The unexpected science hiding in Dante’s ‘Inferno’ Popular Science
Scientists create miniature nuclear fireball to understand how radioactive dust is born Interesting Engineering
Study Finds Pro Chess Players Make Better Moves When They Decide Faster StudyFinds
I Went Looking for the Origins of Clothing and Nearly Got Hypothermia ZME Science
Climate/Environment
National drought severity and coverage index reaches highest level in more than a decade Balanced Weather
Heat Dome Update: Europe Braces for Record-Breaking Late May Heatwave Severe Weather Europe
Scientists Say Huge Dam Blocking the Bering Strait Could Slow Effects of Climate Change Futurism
Airborne Toxic Events
Why experts, emergency crews haven’t been able to find a solution to Garden Grove chemical threat Orange County Register
Garden Grove chemical crisis: Live evacuation maps, closures and updates Los Angeles Times
Ebola
Attacks on Ebola centres intensify in eastern DRC amid outbreak fears Al Jazeera
Over 1000 cases barely a week past detection.
Soon to be the 2nd largest Ebola outbreak ever, and echoing the 2014 mega-outbreak in all the worst ways.
A thread outlining the huge challenge that looms, and some thoughts on what must be done:https://t.co/Ig3tjEZsDW
— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) May 24, 2026
Ebola: The disease of compassion, and the price of when “we” became “me” Your Local Epidemiologist
Hantavirus
Has everyone seen this new NHS UKHSA guidance for ANDV?
***FFP3 RESPIRATORS ***
For EVERYONE in Healthcare
Patients & Staff
In contact w suspected cases
And contacts
I kid you not
Hell hath frozen over
👏👏👏https://t.co/efMMEZqf9H pic.twitter.com/H3PYwW2R53
— Barry Hunt (@BarryHunt008) May 24, 2026
China?
Iran war, China thaw complicate U.S. support for Taiwan WaPo. “U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have been “paused,” a senior U.S. military official said…”
Huawei Touts Chipmaking Breakthrough to Shorten Gap With TSMC Bloomberg
At Least 90 Dead in China’s Worst Coal Mine Disaster in over 16 Years Yomiuri Shimbun
You Don’t Understand China! Sinocities
Southeast Asia
This is pretty insane: the U.S. just tried to literally re-colonize part of the Philippines.
They did so under the so-called “Pax Silica” initiative, the brainchild of – surprise, surprise – an ex-Palantir guy named Jacob Helberg who now runs U.S. economic “diplomacy” from the… pic.twitter.com/RRIT5nvgpO
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 25, 2026
India
Why has India’s ‘sweet spot’ turned into so bitter? India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat
Syraqistan
Malaysia prepared to take Israel to ICJ over treatment of Gaza flotilla activists Anadolu Agency
After Netanyahu, the System Remains Savage Minds
***
250,000,000 Reasons Why Trump is Backing Away From a Deal with Iran Larry Johnson
Sen. Lindsey Graham Backs Trump’s Suggestion To Tie Any Iran Deal To Expanding Abraham Accords Antiwar
***
MAJOR!!
Hezbollah reveals its possession and implementation of night vision and thermal vision equipped fpv drones!
This means that stealth night ops by Israeli forces invading South Lebanon, that were thought to be a solution for daytime fpv dron attacks by Hezbollah (Haddatha… pic.twitter.com/c7ztQBXNL0— Hadi Hoteit | هادي حطيط (@HadiHtt) May 24, 2026
Old Blighty
Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system Democracy for Sale
Labour’s summer cost of living policies reduce it to the Groupon administration The Canary
European Disunion
Major EU countries push for tougher China policy ahead of Brussels debate South China Morning Post
European Gas Storage Can’t Survive 3 More Months of Hormuz OilPrice
New Not-So-Cold War
Oreshnik Post-Strike Analysis Simplicius
Rising Ukrainian losses Events in Ukraine
No EU membership for Ukraine; not even a quarter of one percent sliver of GDP from the rich European pie for Ukraine. Aside from that, Europe is bravely prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian male (and we’re rapidly approaching that last Ukrainian male)https://t.co/TtlsELhzPy
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 24, 2026
Ukraine’s Secret Al Qaeda Invasion Of Africa Kit Klarenberg
The Arctic & Baltic Fronts Of The NATO-Russian New Cold War Are Dangerously Merging Andrew Korybko
RAF jet carrying defence secretary has signal jammed near Russian border BBC
South of the Border
Hasan Piker And Medea Benjamin Served Subpoenas For Their Trip To Cuba: Report Huff Post
Bolivia: Working People Stay in the Streets to Protest Paz amid Labor Leadership Absence Left Voice
all socialists should be learning from the tactics of the bolivian people and the indigenous communities there. they aren’t just on strike, they’re putting up roadblocks around the major cities, they’re actually shutting the economy down.
— Monte🔻 (@bruegels_muse) May 23, 2026
Remember that the Mexican working class achieved these real tangible victories by creating their own political party just over 10 years ago.
Not engaging in entryism into a neoliberal party. A fact that the DSA, Hasan Piker left refuses to reconcile with https://t.co/1Z69BJ5m97
— Nick Cruse 🥋 (@SocialistMMA) May 24, 2026
Backlash Grows as Venezuela Approves Overflight of US Military Aircraft for Embassy Drill Orinoco Tribune
Democrats Suck
AOC takes more steps toward 2028 run for president Axios
The liberal establishment doesn’t take repression seriously Alec Karakatsanis
The Accelerationists
The CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, admits that the trillions of dollars being used to build data centers and power grids will come from ordinary people’s savings accounts and pension funds, and says it is mandatory.
He says America needs trillions in AI infrastructure spending,… pic.twitter.com/YFlKK8tVHw
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) May 25, 2026
Silicon Valley takes its AI pitch to the pope Politico
JD Vance’s Top Donor Suggests Pope Leo XIV is Tool of Antichrist Letters from Leo. From November, still germane.
