Psychologists Find Strange Twist In The Human-Dog Emotional Bond StudyFinds
Water leak in the Louvre damages hundreds of works, museum says The Guardian
Researchers Concerned to Find That Five-Year-Olds Are Already Deeply Hooked on Brain Rot Content Futurism
The Last People Before the Internet Kneeling Bus
Climate/Environment
IS CLIMATE CHANGE AN EXTERNALITY? LPE Project
Storms in the Southern Ocean are producing more rain – and the consequences could be global The Conversation
Irrigation water and drought fuel rising human-elephant conflict Down to Earth
Comparing climate models with observations The Climate Brink
Pandemics
Scientists Uncover How COVID-19 Variants Outsmart the Immune System Mount Sinai
Until the Government prioritises clean air in classrooms, nothing is going to change in education.
Schools will continue to have perpetually ill pupils, perpetually ill staff & perpetual disruption.
Harm will compound harm and everything will be much harder than it should be. pic.twitter.com/eOw8Abwo1m
— Steve B (@75ThunderRoad) December 7, 2025
African swine fever outbreak in Spain may have leaked from research lab, officials say The Guardian
Japan
Radar locked Observing Japan
Japan frustrated at Trump administration’s silence over row with China FT
China?
China’s November exports top expectations, imports underperform Reuters
China’s exports to U.S. extend double-digit declines, dropping 29% in November, despite trade truce CNBC
What do Chinese people think of the US? How has the sentiment changed over the last 10–15 years? China Translated
India
Why Everyone is Dressing the Same: How Global Aesthetics are Quietly Erasing India’s Wardrobe Identity India Narrative
Thailand-Cambodia Conflict
Thailand launches airstrikes against Cambodia in border flare-up Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Disgusting
“There’s another woman in my life…Israel I love her so much”
“We are going to train 100,000 Christian ambassadors to be ambassadors in their own country for the state of Israel, to defend Israel’s brand and to combat anti-semitism
FOZ teams up with Blackboard to… pic.twitter.com/n7ltAfoWig
— Seethroughitall (@seethroughit2) December 7, 2025
Israel Redefines its Military Position in Gaza as a New Internal Frontier TeleSur
Hamas official says the group ready to discuss ‘freezing or storing’ its weapons AP
Netanyahu held ‘secret meeting’ with Tony Blair over post-war Gaza plans New Arab
CIA and Turkey’s MIT planning secret air base to monitor the Middle East Intelligence Online
Old Blighty
Revealed: Hidden scandal of NHS staff exposed to cancer-causing chemical deemed the ‘next asbestos’ The Independent
The Filton Trial Craig Murray
Your Party members told to stop waiting for orders from above, push democracy from the ground up The Canary
European Disunion
America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe Programmable Mutter
X deactivates European Commission’s ad account after the company was fined €120M TechCrunch
As Trump goes on the attack, von der Leyen goes into hiding Euractiv
US security plan: EU’s Kallas downplays fear of rift in ties DW
***
Germany news: Shop bankruptcies surge across Germany DW
European industry faces ‘life or death,’ Macron says — and China needs to help Politico
***
US to hand over 250 heavy armored vehicles to Poland under $1 offer for military use Interesting Engineering
‘I’d defend our nation’: Poles prepare for growing threat of war The Guardian
New Not-So-Cold War
The New Diplomatic Fault Line: How Moscow is Pitting Washington Against Europe Kautilya the Contemplator
London vs Washington Events in Ukraine
Monroe Doctrine 2.0: Euro Edition Venik
John Coltrane Through a Russian Prism: Part 1 – Religious Philosophy and ‘God-Seeking’ Gordon Hahn
SITREP 12/7/25: Russian Tech Advances, New Mass Energy Grid Attacks, Mirnograd Enters Final Phase Simplicius
Ukrainian Propaganda Merchants Working in Overdrive to Deny Reality Larry Johnson
As others have said, this is actual grassroots Ukrainian civil society in action.
Then there’s the other western-paid “civil society”, an elite urban class that’s the loudest advocate for bussifying the Ukrainian masses. Our media has made sure we only hear the forever-war class. https://t.co/sP1iRojuB2— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 7, 2025
IAEA issues new Chernobyl safety warning RT. “The agency has found the protective structure over the 1986 reactor critically damaged after a drone strike.”
Africa
Drone strikes on Sudan kindergarten, hospital kill 50, including children New Arab
‘Only a miracle can end this nightmare’: Eritreans fear new Ethiopia war France24
Nigeria says it deployed jets, troops to Benin to ‘dislodge coup plotters’ Al Jazeera. Commentary:
I think Nigeria is officially over tonight.
Bombing your neighbour because a white guy in Paris told you too.
Carrying out airstrikes against a fellow African country because Emmanuel Macron wanted you to.
Only apartheid South Africa ever did something like this.
It’s over.
