Walking on water: Tales of perilous treks across frozen Lake Erie to Canada Erie Times-News
Sebastopol Sharks dive into underwater hockey The Press Democrat
Pandemics
Let’s talk about COVID, brain damage & society.
Specifically, what happens when a neurotropic virus repeatedly infects the population, targeting the frontal lobe & almost nobody talks about the consequences?
This thread is for the skeptics.
I’m a neurologist, stay with me 🧵 pic.twitter.com/fbMIhtObaz
— James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath (@JamesThrot) July 17, 2025
Climate/Environment
Overnight flooding in Kansas City leads to water rescues, power outages and road closures KCUR
Flooding downpours from Gulf tropical rainstorm expanding inland Accuweather
Pakistan monsoon rains death toll rises to 159 after 63 die in one day Al Jazeera
***
Biofuel demand to consume 27% of global cereals by 2034: OECD-FAO report Down to Earth
Have renewables decreased electricity prices? The Climate Brink
AI Is Heading For an Energy Crisis That Has Tech Giants Scrambling Science Alert
He helped Microsoft build AI to help the climate. Then Microsoft sold it to Big Oil. HEATED
China?
US-China in a defining race for quantum supremacy Asia Times
China and Huawei are winning the 6G race: A boon for the BRICS, and very bad for the US and Europe Kevin Walmsley
Remember: ultimately the price of AI will converge to the price of electricity.
And in general, tomorrow’s economy will be powered by electricity to an even far greater extent than today. The whole economy, ultimately, is energy transformed and, more and more, electricity… https://t.co/BWqxTkKcxL
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) July 17, 2025
A new cold war with China won’t help the US FT
TSMC aims to make 30% of high-end chips in US with Arizona fab build out The Register
US Set to Impose 93.5% Duty on China Battery Material Bloomberg
***
China joins US in hunt for ripples in spacetime with new telescope in Tibet South China Morning Post. “One of the few surviving examples of China-US collaboration in basic science.”
A Eulogy to China’s Art Museums Art Review
Old Blighty
The Big Chill Craig Murray
DWP just gave a company a £15m contract to spy on benefit claimants The Canary
Government’s ‘weak’ evacuation plans for disabled high-rise residents ‘fail to learn the lessons of Grenfell’ Disability News Service
Syraqistan
🚨Israel just bombed the very Gazan church Pope Francis used to call daily during the genocide
They injured the very priest, Gabriele Romanelli, who used to update the Pope on the situation.
2 church goers were killed, 6 wounded. pic.twitter.com/P1Pi9YqCIf
— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) July 17, 2025
British Surgeon in Gaza Reports ‘Unprecedented Malnutrition,’ Says IDF Snipers Targeting Aid Seekers Antiwar
“Zionist terrorism in the West Bank.” The Floutist
West Asian Fog Oliver Boyd-Barret
Iran and the Logic of Limited Wars RAND
“I’m From the Mossad, and I’m Here to Help” Séamus Malekafzali
George Abdallah: Europe’s longest-held political prisoner to be freed Al Mayadeen
European Disunion
UK signs treaty on defense, trade and migration with Germany as Europe bolsters security AP
New Not-So-Cold War
EU approves new Russia sanctions with lower oil price cap Reuters
Russia will face 100% tariffs on all its goods exported to US if no deal
Russias exports have fallen to $1.2bn in 2024.
And it’s actually the American companies that pay duties to govt not the Russians.
This is bonkers. https://t.co/bCX9rbwPp9
— BenAris (@bneeditor) July 17, 2025
Case Study of Tariffs/Sanctions Enabling New Market Opportunities Karl Sanchez
Four EU countries bail out of paying for Trump’s weapons for Ukraine Intellinews
Trump says Patriot missiles for Ukraine ‘already being shipped’ from Germany Anadolu Agency
Merz: Germany and US nearing deal on Patriot delivery for Ukraine DPA International
Yep:
Does anyone even realize how exposed the West looks right now?
The largest Western economic powers cannot even manage to scrape together an old air defense system that is already ineffective against Russian ballistic missiles to send it to Ukraine for its final destruction. Could…— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) July 17, 2025
Some of Ukraine’s Last S-300 Air Defences Destroyed in Russian Iskander-M Ballistic Missile Strike Military Watch
Army Europe chief unveils NATO eastern flank defense plan Defense News. ‘For example, Donahue noted, Kaliningrad, Russia, is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.”’
World War mastermind: Here’s America’s most dangerous person Tarik Cyril Amar. Lindsey.
🇵🇱 will love this: Zelensky signed a decree naming 🇺🇦’s 31st Mechanized Brigade after Leonid Stupnytsky, a general in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the 1940s armed wing of the OUN “Banderite” faction that butchered Poles & Jews during the Holocaust. https://t.co/k8AUDbazvD pic.twitter.com/BE95dBKVWK
— Moss Robeson 🇵🇸 (@mossrobeson__) July 17, 2025
Caucasus
Georgia explores switching to China’s CIPS amid SWIFT alternatives AzerNews
L’affaire Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump. WSJ. Ruh-roh.
Trump directs AG to release Epstein case grand jury transcripts Axios. But not the evidence from the trial nor the sealed files from 2008 “completely unprecedented” plea deal.
Trump Was Attempting to Block Publication of Embarrassing WSJ Jeffrey Epstein Story Variety
You don’t say. https://t.co/6In4E5yxHS pic.twitter.com/AlAr48FYrK
— TARNISHED GOLDEN SUNFLOWER (@_gothlorien) July 17, 2025
“Liberation Day”
The (Muted) Impact of Tariffs on Inflation Barry Ritholtz
Trump 2.0
Trump Diagnosed With Blood Vessel Disease MedPage Today
Democrats en déshabillé
102 House Democrats, Including Jeffries, Help GOP Send Crypto Bill to Trump’s Desk Common Dreams
Tens of thousands in US set to join ‘Good Trouble’ anti-Trump protests honoring John Lewis The Guardian
Is It Time To Revoke John Lewis’s Lifetime Civil Rights Hero Pass? Black Agenda Report. From 2017, still germane.
Sanders Proposes ‘Pensions for All’ as Trump Aims to Open 401(k)s to Private Equity Vultures Common Dreams
Mamdani
What Bernie Sanders told Zohran Mamdani about antisemitism and pushing back on Democratic leaders CNN
A Typology of Socialisms in the 21st Century Left Notes
The Shocking Rise of One of the Tech Right’s Favorite Posters Mother Jones. The individual who provided the New York Times with hacked data showing Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his app to Columbia U.
Realignment and Legitimacy
Is ‘Toxic Empathy’ Pulling Christians to the Left? Ross Douthat, New York Times
Imperial Collapse Watch
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Wow, the US Unveiled “Lucas” – a copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 Drone
Yes a COPY – it has the EXACT size, shape and payload as the Shahed
Arizona based developer SpektreWorks describes LUCAS as reliable and cost-effective
And soon the US will accuse Iran of being a copycat 🙄 pic.twitter.com/3zPo9nCh5u
— David Roth-Lindberg (@RothLindberg) July 17, 2025
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Smart toilets measuring stool’s colour, hardness on sale in Japan, targeting health-conscious users Straits Times
Police State Watch
Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE AP
Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect. “Incompetent and militarized ‘emergency response’ is on track to be a trillion-dollar industry by the end of Trump’s second term.” Well worth a read.
ICE Again Gives The Law The Finger, Denies Member Of Congress Access To Detention Facility Tech Dirt
National Guard came to L.A. to fight unrest. Troops ended up fighting boredom Los Angeles Times
In Distraction From Epstein Files Uproar, AG Pam Bondi Comes to SF to Tour Alcatraz SFist
Trump Justice Department seeks one day in prison for ex-officer in Breonna Taylor case NBC News. Were the allegations that Taylor’s killing was part of a Louisville PD operation to clear out a block for a major development project ever settled?
MLBPA urges players to carry docs amid immigration raids Sports Business Journal
The Bezzle
House Passes CLARITY Act Defining Crypto Regulation Coin World. Gives the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) more regulatory oversight over crypto, and wait for it…
Class Warfare
AWS sheds more jobs as Jassy’s automation layoff prophecy comes true The Register
Opaque Algorithms Are Setting Prices Just For You Boondoggle
How to ‘Drop Out of Society’ Hickman’s Hinterlands
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
194 comments
Comments are closed.
“Army Europe chief unveils NATO eastern flank defense plan”
‘For example, Donahue noted, Kaliningrad, Russia, is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.” ‘
When asked what would happen after NATO seized the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, General Christopher Donahue admitted that every NATO base surrounding Kaliningrad would be slammed with a volley fire of Oreshnik ballistic missiles along with Ramstein Air Base for good measure but hey, you take your wins where you can.
They have the capability to take themselves down in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than they’ve ever been able to do, indeed.
https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/375409799/Monkey-with-stick-hitting-lion
I thought they were talking about defense, not attacks. Silly me!
In the normal world, it would take the combined intellects of Philip K. Dick and Spike Milligan to come up with an idea so audaciously stupid but, for NATO, it is nothing less than pure strategic genius. I am seriously impressed at this demonstration of out-of-the-box thinking.
