Working Cats: A Brief History of Human-Feline Partnerships Earth Food Life
Brainwave study sheds light on cause of ‘hearing voices’ Medical Xpress
The Trees That Remember the Pyramids Nautilus
Climate/Environment
Banks vs. the Amazon: New Data Reveals $2 Billion of Financing New Oil & Gas in the Amazon Stand.earth
Bolivia Burning: Inside a Latin American Ecocide Climate and Capitalism
Invisible poison: Airborne mercury from gold mining is contaminating African food crops, new study warns European Geosciences Union
Mosquitoes Have Been Found in Iceland for the First Time Ever Gizmodo
Committed acceleration of climate stresses in the coming decades Environmental Research Climate
Pandemics
Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Aging, HIV, and Long COVID: Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities Pathogens
Japan
Japan Pushes Back on U.S. Pressure to Halt Russian Energy Imports OilPrice
China?
Jin Canrong on the “Peace Disease” among China’s Elite (Part 1) Sinification
The China Model’s Fatal Flaw Foreign Affairs
G7, EU mull price floors over China’s rare earths curbs Asia Times
Taiwan to receive 1st Harpoon missile defense systems around New Year Focus Taiwan
‘Jakarta Can’t Be Ordered Around’: Indonesia Wants US to Let It Use Chinese Ships Jakarta Globe
Indonesian students stage protest as Prabowo marks a year in office Reuters
India
US May Cut India Tariff Rate to 15-16% in Trade Deal, Mint Says Bloomberg
The Lucky Country
Albanese’s critical minerals handout to Trump damages national security — and rewards laziness Crikey
Syraqistan
🚨BREAKING: Even after the ceasefire, Israel keeps demolishing Palestinian homes across Gaza’s “red zone” an area that makes up almost half of the Strip.
New footage from Rafah yesterday shows Israeli forces detonating and flattening entire neighborhoods, undermining every claim… pic.twitter.com/0eCj18OYuG
— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) October 21, 2025
⚡️🇺🇸🇮🇱JUST IN: Jared Kushner confirmed that the U.S. and its partners will not fund Gaza’s reconstruction in areas under Hamas control. Aid will go only to zones Washington deems “safe” mainly the yellow areas under direct Israeli supervision. pic.twitter.com/x5UDQ4mlQv
— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws1) October 22, 2025
⚡️🇺🇸BREAKING:
U.S President Trump says several Middle Eastern countries have offered to send forces into Gaza at his request, claiming they are ready to intervene “heavily” if the current situation doesn’t improve. He told them & Israel to wait for now, expressing hope that… pic.twitter.com/6GLcVClfiu
— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws1) October 21, 2025
Countries refuse to send troops to Gaza over fears of confrontation with Hamas ANHA
Investigation reveals Israeli commander behind killing of Palestinian child Hind Rajab, paramedics Press TV. Apparently a US Navy Seal who joined the IDF.
Germany signs nearly €4 billion deal for Israel’s Arrow 3 missile defense system Times of Israel
***
A mysterious airstrip has appeared in the Red Sea. Here’s what it could mean The Independent
Old Blighty
🚨 BREAKING: British-Palestinian NHS doctor, Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan (@doctor_rahmeh) was arrested this morning by British police to protect an apartheid, genocidal entity from accountability — just 3 days before her @the_mpts hearing, undermining her right to a fair trial.
(@HCWsAC) pic.twitter.com/xqH5ZA7mrU
— Majid Freeman (@Majstar7) October 21, 2025
European Disunion
Dutch seek solution to stand-off with China over chipmaker Nexperia, while carmakers fret Reuters
Two fires/explosions at two separate oil refineries in two countries within 24 hours. MOL in Százhalombatta (Hungary) and Petrotel-Lukoil in Romania. The Hungarian plant receives Russian oil and the Romanian one belongs to a daughter of Russian Lukoil.
The Ukrainians have just… pic.twitter.com/HAN6trpyDD
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) October 21, 2025
Hungarian oil refinery blaze: MOL addresses allegations of foreign interference Daily News Hungary
European Commission under pressure over Hungarian spying allegations Politico
Slop Check: No, Hungary Did Not Run Brussels’s Dumbest Spy Ring Hungarian Conservative
New Not-So-Cold War
TRUMP CANCELS PREMATURE EJACULATION — EXPLAINER John Helmer
Donald Trump’s Russia Policy… In Tatters or Just Playing? Larry Johnson
‘Calculated Act of Terror’ – US Lawmakers Seek to Cripple Russia with Terrorism Label Kyiv Post
Ukraine Says It Struck a Chemical Plant Inside Russia With British-Provided Storm Shadow Missiles Antiwar
Ukrainian military strike for first time disrupts operations of Western oil majors Intellinews
The Rise and Fall of Russian Historical Determinism Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue
Africa
Aid organisations warn of growing hunger crisis in Nigeria following US funding cuts Africa News
A Coup in Nigeria Would Be Bad…But Could Be (Initially) Popular Sawahil
South of the Border
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon heads to Argentina before key test for Milei Buenos Aires Times
Trump 2.0
Trump-GOP Giveaway to Big Pharma Will Hit Taxpayers With $9 Billion in Higher Drug Costs Common Dreams
US ranchers oppose Trump’s Argentina beef imports, experts doubt it will lower prices AP
Trump could bail out farmers hurt in his trade war, again. Here’s what happened the first time. Investigate Midwest
Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases New York Times
DHS Spends $172M on 2 Private Jets for Noem, Officials Amid Shutdown Truthout
“Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.” Lawfare. My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.
The Uniparty
AIPAC is now apparently having their donors give money to candidates “directly” (through some shady backchannel), rather than through their own organization.
This allows them to avoid the stigma of being “AIPAC-funded.”
“The site appears to be using Democracy Engine LLC as the… https://t.co/fDd5evV9Gc
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) October 21, 2025
Democrats en déshabillé
Why Democrats aren’t talking about climate change much anymore Grist
Video shows Graham Platner with ‘troubling’ tattoo that appears to be a Nazi symbol Maine Monitor. Commentary:
His opponents are funding literal Nazis doing literal Nazi genocide is how he survives it.
But only if reality isn’t totally meaningless & irrelevant which it probably is! https://t.co/MceVMnoSzD
— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) October 21, 2025
Immigration
TikToker shot by federal agents, deputy US marshal hit by ricochet bullet during South LA operation ABC7
Police State Watch
Phoenix sees sharp rise in police shootings since Trump DOJ ended oversight in May Copper Courier
Accelerationists
Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) is getting into nicotine.
“Basically, America smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused, it kept people fit. It’s an appetite suppressant.
“I’m becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking… pic.twitter.com/WSHIsgLeVc
— TBPN (@tbpn) October 21, 2025
Treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco The Argument
Dear Tech Evangelists: Have You Tried “Move Slow and Make Things”? Lit Hub
Washington’s Battery Strategy Is Upside Down The Battery Chronicle
Groves of Academe
Judge declines to block Northwestern from disciplining students over antisemitism training Chicago Sun-Times
Antitrust
Amazon Web Services Had a Very Bad Day, Amazon’s Stock Price Did Not Big by Matt Stoller
Amazon Hopes to Cut 600,000 US Workers & Replace Them With Robots Cord Cutters News
This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services Edward Zitron
AI
AI and the Extended Workday: Productivity, Contracting Efficiency, and Distribution of Rents HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute. From the abstract: “…we find that greater AI exposure, whether from the ChatGPT shock or broader AI developments, is associated with longer work hours and less leisure, particularly non-screen-based leisure.”
