Tootfinder

From Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
September 17 at 7 pm PT for this year‘s Rosenbluth Lecture with Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, who will be speaking about their new book Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us. Linda needs no introduction as one of Canada’s top journalists and progressive commentators. Neil is a lawyer and academic, and his work was extremely influential to me when I was starting out as a progressive economist. They will be available to chat and sign…

Rosenbluth Lecture 2026: live at Vancouver's Harbour Centre | CCPA
Where: Challenge Theatre, Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre campus, 555 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

For months, Washington has threatened to bomb cartel targets in Mexico,
-- a scenario Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum firmly rejects.
“The Mexican people,” she has said, will never accept “violations of Mexican territory, whether by land, sea or air.”
Yet U.S. airstrikes have already struck Mexican vessels carrying Mexican citizens in international waters off the country’s coast, according to a Times investigation.
That includes the fatal strikes on Feb. 16 on th…

The financialization of the American electoral process is well documented.
Now two key progressive legislators are proposing a new law to do something about it. 
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12) introduced the
"Abolish Super PACs Act" on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
It’s a measure they say will eliminate one the primary ways billionaires funnel cash into elections: super PACs.
The bill would limit donations to super PACs t…

Sanders, Lee move to rein in super PACs amid growing billionaire grip on US elections
The bill targets one of the central vehicles for unlimited outside spending, as progressives warn that billionaire money—and broader threats of voter intimidation—are putting democratic elections under strain.

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.

Fucking around with a Sony A7S that was loaned to me ages ago. I'm finally at the point with the work that I do where I'm feeling the need to be able to run a camera myself, even if it's just to clearly communicate with people I work with.
It has a Sony FE 1.8/50 lens, that's all I've got to work with 😂
#photography

A Trump Tower planned for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, is to be built on land currently part-owned by the son of the US-sanctioned leader of the country, according to official records.
The proposed skyscraper, a joint venture between a local consortium and the Trump Organization, which is managed by the US president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump,
will be on a plot whose current registered owner is the International Charity Fund Cartu.
According to official record…