Screening Room
At the Cannes Film Festival, We Saw the Center of Gravity Shifting IndieWire
‘We’re expanding the cinematic toolbox’: AI fault lines on show at Cannes The Guardian
AI
Our Famously Free Press
The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News? FAIR
The Feed Is Fake New York Magazine
Groves of Academe
California State University renews controversial systemwide contract with OpenAI Long Beach Post
The Matthew effect in AI summary London School of Economics
You’ll never guess the university:
Am genuinely shocked by this anecdote. I cannot recall seeing this ever happen at college in the 1990s. pic.twitter.com/vAfMt5M7FE
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) May 24, 2026
Mr. Market Feasts on Societal Collapse
The Stock Market Has Never Been So Good When People Have Felt So Bad WSJ
Economy
Despite high gas prices, drivers aren’t expected to hit the brakes on Memorial Day travel The Hill
Casino Nation
How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency New York Times. Not archived yet.
Class Warfare
Meat Packing Industry Wage-Fixing Continues with Cargill Lockout UFCW 7
They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. The plan is to take on AI and industry layoffs Blood in the Machine
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Sen. Lindsey Graham Backs Trump’s Suggestion To Tie Any Iran Deal To Expanding Abraham Accords”
Yeah, when Trump came up with this brilliant idea, it went down as well as a fart in an elevator-
‘According to a report from Axios, Trump suggested the idea in a call with regional leaders and was met with silence. “There was silence on the line and Trump joked and asked if they are still there,” an unnamed US official told Ravid.’
All those leaders – and their peoples – know that it was Israel that created this war causing them economic chaos and heavy financial losses and now Trump want them to throw Israel a lifeline? More likely they would want to throw Israel an anvil.
@Connor Gallagher:
For some reason I was unable to find this article listed among all the articles; neither when arriving at the site homepage nor when opening other articles and looking at the listed articles. The only way I was able to find today’s links article was by going down to the latest comments near the very end of an article and being lucky enough to find that there was a comment on a link article that I was otherwise completely unable to find on the site.
Hopefully someone in charge can understand what I’m trying to say and fix this up because otherwise it looks like there’s no links article for today when looking at the article list from the main website homepage or the article list from any opened article.
>The Accelerationists
The CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, admits that the trillions of dollars being used to build data centers and power grids will come from ordinary people’s savings accounts and pension funds, and says it is mandatory.
He says America needs trillions in AI infrastructure spending,… pic
Let me correct that; America needs trillions in everyday infrastructure spending.
Clearly Mr. Fink, probably in his private jet, does not have to traverse the crumbling roads and bridges, nor notice the crumbling power grid that we peasants have to deal with on a daily basis.
Larry Fink may be talking his pocket book here. He has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion with the vast majority of it coming from his equity stake in BlackRock. If AI goes down, I think that BlackRock will be one of many corporations taken down too which means Larry’s wealth mostly goes poof! And it’s gone.
Per the transcript, the correct words are:
Didn’t see the word mandatory. “going to be coming” doesn’t cut it.
I suspect that to Fink “going to be coming” does mean mandatory, because he is certain the spending is necessary, and those are the most convenient sources for him.
I wondered if the antidote du jour was an actual photo – apparently so
https://www.phillyvoice.com/biologist-explains-crows-ride-back-eagle/
Such behavior, I believe, typically happens during spring when birds are intent on protecting their nests from raptors. One spring, about six years ago, I photographed a red-winged blackbird hitching a ride on a red-tailed hawk.
A glider pilot friend has also seen instances of smaller birds catching such rides.
It’s a picture of a crow attacking a bald eagle for getting too close to the crow’s nest.
I see this all the time here. Brewer’s Blackbirds attack ravens, hawks and eagles. I’ve seen hawks attack bald eagles. Yesterday I saw four crows attack a Red-tailed Hawk. It all dies down in mid-summer.
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen out in the bush was a very angry Ruby-throated Hummingbird attacking a Tree Swallow. I was in the middle of their high speed tussle and I couldn’t spin around fast enough to keep them in my field of view.
We see this sort of behavior every spring here in the Puget Sound. We have a high bank waterfront house with a colony of crows nesting in alders and madrone below the level of the bluff. Any bald eagles, of which there are many round here, get very short shrift from the crows at nesting time, with as many as 7-10 crows mobbing them at a time. However, they never even bother looking at the ospreys, obligate piscivores.
@Connor Gallagher:
For some reason I was unable to find this article listed among all the articles; neither when arriving at the site homepage nor when opening other articles and looking at the listed articles. The only way I was able to find today’s links article was by going down to the latest comments near the very end of an article and being lucky enough to find that there was a comment on a link article that I was otherwise completely unable to find on the site.
Hopefully someone in charge can understand what I’m trying to say and fix this up because otherwise it looks like there’s no links article for today when looking at the article list from the main website homepage or the article list from any opened article.
For the section “Airborne Toxic Events” (is that new today? I don’t recall it), a curious event in Japan:
At least 19 people taken to hospital after ‘strong smell’ reported at Tokyo mall
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-19-people-taken-hospital-110947466.html
New section, or returned once again, hard to say. Also, great band. For me it’s Sometime Around Midnight
“RAF jet carrying defence secretary has signal jammed near Russian border”
Did his pilot have to use a paper map to find their way home? Asking for Ursula.
Or celestial navigation. Well, if the sun is this way and it’s morning then west must be thataway.
Or the pilot could use his watch. By pointing the flat watch so that the hour hand is pointing at the sun, then halfway between there and the 12 will be due south. Have used that method myself once when in a bind. But if you have a digital watch, then you are screwed-
https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2013/11/watches-time-and-the-art-of-not-getting-lost/
I absolutely loved that book. I’ve never looked at a puddle the same way since, who’d have thought even a puddle of rain water could guide us.
Though in your case, in Australia i guess, halfway between the 12 and the hour hand would be pointing north ahead.
