Links 10/4/2025

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1. Rolf October 4, 2025 at 7:26 am

   From Council Estate Media’s substack,

   [Trump:] “If you try to poison our people, we will blow you out of existence, ‘cause that’s the only language they really understand. That’s why you don’t see any more boats on the ocean. You don’t see any boats around Venezuela, there’s nothing.”

   What Trump is talking about here is fishing boats. He has terrorised fishermen into no longer pursuing their livelihood. He has spread hunger and fear by illegally blowing up vessels belonging to another country. That’s not just an act of war, it’s an act of terrorism.

   Trump is a terrorist.

   This is honestly the only way to now describe Trump and the government he controls: a terrorist leading a terrorist state.
   1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 8:28 am

      Nobody in the fatherland claimed to be a Good German during the war, only afterwards.

      I can’t even claim I was only following orders, being as complicit as the next person who sat idly at the most important turning point in our lives-as crushing blows one after another laid low our democracy-aided and abetted by the standing 9 count, er Supreme Court.
      1. LawnDart October 4, 2025 at 11:01 am

         Lest we forget the 47-million voters who were willing to overlook genocide and affirm their tribal affiliation by casting a ballot for… her… in 2024:

         “Genocide Will Continue”
         1. motorslug October 4, 2025 at 1:00 pm

            Haha yeah, like there was a corn-sized difference in those 2 shits when it comes to zionazis.
2. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 7:27 am

   “Donald Trump has declared the US is at war”

   Jeez, after playing around in the sandbox for the past twenty years or more, it looks like the US military gets to go play in the jungle again. It should be fun. More bugs but less sand. If Trump decides to occupy Venezuela’s oil fields like he did in Syria, what makes him think that the Venezuelans won’t just sabotage those plants so that the US gets no benefit from them? And what if the people there start an active resistance like happened in Iraq after the US had finished invading that country. Is Trump ready to be dealing with his own “Vietnam” for the next three years of his Presidency? And I bet that a lot of South American countries will be sending Venezuela military aid on the side as they know that they can be next.
   1. Carolinian October 4, 2025 at 10:02 am

      So it all must be a bluff, right? Right???

      Trump likes his wars short and preferably overnight. If he’s cooking up a new Vietnam then he may need to start drafting the MAGA.
      1. Tom Stone October 4, 2025 at 11:35 am

         You can not overestimate Human Stupidity, it is infinite.
         1. Jabura Basadai October 4, 2025 at 5:23 pm

            whether Alexandre Dumas or Albert Einstein said it first….
            “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.” Albert Einstein

            “One thing that humbles me deeply is to see that human genius has its limits while human stupidity does not.” Alexandre Dumas
            1. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 8:18 pm

               Brother JB, I forgive human stupidity; in its actual form, it is something one is born with. It can be helped with nurture and compassion. Our malevolent leaders (and their underlings) are not so much stupid, as they have learned well (enough) how to follow orders. There is a class factor and the über class (in the material sense) dictating the orders is where to focus one’s opprobrium. There is little in my world view, to forgive them.
               1. Jabura Basadai October 5, 2025 at 2:45 pm

                  Sister AX – point taken and thank you – i would add patience to compassion and nurturing – an old salesman adage is questions are the answers – when dealing with the less informed asking questions in order that their enlightenment seems self-generated is a better path to travel and in itself is a nurturing method – as i travel further down the path of life it is a much better tactic and easier on the head instead of running into brick walls of their silos – when it comes to the well-educated it’s another story – Musa al-Gharbi’s Substack a couple of days ago, “Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling”, clearly lays out why it is much more difficult with “smart” people – questions/answers works with some, not so much with the majority – have lost friends because of my adamant stand since the beginning against the genocidal holocaust in Gaza and refusal to vote for “her” – c’est la vie – hope you circle back and have a chance to read my response –
      2. bertl October 5, 2025 at 1:16 am

         Nope. He has less grasp of the practical issues of actually fighting a war with any prospect of victory than Kaya Callous, who has the mental acuity of a demented gerbil.
   2. jsn October 4, 2025 at 11:24 am

      My theory is these idiots think occupying the ground over the Venezuelan tar sands will somehow prevent an oil price shock when Netanyahu manages to get Hormuz shut down.

      Some intern made it work on a spreadsheet.

      These clowns appear to be that brilliant.
      1. Mikel October 4, 2025 at 1:34 pm

         There’s that and maybe part of their occassional Wile E. Coyote like shenanigans against China.
         https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/venezuela-increases-oil-exports-to-china-as-us-secondary-tariff-tightens-125032701435_1.html
   3. ilsm October 4, 2025 at 12:45 pm

      I recall in my youthful endeavors in managing war…. Cam Ranh Bay was a prototype of a modern, efficient, loaded military logistics point on the ocean……

      What could we call a prototype in Venezuela? What could go wrong?

      Not on the other side of the world only a time zone or two off from DC.

      Back to “woodland” camo!
      1. AG October 4, 2025 at 9:26 pm

         What would you think if Chavez had agreed on getting an SSBN…(however ruining the Treaty of Tlatelolco)
         but maybe the non-nuclear option conventional hypersonics today are still a serious future projection…
   4. chris October 4, 2025 at 1:23 pm

      Tragic how awful this is. The one possible outcome that I had hoped we would see from a Trump II administration was less war. There was even early promise of peace breaking out in carious corners of the world. Not anymore. Now we have everything that was horrible about Biden and more. From what Ms. Harris said prior to her defeat, there is no hope that she would have given us a different future. The best we can hope for now is some kind of economic crisis that cripples this insanity and forces our hegemoically addicted government to accept reality.
3. AG October 4, 2025 at 7:32 am

   re: New MI6 Chief’s Dark History Revealed Simplicius.

   “(…)
   Maria Zakharova had even recently suggested that people with Nazi ancestors were deliberately being put into positions of power, giving several examples:

   “The trend is clearly neo-Nazi: (German Chancellor) Friedrich Merz, (former German Foreign Minister) Annalena Baerbock, (Member of the House of Commons of Canada) Chrystia Freeland, (former President of Georgia) Salome Zurabishvili. Now we can add the head of MI6, Blaise Metreveli,” she emphasized.

   According to Zakharova, someone is “purposefully and consciously” placing Nazi descendants in leadership positions in Western countries.
   (…)”

   Of course to make a secretly planned “Nazi trend” out of coincidences is rather nonsensical.
   Russophobia in FRG is so rabid it concerns almost all backgrounds.
   Whether Iran-emigrés in THE GREEN party, old CDU guard whose parents were potentially in the resistance, eager lawyers with the SPD who are Eastern European immigrants or old queer artists voting for Turks in the THE LEFT warning of Russia.
   On the other hand many now dead Germans who helped create genuinely the old German-Russian cooperation were somehow affiliated with party structure in the 3rd Reich as young students eg.
   Certainly from a Russian POV provenance turns into providence. But that´s just that.
   Weren´t this heritage not the case nothing would change about the facts on the ground.
   1. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 9:19 am

      I had forgotten her background but when I saw her image, her hairstyle immediately reminded me of those tradition hairstyles that nationalistic Ukrainian men wear. But come on everyone – is this the face of a crazy woman? Hmm, bad example.

      It certainly is noteworthy the number of people in countries achieving power whose grandparents followed the mustache man – some more than others. I can only imagine how it looks to Russians who lost tens of millions of people fighting them down only to see their grandchildren take power with some of the ideals of their grandparents. It would be like a ghost from the past arising again.
      1. AG October 4, 2025 at 10:36 am

         re: “ghosts” – What I find harrowing is the German double standard compared to Israel.
         “We” give them a hall pass to genocide because “we” exterminated them.
         Well, what´s about the Russians then? (Or Africa for that matter).
         Do you think a single German establishment “intellectual” (ha-ha) would admit that.
         But they have such an exquisit hiiiigher education that they miss the forest from that one tree of golden wisdom.
         S.i.c.k.e.n.i.n.g.
         So regardless of my critique I can only imagine what must be going on in the Russian “collective” consciousness. You go through the daily news items in the West (re: today it´s the “shadow fleet” guy) you can only come to consider Europeans having gone mad, besides hating them and giving a rat´s ass about their “wishes”. Go to hell EU and leave us alone.
         1. hk October 4, 2025 at 6:05 pm

            Israelis (even if they are not exactly the “Jews” Nazis exterminated–extermination hit the most assimmilated, ie least likely to become “Israeli,” Jews hardest) are not a great power threatening to overshadow Germany. Russia, since at least 1812, has been a threat to overshadow Germany–even a Germany that was the master of all non-Russian Europe, and unlike US, Russia borders “Middle Europe.” Two World Wars and 1990s haven’t changed the balance of power. In fact, likely worsened things ftom German perspective.
            1. AG October 4, 2025 at 9:24 pm

               Indeed, possible angle!
               A feeling of covert supremacy because “so small”. Almost parental feeling of responsibility for bringing up “Baby”… which is why baby´s nukes were provided and paid for by France and Germany: “Merry Christmas!”
         2. bertl October 4, 2025 at 9:38 pm

            I’ve thought for a long time that the extremity of Hitler’s anti-semitism was a personal quirk which became a strategically useful political objective following the end of the Great War. Active anti-semism was an useful way both to raise finance from rich Jews and to justify the use of slave labour to create an efficient and effective war economy, much as Stalin, during the same period, used criminals, political enemies, the bourgeoisie and others to develop the infrastucture and the resource and the industrial bases of the USSR.

            The death camps were not located in Germany but in the occupied Eastern territories which included the territories Stalin detached from Poland and added to the USSR after the conclusion of the Russo-Polish War in 1922 and the additional territories added to the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine at the end of the Second War.

            The death camps were led by Germans, and staffed by a combinaton of Germans functioning as guards (or medical researchers) and the grunt work was performed by zealous uber-Nazis from the occupied Eastern territories, many of whom were Galicians who chose to either fight the USSR’s forces or to enthusiastically exterminate and dispose of the bodies of Jews, Romanies, Slavs and non-European Soviet prisoners of war amd civilians, many of whom were subsequently given sanctuary in the UK, Canada, the US, New Zealand, Australia and the US and UK sectors of post-war Germany. German Nazis of higher rank, greater wealth and notoriety were able flee a collapsing Germany with ease and to enjoy the climes of Argentina and other South American countries.

            It is, therefore, not surprising that so many politicians in those countries are of what we call “Ukrainian” ancestry and from which we now seed the highest level of the Anglophone Deep States.
      2. Skip Intro October 4, 2025 at 10:49 am

         Is this just the final phase of Operation Paperclip?
      3. motorslug October 4, 2025 at 1:17 pm

         Reading her background, my mind immediately recalled the slimy character from The Boys – Stormfront.
   2. ciroc October 4, 2025 at 10:09 am

      Those with relatives, friends, or colleagues who were Nazis in the 1940s are more likely to have descendants in positions of power today. This is not an issue of ideology but of class.
      1. Tom67 October 4, 2025 at 11:35 am

         I read Simplicius with interest but take his stuff with a grain of salt. His take is very one sided. Maybe he should mention at least one time that Russian soldiers are – just like their Ukrainian counterparts – not exactly gung ho to go on suicide missions either. There are clips of Russian soldiers buried alive, beaten to a pulp or – one of the latest – of an officer whipping a soldier who is suspended by rope.
         Same for the Nazi ancestors of Russia’s enemies. I wonder how many of the high and mighty in Russia have ancestors who were NKVD bigwigs? Let ‘s not forget that under Stalin ten percent of the populations of Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were deported to Siberia and only half came back. Nor that tens of thousands of political prisoners were shot when the Wehrmacht invaded in 1941.
         There’s heavy historical baggage here and Simplicius never seems to count that in. One can and must loath Timothy Snider and his shameless exploitation of past Soviet crimes to whip up hatred of Russia. But that doesn’t mean that the opposite is any better.
         1. Yves Smith Post authorOctober 4, 2025 at 11:49 am

            Enlistments in Russia are still running at ~40,000 a month.

