Delta force

“I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”

[Charles Darwin: From a letter to biologist Charles Lyell, dated October 1st, 1861.]

Patrizia Cavalli
“When, thanks to the virtues of wine …”

When, thanks to the virtues of wine,
I let go of solid memory and a certain pleasure
seems almost real to me
having secretly picked up a scent
in the john of a friend who uses that scent
and I’m about to park,
and I say to myself: “Go on, move, drive around the city,
you won’t find anything, but maybe
you’ll see a light on. You’re in love, aren’t you?
So act like someone in love! Don’t people in love
drive up and down streets like crazy?”
But then, because I found easy parking,
I stop, and while I’m stopped, comfortably stopped,
I imagine you, in the helpless delay of my love, as mine.
 
—Translated from the Italian by Mark Strand with Gini Alhadeff

2

Trump’s Trojan Horse in Europe

The confusion over what happened in Venezuela on Saturday and what happens next will not go away. Comments from Maroc Rubio yesterday only made the situation more opaque. The New York Times, scratching its head on the issue, noted:

It's not an occupation. Pentagon officials said yesterday that there were no U.S. military personnel in the country. (Though U.S. troops will remain in the Caribbean Sea to exert “leverage” on the new leadership, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.)

 

Trump’s Battle With Big Law Firms Heads Into 2026: What to Know

Bloomberg Law: “There was perhaps no bigger story last year in the world of Big Law than President Donald Trump’s attacks on several of the nation’s largest law firms through punitive executive orders due to political affiliations and adversarial hires. Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, WilmerHale, and Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison were hit with executive orders that sought to cut security clearances for the firms’ lawyers and directed federal agencies to review contracts with the firms’ clients.

 The first four firms sued the administration over the EOs, while the last—Paul Weiss—struck a deal with the White House to rescind the EO by promising millions of dollars’ worth of free legal services. That deal became the framework for eight subsequent arrangements with other top law firms to avoid retribution from the administration. 

Four judges ruled in separate cases that the administration’s actions targeting the law firms were unconstitutional. The administration appealed the decisions last summer. The cases are now in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which directed the four litigating firms to file motions addressing the duplicative nature of the cases with a move toward consolidating them.

• Given the government shutdown and other extensions granted by the court, the firms now have until Jan. 26 to file their motions. The DOJ has also introduced new lawyers to argue its side, including the former Kansas attorney general and current Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli. Here’s a snapshot of where the four litigating firms and the nine dealmaking firms are at as the new year begins…”

U.S. Delta Force Captures Venezuelan President Maduro During Major Assault on Caracas: Defence Minister Vows Continued Fight Military Watch Magazine

Man who failed to remove backyard cheese facility told to pay $120,000

 HE’S CERTAINLY EARNED HIS RETIREMENT: A 5 million percent return in 60 years leaves Warren Buffett’s legacy unmatched. “From 1964 — the year before Buffett took control of Berkshire — to 2024, the one-of-a-kind conglomerate delivered a compounded annual gain of 19.9%, nearly double the S&P 500′s 10.4%, resulting in an overall return of more than 5.5 million percent, according to the company’s latest annual report. The shares added another 10% to that return in 2025.”

The Department of Justice May Not Survive Pam Bondi

The New Republic: “At her confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to reassure senators about the job she would do as the nation’s top federal law-enforcement officer. Her “overriding objective,” Bondi said, would be to “return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the law.” 

Her stated priorities were standard fare: stopping violent criminals, gangs, child predators, drug traffickers, and “terrorists and other foreign threats.” Bondi also pledged to return the Justice Department to defend the “foundational rights of all Americans” and to “make America safe again.” 

“Lastly, and most importantly, if confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice—and each of its components,” Bondi said. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.” 

By any reasonable standard, including her own, Bondi’s tenure has been a cataclysmic failure. Her first year as attorney general has seen the Justice Department hollowed out by waves of firings and resignations. 

