“It seems strange thinking about Kill Bill in 2025 the way people did about Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather in 2003, but they just don’t make movies like that anymore and it’s hard to imagine something like Kill Bill getting made in recent years by anyone other than someone with Tarantino’s clout. … Unlike films released between 2016-2024, Kill Bill never felt beholden to some woke Hays Code requiring films to conform to the delicate sensibilities of a thirty-five-year old cat mom with a grievance studies degree.” (12/20/25)
“Over the past year, a new ideological framework, which I’ll call neo-decolonialism, has been taking hold in activist, academic, and political discourse. This framework has the potential to reopen and reinflame a vast number of conflicts. This is where slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’ ultimately lead — to a world in which no political settlement is ever final, and no peace is durable. It’s important to make a clear distinction between actual decolonisation and what I am calling neo-decolonialism. Real decolonisation was a concrete, historically specific process in which empires withdrew from territories they had been administering, as exemplified by the end of the Raj. … neo-decolonialism is not about dismantling real empires …. Instead, it retroactively reclassifies political arrangements as ‘colonial’ based on contemporary group dynamics, racial or ethnic categories (e.g. ‘whiteness’), and the question of which side has the most power.” (12/20/25)
“The amazing thing about Hanukkah is that despite the past mistakes and the mess the ancient Israelis got themselves into, there were a few (indeed a remnant of a remnant: the proverbial three percent, perhaps) who were able to figure out and take successful action to recover and preserve their nation, their people, their religion, and their culture. And thereby set the stage for the rest of human history to our day. Even though those same Maccabean rebels turned around and did exactly the same things that had led to the mess they got out of. And indeed, started making the same mistakes that their oppressors, the Selucids, had made in abusing the Jews.” (12/20/25)
“Few believe the justifications for the ongoing US murder campaign, and now military blockade, off the coast of Venezuela. Even US officials seem halfheartedly committed to their claims about stopping drugs. They now concede that the real goal is overthrowing the Venezuelan government and recovering ‘our oil,’ which was mistakenly buried under Venezuelan soil. If they succeed there, they will surely escalate violence against Cuba and perhaps other noncompliant governments. The larger goal, proclaims the US secretary of defense, is the ‘restoration of our power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.’ That entails reasserting ‘US military dominance in the Western Hemisphere’ and with it the ‘access to key terrain throughout the region’ — that is, markets and resources like our oil. In the meantime, if blowing up boats can also divert attention from domestic scandals, that’s a bonus.” (12/20/25)
“Federal regulators have created a trucking crisis — and they did it by ignoring their own evidence, bypassing basic safeguards and targeting a workforce that has kept America moving through every national emergency of the past decade. In September, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued an interim final rule that effectively bars most lawfully present, work-authorized immigrant drivers from obtaining, renewing or maintaining non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses. The rule limits eligibility to just three visa categories — H-2A, H-2B and E-2 — while excluding refugees, asylees, DACA recipients and other federally authorized workers who have long been able to drive using a valid employment authorization document. These drivers meet every federal safety requirement, pass the same tests, satisfy the same medical standards and comply with the same drug-and-alcohol protocols as every other CDL holder. Yet FMCSA is treating immigration category as a disqualifying risk.” (12/20/25)
“Two million years ago, give or take, there was a fundamental and unexplained change in the archaeological record. Since then our progress has come far faster than it should have according to evolutionary theory, leaving scientists perplexed. … pre-2 million BC skulls (homo habilis and prior) have ridges at the eyebrow level, and that the skulls go directly backward from there. That is, they have no forehead. Beginning at homo ergaster and homo erectus, however – that being roughly two million years ago – the skulls begin to rise in their fronts. … Human brains feature an enormous prefrontal cortex. This is the structure that allows us to do all the massively advanced things we do. And this structure could not fit into our skulls without that high forehead; the prefrontal cortex fills precisely that new space.” (12/20/25)
“With calm resolve, the United States and the European Union have each made decisions in recent days showing a firm watchfulness against big-power aggression. Neither will receive a Nobel Peace Prize for its actions – Alfred Nobel’s idea of a secure world did not include military deterrence. Yet together, the U.S. and EU have at least helped make war a bit more unthinkable. On Dec. 17, the Trump administration approved the largest-ever U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Congress is expected to approve the $11.1 billion weapons package, especially after the House Select Committee on China issued a report Thursday calling for ‘unambiguous’ opposition to Beijing’s moves toward an invasion of the self-governing democratic island.” (12/19/25)
The United States finds itself at a moment when the gap between power and prudence has rarely been more visible. As American society grapples with structural inflation, deep social fragmentation, a crisis of institutional credibility, and the steady erosion of public trust, renewed talk of military confrontation with Venezuela is once again circulating within Washington’s political and security circles. In recent months, this rhetoric has intensified, driven in part by President Donald Trump and influential figures around him – most notably Senator Marco Rubio – who have pushed an increasingly confrontational line toward Caracas, bringing the country closer to the threshold of conflict. These developments are not the product of a genuine threat, but rather reflect a dangerous habit in U.S. foreign policy: transforming domestic deadlock into external military adventure.” (12/19/25)
“Brace for another government shutdown early in the new year …. The short-term funding bill that Democrats finally allowed to pass last month, ending the record-long shutdown, only runs through Jan. 30. The federal Fiscal Year 2026 started Oct. 1 this year, yet the House and Senate have so far passed only three of the 12 appropriations bills to fund various parts of the government. And they’re not even close on the other nine; they’d need a Christmas miracle to get it done in time. And it’ll be brutally hard to pass yet another stopgap bill, or alternately another ‘omnibus’ to cover everything through next Oct. 1: Too many Republicans are sick of these contraptions, while too few Democrats are willing to give the GOP any help at all.” [editor’s note: The Democrats didn’t have to “allow” the funding bill to pass; the Republicans could have passed it without their help at any time – TLK] (12/20/25)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Corynne McSherry & Kit Walsh
“Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture. For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way. Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity.” (12/19/25)
