Tootfinder

Congratulations to Barbara Hof, currently postdoc in my SNSF project, for being awarded the 2025 IUPAP Early Career Prize in the History of Physics!
https://www.iuchpp.org/prize/prize-2025

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/07/17/clive-palmer-united-australia-party-trumpet-of-patriots-data-breach-documents/
I don’t know enough about Australian politics but it sounds like the country’s version of the MAG…

Clive Palmer’s political parties suffer data breach affecting ‘all emails … documents and records’
Identical statements from both parties say a ransomware attack has obtained ‘email address, phone number, identity records, banking records, employment history, documents (including those provided subject to confidentiality arrangements)'.

2/2 Reflection on #citizenship:
I do not treat the concept of “#democracy" lightly. I was born into the aftermath of centuries of totalitarian oppression that ended suddenly, leaving the nascent Ukrainian state of the late 90s and early 2000s floundering in the turbulent whirlpool of hopes and fears felt by millions of people who were finally allowed to ponder: how to build a free democratic state in the place of Soviet and imperial ruins?
I was taught the words "democracy", "citizen", "freedom", "voting", “liberty" (and more) by people who, less than two decades prior, weren't allowed to leave the borders of their country. I was told about self-determination by people whose political choices were ridiculed, punished, and eviscerated form most of their lives. The duty of governing ourselves felt to us ephemeral - a nice fantasy, akin to a fairytale or a utopia from fictional works.
And then I saw those same people fight with their bodies and souls once the previously unfathomable democracy was threatened. Protests in 2004, then again in 2014, then the unthinkable war against foreign invasion in 2022. Democracy no longer felt abstract or silly. It became as tangible as saying "I love you".
I write of Ukraine as I reflect on becoming a citizen of another country because the history and values of my adopted United States feel as real as the skin on my legs, the significance of its legacy lays as heavy as the weight of my waist-long hair, and the desire to uphold the freedoms of its Constitution burns my throat as harshly as dehydration after a long day in the sun.
People have asked me why I even want to join this country, when the present moment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. And I answer: because I've felt the warmth of a newly lit fire of freedom breaking through shadows that for centuries looked like solid walls. I have seen kindness, and solidarity heal the fear and hate of oppression. I've seen liberty emerge from nothing but the human soul.
I am not a religious person, but I have faith. Faith in the ideals at the foundation of the American project. Faint but powerful recognition that "we the people" now includes me.
I love #America. And I hope to keep loving my home for the rest of my life.