I told you guys that AI is garbage
Why the fuck would anyone use AI when it’s been programmed by Billionaire imperialist scum to repeat empire propaganda!? pic.twitter.com/GcjkdfxoS6
— Nick Cruse 🥋 (@SocialistMMA) October 21, 2025
Healthcare?
UnitedHealth and AARP Shake Hands on $9 Billion Deal HEALTH CARE un-covered
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
California’s Ban on Coercive Pricing Algorithms Has Massive Implications Economic Populist
Our Famously Free Press
CNN Cuts Off Pelosi Primary Challenger’s Discussion of NSPM-7 Common Dreams
The Friendly Skies
United flight’s ‘space debris’ scare turns out to be weather balloon, probe finds Interesting Engineering
Class Warfare
Common Evolution And Common Good 3 Quarks Daily
Call of Duty Working Class Storytelling
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“United flight’s ‘space debris’ scare turns out to be weather balloon, probe finds”
But was it *looks suspiciously over shoulder* a Chinese weather balloon?
It’s worse than that, it’s ai…
“We immediately rolled out changes to minimize time spent between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. These changes are already live with immediate effect. Additionally, we are further accelerating our plans to use live flight data to autonomously avoid planes, even if the planes are at a non-standard altitude. We are also actively working on new hardware designs to further reduce impact force magnitude and concentration. ”
Move slow and break things, move fast and beak things, but whatever speed you do so, break things. Non standard altitude, thats funny, and wtf does reduce impact force magnitude and concentration even mean? Disembody the balloon so it bounces off more softly I guess…
File under Amazon and AWS. Amazon delivery services interrupted by a bad server. (They have bugs to workout before they replace humans with robots.) From 2 days ago.
AWS was down — live updates following massive outage that broke the internet
Amazon implemented fixes, but the multi-hour outage took time to resolve
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/amazon-outage-october-2025
My college Canvas system was down. A few local businesses said their ordering and Door Dash didn’t work. I had an Amazon order delayed.
Wait until we get a big one. Accident or on purpose. Heed the warnings HAL.
In the midst of the USSR’s curtain call before collapse, they had G.U.M. as the main place to shop, we have Amazon.
I think GUM predates USSR and is still around….
Don’t do it Dave.
Additional details on the AWS-triggered failure of “smart beds”, leaving some stuck in sauna mode. (I recall that our dear departed Lambert had a particular hate on for all “smart” gadgetry.)
That article shows the great flaw in techbro thinking – no manual backup. No way to manually at least get those beds flat. Found another story about those beds and they are sending gigabytes of data back to their servers each and every month for each and every customer. Do people want to be surveilled that much?
It is a long piece (6k words) and I haven’t finished it, but it is worthwhile so far. The Little Satan and Great Satan designations are useful (from more than just the author’s standpoint). What a world.
In the FT —
The fallout from the AI-fuelled dash for gas: A supply crunch in giant turbines for gas-powered plants threatens environmental and geopolitical consequences
https://www.ft.com/content/dfd87d3d-a386-4706-a4ba-9f9274760111
https://archive.ph/s9zcK
‘“…..Renewables are putting other forms of power generation under increasing pressure,” said Lisa Davis, a board member, at the time (2017). Siemens Energy’s then North American president Rich Voorberg was later even more definitive: “Gas turbines were dead in 2022.
‘Now, in 2025, they are very much alive. Orders are forecast to increase to 1,025 units this year, of which 183 will be large units, the most since 2011 and an almost 50 per cent increase on the average over the previous five years, according to Dora Partners, a specialist energy consultancy.
‘The renaissance of gas is being driven by hunger for electricity from the data centres that are powering the boom in artificial intelligence. In 2024, the US Department of Energy forecast that data centres would consume 6.7 to 12 per cent of US electricity by 2028, up from 4.4 per cent in 2023. The computing capacity required to scale up AI requires reliable, round-the-clock power, causing the US to rapidly become the global epicentre of new gas-fired power plant construction….’
There have been significant delays to the construction of CCGT plants in Vietnam and the Philippines due to increased US demand for turbines. Plus, various supply chain issues have also caused delays. It can take up to five years now to get delivery in some parts of the world. That said, the actual demand for gas, while increasing, has not seen a significant uptick above the long term annual growth.
An important point, generally overlooked, is the distinction between OCGT (open cycle) gas plants and CCGT (combined cycle). The latter are around 30% more efficient, but are a lot more expensive and complex to build. An OCGT plant is quite small and compact (they can fit comfortably into a typical industrial estate) and can be built in a matter of months. Most of the plants built for data centres are OCGT, which makes them unsuitable for providing any baseload as they are far too expensive to keep running full time.
It should be pointed out that some of the crazy power projections out there are built on the assumption of the AI/Data centre bubble not bursting. I suspect there will be a lot of turbine cancellations over the next few years (the industry has already anticipated this – they are frequently insisting on non-refundable deposits).
This seems contradictory to my understanding of data center power needs. Are they just standby? Used to even out daytime loads? How do you just switch on and off a power plant?
Is there an explainer somewhere?
They are primarily peaking plants. They are there to provide rapid electricity load when there is a short term demand over and above what the grid can provide, or if there is an unexpected drop in supply (for example, if a power station goes offline). All grids have them – they are usually co-located with existing power stations or in high demand nodes (such as industrial areas) if the local circuit capacity is an issue.
In the past they were often diesel or distillates (i.e. kerosene), but where there is am ample supply of natural gas it is usually the cheapest option. To confuse matters, in some circumstances, OCGT plants are co-located with additional diesel generator to provide a back up to the back up, so to speak (it depends on regulatory requirements and these vary widely).
The precise nature of the plant and the overall energy use implications are very complicated, and vary according to local grid grid and power capacities, contractual regulatory and legal requirements (i.e. the tolerance for outages) applying both to grid managers, power suppliers and power purchasers, and of course cost implications. To add to the complications, contrary to what many assume, data centres can actually benefit load management, even if locally they may need emergency peaking supply. This is why it is important to make a distinction between different types of data centre – it does seem that AI clusters have less capacity for managing demand, hence the greater need for additional back up power and local resilience.
Thanks so much. Complicated indeed!
These are, as I understand it, common at big hospitals, too. My institution (a major UC campus) has one–the medical center insisted on it, I believe.
PK: …there will be a lot of turbine cancellations over the next few years (the industry has already anticipated this – they are frequently insisting on non-refundable deposits)
Ah. Thanks.
Vietnam could buy MGT-75 turbines from Iran. 300 MW (or so) in a combined cycle use. Philippines probably would not want to veer too far away from US.
“Dutch seek solution to stand-off with China over chipmaker Nexperia, while carmakers fret”
I got an idea. The Dutch reinstate that CEO that was pushed aside, hands back all the shares that they stole, hands back the company, ceases all demands for having a controlling stake like they have been demanding for a long time, apologize profusely and offer reparations to that company for any damage cause with a written legal document that they will never do anything like that ever again. Think Trump will let them?
hmmm, lets see…. Philips (Dutch company) sells its ownership of Nexperia to a Chinese company. Chips are all made in China. The Dutch facility is used primarily for R/D and testing as I think. Now China has issued an export ban
nd testing, as far a on Nexperia chips. (Did NL foresee that possibility?). With or without the current CEO, I’d bet Nexperia can setup a new R/D and testing facility in China.
