What’s the point of words? Sam Kriss. A fun read. The reaction from a friend who says she has a PhD in Proust:
BAHAHA! The name dropping train wreck and “ontological monovalence.” It took me straight back to making fun of the “autoreferential” intellectual wankery of some overzealous theory heads in graduate school. I’m only in paragraph 1 and already cracking up.
Scientists find toxic metals hidden in popular plastic toys ScienceDaily (Kevin W)
Daily Coffee Habits May Shield Your Liver Naveen Shankar
#COVID-19/Pandemics
Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans MedicalXpress. Paul R:
Apparently flu is endemic in birds around here. People are told to keep their cats indoors or “under supervision”, since otherwise the cats kill birds and bring them home and infect their humans. Yuck.
Bird flu virus could risk pandemic worse than COVID if it mutates, France’s Institut Pasteur says Reuters (resilc)
Global measles vaccinations are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, WHO report finds STAT
South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak Shows Chilling Effect of Vaccine Misinformation KFF Health News. The US is again exceptional!
Climate/Environment
Africa’s forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds Guardian (resilc)
The deepest parts of the Arctic Ocean are warming now too Barents Observer
Water
The global threat of water scarcity Counterfire
Violent conflict over water hit a record last year Los Angeles Times
North and Baltic seas show widespread contamination by MRI contrasting agents PhysOrg
How the Nile Water Dispute Threatens Counter-Terrorism Efforts National Interest
China?
Hong Kong fire death toll hits 128, status of 200 unclear; ICAC arrests 6 more South China Morning Post. Live updates.
How Xi Played Trump Foreign Affairs
* * * Taiwan raids former TSMC exec’s home in trade secrets probe Reuters
Taiwan’s President Lai lashes out against Beijing, pledges $40 billion in additional defense budget CNBC
* * * Nexperia control battle rages as China’s Wingtech files appeal Asia Times (Kevin W)
The Dutch Enterprise Chamber (corporation court) has not restored Wingtech CEO management of Nexperia NL, share ownership, or corporate control.
Nexperia CN is ghosting Nexperia NL until it does. This public plea is desperate.
Production shutdowns are imminent unless companies… https://t.co/LlUOJfbChM pic.twitter.com/jEc5gNzFqs
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) November 28, 2025
* * * China’s factory activity set to shrink for eighth month – Reuters poll Reuters
Chinese excavator makers go global with smart machinery YouTube (resilc)
* * * China’s Security Guards Live Lives on the Margin Sixth Tone (resilc)
Japan
Russia warns Japan against deploying medium-range missiles on relevant islands China Daily
Southeast Asia
These Scam Centers Were Blown Up. Was It All for Show? New York Times (resilc)
South of the Border
It’s Not Only About Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect Antiwar.com (Kevin W). And I want a pony.
Elliott Abrams returns, promoting a Caracas cakewalk Responsible Statecraft (Kevin W)
Mega-blockades continue into their fourth day as their effects start to hurt Mexico News Daily
Trump says he plans to pardon former Honduran President Hernandez for 2024 drug trafficking sentence Associated Press
European Disunion
Higher government spending alone will not fix Germany, warns IMF Financial Times
‘Time to act now’: The push to develop Europe’s blockbuster rare earths discoveries CNBC. Kill me now. This could just as easily have gone under The Bezzle. As we keep harping, 1. Rare earths are not rare; 2. It takes a fair bit of skill to process them, which the EU does not now possess; 3. Citizens in advanced economies have little tolerance for the very high pollution produced by processing and refinement.
France to intercept small boats after pressure from UK BBC
More than 110 million euros in losses in Latvia: heavy rainfall and frost have destroyed crops BNN
Bulgarian government withdraws 2026 budget draft after mass protests Euronews
Old Blighty
Britain threatened by gas shortages as North Sea output plummets Telegraph
Reeves’s tax-raising budget is crash-landing on an economy that is struggling for growth Guardian
Cash-strapped Britain to sell off embassies – Politico RT (Kevin W)
‘Unelected power’ of ultra-rich is reshaping British politics, report claims Guardian
At some point in the challenge to the ban on Palestine Action beginning on Wednesday, the co-founder of the direct action group will be asked to leave courtroom five at the Royal Courts of Justice, as will her legal team and most others present. Then the case will continue… pic.twitter.com/EKaDJW48lk
— The Left Bible (@theleftbible) November 26, 2025
Judge in Palestine Action case worked for Israeli spy Robert Maxwell Asa Winstaneley
Israel v. The Resistance
Horrible: Gaza’s health system is collapsing even after the so-called ceasefire, with more than 85% of essential medicines missing and almost no medical supplies, infant or neonatal formulas entering the Strip. pic.twitter.com/yfgCs2vU3r
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) November 28, 2025
Israeli police accused of executing unarmed Palestinians in the street Telegraph (resilc). Mainstream media finally taking note.
Mired in financial crisis, the Houthis resume threats to Saudi Arabia Economist
Stealth Bombers and Bunker Busters William Schryver
Syraqistan
Pakistan’s Quiet Coup Foreign Affairs (Robin K)
Settler activists cross into Syria, are returned by IDF after brief pursuit Times of Israel (Kevin W). Settlers acting like cockroaches.
We now have an Al-Qaeda–linked ruler in Damascus and Israel quietly expanding inside Syria under the slogan of “protecting minorities”. This is not an accident.
Let me break down the strategy behind it.
1/19 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Eta7wh9j71
— Kevork Almassian (@KevorkAlmassian) November 28, 2025
New Not-So-Cold War
Top Zelenskyy aide quits amid corruption probe Financial Times. So much for Mercouris saying the Europeans had told NABU and SAPO to lay off the investigations. Events in Ukraine reported that the all-powerful SBU was backing the two agencies….which means not Zelensky.
Putin Lays Final Word on ‘Settlement’ Sham in Kyrgyzstan Conference Simplicius. Featured yesterday in Links too, but a lot of mainstream and even independent media has not caught up with the implications of Putin’s remarks.
