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New tool in fight against Great Lakes invasive species: muskrats Bridge Michigan
Plant that mimics odour of half-eaten ants to attract pollinators discovered The Guardian
‘Very mean squirrel’ seeking food sends at least 2 people to the ER in California NBC Bay Area
Why Warm Countries Are Poorer Unchartered Territories
HOW TO MEASURE NOTHING BETTER IEEE Spectrum
Climate/Environment
Pacific ‘blob’ heat wave now spans an area the size of the US SFGate
Pandemics
What COVID-19 Does to the Body (9th Edition, September 2025) Pandemic Accountability Index
The Koreas
Why U.S.’s Trade Pact With South Korea Has Gotten Messier WSJ
China?
Unpacking China’s New Headline Climate Targets Asia Society
India
‘Bloodiest day’: How Gen-Z protest wave hit India’s Ladakh, killing four Al Jazeera
Syraqistan
Israel Bombs Yemen as IDF Rolls Through Gaza City, Displacing Hundreds of Thousands Common Dreams
Dockworkers from across Europe gather to plan trade squeeze on Israel Lord’s Press
Microsoft revokes cloud services from Israel’s Unit 8200, following +972 exposé +972 Magazine
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Iranian Air Force Receives First New Russian Fighters in Over 30 Years: How Capable Are Its MiG-29s? Military Watch
Douglas Macgregor: “War is Inevitable” Glenn Diesen
***
Visions of Mustaqbālna Edward Ongweso Jr.
European Disunion
Fingerprints and a €20 fee – the new rules for visiting Europe explained The Telegraph
Marching to the right, Trump-style German Foreign Policy
Polish opposition calls for Antifa to be designated terrorist organisation Notes from Poland
Germany’s new deregulation chief vows to be more subtle than Elon Musk FT
European banks to launch euro stablecoin in bid to counter US dominance Reuters
Three in four European companies are hooked on US tech The Register
Sarkozy says he will ‘sleep in jail but with head held high’ after conviction The Guardian
New Not-So-Cold War
Kyiv called in to help Brussels build ‘drone wall’ along eastern flank Euractiv
Poland Envisages Indirectly Expanding The EU’s “Drone Wall” Into Ukraine Andrew Korybko
Europeans Privately Tell Russia They’re Ready to Shoot Down Jets Bloomberg
Crisis Escalation Becomes Euro-Cabal’s Final Meal Ticket Simplicius
European officials fear Trump’s new stance on Ukraine war is ‘start of a blame game’ FT
Zelensky ready to step down when war ends Baltic News Network
Despite Trump’s rhetoric on Ukraine, Russia believes he’s still committed to diplomatic solution Anadolu Agency
Russia awaiting US response to Putin’s initiative on New START treaty — Kremlin TASS
Turkiye
Trump signals to Erdoğan that US could lift ban on F-35 sales to NATO ally Turkey Euronews
Trump lavishes praise on Erdogan in White House meeting and suggests Turkey stop buying Russian oil and gas Intellinews
US welcomes deal to reopen Iraq-Türkiye pipeline Anadolu Agency
Our Famously Free Press
Trump approves TikTok deal through executive order, Vance says business valued at $14 billion CNBC
Larry Ellison Is a ‘Shadow President’ in Donald Trump’s America Wired
“Liberation Day”
Trump announces tariffs on pharmaceuticals, furniture and heavy trucks beginning Oct. 1 The Hill
Trump 2.0
James Comey indicted on federal obstruction, perjury charges The Hill
LISA COOK V. DONALD TRUMP IS AT THE SUPREME COURT. WHAT NOW? Notes on the Crises
Cook warns Supreme Court that siding with Trump on Fed firing risks ‘chaos and disruption’ for markets Yahoo! Finance
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TEXAS DOMESTIC WORKERS FACE TRUMP ATTACK ON MINIMUM WAGE Texas Observer
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Stephen Miller Claims Simply Calling Trump Authoritarian ‘Incites Violence and Terrorism’ Common Dreams
DOJ Appears to Have Violated Luigi Mangione’s Right to a Fair Trial, Judge Says Truthout
Permitted Trump-Epstein statue smashed and removed without notice Boing Boing
DOGE
DOGE put your Social Security Number on a cloud server with up to a 65% risk of getting hacked: Senate report Fast Company
Police State Watch
Shoplifters could soon be chased down by drones MIT Technology Review
As immigration raids step up, US citizens predicted at risk for detainment Ohio Capital Journal
How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump 404 Media
Imperial Collapse Watch
Secretary of War Hegseth Summons All US Military Brass to Quantico Larry Johnson
New Pentagon strategy to focus on homeland, Western Hemisphere Defense News
What is Liberalism, What is Post-Liberalism, and Why Has the World Lost its Mind? Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue
Wounded Knee Medal of Honor Soldiers Will Keep Them Says Defense Secretary Hegseth Last Real Indians
Accelerationists
