructures to reroute crude supplies from other regions and avoid significant shortages. This is why the popular image of the 1973 oil crisis as a moment when the world was held hostage by a handful of greedy "oil sheikhs" is fundamentally mistaken. In reality prices at the gas pump in countries like the US were set by Western oil companies, which took advantage of the shocks of the 1970s to reap enormous profits.
For much of the twentieth century, the geography of the oil trade ran west. Western firms purchased crude oil from producers in the Gulf and shipped it to markets in Europe and the US, where it could be refined into various fuels and chemical products. From the early 2000s onward, however, that structure began to shift decisively eastward. China's emergence as "the workshop of the world" required a huge increase in energy consumption, which in the past two decades has catalyzed a profound reorientation of the Gulf's exports away from the traditional Atlantic economies and toward East Asia.
In 2000 China accounted for just 4 percent of global oil imports. Today that figure sits at around 25 percent, of which last year more than 40 percent came from Iraq and the Gulf monarchies. Over the same period China's share of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports has also reached nearly 20 percent, more than a quarter of which originated from the Gulf in 2025, mostly from Qatar. The Gulf has thus become China's largest oil supplier and its second-largest source of liquefied natural gas after Australia. Iran supplies another 13 percent of China's oil, typically shipped through Malaysia and labelled as "Malaysia blend" to circumvent sanctions.
These changes in the global economy transformed the Gulf in turn. China's surging demand helped drive a sharp increase in global oil prices during the first decade of the new millennium, securing the Gulf states billions of dollars in wealth. Some of that wealth flowed into the spectacular real estate projects that now dominate Gulf skylines, as well as into overseas acquisitions. But a significant share was spent on expanding national oil companies into a variety of downstream sectors, above all the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, and other industrial materials.
This process has connected the Gulf with global supply chains in far deeper and more complex ways than the familiar stereotype of oil wells and tanker routes might suggest. The region's historic position in the making of the modern oil economy has turned it into a hub for the industries and infrastructures that convert hydrocarbons into the materials on which modern capitalism depends.
Among the most important chemicals that the Gulf started producing are polyethylene and polypropylene. These plastic resins make up nearly 60 percent of the world's plastic production, ending up in everything from packaging and consumer goods to industrial piping, electrical insulation, and chemical storage systems. Today the Middle East, led above all by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, accounts for more than 40 percent of global exports of these two essential polymers, more than any other region in the world. Much like the Gulf's crude oil, these materials flow predominantly to Asian markets, above all China. (Nearly a third of China's polyethylene imports come from the Gulf.) From there they make their way to the rest of the world in the form of industrial and consumer goods.
...Few nonspecialists ever think much about these chemicals, even though they are indispensable to the manufacture of countless goods. This invisibility distorts our picture of how global supply chains work, obscuring their enduring connection to the fossil fuel industry. Batteries and semiconductors, for instance, are often discussed as though they belonged to a world beyond fossil fuels. Yet their production remains fully dependent on chemicals that originate in the hydrocarbon economy.
Indonesia provides a revealing example. The country sits at the heart of the global nickel boom, producing more than half of the world's nickel ore and rapidly expanding its large-scale capacity to produce metals destined for the batteries of electric vehicles. Yet nickel extraction depends upon a leaching process that uses sulphuric acid, and the sulphur used to make that acid comes overwhelmingly from the Gulf (the source of roughly three quarters of Indonesia's imports). Far from standing outside these supposedly new "critical mineral" supply chains, the Gulf is deeply embedded in their foundations.
...Today nearly 28 percent of global ammonia exports originate in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia ranking as the world's second-largest exporter (after Trinidad and Tobago). A large share of this ammonia goes to Morocco, which has one of the biggest fertilizer industries in the world, exporting widely to Latin America and South Asia. India is similarly dependent on Gulf supplies, sourcing nearly 80 percent of its ammonia imports from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. The Gulf states not only export ammonia but convert it into fertilizer themselves, especially urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer. They do so at enormous scale. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest exporter of urea, while Oman ranks fourth; collectively the Gulf now accounts for roughly a third of global urea exports.
...As the Gulf states' industrial capacities have expanded, they have also become far more central to the logistics of world trade. The nerve center of this network lies in the UAE, particularly Dubai's Port of Jebel Ali, the largest harbor in the Middle East and one of the busiest container terminals in the world. Constructed in the late 1970s, it is now the US Navy's busiest port of call outside of the US and a major logistical hub supporting American military operations. But over time the port has also evolved into a vast commercial complex, surrounded by free trade zones, manufacturing clusters, and logistics parks. Today it is managed by DP World, a sprawling state-owned ports and logistics company that ranks among the five largest port operators globally, controlling roughly 9 percent of the world's container market.
...by some estimates, an extraordinary 60 percent of China's trade with Europe and Africa passes through the UAE. The Gulf has thus become not only a source of energy and industrial materials but also a crucial commercial gateway connecting Asian manufacturing to the wider global economy.
...Especially now that the Gulf has such deep links to food systems and manufacturing across the Global South, crises that begin in the Middle East cascade through the global economy, with the heaviest burdens falling on the most vulnerable. In countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, for instance, agriculture depends on imported fertilizers, including nitrogen-based products sourced from the Gulf, which underpin the high-yield farming systems that feed hundreds of millions of people. In Sudan, where famine conditions are already present in parts of the country and the food supply is under extreme strain, the same reliance on Gulf-produced fertilizers risks deepening an already catastrophic crisis.
