Ears of a Caracal cat
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 29, 2025
7 basic science discoveries that changed the world Nature
Philosophy of Absurdism 3 Quarks Daily
Google to bring shuttered nuclear power plant back from the dead TechCrunch
‘Germany Is Back’ – and That Should Scare Us All Zeteo
COVID-19/Pandemics
How the flu, COVID-19, and common viruses could raise your risk of heart attack and stroke Euronews
The bat paradox: what nature’s night flyers could teach us about pandemics – and ourselves VaccinesWork
Climate/Environment
Climate change is becoming an insurance crisis The Conversation
Climate change inaction being paid for in millions of lives every year, global findings suggest Phys.org
South of the Border
Jamaicans take stock after hurricane causes damage, flooding and power cuts BBC
Trump’s feud with Colombian leader threatens U.S. antidrug efforts WLRN South Florida
Mexico rescues lone survivor of US strikes on alleged drug boats that killed 14 Mexico News Daily
‘A colony of the US’: Argentinians contemplate future after Trump-backed Milei coasts to victory The Guardian
China?
Like or not, China has lifted more than 100 million people out of poverty in the past 12 years.
They did it by building vast infrastructure, affordable homes, and access to education and equality of opportunity
Not through War, hegemony and division. pic.twitter.com/dZGAjeSl7g
— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) October 28, 2025
China and ASEAN, hit by US tariffs, sign upgraded free trade pact ReutersTrump ‘losing’ trade war with China going in to Xi meeting, Senate Democrats say in report CNBC
Cheap Goods To Confidence Deficit: Inside China’s Economic Slowdown WORLDCRUNCH
India
India to dethrone US for dev numbers as AI reshapes coding, says GitHub The Register
India’s Major Cities Face Risks as Groundwater Depletion Leads to Land Subsidence Bioengineer.org
How India’s new gaming law is rewriting the rules of online play Tech Funding News
Africa
Is Africa the West’s ‘Human Dumping Ground’? Al Jazeera
Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa Nature
Ethiopia cuts foreign debt by 80%, declares ‘growth without loans’ Business Insider Africa
European Disunion
Can Europe’s farmers save the water cycle? Euronews
Europe’s democratic strain is a crisis of governance, not borders European Council on Foreign Relations
Europe Is at Donald Trump’s Mercy. It Has Itself to Blame. The Nation
Old Blighty
Pound Slides Amid UK Fiscal Concerns RTT News
Government doubles down on green ambition as it unveils new UK climate plan The Independent
Israel v. Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran
🚨HEARTBREAKING: A Palestinian father cries as he mourns the killing of his young daughter after an Israeli airstrike hit their home in Gaza City moments ago. pic.twitter.com/PnuSZemB3F
— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) October 28, 2025
UN chief ‘strongly condemns’ recent deadly Israeli airstrikes in Gaza Andolu AgencyIsrael resumes Gaza ceasefire after 104 Palestinians killed in airstrikes Axios
Revealed: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders The Guardian
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin tests nuclear submarine torpedo capable of causing ‘radioactive tsunami’ The Independent
Pentagon scales back troops from NATO eastern flank, denies American withdrawal from Europe Fox News
Russia Aims to Freeze Ukraine Into Submission Foreign Policy
Russian Forces Finally Break Through Into Key Eastern Ukrainian Stronghold The War Zone
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Are Americans privacy nihilists? Ipsos
Social media privacy in 2025: what you need to know Kaspersky Daily
Imperial Collapse Watch
For the Homeless, Finding a Place to Live Is Only Part of the Problem Racket
NYPD: Raid on Staten Island nets fentanyl, ‘MAGA’-stamped heroin; 4 arrested si live.com
When SNAP benefits run out, ‘people can die,’ say health experts STAT 10
Trump 2.0
Portland says ‘manufactured crisis’ spurred Trump’s National Guard bid as trial begins The Hill
The White House ballroom saga could be worse for Trump than he realizes CNN
Trump fires federal arts board in charge of reviewing White House ballroom and ‘Arc de Trump’ The Guardian
Musk Matters
Why Elon Musk could leave Tesla, and why it might actually happen The Street
How Elon Musk and JD Vance plan to ‘save civilization’ with more babies NPR
Grokipedia vs. Wikipedia: See how Elon Musk’s encyclopedia describes 5 hot-button topics Business Insider
Democrat Death Watch
What Karine Jean-Pierre’s disastrous book tour exposes about Biden loyalism MSNBC