— David Hundeyin (@DavidHundeyin) December 7, 2025
South of the Border
US flew 69 recon missions and hundreds of fighter sorties near Venezuela Nov-Dec, focusing northwest coast and capital. Targets: oil refineries, airfields, ports along Colombia border. https://t.co/QGqYi7x5Ts pic.twitter.com/tvVOHwEDz5
— Rybar in English (@rybar_en) December 7, 2025
Honduras Plunges Into Post-Election Turmoil as Electoral Official Alleges “Monumental Fraud” Drop Site
Trump 2.0
Trump pushes foreign food crackdown as grocery prices rise Axios
Trump Militarized Cities in ICE Crackdowns. Is Militarizing the Ballot Box Next? Truthout
Democrats en déshabillé
Democratic Senators Who Trump Accused of ‘Sedition’ Form Legal Defense Funds NOTUS
The Uniparty
The U.S. House releases annual defense bill. Here’s what it includes Deseret News
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Soviet Union and the “Golden Age” of the West Top War
A New National Security Strategy China Articles
Part I: A National Security Strategy Preying on Disorder Un-Diplomatic. Part II: America, Super-Predator
Accelerationists
Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder Pushes Return of Public Hangings as Part of ‘Masculine Leadership’ Initiative Common Dreams
Why Does the End of the World Look So Profitable? OilPrice
The accelerator is on the floor for autonomous vehicles TechCrunch
All of Russia’s Porsches Were Bricked By a Mysterious Satellite Outage Auto Blog
Police State Watch
FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals Ken Klippenstein
USA: New Findings Reveal Human Rights Violations at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome Detention Centers Amnesty International
Groves of Academe
Accommodation Nation The Atlantic
Antitrust
Our Famously Free Press
A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent. The Intercept
AI
A ‘code red’ for AI Blood in the Machine
AI agents and the 90% problem High Capacity
OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT says posts appearing to show in-app ads are ‘not real or not ads’ Engagdet
Economy
Why these 2 stocks have shockingly blown away Nvidia Yahoo! Finance. Dollar Tree and Dollar General.
Guillotine Watch
The System Has No Reverse America’s Undoing
Class warfare (on the top) Pawel Moscicki
Zeitgeist Watch
Tim Robinson Understands What The Boys Are Going Through Defector
Class Warfare
Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now Labor Notes
How not to talk about capitalism New Statesman
What’s it take to be Santa? New research shows that even atypical candidates can be successful in the role Oregon State University
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder Pushes Return of Public Hangings as Part of ‘Masculine Leadership’ Initiative”
Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale maybe trying to justify this on the grounds of “masculine leadership” but I would guess that it would be more about money and the opportunities to monetize public hangings. So if you want to attend in person, how much will you have to pay for a ticket to this event. Different prices according to seating arrangements? Then there would be the selling of rights to have this televised or live-streamed on a place like YouTube. Then online I am sure that there would be a store where you could buy souvenirs such as t-shirts saying ‘Just Hanging Around.’ And you can be sure that people like Joe Lonsdale would be there in the background earning commissions and the like every step of the way. Of course people like this would have no idea of real world problems and applications so probably people being hung would dangle and choke for minutes instead of the professional drop and snap.
My immediate reaction was that I would not mind as long as he and his billionaire pals are the lead characters in those spectacles. Netflix shows have like two or three seasons, America offers enough material to fill that up.
À_la_lanterne!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12/When meting capital punishment in public was a thing in Europe, owners of the buildings surrounding the place of execution would rent their windows and balconies to those who wanted to have a good view over the proceedings. What you suggest would amount to digitalizing the tradition.
And with the ever expanding world of online gambling: will the neck snap or will they asphyxiate? If asphyxiation, how long will it take? Final words – over or under 30 seconds?
I was originally going to berate myself for this morbid take, but then I read more comments and didn’t feel so guilty!
I’m old enough to remember the good old days when the family could pack a lunch and gather at the town square, chat with the neighbours, watch a lovely public hanging for free and head on down to the square dance while the men folk smoked cigars and drank White Lightning in the local saloon.
German parliament votes against a proposal by the GREENS (opposition) to confiscate Russian assets and against a ban on Russian nuclear products.
The German LEFT decided on abstention re: point 1. So much about “opposition”.
I have had some angry arguments recently because I made clear that THE LEFT is not to be taken seriously.
In my circles trust in THE LEFT is still the main political view.
Why?
Because immigrants and AfD.
I´m telling people that it´s idiotic to talk about “immigrants”, against AfD (are 25% of Germany Nazis? nope) but voting for a party that is supporting Nazis in Ukraine who – were it up to the EU – would have nukes and that was abstaining/voting for the rearmament program, sadly enough.
So the reason to NOT vote for BSW is – immigrants.
Regardless of the fact that LEFT has no plan how to solve the problems arising.
(I have repeatedly argued in favour of progressive immigration policies on NC but for that you need a plan which the LEFT obviously has not.)
And to put immigrants above potential WWIII is beyond me.
These are people who know that Ukraine is not a good place. But they are still somehow living in the realm that Russia, Russia, Russia is worse.
I don´t know what to do.
Except stop talking to people if I know there are some major roadbloacks.
It makes no sense I am not going to change anybody´s view anyway.
the “Left” —- however one may describe them in the western world —- have become the useful retards for the pro-war agenda.
unbelieveable that the (relatively) louder voices for peace are from “populist” voices who realize that it’s their sons who will die in an elite-driven war
“that it’s their sons who will die in an elite-driven war”
The crazy thing is: They have been teaching/learning about this very scheme in WWI for instance.
But now where it is in plain sight in their own time they simply repeat the same mistakes which they have been so arduously studying. It´s totally insane.
I’m pretty sure his “LEFT” is a translation of the name of the German party “Die Linke” and isn’t intended to mean the “left” in general. BSW is an offspring of that party that split in part over this issue (and also on immigration policy).