...The moment you know something about whatever it is you're looking at — the land, a person, an item, it becomes charged: you want to see what you know in what is in front of you. But the surfaces of the land, people, or things do not reflect anything other than the light that falls upon them. Still, it's impossible not to see more — and to find traces of that which invisible in what is visible.
This is where and how photography acquires its own power. Photography is not interesting because it shows things as they are. Photography is interesting because we see or feel something reflected in them. It is the photographer first who picks up on the traces of what they are looking for, and these discoveries are then transmitted to the viewers.
Reflections on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse
...Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious . Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot — a topic I will return to at the end of this post.
...Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.
...A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term "glasshole," and it has happened again with Meta's product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.
When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they're doing it. When someone's wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don't know whether they are looking at you or not.
Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it's obvious that you are on camera. That's not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it's creepy.
Goggles were the ubiquitous visual signature of Cyberpunk. This, combined with the amount of R & D that has been poured into making various head-mounted displays by tech companies over the last couple of decades, has forged an unbreakable connection in many people's minds between the Metaverse and goggles.
In 1990, when I was writing Snow Crash, we experienced all computer graphics through massive, heavy CRTs with terrible resolution. The images were flickery and blurry. Rendering pictures of three-dimensional scenes was in its infancy. It seemed entirely reasonable to think that the future would be all about head-mounted displays that could render stereoscopic (simulated three-dimensional) imagery.
This is not actually what happened. The feedback loop between Moore's Law, the Internet, GUIs and video games brought us to where we are now: thanks to modern graphics cards and game engines, you can bring 3D worlds to vivid life on a cheap flat panel screen. Billions of people have access to such screens and are comfortable navigating through those worlds. There is no business case for headsets any more.
...The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed "kludgeocracy," in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. "Clumsy but temporarily effective," Teles has written, "also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response." The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.
...In trying to identify how the situation in the Middle East can resolve itself in a way that limits further damage to the region and the global economy, it feels more and more like the final stages approaching checkmate. Scanning the board, searching for a move, alongside an increasing realisation that defeat is fast approaching.
Conditions that have been launched by powerful and pernicious agency are lurching over into structural forces and systemic logics that cannot be easily controlled or undone. It is in this sense there are strong echoes of the first quarter of 2020, a transitional period as the arrival and recognition of COVID-19 occurred: 'gradually, then suddenly.'
"We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts," an Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo. "As this situation evolves and, as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations."
...Earlier this month, a media agency affiliated with the Iranian regime released a list of big tech companies that the Iranian forces had described as new targets due to their links to American and Israeli military operations. According to that list, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle's offices and cloud infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf region are now targets for potential Iranian strikes. A similarly aligned group also told Al Jazeera around the same time that American and Israeli economic centers and banks in the region are potential targets, warning civilians to "not be within a one-kilometre radius of banks."
...Trump said over the weekend that his administration was engaged in "very strong talks" to end the war, but Iranian authorities have denied the claim, and the war continues to rage on with no end in sight. Israel said on Tuesday that it was intent on retaining control of parts of southern Lebanon, while a New York Times report claimed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been pushing Trump to continue the war, seeing it as an opportunity to remake the region.
...Zionism, to be more precise, "Zionism avant la lettre," was not invented by Jews but by evangelical Protestants, starting in the 16th century. They pursued two aims: to bring Christ back to this world and to convert Jews to Christianity. This deep affinity with evangelical Protestant beliefs helps explain the massive support the State of Israel enjoys today in the United States and other countries, where evangelical Protestants number in the hundreds of millions and form an impressive pro-Israel force. Christian Zionists view the State of Israel through apocalyptic lenses, viewing it as a tool to provoke Armageddon and hasten the End of Days.
...It was William Hechler, the Anglican chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna in the late 19th century, who greatly inspired Theodor Herzl, future founder of Zionism, to embark on the ingathering of Jews in Palestine. Hechler's Christian influence played a significant role in the Zionist awakening of the irreligious Herzl. Herzl initially wanted to convert the Jews of Vienna to Catholicism and only later embraced the ingathering of the Jews, firmly guided by Hechler, who urged him not to abandon his mission.
...US President Donald Trump has seemingly turned the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil into a referendum on his war against Iran. Thumbs up if WTI stays below $100 a barrel. Thumbs down if it rises above. Even if he succeeds in keeping that particular gauge below the triple digits, it would be a pyrrhic victory. What matters for the American economy isn't the price of WTI, but the cost of refined petroleum products — and they're rising rapidly. While the price of Texas crude is up 60% since January, the cost of key everyday fuels has risen by between 85% and 120%. …
Oil refineries are complex machines capable of processing multiple streams of crude into dozens of petroleum products. For simplicity's sake, the industry measures refining margins using a rough calculation called the “3-2-1 crack spread”: For every three barrels of WTI crude the refinery processes, it makes two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of distillate fuel such as diesel or jet fuel. Measured by that benchmark, refinery margins are approaching 2022's all-time high point, having jumped to nearly $50 a barrel from $20 in January.
