An excerpt from Alan Sillitoe’s The Widower’s Son, WH Allen London 1976, pp 111-14

In the last few days he’d forgotten such things, and fell to brooding on how many men and guns they’d lost, though even that didn’t take away the image of Nicole stripping off her cotton step-ins in that dimly-lit bedroom with its walls of blue-flowered paper.

He stared beyond the narrow line at the first green water-streaked land of Flanders. The British always swore terribly here. Military police shunted them parallel to the main flux, and his gritty eyes opened by looking at the flowing grass and nondescript red-roofed cottages. This is not me, he said to himself, trying to ease Oxton’s boots from his feet. And then: this is me – before scrambling from the gharry to lie in the tadpole ditch till the Stukas had gone. They concentrated more on the coast – luckily – because the plain must have looked as if it were crawling with ants. There were too many to blast everybody. Visibility was fair over the flat land. It was dry and warm, and they were slowed by crowds the closer they got to the Channel.

The burning lorry was heaved off the road, bullying Redcaps cursing blue murder at the chaps till it was done. The wounded lay patient enough. They’d have to wait till someone got them out of it. He felt his spirit wearing away as the truck pushed [N] orth. He’d been primed full to bursting by that last quick firing from his twenty-five pounders. He only wanted to be back on them with unlimited ammunition.

It blackened his heart to realise they had no more guns, not knowing where the next piece was coming from. Maybe they’d dish up a few obsolescent garrison shooters when they got to England, or send them off on some forlorn stunt as footsloggers. The back wheel kicked up a stone. A gunner would rather lose his life than his gun, but they’d been told to spike them and that was what they’d done.

He felt as if he’d been a whole lifetime married to those guns, and now he was exposed to any stray German who might come along in his tank or roar down from the sky in his deadly toy plane.

With the heat of the engine and so many bodies it was an effort to keep the eyes open and the back straight. He answered the chaps’ questions as if he were God Almighty and knew all the answers, when he really was no wiser than a babe just born. Keep the brain clear for all queries, tactically mature, strategically adept. But he wasn’t made for a retreat, having been trained and mentally built to stay in behind those lovely guns till they blew up in his face, or he was shot dead by the first enemy to get close.

Better to die, but orders had to be gulped like acid. You perished if you stayed. You rotted when you left. An artist cannoneer and master gunner couldn’t give up his guns and be the same man ever again. Yes he could. In five minutes he could if he got another gun. But he half dreamed in the heat that he was still with the guns: flesh dissolving with their hot metal when all was split asunder in some final violence, and buried under the soil without apparent trace, staying till the sweet steel corroded, and his dead flesh twisted around it and rusted, and together they melted till nothing remained but God’s clean soil.

When he shook himself, he was a mile or two closer to the sea, which he imagined he could smell above the odours of petrol and sweat. The superlative technical education on which he had prided himself, and in the glorious light of which his father would live forever, hadn’t prepared him for the fact that without his guns he’d feel as primitive as an ape.

He felt shame at registering such emotions, and wondered whether Watkins was equally clawed by their loss. Nobody had liked what had happened but, as they’d often reminded him in a friendly or jocular fashion, they had different backgrounds and attitudes, and so took it in a more philosophical way. Perhaps they didn’t think much about it, looked more towards the future than the past. but by pondering brutally on what had happened he might learn something. Certainly he would rather perish than lose his guns again. Such a thing couldn’t be allowed to happen twice in a gunner’s lifetime.

All kit and tackle had been chucked on to a heap, and blown up at the last minute. They had what they stood up in, and what was inside them.

Oxon had amassed presents for his mother. ‘Never mind,’ William said.

‘It’s all right, sir. It’s me she wants. I’ll explain to her. But I’ve still got a French handkerchief. Bought it in Amiens. Real lace. It doesn’t weigh owt, and it takes no space up. Not much bigger than a stamp. So she’ll get that. She loves things from France, sir. I had some beautiful stuff in that suitcase, though.’

They made their way towards rising heaps of smoke. [ HE KILLED THE FUTURE BY LETTING EACH MINUTE ROLL BY UNDER ITS OWN STEAM ].

He felt that they were driving into a holocaust, but he looked around calmly.

They queued by the East Mole.

He could never understand why some were blown to pieces and he was all right. But a soldier stops craving to understand such things.

It takes too much time and concern. You’d never solve it, anyway.

If you try to puzzle it out while the bombing is going on, you might destroy the sixth sense that seems to be protecting you.

Question things, and you get killed.

And if you want to puzzle it through in safety, it’s even more impossible because your senses have forgotten what it was like.

So you end by calling ist fate or Kismet, or just plain good luck. In any case, it takes too much time to figure things out. And time, as his father had always said, was of the essence.

At Dunkirk, he couldn’t have been more right.

WITH THANKS TO RUTH FAINLIGHT & FAMILIES

John 🦘🌏🌍🌎☢️🔥🌐

01082026

5 William St

Littlehampton

Saowff Oz-trail Y

.. the Christly Easter Sacrificial Trispheric Longitudinal Time-zone 🤮

Nah

ONE lwr-case lttr OR 1 numeral OUT and you’re auslese, trocken-beeren-auslese cum Botrytis cinerea (known as noble rot) – cookered – which is of course you Australians will instantaneously recall almost as bad OR PROBABLY WORSE THAN gassing with Captain James Cook

Date of Publication December 22 2025

Tracing the historical shift from symbolic AI and information filtering systems to large-scale gener
ative transformers, we argue that [ LLMs are not epistemic agents but stochastic pattern-completion
systems, formally describable as walks on high-dimensional graphs of linguistic transitions rather
than as systems that form beliefs or models of the world ]. By systematically mapping human and ar
tificial epistemic pipelines, we identify seven epistemic fault lines, divergences in grounding, parsing,
experience, motivation, causal reasoning, metacognition, and value. We call the resulting condition
Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evalua
tion, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment. We conclude by outlining
consequences for evaluation, governance, and epistemic literacy in societies increasingly organized
around generative AI.

𝜶 AI diffusion is imposing sweeping harmful impacts on critical resources and the planetary biosphere, on a much greater scale than has been previously recognized. That’s the conclusion of our latest piece on the global energy and emissions footprint of AI, which we just released this morning. This was a labor of love that tooks months of writing and research, and I want to thank my co-author @Jesse Damiani for the phenomenal collaboration. I think we’ve created something special here and I’m proud of the final outcome. Nonetheless, we emphasize in the piece that our results should be seen as a first-order approximation, not a definitive final answer, especially because we used a very macro analysis that relies on many assumptions and eschews detailed microlevel inputs, but also because Big Tech itself deliberately hides a lot of critical data that would allow researchers and the public to get a better sense of AI’s ecological footprint ❦

𝜶 The specifics can be found in the post, but here are the main headlines and conclusions: [w] e estimate that the AI industry will be responsible for at least 1.1% of global energy consumption and for 1.2% of all global GHG emissions this year. These are higher figures than most conventional estimates because we use the most recent and updated data for 2026, because we define AI as a tech industry that encompasses way more than just LLMs like ChatGPT, because we adopt a lifecycle analysis that goes far beyond electricity consumption and tracks primary energy footprints and all major upstream and downstream impacts of AI diffusion, and because we explore the impact of AI through new sectors and methods that have been ignored or marginalized in prior studies (for example, we have a first-of-its-kind global assessment for this sector on the emissions associated with land use changes from data centers and other facilities supporting the AI infrastructure boom). In contrast to the message of sustainability that many leaders in Silicon Valley are promoting, we demonstrate that AI is a major global industry that’s already imposing historic consequences for the planetary biosphere. Too often, conversations about the harmful ecological impacts of AI are framed as something that’s going to happen in the future. In reality, AI is already reshaping the global energy and emissions landscape right now. It’s almost certainly the dominant driver of new global energy consumption and emissions, and if it continues at this rate and the corresponding financial bubble keeps inflating until 2030, the AI industry will rival the ecological footprint of steel and cement, the world’s dominant industrial polluters ❦

𝜶 Our piece is comprehensive but also imperfect in many ways, and we acknowledge the shortcomings and limitations that come with this kind of analysis. In many places, we leaned on the side of caution and conservative interpretations. For example, we excluded the upstream energy footprint of the roughly 80 GW of natural gas power plants in the US that are being built to support data center expansion, thus in effect significantly understating our case. But in other places, our analysis includes macroeconomic rebound effects from AI diffusion that we know are going to be controversial, especially because they haven’t been quantified at a global level like this before. And yet, even in the case of rebounds and the Jevons Paradox, we used conservative assumptions that we believe are still understating our case (for example, we excluded by definition any potential rebounds or backfire effects outside the primary energy footprint of electricity consumption). Nevertheless, we are fully aware that there’s enough content in this piece to spark a million debates that will last for years over gross abatement factors, silicon wafer electrical intensities, and land use emission footprints, to name just a few. That’s the main reason we wrote it. Not because we thought the conclusions we reached are ironclad and irreversible (we ourselves acknowledge that our analysis has weaknesses), but because we hoped to spark a paradigm shift in how people talk about the energy footprint of AI. And our hope is that by sparking such a shift we may eventually arrive at better public policy that can establish much stronger controls and regulations over the AI industry, even though the current political moment makes anything like that fairly improbable in the short run ❦

𝜶 I wanted to close on a few notes of context and perspective. The issues involved here are very deep, complex, and usually don’t have perfect solutions. How should we measure the Scope 3 emissions of an industry? There is no universal agreement. Walmart reports four times the carbon emissions footprint of Amazon. If you didn’t know any better, you would think Walmart is so much worse for the planet than a peer competitor which in every other way is roughly the same size! But the real reason for the gaping discrepancy is that Amazon has adopted a very restrictive (and many would argue useless) accounting standard for Scope 3 emissions: it simply excludes the entire upstream manufacturing footprint from its third-party vendors, even though over 60% of all e-commerce sales on the Amazon platform come from independent sellers. By contrast, Walmart includes the manufacturing footprint of major third-party sellers on its carbon ledger. As a result, Walmart looks way worse than Amazon purely because of radically different accounting standards, not because it’s actually that much worse for the planet. These same kinds of issues are relevant for this piece, especially the Scope 3 analysis of the downstream impacts in the final section. But the broader point is that one can adopt different standards, conventions, and assumptions and arrive at very different answers. We obviously think that our analysis is a substantial enhancement over the common assumptions in the dominant discourse on AI, but that doesn’t mean that our assumptions are perfect or can’t be questioned. They certainly can be, and we actually questioned them ourselves numerous times throughout the piece ☙

𝜶 This analysis is partly aimed at experts and researchers, but since we’re obviously posting this on social media, it’s also written in a way that can be accessible for the general public, at least to some extent. There are deep yet balanced theoretical discussions in here that should be of interest to everyone. But we don’t want to overpromise in this regard either. Unit conversions and equations are generally omitted from the written text, but they are always there behind almost every conclusion. If you’re hoping to find the specific number of 167,000 TWh as the 2025 primary global energy consumption in The Energy Institute’s Statistical Review World of Energy, well you won’t. EI gives that figure in exajoules, so what you’ll find instead is 600 exajoules, and only by converting that to TWh will you get the numbers that are shown in our piece. For experts this is all trivial and obvious stuff, but if this world is new to you and you’re trying to follow along with our conclusions and sources, these kinds of nuances could prove to be somewhat annoying barriers, though hopefully only temporary ones ❦

𝜶 Beyond this piece, I’ll be doing a whole series of media appearances on AI in the coming weeks and months, where I’ll be talking to people about many aspects of the AI story that weren’t in focus for this post, like the economic and political impacts related to jobs, the stock market, geostrategic rivalries, AGI and ASI, and so much more. AI is obviously a huge topic right now, and I want to play my small part in driving the public conversation forward and towards a more productive direction/ Erald Kolasi 29072026 Somewhere-the-fuck ☙

Relayed by John Blundell Australia with thanks to the writers Erald Kolasi → Jesse Damiani on behalf john blundell @Google @LinkedIn,’s John Blundell3 @Substack,’s and @greeneconomyact @XComms’ DAILY READERS – @Wordpress the Dogsbody-mechanomorphic ideostructure allowing me to pump long & obviously vitally important long essays concerning the hopeful deflection & deferment per (the greatest hands-on active environmental management project in the 10,000 year history of Civil-societies and City-states)/ of the 2029 global apocalyptic Systems-fail (Diseases, Heat-storms and raging-blubbering-jibbering Dementia in human adults).

Altman Cailliff-hornier Social Darwinist YECH and for the Love of Human Sanity

From the esteemed Ellen Burns..

My courses this fall will be getting a major revamp to protect students brains from not being used properly. This time last year, I had a more laissez-faire attitude to students use of AI.

It was banned in my classroom, but I told students that I wasn’t going to waste my time policing their work. It was their decision if they wanted to learn.

After one year of experimenting with this technology myself, I’ve changed my tune. Corporate LLMs are — by and large — a menace to healthy brain use, unless used in extremely narrow and specific ways.

But it’s not fair to ask students to recognize that in a world where economic, educational — read, ‘grades’ — and social pressures are all stacked against them to outsource their thinking to AI.

My classroom will be technology free, and intentionally designed in a way that promotes the active development of the most rudimentary reading, writing, and thinking skills.

The argument that this kind of classroom design will not prepare my students for an AI ladened work-world no longer moves me. It’s not hard to pick up these tools later in life and learn to use them in a work capacity, nor is there any shortage of people teaching the skill.

What is hard — and what we are completely failing our students on —is learning how to read, write, and think. The argument that your classroom activities are not imaginative enough if an AI can easily do them, also no longer moves me. I’ve tested the hypothesis. I don’t agree.

Possessing the rudimentary skills of reading, writing, and thinking for yourself are essential pre-requisites to using AI in beneficial ways, be that in the workforce or elsewhere.

We are not focused enough on those skills today, and far too focused on AI.

READERS MAY ALSO SEE ⭢

Another excellent read https://www.ft.com/content/bdb3b820-905b-431e-82c0-386535755af1

‘‘This is a moment in which what we most need is the humane intelligence of free human minds. It is a time for academics and faith leaders to maintain a fierce independence from the AI industry’’

❝ I haven’t read the post you restacked (it looks quite juicy though) but I’d like to understand your hypothesis about mathematics, which youve mentioned a few times now.

❝ It seems to me that you are saying that mathematical truth is itself an invariant set, but what dynamical process is it invariant under?

❝ The piece you mentioned about “persistence across perspectives” suggests a relational process to me, but in itself this doesnt completely explain it. It’s not like mathematical truth changes depending on the people between whom the interaction is taking place (although the spirit of the mathematics certainly seems to)

❝ If the energetic heart is fractal and mathematical practise is heartfelt practise, then this suggests that mathematical truth is invariant under the flow of… love?

❝ The concept that it feels you’re pointing to is ‘heartmath’

❞

John 🦘🇦🇺🌏🔥

27 Jul 2026

🥸🥱😴💤🥸🥱😴💤🥸🥱😴💤

The aphorism & shibboleth – hey that’s 2016 @TurnbullMalcolm cum Justin Trudeau ‘Blackface’ neoliberal Renaissance-warrior-prince grade nimbleness & agility, John, state of the art my man – TANR is sourced @ CEP Worldwide faxed newsletter in early 1997 after my wife Rosanne Mary Joyner, spellbindingly convinced by the suasionᵛ & emoluments of my half-arsed hippie @LiberalAus brother Givan Chris Blundell (CBP-B, Adelaide SA, possibly) deserted me to skin me for half a million dollars.

