Week 45
TAC: "Many conservatives have declared [Mamdani] an Islamic communist. But it’s unlikely the secular Mamdani, who enthusiastically campaigned in gay clubs, is a jihadist. The communist accusation has more legs, as Mamdani is a self-declared socialist, albeit a milquetoast 'democratic' kind. The strong denunciations are driven by the understandable desire to paint Mamdani as a dangerous force in American politics. Calling him 'woke' or a 'radical leftist' doesn’t seem to cut it, so conservatives want to refer to him as something newer and more menacing...
Enter the 'Third Worldism' accusation. Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua argued Mamdani espouses this ideology in two Substack posts.. The article primarily focuses on Mamdani’s opposition to Israel rather than his socialism. It insists anti-Zionism lies at the heart of Third Worldism. This strongly implies the purpose of popularizing the term is to sell a new version of neoconservatism to American right-wingers. In order to defeat woke, we must apparently back Israel against the mullahs’ cancel culture. It’s unnecessary and unwise to connect Israeli support with unrelated domestic matters."
TAC: "In a CBS News/YouGov survey released Sunday that sampled 2,124 U.S. adults interviewed October 29–31, 2025, Trump posted personal record lows on the economy and inflation.. And though holders of Nvidia stock may be racking in the big money, normal Americans, the hundreds of millions who aren’t overleveraged in data centers, useless crypto, and computer graphic chips, are struggling to hold on to what they have. New numbers from Ritholtz wealth management show just how wide the gap between the haves and the have nots has truly become. The top 10 percent of US households now own 87 percent of all U.S. stocks, with the top 1 percent alone owning 50 percent. By comparison, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of all U.S. stocks. So while Trump beats his chest about rocketing stocks, the vast majority of Americans aren’t benefitting from 'numbers go up' at all.
And then there’s the housing market. According to new figures published by real estate brokerage firm Redfin, only 2.8 percent of homes changed hands in the first nine months of 2025, about 28 per 1,000. That’s the lowest turnover in at least 30 years. Furthermore, only one out of 100 homes in New York and Los Angeles turned over in the first eight months of the year. Housing issues and the insolvency of the middle and lower class were supposed to be the big programs of the MAGA project, not fighting every country over antique religious doctrines. But no worry, at some point all the good-hearted AI and crypto billionaires will surely bail us all out"
WaPo: "Shutdown halts $4 billion program to help poor people heat their homes"
Politico: "‘There Should Be Flashing Red Lights’: Steve Bannon on Mamdani’s Win.. he sees Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City as proof of its staying power — and a sign of the growing anti-establishment force on the left that Republicans would be foolish to ignore."
Mondoweiss: "Take a March 2025 Pew poll as an example... [it] reveals that more and more younger Republicans are souring on [Israel]. 50% of GOP voters under the age of 50 expressed a negative view of Israel, compared to just 35% in 2022. These numbers line up with a number of recent polls, including an August 2025 University of Maryland Critical Issues survey, which found that just 24% of Republican voters ages 18-34 sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians. 'An Entire Generation of Americans Is Turning on Israel,' declares a recent Politico headline."
"@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
I, for one, welcome all the administrative savings 🇨🇦 can realize by not collecting taxes on luxury purchases."
The Canada budget for 2025 proposes to eliminate the luxury tax on aircraft and boats, which was previously applied to high-value purchases. This change is expected to provide relief to the aviation and boating industries and result in administrative savings for the government
Al-Monitor: "SDF commander:.. Syria’s Kurds prepare for threat of war as Damascus talks falter"
The Guardian: "[UAE]'s diplomatic machine is for the first time admitting to mistakes in its Sudan policy after suffering reputational damage over its support for the Rapid Support Forces, the Sudanese paramilitary group that has carried out mass killings in El Fasher since it captured the city late last month... UAE’s senior diplomatic envoy.. said the UAE and others had been wrong not to impose sanctions on the instigators of the 2021 coup – led jointly by the RSF and the army – that overthrew Sudan’s transitional civilian government."
CNBC: "Supreme Court justices appear skeptical that Trump tariffs are legal.. Trump calls the Supreme Court case on his tariffs a matter of "life or death" for the United States."
Politico: "Supreme Court teases taking away Trump’s favorite foreign policy tool"
CNBC: "China’s Pony.ai on Thursday saw its shares drop over 14%, while rival WeRide fell nearly 12% as the autonomous driving companies began trading in Hong Kong... their U.S. plans face headwinds as earlier this year the government finalized a rule effectively banning Chinese technology in connected vehicles, including self-driving systems."
The Lever: "New York’s Sore Winners.. Congressional Democrats from the Empire State are less than enthused about New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani."
"Why Did ChatGPT Hit a Wall?"
MIT Technology Review: "Goertzel was an influential figure in a fringe community of researchers who had dreamed for years of building humanlike artificial intelligence, an all-purpose computer program that could do many of the things people can do (and do them better)...