...Trump is now trying to offer a solution, of sorts (to the problem of insurance in the gulf): two weeks ago he announced that Washington's Development Finance Corporation, a state body, will “provide political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade” at “a very reasonable price”. US officials are reportedly now urging ships to use this, with a naval escort.
But, as so often with Trump, reality does not match rhetoric. The DFC insurance scheme is apparently $20bn in size and supported by Chubb. However, JPMorgan calculates that what is really needed to get ships moving is “$352bn of maximum insurance coverage that private markets are not presently providing”, while the DFC only has “$154bn of remaining headroom” to use, unless Congress changes its mandate. Scott Bessent, US Treasury secretary, rejects these calculations as “terrible” and “completely irresponsible”.
And the gap in numbers seems to reflect the fact that Bessent's plan is limited in scope and just, say, covers hull damage inside the strait and the Gulf region, rather than full liability. “The administration didn't create universal, cheap, direct insurance for all shippers—it improvised a narrower backstop,” says Ted DeHaven of the Cato think tank. But the advent of cut-price drones makes it easier for Iranians to attack ships from all over the place. Hence the need for protection against tail risk.
Source: Gillian Tett at the Financial Times
...In the first week of the war, America is estimated to have fired around 140 Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors and more than 150 THAAD interceptors. Stocks were already low. America had reportedly fired a quarter of its THAAD inventory last year while defending Israel against Iranian strikes. “We have enough Patriots to keep going,” notes Mark Cancian of CSIS. “But every one we fire is one fewer that we could have for Ukraine or the Western Pacific.” Replenishing all this will take years. The cost of replacing the first four days' worth of munitions would be $20bn-26bn, estimate Messrs Matisek, Bazilian and Amoah. The problem, however, is more to do with scarcity than cost. America is thought to have used more than 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the opening days of the war, but the Pentagon had planned to buy just 57 new ones in the current fiscal year. There have been no deliveries of THAAD interceptors since 2023 and the Pentagon has not placed any new orders this year. A puny 39 interceptors are slated for delivery in 2027—six years after they were ordered. The Pentagon has grand plans to speed up procurement with big, multi-year contracts. It wants to raise production of Tomahawks from 60 to 1,000 a year, and PAC-3 MSEs from 600 to 2,000, for example. But Congress has not agreed to pay for this. And the supply chain for munitions is opaque and gummed up.
Among the weirder features of the contemporary American far right is the emergence of ‘primal fathers' – Old Testament patriarchs who want to sire not just a family, but a race. Elon Musk is the best known of these Aspirational Abrahams, although he is by no means the only one. A long Wall Street Journal report has documented Musk's desire to beget what he calls a "legion" of children who would save humanity from demographic freefall and bear his superior genes into the far future. A Space X rocket stands ready to transport his seed beyond Earth in a process akin to inverse panspermia, the theory that organic life arrived on our planet via space dust. Musk is currently thought to have at least 14 children with four women, whose legal and financial affairs are partly managed by Jared Birchall, the director of his family office. "We will need to use surrogates", Musk texted one of them, to "reach legion-level before the apocalypse."
In preparation for this scale up in operations, he has acquired a multi-residential compound in Austin, Texas. Silicon Valley pronatalism is generally understood as eugenic — a reading that captures the desire for racial purification, but not the distinct process by which purity is pursued. The "classic" American eugenicists of the progressive era sought to banish genetic abnormality, which they saw as responsible for mental degeneracy and other social ills. By contrast, Musk and his ilk are steeped in the pseudoscience of transhumanism — less concerned with the elimination of error than the exaltation of exceptional deviance.
The ideal patriach is one who breaks from the normal distribution of intelligence with his uber IQ. He seeks not just to preserve the white genetic heritage, but to resurrect it on newly sanctified foundations. Primal fathers are revered as the founders of a new race, rather than the ancestors of an old one. The primal father is the stuff of myth.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud suggested that the primitive unconscious was inhabited by an overbearing patriarch and a horde of envious sons. The father demands exclusive property rights over all women, irrespective of age and kinship relation. His autocratic reign is only superseded when the brothers rise up, murder him and enshrine a new regime in which women are communal property. Freud candidly acknowledged that this was bogus prehistory. There was no developmental or anthropological subtext behind the myth of the primal horde, only the crossed-out traces in the minds of his patients. Yet this fantasy is sometimes played out in real life. This is most obvious in the case of cult leaders, who, with fascinating predictability, end up installing a regime of compulsory communal sex over which they hold ultimate monopoly rights. They too prefer compounds to single-family residences and, when faced with the challenge of succession, resort to fantasies of immortality and deification. Their normalisation of imminent apocalypse can be read as the cosmic translation of this fear: cult leaders find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the loss of their personal power.
It goes without saying that this ethos is distinctly at odds with the traditional family values espoused by the religious right (one reason for the rumbling discord among various strands of the MAGA coalition). Primal fathers want an extended household, not a family. They gladly transgress the conservative taboos against adultery, incest and intergenerational sex because all members of their household have the status of servant, whatever their blood relationship.
The distinctive features of their household economies become clearer when we consider the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Like Musk, Epstein was fascinated by transhumanism and had dreams of seeding the human race with his DNA. In 2008, after being convicted for soliciting prostitution from minors, he fantasised about retreating to his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico to impregnate up to 20 women at a time. In her posthumously published memoir Nobody's Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who at 16 was recruited by Epstein and his then-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, recounts that her abusers proposed to retain her as a surrogate for their future child, over whom she would have no custody rights. They would pay her $200,000 a month to raise the child and accompany it around the world for rendezvous with Epstein. Fearing that her child would be abused, Giuffre concocted an escape plan.
