Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy.

Often when in Florence one sees buildings like this, where one section is rough stone standing out amid stucco neighbors.


A photo of a street in Florence. Many tourists walk along and the buildings are all shops and eateries. In the center, conspicuous between buildings of yellow or beige stucco, is one building made of crude-looking yellowish stone, very rough and undecorated, with few windows and all small compared to its neighbors. A couple doors down, a second conspicuous stone section like this sticks up, also strangely blank and rough amid its yellow neighbors. Both stop about half a story above the roofs of the three-story buildings on either side of them.

These are actually the bottom nubs of Medieval stone towers. The town of San Gimigniano (below) is famous for having several still intact. Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families (think Montagues and Capulets) and invasion:

A classic image of the skyline of the town of San Gimigniano, with many smaller houses three or four stories tall with the characteristic Italian yellow stucco walls and terra cotta tiled roofs, but with eleven stone towers sticking up far above them, towering twelve stories or more. The towers are very plain and blank, just squares of stone without decoration and with few windows, clearly utilitarian more than aesthetic.


Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities.

Speaking of weird ancient history, my pal Ada Palmer – sf writer, librettist, singer, and Renaissance historian – blew my mind this week with her article on the tower-cities of medieval proto-Italy during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars (1125-1392):

https://www.exurbe.com/the-lost-towers-of-the-guelph-ghibelline-wars/

Once upon a time, Italian city-states were forested with tall towers, like miniature Manhattans. Rich families built these stone towers as a show of wealth and a source of power, since the stone towers were taller than nearby homes and far less flammable, so the plutes of the day could drop flaming garbage on their neighbors, burn them out, and emerge triumphant. This ended with cities like Florence banning towers above a certain height, forcing their warring oligarchs to decapitate their fortresses down to compliance levels.

Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages. From now on, only Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and the faceless mere centimillionaires running companies like Match.com will be able to directly harvest Americans' most private, sensitive kompromat. The People's Liberation Army will have to build their dossiers on Americans' lives the old fashioned way: by paying unregulated data-brokers who will sell any fact about you to anyone and who know everything about everyone.

After all, the reason the American market matters so much to Tiktok is that America is the only rich, populous country in the world without a federal privacy law. That's why an American is the most valuable user an ad-tech company can acquire. Keep your wealthy Norwegians: sure, they're saturated in oil money and thus fat prizes for ad-targeting, but they're also protected by the GDPR.

If you're an American (or anyone else, for that matter) who wants to use Tiktok without being spied on, Privacysafe has you covered: their Sticktock tool is a private, alternative, web-based front-end for Tiktok, with optional Tor VPN tunnelling:

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America's lead cybersecurity agency on Friday made one final scream into the impending truth void about election security and the role CISA plays in maintaining it.

The 2024 election cycle was the "most challenging threat environment" the United States has ever faced, said Cait Conley, who, as senior advisor to CISA Director Jen Easterly, helped oversee the agency's election security mission.

These threats spanned envelopes mailed to election offices containing "suspicious white power," sometimes laced with fentanyl; election officials being swatted at their homes; ballot drop boxes being blown up; ransomware gangs targeting election vendors and offices; and criminals trying to knock election-related websites offline.

Plus, CISA and friends saw a ton of attempts by foreign trolls to unduly influence and divide Americans going to the polls.

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At Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have leveraged the Frontier supercomputer to create an unprecedented simulation of the universe, encompassing a span of 10 billion light years and incorporating complex physics models.

This monumental achievement allows for new insights into galaxy formation and cosmic evolution, showcasing the profound capabilities of exascale computing.

Breakthrough in Universe Simulation

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have achieved a groundbreaking milestone by creating the largest astrophysical simulation of the Universe to date. This simulation was made possible by the Frontier supercomputer, which was recently the most powerful in the world. Its scale mirrors the vast surveys conducted by advanced telescopes and observatories, offering unprecedented insights into the cosmos.

Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is currently the second-fastest supercomputer globally, surpassed only by El Capitan, which pulled ahead in November 2024. Notably, Frontier is the world’s first exascale supercomputer, a distinction it now shares with El Capitan, both of which represent the cutting edge of computational power.

