Links 4/9/2026

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1. Mikerw0 April 9, 2026 at 7:38 am

   Interesting piece in today’s NY Times on the unexpected and long term impacts of wars. Echoes many of the themes here. I quick return to the prior normal is highly improbable.

   https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/opinion/war-iran-economy-world.html
2. The Rev Kev April 9, 2026 at 7:48 am

   “How It Is.”

   Another fine essay by Aurelien. Near the end he says this-

   ‘The Brussels ideology has carefully destroyed any sense of national identity, history and culture, and left nothing in its place except vague and contradictory norms which will vanish like dew in the morning.’

   When you think about it, the major countries that are resisting the west successfully are those that have kept their civilizational values, their national identity, their history and their culture. And here I am talking about China, Russia and Iran.
   1. Christopher Fay April 9, 2026 at 8:08 am

      Indonesia, Vietnam,Thailand, Malaysia. Basically the new world versus the old world led by the US
   2. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 8:38 am

      Well yep. Nationalism is still a thing even though the Euros tried to suppress it on the theory that competing nationalism caused the World Wars.

      Whereas the reality is that competing upper classes–vying for dominance–caused them.

      As for military technology, digital is proving to be the great disruptor there as everywhere else. Ironically Americans were the innovators who started the digital revolution and are now being undermined by it.
      1. brian wilder April 9, 2026 at 9:38 am

         Not “competing upper classes” at all. The remnant aristocracy had a common cosmopolitan club in place, where monarchs, the font of all honor, were all cousins. It was the challenge of containing and channeling the emerging political economy of mass membership nationalism’s below them that got out of hand.

         Bismarck, in particular, though personally cautious, erred in the shape of his success: “blood and iron” imprinted on Germany’s national self-conception. By making the assembly of the Second Reich a Prussian conquest, the national legislature never gained the power of the purse or control of responsible ministers — an architecture of power ominously echoed in the EU. Liberal Holstein and Hanover were drowned at birth. The insult to France triggered the formation of mass conscription armies. It was Bismarck who regularized the international recognition of emerging Balkan states.

         The competition was for national prestige, badges of honor for whole peoples, through imperialism that provided employment for the vestiges of feudal aristocracy that lingered in European military establishments: the Junkers or the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland, Catholic Reactionary France.

         The incompetence of the political leadership in controlling the catastrophically incompetent military leadership class was the fracture zone that propagated the shocks that brought down the imperial political structures of old Europe.
         1. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 11:02 am

            They were competing cousins.

            And I’m not saying nationalism had nothing to do with it, just that the rulers themselves were not populists but upper class (those politicians and military you mention).
            1. brian wilder April 9, 2026 at 12:56 pm

               No kidding, they were not populists. But, left to their own lights, they would not have had mass conscription armies at the ready, for example.

               It was tension and conflict along the vertical dimension of political hierarchy within states that set up the catastrophe rather than horizontal competition. The old Order had a working system in place to resolve horizontal conflict through Great Power conferences. That system had to be broken to make war inevitable. If Kaiser Wilhelm had power in 1914, he would have approved accepting Serbia’s submissive acceptance of Austria’s ultimatum. Belgrade would have been occupied. Grey would have chaired a Conference to punish Serbia in some limited way.

               None of that happened because of fear of various fires below. After the Panther leapt, Wilhelm was isolated and ignored by his own government. The German military bureaucracy had an “automatic” plan predicated on railroad timetables that took no notice of the violation of Belgian neutrality, did not permit anyone theoretically up the line to interfere. The Austrians had to get the Hungarian Premier on board. The Liberals in London were chickening out when threatened with a mutiny in Ireland. The French military were led by Anti-Dreyfusards — Dreyfus was himself an Alsatian Jew and the actual spy was an Hungarian Catholic. The eruption of progressive nationalism in Ottoman Türkiye was even more acute.
   3. Wukchumni April 9, 2026 at 8:43 am

      Hear, here…

      Another strong effort by Aurelien~

      You can feel end-times coming for the Golden Billion, it was a good 500+ year run and thanks for playing. There’s a consolation prize for you on the way out.
   4. truly April 9, 2026 at 11:50 am

