Here's a summary of the Iran war in Trump's own words (so it's messy). Also, I think it's what wars in general look like from now on for the rest of the century.
National Reflector Day (Heijastinpäivä) will be celebrated on Wednesday, October 1. The day serves as a reminder of the importance of wearing reflectors and encourages people to stay visible in traffic during dark hours.
Early in the speech she speaks in favour of acceleration (of economic growth and activity) and against "goldplating". Especially the latter has been a massive problem that tanked the reputation of EU in newer member countries. As usual, it is too little too late, while trying to give the false impression as if the initiative is now from the commissars themselves. No, the commissars were the brakeblock for decades.
Well, not an all-bad speech, I guess. For example nice to see a rapprochement with Canada. I have not made it to the end yet.
Some 10 days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive move against Israel, but did not update Israeli security leaders and did nothing with the information, according to a report on Tuesday.
An Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed the Haaretz newspaper’s report to The Times of Israel later Tuesday, and said the warning came during a phone call between the two leaders.
I heard quite early in the war that Netanyahu and/or Mossad knew about the attack plans and let it happen in order to wipe clean the prime riviera real estate that Gaza is. Now that it's in Israeli newspapers, there's no walking it back.
Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday to approve a list of polling sites for the November elections that included 92 fewer sites than the 2022 midterms. [...] Commissioners voted along party lines...
Historically a Republican stronghold, Tarrant County has shown occasional signs of trending purple as voters narrowly supported Democratic candidates at the top of the statewide ballot in recent elections. Democratic Sen. Taylor Rehmet’s landslide victory in the northern half of Tarrant County in a special election in January, followed by unusually high voter turnout in the March primaries, spurred Democrats’ hopes of victory in November.
Only black+poor areas have too few polling stations. It should be well known by now that in America the overpopulated polling stations are part of the overall disenfranchisement plan. Did you know that in Georgia it is illegal to distribute water to people in queue?
I say it should be well known because famous gerrymandering itself points to the peculiar American political principle: Politicians choose their voters, not vice versa. In harmony with this principle, Trump has ramped up the gerrymandering wars and is going to stifle mail-in ballots in precisely targeted ZIP codes that are known for voting Democrat. His own province of residence, Florida, will have no changes when it comes to mail-in voting, because they reliably vote Republican. Moreover, Trump himself always votes by mail.
Other topics raised by Trump in the name of good old voter disenfranchisement are voter registration and identification, known to affect precisely black+poor areas again. Trump is right now federalising voter lists, putting voter eligibility checking under his own control - and he of course will check only voters from undesirable ZIP codes. Historical methods of voter disenfranchisement include literacy tests and poll tax.
By the way, the wonders are such that Americans have no clue what it means to have a representative representation. In discussions among Americans that I have seen, they come up with all sorts of ideas to make the "system" representative, but they consistently build it around the assumption of a two-party system and they never for love of God touch the role of the president. They never address the most acute problem they have right now - unchecked presidency - and it never occurs to them to introduce proportional elections.
A "voting district" is the organism that organizes the physical act of voting and all that entails. There are no geographical restrictions in which candidates you can vote for.
It matters because surely you remember the gigantic voting lines in America?
I see. So in your neighbourhood there's just one voting station per voting district? Not so here. Every voting district has as many voting stations/locations as needed to serve the voters who can be expected show up in person on the election day in that district. And as such there's no re-districting to accommodate population movements, but there can be re-scheduling of voting locations. Normally, every (public) school house and "culture house" is a voting location and some more places if need be.
Anyway, given the shape and size of American voting districts, you didn't think that those districts in America have just one voting station/location, did you?
A voting district [...] should strive to be neither too far away for its voters nor serve too many people, which would cause lines.
What does it matter if a voting district serves too many people? It probably does in some federal system, but in a unitary multi-party parliamentary democracy politicians don't serve the people of their respective voting districts anyway. The candidates select their voting districts based on wherever they have the greatest chance of collecting most votes - the number of votes serves the party.
Of course, legally the candidates are allowed to run only in the district of their primary residence, but they have some form of residence in all districts and they select whichever is most opportune to make primary for next elections. It admittedly is a form of gerrymandering again (and in USA it goes on in addition to redistricting), but at least it's entirely the political candidate's job to go through these motions, instead of for the voter to wonder what kind of district he is going to wake up this time around. Isn't this residence lottery happening in Benelux?
CityNerd is of course not fixing anything here. He just gerrymanders based on his own preferences. Here are some hallmarks of gerrymandering that he retains: - Presupposing urban versus rural political divide and making it central to redistricting - Assuming that two parties are forever and that the districting must reflect it - Aiming to capture a given political alignment within every district
Here's how to really fix gerrymandering. First, make no assumptions about the political preferences of the population in a given place and do not use it as a basis of anything. Second, make no assumptions about the party structure in the country. In fact, to encourage proper multi-party democracy with a shifting political landscape, introduce proportional elections in each district. Third, stop re-districting. Simply let the administrative county borders serve as districts.
I was wrong about Sahra Wagenknecht. I thought she was a sufficiently principled leftie to never collaborate with fascists. But her break from Die Linke creates a fissure on the political landscape where BSW has to compete while Die Linke is also around. BSW's very narrow failure to push through into Bundestag has left Wagenknecht very angry and now she is scheming with AfD. The support for AfD is now well over the critical mass to grab power, unless *all* other parties counteract AfD in unison. And not all do.
