A 108-Million-Year-Old Bone Just Rewrote Our Understanding of the World’s Strangest Mammal SciTechDaily
The evolution of elephants
pic.twitter.com/1mYcLgAimP— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 6, 2025
Getting along with grizzly bears Knowable Magazine
Tensions over Kashmir and a warming planet have placed the Indus Waters Treaty on life support 3 Quarks Daily
COVID-19/Pandemics
Trump admin picks COVID critic to be top FDA vaccine regulator Ars Technica
Florida’s COVID-era housing boom is over — biggest decline in prices in more than a decade NY Post
What is H5N1? Warning of new virus spreading across the US raises fears of new pandemic NorthJersey.com
The Cost of Caution: How the Trump Administration’s Ban on Gain-of-Function Research Undermines Pandemic Preparedness Global Biodefense
Climate/Environment
“World Calls on China to Lead”: Urgent Climate Demands Escalate Ahead of Pivotal Global Sustainability Transition Conference Sustainability Times
Climate change intensifies snow droughts: study CGTN
‘Our snow is melting’: Nepal battles fallout of global climate inaction Andolu Agency
Wildfires are getting deadlier and costlier thanks to climate change: Study The Hill
China?
China handles 10.89 million entry-exit trips during May Day holiday CGTN
🇨🇳China is not our enemy.#China pic.twitter.com/cGFLVZWjl1
— Jason Smith – 上官杰文 (@ShangguanJiewen) May 2, 2025
US, China to launch formal trade talks in Switzerland after tariff onslaught France 24
AMD forecasts $1.5 billion revenue hit from US curbs on China chip exports Reuters
South of the Border
Sheinbaum’s refusal of U.S. military action in Mexico could fracture relationship with Trump KJZZ Phoenix
US, Mexico negotiate over efforts to prevent spread of flesh-eating parasite USA Today
Top-Down Peace, Bottom-Up War: The Collapse of Brazil’s Gang Alliance
European Disunion
Ukraine’s top diplomat urges Ireland to support tougher EU sanctions on Russia Andolu Agency
Orbán sidelines Ukraine, helps Moldova. What might happen to Kyiv’s EU dream with Hungary’s veto European Pravda
Old Blighty
India, UK agree ‘historic’ trade deal including tariff cuts Al Jazeera
Seaside town voted one of the ‘worst in the UK’ set for major £16m upgrade Daily Mail
UK services sector shrinks for first time in 17 months amid Trump tariff fears The Guardian
Israel v. The Resistance
UN committee urges immediate lifting of Gaza blockade, cites starvation, mass displacement Andolu Agency
This is Gaza.
And if you condemn the people who are doing this to children, you may get banned on social media or even get arrested in some European countries.
What a dystopian world we live in. pic.twitter.com/ukSTN2j3ZC
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) May 6, 2025
You know what else died in Gaza? The myth of western humanity. pic.twitter.com/VTMs30fFlQ
— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) April 30, 2025
Israel’s Smotrich says victory means Gaza fully ‘destroyed’ DW
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukrainian drones attack Moscow, temporarily halting flights ahead of major military parade CNN
Russia says it stands by three-day ceasefire plan after Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow BBC
Why Zelensky – not Trump – may have ‘won’ the US-Ukraine minerals deal The Conversation
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
EU to Ban Privacy Coins, Anonymous Crypto Accounts by 2027 Reclaim the Net
Privacy in the Age of AI: Return of ‘Get Over It’ Thinking Govinfo Security
“Your privacy is a promise we don’t break”: Dating app Raw exposes sensitive user data Malwarebytes Labs
Imperial Collapse Watch
Researchers say moms and babies are ‘going to get hurt’ by federal pregnancy data team cuts 1CT
U.S. Mortality Rate Compared to Europe as Dr. Oz Blames Health Care Newsweek
Warning signs could soon be posted at hotels that host homeless people Arizona Capitol Times
Trump 2.0
House Republicans warn Trump administration on Social Security cuts Politico
US Supreme Court lets Trump’s transgender military ban take effect Reuters
Trump says US to stop strikes on Houthis in Yemen CNN
US trade deficit hits record high ahead of Trump tariffs ABC News
