Rare footage: Houdini’s first jump into icy New York River, 1907
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) January 23, 2026
Nanoparticles That Destroy Disease Proteins Could Unlock New Treatments for Dementia and Cancer SciTech Daily
The Market for Artificial Wombs is Here 3 Quarks Daily
This startup will send 1,000 people’s ashes to space — affordably — in 2027 TechCrunch
Monster Neutrino Could Be a Messenger of Ancient Black Holes Quanat Magazine
COVID-19/Pandemics
CDC Calculates Continuing Burden from COVID-19 Illnesses Contagion Live
How America’s WHO exit could affect flu shots, outbreaks, and future pandemics Fast Company
Climate/Environment
New filtration technology could be gamechanger in removal of Pfas ‘forever chemicals’ The Guardian
Solar and wind overtake fossil fuels in the EU Semafor
Winter storm doesn’t disprove climate change, despite Trump’s claim. Scientists explain why. CBS News
South of the Border
Venezuela’s interim president’s oil law reform to break with Chavez model Al Jazeera
Trump administration weighs naval blockade to halt Cuban oil imports Politico
Mexico reviews oil shipments to Cuba amid U.S. pressure and rising geopolitical tensions MyIndMakers
Argentina’s F-16 deal signals a strategic pivot toward Washington Argentina Reports
China?
“China will lose the US market…”
“We don’t care. The world is big enough that the US is not the totality of the world’s market.”
🤷♂️Victor Gao was not kidding. https://t.co/G4G2ofVh3D pic.twitter.com/JSWVm8JD0a
— Li Zexin 李泽欣 (@XH_Lee23) January 19, 2026
The Big Winner: China The American ProspectPentagon shifts focus away from China in new defense strategy NBC News
China places highest-ranking general under investigation BBC
India
National Girl Child Day: India advancing towards an equitable society, says govt India Tribune
Europe and India seek closer ties with ‘mother of all deals’ AFP
India Surges Ahead In Clean Electrification Race Grand Pinnacle Tribune
Africa
Remittances take priority over aid as Africa turns to stablecoins Cryptopolitan
AGES 2026 to showcase Africa’s leading pipeline of investment-ready green projects Energies Media
South Africa Declares a National Disaster Over Flooding and Severe Weather San Diego Voice and Viewpoint
European Disunion
Europe needs ‘a huge wake-up call’ on the housing crisis, EU commissioner says France 24
Merz heads to Italy for summit with Meloni with new ideas to shake up EU bureaucracy euro news
The EU finally used an economic threat against Trump. But the markets forced his climbdown The Guardian
Does Europe Need a Modern-Day Octavian Augustus? Lessons in Pragmatic Reform for a Divided Union New Eastern Outlook
Old Blighty
UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings The Register
Israel v. Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran
This is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is North Gaza. pic.twitter.com/8yntAP22FL
— Global Insight Journal (@GlobalIJournal) January 22, 2026
Israel Is Turning the Yellow Line Splitting Gaza into a Physical Barrier Drop SiteKhamenei has gone into hiding ahead of possible US attack, says opposition-linked news site The Times of Israel
How Israeli settler violence empties Palestinian villages DW
‘Impunity won’t last forever’: What gives Francesca Albanese hope +972
New Not-So-Cold War
How Soviet urban planning is helping Russia freeze Ukraine BBC
Russia launches massive strikes on Ukraine’s largest cities and targets energy infrastructure euro news
Ukraine calls trilateral talks with U.S. and Russia to end war “constructive” Axios
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
ICE Is Scanning Civilians’ Faces, Telling Them They’re Being Entered Into a Terrorism Database Futurism
Microsoft hands over BitLocker keys to FBI, exposing users to major privacy flaw Cryptopolitan
Imperial Collapse Watch
Former NFL lineman Kevin Johnson found dead at LA homeless encampment NBC 4 Los angeles
Trump 2.0
What midterm projections tell us about Trump’s central struggle Ipsos
Trump threatens 100 percent tariff on Canada over China deal Al Jazeera
Europe Rides the Tiger: Jeffrey Sachs on NATO, Trump, and the Collapse of the “Rules‑Based Order ScheerPost
As the world finally punches back, was this the week Donald Trump went too far? The Guardian
ICE Rampage
Minneapolis Live Updates: Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Account of Killing New York Times
To be clear about what this depicts: An immigration officer threw a woman onto the ground. Alex Pretti, a registered nurse on scene as a legal observer, is filming and goes to help the woman up. He is then pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground for no discernible reason. Many…
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 24, 2026
To be clear about what this depicts: An immigration officer threw a woman onto the ground. Alex Pretti, a registered nurse on scene as a legal observer, is filming and goes to help the woman up. He is then pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground for no discernible reason. Many…
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 24, 2026
As insane as this sounds, it’s true: Pam Bondi sent Minnesota officials a letter today saying ICE would leave the state if Minnesota turns over its voter files to the Trump Administration.
