‘I’m Not Dead!’ Maine Hospital Informs Living Patients of Their Demise MedPage Today
Toting a tambourine, she built L.A.’s first megachurch. Then she suddenly disappeared Los Angeles Times
A COHORT THEORY OF DRUG-DEATH EPIDEMICS Posting Alone
Universe expansion may be slowing, not accelerating, study suggests The Guardian
Climate/Environment
Philippines declares state of emergency as 241 dead, missing due to typhoon Anadolu Agency
Lebanon Faces Yet Another Drought Al Akhbar
Tehran’s main dams only 11 pct full amid severe drought The Star
What the last gas boom (and bust) says about today’s rush to build Utility Dive
The boldest measures are the safest New Climate Reality
‘Blood rain’ and diseases in the wind: Is the US prepared for deadly dust storms? BBC
Pandemics
Could bird flu be quietly spreading undetected worldwide? Gavi
Exploring predictors of post-COVID-19 condition among 810 851 individuals in Sweden Nature
The Koreas
Russian Nuclear Submarine Technology Will Make North Korean Threat More Palpable 38 North
China?
Taiwan must be allowed equal participation when China hosts APEC, US says Reuters. Already stepping over Beijing’s red lines following trade truce?
Chipmaker Nexperia said it halted China shipments on payment refusal Euronews
China slashes big data centers’ electric bills Semafor
China is running out of garbage. Now they want to burn their neighbors’. Kevin Walmsley
US lifts arms embargo on Cambodia after Trump oversees ceasefire deal Channel News Asia
India
Where does a western chemical plant that contaminated drinking water go next? To India The Guardian
Syraqistan
Gaza officials warn thousands remain trapped under rubble, say aid flow ‘critically insufficient’ The Cradle
Israel begins mass demobilization of reserve forces on all fronts for 1st time since October 2023 Anadolu Agency
Blair emerges on the Lebanon scene as “Israel” escalates aggression on southern towns Vanessa Beeley
Why Germany Is Doing the “Dirty Work” for Trump’s Peace Plan Counterpunch
Revealed: Qatar-linked intelligence operation targeted ICC prosecutor’s alleged victim The Guardian
Washington pushes back after Iraq links US pullout to resistance disarmament The Cradle
US prepares to establish military presence at airbase in Damascus: Sources Reuters
Old Blighty
European Disunion
EU’s AI Legislation Faces Temporary Halt Amid Big Tech Pressure Devdiscourse
Europe’s Cybersecurity Depends on the United States German Institute for International and Security Affairs
BUDGET LAW: KLEPTOCRACY LIES IN THE DETAILS Comidad. Italy.
New Not-So-Cold War
Where are Russia’s immobilised assets? Nobody, except Belgium, wants to say Euronews.
Bulgaria moves to seize, sell Russian energy giant’s refinery amid sanctions pressure Kyiv Independent
Gunvor pulls offer for Russia’s Lukoil as US brands firm ‘Kremlin puppet’ Politico
***
The U.S. Just Fired its Most Powerful Nuclear Missile: Minuteman III Launch Confirmed Military Watch
US tests most advanced nuclear cruise missile aboard 488,000-pound B-52 bomber Interesting Engineering
Africa
A Country of Particular Concern: The Fulani, Faith, and the Failure of the Nigerian State Elnathan John
The Great Game
Kazakhstan set to join Abraham Accords in symbolic move at Central Asia summit Firstpost
South of the Border
Monroe Doctrine Revival? Senate Keeps Trump’s Latitude on Venezuela TeleSur
U.S. Sends Attack Aircraft to El Salvador Amid Regional Troop Buildup New York Times
Colombian Survivor of US Attack at Sea Released From Hospital, No Connection With Drug Trafficking Found Orinoco Tribune
Trump 2.0
‘As Ugly and Cruel As It Gets’: Trump Fights Order to Fully Fund November SNAP Benefits Common Dreams
Food pantries see record demand, as government shutdown becomes longest on record WSWS
The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands New Yorker. Commentary:
The complicated reality of USAID is that it is (was) both one of the best & worst parts of the US government. It does desperately needed humanitarian work, as well as many destructive acts of political manipulation. Trump is getting rid of the former. https://t.co/rGBxvxrh4P
— ☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ (@schwarz) November 6, 2025
America First versus Israel First Larry Johnson
In a first, ballot initiative to divest from Israel wins at the ballot box, in Somerville, Mass. Jerusalem Post
MAHA
Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts ProPublica
GOP Funhouse
Why Are Republicans So Irrelevant In Big City Politics? Arbitrary Lines
Democrats en déshabillé
One of the Greatest Wall Street Investors of All Time Announces Retirement 404 Media
Spook Country
The Democratic party is equally owned by Mossad and CIA. The Republicans are Mossad and FBI https://t.co/coEeuCuuxy
— Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) November 6, 2025
Immigration
More than 250,000 Venezuelans will lose immigration protection in the U.S. TeleSur
Police State Watch
Judge blasts Trump’s Chicago border ‘Blitz,’ extends curbs on use of force that ‘shocks the conscience’ Chicago Sun-Times
DC “Sandwich Guy” Acquitted: Jury Rejects Assault Charge Over CBP Confrontation Migrant Insider
Accelerationists
The Authoritarian Stack. “How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next.”
Disenchanted Enchantment Los Angeles Review of Books
Mr. Market Rattles the Tin Cup
Nvidia leads tech stock declines as Trump official says ‘no federal bailout’ for AI Yahoo! Finance
AI #141: Give Us The Money Zvi Mowshowitz
Why Is the AI Czar Already Saying OpenAI Won’t Get a Bailout? Gizmodo
AI
Chamber of Progress asks for blank check for big tech Digital Content Next. Wants AI training declared “fair use.”
Google says project on famous crab-covered island is about cables, not combat Ars Technica
Chaos and lies: Why Sam Altman was booted from OpenAI, according to new testimony The Verge
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge 404 Media
Groves of Academe
Surge in antisemitism investigations at US universities after October 7 attacks, data shows The Guardian. “According to the report, only one of 102 antisemitism complaints the authors reviewed raises antisemitism claims unrelated to criticism of Israel.”
TikTok Billionaire Is Making Bari Weiss’s ‘Anti-Woke’ College Tuition Free Gizmodo
Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbors Revolted Wired
The Bezzle
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Reuters
Netflix’s new “monthly active viewers” statistic is an all-timer.
If you watch 1 minute of NFLX in a month they credit it as if *every person* in your home was reached.
If we used this trick to calculate reach for the World Series, for example, it would inflate reach by 70%. https://t.co/KdMMjM1VpT
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) November 6, 2025
Boeing
Boeing avoids criminal charge in 737 Max crashes that killed 346 despite emotional pleas from families The Independent
Economy
Job cuts surge in worst October layoffs in 22 years. Here’s why USA Today
US factories rocked by ‘unprecedented’ rise in unsold stock The Telegraph
What’s really going on with AI and jobs? Blood in the Machine
Guillotine Watch
As Americans Live Paycheck to Paycheck, Tesla Shareholders Approve Musk’s $1 Trillion Package Common Dreams
Wealth Taxes Will Barely Slow Inequality. So Why Do the Super-Rich Resist Them? Truthout
Class Warfare
A New White-Collar Gig Economy: Training AI to Take Over Bloomberg
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Will there be a stand alone piece about frm CIA in Congress and how they voted and what their influence was?
to dunk on Spook-Span, my uninformed bet is that she isn’t sharing details from that 6-year period because it was incredibly (shockingly) dry and uneventful—despite the 5 passports. The hagiography sounds better on the campaign trail.