Epstein's case is more instructive than Musk's because it combines the two economies of sexual property that Freud discerned in the primitive unconscious —fratriarchal and patriarchal. Epstein was able to forge unshakeable bonds with his fellow predators by telling them ‘what's mine is yours', and keeping the photo evidence. In this sense, he established a fratriarchal system in which young women and girls were shared among primal brothers as a form of social glue. But Epstein also wanted to retain at least some of these women as his own inalienable property. The mothers of his future children were to be off limits, sequestered behind the walls of an inaccessible compound. The Epstein household economy thus assigned women to one of two regimes of sexual property — with some graduating from the fratriarchal to the patriarchal as they grew older. All women and girls are the property of one man; or all women and girls are the property of all men.
...the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.
Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric.
There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).
...This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" — the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.
...Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything — how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.
This is where Goodhart's law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have "skin in the game" only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it's cheaper to win by cheating, well, "incentives matter," and you'll get cheating.
Any prediction market needs an "oracle" — a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out. "How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan" this year sounds like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say.
Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle. If you let Trump be your oracle, he'll insist (on a daily basis) that his war in Iran is over, and that he had bigger crowds for his inauguration than anyone in history, and that every criminal is Somali, and on and on and on.
So you need to get someone trustworthy and diligent to serve as your oracle. But that person also has to be incorruptible, because otherwise a bettor will offer them a bribe to lie about the outcome of a bet. And if the oracle can't be bribed, they can be coerced.
..."prediction markets" are big business and they have plenty of apologists (incentives matter). These apologists will say that the corruption is a feature, not a bug, because prediction markets will attract insiders who cheat on the bets by using their insider knowledge, and that means that looking at the moving odds of an event can help everyone else figure out what's about to happen. If military insiders who know that Trump is about to kidnap the president of Venezuela and steal its oil start laying big bets that this is going to happen, the shifting odds are a signal about a true future event.
...Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're amazing at producing corruption. Polymarket and Kalshi have at last realized the unhinged fantasy of "assassination markets" — where you stochastically murder someone by putting up huge wagers at favorable odds that your target will be killed. Anyone can collect the wager by putting up a small counterwager and then bumping off the victim. But, as Protos's Cas Piancey and Mark Toon note, Polymarket and Kalshi know what side their bread is buttered on — they have banned bets on Trump's death (Trump's sons are heavily invested in both Polymarket and Kalshi)
Manstuff from The New Yorker: How the War in Iran Became a Race to Stabilize the Global Economic Order
...Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as "woke." Real men burn stuff.
What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a technological revolution in energy? Why valorize "warrior ethos" and bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around a doomed attempt to bring back "manly" jobs? At a deep level, I'd argue, it's about nostalgia for an imagined past in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose of insecure masculinity.
The world keeps declining to cooperate with these macho dreams. Tariffs aren't bringing back blue-collar jobs. Setting out to "destroy the enemy as viciously as possible" — as Pete Hegseth said Tuesday – isn't winning an easy victory over Iran. And turning our back on the energy revolution, even paying the private sector to reject new technology, means both making America less secure and ceding the future to other countries that aren't ruled by MAGA's obsessions.
But that appears to be a price both fossil fuel interests and the Trump administration are willing to pay.
...Iran is still able to fire cheaply made missiles and drones daily at Israel and U.S. allies, hitting targets with increasing accuracy. And, even as the International Energy Agency, last week, said that the war "is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market," Iran has still been able to ship millions of barrels through the strait, earning foreign currency, as the regime selectively allows some ships to pass through that are linked to allies such as China. In a desperate effort to contain soaring energy prices, the U.S. Treasury Department has temporarily lifted sanctions on some Iranian oil to allow the sale of more than a hundred and forty million barrels of crude stranded on ships at sea. Paradoxically, this could help fund the war against the United States and its allies
... Surrealism is deviating from reality and often bending it, breaking it, or destroying it altogether. It'll be easier if you also look at sculptures from both art school. It seeks to show emotions through a person's skewed perception of reality
Symbolism is the outside looking in on a hidden message, and these symbols can be cultural or obvious. A white dove is a symbol for peace, for example, while crows symbolize death. A wolf in sheep's clothing is another good example that can be done visually and easily understood.
Other cultures use symbolism through idealism, a perfectly symmetrical strong man in ancient Egypt's older dynasty symbolized a king, for example
Remember though, it's a spectrum. Things can be symbolic as well as surreal
... Symbolism was a prominent movement in the 19th century and originated from poetry. Basically the idea is to convey meaning through "symbols", so instead of stating things directly everything is a symbol for something else. It can get very cryptic.
Surrealism became a thing along with the avant-garde movement after World War I. It was both an art movement and a philosophy of art. Among others, prominent surrealists said they took inspiration from some symbolist poets.
Both movements share a similar idea: That true insight can be gained by looking deeper inside your mind, free from reason. Like in dreams. In that sense, it wouldn't be wrong to say that symbolism is surrealist, despite one having existed long before the other.
