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The covert project to (finally) measure hellish subway heat Sequencer
MTA Searches Underground for Ways to Cool Sweltering Stations The City
The end of design The Rectangle
Climate/Environment
Energy Dept. adds ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ to banned words list Politico
Tropical Storm Imelda forms alongside Hurricane Humberto, both expected to turn away from US NOLA
Investing in coastal real estate? Might as well bet on crypto futures. Moving Day
‘I couldn’t look’: European farmers on losing crops as the industry collides with worsening drought The Guardian
Cybernetics in the Anthropocene E-Flux
How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo The Marginalian
The Koreas
Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline The Register
K-cure: South Korea’s booming market for traditional (and novel) hangover remedies The Guardian
India
Is India’s ‘Look West’ policy anchored by Iranian port under threat? South China Morning Post
China?
Xi to ask Trump to oppose Taiwan independence in return for trade deal The Telegraph
Classified US intelligence warns of China’s preparations for Taiwan invasion ABC
Profits, Policy and the Recomposition of China’s Industrial Structure Warwick Powell
Syraqistan
.@UNReliefChief: Kids dying of starvation, effectively their bodies consuming their own organs, what we give them to try and avoid that is this high protein peanut butter paste. We’ve been told we can’t bring it in because it’s a luxury@amanpour: Seriously?
Tom: Seriously… pic.twitter.com/9WAcGCAG5x
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 28, 2025
Exclusive: Trump says Gaza peace deal in “final stages” Axios
Draft of Tony Blair’s Gaza Plan Outlines Remote Governance, Little Palestinian Representation Haaretz
Hamas slams US plan to appoint Tony Blair in Gaza, denies receiving ceasefire proposal Anadolu Agency
NEWS: Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Israeli Security Agreement Drop Site
***
In Genoa, thousands flood the streets for Gaza and the Flotilla. Dockworkers block containers with hazardous materials headed for Israel. Il Fatto Quotidiano (Machine translation)
Dockworkers in Italy threaten total block on Israel trade Politico
European dockworkers launch campaign to boycott ships carrying arms to “Israel” ABNA
I’ve investigated the Israeli arms industry for years and this is the first time that I can recall its future is at least a little challenged.
It’s why more states need to step up and not buy Israeli weapons or surveillance tech:https://t.co/M5iXeezJpx pic.twitter.com/fbSq5XVwuL— Antony Loewenstein (@antloewenstein) September 28, 2025
***
EU vows to re-impose UN sanctions on Iran ‘without delay’ as snapback takes effect Anadolu Agency
Netanyahu’s threats against Iraq target more than Resistance Mehr
The Bagram Factor: US Posturing and the Future of Iran’s Regional Integration Special Eurasia
China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran push back on Trump ambitions in or near Afghanistan Intellinews
Old Blighty
Let’s not forget about the Blairs themselves:
No wonder Tony Blair wants Digital IDs… when his son is the owner of the company that’ll be paid £100 billion to develop and monitor them.
And ol’ Tony has £375 million worth of shares in the company, too. pic.twitter.com/fp0dsuGAp6
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) September 27, 2025
Record breaker Starmer is the ‘most unpopular PM since polling began’ The Canary
European Disunion
War propaganda and militarism on children’s TV in Germany WSWS
Private equity’s rush to raise money prompts fears of European sector shake-out FT
EU’s influence declines in its neighbourhood as China and Russia gain ground Intellinews
Moldova Meddling
Moldova’s ruling pro-EU party edges towards majority in pivotal vote TVP
Amazing! Apparently, if you ban opposition political parties and opposition media, if you arrest your political opponents, if you ban election observers you don’t like, if you flood the zone with scare stories about Russians, if you threaten voters with withdrawal of EU funds,… https://t.co/I9vCenn4iL
— George Szamuely (@GeorgeSzamuely) September 28, 2025
There were 75 polling stations in Italy. 12 in Ireland – actually, more Moldovan votes were counted in Ireland than in Russia, despite Russia being home to ca. 200 times as many Moldovan voters. There were as many polling stations in Russia as in Japan and Israel.
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) September 28, 2025
🇲🇩 About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova.
After reviewing the channels…
— Pavel Durov (@durov) September 28, 2025
New Not-So-Cold War
Believe it or not, Russia is great The Spectator
US considers Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine with Trump set to make the final call: Vance The Straits Times
‘There are no such things as sanctuaries’ — Ukraine can conduct strikes deep within Russian territory, Kellogg says Kyiv Independent
Africa
Zelensky’s kamikaze drones now with terrorists? Mali prime minister attacks West & Ukraine at UNGA Hindustan Times
The World Bank’s arbitration body has ordered Niger to halt any trading of uranium from the Somaïr mine, which the government nationalized earlier this year after seizing it from French nuclear company Orano SA. pic.twitter.com/lW0dK9qSjq
— African News feed. (@africansinnews) September 28, 2025
South of the Border
Is Tren De Aragua a CIA Operation In Order to Justify an Attack on Venezuela? Larry Johnson
Spook Country
FBI had nearly 300 ‘plainclothes agents’ at Capitol riot – media RT (Kevin W). From a few days ago but not to be missed.
Our Famously Free Press
1 in 5 Americans now regularly get news on TikTok, up sharply from 2020 Pew Research Center (resilc)
Israel wins TikTok Responsible Statecraft
Trump 2.0
Trump Assumes Control of the Oregon National Guard; Oregon Sues Willamette Week
A Crypto Billionaire’s Path From Pariah to Trump Moneyman Bloomberg
Underreported Memo Is ‘Declaration of War’ Against Trump Opponents Common Dreams
Democrats en déshabillé
While the military descended on Portland, Hakeem Jeffries attended a black-tie dinner pic.twitter.com/3ibU3tQeHC
— Silicon Valley Fodder (@Playerinthgame) September 28, 2025
Kamala Harris Champions American Fashion at the Phoenix Awards Dinner Vogue
DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand is hosting a “Tuscan-European style” Napa retreat with spa treatments, a wine cave tour and dinner featuring #MISen candidate Haley Stevens, likely scheduled right in the middle of a government shutdown that threatens jobs of thousands of workers. pic.twitter.com/hgN1VEmXZK
— umichvoter 🏳️🌈 (@umichvoter) September 27, 2025
In a proper functioning country the ostensibly Left political party, in the event there was a transparent rightwing power grab, would in part marshal Labor to shut down ports and occupy streets. In the US—where this is literally impossible to imagine—they sleepily ask them nicely https://t.co/TjEQpMpYIN
— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) September 28, 2025
The Idiot’s Version of Everything That Needed to Happen Un-Diplomatic
MAHA
MAHA: Make Agriculture Harder for All The EcoModernist
Weimar Republic
Fatal shooting and fire at Michigan Mormon church, police say Michigan Advance
Trump says Michigan church shooting appears to be ‘targeted attack on Christians’ The Hill
Charlie Kirk Murder Mysteries Multiply Kit Klarenberg
Missouri governor signs Trump-backed plan aimed at helping Republicans win another US House seat AP
Imperial Collapse Watch
Accelerationists
Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture San Francisco Standard
Healthcare?
The algorithm will see you now Works in Progress
Mamdani
Mayor Adams drops out of NYC mayoral race following scandal-plagued tenure at City Hall Gothamist
Groves of Academe
Northwestern University Blocks 300 Students From Class Who Refuse to Take Outrageous Zionist TrainingThe North Star
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: U.S. Farmers Revolt Over Trump’s Argentina Bailout BIG by Matt Stoller
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Swiss voters back electronic identity cards in close vote The Guardian
Record everything! Aeon
The Bezzle
WHY TODAY’S HUMANOIDS WON’T LEARN DEXTERITY Rodney Brooks
Tesla Is Urging Drowsy Drivers to Use ‘Full Self-Driving’. That Could Go Very Wrong Wired
Class Warfare
Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation—Report Newsweek (PR)
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
150 comments
Comments are closed.
‘Samantha Smith
@SamanthaTaghoy
No wonder Tony Blair wants Digital IDs… when his son is the owner of the company that’ll be paid £100 billion to develop and monitor them.
And ol’ Tony has £375 million worth of shares in the company, too.’
This all reminds me of an old English saying though I cannot remember all of it. It was something, something far from the tree.
First glance , the picture of Tony reminded me of a character from the LOTR film trilogy. I’m undecided but it’s either a “Grima Wormtongue” visage or that of Lord Denithor, steward of Gondor…
“Rule of your digital identity is Mine!…” \ sarc
That’s just the start of the mega-project cost inflation curve, the farthest-left point, the opener before sunk-cost fallacy takes over.
The UK government ended up spending 37 billion GBP, the annual salary of one million NHS nurses, or 550 per member of population, on their stupid covid tracker app.
Stephen Miller takes leading role in strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats (Guardian)
Busy man, Miller.
When its time to relax morals, one fear stands clear, fear after fear, if you got the time-we’ve got the fear–Miller Fear
Same great laying to waste
Less drilling
Trump’s auto-thumb, according to John Helmer, but perhaps not the one and only. The “paper tiger” tweet sounds like a swamp-fever raving from Sebastian Gorka.
Speaking of signatures, ever notice that Trump’s resembles the teeth of a whipsaw? Purely coincidental.
I can think of no clearer action requiring the intervention of the ICC than the boat bombings.
Gooooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
Château J’If had banned both smooth and crunchy spreads from the island unto itself, explaining that they were very knowledgeable when it came to starving out people that had the nerve to live on a future Club Med-like resort, and prolonging their agony turned stomachs.
“How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo”
LOL! The article in barely a passing fashion almost neglects one interesting fact about the Ginko… nearly every tree you see is a male tree.
“Ginkgophytes survived multiple mass extinction events and outlived their original seed dispersers, which might have been carrion-eating animals attracted by the sweet-rotten smell of the fleshy seedcoats.”
There is a female Ginko on the campus of Syracuse University. I would not use the word ‘sweet’ to describe its fruit – rotten is even being kind. The stench of it’s fruit is almost vomit worthy!
It smells like dog poop.
That’s an interesting article. Sampler
Today, ginkgos line the streets of countless cities and rustle in parks all over the world. The oldest survivors in the wild have witnessed the births of major religions and the deaths of massive civilizations. Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Openheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love.
We have some ginkgos around here including at the arboretum established by deceased tycoon Roger Milliken. It has many Asian species that thrive in this climate.
There are no stinky fruits though so they must be guy ginkgos. It’s probably just as well as few carrion eaters are to be seen wandering the park.
Ginko is homophone for bank in a number of East Asian languages…. Just sayin’.
“Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline”
Apparently the South Korean government is not familiar with the concept of a backup set of servers but preferred to have all their eggs in one technological basket. I mean, look at all the money they save by doing it this way.
like most disasters, you have more than one point of failure/chances to avoid boom:
appropriate data mirroring + those batteries should have been outside
exploding lithium-ion batteries are old hat now.
Whether it’s Korea or the USA or EU, peeps reinvent the wheel only when they get kicked in the rear
The fire seems to have been in UPS (uninterruptable power supply) batteries, which are usually built into data centres (and other key power infrastructure) to ‘clean up’ the power input, as well as to provide bridging power for a few minutes in the event of an external disruption. They work a little like the battery in your laptop when you are plugged in. By their nature, they are usually integrated into the overall hardware.
But increasingly, these are being replaced by co-locating BESS (Battery Electric Storage Systems) co-located with data centres but with sufficient separation for safety. But from my understanding of the current technology, there will always be a technical need for some battery storage to be built into the data centre.
Ironically, Korean media reports that the fire took place when the batteries were being moved following a safety survey. Its possible someone simply dropped one, setting off a fire. While its been reported that they are lithium ion batteries, it seems more likely to me considering the age and nature of the facility that they were ni-cad.
While its reported as being a ‘data centre’, from what I can see the building was more of an old style internal server farm designed to isolate government data from commercial data centre usage. These are being built all over the world rapidly as governments have realised that its impossible to protect data if they are dependent on cloud storage.
“While being moved” would also explain why the presumably installed and working automatic fire suppression system did not put out the fire before it got out of hand. They usually have a manual deactivation for human beings to enter the premises and not risk suffocating – the only method to deal with electric fires (especially in a dense server room) is to remove the air.
Yes, that makes sense, from the available reports it was most likely I think caused by some form of operator error disconnecting or moving the batteries.
Gee, I wonder if the US gov will ever figure this out. But since the same people who own the gov also own the data centers, it’s all OK, right?
BESS
Battery energy storage system
Not
Battery electric storage system
Exposes a glaring vulnerability with data centers, easy to burn, and this in the middle of a heated competition between oligarchs to construct them. Will they require individual “iron domes” to protect them from malcontents and rivals?
As is often the case with battery fires, firefighters struggled to control the blaze, which reached 234 batteries.
Using Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries would reduce fire hazards. LifePo are heavier and in some areas where weight is a consideration (over marketed IMHO) they may be considered unwanted but in stationary weight does not matter….they also have many advantages over Li-ion…. don’t know why this is not the route to go ….I suppose Elon is overinvested in Li-Ion and it’s supply sources to turn around now
We’re still going with lead-acid batteries for our new UPS, because we don’t have the $$ to expand our fire suppression systems into the UPS room, and don’t have an area for the separation mentioned by PK above. They don’t last as long but are cheaper and safer with regard to fires.
BESS is not specific to lithium but includes all other chemistry’s
While LA of all varieties won’t burn they can explode from hydrogen buildup coupled with an ignition source. It’s why all LA battery storage rooms need Venting both passive and active.
It’s pretty hard to meet current codes for anything but a pretty small BESS inside a building.
And so it should be.
The lastest codes 2023 9540-UL lithium BESS have come a long way and are getting way better.
Sodium BESS should be a pretty big game changer in regards to fire safety, even over LFP.
More on the fire:
Lithium-ion Battery Fire CRIPPLES South Korea’s Government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyL_aGQVQYE
From the Drop Site piece on Epstein,
Messages spanning from 2013 to 2016 show intimate, oftentimes daily correspondence between Barak and Epstein. Their conversations address political and business strategy as Epstein coordinated meetings for Barak with other members of his elite circles.
Just in case anyone is forgetting where Epstein’s loyalties were located.
And according to the Epstein client list put together by Ryan Dawson, Ehud Barak’s name appears on that list. And so is Tony Blair for that matter.
Barak has been trying to lead a new party to oppose Netanyahu but isn’t getting a lot of traction. He had a lot of op-eds in the US a month or two before the 12 Day War started urging the US to pull support for Netanyahu and in Israel he tried to lead some opposition rallies with his party that sort of fizzled out. When it happened I wondered what it was indicating; I see him as a major opportunist (he has dealt with accusations in Israel all his post-government life around corruption due to monetizing his extensive contact list).
“Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline”
One more example of how the global elite are so not worthy of their power. They want the world to rush to a digital life and yet they are grossly incapable of understanding the needs of disaster recovery and hardened infrastructure.
I find it amazing how many data intensive companies have actual disaster recovery infrastructure or even realistic action plans. I work for a good sized, but small financial institution (abt $10B in assets). We have an amazing disaster recovery facility 20 miles from our HQs. We can be cut over and fully operational in 20 minutes if need be and have space for physical staff for roles that need to be onsite (i.e. our call center staff).
There is no reason for a nation as wealthy and technically capable as SK for not having a better data disaster plan in place.
I worked for big banks a while ago. IIRC, they had backup data centers in other countries ostensibly to survive a nuclear war.
Balancing the risk of hacking/reliance on 3rd party vs risk of no redundancy?
(I feel very secure knowing my social security data is both in whatever is left of the former SSA repository and random cloud servers.)
“Charlie Kirk Murder Mysteries Multiply”
‘Yet, in a medically unprecedented “miracle”, Kirk’s “body stopped it”. Kolvet claimed his “bone was [sic] so healthy and the density was so so impressive that he’s like the man of steel.” More unbelievably still, a coroner conveniently found the bullet that claimed Kirk’s life lodged “just beneath [his] skin”. This bullet has not to date been presented publicly.’
In a little know fact, Charlie Kirk’s real father was “Wolverine” and thus inherited his father’s Adamantium skeleton structure and not even that .30-06 caliber could make a dent in his bones-
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/wolverine-adamantium-skeleton-history-explained
And if you believe that, then you are ready to believe all the stories that the Feds are coming out with.
Bullets do weird things Rev.
I have a relevant personal anecdote on this from a job where I was culling wild pigs. Out of about 400 animals on this project, I had one where I misjudged the range and hit it dead on in the spine behind the shoulders. Obviously killed the pig near instantly, but also the bullet did not penetrate out the back but instead just left a softball size crater on the entrance side. This was a .300 win mag at roughly 200 yards on about a 200 pound pig. Assume about 20% more kinetic energy than the 30-06 used in the Kirk murder.
I remember it so clearly because it was such a strange wound. That same combination of bullet and caliber would normally pass through two pigs of that size on a standard heart and lung shot. No idea of why, but assume the density of the vertebrae and the rest of the spine acting as a shock absorber just produces some weird results.
You’re being logical and understand there are just so many variable that the average person doesn’t even consider. I think it’s those gullible average folks Rev would like to sell a bridge too.
Still waiting for that autopsy report. More importantly, the persons involved in that autopsy and the precise conditions under which it was performed damn well better be revealed as well. Perhaps the “magic bullet” will become part of a religious shrine – after ballistics links it to Tyler Robinson’s rifle, of course.
Good story. Everyone I know who hunts and shoots a lot has a story about something weird. (Although sometimes the story is about miss when an animal did something totally unexpected.)
People act like physics ignored myriad variables.
But maybe it was his magic knock. According to his wife, who has no financial motives and is merely a grieving widow, a few days before “his adrenal glands were just going off.”
Since authorities apparently did recover the bullet and the murder weapon, it should be pretty easy to do the ballistics test to match the two together, right? It’s been almost three weeks since his death. The longer it takes to give the details on this, the more people will suspect that any match was made after the fact.
Was this kid an ace with a rifle? Did he spend hours out hunting, and was he very good at it? Someone doesn’t just pick up a rifle and make a shot like that. One shot.
Circumstantial evidence says its a sniper, one of similar expertise to the ones who shoot for fun in Gaza. Bang, you’re dead.
It has the same pattern as the shot at Trump. A very good shot. Security magically missing. No sweeps of the area beforehand, in particular of those vantage points that would be the best for a sniper. No checking of bags.
And if what Klarenberg is saying is true, and the evidence seems to be there, then someone tampered with the evidence which was left conveniently unsecured until it could be retrieved and disposed of.
