Colombia’s Cocaine Hippos Ben Goldsmith
The Decline of Deviance Experimental History
Call Security! Archedelia. ‘Skateboarders versus the “Smart City.”’
What Captures Our Attention in an Algorithmic Age? A Statistical Analysis Stat Significant
Thai woman found alive in coffin after being brought in for cremation AP
Climate/Environment
Vietnam dealing with catastrophic, deadly flooding Balanced Weather
Thailand to send aircraft carrier for flood relief as rain intensifies Straits Times
Heavy rain sees part of West Bank apartheid wall collapse and Syrian forest fires extinguished New Arab
WHAT INDIA RISKS AS ITS NATURAL FORESTS DISAPPEAR Carbon Copy
‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as datacentres keep the city hooked on coal The Guardian
Chemical pollution drives prostate cancer, falling sperm counts Climate & Capitalism
Toxic Flaming Ships
Toxic L.A. port fire burned for hours before emergency alerts were sent Los Angeles Times
Pandemics
Neurological Impacts of COVID and MIS-C in Children Bioengineer.org
Why Women Face Worse Long COVID Neuroscience News
Water
‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis Food & Environment Reporting Network
When the well runs dry The Continent
China-Japan Row
What the Trump-Xi call reveals about their priorities on Taiwan, Japan and beyond Channel News Asia
Japan PM affirms close cooperation with Trump after U.S.-China talks Kyodo News
Is Takaichi detering war or encouraging war with her comments? China Translated
A steady China-US consensus becomes ever more crucial as Japan keeps creating risks: Global Times editorial Global Times
Taiwan plans extra $52b in defence spending to counter China Straits Times
Exclusive-China buys at least 10 US soybean cargoes in new deals, sources say Reuters
India
India’s November Russian oil imports set to hit five-month high Reuters
Syraqistan
BREAKING: A new UN report finds that Israel’s assault on Gaza – with the destruction of health care, education, infrastructure, even the banking system – has erased 69 years of human development, marking the worst economic collapse ever recorded.
This is not war: it is genocide. pic.twitter.com/9fGRlFOdRJ— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 25, 2025
Child Amputees in Gaza Use Makeshift Prosthetics as Israel Restricts Medical Supplies Drop Site
Gaza: study reveals unprecedented losses of life and life expectancy Max-Planck Institute. “…current violent death toll likely exceeds 100,000.”
***
Trump starts process designating Muslim Brotherhood ‘terrorist’ New Arab
UAE, Israel quietly advanced ‘Peace Railway’ amid Gaza genocide: Report The Cradle
Old Blighty
Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges The Register
Review judge pulled from Palestine Action hearing at last hour, in patent stitch-up Jonathan Cook
European Disunion
Rising Security Costs Cast Shadow Over Germany’s Beloved Christmas Markets Devdiscourse
The EU continues to self-sabotage its economy by targeting Chinese investment Thomas Fazi
US sanctions push Serbia’s only refinery toward shutdown Intellinews
New Not-So-Cold War
Leaked phone calls throw scrutiny on Witkoff’s pro-Kremlin positions Diplomatic, by Laura Rozen
Witkoff Discusses Ukraine Plans With Key Putin Aide: Transcript Bloomberg
Putin Advisers Discuss Plans for Dealing With Trump: Transcript Bloomberg. Commentary:
The question of how these recordings came about might generate a greater scandal than their content. Somebody made a desperate move. https://t.co/H5esuKRy2s
— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) November 25, 2025
By the way Bloomberg just provided a transcript, without original audio or a source. They even somehow managed to get a phone call “recording” between two Russian envoys Dmitriev and Ushakov.
Sounds totally legit.
— Olga Bazova (@OlgaBazova) November 25, 2025
US envoy set for Moscow visit as Kremlin says ‘leaks’ aim to disrupt contacts Anadolu Agency
‘Settlement’ Carnival Reaches Fever Pitch as Antsy Euros Jockey for Relevancy Simplicius
The European Union votes to deepen defense industry ties with Ukraine AP
U.S. Army secretary warned Ukraine of imminent defeat while pushing initial peace plan NBC News
War or peace? Events in Ukraine
(Guurst):
As a functional state, Ukraine is dead. It’s already over. It has no economy and the worst demographics in the entire world. Beyond this war, there is no Ukraine – it would be a black hole sucking infinite amounts of EU money, money that the EU doesn’t have, money that the EU can…
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) November 25, 2025
Africa
US Troops Fight ISIS Militants on the Ground in Somalia’s Puntland Region Antiwar
South of the Border
War with Venezuela Won’t Solve America’s Economic Woes American Conservative
A Looming Mexican Coup? Kit Klarenberg
L’affaire Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby” Drop Site
Trump 2.0
Executive Order Provides For Bailout Of Overextended AI Companies Moon of Alabama
Democrats en déshabillé
Democrats caving on health care is worse than you think Stephen Semler
GOP Funhouse
Senate Committee to Challenge Auto-Safety Mandates That Hurt ‘Affordability’ WSJ
Immigration
Drug Arrests and Gun Seizures Fell as Homeland Security Pursued Immigration New York Times (resilc)
Forever Wars
The politicization of U.S. legal and financial warfare All-Source Intelligence
Trump Says Urging Troops to Refuse Illegal Orders Is “Sedition.” This Air Force Officer Once Did Just That. The After-Action Report
Imperial Collapse Watch
Musk’s AI supercomputer, used by U.S. military, secretly relies on Chinese hardware Oligarch Watch
“As our postwar ideals fade into history.” Patrick Lawrence
No Saviors In The Multipolar Mirage: We’re Living In An Inhuman World Fiorella Isabel
What is delinking? Jason Hickel
Accelerationists
What the UAE is doing in Silicon Valley Rest of World
Police State Watch
NEWS: Medicaid Data Now Flows to ICE Migrant Insider
AI
The slop layer Blood in the Machine
Thanksgiving Dinner Headed for Tragedy as Disastrous AI Recipes Devour Internet Futurism
Antitrust
The Rent Is Too Damn High: Did Trump Just ‘Bless’ Using AI to Jack Up Rents? BIG by Matt Stoller. Wow.
Our Famously Free Press
Ending Three-Year Strike, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Union Seeks to Rebuild Trust & Unity with Majority Scab Newspaper Payday Report
The Very Big Business of Lying To You Doomsday Scenario
One of America’s TV pastimes is the game show. Why are so many filming overseas? Los Angeles Times
Economy
Class Warfare
Part 1: My Life Is a Lie Michael W. Green. “How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America.” The poverty line.
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Thanksgiving Dinner Headed for Tragedy as Disastrous AI Recipes Devour Internet”
AI slop is everywhere it seems. I have heard of crochet websites where you have a name of a project, crotchet instructions for it that don’t actually work, and an accompanying image of a different crotchet project to show what it should look like when finished.
This is true! I am a good cook and know my way around the kitchen so I can spot dodgy recipes (and there are lots of dodgy ones out there) online pretty easily. But I am new to crochet and published paper patterns are difficult to come by these days, “everything is online” I am told at the craft and yarn stores. I can’t tell if I am looking at a legit pattern or not sometimes. I mean sometimes the AI slop is easy to ID but sometimes not. I don’t know how this changes, as long as people are making money from the ads in their videos and advertisers don’t seem to care about the quality of the content showing their ads… Like most things these days we gotta try to protect ourselves. Sigh.
I’ve been joking/theorizing for about 10 years that there will be boutique doctor/lawyer/dentist/etc offices that keep their HNW client records only on paper as a security safeguard. The market opportunity may be much broader than that. I’m hanging on to my 1970’s copy of ‘The Joy of Cooking’ for the foreseeable future.
real-time experiment: (25 min.)
auto shop uses ChatGPT to diagnose a Honda no-start….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rLr641OzEtg
In the FT —
China is making trade impossible: Europe has nothing to offer and difficult decisions to make
https://www.ft.com/content/f294be55-98c4-48f0-abce-9041ed236a44
No archived link yet –
‘On a recent trip to mainland China, I found myself posing the same question, again and again, to the economists, technologists and business leaders who I met with. “Trade is an exchange. You provide something of value to me, and in return, I must offer something of value to you. So what is the product, in the future, that China would like to buy from the rest of the world?”
‘The answers were revealing. A few said “soyabeans and iron ore” before realising this was not much help to a European. Some observed that Louis Vuitton handbags are popular and then went on to talk about the export prospects for fast-rising Chinese luxury brands. “Higher education” was another common answer, qualified sometimes with the observation that Peking University and Tsinghua are harder to get into, and more academically rigorous, than anything on offer in the west….’
