Scientists Crack 70-Year Fusion Puzzle, Paving Way for Clean Energy SciTechDaily
My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth Gates Notes
COVID-19/Pandemics
Earned Mistrust: How Public Health Forfeited Trust During COVID. What It Would Take To Earn Trust Back Johns Hopkins
Oxford study reveals how COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe illness News Medical
Climate/Environment
Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star Ars Technica
Global Toxics Talks End with Progress Toward Protections for Human Health and the Environment CIEL
China?
US and China open trade talks to ‘de-escalate’ tariff war France 24
🇨🇳 If you can fully understand and explain this photo from China, then you can grasp the course of history in the 21st century. pic.twitter.com/QiIecyUlfs
— Dott. Orikron 🇵🇹 (@orikron) May 10, 2025
China’s J-10 ‘Dragon’ shows teeth in India-Pakistan combat debut FT
India-Pakistan Row
India and Pakistan agree to a ceasefire, but will it hold? Here’s what to know CNN.
🚨🇮🇳🇵🇰 BREAKING: CNN says, Pakistan struck India so hard with drones, that India agreed to a ceasefire. pic.twitter.com/9UmobN1vBZ
— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) May 10, 2025
And (drumroll) India and Pakistan accuse each other of violating ceasefire hours after reaching deal Associated Press
Note Paksitan did say Trump and Lammy played a role, and see this also from the Guardian, so the tweet further down is curious: Indian foreign secretary confirms ceasefire reached with Pakistan – video. Subhead: In a very brief press conference, India confirmed both countries had agreed to an immediate ceasefire through US-mediated talks
After Trump and Rubio claimed they mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, India’s foreign ministry contradicted them, saying the ceasefire was arranged directly between the two countries
They lie about everything pic.twitter.com/iugyYvdxkm
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 10, 2025
South of the Border
Mexico sues Google over ‘Gulf of America’ name change BBC
‘Who’s the next Bolsonaro?’ Brazil’s far right faces a reckoning Andolu Agency
US invasion of Panama was first step toward the ‘forever wars’ Responsible Statecraft
European Disunion
Slovak PM vows to help Putin block EU move to reject Russian gas Ukrainska Pravda
EU lowers protection for wolves as tensions grow over livestock attacks RFI
Romania’s elites are riding the populist tiger George Simion presents a seductive opportunity UnHerd
Old Blighty
Revealed: The constituencies in England and Wales where women are most likely to die young Daily Mail
UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans The Register
Israel v. The Resistance
Children in Gaza are dying from hunger and malnutrition.
Shame pic.twitter.com/OPjbjynyvZ
— Emelia (@vikingwarior20) May 9, 2025
Gaza death toll tops 52,800 as Israel continues genocidal war Andolu Agency
US confirms plan for private firms to deliver Gaza aid despite UN alarm BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
Kremlin insists arm deliveries to Ukraine stop before agreeing to ceasefire ABC News
Ukraine war briefing: US embassy in Kyiv issues warning of ‘potentially significant’ air attack The Guardian
France to Use Frozen Russian Assets for Ukraine Howitzer Upkeep The Defense Post
North Korea’s involvement Russia-Ukraine war exercise of ‘sovereign rights’: Kim Jong Un Andolu Agency
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Google will pay a $1.375 billion settlement to Texas over privacy violations The Verge
Luna Introduces Bill to Repeal Patriot Act, Restore Privacy Reclaim the Net
You can now claim your piece of Apple’s $95 million Siri privacy settlement Engadget
Imperial Collapse Watch
US Sees Increase In Cancer Incidence Rates Among Adults Under 50, New Study Finds Onlymyhealth
Second radar outage for Newark Airport in 2 weeks leaves more flyers stranded CBS News
Trump 2.0
Do These Libertarians Regret Voting for Donald Trump? Reason
Tax the rich? Slash spending? Republicans wrestle with economic priorities in the Trump era AP
Judges have a warning about Trump’s rapid deportations: Americans could be next Politico
Trump’s latest Fox News hire looks even worse than Pete Hegseth The Guardian
DOGE
DOGE has devoured Musk The MAGA revolution has come for Tesla UnHerd
Grading DOGE: Some achievements, several mistakes The Hill
USDA, DOGE demand states hand over personal data about food stamp recipients NPR
Democrat Death Watch
How Democrats’ efforts to retool their message have become cartoonish NY Post
‘Pod Save America’ host: Democrats have to ‘rip the f‑‑‑ing Band-Aid off’ on Biden The hill
Why the “Abundance Agenda” Could Sink the Democratic Party The Nation
Immigration
Trump signs executive order allowing immigrants free flights out of US Andolu Agency
Trump signs executive order launching self-deportation program The Hill
Turkish Tufts University student released from immigration facility BBC
White House considering suspending habeas corpus, Stephen Miller says Axios
Our No Longer Free Press
The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Press Freedom And The Media Religion Unplugged
Trump’s Plan to Give Right-Wing Propagandists a Global Megaphone Free Press
Mr. Market Is Moody
Era of U.S. dollar may be winding down Harvard Gazette
The Stock Market Got What It Wanted From Trump. Why It’s Finishing the Week Lower. Barrons
JPMorgan CEO Says a Mild Recession Is the ‘Best-Case Scenario’ Right Now — Here’s Why MSN
AI
Google AI better than human doctors at diagnosing rashes from pictures Nature
Pope Leo identifies AI as main challenge in first meeting with cardinals Al Jazeera
What’s your pet saying? AI could help translate animal sounds into words Daily Mail
Scientists develop AI tool to predict biological age and cancer survival using just a selfie Euro News
This is WilD!!
This new AI video generator is crazy..
Twin AI can turn your photos into realistic talking videos using just one image and an audio clip.
This is 100% AI… it’s lip syncing is so human like and realistic
step by step tutorial: pic.twitter.com/4m9eCJq3rF
— Atul Kumar (@atulkumarzz) April 11, 2025
The Bezzle
Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky sentenced to 12 years for “unbank yourself” scam Ars Technica
‘Chaos ensued’: California State Bar accuses testing vendor of fraud amid backlash SF Gate
Guillotine Watch
La voiture la plus chère du monde, la Rolls Royce Arcadia Droptail coûte 35 millions de dollars ! 👇 pic.twitter.com/8mNIooVRu7
— 75 Secondes 🗞️ (@75secondes) May 28, 2024
The $300,000,000 Boeing 787-8 private jet with a charter rate of $70,000 per hour. ✈️ pic.twitter.com/qqyWBTHSUl
— Earl Karanja (@Earlsimxx) April 5, 2018
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
“Scientists Crack 70-Year Fusion Puzzle, Paving Way for Clean Energy”
Says this headline which keeps appearing every coupla year since about the 70s. Wake me up when they have a finalized reactor in production.