All the activist women who came forward a decade ago in the UK to testify how they had been infiltrated by police undercover informants, to the extent of being duped into long term domestic relationships with the informants, shows how ruthless and persistent police and security operatives are.
That’s how security services and the police work, nothing left to chance. TPUSA has been a very pro-Israel outfit to progagandise youth, so there has to be plants in the organisation to make sure Israel is getting it’s moneys worth. Probably very high up to control things. And Kirk was turning into a loose cannon who couldnt be controlled. What to do?
You do not need to be an expert shot IF the gun everyone says was found was the weapon. Experts say that technically this was an easy shot. MANY MANY accounts by gun users to that effect.
The hard part is staying calm enough when shooting a person that you don’t shake or breathe hard. If he knew he was shooting a robot that was moving the way Charlie Kirk did, it would have taken very little experience to make the hit.
“Xi to ask Trump to oppose Taiwan independence in return for trade deal”
In many ways this would seem to be a logical/wise trade deal. There already are policies in place to encourage the transfer of chip technology from TSMC to the US. This could be accelerated. However, I suspect that US elites want China to invade to as to ensure that during the invasion all vital TSMC and other players facilities are destroyed by the invasion or by US friendly fire and special ops (oops).
US official have already said that in case of an invasion, that they intend to destroy TSCM and all other facilities so that the Chinese don’t get it. With friends like those…
Matt Stoller from a couple of months ago: https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1950204797140816172
What I don’t understand is that it’s been US policy since the PRC took the UNSC spot that Taiwan was part of “One China”. Seems to me that the PRC doesn’t have to ask for anything more from the US than no change to policy. Is my memory that bad? Or is it just the Oval Office chaos that makes them ask for reassurance?
The US stated its position in the Shanghai Communqué, issued by President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai in February, 1972, about four months after China displaced Taiwan in the UN. The text reads:
“The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.”
My interpretation is that the US agreed not to support any movement toward Taiwan independence. So, I am perplexed as well.
The full text is at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v17/d203
I think the bigger news here is how strong of a negotiating position China is in.
Remember when the Orange liar-in-chief said China would fold like a tent by Memorial Day? Good times.
It’s China in the drivers seat, as evidenced by their going for the big Kahuna. No need to haggle over Boeing jets … they’ve got the rare erfs we need, and they’re going to bend Orange Julius over a barrel. Notice how completely silent he’s gone on “bone crushing” secondary sanctions on China?
“Trump wants India to pick a side, either be a client state or face the bitter wrath of a fading hegemon”
It’s not just Trump. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was saying the other day-
‘We have a bunch of countries to fix, like Switzerland, Brazil, India – these are countries that need to really react correctly to America,” Lutnick said in an interview with NewsNation. “Open their markets, stop taking actions that harm America, and that’s why we’re off sides with them.
Earlier this month, Lutnick said the US will “sort out” a trade deal with India after the South Asian nation stops buying Russian oil and opens up its market.’
So if India crashes their economy and let the US to pillage the Indians, then the US will do a trade deal. But by that point the US would have already gotten most of what they want. And India? Maybe an insurrection, maybe a civil war. Who knows, but it won’t be good.
https://www.rt.com/india/625555-us-needs-to-fix-india/
Yeah, I would suspect the last thing the Indian’s want is a repeat of their time living under British Colonial rule, but only with a different English speaking ruler.
But Lutnick Sahib would have it otherwise.
Apparently officials in the Trump administration are copying their leader’s tendency to say the quiet parts out loud. It doesn’t make me feel much better, but at least it’s more honest than the usual “public diplomacy” pablum we are fed.
India will pick a side of french fries.
my back woke me up at 2:30, and i ended up with coffee and a splif out here by 3:3, and set to roamin.
normally i am far from interested in anything that contains the word “masculinity” in the title,lol…since my last grandad’s passing, when i was 18, there’s been very little “manhood” examples in my life.
but this i went ahead and read, because the writer is someone who’s work i have enjoyed before.
worth a look, to fill in the whole picture of our systemic decline:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/08/masculinity-at-the-end-of-history/
Thanks for this Amfortas.
Gen X dad here trying to raise a 7 yr old boy.
My touchstone is Kipling’s “If.”
The poem hangs on the wall in his room and we revisit it on the regular. I first got it when he was 4 yrs old. Each time I read it he understands more, and how it applies to his life.
i read them both Walt Whitman, Tennyson, etc when they were little…and eldest first Real Dad Book was Tacitus,lol.
Youngest’s 1st RDB was that south sea collection of short stories from Jack London.
and i cant stress enough how much Marcus Aurelius has benefited them.
I placed a portrait of my great-grandfather, Peteris, above the fireplace of where I currently reside, so I see it, look at it, at least a few times a day.
Peteris led his family mostly safely through two revolutions and a world war, but died in Europe before they came to America– a feat engineered by Boris, his son.
Boris was highly intelligent, a chemist with several US Patents to his name, but socially-awkward, an introvert. He was quiet, kind, and kept busy throughout life, not fully retiring until age 98 or so, when both sight and hearing were leaving him. A good man, but not quite of his father’s calibre.
Boris’s son, Peter, who after passing through Ellis Island as a child, grew up, grew into what often (sadly) passes for a “man” in America: gluttonous, short-tempered, selfish, mean-spirited, spineless, bullying, obsequious to authority… but he did build a successful career and made quite a bit of money, and many would feel that that is the important part.
I’ve had years to ponder the question, “what the hell happened?” and “why is this guy the way he is?” But there’s no one, single thing that I can attribute it to: he is the result of a witches-cauldron filled with stomach-churning ingredients.
Retired a bit more than a decade ago, today Peter lies bloated and frail in a nursing home bed, where he eats, shits himself, watches tv, and pisses through a tube, all but friendless. In his defense, it is likely he suffered from high-functioning autisism– it wasn’t a lack of empathy that stunted his emotional development, is was his inability to empathise, to learn from others, i.e., role models.
Making an effort towards being a positive role model to others is one step that each of us can take to resist the madness of this age.
I often read Kipling’s “If” to my daughter, starting at an early age…
Amfortas, thank you for the interesting read.
While I can agree with some points and to the overall issue facing men in the US, red flags immediately went off with the title containing the “end of history” tagline. IMHO, that concept was the epitome of intellectuals in their ivory towers pontificating about the nature of the world that they hardly lived in.
Sure enough, my biggest issues arise from the feeling whoever wrote this article doesn’t really live in the US, at least not the US of today. Making references to the culture of the very early US, the frontier expansion, the teddy Roosevelt administrations, etc. while useful does not really explain how we got here or what is wrong today. The original founders were very different from the immigrants of the frontier expansion period. And they were very different from those that would be key to the US empire building phase. To be charitable, I assume the writer is trying to argue each one of those periods, and the people/culture they embodied, are layers that help define “mascilinity” today. And while I feel this is somewhat true, it is an agonizingly simplistic view that fails to account for differences in culture, class background, etc. And even if we ignore these items, I feel like this is less an organized layering of traits/influences but a slurry of ideas and beliefs rife with contradictions. In other words, much like today’s society/culture only spread out over more time.
Additionally, I feel hinting at “the internet is to blame” not to be helpful as at various points in time other inventions (radio and TV come to mind) were also blamed for helping to “rot” the social/moral fabric of the US. To be clear, I do feel the internet and social media have damaged our culture, but it is nothing like what is being hinted at here.
Finally, I feel that the treatment of this as being a serious issue for men appears a bit sexist (I have no idea if this is an honest oversight or something more problematic). Do young girls not also have issues with how culture sees them, and how they are expected to behave/present in society? Why is it assumed having a mother present in the home equals useful guidance? Especially in homes where the mother works 2+ jobs and is never home.
While I do think this attempts to address and explain the issue, I feel it misses the mark in its treatment of the subject, as well as failing to look at it as a larger issue for both men and women in the US.
I think instead of talking about the “end of history” now we should be talking about the “end of civilization” instead. Because that seems like the much more likely outcome of humanity’s current course of action.
I have always enjoyed history, ancient and otherwise. My view of is that any real understanding of history has to acknowledge the reality that it is everything everywhere all at once. All those moving parts influence all the other moving parts to some degree or another. Therefore any work of history no matter how deep is just a snapshot of a vector. The viewpoint of this essay is narrow, embedded in western cultural memes. The history becomes a scaffold on which the author opines his take on masculinity. or the arc of masculinity. The author is not very old . he refers to his development 10 or 15 years in the past. My development has been running much longer.
Boys are generally different then girls in the games they play growing up. A lot of growing up is getting your corners knocked off, becoming socialized. For boys it is often a very physical process. But unless you are retarded, want to be a solder or just like bar fights, most young men are done with fist fights by the time they turn 18. I was very involved in martial arts. I think martial are very beneficial for men and women but I do not think cage fighting is the frontier of manhood. It seems to me that the leftover drivers of adolescent ego satisfaction should be pretty well worked out by the age of reason of say around 30. That is when the testosterone poisoning really begins to taper off. After 30 a guy should be working on becoming a human not just a man. I worked my whole career indoors but I really enjoy physically working outdoors. I backpack, chainsaw, move rocks not because I’m a man but for the shear joy of doing it. My advice for those searching for manliness is maybe just grow up.
i agree with most of the criticism, here…and had a few cringes, myself.
what i thought was noteworthy, is that it appeared to be an honest attempt at a treatment of this subject that is somewhere between “Patriarchy Now!” and “All Men Are Rapists”…which is the usual fare, and why i generally avoid the subject altogether.
my boys had a feral philosopher as a dad(and a Saint as a mom), but leavened with Mexican Roosters and Post Mexican Strivers…and a whole lot of influential women who brooked no BS.
not every guy grows up like that. I sure as hell didnt.
