The builders of Israeli "settlements" (in occupied Palestinian territory) hold events around the world to sell apartments in them. One such event being held in London has triggered objections supported by 100 members of the houses of Parliament, who call for prohibiting the sale of land that was taken from Palestinians in violation of international law.

The bullshitter and Iran say they are coming closer to a peace deal.

We can't presume that the bullshitter is telling the truth about any of this. Even if some parts are true, other parts may be bullshit.

But even if they do make an agreement, the bullshitter might break it at any time. Iran too might break the agreement.

A study found that children in England who were hit by their parents have a tendency to get worse grades in school.

This could indicate that hitting children tends to lead them to do worse in school tests. Or it could indicate that children who for certain other reasons tend to do worse in school will tend also to be hit by their parents. Is it the hitting itself that does them harm, or the situation that leads to the hitting, or both, or something else?

An estimated 10,000 corpses buried in the rubble of Gaza will be difficult to identify ever. Israel's continued use of bulldozers in some parts of Gaza is increasing that number.

The FBI raided a voter registration group — in effect claiming that to help eligible citizens register to vote is forbidden.

Radio Jornalera NJ coverse the perverse, unpredictable harassment of prisoners in the Delaney Hall privately run deportation prison.

It is admirable nonviolent resistance to violent, sadistic fascism. But I wonder, is there any way to listen to it without subjecting oneself to nonfree JavaScript code? I have a hunch the people who do this, while heroic in resistance, are unaware of the quite different injustice of nonfree software, and have picked up the habit of handing control of their own computers to any and all companies that might want to snoop on them, cheat them or repress them.

Hegseth went to a commemoration of the Normandy landings of 1944 for two events, but his speech at the first one at Colleville-sur-Mer was so racist and hateful that people in the town of Langrune-sur-Mer (where Hegseth had planned to appear) posted their disgust. This showed how vile he is and reverberated around the world.

Ralph Nader argues that a push to impeach the saboteur in chief would boost political opposition to him and his regime, even if it doesn't succeed in removing him.

Separating the UK from the European Union, explained as an example of trying a simple quick fix in a complex situation in which no simple fix exists.

US citizens: call on media outlets to cease climate hushing.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her workplace. "I've seen the news, especially in Minnesota," she said. "And I didn't want anything to happen to me at all."

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver's license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. "They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working," she said. The agents told her to "remove and/or discontinue" the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram. [...]

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat. [...]

Gonyea's experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting left-wing zines linked to a protest at ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Over the years I’ve occasionally noodled on what might be a better working fluid for supercritical turbines than Carbon Dioxide. It turns out the main fixed parameter is the critical temperature, because there’s a strong nonlinearity in density with it going up rapidly as that temperature is approached. The other parameters of note are thermal conductivity, specific heat, and density, with more being better. There’s a very short list of possible fluids to mix which aren’t horribly corrosive, thermally unstable, or otherwise problematic. I’ve put together a tool to play with all the possible options here. You should go play with it. The short of it is that a mix of Neon and Perfluorobenzene tuned to the desired critical temperature is probably optimal, but if Perflueropropane’s decomposition problems aren’t too bad or Titanium Tetrachloride mixes with other things well then combining with some of those may be beneficial. This approach to visualization is probably equally applicable to conventional refrigerants but with the fixed parameter being boiling point rather than critical temperature. I don’t know if it’s standard there. If it isn’t it should be.

Years ago there was this insane academic idea that the isotope Thorium-229 might have a metastable isomer whose energy state is so close that it could be flipped into that state using a laser. In principle this worked on paper but so completely goes against the fundamentals of chemistry that it has to be assumed that it won’t work. Now it’s actually been made to work. It’s a little hard to convey how bonkers this is. A truly herculean effort was necessary to find out what the extremely precise wavelength of the laser has to be. The chemistry actually matters. The chemical which the Th-229 is embedded in matters for how precise the laser has to be. The laser is pushing on the nucleus, which is pushing on an electron, which is in turn pulling on the nucleus, which is pulling on the laser. This is not how chemistry works. But it does have directly applications to making yet even more insanely accurate clocks than we have currently, with possible applications to things like measuring fluctuations in the dark matter passing over the earth.

