🜁 SUMMARY OF TODAY’S COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

1. Entropy — what it is and what it is not

• Entropy is not a substance or a force. • It is a description of how systems move from order → disorder. • Entropy does not destroy matter or energy. • It dissolves structure, not vibration. • In Excrementalist terms: entropy is the muck‑spreading process, not the muck.

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1. Entropy as the existential anarchist

• Entropy rejects hierarchy, permanence, and fixed order. • It equalises everything. • It is the universe’s levelling tendency. • In mythic language: entropy is the cosmic anarchist who refuses to let any structure sit on a throne. • Entropyascosmic_leveller

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1. Consciousness as the counter‑force (negentropy)

• Consciousness is not eternal, not fundamental, and not required by the universe. • It arises from complexity, integration, and self‑modelling. • Consciousness is the temporary rebellion against entropy. • It builds order while entropy dissolves it. • Consciousnessasnegentropy

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1. Consciousness is an emergent process, not a cosmic entity

• You are an expression of the process of consciousness, not a vessel for some external consciousness. • Consciousness is a loop: a system modelling itself. • This is why consciousness can question its own existence. • Selfasprocessnotthing

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1. Eternity is a concept, not a reality

• Eternity is invented by a temporal mind trying to imagine timelessness. • Nothing in the universe is eternal: everything changes, decays, dissolves. • Eternity is a mental construct, not a cosmic property. • Impermanenceasonly_reality

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1. “Before time” is a broken question

• “Before” is a temporal word. • Time began with the universe; there is no “before” because “before” requires time. • The pre‑time state is not something, not nothing — simply no‑time. • Howtimeemergesfromtimeless

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1. The Excrementalist cosmology. The Mythic Frame

• Matter = muck • Life = organised muck • Consciousness = muck that knows it’s muck • Entropy = the muck spreader • Negentropy = the muck stacker • Heat death = the final slurry • New universes = the next bowel movement • The Bog of England = the regulator of cosmic flow • Excrementalist_cosmology

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🜂 THE CORE INSIGHT OF THE DAY

The uncovered real tension:

The universe contains two opposing tendencies: entropy (dissolution) and negentropy (organisation).

Consciousness is the peak of negentropy. Entropy is the universal leveller.

Dan De Lion

⭐ THE MYTHIC SAGA OF THE DUMP OF DESTINY

(as preserved in the Scroll of the Porcelain Throne)

I. The Summoning

In the quiet dawn of an ordinary day, when the kettle had barely begun its whisper and the world still clung to sleep, a stirring rose within him.

Not a whisper. Not a rumble. A calling.

For destiny does not always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes it arrives with cramps.

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II. The Descent to the Throne

He walked — steady, solemn — to the Porcelain Throne, that ancient seat of kings and commoners alike.

The air thickened. The tiles trembled. The toilet sensed what was coming and prayed to whatever gods toilets pray to.

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III. The Great Unburdening

Then came the moment.

A turd of titanic intent, a log forged in the molten core of yesterday, a brown obelisk of liberation.

It fell not as waste, but as prophecy.

Plumbers would speak of it in hushed tones. Pipes would remember it for generations. The U‑bend would never be the same.

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IV. The Blockage of Fate

Water rose. Hope faltered. The bowl became a battlefield between destiny and plumbing.

But he did not fear. For he knew:

“What blocks today frees tomorrow.”

And with a single, mighty flush — a roar like the sea reclaiming a fallen ship — the Dump of Destiny was carried into the Underworld of Sewage, where only legends dwell.

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V. The Aftermath

Silence. Relief. A lightness of being known only to monks, astronauts, and men who have just dropped something that could legally be classified as a blunt instrument.

He rose from the Throne reborn, renewed, a man unburdened in body and spirit.

And thus the saga ends, as all sagas should:

with a clean bowl and a lighter soul.

Dan De Lion

⭐ THE PARABLE OF THE TOILET OF TRANSCENDENCE

As told in the Gospel of the Porcelain Way

There was once a disciple who came to the Teacher and said:

“Master, how shall I enter the Kingdom?”

And the Teacher, who had seen many dawns and many blockages, replied with a gentle smile.

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⭐ I. The Approach to the Throne

The Teacher led the disciple to the quiet chamber where the Porcelain Throne stood.

“Behold the Throne of Truth,” he said. “For all who sit here must face themselves without disguise.”

The desciple trembled, for the room was simple, yet sacred.

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⭐ II. The Teaching of Release

The diciple asked again:

“Master, what must I do?”

And the Teacher answered:

“Learn the Way of Release,” for the Kingdom is not entered by holding on, but by letting go of what burdens the heart.”

The disciple pondered this, for it sounded both simple and impossible.

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⭐ III. The Sitting of Honesty

The Teacher placed a hand on the diciple’s shoulder.

“Sit in honesty,” he said. “For the body never lies, and the soul follows the body’s courage.”

The disciple sat upon the Throne — not to perform a bodily act, but to learn the posture of truth.

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⭐ IV. The Flush of Finality

When the disciple rose, the Teacher pointed to the handle.

“This is the Flush of Finality,” he said. “What is released must be released completely. Do not cling to what has already passed.”

The disciple pulled the handle, and the sound echoed like a small thunder of liberation.

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⭐ V. The Rising of the Lightened One

The Teacher spoke:

“Now you know the Way,” for the Kingdom is entered by those who release their burdens, face their truth, and rise lighter than they sat.”

And the disciple understood.

Not the toilet — but the transcendence.

Not the act — but the letting go.

Not the flush — but the freedom.

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⭐ Rune‑Style Moral

“Let go. Be true. Walk lighter.”

Dan De Lion

✉️ THE EPISTLE FROM THE EAST RIDING WILDERNESS

A Letter to the Nation from the Banks of the Humber

To the people of this tired, beautiful island, from one who walks the long flat roads of East Yorkshire, where the wind tells the truth and the land remembers everything.

I write not as a politician, nor a priest, nor a man seeking favour, but as a voice crying from the margins — from the estuary mud, the terraces, the shipyard ghosts, the places where promises come to die and ordinary people learn to live anyway.

I write because anger has become my companion, not the wild anger that destroys, but the clean, bright anger that reveals. The anger that says: This is wrong, and we know it. The anger that refuses to be domesticated.

For too long, this nation has been asked to swallow injustice as though it were weather — inevitable, impersonal, beyond human agency. But injustice is not weather. It is choice. It is policy. It is the architecture of neglect.

And the people who feel it most are the ones who never asked for anything but fairness.

I speak for the single mother counting coins at midnight. I speak for the pensioner choosing between heat and food. I speak for the young man lost to a system that never saw him. I speak for the asylum seeker treated as a problem, not a person. I speak for the worker whose dignity is measured in zero hours. I speak for the child who learns too early what fear tastes like.

I speak because someone must.

From the Humber’s edge, I see a nation fraying — not from lack of greatness, but from lack of care. We are not broken. We are unattended.

And so, I write this Epistle to say:

We deserve better. We deserve truth. We deserve justice that is not selective. We deserve leaders who remember who they serve. We deserve a country that keeps its promises to its people.

Let no one tell you that anger is dangerous. What is dangerous is apathy. What is dangerous is silence. What is dangerous is the slow erosion of dignity while we are told to be grateful for crumbs.

My anger is not a threat. It is a flare in the night, a signal fire calling the nation back to itself.

And so, I say to you, people of Britain:

Stand. Speak. Refuse the lie that nothing can change. Refuse the lie that you are small. Refuse the lie that injustice is normal.

For from the wilderness of East Yorkshire, I tell you this truth:

A nation is not saved by power. A nation is saved by conscience.

And conscience begins with the courage to say: Enough.

Signed, A Voice from the East Riding Wilderness

In Summary: * Ready now for the Fever / Sky WNBA Game. Enjoyed watching drone videos of downtown Indianapolis before the game. Saw my old neighborhood, streets I used to walk down all the time.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 237.22 lbs. * bp= 154/91 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises

Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana, 1 pb&j sandwich * 06:45 – ½ McDonald's double-cheeseburger sandwich * 08:30 – cookies * 10:50 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 12:45 – pizza * 16:05 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:45 to 13:45 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:00 – I expected to find a MLB Game already in progress, Rangers vs Royals was scheduled to start at 13:10 CDT but, no, instead it's rain delayed. The announcers are running their “rain delay theater” and no mention yet re: when the game's expected to start. And it's not raing there, nor has it been for awhile. Yet the guys keep talking, and I keep waiting. * 14:30 – apparently the grounds crew has started rolling the tarp off the field, and we're expecting the game to start at 15:30. * 17:25 – I've just left the radio call of the Rangers / Royals game and have turned on the TV, switching to Prime so I can catch the Fever / Sky WNBA Game starting in just a few minutes

Chess: * 17:15 – have moved in all pending CC games

Hello again. I hope you will have a great weekend.

Unknown to most citizens POTUS issued an order in March to force the US Postal Service to screen ballots so they only go to people they consider acceptable to vote. The postal service issued a proposed rule in June which you can read here: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2026-10968.

The rule has a 30 day comment period which ends at the beginning of July. The address for sending them a comment is right at the beginning of the proposal. The proposed action states that the post office would have the authority to refuse to deliver your mail-in ballot of your name is not on a list of eligible voters because your state refused to provide the list. Under the US Constitution, states and not the federal government control elections and how they are conducted. Many states have already refused to provide lists of voters.

POTUS wants you to believe that mail-in ballots are always fraudulent. Nothing is further from the truth. Unfortunately places like Los Angeles California or the entire state of Utah vote by mail-in ballot. In the 2024 presidential election there were less than 100 invalid votes in the entire nation and the majority of these were ballots sent in by voters who later passed away before the election. There was no attempted fraud at all.

POTUS wants to prevent anyone from voting that won't vote for his slate of criminals. He needs to be removed from office ASAP.

POTUS Roaster

Thanks for reading my posts. If you want to see the rest of them, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/

To email us send it too potusroaster@gmail.com

Please tell your family, friends and neighbors about the posts.

I‘ve been working on autowt, my git worktree helper, on and off for almost a year now. Most of that time, I was at Descript and getting live feedback from a pretty wide spread of engineers: habits, preferences, which terminal and shell they used, what they were willing to put up with.

Nearing the end of my time at Descript, a few things stood out as missed opportunities.

Performance

autowt 0.5.x takes at least 200ms to do anything, because it has to import the Textual TUI library. Not only that, but what it was doing with Textual was just OK.

Meanwhile, Go has the Charm family of libraries to help build great TUIs. Go, being a compiled language, doesn‘t pay a cost to import code on every program invocation. And conveniently, my upcoming gig uses a lot of Go. I had a good reason to look closer.

So as I was winding down at Descript, I took a couple of days to have a coding agent rewrite the whole project in Go. Now it launches in 30ms. Hooray! It’s a little scary to do this kind of port, but I did a lot of manual regression testing.

The Python version is dead code now. Uninstall autowt from uv/pip, and install it with Homebrew or Mise instead.

Shell integration

I originally built autowt to control your terminal program, i.e. iTerm2, Ghostty, Terminal.app, etc. This is an unusual thing to do! The more traditional approach is to integrate with your shell (zsh, bash, fish) to cd you to the right place. But terminal automation adds value because it‘s legitimately fewer keystrokes, and you can do extra “background” work after spawning the new tab.

Some people just could not get into the workflow of having autowt open tabs on their behalf. It‘s not my job to change their habits, and it is my job to make their lives easier. So I finally figured out a clean way to add a shell integration to autowt, so any autowt command can magically cd you somewhere. Instead of autowt go opening a new tab for you, you can open your own new tab and autowt go inside it.

Invoking hooks via the command line

autowt‘s most important feature is hooks: commands that run at various points in the git worktree lifecycle, like after creating a new worktree. This is the main value proposition of autowt: it installs dependencies and runs configuration code in new worktrees automatically.

Every freaking coding agent GUI tool wants to manage its own worktrees, which means a proliferation of configuration and setup code. autowt now exposes autowt hook to let you reuse autowt’s configuration across tools.

I was tired of waiting on GitHub Actions to see if I broke anything in my last commit. Why did I need network access and a fleet of containers just to run a few linters and tests? I felt like a chump!

The nature of validation during development

Layers of checks are necessary

Every software development process uses a set of automated checks which reduce the likelihood of end users experiencing a harmful change. Some of these checks are cheap, like making sure changed files are correctly formatted, or typechecking small programs. But many are expensive, like UI tests.

These checks are run with frequency inversely proportional to their wall clock execution time. In other words, fast checks are run very often, usually in blocking precommit git hooks. Slow checks are run less often, perhaps only on cloud CI servers triggered by commits to branches. And sometimes checks are so slow or flaky they are only run on the main branch after changes are landed, to be looked at later.

Layers make feedback loops worse

It’s very easy to break something you aren’t looking at. If you’re working on, for example, a design system library, you might introduce a change that breaks a UI test in your main application. If you don’t run your application’s UI tests until you open a pull request, you’re at risk of breaking something without noticing until you’re out of flow state.

Another problem is unique to coding agents: they often want to run an expensive check themselves which has already run elsewhere, because they have no concept of time. Claude is happy to run a UI test suite that takes ten minutes just to “reproduce an issue from CI.”

Remote checks are a tradeoff

Running all your checks remotely can give you parallelism and better laptop battery life. But it has major downsides. For one thing, you need to be on a network. For another, the service you rely on needs to be up, which in the era of not-even-one-nine-of-GitHub-uptime is iffy.

Assuming you’re on a network, and the service is up, now you need to use the service to view results. There is cognitive load to clicking around a CI provider’s UI, or needing to go through extra steps to download a raw log or a build artifact.

LocalCI is a different way of doing continuous validation

Wrestling with these problems in a personal project led me to ask, what if I could get all the best benefits of remote CI without needing an external service? Many of us are sitting here with 16+ core CPUs and tens of gigabytes of RAM, using that power to mostly compile JavaScript programs and serve web pages. The checks we care about most are often IO-bound and need a tiny fraction of that power.

Suppose you could run every check after every commit automatically and check on the results later. What would be the impact?

1. Memory and diligence of a human or agent are no longer a factor in which checks run.
2. Results are just files on your disk. No mandatory over-built web UI.
3. You can use it on an airplane without paying for wifi.
4. It is easier to commit code that fails fast checks. Arguably not a problem since you can amend.

I built LocalCI to see how far I could take this idea. At a high level, it adds a postcommit hook which enqueues tasks in a background process, and provides multiple ways of interacting with tasks and results.

Here’s how it works once you install the postcommit hook:

> git commit -am "test commit"
[//:postcommit] $ ~/dev/cli/localci/mise-tasks/postcommit --repo /Users/<reacted>/dev/…
cwd: /Users/<reacted>/dev/cli/localci
Enqueued 1 task for /Users/<reacted>/dev/cli/localci at 4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c
Status: localci status --repo /Users/<reacted>/dev/cli/localci --commit 4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c
Results: http://127.0.0.1:61924/repo/Users/<reacted>/dev/cli/localci/commit/4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c

Wait: localci wait --repo /Users/<reacted>/dev/cli/localci --commit 4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c
[tmp 4dacf08] test commit
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

Once you see this text, the daemon is running and you can look at the results via the cli, an interactive terminal UI, or a web browser.

With the CLI, you'd usually use localci wait to await results and then print them.

> localci wait
Completed
repo     /Users/steve/dev/cli/localci
commit   4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c
summary  18 passed, 1 failed, 0 timed out, 0 not run
message  test commit
branch   tmp

Failed Tasks
status  task        attempt  duration  failure
failed  noisy-fail  1        181ms     exit
  Output: /Users/steve/Library/Caches/localci/7fcbc2dda3b75a7eb817158c05616922/4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c/out/___localci_noisy-fail/attempt-001
  Results: http://127.0.0.1:61924/repo/Users/steve/dev/cli/localci/commit/4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c/task/%2F%2F:localci:noisy-fail
  Primary artifact: combined.log
  Primary log path: /Users/steve/Library/Caches/localci/7fcbc2dda3b75a7eb817158c05616922/4dacf08719844468d1965830ea5307adec10571c/out/___localci_noisy-fail/attempt-001/combined.log
localci: localci run failed

With the TUI (localci dash), you can browse results interactively, and it live updates.

And if you prefer a traditional SaaS-like web interface, you can run locali web to open it.

Getting fancy

With all built artifacts available locally, and a web server running, LocalCI can give you more options than cloud-based CI. For example, if you build documentation, it can serve the HTML. Or if you produce a non-text artifact, you can give yourself multiple options for what to do with it. The options are configurable.

This has been subtly transformative to how I do something as basic as writing documentation for my projects. Usually for HTML project docs, you either run a self-live-updating dev server in a dedicated terminal, or run a build-the-docs command whenever you feel like it. Both have downsides. I dislike dedicating more terminals than necessary to development, so I like to avoid dev servers, but I also hate manually typing my build commands.

With LocalCI, I just commit, and when I want to double check the docs render, I open the web UI and it simply serves me the built docs.

Mise owns the hard parts

CI systems have sophisticated configuration languages to define which tasks run in response to events, and in which order. You are expected to create containers and install all dependencies. Reproducing this logic myself would have been a big API surface and an implementation with many edge cases and possible bugs.

Rather than requiring a special config file for LocalCI, I decided to use Mise. It’s a dev tool manager and task runner which can handle dependencies, parallelism, secrets, environment variables, and more. It has its own config file and more than enough features to support LocalCI’s use case.

The core idea is that LocalCI will run every task with a localci: prefix, starting with localci:setup if present. As an example, here’s part of LocalCI’s own mise.toml file:

[tools]
node = "24.11.0"
pnpm = "11.2.2"

[tasks."localci:setup"]
description = "Install dependencies for cloned localci runs"
run = [
  "mise trust",
  "mise install",
  "pnpm --dir web install --frozen-lockfile",
]

[tasks."localci:web-build"]
description = "Make sure the web bundle builds"
run = "pnpm --dir web exec vite build"

I’m not sure how well this scales past individuals

LocalCI has been a dream workflow for my hobby projects. Being 100% self-sufficient on my laptop means I can work on anything, any time, anywhere, without adding drudgery.

But when I think about bringing it to a job, I imagine it living alongside an existing CI system, requiring people to duplicate validation commands as Mise tasks, or move the source of truth to Mise and have the CI system call the Mise task, or something else. I’m really curious if anyone has thoughts on how to make this work well. The localci: Mise task convention was a choice I made quickly, but it might not be the best or only option.

TITLE: Unwilling act of breathing. SUBTITLE: The breathing and it's own desire to keeping me alive, even when I don't want to.

Breathing is the rhythmic process of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. – google

Our body works 24/7 without a break so it can keep us alive, yet our brain often works against that. Our thoughts drive us, and because they are rarely positive, they make me wonder whether all the work our body puts in is even needed.

My lungs continue to breathe even in the moment my heart doesn’t want to, making it work — even when it doesn’t feel the need to. Won’t be the end of the world if it stopped for a while, as I’ve already died in those moments, so many times.

It makes my heart do its work, even when it is tired of pushing around all that blood, just so I can cut myself once and for all and lose all its progress because one day all my feelings caught up.

---

I don’t understand feelings.

It is a complex concept for me, there are so many feelings that one is supposed to feel, and I seem to be only feeling the worst ones. It’s been a long time since I have been feeling pain, and I can’t seem to find the reason for all this hurt. I see others with far more problems than me, and somehow they have figured out a way to live through all of it— even if they break down from time to time, they pick themselves up again, and shine their light for the world one more time.

I on the other hand, have zero idea of what to do. I don’t understand what my mind, heart and the body is going through, and that makes it harder to know what I should be doing to fix their problems. I don’t have a way to pick myself up, I don’t know how to bring my shine back.

I am a bulb losing its light, and there is no way to fix it, than replacing it.

But how can I be replaced?

People need me around them right? Well I sit in my room whole day, and their life goes on without my input, so I guess they are fine without me too.

People must be searching for me, when they are sad? Everyone has their own method of coping and people around them to help them, I am just an accessory to most of the people, you need it sometimes, but you can live without it too.

There has to be someone who misses my presence! or maybe not.

Even while writing all this, I wonder what will people think. Even though I am the kind of person who doesn’t usually cares about what people might think about him, but I still dress good, walk/drive nicely, don’t get into fights, and don’t make creepy unnecessary eye contacts when I am outside. It’s not because I am worried about me ruining someone’s day without even doing something significant or without being a part of their life.

I don’t care about what others might think about me, I care to not give them a reason to think bad about me.

I…am not living from any standard, maybe one standard, I am breathing, and conscious, so I have it better than deads and the people in coma atleast.

But I don’t seem to find myself in a simple category of a person, I am not a achiever kind of person, but I am also not doing anything.

I do a few things, sometimes, not everything at once but I live to try everything just once.

I am not an artist, but I can create stuff.

I am not a connoisseur of anything, but I am connoisseur of knowing and exploring everything.

that urge to know and live everything is what’s not letting me live, I breathe but for what? to be confined by manmade ideas and systems? How am I better than a dead person? We both don’t have our personal identity, we both can’t feel, and we both are just floating around with no real purpose. Even the deads have their unfulfilled purposes, I have them too. They don’t have the chance to fulfill those purposes, but even with the chances, I am not fulfilling them too.

Am I better being dead? TBH I don’t have an answer to that, but what I do have is — I’ll get to be free of these desires, needs, and wants. And that might just allow me to live freely for once.

The constant breathing, you don’t feel it happening through your nose until you catch a cold, and get a stuffy nose. Only then, one realises how much they work and how your life goes all upside down when they don’t. And death is just like that cold, till the day my nostrils are pulling that oxygen I will fill up my life with all the experiences (negative and positive), and one day all those experiences will lead to a day of cold, a slower breathing, so slow that my heart can barely keep racing to supply all the blood around, my eyes will slowly shut down, my body will start to relax, there will be a moment when my brain will play memories of this life, and a realisation that all of this is ending will hit me, as everything will fade away and I will turn cold once and for all.

That cold, that will be the only reminder of how much my life actually mattered, and to whom and if not to anyone atleast me. And unlike normal cold, I won’t get my warmth back, and get to see a day without the cold.

I’ll be layed down soon after, with people crying near me, and according to my religion, once again— people will make a choice for me, burn me, bury me and then they will forget about me.

---

Breathing may just be an automatic function of lungs, working till they can’t. but it sure as hell keeps making me work even after I’ve past the stage of can’t. -deep

Fever vs Sky

The Indiana Fever are scheduled to play the Chicago Sky this evening. This WNBA game is to be broadcast live on Prime TV starting at 5:30 PM CDT and I plan to watch.

And the adventure continues.

Yet again, we have another summer of disorder on the streets here in the UK and also, over the water in Ireland. Disorder with its roots in inter-communal tensions. Disorder centred around the question raised by some of who does and who does not belong in these islands. Disorder that’s being fanned by elements with very deep pockets and sinister agendas. Disorder that unless people take a few steps back to think through the situation and realise they’re being played, looks set to get worse. Disorder that looks increasingly likely to lead to some form of civil conflict.

There’s a lot that’s being said and written about the roots of the disorder that we’ve seen so far this summer. There will undoubtedly be a lot more that will be said and written. At some point, I intend to compile a reading list of the more thoughtful, nuanced pieces that are getting written about the volatile and increasingly dangerous situation we’re facing. What I want to do with this piece is look at the consequences that will be arising from the ongoing street disorder and the way it appears to be getting whipped up online. The aim of this is to get people to take a few steps back, and as calmly as is possible under the circumstances, start to think about how all of this is getting used and manipulated to impose an agenda that will eventually strip us of many of our freedoms.

Online safety is being touted as an issue by the UK government. Now I’m not going to say that the Internet, and social media in particular, is perfect because any casual observation will reveal that it’s becoming an incredibly toxic environment. The question is this – is the Internet making society increasingly toxic, does it just reflect back an already toxic society or, is it a complex interplay between the two? I’m of the opinion that while the Internet is a mirror of an increasingly dysfunctional society, it also plays a role in amplifying that dysfunctionality. In other words, there’s a complex feedback loop that if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, is defying any attempt to unravel and understand it.

Looking at social media over the last few weeks of street disorder, it’s all too obvious that actors with very sinister agendas are going out of their way to inflame tensions. There are already moves in place to restrict social media access to under 16s. As an aside, knowing how tech savvy many under 16s are, somehow I can’t see that really working without a considerable degree of friction! With recent events on the streets of the UK and Ireland, there have been calls from some quarters for access to social media to be restricted for everyone in times of ‘crisis’. Calls for clampdowns on social media are nothing new but, given the goals of the ‘great reset’ a.k.a.Agenda 2030, those calls from certain actors are intensifying. This has been touched upon by a number of commentators, this piece being just one example: Quick Take…The (Well-Timed) Belfast Riots – Kit Knightly | offGuardian | 10.6.26:

The timing of all of this is very interesting.

As we have covered in detail, the UK is in the midst of a “controversy” over social media – with the government moving to ban children from accessing it or bring in other tyrannical measures for the purposes of harvesting private data.

In a similar vein, five days ago, Labour’s deputy Leader Lucy Powell was calling for a “misinformation clampdown” on social media.

On Saturday, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall was in the papers expressing “concern” over the role of social media during times of unrest, and wishing they could “do more”.

While I find that social media can be pretty abhorrent at times, being a believer in free speech, I can’t go along with calls to restrict or block it. Bellends have the right to let the world know that they are indeed, utter bellends. We have the absolute right to judge that people are bellends and to respond in the appropriate manner. That may be by blocking them or, ripping the absolute piss out of them. These calls for online restrictions are made using concern for ‘safety’ as their prime justification. That’s the safety of online users who may be offended by the bile that’s being spouted on social media by some elements. What is also expressed is the concern that social media platforms are being weaponised to mobilise people to take to the streets. All very praiseworthy if you take the expression of these concerns at face value.

Let’s take the concerns that social media is being weaponised to get people out onto the streets to create mayhem. I’ve seen footage of residents being burned out of their homes by Loyalist mobs in East Belfast simply because they have dark skins. In short, it’s a racist pogrom. One that it’s been claimed has been inflamed by social media. That claim has more holes in it than a garden sieve. It was the fathers and grandfathers of these Loyalist scum who back in 1969, burned Catholic residents from their homes, forcing them to relocate to other areas of Belfast where they would feel safer. There were lists of people they wanted to ‘remove’. This was all done by word of mouth. Removing access to social media in the current circumstances will do nothing to stop the initiation of a racist pogrom, nothing at all.

Social media, abhorrent as it can be because it’s a mirror of a dysfunctional society, offers a degree of transparency. Without social media, I would have to rely on the mainstream ‘news’ to keep up with what’s going on. Obviously I have to view social media with a critical lens and question the veracity of what I read and see. The worrying thing is that too many people do take what they read and see on social media at face value without thinking about whether they’re being played and/or manipulated. That sadly is down to an education system that no longer appears to teach critical thinking skills to the mass of people. That’s because the powers that be don’t want people who can think for themselves and ask difficult questions that would pose a threat to their authority.

The now almost inevitable clampdowns on social media will be justified in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘de-escalation’. Using those justifications will ensure the support of those people who still have some investment in the social system as it is. That’s even though that investment is eventually going to be thrown back into their faces as the hammer starts to come down on all of us. Restrictions on, and the eventual blocking of a growing number of social media platforms is about controlling the populace. The manipulation of social media has pretty much done the job of atomising and dividing us. The question is, what happens next?

Unless there’s a miracle, the social disorder in the UK and Ireland is going to spread this summer. The social media landscape as we currently experience will likely be very different come the autumn. That’s because it will be cited as a major factor in the spread of social disorder and therefore, something that has to be clamped down upon. I’ll be very surprised if we’ll be able to access platforms such as X come the autumn. The owner of X, one Elon Musk, has been very vocal in his support of the anti-migrant protests across the UK and Ireland. That’s even when they have led to rioting and pogroms. Musk knows that the UK government are itching to ban his platform. He knows that he faces losing a significant number of users and also income. Yet he persists with his inflammatory rhetoric. Which begs quite a few questions relating to how far into the project of Agenda 2030 he is and how much of what we’re seeing is scripted theatre? There are people better qualified than me to go down those rabbit holes – when they post something of interest, I’ll be happy to share it with you:)

So at the very least, we face a massive clampdown on social media. At the worst, we face a state of emergency and possibly, some form of martial law. A situation where a fearful populace will gladly accept whatever measures are imposed by the powers that be in order to restore a degree of ‘stability’. That’s the ‘stability’ offered by what to all intents will be a digital prison. The implementation of which starts with a clampdown on social media. It then moves on to pushing through various forms of digital identity in order to know who is and isn’t ‘legitimate’. Whether it’s Starmer, Farage (Reform) or even Lowe (Restore) who eventually end up imposing digital identity is immaterial. Yes, I know Farage and Lowe have mouthed objections to digital identity but, when both have expressed a desire for ‘mass re-migration’ I can’t see how that could be implemented without it. Beware of Trojan Horses and all of that. Then as a further measure of control, there’s Central Bank Digital Currency. The ultimate form of control as it can be programmed to determine what you can and can’t spend money on. The kind of control where an ‘emergency’ situation can be used to justify implementing it. The problem is that we’re being pushed towards that ‘emergency’ situation.

As I’ve written more times than I care to remember, it’s the playing out of the problem / reaction / solution scenario. Problems that have intentionally been allowed to develop in order to generate a reaction from an increasingly pissed off population. Ever since 2024 and particularly this summer, it’s only too clear that we’re now at the reaction stage of this scenario. ‘Reactions’ that once you start looking, it becomes all too clear are being manipulated and even orchestrated. Aided and abetted by an over-supply of useful idiots. Ones who as things stand at the moment, are unaware of their role in justifying the aforementioned ‘solutions’ that will eventually be imposed upon us.

The useful idiots, what to do about them? I’m talking about the ones who respond to the rage bait on social media, spread it around a bit more and take to the streets without questioning what they’ve read. For clarification, those who are taking to the streets as a result of frustration and anger arising from lived experience, while obviously I don’t agree with their perspective or the course of action they’ve chosen to take, I’m not classing them as useful idiots. They’re the people that somehow we need to reach out to in order to persuade rather than cancel. It’s the morons online who don’t even think or look before sharing rage bait. That’s look to check the AI generated images they’re sharing which even on a cursory examination, prove to be utterly risible. As an aside, all of this falling for AI shite may well be the subject of a future post.

Somehow, we have to think of a way of reaching people who are falling for rage bait and AI shite, and persuade them that taking to the streets is not going to do them or us any favours. All it’s doing is giving the powers that be the justification for imposing their aforementioned solutions upon us, ones that will severely limit our freedoms and utterly change the way we live. There are no easy answers to this that’s for sure. It means finding a way of getting people to see the bigger picture, join the dots and not get distracted by rage bait. The inevitable clampdown on social media is going to make reaching these people even harder than it already is. Should a state of ‘emergency’ end up being declared after a summer of strife on the streets, then getting our message across is going to be even harder than that. Regardless of the difficulties involved, we have to keep trying to alert people to what’s being done to us, why it’s being done to us, and who the shadowy bastards in the background are who will benefit from us being totally screwed down. There we were hoping for a nice quiet retirement – that aspiration is definitely on the back burner now!

i did overdoes on my mental pills, im confsued dizzy and start to lose consciousnes itl be late ifyoure reading this inkow youwill

she landed in the field lightly, then came the heavy rain

I'm sorry, she said. I remembered wanting to put both of my hands on her marble-pale thin neck and snap it in half. She always had apologetic eyes, even when she wasn't apologizing.

Her name is Caroline. Caroline von Aurelia, the eldest daughter of House Aurelia, one of the most prestigious noble families in the Kingdom. I was there for business. I was twenty, had just begun making my name as an info broker — as the “White Spider.”

The grand pillars of House Aurelia extended higher than the tallest tree back on the small island I grew up on. Statues of their ancestors — some saints, apparently — perched where the pillars met the domed ceiling, half their carved features swallowed by shadow. It was an odd space. The halls were long, icy in the moonlight pouring through the giant glass windows. The archways usually ended with enormous carved wooden double doors, always a crack short of closing — and from that crack, warm orange light slanted out. With it, the silver peal of laughter, the heavy rich scent of meat and wine. Sometimes the doors were left open just enough for a quick glance as we passed — women, velvet-draped, lace-edged, lounging like Persian cats, fat or slim. I immediately thought of the house cat my family used to own. It had spent its last years overweight, pooling around the fireplace or the only fur rug in the house, green eyes in a permanent lazy haze.

But I can't recall its name. I stopped being able to remember a lot of things from that small home island since I left at seventeen.

Akira shot me a warning look, and I realized I'd been staring. But the servants didn't seem to care, nor did the noble ladies inside the lavish rooms. The job had come through Akira’s contact. This had been the first big job I'd taken — finally, no more chasing bad debts from small-name pirates or shady black market merchants. We needed money for a better ship to enter the Grand Line.

Caroline didn't strike me as particularly pretty, nor one of those stereotypes of a high-house “princess.” At first glance, she wasn't very tall, nor plump in the way of someone raised on buttermilk and silk. But the more you looked at her, the more small details filed themselves into your brain. The long thin neck. The delicate lines of her shoulders. And a faint crease — not quite a dimple — that attempts to form at her right cheek when she smiled.

The duke — more commissioner than host — kept us waiting outside his study for nearly three quarters of an hour. When we finally came inside, his eyes lingered on my face and silver hair for a heartbeat — a treatment I always got because of my hair color — and then dropped to the contracts on his desk. When he spoke, he spoke to Akira. Obviously assumed I was “the woman by the man.”

I felt my pulse spike, a small tremor in my fingers as I pulled out one of the spare chairs and seated myself in front of his big expensive oak desk.

“Now that’s more comfortable. Where were we, Mr. Aurelia.”

Akira stood there. Even without looking, I could sense the faint curve at the corner of his mouth. With a slight nod of his head, he stepped back to stand guard by the door.

When the meeting was done, the duke invited us to stay for a few more days — his counselor was out of town, and he wanted me to go over the finer details of certain information with him. When Akira and I left the study, we found Caroline already waiting for us outside.

“Allow me to show you around.” She offered, taking over the lantern from the servant, whose surprised “M'y lady?” was cut off by a light wave of her hand. “It's a bit of a long walk — wouldn't want Father's guests getting lost.” She smiled and led the way, light and fast.

Walking once again down the long cold archway, I realized her eyes were actually more emerald green up close, instead of the blue they'd seemed at first glance.

Turns out the duke had an entire guest wing. Caroline left us at the giant metal door of the dining hall. “Make yourselves at home.” She says, “Don’t hesitate to call for me if anything——anything at all.” Her green eyes lingered on mine for a second longer, before she turned around and left.

“Didn’t realize there were oddballs in places like this,” I mumbled, gulping down beef stew beside Akira on the long bench of the dining hall.

“Not as uncommon as you’d think,” he answered, didn’t look up from his food. “But…I admit, most of them are so out of touch they couldn’t be bothered with civilians at all. Unless they have to be.”

“Then why do you think she waited for us and asked all those questions, Aki?”

“Boredom. Most likely.”

“Also — a female info broker with silver hair.” Akira smirked. “I'd want to see for myself too.”

“HEY!” I punched him in the side, and the thin man almost choked on his rice.

[hey folks, been getting kinda tired of unable to find where people could post their creative pieces, thoughts, journals and still get some read. it's a bit ridiculous all these 'text' platforms seemed to be focusing more on performance instead of genuine sharing. I've stumbled upon a few pieces here that made me heart lit up reading it. truly reminds of early internet]

Based exclusively on downloads, it looks like THE SOLAR GRID has readers in Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, in addition of course to the United States.

The story, I think, is just asking to travel into other languages.

The latest newsletter went out a couple days ago. RESTRICTED FREQUENCY #234: Shortform.