A lot of Americans think the Democratic Party is out of touch Tri-State Alert
Immigration
Did the U.S. Supreme Court lift restrictions on immigration stops based on race or ethnicity? El Paso Matters
DHS ends automatic extensions of immigrant work permits HR Dive
New Polling Memo: Five Key Points on Americans’ Current Immigration Views America’s Voice
Our No Longer Free Press
Press freedom debate intensifies after Pentagon and collegiate-level crackdowns FSU News
Younger Americans Less Concerned About Political Violence and Free Speech Threats: AP-NORC Poll First Amendment Watch
Mr. Market Is Moody
China Targets Iron Ore in Its Fight to Dethrone the Dollar Oil Price
Consumers Expect Inflation To Get Worse, Even As Fed Cuts Rates Investopedia
TREASURIES-US yields advance after Fed’s Powell pushes back on December rate cut Market Screener
AI
This ‘impressive’ AI model predicted Hurricane Melissa’s perilous growth Nature
Foxconn to put Nvidia’s humanoid robots to work at Texas factory Cryptopolitan
Nvidia hits record $5 trillion mark as CEO dismisses AI bubble concerns Ars Technica
Dame Emma Thompson gives the ‘AI revolution’ both barrels The Register
The Bezzle
New report reveals “staggering and heartbreaking” trend among scam victims WRTV Indianapolis
Musk’s company just cut off internet to thousands of scammers who stole billions from Americans Mass Live
Guillotine Watch
This is the most valuable baseball card, the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card. It sold for a record-breaking $12.6 million in 2022. pic.twitter.com/eELc2a2Ce7
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) December 28, 2023
Shohei Ohtani’s 50/50 home run ball sold for $4.39 million.
Its the most expensive baseball of all time pic.twitter.com/PP2EORqglT
— Baseball Quotes (@BaseballQuotes1) October 23, 2024
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
Taibbi’s latest, public excerpt:
Bill Gates Says We’ll Survive Climate Change, World Furious
In the panic age, nothing offends like optimism
https://www.racket.news/p/bill-gates-says-well-survive-climate
This simply proves Lambert’s saying, “The optimists will kill us all.”
The “we” he means is not the masses. More will die of heat exposure and floods, even before getting to climate effects on food supply and viablity of existing built environments, which will soon include large cities.
I’m sure that what Bill Gates meant to say is that ‘He’ll Survive Climate Change’. It’s good to be a billionaire.
Which leads to the last bit,
The Microsoft titan will go down in history as God’s own proof that no amount of money can buy likeability:.
These days I can never look at him without thinking that here is a man that ran after Jeffrey Epstein to be his best buddy and get in on the goodies that Jeff offered. That picture can never be wiped away.
He’s always talking his book. He needs large, gigantic, electricity-energy consuming data centers to be built for his AI projects. Suddenly, his prior climate talk is now a ‘never mind’. / ;)
I think Taibbi misspelled “Opportunist”. Nothing offends like an opportunist to me. Mr. Gates is kowtowing to Trump like all the oligarchs.
In the SouthWest we are not coping. My family is complaining about this extended summer. The temperatures have been 10 to 15 degrees above normal for the last three weeks, which is new for me and it is costing us in electricity bills. I guess Mr. Gates can afford his electricity so the Climate Emergency is no big deal.
My husbands question; When will we start a boycott of Big Tech?
He could start it today by taking a hammer to his cell phone. Stop ordering from Amazon. Stop using social media. Don’t wait around for someone else to tell you when the boycott starts, start it.
I feel like whatever good Taibbi does now is overshadowed by dreck like this.
I’d like to think the Taibbi of old wouldn’t have given something like this the time of day. It’s like asking Tom Brady the best way to perform open heart surgery in a war zone.
“What Karine Jean-Pierre’s disastrous book tour exposes about Biden loyalism’
I, for one, very much look forward to seeing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt come out with her book after leaving the White House in several years time and, like Karine Jean-Pierre, trying to defend the indefensible. Can you imagine the treatment that she will receive from the press whom she presently insults and treats like dog food? It’s gunna be a blast.
She was more like a LBGQT queen from a woke scene
Who said, “Don’t mind, but what do you mean, I am the one
Who will dance on the press floor in the round?”