8 days ago.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/10/14/china-imposes-export-ban-dutch-intervention-chipmaker-nexperia
(apologies for the above sloppy editing.)
Thinking about the current standoff over important chips made China, this Ian Welch article makes some good points.
China Seizes The Master’s Weapon As It Makes Itself The New Hegemon
https://www.ianwelsh.net/china-seizes-the-masters-weapon-as-it-makes-itself-the-new-hegemon/
I think this is an extraordinarily on point Hudson/Wolff discussion if it hasn’t been linked here.
https://michael-hudson.com/2025/10/managed-democracy/
One of their points is that, for all the Cory Doctorow claims about Web decadence, the internet world is one where we can now find out the things that were formerly concealed. The elites have lost control of the narrative even as they try to force everyone to accept it. Hence the sense of desperate floundering that Hudson talks about here and Patrick Lawrence elsewhere.
This may not save the poor of Gaza or of Venezuela but bodes ill for the political future of our current boobocracy.
A mixed blessing is the Net, pointing to new skill and discernment needs.
Once, there was consideration of a conventional progression.
Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom
Now, there is greater awareness of how the old convention could be, uh, repurposed.
Data gets fudged or ignored
Information mutates, or is mutated into, misinformation
Knowledge is under assault from watering down, exploding growth and what new fresh hells
Wisdom remains a quaint, even discredited or oppressive word
Okay, ready to return to my pre-modern world. :)
The epitome of wisdom, as lettered on the side of a regional vegetable wholesaler’s delivery trailer: “God grant me the ability to keep my mouth shut untill I know what I am talking about.”
Another succinct piece of wisdom, seen on the back of a working, beat-up truck:
Dirty Hands = Clean Money
This is the fulfillment of McLuhan’s prophesy: We make our tools, then our tools make us. New technology upsets the status quo apple cart. One example: Gutenberg prints bibles, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation are a result.
Computers and internet are the latest iteration.
hence the need to move us all over to AI generated slop ASAP
“Donald Trump’s Russia Policy… In Tatters or Just Playing?”
There is a good chance that the Hungarian meeting will not happen. Russia is still demanding that root causes for this war be negotiated so that this war does not break out again in a few years while Trump is still demanding a conflict freeze which would amount to a Ukrainian victory. Since Trump will not be able to get his way with Putin, it seems that he has lost interest in any meeting with him which will please both the neocons and the Europeans.
Discounting Russian military gains, Trump is Biden in Jan 2022.
Trump and Lindsey Graham, the real ruler, want another Minsk which would be a broken truce where Kiev is rearmed.
Lavrov won’t talk what Graham demands
Graham wants Russian resources!
It may be that Graham needs Russian resources. You can bet that back in 2021 that he was making big promises to any number of billionaires how Project Ukraine would destroy Russia allowing those billionaires to loot that country to their heart’s content. Well here it is 2025 and there will be no looting of Russia so those billionaires will be going after Graham for all those broken promises. They are going to be demanding compensation.
Graham wants whatever his owners/funders/handlers tell him to want. He is a tiresome nag.
Yes. And I want a Cobra Shelby.
Video shows Graham Platner with ‘troubling’ tattoo that appears to be a Nazi symbol Maine Monitor. Commentary:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Platner was 10 when the internet came to be for everybody, just in time to record all youthful and adult indiscretions that might come back to haunt him politically, and if there’s one thing the Donkey Show is particularly good at, its scaring off a new round of talent that doesn’t fit with a bunch of old squares.
And in regards to skull and crossbones, pirates beat out the 3rd Reich by hundreds of years in usage, flying the Jolly Roger~
Look, I am really disappointed by the Platner revelations. But it strains credulity to think he didn’t learn at some point that it was an SS tattoo; that he didn’t then remove it points to terrible judgment, as do his Reddit posts.
Inkremental amounts of evidence notwithstanding, seems like a breath of fresh scare for the Donkey Show & AIPACkage Deal~
Personally, I thought his post claiming to be a communist was quite refreshing. His response to other more legit complaints shows some personal growth between his early 20s and now.
And people who throw billions in weapons at people covered in nazi regalia in Ukraine really have no business calling out anybody on this subject.
The real disappointment here is that the pro-genocide faction in Congress (which is most of it) felt the need to release this oppo in the first place, not that Platner got drunk and got a tattoo.
He is the only person to get really drunk and get a tattoo he later wishes he did not have? Malcolm Forbes had a tattoo.He hid it. People,of his generation, and of mine as well, looked down on tattooing. “He should have know it was associated with the SS…” Perhaps, but I would bet more on Treasure Island, book or film, or Pirates of the Caribbean and others of that ilk. Just as was the case of Katy Porter in California, the “oppo” research folks are on overtime. The Gerontocratic democrat leadership is surgically joined to funders and its “narrative” and clearly more than willing to be dragged down with the ship (party) to protect it. I still cannot decide if the democrats are going the way of the Whigs or the Federalists as a national party.
It’s not like one can just get tattoos removed, like Marky Mark, or Ukrainians heading towards Russia.
Platner is getting the tattoo covered up due to the lack of tattoo removal facilities in rural Maine.
And I’m sure the sclerotic Democrat establishment will pick up some more nits and gratuitously enlarge them regardless. Only way they would be happy is if Platner got Schumer’s face tattooed on his right manboob.
You Muricans are have no ideas how stupid your Uniparty circus looks from the outside.
Yes we do.
Probably about the same as European politics looks to the rest of the world*. In the US, we have one party and pretend we have two. In Europe, there are many more parties and current governments just ban the ones they don’t like to bring about the desired “concensus”.
* the rest of the world outside the US. Most USians don’t pay any attention to what’s going on in the rest of the world.
Many or even most European parties are part of the permanent uniparty anyways–they are always in the governing coalitions, no matter what happens to them electorally.
Besides, the guy is sorry that he got drunk as a young solider and got a stupid tattoo. Meanwhile we have a secretary of ‘war’ who proudly displays his white supremicist ink.
>>>And people who throw billions in weapons at people covered in nazi regalia in Ukraine really have no business calling out anybody on this subject.
As with ideologies and corporations, some groups , like the Democrats and Republicans, can’t sin, but can only be sinned against; they consider themselves without sin anyway as they have performed all the approved chants, rituals, and ceremonies flawlessly.
The really disappointing thing is these ratf**king tactics work. I just had a lengthy conversation with a liberal friend – the type who votes Democrat but isn’t a political junkie and doesn’t dig into the details that much. I asked her about Platner and she said she’d recently seen him at one of his town hall meetings and really liked him, but that she’s now having second thoughts because of the recent stories about the social media posts and the tattoo. I told her that this was oppo from the Democrats and that it wasn’t a coincidence that Mills enters the race at Schumer’s request and suddenly Platner starts getting bad press almost immediately. I also mentioned how the Democrats have proven time and time again that they’d rather lose to a republican than win with someone like Bernie or Platner.
We can all plant seeds, as it were, and change the narrative – hopefully that conversation just took a vote back from Schumer and the Zionists.
I agree. It’s heartbreaking to me that the Democrat establishment can still control the narrative this easily, even in the face of the Trumpian threat. Do we never learn? Maybe not.
That’s one reason why i believe the narrative on Palestine may get reversed with time.
Is still get fooled by them often enough that it is a little scary.
I should be deprogrammed now.
Thank Jesus for reddit and other permanent records of mistakes and inconsistencies. With them, we might actually start electing people who could change things!
Don’t know about others, but I learned about the second tier Nazi signs only during the Ukraine war, where Azov and others are parading them all the time. Before that I would recognize probably only the most famous logos like swastika or SS sign.
“While on short-term leave, he and other Marines went to Croatia, where they got “very inebriated” and decided to get tattoos, he said”
Croatia? Ya don’t say! No particular reason why those goofy SS symbols might be popular in tattoo parlours catering to military types over there, is there now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e
Yep. Looks like a no brainer, but I guess CNN narrative about Yugoslav wars is still going strong.
“…all youthful and adult indiscretions…”
I’m so old that I recall hanging with a group of fellow sophomoric high school smokers, when one of our group tapped a cigarette ash into the palm of his hand, asked, “What’s this?”, then provided the answer, “A Vietnamese Buddhist monk”, to which I and others laughed.
Having gone on to become an antiwar activist and a fan and sometimes practitioner and student of Buddhism, I’m so very glad there is no footage of that and other less than praiseworthy episodes from my misspent youth. People change, sometimes even for the better.
Re the cancelled/postponed RU/USA summit (Helmer’s article) — I cannot help but wonder if Trump and Putin quietly agreed on Budapest as a proposed meeting place knowing full well that it would (a) create dissension within the EU and (b) be unworkable due to Hungary’s location and the ICC arrest warrant…..i.e., they both knew it would end up not happening (or at least not now, and not in an EU country). A clever way of kicking the can down the road while kicking sand in Brussels’ face. The two have little to discuss at this point, anyway.
Re historical determinism in RU — Nice to see that Paul Robinson is back online (he shut down his blog in despair after the events of 24/2/22 kicked off). Since Stephen Cohen passed on, Robinson is one of the better RU experts. It’s a fine article, and I agree with his view that western liberalism has no future in RU.
Re UKR attacks on RU infrastructure — I posted a comment here last month saying that as per my RU wife, there are no gasoline shortages in Moscow. Well, well. Yesterday she informed me that at a Moscow gas station, she was unable to fill up two jerrycans with diesel for our dacha generator (we have occasional electricity outages…..not a daily occurrence, but maybe once or twice a month…..and winter is approaching). The word has gone out from on high that you may refuel your vehicle, but no jerrycans are allowed. Of course this is just a minor obstacle (she filled up our car that uses diesel, drove to the dacha, siphoned the diesel into the jerrycans, and returned to fill up the car anew…..), but I find it noteworthy that even Moscow has started to anticipate shortages of diesel.
Always appreciate your man on the prospekt updates, it brings an every man on the street with a dacha, perspective.
In the north-eastern area of Europe, from Norway to Poland and Czechia and east from there, dachas are almost every man and woman thing. Others just call them chata, hytte, stuga, mökki or dzialki.
Coincidentally it overplaps quite well the area where people have their own saunas, don’t wear shoes inside and like to forage for berries and mushrooms for fun.
I wonder the same sometimes–that the meeting in Budapest was just a pinata, big, loud, and intended to be broken after drawing attention. I remain convinced that there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye behind the scenes…
>Video shows Graham Platner with ‘troubling’ tattoo that appears to be a Nazi symbol
He just wanted to show his support for Ukraine.
A pretty standard military thing for Banderites and Ustashe, and other Nazis.
As a kid, I had a black T-shirt with an evil looking skateboarding skeleton and a nuke going off in the background. Maybe I was a nazi too and didn’t realize it…
Or maybe some younger people just think skull and crossbones are cool for whatever reason. When one gets older and starts contemplating mortality, they become less so.
I’ll admit to buying one of these in Tijuana circa 1971, are my political chances well and truly shot by admitting such?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/95075599@N07/albums/72157636498194886/
Not all skeletons are created equal. If you were a kid in Balkan, Baltic, Ukraine, Germany, and most of Europe, you would know very well what Totenkopf is. Especially after the open revival of Nazism past 1991. Totenkopf was on the wall there intentionally, and everyone knew why, except for the fellow Marines (which are not known as bright, in their defense).
By trying to whitewash this, mabye you are a nazi too and didn’t realize it…
Would it change things if it was a WW1 German thing, too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totenkopf#/media/File:AugustvonMackensen.jpg
Lots of skulls on that Wikipedia page, and they all look different, for some reason. It’s almost like one can instantly tell the SS ones from those that are not. I wonder if tattoo parlor had all of them on the wall, or only the special ones.
Maybe Ustashe pranked him when they saw that they could. A wise man would have gone to China and got “I’m donkey” in stead.
Mackensen’s skull and bones was a Prussian military thing from the 18th century, so it indeed has a history longer than nazism. But so does swastika.
And yet nowadays blue star of David represents shameless genocide, even if it’s older than Palestine.
Symbols do change meaning.when new movements appropriate them.
I don’t know about that: my understanding is that the SS took their version from the emblem of the Prussian hussars and there seems to be a definite continuity in their designs.
That you, Chuck?
I have no idea what is that supposed to mean. Is it some redneck insult, that I am too European to understand? I wrote “whitewash”, not “whitetrash”.
I think it is a reference to Chuck Schumer, the Democrat Party bigwig who dragooned the term limited 77 year old Democrat governor of the State of Maine to run in the primary against Platner. This is a regular interparty tactic called “primarying.” ‘Outsiders’ in or seeking office are attacked in the primary race so as to try and knock them out of the general election.
Anyway, the original Third Reich sent teams to America in the 1930s to study how racism and oppression are done right. (The term ‘whitetrash’ seems to have originated there.) One team went to the American South to study the legal ways that those states “kept down” the lower classes, especially the blacks. I won’t even get into the outright racism of the British Empire.
Ever looked into how the Dutch East India Company managed the growing and harvesting of peppercorns in the East Indies back in the 1600s? Hint: It involved Japanese mercenary samurai, or “ronin,” and the killing off of all adult males in the affected villages.
No one has clean hands if you go back far enough.
Heh. I was pretty hot under the collar when I saw this story come out yesterday, but Platner seems to have brushed aside the accusations. I say “seems” because when I went to find what he said, I ran across this from Jewish Insider which does give his quote –
“Platner, who is running to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said he had gotten the tattoo in Split, Croatia, in 2007, when he and a group of “very inebriated” fellow Marines had time off while on deployment and decided to step into a parlor. “We chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall, because we were Marines, and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing,” he explained on the podcast.
“We got those tattoos, and then we all moved on with our lives,” he added, emphasizing he had later served in the Army and received a security clearance to work as a contractor for the State Department in Afghanistan. “I can honestly say that if I was trying to hide it,” he continued, “I’ve not been doing a very good job for the past 18 years.” ”
– but the article also quotes some unnamed “acquaintance” who claims Platner years ago said he did know about the tattoo’s significance. Quelle surprise, coming from that outlet. They’re really working overtime to get some traction for this smear.
I’m going to go with Platner’s explanation here and all these Zionist oppo researchers can go pound sand. At least until they come up with pics of Platner with a group of friends sporting other nazi tattoos, posing in front of pictures of nazi leaders with nazi flags in the background. Like we see with the “heroes” from the Azov battalion, to whom the US is currently funneling billions of dollars in weapons.
Agreed. And I’m just wondering why if he’s a Nazi he’d support Medicare for All and be calling out genocide.
Bill B: I’m just wondering why if he’s a Nazi he’d support Medicare for All
Actually, the Nazis had universal healthcare (inherited from Weimer and Bismark before that.) so in that respect they were ahead of the US today.
On the other hand, it came with added Rassenhygienepolicies — racial hygiene policies — such as eugenics programs like a 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring with 400,000 people sterilzed for conditions like schizophrenia, epilepsy, and ‘feeblemindedness,’ and then in 1939 a euthanasia program whereby tens of thousands of disabled, mentally ill individuals deemed ‘life unworthy of life’ were systematically executed.
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/public-health-under-the-third-reich
You win some and lose some, I guess. Though the way the US is going, you all are likely to get the racial hygiene policies before the universal healthcare.
>>>You win some and lose some, I guess. Though the way the US is going, you all are likely to get the racial hygiene policies before the universal healthcare.
Already done. Everything about racial hygiene, but the actual murdering aside from the American practice of occasionally denying life saving medical care to “defectives,” was copied by the Nazis from the Americans.
May I suggest until Aktion T4 start in 1939, there really was not much difference between the two countries’ policies of racial hygiene? Using gas vans, gas chambers, and firing squads are things that the United States avoided. No genocide and no healthcare or genocide and healthcare?
Certainly, eugenics ideas were imported by the Germans from the US elites of earlt 20th century.
WJ Bryan had a ln important point during the Scopes Trials about misuse of science!
After reading The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, Hitler believed the United States was a model nation whose policies the Nazis should emulate.
Of course, that’s not at all like the M4A that Bernie, Platner, etc. support. Everyone would be covered.
And considering what happened during the holocaust I’d have to conclude there was nothing remotely resembling M4A in Nazi Germany.
‘Suppressed News.
@SuppressedNws1
⚡️🇺🇸BREAKING:
U.S President Trump says several Middle Eastern countries have offered to send forces into Gaza at his request, claiming they are ready to intervene “heavily” if the current situation doesn’t improve. He told them & Israel to wait for now, expressing hope that things will resolve peacefully and says that if the situation worsens, the response will be “fast, furious, and brutal.”’
Seems as if it’s not only AIs that hallucinate. No Middle Eastern country will send forces into Gaza as they know that if Hamas does not end up attacking them, then certainly Israel will. This claim may stem from when a coupla days ago he demanded that Hamas totally disarm. When a reporter asked him if he would use US troops to do so, he backpedaled at a fast rate of knots. If Israel tries to disarm Hamas that starts the war up again meaning that his peace plan is a failure. So perhaps he was indulging in this fantasy in the hope that a country in this region will take the bait.
I have been throwing my GWB nerf-foam shoes at the TeeVee for a few weeks now— reporting has gone all lawsuit-fear soft, if it ever was rigorous and not establishment-reinforcing.
Cease-fire My Ass. Talking heads need to use “airquotes” when they sit with gravitas at their lucite desks and ‘report’.
Trumps “cease-fire” . It’d be truthier
This is an Israeli style ceasefire, as events prove now and have proven in the recent past. It means the other guys stop shooting and the Israelis do as they please.
Re California and price fixing–if I go to Lowe’s to shop then I know that most items will be the same price as at the Home Depot a half a mile away. The two stores compete on the source of their products and location (Lowe’s has the advantage there) but when it comes to price they might as well be the same store.
The same is true of groceries with a bottle of store brand milk being the same price at practicaly every chain in town (we have half a dozen). There, though, sale prices on less generic items do offer some competition.
Nevertheless digital clearly offers better possibilities for price collusion and you don’t even have to call it “algorithmic” since little more is involved than scraping your competitors website to see what they are charging. They know customers can now do this too and don’t need to drive around window shopping if price is the object.
So one could debate whether this is really so bad for consumers in areas other than real estate or insurance (do insurers really compete?) while conceding it’s obviously bad for suppliers. In the end it boils down to how socialistic and regulating do you want govt to be. Obviously to our rulers the current answer is “not very.”
“The China Model’s Fatal Flaw: Why Beijing Can’t Overcome Overcapacity”
Um, isn’t this just one of those contradictions of capitalism that The Bearded One (hat tip to Lambert) was trying to warn about lo these many years ago?
lmao. if the West had China’s “problems,” it would be a positive miracle
It is similar to Marx’s theory of overproduction as the cause of capitalist crises, although as always with China, it has a very distinct twist, specifically the deliberate suppression of domestic demand in favour of exports which is typical of the Asian model of rapid development (German too). Minsky of course added to this analysis from the perspective of how an appetite for risk builds up during boom periods resulting in overinvestment.
The article is quite good as the author has a good on the ground knowledge of local Chinese decision making. As always, what appears to be rational economic decision-making at one scale can have all sorts of unintended results at another scale. There is nothing new in this – the tendency for over shooting in investment spending is pretty much a built in feature for the Asian fast growth model – and as the focus moves from housing to industrial spending, there will be a hell of a lot of capacity looking for a customer.
And also true for communist (and even Tsarist Russian and perhaps even US in 20s-50s?) economies–of planned economies generally, I think.
Overinvestment in capacity, that is.
The US was the case study from the end of the Civil War to the great crash of 1873. Of course, it can be difficult to distinguish an irrational boom in a particular form of investment (i.e. a Minsky style boom and bust or a conventional Keynesian cyclical boom/bust) to one resulting from a deliberate policy of excessive investment in infrastructure or productive capacity, which is what (arguably) is happening in China. Pretty much all the Tiger Economies of the 20th century went through something similar – some managed to get past it either by luck or good governance (ROK, Taiwan), some hit the middle income trap (Thailand, Malaysia), with Japan being somewhere in between. While the same process could be seen in Europe in the 19th/20th Century, various wars and other things clouded the picture. But a key point I think is that only some cultures (i.e. very disciplined ones, or very authoritarian ones) can maintain an artificial cap on domestic consumption long term. They usually do it by persuading everyone that being underpaid is somehow a sign of virtue.
An issue for China though is that is that while a small economy can get away with some distortions that a larger country can’t, as there comes a point with a large economy when everyone else simply refuses to keep importing the deflation and sacrificing their own industries to help out.
With rapid catch up economies, they are all to some degree different, but there are always underlying themes. China is hitting a wall which anyone with a familiarity with the literature on historic economic development will find very predictable. The question is how they address it.
Overcapacity is not the same as overproduction. To me, overcapacity sounds like a recession and overproduction (inventory build) sounds like time for a market correction. Not saying one can’t lead to the other.
It was hard to find the problem the article was about, and who it was a problem for.
You had to read the article backwards to make sense of it. What you get is that China needs equity markets and intellectual property laws to properly (according to an ideal scheme not described in the article) allocate capital, thus allowing it to “soar to new heights,” which it is maybe in danger of not doing under a regime that prioritizes production, growth, and low prices. China also needs to change the political and tax incentives that have created low profits, low prices, and abundant products.
You have to ask, who benefits from a system that creates $10,000 electric cars and mass produced solar power, but not stock price competition as a capital allocator? My guess is, that will tell us who feels this situation is a challenge. Price competition between manufacturers seems to be a big problem for the writer, who advocates allowing more concentration of ownership. She wants China’s markets to be efficient, but not to achieve a low market-clearing price.
