The idea here is to catch things of interest as they stream by.
Some are Outrages of the Day, some are nuggets and threads
to be woven into one's own macramé.
Mapping in time (mental stratigraphy of encounter)
and Space (the geography of tempting rabbit holes...)
and healthy doses of YCMTSU and KFTF
...and it's partly keeping a record of unprecedented times.
1ii25
Millions Flee War, Floods, and Persecution Maps Mania
Karine Polwart's amazing song about Trump and his Scottish roots, "I Burn But I Am Not Consumed" Hobbledehoy
Where Do We Go? Here? There? Everywhere! Alan Levine
Download everything and keep it safe in a clay jar Bruce Sterling
"I Didn't Hear my Other Children Screaming:" A Family's Horrific Losses in Gaza Belkis Wille at Informed Comment
The growing Influence of Israel's Ultranationalist Settler Movement Informed Comment
Checklist for federal data backups Flowing Data and MIT Libraries
Nature Through Microscope and Camera (1909) The Public Domain Review
Patterns, Facts, and AI Stephen Downes
The Most Important Time in History Is Now Tomas Pueyo at Medium
Keywords at pitt.edu
Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World Marginalian
The dispensable nation John Quiggen at Crooked Timber
2ii25
California Fires Expose a $1 Trillion Hole in US Home Insurance Bloomberg
Cut-up technique Wikipedia
A Human Among Humans The photographer Larry Fink never saw social events as a disposable theme. For him, they were life itself. Lucy Sante at NYRB
There is an exit Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber
Captain Clock Lewis H Lapham
How To Install And Use DeepSeek R-1 In Your Local PC Jim Clyde Monge ast Medium
DeepSeek Is Chinese But Its AI Models Are From Another Planet OpenAI and the US are in deep trouble Alberto Romero at Medium
Discovery of a unique drainage and irrigation system that gave way to the 'Neolithic Revolution' in the Amazon ScienceDaily
3ii25
Synchronized Street View Tours via Maps Mania
Tribble Trouble at A Way With Words (mp3)
'fraudbot' at Cambridge Dictionary's About Words
Adam's Heart Surgery Tesam Hannah Forsyth at Crooked Timber ... and see The M in PMC for more
Mapped: The Top Import Partner of Every U.S. State
Are we All Hungarians now, or Palestinians? Trump's Onslaught on the Rule of Law and Civil Liberties H Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
Nifty Simple Web Archive Tool Alan Levine
"The Lion has Fallen:" The End of Syria's Brutal Regime and the Fate of the Refugees Tomdispatch at Informed Comment
About 8,000 U.S. government pages taken down Flowing Data
How Donald Trump Is Transforming Executive Power New Yorker
Defining Life with Aristotle Small Things Considered
Why This Mysterious Painting Still Has Experts Debating After 500 Years Christopher P Jones at Medium
Unelected Billionaire Elon Musk Is Shutting Down the Government Agency USAID gizmodo
President Trump "agrees" with shutting down the USAID agency boing boing
Sincerity Victor Mair at Language Log
colleagues ...asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so. "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do. Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.
Stunning Subjectivity: Obsessive Typographic Maps by Paula Scher The Marginalian
A Day's Delay in Government Funding Can Scramble Lifesaving Medical Research gizmodo
Move fast and break things: Acting deliberately to destroy the nation The Hobbledehoy
Health and climate data purge Flowing Data
Pestka at Conscientious Photography Magazine
...In those photographs, I noticed a lot of seeing, a lot of different ways in which this young woman dealt with seeing and being seen. The innocence of looking (by which I mean a child's not knowing that in social contexts, you can never just innocently look at something or someone) is slowly replaced by an awareness of the power of looking.
A Mother and Daughter's Joint Becoming
Magdalena Wywrot's moody series "Pestka captures eleven years in the life that she made with her only child, Barbara.
Massive alien face spotted in Antarctica snow Allan Rose Hill at boing boing
The 60-Year History of Digital Image Sensors As Told By Those Involved Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel
Historic Landslide Complex Near L.A. Is Moving Faster and Growing gizmodo
The Palos Verdes Peninsula is sliding by much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) per week, putting hundreds of buildings at risk....The landslide complex has been active for at least the past 60 years, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The expansion of the complex's footprint follows record-breaking rains in the area in 2023 and early 2024. Those same rains counterintuitively contributed to the ongoing devastating Los Angeles wildfires, which fed on the voluminous foliage that flourished in the rains and was parched by subsequent droughts.
What Game Are We Playing? danah boyd
Jenga Politics.Think about the wooden puzzle known as Jenga, where a tower is made out of criss-crossed wooden blocks. Players are asked to take out pieces of the wooden puzzle from the structure and then place their piece on top, increasing the pressure of gravity on the structure. The goal of the game is get your opponent to take the blame for making the entire system fall.For years now, this has been my description of the administrative state as we've known it. Conservatives primarily take pieces out of the tower while liberals primarily add new blocks to the top. But all have a habit of removing blocks and adding pressures in certain circumstances. Meanwhile, both well-intended advocates and malfeasant ones mess with the blocks along the way.
The role of the civil servants play in the game of Jenga Politics has been to run around with duct tape in an exhausting effort to try to repair the tower before it all topples over...
...My only hope at this point is that the blocks still exist when we get to the other side of this so that a new tower can be built. In reality, I'm concerned that we're about to watch as kindling is brought in to ensure that the existing blocks are turned into ash.
...The tech industry loves hockey sticks. Late stage capitalism is not simply about linear growth, but exponential growth. Faster, faster, faster. After all, financialized instruments depend on return-on-investment, not just profit. And so we've seen countless businesses drive towards sharper and sharper hockey sticks in pursuit of their unicorn dreams...
...The end can also be elongated through what we might call corruption. Twitter had been experiencing a long, slow decline for years before Elon Musk took over the company. His actions sped up the collapse, as though he was aiming for failure. As users and advertisers rushed out of the platform, Musk took to blaming everyone but himself. And then he started suing anyone he could think of. Now it appears that he's gone one step further by making his platform the only place to ask questions and learn about certain kinds of government updates...
