Many people engage in "Vice Signalling", where they will intentionally do actions which are considered to be bad according to some social norm or morality system. Recently this has become a…

The Most Engangered Species of All is White People Paul Craig Roberts Hanne Herland, the executive director of the highly […]

An analysis of free software from the perspective of Rousseau, his views on property, and the politics of societies.

Surrender as a life strategy, democracy's bullshit, AI doomers, tiny experiments in uncertainty, Vonnegut's life advice, and rest in peace Om.

In five to ten years, frontier-grade AI runs on home hardware and the state loses central control of inference. So it does what it did with drugs: criminalize the capability and hunt it — a smarter…

I have a folder of RSS feeds called "The Crisis." It contains feeds from Talking Points Memo, Heather Cox Richardson, Empty Wheel and Timothy Snyder. I seldom read many of the posts in that folder.…

GAMA-1 Technologies is yet another company to blacklist. Even if you aren’t a member of the Software Contractor’s Guild, I’m going to share this with you. What makes it worse is the…

Here is historical footage from the German Federal Archives showing the Rhine River during a severe drought in 1949. Months of persistent drought caused the Rhine River’s water levels to drop…

Sunday Asides #101 The Obamas have been outside lately with the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this past Juneteenth weekend, and I gotta say, seeing them and hearing them…

Apologies for posting twice on the same day. I had thought to place this as a late addition to this morning’s offering, Corbyn on Starmer’s resignation speech, but it raises a sufficiency…

Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures: • The deadliest branch of al-Qaeda on earth runs the ground the United States walked away from. You’ve…

Well, it appears the war’s back on, again. Israel continues to blow things (and people) up in Lebanon and now Iran and the U.S. are blowing things and people up again, too. The…

My view is that neglecting 24 Sussex reveals a disturbing hesitation around our national symbols. Ultimately, architecture reflects our values, and we shouldn't treat an official residence like a…

Lauren Southern has an interesting perspective on why the ‘dissident’ social media did not go the way we expected. Yet again, I am very happy I never made Samizdata anyone’s…

Here is this week’s selection of the fools from the past week. It emanates from a blend of religious Fundamentalism with right-wing politics

Photo: © Stan B. None whatsoever, to state that we are dealing with an openly racist Presidential administration. The dog whistles and subtle code talk of yore are no longer needed and can no longer…

And, btw, when it comes to words, Trump made one of his most astonishing public lies recently about how Putin did not help Iran in the recent war. Speaking at the G7, Trump went out of his way to…

The post Is The Fairytale Over For Norway’s Monarchy? appeared first on Life in Norway.

This week’s main blog discussions include … How technology has integrated politics and power There are moments when an unexpected event reveals more about the world than years of official speeches…

Scott Wiener learned that smearing Israel won't earn acceptance from the haters if you're Jewish or support Israel's existence. Continue reading Scott Wiener Learns That Smearing Israel Not Enough To…

The World The Iran ceasefire is "holding", more or less, although both sides have accused the other of violations almost immediately and there are some strikes being exchanged over the past few days…

Loose links Hermes Agent, and Hermes Agent. Both new to me, but look important, because it's open source personal AI. Not clear yet on the difference. Privacy Manifesto. Wrote it years ago. Does…

Someone posted about Alice Friedemann in an online community I participate in. I found her book Life After Fossil Fuels and blog energyskeptic.com influential. The book may be expensive and the blog…

Caolan Robertson is doing good work.

How Russian authorities used Cellebrite's UFED to extract data from a political activist's iPhone, even after the company had cancelled its Russian contracts.

Enterprise AI does not have to be US hyperscalers or on-prem. European providers running open-source models offer a third path that makes more practical sense.

Today I read something about one of Mullvad’s founders, Daniel Berntsson, donating to a fascist party in Sweden. Because I have been championing for Mullvad for a long time, I thought I’d do some…

Geopolitical Economy Report US Big Tech corporations are paying influencers to spread anti-China, pro-AI disinformation on social media. Ben Norton explains why Silicon Valley fears Chinese…

Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same argument as Trump’s. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking.

The line between manner rules for ballot access, which are acceptable for states to do, and qualifications rules, which states may not add to, can be a complicated matter, and one I’ve written…

Here is a short, yet interesting, tale that I would like to report on. It’s kind of cute and helps us to think about our life and the lives of others. I’d like to use it as a springboard…

It's almost exactly 25 years since the EU Summit Protests in Gothenburg, Sweden. The event was, at least informally, called GBG 2001 and most activist meetings took place at something most people…

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday…

The Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC as part of the Theatre 625 anthology series. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best remembered as the creator of the Quatermass…

I’ve written about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 many times over the years on this blog, and the arc those posts trace is worth pausing on before turning to where the…

This quarter 289,878 votes were cast in 110 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 58 council seats changed hands. For comparison you can view…

Kim, Chang, Pham & Iyyer have a new paper on what they call argument collapse: the tendency of LLMs to produce arguments that converge on the same small set of perfectly reasonable, perfectly…

After a relatively quick pit-stop to deal with some niggling ethical queries, the UK NHS’s heavily challenged Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) into Puberty Blockers for gender dysphoric children is…

When Katie Phang first sued to force DOJ to comply with the Epstein Transparency Act, Trump had not yet nominated Todd Blanche to be Attorney General. But because of the arrogance with which DOJ…

The forecasts for the next week or so are definitive: we are going to start the summer quite cool and wet. And the implications for both wildfires, water resources, and agriculture are quite…

Withdrawing its opposition under behind-the-scenes pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawless threats from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the California legislature has agreed to fund…

NYT: The Democrats behind a 2028 redistricting push in Colorado have grown increasingly concerned that the state Supreme Court’s delay in ruling on the validity of their ballot measures could…

Rory Mir and Cliff Braun, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software,…

Mullvad is a “proper” VPN that does its VPN job without collecting or selling your data to various partners. It made a bit of splash recently by vocally objecting to the UK’s authoritarian plans to…

Press release from Police Scotland (26 June 2026), followed by my commentary: POLICE APPEAL AFTER SQUEAGLE THE GOLDEN EAGLE FOUND WITH SHOTGUN INJURIES Police Scotland is appealing for information…

Review of " The Second Estate ", by Ray Madoff, about how the rich have excused themselves from paying taxes. "A system that requires someone who earns $100,000 to pay almost 30 percent in payroll…

To an increasingly authoritarian regime, the opportunity to shape how models describe the world may be too good to pass up on.

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2026 A tool pretends to explain: The meltdown came from various directions in the course of this past week. In one venue, the meltdown started with a set of video clips. The clips…

Why the minority always rules the majority—and the noble lies that make us accept it.