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Links 4/22/2026

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Could the Oldest Human Story Really Be 100,000 Years Old? ZME Science

Who Knew? 1 In 5 Americans Are Convinced They’re Psychic StudyFinds

Waiting on Apocalypse Hickman’s Hinterlands

Climate/Environment

Florida’s On Fire, Montana Puts Up A Column, And Severe Drought Lingers On. The Hotshot Wake Up

The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests Grist

HOW ‘NATIONAL SECURITY’ BECAME THE NEW JUSTIFICATION FOR DRILLING Atmos

Water

Rusting Rivers: Alarm Grows Over Uptick in Acidic Arctic Waters Yale Environment 360

Japan

Japan reverses landmark policy to allow lethal arms exports Asahi Shimbun

China?

Liquidating an “Empire”: China’s Strategy to Capitalise on US Hegemonic Strain | by Wu Xinbo Sinification

Chinese chess scandal erases decade of champions amid match-fixing probe Caixin

Southeast Asia

UN Warns of Worsening Hunger as Myanmar Runs Low On Fertilizer, Fuel The Irrawaddy

Syraqistan

Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank Norwegian Refugee Council

Israeli occupiers’ fire turns morning at Palestinian school into panic and bloodshed Anadolu Agency

IDF Gives Order To Fire On Civilians In Southern Lebanon. The Dissident

Settlers raise Israeli flag at Al-Aqsa, soldiers wave banners amid Lebanese village ruins New Arab

“Zionism is not reformable” — Israel’s ‘moral injuries’ and moral breakdown Conflicts Forum

***

Nerve Agents, Kill Plan: What US Nuke Scientist Told Undercover Journalist NDTV

Trump Does TACO Tuesday, But Still Sabotages Exit Ramp… JCPOA 2 Larry Johnson

Left With Nothing But Gimmicks, Trump Gets Bluff Called Again By Confident Iran Simplicius

US Central Command says forces ‘rearming’, ‘retooling’ during ceasefire – Live UpdatesDawn

Iranian shadow fleet tankers break through US blockade The Telegraph

US stresses effectiveness of blockade based on impact to Iran’s economy Lloyd’s List

US naval blockade has little impact on food supply: Iran Gulf Today

***

Donald Trump considers UAE bailout says he is shocked ‘they are really rich’ WION

European Disunion

EU fuel prices post fastest rise since 2022 — Eurostat TASS

EU attempts to outmaneuver Iran rollercoaster with emergency energy plan Politico

Charles Michel accuses von der Leyen of ‘power grab’ Brussels Times

Timmy the Whale cannot stop beaching himself off the German coast and in this he has become a powerful metaphor for the politics of the Federal Republic eugyppius

Old Blighty

UK inflation jumps to 3.3% in March as fuel prices surge amid Iran war CNBC

UK military trial drone swarm technology with European allies The Canary

Starmer has led a massive cover up about the Mandelson appointment Ian Proud

New Not-So-Cold War

Ukraine reopens damaged Druzhba pipeline to unlock €90 billion EU loan France24

Ukrainian drones strike Druzhba pipeline station that produces export-grade oil – sources Ukrayinska Pravda

The Grid Is the Loan Frame the Globe News. “How Russia Built a Nuclear Dependency Architecture Across the Global South While the West Sanctioned Everything Else.”

Ukraine’s richest man buys luxury apartment in Monaco for $550 million Kyiv Independent

Imperial Collapse Watch

US at risk of running out of missiles if another war breaks out after depleting stockpile in Iran operations CNN. “Breaks out”.

Trump trade chief urges US allies to pay more for critical minerals FT

Fixing the GaN Problem ChinaTalk

Immigration

Trump officials consider sending 1,100 Afghans who aided US to Congo Al Mayadeen

South of the Border

Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege U.S. Forces Kidnapped and Tortured Them Drop Site

U.S. PERSONNEL WHO DIED IN MEXICO WERE WORKING FOR THE CIA, SOURCES SAY The Intercept

Trump 2.0

NASA Breaks Silence on Deaths and Disappearances of Scientists With Ties to Space Tech Gizmodo

Dr. Oz announces a 50-state audit of Medicaid program oversight AP

Trump’s DOJ sued over campaign to amass data on millions of voters Stateline

GOP senators ponder giving Trump official blessing for Iran war Responsible Statecraft

The Uniparty

Biden Official: Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected Caitlin Johnstone

Police State Watch

ICE Is Planning New Fast-Track Construction Contracts Project Salt Box

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Is Your Pasta Sauce Listening? Prego Debuts Recording Device for the Dinner Table Hot Hardware

Maryland’s Bold Stand Against Dynamic Pricing: The First State to Ban Surveillance-Driven Grocery Prices Captain Compliance

MAHA

RFK Jr. Won’t Commit to Following New CDC Nominee’s Vaccine Guidance Truthout

AI

Florida AG launches criminal investigation into ChatGPT over FSU shooting NPR

How to Teach Kids to Evaluate Information (Before AI Teaches Them Not To) Card Catalog

Economy

Lufthansa cancels 20,000 short-haul flights, consolidates routes DPA International

Karex to raise prices sharply as Iran war strains supply chain The Star. World’s top condom producer.

