we are the 99% of the 37

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The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a ballroom.

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[AFP] Capture of Mexico crime boss prompts blockades near U.S. border ❝The leader of a notorious Mexican criminal gang was captured in the northern city of Reynosa, unleashing highway blockades and shootouts near the U.S. border, authorities said Monday. The suspect, identified as Alexander N, is accused of being a “priority target” and member of a criminal gang acting in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, the spokesperson for local security forces said on X. Mexican news outlets reported the individual heads a faction of the Gulf Cartel known as the Metros, part of a criminal coalition that has been weakened in recent years following the capture of multiple leaders. The arrest prompted a highly visible reaction by presumed criminals, who obstructed passage in and out of Reynosa with eight highway blockades. Since dawn, social media users have posted warnings to stay at home to avoid roadblocks and shootouts. Authorities reestablished order without reports of injuries, according to the security spokesperson. Reynosa lies just across the border from McAllen, Texas and is home to the Gulf Cartel, historically one of the most powerful crime syndicates in Mexico. The administration of US President Donald Trump has pressured his Mexican counterpart Claudia Sheinbaum to crack down on organized crime gangs in order to stop the northbound flow of the drug fentanyl. Sheinbaum has repeatedly rejected US offers of drone strikes or ground troops for fighting Mexican cartels.❞ https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/capture-of-mexico-crime-boss-prompts-blockades-near-us-border/

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The U.S. State Department has issued a travel warning for Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico — just across the border from us in deep South Texas.

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👌 good read on some "glitches in the (human) machine that keep getting in the way of progress." ❝These “glitches” aren’t things that can be commented away in code, or worked out with algorithms. They run much deeper and much more subtly through the fabric of the way we work, the way we learn, and the way we connect. ... It’s one thing to have an awkward dinner with a friend. But it’s another thing entirely when our schools, our businesses, and our neighborhoods are all running on different versions of the truth. When we lose the ability to reality-sync, we don’t just lose friends, we lose the ability to collectively build anything together.❞

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run for the shadows in these golden years https://youtu.be/MsfrmNeiuQI?t=7&si=yjW7QqngrG-LBDhE

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Shitting as a Service 😂 https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/weve-upgraded-your-toilet-to-a-subscription-based-model

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The 1965 Russ Meyer film that inspired a Seattle grunge band's name and a Norah Jones album cover.

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Imagine if humans broadly were born with one of two or more natural hearing ranges (sound frequency) and one of two or more natural vision spectra (light wavelength). Perceptions of reality would be fundamentally fractured, resulting in hyper-tribalism. Social sorting grounded in patterns of perception. Subspeciation. When do the "normal" variations of human anatomy and physiology underwriting the perception differences come to be viewed as "abnormal"? What does that evolving social order look like in day-to-day practice? What happens with the advent of language?

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religion seems to have operated as relatively effective coordination technology for millennia and it didn't even have tokens instead, it had stories

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Excellent essay by Noah Hawley, one of my favorite storytellers, sharing what he learned about billionaires at a private retreat Jeff Bezos hosted in 2018 in Santa Barbara, Calif. Hawley (creator of "Legion," "Fargo," and "Alien: Earth") attended the family-friendly event — dubbed Campfire — with his wife and their two children. Hawley's wife fractured her wrist the morning of the retreat's last day, when she slipped on wet grass while kicking a ball with their 6-year-old son. At lunch, after she was treated at a local hospital emergency department, Hawley finally met Bezos, who asked him how his Campfire experience was. ❝And because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection. But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.❞ Elsewhere in the essay, Hawley reflects on the effect massive wealth has on the psyche: ❝The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything. This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. ... Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.❞ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyS-dDYKgrDyp9kauNtFD7UI

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Wife of He-Man co-creator starts GoFundMe for his care as Amazon MGM Studios prepares to release movie based on the IP with a reported budget of $170–200 million https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/09/wife-of-he-man-co-creator-starts-gofundme-for-his-care/ https://variety.com/2023/film/news/masters-of-the-universe-movie-amazon-mgm-1235789957/

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institutions extract as much from students as quickly and cheaply as possible students extract as much from institutions as quickly and cheaply as possible costs are shifted onto the employers that hire the students — and, more broadly, onto the general public who are served by people with more credentials than competence hiring costs increase as employers have to spend more money doing their own independent competency assessments employers, ironically, mitigate their increased hiring costs for verifying competency by using AI to screen and assess applicants AI as both the tool that hollowed out the credential and the tool employers reach for to replace it (of course, one could argue that the value of a college degree was already pretty hollow even before any of us ever used chatgpt)

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The article doesn't expressly call it out but this strikes me as a likely product of: perverse incentives * bilateral value extraction * mass-market LLMs Amazing to me that the article makes no mention of AI. [WaPo] Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators "Some online colleges allow students to take unlimited courses on their own time, leading to quick degrees and worries about devaluing credentials." https://archive.is/k8Ruj

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💀

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