Last weekend, President Donald Trump vowed that he would carry out huge strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure, in a threat meant to get Iran's government to open up the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's closure of the strait was one of the most geopolitically significant developments in a war that began last month with U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, and has caused chaos in the region and in the world economy. In recent days, however, Trump has seemingly searched for ways to de-escalate the conflict, promising to postpone the strikes while Iran and the U.S. consider ceasefire negotiations.
I recently spoke by phone with Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what concessions Iran would want in any negotiations to end the war, whether the U.S. and Israel have the same objectives in Iran, and why an off-ramp—let alone a permanent peace—may be so hard to find.
...For the United States, there are only two possibilities in terms of escalation. One is a ground invasion of a Persian Gulf island or the southern shore of Iran, which could result in a very high number of American casualties, and obviously would deepen the conflict and make it even more complicated to solve. And the other option is to target Iranian energy infrastructure, which could result in Iran retaliating against the Gulf states and torching the entire regional infrastructure.
...What Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have reportedly put on the table is almost a mirror image of Mike Pompeo's twelve demands in Trump's first term in office. And these are basically Israeli demands. So I don't think Trump is acting independently here. These are a set of demands that have been in the circles that are close to him for many years, and they have become a kind of orthodoxy that I don't think he can abandon, even if he doesn't personally believe in them. So he's stuck with them.
...There are a range of perspectives. There are those, like Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, who would be happy with this war stopping immediately and some sort of mutually beneficial solution being presented. But for Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia I think the situation is different. They do not want this war to end with an Iran that can still project power beyond its borders and threaten their interests again by controlling the strait. The problem is that they don't have a clear concept of what defanging Iran really means because Iran is threatening these countries by basically firing drones and missiles toward them.
..."It is very common to see confident assertions that LLMs mimic language use but do not really understand or use it the way that we do, that LLMs do not really reason or think, that they cannot know or understand things. On examination, these claims are often grounded in a folk-psychological understanding about how we think, know, or use language, or, at best, in ideas from philosophy or cognitive psychology that are profoundly disengaged from any understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the brain."
The Pentagon has stated that the first two days of the current war against Iran cost the US about $5.6bn in munitions alone, and the first week about twice that in total costs. Considering the mix of offensive and defensive weapons fired against thousands of targets — perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 already — this is a plausible pace of expenditure. Advanced defensive interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and long-range attack weapons like Tomahawk can cost several million dollars apiece.
That is a lot, but it is a far cry from the amount the White House is now seeking from Congress. The Trump administration plans to ask Congress for $200bn to fund the ongoing Iran war. This would be a gross overestimate of the costs of the war to date and at any time in coming weeks. Worse, if approved, it could be interpreted as a blessing by Congress for a major escalation — since nothing about the current operation implies such a price tag over the weeks to come. ... To grasp how excessive the $200bn request is, consider the costs of some past conflicts in the modern era ... Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with more than half a million US troops, lasted for 40 days of combat, plus several months of preparation and redeployment, and cost about $150bn as expressed in constant 2026 dollars (adjusted for inflation, that is).
The US role in the Iraq war of 2003-2011 cost about $135bn a year on average or more than $10bn a month, as expressed in 2026 dollars — with well over 100,000 American troops in the region on average. … The five-year campaign against Isis in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2019 cost less than $10bn per year for the air campaign in 2026 dollars. Typically, 2,000 to 3,000 munitions were dropped a month. Scaling that to today's larger operation, and accounting for the use of offensive and defensive weapons alike, would imply a pace of expenditure perhaps 20 to 30 times as great. The 78-day Kosovo air war of 1999 involved about 1,000 Nato planes and cost the US about $10bn in 2026 dollars. Taken together, these precedents suggest that the pace of costs of the first week of the Iran war was exceptionally high and has likely declined since. By the end of March, at the one-month mark, the US will probably have spent perhaps $30-40bn in overall military costs — just a fraction of the requested $200bn — unless this war goes through the entire summer, or winds up as a ground war.
America's secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, sports an array of tattoos with Christian messaging, including one which reads "Deus Vult", God wills it, and is associated with the medieval crusades. So perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that, while leading a Christian service at the Pentagon on March 25, Hegseth reached for biblical language to describe the war against Iran.
He called on God to "break the teeth" and kill the "wicked" enemies "who deserve no mercy" and should be "delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them". In other words, for Hegseth this is a holy war in which he calls on god to "grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence".
This war is not primarily about religion. But leaders on all sides have used religion to justify their actions. Not for decades have political leaders of all three major Abrahamic faith traditions invoked parts of their respective traditions to legitimise war in this way. The way faith and religious scripture and doctrine have been used by the US and Israel to justify launching their war in Iran is a worrying development, and one that highlights the growing relationship between religion and authoritarian nationalism.
...In this current instance of assertion of US power in the region, it is necessary to follow the money. And when Trump is involved that is the one thing that matters.
It's no wonder that various administration spokesmen have been all over the map trying to define what our objectives are in attacking Iran. It's because none of them can come out and say that at the heart of the matter, in my opinion, it is to make the President of the United States and his family richer.