***

A wave of fires and explosions hits strained global energy infrastructure. Here’s what to know TRT World

Mr. Market’s YOLO Adventure

The stock market’s new approach to valuation FT

Oil Falls After Iran Says It Received Sign US Will End Blockade Bloomberg

The Bezzle

OpenAI in talks to commit up to $1.5bn to private-equity joint venture FT

Class Warfare

Everything is a Scam Working Class Stories

When Does Breaking the Law Become Moral Courage? The Culture Explorer

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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110 comments

  1. oliverks

    “Who Knew? 1 In 5 Americans Are Convinced They’re Psychic”
    – hey I predicted this, I must be the 1 in 5 😁
    ta – boom I will be here all week

    1. The Rev Kev

      Wow. I knew that you were going to be typing this comment. I must be psychic too – not!

    3. DJG, Reality Czar

      oliverks: That article was about a study designed to give observational studies and the discipline of statistics a bad name.

      From the “executive summary”: The most common “psychic” experiences involve simply knowing something is “off” (33%), sensing dishonesty (28%), or feeling it’s time to walk away from a situation (26%).

      None of these require that a person be a psychic. These kinds of decisions used to considered common sense. “Use your head,” our mothers used to say.

      So the definition of psychic is wrong, because “intuition” is grounded in relationships and events. And “gut feeling” (as if I care about people’s guts) isn’t exactly being a psychic either. Sheesh.

      On the other hand, years ago, I was at a music festival in London, Ontario, and I spied a woman reading the cards. She told me that I am psychic but that I can’t make money from it.

      So there you have it.

      Next up: Thirty-three percent of USanians use ESP to determine that they can order biscuits at a Popeye’s.

      5. Lefty Godot

        A lot of people experience things that fall into the ESP category, however loosely defined that may be. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s something, but whatever it is, it is clearly not something science can reliably reproduce and devise acceptable tests for in a laboratory environment. So should we take the Wittgenstein position and silence all talk about it (i.e., forget it)? If there is something there, unlikely as it might seem, I don’t think silence is the best prescription. But I wouldn’t base stock trades on it either.

        1. cfraenkel

          In other words, if something doesn’t boil down to a lab experiment, it doesn’t exist. Sounds like not taking a parachute due to lack of an RCT. Or believing that LLMs are ‘intelligent’… look where that got us. We could all use a little more humility. The old guy knew as much 400 years ago

          There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
          Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

          Of course, the normal understanding of psychic or ESP is even worse. We seem to be compelled to make stuff up instead of accepting ‘we don’t know’.

          1. Lefty Godot

            There has been a well-publicized group of “skeptics” who insist everything must be explained by hard materialism and that any hint of the “psychic” or “spiritual” must be banished from intellectual discourse as atavistic superstition. It’s part of the committed defense of the modernist project that eventually leads to programs like the Technate, as reality keeps diverging from where rationalism is supposed to lead us. I remember over 50 years ago hearing Sidney Hook, one of the “New York Intellectuals”, lambasting my faculty advisor (one of Hook’s former students) for straying away from the western tradition into Zen and similar awful hippie-like pursuits. He was quite impassioned about his rational views.

    4. Mikel

      In the past, NC has had a lot of fun with the “1 in 5” stats…

      “Five to one, baby
      One in five
      No one here gets out alive…”

  2. The Rev Kev

    “US at risk of running out of missiles if another war breaks out after depleting stockpile in Iran operations”

    The ceasefire has been going on for a fortnight now. My own guesstimate is that the US has managed to produce about 20 or so Patriot interceptor missiles in that time. Something like this fact tells me that the US military should have spent the past fortnight building shelters for their soldiers but to be honest I am willing to bet that they have done sweet bugger all.

    1. Wukchumni

      Can you imagine stalling the Nazis in a ceasefire for a couple weeks so we could crank out 20 Sherman tanks?

      1. Adam1

        Crazy how things have changed. The Sherman’s were significantly inferior to German tanks, but we cranked out about 50,000 of them during WWII. That’s over 300 per week (that’s assuming 156 weeks over 3 years and continuous production, I’m sure there were periods of much higher & lower production).

        1. Wukchumni

          I doubt there was much of an issue with security clearances among Rosie the Riveter and friends, or the guys formerly on the auto line.

          Imagine what it would take to get a job at Raytheon?

  3. The Rev Kev

    “Donald Trump considers UAE bailout says he is shocked ‘they are really rich”

    Trump, finding out that the UAE is not as rich as they made themselves out to be, suddenly loses all interest in that country.

  4. ciroc

    >Biden Official: Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected

    I was relieved to learn that Epstein wasn’t the reason America became evil.

    1. Carolinian

      Re that Caitlin column–she’s quoting some neocon who was on CBS. That doesn’t mean it really would have happened. Of course the PNAC crowd has been beating the drums for Bibi’s war for years but even Bush Jr. didn’t do it after the Repubs were badly setback by elections late in his reign. Some of us couldn’t believe Trump would do it either and assumed it must be kompromat. Starting war with Iran was always correctly predicted to be political suicide and that would have been doubly true under the vegetative Biden. It wouldn’t have happened.