Here’s a crazy new idea of mine: It would be very convenient if there were some isotope which absorbed neutrons and then turned into something with an insanely high cross section similar to Xenon-135 but a half-life on the order of minutes. That could be left in a reactor core to to provide a passive negative feedback loop which operated on flux instead of temperature. Since flux is leading and temperature is trailing this could react more quickly and reliably. The downside would be losing some neutrons to the passive buffer. The funny thing is we have no idea if such unobtanium exists: The neutron cross sections of things with short half-lives are largely unknown and hard to predict. But we have some data already! If this process is already happening accidentally from something in existing nuclear reactors then there should be a resonance in the time series data for temperature measurements in them which is very precise and consistent across reactors. A lot of such data for many different reactors already exists. Checking for that would be an experiment worth doing.

▶︎

As with the Spencer archives, I hope this trend of people unearthing their 36-year-old VHS tapes continues...

• The Bride! (2026):
  Frankenstein is having a moment. This one is absolutely amazing! Where Poor Things was Arthouse Frankenstein, this is more of a Grindhouse Frankenstein. It wears all of the references. There's a little bit of Frankenhooker, a little bit of Young Frankenstein, a little Salome, a little Bonnie and Clyde a hell of a lot of Natural Born Killers, wrapped up in a bow of feminist cannibalism. I spent a lot of this movie with my mouth open, thinking "oh wow, you went there".

  Best movie of the year so far.

• Mother Mary (2026):
  Starts off as a reunion between a fancy pop star and her estranged dressmaker, then takes some very surreal and witchy turns. The cinematography is great, the songs are great. They rubbed a bunch of Charli XCX and Iris Van Herpen over it.

  Second best movie of the year.

• The Peripheral (2022):
  On a rewatch, still absolutely brilliant. A friend was watching it for the first time (impetus for my rewatch) and once Lowbeer showed up I said, "Most terrifying person in the show. In a rich field of badasses." It is an absolute tragedy that the planned second season was scuttled by COVID.

  Because I couldn't get enough I then re-read both novels, The Peripheral and Agency, and though the show is A+, they remain even better.

• Pretty Lethal (2026):
  Some ballerinas break down on the road, and oh no, the nearest cabin in the woods happens to be a ballet themed cabaret, and oh no, their only dry clothes are their tutus, and oh no, the impresario is a mobster washed up ballerina -- wait is that Uma Thurman, what is she doing slumming in this trash -- and oh no, now it's a gang war and ballerinas are uniquely skilled at murder.

  Anyway if you have ever thought, "Oh, I could never be a writer", remember that someone got paid to write this. And dozens of people said, "Yeah, sure, good enough."

• The Ugly Stepsister (2026):
  A pretty great, gory take on Cinderella. They set you up to wonder which of these character is going to end up being sympathetic, but nope, they're all horrid grifters, and there is a heavy emphasis on the details of 17th Century cosmetic surgery techniques, including tapeworm dieting. And the toe thing, obviously.

• Sew Torn (2024):
  A weirdo seamstress sees the opportunity for a perfect crime and it all goes Coen-shaped; and then they do the Run Lola Run thing and play it out three more different ways. Also the weirdo seamstress is like the MacGuyver of sewing; she never saw a problem that couldn't (shouldn't) be solved with 3 bobbins and 100' of thread. It's pretty great.

• Ready or Not 2 (2026):
  Absolutely fantastic. Even better than the first one. Samara Weaving kills a bunch of billionaire satanists. Shit man that's all you had to say. Buffy is in it, and also Cronenberg. ("You made your sale, son!")

• Exit 8 (2025):
  Guy is trapped in an endless subway station loop, with "SCP"-style vibes. It's very creepy and pretty scary without anything graphical happening, or honestly much of anything at all. Well made, unsatisfying ending.

• Stop Making Sense (1984):
  I had not watched this in years and god damn does it hold up. This is the second best* concert film ever made. As I was putting together my nuclear war mixtape I briefly considered including Life During Wartime and that led me to realize that I had never gotten around to ingesting the movie into the DNA Pizza music video rotation. So I did that. Anyway there was a recent-ish 4K remaster that is killer, and has director's commentary and lots of cool extras.

  * Number one of course is Home of The Brave and number three of course is Urgh! A Music War. I will not be taking any questions.

• The Yeti (2026):
  They put together a D&D party of adventurers for a rescue mission to the Alaska Territory, 1946. Extreme Marion Ravenwood feel. Pulpy goodness, but the second half drags a bit.

  (Marion Ravenwood movie when?)