She said I am the one
Who will dance on the press floor in the round
She told me her name was Karine Jean as she caused a scene
Then every head turned with eyes that dreamed of asking of bein’ the one
Who will dance on the press floor in the round
People always told me, “Be careful of what you do
Don’t go around breakin’ liberals hearts (hee-hee)
And the DNC always told me, “Be careful of who you diss
And be careful of what you do (oh-oh)
‘Cause the lie becomes the truth” (oh-oh), hey-ey
Karine Jean is not coherent
She’s just a girl who claims that Joe is still the one (oh, baby)
But his kid is not my responsibility (hoo)
She says Joe is the one (oh, baby)
But his kid is not my responsibility (hee-hee-hee, no-no, hee-hee-hee, hoo)
For 940 days and for 940 nights, Joe was on her side
But who can stand when she’s in demand? Her schemes and plans
‘Cause she danced on the press floor in the round (hee)
So take my strong advice
Just remember before you misspeak to always think twice
(Do think twice) do think twice (ah-hoo)
She said oh whoopsie! then she looked at me
Then showed a photo of Joe, ’80 is the new 40!’, his eyes were like mine (oh, no)
Go and dance on the press floor in the round, baby (ooh, hee-hee-hee)
Billie Jean, by Michael Jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr4EQDVETuA&list=RDKr4EQDVETuA
Well, that is the sweetest bunny I’ve ever seen. A brief respite from the daily menace.
Nothing like a wascally wabbit to set you up for the day. That white coat on him seems very thick so maybe going into or coming out of winter?
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
White Rabbit, Grace Slick
The White Rabbit! Follow him down the Rabbit Hole!
The patron saint of conspiracy theorists everywhere!
“One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all.”
Hear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJM_jC7j_4
Hard to imagine the Maestro will be 100 in March…
One bubble makes your assets larger
And low interest rates makes your savings small
And the ones that Greenspan gave us
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alan
When the dominoes fall
And if you go chasing bubbles
And you know they’re going to blow
Tell ’em a put stroking nonagenarian
Has given you the dough
Call Alan
When the market goes into a flat-spin low
When the men on the Fed board
Get up in Jackson Hole
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alan
I think he’ll know
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwardation
And Dow Jonestown agrees “full speed ahead!”
Remember what Ayn’s acolyte said:
“Heed the Fed. Heed the Fed”
White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane
Nice, thanks.
A perfectly respectable rabbit, but the ears of the caracal cat are sublime.
It looks like Puerto Rican Bad Bunny to me. :)
So Trump basically got skunked at the Korea summit by Xi.
Soybeans have already been harvested and it’s too late for China to buy this season. Contracts to sell to other buyers are in place. Promises to buy next year are empty. As far as “rare erfs” the state of play is only back to what it was in August, before China threatened to cut them off. The sword of Damocles hangs over Trump as the can was kicked but next year it bounces into a sewer grate. In exchange Taco dropped the tariffs on China to a lower number.
Of course the press will portray this as a glorious victory. I hate this timeline.
I wouldn’t really worry about it if I were you. From what you say in your comment, Trump will run into the brick wall of reality next year and it will not matter what the stenographers, errr, members of the press will say, he will find himself more boxed in than ever. And of more serious concern to him, the midterms will be looming up when he has to deal with all this. Just don’t forget to lay in a box of popcorn at that time.
Apparently, the issue of Russian oil was never even mentioned.
So much for Lindsey Graham’s “bone crushing sanctions.” Both India and China did the “Dikembe Mutombo” on Trump – a reference to the powerful NBA center who used to slap the ball away when shorter players tried to do a layup. Rejected! (Marv Alpert voice.)
The stenographers bother me more than the spectacle of Trump’s flailing around.
Don’t forget the affectionate finger wag!
You might get a kick out of this old image-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/tm4tqj/in_2003_micah_ian_wright_published_an_antiwar/
Down here I have long given up on the media. The other night they were talking about the war in the Ukraine so the news presenter had on and interviewed an expert – a guy from the Atlantic Council. Gawd!
lay in a box of popcorn
You mean a TEU, right?
Yes, a TEU, it’ll be a SNAP!
…der TEU-ful is in the details
The Caracal Cat is at the center of an episode of th Finnish crime series from Rovaniemi. Both the episode and the series are recommended.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34762643/?ref_=ttep_ep_4
Its been fascinating to watch the baseball card bubble going on, and much of it stems from the mania of grading-and the company that does it: PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) which is owned by PCGS (Professional Coin Grading Service).