Well, that would depend on what sort of digital watch you wear, now wouldn’t it? ;-)
https://www.casio.com/us/watches/protrek/product.PRG-340ANS-3/
Have to recommend Harold Gatty’s navigation classic, Nature Is Your Guide: How To Find Your Way On Land And Sea By Observing Nature.
Russia has been jamming in Baltics for almost a year now. If the RAF pilots did not know of this their licenses should be revoked. If the NATO air controllers in Estonia, Finland or Sweden did not warn them of this, their NATO membership should be removed.
Seriously. Kick Finland and Estonia out of NATO. Please.
‘Alec MacGillis
@AlecMacGillis
Am genuinely shocked by this anecdote. I cannot recall seeing this ever happen at college in the 1990s.’
If you read the replies to this tweet, most people say that they ever saw this behaviour in their own college at all-
https://xcancel.com/AlecMacGillis/status/2058698619939606661
But Alec MacGillis gives the game away at the top when he identifies this as happening at Stanford. Colour me surprised.
Stanford was my guess even before seeing the xcancel link. I doubt I am unique in that regard.
The unexpected science in Dante. I have been attending performances here in the Chocolate City by Saulo Lucci, who takes a canto and “explains” it, often in a highly amusing way, interposing songs — who knew that Dante requires Delta-Blues accompaniment? At the end of each amuso/educational evening, Lucci recites the canto. Glorious. What poetry.
And yet: writer Margherita Bassi should know better, as should the cited Prof Burbery. Many of the ideas about the physical sciences that they try to portray as novel had been in development for centuries. Just go back to Lucretius and atomic thinking (Democritus). Lucretius discusses atomic theory, what seems to be evolution, and animal intelligence, among other things that he supposedly didn’t know about. Further, the Greek astronomers had already determined a rough distance to the sun (with good accuracy) as well as that the sun didn’t orbit the Earth. Meanwhile, Archimedes anticipated the calculus.
Closer to Dante is his contemporary Nicole Oresme. While Oresme was a wonderful genius, some of his ideas likely were already in discussion in places of learning like Paris, Bologna, Roma, Montpelier, or Barcelona. Oresme was doing mathematical graphing in around 1320 (the year Dante published The Big One).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Oresme#
Presentism. It’s a problem. Those who came before us truly weren’t that dopey. We have to break that habit of thinking.
Sorry: I am going to violate the site rule and not bother with Leo/Antichrist/PeterThiel story.
First, to clue you in: No, Papa Francesco was the Antichrist. He used to come up here to Piedmont once in while to visit his cousins, and we all know the kind of supernatural shenanigans that happen up on Mount Musinè, the closest mountain to Torino.
So that makes Pope Leo a servant of Beelzebub, natch.
And I am in thrall to the Wolf of Gubbio.
It all makes theological sense. All you have to do is accept me as your personal savior.
Sort of. The Democritus of the version of the history of science and philosophy that became dominant, and least in the Anglo-French world, in the 1700s-1800s,in their narrative of the March of Science and Materialism, as a proto-modern physicist, may not be the real Democritus. Democritus is described in ancient sources as a magician and necromancer, and it may be that atoms were postulated as a mechanism by which you could communicate with the dead (about which, according to Proclus, he wrote a book, long lost to us of course).
Some of the violence done to ancient philosophy in service to this Enlightenment narrative is quite severe.
Natural selection is first mentioned by Empedocles, by the way.
Someone once described science as the kid who went away to college, embarrassed when his parents the magicians come to visit.
And someone else said that science is just like magic, except for the tiny difference that it actually works.
Magic is just science we haven’t discovered yet….
In general, ancient sources aren’t always right, and they often contradict each other. Historians inevitably have to choose and take the parts that don’t clearly contradict the preponderance of evidence and seem plausible.
The sources on Democritus are no exception. The rumours about magic are typical of an age that was prone and eager to see magic everywhere. They are far from being the bulk of what the sources say about him. Taking them seriously is confusing the noise with the signal.
Different ancient authors say rather different things about what the book you mentioned was actually about. I don’t find specifically a reference to communication with the dead in Proclus, but rather to the revival of people that had been seemingly dead. This is then given a naturalistic explanation, with the soul supposedly lingering on in some parts of the body for some time after death. Since Democritus thought that the soul was composed of atoms, too, this was in no way ‘un-materialistic’ of him. (The very notion of a somehow purely ‘non-physical’ soul is rather late – and, for that matter, even that notion, while trying to radically separate the ‘spiritual’ from the physical, arguably still fails to do so and ends up imagining the ‘spiritual’ as another kind of physical phenomenon.)
Inferring from this and similar passages that communication with the dead was the main reason for his whole atomic theory seems very far-fetched.
The ‘physicist and materialist’ thing certainly isn’t made up, but a major part of who Democritus was, and the one that has turned out to be most valuable in retrospect. A much more extreme case that still proves the rule is Newton, whose well-known notions on alchemy, the occult, Biblical prophecy etc. are just a historical curiosity. The current fashion of rejecting the Enlightenment narrative is ultimately part of the same reactionary tendency that gave us Vance, Hegseth, Thiel etc. in politics, and which is leading our societies in a rather unfortunate direction.
The feed is fake–
The technology may be more sophisticated, but behind-the-scenes “influencing” has been around at least since I was a toddler. The primary justification for Cleveland’s hosting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the role played by a Cleveland DJ in getting the “Devil’s Music” onto the radio:
Freed didn’t stay in Cleveland, eventually winding up at WABC in NYC, but his career as a DJ came to an abrupt halt when U. S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed him to testify about payola, the practice of record companies paying DJs to give air time to their tunes. Some suggested that Freed was a target, rather than Dick Clark, because he refused to play white covers of black tunes by artists like Pat Boone. Whatever the reason, the controversy ended Freed’s career.