“After 30 a guy should be working on becoming a human not just a man.”
Which, I now realize, is why my mum still insists men should be in a box until 34. Then it’s like Christmas.
Re: “MAHA making agriculture harder for all”
Of course it is a very expensive project to rid agriculture of toxic chemicals. It’s expensive to change any harmful system. Converting US agriculture to organic* methods is a massive project. A massive and necessary project. This article advocates for a do-nothing approach – I really wonder who the author’s sponsors are.
*”Organic” is problematic for different reasons – it means no use of potash-based fertilizers, for example, which is IMHO not sensible. I prefer “no spray” i.e. no chemical pest control (which is the root of the problem). It is not harmful to anyone to use “chemical” fertilizers as part of healthy soil management practices. Of course, this includes maintaining soil health with organic material and healthy soil biotas, which are wiped out by pesticides, but not by proper use of fertilizers.
Oh, I see. You’d rather see even more hunger in America. These purist ideas all sound great until you see who bears the cost.
The main beneficiaries are actually farmworkers, via lower exposure to actually or potentially toxic chemicals.
There is no evidence that organic food is more nutritious, despite years of studies trying to prove that. The potential health benefit is avoidance of said chemicals.
And those benefits are more pronounced when go higher up the food chain.
It is convenient that the Trump Administration is eliminating reporting on food insecurity.
Nope.
1) US ag massively over-produces product – the amount wasted in transport (fossil-fueled) and distribution is very high and with more healthy local food systems the amount of waste would be much reduced;
2) Huge amounts of US farmland are currently in fallow – by government intervention – and even with reduced yields with less chemical use (which is not necessarily so), this farmland could and would be brought back into production;
3) US Ag is devoted to producing cheap animal protein – this is very wasteful, and Americans’ eating less meat would mean MORE food for people;
4) It’s not about “nutrition” – it’s about dangerous chemical residues in our food. Which of course would be eliminated with no-spray techniques. Do you eat Cheerios? How do you like your roundup?
Finally, in order to end ag chemical dependency, the ag workforce would need to be increased – getting people out of their unhealthy urban virtual environments and into healthy work, much of it outdoors. You can have you chemical ag and all its downstream effects – cancer, diabetes, and so on.
I see my comparison to Trump is not unwarranted. You are an authoritarian. People are not going to voluntarily go work on farms. Farming is hard, long hours, often backbreaking work. It was relegated to slaves in the South, FFS. It’s now significantly relegated to undocumented migrants. And that’s not just field workers. Dairy farm operators are deathly afraid that ICE raids will scare off the “illegals” caring for their cows. Dairy cows need to be milked and fed on a very regular schedule or you soon have dead cows.
Most people don’t want to be farmers. Reducing the proportion of the population engaged in subsistence farming has been considered to be a major advance.
Conor’s post today provides more evidence that the US is setting out to use migrant H-2B and H-2A workers as a new exploitable ag workforce, in place of the old “illegals”: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09/war-on-labor-accelerates-administration-predictably-embraces-guest-workers-and-anti-capitalism-is-labeled-terrorism.html
At best, this is the sort of thing you get from MBAs with PowerPoints. Are you going to magic these local farms into existence?
The US is full of food deserts. Your “we can have more healthy local food” is an uproven proposition.
Organic farming is lower yield than conventional. Only 1% of US farmland is organic. Most commentary I found on a quick search says we don’t have enough existing farmland for full organic production, that we’d have to reduce wildland, most likely by cutting down forests, which would have a net negative climate change impact.
So you are going to tell people how to eat, as in consume less animal protein? Price will do that eventually, but acting like you can do that by edict is quite the tell.
The reason I am coming down on you so hard is the way you blithely propose that everyone should fall in line with sweeping edicts. This is the sort of PMC/WEF thinking that helped fuel Trump’s rise. I can’t believe that you don’t begin to see that.
sorry, Yves, but i must disagree(running a bath, so i’ll return, likely, later).
1. the lack of real parity pricing in ag is huge factor in lack of farmers…the big boys have so engineered the subsidies, etc that ordinary farmers cant make a living.
2. organic/regenerative/natural…whatever we’re calling it, now…is entirely capable of outproducing monocropped industrial ag…especially in the mid to long term…since its building soil health actively, instead of killing the living sol(i can see this from where i sit, my place, vs just across that there fence).
see Cuba’s Special Period, for my favorite example of how to transistion rapidly when need drives it(its better, of course, to trasition slower, so as to avoid shocks to the provision of food(ie: not like sri lanka did it).
I produce more fruits and veg all by myself, and half assing it for the last several years, than anybody around here…because ive built the soil and avoid chemicals.
and yes, it is backbreaking, at times…more so after 7 years of neglect, due to wife’s cancer…but eventually, with diligence, the “system” ends up might near running itself(system being the raised beds, and etc). when i’m fully up and running, i do very little backbreaking work, because the weeds, et cannot get purchase.
more later…i moved a buncha lick tubs and big pots full of peppers and tomatoes into the little greenhouse this morning…that is indeed backbreaking,lol…so now, im off to have a splif and a hot hot soak.
my bookmarks are a chaotic mess…as is all the saved docs and pages in all these folders on my laptop.
heres some of what i could find as my hair dries:
https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1098951/
(most of these will be about the Yield Gap)
https://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/thelivestockproject/research-from-the-rodale-institute-shows-organic-yields-produce-higher-yields-than-conventional-during-extreme-weather/
(Rodales is the grandaddy of organic/regen ag)
https://farmaction.us/kings-over-the-necessaries-of-life-monopolization-and-the-elimination-of-competition-in-americas-agriculture-system/
(the main culprit in all this)
https://www.organic-center.org/research/yield-gap-between-organic-and-conventional-farming-narrows-time
(backs up my mention of medium to long term superiority)
https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Cuba_A_Successful_Case_Study_of_Sustainable_Ag.htm
(my favorite part is that this caused a global mule shortage)
ive got prolly thousands more, but i’d hafta hunt.
ive been in and around organic/sustainable ag and hort since i was 5 years old(so, 51 years,lol)…and have been an avid student of all of it forever.
most of the obstacles are policy-based…which actually prevents the great god market from interceding in the orgy of welfare farming that big ag/big chem and their own parasite, Big Finance are wallowing in.
everything from Parity Pricing to market access…to ability to get yer cow processed legally…and just so much more…the entire edifice really is stacked against farmers like me…and even most of the ranchers and bigger farmers i know.
so many of the yield gap studies ive seen over the years fail to account for such things.
i’ll stop, now,lol…i can go on and on for days about this stuff…as anybody in my local feedstore can attest.
The answer to negative externalities is regulation, not capitulation.
The article raises a straw man of total instant conversion but its claims for bigag do not stand up.
It is not clear that organic vegetables are more nutritious but they are certainly better for the environment because they involve fewer pesticides and insecticides and because manures are inefficient to transport and require integrated farming rather than arable / stock monociltures, which again is good for the environment.
Dwarf wheat does not provide ecosystem services for wildlife. Roundup ready crops etc do not maintain their yields because resistance arises by selection and worse by plasmid transmission in the weed crops.
Meat raised naturally (free-range, foraging hens; pasture-fed beef and dairy) is demonstrably healthier for the animal – and we have a welfare duty – and the consumer – grass-fed beef and dairy contains high-levels of valuable nutrients. Organic livestock produce manures that rot and support insects whereas ivermectin-treated cattle produce plastic cow pats that refuse to assimilate back into nature because none of the flies and dung beetles can live on them.
Currently the US grows great quantities of grain to feed cows (not grain eaters!) and to produce bioethanol. Feed cows on grass, fuel cars on renewables (or fossil fuels if you like), the land freed up could grow human food crops at lower organic yields.
Yields do not necessarily drop a third long term with organic systems, because of innovation (agroforestry, companion planting, arable/grass systems, permacultures) and gradual recovery of exhausted land thanks to the “golden hoof”. And margins improve for farmers because input costs drop.
Farming is trapped in a pessimal equilibrium of over production dependent on fossil fuel fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides. The Ecomodernist article reeks of Big At AstroTurf….
I happen to be arguing with a reader who is advocating for the position that you deem to be a straw man. So we are in agreement that it is not realistic.
To the cows point, cows are sent to feedlots to fatten them on corn. As my earlier comments indicate, the onus is on advocates to prove out their airy recommendations. This MBA Power Point thinking is frustrating. I expect better from this readership. It took me all of one minute to find this wee problem:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
That may well be true, but we often talk around here at NC about how people forget about the “reduce” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. We are chopping down rain forests to pasture cows for McDonald’s patties. Maybe we could make do with fewer fast food joints?
