2025-11-05 22:32:15
🛫 Madagascar’s military power grab shows Africa’s coup problem isn’t restricted to the Sahel region
https://theconversation.com/madagascars-military-power-grab-shows-africas-coup-problem-isnt-restricted-to-the-…
🛫 Madagascar’s military power grab shows Africa’s coup problem isn’t restricted to the Sahel region
https://theconversation.com/madagascars-military-power-grab-shows-africas-coup-problem-isnt-restricted-to-the-…
Malaysian authorities are using drones, power sensors, and tips to hunt Bitcoin miners over power theft, which cost a state energy company $1.1B over five years (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
The Authoritarian Stack.
This is brilliant – if you’re interested in human rights, democracy, and tech, and want to understand technofascism/corporatocracy bookmark and read this.👇
#AuthoritarianStack #tech
Republicans hold a 219-213 majority in the House,
but they could lock in more seats if reapportionments go their way
Normally, redistricting only occurs after the US census counts residents in each state every 10 years.
But a demand from Donald Trump to lock in more Republican-leaning districts in Congress,
together with a changing legal landscape around partisan gerrymandering,
set off a chain of mid-decade reapportionments.
Republicans and Democrats have…
" If completed, it could provide enough power for 32,500 homes."
Large-scale solar farm in central WA gets green light from governor • Washington State Standard
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/12/04/large-scale-solar-farm-in-central-wa-gets-green-light-from-governor/
Texas exodus underscores the state's fading relevance in the House GOP (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/04/texas-house-republicans-power-fading-00676389
http://www.memeorandum.com/251204/p5#a251204p5
Non-squeezing and capacities for some calibrated geometries
Kain Dineen, Spiro Karigiannis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02501 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0250…
#Gleichschaltung is a German word that means “coordination” or “synchronization.”
Gleichschaltung refers to a process of #Nazification designed to turn Germany into a single party state under Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Even children were brought into the Nazification process. Participation in t…
Big Tech, business groups and the governor successfully gutted State Sen. Steve Padilla's attempt to protect consumers from the costs, emissions & unintended consequences of the AI data center frenzy. Big money wins again! https://
South Australia just hit a major clean energy milestone: 100% renewable power for an entire week, and 90% over the last month.
The state's wind and solar mix is proving that reliable renewable grids aren't just possible—they're happening now. With new transmission links and battery storage, they're on track for 100% net renewables by 2027.
Clive Lewis MP clearly gets it. The PM should pay close attention to what he says here about the integration of corporate power into the state.
https://bylinetimes.com/2025/09/29/the-integrity-gap-how-we-built-the-authoritarian-f…
There tends to be this implicit assumption that only the state can provide services to the people. It's endemic to liberals. If authoritarians seize power, the thinking goes, there's nothing we can do.
But we have ample examples of the opposite. Trumpism is a specific type of authoritarianism where the state withdraws to allow corporations to control most things. They get a degree of autonomy and, in exchange, bow to the sovereign.
This is common in South American dictatorships (often those backed and supported by the US). So it can be helpful to look to these as examples of how to deal with that type of regime.
#USPol
Mike Schultz, the same weirdo from Hooper, Utah who thought he should have a say in my Millcreek representative choice by creating and funding a PAC that tried to trans scare people out of voting for the progressive candidate.
Thankfully, my neighbors and I like trans people and voted for a candidate that does, too.
Now, it appears Mike is using public funds to attack a judge who is following the law and upholding the power of the people, from whom the legislature gets its power…
Acquiring solar panels at home can be an expensive hassle for people in the US.
But small, simple, plug-in solar panels for use on balconies are soon to become available for millions of Americans,
with advocates hoping the technology will quickly go mainstream.
Balcony solar panels are now widespread in countries such as Germany
– where more than 1m homes have them
– but have until now been stymied in the US by state regulations.
This is set to change, wit…
South Africa considers site near African penguin colony for third nuclear power plant https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/south-africa-considers-site-near-african-penguin-colony-for-third-nuclear-pow…
In early 2023, Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court,
gave the state and the nation a demonstration of the stunning and overlooked power of his office.
