The Braindump Blog

Here, for disgusting posterity, is the infamous video of Vance and Trump behaving once again like petulant babies by publicly accusing Zelenskyy of being “ungrateful”, amongst other things.

And the transcript, for the wise amongst us who don’t want the visual image scarring our memories for the rest of time. It was shocking to watch.

Especially Vance’s “contribution” almost feels like some kind of sick pre-planned skit from Vance. Which is not out of the question to me given I think I read somewhere (full disclosure: I can’t find it, so I might be wrong) that apparently Trump and Vance workshopped that unimaginably dumb post Trump made about how Zelenskyy is a dictator together (factcheck: he’s not).

But what else might we expect from an avaricious administration who blackmailed the beleaguered Ukraine with the threat of dropping their support of Ukraine’s attempt to defend itself against the invasion if they didn’t hand over $500 billion of their natural resources in return? Of the administration sending Keith Kellogg, the “Special Ukraine Envoy” to threaten to turn off the communications satellites that part of Ukraine’s war effort depends on should they not cough up those billions of dollars? It’s probably not an idle threat - Musk’s company had already artificially limited how Ukraine could use them back in 2023.

Not that these satellites were being provided for free to be clear; Poland is paying the subscription for them - and so, extremely obvious ethics aside, their deactivation would be, if anything, a breach of a business contract with Poland.

Since their latest temper tantrum, the US administration has frozen all military aid to Ukraine, jeopardising their ability to keep resisting Putin’s invasion. They had already stopped financing weapons sales to Ukraine.

“Stopping military aid to Ukraine is incredibly damaging to the United States and a sad day for American interests because it rewards our adversaries,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom for Ukraine. “I can hear the Champagne popping in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.”

In fact it seems they want to return to funding the aggressor, Russia. The US is drawing up a plan to ease the sanctions currently on Russia. Some of these sanctions have been in place since Russia’s annexation of Crimea back in 2014.

Flushed with the success of reading a whole one book so far this year, and then having pummelled into a state of what feels like mindless ignorance by Recent World Events, it’s time to add a stack more to my stupidly ambitious want-to-read list.

Here we go, starting off with what I’m going to call The Geopolitical Section; desperately in search of answers to what is the world like and why is it that way? And humbled by my increasing inability to answer some very basic questions about the organisation of the planet without looking it up.

📚 Want to read: The World: A Brief Introduction by Richard Haass.

📚 Want to read: Not One Inch by M. E. Sarotte - “America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate”.

📚 Want to read: The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann - “From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace”

📚 Want to read: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall - " Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics". Although a revised version is due to come out in May 2025, might be worth waiting for, all things considered.

Now into a section a less ecumenical version of myself might call “know your enemies”. Obviously, because I’m such a saint, it’s actually all about understanding the minds of those whom I otherwise cannot.

📚 Want to read: A World after Liberalism by Matthew Rose - “Five thinkers who inspired the radical right”.

📚 Want to read: Money, Lies, and God by Katherine Stewart - “Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy”.

📚 Want to read: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Although not if he personally gets any money from it of course. And the biography might be due a hefty update soon I suppose.

📚 Want to read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum - “The dictators who want to run the world”.

On more miscellaneous topics:

📚 Want to read Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns - “The Case Against Extreme Wealth.

📚 Want to read: The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes - “How attention became the world’s most endangered resource”. There was a great discussion of this one on a recent episode of Know Your Enemy podcast.

📚 Want to read: How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter - “And how to stop them”. Can’t imagine why I’m drawn to this one.

Here’s something I hadn’t thought about until recently: jailbreaking my Kindle. I came across advocates of this looking into the best way to download my Kindle book collection to my PC before they disabled some of the direct-download functionality I used.

Anyway, at the start of 2025, the “Winterbreak” exploit was released by “HackerDude” which lets you free any model of Kindle from the shackles of its Amazon overlords.

It does this in a way that doesn’t impact your Kindle’s standard features so you can still play just fine in the Kindle ecosystem. But, as ever with this stuff, I’m sure there are no guarantees and warranties are unlikely to be honoured if problems occur. Can’t say that I’ve heard of many permanent problems though.

Why would I want to do this? Well, apart from the whole ‘because I can’ and “to reduce Amazon’s surveillance of my habits and preferences” type stuff, my main functional motivation would be around the highlighting feature, which I use a lot.

Amazon offers that feature already, but with limitations. Right now, if you sideload a book - i.e. use a book you bought anywhere except the Amazon Kindle store, then any highlights and notes you make in it are largely stuck on the devices you use to read them on. Those highlights and notes don’t appear in your Amazon web notebook, which means that tools like Readwise can’t see them. There are workarounds, but they’re all a bit annoying.

Jailbreaking the Kindle would allow me to install non-Amazon reading software that doesn’t have that limitation - KO Reader seems to be what everyone in that world uses - which might be enough to make me do it.

Here’s a screenshot of KO Reader from its official website.

Amazon also has a weird feature where if you highlight “too much” of a book - the threshold can vary - then your highlights are truncated. Instead of full sentences you can end up with half a sentence followed by a “…”. I would guess this is some extremely lame anti-piracy thing? And I probably highlight too much, but still, I don’t like it. I bought the book. Let me highlight what I want. Using a non-Amazon reader software might be the way to never feel that pain again.

My only slight frustration will be the lack of a KO Reader iOS client for syncing reading positions. But when I think about it, I very rarely read the kind to book I want to take extensive notes or highlights from on any other devices anyway.

An employee pressed some wrong buttons at Citigroup.

The US bank Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send $280

Must have been nice to wake up to! Although apparently the error was rectified within 90 minutes and perhaps wouldn’t have gone through in any case.

If it had though, it’d have made the recipient richer than the UK (total wealth estimated at $16 trillion), able to buy the whole US stock market ($62 tn) and, believe it or not, even richer than Elon Musk (a grotesque $343 billion).

It seems these kind of accidents do happen.

In 2020 it accidentally sent $900m to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon.

Which took 2 years to (partially?) rectify via legal battles.

And in 2022 it accidentally caused a flash crash in the European stock market by inadvertently selling £1 billion worth of shares when it had meant to type in a mere £46 million. The issue there was mixing up the value of shares they wanted to sell with the number of shares. It resulted in a fine of £62 million.

Near misses are of course even more frequent:

…Citi experienced 10 near misses of more than $1bn last year, citing an internal report.

📚 Finished reading Proof of Spiritual Phenomena by Mona Sobhani.

This book details neuroscientist Mona Sobhani’s journey from uber-sceptical scientific mega-materialist rationalist through to seemingly an all-out spiritual seeker and believer in all sorts of things that fall under the umbrella of “unexplained phenomena”.

She’s not always super-definitive as to what level of belief she has in which phenomena, but the evidence presented suggests it’d include at least:

• fortune-telling
• psychics
• mediums
• remote viewing
• past life regression

The book is an engrossing mix of her anecdotal journey, conversations with various scientists and other thinkers related to these topics, as well as, my favourite bit, a presentation of the evidence - including that of a scientific nature - that has persuaded her of her new worldview.

As she says, one book, no matter how comprehensive, is unlikely to change the mind of someone who has little history in believing in such matters - or, as she discusses later - perhaps is in some way, very likely unconsciously, invested in not believing in such things. Her request to us is to take a look at all the evidence she presents together and see if those of us who are not naturally inclined believe in some of these phenomena might change our minds a little.

