The Braindump Blog

📚 Finished listening to You by Caroline Kepnes.

This is the book behind the TV show “You”. And, at least from my slightly distant memory of the show, it’s pretty much the same story presented in the same style in a different format. So here again, our protagonist narrates his thoughts and dreams as he instantly falls in love with, and becomes ever more dangerously obsessed by, a young lady who visits his bookstore.

Where it goes is not exactly unpredictable. Not much of a spoiler to say that the story contains sex and violence, perhaps a little more graphically than necessary. Shades of the classic “women as perpetual victims” genre and a couple of other tropes are on display. But, to be fair, the girl in question here is integral to and features throughout, the story, and the first / second person narrative style that made it so compelling to me probably makes this unavoidable. It’s not like the guy doing the talking is presented as either a reliable narrator, let alone a sympathetic character.

It’s the sort of thriller that’s all the more chilling for being somewhat plausible. If nothing else, the story might encourage folk to lock down their Facebook a bit.

As regular as these shocks to the system have become, one or two still catch me by surprise.

I did not see the whole “King Charles is going to offer membership of the British Commonwealth” to Trump. Nor, given his infamous distaste for most useful global organisations, would I have expected Trump to want it. It turned out he probably does.

My best guess is he got confused and thinks that this will make him King of the UK, Canada et al. It’s hard to imagine this is something the American public or their founding fathers would have been great fans of given, you know, the vibes of the events of 1776 and the whole “Revolutionary War” thing.

More predictably, given his deep infatuation-for-now with Elon Musk, he recently an extremely weird press conference about how great Teslas are and how he loves paying full price for them - during which is was revealed that not only can’t he drive but as far as I can tell he has no concept of how to use a car in general. There goes Sleepy Donald, a less charitable person might say. Well, someone did the time he fell asleep during a National Prayer Service.

Anyway this particular stunt entailed turning “the White House lawn into a Tesla Showroom” as NBC correctly reports. Imagine the QVC shopping channel, but it’s the US president.

Senator Chris Murphy’s very appropriate response?

Just because the corruption plays out in public doesn’t mean it’s not corruption

Should that not be enough possibly illegal and definitely immoral boosterism for his pal, Trump’s Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced that from hereon in anyone who “attacks” Tesla property - and there are plenty of protests that might by some definitions be categorised in ways adjacent to that - is now to be classified as, wait for it, a domestic terrorist.

I of course have no idea if such events would technically fall under that classification or not - but even if so, note not “car lots in general” or “any defacement”, but rather attacks “on Tesla property”.

So far at least 3 people are being charged as such, which would result in prison sentences between 5 and 20 years. In these cases it sounds like they were going rather above and beyond the typical protestor - Molotov cocktails were involved - but if this works out for the Trumpistas it feels likely the reach might expand a little further.

In any case, the whole merely-domestic-terrorism thing isn’t nearly extreme enough for Trump’s protectionism towards his new favourite brand of the very products he himself hated approximately 5 minutes ago. Let’s never forget him lumping electric cars in with his shopping list of things he wished would “ROT IN HELL” at the end of 2023.

Included also are World Leaders, both good and bad, but none of which are as evil and “sick” as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Anyway, times change, and now he’s started issuing not-so vague threats to deport anyone who vandalises Teslas to El Salvador, presumably under a similar law he abused to unconstitutionally send suspected Venezuelan gang members to a foreign jail without any known evidence or due process.

In 2025 besotted-Trump speak:

I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla

Trump’s explicit view is that the current vandalisation of Teslas is in fact worse than what happened during the January 6th insurrection. The insurrection. Where people died.

What else? Well, there’s the French scientist who was turned away from entering the US to attend a scientific conference seemingly because when the immigration officers went through his phone and laptop they saw text messages that were critical of Trump. He was surprise-detained in the US for a day and then sent packing back to France, minus his work laptop and mobile phone

Said the French minister of Higher Education and Research, Philippe Baptiste:

“This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister said.

The US authorities reportedly said the messages “could be qualified as terrorism”. As far as I know we don’t know what the messages actually said, but unless there was a detailed plan of action regarding another assassination attempt, it’s kind of hard to believe that is likely to be true by any reasonable standards. The FBI declined to press charges after all.

The French foreign ministry obviously can’t do anything about the refusal of entry but said that it “deplored the situation”. France is now going out of its way to welcome with open arms US scientists who understandably feel the need to leave their home country in order to continue their important work.

A day after the French researcher was reportedly expelled from the United States, Baptiste posted a photograph on X, showing a virtual meeting with an American researcher who, along with “several dozens” of others, had decided to take the university up on its offer.