And yet for all of LLMs’ remarkable wordplay, Goertzel doesn’t think that they do in fact contain sparks of AGI. 'It’s a little surprising to me that some people with a deep technical understanding of how these tools work under the hood still think that they could become human-level AGI,' he says...
We saw this when OpenAI released the much-hyped GPT-5 this summer. AI stans were disappointed that the new version of the company’s flagship technology wasn’t the step change they expected. But instead of seeing that as evidence that AGI wasn’t attainable—or attainable with an LLM, at least—believers pushed out their predictions for how soon AGI would come. It was coming—just, you know, next time."
Culture takes input from religion, but contains other elements other than just religious ones... Culture subsumes religion.
Catholicism could have seeped into the cultural fabric of America, they have the numbers... The Irish, the Italian migration is one factor, but most forget another huge wave of migration, the Germans, 1/3rd of whom were Catholic. And obviously the Hispanic migrants are mostly Catholic as well. That means while growing up every American would subconciously adapt part-Catholic cultural precepts along with the majority Protestan ones (that includes Catholics themselves, they will also be part-Catholic in culture, not wholly). US is a Catholi-Protestan synthesis, not Judeo-Christian synthesis.
Politico: "When Jared Isaacman was the nominee for NASA chief this spring, the billionaire entrepreneur wrote an opus proposing drastic changes to the agency... The 62-page plan, obtained by POLITICO, proposes outsourcing some of NASA’s missions to the private sector and treating the government agency more like a business. The draft, known as 'Project Athena,' not only showcases Isaacman’s radical vision for the space agency. It comes as he reemerges as a potential candidate for the position against acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy...
This has concerned some tied to NASA. It’s 'bizarre and careless,' said one former NASA official.. Isaacman’s manifesto would radically change NASA’s approach to science. He advocates buying science data from commercial companies instead of putting up its own satellites, referring to it a 'science-as-a-service.'"
Cato: "At the center of the government shutdown is a disagreement over whether to extend a temporary pandemic-era expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits... [The expansion s]ubsidizes insurance companies, not patients. Unlike other tax credits that individuals claim on their tax returns at the end of the year, most premium tax credits are paid in advance, directly to insurance companies, to lower the monthly premium bill. These direct subsidies allow the insurance industry to shift the vast majority of rising premiums onto taxpayers. Paragon Health Institute notes that these subsidies have been largely incorporated into insurance company profits. Since the premium subsidies were created in the Affordable Care Act, along with other industry-favorable spending increases, health insurer stock prices have increased more than 1,000 percent (compared with 251 percent growth for the S&P 500)."
"@PoliceStateUK@mastodon.me.uk
How it started:
'Starmer: If you don't like #Labour changes, leave.'
How it's going:
BBC: "Zohran Mamdani wins New York mayoral race"
AP News: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney dies at 84"
"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social
In the latest YouGov poll the Green Party is top on 25% in the 18-49 age group - Labour is second on 21%, then Reform on 19% and the Tories on just 11%."
"How THORIUM Reactors Could Solve Our Future Energy Demand"
That's a great line.. The rich do that bcz they are fighting for their class power, to further its absolute dominance over society, that leads them to aim for the other side's destruction.
Mamdani: "Billionaires are willing to spend more money than I would ever tax them trying to defeat our campaign"
#Billionaires #Monopoly
TAC: "America’s Magical Thinking on Ukraine and North Korea.. U.S. planners need to accept that Kiev is losing its war and Pyongyang won’t relinquish its nukes. "
TAC: "Trump Endorses Cuomo for NYC Mayor"
"@web_goddess@aus.social
.. Wow. Twenty-four years ago I was posting about this cool site I’d found called the Wayback Machine.. that had archived 10 billion web pages. A couple weeks ago in 2025, they hit a trillion pages... I need to send them a donation. They are doing amazing work, and their archive has become absolutely essential to the survival of the Open Web."
It makes sense for sharks to hang around fishermen boats.. Fishermen attract the fish with bait, hook it and pull it, shark can just wait and jump it at that stage and have a feast. One Oz fisherman reeled in a huge nannygai but by the time they pulled it on the boat, half of the fish was gone - eaten by shark.
"@wingsylver@hachyderm.io
I did a successful install of [free and open source] Linux Mint Cinnamon on a laptop at one of the repair cafes near me today.
I enjoyed talking to the customer about Linux, and it was interesting to hear that they had already heard and read about some of its many upsides. They saw this as an opportunity to learn more about their machine, and I hope they do just that.
Windows 10 support has ended now, but it's not too late to find a repair cafe or installation event near you."
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
If you're wondering why I've spent years challenging the narrative that all ransomware and extortion originates from Russia...
It just doesn't. The UK and the US, in particular, have home grown problems.
Dismantle the ransomware economy. Orgs secretly paying ransoms should never have been normalised."
NYT: "In Israel, an Unfamiliar Word Is Heard: Peace.. A new kind of Mideast peace process is underway, as a determined Trump administration and its allies in the Muslim world seek to broaden a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Hamas."