Wagenknecht should know history. When the far/populist right gain power, the populist left is among their very first victims. Collaboration that yields the intended outcome will be promptly punished, not rewarded.
The test is De officiis by Cicero. For example the so-called grain ship dilemma, as explained in the video. It is not really a dilemma: To do predatory commerce or not?
De officiis has been on my to-read list for half a year. The book club is moving slow. I have read some of Cicero's disputations, and found him a sleazy manipulator when it comes to legal and contractual matters. We'll see if De officiis paints a different picture or at least introduces enough nuance.
In principle destructive scanning can be a perfectly normal part of mass digitization.
Of mass digitization of pulp, yes, but not of rare books.
A Study in Scarlett, a long essay about that everybody's beloved Gone with the Wind is actually Southern Lost Cause nostalgia propaganda, sanitised and polished for publication via careful pre-screening by editors. Margaret Mitchell was influenced by the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr., who gave us The Clansman, the book that yielded the movie The Birth of a Nation that brought back KKK in all its glory. There's more to the story, such as Mitchell's interesting jazz cabaret socialite career, so give the essay a read.
I liked Gone with the Wind. I was attracted by the (occasionally quite) evident sarcasm with which Scarlett O'Hara was depicted. The character of Scarlett seemed rather light-headed, rightly mockable, so the sarcasm looked well placed. The essay reveals two things I had no idea about. One: Scarlett represents some of the worst aspects of Mitchell herself - except she does not think of those aspects as the worst, but as sort of socially normalish coquetterie, mockable but easily forgivable little sins. Two: Scarlett was not intended to be the main heroine by Mitchell. The pure and delicate Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland in the movie) was.
AI companies are purchasing physical books in bulk, including rare and out-of-print titles, then using high-speed machines to cut the spines and scan the pages before disposing of the originals, according to court documents and industry reports.
Court filings unsealed in connection with a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic detailed Project Panama, which began in early 2024.
An internal planning document stated that “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The same document added that “We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this. This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.”
In a June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California held that digitizing legally purchased print books and using the resulting digital copies to train large language models was fair use. The judge noted that the process replaced the print copies with digital versions without adding new copies or redistributing them. Anthropic later settled related claims involving pirated digital books for $1.5 billion.
The implosion of the AI bubble should arrive soon. AI deserves to crash and burn.
But yeah, Romney does not go all-in into his jokes and this makes him an unlikely candidate. And he is an establishment guy and actually competent both in office and in business, none of which is in vogue anymore. Trump set the new standard: Openly corrupt, incompetent, criminal, lying, and warmongering. Romney does not qualify.
I was very wrong in my prediction of Donald Trump's (second) chances. Now I think times have genuinely changed in favour of populists, liars, lawbreakers and totalitarians, both in politics and in business. A decent guy may win elections accidentally (even if the elections are rigged, which they increasingly will be), but when in office it is mandatory to become a corrupt hysterical lunatic or lose the post in short order. Romney does not have the requisite temperament. I remember that he tried to smuggle himself into Trump's administration both the first and second time, but was rejected both times because he is just not enough of a scum sleazebag — no sex scandals, no open racism and selfish thievery, therefore worthless.
There's another nice initiative - Epstein Wiki. Currently, charges are piling on this personage, so some legal action should unfold soon https://epsteinwiki.com/knowledge-base/lesley-groff/ (I know, still far from getting to the main culprit, namely Donald Trump)
In a new study, researchers from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, have detailed a sustainable, cost-effective method of selectively extracting gold from electronic waste or e-waste.
“The fact I love the most is that we’re using a food industry byproduct to obtain gold from electronic waste,” said Raffaele Mezzenga, the study’s corresponding author. “You can’t get more sustainable than that!”
The food industry byproduct Mezzanga is referring to is whey, the watery portion of milk that separates from the curds when making cheese. Here, the researchers turned this dairy waste into a matrix of protein amyloid fibrils they used as an adsorbent to selectively remove gold from e-waste.
Under acidic conditions and high temperatures, the whey proteins were denatured – the destruction of the protein’s structure into a looser, more random one – causing them to aggregate into nanofibrils in a gel. The gel was dried and formed into a sponge.
Ruhrgebiet is, more or less officially, the urbanised area around the river Ruhr, from Dortmund to Duisburg, plus Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, and (mostly rural) Sauerland. My range for this vacation was wider because my penpal in Germany recommended exploring Hellweg whose one end is Aachen and the other end Königsberg.
Based on my investigations and inspections, besides Zons (which has well-preserved stretches of the wall) there is a short section of medieval city wall in Hattingen.
Additionally, I visited Altes Dorf Westerholt, which is quite a sight in its own right. All around Westerholt there are streets named "wall" - really no wall whatsoever, just streets named "wall" marking where the wall used to be. This does not qualify as any sort of wall, but easily confuses AI. Also, AI gets hazy-dazy-hallucinaty about historical former walls that used to be there until, say, the 30-year war or Napoleonic-Bismarckian overhauls or world war bombings.
Other than that, there are many scattered medieval towers preserved in many places. They don't qualify either.
Who's been to Ruhrgebiet? I have now. I blazed through as many cities as I could, from Dortmund to Aachen. Here's one city I did not get to.
It's Zons am Rhein that is the sole medieval city *with city walls* in Ruhrgebiet. I discovered it by independent research (i.e. AI did not help despite a dozen tries; it mostly lied about city walls in other cities) too late to have time for it. So I have to go back some day to see it.