Huh?

While 6 or 7 years ago Mr SJ Morrison pushed aside parts of the Constitutional federal social contract that faciltated the Federation and to my knowledge NOBODY IN THE FOURTH ESTATE LET ALONE THE ALP RAISED A SQUEAK OF COMPLAINT my man Australia has yet to reach the spectacular state of arrangement & sovereignty you suggest.

Phew

J 🦘🇦🇺🌐🔥

^hey Young People there are always new words to FUN with https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/therefore-mathematical-symbol-on-white-260nw-1815608576.jpg (∴) Pápa John IS gonna have 2 look that one up he’s self because it’s really important that you know what you’re writing about, rite, right, uh-settra (oops there’s another Bogan Labor Party banger &c)

❛ You two are on fire this morning. I send my heartiest most loving and FIERCEST congratulations to you both.

❛ The busted fruit grower man from Ashton John Blundell your servant and a shitload of other people’s servant as well.

❛ Wrong NUMBER?

❛ Well, it’s a cool message anyway

❛ You don’t need if you’re allowed to need to unsubscribe to unsubscribe from about 25,000 emails that I keep getting..

❜

JB-MONDAY

Lundi (derived from lune, meaning moon)

Montag (derived from Mond, meaning moon)

Lunes (derived from Latin dies Lunae)

Lunedì

星期一 (Xīngqīyī, literally “week one”)

月曜日 (Getsuyōbi, literally “moon day”)

월요일 (wol-yoil, literally “moon day”)

Понедельник (Ponedel’nik, meaning “the day after Sunday”)

27072026

GENUINELY PATRIOTIC AUSTRALIAN MUMS & DADS WHO WOULD SOONER DIE THAN SUCK OR IN ANY WAY MANNER FASHION OR STYLE CAPITULATE 2 THE VILE & EVIL USA PLEASE POWER DOWN YOUR COMPUTER PHONES 1:25 THROUGH 1:35 PM TODAY

John Blundell

Now 34 years stripped of his fundamental liberal democratic society CIVIL & POLITICAL RIGHTS for shit – and to PERPETUATE the violence, hatred & gangsterism of Australian & other organised crime operatives

The internet involution worldwide

Australia 🦘🇦🇺🌏

https://substack.com/@ellennoraburns/note/c-301562998?r=22vgiw&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

❝ Like everyone else, I’ve seen discussions of Substack’s AI detection tool all over my Substack feed; that it doesn’t work, that it disproportionately punishes and affects certain groups of people and not others. I share all those worries, and more.

❝ That said, I can’t help but feel our collective efforts to live in a better world are woefully unambitious.

❝ I don’t want to live in a world where the use of AI writing becomes as ubiquitous as using the internet and nobody polices that writing.

❝ I want to live in a world where people have access to an education that teaches them how to read and write, because those skills are essential and rapidly dwindling. AI cannot and should not replace those skills.

❝ I want to live in a world where economic hardship and social isolation don’t drive people to use and engage with AI in a desperate last attempt to ‘make something’ of themselves.

❝ I want to live in a world where tech autocrats don’t get to decide how ordinary people behave and we all waste our time sitting around arguing about whether Substack should then police who succumbs to that behaviour.

❝ Our biggest problem today — and it has existed since long before AI —is the gradual eroding of the human imagination and spirit to dream bigger and demand more

❞

THEN THE SCHMALTZ, CHICK ☞ ER, MAAM

♂ And sometimes when we touch
The honesty’s too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I wanna hold you ’til I die
‘Til we both break down and cry
I wanna hold you ’til the fear in me subsides ♂

J 🇦🇺🌏🔥