DOGE
Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning The Register
Why Are Elon Musk and DOGE Killing a Program That Works? US News
Democrat Death Watch
Kamala Harris mocked as Democratic Party touts her attendance at high-profile Met Gala Fox News
Has Kamala Harris ever tried just being normal pic.twitter.com/ML7Iss7t6T
— Luigi Mangione For President (@DoctorFishbones) May 1, 2025
Clash over teen sex solicitation reveals the rift within the California Democratic Party Cal Matters
Immigration
Trump offers $1,000 incentive to migrants who leave the country voluntarily NPR
ICE visits rattle D.C. restaurants Axios
Trump’s immigration policies will cost Massachusetts billions, experts say Boston Herald
Our No Longer Free Press
Why Journalists Must Band Together to Defend the First Amendment Pen America
Swalwell, Blumenthal reintroduce Journalist Protection Act to defend the free press WNA
A Student Journalist Covered a Pro-Palestine Protest. Soon, Her Graduation Came Under Threat. Columbia Journalism Review
Mr. Market Is Moody
Is Trump destroying the dollar – and what does it mean for the euro? Euro News
Beware, investors: The recent stock rally is based on an unknown outcome after Trump’s 90-day tariff pause MarketWatch
How Japan’s $1.1 Trillion in US Treasuries Became a Strategic Lever in the New Tariff War The Diplomat
Consumer Confidence Takes A Hit As Economic Concerns Grow finimize
AI
Medical AI trained on whopping 57 million health records Nature
Nvidia CEO explains 2 ways AI will boost the global economy Yahoo Finance
We just solved text-to-speech AI.
This model can simulate perfect emotion, screaming and show genuine alarm.
— clearly beats 11 labs and Sesame
— it’s only 1.6B params
— streams realtime on 1 GPU
— made by a 1.5 person team in Korea!!It’s called Dia by Nari Labs. pic.twitter.com/rpeZ5lOe9z
— Deedy (@deedydas) April 22, 2025
AI reveals title of ‘unreadable’ Vesuvius scroll for first time Nature
The Bezzle
AI-Based Fraud: Criminals Are 2 Years Ahead of Defenders GovInfo Security
GenAI payment fraud forces multilayered biometric approach to defense Biometric Update.com
Guillotine Watch
MetGala is probably the most cringe event in human history. A bunch of rich people playing dress up while taking themselves way too seriously in the process. https://t.co/bCVg64kdwv
— Revolutionary Blackout🥋 (@SocialistMMA) May 6, 2025
If you have not heard @megynkelly podcast about The Met Gala, you are missing out. I was dying. I laughed so hard I almost cried. 😂
Little visual for y’all… 🤣 pic.twitter.com/Kc2jre4fGe
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) May 6, 2025
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
Re Fleetwood in UK. Weird that I’ve never heard of it. However it has the advantage of being on the “correct” side of the UK. Sea level rise accompanied by rebound since the last glacier retreated mean the UK is tilting. The west is often moving up above sea level in net terms whilst large swathes of the East have quietly been written off since you can almost in real time see them falling into the North Sea.
We really really should already be well into plans to move the capital. (There’s an ideal area north of Nottingham sitting on all sorts of travel corridors and 50+ metres above sea level). But not gonna happen until it’s too late.
Isn’t Cornwall in the south-west slowly sliding towards the sea as that part of the country tilts down?
Perhaps it’s time, in the context of all that discussion about sustaining the film industry, to adapt the Submersion of Japan into a version dealing with the British Isles?
Thx. Made me curious since no subtitles but unfortunately my BFF who is Japanese expert has brought me up to speed on what Japan’s now rebooted nuclear plants going underwater will do…..
We don’t in UK have that problem bar one or two plants but submersion will be equally catastrophic without radical action starting now. Hell we’ve GOT the perfect site for a kinda “Federal District” like DC already and capability at only moderate cost in real resources to prepare for various things, including a greater (though not total) degree of food security.
