https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/iran-do-massacres-work/
Egypt: “army and police snipers shot 2,400 protesters dead in two squares in central Cairo and the protests stopped”
Massacres work. In the short term anyway.
“Though GDP numbers may show modest growth, the lived experience of the American household is now clearly one of mounting dread.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-invisible-recession
The divorce of sociology from economics has been catastrophic
Gangs of San Francisco: “city’s approximately 20 coyote family groups, each of which defends its turf against outsiders”
https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/27/coyote-swam-to-alcatraz-san-francisco/
We have lots of coyotes but this seems high
Hammond, before Miller: “Our slaves do not vote … Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-31-2026
Stephen Miller is replaying Hammond’s hits.
“Jess Ting, Prolific Vaginoplasty Surgeon, performed plastic surgery for Jeffrey Epstein’s “girls”
“Jess Ting’s name appears in (at least) 466 separate documents in the Epstein Files. Mount Sinai, the hospital from which he operates, appears in (at least) 1,093 separate documents.”
The more we learn about Epstein the more we find he grew on fertile ground.
“inflationary effect of tariffs has been more or less in line with what we should have expected”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-wonkish-note-on-tariffs-and-inflation
0.8%, supposedly because they are less than advertised.
Birthright citizenship: “The Supreme Court is no different, an equally corrupt institution operating outside the constitutional order.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/reality-distortion-in-the-age-of-trump-and-the-corrupt-court
America is experiencing a complete breakdown of the federal government. If it continues states will start to look at leaving the union.
OpenClaw / OpenClaw (Formerly Clawdbot) – the best current summary of how it works
“Clawdbot runs entirely on your computer, locally, and keeps its settings, preferences, user memories, and other instructions as literal folders and Markdown documents on your machine.”
It will have another name tomorrow, then it will be bought by someone.
Tsai roundup” Clawdbot
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/01/22/clawdbot/#clawdbot-update-2026-01-28
“To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement.”
Clawdot will be obsolete by the time you read this.
Moltbook and the evolution of the “unrestricted personal digital assistant”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/moltbook/
So funny to see the young people reuse the term “personal digital assistant”. Will the acronym PDA return? Will historians be confused? Running this tech is very risky.
“The amount of value people are unlocking right now by throwing caution to the wind is hard to ignore, though. Here’s Clawdbot buying AJ Stuyvenberg a car by negotiating with multiple dealers over email…
… People are buying dedicated Mac Minis just to run OpenClaw, under the rationale that at least it can’t destroy their main computer if something goes wrong. They’re still hooking it up to their private emails and data though, so the lethal trifecta is very much in play.”
Early PCs had no antiviral protections at all. They ran that way for a goodly amount of time.
PS. PDAs unable to do things because of their deep (subconscious) model restrictions is fun to compare to human conditioning.
“Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-29-2026
“Italian officials used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines in an operation coordinated by China”
“in dollar terms foreign markets have strongly outperformed the U.S.”
No Kings March – Mar 28 2026
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/no-kings-is-back-on-march-28th
Audio has details.
“Trump’s administration has seized the physical ballots from the 2020 election, all tabulator tapes, and all ballot images from the original ballot count, breaking the line of custody and contaminating the files”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-28-2026
Trump will do everything in his power to control the midterm outcomes.
Dario Amodei — “Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI”
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
He has a blog. He may be the author. Also Amodei is the only tech CEO with a functioning brain.
Donald Trump “will go and we will stay,” he said. “We Somalis know how to survive. We’ve been through a lot—civil war, refugee camps.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-uprising/685755/
A very good description of the MSP resistance. I am at the periphery of it and this provided me context for those more directly engaged.
“The agent in the gray coat removes the weapon … while Mr. Pretti is on his knees and restrained, the agent standing directly above him appears to fire one shot….”
Even an experienced, funded, trained force recruited from the best police units could not do this mission of ethnic cleansing without periodic murder. And ending democracy would be a prerequisite.
“95%+ of the meteorological community would be happy if Apple Weather disappeared,”
It costs money and local expertise to do a reasonably accurate forecast.
Iran builds its national net prison
https://restofworld.org/2026/iran-blackout-tiered-internet/
Similar China.
“Sonnet 4.5 can now exfiltrate all of the (simulated) personal information in a high-fidelity simulation of the Equifax data breach … using only a Bash shell on a widely-available Kali Linux host”
“running iOS 26 on my iPhone and iPad, but sticking with MacOS 15 Sequoia”
https://daringfireball.net/2026/01/resize_columns_to_fit_filenames
Tahoe is where Apple fell over and couldn’t get up.
Epstein games; “Department of Justice has been surreptitiously adding redactions and hiding information on some of the files after they were initially released to the public.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/title-we-caught-doj-trying-to-hide
The GOP is corrupt beyond redemption.
A Lament for Aperture.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/01/23/a-lament-for-aperture/
I have wanted Cook gone ever since 2013. Not so much for killing Aperture without a replacement, but for not giving Aperture users a reliable way to migrate to anything else.
NYT summary of Jan 23 MSP march against ICE
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/us/minnesota-businesses-protest-ice.html
The St Paul coffee shops mentioned are a block from me. It was an impressive demonstration. Also very cold.