Once you get beyond the invocation of the racist trope that China’s economy is imitative, there are some Ptolemaic epicycles on the subject of innovation. Judged against an ideal nowhere defined in the article, China’s production is not differentiated enough. It is also not innovative enough, except when it is — and then it is technically ingenious or “narrowly technical.” Except those are accidents that occurred despite the system.
If this is what the leading foreign policy journal in the US is serving up, you don’t have to wonder how US China policy got the way it is, and who got it that way.
I always thought that a competitive economy was a good thing in which “normal profts” were… well… normal, and that rents were either non-existent or came about only when a new idea provided a short burst of rent before competiiton swept in, over-production would occur, and the weakest went to the wall and their resources are re-allocated more or less efficiently. When over-production turns into a crisis, it is because super profits have allowed some firm’s to grow at the expense of their competitors or to use excess profits to buy up competitors. On this basis, it can be argued that the Chinese have created, through local government lending practices, a barely financialised economy which offers all the benefits of ruthless competition designed, over time, to improve the living standards of all the people, where the highly financialised capitalist West offers the downside of monopolistic competition leading to the immerseration of more amd more people very year through unemployment and the growth of underemployment, precarious jobs and breathtakingly high levels of public, corporate and private debt that’s pretty close to reaching it’s crisis point before very long.
Reading these essays, I always imagine what would be the reaction if late USSR were sending missives to Western capitals complaining that problems in soviet economy and empty shelves are due to western overcapacity, and they should nationalize all bodegas and let some CPUSA apparatchik to run them.
I saw the Mint article elsewhere saying India was about to cave, and decided to read the actual article a little to see if I believed it real. Its source is “three people aware of the matter.” Such careful wording.
For example, I am aware of the matter, but I have no insights other than the idea that India is going to allow American corn and soy in, angering the powerful ag lobbies with upcoming important elections* is hard to believe. I still bet on TACO.
“India will see at least two major state elections this year in Delhi and Bihar” – https://indianexpress.com/elections/upcoming-elections-india/
The Trees That Remember the Pyramids Nautilus
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I never take it for granted, my easy access to Giant Sequoias.
Guess you could get bored with anything if you went at too much, but i’m always well at home in their embrace.
The oldest ones date from late in the game of pyramid building, about 3,500 years old. What is remarkable is that before we showed up, a wildfire would race through the groves every 17 years on average, and every last older tree has scorch marks from multiple encounters. I saw trees with 20-30 foot high scorch marks in the New Oriole Grove a few years back after the KNP Fire, a mere mortal tree would up and die-not Sequoias though.
There is a timelessness to them, trees I played around when I was a toddler don’t look remarkably different almost 6 decades later, sure they’ve grown, but glacially and not upwards-its all about adding girth after a point, for Mother Nature’s sumo wrestlers.
There are two sequoias in a front yard down the road. They are about the same age as most of the sequoias in the Dillonwood grove, about 75 -100 feet tall and 24 in in diameter. Those trees are all the same age because Dillon clearcut the grove in 1898-1902. When I was a little kid about 1954 an old timer who lived there told me when he was a little kid he could jump over those trees.
When sequoias are young they can grow 4 feet in a year.
Re: Antidote
It seems like Catdolf is staring right through me, a bit eerie.
More Gollum than Catdolf.
God help me.
I seriously thought (without knowing the image though) in the first second you were spoofing the name “Gandalf”. Sigh…
And since this is “names” – forgive me for the personal nature but every time I read “Revenant” I have to think about this interview with the late Jacques Rivette in a nice 40min piece about his great “Histoire de Marie et Julien” (2003) and the difference between ghosts and phantoms, “revenants et fantômes”, since the movie is about just that, besides of course love.
Engl. subs
Jacques Rivette interviewé par Hélène Frappat
2003
40 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXTTzh0L1N0
The complete movie (however you need to log in to verify your age because, as I recollect, Béart may be running around naked which in her case is standard when in a Rivette. Something today´s morality priests in the media and universities do not get – the nature of these things depends on the posture, the lighting, the speed, the staging. In fact look at older US indies, and you see many more men and women naked than today. But that´s a different topic, sorry.)
Histoire de Marie et Julien
150 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScX_bXzpIo
Suppressed News.
@SuppressedNws1
⚡️🇺🇸🇮🇱JUST IN: Jared Kushner confirmed that the U.S. and its partners will not fund Gaza’s reconstruction in areas under Hamas control. Aid will go only to zones Washington deems “safe” mainly the yellow areas under direct Israeli supervision.
What this actually means is that Jar Jar Kushner wants all that money from the US and its partners spent on the sections under Israeli control. Things like roads, infrastructure, etc. And then all those Israeli settlers can move in and set up towns and villages with everything already laid out and built for them to use free of cost.
I threw up a little in my mouth when Jared mentioned the Board Of Peace… but being a gentleman, swallowed it back down.
p.s.
Jared mentioned 58% of New Gaza will be under Israeli control…
Hmmm, where have I seen that before?
Three-fifths Compromise
Nice catch! Didn’t make that connection.
Dang. Too bad Kushner’s DisneyGaza doesn’t include any of that fabulous beachfront property. Yet.
Cattle ranchers and soybean farmers, fighting with the Man and the potential outcomes from bad policy. Whatever the rationale might be to alleviate a price crunch, importing Argentine beef doesn’t seem like a legitimate solution to a supply demand problem. I’m not much on buying ground beef myself, except in the occasional finished hamburger product with a side of good french fries.
There’s precious few range cattle around these parts, once upon a time though there were boucoup, and the infrastructure is still there, rusting away barns, fences, and more.
Native grass is only really gonna be viable for 6 months and being range cattle, they get to walk it off-losing weight in the process, and fodder being so expensive, all the business went elsewhere to CAFO’s or gave up. Driving 30 miles between here and Kings Canyon NP, you see the aged apparatus that could handle 100,000 range cattle, and yet you see maybe 100 in your drive.
Lotsa range cows in southern Utah I noticed, and all family affairs with maybe a hundred head, and often alfalfa was grown adjacent to the ranch.
They were purposeful in the way that the Mega-Dairies here aren’t, with much of the latter’s industrial products imported on one end into the cows, and then exported on a not so slow boat to China on the other end.
‘Russians With Attitude
@RWApodcast
Two fires/explosions at two separate oil refineries in two countries within 24 hours. MOL in Százhalombatta (Hungary) and Petrotel-Lukoil in Romania. The Hungarian plant receives Russian oil and the Romanian one belongs to a daughter of Russian Lukoil.
The Ukrainians have just been told formally by the EU that they are allowed to bomb whatever they want in Europe, so they’ll just go ahead.’
Hungary I can kinda understand. They refuse to give Zelensky billions of dollars nor will they empty their military arsenals so that all that gear can be sent to the Ukraine. But Romania? Seriously? That and Poland are the major transit points for military gear going into the Ukraine. And Ukraine has just attacked them? So much for gratitude. Looks like as far as the Ukrainians, that all of Europe is theirs to attack at will. This will not end well.
This will not end well.
Anyone with knowledge of the actual composition of many so-called ‘Russian Mafias’ in the West knew this already.
Simplicius has an article about these explosions this morning he titles EU Declares War On Its Own Members. A link to the free version can be found here. Hopefully I stripped off the right stuff from the URL and it works for you.
re: Germany war economy madness
Two local examples that indicate how much the entire country has committed to the rearmament madness.
On no level of government does this country prove any competence in devising a constructive plan to really solve the crisis which is mainly self-inflicted.
