The art of Pysanky: traditional egg decorating from Europe
📹vilsonpessanka
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) December 20, 2025
Targeting bacterial ‘decision-making’ could help outsmart antibiotic resistance Phys.org
From Roombas to e-bikes, why are hardware startups going bankrupt? TechCrunch
COVID-19/Pandemics
Calling the Shots: Tracking RFK Jr. on Vaccines U.S. News
The global diabetes pandemic: Why cases could reach 900 million by 2050 and what we must do now The Times of India
Climate/Environment
‘Borrowed time’: crop pests and food losses supercharged by climate crisis The Guardian
After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up Yale Environment 360
South of the Border
Trump’s blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil raises new questions about legality PBS
Explainer: Venezuela’s billions in distressed debt: who is in line to collect Reuters
Chile’s far-right president taps into support for Pinochet that never went away The Guardian
Big Pharma Is Making Mexico Sick. Medicine and Supply Shortages Are Rampant. Scheerpost
China?
Robots in China are doing it all now, even dancing on stage like pros.
Here Unitree robots doing Webster flips and are performing at Chinese-American singer Wang Leehom’s concert in Chengdu.pic.twitter.com/2BNWdok0bf
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) December 19, 2025
China housing market crisis deepens as house prices fall sharply Andolu AgencyChina’s Population Crisis—Xi’s Greatest Test in 2026 Newsweek
Report warns China drug innovation fast gaining ground on US biotech FirstWord Pharma
India
India will surpass Germany to become third-largest economy by 2027: Scindia The Economic Times
The cost of India’s anti-conversion laws The Hill
India’s telecom sector surges in 2025! 5G rollout reaches 85% of population The Times of India
Africa
Poor rainy seasons deepen drought risks across Horn of Africa: UN agency Andolu Agency
Africa in Washington’s Lens: Myopia, Transactionalism & Aggressive Disinterest Stimson.org
European Disunion
Finnish finance minister calls EU’s loan deal for Ukraine ‘major failure’ Andolu Agency
Stellantis CEO says investments at risk in Europe after EU auto package Global Banking and Finance
EU Council backs digital euro with both online and offline functionality Reuters
Old Blighty
Labour warned over future of UK’s ‘crown jewels’ as Rolls-Royce threatens to build engines abroad Daily Mail
Christmas ads put on a diet as UK ban on TV junk food advertising bites The Guardian
Israel v. Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran
Imagine that the situation reaches a child to say “Oh God, take us”
These are the most difficult chapters of silent extermination, leaving people drowning and dying in torn tents. pic.twitter.com/oUmKsZpHxW
— Muhammad in Gaza🇵🇸⚡️ (@7MohammedKhaled) December 17, 2025
MSF urges Israel to let critical aid into Gaza as children freeze to death Al JazeeraIsrael Is Preparing for a Permanent Presence in Gaza, Satellite Images Reveal Drop Site News
In 2025, The Israeli Army Was The ‘Worst Enemy Of Journalists’ Scheerpost
Israel’s Deliberate Destruction of Palestinian Academia Jacobin
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine strikes Russian shadow fleet tanker in Mediterranean sea France 24
Ukraine Receives Last of 80 Promised Abrams Tanks: How Many Are Left and How Well Can They Be Sustained? Military Watch
The bleakest winter: Ukrainians face exhaustion and uncertainty as Trump demands concessions The Guardian
Russia strikes Ukrainian port with ballistic missiles, killing 8 and wounding dozens CBS News
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Meta, California agree to settle Facebook privacy lawsuit The San Francisco Standard
Flock Safety cameras helped crack the MIT and Brown case — but at what cost to privacy? Boston.com
Imperial Collapse Watch
Utah’s Trumpian homeless ‘campus’ — lifeline or detention camp? The Times
Trump 2.0
Trump Drags Out His Epstein Files Cover-Up Zeteo
Trump’s ‘A+++++’ economy collides with reality in a Pennsylvania city critical to the midterms AP
‘An Absolute Joke’: Trump DOJ Partially Releases Epstein Files, Many Heavily Redacted Scheerpost
Musk Matters
Elon Musk’s net worth hits staggering $648B, making him more than twice as wealthy as runner-up NY Post
Elon Musk makes another Mars prediction: Mars will be … The Times of India
SpaceX Is Buying Up an Unfathomable Number of Cybertrucks Futurism
Democrat Death Watch
DNC under fire for hiding autopsy report on 2024 election Axios
Democratic despotism: The left moves from censored to compelled speech The Hill
Immigration
Trump Seizes on Brown, MIT Shooting to Suspend More Legal Immigration Mother Jones
Supreme Court rebuffs Trump in immigration judges’ free-speech case
Our No Longer Free Press
Tucker Carlson and the freedom of speech The Mining Journal
SecureDrop: Looking back at 2025 Freedom of the Press Foundation
Mr. Market Is Moody
Next Fed chair faces ‘no-win’ test as White House pushes rate cuts The Street
AI
New York Governor Kathy Hochul signs RAISE Act to regulate AI safety TechCrunch
AI-made listing pics may mislead American home buyers, regulators caution Cryptopolitan
They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job Los Angeles Times
Six (or seven) predictions for AI 2026 from a Generative AI realist Gary Marcus substack
Neuralink’s Blindsight AI Breakthrough: Restoring Vision for the Blind with BrainTech Implants Blockchain News
The Bezzle
Scammers in China Are Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds Wired
Scammers target pet owners, posing as officials from sheriff’s department NBC Los Angeles
Guillotine Watch
The five most expensive dog breeds in the world
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) November 11, 2025
The 5 most expensive cats in the world #top5 #expensive #cats pic.twitter.com/H2puLqt3SS
— Top5expensive (@top5expensive) May 3, 2025
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
132 comments
Comments are closed.
