Powderhorn

The world is in a “democratic recession” with almost three-quarters of the global population now living under autocratic rulers – levels not seen since the 1980s, according to a new report.

The system underpinning human rights was “in peril”, said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a growing authoritarian wave becoming “the challenge of a generation”, he said.

Speaking before the launch of the human rights watchdog’s annual country-by-country assessment, published on Wednesday, Bolopion said 2025 had been a “tipping point” for rights and freedoms in the US. In just 12 months, the Trump administration has carried out a broad assault on key pillars of American democracy and the global rules-based international order, which the US, despite inconsistencies, helped to establish. It was now working in the “opposite direction”, he said.

Citing Donald Trump’s calls on Republicans this week to “nationalise” the US voting system and revelations that a member of an Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, Bolopion said: “Every day you see confirmation of this trend, but when you step back you see an organised, relentless, determined assault on all of the checks and balances that are meant to limit executive power in US democracy – a system designed to limit power and protect rights.”

Even a broken clock, usw. It would have been terrible optics to uphold this bullshit in Texas and then turn around to say California can't do the same thing.

The Supreme Court is allowing California to use its new congressional map for this year's midterm election, clearing the way for the state's gerrymandered districts as Democrats and Republicans continue their fight for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state's voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas' new GOP-friendly map, which President Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.

And in a brief, unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court denied an emergency request by the California's Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state's GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.

The ruling on California's redistricting plan comes two months after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Texas map that kicked off a nationwide gerrymandering fight by boosting the GOP's chances of winning five additional House seats.

Another link that's difficult to categorize. There's little opinion here, so this seems like the correct placement.

At any rate, this is roughly an hour going through the history of nukes and treaties, and if you don't already know of Tom Nicholas, you really should.

This piece is from 2023, but I just ran into the link on a Reddit thread.

Murc’s Law is “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. In other words, Democrats are responsible for Republicans being the way they are and doing the things they do, either because Democrats provoked them or failed to control them.

It came up recently because of an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right”. (This widely-ridiculed article was written by a young man the Times identified as a “senior at Princeton”, not mentioning he’s a Republican activist).

Remember when people who live in the real world, especially Democrats, pointed out that not getting vaccinated would cause more people do die from Covid? And that hearing such a thing supposedly upset many Republicans who then decided not to get vaccinated?

We are now one year into Donald Trump’s second term, and something strange is happening in political media. A lot of people who spent years insisting that the so-called “alarmists” were being hysterical have started, tentatively, to admit that maybe they got it wrong.

Last April, David Brooks published a long essay in The Atlantic titled “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” in which he acknowledged that he’d underestimated how much conservatism had become pure anti-liberal reaction. Jon Stewart, who spent the early weeks of the second Trump administration chiding liberals for being too quick to use the word “fascism,” eventually conceded on air: “I did not think we would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t. I’m sorry. Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on Bluesky about this, I would have known. But no one did. Except every day. In all caps.”

Political scientist Corey Robin, who had spent years dismissing those who called MAGA fascist, admitted on an October podcast: “I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong.”

Closing the barn door once the four horsemen have already bolted.

This is a channel I've only recently discovered.

I'm not going to attempt to summarize, as I wasn't taking notes, but worth the watch.

Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.

Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.

While describing his victory in terms of counties he won in 2024 – and ignoring the vast difference in population between large urban counties and rural counties– Trump said of immigrants: “If Republicans don’t get them out, you will never win another election as a Republican.”

Trump said that immigrants “were brought” to the United States to vote, “and they vote illegally. And the, you know, it’s amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say ‘we want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least many – 15 places – the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Riiiiight ...

Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure it obsessively and experience it as an unbroken flow from past to future. It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless.

And yet, for more than a century, physics has struggled to say what time actually is. This struggle is not philosophical nitpicking. It sits at the heart of some of the deepest problems in science.

Modern physics relies on different, but equally important, frameworks. One is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes the gravity and motion of large objects such as planets. Another is quantum mechanics, which rules the microcosmos of atoms and particles. And on an even larger scale, the standard model of cosmology describes the birth and evolution of the universe as a whole. All rely on time, yet they treat it in incompatible ways.

When physicists try to combine these theories into a single framework, time often behaves in unexpected and troubling ways. Sometimes it stretches. Sometimes it slows. Sometimes it disappears entirely.

