/fetch

Stop the Presses | Mark Jacob | Substack
▻https://www.stopthepresses.news

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Lettre d’information Vita Nova — N° 4 — dimanche 6 septembre 2026
▻https://patrickb446329.substack.com/p/lettre-dinformation-vita-nova-n-4

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Encore une semaine où j’ai écrit sporadiquement, parce que je participe à une exposition à 85 kilomètres de chez moi. Des allers et des retours sur un fil, la Dacia donne des signes de fatigue, nous approchons des 300 000 km, ce qui, pour un diesel, n’est pas le bout du monde, mais quand même.

#lettre

More Fucked Today than Yesterday. And even more fucked tomorrow

I keep wanting to write a post showing off my latest graphics along with the latest data and forecasts, because the picture they paint is one of a truly fucked planet. From the latest global surface temperatures to sea-surface temperatures to the latest El Niño forecasts to the Earth Energy Imbalance to albedo to polar ice. And then there’s everything else. There is so much to write about, so much to document, so many warnings to give.

And then I think, “but tomorrow will be even more fucked, so if I wait a day, the article will be even stronger.” And so I wait and don’t post. And tomorrow comes and most of the time it’s more fucked, but sometimes it isn’t.

Collapse is both slow and fast. It’s glacial and it’s light speed, gradually then suddenly. Total collapse tomorrow or the day after, guaranteed! All humans will be extinct by January 1, 2030. Or, just maybe, there will be some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopia moment on March 17th, 2074. Is it too late in the collapse of everything to go to Starbucks? When is the new iPhone coming out?

The right day will never exist: a hypothetical local maximum of planetary fuckery. So I’m going to take a chance that tomorrow will not be significantly more fucked than today and share some graphics and data. Let’s have a look.
Global Mean Surface Temperatures

More fucked today. The planet is on day six with the global mean surface temperature above 17.0°C. The only other years on record that have broken past this barrier are 2023 and 2024. If we consider the paleo-temperature record, then it is highly likely that 2023, 2024 and 2026 are the only years to break 17.0°C in the last 115,000 years.

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How fucked will we be tomorrow? The global mean surface temperature will likely be over 17.0°C again tomorrow and for a few more days.

Meanwhile, taking the developing record-breaking El Niño into account, the full year 2027 has a solid chance of breaking 1.70°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline. So long Paris. It’s odds-on to see a day above 17.5°C next year, with about a 35% chance of a full month registering an anomaly of 2.0°C or higher.

A decade from now, our lonely planet will likely see the first full year with an anomaly above 2.0°C, with a daily mid-Summer peak reaching over 18.0°C.
Sea Surface Temperatures

More fucked today. It’s hard to put into any concrete terms just how insanely hot the oceans all over the planet are at this moment. Back in 2023, when new records started to be set, there was huge media interest in the topic. Some of my graphics went viral, with images showing temperatures spiking almost vertically to new record highs. Arguments over the lack of Saharan dust and the impacts of the new IMO 2020 low-sulfur shipping fuel regulations were in the headlines.

And then there’s yesterday. It’s not just that a new record daily high was set, yesterday was the 55th consecutive new daily record high, and the global oceans were a full 0.14°C hotter than any previous July 26th on record. For statistics geeks, the current temperature is more than 3.8 standard deviations above the 1991-2020 mean. The daily temperatures are on the precipice of setting a new record high temperature for any time of the year.

Is this being discussed in mainstream media? Crickets. Global oceans teetering on the edge? Crickets. Global impacts? Crickets.

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How fucked will we be tomorrow? As you can see from the image above, there is an annual peak that typically happens in late March, and a smaller secondary peak that happens in late August. Given the current sea-surface temperature, it is very likely that a new record will be set sometime in the next few weeks.

What does this mean in practice? Dead, dying and bleached coral. Marine heatwaves that cause mass die-offs for fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Toxic algae blooms. More intense hurricanes and typhoons, especially in the Pacific. And for humans, the collapse of some fisheries as fish populations migrate towards cooler polar waters.
El Niño

More fucked today. The current sea-surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region is about 2.3°C above the 1991-2020 average. Niño 3.4 is the area of the Pacific Ocean used to define and quantify ENSO events. By any historical measure, this El Niño is already record-breaking. July 26th marked the 58th consecutive day with the Niño 3.4 region hitting a new record daily high, about 0.5°C above the previous daily record high.

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How fucked will we be tomorrow? The latest CFSv2 model run has this El Niño reaching a maximum Niño 3.4 anomaly of about 4.3°C above the 1991-2020 baseline in November. For historical purposes, the previous record Niño 3.4 anomaly was 2.8°C during the 1997-98 El Niño.

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Even Zeke Hausfather, who is known for being conservative with his climate predictions, put the peak of this El Niño at over 3.5°C.

There is simply no historical precedent for a global climate event of this magnitude. Global industrial civilization has never before confronted a planetary emergency as potentially devastating. The precautionary principle says it should be all-hands on deck for every person, neighborhood, city and country to prepare for what may be coming.