PCGS (along with NGC) revolutionized the coin biz in the mid 80’s by offering 3rd party grading of coins for a fee-which were sealed in a tamper proof plastic holder, and quickly became the industry standard, whereas before… everybody graded their own coins, and typically not in a MS (Mint State) 1-70 scale, it was more wordy, such as choice uncirculated or gem uncirculated.
Much of the value of rarer coins is the condition, and on a given coin the difference in value could be immense from MS 63 to MS 64, so it wasn’t uncommon to submit a coin that warranted it, maybe 5-10 times, hoping to get the higher grade, because when you got right down to it, grading was subjective-as are humans.
PSA has done the same with baseball cards, for a $20 fee they’ll grade your card and seal in a tamper proof holder, and its a scale of 1-10, 10 being perfect.
You can buy a PSA-7 of the Mickey Mantle card for $246k, that doesn’t look all that different from the $12.6 million PSA-10 on display for Guillotine Watch, that’s the nuttiness of it all.
It wasn’t uncommon to have on the back of a baseball card circa 1969 (and hopefully not my nemesis in redundancy: Dick Dietz-who seemed to show up in every pack of cards I bought and opened up) what the player did for an occupation in the off-season.
Our local hometown MLB player was Andy Etchebarren, who was the catcher for Baltimore in the 60’s and 70’s winning a couple World Series along with being the last batter to face Sandy Koufax, and he opened Etchebarren’s Liquor-and forget about buying booze from Andy if you were underage, everybody knew that Mickey’s on Valley Blvd would sell to anybody-I once scored a sixer while wearing roller skates @ 17.
But I digress, everything was so innocent then, Dick Dietz ended up making clickity clackity sounds when fastened to the spokes of my bicycle wheels, and like every other boy who collects baseball cards for a few years and then lost interest, no doubt the cards ended up in a trash bin. At a Dime a pack, which included the world’s worst bubble gum-it wasn’t exactly heavy lifting.
I hate to harp on poor old Dick Dietz, but his ho hum card from 1971 in PSA-9 fetched $348 at auction recently, while a PSA-8 of the same card only made it to $30, and a PSA-7 was worth but $14.
there is also VHS-grading. lmao. tòo much liquidity in certain cohorts, chasing too few collectibles.
https://www.cgchomevideo.com/en-US
Wow. the ‘film library’ my brother-in-law had that included around 462 VHS tapes, that was his pride and joy before the turn of the century, might be worth a little scratch…
CGC is owned by NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Company) the other 3rd party coin grading service mentioned above. What an odd niche.
When do you think will ANACS join the “grading collectible crap” game?
Maybe they’ll grade old Nat Geo mags…
Ah, the original grading & authentication service!
Celebrity belly button lint would be hard to grade and certify, how would you tell Jennifer Lawrence’s from Stephen Miller’s
I think I still might have an ancient ANACS slab or two in the SDB. Haven’t looked in a long time.
Belly button lint sounds ideal. Include a fingerprint of the celebrity for authentication. Someone needs to send a proposal to a Silicon Valley VC. They throw money at anything that breathes.
Describing a mass-printed photo on a rectangle of cheap cardboard as a “stunning piece” is a wee bit of a stretch. I like the Mick and all, but his baseball card isn’t exactly the David.
I used to spend most of my lawnmowing money on baseball cards and amassed a collection of hundreds of thousands by opening one pack at a time. By the early 80s I was trying to take decent care of them because prices started skyrocketing, especially for older cards. Of course the older card prices spiked because people threw them out. That had stopped by the 80s. Just took a look at the price of Roger Clemens Topps rookie cards, and while I did see some highly graded cards for over $100, most were in the $20-30 range. Pretty sure you could get more than that back in 1989 – and they aren’t all that scarce. The prize of my collection was a Carl Yastrzemski rookie card, and its price hasn’t gone up that much either over the last few decades.
Cards used to come with bubble gum which was pretty hard and crusty. I didn’t much care for it, but I collected it and sold it to my unsuspecting little sister and used the proceeds for more baseball cards. But the gum would stain one card in every pack, which reduced the value of any card it touched – the horror, the horror… – so they discontinued the gum. That’s about when I lost interest in the hobby. I still have my collection though, if the mice haven’t managed to chew through the plastic tubs in my parents’ attic yet.
all about scarcity.
40 years ago, seemingly every third respectable English household had a Ming vase or other form of porcelain, before the bottom fell out of that bubble in the early 90s credit crunch and change of generational tastes. (low-end Ming vases are relatively abundant).
