Some amazing news, alas

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/belgium-israeli-soldiers-arrest-gaza/

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Agroecology does sound quaint by comparison to Grunwald’s “buzzy biotech startups.” While agroecology, too, recognizes the importance of producing food without further imperiling ecosystems, it sees smaller-scale farms as the foundation for this work. In a piece for Mongabay, Lappé describes it as a nature-based practice that “includes techniques such as intercropping and planting cover crops, integrating livestock and trees into landscapes, and deploying organic farming methods to enhance biodiversity and soil health while eliminating dependence on external inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.”

Or as Molly Anderson, a panelist at the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) puts it, “We’re talking about farming systems that are extractive versus regenerative.” And what that means, she expounds, is: “We want to be regenerating communities. We want to be regenerating soil. We want to be regenerating decent livelihoods for farmers and farm workers, and moving away from everything that’s extracting, [including] extracting nutrients from the soil.” The need to cut back on meat-eating is a given here.

https://foodprint.org/blog/a-new-book-says-tech-supported-industrial-ag-will-feed-the-world-agroecologists-would-like-a-word/

"The compulsion to authenticity frequently backfires. Being exposed as inauthentic can be devastating to reputations and livelihoods. The sociologist Angèle Christin has described savage online battles between vegan influencers who push the envelope of vegan purity or expose their rivals as secret meat-eaters. Other authenticity traps are more ominous, as when organisations use social media feeds as public proof of who we truly are – an agitator, a gangster, a covert terrorist. In his book Ballad of the Bullet (2020), the ethnographer Forrest Stuart found big gaps between the performances that drill musicians put up for social media consumption and the more banal reality of their lives. Young people making themselves look tough to sell music on YouTube may learn the hard way that law enforcement officers and judges tend to interpret these signs literally, rather than seeing them as the status games and identity play that they most likely are. Similarly, the Trump administration’s reliance on tattoos as one easily harvested, measurable piece of evidence of gang membership takes an often superficial marker and turns it into a datapoint in a deportation scoring system. And in a country where the government has taken it upon itself to use people’s professed views against it in immigration proceedings, the effect is chilling. Self-disclosures and social connections that until recently were sources of pride and support suddenly become potential liabilities."

"Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age

Public broadcasting isn’t usually seen as part of the safety net, but it should: a key component in any society that has the remotest concern for its inhabitants’ well-being.

“Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down,” argued the CPB in a press statement.

"Moreover, creative and informational spaces need to be shielded from the influence of commerce. Whether a certain viewpoint or expression is “marketable” has nothing to do with how vital it may be, or whether it deserves a place to take root, grow, and find an audience. This was the stated impetus behind the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the CPB: “Do what commercial media will not. Serve communities being ignored by others. Take creative risks.”"

"Public service broadcasting is not a coherent blueprint for democratic broadcasting, but rather a loose set of ideas associated with a historically contingent set of institutional arrangements which have in fact never been particularly democratic. What it has offered is an institutional space outside of capitalist control, which in the absence of much in the way of formal mechanisms of accountability can be regarded as more or less democratic depending on how closely the interests of the broadcasting professionals and bureaucrats, and the institutional structures within which they operate, align with those of the public."

"The lens of democracy explains a lot about public broadcasting. The Right thrives when people are atomized, their narratives and knowledge fractured and confused. Conservative opposition to public broadcasting is less about the kind of information viewers receive than it is mitigating the potential for democratic access to culture."

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/public-broadcasting-npr-pbs-trump/

In addition to EgoZero, the research group is working on several projects to help make general-purpose robots a reality, including open-source robot designs, flexible touch sensors, and additional methods of collecting real-world training data.

For example, as an alternative to EgoZero, the researchers have also designed a setup with a 3D-printed handheld gripper that more closely resembles most robot “hands.” A smartphone attached to the gripper captures video with the same point-space method that’s used in EgoZero. The team, by having people collect data without bringing a robot into their homes, provide two approaches that could be more scalable for collecting training data.

That scalability is ultimately the researcher’s goal. Large language models can harness the entire Internet, but there is no Internet equivalent for the physical world. Tapping into everyday interactions with smart glasses could help fill that gap.
From Your Site Articles

https://spectrum.ieee.org/smart-glasses-robot-training

Panama in 2025 faces widespread unrest as citizens protest President José Raúl Mulino’s neoliberal agenda, his push to reopen the Canadian-owned Cobre Panama mine, and increased U.S. military presence. The government has responded with arrests, killings, and suspension of constitutional rights, particularly in Bocas del Toro. Mulino’s history of lobbying for U.S. interventions and close ties to foreign powers fuel perceptions of subservience.

The protests involve a broad coalition: unions like SUNTRACS, student and teacher groups, banana workers, anti-mining activists, youth organizations, and Indigenous communities. The grievances combine economic insecurity, environmental concerns, and opposition to foreign influence. Despite violent repression, popular anger remains high, with Mulino’s approval ratings near 30 percent.

The unrest highlights Panama’s struggle for sovereignty, social justice, and the right to protest, while both U.S. and Canadian governments are implicated due to strategic and corporate interests. Protesters frame their movement as a fight to end imperialist influence and achieve genuine national independence

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/panama-mulino-us-canada-protests/