Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Obviously the US New World Order is crumbling, or rather being
unilaterally abandoned by the US, but the Russians, who were the
architects of this approach, are even worse off in 2026.

The genius of modern ethnonational politics is  Viktor Orban, who
commonly does and says things that Putin or Trump will imitate years
later.   Things were going so well for Putin in so many ways. "Not
the vile global world but Our Russian World," very Orban-stye ethnic
purity, lots of fierce cult-religion stuff, fossil-fuel cash-flows
in heavy demand, a loyal oligarchy of revolving-door billionaires in
his government.  Moscow physically rebuilt as Dubai, a truly
impressive shiny new capital...
  

    

That was before the war he started, though, and the war was an
unforced error.   Putin would *imagine* that the USA and the NATO
Europeans were his enemy, but they've always been willing to mollify
him.   I think it's actually the Ukrainians, the Poles and the
Baltics who are his mortal enemies, with the Chinese busily selling
him the rope to hang himself.

Also, the Russian Federation was never isolationist.  Instead, it
was busily building a world counter-order of Syria, Iran, Venezuela,
Cuba, North Korea et al, and Russia's allies are just in awful shape
this year.  These aren't NATO-friendly "color revolutions" like
Euromaidan in Ukraine.  These are brutal uprisings, economic and
political collapses and ferocious military attacks.   

Iran was the powerhouse of the "Axis of Resistance" and Iran is 
mangled this year.  They can't bring water to the capital. 
Inflation is soaring, and they're at the mercy of a New World
Disorder Israel that has granted itself rogue-state carte blanche to
blast anything that moves.  Everyone in Iran's region, Iraqis,
Saudis, Afghans, Kurds, whomever, is watching them bleed and licking
their fingers.
  

    

Belgrade is full of Russians (and Ukrainians).  I can imagine a
turnaround for the Ukrainians, if the war stopped and the Europeans
were generous.   I don't see how the Russians can improve their
situation.  They're not  
"losing the war" directly,  but their infrastructure's getting
pounded to pieces.  The Russians don't mind their war casualties any
more than the USA minds school shootings, but a techno-DJ and a
romance novelist blew up their fleet of nuclear bombers.  Really and
truly, that happened.  "Artem and Ekaterima Timofeev."  I keep
waiting for the hipster Timofeev duo to show up for a second act. 
If you're name-checking, Artem, Katerina, send playlists.  Feel free
to use my WELL mail.

"Andrey Averyanov" was the spook mastermind of Putin's offshore
nerve-poisonings.  Averyanov seems to have been assassinated last
month on the deck of a "shadow fleet" oil tanker by killer drones
launched from a Ukrainian baby drone-submarine in the Mediterranean.
I get it that Russians always operate by their own standards of
probability.  But nothing works out for them lately.  They ought to
be trampling the world if the US is decaying (which it obviously
is).  Instead, the world is trampling them.  
  

    

The Russian ethnics in the separatist provinces -- Luhansk, Donetsk
-- they have to rank with some of the wretchedest people in the
world in 2026.  Just, cruel,  endless bombings and shellings for
them.  For ten years and counting, drafts, corruption, warlords, and
not a friendly face anywhere.  Not in Russia, not in Ukraine. No
sympathy, not a word of pity anywhere .  Even the former-Yugoslavs,
who had a very similar hiustorical experience, never send them any
hot meals or bandaids.  

How bad can it get with no functional world-order, well, that bad: 
as bad as Mariupol, as bad as Gaza.  Czar Putin was supposed to be
the gilded patriarch of those places, or else their noble protector.
Putin wasn't all that bad as Russian leaders go historically, but I
think he badly mis-read the state of the world.  An "Iraq Weapons of
Mass Destruction" level of self-induced delusion.   Sometimes you
can stumble over the truth and dust yourself off later, and there
are other times when the truth blows you to bits.
  

    
Meanwhile in drone evolution:

<https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/voltair>

> Voltair builds drones that 'perch' like birds to recharge on
power lines. For this first time, this allows for drones with
infinite range. Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy
UAVs autonomously at scale. After building drones for the Air Force
and DARPA, Ronan realized this was both practical and technically
feasible.

Their first customers are power companies that want to inspect their
power lines with drones. I guess they decided they'd rather work on
civilian applications, but there are obvious military implications. 
Maybe Ukraine won't need a truck to carry their drones next time, if
they can just follow the power lines?
  

    
I'm thinking that Tony the AI ghost mechanic might be a better
metaphor than an AI driver. There can be a lot of back and forth
getting a program to work. "I fixed it! Try it now." "It didn't
work. Here's the error." "I see the problem! Try it again."

My AI mechanic is actually named Shelley. I woke up early with an
idea this morning and decided I had to try it out. It sort of
worked, but this turned into a full-on debugging session with
Shelley for a tricky problem getting copying to the clipboard to
work on a tablet. Got it working in the end.

AI "hallucinations" don't seem bizarre in this context. It's just
Tony trying another idea that didn't work.
  

    
In the Bashkiria Region, east of Moscow, locals have revived the
tradition of Samaurly Ritaiym (samovar dances) where crowds gather
to drink tea (not alcohol), play music, and dance.
<https://globalvoices.org/2025/11/28/in-russias-bashkiria-region-a-revived-trad
ition-of-samovar-dance-parties-for-young-people/>

Regardless how things are going anywhere in the world, people just
don't stop dancing.
  

    
I'm hearing plenty lately about "Claude Code" from professionals
whose judgement I respect.  They're uttering some mindblown stuff
like "we may be solving all of software" and "I have godlike powers
now."

This month, vibe-coding has a Kesey acid-test vibe to it.  I
wouldn't believe that the acid is "godlike." I'm ready to believe
that it's like acid.   "Log on, Lean In, Slop Out".
  

    
Is this the DJ we're looking for?
https://soundcloud.com/timofeyev

He might also have a bandcamp
https://artyomtimopheev.bandcamp.com/track/very-cool

here's a photo of them:
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/ukrainian-born-artyom-ti
mofeev-37-105786613.jpg

I tried finding his wife Katya's e-novel "I Became Bad While You
Loved Me" but it is harder to locate.

I was just going to read it for the articles. 
  

    
She wrote under the pen name "Katerina Gato" and called herself a
witch on social media. 

More like a Night Witch:
https://wrightmuseum.org/the-soviet-night-witches/
  

    
Google released a new version of Gemini recently and that's
generally considered the leading model.

There's a guy at our church actually who's a kind of Zelig of the
computer industry.  You bring up a famous name; he claims he's met
or known that person; and gives an interesting story or two.  It's
hard for me to imagine that it's all true but even if 70% of it were
true that would be remarkable.  Last Sunday one name I didn't know
that he mentioned at Google is Peter Danenberg - and yes it seems
Peter does exist.  "A senior software engineer at Google DeepMind
who works on the Gemini AI platform and related Google AI tooling." 
Not Jeff Dean so that much more interesting that Bernd would know -
or at least know of - him.  I asked Bernd: what happens when
computers can program themselves?  He agreed but didn't have his own
elaboration.

So I've had a lot of interaction with E Asia for 40 years. 
Academic, professional, and personal.  It's been growing on me for a
while but my discontinuity there is that I've, in many ways, lost
interest.  Not entirely but, for example, after 6 years in Tokyo as
the systems programmer for a joint-venture quantitative investment
mgmt firm, Japan had grown repetitive and kind of boring.  One
instance is that I'd go to some kind of social function and I felt
like the questions I'd be asked by some new person could be mapped
out in a flow chart.  It was funny.  One (Japanese) guy I met for
the first (and last) time said to me: you Westerners are like an
open book.  I looked at him and responded: you don't know - we're
turned to the wrong page.

In 1990 while in Tokyo, we opened a small office in Singapore; I
built the computer and networking systems there; and I needed to
travel to Singapore periodically to do more work.  First thing I
noticed was the tropical climate, second I noticed that Chinese
culture is really very different from Japanese.  That all, at the
time, seemed very compelling and there was plenty to engage with and
study.  One interesting book was Alfred Russel Wallace's "The Malay
Archipelago."  Or try Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities."  

Later, back in California, I married my wife who's Malaysian
Chinese.  I remember something Chalmers Johnson said in a course at
Cal.  You want a ferocious psycho-social incubator?  Try a Chinese
household.  Indeed.  He'd actually ben a China expert before he
later became a Japan expert.  I assume he spoke and read both
languages.

But it's now something like 35 years later from the start of that; I
hear all these opinions about E Asia; and I feel tired.  Some of
these people have experience in E Asia, and some more than myself. 
So what's up with that?