“We need to continue to propose new solutions to welcome the researchers who need or want to leave the United States in the near future,” the minister wrote.

…

“Research is being chain-sawed in the United States!” said Baptiste.

Finally for now, there was the attempt by Minnesota senators to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a phrase previously used simply as an insult against anyone who someone decides is over-reacting negatively to Trump’s terrible words and deeds, as a mental illness.

Let the text of Bill SF 2589 speak for itself.

A bill for an act relating to mental health; modifying the definition of mental illness; adding a definition for Trump Derangement Syndrome

Subd. 28. Trump Derangement Syndrome.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” means the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior. This may be expressed by:

(1) verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and

(2) overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.

So there we go, it seems if you speak badly of Donald Trump you’re either mentally ill or a terrorist who needs locking up in whichever random country will take American money to do so. Take your pick.

🎶 Listening to Critical Thinking by Manic Street Preachers.

This is the band’s 15th album over the astonishing period of 33 years. They’re still going strong, and still very political. Much of it comes across as a thoughtful critique of the experience of modern life, and a mix of a call to resist it, albeit with a certain amount of resignation that it is what it is.

Perhaps they’re also getting a bit existentially old and tired. But their music isn’t. I hope they keep on going, and if it in any way inspires a new generation to resist the less desirable aspects of modern life, so much the better.

🎶 Listening to Brat by Charli XCX.

I’m sure everyone will have heard this album. It was an absolute sensation last year, and created a whole swathe of “Brat whatever” memology. It was of course the Brat summer. Even Kamala Harris' doomed campaign (remember when we had hope?) surfed the wave.

On my first listen it didn’t really impress me. But as the week went on I found myself bits and pieces of its songs re-entering into my mind, unsolicited. So I gave it another go, and another, and another, so I guess I’m well and truly sucked in.

And I’m not alone - it’s currently sitting at a “Universal acclaim” score of 95 on Metacritic. As well as the catchy pop hooks, I think it has a depth that isn’t immediately obvious on a first background listen.

📺 Watched Russia - A Thousand Years of History.

Part of my probably vain attempt to understand the grand history of what led us to the catastrophic place we’re in today. Everything from the creation of the state known as Rus over a thousand years ago, through the era of the Tsars, the revolution, ending with the rise of Putin.

The documentary aired in 2021 so obviously there is some important future-history that we’ll need a new documentary about after the next thousand years.

Trump releases the last batch of previously classified government documents relating to the JFK assassination.

Looking forward to seeing what, if anything, any anyone find in this somewhat unmanageable bunch of PDFs. Surely some of the conspiracy-inclined folk will give it a go.

The dark timeline continues forthwith as the Trump administration explicitly defies the order of a judge, whilst claiming that they’re doing no such thing for reasons including “it doesn’t count because the judge spoke his decision instead of writing it down”. . The story here is that the US deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador without any signs of due process having taken place, no chance to have their cases heard, to appeal the claims that they are violent criminals. Some reportedly claim that they are in fact not event part of the gang that is the supposed motivation for their removal.

We seem to have no sense of what evidence, if any, there is for this. To legally justify this they used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 , a law which is typically intended for and only used during times of war. It was last used in World War 2.

In any case, they were bundled onto a plane. Judge Boasberg found that this is potentially illegal and order the plane to turn back. The Trump administration didn’t like this and simply ignored the order. The folk concerned are now in El Savador’s “notorious mega-jail Cecot” after have being paraded around for the cameras.

Why El Salvador as opposed to, for instance, at least Venezulea? Well, the US has decided to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 300 of these people for at least a year. Strong vibes of the disgraceful British Rwanda plan here. Except that the US actually did it, seemingly in contravention of their own law.

I previously knew nothing about El Salvador’s President Bukele, but it seems he’s a wannabe Trumpster/Muskian, having tweeted “Oopsie… Too late” plus a laughing emoji in reaction to the US executive defying the judiciary. The post was proudly shared by the White House’s director of communications,

We await what comes next - and what will happen to the role of the judiciary under this scary new regime. The BBC summarises what was supposed to happen, but didn’t.

This incident has ignited fears that the White House is willing to openly defy a federal court order, setting it on a potential collision course with America’s judicial branch.

In America’s system of government checks and balances, federal courts in the judicial branch have the responsibility of reviewing actions by the president and the government agencies in the executive branch tasked with enacting laws passed by Congress. An order issued by a judge is binding - and noncompliance can result in civil and criminal sanctions.

Moving now to a totally different realm - but still potentially involving actions equally as illegal and contrary to the US constitution -Trump, via the usual weird ransom-note panic-post on his terrible social network, says he’s going to undo the presidential pardons that previous President Biden granted.