Here is a quote from Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios: (p.s. send this letter to your local political leaders).

This El Niño driven warming will lead to significantly more global flooding, fires, storms, droughts, deadly heat events, dangerous turbulence, and most concerning, a significant threat to food supply chains, crops, and power grids.

The previous strongest recorded El Niño occurred in 1877 leading to 40 million deaths worldwide from famine.

And this coming El Niño event looks to be even stronger.

Earth Energy Imbalance

More fucked today. The “Earth Energy Imbalance” measures the difference between incoming solar energy and the totality of outgoing energy, both reflected (short wave) and radiated (long wave). It gives a simple accounting of energy into the system versus energy out of the system. When the two are not in balance, Earth either warms or cools. According to James Hansen, the “Earth’s energy imbalance is the best diagnostic of where climate is heading.”

As of the latest data from CERES for May, 2026, on an annualized basis, the Earth Energy Imbalance shows the Earth warming at a rate of about 14 Hiroshima nuclear bombs per second. This equals about 1,200,000 Hiroshimas per day or 440 million Hiroshimas worth of planetary heating over the last 12 months.

For those who want a more politically correct way to measure the rate of heating, the current rate is equivalent to brewing about 10.7 billion cups of tea per second.

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How fucked will we be tomorrow? As the planet heats up during this El Niño , there will be more outgoing longwave radiation (radiative heat). Given the strength of this El Niño , this is expected to put strong downward pressure from now until a few months after the El Niño peaks later this year. However, the long-term expectation is for the EEI to continue to set new record highs.

In other words, the planet is not only heating today at a near record pace, but the rate of heating will keep increasing for the foreseeable future.
Albedo

More fucked today. For those who want a quick reminder, “albedo” measures the reflectivity of the planet. It is simply the percentage of incoming solar radiation that is reflected out to space instead of being absorbed and heating the planet. The lower the albedo, the more sunlight reaches the planet’s surface to warm the oceans, melt ice, and heat land and the atmosphere.

The primary drivers of albedo are low-level cloud cover and polar snow and ice. Other drivers include ash and dust, deforestation, and declining concentrations of reflective aerosols. Because of the volatility associated with these drivers, albedo is best measured over longer average periods.

Here is the 36-month running average for albedo, from February, 2003 through May, 2026, showing May’s albedo just above the record low set in February, 2026. Over the last 23 years albedo has dropped from 29.33% to 28.67%. While these values may seem quite close to each other, on a percentage basis, the planet has lost about 2.25% of its albedo during this period.

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From this 2025 article in Discover magazine:

For more than two decades, Earth has slowly been growing darker. Using 24 years of data from NASA’s Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), researchers have learned that this encroaching darkness is because Earth is reflecting less sunlight, with the most dramatic dimming occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.

How fucked will we be tomorrow? The expectation is that albedo will just keep on going down as all the main drivers are expected to keep increasing in their impact. Less ice? Check! More ash? Check! More deforestation? Check! Decreasing aerosols? Check!

And what about clouds? Virtually all global climate models predict a substantial future decrease in low-level marine cloud cover as the planet warms. This article gives three reasons scientists expect this to continue:

The first is a decrease in human-caused aerosol emissions over recent decades. Aerosols – tiny, light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – influence the formation of clouds, by acting as “seeds” for cloud droplets to form.

Second, increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to a warmer and drier atmosphere, which also helps to dissipate clouds.

Finally, cloud cover decreases have also been linked to ocean surface warming, which affects atmospheric humidity and, thus, cloudiness. Reduced cloudiness leads to more sunlight being absorbed at the ocean surface – and more warming. This amplifying loop is known as a “cloud feedback”.

And this article finds that decreasing albedo due to cloud loss is part of a larger feedback loop:

The team also found that the thinning of low clouds … amplifies global warming through a feedback loop: Rising sea-surface temperatures lead to fewer clouds, meaning less reflected sunlight and a warmer planet.

Declining albedo is “The Great Darkening.”
Polar Ice

More fucked today. One of the bright spots on the global doom-o-rama wheel is that polar ice is not set to hit a new low this year. As of July 26th, Arctic sea-ice extent is 8th lowest on record for the day, with data back to 1979. Likewise, Antarctic sea-ice extent is 5th lowest on record for the day. Taken together, global sea-ice extent is 4th lowest on record for the day, about 2.1 standard deviations below the 1991-2020 mean, but over 1.1 million square kilometers above the record low for the day, set in 2024.

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How fucked will we be tomorrow? Will a new record low maximum for global sea-ice extent be set later this year? Maybe. Will the Arctic see an ice-free summer in 2027, a so-called “Blue Ocean Event”? Probably not. But the long-term future of ice on this planet is dire. The consensus opinion of climate scientists is that the Arctic will see its first ice-free day in the 2040s or 2050s. My personal Over/Under is 2043.

But the real future fuckedness happening with Arctic sea ice is that a certain fucking horrible human piece of excrement managed to shut down “PIOMAS” Arctic data — the primary data source for Arctic volume and thickness. In other words, the future of ice is even more fucked because we have lost one of the most important tools to predict its future.