It’s ironic that the UK does have the POTENTIAL to prepare for a lot of what is coming (compared to a number of EU powerhouses)….. it just won’t do it till it’s too late.
Well, there is also the trailer in German (retitled “Panik über Tokio — Panic over Tokyo”) — which works perfectly for me :-)
Thanks for that link, vao. There was a more recent film with the same idea called “The Sinking of Japan” made back in 2006-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJ6Cftc-E8 (3:10 mins)
Since we are at it, there was yet another Japanese movie on the topic which was a parody of all those other films: The world sinks except Japan.
I saw it some 15 years ago — it is an amusing spoof on the genre. Among the highlights, there is that character who is a world-famous actor who escapes from the sinking USA to Japan. Despite his celebrity, he is reduced to an extra in kaiju movies because he does not speak a word of Japanese — playing the role of a gaijin who screams before getting stomped by Godzilla.
I confess I’m not sure. We know that whilst the main axis of tilt is a north-south line of longitude (west rising, east falling) I have heard people say the effect is much more pronounced in NW Scotland to SE England; there are other factors also at play so that might well explain SW sinking despite being west.
Too many dumb surfers clogging it up? ;-)
Maybe they can dig out all those barrage balloons in storage from WW2 and set them up in Cornwall to keep that end of the island up. Back in WW2 the Brits joked that there was so much American military equipment in Britain, that it was only the barrage balloons that stopped the island sinking under all that weight.
Not that I am aware. Will nip out with a ruler and verify.
Awkward if it is. Sealevel in the UK is defined from the mean sea datum at Newlyn in Cornwall (basically an intertidal point) so we might have to.recalculate!
You raise a valid point. One aspect of the post-Katrina study of levees is that contract documents reference “sea level” but determining the datum is not easy but vital when were are talking about a few feet.
After enduring the “Katrina Experience” in coastal Mississippi, (are you experienced?) a couple of we locals measured the high flood lines on several of the extant buildings. We started our measure, using an old Dumpy Level I had and a tape rule tied to a stick. Our starting point was a Coastal and Geodetic elevation marker embedded in a concrete post next to old Highway 90. That’s where we came up with our measure of the flood tide elevation: 17.5 feet above mean high tide.
See: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/navigation/tidesandcurrents/#:~:text=Mean%20lower%20low%20water%2C%20or%20the%20average%20of,the%20datum%20used%20to%20represent%20shoreline%20on%20charts.
So, yes, the beginning standards make all the difference.
Knowing where the high tide mark can be very important. There was this guy in Hawaii that was a photographer that was also legless. He would dangle below a helicopter to get great aerial shots and would do the coastlines. And no, I am not making this up. Then a massive storm hit Hawaii wrecking many of those coastal communities so this guy gets into a helicopter and heads out to those wrecked communities to record the damage while hanging below that chopper. Then the bulldozers moved in to clear away the wreckage. Pretty soon this guy in his Hawaiian shirts starts to find guys in business suits turning up to his doorstep. Turns out that when he recorded the damage, that it showed the high tide mark of it and these suits were from insurance companies wanting to buy copies of his photos for assessment purposes and in settling claims.
Those Fens at risk? Cambridge next century?
The Fens are already below sealevel. Only pumping keeps them dry.
Mainstream models of climate change were saying it’d be Cambridge-on-sea 20 years ago.
And that was before they started added non-linear tipping points in to improve modelling.
After this, will we ever find King John’s lost treasure?
“Sheinbaum’s refusal of U.S. military action in Mexico could fracture relationship with Trump”
Well, there is a simple solution. Sheinbaum could allow a US military expeditionary force into Mexico while Trump allows a Mexican military expeditionary force into the US to blow up all those gun stores selling weapons to Cartel members to be smuggled over the border. Sheinbaum could tell Trump that it would be part of her campaign to Make Mexico Great Again.
Re: the AI tweet from Deedy
The clip tracks almost exactly with an episode of The Office (US version). In which a worker creates a fire to test his colleagues, mocking them when they make poor decisions and causing one of them to panic and have a heart attack. So AI pulled out a script of a scripted fire emergency. Twice fake. Brilliant.
‘Luigi Mangione For President
@DoctorFishbones
Has Kamala Harris ever tried just being normal’
And I was so looking forward to her as President give her first State of the Union speech. Had the popcorn ready and everything.
This is the most ridiculous person EVER to hold public office. We are stuck with Crazy Ass Trump and his tariffs and destruction of our social security and Medicare. The destruction of the economy and everything else because the democrats chose to hide demented Biden and push this ridiculous person as President. Is it any wonder she lost?
The hyena laughter, the stupid comments. What can you say? It thanks you lame corrupt Bastards. We will enjoy standing in Bread lines and sleeping under bushes in the parks, while Kamala and Obama live in mansions, and give lame speeches for millions, while writing boring books that don’t sell. For huge advances from the publishers.
I only listened to a clip of her speaking once; it was painful. She’s coin operated though, so the Hampton’s crowd certainly liked her.
I agree with all you’ve pointed out and add that I can’t forget that mark cuban was waiting in the wings so with both unsuitable candidates had a techie itching to boost his shares. Cuban was going to go in on the sec and likely as not since it’s accepted dogma social security cuts and of course (accepted dogma) privatization schemes cementing oligarch control. The picture of the girl and her former self is the USA looking at its past self. Not good, and no one was/is primed to save us from the spectacle of decline.
The Rev Kev
Well, it seems that a certain tall building on billionaire’s row in New York has been “luigi”ed by design of designers and building contractors. Or perhaps it is being prepared for the next disaster extravaganza for a “made only in America” Hollywood movie
I was thinking that perhaps those wealthy people though that there were builders & contractors that only built buildings for wealthy people and were not the same ones that built for everybody else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYWxoQ9Zkw
Supposedly during the recent 5 days Labor Week holiday, 314 million domestic trips were taken by Chinese citizens ….. so where’s the collapse?
during Chinese New Year they wrote off those people traveling as “migrating”, dunno why they didn’t reuse it
>3000 years of continuous settled civilization and they’ve seen it all. A “trade war” is a preschooler’s tea party compared to the worst chaos of even the past 100 years.
Height of bipartisan “post-modern” arrogance-hubris that the West is in a position to lecture China about how to function as a virtuous civilization.
‘Insurrection Barbie
@DefiyantlyFree
If you have not heard @megynkelly podcast about The Met Gala, you are missing out. I was dying. I laughed so hard I almost cried. 😂
Little visual for y’all… 🤣’
The Aussie phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ comes to mind here.
Here is a link to the podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FO6Wa1iWn4
Now since she is catty, I get to be too. On the one hand, she’s a gorgeous woman and can no doubt claim the high ground v. people who engage in body displays most of us would want to unsee if we saw them, when she could probably pull them off.
On the other hand, she’s ruined her face with having (apparently fairly recently) her buccal fat removed. That winds up being SUPER aging and she’s not that young to begin with. And there’s no way to undo it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcALGkAd1Zc
Thanks for those two links. I’ll check ’em out in the morning but that second one looks creepy as. Getting buccal fat seems to be on par with getting a huge tattoo done on a visible part of your body. There are all sorts of ways that that could go sideways.
Once the surgeon started showing pictures of all those nerves, blood vessels, and glands irrigating the cheeks, I immediately sensed what kind of problems could occur.
By the way: why do people get that surgery? In that video, that Megyn Kelly has a slight, oddly anorexic look.
Oh well, why do people get those ugly, off-putting lip-enlargement surgeries (aka duck-lips)? Or those jobs that leave them with way too narrow noses?
Duck lips from injections and fish mouth from facelifts.
Is there is a PETA ad in the works? /s
Are you interested in an item by item breakdown of contemporary cosmetic decisions or is it OK if I just wave away the whole thing by saying “either status signalling or fertility signalling, depending”. That is after all basically all it ever is to the properly reductive anthropologist.
“either status signalling or fertility signalling, depending”
Status signalling seems intuitively relevant, for all age classes.