Here’s your Left —
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/dec/08/your-party-membership-portal-jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana
‘I subscribed to Your Party at its shambolic start and am now finding it impossible to cancel my membership. No one replies to emails. My local party branch told me it can’t help. The portal requires me to open a new account and commit to another payment in order to cancel anything.
‘I tried to block the payments from my Amex card but they managed to sneak a £5 payment again this month. My attempt to reclaim the money from my card issuer was rejected. I’m so frustrated that they are helping themselves to my account when they’ve been messing people about so much.’
The professional Left (so-called) in the West is not serious about power, but only about performance, posturing, and self-promotion, with that latter including outright corrupt grifting.
Change, when it comes, will likely be brought about by some figure reviled by the professional Left because that figure has gone along within the system and sometimes dirtied their hands in terrible ways it to achieve the power necessary to force through the changes they intend to enact; forex. a Putin or an LBJ.
Maybe Your Party has a crap portal. Crap internet portals seem to be the rule. But anything the Guardian says about a Jeremy Corbyn-related project is highly suspect to me. The Guardian led the “antisemitism” hysteria against Corbyn to get the Starmer faction in power. In fact, anything the Guardian says about any political topic these days is probably best read as directed propaganda from someone in the ruling class.
Lefty Godot:Maybe Your Party has a crap portal.
But a serious political leader of a serious politically insurgent party would have a functional, working website good for something other than taking people’s money, wouldn’t they? More likely, then, that Your Party has a crap leader who couldn’t organize a p*ss-up in a brewery.
Lefty Godot: In fact, anything the Guardian says about any political topic these days is probably best read as directed propaganda from someone in the ruling class….
Of course. Yet a serious political leader would have cut the Starmer-Guardian faction off at the knees before they could do what they did. As even Boris Johnson, FFS, was serious enough to do with his in-party opposition. Which means that Corbyn is no more a serious political operator than the Guardian is a serious leftist media outlet.
Also, I knew someone — most likely, American — would make excuses for him. Stop doing that. Corbyn and his like are part of the problem, because look at his actual, real-world record —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn
In all the forty-plus (40!) years Corbyn has been in the UK’s parliament since 1983 he’s achieved absolutely nothing — nada, niente, zero, zilch — in terms of legislature or anything of benefit for anybody except, arguably, himself. By contrast, even Bernie Sanders, forex, actually delivered some benefits to the people of Vermont when he was a senator there, has a functioning intelligence, and is to that extent serious.
Corbyn has done nothing for anybody for more than forty years but ‘activism,’ ‘campaigning against,’ and ‘protesting,’ and is so dim and vain that he thinks those activities are in themselves meaningful, which they are not.
And the very fact that Corbyn can seriously think they are and that they make him a serious politician shows just how not serious he is.
Some on the LEFT believe reducing turmoil, destruction, and death in vulnerable countries, i.e., Not White and Wealthy would go a long, long, long way to reducing immigration to the W&W countries.
Were the US to cease its destrctive antics in the Horn of Africa (bombed Somolia 100+ times this year, according to a report in today’s NC), and desist from threatening, sanctioning, and killing Venezuelans, and on-and-on, people would not be leaving their homes, families, friends, and livelihoods. Immigration would take on a very different face.
and this very good observation should be stupidly obvious, by now.
but it aint, somehow,lol.
mindf&ck runs deep.
why are there mexicans here? because we ruined their farm econmy(and much else) with nafta.
and ceo’s pay them, and never go to jail for it.
same for every other country we’ve meddled in.
the afghanis who are here worked for us, and would be killed if they go home.
same with the somalis, currently in the news.
our own corporate state engineers these problems by their own greedy, shortsighted actions…and then gets to point at the problems that ensue like its a god action, or a thunderstorm, or something>
we should stop letting them get away with all that narrative control.
“there are thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who strikes the root”-Thoreau.
And the Mexicans are, for the most part, only returning to what was once their “here”.
you mean Die Linke, not the left in general. BSW is still there and to their credit, not “fighting” being defrauded electorally but just getting on with it.
What’s it take to be Santa? New research shows that even atypical candidates can be successful in the role Oregon State University
Christian pastors, influencers join 1,000-strong Israel mission backing Jewish state, fighting antisemitism Fox News
~~~~~~~~~~
Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were imaginary figures who gave you stuff, with really no downside aside from the threat of only receiving a black energy source if you displeased the former.
I can’t remember the wrath of the latter if you yanked on a molar maybe before it’s time, as there was 2 bits waiting for you at the end of the line.
Our parents knew that they were not being truthful with us, but we all realized early on what a pleasant con game it was, and kept up appearances for awhile, so as to get more gotten gains.
My mom (aka Santa) had bought me a speedometer for my bike when I was 8, and when I was snooping around in the closet, to my horror, she got it for the wrong size tire, and I had to spill the beans a week before Xmas, putting paid to the chimera ruse.
Jesus is for all intents and purposes also an imaginary figure, but oh so much death and destruction has come on account of those that basically still believe in an ersatz Santa, who only delivers after you’ve died-as far as they are concerned, with no proof whatsoever-which doesn’t seem to be an issue, that is, if you believe hard enough.
“”There’s another woman in my life…Israel I love her so much”‘
How is that possible? How does somebody end up like this?
Remembering a piece from the bible. It was something, something not being able to serve two masters. That might be relevant.
Yep. And then there is that 1st commandment, “Thou shalt not have other gods before me.”
Christian pastors, influencers join 1,000-strong Israel mission backing Jewish state, fighting antisemitism Fox News
In the past month, 3 different Israeli colleagues mentioned to me they were looking at relocating to the US. I told them to seriously reconsider, showed them videos of the ICE raids, told them it was a very bad time to be an immigrant in the US. They shrugged it off (implication being that they weren’t the ‘wrong type’ of immigrant), two of them tried to turn the conversation into asking me if Americans weren’t worried about “Muslims invading”. None of them had heard about the ICE stuff. None of them knew anything about the Christian Zionist motivations around their support for Israel. All of them looked really surprised when I told them that if they were leaving because of the wars they should expect these same Christian Zionists to support their forced return for conscription if the Zionist regime demanded it in the coming years, a la Ukraine.
I am in the process of transitioning out of my role with the Israeli team (and indeed leaving my job in Big Tech), this will probably be one of my last comments re: Israel. I had an experience there on my last visit that I can’t really discuss that made it impossible for me to continue working with them, even at the sort of remove I am. I think we’re probably going to see a big resumption of the Iran conflict in the next ~3-5 months.
Hoo boy. It sounds like you are having to make your change pronto. Hope you land quickly and well.
thank you for the kind words, Yves. I’ll reach out when things have settled.
“They shrugged it off (implication being that they weren’t the ‘wrong type’ of immigrant), two of them tried to turn the conversation into asking me if Americans weren’t worried about “Muslims invading”.”
Even though they do not seem informed about the good old USA, I think they are correct about not being the “wrong type”
They can always give Steven Miller a call.
Israel’s flexing is impressive, but it is a sign of desperation.
As is the reality of Jews leaving Israel. A prediction: whatever reasons they give for leaving, wherever they wash up they will likely begin to turn the conversation towards the dangers of Muslim – and only Muslim – immigration.
Christian Zionism is popular with only two groups: conservatives old enough to collect social security and those who want to run for office as Republicans. It’s power was always exaggerated by both Israel and the GOP to conceal the power of Jewish donors, while on the left hysterics like Chris Hedges spent decades doing nothing but amplifying this dodge.
Israel has lost young Americans on the left and the right, and no amount of money is going too change that. There is a window of about ten years to fight Iran before the absence of baby boomers makes the AIPAC seal of approval the kiss of death in GOP primaries, at least outside of dry counties in the deep South.
And yet, never has Israel’s power over the uniparty been displayed so nakedly as under Biden and now Trump 2.0. But the obviousness of this is also a sign of weakness, and the reality of officeholders licking Netanyahu’s feet is off-putting for young people whose moral compass was not formed by Leon Uris and Stephen Spielberg.
As Israel’s power wanes I expect more shenanigans, from false flag terror attack to assassinations. I think Trump and a lot of other powerful people are frightened of Netanyahu.
Thinking of Israel as a criminal organization is probably the way to go.
15 earthquakes in the Bay Area the last 24 hours (14 in the same location as the swarm ongoing the past month). I’m supposed to have calls with people in San Francisco in about five hours (I’m still abroad), so far these aren’t large enough to have been felt across the bay but the frequency and duration of this swarm has me increasingly worried we’re preparing for a big one. This is on the Calaveras Fault, one of the more dangerous ones.
I was soaking in a hot springs last week with a friend from the Bay area who is a seismologist for the state, and asked him where the Big One would hit, and he’s of the opinion that the area between Ridgecrest and Lone Pine is where it’ll happen.
Looking at the pattern (zoom in) in the link reminds me of a volcano in Grindavík, Iceland. Half of the red dots (earthquake locations) are in an almost perfect circle, like a caldera, while the rest look like the outflow of lava. I wonder if there is an uprising in that area.
I scoped the plot back to last 30 days for the same area and there are almost 9000 events in the map area (probably the max limit) and they’re not clustered in the same pattern so I think it may just be a coincidence.
Paradoxically seeing so many events in the last month was calming rather than frightening – this is just another day in a very active fault zone, I think!
Small quakes would indicate to me that the plate is moving easily in that area. That puts more pressure on a stickier place on the fault system somewhere that will, in time, result in a larger quake.
Geologist here:
No.
Interesting that the Yukon had a 7.0 quake the same day. Bigger than normal for that area.
https://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/index-en.php?tpl_region=yt_wnt
I live in the SF east bay area and have been seeing these quakes reported in the news but have not felt a one here on our island off the coast of Oakland. We have a lot of old multistory wooden houses that withstood the 1906 quake. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake our house swayed, and while yakking with a neighbor in the front yard the earth shifted beneath my feet so that I nearly lost my footing but our city’s buildings remained standing without damage. We live in an area where there are some half dozen significant faults, so who knows what the future may hold. But hey, the weather is grand.
re: Hollywood PR companies
Inside Hollywood’s Publicist Meltdown
There are fewer projects, tighter budgets, more infighting — and the mega PR firms are breaking up. Not to mention those lawsuits.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywood-pr-world-is-imploding-1236440263/
The System Has No Reverse America’s Undoing mentions the TVA. Henry Ford as early as 1913 saw the potential of developing the Tennessee River’s Muscle Sholes. In 1921 he proposed building a city that would encompass 75 miles of Northern Alabama https://www.al.com/living/2013/01/post-89.html He offered to buy for $5M an uncompleted dam and two federal government owned fertilized plants. There was congressional opposition with critics including Sen. Norris of Nebraska. In 1926 Norris introduced an unsuccessful bill for the federal government to compete and operate the Wilson dam and to build more dams along the Tennessee River anticipating FDR’s TVA. Ford was a major influence in building Detroit including its suburb Dearborn. He attempted to build a Brazil rubber complex and a city called Fordlandia. In some ways Ford built the 20th century.
“Researchers Concerned to Find That Five-Year-Olds Are Already Deeply Hooked on Brain Rot Content”
As a kid we were often left with the one-eyed baby sitter aka the television set. Lots of entertainment for young kids so it was not bad and we still got to go outside to have fun with our friends. Fast forward to today and lots of parents are giving their very young kids a tablet to play with which is not the same sort of animal at all and I doubt that these kids are going outside much. Yeah, I don’t think that those parents are doing their kids any favours.
TV was all 1-way action though…
The best you could hope for was to be on a game show*, snicker.
* I regret that our family didn’t make the cut @ Family Feud, circa 1977
re: AI art
JACOBIN
AI Art Is Weird, Sad, and Ugly. Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise.
By Nicholas Liu
Because capitalism orients people toward profit rather than allowing us to pursue our interests freely, it inevitably separates humans from the creative act. AI art is just the slop frothing up from that gap.
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/ai-slop-art-aesthetics-technology-capital
One could argue the “ugliness” of art has been inherent to the development since art has been decoupled from the Church and then fully abandoned to the era of technical reproduction via photography and then digital technology.
Also there is the point whether or not art as such cannot or is not supposed to be “ugly”.
Many artists would argue one has nothing to do with the other.
Which doesn´t mean the article isn´t making an important point.
thats almost verbatim the adorno-horkheimer argument,lol.
countered, later, by warhol….for better , or worse.
i, myself, havent found contemporary(with my adulthood, at least) art of any kind all that palatable, until recently…when youtube made all the world’s music available, for a time.
then there was a flourishing of mixing and matching and mixing again…until they put it all behind various subscription barriers, again.
i remain a shameless pirate of music that i cannot otherwise afford…i justify this as being an unpaid marketer for said pirated music.
the people i expose to it would not be exposed to it unless i had pirated the music in the first place
(Dave Mathews/Phish Model)
I still hold Adorno and Marcuse in high esteem (Horkheimer I kinda forgot since I read.)
The current backlash won´t change that.
“Japan frustrated at Trump administration’s silence over row with China”
Things like this make me suspicious. Trump hasn’t been making buddy-buddy with Japan lately and it may be that they wanted the US to commit to them. So it may be that when the Chinese held their scheduled maneuvers, that the Japanese sent in some fighters that got a little too close on purpose. After the recent kerfuffle with Japan, China wasn’t having any of that and told their fighters to get missile lock on those Japanese fighters. Perhaps PM Sanae Takaichi calculated that after this happened that Trump would announce that they stood shoulder to shoulder with Japan. But this did not happen. So this may leave Takaichi wondering if Trump values trade with China over any alliance that they have with Japan. That would be a very uncomfortable question to be asking.
Re Variety film critic Gleiberman on Netflix
Oh please. Will the company that turns out endless remakes of Batman and Superman continue to dribble out a few more original movies like Weapons? And given that the company’s most notable cultural product of the 21st may have been Game of Thrones is Gleiberman aware that this was only available on those tiny personal screens that he finds to be such a letdown?
Movie theaters are large pieces of real estate with high operating costs and the resultant need to constantly expect more from the customers via higher prices. A recent article said that a family of four attending a movie and buying the usual snacks can spend $100. Gleiberman of course gets into his faves for free and lives in a large city that can provide the audience to still support the traditional outlets (although technically–other than IMAX–your home version will now be as good).
But it’s the economics that have changed and have been changing for some time with Covid an additional setback.
The merger if it happens may be yet another blow to Hollywood the institution but that too is already ongoing. The planet will still turn.
Ellisons have now hit back with hostile takeover bid partly financed by Jared Kushner’s company–no conflict of interest there.
https://deadline.com/2025/12/paramount-warner-bros-bid-jared-kushner-middle-east-funds-1236642045/
Trump says he personally will be involved in Justice decisions over the Netflix merger attempt.
On THE TOWN podcast by Matt Billoni Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg had a nice and telling anecdote:
The day the decision pro Netflix was publicized Shaw was teaching a class of young fimmakers (argh!). And he said when they learned of the news all their phones went off at the same moment and the room literally was shocked.
Now how dumb must these young – all of them “woke” I assume – be, if they seriously believe a crazy clan like the Ellison Family would be the desireable new owners of mutiple studios.
Folks who are cheerleading genocidal Nazis and really think they are special for building a business with the help of the CIA promoting the sickest surveillance tech around.
Wikispooks with a few really cute quotations by Mista Ellison:
“(…)
“The single greatest step we Americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database. Creating such a database is technically simple. All we have to do is copy information from the hundreds of separate law enforcement databases into a single database. A national security database could be built in a few months. A national security database combined with biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints, iris scans or whatever is best can be used to detect people with false identities.”
(…)
At a November 2014 Friends of the IDF gala in Beverly Hills, he donated $9 million, making him the event’s largest donor:
“The renewal of the Jewish state is something that I think touches all of us. For 2,000 years we were a stateless people. And now we have a country of our own, defended by all the brave men and women of the IDF. So anything we can do to support them, who devote their lives for preserving the state of Israel, keeping the people safe, and allowing our state to continue…I have been to Israel. I have been to the border. I have spent time [with] the people who govern the state of Israel. And I feel a deep emotional connection to the state of Israel and the Israeli people…We have two CEOs at Oracle. One’s name is Safra Catz, and she was born in Israel. So again, we love the country of Israel and will do everything we can to support the country of Israel…”
At another Friends of the IDF gala in Nov 2017, Ellison donated $16.6 million, reported at the time to be the largest single gift in the organization’s history.
(…)
Supportive of mass surveillance. Ellison was critical of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, saying that “Snowden had yet to identify a single person who had been ‘wrongly injured’ by the NSA’s data collection”.
(…)”
Apparently none of these billionaires are very smart or educated people.
p.s. actually those who are interested, listen to the entire thing, because they too end on the same note Carolinian does: that this isn´t over yet!
https://podcasts.apple.com/is/podcast/netflix-buys-warner-bros-emergency-pod/id1612131897?i=1000739940966
I don’t know what it’s like in Europe but the movie theater situation here is very unhealthy and the notion that the Ellisons are better because they might support theatrical is a very thin reed. And of course they are pretty evil…or very evil.
We’ll see what happens. I know a bit about Warner world since they were once tied up with Turner and Atlanta where I used to live. It looks like those cable channels may survive under Netflix which wants to spin them off.
Re: China Artiles A New National Security Strategy.
Notably, the map of the ‘Western Hemisphere’ includes both Canada and Greenland as America’s bailiwick (in adition to its traditional ‘claims’ on the whole of Latin America). This is a continuation of Drumpf’s veiled threats that Canada’s and Greenland’s resources are “ours” to dispose as we see fit. No pretense this time about Canada becoming a “51st State”: because the inconvenient math there is that even if only two senators, Canada would get up to 50 Congresspersons, and that would completely blow up the cosy Repub-Dem uniparty dynamic. Might even lead to universal health care ….
The document reads like a conversation with a child screaming out its demands while having its fingers in its ears, and its eyes shut. ‘Negotiations’ will be enacted in that vein. I am not at all sure whether to be amused or terrified.
It’s the plan for Fortress America with the North American continent being the heartland – minus Mexico of course – Greenland to protect it’s flank and South America being its resource base.
The Western Hemisphere
Using the CIA Fact Book there seems to be 48 countries in the Western Hemisphere plus ,at a guess based on my map of the world , four French départments, at least two or three British Overseas Territories and 2 or more “constituent island countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands”. Greenland is included as a country which a) makes me worry about the CIA’s geopolitical knowledge and b) seems to suggest Denmark comes under this hegemony.
I suspect the authors of the National Security Strategy have no conception of what is included in the Western Hemisphere.
I expect up here in Canada we’d be “offered” more of a Puerto Rico style deal, efschumacher. No Senators or Congresscritters need apply …
As a coincidental detail that gives some underpinning to the Substack article about Russian interest in John Coltrane, the church in San Fransisco where he is the patron saint sells posters and postcards that depict him in the style of a Russian religious ikon (the image didn’t appear in my NC link, but did when I forwarded it to a friend, so perhaps the rest of you saw it).
Also coincidentally, I’ve been listening to a lot of late Coltrane lately, the period when his music had its most explicitly spiritual/religious dimension. What the author doesn’t adequately address (though perhaps he will in Part Two) is that, like deep religious engagement, Coltrane’s music might be beautiful but it’s not easy. It takes commitment, has a fair amount of chiaroscuro, at times is almost harrowing and for many is unlistenable. I’d also say that, like religion, Coltrane’s music, especially post A Love Supreme, requires a certain amount of submission and immersion in order to fully get it and reap something from it.
Trane’s later, explicitly religious/spiritual music was achingly, yearningly beautiful (and at moments it swung unbelievably hard) even as it got increasingly wild. Yes, it’s transcendent, but don’t leave out the dissonance, pain and struggle.
Here’s a Coltrane documentary I found on Utoob, full disclosure I haven’t watched it myself:
https://youtu.be/vEKDwT5L67Q?si=Zx5q3lnOVi5bg7Qt
aye. late Coltrane is among my very favorite music, hands down.
and seconded, all that you say, Re: commitment, etc.
its like smoking a good kush.
my current fave from all that is africa/india with that bass clarinet guy….Dolphy.
one can get high as hell and work on the farm with that kinda thang playin in the trees.
I’ve been bingeing Out of This World (Live in Seattle version, which Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen could’ve never imagined), Kulu Se Mama (with Donald Garrett playing Eric’s bass clarinet) and Compassion from Meditations ll.
Calling up the Spirits, indeed…
re: Accommodation Nation
A few years back a friend who teaches undergrad courses told me about the disability hustle. Students were using the system to get out of taking tests, getting extra time for projects, and dumbing down the material they were tasked to work with. One young girl in particular was very problematic, with all sorts of demands to make things easier for her. And when my friend drew a line, she immediately ran to the administrators. They in turn opened an “investigation” into his handling of the affair. My point is that not only does the culture of disability offer shortcuts to the students, it’s a potent weapon in the hand of administrators seeking to undermine the power of the professors.
What kind of sick culture is that???
Where has the pride gone of figuring out things? Of creating ideas?? Of being the actual author???
Education is just a means to an end for most students, a status marker and the path to a high-end job (hopefully). When I was in school, the professors used to beg my friend and I to take their classes because they were so sick of classrooms full of blank stares.
John Coltrane Through a Russian Prism: Part 1 – Religious Philosophy and ‘God-Seeking’ – Gordon Hahn
And there was Alice Coltrane.
Some musician friends and I had musical and personal relations with their sons and daughter. We’d visit their homes. A couple of fellow band members reported instances of catching Alice Coltrane levitating.
Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, or as Ayler referred to them, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost… to which I’d also I add John Gilmore of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Bird, the Blues, the Church… and that Other Dimension.
Black music and jazz are among relatively few things that give this country any redeeming qualities.
Who the hell knew Gordon Hahn was a Jazz aficionado ?! And overwhelmed by the music of Coltrane. The connection with the Russian Orthodox Church better explains why Pussy Riot was jailed. ;}
“Is Climate Change an Externality?” The author makes a reasonable case that climate change is just that, and by not pricing in externalities, western capitalism enables it.
“Comparing climate models with observations” It troubles me that the article ends with this,
We will have to wait a few more years to know how much of the recent rate of warming is here to stay. Umm, (taps wristwatch) look who’s enabling now. Skepticism of “modeling” and its usefulness in evidence amongst the comments.
With the precipitous decline in capabilities of Western leaders, financialized capitalism has become an abstracted “paper clip maximizer”, except that instead of making paper clips, which actually are something, from whatever it touches it makes money, an increasingly empty symbol on a spreadsheet.
It makes nothing from something.
For the last decade I haven’t been able to see anything in Capitalism but a nihilistic death cult.
The Last People Before the Internet story reinforces my belief that all the big cultural changes really take off in years ending with 5, not 0. For instance, what most people think of as “the Sixties” now was more like 1965-1974. After which we got punked. But 1995-2004 is the decade when we had the “innocent internet” of message boards and news groups still coexisting with Web 1.0 sites and things like AltaVista, GeoCities, AOL, Napster, HotMail, MySpace and Yahoo! With Google just getting huge, and before Facebook and Gmail really became dominant. The last twenty years of the internet have seen it become an overwhelmingly malign cultural force in world and national affairs. But that first decade really seemed like it would be the opposite. (sigh)
Why Everyone is Dressing the Same: How Global Aesthetics are Quietly Erasing India’s Wardrobe Identity India Narrative
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I traveled heaps around the world in the 1980’s, little did I know that it was last call for regional clothing, and everybody dressed differently around the world in the the first world countries I visited.
On my first trip to NZ in 1981, every other adult man had on the uniform, which looked like this:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Walk_shorts
I asked my buddy in Auckland a year ago if there were any men so attired currently, and he said nope!
A lot of “Important people’ are driving around in rolling surveillance platforms and discussing whatever comes to mind while taking no precautions to avoid being hacked.
I am also surprised that no one has gotten ticked off at a car company (Tesla comes to mind) and bricked all of their vehicles.
Amongst the “IOT” cars are among the least secure and no one pays attention.
I expect to know when the main action of WWIII starts by the simultaneous failure of more or less the entire IoT.
The crappified apocalypse!
Mike Brock: ‘The 21st Century is a New Dark Age
An open letter to the intellectual community.’:
“Dear Intellectuals,
I mean, what would a modern intellectual Dark Age look like? If you had to imagine it, you might imagine institutions of higher learning being reduced into cultural disrepute, charlatans substituting for thought-leadership, selling validation of prejudices in exchange for a buck. It might look like the democratic populaces thinking so lowly of the intellectual class that they install reality TV show stars into the highest offices of public trust..”
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-21st-century-is-a-new-dark-age
Been thinkin’ that for awhile, myself.. ;)
Gary Marcus on “AI” : “Scale Is All You Need” is dead. AI’s biggest conference vindicates this newsletter’s longstanding critique of generative AI. What comes next?
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-news-scale-is-all-you-need
The U.S. House releases annual defense bill – thanks for the article from Deseret News above –
I got rabbit holed into a quick review of the actual 3086 page National Defense Authorization Act
for Fiscal Year 2026 –
And, while subjecting myself to this misery, I came across sections that were replacing others with reference 10 USC 101: Definitions
Text contains those laws in effect on December 7, 2025
From Title 10-ARMED FORCES
Subtitle A-General Military Law
PART I-ORGANIZATION AND GENERAL MILITARY POWERS
CHAPTER 1-DEFINITIONS, RULES OF CONSTRUCTION, CROSS REFERENCES, AND RELATED MATTERS
and, thought to get myself up to snuff on 10 USC 101 and definitions.
Anyway, I came upon something that, to me anyway, crosses outside the boundries set by the constitution (text below)
That being congress’s authority to declare war and check Presidential overreach outside enumerated power…. maybe just me thinking out loud, but I guess both parties are united to let it slide considering how far down the anti-democratic neoliberal rabbit hole they have burrowed.
It could be just a new try at the old “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” where in this case it is the word “or”………. the text below of 10 USC 101 definitions
“(13) The term “contingency operation” means a military operation that-
(A) is designated by the Secretary of Defense as an operation in which members of the armed forces are or may become involved in military actions, operations, or hostilities against an enemy of the United States or against an opposing military force; or
(B) results in the call or order to, or retention on, active duty of members of the uniformed services under section 688, 12301(a), 12302, 12304, 12304a, 12305, or 12406 of this title, chapter 13 of this title, section 3713 of title 14, or any other provision of law during a war or during a national emergency declared by the President or Congress.”
That part… “a war or during a national emergency declared by the President or Congress.”
the part that gives me the most dicomfort is “national emergency declared by the President or”
With this chicken little coward comander in chief being paranoid about everything and everyone who is not completly up his a-hole …
Can anybody who is practising law maybe give clairification as regards constitutionality?
I’m not a lawyer but I think this may help.
To the best of my understanding:
Congress has the power to delegate its powers to other entities, including creating agencies and delegating its authority to the other branches, Executive and Judicial by passing laws to those effects.
Otherwise, the power to raise monies through taxes would have to be done by direct congressional organization instead of the IRS, which Congress created to do the admisitrative work of enforcing tax laws and collecting taxes, etc…
If and when the Congress wants its constitutional power back to be the sole determiner of a state of war, they can reclaim it by passing a new law superseding the old ones like the infamous post 9/11 AUMF that delegate some of that to the Executive.
Historically, there may have customarily always been some leeway given to the Executive to use force in times of emergency in their official capacity as the civilian head of the military forces, but I am not a lawyer or historian or constitutional scholar.
Trump’s Interference Destroys Trust of Election Results in Honduras, Common Dreams, John Perry. Well worth a read.
Cause, As Roger Harris and I noted in a recent article, the deployment of one-fifth of US maritime power is aimed not just at Venezuela, but at starting a wider domino effect in the Caribbean basin,…
Effect, (Rixi Moncada harshly questioned) the silence of the electoral observation missions from the Organization of American States and the European Union, which she accused of deliberately omitting any reference to Trump’s interference in their bulletins on the conduct of the election.
With about 90% of the vote “counted”.
Asfura, 1,150,667 votes
Nasralla, 1,129,583 votes
China’s trade surplus tops $1 trillion despite Trump’s attempt to contain it. Here’s what that means
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-s-trade-surplus-tops-1-trillion-despite-trump-s-attempt-to-contain-it-here-s-what-that-means/ar-AA1RUpfq
Looks like those tariffs just ended being a tax on the American people.
Whocuddaknode? Everybody knodes.
Meanwhile the Maligned 7 lean into the re-industrialization of America:
Magnificent 7 Stocks: What Are They and How They Dominate the Market
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/magnificent-7-stocks-explainer
What’s the big new feature this month?
OpenAI’s ChatGPT will soon allow ‘erotica’ for adults in major policy shift
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/15/erotica-coming-to-chatgpt-this-year-says-openai-ceo-sam-altman.html
Wow, Silly Con Valley and the AI tech lords sure know how to run the economy! If we could only get people this stupid to run China’s economy, there might be some hope for us.
Was the “Should the poverty line be raised to $140k?” (The Purse) link included as a critical thinking exercise for NC readers?
The authors are “grumpy” that Michael Green’s “Part 1: My Life is a Lie.” blog post went viral, and they reject his rough back of envelope estimate of $140K/year for a family of four as a threshold income to be able to live a minimally functional life. Green essentially argued for treating what everyone else calls a “living wage” as a functional poverty line, and treating the current poverty line as an indicator of abject destitution.
As a “sanity check,” The Purse authors consider a family in Boston, MA making $150K (with $14400/yr childcare expenses) and a family in Louisville, KY making $162K (with $13800/yr childcare expenses). But both those families have one child, not two. MIT’s living wage calculator (a good proxy for what Green would calculate for a specific case) says that an average family of 3 in Boston needs $131123.2/yr income and would typically spend $23800/yr for childcare. In Louisville, the numbers are $86736/yr income and $10,496/yr childcare.
So the authors “rebut” Green’s argument (and by extension, the “living wage” argument more generally) by considering a families with a different number of dependents who have either $19K (Boston) or $75K (Louisville) than what a fair representation of Green’s “functional poverty line” would be. That’s 15% and 86% more than the “functional poverty level”. (The Boston family has more like $30K extra usable income, considering their lower than normal childcare costs.) Apples to Oranges on two counts: dependent count and income level.
The Purse authors acknowledge in a footnote that a family 3 does not equal a family of 4, but don’t bother running any numbers. In another footnote they say that they “could be lumped in with the business journalists, but we’re cool business journalists.” I’d lump them in with the stupid or disingenuous, or both.
Thank you SW. You did the work and made a contribution to our mutual understanding. I just dismissed the whole article, but it bothered me.
Your lumping decision is a good one, in my opinion.
Hmmm. Sounds like The Purse article authors “knew” their conclusion before they went looking for their article’s “verifying” facts, as they say. (I’ve heard that happens sometimes.) / ;)
Apropos of absolutely nothing in today’s readings:
I went to the Post Office today to get some stamps and mailing labels. Long lines at the Post Office, this being that time of year. Long lines comprised of all ages including young mothers with babes in strollers and old folks with canes and walkers. All ages, all races, many nationalities.
Everyone was in a good mood, this being that time of year. No irritations on having to wait on line that I could detect. Happy laughter when a very young youngster would act especially youngster-like when waiting on line.
I love the Post Office. It’s the one place where I see people I would never normally see in my daily ’round and about. Keeps me grounded in real life. The kids are alright.
News flash to big media: we do not hate each other. / ;)