> After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up Yale Environment 360
The destruction of the qanat system is beyond reckoning. Pietro Laureano describes it beautifully in The Water Atlas. It’s one of the finest books I’ve ever seen.
Here’s a pdf (big):
https://catalogue.unccd.int/1148_The-water-atlas.pdf
Thank you!
“Finnish finance minister calls EU’s loan deal for Ukraine ‘major failure'”
Gee, she is pretty sour about the EU only giving Zelensky €90 billion instead of those frozen/stolen Russian assets. I got an idea. Maybe Finnish Finance Minister Riikka Purra could tell the EU that Finland will step up to the plate and give Zelensky €120 billion from their coffers to make up the €210 billion that he was expecting. Hope that President Alexander Stubb is not reading this as he would regard that as a great idea.
I feel like there are some matters of the conflict with respect to engineering or logistics I can speak to and understand. But the continued push to throw more and more money into the corrupt pit that is Ukraine baffles me.
I can’t even ask NC’s favorite question, “cui bono?” I have no idea who could possibly benefit from this death and destruction. Especially since we have now proven our NATO weapons platforms don’t work and showing more people how badly they don’t work as the conflict continues can’t be good for business. Also, it appears from polling results that EUcrats aligned with the Ukraine project continue to do poorly and are now facing a resurgent right wing in their countries. So why is everyone in Europe so damn committed to death by 10000 cuts here?
There is no plan for winning in the sense that the West have defined victory. Russia has been very clear that they’re not going to freeze the conflict or grant a ceasefire so Ukraine can lick its wounds and rre-arm. So what are Finland, Germany, France, the UK, etc. doing here? Are there any analysts who seem to have a clue?
Thomas Fazi, on his Substack, makes an interesting argument:
“ I intend to argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a century-long Western campaign to weaken, isolate and contain Russia. This antagonism long predates the Soviet Union and is rooted in both geopolitical and civilisational motives: Western powers have historically viewed Russia as too large, too independent and too culturally distinct to integrate into a Western-led order”
https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/the-wests-century-long-war-against
(Sorry if this has already been a link)
With politicians who have the memory of a fish, explanations like this leave me uncomfortable. IMO this doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t help in any way or form to explain why the idiots in charge are playing the fool so much. We might try to find reasons back to the Middle Ages but let’s be clear, these are not “reasons” neither “roots” of conflict.
Politicians have the minds of goldfish.
The Rich like it that way.
Ancient cultural imperatives and Prime Directives remove the need for “having a mind”
and any goldfish can keep re-doing more of the same of what has been pre-done for the last thousand years.
And with the “brain-parasites” from Eastern Europe and ” Legacy Great-Game Britain” now in firm command of NATO’s cultural brain-command centers, don’t be surprised if this is sustained until it can’t be, per Herbert Stein’s dictum that “anything that can’t continue will stop”.
This will continue until it can’t, then it will stop.
>>>So what are Finland, Germany, France, the UK, etc. doing here?
Have you ever seen deer trapped in a car’s headlights? I think that see the oncoming wreck, but have no idea what to do except more of the same.
I wonder if the continuing the war serves the cause of consolidating the EU into a kind of US of Europe. Indebting the member nations by funding Ukraine and having member states indebt themselves by expanding their militaries will increasingly put the EU under the tutelege of creditors. Creditors might prefer dealing with one central agency in Brussels rather than dozens of national capitals.
Immigration/Police state
Please see:
https://jennbudd.substack.com/p/the-real-purpose-of-ice-raids
This may be the reason that all of the border relief workers that I work with speak of seeing less BP and way more active military along the wall.
People doing water drops are now regularly approached by bored military personnel wondering what’s going on.
I have heard that BP agents who “go on safari” get significant bonus and Per Diem money.
And since it is really boring patrolling out here, going off to tackle some guys in a Home Depot parking lot may look like fun
While President Trump and the people he works with probably believe that they can suppress voters using the same methods as the Southern elites did after they overthrew Reconstruction, using goon squads (and let’s be serious here, death squads as both the police and the KKK were by the elites and not only in the South) would likely go very badly for them. If nothing else, I am not sure that the local police and the national guard would acquiesce, nor would the locals themselves.
The Border Patrol would probably win in the first election, but once people got over their suprise, and after the ruling party lost its Mandate of Heaven, the loss of acceptance, and therefore authority and power would be extreme.
The United States is still a quasi democracy and the government depends on the people’s acceptance of at least semi fair elections; it has been this way since almost two centuries before there was an United States.
It is more of a cultural reflex or instinct than conscious thought.
Historically authoritarianism has been expensive. Policing, containment and punishment compete for resources while simultaneously reducing manpower.
Brutality, torture, terror and horror are then made political tools, pour encourager les autres. With this, and the redirection to MAGA aims of the vast American siloviki between Georgetown and Langley, team Trump hope to keep those domestic costs manageable.
That said, the incompetence of it all in the face of our traditional myths of freedom, culture of satirical humor, and the basic decency amongst most of us commoners makes me believe you’re right and eventually we’ll vote again for something better!
Correction. “Hope we will be offered the chance to vote for something better…..”
Preventing that has been the plan so far……
Which has worked so far, but denying even the option of voting for the approved candidates is still likely to backfire.
I don’t know. Denying the people the option of voting for “the other side” did sort of backfire on the Dems, but it didn’t exactly lead to any improvement, other than tearing down further what was already a dubious situation.
That post is likely correct that the idea is to use ICE and border patrol to suppress black and latino votes. Given how its going and the stakes involved, I would guess in particular in the 2026 midterms.