NABU and SAPO raid Yermak’s office in Kyiv’s government quarter New Voice of Ukraine (Micael T). Zelensky and Yermak are joined at the hip. Zelensky sent Yermak to Geneva to negotiate to try to reaffirm that his position is essential. Alexander Mercouris reported last week that European officials told the anti-corruption investigators at NABU and SAPO to back off on the investigation, IIRC so as not to destabilize Zelensky. They have a big vote because Europe is funding the government.
the POW challenge Events in Ukraine
The EU’s Kaja Kallas is Bad at History Larry Johnson
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
An open letter signed by 18 of Europe’s leading cybersecurity and privacy academics warned that the latest Chat Control proposal poses “high risks to society without clear benefits for children”. The first, in their view, is the expansion of “voluntary” scanning, including… https://t.co/Jqw2ZvYIFA
— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) November 28, 2025
Imperial Collapse Watch
Michael Carley: Rewriting WW2 – Historical Revisionism in Geopolitics Glenn Diesen
New York’s BQE Is Falling Apart. The City Can’t Agree on How to Fix It. New York Times (resilc)
The Biggest Problem With Air Travel: Pajamas? Atlantic (Micael T)
Baikonur’s only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight The Register (Kevin W)
Trump 2.0
Trump has rescinded all executive orders signed by Biden using the auto-pen TASS via machine translation (Micael T)
Immigration
Trump says US will pause migration from ‘third-world countries’ BBC
More than 220 judges have now rejected the Trump admin’s mass detention policy Politico
Woke Watch
Our No Longer Free Press
Hearing in Brussels on EU sanctions against German journalists: Massive violation of fundamental rights Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)
A Visit by the German Thought Police Consent Factory (AG)
Economy
IMHO, this tweet misses the real point. This is massively stimulative fiscal action, yet job numbers are shrinking, and the economy ex AI sucks:
BREAKING: The US Treasury posted a $284.4 billion deficit in October, the worst opening month to any fiscal year in history.
This exceeds the previous record of $284.1 billion in October 2020, during the historic pandemic response.
Government spending jumped +18% YoY, to $688.7… pic.twitter.com/phxhjHkFRT
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) November 26, 2025
Year-on-Year Change in US Manufacturing Employment Joseph Politano (resilc)
Mr. Market is Moody
The European Central Bank (ECB) has warned that the global threat of shocks to the economy, financial markets and banks is at an unprecedentedly high level Green Central Banking
Hedge Fund Bond Market Bets Risk Yield Spikes, BIS Chief Warns Bloomberg
🚨Major investors are DUMPING Japanese government bonds:
The Bank of Japan, domestic banks, insurers sold -¥10.7 TRILLION in Japanese Govt Bonds (JGBs) in September, the most EVER.
Demand for Japanese debt is falling; no wonder yields are rising.👇https://t.co/VO2K3zwQfl
— Global Markets Investor (@GlobalMktObserv) November 29, 2025
Yen Carry Trade Collapse Threatens Global Financial Stability Discovery Alert
CME Futures Outage Disrupts Trading Across Global Markets Bloomberg
The US is deregulating banks. Will the rest of the world follow? Financial Times. No archived version yet.
SEC probes Jefferies over First Brands Financial Times. Running this as sort-of obligatory coverage. The SEC probes a lot of things. This does not mean any action will be forthcoming. We saw only token action versus private equity despite numerous front page Wall Street Journal and Gretchen Morgenson stories, and an SEC under comparatively tough-minded Gary Gensler. Having said that, Jeffries, unlike PE, does not have a lot of paid-for friends.
AI
Is AI On A New Trajectory? Colin W.P. Lewis I obviously have strong priors. And the papers referenced may deliver the goods. Nevertheless, I see a lot of assertions and bafflegab but no explanation from Lewis of how they go from the model of scaling, which is already breaking down due to becoming more and more recursive (having to use at least some flawed AI generated data; also training sets never having being screened for caliber of input data) to this supposed next phase.
Google’s AI identified the father as a criminal Aftonbladet via machine translation (Micael T)
A.I. and the Trillion-Dollar Question New York Times
Class Warfare
The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism Financial Times
Antidote du jour (via):
A different sort of antidote (Chuck L):
Gitchi Gumee pic.twitter.com/kw5plpagdZ
— KeriA (@KeriA1776again) November 28, 2025
A bonus:
Baby bear learning to skip
pic.twitter.com/pE29VuGtwN— Science girl (@sciencegirl) November 28, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“NABU and SAPO raid Yermak’s office in Kyiv’s government quarter”
Hard to say what is going on here. As it was a NABU & SAPO raid, it could be a western effort to isolate Zelensky by removing his right hand man. A campaign to get rid of Zelensky but who knows who his replacement would be. It has also been suggested that this may have been done to derail any peace negotiations with the Russians as Yermak knows so many players, that he might have been expected to be a part of any negotiations. Guess it will take some time for the truth to emerge and the war may be over by then.
”Former top Zelensky aide sends The Post ominous message hours after resignation: ‘I’m going to the front’”
– I am pretty confident that this smelly little rat is not going to the front where the Ukrainians die like flies. If he does, he should do us the favour to being von de Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Macron le Con and the other EU-leaders.
My guess is that he means the Israeli front against tye Palestine where he can continue his genocidal proclivities and still keep the stolen billions.
https://nypost.com/2025/11/28/world-news/andriy-yermak-is-prepared-for-any-reprisals-after-resignation-from-ukraines-govt/
Saying that he’s going to the front might be a good cover for faking his own death and disappearing. It also might be the case that he’s safer there – I doubt any prospective assassins would risk getting too close to the line of contact.
Maybe they will appoint him as Ambassador to the UK to get rid of him. As I recall, they have two of them there already so why not three?
He’s going to the frontline in the war on drugs and prostitution.
I’ve read rumors that billions of dollars have gone missing in Ukr, and have somehow found their way into the pockets of European elites. If true, no wonder the EU elites want to keep the war going. In fact, get EU countries to take on even more debt to fund the… er… war. Money laundering thru Ukr has never been better.
If true.
It would be certainly true and the Ukraine, being the successor to Afghanistan, is just a washing machine for all that money-
https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1547752702511263745
But those European leaders have really deluded themselves. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll gave them a briefing on the real military situation in the Ukraine and it was grim but those European leaders went ballistic at him for saying all that stuff. He was supposed to meet with them in the UK several days later but cancelled that meeting as being pointless.
And then there’s the French army chief who caused a ruckus in France. From Le Monde:
French army chief warns France should be ‘prepared to lose children’ in face of Russian threat
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/11/20/outcry-after-french-army-chief-s-prepared-to-lose-children-warning_6747661_7.html
That idea didn’t go over well with the public.
From Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, utube, ~22+ minutes.
The EU seizes 300 billion dollars from Russia —Russia Strikes Back With a $1 Trillion Blow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0l_SdawEUk
The comments are interesting.
Are we sure that’s actually Jeffrey Sachs? I’ve never heard of that channel before but I have listened to Sachs a lot and there’s something off about the cadence of the voice in that video. Pretty sure that’s some AI slop.
And even if I’m wrong, it is infuriating to have to second guess almost everything you see now.
I noticed that too. The cadence and delivery. The fact that he says “300 dollars billion” instead of “300 billion dollars” – several times – is a red flag. The subject matter is not too discordant with what Sachs would probably say, but still if this is fake it is disturbing.