And so on.
Nothing of interest for China – wasn´t it (almost) always this way?
At least measured in centuries and millennia.
Historically, Europe had nothing interesting to offer to Asia as a whole, but was desperately seeking to obtain the produce that China, India, Malaysia, Ceylon, etc, were selling: tea, chinaware, cotton fabric and garments, silk embroideries, carpets, gemstones, anything made of precious wood, spices, perfumes, medical preparations (including opium)…
The result: more often than not, trade took place under duress, forced by the threat of the heavy cannons aboard European ships. Asian polities rarely, if ever, had anything to counter them, even when their artillery technology was actually more advanced (such as Malay swivel-mounted, breech-loading cannons — alas of a smaller calibre and shorter range than the plump European muzzle-loading ones).
There was only one area where Europeans had a long-standing technological advantage that made them commercially successful: firearms. Even in steel weaponry, they had trouble competing (at least till the second half of the 18th century) with Damascus/wootz steel blades, while India was proficient enough in producing steel armour. European also undisputed masters of optics, but sustaining a sizeable trade network just selling spyglasses and microscopes was a bit of a stretch.
Regarding China, there was one very important item that the country eagerly imported, but that European, for practical reasons, could not supply: horses — constantly needed to equip Chinese armies battling nomad peoples in the Northern marches (Mongols and the like). Central Asian states, besides levying taxes along the Silk Road, made fortunes breeding and selling entire horse herds to China.
While Western Europe still has an edge in optics and optics-adjacent domains (witness ASML), it seems to be no longer able to design and build competitive military equipment.
If I remember this correctly, initially China would only accept silver (expropriated mainly from Mexico) from European traders in exchange for Chinese goods. The trade imbalance created was rectified by smuggling opium, grown on British and Portuguese poppy farms in colonial India, of which only silver was accepted as payment.
Those shenannigans with opium by the Eastern India Company started in the late 18th century. At the time of the First Opium War, China lost its pre-eminent role as an export nation.
By then, India already had its economy deliberately and systematically destroyed and no longer was the world’s manufacturer and exporter of finished cotton textiles. All thanks to the East India Company.
Again: Europe could only dominate the world market by crushing its competitors with the power of its guns, not through the desirability and quality of its products.
Second case in point: The destruction of Egypt and her attempts of becoming a modern industrial power (growing her own cotton unlike Britain and thus owing an unsurmountable economic advantage once in place) under King Muhammad Ali I., by France and England.
p.s. any reading recommendations on your above China points? (India too)
I believe that “The great divergence” by Kenneth Pomeranz is still the reference on the topic of China (and India) vs. Europe regarding development (agriculture, technology, demographics, economy, trade).
For Southeastern Asian countries vs. Europe, there is “L’histoire à parts égales” by Romain Bertrand, but I do not think it has been translated from French to other languages.
👍👍!
“There was only one area where Europeans had a long-standing technological advantage that made them commercially successful: firearms.”
All this narrative claptrap about the beneficent global spread of superior Western values and know-how is really a tawdry crime drama about the rise to international power of thugs with guns. I oversimplify perhaps, but only slightly.
One should also put in a good word for the role of germs in shaping human history and to a great degree accounting for the rampant global sprawl of Europeans, particularly in the New World as noted by Jared Diamond, Alfred Crosby and others.
Europeans, and their far flung spawn, of whom I am one, just ain’t all that.
Only to realize that all those that they discovered, discovered them in return.
William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples had a huge influence on my thinking.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/112492/plagues-and-peoples-by-william-h-mcneill/
Vao: “There was only one area where Europeans had a long-standing technological advantage that made them commercially successful: firearms.
No. Merely to start with —
The steam engine appeared in England, with Thomas Savery’s pump (1698) and Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine (1712) being the first practical machines. In China, steam engines appeared in the early 19th century only because Westerners brought them.
Clockwork. The emperor had secretly collected 100-odd European clocks — mostly Swiss and English, which Jesuit missionaries had introduced to China from the late Ming into the Qing and which the Chinese had begun to copy, though haltingly — when he demanded Lord MacCartney and company kowtow to him and told them that the mighty Central Kingdom had no interest in barbarian geegaws.
Lee: All this narrative claptrap about the beneficent global spread of superior Western values and know-how is really a tawdry crime drama about the rise to international power of thugs with guns
All human civilizations throughout history have been nothing but tawdry crime dramas about the rise to power of thugs. Most especially the Han empire.
China, with the longest continuous history of any human civilization, used castration for forty-one centuries on state slaves, for political punishment, and to create eunuchs for imperial service, till at the Ming Dynasty’s end some 70,000 existed. The last imperial eunuch, Sun Yaoting, only died in 1996. At its height, China was a slaving power only equaled in extent by its then-contemporary in Europe, the Roman empire.
And the Chinese elite’s suppression of technological development was deliberately decided upon precisely to maintain the social order in which they were powerful and the vast majority of Chinese were agrarian peasants.
The result of the Chinese elite’s suppression of development was the Century of Humiliation, which began with in the Second Battle of Chuenpi of 1841 in which many regular Chinese fought with “with the greatest credit and devotion” according to one British commander, but Chinese elites and the social order performed pathetically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Chuenpi
Steam engines started to make a difference in Great Britain in the last quarter of the 18th century. Lord MacCartney’s embassy to the clock-loving emperor took place in the late 18th century.
The late 18th century was the beginning of the end for China (for India it had started a couple of decades earlier). Interestingly, at that time, the Chinese had managed to maintain their agriculture at a level of productivity substantially above the European one — and this for centuries. European agriculture managed to catch up (also at the time of the first Opium War) and then surpass Chinese levels of productivity only when it started relying upon artificial fertilizers (first guano, then Haber-Bosch derived fertilizers).
The development of the coal-based industry in China was also contingent on physical conditions: contrarily to Europe, in China large deposits were found far from where manufactures and ore deposits were located, with no easy transport facilities by river (and then railways). This is one of the main reason why the Industrial Revolution did not originate in China.
But from the time the Europeans started sailing over the entire globe and trading with far-Eastern nations till then (i.e. at least for 300 years or so), the situation was as I described — not just with China, but also with India, Ceylon, what is nowadays Malaysia and Indonesia…
@vao et al., Rather than any single product like a firearm or steam boat, it was the West that created science and it was science that transformed the world. True, the Greeks and Arabs made advances in mathematics but calculus and higher forms of abstraction come from the recent West.
Science applied to industry resulted in transformative technologies: steam power, a profound understanding of electricity, the railroad, automobile, airplane, telegraph, radio, tv, chemicals, efficiency in agriculture, and the computer and the internet.
Science applied to medicine created transformative innovations: CT scans, MRIs, 3D imaging of the body, vaccines, antibiotics, antiseptics, anesthesiology, open heart surgery, organ transplants, implants, insulin, hearing aides, and on and on. Medicine is unrecognizable from merely a century ago.
Undoubtedly, there is a downside as science transformed western military capabilities which enabled colonies and empires.
The Japanese were the first Asians to realize that in order to survive it was crucial to understand Western science and industrial engineering. Japan, IIRC, is the only non-white nation to defeat a white nation in war; the 1905 Russia-Japan War. Japan also had a seat at Versailles with the victors. Japan nearly conquered all of East Asia trying to create its own empire.
If the West has little to offer China via trade today, it is because China’s success and self sufficiency is the result of decades of commitment to Western Science, economics, industrial organization, computer science, and biotechnology, without giving up its legacy of Socialism which, of course, is a Western political idea. China has become an advanced first world country, equal to the West and in some ways superior, without the baggage of empire.
No, science is not a thing that someone created. Taking credit in such a blatant way is exactly what is wrong with the West. It sounds like something Trump would say. We created science, and everything else, and Chinese stole it from us/US.
What West had, for few centuries, are scientific and technological advances that gave it the edge. They have used that edge to slit way too many troaths, and now it’s getting dull.
The Japanese were the first Asians to try and copy-paste a western type empire, and they managed to outdo Nazi Germany in some things (e.g. mass rape, experimentation on humans). They ended up the same, as USA’s bit*h.
Also, Russian have never been considered white by white people (neither were other Slavs, which dovetails into etymology of slave). Even now they are thought to be Mongolian hordes invading Europe.
The most powerful creation of the West is Kool-Aid.
Modern science is not a thing but it is a method. It’s based on observation and experimentation whose origin is closely associated with Galileo Galilei. Great thinkers of the past relied on intellectual arguments without running experiments.
A modern scientist recognizes the importance of experiment, relies on mathematics as a fundamental tool, considers information without bias. Basically, observe, react and think objectively. The modern scientific method originated in the West.