The work of nothing less than pure strategic genius, by people that brought you the Ukrainian mega-counter-offensive in Zaporozhie.
The Lucas drone, a copy of the Iranian drone. Except for the price tag which will be 3 to 10 times the cost of the Iranian drone ex service contracts
As I said in a comment yesterday, Trump will claim that Iran stole the blueprints for the Shahed drone from the US when Obama was President. If they were going to copy something, couldn’t it have been an X-Wing? At least it would have looked cool. This Lucas drone is just plain embarrassing. Iran should sue for copyright infringement.
It actually turns out the basic design dates back to a German anti-radar loitering munition (Dornier DAR).
Later Israel copied it as IAI Harpy (and it may have gone through a South African iteration too in between), then Iran made the Shahed.
But if the US is now copying the Shahed, it is two generations behind the curve. What the Russians are flying now is a whole zoo of advanced derivatives that share with the Shahed only the shape, but are otherwise their own developments shaped by the experience of the war
Back when the Russians adopted the Geran I spent a few hours googling terms I would associate with the vehicle’s form/aerodynamics and skimming engineering papers that came up. I came away reckoning that the form probably had significant advantages for a mini cruise missile, and the Iranian design likely incorporated nontrivial engineering, as well as the almost inevitable hands-on fine tuning needed to make such a machine work, and that it made all the sense in the world for the Russians to buy it.
It also occured to me that most military-industrial complexes would have strangled such a project in the cradle – or goldplated it to death. The constraints on Iran were perhaps what made the Dorito fly.
Russia “bought” it only for a short period of time. It might have paid some licensing fee to be nice, but Russia was making them pretty pronto. And in any event, they had to add the Russian GPS module.
Russia has the most extensive aerodynamics information in the world, having long had huge testing tunnels and keeping the data from every test.
Given the robust market for Switchblade™︎ drones, it’s difficult to understand why the U.S. would want to imitate Iranian drones.
Don’t forget that it will need a subscription license to the software and support package or it won’t be able to take off any more.
Military push back against that concept and their insistence on the right to repair is one of the few things that gives me hope we can change this awful future our overlords are cramming down our throats. I sincerely hope that the USAF and any other branches which rely on this tech continue the push to kill SaaS and it’s insidious need for constant licensing to support basic functions.
The fact that “the right to repair” is a term that exist, and that it’s a matter of debate, is an indiciation that the system is beyond repair.
That’s exactly right fellow Chris.
You can’t win a war with Cost-Plus contracts… but we’re never in it to win it for anyone but the contractors, so I guess that doesn’t matter.
Will Kaliningrad be the Alamo or Bastogne?
More likely Rorke’s Drift.
For the Commonwealth adjacent.
Lucas the copy another exception will perhaps be quantity which will be a fraction of East Block production
More likely this Empire’s Teutoburg Forest disaster. Who will be NATO’s Varus?
Charge of the Light Brigade. Or Gallipoli. Important that the stupid slaughter be so epic that it was recorded in verse.
TBH the “setting prices just for you” is 20 years late. It long predates AI etc. Choice modellers whose “home field” was academic marketing were ALWAYS about willingness to pay (WTP).
Giving you different prices for a flight on repeated requests has a very statistically valid (if unethical) aim: to quantify your “lost lambda” as Yves so pithily summarised my article about discrete choice models. (Wish I had thought of that byline!)
Plus stated preferences don’t usually match revealed preferences (except THE PATTERNS, hence the different prices on repeat searches). The latter carry much more weight for the Ryanairs of this world. Ultimately, what did the potential customer DO? Mapping their demand curve was around long before AI. AI merely makes it easier. O’Leary knew a LOT about you already before AI came along.
I was working on demand mapping software (which was used by airlines) 26 years ago. Personalized pricing can be seen as an extension of demand curve mapping but it’s a customer-specific evolution: related but not fundamentally the same, because of its application at the micro level.
Yeah my mentor got his big break in early 1980s by promising Qantas better pricing strategies for Trans-pacific routes. He had little to back up his assertions but faked it till he made it.
Not sure if we’ve talked at cross purposes but we definitely do everything at the micro level. The most recent developments in best-worst Scaling enabled us to feed back people’s preferences immediately after they did the survey…… in areas like personality assessment they LOVED this. It’s all part of the current fad for online surveys feeding results back to you….. except ours are actually based on proper theoretical and statistical principles, not some guff that so many online apps use ;)
PS for anyone keeping score who remembers me saying AI ain’t a threat to my old field, here’s the explanation. Aviation is a mature industry and AI absolutely can scrape information to aid in modelling the demand curve…..and for YOU the individual.
“New products” (like the original iPhone when launched) could not have had demand predictions from AI. AI relies on existing datasets of actual purchases (revealed preferences) and/or discrete choice experiments producing stated preferences. We had neither for the iPhone. Think of it as the demand equivalent of the supply “production probability frontier”. Revolutionary products lie beyond the frontier so nothing to scrape from. Gotta do the legwork.
Interestingly our Sydney unit advised both Nokia and Motorola around time of the iPhone launch…. we helped them perfect their existing “brick” and “flip phone” respectively but also we told both touchscreens were coming…… they ignored us.
Re: Syria
Continuing a discussion with raspberry jam from yesterday’s links, it seems Ben-Gvir and Bibi are going for broke. I read DDGeopolitics TG channel feed, and they are saying Al-Julani has fled to Idlib, probably a good career move. They also claim that Mossad is already in Damascus and if true, for all intents and purposes, the new government of Syria has already fallen.
Any links from outside Telegram yet? Today is not a working day in IL so I cannot ask colleagues in IL what they think until I get to our meetings on Sunday.
I haven’t seen any – I refuse to install the app and rely on the browser based site, which is spotty at best.
MoA has a Palestine Open thread, and a commenter linked to an Al Manar article that sites over 200 airstrikes by Israel inside Syria since Tuesday, with “most of them against targets unrelated to the events in Sweida”
MoA Link
Too much fog currently to conclude Al-Jolani has fled or this is ultimately about anything other than Netanyahu needing to stall on his trial and maintain his governing coalition until the Knesset breaks at the end of the month for 3 months IMHO although note that Smotrich has delivered speeches showing his map of “Greater Israel” includes Syria and Jordan which is maximalist by the “normal” revanchist view. So aside from stalling this smells more like bait to keep the Ben Gvir/Smotrich hardliners on side in the face of other developments regarding Gaza which I discussed more yesterday.
We’ll have to wait to see how events unfold. Just caught this on DDGeopolitics:
DD Geopolitics
DD Geopolitics
🇸🇾 BREAKING! We have received information from reliable sources that Al-Julani allegedly fled Damascus and is in Idlib at the moment. 🔴 @DDGeopolitics | Socials | Donate | Advertising
🇸🇾 Al Mayadeen confirms that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has left Damascus with his family—just hours after an alleged Israeli assassination operation targeted three top officials in the Transitional Administration, including Defense Minister Marhaf Abu Qasra.
If Israel could get Nasrallah, they should certainly be able to take out al-Julani. So, maybe more theatrics than reality here. It’s a defect of the so-called Axis of Resistance that they can’t pull off hit jobs on the leaders of their enemies, even as they themselves get subjected to assassinations and terror bombings on a regular basis. Too much romanticizing of martyrdom is not helping matters.
Israel and Syria agree to ceasefire, US ambassador to Turkey says
The last round of airstrikes occurred under a ceasefire too so not sure it means much.
Is this another one of those special USian “non-ceasefire ceasefires”,* in which actually not all parties have agreed or were even asked, but the Empire is trying to force everybody’s hand and make the non-Israel side look like spoilers if they don’t come to the table and make concessions ?
Just wondering ;)
*(Hat tip to the Watergate era “non-denial denial”)
Remember, Israel does not obey ceasefires. If anything, they can be used as a pretext to lull their enemies into a false sense of security. Followed by a sucker-punch.
And, the Times of Israel reports this AM that Israel has NOT confirmed the ceasefire:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-syria-have-agreed-to-ceasefire-announces-us-envoy/
Plus, Unilateral ceasefires mean one side surrendered.
Trump: “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story.”.
Austin Powers: “This sort of thing ain’t my bag, baby!”
I’m surprised he didn’t go for the easy layup and blame it on fake AI.
I’m probably too optimistic but I think Orange Julius may be fatally wounded. There is one thing you never do in politics and that’s say the quiet part out loud – you don’t need your supporters, which implies they were just tools for him to use on the way to the top.
Been thinking about what you said and maybe he feels that he does not need his supporters. That they can go the way of Obama’s Army as he will be President for the next three and a half years. And that he can force the Repubs to toe his line in the Senate and the House. But I am willing to bet that those Senators and Reps have their phones ringing off the hook & their email inbox overflowing with lots of threats about the midterms. The Zelensky Curse strikes again.
> maybe he feels that he does not need his supporters.
They’ve served their purpose. He rode the populist wave with a counter-elite hostile takeover, but the cankles won’t carry him to the third term he hoots about.
