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
Project Syndicate: “…The breadth and granularity of what companies now know about their customers is astonishing. When San Francisco-based WIRED reporter Reece Rogers asked McDonald’s for a copy of the data the company keeps on him—a right he enjoys as a California resident under the state’s privacy law—he expected to get a log of all the burgers he has purchased over the years. Instead, he received a 515-page dossier:
McDonald’s predicted how many times he would visit a restaurant in the next six weeks (2.16, to be exact) and labeled his behaviors (he tends toward a “Food-Led Afternoon Snack”). He was assigned an attrition score of zero. Rogers, it seems, is a McDonald’s lifer. While the invasiveness of the dossier came as a bit of a shock to Rogers, it’s not surprising for economists who study pricing. In 2004, Duke University economist Curtis Taylor asked what would happen once firms could buy and sell records of what shoppers purchased. Gone were the days of Box Top coupons on Betty Crocker boxes; by that point, loyalty programs had gone mainstream and were cataloging every dollar customers spent at the grocery store and on flights.
Taylor predicted that companies would use these records to identify their most eager customers and charge them more. Loyal customers, he said, would pay the price, especially if they had no idea that their data was changing hands. Taylor’s warning stayed buried in the academic literature while the practice crept, largely unnoticed, into our shopping carts. Or, in Rogers’s case, Big Mac orders.
Purchase history is now the least of it. As shopping is increasingly conducted online, companies also collect customers’ location, demographics, behavior, and biometric data. A recent Federal Trade Commission studyuncovered systems created by the likes of Mastercard and Accenture that log whether your cursor hovers over a “buy” button, lingers on a product name, or drifts toward “close tab.” Delivery platform DoorDash recently filed a patent for a technology that tracks 16 different signals, including phone battery level, how quickly and jerkily users scroll, and how long it’s been since a consumer last ordered a meal.
Consumers are often unaware of how much of their personal data is being collected. Car companies like General Motors have amassed millions of drivers’ precise location and driving-behavior data through technologies like OnStar, and then sold this information to insurance companies to feed into car-insurance rates. When Walmart bought the television maker Vizio, the retail behemoth had littleinterest in televisions. By linking Vizio TVs to Walmart accounts, Walmart could merge data on the ads consumers watch with what they buy in the company’s stores and on its website…”
Trump’s Unlikely Strategy to Control History: Footnotes
The Atlantic, no paywall: “Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud.
Congressman Calls on Smithsonian to Document Trump’s “Narcissistic Self-Worship”
Hyperallerrgic: “Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland has proposed a bill calling on the Smithsonian to preserve and permanently exhibit artifacts related to the Trump administration’s escalating aggressionagainst the institution’s museums and research centers, which Trump accused of “extreme political activism.”
Introduced yesterday, October 7, the “Preserving and Remembering the History of Trump and other Tyrants Act” directs Smithsonian officials to collect “artifacts reflecting the rise of governmental propaganda, corruption, and authoritarianism” under both of Trump’s presidential terms to create a permanent display at the National Museum of American History (NMAH).
Among the examples outlined in Raskin’s bill are artifacts and ephemera related to Executive Order 14416, which called for erecting content warning signs outside NMAH; banners with Trump’s portrait installed on federal buildings and other artifacts depicting his “narcissistic self-worship and propagandistic assault on American history and American democracy”; and other related objects, communications, and testimonials that the Smithsonian deems historically relevant to this time period. “To avoid repeating this descent into authoritarianism, we must study this corrupt President’s actions and allow the public to learn about the numerous tools he deployed while attempting to remake American history in his own image and according to his own autocratic and white nationalist beliefs,” the representative said in a press statement regarding the bill..
To avoid repeating this descent into authoritarianism, we must study this corrupt President’s actions and allow the public to learn about the numerous tools he deployed while attempting to remake American history in his own image and according to his own autocratic and white nationalist beliefs,” the representative said in a press statement regarding the bill…”
BERLIN, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Germany's former spy chief August Hanning, who has been placed under arrest for suspected espionage, had longstanding contacts to a former senior Chinese general, Spiegel magazine reported.
The magazine said Hanning, who left Germany's foreign intelligence service in 2005, had travelled to China several times, where he knew a former official who had served in China's embassy in formerly communist East Germany.
It said the former major general, whom it identified as Wang Jianzheng, was an established expert in German-related issues and had translated a number of German books into Chinese.
Hanning was detained this week on suspicion of sharing information from confidential documents provided by his former chief of staff with foreign intelligence agents. The alleged activities took place after his retirement, when he worked as an independent security consultant…
Central Ukraine: He does not claim to be Russia’s brightest spy.