Her political appointees have misled federal judges, botched high-profile criminal cases, and embarrassed the Trump administration on multiple occasions. Whatever reputation the department once had for competence and integrity is now in tatters…

Under Bondi’s watch, Justice Department officials have sought to coerce the nation’s top universities into submitting to legally binding “compacts.” These mafia-like offers run afoul of First Amendment protections by threatening trumped-up civil-rights investigations or the withholding of federal funds unless universities bow to Trump’s demands. This campaign mirrored other administration efforts to unconstitutionally bully law firms and media conglomerates into ideological compliance…”

Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’

Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’

The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up

Pic Detective – Reverse Image Search – Upload any photo to find its original source, discover who else is using it, or locate higher resolution versions. 

Free, fast, and no account needed. Pic Detective is powered by advanced visual recognition technology that goes beyond simple pixel matching. When you upload an image, our system analyzes it using sophisticated lens-based recognition—the same type of technology that powers modern visual search across the web. 

This approach means we can understand what’s actually in your image, not just compare it byte-by-byte against a database. The result? We find matches that simpler tools miss entirely. Here’s what our technology catches:

• Cropped versions – Someone crops your photo to dodge detection? We’ll likely still find it
• Color-adjusted copies – Filters, saturation tweaks, color grading—our algorithms see through them
• Watermarked or edited versions – Text overlays and minor edits get detected
• Different resolutions – Thumbnails to high-res, we index across the spectrum
• Flipped or rotated images – Mirror images and rotations match correctly

Eduardo Mendieta (1963-2025)

Eduardo Mendieta, professor of philosophy at Penn State University, has died.

1. “Some objects and properties that make up a body are too specific or small—too deep—to properly count as parts of the body in a morally significant sense” — Christopher Register on the ontological “depth” of bodies, and why it is important
2. “Why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa?” — Oliver Traldi goes meta-monster
3. A collection of posts about the philosophy job market — at The Philosophers’ Cocoon
4. What can psychoanalysis do “as political theory rather than praxis”? — says Amia Srinivasan, “it can help us better understand how the world… what wishes we might have for collective life, and which of these… reality… demands we set aside” (video) (text version here)
5. What happened in physics, math, computer science, and biology this year? — check out Quanta’s annual roundups of recent scientific developments
6. “I doubt even the beginning of real mutual learning can occur in an atmosphere of mistrust” — says Eric Schliesser, though the example of Socrates gives him some reason to doubt that, too
7. “In each issue, we will share a curated overview of key research papers, organizational updates, funding calls, public debates, media coverage, and events related to digital minds” — a new newsletter from philosopher Bradford Saad and others; send them relevant material, and subscribe

UK Accounting Body To Halt Remote Exams Amid AI Cheating

InterviewLunch with the FT

Spy chief Andrew Shearer: ‘I’ve never seen our agencies so stretched’

The head of Australian intelligence on the Hanukkah attack at Bondi Beach, the risk of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — and his new role as ambassador to Japan

Geoffrey Robertson puts Maduro’s rights before regular Venezuelans’ Nobel Prize winner Machado has made it clear she supports Trump’s efforts, which provides all the legitimacy needed to demonstrate that America has acted on behalf of Venezuela’s legitimate government

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian – AI has flooded the zone, overwhelming one on one human knowledge sharing. In this article Hana Lee Goldin returns the focus to the art of the reference interview

Energy company ENGIE promised pensioner refund then sent debt collectors after him

Stream Global TV Free

A gift to myself and hopefully to many other to being 2026 – “tv.garden is now Famelack! Same platform, same idea, and the same promise to bring you global TV. We changed our name because what we’re building is growing beyond TV. This is just the beginning. Stay tuned. 

Welcome to Famelack, your gateway to free live TV streaming from anywhere. Our goal is to make discovering and watching global channels as easy and enjoyable as possible. 

Explore a wide range of channels, including international news, live sports, movies, entertainment, and cultural shows. Dive into global cultures through our intuitive interface: pick a country on our interactive 3D globe, use the handy sidebar, or try your luck with the “Random Channel” button to explore something new. 