Senators and Congresspeople need them, though. Abortion has been a perfect wedge issue, in part because of the black & white simplicity. Yes/No. Perfect positive assortment for what each side views as co-operators.
But for the evangelical base, children are innocents. The provenance of the evidence can lead to some disturbing conclusions regarding hypocrites, if perception of it can penetrate the protective bubble meant to maintain innocence. Those Senators and Congressfolks voted yes/no on the issue. Feels existential.
The three and a half years seems dubious now. I would bet they pull the plug on him somewhere around the 1 year mark, so Vance can try to recover the base’s deluded loyalty in time for the midterms. There are obvious health problems that can be blamed for his demise (they could also put him in a permanent coma like Ariel Sharon). The deep state is probably running out of use cases for keeping him around at this point.
This is what Biden’s staff and cabinet basically did with him, keeping him cloistered and limiting his appearances and public engagement while they made all the strategic decisions and ran their own pet projects, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Republicans started doing the same with Trump.
Republicans will probably want to keep Trump as the figurehead for at least the start of 2027 if Trump’s health doesn’t get to him first. Their data is likely telling them to anticipate corrections/losses during the mid-terms regardless of whether Trump or Vance are in charge. Dumping Trump afterwards (at the two year mark after Congress reconvenes or by the RNC for 2028) though can make it look like Republicans are actually attentive and/or conciliatory to their base compared to Democrats, who had kept their own constituents in the dark about Biden and didn’t replace him as the candidate until it affected their ability to win the 2024 election. If they replace Trump with Vance after the 2 year mark, then Vance wouldn’t have that time count against him for re-elections, and he could be president for just under 10 years
No one can control Trump. He is surrounded by toadies who will do their best to polish his verbal turds. The best they can do is occasionally convince him not to proceed with maximally stupid ideas.
It will be after the mid-terms so that Vance can complete Trump’s term, and then he can run for two more terms and completely reshape the Republican Party.
If he has the self discipline to execute on the clearly unconstitutional budgeting power (spending the budget now being at the president’s discretion) SCOTUS handed him in the context of ICE/Brownshirts (Hawaiianshirts?) disappearing people, and the TechBros are correct in their calculations that AI has reduced the cost of coercion to the point a new slave society is possible, and that we all play along.
Then the idea of a “base” becomes irrelevant, but only then, it seems to me.
I have to go with “too optimistic”. Maybe if there was murder involved in this scandal, even then I say maybe, we might see Trump’s downfall. This may lose him some, maybe even a lot of supporters. But he will deny, deny, deny and carry on with the crazy because he’s got 3 more years and that’s it (she types with one hand while crossings fingers of one hand). Unless things go even more awry, he can’t run again so he doesn’t need those supporters. I’d lean more towards poor health being his ticket out. And in the end, I remind myself that he is but a symptom of what is wrong, yes, doing more damage but the damage started long before he was elected the first time. Also, what will his downfall look like? Anything that removes him and leaves us with Vance is not a better scenario. Hell, a Democrat comeback is not really a better scenario.
The only way Trump gets a boot to the head is if there are compromising photos of him with a trans, and extra bonus points for an underaged darling.
Nah, who am I kidding. This guy is the acknowledged master of nothing sticks to him.
Seems to me that many things stick but they don’t take him out. Few of us believe his lies but it seems to make no difference, certainly not to him. Instead of an aging portrait ala Dorian Grey, I envision Trump’s hidden portrait as ever-growing, showing an expanding aura of sh*t while he carries on, seemingly care free.
Trump is the boy who cried wolf whistle.
Trump Goes Berserk
Melody
In the shuffling madness
Of sanity’s last breath
Runs the all-time poseur
Headlong to his death
Oh, he feels the dopamine fading
Screen breaking on his phone
Old Jeffrey stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going
No it couldn’t slow down
He sees his minions jumping off
At the station one by one
A card with him and Epstein
In bed and having fun
Oh he’s crawling down the Acela Corridor
On his hands and knees
For Jeffrey stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
Yeah, Yeah!
He hears the sirens howling
Job approval numbers fall
And the Netanyahu
Has got him by the balls!
Oh, he picks up Clintons bible
Open at page one
I think God he stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
NH will send a democrat to the senate to replace retiring Sen Shaheen.
The two house seats remain democrat.
Re: Trump’s health prospects
Yeah, and check out John Helmer’s article (above).
Thanks for the pointer to the Helmer post. Crikey! When I mentioned his health, I was thinking along the lines of a cardiac event or a stroke based on his current venous woes. A slow descent into dementia is not what we need. We have more than enough past experience with the cover-up that will no doubt take place, er, is taking place. Sigh. I was going to go on about an age limit for presidential candidates but then gave my head a good shake… I can only assume that an aging and demented president works well for those with the real power. Although, one hopes that Trump’s personality is giving those *ssholes some trouble. With or without dementia, Trump is seemingly uncontrollable. And really, is it dementia that is causing his inability to see reality or is it just his normal self-serving, lying personality? Who knows? I’d guess that the larger shoe is to accommodate the swelling from his venous insufficiency. Hoping that IM Doc chimes in on the Helmer piece and the Trump health speculations.
First of all, discussing whether or not family members and parents have Alzheimer’s is irrelevant. The data on Alzheimer’s disease being a genetic issue is sketchy at best. Secondly, discussing the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in a 90something is also a bit problematic. Actual Alzheimer’s disease emerges at much younger ages. Unfortunately, our culture has co-opted the name Alzheimer’s Disease to encompass any and all forms of dementia. This is completely inaccurate and anyone who writes like this is out of their ball park on this issue.
It may just be me, but when I read stuff like this I am reminded of The New York Times in the months after the Ukraine invasion. First, Putin had some kind of dementia, then he had terminal cancer, etc. It was clear to any diagnostician that none of those things was true.
We as physicians should be very careful to call out diagnoses on videos of patients. That being said, with Joe Biden it was so obvious that my kids could tell something was wrong. His dementia is obviously a part of some kind of neurodegenerative disorder – the symptoms of which were easy for all rational diagnosticians to see as far back as 2019. The open mouth gape, the constant inappropriate whispering, the pigeon toed gait, the peculiar way he fell, the inability to navigate stairs, the constant emotional disruptions, all pointed to that and it was not even closely subtle. Anyone can see it – play a tape of Joe Biden 2023 – and a tape of Joe Biden 2013. This was not simple aging. Anyone that is a true diagnostician that tells you otherwise is a liar or actually does not see patients. The media and political coverup of this has been something for the ages.
Trump is a completely different animal. He certainly does not have Alzheimer’s Disease. He absolutely has personality traits – and just listening to him and watching his behavior – I lean toward Narcissistic Personality Disorder and likely Antisocial Personality Disorder. Having been around wealthy and powerful people for large amounts of my professional life, he is not alone, indeed, he may be less affected with these than the majority I know.
At his age, and with some of the behavior I see, there is a far more common issue that may be going on. It is known as microvascular white matter disease – what used to be known in our culture as “hardening of the arteries”. This is profoundly common in The West. Multiple theories abound as to the cause…..smoking, eating unnatural fats all of our lives ( chips, french fries, donuts, KFC), diabetes and obesity. One may look at this as the brain manifestation of what we call Metabolic Syndrome or Syndrome X.
The white matter contains the billions of conduits going from one neuron to the other in the brain as opposed to the gray matter where the actual neurons reside. As we get older – and some of us are far more prone to this than others – the white matter begins to have large numbers of microscopic strokes. These may take out the CONDUIT for 10-15 neurons, maybe more BUT NOT THE NEURONS THEMSELVES. Our brain can rewire around them but eventually things begin to look like Swiss Cheese and there is no way to repair things. At that point, symptoms begin to set in. This is usually manifested as “filter” deficiencies, sudden emotional outbursts, inability to decide, long diatribes and stories about things from decades ago, inability to recognize one’s own mistakes and deficiencies, some mild memory issues but maybe not, increased impulsive and risk-taking behavior, anger and wrath, inappropriate laughing and crying among many others. This disease process also greatly magnifies the underlying personality disorders. There are more than 20 personality disorders – and it is often a sight to behold as some of these get worse.
This affects so many of our elderly. It is absolutely not Alzheimer’s. But it can eventually become a type of what we call dementia. Unlike Alzheimer’s, these patients can feed themselves, care for themselves, do housework, engage in family and social activities, and be self-aware. They however, are often “kept in the attic” away from the world so as not to embarrass themselves. I try my best with my patients to give them avatars in literature and culture to understand their issues. Literature is full of examples of this – but the most easy to comprehend touchstone for most people is the little old lady Sophia from The Golden Girls – Bea Arthur’s mom.
Dementia behavior and psychiatric issues are so easy to see with serial tapes and videos of the subject. It is why I feel somewhat comfortable to expound. That being said, my wife is constantly horrified at my habit of going up to strangers and telling them – “you really ought to get this looked into”. There are all kinds of medical diagnoses that can be gleaned with a glance from a trained professional. I just got a long detailed thank you note from someone who about 4 months ago I told them needed to go get screened for Type 2 DM. They had severe acanthosis nigricans and skin tags – a dead giveaway. My wife yelled at me all the way home – but the person is now on the right track.