            In Ukraine, they are having to hunt down men, chase them, tackle them, and drag them into cars to get them to serve.

            Russian special forces have repeatedly done near-suicide missions of crawling through gas pipes for long distances (>1km) to make surprise attacks in the rear.

            So Ukraine has a demoralized force of old, unfit and badly/barely trained men. Russia does not.
            1. Tom67 October 4, 2025 at 12:27 pm

               Please regard that one cannot compare special forces to ordinary soldiers. The reality of the war is such that any movement towards the enemy practically amounts to suicide. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians will use special forces for that. The point of these so called meat assaults is not to capture a position but to draw out the enemy, that is find out where their drone operators are located.
               There’s a reason that the Russians are not moving faster. I don´t dispute the fact that Ukraine is attrited to eventual defeat nor that the majority of Russians soldiers – being highly paid volunteers – are more motivated than the majority of the Ukrainians. But even a highly paid soldier is not paid enough to commit suicide. That is why you find such videos as the ones I have mentioned above.
               1. Yves Smith Post authorOctober 4, 2025 at 12:53 pm

                  Russians regularly run motorbikes into combat areas and survive. Russian death rates have been falling. Training (Russians get >7 months before they are sent into combat while Ukrainians get at most 2 weeks), experience, better weapons, better drone coverage all make a difference, You are incorrectly imputing = survival rates.

                  And Russia making meat assaults is a Western myth. It apparently did happen in Bakhumt with the prisoners in Wagner, which was one of the reasons Russia wanted to and did take Wagner away from Prighozin and reconstitute it. The Russian higher ups were appalled. Not only is it a horrible abuse, but it’s a negative for recruiting and sustaining forces.
                  1. Tom67 October 4, 2025 at 2:37 pm

                     I wish you were right. I honestly don´t believe so. Thanks to US assistance the Ukrainians have total battlefield awareness. They are few and far between and have great problems manning their ranks. Still anything moves in the “kill zone” their drones will pounce. Special forces are certainly not the ones the Russian command will send there. Rather some poor shites from the provinces that nobody will miss. The US after all – in a much more open society – managed to use its soldiers as guinea pigs in peace time. See Anthrax et all. I don´t doubt that the Russian command has just as little – or possibly even less – compunction to waste its equivalent.
                     1. Polar Socialist October 4, 2025 at 5:35 pm

                        It may surprise you, but there are approximately half a million Russian veterans of SMO already; contract soldiers who have spent at least 6 months in combat operations and then been honorably discharged.

                        You combine that with over a million that are in service and get rotated in and out of SMO, and you end up with every tenth Russian male between 20 and 40 having a very personal experience of what is going on in the SMO.

                        So, the chances are that each current volunteer has a friend or a relative with that personal experience. You think they’d be volunteering en masse if they knew they’d be treated like cattle to the slaughter?
                        1. skippy October 4, 2025 at 8:28 pm

                           I never get the angle some promote that Russia is somehow ethically abhorrent and without any notion of the life of its military members. It has a whiff of the old cold war commie notion that it disregards any idea of personal freedoms/liberties/potential. Not that these same sorts have no drama dealing it out to lesser beings that are not compliant with their demands.

                           On that note, its interesting to watch how its all unfolding at the time. The evolution of kill chains, adaptation of troops/materials. Per se Ukraine is dependent on drone operators and how Russia is approaching that. On that note its interesting to see a side of this conflict I think many don’t/unaware what is happening.

                           Far away from the front people in the West and in Russia are having a war of Maths, so much of this conflict is electronic.

                           For example … Russian medium range missiles vs Patriots et al. In the beginning the latter had some success, thus Russia spammed radar with numbers/EW/dummy drones. Just so the high accuracy missile could penetrate and hit its target. That has changed now. Russian Maths is now enabling its missiles to exceed the limits of the Western Maths systems in its antimissile systems e.g. Lockheed vs Russia at the end of the day. Seems Russia has been able to change trajectory of missiles at the last moment and that buggers the maths of the systems attempting to take them out.

                           Other than that I think Tom64 should done the sort of gear both sides are wearing on the ground and how it feels in both open and urban settings – brutal. Hence age and fitness is critical. So at the end of the day the age disparity between Ukraine and Russia will show, not that Ukraine is mostly static defense at the moment.
                     2. Revenant October 4, 2025 at 5:37 pm

                        https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/03/28/ukraine-and-russia-exchange-nearly-1k-bodies-of-fallen-soldiers-a88526

                        “Russia and Ukraine exchanged the remains of 952 fallen soldiers, officials from both countries said Friday.

                        “Vladimir Rogov, a pro-Kremlin activist in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region, said Russia received the bodies of 43 soldiers. Russian lawmaker Shamsail Saraliyev confirmed the exchange and the figure to the RBC news website.

                        “Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said it received 909 bodies, adding that the soldiers had died in combat in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

                        […]”

                        43 Russians for 909 Ukrainians. And that was in March 2025: the recent exchanges have been more lopsided but I couldn’t find a reference.

                        This is why Ukrainians have “blocking detachments” shooting deserters and pressgangs kidnapping men into the Army. Because the chance of dying under Russia’s huge fires superiority is immense.

                        And this is frankly a diversion from the issue of Mrs Metreweli and her Nazi descent. What are you trying to say by bringing the NKVD into it, that MI6 should be recruiting the grandchildren if Beria as an equal opportunity employer?

                        No, it is shameful that the UK has employed somebody to run MI6 who has a direct family history of anti-Russian fascism, Nazi sympathy and irredentism that they share with a major NATO vassal *and* then refuses to address this and the questions it raises. Caesar’s wife must be seen to be pure….
                  2. hazelbee October 5, 2025 at 5:57 am

                     training of 7 months vs 2 weeks?! my oh my. that jumped out this morning

                     anyone with an ounce of systems thinking can take that one comparison and see which way this goes over time.

                     7 months or more for – fitness, awareness, basic techniquess and actually time to practice and form memory both brain and muscle memory.

                     vs two weeks. you can’t do anything in two weeks.

                     7 months – 30 weeks or more? that’s is 10-15x the training, awareness, bonding, mindset change.

                     think of the difference between a new starter graduate or intern.
                     At 2 weeks? enthusiastic liability.
                     at 7 months? actually able to make some impact.
               2. ALB October 4, 2025 at 5:00 pm

                  Russians have literally run multiple operations through Soviet pipelines to surprise Ukrainian positions from
                  The rear, as Yves has pointed out, not only that but they’ve been regularly running their DRG groups well behind Ukrainian lines for the same
                  Reason.

                  As far as why Russia isn’t moving faster ? It’s because lots of these cities are full of ethnic Russians, and they would like to leave as much of it standing as possible. Will it matter how “fast” it was when they take Odessa ? Will their be a ukraine left afterwards ?

                  Ukraine, also has sent their elite forces to beat back Russian breakthroughs in their lines, so I’m really not sure what you’re trying to get at here.
            2. AG October 4, 2025 at 6:24 pm

               Reminds me of something I always wanted to look into:
               In how far did (or did not?) the Russian Army today end its mistreatment of young recruits compared to pre-1991 routine. And in how far would USSR/RU (?) mistreatment of recruits potentially be comparable with e.g. regular US Armed Forces.

               In the early 2000s I was working with a Ukrainian refugee who had deserted the Red Army shortly before it would dissolve and had fled to the FRG. He had asked for political aslyum and to make his legal case created a whole dossier of how recruits were mistreated. I wonder what I would be thinking today.

               Needless to say that said refugee soon after 1992 was disposed of because not interesting any more for West German intelligence services and put on hold on a three-month basis to be soon deported. Which made it impossible for him to even get the most demeaning of jobs. So he was vegetating for almost 10 years in refugee camps by the time I met him constantly fearing every three months to eventually be sent back to Ukraine or Russia. Not good as a former deserter.

               This form of temporary asylum is btw one of the inofficial forms of psychological quasi-torture affecting thousands of refugees who are spending countless years in stasis. With their legal case pending forever.

               re: RU special forces – Cechnya War II – I remember well how German TV pictured that war as being fought by poor overburdened RU troops. (the era when “pitying” Putin´s Russia was still en vouge).
               One of the retired major German TV RU correspondents then, Gerd Ruge (1928-2021), was among only the few who tried to point out that a lot of the fighting was done by RU special forces who were excellently paid, equipped, trained. By then the poor-third-world Russia delusion of the West was well established.

               It is interesting that the larger, I dare say utopian idea behind “Soviet” citizens and nation(s) never was understood or accepted by the West. It always was only taken into consideration because the USSR had nukes and thus could not be messed with. Beyond that the Soviets were a menace and a mental illness and simply not human(e).
               1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 3:54 am

                  I’m honestly not sure how it is now – a real war may well have changed this. But back in the 2000s and 2010s dedovschina was still very much a thing. I mean the system in which new recruits are systematically abused and exploited by those who started serving before them. How bad it was depended on the unit’s informal traditions and the officers’ willingness to intervene them (in some it was basically unheard of, in some orderly, honest and basically survivable though blatantly corrupt, and in others still, indistinguishable from slavery). Every now and then someone would end up nearly dead from it, causing a news scandal and promises to investigate and maybe do something.
                  1. Donaldo October 5, 2025 at 8:16 am

                     Sounds like US higher education.
                     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_United_States
                     1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 10:00 am

                        It seems to be a universal human urge that finds different expressions depending on where you can get away with it with impunity. But by the way, I wonder if the US military is so free of it…
                        1. Donaldo October 5, 2025 at 11:23 am

                           I wonder if any military is so free of it…

                           In some navies it is institutionalized, though dialed back in modern times.
                           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-crossing_ceremony
                           “Throughout history, line-crossing ceremonies have sometimes become dangerous hazing rituals. Most modern navies have instituted regulations that prohibit physical attacks on sailors undergoing the line-crossing ceremony.”
         2. comrade October 4, 2025 at 4:24 pm

            Half coming back from Siberia was an obvious mistake, in hindsight. None of them should have.
         3. jrkrideau October 4, 2025 at 8:46 pm

            Did you notice that the USSR under Stalin deported people for political reasons (probably some dodgy reasons at times).

            The Nazis enslaved and kill everyone: Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, homosexuals, the handicapped, Roma, and I am sure I am missing other groups.
            1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 3:49 am

               “Did you notice that the USSR under Stalin deported people for political reasons (probably some dodgy reasons at times).”

               Entire peoples, sometimes, like the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars or the Chechens, and of course far from all of them survived getting “evacuated”. Our approach was generally closer to the Americans’ treatment of natives.

               But it’s true that there was no “Soviet Holocaust”. Bear in mind, though, that the Holocaust made practical sense in Hitler’s worldview (with metaphysical racial essentialism, it made sense to want to remove some groups entirely) and not in Stalin’s or Lenin’s worldview (the groups the Communists deported were not – in their eyes – a dangerous presence by their very nature, so they could afford to not care whether they lived or died, as opposed to wanting them to die). It’s a difference in worldview more than in ethics, I think – both believed (quite openly) that their ends justified any means, but they held different worlds in their heads.
               1. Acacia October 5, 2025 at 4:51 am

                  I don’t know if you’ve heard of Grover Furr, a USian academic who has done research in the Soviet archives, and through a variety of books and publications has set out to defend Stalin on many points. Furr has questioned the Holodomor, which is of course a sin nowadays:

                  https://espressostalinist.com/2017/03/31/grover-furr-the-ukrainian-famine-only-evidence-can-disclose-the-truth/

                  For this, he has incurred the wrath of many leftists in the US (and given the state of the US now, some of whom may be only leftists in name), who accuse him of conspiracy theory, etc. E.g.:

                  https://www.leftvoice.org/the-inquisition-with-footnotes-grover-furrs-stalinist-conspiracy-theories/

                  I am not knowledgeable enough about Soviet history to parse all the accusations that are flying around, and whether Furr is as far “out there” as his critics claim.

