The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago Science
Global Seaborne Trade Reaches Historic $35 Trillion as Regional Shifts Reshape Maritime Flows gCaptain
US scientists design first highway that wirelessly charges electric trucks on the go Interesting Engineering
Australia has banned social media for kids under 16. How does it work? Straits Times
Climate/Environment
‘Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour’ The Guardian
Heavy rainfall and flooding continue to plague the Pacific Northwest Balanced Weather
Study links rising temperatures to reduced sleep in US adults Keck School of Medicine of USC
Pandemics
Is the comparison between HIV & SARS-CoV-2 correct or useful? Let’s not go all black & white, and instead just look at how they are different and how they rhyme, and at the implications, shall we? Mini-🧵 1/ https://t.co/tG5DCChgXK
— FluSCIM Lucas Gonzalez (@lucasgonzalez) December 7, 2025
I’m an Infectious Diseases Doctor. Our Pipeline of Experts Is in Distress. MedPage Today
China?
China fears its manufacturing is shrinking too fast and too far The East Is Read
China’s Rural Reform: A History Not Designed but Discovered Pekingnology
India
Why are tech giants Microsoft and Amazon betting big on AI in India? Firstpost
Thailand- Cambodia Conflict
Cambodia retaliates in renewed clashes with Thailand as death toll mounts to 10 France24
Syraqistan
Revealed: Israel Used Palantir Technologies In Pager Terrorist Attack In Lebanon. The Dissident
Hamas says no second phase for Gaza ceasefire until Israel ceases ‘violations’ France24
Israel remained leading killer of journalists in 2025: RSF Al Jazeera
Tony Blair ‘dropped’ from Trump’s Gaza ‘board of peace’Middle East Eye
The Gaza “Ceasefire,” the Media/Think Tank Establishment, and Post-Meaning Sawahil
‘Economic peace’ comes to Lebanon: The committee paving a new border order The Cradle
UAE royal brothers’ ties with West threatened by Sudan massacre The Telegraph
What Does the Trump National Security Strategy Mean for Iran? Larry Johnson
Africa
South Africa’s hydrogen extractive frontier: climate action or recolonisation? Review of African Political Economy
Firms or Families? Another installment in the Mission 300 electrification debate Ken Opalo
O Canada
MAID increases — Ottawa holds firm Canadian Affairs. “‘[Medical Assistance in Dying] is no longer this exceptional procedure to facilitate the dying process,’ says expert in wake of Health Canada’s latest MAID report.”
Old Blighty
UK’s largest pro-Palestine prison hunger strike in decades sends activists to hospital New Arab
UK ‘incapable’ of maintaining nuclear submarine capability as expert issues brutal verdict Daily Express
European Disunion
Eighty Years After Yalta: Europe’s Return to Irrelevance Kautilya the Contemplator
New Not-So-Cold War
E3 meeting in London proposes alternative Ukraine war 20-point peace plan Intellinews
Member of UK armed forces killed in ‘tragic accident’ in Ukraine, says MoD The Guardian
Do You Believe in Coincidence… Was the CIA Involved in Operation Spiderweb and Israel’s June 12 Attack on Iran? Larry Johnson
TRUMP FOR PEACE IS BELIEVING IN FATHER CHRISTMAS — PUTIN AND MODI DON’T John Helmer
Lithuania declares state of emergency over smuggler balloons from Belarus Al Jazeera
The West’s century-long war against Russia — part four Thomas Fazi
South of the Border
US fighter jets approach Venezuelan airspace in closely watched flyover Anadolu Agency
“Oil and ideology.” Patrick Lawrence, The Floutist
MS-13 AND TRUMP BACKED THE SAME PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IN HONDURAS The Intercept
Pentagon Redefines Drugs as Combat Threat, Justifying Strikes on Survivors The After-Action Report
The Great Game
Why Washington can’t outbid Beijing and Moscow in Central Asia ThinkChina
L’affaire Epstein
“Ask Jeffrey”: Epstein Ran Wexner’s Pro-Israel Philanthropy Machine, Emails Reveal Drop Site
Trump 2.0
Trump hails economic record, calls affordability concerns Democratic ‘hoax’ Anadolu Agency
More people crowdfunded basic needs in 2025, GoFundMe report shows Fast Company
A new threat to affordability – just in time for winter CNN
AI can help address America’s affordability crisis The Hill. Is this what the administration is banking on?