We are sure that’s actually the best Jeffrey Sachs that cheap AI can buy. No second guessing there. :)
It always seemed that Yermak was the Cheney to Zelensky’s Bush, more the power behind the throne than a right hand man. Maybe NATO and its NGOs want to change the power and keep the facade, or maybe Zelensky is next, and Zaluzhny is returning with the Brits at his back.
WaPo:
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.”
So this is why that “do not follow illegal orders” thing has Trump screaming?
I hate to defend Trump and Hegseth here but it was Obama that opened the way with his ‘signature strikes’. So if you had a drone flying over Afghanistan and it spotted a kid carrying a log, then they would be identified as a Taliban fighter carrying an RPG and a missile would be launched at that kid. Any military-age male was fair game as were wedding gatherings and nobody knows how many innocent people were killed in these strike. These strikes on those speed boats are yet more ‘signature strikes’.
From what I have read, there are rumours Hegseth ordered second strikes to kill survivors still holding out in the water after their boat had been destroyed.
If I remember correctly, this is called “strafing”, an action reviled by every sailor of every rank in every navy around the world, and is considered an outrageous war crime since WWII.
Second strike to kill survivors is nowdays called double tap.
Strafing is a type of attack by an aircraft, and can be used on various target types (that may or may not be able of shooting back).
The attack on the USS Liberty comes to mind.
It has been reported that President Obama personally approved hundreds of drone strikes on terrorists on the say so of intelligence agencies. About 4,000 human beings were killed. After action analysis found that some 84% of the dead people were not terrorists but innocents. This ratio was known early by the Obama Administration but the remote killing spree continued for years.
I believe it was under Obama where one of his henchmen said, on killing Afghan’s, “We determine what is due process.” This should have been challenged in the Judicial and Legislative branches but wasn’t. It’s now an open door for Trump and future presidents to kill anyone they want.
Weak defense, don’t you think? But indeed, Trump et al. are just continuing a policy in place for at least 15 years (not absolving JWB, just citing what we remember without effort).
“Trump says he plans to pardon former Honduran President Hernandez for 2024 drug trafficking sentence”
This is just Trump showing how little he cares about the truth behind the reasons for going after Venezuela for hosting ‘narcoterrorists.’ Hernandez was arrested and extradited to the US about a year or two ago where a New York court found him guilty of trying to import 400 tons of cocaine into the US. And Trump just gave him a pardon. Maybe he wants to set up Hernandez to become once again the President of Honduras or something. Meanwhile Trump has a fifth of the US Navy parked off Venezuela’s coastline over a nowadays nonexistent drug cartel and nonexistent threats to the US. Probably reporters are scared to ask Trump about this lest he calls them terrible and awful people or say something like quite, piggy.
That story was shockingly ridiculous, even for Trump. Pardoning ACTUAL drug traffickers while making up stories about fake ones like Maduro.
Sam Kriss. Well, that essay is quite a mouthful of words, with much going on. But he is entertaining, especially when he gets to his deliberately and pointedly annoying analysis, which is also funny.
And there’s this: “What I will not do is pretend that Judith Butler is a good writer. This writing is bad, incredibly bad; it helps no one to act otherwise.”
If she isn’t a good writer, then she isn’t a good thinker. (I also happen to find Rebecca Solnit and her endless gear-grinding on the page to be another bore.)
The peerless Camille Paglia dismissed Judith Butler as a bad philosopher years ago. Like so many barnacles of academia, Butler still manages to hang on and make appearances on Democracy Now!
Yet: Consider this. What if she is just the Ayn Rand of those in academe desperately trying to redefine and tame gayfolk for tenure and speaking fees?
You may want to find a better philosopher…
Judith Butler? Forgive me, I can’t resist posting this piece of … um… prose. / ;)
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
– Professor Judith Butler
Glad she cleared that up.
That’s merely a convoluted restatement of the Bearded One’s aphorism about history repeating itself, amirite?
Bafflegab is a menace but the Kriss pondering on the matter goes on at considerable length. Brevity is the soul of wit?
Edmund Wilson said he had trouble reading anything that wasn’t written–meaning writing skills are important if you are trying to convince others of the merit of your ideas. Perhaps much maligned English departments should be getting more attention in the academic world. That’s assuming they aren’t pushing their own bafflegab.
Has an English translation of Judith Butler’s works been ever published? Or is it out of print?
Word saladus maximus.
I don’t like her prose, but I think that Kriss makes a very good point that it isn’t actually any harder to parse through, so to speak, than a manual to a device one hasn’t the foggiest idea what it does or how it works. It’s a a very silly paragraph, but it’s not incomprehensible; also I was surprised to find out it comes from a very irrelevant essay.
Same, thanks. I was also surprised by the source of that quote. I’ve read some Butler, finding some of it compelling but a lot of work — but more important, perhaps, is that I’m friends with a decent number of artists in performance studies, creative writing, film, movement and there are now a couple generations heavily influenced by Butler’s work. So as much as I’ve NEVER enjoyed reading her (to the author’s point about its joylessness), based solely on the number of intelligent and talented people I know who are moved by her ideas. there’s little point discounting her work as fraudulent or irrelevant.
A word I didn’t find in the author’s essay, though implied, is “poetics,” which was at the heart some of the writing’s humor. His finding of whale imagery in the repetitive breaching of light and dark smacks directly of poetics, and the spontaneous generation of new / abstracted / multiplied meanings that good poetry delivers by actively redirecting the reader from the concrete (accepted) meaning of words and a texts possible multitudes.
Especially when joyful.
There is a likely relationship between the United States general dismissal of ‘abstract’ arts like poetry and dance (even within our country’s larger dismissal of the arts in total), and it’s stubborn intolerance toward intellectuals, artists, and “others.”
Yes. I enjoy making fun of incomprehensible academic prose, the “Standard Repertoire of Frenchmen” game, and Judith Butler as much as the next NC reader. But there is more to this essay than merely satirizing such examples. The author’s argument is more complex, and if we only get a “ridicule” message then we fail to understand why he is actually as critical of ‘Philosophy and Literature’ and its bad writing contest as he is of Butler’s writing. It’s a long essay, but reading through to the end is helpful.
That machine manual undoubtedly came with a diagram labeling all the parts and therefore making the prose plain via the “picture worth a thousand words” method. He’s making a false analogy IMO.
But then I love machines and the logic of their construction as most bafflegabbers probably don’t.
Language is also a machine created to communicate but also useful for more poetic purposes that don’t seem to be the aim of Judith Butler.
Butler’s a hoot!