                  Needless to say, the history is extremely contested — at least in the West, possibly in Russia though perhaps(?) less — and no doubt the current climate is inflecting that. Unfortunately, this makes it more difficult for Western and Russian scholars to discuss the actual history, though perhaps this is just a constant in turbulent times.
                  1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 10:12 am

                     It really is very complicated. There were many genuine crimes against our people committed by the Bolsheviks (and not just Stalin, popularly used as scapegoat for all their sins by Trotskyists and certain other admirers of Lenin) and also a lot of wild-eyed exaggerations pushed by anti-communists that make even credible claims hard to believe. Notably, Stalin’s popularly accepted “kill count” has been vastly exaggerated (including by at least one notable dissident who knew better and admitted it after the fact), and the Golodomor was most certainly not a genocide of Ukrainians (if only because neither ethnic Ukrainians nor residents of the Ukrainian SSR were anything like the sole victims; but a mass die-off of valuable manpower was also not intended, at most a certain much smaller amount of deaths was accepted as a fair price to pay for progress). I assure you that this is all heavily contested in Russia as well.

                     But deportations of ethnicities deemed likely to go over to the Germans en masse, and the deaths resulting from the deportations and the conditions encountered on the other end, are a well-established (if often also exaggerated and manipulated) fact. Stalinists here do not, in my experience, contest that this happened – they simply say that it was right to do it under the circumstances, while excess deaths are only tragically unavoidable collateral damage. When they can be bothered to justify it at all, that is.
         4. bertl October 4, 2025 at 10:01 pm

            Please can you provide the urls of “clips of Russian soldiers buried alive, beaten to a pulp or – one of the latest – of an officer whipping a soldier who is suspended by rope”?

            The point about the NKVD, and it’s re-branded successors, is that they acted pretty much as other intelligence and security services acted and, overtime, became a highly professional service staffed by well educated personnel. The Siberian camp were not death camps, unlike those manned by Galicians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonian riff-raff, they were work camps contributing to the re-development of the post-war USSR, which had lost some 27,000,000 souls in the conflict, and, as you say, half or so were able to return after completion of their sentences, as were German POWs.
            1. Tom67 October 5, 2025 at 2:36 am

               You should read any of the myriad eye witness accounts of those camps. For instance Yevgenia Ginzburg, a jewish communst who was arrested in 1937 and only returned in the Fifties. How many survived the camps in the Kolyma? A small fraction.
               As to the NKVD being professionals: sure as professional as the Gestapo in installing icy fear in the population.
               To get an idea of the times and what it was like living under the double threat of Gestapo and NKVD I recommend the novel “life and fate” by Vassily Grossman. He was a jewish writer fighting on the Soviet side. His reports about the German death camps were among the first to be published. His novel “Life and Fate” that deals with both – the Gestapo and the NKVD – could only be published long after his death.
               1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 4:16 am

                  I’d also recommend Varlam Shalamov, a lifelong (heterodox) leftist. He eventually renounced Solzhenitsyn in part of working against his country and in part for making the camps look too good. He was in worse places for longer than Solzhenitsyn, who, unlike him, had started out as a normal communist and ran afoul of the system largely by accident. A few of his writings are available in English here.
                  1. Polar Socialist October 5, 2025 at 5:49 am

                     Anton Chekhov’s Ostrov Sahalin describes the system as it was in the good old times…
                     1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 10:16 am

                        Yes – Shalamov’s thesis was that bad as it was, it somehow got much worse since then. “The quotas have gone up”.
               2. bertl October 5, 2025 at 6:25 am

                  You specifically said “clips of Russian soldiers buried alive, beaten to a pulp or – one of the latest – of an officer whipping a soldier who is suspended by rope”? Where are they?

                  I also said over time and rebranded. In the years after Beria, the KGB became very professional and employed highly qualified lawyers, wechanics, economist, &c. President Putin is a good example of the kind of people the KGB employed. Their overseas operatives, of necessity, have professional skills and knowledge and were expected to speak the local languge with a high degree of competence.

                  I remember speaking to a well turned out and oviously weathy parent of a student who spoke with a Russian accent and her father spoke with an American accent and used a lot of US slang terms, many of them obviously dating from the years he spent overseas on business, as it were.
            2. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 4:23 am

               They were not death camps, you are right. The distinction was that the Nazis wanted to work their prisoners to death, while we wanted to squeeze as much free labour out of them as possible, keeping them alive to that end; and if they survived long enough, they could indeed be released, though for example, at least one of my relatives, who made the mistake of once attending a demonstration that later turned out to be Trotskyist, didn’t.

               Incidentally – did those other intelligence and security services run work camps of their own?
               1. hk October 5, 2025 at 5:05 am

                  Quite a few police agencies in US have and still do, sort of. Prison industrial complex has a long history in US.

                  Apparently, we were able to put German POWs during WW2 to work doing hard labor very easily because we had a lot of experience with work camps with prisoners sentenced to hard labor already–eg accepted practices for “hiring out” prison labor and such. I do imagine our camps were rather nicer than USSR’s though, as far as I know of comparative mortality rates.
                  1. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 10:21 am

                     That’s very interesting, because in Russia the mass modern-day use of unfree labour (or, if you prefer, slave labour) in factories started during WWI, when prisoners from Central Powers were put to work at the factories here in the Urals (and, I imagine, elsewhere, but I read this about the Urals specifically). Mostly in assorted “low-qualification” jobs previously performed by poorly-paid locals that have been called up to fight, creating a labour shortage. Factory management loved it and began to ask for more prisoners to be sent over here. Then after the revolution, this practice was carried on with domestic prisoners of various sorts. And then with PoWs again during WW2. Looks like convergent evolution, the same system arrived at from different starting points.
               2. Bugs October 5, 2025 at 5:52 am

                  Prison labor is an exception to the constitutional prohibition against slavery in the US. As has been discussed here frequently.

                  Prisoners are outsourced by both the state prison administrations and private for-profit prisons, they do anything from landscaping to firefightering to light manufacturing (for example making gloves, just like in the gulags) and call centers. It exists in plain view and is abhorrent.
               3. bertl October 5, 2025 at 6:08 am

                  From conversations with parents of Russian students in the eary 2000s, the children of the security services personnel generally qualified as engineers, lawyers and so on, but many of them went on to make their careers in the KGB. In many ways it was an effective home for the “best and brightest” – as were the intelligence officers of the CIA. Whereas the CIA had its band of crazy operatives (which became it’s most visible and useless tail wagging the intelligence dog), the Russian crazies/high risk oriented individuals tended toward the GRU whose escapades usually involved gathering military intelligence and other kinds of work related to military intelligence more broadly defined.
               4. Polar Socialist October 5, 2025 at 6:39 am

                  If one considers that NKVD was comparable to a ministry of internal affairs, then yes, it was the same ministry taking care of arrest, prosecution (or “administrative procedures”) and detainment.

                  For example Estonia was a petty right-wing dictatorship in the 1920’s and 30’s, and had thousands of political prisoners. No wonder when the Estonian communists were released and put into power by the Red Army, they did arrange for almost all members of the Estonian Political Police to be deported.

                  And I guess when Wehrmacht released and put into power the imprisoned Nazi-minded Sudentendeutch they exerted their own revenge, too.
         5. Daniil Adamov October 5, 2025 at 4:12 am

            “I wonder how many of the high and mighty in Russia have ancestors who were NKVD bigwigs?”

            Not that this contradicts your main point, which I fully agree with, but I’d guess not many – we tended to kill our own bigwigs, and our own in general, a lot more than the Nazis did. I understand Hitler eventually came to regret not imitating Stalin in that regard, certainly with his generals.
   3. ALB October 4, 2025 at 4:50 pm

      I can’t speak for any others than Freeland whom were mentioned by Simplicius; however I know quite a bit about the history of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, which is the largest in the world. Since the Soviet era the Canadian government has used the UCC and other right wing Ukrainian groups as a battering ram against labour and left wing activists in Canada. The Canadian government literally took labour halls away from left wing Ukrainians (who came fleeing the Tsar) and gave them to the groups affiliated with the UCC who are Banderites. Chrystia Freeland was a star in these factions and as has been pointed out before not only was her Grandfather a chief Nazi propagandist, she was groomed for her current role from an early age, running spooked up secret missions to Ukrainian “dissidents”, who also, were Banderites. Then despite being a minor political player from a backwater district that doesn’t matter nationally she was catapulted to the second highest position in the country, just in time to oversee Canadas contribution to the NATO conflict.

      I mean you could say all that is coincidental but I certainly don’t think it is. Banderite influence in Canada goes so far there is basically no bottom. I’ve never seen allegations Freelands grandfather actually killed anyone himself, so it would appear the Brits have ratcheted things up a bit. Here’s hoping they don’t get us all killed.
      1. Kouros October 4, 2025 at 6:40 pm

         The “Ukrainians” that emigrated in late 1800s in Canada were not known as Ukrainians, since such a polity did not exist and never existed before. 9 out of 10 or more Rusyns or Ruthens were coming from Galicia which was under the Austro-Hungarian empire.
      2. alfred venison October 4, 2025 at 8:07 pm

         My Ukrainian in-law’s ancestors were interred by the Canadian government during WWI as enemy aliens, having fled, not the Tsar, but the Hapsburg Emperor. Bad luck for them, if they’d fled the Tsar their farms wouldn’t have been wrecked by 4 years of enforced neglect.

         I agree with what you say about Freeland. Have you read John Paul Himka ?
4. mrsyk October 4, 2025 at 7:39 am

   Working (archived) link for Why has Pakistan-administered Kashmir erupted in protest again?, Aljazeera.
5. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 7:43 am

   US Treasury unveils draft design of coin with Trump’s profile RT
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   There has only been 1 live American @ the time on a coin, with some weird precedence, in that it was Calvin Coolidge on the 1926 Sesquicentennial commemorative coin, so D.T. Barnum being on the 2026 Semiquincentennial almost makes sense.

   Now, to give you an idea of who has been on American coins, P.T. Barnum was on the 1936 Bridgeport coin, so there is precedence there too.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sesquicentennial_coinage

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport,_Connecticut,_Centennial_half_dollar
   1. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 8:45 am

      Frankly the original article is wild. Next year the US is going to be 250 years old which is the same as saying a quarter of a thousand years old. You would think that there would be all sort of celebrations planned but this coin indicates that he wants to make that event all about himself. Look at the specs-

      ‘According to the first design draft revealed on Friday, the coin features Trump’s profile on one side, along with the words “Liberty” and “In God we trust,” and the dates 1776–2026.

      The other side shows Trump raising a clenched fist against a backdrop of the US flag, with the inscriptions “Fight, fight, fight,” “United States of America,” and “E pluribus unum.”’

      With his mug on both sides, it has very little to do with America’s Semiquincentennial but is all about him. Next year’s celebrations are going to be a joke and will make America look like a laughing stock if Trump has his way.
      1. mrsyk October 4, 2025 at 8:53 am

         I wonder why the public wasn’t invited to submit design ideas…
      2. griffen October 4, 2025 at 9:13 am

         Since it’s October and all manner of nightmare or terror films will be running throughout the month…why not the clown from IT? Pennywise on a US coin could be something unique and valuable by the year 3000.