Boomers grew up with Top 40 AM radio. Even if you lived in the boonies, at night, you could get the 50,000 watt stations like WLS in Chicago and KOMA in Oklahoma City. Censorship and payola were both factors influencing what was and wasn’t played on AM radio. Eventually, the pressure of the popularity of music far from Pat Boone began to put bands like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, the Stones and the Jefferson Airplane (“White Rabbit” !) on Top 40, but it wasn’t until the rise of local “underground rock” stations on FM that you could hear the long version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” without buying the album.
As a counter to this sad story of how money corrupted music, here’s a link to a 1970 concert in the Hollywood Bowl honoring Woody Guthrie and raising money for Huntington’s Chorea, the genetic disease that killed Woody way early. Peter Fonda and Will Geer narrate, using Woody’s own words, and performers include: Arlo Guthrie; Pete Seeger; Odetta; Joan Baez; Richie Havens; Country Joe McDonald and others. Geer (Grandpa Walton) and Seeger were old blacklisted Reds and the rest were not exactly members of the Silent Majority.
This link is spot cut to Baez’s rendition of “Planewreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).”
Concerning the mathematics article…
Stopped reading right there, the first sentence of the article conflates mathematics with science…
They’re two separate disciplines… mathematics is pure logic… science is a guess.
The equations that “govern” theoretical “sciences” are human constructs… IMO.
Saying that pure logic is a human construct is quite hard to maintain
Mathematics is pure logic… science is not.
The equations used in science are not mathematical… just as the equations used in engineering are not mathematical… those disciplines use mathematics as a tool to describe their hypothesis… and the equations are a human construct…
Trig, algebra and calculus are mathematics which were “discovered”… pure logic.
“those disciplines [science & engineering] use mathematics” – presumably in the form of equations, and yet “The equations used in science are not mathematical”?
No, because the variables used… or excluded… can determine the outcome…
Equations in science can be formed to produce a desired outcome…
It’s not pure logic.
It may or may not be pure logic, but surely the relations are mathematical.
y = 1/x² and f = 1/r² show the same relation between the variables, and it’s a mathematical relation. If it’s not mathematical, what kind of relation is it?
Indeed it seems to me a case of form A:
From E. T. Jaynes in “Probability Theory as Logic,” P. F. Fougere (ed.). Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, 1-16, 1990, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Christ alive, that dining hall vignette is as near to Guillotine Watch as the (increasingly blighted) Groves.
Anyway, regarding AOC’s probable presidential run…do we have to? I remember some – if I’m being generous – mealy-mouthed responses on security not long back…at the Munich Security Conference…and if I’m being rather less generous she looked like a deer in the headlights even being asked about major security conflicts. Did she expect it’d be Medicare for All on the agenda there?
Really though I just can’t wait for 2 years and change of vacuous punditry on the potential first woman president and the youngest president ever (maybe that’s the sell, a hard pivot from senility to juventud absolut) and a “””socialist””” president and in any event the only interesting thing about her ambitions is whether or not she’s sufficiently masticat’d-swallow’d-digest’d the soylent green of the DC*3 donorcrats in order to be coronat’d. First step may be unnecessary if they’ve managed to fully liquefy the concoction.
We could do worse than her. In fact, perhaps that’s what the poll reflects.
Holly Mathnerd‘s critique of the DNC 2024 autopsy is worth reading. She left a good chunk outside the paywall. Some quotes:
I don’t care much for partisan politics, but this blows my mind: reviewing the 2022 election the report doesn’t mention the abortion case?? When, if I recall correctly, other than “not Trump,” in 2024 that was nearly their entire appeal even to men?
I really dislike these terms like “indigenous peoples” in places like Bolivia. There have been Iberian Europeans there for 500 years, which is by the way considerably longer than the Aztecs had been in the Yucatan at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and not much less time than there have been Inuit in Greenland and Bantu in Uganda. By this point, they are “indigenous” themselves.
Sort of like the Protestants in Northern Ireland then.
The ones who posit that a united Ireland doesn’t have a right to exist…
No, the Celts (pagans) would be the indigenous peoples of Ireland, as well as Scotland, Wales and UK. That is assuming no current name for the Mesolithic people before them.
As far as Chris’ comment, I completely disagree. There have been settler/colonialists here in the US for 500 years too. Lumping we savages in with the land’s original inhabitants is criminal.
There have been human beings in Ireland for at least 10 thousand years. Celts didn’t arrive until… I don’t know when the Indo-European expansion hit Ireland and am not going to look it up, but in any case far after 8000 BC. They were… you guessed it, settlers! Just like the ancestors of the Aztecs, who didn’t get to central Mexico until the late Middle Ages, and just like the ancestors of the Amerinds displaced by the Americans had themselves displaced other peoples, sometimes quite recently (going by memory, the Lakota had been living in the area a grand total of 50 years when the Americans drove them out, having recently conquered the terrritory from another group). History does not begin when white people show up. The only people on the planet who can claim to be original inhabitants are on islands, or perhaps the San and Pygmies in Africa — both of whom have been displaced. Oh, and I guess scientists in Antarctica.
Someone whose ancestors have lived in a place for centuries are not settlers. This is just a weird narcissistic attempt to make Europeans special. “Look how savage we are!”
Oh, thank god for that.
East European little hats only have to hang out for another 35 years or so then it’ll be okey dokey for them to eliminate all those who have lived there for 3000+ years.
As I said, have not heard of a name for the Mesolithic peoples occupying Ireland prior to Celtic recorded history.
If they live there for 500 years, calling them settlers will be absurd. By the way, the largest Jewish group in Israel, and the most ardently Zionist, is not from Europe. They are mizrahim.
Protestants/unionists are Irish whether they want to admit it or not, their religion, culture and dialect is a product of and exists only on the island of ireland. They’re “native” irish just a different kind than the majority of the island’s population.
An earlier generation would have said that they ‘went native.’ :) But those Protestants would not have that much in common with the parts of Scotland that most originally came from. Maybe in the 19th century but not now.
I hate the pedigree nonsense, too. We’re human beings, not show dogs.
The only way to end racism is to stop doing racism, and that means to stop doing the sorts of racism we think of as acceptable.