A genuine pencil sketch by Picasso is within reach for any motivated American in the top 20%.
Which is why supply of all the high-end stuff is gate-kept by galleries or foundations (see Andy Warhol’s foundation), a bit like DeBeers, lmao.
High-end collectibles is like a form of “egregore”—it’s worth something because everyone says it is—even if it has no/little functional value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain reckoned he saw enough pieces of the true cross scattered around the churches he visited in Europe in the late 1860’s, to make up a few dozen crosses, religious relics being the bees knees.
Now its all about reverential irreligious relics…
Around the 15th inning of the 3rd World Series game, the announcer mentioned they had gone through 220 out of 290 official MLB baseballs prepared for the game-each of which look no different than the $4.39 million Ohtani 50/50 ball.
And while i’m at it, what is this fetish by the umpires of 86’ing any baseball that deigns to get down & dirty?
Before 1920 the same baseball would be used until it was lost, no matter how brown it got. On average there were maybe ten balls used per game.
During the 1919/1920 offseason the owners decided they wanted more offense in the game. (It may not be a coincidence that this happened in the immediate aftermath of the Black Sox world series, though the story hadn’t fully blown up in the press yet.) Criticism had also developed over time that pitchers had abandoned pitches like the change-of-pace and the curve ball in favor of “freak pitches”–spitting on the ball, filing it with an emery board, rubbing it with vaseline, etc. Freak pitches were banned for the 1920 season and the umpires were directed to remove any ball that was scuffed or dirty.
Which latter part didn’t really happen, at first, because the owners didn’t like wasting all that money on baseballs. But then Ray Chapman (a big star at the time and likely hall-of-famer) was hit in the head by a pitch, frozen in the batters box like he’d never seen it according to an eyewitness, and died the next day of a broken skull.
“We mean it” the umpires were then told.
Over time the interpretation of “scuffed” became more and more strict and sometime in the last 25 years or so we reached the point where the ball was presumed scuffed if it had touched the ground.
This all makes it sound like safety was the primary consideration, but if it were we probably wouldn’t have had to wait 30+ years for the batting helmet to be mandatory. It’s lot easier to a hit a ball you can see, and fans liked watching Babe Ruth hit 60 homers a lot more than they liked watching Home Run Baker hit 10. And owners liked what fans would pay for.
The Umpires are no longer prepared to let the ball slide. It’s a sort of slight of hand.
I cant be the only one thinking that the balls that get tossed are being recycled before our very eyes, that being my conspiracy theory.
Potemkin Hardball
Israel/Sparta
I stopped reading right about here…
Dead Israelis rarely move the world; wounded Palestinians dominate its conscience. News coverage amplified Palestinian suffering, often without verification, feeding the now-familiar accusation of “genocide.” Media monitors helplessly whine about the coverage.
Privacy nihilists?
The tech bros “not breaking any laws” with nimbus took our privacy away, privacy the federalist society said you didnt have…well i did used to have it, you couldnt tap a land line without due process. Whats next?
What’s next? How about tying your access to your bank accounts to your Social Credit Score? It was beta tested during the Toronto Trucker’s Strike.
In this instance getting covid was a good thing. Can you imagine?
I was prescribed trazodone for sleep perhaps 5 years ago… insomnia became a thing after we lost our daughter to a drunk driver, 5 years of grueling IP litigation (we won, but the business was trashed), my wife’s breat cancer, ad infinitum.
Slowly I began having atrial fibrillations. Gradually they became more frequent. This summer it was nearly disabling. I’m 71, had been running 5k most days, XC in winter, etc. So in December I got a Holter and it showed afib the GP scoffed at my home device). Then I got a cardiologist and electrophysiologist referral. Got scheduled for an ablation on November 13 to “fix” the problem. .
We escaped COVID for 5.5 years, mainly with masking in crowds. While visiting my brother in Fairbanks, we went to a museum, but forgot our masks! 2 days later positive test. So I got a paxlovid prescription. Trazodone is contraindicated. The AFIB stopped the next day! That was 8 weeks ago.
So i got the another Holter in October. Results yesterday. Not a single episode of AFIB, which was expected. Obviously I cancel the November 13 ablation. I’ll have to consult with the cardiologist for interpretation (assuming they even give me an appointment). WTF. I have had this problem for YEARS. The GP, cardiologist and 2 electrophysiologists all knew I was on trazodone (prescribed for sleep). Afib has been a documented side effect of trazodone at least since 1983. Not a single provider suggested I stop trazodone.