         Your coins will all float ….you’ll all float! \sarc
      3. mzza October 4, 2025 at 9:43 am

         a little surprised the article doesn’t raise the idea that these coins might be part of a plan to market and sell as commemorative merch by Team Trump (as were any number of 1776-1976 branded items). Considering how much personal wealth they’ve managed to hoover up launching (literally) immaterial coinage, not much of a stretch to think someone might be looking into how to make money selling (sur)real ones.
         1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 10:08 am

            It could pay for the Trump Library inventory, consisting of 235,238 hardbound copies of Art of the Deal.
            1. Ken Murphy October 4, 2025 at 2:35 pm

               Read that back in the 80s as a young business-y type. My conclusion was that the guy was a blowhard jackass, although he made some interesting points about working with La Famiglia.
               Years later, the bank I was working at was holding his casino bonds. He and his daughter stopped by, and everyone had a chance to meet him.
               I passed. I had better things to do. Do not regret it to this day.
      4. Tom_Doak October 4, 2025 at 10:50 am

         Heads he wins, tails you lose.
      5. ThirtyOne October 4, 2025 at 11:59 am

         ‘While we’re at it, we have a sort of a cowboy song we’d like to do for ya. This is a song that deals with the rapidly approaching 200th birthday of the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen! This is a song that warns you in advance that next year everybody is gonna try and sell you things that maybe you shouldn’t ought to buy, and not only that, they’ve been planning it for years. The name of this song is (pardon me), “Poofters Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead”‘

         Zappa/Beefheart/Mothers – Poofter’s Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead, Providence, RI, April 26, 1975
         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egIbvpyekdA
   2. wendigo October 4, 2025 at 9:15 am

      Not very original at all, Canada put a loon on the dollar coin in 1987.
      1. Ben Panga October 4, 2025 at 10:52 am

         Thank you for this gem
      2. Birch October 4, 2025 at 2:24 pm

         Loonacy on one side, and a monarch on the other. Sounds like Canada.

         To my understanding, the point of coin art is that it represents the two sides of what gives money value: the monarch (or government rep) who will accept the coin for taxation on the one side, and a representation of the physical or social resources the nation has to offer on the other side. Taken together, this makes the coin more than a small piece of plated steel.

         What is a coin with a monarch on both sides? Hollow promises.
      3. jrkrideau October 4, 2025 at 8:55 pm

         It was supposed to be something else, no idea now what, but Canada Post lost the dies so the loon die was substituted. Nowadays we use “loonie” and “toonie” ($2 coin) in normal speech. “It’s only a loonie”.
   3. ilsm October 4, 2025 at 12:55 pm

      Maybe a Venezuelan palm tree in the background.

      A bit of irony on a Saturday AM!
   4. comrade October 4, 2025 at 4:32 pm

      Considering the current geopolitical situation, I thought that they were going to reviveve an old design.
      https://jewishnews.com/2018/01/22/a-nazi-travels-to-palestine-a-swastika-and-star-of-david-on-one-coin/
   5. hk October 4, 2025 at 6:08 pm

      Ahem. D. T. Barnum.
      1. Mikel October 4, 2025 at 10:02 pm

         For the win…
6. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 7:56 am

   “French troops arrest captain of Russian ‘shadow fleet’ oil tanker feared to be behind Denmark drone incursions”

   Last I heard, that ship was continuing its voyage but do not know about the skipper or the first mate. Of course this is not to be confused with hostage taking – like Macron did with the Russian-born owner of Telegram. There is a – unconfirmed – story that when the French pirated that ship, that the Russians dropped a missile on a place outside Odessa where some 20 French mechanics were working modifying boats being delivered to the Ukraine from Romania. But if Macron keeps this up, certainly the Russians will respond. Perhaps those tankers will suddenly have a squad of Russian marines aboard for the purpose of fending off “pirates” on the high seas and armed with manpads to stop people getting any funny ideas. I think that Macron stated that the idea was to halt and delay Russian oil tankers to disrupt their schedules and to make them uneconomical to use. But does he really want to go there?
   1. JohnA October 4, 2025 at 8:52 am

      Macron has also made a big show of the death of a French photojournalist embedded with Ukrainian forces on the front line. Nasty Russians and all that.
7. griffen October 4, 2025 at 8:17 am

   It’s the dopamine wheel for all your little gambling hamsters, the growing influence of available sports betting and live action bets. I can’t watch 10 minutes on ESPN without a direct reference to how to position one’s intended betting or a news scroll that features game schedules with the prevailing odds attached ….Keep the machines on !!

   I checked a few weeks ago as US football got cranked up, and South Carolina is still in that list of 11 states where the action is not yet legal.
   1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 8:48 am

      Being in action was really my downfall when it came to 52 card pick up games. I could sit at a blackjack table for a mighty long time, and the cards did sway back and forth-you could almost feel it when all of the sudden you win 9 out of 11 hands, that sort of thing. Of course it goes the other way when you lose 9 out of 11 hands, chasing losses all the way.

      The thing was, I had to drive 250 miles to & fro, to be able to torture myself in such a fashion, and now from the privacy of your phone, you can get 4-1 odds on the batter currently up at the plate hitting into a double play.

      Even though they make shitgobs of money, are pro athletes any less susceptible to the lucky charms of gambling?
   2. Anon October 4, 2025 at 10:26 am

      Saager from Breaking Points has been saying that sports betting is a disaster waiting to happen for months now. It’s not really in my world–as far as I can tell, I need multiple subscriptions to watch American football now, so I just stopped watching.
      1. lyman alpha blob October 4, 2025 at 12:10 pm

         It was bad enough before the apps and in-game betting – now I’m assuming the disasters are already happening. Is there anything that would stop a player’s buddy from putting down a massive bet that his friend will strike out the next time up, and then telling the friend to go down swinging in the next at bat for a 50% cut? If there isn’t, then it’s already happened.
         1. You're soaking in it! October 4, 2025 at 4:52 pm

            I’ll give you 4 to 1 on that.
      2. Bugs October 5, 2025 at 6:10 am

         There’s IP TV and something called the TV App that make watching American sports abroad or at home fairly easy. It’s a reddit rabbit hole, be forewarned.
   3. Tom Doak October 4, 2025 at 11:07 am

      I’m amazed that the NYT can do a whole article about the perils of sports betting and NOT MENTION that two Cleveland Indians pitchers [including an All Star] were suspended for the season on suspicion of illegal gambling activity. They are suspected of deliberately throwing balls on the first pitch to certain batters to skew the results of in-game betting on whether a given pitch will be a ball or a strike. The gambling sites alerted MLB that there was very high activity when those two pitchers came into games.

      Pete Rose is laughing from somewhere in the afterlife, while Shoeless Joe Jackson wonders what happened to the good old days.
      1. Mikel October 4, 2025 at 1:02 pm

         The Cleveland pitchers couldn’t find someone to take the fall? Did they get caught on camera?
         Just wondering…from over in LA.
8. Louis Fyne October 4, 2025 at 8:25 am

   >>>U.S. military planners believe that forces being assembled in Puerto Rico and the Southern Caribbean are now sufficient enough to launch “territorial-seizure operations”

   wish OpenSIGINT bros would attach citations. Wonder what article he cited.

   Anyone remember Grenada? by then and today’s standards, that was a *huge* operation—with an (arguably) embarassing level of US casualties/deaths given the absolute weakness of the opponent.

   granted this time around, there aren’t a flock of civilians to secure, but still…securing one offshore Ven. airfield = essentially another Grenada.
   1. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 8:32 am

      It’s reminding me more of the time that Reagan put a force of Marines into Beirut International Airport but with no follow up forces back in ’83. When a suicide truck bomber hit them over 240 US troops were lost. Reagan was smart enough to pull the rest of that force out but I think that a Trump would double down because of his wounded pride.
   2. .Tom October 4, 2025 at 2:34 pm

      The forces are sufficient enough? I well remember my mother correcting me when I used that daft loqution. “Sufficient is sufficient,” she told me. I was embarrassed but doubled down. “Yes, adequately sufficient enough.” Me and my wife still sometimes use this joke after all that time.

      OT, I know, but I know some of you like word jokes.
   3. hk October 4, 2025 at 6:13 pm

      Idk. Grenada is a tiny island. Venezuela is a sizable country with plenty of bad terrain. Caracas is a large city some distance from the sea. Breaking things may not be too hard. But, if you break things and leave a big mess, it’ll get complicated fast, and unlike Iraq, Venezuela is in Western Hemisphere–we won’t be left free of the consequences.

      The last point makes me see the wisdom, assumming it is the design, of Putin not wanting to leave a mess of postwar Ukraine, Poland, or Germany if he could help it.
   4. skippy October 4, 2025 at 6:21 pm

      Grenada was a PR/Marketing stunt with a side of all the players getting a cameo for the viewers at home. It was a mess, coms between forces all over the shop in real time, especially the SEALS fiasco, Rangers came in C-141 for a drop on the airfield, copped some light weapons fire and ended up doing a 500 ft pop and bang. Same – same for the Panama comedy show. The results of this debacle resulted in a complete overhaul of combined forces infrastructure.

      The difference with Venezuela is they know an attack might be coming and Russia has fingers in the pie.
9. LawnDart October 4, 2025 at 8:27 am

   Re; Trump 2.0

   YOU ARE INVITED TO THE MAGA BALLROOM 2028

   My latest AI experiment has gone viral reaching millions in less than 24 hours.

   The inspiration was the announcement by the White House of a new $200 million ballroom with renders that looked a lot like Versailles. Having just visited the palace on vacation and being somewhat disgusted with the level of opulence on display, I had the insight that this new ballroom could become a future museum like Versailles to show what happened in this era.

   I didn’t have a script but made it as I went and felt the karmic action and reaction would work well visually. More insights and powerful images came as I worked on it.

   I made the stills using Freepik and Sora. Used primarily Kling AI for video and sfx, last shot was with Veo 3. More sound design from ElevenLabs and the music is synced to Masquerade (Suite): 1. Waltz Khachaturian, London symphony orchestra.

   https://youtu.be/nD_25aSMSFc?si=gl44EtYrxECVKU7k

   Are some AI more equal than others?
   1. mrsyk October 4, 2025 at 9:07 am

      Interesting query. I’ll argue the end product has cultural value. Nevertheless, a person with skills at digital animation could have put that together ex-AI.
      1. LawnDart October 4, 2025 at 10:26 am

         A person without skills at digital animation was given voice by AI, and yes, I’d agree that he used it well in order to convey his ideas– it is a wonderful piece.

         Does the social value he adds exceed the social costs of generative AI?

         With these tools, literally anyone can enter the race to shape/reshape cultural narrative, image being one of the most powerful tools in propaganda when it comes to affecting or swaying public opinions.

         And as with literature, isn’t fiction often the most effective means of conveying a larger truth?
         1. mrsyk October 4, 2025 at 11:18 am

            Yes, “was given voice”. Important. There is much to chew on, thanks.
            As an aside, I am a subscriber to that last axiom, currently re-reading Gene Wolfe’s terrific Litany of the Long Sun, which I’m finding amusingly relevant to todays threatening and rapidly shifting landscape.
            1. ibaien October 4, 2025 at 8:04 pm

               never a bad time to revisit the ‘solar cycle’. i’m now stuck imagining trump as typhon, with vance as the poor piaton sustaining his life. thanks for that 😒
   2. earthling October 4, 2025 at 9:58 am

      It’s a great piece, and in my mind the title is “Monster’s Ball”. If it could get through to even a few of the Trump cult who can’t/don’t read, that would be a great thing.