There are a number of other clues to such an agenda: Trump’s expressed wish to federalise the elections, Trump’s propaganda against postal voting, ICE and border patrol pushing the line by raids in court houses, Trump’s continued insistence that 2020 was stolen, the open gerrymandering.
I think what might stop them is the polling. If it looks like they will still lose they might think twice. Or double down, depending on how desperate they are at that point.
“India will surpass Germany to become third-largest economy by 2027: Scindia”
I don’t mean to rain on India’s parade but it should be remembered that German is being rapidly deindustrialized as well as taking on colossal amounts of debt so it may not be so much a case of India rising here as Germany sinking. Here are the guys at The Duran talking about Merz and the German economy-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWCUgu_hzM4 (20:41 mins)
I think part of the German decline is because they are paying dearly to India as a middle-man for Russian energy. The final phase of the decolonization of Europe – the idea being that a colonial system consist of the colonized and the colonizers, not really dipping into the idea that EU has been a colony of/exploited by US (that’s another discussion).
Germany’s pains are largely self-inflicted.
Their abrupt energy policy change some years ago resulted in loss of base load generating capacity. Most utility planners would call that stupid, inviting outages and soaring prices as alternatives were desperately sought.
There are more orderly ways to transition over decent realistic intervals that don’t require such risks.
Add in their so-called political class and that spelled trouble.
Is acquiescing to Biden’s elimination of Nordstream the policy shift to which you refer?
They had some problems before no doubt due to the same Greens who led them into war with Ukraine(once removed) shuttering base load, but industry didn’t actively start migrating until the Biden move forced it.
Did the Germans blow Nordstream?
The decision not to invest in new nuclear power (or renovation to practically the same extent as new), but instead go for wind and solar did not cause outages and soaring prices. We know this because there was enough time between that shift and the 2022 war to see the difference. In fact the minimal cost of marginal electricity production from wind and solar pushed prices down.
What increased electricity prices in 2022 was the lack of cheap gas and half the French reactors being idle for half a year. (So much for stable base load).
And the main problem for German industry isn’t even electricity prices, it’s gas as a direct input in industrial processes.
>>>>Americans have lied about a Venmo glitch to avoid paying the bill.
Not saying that is neccessarily wrong….but all these “polling” stories, irrespective of “conclusion”, need to be taken with an **extreme** grain of salt unless conducted by a reputable pollster.
There is a cottage industy of lazy market research and polling—-relying on paid, online respondents. (garbage in, garbage out)
naturally since it’s paid, the respondent pool skews to self-identifying as wealthy—as few paid polls involving research the non-comfortable.
see amy survey, especially touted by a non-authoritative or tabloid outlet (NY Post)….be skeptical!
My bank doesn’t allow Venmo transfers, for what it’s not worth.
The article says it’s this one from Harris https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Income-Paradox-Survey-November-2025.pdf. It doesn’t mention paying respondents.
I thought it was an interesting read but otoh not really a surprise. I don’t think it would be hard to use up a 6-figure income on mortgage, kids, day care, cars, insurance, utilities, food and the rest.
Also see Part 1: My Life Is a Lie by Michael Green, and IIRC has been previously linked at NC, in which he argues that the true poverty line for a family of four should be $140K per year for a family of four.
Tangentially related, I was just listening to a New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Maine Senate candidate, Graham Platner, in which he claims he and his wife are getting by on $60K per year, which he says is only made possible by his having free healthcare from the VA.
I haven’t listened to the interview. Maybe he’s giving a lot of his annual salary to his campaign, but U.S. Senators are paid $174,000 a year.
“James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st ‘runaway’ supermassive black hole rocketing through home galaxy at 2.2 million mph: ‘It boggles the mind!”
Imagine a planet with an emerging sapient species. They go from discovering agricultural to being an industrial society in only 4,000 year. Eventually they put more and more resources into astronomy because one part of the sky looks weird. And eventually they work out that it is because a supermassive black hole is heading directly for them and there is not a damn thing to be done. What sort of effect would that have on an intelligent species? And for all we know, this could be happening right now.
there was a story arc in Stargate Universe about just that…nd im too scatterbrained, atm…but i do recall a couple of Star Trek episodes and at least one Arthur C Clarke story regarding this scenario.
lol, prob. thinking of the Star Trek Voy episode where the Voyager is an anomaly in a time-accelerated planet….and Voyager causes a scientific explosion on said planet. (The Doctor also fathers a kid, random unexplored plot point)
That episode is based on a short story….and in classic literary style, there is a debate of the Voyager story is an homage, or an outright rip-of
And that is all I can remember without resorting to the internet.
and IIRC, this type of plot point is almost commo enough to be labeled a sci-fi trope?
Know the episode that you mean as it was one of their finest in story telling. It was called “Blink of an Eye”-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
I liked how in each era they were at the same place that starts off a hill with a shrine to the gods until it is eventually overlooking an advanced city. You guys might enjoy the following Netflix video which is kinda along the same lines-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM (3:46 mins)
It really does boggle the mind. I got stuck with acute boggling twice just in the first sentence.
First, this black hole is “10 million times larger than the sun”. I guess that means they estimate the diameter of its event horizon at about 10^7 x the diameter of the sun. That’s about 10^5 astronomucal units (AU), i.e. 100,000 times the distance of the Earth from the sun. For comparison, the orbit of Neptune is about 60 AU. This black hole is about the size of the Oort cloud is theorized to be.
Second, “rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour”. What does that mean? In first year physics at Edinburgh we got an introduction to Special Relativity class and since then I have never been comfortable with the notion of astronomical speed or velocity. I can deal with quantifying the relative movent of two things but I don’t understand the speed of one thing in space. Is space itself a thing we can measure the speed of something else against?
And that speed they said, 1000 km/s. For comparison, the speed of light is only 300 times that.