...The religious militancy of Ayatollah Khomeini is based on his doctrine of vilayet al-faqih which means rule of the cleric and his assertion that he was the representative on earth of the occluded Imam, Muhammad ibn al Hasan al Mahdi who disappeared from the world in 874 CE and was a direct descendant through Ali ibn Abu Talib of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
...In my opinion, Netanyahu owns Trump. AIPAC gave the Trump campaign somewhere between $230-300 million. Plus, there is the unknown issue of exactly what information on Trump, Jeffery Epstein might have given Mossad or what Putin might have given the Israelis for that matter.
In the case of the Saudis, it is being widely reports that they gave Trump the final shove to start this war. What does Trump get out of it?
Let's see. The Saudis have already placed $2 billion from its sovereign wealth fund with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's company.
There are two Trump Tower deals on the drawing board, one in Riyadh and one in Jeddah, each for $1 billion.
The Saudis put $2 billion into Trump's Stablecoin.
There are two Trump golf course developments in Saudi Arabia totaling $5.5 billion in progress with a Saudi developer, the first at Wadi Safar, Diriyah just outside of Riyadh.
In addition to this, Saudi Arabia is the main purchaser of US defense systems which are of a scale projected to provide major support to the US economy according to the Q3 and Q4 GDP report, something that the Trump administration needs given the mismanagement of other aspects of the US economy.
...Power politics' in the Trumpian sense is not really an intellectual disposition, or a way of apprehending America's global situation. It is an ideological fantasy of "pure" power without mediations: that is to say, all the benefits of power without any of the burdens. A will that encounters no real resistance, a power that needs no legitimation and therefore, in the Lacanian idiom, no 'Other'. It is a fantasy of the obscene father who, above the law, enjoys without limit. The old disavowals of liberal internationalism — where we act because we must, or out of moral necessity, and certainly not because of any pathological interest on our part - no longer apply. The enjoyment in humiliation and dominance is explicit: you don't have the cards, they all kiss my ass and call me sir, 1 can do whatever I want to Cuba. This is not a demystification of power, as it seems to be. For those to whom
the fantasy appeals, those who enjoy it, it is actually a source of enchantment.
One afternoon in 1963, 13-year-old Erasto Mpemba was making ice cream at Magamba Secondary School in Tanzania. In a hurry to claim space in the freezer, he stuck in his slurry of milk and sugar while it was still piping hot—unlike his classmates, who had left their batches out to cool beforehand. Yet, in an event that would shape the course of modern physics, Mpemba found that his ice cream froze first.
Mpemba later repeated the experiment with water and kept asking his teachers why hot liquids froze faster than cold ones, but they brushed him off. Undeterred, Mpemba decided to ask Denis Osborne, a physicist visiting from the University of Dar es Salaam. Osborne promised to go home and repeat the experiment himself. In a now-classic 1969 paper, Osborne—crediting Mpemba as first author—reported the phenomenon, proclaiming that "no question should be ridiculed."
It turns out water was only the tip of the iceberg. Over the past decade, scientists have uncovered similar "Mpemba effects"s in a zoo of different materials—from crystallizing polymers to magnets. More recently, the effects have turned up in the quantum realm, such as single ions suspended with lasers. Now, a new theoretical framework, published this week in Physics Review X, stitches the assorted Mpemba effects together. It explains how, in each case, a system that's pushed farther from equilibrium can find a quicker path back to a steady state.
...Goold and colleagues have identified what he calls "one ring to rule them all"—a common framework to describe various classical and quantum Mpemba effects. They borrowed a tool from quantum information theory, which describes how systems evolve in terms of how they consume a particular resource. In each case, a system that requires more of a certain resource—be it temperature fluctuations or magnetic asymmetries—to reach a target state can nevertheless reach it faster. Because systems very far from equilibrium tend to follow different rules, they can feature special configurations in which the slowest routes to equilibrium cancel out—allowing them to eat up resources unusually quickly to reach equilibrium faster. "He really managed to put everything under the same umbrella, Murciano says.
Earth had variable tectonic plate motions and a strong, stable magnetic field 3.5 billion years ago
The movement of tectonic plates—massive slabs of rock—over Earth's surface controls the planet's habitability by sustaining the carbon cycle that regulates the climate and stabilizes liquid water at the surface (1). It also facilitates efficient planetary heat loss, thereby maintaining convection in Earth's core and the generation of a magnetic field. The presence of a magnetosphere—a space around Earth dominated by its magnetic field—provides shielding from solar and cosmic radiation and mediates the loss of atmospheric gas into space
...Signals from Earth's core dynamo are recorded by iron-bearing minerals in rocks, preserving a history of the direction and intensity of the planet's magnetic field. These signals are used to infer past tectonic motions by relying on the geocentric axial dipole hypothesis, which assumes that Earth's magnetic field is dipolar with the poles aligned to the planetary spin axis. Ancient pieces of continental crust such as the Kaapvaal Craton in South Africa and the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia contain rocks with certain characteristics that indicate they are likely to have preserved a paleomagnetic history during the Archean Eon (2.5 to 4 Ga ago)
...Hydrothermal reactions and other thermal events (such as metamorphism) can cause rocks to change their mineralogy and thus compromise the original paleomagnetic record preserved by a rock. In many cases, these events form a new set of magnetic minerals that reflect Earth's magnetic field at the time of alteration as an overprint (5). This results in rocks containing a mixture of the ancient and later-formed paleomagnetic information, making interpretation difficult
quotes Taylor Gaw: Those things we're missing aren't gone. They're still right here. They never went anywhere, they just got layered over by time... I don't consider myself an outlier here. I would wager (without any data) that most people who had a personal site and/or blog 20 years ago, still have one today. And there's a high likelihood they've maintained it throughout those years... But Good Internet is still here. We're still making stuff we care about and sharing that stuff on our websites. We're making it for ourselves first, but we're also making it for you.