      Yes AI is crap, but there are virtuous uses for it, and here is one.
   3. Michael Fiorillo October 4, 2025 at 12:23 pm

      To be filed under:
      1) How Far Computerized Graphics Have Progressed as of 2025
      2) Wouldn’t It be Nice To Think So?

      Deep red hat MAGA, combined with a lavishly-funded Repression Apparat, will remain loyal to the bitter end; there’s always someone other than the real perps they can be primed to blame.
   4. .Tom October 4, 2025 at 2:52 pm

      It’s very good, I love the class war pot stirring, but the ending is a bit NPR.
   5. marku52 October 4, 2025 at 3:06 pm

      Huh. won’t load. Did he piss someone off?
      1. LawnDart October 4, 2025 at 3:55 pm

         Video can be found via youtube, instagram, or facebook.

         Hopefully other website owners have downloaded the video so it can be mirrored and found elsewhere.
10. KLG October 4, 2025 at 8:40 am

    Betting anecdata: Late-20-something son of a good friend took in one of his friends when said friend’s life collapsed. The young man in distress could live in the spare bedroom indefinitely (within reason) for $1000. Turns out his online gambling debts prevent him from being able to pay, which is why the girlfriend put him on skates. Multiply by a million and you have a good idea of the pervasiveness of this ongoing catastrophe. I don’t watch nearly as much televised sports as I have in the past. The incessant DraftKings, FanDuel, and other ads (Bet $5 and get a $200 credit!) on all sports, golf included, make me much less likely to continue watching even at this low level.

    According to a young friend, it is much safer to use a conventional independent bookie. The bookie will cut you off at the first sign of financial distress…We are a very sick society. But this is common knowledge to anyone paying attention.

    Just saw that griffen beat me to this!
    1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 9:05 am

       We are fast creating a wasted generation of young men (women play a much smaller role typically in gambling outlays) many of which are to the point of robbing Paul to play Peter’s parlay, or at best are flat broke, with gambling opportunities a plenty out there like so many sugarplum dumplings.

       I wish them luck transitioning from slitting their risks in such endeavors, and a problem gambler typically looks like anybody else-no telltale signs of outward distress.

       Legalized casino gambling only shows up in 1931, I could see gambling banned in all forms by 2031.
    2. curlydan October 4, 2025 at 12:05 pm

       Every time I see a “Bet $5, Get $200 in Bonus Bets for Free”, I can only think of “Smoke 1 cigarette, get 2 packs free”. We are begging these young men to become addicts.
       1. TimH October 4, 2025 at 12:34 pm

          If Amazon can make walk-in stores redundant, online gambling could make Vegas casinos unprofitable.
    3. scott s. October 4, 2025 at 12:47 pm

       Here in Hawaii, all forms of gambling are illegal. Pretty much every year there is a push to legislate a casino or two which is supposed to bring in wealthy Asians. I think the large LDS population here helps prevent that from happening.

       My anecdata is after my Mom passed, my Dad remarried in his 80’s. They had pre-nups to keep all their finances separate. After wife no 2 died, my Dad found out she had $30k in personal loan debt from gambling (she had essentially no income of her own). This from local New Orleans casinos and occasional weekenders to Biloxi. (I guess there is a train now to get you there.)

       When visiting I would hear all about the $5k slot jackpots; nothing about the over-all results.
       1. skippy October 4, 2025 at 6:45 pm

          ” I think the large LDS population here helps prevent that from happening. ”

          Fun Fact … LDS bankers underwrote the establishment of Vegas with the Mob back in the day. Its right up there with retroactively baptizing dead people into the Faith, never mind ones agency post facto …
          1. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 7:02 pm

             You know, I have a distant relative that was baptized into the LDS church. I thought that interesting until I noted that the date for this was also the date of his death.
             1. skippy October 4, 2025 at 7:41 pm

                It was a bit of a deal back in the early NC days mate. The amount of money, capex, admin/staff, dedicated finding deceased relatives via archives and retroactively baptize them. Then again the subscription channel show about how LDS operated back in its early days, wellie, how many faiths[tm] have been built on suffering and carnage yet today wrap themselves in light[tm].

                Hope your place is bush fire ready mate.
                1. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 8:16 pm

                   Hopefully. But you can never really tell until a fire hits next to you.
                   1. skippy October 4, 2025 at 8:31 pm

                      Lmmao it was the whole reason behind Ancestry dot com.

                      BTW epic grand final tonight ….
          2. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 8:11 pm

             Its a bit refreshing driving around Utah with nary a casino around, nor any sort of gambling possibility.

             No billboards in regards to casinos, and even the few lawyers held up to a high standard are on the down low-nothing compared to the garish Vegas ones such as ‘In a Wreck-Need a Check!’, such as:

             ‘Injured?

             Dan Can Help’
    4. Revenant October 4, 2025 at 5:54 pm

       Obligatory Kneecap reference:

       Naoise Ó Cairealláin (the Irish language rapper Móglaí Bap) has written an Irish language play, performed in 2023, based on his experiences as a teenager (so, 2010-2015), sucked into addiction to the fixed odds betting terminals in UK bookies.

       https://www.rte.ie/gaeilge/2025/0808/1323309-moglai-bap-on-his-new-play-and-the-predatory-culture-of-gambling/

       His comments on it reflect all your points.
    5. ACPAL October 4, 2025 at 7:30 pm

       My gambling habit is voting for a president every four years and hoping he’s better than the last. I don’t remember the last time I won.
11. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 8:52 am

    A long interview from several days ago with a post peace plan insert at the beginning:

    Gaza’s obliteration has been paved by US-Israeli peace proposals | Norman Finkelstein | UNAPOLOGETIC (MEE)
    1. mrsyk October 4, 2025 at 9:12 am

       Paved with good intentions then, heh heh;)
    2. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 12:00 pm

       >BREAKING: Hamas Responds to Trump Gaza Plan

       I am at a loss to understand the somewhat hopeful commentary from DropSite.

       Likewise. I watched (mostly) this live yesterday when it dropped. It seemed to me that Sami Al-Arian was the most somewhat hopeful, Scahill less so. Trump wants the peace prize, by hook or crook. Finkelstein had a more measured assessment. His prediction: maybe there will be a lull in the slaughter, perhaps two months, then back to business. The business being no Palestinians in Palestine. Trump is a powerful fool, with an enormous ego. The ego that ever needs to be massaged.
       1. Balan Aroxdale October 4, 2025 at 12:50 pm

          I think it makes more sense if everyone simply looks on the plan as a performative politics, which nothing concrete will emerge from. If Israel and Hamas signed on the line and freeed all the hostages tomorrow, we all know that the IDF would continue to slaughter the population and deny the entry of food. No-one believes otherwise anymore. No-one even pretends otherwise anymore.

          A serious PR effort to sell this plan would have, for example, let the flotilla ships in. It would have been a signal that the political class was indeed serious this time. Instead the likes of Ben Gvir turned the flotilla seizure into an election campaign video. Netenyahu has made more noises about new campaigns to censor the internet than about Gaza reconstruction.
          Western governments continue to supply Israel with arms and ammunition to massacre civilians. They continue to allow Israel to trade with them even as it blocks peanut butter and baby food for people whose bodies are eating their own organs.

          This plan is not serious. The genocide will continue until the quislings in the western world are removed from power, and until there is a comprehensive military effort to dislodge the IDF from the occupied territories. Trump’s tweets and cheap PR bunting matter no more than retweets on social media. Put cuffs on the suits who have planned and enacted these mass murders over the last two years and I’ll think differently. Until then I don’t pay attention to performative political art forms.
          1. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 1:56 pm

             The MEE interview with Finkelstein is 2:48:44, divided into the first circa 45 minutes which actually is several days after the second two hours. The first segment is on the peace plan, the second is on the broader history.

             Finkelstein cannot be bought. He has paid for that.

             The present is history.

             Will those of us present remember?
             1. Mikel October 4, 2025 at 4:16 pm

                The section beginning around the 1:30:00 mark…media and propaganda…
                It’s the same historical perspective that I’ve been thinking about.
                1. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 8:25 pm

                   Two tries (lost in the ether) on Abe Lincoln and the indigenous people.
          2. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 4:18 pm

             Until then I don’t pay attention to performative political art forms.

             ~Political power flows from the barrel of a gun
    3. Mikel October 4, 2025 at 1:53 pm

       Will check this out. It’s close to 3 hours, but Finkelstein is usually informative and captivating.
       But I think that for the Zionists, disarming Hamas (Palestine), Hezbollah (Lebanon), and Iran is the only package deal they will find acceptable.
12. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 9:39 am

    “A vivid new telling of the herring farts / Soviet sub history”

    Maybe the Russians could mess with the Swedes by dropping buoys that broadcast human farting sounds from time to time.
    1. Trees&Trunks October 4, 2025 at 11:05 am

       We fart in your general direction.
       Мы пукаем в Ваше общее направление.

       In these nationalistic times it would be hilarious if different nations have different sonic finger… or should I say assprints. What possibilities that would open up for heavy trolling. Imagine these “Russian” drones flying around in Scandinavia blasting Baltic noises.
       1. AG October 4, 2025 at 9:10 pm

          we should establish an alternative to SNL
          all of this has so much unused potential
          I am thinking of such things, like Putin and his wife having breakfast / Starmer trying to drive to Ukraine by car never makes it out of the City of London / Russian, Swedish and British submarines battling each other with farting sounds / Macron losing the next election against a real Macaroon / Kallas´s Vagina monoluges and Merz trying to teach his dick to speak Ukrainian like Z does but it doesn´t listen…
13. Carolinian October 4, 2025 at 9:58 am

    That’s a good Moon of Alabama with a clear explanation of why AI is bs. One might add that the whole notion that humans can create a machine more intelligent than themselves only works if you redefine intelligence as reinventing the wheel rather than inventing the wheel. If your machine only knows about previous knowledge (in vast quantities) then how can it invent something new?

    But in an age of specialization then something that embodies vast amounts of general knowledge may seem new and exciting. Perhaps we should be more worried about human intelligence receding.
14. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 10:01 am

    Leavitt to Believer

    In this week’s episode, Karoline gets high-jacked by a Jared Kushner’s Iraq Concert question from the press, more than likely from that Eddie Haskell @ AP, wanting to know where the couple billion payout went, when like a karate chop from any tv series in the 60’s, Leavitt lays out a loyalty oath of sorts for Jared in face of conflict of interest queries. Game, set, match.
15. Socal Rhino October 4, 2025 at 10:20 am

    Larry Johnson (sonar21.com) has dash cam footage from multiple sources that may show a Russian test of a non nuclear EMP weapon. What is seen is a blue flash in the sky and a city immediately falling dark. He speculates that Russian research in plasma physics that enabled maneuverable hypersonic missiles may have led to a another new weapon. Very speculative at this point but Nato planners will presumably take note. Putin has hinted at times that the Oreshnik was not the only new breakthrough weapon technology in the pipeline.
    1. Michaelmas October 4, 2025 at 11:47 am

       It’s an obvious thing to develop, if true. It needn’t have anything to do with plasma physics, though — there are more obvious starting points.
       1. AG October 5, 2025 at 7:07 am

          Ever looked into Steven Starr´s EMP book?
          He wrote about that on MoA in the comments.
          I didn´t have time for it though so far.
    2. Skip Intro October 4, 2025 at 11:53 am

       It sounds plausible, but I think the blue flash and power dying could also be explained by a big high-voltage arc, like catastrophic failure of some of the power infrastructure. The flash could have been reflected by clouds. An EMP would leave a lot of small electronics fried, so getting the power back on would just be the beginning, and there would be a lot of evidence from the area.
       1. hk October 5, 2025 at 1:14 am

          I wondered the same: I didn’t think it would be possible, or at least likely, to successfully record an EMP going off with a phone.
    3. comrade October 4, 2025 at 4:43 pm

       The flash is from the mighty transformers dying. EMP weapon would do a lot more than a light show for the observers. Lots of unsuspecting electronics would get fried.
16. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 10:29 am

    “The UK Needs to Break Out of Its Debt Doom Loop”

    So I suppose the UK telling the Ukraine to take a hike and no more £5 billion a year is out of the question. Since Starmer also signed up the UK to be the Ukraine’s best buddy for the next hundred years with the UK handing over £5 billion annually, after 100 years that would mean that the UK would have given the Ukraine about half a trillion pounds in that time. They may want to rethink that one.
17. The Rev Kev October 4, 2025 at 10:39 am

    “US farmers hit by trade war to get ‘substantial’ aid: Treasury chief”

    Even if Trump does the right thing by those farmers, what do they do for next year. Soybeans? The US has lost the Chinese market for good. China will be getting their soybeans from places like Brazil and Argentina. But it’s not just soybeans but other crops like corn and cotton and others. So what will American farmers be planting for next year? Will it be an export crop or will it be crops for local US consumption? Those that haven’t gone bankrupt by then that is.
    1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 10:53 am

       I’ll commit to using more packets of soy sauce than usual this year, in doing my part to get the Soybelt back on its feet!