Uspol, genocide
In case you're wondering whether "political violence" is escalating in the U.S.A. right now, of *course* it is as we move into an era of concentration campus and domestic military deployments. But both domestic genocides and purges as well as political violence targeted at individual prominent figures has been a *constant* throughout American history, from gun duels fought between political rivals to massacres of Native Americans in order to steal their land, to pogroms against Catholics, to literal wars on local Black success and political participation, all dating back before the American Revolution to the beginning of colonization. Thanks to Wikipedia, here's a *small sampling* where I attempted to whittle things down to about one event per decade before recent times.
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States
Killings, woundings, and plots against political figures:
Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in 1804
Sam Houston beats Rep. William Stanbery in 1832
Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
Fight between Representatives Churchwell & Cullom in 1854
Caning of Sen. Charles Summer in 1856
Brawl on the House floor in 1858
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865
Assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881
Assassination of President William McKinley in 1901
Attempted Assassination of William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in 1909
Wounding of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Bombing of the U.S. Senate reception room in 1915
Attempted Assassination of President Herbert Hover in 1928 (in Argentina)
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1947
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950
The United States Capitol Shooting in 1954
Planned Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1960
Attempted Assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1963
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Weather Underground bombings in 1970, 1971, and 1975
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1972 (Alabama Governor George Wallace was targeted & injured instead)
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1974
Planned Assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1974
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Gerald Ford in 1975
Wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981
Attempted Kidnapping of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981
Planned Assassination of President George Bush in 1993 (in Kuwait)
Attempted Assassinations (x3) of President Bill Clinton in 1994
Attempted Assassination of President Bill Clinton in 1996
Anthrax attacks on US senators in 2001
Attempted Assassination of President George W. Bush in 2005 (in the foreign country of Georgia)
Planned Assassination of President-Elect Barrack Obama in 2008
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2009 (in Turkey)
Attempted Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2011
Shooting of Rep. Gabby Gliffords in 2011
Planned Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2012
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2013
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2015
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Donald Trump in 2017
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2018
Pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders in 2018, including former President Barack Obama
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2019
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2020
Kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020
Planned Assassination of Former President George W. Bush in 2022
Planned Assassination of Former President Barrack Obama in 2023
Attempted Assassination of President Joe Biden in 2023
Planned Assassinations (x2) of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Wounding of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Massacres and other mass killings, mostly with genocidal motivations:
The Acoma Massacre in 1599
The Paspaheg Massacre in 1610
The Wessagusset affair in 1623
The Mystic Massacre in 1637
The Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644
The Susquehannock chiefs massacre in 1675
The Apalachee Massacre in 1704
The Massacre at Fort Narhantes in 1712
The Norridgewock Massacre in 1724
The 1745 Massacre at Walden (in 1745)
The 1756 Massacre at Walden (in 1756)
The Killings by the Paxton Boys in 1763
The Yellow Creek Massacre in 1774
The Gnadenhütten Massacre in 1782
The Canyon del Muerto Massacre in 1805
The Battle of Tallushatchee in 1813
The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844
The Bloody Island Massacre in 1850
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864
The Opelousas Massacre in 1868
The Chinese Massacre in 1871
The Election Riot of 1874
The Haymarket Affair in 1886
The Buffalo Gap Massacre in 1890
The Wilmington Massacre in 1898
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (in 1906)
The Ludlow Massacre in 1914
The Elaine massacre in 1919
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
The Bonus Army Conflict in 1932
The 1937 Memorial Day massacre (in 1937)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963
The Kent State shootings in 1970
The Greensboro massacre in 1979
The MOVE Bombing in 1985
The 4 O'Clock murders in 1988
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995
The September 11 Attacks in 2001
The Fort Hood Shooting in 2009
The Holocaust Memorial Shooting in 2009
The Isla Vista killings in 2014
The Charleston Church shooting in 2015
The San Bernardino attack in 2015
The Orlando Nightclub Shooting in 2016
The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting in 2018
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019
The January 6th Capitol Attack in 2021
The 2022 Buffalo Shooting (in 2022)

People keep trying to point to an event where the "right/left" political violence thing got out of hand. You cannot point to anywhere in US history where the right hasn't been murdering leftists. It has never happened.
They've been talking about civil war since they lost the last one, and most of US politics before that was just trying to prevent the first one.
There isn't a wave of right/left violence. Right wing violence has just gone unchecked for so long, and been so accepted, that now they're killing each other regularly. The Trump assassination attempts were all from the right. #CharlieKirk was killed by another fascist for not being fascist enough.
Fascists have so completely taken over that they see each other as legitimate targets because they've run out of "leftists" worth murdering. That's the story. That's what people can't wrap their heads around.
Everyone is worried about the right wing response, worries about right wing escalation, but they called for civil war over the cracker barrel logo. They're already maxing out their base. All the proud boys and other Nazis are already hired by ICE. They're also already going as hard as they can. They don't need any excuses. They have total control of everything. This bumbling mess is *the best they can do.* They call for civil war every few days.
We're not seeing a war between the left and the right. We're seeing a war between the right and the far right, where both side opportunistically punch left when they can and liberals help them justify their actions.
#USPol

Trump’s stories serve to exaggerate his foresight about and knowledge of domestic and foreign affairs,
embellish his biography and record in office, and diminish his political opponents.
The stories tend to be colorful even though they’re fake.
Trump’s historical fiction is sprinkled with vivid details and make-believe quotes,
all the better to make it seem authentic and get it to stick in the minds of voters.

Analysis: Donald Trump’s long history of fake history
President Donald Trump told a story on Monday about how he “made a correct prediction” about the outcome of the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum while he was visiting his golf course in Scotland “the day before the vote.”

Google's Ad Transparency tool no longer shows any political ads, past or present, from any EU countries ahead of new EU ad transparency regulations (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/google-ad-transparency-european-union/

Google Just Removed Seven Years of Political Advertising History from 27 Countries
Ahead of the European Union's Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising, Google's Ad Transparency Center no longer shows political ads from any countries in the EU.

