Links 5/31/2025

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1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 7:07 am

   re Individualism. The “God” of health Economics back in the 1990s when I learnt it, was Professor Tony Culyer. His favourite word was “flourishing”. He wanted that for everyone and it was interesting to see that term used so much in the Aeon article.

   Indeed humans need first and foremost basic needs, then to flourish. He had it right back then but got sidelined in favour of a bunch of people (Alan Williams being one who EXPLICITLY published that men deserve 70 years and no more) who infected the field with mathematics, first classical, then Bayesian.

   I reviewed Culyer’s Dictionary of Health Economics (1st Edition) for a major Epidemiology Journal and expected never to be invited back, yet he/they asked me to do 2nd Ed too. Wow. He was lovely. Died before his time and really got what it was to “live and flourish”, not merely exist. Honoured to have had contact with him since he “got it” and clearly was exasperated by the mainstream who, although claiming not to be neoclassicals, most definitely were. That’s what got the Manchester group exiled from the field.
   1. Michaelmas May 31, 2025 at 8:37 am

      Terry Flynn: he … really got what it was to “live and flourish” … That’s what got the Manchester group exiled from the field.

      Elites are not listening as hard as they can.

      Five minutes ago, I read Andy Haldane in this morning’s FT —

      Governments are chasing the wrong rainbows
      Opportunity and upward mobility are more important than GDP growth

      https://www.ft.com/content/50e79018-83ac-4cf0-8747-237a8696baa6
      https://archive.ph/uhDT2

      A sample: ‘During a Brexit referendum debate, an audience member rebuked a panellist with: “That’s your bloody GDP, not ours.” There was statistical truth in this quip. Growth recently in the UK, US and beyond has been anything but inclusive, both geographically and socio-economically. And as Brexit illustrated, non-inclusive growth centred on the well-off and the south-east only adds to public discontent.’

      And so on. An anodyne presentation of the absolutely effing obvious, right? But glancing at some of the BTL commenters erupting in fury and denial, you’d think Haldane had suggested eating babies.

      Well, they’re threatened, of course. Beneath it all, some of them are smart enough to realize that not only is the neoliberal order ending that’s given them and theirs the last 40 years of privilege and they probably won’t be among those who’ll make it to the subsequent lifeboat, but global transformations — China’s dominance, the fall of the US, climate change disasters, AI and biotech advance — mean that in just ten years time the world as they know it now will likely be swept away.

      So they’re not listening as hard as they can. Things are going to get worse in the West, before they get better — if they do.
      1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 8:59 am

         Thanks for shout-out. The Manchester thing was always interesting. It was NOT that the Manchester UK group “definitely agreed” with the Bristol/Birmingham Group which I came to be the cheer-leader for. It was merely that they were incensed that NICE (advising the Blair Govt) was using an equation that encouraged companies to “play the system” or “interpret the data in one way” so as to ensure they get certain drugs funded.

         Manchester called the establishment on this and thus became the “bad boys” at conferences”. Yet I knew, once I learnt about discrete choices, that, Manchester were in fact correct: you CANNOT use an equation that has NEVER been put to democratic debate.

         So we got on well. In the end, after presenting to NICE in 2009 in Whitehall, I came to the conclusion that “NICE will NEVER EVER listen to the alternative explanations” and I felt happy to move to Sydney. NICE just got worse under the coalition. Now unless I get one of three agencies to prescribe a crucial drug to me in the next 3 weeks – all currently refuse – I’ll probably get stroke or heart attack within 2 months. But they’d rather argue over which private sector organisation has authority. Trouble for them is if I die then I have a delayed blog entry which names names – I know where all the bodies are buried.
         1. ambrit May 31, 2025 at 9:28 am

            Oh bloody H—. This does not look good. Perhaps, if “things” do indeed look dire, at the least release the “List” before you go and enjoy the spectacle of heads exploding.
            As the character says at the end of Beau Geste, “He had a dog at his feet to accompany him to heaven.” Imagine the fun of having an entire pack of hounds baying at your heels as you enter the feasting hall of Valhalla.
            We’ll spin the prayer wheels for you.
            1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 9:36 am

               Thanks. I’m actually very relaxed. I’m gay, no dependents and to be honest me being absent from this world is unlikely to create any waves! I wrote the top textbook in my field and I’m proud of that…….there are those who’ve bought it and got “what was going on” and those who didn’t.

               The only annoyances I have are that some people thought up “special cases” that I really should have thought up myself (notably best-worst voting!) But that’s life. Meanwhile I just do my caring responsibilities etc in conjunction with long COVID making things worse til time runs out.
               1. Laughingsong May 31, 2025 at 11:26 am

                  It will most certainly create waves here, TF. Your contribution here has been phenomenal.
                  1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 11:52 am

                     Many thanks. I’ve NEVER thought of myself as a genius or “anyone special”……merely someone of slightly above average intelligence who sacrificed a load of the “social stuff” in order to do well on intellectual stuff. I took me 15 years to learn the combination of statistical design theory, discrete choice choice modelling, and other areas of health services research, to enable me to be “the last living expert on best-worst scaling”. (I don’t know FOR SURE how my two co-authors died since they were old anyway…..but COVID stuff + other issues where they lived made me a tad suspicious).

                     If it helps others then great. Certainly doesn’t help my bank balance: I get about 80 quid in royalties p.a. and that’s what I must usually pay accountant to do my tax return since I had a “non-standard income”. Hahaha. Fate has a sense of humour.
                     1. Laughingsong May 31, 2025 at 1:20 pm

                        I very much enjoy your posts, and try to learn/understand as much as possible, given I’m not, er, above-average intelligence. Like many commentators here, I’ve gotten a lot out of your sharing!

                        Thanks for using small words! 🫶

                        I’m praying that things come good for you. You’ve been through so much.
                        1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 3:22 pm

                           Thanks. Truth be told, I’ve been subject to Reform UK elimination here. Which is why I told my mum “vote” for them then I use my Aussie passport to move down under and you will NEVER see me again.

                           I’m done with trade-offs. Time to tell family where to get off. People like skippy and others will no doubt warn me of the crap in Aus too…but dying on a nice hot beach beats this sh!thole.
                  2. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 12:38 pm

                     FWIW I don’t self promote this but a public lecture I gave in early 2010s in Sydney about quality of life which kinda touched on this is still up there on YT.

                     Part of why I don’t promote it cause I say “umm” and “ahh” too much but it’s there for those interested!
                     1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 2:34 pm

                        It’ll be there till the long COVID gets me!

                        Then POA goes to my sis
               2. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 2:45 pm

                  Just ordered your book! Should be ready in the store topick-up in about two weeks.
                  1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 2:54 pm

                     Thanks. Certain chapters are (even to me) pretty dense! Tony – our math psych guy – was on the level of people who invented the bomb (indeed you don’t need to follow a long chain of people to geto to chose who understood the physics of the bomb). But he went on to thankfully look at more productive issues like “how do humans make choices”.

                     Try to stick to the empirical chapters that are in an empirical area “closest to you”. Tony’s’ stuff is right but reallly really difficult!
                     1. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 5:32 pm

                        Thanks, will do that. Sorry to hear that some good examples didn’t make it into the book.
         2. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 2:37 pm

            If you have all the names and a short window span, as you claim, the best rational and emotional course of action is to make noise now rather than glibly hope for an approval. If you do not personally know and can influence inside decission makers to give approval, admin type requests following the bureaucratic path will not do it. But a bit of a scandal might. At least this is my experience working in the government.

            Anyways, best of luck Terry!
            1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 3:01 pm

               You are 100% right. When I left academia I ran a business for 4 years. Never made a loss but I could see which way the wind was blowing.

               If the UK govt would rather commission “mates” to give happiness scores over a study that I charge only £40k for them to really understand preferences they go with mates. Another reason why I think “why should I help humanity”?

               Sorry, I’ve checked out.
            2. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 3:08 pm

               Once upon a time I was “fight fight fight”.

               Then Long COVID hit me and it’s too much :-(

               I’ve privately told Yves about something else that reallly worries me ….. but I don’t have the strength to fight it…….that’s life in the COVID world I guess. (Plus I’m really bad at asking for help).
            3. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 3:26 pm

               I could create scandal! believe me! But I’ve done it TWICE and the main effect has been impairments to my MY mental health rather than enact countrywide-change.

               Do not EVER be a whistle blower.

               *sigh*
               1. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 5:36 pm

                  Believe me I KNOW!

                  I had my fights with the government. Won some, lost some. And I was soo good at my fighting that in the end I was helped in my current job when I said I want that one, and I forced the Parliament to not continue with the existing merit commissioner when it was time for renewal…
         3. amfortas the hippie May 31, 2025 at 5:38 pm

            “Trouble for them is if I die then I have a delayed blog entry which names names – I know where all the bodies are buried.”

            Lol, Terry!
            those are always a useful card to have up the sleeve of some rando third party somewhere.
            I have one…havent updated it in a long time:partly due to no new dirt on local power players, since i have grown into this whole hermit thing…but also because i, and the third party, reckoned that with the increasing panopticon, less contact is better.
            they do a periodic google search or whatever on me, to see if i died…and then will investigate to attempt to discern if it might be local Big Boys behind it.
            the insinuation that this “file” exists has likely saved me a lot of trouble, over the years.
            i’ve known that third party for more than 40 years.
            and looking at our respective Permanent Records(lol), one would never guess that we ever even met.
            I started doing this long ago, during my outlaw days, back home…wherein i was accused of nefarious behavior(untrue) by a local warlord who’s daughter i had helped out, thus embarrassing him. cops were given a tale of outrageous lies about me(white slaver(whatever that is), heroin trafficker, etc)…and did what bored semirural cops do. so it seemed prudent to have a failsafe,lol.
            i went to the library at Sam Houston State(a LEO hive) and did a lot of research on things like countersurveillance, “Tradecraft” and such…and this was one of the backups i learned about, there.
         4. Alex Cox May 31, 2025 at 9:17 pm

            Terry
            Did you ever read CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength? The bad guys are a government/ business outfit called NICE.
      2. bertl May 31, 2025 at 4:23 pm

         Andy Haldane is the least known truly signicant figure in British life. He mentions Robert Kennedy’s University of Kansas speech which became the basis of my approach to economic policy and politics and the central point I made to my Econ students from the moment started teaching. And, of course, Haldane reminds us that the warning Michael Young gave us about meritocracy was rapidly reversed in the public mind and the concept of rising through superior credentials and being rewarded accordly ended up legitimising increasing rather than narrowing social, economic and political inequalities.
         1. Yves Smith Post authorJune 1, 2025 at 2:02 am

            He wrote a ton of absolutely amazing papers when he was the head of financial stability at the Bank of England. An original thinker yet also very rigorous. You seldom see economists so able.
            1. bertl June 1, 2025 at 9:49 am

               Yup! I used to get every BoE paper but Andy’s were the only ones I looked forward to to in excitement. He actually believes that economies should serve their purpose by making everyone’s life easier and more worthwhile like so many of the people who taught me in the early sixties and mentored me as a teacher, but became invisible under neo-liberalism which was neither new or liberal.
2. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 7:15 am

   “What’s inside the boxes of aid being distributed in Gaza?”

   A brand new pager?
   1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 7:18 am

      THe same thing as in Se7en?

