Akshay

Tehran makes new threat to Gulf shipping as US says 'hardest hits' on Iran 'yet to come' - BBC News A Iranian official warns the country will "set fire to anyone who tries to pass through" the Strait of Hormuz - a crucial transit route for oil and gas.

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.”

I see that Gulab Jamun Creme Brûlée and raise a steamed chocolate lava pau.

“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.

Falling Enrollment, Money Woes: The New School Seeks a Path to Survival

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

It’s essentially a tribute to Kurosawa’s Magnificent Seven spoken through the language of India’s cricket history and Bollywood. When you do watch it, keep a lookout for historic references: to descriptions of when Indians first encountered cricket per Guha’s cricket history book or Palwankar Baloo.

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.

Person wearing glasses behind a crowd standing in front of a brick wall with a sign saying "If you won't support our sisters, we won't run your units"

"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.

Welcome to the Straits! 🙂

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/...

Hi everyone, I wanted to share some sad news about the future of the Verena program. As you know, in September, NSF delayed our annual payment indefinitely, and asked us to keep spending closer and closer to zero until they could “justify” another payment. We began to run out of funds at some universities this month, and will be fully spent out by late spring, so the goal was to get paid in December. We’ve been working with our program officer to make this happen, but sadly, we’ve learned we’re not getting an increment again, and there’s no clarity on when or how much we will be paid in the remainder of the grant (through September 1, 2027). Because of this, the Executive Committee has made the difficult decision to essentially shut the BII down until / unless something changes. What that means is an indefinite end to all programs (e.g., seminar), training activities (integration workshops, trainee corner), and evaluation. On research, what’s able to continue will have to be navigated by each investigator; our goal is to work together to push out all the impactful science we’ve spent three years collecting and analyzing data for, but we also know that priorities may shift around to keep people employed. If we’re lucky, Congress will pass a budget that lets us continue doing something like what we planned, and we’ll pick that back up when Zoe and Collin are back in April. Until then, Verena will continue to exist as a community where we can collaborate (and give and receive support!), and we’re working to find funding sources that can pick up from where the BII left off. On a personal note: it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work with all of you, and an unbelievably lucky thing to get to run an NSF center in my 20s. I’ve loved this project, and I hope it’s made as much of a difference in your lives as it has in mine. In case I don’t see you later: happy holidays, be well, and so long and thanks for all the viruses. Best, Colin

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.

As the last century ended and the year 2000 began, my hometown newspaper, The Kansas City Star, asked me to write a short guest opinion piece predicting the course of the new century. It was part of a journalistic time capsule, an editor said, and would likely be read a hundred years hence. The same had been done by the newspaper's forebearers on January 1, 1901, when men considered "prominent" in Kansas City wrote short pieces about the future. A bit nervous about prognosticating in general, particularly in fewer than five hundred words, I asked the editor to send, as a guide, copies of the articles written one hundred years prior. Each had been penned by a religious, civic, political, or economic captain of the city. A great hopefulness pervaded their expectations of scientific and industrial advances. In this regard, these city fathers (and they were all fathers) reflected the optimistic spirit of the age. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was then immensely popular, for example, as one of almost fifty utopian novels published during that period. One of the most fascinating aspects of these turn-of-the-century opinion pieces is that several predicted a happy future in explicitly racist terms. Not that they didn't worry about challenges to white supremacy's permanence. The city's "leading lawyer" feared that "the yellow peril threatens the world with untold disaster." One preacher fretted that the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionally guaranteed the rights of citizenship to black people, had been a "capital blunder." But a more prominent Baptist minister prophesied a noble century to come, including the end of war and the uplift of the poor, all under "the

growing supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon."2 In this regard also, the city's sires reflected the spirit of the nation's elites at that time. University deans then taught that humanity could be improved through eugenics, the supposed science of selective "up breeding."3 The Supreme Court had recently ruled that "separate" was equal, and newspapers uncritically published accounts steeped in these and related ideas. The twentieth century did not end as it had begun. Science and technology, as predicted, did reach new heights. They split the atom, took us to the moon, and created a global cyberspace communications system. They could have also provided food to every hungry soul on the planet— but they didn't. Instead, scientific advances fed an unending series of wars, genocides, and man-made disasters. And the ethic of Aryan supremacy, so prevalent a hundred years earlier, (temporarily) buried itself beneath the mountains of human ash produced by Hitler's crematories. After World War Two, Europeans ceded legal sovereignty over Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their noticeably more darkly hued (former) subjects, even as the strains of four centuries of colonial exploitation were not erased. And in Kansas City, the newspaper-for-the-future included opinions by four women and three persons of color, including the city's first black mayor.

My contribution to that time capsule stemmed directly from the subject under consideration here. I predicted a mid-twenty-first century conflict within the United States as white people became a minority in a nation of minorities and were no longer able to preserve a system of white privilege through majority-rule winner-take-all democracy. As the century wore on, I wrote, white nationalists would push toward instituting new forms of racial apartheid and other antidemocratic measures. The outcome in the year 2100, I argued, would depend on what we learned today about white supremacy and white nationalism. 4 This book does not pretend to predict prospective events, but it is not simply an account of the past either. While it is a history focused on the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, it is my intention that it serve as part of a prolegomenon to the future discussion of racial egalitarianism and democracy. My hope is that it will provide the reader a view of the contemporary white nationalist movement that is both comprehensive and instructive. Though it takes into account organizations, individuals, and

events such as the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and the Oklahoma City bombing-things ascribed more to memory at this point than daily life—the objective is to demonstrate that this movement, driven by a vision well within the mainsprings of American life, is already self-consciously pitching itself toward the future. Perhaps when white nationalism's next iteration emerges, our country will better understand it.

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.

U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance

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.

Women suffer most from deepfake abuses, and as cases rise, victims need better ways to regain control Being deepfaked can feel like sexual assault, stripping victims of control, identity, and dignity. With the rise of AI-generated content, experts tell CNA Women that digital sexual violence against wo...

“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.”

I’m sick of writing about dead trans people | Xtra Magazine For 15 years, I hoped my words would change something. Now I’m grieving the world that could’ve been

“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.

I used to tune into their podcast once in a while, but haven’t in a long time lest I find out that yet another liberal out there is a transphobe.

So glad to read that Campbell and Stewart have bucked that trend. So so glad.

If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature’s constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president’s effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They’ll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we’ve seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand.

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.