The previous year, the court — then majority Democrat — had outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the swing state.
Over Newby’s vehement dissent, it had ordered independent outsiders to redraw electoral maps that the GOP-controlled legislature had crafted to conservatives’ advantage.
Former NFL, Boise State RB dies at 36 https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/nfl/former-nfl-boise-state-rb-dies-at-36-3510465/
😅 New research finds Americans deeply concerned about US democracy
#usa
A draft EO shows President Trump plans to grant the federal government sole power to regulate AI and create an "AI Litigation Task Force" overseen by the AG (Tina Nguyen/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/82…
Remember that authoritarian movements of all kinds, but especially fascist movements, do not initially have the power to force an entire nation state to bend to their will. They need — not just benefit from, but absolutely •need• — the passive acquiescence of large numbers of people.
Loud, annoying, visible resistance punctures the lie that it’s inevitable, that people who keep their heads down will be rewarded in the end.
Restricting #JuryTrials
"It will make only a marginal difference to the problem it seeks to solve.
"But it is fair to suppose that the main motive for the change is increasing the power of the state at the expense of the people by stripping out a check on the power of the Establishment."
MPs are right to rebel over jury plans | Morning Star
Syndicalist unions are fundamentally different from the bureaucratic trade unions that dominate today. Modern unions function as institutional frameworks that negotiate within capitalism, often acting to preserve the system rather than challenge it. They centralize power in hierarchical leadership, limit direct worker control, and prioritize legal contracts and state approval over genuine worker autonomy.
Syndicalism rejects this institutionalized framework. It refuses collective barga…
"When #billionaires own major media outlets, “news” becomes something closer to state messaging. Not because the government controls it, but because the financial class that funds political power also owns the platforms that shape public perception."
#kleptocracy
Legacy M…
This quote encapsulates some of my thinking about AI and knowledge creators, language communities: '"Inclusive institutions" reward you for baking more cake. Inclusive institutions like the rule of law, contracts, and open competition ensure that if you invest, you will reap the rewards.
"Extractive institutions" are how elites grab instead of bake cake.
They siphon state revenues, seize assets, block competition, smother innovation, centralise power, explo…
Paul Krugman compares the current US policy on digital media to a country trying to sell you illegal drugs: They know that what they sell harms people, but they have the money and power to make sure you will not intervene.
Very powerful comparison. #MustRead
"America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state."
Neighbors with solar panels can now trade energy directly with each other, thanks to a breakthrough cloud-based system from Washington State University.
The platform lets communities share power locally, cutting energy costs by up to 12% in testing. It's a glimpse of how neighborhoods could become mini power grids, keeping solar energy local instead of sending it back to utilities.
Faster State Preparation with Randomization
Yue Wang, Xiao-Ming Zhang, Xiao Yuan, Qi Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12247 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12247…
Critical States Identiffcation in Power System via Lattice Partition and Its Application in Reliability Assessment
Han Hu, Wenjie Wan, Feiyu Chen, Xiaoyu Liu, Bo Yu, Kequan Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09420
Blind Construction of Angular Power Maps in Massive MIMO Networks
Zheng Xing, Junting Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07071 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0707…
A White House Power Grab on AI Would Be a Huge Mistake (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-11-20/state-ai-laws-should-not-be-banned-by-white-house
http://www.memeorandum.com/251120/p69#a251120p69
Slepton pair production at next-to-leading power
Lasse Lorentz Braseth, Tore Klungland, Are Raklev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07397 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…
Beyond the Use-and-then-Forget (UatF) Bound: Fixed Point Algorithms for Statistical Max-Min Power Control
Renato Luis Garrido Cavalcante, Noor Ul Ain, Lorenzo Miretti, Slawomir Stanczak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11582
State Constrained Optimal Control Problems With Control On The Acceleration. Applications To Kinetic Mean Field Games
Yves Achdou (LJLL)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07332 https:/…
Classification and qualitative properties of positive solutions to double-power nonlinear stationary Schr\"{o}dinger equations
Takafumi Akahori, Slim Ibrahim, Hiroaki Kikuchi, Masataka Shibata, Juncheng Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12484
Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading
There are no innocent bystanders in this. As long as TACO remains in power, calling us the 51st state, thundering his 'tariffs' on any any country who displeases him, unleashing the various departments to punish those who oppose him, masked & armed toadies terrorizing your people, ignoring the constitution and laws why the hell should we do business with a dictatorship and populace that allows that.