Again, I feel like I am watching the early days of the Ukraine situation all over again – with Putin having this or that terminal problem. I really do wonder what has happened to the medical input to our media. The reporting at this point is far more common to be totally wrong – and there appears to be no one even remotely trying to get out correct and accurate information.
Thanks IM Doc! Your input and observations are much appreciated
Thanks.
As to the last point – I think this issue has nothing to do with the question whether media are interested in medical sound judgements or not.
It´s simply about creating yellow press style news.
Fabrications, sensations, freaks.
In fact it doesn´t matter if it´s Alzheimers, WWIII or Martians. By now it is all treated the same way by all outlets.
To your Biden assessment: The not so bad Nonzero podcast by Robert Wright had a left but pro-Biden member of the DNC as interviewee about a year ago. I think Sara Posner.
She was absolutely convinced that Biden was okay and denounced opposing views as smear campaigns of the Reps and lies.
This was genuine. I sort of bought it. (I did not care much about minutes of Biden’s state frankly, living in Germany. Besides I don’t watch news.)
How can somebody be “a left but pro-Biden member of the DNC” ? Lol
By definition, they are a pro-Empire grifter, no ?
And it sounds like this one was either lying through her teeth or else drinking way too much DNC kool-aid.
I think it was this one interview. I don’t have the time to look up the TC for the health issue, sorry🙄
I just saw it was much earlier, fall of 2023:
Is a Second Trump Administration in the Cards? (Robert Wright & Sarah Posner)
Sept. 2023
53 min.
https://www.nonzero.org/p/early-access-is-a-second-trump-administration
p.s. “pro-Empire grifter” – when I first realized that something is off in the US of A it was an interview with Matt Duss by Amy Goodman about Ukraine on DemocracyNow. Before that I had only known him simply as “Bernie´s man”. But that is all a lifetime ago.
John Helmer reports that Trump can no longer tie his shoelaces: https://johnhelmer.net/three-rational-calculations-by-trumps-men-that-they-can-win-their-war-against-russia-or-escape-voter-blame-if-they-lose-it/
That might be due to obesity, not loss of fine motor skills.
He’s still able to golf, although we have no clue on how many mulligans and “foot wedges” he uses.
This is what I keep telling my terminally TDS-infected friends, but to no avail. Sigh.
…the DOGE ate my ‘homework’
Dr. Richard Kimble, to the authorities. “It wasn’t me it was the one armed man. You find this man. I did not kill my wife!”
Snarky comment aside. Well someone somewhere found them skeletons after all. Things that make you go…FFS.
Benedict Donald filed a lawsuit every 10 days on average for 30 years before becoming President in 2017. It’s his drug addiction.
The old Streisand Effect for me, was she was better heard than seen, while with the new version Trump is better seen than heard.
The link for “Four EU countries bail out of paying for Trump’s weapons for Ukraine” is dead and the story seems to have been taken down. Regardless, most of the big NATO nations have bailed on this idea and it may have been that they were not told about it before it was announced. I think that Germany is the only major country that has not bailed from this idea. And for that they win second prize – a set of steak knives.
The whole intellinews.com site is unresponsive. The outage is probably not related to the news story itself, but maybe there’s some maintenance going on.
So the crypto bill has passed. Interestingly, at the end of June a new bank charter was filed for “First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A.”. It’s not a depository charter but a bank trust company charter.
OCC charter number 25361
https://apps.occ.gov/CAAS_CATS/CAAS_Details.aspx?FilingTypeID=2&FilingID=342299&FilingSubtypeID=1093
Bitcoin unfazed: https://www.tradingview.com/x/2I0IeBO8/
…but maybe this was already priced in.
What a coincidence!
Passage of this bill really frosts me. I had the opportunity a few years ago to directly ask one of the high ranking members of Congress on the DCCC if they had any contact with Sam Bankman Fried and was told that “maybe they passed him in the hall once”. That person was a yea vote according to the Congressional roll call.
Interesting. My congress critter was a recipient of likely illegal straw-donor scheme FTX donations. She voted nay. I’m not sure what conclusion is to be drawn from that.
My own Congresswoman Chellie Pingree was a nay vote. I’ll chalk that up to her being divorced from a squillionaire and likely having enough real currency on hand not to need to participate in this particular grift. I’m really in a mood about this one.
So, it has a Bank Trust Company Charter. Which means that it is distanced exactly how far from the endlessly deep pockets of the US Federal Reserve?
Re: Alcatraz
In a double feature, I would opt first for Boorman’s Point Blank, with Lee Marvin, and then as a second feature, Escape from Alcatraz with Eastwood.
And if Bondi really wants to Make America Safe Again, she could do worse than to intern Pelosi, Newsom and herself on the island.
When that prison was up and running they had to shut it down because the buildings and infrastructure were being eroded by the salt air from the surrounding bay but more to the point, it cost far more to house those cons than a run of the mill prison on land. And that is why it was shut down but if they open it up again the same factors will still be in play.
As I recall from a tour of Alcatraz, the underlying construction method left the buildings internally structurally vulnerable.
It was far easier to make the construction concrete with the salt water that surrounded Alcatraz Island, rather than bring in fresh water.
Maybe a metaphor for much of USA infrastructure.
Never did the Alcatraz tour, what kind of a lousy excuse for a native son of the golden west, I am.
Glad you’re willing to take the prize! I only visited Alcatraz from the safety of a tour boat. (But the penitentiary was operational then.)
While I am not native to the state of South Carolina where I currently live, and may indeed live here another 10 to 20 years I am reminded of this timeless, my paraphrasing, quote below. I’m going to add context that indeed I grew up nearby to SC, and spent my first 30 years in North Carolina.
“South Carolina, too small to be a republic yet too large to be an insane asylum.”. I’ll include below the cited source of that quote….
https://www.nps.gov/people/james-l-petigru.htm
This morning, on an interview recapping this story AG Bondi noted that no one had ever escaped. I’d venture it wasn’t for lack of trying but what do you once you hypothetically got out (?). The story went onto tell how antiquated that facility currently is…
Continuing the American Prison theme; I vote for “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_the_Spider_Woman_(1985_film)
So many timely themes it hurts.
Make it a triple feature with The Rock, or a quadruple with Birdman of Alcatraz.
Smart toilets…tracking you when you go poo, yes tracking how often or when we go number two…
Weirdly funny. “What is that new app you downloaded?”. Oh it’s called InstaColoGuard. That box was just impersonal.
Well that app certainly sounds like it has the ring of truth about it.
Shit happens and perhaps similar to others, I read into my handiwork when pressing down the lever that sends it to the nether regions.
My favorite is the long Kielbasa floater
I got one of those things delivered to me by UPS, un-solicited. And a string of annoying text messages nagging me about it. So I took out some tape, wrote “return to sender address unknown” on it, and dropped it off at the UPS store.
It came back like a boom-a-rang to my porch the next day.
Got one too, just threw it out. Redundant w/ my 10-yr cycle for colon-scoping.
Enshittification? What will Homeland Security doo-doo with the data?
….don’t spoor them on
No, but I wouldn’t be surprised by any movement on their part.
Many years back there was a fancy Japanese toilet that was already accumulating some kind of data on the user’s excretions.
It occurred to me that it should be named,
the Know Shit toilet.
I thought this was about Putin’s marine fauna weaponization program going beyond mammals.
That a second Austin Powers reference of the mornings fits here seamlessly……
Sharks with lasers
You outta see Putin play hockey. I’m just shocked that the NKVD has yet to erase this video from the view of anyone on the planet near a rink.
The link to the video does not work, so the NKVD is still alive and kickin’.
House Passes CLARITY Act Defining Crypto Regulation Coin World.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How funny, an online crypto presence has lifted the name of the oldest weekly (now monthly) numismatic* newspaper: Coin World
Founded around the same time as yours truly in 1960-full of interesting articles, it was the main vehicle to do retail sales via snail mail. An edition from the 1970’s might have 100 pages, and they did this 52 times a year.
Talking to the old guard of aged round metal discs who are still active, there are essentially no young coin collectors-the hobby of kings is on a 1 way street to palookaville, gonna age out.
But young men are the drivers in newmismatics, ha ha!
* numismatics was about 99.87% male dominated, there were a few female coin dealers in the entire world-i’m talking on the order of less than 10 compared to say 1,000 men pushing old metal, and a handful of women coin collectors
RE: A Eulogy to China’s Art Museums
The interesting part was this –
“The Shanghai Himalayas Museum’s decline began with the collapse of Dai Zhikang’s financial empire. In 2019 Dai admitted to creating unauthorised capital pools and misappropriating approximately £1 billion in funds from the public, leading to his arrest along with 40 associates. In December 2022 he was sentenced to 19 years in prison, and his assets, including a dilapidated mansion in Shanghai, were auctioned off to repay creditors. The downfall of Dai and the financial instability of the Zendai Group left the Shanghai Himalayas Museum without its primary benefactor. This loss of funding, coupled with the museum’s integration into Dai’s commercial ventures, led to a significant decline in its operations.”