One of my good college friends was a spook too, under “cover” at the local embassy., around the same period as Spanny. It was incredibly banal work paid by the intel black box, slush fund. DOGE the CIA.
or maybe i’m wrong and she’s a master hacker and can shiv me with a pen
“You don’t understand. She killed a domestic infrastructure project with a f—ing pencil! F—ing Baba Yaga Lago she is! Leave her alone. You’ll survive longer that way.”
The movie stuff is mostly either special forces (the James Bond stuff), or the NSA (spying).
The CIA is mostly propaganda, disinformation, subversion and cultivating foreign assets. ‘Analysis’ seems to bottom of the totem pole.
Can anybody, anybody, point to one success of the CIA in its entire history? I am considering 9/11 primarily a central government including the CIA a failure. The coup against the democratically chosen leader of Iran? How much has that cost us until the day after two years from now? The Coups in Greece or Argentina. We did get some great movies from those two coups, but they don’t celebrate the CIA. I do recognize those movies as great creative works.
If you read “Operation Gladio”, by Paul Williams, it turns out that the CIA is a pretty successful drug smuggler and distributor
I suspect the CIA has any number of small successes. That we don’t know about. Which involve that type of crime.
And credit for destabilizing… the US. I was surprised when it never came out that George Zimmerman was a CIA or FBI “asset.” He’s the type. So many moody loners with handguns get a bit of credibility (in their own minds) and ego boost when the Feds step in to sign them up as an “asset.”
Sometimes, they are actually handled and eventually commit a crime that, far more likely than not, they would never have done. But usually they are just kind of on a list, and the only outcome is that when they, for instance, make a credible threat against Kissinger or someone, they’re handlers swoop in to smooth it over.
Read “Family of Secrets”: the Kennedy hit and Watergate were both successful!
First is how they treat their enemies, the second how they treat their friends.
CF is just thinking about success from the wrong point of view: once you institutionalize secrecy the system quickly coheres around its own interests and just look at where Federal money has flowed since OSS at personal risk secrecy was transmogrified into Three Letter Agency impunity.
Good points. The Kennedy murder and the removal of Nixon seem like successful CIA ops.
But what came after is an untramelled record of success: “Agents For Bush” positioning CIA director George HW Bush as Vice President for 8 years, followed by 4 years of Bush as president, followed by CIA-adjacent Clinton for 8 years, followed by Bush’s son for 8 years, followed by CIA-groomed Obama for 8 years, followed by Russiagate and the CIA Democrat Reps…
CIA is on a world-wrecking roll!
They do seem to have pulled off a massive, long-lasting propaganda success in convincing the US population to give them a mountain of funding and influence…..
We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
William J. Casey, 1981
“Taiwan must be allowed equal participation when China hosts APEC, US says”
Maybe China can mess with Trump as say that they will allow Taiwan to have full participation – so long as they allow New York City to have full participation as well. Whose the Mayor of New York City again?
The Ryukyu Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Marianas, the Chagos Islanders, and the native Hawaiians all have better claims than Taiwan for full participation.
The penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands also deserve full participation since they were recognized by Emperor Trump’s tariff policies. I know they’re more Indian Ocean than Pacific Ocean but American politicians don’t know that.
A friend worked for the National Wildlife Refuge on Palmyra Atoll-the safest place in these United States with a staff of 4-20 people that live there year round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyra_Atoll
The lucky bugger! That and working as a wage mariner for NOAA have always been dream jobs for me.
Met her about 30 years ago, her off-season job off the atoll was working at the Bearpaw Meadow High Sierra Camp in the backcountry of Sequoia NP.
A visual of her workplace:
https://www.redwoodhikes.com/SequoiaNP/BearpawMore.html
Thanks. That was a day brightener.
Beautiful photos. I guess that this is her version of a day at the office.
I’m really hoping Beijing tugs the choke chain, the salami slicing implies is rampant here.
Rare earths licensing was a rare feedback that actually penetrated the massive embubblement that constitutes our politics.
I think that China should thank the US for not only recognizing, but insisting that Taiwan is part of China.
I think the Guardian oversimplifies the interpretation of the important new study on calibration of Type 1a supernova intrinsic brightness.
Here is the underlying article
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/544/1/975/8281988?login=false
The implication the authors of the underlying research draw is that the dark energy responsible for cosmic acceleration does not have time invariant energy density, but has declined over the passage of time to the point that the current state of cosmic expansion is deceleration rather than acceleration. It may be that “Lambda-CDM” cosmology can be tweaked by introducing time variation to the dark energy density.
I think there must also be implications for particle physics, given that dark energy (whether constant or time-variable) does not yet have a description in terms of known particles or fields.
A point raised in the paper is that this development may help to resolve the Hubble tension (time variable dark energy density has been in view as a possible solution to this problem; this paper reinforces the likelihood that dark energy density is not time invariant).
I’m sure they simplify things as you noted, but the one detail I took away was that the new study was based on observations of 300 galaxies. I never liked the Schmidt/Perlmutter finding much, for very unscientific reasons – even though I won’t be around to witness it, the thought of looking up and seeing a dark, starless sky on the way to the heat death of the universe leaves one, well, cold. But I liked it even less when I found out their conclusions were based on about a couple dozen observations of Type 1As if I remember right. A larger sample size was in order if you ask me, and there have been other studies done in recent years with more samples that also disputed the Schmidt/Pearlmutter findings.
More studies, and they may determine there is no such thing as “dark energy” at all. As you note, there is no physical description of it, and science authors, at least the good ones, will often note that the fancy sounding terms like dark matter and dark energy are really the equivalent of “we don’t know yet”.
Side note: if I ever get tired of my current username, I’m going to change it to ‘negative lambda’.
I just saw this: https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251106003906.htm
Summary: “A new theory claims dark matter and dark energy don’t exist — they’re just side effects of the universe’s changing forces. By rethinking gravity and cosmic timelines, it could rewrite our understanding of space and time itself.”
I have no idea what physicists think of it.
via German MULTIPOLAR news blog
1) re: EU vs. free press
Italian reporter in Brussels fired by news agency after asking whether Israel would be paying for Gaza or not after EU raises such demands against RU in Ukraine.
Journalist fired after critical question to EU Commission
Italian reporter Gabriele Nunziati was fired after his question about the EU’s double standards in its dealings with Israel went viral. The case is now sparking debate.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/geopolitik/eu-kommission-italienischer-journalist-wird-nach-kritischer-frage-gefeuert-li.10004157
2) new German NSC first meeting
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/nationaler-sicherheitsrat-erste-sitzung-100.html
National Security Council Plan against hybrid threats adopted
November 5, 2025
National Security Council. In its first meeting, the body passed a resolution aimed at Russia.
The newly established National Security Council of the German Federal Government has convened for the first time. In its inaugural meeting, chaired by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Security Council adopted a cross-departmental action plan to counter hybrid threats, as announced by government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius. This is the Federal Government’s response “to the growing number and intensity of hybrid threats against the Federal Republic of Germany, emanating in particular from Russia.”
The action plan includes measures in the areas of counter-espionage and the protection of critical infrastructure, the spokesperson explained. This includes, for example, power plants, water and electricity lines, and gas and oil pipelines. Details of the plan were not released, as the committee meets in secret.
Re: German National Security Council–
They should have conjured Paulus for the meeting. Zelensky learned everything he knows about military strategy and tactics from Paulus.
