Tootfinder

ASPI researchers: Myanmar's online scam centers on the Thai border rose from 11 to 27 since 2021's military coup, holding an estimated 100K trafficked people (Rebecca Ratcliffe/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/global-devel…

As the federal government begins to implement President Trump’s new national security directive
to investigate the so-called
radical left as domestic terrorists,
a little known FBI organization,
located in an affluent and leafy suburb of Northern Virginia,
is at the center of it all.
Based just seven miles from CIA headquarters,
the Threat Screening Center
has a secret budget and a classified personnel count.
The nondescript cluster of g…

Secretive Watchlisting Center Executing NSPM-7
“We’re expanding the watchlist,” FBI director says amid 300% increase in domestic terror investigations.

This creates truly perverse incentives and a strange culture — and it’s not clear to me that has to cut any one particular way.
I’ve heard Harvard described as a massive investment company with a small education wing, and the desire to control risk in such a situation is overwhelming. Making a deal with Stupid Darth Vader looks ridiculous if you think Harvard’s purpose is the advancement of human thought — but if you’re an investment manager treading water through the rise of authoritarianism, well, yeah, maybe you go along to get along and kiss the authoritarian’s ass.
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Strain-control of electronic superlattice domains in CsV$_{3}$Sb$_{5}$
Elaheh Sadrollahi, Jo\~ao Almeida Mendes, Nina Stilkerich, Avdhesh Kumar Sharma, Chandra Shekhar, Claudia Felser, Tobias Ritschel, Jochen Geck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05680

Strain-control of electronic superlattice domains in CsV$_{3}$Sb$_{5}$
The kagome metals AV$_{3}$Sb$_{5}$ (A = K, Rb, Cs) provide a unique platform to investigate the physics of interacting electrons, a central challenge in condensed matter physics. A key obstacle in unraveling their correlated behavior is to determine which structural and electronic degrees of freedom are involved and how they couple. Here we address this important issue with a novel approach, namely by exploring the strain dependence of electronic superlattices in CsV$_{3}$Sb$_{5}$. Using high-r…

Engineering the uncontrollable: Steering noisy spin-correlated radical-pairs with coherent and incoherent control
Farhan T. Chowdhury, Luke D. Smith, Daniel R. Kattnig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05074 …

Engineering the uncontrollable: Steering noisy spin-correlated radical-pairs with coherent and incoherent control
The quantum control of spin-correlated radical pairs (SCRPs) holds promise for the targeted manipulation of magnetic field effects, with potential applications ranging from the design of noise-resilient quantum information processors to genetically encodable quantum sensors. However, achieving precise handles over the intricate interplay between coherent electron spin dynamics and incoherent relaxation processes in photoexcited radical-pair reactions requires tractable approaches for numericall…

How candidates evoke identity and issues on TikTok
Sabina Tomkins, Chang Ge, David Rothschild
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05310 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.0…

How candidates evoke identity and issues on TikTok
Social media platforms are increasingly central to campaign communication, with both paid (advertising) and earned (organic) posts used for fundraising, mobilization, and persuasion. TikTok, and other short-form video platforms, with its short-video format and content-driven algorithms, demand unique content. We examine the final six months before the 2024 US Presidential Election to understand how major campaigns used TikTok. We frame our analysis around two political science theories. The fir…

The Tautochrone of Huygens and Abel: From Constructive Geometry to Fractional Calculus
Luiz Roberto Evangelista, Francesco Mainardi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05308 https://

The Tautochrone of Huygens and Abel: From Constructive Geometry to Fractional Calculus
In this paper, we explore the connections between Christiaan Huygens and Niels Henrik Abel through the tautochrone problem. The problem -- determining the curve along which a particle descends under gravity in the same time, regardless of its starting point -- has been a central topic at the intersection of physics, geometry, and analysis. Though these two major figures are separated by nearly two centuries, they approached the problem in radically different ways. While Huygens proposed a physi…

On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases
Hadar Rotschield, Liat Peterfreund
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07062 https://

On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases
SQL/PGQ is the emerging ISO standard for querying property graphs defined as views over relational data. We formalize its expressive power across three fragments: the read-only core, the read-write extension, and an extended variant with richer view definitions. Our results show that graph creation plays a central role in determining the expressiveness. The read-only fragment is strictly weaker than the read-write fragment, and the latter is still below the complexity class NL. Extending view d…

"He [potus] spoke of a necessary confrontation with an “enemy from within” and proposed using our own cities as “training grounds” for troops. This rhetoric dangerously blurs the line between soldier and police officer, a distinction that has been a cornerstone of American liberty for over two centuries and is enshrined in federal law. It is a radical departure that treats dissent as insurgency and American communities as battlefields."

"An Enemy From Within": Trump's Plan to Turn the Military on American Citizens
Donald Trump called American cities "training grounds" for our troops. We need to take that threat seriously.

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol