[politics] Dominic Cummings: oracle of the new British berserk… Update on what Dominic Cummings is up to.

‘He recited his current favourite examples of state failure – fugitive terrorists using human rights law to sue the Ministry of Defence, deep-state officials murmuring of riots in the provinces, politicians who hide from responsibility behind the scripts of their civil service administrators. He connected this with his current favourite historical parallel: the crisis of capitalism, technology and ideology of the 1840s, which he compares to the revolutions in AI and “biological engineering” in Silicon Valley about to “smash into all our lives”.

Cassandra in tracksuit bottoms, then. And given the scale of this upheaval, the corresponding Cummings programme is remarkably precise, but limited. His great theme is, to put it facetiously, paperwork management. Government should be narrower, sharper, modelled after the administrations of Pitt the Younger (he speaks as if there is no difference between late-18th-century carronade procurement and modern bureaucracy).’

[comics] Dark They Were And Golden Eyed Adverts … DTWAGE was a sci-fi and comic book retailer based in London in the 1970s. Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Moore and many other comics artists created adverts for them.

[tv] Adam Curtis's Shifty Playlist … Feeling Listless has put together a playlist for Adam Curtis’ new documentary series.

[hardware] More Undervalued Hardware Companions … An update to a great list of list of hardware gizmos you never realised you needed. ‘Small Powerful USB-C Chargers – The times when you need a large PSU brick and a thick unmanageable cable to charge your 65W laptop are long gone…’

[comics] Jack Kirby Draws Jack Ruby … Today I discovered that Jack Kirby did a annotated 3-page comic about Jack Ruby for Esquire Magazine in 1967. ‘Ruby looks like a dissipated, angry version of Kirby’s later creation, Goody Rickels. He’s a small man who thinks he’s big, and other than brooding over the president’s assassination and killing Lee Harvey Oswald, he spends most of the three pages doing things such as ordering cold cuts, placing advertising for his club, going for a swim, demonstrating something called a “Twistaboard,” and having a Coke.’

[politics] The race to succeed Sadiq Khan … It’s looking likely that Sadiq Khan will stand down as London major before the next election in 2028. ‘But friends of Khan tell me that he has privately indicated he does not plan to stand for a fourth term. Some attribute this to the strain of being the most heavily guarded person in the country after the King and the Prime Minister. “Hand on heart, had I known when I first began this journey what it involved for my family, I can’t unequivocally say I would have done this,” Khan reflected last year.’

[curtis] Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war. .. Curtis setups the UK history described in his new documentary Shifty. ‘It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.’

[oceangate] So what was Stockton's motivation for his decision? … A thoughtful Reddit posts on the motivations and decisions that led to the Titan submersible implosion. ‘I guess the only thing that makes sense to me is the comment by another redditor that “it HAD to work.” He bet everything on it. Since switching to carbon fibre after the Fosset sub was built (started OG in 2009, and this was sometime around 2011/2012 I believe) – his entire business model revolved around being able to monetize submersibles.’

[tv] 10 Most Shocking Reveals From Netflix's OceanGate Titan Submersible Documentary … Fascinating documentary from Netflix that shows some of Stockton Rush’s movtivations. ‘Although they worked on the Titan, many of the engineers had little to no confidence in the vessel. This is best displayed by the testimony of Tony Nissen, the Director of Engineering, during the Coast Guard investigation. He asserts that Stockton Rush asked him to go into the Titan for a test dive, but he refused to go inside the vessel for a dive. Theoretically, if anyone should have had confidence in a submersible’s efficacy, it would be the head of engineering.’

[history] The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris … Wonderful story about the radioactive traces Marie Curie left behind in Paris where she worked. ‘”The lab was already decontaminated in the 1980s,” says Huynh. At the time, the practice in the museum was to “try and scrub off the contamination with abrasive sponges, and if radioactivity was then still detected, it meant it had sunk into the material, and they’d throw away the whole thing and replace it” with a copy, he says. The lab bench, for example, was replaced with a replica, Huynh explains. Today, weakly radioactive traces such as the ones on the chair and doorknob are allowed to stay in place, he says, and are considered as heritage.’

[comics] Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales … Garth Ennis mentions an unseen anthology series with Alan Moore during a 2024 interview. ‘There’s a series called Yuggoth, and it’s based on the work that Alan did – Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft. And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline. Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.’

[comics] Ha Ha. Maybe a Comic Book Would Make Me Happy … from Matt Fraction’s Tumblr Archive.

[tech] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet … Doctorow discusses enshitification, twiddling and more… ‘A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that “”bill themselves out as ‘Uber for nursing'””. The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to “”play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced””. In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. “”Because, the more desperate you are, the less you’ll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.”” That is horrific on many levels, he said, but “”it is emblematic of ‘enshittification'””, which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.’ [The Keynote can be found on Youtube]

[life] What The Hell Are People Doing? … A visualisation of what the entirety of humanity are up to right now. ‘Sleeping: 50.79%’