       Give a farmer a bailout and he’s good for a year-teach him to code and he has in demand skills.
       1. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 11:34 am

          he’s good for a year-teach him to code and he has in demand skills.

          In India?
          1. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 7:14 pm

             Well, there’s always hope farmers can do well in their combine @ the NFL combine and catch on with a team. Heard some hayseed from Nebraska did a 4.1 in a souped up CAT.
    2. North Star October 4, 2025 at 2:09 pm

       China was also the main importer of Canadian canola, but applied retaliatory tariffs on it when we followed the US lead in denying the import of Chinese electric vehicles. My relatives just finished harvesting a large crop of canola and now it sits in storage. It will be very difficult if not impossible to find new markets for the quantities harvested.
18. Screwball October 4, 2025 at 11:16 am

    ‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?

    My son? How about us old people? Here’s my little AI story.

    My laptop developed a problem so I took it to a guy to look at. The disk drive was going bad. He fixed me up with a new drive and I’m good to go. He also said there is still and extra slot so I could add another drive and use it as a back up. Good idea, lets do that. This same guy was telling me about Mircrosoft Co-pilot, which I never used. So I thought I would ask co-pilot how to add another drive.

    I did this by typing the information into co-pilot which gave me step by step instructions. They came back with a really nice set of instructions. But the next problem, how to read this if the computer is off? So I asked co-pilot. Use the app on your phone. OK, that makes sense. So I downloaded the app with the intention to remove it when done, so off I go.

    I call up the transcript on my phone and started taking my laptop apart. This is where it got weird. I ran into some trouble so I asked co-pilot what to do – and it started talking to me. Sounded like a guy with an Australian accent. So as I work on the computer we are having a conversation on how I was doing. It was like the customer service/support technician on the phone with you at all times. You don’t have to wait on hold, they are always there.

    OK, put those 6 screws back in. I’ll be here if you have any questions, good luck. OK, well done, let’s move on to the next step. After a while it seems like you are talking to a real person – it is that real. I decided to ask “are you from Australia?” No, I’m just a typical AI says the guy in the box.

    It was really wild how human it sounded, and I must admit, a bit creepy. I could see how people could get addicted talking to one of these bots or whatever you want to call them. Not just kids, but adults. It is not hard at all playing around with this technology for hours and hours.

    I don’t know where it goes, or if it is good or not, but it sure weird and creepy.
    1. Michael Fiorillo October 4, 2025 at 3:27 pm

       “I don’t know where it goes, or if it is good or not, but it sure is weird and creepy.”

       As Jack Kerouac said, “First Thought, Best Thought.” I think you can stick with your initial impression, and what follows logically from it.
19. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 11:22 am

    From America’s looming electricity crisis is Trump’s Achilles’ heel

    The US Energy Department said in its Resource Adequacy Report in July that the planned increase in firm electricity supply is a fifth of what is needed by 2030.

    “Absent intervention, it is impossible for the nation’s bulk power system to meet AI growth while maintaining a reliable power grid,” it said.

    “A failure to power the data centres needed to win the AI arms race could result in adversary nations shaping digital norms and controlling digital infrastructure. The situation necessitates a radical change.”

    So this is stupid; What race? Has anyone ever actually elucidated the “goal” of this race? What’s the finish line? How do we know if we’ve “won”? Urgency of action without a goal is lunacy.

    It is one thing to keep eight obsolete coal plants on life support to plug immediate gaps, it is another to wager America’s AI future on this culture war banter.

    I’ve yet to hear a coherent description of this future state of AI in America. What exactly is the destination? Why do I want to go there? Why are we expending resources to travel this path to an unknown destination?
    1. ilsm October 4, 2025 at 1:07 pm

       The breathtaking drama of AI growth limited by watts!

       By the time the powers that be finance the increased grid load, wattage AI demand will be flat to collapsing.

       See the discussion on AI at Moon of Alabama.

       OpenAI who has hundreds of billions in capitalization increased revenue by 16% first half y on y, at $4.3 billion a magnificent loss.

       DHS might need a few hundred billion a year to keep data centers assimilating their planned population surveillance…..
20. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 11:37 am

    Whoa, thought it was a nightmare
    Lord, it all so true
    They told me, “Don’t go walkin’ slow
    ‘Cause Epstein’s files still on the loose.”

    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Whoa, don’t look back to sea

    Thought I heard a rumblin’
    Callin’ to my name
    Four hundred million guns are loaded
    Satan cries, “Take aim!”

    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Whoa, don’t look back to sea

    Over on the mountain
    Thunder magic spoke
    “Let Maduro’s people know my wisdom
    Rid the land of coke.”

    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Better run through the jungle
    Whoa, don’t look back to sea

    Run Through the Jungle, by CCR

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7PUPNxsRQ0&list=RD_7PUPNxsRQ0
21. Craig H. October 4, 2025 at 11:37 am

    SF Standard has had some very good articles lately. So many I have collided with the paywall. If you want a link to an archive of the TechBro 2.0 article it may be found here:

    https://archive.ph/sRGwq

    Pretty sure the Gecko startup company was named after the anti hero in the Wall Street movie and not the awesome animal.
    1. raspberry jam October 4, 2025 at 12:35 pm

       I work with a ton of these guys. Tech (especially the Bay Area variant) has always been a boys club but this new permutation is even more so although this could just be more obvious because it is a reaction to the previous ‘soft tech’ era with inclusion/diversity initiatives that papered over a lot of these tendencies. My current org setup is like 80 men to 7 women. The two technical women are femme lesbians, two in sales/finance are early career femme pre-family married women, one is a married mother of three who does marathons and two of the data scientists are mothers with 3+ kids. Any other women are in operational support roles, like HR or executive assisting. Deeply disconcerting after a decade of the typical ‘woman in tech’ archetype being a sort of gender ambigious cool girl with a creative hobby. All I can say is that at least the guys do not appear to be embracing aggression despite all the free floating testosterone and recreational performance chemicals. Honestly they seem sort of shy and emotionally stunted, like they need a leader (of which we have a few also of their type who are quite a bit more forthright and domineering).
       1. raspberry jam October 4, 2025 at 1:10 pm

          Something else while I’m on the topic of the new unspoken gender rules in tech: I am currently working with a lot of defense/miltech companies, very large ones, and they have a very distinct pattern I was not expecting: their technical leads are all women, also hyper-femme with multiple children. For tech I think this setup is more about reducing in-office sexual tension (lots of stories from the crypto unicorn era about intra-employee sexual relationships and rumors of big sexual harassment payouts) but for the defense companies I think it is more about the pretty face on a morally-questionable industry as their typical buyer/contractor will be a more conservative and older male team. How do you motivate workers in an era of precarity? Apparently we are bringing back 1950s style gender roles. For the first time in over a decade I recently bought actual high heels as a response to some style competition with another woman on a customer visit. I started looking around at other women’s footwear in the Bay Area after that. Expensive sneakers are still the standard but more and more heels. The defense women are still doing the conservative woman sheath dress + cardigan thing (again, very 1950s). The Bay Area women are going back to long hair with waves and curls. Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, is a good example of the new female tech archetype.
          1. JBird4049 October 4, 2025 at 8:13 pm

             >>>Apparently we are bringing back 1950s style gender roles.

             Historically, during major wars or depressions, fashion becomes much more conservative, uniform, and conforming. Interestingly, during major crises such as war or epidemics, mental health tends to improve in the general population as whatever the mental illness is, it tends to be suppressed by the destruction and death of serious conflicts of plagues; I only really became afraid of Covid once I saw that the usual decline of conflict and personal neurosis wasn’t happening in the United States, but was getting worse, which meant that the social and political problems are much worse than I had understood.

             Socially, I do expect that a more traditional social lifestyle will come around especially if the current “New Right” gains more power or the Neoliberal left continues to stab itself.

             Since the changes that I had expected from Covid did not happen, I wonder if the reversion to conservative clothing like suits and dresses along with hairstyles, makeup, and jewelry will happen. Or will it happen, but be confined to the top fifteen percent of the population that can still afford good clothes, never mind conservative fashion?
             1. raspberry jam October 4, 2025 at 10:34 pm

                Or will it happen, but be confined to the top fifteen percent of the population that can still afford good clothes, never mind conservative fashion?

                Well I can only speak for the ladies but I can confirm the trend towards more traditionally femme presentation to a degree that would have been considered retrograde in the mid 90s to now has made its way down to the younger (and thus lower income) women as well. Money is being spent on blowouts, manicures (mid-length almond shaped nails with red lacquer are back, extremely early 90s style, after decades of really gaudy fake/flashy/overly long styles), and a clothing style usually called quiet luxury of which the budget brands Quince and Everlane are the standard among those unable to pay for the name brands. And the budget stuff ain’t cheap either but since it is all quite boring and, well, quiet, there’s an immense focus on things like skincare, teeth, and perfume to provide a little bit of personal flair. Lots of emphasis on extremely throwback hair styling like Sabrina Carpenter’s in the younger set too. I have assumed a lot of it in the younger women without established careers is about landing a husband. The young tech bros looking for wives are looking for that type, not the gender ambiguous cool poly girls of a decade ago.
          2. hk October 5, 2025 at 1:10 am

             I am reminded that Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were apparently all very “traditional” women, as I suppose, were Maria Theresia and maybe Elizabeth of Castille?
    2. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 5:07 pm

       Many have forsaken alcohol and vacations to “lock in” before AGI arrives and upends the future. “This is the last chance to build generational wealth,” said Sheridan Clayborne, 25, cofounder of AI recruiting firm Brix. “You need to make money now, before you become a part of the permanent underclass.”

       Imagine that kind of exploitative garbage we’re going to get out of founders with this perspective, however accurate it may be.
       1. hazelbee October 5, 2025 at 7:17 am

          it’s awful isnt it.
          so many preconceived ideas and cultural norms.

          “last chance” – like a spear phishing attempt , desperate language creating a false sense of urgency. “don’t miss!”, “once in a lifetime!” “by tomorrow this will be gone!”

          “to build generational wealth” – like that is the only thing that is valuable. vs , say mental health or physical health, or interesting meaningful work. I’ve never trusted those that are out for themselves simply to make money. I don’t understand the lack of imagination. there are countless other more interesting things to do with our time.