But yeah, whatever that means, if you think human violence is bad, or even measured against what some imagine god might do to punish us, the scale and power of this speedy SMBH boggles.
“First, this black hole is “10 million times larger than the sun”. I guess that means they estimate the diameter of its event horizon at about 10^7 x the diameter of the sun.”
OTOH, they could mean that the *mass* of that black hole is 10 million times the mass of our sun. Which I think is more likely, but I haven’t read the article.
I considered that but then I think they should have used a word other than “larger”. However, assuming you’re right, the Schwarzschild radius for 10 million solar masses, according to Wolfram Alpha, is 295.3 10^8, only 42 times larger than the sun, or about 0.1974 AU, which fits inside the orbit of Mercury.
*only*
“its event horizon at about 10^7 x the diameter of the sun”
The mass of this black hole is about 10 million times the sun not 10 million times larger.
https://astronomyexplained.com/how-big-are-black-holes/#google_vignette
“The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) gained significant attention in 2019. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope took the first image of its shadow. With a mass estimated to be 6.5 billion times that of the Sun, this supermassive black hole has a size comparable to the solar system.”
So comparing physical size of the sun to a black hole has to take in the difference in density.
Think of a lead ball compared to a styrofoam ball.
Well, now I’m boggling again. 6.5 billion solar masses gives M87’s SMBH a 128.3 AU event horizon radius.
I’m no physicist but am puzzled by the assertion in the story that this thing is generating a shock-wave ahead of itself, given that a) its supergravity would surely attract anything towards it as soon as any influence is felt and, b) it’s travelling in a vacuum so what would transmit any shockwave forward?
Somewhere in the Universe it probably is.
Aren’t we in that same thought experiment with our own heat death? Cassandras and skeptics.
Venezuela tanker: “But the vessel boarded on Saturday, called the Centuries, is not on a list of entities under U.S. sanctions that is publicly maintained by the Treasury Department. The people inside Venezuela’s oil industry said the cargo belongs to an established China-based oil trader with a history of taking Venezuelan crude oil to Chinese refineries.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/us-coast-guard-venezuela-oil-tanker.html
Pirating Chinese oil seems like something that could have some sort of international fallout but who knows anymore. There never seem to be any consequences for US actions internationally.
You should read the Homeland Security tweet-
‘Homeland Security
@DHSgov
PREPARE TO BE BOARDED.
This morning @USCG
in coordination with the @DeptofWar
executed a lightning strike operation to seize the Motor Tanker Centuries, which is suspected of carrying oil subject to U.S. sanctions.
The iron fist of America’s joint military and federal law enforcement rules the waves.’
https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2002493812976095249
Arrgghhhh, me maties. Good thing that they did not drag China into all this as they won’t sit down and take it. Oh wait…
It’s all so very Ragnar Danneskjöld, this piracy on the high seize…
Does everything have to follow the plot in
Atlas Shrugged?
Reads like some teen bragging about his videogame wins. Surprised they didn’t spell it “Rulz the waves”.
Also, I’m no history expert but wasn’t “iron fist” what Stalinist Russia was labelled?
Wow our military is bragging about taking over a non-military vessel
You guys look like idiots
Actually the Coast Guard, which I have a hard time equating with “the military,” although I guess they really are. I don’t recall ever seeing a report that they brutalized the crews of the vessels they seize.
Say China (or Russia), sinks a third of the u.s. navy in one fell swoop. I’m wondering if Americans would “rally around the flag” or condemn the current administration for negligence.
In that event, to hide our shame and embarrassment at having been defeated by the commie Chinese horde of lesser humans, we’d resort to our own “Samson option”. Because if no one is around to write about a defeat, then it didn’t happen.
That’s really dark.
Dark but accurate.
This is why even after all this the opponents to empire continue to hang separately.
Samsonite Option or American Tourister Option?
I’d expect Russia and China to arrange a “freedom of navigation” exercise in Caribbean Sea in the very near future. And I doubt it will escalate beyond that.
Maybe a joint Russia-China task force sailing between Cuba and Florida then? Can you imagine the panic?
We lost our minds over a balloon.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/
Heh heh, yes we did.
Very interesting hypothetical that gives you an idea of how much fun it is to be Putin or Xi these days. It has seemed to me that Putin and Lavrov have been trying to conduct an intervention for power and violence addicts since Munich ’07, but now it’s more like cornering a rabid dog.
That answers Joe Biden’s question from SOTU that year…
“The iron fist of America’s joint military and federal law enforcement rules the waves.”
The messages continue to shock and scare me despite preceding insanity.
I won’t make the obvious points, ie.
1. What Federal Law was this tanker in breach of?
2. Federal Jurisdiction is limited to territorial waters only.
After all, the US has joyfully regressed to its Wild West childhood where the man with the biggest gun wins, as long as it’s John Wayne.
Well, not necessarily immediate consequences, but if we entertain the Mahanian idea of the USA being a Sea Power (as in dependent of secure sea lines), deteriorating the the trade security in the proximity of the North American continent may have certain long term repercussions.
If naval conflicts replace the “Pax Americana” in places the Multipolar Stability (between agreement capable nations) can’t reach, US may learn about autarky at an accelerated pace.
There never seem to be any immediate consequences for US actions internationally.
Fixed it for ya!
I would say BRICS and the rise of a multipolar world is a consequence of America’s actions. A world responding to decades of senseless wars.
The more immediate problem is the neocons are very likely to get the war they so desperately desire despite the fact that the neocon wars America has conducted over the last couple of decades have done a huge number on the US military. Sometimes I cannot help but feel that the whole neocon bit for the last forty years has been a plot to wreck America, mostly because it seems to have worked.
