Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
It’s a perfect distillation of Carlin’s genius—finding profound, rebellious beauty in the absolute unlikeliest of places. It perfectly sums up the beauty of raw resilience against all odds.
Is this a trend? Are all these pictures related? Common sense, our trusted friend, tells us that life is random and arbitrary and that we’re mostly making it up as we go along. But the conspiracy theory is like a seductive interloper, sidling up to assure us that, actually, that’s not true at all. - The...
Assume You Will Be Hacked
The Atlantic [no paywall] – AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. “AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before…As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate:
Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours.
“There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”
White House App Uses Code From Tech Vendor Still Operating in Russia
The Newsground: “Leaked Russian records obtained by The Newsground show that the founders of a technology company embedded in the White House’s official mobile application continued using sanctioned Russian banks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Following the invasion, its founders continued to travel to Russia, even after one of them complained on Telegram that Russian tax authorities had issued him a subpoena regarding a related business.
The company, Elfsight, markets itself as a European company headquartered in Andorra, where its founders now appear to reside. But records reviewed by The Newsground show that the company’s Russian operations continue. Elfsight is a software vendor that supplies pre-built, embeddable widgets such as social media feeds, image galleries, and forms for websites and apps that load directly from Elfsight’s servers.
According to a network traffic analysis by the security research firm Atomic Computer, Elfsight’s code runs inside the White House app and is served through a broad network of Elfsight-controlled domains. The app is now reportedly mandatedfor government employees’ phones.
NOTUS, a nonprofit newsroom, previously reported that security researchers had raised alarms about the White House app’s use of Elfsight and that the integration had already exposed personal details of some White House staffers through the app’s network traffic…”
President Donald Trump attends the FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on December 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Hector Vivas / FIFA via Getty Images)
We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election.
The current executive is slowly dismantling institutional checks on the president’s power. Their efforts to corrode and then destroy democracy as we know it are more discernible each month and year.
Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these events and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture. Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration, but few have taken a step back and connected the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision, or a single day.
Consider what happened in plain sight over the past nine months. On September 25, 2025, the president signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”). Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway.
On September 30, 2025, the president stood before nearly 800 senior military commanders at Marine Base Quantico, an assembly without modern precedent, and told them that the United States was “under invasion from within.” He said, “the enemy is not in Beijing or Moscow. The enemy is domestic,” adding that US cities should serve as “training grounds” for troops to target domestic “enemies.”
NPSM-7, the sweeping federal directive issued by the White House, orders federal agencies to aggressively investigate and disrupt groups or financial networks associated with political violence and domestic terrorism. It tasked the FBI, the IRS, and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.
Soon thereafter the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from 10 federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified to a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of US citizens and nongovernmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.
Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and the president himself amplified this by posting on Truth Social, “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all……… But first, Barack Obama.”
0n May 6, 2026, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States. Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five-year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named.
The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion budget to do the targeting. Trump v. The United States provides absolute immunity for official acts; and the president’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel has preauthorized the use of domestic force. Meanwhile, the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Tom Homan, the president’s “border czar,” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of US citizens without an act of Congress.
In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific US forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly 60 strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial, or judicial review. The commander of US Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil. The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against US citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while the president has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations. And he is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports, and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter rolls and ballots.
Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADS). These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” that is currently underway. Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.
Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens
Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.
The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.
So what is to be done? Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on US soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo. Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, nonprofits, and election workers from NPSM-7. Newsrooms must report the rolling-coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is. And each of us—in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work, and around kitchen tables—must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.
What makes this a “rolling” coup rather than a sudden one is that each part of the mechanism was built individually; each in isolation appeared to serve a defensible purpose, and no single step was dramatic enough to trigger unified institutional resistance. The public is not awake to the architecture, which is only visible when you begin to see the whole construct.
What is happening is clear. The question is whether enough of us will face the uncomfortable prospect of the destruction of our democracy. Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude, and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost, and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures found in the PEADS, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any congressional oversight.
We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes—to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.
Three findings emerge. First, improvements in aggregate tax competitiveness are positively and significantly associated with real GDP per capita growth, robust to a wide range of controls. Second, this aggregate effect is driven entirely by the corporate tax pillar; no other component displays a significant growth effect. Third, the corporate tax effect materializes contemporaneously and accumulates over time, with a statistically significant three-year cumulative effect of approximately 0.16 percentage points per one-point improvement in the corporate tax score. These results suggest that the full architecture of the corporate tax system, not merely the headline statutory rate, is what matters for growth.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Christla and Monika Köppl–Turyna. Via the excellent Samir
Data Centers Exposed
I found it on a drive, about a mile off the highway. A data center. I got curious and tried to answer two simple questions when I got home. Who owns it, and what did the county give them to build it there. It took me most of a weekend and I still was not sure.
The site was owned by an LLC, which was owned by another LLC, which traced back to a name that meant nothing. The tax break was real and large and buried in a county commission PDF from two years earlier that no search engine had ever touched.
Meanwhile every utility in the region is asking for rate hikes and pointing at “load growth.” That is when I started building again. It is called DataCentersExposed. Same idea as before. Take the records that are public but unusable, and make them searchable for a regular person in about ten seconds.