And black descendants of slaves and white folk of European descent are, or soon will be, indigenous to what is now the USA?
Doesn’t the word indigenous indicate something useful about who was there first, while by your logic just about everyone is indigenous to wherever they now live?
I believe that it is a term used by Euro-descended peoples to indicate their supposed specialness, no matter how long ago they moved to a place, European-descended people in Greenland in fact predate the Inuit (and were possibly wiped out by them). However, nobody is going to refer to Inuit as not indigenous. Bantu are not native to South Africa either; the historical population of southern Africa is the San, who were displaced by the Bantu, similarly to how they displaced Pygmies in central Africa during the Bantu Migration. But, they are “indigenous” in the Western imagination, because the arrrival of Europeans is supposedly Year Zero because Europeans are just so special.
What term, if any, would you use for say the Aymara people in Bolivia?
I would call them the Aymara people. (Who, if Wiki is to be believed, may be relatively recent settlers themselves.)
“Indigenous” as commonly used is, ironically, sublimely Eurocentric. It only applies to Europeans. Bantu (“black people”) are not actually any more native to South Africa than Boers or Englishmen are. They didn’t grow out of the ground — they migrated from the north, and kicked the San into the Kalihari Desert. But, there is apparently a deep, almost metaphysical difference between their settling and oppressing the locals, then becoming the locals, and then Europeans settling and oppressing the new locals.
im a quarter Czech, likely with some Bohemian Jewry in there, 1/2 Irish/Scots Irish, and about an eighth Chocktaw( we’re in the Dawes Rolls)…with a buncha english, and french hugenots(Davy Crockets brother is a direct ancestor), and a lot of sundry others thar are unknown and/or obscure, to me thrown in the mix.
i came out here to the Wilderness 31 years ago.
and while the local Pioneer Families might still consider me a ferriner, i have never felt like i belonged somewhere like i do here.
thats a big freaking deal for me, given my wastrel/pariah history.
so yeah, i’m indigenous to this place…i got people buried right over there, in the front pasture.
everybody comes from Africa, anyways.
its the stories we tell about how we ended up where we’re at that matter.
my people endured the trail of tears, the irish famine, and assorted other atrocities…”Slavs” comes from the root word for “slave”, after all.
there was a guy with my exact name who was a guard at Flossenburg Concentration Camp…i assume he was related, somehow.(its an uncommon name, even in europe).
the point of all such personal histories and genealogies is to frelling learn from them.
so “we dont get fooled again”.
everybody comes from Africa, anyways.
Except for, you know, the lizard people from Epsilon Eridani IV…. ;-)
Not only does everyone (except the lizard people) come from Africa, there appear to have been at least TWO “bottlenecks” in human evolution which reduced the population to (possibly) very low 4 digits.
Which means that we’re all just basically each other’s aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces and cousins, and it’s just a matter of how many gazillion times removed….
To my understanding, Inuit in Canada do not consider themselves First Nations. Unlike the many First Nations, they moved in around 1200AD. Their claim to land in Canada is markedly different.
To answer your point, though, I would say that people of distant African and European extraction are in 2026 indigenous to the eastern part of dentral North America. They haven’t been “settler colonists” for a long time.
Now that I think of it, Manifest Destiny might be better describable as a settler-colonial project of Eastern Americans, or as a prroject of straight imperial conquest, than as a species of European colonialism. It does not differ in kind from the sort of wars that Amerind groups engaged in with each other; the only difference is that in this case one side massively outmatched the others in technological and economic ability.
“They haven’t been “settler colonists” for a long time.”
Ouch.
“Indigenous” and “settler” are a function of time and definition, so there’s no correct answer to this question. The whole topic is a function of our very short lifespans.
So let’s say indigenous = born in the area, settler = new arrival taking over land, and immigrant = new arrival who lives by laws of existing inhabitants.
If my time window is 50 years, then all children born in the USA today are indigenous to the USA. It is their home. People arriving today from say Europe or Africa are immigrants. But if they go to Israel they are most likely to be settlers.
If my time window is 500 years, the children being born in an area were indigenous. It was their home. And any person coming from another land to stay was a settler because we know they looted the lands. They didnt try to live by local laws.
And if my timeframe is 5000 years, then we have a whole different set of indigenous and settlers and immigrants.
Settlers are good at killing and looting, and white Europeans have been settlers par excellence.
My guess is that the caribou and mammoths, who were chased into the Cuyahoga Valley 13,000 years ago as the glacier retreated, did not consider the two-legged wolves with spears who followed them to be “indigenous.”
I think one of the things we’re trying to get at with “indigenous” is what happens when one culture with superior military technology encounters another. There are two aspects to this. First, the militarily superior culture feels itself superior to the other culture in all respects. Hence, there was shock among the Europeans when Native Americans like Kandiaronk pointed out inferior aspects of European culture. Second, technology separates us from Nature as it insulates us from some of Nature’s more threatening characteristics. Thus separated, the succeeding, militarily superior culture will almost never take care of its new land as well as the vanquished culture did. This was Thomas Berry’s primary concern.
I’m glad Pope Leo issued his Encyclical, but one of its weaknesses is its complete reliance on human exceptionalism, in the form of “man created in the image of God,” to buttress the value of humans over that of the machines and systems they create. This leaves Leo without much of an argument to make when it comes to the “dignity” of the biosphere. He tries so hard not to criticize technology per se that he really has no argument to make that AI’s effects on the biosphere alone are more than reason enough to ban it, at least until some magic beans appear that allow it to function without so much energy and water.
Leo has it right that a major impetus behind this AI quest is an underlying fear of returning to our formerly vulnerable selves who huddled together in walled cities in fear of the lion, tiger and bear. By Milne’s time, children carried stuffed bears who were given life as a bumbling, honey-obsessed fool in constant need of saving, a picture of a bear far, far removed from reality. While perhaps comforting to a child in a dark room, that conception of a bear has as its complement the mindless, destructive picture of the shark in Jaws. What would happen to us if we didn’t have a big enough boat?