The body of the text strikes me as not warranting the headline.
The very old problem is “heat loss through insufficient confinement of electrons and nuclei in magnetic confinement fusion systems”.
What was accomplished was a significant (10-fold, per the text) improvement in the speed of computation of simulations of plasma behavior in numerical models of magnetic confinement systems.
The heat loss problem has not been solved, contrary to the headline, but the improvement in computation speed makes researchers hopeful that a solution, presumably to be discovered through exploration of the parameter space of possible magnetic field configurations, is closer to discovery.
The headline strikes me as click-bait.
Wait, ChatGPT does not have a solution? I am shocked, shocked that it can’t even hallucinate an answer to this problem.
You don’t want to use a Ukrainian ChatGPT. No matter what question you ask it, its offered solution will always be more money and more weapons.
You’d expect the American version to come up with the same results, really.
Sadly the way of all (most) media these days. If the headline had said “Partially solving one of the problems involved in developing one of the tools that might collectively enable fusion power one day, if it turns out to be physically possible/efficient/safe within the limits of our technology” it would have been more accurate, but less appealing to readers.
When I read this: “The heat loss problem has not been solved…”
I ceased reading any further about this pie-in-the-sky B.S.
More importantly, and not considered in the article, is that the 10x speed-up in design prediction will be able to more exhaustively search the design space, and provide a more compelling argument that the current issues that prevent fusion are a material science one (i.e. nothing that can be manufactured economically enough that can withstand even the reduced heat loss/radiation/plasma collision) and not necessarily a reactor-engineering/design one.
If it turns out even all novel designs predict more heat rejection/leakage than the confinement / plasma facing materials can tolerate, then funding should be prioritized to finding a way to exhaust the design/search space for those materials before testing those novel reactor and fusor designs.
Amen. The scam must continue however because “SCIENCE”.
Explained to Dad today about how “scientific proof” is not same as mathematical proof.
The latter is where something is an identity and must be true by definition (like how a balance sheet must balance etc, for MMT etc). The former is where we simply make an arbitrary decision that something else is so unlikely then it must be true (the 6 sigma thing). The discovery of a possible earth-like world was exposed to this by my fave YouTuber CoolWorlds in science. TL;DR the chances of this world hosting organic like are in in fact no better than 75% – rubbish by scientific standards).
I’m sick to death of the “guardianisation” of science – I pick on them because they have been much worse than the right-wing (a point Yves has made). I have headed off two articles in last year after a letter to them made it clear my research would torpedo their entire editorial line w.r.t. the article.
Just something for you to think about from the book “Life as No One Knows it” by the theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker.
“Importantly for our discussion in this book, what is significant is not that ideas can be written in math. Instead, it is that the abstraction we uncover—which may be written in the form of mathematical laws that explain life—should have high explanatory power. In the philosophy of science, there is a lot of debate about what constitutes “explanation,” but in general we might consider the explanatory power to be higher for theories that clarify more facts about the world, change surprising facts into everyday knowledge, make better (more accurate) predictions, have fewer assumptions, are testable by more observations or experiments, and as the famous Occam’s razor holds, they should also be based on a relatively simple set of elements.”
Thanks for that. This sounds not inconsistent with Thurstone’s 1920s theory of choices….namely that there are VERY few assumptions and the “proof of the pudding is in the eating” reigns supreme, namely, does the survey predict well?
The distinction brought back a wonderful memory. I am a chemical engineer by training, and had a mathematics professor on my committee. I studied reactions that could be recorded visually, and they displayed behavior consistent with a sub-critical Hopf bifurcation, i.e., the sudden appearance of large oscillations as a parameter was changed. I had a model for the process that had to be solved numerically, and it showed a sub-critical Hopf when the parameters were consistent with the physical experiment. I stated during my final orals that there was a sub-critical bifurcation, to which the math professor replied with a smile, “So… you have evidence.” Indeed, I lacked a mathematical proof. And I was so happy to have had that professor on my committee to forever seal the distinction.
So you don’t like electricity? Or surgeons scrubbing up before they operate on you? Or solar panels?
Whilst the tone of the response (and name of the commenter) strongly suggest you’re correct to criticise, as my response above shows, there are people who “do” science properly and don’t say something is proven until it reaches 6 sigma.
Even that now deserves a post (if anyone is willing to do it but I’m nnot asking for homework – if my mind were less fuzzy I’d do it myself) since Bayesian statistics based on priors of “what we already know” have already pretty much made mincemeat of the story that there’s an Earthworld in another system.
BTW I’ve been quite sceptical of how Bayesian stats have been done but sometimes you really can’t ignore what it suggests. So I’ve NEVER (And anybody can check) been a cheerleader for this method. But sometimes you must go with the data along with what we know. If I were a betting man I’d say this is a total false positive.
My beef is not directed at you, it’s at the neoreactionary tending to the Pol Pot idea that science, apparently because it was once (over)revered, is now bad.
Yep gotcha – never thought it was but just wanted others to understand :-)
Let me start with what I don’t enjoy. I certainly didn’t enjoy my visit to the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima last week. In fact I am still having problem sleeping the last few nights, although I am sure things will get better once I’ve gotten over the experience. Thank you science? Or maybe that’s the fault of engineers and FDR with scientists remaining above the fray?
I am going to skip over large scale climate change, colonialism, overpopulation, industrial waste, etc all enabled by science because tomes have been written about them and let the following line do all the work: “Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.” And all of that would not be possible without …. science.
Last but not least, here’s another thing I really will HATE, and that’s when all the things that you’ve mentioned start going away a couple of decades from now due to resource depletion, thus leading to civilization collapse and its attendant problems. Should I be enjoying the process going the other way?
Science is an endeavor that’s not independent of human beings, and because the later are nothing but a bunch of scums (myself included) whose ultimate skill is ultimately the rationalization of each and every action, please forgive me for viewing science through a less than benign set of lens.
As Terry Flynn suggests science observes phenomena and attempts to draw conclusions, these are hypotheses.
Hypotheses are then evaluated data observed and analyzed. The rules are then stated and risks assigned to accepting and rejecting the stated hypotheses.
Then with low enough risk of accepting the false statement engineers try to apply it to useful solutions leading to systems or hardware.
Rending science to worth is hard.
