Unfortunately this piece became unusable because of the rip in the paper, however it's one of my personal favourites because I painted it from a memory of my childhood in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. I keep in a frame by my bed.
I'm seeing some reports that the fantasy artist Emmanuel just passed away. One of the artists who helped hone the look of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I was especially a fan of his cover for the Fiend Folio, which I consider one of the sacred texts of AD&D. One of the many guides I used to check out from the library and draw monsters from.
I've never been able to learn much about the artist who was always credited only as "Emmanuel." Apparently he was Emmanuel Papadopoulos, and passed away in June, 2026.
White Dwarf and ADnD were a foundational part of my life growing up. Emmanuel's art was integral to that, and the fact that he is Greek makes me smile a little more.
sex criminal j k rowling bullies amnesty international into retracting unbiased report about genocidal risks, after paying for the manufacture of a scottish devolution crisis over the same issue
The pro-Israel group’s absolutist stance has alienated even moderate Democrats who support the Jewish state.
Arthur Delaney and Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON — In 2024, a super PAC allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent $4 million to boost then-state Sen. Sarah Elfreth in a contested Democratic primary in Maryland. It’s not an exaggeration to say the money was decisive: It was more than twice as much as Elfreth’s campaign raised and spent.
[...]
But last week, Elfreth was one of the 10 Democrats who voted “present” on a symbolic amendment to cut off aid to Israel, signaling an unwillingness to shoot down the effort completely. Another 21 Democrats who had received financial backing from AIPAC voted for the amendment. Altogether, 103 Democrats voted for the amendment in a rebuke of Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has overseen a war in Gaza that has led to more than 70,000 deaths.
[...]
AIPAC appeared to cut off fundraising support to the Democrats who voted yes. One of them, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), said he welcomed the consequences.
“I expect groups like AIPAC will not support me in my future elections and frankly, I don’t want their support,” Ryan wrote on social media after the vote. “Hardline stances that refuse to stand up to a corrupt and increasingly dangerous Netanyahu regime have no place in our politics.”
The vote showed how AIPAC’s grip on American politics is slipping, at least among Democrats. The group, which continues to pour tens of millions of dollars into contested primaries with mixed success at best, is fundamentally trying to convince members of Congress to ignore the clear moral judgment of their constituents, while also turning itself into the No. 1 example of political corruption in the country.
“If AIPAC cares about saving the US-Israel relationship, the best thing it could do right now is to disband,” former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who lost a Democratic primary this year thanks partly to more than $2 million in spending by an AIPAC affiliate, said in an interview. “It has only toxic influence.”
[...]
AIPAC’s reputation among rank-and-file Democrats is poisonous, party operatives say, referring to internal campaign surveys. AIPAC’s super PAC routinely tries to disguise its spending by funneling cash through pop-up or unrelated groups so voters don’t know where the cash is coming from. Potential presidential contenders, even moderate ones, are determined to keep the group at arm’s length.
“If someone is receiving a lot of support from AIPAC, it makes it harder to campaign with them,” said an adviser to one 2028 presidential contender, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, pointing to the ultrawealthy conservatives whose $100 million fills the coffers of United Democracy Project, a PAC affiliated with AIPAC. “Base voters in New Hampshire are going to want to know why you helped out a candidate backed by Trump-supporting billionaires.”
AIPAC, for now, remains determined to solve the problem with more campaign spending. It has spent nearly $20 million backing Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Senate race and more than $1.4 million backing Rep. Wesley Bell in Missouri’s 1st District, aiming to hold off progressives in both races. But its spending is only further alienating the Democratic voters it is allegedly trying to win over, who are largely skeptical of money in politics.
[...]
Even Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, Democratic lawmaker and White House chief of staff — and a possible 2028 presidential contender — warned Israel this month that its war in Gaza is making it a pariah nation.
“Your government has been complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank,” Emanuel, long an ardent defender of the country who volunteered in assisting the Israel Defense Forces during the Persian Gulf War, said in a speech at Tel Aviv University.
In a statement, AIPAC said last week’s aid vote “sends a dangerous signal to both our allies and our enemies around the world.”
The amendment, by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), would have cut off the annual $3.3 billion allotment the U.S. has been providing Israel under the terms of a 2016 memorandum of understanding. The amendment failed thanks to every Republican but Massie and 98 Democrats voting against it, but Massie called it a resounding success.
AIPAC’s reputation among Democrats is tanking by the day, and as the recent Massie Amendment vote to cut aid to Israel shows, even some Democrats those that have been endorsed and funded by AIPAC in recent elections such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA), Joe Neguse (CO), Robin Kelly (IL), Katherine Clark (MA), and Pat Ryan (NY) voted in favor of Massie’s amendment.
Adding more heaps of injury is former Chicago Mayor and potential 2028 candidate Rahm Emanuel-- one of the last Democrats you’d expect to make a statement of this kind-- come out swinging and criticize Israel.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/
The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.
This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.
The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.
That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:
Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.
Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.
Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.
This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?
Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:
After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.
The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.
Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.
But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."
Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.
Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.
Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.
Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.
On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.
America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."
On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":
As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.
First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:
In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.
The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).
Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.
The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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