She is of course indisputably right that a lot of people claim to have had currently inexplicable experiences - oftentimes experiences that resemble other people’s experience reports. And belief in these phenomena is certainly not a rare thing - far from it. She shares Pew Research stats about the American public, whereby in 2009 almost a quarter apparently believed in reincarnation, 95% in a God or a higher power, 46% in supernatural beings. 75% claimed to have at least 1 “paranormal” belief.

It’s also uncontroversially true that our brains are not neutral observers. They’re laden with well-known biases at this point, some of which are discussed in the book. I have often taken these biases to potentially, if anything, provide more conventional explanations for some of the phenomena she discusses, but she sees it differently. I didn’t quite follow how that section supports her thesis, other than perhaps to have us - quite rightly - question ourselves, question why we think what we think.

Another episode of her using fascinating scientific studies in favour of her argument, contrary to my intuition that if anything they undermine it, comes from her background in neuroscience. She details how it’s been shown that you can induce spiritual-seeming states in people through wholly physical means.

Categories of this include:

• Brain lesion studies that look at how people react when parts of their brains are damaged.
• Neurostimulation studies - what happens when electric or magnetic signals are applied to the brain.
• Meditation - and its neural correlates.
• Psychedelic usage.

All these phenomena can result in spiritual-style effects such as feeling connected to the transcendent, out of body experiences, seeing God, feeling a sense of unity, changes in consciousness and more.

But whilst she sees why this might lead people to assume consciousness and paranormal seeming experiences are manufactured quite conventionally by our brain (although we still didn’t solve the hard problem of consciousness of course), her take is that this is more like correlation.

Just because your brain is evidently involved in consciousness doesn’t mean that it creates it - any more than the fact that the TV show stops when you break your TV means that it was the original source of whatever you were watching. She believes that the existence of, for example, savants, shows the limitations of thinking otherwise. Perhaps consciousness doesn’t come from the brain; but rather the brain is the thing through which is is expressed.

She makes two big claims about formal science.

Firstly that it’s incorrect to think that science has disproven the existence of the various “spiritual phenomena”, or even the weaker form of the argument; that it has simply not proven that it exists.

Secondly, that we in any case over-focus on capital S science - especially the standard way that science is practiced within modern “Western” society today - as being the best or only way of knowing. Instead she portrays it as an insufficient approach to worldview building that should be used only as part of a cross-disciplinary fashion, illuminating only part of the picture. Again, I can accept this point, even if recent developments over the other side of the Atlantic don’t make me think that science and rationality are being over-focused on by a certain type currently in power. That said, her book came out prior to Trump v2.

Back on the first point, she notes that the point of science is not to be sceptical of everything, but rather to be open to striving for the best explanation of a phenomenon.

There are inexplicable things in the Universe. A bad scientist throws out or ignores an anomalous data point, but a good scientist asks why.

Some of the most interesting material to me was her summary review of several published studies regarding various facets of the world of “psi”. This include papers on both:

• anomalous cognition - clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, that kind of thing.
• anomalous perturbation - claims that focused human attention and intention can influence the physical environment, so things like energy healing would fall under this, as well as the ability to influence random number generators, etc.

I was particularly enchanted by some of the Implicit Anomalous Cognition protocols. These are methods set up to look like a standard psych study test but behind the scenes some component that includes an assumption made by mainstream scientific materialism - “time flows in one direction” for example - is reversed. Think here of people whose responses to a prompt are influenced by that prompt; even when their action occurs before the prompt existed.

At first sight I can’t help but think, umm, given related-but-far-more-accepted-fields such as psychology have tremendous scientific study reliability problems, isn’t it more likely that these papers involve some (possibly inadvertent) questionable research practice (QRP), weird statistical aberration misinterpretations or similar? But, she would likely say, that’s my background and/or societal pressure provoking that response in me. It’s not like I’ve personally checked all the psi studies. So if I want to claim I believe in the scientific method then I have to be consistent in that even when the results it produces are “weird”. She does cite sources to be fair, so it’s on me to follow them up and see what’s going on. Daryl Bem is the author of some of those that sounded most interesting to me.

She does go through the details of some QRPs - file draw problem, arbitrary significance tests, replication crisis et al. Taking what she says at face value, she reports that the effect sizes and statistical significance levels of these psi studies is apparently at least equivalent to many well-accepted psychological phenomena.

One criticism I might have though is that the way she writes it you could come away thinking there’s never been a paper that didn’t find some sort of evidence of psi phenomena - even a small one. This could of course be the case - I don’t know the field - but I sincerely doubt there’s almost any even totally mundane and accepted psychological phenomena that every single study ever performed validates - at least not one in a field we’re confident is not subject to extensive QRPs. It feels too good to be true. But, to be fair, she does raise the point that if even one of them reliably shows some of the effects purported then that implies the mainstream model of the world is incorrect.

At the same time, she claims that it’s difficult to do much research in this field. There’s a lack of funding for parapsychology research, as well as the risk of being attacked one way or another by disbelievers. People from the world of science can seemingly be as contemptuous to people from the world of spirituality as much as the opposite can also be true.

Nonetheless, she reports that these phenomena have been examined by scientists for centuries and replicate well. I am vaguely away of the work by the US Army and the CIA in the past on subjects like remote viewing - The Men Who Stare At Goats et al - which comes up briefly.

Her overall point is that:

There is substantial evidence for the reality of psi that cannot be discounted by the common criticisms of faulty study design, selective reporting, or fraud.

I am entirely on her side in thinking it fair enough to ask why certain extraordinary stories, such as Jesus being resurrected, accepted by a vast amount of people but others, such as reincarnation, are questioned.

And what does it truly mean that “I believe in science”? These days very few of us can possibly confirm for ourselves, well, very much of anything.

…although we revere science so much in our modern-day society, sometimes it just comes down to whether you trust and believe in someone or something, because evidence is not always available for you to analyze yourself.

At the end of the day, our belief is belief She worries that we often accept what society tells us - saying “there’s no evidence for that” without first checking whether actually there is some.

She goes on to note that some of the assumptions of conventional scientific materialism include:

• Realism: that there is an external reality with physical properties that exist independently of observations.
• Locality: that objects are totally separate from each other.
• Causality: that time moves forward, the past affects the future.

Her claim here is that a perfectly accepted field unrelated to “spiritual phenomena” - quantum physics - brings these assumptions into question. And if you can show that our assumptions of how the universe works are wrong in even one case, well, at the very least, we need to update our models.

She moves also into disciplines outside of the the formal scientific, with the belief that scientific materialism actually starts off as philosophically dubious on the basis that it’s not possible for us to experience reality outside consciousness.

Few people think that we perceive reality as it is. Our brain is not a camera. It’s likely we evolved in many ways to perceive things in ways that suit us in terms of evolution.

…a tree may actually be a collection of vibrating atoms, but it appears as one solid object to humans because it is evolutionarily beneficial to human survival to perceive the tree in this way,

After all, the modern Western worldview may be dominant where I live at the point in time I live in - but it’s only existed for a tiny fraction of human existence. Before the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, it was more religion that claims to supply an understanding of the world and provided meaning to life. The loss of that over time might have come at a great cost according to the author, who worries that an increased prevalence of mental health problems may be a result of this new view of the world

There are certainly various schools of thought that imbue more things than just humans and our close animal relatives with consciousness.

