Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura Public Domain Review
Someone keeps stealing, flying, fixing and returning this man’s plane. But why? Los Angeles Times
Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them? The Register
Women in Trees Creative Fuel
Climate/Environment
The ‘King of the Great Plains’ is dying. Drought is killing giant oak trees in the Midwest KCUR
What happens to net zero if the trees don’t survive? New Climate Reality
Another 2025 day, another record flash flood event Balanced Weather
Colorado prison evacuated as wildfire becomes one of largest in state history AP
Firefighters tackle large gorse blaze on Arthur’s Seat BBC
Canyon Fire ignites in Southern California, echoes January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires WSWS
Wildfires close Dardanelles gateway to Black Sea Intellinews
Pandemics
The Koreas
South Korea’s military has shrunk by 20% in six years as male population drops Channel News Asia
India-Pakistan
ThePrint Exclusive: Asim Munir’s India nuke threat from US ballroom—‘will take half the world down’ The Print. Also says if India builds dam on Indus River as planned, Pakistan will bomb it.
India Cancels Planned Purchase of P-8I Anti-Submarine Warfare Jets Amid Rising Tensions with U.S. Military Watch
India’s existential angst to confront Western imperialism Indian Punchline
China?
China pushes for looser chip controls in US trade talks Semafor
Nvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US Reuters
How the U.S. Installs “Backdoors” in Chips CCTV (Translation)
CIA maps reveal the legacy of the planned economy in Chinese cities Sinocities
China to sustain top-down, debt-fueled investment in major projects and security capacities, ex-official says Pekingnology
Will the new judicial ruling in China bankrupt small businesses? China Translated
Philippines, Poland find common ground in deterring China, Russia South China Morning Post
Syraqistan
Israel allows for 430,000 reservists to be called up amid Gaza takeover plan New Arab
Despite What Netanyahu Wants You to Think, an Israeli Conquest of Gaza Remains Far Off Haaretz
Senior Israeli Commanders Openly Contradict Netanyahu Claim On Gaza Destruction Drop Site
Anas al-Sharif among five Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel in Gaza Al Jazeera
As Sisi Accuses Israel of Genocide, Egypt Signs Record $35 Billion Gas Deal with Israel Drop Site
Germany’s Merz defends partial weapons halt to Israel DW
‘Civilisation is no longer the norm.’ Patrick Lawrence, The Floutist
***
Another excerpt from Pezeshkian’s “despair” speech:
The state of revenues and expenditures is clear. When we create expectations (for the people), we must also ask where we will get the means to meet those expectations.
Industry has faced problems (budgetary) and was bombed.… https://t.co/4cEy8BPFRF pic.twitter.com/eK6Xl3i4l8
— The Middle Eastern (@TMiddleEastern) August 10, 2025
Iran says deputy chief of UN nuclear watchdog to visit Tehran on Monday Anadolu Agency
Old Blighty
London police arrest at least 450 protesters at rally against Palestine Action ban Middle East Eye. A new record for the Met.
The UK:
Throwing a Nazi salute: “Free Speech.“
Protesting against Genocide: “Not ‘Free Speech’, Criminal Offense, Arrested.“ pic.twitter.com/YMc0RT1hFx
— John O’Connell (@jdpoc) August 10, 2025
European Disunion
TRIESTE PORT MOVES CLOSER TO THE SILK ROAD GeoPolitiQ
New Not-So-Cold War
Vance tells Europe to step up in Ukraine, even though it lacks the strength The Times
Europe urges Trump to use sanctions pressure ahead of Putin summit FT
Crazy Spin About Upcoming Summit by Collective West Karl Sanchez
Is Vladimir Putin Naive in Pursuing a Meeting with Donald Trump? Larry Johnson
🇺🇸🇷🇺NEW VIDEO: US-Russian Presidents to Meet: US Prepares Dagger of Betrayal (Again)
On YouTube: https://t.co/xEt1m4u45B
▪️Nothing has changed fundamentally within the US power structure to change the overall objectives of US special interests in regards to pursuing primacy…
— Brian Berletic (@BrianJBerletic) August 10, 2025
THE RUSSIA I DREAM OF FORGETTING; WHAT PEOPLE ARE DYING FOR IN UKRAINE Marat Khairullin Substack
How Nazi Collaborators Are Celebrated in Wartime Ukraine The New Paradigm
South of the Border
Wargaming Scenario: MAGA Versus The Cartels Un-Diplomatic
How Mexico Doubled the Minimum Wage Phenomenal World
Spook Country
When counterculture and empire merge All-Source Intelligence
“Liberation Day”
Goldman’s latest (still very early) analysis of tariff effects thru June 2025:
-Foreign exporters absorbed 14% of US tariffs
-US companies ate 64%
-US consumers ate 22%
-Protected US companies also raised prices
-Consumers will see bigger price increases (70%) thru the Fall pic.twitter.com/0S0fVnEvQp— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 10, 2025
Why is ASEAN planning a rare joint meeting of foreign and economic ministers? Channel News Asia
Trump expands use of tariffs to reach national security goals WaPo. Not new.