Except the surrender rather than sacrificing hundreds of thousands of soldiers part.
and Drop Site is being sued by a top BBC editor for this article
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-biased-coverage
got an email from them soliciting support (I don’t know how to link emails!)
apologies if this was already posted here
re: Russia – The West/Germany
DIALOGUE WORKS with a 2-part show
1) John Helmer
2) TC 44:00+ Patrik Baab
John Helmer & Patrik Baab Putin’s BLITZ Leaves Trump STUNNED
https://rumble.com/v718qrg-john-helmer-and-patrik-baab-putins-blitz-leaves-trump-stunned.html?e9s=src_v1_cbl%2Csrc_v1_ucp_v
As COP in Brazil starts, please remember this little item of gentle farce which shows COP to be the biggest piece of shittiest greenwash in the world…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9vy191rgn1o
hosting COP in Manaus, of all places, shows the tone-deaf greenwashing.
In order to save the rain forest, we must turn it into a tourist trap like Cinque Terra in August!
re: Mamdani
2x CONSORTIUM NEWS
1) Jill Stein on Mamdani Mania
52 min.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/11/07/watch-jill-stein-on-mamdani-mania/
2) ‘Run, Zohran, Run’
Theodore Hamm, author of a new book about Zohran Mamdani
31 min.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/11/06/watch-run-zohran-run/
Prediction: rubber hits road when ‘the seventh biggest army in the world’ goes on strike. That’s when Defund The Police gets operationally tested. Contingent possibility: neighborhood watches leading to local fiefdoms, the old-school way of city-states. Sliwa cut his teeth on such matters.
Last time they went on strike, crime went down. Probably unrelated, but still.
The dirty secret about US policing is that US cops are really really bad at their jobs. They don’t prevent crimes, they don’t catch criminals and they don’t seem to make anything safer.
As a point of comparison – I have a LOT of issues with British policing. But the gulf between them and US police is vast.
American policing was generally improving until the Crack Wars followed by the Biden Crime Bill made it turn from law enforcement to using civil asset forfeiture and other abusive tactics to “fight” drugs. That the financial stress the states and local municipalities increased, which encouraged the use of fees, fines, and forfeitures to replace lost tax revenues using the police didn’t help.
More Mamdani, this about the transition team. From the Guardian, Zohran Mamdani announces all-female transition team as he prepares for New York mayoralty. This lot is heavy in NGO executives, for better or worse. Here they are, each linked to a bio-sketch.
Lina Khan, Columbia Law
Melanie Hartzog, The New York Foundling. Reason to worry, check out the Board.
Maria Torres-Springer, Wiki.
Elana Leopold, London House.
Grace Bonilla, United Way
mrsyk
Lina Khan is the most qualified among them. I see some revolving doors in Torres-Springer and Bonilla. Ford Foundation and United Way are heavyweights, and not in the sense of big, muscular, and fast.
The Foundling board includes two nuns. Believe me, given that their order founded Foundling, they aren’t taking much bourgie crapola.
My objection is to the signal: I call the syndrome Too Much of a Good Thing. One doesn’t go from boys’ club to girls’ club. There is no qualified man in NYC?
A while back, I had a residency at a writers/artists colony. Thirteen in residence. Twelve women, and me, the only guy and only playwright (another barrier).
Then the women started quarreling among themselves, some of it class-based, some of it age-based.
I retreated and maintained my masculine mystique.
A positive spin is that all five members of the team look to be well seasoned in the ways of politics. This group just may turn out to be “big, muscular, and fast.
(Reaches for up half full of coffee gone cold) I remember having masculine mystique.
I went to a writing retreat years ago and just now realized it too was all female but for me. I never thought of it because one was a transsexual woman, whom I totally palled with like one of the guys. I hope it wasn’t hurtful.
fun thing on Mamdani:
https://www.threads.com/@karaswisher/post/DQujv3_kTUi
Goooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
Well, it was official now, the first 4 comma Capitalist was upon us, no mere Illionaire with his elongated income, and obviously a game changer from when he was just another 3 comma Capitalist
The idea that some wag on the internet was calling him a ‘Commanist’ hadn’t yet taken off in online parlance
Larval trillionaires are emerging from their pupae.
re: Israel
YouTube Deletes Hundreds of Videos Documenting Israeli War Crimes
https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/07/youtube-deletes-hundreds-of-videos-documenting-israeli-war-crimes/
A COHORT THEORY OF DRUG-DEATH EPIDEMICS Posting Alone
Thank you for this article. Now, is Belgium following the same path with a drug supply shock? Now cocaine being less expensive than a rum@coke combination in Belgium. The difficulty, so it seems rises from inability to control drug trafficking in the Port of Amberes. They should get serious about it.
Why burn books when there is an easier way?
AISontag. Call out the Firewall Brigade. (A reference to the book, “Firmware 404” by Ray Redacted.)
I would have written the Chinese Firewall Brigade, but then Microsoft would have sued over trademark infringement.
The real book burners are the ones who support intellectual property. The Statute of Anne was written for the purpose of censorship, not to enable petulant rentiers in knowledge.
I take deep offense at that remark.
First, this site would not exist if it were not for intellectual property rights. So you hate authors, including the ones here? Glad we have that straight.
Second, if intellectual property rights were respected, we would not have the scourge called large language models.
To be fair, copyright does “hide” works: How Copyright Keeps Works Disappeared (Illinois Public Law Research Paper No. 13-54).
I, for one, have inherited IP originally published in 1928 and 1932 and I’ll retain all rights until 2049. Or my kids will. That doesn’t really make sense to me.
Yes, one can approve of copyright and patenting if the terms are reasonable, but the grotesque extensions to the periods for which these intellectual property rights are prolonged in the US now make many of us hate the whole system. And “fair use” for individuals for strictly non-commercial purposes should be a no-brainer and clearly distinct from the organizational hoovering up of hundreds of thousands of works for (desired) eventual profits. LLMs should be sued into the dirt for their practices, which are far, far worse than what the Internet Archive has been doing and getting all kinds of legal grief for. As for patents, the more necessary to human life a product is, the shorter the term of the patent should be. Life saving drugs should not be an endless source of profit, while video game consoles can certainly be milked for as long as a company wants.
I wrote music for an auto manufacturer adjacent media firm thirty five years ago, ten years later I found it being used by a major news network. I just said oh well, who am I to go against them with their deep pockets and my small copyright claim. I’d learned a lesson from a friend who won a first round but then was crushed.
Indeed, it’s a mess. Allegedly, that’s what publishing companies are for. But that depends on how the depth of their pockets and how they value each relationship.
Yves Smith: thanks. And it’s not as if I am rolling in dough from the translations, the plays, and the chapbook of poetry.
As both of your points indicate, it is about protection from predation and misrepresentation. Writers watch with horror what has happened to music and musicians.
People who go on about “IP” remind me of the anti-Darwinists or those who jeep trying to disprove the value of statistical nalysis. To what end?
Note to Polar Socialist above: if you are the heir to some literary estate — Waltari’s Egyptian — it’s about protection of the work. Why should anyone begrudge you a thousand euro a year for a novel? Or a symphony by Sibelius?
It’s not going to be dismissed.
Some other entities are selling you some bait and switch BS lines while it’s being stolen for their use and profit.
There isn’t go be any “democratization” of this or that.
“going to be”…got a bit riled up there.
Nothing is more rentier than AI Fintech middle men.
I’m telling you, I’m hitting up the used bookstores more than ever these, because once everything is digitized and crapified and nobody really knows anything any more, things are going to get very ugly.
I’m also very suspicious of any new authors these days. If some are already admitting to using AI to write, then I assume many more are doing it and just keeping quiet about it.
Future historians may refer to the time between 2022 and whenever we’re rid of the anathema that is “AI” as the Muddled Age, where all info is highly suspect.
The Butlerian Jihad can’t come soon enough – bring on the mentats!
I have a bad feeling that the writing business now is not only endangered by AI slop but also by sort of a self-slopping content generation from many authors that (A) are in it very explicitly as an income-generating career and (B) have learned all the techniques for authoring a mostly competent novel but just reuse and regurgitate formula plots and character types from older works. There are so many novels that are just “retelling” someone else’s older story (going back even to ancient works) but with all the characters having today’s fashionable US PMC attitudes and way of talking and behaving. So many very derivative works, even if they don’t acknowledge their original sources, with all the right opinions and “important” themes for the target market their work is aimed at. More authors are writing more skillfully, having been self-helped and workshopped and given online feedback, but they have nothing new or interesting to say, no actual story. Eventually AI will be sufficient to generate works like these.
Fortunately AI doesn’t seem close, yet. Well, the ones I’ve read anyway.
Regarding writing for income generation – I looked into this recently and the process to get to getting published seems like hell. I keep seeing stories of query letters being rejected dozens of times and I have no idea who has time to write tens of manuscripts before finally getting a call. It is a bit concerning, actually and I wouldn’t be surprised if the type of people of making it through that are/were made to become garbage machines, recycling the tired tropes that apparently still sell. Unless I’ve only happened to read the horror stories, I don’t know.
I think it’s one of those professions like being a star basketball player where very few aspiring individuals get to have a decent or better payday, but the very few often get insanely much. The publishing business like the video entertainment business is all about getting that next really big hit, the next Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey or The Da Vinci Code. Or at least to get a prestige title that makes back its costs and then some, hence all the big publicity about literary prizes. The easiest way to get published is to already have had a hit book or else to be a big enough celebrity that there is a sort of built-in audience for pimping your words. So many writers self-publish on the internet now, hoping to catch the eye of a big publishing house or maybe catch word-of-mouth lightning from internet “fandom”, but it seems like an unforgiving business. It’s like wanting to be a lottery ticket winner or the next big “influencer”, the type of desperation swing-for-the-fences career path you see touted when normal job opportunities have been closed off or reduced to only the most precarious and poorly compensated work.
I have to agree on the lottery analogy.
Still though, yikes. It sounds like another traipse down Dante’s circles.
I wish I could say that all libraries would fight off AI implementation but of the 34 years I worked in libraries, 28 of those years was for a system that toward the end of my time there had completely lost its mind in making noises about being “modern” and “relevant” go down a path where I could see them fully embracing AI now. They have already largely gutted their book collections, if it hadn’t been for a former librarian keeping track of classics that warned about today’s dystopia books like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 would have never been replaced and since that librarian has retired those titles are probably all gone again.
They also tested a tracking system used within the library that could pinpoint the exact location of every cell phone in the building and a full radius of 500 feet around the building. The “wouldn’t it be cool” contingent thought it would be awesome to send library patrons suggestions for the very place they were standing. Older librarians strongly objected, but after the trial period it wasn’t the creepy dystopian nightmare that stopped the purchase, it was the cost of the tech. That was a little over ten years ago before AI. All of us old librarians are gone now, I don’t know of anyone there now who’ll object to having AI “solve” all of their problems for them.
Thank you so very much; elements of a conspiracy (I’m not a conspiracist) of those that have: against those who do not. The targets, those who do not have information will be confused. They will be manipulated into their own groveling on the ground, too soon below it.
Is it verboten to suggest that current ideas about childhood gender fluidity are at least controversial? And in ten years we may have no libraries at all as print book popularity is already fading (evidence: our new book shelf always has items that are waiting list if online library items). Here’s suggesting that this is the real threat rather than AI. Some of us love our library and prefer that it not be made a political football by either side (and both political sides are trying).
regarding the SNAP debacle: i went in to what we around here call the “Old Dollar Store”(because its older, dingier, cheaper and much more disorganised than the new fancy one)
because mom wanted milk.
the freezer and fridge sections that usually have WIC and EBT stuff(per the prominent signage) were totally empty.
whether this is bc smart folks cleaned it out before the cessation, or if its company policy to avoid running afoul of trump’s goons…i have no idea.
he has stated that any retailer offering deals to the now sans-ebt people will be punished.
i find the entire thing utterly disgusting.
I was in Wal*Mart in Godzone yesterday and none of the 7 checkers had a line going, onesy-twosey people waiting, as opposed to the usual 6 to 8 people waiting to check out in each line. There was more of a wait to do self-checkout, to give you an idea of what’s what.
I asked the checker what’s up?
She practically screamed ‘EBT’!
When you got nothing-you got nothing to buy stuff with.
How does it feel…,
It seems that we’re devolving slowly into anarchy. Taco’s SNAP debacle meets an out-of-control judiciary, or maybe nature abhors the vacuum that is Congress (Mike Johnson i.e. the weakest House speaker ever.)
I have a flight scheduled to Florida in two weeks … if it gets canceled can I get an injunction forcing the airlines to restore it?
You would have better luck hopping aboard a UPS freight as a “deadhead.”
Amen.
I find his Presidency, Congress and the path this Nation’s leaders are taking us on utterly disgusting.
Australians to get three hours of free electricity every day under solar scheme
A good article, if chilling. If I understood the practice in recent years (which includes foreign medicine production inspection) it was was already a strained process.
“Washington pushes back after Iraq links US pullout to resistance disarmament”
Yeah, a bit of a cheek. The US has said that they will never leave Iraq but will only relocate to different parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Parliament demanded that the US leave but it was ignored. But there is a fly in this ointment. Those resistance groups. The Iraqis know that if they disarmed those militias, which are part of the army, then maybe ISIS will come back. And they can’t depend on the US as last time this happened, the US let those ISIS forces get all the way near to Baghdad. The US can’t disarm those groups as they would need to bring tens of thousands of troops into the country and at that, those groups might counter-attack with rockets and drones. And of course that article said that the Israelis are not happy with those militias as well which settled it for the US.
Those “resistance groups” were influential in driving ISIS out.
US likely has a former ISIS head chopper lined up to take over in Baghdad. Like Damascus.
Bravo Somerville! D and S are the more important parts of BDS.
“America First versus Israel First”
If there is going to be a civil war between Trump’s America First supporters and the Republican Zionists then I say great. Trump will automatically go with the Zionists but after the recent election results, the Republicans must know that they are bleeding votes. And Trump is not growing more popular, especially after telling over 40 million people to go starve. The best thing for America would be to purge themselves of Zionist influence which would solve a lot of their Middle East problems. Trump may also want to attack those America First supporters but he cannot escape the fact that he will need their votes in next year’s midterms which are now less than a year away.
Hear hear!
To throw in a bit of a popular meme of late; if there are ‘elections’ next year.
I work in County Courthouses, mostly in offices of Clerk and Recorder/ Register of Deeds. First question I ask when I go in and say hi to the Clerk and staff: “You all going to have an election next year?”
The seemingly honest and universal reply: “Well, we are planning on and preparing for one”. (Shoulder shrug and concerned resigned look)
Needless to say, staff and Principal turnover is breathtakingly fast and short duration in those offices since Trump 1 and Covid.