• How To Get To Heaven From Belfast (2026):
  Three idiot 40 year old women try to solve a murder that has something to do with some murderous and/or witchy antics they got up to in high school. It's pretty funny and I liked the characters, but it does the Netflix Episode seven flashback exposition thing (this time in episode 6) and when it did, the reveal of the mystery was just so stupid that I didn't care any more. Squandered. SQUANDERED.

  Also, in this entire show full of quite foul-mouthed Irish people, never once was the word "cunt" deployed, and honestly, that's just implausible. I feel the feathery touch of a US Netflix exec on the script.

• They Will Kill You (2026):
  Final Girl does a John Wick on a Dakota Building full of immortal, regenerating Satanists. Pretty much one arterial spray per minute. Does what it says on the can.

• Daredevil, Born Again S02:
  It's always good when you get more Kingpin. And they stuck the landing with the finale. Thumbs up.

• Pretty Ugly, The Story Of The Lunachicks (2026):
  Honestly I wasn't that familiar with The Lunachicks but that won't stop me from watching a documentary about an early 90s punk band. This was pretty good.

• Spider Noir (2026):
  I find Nicholas Cage's movies pretty uneven -- ok, mostly bad -- but rarely boring. This is a snore. How did they make it so boring? In the last 2 eps they finally kinda-sorta let Cage off the chain but it was too little too late.

• Hokum (2026):
  Decent haunted hotel story with Adam Scott from Severance.

• Vampires of the Velvet Lounge (2026):
  Pervert vampires who run an absinthe bar get their victims on Tinder. I started watching this thinking, "This is going to be too cheesy to make it more than a few minutes", but it's actually pretty fun. It has no budget, but the look of the green-fairy vamps is pretty cool. (And these are some ...relatively... big names for what's basically a Troma movie, how did this happen?)

• The Voices of Our Mother (2026):
  Bad moms, generational trauma, demonic possession. Not bad.

• The Testaments (2026):
  Handmaid's Babies. Not bad but could have moved the plot along much faster.

• Margo's Got Money Troubles (2026):
  Elle Fanning gets knocked up and does Onlyfans. Her trashy mom is Michelle Pfeiffer. Raunchy and hilarious, but content warning for having too much baby.

• My Animal (2023):
  Love story about small-town Canadian lesbians in the 80s, hockey, alcoholic mom. Oh also one of them's a werewolf. It's great. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the best werewolf genre is "small town werewolf". Killer contemporary-synthwave soundtrack. Also, to my great surprise, the font used in the titles and credits is the DNA Lounge font (Helvetica Neue LT Com 93 Black Extended, I'd know it anywhere.)

• Widow's Bay (2026):
  The guy from The Americans is the sad-sack mayor of a haunted town on an isolated island, trying to get tourist trade with a minimum of murders. It's very... Netflixxy. Not bad, but it takes forever to get going and drags anything of consequence out until the very last minute.

• Slanted (2025):
  A Chinese-American girl gets magical-surgery to turn white. It starts off a bit Mean Girls / Freaky Friday and then goes to some body horror places, and has a few twists that I did not see coming. Really fun.

Previously.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

"Serhiy was great at flirting," his commander told me. "Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice." Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone. [...]

Any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge -- Друг -- which means "friend" in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. [...] At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone's owner a trip to the basement. [...]

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson's partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

"Your CIA was good at this," Dmytro said. "You bastards knew how to use sex."

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

All told, at least 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or investigated by their employers (many in academia or public service) in the days following the death of Charlie Kirk, with companies frequently kowtowing to Libs of TikTok-style online pressure campaigns to avoid negative attention, even when their offending employee had posted something truly innocuous. In many cases, people lost their jobs for simply posting quotes from the likes of Donald Trump or Kirk himself. But checking back in now, some 10 months later, many of those people not only succeeded in getting their jobs back -- they've also received hefty settlements following the world's most obvious wrongful termination lawsuits. Millions of dollars have cumulatively been awarded to people fired or even jailed over Charlie Kirk-related comments. [...]

The goal of a mass cancelation campaign is not just to cause the petty loss of a few hundred jobs by way of punishing people for their speech; it's to intimidate everyone else around them into not daring to speak in the future, in order to create the appearance of a culture with no dissent against right-wing domination. [...] MAGA America might consider the court settlements money well spent, if it stops people from the opposite side of the political spectrum from feeling safe in expressing themselves in the future.

Previously, previously, previously.