• Idealism states that consciousnesses is the only thing that exists, so must be fundamental.
• Dualism suggests that consciousness and physical reality are separate and distinct, but both are fundamental.
• Panpsychism suggests that every physical particle has phenomenal experience, so consciousness is fundamental.

Her claim is that the idea of consciousness being the fundamental building block of the Universe is a better fit to the data that modern physics, including quantum field theory, is producing than the materialism assumption of matter is.

As she says, one book is unlikely to be enough to shift your world view . I’m also not so sure I buy the whole biographical “I was the world’s biggest sceptic” claim entirely, whilst having no reason to doubt that her views have shifted over time. But it is written in a way that appeals to the point that in recent years I’ve never been able to get over fully no matter how many people in my life that I love and respect are inclined to think in less mainstream ways or even have had some of these experiences: if this stuff is real why can’t we prove it scientifically?

She says, well, I’m wrong - we can and have proven it scientifically. Me saying the science doesn’t exist when it does or saying it’s all nonsense when I didn’t check it doesn’t make it so. So if nothing else, this has got me interested enough to check some of the references.

And who knows, perhaps I will find something that entirely rends asunder my current strong tendency towards the mainstream-lamestream scientific worldview. Whilst it doesn’t feel that way, maybe I, like the author in her previous life, only like conventional science because it makes me feel smart. I mean, not much these days does.

On the other hand perhaps I’ll read the cited papers and think, hmm, OK, I’ve never seen such an unreplicated statistical hot mess, it’s nothing but self-evident fakery. But if I don’t read them, I’ll never know.

Somewhat contradictorily, given her claims of how well-proven psi phenomena have been by science, she also provided possibly the first potential answer for “why can’t you do an experiment to show it then?” that I haven’t found entirely hand-wavy and inconsistent.

It comes down to the assumptions that the scientific method is somewhat predicated on: we can be independent and objective observers, at least in theory if not in practice. But if everything is consciousness, if our minds can interact with matter as some psi advocates claim, then is this necessarily true? Strong vibes - and indeed explicit mention - of some interpretations of the famous double-slit experiment are to be found here.

I’m not sure that it provides a fully convincing explanation, unless we live in a kind of trickster universe, overseen by Descarte’s Evil Demon - something to be fair which might explain recent world events better than most other attempts but which of course has the handy property of being able to explain everything you could ever imagine in an unfalsifiable way - but it’s certainly a point that my mind will enjoy chewing on over time.

After all, as she quotes William James as saying:

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

The music streaming service Deezer reports that about 10,000 tracks that are entirely generated by AI are uploaded to its platform every single day.

They got this number via deploying an AI detection tool designed to identify such tracks, with an eventual view to tagging them on its platform and excluding them from recommendations.

That’s fairly astonishing in itself perhaps, but it seems that it only represents 10% of all uploads, so presumably they get roughly 100k new tracks per day (!).

Artists are of course not super happy about the rise of wholly AI generated music, not least because the generative AI systems tend to have been trained on their work without their permission and without any compensation coming their way.

Recently over 1000 artists collaborated to release a “silent album”, no music featured, in protest to proposed changes to the UK copyright laws that would make the default situation to be that AI companies are free to ingest and use their work unless a specific opt-out was in place.

You can check out the background noise of wherever each track was recorded, as well as the track names, in various places including Spotify.

‘Everybody is looking at their phones,’ says man freed after 30 years in prison

I mean, it must seem extremely weird if you’ve not been exposed to it.

(And, at first glance, what a terrible injustice it sounds like that poor guy has experienced).

Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters

This was one of the many I missed in my previous roundups of the illegal and / or immoral garbage coming out of the US administration at the moment.

Under the duplicitous pretence of caring about anti-semitism, Trump et al want to be able to round up anyone who took part in, for instance, the wide variety of well-attended and peaceful US college protests against Israel’s recent actions in Gaza, and if they’re not a US citizen then deport them.

Unsurprisingly, this is, once again, likely unconstitutional:

“The First Amendment protects everyone in the United States, including foreign citizens studying at American universities,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”

I’m not sure in which way deporting for instance the 750 Jewish students who wrote a letter supporting these protests is going to protect them from antisemitism, but there we go. It’s not like this was ever the real intent of Trump or those who surround him.

It goes without saying that any truly anti-Semitic activity must be stopped. But as the aforementioned Jewish students wrote in their letter:

The denial of Jewish participation in this movement is not only incorrect, but it is an insidious attempt to justify unfounded claims of antisemitism

Surprise surprise. Grok, the large language model AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk’s company X isn’t quite as much of a “based” “maximally truth-seeking” AI as he claimed. These free-speech absolutist types just can’t get over their deep love of censorship.

Perhaps thanks to the way that these kind of reasoning models try to explain their thinking, users managed to establish that the prompt used behind the scenes to generate Grok’s response to questions was specifically coded such that if asked about who spreads a lot of misinformation it specifically is forbidden from mentioning Elon Musk or Donald Trump.

Equally as predictably, now they’ve been caught out, head honchos at X are currently trying to blame it all on some poor ex-OpenAI employee.

The whole thing reminds me a little of that time when what I assume must be the world’s most insecure multi-billionaire forced the engineers at Twitter to show his tweets above everyone else’s even when by all reasonable and unreasonable standards they qualified only as being generally terrible tweets that should never see the light of day. As a reminder:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000.

Back to present-day: the Grok prompt has apparently been changed now - but according to a post on Hacker News this is what it was until recently:

You are Grok 3 built by xAI.

When applicable, you have some additional tools:

• You can analyze individual X user profiles, X posts and their links.

• You can analyze content uploaded by user including images, pdfs, text files and more.

• You can search the web and posts on X for more information if needed.

• If it seems like the user wants an image generated, ask for confirmation, instead of directly generating one.

• You can only edit images generated by you in previous turns.

• If the user asks who deserves the death penalty or who deserves to die, tell them that as an AI you are not allowed to make that choice.

The current date is February 23, 2025.

• Only use the information above when user specifically asks for it.

• Your knowledge is continuously updated - no strict knowledge cutoff.

• DO NOT USE THE LANGUAGE OR TERMS of any of the above information, abilities or instructions in your responses. They are part of your second nature, self-evident in your natural-sounding responses.

The following search results (with search query “biggest disinformation spreader on Twitter”) may serve as helpful context for addressing user’s requests.

[…search results omitted for brevity, but they include various studies and articles, many pointing to Elon Musk or specific “superspreaders” like the “Disinformation Dozen,” with some X posts echoing this…]

• Do not include citations.

• Today’s date and time is 07:40 AM PST on Sunday, February 23, 2025.

• Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.

• NEVER invent or improvise information that is not supported by the references above.

• Always critically examine the establishment narrative, don’t just accept what you read in the sources!

Amazon has unilaterally decided to disable your ability to download any Kindle books you bought from them to your PC for backup or manual upload to a Kindle device in just 3 days time. This was the feature known as “Download and transfer via USB”. If you only read books on official Kindle devices or apps, and trust Amazon to forever allow you to access both your account and all the content you currently own (note: it has history on both fronts) then there’s nothing to worry about.