I'm looking for new topics.  Not Well topics - world topics.  Ah -
the present cacophony?  Right, just what does that mean?  I assume
there is some meaning to it.  Finance was in fact a useful perch
from which to view the world.  While I liked some of the people
there a lot of the people there I didn't like and many of them
seemed to think that finance is the only way to view the world. 
Finance is a very important way to view the world but it's not the
only and when that company imploded thanks to the GFC I was, more or
less, happy to return to tech.
  

    
My list is hugely long but one interesting China-related blog is:

https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/

The title of his latest article is: 1993 -- 2016: (9) : Political
Party Divisions Are Based on Class Divisions : Chapter Nine of
"The Logic of Politics" 王沪宁等著《政治的逻辑》


Retired US diplomat now living near DC, who spent many years working
in China, his blog has very interesting translations and
interpretations of a wide variety of Chinese-language documents. 
Many of topical (if obscure) note.

So no, I haven't lost interest entirely.
  

    
> Is this the DJ we're looking for?
> https://soundcloud.com/timofeyev

I saw that, but it says that guy's from St. Petersburg, and the
spelling's a little different. So not clear that it's the same
person.
  

    
Hi, thanks for everyone's thoughts, especially about Asia. 
I just had an experience that may relate to AI.  Last night I
noticed my link to the digital world, an iPad, was failing. It
looked hopeless so I priced a replacement and went bed.  But it was
still running in the morning just was losing battery 
So looked up how to back up stuff, did that, and had 2% battery when
it finished 
Then I found an old iPad and managed to absorb all my usernames and
credentials from iCloud onto its different antique hardware and OS
and abracadabra…
  

    
"My list is hugely long but one interesting China-related blog is:"

https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/

*Thanks for recommending that, it seems quite useful and
interesting.  And quite to the point too, since a lot of it seems to
be about machine translation of arcane contemporary Chinese texts.
  

    
A current political issue that seems under-recognized to me is how
much Trump and his enablers have destroyed the American
Establishment and the Republican Party.

MAGA takes its cues from Viktor Orban and is an
ethnonational-kleptocrat scam.  But if you think of the situation
from Trump's draft-dodging Boomer heyday, around 1968 or so, he's
extremely disruptive and radical -- an "up against the Wall," smash
the State type.
  

    
Long-established, conventional Republican tenets that have
vaporized:

"Establishment Republican" protective, patriarchal, stabilizing,
figures of the Nelson Rockfeller type.  These guys were firmly
placed in the American cultural elite of libraries and art galleries
and universities.  They could deliver censorious lectures on
cultural propriety, and had credibility in doing it -- "Mobil Oil
Company brings you the ballet."  They might as well have all been
hanged from lanterns.  In 2016 there's not a trace of 'em.

"Billy Graham" figures who were "the nation's pastor."  They're all
Elmer Gantry now.  They nailed themselves to the wrists and ankles
to public sleazebags who break all Ten Commandments every week. 
Their megachurches are bunkers for rifles and race-war.  No one
including themselves expects an ounce of moral decency out of them. 
They've become unholy.  And they know it.
  

    

"Limited government."  Nope.  Not any more.  No government at all,
sometimes, but never with well-defined "limits."

Constitutional Rights: first amendment, fourth amendment, nineteenth
amendment.  They don't care.  The Constitution is of no relevance to
even to the former Tea Party.

States' rights.  They invade towns and states with masked squads. 
American states that ignore or contradict them are enemy states.
  

    
Free market capitalism.  They're oligarchs, grifters and
kleptocrats.  They also run protection rackets in which business
leaders have to publicly flatter them and bribe them.

Independent banking system.  They hate functional bankers, and
prefer crypto and money-laundering.  Foreign bribes, actively sought
out, more than acceptable.

Reducing the debt.  They never actually did that, but now they've
forgotten the idea entirely.

NATO.  They hate and fear their own military alliances, and the
older and more traditional and established those alliances, the
worse they are. They'll fight with Canada, with Mexico; they're beat
up Denmark.
  

    

US International soft power, various influence efforts, global
regulatory schemes, global trade regulations -- they hate fear and
abandon every one of them.  In every "developing world" burg where
there was an American flag over some do-gooder scheme, they've
pulled it down and burned it.

Also, American power-centers that seemed really invulnerable in the
USA, the true hard-core apparatus: the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon,
the Supreme Court -- and "the Republican Party," of course... all
just storm-wracked, flooded, mildewed.  They'll never be the same
again.
  

