Saw a very bright shooting star about 10 mins ago, due south. Was a brilliant white and fell in almost a vertical line. Just went back through the Sydney LiveCam feed and there it is — right above the Sydney Opera House! #Sydney

This morning scrolling Bluesky, there is nothing at all in my feed about Putin’s barbaric attack on the Ukraine’s holiest site, the UNESCO protected Lavra so I’m posting this here.

The world's first trillionaire did this

“it’s clear that modern America suffers from a combination of cynicism — “everybody does it” — and fatalism — “that’s just how the world works” — far worse than anything we experienced in the robber baron era.”- Krugman

There are currently more bills attacking trans youth’s right to play sports across the U.S. than there are trans youth in school sports.

I was just thinking of the way that Facebook allowed genocidal incitement and coordination on their platform, which was evil, but Musk is using his platform to personally incite pogroms, which is worse.

it took a phenomenal, expensive, coordinated effort to get from north carolina losing 400 million dollars & a gubernatorial race over one bathroom ban to felony hand-washing, citizen bounty hunters, and “we reserve the right to make you people piss outside” in 10 years.

I’m declaring my support to VESTURBÆR VOLCANO! It’s about Passion. It’s about Intensity. It’s about Erupt. Unlike other teams, it is singular. It has characters I can only copy-paste, not type on my mobile keyboard. VESTURBÆR VOLCANO. The team to watch out for. Goooo VV! 🌋🤘🏽

What the flying fuck?!

I realize this is obvious to most but allow me to rant: At the core of Trump's base love for him is a simmering resentment over their mediocrity and gratitude for him making it permissible to be arrogant whilst mediocre. Everything in this cult can be traced back to that. (thread)

“ Two emotions have driven the films’ success. One is sheer exhilaration at the stylised ultraviolence set to a sweat-soaked soundtrack. The other is a sense of catharsis. A country that cannot pull off an assassination in Canada without getting rumbled is in “Dhurandhar” capable of retribution”

So over the past two days, the right of trans folk defining their identities have been taken away from them and given to district-level boards. “Alluring” people (whatever) in “becoming” trans is now a crime. Max punishment for rape of trans folk has been reduced from 10 to 2 years.

“This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” was especially bizarre […]: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.” open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Straits of Hormuz carries 50% of India’s crude supply apparently. (Don’t know what the percentage is for Singapore, but we do get some Malaysian/ Indo crude as well?) www.bbc.com/news/live/cy...

From The Economist’s War Room Dispatch: no central command and control in Iran. All the missiles you are are local decisions made by junior officers. Finding this incredibly chilling.

Krugman summarises the last two days in world news: “At Davos, Mark Carney called for giving up hope that the Pax Americana can be restored, and Donald Trump proved him right.” open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

“ “Villagers came and told me that people close to the accused were boasting about their release. ‘Humne uske bete ko maara, lekin woh kuch nahi kar paaya,’” he heard them say. We killed his son, but he could do nothing.”

“These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

"The Trump administration had stalled all his lawsuits and barred officials at his agency from speaking any language that wasn’t English. They’d even ripped down posters written in Spanish. Overnight, the attorney found himself unable to talk to many of his complainants, or even explain why."

“[Q]uerying and queering of Bond as a figure for what Matthew Bellamy has called “drone masculinity”: an ideology in which “masculinity, heterosexuality, trustworthiness, and the capacity to inflict and endure violence in the name of the state” are linked” This and other hits in an excellent piece.

New School “administrators have started to implement a plan to close, overhaul or merge about 30 academic programs or majors; pause nearly all admissions to doctoral programs; and offer buyouts or early retirement to what professors say is about 40 percent of the full-time faculty.”

insane

Russia destroyed 100% of Odesa’s energy infrastructure. All substations were destroyed by missiles and drones. The city has been completely left without electricity, hot water, and heating for over one million people, including all critical infrastructure.

America winning hearts and minds.