Silicon Valley’s latest argument against regulating AI: that would literally be the Antichrist The Verge
AI
And probably the worst is the waste of human resources. You’re really going to get some of the smartest people in the world (like this guy 👇) to do stuff like that?https://t.co/xQYu4nHVkC
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 26, 2025
Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies 404 Media
How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral MIT Technology Review
Groves of Academe
Felony charges after South Carolina high school filled with “fart spray”… for weeks Ars Technica
Supply Chain
800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics more expensive The Register
Economy
The Bezzle
Amazon Will Pay $2.5 Billion to Settle FTC Suit That Alleged ‘Dark Patterns’ in Prime Sign-Ups Wired
Mr. Market
‘ChatGPT, What Stocks Should I Buy?’ AI Fuels Boom in Robo-Advisory Market Reuters
Class Warfare
Amid strike, Boeing taking rare step of hiring permanent replacements for union workers Breaking Defense
OSHA Proposes Revisions to Workplace Safety Regulations National Law Review
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
” ‘Very mean squirrel’ seeking food sends at least 2 people to the ER in California”
It could have been worse. It could have been a bunny rabbit-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCI18qAoKq4 (1:46 mins)
The picture is of a red squirrel, which is probably right. Red squirrels are much more aggressive than the larger, cuddlier grey squirrels.
A unfortunately rather amusing look at the state of the Hong Kong separatists
https://xcancel.com/chungchingkwong/status/1970388645061501048
https://xcancel.com/chungchingkwong/status/1970388650077888848
After being used and disposed of, the collaborator arrives in the UK where they are SHOCKED that their white masters have no respect for them and do not give them full rights and benefits. Their cries for this are met with derision expectedly from both Chinese people and especially British mocking with racial stereotypes in the replies, perhaps rather deservedly.
They served their purpose at the time – to make the Chinese look bad – but now their usefulness is long at an end, they can be disposed of. I would not be surprised to hear one day that the British have made an agreement with China to ship those Hong Kong separatists back home. There is form here in how the UK made an agreement with Qaddafi to ship Libyan dissidents from the UK back to Libyan torture chambers for some sort of political gain.
It’s very ironic they spend all their time preaching that they are Hong Kongers and not Chinese only to arrive in the West to discover that the Westerners have thought they were Chinese all along. Hard to say with these people though, the least delusional have already left the UK quietly and returned to Hong Kong while the most hard core, finding that their credentials and degrees are not recognized to take on the jobs they used to do, are taking on jobs like warehouse workers and delivery drivers. The super hard core guys will probably either attempt to persist in their delusion, claim asylum, probably run over to Canada or do something like join Falun Gong. Why would China want these people back when they can do wonderful things like Gordon Chang has done in America? I guess they did jail Joshua Wong though but the way he would fly back to US for instructions and then go back to Hong Kong was just too insane to not do something about
Didn’t help Joshua Wong’s case when he would have his photo being taken with Washington politicians and letting them be published.
Thumbs up for the Discworld antidote.
I just listened to the new episode of my favorite millennial derangement podcast, an interview with Jasper Craven, author of “Battle of the Sexes – Pete Hegseth’s war on women” in the September The Baffler. Wow! What a man Peter Brian Hegseth truly is not. Monumental loser, messed up abuser, and Platonic ideal of the Trump cabinet.
Here’s Craven’s article https://thebaffler.com/salvos/battle-of-the-sexes-craven
And the Trueanon interview of Jasper Craven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7nA-9wWAi8 or in your podcast app.
I heard in a podcast earlier this evening with Douglas Macgregor that women make up about 20% of the US armed forces and Hegseth wants to reduce that down to about 5%. Good thing that so many young men are rushing into recruitment centers to make up that difference. Seems to be a case here where Hegseth is thinking with the wrong head.
>DOJ Appears to Have Violated Luigi Mangione’s Right to a Fair Trial, Judge Says – Truthout
And then there is the person charged in the Charlie Who case. It seems to me the same thing in spades.
You and I are on the same page. Has Robinson even gotten a lawyer yet?
And what’s up with the “reconstructed” texts? Are we looking at jury pool poisoning?
I fear this is going to be like the Vegas shooter, memory-holed.
After the terrorist act in Pavlovegas that killed 60 and wounded 600, ‘Vegas Strong’ bumper stickers and signs sprung up all over the place in Sin City… yeah that’s the ticket, we’ll address out of control gun policies with a slogan!
Might ‘St. George Strong’ work?
Why did China agree to sell tik tok?
CNBC yesterday was skeptical about a deal being in place when they heard the $14B price. I actually wonder if this is one of those agreements occurred only in the administration’s imagination.
Wonder if the stalling will reach the point of requiring yet another executive order to extend the timeline as every single legality and fine point is debated.
As was it was so nicely said in Dune, “You made the peace gesture. The forms have been obeyed.”
As is usually the case, the situation is much more nuanced than that.
Tik-Tok is owned by ByteDance, a privately held Chinese technology company. ByteDance agreed to give up majority control of its US operations, but not the entire company.
According to information I found online, “Oracle will manage U.S. user data storage, cloud services, and oversight of the app’s recommendation algorithm (which will be licensed from ByteDance and retrained on U.S. data only).”
THe spooks will certainly put backdoors in as well
So we now have a situation where the US version of Tik-Tok will be controlled by a US entity, and the rest of the world will get a completely different Tik-Tok, or at least one that is not controlled by the US government.
(This would be sort of analogous to Microsoft divesting its’ Israeli cloud operations to an Israeli-controlled entity that would run Azure cloud locally according to the Israeli government’s wishes. )
The real losers here are US citizens who now face a government-controlled and presumably censored version of Tik-Tok. I bet anyone posting videos to the “American” Tik-Tok that questions the narrative gets de-platformed or censored.
In theory, it should be possible for US citizens to bypass the censored TikTok using a VPN, and possibly a jailbroken iPhone, although I am not sure about that. Certainly, the US government will try to prevent Americans from downloading the “rest of the world” version of the app. I don’t use Tik-Tok so I can’t really say, but if there is a simple web-based version of Tik-Tok that loads in a browser, there is no practical way to stop Americans from using a VPN to circumvent the restrictions.
A major impetus for all this was so many people posting pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel Tik Toks. Under the new management, all this will go away of course. I have heard that the Chinese will still retain the secret algorithms responsible for Tik-Tok’s success so maybe the US will be getting an ‘export’ version of it.
Arch pro Israeli supporters will now control the content. Israel has solved its tik-tok problem.
Oracle is owned by Larry Ellison. Ellison will control the algorithm for recommendations, which means no more pro-Palestine videos, as they’ll simply be downvoted by the algorithm.
“China” doesn’t really care. For the current shareholders/management of ByteDance, USA Tiktok is not as profitable as the rest of the world.
The monetization model for social media in Asia is different than the USA.
The only national security threat of Tiktok is the latent brain rot that it produces like any other American social media outlet…..pearl clutching from the NYT aside
Goooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
Once again the Tariffist attacked on multiple fronts, just say no to drugs that used to be 50% less was the feeling-sending the country reeling because everybody and their mother is on safe & sane Rx ireworks.
“Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies”
That’s the way to do it. Reddit said that since AI slop is unstoppable, they they are going to use it. So those Reddit fans flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit with all sorts of AI slop and now the editors have discovered that they can stop all AI slop after all. Seriously, who is asking for the use of AI slop anyway? Who wants or even needs it?
“…who is asking for the use of AI slop anyway? Who wants or even needs it?”
See the post on Meta’s Vibes. It offers another means by which Facebook users can “express themselves.”
Hopefully they will mostly remain contained in their digital bubbles where they can wank to their heart’s content and we need not deal with them in real life.
It’s Pyrrhic poetry in motion
They turned their tender eyes to he
A conviction deep as any ocean
Including trans harmony
But they blinded me with Zions
(They blinded me with Zions!)
And failed me in triggernometry, hey (huh, huh, huh)
Huh, huh
When I’m looking at the evidence
(Blinding me with Zions, Zions)
(Zions!)
I can smell something awfully fishy
(Blinding me with Zions, Zions)
(Zions!)
Now, but it’s Pyrrhic poetry in motion
When they turned their eyes to he
A conviction as deep as any ocean
Including trans harmony
They blinded me with Zions
(They blinded me with Zions)
Failed me in skulduggery
When I’m looking at the evidence
(Blinding me with Zions, Zions)
(Zions)
I can hear conspiracy theory machinery
(Blinding me with Zions, Zions)
(Zions!)