"Hello! I am an American syndicalist, and I study political science. If you're interested in international political history, philosophy or a rare dose of contemporary political analysis from a pro-Western perspective, this is the place for you."
—@thejaylino
https://www.youtube.com/@thejaylino

So Trump is targeting NY's AG with bullshit charges. The AG is sending me emails that look like every single other generic Democrat "we need $15 to fight!" nonsense email, which makes me much less inclined to actually send her money.

Google's Ad Transparency tool no longer shows any political ads, past or present, from any EU countries ahead of new EU ad transparency regulations (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/google-ad-transparency-european-union/

Google Just Removed Seven Years of Political Advertising History from 27 Countries
Ahead of the European Union's Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising, Google's Ad Transparency Center no longer shows political ads from any countries in the EU.

Assistant Professor of the History(ies) of Global Christianity(ies) https://churchhistory.org/assistant-professor-of-the-historyies-of-global-christianityies/

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. IG Farben initially wasn’t keen on working with the Nazis, but it just made business sense to adapt to the new political environment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/gold_frankincense_and_silicon

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. IG Farben initially wasn’t keen on working with the Nazis, but it just made business sense to adapt to the new political environment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/gold_frankincense_and_silicon

Sounds an interesting book - an analysis of the significant role of "elites" in societal collapse. But a slightly ominous message looking at the behavior of today's high priests (conservative economists & religious bigots having outsize roles in their respective disciplines), and rulers (the CEO & vulture capital class who have bought the political space)

[disclaimer: not a political scientist, just riffing here]
Plurality voting forces a two-party system. There will always be two parties (or if a third forms, the system will rapidly collapse back to two; this happened twice in US history).
The role of the two parties can change, however. Parties are coalitions, and coalitions are heterogeneous. There are lots of ways to draw lines through the myriad political interests to form two coalitions of roughly equal size. And those lines can shift.
3/

I'm so looking forward to this:
50th Anniversary of The Dismissal. This will be a fascinating symposium -
registration is free or by donation
Event Overview
On 11 November 1975, the dismissal of the Whitlam Government plunged the nation into a political crisis.
Fifty years on, the events of November 1975 remain the most contested and consequential in Australian political history.
This one-day symposium, presented by the Whitlam Institute within Western…

The Whitlam Dismissal and the Crisis of November 1975
A one-day symposium on the most infamous Constitutional crisis in Australian political history: the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam.

Google Just Removed Seven Years of Political Advertising History from 27 Countries https://www.404media.co/google-ad-transparency-european-union/

Peter Thiel
Qatari Airbase
#SheShed
We’re eight days away from #NoKings Day, and over 2,500 protests planned in all 50 states and across the world.
October 18 is going to be the biggest day
of nonviolent protest in US history — because Courage is contagious.
Find an event 👉🏾

Volunteer Opportunities, Events, and Petitions Near Me · Mobilize
Create change in your community. Find events, petitions, volunteer opportunities, and fundraisers in your local area, organized by charities, campaigns, political organizations, grassroots groups, and other volunteers! Together, we'll help make the world more just, inclusive, and democratic.

“Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba”

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. IG Farben initially wasn’t keen on working with the Nazis, but it just made business sense to adapt to the new political environment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/gold_frankincense_and_silicon

Assistant Professor of the History(ies) of Global Christianity(ies)
https://ift.tt/XKZqLPU
Phillips Theological Seminary invites applications for a full-time, tenure-trackposition in the…
via Input 4 RELCFP

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

@… @… great find!
His obituary to Nixon often reminds me Trump:

Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard M. Nixon (1994): “He Was a Crook.”
Arguably, the finest political obituary in American history. A Twitter friend linked to it recently, remarking that he rereads the piece every few months. It's a sign that I should, [...]

Good Morning #Canada
July 1840 - British parliament passed the Act of Union 1840, and it was proclaimed officially on February 10, 1841, in Montreal. The act abolished the legislatures of Lower Canada (basically the East coast and Quebec) and Upper Canada (most of present day Ontario) and established a new political entity, the Province of Canada to replace them. British objectives were to exert more control of their colony and suppress the French speaking population. In 1848, the Province of Canada was allowed "responsible government," giving them limited rights to pass laws, and some of the more repressive laws of the Act of Union were repealed.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/act-of-union

When Donald Trump didn’t like the weak jobs numbers that were released on Friday, he fired the person responsible for producing them.
It was a move with few precedents in the century-long history of economic statistics in the United States.
And for good reason: When political leaders meddle in government data, it rarely ends well.
Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degre…

Trump Fired America’s Economic Data Collector. History Shows the Perils.
Economists say unbiased data is essential for policymaking, and for democracy.