      1. t

        Might have, I suppose. Planning to in during the reelection campaign? I don’t think so, Jack. Just because Cornpop says so.

        Agree overall. That neocon is, in my unlearned opinion, another one trying to normalize the madness, convince us all the war was inevitable.

        Anyone working closely with or for the Biden campaign was – far more likely than not – laboring to hold steady for another four years while they found the candidate for the next election. What else could they do?

    2. dearieme

      Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected

      Proof positive that it’s been a stupid idea.

    3. Lefty Godot

      That’s it! Somebody in IT forgot to change the Auto-pen’s default setting from BOMB_IRAN=YES to NO. There’s the explanation, no 5D-chess or compromat needed. Those pesky factory-installed default settings!

  5. The Rev Kev

    “Left With Nothing But Gimmicks, Trump Gets Bluff Called Again By Confident Iran”

    Had a laugh at the news tonight. They were reporting how both sides were doing a no-show in Pakistan but when they talked about Vance (and I apologize for not remembering the exact word that they used), they said that Vance was resolutely staying in Washington instead. Who writes this stuff?

    1. jsn

      Sam Altman perp-walk would be great!

      Blankman-Fried that possibility with “the last IT perp-walk” before IT & Crypto jockeyed into position next to AIPAC.

      In the Political Market the buyer is never wrong no matter what the crime.

    2. Lefty Godot

      “When AI is outlawed, only outlaws will have AI!” (I get to snark that one as an NRA member.)

  7. JohnA

    Re n a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” [Professor] Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza …

    Nothing ‘went wrong’, it is the classic route of settler colonialism where there are 2 possible outcomes:
    1. As in the US and Australia, the indigenous people are slaughtered, displaced and crowded into smaller and smaller spaces – let us call them reservations – until their numbers have declined sufficiently to make them irrelevant
    2. the attempt as above fails and the settler colonialists have to accept to live side by side with the indigenous population as in much of Africa.
    Obviously the Zionists are aiming for 1, and it is up to the world to either continue to turn a blind eye, or shun them sufficiently via boycotts etc., as in the case of South Africa as to which of the 2 possibilities ensue. Pretending Zionism simply went wrong is putting lipstick on a pig.

    1. Wukchumni

      In our defense, germs did the trick in doing away with the native population in many cases, whose immunity systems weren’t up to snuff.

      Malaria swept through the Sacramento Valley and up into the PNW in 1830-33, decimating native populations there.

      85-90% of the various Yokuts sub-tribes population here died of Measles in 1868-69.

      1. The Rev Kev

        And measles really went to town on the native Hawaiian population in the 19th century.

        1. Wukchumni

          The 1830-33 Malaria bout was thought to have been brought about by the ship Owhyee that came from Hawaii, as luck would have it.

      2. JohnA

        Weren’t many such germs deliberately passed on via disease riddled blankets and similar means?

        1. The Rev Kev

          Certainly true in the very early days of Virginia. Other places may be more happenstance rather than deliberate intent. Look how a deadly virus in the middle of Africa can be spread onto the streets of New York, courtesy of jet liner travel, in a matter of hours

        2. Objective Ace

          Was that deliberate state policy or a couple psycopathic wannabe settlers who couldn’t wait for nature to take its course?

          There’s always going to be a few bad apples in any society. Its when the actions become state sponsored that we need to start feeling culpability

          1. Rabid groundhog

            Modern understanding of infectious disease taken for granted today was surprisingly late in coming to western medicine.
            In mid nineteenth century Vienna, Semmelweiss was widely ridiculed and worse for daring to suggest that OBGYN doctors wash their hands between examining patients, the experiments that defintively proved the germ theory of disease were conducted by Pasteur even later, and the first attempts to perform surgery under sterile conditions after that. Evidence that viruses cause disease did not come until the twentieth century.

            Attributing deliberate malicious intent when understanding was so limited always seems like a strech, especially since as pointed out above, even with knowledge, controling the spread of infections is beyond us.

        4. Adam Eran

          Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493 cover this ground. In addition for their responsibility for one of history’s largest genocides, diseases were one of the biggest reasons for slavery’s success. The vector (mosquito) for yellow fever and malaria ranged from the Mason-Dixon line to the northern border of Argentina. Africans have some immunity to these diseases, so they were imported to work there.

          This may also explain why (black) Haitians were able to defeat Napoleon’s troops in 1805. Hard to fight when you’re sick.

        1. Wukchumni

          Why would the Yokuts have put on the very first Ghost Dance in Eshom Valley in 1870, if 85-90% of them hadn’t been killed by Measles in 1868-69, and instead by genocide?

    2. ciroc

      I am appalled by the claim that, at the time of Israel’s founding, Zionism was not associated with extremism, militarism, racism, or genocide.

    3. vao

      There is the 3rd possibility: after a long and bloody war, the settlers give up and depart. It happened in Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Portuguese Africa.