Trump 2.0
DONALD TRUMP IS MOSTLY A CRYPTO BILLIONAIRE NOW, GROUP SAYS The Intercept
Donald Trump exposes US retirees to new world of risk with 401k order FT
Trump warns homeless to leave Washington, D.C., ‘immediately’ CNBC
GOP Funhouse
Mamdani
Zohran Mamdani Must Build Power, Not Bridges America’s Undoing
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Back-to-School Inflation Stories Crop Up on TikTok BIG by Matt Stoller
AI
AI Designs Super Safe Sub for Billionaires to Ride Into the Depths of the Ocean Futurism
Imperial Collapse Watch
Foreign investors disappear from US Treasury auctions, as China borrows at the lowest rates ever Kevin Walmsley
Accelerationists
Sports Desk
The Bezzle
Big Tech is building AI in the desert. The water may not last Rest of World
Class Warfare
Public Money, Private Benefit Working Class Storytelling
Ride-sharing apps are bad, actually Edward Ongweso Jr. “Or why Matthew Yglesias has no clue what he’s talking about.”
Fragile Movements Crumble Hamilton Nolan
Labor’s Strategy Must Lean Into Synergies Convergence Mag
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“AI Designs Super Safe Sub for Billionaires to Ride Into the Depths of the Ocean”
‘When the presumably tongue-in-cheek Blueskyer asked the AI if this brave new submersible would be able to “go deeper than the Titan,” the chatbot responded with a resounding “yes.” ‘
Technically true as the Titanic itself was able to go pretty deep until it was stopped by the ocean floor.
The game changer with the new AI-designed submarine is the proutic haripotator. The submarine also has a truister, which means there is no problem when it comes to financing the operations, and the emergency baby is useful, but truly, what can go wrong when the vessel is endowed with a proutic haripotator?
They should really ask an AI to design a turbo encabulator to challenge it-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4 (3:53 mins)
LOL! It’s like wild mushrooms. You can eat any mushroom in the world, at least once ;)
To help out here, you should get a copy of that famous book – “How to tell the Difference Between Mushrooms and Toadstools” by the late Dr. P.I. Staker.
Especially if it’s included in a lovingly prepared beef Wellington!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-08/erin-patterson-late-august-mushroom-murder-pre-sentence/105627582
Humans were responsible for engineering and design of the Ford Pinto…just saying and yeah the Pinto was better advertising than calling the hatchback the “Ford Coffin Car…”. And well the Titanic was a feat of engineering it’s just unfortunate no one in charge thought to take caution of the iceberg here or there. Ok pulled the above article on my cell phone and getting properly updated this reads as though it was written by Mark Twain, or maybe Mel Brooks!
Billionaires should be forced to eat their own cooking, since it’s their AI recipe after all. Naturally each Tech bro wizard has their own fanciful brand of AI which won’t destroy jobs or humanity…
My first car was a puke-green (manufacturers claim was avocado) 1974 Pinto which I demolished by rear ending a lady in Buena Park, luckily not the other way around.
Did you hear that the US Air Force is going to by a coupla Tesla Cybertrucks – to use for target practice?
https://fortune.com/2025/08/10/air-force-tesla-cybertruck-relationship-big-tech-pentagon-contract-spending/
You’d think that it would be far cheaper just to find up a coupla old Ford Pintos and just make sure the gas tank was full and let the USAF practice on them. Of course you could probably get them to blow up by just throwing a rock at their rear end and save the cost of a coupla missiles.
Good morning, two rhetorical questions:
1. Where are the “bone-crushing sanctions” Linsday Graham promised?
2. Tomorrow is the 12th, where is the Chyna! trade deal TACO promised?
And right there is your answer to why Trump was frantic to set up this meeting with Putin in Alaska. He had boxed himself in with this threats and needed a huuge distraction to make people to forget about them. Thing is, now that he is meeting Putin in Alaska he has kinda boxed himself in again as there will be expectations that he will be able to get something done. As he is losing in the Ukraine he could make some sort of deal with Russia to scale back nukes in Europe for example which he could be seen as making him a “winner”. It won’t matter that countries in Europe will demand the right to have nukes stationed in their country as Trump will renege on that deal anyway lest he face the wrath of Lyndsay Graham.
I don’t see how any deal on any subject that satisfies VVP’s concerns would not be interpreted in the West to be Munich-scale appeasement.
Best case outcome IMO is agreement to continue to meet, thus kicking the sanctions can a bit further down the road.
No, best case scenario is that Putin and Trump discuss nuclear arms limits and Trump decides to pursue the idea to produce a great talking point alternative to Ukraine and would be one of the few things Trump could do to legitimately advance his Nobel Peace Prize aims.
Both of those things are Old (fake) News. Have you so easily forgotten that history started yesterday, and will be different tomorrow?
Balanced Weather – “…rainfall rates of up 7” per hour…”
WOW! Even places that don’t flood from creeks/streams/rivers can flood in that situation. That’s a lot of water that needs to drain away and if it’s coming down faster than it can move then you’ve got flooding. Even if it can move fast enough now you’ve got a volume of water moving at speed that can be highly erosive.
Back in June we had a serious rain storm drop rain at about a 3″ per hour rate and it closed part of the NYS Thruway in an area with no real waterways. It was just too flat for the water to move out fast enough and limited places to drain too so the road flooded.
yep. im still in lingering shock from a month ago,lol.
we get torrential rains…3″…sometimes 6″…in a day, day and a half.
the pastures absorb it(by design…i cut a big hole in one of the ancient levies that was chanelling flooding into the belt of trees, slowing it down, and making it overflow that gully into mom’s yard….now, all that water floods the front pasture, and generally soaks in)
but 30+” in 3 1/2 days?
on top of 20+” a mere 3 weeks before?
its too much.
the usually dry creek down close to the highway still has running water a month later.
and when i go poke a stiff metal rod into either pasture, its still wet at 1 foot down in some places.
Late July (after your rains) I made a comment about Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE). My concern at the time was about devastating downdrafts. In that event, it wasn’t wind but rain, with rates at >18″ per hour. At least around here, it wasn’t broad & long, like Carolina in the 70’s during hurricanes. Rather it was locally torrential. Where there were organized fronts, there were sizzle-lines of massive amounts of lightning strikes.
Exciting times!
When we had our winter of record for the past 125 years in the southern Sierra in 2023, it was a series of atmospheric rivers often with bright and sunny days inbetween storms, and the day before the big deluge I was by the river with a friend talking about what was well advertised in terms of what was about to hit us, and I could have walked across the river maybe up to my upper thighs in water-no biggie.
The next morning I woke up and went outside to make my bladder gladder and my current was drowned out by the insistent howl of the river, which I couldn’t wait to see up close and it was 26,000 cubic feet per second @ max flow, and instant death if you got into the water.
I saw creeklets 150 feet from the river flowing for the first time ever as far as I was concerned, water does what it wants.
Of course you have to ask yourself if this was a one-off or whether you will get to experience this sort of rain more and more down the track. From what you said, you made your preparations and it was still not enough. Good way to fill an artificial pond as a water reserve though if the terrain permitted it.
Trieste Moves Closer to the Silk Road.
Che sorpresa! I’m sure that right now the port authorities in Genova are trying to figure out a way to get into the action.
Note the map in the article. As ever, I realize that U.S. foreign policy is all about “Don’t know much about history…” Yet the two main operating “silk roads” / development roads are thoroughly in McKinder’s crescent, which was dismissed as pishtosh by commenters to a post here at Naked Capitalism just a few days back.
The soon-to-fail Cotton Road is outside the crescent. Hmmm. Now why didn’t it knock out the other two, which also have long histories of use? Some of the incipient failure is U.S. / U.K. sponsorship and the culture of inattention to details (like long sea voyages for freight). Some of the failure stems from the determination of Anglosphere imperialists to run the Cotton Road through two imperial creations, Israel and Saudi Arabia, rather than along viable routes.
As I watch political and cultural developments in Italy, I am always seeing geography in action. Italy has long ties to the Levant and to Anatolia. It almost goes without saying that Italy has long ties to Greece and Tunisia (Carthage).
Hamburg? Tallinn? Riga? Not so much.
“India Cancels Planned Purchase of P-8I Anti-Submarine Warfare Jets Amid Rising Tensions with U.S.”
Can’t really blame them. If they get into a shooting war with Pakistan again, they have to be sure that they will have no problems with their weapons. But if a country buys US weapons, that usually means the need for contractors to service and maintain those weapons. When things went south in Afghanistan those US contractors were pulled out which put a big crimp in the Afghan military. More concerning, Iraq purchased US tanks to make nice but then one day a militant group was spotted driving US vehicles so Washington decided that it was Iraq’s job to get those vehicles back for them and to lean on them, pulled the contractors for those US tanks out of the country. And one after the other they fell out of service. The Iraqis had to go out and buy Russian tanks to fill the gap.So India knows that the US backs Pakistan so buying US weapons creates a massive vulnerability for them as the US might pull out their contractors on the eve of another war.
Saw this when taking a brief look at Ars Technica: Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent. Lovely. With such plagues, can we decisively attest that the Mandate of Heaven has been lost?
If they’re lucky, those Africanized honey bees aka “killer bees” might take care of them as they arrive.
I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down (NY Times via archive.ph) (25 minutes)
Without a doubt, there was no anything out here. The loss of cellular service and broadband, with Spectrum not even notifying anyone it was down throughout the entire region, nor if they were even working on it. Other than the radio, I asked random strangers what news they might have. A curious way to learn about your immediate world, through rumor.
And a good example