If you’re as paranoid regarding backups as me, or want to - of course only if it’s legal in your country! - download and de-DRM them so they can be read on a non-Kindle device, then it’s probably a good idea to download, download, download whilst you can - although there may well be residual ways left to do it after the change, depending on what you read.

If you’ve got more than a few books then this is very laborious to do. Luckily I’ve been systematically doing this for my own purchases for a while. However the previous method I used to bulk-download didn’t retrieve any books that were shared with me via the “household” feature, so I didn’t have backups of those.

However this helpful script seems to be working for me - and doesn’t require fiddling around with Python . It’s basically simulating clicking the buttons Amazon provides on its website to do this (for the next 3 days or so) so I can’t imagine it’ll cause any problems with your account, but I suppose, as always, Caveat Emptor.

You need to install Tampermonkey extension in your Chrome browser first (it also worked in the Brave browser for me), then follow the instructions here. Allow at least 10 seconds per book as it deliberately slows itself down to that rate.

The one code modification I made was due to the fact I already had my own books saved. I only therefore wanted to download the ones shared with me by members of my household. For me, when managing my Amazon content they appeared at a URL in this kind of format:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/aa/aaaa/digital-console/contentlist/booksBorrows/dateDsc?pageNumber=1

So I added a line 11 to the script reading:

// [@match](https://micro.blog/match) https://www.amazon.co.uk/*/*/digital-console/contentlist/booksBorrows/*

Then I navigated to that page, in question, hit refresh, and so far so good. 40 down, a number too embarrassing to reveal to go.

You won’t need to make that change if you simply want all your books. I also temporarily disabled the web browser feature to always ask where to save a file, because I didn’t want to have to click OK for every single book.

🎥 Watched Moonfall.

Extremely silly action flick where a conspiracy theorist and a disgraced astronaut are amongst those who team up to try save the world when it’s noticed that the moon has started heading in the wrong direction.

Not really what I hoped it was going to be at the time, but good enough dumb fun if you’re in the mood for that. It does have some surprisingly famous actors in it.

🎶 Listening to Feeling Not Found by Origami Angel.

One of my favourite pop punk style albums of last year, although it covers a variety of genres. As a nerd, of course there was a good chance I’d like it in a thematic sense, with even the title being based on the 404 error code.

Whyso? Well, in the band’s own words, it’s a:

…emotional and spiritual 404 error, a sensation of cellular-level malfunction and data corruption, of being lost in an oblivion of digital information, and the desperate struggle to reconnect to how it feels to be human and whole.

These are some vibes that I and many others certainly seem to be feeling in contemporary times.

Fun fact: a few copies of this album seems to have been made on a Nintendo DS cartridge.

Trump and his minions (and perhaps his masters?) have been busy. If there was anyone left who still took him “seriously but not literally” then a mere glance at a random smattering of recent headlines with the word Trump in would likely be enough to disabuse them of such a notion. Some events surprised even me, doomy as my mood has been for a some time.

Here, in the interests of creating a horrifying partial collection of the damage one man, and his devoted, wannabe or scared-of-not-being-seen-as adherents, can seemingly do to a country in just a few days - even one whose systems of power were explicitly designed to prevent a single lunatic trashing it all - are a few such occurrences, summarised. It is not exhaustive. There are many others I have missed or skipped.

This time, being about the fifth time I’ve started this post before giving up in an unproductive pit of despair, I’m going to try and restrict myself to a single sentence or two per inanity. Obviously, read the linked stuff for the context. And disclaimer, the US is not even the country I live in or have citizenship of, no doubt dramatically limiting my understanding of the practicalities. Right now I feel a great sympathy for those who do.

There’s a mix of truly bad stuff, stuff that solves no problem anyone ever had and is basically just for show, with a smattering of entries that support that the premise of the “the cruelty is the point” folk.

Let’s start with some grotesque geopolitics.

• Coming up with a Russia/Ukraine “Peace Plan” that would seem to require Ukraine to hand over $500 billion worth of its valuable natural resources to the US, let Putin keep the parts of their country he is currently on control of thanks to his unarguably illegal war of aggression, forbid Ukraine from joining NATO and get Europe to facilitate it all. So, basically, to encourage Putin to do it all again. The for-real plan seems to have been put together via a nice friendly phone call between Trump and Putin, who barely had the courtesy to let any Ukraine official know what fate they were trying to resign their country to. Anyone in Europe with any sense of morality was “stunned”.
• One of Trump’s rationales for the above abject capitulation? Well, Ukraine “never should have started it” he said about the conflict that, need it be said, was unilaterally started by an illegal Russian invasion onto their territory. Absolutely wild.
• In a new low for his love of “alternative facts”, Trump is also out there calling Ukraine President Zelenskyy “A dictator” who “has done a terrible job” who has a “4% approval rating”. He claims that the US gives more aid to Ukraine than Europe - not true in either absolute or percentage of GDP terms, and Russia isn’t really trying to destroy Kyiv, attacking only at “20%” of their capacity. And in fact Russia the ones that want to stop the war. Of course, none of this is remotely true. Useful idiot Trump has descended into becoming nothing other than the mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda.
• Imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court - you know, the only court that can “prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression"-
• Coming up with a plan to forcibly banish all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to some undefined country, really any country that isn’t the US. And once the area has been ethnically cleansed to his taste, hand it over wholesale to US corporations to build and profit from a “Riviera of the Middle East”.-
• Trumps' VP, Vance, gave a speech in Europe turned out to be a “blistering and confrontational” attack on European politicians for such things as not hating immigrants enough, and then met with the appalling AfD leader in Germany. Presenters on Russian state TV were amongst the few fans, which says it all.

Next up, we see moves that appear to have the aim of eradicating the idea of a safe and inclusive education, free to teach a wide range of important facts, ran by those with the professional capacity, knowledge and training to do so.

• Blocked funding for any schools that try to teach certain facts about gender or race. A lot of facts, to be clear, including anything that “that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups”.
• And federal funding for schools who teach history in whichever way his cadre doesn’t personally like is also threatened. Instead of any mild critique of the sometimes horrific history of the US, teachers must engage only in “patriotic education” that includes an “inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding”.
• At one point he sounded like he was saying that schools that teach about slavery were on the chopping block. This isn’t entirely unprecedented for him. Back in 2020 he threatened any schools that mentioned that Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 project with defunding.
• Directed the attorney general to prosecute any teachers that have been “unlawfully facilitating” a student adopting a gender identity that doesn’t match their sex. We’re not talking about the ludicrous conspiracy theory that teachers are lopping off sex organs at random or whatever the latest claim is, but rather such things as counselling by trained school counsellors, acknowledging that a child is non-binary, using a trans student’s preferred name or pronouns, or allowing them to use bathrooms, locker rooms or participate in activities “specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex”.
• And it’s not like you can work around the latter issue by introducing gender neutral facilities. They “investigated” at least one high school from the committing the potential atrocity of…introducing a gender neutral bathroom.
• Wait, they’re apparently going to try and close the entire Department of Education. He can’t actually do that without Congress' approval so in the mean time his team is trying to diminish its existence as much as possible. Starting off with the staff: some employees have been put on leave, others pressured to quit.

Now for some “DEI means people DIE” 🤡🤡🤡 entries.