While more “indigenous” humans didn’t need movies to experience the fear of animals more powerful than they, ancient humans left behind evidence that they revered these animals as well as feared them. The bear had the dignity Leo writes about. So did the buffalo. Humans had a place in such a universe, and it corresponded fairly closely, even when we hunted with the advantage of language and spears, to the place to which we had evolved as part of this biosphere. Now we hunt bears with rifles and helicopters, technology insulating us from the target of the hunt in a way that spears did not. We have reduced the mighty bear to an ant we step on with our feet, only more energy is required–always more energy.
Leo was too cautious, perhaps too worried by the threat of the Avignon-like schism threatened by the Americans, to acknowledge that any technology separates us further from Nature. The process has reached the point where the most privileged among us are building personal bunkers to insulate themselves from Nature and the rest of us should the protection of our technological system fail at some point. The rest of them can hardly wait to get off this planet that they regard as imperfect and used up. an attitude not far from their view of their own species, as Leo recounts in the Encyclical.
“Created in the image of God” doesn’t help much with that. That concept derives from the choice humans made when they began looking for their gods in the sky rather than beneath their feet. We projected ourselves into some heaven, adorned a human personality with omniscience and omnipotence, and called it the God of the universe. We discovered that didn’t really do us that much good, so we had to bring that sky god back down to Earth, first in the form of man created in the image of the God that man had created, second as God Incarnate, come to suffer with and redeem the people who had created him. But Leo’s job prevents him from considering the possibility that Feuerbach was right, and that it’s time to reconsider that ancient move to a sky god.
One minor correction: Yucatán was Mayan.
You are correct of course, Mesoamerican geography fail on my part.
Stop hating, start virtue signalling! I rarely let facts get in the way when I virtue signal. It really opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
I recall on Twitter that Stuart Parker suggested that indigenous refers (or referred, usage has spread) specifically to pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas who were devastated by disease. Here he connects that to white guilt:
Unfortunately (I’m not suggesting Stuart would disagree with me) what is taken for granted is the divide between “us” and “them,” which I hoped would long have softened into cultural variation.
Those who survived the epidemics had their culture devastated, enclosed by the market – a devastation all cultures suffered, Europeans first but not least. The difference perhaps is that for some indigenous people the shock was within living memory. The loss of traditional community left a void that commerce fills with hollow substitutes – when it’s not actively destroying any relationships that remain so that they too can be monetized.
Modernity undoubtedly has many advantages. My wife and son survived childbirth, for one. Had we even the mad convictions of Uncle Ted how many of us would have the strength to go back? We can’t even bear to set down those little black portals to Hell that every critic of technology seems compelled to praise “The miraculous supercomputer in our pockets.” Dude, it’s no longer 1995. I have one word for you, and it’s not miracle and it’s not plastics: demonic.
Faint instincts of ancient community life reverberate through our blood. We feel that indigenous people are closer to our vision of untarnished Nature. Sometimes they are, though our romantic visions are about as realistic as can be expected for a people who commune with demons. It’s been said before that we demand that indigenous people stay pure and preserved – not for their own sake, but as a reservoir for our nostalgia.
Here in BC indigenous ceremonies that have become de rigueur and public events. Many people (disproportionately PMC white women and Boomers) react as they might from an encounter with a celebrity or a guru. It’s very strange. I imagine it feels very odd to be indigenous in Canada right now, treated like a mascot of virtue even as many native communities are bereft of infrastructure or community.
Attending a conference about the commons as a younger man I ended up eating lunch beside a young woman and her elder. With all the propaganda I figured the thing about elders was probably hogwash. I chatted with the young woman while her elder watched with a challenging look protective and proud. It said, “This young woman may be innocent, but I have my eye on you, young man.” The kind of look that demanded respect for both of them. Later, in an at large session, a discussion praised community gardens set up on one of the local reserves. The young woman stood up – shy, nervous, but with strength flowing from her elder. She said: the garden plots are controlled by the chief and council. They are handed out to political friends. The commons, in other words, was not so common. The audience remained silent a moment after she spoke. Then the conversation continued with no acknowledgement or reaction. I believe when she sat down again next to her proud elder she was stronger. The story may seem small but it affected me deeply. My ideas of hogwash flew out the window.
There is probably much we can learn. We don’t want to. We want our romances. We want our noble savages. We want to be the parents who give to children who receive, not equals who speak for ourselves and our interests, and listen to theirs. Our weakness does not make them stronger just as their weakness does not do so for us. Strength makes strength.
the family oral history had us as part Cherokee, until i scrutinised the Dawes Rolls, a few years ago, and learnede that we were actually Choctaw(who were related and intimately involved w the Cherokee and the Chickasaw, back in the day). so during my Wild Years, on the road, when i breezed through the Cherokee Nation by literal accident(acid and tequila and a rambling soul, hunted and hounded, jess tryin to get by), i thought i was partially of Cherokee descent.
what i found was disappointing….a grasping, hypergreedy culture focused on beating the white devils at their own game. casinos going up all around, back then…blood quanta as settled requirement.
etc.
when i realised where i was, i hoped that i could access that lost Wisdom…but my blood quanta wasnt enough, and i didnt see it anywheres, anyways,lol.
it was soon after this that i lived in my first cave(!), somewhere in Arkansas…dont remember where…to dry out and recenter, etc.
Thank you amfortas, you make me smile and laugh. You have led a wild life.
Blood quanta. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at how race has crept in the back door after being booted out the front. Mark Hecht on YouTube said the Haida succeeded where others failed by not allowing the government to determine who’s an Indian. They decide themselves. You don’t necessarily need blood. Whatever petty politics are probably involved, that strikes me as far better than race silliness.
Blood Quantum (2019) is a great B movie well worth the time. So serious yet ridiculous, and who doesn’t want to watch a bunch of Mohawk shoot white zombies.