      Yes. And it occurs to me that these countries “resisting the west successfully” have actually built a culture, developed assibayah, around resistance. As if their values and identity are wrapped up in resistance. The countries that are trying to “be a partner” to the U.S. are waning, while those resisting are either surging or setting themselves up to surge in the near future. Russia, NK, China surging. Iran surging or set up to in the very near future. Cuba and VZ if they continue to resist very likely to surge soon. If they attempt to “partner” set up to fail. (To be clear, I am thinking about these countries not compared to their neighbors, but to where THEY were 20 or 40 years ago.) Yemen probably also setting itself up to surge.
   5. Matthew April 9, 2026 at 12:12 pm

      There’s a smart fellow named Jon Rapley, who I interviewed for the Jamaica Gleaner long ago while at UWI, now at Oxbridge–can´t remember which of those–who contends that fundamentalism is a (misguided) reaction to a spiritually empty/destructive globalizing capitalism that sweeps all before it. I always wanted to add the caveat that when you have destroyed the (usually mild) socialist [read Bandung/Darker Nations] alternative everywhere, the only thing left in reactionis the kind of fundamentalism that, say, Iran–or just for yucks the United States–ends up with.

      A lot of those post-independence small countries whom the development studies people (Rostow, Inkeles, all bums) lambasted because their economies only grew at 2-3% PA would KILL for that kind of growth, long-term, today. It would be far more consonant with de-growth and ecological thinking. Yes, they would need to control their own currencies and, no, that would not solve all of their problems, because they would need to be able to protect key emerging industries, etc., (see Haiti and the Kreyol pig, imported rice and pasta). But it would be a helluva good start. Add a universal debt jubilee, the planet would stand 1/4 of a chance.
   6. Kouros April 9, 2026 at 3:12 pm

      Yes! This is why they want R of Moldova to join EU rather than the more easy and natural path of re-uniting with Romania. No talk of nationalism allowed (except for the German re-unification, of course)…
3. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 7:54 am

   That’s a good article on the entertainment streaming biz–something I know little about since I don’t stream. Samplers:

   But beneath this ostensible advantage lies Disney’s core problem—one that cuts across both film and television: the hundred-year-old conglomerate struggles to create anything new. At some point, this lack of innovation will cause problems for Disney. For example, what would happen if Bluey secedes from Disney and launches its own service called Bluey+ Max?

   and

   Yet hiding in plain sight is an entirely different class of TV programming defined not by novelty, but by abundance and familiarity—call it comfort viewing. For this silent majority, lack of newness is an asset, as is volume. Shows like The Office and Friends endure because they soothe us, filling time and regulating mood (by way of glowing tablet).

   Perhaps familiarity is more powerful than awe, or at least more than we care to admit.

   Which is to say that those of us who grew up along with television are totally familiar with a streaming world dominated by “comfort” viewing. After all from I Love Lucy to Andy Griffith to more recent sitcoms it’s the characters we tune in to watch more than the formulaic narratives. And many of the stream world shows I do see on disc struggle with good narrative.

   As for Disney, any company that thinks Emily Blunt is a suitable follow on for Julie Andrews doesn’t know its own business. Audiences can be very picky about choosing their vicarious friends.
   1. bassmule April 9, 2026 at 12:08 pm

      The reason I keep watching old episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s shows–first on Food Network, then Travel Network, and finally CNN–is that they show a world before COVID, back when Trump was still the punchline of jokes about failed casinos.
4. Mark Gisleson April 9, 2026 at 8:00 am

   The WSWS screed on Trump “rigging elections” again reminds me why many on the Left hate Trotskyites.

   Nineteen paragraphs only two of which mention Trump’s proposed actions to increase election security. Missing from those two grafs was any explanation of how Trump’s SAVE Act and mail-in ballot restrictions are tools for rigging the pending election.

   Trump is clearly trying to reduce the number of votes cast. I have a long history of calling out Republican vote suppression. This is not vote suppression because the rules on voting were radically changed during the pandemic and it is not unreasonable to change those rules back. Gerrymandering, imo, is a greater sin against democracy.