If I hadn’t gotten COVID and requested paxlovid AND trazodone was contraindicated, I’d have never known! I called multiple times in July and August to get on cancelation list. I have learned an important lesson.
ad infinitum
Oh Holy Cow, you’re not kidding.
Hang in there.
And I thought my recent bad experiences with medical care were unique! Is it Syracuse or everywhere nowadays?
But what a relief to be without Afib…
“Dame Emma Thompson gives the ‘AI revolution’ both barrels”
Can you imagine if there was Copilot years ago as George R.R. Martin was finishing his first novel “A Song of Ice and Fire” and just after he finished, Copilot asked ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’ – and a very tired Martin accidentally agreed?
‘A colony of the US’: Argentinians contemplate future after Trump-backed Milei coasts to victory The Guardian
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We’ve been there before, the Argentine Peso was linked on a 1–1 basis with the almighty buck, which lasted from 1992 to 2002, and then things went awry in hyperinflationary tango, now @ 1,437 Pesos to the $.
Seems to me Argentina has been in one crisis after another since the days of Juan Peron in the 1940s or is my memory showing its age?
Argentina has been a financial sinkhole since the late 70’s.
I never did biz in South America in the early 80’s, as although opportunities were ripe with eager sellers wanting Yanqui $, getting anything through customs was problematic, whereas it was never an issue in Europe, Asia & Australasia going back and forth with aged discs.
I knew a numismatist who circa 1982 would go to Argentina and book a hotel room in a nice place in Buenos Aries at a set rate, and stay there 30-45 days, and by the end of his stay the rate in $ was 1/3rd to 1/2 of what it was when he booked the room!
They changed the name of their national currency 3 or 4 times in the 1980’s, with each new currency being worth 1,000 or 10,000 of the prior currency.
Its a different basket case than Venezuela, but they’ve endured the unendurable for over 4 decades now.
“How Elon Musk and JD Vance plan to ‘save civilization’ with more babies”
When you are a billionaire or a powerful person, finding willing partners to have your babies is not so hard. But it is what come afterwards that matters. I do not know about Vance as a father but I know that Musk’s kids only find out that they have another sibling by reading social media. Definitely not Father of the Year material but if you are going to be a father, you have to be there for your kids – all of them.
Sperm donors also have a plan to ‘save civilization’ with more babies.
It peeves me that an average healthy male has upwards of 100 million spermatozoa and so many go to waste, in baby batter bingo.
How very surprising! It can’t be that the people that they are concerned about having to many / to few kids have certain skin colors, and this can’t be rather obvious when it comes from the heiling billionaire!
By the way globally we, as in humanity, isn’t decreasing in numbers.
Wikipedia
Which means the population is still growing as larger younger generations replace smaller older generations. It just means that todays women has about as many children as their generation. But the average hue is not pale enough for the heiling billionaire. And yeah, Father of the Year, he isn’t.
Re YouGov on Trump’s sinking approvals–perhaps this is the reason that during his current tour he told reporters he was just kidding about another term. Here’s suggesting that Trump is afraid of low approval ratings. After all the objecting public might elect a Dem Congress that would investigate all the dirty deals enriching his family. Then there’s that Epstein thing still waiting to be fully explored.
Humanoid robots? What is the point? Why do this? I am entirely unable to explain this except as a performance to make people look bad.
We have machines that assemble, sort, and move things, for instance. Used to be the promise was machines were task built and therefore better than humans, who are wobbling around on two legs and have only two puny arms.
Other problems, explained well.
Saw a video not to long ago promoting humanoid robots to sort mail by using their robot legs to walk from one place to another carring small bundles of mail in their robot arms. Insanity. We already automated sorting systems that are vastly more efficient, and probably cheaper and easier to maintain, than humanoid robots.
It rhymes with the LLM -> AGI bs. A large enough fraction of the investing / ‘decider’ class grew up reading ’50s ~ ’60s sci-fi, and only comprehended the surface of the stories. Robots! AI! Spaceships! Aliens! (hmm, that last one is still mia.)
This Why today’s humanoids won’t learn dexterity is a longish, thorough debunking of the humanoid robot mania from Rodney Brooks, one of the pioneers in the field. Among other reasons, he points out that the prior two successful ‘AI’ paradigms (LLMs and generative images) started from a base ‘knowledge’ of how humans preprocess the raw real-world inputs into machine understandable data. For LLMs, it’s trivial, computers have been processing words for decades. For images, cameras have also been converting the optical field into RGB and then running it through the FFT into jpegs. Touch, proprioperception and dexterity are fundamentally different. We’re still trying to figure out the details of how humans do those. So the computers have nothing to ‘learn’ from. Well worth the time.