      I would argue that South Africa and Zimbabwe correspond to a combination of (2) and (3). The purest examples of (2) are the Greek colonies in the Antiquity, when contact with the homeland was permanently cut.

      And as you state, nothing went wrong: right from the very beginning, as soon as the question went from “Shouldn’t there be a state only for the Jews since European countries do not consider Jewish people to belong to their respective nations?” to “Where and how to establish that Jewish state?” the approach was a colonialist one.

      There was some initial wondering about Uganda and Argentina, before settling on Palestine. Till WWI, the models were the French and German colonial administrations. After WWI, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and others were unabashedly outspoken about the need to proceed ruthlessly, expell the natives, and build Israel.

      1. JohnA

        Yes, but I included that in 2 as giving up attempts to eliminate the indigenous population and accepting their continued presence, and the settlers either living side by side, or going elsewhere. As I understand it, there has been a fair number of Israelis emigrating in recent times, either to their original homeland or some other country where they can settle. Eg Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, US.

    4. dearieme

      until their numbers have declined sufficiently to make them irrelevant

      And that’s how the Bantu occupation of South Africa has worked out. Demography was destiny.

  8. CanCyn

    Regarding How To Teach Kids How to Evaluate Information – I just commented over on the AI Health Information post that I am very grateful to be retired and no longer teaching Information literacy to college students. Expertise and context were difficult enough to teach once the Internet proliferated. I am not sure how one goes about getting students who barely want to be in class that ChatGPT is not a reliable source. I remember when everyone was having heart attacks about Wikipedia – our solution was not to forbid it but rather to allow it as a potentially good starting place not to be quoted in final projects. I suppose you could argue the same for ChatGpt and the like. The education industry, with its large classes and stressed out teachers and students does not allow for learning as outlined in the frameworks discussed in the article. Multiple choice assessments marked by computer do not go along with thoughtful contemplative learning, unfortunately.

    1. Craig H.

      Brian Keating had a show this week with a Berkeley AI researcher with some preliminary data on educational use for AI. Title “Answers make you stupid”. She (her research group) got much better results with a custom AI that never said what the right answer was but did more of a Socrates-type survey on its archived material with pluses and minuses for the prompters’ queries.

      I saw one of the few really great applications of AI where James Ellis bought dedicated time on an AI to translate Ludwig Klages’ magnum opus from German to English. Two weeks run time on his PC for 1300 pages. He had an English friend of his who has written books on Klages pronounce the result “usable.”

      His disclaimer: you certainly don’t want to cite the content but if you don’t know German it is far better than nothing and it looks like we might not ever live to see a proper human translation of the book done. He has the result posted on his website.

      https://klages.bearblog.dev/

      He did basic trim and so forth on the AI output for those pages. He also has the raw AI output file posted.

      1. CanCyn

        This is it isn’t it? If we use it as a tool, things like long translations as a use case make sense. But I still worry about power use. How lovely would it to be live in a world where we valued that book enough to pay people to translate it? Becoming friends with AI, calling it anything other than ‘it’ for crissakes, and worst of all letting it think for us, these are things that give me nightmares.

    2. In Cold Chud

      I am not sure how one goes about getting students who barely want to be in class that ChatGPT is not a reliable source.

      That is really the main point. As someone who currently works with young people, I can say that usually you don’t.

      I was in a (mid-size American city, public) high-school classroom several months ago where there was a poster (professionally made, perhaps purchased from a catalog) of acceptable uses of AI, for students. Its essential conclusion was that AI was acceptable for every step of an assignment except producing the complete, final version. I’m not sure what this means in practice. Manually copying and pasting the results of various LLM prompts together?

      It’s difficult not to put this in the context of American education and our culture’s attitude toward it. Everyone here already knows all this, but one thing I would emphasize is that, since at least the 1980s, the political function of k-12 education in America has been to absorb the blame for problems it can’t fix. This has led to endless bad-faith exercises in changing with the times. The last such cycle centered on everything STEM and, in particular, coding. That a generation that never learned how to type a URL, failed to learn to code from an online game where one clicks on puzzle pieces, was sadly unforeseeable. But I digress.

      At the same building, late last year, I had gotten into a conversation with a student about LLMs, explaining that they just pull together whatever is available to them, and that, when whatever is the whole Internet, a lot of it is wrong. I think it was the second part he had a problem with. With access to all human knowledge (a dubious claim I let slide) how can ChatGPT be capable of error?

      It’s bad, you know.

    3. Revenant

      Well, my reading of Links tell me that Frame the Globe News and The Culture Explorer are both AI slop.