   The other seventeen paragraphs read like they were cribbed from MSNBC. I still appreciate and value the work WSWS did to debunk the absurdist agitprop of the NY Times’ 1619 project which exonerated capitalism as the driving force behind antebellum slavery. I doubt very much we’ll see a series of articles on Trump rigging elections given how hard AI had to stretch to stitch together this attempt at a news story.

   Ditto the Truthout scare article about the Supreme Court “gutting” absentee ballot procedures (returning to prepandemic rules is “gutting”?).

   Thanks for posting links to these excellent examples of just how thoroughly Deep State has hollowed out our media regardless of putative political orientation.
   1. Michael McK April 9, 2026 at 9:15 am

      I think absentee ballots are a problem because they are not certain to be secret and those voters could be subject to intimidation. Some helpful things would include… A few days to vote with at least one a holiday. Counties bringing polling stations to home or institution bound people with independent and sworn in people to help those totally unable to mark a ballot. Embassies and Consulates serving as polling stations for those who reside overseas. But wait, that would cost money and we have wars to pay for. Hand marked paper ballots too, of course.
   2. Michael Fiorillo April 9, 2026 at 9:55 am

      Trots have a long-standing and well-earned reputation for taking small organizations and making them even smaller.

      In my most recent experience with them – the now-defunct International Socialist Organization, which imploded due to a botched coverup of a sexual assault by leadership – virtually all of them had attended Ivy League schools and likewise “left the point of production” (in this case, public school classroom teaching) in search of greener pastures.
      1. flora April 9, 2026 at 12:07 pm

         Maybe they’re an op? / ;)
   3. AG April 9, 2026 at 12:42 pm

      thanks
      With your assessment at hand it makes more sense to read those two texts.
      To see creeps like Warner & Cotton quoted by an allegedly serious outlet like WSWS, two of the worst hypocrits in the House, I would have opted against reading.
   4. RookieEMT April 9, 2026 at 1:15 pm

      Didn’t think I’d ever see Trotsky criticism on Naked Capitalism. Granted I am still a baby communist and chipping away at the foundational literature, but it’s obvious that man had a very strange career in Russia with the Bolsheviks.

      I am heavily skeptical Trotskyism would lead to anything. I need to see his later writings where he calls outright for the fall of the USSR to save communism. Then I can write him off permanently.

      The final mystery is how did Trotsky gain such a following in the UK and America despite not really accomplishing much. His revolutionary accomplishments were during his glory days in the Russian revolution helping the Bolsheviks and nothing else afterwards.
      1. nothing but the truth April 9, 2026 at 4:14 pm

         tribe
         1. RookieEMT April 9, 2026 at 4:22 pm

            Tribe?
            1. RookieEMT April 9, 2026 at 4:44 pm

               Spitballing a theory. I am thinking a toxic combination of sorts. Trotsky is a ‘softer’ communism’ then declaring oneself an old school Marxist-Leninist. Since Trotskyists evicerate the USSR, capitalists tolerate them a bit more. So Trotskyist organizations had a higher survival rate and we’re attacked less by COINTEL forces.

               This leads to accusations that many Trotskyists are actually closeted liberals or paid off by the CIA. I simply have no idea how true this is or how exaggerated the accusations are by angry MLs’. I gotta do a bit more reading.
5. ventzu April 9, 2026 at 8:05 am

   Do you give any credence to the view that there has been a Venezuela-style coup in Iran, with “moderates” taking charge, as the “hard-liners” have been eradicated by missile strikes. This could explain why the Supreme Leader has not been seen – that he is in fact incapacitated, but the “moderates” are using “his” written words as a means of exercising control over the IRGC?

   I hope this is not the case, but Iran’s lack of kinetic response whilst Lebanon is being pounded is not a good look.
   1. The Rev Kev April 9, 2026 at 8:35 am

      You got it back the front. It has been the moderates that have been murdered and those that have taken their place are more hard line. It is the IRGC that are running things now and many of the senior leadership are combat vets from the Iran – Iraq war and know what war is all about. Being a moderate in Iran is hazardous to your health – but not from the regime. Douglas Macgregor was saying that he was shown a map of Tehran and areas were pointed out to him where progressive Iranians lived that want a more secular Iran. But these neighbourhoods have been leveled by the US and Israel.
      1. pjay April 9, 2026 at 11:57 am

         Yes. And in the longer historical version of this story we can trace many periods in which more moderate and conciliatory factions gained some degree of power in Iran, only to be undermined and sabotaged by US actions, Israeli assassinations, etc. A very relevant example was the JCPOA with Iran, hammered out with great difficulty against the resistance of “hard-liners” in both the US and Iran – and of course Israel. Trump comes along and tears it up, allowing the Zionists to use their bulls**t nuclear scare once again and undermining “moderates” in Iran. Of course these days taking them out with precision weapons is faster and more efficient.