          “you need to make money now…” – need? no. I need regular food, exercise, sleep, friends and family.

          “before you become part of the permanent underclass” -mmm. if you have to say that you are already part of the underclass? and its a very privileged western view isnt it? versus rest of the world.

          We’re an apparently intelligent social animal. but together we do some very dumb things.
22. farmboy October 4, 2025 at 11:44 am

    Good question Rev! there will be some crop switching to corn for sure and it’ll go straight into feedlots that are minting $’s and to export, bankruptcies won’t start until the following year, the China market can come back overnight. Big ongoing crop support payments for all field crops, corn, beans, and wheat are coming. All below cost of production at different times. Since WW2 US ag is export driven and the tariff regime is directly having a negative affect. Soybeans is the obvious loser now, but if any country follows China example, huge inventories of any grain will pile-up overnight. US farmers and their commodity groups are gonna be scarred for a long time. I’m still astonished at the stupidity of all of it.
23. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 11:48 am

    Horrors hiding in plain sight. From AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring

    Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills.

    …

    Stanley’s neighborhood is a mix of well-tended houses like his and those that are condemned or abandoned, with broken windows and holes in the walls. He used to work as a hotel manager but glaucoma took his vision almost 20 years ago, leaving him with few employment options.

    …

    The rise in his power bills has him reusing disposable razors 20 times and stretching the supplies for his diabetes and sleep apnea. Sometimes he goes to food banks.

    And my takeaway is actually, if we had a functional healthcare system in this country, would this gentleman still have lost his vision from glaucoma? Diabetes is a manageable condition, if you can afford insulin. And if you’re an American diabetic, well, because markets, go die, applies.
    1. Revenant October 4, 2025 at 6:02 pm

       Having to stretch your insulin supply is a tragic fate.

       But I reuse disposable razors 20 times and always have. I hate paying money to Gillette! When the little lubricating strip finally falls off, long past lubricating, it”s time for a new blade head….
       1. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 8:55 pm

          I was literally just considering this further, and insulin availability represents a basic test of civil society. It should be free. Untreated diabetes leads to all kinds of bad, expensive outcomes. And giving people insulin for free literally, there’s no downside. No one can steal it, or take excessive amounts, or sell it on the black market. And no one is trying to become diabetic. No one can freeload or exploit free availability.

          And still because markets, go die.

          America is a sick place to live.
24. farmboy October 4, 2025 at 11:52 am

    ag writers canvassing republicans suggest 10-14 billion coming soon with 30-50 billion more in the offing, wow!
    1. Michael Fiorillo October 4, 2025 at 3:35 pm

       It’s quite a set-up: those free market welfare queens vote for Trump, he screws them over and the rest of us get to eat even more shite as a result. There’s an evil/pathetic symmetry to it…
    2. skippy October 4, 2025 at 7:07 pm

       Part of me wants too see it payed in Trump crypto coins as part of a stable coin cryptocurrency-backed collateral. I mean … Trump is just another Javier Milei, Argentina is just a satellite nation where citizans are just crash test dummies for economic ideologues in perfecting the utopian society based on the Natural Order. Only difference is Trump has the power of USD fiat and Milei is just a Ruby member of the cult, hence requires trickle down from his betters.

       It will be interesting to watch how decades of industrialization of productive farm land and food processing/distribution being administered by PE machinations unfolds with environmental risk factors [insurance/ -crop yields] on the rise.
       1. farmboy October 5, 2025 at 11:37 am

          skippy, very important to watch how crop insurance handles worsening climate impacts. these companies are subsidized by premium discounts to farmers paid for by CCC/USDA at or near 60%. so there is aperiod every year used to calculate premiums for the next year tracking a basket of weighted futures prices and discount or additions for cash markets that lasts 30 days. I’ve often wondered how hard the private owners lean on futures by building huge short positions to drive down price coverage levels. the addition or premium to conventional is what made organic work for me.
25. matt October 4, 2025 at 11:58 am

    Re: What if the Universe Remembers Everything? New Theory Rewrites the Rules of Physics
    I looked into this article and it immediately made me go “wow this is a computer scientist’s wet dream.” Bro is basically proposing that we live in a simulation with discrete “quantum memory” spaces that are analagous to bits. Reading the first author’s other articles, it’s very clearly written by a compsci guy who is applying the principles of computer science to quantum physics. I can’t hate because when you are really into a topic, you start viewing the rest of the world through that lens. I, for instance, like to apply chemical engineering concepts to the economy. I think this theory might pick up steam among the tech community for the meta-communications reason that it it just applying principles of computer science to quantum physics, and computer science guys are more likely to believe things they kind of understand.
    I am proud to say I understand the math notation and about half of the concepts referenced, but there’s no way I’m gonna read the whole paper. I have homework, rip.
    1. Lefty Godot October 4, 2025 at 1:42 pm

       Don’t know about the universe, but I sometimes wonder if there is a planetary memory picking up electrical impulses from our brains that might be responsible for the “evidence suggesting reincarnation” that Ian Stevenson wrote several books about, things like kids reporting events that happened before they were born as memories. All of the theorizing on stuff like this seems to be based on the scientist’s preferred view: reductionists want the “meat machine” view of the mind to be true, with nothing beyond what’s inside your skull, and cosmicists want a mind beyond the body, if overlapping it for some period. Few disinterested parties.
    2. Revenant October 4, 2025 at 6:09 pm

       This theory seems very close to what Stephen Wolfram is doing, rewriting spacetime as a Planck-scale graph data structure and physics as information manipulations upon it.

       It sounds like madness but the ability to derive higher order physical laws is uncanny. Other curiosities, like the idea that our universe appears to be a holographic surface, in informational terms, and the precedent that Faraday’s laws of electromagnetism fall out in a beautifully compact formulation of recast in relativistic space-time rather than in mere space, make me think this could be the best hope of a grand unified theory in decades.

       Forget software is eating the world: software is eating the Universe!
26. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 1:05 pm

    How Private Equity Oversees the Ethics of Drug Research

    IRBs. IM Doc could have a field day with this.

    When the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk wanted to test whether the main ingredient in Ozempic, its wildly popular weight-loss and diabetes drug, could also treat liver disease, it first needed approval from an ethics panel to ensure the safety of trial volunteers in the United States.

    Such panels, called institutional review boards, have the power to reject drug trials or order modifications if participants face unreasonable risks. They are supposed to be independent watchdogs — counterweights to Big Pharma and overzealous researchers.

    Yet Novo didn’t have to venture far to hire an ethics panel for its liver-disease trial in May 2024: It chose WCG Clinical, a review board partly owned by its own corporate parent, The New York Times found.
    1. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 4:56 pm

       This country is sick

       As the pharmaceutical industry expanded, with new discoveries and increased competition, drugmakers sought faster turnaround times. Commercial ethics panels were ready to oblige.

       As for-profit review boards grew, so did concerns that they might be inclined to sacrifice patient protection for greater profits. Those concerns came to a head in a scandal over an experimental antibiotic, Ketek.

       The F.D.A. approved Ketek in 2004, and within two years, reports of liver failure and deaths linked to the drug began rolling in. Only then did it emerge that F.D.A. approval had come despite reports of fraudulent research and concerns within the agency over the drug’s safety.

       Congress investigated, and it wasn’t only the F.D.A. that came under criticism. There was also a for-profit ethics panel, Copernicus, which would later become part of WCG.

       At a 2008 hearing, Copernicus’s chief executive, Sharon Hill Price, acknowledged that the company had failed to inform the F.D.A. after receiving 83 notices of testing protocol violations. “So protocol violations, no matter the number, wasn’t alarming to your organization, to Copernicus?” asked Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan.

       “Not at the time,” Ms. Price responded. “No.”

       (Ketek’s manufacturer, Sanofi, ceased production in 2016.)

       Dr. David B. Ross, who evaluated new drugs for the F.D.A., offered a harsh assessment of ethics reviews. “The I.R.B. system nationally is broken,” he testified.

       Any drug approved since the 1990s is possibly dangerous. You have to assume hazard by default.
27. Tom Stone October 4, 2025 at 1:12 pm

    Has anyone else been impressed by how quickly Charlie Kirk’s murder was Monetized, I am willing to bet that the profits have exceeded $100MM already.
    God Bless America!
    1. ThirtyOne October 4, 2025 at 1:47 pm

       Last week I typed in “Charlie Kirk” into the AliExpress search. I was not disappointed.
       1. amfortas October 4, 2025 at 4:45 pm

          idk. my twitx feed is littered with all manner of righties…for research purposes…and that whole martyrdom thing is looking like a damp squib, to me.
          didnt take.
          either he wasnt widely known enough to merit martyrdom, and/or enough of his videos of him saying horrible shite were available that those who werent already fans/had never heard of the guy, just moved on.
          could be the goldfish attention span engendered by the fondleslab culture, as well.
          people like that loomer woman are still yammering on…bu when you get right down to it, hard core maga is a tiny, insular bunch(as has always been the case with the hard core righty amurkins, btw, per social science)…the rest of their “movement” have jobs and other interest vying for their attention, and are not as invested in such things as the hard core cohort.(i watched this same thing play out locally(and on locl faceborg) during teabilly times…a screamer could whip everybody up, but it never lasted..people have shit to do)
       2. hk October 5, 2025 at 1:45 am

          I remember Trump T shirts emblazoned with the iconic photo showing up for sale within hours of the shooting. Of course, in both cases, it’s the Chinese doing the monetizing (very fast!).
28. XXYY October 4, 2025 at 2:41 pm

    New York’s Mass Flight From Reality Tablet

    This piece makes me nostalgic for a time when having something to say was an important qualification for being a reporter, or even a writer. Not well observed enough to be an amusing commentary, and too nonsensical to promote any useful reflection in the reader, this is primarily an example of words-in-a-row journalism that seems to be an adequate qualification for getting into print in the days of late-stage capitalist media.

    Perhaps AI-generated articles will actually turn out to be an improvement over current media industry work, since ChatGPT 4000’s training set will extend into earlier decades when human writing had form and purpose.

    Not holding my breath, though.
    1. Matthew G. Saroff October 6, 2025 at 3:49 pm

       You should not expect particularly cogent analysis from Tablet anyway.

       I would also note that the underlying context here is that we have a guy whose professional history is to find genteel ways to say, “Muslims are scary and bad.”

       This is just another proxy for Islamophobia.
29. raspberry jam October 4, 2025 at 3:14 pm

    re: Hamas “accepts” Trump’s peace plan with caveats

    I am at a loss to understand the somewhat hopeful commentary from DropSite. Trump’s earlier position was that this was a take it or nothing deal. That is surely Netanyahus’s. Rejection of any part = justification for Israel to continue the genocide.

    I am a little more hopeful but not for the reasons you might expect. Consider the following three points:

    1. Netanyahu’s hold on power is weak.
    2. Only Netanyahu (with a very precise set of conditions on the ground and a very specific government coalition) could have destroyed Gaza, clearing the way for development of the Strip by Israel and allies.
    3. Only Netanyahu could have created a weak Palestinian state in name and deed without actual power, thereby destroying the possibility of a multi-religious, multi-ethnic secular Israel, without being murdered by the Israeli religious right wing.