Brooks also explains the rational behind the interest in humanoid robots. Basically, task specific robots have to be designed / engineered / built for each use case, *and* the operating environment has to also be built so the robots can operate safely. Both are expensive. The thinking behind humanoid robots is you build the robot once, and they can just ‘walk into’ the existing working spaces designed for human use. No new buildings, no new production lines needed.
Wishful thinking, but you asked what the point was.
Re: the source for “A lot of Americans think the Democratic Party is out of touch”
I wanted to confirm the three states in the source “Tri-State Alert” but the web site has no “About” section. Since I have relatives who live in the panhandle of Maryland, I’m familiar with Maryland, Pennsylvania and W Virginia being a “tri-state” area. But then so do parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York constitute another tri-state region, as do sections of PA, OH and WV.
I did find the following, which not only did NOT identify the three states in question, but also failed to inspire confidence in the site:
“The Tri-State Alert is a News Talk 103.7 FM publication. Any views or opinions expressed in this publication are of the host, guest, author or group and not the publication, owner(s), its advertisers, or affiliates.
AI technology assists in content creation on this site; verify independently for accuracy.”
Indeed.
Now, having failed in confirming the three states and but having actually read the linked story, I will assiduously avoid the Tri-State Alert from now on.
I am in 100% agreement that the “Democratic Party is out of touch” but that “news story” is a POS.
The punchline being “Democratic Party is out of touch” is news. File under a sarcastic No Kidding.
This assumes that the Democratic Party is even a viable political party anymore instead of a fundraising platform masquerading as a political organization at this point.
As long as the donor money flows, the DNC doesn’t really care if they win electorally or not, and this is part of the problem with them, as voters cannot really punish a political institution that simply shrugs its shoulders in the face of losing elections now that its entire purpose seems to be enriching itself from wealthy patrons.
Re: “Tri-State” — my concern was what seems to pass as a “news” web site and can’t even be bothered to specify which three state area it’s purporting to cover. Every minute of every day, we sink deeper into the rot.
‘Chay Bowes
@BowesChay
Like or not, China has lifted more than 100 million people out of poverty in the past 12 years.
They did it by building vast infrastructure, affordable homes, and access to education and equality of opportunity Not through War, hegemony and division.’
If you look through the comments, you will find a lot of sour grapes-
https://xcancel.com/BowesChay/status/1983207809131983252
And this is the same nation that a century ago would have carts go through the big cities after dawn to pick up the bodies of the dead paupers. Imagine if these Chinese priorities were Western priorities too. Yeah, I know. Dream on McDuff!
RE: Israel resumes Gaza ceasefire after 104 Palestinians killed in airstrikes
What a piece of garbage propaganda that Axios headline that is. Those 104 Palestinians are killed in the passive sense, leaving a flicker of doubt as to who might have done it. And no, you don’t “resume ceasefires” after murdering 100 people. There is no longer a ceasefire at that point. It’s like someone trying to claim they quit smoking in the hour between cigarettes.
Just disgusting they way our entire corporate media twists itself into knots trying to put lipstick on these genocidal pigs.
We need comedian Jeff Foxworthy to mock this sort of propaganda.
You might not be in a ceasefire if … your enemy reserves the right to attack and kill you any time they want and then claim it is still in a ceasefire as soon the gunsmoke dissipates.
You might not be in a ceasefire if … the other party is named “Israel” or “USA.”
“China and ASEAN, hit by US tariffs, sign upgraded free trade pact”
Apparently Trump blew off the significance of the ASEAN meeting as he did not consider it important for him or maybe he did not understand what it was. Nobody has ever accused Donald J. Trump of having too much curiosity. He showed up, had a formal dinner, met a few people but what was really on his mind was his meeting with Xi in South Korea. Meanwhile China just signed this trade deal with the ASEAN nations and thus increased their resiliency to a Trump attack down the track along with those ASEAN nations.
Question:
NC is my go-to “news and opinion aggregator.” it’s so good. You daily lead with climate change but I am wondering why resource depletion never (almost never?) appears here.