Development of a projectile charge state analyzer and 10 kV bipolar power supply for MeV energy ion - atom/molecule collision experiments
Sandeep Bajrangi Bari, Sahan Raghava Sykam, Ranojit Das, Rohit Tyagi, Aditya H. Kelkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18707
Trump said Thursday evening he is granting a pardon to Tina Peters,
a former Colorado county clerk who is serving a nine-year state sentence for allowing unauthorized access to voting machines
— even though the president's pardon power ionly applies to federal crimes.
https://www.
A look at Meta's 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, with the first phase opening in 2028; an analysis shows sales tax breaks on GPUs could total $3.3B (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News)
https://sherwood.news/tech/hyperion/
Enhancing the mass resolving power of FRIB's proposed high-voltage MR-ToF mass separator and spectrometer: addressing non-ideal conditions
Christian Michael Ireland, Franziska Maria Maier, Einstein Dhayal, Erich Leistenschneider, Ryan Ringle, Austin Sjaarda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11741
Trump's redistricting effort fails in Indiana as GOP lawmakers deliver rare rebuke (Patrick Marley/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/11/why-these-red-state-republicans-are-resisting-trumps-efforts-expand-gop-power/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251211/p152#a251211p152
Transforming Tarlac State University (TSU) Gymnasium to a Nearly Zero-Energy Building through Integration of a Solar Photovoltaic (PV) System
Rafael R. Yumul, Enalyn T. Domingo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10552
I refuse to replace capitalist hierarchies with red-tinted authoritarianism, because in the end, I want liberation, not another power structure draped in red with the hammer and sickle.
#Authoritarianism #Anarchism
Thermal gravitational waves from warm inflation
Anupama B
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10727 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10727
Very happy to see Trump’s illegal block on wind farm development thrown out by a judge, along with the Orwellian justification given for it—a classic inversion of the truth. Every accusation is a confession, etc. (“The government argued that the states’ claims amount to nothing more than a policy disagreement over preferences for wind versus fossil fuel energy development that is outside the federal court’s jurisdiction.”)
3D Moving-mesh Hydrodynamical Simulations of Wind/Jet Driven Ultraluminous X-ray Source Bubbles
Jiahui Huang, Ken Ohsuga, Hua Feng, Hui Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09066 https…
🤯 How India's unplanned hydropower dams and tunnels are disrupting Himalayan landscapes
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-india-unplanned-hydropower-tunnels-disrupting.html
If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive,
the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president,
a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.
https://
New York just doubled down on clean energy in a big way.
The state's Power Authority approved an ambitious update: 5.5 GW of renewable capacity including solar, wind, and innovative compressed air storage. That's 2.5 GW more than previously planned.
The goal? Help develop 15 GW total to hit climate targets while keeping costs down as demand surges.
