(PDF) Shared Battlegrounds: War at the Crossroads of Environmental History and the History of Science

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The geography of US inflation. Crushing Cuba. A third industrial divide. Cornel West on Hegel.

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The geography of US inflation. Crushing Cuba. A third industrial divide. Cornel West on Hegel.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
ADAM TOOZE
FEB 19, 2026
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Tan Lip Seng Iron and Steel 1970, reprinted in 2017

Will Texas slide into deflation?




Bloomberg h/t Anna Wong

The AI productivity take-off is finally visible

Erik Brynjolfsson The writer is director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab and co-founder of Workhelix

Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade."

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EU's DSA Enforcer Defends Team as US Pressure Grows

"EU Defends Censorship Law While Commission Staff Shift to Auto-Deleting Signal Messages
Brussels is pursuing Chat Control to surveil private communications while its own enforcers retreat deeper into encrypted, self-destructing ones."

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Dm_InnovatingWelfare.pdf - Google Drive

"Innovating
Welfare in
an age of
degenerative

volatility."

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(4) French Left Targeted by Smear Campaign - by Ana Vračar

"The confrontation took place on 12 February in Lyon between far-right activists “protecting” a protest action organized by the xenophobic women’s group Némésis and individuals believed to be antifascist activists. During the clash, Quentin Deranque, who was allegedly an activist in the neo-Nazi group Allobroges Bourgoin, suffered severe head injuries and died a few days later. The news was quickly distorted by the right—from politicians like Marion Maréchal to groups like Némésis—to promote retaliation against progressives.

In addition to LFI, student unions, the group Jeune Garde, and similar networks were accused by far-right figures of being responsible for Deranque’s death, according to Mediapart. Soon after the incident, right-wing politicians and activists launched a malign campaign of public accusations, even circulating the names and personal information of individuals they claimed were involved."

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Munich in the Bunker - by Nel Bonilla

" The Munich Security Conference 2026 celebrated the deepening of Europe’s structural dependence on the USA, which is now being openly stated as a program. The supposed drifting apart is, in reality, a functional division of labor within a shared transatlantic bunker. It is, in other words, a security architecture that gives Europe more mass, but no sovereignty; more responsibility, but no autonomy. We are therefore experiencing an even deeper, almost irreversible fusion into a transatlantic war architecture, in which Europe provides the muscles (troops, logistics, arms spending), while the brain (command, strategy, nuclear escalation control) remains firmly in Washington.

To substantiate this thesis, we must peel away several layers: the staging in Munich, the material reality of US command structures (including the new NATO hierarchies), and the bureaucratic preparation of this condition."

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(4) The “Whiteness” Double Standard - Christopher F. Rufo

"The Carl affair is a reminder that none of us should be shamed into silence about our history. The genius of the early Americans is that they gave us a nation that, over time, yielded a shared culture capable of recognizing the contributions of various groups while building a government based on equality under the law. At our best, we can honestly discuss the realities and differences among cultural groups while insisting that, as a matter of policy, we treat all individuals as individuals.

It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that our founding culture should be admired for its virtues, remonstrated for its vices, and celebrated alongside the contributions from all of those who came afterward."

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Dear Reader, From the Threshold - by Benjamin Life

"There’s a covenant between a writer and a reader that most of the internet has forgotten. When you offer your attention to someone’s words, you’re extending a form of trust. You’re saying: I believe this might be worth the hours of my one finite life I’m spending on it. That’s sacred.

I’ve made a commitment to myself, and now, to you, that everything published here might be worthy of being considered as part of the emerging canon of the bioregional, regenerative, and open civic innovation movements. Not because I think I’ve arrived at some final truth, but because I refuse to add to the noise. There is enough noise.

What you’ll find here is my honest attempt to contribute something worthy of the moment we’re living through. Something that earns its place alongside the writers and thinkers who are earnestly trying to make sense of a world coming apart at the seams while something else, something we can barely see, is struggling to be born."

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Jacob Savage on the Costs of the Great Awokening

"I teach a lot of younger students, a very diverse group, and I am finding in the classroom that a term we used to use has fallen out of favor. Part of that is because it started to sound like an angry uncle shouting at the Thanksgiving table. But part of it is that I think the underlying phenomenon has actually gone away. That term is social justice warrior. There was a moment when a cohort of young people thought of themselves as warriors in the cause of social justice. This was their cause. They saw themselves as revolutionaries. They wanted to impose this on society.

When you were teaching, you always felt that there were at least a couple of students, though many were lovely, who were there as social justice warriors. They were going to say something that broke the ethos of the class, or try to make life difficult for you. I am struck by the extent to which that has evaporated over the last few years. For many students now, these ideas feel like what their elementary school teachers taught them, what their middle school teachers taught them, and what their high school teachers taught them. The"

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Empires of the Ego - by Richard David Hames

" Our current world‑system remains haunted by the Westphalian ghost – a 17th‑century model of sovereign silos attempting to govern 21st‑century metabolic flows. This mismatch generates a paralysis of intent. The nation‑state, as an industrial‑age construct, excels at territorial defence and economic extraction but falters when confronted by the borderless contagions of crises born out of complexity. Is the sovereign state itself becoming an obstacle to human survival? To approach that question, we need to articulate what now constitutes an escalating and highly complex global problematique.

At its core we’re witnessing the collision of two incompatible scales: the sluggish, bureaucratic friction of the nation‑state and the lightning‑fast, interconnected collapse of our biosphere and social cohesion."

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