Modern science does not know what a woman is. A modern scientist is a tool of corporations.
People have been running experiments since the beginning of time. Here are a few illustrative videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550/videos
As a bonus, here’s an analogue computer made by “intellectual arguments without running experiments“, during the second century BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Since USA invented science, and everything in the universe, I expect Musk to make a time machine in the near future, and go back in time to plant this device.
P.S. Ancient Greeks figured out that the Earth is not flat, and proved it with an experiment. Google it.
And the Chinese elite’s suppression of technological development was deliberately decided upon precisely to maintain the social order in which they were powerful and the vast majority of Chinese were agrarian peasants.
or for a contemporary version
the American elite’s neglect of technological development was deliberately decided upon precisely to maintain the social order in which they are powerful and the vast majority of Americans are peasants.
cold comfort I guess to know that we are not the first to be so foolish
Europe is going to be the world’s largest EPCoT park…and it’s not impossible that prestige Euro fashion labels loose their premia among Asian new money
French culture has lost 99% of its historical cultural impact on the USA; 99.9% on the hoi-polloi as America has become more diverse and don’t look to Coco Chanel for avant garde fasion tips
The trend can be spotted many years ago when the French all learned English and started to be nice to ugly/clueless Americans (like me).
My current plan is to market to them my AI slop detector which can discern with 99.999% reliability between humans and bots. After that I am going to start working on my bot which can pass through the filter. Reliable production of human brain think-o-graphical errors is the magic formula. : )
Also, this from Alex Mercouris’s Substack is interesting —
WILL RUSSIA LOSE THE PEACE?
https://theduran.substack.com/p/will-russia-lose-the-peace
Mercouris is an intelligent, clear thinker when he writes and I don’t have to (try to) listen to him burble on at length.
Mercouris:
To my understanding the occupation of Ukraine never was literally inconceivable by Russian standards and scenarios (I always held that more of a wishful interpretation by Mercouris).
For RU even nuclear war is conceivable. Do they want it? No. Does Putin want it? No. Same with occupation. Here even more argued against by the President.
If one looks at it from Martyanov´s perspective (but others too of course) it all is not too surprising – Russians have been preparing for this since 1945. So the stakes they are willing to throw in are so much higher.
This is something almost nobody in the West, especially among the “educated” – be it completely private people or public pundits or diplomats and politicians are grasping.
Only for them the term “inconveivable” is a fitting one.
Mercouris is often very good but takes his habits from stock jockeys: “If you must forecast, forecast often.” He’s been non-stop urging negotiations, and got wildly excited after the Alaska Summit, and only very recently got religion about the war being won on the battlefield. That might be OK except he has tried pretending that his position has been consistent over time, which it has not been. I do recall, albeit not recently, Mercouris treating whether Russia would lose the peace as a legitimate issue.
repropbate: …except he has tried pretending that his position has been consistent over time, which it has not been.
Well, he’s not alone in that as it’s a pretty common human failing.
Who amongst us likes to advertise those occasions when we have been dismally, abysmally wrong?
I am imagining a total Russian victory in Ukraine and a lull of 5 years, during which time the European wing nuts will have rearmed themselves adequately (thank you, USA), and will engineer a provocation to extend this contra-temps to a new decade. Of course, a Ukrainian underground will be kept quite alive. Meanwhile, a Trumpian administration in the US (I cannot imagine anything else because no formal opposition) will extend whatever sanctions to create that pressure on the Russian economy while rearming Europe and extending NATO to the Pacific where Japan and the Philippines, stuffed with weaponry, will find the false flag to invade Taiwan.
So, peace? Unless Russia, China, India, and whoever else is left in BRICS form a formal defensive alliance, they will be prone to the “hang separately” syndrome, and the rabid ascendant Right will eat away at this chance for a multipolar shift. With that, I say Happy Thanksgiving and sweet dreams
Mike: ….the European wing nuts will have rearmed themselves adequately
The obstacle to that ever happening is that much Russian missile and EW tech is arguably a generation ahead of that of U.S., let alone most European. So ‘adequate’ rearmament looks problematic.
Not to mention that financialized neoliberal states can’t win prolonged wars against industrial states.
Or the beggar poor EU can’t really afford to buy the weapons the USA can’t really produce in relevant amounts.
Europe really couldn’t afford WWI and II, but that didn’t stop them.
Much of the history reads like everybody jumped into the deep end and then tried to figure it out.
Oddly enough, both wars were preceded by an European arms race, first between 1908-1913 and then 1935-1939.
Does that mean we have about 4-5 years until another big one?
That’s how they usually start. Buying weapons and neglecting so many other ailments.
Just thinking about the global psychosis of it all…
From “As our postwar ideals fade into history.” – Patrick Lawrence
This part:
“In the fiscal year ending next 31 March Japan will spend ¥8.7 trillion, $55 billion, on its military, an increase of 9.4 per cent and a record. This follows an increase of 26 per cent in FY 2024 and is part of a five-year plan to bring defense spending up to Western standards as a percentage of G.D.P. There is no turning back from this. Takaichi has merely announced the future, and what has distinguished Japan and its people as they emerged from World War II will not be part of it.”
You have a point about current weaponry, but my five year plan allows for US research and theft of Russian tech to answer that superiority. This is, after all, war, declared by the EU/NATO with the original goal in mind back to 1917- curb Russia no matter what economic or political system it has – no matter what it takes in debt.
Current weaponry was decades in the making. For example, USA had their hands on Kh-31 a while ago and stll did not make anything comparable, let alone stuff like Kh-22.
What significant western state actually has a functioning government, not to say one that could plausibly sustain economic, political, and cultural reproduction over the next five years?
Not the US, UK, Germany, or France certainly.
With current neoliberal economics the prospect of even recovering domestically from a defeat in Ukraine for any of these countries is supremely unlikely. Terrorism will shortly be their only capability.
A puppet regime ruling a downsized Ukraine makes more sense than trying to occupy the whole thing. With Russian bases here and there to help the regime stay in power and defend it from Euro bad actors. But somebody in Ukraine has to be ready to slide into that role and have at least a bit of popular support.
When/if borders open after some stop in fighting, and at a slower rate if that doesn’t happen, those remaining Ukrainians that can walk will decamp.
Prevent utility repair until some remnant acclimates to the new reality, and watch the West decompose.
That was the (darkly) hilarious part of the 28 (or less) points plan: Ukraine has no means to keep a standing army of 800,000 after this war – they will be lucky to have that many eligible adult males left.
Puting insane numbers intentionally is how the modern world rolls. Trump demanded one billion dollars from BBC for one manipulated video.
Why (he asks rhetorically) does this mis-translation keep getting repeated?
Putin said “Ukraine is us“.
‘нас’, not ‘наша’.
Because it’s basically true.
“My Life is a Lie” Part I actually was a must-read in Links yesterday, but I’m glad it’s featured again today, because it gives me a chance to share this link to what I think is quite a beautiful story about one of the poorest parts of inner city Cleveland:
https://signalcleveland.org/cleveland-neighborhood-photos-clark-fulton
The poem, beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
“My Life is a Lie”, and yesterday’s other must read, “It Works, If You Work It“, could be posted every day here as far as I’m concerned so that those that missed them may yet read them. They are that powerful and on point. I’ve sent them around to friends and family.
A few thoughts/observations on “My Life is a Lie” and “It Works, If You Work It”.
Both are indeed excellent. I, too, have forwarded them to friends and family, and added the blogs to my RSS reader. I found the explanation of the poverty line formula and its origin story, along with its description as a “crisis threshold” “measuring starvation” to be revelatory. When it’s explained that way, light bulbs go off in the heads of (well meaning) people who would otherwise have a completely different picture of poverty (even people who’ve read Desmond’s Poverty, By America, which somehow fails to make the point as starkly).
In the section “The Real Math of Survival,” Green rediscovers the notion of a “Living Wage”. Checking his math (all of which is intuitively plausible) against MIT’s Living Wage Calculator (https://livingwage.mit.edu) for a few places I’m familiar with, I get these numbers for a family of 2 adults, 2 kids in 2025:
Salt Lake City, UT: $117,312
Jackson, MS: $98,051
Boston, MA: $164,944
Ithaca, NY: $132,954
Austin, TX: $115,565
San Diego, CA: $148,595
NYC Metro: $145,683
All of these are in the right ballpark, though Salt Lake, Austin, and NYC seem a little low. The MIT calculations follow a similar logic to Green, with a more meticulous methodology (https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology). You can see the living wage, minimum wage, and poverty wage levels for households with one or two adults, different numbers of kids, etc., along with the proportions spent on childcare, food, healthcare, housing, transportation, etc. The numbers corroborate Green’s analysis.