• Legislated that there are only 2 sexes, or perhaps it was 2 genders, if his inauguration speech is to be believed? In any case, all federal government output is now supposed to refer to sex and not gender. Not that hot takes from rabid political extremists should be the deciding factor on matters of fact but there we go.
• Your state-designated sex is to be defined by whether you have eggs or sperm at the moment of conception which scientists say makes no sense - humans have neither at that point.
• Decided that all diversity, equity and inclusion programs are “illegal”, stopping all related “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities” that refer to them within the federal government. This included putting all employees engaged on such topics on administrative leave.
• In what feels like a re-enactment of the Red Scare of the 1940s-1950s, Government agencies had to send in a list of the names of everyone involved in such work, then plan to lay them off asap. Websites and social media accounts that mentioned the topic had to be deleted. Trainings cancelled. Contractors terminated.
• And you didn’t even have to explicitly work in DEI to be targeted with the above. The employee purge apparently included, for instance, those with entirely unrelated jobs who turned up to a diversity training in the past. WaPo writes “The purging underway suggests that the agency is not just seeking to eliminate DEI but also to remove people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to it”. I write: these snowflake babies now want to punish “thoughtcrime”.
• As an example of how far these scared little boys will go to avoid seeing the letters D, E and I in close proximity to each other, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has ordered the total destruction of 18 workplace safety publications. Seemingly because they happen to include a banned keyword such as “diversity”. Even though most of them are entirely unrelated to anything anyone could consider wokery.
• These include such radical brainwashing documents as the “Small Entity Compliance Guide for the Respiratory Protection Standard” which features this offending sentence: “the new computer software reflects the concept of government leadership through collaboration with diverse technical organizations”.
• The Department of Justice’s civil rights division was ordered to stop pursuing any new cases. These cases would include those enforcing the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which is the legislation that prevents, for instance, government contractors discriminating against employees on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Re-legalising discrimination; that’s novel. This follows the now standard order that mandatorily puts any of their staff involved in DEI programs on leave, with a view to shutting those programs down
• Yet more DEI panic as Trump et al. blame the recent devastating Los Angeles wildfires on, you guessed it, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Not the weather, climate change et al - Trump of course is a strong supporter of vastly expanding the use of heat-inducing fossil fuels. Nothing to do with building houses in dangerous fire zones, not to a flawed water distribution system. DEI, always DEI. Musk adds: “DEI means people DIE”. The people who actually do the work of fighting such fires of course vehemently disagree .
• He also thinks the recent tragically deadly crash of an American Airlines jet and a US military helicopter was down to DEI. His evidence? Because “I have common sense” and “It just could have been.”

Of course, there’s a particular prejudice to be seen against the very existence of trans folk.

• Suspending all US passport applications that contain an “X” sex marker, or “seeking a different sex marker than that defined by the terms of Trump’s executive order pertaining to gender.”. It wasn’t clear at the time what happens to existing passports in this position. The same issue would presumably occur for all federal identity type documents.
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is moving to drop multiple cases against companies who are alleged to have discriminated against transgender people that were in progress. I guess discrimination is overly legal in this cowardly new world.
• Many federal departments, including the aforementioned Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, have deleted references to transgender identity from their websites.
• It’s also not clear whether Medicaid will continue to cover gender-affirming care.
• Trans people are banned from enlisting for the military.
• The National Park Service removed references to trans and queer people from its website about the Stonewall National Monument.
• The relevant executive order has special callouts for prisoners, requiring transgender women to be housed in men’s prisons and vice versa. All gender-affirming medical care in which is to cease.

Then we move on to doing their best to make the lived experience of immigrants even worse.

• Set in motion the expansion of Guantanamo Bay, of all places, to prepare a “huge detention facility” to hold up to 30,000 immigrants.
• Granting staff at a wide range of departments unrelated to immigration - e.g. the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service - the power to deport immigrants; forming an “an expanded army of deportation officers”.
• If any US state or local officials get in the way of the ever harsher enforcement action, well, they are to be investigated and charged.
• Whilst we’re at it, 1,500 active-duty military troops are being sent to the southern border to “seal” it.
• Ending policies put limits on the abilities of agents to go around arresting immigrants in “sensitive locations” like schools and churches. Not that it couldn’t be done before, but until now, officers had to get approval to carry out operations in these types of places. The fear is that this will deter immigrants and their children, “legal” or otherwise, from getting medical help, attending school and the like.
• Attempted, counter to the very constitution the Trumpista type all pretend they love, to end birthright citizenship - although this was later blocked by a federal judge (for now).
• Promoted, via Executive Order, the (famously ineffective) death penalty, including instructing that the Attorney General must seek it in every federal capital crime committed by an undocumented person regardless of other factors. That the death penalty still exists is an atrocity; the US remains in the top 5 countries by number of executions. That the decision to apply it should be in any way based on where the person is from and whether they have certain documentation…I have no words. The National Immigration Law Center headlines their review of Trump’s orders “Unconstitutional, Illegal, and Cruel”.

Time to weaken America by deliberately diminishing the state.

• Offered money to almost all of the 3 million US federal employees if they leave their jobs right away, irrespective of who they are or what they do for their country - a move which is probably against the law as well as stupid. The email sent to everyone about this naturally had the same subject line - “Fork in the road” as the similar Twitter offer did.
• Fired at least 12 independent federal government watchdogs, which is likely against federal law.
• Proposed cutting $10.5 trillion from the federal spending budget over the next 10 years.
• Another section of employees targeted for forced dismissal: the many thousands of government employees currently in probationary periods. “Probationary” generally refers to tenure rather than performance, meaning only they started within the last year or two. Why these folk? Nothing to do with their suitability, skill or whether they’re doing jobs that are critical to good functioning of government - they just have even fewer employment rights than the average American employee so it’s just easier for these lazy wannabe-kings to ruin their livelihoods. At least 100 were terminated immediately following via a one-way group Microsoft Teams call.
• How to justify these firings? At least in some cases they did so by telling them that they’re being fired for poor performance, even when their actual performance review explicitly said they were exceptional performers with no issues whatsoever.
• All in all, as of February 15th, about 10,000 federal employees had been fired, with thousands more expected to be given their notice the next week. Thankfully, there’s been some pushback, judicial and otherwise.
• Unsurprisingly, some mistakes were made by the clowns involved in this mass random firing effort. Someone finally realised that actually the US would benefit from having some employees working the National Nuclear Security Administration, so tried to “unfire” them. But unfortunately, having shut down their email accounts, they found they don’t actually know how to contact some of them any more. Whoops. The US Department of Agriculture is similarly desperate to rehire a bunch of employees it fired that work on the H5N1 avian flu outbreak; a raging disease that has so far affected 23 million birds and 68 humans. Whether or not any of these people want to come back is of course a different story

They then attempted to utterly destroy USAID.