         Zionists and their neocon allies in the US do not support “moderates” who might be willing to negotiate. They want the destruction of Iran as a functioning state. This idea that “moderates” could take power in Iran is Western propaganda, or the fantasy of “humanitarian” liberals in the West.
         1. Procopius April 11, 2026 at 12:04 am

            Look at the history of American foreign policy, going back to the conquest of Hawaii. The U.S. State Department always supports the most right wing, tyrannical, depraved governments to support. I first noticed this during the days of Idi Amin, but it’s especially noticeable in Latin America, and Haiti. Oh, Cuba, too, Batista in the 1930s. It’s built into the institution. It’s why President Truman assigned scarce U.S. ships to transport French soldiers to Vietnam, even though FDR had sworn to destroy French colonialism. If you can get a copy of William Applebaum Williams’s The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, read it (frankly, the writing is terrible and it’s badly edited, but I never got around to reading any of his other stuff — it’s basically a screed against our Vietnam War).
6. Steve H. April 9, 2026 at 8:19 am

   Julian Dorey: “OCCULT!” – Epstein Investigator UNLOADS on Craziest Elite Global Network | Henry Abbott • 406

   Starts with Russian oligarchs exfiltrating money, quickly to Milken and Boesky, back when Leon Black was a f*ck-up kid, and just… Not quite half-way through a three hour interview, and I need to go to the Iran war for some light relief…
7. AG April 9, 2026 at 8:21 am

   re: Hiroshima lie

   JAMES CARDEN

   Nuclear Myths Continue to Fuel Neocon Fantasies
   Mark Levin is a fool, but he is hardly the only one.
   https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/nuclear-myths-continue-to-fuel-neocon

   “(…)
   Truman’s military advisers disagreed with Truman. Five-star Navy Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt and Truman’s chief of staff, felt that the bombs were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan.” The Japanese, said Leahy, “were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Leahy believed Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons had “adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Likewise, Admiral William F. Halesy, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, noted that, “the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers throughout Russia long before” Truman decided to drop the bombs. Two weeks after the nuclear attacks, General Curtis LeMay publicly criticized the decision, saying, “The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

   The myth that the bombs “saved” a million US servicemen who would have otherwise perished in the invasion of the Home Islands came from the pen and imagination of the man who would become among the most infamous strategists and apologists for the War in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy.

   Born in 1919 to an upper-class family from Boston, Bundy was a graduate of Yale who served as an Army intelligence officer during the war. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was a close associate of FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. After the war, McGeorge was hired to ghostwrite Stimson’s memoirs. It was just around that time that journalists and a number of former high-ranking military officials began asking uncomfortable questions about whether it was necessary to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese.
   (…)”
   1. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 8:48 am

      Thanks. In his WW2 novel Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer speculated that the war he participated in was to defeat fascism so the winners could substitute their own fascism. You can’t just blame the bomb on Truman (do blame him for the Cold War and Israel) since clearly Groves and the others always intended to use it, having spent billions and the brainpower of perhaps naive scientists creating it.

      If Mailer was right then the “good war” was a racket like all the other wars. He may have been overstating, but clearly characters like Churchill and Truman are not the unblemished heroes some prefer to make them.
      1. Michael Fiorillo April 9, 2026 at 10:03 am

         Or as Marshal Zhukov said, “We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.”
   2. KD April 9, 2026 at 12:59 pm

      Levin isn’t a fool, Levin is a tool.
8. Jason Boxman April 9, 2026 at 8:58 am

   At an employer I know, the company just nuked their entire China team from orbit, employees in some cases with a decade of tenure and deep domain knowledge. The functions are moving to the hub in India. This is in service of “evolving our global footprint”.