1) The 5 governors of the 5 main German states where the arms industry is located in a joint declaration are demanding a “national solution” to integrate the rearmament efforts into a larger financial package dedicated to improve infrastructure at large.
The declaration demands: “to combine a combat capability package for the Bundeswehr with an economic stimulus package for our country.”
They are demanding this on the occasion of a new batch of APCs. The order 1000 pieces worth 2B Euros.
It used to be the German FUCHS APC. However the government had planned to replace German FUCHS by Finnish PATRIA 6×6.
The states are now opposed to that.
see German JUNGE WELT
Economic stimulus package for rearmament
Successor model for the “Fuchs”: State premiers demand “national solution”
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/510846.r%C3%BCstungsprofite-konjunkturpaket-aufr%C3%BCstung.html
2) Bavaria´s governor Markus Söder (reminder: was and remains potentional candidate to run as chancellor)
suggests a totally new law:
He wants to lift administrative restrictions for military industrial facilites when new buildings are greenlit. This is remarkable as Germany has a strict control over where what kind of building may be built even its design depending on the location (this is much more liberal in Austria e.g. which is why architects often prefer to go there.)
Additionally he wants to support investors into the MIC and help arms companies wherever the state can by exempting them from administrative procedures in general. This includes investments of the LfA Förderbank Bayern, the regional promotional bank of Bavaria.
see local MERKUR paper
Bavaria as a center of defense: Söder introduces unique law
https://www.merkur.de/bayern/weg-roter-teppich-fuer-die-ruestungsindustrie-soeder-bringt-einzigartiges-gesetz-auf-den-93997900.html
All the while civil society goes bankrupt.
Nobody is opposed to this because all those institutions that traditionally fed political protest have bought into this self-destructive bullshit. Which is another indicator how elitist academia and media still are/have turned again.
However if local level policies align with national-level PR stunts you know you have a problem.
Traditionally the states often fought with the national government. Not any more.
It was always asserted that Allied command after 1945 insisted on a federal republic for Germany where nation and state share power to prevent a concentration of power as had happened pre-1945.
When it´s most pressing to actually work that way however you may now witness how spectacularly the federative intent fails.
Which is one reason why I have no hope.
This did e.g. work when national mandatory vaccination against Coivd-19 was averted in the last moment.
But obviously Russians are more dangerous than any killer virus or germ…
Re: Palmer Luckey talking nonsense about smoking and health:
From 2024:
[Luckey] said in another interview that what he’s doing now might kill him.
“It’s very, very unhealthy, and it’s very corrosive,” he told me as we sat in his living room, beneath the giant aquarium, surrounded by the sounds of painters and builders modding his house in preparation for the arrival of his first child.
“Even positive forms of stress that lead to good outcomes for your company can still have a negative impact on your health, your spiritual well-being, your psychological well-being,” he said. “The way that I am running my business and that I’m managing my own time is not designed to be self-sustainable or psychologically positive for me. I’m not going to be one of those people who’s like, ’Oh, no, it’s totally fine to wake up with your fist clenched and your teeth grit every morning, stewing on the people who wronged you a decade ago, and applying that to being motivated today.’ That is not a good way to live. But it’s very, very effective. And so, I’ve just decided that I’m going to take that trade, at least for now.”
“At some point, I’m going to be all used up. This can’t last forever. I cannot survive my whole life like this. But, right now, it’s what my company needs, and I think it’s what my country needs. So, I’m able to put up with it for now, and I’ll probably just have a few extra wrinkles, and I’ll look back on it, and be glad that I did it.”
I don’t think I need any advice from him.
Side note: he also describes himself in that interview as “a radical Zionist”. He’s not even Jewish; he was homeschooled in a Christian household iirc.
I’ve interacted with him in a professional capacity a few times over the years. He’s a bombastic moron. He was a ‘teenage genius’ (please note those scare quotes!) and is great at making stupid older investor and executive types feel like they have a direct line to a young gun who can make them a lot of money. He is erratic and does not take guidance and so he has burned a huge number of people who now refuse to have anything to do with him. He is one of the worst products of Silicon Valley post-GFC culture that I can think of. I have a fervent hope he will experience a profoundly embarrassing fall from power/wealth but so far he seems to be a living example of nominative determinism.
He is one of the worst products of Silicon Valley post-GFC culture that I can think of.
Not unlike many of the products of Founders Fund.
https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/
Sounds kinda like RW SBF!
I dunno. Caffeine, Nicotine, and Dexedrine. When they were considered the Holy Trinity of food groups we ruled the World. Today, not so much. I’ve done them all, quit them all, and miss them all.
My pop was a WW2 vet who used the skills he learned as an Army quartermaster in New Guinea and the Philippines to start a small business that sustained our family for over 40 years. He smoked 3 packs of unfiltered Pall Malls every day for 50 years and died in his sleep at 92. The Greatest Generation.
So re the praise of nicotine…why not nicotine gum?
I know a lot of tech people who take nicotine for performance/nootropic reasons and they all like transdermal patches. apparently it gives crazy dreams if they put them on before bed? Lots of discussion/comparison on dosage for specific effects.
My cynical voice is torn between:
Luckey is an idiot (as RJ well describes above)
Luckey or someone he wants to curry favour with had tobacco investments
re: EU and free press
German NACHDENKSEITEN
use google-translate
Made invisible – How the EU silences critical media
The EU doesn’t have a censorship ministry. It doesn’t need one anymore. The work is now done by algorithms, compliance departments, and laws that sound so innocuous that it’s hard to believe how deeply they interfere with public life. Anyone who runs an inconvenient website today won’t notice this change immediately. There are no house searches, no bans, no court orders. Instead, the number of hits drops.
By Günther Burbach
https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=140914
p.s. of course serious law enforcement is all over the place to intimidate if they have no other means. But the invisibility is indeed one of the most dangerous aspects regarding the general population. They go on demonstrations in the millions against an AfD but have no clue their entire news environment is censored and white-washed.
Riding the AI train
Meta lays off 600 employees within AI unit (CNBC)
A sign of the times? (NY Times Mag, paywalled, works w/ JavaScript disabled in browser though)
‘I’m on Fire’: Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — and Then Some
It seems everyone is getting high on something in the 2020s?
America is a civilization adrift with no moral compass or purpose. Elite self gratification is just the most extreme example of this.
Wow. I think that once the word gets out, a lot of women are going to try this; not feeling miserable sounds really appealing. This item wouldn’t count as elite gratification since testosterone is not expensive and this could be afforded by most women; it sounds more like a survival tactic in a messed up world (as a way of earning more). One that could have terrible health consequences, but so does not wearing an N95 and that’s most people.
Man, the translations of Jin Canrong by Jan Brughmans on the Sinification blog are some clumsy orientalist stuff. It really does underline once again the disciplinary origins of PoliSci/IR in global white hegemony (see Robert Vitalis White World Order, Black Power Politics for a description of that history).
Jin’s characterization of the West in terms of what Brughmans awkwardly translates as “piratical cultural genes” obviously refers to the Brits and is almost certainly referencing the work of Carl Schmitt (see for instance the 1937 essay “The Concept of Piracy”), who was deeply critical of the role that piracy had played in the establishment of Britain’s global maritime empire and the terms of international law. Schmitt’s criticisms of the historical links between international law and liberal imperialism have been discussed widely in China.