I pine for the days of the omnipresent good-willed smiling comfort of the League of Women Voters volunteers, rather than the new tribe of glowering bellicose belligerents who seem intent on spreading intimidation and instilling fear and discomfort- lurking like managerial gargoyles.
In ‘their’ present forms and operations, I am not enamored with either.
There has always been a large part of MAGA that follows Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. That reflects in many with the attitude: “never again, Pearl Harbor”.
The “never again” extremist faction supports empire (as patriotism!!) and greater Zion as bolster against a Pearl Harbor in the Mediterranean theater! This is the illusory “patriotic” plank of the Israel First aisle of MAGA.
The isolationist aisle of is quiet! Too quiet.
Instapundit seems capture by empire and Israel firsting. While LewRockwell.com may be cooling to Israel mildly sliding with Tucker and Rogan.
I confess to trolling those sites!
But that is Johnson’s point. Some of the most prominent conservative media stars – including the two *most* prominent – are now criticizing the warmongers in general, and the Zionists in particular, quite loudly. I can’t remember anything close to this happening before in my lifetime.
I’ve been around too long, and I’m way too cynical, to get my hopes up very much. But I do see this as different. On the other hand, it is not just the Israel lobby or Christian Zionists who push war and interventionism. Our massive MICIMATT* complex depends on it, is built to sustain it, and controls our political system.
(*military-industrial-Congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank – Ray McGovern’s useful acronym)
Once the Boomers die off, Camp Bibi is toast…..under both parties, even with infinite AIPAC cash
I’ve been hearing the old saw “once the oldest generation dies off things will be different.”
The boomers are now the oldest generation but not the largest US demographic. Boomers are roughly 66 million, or 17% of the US population.
the largest cohort is the 18-64 year-olds. 202 million, roughly 61% of the US.
Or maybe your remark is aimed at currently serving pols. That’s a different target. If so, I might agree with you. There have always been in every generation powerful older pols in Congress. In the US Senate they were and are known as “the old bulls of the Senate.” If that’s your target, I might agree with you. / ;)
When I was a lad, it was precisely we boomers who were going to usher in either the paradise dreamed of by the old and new lefts or the hell terrifying the conservatives. And endless books and articles on the topic. Those receiving the Gen z hype would do well to revisit some of that blather.
This dovetails with the Z’nists’ frantic effort to co-opt TP USA.
Remember Lambert’s (blessed be his name) assertion: “Generations don’t have agency.” The one possible exception being 14 year-olds, mostly girls, who determine who tops the pop music charts.
Does Taco really need their votes (America Firsters?)
Losing Congress will mean his life gets harder, but he’s a lame duck anyways, and even if the House impeaches him, you can forget about a 2/3rds majority voting to convict and remove him on the Senate side.
I think we have objectively reached the stage where Trump has thrown MAGA to the curb like yesterday’s garbage. They served their purpose. Plus, Congress has been effectively dissolved by the incredibly weak Mike Johnson. He’s going to spend the next three years on more war and trade deals that add up to nothing.
The GOP civil war will be for the 2028 nomination.
I sometimes wonder how bad Walmsleys China takes can get, but this one is really something. China has an environmental disaster on its hands due to an inept waste policy and he reports it as a good news story.
China has long had a serious waste problem, and as usual went into overdrive to fix it, and managed to make it worse. It has massively overbuilt its domestic incinerator capacity, which has caused enormous problems for its recycling industry, while creating a parallel problem with creating giant amounts of toxic bottom and flue gas (its basic physics, incineration only reduces waste by the carbon that goes up the chimney, everything else is converted to ash). When you overbuild incinerator capacity you create a specific air pollution problem, because incinerators operating at lower than design temperatures (due to a lack of sufficient calorific intake), either have to turn a blind eye to the pollution or pump fuel into the burner. Guess what a typical private sector operator (and all incinerators in China are run by private operators) will do. So, inevitably, China now has yet another air pollution source.
And Walmsley doesn’t seem to realise that his quoted figures for waste disposal are very high – far too high for poorer countries to pay (unless there is some corrupt dealing). Also, China’s incinerators are not ‘state of the art’. Thats a phrase from a marketing manual. They use standard tech thats used all over the world, with very mixed results, especially in countries with weak regulatory systems.
For a much better overview of the huge problems created by the rush to build incinerators article, this Dialogue Earth article digs into the figures.
The NY Times recently had an article about how poorly run the incinerators are in major Indian cities and the pollution horrors that result.
Is a ‘Green’ Revolution Poisoning India’s Capital? (NY Times via archive.ph)
A year ago, wow, it’s been a long Pandemic…
Incinerators are a classic quick fix for the complex problem of managing waste. They turn a big nasty smelly pile of waste into a more compact toxic block of ash. But they are easier to build than it is to develop a complex network of recycling, composting, and (where necessary) properly designed landfills. It seems that in China companies were promised a steady flow of waste, but they failed to lock it down contractually (this is normal in most countries).
Its hard to know what to do in a country like India. Incinerators will never be properly run or regulated, but the waste mountains are horrific.
“The United States Senate on Thursday rejected a bipartisan resolution that sought to prevent President Donald Trump from ordering a military attack against Venezuela without prior congressional authorization.”
Seems that the senate gets things done when it entails the support or dereliction of duties… and considering the amounts of resources to be financialy extracted from our neighbors to the south and those who will profit most…. of course they will pass on their duties to provide congressional authorization.
And, to answer the question “Why Is the AI Czar Already Saying OpenAI Won’t Get a Bailout? Gizmodo”
Because everything that the Trump administration claims it won’t do— is historically and, most surely, be exactly what they are going to do?
It should be an on-line bet.
-Huck Finn to Jim re Henry 8th-
S’pose he opened his mouth –- what then? If he didn’t shut it up powerful quick he’d lose a lie everytime.”
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied combined with “the lady doth protest too much”
Nothing to worry about. Trump will counter it by
*checks notes*
sending two submarines to the coast of North Korea.
Going on for 2 decades now there have been unprecedented droughts in a triangle from Turkey and Israel across to Iran. Its becoming increasingly apparent that this isn’t drought – this is a fundamental climate shift and this region is getting much drier – much too dry to support the current population, at least not without massive food imports. The current conflicts there may be just the beginning of something much worse, something that transcends normal politics.
“No sweat, ” says Gates as he sips water bottled from a Finnish lake while private jetting to and fro. Maybe his robot bees will attack him.
Not the bees!
– he’ll yell, hopefully
..something that transcends normal politics., yes, water wars. Last I checked, the Indus Waters Treaty is still “suspended” by India. Remember how close we came to a hot war between India and Pakistan over this only months ago.
One of the more surreal aspects of the debate on population is that its now very obvious that the next 50 years are going to be defined by mass death from famine, drought, disease and mass migration (or attempts at such) on a scale that we’ve never seen.
But nobody ever really talks about this.
Sometimes I wonder if our betters don’t believe climate change is some sort of population management tool they can somehow control.
One irony is that it seems that we are hitting a demographic cliff right as we hit a climate wall.
I don’t think anyone really wants to address this because we are talking about entire countries collapsing in chaos, just as the luckier countries are going to be hitting their own climate and demographic problems. It will not be a pleasant mix.
Look at the chaos that 80 million climate refugees (~1% of global population) is already causing, all over the world. Now multiply that to 800 million climate refugees (~10% of current global population) by 2050 or so, as rising sea levels and persistent droughts trigger extreme conflict and forced migration on every continent.