      – there are no people disclosed as running the sites or writing for them
      – even the about page is written in breathless “we” optimism
      – the articles are full of AI tics
      – the articles are far too prolix and “twisty” and never get to the point
      – the Frame the Globe article about Russian civil nuclear exports is absurdly conspiratorial. The history is quite simple: Western countries stopped being able to even build nuclear power stations because a toxic mix of environmental and safety objections, regulation, “privatisation” and short-term policy swings and financial targets resulted in them ceasing to commission large fleets of similar reactors with regular new projects and instead commission one-off “art” reactors and their nuclear industries went deservedly bust enabling and participating in this. In IT jargon, they stopped buying farm animals and started buying pets. Russia and China and France are the only nations left with a complete ore-to-waste nuclear industry. There is no cunning dependency plan other than selling the capitalists enough rope to hang themselves!
      – the Culture Explorer article is as mad as a box of frogs. It AI’s its way through an analysis of Antigone in classical Greek myth and then swerves to a set of superficial analogies about the Troubles? The fucking Troubles? Dolours Price and Bernadette Devlin? To misrepresent their lives to illustrate some hokum sitcom civics learning from Antigone? And then swerves back to Antigone like nothing happened. WTF? What was the prompt: hey Grok, write me a moral enquiry applying insights from antiquity to a 70’s-noir civil emergency? The Epic of Gilgamesh as applied to the Years of Lead? No. The Bhagavad-gita and the Jakarta Emergency? No. Oh, Antigone and the Troubles? Bring it on!

      I’d prefer not to see any more links from these sources but I know we’re all guests here so I won’t complain about it again….

      1. CanCyn

        I was commenting on the Card Catalogue link, pretty sure there are people behind that one.

        I do think it is helpful to point out AI generated pieces. Our hosts work hard, we can’t expect them to catch everything. So rather than complaining and spending so much time responding to something you’ve ID’d as worthless, just be helpful and point it out and carry on with your day.

        1. Revenant

          Sound advice, will take.

          But the problem with those two articles was the subject matter was potentially interesting and that got my goat, as it were.

          I am still trying understand for whom and why that Antigone article was generated. Deterring anti-Treaty Trinity College Dublin classics graduates from refounding the Continuity IRA, even though Michael Collins has been dead for years?

  9. Carla

    Re: “Lufthansa cancels 20,000 short-haul flights, consolidates routes” — Sounds like this could be good for the environment long-term, particularly if it sets a trend.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      Rest assured, our elites will still have jet fuel for their private jets to fly around in. While the rest of us have forced conservation.

      Not saying that it isn’t a good thing to cut flights, particularly short-haul ones, but those of us who do attempt to fly commercial are facing a “summer of rage”.

      Canceled flights, no gate agents, AI chatbots as your only recourse if you need to re-book. Spirit liquidating will mean one less option for El Cheapo tickets.

      I think I’ll stay home, or stick to options that are within a day’s drive.

      1. southern appalachian

        In the U S there was already a shortfall of visitors from abroad, curious to see the effect domestically

  10. MicaT

    Russian nuclear plants. This is how it’s done when there is no competition except China.
    The US can’t compete. The last 2 reactors cost about $20 billion each while China is doing them for about 3-5. And yes the US imports a lot of nuclear fuel because the same reasons as always, price.
    So we can’t build on time or for anything close to a competitive cost, can’t provide the fuel of course other countries will fill the void. And the Russians have a lot of experience.
    Who would even try to buy from the US ?
    Countries want more power and long term stability, nuclear provides that. Ah just look at the gas market.
    Nuclear and renewables just went to the top of the list.

    1. BlueMoose

      Can you guess who Poland chose to develop their first nuclear plant? Expected to first go into production in 2036. Sure. But some people are going to make serious money in the initial planning stages.

      1. Krautsalat

        Via Wikipedia I found this Reuters item (from 2024).

        “We cautiously assume that it will be 2040, our predecessors had an optimistic scenario of 2032, without having much on the table,” Czarnecka told an industry conference.

        So probably 2046 …

  11. ciroc

    >Is Your Pasta Sauce Listening? Prego Debuts Recording Device for the Dinner Table

    Italy is truly the capital of innovation. Had this been an American company, someone surely would have stepped in and said, “Wait, there might not be a market for that product.”

  12. AG

    re: China and oil

    German NACHDENKSEITEN

    use google-translate

    How China prepared for an oil outage

    The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is causing a significant disruption to oil and gas supplies, inflicting considerable damage on the global economy. But what about China? Is this industrial powerhouse severely impacted by the lack of oil imports, or even on the brink of collapse? Beyond all the dramatic expectations, the facts tell a different story.
    https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=149439

  13. Jason Boxman

    At an employer I know, at the departmental quarterly, they’re giving out a rewards prize if employees write how they’ve used AI in their workflows. And everyone on the call in chat is describing their usage of AI! Rah rah!

    I’ve never heard of anything quite this unhinged.

    If the tools were so useful, why are people being cajoled and bribed to use them? Why is every quarterly review a gentle interrogation by managers about AI usage?

    This timeline is lit.

    1. vao

      “they’re giving out a rewards prize if employees write how they’ve used AI in their workflows.”

      Really? Seriously? All right, since you report it, it must have happened. Oh, and this means they just dumped AI on employees, telling them they have to figure out how to integrate it in their work? They did not even have some kind of unit responsible to define, document, and teach business processes and ISO-9000 and whatnot to deal with AI?

      I am baffled.

      Any information about the kind of prizes those AI-evangelists are rewarded with?

      1. dearieme

        Kind of prizes? If they are clapping themselves like seals in a zoo, toss ’em some fish.

        If they’re just scratching themselves throw ’em a banana.