They’re openly using state violence as a bargaining chip to seize election infrastructure. https://t.co/v5L9ByI4eK pic.twitter.com/gRZ6SnU1Zf
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) January 25, 2026
Legal immigration pathways shrink as Trump restricts humanitarian programs and revokes visas KCTV 5.com
Pepper-Sprayed While Pinned Down: A Searing Scene Provokes Outrage NY Times
Musk Matters
Elon Musk Is So Unlikable That His Feud With Random Airline Is Doing Wonders for Sales, Says CEO Futurism
‘Peace’ or ‘Piece’? Musk mocks Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace in Davos euro news
Elon Musk just told Davos that Tesla will sell humanoid robots next year, really, he swears engadget
Democrat Death Watch
James Carville says Jasmine Crockett’s rhetoric offends people who have ‘any sense of humanity’ New York Post
Our No Longer Free Press
Nevada Press Association Defends Press Freedom After Courtroom Removal of Reporters The Fallon Post
Documents Prove The Trump Administration Arrested Students for Criticizing Israel Mother Jones
Mr. Market Is Moody
The stock market is flashing a signal that inflation may be poised to spike Business Insider
Bitcoin’s weakness versus gold and equities puts quantum computing fears back in focus CoinDesk
Meet David Bateman, the man who invested $1 billion into physical silver ahead of historic rally Cryptopolitan
AI
The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself Noema
Designing AI-resistant technical evaluations Anthropic.com
A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money? TechCrunch
Get ready for the AI ad-pocalypse The Verge
The Bezzle
Toronto man posed as pilot to rack up hundreds of free flights, prosecutors say The Guardian
Gavin Newsom roasted as huge $23M homeless fraud investigation nabs suspect in LA: ‘Zero vetting’ New York Post
Guillotine Watch
Veekey James’s 30th birthday cake is “currently the tallest cake in Africa” and it cost 18 million Naira 🤯🎂🔥 pic.twitter.com/YU3u4uuG4x
— Oyindamola🙄 (@dammiedammie35) June 9, 2025
The 5 most expensive weddings cake in the world #top5 #expensive #weddingcake pic.twitter.com/PlyudLX74l
— Top5expensive (@top5expensive) November 20, 2025
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
They are more than Pretti Good.
They are the best of us.
And monsters run free.
Re bitlocker. Most reporting just uses the word “warrant” or “legal warrant” or “warrant request”, but here we have:
https://cybersecuritynews.com/microsoft-shares-bitlocker-keys/
Search warrant? All a bit fishy, and doesn’t sound like a legally binding court order to me.
If you own a MacBook with Tahoe (MacOS26) and have file vault enabled, I want you to take a look in your Passwords App where you will find the encryption key for you laptop. This encryption key is most likely backed up to your iCloud account.
This is just as bad, maybe worse, that what is going on here with Microsoft.
If the FBI gets a warrant for your iCloud account they now posses the encryption key for you Laptop.
I do not use iCloud. I never trusted it. Hard disk backups only. There are also Mac backup services which say they don’t knuckle under to police requests for data.
Good point. I wouldn’t trust any of these services either.
On macOS, I believe you mean the Turn on iCloud keychain setting.
There is also one on iOS in the iCloud Settings, called Sync this iPhone/iPad.
If you read the End User License Agreement that you have to accept to use proprietary software, there is without fail a clause where you have to give up a right to personal information if the software company is subject to a legal obligation or must comply with a government order. It will usually not mention a warrant or courts. I’m not saying that this is fair or right. It’s become boilerplate. The IT weasels will always lay down for the fascists.
Imho, local detached storage is always your best bet to preserve your privacy. There are reasonably cheap 2tb+ external SSDs that you can protect with open source encryption software. Always make more than one backup. Keep them in separate locations, if you can. Keep minimal personal data on your actual computer. NAS is also a good option at home – if you use an open source OS on the NAS box, even better.
It takes a few extra steps, but macOS Time Machine can backup to a NAS too.
The open source OMV running on Linux is very reliable, and community support is excellent.