Civilization cannot thrive when you start approaching a billion people with nothing left to lose. I still think that we could fix this. But we won’t, as long as people like Bill Gates define “adaptation” as anything less than assuring that everyone – everyone – has enough.
Super Duper Micro Mini Zeitgeist Report.
Your humble interlocutor had his quarterly visit with La Medica yesterday. Hooray, blood pressure is near “normal” and I have few other maladies at present. The kidneys are looking iffy, but that’s a hill I would die on anyway.
The clinic, which serves the poorer cohorts of an area of about fifty thousand people population, looked almost empty. There were basically one half of the usual number of workers in attendance. The patient load in the waiting room was low as well. This clinic relies heavily on government grants to function.
The back rooms were as depopulated as the front of the shop. I waited for ten minutes, (I timed it,) to have my blood drawn for a battery of kidney tests. This is not the normal wait time.
When I brought up the subject of “government shutdown” effects on the clinic, La Medica shushed me. “We are not supposed to speak about that,” she said sotto voce.
In my post exsanguinatory perambulations, I dared to enter several of the local thrift shops. Customer load there was “normal” for this region. None of the workers there had seen spikes in customer traffic yet. I did not dare to visit any of the food pantries yesterday.
This is how a society dies, not with banging but with whingeing.
Stay safe out there.
Nexperia Kerfuffle
🤡 🍿
China’s real plan for the dollar – Yanis Varoufakis & Wolfgang Munchau video
https://youtu.be/O6ENuq-BH-Y?si=2BQd3VytloLKQdK2
“Exorbitant privilege is an exorbitant burden.” Covers the necessity of running massive trade deficits, BRICs, capital controls, etc.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/467025/ozempic-glp-1-drugs-obesity-weight-loss
I want my, I want my GLP
I want my, I want my GLP
I want my, I want my GLP
I want my, I want my GLP
Now look at them yo-yo dieters, that’s not the way you do it
You do an injection of the GLP
That Rx is working, that’s the way you do it
Weight loss for nothing and skinny for free
Now that its working, that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them prescription drug guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get hundreds of millions wrapped around their little finger
Maybe make hundreds of billions as a rule of thumb
We got to uninstall microwave ovens
Delay nourishment deliveries
We got to clean out these refrigerators
We got to move these calories
See the not so little Governor in the land of Lincoln?
Yeah buddy, that’s his own burden to bear
That not so little Governor got his own jet airplane
That not so little Governor, he’s a billionaire
We got to uninstall microwave ovens
Delay nourishment deliveries
We got to clean out these refrigerators
We got to move these calories
Hoover mover, eh!
We got to uninstall microwave ovens
Delay nourishment deliveries
We got to clean out these refrigerators
We got to move these calories
Looky here, look out
I should a learned to eat less
I should a learned to stay away from processed food
Look at that mama, she got skinny on Ozempic
Man, we could have some
And he’s up there, what’s that? silent noises?
He’s plunging on the injection point like a chimpanzee
Oh, that;s working, that’s the way you do it
Get weight loss for nothing, get skinny for free
We got to uninstall microwave ovens
Delay nourishment deliveries
We got to clean out these refrigerators
We got to move these calories
Listen here
Now old fashioned dieting ain’t working, that’s not the way you do it
You do an injection of the GLP
That’s working, that’s the way you do it
Weight loss for nothing, and you’re skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Get your weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Ow, weight loss for nothing, yeah
And skinny for free
What’s that?
Get your weight loss for nothing, and you’re skinny for free
Look at that, look at that
Get your weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
Bozos
Skinny for free (I want my GLP)
Weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
And skinny for free (I want my GLP)
Get your weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
Skinny for free (I want my GLP)
Ah, weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
Skinny for free (I want my GLP)
Easy, easy weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
Easy, easy, skinny for free (I want my GLP)
Easy, easy weight loss for nothing (I want my, I want my)
Skinny for free (I want my GLP)
That’s working
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Weight loss for nothing, skinny for free
Money For Nothing, by Dire Straits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC1Pdsppch4&list=RDZC1Pdsppch4
I can hear Sting in the background.
“‘I’m Not Dead!’ Maine Hospital Informs Living Patients of Their Demise”
I had a similar but reverse situation happen back in 2021 after my father passed away. Since I was managing his estate, I had his mail forwarded to my home. It hadn’t been maybe 2 months and my father got a jury notice mailed to my address as if he was a real resident in my county. I replied with a copy of his death certificate and a note indicating that he’s only been present in Monroe County while being in a box on my mantle.
Yet Another Mini Zeitgeist Report.
Someone at City Hall is trying to get out ahead of the angry mob and call it a parade.
Crowdsourcing Thanksgiving Food Assistance?
From the City Website:
As we approach Make a Difference Day on Saturday, November 8, we’re inviting our community to take part in a simple act of service that can have a big impact.
The City of Hattiesburg is partnering with Edwards Street Fellowship Center for a community food drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at both Hattiesburg Walmart locations.
If you’re looking for a meaningful way to participate in Make a Difference Day, consider picking up a few extra non-perishable items during your grocery run and dropping them off at one of the locations.
Every can, box and bag of food helps support local families and strengthens our community. Thank you for being a city that always shows up for one another.” – copied from the City of Hattiesburg Facebook page
In addition, the local Aldi is selling a Thanksgiving Dinner Kit for $40 USD this year.
Also from the Nextdoor page:
Please make sure your family and friends are aware that Aldi is selling a “Thanksgiving Feast” package that can feed 10 people for just $40. The items include:
. Whole Turkey
. Chicken Broth
. Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup
. Evaporated Milk
. Hawaiian Sweet Rolls
. Miniature Marshmallows
. Cut Green Beans (x2)
. 100% Pure Canned Pumpkin
. Shells & Cheese (x2)
. Brown Gravy Mix (x3)
. Poultry Spices & Herbs
. French Fried Onions
. Pie Crust
. Chicken or Cornbread Stuffing (x2)
. Whipped Dairy Topping
. Yellow Onions (3 lbs.)
. Baby Peeled Carrots
. Celery
. Cranberries
. Sweet Potatoes (3 lbs.)
. Russet Potatoes (10 lbs.)
It looks like someone is “reading the tealeaves” and trying to avoid problems coming up.
Stay safe, and fed.
Did the first deposits of the season to the First National Food Bank of Tiny Town yesterday.
They have a C-Train with a built-in door that allows you leave goodies, and this was the first of around 4 trips i’ll make in the next few weeks. It can only take so much at a time, so I stagger deposits.
Keeping a year’s worth of nourishment on hand starts off as a hunger insurance policy for Mr. & Mrs. yours truly, and then turns into a gift for the community as the use-by* dates come and go.
* our food bank doesn’t care about use-by dates, no rusted or dented cans though.
I volunteer on the executive board in the small, New England town where I live. Following the recent SNAP snafu, we learned that approx 1000 of the 8500 local residents use SNAP benefits. There has been a significant response from town hall to learn and coordinate meeting needs. I’m really hopeful that this leads to more action on long term mutual aid from locals that previously were not involved, myself including. Was pleased to put a couple dozen eggs from our layers in a community fridge this week, and plan to keep doing it whenever the ladies provide the product.
We’ve been slowly building out a little permaculture farmstead, knowing well that by the time we get our full set of planings done it will likely be more than we could harvest and use ourselves, but also less than commercial viability. I’ve got some hope that we’re building a community that will be ready to help me with too many apples, berries, and hazelnuts to harvest by myself in the future.
Walmart has also said they will be selling a pre Covid priced Thanksgiving package. Here’s guessing this preceded competitor Aldi.