      (dark I know but we’re into dark territory)
      1. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 7:51 am

         With Israel the territory has gotten so dark we need flashlights to see or way around.
   2. mahna May 31, 2025 at 10:05 am

      Poison?
   3. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 5:38 pm

      Based on latest experience, I would say cement…
3. farmboy May 31, 2025 at 7:17 am

   https://futurism.com/ai-models-falling-apart
   1. Judith May 31, 2025 at 8:16 am

      Thanks.
   2. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 9:28 am

      Thanks, fixed.
   3. CitizenGuy May 31, 2025 at 1:14 pm

      I work in this space and wanted to provide some clarification. The claim in the article is made specifically around RAG (retriever-augmented generative) models. These are more like a pipeline that involve an LLM rather than an LLM itself.

      LLMs have something called a “context window” — usually on the scale of thousands to millions of tokens (characters). When LLMs are trained, they are trained on massive proprietary datasets that are effectively web scrapes of the entire Internet. The result of this training is captured in the LLM’s weights. Meta’s Llama 3.1 70b, for example, is an LLM with 70 billion weights (scalar values) and a context window of 128,000 tokens. That means you cannot provide more than 128k characters (let’s assume 1 token = 1 character) in your question. And because LLMs are effectively autocomplete, the prompt (or question) you ask it PLUS the response from the LLM is capped at 128k. I provide the first half of the sentence (say this sentence is 64k or 64,000 characters long) in my prompt, and the LLM tries to complete the sentence by providing me up to 64k characters in the response.

      Now back to RAG. What these massive proprietary datasets are missing is data that can’t be scraped from the web. Imagine enterprise companies with private intranets behind VPNs — these aren’t accessible to web scrapers. An LLM won’t be able to answer “How many people at Amazon are currently on a PIP?” because it didn’t see Amazon’s HR documents in its training set. A RAG pipeline tries to solve for this by incorporating additional data, or context, right into the prompt. The final prompt given to the LLM has the HR documents in the prompt itself. Don’t get me wrong — a vanilla LLM may answer, but its answer is almost certainly a hallucination (maybe some reddit user opined on Amazon PIPs on an internet forum that was in the training data).

      While 128k for a context window seems large, that limit quickly gets hit when you try to load an entire company’s private data into the prompt so the model has context for the question. A RAG pipeline tries to optimize what documents should be provided in the prompt that are most likely to contain the answer to the question in the prompt. It does this usually through a vector database that contains the private documents, and a distance algorithm that can be computed between the question in the prompt and each document in the vector DB. Say only the top 10 documents (closest in distance to the question) are then loaded into the prompt.

      So the problem is solved: we now have an LLM that can leverage private data sources to answer questions about your company’s private data.

      If RAG pipelines are experiencing coprophagy, it’s probably because the data in the vector DB or whatever external data store is garbage, albeit garbage created by the LLM itself and allowed to be stored in the DB. But it’s not necessarily an issue with the LLM as the data in the vector DB wasn’t used to train the LLM’s weights. That data is only used as additional context when the LLM is given a question (prompt). Bad results, in the RAG setting, could be a function of a poor distance metric, poor data in the DB, or limitations on the LLM.
      1. raspberry jam May 31, 2025 at 1:40 pm

         To build on your great comment, I also work in the field in a role where I see what a lot of big companies are currently doing in this space and I see two major trends:

         – Building out their own air-gapped model farms using the open source models, with the intention of performing additional training and changing of weights so these models are more tuned towards the organization’s needs. Think about electronics hardware, which requires a lot of special software (firmware) written in languages that aren’t common on the public internet (VHDL, System Verilog, etc) that these companies have decades of old code that can be used for training exactly for the purpose they need for their workers.
         – Creation of more RAG connectors to increase the context pipeline to the models. Again the use case here is to build on the existing data/material already owned by the organization and utilize it in a more automated fashion instead of requiring specialists to research old implementations in the context of new projects.

         My personal belief based on my professional experience is that the public-facing, general purpose LLMs are probably not going to be much of a commercial thing in the coming years. Most of the use cases that have been attempted so far with them (again, public-facing) don’t have staying power. However custom built LLMs + massive RAG systems will be a permanent fixture within big corporations and organizations and significantly change how software is created and managed. This also bypasses one of the bigger objections people have with their use (looting the commons for the training data sets).
         1. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 1:51 pm

            But the stochastic nature of the systems remains the same. I don’t think we should be deploying these non-deterministic things in all the places that they’re going to be deployed, especially criminal justice, public health, health care, state-security/police, and so on.

            It’s going to bad enough in call centers.
         2. Wisker May 31, 2025 at 3:03 pm

            Very interesting discussion, thanks to you both.
      2. Yves Smith Post authorJune 1, 2025 at 2:31 am

         Having been a consultant and seen a lot of internal records, your assumption that coprophagy is the result of external bad data is extremely charitable. There is a shit ton of internal bad data. Also confirmed by Public Records Act responses from CalPERS.
4. jefemt May 31, 2025 at 7:21 am

   Canned goods..chemical migration..plastic liners… Queue the LDS / Mormon jokes.
   But seriously, might be an interesting co-hort for studies. Where does one find a control group that eats only fresh, wholesome, chemical fee foodstuffs in 2025?
   1. Unironic Pangloss May 31, 2025 at 8:55 am

      >>>>Where does one find a control group that eats only fresh, wholesome, chemical fee foodstuffs in 2025?

      probably literally nowhere (unless sequestered, eating food grown in $$$$ “clean room” conditions). Even if one is a homesteader, your standard commercial farm or personal garden uses **a lot** of plastic—plastic that gets hot. And many hot plastics leach chemicals.

      Something similar happens in lead-exposure studies; even if you sample kids in Patagonia where the closest industrial air pollution source is hundreds of miles away, kids there have measureable lead exposure.
   2. IM Doc May 31, 2025 at 11:16 am

      We are not Mormon. But we do grow and eat most of our own food. The only thing we do not are tropicals like coffee, chocolate, bananas, avocados, etc…….and grain like flour and corn. All meat fish and dairy are from surrounding farmers and waterways. We eat out 3-5 times a year. We are harvesting strawberries right now, and lots of greens. The last several weeks has been dandelion time – yellow flower heads placed in Mason jars and frozen. Dandelion and pine needle tea every morning all year round.

      All hopes of plastic free living were totally torpedoed as one by one article came out in the past few years about the alarming amounts of micro plastics being found in this or that pristine area around us. I am fairly sure it is raining microplastics. It would seem logically to be the only route of contamination in some of these areas.

      I would however, love to be the control group in the study. If these plastics are present in the bodies of my family they are by definition everywhere.
      1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 12:05 pm

         There are water filters, which although not certified to filter microplastics (there are no such certifications) do filter small enough particle sizes so as to get nearly all of them.

         I intend to buy one when settled. In the meantime, my stopgap, which only reduces microplastic content but is still better than nothing, is to boil water for 5 mins, then filter through a coffee filter.
         1. Unironic Pangloss May 31, 2025 at 1:09 pm

            electric water distiller w/innards of stainless steel, which most of them have and they advertise that fact.

            Obviously not cheap compared to the tap; but (imo) most affordable/simple. no filters to worry about.

            Prices are all over the place from bespoke USA-made to mass-market from China
         2. Tinky May 31, 2025 at 3:54 pm

            I have been using the well-regarded Berkey water filters for over 20 years, and this is the company’s related claim, from its website, about the standard Black Berkey filters:

            Black Berkey® water filters remove microplastics?

            A distinction must be made between plastics that dissolve in water and pose a health hazard and those in the form of tiny solid elements.

            In the first group, and among the health-hazardous plastics that can dissolve in water, the most common are bisphenol A (BPA) and 1,1-dichloroethane (11-DCA). Good news, Black Berkey® filters allow for the removal of both of these plastics.

            In addition, thanks to the filtration power that can operate in the 24 to 26 nanometer range, micro-plastics in the form of solid residues are also removed. In fact, these measure approximately 2.5 microns (2500 nanometers), much larger than the 24 nanometers of the filter.
            1. juno mas May 31, 2025 at 9:50 pm

               Reverse osmosis is said to filter solids at 1micron. I use it for my drinking water. The tap water in my town is so bad that there are lines at public RO water dispensers.
            2. Yves Smith Post authorJune 1, 2025 at 2:33 am

               Yes, Berkey is what I intend to get. But the units are pretty tall, so if you have only low clearance next to a sink due to cabinet placement, they can be a hassle.
   3. diptherio May 31, 2025 at 12:10 pm

      Mennonites is probably where I’d look.
   4. amfortas the hippie May 31, 2025 at 6:11 pm

      hi. my name is Amfortas.

      lol.
      like ImDoc, i grow a whole lot of what i eat.
      but i still cant grow pasta or bread…and those come in plastic.
      and like he said, its prolly in the rain, by now.
      1. johnnyme May 31, 2025 at 6:37 pm

         It is definitely raining micro and nano plastics. :(

         Plastic rain in protected areas of the United States

         Eleven billion metric tons of plastic are projected to accumulate in the environment by 2025. Because plastics are persistent, they fragment into pieces that are susceptible to wind entrainment. Using high-resolution spatial and temporal data, we tested whether plastics deposited in wet versus dry conditions have distinct atmospheric life histories. Further, we report on the rates and sources of deposition to remote U.S. conservation areas. We show that urban centers and resuspension from soils or water are principal sources for wet-deposited plastics. By contrast, plastics deposited under dry conditions were smaller in size, and the rates of deposition were related to indices that suggest longer-range or global transport. Deposition rates averaged 132 plastics per square meter per day, which amounts to >1000 metric tons of plastic deposition to western U.S. protected lands annually.
      2. Hickory May 31, 2025 at 8:07 pm

         I’ve read multiple studies showing that microplastics and pfos are in the rain. the pfos at > gov’t health levels.
         1. Charger01 May 31, 2025 at 10:15 pm

            Citation, please!
            1. Skippy May 31, 2025 at 10:37 pm

               Its curious when the precipitation cycle does its thingy and not only microplastics/pfos are on offer but, all the chem introduced via meds et al.

               https://nautil.us/blissed_out-fish-on-prozac-234624/

               Estrogen in chicken, growth hormones in beef/pork, and psychological meds like SSRI’s, neurotoxins in many products … all getting Maytag’ed by the cycle.
5. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 7:23 am

   Anyone else on Linux/Firefox getting all Xwitter links now blocked on a PC/laptop with a standard placeholder thing there instead?

   I don’t mind, would rather be safe than sorry and I can easily click through here or on the tablet to get to content so there’s no work required to change anything….just started after latest Kernel update and I’m curious.
   1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 7:35 am

      I use Firefox and Safari on a Mac and have no issues save that Twitter sometimes does not like my trying to generate embeds in Safari where I am not logged into my account. It will then work when I switch to Firefox, where I am logged in.
      1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 7:52 am

         Ah thanks. Yes, it is firefox that gives me “inconsistent” results”, sometimes being picky (especially on a computer, and increasingly so) but often being “fine here you go” on my tablet.
         1. Revenant May 31, 2025 at 4:54 pm

            Nitter.poast.org still works as an alternative.

            In other neses, the Guardian just started pay waling the web version (months ago) and this week the mobile version.

            It’s not too strict at the moment. Just agree to subscribe and at the next page in the subscription flow, just do page back and you return to the unpaywalled article!
            1. ambrit May 31, 2025 at 7:16 pm

               What is hilarious here is that “they” demand that we pay them to read their propaganda.
               We now are dealing with “Unthought Leaders.” Who’d a thunk it?
   2. .Tom May 31, 2025 at 8:30 am

      Yes, a recent FF update on Windows did the same to me. I’m never logged in to Twitter.