   Always weird people can’t speak with English.
   1. The Rev Kev April 9, 2026 at 9:05 am

      Don’t forget that Jeff Bezos nuked all his Middle East reporters just before this war kicked off. How stupid was that. As for that employer you know, I am sure that the Indians will give lots of unbiased and truthful advice about China. /sarc
9. brian wilder April 9, 2026 at 8:58 am

   Calling for an inchoate “government oversight” of AI, let alone a treaty with China, is itself a pretty frightening indicator that the conceptual boundaries around AI have been blurred and fuzzed up by b.s. and hype certainly, but also by the ambiguous novelties of the technologies itself.

   Serious public resources would have to be marshaled to “model the models” before even beginning to “guard the guardians”. What theory of politics could generate sufficient countervailing power to confront the AI tsunami? And, to organize technical expertise to do the meta-level architectural thinking necessary to move feedback from amateur experiments and anecdotes to construction of — I cannot guess what the right metaphors would be, but not being able to guess is my point here, but for the sake of argument, I will go with the generic — guardrails.
10. Revenant April 9, 2026 at 9:02 am

    Re ‘The CIA “Ghost Murmur” Story is Probably Bullshit’ – I started writing a post last night about this sensationalist tripe because in the days since it was breathless stenographer by the science press (shame on you!), I have had an epiphany that it is a cover story.

    There is no quantum magnetic boondoggle capable of detecting a single pilot’s heartbeat and if there were it would detect all the heartbeats in a cone of reception to the pilot.

    There is, however, a SQUID. A superconducting quantum interference device. This is capable of measuring changes in magnetic flux with exquisite sensitivity. I remember these as a pure research curiosity in the New Scientist as a schoolboy. Well, they have applied to many things, one of which is aerial surveying, looking for metal deposits (the conductivity of metal changes the magnetic flux of the area overflown) or buried infrastructure. The liquid helium or liquid nitrogen cooled “bird” is towed behind an aircraft and the land beneath surveyed.

    Based on cynicism and my Natural Sciences degree (thank you, Cambridge), I believe the US was looking for the Iranian facilities where the uranium is stored by SQUID surveying. Further, I suspect one or more of the downed aircraft (the F-15 debris has been identified but an F-35 ejector seat has also been identified) was conducting this surveying.

    What I don’t understand is why any cover story is needed. My best guess is that it is enables the USA to deny something. SQUID sensor surveying is a highly specialised skill and unlikely to be a military one. Possibly the Israeli civilians (and US?) involved in the operation were working on SQUID sensors and, when their presence has to be announced, it will be they were there (and maybe died) for Ghost Murmur.

    I’ll post some links as background later.
    1. Di Modica's Dumb Steer April 9, 2026 at 1:32 pm

       Are you messing with me? A SQUID (no change in the details of the acronym) is the device you wear under your wig to record your experiences onto a minidisc which later might get sold to Ralph Fiennes.

       First paragraph of PLOT, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)

       “…SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), an illegal electronic device that records memories and physical sensations directly from the wearer’s cerebral cortex onto a MiniDisc-like storage device.”

       Excellent movie, by the way.
       1. Revenant April 9, 2026 at 7:04 pm

          No, not messing with you. It’s a real thing, straight up.

          The theory of the Josephson junction invented by Brian Josephson while still a PhD student at Trinity College Cambridge in the 1960’s won him a rapid Nobel prize in the 1970’s.

          SQUID’s exploit the exquisite magnetic sensitivity of the Josephson junction to infer the structure of the ground from a distance.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson

          Brian Josephson is one of the most out there Novel recipients. His subsequent work has been on quantum mysticism (Roger Penrose gives him a run for his money), water memory and cold fusion. He was still active in his own esoteric research, to institutional embarrassment, and would be pointed out to awed undergraduates like me in the 1990’s and 2000’s.
11. The Rev Kev April 9, 2026 at 9:58 am

    “Ukrainian forces operating in Libya have attacked a Russian tanker, officials say”

    Are there Ukrainians in Libya? Certainly. But there were strong rumours that a Ukrainian attack on a tanker several weeks ago actually came from Malta. So that makes me wonder if this article is trying to cover up that rumour and saying any attacks came from Libya.
12. Wukchumni April 9, 2026 at 12:08 pm