😂👍
The whole essay was worth the read for this bit:
“ And people really do this. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ll know that about a decade ago I had a bad habit of punctuating my writing with constant references to the Standard Repertoire of Frenchmen. The SRF consists of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Baudrillard (there are also some optional add-ons, plus a Standard Repertoire of Frenchwomen if you want), and you keep them in your pocket at all times like a deck of Pokémon cards. The game was simple: to demonstrate that you had a deep theoretical understanding of what was happening in the world, you had to relate absolutely everything—Miley Cyrus twerking at the 2013 VMAs, massacres in the suffering countries far away—to some concept from one of the SRFs. Twerking as Event that inaugurates a new regime of truth. War as a rhizomatic assemblage. To be honest, anything could be a rhizomatic assemblage. (Meanwhile, looming vaster in the background, there’s the Standard Repetoire of Germans, which consists of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Adorno. You treat the SRG much more reverentially than the SRF. These are not toys.)”
I’ll never read a reference to the SRF again without thinking: Pokémon
I remember the first time I encountered this SRF game played for real in grad school in 1986 while listening to a fellow student at a series of lunches between classes. He was in earnest, and from what little I knew about him seemed to me to be simultaneously a nice person who took this very seriously. In retrospect this encounter was part of my recognition process that the academy was not for me. A priest really needs to believe (or at least needs to be able to fake it convincingly and consistently enough) in order to be effective, and I just couldn’t take it seriously. In part I think this was because I had an undergrad professor (the course was modern American satire — Pynchon, Coover and so on) who treated the whole thing as a joke. His tag line was, “imagination rules the world — shithead!”
More generally, my reaction to the piece as a whole falls into “all models are wrong, but some can occasionally be useful.” I suppose this puts me in the same camp as the Pragmatists. Where simple utility is concerned, words are for storytelling (man is the storytelling animal) and rhetoric (the art of persuasion). The rest is, well, entertainment?
I can’t believe I read the whole thing, as I have little patience for ethereal abstraction. But then I got to the very last paragraph, which made the effort worthwhile. Also, earlier on, the author’s statement that words are not so much intended to represent things but rather to do things rang true and clear. Otherwise I was pretty much lost at sea in heavy fog.
Sam Kriss article:
I read this because Yves said a friend who had a PhD in Marcel Proust found it hilariously funny. It so happens I finished reading the first half of Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust yesterday afternoon. I started the second half after a long drink on a lemon daiquiri prepared by John, the talented bartender at the Cuban resort where I`m staying for a few weeks. Proust’s writing has lots of ”incredibly long and complex sentences, full of nested clauses…” the same as Robert Burton I learned from Mr. Kriss.
I have enjoyed Proust so far because of the beautiful prose and the unexpected short concise sentences describing people’s foibles.
I also enjoyed the many amusing observations by Kriss including a quote by Derrida ”that the most interesting thing about a Kafka story is the page numbers”. Hilarious albeit complete nonsense!
Mr. Kriss also comments on a paragraph by the theologian DG Leahy -”dense and utterly obscure, and very possibly doesn’t mean anything at all, but it’s magnificent. The slow cadence of all those monstrous words, rolling and roiling in the wide murky thickness of their sentence. I’ve reread this passage several times, and every time it generates a sudden mental image of whales, huge humpback whales…” Remarkable imagining by Mr. Kriss since there is no mention of whales, the ocean, or even water at all.
A fun bit of relief from our political reality.
I was intrigued by the image that paragraph summoned for Mr Kris’s.
On re-reading it, I think the phrase “shining of the light … the limit of the darkness” conjures a sharply split view of bright and dark and the pivotal word that follows is “breaking”, which conjures a whale breaching from the abyss into the Empyrean…..
” This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light.”
And don’t forget Kriss’s definitive profile of Tony Blair, “Tony Blair, dread creature of the forbidden swamp”: https://samkriss.com/2014/06/23/tony-blair-dread-creature-of-the-forbidden-swamp/
@SES at 4:12 pm
Thx for the hilarious article about the repellent Blair as an historical figure of evil that reappears over the millennia.
An excerpt:…Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through…”
It’s because he smells money – like in Gaza now.
Because he is always associated with the Neoliberal Dispensation, he is redolent with the reek of corruption, like swamp gas everywhere.
After reading some contemporary artist statements and all that the art could do for the viewer, I prompted chatgpt to give me Tom Waits’ ‘Step Right Up’ as if written by Artforum, a leading art rag. Segments include:
‘…a multipurpose, post-conceptual apparatus guaranteed to exfoliate the soul,
decolonize your pores, and archive your regrets in museum-quality vellum.
It’s artisanal, algorithmic, non-toxic, and possibly eternal
— depending on humidity control and the benevolence of the market…’
‘…behold the avant-garde promise of frictionless transcendence.
Critics call it “an immersive detournement of consumerist teleology,”
though the installation instructions suggest
you simply plug it in and believe…’
‘…Buy two and the third one
will be acquired by a mid-tier biennial,
where docents will gesture toward its
curatorial inevitability.
It slices semiotics, it dices affect,
it juliennes nostalgia and declares
your complicity “immersive participation.”…’ Etc.
I further requested a Post-Structuralist Addendum which resulted in an even denser proposal.
Step Right Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTdScE3Rqh8 (5:43)
Sam Kriss can be very funny. I first read him in The Baffler 9 years ago with this slightly baffling article https://thebaffler.com/salvos/degrasse-tyson-kriss-atheists. He usually has a characteristic blend of twisted language, humor and what seems to me a resentment that others are winning a game that he feels he out to be winning. One of my favorite of his articles is this one about philosophers https://damagemag.com/2021/06/17/i-know-a-song-that-gets-on-everybodys-nerves/ . I can go along with that as of my favorite slogans is: “Philosophy is too important to leave it to academics.”
From time to time I listen to the London Review of Books Podcast. It goes quite well with walking the dogs or emptying the dishwasher. Sometimes is very good and sometimes it really isn’t. In the spring Judith Butler was a guest. Her contribution was so poor that I shared it with a friend so that we could have a chuckle about it. All she had was the then orthodox Team Blue rote aghastitude over Trump and the danger to xyz all dressed up in unconvincing academic gravitas. I didn’t take the time to read her article for LRB.
@.Tom at 2:52 pm
Thx for these links. I didn’t know of Sam Kriss. I suspect his puzzling article on atheists may be explained by this quote from the second article you linked to:”…not so long ago I spent a good chunk of my waking hours deliberately trying to infuriate people online. It felt very politically important at the time, but it also felt good; the redder and madder my enemy became, the more I was enjoying myself.”
The second article discusses the challenge of dealing with annoyances. Fun again. For me most are easy to just brush off but when the source is a family member or someone else you must deal with repeatedly it can be enraging.
He does write very nicely and is fun to read.