Ha, it’s Pyrrhic poetry in motion
Now they’re quiet as church mice
The usual spheres are in commotion
The red elements in harmony
They blinded me with Zions
(They blinded me with Zions)
And hit me with AI technology
Hey, I don’t believe it
There they go again
Everything is tidied up and I can’t find anything
All my usual curiosity
And careful notes
And antiquated notions
But it’s Pyrrhic poetry in motion
When they turned their eyes to he
A conviction as deep as any ocean
Including trans harmony
Oh, they blinded me with Zions
(They blinded me with Zions)
They blinded me with
She Blinded Me With Science, by Thomas Dolby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdSUnV2fJGk&list=RDwdSUnV2fJGk
note at the bottom: When in Utah, you’ll encounter Zions Bank, Zions Bakery, Zions Science Department, etc. you get the gist.
– ‘Visions of Mustaqbālna’ – Edward Ongweso Jr.
Here’s a question for NC commentators. When you think of “the most prominent instance of Silicon Valley’s widespread—and growing—vulnerability to espionage” by a foreign power, what country first comes to mind? How about your reaction to sentences like this:
“Some tech billionaires appear to consider the infiltration of their companies by foreign dictatorships simply a cost of doing business. And some seem to share their authoritarian instincts.”
I assume everyone immediately thought “Saudi Arabia,” right?
Ok, this article is actually not bad on the fads and foilbles of MBS and the KSA. But if I’m going to worry about the “infiltration” of Silicon Valley by a “foreign power,” it’s not going to be *this* foreign power. I quickly scanned several of the other articles at this site. Time and paywalls limited my inquiry, so I could be wrong. But I did not see any reference to The Country that Shall Not Be Named.
> What is Liberalism, What is Post-Liberalism, and Why Has the World Lost its Mind? Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue
I asked some Buddhist scholars to riff on this sequence:
> agape, compassion, nonattachment, dissociation
My understanding of the response: agape is love, which wants the other to be happy; but this notion of love reflects to the self, while compassion removes the self and focuses on the other. Nonattachment and dissociation might seem similar, but are nearly opposite, as nonattachment allows complete focus on the other, while dissociation removes the external.
Grenier briefly capitalizes good into the Good, making it The definite article. I’ll assert this introduces a Type I error, implicitly asserting there is no good but The Good. The word ‘better’ does not appear, and the rejection of melioration becomes Ideational, without regard to the Sensate real world. The Buddhists seem to be agreeing with a suppression of the Self, but only so that the subject may engage with the object without illusion.
Beware the definite article, and its extension, ‘they’.
“Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users’ phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts”
‘A viral app called Neon, which offers to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell that data to AI companies, has rapidly risen to the ranks of the top-five free iPhone apps since its launch last week.’
For the love of god, who thinks that this is a great idea and who needs privacy anyway. Sorry, but if their information got compromised then it is all on them. Zero sympathy.
performative, yes.
but still…
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1971569405323792709
in anthropology/sociology, this is called “shunning”, and can be very effective(says the former folk devil).
it legitimises ignoring or otherwise challenging the object.
makes it normal to cast the ostraka.
People are really getting tired of his s***, no matter how many cartoon boards he brings to the UN. Same with Zelensky. He gave his speech and there were very few people there to listen to him. Al Qaeda President Jolani get more respect at the UN these days.
china/renewables
Maybe they are being super conservative in their estimates?
As of early this year they have reached the 1000GW solar and roughly 550GW wind.
By the end of the year, roughly 1300GW solar, 650GW wind for a total of 1950 of 3600, so only 1650 gw to go.
At the pace they are currently on, 10 yrs of solar would be an additional 3000 GW, and wind 1000GW or 4000GW of new plus the 1950GW for a total of almost 6000GW vs the 3600 goal.
Curious why they started the math at 2020 vs today, why such a low goal.? Almost makes me think it was a poor translation, because if it was 3600GW of new solar and wind that I would believe more than just 3600GW total.
And while yes every country should do more, they are doing more percentage wise vs any other county especially the US. It’s usually not stated that one major reason the US has had a reduction in emissions is the outsourcing of manufacturing mostly to china. If the US keeps up its so-called manufacturing revolution, then its emissions will go up.
The Quantico convocation of military leaders: “Let’s get together and talk about a coup.”