...Quite apart from the pointlessness of the war, it's hard not to worry about the change in culture underway in the American military, which has become notoriously focused on what Hegseth calls "maximum lethality, not tepid legality." One large sign of that shift came in the last few days, as reports emerged that the Pentagon was cracking down on Stars and Stripes, the soldiers' newspaper. As the paper itself reported last week, "an eight-page memo, dated March 9 and effective immediately, limits the use of wire services, bars comics and other syndicated features and states that content must be consistent with 'good order and discipline,' a phrase borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice." It was the first outcome of a plan announced by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell in January to stop the newspaper from publishing "woke distractions that syphon morale."
...This war has taken the spotlight off Palestine as Israel halts humanitarian aid to dying Gaza, and the West Bank is being taken over by right-wing settlers. Meanwhile, a mere 1 in 4 Americans support the US missile strikes in Iran costing American taxpayers $1 billion/day.
Israeli chauvinism is based on a lie, one the world has been convinced to believe. What does Palestinian writer Abu Alya, from Gaza and now in exile, mean by this? He explains that Israel called the land of Palestine a land without a people, a barren desert that they made bloom, when the truth is that Palestine was a land cultivated by farmers for thousands of years, a literate country of newspapers and cinemas, with a “developed civic and agricultural life.” Their tragedy was to be a "people written out of history." And the greatest tragedy is that "the world has accepted the original lie." This made possible the war in Iran.
...What if technology is not the issue? The human world revolves around language, so when we judge intelligence and creativity, language plays an outsized role. We need "language" every time we interact with something outside of ourselves. But do we actually understand how language emerges and what signals it sends?
...even more recent research on the mind shows that people have quite different thought processes involving language. Some have reasoning "inner" voices, commentating their lives, putting things in order and eliciting judgements behind others' backs, while others have little to no such linguistic commentary to translate into text. They experience images, sensations and so on. Some need to speak aloud to turn thoughts into language. What handicap would a person with no inner voice represent in a world of language models, and how might this alter our approach to learning?
...Don't build a totem database to squirrel away and horde learning, build a knowledge base that you intend to inhabit. One where you enter every day, feed your pets, attend to the cleaning, and set to work creating a studio for learning.
...As someone who lives in my head a lot of the time, I personally have a window of just a few hours of unusually creative lucidity, between waking and mid-morning. Once I'm sufficiently awake, I want to get a load of ideas down on paper (or some electronic format) as quickly as possible, before I forget them. By lunch time, I switch to typing up my notes mechanically, and giving them a critical eye. This is a much more efficient way of working than doing everything in a linear order.
...For most of the twentieth century, psychologists treated the inner voice as a universal feature of the human mind. The dominant framework came from the Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who argued that children first learn to regulate their behavior through spoken language with caregivers and peers, then gradually internalize that speech into a private, silent medium. By adulthood, this internalized language supposedly forms the scaffolding for working memory, self-regulation, and problem-solving. To be a conscious, functioning adult, in the Vygotskian picture, was inherently to possess an internal dialogue.
...Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at UNLV who has spent decades studying inner experience, suspected that asking people to remember their inner experience after the fact was about as reliable as asking witnesses to reconstruct a car accident from memory. People don't just recall their thoughts; they reconstruct them, and the reconstruction is biased toward narrative and language. You might have originally experienced a thought as a flash of visual imagery or a wordless hunch, but when you look back on it an hour later, your memory translates it into a verbal story.
...Anthony Lambert and Rish Hinwar at the University of Auckland coined the term anauralia for the complete absence of internal auditory imagery: no inner voice, but also no ability to mentally replay music, environmental sounds, or other people's voices. Based on a New Zealand survey of 32,000 people, roughly 1% of the population experiences total anauralia. One participant told researchers the inside of their head was "blind, deaf, dumb and mute."
Johanne Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan proposed a narrower term, anendophasia, referring specifically to the absence of inner speech without necessarily implying the loss of all auditory imagery. Estimates suggest 5% to 10% of people lack an inner voice, making anendophasia far more common than full anauralia.
...If the absence of inner speech carries a few specific costs, the opposite extreme carries its own dangers. Rumination, the repetitive, self-critical mental loop that sustains clinical depression and anxiety, is fundamentally a disorder of inner speech.
...children raised in settings that demand higher levels of self-regulation and independent problem-solving tend to develop stronger reliance on inner speech. The biological capacity for verbal thought is heritable. How much you actually use it appears to be sculpted by experience.
...Some people have no mind's ear. Some have no mind's eye. Some have no mind's voice. Some have all three running at full blast, all the time. The old assumption, that consciousness is a single, standardized operating system running slightly different software in each skull, is giving way to something more interesting and more humbling. The basic architecture of inner experience varies radically across the population. Your neighbor may process the world through a rich verbal narrative, a stream of vivid imagery, wordless intuitions, or some combination you've never experienced.