I am not at all sure about fertility signalling: aren’t those kind of surgeries largely performed upon women whose fertility is declining? Then, the fact that said surgeries were performed being obvious ends up stressing the point that they are no longer in their prime?
Perhaps the bucal fat removal, but the plastic surgery phenomenon is rampant in young women, and a fair amount of young men as well. I don’t get the desire to look like a Kardashian, but between them and many other influencers of all type, youthful surgical ‘enhancement’ is no longer just nose and boob jobs.
And it is amazingly plastic, I realize that we place a huge value on physical appearance that conforms to current standards, but to this old broad what I see is like looking at artificial flowers you can get at the dollar store, a bad imitation of human beauty with weird distortions.
Reminds me of a Korean TV Drama, the premise is that a princess in 15c Goryeo is badly injured and can’t be helped. So the hero is sent through a wormhole to modern Seoul where he happens upon a convention of plastic surgeons and drags one of the presenters back.
She protests, to no avail, that she knows nothing about doing “real” surgery but is successful. In the climax she has to go to the evil lord, who has taken an unwelcome love interest in her, and convince him using a BS story. Before she leaves, a court lady asks if she thinks she can pull off the lie. Her response: “Can I lie convincingly? I’m a plastic surgeon!!”.
Fertility in decline, perhaps, but that just means it’s a false signal; deception is innate to the interests of the animal in that instance. Anyway the fertility signalling would tend to explain the kind of cosmetic enhancements that aren’t age-specific, eg.an enhancement to the enormity of the derriere. As to whether or not such interventions are obvious…to be perfectly honest I’m not sure they are to most people, I haven’t a tremendous amount of faith in the common power of observation.
You mean the “Mar-a-lago look”? The question answers itself….
NO REGERTS!
Maybe she wants to look anorexic in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Cannot rightly say I expected the cosmetic surgery critique reading the links this morning but you’re perfectly right, it’s a very high time preference type of deeply artificial vanity. Maybe not exactly the equivalent to a modern venetian ceruse but it’s in the same spirit.
strangely, i didnt even notice her face.
probably some as yet unidentified long covid cognitive sequelae…
BWAHAHA, she has so much makeup on you have to look past it!
The alleged JD Vance effect. If you wanna be a drag queen then just do it. I don’t care.
Met a wizened 82 year old German hiker on the Inca Trail, who’d been to every country except for 6 of them, and the wrinkles on her face were tantamount to a 15 minute topo map, so stately was she.
In contrast to Megyn et al…
Reminds me of one of Captain Beefheart’s many brilliant turns of phrase, this one from the song Pachuco Cadaver:
“She wears her past like a present”
Just caught up with that second link and wow. Just the first three minutes is alone giving good enough reasons not to go screwing around here. Too many dependencies. I do wonder one thing. I notice a lot of women that have had plastic surgery looking like they have very high cheekbones and it reminds me of North American Indians. So I am now wondering if that look is a result of the removal of their buccal fat.
On the subject of plastic surgery reminds me of what a friend of mine in our yoga class remarked when referring to one of the older hotties, “If she has one more face lift she’ll have a beard”. Sorry, if that’s inappropriate.
– ‘UN committee urges immediate lifting of Gaza blockade, cites starvation, mass displacement’ – Andolu Agency
– ‘Israel’s Smotrich says victory means Gaza fully ‘destroyed’’ – DW
Strangely, NBC Nightly News said nothing about any of this last night. However, they did have a long segment on the terrible incident of “antisemitism” that occurred in a Philadelphia sports bar. Seems someone sent a tasteless note to another table as a joke, but fortunately owner Dave Portnoy made national news by evoking the Holocaust. There are only so many minutes on the Nightly News, so NBC only has time to air the important stories.
Portnoy’s complaint!
– ‘Why Journalists Must Band Together to Defend the First Amendment’ – Pen America
– ‘Swalwell, Blumenthal reintroduce Journalist Protection Act to defend the free press’ – WNA
Of course I support the First Amendment and a free press. But as I read these pieces I’m wondering how many of these organizations or individuals advocated censorship or smeared their fellow scribes as “Putin puppets” or “Assadists” during the first Trump or Biden administrations? How many raised their voices in support of Julian Assange?