Trump’s Billionaire Education Secretary Makes ‘Backroom Deal’ to Shaft Low-Income Borrowers Common Dreams
Democrats en déshabillé
Democrats end 30-year losing streak in Miami as Trump-backed candidate falls short Fox News
Analysing The Imperialist Left – Interview With Gabriel Rockhill Decline and Fall
The Supremes
Supreme Court Orders New Review of Religious Exemptions to School Vaccines Education Week
Imperial Collapse Watch
Trump: Nvidia Can Sell H200 AI Chips to China, But US Will Get a 25% Cut PC Mag
Economic Statecraft on Chaos Mode False Positive
Preventing empire collapse The Duran (Video)
Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from US military spending bill The Register
America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most Distilled
The USA’s airports look like third world countries and are barely functioning but it’s fine because you can do pull-ups in them now. https://t.co/NSd5a12U1s
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) December 9, 2025
Screening Room
Rage, Radicalism, and Netflix-Style Propaganda Un-Diplomatic
Guillotine Watch
Just 0.001% hold three times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds The Guardian
Immigration
CBP Announces Plan to Look at Foreign Tourists’ Social Media Activity Prior to U.S. Entry Gizmodo
Police State Watch
Florida blacklists CAIR, Muslim Brotherhood as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ The Cradle
Senate Report Exposes Systematic Abuse of U.S. Citizens by ICE and CBP, Directly Contradicting Noem’s Denials Migrant Insider
Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It 404 Media
Healthcare?
Dr. Oz Called Prior Authorization “a Pox.” Now He’s Spreading It. The Economic Populist
The Bezzle
How Tesla bilks taxpayers Oligarch Watch
Class Warfare
Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout Groundwork Collaborative
Price Shocks are Redistribution Shocks: Systemically Significant Prices for Inequality in the United States University of Massachusetts Amherst. A summary thread:
The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it’s not just inflation—it’s a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest. In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A 🧵https://t.co/i8J5zQAURx pic.twitter.com/0MDZ8MrM9f
— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) December 8, 2025
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
‘Secretary Sean Duffy
@SecDuffy
Having pull-up bars in airports means you can stay fit while traveling.’
Because people traveling by airliner love nothing more than to have some guy who just did a gym workout session sit next to them.
Kennedy’s “pull ups” leave something to be desired. Pretty sure it doesn’t count if your head doesn’t even touch the bar…
Do RFK Jr.’s pull-ups count if he isn’t naked from the waist up and idiotically wearing a pair of dungarees?
We don’t even have a decent luggage cart system, or airports working as real transportation hubs (i.e. trains, or even buses, to downtown). But hey, you can do some pull-ups after your fast-food meal.
Gaslighting seems to be the modus operandi of our society
Gooooood Moooooooorning Fiatnam!
The platoon was at the ready with TAWS (Terrain Awareness Warning System) deployed while we were awaiting our flight, when klaxons sounded near the Cinnabon in the food court along with the tune from Rocky and a less than subtle computerized voice pleading with us to pull up~
Pfc Jones managed to do half a dozen as we looked on silently barking Oorahs! in his general direction…
In my misspent youth, a friend sleeping next door shouted in a dream: “pull out pull out”.
Best excuse we could make was he was planning to fly for the AF. After ROTC.
When I traveled regularly I used O’Hare as a daily aerobic exercise. Just to catch my plane.
Quite. Followed by the middle-aged dude suffering a rush of testosterone who succeeds only in throwing out his back.
A lot of airports actually do include gyms, but they generally tucked out of the way and not performative.
The last time somebody worked out in an airport…
O.J. Simpson For Hertz Rent-A-Car (1977)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0MIUrrNpc
Rep. Haley Stevens files articles of impeachment against HHS Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NewsWire
@NewsWire_US15s
WASHINGTON —
“Australia has banned social media for kids under 16. How does it work?”
Fortunately kids these days know nothing about computers, the internet and file configuration so will be completely defeated by this ban. And of course Honest Government weighs in with what they think-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxRB5qWphJE (2:44 mins) – language alert
Bought to you by the “Department of Rearranging Deckchairs.” We need one of those over here in America Rev. Can you give us a contact link for the Australien Export Commission? If that won’t work, we’ll settle for the Public Affairs Department of the Chamber of Commerce.
Stay safe.
A question to native English speakers. When reading this title:
“Europe needs heed the invitation in the US National Security Strategy […]”
I sense a kind of grammatical creaking going on. Shouldn’t it be “must heed”, or “ought to heed”, or even “needs to heed”? Or am I just disturbed by the unpleasant assonance?