      This hasn’t happened yet in FF on my MacBook. There I get a text summary of tweets, not the full embed, as a privacy add-on I use (uMatrix) blocks the twitter iframes. The text summary is a pretty good compromise and is all loaded from NC.
   3. gf May 31, 2025 at 9:08 am

      I see nothing unusual on Firefox/Fedora (linux) and Twitter for the links above.

      I do not have a Twitter account.

      Fedora pushes updates (fixes) very quickly though. (almost daily)
   4. Mo May 31, 2025 at 12:01 pm

      Sometimes I have to reload the page on firefox to be able to click through to x/twitter
   5. Glen May 31, 2025 at 2:04 pm

      Xwitter working OK. Comments not, hmm, wonder how I managed THAT?
   6. Vandemonian May 31, 2025 at 4:09 pm

      On an iPad I only see the original Twitter post, not the thread. I routinely edit the URL, and replace “x.com” withe “nitter.net” if I want to read the full thing.
      1. Yves Smith Post authorJune 1, 2025 at 2:35 am

         I can see the thread only when logged in. This is always the case for me. I trust you are not logged in on the iPad.
         1. Vandemonian June 2, 2025 at 8:49 am

            I have studiously avoided creating a Twitter account (or a Facebook account).
   7. GF May 31, 2025 at 6:22 pm

      Yes with Firefox and Windows 11. The placeholder thing allows for the xtweet to come through with a mouse click or two. Ironically it started happening at the same time I decided to not view X anymore, so no loss here.
   8. Keith Newman May 31, 2025 at 10:10 pm

      @Terry Flynn at 7:23 am
      Firefox blocks all the X links on NC for me. I can allow them if I want and that “allows them” only on that day’s NC. Usually I don’t allow X and do without those links. This only began a couple of months ago. Don’t know why.
      I do not have an X account.
      And Terry, I really enjoy reading your posts. Much appreciated. Thanks you.
6. Wukchumni May 31, 2025 at 7:43 am

   Jodi this and Jodi that

   Jodi is a real cool evang cat

   Ain’t no use in going home

   Jodi’s been known to roam

   Sound off, 1,2…3,4

   Ain’t no use in the future tense

   Jodi’s afterlife plans are immense

   Might as well hide that frown

   Jodi says everybody’s not long for town
   1. Bugs May 31, 2025 at 9:38 am

      jodi dot org was a pioneering experiment using the Internet itself to create art.

      I don’t recommend opening it unless you know how to force shutdown your browser, if you get stuck in the jodi maze.
      1. Wukchumni May 31, 2025 at 11:06 am

         I was referencing the irksome ‘Jody’ back home in military cadence, the idea that Jodi was in the army is an added bonus.
         1. ambrit May 31, 2025 at 7:19 pm

            Round here in the Rancid Underbelly of the North American Deep South, a “Jody” is a married woman’s “backdoor man.”
            “Jody done paid your place a visit whiles you was out of town working Bud.”
7. Arby May 31, 2025 at 7:47 am

   America has a grand strategy: full spectrum dominance, in place for 35 years. American leadership has been proven incapable of executing any practical tactics or operational art to achieving it. Indeed, going backward.
   1. tegnost May 31, 2025 at 9:21 am

      yes to this, global control for wall st (which imo they think they already have and are just incrementally letting the ROW know about that)., essentially the extension of british colonialism so those who think the empire has been here for 200 yrs have got the math badly wrong, more like from the dark ages to the present. The leadership of this debacle proves the axiom “There are none so blind as those who will not see”
   2. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 9:44 am

      I’ve listened to a second interview with Chas Freeman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgfWODxluXk) and he disagrees. I believe would classify that as a goal. Strategy is how you get there.
   3. ilsm May 31, 2025 at 10:38 am

      Macron just let the strategy out of the bag…

      He warns DPRK not to involve itself in the US’ Kiev gambit to balkanize Russia so that the US can go after China by way of Manchuria using the Russian Pacific as logistics hub.

      Two problems with this strategy: DPRK has nukes, so that China has strong flank cover. With as much deniability as US damaging Russia by Kiev.

      Second, US has inefficient, low results welfare state as arms its suppliers.

      All Mackinder while paying the shipbuilding lobby for Taiwan.
      1. Aurelien May 31, 2025 at 12:00 pm

         Actually, Macron continued his notably anti-American stance of recent times, and openly criticised, for example, Trump’s trade policies. The French have always been against any extension of NATO to Asia, and have said so frequently. Macron’s remarks cited by Politico (which doesn’t seem to have understood them) were actually a criticism addressed to China, arguing that it was hypocritical for the Chinese to complain about NATO interest in Asia if they were at the same time encouraging the NK to send forces to Europe, or at least not discouraging them. As a debating point, I suppose that’s fair enough. Macron’s speech was mainly devoted to the need to construct a “third force” between Europe and SE Asia, to confront the power of both the US and China.
         1. bwilli123 May 31, 2025 at 2:15 pm

            Macron has islands & seabed resources to protect.
            “States with territorial assets proximate to the CCZ, such as France’s Clipperton Island, gain further leverage by using these holdings as logistical hubs or jurisdictional springboards. Thus, the geography of deep-sea mining is simultaneously physical, institutional, and infrastructural. It maps the extension of national strategy into an unbounded, submerged arena.”

            https://horizongeopolitics.substack.com/p/deep-sea-mining-boom-who-will-control
         2. bertl May 31, 2025 at 4:38 pm

            I was living in France when Macron kicked off his first campaign for the French Presidency and even then he struck me as a very dim bulb which, when stimulated by some off the wall idea, usually prompted by a sensible remark from Le Pen, occasionally sputtered into a slighty brighter sickly yellow light before flickering back to his normal state. My view hasn’t changed much and I guess my mum would have dismissed him as a flipertlygibbet with a butterfly mind.
         3. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 7:12 pm

            I think that one argument that China has with NATO is in it’s name aka North Atlantic. So why are they pushing their way into the Pacific? As for NK sending military equipment and about a battalion’s worth of troops to Europe, that is in itself hypocritical of the west as the entire Collective West have been stripping their armouries and sending who knows how many billions to the Ukraine the past three years along with many other countries. Is this a case of ‘It’s OK when we do it?’

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukraine_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
8. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 7:48 am

   “Bessent Says US-China Talks ‘Stalled,’ Pushes for Trump-Xi Call”

   Does Bessent even listen to himself? What good will a single phone call make at this point? The Chinese alone have an increasingly long laundry list of issues that they want to settle with Trump who continues to put more restrictions on them. And you can’t do them on the phone. Just imagine – Trump has been on the phone with Xi for five hours as President Xi says ‘Now about item number 47 on our list…’ Stuff like that does not happen. You have the trade wallahs on both sides sort out the bulk of the issues so that the leaders of both countries can fly in, sign some papers, get good publicity & photos and maybe visit a good knocking shop on the way back to the airport. But assume that a major phone cal is arranged. I can tell you exactly what will happen as I have seen it time and again in the past. Just as the phone call is about to be made, the US will impose some sort of heavy restitution or the like to show Xi that they are tough and (they think) gives them the advantage before contact. All it does is show the other side that the US is not serious and only wants to pretend to be tough for the domestic audience, even if it threatens any agreement that could be made.
9. flora May 31, 2025 at 7:51 am

   re:America Let Its Military- Industrial Might Wither. China’s Is Booming Wall Street Journal (resilc)

   Fixed the headline. / ;)
   1. Skip Intro May 31, 2025 at 10:04 am

      America Let Its Industrial Might Wither. China’s Is Booming Wall Street Journal (resilc)

      Wall Street Journal Subscribers Dismantled America’s Industrial Might, Moved It To China For A Few Pieces Of Silver

      Fixed the fix!
10. Wukchumni May 31, 2025 at 8:03 am

    Goooooooood Moooooooooorning Fiatnam!

    A tariffist attack’s full effects were out on the perimeter lurking in the DMZ (Donald Monetary Zone) as no corporate shopkeepers dared exhibit the emperor’s new diktat until somebody else did, incurring initial wrath laden rich with capital letters on social media.
11. vao May 31, 2025 at 8:10 am

    Regarding Surprise! New “MAHA” Report Is Full of Junk Science and Fake Studies, the fake studies include:

    1) phantom papers that the (real) authors never wrote;
    2) (real) journal issues that do not contain the papers referred to;
    3) references to papers that cannot be found anywhere;
    4) authors of papers who do not exist.

    All these constitute the hallmark of AI-generated bibliographic references. As soon as Chat-GPT & co were released, people were immediately faced with “fake papers” and other such bibliographic “hallucinations”; these problems were widely discussed right from the beginning of the LLM AI craze.

    To summarize: RFK Jr. and his staff relied upon AI to generated their 500 pages report. With an inevitable outcome: the report is slop, just good to be thrown into the trash bin.
    1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 8:41 am

       Once upon a time we had high certainty in science. Now we have low certainty (high sigma or low lambda for those who read my previous piece). Result? All the probabilities skew towards 1/n where n is the number of options.

       If you were a party epousing anti-vax instead of vax, wouldn’t you like the (anti/pro) percentage to be 40/60 rather than 10/90? Cause that is is world we are rapidly iterating towards. For those who didn’t get what I was saying, THIS is the ultimate conclusion.

       Don’t say you were not warned. The maths also showed EXACTLY how this was done. We’ve known how to do this for 40 years. The “cleverer” right wingers were paying attention and saw ways to “thin out the population” aka “go die”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
       1. Steve H. May 31, 2025 at 9:59 am

          Your previous piece showed how well-meaning professionals can be exactly wrong. That assumes good intent.

          As to ‘go die’, see ‘cui bono cui malo’. In both this, and increasing uncertainty in science, there’s an inevitability in Positive Assortment. China is the leading producer of scientific papers, and I don’t think they gon put up w this shite.

          In the same way, given your personal ‘go die’ comment above, perhaps look beyond your shores. A friend tells me some such may be available from our friends in India.
          1. Terry Flynn May 31, 2025 at 11:34 am

             Thanks. The (sorry for the tech) “decomposition of a probability” was simultaneously liberating and also very very dangerous. It taught those with malign intent how to manipulate people, not via their “true preferences” but by introducing enough uncertainty that things like “crucial levels of coverage by a vaccine” might be no longer achieved.

             It is is insidious and disgusting. THAT is why we get insufficient percentages to ensure coverage. It is the victory of the “individual preference” over “population public health”. I’m a Brit. Personally I think that this emphasis on “individual choices” in the USA is wrong. Dead wrong. Philosophically it is why I think the USA is a failed state and we’re just watching it it in its final stages. (FWIW UK did very similar thing and why we collapsed).

             Preferences should NEVER be sacrosanct at the level of the individual because of interactions across society. THAT is is why the USA is a failure. So Lots of us are just stocking up on popcorn. Those who class themselves as “libertarian” are just wrong. You ignore group effects and I will NEVER take you seriously.
             1. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 5:57 pm

                The trick with uncertainity started lon, long time ago. The worst one can see is in the struggles OSHA (now kind of defunct) had to face from American industrialists. And let’s not forget the fight with BIG TOBACCO. Purdue Pharma has not put up any “scientific” fight, just PR and bribery.
                1. Terry Flynn June 1, 2025 at 6:20 am

                   Whilst that is 100% true, this is more insidious. When you have an equation that can be interpreted in literally an infinite number of ways, that will not pass the “beyond all reasonable doubt” criterion in court.
    2. IM Doc May 31, 2025 at 11:30 am

       I have a recent observation. This seems to be the past 1-2 years and not frequent but it has happened a few times. When doing searches on the big medical databases like Ovid/Grateful Med, etc, I have been on 2-3 occasions presented with citations that fit my parameters very well…….but then when I have gone to look it up and obtain the actual document, neither I nor the librarian can find them. 2-3 times. These so far have not been on new research items but have been medical historical items. I distinctly remember one being a supposed bio of Dr. Graves of Graves’ Disease fame. We were presented with a citation from the 1950s, a review article about his life, in a reputable journal…..and the article could simply not be found.