In fairness though, they do seem really worked up about the defunding of Voice of America, so maybe they really mean it.
“Orbán sidelines Ukraine, helps Moldova. What might happen to Kyiv’s EU dream with Hungary’s veto”
Now that sets up interesting dynamics. President Sandu of Moldova would love to reunite Moldova with Romania and like many people in Moldova, she has her Romanian passport ready to go. And now there seems to be a bit of a stampede to get Moldova into the EU. But if Orban gives the nod and lets Moldova join the EU, then that is it. Moldova becomes a full-fledged member as an actual country and I bet that there is no process in the EU where two member states can unite into one member state. Union with Romania would then be dead in the water. But as least President Sandu could console herself with all that EU money that would be flowing into the country.
This is not your father’s EU, this is the one where nullifying elections, banning parties and ordering prime ministers around is the new normal. Probably one of the requirements of Moldova’s membership is annexation by Romania.
And there will be all the NGOs and the EU commission to make that happen, no matter what people would prefer.
RE: Warning signs could soon be posted at hotels that host homeless people
From the article –
“Sen. Mitzi Epstein said she finds the bill offensive.
“It assumes that people, just because they don’t have a place to sleep, just because they don’t have a home, that they are criminals,” the Tempe Democrat said. “And we as a country are really tired of our elected officials assuming somebody is a criminal because they are something else.” ”
That assumption is not a bad one. A few years ago, our small city used a couple hotels to house people – one for the recent immigrants dropped off en masse here, and another for the burgeoning homeless population. My better half held public office at the time so was in touch with the local police. There were an astounding number of police calls to the hotel housing homeless people – dozens per day, so high I almost couldn’t believe it. Calls to the hotel housing immigrants were minimal – they were by and large families with children and not causing any problems.
That being said, these hotels were exclusively housing homeless or immigrants so no rooms were available for people off the street, so no warning signs needed. The practice was also extremely lucrative for the hotel owners – full occupancy for past-their-prime hotels for a couple years running, with all expenses picked up by the federal government. Or some of them at least – the cost of educating the recently arrived children was picked up by me and my neighbors via a whopping tax increase due to the increased school budget.
Anyway, I think we can be compassionate to people who are having a rough time with life while at the same time not overlooking the problems in those communities and pretending they don’t exist. There are legit public health issues with having so many people who can’t afford a place to live and don’t have adequate medical care.
If we don’t want homeless people everywhere, instead of arguing about proper signage, my suggestion would be to build them some damn homes, here in the richest country the world has supposedly ever known. And throw in a universal healthcare system while we’re at it. Instead, we spend billions to bomb people’s homes to rubble with USian ordinance, and bankrupt the citizenry over health costs. What a country.
lyman alpha blob: my suggestion would be to build them some damn homes, here in the richest country the world has supposedly ever known.
Can’t do that, and not just because it would be godless communism.
If they did, or even just housed all the US homeless in the structures existing now but kept vacant to preserve their ‘value’ — there are over 15 million vacant homes in the U.S., or about 10.5% of the country’s total housing inventory, whereas there are approx. 771,480 homeless (officially) — all the US real estate currently priced at sky-high, phony-baloney values couldn’t be priced at those sky-high values, and a crucial underpinning of the ‘richest country in the history of the world,’ the inflated RE market, would vanish.
And then, what would the US have, since it doesn’t much make real things anymore?
Cloud capital and the global reserve currency, I guess. But both those — the latter, especially — look pretty tenuous, unstable things to be basing claims of being ‘the richest country in the history of the world’ on
In other words, not only will they not ‘build the damn homes,’ but also they’ll keep on trying to hike the rents and inflate the mortgage values till housing will be so unaffordable for so many that there’ll be millions of homeless people. And this will all be just so the US can keep on pretending to be the ‘richest country in the history of the world’. Rather than the cr*phole kleptocracy it actually is.
.