“We’re running out of aspirin! Pharmacies rationing aspirin to patients with most serious heart problems due to ‘worrying’ UK shortages”
I got an idea. What if Starmer got on the horn to China’s President Xi and see if he can ramp up production of aspirin which the UK will purchase for a good price. It is hardly a high-tech medicine and so much of the world’s drugs is produced by China anyway. This could even open up the door to further trade deals between the UK and China. Of course this all depends on Starmer not stuffing it up but it is worth a try.
Aspirin? Massive shortage? You must be kidding me. Literally, aspirin is one of the most simple of organic processes to manufacture drugs. If there are shortages of aspirin and empty shelves anywhere in the Western world, I would view that as a sign of great concern.
Aspirin – or acetysalicylic acid ( ASA for short) – is a completely artificial compound made from petroleum organics. The original product for literally centuries dating back to the Greek and Roman world was from salicin or willow trees. I have literally seen all kinds of recipes and methods to extract it in ancient texts but mostly medieval texts and mostly in Latin. You basically take the bark, char it just a bit, mash it up into a fine powder and then stir it into vinegar. I have seen it being used in this vinegar extract all the way into making a poultice out of things like sour cream and placing it directly on the affected area.
It was not until the late medieval era that its modern usefulness became known. The word is “auge”. It means fever of an intermittent nature that is still totally with us today – almost every severe infection presents with intermittent fever spikes. And these ancient preps absolutely helped with that. The cardiac and blood clotting indications did not really become obvious until the 20th Century.
The problem making the jump from a natural product to a synthetic product is also quite interesting. In medicine, this process was basically started during the 19th Century and this was done with so many other drugs and compounds. It was a process of refining and stripping out all the other chemicals that existed with the main target. The same exact thing was done with coca as it was turned into cocaine, and opium as it was turned into heroin. Among so so many others. The active chemical was found awash in all kinds of other similar chemicals in the plant. When we refined and severely concentrated the original chemical from these plants, it turns out that there is a much more intense medical activity. Modern cocaine is so many thousands of times more powerful than a native Peruvian chewing on coca leaves. The same can be said for heroin. In essence, we created Frankentsteins. Salicin was a bit different in that the refined natural product, the profoundly concentrated salicylic acid makes anyone taking it orally violently ill. In the late 1800s, chemists discovered that if you stick an acetyl group on this salicylic acid molecule, it is perfectly tolerated and very useful for fever. In short order, the very simple mass manufacturing process for this compound was easily worked out with petroleum organic chemicals. It is profoundly easy to manufacture and profoundly cheap.
In the past 10 years, we have had all kinds of medical shortages. Largely because we have completely shipped all drug manufacturing to overseas locations, some friendly like Ireland, but the vast majority to China and India. It is one of the single most stupid doltish decisions I have ever seen – who would ever have thought that the massive shortages in the entire medicine cabinet would not be a national security issue? Most of the shortages have involved drugs with profoundly complicated manufacturing. This is the very first time I have heard of something as simple as aspirin. I know the article is about Britain – but if a major Western country is having this problem it will not be long until they all are. Stupidity in this realm is universal among Western countries. We are so screwed it is hard to contemplate.
Auge, a typo for “ague” ?
Yes – you are correct – I am not sure if that typo was an early AM brain malfunction or the autocorrect. Curiously, on so many autocorrect platforms – it sometimes insists on placing words that are not even English.
Auge is a region in Normandy. Pays d’Auge, in French. Some good Calvados comes from there, Doc.
My first thought was “maybe that’s a more traditional, ancestral, spelling….” ;-)
The first time (only?) I recall seeing that word was in a poem by Lord Byron about swimming the Hellespont.
“Literally, aspirin is one of the most simple of organic processes to manufacture drugs.”
In high school, one of our chemistry lab exercises was to produce aspirin.
“Most of the shortages have involved drugs with profoundly complicated manufacturing. This is the very first time I have heard of something as simple as aspirin.”
There is a very simple solution: order the Pharmacy of the Army to start producing aspirin to make up for the shortage. Every country has such a pharmacy, with the necessary production lines to manufacture essential medicines for the troops. In the spirit of rearmament and Kriegstüchtigkeit, let us take advantage of those NATO-level 5% defense budgets to Make Aspirin Procurable Again.
You are not telling me that those Army Pharmacies have been dismantled and the supply of pharmaceuticals for war emergencies privatized, are you?