...Trump is all about spectacle. But all around him are gamers. And not just any gamers — gamers who are happy to destroy their opponents at any costs, regardless of the societal consequences. Gamers who see such destruction as a source of their power, rooted in their visions of masculinity. Gaming has long been entangled with masculinity, even before there were video games. Sports, gambling, and the stock market are all gaming practices known for expressions of masculinity. Gaming in the context of computing offered an alternative form of masculinity, one that was deeply empowering to so many geeks... But these guys aren't just any gamers. They're trolls who sharpened their claws during #GamerGate. Their version of gaming took on a toxic and abusive form long ago, one seeped in aggression and hate...
...War, politics, and financial markets are often viewed as games that attract all sorts of problematic behavior. The very idea of a society is to create rules and guardrails, checks and balances. But gaming logic has always been about pushing those edges, exploiting the gaps, and finding the secret passageways. For decades, we've struggled to contain war mongers, corrupt politicians, and fraudulent scammers, although we've had mixed success. But this crew of gamers is playing a different game. And so we are going to need a whole new strategy for containing their destructive tendencies.
...To make matters more complicated, there's not just one game at play right now. Different actors in this melange are playing at different games. There are divergent ideas of what the "win" state is. And this has led people to be very confused about what's happening. Is this about financial gain? Is this about power? Is this about a particular vision of the future? Or is this just downright fuckery because you can.
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Corruption, Tariffs, and US Renewal Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber
This week-end's abrupt attempt, through pre-emptive tariff changes, to reshape the global environment to new political reality is the beginning of the test to what degree the US can ignore the reactions of the rest of the world (and stack the deck toward a certain kind of new, Mercantile regime) as its struggles internally over its future. Your guess is as good as mine in these matters, but I strongly suspect that none of the rules of thumb and maxims about how the world really works that policymakers, commentators, global businesses, NGOs, and academics have relied upon for, say, the last thirty to sixty years, are going to be very robust.
Crystalline Multiverse Andy Ilachinski
The Great Indian Head Shake Sandeep Sreedharan at Medium
OnlyFans, Sophie Rain and the media's parasociality vortex Nick Hilton at Medium
The perseverance of a 'harmless drudge Trinity Hall Cambridge
..."Dull, adjective: Not exhilarating; not delightful: as, to make dictionaries is dull work". The book, Johnson sums up self-pityingly at the end of his preface, 'was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amid inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow ... I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.'
The Power of Naming Victor Mair at Language Log *****
...information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: "Shannon's information theory." In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data-communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as "information theory." The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century...As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.
Ramekin via Sesquiotica
Radar Trends to Watch: February 2025 O'Reilly
37 years of Life photos from time.com
The game theory of Trump's tariff threats Nate Silver
...I find President Trump's bullying of Canada and Mexico with tariff policy unseemly....The game theory says that because the US economy has so much more leverage, he should be able to extract some minor concessions from Canada and Mexico by threatening a trade war. He doesn't necessarily want a trade war, but he's betting his bluff won't be called — and he'll usually be right. And that's basically what happened in Round 1. We threatened tariffs, and because Trump's threats are fairly credible for reasons ranging from his ideological commitments to his reputation as a rogue actor, Canada and Mexico capitulated.
But this will likely build up a lot of resentment — nothing creates resentment like capitulating to bullies — and a lot more Leeroy Jenkins energy from our neighbors in the future. If Trump expects to extract some new form of tribute from Canada and Mexico every month in exchange for delaying tariffs, their leaders are eventually going to say fuck you — or their populace is going to elect new leaders. Wall Street might have been pleased by how the situation played out. But it should probably have sold off more when Trump pledged to implement the tariffs in the first place. This was a highly escalatory move with the potential to go badly next time we play the game.
High-yield rice breed emits up to 70% less methane ScienceDaily
Cosmohedron: A cosmic shape could explain the fundamental nature of the universe New Scientist
...The researchers have been exploring similar shapes that fit into a kind of family tree of fundamental mathematical objects. For example, shapes called associahedra encode the way particles may collide with, or scatter off, each other — without having to use equations that involve space and time....The transformation from an associahedron into a cosmohedron is both surprisingly simple and incredibly powerful. It involves shaving each of the shape's edges to create new surfaces, adding extra parameters into the formulas that correspond to associahedra and endowing them with more meaning. Specifically, by turning a given associahedron into a cosmohedron and then studying the this more complex shape, the researchers could reconstruct a quantum mechanical wavefunction — the formula that summarises all properties and possible behaviours of a quantum object.
Trump's Trade War Is Only Getting Going John Cassidy at New Yorker
...since his Inauguration, Trump has made clear that he plans to upend the international trade system and assert U.S. economic power in ways that are fundamentally antithetical to how the world economy has been organized since after the Second World War......Canada is not a major source of the fentanyl killing Americans, and the real reason for Trump's animus toward the country appears to be that it runs a trade surplus with the United States and that its leader hasn't been sufficiently deferential to him.
Over the weekend, Trump claimed on his Truth Social account, "We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason." And on Monday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he repeated his assertion that Canada should become the fifty-first state. Of course, the United States doesn't spend a dollar to subsidize Canada...
...Over the weekend, Irving Energy, a Canadian company that supplies propane to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, warned that it would pass the levies on to its customers. That's what happens in trade wars.
...As many big U.S. firms, including Apple, Intel, and Tesla, remain heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains, the government in Beijing has the capacity to inflict a great deal more hurt on the U.S. economy, but its measured response signalled it is open to negotiations, and some of Trump's business allies may well be advising him to exercise caution. In the meantime, he is busy bullying the vulnerable and figuring out how far he can take things without creating a financial crash.
Swear at Google Until It Hides AI Search Results Lifehacker
Are you tired of the annoying "AI overview" at the top of your search results? Turns out you can get rid of it by starting your search with the word "fuck." The trick spread thanks to a now-viral thread on Tumblr and it works wonders. I've been trying it out all morning: the AI disappears but the results are otherwise more-or-less the same.
The 'Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly' of the United States Government Elon Musk's bureaucratic coup is under way. Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic
Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup......This is called "flooding the zone." Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk's political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world's richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies...
...Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates.
...As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, "The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution."
...The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk's personal political weapon.
