Tootfinder

"A society under “number go up” tends towards evil. The men and women behind an excessively high rate of return often make deeply sinful and immoral choices, little different than the Confederate plantation owners did in whipping slaves or lords in castles did when abusing serfs. That they do it with spreadsheets doesn’t make it better. (We even use old terminology: I know of several people in a large health insurance conglomerate who set policies to deny care whose nickname is “the three witches.”)
And that’s why Jeff Epstein’s story is so compelling, it expresses this evil in a way that we all understand. On Sunday, I wrote about the oddness of the story, how an elite sex trafficker convicted of procuring children as prostitutes was friends or associates with everyone from Trump to Bill Clinton to Larry Summers to Bill Gates. Epstein represents how elites live in one moral universe where evil bacchanalia is rampant, while the rest of us live in a different more normal one. Every society has elites, and there are always weird things that elites do. But America, and the West, have reached a point where there is increasingly deep resentment and cynicism about this divide."
#USPolitcs #EconomicInequality
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-number-go-up-rule-why-america

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ThroughTheNight
Elliot Galvin:
🎵 Gold Bright (Live From Manchester Jazz Festival)
#ElliotGalvin
https://open.spotify.com/track/5o5RUTP8VkveNB0JVrBwAX

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
PJ Harvey:
🎵 Long Snake Moan
#PJHarvey
https://elliotsongs.bandcamp.com/track/long-snake-moan-pjharvey
https://open.spotify.com/track/36YJWsgSCEMFsv9Y2jxI4U

National security elites accept Trump is creating a new world order (Eric Bazail-Eimil/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/19/aspen-forum-attendees-admit-theres-no-return-to-a-pre-trump-world-order-00464338
http://www.memeorandum.com/250719/p37#a250719p37

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Elliot Galvin:
🎵 Gold Bright (Live From Manchester Jazz Festival)
#ElliotGalvin
https://open.spotify.com/track/5o5RUTP8VkveNB0JVrBwAX

"Imagine capitulating to a president so underwater that he doesn't even have 50% approval with white people as a white supremacist"
"crazy that our Elites “confused” the most anti-free-speech extremists as pro-free-speech warriors
https://bsky.app/profile/davmicrot.bsk

The UK is (still) going backwards.
"Since 2019, the number of privately educated elites has barely changed and in some fields is growing, the report found. The social mobility charity said it was a “disgrace” that most of the country’s top jobs were still dominated by privileged people"
But of course we must tax the poor to subsidise the rich.
#UKPol

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Elliot Galvin:
🎵 A House, A City / From Beneath (Live From Manchester Jazz Festival)
#ElliotGalvin

A geometry of cubic discriminants in 8 dimensions
Elitza Hristova, Ivan Minchev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12014 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12014

A geometry of cubic discriminants in 8 dimensions
This paper examines 8-dimensional Riemannian manifolds whose structure group reduces to ${SO(4)}_{ir}\subset GL(8,\mathbb R)$, the image of an irreducible representation of $SO(4)$ on $\mathbb R^8$. We demonstrate that such a reduction can be described by an almost quaternion-Hermitian structure and a special rank-4 tensor field, which we call a cubic discriminant. This tensor field is pointwise linearly equivalent to the formula for the discriminant of a cubic polynomial. We show that the only…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Elliott Smith:
🎵 Needle in the Hay
#ElliottSmith
https://elliottsmith.bandcamp.com/album/needle-in-the-hay
https://open.spotify.com/track/1bFPKxP56XWDXJOwo3Kvfp