A new collection of his essays (although some were already published in other collections of his). Still, it's great to see such an eminent voice talk about utopia.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 05-Jun-2026 12:33:54 JST 
simsa03
George Scialabba has a new book out : "The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia" (2026)
A new collection of his essays (although some were already published in other collections of his). Still, it's great to see such an eminent voice talk about utopia.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 25-May-2026 04:34:44 JST
simsa03
https://omny.fm/shows/kan-english-podcast/the-trump-netanyahu-tightrope
This is a stellar interview with former Israel ambassador to the US, MichaelOren, and Israel public broadcaster Kan's host David Ze'ev. Insightful, to the point of the various complications that tie but also set apart the U.S. and Israel in the current war with Iran. Recommended.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 19-May-2026 03:23:14 JST
simsa03
i24news https://i24news.tv/en and #Israel public broadcaster Kan https://kan.org.il/content/kan/kan-reka/p-10861/ are good English language sources on politics, security, military, culture in Israel. (i24news seems more hawkish to me than Kan.)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 10:22:48 JST
simsa03
Historical knowledge repositories und encyclopaedias https://enzyklothek.de/en
A database of facsimiles!
sources
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Nonilex (nonilex@masto.ai)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 05:54:44 JST 
Nonilex
…Even if there is no incriminating evidence in the files, an extensive case file could contain revealing & personal details about #EricSwalwell & his campaign operations.
The lengths that Patel’s circle is going to in the bid to pursue a political foe of #Trump has raised alarms within the #FBI, where some ofcls fear that releasing the files—even with redactions—could compromise law enforcement #sources & investigatory #methods, making it harder for the FBI to gain trust with witnesses.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 06:04:48 JST
simsa03
Only now did I notice: "The Israel National Archaeological Database" https://discover.iaa.org.il/
sources #archeology #archaeology https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/45cf0b6eb0c6564aba0875cc14ff5f2142759dffa99c06d998bbe5a9b284025f/view
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Nonilex (nonilex@masto.ai)'s status on Wednesday, 25-Feb-2026 09:08:34 JST
Nonilex
A federal judge in Virginia rejected DOJ’s request to search through a #WashingtonPost reporter’s electronic devices as part of a national security #leak investigation, ruling that the court would instead be responsible for conducting the search.
The Tuesday ruling suggested that Magistrate Judge William Porter did not trust the #Trump admin to conduct a narrow search of the devices & feared that such an examination could risk exposing more than 1,000 of the reporter’s govt #sources to the #DOJ. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 18:59:26 JST
simsa03
Jonathan Watts, "Economic growth no longer linked to carbon emissions in most of the world, study finds" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/11/economic-growth-no-longer-linked-to-carbon-emissions-in-most-of-the-world-study-finds
That seems to refute 1) "No infinite growth on a finite planet" 2) the claim of Degrowth that only a reduction of production and consumption can cut CEs.
Interesting.
energy #infrastructure #postdoom #sources
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Dec-2025 09:27:02 JST
simsa03
John Kemp has published his 2025 reading list of books and articles on #energy, #infrastructure, and history https://jkempenergy.com/favourite-reads/
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Dec-2025 08:38:29 JST
simsa03
Oh, a new book by John Bellamy Foster (author of "The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth"):
"Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx" (2025) monthlyreview.org/9781685901233/
#sources https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/1eeba40c0125c28831b90f9cbb20496c5f8b0f51f9ba1fb6b183cbf389abe9da/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 20-Nov-2025 21:59:08 JST
simsa03
Hannah Hindley, "University of Arizona astronomer develops novel method to make AI more trustworthy" https://news.arizona.edu/news/university-arizona-astronomer-develops-novel-method-make-ai-more-trustworthy
#sources !reading -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Nov-2025 02:09:28 JST
simsa03
Sergei Chekanov, "Top 6 Wikipedia Alternatives You Should Know About in 2025" https://jwork.org/home/top-6-wikipedia-alternatives-you-should-know-about-in-2025
Helpful info on (more or less) general topics encyclopedias with free access.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 02-Nov-2025 02:01:46 JST
simsa03
Mir Faizal et al., "Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of Everything" https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488.html
Exciting! But just because the universe is proven not to be a simulation doesn't mean that the universe is real or that it is proven to be real. ;-)
«Physically these Gödel sentences correspond to empirically meaningful facts—e.g., specific black‑hole microstates—that elude any finite, rule‑based derivation. Gödel’s second theorem deepens the impasse: the self‑referential consistency statement Con(FQG) ≡ ¬ ProvΣQG (⊥) cannot itself be proved by FQG without contradiction [41,42]. A purely computational theory of everything would therefore not be able to establish its own internal soundness.»