DoD R&D appropriates five or six kinds of development money. The most risky is basic science, least risky develops prototypes
Thanks for adding valuable context to what I said! :-)
The thing that really made me question my methodology was when they they explained alternative hypotheses concerning this planet…….up til then, I was exposed to a very watered down (perhaps nonsensical) version of Bayesian Economics in my health Econ days……..”place a flat prior” was their answer to anything and everything not already known. Which made me go “then why use your stuff at all?”
But I’ve gained a new recognition of Bayesian stuff (now I see it being used correctly) in “hard” sciences. And thus 75% just does not cut the mustard. I’d be happy to be proved wrong and they find on next scan from JamesWebb or whatever that they have much more confidence. But for now? Watch this space…..
Hi Terry,
As one that early on here on NC, took exception too the use of Bayesian stuff, because not only of its Newtonian treatment of the human condition, but in my mind and some others, its post market based treatment [narrative] of all of humanity. Not to mention it is the foundation of Orthodox economics and how well has that been working.
Agree that in Royal Sciences various optics in maths can help shape thought and perspective albeit always need to be constantly reconciled moving forward. I think this is where mythos and science socially collide. For whatever reasons humans like a level of security in life for without it they feel insecure, past is indicative of making stuff up.
Sometimes I ponder the effect of all of humanities emotions in constant flux and how that shapes today and the future e.g. some of the best clinical medicine came out of WWII via need and experience.
Sorry waffling now as is my penchant, but per the economic side – https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/?s=Bayesian+Economics
Real science almost by definition is ‘wrong’, in the sense that everything must be falsifiable. (and is expected to be tweaked when new insights come to bear, as in Newton’s ‘Laws’ getting additional terms added for cases where v approaches c. Doesn’t mean Newton was wrong, just incomplete, since Newton had no way to think about v -> c.) If you’re insisting on ‘TRUTH’, go visit a church, or talk to an economist.
Kinda what I said above.
Shhhh we’re not meant to admit that. Let’s just stick with a certain level of significance…..be it Classical or Bayesian :-)
Right now I am awaiting “science based” BS from our local Reform Party PLC (owned by peopke like RFK jr) who want 75% of all ADSD/autism diagnoses cut……..bet my Reform sister didn’t bother to see THAT coming…….
A candidate for the Pons-Fleischmann Award in fusion journalism. ;)
Yes. Perhaps not quite as often as the headlines announcing the latest promising treatment for Alzheimer’s, but I treat them the same way.
Fixed it for ya. In one of my early undergrad years Ralph Lapp, a Manhattan Project Alumnus, came to our campus to talk to the Physics club. In addition to preaching his anti-nuclear war message he estimated that commercial fusion power would be with us within about 30 years. That’s now pushing 70 years ago.
Nuclear fusion is the power source of the future, and always will be!
This latest dramatic breakthrough means that commercially viable fusion energy is only 20 years away from reality, just like it’s been for 70 years.
I happen to think that fusion research is important, although there does seem to be more than a bit of overselling going on in this particular article. As an engineer, I’m always more convinced progress is being made when the project is passed computer modeling, and is instead, up and running. Here’s a article about a real milestone on a functional reactor (it’s a pilot plant providing enough power for about 100 homes):
China makes thorium-based nuclear energy breakthrough using past US work
https://www.mining.com/china-makes-thorium-based-nuclear-energy-breakthrough-using-past-us-work/
Kudos to that team, that’s some good work there!
So my question is, why doesn’t America have a similar effort? Or are we going to spend all of our limited national resources figuring out how to cut taxes for billionaire oligarchs and mega corporations again, and make even more trillions vanish into the Pentagon?
Thorium isn’t really weaponizable the way that Uranium is. Why waste time on something that can’t be a weapon when we can work on something that can?
Facetiousness aside, I’m increasingly of the opinion that there’s a lot of science where our progress is kind of stalled out until we start putting real labs in space and on the Moon. Which has thorium in some of the mare flows.
I also don’t think we’re going to master fusion until we’re in microgravity. I don’t have any scientific evidence or mathematical formulae in that regard, just a hunch that there’s some key bit that we’re overlooking that will become more obvious when we re-tool everything for the micro-g environment. Plus, when it accidentally goes Boom it will be well away from our environment.
Would really like to see the U.S. doing more research in that regard.
With regard to thorium reactors, in America that effort was lead by Alvin Weinberg (director of Oak Ridge during the molten-salt reactor experiment) who was eventually pushed aside when he also questioned the safety of PWRs:
Alvin Weinberg Questioned Safety of PWR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8yuyk3Ugw
Alvin thought that the reactors designed for subs were safe, but the upsized reactors designed for power plants were not. Of course, he ended up being proven right about the potential problems with large PWRs.
re female mortality. I really think they should be looking at the elephant in the room: spouses and their deaths.
I have hard data (in my 2015 book) about how widows deal much better with life than widowers (who typically relied on their spouses for social networks). But the effect is lessening over time and the spousal connection is becoming a bit more “balanced” – in other words IMNSHO look at husbands’ mortality in conjunction with this (and indeed hubby’s general health so don’t use too much historical data but the effect is still there).
Women still generally deal with spousal death better than men. But that still raises questions about what’s happening to the hubbies. As a gay guy I look at this with an unbiased(?) clinical eye but I sat in on countless interviews with older people over a 10 year period in the UK and that pretty much perfectly predicted what happened amongst friends of my parents (in terms of if wife dies first or vv etc).
TL;DR If your hubby dies youngish because of life down a mine or some horrid manufacturing job then your “female effect” will protect you but only so much. Thus why female mortality is less bad in posher areas. The Aussie data suggested Aussie women got a new lease on life after the bloke was gone…….but that’s a topic for another day.
Astute insight, Terry. But today is the perfect day, at least in America, to consider this issue. My guess is that it’s one less person that a woman has to mother.
True. Though, without betraying confidences, I’ve seen the opposite too (albeit, far far less often, as I say from my “official” research)..
I’ve been surprised at how many widowed men rush to acquire a new support system as soon as possible. And I wonder if the time they take to do it has shortened quite a bit in recent years, as we become a shameless society, with no aunties tut-tutting about waiting until after a ‘decent period of mourning’.
But older women are very wary about men looking for ‘a purse and a nurse’.
Widowed women are not necessarily looking for another ‘Mr Right’, a lot of the time they are just enjoying the new serenity and freedom to do as they wish.
Maybe divorced women are the ones looking.
It’s the victory of hope over experience.
