Links 12/25/2025

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1. The Rev Kev December 25, 2025 at 7:20 am

   “Cambodia sees mass displacement as conflict with Thailand escalates TRT World”

   ‘Erm, some of this “displacement” is due to Cambodian encouraging establishment of Cambodian villages over the Thai border, which Thailand is now cleaning out.’

   Establishing settlements in another country’s territory when there is still shooting going on? I thought that only Israel did that. : )

   Certainly settles the question of who the aggressor nation is here.

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   1. Yves Smith Post authorDecember 25, 2025 at 7:43 am

      No, the encroachments were before the shooting (but not the mining in Thailand) started.

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2. Wukchumni December 25, 2025 at 7:32 am

   Camus believed that the essential purposelessness of existence didn’t mean acquiescing to nihilism. Instead, it was an opportunity to rebel against life’s absurdity, by living authentically and passionately. He believed in staring the world in the face, and appreciating it for all its strangeness and beauty, even, and especially, in the absence of some grand unifying purpose, deity or ideology.

   That’s where i’m at, a pantheist who sees staring me in the face, so many earthly delights that titillate my senses just so, and never demand that I kowtow to some all-encompassing God who is watching over my every move, so as to keep a scorecard where i’ll be judged in the afterlife after i’m pushing up Mariposa lilies…

   Heaven is right here on this good orb~

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3. ChrisRUEcon December 25, 2025 at 7:34 am

   Merry Christmas!

   Thanks for providing links today, Yves!

   #NCStockingStuffer

   “Islam versus Judaism… How is Jesus Viewed?”

   Thanks for this article. Most people, especially people who are islamophobic, don’t know that Muslims see Jesus as a prophet etc. A gap to be sure, but not a chasmic gap as evidenced by places (beyond Iran) like the southern Caribbean where Muslim indentured workers from India brought their faith to the largely Christian (Catholic and Anglican) region.

   I woke up this morning with news of the world on my mind and was thinking that if Jesus were to be born today, he’d probably be born to a family fleeing Gaza, so little has changed. I was inspired by Yves’ “What World Was Jesus Born Into? A Historian Describes the Turbulent Times of the Real Nativity” post yesterday.

   However, a 21st century Jesus could also easily be Sudanese … or perhaps (though one hopes not, for the sake of not adding to the list of wars/conflicts), even Venezuelan (Chavista).

   I have remarked before about how NC articles posted either in links or across a number of days often weave into a cohesive fabric, and how much I love it when they do.

   I would stitch together one more piece here, and it’s Nat’s from yesterday – Coffee Break: Going Beyond the MSM Name-Calling Narrative at TPUSA.

   In it, he quotes a Vanity Fair article that in turn quotes a young couple beginning to reckon with the decidedly non-Christian and non-America-First nature of evangenlical support for #1sRa3L.

   I wish someone could find them and share the “Islam versus Judaism …” article with them.

   ¡Feliz Navidad!

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   1. Wukchumni December 25, 2025 at 8:05 am

      ¡Feliz Navidad!

      I’m presently in Mexico where a good many Jesus’s reside, and Xmas isn’t much of a holiday here compared to the USA, maybe 1 out of 30 stores and houses puts on a token display-nothing over the top.

      Easter is the bigger gig here-anybody can be born, but getting resurrected is more difficult…

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4. amfortas December 25, 2025 at 7:37 am

   ugly american anecdote: friends son, home from navy…been deployed somewhere in the baltics and incommunicado for a year..also spent a lot of time in spain(all this is gleaned from things he says, since hes not supposed to talk about it).
   he says that the whole world hates us,lol.
   much worse than it was before, when usaians were a nuisance.
   now, its active hatred…want nothing to do with us.
   wish we’d go away.
   says this sentiment is out in the open, now…not couched behind subtlety.
   im far from well traveled enough to know…but i thought it was interesting.
   happy jesus day, peeps.

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   1. vao December 25, 2025 at 8:05 am

      Wait a minute: he was “incommunicado” and “not supposed to talk about it”, but interacted with locals to such an extent he could experience their hatred? Or was he reporting about what colleagues from foreign navies think about the USA?

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      1. The Rev Kev December 25, 2025 at 8:25 am

         Might be like the guy that lets rip a big one in a crowded elevator. The other people may not say anything in words but the feelings of them are on full display.