       It seems to me to be some of the same types of hallucinating that AI does. The thought of medical databases using AI is chilling at best. I have been doing this type of thing for years. It seems strange that this type of thing would all of a sudden happen once AI is present in the ecosphere. How easy it would be for malevolent players to completely disappear or alter things that are no longer convenient.
       1. flora May 31, 2025 at 2:58 pm

          Suppose for a moment that AI’s prime directive is to generate an answer. An answer. It does not have to be a true statement of facts. It does not have to represent existing real world objects in the real analog world. It can be completely made up. But if it is an AI generated ‘answer’ then that fulfills AI’s prime directive to create an answer, it passes the AI’s internal test of ‘did the program generate an answer.’ / ;)
       2. Boomheist May 31, 2025 at 4:00 pm

          I think this issue of invented and fake references is much bigger and more widespread than anyone thinks. Yes, AI can create false references. Just ask one – I asked Grok – will you invent fake references to support a paper I am writing, or a position I want to justify? Grok says, I will, after asking you first are you serious you want me to? I have not heard or seen AI invent references on its own – ie I have not seen evidence that the systems were set up to do this – but it seems clear anyone could ask for AI to footnote a paper they had written, or write a paper about some subject and then invent footnotes to support that paper, and AI will do it. It is not at all outside my wheelhouse to believe that humans will often invent references, and footnotes, this even before AI came to the fore, because a paper with 98 footnotes that all look official suggests the paper is SERIOUS and IMPORTANT, and it is probably not often a professor in college or someone in the field actually will drill down and see if the reference is real. Apparently someone did that with the MAHA report and guess what? Filled with false footnotes. About 15 years ago I remember getting a book from a highly respected climate activist, whom I will not name here, but this was a big book, well received, and considered Important. At the time I was doing my own research for a novel I was thinking about, and so I was in a researcher-type head space, and because I am a bit ornery and suspicious, I started checking the footnotes of this great climate book. On the face of it the notes were impressive, seemed legitimate, but as I drilled down I saw that 80 percent of the notes were simply references to articles written by other climate activists. Maybe 90 percent.

          All of this goes to say that the flood of peer-reviewed papers, digital abundance, and efforts to look Serious and Scholarly has, it seemed, even before AI, created a deep well of Bull***t, and these days in order to determine what might be true you not only have to check the orientation of the author but also take the time to dig deep into the footnotes, both very time consuming. In fact you might even argue that the whole point of peer reviewed deeply footnoted papers is not to find truth but to hide it, behind a blizzard of fakery. This MAHA story has ripped the lid off this industry.
          1. vao May 31, 2025 at 6:19 pm

             “I have not heard or seen AI invent references on its own”

             They actually do that all the time. Here is an example, and another, and yet another.

             There have also been a number of cases where legal briefs included invented references to judicial cases such as here.

             There are indeed plenty of testimonies about that, and no, you do not need to ask the AI specifically to invent references. One of the examples above corresponds to a prompt asking for the “most referenced paper in economics” — the AI chatbot replies with a complete fabrication, and the thread explains why.
             1. Terry Flynn June 1, 2025 at 6:00 am

                Bunch of my stuff no longer appears on any search engine, despite me knowing the EXACT keywords/times etc that used to give it as first hit.

                The only things they can’t get rid of are my book, my top cited work (which also happens to be open access) and some other key worksl

                The funny (in a not funny at all way) thing is that AI summaries via chatGPT will give their take on the “omitted papers”.
12. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 8:19 am

    “Brussels tells EU capitals to cut water use by 10% in face of droughts’

    (clears throat) Ahem. Doesn’t Brussels also want to build a massive military industrial complex in Europe to go fight the Russian bear. All those industries, especially the one dealing with steel, are not only energy intensive but are also water intensive. So assuming that these droughts may be part of the new norm due to climate change, will the EU have the water resources for those new MIC industries? And telling people not to shower so that another tank can be built will not cut it I think.
    1. Michaelmas May 31, 2025 at 8:44 am

       Hey, don’t leave out the massive AI datacenters the the EU will also build to establish itself as an AI technology superpower on a par with the US and China
    2. mahna May 31, 2025 at 10:18 am

       All those industries, especially the one dealing with steel, are not only energy intensive but are also water intensive.

       They will make up all the extra water spent, once they take Lake Baikal.

       And telling people not to shower so that another tank can be built will not cut it I think.

       You won’t shower so that another tank can be built, and then you will get into that tank. 🦨
13. Earl May 31, 2025 at 8:23 am

    Re When the Dead Speak…., the U. S. my country is in effect as guilty as Israel. We can only pray. I recall this prayer. Lord, distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy, and deliver my life from the hands of violent men.
    1. Socal Rhino May 31, 2025 at 11:24 am

       To quote the man who crafted the Declaration of Independence: I tremble for my country when I reflect that god is just…
14. Steve H. May 31, 2025 at 8:29 am

    > Why liberal democracies win total wars Engelsberg Ideas.

    Since the most recent date noted was 1918, its title should be:

    Why liberal democracies haven’t won a total war in over a century.
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 9:02 am

       Excellent catch!
    2. ilsm May 31, 2025 at 10:45 am

       I was waiting for Duncan to talk WW II.

       He also ignores the impact of the US’ arms sales to the GB and France, as well as it showing up in late 1917 with 2 million soldiers and thousands of brand new artillery pieces!

       Had he gone into WW II his thesis would have been shot, by Stalin!
    3. hk May 31, 2025 at 11:33 am

       There were liberal democracies in 1918?
15. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 8:45 am

    “How American intelligence sees the new global order”

    I think that the Defence Intelligence Agency may have been a bit remiss in their report. I would have included a section on ex-Ukrainian military forming criminal gangs in Europe using their training, experience and the weapons that they took out of the Ukraine as it starts to collapse. They would have a chip on their shoulder about Europe “not doing enough” to help the Ukraine beat Russia and the ruthlessness to achieve dominance amongst the criminal world. Bonus points if some of them have been trained in explosives, assassinations and sabotage by the CIA.
    1. ilsm May 31, 2025 at 10:47 am

       “American intelligence” is now as much oxymoron as “military intelligence”.

       Its world view limited to wises.
16. Ben Joseph May 31, 2025 at 9:00 am

    “COVID-Related Cardiac Deaths Spiked Significantly Post-Pandemic”

    While not as glaring as a typo or homophone substitution, another editorial fail.

    The redundancy creates nonsense. Either Covid-related or post-pandemic has to go (unless they really thought that stating the obvious was newsworthy).
    1. tegnost May 31, 2025 at 9:37 am

       Thanks, I was in friday harbor a few days ago and scuttlebutt at the grocery store was “everyone is sick” which I duly noted and scrammed asap…also the mariners broadcast booth has been beset by laryngitis (pretty tough for a radio personality). See nc from a few days back on the symptoms of the current variant. I’m signing up with b. carful insurance myself and implore others to do the same, if possible
    2. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 9:52 am

       No, it depends on how you define “post-pandemic”. After all, the US declared it to be over when Rochelle Wallensky started mask-shaming.
       1. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 10:00 am

          Didn’t help when Biden said in an interview-

          ‘The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing, and I think [the Detroit auto show resuming after three years] is a perfect example of it.’

          https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123767437/joe-biden-covid-19-pandemic-over
       2. Steve H. May 31, 2025 at 10:26 am

          May 5, 2023

          WHO chief declares end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency

          http://www.who.int/news-room/speeches/item/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing—5-may-2023

          On this definition, ‘post-pandemic’ is exact tho stupid. ‘COVID-related’ is also permanent, given the airborne acquired immune deficiency. Crawford Killian used the phrase ‘polydemic’ in 2022, but fortunately that didn’t stick.
17. diptherio May 31, 2025 at 9:05 am

    Bloomberg on Builder.ai and VerSe doing a little creative accounting:

    https://archive.is/mNqQG
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 9:57 am

       This is wild. Thanks,
       1. diptherio May 31, 2025 at 11:30 am

          Credit to David Gerard at the Pivot to AI blog. He’s been doing great work tracking the con.
          1. Mikel May 31, 2025 at 11:42 am

             A Gerard and Zitron collaboration would be a fun read.
             1. diptherio May 31, 2025 at 12:14 pm

                I want a two hour TrueAnon episode with the two of them. That’d be a real banger. Liz, I know you read NC comments. Make it happen! lol
    2. ChrisFromGA May 31, 2025 at 9:59 am

       I had this one on my bingo card. A major AI startup was revealed as a total fraud.

       I suspect 90% of AI-related companies will turn out to be frauds.
    3. ilsm May 31, 2025 at 10:55 am

       AI is trouble by lack of discipline in search parameters (ask the right question) and risk the search gets into bad data.

       In many applications not worth the energy expended….

       Evolved google search?
       1. Mikel May 31, 2025 at 11:51 am

          I think the right question is “Why denigrate human creativity?”
          Which pockets get lined?
       2. GF May 31, 2025 at 6:45 pm

          “and risk the search gets into bad data.”

          Isn’t a lot of the data on the internet bad data? It’s a wonder there aren’t more hallucinations. /s
    4. skippy May 31, 2025 at 10:26 pm

       Reads like the script to the movie the *Accountant* w/o the reality check at the end – I give people[investors] hope – bang …
18. Yeti May 31, 2025 at 9:13 am

    Re COVID-Related Cardiac Deaths Spiked Significantly Post-Pandemic
    median age in study 77 years, see here for All hospital ED admissions of anyone under 40 years of age with ICD-10-CA I00 to I99. (Date Range for Record Search: From
    1/1/2017 To 12/31/2023) from FOIA request FOI HTH-2024-42317 from British Columbia Ministry of Health. These codes are for cardiac related issues. Unlike this article our hospitalizations continued to rise significantly through 2023 -69% over 2017-20.

    Calendar year Number of Hospitalizations
    2017 2,377
    2018 2,473
    2019 2,472
    2020 2,541
    2021 2,748
    2022 3,447
    2023 4,022
19. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 9:15 am

    ‘Iran International English
    @IranIntl_En
    The US, Britain, France, and Germany are preparing to push the UN nuclear watchdog to declare Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations at the upcoming IAEA meeting — the first such declaration in nearly two decades, Reuters reported citing diplomats.’

    I don’t think that Iran is in breech of any obligations so far as I know. They have been very careful here. Maybe IAEA Director General Grossi can punt it like he does on the attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and say that he thinks that there may be breaches – but cannot say who is doing them.
20. Unironic Pangloss May 31, 2025 at 9:30 am

    >>>>Why liberal democracies win total wars Engelsberg Ideas

    Pieces like this are important because he shows the roadmap how DC (politicians, think tanks, media) might get the US involved in a “Vietnam War: Pt. 2” — this time the opponent is 1, 2, 3 generations ahead in tactics and weaponry.