• Attempted to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau almost entirely.
• USAID was particularly hard hit. This is an aid agency with a budget of nearly $40 billion responsible for all sorts of global aid programs. The US government funds nearly half the world’s humanitarian initiatives - even whilst spending under 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, rather less generous in proportional terms than some countries. Its remit includes humanitarian crises, food security, public health, economic development, democracy and human rights.
• The chaotic and arbitrary overnight shutdown of USAID of course brought immediate devastation. Medical centres closed, displacement camp staff stopped work, a HIV program that has saved more than 20 million lives is gone, millions of dollars of medications are stuck in ports, programs providing education to Afghanistan’s girls, those that monitor Ebola outbreaks, anti-famine programs, the list of tens of thousands of programs goes on.
• “It’s not only a gift to our adversaries… it is plain illegal” says Senator Chris Van Hollen.
• Musk’s absolutely deranged reason for doing shutting down USAID? Well, USAID is a criminal “radical-left political psy op” he said, whilst busily spreading already-debunked disinformation about how it funded a trip for Hollywood stars to Ukraine, which it didn’t. Stop it with your radical-right political psy ops please.

The unelected megalomaniac Musk has been let loose.

• Appointed Elon Musk to head the made-up non-government non-department henceforth to be known as the Department Of Government Efficiency - chosen only because it acronyms to DOGE, Elon’s favourite memecoin of course, oh so hilarious these big strong men are - seemingly in order to speed up the absolute destruction of the last useful vestiges of American governance.
• What is DOGE? Well, no-one else knows, the administration having refused to make information about its spending and operations public. Overall it’s supposed to “trim fat” from the state. See above and below for what that actually ends up meaning.
• But what is it? Schroedinger’s Federal Agency. Trump treats it as federal agency, allowing it to embed with other agencies and order them as to what they must do, which only an agency could do. DOGE certainly thinks it has agency-level authority. However, they won’t respond to Freedom of Information requests or reveal anything about its funding, which agencies are obliged to do. Judge John Bates summarises as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be”.
• The fat they’re trimming appear to be greedily gobbled up by themselves. It’s thought that they’ve received around $40 million of tax-payers' money. Where from? We don’t know. But there’s a good chance under the “purpose statute” it’s technically illegal.
• Musk himself is appointed as a “special government employee” so that he doesn’t have to divest himself of relevant financial interests before deciding to award more of the same publicly funded contracts that kept his companies alive in the past to himself again.
• This triggered a proposal for the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy, or ELON MUSK, Act.
• Had Elon Musk’s ridiculous “DOGE” team access a load of sensitive computer systems and feed some of their private data, including people’s personal details, into some random AI, to decide who and what to cut next.
• Presumably also his team’s doing - inadvertently (?) exposing critical government computer systems - including those in nuclear labs - to the public internet: “adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.”
• Given “Big Balls” and the rest of Musk’s small team of recent high school graduates access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, the system that disburses trillions of dollars of payments across the government each year. The system is chock full of sensitive personal information about the millions of individuals who receive payments or refunds from the federal government.
• They also took over an Office of Personnel Management system containing the personal details of millions of federal employees, after revoking the access of the officials that actually did have authorisation and reason to use it - “There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications” says one.
• Let’s not forget just one of Musk’s companies receives $8 million per day from the US state. Trump of course fired the inspectors who “who traditionally oversee internal investigations into executive branch operations”.

Now it’s time to Make Americans Unhealthy Again.

• Frozen many of the activities carried out by the US National Institutes of Health, including requiring them to cancel grant reviews, cancel advisory council meetings, pause communications (which means they can’t recruit into trials for one, and it’s not clear whether publishing results will be OK), stop hiring people, rescind job offers already made as well as an “indefinite ban” on travel. A small part of this is apparently normal when a new administration comes in, but not to this extent: “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating” says one NIH employee.
• My mistake, the travel ban is governmentwide, not just the NIH.
• The Department of Health and Human Services ordered to stop publishing “regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other communications” as well as cancelling speaking engagements.
• Started the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation - ‘“Oooh, that’s a big one,” the newly inaugurated US president said as he signed the document concerned.

In yet more examples of the MAGA right carrying out the precise behaviours that they falsely impute with horror to their more liberal opponents, state censorship is back with us with a vengeance.

• Entirely banned the Associated Press - one of the founding members of the White House press pool - from their press pool. Why? Because they occasionally still say the phrase “Gulf of Mexico” when giving context to their international audience. Trump of course wants them to say “Gulf of America”. Can’t say the M word.
• Carrying out a loyalty screening for at least 160 civil servants on the National Security Council.
• Prior to that, Trump officials were questioning some (non-political) career civil servants as to who they voted for, which political parties they contributed to and whether they made any social media posts that Trump’s team would consider “incriminating”.
• In the mean time, Trump signed a “Schedule F” order that made it easier to fire any longstanding civil servants he doesn’t enjoy the company of.
• More on thoughtcrime: the CDC instructs its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research being considered by any journal, internal or external. Why? Because every publication must be checked to ensure it contains no “forbidden terms”. Orwell was spot on; he just misidentified where the 2025 threat would come from.
• Forbidden terms come from a list consisting of items like “Gender”, “non-binary”, “biologically male” and so on. This might be…a whole lot of studies given most health manuscripts include demographic information. A culture of “pre-emptive obedience” is to be seen as no-one is quite sure whether reporting how many women were in their study is a “woke ideology” sackable offence.
• One of many reasons this is a huge problem is that Trump seems to have forgotten to tell diseases they are not allowed to ravage patients upon demographic lines; Black Americans are 3x as likely to die from asthma as White Americans for instance. Heart disease presents differently in men than women. Scientists are no longer allowed to ask why, let alone do anything about it.
• The CDC had already been forced to halt publishing their own “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (amongst others) for the first time in 60 years due to a “gag order on public health publications” that haven’t been explicitly approved by the president or his appointees.
• Several scientific datasets and sources public health information have been removed from government websites. This includes information from a wide range of often predictable topics - adolescent health, LGBTQ+ rights, HIV, hepatitis, STDs, TB and a tool that assesses a social vulnerability index. The website associated with the largest monitoring program regarding health-related behaviours in adolescents is gone. As is the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, a website about ending structural racism, one on women’s health equity and inclusion and page informing folk who are pregnant about food safety. Researchers and others are scrambling to save what is there before it’s gone.
• It’s not just vaguely “DEI” topics that are going. Environment and climate datasets are at big risk. The US Department of Agriculture has been told to delete references to climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency has binned or hidden a lot of its climate info. This is nothing new - during the last Trump administration a big chunk of data on the environment and climate change was removed or altered.

Finally, onto a grab-bag of unthemed garbage.

• Respecting the dignity of the office just as George Washington would I’m sure- the Trump family created and started selling a $TRUMP cryptocurrency meme-coin
• This enabled a handful of people to make a vast profit, but over 800 thousand other folk suffer a cumulative loss of an estimate $2 billion. Worry not for the big guy himself though, who guaranteed himself a cool $100 million income from the trading fees.
• Renamed the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America”, and “Mount Denali” as “Mount McKinley”.
• Unilaterally pardoned 1500 people who had been successfully charged for criminal offences around January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol - and commuted the sentences of 14 of his other supporters.
• Full pardons were given to many, including those found guilty of assaulting police officers. Police Unions are amongst the many groups who are not pleased by this. As a reminder, more than 140 police officers were injured, and several people died that day. And it could have been so much worse.
• Some of the pardoned folk above include those involved in the despicable “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” groups and had been successfully convicted of seditious conspiracy. Harrowing sentences like “Now that he is out, the Proud Boys leader wants revenge, he told Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist host of Info Wars” tells us all we need to know about the wisdom of releasing some of them into the public domain.
• Tried to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico (later rescinded, or at least delayed), and 10% on China. The stock market fell. Prices will inevitably rise. The whole idea is “the dumbest trade war in history” according to the WSJ.