Who knows what you’ll discover next? Famelack offers a fast, user-friendly way to explore live TV channels worldwide—no account needed, no hidden steps—just click and enjoy.”

Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

The word “capitalism” originated in France in the 1840s, but the system is much older. Sven Beckert starts the story in the port of Aden in 1150...

Taibbi and Tracey JOIN FORCES To GATEKEEP Epstein Files Discourse Due Dissidence, YouTube

Epstein and Leviathan: How the Financier Opened Doors to Netanyahu and Ehud Barak Amid Israel’s Offshore Gas Fight DropSite

UK Accounting Body To Halt Remote Exams Amid AI Cheating Guardian

 The Bruising Reality of Searching for a Job at 65Wall Street Journal. From last week, still noteworthy.

10 Tips for Prosperity and Profit in 2026: AI, Law, Tech, Marketing

10 Tips for Prosperity and Profit in 2026 – Jerry Lawson advocates consulting more than one AI app when dealing with important issues. 

Multiple AI perspectives help with high-stakes questions, unsettled law, or anything involving tax regulations. When two models agree, you gain confidence. When they disagree, you gain a warning sign. 

Lawson also addresses cybersecurity issues, technology risks, legal marketing, and choosing the best hardware and software for your work configuration.

Mojeek, the independent search engine worth trying

Make Use Of: “One of the biggest issues with modern search engines is that they’re a huge privacy concern, hoovering up your data, tracking you across the web, and building a unique profile of you. 

It’s the same with the advent of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity; you can ask and search for what you want, but it’s all being logged. That’s where this independent search engine comes in, and makes it so rare in 2025. Mojeek crawls and runs its own search index, doesn’t track you for advertising, and offers a rare sliver of peaceful privacy in an online world swimming in trackers, fingerprinting, profiling, and more. 

Now, this privacy is obviously wonderful, comes with significant benefits, and helps us claw back some privacy. But it doesn’t come without losing many of the conveniences we’ve become incredibly accustomed to over the years in modern search tools.

PWC and Trump Crypto: The $480k 'scrum master': Audit exposes 'systemic' integrity failures at OPC

PwC ‘leans in’ to crypto as Trump and lawmakers embrace sector

Big Four firm has made strategic pivot towards digital assets, says US boss

PwC decided to “lean in” to cryptocurrency work after years of taking a more cautious stance, following the Trump administration’s embrace of digital assets, according to the US boss of the Big Four firm.

The strategic reversal last year came as the US appointed pro-crypto regulators and Congress passed new laws governing digital assets such as stablecoins, Paul Griggs told the Financial Times in an interview.

“The Genius Act and the regulatory rulemaking around stablecoin I expect will create more conviction around leaning into that product and that asset class,” Griggs said. “The tokenisation of things will certainly continue to evolve as well. PwC has to be in that ecosystem.”

His comments highlight how the Trump administration’s moves on cryptocurrency policy have finally convinced blue-chip businesses that they can dive into the digital asset market that many have long shunned…

ANAO reports 

Managing the Privacy of Client Information in Services Australia

The $480k 'scrum master': Audit exposes 'systemic' integrity failures at OPC

By Ray Athwal
The federal agency in charge of drafting Australia's laws flouted basic government spending rules, overseeing a project where budgets tripled, conflicts of interest were not declared and contracts ballooned up to 1900 per cent

A blistering audit of the Office of Parliamentary Counsel (OPC) by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) found the development of the new Federal Register of Legislation was marred by systemic non-compliance and procurement failures. 

The project, launched in January 2024, suffered a four-year delay with a budget blowout in which the final price tag reached $11.8 million, nearly triple the original $4.2 million estimate.

The audit identified a pattern where the agency relied on contract variations to expand the scope of work, a practice that can bypass requirements for open market competition. Nine of the 13 procurements were amended leading to an increase of 125 per cent, from $6 million to $13.5 million. One contract alone was varied 20 times.