...Saddles rowdy with double entendre, demure coin purses: the objects gathered in "Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages," an exhibition currently at the Met Cloisters, braid together various threads of medieval romantic life, from erotica and same-sex relationships to heterosexual marriage and religious celibacy. Staged in the museum's "chapel," which is presided over by a twelfth-century apse, a crucifix, and a painting of the Madonna nestled within a yonic wound-shaped frame, is an assortment of medieval objects as well as representational art: tapestries, paintings, statuary.
...What do we see when we see an image? Is it possible, in an image, to see immaterial phenomena such as movement, emotion, or even the expression of an ethical-political value? When is this the result of perception and when is it the result of interpretation?
Third, by reading the supplied guidebook, one could discover that not all of Tuymans' paintings depicted real objects. Some canvases portrayed scenes or things that were the product of imagina-tion, others represented experiences that the painter had lived in the past and then brought back to memory. In one way or another, many of the works exhibited in the Venetian museum had passed — perhaps — through the artist's mind before becoming real. Conversely, the same process seemed to happen in the mind of the viewer when, once back home, he reflected on the exhibition remembering what he had seen during his trip to Venice.
So can it be said that the artist and the viewers had mental images of the works on display? Do these mental images really exist? What do they consist of? And if they do exist, can we say that they are of the same kind as the other images we have mentioned so far?
Through this third issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts we want to ask ourselves a series of questions similar to those raised by Tuymans' exhibition at Palazzo Grassi. We ask ourselves what images are and what properties characterize them; if and how they exist also in our mind; what relationship they have with phenomena such as perception, memory, language and interpretation. In fact, it is repeated more and more often that in the twenty-first century the world is overloaded with images, that our culture is now made up of images, but it is not at all clear what this means.
...According to Scientific American, we ought to be able to sniff out where we are at. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Research Center in Philadelphia examined sweat-stained pads from the armpits of a cross-section of ages and, it appears, were able to tell by smelling them which had belonged to the old. It confirms what we all know but hesitate to say: old people smell. Apparently it isn't an unpleasant smell — like 'cucumbers and aged beer' or comparable to 'old book smell' — but it's there.
...The young of our old age have expressed considerable resentment at the noise we have made about our activities in the 1960s and 1970s — just wait till we've all got our old age books out. By squinting slightly, I can see what a gloomy prospect that might be for you young 'uns, but given that you will be rid of us soon enough, you might just as well put up with it. Read, don't read, it's up to you. It's our last shout. We will read one another, then notate, cross-reference and append our thoughts in our own books. When we're dead I suspect it will be as if we had never been. The feminists, the radical left, the communards: all will dissolve into a trivial pop culture history called the Sixties, much slighter and less consequential than it thought itself to be. So bear with us. Those few of our parents, aunts and uncles who remain still disapprove of us. The young now disapprove of us too. Even some of our own demographic disapprove of us. So nothing, really, has changed for the self-loving unloved baby boomers.
...We are the baby boomers, the demographic catastrophe waiting to happen that is now happening. Baby boomers lived their youth in a golden time. Far from having to go into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, we had free tuition and decent grants to live on while we received a higher education. The generation that bore us and lived through the hardships of war and austerity, while disapproving of us, also provided us with welfare benefits that allowed us to take time off from earning a living, to play with ideas and new ways (we thought) of organising socially and politically, of exploring other cultures, drugs, craziness, clothes and music. Now, this free time seems mythic. If we wanted jobs, there were plenty of them. If we didn't, we benefited in a way that would be called scrounging now (it was then, but no one stopped it). We are costing a fortune as we age and we'll go on to cost much more because medical science has promised us twenty more years of some sort of life than our parents expected.
...t turns out to be harder than we thought it would be. The ageing flesh is not so fascinating, erotic or irrelevant to our sense of ourselves as we had planned to make it. Segal points out that everywhere culture still teaches us shame and disgust at our ageing reflections, and makes it seem reasonable that men see older women in that way too. The older woman becomes invisible in public, just part of a crowd, while recalling how when young she was catcalled and handled by strangers as soon as she stepped out on the street. Like young women now, we were spectacle whether we wanted it or not. We were always visible, even when alone. It is almost impossible to be a young woman and not imagine yourself being looked at. Some of us tell ourselves that invisibility is an improvement, and so it can be, but the release comes with, it's accepted, a loss of our sexual selves. Visibility and our sexuality are relegated to the past, youthful self, and it's not surprising if those selves grown older breathe a sigh of relief at being free from the incessant gaze, the time-consuming achings of desire and the desire to be desired.
...Having women lovers makes sense. It always seemed to me to be what there was to look forward to once the tedious hang-up with youthful heterosexuality had played itself out. If you didn't want to keep the bed to yourself, you might well choose, I imagined, to share it with another woman, on the grounds that women have a wider understanding of love and sexuality than men, and they don't make so much noise in the bathroom.
We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. [...] The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. [...] But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity."
David Weinberger once said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people." It's the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody.
...much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.
But scarcity was the media's main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those sphincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means.
...The allstream is everywhere, and no longer only (1.0) or mostly (2.0) on the Web. It has spread across too many places for an old-fashioned search to encompass. As Gemini tells me, Google would rather be your "helpful assistant" than your librarian.
And that's your new sphincter.
Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, "I'll handle this." So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)
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