Dollar Dilemma
It powers global trade and secures U.S. privilege—but the dollar’s double role is fraying. As geopolitics shift and deficits deepen, can the dollar remain both sovereign and supranational?
https://www.beyondwasteland.net/p/dollar-dilemma
Thanks. A clearly-written summary of the dollar dilemma that I can share with my PMC, TDS-afflicted sisters. IMHO, it fails however in two respects:
1. It doesn’t consider the possibility/necessity of other currency(s, like BRICS) replacing the dollar. This might be forgiven as the essay does propose a twenty-year rebalancing as an alternativeto Trump’s Samson strategy, but this raises the ultimate question not considered:
2. How is a twenty-year plan agreed in a system built around quadrennial elections?
In fits and starts? Must the fits be wars??
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback!
1. The prospect of a BRICS currency akin to the Euro remains remote for now. As I tried to suggest, there’s little incentive for China or the broader BRICS bloc to “solve” America’s dollar dilemma. Why should they pull the U.S.’s chestnuts out of the fire when the current arrangement—however fraught—still serves many of their strategic interests? Letting the U.S. stew in its own contradictions may be the more advantageous path.
2. You’re absolutely right to question the feasibility of a twenty-year economic strategy in a system governed by four-year election cycles. That’s why I introduced the scenario explicitly as a thought experiment: “While such an idea is politically implausible in the U.S., imagine…” The point was to underscore the temporal impossibility—while the U.S. could theoretically provide dollar liquidity to the globe via a financial account deficit, but that there’s no viable economic, not to mention political, pathway to get there, due to the time it would take to make such a transition.
The central pillar of Western planning is “central bank independence.” In theory, this provides continuity across 4 year electoral cycles.
The oligarchy thinks it can use market power to coerce the future and has seen no counter indication directly affecting decisions makers in 80 years.
It took forty years and two world wars for the original Populists to get effective popular control of finance, we benefit from that beta testing of what does and doesn’t work, and for what period in the face of what resistance.
The term of a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is fourteen years, an amazingly long time in the current political environment. I see not the slightest crevice of an opening for popular control of finance there. Talk about an entrenched oligarchy.
In “Conjuring Hitler”, Preparata paints a damning portrait of Montague Norman, longest serving head of the Bank of England.
Poisoned financial terms, not just the reparations merry go round, but a deliberately destructive return to gold standard while manipulating international currency flows, strategically imposed at Versailles to both preserve the Prussian Aristocracy at the expense of Weimar, and ensure recidivists militarism in Czechoslovakia and Austria.
An avowed antisemite, as well as all around racist, he dropped Schacht in and out of Weimar and its Nazi successor, while funding the White Russians to dictate strategy designed to fail them, all towards the Mackinder vision of keeping Russia and Germany at one another’s throats. A financially managed foreign policy Thorstien Veblin saw though in 1920, predicting it was intended to and would lead to another war.
Fascinating book! Thanks for the suggestion. Online at archive.org here:
https://dn790004.ca.archive.org/0/items/ConjuringHitler/ConjuringHitler.pdf
I picked up some great vocabulary from it: heirodule immediately brought any of a number of NATO and EU officials to mind!
Anecdotally, when I worked in a private bank in Dallas, one of the members of the Dallas Fed was around a fair amount to talk with the higher-up muckety-mucks. Pretty sure he was on the Board of Directors, but since I knew not to pay too much attention too it I’m not 100% confident in my memory in that regard. Further, affiant sayeth nought.
It’s all a big cabal of collusion and consultation at the top. Not sure what it would take to flush things out and return our markets to being a tool for economic growth, rather than a mechanism for maximizing value extraction.
Robert S. Kaplan did cut quite a figure while president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank:
https://archive.ph/j7dMW
https://www.qwant.com/?q=Robert+Kaplan+Dallas+insider+trading+hedge+fund+kingpin
“Mexico sues Google over ‘Gulf of America’ name change”
If Sheinbaum filed this in any International court, then Mexico would win hands down. If she filed it in the US, then forget it.
I dunno about AI pictures being great but one of my oldest friends is a consultant radiologist.* He would NEVER have AI do the job for him, but he is open to the possibility that it can spot certain things that an over-worked radiologist might miss which warrant a 2nd look (by a HUMAN).
It’s all in the interpretation. Like why I NEVER over 20 years in choice modelling took the “maximum likelihood solution” as THE solution. 9 times out of 10 there was a lot more to things……but the software (in the larger datasets) could alert me to weird stuff more quickly than my eyeballling of data so enable me to “go fishing” in the data earlier than I otherwise might have done.
This ties into yesterday’s discussion over Smith and quoting medians. I eventually discarded even medians as a benchmark once I started seeing the overall distribution of quality of life in major Anglo cities. (A biggish mode in top half but a distressingly large 2nd and sometimes 3rd mode below the median.). This kinda stuff is why psephologists get elections wrong increasingly often.
* For any Green Wing fans out there, Dr Alan Statham is closer to a real person than you might think. Radiology is full of nutjobs as my friend freely admits.
That piece reeks of a PR stunt. Of course image recognition algorithms work better on pictures than human docs, who use more and different information for diagnoses. There is a lot of money pushing AI-inevitability narratives.
Not the least because it looks like a beer commercial. Subtle, lol.
My working hypothesis is that, with a carbon fart about the size of a BYD, AI will help technical area experts address the various sorting problems technical fields confront.
Unless we manage this carefully it will result in the intergenerational decline of technical area expertise as the AI will normalize over time while the world changes and experts die.
I think western aviation, dependent now on design software from a generation ago not being able to reproduce the hypersonic capability of its competitors, not so dependent, is a reasonable illustration of the trend.
Yep. IMNSHO there is a basic level of numeracy and literacy that all humans should have before playing with AI etc. We’ve dropped below that level.
We are dangerously reliant upon tech to an extent that we don’t have the skills or experience to deal with problems. And that’s before we even get to AI.
Personally, despite illness, I’m gonna act on this. Gen X are ignored but can be enticed to vote. Younger ones think that memes change things *sigh*
Agree…see this already in health care where doctors are at the mercy of drug company statisticians.
EU wolves–
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael explores mythically humans’ attitudes toward other creatures after Adam took a bite of the apple:
In his (Adam’s/humanity’s) arrogance, he might look around the garden and say to himself, “This is all wrong. Why should I have to share the fire of life with all these creatures? Look here, the lions and wolves and foxes take the game I would have for myself. This is evil. I will kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the rabbits and the grasshoppers and the sparrows take the fruits of the land that I would have for myself. This is evil. I willl kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the gods have set a limit on my growth just as they’ve set a limit on the growth of all the others. This is evil. I will grow without limit, taking all the fire of life that flows through this garden into myself, and that will be good.”