        On second thoughts I have never been subject to such inane pressures so perhaps I shouldn’t mock. Perhaps.

      3. t

        We have this kind of “AI” cheerleading and incentives where at my job. Always hand in glove with dire warnings about which of our own tools to use, whose approval you need first, and which specific detailed review processes must be followed.

        There are chatbots, which don’t work, but most of the AI is simple process automation. These things aren’t particularly new and weren’t called AI when we deployed them.

        (Autocorrect was determined to change lower-case chatbots into chariots. I finally won, I think, but autocorrect maybe onto something. Chariots in the workplace! Pulled by emus!!!)

      4. Jeremy Grimm

        I do not know what the prizes are — but based on decades of experience working for a large firm, I would bet on the prizes being some kind of coffee mug with a cute AI related saying on it … something the winning employee can proudly carry to and from the office coffee urn.

    2. The Rev Kev

      Did those employees use AI to write out a response how they are using AI in their work and use it in that call?

      2. Ben Joseph

        Some sources suggest that quoting AI would be an optimal strategy.

        Other sources emphasize AI being both adaptive and useful.

  14. .Tom

    Combining the two links about the Druzhba pipeline, it appears Kiev is “reopening” the stretch inside Ukraine while bombing another part of the same pipeline in Russia. So my read would be that it wants to get out of the wrangle with Hungary so it can get the Euroloan but still prevent the flow of oil while not being responsible for repairing that part.

    You seeing the same?

    1. Skip Intro

      And Russia just announced that they were stopping exports from Kazakhstan via Druzhba to Europe on May 1!

  15. ciroc

    >Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege U.S. Forces Kidnapped and Tortured Them

    One of the worst drawbacks of being an ally of the United States is having to accept the impunity of Americans who kill your citizens.

    1. The Rev Kev

      But like with other American wars, they will write and make a movie about this in twenty years and how sad it made those Americans feel.

      1. Michael Fiorillo

        It’s even worse than that: I recall a Time Magazine cover story (from the early eighties, I think), entitled, “What Vietnam Did to Us.”

        1. Lefty Godot

          Aren’t there already IDF members pouring out soulful tales about how much “moral injury” they suffered using Palestinian children for target practice? I’m sure we’ll be seeing NYT and New Yorker stories any day about how “threatened” those soldiers’ families feel due to the online “hate” they received in response to a harmless Tik-Tok video where some subhuman Amalek kid got wasted.

  17. Paul W.

    Some thought about exploding oil and gas sites. I’ve worked as an aircraft mechanic for 40 years. 20 years ago, you could not get a job at an airline without 5 years experience working on general aviation piston aircraft or military experience. Now, airlines are hiring graduates from aircraft mechanic private diploma mills. I read on an aviation Reddit about the difficulties of new hires getting mentoring or any help to learn the ropes. I think that oil industries are having the same problems. Inexperienced new hires, institutional lack of knowledge transfer. A very relevant YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB. This organization shows the lack of training and knowledge lead to catastrophic incidents on a regular basis.

  18. The Rev Kev

    “Oil Swings on Elusive Peace Deal Outlook, Iran Gunboat Attacks”

    It is now well know that Trump announces all sort of things to be timed with the closing and the opening of the markets so that he and his friends can profit. Wouldn’t it be funny if Iran decided to short circuit Trump’s announcements with a few of their own which would blow up any predictions booked.

  20. Jason Boxman

    Hello climate disruption. From the local farmers market grocer out here

    We are getting a lot of questions about tomatoes…here’s what we’re experiencing.

    We’re going to be honest with you…
    these are not the best tomatoes, and no… we have not changed suppliers.

    Florida, Mexico, and California all got hit hard by unusual weather this year. There has been a shortage. Tomatoes are hard to come by right now and are over 3x more expensive than they were before.

    We have not raised our price and are actually selling these at a loss, so please give us a little grace until the next wave of crops comes in.

    If you want perfect tomatoes… hang tight, they’re coming. If you need tomatoes today… these are the best available.

    Many restaurants are even taking tomatoes off their menus right now…so everyone is eager to get the tomatoes you love back in!!

    1. jrkrideau

      Due to a shortage of interceptor missiles, the 12th and 27th Air Defence Units are re-equipping with modern, high-powered, crossbows.

  23. Wukchumni

    I remember the first Earth Day 56 years ago…

    At my elementary school, they had strategically left a bunch of trash out on the fields of the campus and we were tasked to clean it up~

    I wonder if its even mentioned at school these daze?

  25. Bill Carson

    Regarding all of those purely coincidental fires and explosions at oil refineries across the globe, does anybody remember Stuxnet? Wouldn’t it be interesting if Iran was able to engineer some sort of malignant source code that would affect some sort of specialized refinery equipment? But nah, that probably wouldn’t happen because all of the Irani techies are too busy making LEGO videos.

  27. Alphonse

    ‘“Zionism is not reformable” — Israel’s ‘moral injuries’ and moral breakdown’

    I don’t have anything to add about the experience of Israeli soldiers. The genocide, their acts and their anguish are unimaginable. I do not understand how any nation can function through such pain. I would say to go and read the article, except that I can imagine it could produce moral injury in readers. We already know.