In China, there are still consequences for financial criminals – imagine that! Meanwhile in the US, we bipartisanly pass the crypto bill, legitimizing the grift.
They do punish you in the US if you steal from the rich…
Sending thoughts and prayers on the Instagrams is where it’s at. He forgot to promise sending his car, though.
Renewable prices.
It’s a good article but things are changing so fast they are behind in the costs.
First we have to understand the US pays the highest prices in the world for solar due to tariffs and the IRA. Domestic assembled solar is close to 40 cents a watt. In China they are 10 cents. When you get to batteries the prices have dropped just in the last year by between 30-40 percent. Again tariffs and rules mean we are not seeing those price decreases but increases.
Because of all that, PPA’s ( power purchase agreements) have been going up the last year or more having nothing to do with trumps policies. And id expect with what Trump has done and probably what we will expect will drive the price up significantly so NG will be cheaper. Renewables have been by far the biggest source of new generation because lower cost and I’m guessing the NG boys are not happy about that, hence the main reason for the Trump to make renewables more expensive.
Meanwhile around the world renewable prices continue to drop
I’m just a sleepy-headed art major, but won’t higher domestic energy costs make US products less competitive? Oopps.
In Spain it is about 0,9-1,4€/watt, all included, for single home assemblies. Much more expensive than the US so it seems.
I think you mean much less expensive than the US.
If you are saying that a full solar installation costs between .9-1.4 euro per watt?
Here the average is around $3.5-4.5 per watt.
Lots more expensive in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world as best I know.
Oh!,Did then I misunderstood your 40c/Watt in your first post? What was then this cost?
Excellent thread on covid brain by James Throt. IANAD; but I do take issue with his comment that:
Spike protein expression from vaccines is localised and short lived.
Yes, if the injection was done properly (into muscle). But there were millions of jabs and some went accidentally into the circulatory system and embedded on-going protein expression in some random organ. An accounting of that would be prudent.
for non-twitterati:
https://nitter.poast.org/JamesThrot/status/1945802539615572284
Thanks for the link Hardscrabble! My sister was recently diagnosed with dementia and brain atrophy. No one is talking about COVID but she had a very bad case. Not hospitalized but sick for weeks including loss of smell.
Thanks for sharing that. There’s an interesting discussion down in the thread that leads to this paper, which is an analysis showing that the spike protein from the vaccines is not short lived in the human body. The authors say they need more testing to understand these results. Interesting paper regardless. Kinda scary too.
I think it might be years before we really understand the results of our mass infection and mass vaccination experiment. I wish we had chosen to invest in clean air for our built environment too. But, I guess all those bombs for Ukraine and Israel were better uses of our money and resources :/
“Government’s ‘weak’ evacuation plans for disabled high-rise residents ‘fail to learn the lessons of Grenfell’ ”
‘New post-Grenfell regulations designed to ensure disabled people can safely evacuate from high-rise residential buildings will instead continue to put their lives in grave danger, the government has been told.’
I’m given to understand that the government will issue every high-rise resident a sealed envelope to be opened only in case of a fire. Inside of each envelope will be detailed instructions on how to knot sheets together in order to form a sheet rope to rappel down the side of the blazing building with.
The truth is, they aren’t great egress options for the mobility impaired, let alone the disabled, in high rise buildings. If you can’t go down stairs quickly in the event of an emergency you will be in a tight spot. As numerous past emergencies have shown, even if you can descend quickly, you might not be in a good position either.
One thing that can be done to help, is closing your bed room door. Especially before you go to sleep for the night. That won’t help in office spaces and it won’t help if you have trendy things like barn doors on tracks. But, for many apartments and residences, closing your door can buy you some time to allow for rescue.
Re the Lindsey in trouble article from RT–not very convincing. The suggestion that Andre Bauer may defeat him in the Repub primary ignores Bauer’s previous political struggles not to mention the fact that he would scarcely be an improvement. Wiki offers this gem.
In January 2010, Bauer came under fire for comparing public school children who receive free lunches to stray animals who should not be fed. “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting. “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t… think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” Bauer made the comment as part of an argument that people should lose government benefits if they fail drug tests or don’t attend parent-teacher conferences or Parent-Teacher Association meetings. The Associated Press reported that Bauer was a child of divorce who benefited from free lunches himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Bauer
The Dems tried to take out Graham last time, spent lots of money against him and he still won. No more Lindsey is devotely to be wished but so far just a wish.
Nice. Sounds like Bauer would fit right in.
Congress is so full of despicable bribed, blackmailed, and/or brainwashed warmongers that it is almost impossible to choose one as the worst. But if I was forced to do so it would have to be Lindsay, for all the reasons noted in the RT article and more. The really frustrating thing is that this miserable neocon front-man seems to be so untouchable, as you say. Part of my own struggle with the “theodicy problem” is asking how a Lindsay Graham is allowed to exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
I’m sorry. When I read about the “theodicy problem” and Lindsay Graham, I read it as the “idiocracy problem.”
CBS just announced that they are ending the Colbert show next year. Maybe Colbert can return to his native state and run against Graham.
This would almost make me vote for Lindsey.
Preparations to deliver Patriot missile systems to Ukraine under way, Nato’s top Europe commander says – as it happened – The Guardian
Looking past the Three-Card Monty with weapons, check out this part of the article:
“UK prime minister Keir Starmer confirmed meanwhile that the proposed peacekeeping force by the so-called Coalition of the Willing will include a land element, as he repeatedly called to increase pressure on Russia’s Vladimir Putin to force him into peace talks with Ukraine.”
Sounds like they think they have the Trump administration by the balls enough to bring that “back stop” idea back to life.
The peacekeeping force will be something for the teenagers to do on their Gap Years. As the Strategic Defence Review said, the Government will deliver more opportunities for young people to engage with the armed forces by introducing a voluntary ‘Gap Year’ scheme.
Why wait for the “teen” years? Child labor laws aren’t under attack for nothing.
Thanks for the link to a piece by Maureen Tkacik. She is wonderful and funny. Always worth reading.
I am Pam
Pam I am
That Pam-I-am!
That Pam-I-am!
I like that Uncle Sam-I-am!
Do you like
Epstein Files rotten eggs?
I do not like them, Pam-I-am.
I do not like
Epstein Files eggs, rotten or otherwise
Would you like them
here or there?
I would not like them
here or there
I would not like them at Alcatraz or anywhere
I do not like
Epstein Files free for all
I do not like them, Pam-I-am.
Would you like to see them @ your house?
Would you like to see them clicking a mouse?
I would not like you to see them
In a house
I do not like you to click on them
With a mouse
I do not like them
Here or there
I do not like them
Anywhere
I do not like
Epstein Files anywhere!
I do not like them,
Pam-I-am
You might add the following stanza:
A plane, a plane, a plane, a plane?
Would you, could you, on a plane?
‘BenAris
@bneeditor
Russia will face 100% tariffs on all its goods exported to US if no deal
Russias exports have fallen to $1.2bn in 2024.
And it’s actually the American companies that pay duties to govt not the Russians.
This is bonkers.’
As Yoda would say-
‘Around, they effed.
Find out, they will.’
– ‘Tens of thousands in US set to join ‘Good Trouble’ anti-Trump protests honoring John Lewis’ – The Guardian
– ‘Is It Time To Revoke John Lewis’s Lifetime Civil Rights Hero Pass?’ – Black Agenda Report. From 2017, still germane.
As the late Bruce Dixon pointed out in this BAR piece, Lewis had long been a central member of the Black Misleadership Class so important to the Democrats. He mentions that Lewis supported Hillary in 2016. But to me his disparaging of Bernie Sanders’ life-long civil rights record (he “couldn’t remember” seeing Sanders at any of the rallies he attended back in the day) while holding up Goldwater Girl Clinton as paragon was the ultimate and final betrayal of what was left of his “legacy.” That Bernie would also go on to do something similar with Russiagate et al. only demonstrates the power of the Machine to co-opt any real resistance. It’s hard to overstate how cynical I am now toward these performative “protests” that I used to take seriously.
Yeah, some days it feels like The Man’s Too Strong. Gotta hang in there though.
Look at what he did to, and did not do for, his District. A lot of talk and coasting.
As Lily Tomlin said: the older I get, the more cynical I get but I just can’t keep up.
Colbert cancelled – https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/cbs-cancel-show-stephen-colbert-232153421.html
Perhaps he’ll get a new show somewhere else and go back to being funny again.
Colbert has mocked Trump so many times that CBS probably decided to make nice with Trump and dump Colbert, especially after they had to agreed to a $16 million settlement to end Trump’s lawsuit not long ago. Either that or the last of Colbert’s audience has died of old age.
He was so good in Strangers With Candy and Colbert Report. I could never understand what happened to his edge. CBS really did him a dirty though. All for the ego of the Orange Devil.
There will be a reckoning for all of this madness, though this is just a tiny little piece that doesn’t mean much in the long run.
I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so people hungry for laughter can guffaw, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a President beatin’ up a country, I’ll be there.
No loss.
His big break was from Jon Stewart and it was all downhill once he went to CBS.