"@PabloMartini@climatejustice.social
The EU continues to move from US tech to open-source-based digital sovereignty approaches, with Austria's Ministry of Economy successfully shifting from Microsoft 365 to NextCloud.
Woohoooo!"
Ally Maynard: "I don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks.
Daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs.
College costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars.
Everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services."
Travel tubers ran into a tech-libertard cult while investigating the famous Malaysian ghost town Forest City. They are the followers of one of those Thiel affiliated "visionaries", the author of Network State.
The name sounded familiar, turns out I shared something on it back in 2021 from a Bloomberg article (below). The cult must have seen the empty city and thought "aha! this is our chance to colonize it, and create a fake country wout government"
"@SecureOwl@infosec.exchange
Speaking to my dad this morning, a Microsoft Office user and Excel wizard for 25+ years.
'What the fuck is this copilot thing they’ve shoehorned into everything. it pops up everywhere and it’s absolutely fucking useless. how do i turn it off?'"
#AI
#ΛCDM #RiggedfromTheStart
Yahoo Finance: "Ray Dalio sounds alarm over looming ‘civil war’ in US — and our power to ‘hurt each other’ has never been greater.. This isn’t the first time Dalio has sounded the alarm about America’s internal fractures... he wrote: 'From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolution is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps'
And the U.S. is edging dangerously close to that description.
The national debt has climbed to $37.92 trillion, with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 125%, up from 100% a decade ago. Dalio has warned that when debt rises relative to income, it’s like 'plaque in the arteries' — eventually choking off spending.
Meanwhile, wealth inequality has ballooned. The wealthiest 1% of Americans now hold 31% of the nation’s net worth — up from 22.8% in 1989. By contrast, the bottom 50% watched their share shrink from 3.5% to just 2.5% over the same period, Federal Reserve data shows"
Statista: "In Three Years of War, Almost 7 Million Ukrainians Have Fled"
Maybe I should make it map to a new name.. "True Word"? "Thought Waves"? I'll leave it undefined, unknown - much like the fate of humanity.
Site URL change. now the name of the site is simply TW.
The Guardian: "US military to reduce number of troops in Romania as start of European drawdown"
I bet the rise of the gerontocracy coincides with the rise of the uniparty. Both sides agree on the main economic system, but they need a modicum of "battle of ideas" between two things, at least the illusion of it, so both parties amp up culture war and superfluous divisions, that increases polarization, then boom: Gerontocracy.
Vox: "[T]he median age in the US Senate is over 65 years old. In fact, American politicians have aged so much that the United States has been dubbed a gerontocracy — a system of government where power is concentrated among the elderly..
There are two main reasons why House elections are so uncompetitive: polarization and gerrymandering. As Americans became more polarized, they became more loyal to their political parties. That meant that fewer and fewer Americans split their tickets — voting for, say, a Democratic presidential candidate while also voting for a Republican candidate for the House or Senate — making congressional districts safer during a general election. And more importantly, partisan gerrymandering, where lawmakers draw up congressional districts to benefit one party, has made competitive elections all the more rare."
The Register: "International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb.. The ICC will switch from Microsoft's productivity wares to openDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite provided by the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior."
Arnold doesn't seem to be fighting against Prop 50 all that much... Probably because he knows he will lose, he is being kinda stealth about it
ABC7: "New polls show Californians overwhelmingly support Prop 50 ahead of Election Day"
#EU
"@Tutanota@mastodon.social
🚨BREAKING: We've stopped #ChatControl.. !
Until a new Council Presidency tries again...
But for now, we can enjoy our success. Thanks everyone for fighting for #privacy along with us! ❤️ 👏'
#HeliumCooled #NuclearPower
John Scalzi: "I have personally found a good way to spot-check “AI” is to ask it questions about me and see what it gets wrong, and so, in a similar fashion, I popped over to Grokipedia to see what its article about me says, and how accurate it might be.
And how accurate is it? As accurate as anything made with an LLM, which is to say: meh, not especially, because fundamentally LLMs aren’t built for accuracy, they’re built for statistical probability, and these really are two separate things. Grok can find out things about me on the Internet, and put those things into Grokipedia, but it doesn’t appear to have the ability to discriminate between what is truth and what’s not. If it shows up enough on the Internet, Grok’s happy to print the not truth."
Charles K.. That is a good move.
Reuters: "King Charles strips brother Andrew of titles and his mansion"
TR purchase of Eurofighters is an indirect admission the indigeneous fighter aircraft Kaan is not ready for prime time.
"Why are most Chinese still poor" #LeiRealTalk
#China #Globalization #Firstpost
The Lever: "How A Pharma Giant Is Looting The Pentagon.. The drug intermediary overseeing the military’s TRICARE pharmacy program is limiting access to care and overcharging taxpayers hundreds of dollars on average per prescription."
Politico: "[T]he Biggest Federal Worker Union Broke With Democrats on the Shutdown"