The ANAO warned that agencies should not use contract variations to "significantly change" the scope of deals or to "avoid obligations under the Commonwealth Procurement Rules", noting the OPC's use of variations risked doing that. 

A spokesperson from the OPC said that, while the project was complex and staff tried to follow the rules, the agency acknowledged the mistakes and had already started incorporating the recommendations.

In one instance, a labour-hire contract with HiTech Group for an experienced "scrum master" was originally valued at $65,250 for just two months of work. A scrum master helps lead teams to tackle complex projects by dividing them into small chunks of work, improving processes as the project advances.

However, despite the absence of extension options, this contract was varied six times. It ended up running for 18 months with a final price tag of $479,694 - an increase of 635 per cent. 

The agency justified the six variations by claiming that retaining the supplier would "reduce administration costs", suggesting that the decision was driven by a desire to avoid the administrative workload of a new competitive tender.

Audit into the Office of Parliamentary Counsel

Key findings

• The project budget tripled to $11.8 million largely due to a systemic use of contract variations.
• An evaluation panel member failed to declare they were related a supplier candidate.
• Of the requests, 92 per cent lacked evaluation criteria, meaning suppliers were not told how they would be judged.
• Work was awarded to a candidate that ranked lowest against the evaluation criteria.

In another instance, a contract with 101 Web Technology, established through a panel arrangement for $101,640, was varied 20 times. The variations increased the contract's value by more than 1900 per cent to $2.1 million without the agency testing the market for the expanded scope.

The audit also heavily criticised the agency for failing to estimate the value of contracts before going to market, a vital step in deciding if a contract should be open to competition. 

This oversight meant the OPC could not justify bypassing the open market, creating a risk that contracts exceeding the $80,000 threshold were awarded without proper scrutiny. When the agency did choose its suppliers via limited tender, it frequently failed to provide a justification.

When the agency attempted to justify a sole-source contract through a small business exemption, it did not meet the mandatory rules. It was required to check if an Indigenous business could do the job, but it skipped that step entirely, failing to produce evidence that it tested the market as required under current procurement rules.

A Canberra Times analysis of Austender data revealed that the agency's use of limited tender extended beyond this project. The analysis identified 51 other instances of contracts and amendments categorised as limited tender exceeding the $80,000 threshold again without a clear justification recorded for bypassing the open tender process.

ACT independent senator David Pocock is a vocal supporter of making government procurement more transparent. Picture by Keegan Carroll.

ACT independent senator David Pocock said the findings regarding value for money were alarming.

"Cost blowouts, contracts without clear performance requirements, and serious shortcomings in managing conflicts of interest point to failures in the procurement process," Senator Pocock said.

"The community expects high integrity and proper management of public funds. This audit makes clear that the OPC has fallen short and the government should consider what reforms are needed to avoid repeating these issues."

The review also highlighted gaps in documentation, integrity and transparency processes. In 12 out 13 procurements examined, request documentation did not include evaluation criteria, meaning suppliers were not informed of the assessment criteria. In one example, the OPC awarded a contract to the candidate that was ranked lowest against the evaluation criteria. 

Integrity management practices were deemed insufficient. None of the 13 procurements examined contained a single conflict of interest declaration. The audit identified one instance where an evaluation panel member failed to declare a conflict of interest despite being "related to or socially engaged with" a candidate. 

It was also common for details and roles of panel evaluation members and advisers who were part of the procurement process to be excluded.

.

Are you worried things can’t get stupider in 2026? I assure you they can and will

The world is peppered with new euphemisms for "bottomless corruption and naked abuses of power"

Guillermo del Toro nails Krasnov and His Cult:

“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art,” he said. “At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”

Wiki Guillermo_del_Toro

The Infamous Australian Prison’s Huge Record Collection

“The most remarkable records bear the hallmarks of the prison itself: a Bob Dylan album that was censored to remove the song ‘Desolation Row,’ and a Johnny Cash record that’s been defaced to read ‘I hate it here.’” - The New York Times (Seattle Times)

It’s Shocking How Radical Right Extremism Has Crept Into Mainstream Culture

Extremist messaging is now woven into music and YouTube videos, with one expert saying: ‘You can be radicalised sitting on your couch.’ - The Guardian

The New Surveillance State Is You

Wired [no paywall]: “Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them. 