Changes in biomass over last 100,000 years.
Henry Moon Pie. Thanks. The remarkable thing about conservatives like Ursula von der Leyen is how much they believe that killing things (like a million men in Ukraine) will resolve matters — no matter how benign Ursula seems to think that she is. Also, in their hierarchical thinking, wolves are awfully inconvenient — intelligent, stealthy, careful of their family groups.
This caught my eye: ‘Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the results of Thursday’s vote.
“With growing wolf concentrations in some areas, we should give authorities more flexibility to find balanced solutions between the aim to protect biodiversity, and the livestock of local farmers,” she wrote.’
Ahhhh, freedom. The Spanish lawmaker claimed that her figures showed that the 23,000 wolves in the EU attack 60,000 livestock a year. That’s nothing. But, as you point out, by means of the quotation, for the control freakery of human beings, one missing sheep means a massacre is to be had.
I note an article above that claims 53,000 dead in Gaza — if anyone believes that figure, they will also believe that figure of 60,000 attacks on livestock.
Here in Italy, which supposedly has the largest population of wolves in the EU — some 4,000 — the region with the most wolves is said to be the Undisclosed Region. Wolves are seen regularly in the ring of cities that surround the Chocolate City, and there are reliable reports of wolves stopping in the Chocolate City, to say hello, I suppose.
The response has been a mix, but no one is proposing mass culling. The governments do try to reimburse farmers for livestock killed by wolves. Culturally, the wolf is assimilating as one more intelligent animal among many — foxes are held in high regard in Italy, and golden jackals have moved into the regions around Venice to assume a niche something like the coyote.
To grow, one must accommodate many others. Otherwise, human beings will end up starving in a desert (an eventuality that seems increasingly likely).
Ursula von der Leyen has got a grudge against wolves ever since one killed her favourite pony Dot back in 2022 as mentioned in that article. Rather have hunters go after the one that killed her pony, she want to encourage people to slaughter the whole species-
https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-campaigning-hard-against-the-wolf/
Rev Kev: Yep, both articles mention Ursula von der Leyen’s brief against wolves.
It is well known that donkeys are good protection against wolves. So she might have bought an asinello.
I suppose, given the quality of her leadership and her general slick ambition, she wouldn’t want to be photographed with an asinello.
Asses are notoriously intelligent. Someone else (hhhmmmm) seems not to be.
Frankly, life under Ursula and her ilk is simply different kind of awful than life under Joe or Donny. She’s Hillary, but European and slightly more incompetent.
From the article, it sounds like Ursula isn’t interested in following the science.
She’s a hard-core Taker in the language of Ishmael.
Naomi Klein has co-written a new book about Leavers and Stayers. The Leavers are the billionaires who are actively planning to depart for Mars or Elysium and don’t care if they burn up the Earth in the process. We’re the Stayers, of course, with no ticket to ride.
Maybe Useless just has a thing for killing because it’s in her blood and she sees it as a genuinely positve act so it’s not just wolves but Palestinians and Russians as well, and probably any conveniently passing stranger.
> I note an article above that claims 53,000 dead in Gaza — if anyone believes that figure, they will also believe that figure of 60,000 attacks on livestock
Do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that you yourself believe that the true figure for dead in Gaza is substantially less than 53,000?
Pretty sure that means neither number is based in reality, rather it serves political purposes.
I read it the opposite way, that the 53k is understated, and the 60k is overstated. As mrsyk put it, they’re both politically useful figments.
Re: Trump signs executive order launching self-deportation program (The Hill)
To where will he be deporting himself?
What if those who decide to self-deport turn up to the airport with their free ticket only to find a set of handcuffs and leg shackles awaiting them?
Watching some Jeopardy episodes this week, one of the answers was to name the island where the then twice defeated Napoleon was banned and sent to live out his days…
Wherever it is, I hope it’s one way!
Qatar, it appears.
– ‘Trump’s Plan to Give Right-Wing Propagandists a Global Megaphone’ – Free Press
“… The VOA charter states clearly that the agency must “serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news” by being “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.” The global outlet has operated with the understanding that its reporting is independent of any strong-arm political pressures from the White House.”
“Providing One America News Network to our global audiences makes a mockery of the agency’s history of independent non-partisan journalism,” a former employer of the agency that oversees VOA told NPR.”
This is from ‘Free Press,’ co-founded by the late Robert McChesney, not *The* Free Press co-founded by Bari Weiss, so I’m sure the author is sincere in his concern for “democracy” and “independent media.” That just makes it all the more irritating in my view.
We reported on this yesterday, including resilc’s remark: “I was involved with overseas ops for 25 years+. I have yet to meet someone who ever listened to VOA…..”
Can’t say I’ve ever listened to it, either, but the common understanding among the people I know that know about VOA is that it has always been “Right-Wing Propagandist Global Megaphone”.
As a young American living abroad, I tuned in every night at 18:00GMT for the Jazz program. It was transcendent. The host Willis Conover was a fantastic DJ with deep Jazz knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America_Jazz_Hour
The news was fairly objective in the 80s. Combined with BBC, Radio France and Radio Moscow, one could be relatively well-informed. I miss the days of shortwave radio. Hearing those first few notes of ‘Take the A Train’ meant that an hour of bliss was ahead.
Today’s antidote is identified as a “grey rodent.” It is not. Lemurs are primates.
It’s a “grey rodent” with tags: “bear”, “giant panda”, and “lemur”. :)
It turns out it’s not just about gas.
I wonder if the fuel from Westinghouse actually comes from the enriched uranium that Russia still ships to the US. If I recall correctly, Westinghouse fuel rods are square shaped through the middle while Russian ones are hexagonal. Don’t know how the comparability issues are handled.
Europe has 19 Russian reactors and has been moving away from Russian fuel.
Fuel rods are in specifically designed assemblies for each reactor type.