    There’s a brand new dance we all know its name
    That people from bad countries do again and again
    It’s big and it’s bland, full of tension and fear
    They do it over there but we don’t do it here

    Fascism! Turn to the left
    Fascism! Turn to the right
    Ooh, fascism!
    We are the goon squad and we’re in DC town
    Beep-beep
    Beep-beep

    Listen to me – don’t listen to me
    Talk to me – don’t talk to me
    Dalliance with me – don’t dalliance with me, no
    Beep-beep

    There’s a brand new ceasefire but it’s not very clear
    That people from bad countries are talking this year
    It’s loud and tasteless and I’ve heard it before
    Karoline shouts it while reporting from the WH floor
    Oh bop, fascism

    Fascism! Turn to the left
    Fascism! Right
    Fascism!
    We are the goon squad
    And we’re in charge of DC town
    Beep-beep
    Beep-beep

    Listen to me – don’t listen to me
    Talk to me – don’t talk to me
    Dalliance with me – don’t dalliance with me, no
    Beep-beep

    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    La-la la la la la la-la
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    La-la la la la la la-la
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    La-la la la la la la-la
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    Oh, bop, do do do do do do do do
    Fa-fa-fa-fa-fascism
    La-la la la la la la-la

    Fashion, by David Bowie

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWCAqD_jHq0&list=RDApHM1ct4tdM
    1. AG April 9, 2026 at 12:30 pm

       “Listen to me – don’t listen to me
       Talk to me – don’t talk to me
       Dalliance with me – don’t dalliance with me, no
       Beep-beep”

       👍💣🥊💃🏻
       (when typing on my display the icons look much cooler)

       Brevity is the sweetest of all.

       p.s. different but since I ran across:
       Caitlin Johnston´s latest
       “The World Can Have Peace Or Israel, But Not Both”
13. hereweare April 9, 2026 at 12:10 pm

    Microsoft Abruptly Terminates VeraCrypt Account, Halting Windows Updates 404 Media
    From that article:
    “Regarding VeraCrypt, I cannot publish Windows updates. Linux and macOS updates can still be done …” he [Mounir Idrassi, VeraCrypt’s developer] continued.
14. Geo April 9, 2026 at 12:23 pm

    I’ve not been on NC for a few days so my apologies if this is a repost but felt it’s worth sharing this news just in case it hasn’t been posted yet:

    Forest Service Sheds Research Capacity in Move to Utah

    U.S. Forest Service is shuttering more than 57 research stations and eliminating a significant but unknown number of forestry scientists. Rather than streamlining the agency, these moves may render it less capable of addressing growing threats to forest health from wildfires, diseases, and the effects of climate change, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

    https://peer.org/forest-service-sheds-research-capacity-in-move-to-utah/

    From the reading I’ve done it seems they’re using “restructuring” language to hide the reality that they’re basically annihilating the forestry service and putting its charred remains in the hands of those who wish to dismantle it. Moving the HQ to Utah seems intentional due to Utah being a notoriously anti-public lands government. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/why-mike-lee-waging-war-against-america-s-public-lands?amp
    1. Geo April 9, 2026 at 12:54 pm

       Another article about it:
       https://www.hatchmag.com/articles/trump-administration-orders-dismantling-us-forest-service/7716263

       Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

       They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.

       The Forest Service was the last major federal land agency that still had the institutional muscle to resist. It had the scientists. It had the regional foresters. It had the culture, imperfect as it was, that still believed forests belonged to the public.

       After today, that agency no longer exists.
       1. Wukchumni April 9, 2026 at 5:41 pm

          Potentially the biggest wildfire year in the west is just a month or 2 away from ignition, the timing couldn’t be any suckier.
       2. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 11:15 pm

          That’s appalling but the notion that the Forest Service are always the good guys ain’t necessarily so just as the BLM often has a cozy relationship with the cattle barons out west.

          Pinchot himself set the agency up to serve timber harvesters as well as the general public. A real change would be moving public land ownership to private as Newt Gingrich and company once wanted to do. For that they will need Congress and thanks to Trump Congress may not be a Republican play ground much longer.
15. hereweare April 9, 2026 at 1:11 pm

    What should we take from Anthropic’s (possibly) terrifying new report on Mythos?