Meat should not be a staple food.
no doubt…and due to misunderstanding of things 100+ yars ago…as well as Butzean Get Bigism and all the rest of the misallocation and mismanagement and misincentivising since then…so a true sunk cost that will hafta remedied over time(or that will remedy itself, after we off ourselves).
my neighbor the rancher just sprigged the 2 fields on either side of me with coastal a couple of years ago, and its finally up enough to have cows on it. ive encouraged his daughter(who’s taking over) to consider planting some oak trees in both…but she’d hafta dig in a bunch of good manure wherever a tree is planted, due to 60 years of conventional farming(peanuts/hay)…and run some driplines to them in such a way that the cows cant tear them up. both are expensive projects, initially.
and the cafo ops are just plain evil…cant even use the manure for soil building because of all the crap they prophylacically inject in those cows, due to the horrible living conditions.
hafta run it through a digester or even thermal depolymerisation, first…which is just silly…and also due to policy choices, not husbandry.
(theyre also the main reason antibiotics keep failing…not worried soccer moms administering them wrong)
I didn’t take the comment as defending any authoritarian measures. The article did come down on the side of the status quo which does benefit big ag. I don’t think anybody is expecting the system to change overnight, and I’m definitely not defending any positions of MAHA or the current administration. Just saying that something needs to change.
I found divadab’s comment to be pretty sensible – continuing to use fertilizers which would not be considered “organic”, and finding a better way to control pests than spraying toxic chemicals. Something I’ve often wondered about organic farming – how does organic fertilizer differ from non-organic in the first place? Both consist mainly of phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen and those elements have the same atomic structure whether a fertilizer is organic or not.
No, people are not going to work on farms just because, but they will if you pay them. As Conor noted in today’s labor essay, none of the solutions on offer from the government involve raising the minimum wage, but they should. As I’ve noted, my family’s small farm went out of business a couple years ago after a 100 year run. Nobody in my family is celebrating its demise, quite the contrary. My relatives who ran the farm did it themselves and didn’t need to hire extra labor. But it got to a point they couldn’t turn a profit, because they didn’t set the price for their milk. So now the land sits idle while my relatives work as farm hands on some rich guy’s gentleman farm. They do like farm work – too bad they can’t do it independently any longer thanks to decades of congressional policies deliberately designed to kill off smaller farms.
But things can gradually change. There are lots of younger people taking up farming in Maine and I’ve been seeing articles on it for years. Here are a couple – one from a while ago: https://www.mainefarmlandtrust.org/blogs/maines-growing-the-state-has-the-second-highest-rate-of-new-farms-in-the-country And a more recent one: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Beginning.pdf I also talked to a few of them personally over the weekend at the county fair. We have subscribed to various CSAs for many years now, trying to keep local small farmers in business, so little by little it is being proven that you can have good locally produced food.
Like most structural issues the US faces, this one isn’t going to be fixed by just changing ag policy. It’s going to require changes to industrial policy too, and labor policy, financial policy, etc. Change needs to be comprehensive. And it sure does seem pretty impossible. But we have made comprehensive nationwide policy changes before, backed by widespread popular support, that greatly benefited this country (New Deal) and we could certainly do it again with the right political will. The popular support is already there. We now need a political class that works with the populace rather than against them.
It was authoritarian but in a covert way:
Tell me how that happens ex coercion. We now have to get desperate illegals to provide the bulk of farm labor. From what I have read, organic farming is more labor intensive. There is no pool of labor in the US eager to work on farms.
That is what triggered me, the pretense you could make this happen ex force like more prison labor.
Interesting that slave labor mostly worked in agriculture. Granted, the timing is a bit mesdy, but I always did wonder how slave labor fit agriculture particularly well (I realize thst there were factories in the South that employed slave labor. I don’t know too much aboit their issues, though…)
I’m not too familiar with US slavery, but slavery has been used for factory work most infamously with the Nazi’s in WW2, who used it extensively to build things like (Wernher von Braun’s) V2 missiles and advanced jet fighters. So, not limited only to ‘low skill’ labour, although I imagine that has a lot to do with the ‘source’ of your slaves…
I know in the ancient Mediterranean world, slaves could be anything from bakers to teachers. The police force of ancient Athens were famously slaves: the Scythian Archers
There are some peculiar features of US slavery that I was taking for granted. Even in different types of actual slavery systems, they didn’t apply, so apologies and clarifications.
In cases of Nazi slave labor and, probably, some New World slave systems (Caribbean specifically, although I’m a bit puzzled about some aspects), slaves were basically not expected to survive for long. They were starving, unskilled, and unmotivated people who were expected to churn out basically crap work fast, for people who didn’t care about the quality of what they did. A peculiar feature about the American slavery–which, incidentally, accounted for a lot of its inhumanity–was that slaves were not short lived. They lived and worked under duress for a long time and the slave owners came up with ever more devious schemes to get more “value” out of them one way or another for many years. We also know that agriculture requires far more skill than people give it credit for: idiot politicians used to talk about how “anybody can farm” or something like that–well, try making software engineers farm. I’d bet on farmers learning to code like pro more than I would about the inverse.
So, going back to the question of slavery, how do you lock up skilled workers in underpaid, shabbily treated roles far longer than they should? Well, by making it impossible for them to leave, subject to treatment that is not abjectively horrible necessarily (that’s the Caribbean slaves and forced labor camps) but conditions where your liberties are inhumanly constrained.
I think they are called re-education camps
It’s a nice idea in principle but practically it seems to inhabit “you can’t get there from here” territory.
It was tried in New Zealand by the Labour government during the Covid period, after closed borders shut down access to the usual pool of temporary guest workers for agriculture. After borders reopened, the government delayed restoring the temporary work permits, instead trying to get businesses to hire more local workers. They relented after it became clear the industry couldn’t find workers (in time, or often at all) and was headed for a massive vote-losing crash if they didn’t.
It turns out the industry has optimized itself around conditions that guest workers are willing to accept. The roles are seasonal only, not permanent, so anybody making a permanent move would need to find other work in the offseason, which is mostly not to be had. A temporary move entails living in temporary accommodation (often not the best quality) as well as separation from friends and family. There’s also plenty of evidence that employment standards and immigration laws aren’t reliably enforced, with numerous stories about worker exploitation that are probably only the tip of the iceberg.
The upshot was that staffing with local workers would have required fundamental shifts in business practice (which would take time to implement) as well as raising the cost structure significantly. Even if local customers were willing to pay, much of our agricultural produce is for export, and if production costs go up too much we risk losing our key markets. On the political front, refusal to do anything meaningful about poverty hamstrings us on the agriculture reform front as well, since food price increases disproportionately harm the poor.
Considering the ammount of food thrown away in America, one might surmise that hunger is not caused by agricultural reasons.
I agree that waste is a good angle to combat hunger, but assigning causation to a single source always bears the risk of donning blinders. How about being very poor? Or overpopulation?
“MAHA: Make Agriculture Harder for All”
While I don’t have any faith in MAHA actually fixing agriculture and the American food supply, I also find this article deeply flawed. Its basic argument is that if we go fully organic then other bad things will happen that will out way any benefits of having gone organic.
At the 10,000 foot level that is basically true; continuing to farm as we do now but only organically is not really going to fix our unhealthy food supply either. For at least the past 150 years we’ve been encouraging farmers to increasingly use unsustainable farming practices and encouraged them to keep getting bigger or get out of farming.
Yes, the price of food likely needs to go up. And yes, we definitely need many more smaller farms. In today’s world we grow thousands of acres of corn and soybean which we then ship 100’s or 1,000’s of miles to another farm where 1,000 to 10,000 animals live in confined spaces eat that food. Those animals create a mountain’s worth of manure every day that has to be put somewhere. It’s almost certainly more nutrients than the local soils and fields can use while at the same time, because there is no return of the nutrients to the corn and soybean fields where the animals feed came from those fields NEED fertilizer.
And going to a vegan diet doesn’t fix the nutrient issue either as most human solid waste streams are actually quite hazardous as they are mixed with household chemical and industrial waste streams and are increasingly loaded with PFSAs.
“Yes, the price of food likely needs to go up.”
Yes. To me, it’s better to have more expensive healthy food than to have cheap unhealthy food. This does increase food insecurity, as Yves argues. However, this could be mitigated using existing institutions – CHIP, School food programs, etc. (so long as the Trumpers don’t destroy the whole edifice). There is simply no reason other than political for anyone to be hungry in a country as rich in the USA.
As they are being gutted by Trump? This is magical thinking.
More generally, the reason for my negative reaction is that simple solutions to complex problems are not just simple minded but backfire. We’ve written repeatedly over the years about the principle of obliquity, that trying to achieve seemingly clear objectives in complex systems are doomed to fail and regularly result in worse outcomes. Two prominent reasons (there are others): 1. The terrain is too complex/unknown to chart a path; 2. The system changes via interacting with it.
I don’t mean to sound harsh, but your “Oh, let’s make everyone go over to organic farming” is the sort of edict Trump regularly makes: “Let’s make America a manufacturing powerhouse again!” “Let’s stop the rise of China!”
If you were serious about health effects, instead of making sweeping policies based on ideology, you might instead have started by looking at which crops have high enough pesticide loads to have some evidence that they could pose health harms and start with them first. Evidence lowers the bar to garnering support, and 80/20 approaches are typically achieve concrete results faster. Spinach, strawberries, and raisins are high on the list. One could look at policies aimed at those particular crops…except I imagine a lot are imported (my Publix organic frozen spinach, assuming it actually was organic, came from Turkiye, for instance).
https://www.thenewlede.org/2025/09/pesticides-on-your-plate-new-study-warns-of-need-to-better-understand-health-effects/
I think some of the non-human impacts bear consideration. The class of neonicitinoid pesticides really seem to be having broad impacts on non target invertebrates.