You can type in your address or your zip. It shows you the data centers near you and a rough estimate of what they are costing you on your own utility bill, with the math shown so you can argue with it. For each site it tries to name the real corporate parent, not the shell LLC on the permit. That part was the hardest. These projects hide behind codename companies on purpose, and I have decoded over 1,300 of those shells back to the actual company so far. Google, Meta, Amazon, the big REITs, all of them do it.
It also pulls the tax breaks and subsidies for each site and totals them. I am at over 3.2 billion dollars documented right now, every figure linked back to an official source. On top of that there is the water each one draws, any EPA violations on record, and the grid it actually runs on. If a data center near you is being fought by locals, there is a page with the upcoming public hearings and how to show up to them, because that is usually the only point where any of this is still up for debate.
It covers more than 3,000 sites across 31 countries. I will be honest about the limits. The US is by far the deepest because that is where the records are best. International coverage is thinner and growing. Some of the bill-impact and capacity numbers are estimates and they are labeled as estimates, not facts. If you find something wrong, a bad owner link, a number that looks off, a site that is missing, tell me. That kind of boring correction is what made the last project trustworthy and it is the same deal here.
One thing I will repeat the same way I did last time. A company showing up in this data is not an accusation of anything. Building a data center is legal. Getting a tax break is legal. The point is just to make it visible who is getting what, with public money, in your community, so you can decide what you think about it.
It is free. No ads and no paywall. It is part of a small group of sites I run now. If you want to see what is near you, it is at datacentersexposed.com. Go put in your zip and then tell me what I got wrong. Just keep in the mind this is just the beginning…”
The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear
minid.net – Diego Lafuente’s personal blog: “Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces.
The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape…”
Brilliant but disgraced barrister Alan Armstrong cops a twelve-month supervision order for tax evasion, and finds himself working out of a solicitor’s office above a panel beater in Maroubra.
Crushed by tax debts and his disabled son’s mounting care costs, Alan is on the brink of financial ruin but is desperate to return to his former glory. He’s presented with a dangerous dog case. It’s beneath him, but it is this case that will trigger a surprising transformation.
What begins as a fight to save a dog ends with Alan arguing habeas corpus for an escaped zoo elephant. This is a story about breaking good.
The Great White tells the story of a brilliant but disgraced barrister Alan Armstrong (Hugo Weaving) who is slapped with a twelve-month supervision order for professional misconduct, and finds himself working out of a struggling law office above a panel beater's shop in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
What begins as a fight to save a dog's life draws Alan into the unexpected world of animal law and becomes a series of cases on behalf of animals, culminating in an audacious Supreme Court challenge to free a zoo elephant.
“The Great White,” ABC Australia’s upcoming legal workplace drama series from See-Saw Films, has bolstered its cast with filming now underway in Sydney.
Alongside the previously announced Hugo Weaving, Eamon Farren (“Jimpa,” The Witcher”), Arlo Green (“Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant,” “M3GAN”), Miranda Otto (“Talk to Me,” “The Lord of the Rings”) and Sacha Horler (“The Dressmaker,” “Peter Rabbit”) have joined the show, as have Brigid Zengeni (“The Artful Dodger,” “Missing You”), James Majoos (“Heartbreak High”), Emily Barclay (“Babyteeth,” “Inbetween”) and Dinasha Perera.
Behind the camera, Alyssa McClelland (“Sex Education,” “My Brilliant Career”) serves as set-up director, actor and filmmaker Mia Wasikowska makes her TV directing debut and Cannes-selected Samantha Lang (“The Well,” “Carlotta”) also directs.
From ABC, Screen Australia and U.K. and Australia-based See-Saw, the Mediawan-owned and Oscar-winning powerhouse production company behind “Slow Horses,” “Apple Cider Vinegar” and “Heartstopper,” “The Great White” sees Weaving play a brilliant but disgraced barrister who is slapped with a twelve-month supervision order for professional misconduct and finds himself working out of a struggling law office. Crushed by debt and desperate to restore his reputation, he reluctantly takes on a dangerous dog case he considers far beneath him.
However, what begins as a fight to save a dog’s life draws him into the unexpected world of animal law and becomes a series of cases on behalf of animals, culminating in an audacious Supreme Court challenge to free a zoo elephant.
“The Great White” was originated and developed by Samantha Lang and created by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Ange Betzien (“Apple Cider Vinegar”) – both executive producers. Writers are Betzien, Nick Coyle and Andrew Anastasios. ABC Australia is set to broadcast “The Great White” in Australia with Mediawan and Entourage Media handling international sales.
This is See-Saw Films’ first collaboration with the ABC and we are thrilled to be working with them on a show that brilliantly blends sharp wit, emotional depth and compelling courtroom storytelling, delivered by an exceptional team of cast and creatives representing Australia’s finest screen talent,” said Liz Watts, See-Saw Films Head of Film and Television (AUS).
Added ABC head of scripted, Rachel Okine: “‘The Great White’ instantly caught our attention as one of the most distinctive and surprising stories we’ve ever read and the team at See-Saw has assembled the perfect powerhouse of creatives, both in front of and behind the camera, to bring it to life. Audiences can expect to laugh, to cry and to reflect.”
‘The Great White’ will air on ABC TV and ABC iview in 2027.