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation and An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them The Marginalian
The End of Programming as We Know It Tim O'Reilly
Dolní Věstonice Portrait Head: The oldest known human portrait in the world Live Science
5ii25
...after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. "will take over the Gaza Strip," and suggested sending troops to make that happen. "We'll own it," he said. "We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of." It could become "the Riviera of the Middle East," he said.Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan "deranged" and "nuts." Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was "speechless," adding: "That's insane." While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, "Let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago," Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were "a few kinks in that slinky," a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
Ethnic Cleansing for "Gaza's Riviera"? A Secret Israeli Memo and Trump's Plan to Displace 2.3 million Palestinians Dan Steinbock at Informed Comment
Bonobos can tell when they know something you don't New Scientist
Bonobos are quick to help a person who doesn't know what they know, a sign that they can think about what others are thinking. Being able to deduce the mental states of others, known as the theory of mind, is an essential skill that allows humans — and perhaps these primates — to navigate their social worlds.
USPS will no longer accept packages from China and Hong Kong Boing Boing
The Greenland Ice Sheet is falling Apart at Informed Comment
The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump: And the Booming Border-Industrial Complex TomDispatch at Informed Comment
It didn't take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump's reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. "We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement," explained the GEO Group's executive chair, George Zoley, "and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals." In other words, the "largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history" was going to be a moneymaker.
Geographic boundary data and microdata from Census Bureau is offline Flowing Data
Download CDC data through Internet Archive Flowing Data
Before Etsy Fell Victim to the Algorithm, There Was Community Abby Paradis at Medium
...Tech platforms foster weird, fragile communities early on — until they grow big enough that they develop hyperpersonalized algorithms and community erodes as a result.
The Ridiculous Saviours of Our Culture Yeah, we're screwed Matthew at Medium
...So sadly, there are no saviours, because the voices that rise to the top of this world we have made are not the reflections of the values that matter to us but the scum that floats to the top of the cooking vat of the attention economy. If salvation is to be found, it must lie in a reshaping of the entire way we relate to one another.
Political Lessons from an Underwhelming Stone National myths & my visit to Plymouth Rock M. Cole Grady at Medium
...Nearly every word in that story has been spun into a convenient tale for the American national project; it's a story that echoes a single message: America has always been a haven for those escaping religious or social persecution, a home for anyone who wants to live up to their convictions. It's elegant, a clean line drawn from our past to our present and a justification for America's unwavering moral supremacy....A country of tolerance and love and inclusion: it's a wonderful idea. In our collective memory, one birthed through symbols like Plymouth Rock, it's easy to get lost in these ideals, that somehow this country has a soul and somehow that soul contains the very essence of liberty and tolerance and acceptance for all —that we cannot lose it.
It is indeed a tantalising myth that, whatever may come of our future, we can rest sound in our ethical fulcrum. As our past and our present show us, the national justification global and domestic cruelties, the now undeniable political success of neo-fascism, that is indeed not the case.
MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing Cory Doctorow
...Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"...pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements: Know Your Enemy: The Entrepreneurial Ethic
MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").
The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).
...MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.
In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.
...The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.
The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF Matt Novak at gizmodo
here's the list
Nevermind the flood zone, focus on the coup The Hobbledehoy
Kape: the language rope that binds the people of a remote Indonesian island Victor Mair at Language Log
AGI Is Already Here—It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Or: why you should learn to prompt AI models Alberto Romero
Elon Musk Wants What He Can't Have: Wikipedia The Atlantic
Trump's Gaza Takeover Makes No Sense The Atlantic
Enigmatic people who took over Europe millennia ago came from Ukraine New Scientist
Indoor cannabis farms in US use more energy than all other agriculture New Scientist
What the new field of women's neuroscience reveals about female brains New Scientist
Trump, an American Stalin? Massive Population Transfers were a Feature of Communist Dictatorship Juan Cole
A Hostile Corporate Takeover of our Democracy Informed Comment
Elon Musk is serving as a 'special government employee,' White House says CNN Politics
The SAVE Act Will Prevent One-Third of Women From Voting Carlyn Beccia at Medium
Meta Promises to Launch 'Half a Dozen' AI Wearables in 2025 gizmodo
Google Maps celebrates 20 years with 20 favorite features
Interesting how few have any relevance to me
Statista research department and content philosophy
Gen Z Has A Manchild Problem, And It's Scaring Everyone Ossiana Tepfenhart at Medium
While Elon Musk was showing off the competition pushed him out Billy Jones at Medium, on Tesla long-haul trucks
Landmark studies track source of Indo-European languages Harvard Gazette
Elon Musk Says DOGE Will Make 'Rapid Safety Upgrades' on Air Traffic Control gizmodo
Eggs lower heart disease death risk by 27%, new research shows boing boing
New Indo-European genetic evidence Mark Liberman at Language Log
What Makes an AI personal? Doc Searls
Cybertruck meets the "Cybercock test"
Chaos Monkey github
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Antonio Garcia Martinez 2016
Academia: What They Are About To Take From You? Timothy Burke
Musk Shows Us What Actual Government Censorship On Social Media Looks Like Techdirt
Yes: This Is Worth Signing: Economists Who Are Neither Bought Nor Crazy Oppose Broad-Based Tariffs Brad DeLong
...The primary argument for the implementation of broad-based tariffs is that they will reverse the hollowing out of American manufacturing and reduce the trade deficit, which is causing a "hemorrhaging of America's lifeblood." Contrary to the repeated claim, there has been no hollowing out of American manufacturing. Industrial production in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The U.S. is producing 2.5 times as much real industrial output as it did when we last ran a trade surplus in 1975. We are producing that record output with the smallest percentage of the labor force involved in manufacturing since America became fully industrialized. The percentage of the civilian nonfarm labor force employed in manufacturing peaked during World War II and has been in secular decline ever since. This has been a great success for productivity and not a failure of trade, as today's full employment attests.
Google Lifts Self-Imposed Ban on Using AI for Weapons and Surveillance gizmodo
Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy Economics from the Top Down
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders Ars Technica
You Cant Post Your Way Out of Fascism
Elon Musk's DOGE Is Running Highly Sensitive Government Data Through AI gizmodo
7ii25
The perfect boiled egg takes more than half an hour to cook New Scientist
Facing the Rise of Fascism Like Fools for Freedom Rebecca Gordon at Informed Comment
Flooding the Zone
The list of Trump's post-election actions is its own kind of litany — not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that's now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), the Washington Post reported that Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, "including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal." And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order — for the moment.