#journal #RF #TSG

Between two digital hegemonies, middle powers no longer have to choose vassalage. The White Paper V2.0 of the Aether Initiative offers something else: a mutual for technological sovereignty — pragmatic, fundable, governable.

-—

We long lived under the illusion of a neutral cyberspace, a common good of fluid globalization. The systemic outages of 2025 and the remotely activated “kill switches” tore away this veil: the digital world has become a battlefield where every processor is either a lever of power or a leash.

It is in this context that the White Paper V2.0 of the Aether Initiative appears. More than a technical document, it is a founding act: the organized response of middle powers that refuse to choose between two empires and prefer to build their own vertical.

Why now?

The geopolitics of 2026 is no longer read on maps, but on the mapping of bottlenecks: EUV lithography, sub-3 nm foundries, frontier AI models. Each link is controlled by the Sino-American duopoly — and each link is a potential weapon.

Champions like ASML or TSMC hold the keys to the future, but their locks are forged elsewhere. Subject to extraterritorial laws and export controls, they are no longer masters of their customers or their destiny. For a middle power, dependence is no longer a theoretical risk: it is a daily erosion of sovereignty.

Three shifts make 2026 decisive:

1. The regulatory awakening. The CADA framework (Cloud and AI Development Act) finally creates a captive market for sovereignty in Europe, excluding from sensitive markets actors subject to hostile foreign laws.

2. The reality shock. The incidents of 2025 proved that technological dependence can paralyze a state in a second.

3. The critical mass. Collectively, middle powers already hold all the pieces of the puzzle. All that was missing was the binder.

The sovereignty mutual: the Visa model applied to tech

Aether's genius lies in a paradigm shift: no longer recruiting through idealism, but offering insurance against erasure.

The inspiration comes from Visa before 2008: a cooperative where competing banks collectively owned the infrastructure that none could build alone. Aether transposes this logic: exchange a fraction of local revenue for universal and protected access to critical resources.

The architecture is based on three tiers:

- The Aether Foundation (Geneva) — the guardian. It defines the “Aether Grade” standards, certifies, arbitrates, and guarantees the project's neutrality.

- The Aether Operating Co. — the commercial arm. Owned by the members, it sells cloud, AI, and computing power. This is what funds autonomy.

- The Aether Commons — the legitimacy mechanism. 15% of profits are redistributed to education and a “capacity dividend,” so that the citizen is a shareholder and not just a consumer.

The wedge strategy: hit one point, open the way

Where Gaia-X wanted to define everything before producing anything, Aether adopts the wedge method: one entry point, then expansion.

Phase 1 — Federated cloud and sovereign AI. AetherCloud does not build datacenters from scratch: it certifies and interconnects existing champions (OVHcloud, Scaleway, etc.) under a single interface. For the developer, the experience is equal to that of American hyperscalers — with total extraterritorial immunity. Added to this is a sovereign inference layer built on open models like Mistral, for administrations and regulated sectors that can no longer entrust their data to overseas algorithms.

Phases 2 and 3 — From software to silicon, then to matter. Once revenues are secured, Aether moves into hardware. Not by competing with TSMC in the nanometer race, but by securing mature nodes (28–65 nm) that power 80% of the real industry: automotive, IoT, infrastructure. Then the project goes back up to the refining of rare earths — the true lock of the energy transition.

The capacity dividend: a new social contract

Rather than micro-monetary payments diluted by inflation, Aether redistributes capacity: sovereign storage, computing credits, certifying training.

Education is treated as CAPEX, not philanthropy. Training a million developers in India, Brazil, or Europe is building the human infrastructure that will make Aether's supply chain indestructible in ten years.

Anti-capture governance

To avoid becoming an “institutional zombie,” Aether has engraved three locks in its statutes:

1. Sovereignty lock — only actors legally and capitalistically controlled from a member country can vote. GAFAM can be customers, never architects.

2. Anti-hegemony lock — no state can exceed 8% of voting rights. End of any bilateral directorate.

3. Neutrality lock — no service cutoff for political reasons without a three-quarters majority in both chambers.

Added to this is a democratic innovation: a Citizens' Chamber drawn by lot, with a veto on ethical issues (data sales, surveillance partnerships). Aether does not just want to be efficient; it wants to be legitimate.

Addressing doubts

Thirty billion dollars against the hundreds of billions of hyperscalers? The objection misses the point. Aether does not win by volume, it wins by relevance: it is the only option for those who refuse to disappear, the only one that guarantees that a judge, a doctor, or an engineer will not see their tools shut down by a decision made 10,000 kilometers away.

And the V2.0 has cleaned up: the sale of data, even anonymized, has been removed; the gadget blockchain has given way to citizen audits and rigorous certifications. Aether has become a cold economic machine in its execution, burning in its vision.

Conclusion: the choice of verticality

Will we remain passive customers of empires that see us as data deposits? Or will we become the builders of an infrastructure that resembles us and protects us?

The call of June 2026 is clear. To governments, it asks for political courage. To industrialists, a long-term vision. To citizens, conscious adherence. Aether is not a third empire awakening — it is a third way opening, where technology becomes again what it should never have stopped being: a tool in the service of humanity.

Check out the project:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DozT6ekrn/

#AetherAlliance #TechSovereignty #DigitalRenaissance #DigitalSovereignty #SovereignCloud