Alexander had really wanted the job, though. He was born in Ukraine but believed in Russia. And it was hard getting by on his shifts at McDonald’s. So when two Russian operatives approached him with the offer of a piecework spying gig, he jumped.
DLA Piper Is Defending The Paywall On Trump’s Presidency
Above the Law: “The administration is trying to sell early access to the president’s thoughts, and DLA Piper is the Biglaw firm defending it. Freedom of the Press Foundation and The Intercept Media sued the president and White House officials last month, saying efforts to charge for advance access to his government announcements via Truth Social are “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.”
The product at issue is Truth API, a data feed Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. rolled out over the summer that charges subscribers $60,000 to $100,000 a month for faster access to the president’s market-moving posts. The president, for his part, is Trump Media’s largest shareholder, with a stake worth roughly $1 billion held in a trust overseen by Donald Trump Jr. So the president announces military operations, ceasefires, and the firing of agency heads on a platform he owns, and the company he owns sells a head start on those announcements to anyone with six figures a month to spare. You do not need a Con Law seminar to spot the problem.
But according to reporting by Bloomberg Law, Trump Media (which isn’t a party to the lawsuit) hired DLA Piper to defend the proposition. DLA Piper partner Caryn Schechtman and other firm attorneys submitted a letter as counsel for the company on Tuesday, arguing against the preliminary injunction sought by the two organizations. The firm’s argument is that the plaintiffs are trying “to constitutionalize TMTG’s independent commercial decisions regarding the distribution of publicly available content.”
See alsoEFF: “Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump administration’s use of Truth Social’s preferential treatment scheme, which blocks people who won’t pay Trump’s company up to $100,000 a month for early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.The First Amendment guarantees that members of the public have equal access to public officials’ public comments, we reminded the court. EFF filed an amicus brief in support of a motion for a preliminary injunction in the lawsuit filed by The Intercept Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation against President Trump and other administration officials. The lawsuit challenges their use of Truth Social as their primary social media method of making official announcements when that platform provides people who pay a fee for early access to such posts.
Trump uses his Truth Social account as his primary means of communicating with the public, including to announce military operations and ceasefires, foreign and domestic policy, and the removal and appointment of heads of federal agencies. Earlier in the year, Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, announced “Truth API,”a service that provides investors early access to “market-moving” messages from the president and other high-ranking officials for a fee of up to $100,000 per month…”
People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms
NPR: “…Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm.
About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42% of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center. Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors’ races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots.
Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please. “It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already,” said Rafael Batista, a postdoctoral fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies the societal and behavioral impacts of AI. “So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world.”
Since AI companies don’t disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it’s hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said. Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for OpenAI directed NPR to its election information and safeguards page which notes that the company continues to “monitor bias in our models to keep ChatGPT’s responses politically neutral.”
See also Trump signs executive order to launch AI-powered ‘America.gov’ 29 Sep 2026 Links to all the urls referenced below are here https://www.bespacific.com/trump-signs-executive-order-to-launch-ai-powered-america-gov/ Trump Announces His Own AI Platform Will Take Over The American Government – the site is powered by artificial intelligence from Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok.
[Just a suggestion – do not use this website…“Trump’s new AI chatbot wasn’t hallucinating, he lost the 2020 election. But when the newest rollout from the White House contradicted Trump’s rhetoric, they pulled the plug. Now when asked about it, the AI tool says “I do not offer political commentary on elections” and dismisses the question…” See also: NextGov/FCW –
“The Trump administration launched an artificial intelligence-powered one-stop shop for citizens interested in federal services and information on Tuesday with the help of former Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] employees.
The website currently allows users to ask a chatbot questions about everything from qualifying for Medicare to finding a job to renewing a passport, without ever creating an account. Users receive AI-generated answers derived only from official federal sources.
Phase two of America.gov, which is set for early 2027, will allow Americans to apply for, enroll in and track progress of benefits such as Social Security directly within the chatbot. The order also directs the head of the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies on implementing their covered services into America.gov.
The National Design Studio, a Trump administration creation that includes former DOGE employees, designed and engineered America.gov. The General Services Administration is operating the website amid a major shakeup to its web design system staff.
From Hügelkultur to habitat piles — and a bin called Johanna
As one of life’s great hoarders, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid a bin. Take tea. I recently switched from bags to loose leaf, not for the taste but so I could add them to my home compost (tea bags are only compostable in industrial composters). Why would I give those valuable nutrients to the council? Then there’s broken crockery — useful substrate for the gravel garden. Cuttings and twigs? Insect homes and fodder. As autumn begins to unfold, attention often turns to the nitty-gritty of a garden in preparation for winter; soil health, mulching — and what to do with piles of plant detritus that have gathered over the summer.
When I was a child, bonfires at the bottom of the garden dealt with most of its unsightly waste.