Pollinators, aquatic insects, etc. I would not be surprised if we eventually find that these impacts are worse than what we saw with DDT.
Please note that what was proposed above was full organic produce, which means not just no pesticides but also no fertilizer. I’m not advocating for pesticides per se, but please tell me what you would do instead.
The USDA recommended in 1938 (no typo) that the public start taking vitamins, because the soils had become so depleted that it was no longer possible for many consumers to get enough nutrients from food. So an unacknowledged problem is how long it takes to restore soil quality.
In Oz, they did require before I got there (2002) not antibiotics or hormones for chicken. The chicken was the awesome and IIRC still not expensive.
There are organic pesticides. And organic fertilizer.
Bacillus thuringiensis and Pyrethrins are two pesticides. Blood meal and animal wastes are two fertilizers.
Are they available at scale? And at what cost? Again, this is reality testing. The old rule in proposing policy changes is the burden is on the advocates to prove that the advantages outweigh the costs, including transition cost. I’m not seeing enough acknowledgement of the scale of what is required. What you can do at individual farms that sell to high end health-oriented store and “farm to table” restaurants won’t scale to the level of feeding the country.
Bacillus thuringiensis is the bacteria used with BT corn which was much in the news several tears ago, and I believe it was because it was available at scale and people were afraid of the harm it would do in industrial use. One claim was that it was responsible for the decline in numbers of monarch butterflies. My uncle was a research entomologist and did a study on BT’s effects, and his team determined that BT was not harmful to monarchs.
One benefit of smaller farms is that they can use their own waste as fertilizer pretty easily. My family spread manure daily as fertilizer, except in winter – then it was piled and spread later in the spring. They milked 60 cows, which is way above subsistence level. There were a lot of farms like this around when I was a kid, even more when my dad was a kid in the 60s – then Vermont actually had more cows than people. 60 cows was also considered a pretty large farm not that long ago – now it’s too small to stay in business. You must now either milk several hundred cows, or just a few handful and sell very expensive, “artisanal” products.
We had viable medium sized farms due to congressional policies which have since been removed. We could have them back again if we could find some representation willing to stand up to big ag,
I am sorry to seem impolite, but this “more small farms” is the economist’s “Assume a can opener”. Please point to the army of people who want the hard work and precarious economics of running a small farm. And that’s not even factoring in the land cost.
There’s a comment still in moderation where I point out that my family’s farmland is sitting idle while my relatives work on a rich guy’s vanity farm instead. They’d prefer to be working on their own, but can’t due to the economics of the situation. Nobody has ever gotten rich by farming, but we did have policies that aided medium sized family farms and that allowed them to be viable. Those have gone by the wayside as Congress favored policies supported by big ag.
If you drive around rural Maine and Vermont, you will see lots of abandoned old farms that could be producing food, but aren’t. My other comment also noted a lot of younger people who are turning to farming in Maine in recent years. I’m sure even more people would give it a go if there were cheaper land around, but land has become prohibitively expensive as wealthy people buy up property for second homes. One reason my family’s farm was viable for so long was because land wasn’t dear like it is now. My grandfather sometimes acquired more land abutting his property in exchange for a side of beef for example. I don’t expect those days to come back, but with some different policies that favored the working class over the investing class, policies that didn’t keep asset prices artificially inflated, land would be more affordable.
My father’s family was in Maine from when it was first settled and were farmers and fishermen. The growing season is very short. You can get only one planting in v. 3 in the South. No one in my family would ever farm, and they love Maine. I don’t understand this romanticization of farming. It is a decent way to earn a living but it is physically demanding and often entails long hours. Here in Thailand, a middle-income country, most people in farming areas want to go to the cities, even if not necessarily Bangkok.
Haha – to each their own I suppose :)
In the summer, hours are long. In the winter though, not nearly as much – you need to milk the cows and do chores a couple times per day. I’m going to guess my relatives worked less than 8 hour days in winter – probably 5-6 most days.
Another farm in my family shut down decades ago. I sat next to one of those cousins at a wedding and he told me how much he hated working in the fields as a kid, picking out rocks in the heat, and couldn’t wait to get away from it all, which he did for a while. But he said now he wished they still had the cows so he could work the farm again – he really missed it. There’s something to be said for working in nature and being around animals. This cousin still grows some vegetables to make a living and rumor has it he may have another more lucrative cash crop that he’s isn’t so vocal about.
One reason my family decided to sell the herd was due to the get big or get out “rule” and they didn’t want to get big. My uncle said that if they did, it wouldn’t be a farm anymore, it would be a factory, and he didn’t want that. They took good care of the individual animals and wouldn’t have been able to do that if they got bigger. And to your point about the hard work, he also said he wouldn’t work his boys to death just to keep the farm going. He was in his 80s and couldn’t do the work, and my cousins were in their 60s and had already put in a good 50 years or so of heavy labor. I think we all really miss it though. Another cousin who never worked the farm couldn’t even bring herself to talk about it well over a year after the herd got sold. It;s not easy to lose a way of life, your family’s heritage.
And one of the big reasons people like to farm is because for the most part, you are your own boss and nobody can tell you what to do. I’d jump at the chance to make a living farming right now. I’m also older though and wouldn’t be doing it for 50 years.
see my above for the cafo manure issue.
theres plenty of manure…but its contaminated by the practices necessary to feed up animals in such conditions…and those facilities are generall located where the manure couldnt be used anyway…due to concentration..even if it was usable, hafta be trucked off somewhere.
all of that is a direct result of monopoly concentration…so policy, not husbandry.
part of that concentration involves the processing of meat. the regs are engineered to make it cumbersome, if not impossible, for small to medium sized ranchers to process their meat, and be able to legally sell it, without plugging into the big ag system.(cant plug in partway).
this is changing at the margins: we have 3 rancher co-ops out here, now, that somehow butcher locally and sell at the local stores.
i treat myself to a porterhouse on occasion, and its excellent beef, and actuall cheaper than what i see at HEB.
(i asked, but was on a dead run,lol…something about a new texas law(texas pols doing enlightened policy!) regarding mobile slaughtering facilities)
plenty of potential for blood and bone meal, too….just no incentives, not due to markets, but again, due to the inertia of policy focii over the last 60 or more years.
as for realistic, under trump?
lol.
not a chance…but neither was it under any of the others, due to incentive structures, again.
would take a wholesale antimonopoly axe to be taken to the integrated ag/chem/finance/transport/machinery/etc.
To truly change our agriculture system here in the US we needed a massive program and probably 20 years of steady organized incremental changes.
A simple baby step would be to outlaw the usage of antibiotics or hormones. Antibiotics are primary used to keep animals that are living in what are actually almost unlivable conditions alive. Removing the usage of antibiotics (for realistic non-medical reasons) immediately forces the agricultural situation to improve the living conditions for the animals. While it’s a long way from a sustainable pasture raising approach it’s a step closer. And as you mentioned it improves the quality of the meat because the animal is living a lower stress life. And it removes the unspoken human problem of too many antibiotics causing antibiotic resistance.
Moving that bigger step to pasture raised animals would be huge. Beef is actually a fairly lean meat when raised on a pasture. All of the fat and marbling comes from feeding cows corn. Cows are not supposed to have a diet of corn even though they’ll eat it like humans eat sugar which isn’t very good for us either. And, you reduce e.coli issues too. Cows moved off of corn and fed grass have a massively lower e.coli cell count. A cow routinely fed corn is a sick animal and the excessive amount of e.coli in their lower digestive track is a sign of that. And cows that are not sick don’t need antibiotics!
What really increases food insecurity is expensive housing, healthcare, and education. Not to mention wages racing to the bottom.
Of course there is. Profit. The reason for everything in the USA.
This is a much sounder critique that the one above. However, from what I have seen (admittedly at a bit of a distance) from MAHA is that they are taking an awfully strong form position on organic food. And I think you are also making a point about soil quality, that we can’t get there any time soon.
But you miss the point I made above (and a bit aggressively): you assume that we can magic small farmers into existence. I don’t begin to see it. I don’t see many Americans hankering for the regular hard work required. And that’s before adding in that farming is economically precarious and set to become more so with climate change induced erratic weather patterns.
in this former farming community(and the other one i grew up in) its a lifeway.
i know numerous young people right now who would love to stay on the farm/ranch, but feel compelled to run off and become MBA’s or lawyrs, so they can end up subsidising the farm/ranch.
lota people my age who already did that, and have taken a paycut to come home to live on/near the farm/ranch while they subsidise it.
read through the more heterodox trad rag/rural focused mags and this seems quite common .
whats lacking is a fair payment/incentive structure…and that is wholly policy.
“they” aint gonna change that on their own, of course.
it takes masses of people yelling at them.
ive recently taken to twitterwanders, starting at Maha X and sec rollins x…following the links of folks who comment…often irately.
the Movement required is out there, i think…its just inchoate and scattered, still…and subject to Movement Capture by the Usual Suspects.
Sorry I missed your reply the other day. It got lost in the other sub-treads.
The strong form position on organic food is probably not possible, especially if we’re talking industrial farming. It’s not sustainable and it will continue to making farming a significant contributor to carbon emissions.
As I mentioned in a reply somewhere in the comments… if we were truly to change farming in the US it would take a highly organized and impactful program 20+ years to do it.