«The claim that our universe is itself a computer simulation has been advanced in several forms, from Bostrom’s statistical “trilemma’’ [85] to more recent analyses by Chalmers [86] and Deutsch [87]. These proposals assume that every physical truth is reducible to the output of a finite algorithm executed on a sufficiently powerful substrate. Yet this assumption tacitly identifies the full physical theory with its computable slice FQG. Our framework separates the computable fragment FQG from the non-algorithmic meta-layer MToE. Because MToE contains an external truth predicate T (x) that by construction escapes formal verification, any finite algorithm can at best emulate FQG while systemat-ically omitting the meta-theoretic truths enforced by T (x). Consequently, no simulation could in principle reproduce what would otherwise be the full underyling structure of the physics of our universe. Our analysis instead suggests that genuine physical reality embeds non-computational content that cannot be instantiated on a Turing-equivalent device. Since it is impossible to simulate a complete and consistent universe, our universe is definitely not a simulation. As the universe is produced by MToE, the simulation hypothesis is logically impossible rather than merely implausible.»
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Jul-2025 09:27:27 JST
simsa03
@band@octodon.social @band@hachydem.io @scribe @woodbark @es0mhi
Have you seen this?
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/projects/technological-condition
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-technological-society
FYI
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 12:54:04 JST
simsa03
Izabella Tabarovsky, "Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism" (2019) https://fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zionism-and-contemporary-left-antisemitism/
Izabella Tabarovsky, "Zombie Anti-Zionism" (2024) https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/zombie-anti-zionism
In the first piece the author traces origin and developement of the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Soviet propaganda, primarily in the mid 1960s to the late 1980s. Here she concentrates on the USSR and the relevance of this propaganda in domestic societal control
In the second piece she describes in a tour d'horizon how anti-Zionism between the late 1950s to 1990 provided the USSR with a very effective tool against the West by uniting various anti-Western sentiments and movements. Combining allegations of imperialism, genocide, apartheid, Nazism, it unites Western communists (and the Left in general), African, South-American, and Asian liberation struggles, Arab nationalism, as well as Jihadists.
In both pieces Tabarovsky describes genalogies, e.g., how in 1982 Abbas wrote a Ph.D thesis equating Zionism and Nazism at the prestigious Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
Immensely helpful, not just with regard to the origin of late 20th century Western anti-Semitism on the Left (e.g., George Galloway, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn) but even more with regard to the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Arab (e.g., Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mahmoud Abbas) and Latin American nations (e.g., Lula Da Silva, Gustavo Petro).
«What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.»
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Jul-2025 02:48:04 JST
simsa03
Mikhail Zygar, "The Next Generation: Russia’s future rulers" (July 2025) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Russia-Tomorrow-The-next-generation.pdf
Overview of names to come and names to go—possibly, given Putin's suspiciousness of powerful rivals, his desire to balance people and influences, and the need to bring in a younger generation into office.
«It is hardly surprising that a significant portion of this new generation coming to power consists of the children of current top officials and Putin’s closest friends—or even his own relatives. In this sense, Russia increasingly resembles a feudal state, in which power is inherited at all levels. The children of the bureaucratic aristocracy are all, in one way or another, striving for government careers and positions of influence.
[...]
The ongoing generational shift will, of course, change the face of Russia. The new officials, who were very young when the Soviet Union collapsed, differ from the previous generation in that they lack Soviet psychology and a Soviet background.
On one hand, many members of this next generation of Russian leaders tend to idealize the Soviet Union and dream of restoring imperial power. On the other hand, they are full-fledged capitalists, and most of them clearly do not want another Cold War or international isolation for Russia.
They are the children of a cynical generation, convinced that business can—and should—be done with everyone: China, Iran, Europe, the United States, and even Ukraine.
In many ways, Putin’s personnel policy resembles the dynamics in the final years of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s rule. Castro also tried to cultivate a new generation of Komsomol-style loyalists—and, in some ways, succeeded. The politicians he nurtured, young enough to be his grandchildren, turned out to be even more orthodox and staunchly conservative than the generation of officials who were old enough to be his sons.
But when the decisive moment came, Castro still chose to hand power to his own brother, Raúl.
Putin has no brother, and he trusts no one. That’s why he is focused on grooming a new, younger, and thoroughly indoctrinated generation—one that he is confident will carry on his legacy.»
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br00t4c (br00t4c@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Jun-2025 02:16:47 JST 
br00t4c
Trump considers forcing journalists to reveal sources who leaked Iran report
#USIntelligence #Journalists #Trump #Sources #Prosecution
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/29/trump-iran-military-strike-report
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br00t4c (br00t4c@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 04:02:51 JST
br00t4c
Inside the Oval Office where phone calls during Fox News commercials and desperate world leaders changed Trump's mind on tariff plan
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 11:03:19 JST
simsa03
Seda Motie, Jonas Oesch, Jonas Roth, "Friends, enemies, frenemies: An interactive overview of the key actors in the Middle East" https://nzz.ch/english/interactive-map-the-middle-easts-alliances-and-enmities-ld.1859853
«Who is allied with whom? Who is pursuing what interests? And how do the individual actors relate to each other?»
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 25-Jan-2025 22:02:47 JST
simsa03
Michael Schilliger, "«Anyone can become a torturer. And all of us, in some way, already know how to torture» – Interview with Jonathan Luke Austin" https://www.nzz.ch/english/all-of-us-in-some-way-already-know-how-to-torture-ld.1867657
#sources
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