    Most people who try to pay attention to this horrible issue look at it through the lens of empathy (understandable, human) or what ‘should’ or ‘would be best’ to happen for the fighting to stop with a minimum of loss of life going forward. So they think Israel might be willing to make concessions or come to a ‘live and let live’ agreement after enough fighting. But if you actually listen to what the vile Kahanists in the Israeli right wing are saying repeatedly you will understand that was never an option. What they say:

    – they are fighting to keep Israel for the Jews
    – Palestinians are not Jews, and are funded and backed by Arab states
    – Arab states (and by proxy Arab Israelis) will always be a threat to Israeli Jews

    So a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Israel is not an option for them. This is existential for them and they’ve been marinating in fury and resentment for at least 30 years since the Oslo process started (really, longer, but this is the generation currently in Netanyahu’s cabinet so I just start the clock there so I don’t have to drag 80+ years of history into the discussion). But this religious right wing did not have the electoral numbers in 2022 to form a government without Netanyahu – he had to cultivate them with the collaboration of the Israeli media and to an extent the US political structure – as late as September 2023, Netanyahu’s current government with Ben Gvir and Smotrich was in danger of falling again.

    Then October 7 happened. This was the radicalizing event that made the Kahanist position tolerable to the majority of secular and religious but non-Kahanist Israeli Jews. And as soon as the IDF went into Gaza it was likely the intent was to destroy Gaza so comprehensively (under the cover of ‘eliminating Hamas’ and ‘freeing the hostages’ which had wide support) that ultimately what remained would be too weak to require a military occupation by the IDF. I believe they likely had plans to seize and develop the strip prior to this, but they needed an inciting event, an excuse. And they didn’t expect it to take so long or cost so much in terms of life. Once Gaza was destroyed and weak, they could have a state – a weak state without a military, without the majority of the resource assets (they would have to pay for their destruction, after all) – and the international community could be satisfied. “Now you finally have a free Palestine, what are you complaining about?” And of course the Kahanists would howl about the threat on the borders, but with a Palestinian state the West Bank could be annexed for the settlers and the non-Jews expelled. It would probably be enough to return Ben Gvir and Smotrich to a vocal minority instead of the likely successor to the Likud. For at least a decade or two.

    For everyone else to the left of Ben Gvir in Israel who relies on a salary to live, as soon as the hostages are freed, Netanyahu’s job is done. This Greater Israel settler nonsense isn’t of interest to them – this is terrorist stuff – these people were barred from running for office before 2022. The last 3 years have not exactly been a pleasure in terms of daily life. And for the tech companies in particular, this is close to the end of the line for running on fumes while waiting for conditions to improve. There has to be a period to recover, to return to business, to close on all these contracts that have been in a holding state for years now. And the only way to do that is if the war ends and there is a perception in the international community that the Palestinians were not exterminated.

    Note that I am not saying ‘this is it, peace is at hand’. Like Finkelstein I think we’ll see a couple of months of quiet before fighting erupts again. I think if Netanyahu’s government falls the chances for peace rise exponentially, the real wild card here is how much the various factions propping up Netanyahu are ready to pull their support because he’s finished his job. We could also see the Gaza situation stabilize as above only for the Iran situation to fire up again. Or another round with Iran that gives cover to the massive assault on Gaza City that is currently being postponed by the ceasefire.
    1. Alice X October 4, 2025 at 11:00 pm

       Just taking note here. Much original composition, if I have it so: thank you! I will review if I might.
       1. raspberry jam October 5, 2025 at 2:30 am

          Thank you, Alice.
    2. hk October 5, 2025 at 1:54 am

       Very insightful. Thanks. It does make me wonder that is exactly why Netanyahu is going war mad, though. Gaza may matter to the Kahanists, whose interest is limited to Eretz Yisrael, whatever its limits are, but Netanyahu wants war–the bigger the war, the better, so the “job” can never be finished.
       1. raspberry jam October 5, 2025 at 2:27 am

          I think Netanyahu wants a pardon for his long-running corruption trial, which has been eternally postponed by the wars. Every time he is called back in for depositions, what a surprise, another war. He clearly asked Trump to do something about it a few months ago because Trump, who I guarantee doesn’t know or care at all about Israel’s judicial situation or the concept of foreign interference, tweeted extensively about how they should pardon Netanyahu for the good of the country. They didn’t, and so Gaza was reinvaded after the 12 day war.

          Earlier I read that opposition parties are offering to hold the government together if Ben Gvir and/or Smotrich’s faction quit over signing the deal with Hamas:

          Opposition Leader Yair Lapid has said multiple times that his Yesh Atid would grant Netanyahu a safety net to implement a Gaza deal that returns all of the hostages, even if the far-right coalition parties oppose it or threaten to quit the coalition.

          From Ben Gvir threatens to bolt government if Hamas ‘continues to exist’ after hostages freed | Times of Israel
30. ChrisRUEcon October 4, 2025 at 4:32 pm

    #SecondJobSearches #ThereIsAlwaysOne

    Thanks for sharing the tweet. I checked the replies and saw someone (Quelle surprise! A Bitcoin bro!) making fun of the methodology (via X.com). They won’t see if I reply, so here’s official data from FRED(St. Louis Federal Reserve Database/BLS(Bureau of Labor Statistics):

    • Multiple Job Holders (Thousands of Persons, Seasonally Adjusted)
    • Multiple Jobholders as a Percent of Employed (Percent, Seasonally Adjusted)
    1. skippy October 4, 2025 at 11:29 pm

       Mate … imagine a crypto as a evolution of company script/free banking period. Although this time its not the company store you buy at but, exchange it via other company stores with an exchange rate variable. Yet it washes over all their balance sheets and at the end of the day that is all that matters ….. more flows …
       1. ChrisRUEcon October 5, 2025 at 11:54 am

          Skippy, mate:

          You know I’m a Chartalist, right? :) LOL

          While I am absolutely open to a non-state or trans-national unit of account, I don’t see crypto as the solution. Main reasons:
          • Exogenous supply: Money supply should be endogenous – flexible enough to move with increases in population and shocks.
          • Volatility: the high variability in the price of the crypto asset, and the lack of lender-of-last-resort liquidity makes it unattractive as a medium of exchange … which leads to …
          • Convertibility: At any point in time, converting crypto asset to a state money is not guaranteed since this depends on participants willing to pay a high premium if the asset value is high.

          I’ve commented here on how I’d like to see a trans-national unit of account evolve. If anyone is in crypto, and I have friends who are, I always advise them: please don’t “bet the farm” on it; and get in and out with a profit if you’re getting a buyer. But as always, disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. :)
          1. skippy October 5, 2025 at 4:36 pm

             “You know I’m a Chartalist, right?”

             Hence why I chucked it out there for its absurdity, yet some think, like AI, it will fix everything.
             1. ChrisRUEcon October 6, 2025 at 12:15 am

                #Lordt … ::as I enter the cube of shame:: LOL

                Sorry that went over my head … :)
31. Googoogajoob October 4, 2025 at 5:17 pm

    If you need a better fleshed out example of what gambling is doing to sports, I’d point to the NBA and Jontay Porter’s ban from the league

    As with the above example and what I’m referencing, it’s the proposition bets that are usually what ends up resulting in these people getting caught. It will always attract significant attention when someone is betting significant sums of money on what are very marginal occurances. On top of it, it is very hard in this age of high definition broadcasting and replays to not pick up on the tells that players give away when attempting to secure an out come.

    The greed is really putting into question the integrity of sports if the free for all of betting continues on. The bare minimum claw back I’d like to see is to ban prop betting and limit it to the general outcomes of the games. Maybe perhaps have the same restrictions on the advertising for it similar to that of cigarettes and alcohol while we’re at it.
32. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 7:30 pm

    Cali Quakefidential dept:

    Being an outlier to where the fault lines are mostly on the inlier coast, it gives me cold comfort knowing yours truly wont be directly in the path of the Big One percolating underfoot as I peck away on the QWERTY, oblivious to risk-or so goes the thinking.

    One April Fools Day during trying teenage years, my siblings and I positioned ourselves at the foot of each corner of mom’s bed and shook it like the dickens, while my sister screamed earthquake! ensconced in the safe confines of the door frame-looking mighty concerned.

    Being a lapsed Canadian not used to such things that go bump in the night, or in this case morning, mom dreaded earthquakes and the family pulled off a 5.1 that day. I think she got even and then some, tricky that way.

    Getting back to the Big One, its coming.
33. Wukchumni October 4, 2025 at 7:49 pm

    The crisis along the Colorado River is coming to a head as seven state negotiators fail to deliver an agreement on how to manage it over the next 20 years Las Vegas Review Journal
    ~~~~~~~~~~~

    Read a gripping novel in regards to the Colorado River a few years back…

    Wet Desert, by Gary Hansen

    A worthy diversion, easier done than an actual diversion of the water.
34. Jason Boxman October 4, 2025 at 9:50 pm

    Gee, is that you, COVID?

    American Women Are Leaving the Work Force. Why? (NY Times via archive.ph)

    By any metric, America’s working women are doing poorly compared to men. Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, according to Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Put another way — as Time magazine did — 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered. The gender wage gap is widening, notes the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, and, she said, “There is no racial group or educational class within the working population in which women outearn men.”

    …

    Since the federal government seems less and less invested in whatever is going on with female workers right now, I asked three economists why they think there has been a decline in the number of women working. They all said there isn’t an obvious reason; industries that are predominantly female, like health care, continue to add jobs. “There are so many negative pressures on women working today that we can’t easily point to one story,” Kathryn Anne Edwards told me.

    Misty Heggeness, who is an associate professor at the University of Kansas, said that the cost of child care has outpaced overall inflation during the past few years, which may push some women who are in dual-earning families back home. Child care costs increased an eye-popping 29 percent from 2020 to 2024.

    Edwards speculated that college-educated, young female workers without children may be opting to ride out a bad job market by getting more education. She added that return-to-office mandates championed by the president may be pushing some mothers out of the job market because they had built their lives around hybrid or remote roles, and can’t manage without that flexibility.

    (bold mine)

    No mention that women are more likely to get long-COVID than me, or that the nursing profession, where nurses are put at risk of getting COVID repeatedly, is majority women.

    Childcare, too, is horrifically expensive, and this is often provided by women, and Trump is certainly targeting immigrations, including those that would be providing childcare. But childcare costs were insane even before the Pandemic. And again women are more likely to get long COVID then men, and provide much of this service, paid and unpaid.

    Grandparents would provide this service, too, but Biden and neoliberals murdered many grandparents because markets.

    So too with teachers:

    About three-quarters (77%) of teachers are women and 23% are men, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for the 2020-21 school year, which is the most recent one available. This gender imbalance is especially notable in elementary schools, where 89% of teachers are women. Women make up 72% of middle school teachers and 60% of secondary or high school teachers.

    And we do nothing to protect teachers nor students from repeat infection.
35. Ben Panga October 5, 2025 at 1:05 am

    Tories to pledge to create immigration taskforce modelled on Trump’s Ice (Guardian)

    The party’s leader, Kemi Badenoch, is expected to announce the policy on Sunday as the Conservatives heads into their annual conference after a year of historic low poll ratings. The proposed “removals force” will be tasked with deporting 150,000 people a year in a move to tackle illegal immigration.

    Badenoch will say that the taskforce would be given £1.6bn and “sweeping new powers” if the Conservatives win the next election. This would include the ability to use facial recognition technology without warning to help identify those eligible for removal from the UK.

    Under the plans, the taskforce would be expected to “work closely” with the police. Officers would be required to conduct immigration checks on everyone they stop or arrest, Badenoch is expected to add.

    Badenoch will say that the Ice model has proved to be a “successful approach” in removing migrants who have illegally entered the US.
    1. raspberry jam October 5, 2025 at 3:11 am

       hard to believe anyone could watch the videos coming out of Chicago this past week and think recreating the experience locally was a good idea but I guess the Tories are just demonstrating their impressive political instincts, maybe seeing if they can reach new lows in polling?

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