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5. J Johnston December 25, 2025 at 7:46 am

   On the higher incidence of flu and other illness since Covid. I see this in my own health and it the folks I know. I do not doubt it at all. I just wish that these X reference included citations on these graphs and and other claims. It would be so much easier to share with those that do not or refuse to confront this reality with real data. Also, with AI it makes it easier to manipulate these facts. Merry X-mas to all and may the new year bring health and happiness.

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6. The Rev Kev December 25, 2025 at 7:50 am

   ‘I’lkka Rauvola
   @jukka235
   In fact, we’re seeing exponential growth in patient numbers across all disease and age groups in Finland. The trend is strikingly linear on a log scale, with no sign of any slowdown since 2020.
   No health system can take this for long. It’s just a matter of time. 8/x’

   In one of the replies to this tweet is the following nugget-

   ‘Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA
   @michael_hoerger
   The European Union announced this week it will take the lead on the future of wastewater surveillance.
   The new approach will unify strategy, improve standardization and rigor, and better summarize transmission with metrics that matter to people.’

   Yeah, doesn’t fill me with confidence that. It means that Ursula would be able to fiddle with the data if she thought that it was making the EU look unhealthy. It would be like centralizing wastewater surveillance in the US meaning that Trump would be able to put his fat thumb on any bad figures.

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   1. Michaelmas December 25, 2025 at 8:07 am

      Thanks for running the link to the account of the 1914 Christmas truce, which I encourage everyone to look at and shows broadly how the mass of humanity operates when the psychopath class is removed from the picture.

      https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-the-christmas-truce

      Of course —

      ‘The high commands on both sides ordered an end to the truce when they heard of it. George Ashurst described how unpopular this made them.

      ‘”We got orders come down the trench, ‘Get back in your trenches every man,’ by word of mouth down each trench; ‘Everybody back in your trenches,’ shouting. The generals behind must’ve seen it and got a bit suspicious so what they did, they gave orders for a battery of guns behind us to fire, and a machine gun to open out and officers to fire their revolvers at the Jerries. ‘Course that started the war again. Ooh we were cursing them to hell, cursing the generals and that, you want to get up here in this stuff never mind your giving orders, in your big chateaux and driving about in your big cars. We hated the sight of the bloody generals.'”

      Merry Christmas

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      1. CanCyn December 25, 2025 at 8:33 am

         A good alternative history novel would be imagining what the world would look like if those soldiers had refused to get ‘get back to work’.

         Happy Christmas Day to the NC community, however you choose to celebrate, or not. My day will include a walk in the woods (it is cold and sunny here) and the cooking and eating of good food. No presents, no tree, just a show of gratitude for life.

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   2. Polar Socialist December 25, 2025 at 8:34 am

      Ilkka Rauvola is an example of a data scientist which has caused me to recent them to some extent. They don’t do any explanatory data analysis before they throw the data against the wall and see what sticks…

      In other words, he’s getting his data from a data collection system that has been activated stepwise since 2019. It currently records about 30-40% of health care “events”. What his graphs show is actually the rate of adoption of the reporting system among the health care providers in Finland, not the prevalence of any ICD10 diseases.

      That is not to say that there isn’t a rise in cases, or that he’s a charlatan, just that this specific graph is not showing what he thinks it’s is showing. And it took me under 5 minutes to figure that out, just because his numbers did not make any sense to me – I happen to work on the biggest hospital campus in the Nordics, and I would know if the all cases were rising exponentially (a.k.a. zombie-like epidemic).

      Click to Edit – 

      

      Ilkka Rauvola is an example of a data scientist which has caused me to recent them to some extent. They don't do any explanatory data analysis before they throw the data against the wall and see what sticks... In other words, he's getting his data from a data collection system that has been activated stepwise since 2019. It currently records about 30-40% of health care "events". What his graphs show is actually the rate of adoption of the reporting system among the health care providers in Finland, not the prevalence of any ICD10 diseases. That is not to say that there isn't a rise in cases, or that he's a charlatan, just that this specific graph is not showing what he thinks it's is showing. And it took me under 5 minutes to figure that out, just because his numbers did not make any sense to me - I happen to work on the biggest hospital campus in the Nordics, and I would know if the all cases were rising exponentially (a.k.a. zombie-like epidemic).

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