Couldn’t tell you anything about Lima, with its 13 million population, but we spent a fortnight in Cusco and the Sacred Valley with its population of 1.3 million, being driven around, and their dwellings are inevitably unreinforced brick and some adobes and precious little in wood (the dominant tree of size we saw was invasive eucalyprus-the pigpen of trees). because it would all have to be imported. Peru has a history of earthquakes, yikes.
Looked up the average per capita income for Peruvians, and its around $5k for males and $4k for women.
Why did I only see 1 obvious homeless person in all that time?
When I got back to Van Nuys Flyaway in LA, saw dozens within 15 minutes
Same sort of thing happening in Vancouver, Canada. Gov’t paying big money to put the homeless in hotels, when they could be properly housed for less. Meanwhile, a shortage of tourist accomodation drives an increase in the short-term rental of apartments. Why? Real estate bubble, and corruption.
I always enjoy the links from NC and of course the comments as we deconstruct the headlines. And this headline is amazing for it’s propaganda: “How the Trump Administration’s Ban on Gain-of-Function Research Undermines Pandemic Preparedness”. The gain of function “research” is what got us here in the first place! I am livid so I won’t say much more. Perhaps we should re-open the many bio-weapon labs in Ukraine and see how well the gain of function was going there? Just yank the door open, hit the fan to get some fresh air in, grab some samples, and take zip lock baggies of material back to N.C. State U. to compare with the current bio-weapons languishing on shelves there. Let’s do it, come on! We’ll call it a “gain of function-a-thon”. We could make it a fundraiser for Fauci. He has suffered so much from abuse and personal attacks and he may not have much in his 401K so we can support him and the future of “science” with a “Funds for Fauci” initiative.
100% – I was about to post the same thing. In the case of Trump, even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. Perhaps I don’t understand how improving the function of a virus makes us safer or improves vaccines.
So why would DOGE target Direct File?
Because Republicans (especially) want USians to HATE the income tax so much that they will let them drown it in the bathtub.
Who’s going to fund DoD then?
Tariffs.
Seriously, that’s what Trump thinks. I know it’s deluded.
On scroll deciphering… not dissing the work, but I wish that the article would say that the analysis is a very likely guess, but cannot be definitive.
Did DOGE FAA cuts lead to the situation at the Newark airport and the PHL TRACON?
Some of the 400 jobs that were cut at the FAA helped support air safety, a union says
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-airlines-27390c6a7aac58063652302df5a243d3
This article is from February when DOGE fired the FAA personnel, but one has to wonder if this is having an effect on the FAA’s ability to keep it’s facilities running.
Having worked very closely with maintenance people almost my whole career, I’ve seen this same dilemma play out many times. Upper management is doing budgets and everything is is running OK in the factory so we must have too many maintenance people so let’s get rid of some of them. This keeps getting repeated until a now chronically understaffed and overwhelmed maintenance group just cannot keep up anymore.
This is of course, anecdotal and speculative. You would hope management at the FAA realizes that America’s air traffic control system requires a high level of redundancy (including people) since it is such a critical system, but judging by the chronic shortage of air traffic controllers one does have to wonder about the rest of the system. Any first hand input from people working there would be appreciated.
Smokescreen of the day:
Per Trump’s decree, the Persian Golf will be called the Arabian Golf.
Next up:
Red Sea will be known as Retreat Sea.
And Mr. DT will start calling Canada “AREA 51.” What else could a man with the DT’s do?
Unless Mr. DT calls it “Mar-a-Lago North” instead.
Perhaps because he’s being underestimated, or perhaps just in the sense of a stopped clock being right twice a day, Trump sometimes does things that seem eminently sensible. Banning GOF research is definitely one of those things.
In fact, GOF research was already banned in the US several years back, but the ruling had a “national security” exemption that rendered it toothless, and this extremely dangerous work kept rolling along despite the supposed ban. There’s pretty compelling evidence, at least to this layman, that the covid virus emerged from GOF work being carried on in Wuhan by the US-funded Ecohealth Alliance.
