Tootfinder

Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.

WBD unveils agentic AI ad tools at its upfront presentation, including a Kerv.ai integration for scene-level contextual targeting and shoppable ads (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/ahead-of-paramount-meg…

Ahead of Paramount Mega-Merger, WBD Bets on Agentic Ads
At its upfront presentation to advertisers, the entertainment behemoth showcased plans to enhance targeting and interactivity across media environments with AI

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

The "handbook ... urges lawmakers and election officials to severely restrict mail-in voting, eliminate same-day voter registration, conduct mass voter challenges and empower officials to deny and delay certification."
Cleta Mitchell Issues New Voter Suppression Handbook - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/05/cleta-mitchell-issues-new-voter-suppression-handbook/

Veteran Adam Marshall testifies on his abduction by fascists while helping protestors as a street medic at Delaney Hall concentration camp (Newark, NJ • 06/17/26)
On Wednesday, June 17th, Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Committee on Homeland Security Democrats will hold a Democratic forum in Newark, New Jersey to conduct oversight of the Delaney Hall ICE detention center operated by GEO Group. At the forum, entitled “The Human Cost of Immigration Enforcement and Detention:…

Quantification of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES East)
Aaron Sonabend-W, Sean Campbell, John Platt, Christopher Van Arsdale, Anna M. Michalak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23991 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23991 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.23991
arXiv:2605.23991v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: There is a growing urgency to track greenhouse gasses with the resolution, precision and accuracy needed to support independent verification of $CO_2$ fluxes at local to global scales. The current generation of space-based sensors, however, only provides sparse observations in space and time. This challenge has fueled interest in the potential use of data from existing missions originally developed for other applications for inferring global greenhouse gas variability. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-East), operational since 2017, provides full coverage of much of the western hemisphere at 10-minute intervals from geostationary orbit at 16 wavelengths at an approximately 2$km^2$ spatial resolution. Here, we leverage this high spatial coverage and temporal revisit to develop a single-pixel, physics-guided neural network to estimate dry-air column $CO_2$ mole fraction ($XCO_2$). The model employs a time series of GOES-East's 16 spectral bands, ECMWF ERA5 lower tropospheric meteorology, MODIS surface reflectance, solar and satellite viewing geometry, and day of year. Training used collocated GOES-East and OCO-2/OCO-3 observations. We also present case studies illustrating the use of the model to observe $XCO_2$ enhancements over urban areas and drawdown over agricultural regions. Overall, while the precision of GOES-East derived $XCO_2$ can never rival that of dedicated instruments, the unprecedented combination of contiguous geographic coverage, 10-minute temporal frequency, and multi-year record offers the potential to observe aspects of atmospheric $CO_2$ variability currently unseen from space.
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