Renaming the “Poverty Line” as the “Starvation Line” and “Living Wage” as (something like) the “(Functional) Poverty Threshold Wage” is rhetorically powerful. It gets the imagery and the implications right.
The “Functional Poverty Threshold” also clarifies just how awful is inequality in the US. Plugging the numbers above into https://dqydj.com/income-by-state/ to estimate where the FPT would land you in terms of statewide percentile for household income (admittedly not quite the right calculation), we get
Salt Lake City, UT: 57%
Jackson, MS: 74%
Boston, MA: 66%
Ithaca, NY: 66%
Austin, TX: 65%
San Diego, CA: 66%
NYC Metro: 69%
Roughly 2/3 of households below the Living Wage/FPT? Sickening, but sounds about right.
GenZ has been ridiculed in the business press for supposedly needing a 600K salary to feel “successful”. For a single earner with 2 kids, that’s 4-6x the living wage/FPT line. In fairer times company CEOs made 10-15x the salary of the average employee; GenZ’s numbers would only put them halfway to the boss’s level (which is the 98th-99th percentile in today’s much less equal society). Maybe not so unreasonable.
Reframing poverty and deprivation in terms of time rather than money, as is done in “It Works, If You Work It”, also provides a powerful change of perspective. (Charles Hugh Smith did something similar in an “Of Two Minds” blogpost that was featured in links a while ago.) It exposes the facile lie that the poor could just “work harder” (as entrepreneurs in the Gig Economy?) to escape their immiseration, so often heard from the callous or merely ignorant.
The Living Wage Calculator assumes 2080 of work per year — 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, no vacations — for its living wage and poverty wage calculations. Minimum wage in Boston is $15/hr, living wage (2 adults, 2 kids) is $39.65/hr. Minimum wage families would need both parents to work 105 hours a week to reach the FPT, leaving 9 hours a day for everything else. In Salt Lake City, poverty wage is $7.73, just a bit over the minimum wage of $7.25. Poverty wage families would need both parents to work 146 hours a week, leaving a bit over 3 hours a day for sleeping and all other activities. Physiologically impossible, a mathematical restatement of Lambert’s second law of neoliberalism: Go Die.
Everything is a lie in the Empire of Lies. Those that have been paying attention knew it all along. The game is rigged, as the late and great George Carlin would say it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeRd0EJbkC0
Who has succeeded Jeffrey Epstein? Israel has not stopped their evil dark arts of corrupting people. The misleadership are still perverts and stupid enough to fall for paedophile traps. The business is still there. Who is running it?
My guess is Epstein was his own special person. In the broad picture APIC has been far more successful in convincing the elected that their interests should align with APIC if they want to remain viable.
It’s a flexnet of negotiable morals and opportunistic ambition, cut loose from any real connections to reality by the looting and depredations of those for whom this has been a path to success since Reagan/Thatcher.
It’s easier to imagine it as a set of competing, interconnected clubs that share sociopathy, at a minimum, for acceptance.
Each club has its particular domain, but all the top players or officers share the common goal of keeping the extractive empire alive. As the Imperial Trump L’oy tares apart they’re increasingly at each other’s throats. Most of the major events in both seasons of the Trump show can be explained by this inter & intra club infighting.
Speaking of RealPage:
https://i.ibb.co/Qt9TNc2/post.jpg
Heh heh, life lessons from Parker Bros.
In my hypnagogic conspiracy mind-mapping session last night, I wondered if we can blame the Arab Spring on Larry Summers. Ann Pettifor was in Links the other day (Larry Summers and the Hunger Games) explaining how we should blame food inflation on Summers at Treasury pushing through deregulation of commodity speculation including derivatives especially in the last years of the 00s. The Tunisian revolution of Jan 2011 followed protests in which food inflation was a prime mover.
There are probably simpler arcs from JefEp to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali but maybe not one with the label “caused ouster of”.
No, commodity speculation was always legal save front running customer orders. Much laxer rules than for securities. And there were regulated commodities exchanges forevah. The Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market in 1980 and nothing happened afterwards except they lost some money and paid some fines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
The Hunt Brothers (TM) “fell from grace” because the Comex specifically changed the rules for silver to stump their attempt to corner the market. If they had tried this on the LBMA for instance, they might have succeeded. The ultimate “problem” the Hunt Brothers faced was that they were going up against some of the largest commercial banks and their commodities stakes. If it had only been the Hunt Brothers versus the general investor pool, things might have turned out quite different.
Moral of the story; be careful of who you choose as “competitor.”
Family anecdote as an example of the above.
Dad played the Market all the time. He once took a beating in pork bellies. He once made a small killing in soybeans. In these endeavours, he used a “quant” strategy. His favourite saying was that; “The numbers never lie.” As he found out in the stock market, the “numbers” were seldom in charge.
Roughly, Dad found out that a small plastics company had a workable and usable solution to the Federal dictate that pill bottles have childproof tops by a certain date. The stock was cheap when measured in P/E ratio terms. The Federal deadline was coming up. Dad plunged and bought up as much of the stock as he could afford. (Thankfully for all concerned, he never used margin.) A week before the rule was due to be implemented, the Feds changed the rules. Due to worries about “competition problems” the implementation date was set back by a year. This was to, as publicly stated, allow “market competition” to function freely. The stock dropped, Dad had to wait two more years to recoup his investment and another company managed to introduce a competing pill bottle design. In that year, who knows how many little kids died as a result of there not being a “childproof” pill bottle top in use? No data was ever released, if it was ever gathered at all. “The Market” had pronounced judgement, the ‘proper’ investors had made out. The Spice did flow.
I believe that this event put paid to my Dad’s belief in the theory of “Free Market Economics.” It did mine.
3 weeks ago we heard that Mali was about to fall to the JNIM jihadist. I guess the Canadian gold mining company Barrick does not believe this, as they have capitulated to the Malian government demands so that they may restart their gold mine in that about-to-be-jihadist country according to the mainstream media:
https://www.africanews.com/2025/11/25/canadian-firm-barrick-settles-gold-mining-dispute-with-mali/
(By the way, those employees of barrack that are being released from custody, they were accused of providing funds/paying off the JNIM jihadists so that they wouldn’t attack their mining interests.)
And in case you forgotten the dire dire situation, the Atlantic Council keeps dishing it out: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/mali-is-at-a-turning-point-that-risks-a-disastrous-domino-effect/
A piece in The Cradle last week offered a counter to the western hyper-ventilations about Mali’s alleged dire straits.
For advice on how to deal with different political views during Thanksgiving dinner, navigate to the final section titled Peace Talks:
https://youtu.be/PV-bJh_OlzI
I also recommend the penultimate section titled Rumor Has It, that carries important information about some rumors that are circulating that may come up as you mingle with other people in the coming days.
I really like Jordan Berman’s YouTube channel Unbiased Politics, especially her critical thinking segment that usually is included at the end of all of her videos. Her videos are very detailed and digestible and for this reason are good for sharing with other people, as they don’t contain rhetoric.
Leonid Ragozin
@leonidragozin
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The question of how these recordings came about might generate a greater scandal than their content. Somebody made a desperate move.
In that X post, go to the reply by Kirill Dimitriev (it appears third in my X feed):
“Warmongers are desperate“
Yes. Once again a leaked phone call (or two) will be used to sabotage any chance of a rational policy toward Ukraine and Russia. I can’t wait for the media’s “Putin’s puppet” spin on this one. And the suggestions about how to flatter Trump into cooperating are such obvious attempts to force Trump to react in once again proving his manhood. The depths to which anti-Russian ideologues are embedded within the Blob are striking. There does indeed seem to be an “Atlanticist” faction of neocons willing to destroy Europe and even risk WWIII in pursuit of their dream of dismantling Russia once and for all.
How these recordings came about? One is tempted to ask if AI was involved. That temptation is going to become far more common with the media’s reliance on unsourced and unevidenced statements attributed to supposed “insiders” and important people.
Dmitriev said it was fake.
Only takes a few seconds of a recording to simulate a voice. And that was before AI.
Reuters says China will buy 10 cargos.
Is this a new measurement?
The comments point out at best it’s a very small % of what they used to buy or currently are getting from Brazil.
Which I guess Reuters didn’t want to say?