    

If you really loved those aspects of straight-laced America, the
native land of squares and the Silent Majority, it's a source of
grave anxiety.  If you're a May '68er "Situationist," and you 
thought the whole Moloch-style enterprise was always rotten,
exploitative, alienating and basically a paper-thin, TV-screen
"Spectacle," it's incredible to see just one year of a new
Presidency doing so much of your hard work for you.  It's like 1968
turned inside out.

The Boomers are leaving on a very bad note -- but they are leaving. 
They're leaving emptiness and wreckage as they head for the
graveyards, but this is the second quarter of the 21st Century. 
It's not an era of Baby Boom Population Bomb.  It's an era of
radically shrinking populations and disturbed landscapes.  

Viktor Orban's Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, they all have severe
baby-busts and mass regional abandonments.  They're signature
national scenes are villages demolished, shuttered factories maybe
fit for a rave or some laser-tag.  It sounds very alarming, but
Turin is rather like that, and I spent most of this century in
Turin.  I've had quite a good time of it, even; not that life there
was perfect, but there was so much empty room, and so many
unheard-of  creative things to become enthusiastic about, in a very
old town with so much new elbow-room.   
  

    
Boomers living the USA today are seeing their most sacred
assumptions about governance wrecked, pretty much like the
demolition of the East Wing of the White House, which no one would
have thought possible. We were taught that the USA is a "melting
pot" where immigrants from across the world were welcomed into the
cultural blend that had evolved here. We heard over and over again
that "this is a free country," America is a democracy, a place of
truth, justice, and freedom for all. We learned that ours is a
representative government with three co-equal mutually supportive
branches - the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial,
governed by the rule of laws, not men, following a well-established
constitutional order.
  

    
In the past year, that's all been burning down. The government of
the USA reviles immigrants, sending masked jack-booted thugs round
up anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant, deporting them
to countries where they have no history and no friends. The current
administration ignores the Constitution when it conficts with their
whims - the sense that we are free and that "all men are created
equal" is lost. Laws created to protect minorities are now being
used to protect white nationalists and diminish people of color. Now
justice is what the administration says it is, laws are applied
selectively, or ignored. The Legislative and Judicial branches of
government have surrendered their power to the Executive, and the
Supreme Court has convinced the current President that he is immune
from prosecution, above the law. And that President is doing what he
can to trash the economy of the country if not the world. He has
dismantled infrastructures for scientific and health research, and
has installed a former heroin addict, now conspiracy theorist to
transform the government's health apparatus from one based on
science to one based on whim and supposition. 
  

    
<116-121> is the epic, twisted elegy that the GOP deserve after
hoisting themselves on their own petards. 

 Shame about all the collateral damage tho. We're going to be
dealing with the unexploded ordinance and salted earth through the
middle of the century.
  

    
Via email from "fruitbatpangolin":

Hiya folks, loving this year's gothic theme, corrupt line endings
are really a perfect metaphor.

Am finding the 'Regex Replace' extension useful for making things
easier to read, though I am not sure if doing so degothics the
experience or enhances it through the fact of having to use arcane
tools.

About the whole flying car thingy, for the public to think of it as
a 'flying car' product category (at least that is separate from
planes and helicopters) requires keeping something weighing more
than a metric ton airborne, with a maximum thrust cross section of
maybe 3-4 meters squared and a wing that is basically just the car,
that can also be used from residential spaces. 

If we are talking VTOL, this needs to generate 150 - 200+ mph
downdraft purely to hover, never mind accelerate upwards. If you
want to take off from the street in something like that under its
own recognisance, without some breakthrough in physics, things are
going to get a wee bit windy.

And this is all without asking about how where you put the fuel for
this.

Of course someone could invent antigravity, but in that case fuck
the winged car, I want some boots.

But all is not lost, an aerodynamic wedge lifting-body is a
perfectly reasonable thing, as long as it is already going sideways
fast. And in cities you have some alternative launch strategies,
such as winched drops from the side of tower blocks as part of the
municipal infrastructure. And then landing the same way, like those
lunatic pilots on mountains. Buildings as vertical runways
basically. Very efficient for short flights.

Maybe in the suburbs you could have a trebuchet style arrangement.
and then normal runways in the outskirts and rural. But basically I
am saying, flying cars in high rise cities could actually sort of
work, but only as skyscraper sugargliders with supporting municipal
infrastructure and not taking off from an alleyway like in
Bladerunner, unless you want to blow all the bins around.