My only real experience in a setting dominated by First Nations people was at a meeting of the local education advisory council when I was sent in the place of a regular attendee. It took me a while to grasp why the discussion initially made me uncomfortable: my expectations of how meetings are to be organized around agenda, purpose and outcome were orthogonal to something else central to this dialogue — identity, belonging and narrative sharing were clearly critical, and much more important than anything so prosaic as short-term problem solving. I was initially struck by what seemed to me to be oddly recursive and dilatory orations not immediately related to anything I recognized as “productive.” Eventually it dawned on me that something else entirely was being shared and communicated.
I will never forget it.
I hear stories. It would drive me mad.
I think most validation is actively harmful. It feeds narcissism and borderline. Who one is cannot be put into words (McGilchrist’s right hemisphere again). A truly secure person is simply comfortable in his or her skin. Fostering dependence on external validation is no kindness. I am no specialist but I think this is intuitively obvious.
The story Hollywood tells women and girls today is that they are already perfect but need confidence – which is often bestowed by a figure in authority. In Hidden Figures the worth of the black women was ultimately validated by Kevin Costner. To me that does not look like liberation. Contrast Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Through her actions she bestows dignity on herself. First, when she exchanges herself for her father. Second, after the Beast saves Belle, when she chooses to stay and treat his wounds. Unlike Gaston she needs no-one’s words to define her.
The narrative of validation by authority is the cultural script today – for children, for adults, and for marginalized groups who are honestly often treated like children. Are any of us grown ups anymore?
I would politely disagree with your assessment of Hidden Figures. It seemed to me like those women were quite confident – and rightly so – in their abilities and what they achieved was not validation so much as recognition. But it never felt like they felt like they NEEDED the recognition; they were just going to keep on keeping on, doing the right thing the right way.
The “she’s not a spy” scene was hilarious.
But otherwise, I’d agree – the quest for active validation by an authority figure is detrimental to the questor as it does demonstrate a sad lack of confidence on the part of the questor.
I’ve heard the Western idea of the “productive” meeting criticized from a different angle, that of solidarity. I watched Staughton Lynd sit through a “business meeting” of a Wobbly group that had invited him to speak. After quietly sitting and watching our motions and points of order, he interrupted that, although he’d been a keynote speaker at an IWW convention, he never joined. Too many formalities in their interactions in meetings, he said, and he contrasted that with the reaction of the Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers and trainers to the news that three of their trainees had disappeared. There were no motions, no seconds, not even any votes. Instead, they gathered, held hands and sang “Kum ba ya.” At the conclusion of the singing, people simply began saying out loud what they were going to do next to deal with the situation.
The important thing was not Robert’s Rules of Order or even democratic process. It was solidarity, and in Staugton’s view, there was no more direct route to solidarity than singing together.
AI Will Drink 73 Billion Gallons Of Water By 2028 But Nobody Can Trade It.
AI’s water bill triples by 2028 and global data centers will pull 1.2 trillion liters by 2030. But water has no futures, no hedge so the only way to express the trade is written in this article.https://themerchantsnews.substack.com/p/ai-will-drink-73-billion-gallons?r=wh9r
Rainmaker is gonna be all over the West and the Columbia-Snake River drainage. Irrigation water rights can be moved with state permission, we’ll see lots of irrigated farm land go dry.
Supposedly there’s no hedge or trade on water because it’s a natural (human) right. I think some are trying to change that.
DR Horton is already a scammy builder but this makes it worse, what will they use the rights for?
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/why-hortons-291-mil-buy-of-vidler-makes-such-a-big-splash/
No water, no farming, no food.
So it’s good that the “people” at the top of the “food chain” so to speak, have organised themselves bunkers to ride out the riots and demise of millions of people all around the world. While soothing them with AI friends, and compelling reasons why hunger is all in their head, and hot news about the latest war. And bombing them if they’re brown.
When it’s all over, they’ll have to come out of their bunkers sometime. To a hellish world where oxygen is a fading memory because the ocean critters and the plants that made it are dead too. They’re just too stupid to realise it yet.
“Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system”
Jeez. Over £330 million spent and the system is a hunk of junk. For Palantir, it was all about sucking up all the private data of 65 million people for monetization but you would think that they could have built something usable and not ten times slower than the system that it replaced. A linked article from last year goes into it even more-
https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/palantirs-nhs-data-platform-rejected-hospitals
It’s ten times slower because palantir is siphoning 9 times more data into its own gaping maw.
It’s ten times slower because Palantir is running the foreground task of deciding who gets relocated to New Eden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanity_Bureau
For those who have been distracted ICE/CBP are supposed to be the President’s hammer.
20,000 strong and well armed but poorly disciplined, the usual method is to forge alliances between Brownshirts and violent right wing gangs as a way to keep the rabble in line.
Their recruiting at UFC events shows that the usual program is being followed, Palantir provides the ( Frequently wrong) targeting and the Brown Shirts do the enforcing.
I don’t think the over riding ideology is there and I question whether either the numbers are sufficient or that the discipline is adequate.
A godawful horrific mess seems inevitable, anything like a smooth takeover appears impossible from where I sit.
ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence
https://theintercept.com/2026/05/21/ice-dhs-social-media-white-supremacist-violence/
Colorado law enforcement officials warned their counterparts across the country that social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security recruiting for ICE contained so many white supremacist themes that they could endanger the public, according to internal records obtained by The Intercept.
Nice juxtaposition of the Ames tweet, documenting EU and NATO rejections of Ukraine, with the Klarenberg article, describing how the CIA and MI6 trained a militant Ukrainian proxy force allied with head choppers and other bad actors, currently operating in Africa on behalf of a revanchist France.
The West learns nothing. Use and abuse the population of an entire nation, cause deaths by the millions, give nothing in return, and leave behind a bunch of angry and heavily armed young men, The blowback from these latest colonial adventures is going to be a real bi*ch.
“Despite high gas prices, drivers aren’t expected to hit the brakes on Memorial Day travel ”
Ha! Wrong. Well at least anecdotally. I am in a very popular seaside town on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. I have not, in the last five years, seen tourist traffic this low on Memorial Day Weekend. We are less than an hour away from Seattle as well.