My Aldi has quite the crush these days. The Germans are doing great in SC if not in Gernany.
I don’t know if giving people a turkey is such a good idea, especially if the recipients are inexperienced at preparing one. Failing to get our raised-in-cages birds done can result in some nasty, if not deadly sickness. Plus there are massive leftovers that offer delightful possibilities to those who know how to safely preserve and reheat it, but just another chance to poison yourself if you don’t.
Same thing here. Last week our local (and very well run and respected) food bank approached my workplace and put a food collection barrel in our break room. The message was “please donate, we’ll pick up the barrel by thanksgiving or when full, whichever comes first.”
I have many friends who depend on SNAP, so I emailed my coworkers to remind them of the SNAP debacle and asked them to give early and often. The barrel was full to overflowing by this Tuesday, with bags and boxes piled up outside it. They picked it up Thursday and left another barrel and I’m hoping this one fills up as fast.
They leave collection barrels all over, at places like the concert halls, sports venues, fairgrounds (where all the holiday markets happen). They also have two collections centers, one for packaged goods and one for fresh overflow from farms and backyard gardens.
‘Blood rain’ and diseases in the wind: Is the US prepared for deadly dust storms? BBC
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’ve got about a decade’s worth of Burning Man dust storms under my belt, and its different from other windy events of the type in that its all alkali dust in rather endless amounts.
I never got ‘playa lung’ but it wasn’t from a lack of effort on my part.
It’ll be interesting/scary if others states start getting hit with our monsoon season haboob type dust storms. Crazy stuff for sure.
“‘Blood rain’ and diseases in the wind: Is the US prepared for deadly dust storms?”
I wouldn’t bet on it. But the aftermath of massive dust storms will be worse. Back in the 1930s there were massive dust storms and Washington had to pay attention when those dust storms arrived in DC itself. The government at the time undertook massive programs to fight this problem which is summarized here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl#Government_response
But here is the thing. If this happened again, the only solutions allowed would be market based solution as we live under a neoliberal system. Only corporations that want to see a profit or have the government guarantee their investments will be stepping forward. I do not think that it will be enough to cope with the size of the problem and I cannot see the Feds undertaking the same sort of measures like was done in the 1930s. And that is why I say that the aftermath will be worse.
My mom grew up on the farm south of Calgary in Okotoks and told me once of a fierce dust storm containing real estate formerly in the United States, and a dozen First Nations men on horse asked her father if they could stay in the barn until it had passed, and they were there for almost a week!
When I lived in the high desert north of L.A. we had a fungus in the soil that caused severe lung disease in some people. We called it “Valley Fever.” A friend of mine was bedridden for several months because there was no treatment for it at the time. I’ve read that some ancient bacteria are being found in what was permafrost. Who knows what other evils will be unleashed as weather patterns shift. We do live in interesting times.
New Construction Physics is somewhat interesting–the 19th c when some US railway rails were made of wood.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/strap-rail
That site is always fascinating.
Its surprising just how much randomness was involved in the selection of modern railway gauges. If IK Brunel had had his way, we’d have much bigger, wider railways, just like his Bristol to London line. But if we had, many would never have been built, they were far too expensive. In the UK, the transition to twistier, cheaper lines occurred after the first crash in railway stocks. As one former boss of mine put it, it led to the victory of the Quantity Surveyors over the Engineers and the latter didn’t wrestle back control until the development of HSR. One of my favourite spots for engineering history is a desolate canal under the M6 ‘spaghetti junction’ interchange in Birmingham, England. In one spot you can stand on a beautifully designed 18th century caste iron bridge over the canal, while two railway lines – one an elegant brick early line, the second a crude steel truss later structure – all overshadowed by the decaying and rotting concrete of the 1960’s highway. We learned to build bigger, but not necessarily better.
On a point about rails though – they long predate the railway age – there were numerous different types of railed vehicle built going back well into the 18th century, mostly for mining. So it was already quite a mature product by the time railways were invented. the relatively narrow and slow railways in the US provided an unusual benefit in the later 19th century – they were better for riding penny farthing bikes than roads at the time. ‘Riding the Ties’ became a popular method of cycling across America.
I believe there are special rail bikes for riding our many abandoned US rail lines. And thanks. I knew about the Brunel history.
A friend of mine recently took the tourist train from Williams, AZ up to the Grand Canyon. She thought it was steam but after I expressed skepticism she looked it up and it’s diesel. They used to have steam I believe but those are hard to keep going and often need custom parts. People here have mentioned that the steam train from Durango, CO up to Silverton is still operating.
I find the discussion on AI and jobs very frustrating, as its completely disconnected from what I’m seeing.
The reality is that there have been declining profits for the US corporate sector for the past year, for a variety of reasons (I’d guess tariffs, rising interest rates and the collapse in living standards for the majority of consumers). You would expect to see significant job cuts. Proponents of AI are mistaking correlation for causation.
In IT what you’re seeing is a collapse of the VC tech world, due to high interest rates and the demand for AI investment and the rest of the sector responding to overhiring post-covid and a weak economy. Obviously they’re not going to admit this, so AI is a way to spin this.
Anyway, kudos for Brian Merchant for pointing this out in his article.
Yep, completely agree; Tech has been in basically a hiring recession since about summer 2023 or thereabouts. When interest rates started going up, I stopped getting weekly emails from crypto startups, which is a shame because I enjoyed replying to recruiters with “i’m not a believer”.
That might be true, but I suspect that the likely fool’s gold of AI efficiencies is resulting in existing positions being held open or withdrawn, with co-workers being told to use AI to fill the gap.
I am seeing AI being used to answer basic questions that would take ten or fifteen minutes of research, and while that is marginal, it will result in feedback to management that yes, AI is being used, and yes, it is resulting in marginal but tangible benefits. The MIT study that 95% of AI projects fail seems to miss the mark by referring to affirmative initiatives (I have not read it, so I could be misinterpreting the discussions of its results).
A company in my industry is investigating the use of AI for higher-level decision-making relating to risk management and credit analysis. A competitor in that industry attempted a similar model-driven approach ten years ago and utterly failed, and I suspect this initiative will similarly fail.
LAT/Aimee Semple McPherson
Even megachurches not new under the sun. Sinclair Lewis–satirist of all things early 20th American–wrote Elmer Gantry with the lead switched to a male. Later there was Garner Ted Armstrong with his church in Pasadena. One of my uncles was a big fan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner_Ted_Armstrong
No discussion of Big LA dogma is complete without including Gene Scott~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Scott
I, along with a lot of people I knew listened to Gene Scott, he might have been somewhat unorthodox, but he told the truth about a lot of stuff. I was always surprised at the people who told me they listened to him. Funny thing was, he exposed many of the evangelical fakes and faith healers. Johnny cash and Merle haggard were among his followers. I thought he did a lot of good.
“If you watch 1 minute of NFLX in a month they credit it as if *every person* in your home was reached.”
Meanwhile, any household can tell you about their infotainment silos. One peraon may be watching Netflix, another HBO or Youtube, while yet another could be off somewhere browsing social media.
So if they all use this metric, it’s all BS metrics.
Israel begins mass demobilization of reserve forces on all fronts for 1st time since October 2023 – Anadolu Agency
The headline vs the real story in the content of the article:
“The paper cited the army that said about two and a half reserve brigades will be withdrawn from defensive missions, without specifying the deployment areas or which fronts are affected.
It added that by the end of the week, two reserve brigades on the northern border will be replaced by regular army units, while battalions from the Givati and Kfir brigades will take over from reserve forces in the West Bank.
The report noted that the army has redeployed hundreds of regular soldiers from elite units in Gaza to the West Bank division after months of fighting, without providing additional details.”
more on the so-called free press
Drop Site is being sued by a top BBC editor for this article
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-biased-coverage
got an email from them soliciting support (I don’t know how to link emails!)
apologies if this was already posted here
I got the same email, I wish I could donate, without EBT this month I will be tapped. As far as proving BBC bias that should be an open and shut case. But…
So what if anything would slow it? And I’ve been wondering why Gary’s Economics has been obsessed with them.
He is looking for people to talk to for a documentary btw. I had been wanting to post something about that here but by now have forgotten the specifics and will have to re-watch the request. It’s from a short video he did last week or so.
Oops?
The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. (NY Times via archive.ph)
Most hikers and backpackers I know tend to loathe the Sierra Club-as they lost their focus eons ago when deciding to concentrate on politics.
The times i’ve come across Sierra Club groups in the Backcountry, they’re almost as disagreeable to me as Boy Scout troops led by inept father figures who have no idea what they’re doing, and the young charges follow suit.
Agreed. I still have a collection of small Sierra Club books with hiking trail data that were useful in backpacking in California. But the current club seems irrelevant for this purpose.
Not that it’s fair to the vermin to compare them to us, but its where my mouse led me~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
The first of the 18 year old 47 day wonders from ICE will be hitting the streets by late November, armed with M4’s and flash bang grenades.
Larping ” Seal Team 6″…
My over/under on one of these idiot kids shooting a mess of people is 60 days, January 1st 2026.
And can people please stop calling cold blooded murder “Extra Judicial” killings… a few extra syllables doesn’t change the reality of these brutal crimes.
I like this:
Most technological objects are required not only to physically exist, but also require an associated cadre of technical workers who understand and can support the objects, and can maintain or improve them if needed. This is something that technical leadership frequently doesn’t understand in their zeal to reduce head count and expenses going forward. ICBMs are a dramatic example of this, but anyone can look around them wherever they are and see dozens or hundreds of objects that were invented and manufactured by a group of people who understood well what was going on during the process.
Bic lighters, bank software, window glass, metal objects, wooden objects, microcircuits, hundred story buildings, grown and packaged food, the list is literally endless. Human civilization quite literally rests on these products of human civilization.
I get a kick out of billionaires putting together some kind of post-apocalyptic hideout where they imagine themselves living on after the rest of society has collapsed. The fact is, all of us are interdependent to an extent that is literally impossible to conceive of, whether we like it or not. The momentary interruption of various human supply chains during the covid epidemic has given us a tiny taste of what it is we have wrought.
We need to accept and celebrate the fact that the members of the human species all rely on each other for our literal existence, the same way that a liver cell in a human being depends on billions of other types of cells throughout the body.
Right on to this
https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/07/congress-could-get-millions-of-people-off-of-snap-by-raising-the-minimum-wage-but-it-hasnt-for-16-years/
MAGA on the March
Consumer sentiment nears lowest level ever as worries build over shutdown (CNBC)
and
File under: post-democracy preparation
Hegseth Is Purging Military Leaders With Little Explanation (NYT via archive.ph)
I believe this goes hand-in-hand with the excellent “The Authoritarian Stack” piece in today’s Links.
I also (at the risk of being a broken-record) think we need to be looking beyond Trump, and viewing this as an emerging regime.
If/when Trump goes/dies, America will still be left with a bunch of sociopath fascists, a loyalty-tested military leadership and a Palantir infested/controlled infrastructure of governance.
And if Trump dies in office, Vance wouldn’t even face a primary (supposing elections happen at all).
America as a third world country. Getting gas today the pump had second harvest donation option and then video fundraising for second harvest wow.
re: US Stratcom
probably new head Vice Admiral Richard A. Correll after hearing:
Full Committee Hearing
To consider the nomination of: Vice Admiral Richard A. Correll, USN to be admiral and Commander, United States Strategic Command
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2025
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-consider-the-nomination-of_vice-admiral-richard-a-correll-usn-to-be-admiral-and–commander-united-states-strategic-command
bio
https://www.stratcom.mil/About/Leadership/Bio-Article-View/Article/1552361/deputy-commander/
Hans Kristensen TWITTER:
“In confirmation hearing for VADM Correll as new STRATCOM head, part of mission of Golden Dome missile defense is to “guarantee a second strike capability.” A tall order since China’s current nuke buildup is already partly a response to such defenses.”
On that thread the last comment gets it right:
“No true. Hansy always—and I mean always—gets it wrong. The man is truly lost. 😂
This “Golden Dome” is designed to secure a more credible US first strike capability by limiting an adversary’s retaliatory strike capability. But it won’t work, and it will wreck the DoD budget.”
https://nitter.poast.org/nukestrat/status/1986379181224305089#m
A June 2025 essay by Adolf Reed jr. in nonSite.
Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair
Articles, Issue #50
One para that seems relevant today:
” [Walter] Reuther’s proposals articulated a coherent response to what he perceived as a problem of chronic, if not intensifying, technological displacement that was endemic to significant sections of the postwar labor market. He offered several measures intended to compensate for shrinking employment possibilities, e.g., legislation establishing a flexible full-employment work week pegged to the overall level of employment, increased and nationally administered unemployment compensation, increased social security payments, and lowered retirement age. He considered social-democratic planning to be a consistent extension of the warrant of the postwar policy consensus inasmuch as structural unemployment was a worsening problem that undermined the central goal of full employment.”
https://nonsite.org/looking-backward-to-counter-mysticism-and-despair/
How many people in the US DSA read Adolf Reed jr, I wonder.
Why Are Republicans So Irrelevant In Big City Politics?
Because they can’t have leach fields?
Oooooooh! An “underground” form of “trickle down economics!” With the same outcome; “Yes. That really is rain on your leg.”
A.I. Abuse Is Reinventing the Law (NY Times via archive.ph)
If an LLM can do your legal job, why do you even have a legal job? For that matter, does this violate some kind of duty to the client?
“If an LLM can do your legal job, why do you even have a legal job? For that matter, does this violate some kind of duty to the client?”
Not if you have a ChatJudge.
Capitulation beginning
Democrats Scale Back Shutdown Demands, but G.O.P. Digs In
Both parties starving Americans to death. Don’t care. Democrats not even demanding an end to Medicaid work requirements. Worthless people all of them.
Judge Napolitano (whatever is said, he is prepared with relevant questions):
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel’s Nightmare.
Moi: there is a long nightmare ahead for us all. I am hoping against hope for the Palestinians to not lose too much more in this nightmare.
A bit long and definitely repetitive but I thought the article on Nigeria was excellent and made some good points. I couldn’t help thinking near the end that much of the attitudes/practices sounded like Zionism under a different name and with a diffeerent target. It really drove home the point about history repeating itself unless we’re careful to control that want to insist some of us are more equal than others.
Am I to adhere to religious factions against basic material necessities?
Not by instinct. The Palestinians must be relieved.
Thunderstorm in western NC at 11 pm at night. Thunderstorms here are a summer phenomenon.
This is not normal.
Earth is going great!
Lol
Starving people is gonna definitely fix court legitimacy
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/11/07/us/trump-news-shutdown
An interesting interview by Paul Jay:
Cheney’s Death, Mamdani’s Victory: Wilkerson on War Crimes & Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu7LjcdFTHA
Thanks for dropping that. The algo often hides these things from me.