In other news, the UK is looking to reduce the case backlog of its courts system by taking away trial by jury, for all but the most exceptional cases. It didn’t occur to them to stop charging people criminally for facebook posts and supporting Palestine Action. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/jury-trials-scrapped-court-backlog-5sh9b8psn
I’d love to hear from others on this; from my end, I’d wonder first about conviction rates in bench as opposed to jury trials. The main exceptions they plan to carve out in the legislation which would affect this are for rape and murder, two charges about which it would seem juries might tend to become overzealous. Another question I’d have has to do with the prison capacity of the UK. I’d like to know what the likely and intended effects are, and what, if any, financial or professional interests are at stake in the decision.
When we zoom out, throwing a lot of people in prison is a way to manage the surplus population, necessary given that a certain amount of unemployment is ‘healthy’, and giving them all trials is a way to feed lawyers and bureaucrats.
Juries can be unreasonable and deliver convictions where the state hasn’t met its burden of proof, but the system of jury trials itself probably also offers the defense some not insignificant room to work with.
The 48,524.48 Pound sterling question is which costs less on a per-hooligan basis, social setvices or an extended vacation in Holloway.
Vera: Most criminal cases that result in conviction—97 percent in large urban state courts in 2009, and 90 percent in federal court in 2014—are adjudicated through guilty pleas.
It’s been at least a decade since I stopped being a mediator. Broadly, the organization had become a wing of the judicial system, which was funding it to dump cases off the docket. Specifically, this shifted the type of cases from community to criminal, and despite some successful restorative justice outcomes, I got tired of trying to meditate the agreement-incapable overlap of borderline personality disorder and petty crime. Lost faith that all parties would work to make the agreement stick. Had to send someone down the back steps since the folks they just signed an agreement with were waiting outside the building to serve them with papers.
I also mediated between our local Housing and Neighborhood Development and an individual, a yearly cycle which had run through all the local judges and had to import from out-of-county, at cost. Tremendous overburden on the whole system. But a quarter-billion dollar new jail being proposed, not quite doubling capacity, in a 100-k population town.
The answers I have don’t match the trends. It’s a one-way ratchet.
I think they want to avoid the possibility of juries refusing to convict Palestine Action supporters. They had the same problem with some anti-porn legislation a few years ago.
The right to trial by jury has been slowly whittled away over decades but big changes like this tend to get too much opposition to go through.
UK prisons are overflowing and always have been. The government is, of course, encouraging the building of private prisons.
As our postwar ideals fade. Patrick Lawrence, insightful as ever.
Those of us who keep up with the flow of information at Naked Capitalism will find the first part of his essay, on the Gaza plan by Trump and Netanyahu, familiar information — not that it is any less shocking.
The second half of his essay focuses on Japan, and in the U S of A, Japanese politics is often glossed over as inscrutable, as if Japanese culture is somehow inscrutable. See: Manga. Even more so than the case of Italy, the usual reporting in English-language media about Japan is ever-slipshod and deeply shallow.
Instead:
Lawrence on Sanae Takaishi: “A protégé of the ever-controversial Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022, she is straight from the old, objectionable mold: She is a xenophobe who denies Imperial Japan’s crimes during what Asians call Japan’s Fifteen–Year War, who asserts the “comfort women” forced to serve the Imperial Army were willing prostitutes, proposes that Japanese history texts be revised to erase the nation’s shameful past.”
It’s a syndrome, the woman who ascends to power and wants war because she somehow thinks war won’t affect her. See: Margaret Thatcher. Saint Madeleine Albright. Hillary Clinton, America’s Most Egregious Example [trademark[. Ursula von der Leyen, who has used war to arrogate power to her position in the European Commission. I am not sure of the causes of this syndrome, but I am seeing the effects.
And as someone remarked here in the comments the other day, ahhhh, Japan, the new Ukraine. With still another charlatan as a leader.
DJG: I am not sure of the causes of this syndrome
The cause is usually the same as it’s been all through history and in males: some combination of malignant narcissism and straight-up psychopathy. I assume you’re being rhetorical, because it’s not a mystery
As for the “she somehow thinks war won’t affect her” part, well, that’s because woman have been excused from fighting duties through most of history. In the real world, I’ve never noticed any fewer female psychopaths than males ones, however.
It’s a really good piece by Lawrence. Worth reading, especially for the very poignant prose. I suspect we can no longer return to anything like those hopes after the war; but then again, back then most of the world was comprised of colonies and protectorates which had to fight tooth and nail to get their independence. So, of course, Miller’s feelings, that Lawrence echoes, were in fact somewhat blind. As I suppose such hopes always must be.
re: Gaza genocide
German (!) study estimates 100k+ killed in Gaza
by Max Planck Institut
Accounting for uncertainty in conflict mortality estimation: an application to the Gaza War in 2023-2024
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12963-025-00422-9#Sec19
see also antiwar.com:
Study: Israeli Forces Likely Killed More Than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza
The study also found that the age and gender distribution of violent deaths closely resembles patterns observed in several genocides
https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/25/study-israeli-forces-likely-killed-more-than-100000-palestinians-in-gaza/
I was thinking of Green’s argument as I watched a segment on CNBC this morning where they tried to paint lack of affordability as vague and unsolvable.
I first saw Michael Green’s tweet when it was retweeted by Mark Blyth with a strong endorsement.
More and more people have attacked Green, most along the lines of “it’s obviously crazy to call $140,000 the poverty line” or “your numbers are wrong” but none addressing the specifics.
I hope this continues to draw attention and argument. It seems to make both Democrat and Republican partisans uncomfortable.
Socal Rhino,
Your last sentence should bring smiles to many faces!
It is an important piece but the weak point is the $140,000 figure. People (the ones I know) who approach or exceed that income have their healthcare covered by one or both employments and do their best to mitigate child care costs. Those that do not rent bought their homes before the stratospheric rise in prices. If they move they will parley that investment. His figure assumes a new entry into the current economy/
Your comment, pointing out a valid exception, shows how valuable the article is, since he provides all the numbers to explain his argument.
It’s also simplistic of him to say that Social Security isn’t enough. It can be (on the higher level, $40k+) when living in a well insulated, paid off house with a garden to grow veg and keep chickens, low property tax etc. Absolutely impossible in most parts of California, agreed.
“Absolutely impossible in most parts of California, agreed.”
The only state that exceeds California, at 1.42 times the national cost of living average, is Hawaii at 1.85, according to the U.S. Cost of Living Index.
And the cost of living in my particular town is about 60% higher than the California average. Decades ago by hook, crook, and sleight of hand, plus marrying and divorcing well, I managed slip-slide my way into this suburban wonderland. I’m currently sharing my house with and will be leaving it to my kid who, as hardworking as he and his wife are, could not otherwise afford to live and raise their own family in the town where he grew up.
His $140k was for a family of four, not an individual, and few of those who objected to the piece understood that. Bold emphasis mine:
He’s talking about the price of participation for those entering or trapped in the sub 140k market, not about those in it with the buffers you mention.
So yes, he’s talking about the world we’re bequeathing to un-monied children of the future, and growing percentages of those who’ve entered in the last 20 years.
He missed points after pegging later arguments to 1963. His general arguments suffer.
On the larger argument that the Über Looters have had tremendous success, the author misses that point through his view of dollars as the measure. The measure is who gives the orders and why those who take them do so. Do not take those orders unless they serve the life on earth would be my advice in a better world.
But meanwhile the author’s heart is on a good trajectory.
– ‘U.S. Army secretary warned Ukraine of imminent defeat while pushing initial peace plan’ – NBC News
“The meeting was just the latest example of a long-running rift inside the Trump administration over how to end the war in Ukraine… One camp, including Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and other officials, views Ukraine as the primary obstacle to peace and favors using U.S. leverage to force Kyiv to make major compromises, according to multiple current and former officials… The other camp, represented by Rubio and other officials, sees Russia as the culprit for having launched an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor and says Moscow will relent only if it pays a price for its aggression through sanctions and other pressure.”
Remember how Trump ridiculed “Little Marco” during the 2016 Republican primaries? Now this neocon ideologue, having gained unanimous bipartisan confirmation in the Senate, holds the “Kissinger” chair as both Secretary of State and National Security advisor in Trump’s administration. So symbolic of the complete bankruptcy of Congress and the continued stupidity of Trump – assuming he had any intention of actually challenging the foreign policy Establishment on Ukraine or anything else.
Events are moving fast in Ukraine on the battlefield. Even this report by Simplicius is now out of date:
SITREP 11/16/25: Overblown Energy Strikes on Russia Again Mask UA Frontline Collapse
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-111625-overblown-energy-strikes
It really makes one wonder at the calculus being made by American neocons:
Ukraine’s tragedies: A ‘good deal’ for some war supporters
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-war/
When a US Senator says he thinks you will fight till you’re all dead then you begin to understand what he has planned for the future of your country.