Colbert? Didn’t he die three hundred years ago?
It sounds like he was offered a renewal # he rejected. Or he may have countered and that was rejected. But really rude to tell him right before a show.
Julie Brown says the video of Epstein’s “cell” isn’t really a video of his cell.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/14/us/video/the-lead-julie-k-brown-epstein-files-president-trump-justice-department-jake-tapper
Transcript:
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cg/date/2025-07-14/segment/01
On today’s antidote from 800 years ago but still timely:
The water-bird
Wanders here and there
Leaving no trace
Yet her path
She never forgets.
—-Dogen (Translation by R.H. Blyth)
Thank you, Conor.
Further to the link about the Israeli targeting of the Catholic church, not for the first time, an increasing amount of the faithful, including my family, are getting fed up with the Vatican / hierarchy’s tolerance of Zionist aggression and fear of Zionists raising the issue of child abuse. They are in no position to cast the first stone at Catholics.
What added insult to injury was this morning’s French government statement, reminding Israel of France’s historic responsibility to protect Christians in Palestine. WTF?! After most Arab Christians, a fifth of the Arab population under the last Ottoman census, have been exiled or killed since Sykes-Picot and France gave Antioch to Turkiye.
This Francophone Catholic and his family, which includes cardinals Jean Margeot and Maurice Piat, if one counts mum’s extended and oligarch family, laugh at such nonsense and arrogance. This is the France that allows Charlie Hebdo to insult Catholics and Muslims in the name of free speech and even entertainment. It’s the France that preached freedom, but had the code noir on the statute books. It’s the France that pretends it won WW2 and ignores the contribution of imperial troops, including my paternal and oligarch cousins Amedee Maingard de la Ville Es Offrans and Suzanne Leclezio. It’s the France that preaches secularism and even ignorance, but wants its children to attend Catholic schools and even universities.
Please excuse my rant about French hypocrisy and ignorance. It’s one of those days. :-).
You may find some comfort with Viganò.
Thank you.
The Crimean War was started by France and Russia arguing about the Holy Land.
But the hypocritical French, it took over 150 years for Haiti to pay their “debt” to the French after winning their revolution and independence. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, my dos!
I am just making my opinion known from the many assorted stories related to Epstein and Trump.
Trump is guilty of Statutory Rape and human trafficing at the very least aiding and abetting others. As for other prominents: guilty as well. What do you expect from politicians who run for personal gain and not to uphold their sworn duties… sort of like child preditors drawn to the boy scouts and the catholic church, abusers to police, sadists to mercenary posts and etal ….. what would be the disorder that draws people to commit human rights abuses and genocidal activities??
As for those who have had multiple contacts with Epstein….such as in that florida mansion,in flights, on islands, at clubs chumming around – Two possible scenarios 1) That individuals with multiple contacts claiming not to know what was going are Pathological lying to avoid prosecution or have a Delusional disorder that precludes them telling the truth….. like so many others (fill in all names, use another sheet of paper if their is not enough space provided).
It strikes me that the birthday card could be evidence of an intent to agree with Epstein, along with an agreement to commit a criminal conspiracy to human trafficking. That would raise the stakes to criminal conspiracy, and open the door to liability for any foreseeable crimes that were later committed in furtherance of the conspiracy by Epstein (Pinkerton rule.)
Theoretically, given all the counts, Trump could face life in prison.
Of course none of that will ever be prosecuted. As for the other accomplices, they can try to claim they didn’t know about the conspiracy or never agreed to it, but they still ought to be prosecuted for statutory rape, solicitation, being accessories before or after the fact, or any other crimes they committed. Not getting my hopes up.
Trump knows he’s a felon and only became president to pardon himself.
He would need to become governor of NY State in order to pardon himself. All of his convictions are NYS – NOT Federal.
Any of you guys in Europe had better prepare for higher fuel prices. How so? The EU, in their infinite wisdom, are sanctioning India’s second-largest oil refinery because it is partially 49% owned by a Russian corporation. It’s part of the 18th sanction package. There is only one tiny problem. The EU is a major buyer of the Russian crude that is refined at that refinery. In addition, the EU can now punish any India-flagged ship for transporting Russian oil. I would imagine that as far as India is concerned, the EU can take a running jump-
https://www.rt.com/india/621646-eu-sanction-india-oil-refinery/
No doubt VdL and Kaja Kallas will be popping champagne corks in celebration at these brilliant moves.
The price of residential natural gas from PG&E here in northern California went up 30% in the last 12 months. Perhaps a clue as to why this might be can be found here.
I don’t think the Indians want to sell oil to some European cheapskates who don’t want to pay market prices.
I thinks this also points to the colonial aspect of the price cap. No price cap on American oil, but instead price caps on oil from Russia and other places that are not part of some eurocrat’s idea of the developed world. The sanctions might today target Russia, but at some point also China, and then a lot of the global south will be included as well.
(pinched from ambrit on the nuclear war page)
“Threads” is available on YouTube for free.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFu7Z5cc88&t=80s&ab_channel=Retrospective-ClassicMovies
So is “Testament.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9cKi6f9nEE&ab_channel=YouTubeMovies
So is “When the Wind Blows.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TxrnYBrZME&ab_channel=YouTubeMovies
That should be enough “doom scrolling” for one day.
Stay safe. Don’t forget the potassium iodide tablets.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Watched Testament & Threads yesterday, never having seen them and the latter in particular is so very harrowing and set on a 13 year time frame after the fact, Jack.
Worth the price of admission, but you’ll have to make the popcorn.
Sorry to have harshed your buzz Wuk.
Getting ready for Homeland Security Day with a rewatch of those French classics: “The Battle for Algiers” and “The Sorrow and the Pity.”
Be safe up there in the defensible position. (Start some tomatoes and squash plants?)
Waiting for the General Atomics “Funcorn.” So ‘hot’ it pops itself!
Congress approved a bill to cut about $9 billion from Public Broadcasting and Foreign Aid. $1.1 billion will be cancelled for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $8 billion for foreign aid.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.” Yet the bill passed anyway.
Blueridge Public Radio was a major lifeline and source of community support last year during the massive flooding around Asheville NC. I can’t imagine what the locals would have done without it. Tragic and short sighted.
Casual murder continues
Health Insurers Are Denying More Drug Claims, Data Shows
I can’t tell if things are really worse than they’ve been because of an ongoing Pandemic or if things really have gotten more vicious over the past 5 years.
Health insurance, now with
BrawndoAI profitability management!It’s what investors crave.
Data centers eating power–
Another business source has admitted that climate change will bring down capitalism. Gunther Thallinger, a scientist and on the board of Allianz, had this to say on his Linked In page:
There are three rapidly growing sources of CO2 emissions:
1) Data Centers (see today’s link):
;
2) Tourism:
3) Private jets:
For better or worse, we’re past the point where geo-engineering is optional, and I think all future investment needs to be tied to removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Regardless, in order to achieve the carbon goals that Gunther Thallinger states, we need to cease capitalism. We can’t get there if we’re still filling store shelves with 38 different types of toothpaste and dozens of different bottled water brands. Can’t be done.
Basically shuttering the entire consumer economy is going to piss off a ton of wealthy people. Full stop. Good luck with that.
Current carbon capture technology is really only applicable to power plants since there’s no current technology to capture carbon from moving objects. (But Aramco says they’re working on it!). And carbon capture now requires 25% of the energy generated by a coal plant and 15% of the energy generated by natural gas.
David Keith, whom Bill Gates hired to come up with a plan to spray sulfur in the sky every two years until Harvard was finally pressured enough to boot them off campus, wanted to spray the sulfur in the stratosphere, and that would require a plane that doesn’t yet exist:
As desperation has grown, some are now claiming that modified airliners can do the trick.
The really fun thing about this type of geoengineering is that it’s a lot like heroin once you start it. It is no solution for the warming; it merely masks it. If you stop, temperatures begin to rise–and fast–as the sulfur falls out of the sky. It’s a similar effect to what happened over the past couple of years as particulate pollution was reduced. Ill side effects included worsening of ocean acidification, already a global boundary problem; and radically shifting weather patterns, bringing droughts to agricultural areas, etc.
And who will govern it? Gates? What fun it will be to hand this to any authority when stopping it will rapidly make large areas of the planet uninhabitable.
Plus 2 degrees by 2030 is already baked in the cake according to those in the know, which means undeniable real trouble is here by 2040. You can’t have missed how as soon as the US officially went into denial with Mr Trump many others have ceased meaningful attempts to control the situation.
It is all too hard to even contemplate for the weaklings in charge and the heat is already in the oceans to cause a catastrophe. Taking the waste heat out of our civilisation ( and nothing else will help ) means the end of industrial output on a national scale. Net zero and renewable electricity generation are both side issues.
I am trying to put together ideas to inform my great grandsons when they are of an age to really understand what their lives will be like , before I die. Their teachers have filled their heads with tech cornucopian ideas which will fail them.
Beside abandoning capitalism, killing a LOT of people makes more sense for TPTB. That will also reduce drastically the emissions.
What is your bet?