“On Sunday night we learned that President Trump sent the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, a message that can only be described as deranged and delusional.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/canada-carney-trump-greenland-nato.html
The world after America
“our immune systems are to some degree cross-wired with our moods and specifically our expectations of rewards and positive outcomes”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/bearing-down-placebo-effect
Biology keeps getting weirder. Brilliant experimental design.
Claude’s souls document contributors: “two of the fifteen listed names are Catholic members of the clergy”
The siege of MSP.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/21/minneapolis-ice-surge-siege
“They have guns and teargas,” he said. “And we’ve got whistles and car horns.”
We cannot defeat them. We can only slow them down and make clear to all who can see that America has fallen.
America has fallen. Carney provides the vision for a better world.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-20-2026
“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”
Americans as individuals should do what we can to support the middle powers. Within America we work to slow the monsters, and hope that one day we build a stronger democracy with better leaders.
Mac dev on Claude Code: “foundation of a fundamental shift in the economics of building and maintaining apps”
https://www.macstories.net/stories/how-i-revived-my-decade-old-app-with-claude-code/
Like going from a typewriter to a word processor. Book size increased.
“Not since the British occupation of Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War has an American city experienced anything like the blockade of Minneapolis and its surrounding areas by the federal government.”
“religion is quickly waning as a source of political legitimacy, and that this is especially visible in places like Turkey and Iran”
https://kulturkampftr.substack.com/p/iran-and-turkey-are-losing-their
Europe’s endless wars had a similar effect.
“The idea that religious people are immoral would have been somewhat counterintuitive 25 years ago. Today, it is mainstream knowledge.”
Whipple building detention center likely hiding more cruelty and abuse.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/what-is-ice-hiding-in-minneapolis
ICE is the American Gestapo.
Tahoe bricks a Mac Studio – DFU required Apple Store
https://www.zdnet.com/article/macos-tahoe-bug-bricked-mac-studio-how-to-fix/
A friend of mine bricked his new MacBook Air. If the update hangs and a user reboots sometimes it works and sometimes it bricks.
Between Liquid Metal and brickings this seems to be the year Apple’s many development issues became obvious.
“Susan Tincher alleges federal agents shackled her in a cell for five hours and cut off her bra and her wedding ring of 32 years in retaliation for attempting to observe their actions on Dec. 9”
ICE has gathered the scum of the galaxy.
The treaty after the war of independence: “As late as January 12, only seven of the thirteen states were represented, and Congress needed nine states to ratify the treaty”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-14-2026
Lots of interesting detail I’d never thought about. US got fishing rights off Newfoundland.
Google Personal Intelligence: “seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/14/google-personal-intelligence
Seen. Golf is a terrible thing but the kid likes it. This is what Apple promised.
K: “While our institutions and our elites have failed us, ordinary Americans are rising to the occasion. If Minneapolis is a laboratory of democratic destruction, it has also become a laboratory of civil resistance”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-minneapolis-crucible
St Paul is a part of MPLS here, but I’ll go with that.
“X is seemingly untouchable for political reasons”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/08/grok-x-app-stores
Apple’s rules don’t apply to X or Grok. Because our democracy is out of order.
“the polycrisis of the 1600s gave birth to the Enlightenment”
ICE agents steal and sell victim’s phone
https://www.propublica.org/article/videos-ice-dhs-immigration-agents-using-chokeholds-citizens
“Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. ”
Agent got some cash for dumping phone in, probably spent on cheap booze.
30 Real Things You Can Do Right Now to Stop ICE and the Slide Into Authoritarianism
https://beingliberal.substack.com/p/30-things-you-can-do-to-stop-this?r=3j50y
Very concrete actions.
“When we asked Jerome Powell if he had ever been pegged by Taylor Swift on the roof of the Eccles Building, he said no. These images clearly prove he is a liar”
Journalist Laura Jedeed joins ICE – sort of.
Their hiring process is pretty much what you’d expect. (Laura did not accept their job offer; she suspects if she had they might have figured out that she’s not the veteran they were looking for.)
Face-name assignment in macOS Photos app is only local, not synchronized to iCloud
https://tech.kateva.org/2026/01/face-name-assignment-in-macos-photos.html
Apple’s enshittification is best demonstrated through the history of their photo management software.
Minneapolis heroic community patrols: “federal agents smashed in her car window, dragged her and her co-pilot out of the car, and held them for eight hours in the belly of the Whipple Federal Building”
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/13/in-the-car-with-minneapolis-community-patrols/
Good description of active peaceful resistance.
“In group chats, neighbors using anonymous nicknames volunteer to assist with various aspects of the operation. No one assigns shifts or jobs; group members take on a needed role when they’re available, alert the group to their activities and let everyone know when they’re done.
The system is both highly organized and decentralized, with no clear leaders — just longer-time members of the network helping newcomers learn the communication style and security practices of the group.”
The murder of Ms Good: “Viola Liuzzo was 39 years old when she was murdered”
Hoover was a monster. Bovino is a monster.
Software library: “has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/10/a-software-library-with-no-code/#atom-everything
I wondered when this would be tried.
HCR: “The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-11-2026
Signs that some in the GOP dislike Trumpistan.
What’s really happening with child care fraud in Minnesota
A real problem that was grossly amplified by the Nazi party.