Second map with more of a gradient of plague species reservoirs courtesy Mahmoudi 2021 et al:

RT @BlisterPearl: Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. But if it had headquarters, it'd be Arlington National cemetery. There are…

Had Carl Sagan lived to see the dawn of social media, he would have realized that the seduction of television media was only a mild simulacrum of "do your own research." Profit motive has moved from lowest common denominator mainstream views, to digging into individual piles of refuse and scavenging from the most gullible tranches of the population you can find.

Historically, high trust societies spawn from abundance and openness. When societies(or people) are preoccupied with protectiveness, high trust experiences a negative spiral even within the "trusted" group as the perception of common humanity decreases.

Re: On AI companies (@AnthropicAI) destroying books Even if your premise that all information is somehow retained was true, AI will almost always resort to a derivative form of information. When you ask AI to repeat verbatim parts of a book or a conceptualization of an idea presented in a book, you usually won't get the copyrighted material but typically a simulacrum of the real idea. The knowledge is incorporated in parameters but diluted/aggregated(by necessity for models to be efficient). You can't really replace reading a full book from cover to cover. You won't read a Wikipedia article and get the same knowledge, because what's scraped away as peripheral is often part of a narrative arc that adds to the thesis in a meaningful way; and AI is worse than that.

I wonder if there's a point where as an artist you become so disconnected from your success you start to lose sight of what gained you traction. The goal of artistic endeavor isn't "efficiency" or to "put out the best product" by itself, but to reflect in your own creation the process of effort in ideation, and to encapsulate your agency in your work. AI art may be aesthetically pleasing on occasion, but it is more like a hollow shell without the imprint of effort, idiosyncratic error or flourish, the beauty of the inadequacies of human labor as it strays, and the conscious moral emotion of the author.

The idea that everything in a "free" market is consensual and voluntary is a pleasant fairy tale, on the basis that human ingenuity and hard work can overcome any monopoly if only one pulls the correct levers and employs the right variables to attain outcomes. The reality on the ground is that human interactions and allocation of resources are always lopsided. A small increase in intelligence or starting resources and connections are arbitrary things, and they create results that are disproportionate to one's needs and necessarily exploitative to those with less. Part of this is voluntary acquiescence to the unequal biological and physical distribution of the world, the scale of it derived from 8 billion human beings' labor and mental strain is not. No one consents to living in a shanty town working for pennies to afford food while living with cancer derived from a capitalism that dumped toxins into the lake, simply because growth and expediency was for the "greater good" and progress.

Xi Jinping referencing the Thucydides Trap is only considered aggressive if you think China's trajectory is not aligned with surpassing the United States, or that this is purely hypothetical. If you think China is, then it's a statement of pragmatism to avoid catastrophe. Trump and those in his orbit don't read, so they probably asked the translator for a redo. This isn't a just a whimsical theory, and it has occurred from Rome v Carthage, Ming v Jurchens, Germany v Triple Entente, Japan v Western Colonies, Britain v Tsarist Russia, Egypt v Hittites. As the surface area and points of contact increase, so expands a total economy and total war effort at containment or expansion.

There is a critical difference between the nascent formation of a faceless cause that requires momentum to build and resurgent, revanchist patriotism in the face of contraction. The suit, the contrived confidence, and the impending fall all indicate we are in that late stage contraction, where nationalism is an angry and reactive mechanism to a changing and more multicultural world. Ascending civilizations and ideas move with a quiet confidence. They don't dress up fancy and clutch their flag with quite the same longing; they struggle, they push against impending forces, and they talk less than they act. A person that is confident in their nation does not need to walk around complaining about immigrants, wave a flag around wildly, or claim that their skin color makes them one-of-a-kind. These are desperate qualifications made for a contracting state and power demographic; the lizard's frills go up when it is scared and intimidated.

The Treatment.

I just love the absolute, cemetery-level seriousness treatment they give one of the most absurd aspects of this Presidency. The man is an absolute loon but this is a matter of linguistic nuance. youtube.com/watch?v=Mn8XpolM…

One of the problems with Trump's "truthful hyperbole" is that his bluffs set the stage for accepting something lesser, but still abominable. It's bartering a high offer so that you will accept more when the strike happens; anything less than absolute widescale destruction to civilian infrastructure. If the Trump campaign had been honest that half of the things proposed in 2025, and then all of the things that have come after in tariffs, defunding science and institutions that save lives, ICE militarization/deportations of non-criminals, and aggressive militarism, he unlikely would have been elected. These were pre-campaign underpromises, but over the course of the Presidency, his continued upping the stakes has desensitized us to the stuff he has actually done. We shouldn't wipe our foreheads in relief if it turns out he bombs three periphery military-critical energy facilities that are also used by civilians at 8 pm.

Most being honest would consider the current populist Trumpian field to be politically nihilistic in nature, or at the very least anti-institutional and status quo. If you consider that large gamut of "views"(as below) to consist of everything from vaccine microchips, to groypers, to white nationalists, all the way to ordinary fiscal conservatives without a particular social bent, that "acceptance of many views" is built on dissatisfaction of the system. A natural reaction to political nihilism is to narrow and guardpost ideas that truly matter, to establish stricter moral claims as the entry point to reinforce institutionalism and *structure*. I wouldn't say it's impossible for liberals or progressives to go too far in this respect, but it's also reasonable to have those limits on entry if the basis is to create a standard of civic ethics and expanding human representation.

Taking aside that the larger intended main doors were disabled for practical reasons, the criticism is that you have a very large facade where none of the facing architecture has any utility at all. There is an aspect of subtlety in maintaining a small amount of functional space on a face, with the majority being monumental/artistic. At any rate these are smaller criticisms than the height of the building(which breaks lines of sight, reduces the overlook of Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, and looks completely disjointed next to the main building) and the asymmetry of the structure itself. I'll never be able to look at the side again without knowing that behind those faux windows is a phalanx of bathroom stalls.