Interesting about the hippos. Maybe we need some here.
However I believe they are rather dangerous to humans in the wild. Still probably only a matter of time before those hippos to be seen in Florida nature parks join the pythons in the Everglades.
From The Very Big Business of Lying To You,
Ed Zitron has provided a longer list. Graff then compares Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring more than 60 years ago and the environmental reforms that followed, with the response to current exposures of SM platforms’ intentional pollution of the public square:
And not just SM.
Reading through this piece, it is clear that the author, Garrett Graff, is primarily concerned with the profits made by poisoning *right-wing, MAGA* American brains. While he is not wrong, there are some critical problems with his one-sided discussion. First, it is not just the right-wing tweets and memes that are “lying” to us. The propaganda churned out by the non-MAGA Establishment media is also a “very Big Business” that lies to us. And in its ridicule and disdain for those “deplorables” and “conspiracy theorists” who might challenge its narratives, it is just as guilty of generating distrust, division, and hate. Second, what are we to do about these dangerous social media “lies” that often originate in foreign nations like Bangladesh, Nigeria, or – gasp – Russia? Perhaps we need greater safeguards, perhaps increased government oversight or private sector policing, to keep these “lies” out of our social media. So… who will provide such oversight, and who will determine what is true or false?
I can’t help but think Graff, the epitome of a liberal establishment media figure (see his Wikipedia entry), would favor, at the least, a return to the type of social media censorship that was exposed in the Twitter files when his super-villain Musk bought it. Quoting Elliot Higgins favorably without irony signals how oblivious Graff is to the holes in his one-sided argument.
Suspect Us gov bailout of AI coming (if not already here).
Today’s link has Moon of Alabama link. Found this Fortune link:
https://fortune.com/2025/11/25/trump-white-house-genesis-mission-ai-scientific-breakthroughs/
“Trump is increasingly counting on the tech sector and the development of AI to power the U.S. economy, made clear last week as he hosted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The monarch has committed to investing $1 trillion, largely from the Arab nation’s oil and natural gas reserves, to pivot his nation into becoming an AI data hub.
For the U.S.’s part, funding was appropriated to the Energy Department as part of the massive tax-break and spending bill signed into law by Trump in July, White House officials said.”
I’m thinking the “Genesis Mission” (exec order) is how this bailout will be done, perhaps with some help from friendly despots. As the project is likely to run in the trillions.
As MoA points out, this will centralize control of the massive AI infrastructure. However not the Asian version.
The Genesis Mission was suspicious to me but using it facilitate the private side bailout makes a lot of sense. Guess I’m going back to calls
“Genesis Mission”–
So-called because the first Genesis had God creating man. This time around, it will be man creating God.
I thought that it was a Star Trek reference some what like the Warp Speed project in his first term.
I thougth that Musk lifted the name form his baby mama’s song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WizNXQGBMEk
AI as in Surveillance and wealth transfer.
This idea was sold to the guy with the memorable quotes about magnets.
Life as a Lie article. I needed roadside assistance. My state’s Auto Club AAA assistance no longer provides someone to talk to besides a few initial automated recorded questions including policy info. The needed Information to get help must be texted.
I wonder what would happen if people started selecting the number for closing the account when needing assistance?
Oh God, imagine seniors…. That’s why they prefer real Taxis over Uber app.
US Navy cancels Constellation frigate, latest warship design years late and billions over budget, no successful procurement in decades. And this was the safe off-the-shelf design too, but construction started before the plans were finalized and tinkered with until it has only 15% commonality with the original off-the-shelf design.
link
Still more successful project than Zumwalt-class destroyer. :)
I would say that remains to be seen. From what I see, main problem of Zumwalt was Marines’ insistence that large caliber guns are needed for fire support.
https://cepr.net/publications/q-and-a-on-honduras-2025-general-elections/
On November 30, Hondurans will vote to elect a new president, all 128 members of the legislature, and all local officials across the country’s 298 municipalities.
The presidency is a contest between three parties and there is no second round.
Accusations of fraud are expected: the US wants current left-wing government out, which also figures into pressure campaign on Venezuela.
Executive Order Provides For Bailout Of Overextended AI Companies – Moon of Alabama
I was stopped in my tracks by this line from the WSJ:
“The economy’s dependence on AI comes with risks. Stock price/earnings ratios are near record highs. If lofty profit predictions prove wrong, share prices may tumble and investment could slow. The S&P 500 fell about 2% last week on concerns about a bubble, despite rallying 1% on Friday.
Falling stocks could trigger a reverse wealth effect: Americans would consume less, which would tend to depress sales, profits and, potentially, employment…”
The “AI” has cheerleaders for the potential to reduce employment, but suddenly here there is fear of reduced employment.
Emphasizing whose employment the establishment is worried about.
re: Ukraine
Gordon Hahn, who is now on Substack too, with his latest assessment:
Fighting for Peace and Fighting for War in Ukraine
Gordon Hahn
Nov 26, 2025
https://gordonhahn.substack.com/p/fighting-for-peace-and-fighting-for
We are witnessing another failed effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to make peace in Ukraine. Europe, perhaps along with the Deep State, has helped Kiev reject yet another Trump diplomatic effort. This leaves in place the threat of a Europe-wide war with Russia. Europe very possibly will spark a larger war with Russia.
(…)
Furthermore, it appears that the Deep State and/or MI6 have helped to spearhead the Eurpean effort to derail the Trump peace train. The bugging and leak to Bloomberg of a less than compromising conversation between Steven Witkoff and Russian President’s chief foreign policy advisor Yurii Ushakov has been used as was intended:
Stuff like these have convinced me for some time that the only path to peace will be T90s rolling down Champs d’Elysees–or peoples of Europe rising and overthrowing their tyrants themselves. Perhaps shades of Goa–which, incidentally, was another “brutal unprovoked war of aggression,” according to Salazar, at any rate–which wasn’t really over until 1974…which, until then, involved Salazar literally being kept in a make believe world by his underlings (Salazar was incapacitated by a stroke in 1968 and was formally removed from power, made improbable recovery, but no one told him he was no longer the president and instead kept holding fake cabinet meetings etc until he died in 1970 and the leftovers of his regime last for a few more years.)?
T90s rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Well, I suspect that many of the people now having fainting fits about this were telling us as recently as last week that Trump’s “plan” wasn’t real, and that the whole thing was a political ploy. In reality, this wasn’t a “peace plan,” it stood no chance of being accepted, as we discussed at length, and even if Zelensky could have been bludgeoned into accepting it, there’s no way the Russians would have signed up. The most you can say is that the “plan”–in effect just a jumble of half-formed ideas–was actually more realistic than anything else we’ve seen.
It wasn’t a “diplomatic effort” to “make peace,” it was a device to get the US out of Ukraine and leave it to the Europeans. Hence the European reaction. There will be no Europe wide war against Russia because the means do not exist. What we are looking at is the usual bitter Washington infighting between interest groups, but turned up to 11. It has relatively little to do with Ukraine as such.
I don’t think I’ll subscribe.
> “It wasn’t a “diplomatic effort” to “make peace,” it was a device to get the US out of Ukraine and leave it to the Europeans”
That´s a good formula to describe the core idea – from US POV, peace = US pulling out of Ukraine.
Whatever happens afterwards is none of their business and not covered by the formula/insurance.
Will deep state be able to drag this on beyond into the next term?
If so we might see a stand-off within the GOP between Rubio who would turn 180° and Vance?
Or is this too much of a stretch?
Although the Russians will allow no threat to their plans take shape, whoever is in the WH by then.
However I wouldn´t discount Ukraine as an eminent means to an end many in Washington will agree on.
When did the establishment have such an easy time increasing their favourite budgets and so little resistance. Even the non-establishment left is divided over Ukraine. Not a single serious Dem who would defend the Russian view publicly. It´s even worse than Iraq 1990 and certainly post 9/11wars.
If Ukraine achieved one thing, it wiped out the post-1945 antiwar movement in the West.
I don’t remember seeing much of that “post-1945 antiwar movement in the West” in the 1990s, when wars in Europe (re)started. I would go even farther, and say that nowdays less people believe in the MSM BS than then.
There used to be more protest than there is now. I participated in some of it.
Before The Left and the Greens could sell out completely there needed to be something to sell out first. And that was the antiwar movement, the inner party resistance, and in general resistance against certain totalitarian monolithic views and policies.
The huge public debates in the late 90s, the millions against the Iraq War, the time when Assange was talked about all over. You may call that fake if you wish. But there was major substance to it for 15 years or so.
