The Middle Distance - by Chor Pharn

"Metabolism before meaning.

I had become allergic to the way modern commentary treats societies as primarily rhetorical projects: systems of belief, persuasion, narrative, elections, identities. Those matter. But they float. What doesn’t float is energy, logistics, food, housing, grids, and the ability of an administrative system to keep ordinary life running under pressure.

That is the origin of what I called metabolic sovereignty. Not sovereignty as command. Sovereignty as the ability to keep a society physically coherent in a world where supply chains snap, demographics invert, and time horizons shrink. A polity that cannot keep the lights on cannot keep its promises.

This is also where the “stack” entered my vocabulary—not as tech jargon, but as a geopolitical fact. A society is increasingly governed by the stacks it depends on: payments rails, cloud platforms, logistics networks, measurement regimes, standards bodies, insurance and reinsurance, energy grids. These are not neutral. They are the quiet ways power expresses itself when legitimacy is thin."

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Broken Skulls and the State! - by Alice Evans

"Smashed skulls remind us that organised violence was pervasive for most of human history. In such ecologies, men gained power by assembling mobs and militias, forging solidarity and glorifying domination. Bigger armies and sharper military innovations enabled ever greater extraction - of land, labour and tribute. Commanding force got you status.

When state enforcement was weak, private groups wrestled for advantage, battering rivals with stone axes, obsidian-edged macuahuitls, talwars and kris daggers.

As rulers monopolised force and courts gained authority, the returns to aggression began to fall. Only under these conditions could men (and much later women) pursue status in other domains - administration, commerce, innovation, and literature. (Or at least until AGI turfed us all out).

Anyone who tells you that there was some primordial feminist utopia where we all lived in harmony may be better suited to writing fiction."

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Planetary Commons: Fostering global cooperation to safeguard critical Earth system functions — Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

"Tipping elements of the Earth system should be considered global commons, researchers argue in a new paper published in the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Global commons cannot - as they currently do- only include the parts of the planet outside of national borders, like the high seas or Antarctica. They must also include all the environmental systems that regulate the functioning and state of the planet, namely all systems on Earth we all depend on, irrespective on where in the world we live."

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Arron Reza Merat & Anon, Red Lines — Sidecar

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The MAGA-friendly European think tanks Trump wants to fund – POLITICO

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E239 - Iran and the End of Res… - American Prestige - Apple Podcasts

"Danny and Derek are back with a two-part episode on the war with Iran. First, they speak with ⁠Trita Parsi⁠ of the Quincy Institute about the Trump administration’s decision to go to war, the belief that assassinating Ayatollah Khamenei would cause the regime to implode, the structure and failure of pre-war negotiations, the influence of Israeli officials and hawks, the potential for sending in ground troops, and the impact on Iranian society. They then speak with ⁠Akbar Shahid Ahmed⁠, Senior Diplomatic Correspondent at HuffPost, about the erosion of rules of engagement, the alignment of U.S. and Israeli military strategy, congressional inaction, compliant allies, and whether any realistic off-ramps remain"

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Retreat, Not Betrayal: The Bolivarian Revolution's Survival Strategy After the US Kidnapping of Maduro

"In the two months since this act of war, a torrent of speculation has emerged from so-called experts and pundits across the political spectrum. This has followed three main lines:

One. The operation’s success indicated treason at the highest levels of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Two. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez and the remaining leadership have abandoned the Bolivarian project and socialist transformation, surrendering the country, its economy and its resources to US imperialism.

Three. In foreign relations, the Venezuelan leadership has abandoned its historic anti-imperialism.

Taken together, these claims amount to a proclamation that regime change has succeeded in Venezuela.

They are each false, reflecting an amateurish and superficial approach to politics, reactive ‘hot takes’ rather than real analysis or investigation, which provides a left-wing echo of Trump’s own presentation. To understand Caracas’s current trajectory requires a sober appraisal of what took place on 3 January, a close look at the facts of Venezuela’s financial and commercial situation, and an honest assessment of the international correlation of forces in which Venezuela operates. It requires understanding what has changed in this new situation. To sort through the complicated reality of the present, certain examples in the history of socialist states can serve as a guide.

A close look at the facts will prove that what we are witnessing is not surrender but a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming force for which there are clear analogies in revolutionary history."

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Neutraliser le monde associatif - Enquête sur une injonction à la dépolitisation - Observatoire Libertés Associatives

"La nouvelle enquête de l’Observatoire des libertés associatives sort ce 12 férvier 2026. Ce rapport interroge l’émergence d’un impératif de neutralité associatif qui, bien qu’extra-légal, vient entraver le rôle démocratique des associations."

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What is NuNet? | NuNet Documentation

"At its core, NuNet brings together:

Compute Providers – individuals or organisations that offer their hardware (such as servers, GPUs, or edge devices) to the network.
Compute Consumers – users, developers, or systems that need computing resources to run applications, services, or AI workloads. Workloads are started from an Orchestrator, the device that defines and launches deployments.
A Protocol for Distributed Compute – a protocol that allows deployments to be created and managed on heterogeneous hardware distributed across geographic locations, organisations and security perimeters. This is achieved through open protocols, decentralized identity systems, and resource allocation algorithms designed for transparency and scalability.
Over time, NuNet is being designed to support direct interaction between AI agents and general algorithms using the same underlying infrastructure, creating a unified substrate for autonomous machine-to-machine and machine-to-algorithm collaboration.

The main building blocks of the NuNet platform are:

NuNet Appliance – a standardised environment with a user friendly web interface to join and interact within the NuNet network.
Device Management System (DMS) – core software enabling machines to securely interact within the network to provide or utilise compute resources.
Together, these components form the backbone of the NuNet platform, making decentralized compute practical and accessible."

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Our Underappreciated International Reserve System | NBER

"Our Underappreciated International Reserve System
Serkan Arslanalp, Barry Eichengreen & Chima Simpson-Bell
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WORKING PAPER 34478
DOI 10.3386/w34478
ISSUE DATE November 2025
We document some underappreciated aspects of the recent evolution of the international reserve system. These include the growing share of gold in global central bank reserves, the continuing emergence of nontraditional reserve currencies, and the stalling share of renminbi in reserves. These trends are consistent with our findings in our earlier papers. In addition we look to the future, pondering the potential implications of dollar-linked stablecoins, the expansion of the BRICS grouping of countries and their de- dollarization plans, the development of blockchain-based platforms such as Project mBridge for the direct exchange of central bank digital currencies, and questions about the dollar’s safe-haven status."

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