Aside from the obvious monetary motives, I have a hard time understanding why someone would want to answer the question “how can we make this virulent organism even more virulent?” The level of danger seems beyond belief given the fact that these organisms are self-replicating and self-modifying, and, as we have seen, are impossible to control once the escape the lab environment.
this guy has big brass balls:
https://alonmizrahi.substack.com/p/a-lesson-learned-if-you-believe-god
https://x.com/alon_mizrahi/status/1920114828519088337
save and share, because i expect him to vanish.
Yeah, it fully can be expected that Mr. Mizrahi will at soon find his liberty curtailed by one “security” service or another, at the very least:
…So I am telling you – whoever you may be reading this – that you have the authority, privilege and duty to do whatever is necessary to stop Israel’s extermination of Palestinians. Whatever is necessary.
…
We, the people, have to do whatever we can to make it stop. Whatever is necessary. No more opining and complaining. Organize now to disrupt, sabotage, and stop it using whatever means necessary and fitting to save the lives of 1 million people.
In 2024, 74,749,891 democrat voters consented to and affirmed Team Biden’s “partnership in genocide” with the Israeli state. It is unfortunate that we will need to wait until 2028 to know exactly how many voters approve Team Trump’s wholehearted affirmation of this, but it seems safe to say that approximately 150 million Americans are perfectly OK with using their tax dollars to help exterminate innocent people.
re: Medical AI trained on whopping 57 million health records – Nature
OK. Now let me tell you about corrupted databases with typo errors and incorrect original entries. Not corrupted deliberately with bad intent, but corrupted with the best intent by data entry mistakes or by mistakes in the early diagnosis. GIGO.
Yes, After my last Doc appt His post visit notes included a diagnosis of “Mixed hyperlipidemia” which apparently means high fats in the blood including high LDL and high triglycerides …. which is absurd. My total cholesterol level has never reached 85 and my triglycerides are about 30. And have been my entire life. So a month after this I got a letter from my Part F plan that I should ask the Doc for medication to treat this dreaded problem. So dumb. Anyway he retired last week so I don’t think his mind has been on patient notes for a while…
re: education and censorship
RACKET
This is a longer excerpt from a paywalled piece by Taibbi.
He essentially points out the exaggeration by both sides about censorship under Obama and Biden and now under Trump.
Maybe someone can weigh in.
My Education Solution
Stop lying, blow it up, and start over
https://www.racket.news/p/my-education-solution
see original for several hyperlinks throughout the entire article
“(…)
From a New York Times editorial originally titled, “I Know Trump’s Plan for Universities. It Transformed My College,” by University of Florida professor Anna Peterson:
(…)
Everyone lies about education. I find it hard to believe Professor Peterson isn’t aware this exact strategy of “anticipatory obedience” became second nature among students. and professors at universities (and eventually beyond, in sectors like media and politics) over the last decade-plus, in response to government dictates at least as ambitious as the DeSantis Higher Education bill or Donald Trump’s Executive Orders on Antisemitism or DEI. What she’s describing isn’t something new, but the latest in a long chain of official actions and reactions, during which American higher education became increasingly a) expensive and b) useless.
Peterson describes a “climate of fear.” The April, 2011 “Dear Colleagues” letter from Barack Obama’s Department of Education kicked off an era of Title IX investigations that quickly flew off the rails and became a fear-generation machine. Racket readers should recall the two harassment cases opened against then-Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis for writing an article called “Sexual Paranoia on Campus” for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Obama letter empowered the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights (and by extension, huge quantities of campus administrators) to become sexual and ideological police. They opened investigations into everything from consensual relationships to dancing “too provocatively” at parties to a ballet teacher saying “I always wanted to partner a banana” in class. The accused were often not informed of charges for long periods, nor were they allowed to bring lawyers to proceedings (Kipnis was permitted a “support person”). Fear spread further when the OCR in 2013 defined harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” in a way that included speech, opening the door for articles to be considered harassment. These and other federal pressures contributed to the feeling expressed in a 2022 poll (reported in a much-denounced New York Times editorial called “America Has a Free Speech Problem”) showing huge pluralities of Americans held their tongues for fear of “retaliation and harsh criticism.”
(…)”