What makes MSM today so bleak is this former conscience missing. The old critics of today are originating somewhere. I wouldn´t make the mistake as to discount it all. The demise did not come about over night and not without major force from above and from within.
The Bologna “process” aka stratification of European academia, the bailout of the banks, the sellout of social democracy and dismantling of welfare state and social care, the transfer of legislation from parliament to London-based law firms, the destruction of labour unions – a big one, and almost not talked about outside expert circles then and now; for instance Bourdieu gave one of his last talks in front of Greek labour unions in 2001 I believe. And 10 years later I would reread it and it contained everything that eventually happened. By then those unions had gone. It was shocking.
One early paragraph from 2001:
“The politics of globalization, in terms of its production and diffusion, are largely shrouded in secrecy, and considerable research efforts are needed to make them transparent. Furthermore, it has effects that can be predicted using social science findings, but which remain invisible to most people in the short term.”
This may seem banal today but the “secrecy” led to the demise of public attention and scrutiny. It is paramount. It was paramount.
This understanding was once present in Europe and had to be erased first. How that came about and has never been discussed is one of the major frauds and failures of the new era.
All this needs to be considered. And MSM are core. And so I agree with your last thought. But inner immigration is no long-term solution if the others are going along with the destruction of civil society.
Gabriel Rockhill has this David Hume quotation in one preface which I am not sure is valid:
“Nothing appears more surprizing to those,
who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,
than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few;
and the implicit submission,
with which men resign their own sentiments
and passions to those of their rulers.
When we enquire by what means this wonder
is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the
side of the governed, the governors have nothing
to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on
opinion only that government is founded; and
this maxim extends to the most despotic and
most military governments, as well as to the
most free and most popular.”
Trump peace train is Hypeloop. The ceremonial signing of armistice will be in a Compiègne Wagon 2.0, to be built on Mar-a-Lago golf course.
Trump Says Urging Troops to Refuse Illegal Orders Is “Sedition.” This Air Force Officer Once Did Just That. —
I would feel truly honored to buy USA air force major Richard Rynearson multiple rounds of beers (or the alcoholic beverage of his choice). What a splendid fellow. The USA desperately needs more principled people like him.
Read the article; it’s a good one.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice you can’t have everyone in uniform playing constitutional lawyer. You have to depend on the JAGs to sign off on the ROE.
“Throughout the ordeal, Rynearson maintained a crucial distinction: his duty was to the Constitution, not to his commanders.” This is wrong, of course, in any country. The law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law take precedence over any domestic legislation, and military law reflects them. Whilst in the US system the military should not obey an order which violates the Constitution (nor should they give one) you obviously can’t have a situation where any soldier at any time can refuse to obey an order, because they interpret the Constitution differently from their commander. In practice, orders from above are generally assumed to be legal under IHL unless they are manifestly (“on their face”) illegal. Reflect on an equal and opposite case: a pilot who launches an attack on a group of civilians suspected of being jihadists against orders, because he lost relatives in the 2001 attacks, and believes his actions are justified by the Constitution. Would anyone buy him a beer?
‘This is wrong, of course, in any country.’ —
I won’t invoke Godwin’s Law, other than to note that ‘I was only following orders’ is hardly a bulletproof defense (especially if you end up on the losing side). But I would note that one of the advantages of being a USA citizen is (was?) the quaint concept of constitutional rights as embodied in the first ten amendments to the USA constitution (the so-called bill of rights), at least one of which was intended to prevent the government from doing exactly what Rynearson had sworn an oath not to do. Rynearson took his oath seriously, unlike most of his peers.
‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ — Benjamin Franklin
Yea. I bet many would.
Hi Naked Capitalism team, hi, excellent commenters. Today’s headlines read like Cold war daily news only a hundred times worse.
A nightmare I would like to wake up from, only I know for pretty sure I got up 14 hours ago (wait, let me call my boss to verify). I don’t know how we will be able to justify this behavior to the new generation. Or are the elites hoping to brainwash babies?
I used to like to read “post apocalyptique” dystopian webcomics. Somehow, they seem to have merged with reality.
I am delighted by the article on Columbian “cocaïne hippos”
I wonder what other large African mammals would thrive in that ecosystem.
Have any of your come across books on Afghanistan war written by an author whose pen name is D.O.A. ?
You all have all of my respect and my best regards.
Making America safe again
Green Card Interviews End in Handcuffs for Spouses of U.S. Citizens (NY Times via archive.ph)
Hi Naked Capitalism team, hi, excellent commenters. Today’s headlines read like Cold war daily news only a hundred times worse.
A nightmare I would like to wake up from, only I know for pretty sure I got up 14 hours ago (wait, let me call my boss to verify). I don’t know how we will be able to justify this behavior to the new generation. Or are the elites hoping to brainwash babies?
I used to like to read “post apocalyptic” dystopian webcomics. Somehow, they seem to have merged with reality.
Have any of your come across books on Afghanistan war written by an author whose pen name is D.O.A. ?
You all have all of my respect and my best regards.
No, but that’s quite a pen name. D.O.A. is a medical term in the USA for “Dead On Arrival”.
Dead on arrival. What a name.
I read I think the second volume, it was incredible. I imagine the author would like to hide his identity… Incrédible amount of what looked like legit insider information. I wonder if anyone else stumbled upon it.
There is one possible explanation for the Decline of Deviance that seems so obvious I’m shocked the author didn’t mention it: feminization.
Indeed, the article and some of the comments seem to be orbiting this. His proposed explanation is that people care more about being alive. We know that men are greater risk-takers, while women are more concern about safety. There is the greater male variability hypothesis that men tend to be outliers on numerous characteristics while women tend to cluster closer to the average. His indications of deviance include things like crime, which are clearly male.
This raises a few overlapping factors. Commenters mention an HR culture and how kids in school are heavily socialized and often medicated in school (both feminized institutions). The broad use of medications that control mood, e.g. ritalin, antidepressants and the birth control pill, and biological changes probably due to environmental pollutants, particularly declining testosterone levels almost surely have had an impact (just as lead has been blamed for the 1970s crime wave).
While I suspect other factors like these contribute, it seems to me that feminization is the big one. Whether that’s because of the greater social and cultural power of women or whether it goes hand-in-hand with changes in men (e.g. the testosterone issue) I don’t know. I suspect the reason that the author did not mention the elephant in the room (probably didn’t even think of it) is that in many circles it is unthinkable.
Alphonse, Feminism (always an easy target) may be a root cause. I’m not going to argue but the Post WW II push at most levels of academia and society to get women out of the home and into the workforce had many parents and sponsors. What can not be said is the centralization of education policy parallel to government funding (overt and covert) of academia and the media that can suspected of increasing behavioral homogeneity. Consumerism and suppression of deviance create more cohesive market demand and simpler politics.
Just my 2¢.
My mother graduated from college in 1950. My father in 1965 was in the first Harvard Business School class that admitted women. My mother had friends who wanted serious jobs, like a math PhD and a graduate in international relations. All they could get were traditional female jobs: teaching primary and secondary schools, residential real estate brokerage, secretarial work.
They would fiercely dispute your contention re “post World War II”. An undergraduate degree for women was called a MRS. Even when I went to Radcliffe in the 1970, the joke was it stood for 100 years of enlightened motherhood.
I am not accusing feminism per se. Which feminism? The feminism of women as human beings equal before the law? The feminism that allowed women to be other than mothers? The feminism that opposed rape and sexual assault? The feminism of revenge?
And it is not necessarily an accusation. The author of the article suggests that the decline in deviance may on balance be an improvement. What’s not to like about less violence, less drug abuse, fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer serial killers? I think it’s a legitimate position that this is an improvement. I personally think the trend has gone too far, but I welcomed many of the earlier stages of the shift from a rough and violent culture to a more gentle one. But I want to make a descriptive argument, not a normative one.
By feminization I mean an institutional and cultural shift towards feminine preferences and ways of operating. This is not about individual men and women, who combine masculine and feminine. Some women are in respects more masculine than the typical man, just as more feminine than the typical woman. I’m talking about masculinity and femininity, not men and women – although in large numbers groups of women do consistently behave differently than groups of men. By the time an institution becomes majority female, it is almost certainly feminized.
So this is about a shift in balance from yang to yin. Although I don’t think it’s just a matter of balance: I see a lot of negative masculinity and negative femininity today. I haven’t quite put my finger on it. But setting that aside, I think it’s obvious that there has been a shift in the culture and in institutions towards female-typical priorities, for example from risk to safety. That’s a trade-off: safety is obviously important, but without risk there is stagnation.