- The nominations to positions of power of the manifestly unfit (remember Matt Gaetz, the ethically-challenged), or the frankly vicious (Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer), or indeed of candidates combining both qualities (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabard).
- A spate of executive comments, orders, or presidential decrees displaying an imperial greed for territory that would have seemed like so many jokes just a few weeks ago. (Watch out, Panama, Canada, and Greenland!)
- The fulfillment of the Israeli fascist right-wing's dearest desire: a proposal to cleanse Gaza of its more than two million Palestinian inhabitants, in order to make way for the development of what Trump has labeled "a phenomenal location," where "some beautiful things can be done."
- First steps in keeping his vow to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States, including a Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operation, which included an "embedded" Dr. Phil — further proof, should we need it, that the strategy is to enforce the authority of any decree, no matter how bizarre.
- Elon Musk's seizure of access to the records of all federal employees and control of the Treasury Department's disbursement process
These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury Other Sides of a Nobody
Archiving effort to preserve Data.gov Flowing Data
Spiritual Nature Andy Ilachinski (quotes Emerson)
Controversial Philip Guston Mural Unveiled in Mexico After Major Restoration Other Sides of a Nobody
Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification We've got the wrong kind of middlemen. Cory Doctorow
The Internet Has Failed Us Culturally Instead of democratising culture, the internet has destroyed it. Where did it all go so wrong? Matthew at Medium
How did this happen? How did the internet, the place that promised us broad sunlit uplands of a culture freed from gatekeepers and so democratic and free, engender a culture stiflingly banal and entirely empty of novelty? How is it instead of music and cinema flourishing in a lively mainstream full of novelty and variety, the musical world has been listlessly dominated by the Eras tour and Sabrina Carpenter, the television world by mediocre boxsets ripping off classics for money and yet more Superman movies?Culture has always functioned like a filter. In the same way that humans themselves filter the necessary information out of the white noise of reality outside, culture is a processes of selection and elision, the end result of which is the literature, music, poetry and art that reflects back to us something like what we are. Culture is and has always been about identity, and its pleasures are in part pleasures of identification. I am this.
On Undermining the Administrative State Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber
The last two weeks have seen a number of highly irregular practices develop Stateside since the creation of The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as controlled by Elon Musk, apparently the world's richest person. DOGE's own status within the government is highly unorthodox, and its practices thus far, too. There seems to be little regard for conflicts of interests (and a whole range of other concerns one might have).But DOGE's actions have immediately impacted the second and third of the functions I have mentioned above. When it comes to the three roles established above, a non-trivial number of websites have gone dark, government agencies appear to be closed down, and research halted, and even ended. In addition, some of the public provision of goods and witnessing of truth is being privatized for profit.
So, the second Trump administration is embarking on some dramatic actions that will destabilize existing conventions in and the known workings of the machinery of government and the state's witnessing of truth. Quite a few of DOGE's immediate targets are central to both functions (CDC, NSF, NOAA, etc.). To the best of my knowledge no group with such evident oligarchic tendencies has ever embarked on this road with such reckless abandon before. And whatever their motives, I am pretty confident that they have no idea what kind of intermediate effects they will generate.
Eoin Higgins' "Owned" is a harrowing history of the right-wing billionaire tech takeover
How Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics Quanta Magazine
Palantir's Billionaire CEO Just Can't Stop Talking About Killing People gizmodo
The Private Equity Hatchet Man Leading the Lost Boys of DOGE The American Prospect
The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk's merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets Cory Doctorow
...This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class — like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod...
...These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.
This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson — that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them — of course.
But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient...
We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government — of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does
Public and Private Life of Animals (1877) The Public Domain Review
Elon Musk's Enemy, USAID, Was Investigating Starlink's Contracts in Ukraine gizmodo
Musk Rats Hobbledehoy
An Accurate Organizational Chart of Your University McSweeney's Internet Tendency
DOGE Staffer Previously Fired From Cybersecurity Company for Leaking Secrets Matt Novak at gizmodo
Bullying as a mode of power Adam Tooze
Bullying involves the use of power to humiliate as well as to intimidate, hurt or coerce.Bullying is transgressive and excessive. It goes beyond conventional police, punishment or compellence and yet it is also less. It is less purposeful and instrumental than other forms of power. In the end, enacting repeated moments of humiliation may be an end in itself.
In a world of warlordism, bullying may be the normal modus operandi.
In a world of order, bullying can not persist unless it is tolerated, or it is authorized by other more stable and legitimate modes of power.
...The question in the case of the Trump Presidency is how much is instrumental and how much of the bullying is nothing more than that, an end in itself.
Elon Musk's Revolutionary Terror Susan Glasser at New Yorker
The evisceration of U.S.A.I.D. isn't a policy fight&mdash'it's an execution designed to strike fear in our own government......In its short existence, Musk's small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. Upcoming targets reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to the government weather-forecasting service and the U.S. aviation system. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk's offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation "buyout."
..."Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World," he observed, and "that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that."
...The point is not a policy fight; it's an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others.
The Government's Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified The Atlantic
Elon Musk's unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control......Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk's campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running.
..."This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country's history—at least that's publicly known," one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. "You can't un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want."
...The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo.
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The Slow Suicide of the State of Israel Informed Comment
Gaza: We Analyzed a Year of Satellite Images to Map the Scale of Agricultural Destruction Informed Comment
The art of the Steal: Lawless sheriff Trump goes Rogue in Gaza
Shamash! The Transformation Informed Comment
Your coverage of this event has been completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience Other Sides of a Nobody
My Life with Left-Handed Women The New Yorker
Why Trump Is Targeting Foreign Aid, with Atul Gawande The New Yorker (podcast)
Elon Musk and Donald Trump Are Not Fixing U.S. Foreign Aid but Destroying It John Cassady at The New Yorker
iRabbit call centers Victor Mair at Language Log
Emergency Update Umair Haque at Medium
Oh, Tesla Is Doing So Much Worse Than I Thought Will Lockett at Medium
9 Bizarrely Awkward American Questions That Baffle the Rest of the World David Peluchette at Medium
Dinkscrump Linkdump Cory Doctorow
Fast Culture, Slow Change: The Paradox of Digital Society Giles Crouch at Medium
Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government Lawfare
Some species of baleen whales avoid attracting killer whales by singing too low to be heard ScienceDaily
Multinational research project shows how life on Earth can be measured from space ScienceDaily
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How to Achieve Immortality Ted Gioia
So it's ironic that the people who promote this vapidity are seeking immortality for themselves. I doubt they will find it. But they do have good reason to fear transience and oblivion&mdashbecause that's what they've staked their whole careers on.