Now, we are more mindful of hedgehogs and our neighbours, and more of us understand the benefits waste adds to a microhabitat. Garden waste in particular is integral to good soil and therefore flourishing plants. My front garden at home barely noticed the summer droughts, its loamy soil having been nurtured with mulch and compost. We’re reaping the benefits of good waste management and soil improvement. . .
About a decade ago, I traded in a shiny life as a magazine editor to make baskets in a one-woman supply chain, from plant to product. My previous work reached millions of people; now it reaches just one at a time – and I find that more satisfying. To try to understand why, I began studying regional craft cultures around the world. I came to see that one can find an entire world of knowledge, intelligence and history hidden in a single object, especially an object that is grounded in the landscape. “Beauty lay not so much in the thing,” writes Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “but in what the thing symbolised.”
Hardy’s novels, particularly those he later classified as “Novels of Character and Environment”, are rooted in the largely forgotten rural patterns of life in England’s West Country. He was, as he wrote in the poem “Afterwards”, “someone who used to notice such things”. Born in the tiny hamlet of Higher Bockhampton before the arrival of the locomotive in nearby Dorchester, Hardy was still writing at the interwar peak of 20th-century modernism. He was intimate with both the rhythm-bound woodland communities he grew up in and the urbane world of literary London that overlooked them. Novels such as The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd are each set in a distinct landscape within Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, loosely draped over the actual map of the South West, where the natural world exerts a powerful, even deterministic, force in human lives. Each mourns a culture of craft he saw disappearing amid encroaching change.
But it is The Woodlanders to which I return most often. Set at the edge of a forest in a fictionalised version of Dorset in the 1850s it is, at its core, about the intimacy between people and trees. The village’s livelihood and survival are bound to its sylvan neighbours. The novel is also a literary lodestar on old woodland crafts, such as coppicing, spar-splitting, hurdle-making and cider-pressing. The characters’ relationships to these trades form the narrative backdrop for a tragic triangular love story. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
It tells the story of Grace Melbury who, after being sent away to be educated, returns feeling superior to her promised lover Giles Winterborne – a supremely decent copse-worker and cider-maker – and Marty South, a plain, impoverished girl as keenly attuned to the ways of the woods as Winterborne, and hopelessly in love with him.
Hardy’s heroes, like Winterborne and South, are those most in sympathy with the natural world, able to “read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing”. Indeed, they seem hardly separable from it; Winterborne is described during cider-pressing season as “autumn’s very brother”. But while Hardy’s moral heroes are society’s losers, left behind as a blinkered world steam-powers into the future, their ways of life are, even now, not entirely extinct. There are some holdouts in Wessex’s woods, orchards and fields refusing to let traditional practices, and the knowledge that informs them, die.
For centuries, cider-making has been an integral part of West Country life. Malcolm Seal, a legendary basket-maker and gardener, is also a keen “ciderist”. In Hardy’s day, every large farm had its own cider shed, and each village had a communal shed and orchard. But when Seal moved to Nettlecombe in west Dorset 26 years ago, its village press was gathering dust. He and a few friends got it running again, and they now press in various sheds each autumn. They make cider the way Giles Winterborne does in The Woodlanders: using a scratter to crush the apples into a pomace that is then set into straw and built up in layers called a “cheese”. The main difference today is that these “anarchist ciderists” have a WhatsApp group to let people know where to gather. “Whoever feels like it turns up, maybe helps press a barrel, catches up with mates and drinks,” says Seal. Evenings often end up as a multigenerational party, with music and singing around a fire.
Celebrating the cyclical nature of agrarian life has bound rural communities together for millennia. At Seal’s farm on the eastern edge of the Powerstock Hills, the days follow the rhythm of the seasons. There is the willow harvest in the early months of the year, followed by sheep shearing and lambing in the spring, hay cutting in summer, the autumn apple harvest followed by cider-making, and basket-making in the short dark days of winter. “I made a deliberate choice to live a small life,” he tells me. “Sometimes it can be a pain in the arse being tied down by the sheep” – he laughs – “but to get to see the sun rise over Eggardon Hill every morning…” This echoes something Hardy wrote in Tess: “The magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.” Seal’s is a life of hard, satisfying work attuned to beauty and the agricultural traditions he loves.
Neil Parsons is the lone and final practitioner of a five-generation family of local hurdle-makers in Alderbury, near Salisbury. In a workshop behind his house, he splits hazel rods with a billhook and weaves them into panels traditionally used to pen sheep. When I visited, he – like Hardy’s Giles Winterborne – “was in the act of making a hurdle, the stakes being driven firmly into the ground in a row, over which he bent and wove the twigs”. Beside him lay “a square, compact pile” of finished hurdles.