Unless we believe that the differences between men and women are all nurture rather than nature (an insuperable position given e.g. the cross-cultural people/things difference), we should not be surprised that a society shift in masculinity and femininity and the spheres in which they operate would have large effects, or that these effects would not be entirely positive.
Mary Harrington argues that the root cause of feminization is not feminism but economic and technological change. The industrial revolution destroyed the traditional economy in which men and women worked in and around the house. Feminism was simply a consequence. John Michael Greer suggests that the destruction of informal spheres of influence pushed women to pursue power in formal institutions. Camille Paglia argues that men and women traditionally competed in separate hierarchies. Our institutions were designed by men competing with men: it is not obvious that they are compatible with feminine ways of doing things. Helen Andrews worries specifically that women will undermine the impartiality of the judiciary.
One of our problems is that we do not talk about this because describing the phenomenon is taken as a covert attack on women (which sometimes it is). We therefore simultaneously celebrate it (the future is female) and deny that it is happening or could have any challenging effects.
I don’t have any solutions to propose. I intended to limit my point to this: the decline in deviance appears to me to obviously at least in part a consequence of feminization.
OMG, My life is a lie. Right on. I don’t have any earth shattering comments. But it’s exactly what I’ve been feeling / saying for the past few years now. The system is so messed up. Just awful.
And you can see then why so man young men are simply quitting the system; they can’t win. Why play?
This is the whole premise and value proposition of AI, am I right? A unit of output will be cheaper to produce with AI?
The fact that even the Wall Street Journal admits this is not happening, and yet everything keeps rolling on unchanged, is completely amazing. Evidently the hype cycle has three stages:
(1) Make up some fantastic technology or workflow, and attribute magical properties to it. Fine if you just pull the whole thing out of your ass.
(2) Once things get rolling, fear of missing out will keep it rolling and expanding until the collapse comes.
(3) Get out just before the collapse (the quiet part you’re not supposed to say!).
Note there is nothing in the sequence that requires the slightest connection to reality
Expect Trump’s reaction to be swift, and unhinged
Live Updates: Two National Guard Members in Critical Condition After Shooting Near White House (NY Times)
Someone knows something
Amid Confusing CDC Guidance About Vaccines, Study Highlights New Risk of COVID-19 During Pregnancy (Pro Publica)
It’s a shame that recommendation does not extend to every human, only pregnant ones. It might be nice if Pro Publica reported on the one particular type of “mask” that works best. I wonder what it is? The CDC doesn’t seem to know, so I guess why would anyone else?
Hint, it starts with an N and ends with a 95.
Seems dire
bad for women, bad for babies
very very bad
Strangely, it seems non-pregnant humans are completely immune from the devastating effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection, or so it seems to the general public and anyone in Public Health.
Stay safe out there!
This timeline is stupid:
Chronic Absenteeism Still a Struggle in 2024–2025 (RAND)
And yet in the intro
Only if you’re willfully ignorant.
I first heard about chemicals reducing sperm counts and causing health problems in men from a PBS documentary, around 2001. Apparently, this had been researched for awhile, in Europe, but was forbidden to be publicized (or researched?) in the US. There is an excellent book about it, titled ‘Our Stolen Future’, by Theo Colborn, published in 1997. I doubt anything has improved.
re: Imperial Theory Industry
Interview by MONTHLY REVIEW
An Insider Critique of the Imperial Theory Industry: Gabriel Rockhill Interviewed by Michael Yates
Nov. 21, 2025
https://mronline.org/2025/11/21/an-insider-critique-of-the-imperial-theory-industry-gabriel-rockhill-interviewed-by-michael-yates/
Gabriel Rockhill is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He earned PhDs at Paris 8 University and Emory University. An accomplished scholar, he has published works for many outlets, both in the United States and in France. He is the editor of the English edition of Domenico Losurdo’s book Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, published by Monthly Review Press. Michael Yates interviewed Rockhill about his new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025).
re: Tariq Ali
book review by MONTHLY REVIEW
The Long Road of Tariq Ali
by Paul Buhle
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-long-road-of-tariq-ali/
Tariq Ali has been there. Basing himself in Britain, Ali has traveled through every leftist event and met every leftist personality for the last sixty years. No, not really, but I do not know of anyone else who could come as close to this improbable claim (which he does not make).
re: The Left in South America
MONTHLY REVIEW
You can’t build a revolution on Instagram: Cuba and Venezuela explain why
https://mronline.org/2025/11/21/you-cant-build-a-revolution-on-instagram-cuba-and-venezuela-explain-why/
re: British academics as policy advisors
MONTHLY REVIEW
Academics or consultants?
https://mronline.org/2025/11/25/academics-or-consultants/
WE NEED to talk about the consultancy work many academics undertake for governments and corporations.
We need to talk about this because it’s the dirty secret of policy-focused academia that no-one mentions publicly, even though it raises huge questions about academic independence and integrity, and the ability of the compromised researcher to provide clear and critical analysis of world events.
(…)
This type of research is the unquestioned norm in influential think-tanks like the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and university research centres like LSE Ideas.
In 2015 Wearing surveyed 11 articles researchers from RUSI had recently written for the BBC News website, highlighting how many of the articles were written from the British state’s point of view.
“So close is the author’s identification with the UK armed forces” in one article by RUSI’s Shashank Joshi about Britain’s bombing of Iraq in 2014, Wearing notes that “three times—twice as ‘we’ and once as ‘our’—Joshi refers to them in the first person.”
Similarly, a 2024 Financial Times article about Nato and the Russia-Ukraine war by Alexander Gabuev, the director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, reads like an advisory briefing for Nato leaders, with the text peppered with phrasing like “Nato… needs to,” “Nato should” and “Nato’s response must.”
More disturbingly, in a 2023 Chatham House report about Iraq since the U.S.-British invasion, Renad Mansour declared “a key lesson for international forces seeking to support regime change or political transitions in other states” is “working with a small group of exiles who have lived outside the country to form a new system will likely not lead to democracy.” Regime change, of course, is illegal under international law.
“One of America’s pastimes is the TV gameshow. Why are so many filming overseas?”
Oh my god, the stupid, it hurts! (MY EMPHASIS):
“Gorman said in a recent interview dock10 gave UTAS an advantageous price on the “Wordle” pilot as a way to get the company to sample the facility located in MediaCityUK, a development on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. The NBCUniversal unit had never done a game show overseas before.
“They gave us a great pilot deal so we could see everything their studio and team had to offer,” he said.
But it’s competitive, EVEN AMONG THE COUNTRIES IN THE U.K. GORMAN SAID HE IS ALSO CONSIDERING SETTING THE SHOW UP IN IRELAND, which recently added a tax credit for unscripted programming that would bring the savings to 40%, compared to 30% in England.”
Ireland is not part of the UK. Three wars have been fought over that in the 20th century (Irish war of independence, Irish civil war, the Troubles). Are Hollywood types this ignorant of history and geography?
Yeah, that screamed out at me. I guess that’s the difference between a west coast and an east coast publication – one of the latter would quickly have had that error pointed out. It is particularly egregious though as no doubt the interviewees would have been perfectly aware of this, as there are very different tax regimes at work.
An American couple I know live very close to Ardmore Studios, where the Rob Lowe gameshow is shot. Its a very self contained campus – they were actually unaware of how big it is and that hundreds of people were being flown in to fill the audience (as well as the many other shows being shot there). The only indicator of how globally important it is is that occasionally you’ll see a well known actor at one of the cafes in the area and quite a few locals get a little income from working as extras over the weekend. I suspect that unlike most studios they see an advantage in keeping a low profile – not unrelated, I assume, to its somewhat favourable tax status.
Are Hollywood types this ignorant of history and geography?
No. They are worse. Much worse.
The level of self-centeredness in Hollywood and the ignorance to the possibility that things in the world are in fact a bit different than what they are convinced of is mind-boggling.
On the other hand to a very large extent this is simply due to the fact that those affluent few who are regarded as “Hollywood” are too rich to really need to care.
So any political assessment à la Hollywood made in this public manner is not to be taken seriously. It´s white noise mostly. If there is anything in Hollywood that does matter you will most likely never hear about it in the news. Until it comes to light through some scandal.
The movers and shakers are people in suits whose names are not known to the MSM public. And their business is the only business where you would find Hollywood-ers truly invested.
So be it Ireland or the history of Venezuela don’t look to Hollywood to find sincere answers. If you want insight into private perversions of this attorney or that agent or some investor which helps getting their attention, then go to those film folks. It´s all business.
Nothing less and mothing more.
I do not kow if this was better in the past. I suspect it was, at least in some quarters.
It seems like the Bulgarians make the same mistake.