I like big buts and ifs, I cannot lie.
It’s an archaic idiomatic usage, back to at least Shakespeare’s time. Proud was a diplomat, so the use is probably deliberate, to give extra weight to the phrase.
The creaking can be attributed to the broken metre. Inserting ‘to’ would give ten syllables, and English works well with iambic pentameter:
Eu-rope needs to heed the in-vi-ta-tion
It’s a weak line, but alternates emphasis on the syllables, and the phrase flows better to the ear. But ‘needs heed’ is a double emphasis, lending weight to ‘needs’ as necessity rather than desire.
vao: You are correct, at least with regard to standard U.S. English.
Ian Proud, though, is British, and somewhat mysteriously for someone who claims to have been in the foreign service for twenty-years and been highly placed in the foreign service, Proud has no Wikipedia entry. Hmmm.
I cannot find a university in any of his biogs. He must not have gone to Cambridge or Oxford.
You might consider the usage “high British semi-archaic literary.”
I rather like not too archaisms, if not too archaic. “needs heed” — quite proper if odd to the American eye.
it sounds subjunctive mood to me. -a.v.
Imo, US English would add “to” before “heed”: “needs to heed.”
UK English would write this as written: “needs heed.”
Old joke: The UK and US are two countries separated by a common language. / ;)
Should say “should heed”
Thanks for all the answers.
Funnily enough, had the sentence be “Europe needs not heed the invitation […]”, I would not have found it linguistically disturbing. Of course, like all good Europeans, the British English I have been inculcated has been inevitably and thoroughly affected by American English.
Thanks, vao.
I believe the word “to” when used as an infinitive is almost always included in written US English, and is sometimes or often excluded in UK English as simply “understood” in the context of the sentence.
adding: ‘Infinitives are a special form of verbs that can be used as a noun, adjective, or adverb.” The word “to” is an infinitive.
Maybe that’s what’s meant by English being a contextual language. / ;)
Er. make that “context sensitive language.” / ;)
It’s poetry in motion.
“‘Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour’ ”
Let me guess, the 1% also inflict 90% of this damage but they want to decrease food production to kill off poor people?
You know something is serious when it has a price tag. Those poor people don’t. /s
“Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from US military spending bill”
‘In the Navy’s case, part of that was motivated by incredibly costly repairs needed for the USS Gerald R. Ford, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with a crew of 4,500 that, at one point, had six of eight kitchen ovens out of commission. The support contract for ship maintenance barred sailors from fixing the ovens themselves, even if they could do it.’
So what happens if some sort of war breaks out and all those contractors say that they are not going anywhere near the conflict zone as they are not being paid to get killed. It happened in the collapse of Afghanistan where the contractors servicing the Afghan Air Force were pulled out as the situation deteriorated – as did subsequently the Afghan Air Force of course.
Only crazy people work in DC anymore. As I recall it was the DOD that originally asked for RTR because of this exact fear. I can’t remember when that was, but it’s just stupid policy. Wars/Battles are won and lost based upon being able to actually use the resources you have – brick a dozen tanks while you wait for some civilian contractor to arrive from the states, that could be devastating in a live combat zone.
“The support contract for ship maintenance barred sailors from fixing the ovens themselves, even if they could do it.”
How glorious! Starvation through contractors. If the Navy soldiers don’t die by a missile from the Israelis, then they starve to death from contractors.
The simple solution here is that the DoW conscripts the relevant “civilian” contractors for the duration of the “emergency.” Those that refuse to comply can then be shot and scabs brought in. It is the military version of the Rules of Neoliberalism. Rule #1: Because emergencies. Rule #2: Get shot. (Do notice the lack of Agency here. It is the DoW after all.)
Stay safe. Don’t become a Strategic Asset.
I remember protesting the DoW de DoW.
No, that might cut into profits. Love of country, all well and good, but let’s be realistic here.
Better make it the C-suite that gets shot. You have to motivate the right people.
Once conscripted the contractors are employees of the war department and no longer have the right to repair the equipment.
TRT is Congress meddling where they don’t understand what is going on.
US DOW is heavy into using contract repairs. It is not like GM withholding repair data from qualified repair shops!
Since C5 acquisition debacle, cost overruns in design were paid by not spend to design and provision repair processes, the default is hire contractors to do shade tree repairs.
One contract provider during Desert Storm offered million dollar life insurance to techs to go to Saudi.
Image of contractor leaving battle have been around for years.
If I was captain of that ship, I would have the crew repair those so fast, and insist on a Congressional hearing. Can you imagine how that would go?
Normally the problem was something broke, and it could not be repaired due to lack of parts, or lack of knowledge to do the repair. Back when the MIC started it’s massive consolidation, major companies would rather routinely walk away from performing repairs or support of any kind for some rather important systems. We literally had the (at that time) brand new Burke’s leaving the pier for a deployment with some systems broke and un-repairable until the Navy depots could get cranked up to support them.
At least we didn’t have to deal with the complete stupidity of not getting parts because these come from China. When are they going to have that Congressional hearing?
This site had a link years ago to an editorial written by an active duty officer regarding this issue of essential equipment repair. If I remember the issue was her unit had essential equipment that was off-limits to military personnel due to “contracts.” I wonder how her career progressed after her editorial was published.
Ronnie Chieng took the piss out of the airport pullup stunt on the Daily Show.
https://mashable.com/video/daily-show-ronny-chieng-airports-sean-duffy-rfk-jr
“Trump hails economic record, calls affordability concerns Democratic ‘hoax’”
Has the man finally jumped the shark on this one!?!?!
He is the Shark here.
‘Phoney-zie’?
Ayyyyy!
It’s not ‘that’ kind of skiing Wuk! Geeze Louise. Kidz dese dayz!
He looks more like the Apprentice here.
I was thinking of someone different-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6WD7B_I_9c (12 secs)
“US fighter jets approach Venezuelan airspace in closely watched flyover”
I’m guessing that the reason that these fighters were sent into the Gulf of Venezuela was to try to test aerial defenses and hopefully to have some radar station light them up so that in case of a US attack, they would know where those radar stations are located. Sounds good in theory but not if you are sitting in the cockpits of those fighters doing this stunt. They keep on pushing Venezuela but that country still manages to play it cool. I wonder what would happen if some US fighters were sent to fly over the capital, only to have some “visiting” Russian fighters escort them so that they did not get lost in downtown Caracas. Still, the Venezuelans are holding their cards close and are not showing them until they need to.
My first thought was that they are hard trying to create an incident as a pretence for going “kinetic”. If none happens, they can always have an imaginary one and go with it.
Like the sinking of the SS Maine – which proved to be an accident? Or the Gulf of Tonkin attack – that never happened? Or Iraq’s weapons on mass destruction – which did not exist. Lots of precedents.
>>>Lots of precedents.
Sure, but many Americans remember those precedents and I am thinking that the political costs might be greater than what the warmongers believe likely.
U.S. REALIZES IT CAN SEIZE BOATS AFTER ALL
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/10/united-states-seizes-oil-tanker-venezuela/
I heard it was sanctions so it must be on here somewhere:
Venezuela-Related Sanctions https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information/venezuela-related-sanctions
Haven’t found it, and doesn’t look like this web page has changed in months.
Here where I live in the PNW the news isn’t so much the rain (atmospheric rivers are regular visitors during the winter season), but the warmth. 58 degrees at 4am. A few years ago that might have been dismissed as just another anomaly, but now? Added to all the other signs of environmental degradation – collapsing insect and bird populations, new diseases (heartworm in dogs currently has my attention), etc, and it looks like one more sign that ecological collapse is proceeding apace. This is the subtext behind all the stories of social and political catastrophe. It would not surprise me at all if the population of the planet started dropping dramatically (say, 8 billion to 1 billion) in the immediate future.
The Club of Rome target population is 500 millions.
Didn’t know that. I also note that the 1% seem to think they’re somehow exempt from the coming train wreck
I am not sure i would like to survive in a world with the 1% as survival companions. Gives me the creeps.
Imagine being stuck in a cell with Epstein, Weinstein, and Trump
I’m guessing it would be a ‘soap opera’.
Don’t say it. One of them would be found in the shower “accidentally” hung from the shower head by the string on the soap bar. The other two would immediately be thinking; “Lather, rinse, repeat??!!”
Stay safe. Stay squeaky clean.
So, you’;re saying the Chief Executive more closely resembles Ralph Mouth?
Right about now, he’s looking a lot like Mork from Ork. Complete with Shaz Bot.
Nah, you’d need something stronger. Industrial strength bleach
Here in Hawaii I have to give my dog a monthly heartworm pill ($10 each). Thought it was a tropical thing…
Has been until recently. It’s been gradually moving north – yet another sign of climate change – there’s now a pocket of the stuff just south of here around Eugene. Some vets are now advising their clients to give the monthly dose of heartgard . . .
OTOH, the mosquito population has crashed along with the rest of the insect world, so that may slow the advance. Who knows? Lots of moving parts
We have it the opposite here in SF. Colder than normal with 45 degrees at night instead of 60, and sunny when we are not inundated by Tule fog from the central valley. Very chilly down here, and little rain.
I miss the foggy misty 60 degree days we used to have year round. sigh.
Do crowdfunded basic needs count as communism or capitalism?
Capitalism. Crowdfunding does not assure adequacy, among other reasons.
Anywho heard of this?
> That the collective revelation is continuous and ongoing is evidenced by a recently designed framework for teaching critical thinking in secondary schools called “The Ultimate Cheatsheet for Critical Thinking” (Wabisabi Learning). That framework consists of the terms who, what, when, where, why, and how, each of which serves as a prompt for several critical questions.
[A Survey of the Diverse Historical Uses of the Circumstantial Terms from Homer to Kenneth Burke and Beyond]
“E3 meeting in London proposes alternative Ukraine war 20-point peace plan”
For all we know this list could be Zelensky’s original 10-point peace plan – repeated twice. With European backing there will be no peace and this war will continue so that the money flow to the Ukraine will continue. These are not really negotiations but ways of delaying the final outcome which the Russians are happy to play along with. There is only one way that this war will finish and that will be on the battlefield. Trump should dump the whole thing in the Ukrainian and European laps but he can’t. The Neocons and all their allies will not let him and if he tried, I would not be surprised to see an effort to impeach him on some charge or another. The fact that Trump and the EU wants to get their hands on those frozen Russian assets shows how close we are to the end. It’s an attempt to grab that honey pot of money while there is still time. Learned the other day that if this did happen, that immediately $40 billion would be clipped out to pay back a loan that the G-7 made to the Ukraine. Saywhatnow?
I would agree with the three idiots when they ask Z not to trust Trump. But, must Z trust the idiots no matter if they don’t have enough money, weapons, soldiers or any doable solution for the conflict? Hold fast Z! We will somehow come with something some day!
Per Alastair Crooke, Witkof and Kushner were not official. Not diplomats.
That Lavrov was not there suggests Putin was graciously “shooting the breeze” with friends of his friend Trump.
Putin will oversee with the MFA talks by accredited diplomats when Trump decides to push positions rather than points already dismissed.
That phrase “…alternative Ukraine war…” sounds quite ominous. Where would they hold this “alternative Ukraine war,” Poland, Romania, the Baltic States, Finland, all of the above?
UK National Emergency Briefing Wakes Up World
“Briefing” or “Briefly”?
Here is a version of the article on Counterpunch, the Pressenza link goes “bad gateway” for me.
“US scientists design first highway that wirelessly charges electric trucks on the go”
First question that popped into my mind was who is going to pay for it all. I mean, look at all that metal work in that section. Can you imagine the cost of doing this on a large scale? Here they only did so for a quarter-mile stretch of US Highway 52/231 in West Lafayette, Indiana which you could walk in about five minutes. So how long is the core Interstate Highway System in the US itself. Nearly 50,000 miles (about 80,000 kilometers). It would take decades to do assuming that improving technology did not make the whole thing obsolete just as they were starting. And then there is an insurmountable problem right now. If you took this idea to Trump and pointed out the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to do so his eyes would light up with all the kickbacks possible in awarding this scheme which he would probably name the American Golden Highway plan. But as soon as you mention that it was for electric trucks and not diesel, he would kill the whole thing dead on the spot.
We think alike.
Can you imagine the cost of doing this on a large scale?
Probably comparable to building normal road, railroad, and power lines, combined.
No mention in the article about efficiency: How much of the energy put in actually makes it to the truck batteries vs waste heat? While we’ll have to do something with all that new power capacity once the AI bubble bursts, is this where the power should go?
A lot of the hysteria about electromagnetic fields (initially from power lines) has been scientifically laid to rest, but given current attitudes about science, I can see this also being a game killer.
Not to mention operating costs of maintenance. If it charges fast (which I doubt) you could install it every 400 km, or whatever the truck range is, along major routes to prevent fuel stops.
This article from 2021 talks about it’s been in operation for 21 months.
It doesn’t have to be developed it has to be installed.
It’s an overhead cantenary truck charging system.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
Also, what truck company is going to invest in buying trucks for this? Particularly given they’d have limited utility until a lot of roads were built (and would be more expensive).
This also will have scalability problems. As more trucks use it, you now have to supply more power (or each truck will get less power).
I suspect if anything happened for this, it would look like the hydrogen vehicles fiasco from the Obama years.
Re trucks, charging coils and concrete–sounds like it might work other than the fact that you’d have to repave all the country’s interstates with concrete. Meanwhile existing concrete highways are often paved over with more maintainable asphalt. More drawing board work needed?
Cement for concrete is soooo C O 2 -intensive. No problems!
Scarce electricity for transpo v scarce electricity for AI and data centers. Talk about narrow-focused scientific passions driving dumb-assedness.
The demand-side is showing some vigor and virility. Grow or die! said the cancer.
Anyone else feel we are on a Lemming – brink accelerating dither-fest? Circles back to Yves loss of The Muse the other day?
Hegseth has promoted his favored, buffed-and-honed no-flab Warrior: General Malaise.
Re: Same Cart, Different Price: Definitely worth reading the entire post and the underlying details. The study focused on prices at local groceries as advertised through Instacart, but excluded delivery, to eliminate that variable, and their overall methodology looks well thought out and valid.
In NY State, a gas station cannot change the posted price of gas more than once every 24 hours. How hard would it be to extend that law to all prices in grocery stores? I get an occasional discount from my gas station because I have a loyalty card, but it’s a *discount* from the posted legal price. So perhaps extending the pricing law to permit only discounts from posted prices at grocery stores would reduce negative algo pricing variations?
Truck charging. It’s slow snd expensive idea that’s already been done for ever.
It’s called catenary and has been used in electric railway forever.
I’ve seen it discussed for trucks. It’s easier and faster to install because you can mount the posts and wires a whole lot faster than rebuilding roads, let alone when you have to repair roads or the wires if they fail.
I do like the idea of charge as you drive.
Probably that (repair) is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem, in this Neoliberal world, is the need to follow a standard procedure in all the states/countries valid for all trucks and then the need for intense and centralized PLANNING. Verboten!
“Do You Believe in Coincidence… Was the CIA Involved in Operation Spiderweb and Israel’s June 12 Attack on Iran?”
Even after all this time, I still find it hard to believe that Trump was so stupid as to green light an op to have American, British & Israeli spooks launch an attack on Russia’s nuclear triad, simply so that he could get some leverage in negotiations with Putin. Does he think anything out or was he in a really tight bubble of people telling him to do such stuff.
Job of US president is not to think anything out, but to sign on the dotted line. A glorifed Autopen of sorts.
We did see that de minimis level reached in the last administration, but the “good” President will be an effective salesman for war on the world and cruelty toward the vulnerable at home. How did Nancy put it? Selling a shit sandwich?
Re the Patrick Lawrence on Trump and Venezuela
Or to put it another way Trump needs a base to retain the power to continue along his merry grifting way and the Republican establishment represents power in a way the MAGA hoard do not.
Lawrence’s theory sounds plausible. Still it’s unclear whether Trump is going to grant Rubio his heart’s desire. He could be playing that establishment or simply floundering.
AI can help address America’s affordability crisis – The Hill. “Is this what the administration is banking on?”
Me: Laughing at the outcome where, if by some wild chance, the algorithm answers “redistribute the wealth”.
I am on snowflack’s ad list. Some AI caught me googling agentic AI….
I can get a free on line course in how to change my processes to use snowflake AI….
Agentic AI is supposed to teach a super chained set of computers how to do what an operations analyst does, the AI with a few million bucks “training”. No one knows if agentic AI hallucinates better than generative AI.
I can see why OpenAI can’t get their customers to pay for the compute .
NVIDIA is not ENRON. ENRON’ customers mostly had a business model.
Has anyone dove into the operating and support costs of data centers needing GW of clean power, dissipating huge heat linked by miles of copper, on complex backplanes?
I’ve seen some of Sugar Mountain’s AI efforts on FB and they are laughable, so obviously not real it hurts.
Did he really lay out $30 billion on pure dreck?
A bit of good news. From Catherine Austin Fitts, Solari Report, short clip. utube, ~1+ minute.
What’s behind the CLARITY Act Delays? Are the Central Bankers Letting the Tech Guys Know Who’s Boss?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbMO3F1O1ak
(I wonder how this will affect the AI bubble? / ;)
Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout – Groundwork Collaborative
That’s putting people in a trick bag and shaking it.
bAIt & switch
IAN PROUD
For some career information re Ian Proud, via the Amazon listing for his book, scroll down to “Book Overview” :-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Misfit-Moscow-British-diplomacy-2014-2019/dp/1739543106
Some more, from TLS Book of the Year 2024, Judge’s Notes : Rachel Polonsky on Ian Proud :-
https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/books-of-the-year-2024-2/pugpig_index.html
On his X feed today Ian Proud recommended this overview of the NSS in American Conservative. I found it helpful.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-trump-seeks-a-swift-end-to-the-ukraine-war/
The article about requesting social media information on travelers REALLLLYYY misses the depth of what they are doing.
Go take a look at the thing open for comment https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/10/2025-22461/agency-information-collection-activities-revision-arrival-and-departure-record-form-i-94-and
They want to require:
a. Telephone numbers used in the last five years;
b. Email addresses used in the last ten years;
c. IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos;
d. Family member names (parents, spouse, siblings, children);
e. Family number telephone numbers used in the last five years;
f. Family member dates of birth;
g. Family member places of birth;
h. Family member residencies;
i. Biometrics—face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris;
j. Business telephone numbers used in the last five years;
k. Business email addresses used in the last ten years.
Who in their right mind is going to travel to the US with this amount of information required for a weeks long vacation?!
It’s the kind of information needed if someone wants to send a drone to wipe out an entire family.
The World Cup is going to be a complete bust, no one is going to give the US government that much information to simply be here for a few weeks.
What global sports commission from this point on is going to vote for events to be held in the USA? How high would the bribes have to be?
The original batch of Know Nothings were very anti-foreigner, and our current batch isn’t any different.
Unless they have the idea that this going to become a global thing.
Then that’s another “conspiracy theory” that turned out not to be a “conspiracy theory.”
kind of like a purse seine
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/purse%20seine
And what a nice thought that is.
Applying the tried and true “Blowback Effect,” we can soon expect to have the Organs of State Security do random stops on the street or at roadblocks to demand one’s mobile phone for Pre-Forensic Download in the Interests of Public Safety.
This fits perfectly with the other piece in today’s links: “Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It.”
Total Situational Awareness (Past, Present, Future) is the strategy being advanced in the Homeland.
Citizens have generally been required to Conform. That has been an eternal struggle. Now, with the wonders of Progress(TM) we Citizen Consumers are being told to Conform! [That’s Conform factorial, as in mathematic notation.]
Stay safe. Leave the phone at home, where it belongs.
Who could possibly put together such an information packet? I don’t think that I could do it to save my life. You would need the resources of government departments to answer some of them. Yeah, nah, I think that I would give the whole thing a bit of a miss.
I am extremely skeptical of this, for anything other than a technicality.
Could Palantir’s datamining and surveillance tech have been used to identify/survey potential Hezbollah members prior to the attack. Possibly.
Was Palantirs tech in any way involved in the booby trapped batteries or their detonation? No. Not a chance. The IDF would have kept, and would have to have kept, all of that very very close to the chest in house.
This story is little more than an attempt to pump up Palantirs cred and stock price. A cheap insinuation of sophistication for a company that does little other business than selling governments ad-targeting tech re-dressed as security state surveillance. Micheal Burry’s shorts are probably once again on the mark.
A few days ago, in the morning links, there was a French study published that seemed to put to rest the notion that the mRNA vaccines were causing an increase in mortality:
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/french-study-on-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-finds-a-drop-in-severe-covid-and-no-increase-in-deaths/
Reading the article (sorry I’m late to the party), it seems like a pretty solid study; however, I found at least one discrepancy. In the breakdown of “primary causes of death,” there is no category for heart disease!
Given that it’s the number one cause of death in the US, this seems like a glaring omission. There is a category named “diseases of the circulatory system” that might include heart disease, but the incidence #’s are rather small (650 per million) versus cancer, which is at 1600 per million.
Even factoring in a confounder like the French having a better diet and less obesity than Americans, I would have expected heart disease to be at least close to the same level of deaths as cancer.
And “circulatory diseases” could include non-cardiac diseases, like blood or arterial problems (strokes, for example.)
I’m not saying that discredits the entire study, but given the risk of myocarditis that my PCP told me specifically as a reason for me not to get the mRNA vax, I wonder if this is a deliberate omission so as not to give the anti-vaxxers any fodder.
Vioxx was just a warmup wasn’t?
” wonder if this is a deliberate omission so as not to give the anti-vaxxers any fodder.”
Sure looks like it.
The short answer is that the French mortality patterns are just that different. The longer response is below:
The diseases of the circulatory system does include heart disease – it’s defined in the study as ICD-10 codes that start with “I”. Note that the study only includes individuals 18-59 years (it’s literally part of the title of the study: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France).
I was able to find historical data on French mortality by cause and age going back to pre-pandemic, and deaths due to cancer was always much more common than deaths due to diseases of the circulatory system in the under 65 age group. See CepiDC (fr: Epidemiological Center for Medical Causes of Death). The relevant section is “Effectifs de décès par cause et âge entre 2018 et 2023” (Counts of deaths by cause and age between 2018 and 2023). We want to look at the columns under “Moins de 65 ans” (under 65), and the rows “Tumeurs” (tumours) and “Maladies de l’appareil circulatoire” (diseases of the circulatory system). As you can see, deaths from tumours has consistently outnumbered deaths from diseases of the circulatory system by about 3:1 in this age group since before the pandemic.
Thanks for the explanation.
I still find it odd that the study did not break out heart disease separately; that would have been interesting to see if there was any increase in mortality from the vaxxed group vs. the unvaxxed, especially as the cohort is younger.
It is quite possible that the data are there in the initial study and Reason just chose not to include that in the article. It is a bit suspicious that the table doesn’t include the letters “S” and “T” as codes in the first column … almost as if Reason just cut that data out.
If I can get my hands on the actual paper, and not just the write up, I’ll check.
The original study is at JAMA, no paywall.
Deaths from “diseases of the circulatory system” are primarily deaths from heart diseases – if you go back to the CepiDC table I referenced above and click the “+” symbol next to “Maladies de l’appareil circulatoire”, you get a more detailed break down. Almost 60% of the deaths in the category were due to “dont infarctus aigu du myocarde” (acute myocardial infarctions – i.e. heart attacks), “dont autre cardiopathies ischémiques” (other ischemic cardiopathies), or “dont autres maladies du coeur” (other heart diseases). More than half the remainder were due to “maladies cérébrovasculaires” (cerebrovascular diseases – e.g. strokes). So if you want to propose that there might be more deaths due to heart disease in the vaccinated group that is masked by an even larger protective effect against deaths due to other circulatory diseases versus the unvaccinated group, I suppose you could, but I hope you can see why the authors may not dig deeper into details of an already small cause of mortality (they did break down the larger ones like cancer and external causes of death), especially when the direction of the overall effect is already clear.
The ICD-10 codes beginning with letters S and T (injuries, poisoning, and certain other consequences of external causes). Deaths due to these are already presented in the table under V, W, X, Y codes; these are usually considered modifiers to help specify the cause of a patient’s condition, whereas the S and T are the primary codes that are more pertinent to what treatment are required. But in the context of this study, it doesn’t matter whether the patient died of a fractured skull (which would be an S code) so much as they got it from being hit by a car (a V code).
It’s actually the same thing if you look into the CDC Wonder database: S and T codes aren’t options as the underlying causes of death – the V-Y codes specifying what caused those S/T codes are.
There were other discrepancies in that study and its conclusions. At least one math-dont-add in the table, and the correlation between income and likelihood of vaccination (poors got less). Could be important, could be the 1-in-20 papers are wrong thing; needs a confirming independent study.
An important difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden was controllable by his handlers ( for the most part) even when his dementia became extreme.
Trump….it will be entertaining.
US seizes a tanker off the coast of Venezuela | NYT live feed
Sad news. Iain Douglas-Hamilton has passed on. Champion of elephants.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton obituary Guardian.
re: Gaza/ICJ – Finkelstein´s latest book is out
Maybe we can turn it into a best-seller!!!!!!!!!
Gaza’s Gravediggers
An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN
The world’s leading forensic scholar exposes international duplicity and complicity in the Gaza genocide.
https://orbooks.com/catalog/gazas-gravediggers/
hard copy $35
ebook $15
“The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago”
So if I got this right, cats learned all they needed to know about empire expansion from the Romans – but without the aqueducts.
https://www.surfer.com/news/jezz-bezos-blue-origin-florida-wildlife
Confirms my priors, yet again
For the season.
Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and choir in Handel’s Messiah, verse
“The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
A slow, and deep, and magisterial conducting of the work, imo.
For the season. utube, ~5+ minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwAyxHM36Qw