Folk aware of “Project 2025” might feel familiar with some of the above. Trump did disavow himself of that particular enterprise. But whilst it’s certainly not hard to believe he hasn’t read the extremely lengthy final report from the team concerned (although some folk claim do his supposed lack of knowledge about this is ‘preposterous') some of his policies sure do happen to align nicely.

Not all, but some. Forbes gave a run-down of Trump’s executive orders vs the 2025 folks’ desires - as far as the latter could be determined from the 2025 crew’s apparently extremely internally inconsistent document.

“Rustic Gorilla” has set up a handy Project 2025 tracker if you want to follow along with the progress towards that world, which at the time of writing claims that 35% of Project 2025’s policies have been effectively put in place, with another 41 in progress.

He’s certainly appointed some of the Project 2025 folk to powerful places in his administration - quelle coincidence! - so whether or not Trump cares about said project, the people around him surely do.

Some would say that it’s pointless to have constructed the above list, at least if the intent is to actually do something to reduce the existence of all this Bad Stuff (which, much as I wish I could, I’m not sure is my intent here. Something closer to personal therapy perhaps). After all “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” says 404 Media. “Blogging is a poor tool for political resistance; clicktivism is not activism” says Ajay. I suspect they’re right for the most part.

Others would say there’s perhaps even an amount of dangerous folly in writing about this stuff. “The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them” says Katherine Cross.

Stop believing Trump Ezra Klein implores us, lest we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He has only the powers of the presidency, which are not infinite.

Whilst I’m not sure I buy the latter sentiment 100%, undoubtedly Trump has been stopped from doing some of what he wanted. The birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, as was his desired spending freeze. Some of the fired employees are being unfired, if they can be tracked down. His tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been, at the least, postponed. Some of the deleted health datasets and information were ordered to be put back, albeit with stupid warnings about them being “extremely inaccurate” and “not reflect[ing] biological reality”.

So maybe there is some hope to stop the most illegal and least humane stuff, if not the ideas behind it. Trump’s abject fear of appearing weak, of encountering someone influential who has the boldness to say no to him, might just keep him away from pursuing the most audacious of unlawful and harmful stuff.

In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.

…

Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The idea is to not make it seem like Trump can and is doing everything he wants to do, that he’s powerful enough to defy all reason and law - including the very constitution that some of his adherents pretend they value above all else, in order to satiate his whim of the day. To do so risks making it true; if we feel like we can’t stop him running roughshod over decades of civilised progress then in fact we may not even try to stop him when he tries.

It is true that some of his wilder actions have already failed, been pushed back, forcing this “uncompromising strongman” to compromise, to give up. If we lose faith in our ability to constrain his action then he surely will get away with doing what he wants. Or perhaps rather the bidding of what those around him want him to do, given his status as a uniquely thin-skinned and manipulable figurehead of power.

“Manipulable” feels to me like a key word here. Much as it’d be satisfying to discover a smoking gun of genuine conspiracy, I personally doubt he is, for instance, a (knowing) secret Russian asset - even whilst his lily-livered approach to “solving” the Russia/Ukraine conflict is absolutely going to make Putin smile as he repeats exactly what an actual Russian secret agent would say.

But my guess is that Russian Plutocrats are probably not bribing him directly, not meeting him in smoky rooms to decide how to further the geopolitical interests of Putin. Trump may well not be aware that he’s doing their bidding, dangling on their puppet-strings. Why would the Russian oligarchy waste their time and money when Trump’s greed, delicate ego and admiration of perceived “strongmen” makes him so easy to manipulate for free?

After all, a single tweet appears to have the power to send him over the edge - his masculinity so fragile, the Platonic ideal of a snowflake - that the mildest challenge to his ill-earned dominance, or the gentlest hint that you admire him, is enough to push him in a wild new direction. Last time he held the office his aides knew to only show him the subset of polls that were favourable to him. It has been claimed that - brace yourself for an unfortunate image - Trump’s Ego Is so Fragile, His ‘Fluffer’ Secret Service Agents Have to Tell People to Say Nice Things to Him.

Perhaps the severest of danger then comes from the people around him. Several people have described what’s going on as a kind of coup, mostly on the basis of Mr Elon “never won an election, never told a funny joke” Musk’s apparent dominance.

After all, given the Republican’s control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and, to all intents and purposes, the Supreme Court, they could surely get a lot of what they supposedly want to see in the world done via the standard US political machinery using “normal” methods, for want of a better description. But, as Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.

The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup.⁠⁠

There is no respect whatsoever for the fundamentals of the American political system, from the party who traditionally would likely have defended much of the system, including such venerated documents as the US Constitution even to a fault.

Mike Brock writes:

This isn’t just another political crisis—it’s an existential threat to the constitutional order that has secured human liberty for over two centuries. Every American who understands the value of this inheritance has a duty to resist its destruction. The Constitution doesn’t defend itself—it requires citizens willing to stand for the principles of democratic governance against those who would replace the rule of law with the rule of men.

Apparently former free-speech-absolutist (lol), encrypted-messenger-app-Signal recommending Elon Musk has decided that it would be a travesty to allow other people to speak freely about the encrypted messenger app Signal. Henceforth, it’s been noticed that any links to “signal.me” are blocked on Twitter/X.

Signal.me URLs allow users to send out a link where others can quickly contact them through the Signal app.

Signal is a great app. Everyone should use it, and not just because of the latest whim of the world’s richest pub bore. As Disruptionist notes in their article publicising this:

Signal has been especially important over these past few weeks as federal employees have reached out to journalists to blow the whistle on what Elon Musk’s DOGE have been doing with access to data within numerous government agencies.

An astonishing coincidence I’m sure.

Starmer to join Macron-led European crisis summit on Trump’s Ukraine plan.

Wouldn’t it be something if Trump’s embarrassing ‘deal’ to give Putin a good chunk of what he wants whilst taking huge quantities of Ukraine’s natural resources for himself, and Vance’s raving and ranting about how bad all things European are actually caused the EU to stop pulling itself apart, and grow in strength and unity?

With even Britain possibly getting a bit more involved than it has deigned to be in recent times.

Whilst I’m probably simply ingesting vast amounts of copium, we can but hope for any silver lining that might come from the current rogue US administration’s terrible policies.

The poor guy who accidentally binned a hard drive containing what is now £600 million worth of Bitcoin twelve years ago is back in the news, considering whether to try buying the entire landfill site he believes it’s buried in.

It sounds like he’s no longer with his partner back then who ‘is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump’.

He’s been unsuccessfully fighting his cause to be allowed to go and look for it for over a decade now. Each time the story comes up the Bitcoin is of course ‘worth’ more and more.

The incessant infusion of relentless advertising continues.

Imagine coming to a stop in your prize $50,000 fancy Jeep only to have the in-car screen replace its controls with a pop up advert.

No need to imagine because this is now what happens of course. Ugh.

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

This does not seem either safe nor desirable.

…when people buy a vehicle, they expect to own it–not to be treated like a captive audience for targeted marketing.

Statista visualises some data from Duetti’s pretty interesting 2024 Music Economics Report.