Yes, I did say we need more people in farming, but I never said small farms. I can confirm what Amfortas said… there are lots of people who would like to farm but they can’t or worse yet have been economically forced off the family farm. Yes, farming is financially very precarious, but at least ½ of that is government policy – that needs to end. In the last 10-15 years, the last close family I had that were still farming have stopped farming. It wasn’t because no one wanted to continue to farm, but because they couldn’t financially make it work short of massively growing the operations. There are people who would love to farm, but unless you are starting some niche organic operation… no body can afford to start farming at scale at current wholesale prices.
When I was a teen in the mid 1980’s the typical NYS dairy farmer was milking 60-100 cows with the best financially stable operations being 100 or more cows. There were few farms with more than 150 milking cows. Most farmers milked 2 times a day… once in the morning and once in the evening.
I’m including a link to some data that starts with 1993… avg NYS dairy farm size was 130 cows. In 2022 it was over 1,200.
Friends of my family are one of the “big boys” now and they milk in the ballpark of 800 cows. At this size you basically milk all day even if each cow is only being milked twice. On the farm being described, they have a 60’ and 40’ stainless steel silos that houses milk and it takes 7 milk tanker trucks per day to keep that those silos from overflowing. Mind you this is an 800 cow dairy… there are larger ones in NYS and MASSIVE ones elsewhere in the US and the world.
This might sort of look like a farm from the road, but it’s not. It’s a god damn factory and it is not environmentally sustainable let alone the best healthy wise way to produce milk.
https://www.farmprogress.com/livestock-and-dairy/how-have-new-york-dairies-changed-over-30-years-
So are the kiddos going to realize what happened to TikTok? Or are they just going to eat up whatever it serves? Hopefully the enlightenment of the young is real.
“🎓 Northwestern University Blocks 300 Students From Class Who Refuse to Take Outrageous Zionist Training”
So what happens if what is happening with Northwestern University is just a trial balloon. And that a Trump regime would mandate this video being shown in every university in the country. Do they even realize that such efforts only encourage resentment of Israel if not Jewish people themselves? What’s the next step. Every student having to answer the question before commencing studies-
‘Are you now or have you ever been a critic of Israel?’
Yes. I have been a critic of Israel’s policies toward the residents of the Occupied Territories for many years. I am a critic of the government of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. And yes, I am aware that the Palestinians are not without flaw and have attacked Israel in sundry ways since 1948.
And, I would not touch Northwestern university with a barge pole. It has not business requiring political indoctrination of any kind. The university seems to have forgotten that it is meant to be a forum for debate, devoted to opening minds to a variety of opinions.
Does this count as “history repeating itself as farce”. I can’t wait to see ganz neue Merzjugend marching, in all their diverse arian glory.
Wankers.
re: Iran
‘No Doubt They Will Attack’: Max Blumenthal Meets Iran’s President In NYC
https://scheerpost.com/2025/09/29/no-doubt-they-will-attack-max-blumenthal-meets-irans-president-in-nyc/
Max needs to be careful by now.
Not just Max
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/
re: Moldavia
Anti-Spiegel´s Thomas Röper of course confirms the info given above in the links in his Monday podcast in the first 5 min (German talk). He also mentions that Pavel Durov stated that French security services last forced him to block oppositional TG channels in Moldavia
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5959hjK0c0myf9d4MO31GK
“The Bagram Factor: US Posturing and the Future of Iran’s Regional Integration”
Trump saying that he wants Bagram back again was jut him acting like a Reddit ****poster. In that article is a whole series of ways that the US would be able to wreck Afghanistan and it’s development if they got back into Bagram. Not going to happen and the Afghans have already killed that idea. The Afghans are more likley going to be allowed to take over Eglin Air Force Base in Florida first.
Afghans running Reddit from Elgin Air Force Base would probably be an improvement
Re ‘The Idiot’s Version of Everything That Needed to Happen’
Having witnessed the responsibility of the Dems for creating Trump and MAGA, I now see Europe led by the liberals following the same trajectory and repeating the same mistakes. It’s only fitting that my warnings are dismissed by my liberal acquaintances as “the ravings of a Putinist.” Yes, liberals in Europe are at the Russia Derangement Syndrome stage of deluding themselves about the root causes of the problems facing us here, all the while the nativist far-right is gaining strength just about everywhere. No amount of “Russia Russia Russia” and election tampering will fix what’s wrong with Europe. The sense of demand vu and the frustration with the Euro PMC liberals’ inability to come to terms with reality is infuriating. That dismissiveness is based on the same self-sense of them being the smartest kids anywhere and ever y’all know and love about liberal Dems.
It’s enough to make a guy wonder where else he can run off to.
WSJ observes DoD is having trouble using AI for autonomous (swarmed) independent weapons.
DoD has been after autonomous networked systems for many years. A lot of large data multi mode data computing ‘architecture’ in support was devised under Missile Defense Agency (Star Wars). The small diameter bomb has multiple sensors and on board target discrimination to independently “go after” the right high value target within “sight”. Networking them has long been in the cards.
AI could be an incremental improvement, if they got it to work.
SW is the basis and SW is hard for both the pentagon and trhe other US economy.
AI is less than revolutionary and like all other SW is hard to implement……. The increment has to prove its ROI!
AI has been a thing for DoD since 2019, A USAF/MIT consultancy delivered an AI Acquisition Guidebook in 2022.
AI “has been a thing” for DoD long before 2019. I was sent to grad school with a specialty in AI way back in 79. But back then it was about “expert systems” and capturing a set of “rules” that could be organized and searched. Search in particular was a big thing, with chess serving as a model.
That approach could work in certain limited domains, but couldn’t be expanded into any sort of real intelligence. The idea of “common sense” couldn’t be captured as rules. The “Holy Grail” was understanding natural language but never came close to being met.
Neural Nets were investigated, but there wasn’t the compute power to exploit the concept.
It is wonderful how much “compute” running over NVDA GPU chips are used with infrastructure to do modest tasks up to a junior high mind….
How do they expect to keep the drone seeker head connected to 1 plus GW data centers? Much less running a swarm. Lots of comms.
If you have a few hours for this substack entry…. then a lot more time going back with Ed Zitron.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter
‘George Szamuely
@GeorgeSzamuely
Amazing! Apparently, if you ban opposition political parties and opposition media, if you arrest your political opponents, if you ban election observers you don’t like, if you flood the zone with scare stories about Russians, if you threaten voters with withdrawal of EU funds, you get to “win” an election. Who d’a thunk?’
Sandu for the EU is the ideal leader for Moldova as she has taken to heart all those “European values” that we keep on hearing about. Banning opposition parties just before an election, arresting opponents, forbidding international observers into the country, restricting voting booths and even threatening to cancel the election if she lost. And of course this is all with the warm approval of Brussels.
Voltaire : I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend your right to say it. Not a quote. Either speech is free or it is not. Either an election provides options or it is a farce. Moldova is conducting a farce.
Kind of a nothingburger wildfire year in the golden state, that is if you look beyond the LA Infernos of early January which destroyed 16,000 homes~
It has been a cooler summer for much of California, wonder if that was a contributing factor?
Recent rains have dampened chances of any conflagrations happening in the next fortnight or longer, and before you know it we’ll get the first substantial storm of the year-putting paid to worries, living’ la vida Club Mediterranean.
Hopefully we’ll get more rain in the PNW to put out the fires up here.
@Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation—Report
It’s worse than it appears. I have colleagues who use their PTO to…work.
In September my brothers and I got together for a couple of weeks in a natural setting, and one of them spent most of his time working on a PowerPoint, and trying to get me to review it even though we work in different fields and different companies.
His excuse was that someone unexpectedly booked him to present the PowerPoint on the Tuesday after he got back.
I think it’s not so different from those who spend their time sleeping. Their identity is so closely connected to their employment that there is nothing else.
I may be in a small minority who by principle refuse to use this sick acronym “PTO”. My time is mine. If I am forced to sell it to an employer to support my existence, the time I have off from that wage slavery is my vacation.
I don’t care that the employer has to pay for my vacation time. “Paid Time Off” is not a term that I will use against my interest. Words mean things and it seems that your brother understood that since the time off was still “owned” by the employer, he felt somehow that he owed it them to finish the stinkin’ deck. It makes me so angry and sad to read this. Wouldn’t be surprised if the employer was a big consulting outfit btw.
Had to find out what animal is in today’s Antidote du jour. It says ‘An Arctic fox in the process of changing from her summer coat to a winter one.’
Would never have guessed that one.
Re: climate change/hurricanes
Starting last week, my FB feed became polluted with “meteorologists” claiming that the loosely-organized, weak TS now threatening to terrorize fish off the Bahamas was going to turn into a cat 5 monster and ravage the Carolinas. These “click bait” morons totally blew the forecast, fortunately.
And the mainstream media didn’t help either – you could almost taste the drool coming from their mouths as they gloated over the prospect of another Helene. I’ve never heard of a state of emergency being declared over nothing. Or a bunch of thunderstorms not yet organized called “future Hurricane Imelda.” Hint – it’s not even a hurricane yet, just a weak TS.
Another reminder that mother nature is still fickle, and climate does not equal weather. We’re looking at a big goose egg for landfalling hurricanes in the US, yet that is just part of normal variability in weather patterns independent of long term climate trends. Don’t try to tell that to the hype-mongers, though.
Last week was the one year anniversary of Helene and both a Frontline doc on PBS and local TV coverage ensued. While things are largely back to what we call normal in upstate SC, the Asheville area still a mess apparently depending on where you look. They had to drain Lake Lure to get to the toxic sludge. I still haven’t driven up that way.