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And finally, even though I neglected to mention a few things, you surely are following the latest news:
Heatwaves and fires and floods and storms and drought and melting glaciers and the AMOC and Thwaites and the methane bomb and planetary boundaries and tipping points and feedback loops and the AI bubble and kakistocratic fascism and pedophiles and genocide and Iran and Ukraine and Gaza and ICE and explosive diarrhea and Ebola and Covid-19 and famine and the new world screwworm and the Kessler syndrome and conspiracy theories and … and … and … nevermind, there’s solar and wind and batteries.
More fucked today than yesterday and even more fucked tomorrow. I’ll leave it to the interested reader to track down the information and fill in the details.

►https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/more-fucked-today-than-yesterday
#climat #changement_climatique #futur #graphiques #statistiques #chiffres #el_niño #albedo #température #mer #températures
signalé aussi par @fil:
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Burkina Faso bans “#poverty_porn”: photography as a neocolonial artefact

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Burkina Faso has made a historic move against imperialism: it banned poverty porn.

On July 2nd, the Council of Ministers adopted a new decree regulating humanitarian aid, including a ban on NGOs photographing vulnerable people next to the donations they’ve just received.

The decree, which restricts degrading or exploitative images of aid recipients and requires informed consent, is part of a larger, radical anti-imperialist project led by the country’s leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who has also nationalised gold mines, rejected IMF loans, and ordered the withdrawal of French troops from the country — all in service of his self-declared war on imperialism.

Although many around the world celebrate the Burkinabe government’s anti-colonial project, the political conditions in which it is being carried out are far from auspicious, with a government crackdown that has dissolved political parties, shut down civil society groups, and tightened control over NGO money and operations.

Even in a regrettable political context, this small line in a larger policy is a significant win in a much bigger fight over who gets to tell the story of crisis, and it exposes a deeper truth about the humanitarian sector’s obsession with turning crises into content.

We have to ask ourselves: why has the Burkinabe government targeted humanitarian action as part of its war on imperialism?
Human billboards, virtue signalling, and opportunities for compassion

The new rules bar humanitarian actors from taking, displaying, or sharing images or videos that depict beneficiaries with donated items in a manner considered degrading or exploitative. The regulations are intended to ensure vulnerable people are treated with dignity and respect.

A couple of months ago, one of the top voices in fundraising made the same point in his Substack newsletter. Beneficiaries shouldn’t have to carry around donated goods that bore the logo of the aid organization, he said. There really is no need for kids to carry a backpack with a huge NGO logo to school, to be constantly reminded of their position as aid recipients. It’s just unnecessary.

You shouldn’t have to turn real people into billboards to convince others that your work is worth funding.

I thought this was an obvious claim that did not need further discussion, that we were past using communities in crises as props for promotional communications. But I guess I was wrong.

An American man, who had built his career as a Strategic Advisor to U.S.-based philanthropies and NGOs, took to LinkedIn to call this idea “peak ridiculousness”. “Storytelling takes many forms,” he argued, “and telling the stories of others is a perfectly valid way of creating opportunities for compassion.” He went on to declare that communities in crisis did not need this kind of “virtue signalling” and “we should be honest about what gets audiences to open their hearts and wallets”.

Here is the uncomfortable thing: he is not wrong about the mechanics.

The sad photo works. A 2024 study interviewing fundraising managers at NGOs in Ghana found they knew exactly what they were doing, described the imagery as effective, and considered the ethical cost worth the money it raised. In a way, the American strategist was right — beneficiaries need the money more than they need the virtue signalling.

But what if it wasn’t about that? What if what Burkina Faso found was that these depictions carry more than just a moral cost, but perhaps also a monetary and political one?

The real story isn’t who benefits from the picture, but what it costs, and who pays.
A false story of passivity
What he was doing was defending what is commonly known as “poverty porn”, a form of humanitarian imagery that uses graphic, shocking, or stereotypical depictions of poverty to elicit sympathy, pity, guilt, or donations, often by portraying people as helpless, dependent, and devoid of agency.

This kind of distorted representation was first described by Jørgen Lissner in Merchants of Misery (1981), who warned against the “pornographic” use of suffering in aid imagery. His critique, and the work that followed, made a simple but important point: when people’s grief, bodies, and fear are displayed for emotional consumption by distant audiences, they are effectively stripped of their agency and their lives flattened into suffering.

One thing I’d like to say up front, before I go deeper into this topic, is this: communities in crisis should not be reduced to simply being aid recipients.

In many cases, they are also direct responders, actively leading resilience, peacebuilding, and reconstruction efforts. They effectively organize themselves within and outside of the sphere of international humanitarian assistance, forming community patrol groups to protect civilians in displacement camps, Village Savings and Loan Associations to pool resources for emergency funds, and mutual aid groups to deliver essential services where others cannot reach.

When INGOs flood their communication materials with images of these communities receiving aid, they are perpetuating a false narrative of passivity, actively shaping how audiences judge what affected people are capable of.

Now comes the million-dollar question: who is truly benefiting from this narrative?

Hint: it’s not the communities.
The White Savior Industrial Complex

Poverty porn is not just a fundraising style but a business model.

It relies on infantilizing and degrading stereotypes of beneficiaries to keep the colonial trope of the helpless ‘other’ alive, as a vehicle for sustaining humanitarian business.

Why do you think most nonprofit leaders in the Global North believe that by emphasizing powerlessness, they will unlock more generosity? Because it reinforces the same moral script Western humanitarian fundraising has long relied on. The more desperate the people in the photo, the more righteous the donor feels for helping them.

That is what this kind of visual stereotyping does. It casts the person in the photo as helpless and the organization as the savior, turning aid into a performance of moral authority that reinforces harmful narratives of white saviorism that are at the core of international development.

A recent study looked at 363 charity ads in the UK and found that the majority of photographs used by INGOs featured children, or women and children, and depicted rural areas and poverty. Not a man, teenager, electrical device, or shoe in sight.

This portrayal is intentional. The use of indigenous women and children as symbols of innocence and fragility, and the use of rural scenery to portray Global Majority countries as underdeveloped can be traced back to the origins of colonialism, when foreign lands were described as virginal, fertile, untouched (do you see the pattern here) and the people living in them as uncivilized savages in need of saving.

The same study also demonstrated that Africa remains the predominant subject of charity appeals, even when this does not reflect the ratio of programmatic delivery by the organisations producing these ads. Read that twice. We have turned Africa into a ~literal~ begging bowl.

“This continuous majority casting of African nations in the theatre of global development as recipients of humanitarian assistance, serves only to aid and abet the colonial notion of Africa as one huge ‘begging bowl’” — Deborah Adesina and David Girling, Charity Representations of Distant Others

This kind of fundraising tactic profits from neocolonial ideological constructions, white sentimentality, and white guilt without requiring the viewer to confront their own role in the systems of power that created that injustice in the first place.

Teju Cole, who coined the term ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’ in his 2012 article of the same name, named this dynamic years ago, and it is still with us. In his own words: “The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund.”

In other words, Global North charities, development, and humanitarian organizations, in their performance of white saviorism, are simultaneously benefiting from the exploitative and extractive post-colonial global order and helping perpetuate it by creating a cognitive “vent” through which the moral pressure of existing on the winning side of this system is relieved.
Photography as a tool for empire

So there it is, the ugly truth. International aid uses photography not for storytelling but for extraction.

None of this is new. Photography has been a powerful tool for empire since its invention in 1839, shaping what could be seen, known, and believed about colonised peoples and places long before it decided what could be crowdfunded.

The Decolonial Centre explored this in the article Photography and Colonialism, which explains how Western photographic practices have been used to create Eurocentric ‘visual regimes.’ Using Palestine as a case study, it examines how European photographic representations after World War I othered, erased, or deliberately mischaracterized Palestinians, framing them as disorderly subjects in need of control in times of resistance, and using visual erasure to deny their historical ties to the land.

As anti-colonial theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon famously said, colonialism is a psychological project as much as a political one.

That’s what the American strategist missed. Photography is not just another form of storytelling. It is an inherently political medium, and it serves colonial interests now as much as it did a hundred years ago.
The Grand Bargain’s Lie

I know what you might be thinking: Woah, Paola, slow down.

First you say poverty porn is a fundraising tactic, then a business model, and now you’re saying it’s a political tool? You’re starting to sound a bit conspiranoid.

To which I say: hold my tinfoil hat.

In 2016, the biggest players in humanitarian aid signed the Grand Bargain and promised to move at least 25% of funding to local and national responders, as directly as possible. It was going to be the great correction.

In 2024, less than 10% of international humanitarian funding reached local and national actors at all, counting money that passes through intermediaries first. Direct funding sat at 3.8%. More than ninety cents on every dollar stayed with international organizations, most of it with UN agencies and international NGOs.

So there is the stated bargain, and then there is the real one, the one nobody signed but everyone honors: keep the old architecture intact while performing its dismantling. Say decolonize in the panel. Wire the money north after.

It’s all a clever scheme. The real bargain allows rich countries to quieten and distract from calls for global redistributive justice and new systems of global equity-based power distribution, which gained traction in Global Majority countries after World War II. All while keeping more than 90% of the tens of billions of humanitarian dollars flowing through and to Global North institutions.

How do they do it? Use human rights as a distraction, humanitarian action as a band-aid, and development as the smokescreen.

This is what makes aid imagery so politically useful to the existing order. As Janice Nathanson argues, aid photography often isolates suffering from the political and historical causes that produce it, so audiences are encouraged to see crisis rather than structural injustice. In other words, the same visual economy that turns poverty into pity also helps depoliticize inequality, making it easier to sustain a humanitarian system that manages symptoms while leaving the broader architecture of global redistribution untouched.

The international humanitarian community uses sad pictures of vulnerable people to manufacture moral authority, which allows it to keep operating exactly as it does now.

It makes international aid look essential, its value undeniable, its continuation imperative.

It benefits us, the expensive intermediary layer sucking up 90% of the money, because it makes us seem necessary, instead of optional and redundant.

It takes agency away from affected communities, which is convenient to international NGOs, because it justifies gatekeeping resources from local and national actors, rather than treating them as equal partners. It assumes communities in crisis should be grateful no matter what, which divests accountability to them and spares INGOs the work of meaningfully engaging them and capturing their voices.

It’s a hard truth that most people in the system will never admit: that they need communities to stay dependent on international aid, so they can continue benefiting from their struggle.

The humanitarian and development sectors don’t really want resilient communities. They want to get paid to foster resilience in communities.

This bargain is so enmeshed in the fabric of the system that even people within it, like you or me, will inadvertently contribute to its continuation.
The alternative: pictures that honor agency, dignity, and resilience

But is it true that this genre of imagery is the most effective way to raise money? Obviously not.

Stories of resilience, transformation, and overcoming travel much farther than stories of despair. Agency and persistence in the face of adversity will always be more compelling to audiences than sad stories that flatten the diversity of human experience.

Look at what comes out of Gaza every day, images and videos made by Palestinians insisting on being seen as full people under conditions built to erase them, and how far those images move compared to any appeal a Western agency has ever art-directed.

If poverty porn turns crisis into a spectacle of passivity, then the images and videos coming out of Gaza offer a radically different visual grammar. They reveal a struggle not only over land but over subjecthood itself — over who gets to define the meaning of life under conditions of domination. As Zahra from The Mazaj argues in her article Colonisation is as Much a Psychological Project as it is a Political One, Palestinians’ insistence on visibility and dignity on their own terms is an act of radical resistance to the oppressor’s decades-long attempt at narrative erasure. In that sense, the videos and images Palestinians create and circulate are not just records of suffering; they are acts of self-definition.

And these images are more effective in unlocking generosity than swollen bellies and dusty feet. Susan Sontag warned that compassion is not a stable resource; it must be translated into action or it withers. The problem with poverty porn is not simply that it shows suffering, but that it so often leaves viewers in a state of passivity, where repeated exposure can slide into boredom, cynicism, or emotional numbing rather than solidarity. The sad photo does not just cost the person in it. It exhausts the audience it depends on.

The videos circulating from Gaza confront this passivity directly: they demand that viewers not only witness suffering, but respond: to prove, as it were, that they are still human enough to be moved. — Laila Gutknecht, «Please don’t scroll»: Social Media as Humanitarian Communication in Gaza

These alternatives exist in humanitarian work: plenty of local and lived-experience-led organizations already use visuals that center resilience without erasing pain. They show people as responders, organizers, and political actors, not just as aid recipients — and they don’t bypass dignity or consent in order to inspire generosity.

The way forward

Burkina Faso’s new decree does not solve the politics of aid, but it does expose a basic truth: the people being photographed are not props in someone else’s fundraising campaign. They have the right to refuse that role, and the aid sector has the right to be judged by how seriously it takes that refusal.

The people caught in crisis are already rewriting the narrative behind a system that uses poverty and human suffering as promotional and fundraising tools. Our job is not to overwrite those accounts with prettier, more fundable narratives. It is to stop mistaking extraction for storytelling, and to build fundraising and communications strategies that do not depend on humiliation as a shortcut to compassion.

We are undergoing a collective reckoning, and the new order — the one where mutual aid groups substitute foreign aid and South-South cooperation becomes the new ODA — will not be dependent on white pity.

And it matters that we have honest conversations about this, not only as fundraisers, humanitarians, or donors, but as individuals who make choices about where our money, attention and support go. Our everyday decisions about how to engage, represent, and stay accountable to communities are how we build more equitable and sustainable alternatives to the current system.

▻https://pitchandpurpose.substack.com/p/burkina-faso-bans-poverty-porn-photography
#Burkina_Faso #photographie #photojournalisme #nécolonialisme #interdiction #impérialisme #humanitaire

Lettre hebdo — Le Collectionneur de silences (chapitres offerts), Fat, et une note sur le silence et la violence sur les réseaux dans « fatigue »
▻https://patrickb446329.substack.com/p/lettre-dinformation-vita-nova-n-3

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L’almanach Vermot, l’horoscope et ChatGPT | LinkedIn
▻https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lalmanach-vermot-lhoroscope-et-chatgpt-lionel-myszka-vuz4e
Image proposée par Midjourney à partir d’un prompt écrit par Claude à qui j’ai demandé d’illustrer le texte.

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Lionel Myszka
J’ancre les usages de l’IA là où la formation s’arrête · Créateur de la méthode Portulan · Plus de 1 800 personnes formées

29 août 2026

Nous prenons parfois de mauvaises décisions, qu’elles soient professionnelles ou personnelles. C’est comme ça, c’est inévitable. Consulter l’intelligence artificielle peut nous éviter une partie de ces mauvaises décisions, à tout le moins, nous aider à en prendre de moins mauvaises.

Pourquoi ? Parce que l’IA synthétise tout ce qui a été créé, numérisé et jugé exploitable, c’est à dire une grande partie de l’expérience du monde. Autrement dit, parce qu’elle a ingéré mathématiquement toutes les expériences humaines, on peut dire que la machine produit une sorte de sens commun statistique.

Prenez-vous toujours des décisions rationnelles et constructives ? Moi pas.

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La vie (très schématiquement).

Consultée pour résoudre un problème personnel ou professionnel, l’IA peut nous permettre d’identifier des écueils. Elle devient une béquille probabiliste, un outil de compensation de nos biais cognitifs individuels éclairés par l’analyse statistique, un révélateur de notre ignorance.

Elle est sans doute le meilleur outil de compensation qu’on ait jamais connu. Elle prolonge et actualise d’autres outils de compensations plus anciens : l’almanach Vermot, les prescriptions de l’horoscope, les dictons de grand-mère, les phrases de sagesse dans les biscuits chinois, les aphorismes, les conseils prodigués par les spécialistes, Nicolas le jardinier, Caroline la pédo-psy, Michel le médecin. Elle remplace l’encyclopédie et même le moteur de recherche de Google a plié le genou devant ses capacités de synthèse.

L’intelligence artificielle s’inscrit dans la continuité de tous ces moyens qui ont permis de porter et de transmettre l’expérience cumulée. Cela répond à un besoin fondamental, car on le sait bien, nous les humains, construisons sur le socle du passé et paradoxalement oublions ce passé en permanence. Comme le dit la chanson : “ Un jour ou l’autre, il faudra qu’il y ait la guerre, on le sait bien, (…) on dit, c’est le destin ”. C’est la raison pour laquelle les Hommes ont fini par instituer des commémorations, construire des mémoriaux, ériger des monuments aux morts, écrire des livres d’Histoire, afin de ne pas perdre de vue les conséquences des horreurs que nous pouvons produire.

La religion elle-même a pour fonction de nous rappeler ce qui est bien ou mal, ce qui est autorisé de faire ou de ne pas faire. C’est ce que nous indiquent les commandements chrétiens ou judaïques, les sourates islamiques ou les préceptes bouddhistes. Les hommes, c’est comme ça, ont besoin de guides, de repères, de rappels constants pour ne pas ressombrer dans leur animalité, dans leurs réflexes délétères, dans le repli sur soi et la violence.

Quel rôle l’IA peut-elle jouer sur cette scène peu flatteuse de la condition humaine ? Le pape François avait validé, à propos de l’IA, peu de temps avant sa mort, le texte suivant : « En se tournant vers l’IA comme vers un “autre” plus grand que lui-même, l’Homme risque de créer un substitut de Dieu. » (Antiqua et Nova, 2025). Il y a sans doute dans la religion et la croyance, des apports fondamentaux qui sont prodigués à l’Homme et que l’IA ne peut pas apporter. Sans doute. Mais en ce qui concerne le bon sens et la rationalité, il saute aux yeux que la quantité d’hallucinations est bien supérieure dans les textes sacrés que dans les réponses de ChatGPT, et pas que de manière symbolique. L’IA, par ailleurs, se laisse contredire. Je ne me prends pas à la religion, j’interroge notre refus d’interroger le sacré, en général.

Nous avons tort de mépriser l’IA, qui en réalité nous ressemble. Elle est un miroir de nous-mêmes, un miroir aux mille facettes qui nous renvoie une image moyenne de ce qu’est l’humanité, reflétant sa splendeur et sa déchéance. Mépriser l’IA, c’est nous mépriser nous-mêmes, ce qui, hélas, est une passion triste que beaucoup d’entre nous entretiennent.

J’ose le dire, nous devrions ressentir une forme de gratitude à l’égard de cet outil, un outil miroir que nous nous sommes fabriqués. Entendez-moi bien : je ne parle pas de gratitude à l’égard des créateurs de ces outils, mais à l’égard de l’IA en tant que phénomène advenu. La gratitude, comme le pardon, n’est pas une soumission. C’est un choix. Celui, en ce qui concerne l’IA, d’aller de l’avant et de saisir toutes les opportunités de se doter de garde-fous contre le pire.

Car soyons honnêtes. Qui peut affirmer sans rire que nous allons survivre au monde actuel avec nos moyens intellectuels d’aujourd’hui ? (Monde, soit dit en passant, que nous avons bâti sans l’aide de l’IA). Qui peut affirmer que nous n’avons pas besoin d’un énorme coup de pouce intellectuel et collectif pour sortir de l’inaction et prendre de moins mauvaises décisions ?

L’IA est une main tendue à travers le miroir que l’humanité s’est fabriquée.

la newsletter de l’auteur :
Les Capteurs | Lionel Myszka | Substack
▻https://lescapteurs.substack.com

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A Gaza, des funérailles collectives pour 112 victimes longtemps ensevelies sous les décombres
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/08/04/a-gaza-des-funerailles-collectives-pour-112-victimes-longtemps-ensevelies-so

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Lettre d’information n°2
▻https://patrickb446329.substack.com/p/lettre-dinformation-vita-nova-n2

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#lettre

The Revolution Will Not Be Hashtagged - by BettBeat Media
▻https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/the-revolution-will-not-be-hashtagged

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Every minute spent crafting the perfect post about atrocity is a minute not spent organizing a tenant union, blockading an arms shipment, confronting a politician in person, or building the parallel institutions that can sustain resistance over years, not news cycles. Every hour spent arguing with strangers in comment sections is an hour not spent in the physical company of comrades, developing the trust and discipline that real movements require. The screen is a trap. It captures your attention and returns to you the sensation of agency while ensuring you remain alone, atomized, and unthreatening. None of us is immune to it. Neither am I.

Those in power understand this perfectly. They are not afraid of your posts. They are afraid of what you might do if you stopped posting and started acting. They are afraid of general strikes, of port blockades, of civil disobedience that disrupts the flow of commerce and the machinery of war. They are afraid of organized, disciplined, sustained collective action that imposes costs they cannot ignore. They are not afraid of hashtags. They have never been afraid of hashtags.

The people of Gaza cannot be saved only by our awareness. They need us to make their suffering politically and economically unbearable for those who enable it. They need us to act in ways that matter, not in ways that perform. And every day we substitute the performance for the act, we become complicit in the very atrocity we claim to oppose.

Put down the phone. The revolution will not be hashtagged.

The Majority Hordes Only Disperse When a Body Is Found
▻https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/the-majority-hordes-only-disperse

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Indeed, there is nothing a white supremacist culture needs more than to project its own moral depravities onto those it has classified as not-white. Whether it is pinning the grooming of children on Pakistani men while most offenders are white, blaming antisemitism on Muslims while backing a genocide, or, as we see now, casting a Black man as the face of academic fraud while its white practitioners flourish untouched, the mechanism never changes. Western culture is addicted to projecting its inner demons onto the non-white other, and for one reason only: to preserve the artificial image of white innocence, and the fantasy of white superiority that rests upon it.

Lettre d’information Vita Nova n° 1 - Patrick B
▻https://patrickb446329.substack.com/p/lettre-dinformation-vita-nova-n-1

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Je bute sur l’idée de fabriquer une lettre d’information, je bute régulièrement sur ce sujet, à période régulière, sans trop savoir pourquoi. Je crois que c’est parce qu’elle serait adressée, sans doute. Rien de plus bizarre que d’écrire une lettre adressée à personne. Mais écrire, c’est peut-être aussi ça : on écrit sans savoir vraiment à qui, peut-être à soi-même, ce qui est déjà quelque chose. C’est une piste. Écrire une lettre d’information pour soi-même, pour s’informer de ce que l’on a fait durant une période donnée — un mois, une semaine, je ne sais pas. Une semaine paraît bien. Ce n’est pas trop long, on a le temps de s’en rappeler. Il peut se passer tant de choses en un mois

Note : les liens pour les images en provenance de substack sont très moches je découvre.

#lettre

Why Power Hates Palestine - by BettBeat Media
▻https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/why-power-hates-palestine

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The uniforms differ, the parliaments differ, even the levels of coercion differ. What does not differ is the function: Each of these governments derives some part of its legitimacy, its weapons, its market access, or its debt terms from the same center, and each therefore treats a demonstration for Palestine as a domestic threat rather than a foreign opinion. On the surface, a Bahraini interior ministry and a Berlin senate seem separated by every constitutional difference you can name. However, they are united by the single instinct that makes them both detest the Palestinian flag: maintaining the system.

Who Are the True Defenders of the Christian Faith in West Asia?
▻https://beeley.substack.com/p/who-are-the-true-defenders-of-the

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Those who defended the Christian communities of all denominations were the very groups demonised by the West and scorned by the aligned media outlets as proxies of Iran operating illegally while resisting the sectarian, savage extremist mercenaries masquerading as ‘moderate rebels’.

This article will provide a verified timeline of the Hezbollah interventions to protect and defend Christian communities in Lebanon and Syria from 2013 to 2017. I personally reported from the majority of the Christian towns and villages following savage attacks by the US-UK-Zionist terrorist proxies designed to drive these historic communities from their homes and from the region.

Accessibility and Archives: Lost and Found: The Hans Würtz Collection — Archives & Records Association
▻https://www.archives.org.uk/diversity-allies-blog/accessibility-and-archivesnbsp-lost-and-found-the-hans-wrtz-collection

The Würtz Collection stands as a singular repository of new knowledge, revealing that representations of disability in art long predate modern figures like Frida Kahlo. Within the Collection, distinct groupings—particularly of figurative sculpture—suggest the presence of artists or studios deliberately creating images of disabled people for public viewing, collection, and purchase. Some of these works appear to draw directly from Jacques Callot’s (1592–1635) Grotesque Dwarves series, which likely inspired both porcelain and bone-carved pieces in the archive. We also believe that original prints by Callot are housed within the Collection itself.

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UN official leaked confidential files to ’Israel’ : DSN report | Al Mayadeen English
▻https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/un-official-leaked-confidential-files-to--israel---dsn-repor

Quelle surprise !

A UN official who now leads UNICEF’s Washington office spent years secretly feeding confidential United Nations documents and internal deliberations to Israeli diplomats, according to a new investigation published by Drop Site News on Wednesday. 

The outlet reviewed a hacked archive of emails belonging to Ron Prosor, the Israeli regime’s former permanent representative to the UN.

The correspondence, spanning 2014 and 2015, shows Yahav Lichner, then an official at the UN Population Fund, repeatedly sharing classified reports, pre-release material, and private accounts of meetings involving senior UN officials, including then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

How the archive surfaced
Drop Site News reported that the emails were obtained by the Iranian hacking group Handala, and later published online by the whistleblower platform Distributed Denial of Secrets.

How Anti-Imperialists Copy Empire’s Anti-Arab Hatred
▻https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/how-anti-imperialists-copy-empires

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A pattern becomes unmistakable: Arab is a word reserved for failure. And any attempt to reclaim it for courage, resistance, or steadfastness, will make Westerners step in to correct you. Those positive examples, they insist, simply do not count as Arab.

That absence matters. Arab identity becomes visible when there is humiliation to assign and invisible when there is courage to acknowledge.

Heatwaves, wildfires and the growing climate challenge
▻https://channel4news.substack.com/p/raging-wildfires-and-another-heatwave

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The results are astonishing. Had it happened in 2003 and 1976, daytime maximum temperatures would have been 2C and 3.5C cooler, respectively. This shows just how rapidly our climate is warming.

#Europe is Earth’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising around 0.56C per decade since the mid-1990s - more than double the global average.

As heatwaves intensify, so will accompanying droughts, leading to an environment in which any wildfires that start can thrive.

#climat

Sinistre farce

House Democrats Voted to End Iran War—After Giving Up Their Best Leverage to Actually Stop It
▻https://capitalandempire.com/p/house-democrats-iran-war-ndaa

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House Democrats voted Thursday to direct President Donald Trump to end his illegal war against Iran. Just a day earlier, they gave up one of their best chances to actually force his hand.

Six Democrats provided the decisive votes Wednesday to pass the annual National Defense Authorization Act, rescuing the bill after seven Republicans defected, leaving GOP leaders unable to pass it with Republican votes alone. The bill passed 216–212.

La BRAV-M est invitée à défiler le 14 juillet
▻https://bonjourtsundoku.substack.com/p/la-brav-m-est-invitee-a-defiler-le

Je vais vous parler de la BRAV-M qui est invitée à défiler le 14 juillet. De quoi elle est héritière, de quoi elle est responsable. Je vais vous parler de l’ordre que l’Etat impose et qu’il sanctifie.
Une brève histoire de la violence policière

Je pourrais résumer ça à : au commencement était la violence coloniale. Il faut toujours garder ça en tête : la police est liée à la répression et à la domination des corps non-blancs. La police qui tabasse en manif, elle est héritière de la police déployée dans les colonies. Son arsenal de méthodes et d’armes, il a été testé dans les banlieues.
La police n’a pas été réformée depuis le régime de Vichy. Elle a participé à la déportation de milliers d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants.
La police a commis un massacre colonial en plein Paris en noyant, arrêtant et tuant jusqu’à 300 algériens.
Ce qui est permis sur le peuple, dans son ensemble populaire puisque la police est le bras armé de l’état et la bourgeoisie (au sens sociologique du terme, pensez-y quand vous appelez la police pour des punks à chiens qui écoutent du son trop fort dans votre rue), a été avant ça éprouvé sur les corps non-blancs. Il est d’ailleurs judicieux de rappeler que ce sont bien les personnes racialisées qui risquent le plus face à la police.

En ce qui concerne la BRAV-M, nous parlons bien là aussi des mêmes choses : d’une formation historiquement violente, d’abord sur les personnes racialisées, et d’un changement radical dans le maintien de l’ordre à la française (ce n’est pas une tournure, mais la doctrine : le maintien de l’ordre à la française était un encadrement distant du corps manifestant)(je vous laisse vous remettre de ce qui paraît tout bonnement fantaisiste désormais).

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#ACAB

They Built a Machine That Knows Everything You’ve Ever Done.
▻https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/they-built-a-machine-that-knows-everything

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The Digital Assassin

Imagine a machine. One prompt is all it takes. Your name.

Within an hour, it hands back your life. Reassembled. Every word you have ever typed, spoken near a microphone, or whispered to a search bar. Under your real name. Under every alias. On every forum you thought was anonymous. In every private message you assumed was deleted. Every porn site you visited at 2 a.m. and the specific fetish categories you clicked. Every political rant on a burner Twitter account in 2013. Every therapist you searched for. Every symptom you Googled. Every ex you drunkenly stalked. Every joke that would end your career if screenshotted without context. Every doubt about your marriage typed into a Reddit thread you forgot existed.

Every version of yourself you thought was safely buried. Handed to a stranger. In an afternoon.

This is not a thought experiment. The machine exists. It arrived quietly. The only thing you do not know is whether your name has been on the prompt yet.