LAST UPDATE June 7, 2026
Culling the internet
"Fashion takes the pulse of things before anyone else"
Nostalgia and politics in the wardrobe. Story at Tanea [Greek]
Nostalgia is a political purpose. It is an anesthetic. It is easier to subjugate a people by educating them to have a sweet obsession with the past and fear the future..."
The "it is easier" statement corresponds to a long running idea, to put it mildly, of some two millennia, made by observers of human activity. As a literary archetype it shows up over and over, a formula worked out like this:
- Ancient Greece: easier to rule by customs than by laws
- Roman era: easier to rule by using bread and circuses
- Renaissance: easier to rule by fear
- Enlightenment: easier to rule by beliefs
- Industrial: easier to rule by bureaucracy
- 20th century: easier to rule by propaganda
- Television age: easier to rule by entertainment
- Information age: easier to rule by distraction
- Internet age: easier to rule by algorithms / engagement
These statements appear to be frustrated conclusions by (perhaps) cynical observers. The implication is that "it is easier..." is contrasting with something else, that is "It is harder to rule by..." and any number of words can be inserted there: reason, engagement, gifts, platitudes, cookies.
In the case of the statement about nostalgia, it is a quote from the UK publication The Gentlewoman Magazine discussing "...at the renovated Frick Collection museum in New York, the historic halls with works of European painting welcomed models, celebrities and modern businessmen in the role of patrons of the arts and culture."
The "political purpose" would be, in this calibration of ideas, that fashion and art, are the customs of nostalgia, whether the participants and the writer recognize it or not, certainly not what is intended since the context is that fashion is the vanguard of the future.
New census data shows how populations are shifting by metro area, county – WMUR
Populations are growing at a faster rate in the southeastern United States, according to new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday...."
We bake out own bread
"Mathematicians warned against rising tech industry influence in a declaration describing the many challenges that AI poses to mathematics research. The timing of the declaration comes two weeks after OpenAI publicized one of its AI models as having disproved an 80-year-old mathematical conjecture in geometry."
June 2, 2026: Well, we're back: apparently due to the WHM-Cpanel vulnerability that happened recently, this site was redirected at root level (but not DNS) to a gambling site. To whit:
CVE-2026-41940 is a critical pre-authentication remote code execution and authentication bypass vulnerability (CVSS score: 9.8) that affects cPanel & WHM (Web Host Manager) and WP Squared (WP2). It allows unauthenticated remote attackers to inject arbitrary session data into the server and gain root-level administrative access without any valid credentials.
May 26, 2026
Cartoon laughs Comic Atomic