Pacing and spacing Christopher Hobson at Substack
...the US and the internet / world is jumping 'right to ludicrous speed', increasingly lost in an ever-widening attention vortex. Our digital existence disintermediates and disorientates, trapping us in immediacy and reactivity.
...we are again in times in which there is a demand for difficult and deep thought, and yet our digitally mediated world largely works to impede and impair this from occurring. There is much to suggest that we are in conditions of genuine flux and transition, with the scope for agency being extremely unevenly distributed
The Sensation of the Mystical Andy Ilachinski quotes Einstein
Efficiency — or Empire? How Elon Musk's hostile Takeover could end Government as we know it Allison Stanger at Informed Comment
In his new role, Musk can oversee — and potentially dismantle — the government agencies that have traditionally constrained his businesses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla's Autopilot system; the Securities and Exchange Commission has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental regulations have constrained SpaceX.
...But the most catastrophic aspect of Musk's leadership at DOGE is its unprecedented access to government data. DOGE employees reportedly have digital permission to see data in the U.S. government's payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers and income tax documents. Reportedly, they have also seized the ability to alter the system's software, data, transactions and records.
Multiple media reports indicate that Musk's staff have already made changes to the programs that process payments for Social Security beneficiaries and government contractors to make it easier to block payments and hide records of payments blocked, made or altered.
...funneling the data into Grok, Musk's xAI-created artificial intelligence system, which is already connected with the Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled capability for predicting economic shifts, identifying government vulnerabilities and modeling voter behavior.
...Like Trump himself and many of his closest advisers, Musk is also deeply involved in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump's own cryptocurrency and DOGE's apparent alignment with the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin suggests more than coincidence. I believe it points to a coordinated strategy for control of America's money and economic policy, effectively placing the United States in entirely private hands.
...Who can effectively investigate a group designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration's illegal firing of at least a dozen inspectors general before the Musk operation began suggests a deliberate strategy to eliminate government accountability. The Republican-led Congress, closely aligned with Trump, may not want to step in; but even if it did, Musk is moving far faster than Congress ever does.
The Empire Self-Destructs The Hobbledehoy
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire's diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
..."Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and 'Christian values' form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all," I noted in my book. "Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and 'homeland' security."
...Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don't do not.
When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba's admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds "democracy promotion" and "judicial reform" that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
Fire and Rain Doc Searls, quoting John McPhee
Insidious and Invidious Victor Mair at Language Log
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Cambridge Dictionary blog, "Commenting on developments in the English language"
A UK Skills Taxonomy Stephen Downes
Demonic Duo Trump and Musk Detonate a Blast Wave at US Foreign Aid, Harming Millions Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
Palestinians have long resisted Resettlement: Trump's Plan to 'Clean Out' Gaza won't Change that
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises: The Secret War within the Pentagon Michael T Klare at Informed Comment
Silicon Valley's DOGE project: The plan to replace democracy Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
Roz Chast on George Booth's Cartoons New Yorker
A Centenary Cartoon Collection New Yorker
ChatGPT isn't hallucinating — it's bullshitting Mark Frauenfelder at boing boing
Symmetries Andy Fraser at Medium
Will AI Become a Cultural Mediator? Giles Crouch at Medium
A Teaching on Consciousness, or Your Life in an Age of Collapse Umair Haque at Medium
The Scientific Reformation is OverWhat now? Matthew at Medium
It is not the printing press, but social media that has played a significant role in the undermining of the authority of science in the public world. The missteps and over-claims of public scientists during the pandemic fed into the ability of everyone with an alternative narrative to curate an audience in the online sphere, and allowed significant counter beliefs to spread like wildfire, even as governments and social media authorities such as the then owners of Twitter and, as they have now admitted, Facebook, tried to silence them.
Your Fake Online Friends Have a 2,000-Year-Old History TNL.net
Where The Link Goes Therefore I Go (beyond) Alan Levine
Campus closures, mergers, cuts, and crises at the start of 2025 Bryan Alexander
Gary, Indiana, and the Long Shadow of U.S. Steel The New Yorker
Company gearing up to sell sunlight at night using orbiting mirrors boing boing
'In a real sense, US democracy has died' Guardian 7ii25
Elon Musk Offered to Buy OpenAI For an Absurd Amount of Money lifehacker
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Win
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Access previous versions of government websites with GovWayback flowing Data
Gretchen McCulloch — Internet Linguist
Acadia Archives Digital Collections
Make foreign aid great Matt Yglesias
...Much of what's been going on reminds me of the line from The Great Gatsby, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Musk strikes me as the kind of person who is so focused on his amazing dreams for the long-term future that he simply cannot spare any consideration for actual human beings. We have food shipments stuck on American docks because no thought or planning went into any of this. There's no excuse for behaving this way.
The Second Trump Administration Takes Aim at the Climate Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker
Who is helping Elon Musk gut the US government? Guardian 8ii25
Multinational research project shows how life on Earth can be measured from space ScienceDaily
Jared Kushner Bets on a Trump Hotel with Emerati Billionaire in Belgrade... Bloomberg
'Rip their skin off': Montenegro's Pivot Alexander Clapp at LRB
Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit Cory Doctorow
The Unhinged Presidency David Cole at The New York Review of Books
I Regret to Inform You That a 19-Year-Old DOGE Stooge Named 'Big Balls' Is Now Advising the State Department Lucas Ropek at gizmodo
Why Blog If Nobody Reads It? via DStephen Downes
Outskirting Istanbul Part 1: Bakirköy Dumneazu
JD Vance Tells World to Shove It, US Won't Join International Treaty on AI
AJ Dellinger at gizmodo
Vance, seemingly defiantly, insisted that not only will America reject this international agreement, but it'll "ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American designed and manufactured chips." And while he said that America won't go at it alone, he also made clear that if the rest of the world wants to come along on that journey, the Trump administration will allow it—but only if they drop this whole "inclusive and sustainable" stuff.