The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: 

Surveillance now goes both ways. Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels.

 “ICE watch” groups have appeared across the country. Apps for tracking immigration enforcement activity have popped up on (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash in videos of unidentified agents tackling men in parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and ripping families apart. 

From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby have pulled out their phones to document members of their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump administration’s machinery…”

How a scholar nudged the Supreme Court toward National Guard troop deployment ruling

The New York Times Gift Article: “The Supreme Court’s Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics. 

The Supreme Court’s refusal on Tuesday to let the Trump administration deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area was in large part the result of a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by a Georgetown University law professor named Martin S. Lederman. The argument Professor Lederman set out, and the court’s embrace of it, could help shape future rulings on any further efforts by President Trump to use the military to carry out his orders inside the United States.

 Professor Lederman’s brief said that the government had misunderstood a key phrase in the law it had relied on, which allows deployment of the National Guard if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”The administration said “the regular forces” referred to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Professor Lederman argued that the great weight of historical evidence was to the contrary. The regular forces, he wrote, was the U.S. military. 

And, he added, “there is no basis for concluding that the president would be ‘unable’ to enforce such laws with the assistance of those forces if it were legal for him to direct such a deployment.” Professor Lederman wrote his brief over a weekend. “I hesitate to acknowledge that,” he said on a podcast last month, “but it’s really true that I didn’t have like some great background knowledge in this statute.” 

A veteran of the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department unit that advises the executive branch on the law, Professor Lederman identified what he called a glaring flaw in the administration’s argument. “None of the parties were paying attention to it,” he said. But the justices were. A week after Professor Lederman filed his brief, the court ordered the parties to submit additional briefs on the issue he had spotted. 

They did, and almost two months passed. In the end, the majority adopted the professor’s argument, over the dissents of the three most conservative justices. It was the Trump administration’s first major loss at the court in many months. During that time, the court granted about 20 emergency requests claiming broad presidential power in all sorts of other settings…”

See also Steve Vladeck – Four Takeaways From the National Guard Ruling. A deep dive into last Tuesday’s ruling in which a 6-3 majority of the Court stopped the Trump administration from deploying federalized National Guard troops into and around Chicago.

How TikTok Is Distorting the Memory of the Holocaust

Der Spiegel Guest Editorial by Eva Berendsen – political scientist and head of the communication and online education department at the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt. She has written extensively about the effects of social media on memory an artificial intelligence’s influence on racism and anti-Semitism. 

“Imagine for a moment your 13‑year‑old child stumbling across a TikTok video in which an AI‑generated Anne Frank with sad eyes recounts her story of persecution – though without an overly strict adherence to the facts. This AI Anne claims she was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, even though Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in the Bergen‑Belsen concentration camp, most likely of typhus.

 One might be inclined to overlook this inaccuracy – if, that is, the video, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, was not being praised by viewers as original educational content, a “good summary” and even a substitute for classroom teaching. “Learned more in five minutes than in five years of school,” one user wrote enthusiastically in a comment. 

The account has over 30,000 followers, and at the end of the clip AI Anne Frank also seeks to drum up a bit of business in good entrepreneurial fashion: “Please subscribe to my channel and leave a like if my story moved you.” The boundaries between dead and alive, fiction and historical accuracy are blurred – just as they are between commerce and basic decency. 

Now imagine the TikTok algorithm having a quick look at your child’s profile. From that point on, this algorithm, which has excited marketing professionals ever since the app from the Chinese company ByteDance appeared seven years ago, will continue to push more and more such history clips onto the “For You” page, as the feed is called on TikTok.