Nuclear spin quenching of the $^2S_{1/2}\rightarrow {^2}F_{7/2} $ electric octupole transition in $^{173}$Yb$^ $
Jialiang Yu, Anand Prakash, Clara Zyskind, Ikbal A. Biswas, Rattakorn Kaewuam, Piyaphat Phoonthong, Tanja E. Mehlst\"aubler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05872 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05872 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05872
arXiv:2512.05872v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We report the coherent excitation of the highly forbidden $^2S_{1/2} \rightarrow {^2}F_{7/2}$ clock transition in the odd isotope $^{173}\mathrm{Yb}^ $ with nuclear spin $I = 5/2$, and reveal the hyperfine-state-dependent, nuclear spin induced quenching of this transition. The inferred lifetime of the $F_e = 4$ hyperfine state is one order of magnitude shorter than the unperturbed ${^2}F_{7/2}$ clock state of $^{171}\mathrm{Yb}^ $. This reduced lifetime lowers the required optical power for coherent excitation of the clock transition, thereby reducing the AC Stark shift caused by the clock laser. Using a 3-ion Coulomb crystal, we experimentally demonstrate an approximately 20-fold suppression of the AC Stark shift, a critical improvement for the scalability of future multi-ion $\mathrm{Yb}^ $ clocks. Furthermore, we report the $|^2S_{1/2},F_g=3\rangle~\rightarrow~|^2F_{7/2},F_e=6\rangle$ unquenched reference transition frequency as $642.11917656354(43)$ THz, along with the measured hyperfine splitting and calculated quadratic Zeeman sensitivities of the ${^2}F_{7/2}$ clock state. Our results pave the way toward multi-ion optical clocks and quantum computers based on $^{173}\mathrm{Yb}^ $.
toXiv_bot_toot
Tempological Control of Network Dynamics
Yuanzhao Zhang, Sean P. Cornelius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10926 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10926
Quantum Entanglement without Spin-Analyzing Power Dependence at the Colliders
Junle Pei, Tianjun Li, Lina Wu, Xiqing Hao, Xiaochuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08031 https:/…
When Monroe issued his famous doctrine in 1823, it wasn’t the chest-thumping declaration of hegemonic destiny that later generations made it out to be.
The Monroe Doctrine was, at root, a nervously defensive posture
— a hemispheric firewall against a reassertion of European imperial power in the post-Napoleonic world.
The U.S. was barely a functioning state itself, and its military reach extended no further than its continental borders.
The Doctrine’s function was …
I believe the dismantling of capitalism and the state must come through direct action and self-organization by the working class, united in democratic, federated, and recallable unions. Power must grow from the bottom, from the workplaces and communities of ordinary people, instead of being handed to parties or leaders who claim to act on our behalf. Emancipation will only be achieved when workers collectively take control of production, end exploitation, and organize society through free co…
Persuasion with Verifiable Information
Maria Titova, Kun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08251 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08251
The Supreme Court appears ready to strike down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
threatening the equal representation of Black voters,
and potentially greenlighting Republican gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 midterm election.
The case concerns Louisiana’s six congressional districts,
two of which are majority-Black,
in approximate proportion to the Black population of the state.
A previous map that gave Black voters only one district in which the…
Perturbative $\chi$EFT calculations of the deuteron and triton up to N$^2$LO
Oliver Thim, Andreas Ekstr\"om, Christian Forss\'en
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12207 https:…
The Trump administration faced a string of four significant legal defeats this week
as federal and state courts pushed back on a range of initiatives spanning immigration enforcement,
deportation authority,
voting policy,
and the use of the National Guard.
The rulings, delivered in quick succession, highlight the extent to which judges across multiple jurisdictions are scrutinizing the administration’s procedural compliance,
statutory interpretations,
This week, public power is stepping up.
Great British Energy is targeting 15 GW of wind, solar and storage by 2030. New York's NYPA is building 5.5 GW of renewables. Bolivia launched its first Indigenous protected area with forest monitoring. Tennessee turned a former farm into Middle Fork Bottoms State Park, reconnecting floodplains to reduce flooding.
Sign up for the For People And Planet climate solutions digest.
A federal judge on Monday
struck down Donald Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy projects,
saying the effort to halt virtually all leasing of wind farms on federal lands and waters was
“arbitrary and capricious” and violates U.S. law.
Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
vacated Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order blocking wind energy projects and declared it unlawful.
Saris ruled in favor of a coalition of…
"The United States condemns the Houthis' ongoing unlawful detention of current and former local staff of the U.S. Mission to Yemen,"
U.S. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement.
"The Houthis' arrests of those staff,
and the sham proceedings that have been brought against them,
are further evidence that the Houthis rely on the use of terror against their own people
as a way to stay in power"
Pigott said