Anecdotally, this time last year I met dozens of Washington/Oregon tourists coming north. This year not a single one yet, despite identical parameters. I also feel the yellow license plates heading to Alaska are way less common than they should be in May.
For the AI rubric – an interesting post from Ava’s Blog about the Law Enforcement exception in the transparency provision of the update to the EU AI act. The cops don’t have to tell you if they’re not human.
https://blog.avas.space/le-exempt-draft-aiact/
Let the Darwin Awards begin
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/25/russia-warns-foreigners-to-leave-kyiv-as-it-prepares-systematic-strikes
This day in history.
https://husseini.substack.com/p/memorial-day-when-israel-killed-34?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=201840&post_id=199180811&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ifc5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Re Cannes, AI, Aronofsky–surely this AI panic is misplaced given that the phenomenon is merely an extension of the heavy CGI presence in so many existing H’wood tentpoles. Presumably the objection is more to robots replacing the “creatives,” but then those latter have not exactly been a priority in the many comic book films where lame banter and incomprehensible plots are propped up by visuals that came out of the inside of a computer. In recent years where computers have been used to simulate aging real actors or dead actors (i.e.Carrie Fisher) the results are downright weird. A recent film set in Finland with Glenn Close uses computers to do some aging makeup and that too is weird.
So as with 3-D or Cinemascope this is likely simply another technofad designed to prop up the creaky Hollywood business model. Actors shouldn’t be upset because sooner rather than later the moguls will figure out that movies are still all about them.
Too true, the latest Superman movie was so overblown with CGI it was irritating to watch. That’s not even mentioning the unbelievably lame dialogue, unrealistic character decisions and formulaic plot. I hate AI but they could hardly be more insipid than what was presented.
Avatar earned it’s place with advancing the technology but we didn’t need two more versions of the same movie.
Russia warns Kyiv residents, foreign missions’ representatives to leave Ukrainian capital
Yes, the Russians have been convincing the themselves of the inevitability of this for some time. The seemingly separate conflicts of the hybrid WW3 that has started will eventually try to join up. A lot like 1936 as precursor for WW2.
No wonder they kept Gerasimov past his retirement date, he wrote his thesis on these hybrid wars some time ago and is no doubt updating it in the light of current events. Next will come the debate on the inevitability of having to attack the European arms production centres fueling this conflict, creating consensus and convincing themselves that they have no choice. And they will be right. Timing will depend in some sense on events in Iran.
Latest development in the ISDS case filed by Russia as reported here last December in Russian Central Bank Sues Euroclear Over Frozen Assets; Will the EU Be Hoist on the Investor-State Settlement Disputes (ISDS) Petard? regarding the funds seized by the EU:
Central Bank of Russia challenges in EU court regulation allowing regulator’s assets to support Ukraine
On MSN free
The stock market has never been so good when people have felt so bad (WSJ)
Ohio lawmakers refuse to protect girls from nightmarish marriages. Men in Ohio can legally import 17-year-old child brides from any country around the world, a legal form of sex trafficking.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2026/05/21/ohio-child-bride-marriage-17-senate-bill-341/90178596007/
‘Looks bored’: Onlookers crack up as Trump appears to be asleep at event for dead soldiers
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-sleeping-2676938699/
3.5 hour long documentary about the impact of LLM companies on personal computing, featuring interviews from a number of companies in the DIY PC space from around the world.
Collapse of Personal Computing | Investigation into the Destruction of Ownership
Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, who is facing calls for his resignation as Indigenous and labor organizers lead protests across the country, could declare a “state of exception”—described by local reporters as “essentially martial law”—as soon as Monday night after the country’s Senate overwhelmingly voted to overturn a law regulating the government’s ability to crack down on protests.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/blockades-in-bolivia
had a mowing gig til almost 1pm with my eldest, and then i went down a rabbithole, as an alternative to the usual gooning on the war-porn:https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost
much to chew on, even if its from a month and a half ago…and linked within that was this, from last october, which i am still digesting:https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-state-led-financial-empire/
looks like 1: trump, et alia, have shot their own aspirations for continuing hegemony in both feet, and 2. china is still doing ‘slowly, slowly, catch the monkey’.
i get a woody for strategic thinking, in general…and china seems real frelling good at it.
3, from the first art…is that it seems iran has done the world a solid,lol….in curtailing the dystopian fantasies of the ai feudalists and exterminists.
and in the second art i linked, above, they adress directly what Yves and Dr Hudson have said about why there aint a BRICS Bancor or whatever…namely China’s reluctance to open its currency in the manner that the usa did, leading to hyperdebt, etc:
“Many commentators argue that China’s restricted capital account continues to hinder its internationalization. Yet this view underestimates Beijing’s deliberate strategy to internationalize on its own terms. Rather than replicating US-style open and speculative capital markets, China has built a state-managed infrastructure that selectively connects foreign investors to its domestic markets. These tightly controlled channels allow cross-border investment to grow without surrendering monetary sovereignty—advancing RMB internationalization while preserving the political and regulatory autonomy that underpins China’s distinct form of financial empire.”
im just a yeoman farmer and a poor person,lol…entirely self-educated in such matters(and greatly informed by Yves and Hudson and Keen and so on…) but this sure looks to me like a viable path to ending usa global unipolarity. problem remains our elites being unwilling to give up their power, and even being unable to contemplate it. ‘epic sulk’ incoming, perhaps, is the best outcome.
from memory, Milton in paradise lost writes about the same event
“From dewy dawn till dusk on midsummers day he fell, dropped from the zenith like a falling star”
My freshman physics final included the question
how high is heaven?
If we know the length of midsummers day at the latitude where Milton wrote and assume satan began with no velocity, we can calculate it…
please send seeds of whatever yer smokin.
i dig it,lol
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/library/poem/the-triumph-of-dullness/
i think about this passage often, these days
palliative, if not curative:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4wFjxGHcBU