Linguist Llama Mark Liberman at Language Log, and see also Know Your Meme and linguist llama language changes faster because internet at Sentence first, and review of
Internet Meme Database knowyourmeme.com
Know Your Meme Wikipedia
Category: Internet memes Wikipedia
The Meaning and History of Memes NYTimes
An Extremely Detailed Article on the Evolution of Internet Memes & Trends The Charger Account
Internet Memes and Desensitization Barbara Sanchez
The evolution of political memes: Detecting and characterizing internet memes with multi-modal deep learning ScienceDirect
Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz (pdf)
Theorising the memescape: The spatial politics of Internet memes Review of International Studies at Cambridge Core
10 classic memes that owned the Internet CNN
What is 'Doge'? Explaining the meme after Trump appoints Elon Musk usatoday
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The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism The Guardian
The paradox of Trump's first weeks Matthew Yglesias
The DOGE hyper-focus on things like foreign aid and the Department of Education is kind of clever politics, but the cleverness lies precisely in its ability to provide cover for diminished aspirations in the face of these failures. Trump is many things, but he is most of all a showman, who's doing a good job of performing mastery rather than letting attention fall on the razor-thin GOP majority and their somewhat incoherent policy agenda.
The fact is, Republicans don't have a politically or economically viable path to creating the level of taxation that they want. Rather than try to reconcile themselves to that reality and come up with a more realistic fiscal agenda, they are lashing out at the pillars of the political system itself.
Dumpster fire Wikipedia
Urban Dictionary Wikipedia
Marco Rubio miserably sighs while Trump insists on "owning" Gaza Carla Sinclair at boing boing
Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.
...Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley.
A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk's program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk's special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology... the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself. Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.
...Ultimately, though, Musk's push for A.I. in government may be best understood as a marketing tactic for a technology that Silicon Valley sees as an investment too big to fail. A.I. is meant to be powerful enough to rule the world, so rule the world it must. In a recent blog post, Altman heralded artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical A.I. model that meets or exceeds human cognitive abilities, as "just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together."
The News: Apocalypse Now Timothy Burke at Substack
Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon's "populists" and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic's basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.
...the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters.
...The desire to hasten the Second Coming, to see the last days of life in a fallen, post-Edenic world and to rise again in the world to come, is a long-standing part of American evangelical belief.
...There may be a second eschatology lurking inside of the current version of Trumpism within the White House, which is a belief in the Singularity, a technological end-of-the-world where our machines outdo us and subsume us, where human beings become something so different than what they have been that everything that has come before is irrelevant. I never know whether to take people from the Big Tech world seriously when they indulge in Singularity talk. A fair amount of the time, it seems more like a typically cynical move meant to hype up some shitty app or justify pointless "disruption" in the name of some future cyborg inevitability. Or in the case of the truly swollen egos at the top of the food chain, it's a way to buttress their belief that they are already the cyborg overlords and the only problem left for them is to figure out how to live forever.
...the extreme financialization of the global economy and the associated rise in dramatic wealth inequality. To put it simply, financialization means that a smaller and smaller number of people are making truly extraordinary amounts of money from having money, that investments no longer correspond to any materially real economic activity.
...Look at Elon Musk, who seems on paper to have lost $30 billion buying Twitter, and who is technically in charge of multiple companies in a way that is plainly impossible in terms of exerting actual leadership within them. Doesn't matter: he had assets to spare to the point that he could and did buy a position of almost unlimited power over the entire government and the nation. He might eventually be a loser in the dangerous game of power, but he almost can't lose in the economy that he both represents and has helped to create.
...I keep reading people saying, "They're stupid, they don't understand what they're destroying, they don't understand that they're just hurting themselves." That's the point. They're not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now.
...Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It's the end times. Or it's that this moment is the only thing that matters. Screw our kids and our families, who cares about them. (I suspect this is one of the few things that Musk and Trump really share as an outlook.)
There may be one group of long-term thinkers in the White House, but they're no more reassuring. Those are the people who recognize that the Rubicon has been crossed and the die is cast. They either win forever or end up in jail. That is a mindset that can easily reconcile itself to millenarian thinking or to living like there's no tomorrow: it all points in the same direction as a first step, which is to destroy everything that already is.
early Sarawak Museum Journal and more recent SMJ articles from Anthropological Index Online
Make Art, not War William D. Hartung at Informed Comment
'Woke' is Dying Matthew at Medium
...The complete failure of the Harris/Waltz campaign seems to have finalised a realisation that wokeness in the political sphere was less a movement of radical conscience than it was an attempt to bandwagon certain ideological movements that have long since lost their impetus. Trump's slogan "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" struck a chord that has resonated beyond merely his own supporters. More than just the Republicans it seems are awaking from wokeness.
It is not easy to chart Polanyi's intellectual trajectory across the 1920s. He was sympathetic to the collectivist policies of Vienna's ruling socialist party, while being drawn to the guild socialism of G.D.H. Cole (his early Anglophilia persisted). Beyond current politics, his energies seem to have been more and more focused on challenging the pretension of free-market economic theories at a conceptual level, especially as those theories were articulated by the Austrian school led by Ludwig von Mises. But by the early 1930s the political tide in Austria was running irresistibly towards fascism. Polanyi's position as an editor on a liberal economic journal — and as 'racially' a Jew in fascist reckoning — became untenable so he emigrated once more, arriving in London in January 1934. He was 47 years old, without a job, money or obvious prospects. Drawing on previous contacts made in Vienna, he became associated with several of the leading figures on the Christian left in the mid-1930s as well as with notable Labour Party intellectuals. (When later he was unsuccessfully applying for academic posts in Britain his referees were Tawney, Lindsay, Cole and Mannheim, a battery that might seem capable of reducing any appointments committee to rubble.) He was particularly impressed by Lindsay's Christianity and Economics (1933), which attacked the dominance of economic calculation in contemporary society; he even read a good deal of T.H. Green. No less crucial was his employment from 1936 as a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association, conducting classes in South-East England. In the early decades of the WEA there was a marked demand for courses in British social and economic history, its adult students eager to understand the origins of what were experienced as the harsh and unjust conditions of modern Britain as an industrial society. (Such classes formed the matrix from which the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.) Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for his classes. His wife later spoke of how his years in Britain in the mid and late 1930s nourished ‘that abysmal hatred of the market system, the passion behind The Great Transformation', the book he eventually published in 1944. In the acknowledgments Polanyi declared that, even though the book was largely written in the US, ‘it was begun and finished in England' and ‘its main thesis was developed during the academic year 1939-40' in connection with his WEA courses. This report is supported by the thorough researches of Gareth Dale (who also contributes a helpful introduction to this new edition): ‘It was as drafts of economic history lectures [for his classes] that the principal theses of the book that was to make his name were first jotted down.' Tellingly, one of the possible titles for the book that Polanyi favoured (before he was talked out of it by his American publisher) was ‘Freedom from Economics', an odd phrase that nonetheless captured the essence of what was, arguably, to be his lifelong quest (‘The Liberal Utopia' was another rejected candidate).