Article has picture.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/eu-launches-initiative-to-accelerate-european-fuel-supply-for-vver-reactors/?cf-view&cf-closed
After reading that DOGE is trying to get personal information on snap clients. I spent 20 plus years as a AFDC and food stamp worker. No non citizens get any benefits from these programs. NONE. With no birth certificate or valid SSN they can not get anything. Now with that said. The children born in this country as citizens ARE eligible. This is who they are after. In the snap program these children have the income of the parents applied to their eleigibility level. So they are getting usually less than full citizens who almost never have any income. Compared to people that are migrants. Where everyone in the house hold works. Almost all food stamp recipients have income applied to the food stamp amounts they receive. Cidtizen households rarely have any income. In non-citizen home everyone works. They have to
Work. Even grandma will collect cans and redeem them for cash. The kids deliver nrewspapers. In short
They all have income and report it. Lots of companies employ illegal immigrants. Fast food places are notorious for employing illegal immigrants. Almost entire staff are illegal immigrants. Construction companies, concrete work, car washes, lawn services and agriculture. The government knows this . The IRS has all information pertaining to who works where. If someone is using a fake SSN or a child’s SSN which is very common. A report is generated. So if they want to find these persons they can, but it’s more of a good story to pretend that they are getting something for free. Not that American companies hire them so they come here to work. It is much better to tell people this big lie. Truth is that the immigrant workers do all the work that Americans won’t, so I wonder how the cats will washed or hamburgers fried
Or crops will be picked? This is the real story. The racist Trump administration and FOX news want to tell
The lie.
They’re not just eating the cats, now they’re washing them too?
The indignity!
As we saw during his campaign, Trump’s a mean man when it comes to fries and burgers, and he can always be upskilled to wash the cats before they become burgers. It’s about matching the man to the job and then having a fully qualified catwashing trainer just fill in the gaps.
During Covid, before getting RIF’d, DOL contacted my HR bc someone in another state had applied for unemployment using my name and ss#. This person had worked at Lowe’s three years before being let go. Had they not applied for benefits I never would have known, bc everything on my end was correct – W2s, SS. It’s an employer scam, our illegal immigrants problem. This person was employed, taxes supposedly withheld that never made it to the state or feds.
It’s nice of them to maintain the destroyed ones too.
The frozen assets are likely to become very, very hot as Russia ploughs its way through Ukraine. One thing the Collective West has failed to notice is just how aware the former colonies are of the theft of their assets, human, material and monetary, by the colonisers. It also seems unaware that militarily it is in a very weak position relative to non-Western military and nuclear powers, many of whom are concerned about the odd current day issue or two, like genocide, proxy wars, election fraud, regime change, the resurgence of slave markets, the continuing outright theft of natural resources, inter alia.
The Europeans may have a subtle combination of psychological and material difficulties in paying up the frozen assets and the interest owed as caculated by the Russians. The US will find it much easier to pony up as it scrambles out of conflicts it has managed to create in the South China sea and the Middle East, and wisely backs away from the defence of Europe encouraged by a sprinkling of hazels on a couple or ten of Europe’s major cities and the Baltic hamlets.
It is as if the West has been fated to chose leaders, elected and unelected, stupid enough not to recognise that it is settling its fate in the killing fields of Ukraine and the genocidal pit of Gaza and has neither the will nor the wit to get out of either. War is a funny business when backed only by words and not weapons and it is rather unfortunate that so few of “our” political élite have failed to make that connection
As is my daily burden, I dipped my toes in the sewage and checked the Guardian’s website for news of the Collective West’s latest flight through Fantasyville, but it’s just the same old same old, banging on endlessly about a thirty day unconditional ceasefire exceot now Alberich says he is prepared to kit himself out in new greens to have a little tête à tête with Putin if he, Putin, will agree to a thirty day unconditional ceasefire – which, if you think about it for a moment, is itself conditional
Apparently, Starmer says, “the position we’ve got to today is absolute unity across a whole range of countries around the world including the POTUS,” and then repeats himself, presumably for emphasis, that the ceasefire has to be for thirty days and that it must be unconditional. So, the vast minority of countries around the world have stumbled back to the same agreement they had with each other for about the last fortnight. It’s as if we are governed by a group of master strategists who have encountered vast, impassable difficulties in translating, “Nyet”.
I think this latest demonstration of gormlessness is just further evidence that the Europeans have completely lost contact with reality, and I hope that POTUS recognises that Europe’s stubborn commitment to magical thinking gives him his last chance to bail out of a situation he should have kicked behind him the nano-second he became President. POTUS has bigger things to think about than the Ukraine – like negotiating a trading relationship with China which will work for both countries, and normalising its relations with Russia – and he can simply ignore the SMO and leave it up to the collective dunderheads of Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/11/ukraine-ready-meet-russia-only-ceasefire-agreed-zelenskky
It’s so realistic, that I expected an alien to jump out of her belly at any moment.
Same here. Her front seemed all weird and not human like at all. Here is something that might be more enjoyable-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzfe757GJCU (10:10 mins)
The loss of energy star will be big actually.
It’s the only way to know the efficiency and there for cost to operate of most of the appliances we buy.
This was impressive, but in just a few cases I had the odd, faint feeling that the face of the woman had morphed into something slightly different just after transitioning from the photograph to the video. Some morphological features (such as the shape of the head or the placement of the eyes) appeared to me to be very slightly off — a bit as if looking at somebody who resembles another person really a lot, but is not that person.
It’s the Uncanny valley effect-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Your brain will watch it going uhuh, uhuh until it sees something “off” and then it goes aww, hell no!
Did you also have that impression upon seeing that 10mins video of old photographs morphed into motion pictures? In a few cases I had the vague feeling that the moving images were not the same person as in the photo.
Yes, I had the opposite reaction from what was probably intended. It’s clearly just a bunch of still images smoothed together and there’s no real understanding of motion or anatomy. The ribs are the most obvious sign as they immediately become more prominent and move around slightly (hence the ‘Alien’ effect).
Every AI video generation tool I’ve seen has had the same problem. None seem to have been trained on videos or motion data (which would be orders of magnitude more expensive than models based on still images). One of the most obvious signs is variation in things that shouldn’t change – pot plants morphing between different shapes, posters on the walls moving through different forms, people changing their skin color or physical features in non-physical ways…
Uncanny valley is accurate – the combination of realistic still images with highly unrealistic motion effects is quite jarring and veers into nightmare fuel territory very easily. You can also see obvious training data biases in evidence (ribs immediately becoming more prominent = disproportionate number of underfed female models in training data).
Looked real sus to me. It was either way too smooth (making facial bones disappear), or the smile/age lines cut too deep.
The more AI tries to go for realism, the worse it looks. Going for a odd sci-fi effect is where it has the most traction.
Improved and fine-tuned, this will finalize the demise of the acting profession regarding a wide range of movies featuring standard hollywood faces and bodies (not Federico Fellini’s extras!), cookie-cutter scripts, boilerplate dialogues, and standard scenery.
In other words, for most of the commercial production out there.