    And whichever party’s president does decide that it’s important to have 18 y.o. from El Paso, Kentucky, Baltimore dying for Estonia….they are going to be nuked for a generation; if Brussels and Kaliningrad don’t get nuked first!
21. Carolinian May 31, 2025 at 9:50 am

    Re RFK jr. and the “who do you trust?” question–is he a gadfly with a search engine and sloppy with many details? Without a doubt but the problem is that in a money driven system who to believe becomes a problem. There once were ads claiming 9 out of 10 doctors recommend certain brands of cigarettes as being good for you. TV and print media were hugely dependent on tobacco advertising just as they are still dependent on pharma advertising. It took decades to settle the cigarette issue but the tobacco companies only agreed to an advertising ban to stop the anti smoking ads–put on due to equal time rules–that were hurting their business. It’s possible that Kennedy is sloppy with the details while still being right about the bigger problem and people intuit that. His comments on AIDS and AZT probably track back to reports like this one from the 1990s

    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-rise-and-fall-of-azt-it-was-the-drug-that-had-to-work-it-brought-hope-to-people-with-hiv-and-aids-and-millions-for-the-company-that-developed-it-it-had-to-work-there-was-nothing-else-but-for-many-who-used-2320491.html

    It is a lot less emphatic than he is but still the tale of a drug that doesn’t really cure, has serious side effects and is a marketing bonanza does parallel the story of the recent vaccines–or for that matter the recent NC story on dubious depression medicines.

    I’d say it’s likely that RFK is a person from a famous family who is seeking issues to give himself some of that importance but trying to paint him in a more sinister light is also an assertion not proven. We just had a president for four years who, mentally, was not even there. Who to trust is the real problem for people in our media saturated country. RFK is a sidebar.
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 10:07 am

       Sorry, not buying any defense, even a weak one, of RFK, Jr. He is now head of HHS and has tons of power, so his integrity, and in particular intellectual honesty, matter. .

       His own book (and I can tell you getting a book published is NOT a fast process) misrepresented studies it cited. A lot! Like >30% of the time. That is flat out dishonest. I can’t believe you are defending him. I read his damned book and checked his footnotes, It is easy to establish that he is a fraud.

       About another 20% to 30% of studies he cited d been debunked for serious failings like biased choice of study population. This is not “We have a minority view”. This is “We have a minority view and we will shameless misrepresent the information out there to pretend it has some validity.”

       And this is not due to him being from a famous family. He had a litigation practice based on this sort of nonsense. He had clear economic motivations. His anti-MMR campaign killed people in Samoa via him getting personally involved in a measles vaccine scare (which was the result of incompetence by 2 nurses that was so bad they were convicted of homicide) and not the vaccine as RFK, Jr. touted. He is corrupt too, just not on the same scale as the drug companies.
       1. Bsn May 31, 2025 at 11:08 am

          I’m torn about the whole RFK Jr. situation. Has it boiled down to the lesser of two evils? Yves writes “He is corrupt too, just not on the same scale as the drug companies.” Would we rather have another pharma CEO running HHS? Where are we as a nation to go?
22. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 9:56 am

    “US defence secretary urges military build-up over ‘imminent’ China threat”

    ‘US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned that a Chinese military attack on Taiwan “could be imminent” as he called on America’s allies in the Indo-Pacific to boost defence spending as a further deterrence to Beijing.’

    Hegseth being a huckster for the MIC here. Trying to get the Indo-Pacific nations to militarize the Pacific and trying to panic them about China – who are probably their biggest trading partners. And if those nations boost defence spending, they will be mostly spending it on weapons. So guess who they will buy those weapons from? Go on, guess. It’s not about security at all. It’s about making the MIC even wealthier who have probably got a board seat waiting for Hegseth when he is finished with his governmental job. But that was not enough. He also said this-

    ‘But he warned that economic dependence on China “complicates our decision space during times of tension or conflict”.’

    I’m taking that to mean that sooner or later, that there will be a demand that those Indo-Pacific nations cut all trading ties with China and only do business with the US. It will be – ‘Either you are with us or against us.’
    1. ilsm May 31, 2025 at 11:21 am

       Where BRICS and SCO come in…..

       Has Hegseth’s ship already sailed?
    2. nyleta May 31, 2025 at 6:04 pm

       It means us in Australia as well, Richard Marles is the stalking horse now that the LNP is out for a decade. What will happen when we are told to place secondary sanctions on China, our largest trading partner ? The damage to our economy will be epic, but our pollies have taken the US tariiff insults without protest so far so not looking good at all.
    3. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 6:10 pm

       What FT has failed to describe is the answers Asian countries are giving. Wasn’t just recently that big ASEAN-GCC-China meeting in Singapore…? I am sure there people that went at both and could really compare and assess the thrat of china vs the threat of US.
23. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 10:34 am

    ‘William Huo
    @wmhuo168
    Imagine letting your rival read every chip blueprint you design. That’s what the US just confirmed you’ve been doing.’

    For those that cannot see the full thread, try this link. It’s well worth reading-

    https://xcancel.com/wmhuo168/status/1928445927179657556
24. Patrick Donnelly May 31, 2025 at 10:57 am

    Terry, consider the non poisonous proteases. They reduce clotting and remove scarring. Serrapeptase, Nattokinase, Papain, Lumbrokinase or Bromelain.
    No LD50. Take grams sub lingua.
25. AG May 31, 2025 at 11:20 am

    ATW
    30 min. preview

    America This Week, May 30, 2025: “The Great American Fascism Panic”
    Walter and Matt on another hilarious propaganda scare and few chuckles over Jake Tapper’s “Original Sin.” Plus, the thrilling end of “The Quiet American,” by Graham Greene.

    Matt Taibbi
    and Walter Kirn

    https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-may-30-2025-the

    transcript
    https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-may-b4b

    It´s revealing that Stanley had no issue with appearing together in one video with a useless hack as T. Snyder.
    Has he no decency?
    Or is he just not as top notch a scholar as he think he is… because he is not based on the interviews he gave putting out some nonsense at least on historic topics concerning Germany. I commented on that months ago.
    He is better than this though. “si tacuisses”…
26. Wukchumni May 31, 2025 at 11:27 am

    ‘Leavitt to Beaver’

    A new TV show starring Karoline lying to us through her perfectly straight and white teeth with a welcoming smile all the while, in a comeuppance see me sometime total lack of concern.

    Cory Lewandowski plays Eddie Haskell…
27. Socal Rhino May 31, 2025 at 11:36 am

    I prefer consuming info via text rather than video, but always make an exception for Chas Freeman. Watching the linked discussion with Colonel Wilkerson I was struck by how much I prefer Nima Alkorshid’s moderating style to Judge Napalitano’s.

    And did you know there’s a trick using pink salt that can help woman over forty shed weight? Some random woman and Oprah told me so repeatedly.
28. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 11:52 am

    My thought on the title, Why Liberal Democracies Win Total Wars, immediately flashed to Hudson’s observations about why debt jubilees originated, as it became obvious free land holders made better citizens/soldiers, than half starved debt serfs.
    Then reading the comment attached, that we in the West have a very distorted view of Russian communism based on our oligarchs interpretation of it. That for the Russians, it was the passage out of feudalism and monarchy. Basically the Russian Renaissance. That might seem far fetched, but it went from feudalism to full on industrialization in half a century. Basically turbocharged what the West went through in several centuries.
    1. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 1:10 pm

       Renaissance, industrial revolution combined.
    2. Daniil Adamov May 31, 2025 at 1:38 pm

       Which Russians would those be? I know a few Stalinists and, funnily enough, liberals who believe something like that, as a bit of retroactive accelerationism, but I don’t think they’re very representative of the population at large. The idea that Russia before the Revolution was basically a backwards medieval European country seems more like something that comes from Western intellectuals of various ideological persuasions than how “the Russians” see it, to me. Russian historians these days tend to acknowledge things like pre-Soviet industrial development (depending on your definition of “industrial”, going back to Peter the Great’s day) and the transformation of society in the wake of the Great Reforms under Alexander II. Frankly, I consider the latter period to be more worthy of being called a renaissance, given the urban development and cultural enrichment it kicked off, but we weren’t such primitive savages even before it.

       I’d also add that even our communists usually recognise that the country needed decades to recover from the carnage of the civil war (the term “razrukha” is often used, I’m not sure how to translate it to English, but it means something like what’s left after a great destruction, the long-term consequences of chaos). Not much of a “renaissance”. At best, a tragically necessary act of destruction before a certain flourishing that was, however, itself badly flawed, even if we only judge by its later self-destruction.
       1. KD May 31, 2025 at 2:58 pm

          Stalinism is a method for transforming a traditional and developmentally backwards (in the sense of industrialization) country and turning it into a modern industrialized society in one generation. Britain and America had over a hundred years. [Hint: you eliminate the middle men.] Further, for doing so primarily on its own, as you aren’t going to attract a lot of foreign investors, and without great dependence on the West. These features are probably what motivated a lot of anti-colonial nationalists to end up in the Communist camp.
          1. Daniil Adamov May 31, 2025 at 5:26 pm

             Broadly speaking, yes, although I’d note that many modern Russian historians dispute just how much of a “modern industrialised society” Russia was under Stalin. Certainly more than before, yes, but in the Urals for example the positive and/or “modernising” changes weren’t as major as sometimes expected, with many elements of the previous system surviving largely unchanged (a small worker aristocracy and a larger less-qualified and/or less-privileged labour force controlled in a top-down manner, with workers often still depending largely on their own gardens to feed themselves into the 30s if not later, according to a specialist study of the subject).

             Also, we had plenty of foreign investment under Stalin until 1930 via the concession system (enterprises funded partly or wholly by foreigners). Afterwards we switched to signing contracts for foreign (chiefly American) companies to send specialists (like engineers) and equipment and establish new factories. Thus, much of Soviet industrialisation was the work of American capitalists. Not exactly investment, but I’d say adjacent, and showing a certain willingness of capitalists, at least back then, to work with any system that would pay them money. Though it is fair to say that this was done on Soviet terms and thus did not result in significant dependence, especially once our own specialists had caught up with foreign expertise and figured out their equipment.

             But it is not clear to me that a different strong and motivated government could not have done something similar. The Soviets actually borrowed a lot from the late imperial government in terms of industrial policy, good and bad. They had freer hands with everything, it’s true, and that was an advantage for their policy. But they also had to overcome widespread ruination and the mass flight of capital and brains from the country.
       2. PlutoniumKun May 31, 2025 at 3:35 pm

          Thanks for your contribution to this. I’ve always found it odd that many people seem to think Russia was some sort of medieval backwater in the late 19th/early 20th century. It certainly was a little technologically behind Britain and the US, but was still considered at the time to be an advanced industrialised country (albeit one generally considered to be somewhat rotten politically). This is why the Russian loss in the 1908 war with Japan was such a seismic shock. But that owned more to the sudden rise of Japan than any backwardness of Russia. Of course, very large areas of Russia were agrarian, but at the same time, huge areas of England, Germany and the US were agrarian too, even at their absolute peaks.

          When you take the a ‘very long’ view of Russians industrial growth from the mid 19th Century to recent times, it follows quite a consistent and steady rate of industrialisation (albeit with several very intense ‘blips’. It’s very easy to isolate a period of a couple of decades and declare it as somehow unique – you can do that with any countries development. Only Britain, as the industrial revolution ‘lead’ country for a century or more had a fairly straight line development (and is arguably the first one to go into permanent decline).
       3. AG May 31, 2025 at 4:24 pm

          1) How would you judge the inequalitiy issue pre 1917?
          Hobsbawm famously argued the purge of the elite and the violence under Stalin were necessary as it was the only way to end that and open the way into the future.

