Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don’t, and borrow the difference from people who aren’t old enough to vote.
— Justin Wolfers, Economist, quoted in Letters from an American, October 21, 2026
Fluid Imagination
An eclectic blog, written & curated by Kyle Callahan.
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Trump’s support for Putin is unique in American history. Previous administrations have made deals with erstwhile adversaries, as Nixon did with China, and given up on support for failing allies, as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But never before have we outright switched sides, let alone supported an aggressor while vilifying that aggressor’s victim.
What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started. Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the aid goes beyond intelligence sharing that has helped Iran target U.S. forces. Russia has also reportedly been sending Iran explosives and weapons components.
What would Republicans be saying if a Democratic president were supporting a foreign dictator even as that dictator was helping another nation kill American troops? They would be crying “treason.” But this is all apparently “fine” with Trump.
— “The Traitor in Chief,” Paul Krugman
[T]he Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.
The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.
A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.
— “October 18, 2026,” Letters from an American
Nils Ollrogge reported a bug in the assoc_array library and had a patch to fix it too, but that code was too obscure for me to follow, so I did what I preach: use modern LLM tools to help make sense of it all.
So this is an LLM-assisted branch which makes the code more readable by splitting up some of the larger and hard-to-read functions. The code was then run through a test harness in user space, which not only confirmed the bug Nils reported, but found three other bugs too – all going back to the very first commit adding this library back in 2013.
— “Linux kernel source tree,” Linus Torvalds, kernel.org