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

More Parameters Than Populations: A Systematic Literature Review of Large Language Models within Survey Research
Trent D. Buskirk, Florian Keusch, Leah von der Heyde, Adam Eck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03391

More Parameters Than Populations: A Systematic Literature Review of Large Language Models within Survey Research
Survey research has a long-standing history of being a human-powered field, but one that embraces various technologies for the collection, processing, and analysis of various behavioral, political, and social outcomes of interest, among others. At the same time, Large Language Models (LLMs) bring new technological challenges and prerequisites in order to fully harness their potential. In this paper, we report work-in-progress on a systematic literature review based on keyword searches from mult…

Zohran Mamdani wants to make New York more affordable
by raising taxes on the city’s millionaires.
History shows they won’t leave
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/zohran-mamdani-tax-rich-new-y…

Tax the Rich. They’ll Stay
Mamdani’s plan to tax New York’s millionaires has the penthouse crowd aflutter. History and data show they won’t fly the coop.

When we travel from deep-blue states to deep-red states,
the ‘Fox-Book’ media diet increases by about 10 percentage points.
Likewise, the diet of political ignorance (no political media consumption) increases by about 3.5 percentage points.
Summing these two diets, we get a roughly 14-point swing in media consumption across the state partisan spectrum.
Obviously, this 14-point swing is not Orwellian: there is no state population that receives all of its political infor…

Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy – Economics from the Top Down
In this essay, I take a deep dive into the history of American plutocracy and its conspicuously Republican roots.

Refugees, intergenerational trauma, child death, abusive family
Also just finished "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui, which is the second memoir I've stumbled upon recently that deals with the Vietnamese exodus after the end of the war (House Without Walls by Ching Yeung Russel is the other one, which is written in verse, not illustrated). Bui traces more of the political landscape and history of Vietnam through the stories of both of her parents, and also unpacks a lot of intergenerational trauma, but has less focus on the boat trip out and refugee camp experience, presumably because hers were easier than Russel's.
My thoughts after reading this return repeatedly to all of the impacts that patriarchy and toxic masculinity had on her father, from setting up his father and grandfather to be abusive towards him and the women in their lives, to pushing him deep into depression when he feels unable to fulfill the role of a protective husband, ironically leaving his wife to pick up the slack and ultimately ruining their relationship, to how it teaches him to despise and shirk the caregiver role he's left with, ultimately passing on some measure of trauma to his children. For sure war, abusive family, and child death can happen in the absence of patriarchy and those are in some ways perhaps bigger factors here, but at the same time, Bui's mom copes with most of the same factors in healthier ways.
#AmReading

Few countries are more aware of the fragility of democracy than Poland.
45 years ago, Lech Walesa started Poland's Solidarity Movement, stared down the Soviet Union, and became his country's first democratically elected president.
He joins the show from Phoenix, Arizona to discuss today's dangers and his own extraordinary personal and political story.
Christiane Amanpour is fixated on history, which is important, but 82 year old Lech Walesa is not having it…

When Donald Trump addressed the nation in the early hours of November 6, 2024, he didn’t just celebrate his improbable return to the White House.
He hailed an unprecedented political realignment.
“This campaign has been so historic in so many ways,” he said.
“We’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition.
They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history.
They’ve never seen any.
Young and old, men and women,
rural …

Everybody Hates Trump Now
Six months after Trump bragged about a “historic” realignment, voters from across the political spectrum have soured on the president.

Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny,
one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis.
A concentration of power
—whether by government or banks
—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy.
In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few
whose misuse of their power induced a financ…

Seeking a distraction from his current political travails,
Donald Trump is attempting to relitigate the nearly decade-old controversy over Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
Trump claims that President Barack Obama committed treason,
-- a crime that may be punishable by death.
Trump is wrong on the facts and the law,
and his sensational allegation serves only to demonstrate how completely he has degraded contemporary political discourse.

Opinion | The Line Trump Crossed by Accusing Obama of Treason
President Trump’s history of intemperate remarks has earned him a perverse kind of immunity; the more outrageous his statement, the faster it is often dismissed.