A US disaster response firm submitted a plan to White House officials that would guarantee 300% profits and a seven-year monopoly over a new trucking and logistics plan for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Gaza, according to a November proposal obtained by the Guardian.

The draft plan from Gothams LLC would allow it to collect a fee for every truck moving goods into Gaza, and charge for the use of its warehousing and distribution system.

The Guardian first reported in December that Gothams was the frontrunner for a lucrative deal that would be doled out by a future Trump-chaired Board of Peace, but the scale of the profit margin was not clear.

Though the firm’s CEO, Matthew Michelsen, told the Guardian in December he was halting his proposal, a company partner is still involved, records show, and a new Gaza supply system (GSS) is being discussed by administration officials and businesspeople affiliated with Trump’s Board of Peace. Michelsen declined to talk to the Guardian for this story.

As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers.

Threat researchers at SentinelLABS teamed up with internet mappers from Censys to take a look at the footprint of Ollama deployments exposed to the internet, and what they found was a global network of largely homogenous, open-source AI deployments just waiting for the right zero-day to come along.

175,108 unique Ollama hosts in 130 countries were found exposed to the public internet, with the vast majority of instances found to be running Llama, Qwen2, and Gemma2 models, most of those relying on the same compression choices and packaging regimes. That, says the pair, suggests open-source AI deployments have become a monoculture ripe for exploitation.

Out on the water, paddling across the straits between two small rocky islands, the dusk fades and the stars appear. Jennie has done her best to coach me in local geography before darkness, showing me the map with its patchwork of islands and bays, and describing the shape of each landmark. All to no avail. I’m more than happy to be lost at sea, leaning back in my kayak to gaze at the constellations, occasionally checking that the red light on the stern of her kayak is still visible ahead. We stop in the sheltered lee of an island and hear a hoot. “Eurasian eagle owl,” says Jennie. “They nest here.” Then she switches off all the lights. “Let’s paddle slowly close to shore. Watch what happens.”

As soon as we move, the sea flickers into life, every paddle stroke triggering thrilling trails of cold, blue sparkles. When we stop, I slap my hand on the surface and the sea is momentarily electrified into a nebulous neural network of light, like some great salty brain figuring out this alien intrusion. Below that, squadrons of jellyfish pulse their own spectral contribution.

“When I was a child,” Jennie whispers (we are both whispering), “there was no light pollution. We would throw stones from the shore to see what we called ‘sea fire’.” I spend a pointless few minutes attempting to photograph this elusive bioluminescence, then relax and simply enjoy it. Travel should broaden the mind, not the iCloud.

We are in the maze of deserted islands off Hälsö (population: 569), one of 10 inhabited islands in Sweden’s northern Gothenburg archipelago. To get here, all it took was a short bus ride out of Sweden’s second city, a brief ferry ride, then a leisurely hike along the new coastal trail that snakes round these islands, using bridges, causeways and ferries to connect. It does not feel like a lot, not for the sensation of being on the far side of the Milky Way in a kayak-shaped flying saucer.

Last week, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner formally announced the US government’s long-awaited “master plan” for the future of the Gaza Strip—one Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said was in the works for two years. Kushner could not have chosen a more fitting venue for the spectacle: the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the powerful gather to congratulate themselves for expressing concern about crises they have no intention of resolving.

The picture Kushner painted of a “new” Gaza—replete with looming luxury high-rises and sprawling resorts—is unrecognizable not only from the morbid expanse of rubble that Israel has turned the territory into during more than two years of genocide, but also from the once-teeming city that endured, despite all odds, under a suffocating Israeli blockade for decades. But there is something even more sinister at the heart of Kushner’s vision: the effective absence of Palestinians.

Kushner has never been shy about his support for Israel’s most extreme fantasies for Gaza—fantasies that begin with ethnic cleansing. But he also knows that a single, overt act of ethnic cleansing on the scale that many Israelis openly dream of might be too controversial to launder through Davos-speak—and that the prospect of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza in one fell swoop has already triggered international backlash that the architects of this project would rather avoid. So the Kushner plan is built around something more marketable, more reproducible at scale: attrition. Or, to put it another way, the fulfillment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reported order to close aides to “thin out” Gaza’s population.