Source: Stefan Collini on The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi at LRB
The true power of AI deepfakes is not what you think
Alberto Romero ...So it seems people might be better off abandoning their brittle defenses against the deepfake deception threat. They'll be cheaper over time, they're not a conspiracy, they're accessible and don't take much time to make, and, to repeat a tired maxim, "this is the worst quality they will ever be." Worry seems justified. Misinformation will catch you off-guard.
...The reason is that the real power of the deepfake doesn't lie in how well it can deceive, but in how well it can express... a deepfake is more like satire than propaganda. A powerful new means of expression. Being worried about it is justified—only for a completely different reason.
...A deepfake tells a story, fictional or not, that directly alludes to our emotions. It doesn't intend to change our minds—because it can't. Deepfakes don't change our minds. We worry about how they could deceive en masse those poor gullible others (not us, of course), but it just doesn't happen. We aren't that credulous, what we are is stubborn. And we love to rejoice in our stubbornness, especially when some external element validates it further.
...The more finely attuned a fake is to our preconceptions of the world—or what we believe it ought to be—the greater its power. That's the right frame to look at the issue: we're mostly moved by things we want to believe and things we want to be real; any expressive vector pushing us in that direction—be it deepfake or art or satire—is effective...
...Deceitful information is sterile on its own, but stories that reinforce what we've already convinced ourselves of spread far and wide. In a way, deepfakes—especially sociocultural and political ones—do best what they were invented to do: manifesting our preferred counterfactuals (things that could have happened in this universe but never did).
...At first, they didn't realize it was AI. They shared it because it advanced their political agenda and when the stakes are that high, anything goes.
But then they were told it was AI slop, they simply changed the story along the lines of "it's a good illustration of what could have been." AI or not, deepfake or not, they didn't care at first. They wanted to believe it was real and once they realized it wasn't—they didn't care either.
The deepfake, as a counterfactual, did the job just fine. It is the expression of what could be, not the deception of what wasn't that makes it powerful.At first, they didn't realize it was AI. They shared it because it advanced their political agenda and when the stakes are that high, anything goes.
But then they were told it was AI slop, they simply changed the story along the lines of “it's a good illustration of what could have been.” AI or not, deepfake or not, they didn't care at first. They wanted to believe it was real and once they realized it wasn't—they didn't care either.
The deepfake, as a counterfactual, did the job just fine. It is the expression of what could be, not the deception of what wasn't that makes it powerful.
...Deepfakes, as expressive vectors, are great at reinforcing preexisting beliefs, not at changing our minds with inconsistent truths. A deceived brain is, by definition, a brain that failed to make the word consistent. It doesn't like that so it tricks itself out of that dead end. Most times, it succeeds.
...Now imagine you know nothing about deepfake technology. What changes? What is so different if you never realize you're looking at a fake? That's right, your reaction is the same—truthfulness is effectively a non-factor.
...Deepfakes are the greatest threat not against the easily gullible but the terminally stubborn. They're the finest weapon not in the hands of the compulsive liar or the corrupt politician but the charismatic leader.
The longer we fail to recognize and accept this, the more destructive they will become.
The Infernal Machine
On escaping the doomscroll Molly Crabapple at Substack
The Trump Supporters Who Didn't Take Him at His Word
Truly autonomous AI is on the horizon Science Daily
The Soy Right may be in charge, but who will clean up its mess?
Rob Beschizza at boing boing
...Here's my guess on how it goes: the Silicon Valley faction, the Muskite wing, will fail for basic competency reasons after moving quickly and breaking everything. It will solve no real problems but will create complicated and expensive new ones. In the context of a Trump administration suddenly needing to reconstitute the administrative state, he will blame the Muskite faction and turn to the third faction of his coalition, currently all but dormant: conservative Christianity. It can promise the three things he needs: ruthless order, mass organization and executive permanence. If Elon Musk succeeds, we get cybernormal dystopia. When he fails, we get Gilead.
Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans "Should Just Die Other Sides of a Nobody
this is going to sound very juvenile and shallow but i am actually 100% serious when i say this re: MAGA portraits
So far, Musk's DOGE gang has outmaneuvered the Democrats and produced a governmental soap opera ravenkings, via Other Sides of a Nobody
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A whole new world of tiny beings challenges fundamental ideas of life New Scientist
A Self-correcting System Andy Ilachinski quoting George Carlin
Diversity, Diversidad, Diversität Small Things Considered
"Diversity" Joachim Frank at albany.edu
A Hero for Cro-MAGA Times Sigrid Nunez at NYRB
Bridging the AI Learning Gap Andrew Stellman at O'Reilly
Oracle Billionaire Encourages World Leaders to Funnel All of Their Data to AI (and Maybe His Data Centers) gizmodo
Wicked High-Definition Image of the Cosmic Web Shows the Universe's Dark Matter Scaffolding gizmodo
"Red, White, and Blueland" Mark Liberman at Language Log
Rich people paying $136K per pound for sex mushrooms grown from dead moths cordyceps ftw
What the Assault on Public Education Means for Kids with Disabilities Jessica Winter at New Yorker
There's a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing How regime change happens in America
Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic
No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as "Liberation Day," a moment when, in his words, "vermin" and "radical left lunatics" would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people." Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the "deconstruction of the administrative state," but that amounts to the same thing.
...Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda...
What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk's companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers' rights, and consumer protection...