If we’re thinking about things that will radically and adversely affect our lives and the current world system, the likely order in terms of timing seems to be (i) financial collapse, (ii) resource depletion and (iii) climate change. The last is surely horrendous, and there is a lot of hopium that there’s still time to change the outcome (not sure about that, I suspect some tipping points have already been crossed given the accelerating pace of changes), but the devastating effects of the other two are going to hit us first.
Here are two recent good articles on resource depletion, and the probable coming shift to a “war economy” to support wars over remaining resources. In Spanish, but use the Google Translate option
“A dose of reality. How is it possible that nobody is saying anything about the future?”
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/un-bano-de-realidad-como-es-posible-que.html
“Target 2030-2035. Symbiosis between the war economy and the digitalization of the economy.”
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/objetivo-2035-simbiosis-entre-la.html
Today’s post at the same blog is a good primer:
“Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet”
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/crecimiento-infinito-en-un-planeta.html
Welcome.
Check over in the NC archives and section where topics are indexed by subject.
Thanks, Mikel!
“Trump fires federal arts board in charge of reviewing White House ballroom and ‘Arc de Trump’”
Same old Trump methodology. If people disagree with you, fire them and replace them with Yes men/woman. I suspect that nobody wants to be the person that brings Trump bad news as it would be very much a case of shoot the messenger. Trouble is, you wonder how much Trump is living in his own personal bubble because of this and only listens to what people tell him – or those people tell him stuff that they think that he wants to hear. Maybe that is why he sometimes says stuff that makes him sound outstandingly stupid.
He sounds outstandingly stupid because 99.9% of his grey matter is devoted to “what can I say to brag about myself?”
What to make of this?
Trump directs Pentagon to start testing nuclear weapons
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5580424-trump-directs-pentagon-to-start-testing-nuclear-weapons/
Is it a modern Sputnik moment for American elites?
Putin brandishes a new nuclear-powered missile as he digs in over Russia’s demands on Ukraine
https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-ukraine-nuclear-missile-trump-ukraine-1bde7246084003a9a20c873360ebeed5
Nuclear powered missiles and underwater drones with miniaturized nuclear reactors which provide power in seconds? That’s, ummm, pretty impressive.
The West is still stuck working on hypersonic missiles and re-learning how to make 155 rounds, and it’s preeminent weapon system, oligarchic billionaires wielding neoliberalism, is still fully deployed wrecking it’s middle class so what to do?
Russian Forces Finally Break Through Into Key Eastern Ukrainian Stronghold The War Zone
The same old tired narrative all over again. The Russians advancing “at a high cost in troops and equipment”. No mention of Ukrainian losses in troops, equipment, territory etc except may be some “problems holding territory and supply disruptions”. Tactical problems only? This indicates how little the media worries about Ukraine except as a tool against Russia while insisting on the heavy toll Russia has to pay more than once in the text. One day the Ukrainians will open their eyes and see. The Russians are indeed paying a toll but they are becoming more resolute every passing year. The narrative won’t stop them.
RE: New Polling Memo: Five Key Points on Americans’ Current Immigration Views
As with any polls, watch out for weasely worded questions. This question leaves out something very important –
“3. Americans strongly prefer legal status for undocumented immigrants over mass deportation and remain supportive of a balanced approach prioritizing both “order and humanity.” By a 72-24% margin, Americans supported legal status for undocumented immigrants over mass deportation in the new 2025 edition of PRRI’s massive sample (5,000+ respondent) American Values Survey. When asked a three-part question about preferred policy for undocumented immigrants, 60% preferred, “allow them a way to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements” and 12% preferred, “allow them to become permanent legal residents, but not citizens” versus 24% who preferred, “identify and deport them.” ”
They fail to note exactly where immigrants should be while that way for them to become citizens is worked out. My guess is that 60% are not saying “come on in any time you want and we’ll figure out the legality of it later”. There is already a process for people to come into the country and become legal citizens, and I suspect that process is what poll respondents would like new immigrants to follow. Because there are tens or hundreds of millions of US citizens who are descendants of people who at one time or another did follow that process.
There was some speculation here that Trump might be addicted to Rage a few days ago, and to me that makes sense.
Trump’s recent video showing him crapping on NYC from a great height illustrates the point quite well.
Trying to discern a rational explanation for Trump’s behavior has been, for me,futile.
Incoherent Rage, encouraged by the sychophants and crazies (Laura Loomer comes to mind) he has surrounded himself with seems more convincing as an explanation for his actions.
As inflation increases and his “Plans” continue to fail it seems likely that his behavior will become more extreme, which is not a happy thought.