    What caught my attention was not about Israel. It was the description of moral injury:

    Some trauma stems from a breach of values – from betrayal, from the collapse of trust in institutions once seen as moral anchors, and from the unbearable gap between who we believed we were and what we now witness. . . . moral injury arises from participation in, witnessing, or accepting actions perceived as profound violations of basic values: justice, responsibility, humanity, and the sanctity of life. When such injury persists without acknowledgment or correction, it manifests in shame, guilt, rage, alienation, loss of trust, and a haunting sense that “there is no longer a moral place for me here”

    My heart sinks in recognition.

    When I saw Schindler’s List I wondered whether the purpose of the film was expose how evil could come to feel normal. The great crimes did not shock me – not the gas chambers, the murders, the bodies. I had already been shocked. The greatest tragedies are shown in the littlest signs. The Holocaust is already present, pregnant in the moments when the Jews are singled out, identified, removed from their homes. From then on the logic of horror is inexorable.

    I took the mRNA shots. Then the madness came. The hatred towards the unvaccinated shook me. Put them in camps! Let them die! The mandates followed. “Collapse of trust in institutions once seen as moral anchors,” “profound violations of basic values,” “a haunting sense that ‘there is no longer a moral place for me here’.” In the hatred of the unvaxxed I felt the same inhumanity, the sign of the logic of horror.

    Hatred is not mere anger: it is a desire that the hated ones cease to exist. We imagine that we can aim our hatred at a deserving target. But hatred is like mustard gas. You aim it one way, the wind blows it another, your enemy responds in kind. Hatred becomes a condition of life, psychic pollution. Even the mandates were just an escalation. Trump, Hillary, the two minute hate for the Covington kid. Wokeness was already spreading its hateful poison among advocates and opponents alike. Gaza did not shock me. I was expecting genocide. Who, when, where I didn’t know: it was in the air.

    “Unaddressed moral injury tends to worsen.” We act as though these things did not happen. They cannot be spoken. “They’re afraid to tell their friends about their feelings, fearing they’ll be branded as traitors, leftists or weaklings.” “One of its quieter but most damaging outcomes is departure: not dramatic protest, but the silent exodus of previously-engaged, well-educated, committed citizens who feel they no longer have a moral home here.” For us elsewhere in the West there is nowhere to go, except out. Out of the institutions, out of civil society, let the sociopaths grind them down.

    We talk about how the West is not capable of diplomacy with Russia, Iran. We pontificate, we don’t negotiate. As above, so below. The righteous arrogance of the leaders mirrors that of corporations, governments, activists, right down to ordinary citizens. The hubris of war is the hubris of DEI. The logic of genocide is the logic of mandates. Israel is only taking the logic to its conclusion.

    Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for downloading scientific publications with the intent to distribute them freely. Threatened by the government, he took his own life. Lawrence Lessig wrote,

    Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: shame.

    One word, and endless tears.

    1. hk

      Dostoevsky said (IDK if I’m remembering it right) that absolute evil emerges from an absolute sense of moral righteousness. If you believe you are doing absolute justice, anything you do is justified, or so you tell yourself, and anyone who doubts you are part of the problem, too.

      (Going off the deep end a bit) The thing about old fashioned Christianity that stood out was that it was a religion of sinners, the sinners who recognized that they are in the wrong, wanted to change thdir ways, and sought forgiveness. Somewhere along the way, it became the religion of the self claimed righteous, or, in other words, a religion of evil–people who do evil be suse thdy feel entitled to because they were foing great good things. Of course, the modern Christianity is not the only gulity party: anything that claims “righteousness,” to me, the back door vehicle for doing evil.

      1. Nat Wilson Turner

        Tom DeLay, the GOP Majority Leader in the US House of Reps 20 years ago fit this description perfectly. Sadly, at this late date he stands out from the pack more for his legislative competence than his evil.

    2. Vicky Cookies

      I’ve experienced “moral injury”, in one sense, since I first encountered the term in a trauma-informed care list serve. What it describes is the feeling of having done something wrong, which can serve as a corrective, like how the pain we experience touching a hot stove teaches us not to do it again. That this potentially healing psychological experience is pathologized is a troubling symptom of a diseased culture; it reflects a culture terrified of accountability. I’m not at all opposed to expressing compassion for those who perpetrate crimes (in fact, I’m on the way to law school so that I can work in indigent criminal defense), but I think that morally guided people ought to have some wider perspective here and choose whom they spend their time feeling bad for. In this case, it is decidedly not IDF soldiers, conscripted, conflicted, or troubled though they may be, but their victims.

      Other examples you cite are orders of magnitude less serious, and tend to make it seem like you are trivializing the genocide of the Palestinians through your argument. All in all, though you make some interesting observations, and I appreciate the perspective you’ve shared, I feel compelled to write against much of it.