The claim here is that they were signed via a computerised pen - where “the individual’s signature is digitally recorded and stored and a robotic arm holding a pen or pencil creates a near-exact replica of the signature on paper” - rather than an actual pen, and that Biden didn’t know anything about them. The latter is ludicrous, the former is irrelevant.

…according to the U.S. Constitution, the President has no such authority to overturn his predecessor’s pardons, especially not based on the type of signature, legal experts say. “The Constitution doesn’t even require that the pardon be written, so the idea that the signature is by autopen rather than by handwritten signature seems not relevant to the constitutionality because Article II just says that the President has the power to pardon,” says Bernadette Meyler, a Stanford Law School professor and constitutional law expert.

The method of signing - autopen - has been used by other US presidents since the days of Truman. The Justice Department, under President George W Bush, has previously explicitly found this to be absolutely fine.

📚 Want to read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

…exposes both the personal and political fallout when boundless power and a rotten culture take hold

She is, of course, referring to her ex-employer, Meta / Faceboook. The fact that the company tried to use legal shenanigans to stop the book being published just make it all the more irresistible.

AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead.

Uh-oh, either Cursor developed AGI and the resulting robot decided it has something better to do with its time than doing our jobs for us, or else it leaned hard into parroting the very human traits of judginess and laziness.

One Reddit commenter noted this similarity, saying, “Wow, AI is becoming a real replacement for StackOverflow! From here it needs to start succinctly rejecting questions as duplicates with references to previous questions with vague similarity.”

Revealed: how the UK tech secretary Peter Kyle uses ChatGPT for policy advice.

‘Revealed’ is a dramatic word for discovering that an official uses ChatGPT for pretty mundane and mainstream things in the course of doing their job.

But this is an interesting precedent to set - that’s someone’s LLM chat bot interactions are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests under the right circumstances.

US Senator Chris Murphy details just some of the incredible amount of very corrupt seeming activities we’ve seen from Trump’s administration in the last few weeks.

Murphy condemned Trump’s normalization of pay-to-play politics, where billionaire donors dictate policy and taxpayer money is funneled into the pockets of the president, Elon Musk, and the corporate elite.

Of course it would be ridiculous to compare the UK’s current administration with the appalling ventures conducted by that currently lording over our poor American friends, but I’m not loving any moments where similarities feel evident.

It feels like Starmer’s government has recently copied a few of the vibes in making substantial cuts to aid programs - albeit not abolishing the whole idea that it should even exist - as well as expressing a desire to lay off a large number of staff working for the state.

Aid will be cut to 0.3% of the UK’s gross national income from the previous 0.5%, which it itself a recentish cut from 0.7%. This is the lowest value it has been for over 25 years, and contrary to the demands of the International Development Act 2016.

There could naturally be legitimate and good reasons for these UK policies - no-one should pretend Britain is in a particularly good place at the moment - but any echoing of Trump’s actions makes me even more suspicious than even usual. We have of course seen at least one British company trash their DEI type policies using the baseless excuse given by the horrific words of Trump et al.

Billionaires at Trump’s Swearing-In Have Since Lost $200 Billion

Donald Trump inadvertently improving economic equality a little via his incompetent crashing of the US economy, in this case the stock market.

Their associated companies lost $1.4 trillion in market cap.

Elon is down $145 billion which is amusing but the fact he still has over $300 billion left of course is not. These folk need another few trillion taking off them.

Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation.

It sounds like it’s early days for research on this topic so the headline figure of this effect causing an extra 400 million folk to be at risk of starvation over the next 20 years might not be the exact number. But any substantial amount of crop loss (and subsequent seafood production), especially in conjunction with that caused by climate change, certainly isn’t good.

Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday.

Here’s the NYT’s attempt to catalogue the web pages which the new administration’s extremely censorious former “free speech warriors” have been insisting are taken down. As of a couple of weeks ago at least - I’m sure it hasn’t stopped.

The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics.

They’ve kindly done the world a service by linking to copies of some of them, archived by a third party service, the Internet Archive - something I’m endlessly grateful exists.

OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI ‘agents’

Slight price increase coming for any ChatGPT users who like to keep on the cutting edge.

OpenAI’s most expensive rumored agent, priced at the aforementioned $20,000-a-month tier, will be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research”

I must say, zero of the human PhDs I personally know are earning close to $20k a month, so if whatever you need doing can feasibly be done by a few select humans, there’s still that option.

Sisyphus 55 on the relationship between the modern-day internet and Carl Jung’s notion of humanity’s collective unconsciousness.

📚 Want to read: Pink-pilled by Lois Shearing - ‘A daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online.’

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of.