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The outgoing president was right, in his farewell address, to warn of the dangers posed by the billionaires around the table

Aristocrats are “the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed,” John Adams warned, writing after his presidency. Banning titles was insufficient; a few would still be distinguished by birth or, especially, wealth. The problem was not just their ability to buy political favours but the grip that their money had on people’s minds.

Economic and political power entwine everywhere. Fear of the rich’s outsized influence has existed throughout US history. Yet at times the relationship becomes especially stark and threatening. On Wednesday, Joe Biden evoked the 19th-century Gilded Age and the robber barons – who crushed competitors, exploited workers, bought judges and politicians, and flaunted wealth – in his warning against oligarchs.

In his parting words from the Oval Office, the president talked up his achievements: “The seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.” It is true that he received insufficient credit for the strengthened economy, green investment, massive healthcare expansion and his management of the Covid disaster that he inherited from Donald Trump, alongside his support for Ukraine. But his carelessness towards Palestinian lives in Gaza and his refusal to stand aside sooner – extraordinarily, he still maintains that he could have beaten Mr Trump – contributed to the Democrats’ defeat.

What resonated, however, was his alarm call as he warned of the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people”, adding: “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

In an effort to broaden its appeal, the Washington Post has changed its slogan from “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to

“Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The following are six runner-up slogans that were in strong contention:

The Kid Rock of Newspapers

Every Subscription Comes With Free Trump Bible

All the News by Writers Who Haven’t Quit

News? Fuck Yeah!

Ten Millionth Subscriber Gets to Ride in Bezos’s Rocket

Release the Kraken

Editor’s note: We want your slogans, too! Please share at [email protected]. Our favorite will get a shoutout.

Preston Martin figured the retro blue Volkswagen van he slept in for a year during college was a goner, given that he had parked it in a Malibu neighborhood just before the Palisades fire ripped through, reducing homes and cars to rubble and charred metal.

So the surfboard maker was stunned to find that the vehicle had survived. Not only that, a photo of the vibrant bus taken by an Associated Press photographer was circulating widely on television and online, giving viewers a measure of joy.

“There is magic in that van,” Martin, 24, said Tuesday in an interview with AP. “It makes no sense why this happened. It should have been toasted, but here we are.”

Martin purchased the 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 somewhat on a whim sometime around his junior year studying mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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What-iffing Trump troops in the streets

D.C. National Guard Military Police, Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. on June 2, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Revé Van Croft, 715th PAD)

Donald Trump talks tough about deploying troops in the streets. Why? For the same reason he muses about “acquiring” Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Trump, Alex Shepard believes, “is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.”

Yes, Greenland may have significant resources, but as we pointed out last week, that’s not really why Trump wants it. That’s about Trump’s obsession with size (The New Republic):

As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)

Twenty years of war has created tens of thousands of broken men and women.

Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.

Never heard of Hatch? Well, maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to … reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”

In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing “a serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”

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The final missions of two previously unknown Army sergeants—37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—left millions of other Americans scratching their heads. Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?

Michael Tomasky wrote an excellent piece today about the unaccountable president, laying out the process by which he gets away with everything. No one expects anything of him and no matter what he says, the right wing media, the Congress and his allies in the judiciary will back him up.

As an example he suggests that even if Trump were to be found to have given nuclear secrets to North Korea he would either claim it was fake news and the entire wingnuts apparatus would launch into gear calling it another hoax or he would admit it, saying it was a perfect move of a very stable genius and they’d all back his decision as necessary for national security despite its madness. That is not an exaggeration. I believe there is nothing that can make them abandon their support at this point.

We’ve Never Been Here Before: The Zero-Accountability Presidency
The only institutions that will try to hold Trump accountable are powerless, while the only ones with the power to punish him will never do it.

So here we are, at another one of those Trump moments that by now can only be called boringly surreal: The president-elect was sentenced Friday in New York in the hush-money trial, 10 days before taking the oath of office. He was given an “unconditional discharge.” At least he had to appear. Amazingly, the Supreme Court, this once, did not bail him out, although four justices were ready to.

Nothing is shocking anymore. Trump refused to rule out invading Denmark (to take Greenland). Well, of course he did. What else should we expect? That he also wouldn’t rule out invading Panama (to take the canal) took me by surprise, I admit. But only for about three seconds. By the fourth second, it made perfect sense: Jimmy Carter’s decision to give the canal to Panama has been a festering boil on the right ever since it happened.

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