Anatomy of an AI Coup TechPolicy.Press
Muskology Radio Open Source
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Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
Proem: The Trauma of Gaza Scholasticide Hugh J Curran at Informed Comment
What was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Why does it still affect the Middle East Today? Informed Comment
Maga Wikipedia
The Trump Dictionary: Re-Education of the American Nation
What does 'woke' mean and why are some conservatives using it? ABC News
The Woke Movement and Backlash The First Amendment Encyclopedia
Disrupting the Anti-'Woke' Discourse FrameWorks Institute
What 'Woke' means to Liberals & Conservatives AllSides Red Blue Translator
How Woke Went From "Black" to "Bad": The Meaning of "Woke" NAACP
Reclaiming the Word "Woke" as Part of African American Culture NAACP
Refuse to Say Just What You Mean: Anti- "Woke" Rhetoric As an Exercise in Destructive Abstraction Political Communication: Vol 41 , No 5
Scottsboro Boys lyrics (pdf)
The blues guitarist who invented the phrase "woke" farout magazine
Here's where 'woke' comes from The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
'White supremacists in suits and ties': the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump's ear Guardian
Age of the panzootic: scientists warn of more devastating diseases jumping between species Guardian
Lonely Charts Personals Adam Tooze [lexicon...]
The Essential Joan Didion Alissa Wilkinson at NY Times
...Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn — or apply — the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move — it would be a self-inflicted wound.
...What these platforms deliver is the exact opposite of immortality. The empires of TikTok and Instagram and hundreds of other apps are built on the flimsiest of foundations—a few seconds of streaming data.
...Contemporary academia, ceaselessly warped and worsened by the collision of petty politics and neoliberal nastiness, constantly demands more and more. As researchers, we are expected to produce research™: commodified, packaged, ready to be sold back to universities. The type of scholarship and thinking encouraged by such conditions is not only increasingly incremental and irrelevant, it tends to be narrow and banal.
...Viewing Musk's moves as a power grab becomes clearer when examining his corporate empire. He controls multiple companies that have federal contracts and are subject to government regulations. SpaceX and Tesla, as well as tunneling firm The Boring Company, the brain science company Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI all operate in markets where government oversight can make or break fortunes.
We share the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
...What seems to have happened, and what the pandemic accelerated, was something akin to the beginning of the protestant reformation. Part of the reason Luther was able to so powerfully undermine the Catholic powers of the time was his proximity to the novel technology of the printing press, and the sheer volume of pamphlets that he was able to turn out and distribute. Authority rests on trust, and the more its assumption can be directly questioned the more it begins to become shaky, especially if that questioning comes at a time when the foundations really are shaky.
...With the tech billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump has moved with astonishing velocity to fire critics, punish media, reward allies, gut the federal government, exploit presidential immunity and test the limits of his authority. Many of their actions have been unconstitutional and illegal. With Congress impotent, only the federal courts have slowed them down.
...if you want to get away with something that involves an extremely dodgy process, it's smart to start with the most substantively unpopular program you can find. The humanitarian work of USAID seems largely irrelevant to this administration. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, had a genuine interest in global public health that was motivated by a sincere idealism, and that's just not the case for Trump or anyone influential on his team. USAID is a soft target to beat up on while testing the theory that the president can ignore the law and unilaterally kill off duly authorized programs.
...Affinity Partners, the investment firm Kushner founded after leaving the White House, and Emirati billionaire Mohamed Alabbar will develop a luxury hotel and apartment complex in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, on the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry. Trump considered a similar idea before running for president in 2016.
Vance's primary reason for snubbing the global community, he said, was because the Trump administration believes "excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off." Growing that industry safely and with guide rails would get in the way of profits, you see, and that simply cannot stand.
...It's also true, I think, that Trump has been able to consolidate mainstream Republican support for his unlawful behavior in part because Republicans do not have a viable legislative agenda, despite their trifecta. George W. Bush tried to significantly reduce Social Security spending. Mitt Romney ran on significantly reducing Medicare spending. Trump, in his first term, tried to completely eliminate ACA subsidies, completely eliminate Medicaid expansion, and then cut Medicaid even more to below the pre-ACA level. None of this succeeded.
...he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart... The team was aided in this demolition job by a suite of tools from the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an "A.I.-first strategy," which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts. DOGE is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including "climate change" and "gender identity"—and then block the proposals. "Everything that can be machine-automated will be," one government official told the Washington Post. "And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats."
Trump's first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.
...many companies including Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald's and Walmart have gradually been abandoning many of the DEI policies that have been front and centre over recent years. And the decline in what is mockingly called 'woke' is not just limited to companies or caused solely by fear of the wrath of Trump. Even those once fully sold in seem to be turning their backs on support for a political movement seemingly running out of steam.
Stefan Collini on the new edition of the Great Transformation is a heavy dose of Oxbridge Senior Common Room. Nevertheless, interesting, as one would expect from Collini, on the English intellectual background.
...What they all have in common is that they remind us how unprotected we are from information that appears to be real but is completely false.
...we can't stop the coming tech fascism by spending our lives hypnotized by social media platforms run by billionaires. Even as we try to inform ourselves or raise awareness for one of the ever-increasing barrage of horrors, we are enriching toads like Zuck and Muskrat. As we tear each other apart according to the dysfunctional logics that their platforms incentivize. as scroll through child snuff films bracketed by ads for Adderall substitutes that don't work, we are feeding our lifeblood to their bank accounts. We stare into our LED screens until the physical world seems pallid by comparison. We scroll. Our lives tick by, ever more isolated and disembodied. We have to pry their trap from our hands...
...In a 2015 tweet that remains depressingly relevant a decade later, Adrian Bott joked: " 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party." But I don't want to single out ordinary citizens. Even Republican members of Congress are doing the same dance—cheering on Trump cuts in general but scrambling to protect their own states from losing any federal money. They ran for office with the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, but they never expected the leopards to eat their faces too.
Researchers have developed a new AI algorithm, called Torque Clustering, that is much closer to natural intelligence than current methods. It significantly improves how AI systems learn and uncover patterns in data independently, without human guidance.
In "Soy Right ascendent" Max Read describes the shift in Trumpdom away from the old MAGA tribe of angry dads and obsessed moms toward the "Soy Right" of sexist techbros, whiny contrarians and meme Nazis. This group, he points out, is what evolved out of Gamergate, and its ascendance is happening mostly because one of them is the richest man in the world.
Philip Roth famously worried that good satirical fiction was impossible to write in America because actual America was too absurd and too extreme to effectively parody. In an essay published in Commentary in 1961, he wrote:
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.