          There is also this German (Western?) scholarship about the USSR of the 1920s-30s that in the cities when this huge mass of labourers and small peasents was entering it upset the hierarchies there disowning the bourgeoisie who found themselves sidelined. Suddenly people got a shot who had been suppressed.

          That is interesting read but since 2022 many of those scholars have also revealed themselves to be rabid anti-RU (RU imperialism and Putin nationalism etc.). That doesn’t mean their findings of the past are incorrect. But it has become really difficult to judge. The entire profession of RU historians has become questionable. I sometimes really am not sure any more what do I know? Other examples are the collaboration of Western Europe in WWII. and the fall of France. Or in general Cold War era Soviet history by the West. What is essentially MI-6? And what is genuine?

          2) What would be a serious account on the RU Civil War? Also number of dead etc. I almost come to think that the term Civil War is a construction of the West to cover their tracks and involvement.

          A lot is based on accounts by emigre writers like Gaito Gazdanov. But that was a White-supporter. As most in the West.
          1. Daniil Adamov May 31, 2025 at 7:09 pm

             1) There was tremendous legal and actual inequality under the late Empire, as well as considerable and steadily increasing social mobility and a likewise gradual improvement in living standards for the majority of the population after the 1860s. The legal inequality of estates, religions, sexes etc. was formally abolished after the February revolution, and it’s worth noting in passing that the mainstream Whites were overwhelmingly in favour of keeping this and other results of February, unenthusiastic though many in the leadership were about it. It was clear to most that there was no going back, and not all officers particularly wanted to; rather, what they opposed was the Bolshevik overthrow of the republican Provisional Government and the policies that they soon began to introduce.

             After the Bolsheviks had taken over, social mobility was vastly increased, if only because a lot of people were deprived of rights (for example “byvshie”, “the former people” – Stalin restored their formal equality in 1936, but in practice they and “relatives of enemies of the people” still had a hard time getting anywhere in society) or lives (far from always by Bolsheviks of course) or simply ran away, opening a lot of spots for others. But also, the new government sought to promote supporters and punish opponents. In Urals factories, this manifested as a policy of punishing experienced long-term workers (who were seen as pseudo-bourgeoise) and promoting politically reliable members of the lower working class. In practice it soon amounted to constructing a new worker aristocracy while displacing the old one.

             Undoubtedly the Bolsheviks did open the way to a lot of otherwise frustrated people, while destroying many others and also many of those they opened the way to when they turned out not as reliable as it first seemed (including some of my relatives, so I am admittedly biased; their surviving descendants, though, made it more or less alright and probably would’ve had a harder time otherwise, with stronger competition). Soviet society was extraordinarily socially mobile and that probably also made it easier to introduce new policies (at least at first, until ossification set in on the level of no longer new institutions). The flipside of this was that many (though certainly not all) of the people who came up through this system were more or less unscrupulous careerists who were more interested in self-advancement under the guise of ideological purity than in anything working well… Something Soviet authorities never denied, by the way, since that was one of the tendencies they kept fighting without much success.

             So I suppose it’s fair to say the various dislocations of the 1910s-1950s (not just deliberate Soviet policies, after all) made it easier to try new things, for better and worse. Same may be said about Peter’s reforms, which had similar good and bad effects (meritocratic opportunity, dynamism, innovation, corruption, new abuses, new repressive policies, de facto if not de jure deterioration of rural population’s status) though on a more modest scale. Equality, though, is a connected but somewhat separate question. Social mobility is great for those who, for whatever reason (skills, connections, character), manage to move up. But the educated party members in good standing still just formed a new meritocratic pyramid on top of a mass of less successful people who existed in a highly precarious state, gaining some useful things (widespread though initially low-quality education and healthcare) but often suffering the consequences of less successful policies (famines first and foremost, but also frequent localised lawlessness, abuse of authority from those in a hurry to prop themselves up, etc.).

             2) I don’t feel qualified to give a recommendation; I’m not a specialist and while I know there is a lot of literature in Russian and English, sifting the good from the bad requires expertise and/or a lot of time. There are many different narratives being pushed, after all, and a lot of hacks doing the pushing. (For example, the American expeditionary force commander was, if anything, sympathetic towards the Reds out of general Progressive principle and kept trying to undermine the Whites – politically at the time and in writing afterwards.)

             I will say this, from what I have read from different sources over the years, I see no reason to doubt it being a civil war at the least. It was extremely chaotic, however, and foreign interventions were frankly the least of it, though important locally. One thing to remember is that while the Reds had one central authority and the Whites had several under a loose umbrella, both the Reds and the Whites had many local warlords and frequently little to no control over their actions. And the same went for all the smaller factions involved, of which there were many. In a sense it’s not unlike current Syria expanded to the size of the Russian Empire, but with more ideological diversity and denser fog of war that helps account for widespread confusion, as do the aforementioned hacks.
             1. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 10:24 pm

                Thanks for the insight. As an American, I just try to push back against the evident propaganda I grew up with.
             2. AG June 1, 2025 at 4:17 am

                Excellent!
                And thanks for taking the time.

                p.s. fwiw
                Hungarian cinema in the person of Miklos Jancso produced a few major historic items 2 of which are about the Civil War.

                When I watched them many years ago in the theatre they did convey an understanding of the chaos that you describe

                Red & White (1967)
                unfortunately I cannot find but this version part Hungarian part Russian
                90 min.
                https://ok.ru/video/1602181597718
                https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0061537/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_50

                And focused on the Hungarian situation 1919 (entirely rural societies in these films which gives them almost a touch of dystopia)

                Silence and Cry (1968)
                73 min.
                Hungarian track but dubbed with that single RU voice…
                https://ok.ru/video/91397753457
                https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0061536/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl

                Movies made entirely of tracking shots
          2. amfortas the hippie May 31, 2025 at 7:43 pm

             aye, AG. I downloaded the Losardo thing on Stalin more than a year ago…recently read it all the way through.
             and it is totally different than anything i’d heard or read about the man before.
             i rather easily fall back into my comfortable Socratic Perplexity…moreso these days.
             because, as i have said elsewhere, i think we’re in a giant ontological crises right about now…largely unacknowledged.
             (ie: folks think we’re still in some kind of existential crises…but its really much worse than all that)
             1. AG June 1, 2025 at 3:46 am

                thanks for reminding!
                I got it now too.
                p.s. there is also this Geoffrey Roberts thing about Stalin and his library which I haven’t yet read
          3. Daniil Adamov June 1, 2025 at 4:52 am

             (Having thought about it some more…) If nothing else, I’d want to emphasise that – popular as they are in some circles both here and abroad – the radical reforms of Lenin and Stalin (and Peter the Great before them) were never “the only way to open the way into the future”. One might argue that they achieved social and industrial progress at a particularly high pace, though also at higher costs (both short-term human costs and long-term societal dislocations that undermined their accomplishments further down the line). One might further argue that they were necessary due to foreign threats. I confess I am skeptical about that line of argument, but it’s hard to refute conclusively as it becomes a matter of speculation and opinion.

             (Without rushed industrialisation, mass education and super-centralised control, could we have held off the Nazis? How about without losing the imperial officer corps with its institutional memory and the inventors who moved to America, and without antagonising large chunks of the population to such an extent that they would greet any invaders as liberators? Would the Nazis have come that far without exploiting the communist boogeyman in the first place? And so on…)

             But be that as it may, our society was evolving even without them. The late imperial government was plagued by complacency and incompetence, but it still built new railroads and factories. How ever haphazardly at times (especially under the terminally ill-suited Nicholas II), they did carry out social and labour reforms. There were plenty of local-level initiatives akin to those seen in other “bourgeois” nations at the time, like the widespread establishment of schools, hospitals and cultural institutions in previously neglected areas. For that matter, there was union activity, sometimes harshly repressed and sometimes tacitly permitted, but anyway much more independent, lively and consequential than it would become under the Bolsheviks, who inevitably found it necessary to put it under central control and thus pretty much killed it. Before WWI more or less peaceful evolution had started to seem like the more likely outcome, but the war and the disruptions brought by massive mobilisation sustained over several years broke the system’s back. It’s far from clear to me, in light of the above, that it was doomed to either collapse or stagnate indefinitely in the absence of such a catastrophe, though that is the “progressive” thesis I’m familiar with, and which Hobsbawm seems to have picked up. Unsurprisingly given his political sympathies.
             1. John Merryman June 1, 2025 at 5:17 am

                Which does go to basic physical dynamics. The pluses and minuses to everything.
                That as societies and states function as super organisms, governments form as a nervous system, executive and regulatory. Along with mediums of exchange and circulation systems, money and banking, as a form of blood and circulation system.
                While people, as cells in these systems can only make sense of them through the narratives they are told, so trying to understand all the ebb and flow is hard. We have gone from tribal cultures, where status would be a function of what we add, to these nation states of many millions of people. Where organic trust and interpersonal knowledge is replaced by these financial accounting systems and hierarchies in what is an evolutionarily short timeframe of a few thousand years.
                Given our tendency to fix problems as they arise, the effect is patches over the tears in the previous patches, going back to the dawn of civilization.
                It’s a learning curve.
             2. PlutoniumKun June 1, 2025 at 6:04 am

                You hit the nail on the head about rapid development. If you look historically at examples of rapid development/industrialisation, it’s striking how varied they are and how difficult it is to ascribe to a particular system or ideology. Sometimes they just ‘happen’. The circumstances come together. Its happened under right wing authoritarians (South Korea, Taiwan), left wing authoritarians (Stalin), democracies and quasi democracies (US, Germany), and so on. It’s also important to distinguish between ‘organic’ growth (i.e. when things just come together and it happens), ‘catch-up’ growth (when countries simply take the template set by a more advanced country and use their tech to raise productivity rapidly), and brute force growth (arguably, Stalinist growth). Then there is also ‘hit an oil well’ growth. It’s a complex phenomenon.

                To make things even more complex, growth can be regional (even crossing national borders), leaving backward areas in otherwise very advanced countries (think north vs south Italy).

                It seems to me that the growth that occurred under Stalin was impressive, but by no means unique, and it very much had its roots in the historical economic development of Russia as a whole.
             3. AG June 1, 2025 at 6:55 am

                …just on a side note – It might be an off-track association – but the akward and contradictory nature of all this reminds me of that insane historic episode of former Freud disciple Max Eitington. A therapist and highly regarded doctor he probably abused his function to spy on rich emigrés who were his patients and confided their secrets to him. Some of which were of interest to NKVD, as far as rumours go re: the infamous Tukhachevsky Affair…
       4. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 5:03 pm

          I certainly agree that Russia made much intellectual contributions to the world.
          My point is that it did make an enormous economic leap under communism.
          Politically both Germany and Russia lost the Kaiser and the Czar around the same time. Germany also lost the war and Russia pretty much lost its national structure. Given how they reconstructed themselves, it would seem Russia did a better job of remaining connected to the basic tenets of civilization. Considering Germany reverted back to a primal tribalism, that seems to be bubbling back up in a significant fashion, as both Nazism and Zionism are both primally tribal and emerged from the same Central European ferment.
          I agree my historical analysis is off the wall and qualified it as such, but it is evident we need to go back and understand the basic dynamics of why we are where we are.
       5. Steve H. June 1, 2025 at 7:54 am

          > the term “razrukha” is often used, I’m not sure how to translate it to English

          Working with etymology, the roots being ‘un-‘ and ‘movement’, a parallel word is ‘stagnation‘:

          > 1660s, “cease to run or flow, be or become stagnant, stand without current,” from Latin stagnatum, stagnatus, past participle of stagnare “to stagnate,” from stagnatum “standing water, pond, swamp
          1. Munchausen June 1, 2025 at 8:47 am

             Google translate says devastation. Translate.ru says ruin and even gives an example:
             Yugoslavia’s enmities, and the ruins of its economy, need to be addressed in a similar spirit.