    I don’t see what the fuss is about. It can find vulnerabilities in computer code. It’s found security problems in every major operating system and web browser, which are being sorted out. It isn’t being widely released yet because hackers might find vulnerabilities first and exploit them. And the Linux Foundation, among many others, are able to use this preview, so it’s not just Microsoft et al getting an edge on competitors.

    And while the article in Links has “what role humans played, isn’t clear”, one of Anthropic’s press releases says “It was able to identify nearly all of these vulnerabilities—and develop many related exploits—entirely autonomously, without any human steering.”

    I’m not impressed by Marcus on AI’s clickbait article.
    1. samm April 9, 2026 at 5:36 pm

       Not to defend Marcus too much (he is after all an AGI true believer), but he did post a followup clarifying that post:

       https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/three-reasons-to-think-that-the-claude

       The results Anthropic were hyping weren’t really all that.
       1. wl April 9, 2026 at 11:12 pm

          he is after all an AGI true believer)??
          unless what you mean to say is he has not ruled out he possibility of agi in some future completely different strategy, other than LLMs
       2. hereweare April 10, 2026 at 3:15 am

          ‘The results Anthropic were hyping weren’t really all that.’
          That’s according to Marcus on AI. It’s found vulnerabilities in every OS and browser. OK, so other AIs can confirm them when shown the relevant code, but didn’t find them on their own.
          “But here is what we found when we tested: We took the specific vulnerabilities Anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights models. Those models recovered much of the same analysis. Eight out of eight models detected Mythos’s flagship FreeBSD exploit, including one with only 3.6 billion active parameters costing $0.11 per million tokens. A 5.1B-active open model recovered the core chain of the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug.”
          https://x.com/clementdelangue/status/2041953761069793557?s=61
          (part of that post is in Marcus’s followup piece)

          And Bessent and Powell taken in by Anthropic’s hype?
          Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street leaders to an urgent meeting on concerns that the latest artificial intelligence model from Anthropic PBC will usher in an era of greater cyber risk.

          Bessent and Powell assembled the group at Treasury’s headquarters in Washington on Tuesday to make sure banks are aware of possible future risks raised by Anthropic’s Mythos and potential similar models, and are taking precautions to defend their systems, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified citing the private discussions.
          https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-10/anthropic-model-scare-sparks-urgent-bessent-powell-warning-to-bank-ceos

          Looks real enough to me, but I don’t see the fact that it hasn’t been publicly released as sinister, which many seem to do.
16. Maxwell Johnston April 9, 2026 at 1:18 pm

    The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy —

    The Vatican City sits deep inside the capital city of a country which not only is a key NATO ally of the USA, but also hosts several of its military bases and nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the current Pope is a citizen of the USA. And the Vatican Bank (over $5bn in assets) is subject to the regulations of the western (largely USA-controlled) financial system. Elbridge Colby was simply reminding the Vatican envoy of some basic facts of life.

    If the Pope is truly serious about steering his flock towards the actual teachings of the New Testament, he can start by visiting the USA embassy in Rome and renouncing his citizenship (and doing so very publicly). He can continue by moving his Church’s world headquarters to a neutral country with a large Roman Catholic population (the DR Congo would fit the bill nicely).

    I doubt that Pope Leo will do anything of the sort. He reminds me of Pope Pius XII; well-intentioned but utterly out of his depth. And Rome is much comfier than Kinshasa.
    1. Es s Ce Tera April 9, 2026 at 3:52 pm

       Vatican City is its own country, actually, a fully independent city-state.

       And the administrative centre for the Catholic world which is, well, the world.

       So I’m unsure why the Vatican needs to move anywhere.
    2. Revenant April 9, 2026 at 7:14 pm

       I think you’re missing the point. The USA just assassinated one cleric who was both a spiritual and temporal leader (Khamanei). Threatening another one, with a much more substantial proportion of US and NATO citizens in his flock, looks very bad.

       And I don’t think it is mitigated by your implying that the USA can de-bank the Vatican and can nuke Italy so the Pope should shut up about matters of conscience. Those are just variations on the outrage, of the temporal dictating to the spiritual.