I wondered myself years ago if we are heading to a future where all actors and actresses will be digital and you will not be able to tell the difference if they are real or not. They would have test audiences to give input if the “actress” had boobs too big or if the hair of the “actor” was too long. Don’t laugh. That happened to Tom Hanks a coupla years ago. People could ‘rent’ a version that they could inter-react with on their device and you would have fan clubs. I think that anime art is a step in this direction. And real life actors and actresses? For them it will be stage plays and low budget films I would guess.
Not just actors, but also the scenery… The sector is already well into that with computer-generated imagery, but even those movies that do not need those special effects typical of sci-fi, catastrophe flicks, or explosion-laden action series, resort massively to green screens for backgrounds even for mundane sceneries such as modern cities (because shooting in situ has become cumbersome and expensive).
I am so afraid for young girls and boys. Imagine this type of doctored photo turned film with speaking being passed around the playground. There is so much more negative than positive with tech tools.
Everything in context. I’m not referencing tech such as the iron plow or the tech of a wheel.
I don’t believe they’ll be able to replicate the close-up shot: our eyes are all over the features of a human face, and in my view that’s the fascination of movies. Medium to long shots I guess will be routine to replicate – but not the intimate stuff, when the tiniest movements in the face are registered on screen.
If it means ejecting charismatic actors from the Marvel Universe and driving them back to material that needs blood-in-the-veins close-ups, I’m all for it. But still, I can’t imagine the John Wick franchise, or all that Jason Statham crash-bang-wallop, would maintain their success without the real presence of the lead actors’ charisma.
My eyes were nowhere near the girl in the AI tweet’s face. Seems they chose that particular girl wearing that particular shirt for a reason: Distract the gaze from the not-so-great lip movement and facial expressions.
Yes, given how much of Hollywood has become extensions of action or sci-fi frachnises.
But acting is often what happens between actors.
It will be a while before AI can do anything like this scene (the key bit is through 2:40):
For completeness, if you wind up watching the segment above through the end, this part, the end of the movie, is cut off:
Or this, for another charged exchange:
Agreed.
But we will run into new levels of legal bargaining and fights when e.g. indies, high schoolers, film schoolers will use AI for voice-only acting for lack of money (dubbing with good actors is expensive). We won´t be able to stop that in the long run.
And that will change the landscape of radio drama (as I knew them) / fiction podcasts completely. Without a single actor people will write and edit these things at home.
While the US might not have a genuine dubbing culture, other countries do.
At some more or less distant time in the future however the issue of replacing most of the entire film work force by AI will happen. And that is going to be stuff of a conflict even worse than caused by industrialisation.
Including a total reconfiguration of IP laws and everything that comes with it.
People creating these things for fun at home will probably be put into prison.
On the other hand particular countries will have a sealed off culture perhaps using film only done with AI. And even if this yet appears speculative as a sci-fi novel I am sure China is already working on how to solve this for their own domestic entertainment work force.
I am thinking of Doug Henwood´s May Day interview with Vijay Prashad which I posted yesterday where Prashad speaks about China´s culture of planning, as we all know, 60 years into the future.
Controlling the development of AI will be a huge chunk of that.
I wasn´t convinced of the new AI images for world-building as they were presented last year in Vegas I believe. But immediately Tyler Perry announced to put on hold his planned investment into a brandnew studio complex. I don´t know what happened to that since though.
besides the clear unreality of the video, i bet the ai video generator would do a lot worse with someone who wasn’t a thin woman with instagram face. if i asked it to make a photo of my grandfather sing and dance it would probably flop, as it mostly has training data of a specific type of person.
PopeWatch: Leo XIV is doing everything he can to provoke neo-convert (and Catholic-authoritarian-adjacent) J.D. Vance.
The Pope’s first surprise / official foray out of Roma was to a shrine that his order has maintained in Genazzano, one of the scenic towns southeast of Roma:
https://www.vaticannews.va/it/papa/news/2025-05/genazzano-visita-papa-leone-xiv-santuario-madonna-buon-consiglio.html
Noting that the miraculous icon seems to have come from Albania (!!!).
I’m sure that “Justice” Sammy Alito is foaming at the mouth.
This sort of appeal to basic / popular Catholicism is a continuation of Pope Francis (who, after all, took the name of one of the Catholic Church’s superstar saints + bodhisattva).
Meanwhile, Opus Dei is twisting its barbed-wire thigh guards. (Do a search on-line for Opus Dei self-torture gear!)
As a bad Catholic and a bad Buddhist, I sometimes scratch my head at how Roman Catholicism can maintain itself as such a mystical mess. But if you have ever been to Assisi, well, you’ll get its popular appeal. And now Leo goes to Our Lady of Good Counsel, an oracular figure, for advice…
My parish has a retired Augustinian priest who says scheduled Masses and is “helping”. He is full time.
He has met the Pope over the years in the order. Our priest is very devout toward the Eucharest, St Augustine preached about grace and mercy, somewhat mystical.
That said I don’t agree with some such as “just war”.
Leo XIV may be good for the church in the U.S.
He spent years as missionary, in Latin America.
’75 Secondes 🗞️
@75secondes
La voiture la plus chère du monde, la Rolls Royce Arcadia Droptail coûte 35 millions de dollars ! 👇’
That big reveal reminded me of something that I read about earlier American life. How new cars were delivered under covers to show rooms so nobody could see what they looked like and the windows would be covered too for the showrooms. People would crowd around them for the big reveal. Still, that was an earlier time. Like when people used to be lined up around the block waiting for the latest iPhone to be released – to see if it had rounded edges or not.
This is probably something for ignorant nouveaux riches.
There is a point when the price is so outrageously disproportionate that the simple fact of splurging that amount of money does not signal “filthy rich” but actually “filthy rich and stupid”, because a good of the same quality/luxury level/technical sophistication can be had for 20 times less money (still a princely sum).
Free flight to a country of your choosing! How exciting. A word of caution for Ameriweary migrants, however; those of you residing in my beloved Mid-Atlantic might steer clear of Newark when contemplating this offer. I’m sure the good people at PHL will take much better care of you.
Or better yet consider JFK. Maybe you can snag a one way trip on the ol’ Guillotine 787-8 and leave in luxury on Uncle Sam’s many many dimes. Worth more than just a band of cash in hand. I don’t know, maybe there’s a price cap on the executive order there; I didn’t read the text, I doubt the president did, and at the rate things are going probably nobody actually wrote it so that’s about all the due processing it deserves.
The photo of the hammer & sickle above a Gucci store is interesting. Trouble is, was it done with AI or, essentially a fake photo, or was it Memorex? It’s getting hard to know for sure. So sad that we can possibly be so easily fooled and manipulated.