"If you won't support our sisters, we won't run your units"

“A colleague had two Indian immigration agents show up at her home in Canada and tell her she had two weeks to challenge the impending loss of her OCI status because of a rather benign article she published a long time ago,” she said.”

Travelling to China is easier these days.

Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse place on earth. Turns I’m not alone in routinely offering joss sticks to Mariamman, Srinivasa Perumal, Murugan, Rudrakali, Shiva, Rama, Buddha, Tua Pek Kong, and Guan Yin. In fact, 6 in 10 do. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Yesterday, we sent this message to the @viralemergence.org team, bringing a (hopefully temporary) end to our project three years into what started as a decade of planned work. /1

They are running the government according to the logic of right-wing grievance media. I cannot emphasize that enough. The point is to create content, and they don't see an actual difference between dunking on Sabrina Carpenter, passing legislation, and bombing other countries.

Reading the opening of Leonard Zeskind's 2009 book Blood and Politics in the midst of Trump 2.0 is quite a gut punch. In 2000 he warned of a rising tide of violent white nationalism & Christian nationalism on the American right...few people took those warning seriously. And now here we are.

The USG has a new explanation on why they (now admittedly) intentionally killed 2 shipwrecked men. It does not pass the laws-of-war smell test Worse for Hegseth, NYT: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors." 1/🧵

Today’s driver is of Yi descent. Says daughter speaks better Mandarin than he does.

“Getting the deepfakes removed is only the beginning of regaining control,” she said. “Work doesn’t stop when the report is made. Allowing women the space to process what happened and to speak freely is just as, if not more, important.”

“It’s 2025 now, and what time are we living in? One where trans people are so reviled and politically scapegoated that for some lesbians, gays and bisexuals, it’s no longer even politically advantageous to trot out the names of our murdered sisters and siblings for street cred or grant applications”

I am told I now know more French. On me dit que je parle maintenant mieux français.

Jamelle was cooking. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

Singapore So Kaypoh Edition 2234: daughter’s (well-known) school received a call from some useless idiot who complained that she untied her hair and let it down contrary to school rules. She was travelling home in the MRT.

trans rights are human rights 💾🏳️‍⚧️✊ #floppydiskart #transgender

“If Trump wants to save the lives of Nigerian Christians… all Trump has to do is restore the American aid that was estimated to be saving the lives of more than a quarter-million Nigerians each year.” Bang-on (as usual) from @nickkristof.bsky.social

While US venture capitalists were buying monkey jpegs, and DOGE coins, and figuring out how to get Black women fired, and tweeting about white birthrates, and trying to mandate which bathroom trans kids should use, China was making progress on climate change and taking the lead in a real industry.

Off the top of my head, in terms of degrees of separation I managed to get from myself to *Jimi Hendrix* in "three hops," this is a WILD assertion to make www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

So Rushdie's Satanic Verses wasn't technically banned in India, only its import was. But because Penguin India refused to print it, it was defacto banned. Which, ironically, was why you could always pick up a pirated edition at, say, Hyderabad's Sunday book bazaar at Abids. But now there's a twist.

Jacky Kennedy’s garden is now completely destroyed

They abolished the House of Representatives ... solely to prevent the release of information about the president's best friend, the pedophile who ran a sex trafficking ring.

You still want to believe the political fuel that powers the American collapse into authoritarianism isn't the deep, abiding resentment of white men who pine for an America that sees and services only them? Gaze upon Leni Riefenstahl's recent work for Donald Trump's U.S. Department of Labor.

The 18th-century shift from militaries raised privately by nobles to standing armies financed by taxes is one of the central moves in the creation of the modern state. Trump is dialing it back to feudalism. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/u...

Another Chindian couple moving into the flat upstairs, so they gave us Milo and ondeh-ondeh-flavoured cookies. This, right here, is the Singapore I’ve grown to love. 🇸🇬🤘🏽

Dude is William F. Buckley's nephew. Bozell's son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, participated in the 2021 United States Capitol attack. He was convicted in September 2023 of ten charges, including five felonies and was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison. Bozell IV later received a pardon from Trump.