I am trying to listen to LRB podcasts from time to time. I haven´t heard enough to actually bolster my claim but is it possible that with politically “risky” subjects (vis a vis establishment) they may likely fail while on the arts e.g. or established historical subjects they are more likely to be decent.
Right now I am forcing myself to listen to their conversation on the BBC “crisis”.
But the fact alone that “Trumpian” by now is an actual word used by the LRB staff is underwhelming.
Even if linguistically that may be sound I find it disturbing.
Year-on-Year Change in US Manufacturing Employment – Joseph Politano
That chart needs to make up its mind.
Is it a job growth or job loss chart( the statement slapped on to the top)?
? Huh? It shows job ‘growth’ down below zero. Ie negative numbers. Growing less than zero means shrinking, fewer jobs than last year.
Yes, I apologize.
#SouthOfTheBorder
“It’s Not Only About Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect”
Yes, this is true:
“This is the objective – on a longer timescale in some cases – across several of the countries in the Caribbean Basin, aiming to cleanse the region of governments deemed undesirable to Washington.”
Radar of some sort being installed on the island of Tobago (guardian.co.tt) is a clear sign that this is more than just about drugs via fishing boats.
I’m waiting to see what happens post-elections in St Vincent and St Lucia vis-a-vis US foreign intervention in the basin.
RE: Is AI on a new trajectory?
I don’t pretend to be as smart as the brain geniuses working on AI – my coding experience consists of a few lines of BASIC I learned in a high school class circa 1985 and forgot circa 1986. But I do read quite a bit about the industry and have watched IT projects go extremely pear shaped at work. So I wonder if these recent claims that the scaling phase of AI is over and now they’re on to research and reasoning could be translated as “We really screwed things up but we sunk a ton of money into this debacle so now we’re going to try to fix it. Please send more money.”
An example that comes to mind is how a company I’m familiar with dealt with Salesforce. They implemented one instance of Salesforce, poorly, and hooked it up to other software the company used. Every time there was a new acquisition, the company would combine the acquired company’s instance of Salesforce with its own without bothering to check if data was duplicated, which it was. The bad data then affected other software. Ten years later comes an admission that “mistakes were made” and the announcement of a large corrective project. Corrections will largely be made by automation. It remains to be seen if this will work or not, but there sure was a lot of time and money wasted to get to this point.
All this reminds me of The Big Ball of Mud paper* about how projects go wrong.
I don’t know if this is really an apt analogy to the AI situation or not, but at the very least I think you can say that those in charge of IT projects should make sure everything is tested and workable before turning it on at a company, and even moreso when your unleashing some inchoate tech on the whole of humanity.
*link doesn’t go directly to the paper – the direct link showed as unsafe – but you can find the paper through the link I provided
Makes you wonder if the Salesforce software was needed at all?
I read it, and yet again…”it’s about 5 years away”…
Just you wait…
You’ll see…
I won’t even get into the claims about LLMs (or whatever EXACTLY is being discussed) “understanding consequences” for complex human relationships.
I read the post and though I am not currently in great circumstances for a thoughtful reply (having a beer and a cigarette at an outdoor bar in Exarcheia) I do work in the field and I work on one of the more well-defined use cases (coding assistant). Two things:
One, in the real world, over the past 9 months or so, the companies that had previously been standing clear of using AI for code development because of the lack of clarity around the legal landscape of the IP have dropped a lot of their objections. What I hear from the companies is they don’t want to get left behind in the paradigm shift. Discretely spoken at the exec level is the desire to use the technology to reduce headcount. I tell them it’s not there yet, treat it more about increasing developer productivity. I work with them to define workflows for thinks like test case generation, documentation, and CVE mitigation – things that typically fall to the bottom of the tech debt pile. The results there are solid with guidance (the customers renew and expand their contracts with my product). Without this kind of hand holding and use case specific tooling the business is more about FOMO than actual value.
Two, the piece may have a point (I have spoken here before about the public debate being at least 6 months behind what industry insiders are discussing) but ultimately he isn’t providing and real details to back up his claims. It smells like “superintellingent machines” crap to me. I still approach this cautiously from real world applications, since I work with software development use cases, I think the better analogy is to how object oriented languages changed software development when they were introduced: we got a lot more software. Considering how much we have now, and what I see companies doing with the tech, I think it will be closer to agent-driven software maintenance (and then infra, and then product design ect) than anything wildly super intelligent. Think a small team reviewing agent work and guiding it instead of multiple teams coordinating sprint delivery based on their project/team membership.
The one use case for AI that I have seen is that Copilot does an excellent job of taking recordings of meetings and compiling them into detailed notes including an overall summary and accurate action items. Note that AI doesn’t even know how to include all the meeting attendees in the list of at the top of that summary [leaves out every person who doesn’t speak]. Other than that, AI has zero use in project management because by definition every project in an organization is something that hasn’t been done before [unique parameters, unique sponsors, unique political context etc] and so the “history that it’s trained on” simply isn’t applicable.
One thing to keep in mind is that scientific or technological breakthroughs don’t just spring up out of nowhere, generally speaking. Whereas the general public is under the impression that ChatGPT came out of the ether in the fall of 2023, the truth is that it was built on prior work, including neural networks (NNs), that had been around since the 50’s. In the 2010’s NNs got rebranded as “deep learning.” Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was the development of powerful GPUs by companies like Nvidia, making the brute force computations that had previously been out of reach suddenly doable.
Not to diminish the effort, but rather to say it took many years from the initial concept/theory to a practical implementation. So, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Otherwise, that sort of breakthrough could be 70 years away, or just vaporware.
I’m a witness to this stuff from the legal and commercial side, how the consultants are pushing it for nonsense projects, where it’s shoehorned in as a discreet synonym for RIF. The developers are using Copilot and Claude and saving time, from what I hear from the FTEs. Vaporware and infringement exposure is what I’d term the rest of the package.
In an ironical twist of history, the original cybernetic study of artificial neural networks almost died in the late 50’s, when the artificial intelligence research separated from the rest of cybernetics and hogged a big part of the funding.
Four decades later it was what saved the AI research.
Ha, at a company I know, there’s an ongoing migration project for a massive, massive set of mission critical documentation from one system to another. This serves neither users, customers, or stakeholders in any way, as the current system would be fine, if the department in question were ever allocated a handful of software engineers to maintain the current system. But alas, for reasons unknown, a different department is responsible for pitching in, and doesn’t really care.
So instead of fixing the org chart, there’s been a nearly ten year attempt at a migration to a rotating cast of either badly designed and abandoned in-house reimplementations, and now finally to an outside vendor’s product that is really targeted towards other kinds of content, not documentation. And said company does not have its own documentation in the product they sell. This migration has progressed to an all-hands-on-deck moment of massive disruption as the new system keeps source material completely orthogonally than the target system.