How about a Gucci store in Shanghai?
Yeah that’s enough all by itself.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”
‘Earl Karanja
@Earlsimxx
The $300,000,000 Boeing 787-8 private jet with a charter rate of $70,000 per hour. ✈️’
That has got to be one of the most blandest interiors that I have even seen. The only colour to be seen was a bowl of fruit, a few cushions and the stewardess passing by. It was just all greys and beige and other nondescript colours. Nothing to grab your eye but mostly flat surfaces.
This is perfectly in line with what is called “Scandinavian style”, which has been raging with devastating outcomes in interior design for a number of years.
“Scandinavian style” is all about natural light because we have it only 6 months of the year. Thus the light earth tones and preference of natural materials, since they come alive and create a world tiny details in that precious natural light.
You can keep your over-decorated, over-saturated, claustrophobic hellholes, thankyouverrrymuch. I’ll take clean, plain and happy any day over the whirlwind of chaos the rest of world calls decor.
As I said, that fashionable interior design based on beige, grey, and tan, is called “Scandinavian design” — sometimes “Danish design” — but when I think about Marimekko, I strongly suspect that utterly bland and boring style is not what you will find in Danish, or Norwegian, or Icelandic, etc, homes.
You should once look at the kind of interior and furniture catalogs in countries like Germany. The “Scandinavian design” they tout is indeed depressing.
Thanks, I barely noticed the design details, but will take a second look. I just saw a bed, and briefly wondered about seatbelts.
I like it. Bland helps me go to sleep. To each their own.
RE: Energy Star Demise
This quote from the article caught my attention:
“But Joseph Goffman, who headed up air pollution programs at EPA under President Joe Biden, thinks the decision aligns with the Trump administration’s other actions—its regulatory rollbacks, its cuts in personnel and its clawing back of clean air and water grants.
‘What I think we’re looking at here is an absolute distillation of the ideology of this administration, which is a thoroughgoing hostility to anything that the government does that helps people,’ Goffman said. ‘If you want to destroy the relationship between the public and government, you’re going to target the Energy Star program.’”
I hope Goffman is wrong, but at this point I am afraid he might be right.
Once again, DJT does not have authority to overturn a legislative act, but our conscripted congress is MIA.
RE: Repealing the Patriot Act
I confess to never having heard of Anna Paulina Luna. She’s young, stylish, Mexican-American…
Luna believes this has produced “the most sophisticated, unaccountable surveillance apparatus in the Western world.” And she believes it is necessary to act now to rectify this situation.
“It’s past time to reign in our intelligence agencies and restore the right to privacy. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is using ‘security’ as an excuse to erode your freedom,” the legislator is quoted as saying.
Her bill has the backing of (bless their hearts) the ACLU.
Repealing one of the most nefarious pieces of legislation of my lifetime? Sign me up! Clearly, Ms. Luna must be a rising star in The Squad?
Nope. Florida Republican. But of course, the House Progressives will back this bill to the hilt. I guess we’ll find out.
Whoever is quoting her should know that one reins in, as a lively horse for instance
Yup, but so far the Patriot Act mentality reigns.
Luna was one of the loudest voices and hype-merchants in , which makes me suspect her of being Palantir-adjacent.
The congressional side of the UFO-scheme was run by Matt Gaetz (married to the sister of the founder Anduril, the big drone and anti-drone Palantir spin-off), with assistance from Mace, Luna and Burchett. The last congressional hearing, much hyped by and featuring Luna, was dominated by mysterious claims from Palantir pet journalist Michael Shellenberger.
My point: there must be a Palantir reason for the attack on the Patriot Act and given their centrality to the surveillance state, it’s hard to see it being benevolent.
My first sentence regrettably lacks “whatever the heck the UFO story of 2017-2024 was”.
RE: Boston dynamics robot. Do you love me? / ;)
Star Wars scene, utube, ~1+ minute.
Activate the Droids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjCLlsOvKrQ
Perhaps a video of the robot dancing on the graves of Palestinian children would be more realistic.
Well, we do have the IOF creatures with their social media uploads, and they’re all too realistic.
Imagine what Busby Berkley could do with robot dancers.
Makdisi Street YouTube 1:28:13
“We were conscripted into the Zionist project” w/ Avi Shlaim
I have viewed several in depth interviews with Avi Shlaim and always found them informative, even enlightening, this is no exception. He along with Ilan Pappé and earlier Benny Morris (though as Avi explains fell out of the group) are the principal New Historians of Zionism of the last 150 years.
Alice in despair at seeing another starved Gazan.
I share the despair. I stared at the photo of the starving child for a long time today.
The truth burns, and may it burn down the status quo and its injustice.
As the algorithm goes, another interview with Avi Shlaim, this time with Chris Hedges from 8/14/24:
The Arab Jew Experience Exposes the Myths of Middle Eastern Antisemitism | The Chris Hedges Report
Every pop-science fusion clickbait article from the last 20 years is identical. They are embarrassing and deeply unserious. It is modern alchemy, it is the pursuit of a perpetual motion machine, it is to be ignored and mocked.
The article on Romania is quite good.
The rich in Romania will never be populists in action but just like Trump, in words.
And obviously the young man positing that Romania is the bastion of the west in Eastern Euope, such a load of nonsense. Probably never noticed that Romanians are among the most religious (cough, cough superstitious) in Europe. Mothers still spit on their young children against the evil eye. Never mind that the young man has not visited Russia for instance, never mind China, to see how not modern Europe has become. As for the values, the emaciated child in Gaza is the medalion subsuming European values.
One of my neighbors is a night manager at the local CVS pharmacy, he told me the last shipment due for his store was short two pallet loads of goods from China and that he has been told that the usual summer supplies won’t be showing up in the usual quantities if they show up at all.
Coolers, folding chairs and the like.
Also, the growth of grass and brush this year is the highest I have seen in the two decades I have lived in Sonoma County.
WTF? Sayin Joe Biden should not have run for a second term is called ” puling the band-aid off”?
No, pulling the band-aid off would be saying Joe Biden should never have been anywhere near a position of power, was about as morally decrepit an individual as exists in American today, and never made any lasting positive contribution to American or global society, as in NONE.
I’ve been pres voting since 1980 and I can’t say for sure who was the worst.
I wouldn’t call any of them good…
Touché
Biden had a long list of social demerits well before 2008.
I didn’t vote for him then, nor obviously, for his chameleon in chief.
Americans are forever hoodwinked.