In John Michael Greer’s novel “Retrotopia” he makes the point that modern medicine selects one particular ‘active’ ingredient and discards the rest which may be a mistake. Do we really know the purpose of some of those other ingredients were. Some of them come from plants that were specifically bred so there may have been a purpose in having these ingredients as part of that plant.
“purpose” is for the plant that produces them; “effect” is what they may do for humans who ingest them.
I have read that gut flora produces all sorts of by-products that can be beneficial to the host organism. Each of us is carrying a bioreactor around with us in our abdomen. Take good care of your gut flora.
(amusingly, while “gut fauna” is not something that one likes to think about, sometimes it can be beneficial. There is an old RadioLab episode about parasites that reported on someone who infected himself with hookworms to control severe asthma. Evidently the worms negotiated with the immune system to be tolerated, and this had the side effect of moderating asthma symptoms. I don’t recommend trying that at home, though)
I did not even mention the single most important of all chemicals refined from plants – and that would be sugar from sugar cane. Certainly not a “drug” per se. But it is one of the most consequential chemicals the world has ever seen. Not only for the whole economies built on it but also for the millions and possibly billions suffering from its overuse. And I can assure you, slowly chewing on a piece of sugar cane is an infinitely better experience than ingesting 2 tablespoons of refined sugar. I have yet in my life been able to do that without hours of nausea – while the slow chewing of a sugar cane in the mouth lights up the entire rest of the day.
Chewing sugarcane was an absolute treat. Growing up, in January we would get couple of whole sugarcane stalks, break them up and chew on them for couple of days. We pretty much couldn’t eat anything spicy after that as our tongues would be roughed up… but absolutely worth it.
I had one experience of chewing sugar cane while in Hawaii. That was over 30 years ago. Definitely worth it.
In Robert Lustigs “Metabolical”, he presents the mantra- “protect the liver, feed the gut”. He also states that the fiber in fruits, regulates satiety as a protective mechanism against overconsuming fructose and overwhelming the liver.
“I did not even mention the single most important of all chemicals refined from plants – and that would be sugar from sugar cane.”
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz
The villain in John Yudkin’s Pure, White and Deadly
I wonder what “decide for yourself” people in the current HHS administration think about anarchist biohacking such as that developed by Four Thieves Vinegar collective.
Perhaps a UK branch of that group will work out a simple procedure for at-hope preparation of ASA.
I hope that there will be a core of “makers” who can keep the world running after the LLMs have cognitively disabled everyone else.
I sometimes see white willow bark as an ingredient in dietary supplements. But the only one I remember specifically is some ACE stacks (aspirin, caffeine, ephedra). Take those in the proper ratio and you get a thermogenic boost. Popular among body builders in the dieting down phase. But too much and you get mighty speedy!
Maybe the UK needs to contact their former colony: Ghana…
https://cpmr.org.gh/
IM Doc you mention petroleum organic chemicals. If these are refined from petroleum oil, could there be shortages in some areas where manufacturing takes place?
The vast majority of our medications are from all kinds of organic chemistry molecules. Some of them are far easier to combine together than others. Some of them are absolutely ridiculously tedious to make. We also have the problem of right sided and left sided enantiomers. This is in many cases very difficult to separate – and some of these issues have actually gone on to be carcinogens. Needless to say this is a very delicate process.
All of these drugs which are made from organic chemicals largely come from natural gas and petroleum by-products and reactions. That is another issue of contention in our world trade system. So many of these precursor chemicals are shipped in from China and India to be manufactured here that that entire system could be used as a chokehold and a significant disabling weapon.. Please note, it is not just pharmaceuticals. These precursors that are shipped in also include many other things like fertilizer, pesticides and all kinds of plastic products. The IV bags for instance that are used in the hospital…..virtually none of the actual bags is made in the USA.
I suspect the shortage exists within the system rather than in the whole of market. NHS drug buying ends up with a small number of wholesalers on contract at a price. If nobody can supply them at that price (logistic issues, inflation etc) then none of said drug will be in the pharmacy system. There’s no shortage of aspirin on supermarket shelves at ten pence a pill, AFAIK, just in NHS pharmacies at a penny a pill.
Whereas some drugs have been in short supply for years in serious indications like oncology. This has been the result of slightly different drivers, where a European wholesaler is able to achieve higher prices in other health systems and slow rolls NHS delivery….
You can get a good idea how widespread the purchasing issues are from this page of Short Supply.Protocols, which are triggered for substitutable drugs.
Only a handful are current but there are pages of expired protocols for basic medicines like antibiotics and blood pressure treatment (Ramipiril) etc.
Could not get the link to paste in my earlier comment but here it is:
https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/pharmacies-gp-practices-and-appliance-contractors/serious-shortage-protocols-ssps
The NHS can be very late&stage USSR in its mal-incentives but it did employ more people than the Red Army!
Regarding “This is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is North Gaza”:
1) The comments under the twitter post are edifying.
2) Those who posted the video clip utterly failed to draw the appropriate comparisons: it should have been “This is not Nanking in 1938 or Warsaw in 1944, this is North Gaza”. The context of those historical precedents — reasons for the armed struggle, mentality of the oppressor, disparity in power, methods applied to eradicate the resistance, complete material and human devastation as outcome of the operation — match accurately those for Gaza.
Re Musk and his spat with Ryanair CEO:
‘Musk could barely hide the sting he felt from the snub. He initially responded by calling O’Leary “misinformed” and added that he doubted Ryanair “can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately.” ‘
Ryanair are notorious for cost shaving and penny pinching. Basic fares are usually low but notorious for add-ons that push up the price. Air crew have to pay for their own uniforms and supposedly not paid when the plane is on the ground. Hence their punctuality. As most Ryanair flights are relatively short hop, not sure how many passengers would be desperate to pay for add on wifi connection. Having said that, when I fly from to my local airport in south of France – only served by Ryanair, I am amazed how many passengers buy small bottles of wine at an outrageous price on a 1.5 hour flight when the bar in the arrival area charges less than 1/4 the price if you are that bothered about having a drink.
However when it comes to fuel use, the airline is renowned for not carrying too much ‘redundant’ fuel on flights. So much so, that when a Ryanair plane has to circle an airport for whatever reason before landing, the pilots often ask for priority to land lest they run out of fuel if they have to stay airborne for much longer.
Musk would be well advised to heed the old advice of not getting into a pissing contest with a skunk when it comes to duelling with O’Leary.
Hard to believe that Musk was stupid enough to fall for it again and again. I swear to you, Musk has the temperament of Donald Duck-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFJLD7w_kdE (14 secs)
And it gets him into trouble. Like when he had a fight with Scott Bessent and ended up with a black eye that could not be hidden. And O’Leary played him like a fiddle here and made Musk look stupid.
Ryanair once tweeted a ‘risque’ ad hinting William Windsor might like to fly with them, taking into account his alleged sexual preferences and only withdrew it under pressure from the royal family.
https://www.celebitchy.com/860474/kensington_palace_demanded_that_ryanair_apologize_for_that_2022_tweet/
LOL #TIL
Re: China reveals 200-strong AI drone swarm that can be controlled by a single soldier — ‘intelligent algorithm’ allows individual units to cooperate autonomously even after losing communication with operator
This is what Anduril software is in theory made for. If drones are the future, these will be the 2 teams.
My money is on the Imperial Chinese drone tech.
It’s nice to see a positive article about renewable energy “solar and wind overtake fossil fuels in the EU.” Unfortunately the article was superficial and didn’t go into any of the Dynamics of the energy market. Last week NC ran a piece by an oil and gas lobbyist telling us how renewable energy is too expensive. What a shame NC doesn’t want to discuss energy from and energy centric perspective. The first step is acknowledging price, by accepting Lazard’s numbers as the industry standard: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/
NC often includes links to pieces that the editors disagree with. One has to hear contradictory opinion and arguments to understand what’s going on.
Based on having read over two million comments (no typo), I have yet to see an instance, including this one, where concern trolling was done in good faith. Your comment is an attack on the site by falsely depicting NC as having an anti-renewables posture. So this is two policy violations in one comment, since you also straw manned.
I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet elsewhere.
Zap!! Reading and responding to articles and comments at NC requires knowing the neighborhood, first. BTDT.
‘Li Zexin 李泽欣
@XH_Lee23
“China will lose the US market…”
“We don’t care. The world is big enough that the US is not the totality of the world’s market.”
🤷♂️Victor Gao was not kidding.’
The US deep state has been pushing for an economic divorce from China for many years now. The Chinese, realizing that this was inevitable, hoped for an amicable divorce. Instead Trump tried to make it a sudden split that would leave the US in the commanding position. Well, that didn’t happen. At this point I think that the Chinese are slowly giving up on the US market and will concentrate on the rest of the world instead. This would end up leaving the US in an isolated position but free-dum, amiright?
Other than the unlimited* dollar printing press, what is the attraction of the US market to the rest of the world anyway? It seems like we have largely become a middleman in everyone else’s transactions with our funny money lubricant supposedly making the process easier. But this just seems like such an exorbitant expense that it might be worth taking some financial pain now to cut this particular middleman out of the system.
* unlimited only for the purposes of TPTB, not for any social good of the deplorables inhabiting the US.
re: history genocides
COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE
What Did Germans Know About the Holocaust? What Do We Know About the Gaza Genocide?
By Alfred de Zayas
January 21, 2026
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2026/01/21/what-did-germans-know-about-the-holocaust-what-do-we-know-about-the-gaza-genocide/
Merka: “I see nothing… I hear nothing…I know nothing…”
“Ukraine calls trilateral talks with U.S. and Russia to end war “constructive””
The Russians are of a different opinion. They are furious that the Ukrainians still target civilians and just a day or so, a Ukrainian UAV blew up an ambulance on the way to pick up someone and which killed all three paramedics. This was in the Kherson Oblast-
https://www.rt.com/russia/631475-zakharova-accuses-kiev-of-hypocrisy/
Trump offers nothing different from Minsk, that is rebuild Kiev for a go in 2029. Russian Federations wants the Russian speaker Oblasts and nothing like Minsk.
The EU wants to occupy Kiev.
Regime change needed in the west!
There’s a lot of questionable supposition and rhetoric in the article about Artificial Wombs (not the least tarring Marxist Feminism with what I think is a largely discredited theory — personally I prefer Sylvia Federici’s more contemporary ideas of women and reproduction as a segment of marxist theories on primitive accumulation).
But I was genuinely surprised to see the author skip over the biological risks at a time biome science is defining medical issues related to even c-sections for drastically reducing an infants biome diversity. Limited access to the birth canal isn’t the only possible culprit (overuse of antibiotics during pregnancy and with the very young is also a likely suspect). Even from the headline my brain jumped to the potential developmental and physical risks such a procedure would likely cause.
The author also ignores the recent study shared here at NC a couple weeks back on the increased understanding of two-way communication between the mother and developing fetus, using the example of how mother’s milk production varies by situation and child.
If anyone is interested in more on research into the human biome, a friend’s excellent documentary “The Invisible Extinction” is well worth watching https://www.theinvisibleextinction.com/
Of the other part of my brain raised on science fiction likes the idea of swarms of subhuman billionaire children turning on their parents in a classic ‘eat the rich’ kind of way, but of course we’re currently living with the wider trump family who sadly seem far too capable of hurting the rest of us faster than they seem to be hurting themselves.
Great comment.
Have you read the Dark Matter book? opened up my thinking to the microbiome and importance of to us.
almost to the extent that i should refer myself as “we” rather than “I”.
you can make the case that our behaviour is not based on our brain but our brain body system including billions of bacteria, phages, etc. in other words “we”.
We are walking talking ecosystems.
re: Designing AI-resistant technical evaluations Anthropic.com
For those who are unaware, Anthropic makes the US OpenAI competitor LLMs and their models are generally considered the best currently for software-related tasks. I think Anthropic’s success is really a story about early recognition that general purpose LLM would never pay off given the training costs and focusing on niches/use cases to sculpt and train the models around is a better strategy. Anthropic/Claude usage is extremely dominant for software tasks to the point where it is seen more as a “luxury B2B service provider” than anything grandiose like AGI.
Some company vending toward the US Navy is selling an AI call ShipOS they claim can project “manage” shipbuilding ostensively that it won’t take 12 years to get the second Ford class aircraft carrier to sea.
My observation is how do you train an numerous interacting LLM’s for AI on 6000 pages of DoD finance and budget manuals. Much less get an LLM to tell you the ship should be cancelled due to schedule and cost variances which could never be overcome (people cannot say this now!!!).
Program schedule/cost performance has been IT’ed since the days of Honeywell 6000! AI (data center doing supercomputing for chess) is scarcely more than an evolution of H6000…..
The current class of US LLM’s are transformer type models. Here is a good visual explainer of what a transformer model is and does.
There are two main approaches to your question: first, training an existing open source model on the DoD finance and budget manuals and have someone assign weights and biases to each new bit of data so the LLM itself can respond on the custom/private data. This is usually called “fine-tuning” a model and has hit or miss success rate depending on how well-curated the new data is and if it is enough to construct meaningful associations based on the use case. Not to mention the use case has to match the type of model used (for example, is the end application going to rely on agentic/multistep workflows or simple question and response interaction + new project/file/asset generation)
Second, more context is provided to the model as part of a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) connection. Depending on how the context is provided and additional tooling (this is the software/IP black box of the current crop of AI companies built on top of LLM providers) the output of the LLM is significantly altered.
What they’ve likely done is created a curated data set around DoD project management and trained a suitable open source model on it, and come up with some project management tooling and a means to customize RAGs so a project can ‘learn’ from any new custom project manuals or whatever. This is like 95%+ of all the AI application tiers built around the current types of open source and frontier LLM.
I assume over the next 18-24 months there will be a mini-cycle in AI backend infra providers focusing just on RAG layers and tooling for downstream providers and this will be another type of “luxury B2B software service” like Anthropic’s models. This has been one of the big lessons of the coding assistant tooling era of LLM applications: RAG has a bigger effect on use case outcome than model itself as the models reach parity outside of specific use case focus. RAG tooling for software management is much different than, say, RAG tooling for video/music generation/editing for creating advertisements (my personal vote for the next major LLM use case after coding assistants are settled over the next year).
Thanks a lot for that explanation. I appreciate your educated comments on AI that treat it as what it is, a programming technology that can perform interesting tasks.
More like, how do you train the LLM to pretend to follow the DoD manuals, but actually ignore them. Which is what the admirals (and contractors) really want…. Since they’re an opaque black box, they can point to the LLM and say, ‘We trained it on all these conflicting rules and this is what it came up with, so everything is fine’ and no one can prove otherwise.
I don’t think Ship OS has anything to do with finance and budget manuals. It’s aimed at the planning/scheduling/operations processes in the yard. Probably first new construction (as the tasks are more knowable) and then repair (where condition assessment is a large factor in determining scope of work). That does flow back to the buyer (program office or type commander) as “should cost/will cost” estimating.
We’ve been using Claude on our open source project for code reviews for a while. Kind of testing the waters for asking Claude to analyze issues but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Recently started looking at Llama, but that one doesn’t seem as polished.
“Does Europe Need a Modern-Day Octavian Augustus? Lessons in Pragmatic Reform for a Divided Union”
Oh god no. The EU already has its Lady Livia behind the scenes trying to centralize all power to her own office. A major problem for the EU is that Brussels is seizing powers from its member States and treat them like vassals. Having a modern day Octavian Augustus would accelerate the problem and make the EU even more dysfunctional. They need to revert back into a sort of federation to give them any chance of survival as the present EU leadership is running the whole continent into the ground.
Would Russia, China, and America be the new Triumvirate?
Trump-Xi-Putin
Gotta nice ring to it!
The only way out is “through” right?
Reply to the Rev above: And on top of all that, the EU have the acting emperor, an unhinged neo-Caligula, to deal with. There is no way for an Octavian to emerge, it would have to be a proconsul to enforce imperial oligarch policy on the unruly vassals..
The Commission is not elected by the public, and largely uncountable to the public already. Doubling down on authoritarianism and corruption will make it worse. Or maybe there is an opportunity here?
Translation: The emiseration propaganda apparatus has been tried and found wanting.
RIP Michael Parenti
https://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/25/michael-parenti-1933-2026-1918/
Parenti had been ill and out of commission for quite a while. He never received the widespread acclaim or veneration given to Chomsky. But if someone were to ask me which of these prolific authors were more valuable, it would be no contest. For those who might question my strong preference for Parenti, here’s a useful, long-form explanation:
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2020/06/03/the-mainstream-and-the-margins-noam-chomsky-vs-michael-parenti/
Rest in Peace Michael
I recently read Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar which I recommend. I agree, for me he was more valuable and showed more consistency than Chomsky.
Another person of that generation who is still going strong, of course, is the inestimable prof. Michael Hudson, who has not received the widespread acclaim that he deserves. However, here on NC, he is a superstar.
FACTS
HUDSON IS ALREADY A LEGEND
#HUDSONHAWKS
#FORGIVEUSOURDEBTS
also 🪦 Parenti 🫡
R.I.P.
RIP
“CDC Calculates Continuing Burden from COVID-19 Illnesses” – the proposed reason that the number of deaths and hospitalizations (for older adults) are ~half the highest point is population immunity… Something that is not applicable to Coronaviruses, and an idea that will have to be pried from their cold, dead, fingers.
Looking at 2022-2024, the count of illnesses go down, which of course would have nothing to do with the dismantling of the testing infrastructure that had existed. Outpatient and inpatient visits go down slightly, and deaths stay the same. I wonder if general economic malaise and lack of access to affordable health care could possibly factor into that.
While older adults are still getting it the worst, very young children are second, which is certainly a good thing long term; building immunity and all that, dontcha know.
Finally, the big point they make, that older adults are being impacted at lower rates, glosses over that if that’s the case, then regular adult numbers must be up overall (if still below the high-water mark) – because the overall numbers aren’t shown as having a significant decline.
So if you’re like me and thought – oh good, at least the CDC’s still talking about this a little bit and in a way that doesn’t sound like complete denial. They’re still soft-pedaling as much as they can.
And I hope such grief is visited upon these minimizers, that opting out of this world is seen as an urgent recourse. We’d be better without them anyway.
Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis (NY Times via archive.ph; 22 minute read)
Maybe it’s just that stable genius Trump’s attempt to recreate of the Warsaw Ghetto – only this time it’s packed with multicultural anti-Trump voters.
And now, a word from the Guardian, where poor Mr. Tisdale is convinced the liberal world order isn’t collapsing, it’s just Trump.
Because we should all remember, they’re OK with Gaza, with Ukraine, and mostly OK with what happened in Venezuela. They’re especially OK with denying Venezuela the ability to use their gold stored in UK facilities to buy medicine for their citizens. They’re OK with debanking undesirables. They’re OK with total information awareness and future crime policing. They’re OK with limiting free speech. They were OK with the Maidan. They’re happy to erect agreements that they know are lies, Minsk I, II, …. They’re happy to bomb Somalia and Yemen. They’re OK with ISIS. All of this is fine. But threaten NATO and of course, now, the world order is in jeopardy from a “monster”.
I feel like Gandi’s joke has only gotten better with age. Western civilization is a great idea. I hope we realize it someday.
I always assumed that the Observer retained Tisdale as an empathic act of humanitarian generosity to remind us all of our responsibilities to the truly unhinged. Now he’s been relegated to the Guardian because the Observer’s new management probably wish the paper to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the Middle East build up is to protect Israel while the disarmament of Hezbollah is finally put into operation ? The Lebanese gov. was suborned as soon as Mr Trump was elected but despite extreme pressure has not been able to seize Hezbollah amouries.
Just lately there has been some statements about Iran backing them up this time and the West will have to occupy Iran’s missile forces if they try to intervene on Israel’s assembly areas. Poor Lebanese know they will get the Gaza treatment but are incapable of protecting themselves.
I already mentioned it once a couple days ago, but I find it surprising that nobody is considering these assets could be deployed to cover US forces exiting Syria and Iraq.
Of the sources I’ve seen that actually analyze the details, they seem to agree that an air bridge is now in place but sufficient forces for anything more than a (stupid & spiteful) skirmish aren’t really being accumulated in the theater. Which would imply to me the air-bridge is in case things need to move the other way, out of the theater.
And all within a few weeks of Saudia sweeping the UAE (and therefore Israel?) out of Yemen, the US abandoning the YPG in NE Syria, a reshuffle in Iraq (even Nouri al-Maliki coming back?), and things clearly not going the way the Western governments hoped in Iran. Even Pete Hegseth seems to be suddenly very camera-shy, especially for a former TV host.
Anything’s possible, but my gut feeling is all this news about a US build-up may turn out to be the proverbial mountain birthing a mouse, while the (unreported, more embarrassing) truth is US forces & influence are being ejected from multiple countries.
Drove to Salt Lake City today, and its amazing how little snow there is in Utah, and Colorado and other Colorado River tributaries are just as bad. There’s a couple months of winter left to play catch-up, but if they don’t get a winter, the Colorado River situation becomes rather more urgent.
So you drove in from the South on I-15? That area of Utah is the western edge of the Colorado River watershed. The CR Basin is in steep decline, but I believe it’s the snow in the Rockies that is most important. The powder skiing in Utah is sublime, however.
Fascinating to see all the Old Testament themed media coming at us this spring. I wonder how much of that propaganda was planned after the concentrated bad press from Gaza?
> I wonder how much of that propaganda was planned after the concentrated bad press from Gaza?
100%
re: Western Marxism
Important addition to the debate about the left in the West:
German-language JACOBIN with a longer piece about Perry Anderson´s criticism of “Western Marxism”.
machine-translation
The problem with “Western Marxism”
Perry Anderson’s classic work “On Western Marxism” is hardly read in Germany. Yet it would be a key work for understanding the academicization of the left and for moving away from it.
by Christian Hofmann
Jan. 25th 2026
https://archive.is/bTkSx
Excellent. Thank you, AG.