I think Malm’s Overshoot is right that TPTB are telling themselves it’s fine to head to 3 degrees C. They’ll protect themselves (they think), and somebody will figure out how to bring the CO2 back down in a few decades. Maybe throw an attempt at solar geoengineering in there, but who will control what must be a worldwide project?
I think the best hope for future generations is for a full-blown depression before we hit enough tipping points for Venusification. If I were young and healthy and without attachments, I’d take Schmachtenberger’s advice to use any and all methods to bring down what he calls Moloch.
Leavitt to Believer
In this episode Believer Cleaver knows Eddie Haskell is working as a go between for Russia on oil deals which will lead to very steep tariffs and secondary sanctions, watch Karoline defuse the situation in 23 minutes flat.
Trump diagnosed with blood vessel disease – MedPage Today.
I took one look at Twitter today and realized that many of my fellow Dems have well and truly jumped the shark. We are already celebrating Trump’s imminent death. The general prognosis among the dailykos crowd seems to be about 6 months or so. They even have doctors talking about this.
Let me assure you of one thing. The doctors doing this prognosticating must be practicing medicine either not at all or on a completely different planet than I do.
Make no mistake, there are indeed multiple medical problems outside of the legs that could be causing this issue. Some of them with grave prognosis. Things like pulmonary fibrosis leading to pulmonary hypertension leading to right sided heart failure and then chronic severe edema. There are several possibilities in this regard – and they are indeed quite bad. However, and this is a very important point – the patients with these problems would be having all kinds of other very noticeable symptoms. They certainly would not be out playing 18 holes of golf every day.
Take it from me, a general internist of 35 years, someone who deals with this problem many times daily……the vast majority of these patients have no such medical problems. They have veins in their legs that have “aged out” just like cataracts, just like bad knees, etc. They just do not function as well as they did when the patient was 20. Then one must consider that this issue occurs frequently in people who are overweight. And just like above – a patient can handle at age 30 an additional 40 lbs much better than at age 75. There are also patients who have this issue with other more mundane diagnoses like sleep apnea. Let me assure you, with appropriate care, all of these things are not necessarily “fixable” but they are certainly “manageable” and the vast majority of my patients with this problem ( in the absence of the above very severe underlying diagnoses) go on to live years even decades and die from something else. In general, in men, it is often a sign of living a less than active lifestyle and poor eating choices. A bad sign in this medical issue is the development of ulcers and or leakage. This is caused by a) a negligent or non-thorough physician ( I think very unlikely with POTUS of any party) or b) a patient who does not care and continues right on munching the Twinkies and Cheetos.
Trump could very well die within 6 months. Guess what – so can I. Humans reach an age where all bets are off.
What a complete joke our culture and commentary has become. I am genuinely scared and horrified by the lunacy. I just cannot believe what I am seeing anymore. And all of this is being done by people who have literally no idea what they are talking about and literally no experience in the area of concern.
…are there any tests to diagnose a swollen ego?
Saw this and thought of you IM Doc … very informative graph.
One of the many problems of the modern health care system.
https://x.com/robertlufkinmd/status/1945921745027740117
I ponder the aspect that all the MBA/Admin bloat, which adds on to increasing costs whilst delivering sub par public health outcomes. How that eventually attacks family formation or its viability [two income trap level stuff] or econometrics of productivity.
I share your views in the last paragraph.
re: NYT Ukraine war crimes
Did anyone run across the NYT text Gilbert Doctorow is referring to today:
‘New York Times’ prepares American public for Ukrainian defeat
“On Monday, the New York Times had a front page article on the war crimes that the Ukrainian forces committed against civilians in Kursk oblast of the Russian Federation during their occupation from August 2024 to January 2025. This is the first report since the start of the war in which the Ukrainians are shown to be not bunny rabbit victims but vicious predators who violate the internationally recognized rules of war.”
re: RU nuclear doctrine
There is a 3rd part of the essay which I have linked to in recent days which is the actual ending:
It´s here in German:
https://www.telepolis.de/features/Atomare-Bedrohung-Russlands-radikalisierte-Sicherheitspolitik-10492103.html
Nuclear threat: Russia’s radicalized security policy
July 18, 2025 Dmitry Trenin, Sergei Avakyants, Sergei Karaganov
Russia’s nuclear doctrine is intensifying. An expert paper highlights the growing danger of nuclear war. Read here what the Kremlin is planning. (Part 3 and Conclusion)
Breonna Taylor, sentencing the police, and the swamp of corruption in Louisville.
It seems that the local elites don’t want the dots connected, because Kentucky is run by a small group of families. This article in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine is worth reading, if just for the sheer torture of the author’s history and the rawness of his present.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/sons-of-good-fathers-jonathon-sturgeon-kentucky-killings/
It seems that even Democratic darling Gov. Andy Beshear is besmirched.
The corruption in KY politics is said to be second only to Chicago. During #MeToo a lowlife in the capital got caught running a brothel where he secretly taped everyone. Lowlife got a suspended sentence because he’d gotten the girls heroin addicted and *ahem* their testimony couldn’t be trusted. One girl testified that she was taken to a local hotel and didn’t know the name of her john but she had seen him often on television.
Thanks!
For someone who lived there 30 years ago a very new perspective to think of about cozy, poor but loyal Kentucky…
Dr James Thrott linked above may well be right about Covids long term effects. But he also is certain that the MRNA vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective.
I should think there is some reasonable doubt about that
Straw manning is a violation of our written site Policies. I have read all of Throt’s tweets in 2025 (a lot!) and he says no such thing, What he does say, multiple time, is that repeated cases of Covid is vastly more likely to be the cause of the cognitive and other ongoing health issues than vaxxes from years ago.
re: US comedy vs. Israel
Important for any comedy writer or anyone interested in issues of comedy:
Seinfeld Writer EXPOSES the “Israeli Propaganda Machine”
30 min. excerpt
https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/seinfeld-writer-exposes-the-israeli
“(…)
Larry Charles, who’s worked on some of comedy’s most influential and successful projects, from Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Borat and Bruno to The Arsenio Hall Show, tells everything about his forty years of blood, guts, and laughter in the new book Comedy Samurai.
Including the juicy stuff, which he shares with us on Useful Idiots: as an activist against genocide and for Palestinian rights, what is it like to work with notorious Zionists Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Bill Maher? And as a Jewish writer in Hollywood, how did he escape the Israel propaganda machine when his friends didn’t?
Useful Idiots: You’re very political. Do you ever struggle with making sure your politics don’t get in the way of comedy?
Larry Charles: Well, I think my bottom line is it needs to be funny. And I bet I’ve been exploring that relationship between things that aren’t supposed to be funny that I would then rise to the challenge of trying to make funny. And of course, political issues are amongst them.
Working on Fridays as my first job plunged us into the political world. Some sketches were more successful than others in terms of funniness and/or in terms of insight, but we were not at all censored. And I never have felt since that time that I was censored in terms of exploring politics through comedy. I love the idea of trying to bring those two worlds together, even when they’re not on the surface supposedly funny, because there’s always an angle.
I was a big political cartoonist fan and I did political cartoons in high school. So I’ve always been looking for that juxtaposition, that interesting synthesis between politics and humor.
Useful Idiots: You have visited Palestine, and you’ve been very vocal on the issue, especially since Israel started attacking Gaza after October seventh. Now, you’ve worked with some people who have made some of the most influential comedies ever: on Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld, Borat and Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen, and others too who have very different views than you when it comes to the issue of Palestine. I’m curious how you navigate that, how incredibly creative partnerships can not transcend to being in alignment on really fundamental political issues.
Larry Charles: The propaganda machine is able to seduce you, you get sucked in very easily. And you believe that Israel is your birthright. And those kinds of things were not questioned at all when I was a kid. And I’m sure for Bill Maher or for Jerry or for
(…)”
Trump Aims Tariff Double Whammy at Industries, Nations by Aug. 1 (Bloomberg)
The Taco continues. America is going great!
GrandJury Files:
Does the law even allow those to be released? I thought it was a NO. But I agree: those are likely a nothing burger
Please do not waste reader and my time by asking questions you could readily answer by using a search engine. And no, I am not going to spoon feed you by supplying said answer.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I suspect that the Epstein case is swirling around to swirl around to cause people trouble in following what has gone on.
I did a search for some earlier info: And what do I discover? Two Epstein black books, one of which was typeset and bound. Now, if one were engaged in trafficking, would one have one’s address book typeset and then sent out to be bound? In 1999, and even now, there was no such thing as bindery-at-home.
Overly curated and badly plotted but with some useful information, at Business Insider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7box15ryvx8
What was the upshot?
Also, too, let’s not forget the immortal painting of Bill Clinton in the blue dress and red high heels that made it into Epstein’s mansion.
Someone expressed concern in the comments here that taking all of these clowns to court would cause the government to collapse.
I say: Let justice be done even if the heavens should fall.
Because what we will find when Bill and Hillary, and Trump and Jared, and Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem, and Nancy “We’re All Capitalists Now” Pelosi and Mike “Reign of the Tartuffes” Johnson are in jail, the Republic will not fall. None of them is indispensable.