I’ll be traveling up to the Western NC mountains in late October. It should be interesting to see how the landscape has changed.
Super happy that the Carolinas got a break and Imelda is just another fish storm. Should be some good surf on the beaches, though … if I were retired I’d book an Air-b-n-b for the week and enjoy the relatively deserted beach as the yahoos at CNN blew the forecast but succeeded in scaring everyone away.
I’m glad to hear the shoe is on the other foot with Imelda, shift happens.
I hear that while Imelda may be a fish storm, she packs a mean shoe closet.
The truth is that at 800 ft ASL–Asheville around 2000, Mt.Mitchell over 6000–hurricanes rarely have much of an effect here other than extra rain. So that is why Helene was such a shocker. In recent years we do seem to be getting more rain in general, harder rains, and more flooding of the local creek.
Was in Brevard late the prior weekend, like a Thur to Sat visit. A favorite local spot off hwy 276 is likely to have permanently closed, but areas in downtown Brevard seemed generally alright. Could still tell a lot of damage has been done, hiking trails nearby in Dupont Forest.
First time visiting since just before Helene hit last September. Any storms dodged are worth noting, since these TS depressions don’t always comply to a forecasted track necessarily.
Fatal shooting and fire at Michigan Mormon church, police say Michigan Advance
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All of the news i’ve read makes no effort to tie the Charlie Kirk murder by a Mormon, to this tragedy.
It reeks of revenge…
On the face of it, the murderer had a pickup truck with a couple of old glories in the bed that waved furiously once he got up to speed, and i’m not sure what to make of the antlers on the front of his rig, but it’s somebody I would have given wide berth to.
…any Gideon bibles on the back seats?
Guy served four years in the Marines during the WoT (Afghanistan and Iraq). I’d be looking at PTSD before other causes.
>>>Trump says Michigan church shooting appears to be ‘targeted attack on Christians’
The Daily Mail has social media posts of the alleged perp’s mother—-if you read between the lines, the alleged perp had some type of dissociated mental health (chronic) crisis.
Easy access to guns + zero mental health infrastructure + theoretical “black label” side effects of chronic psych med usage = constant stream of mass shootings (and/or throw in chronic hyper-THC use and/or chronic psych med-hyper THC use during adolescence). Or so should be a public health hypothesis.
Not holding my breath re. any changes….as the shouting match always devolves to: team: guns are bad (and that is the only variable) versus team: shooter is evil (and that is the only variable).
If you think things are Crazy now, give it six Months.
The Trump administration seems to be using a form of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” tech when it comes to policy…
apropos analogy as Tesla’s FSD debuted during the Obama admin, then got federal ignores under Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2.
this is a bipartisan speed-run over the cliff
MAGA on the March
Fragile N.C. Residents Lose Medicaid Support for Food and Housing (NY Times via archive.ph)
Definitely the case that local food banks have seen more demand than pre-hurricane.
The Man Behind Trump’s Push for an All-Powerful Presidency (NY Times via archive.ph)
This has been happening under all administrations since 1917. Suddenly, the NYT finds pearls to clutch because it’s Trump?
You’ve got to be kidding me:
His dad was part of a union! His mother was paid by the public to education children, likely also in a union!
This dude is a clown.
His parents worked hard because they chose to have seven children! All with the opportunity for a free public education, on publicly funded roads, using automobiles build against standard weights and measures, and conforming to unified safety standards, while enjoying the benefits of public health, like vaccinations and mosquito sprayings. The list goes on.
Labor Department won’t release Friday’s key jobs report, other data, in case of a shutdown (CNBC)
Oops.
It’s not like we want to know how the economic is doing, anyway. America is going great, after all!
And the brinkmanship continues
Finally, a reasonable explanation of why the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk behaved so oddly!
It was coated with Novichok.
Or it was a TACO-sauce coated bullet and stopped as soon as the going got difficult?
From Tesla Is Urging Drowsy Drivers to Use ‘Full Self-Driving’. That Could Go Very Wrong
Huh, I certainly don’t. What a bizarre statement. Which humans? Tesla owners, perhaps.
A few years ago there was a story in the SF Chronicle about a sleeping driver in a Tesla on highway 101 near Palo Alto. For some reason the CHP wanted to stop the car but the driver ignored the red lights and sirens. Eventually they boxed it in with CHP cars all around and gradually slowed down to a stop then banged on the window to wake the driver.
On Charlie Kirk & Israel
Kirk at the Oxford Union on 6/6/25 seemed firmly pro-Israel: see the video on YouTube 39:30-44:37, https://youtu.be/xnqSNEiLTeY?si=hTkltS7jEGiRSkXb
Facebook is sadly one of the places with large, active COVID groups. Thus I have the misfortune of having a Facebook account. As it happens, Facebook has now introduced a LLM dating “assistant”, because I just received a message from it introducing itself. Hooray!
Welcome to our dystopian future.
Is it hot?
What happens when you tell it to go perform an anatomically impossible act on itself, using more colorful language?
re: Germany – English speech by Sevim Dagdelen former MP Die Linke, now with BSW
Whitewashing Germany & Japan’s WWII Crimes
September 29, 2025
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/09/29/whitewashing-germany-japans-wwii-crimes/
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, Sevim Dagdelen warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII.
The following is an address delivered by Sevim Dagdelen, foreign policy spokesperson for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (Germany) to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, which took place from from Sept. 17 to 19.
Trump and Netanyahu to Hamas: accept Gaza peace plan or face consequences (Guardian)
Pair say proposal represents new chapter but Israeli PM threatens to ‘finish the job’ if Hamas officials fail to agree
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, have delivered an ultimatum to Hamas, warning the militant group to accept their 20-point peace plan for Gaza or face the consequences.
The two leaders met at the White House in Washington on Monday then held a joint press briefing in which they hailed their proposal as a historic breakthrough and new chapter for the Middle East.
But it was clear that Hamas had not been consulted and its position on the terms remained uncertain. Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said the group had not even received the plan, the Reuters news agency reported.
It was later briefed that Qatari and Egyptian mediators met with Hamas on Monday evening to provide the group with the peace plan.
Both Trump and Netanyahu made clear that they were not offering Hamas a choice in the matter. If the group refused, Trump told reporters, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.
“But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal … Bibi, you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do.”
The Israeli prime minister said ominously: “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done.”
Trump said: “To ensure the success of this effort, my plan calls for a new international oversight body – the Board of Peace – which will be headed, not at my request … by a gentleman known as President Donald J Trump of the United States.”
Earlier, a leaked 21-page draft document, seen by the Guardian and Haaretz in Israel, showed that a postwar Gaza governing authority would sideline key Palestinian political figures while giving significant authority to its chair on most key issues.
Monday’s 20-point plan does state that “a Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energise Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East”.
But it also notes: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.”
BP: the Blair plan with rivieraness.
Edit: full text of “The Plan” via NYT: https://archive.ph/e9zUk
Interesting in multiple ways that this is coming out for deliberation right before Yom Kippur begins.
The list of reads like several different parties contributed their points without consulting or agreeing to others.
We have those that read like typical Trump puffery;
We have detailed descriptions of an international security force that read like they have been prepared by Egypt and Jordan with buy-in from Qatar and Hamas in advance;
We have the token demands that clearly came from Israel about no Hamas in positions of power ever again;
We have the most mealy-mouthed statement that maybe statehood could eventually be possible eventually that sounds like it was extracted from Netanyahu under profound duress:
I have yet to see any serious analysis (or even casual unserious analysis) of the plan that is optimistic it will work. Netanyahu also said explicitly before he left the US that the plan didn’t mean it supported Palestinian statehood and the IDF will remain in Gaza. I feel the plan and the ultimatum about doing this the easy or hard way is just how they will justify destroying the rest of Gaza.
>I feel the plan and the ultimatum about doing this the easy or hard way is just how they will justify destroying the rest of Gaza
…
…
…
Blair: U.S., U.K. Make Last Peace Push (Feb 2003)
Britain and the United States will make a “last push for peace” as they try to secure a new United Nations resolution ordering Iraq to disarm, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said.
Tony Blair.. truly no hell hot enough. I should have known when he reappeared on the scene with his ‘plan’ a few weeks ago that he was the point man for something like this.
Moldova & Russia is not that bad.
Stealing elections in Moldova was bad, but not as bad as it was done in Romania. In Moldova they did it pre-emptively, before the elections, in Romania they did it after, with a judicial coup. Lessons learned for everyone.
However, the article in The Spectator did carry some water for the Russian propaganda:
“The Chisinau government wants to join the EU and is busy sucking up to its future overlords by harassing the Moldovan Orthodox Church, which, though autonomous, is mostly closely tied to the values and traditions of Russia rather than the liberal West. Moldovan priests who won’t support gay marriage, LGBT parades or abortion – almost all of them reflecting the view of their parishioners – are monitored and tailed, as in Soviet times. ”
Chisinau wants to have the church subordinated to the Bucharest Patriarchate, the Romanian autocephalic Orthodox Church, which is definitely anti-gay, anti- abortions, anti LGBT.
In fact according to surveys, Romanians are much more religious than Russians, which means the Romanian Orthodox Church is a more succesful institution than the Russian Orthodox Church.
As for Moldovans in R of Moldova, they were gaslighted for 3 generations that they are not Romanians, they don’t speak Romanian, and that they have a different language. Moldova is the stain on Russia’s face.