Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment, collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
...Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Computer is a fascinating account of the decades-long effort by linguists, computer scientists and engineers to incorporate Chinese characters into the digital age.
...Mullaney makes a case that the speed of the new Chinese input methods is due to an increasingly common mode of digital-age writing that he calls "hypography." Simply put, hypography is "writing-by-retrieval." That is, the sequence of alphanumeric symbols inputted do not directly represent the output text, and those input symbols are then used to retrieve the intended characters as visible text on the screen. This mode of writing is in contrast to the direct "what-you-type-is-what-you-get" principle of inputting alphanumeric symbols on the keyboard."
...The vast majority of Chinese syllables are morphemes, and each written character corresponds to a single-syllable morpheme. Because Chinese has so many homophones, the number of possible spellings is relatively small, and forms a closed set. English, by contrast, has a much more complex morphological system, with morphemes of different syllable length and inconsistent spelling. Thus the possible spellings for each morpheme is enormous.
...For us, the upper speed constraint of QWERTY keyboards is the clumsiness of human hands, not the layout of the keyboard. In the present era, most users cannot even achieve the theoretical speeds of existing input methods, much less the more hypographic ones that promise even faster performance.
...What sets Chinese computing apart, then, is not the existence of hypography, but the scale and intensity of its usage. In English, hypography remains a hyperspecialized practice, reserved for specific domains of work (court stenography, for example), or in cases when practical limitations or physical abilities make the use of "conventional" QWERTY-style typing untenable or unattractive (as with the Palm Pilot and other small electronic devices). In Chinese, by contrast, hypography is ubiquitous. (p. 222)
Donald Trump famously hates stupid wars and claims to have set the record for ending wars in a presidential term. It's not the worst idea to wonder if he's starting the former so he can keep resetting the latter. If you're already a great fake businessman, you might as well be a great fake statesman. Smarter people than Trump would realize that, having come this far, you might as well fake the war too. In this respect, we bear witness to the rare instance of Iran, Greenland and Minnesota all having the same defense policy.
...Whether the enemy is Cuba, Minneapolis or a transgender person, the war is the purpose of the war. Its prizes are nihilism and hatred at best. No greater project awaits an armistice. There are only enemies, victories and different enemies. There is no strategy, because realizing the ostensible macro purpose of each war, besides having it, requires committing to an absurd and criminal totality, because their own rhetorical stakes have demonstrated that nothing less than an American Iran, an American Cuba, a transgender-free nation or a Minnesota with only the correct voters will be acceptable. Carried to their conclusions, you can do one of two things: exterminate the enemy or the treasury and destroy yourself as a nation.
...The prevailing wisdom thus far is that Trump is operating a protection racket disguised as a foreign policy — and, in a twist, as a domestic foreign policy. That's certainly part of it, as is the fascist need to obscure its incompetency by feeding its followers an illusion of constant action meeting an illusion of constant, variegated threats. The tempting term for the hegemony he seems to wish to impose is something like "vassalage," because it sounds like government instead of extortion. But vassalage was a reciprocally binding contract, which both sides were entitled to rescind in response to the other's broken faith, and it represents a degree of accountability that Trump's career of lawfare says does not apply to him.
In his gut, Trump is the preteen bully on the playground — more big bones and huskiness than muscle — who gets his snack freebies at recess by rearing back an arm, cocking a fist and letting everyone's imagination do the work for him. He has neither the first clue what to do if swinging becomes necessary, nor the slightest desire to find out, because it might hurt. He hasn't thought for a second about how he would maintain dominance day after day. The menacing fist exists to express the hate he thinks he's entitled to unleash and to generate the fear that he is owed. But the work ends there. Snacks are treats he gets as a reward for being his worst self, and it's hard to tell which is more satisfying, but this is also all that there is.
...Of the many forces sustaining Trumpism all this time, one of the strongest and most enduring is that everything is too stupid and humiliating to be real. The sheer effrontery of such a clownish machine is enough to keep the horror of what it does in abeyance until it starts to roll over the bodies.
...After the repetition of the war's pretexts has created space for the possible, after the easier lies are spent, after Trump the Scamp and his greedy feints at war stop paying off, the only thing left is the original cause, the long-awaited victims. All that is left then is the demented demand for the impossible and the criminal, one that must be met by total measures, and for which there is a waiting library of techniques of colonialism and repression and deprivation and, ultimately, extermination. When each runs out of lies to destroy, what is left is only ourselves, and what is lost of America in their application is total too.
...Serafini has an explanation for how the 360-page book came together: a stray white cat wandered into his studio and telepathically guided the whole thing. He now claims the cat was the real author.
...Vonnegut's fears about automation and employment were, in fact, largely right if we focus only on employment in manufacturing. In 1950 around 30 percent of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing; it's less than 10 percent now. Trade deficits explain some of that decline, but mostly it reflects technological progress that made it possible to satisfy demand for manufactured goods with many fewer workers — just as we can now feed ourselves with only a small fraction of the work force employed on farms.
...The rise of information technology, however, created a new kind of monopoly power and a new class of robber barons. Where Standard Oil's market power rested on its control of physical infrastructure, mainly refineries, many of today's most valuable companies — Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Meta (Facebook) — are de facto monopolies or near-monopolies thanks to “network externalities.” So are somewhat smaller but still big players like Uber or DoorDash (which dominates food delivery in much of the country, but not where I live.) What the term network externalities means is that these companies offer products that many people use because so many other people use them. Few people love Word, PowerPoint or Excel, but most people, myself included, use them because they're so widely used that it's hard to do anything different. I am also to some extent a prisoner of the Apple and Amazon ecosystems. Network externalities create "moats" around a number of companies, which have allowed them to retain customers even when they charge high prices and degrade their product's quality. In 2023 the American Dialect Society named Cory Doctorow's term "enshittification" the word of the year.
(quoting Baudrillard) ...What characterizes consumer society is the universality of the news item [Ie fait divers] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same - at once anodyne and miraculous — form of the news item. It is entirely actualized — i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode — and entirely deactualized — i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs. The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology.
That mythology is buttressed by the all the more voracious demand for reality, for ‘truth', for ‘objectivity'. Everywhere we find 'cinema-verite', live reporting, the newsflash, the high-impact photo, the eye-witness report, etc. Everywhere what is sought is the 'heart of the event', the ‘heart of the battle', the 'live', the 'face to face' - the dizzy sense of a total presence at the event, the Great Thrill of Lived Reality — i.e. the miracle once again, since the truth of the media report, televised and taped, is precisely that I was not there. But it is the truer than true which counts or, in other words, the fact of being there without being there. Or, to put it yet another way, the fantasy.
What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [Ie vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this 'Heart' which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message — all these things we 'consume' — represent our tranquillity consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
<.p>(Tooze resumes) ...Do we live in a world in which the question of popular legitimation for war, or the legality of Trump's actions — the classic questions still posed by war-making in the period between Vietnam and Iraq and implicitly answered by Baudrillard — still matter very much any more?
As Stephen Wertheim points out, there was zero preparation of the American public for this conflict. What is by any stretch of the imagination a major military action seems entirely divorced from American politics in any conventional sense.
...Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator. No one in the Trump administration is a reliable narrator. Plus the U.S. these days cannot be understood, even as shorthand, to be a unitary actor with coherent objectives. It is chaos monkeys all the way down.
Trump has offered no endgame: there are no articulated conditions for success beyond the fall of the regime, no explanation of what follows if Iran fragments or descends into civil war, and no domestic debate rallying support comparable to 2002–03. <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/>. Every sortie, carrier deployment, and Patriot battery shifted to the Gulf is something not available for deterring Russia in Eastern Europe or China in the Western Pacific. How big will the strain be on U.S. readiness in Asia ? This war is a gamble, taken with incomplete information and in the teeth of historical experience that suggests such gambles often go badly—above all for the people living under the bombs.
... The war is now a multi‑node regional air and missile war. Inside Iran, the regime has moved—remarkably quickly, given the shock—to institutionalize succession.
...Pause for the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. 1000 miles to the west-southwest, the Houthis succeeded in their operational aim: closing the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea and convincing the U.S. Navy that continued retaliatory strikes attrit the U.S. Navy more than Houthi capabilities. They did this for nearly two years until the October 2025 ceasefire. They exploited the asymmetry between how much it cost them to keep shooting, how much it cost the U.S. Navy to suppress their capabilities, and how much it costs everyone else to keep sailing. The Houthis are now doing again, as MAERSK reroutes away from the Suez Canal to the Cape of Good Hope. Only a sliver of the 20 mb/d of oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz has pipeline alternatives. An Omani-via-land bridge is OK for high-value but not for bulk commodities. Thus adding enough stochastic risk to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz may be possible even for a substantially degraded Islamic Republic military.
...Since the 1970s, US administrations have progressively opted for illegal wars and unilateralism at the expense of international law and multilateralism. What is new is that today all gloves are off. The deployment of brutal force is open, blatant and unapologetic. Since might is right, any criticism must be regarded as potential subversion.
Moreover, these strikes against Iran are not just about the Middle East. They are a prelude – a demonstration effect toward China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine theaters.
Overnight, the Trump administration, once again without an exit strategy, managed to drag the international community ever closer to a Cold War escalation.
...I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I'd be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on.
...Despite this ever eerier present we're now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we've gone through so far, don't count on it not happening either.
And, of course, we're not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we're talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren.
...In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was "erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet... a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather." And count on this: for the next three years, that's only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health "a scam."
...in 1978 Iran didn't account for a large share of world oil production either. So why did world oil prices rise 165 percent after the Iranian Revolution? Fears of disruption in other Middle Eastern nations led to speculative hoarding, followed by Saudi production cuts that kept prices high. The lesson for today is that when assessing the impact of events in Iran on world oil markets, we need to consider the impact on exports from Iran's neighbors.
...As of this morning, oil prices were about $10 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February. That will add approximately 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. So far markets are in effect betting on a short, not-too-disruptive war, although that could change.
...one point I haven't seen many observers emphasize is that the modern Middle East now plays an important role in the world economy that goes beyond its status as a major source of oil. Dubai in particular is an important node in the global financial system, as well as playing host to many extremely rich people who thought they had found a safe haven. One indicator of that changing status is the transformation of Dubai International Airport into one of the world's most important travel hubs.
...World Sense is a kind of intelligence trained on the real world, instead of being trained on text descriptions of the real world. These are sometimes called world models, or Spatial Intelligence, because this kind of cognition is based on (and trained on) how physical objects behave in the 3-dimensional world of space and time, and not just the immaterial world of words talking about the world. This species of cognition knows how things bounce, or flow, or how proteins fold, or molecules vibrate, or light bends. It incorporates a recognition of gravity, an awareness of continuity, a sense of matter's physicality, an intimate knowledge of how mass and energy are conserved.
The United States Secretary of "War," Whiskey Pete Hegseth, has proudly declared that this war will not be "politically correct." The United States will adhere to "no stupid rules of engagement." No "nation-building quagmire." This is not a "democracy building exercise." Just "winning," in the most Charlie Sheen interpretation possible. America is unburdened by complexity or morality. What they are calling "Operation Epic Fury" is really just "Operation F Things Up."
...This is a war being run as a content pipeline. You don't articulate objectives. You declare vibes. There is no defined victory. The promise to "fight to win" may sound tough to Whiskey Pete, but it provides no calm for worried families of service members sent into this quagmire. Just say you have "generals" and take the next question.
Rules of engagement aren't "stupid." They exist because war has terrible consequences: civilian casualties, retaliatory strikes, regional spillover, international law, and the small matter of US armed service people getting sucked into endless cycles of retaliation. Discarding long-accepted RoE isn't a show of strength. It's branding. It's dangerous and opens the doors to all sorts of awful behavior.
"No nation building," he says. What replaces it? Containment? Deterrence? Regime change? Strategic degradation? Negotiation leverage? The doctrine is literally and only: break things loudly.
...Now, if you have any experience with politics, your first six thoughts upon seeing this document can almost certainly be summarized as follows:
OMG!
WTF?
The Minister himself actually wrote that?
And his officials let him circulate it?
AND NO ONE THOUGHT TO MAKE SURE NO COPIES LEFT THE ROOM?
So, it's a total amateur hour, huh?
I spent an hour or so on the first issue (1911) of Sarawak Museum Journal, which has the text of two 'Sea Dyak'/Iban dirges, impelled by the arrival in today's post of Howell and Bailey's A Sea Dyak Dictionary (1900)
...and that led to a passing curiosity about dialects in Javanese, and if there are maps of...
...I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I'd been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.
Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we're ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.
And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.
Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.
...I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who genuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn't have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.
...I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don't think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don't know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can't figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it's still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.
And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won't stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It's all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn't matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.
Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq's and Afghanistan's combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives. His launching of hostilities (with the embarrassingly bro-themed name "Operation Epic Fury") is the culmination of decades of expanding presidential powers over national-security issues, and Trump has now taken that expansion to its extreme conclusion, launching wars and using military power as he sees fit.
Many of his critics are focused on the claim that the war is illegal under both U.S. and international law—and they are probably right about that. But Trump has already floored the accelerator and driven off the cliff. What are the options for Congress and the American people—the majority of whom do not support this conflict—to regain some control over a president conducting a war as if he were a medieval prince?
Unfortunately, the few legal options available are laden with their own risks. Congress could decide to cut off funding for the war, which at this point could be as reckless an act as starting one. Men and women overseas did not choose to go, and they should at least be allowed to conduct their operations without worrying that Congress will simply turn off all funding. It could pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to hostilities—aalso a risky move.
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 poin" 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.
Hi, Paul Krugman with an update at about noon on Sunday. Like everyone paying any attention, I'm very focused on the war. which is going badly. It's enough that I'm a little concerned about how it's going to disrupt daily life, even for those of us who are, by most measures,
extremely insulated from all of that. This is looking really, really bad. How did this happen?
Now, we talk a lot about the specifics of Trump and we talk about the motivations of people involved but what is really striking gets all of us is how utterly utterly unprepared the
administration was for the kind of obviously at least possible consequences of going to war in the persian gulf how could they have been so blind Well, if you look at what the rhetoric that Donald Trump uses and continues to use even in the face of all of this,
one thing that always strikes you is how he continues to insist that everything is going great and everything is going according to plan. So just on Thursday, he said, once again, I think he's used the words exactly the same words many occasions, but he said in a speech, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising,
the economy is roaring back, and America is respected again. Now, as we all point out, none of that is true. Inflation is not plummeting. In fact, the latest numbers show it ticking up, which was not what people expected before Trump took office. The economy is definitely not roaring back.
Now,
the last growth numbers were probably artificially weak because of the effects of the shutdown, but it's not a roaring economy. Job growth has been virtually zero for the past year, so this is not a great economy. And this persistent delusion that America is [not] respected because Trump is there, which
I'm probably going to write about that so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's utterly, utterly not true. Of all the things he just said, that's probably the most at odds with reality. We have probably never been as despised, held in contempt as we are right now.
But what strikes me about all of this is that Trump has been able to keep peddling this fantasy about how well things are going on his watch. And although polls say that the public isn't buying it, the consequences for this kind of delusional thinking have been, for him so far, pretty minimal. It's kind of,
you can keep on doing, keep on claiming that things are going great, and certainly nobody immediately around him is going to tell him that it ain't so.
And so I found myself thinking about an essay of George Orwell's. Now, I've read a lot of Orwell over the years, and there's the, There are many great oral writings.
It's not just 1984 and Animal Farm. But he had an essay just written shortly after World War II ended called In Front of Your Nose about people's capacity to delude themselves. And there was a line in there. in which he talked about this, how even when things are very much not what you said was going to happen,
you can keep on telling yourself, particularly, of course, if you're a person in power, a person surrounded by sycophants, which we're seeing at a drastic level for Trump, that you can just keep on telling yourself. about how things are going, maybe even persuade some people to believe them until at some point you can't.
And here is the line from Orwell. He said, the point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time.
The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
I think I'm just going to leave it there.
[the concluding sentences of In Front of Your Nose: ...In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.]
...Hobbes' useful tripartite division of ‘why we attack' — the three causes of quarrel in human 'nature' laid out in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan. In this post, I've decided to cover the first two, in the order I take them: first glory, then competition.
This is because I think the third one, diffidence — mutual mistrust, the distrust of all by all — merits its own whole post, which I'll follow up with as soon as I have time. Diffidence is surely the basal structure of feeling gripping the world now, regardless of whether our analysis then hews to Hobbes and talks about fear (Davies), anger and ressentiment (Mishra), or anxiety (Neumann).
...And the World Enters The Funny Zone: the globalisation and rationalisation of 3SD (surreal, stubborn, stupid; dangerous, destructive, dumb)
So yes, here we are in full-blown stage four 3SD 2026, in which it's just true:
"this unstable guy (is) carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and... this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about."
So if we're done with laws of war and international criminal and humanitarian law, what then? Next topic? Here's Tom with the weather..."
And yet... we are now — all — in The Funny Zone because of this lapsus, aren't we: 3D's dumb dangerous destructive ramps up, then 3S' stubbornly stupid slides everyday life further over into the surreal.
Middle class life outside this month's war zones continues to chug along in its involuted somehow, in a shrinking zone of coverage, with more sand in the gears, more onerous cost of living pressures, more disorientation and shrinking hope.
...The Funny Zone is this weird — surreal, stubborn — realm in which words fail and words proliferate, or where the truth is spoken for a moment, like the bubble of a bath fart, then we revert to habitually telling each other lies and disavowing what's going on. Reasons are explicated, reasoning is adduced: some kind of Papier-maché sense of the whole is induced.. the spectacle of bombardment perforce unfolds, real people do get bombed in their thousands, and Bibi continues to dom the region via his unchecked schoolyard bully routine, instead of standing trial on his criminal charges. Bibi: he is very much 'at large', isn't he. But in the Funny Zone, 'we' still don't think these could be our kids getting bombed by US ordinance, we still think it's out of reach of us and the people we love, don't we.
...the idea that 'playing dumb' somehow protects us all, that stupidity, a kind of bimbo pretence, has some kind of prophylactic value for all of us. In this global ostriching, as long as we know as little as possible about Hormuz, and Caracas, and the acceleration of the land grab in the West Bank, if we just ignore it or diminish it or make it clear it's 'not chill' when someone raises the topic, then we're safe, and we can go back to blathering about our real estate, long haul travel, fine dining, home renovations...
...So then, what if we *did* stop pretending ... what would we know very well?
We know very well that Iran isn't really about Iran — and yet we have Iran.
We know very well that Venezuela wasn't about Venezuela, and yet, that happened…
and it disappeared down the memory hole: barely remembered, although it was six weeks ago.
We know very well that Greenland (remember Greenland?; you will!) is not really to do with Greenland — and yet we will have Greenland, or Trump will have Greenland, at some point, and then Greenland will have Trump and his entourage of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies kicking its prone and rubbery head and body, just as we will have Cuba getting stomped in the guts while down (its people already starving), at some time later this year.
'Stay tuned...' Monitor the situation... &c
We know very well that, on the hegemon's side, this resplendent stupidity is completely unchecked and uncontrollable, for the moment. We know this. Planet Earth is blue — and there's nothing we can do. And we also know that the Trump regime is basically running around looking for unsympathetic regimes who on their knees that they can just kick and kick and kick.
We know this because Hegseth just said it directly:
"This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it isn't... We are punching them while they are down."
Yes, it's a funny zone, The Funny Zone. Full of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies.
...In The Funny Zone, we are subsisting in a moral and existential voidtime of strategic prolapse, a global spectacle whose main event is a simulated gigantomachy between petty, vengeful, emotionally immature egotists who have no regard for the world or other people, cannot care for people or institutions, cannot think, never move outside their own reactivity — and don't have a plan
...And these domineering styles of stupidity, as I've been trying to track, are stupefying when weaponised and deployed against the whole world in bad faith: opponents' words fail, we get pipiked, then we are confounded, deprived of moral seriousness and good reasons — the gentle, subtle and substantive is relegated to NPC, the shallow, unconvincing, and grotesque are globo-goatsemaxxed to Main Character Energy.
...where domination co-mingles with domineering stupidity this *is* the big chunky 'bombing you now' part of the point; it was-and-is always how schoolyard bully domination works. The point is just to dominate, to punch people in the guts and steal their lunch money, to be a mean, cruel asshole knowing the person you're victimising can't hurt you back the way you keep hurting them, and enjoy continuing to hurt and terrorise them. Once you add in Bibi's unchecked warmongering and bloodlust, you probably have enough of a read on 'why Iran is happening'.
...In this famous passage from the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes adduces three basic causes of quarrel in human nature:
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.
The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.
The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
...we are in this Funny Zone where there's this orange guy who can do all kinds of things. Most of them are unlawful, immoral, unconscionable, stupid, and very consequential — you may have heard of him, and have thoughts and feelings of your own. He grabs the whole world by the pussy, like he warned us he was gonna, yet nobody does anything, none of our leaders (except Pedro from Spain) say fuck all about it.
...attacking Iran, or attacking anyone anywhere for any apparently stupid/insufficient reason, is about clicks and likes and shits and giggles, it's the involution of our infinite jest, as we amuse ourselves to death. This is spectacle (Debord), this is simulation (Baudrillard), this is deadly entertaining (Postman). And what do we do? We like and follow, we are 'monitoring the situation'.
...in such a milieu, everything substantive and prudent can be chucked out, nothing careful or subtle survives, and above all, the most angering, outrageous, dickhead behaviour 'wins'. The clicktatorship is a dicktatorship, which is why Trump and Hegseth and Rubio &c &c are all such dicks. And we love it. Trump is more entertaining than Biden was; you could tell how 'relieved' news media was when the T bag one again.
...we can think of this mob as 'Glory Clowns' — and this speaks to their cartoon villain aspects. Whenever they have the joker, the play the joker; they method act the Joker. We then move from the street parade scene in Burton's Batman to a world afflicted as The Dark Knight put it: 'welcome to a world without rules'.
...In the case of a veritable Trump, a true world historical Glory Clown, the real danger here is closer to Fromm's idea of the 'marketing orientation': a person who is entirely transactional, always peddling, wheeling and dealing and grabbing pussy as he can, because everything and everyone (including and above all 'personal brand') is just-only a commodity to be snatched and exploited.
Glory Clowns subsisting in the marketing orientation have no relation to truth or morality. This makes Trump (and his ilk) the kind of haute charlatan who don't understand (or have any care about) what's wrong with how they operate. This means they are (thus) capable of doing things that most people would balk at as unconscionable. Ordinary guilt-and-shame riddled people, from our cage of inhibitions, call such people 'brazen' and 'shameless', but these words contain moral condemnations of states of being that are foreign to the marketing orientation's fundamental mode of relatedness.
...The grand irony of 'all of the above' is that a specific — and uncontrollable — agency emerges from this: uninhibited by ordinary compunctions, they are very capable of unhesitatingly 'doing' a bunch of stuff that you or I just would never dream of doing to other people. Attacking Iran for no substantive reason is the least of it; it's just one transaction of many to come.
Dangerously for all of us, Glory Clowns get ahead. all the more so in conditions of involution where people crave the clear voice of a 'strong leader'. Berlusconi was the ultimate proto Trump Glory Clown; Bolsonaro, and especially Milei, are regionally significant Glory Clowns. This is also because not only are they disinhibited by viewing the world-and-people as commodity objects to get pimped and pumped, they also tend to be ego maniacs, so profoundly centred around an — always inflated and endangered — self, that they will say and do anything to achieve their glory.
...As Hobbes noticed, this means that they attack 'for trifles': any perceived slight, any endangerment of rep, anything that can be perceived as a diss, no matter how petty (especially if petty), activates a boundless wish for Attack, for limitless revenge.
In such a mode, it's also that everything is personal, because every moment is comprised in relation to the defence and entrenchement of one's huge ego, continually exposed to the massive threat of endangerment. The Glory Clown who attacks for trifles reads the world as either a commodity-object to be totally exploited, or a potential imminent total threat. Thus every entity is either a potential total donor to the ego, or it is a looming total threat that can and must — 'regardless' — be pre-emptively annihilated.
Tragically for anyone within his radius of stupidity (which is by now global) this means that Glory Clowns can be very easily manipulated behind the scenes — by a Bannon, or an assiduous lobby group, or by the cannier among their backroom tactician handlers.
I think this speaks directly to why there's no strategy.
...Truly, yet another country is being bombed for trifles, because of the egoic vanity of an a very insecure, emotionally immature, narcissistic Glory Clown, forever just pimping his own personal brand and business interest, all for clicks and likes and shits and giggles.
It's yucky to realise this is the state of the world from this perspective, yet here we are
...But there aren't too many Glory Clowns: not many of us get to scale the empyrean heights and achieve such clowning glory10. So, sadly, living through the Funny Zone means we have Glory Clowns in High Places, and, as I've just explored, this does amount to meaning that Trump can very easily be pulled right down into Bibi's dirty little regional war in a way that is destablising the whole global economy over trifles.
However, just below the Glory Clowns, and feeding them all kinds of glory offers and 'rumours of being slighted' that can goad them into attacking for trifles, there's a venerable intra-institutional dynamic in the mix that is fundamentally about ruthless competition.
In these realms, groups of people you've never heard of are scheming away in the background, on the downlow, jockeying for suction, traction, faction and position, in ways that lead to the kind of dominance that will play well in the division of spoils.
In these realms, it's not as if we leave ego and vanity behind, but the game is more about expediency, pragmatic flexibility, the ruthless running of the numbers, the pitiless seeking of advantage
...In instituted politics, we can see the cumulative-collective effects of this most of all in the group chats of staffers around ministers, those hyperactive hive minds that — dangerously — are both hall of mirrors and pinball machine around the Glory Clowns (or pusimaxxing beanbags) they serve.
...one is in the realm of Ianucci-style 'satire', filled with ruthless manipulation, zero sum hardball, and pointy stabby Machiavellianism. In the back end, competitive individuals are stabbing each other in the back end, in a world of knifey discourse, where Glory Clowns come and go.
...we suspect manipulation because, indeed, there are groups conspiring. Less to do with ‘nefarious control' and more to do with stitching things up. More like Cambridge Analytica and the Andreesen groups than Epstein – though latter also exists, doesn't it, as did PC Houthi Small Group.)
Most of those who thrive in these groups work 80-100 hours a week, they have no hobbies, are usually divorced, have terrible boundaries, and would kill you, or have you killed, to get ahead in their game. Among their kind are (Glory Clowns and beanbags notwithstanding) the worst bosses many of us have had: taking breaks is a sign of weakness, showing feeling is a sign of weakness, caring for someone or something is a sign of weakness. Even your mum's cancer was a sign of weakness; 'that's why you were sacked — because you were weak and didn't take this seriously enough'. In other words, the people who thrive in these ruthless intragroup fields of competition succumb to a loss of perspective that leads to the loss of basic humanity for which they're perennially famous — with the collateral damage of their sense of humour, proportion, and spacious appreciation for a broader context in which 'none of this matters'.
In the course of becoming hardbitten playaz, the world and other people disappear, and only the game and its tactics and state of play exist. Ball don't lie, ball don't bawl, ball only balls.
To bring in Hobbes' 'reasons for attack' here, those driven by competition attack for gain. They're there to grab an advantage. So, if they think it is in their interest (or their group's interest), they'll nab your job, your "wives, children, and cattle", just as they'll bomb your institutions, your desal plant, or whatever.
For such groups, every Glory Clown is something between a Trojan Horse and a puppet, and the front of house is just a spectacle who can be 'puppeted'. The point is to stitch it all up in favour of your faction, hog tie 'the competition', and... Well, what exactly? What then; now what?
This speaks — again — to the absence of strategy.
As I get older and I see more people who become successful in institutional life by operating in this way, the more I notice that they seldom actually 'win'. In chess terms, they're all mid game, and no end game. Ruthless playaz are masterful tacticians within strict game logics. To this extent, they are perennially embroiled in ‘moves', so there never comes a point where things are clinched, let alone is there ever an 'off season' where a glorious victory could be enjoyed in voluptuous peace. Above all, I think this is because operating so ruthlessly deep inside a game logic not only means losing your basic regard for other people, it also perforce means seeing the world with a wide aperture: context and background is a big blur, so you never see the horizon, never notice the sun rising or setting, don't see the missile heading toward your generic climate-controlled office building. This means everything is just tactics, 'next move' — and thus both the victory and any point it could have had is completely lost.
The grand irony of a group of people for whom the means justifies the ends is that they completely lose track of the ends, and are all means (and very mean).
Ultimately, the individual-in-competition might become a playa, and be a masterful tactician within the bounded space of the game (they take to be the totality), but as such, they no longer really know why they're playing, what they're playing for, what it means, or why (or indeed, if at all) any of it matters.
At its now necessarily blurred horizon, 'playing to win', or being the 'last man standing' in an 'only one can live' dynamic is fundamentally amoral and even nihilistic.
Once we become absorbed by the game of competition, once we become ‘operators', once we only ever ruthlessly seek our advantage on the next move, every tactical victory brings us closer to strategic annihilation.
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.
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?
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...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.