The term 基因 in the phrase 海盗文化基因 (Brughman’s “piratical cultural genes”) is of course the Chinese term for “genes” but in contemporary Chinese parlance (including both China and Taiwan), the term, which is used on a daily basis, has nothing to do with genetics as a science. Rather, it is part of the reigning cultural essentialism/civilizationism that dominates pan-Chinese popular discussions about globalization and cultural difference. As such, it doesn’t refer to genes but to a deterministic “origin” and is regularly used in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with genetics.
One might have reflected on the popularity of this usage of the term and concluded that it reveals the extent to which the Social Darwinism that Jin ascribes to the West is also something of a global Zeitgeist. In that sense, Jin’s use of the term is on exactly the same level as Dan Wang’s wildly popular, extremely reductive characterization of US-PRC relations as “lawyers vs. engineers.” Like most people today, Chinese, too, are highly sensitive to the cultural essentialism of the reigning episteme. Rather than try to figure out a non-essentialist approach, they, too, basically accept the essentialist framework and try to figure out how to survive within it. In that sense, Chinese aren’t as alarmingly exceptional as the orientalist translation makes them look.
A less orientalist translation would be something like “inveterately piratical culture”. If one were to insist on reflecting the presence of the term 基因 in the original, it would be better to translate it as “genetically piratical culture,” a formulation that points more to the meaning of “genetic” in the sense of origin.
And that’s only one example of the poor translational choices that abound in Brughman’s rendition…
The fact that the world as a whole seems to run on the fumes of expended 19th century epistemes would be an interesting topic for discussion and debate. Sadly the folks over at Sinification seem more interested in a typical orientalist approach that makes it seem like China is on another planet, totally disconnected from the West.
>DHS Spends $172M on 2 Private Jets for Noem, Officials Amid Shutdown
What happened to the planes that Biden and Trump stole from Maduro? If they still exist, Noem could use them instead of buying new ones.
What happened to Jeffry Epstein’s “Lolita Express?” That would be perfect for the Noem/Lewandowski “power couple.”
The present day American power elites seem to be reproducing the murky moral morass that was the UK Empire’s aristocrats’ lifestyle.
At this point, I’m going long guillotine futures.
re: Zitron on Anthropic/Anysphere AWS costs
This is my first time forcing myself through an entire Zitron piece so I apologize if I come across salty, the man needs to learn how to do summaries and reduce his back-patting. I work in the industry and while I accept his basic premise (costs are out of control and most of them are going to AWS), many of his assumptions and guesses are probably not correct (and to his credit he says repeatedly many assumptions are just that). Take this for example:
Cursor is built with a hybrid application structure that moves significant amounts of its application into the server-side processing. For things like embedded code completions, RAG retrieval, rule and guide assessments, etc, these functions are probably not using Anthropic (or any other frontier model) because it’s too time consuming to traverse the network and the actual output will be poor because for those functions you want a model that is designed to be less chatty than Anthropic’s Claude series. For example, for Cursor’s autocompletion feature, it uses a model it developed:
Model development is expensive, even for small custom behavior models. If they have other custom models for other features it could explain more of their AWS spend than just shoveling it to Anthropic. Cursor supports many models. They also support customers using their own API keys! That means they won’t be hitting Cursor’s own Anthropic endpoints and contributing to that spend! And real business customers will tend to use that because they can negotiate better prices directly than what Cursor will charge them for the monthly overages. So Anthropic’s cost increases play a part, sure, but it’s not the whole story.
There are many more examples like this in his piece but I’ll stop there. Again, let me emphasize, I do not disagree with the basic premise of his piece. However I think he is way out over his skis with his assumptions and extrapolating those assumptions to their conclusion. I think this is also playing into the ‘AI bubble Minsky moment imminent any day now’ heavy breathing ongoing as well.
ISTM that the Izzies need to adapt their PR strategy by adopting what Nixon called a “Modified limited hangout’.
Start calling Gaza the “Most moral Genocide in the history of the World, being performed ( Not committed, performed) by the most moral army in the World.”
It’s totally justified by a very old, very holy book which means it is absolutely Okey Dokey.
There is something morbidly funny about “most moral army” bit. I read sonewhere that Himmler was a real straitlaced moralist, in a manner of speaking, and insisted on a very strict standard of ethical behavior from the SS…and even the mass murders they conducted were warped via a peculiar “morality” lens.
It’s amusing to see the US/EU establishment, which is now presiding over a gigantic house of cards teetering on the brink of recession while 1% of the population continues to run away with society’s wealth, criticizing China for its economic arrangements.
Most of the complaints here seem to revolve around the fact that China does not have the same elite-favored arrangements that the West does. E. g.:
Certainly the thing that has Western car makers in a tizzy is not “too much stuff.” Western new car markets are collapsing because of the skyrocketing cost of new cars in the West, and the stagnant wages of workers who must take on more debt than they can afford if they want to be able to drive to work. One would think a new stream of low-cost, climate friendly cars entering the West would be just what the doctor ordered, and an economic system capable of producing such a thing should be applauded and emulated. But, apparently it would produce “economic injury” instead.
(Also interesting to see Western critics complaining about the “speed and scale” of manufacturing operations in China. I think most business schools teach those as excellent attributes for a business to have, but apparently we will have to revise the curriculum!)
Lovely post on working cats! Seems to me, the decline in store cats likely led to the current rat problems in cities. I bet Istanbul doesn’t have a rodent problem.
There are times when I am queasy with Greenwald (when I seek to find his central core). I adhere with his views on Israel in general though here he expands. The basis can seem to diverge on left – right framing but, thinking of paraphrasing Lenin, there are useful idiots. No, I’m not so mean. But others are.
Tucker Carlson Speaks at Turning Point, Prompting Cheers and Controversy; More Evidence of Israeli Atrocities Amid Fragile Ceasefire; Tommy Robinson Submits to Re-Education in Israel | SYSTEM UPDATE #536
Scheerpost asking for donations.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/10/03/help-a-note-of-desperation-from-scheerposts-editor-and-publisher/
Apparently several readers among those who cared to comment or cast a vote are not content with their comments section among other things.
See readers´ comments under the link for more. I found the reactions interesting, not aware of the issues.
Chess:
Ex-world champion bullies top player/streamer into suicide. I’ve followed this cheating story and Kramnik’s derangement for two years.
Nihal Sarin on Daniel Naroditsky’s death: ‘He (Vladimir Kramnik) has kind of literally taken a life’ (Indian Express)
Hikaru Nakamura was the only top player to forcefully push back on Kramnik’s nonsense over the past two years. Here’s his response to Danya’s death.
Family-blog] FIDE president makes things worse:
Fide to investigate Kramnik over attacks on Naroditsky as chess reels from player’s death (Guardian)
[Family-blog] FIDE president makes things worse:
Sutovsky’s own attempt at reflection soon plunged the governing body into deeper controversy. In a lengthy post on X, he wrote that while Kramnik’s behavior was “appalling and outright shameful”, he also questioned whether Naroditsky’s friends had done enough to help him in recent months. “Amount of love given to Danya post-mortem is unprecedented,” he wrote. “But here is the problem – where all of you were when Danya was alive and unwell?” He went on to say that “virtue signalling and like-grabbing is the worst way to pay respect to Danya,” adding that Naroditsky “was kind to many, but it feels like most of the time he was lonely”.
Chess followers know Sutovsky is a real piece of work. Kramnik had respect as a great player, but should have been called out more a long time ago.