             P.S, It seems that posting Cyrillic trigggered some automatic moderation mechanism, because my first post attempt went straight into the void. I hope this one, without the example sentence in Russian, will go trough.
    3. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 6:18 pm

       Mike Duncan in his Revolutions podcast, part 10 I think, has an exhaustive description of the Russian affairs prior to 1917. He goes waaay back in order to give a great picture of the background. Highly recommend it.
       1. AG June 1, 2025 at 4:20 am

          thanks!
29. Mo May 31, 2025 at 12:13 pm

    Regarding all the Chinese companies switching to native AI: this seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, but it seems obvious to me that most monopolies like Nvidia exist not because their technology is difficult to reproduce, but only because the technology cannot be reproduced by others at a lower price. Also there is a cost with switching sockets and software to someone else’s pinouts, API, learning a new supplier’s bugs, etc. Therefore no one would ever switch to a competitor’s chips at the same price. But once a competitor is guaranteed business, of course they will be able to make a good AI chip. The general architecture is well known and many many people know how to make chips.

    How could anyone not see this coming?
30. Tom Stone May 31, 2025 at 12:45 pm

    When I think about Trump’s emotional maturity and the quality of the people He has surrounded Himself with it seems entirely possible that he could pout His way into WW3.
    This may have been really bad time for TACO to become a meme…
    Mocking the King can have unexpected consequences….
    1. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 1:14 pm

       The Donald’s nuttiness is as much a stumbling block for the neocons, as anyone else. It might be what keeps us out.
       1. KD May 31, 2025 at 2:36 pm

          If an ill informed vulgarian narcissist-in-chief wading into senility is going to be God’s instrument for world peace, lets just call it what it is: miraculous/divine intervention, like Mary getting pregnant while remaining a virgin. But don’t get me wrong, the miracle of the Virgin Birth is a much more plausible sign of divinity than the notion that God has selected Donald “McRonald” Trump to make peace. I don’t know if anyone has applied Georg Cantor’s approach to leaps of faith, but its something like the set of all natural numbers versus the set of all irrational numbers.
          1. John Merryman May 31, 2025 at 6:24 pm

             Lol. I tend to just handicap the races, not root for a particular side. My sense of Trump is that if he wasn’t such a loose cannon, the powers that be would have figured out a way to corral him by now.
             The system seems to be in a death spiral and Trump is more symptomatic of that, than a solution. That it might crash and burn before it blows up the world is my hope.
             1. Henry Moon Pie June 1, 2025 at 1:16 am

                Agreed. To which I add burn it up.
    2. steppenwolf fetchit May 31, 2025 at 4:46 pm

       If he does, it would be with China, not with Russia.
31. Mikel May 31, 2025 at 12:49 pm

    The government is selling the roof Kommersant via machine transaltion. Micael T: “Housing must be an object of speculation, never just a house.” Moi: The neoliberals won in Russia.

    And there’s “let them eat bitterness” version of Xi, Modi and his oligarchs, and these kind of characters in Brazil:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvWCK28hdI/ – short video that’s interesting, but the clip of the “performance” begins after the 5 min mark.

    While the USA and associates deserve every ounce of criticism they get, more attention should be paid to these things as well.
    1. Daniil Adamov May 31, 2025 at 1:44 pm

       Speaking of neoliberalism, every now and then I am reminded of the early post-SMO start news in 2022, I think it was in March, when the Russian government substantially reduced its regulatory requirements for construction and car manufacturing. I suppose it may have been deemed necessary to help keep the economy afloat in an uncertain period, before it was clear that the impact of sanctions wasn’t all that serious. Or perhaps a bribe to keep the otherwise disgruntled elements of capital reliably on side?
       1. PlutoniumKun May 31, 2025 at 3:42 pm

          This is a picture we (by which I mean, those of us not in Russia) are sorely lacking – due to the waves of propaganda and bad faith commentry its very hard to get any idea of the internal plumbing of the Russian economy right now, in particular the compromises and back door deals needed to keep everything fiscally stable. It’s usually only after conflicts like this end that the real deep damage (assuming there is some) can be identified. I know Russia’s GNP growth is very strong right now, but this is typical of a war – it always results in a high octane economy. But what matters in the long term is what sort of problems have been allowed to build up. There is always a bill to pay after a war.
32. Anonted May 31, 2025 at 1:45 pm

    TRUMP WANTS THE DARKEST CORNERS OF BIG TECH TO OWN THE DOLLAR

    Sucks to be right. This should lock us into neoliberalism till the Second Coming. Automate it, really. Any time now Jesus.
33. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 1:47 pm

    Of course, what Ernst said has already been visited upon the populace by Biden’s destruction of public health and Pandemic denialism, liberal Democrats doubling childhood poverty, and ending the emergency that allowed for Medicaid expansion in many states. So this already came to pass by way of the Democrat Party.

    So naturally, liberals are aghast that a Republican said the quiet part out loud, but not at what Biden and the Democrats did.
34. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 2:05 pm

    From World faces new danger of ‘economic denial’ in climate fight, Cop30 head says

    But much mainstream thinking on economics does not take the climate crisis into account. Most governments preparing budgets, for instance, do not include climate impacts in their estimates, and nor do businesses. Many of the economic estimates of climate damage are also far too modest. For Corrêa do Lago, this shows that much more needs to be done.

    “Climate has not been incorporated into economic theory in a satisfactory way yet,” he said. “Because it’s a very disturbing element.”

    You can’t fix this with economics; traditional economics doesn’t take into account thermodynamics, and capitalism doesn’t properly price negative externalities.

    More of the same isn’t going to manage our decline.

    Capitalism is breaking the world; capitalism isn’t going to save it, whatever liberal Democrats might wish.

    This is really the ultimate day late, dollar short approach.
35. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 2:22 pm

    On Haiti and violence, I knew I read about this years ago, but how guns make their way to Haiti made the rounds again a few months ago: Haiti Doesn’t Make Guns. So How Are Gangs Awash in Them?

    The United Nations imposed an arms embargo on Haiti three years ago, yet most weapons on Haiti’s streets are from the United States, where they are purchased by straw buyers and smuggled into the country by sea or sometimes by land through the Dominican Republic, according to the United Nations.

    The issue has become so serious that Haiti’s government has restricted imports along its land border with the Dominican Republic. Only goods that were originally produced there are allowed; any products that didn’t originate in the D.R. have to enter through Haiti’s gang-infested seaports.

    …

    South Florida, including the ports of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, was the point of origin for 90 percent of Caribbean-bound shipments of illicit firearms reported between 2016 and 2023, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

    The US might be the world’s largest exporter of suffering?
36. KD May 31, 2025 at 2:23 pm

    Why liberal democracies win total wars Engelsberg Ideas. Readers no doubt readers will have a field day. Without having read this, one wonders how this article tortures facts so as to deny that it was Russia that defeated Germany in World War II.

    I was looking at a map the other day and all there was in the East was a forest labelled Germania and then a caption “there be dragons”. , , but on a serious note, it was probably easier for liberal democracies to win total wars when liberal democracies constituted 2/3rd of world’s GDP, especially back when GDP measured things like industrial production instead of the “world’s most innovative financial derivatives” dark pool.
    1. Kouros May 31, 2025 at 6:27 pm

       The article also omits the fact that the Soviet attack on Manchuria in August 1945 was more likely the main factor that convinced the Japanese General Command to surrender.

       An attack from the mainland on Japan had more likelihood of success than from Okinawa.
37. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 3:47 pm

    Wes Moore and Tim Walz Go to a Fish Fry and Spatter 2028 Gossip Everywhere

    Ladies and Gentlemen, the Democrats!

    The story photo is both Moore and Walz wearing, wait for it: Clyburn campaign t-shirts, the Democrat that brought us Joe Biden and his Regency presidency, that ended public health and doubled childhood poverty, not to mention elevating Clyburn this past cycle by making SC the leading Democrat Primary state.

    Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland played up his family ties to South Carolina and issued a spirited call to action as he addressed a room of Democrats hundreds of miles from home.

    Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota told The New York Times that he liked the idea of holding the first-in-the-nation presidential primary election in South Carolina, and stressed that Democrats should show up in red states like this one.

    The 2028 presidential campaign is years away, and virtually everything about it is uncertain. But in the eyes of some South Carolina Democrats who filed into the state party’s dinner on Friday night, or who headed to Representative James E. Clyburn’s annual fish fry nearby, the earliest stages of the primary race are plainly underway.

    I can’t wait, to not vote for either of these people.

    It’s gonna be a long couple of decades until Climate and the ongoing Pandemic finally break apart the US and it collapses with finality.
    1. steppenwolf fetchit May 31, 2025 at 6:38 pm

       Which piece or pieces of it might be most inhabitable? For what reasons?
       1. amfortas the hippie May 31, 2025 at 8:10 pm

          well…with sufficient sealevel rise, i reckon the Texas hill Country might just be what we now consider a Mediterranean Climate….if the Gulf of Mexico intrudes as far as Gonzales or Shiner(!).
          20 foot should do it…altho intitially there’ll be a couple hundred miles of salt marsh, until it gets eroded sufficiently by wave action and hurricanes.
          this was what the hadley climate model predicted, in fact, when i first started looking into GW more than 25 years ago when i first obtained access to the web.
          a beach at fredericksburg is not out of the question, however.
          ignorant firemonkeys, fu^king in the mud, and all.
       2. juno mas May 31, 2025 at 10:18 pm

          Those pieces that have agricultural grade soils, and a group of folks skilled at growing food, creating shelter, and making music for the group.
    2. Henry Moon Pie June 1, 2025 at 1:09 am

       In 2004, I was living in South Carolina and blogging among other things. Kerry chose to “re-start” his Presidential run, standing across the bay from the Yorktown, so I decided to check it out The national press was all there, and when Kerry stopped talking, the majority of the press gathered not around Kerry, but around Clyburn. He’s had the paltry Democratic side of that state under his thumb for a long time.

       Lee Atwater made S. C. a key Republican test. Remember Bush and McCain in 2000? Now Clyburn, without whom Biden would not have become President (along with Obama), got the Democrats to do the same. With the media playing along, that’s a lot of power over the primary process. S. C., it seems to me, has supplanted both Iowa and New Hampshire, and now has nearly the influence of both combined.

       Those hoping, yet again, to see a Bernie-style Democrat win the nomination in ’28 should consider just what sort of candidate will pass muster with Rep. Clyburn, because that’s the way the system is set up.
       1. AG June 1, 2025 at 2:39 am

          Fascinating.
          Is there suggested further reading on this?

          p.s. I just watched Steve Zaillian’s “ALL THE KINGS MEN” (2006), a much criticized remake of the 1949 adaptation by Robert Rossen. It is naive in it’s own way but still remains of relevance due to the nature of politics that you illustrate. I watched the German dubbed version which has an excellente actor for Mr. Penn. But I read Penn’s real-voice acting was also much disliked as very fake.
       2. steppenwolf fetchit June 1, 2025 at 3:15 am

          The DemParty re-engineering of its nomination process began after the McGovern nomination to make sure that no McGovern would be permitted to get the nomination again.
          Part of that was hundreds of “supergelegates” who could dilute or even drown out elected delegates for a McGovern-figure. Part of that was “Super Tuesday” . . . several Southern States holding their DemPrimaries on the same day . . . states with more conservative DemVoters than most other states, who would vote for more conservative primary-runners. And of course South Carolina coming before “Super Tuesday” to help bias and filter the selection of what would even reach the “Super Tuesday” primaries.