I anticipate learning of a great debacle in this, and pity the poor souls that are certain to suffer grievously during and after the migration, assuming this 4th attempt in 10 years is forced through, as it appears to be. I have no doubt that departmental employees yearn for competency in leadership, accountability, and an ability to admit failure.
>>>I have no doubt that departmental employees yearn for competency in leadership, accountability, and an ability to admit failure.
Sounds like politics nowadays.
I should have commented yesterday with regard to the IEEE article, “HOW IT MANAGERS FAIL SOFTWARE PROJECTS” or as the link had it, TRILLIONS SPENT AND BIG SOFTWARE PROJECTS ARE STILL FAILING. I’m not in a position to comment thoughtfully on AI development since we decided it would not work for our projects (factory automation) although it’s being used for that in China so I’d like to learn more.
What I see is a through line to the denial and stupidity that we now see in an elite like Kaja Kallas just denying reality with regard to the Ukraine war had increasingly become very common in our upper management, and in extreme cases, all the way down to first line management. As others have said, people became increasingly treated as widgets on a spreadsheet so key people on hardware/software development teams were tossed aside because they wanted to dump senior engineers and replace them with new hires. Upper management would set project goals and budgets with minimal input from the team that had to do the work so the first line and middle managers would get creative (lie their heads off) on the KPIs and progress reports being generated. And at some point reality hits and everything goes bad, but generally the upper manager that got ahead by slashing senior engineers, out sourcing work ,and ignoring pressing problems had been promoted up the management rung, and was doing more of the same to get ahead (just had to get promoted before the brown stuff hit the fan).
This worsening of management seems to be directly related to the size of the bonus these people can score if they are willing to cut corners and lie about how things are actually going. We never realized how bad it was until we had one manager brag in front of us about the size of her bonus by telling the C suite folks a lie about progress on one of our projects. So yeah, the whole management chain, top to bottom, pretty corrupt and in it for the cash. The rare honest ones have a real hard time surviving in criminogenic (as Bill Black would say) environments like that.
“Chinese excavator makers go global with smart machinery”
Impressive to say the least. You could send such machinery to places where it would be dangerous for human drivers too. A coupla months ago I stumbled across a YouTube channel – which I kick myself for not bookmarking – by this American dude who was into light machinery. He has imported several different types of machinery into the State where he lives and is forced to conclude that not only is the Chinese machinery better but that it is about a third the price of an American equivalent, even after import costs. Of course this might be pre-Trump tariffs and he wasn’t popular with some of his neighbours and viewers but facts are facts.
FF12 micro-excavator
I have one of these, with a rake and narrow bucket accessories. Sure beats a pick and shovel about the yard :-)
They’re the occupying army, military police. Even when the media are dragged kicking and screaming into an admission they still try to whitewash the IDF.
Of all elements of the Israeli state, the UK establishment tends to go farthest out of its way to protect the Israeli army.
Maybe that’s because the brits are so intent on keeping jews as far away from the u.k. as they possibly can.
is there a historian/social scientist with a coherent social democratic worldview that ranks/reviews US Presidents?
The Wikipedia page says the “consensus of US historians” rates both FD Roosevelt & Reagan highly as among the best in US history. That seems bizarre to me. FDR & Reagan are similar at being effective in implementing their policy agenda. But otherwise I don’t see how both could be considered in the top tier. FDR New Deal improved the material conditions for a supermajority of Americans. In contrast Reagan’s neoliberal Reaganomics worsened the material conditions for a supermajority of Americans.
FDR implemented his policy agenda, that is an agenda he and his political associates had spent years building.
Reagan was a front man for the American Chamber of Commerce, rolling out the Powell Memo plan under the supervision of his Ur Neoliberal CIA handlers, Campaign Chairman (and former CIA Director) William Casey, and VP (and former CIA Director) George H. W. Bush.
The former was his own man with a vision for his country, the latter a PR front man for the Mont Pellerin project. As outlined in the Powell Memo there’s now been a fifty year, well funded campaign to prevent what you’re looking for from coming into being by creating alternative histories the likes of Baerbock and Van Der Layen can quote to justify Neoliberal Imperialism. These useful tools probably believe they know their history.
Re the measles story about my county
Well there it is. The charter school scam perhaps has as much to to with this as RFK and the autism theories that have been around for some time. The article says the state is trying to get people vaccinated against measles if not very enthusiastically. No word on moves against the virus that is our senior Senator.
This gave me some animal abuse vibes, and reminded me of dancing bear practise (which I did witness very long time ago).
Me too!
“Chinese excavator makers go global with smart machinery”
Just watched a German guy get one of these on YT. I think he said it was 2000, not sure if that was Euros. Either way, a pretty nice machine for 2000, Euros or dollars.
‘The Left Bible
@theleftbible
At some point in the challenge to the ban on Palestine Action beginning on Wednesday, the co-founder of the direct action group will be asked to leave courtroom five at the Royal Courts of Justice, as will her legal team and most others present. Then the case will continue without them.’
And this is when things go downhill with a country’s justice system. Secret procedures, secret evidence, secret witnesses all on the grounds of security. And this has been spreading for years in western countries though the UK seems to be a bit more down this road than most. A low point for the UK was the Julian Assange trial where the guy was in a plastic box and could not hear what was being said in court right in front of him.
What is funny about the CyrusOne data centre stoppage affecting the CME is that it happened exactly when Silver was ready to make a nominal new high. Silver later made that new high and settled in for a weekend’s nap at the high.
That might be CT at it’s best, but a cooling issue in a location that was experiencing sub-freezing temperatures? A complete breakdown of a data centre designed with a T+2 cooling system? (Not one but two backup cooling systems available.) A complete cooling system breakdown in a state of the art facility? A complete breakdown of the cooling system on the slowest data usage night of the year?
Too many red flags here.
Here is a YT post on this event in the silver market that might be interesting for some.
https://www.youtube.com/live/-F5DszTzeGM?si=vfhkqCOKwj28SbzN
I have a friend who was a maintenance engineer for.the county. During one of the coldest winters on record, some decades ago, he was on the roof of the county office building repairing the air-conditioning machinery for the data center floor!
I heard $24.5 billion was borrowed from Fed’s Standing Repo Facility shortly after the “outage.”
Methinks someone needed to cover a margin call in silver and the authorities preferred to shut the whole market down to give them time to gather the funds, as the alternative would have been “disorderly” short covering and a price spike a la nickel.
I wonder what the “collateral” was for that repo trade? Don’t the banks usually avoid using the Standing Repo Facility because it has the aura of “banks in trouble shop here?”
I expect to see the Mother of All Paper Short Selling Monday morning around 9 AM Eastern standard Time on the Comex.
Link for Fin Times: The US is deregulating banks.
https://archive.ph/03wig
Hmmmm
“The top 13 US banks already have about $200bn of excess capital above their regulatory minimums, according to Rebecca Boeve, an investment specialist at JPMorgan’s private bank. “Deregulation should enable banks to allocate this excess capital towards loan growth, share buybacks and dividends, and mergers and acquisitions,” she says.”
And the one word not mentioned in the entire article is bail-in, which, IIRC, was the main thrust of the Basel III accords. Seems like that would be an important point now that banks have a first lien on all deposits.
Am I being obtuse here? If they “already have about $200bn of excess capital above their regulatory minimums” what do they need de-regulation for?
No, I don’t think you are being obtuse. That sounds like she has a preliminary formula for how much more of their reserves she thinks she can privatize without raising hackles; a trial balloon.
You are making the fatal error of assuming logic…..
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bailin.asp
And five hundred thousand for joint accounts.
However, the FDIC is backed by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is owned by banks. How do you know that some of the banks would be in a position to buy out failing ones so as to ensure seamless access to funds by depositors in the event of a failure? That some of the “reserves” they seek to deregulate are not in that FDIC fund? These were questions brought up in 2013 when Basel III was ratified. In light of recent history it seemed a little self serving at the time.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?s=basel+III+bail+ins
The GFC showed graphically that this is not an ideal system when the banking sector was essentially allowed to bail itself out on the back of the taxpayer in ’08. So, I guess, the question is how much you trust them now that they have unilaterally given themselves a first lien on all of our accounts?
“Russia warns Japan against deploying medium-range missiles on relevant islands”
Japan seems to be determined to be the Ukraine of the Pacific but they had better be careful here. If they get too antsy with the Russians, then they might find that the Russians will station ‘defensive’ missiles on the Kuril Islands. The Japanese would have a freak out session over that one.
> Japan seems to be determined to be the Ukraine of the Pacific
Does no one have a spine against the US anymore, or are there Japanese names on the LolitaExpress™ manifests?!!
In Japan, they would be boasting about being on the LolitaExpress™ manifests. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_fashion#Gallery
Ha! #TIL
Russia has already deployed Bal*, Bastion* and S-300V4*** systems on Kurils Islands in the last five years.
* battery has 4 launchers with two salvos of 32 Kh-35 cruise missiles, range 300 km, Ukraine reports >7% interception rate. Distance from Japan 16 km.
** battery has 4 launchers with 3 salvos of 8 Onyx missiles, range 800 km, Ukraine report 0% interception rate. Distance from Japan 80 km.
*** a battery deployed to Tartus in 2016 stopped most air activity above Syria. A battery has 48 to 73 missiles ready and 96 in loaders. Range 200 km. Distance from Japan 80 km.
Tbh my first thought when I saw that terrible Bond flick No Time To Die (2021) where the plot revolved around evil Russians engineering racist bioweapons on the Kurils was that Japan was being set up for something. After the SMO started and there were all the bioweapon rumors in the first days the film took on completely different (even more menacing) implications.
Japan was the Poland of the Pacific before…
During the interwar years, Poland and Japan became close de facto allies against USSR. They were close enough that, after Pearl Harbor, when the Polish government in exile was obliged by US to declare war on Japan, Japan declined to reciprocate, with Tojo saying something about how the Poles didn’t have a choice.
IIRC by then Japan and the USSR had signed a peace treaty after a couple of battles c. 1939. Both had bigger things to worry about.
Lots of history in the “Far East” which doesn’t get much publicity…
Nomanhon or Kalkin Gol depending on which side was referring to it. This was the campaign in which Zhukov’s star began its rise when he crushed the Japanese invasion force.
I read someplace that in its struggle for resources, Japan had the strategic choice of attacking north against the USSR or south against the various European colonies and the U.S. They tried the north option first and (as you say) got beat, so went to option #2. Makes you wonder what would have happened if Japan had had success against the USSR. No Pacific war? USSR ends up fighting Germany and Japan at the same time?
Red Army beat the crap out the Japanese in Khalkhin Gol, Mongolia. It marked the end of Japanese expansion in Manchuria and turned their eyes on the Southern Pacific.
It’s also claimed that the introduction of the Soviet TB-3 bombers in these battles made the Japanese wary of aggravating Soviet Union any more. They were slow and had a rather unimpressive bomb load, but they could nevertheless reach Japanese home islands and there were over 500 of them. In the early 40’s that was a deterrence enough.
So both the Soviet spy Richard Sorge in the Germany’s Tokio embassy and the Red Army signal intelligence were able to verify that Japan was not planning to attack Soviet Union in 1941 even if Hitler pressured them to do so, and Red Army was able to pull majority of the it’s elite formations in the Far East (30% of the Red Army manpower) to defend Moscow and drive the Germans back.
Oops, replied to Darthbobber before seeing your better-informed comment…
Sorry, didn’t see your better-informed comment before I replied to Darthbobber…
One could add that before Khalkhin Gol, other engagements between the USSR and Japan (and their respective allies) had taken place. Thus, the year preceding Khalkhin Gol an important battle at lake Khasan ended up with a setback for the Japanese.
Japan also found out what it’s (exclusively light) tanks were worth against the Soviet models. And the answer was “not much”.
Russian Federation can offer “intel” to the DPRK…… just like US to it contractors in Kiev.
RF and PRC have a potential proxy in west Asia!
I would line Japan up to Donbas vis a vis attacks from Ukraine.
Martyanov with Brandon Weichert on Japan, China, Russia, US
https://rumble.com/v72c380-neocons-run-trump-heres-the-evidence.html
Re Vaccinations and MAHA
Can’t recall the source but I liked this:
Given the overrepresentation of the neurodivergent in medical research, it’s more accurate to say that autism causes vaccines.
A.I. and the Trillion-Dollar Question – New York Times
“I spoke to my colleague Cade Metz, who writes about artificial intelligence… ”
Was it by phone? Did the reporter see him reading from the script of non-answers to questions?
Trump, our Three Stooges Nixon, wants to be Agnew too.
https://deadline.com/2025/11/trump-media-offenders-list-cbs-cnn-1236630924/
No comment so far from the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism (ht William Safire).
Trump approval rating sinks to all-time low:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5626295-donald-trump-approval-rating-survey/
These are Biden-esque numbers. Contrary to the triumphalists who think M T-G’s retirement means the end of rebels and gadflies in the GOP (save Massie), I think big trouble is a-brewin’.
GOP Congress critters can read polls, if nothing else.
From the 2 Due Dissidence guys, utube, ~15+ minutes.
Report: 1 in 4 Israelis Mull FLEEING Amid COLLAPSE in Global Support
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e1byuqdsy8
Scientists find toxic metals hidden in popular plastic toys
Yep, not surprised. That’s why I bought my niece a wooden toy. Is nothing despoiled?
These are pretty much western leader numbers at this point. Few of them doing better, and many even further underwater.
yeah.
and wooden toys are often still Made in America(like “pick up sticks” and little wooden trains…i leaned this 20 years ago, and took it as a major indicator of where we were at,lol)
i dont generally Do xmas, but if i must, i give away things like jelly, that i made myself….too expensive for me, these days, to merely hand out 20’s to my nieces and nephews.
my granparents always gave us fruit…especially oranges.
papaw was forever amazed at oranges. (a Depression Era thing)
Found archive
The US is deregulating banks. Will the rest of the world follow? (FT via archive.is)
Whenever you see innovation, always mentally replace with “fraud”.
These people are retarded
From Bird flu virus could risk pandemic worse than COVID if it mutates, France’s Institut Pasteur says
I’ve never seen a flu shot that provides sterilizing immunity, or even effectiveness. For example, here’s CDC on effectiveness. It’s dire.
CDC Seasonal Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Studies (CDC)
So, there’s that.
And untested antivirals. Great.
This timeline is stupid.
Public Health is absolutely in shambles in part due to the pathetic COVID-19 response, which nuked trust in vaccination from orbit. How many people do you think are going to be lining up for any possible flu shot targeted at this, particularly if it is based on modified RNA platform?
And we definitely learned we don’t have the infrastructure in place for a mass death event. What was the death rate in NYC in 2020? Was it even 5%? If the lethality of H5N1 is even in the low double digits, bucket up! The same for hospital capacity, as private equity likes to run really lean, without any at all if possible.
Someone, please give the gift of a clue.
yup.
its prolly too late, but i will not be taking any more mrna vaccines.
i no longer have a cancer patient to justify the risk to myself.
and this time of year,theres alots of wild birds hanging around…so i think about this literally every day.
luckily, most, if not all of them travel north- south. humans are the vector between flu spawning grounds and the ROW.
I just love the article “Is AI on a new Trajectory,” because it throws into question some of my primary assumptions.
Sensing similar developments, Gillian Tett over at the Financial Times recently wrote an opinion piece (Nov. 20) entitled “Behind the AI bubble, another tech revolution could be brewing.” She mentioned in this opinion piece a 2022 paper by Vann LeCun which proposes an architecture and training paradigms with which to construct intelligent agents. The abstract says it combines concepts such as configurable predictive world model, behavior driven through intrinsic motivation, and hierarchical joint embedding architecture trained with self-supervised learning.
Technically, all of this is way beyond me but I have a gut layman sense that the movement from scaling to reasoning is now occurring.
They need much more wide spread adoption than this to justify the credits being created here. I just read a study about ChatGPT being used in negotiations because it is much more win win based than others.
They want to be the next Microsoft, everyone will have their own agent between them and the world. All the drudgery of first world life will be taken care of by your agent after it gathers all your data and re-orders your affairs. After a period official sources will no longer deal with you, only your agent.
After the free trial period ends like all internet goodies the fees will be imposed.
i just hope someone marks the date effectively, so we know when to celebrate while huddled around our dung fire in the wasteland under the blackened sky.
New ideas mean new SW and HW……
I wonder if there is a trade off between marginal cost of compute increase and the value to someone having to pay for the compute?
I think OpenAI’s, or other sellers of AI value, problem is paying too much for outside compute. I doubt them running the computte will be more profitable.
Especially if the HW/SW baseline is changing and they buy new chip sets instead of paying off notes…..
There is money to be made in lower power chips and SW that don’t cost so much to train and run.
Big Fraud
How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch (NY Times via archive.ph)
Wowzers
This kind of fraud must make Rick Scott smile.
And fun reputational threats
‘Why I am betting against the AGI Hype’:
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/why-im-betting-against-the-agi-hype
Re “North and Baltic seas show widespread contamination by MRI contrasting agents”
This isn’t exactly the biggest threat to our drinking water but it is one of a number of related issues that drug and medical device / diagnostic companies are grappling with. The problems are yin and yang: excretion to the environment and retention in the body. There’s a growing movement to hold pharma and water companies to a higher standard so that our water is drug free. At the moment it contains non-negligible quantities of female hormones (the pill), heavy metals (contrast agents, radio pharmaceutics) and drug metabolites generally (presumably including untransformed antibiotics).
I am.working with a US company applying innovative chemistry to these problems. I didn’t expect the problem to reach popular consciousness! They have new gadolinium agents that are fully and quickly excreted – unlike current MRI contrast agents that are sequestered in the brain and organs – but that makes the excretion problem worse. Luckily we also make the signal better so we only need half the material, reducing the absolute release but in future environmental rules may require those patients may have to be admitted, not for the MRI but for the hospital to collect their excretions and egestions to recover the gadolinium and keep it out of the environment….
Sorry, no, while temperamentally I’d like to agree with you that bad writing equals bad thinking it’s just simply not the case, and somewhat absurd to assert otherwise. All one need do is review the history of philosophy to know this doesn’t hold up to a moment of scrutiny. There’s precious few good writers to be found in that history, it’s true. To say they’re thus all bad thinkers is something else altogether.
Writing is thinking. And the question is not whether great thinkers have to be skilled writers but whether obscure language is indeed necessary to convey advanced concepts. There’s a difference between dull writing and the clumsy attempts to convey erudition via coded language that only those in the know are equipped to read. There was a time when many clerics were required to learn Latin and even use it to conduct their services. More bafflegab to keep the peasantry from questioning divine right and other power concepts? Clarity matters. I think.
Nicolas Boileau, Art poétique, 1674:
Avant donc que d’écrire, apprenez à penser.
Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,
l’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure.
Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement.
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
Or:
Learn then to think, ere you pretend to write.
As your idea’s clear, or else obscure,
The expression follows, perfect or impure.
Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,
And the words to say it flow with ease.
Re that clip of Lake Superior, the breakers in that clip wouldn’t disgrace the N. Atlantic
There is a marvelous new book out called The Gales of November by John U. Bacon about the Mighty Fitz.
It was just over 50 years ago (10th November 1975) when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank just 15 miles or so from safety near the Soo Locks. I love the song that Gordon Lightfoot wrote, but my favorite version is by Laura Cantrell.
I see Lake Superior has had quite a few shipwrecks over the years and am not surprised seeing how dynamic those waves were-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_Lake_Superior
https://youtube.com/@bigoldboats?si=4jic7z4iWPh9kcCL