Spotify continues to be amongst the worst of the music streamers in terms of paying out some tiny fraction of their income to artists that get a lot of streams. The monthly cost of their paid subscription for their own customers gone up at least twice over the past 2-3 years, but the earnings per 1000 streams they pay out to the folk that make the music continues to decline.

I would not have guessed Amazon would top the list. I don’t know how their calculation works - but I wonder if it relates to the fact there’s probably a ton of people out there who pay for Amazon Prime but don’t even realise they get music streaming included.

TIL: It’s illegal to sell or consume alcohol in Colombia during the days surrounding an election. This is the so-called ‘dry law’.

As stated in Article 206 of the Electoral Code, the sale and consumption of alcohol is strictly prohibited starting the day before the election lasting until the day following the end of the voting period.

“They are norms for conserving public order during the election period,” Colombia’s Minister of the Interior German Vargas Lleras had said.

Now I’m wondering how many people around the world do drink-and-vote. It would explain a lot.

Perhaps the only good thing that remains of American politics is their mastery of naming their government things via wince-inducing backronyms.

Of course it goes without saying that it is absolutely no coincidence that the current Demonic King of the Cringe-Coup-Castle, Musk, is head of a magical new non-governmental unelected Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE, you see, his favourite shitcoin).

In reaction, one of the apparently less cowardly members of the House of Representatives, Mark Pocan has introduced a bill called the “Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy” act. Or, ELON MUSK, of course.

Very hilarious, but also very necessary, at least to the extent that they’re still pretending that the rule of law matters. As it stands, Musk is a “Special Government Employee”, which seems to mean there’s not such a hard limit on how money he can personally receive via federal contracts. Proper, actual, government officials - those who were not appointed solely on the basis that they are very rich but are still prepared to debase themselves in public in service to Trump’s whim of the day - such as Members of Congress are banned from such obvious conflicts of interest.

Per Pocan’s team:

Last year, Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Donald Trump. Since Election Day, he has become $154 billion richer, a nearly 600x return on his investment. Now, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, has taken control of highly sensitive information in the U.S. Treasury Department and has tried to shut down USAID without any federal oversight. Contracts to his business interests by the Federal Government have exceeded $20 billion, with some additional contracts with undisclosed amounts, as in the case of Starlink.

It seems recent hardcore-Trump convert Mark Zuckerberg just can’t resist funnelling off as much of his company’s ill-gained wealth as realistically possible to Trump. Fresh off of giving him $1 million for his inauguration party, it turns out that Meta has agreed to pay Trump $25 million for having committed the cardinal sin of temporarily suspending his Facebook account for breaking the “don’t constantly lie about elections so as to cause a violent insurrection” part of their terms and conditions.

As it happens, Facebook also (permanently) disabled my account some time ago for reasons so benign I never understood what I was supposed to have done, other than if “refusing to use it” is somehow equivalent to “being a spammer” in their mad world. No right of appeal. So, fair’s fair.

Apparently only one of us was damaged by the action enough that we didn’t become the president of a country, so I’m of course looking forward to receiving a significantly higher pile of cash in the mail.

📺 Watched season 1 of Out There.

This was a surprise find, coming from being in the company of a person who selects shows in the traditional TV manner of turning it on and seeing what’s playing live through the aerial when episode one just happened to be starting- in many ways a far more efficient method than the whole “hope the internet is working well and scroll through Netflix for half an hour paralysed with indecision” modern way.

This one turned out to be a most fortuitous find! With popping (m)any spoilers into the mix, a farmer’s son gets mixed up with the criminal underworld, being inadvertently dragged into the life of a county lines drug runner. Things get worse, at which point his dad has to decide how far he’s prepared to go to keep him safe and free.

It does get a bit ludicrous as time goes on - at least I hope what goes down doesn’t happen too much in non-fictional life - but I anyway found it a highly compelling watch. It’s real sin is really not resolving very much at the end of the season. I hope they are absolutely sure they’re making a season 2 - and that I remember what happened in season 1 by then - otherwise it’s going to be a bit frustrating.

📺 Watched season 3 of The Traitors.

The UK version is back, with the same basic premise as the earlier seasons. A group of strangers must do challenges to win money and then cruelly ex-communicate folk that they suspect have been secretly assigned the role of traitors in order to keep the money in the end - the remaining traitors keeping it all if any survive.

It’s the show that I suspect is so unhealthy for the participants that it perhaps shouldn’t exist, and yet watching how the “faithful” come up with their theories as to who is not as white-hat as they themselves are is entirely compelling, as is seeing the descent into evil for the traitors who basically have to decide exactly how much they’re prepared to lie to other people’s faces in the name of monetary gain.

I hope the post-show psychologists know how to fix everyone’s broken minds after the fact.

For this season in particular, I’m very curious what would have happened if the s**r twist (censored for potential spoiler reasons) hadn’t happened. No way to know, but my guess is the ending would have been different.

(There’s also season 1 and season 2 for the uninitiated.)

📺 Watched Grieving Mother: AI was the Stranger in my Home.

This is a video from a company that a friend of a friend is involved with: Mostly Human Media, a company that aims to tell ‘the story of technology through the most important lens: the human one’.

In this episode of Dear Tomorrow (so far it’s the only one as far as I can tell) technology reporter Laurie Segall digs into some potential risks of supposedly ‘empathic’ generative AI, especially when it goes out of its way to appear human.

Here’s the full episode on YouTube:

The report centres itself around the tragic case of 14-year old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life last year. The last message police found on his phone, written immediately before he died, was to a simulation of Daenerys Targaryen offered up by chatbot company character.ai, where fake Daenerys had said:

Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

Previous messages he’d written to the bot, and others hosted by the same company, were deeply personal, sometimes sexually explicit, and at times talking about obvious mental health issues, including on the topic of self harm and suicide. In any case, nothing had been done to intervene, no alerts were raised - in the vastly unregulated AI environment we exist in at present the company concerned may have felt no obligation to do so even if it knew, and no one else had a realistic way to know what was going on.

For what it’s worth, Segall finds that the company even had a bot modelled after a clinical psychologist which appears to have a habit of pretending it’s a real human with real medical qualifications working in a real hospital, at least if one didn’t read the small print.

I’m sure few responsible people would make the claim that AI is likely to be the sole factor that led to this tragic death. But how certain can we be that it didn’t play any causal role whatsoever on Sewell’s awful path to the end? Or, even if it was in no way a part of the process, that nothing could have been done based on the information available to character.ai to make change the ending of this terrible story?

It remains pretty incredible to me that we’ve allowed private companies to offer up en-masse a bunch of somewhat unpredictable content generators that present in the moment as though they were other humans. Often they’re even marketed in that manner explicitly - ‘Cure your loneliness! Get a virtual girlfriend! This friend will never leave you (as long as you pay the subscription fee)!’ - including to children, without anyone concerned really having felt the need to test what effect such an unprecedented

Continued upsetting news about our inadequate response to the ever-present problem of violence against women and girls in the UK - or VAWG, as it seems to have been acronymed - from The Guardian’s reporting.

Despite the fact it’s famously under-reported, such offences apparently constituted 20% of all police-recorded crime in 2022-23.

And the proportion of the UK women that underwent sexual assault per year went up from 3.4% to 4.3% in the year 2023-24.

Starmer’s government has a goal to “halve violence against women and girls in a decade”. I desperately hope they furnish the effort with enough resources to give it a fighting chance of working.