          And the Inner DemParty rulers knew/know that South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states will not vote for a Democrat in the General Election anyway. They just elevated these states to try preventing a less conservative Democrat who could win primaries in less conservative states from even reaching those states with plausible numbers of delegates.

          The amount of energy needed to counter that DemParty counter-progressive electoral engineering would be better spent if it were invested in Separate Survivalism in those states which are ready for it. But if someone wanted to spend all that energy on primary electoral politics anyway, perhaps that someone and its movement would see which states would provide the very barest minimum of electoral votes to win the election, and then concentrate on only running in the primaries of just enough of those states to try winning those state primaries to deny those states from that someone’s enemies elsewhere in the party and the country. And that someone would begin by boycotting the New Hampshire and Iowa Primaries/Caucuses/whatever method is used . . . and then boycotting the South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries, to make the point that they will not pursue conservative Dem votes in states which will never vote for a Dem President. That should destroy the influence of the conservative Dems in those “never vote Dem anyway” states within the Dem Party.

          But really, all that energy should be spent on Separate Survivalism. I would like to see a Blue State Survival Party starting up in a few Blue States to see where it could go.

          All this is just my mere amateur citizen opinion to be sure.
38. steppenwolf fetchit May 31, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    . . . ” Carbon footprint of Israel’s war on Gaza exceeds that of many entire countries ” . . .

    One wonders how it compares with the carbon footprint of Russia’s war in Ukraine, or Syria’s war against the Global Axis of Jihad ( Syrian “Civil War”), for example.

    One wonders if the concept of ‘carbon footprint of war” in general might get taken seriously enough to where
    wars-in-general get intervened in fast, hard and early to stop them from continuing.
39. Skip Intro May 31, 2025 at 4:47 pm

    Haven’t seen this posted here, a game that illustrates the cumulative impact of long COVID and multiple exposures:

    The Long COVID Game

    This short (under 5min) instructional game can help illustrate the risks of repeated COVID infections and the chance of acquiring Long COVID. It was designed for large groups, such as a classroom of students. The goal is to communicate the benefits of wearing a respirator, such as an N95, to reduce the number of COVID infections and thus the risk of contracting Long COVID.
40. AG May 31, 2025 at 5:43 pm

    re: Trumpism – McCarthyism

    This is strange:

    “Worse Than McCarthyism”: Historian Ellen Schrecker on Trump’s War Against Universities & Students

    https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/30/mccarthyism_universities

    But may be I just don’t get certain things. I mean, I needed some time to understand the realities behind the Trump hysteria during the last administration.

    But the breadth of the 1950s attack on US society at large seems to escape this angle presented via Schrecker.
    It may well be that the number of staff at universities now fired or intimidated (how do you assess that?) is larger – but did members of oppositional parties go underground? How many screenwriters, directors, actors in Hollywood were blacklisted now? How many reporters and TV journalists lost their jobs today?

    Actually I see only little grounds to compare both eras.

    The state of US education today, of US relation between elite educational institutions and the working-class then, the role of US education as an asset of financial speculation where education has in part turned merely into an appendix of the main hedge fund intended product, today – all of these make for too many major differences to draw such dramatically sounding conclusions. Again it appears a bit of too much PR in place of skepctical analysis and scholarship knowing the limits of its discipline and subject matter.

    p.s. the fact that Mr. Clooney is now turning his decent movie into a broadway show is not really a compelling argument and makes it all appear in fact even much less credible. When fears are turned into entertainment that is usually a sign for sovereignty (“history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as entertainment”).
    Of course you could argue that it´s not comparable simply because we have no Left left with the power and quality of the 1950s.The general conditions are just very very different which makes comparison between both with such dramatic vocabulary so questionable.
    1. Lefty Godot May 31, 2025 at 10:20 pm

       The talk about “book banning” (like, your second grader can’t have Genderqueer in their school library) also seems very exaggerated to me, remembering that books were actually banned in the US up till the mid-1960s, as in “you get charged with obscenity and potentially jailed if you sell those books”. Town and school libraries always had special policies for holding and lending any books that might possibly corrupt the morals of budding juvenile delinquents. In our town library, some books were kept in a locked cabinet and would have to be fetched for the (adult) customer that wanted to borrow them. Forget it if you were a kid. So, yes, we are nowhere near the McCarthy era redux. Yet.
41. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 8:09 pm

    ‘Republican Senator (Iowa) Joni Ernst hosted a tall hall this morning. The county (Butler) voted 72% for Donald Trump.
    Medicaid cuts (UNIVERSALLY UNPOPULAR, even in GOP strongholds) came up, the audience yelled “people will die!”
    With a big ass shit-eating grin, she replied…’

    I saw that Joni Enst in a video a coupla days ago and thought to myself that she was a nasty piece of work but after this video, went into her Wikipedia entry. Make your own conclusions-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joni_Ernst
    1. Alice X June 1, 2025 at 1:39 am

       Rev!

       Nasty pieces of work abound on this orb!

       As to world power, and even in social power, key to having their proxies elected, the USians Elite have had a somewhat leveling polished way, in their expression.

       What is new is the out-takes, per the corporate media, now found through another medium, captured and shared to many, even millions.

       It yields a clearer view of the heart of a reptilian mind.

       Its on your phone, and Wiki…
42. skippy May 31, 2025 at 9:43 pm

    Interesting to note after I mentioned Prof Wolff the other day – low and behold. I was actually imagining Prof Hudson and him having a chat.

    Richard Wolff: US Dollar is DEAD! China Just DESTROYED America’s Empire w/ Michael Hudson
    Danny Haiphong

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS4MZYbA5ro
43. Jason Boxman May 31, 2025 at 9:45 pm

    Wowzers, people kept bar tabs open? I always paid up, you never know when and where people might take you next, who wants to have to close out a tab?

    Of course it’s been over 5 years since I’ve been to a bar, mostly, given the Pandemic. But no one at the NY Times knows we’re in a Pandemic.

    Gen Z Doesn’t Want to Start a Bar Tab

    To the chagrin of bartenders, many 20-something bargoers prefer to close out and pay after every single drink, no matter how many they might order during an outing.

    Meanwhile this tweet links to a CDC report graphic showing we’ve had the largest number of people reporting flu-like symptoms in 2024-25 season, ever.

    https://x.com/CyFi10/status/1928644751164633125

    44% over 2018-2019 season, which is about 0%, so the baseline I think.
    1. Jason Boxman June 1, 2025 at 12:26 am

       And check this from the credit card cartel

       If someone spends $100 in one transaction, for instance, the percentage fee might be $4, or 4 percent, plus a fixed fee of roughly 30 cents. (Merchant fees vary, ranging between 2 and 4 percent on average.) But if a customer spends that same $100 through 10 transactions, the bar is charged that same 4 percent per swipe plus the fixed fee of 30 cents multiplied by 10. In that instance, the fees now total $7.
       That piles up when cards are swiped hundreds of times per night. Credit card fees, which soared 80 percent from 2020 to 2024, according to Mr. Kantor of the Merchants Payments Coalition, are one of the highest operating costs for bars and restaurants besides labor and rent.

       Maybe we should go after the credit card cartel instead of complaining about millennials?

       To say nothing about the ongoing Pandemic.

       Sensing that some Gen Z barflies might be bashful or perhaps less experienced with traditional bar etiquette, bartenders have tried gently nudging them to consider opening tabs. If he anticipates an impending rush at the bar, Mr. Perez will sometimes tell bargoers, “Hey, guys, let’s just start tabs right now.”

       I don’t miss trying to close out at bars pre-Pandemic. What a pain. Places got mobbed and you were stuck for 5,10,15 minutes while everyone else bailed on you. Why would you logically do that?

       If a group of friends closes out separate tabs multiple times at Seattle’s Central Saloon, Tiarra Horn will call them out from behind the bar: “‘You guys all know each other? You guys not friends? You can’t get this round?’”
       “They haven’t even thought about it,” Ms. Horn said. “Someone has to bully these people. Respectfully.”

       F. That. Find another bar.
       1. steppenwolf fetchit June 1, 2025 at 3:20 am

          I have no experience in bars. So I have to wonder . . . why can’t drinkers just pay cash for each drink? Why use a credit card at all?
          1. Revenant June 1, 2025 at 1:24 pm

             People should buy rounds. Social credit rather than actual credit!
             1. steppenwolf fetchit June 1, 2025 at 6:39 pm

                But in cash, not with cards.
44. The Rev Kev May 31, 2025 at 10:37 pm

    ‘Buitengebieden
    @buitengebieden
    I can’t stop laughing.. 😂’

    Nice to see that dog and that chicken living their best lives.
    1. wol June 1, 2025 at 2:47 am

       I had two Aussies, as they’re called in the States. Wonderful dogs. They both had
       senses of humor. Their ears smelled like snow.
45. skippy May 31, 2025 at 10:48 pm

    Prof Wolff and Hudson just had a chat on Danny Haiphong’s YT channel. Dreams do come true lmmao …

    I would quibble that neoliberalism/libertarianism is dead, sure as a international agenda sure – Russia/China but, repurposed as the last bastion or inverted in the nations that persist with its core social agenda e.g. two tier societies of a few haves and then have nots … its the Natural Order[tm] … meritocracy of wealth and deity choices thingy …
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 31, 2025 at 11:02 pm

       Russia’s central banker Elvira Nabiullina is neoliberal, as are all central bankers.

       Neoliberalism holds that pretty much everything can be solved by markets. It goes a long way in explaining elite incompetence in Europe. Governments aren’t expected to do stuff and they have a predisposition to fob it off to the private sector.
       1. skippy May 31, 2025 at 11:37 pm

          Agree, yet its a weird dynamic, due to education factors, networks both social and business, ultimately resulting no one going to far off the path to soon or sudden. I don’t know … some favor change from the inside over time vs going rogue which then provides fodder for being painted in Western MSM as anti economic freedom and liberties e.g. I as an individual make my own way in the market place. Not that others have massive powers in shaping it for their dominance.

          It has been my long held view that both China and Russia use neoliberalism econ philosophy as a bridge, not like communism back in the day, as a means to placate international norms whilst advancing their own sovereignty. I think that both are more pluralistic and use what works in that regard. Say how Russian MIC is non profit, massive state R&D, heaps of MIC mfg is being done by soldiers rotating out of the military e.g. they care.

          I don’t know what too say … I always via natural history and political theory see things as contracts and not the tool that its noted in. The social balance sheet that proceeds everything else till it does not and that is the path of so many nations [Toynbee-esque].

          That is why in my own way I attempt to change perspectives from the inside casually. So much of my work is within that sphere of society and them seeing someone my age and experience in life working hard and delivering a top shelf job allows me to drop a few hints/bread crumbs. Per se your blog or other informative sites.

          I digress.
46. AG June 1, 2025 at 3:16 am

    re: JCPOA

    Including an odd quid pro quo (if US focuses on China we can have peace in Middle East)
    but interesting enough

    How the US could use Iran’s uranium enrichment to its own advantage
    A plan for a regional nuclear consortium under international auspices has merit.
    by Seyed Hossein Mousavian

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-2672224731/

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