High-net-worth investors are pulling out of the stock market. Here’s where they’re funneling their cash instead Moneywise
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Big fan of the fourth turning, and we are at 81 years since Bretton Woods, which set the table for our fiat economic existence~
…shift happens
“‘An Absolute Joke’: Trump DOJ Partially Releases Epstein Files, Many Heavily Redacted ”
Barbra Streisand to the white courtesy phone, please. Frankly wasting the ink to produce 113 pages of big black blocks is the Trump regime mocking people. At least the entire Epstein saga is finished and closed and nobody will ever talk of it again, especially during the midterms.
Please Rev Kev,
Think of the revenue stream with all those black Sharpies utilized!
Disagree on the Epstein saga being over. Trump is still falling, and as the fall picks up speed the Epstein matter will come back. It’s too radioactive to die anytime soon.
For either party.
Based on knowns, the fallout will be felt far more among the Dems. Bubba is front and center, and doesn’t have the benefit of Epstein’s own attorney and many witnesses attesting to lack of scandalous involvement for Trump.
Bubba likely will be joined by a lot of celebrities in the hot seat. Also count on many from both sides of the aisle and from academia and media.
The full scope of the espionage and blackmail may never be known, but more spotlights on DC, Cambridge and elsewhere are welcome.
Now, pray for the children victimized as their experiences will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Bubba is front and center because Trump was redacted and he wasn’t that of a big deal, politically and power wise speaking…
Me thinks Rev Kev was being sarcastic ;-)
Could be wrong, though.
Perhaps AI can “fill in” the redacted text?
Might make for some interesting denials from team Trump.
Re the Iran/water story–talk about burying the lead. This is the final para.
Given the heavy Israeli thumb on all of Iran’s international relations clearly the implied path for sanctions removal would be to bring back the reign of the Shahs who, as the article admits, also had more than a little to do with aquifer pumping and other environmental mistakes. One might also point out that the Cadillac Desert problem is prominent in our own Southwest with politically powerful agricultural incumbents being a factor.
Does the writer know that Iran joined BRICS+ two years ago? It’s 36% of the global community by GDP PPP and 46% by population. 3 of the world top food producing countries are members, too.
So maybe, just maybe, Iran is a enough of a member of the global trading community?
All in all, I think it was a decent article, especially on the technical points. Like almost everything on Iran in Western or Gulf Arab media though, there’s a strand of concern-trolling running through the whole thing that omits a lot. Besides the sanctions issue you mention:
1. The author brings up that the qanats are centuries old (some millennia), but implies they’ve been mostly damaged / neglected recently. My understanding is most of the old qanat network was degraded irreversibly during the Mongol invasions, partly out of direct destruction, partly out of lack of maintenance. Even after the Mongols, Iran’s population was less urbanized and so much smaller (it didn’t recover fully until the 1950s) that rebuilding a new network was never really feasible.
2. So new qanats today often have to be built from scratch, and what he doesn’t mention, is that you can’t really build them anywhere. You need just the right topography and springs in the right place relative to a population center. Like he does mention, they can also only provide a certain level of flow. With a large population under siege, the hard choice is to pull more water now with pumped wells, try to limit consumption downstream, and hopefully do things more sustainably once they’ve reached a strategic / economic stage closer to China or Russia (probably 1 more generation out).
3. I’m not a hydrologist, but IIUC many of the dams he mentions running almost empty were designed with that in mind. The Iranian government trains a lot of hydrologists, it does pay attention to climate models, and in particular, I think it expects a lot more extreme precipitation events around a drier average. The dams are staggered up in the highlands to retain water from wet / snowy years, not with any expectation of being close to full on average.
4. It still seems like way too many people haven’t realized that the Iranian government wants as many people to (gradually) abandon Tehran as possible. They aren’t going to plow their budget into saving a city they’ve already written off. Everyone assumes it’s going to be whacked with a giant earthquake eventually, plus it’s built right up against the Alborz so the air quality will never be great (imagine Boise during an inversion if 10 million people tried living there). And that’s before you get into all the weird cultural aspects of how the city relates to the rest of the country.
File under Bondi Beach and narrative control.
From Glenn Greenwald 4 days ago. utube, ~20+ minutes.
Israel Threatens Western Governments, Demands ensorship After Bondi Beach Shooting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vh5PB-g950
Patrick Lawrence:
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/after-the-first-70669-deaths-there
Thanks for the link. Good read. I think I’ll check out the book he mentions.
It took guts to write that book these days.
From Glenn Greenwald, 2 days ago.
utube, ~22+ minutes.
Australia and the UK Obey Israel’s ensorship Orders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKBz6bKbuzQ
Space X buying cybertrucks. Seems like an Elroy S L I C C */ Madoff Ponzi?
Does Polymarket have book on:
1. When Elroy demands another several bazillion in pay;
2. The date of the Demand by Elroy for MOAR money MOAR Money because he’s Elroy & he’s Fabulous?
* SL I C C – Self-licking Ice Cream Cone
Good god man, Elon is on the very cusp of attaining the fourth comma, can’t we show the Sum King a little respect?
El Rey-o X? Some King, alright. He is really someking…
I like the nickname. Is that a reference to “his boy Elroy?” That would fit Thiel as well since one of his big complaints is we don’t have flying cars yet.
Yep. Space-boy savant. Just ponder those clips of him jumping for joy with outstretched arms.
Although I think George and Judy did not capitalize the R….
More musk
https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-starship-most-important
There are no words for what a complete idiot he is
A complete idiot? He is the richest person on earth. He must really know what he is doing (and saying).
That he got his wealth by hook and crook, and whether he believes in his own drivel is irrelevant; the governments that subsidize his endeavours, the public buying shares in them, the consumers acquiring the junk his firms produce, the press and other pundits transported into states of ectasy at his pronouncements — these are the true imbeciles.
Agreed. If he’s an idiot (and he seemingly is) what does that say about everyone else? Same could be said about Trump. He’s clearly a dullard but apparently a slick salesman can climb their way to the top. We are truly a society of marks.
I often think back to the NFT/Metaverse craze a few years ago. Was at SXSW in 2022 and it was like being at a massive cult rally as the KoolAid was being passed around. The bottom was already dropping out but everyone was spewing buzzwords, minting coins, and speaking abstractly about the new frontier they were pioneering. I thought, just maybe, in all the talks about presentations I’d garner a hint at some sort of tangible application for any of it but walked away from that experience certain of nothing but how empty it all was. Just hype and faith.
But, one thing that seems to draw in legions of diehard acolytes is confident hype. People swoon to that like moths to a flame. I’ll never understand it. Anyone that speaks to me with unbridled confidence repels me like a used car salesman. But it works on the vast majority of humanity it seems. I don’t claim to be smarter than others, I just don’t like salesmen/preacher types. I prefer people who see the complexity of the world and doubt their own grasp of it.
Yes, that is why this guy says this is and is not an AI bubble at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh3d43DlBOU
OpenAI and Xai are cults.
I’ve dodged a metaphorical bullet by missing out on big tech jobs a decade or more ago. Watched friends and colleagues go to them.
Facebook, Atlassian, slack, google. you don’t get hired, last or thrive in places like that if you question the orthodoxy or show signs of skepticism.
they all know what game they’re playing – “big number get bigger”. might as well look for another job if you question it.
the sad thing is they don’t always start that way. plenty of moral, ambitious, startups with talented curious skeptical people in them. but those start ups get absorbed by the tech-finance borg and…
I think the country has always been like that, but there was a transition in corporate CEOs from engineering background to sales background to finance background. Where once competition was for things like market share, now it’s stock price, a measure far more removed from reality than whether the public likes the design, price and reliability of your cars.
And if it’s even worse now, I wonder if it’s not an effect of the existential fear that I believe is creeping in on “little cat feet” throughout Western society. I hear people from my Millennial son to my Boomer friends talk about cutting themselves off from the news in order to avoid the anxiety and dread that seem to be building in the old “West” because of a combination social dissolution, economic instability, international chaos and an increasingly enraged Earth. Do we believe at some level that the confidence man must know something because somebody, somewhere must know something. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that we’re screwed.
Another thing I’ve observed about some “normie” types is that they’re desperate for some authority they can rely on. Some resort to traditional religion, the more conservative the better. Some bow the knee to Science as KLG discussed here. Technology and the Progress Myth may even be displacing Science as the sand upon which our society is built, so in such times as these, the Tech huckster has plenty of desperate marks.
Yes an idiot.
Being born wealthy and then being at the right time, right place takes no intelligence. And the real reason for his wealth, achieving TechBro cult status, he fell into. None of that was planned, and he just believes his own BS.
I would add that from my brief time running with some rich and powerful (albeit on a much much lower rung of the ladder), they know so little about tech, and are even intimidated by it, so are incredibly easy to baffle and impress with bull$h1t when it comes to the areas Musk is in. It’s always felt like a lot of his success has been due to sounding intelligent to those who don’t know any better and them having FOMO if he turns out to be right.
Astrophysicist and author, Adam Becker, in his book More Everything Forever, provides incisive, science based proofs as to the idiocy of Musk’s Martian fever dreams and other lunacies from Silicon Valley’s best and brightest.
If you’re in a Waymo in San Francisco
Be sure to wear some walking shoes there
If you’re in a Waymo in San Francisco
You’re gonna have to hoof it on foot there
For those who come to San Francisco
Christmastime will be a black-out there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with no electricity in their lair
All across the city on an electricity vacation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion
There’s no electricity generation
With no explanation
People in motion
People in motion
For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some walking shoes there
If you come to San Francisco
Christmastime will be a black-out there
If you come to San Francisco
Christmastime will be a black-out there
And don’t forget a flashlight. Love it, Wuk. And when that song came out, I was a 14 year-old Midwest teenager wishing I was old enough to drive to check it out. Surely it was a mix of good and bad, but there were things happening like the Monterey Pop Festival, the Be-In, the Houseboat Summit and the kool-aid acid tests that I would like to have seen or participated in. Just the bands that were playing at the Fillmore or Monterey would have been amazing to see as they were forming and evolving.
It would have been a different route. More New Buffalo Communes and fewer Waymos. Maybe your Burning Man, Wuk, preserves some part of that, but it seems to me we’re a lot closer to Dick’s and Scott’s vision of the future than the 60s San Francisco that MacKenzie was writing about. And I’ll throw in an Animals’ tune along the same lines. British bluesmen could dig the Summer of Love along with Americans.
Thanks HMP, that song was crying out to be rearranged~
One thing about the 60’s is that money seemed to be irrelevant in all goings on, you could see a concert with 5 really good bands for a few bucks in the SF Bay area.
Burning Man costs a bit for entry ticket and parking pass, and then money becomes ballast, in that the only thing you can buy on the playa is bags of ice, that’s it.
So, it has some of that 60’s vibe going on, art for the sake of enjoyment-not enrichment.
So Kagi came out with a game to help kids detect AI slop.
This is the state of the world in late 2025.
We need a tool like this for kids to understand econo-priest speak as well, so that they can see through market worship.
Anybody else notice the demise of the Xmas card?
Used to get 30-35, up to 2 so far this season~
What, no tidings of DeJoy? I guess he is no longer in charge.
I imagine that your cards will arrive with your 1098 and 1099’s at end of January.
There apparently is a small groundswell emerging that some 2025 tax returns may be submitted- redacted.
We really might run out of ink!!
Same here. I still send ’em though. / ;)
Mrs. Socialist makes me sign a bunch of hand-made cards every Christmas, but whether they get sent or not depends on if she can locate her address book in time. This Christmas it was a no, unfortunately.
I had enough trouble just getting my gifts selected and purchased. I still have a few to go. Cards?!!??? remain beyond me yet another Christmas. I have not received any Christmas cards but I will send some next year if I can get my act together.
I still send out some Solstice cards as I have for a half century I don’t send them out to get one back, just like making them and sending them out. For all of the attempts to destroy it, the USPS is still a great service.
Denmark has solved that problem. You cannot send letters there anymore and they have removed all their mailboxes. You wanna send a Christmas card, send an email. But around here I noticed something more prosaic. Over the recent decades as friends and family pass away there is less and less people to send Christmas cards to so this year there are only a handful to send. Nobody told me that that would ever happen but I guess that it is inevitable.
Same here. Many of the older generation I used to send cards to has passed on. The better half has decided we will switch to sending very pretty PDFs of Christmas cards that she designs.
I really enjoyed watching the video embedded at the top of the links showing a traditional egg decorating technique. Thanks for sharing that.
I also enjoyed the video. The work shown was amazingly precise showing the great skill of the person creating the egg. It looked like something to start practicing for next year’s Christmas.
Technically the traditional egg decoration is for the Easter (spring, resurrection etc). Nothing really preventing one from doing for Christmas, though. It’s a living tradition so change, appropriation and assimilation do apply.
Latest from Eric Salzman at Racket News. no paywall.
Life in the Fast Lane With Robinhood Markets
At least in a real casino you get some free drinks and maybe a free suite if you lose enough
https://www.racket.news/p/life-in-the-fast-lane-with-robinhood
So They pirated a Chinese owned ship full of oil heading to China.
I’m speechless.
I bet Xi is pissed.
No magnets for Xmass…
A drop in church attendance preceded the opioid epidemic:
“Long before opioids flooded communities, something else was quietly changing—and it may have helped set the stage for today’s crisis. A new study finds that as church attendance dropped among middle-aged, less educated white Americans, deaths from overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-related disease began to rise. The trend started years before OxyContin appeared, suggesting the opioid epidemic intensified a problem already underway.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/12/251219093317.htm
Maybe some independent factor caused both the drop in attendance and the opioid epidemic. Or maybe a fair number of people are better off attending church than not, no matter how wart-ridden the church inevitably is or what they believe. I’m not sure how one would set up a study to determine which it is.
I would add that too many of the preachers in these congregations served neither to educate their parishioners to some of the realities of their existence nor did they advocate publicly for their interests. Instead, many of their preachers reinforced the status quo that was crushing these people with their preaching and considered themselves upstanding members of their local communities in terms of their memberships and friendships.
First, the church often left them. Losing that membership in the community may well have been an important contributor to the epidemic. It wasn’t weekly exposure to the preaching of fire and brimstone.
Spiritual Fitness Inventory User Guide
US Army Public Health Command, Technical Guide No. 360 [2012]
Even if a particular church left people, they could have still gone to a different church, or formed a new one. In many denominations the members choose their own pastor (or in the case of my denomination, have no paid pastor; everyone is a pastor). I’m not convinced that the cause was bad pastors. It seems like a little much to expect some one person to “educate” parishioners to the realities of their existence; I wouldn’t expect that of a pastor even if my denomination had them. I’m just not sure why people stopped attending. In my part of the country I did see social snobbery being a factor; religion was seen as being for the uneducated.
Lack of community and peer to peer support in a world of neoliberalism and unaffordable or underfunded social services is a recipe for disaster.
I don´t sympathize with that claim at least at its face value.
There were also anecdotes where in the light of lacking support from state (as DEA colluded with Purdue) victims turned to church where prayers were supposed to solve the problem of addiction!
The thing that did the trick was organizing and the FBI connecting the dots, to my knowledge.
That doesn´t mean “church” doesn´t help in certain context. But then “church” is just the representation for something else. Call it solidarity, call it community organising, local social services.
It´s risky to think religion helps where in fact it is serious shortcomings and corruption in rich societies.
In fact Purdue abused such indicators as poverty or “decency” to claim why victims of Oxy had become addicted. NOT actually Oxy.
That´s is not unlike claiming “well it´s all due to the loss of values that our kids are taking drugs”. i.e. it´s their fault.
The less solidarity in a society because its dismantled by its elites the more religion is supposed to step in. Eventually an Emmanuel Todd says that the demise of religion is directly connectet with the demise of societies.
I.don´t.think.so.
Forgive me but to cease this dependency on religion as it was established in the Soviet system was progressive achievement. (it was other issues that didn´t work.)
Thanks for the link. From the article:
“The researchers found a clear pattern at the state level. States that experienced the sharpest drops in church attendance between 1985 and 2000 also saw the largest increases in deaths from these causes during the same period.”
Now what else was happening in the US during that time period – 1985 to 2000? My very first thought is that was when the big push to move factory jobs offshore or from northern states more expensive labor to southern states less expensive labor, the difference being the rate of factory labor unionization between northern and southern states. Moving manufacturing to Mexico and Vietnam and later to China.
People were told to move from places like Detroit and Dearborn to places where the work was. Or told to accept lower wages or the company would move the factory jobs to another state or to another country. Either accept lower wages or quit and ‘learn to code’. Working class people were economically whipsawed by this threat for many years.
People were uprooted, displaced, financially distressed, and moving into a new community when feeling desperate, maybe a second or third move, could I imagine leave one in a state of turmoil. Finding a new church to attend and join might have been the last thing on the mind if wondering just how long one might live in the new city.
Shorter, it started during the Reagan years of outsourcing and downsizing that put families on the move looking for work. / my 2 cents
And putting too fine a point on this, I’m thinking of the US’s internal great migration of farmers and farm labor, dispossessed of their farms and labor during the Great Depression, on a constant move looking for work.
I don’t think many of them looked to join a new church during those terrible years when they were on the move. No stability, no knowing how long they’d be in any place if they did find work. Dorothea Lange made a series of famous photos for the Farm Security Administration in FDR’s administration. You’d recognize the pictures. Search on the term “Dorothea Lange”.
But church attendance dropped among people who stayed put. And it dropped in areas like my home region of New England that weren’t affected in the same way by Reaganomics. And it used to be that when people moved to a new area the first thing they did was look for a church for support.
I agree about the badness of Reagonomics and its dislocations but I think there may be something more.
Pretty sure Space X gets a tax wright off for the CyberTrucks.
That will be some form 179. Here I was wrestling with the older eurovans clocking in below 6K GVW. It’s all a matter of scale, no?
With Elroy, it is almost also like a stock-buy-back.
My bet: He got a discount-to-MSRP ro deal, books the sale, never pays a penny, sells to Guvvy for their Venezuelan ground transpo at 150 % of MSRP (Military Pro deal) , but graciously throws in solar charge stations.
So many headlines to anticipate for 2026!!
Maybe that will offset the cost of exploding rockets. / heh.
RE: Roomba’s and ebikes. . .
Rad ebikes dominate the ebike category in my town. They start at $1k for the model parents are buying for their kids (as young as 9 y.o.). The town council has now created administrative fines for the reckless riding the youngsters create. The fines are payable by the parents. Needless to say this market for ebikes is shrinking. Older adults buy the more expensive models, but after less than a year realize an ebike is the prey for distracted automobile drivers. One local dealer told me that 40% of buyers want help selling their purchase in the first year of ownership. (I own an expensive Class 3 ebike that is stored in the City run Bike Spot indoor parking; there are ebikes next to mine that have not been ridden in the last 6 months.) It’s not just the tariffs that are depressing the market.
E-bikes are so dangerous in the hands of a kid or adult, as I see them rather silently almost keeping up with cagers, often in their blind spot.
In Brooklyn they are known to burn down buildings due to off market chargers and lithium batteries. There’s a reason why some people don’t park their Tesla in the garage.
It does seem I see fewer ebikes on my trails these days. And on the street even motorcycles are quite dangerous because of the visibility problem.
“They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job – Los Angeles Times”
This is a complete farce.
AI is not replacing people. AI is not responsible for new grads being unable to find tech jobs.
It’s Indians. Indians and other mass migrants via fraudulent visas.
This is congruent with the adage that AI means “Actually, Indians”.
I’m calling bullshit. No-one is signing off sending 80 $25 million turbine powered tanks to be obliterated by 200 $1500 drones within 96 hours. The total budget for the endless drone destruction music videos and edits over the next 5 years remixes won’t even exceed the paperwork budget for shipping this many tanks into Ukraine. It makes more sense to relegate the tanks to bulldozer duty behind the lines than to do this.
Probably they are being shipped somewhere else, or being sold by the Ukrainians to someone else, or are for conquering Poland. I simply cannot believe even the Nato MIC would send this much (relatively) good hardware in after bad.
I doubt that those tanks are for the present conflict. Instead, they will be the nucleus of a more powerful tank force for the Ukrainian army that will be built up after the Russians sign Minsk 3. Then when NATO gets its planned 2030 war against Russia, they will be at the forefront of the new attack against the Russians. Now we just need to have the Russians cooperate more…
re: Protonmail leaves Switzerland
use google-tranlsate
Proton leaves Switzerland: CEO warns of surveillance state
https://tarnkappe.info/artikel/it-sicherheit/datenschutz/proton-verlaesst-die-schweiz-ceo-warnt-vor-ueberwachungsstaat-324338.html
“Proton has begun relocating its infrastructure from Switzerland. Servers are being operated in parallel in Germany and Norway, systems are being mirrored, and preparations are being made for a worst-case scenario. Should the Swiss Federal Act on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF) come into force in its planned form, Proton could shut down its Swiss servers at short notice. The company is also taking personnel measures and creating jobs outside of Switzerland.
That Proton is even considering this step is remarkable. The company was founded in Switzerland, emerging from the CERN environment, and deliberately remained there for years because of the strong rule of law and high data protection standards. Yen now sees precisely these standards as being under threat.”
Thanks. Helpful info.
re: NATO was the root cause
Former Biden National Security Advisor for Europe, Amanda Sloat “admitted” to those two Russian pranksters that NATO expansion to UKR was the major cause for the war.
This is reported by Responsible Statecraft by Branko Marcetic.
I am a bit surprised since I could never regard this pranking as a 100% sincere source for such an “admission”. That is entertainment, not schoalrship or journalism. But I guess these are simply the new times and I am getting old.
Pranked Biden official exposes lie that Ukraine war was inevitable
She isn’t the first to admit — after the fact — that taking NATO off the table to avoid Russian invasion was considered, and dismissed
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-nato-sloat/
However Jeffrey Sachs too quoted Amanda Sloat but not in the context of the prank but in form of a private admission/comment to him (the same way Jake Sullivan in 2021 admitted to Sachs that he could not say something particular in public.)
see TC 17:50
https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/jeffrey-sachs-an-open-letter-to-chancellor
Here is my question: Are the prank and Sachs´s story connected or are the coincidences?
Western society is rotten
As U.S. Guns Pour Into Canada, the Bodies Pile Up (NY Times)
America exports death and finance.