       I hope the Pope excommunicates Vance and we’ll see what kind of retaliation ensues. Perhaps, like Zelensky, Vance will run up a competing church out of whole cloth – maybe even appoint himself Defender of the Faith like Henry VIII?

       Renouncing his US passport would be a good start.
17. hereweare April 9, 2026 at 1:28 pm

    CDC delays publishing report showing covid vaccine benefits – Washington Post

    The acting CDC director cited concerns with the methodology, but the design has long been used to test vaccine effectiveness.

    The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision. The scientists spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

    The move has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits are being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots.
18. flora April 9, 2026 at 1:35 pm

    File under Democrats Suck. From Glenn Greenwald’s substack.
    No paywall.

    The ‘Opposition Party’ Has Done Nothing to Stop the Iran War and Much to Goad Trump Into Continuing It
    When Democrats pretend to attack Trump, many clearly want more war with Iran.

    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-opposition-party-has-done-nothing

    The opening 2 paras:

    There is a version of the Democratic Party that exists only in the imagination: the peace party, the anti-war party, the party that marched against the Iraq War and howled at its neocon designers. As Donald Trump (reportedly) accepted Iran’s ceasefire terms this week, some of the most pointed attacks coming his way from Democrats are not about the thousands of civilians killed, the weeks of brutal bombardments against medical centers and universities, or the global economic damage the war has caused. They are about the war ending before the U.S. and Israel finished the job.

    And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a pattern coming from Democratic senators, the Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee, ranking members of the Armed Services Committee, and some of the party’s most prominent voices. The liberal opposition party wants more war.
    1. hereweare April 9, 2026 at 1:49 pm

       The WSWS regularly says the role of the ‘left’ of the Democratic Party (they usually use the term pseudo-left) is to channel any opposition to capitalism, imperialism, US foreign policy and so on into futile support and votes for the Dems. I’m far from agreeing with everything the WSWS says, but here, I think they’re spot on.
    2. Screwball April 9, 2026 at 2:33 pm

       My vote blue no matter who friends would never believe this. Of course, they consider Greenwald nothing but propaganda anyway and would never read him, so there is that.

       They also tell me the dems never lie, and what they tell them is nothing but the truth. We must elect them to save the world because they are the only people who care about us.

       Strange world huh?
19. Kouros April 9, 2026 at 3:18 pm

    A good one from John Helmer today:
    https://johnhelmer.net/the-dolittle-question-the-do-nothing-answer-the-power-shift-which-the-iran-war-is-causing-in-moscow/

    people are not really happy with the way Putin is running the war.

    Also, Big Serge’s post had the most pushback from readers I have ever seen so far.
    1. leaf April 9, 2026 at 3:48 pm

       With how non-agreement capable Trump is, and after the assassination attempt on his residence, it’s hard to see what value Putin has in maintaining these Anchorage understandings. Maybe it’s just for the sake of nuclear talks even though all the arms control has ended?
       Also Big Serge is definitely zionist leaning from his past twitter postings or at least some perceived notion that the “mullahs” are detrimental, which might be why.
    2. Mikel April 9, 2026 at 3:50 pm

       And check this out:
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olmFaNjvqSA/
       Russia and Iran: Do Russians Think Putin is a Softy? | W/ Fiorella Isabel & Vanessa Beeley

       I noted they said Fiorella is in Russia.
    3. Carolinian April 9, 2026 at 11:56 pm

       A lot of “let us stipulate” in Serge. Instead of assume a can opener, assume an all powerful hegemon that knows what it is attempting. The column seems to be fancy talking BS. Zionist indeed?
20. PapaPoe April 9, 2026 at 5:25 pm

    https://www.utilitydive.com/news/fervo-turboden-enhanced-geothermal-turbines-vallourec/817096/”

    Perhaps a positive development on geothermal energy.

    Fervo has built a 100 MW facility.

    Is there anyone here that can confirm that Geothermal is becoming an option for baseline power on the US.
21. Wukchumni April 9, 2026 at 6:30 pm

    Did Melania just throw Donald under the bus?
    1. JG April 9, 2026 at 10:00 pm

       Stir it up baby, twist and shout… hum, unknown. But, I sure like your prose. 123W, 42N… neighbors of the Far Reach🌅

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