But still not ready for Baader-Meinhof? ;)
For those of us old enough to have been young adults as the 60s gave way to the 70s, I still think it’s an interesting question whether you’d join the Weather Underground if you knew then what you know now.
None of them are even helpful, really.
> How to ‘Drop Out of Society’ Hickman’s Hinterlands
This is an excellent essay.
>> the “tips and tricks” don’t matter much if you haven’t wrestled with the ideas I’ve laid out here.
Some of his insights are over-generalized, but underneath is how the experience changes you, so generalizing from experience doesn’t lead to a stable position.
>> But in the world we now live in, there are others for whom avoiding suicide is a full-time job.
Fair enough.
>> For what does one need now? Sixty-three cubic feet of space in which to pass each night of sleep; preferably non-freezing, secure, and free of any environmental hazards to health, for the first. Then, what else but a few measures of rice and beans, lentils and discount chicken, a bag of oranges now and again, clean water, perhaps a spot of tea and a plug of tobacco — a pair of shoes, a set of clothing, and some means of transportation.
One sure doesn’t need a basement with thirty years worth of stuff. Holy hexnut, we’re shredding stuff from the 20th century. Ötzi has come to mind more than once. But I slept raw on the porch in 40’F the first time I got Covid, hoping to avoid Janet getting it. Didn’t work, and not inclined to do it again.
re: Israel – Silicon Valley – PR
Alan Macleod, MINTPRESS
Rotten Apple: Dozens of Former Israeli Spies Hired by Silicon Valley Giant
18th July
https://www.mintpressnews.com/apple-israel-unit-8200-hiring/290226/
Is ‘Toxic Empathy’ Pulling Christians to the Left? – Ross Douthat, New York Times
https://dnyuz.com/2025/07/18/how-empathy-became-a-threat/
Apparently, it’s a threat when it leads to self-defense.
It’s transparent that there is a group that struggles with it so they’ve whipped out the sophistry to make it seem as if they aren’t lacking.
And it’s something the super-hyped algorithms will never have, so the people seeing $$$ don’t want people to think empathy is needed for a host of services.
The argument — bolstered by Biblical interpretation — seems to be that when empathy might interfere with condemning sin, condemnation should win every time.
I always thought of empathy along the emotional reading side of things, which is not the same as not holding people accountable for harm to others or other misdeeds.
But those are two different stories I mentioned. Popping up at the same time. And when the social engineering around over-hyped algorithms is in full swing.
I’m more reacting to all the interest to the subject at this time more so than a particular article.
regarding Hickman’s thing on being a road warrior.
that was wonderful…i follow him on twit, but didnt know he had a substack.
he’s way, way more conservative than I…and much more religious…but i am mature enough to overlook such things when there’s a lot we agree on.
my life on the road…what i have called my Wild Years…was foundational to who i am, now.
it was not chosen, and it wasnt easy…i suffered, a lot.
6 years, full time living in a 76 vw camper van, all over the south…about half of that with a road buddy(Sam, sometimes his wife, Rose, and less often, his brother, whos name escapes me)we had adventures…a lot of which y’all have heard tell of.
then another 4+ years attempting to come off the Road….with little success…until i finally gave up and came way the hell out here(because i had nowhere else to go)…and met Tam(who saved my life, thereby).
That kind of life(style?) sticks with you…now 30 or so years later.
when cousin’s up, i’ll sometimes get a hankerin to drive down to where the dirt road meets the highway, in the moonlight, and park under the big oak in the bar ditch. and look at the Road.
I did this with Tam a lot, too.
aside from bruxist tenacity, i suppose what i came away with from all that is a whole lot of crazy stories to tell.
Most people…at least initially…dont believe them…its just too crazy, to have crammed so many lifetimes into a mere 10 years(16-26).
I read Blue Highways, by william least-heat-moon when i was in highschool…thought it would be cool…but i didnt have the support, nor the money.
it was only after the Road was the only choice open to me that i read Kerouac, et alia.
all Hickman has to do is say the word “Rucksack”, and i am transported,lol.
in spite of his proselytizing at the end, it is well worth a read.
Blue Highways is one of my favorite books, maybe the best roadtrip tome ever, based largely upon interesting names of towns and cities on the back roads of the USA.
What Hickman is not discussing is what happens to children when their father picks this lifestyle: little medical care and poor education.
It’s fine if you will sterilize yourself or be celibate, otherwise your kids pay the price, and it can be very heavy.
Heck in some parts this lifestyle matters not, mate. So many jobs down in Texas during the early 90s, driving down from Boulder, CO. Once you hit Texas the bill boards with advertising for vasectomies was just hilarious, especially when the next bill board was a a vasectomy reversal, interspersed with divorce lawyers.
Which I always found curious being Red States promoting family first values[tm] and solid moral grounding. Then again neoliberalism did a number on both liberal and conservatives via the meritocracy of money and class status through hyper individualism. Cough …. ***ones*** potential[tm] is all that matters in life.
Recalls this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Fantastic_(film)
yeah.
it’s a lot like that, but with my wife’s catholic and hispanic familia.
but our boys were fully involved with all of that(i supported their communion, etc)…as well as w sports, etc.
they didnt bitch about cremation.
it’s what Tam wanted, as well as a whole lot cheaper.
Our boys got their Socratic/anarchist upbringing, dammit…and the familia supports the results, wholeheartedly.
Sounds righteous, Amfortas. Anarcho-Catholic, Socratic education for the young ‘uns. Bases covered.
I guess the only thing missing might be the Capt. Fantastic school bus, but perhaps you’ve been working on that angle as well ;)
i didnt have kids..and neither did he, as far as i know.
i became a father at almost 30.
(that i am aware of…been waiting on my grown kids to show up at my door for decades…i’d welcome them into the fold)
Hi Amf, I posted some Yeats for your solace below your requiem for a UPS girl, if you check back.
(Like Dean Friedman and a McDonald’s girl, she’s an angel in a polyester uniform!).
re: lithium Congo-US deal
via German daily JUNGE WELT
“(…)
DR Congo: US mining company secures lithium exploitation
Kinshasa. The mining company Kobold Metals, backed by US billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, is entering the lithium mining industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The company announced on Friday that it has signed an agreement with the government in Kinshasa that provides for the acquisition of the Manono lithium deposit and large-scale mineral exploration. Manono, in the north of the country, is considered one of the largest lithium deposits in the world. The metal is crucial for the construction of batteries, for example in e-mobility.
The Australian company AVZ Minerals is engaged in a protracted legal dispute with the Congolese government over mineral rights. The agreement with Kobold makes the California-based company Kinshasa’s preferred partner in resolving the deadlock and developing the resource. President Félix Tshisekedi confirmed the agreement in an online post.
AVZ could not be reached by Reuters for comment. The company originally held the permit to develop the Manono project, but in 2023 the Congolese Ministry of Mines revoked this permit, arguing that the project had not progressed quickly enough. AVZ subsequently appealed to the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Kobold must apply for exploration licenses covering an area of more than 1,600 square kilometers by July 31, while the Central African nation will appoint a commissioner by the same date to facilitate the acquisition of Manono.
The agreement comes after President Donald Trump brokered a deal in June to end fighting in mineral-rich eastern Congo in return for Western investment. (Reuters/jW)
(…)”
Local young girls turning tricks…
Riata Ranch Cowboy Girls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEQ85hpg8xs
Ouch Wuk! Click Jail Bait?
Their routine would be hard for an adult male, much less a wee lass. Good for them.
Colonel Smithers took on Tony Blair recently and here’s a fuller rundown.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/16/whsu-j16.html
Meanwhile Trump’s sons are going around cooking up business deals like a resort in Hanoi even as dad dictates trade terms to that entire country. How is this even conceivably legal?
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/07/18/the-cost-of-the-western-illusion-in-vietnam/
Overnight flooding in Kansas City leads to water rescues, power outages and road closures KCUR
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A different situation here in terms of altitude, but our big problem in the winter of record for 125+ years in 2023 was that many culverts were filled in, blocked or what have you, leading to massive road damage.
It didn’t help that the Castle Fire and KNP Fire had rendered many slopes to be somewhat vertical lunar landscapes~
Word rippling through the ranks of National Park Service is that Interior Department officials have decided to close the Horace P. Albright and Stephen T. Mather training centers that have long served as primary training facilities for hundreds of new Park Service employees each year.
Interior and Park Service officials in Washington did not immediately respond Friday morning to an inquiry about the centers, though active and retired Park Service employees said they heard the centers were being closed.
“It’s official. The end of the Horace Albright Training Center and Mather Training Center is here,” Costa Dillion, who had a long Park Service career, told the National Parks Traveler in an email. “If the decision was NPS’s to make, why did they decide to close them? How will employees be trained?”
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2025/07/interior-said-be-closing-albright-mather-training-centers-national-park-service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To watch the dismantling of the National Park Service is a bit horrifying, where are the young DOGE replacements for NPS staff gonna learn to do their job?
File under Class Warfare:“Every summer, fate chooses a CEO for the sacrifice”.
Amazing how quickly it all unravels
E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm