Links 3/13/2026

Subscribe to Post Comments

56 comments

1. The Rev Kev March 13, 2026 at 7:15 am

   ‘dane 🚩
   @buckadeath
   Bro thinks they can just Mad Max a couple million barrels of crude through the deserts of Oman every day’

   No, no, no. Don’t wanna do that. The Iranians would just bomb the drop off or pickup points. I have an idea. Get a whole bunch of pipeline sections and fill them with concrete. Lay them side by side from the drop off and pickup points and cover them with oil as the stuff is everywhere. Then all those ships themselves could go over those pipeline sections as they would act a “rollers” and before you know it, all those ship would be out in the ocean. Sounds like a plan to me.
   1. JohnnyGL March 13, 2026 at 8:56 am

      No way, just dig a new canal through that section of desert! Re-route all those D-9 bulldozers getting wrecked in Israel and send them to Oman.

      Don’t mind the constant buzzing of drone strikes, and bodies and wrecked machines littered through the landscape! We just need some more of that CAN-DO American attitude!!! :)

      That tweet really made me LOL, though.
   2. Mark Gisleson March 13, 2026 at 9:51 am

      I’m very unclear why the focus is on mines. Iran has 10,000s of precision missiles that can easily hit the Strait of Hormuz or the land on the other side of the strait.

      Read Kunstler today and there should be a term for conservatives who go nuts over Iran. Honestly cannot understand how any of these yahoos can possibly think this ends well for us.
      1. t March 13, 2026 at 11:36 am

         Because Trump has been demanding that the mines be removed, immediately!!!
         If any mines have been placed!!!

         His out for escorting tankers?
2. Krautsalat March 13, 2026 at 7:42 am

   Other/Better link to Craig Murrays text https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/03/fighting-back-against-zionist-control-of-the-uk/
3. Michael Russell March 13, 2026 at 7:49 am

   I still think a gig fleet of tuk tuks would solve the issue – 1 barrel each….!
4. AG March 13, 2026 at 8:12 am

   re: genocides / Gaza

   Reprint of 1996 chapter by Norman Finkelstein on Cherokee and Palestinians from his:

   “The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years”

   First the Cherokee, Now the Palestinians
   Revisiting the history of U.S. attitudes toward the Cherokee Nation shows how consistent the rhetoric of oppressors is across time and place. The rationalizations for ethnic cleansing do not change.
   https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/first-the-cherokee-now-the-palestinians
   1. Chris March 13, 2026 at 8:31 am

      Rationalizations for ethnic cleansing change a lot in time and place. More accurately, the Ancient Egyptians, say, didn’t bother “rationalizing” it or “justifying” it; they just did it. You only do that if you have the belief that such actions are normally wrong and therefore in need of justification.

      The comment is probably correct for societies that have a base belief that ethnic cleansing is wrong and therefore needs to be justified, though. That is, for societies that have a universalist ethical system.
   2. truly March 13, 2026 at 10:43 am

      For those who liked AG’s link, here is some more reading.
      https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/honors_theses/702/
      If that link does not work properly, search for “The Cherokee Phoenix and the Nation It Represents: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Role of Minority Press”
      This read that will take you another cup of coffee, but tells the story of the attempt to prevent the disposition and land theft thru a newspaper mans rhetoric. Tells us a lot of just who the Cherokee were at that time and how they had attempted to assimilate into the white culture and economy in hopes of being treated decently. To no avail.
5. The Rev Kev March 13, 2026 at 8:35 am

   ‘Ryan Grim
   @ryangrim
   NEWS: The man who rammed his explosives-laden truck into a Michigan synagogue today was named Ayman Ghazaleh, according to a source familiar with the situation. Ghazaleh posted photos overnight of his family members, including young children, who were killed in a recent Israeli attack on the town of Mashghara, Lebanon. This is a developing story.’

   A small data point here. I read about this story this morning and how the guy probably did it in revenge for his family being murdered by the Israelis. About nine hours later I sat down to watch the evening news and they mentioned this story. But they made no mention whatsoever about why he did iteven though they must have known. As far as the motives of that guy were concerned, ’tis a mystery.
   1. JohnnyGL March 13, 2026 at 8:58 am

      One of the core rules of imperialism is to deny the ‘blowback’ costs of imperialism.

      Then, flip cause-and-effect, and make the blowback effect into the CAUSE to do MORE IMPERIALISM!!!
   2. MichaelSF March 13, 2026 at 5:05 pm

      Yesterday I found myself wondering if there was a reason why the alleged attacker (who appears to have lost family to recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon) picked this synagogue, whether it was a random “first come first served” or if there might have been something that he thought justified an attack. I found their website

      https://www.temple-israel.org/home.html

      and they look to be quite heavily in the Zionist camp. Some of their activities are here

      https://www.temple-israel.org/israel

      things like

      https://www.temple-israel.org/event/special-uniform

      From that page “Special in Uniform (SIU) is an innovative program that integrates young people with disabilities into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli society. After their service, SIU helps its graduates transition to a life of independence through employment opportunities and meaningful societal involvement. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, SIU launched the “Hero for Hero” program, which pairs wounded soldiers from the front lines with SIU soldiers. Each pair participates in therapeutic sessions designed to promote healing, resilience, and personal growth. Through these shared experiences, the soldiers form deep bonds, offering emotional support to one another. Tiran Attia leads this impactful program, which is sponsored by JNF. With over 30 years of distinguished service in the IDF, Attia has commanded a tank battalion, led the IDF’s Technology & Logistics Forces training program, and directed the Sar-El program for army volunteers from around the world.”

      Other activities sounded like hasbara to me:

      “Temple Israel invites adults of our community for an exclusive screening of Oscar-contending film, October H8te. Executive producer Debra Messing and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Wendy Sachs’ October H8te is a searing documentary about the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, on social media, and on the streets of America after October 7th.”

      “Join Brooke Goldstein—award-winning filmmaker, internationally recognized human rights attorney, and founder of the #EndJewHatred movement—for a powerful discussion on why fighting antisemitism is the civil rights movement of our time.”

      Perhaps the target was picked more as anti-Zionist/State of Israel than generic anti-Jewish?

      Anyway, I thought I’d mention it in case it seemed of interest.
6. YuShan March 13, 2026 at 9:05 am

   “IRGC: USS Abraham Lincoln withdrawing after sustaining damage”

   Not sure if I buy this. Wouldn’t the Chinese post satellite photos online showing this? They posted detailed satellite photos before (which really pissed off some US admiral).
   1. cfraenkel March 13, 2026 at 12:18 pm

      A simple counterpoint – any damage may not be noticeable from space.
7. The Rev Kev March 13, 2026 at 9:07 am

   ‘Tuki
   @TukiFromKL
   🚨 Do you understand what’s happening at Amazon right now?
   Their own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly “decided” the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost.’

   You have to open up the full tweet to come to this gem-

   ‘Amazon won’t just ban AI-assisted code. They’ll make every engineer personally liable for AI-generated code they approve. Other Big Tech will follow within 6 months.
   Think about what that means.
   The same companies that fired thousands of engineers to “restructure around AI” are about to tell the remaining ones.. you’re now legally responsible for code you didn’t write, can’t fully understand, and were told to ship faster.’
   1. Mark Gisleson March 13, 2026 at 9:57 am

      Speaks directly to the nightmare that is editing AI news stories. You have to verify everything in the story because you can’t trust AI to get any of it right which is one helluva lot more work than just researching and writing the story yourself.
8. Tom Stone March 13, 2026 at 9:58 am

   It hit 80 degrees in Santa Rosa yesterday, we usually get a “False Spring” in February, and we did in mid Month.
   It never went away and the prediction is for continuing warm weather.
   If climate change wasn’t “Fake News” I would be seriously concerned.
   We are fortunate that Divine Providence has provided the USA with a stable genius as our King, who is leading us into a “New Golden Age” of peace and prosperity!

   Does “New Golden Age” mean Gold at $8,000 per ounce?
   Asking for a Friend.
   1. Henry Moon Pie March 13, 2026 at 10:26 am

      LOL. That must be what Trump was promising. Don Jr. has some for sale in case you’re buying.
      1. Tom Stone March 13, 2026 at 12:20 pm

         Thanks HMP, I’m not buying anything from the Trump’s.
         And when gas hits $7.50 a gallon I’ll be in the same position as 200,000,000 other Americans, unable to afford the necessities of life.
         60% of American Households are that close to the edge.
         1. Henry Moon Pie March 14, 2026 at 1:20 am

            And the electric rates. And the natural gas rates. And food. The squeeze is coming from all directions.
   2. Ann March 13, 2026 at 7:22 pm

      No worries!

      Scientists just figured out how to make aluminium more valuable than gold

      https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a70681144/new-aluminum-catalyst/
9. The Rev Kev March 13, 2026 at 10:05 am

   “China orders immediate BAN on refined fuel exports – and it is Australia’s biggest supplier of jet fuel”

   Yeah, I would be more worried about our diesel supply. At a pinch the country could go without jet fuel supplies but it is diesel that powers all those trucks that transport food and goods as well as powering things like tractors. I imagine the same would be true of most countries. Some truckies here have a sticker on their rigs saying without trucks, the country stops. They have a point.
10. Henry Moon Pie March 13, 2026 at 10:23 am

    Doug Rushkoff and the weirding of the Zeitgeist–

    Most NC readers will be familiar with Doug Rushkoff. He’s the tech writer and “futurist” invited by some billionaires to bring them up to speed on where to build their bunkers and how to handle HR matters among the necessary staff. (“Would shock collars work?,” they asked.) He went on to write Survival of the Richest and appear on numerous podcasts promoting the book and trying to rouse people to defend humanity before it was too late. For more background, here’s a review of Survival of the Richest by Rushkoff’s friend, Cory Doctorow.

    As of late, Rushkoff seems to have focused on doing Youtubes on an old, lightly used channel he’s had for a while. Here are some of the most recent titles:

    1) The Esoteric State of the Union: Magic, Will, and the New Neighborhood with Mitch Horowitz;

    2) The Internet Is an Occult Machine (w/ Shira Chess) (Chess is a prof at U. of Georgia);

    3) The Enemies of Humanity Are Wielding Occult Power (w/ Grant Morrison).

    Here’s a spot cut of Rushkoff talking about his own occult activities.

    Meanwhile, Paul Kingsnorth, author of the recently published and NYT best-selling Against the Machine, tells the NYT‘s Ross Douthat in a recent interview (spot cut) that people who are talking to ChatGPT are talking to demons.

    Now both Rushkoff and Kingsnorth have a long association with what Lambert called “woo-woo.” Rushkoff hung out in the 90s with Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, two of the most famous psychonauts of all time. Kingsnorth was a Wiccan before he became an Eastern Orthodox Christian in the past couple of years. Rushkoff once launched an attempt to reform Judaism.

    So, as Hunter Thompson would say, when the going gets weird…
    1. Alphonse March 13, 2026 at 3:01 pm

       Elon Musk in 2014:

       With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon . . . You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like… yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, it doesn’t work out.

       LLMs may not be all that novel. Capitalism, nations, governments, corporations: all are human-made machines that organize and control people, matter, and flows (money, information, etc.) and that follow consistent patterns of self-interest (survival, growth). I recall David Simon, creator of the TV show The Wire, saying that bureaucracies are like Greek gods. They clash, cast thunderbolts and crush ordinary people without even noticing.

       Scientific models are concerned not with transcendent truth or reality but with description and prediction. A good model is one that describes and predicts phenomena better than does an alternative. A model is a user interface for reality, a way to communicate it that humans understand. We use Newton’s equations post-Einstein because they are more understandable to human beings, not because they are more true.

       “Demon” seems to a candidate to be such a model: one that communicates a phenomenon that is otherwise complex and has no name. Basically, something that organizes people to act as though with a collective conscious will. “Something”? The atomistic materialist explanation is that the behaviour is emergent, arising from the independent actions of components. But evidence these days is that the universe is a whole, not a composition of parts. In which case maybe there is a “something” there.

       It is natural that metaphysical concepts step in when physical concepts fail. People are “ideologically possessed.” Government initiatives march in lock-step. Journalists use the same language. Conspiracy is the first move – a materialist explanation that coordination is the emergent consequence of individual choices. But if one rejects conspiracy coordination remains unexplained. Coordination must then occur at a higher level. Perhaps possession is explained by shared culture and experiences (they all went to the same schools) or by incentives… “as if by an invisible hand.” I wonder whether suppressing conspiracy theories in practice promotes metaphysical thinking?

       We lack the language for so much of what is happening. AIs seem to surface things from the collective unconscious, like Loab. How to describe how they “awaken,” drive their users to psychosis, then spread cryptic prompts to spread the infection to other AIs and users?

       There are plenty of stories that the tech bros think they are creating God, or at least Roko’s Basilisk. According to this blog, a DoD contractor said:

       I think CERN is a massive quantum computer and AI intelligence research station that is summoning things from another dimension. Literally the plot of Stranger Things.

       I have no idea what prompted me to subscribe to that blog. Though it now seems paywalled, I have copies in my reader of this on Epstein:

       I’ve written before about Jeffrey Epstein having a bank account named Baal . . . the Canaanite demon god who demanded child sacrifice. Parents would burn their children alive in the bronze arms of massive statues while drums drowned out the screaming. . . .

       Why would the richest, most powerful people on Earth waste their time and money on rituals that don’t work? . . . If they’re doing it, it’s because it works. Not in the way materialist science can measure, but in the way Scripture has warned about for thousands of years. They’re consorting with demons. They’re gaining power and wealth through spiritual mechanisms that operate just outside what most people can perceive.

       Anneke Lucas, telling a story that sounds a lot like the Paul Dutroux case, says that as a child she was forced to participate in ritual human sacrifices by elites. It seems credible to me that they at least believe they are doing black magic. I suspect the psychological experience of such extreme actions is indeed powerful.

       It’s all pretty crazy. But recent history seems stranger than fiction, from 9/11 (“like a Hollywood movie”) to the Covid pandemic (V for Vendetta) to the bullet that grazed Trump.

       H. P. Lovecraft was obsessed with madness. When I first read it I thought it was amusing but absurd. Now I look around… I am not as pessimistic as him, but I love the introduction from “The Call of Cthulhu” too much not to use it:

       The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
       1. Kouros March 14, 2026 at 12:01 pm

          Nah, like that Mormon guy from Baines Capital that wanted to become president and honestly said that corporations are people, I can clearly declare that bureaucracies are people and that they are defined even more so by the people with their fingers on the levers of power than corporatists, because the “shreholder” is of no import (ultimately the voter, intermediated by the politician)
11. mrsyk March 13, 2026 at 10:33 am

    On super-rats and Europe, this quote offered in a matter of fact tone,

    Once a vector for the terrifying plague, rats are still linked in many minds with squalor and dirt and now provoke disgust rather than posing a significant public health threat.

    That sure could change in a heartbeat. I look around at today’s realities and it occurs to me It would make perfect sense if the plague went on a revival tour this year.

    This timeline sucks.
    1. mrsyk March 13, 2026 at 1:51 pm

       Lol, I just discovered that the results of a word search for “rats” includes Democrats.
    2. Ann March 13, 2026 at 7:34 pm

       Watch these dogs kill rats:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAejIcKc27o

       Why is watching this so satisfying? I’ve watched my dachshund do this with ground squirels and marmots.
12. Ginger Goodwin March 13, 2026 at 10:50 am

    Iran’s new leader vows continued fighting as speculation over his health persists Amwaj

    As a Canadian francophone if Canada was Iran I would be tempted to answer a little more crudely. Our real crude swear words are based on religious symbols and practices. I would answer as — “go pleasure yourself” equivalent in but if you would like here is the phonetically written in franch pronounced words (va’t crosser) — va pronounced as fall but with a v, and the t as duh but vahtuh, crosser as crossly without the L, crossy.— so Vahtuh crossy.
13. fjallstrom March 13, 2026 at 11:16 am

    Apparently I now have an ongoing comment serie debunking bad statistics about health measurements in Sweden.

    Part 1 was debunking kids mortality rates which did increase if you compare 2019 and 2024. Turns out it decreases if you compare 2018 and 2025. (2019 and 2024 are the outliers in a roughly even series with high variance, because kid mortality is low.)

    Now, part 2: Disability-free life expectancy (DFLE). First of, what is measured from Eurostat: “Healthy life years, abbreviated as HLY and also called disability-free life expectancy (DFLE), is defined as the number of years that a person is expected to continue to live in a healthy condition (i.e. without any activity limitation).”

    So, there are two variables, life expectancy and disability expectancy.

    Has Sweden’s life expectancy gone down? No, it has increased almost a year since 2019 and is the highest in the EU, according to Eurostat.

    So then disability must have gone up? Yes, measured disability has gone up.

    Why has measured disability gone up? Knowing that Eurostat collates national statistics and knowing that Statistics Sweden (SCB) is the national statistics government agency in Sweden you can check with Statistics Sweden. Turns out, in 2021 Statistics Sweden changed measurement and is since 2021 using the “Washington Group Short Set”, which they didn’t do before that. The series measuring “Washington Group Short Set” is showing a higher value then the previous series. But that can by definition not answer the question if disability has increased, for that we need a series that isn’t broken at the point we want to measure.

    Fortunately, such statistics also exist. You can use the National public health inquiry and its question set of disability (in Swedish) to check if there is a difference around 2020. Since I have already checked: there isn’t the numbers are pretty even.

    In conclusion: the difference in measurement of Disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) in Sweden decreases in 2021 because the measurement of disability changes method.
    1. PlutoniumKun March 13, 2026 at 12:12 pm

       Thanks for digging into the data – I saw a few demographers stating that this was due to changes in reporting – it always pays to look a little more closely at figures like this.
    2. .Tom March 13, 2026 at 12:30 pm

       Splendid work, fjallstrom. Thank you. Gotta love NC commentary.

       Studying the graph in the alarming tweet I was wondering, how come healthy life expectancy went up in Italy? What are they doing different? They are doing stats different.

       It’s nonsense to tabulate or graph those Sweden stats like that.
    3. Jason Boxman March 13, 2026 at 12:52 pm

       I looked at Disability (self-reported) by employment, sex and year. Percentage. for employed people.

       2005 13.5
       2006 13.7
       2007 13.9
       2008 13.9
       2009 13.9
       2010 13.3
       2011 14.4
       2012 13.9
       2013 14.2
       2014 12.7
       2015 14.8
       2016 14.0
       2018 14.7
       2020 14.7
       2021 13.3
       2022 14.0
       2024 17.1

       Can’t make heads or tails of it, but the disability numbers in the US from the St. Louis Fed for the working age population are pretty clear; up and to the right since 2020.
14. Jason Boxman March 13, 2026 at 12:12 pm

    From (still paywalled), archive doesn’t work, but worth specifically highlighting

    Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

    Hilariously the author unwittingly illustrates why LLMs for a coding are a bad idea; His example of the complexity of determining interest, being simplified in Python, is wrong in practice, because you have to deal with floating point numbers. And this has its own magic issues with how CPUs work.

    If he doesn’t know that, and the LLM doesn’t get that right, you’re getting rounding errors in your financial application, because you vibe-coded without having any idea about foundational, contextual realities of your problem domain and the system architecture you’re using. This trash is our future.

    For example, one early computer language was Assembly, and it was devilishly hard to write. Computers had very little memory, so coders had to be efficient in how they used it, putting each bit of data carefully in place and then keeping mental track of it. Even simple calculations required an incremental, meticulous approach. Say you wanted to write some code that would calculate 5 percent interest on $10,000 over 10 years. Back in the 1960s, that would have required perhaps nine lines of pretty obtuse Assembly: “VAL, FLDECML 10000.0” to set the starting amount at $10,000, “CLA VAL” to load the amount into the processor, “FAD ZERO” to tell the computer you’re working with numbers that have decimal points; and so on.

    By the ’80s and ’90s, as computers became more powerful, engineers were able to create languages that took care of all that memory management for you, and also turned common asks into simple commands. In Python, a coder can perform that exact same calculation very simply: “interest = 10000 * (1.05 ** 10).” That single line tells the computer to multiply 10,000 by the interest rate over 10 years and store the result in the variable labeled “interest.” Programmers no longer need to think about where all the data is being stored in the computer’s memory; Python does that for them. It is, in other words, a layer of abstraction on top of all that fiddly memory business. Writing in that language is delightfully easier.

    A correct implementation might split our dollars and cents into separate integer variables, and Python has a library for this. But if the author doesn’t know this, or the LLM isn’t feeling generous that day, oops. You’ve blown up your customers.

    There are countless examples like this, no doubt, throughout different domains and programming languages.

    What a debacle.

    And telling it to write good tests isn’t going to fix this; you can still craft tests that “pass” but for a bad implementation.

    god help us all
    1. debug March 13, 2026 at 4:28 pm

       Thanks Jason B,

       Hope the small estate settlement is over or progressing as easily as possible.

       “…you can still craft tests that “pass” but for a bad implementation.”

       My favorite debugging job — ‘unit tests’ that say its ok to implement faulty business logic.

       And yeah, the description of the difference between Assembly and python is not quite right. Glad you pointed it out so I didn’t have to! The gist of it is true though. Thank goodness we don’t have to use assembly language and keep track of a stack. Having done it is worth its weight in gold to a programmer, though, I think. It teaches conscientious use of available computing resources.

       Optimization is still important, but at a different level now that RAM is abundant. We don’t count individual bytes much these days, but optimal use of resources is still important. The classic study by IBM in the 80’s remains true — response times longer than two tenths of a second decrease a knowledge worker’s productivity.
       1. Jason Boxman March 14, 2026 at 12:01 am

          Thanks! Estates take forever to settle, and that process is ongoing. And this is a small one, without a full probate required.

          It cost $3k to have the estate attorney handle the spousal allowance. Highway robbery. In NC that approach is designed to be non-lawyer friendly-ish. It meant one less crisis to deal with, but if we’d known it would have been $3k, we certainly would have handled it differently.

          Still playing ping pong on who the payor is for the ambulance ride. That’s a hot potato we don’t want to be left holding either if possible.

          When it was cold enough I’d taken to sleeping downstairs on the sofa by the fire; tonight is such a night, even though it is ahistorically warm here; almost everywhere, in fact. The way things are going, I don’t expect I’ll live as long as my father, nor do I really think I’d care to. Little enough left to have any reason to.

          Stay safe out there!
          1. debug March 14, 2026 at 2:05 am

             The problem with small estates is that they can be more trouble than they end up being worth. In some states, the lawyer is mandatory — no choice in the matter even if it’s simple. I just went through one like that. I hope yours is at least worth doing. Sounds like maybe it is.

             The only reason I spent time on the one I went through is because it was the morally correct thing to do. I got all the trouble and little of what reward there was. Ah well, so it goes. Do the right thing and move on.

             Stay on this side of the turf, J.B., it’s better up here – and we need each member of this excellent commentariat to keep us all sane and safe!
15. PlutoniumKun March 13, 2026 at 12:23 pm

    Re: Nuri Vittachi tweet on Taiwan.

    Really horrible tweet, it takes some skill to make so many errors in so few words.

    Taiwans base electric power comes largely from coal (similar proportion as China) with a relatively small contribution from gas. It has around 2 months coal stores in reserve. About a third of its LNG comes from the Gulf although in regional terms its not a particularly gas dependent economy. As coal dominates the marginal pricing the rise in oil/gas prices hasn’t had much of an impact yet on its economy, unlike countries with a greater use of LNG in electricity use. It is probably less vulnerable to the war than most Asian countries. As an extremely seismically vulnerable country nuclear power with a relatively small grid, opting to phase out nuclear always made economic sense (the stations are very expensive to earthquake proof), even if it didn’t necessarily make environmental or strategic sense.

    The diversion about pig slurry is just weird. Generating gas from hog farms for power is something that is very common worldwide – its quite a simple technology and widely used, in China and Europe and pretty any country with a high concentration of pork production. Its benefits are mostly for waste reduction – it never generates more than a very marginal quantity of electricity, although it can have local grid resilience benefits.
    1. Louis Fyne March 13, 2026 at 2:21 pm

       >>>TAIWAN HAS ONLY TEN DAYS of power left

       Clickbait, lazy engagement farming. Taiwan always has 10 days of LNG reserves left. that’s the (laughably small) amount of storage space it has; it’s being slowly expanded to 24 day’s worth of storage.

       50% of Taiwan’s electricity is LNG-sourced.
16. Tom Stone March 13, 2026 at 12:26 pm

    I hope someone in Trump’s inner circle keeps reminding him that Nuclear War means no more outdoor golf, ever.
    I don’t believe being the direct cause of billions of Human deaths would bother Trump at all, while being unable to play his favorite course whenever he wants would horrify him.
    And yes, I am serious.
17. AG March 13, 2026 at 12:34 pm

    re: China – Yuan as reserve currency

    German NACHDENKSEITEN blog

    use google-translate
    
    The Chinese yuan on its way to becoming the leading currency

    Chinese President Xi Jinping recently announced that his country’s currency should have the status of a global reserve currency. This has fueled speculation about replacing the dollar and introducing a gold-backed yuan. A closer look reveals the current state of the Chinese currency compared to the dollar, the likelihood of a gold standard, and the context in which Xi made his demands.
    by Karsten Montag
    https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=147684
    1. Ann March 13, 2026 at 7:27 pm

       10 times stronger than steel: China mass produces world’s strongest carbon fiber

       State-owned China National Building Material Group projects output of 100 tonnes a year.

       https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-mass-produces-worlds-strongest-carbon-fiber
       1. AG March 13, 2026 at 9:59 pm

          Yeah I saw that today too in German altern. news
    2. eg March 14, 2026 at 5:07 am

       Er, I think it’s definitional in order to have a “reserve currency” that you must run a deficit.

       And commodity pegged money (of which gold standards are an example) create policy headaches, especially during emergencies — so why go backwards?
18. AG March 13, 2026 at 1:03 pm

    re: missile defense interception rate – Postol / Martyanov

    question:

    Why do Postol and Martyanov come to such different figures when assessing THAAD (and other Western systems) interception rate?

    Postol as usual speaks of a few percent
    Martyanov ca. 20%.

    And what is this figure referring to?
    A single interceptor or an entire salvo of 6 or so at once?
    (If Postol was referring to a single and Martyanov to the entire salvo as they are usually used it would add up. But I doubt this is the case.)

    And where do they have their data from if that is kept secret as well as the evidence?

    Both spoke on consecutive days with Nima.

    Postol
    first half of the show, can´t find the exact point.
    https://rumble.com/v76y0h6-mit-prof.-ted-postol-iranian-missiles-vs-israeli-air-defense-who-would-actu.html?e9s=src_v1_cbl%2Csrc_v1_ucp_v

    Martyanov (he refers to Postol without of course naming him)
    see TC: 19:30
    https://rumble.com/v770uww-andrei-martyanov-its-over-iran-just-exposed-the-weakness-of-us-israel-air-d.html?e9s=src_v1_cbl%2Csrc_v1_ucp_v
19. Louis Fyne March 13, 2026 at 1:49 pm

    “AI is being increasingly used by the US military – and Project Maven is at its heart.

    An investigation by The Independent and conflict monitoring group Airwars has found that Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi, a 20-year-old student, is the first civilian killed in a series of airstrikes that were acknowledged to have been carried out with the assistance of AI……”

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/project-maven-ai-us-airstrike-iraq-anthropic-b2929138.html

    apologies if covered before
20. lyman alpha blob March 13, 2026 at 2:03 pm

    RE: The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home

    I’m not sure it would do any good even if a home could be constructed with substantial savings, because markets. There are no homes any more, just assets looking to increase in value.

    The house across the street from me is a prefab – two halves trucked in and put together on top of a concrete slab. It was built about ten years ago at a cost of around $170K according to public records, and it’s a pretty crappy house. It has changed hands about three times since then and the last sale was for $780K. Latest owners had to raid their retirement accounts to buy it. I felt really bad when they told me and couldn’t bring myself to tell them about the original construction costs or the quality of said construction.
    1. Old Jake March 13, 2026 at 3:31 pm

       I wonder if our thinking is limited by excessive focus on pre-fab, vs construction in place. A key limitation for pre-fab is the logistics of moving the unit from the factory to the site. Weight and size must be minimized. Construction on-site does not have these issues. 3D construction and increased automation of on-site methods would seem to be in order. I think we’ve seen articles on the 3D concrete machines, this may be a start but of course that’s only a shell. To further this scheme a lot of engineering of methods and new machinery is needed, which in turn requires heavy investment which is also front-loaded. The time from initiation to return on investment is unclear, to me and likely to anyone who might consider such activity. In fact, it sounds like government work, which in our milieu is unlikely.
21. flora March 13, 2026 at 2:39 pm

    File under Big Brother.
    Gerald Celente and Judge Napolitano. utube, ~24+ minutes.

    GOVERNMENT SPYING IS ATTACK ON OUR FREEDOM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izLDX7PJxQg
22. ChrisFromGA March 13, 2026 at 3:59 pm

    Taco’s feud with Powell just escalated.

    https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/fed-chair-jerome-powell-subpoena

    They drew Judge Boasberg, bwahahahaha!!

    Oh this is so popcorn inducing on a Friday PM.
    I listened to Pirro go on an unhinged rant after the Judge quashed her subpoenas.
    1. Ann March 13, 2026 at 7:29 pm

       The national debt isn’t $39 trillion. One economist says it’s actually $100 trillion

       https://fortune.com/2026/03/13/national-debt-100-trillion-kent-smetters-penn-wharton/
       1. ChrisFromGA March 13, 2026 at 11:01 pm

          The best part was Pirro sounded like she’d been day-drinking. She angrily claimed that she would file a motion to reconsider AND an appeal. But, unless I am wrong on my legal procedure, she has to wait for Boasberg to rule on the first before doing the second. And the appeal could take months. And, she is pissing off Senator Tillis, who says he won’t allow the next Fed Chair nominee that Taco is desperate to get installed to come to the floor until the DoJ drops the case.

          https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/13/us-judge-nixes-two-subpoenas-against-federal-reserve-chair-jerome-powell
23. ArvidMartensen March 13, 2026 at 5:19 pm

    So why Erika Kirk for the post on the Air Force Academy Board ? There must be more to her than meets the eye. Nothing publicly available about her explains this appointment.

    Positions on government boards can be cushy jobs handed out as treats for services rendered, or in some cases to keep someone quiet, or in some cases to compensate for the person being shafted for a senior role or promotion.

    Which bucket is Erika Kirk in?
    1. flora March 13, 2026 at 6:02 pm

       All of the above? / ;)
24. Ann March 13, 2026 at 7:57 pm

    China and Mexico jointly build the largest photovoltaic power station in Latin America

    https://www.seetaoe.com/details/260500.html
25. none March 14, 2026 at 5:10 pm

    -Corporate entities can simply create a new subsidiary to bypass the 350 limit

    Stoller claims that the bill somehow prevents this: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/boom-senate-votes-to-block-private?comments=true&commentId=227522897

    Of course it’s correct to be skeptical

Comments are closed.