Blaine

Today, DHS detained 20+ activists at Miami International Airport as they returned from delivering thousands of pounds of humanitarian aid to Cuba. The DHS wants to intimidate activists into abandoning our solidarity with Cuba, but we aren’t afraid. We will continue to support our Cuban brothers and sisters until the brutal US blockade is lifted once and for all.

prepping for my thursday night DJ set in the CLI...

BREAKING: 'The Earthquake Faction' launches by setting ablaze Elbit's Israeli weapons manufacturing centre in the Czech Republic. The site was built to "service the global expansion of Israel's biggest weapons producer". No one was harmed, but photos show the site destroyed.

"In response to the rise of right-wing populism, liberal governments surveil, prosecute, and bar their political opponents from office, purge judges, and re-run elections." To save liberal democracy, liberals are abandoning it. Leo Greenberg for @Compactmag_ compactmag.com/article/the-ag…

New study finds the current heat wave in the West would be "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate pollution. We're on the verge of breaking an all-time March heat record for the US today/tmrw. cnn.com/2026/03/20/wea…

ICE is straightforwardly a gestapo secret police now, disappearing people at the president’s personal direction for simply crossing one of his cronies

Well, if yesterday's map was ridiculous, I'm running out of superlatives to characterize today's. Countless locations from Pacific Coast to Great Plains are currently experiencing all-time record March warmth, w/ some locations approaching/exceeding April (or even May) records.

This is what they did before they abducted Maduro. They're gonna try regime change in Colombia as well. For the love of god IMPEACH HIM. 25TH AMENDMENT. HE NEEDS TO BE FUCKING STOPPED. WAKE THE FUCK UP.

"California housing crash fears as buying rates plummet below Great Recession level," per NYP

What would it take to get to a united Ireland? In 2024, @YuleGoat described the bureaucratic and legal obstacles that stand in the way of a true reunion. thebaffler.com/salvos/irish-u…

fReEdOm oF sPeEch!!!!!! 🤪

LOCKED UP FOR A YEAR WITH NO CHARGES FOR PRO-PALESTINE FREE SPEECH!!! AMERICA IS A FAILED STATE.

This is the new EF Mandate. For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making. Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total. The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to. There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role. At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack. We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum. At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing. But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time. This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies. Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one. I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

The upcoming Western heatwave could be the most extraordinary US heatwave since the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Dome. NWS forecasts 114°F near the Salton Sea next week, which would break the national March record by 6°F and surpass the April record of 113°F. Unprecedented.

So very concretely the outcome of the war so far is that Iran controls the world's most critical energy chokepoint, and Russia can now sell their own oil freely and at a premium. I can't think of another U.S. war that's been such an obvious strategic disaster so quickly: normally it takes them a couple of years...

I heard when David Lynch got an iPhone he sat on the deck and talked to Siri for a month straight

The Pentagon purchased $2 million worth of Alaskan king crab in September, per new released documents seen by MSN.

MrBeast competition to see who can make it through the Strait of Hormuz

Winter 2025/2026 is officially the warmest winter in recorded history for the Western United States, per NOAA. Compared to the 1901–1930 climate baseline, this was a 4-sigma event. In short, a winter this warm would have been virtually impossible without climate change.

Remember when they told you the war was costing $1 billion a day? Turns out it was $3 billion a day just for the munitions. Oops.