 It is quite possible that within a few days your child will encounter additional AI‑generated historical content packaged into short videos, including an android named “Anne Clank,” who, in a completely bizarre science‑fiction scene, shakes Joe Biden’s hand and spreads anti-Semitic conspiracy theories…”

Crypto users forced to share account details with tax officials

 

Taxation in a strong AI world

by  Tyler Cowen 

Here is Dwarkesh’s tweet, based on his recent paper with Trammell, raising the issue of whether wealth taxes will become desirable in the future.  A few points:

1. I think quality homes in good locations will be extremely valuable.  Those could be taxed more.  You could call that a wealth tax, but arguably it is closer to a “housing services tax.”

2. You could put higher consumption taxes on items the wealthy purchase to a disproportionate degree.  Paintings and yachts, and so on.  Tom Holden argues: “In a world in which capital is essentially the only input to production, taxing capital reduces the growth rate of the economy. Whereas at present capital taxes have only level effects. So if anything, capital taxes will become less desirable as the labour share falls.”

3. I think the amount of money spent on health care will go up a lot.  And people will live much longer, which will further boost the amount spent on health care.  Taxing health care more is the natural way to address fiscal problems.  Some people will fly abroad for their knee surgeries, but for a long time most health care will be consumed nearby, even in a strong AI world.  If the way we keep the budget sane is to have people die at 95 instead of 97, there may be some positive social externalities from the shorter life spans.  We also could use some of that money for birth subsidies.

4. As a more general point, capital will not be a perfect substitute for labor, or anything close to that, anytime soon.

5. Final incidence of the AI revolution is not just about the degree of substability of capital for labor.  It is also about supply and demand elasticities in goods and services markets.  For instance, to the extent AI makes various services much cheaper, real wages are rising not falling.  That may or may not be the dominant effect, but do not assume too quickly that wages simply fall.

5b. It is not an equilibrium for capital to simply “have all the goodies.”  Let’s say that Simon Legree, using advanced AI, can produce all the world’s output using a single watt of energy.  And no one else with an AI company can produce anything to compete with that (this already sounds implausible, right?).  If Simon simply hoards all that output, he has no profit, though I guess he can cure his own case of the common cold.  The prices for that output have to fall so it can be purchased by someone else.  The nature of the final equilibrium here is unclear, but again do not assume all or even most of the returns will stay with capital.  That is almost certainly not the case.

Addendum: Here is some follow-up from Dwarkesh.  I think he is talking about a world very different from our own, as there is talk of ownership of galaxies.  That said, many other people wish to implement his ideas sooner than that.

Crypto users forced to share account details with tax officials

 

25 Worst Villains of the Trump Admin MEIDAS+

7 takeaways from Jack Smith’s congressional testimony Politico

Private equity firms sell assets to themselves at a record rate Financial Times

13

What is private equity up to?

The FT published an articleyesterday in which they reported:

Private equity firms sold companies to themselves at a record rate this year, making use of a controversial tactic to hold on to assets as managers struggled to find buyers or list their investments.

Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

The word “capitalism” originated in France in the 1840s, but the system is much older. Sven Beckert starts the story in the port of Aden in 1150...

A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet

HackADay: “We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets.

 Best non-fiction books of 2025 with one late addition.

Next I was pleased to see my post in which I explain some standard economics but in a deeper, more fundamental way than is usually done: One of my favorite posts of the year

World reacts to US bombing of Venezuela, ‘capture’ of Maduro Al Jazeera

Report: US Attack on Venezuela Killed at Least 40 including military personnel and civilians Antiwar

The United States Captures Nicolás Maduro and his Wife Jonathan Turley

Trump admin sends tough private message to oil companies on Venezuela Politico

Trump’s Golden Hour: Historically Flawless Military Masterclass or Just Another Theatrical Production? Simplicius

Why Capturing Maduro Solves Nothing Modern War Monitor

Decapitation Without Destruction: Why the Abduction of President Maduro Creates a Strategic Crisis for the United States Kautilya the Contemplator

Colombia sends armed forces to Venezuela border amid concern over refugee ‘influx The Guardian

Mexico condemns U.S. military action in Venezuela, capture of Maduro The Washington