This craft, practised for at least 7,000 years in Britain, began to die out in the 1950s and ’60s with the arrival of metal and plastic fencing. When Parsons, now 63, was learning the trade at the age of 11, he was one of a dozen struggling to carry on. But the death knell for the local industry was the arrival of cheap eastern European versions in the 1990s. He kept at it, his business eventually saved by the internet, which allowed new customers, mostly garden designers, to find him.
The demise of the wattle hurdle is not merely the loss of an old craft. It signals the demise of Britain’s woodlands themselves. Coppice products such as hurdles, spars, charcoal and many others sustain an ancient – and elegantly circular – system of forest management. In a coppiced wood, hardwoods such as oak, ash and hazel are selectively cut back close to the ground on a rotation of between five and 20 years, depending on the species. The remaining “stool” resprouts, replenishing the wood supply, while simultaneously extending the trees’ lives, often by centuries.
We drive to an estate where, on one side of a dirt road, is an abandoned copse. Its dense oak canopy starves the understory, leaving the forest floor dark and bereft of life. Across the road, where Parsons has been culling, birds flit in the filigreed light. “This gentle, cyclical thinning allows all kinds of wildlife, birds, insects and flowers such as wood anemones, primroses and bluebells to return at different stages in the cycle,” he explains. The ancient practice is almost too good to be true: a symbiotic relationship of craftsman and woodland that enhances both.
Forest
Jim Bettle likes to quote a study that claims one in three people don’t know that charcoal is wood. The material for making it is the last refuse left on the ground in a coppiced wood, after every other more desirable stick has gone to be used elsewhere. Nothing is wasted. Bettle has been making charcoal for 30 years in the same manner as in Hardy’s day: in a steel kiln, filled and fitted carefully, which he takes to woodland across the county of Dorset. While most modern charcoal production does enormous damage to the environment, Bettle is driven to do the very opposite.
Charcoal is that rare product whose means of production can actually benefit the environment. It sequesters carbon, and can be used for biochar, which improves soil health (while keeping the carbon locked in the ground for centuries); in pet food and animal feed, where it helps digestion and filters toxins; in cosmetics and soaps as an exfoliant; and many other uses that Bettle continues to learn about. It is only by burning charcoal, as we do on barbecues, that it releases carbon. Bettle points out that this is offset, because otherwise you would be using your gas or electric stove. But to reap the benefits of British charcoal, which includes not just carbon sequestration but all the biodiversity that thrives in a managed woodland, there has to be a market for it. Alas, almost no one in Britain uses British charcoal. Most is imported, and the commercial production of that charcoal is one of the most damaging practices in the world, ranked fourth after palm oil. The raw material comes from large-scale deforestation, rife with corruption and harmful labour practices, which is killing rainforests in the Amazon, and desertifying southern Africa. But it is cheaper. Humans have been making and using charcoal for more than 4,000 years, Bettle tells me. “But we’re having to relearn what we once knew.”
Dave Symonds comes from a centuries-long line of local farmers in Dorset that ended when he was 12. He lived part of the time with his grandfather on an estate that, in a Hardyesque turn, had no tenancy succession. When his grandfather died, he had to find a job outside farming and, at 15, found himself apprenticed to a thatcher.
Today there are 700 or so British thatchers; Symonds is one of around 24 who still grow their own material. When he started out on his own, 50 years ago, he wanted to return to the old methods. He knew how to make thatching spars – the cleaved sticks of coppiced hazel twisted into a hairpin shape to secure thatch – from watching his great-grandfather and “the old cider boys” cut them as they drank and talked in the estate’s cider
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
~Haruki Murakami
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”
Why are you reading this? Do you believe in chance, probability, conspiracy, serendipity or synchronicity? Theories on coincidence range from “Show me the numbers!” to blind faith in “God’s wink.” As the world gets smaller, the questions around coincidence are getter bigger. And there’s advantage in answering them. As Steve Jobs says “creativity is just connecting things.” Here’s some current context:
After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning And company doesn’t mean security,
And you begin to understand that kisses aren’t contracts And presents aren’t promises.
And you begin to accept your defeats With your head held high and your eyes open,
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child. You learn to build your roads
On today because tomorrow’s ground Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have A way of falling down in midflight.
After a while you learn that even sunshine Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate Your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you can really endure,
That you really are strong And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn … and you learn With every goodbye you learn.
~Veronica A. Shoftstall
Like something out of a Wes Anderson movie.
Ukrainian Railroad Ladies is a series of portraits of women who work as traffic controllers and safety officers at railroad crossings in Ukraine. The women spend their long shifts in the little houses built specifically for them along the tracks … They are a symbol of certain things in this country that don’t change, standing firm in the present as a defiant nod to the past. They endure, unfazed by the passing of trains and time.
