Can you interpret a photograph?

The fall of man.

Noam Chomsky, the world’s most famous critic of power structures, photographed at 30,000 feet with Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/zi05lGSrfX

— Shiv Aroor (@ShivAroor) December 19, 2025

And what does Bill Clinton in a hot tub mean?

ADDED: If you drop Bill Clinton in a pot of boiling water, he will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place him gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, he will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, Bill Clinton will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on his face, him will unresistingly allow himself to be cooked into a sumptuous feast for.... Well, I don't know who it's for, but Bill sure looks dreamily blissful.

(See "Boiled Frog" (Wikipedia) for my source material, the version of the apologue in Daniel Quinn's "The Story of B.").

"The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called 'life among the lucrative and louche'..."

"... and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money. Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: 'U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.' Mr. Epstein replied: 'And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.'... Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: 'I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.' This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island. Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s 'ideas.'... The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas...."

Writes Anand Giridharadas, in "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots of interesting stuff there).

"[T]he human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information..."

"... it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.... The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism...."

Write Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull in "The False Promise of ChatGPT" (NYT).

Trump echoes Noam Chomsky says Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald tweets:

Trump echoes Noam Chomsky in correctly pointing out that the only viable, rational, humane policy toward the war in Ukraine is for the two sides to sit down with international help to find a diplomatic solution to end of this carnage and destruction.

Here's Trump's statement:

It doesn’t make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren’t sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement. If they don’t do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage. This is a war that never should have happened, but it did. The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!

"Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, a rage-driven bully, and a shadow of their former selves is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents..."

"... from their in-group circles. A lengthy 2003 New Yorker smear job on Noam Chomsky headlined 'The Devil's Accountant' — at the time when he was a rare and vocal critic of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — described how Chomsky was once a credible voice but, sadly, has now 'become increasingly alienated from the mainstream' because he 'has no ideas to offer.' Chomsky's 'thinking has grown simplistic and rigid,' the author wrote. She quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that while he once admired Chomsky's stable ideology and noble commitment to principle, he is now going basically insane, describing his views of the war in Afghanistan as 'the gleam of utter lunacy piercing through.' The article also claimed that while Chomsky's criticisms of Israel has alienated his liberal following, it has caused him to become popular in far-right anti-Semitic circles. That article also described Chomsky as an angry bully, prone to outbursts of rage against female colleagues to the point of making them cry, being humorless, and in general just plagued by mental pathologies which accounts for his unwillingness to accept liberal pieties. Sound familiar? In 2018, I compiled many of those personality-driven and mental health smears that had been weaponized back then against Chomsky because, at the time, other liberal outlets — such as The New Yorker and New York Magazine — were already using the same mental health and personality-based themes to expel me from the precincts of liberal decency due to my rejection of their Russiagate conspiracy theories, which had turned into a virtual religion, including at The Intercept."

Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Corporate Media's Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them/My responses to The Washington Post's article and Daily Beast's questions about accusations from The Intercept that I have 'endangered' their writers" (Substack).