      If the guns were silent, I think the truth and reconciliation method would be a beautiful approach, fostering forgiveness, healing, understanding, and peace. But the fact is that they are not. I applaud the compassion of those who find themselves in roles where they are offering personal support to traumatized soldiers, but for the rest of us, it is in large part a political question, and I think the decent thing to do is to focus our attention and our compassion on, and direct our advocacy to the cause of, the Palestinians, rather than their tormentors.

  28. Mikel

    The stock market’s new approach to valuation – FT

    That fine line between saying “This time it’s different” and not saying it.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      “new approach to valuation”

      1. Hit the magic mushrooms
      2. Wait for mother nature/digestion to take its course
      3. Enter make-believe world

  30. Jason Boxman

    In today’s episode of American healthcare is trash

    A $440,000 Breast Reduction: How Doctors Cashed In on a Consumer Protection Law (NY Times; paywalled)

    When the law passed, government officials estimated that about 17,000 cases would go to arbitration a year. Instead, doctors brought 1.2 million such cases in the first half of last year, and won around 88 percent of them.

    The arbitrators are doing well too. The fees they earn for deciding cases, which range from $425 to $1,150 per case, have added up. They earned $885 million from 2022 to 2024.

    and

    A neurosurgery practice outside of Philadelphia went to arbitration after the health plan Highmark offered its standard payment of $2,660 for a diagnostic procedure to measure blood flow to the brain. An arbitrator awarded it $333,000 instead. A New Jersey anesthesiologist was awarded $14,560 in 2025 for an X-ray-guided steroid injection.

    Many claims that shouldn’t be eligible for arbitration, such as those for patients covered through the government programs Medicare and Medicaid, move through the system anyway. The claim from the New Jersey anesthesiologist involved a patient on a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan, according to a lawsuit that UnitedHealth has filed protesting the arbitration decision.

    America is not a serious country.

  31. AG

    “I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being—all stories have become obsolete and clichéd and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine—time itself: the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.”

    — Béla Tarr

  32. LawnDart

    Re; Waiting on Apocalypse

    That kid is one heck of a writer– thanks for the post.

    “Better Christ without Truth than Truth without Christ” came to mind whilst reading the piece. It reminded me of my own journey through life, of friends lost at such a young age, to murder, suicide, ODs… here I am, not quite an old man, but still…

  33. AG

    re: obituary Lord Skidelsky

    Economic historian and politician who was a leading authority on the life and work of John Maynard Keynes
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/20/robert-skidelsky-obituary

    Glenn Diesen:

    I had the great pleasure of interviewing Lord Skidelsky five times:

    Lord Robert Skidelsky: Europe Is Trapped by Its Own Propaganda in Ukraine
    https://youtu.be/qtDydebAs8k
    Lord Robert Skidelsky: Pax-Americana is Over
    https://youtu.be/ALnyAWz5l8I
    Lord Robert Skidelsky: Russophobia & the Politics of Fear
    https://youtu.be/JMSpkefiQ_c
    Lord Robert Skidelsky: After Globalisation – Return of Fascism & War https://youtu.be/CTE0nUhtj3c
    Lord Skidelsky: Europe is lost in the Multipolar World
    https://youtu.be/-TGMXZtFUF8

  34. AG

    re: Siemens testing part-humanoid robots alongside real workers

    I find it more than appalling that no MSM are covering this.
    In fact they ignore the whole topic.
    (A bit like “the market” has been ignoring the economic damage done by the attack on Iran.)
    History repeating itself when labourers were confronted with mechanized cotton and textile manufacture.
    I just don´t see the farce here. It´s tragedy twice.

    use google-translate

    Siemens is now letting the robot take over.
    https://www.telepolis.de/article/Siemens-laesst-jetzt-den-Roboter-ran-11267275.html

    “(…)
    Not your typical robot with legs

    The HMND 01 Alpha doesn’t look like the humanoid robots you see in videos. Instead of legs, it has a mobile platform that can move in all directions. A humanoid torso with two arms sits on this platform.


    A few technical details:

    29 movable joints that give it a lot of mobility
    Height adjustable up to 2.20 meters
    Arms that reach from the ground to a height of about two meters

    The robot autonomously picked up transport containers of two different sizes, carried them through the hall, and placed them on conveyor belts. It perceived its surroundings using 360-degree cameras and depth sensors – meaning it could “see” all around and estimate distances, as Heise online reported in detail .
    60 crates per hour – and that for eight hours straight.

    The results are impressive:

    The robot moved approximately 60 containers per hour.
    He worked for over eight hours without a break.
    More than 90 percent of his grasping and placing attempts were successful on the first try.

    (…)

    Nvidia’s artificial intelligence makes it possible

    The secret lies in the software. Humanoid has integrated Nvidia’s complete “Physical AI Stack”—a package of various AI tools:

    Jetson Thor : a powerful chip that is embedded directly in the robot and performs calculations there (this is called “edge computing” because the processing takes place on the device itself and not in a distant data center)

    Isaac Sim : a software program that creates a digital twin of the robot – a virtual copy that allows you to try everything out on the computer first.

    Isaac Lab : Here, the robot is trained using “reinforcement learning.” This works similarly to a child learning through trial and error: The robot tries something and receives feedback on whether it was correct.(…)”

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