R. A. Fisher at the Indian Statistical Congress, Sankhya, ca 1938, succinctly expressing the frustration of the way of working that persists in many stats-oriented jobs even today.

📚 Finished reading The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You by Ricken Lazlo Hale.

After finishing the Lumon Industries staff handbook, I ploughed on immediately to the second Severance mini-book. It’s the famous and much-heralded work of the revolutionary scribe, Dr. Ricken. At least the few chapters that so far he was able to release so far.

Viewers of the series will be drawn in from the first incredible sentence:

It’s said that as a child, Wolfgang Mozart killed another boy by slamming his head in a piano.

If that thought distresses you, well, you’ve no choice but to read on really, have you?

It’s free on Apple Books, and also available in audio book form.

Since I last looked at the news, it seems that the US has unilaterally decided to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, further hampering their ability to defend themselves. I’m not sure what it means for us in the UK with regards to Five-Eyes.

Doubling up the cruelty, Trump’s administration is also planning on revoking the legal status of nearly quarter of a million Ukrainians who had quite legally fled from the increasingly war-torn country to the US, the end point of which presumably being that they get deported right back into the warzone. Similar rules will apply to even greater quantities of immigrants from other jurisdictions.

📚 Finished reading Severance - The Lexington Letter by Anonymous.

OK, this might be something of a stretch to call a book, but I need to pad my read list somehow! It’s a 43-page official spinoff of what might be the best show on TV since the beginning of time as far as I’m currently concerned, Severance. I think it was released around episode 4 or 5 of season 1, so if you’ve watched at least up to there it’s safe to give it a read.

It start off with the premise of an ex-Lumon employee emailing a newspaper to express some concerns; and ends with a reproduction of the Lumon Industries employee handbook. What’s not to love?

As far as I know it’s only technically available on Apple Books (for free) - but if you’re not an Apple user then there’s a PDF version on the Severance wiki.

Big pharma company GSK - a British company based in, under the jurisdiction, and listed on the stock market of the UK - becomes the first British company I’ve noticed that is using the election of a foreign leader, Donald Trump, and his ridiculous preferences and policies as an excuse to ‘pause’ their own diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

References to “diversity, equity and inclusion”, present as late as 19 February according to the Internet Archive, were changed to merely “inclusion” on one section of GSK’s website.

Mentoring groups for women have been put on hold, as has a social mobility programme in the UK that works with students from less-privileged socioeconomic groups to support them entering the workplace, according to sources. Charitable activities with a diversity element are also under review.

Presumably this is entirely unrelated to the issue of money, given they’re currently considering raising the annual salary of their Chief Executive from around £11 million to £22 million on the basis that the former is “insufficient either to reward her performance, or to provide the appropriate capacity for succession”.

📚 Finished reading The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis.

If you’re one of the millions of people who previous watched the famous documentary “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” then you’ll know this story. I covered it here so won’t go into detail. But in summary, the Post Office introduced a new computer system to their post offices that had bugs resulting in it showing perceived discrepancies between the amount of stock and money a post office should in theory have in hand vs how much it actually did.

Some of these discrepancies constituted huge losses which, despite the protestations of their workers, some of whom had diligently called the IT helpline hundreds of times to report the system error, the Post Office typically assumed was the result of theft by the staff who worked there rather than take the time to actually investigate what had happened - or even let the accused investigate properly.

Said staff were thus prosecuted. Some were thrown into jail. The people concerned lost their business, their livelihood, sometimes their family, their mental and physical health or even, in the most extreme cases, their lives when they simply couldn’t cope with the shame, destitution and other consequences that such unfair prosecutions brought upon them.

It of course turned out that the computer system did have bugs, several of which the Post Office high-ups explicitly knew about. They deliberately covered it up, lying to the people accused and the courts that they were prosecuted in. And this, after several years of becoming an ever larger travesty of justice, was finally proved via the extremely hard work of the people accused along with a few allies, turning these events into possibly one of the biggest scandals in the UK’s recent history.

Nick Wallis, the author of this book, was one of the few journalists who’d taken an interest in this story several years before it came to a head. This book - subtitled “The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail” - presents an extremely detailed retelling of the story and the campaign to do what was possible to give at least some justice to the people that suffered from the Post Office’s incompetence and deception. Over 500 pages long, so perhaps only for the fairly committed - but these people undoubtedly deserve to heard their stories told in full.

Elon Musk supports the idea that the US should leave both NATO and the United Nations.

Of course they’ve already started the process of leaving the World Health Organisation.

Has an country ever seemed so intent moving from thinking it’s on the top of the global geopolitical pile (at least by some measures) to such a close-minded and insular wannabe-pariah state?