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Links 5/12/2026

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The Criminal Enterprise Run by Monkeys Wall Street Journal (Li). No, not OpenAI.

We missed this when first ran. Seems to be a product of the smartphone era. I was there in 1993 and 1994. They were aggressive but not in this manner.

Whales ‘forced to shout’ to communicate over shipping noise Telegraph

A supervolcano nearly wiped out humanity 74,000 years ago, but humans did something incredible Science Daily (Kevin W)

Hantavirus

How are countries responding to hantavirus? BBC

French woman was told by doctors hantavirus symptoms were just anxiety Guardian (Kevin W)

Climate/Environment

Canadian Muskoxen Hit by Double Punch of Novel Diseases and Climate Change Good Men Project :-(

A ‘triple whammy’ of chaos has triggered a downward spiral in Antarctica, scientists discover CNN

‘The worst time for wheat’: US farmers face losses to extreme heat and drought Guardian

Plastic waste carries toxic chemicals through seas: Study Daily Sabah

China?

The Stakes of Trump vs. Xi Foreign Affairs. I can’t even…..

New Trump sanctions on Chinese firms: leverage on Xi or overkill? Asia Times (Kevin W)

Trump invites Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink and other CEOs to join China trip for Xi summit CNBC (Kevin W). ZOMG, Trump betters Netanyahu’s cheekiness (of bringing a suitcase of laundry with him on official visits and having it cleaned on the US taxpayer dime). Recall China confirmed this summit at the very last minute. Chas Freeman confirms no sherpa work was done in advance. Is China expected to give these clowns an official audience? I hope it instead put them all on a tour bus. No quotes from Chinese officials in this article.

China warns against rising Japanese neo-militarism, urges sincere remorse from Japan Bastille Post

India

Modi urges Indians to WFH and limit foreign travel as Iran war continues BBC

Southeast Asia

Philippine debt service payments more than doubled to P737 billion in first quarter Manila Standard

Indonesia’s debt wall hits an economy running on borrowed time Asia Times

Thailand may face dual water risks as El Niño risk rises from May to July The Nation. If Thailand is exposed to this pattern, you can assume the rest of Southeast Asia is too, at least to a degree.

Africa

Conflicts in the Middle East are increasing dangers for whales off South Africa by shifting sea traffic into their habitats and heightening the risks of collision New Arab

Dozens killed in jihadist attacks in central Mali Aljazeera

Nigeria says dozens of terrorists killed as troops repel assault on base TRT Afrika

Rebel fighters kill at least 69 people in northeastern DR Congo Aljazeera

‘It’s like we went bankrupt overnight’: poorest Somalis suffer as piles of worthless shillings mount up Guardian

Tremors in South Sudan are a warning of worse to come Arab News

Sudan: How One of the Most Severe Humanitarian Crises Became Marginalized in the Global System Stimson

South of the Border

Venezuela’s leader to defend her country’s claim over mineral-rich Guyana region before UN court Independent

Venezuela warns of ‘serious’ environmental impact from oil spill off Trinidad and Tobago Los Angeles Times

Antipodes

New Zealand Outlines How Potential Fuel Rationing Would Work Bloomberg

European Disunion

US in closely guarded talks to open new bases in Greenland BBC. Lead story in US/Canada version of the site.

How the Iran war is impacting food production lines across Europe Sky

The real meaning of German rearmament Thomas Fazi

Germany in fresh push to buy Tomahawks after Trump row Financial Times

Old Blighty

Global Bond Vigilantes Circle UK Economy After Labour Polling Disaster Streamline

Did Starmer speech do enough to end call for him to quit? STV. The short clip from the speech is cringe-making. I know I should have more on Starmer twisting in the wind. But he is such a pathetic, vile figure that I hate having to think about him much, particularly since his political demise is certain, even if the timing is not. But UK readers have a lot at stake in where this goes, so please do pipe up in comments!

Israel v. The Resistance

Marathon marks a turning point for a Palestinian runner released from an Israeli prison ABC Australia (ma)

Israel needs more troops to join ‘immediately’ amid ‘collapsing’ army TRT World

Israeli weapon fires tiny metal cubes into people in Lebanon, like Gaza Aljazeera

Gulf turns to Turkey for air defence systems amid Iran threat Middle East Eye

Yemen Faces Accelerating Economic Collapse Amid War , Regional Tensions Yemen Online

War on Iran: Senior royal says Saudi Arabia avoided Israeli plan to ‘plunge region into ruin’ Middle East Eye (Kevin W)

Trump’s ‘Unacceptable’ Answer Daniel Larison

Iran’s banks defy Trump financial sanctions to keep business as usual for regime Observer

New Not-So-Cold War

WWIII drones on Julian Macfarlane. Opening section about the Middle East but the bulk of the post is on Russia.

Finland Is On Track To Become One Of Russia’s Most Intractable Foes Andrew Korybko

Imperial Collapse Watch

Why Are Americans So Bloody Stupid? YouTube (Roy P). ZOMG, I got a few minutes into this and so far it is great.

The RICO State: How Legal Pattern Recognition Reveals the Criminal Architecture of Transnational Capital William Murphy

Yes, Death to American Sam Husseini

A History of OPEC: Why Its Crisis Is Bad News Think BRICS

Trump 2.0

Trump says he’ll move to suspend federal gasoline tax. He can’t do it on his own Associated Press (Kevin W)

Lawsuit filed over Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovations The Hill

GOP Clown Car

Why Is Susan Collins Shaking? Ken Klippenstein

Our No Longer Free Press

Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time. New York Times (The Joker)

Economy

The Middle East conflict has triggered a “super squeeze” in the global sulphur and sulphuric acid markets, driving prices to record-breaking levels CRU

Coal shipments jump as countries seek alternatives to disrupted gas supplies Financial Times

Asia braces for a second wave of energy shocks from the Iran war Independent

Hokkaido Faces Garbage Bag Shortage as Panic Buying Spreads News Japan. This is not surprising except perhaps that it is showing up early in Japan. We have pointed out that naptha, used to make plastic, is set to run short all over Asia.

Mr. Market is Giddy

The financial system is a giant polycrisis waiting to happen Globe and Mail

AI

AI-powered hacking has exploded into industrial-scale threat, Google says Guardian (Kevin W). BWAHAHA.

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain 404 Media

????:

Class Warfare

The Serpent in the Garden: A.J.A. Woods’s history of the ‘cultural Marxism conspiracy’ Commonweal (Anthony L)

Tesla strike moves beyond Sweden’s borders – IF Metall blocks foreign work Dagens Arbete via machine translation (Micael T)

It will now be prohibited for municipalities to compete with companies Tidningen Näringslive via machine translation (Micael T)

Why should Swedes consume when half the country is going backwards? Aftonbladet via machine translation (Micael T)

Antidote du jour (Nat):

A bonus:

A second bonus:

And a third:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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148 comments

    1. LawnDart

      This is not dissimilar to a hazard faced by those in certain occupations, mostly within the trades:

      Injection injuries: seemingly minor injuries with major consequences

      You can search for images via “injection injuries” for some easily findable stomach-turners, but text alone will suffice to give the gist.. these injuries are freakin nightmare fuel, and always in the back of my mind when I’m tasked with hydraulic troubleshooting, which I try to stay away from these days.

      It got me thinking: what if Israelis replaced the metal cubes with another material? One more conducive to infection risks or that is more difficult to detect?

      Note, like the Israeli cube-projectiles, here’s the thing that often accompanies injection injuries: they don’t look serious, at least initially, and the pain is somewhat mild so victims tend to defer treatment, not realizing the severity of the wound. In the case of injection injuries, this allows the substance, usually an lubricant or solvent, to spread and kill healthy tissue to create necrosis, gangrene, leaving amputation or tissue-removal as the only treatment options.

      Imagine that injury in a war-zone or elsewhere in conditions where medical treatment is scarce or simply unavailable…

  2. farmboy

    astonishing Felipe Demartini
    @namcios
    Translated from Portuguese
    The woman who built ChatGPT left OpenAI, stayed silent for a year, and what she just launched could change forever how you use AI in your day-to-day life.

    Mira Murati didn’t just found another chatbot. She went after the problem no lab wanted to solve: every AI that exists today works in turns. You type, wait. The model responds, waits. It’s like trying to solve a crisis by email when you could be in the same room as the person.

    What Thinking Machines launched today puts an end to that.

    The model listens, sees, speaks, thinks, and acts all at the same time. It’s not a stitched-together pipeline of components. It’s the model itself that was trained from scratch to work this way.

    → Latency of 0.40s per turn. The industry standard is 1 to 2 seconds.
    → Micro-turns of 200ms interleaving input and output nonstop
    → Does searches, uses tools, and generates interfaces while chatting with you
    → Senses when you hesitate and steps in before you even ask
    → Real-time simultaneous translation with both parties speaking

    The team: Mira Murati as CEO (ex-CTO at OpenAI), Soumith Chintala as CTO (creator of PyTorch), and recent hires from Meta in multimodal perception.

    The key technical point worth noting: they cite Rich Sutton’s “bitter lesson.” Interactivity built through external components will always lose out to native interactivity in the model. Scaling the model makes it smarter and more collaborative at the same time.

    822K views in 4 hours. a16z commenting. Brazil sleeping.

    Every AI you use today will feel like email in two years. And the one that took the lead in this race wasn’t OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic.

    It was the company of the woman they let walk away.

    1. BrianH

      Ok, seems like “Thinking Machines “ developed a faster and more user friendly AI. But no, Thinking Machines did not and cannot create AI that thinks, as it seems to allege by its very title and the marketing language included here. A lot less clunky, maybe not clunky at all. But not a thinker. AI isn’t there.

      1. TimH

        That X on the Google article nixing AGI raises a pet peeve. Why don’t these X commenters provide a link to piece that they are commenting on?

        1. cfraenkel

          Speculation on my part, from a platform abstainer…. All of these platforms really, really, don’t like external links, since the algorithm’s primary directive is to keep people onsite. Very likely, authors have learned that posts with external links don’t get shown by the algorithm. So they don’t provide them. (or equivalently, you never see the posts with external links – same difference)

  4. dearieme

    “Why Are Americans So Bloody Stupid?” I found the girl’s voice ugly (and incomprehensible); I couldn’t listen beyond the first few seconds. I can see that not everyone will want to go to speech therapy or elocution lessons but surely there must be some simple electronic way to improve things?

    1. CanCyn

      Really??!! She has an Australian accent, no big deal. She’s a bit dramatic to watch so I’m just listening. Nothing ‘ugly’ about her voice to me and not the least bit incomprehensible. Also, she’s right. Anti-intellectualism is a huge problem in the US.

      1. .Tom

        I don’t think anti-intellectualism is the problem and I think the intellectuals are a big part of the problem.

        This style of production isn’t something I can put up with but it may be useful to some people. Even the description is completely off-putting

        The world constantly looks at the United States and asks one question: “How did they get so dumb?” But the truth is much darker. Americans aren’t naturally stupid – their system was meticulously engineered over 200 years to destroy critical thinking.

        Almost everything about that is wrong.

        1. The Rev Kev

          There is a book that came out way back in 1987 that might be relevant called “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” by Allan Bloom. God knows what an updated version of that book would be like with present day use of AI-

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

          I admit that I have not read it but I keep on coming across references to that book over the years. Today’s intellectuals came from that background.

          1. .Tom

            Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (2000) is a very good book. It opens by observing that open mindedness statistically decreases with more education and then explains in thoroughgoing detail how graduate school works to produce people who can be relied upon to adopt, support and enforce the ideology of whatever organization they go on to be employed by.

            1. Objective Ace

              I wonder if this is dependent on the major (arts vs sciences). From my perspective, open mindedness increases when learning about confidence intervals and the assumptions that go into various models

            2. lyman alpha blob

              Maybe the key to having an educated and also open mind is getting a broad education rather than a specialized one. The post near the top about the chess grand masters seems to indicate that that is the case.

        2. amfortas

          i could argue with everything before the prussian thing…after that, pretty spot on, imo.
          and i come from a family full of teachers.
          and what she goes on about in american ed is exactly why i ended up being chased out of it. independent minds are not welcome…or at least they werent in texas in the 80’s.
          i stopped doing the pledge of allegiance in 2nd grade…because it felt just wrong, somehow.
          got in trouble for it, too.
          cited first amendment.
          caused much fear and loathing,lol.

          and…this presents an opportunity to use one of my favorite quotes:” what luck for the rulers that men do not think.”
          (hitler, in mein kampf…)

          1. lyman alpha blob

            My teacher friends have kept me out of the teaching profession for exactly the reason you cite – independent minds not welcome. It’s more and more just teaching to the test, and everyone must teach the same way.

            Math teacher friend told me years ago about a colleague who had great success using baseball stats to teach math to his class, and thought everyone should do it that way. My friend pointed out that he had a real passion for baseball, which is likely why it worked for him, but she did not share that interest and did not care to teach that way. She was eventually chased out of the profession.

            Private schools are likely less rigid with the standards they must adhere to. But personally I would like to help educate those who need it most, not those born with the silver spoons who don’t really need the help. So did my friend – after 30 years teaching math in public schools, she wound up as a cashier in a general store so she didn’t have to deal with the hassle any longer.

            She died last year. One younger former student of hers who I’d not met before said at her funeral that she taught him to have a healthy disregard for the opinions of others, a quality I much admire.

          2. Tom Stone

            One of the reasons I was encouraged to leave Piedmont High School was asking the Librarian why their wasn’t a copy of the “Communist Manifest” on the shelves…after all it is one of the most influential books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

            1. LifelongLib

              IIRC my high school library had both Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. One (I forget which) had an intro by J. Edgar Hoover assuring parents that it was for educational purposes only, not to turn the kids into Communists (or Nazis).

        3. Alphonse

          I agree.

          When all you have is a hammer… For intellectuals, that hammer is reason. Reason has its limits. It easily becomes degenerate, moving from understanding to a mode of domination wherein the natural world and human beings themselves become means to an end. This was the critique of the Frankfurt School and of Heidegger. This is Iain McGilchrist’s characterization of the narrow instrumentalism of the right hemisphere of the brain. Reason is restrictive, not expansive. It functions by cutting reality, reducing a phenomenon to few dimensions, like the experiment that eliminates all variability except for the one being tested.

          Reason privileges thought. It abstracts axioms then proceeds logically to a conclusion. But the world is not made of thought. Abstractions always miss something. This is the point, the thing that makes them powerful – and ensures that reasoning can never quite hit the target. They can never fully succeed because reality is inherently contradictory. It cannot be captured in thought.

          Narrow specialization serves institutions well because they are rational. In order to affect the world they must reduce it to measurements and operations. This is a limitation of reality, not a fixable flaw. Institutions prefer workers who are in this sense rational. So with capitalism. Henry Braverman shows that the primary purpose of Fordism was control, not profit: capital first controls labour, then it profits. Similarly for bureaucracy and the relationship of government to citizenry, I would add.

          As the book you mention, Disciplined Minds, explains, the purpose of higher education is not to grow students into the full potential of their intelligence, but to hone students to fulfill instrumental roles. Because the work they preform is intellectual it cannot be fully specified, measure and controlled like the Fordist worker shovelling coal. If the body of the intellectual cannot be controlled, then the mind must be. Instead of cutting away excess motion, schooling cuts away excess temperament and character.

          But temperament, I believe, is the core of real intelligence, or at least the catalyst that activates it. In this respect the dog in the antidote video seems more intelligent than many intellectuals. To make a try at abstracting that temperament, I suggest:

          – The capacity for abstraction. Not a universal trait.

          – Flexibility, to go beyond the given framework.

          – Discipline, so that moment-to-moment motivation and desire are not limiting.

          – Sensuousness, by which I mean an emotional connection to the experience of the world, to keep one in touch with reality beyond thought.

          – Hubris or disagreeableness, sufficient to free one from social conformity.

          – Humility, to submit to reality and enable one to change ones’ mind.

          Flexibility and discipline, hubris and humility, sensuousness and abstraction: the list is contradictory. But then so is the world.  To understand it one must flow with it. Perhaps the acceptance of paradox is the meta trait, one that is ironically as accessible, if not more, to those who lack raw intelligence or schooling.

          One can distinguish two flavours of intellectualism. The first rejects reason tout court. This is indeed foolish. The second argues against it in order to transcend it. This, I believe, is wisdom. Reviewing old articles I have saved, I came across this one. It presents a framework of stages of intellectual development. Stages 1 and 2 are not relevant. Stage 3, pre-rational, believes in communal harmony. One follows rules in order to fit in. In stage 4, rational, the individual is able to follow reasoning to its conclusion even when this contradicts the feelings of the group. In stage 5, meta-rational, one recognizes the limitations of rationality and learns to tolerate contradiction. This stage is not anti-rational – it transcends rationality.

          The problem is that the only way to get to stage 5 is to first pass through stage 4. One cannot see the need to go beyond rationality until one has achieved it. But if you haven’t got there, stage 5 looks like stage 3. When you teach students in stage 3 postmodernism, they take it as a rejection of stage 4 rationality. Meanwhile people in stage 4 see stage 5 not as transcendence of rationality but as a failure to understand it. And the transition from 4 to 5 is traumatic, for it begins with the collapse of faith in reason and descent in nihilism.

          Our culture and our institutions were once characterized by an excessive reliance on stage 4 rationality. In our effort to transcend it we have instead fallen back to stage 3, which reduces to consensus irrationality. Until we reconstruct rationality we will not be able to go beyond it. For now we are mired in tribal polarization and the domineering logic of instrumental rationality.

          2. Henry Moon Pie

            I’ll second lymanalphablob. Enjoyed it and the essay from Metarationality.

            I’m familiar with a similar “stage” concept from James Fowler and his Stages of Faith. Your jump from stage 4 to stage 5 is similar to his jump from Individuative-Reflective Faith (think: college freshman who rejects everything he learned in catechism) to Conjunctive Faith, where there is an appreciation for uncertainty and paradox.

            I smiled when I read this in the Metarationality essay:

            At best, if they do somehow make it to stage 4, deconstructive postmodernism can only push them on into the ultra-relativist nihilism of 4.5. In that abyss, you realize rationality is not the answer, but can see no alternative.

            “No reason to get excited,”
            The thief, he kindly spoke.
            “There are many here among us
            Who feel that life is but a joke.
            But you and I, we’ve been through that
            And this is not our fate.
            So let us not talk falsely now.
            The hour is getting late.”

            Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”

            Lao Tzu understood what McGilchrist is talking about:

            To know without knowing is best.

            Tao te Ching #71 (Le Guin rendition)

            1. amfortas

              second the excellence of that comment, and welcome!
              lol.
              i apparently started my schoolin at stage 4.
              and the system i was born into wasnt able to deal with me.
              my aunt was the retarded teacher at the time, and i remember her telling my mom…after making me do a buncha tests there at the kitchen table…that i would be regarded as retarded because i was the opposite,lol.
              system wasnt set up for people like me.
              so supergenius= retarded.
              welcome to late 70’s-early 80’s east texas hillbilly madness.
              first day of kindergarten, teacher knew that i could already read. made me read a story, based on revelations, about papa rabbit leading his brood into the bottomless pit to weather some cataclysm….and forever after, i was a weirdo….to be feared and hated.
              Swift said something to the effect of:” you shall know the genius by the crowd of morons chasing after him”
              that is me,lol.
              and i live on a dead end dirt road in the middle of nowhere because of it.
              its a frelling miracle that i found Tam, and that she stayed with me for all those years.
              repeat is unlikely, given current conditions.

              1. Robert Gray

                > Swift said something to the effect …

                ‘When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this Sign, that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him.’

                Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting (1706)

          3. wol

            Excellent comment. It warms my heart to see a reference to Iain ‘don’t believe anything about split-brain theory unless you hear it from me’ McGilchrist. The experiential is more alive than the philosophical, which can be reduced to left-hemisphere word games. Especially regarding paradox/ non-duality.

        4. LifelongLib

          It’s been obvious for a while that the U.S. needs another FDR, maybe even another Lincoln. But the “best” our political process seems able to produce is another version of Joe Biden (hopefully sans the health issues).

        5. CanCyn

          I never said anti-intellectualism is THE problem but it is a big problem. Conversely, having spent most of career in education in Ontario, I can also say that prejudice against the skilled trades is also a problem. We haven’t been getting education right for a very long time in Canada or the US.
          As to your point below about open-mindedness, narrowing with higher education, that one I do see examples of. To ydispute Objective Ace below, I have a friend with a masters in epidemiology who can be very closed minded about many things, including science. One could argue that many in the PMC are closed minded – those who love brunch do not understand much about those of us who don’t. And yes to those who find teachers to be unwelcoming of independent thinking – I often wonder if that has more to do with classroom management than anything else? Anyhow, regardless of how we feel about content or presenter in that video, it certainly got a rise out of all us!

    3. Wukchumni

      A pity all Sheilas don’t sound like Olivia Newton-John. but you go with the hoarse screechy voice you have-not the one you want.

      You can sense that all of the causes she states for individual Yanks being rode hard and put away wet behind the ears, need to be broken. But the only way we get there is via another revolution.

      Instead of the founding fathers, we get floundering father-figures…

      1. The Rev Kev

        When “Grease” came out, that Aussie accept that Olivia had was certainly a cringe worthy event here. But then again, the movie was set in the 50s.

          1. Wukchumni

            Let’s get physical, physical
            I wanna get physical
            Let’s get into physical
            Let me hear your bloody paper oil talk, your paper oil talk
            Let me hear your paper oil talk
            Let’s get physical, physical
            I wanna get physical
            Let’s get into physical
            Let me hear your bloody paper oil talk, your paper oil talk
            Let me hear your bloody paper oil talk

            1. The Rev Kev

              There was a play on Olivia Newton-John’s name and John Travolta at the tie but cannot say it here as this is a family-friendly blog. :)

      2. .Tom

        Re revolution, I said the same to my pal Fab at lunch yesterday.

        As for breaking in individual Yanks, I propose a question before we send someone to reeducation: “You must choose between freedom and treats! iPhones, Ubers, exotic food/travel etc. or the end of the Epstein Empire? Which will it be?” Those that choose treats get to go but may never own or use weapons.

    4. t

      Reading the machine transcript, which will be messy but no more difficult than parsing the autocorrect s in a text chat. Simple. Simple and faster than watching.

      1. vao

        The eucalyptus also wrecked havoc in Spain and Portugal (as well as in North Africa) because of those huge monocrop plantations of trees only good for producing paper pulp. Plenty of large fires there; besides, eucalyptuses have the reputation of sucking the soil dry thanks to their deep roots.

        1. Wukchumni

          We were in Peru last year and the trees of size there are Eucalyptus, and I asked our guide where they came from, and he said ‘why, your state-California’.

    6. ForFawkesSakes

      Now, see, if this were me, I would have asked myself whether I would be embarrassing myself if I made a comment as you did. Ultimately, I would have said, “Nah, that would be exactly like saying, ‘You’re in America, speak American!'”

  5. .Tom

    2nd bonus: tecspacular! Notice the rope “handle” added to the stool to allow the dog to move it around and set it upright.

    3rd: hierarchies in action: looks like a woman cleaning the kitchen floor while a man lounges when a cat asserts dominance to take his comfy spot with the foot stool.

    1. mrsyk

      Ha, that dog has skills that required a bit of training, the white cat, not so much.
      As always, thanks for the antidotes.

      1. .Tom

        Yes. Judging from the wagging I figured the trainer is behind the camera. Likely giving some cues, too.

    2. t

      You mean sitting on a knot isn’t how you prefer to use a stool?!

      The original source might explain the training steps, which would be more interesting to me.

  6. Henry Moon Pie

    Boomers and AI–

    “But they partly WANT to believe, perhaps to atone for their generational failure to make a better world.”

    There would have been a time when I took offense at the above statement, but I now concur completely. This is what I wrote in my 50th Class Reunion Class Report in a piece I titled, “Deadlines.”

    I also wonder if our generation, which “started out so young and strong,” doesn’t also beg for an extension because we have failed so miserably to meet another deadline. The long-heralded goal of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 °C has been breached continuously for more than a year now, and Business As Usual still prevails, reconciled in the minds of some by flat-out denial of the problem and among others by a fantasy relying on mining immense amounts of lithium and copper, a kind of destroy-the-Earth-to-save-it strategy we remember from Vietnam and which cancer patients know well.

    The quoted reference is to a line from Jackson Browne’s “Pretender,” a song that captured where our generation was headed 50 years ago.

    I’m gonna be a happy idiot
    And struggle for the legal tender,
    Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
    To the heart and the soul of the spender,
    And believe in whatever may lie
    In those things that money can buy,
    Though true love could have been a contender.

    [Chorus]
    Are you there?
    Say a prayer for the pretender
    Who started out so young and strong
    Only to surrender.

    Jackson Browne, “The Pretender”

    Browne included just one possible note of optimism:

    I want to know what became of the changes
    We waited for love to bring
    Were they only the fitful dreams
    Of some greater awakening    ?

    Still waiting on that “greater awakening.”

    1. mrsyk

      I don’t believe people are capable of the collaboration required for global stewardship. Blaming boomers seems like a convenient way to avoid discussing the numerous shortcomings of the human species.

      Are you there
      Say a prayer
      For the Pretender

        1. mrsyk

          I’ve been singing JB songs to myself all morning, and high quality ear-worms they are.

        2. Henry Moon Pie

          Thanks for that. Here’s another with the Haiti earthquake in the background:

          And though the earth may tremble and cast our works aside,
          And though our efforts resemble the fluctuating tide,
          We rise and fall with the trust and belief
          That love redeems us each,
          And bend our backs and hearts together standing in the breach.

          Jackson Browne, “Standing in the Breach“

      2. Es s Ce Tera

        Perhaps the only way to global stewardship is a disinterested non-political, non-partisan algo with no consciousness and no emotions. As in, the only thing incapable of greed, malice, hate, selfishness, etc. The only thing capable of loving all equally is something incapable of love?

        (Not plugging AI, just a meandering thought.)

        1. mrsyk

          It’s been five hundred years since the globe was circumnavigated. One might be inclined to think somebody would have come up with a plan, what with our planet proven to be a finite space, that is a plan other than spoils of conquest.

          1. Henry Moon Pie

            For those inclined to “blame humanity” for the coming climate catastrophe (rather than capitalism, Christianity or well-marbled porterhouse steaks), I recommend hearing Nate Hagens’s theory about “phase shift” and Dunbar Number. This is spot cut to the core of the argument. He uses a lot of visuals.

            Other than that, it becomes a question of whether evolution/Gaia has outsmarted itself/herself. Or maybe we’re merely the unwitting agents of a plan to destroy the old world to make way for the new.

            There’s no question that humans are very fond of apples, to the point that you have wonder why Nemesis hasn’t shown up at some point to put the dangerous, hubristic beast down. I guess we do have a few endearing qualities, at least in small numbers.

            1. mrsyk

              Thank you Henry. You’ve an even keel that I’ve admired for over a decade. Admittedly, I’ve an axe to grind with the man-over-nature crowd.

    2. Socal Rhino

      Generational cohorts, a marketing creation, is just another deflection from discussing class warfare. If people had never heard the terms, would they stop and say, you know, have you noticed all these problems were caused by people born in this particular range of years? But kids born a year later, they’re okay?

      It plays on the common experience of perspective change as individuals go from being young and ready to change the world, to getting older and wondering why kids today are lazy and disrespectful and who calls this crap “music.”

      Just one small aspect of teaching Americans not to think about power dynamics.

      1. Wukchumni

        I’m nominally in the same category as our Teetotalitarian Leader in that he’s on the cusp of being a Baby Boomer, while i’m just inside the margins, and really fit better into Generation Jones (1958-64) which got Boomer leftovers & that 70’s inflation.

        I so wanted to go to Woodstock, but no way mom was gonna let a 7 year old go by himself.

        1. ChrisFromGA

          I’m too young to remember the “Summer of Love” but growing up in Buffalo, the trends always hit about 10 years later than the coasts. I can recall hippies hanging around on the banks of the local pond and smoking funny cigarettes as late as ’78.

          My after school program was hunting for snakes, frogs, and setting localized fires in the woods with other miscreants. Fortunately, the worst damage we ever did was burning down a stump that the hippies used to sit down to get stoned on. Rumor had it they were not happy with us.

          1. Wukchumni

            My memories of the Summer of Love were that the entire neighborhood in my east LA hood threw a massive July 4th party, with every family having 4.7 kids, so we knew each other incredibly well.

            We had suburban hippies, and back in the day when you were selling a house, the methodology was pretty crude, and a rectangle sign with a stake going into the lawn was good enough of a selling device, and our so-called hippies ax to grind involved canvasing an area of say 300 houses and finding the 22 of them for sale, and absconding with said for sale signs and planting them all on the lawn of a grown up they didn’t much care for-their act of rebellion, this according to my mom.

            1. jonboinAR

              I grew up slightly closer to the “original” hippies. In about the mid-late 60’s we lived in Humboldt County, CA (well before the chronic). We visited my grandparents in the Bay Area a couple of times each year. For some reason, due to some esoteric calculation on my parent’s part, before we went over to grandparent’s house, we would kill an hour or two in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, I guess in the panhandle area of it. For a couple of trips we picnicked there in a typical big city park with big lawns, small ponds, ducks, squirrels, a young couple making out, etc. Then, one time we came, the place was filled with scraggly haired, unkempt post-teens, drunken, swinging around gallon bottles of Gallo Red Mountain wine. (I knew what it looked like. Mom kept it in the fridge.) My parents, very accommodating sorts, I don’t think they judged. We may have gone back a couple of more times. I think this might have been ’68 or ’69, the denizens of the Summer of Love Haight-Ashbury had spread out to there, but I can’t recall more precisely. Might just have been a nice day at the Park.

              1. quondam SoCal lout

                > … gallon bottles of Gallo Red Mountain wine.

                Oh! the memories! $1.99 in 1971.

      2. Henry Moon Pie

        “Generational cohorts, a marketing creation, is just another deflection from discussing class warfare. If people had never heard the terms, would they stop and say, you know, have you noticed all these problems were caused by people born in this particular range of years? But kids born a year later, they’re okay?”

        While the Madmen did their best to intensify Boomer solidarity at the same time as they sought to co-opt it, they could not have done so without a set of common experiences shared by those who grew up in the 60s. Those common experiences came to most of us over the new medium of television, giving us all a common perspective on events that ranged from JFK’s address announcing a quarantine of Cuba to Ruby shooting Oswald to Tet to the post-MLK riots to Daley’s Chicago to Kent and Jackson State. On a lighter note, there were the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Woodstock, Altamont and Apollo 13. These are common, shared experiences for people born from ’46 to ’58 (or so). Many of them shook our world at the time, and some of these happenings imparted to many of us that all was not as rosy in America as Dinah Shore claimed (also, a TV experience). A pretty mild flavor of solidarity in a generational cohort sometimes comes out right here on NC as us oldsters respond to someone’s mention of an event, person or work of art that evoked that era in our lives.

        Boomers are not unique. My parents’ generation, formed by being young during the Depression and Second World War, had such a strong sense of generational solidarity that they dominated politics for more than 30 years. My kids and their generational cohort all shared being in school during 9/11.

        I don’t think class analysis is getting us very far these days. The whole concept is far muddier than it was in the mid-19th century, and in “get ahead” America–the “struggle for the legal tender” as Browne put it–no one wants to even admit they’re working class, much less go to the barricades. American labor unions mostly fed into this, concentrating almost exclusively on using solidarity to obtain “middle class” benefits for their members so that they could see the USA in their Chevrolets right along with the white collar dudes.

        In a way, I think we’re headed to a time similar in some ways to the 60s. A few years ago, Neoliberalism seemed as entrenched as Fordism seemed in the 50s. American Full Spectrum Dominance seemed to be a permanent institution, as depressing as that was to some of us. Both are cracking into pieces, but not because of any real push from below. The elites have pushed auto-destruct, and we’re left to fend for ourselves. A decade from now, “class” may have even lost more of its meaning as the economy dissolves.

        It will take more than “class” to stir people to resistance these days, especially given the nature of our problems. The means of production are important in any society, but as someone said, people do not live by production alone.

      3. Michael Fiorillo

        Thank you.

        Most Boomers are going to spend their physically declining years in financial precarity, victims of the half-century-plus backlash against the New Deal/Great Society by the most powerful ruling class in history. I guess the author of that tweet never heard of the Powell Memo, union busting or neoliberal austerity.

        I call bs misdirection.

        1. Mikel

          Granted, there are many devils in the details with any plans like the Great Society and plenty of debate could be had about the plans. Is it to far off the mark that simply speaking the concept was enough to ramp up the Vietnam War?
          Everybody talks about the epic resistance. True. But….

          At the time, that same ruling class successfully threw a wrench in more long term plans for expansion of social spending (something the most rabid equated to “communism”) in the BIGGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD.
          They always said it was about countries falling to communism and the whole “domino theory”.
          In the minds of rabid Birchers and such, the biggest one that would have knocked them all over was a USA committed to social spending.

          Thus, a bigger win for them at the time than defeating a smaller nation in SE Asia….

          Just spitballin’ way past my bedtime…

    3. Charles Carroll

      There is a story about a guy named Lynch who was a consultant to slave owners, and he advised the slave owners to keep their slaves divided by classifying them by skin darkness (the darker, the lower classification), and gender and by age. That is what the ruling class does to the population in current times.

      1. Michael Fiorillo

        Lynch, the consultant to slave owners? Talk about nominative determinism!

  8. Alice X

    Why Are Americans So Bloody Stupid? utube

    shorter: I know America has an education system, there’s a mass shooting there every day.

    3. Alice X

      There is some to critique to be had of this video.

      The point is critical thinking. While it points at an authoritarianism which denies the authority of intellectual pursuit, it does not point to another authoritarianism potential of that pursuit.

      Equanimity.

      Calmnest of mind.

      Many questions.

  9. The Rev Kev

    ‘cats with powerful impression 🐾
    @catshealdeprsn
    Impossible😂😂😂😂😂 ‘

    I cannot see the problem with that video clip. Obviously the guy was in the cat’s spot so had to move. What else could he do?

    2. Old Jake

      He pre-warmed the spot. Doesn’t matter where he was, it was warm so the cat wanted it. And they had done it many times before, both well “trained.”

      Experienced cat caterer here.

  10. Robert Gray

    Re: chess from childhood

    Ihtesham Ali’s X-twist looked interesting, until I got to this:

    > Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.
    …
    > Chess works that way. Most things do not.
    …
    > Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser.

    Bzzzt.

    1. Bad Coffee

      A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow.

      Dating is a wicked environment, particularly for men, is it not?

    2. diptherio

      Yeah, his knowledge of chess is lacking – but I think the overall point stands…or at least I want it to, as a bit of a generalist myself…

  11. Tom Stone

    I’m sure the commentariat will correct me if I am wrong, my understanding is that Hantavirus is airborne, that transmission can take place even with minimal contact, that symptoms don’t usually show up for 42 days and that the infected become progressively more contagious during that time.
    With a Mortality rate of 40%.
    And CDC guidance is “Call your Doctor when symptoms occur”.
    No worries, the Center for Disease Communication is doing its job…

      1. Tom Stone

        The job of the current Center for disease communication is to communicate diseases to as many humans as possible…
        This may sound a bit “woke”, but it isn’t really.

        1. amfortas

          depopulation by pretend incompetence/ignorance/lack of funds.
          almost 40 years of doomerism, and i never thought that ‘they’ would resort to disease as a method…because of the likelihood that it would splash all over them and theirs.
          i expected a more targeted approach.

    2. Who Cares

      Yes, the hantavirus is airborne with a but qualifier. It survives by piggybacking on aerosols/particulate from rodent dropping/urine/saliva, survival of the virus in those is up to two weeks even when they dry out. If a human inhales those aerosols they can get the virus but a human can’t transmit it (barring one exception). Note getting bitten, imbibing infected blood, or eating food contaminated with rodent excrement are also pathways for infection.

      What makes the Andes virus, the hantavirus strain that is now in the news, special is that it is human to human transmissible (same ways as the rodents, excrement, urine, saliva, and blood, the last includes pregnant mother to unborn transmission). The period people start being contagious is about 5 days before the expected symptoms of a hantavirus infection show, during those days people feel like they have a flu.

      Ease of transmission is not yet fully established with evidence that regular/continuous contact, like on a cruise ship, is needed where some evidence seems to indicate just passing someone is enough. That said most evidence for ease of transmission seems to indicate that it takes prolonged contact with a contagious person otherwise we’d have had (larger scale) outbreaks in the 1990s, when the virus was first identified, then have occurred to date.

      Incubation period is up to 6 weeks for Andes virus. Hence the headbanging I did when I read that Canadian passengers only had to self quarantine for half that.

      1. vao

        “The period people start being contagious is about 5 days before the expected symptoms of a hantavirus infection show, during those days people feel like they have a flu.”

        My goodness! Yet another virus infection causing “flu-like” symptoms. Covid, RSV, parvovirus, monkeypox, now Hanta.

        And I have also seen the adjective “mild” hanging around.

        The nonchalance-mongers really want to kill us.

        1. Who Cares

          Flu is never mild, well there are relative variations between different flu strains, anyone adding that adjective to flu has never had the flu just a good common cold infection.
          Also I wrote: “about 5 days”, I should have written: “up to 5 days”.

          The flu like symptoms are just the virus preparing to kill you, after the initial phase you get hammered with Hanta Pulmonary Syndrome.

          Not so much nonchalance-mongering as calm-mongering. It is almost eerie in how synchronized the messaging on this is. Well I’m going to wait with that until they contact trace the people who disembarked at St. Helena and went home.

      2. Mikel

        “What makes the Andes virus, the hantavirus strain that is now in the news, special is that it is human to human transmissible (same ways as the rodents, excrement, urine, saliva, and blood, the last includes pregnant mother to unborn transmission)…”

        Should this be a red alert about using public restrooms that don’t have toilet lids that can be closed before flushing (or even entering such an area)?

        1. amfortas

          “aerosolised fecal plume”
          i avoid public restrooms like the plague they are…but when i must, i never flush, and exit fast.
          hold my breath behind my bandanna, etc
          both my toilets dont have that problem,lol…dry composters. no water wasted, at all.
          feeds the pasture.
          we are on our own…just like the randian nutjobs wanted it.

          1. Mikel

            You are probably like me…feeling the terror of an emergency where I have to enter a public restroom, especially the ones popular at movie theaters or airports with the auto flush features (and toilets with no lids).

            Aren’t things advanced enough to have automatic lid closing then an automatic flush?

    3. nyleta

      It is already in the wild, two cases in Ukraine. It has never been in a jet plane with circulating air before. It is just a matter of what the R0 is in the new circumstances.

      Apparently the RNA of this is laid out in such a way that allows antigenic shift as well as antigenic drift. Expect quick variation. CDC has now said 50% death rate with up to 6 weeks incubation and positives to go in a negative pressure room. Once the HPS starts it is over quickly and the PCR test is wildly inaccurate with molecular testing needed for unsure cases.

      We are making the same mistakes again.

      1. Who Cares

        The Andes variant hasn’t reached Ukraine (yet).
        Ukraine has their own Hanta virus variants. Dozens of cases from them yearly before the war, I suspect it is in the hundreds now but no one tests deceased soldiers.

        There were five Ukrainians aboard the Hondius, as crew members. One was flown to Netherlands, the other four stayed on board to crew the ship, they are quarantined.

  12. Mark Gisleson

    re: auto loan and credit card delinquencies

    I wonder how many taxpayers have simply stopped filing their returns? Anecdotally I’m hearing from almost everyone that they know at least one person who’s stopped filing (the reasons vary wildly but all reflect either anger at government’s failures or simply a flat out inability to pay).

    I’m troubled by the lack of seeming government awareness of this issue. Since they must know better than anyone else how much filing noncompliance is occurring, this would seem to be a conspiracy of silence. Not paying taxes is straight up legit rebellion but only crickets from the government and their pet media outlets. Almost as if we were in a dumpster rapidly rolling down hill with all the occupants focused only on putting out the fire.

    1. scott s.

      ‘Not filing” and “not paying” are two entirely different things, at least if you are a W-2 earner (and also paying FICA regardless).

      1. lyman alpha blob

        Indeed. If you’re working, you pay, and often more than you should.

        Years ago a coworker who was unfortunately not the sharpest tool in the box got in trouble for failure to file taxes for several years and was facing some stiff penalties he definitely could not afford. Not a tax accountant myself, but all he’d needed to do was file the 1040 EZ. I filed a few years’ worth for him and he wound up with a sizeable refund.

        That being said, I’m at a loss to figure out why anyone who just works a 9-5 for their income should have to file at all. Why so difficult to take out the correct amount from the get go? Others countries are apparently able to do that.

    2. chris

      The risk is too great for me to even think about not filing. I would love to with hold funds from my criminal government. I’m tired of paying them protection money and not getting any protection. But the penalties for getting caught are severe. So I pay my accountant to help me manage that and then grumble about it every year.

      I suppose we can look at how many people have W-2s issued vs. how many tax returns were received. It would be interesting to see how large the tax revolt is. My feeling is there’s a lot more people talking about it than doing it.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        I assume the IRS is at least as draconian as the NYC tax police. NYC will garnish 2x the amount they say you owe if you ignore penalty notices.

        1. Mark Gisleson

          I stopped paying at least five years ago (deliberately not giving it much thought). State collectors garnished one govt ag check and that’s been it.

          Govt is fairly screwed on tax collection right now. It’s an election year (it almost always is) and Trump’s IRS has been cut back and lacks auditors. But even at a nonpartisan level, if there is significant resistance to paying taxes and the govt admits it, noncompliance wouild skyrocket.

          The fix is to start up draconian collection efforts in early 2027 which may be too late. People not paying taxes is one of the tells that you’re living in a failed state.

          Common characteristics of a failed state include a government incapable of tax collection, law enforcement, security assurance, territorial control, political or civil office staffing, and infrastructure maintenance. [The Economist]

          Anything on that list that the USA hasn’t checked off?

          #Nihilism>survivalism

        2. In Cold Chud

          Having briefly worked for the IRS, I can say that interest is fairly low (6-7%), though there are effectively no circumstances under which it is abated. Penalties are usually lower, and are relatively easy to get abated.

          A lot of people are surprised that state revenue agencies have MUCH more latitude in enforcement than the IRS, but there is a certain logic to it–the tax rates are lower, the agencies in question are not anything like the political target* the IRS is, and the states actually need the money.

          One colleague who had previously worked for the revenue agency of a Western state told me that Revenue Officers there could open investigations on their own initiative into whoever they wanted, whereas, at the IRS, just looking at the tax information of anyone you don’t have a case with a clear nexus to, is a fireable offense. (That was not what got me.)

          *The Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 was a big result of this.

          1. amfortas

            ive been required to pay federal income taxes in all of 2 years of my almost 57…because ive never made enough money.
            the second time had to do with payroll taxes that i frelled up when i had my cafe.
            owed like $9k.
            freaked me out.
            so i called the number on the bill thing, and they were literally the nicest, most helpful government employees ive ever dealt with.
            nothing like the righty rhetoric ive swam in my whole life in rural texas would have had me expect.
            i worked out a payment plan, and after a year of like $50/month, they unilaterally wrote the rest off.
            woman told me…after i expressed shocked surprise…that it was because it was obvious that i was trying to make right,and that i wasnt trying to pull one over.
            she said those are the folks that get the full treatment.

            much different from my experiences with literally any other government organisation…right down to food stamps and local cops.

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              To tell one on myself:

              1. I had paid all my NYC corporate taxes BUT

              2. One check for >$5k had not been credited properly to my account even though it cleared

              3. NYC claimed it has sent notices. This was in the days when mail was reliable.

              4. But I had not gotten any notice from NYC. Instead I got a notice from Citi that NYC is about to garnish 2x what I supposedly owe.

              5. I figured out what had gone wrong and had found the cleared check (this was so long ago that it was when you got the actual check).

              6. I called the Tax Dept to tell them I am not in arrears, I have the cleared check, where can I fax or messenger a copy?

              7. The agent I get screams at me (no exaggeration), said he is like the police, he can keep the money, I will have to go court and fight him to get it back

              8. I am not easily reduced to tears but I called my accountant, crying.

              9. Accountant immediately gets a supervisors and goes nuclear. Says I am very responsible, if I say I did not get a notice I did not get it, that regardless an agent had no business treating a taxpayer that way, that I was owed an apology and the agent should be reprimanded or fired

              That did solve the problem.

              1. amfortas

                thats cool,lol.
                when people are grousing about irs in the feedstore, my often utterance is, “welp, if you made a whole lot less money, you wouldnt be having this problem”…which is met with slackjawed gawking, usually.

                sometimes i advise,”try poverty”, to the same effect.

                seems the more money you have, the less you want to share with your civilisation.
                its like an axiom or a natural law, or something.

                i pay sales tax, of course…its texas…and property tax…which aint that bad out here…and i can go to the man, himself and yell at him if i think he’s being stupid.
                which i have done, many times.
                but irs? thats the only experience ive had with them…and it was entirely positive.

                both my boys are in arrears, due to the idiocy of “independent contractor” abuse.
                and i tell them to just call them up, start a conversation.
                but, so far, the great weight of the righty narrative regarding evil irs agents comin to get ya outweighs dear old dad’s actual experience.

        3. chris

          The IRS and state authorities will also make it impossible for you to renew licenses if you are not in good standing with taxation in a jurisdiction. So if your career and earnings depend on professional licensure, kiss that good bye once the state determines you haven’t filed. Many states also derive who should be paying and how much you should be paying by their contacts with the IRS. In Maryland for instance, if the IRS finds out you didn’t report everything and need to update your gross taxable income with the Feds, the kind people at the state comptroller will also follow up asking for more. So the choice really is to pay now or pay later. But you will pay.

          I dislike the amount of money involved and the causes my tax money supports at the federal and state levels. I have no good choices in the matter. We have a strange tax code where most people who pay income taxes are over taxed, but most people with significant assets are barely taxed. Owners are favored over earners. That probably has always been the case but now that I’m stuck in it, it sucks.

          At least now I have an accountant who does the work of figuring out how much I owe and keeping me out of jail for not paying enough.

      2. Vicky Cookies

        https://www.warresisters.org/consequences-war-tax-resistance/ this lays out the likely and potential consequences of withholding or not filing. In short, prosecution is very unlikely, but especially if there are significant sums involved, an audit or other harassment, including compounding penalties may be in store. Anecdotally, some old school pacifists I know have withheld token sums for years without much if any trouble. Some calculate the percentage of their tax payment which would go to the military and withhold that.

    3. curlydan

      The claim that credit card delinquencies are at an all-time high appears to me to be false. Here is the delinquency rate over time:

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS

      It’s currently at 3% but spiked to nearly 7% around 2009. Now we _might_ be at an all time-high for credit card balances in delinquent status (?), but that’s probably not inflation adjusted.

  13. The Rev Kev

    “Finland Is On Track To Become One Of Russia’s Most Intractable Foes”

    It’s kinda sad reading about what has happened to Finland over the past few years. As a neutral state, it nearly had it all. Good relations with Russia that gave it large economic advantages, an international reputation for neutrality that gave it good standing and a very good social system to support it’s people. And now the whole country is being militarized and the country itself set up to be a future battlefield while their politicians clamor for nukes that would make it a nuclear target. What a waste.

  14. AG

    re: EU/Germany vs. freedom of speech

    A long, comprehensive look by German NACHDENKSEITEN´s solid Karsten Montag.

    machine-translation

    EU sanctions against journalists: Shocking silence and active turning a blind eye by civil society
    https://archive.is/bBEyr

    final two paragraphs

    The role of influential, established media outlets should not be underestimated in this context. They significantly contribute to the fact that even a critical assessment of the Western perspective on the conflict in Ukraine—keyword: “unprovoked, brutal war of aggression by Russia”—is classified as pro-Russian propaganda and essentially punishable as a crime. The same applies to a critical view of the war in Gaza and Israel’s actions, when interviews with Hamas representatives or reporting on pro-Palestinian protests are equated with support for terrorism and anti-Semitism. The sanctions against Hüseyin Doğru and Jacques Baud only reinforce this approach. For this reason, organizations with large memberships must expect to lose a significant portion of their income if they consistently advocate for the sanctioned individuals and thus for the unrestricted preservation of their fundamental rights—especially if they also receive government funding.

    It is quite possible that current developments will lead to even more censorship and an autocratic state. At the latest, if a direct military confrontation actually occurs between Russia and its western European neighbors, it is to be expected that the instruments currently being tested will be used to ban the political opposition and further censor media critical of the government in the name of preserving democracy. What will remain is the shell. Even the GDR was, at least in name, “democratic.”

      1. tegnost

        Chipotle = Chutzpah Hallelujahs Invoke Phantasms Obscuring Trumps Languishing Excursion…

  16. The Rev Kev

    “Trump invites Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink and other CEOs to join China trip for Xi summit”

    ‘I hope it instead put them all on a tour bus’

    It has happened before. Not that long ago I saw a delegation at Beijing’s airport after they just arrived. Can’t recall if they were a political or business delegation but they all looked in surprise as a bus pulled up for them to take them away. So when was the last time that Musk and Fink and Cook took a bus?

    1. ChrisFromGA

      Extra points if the bus lacks air conditioning. I hear China can get hot in mid-May!

      1. amfortas

        super extra points if that unairconditioned bus takes them to a giant wind or solar farm, then back to the airport.
        perhaps with happymeals all around, to soften the epic dis.

  17. hamstak

    RE: Trump invites Elon Musk…Xi summit

    The article says that the WH invited this cast of luminaries, but does not say if any of them accepted. What are the logistics of getting them there, accommodating them, setting up meetings, etc.? The list itself sounds like it was generated by a ChatGPT query. Calling this a summit, which implies a diplomatic thrust, seems a stretch, particularly when the objectives are to “secure a series of business deals and purchase agreements”. Trump is acting more like the head of a business consortium than a head of state — but that is not really news.

    What could this group possibly have to offer? What’s the plan, are they all supposed to sit at one big table with Chinese “counterparts” (who speak English and have engineering degrees) and brainstorm? Are these “business deals and purchase agreements” already set in document? I suppose that Taiwan and Iran are also among the topics of discussion, but this is not exactly a choice group to contribute to those conversations.

    I count sixteen names — should have gone with twelve to match the number of Christian disciples. Maybe half of them won’t be able to attend due to prior commitments and this will give the president an excuse to cancel the “summit”.

    With any luck, the main dinner course will be a large bowl of piping hot mashed potatoes.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      Imagine if Xi announced that all formal talks were to be spoken and conducted in French. French is the official language of diplomacy, last I checked. The cast of grifters would be relegated to the kiddie table, maybe with one of those gizmos that translates from French to English and piped into the room, along with some blocks for the kiddos to play with.

      1. Mikel

        There are many French speakers in Africa.
        And all Africa is getting is armed conflicts.

      2. vao

        I believe French ceased to be the official diplomatic language long ago.

        On the other hand, the UNO has 6 official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish — so the Chinese could corner the delegation from the USA with some interesting linguistic traps.

  18. AG

    re: French Revolution & speech

    MIT Press

    by Richard Taws

    The Forgotten Communications Devices of the French Revolution
    In a period when confusion could be deadly, inventors devised ingenious contraptions to help carry the nation’s boldest voices.

    During the French Revolution, speech could be a matter of life and death. To carry ideas clearly to the masses, inventors created strange devices: giant trumpets, public drums, parabolic screens, and, eventually, the Chappe brothers’ optical telegraph. So powerful was the technology, Richard Taws writes, that “an uncluttered, transparent sign language was being proposed as a realistic alternative to speech altogether.”
    https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-forgotten-communications-devices-of-the-french-revolution/

  19. AG

    re: linguistics

    interview

    In her new book, Translation Multiples, Kasia Szymanska writes about literary works made from two or more translations of the same “original” text.

    I first met Kasia in Oxford, U.K, where she taught me with good humor and infectious curiosity in a seminar called “Spaces of Comparison.” In the years since, as a reader and writer of translations, I’ve thought of Kasia often. Her work reminds me that multiplicity in translated literature is a problem in the best sense. Kasia and I talked about her new book over email and a shared google doc.
    https://www.full-stop.net/2026/05/05/latest/fiona-bell/kasia-szymanska/

  21. Jason Boxman

    Is tariffs working?

    Steel Tariffs Are Harming Tin Can Makers and Lifting Food Prices (NY Times via archive.is)

    The simple tin can is proving to be one of the toughest tests for President Trump’s tariffs.

    Just over a year ago, Mr. Trump imposed high tariffs on steel to try to stifle imports of the metal and bolster domestic production.

    But imports of the kind of steel used to make cans surged in 2025, and American can makers say they will remain heavily dependent on foreign supplies — now made more expensive by the tariffs — for a long time.

    “We have to import all this tin plate,” said Scott Breen, the president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, referring to the thinly rolled steel that is coated with tin and used to make cans. “There’s not any more being produced here than there was before.” The institute is a trade group representing some of the largest can makers in the United States.

    1. Mikel

      “If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

      Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

      They doubled down. 🤣🤣🤣

      It’s “The Times” in these times…

      1. JohnW

        Yeah, and Beato just released a response. His disgust with the nyt flacks is something to behold

  26. lyman alpha blob

    RE: The Criminal Enterprise Run by Monkeys

    Is it a criminal enterprise, or a capitalist one? Perhaps those words should be synonyms. Because “we steal your stuff and charge you to get it back” is how capitalism has rolled since it’s inception, and it’s still going strong today.

  27. lyman alpha blob

    RE: Klippenstein on Susan Collins

    I am not a Collins fan at all, but I do think he’s being a wee bit harsh in search of a scoop here. She’s had a wavering voice for many, many years now. I know, because I’ve made fun of it myself for quite some time – I can do a pretty decent Collins impression! Maybe it’s gotten worse over time, but I haven’t noticed.

    What reporters should go after her for is her practice of trying to seem like a “moderate” Republican, framing herself as the swing vote in close Senate votes that might go either way, and then voting with the Republicans anyway, just as she’s told.

  28. Rick

    Only older people are buying the magic beans of AI

    Not this septuagenarian computer engineer. I remember Eliza: humans have an impressive capacity to project intelligence on inanimate objects. Combine with the human tendency to grift and, well, here we are.

    The recent article about students AI cheating through college shows it isn’t a generational issue.

    2. Glen

      Ha, better put that into some context for the young among us:

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

      I first ran into ELIZA on a school trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science shortly after the hall opened. It was running on a terminal in the lobby, and there was quite the line of kids waiting to “talk” to ELIZA:

      Lawrence Hall of Science https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/research-unit/lawrence-hall-science

      And here’s another older engineer that looks at AI and sees a whole lotta sizzle and not much steak. Make looking up (sometimes wrong) answers easier – sure. Re-industrialize America – only in Silly Con Valley wet dreams.

  30. Jason Boxman

    BMJ

    Hantavirus outbreak should reset WHO’s default approach to airborne risk

    Person-to-person transmission of ANDV is not hypothetical. It has been documented several times over almost 30 years, although this aspect has rarely been investigated.45678 The Epuyén outbreak in 2018 in Argentina is especially important. Martínez and colleagues reconstructed transmission chains of 34 confirmed infections and 11 deaths after a single zoonotic introduction.7 The outbreak was amplified by people with symptoms attending crowded social events, including a birthday gathering and a wake.

    The birthday party is particularly telling. More than 100 guests attended, the index patient was there for 90 minutes while having symptoms, and secondary cases occurred among people seated up to about 2.5 metres away. One attendee reportedly crossed paths with the index case without physical contact.7 Several transmission events were considered consistent with inhalational exposure, and the investigators concluded that transmission may have occurred through “inhalation of droplets or aerosolized virions.”7 This evidence is precisely the sort that should trigger airborne precautions in light of new cases, not a wait-and-see posture.

    WHO guidance on this recent outbreak continues to emphasise “close contact” transmission.12 But close contact is a setting, not a mechanism. WHO’s own airborne pathogen consultation recognised that close contact often means exposure to concentrated aerosols from exhaled breath.9 The repeated association of ANDV transmission with shared indoor spaces, prolonged interactions, crowded gatherings, and transport settings is therefore compatible with respiratory aerosol spread.1011

    (bold mine)

    At last, people with brains.

  31. Jason Boxman

    How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough (NY Times)

    Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obstacles could not be surmounted.

    In what seems the blink of an eye, all that has changed. A drug nearing regulatory approval, daraxonrasib, is the first to substantially extend the lives of patients with pancreatic cancer. It works by targeting a cellular protein that fuels not just nearly all pancreatic tumors, but also many lung and colon cancers. Those three are the leading causes of cancer deaths.

    also, this timeline is stupid

    In the fall of 2023, Rhea Caras, a retired lawyer in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., got a tip from her oncologist: He would soon be flying to Europe to attend a medical conference. He was excited about early data that researchers would be presenting on a promising experimental drug.

    Earlier that year, Ms. Caras had been diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer and told she most likely had just months to live. By the time her doctor told her about the experimental drug, she had already tried a first line of grueling chemotherapy and was looking for her next treatment.

    Ms. Caras soon joined a mid-stage daraxonrasib trial. Over two years later, she is still taking her pills every day.

    Now 67, she routinely deals with side effects like fatigue, nausea and digestive problems. But her cancer has shrunk. Next month, she plans to travel to Hawaii with her family.

    (bold mine)

    Yeah, go get you that COVID. That’ll work wonders for staying alive.

  32. Mikel

    Trump invites Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink and other CEOs to join China trip for Xi summit – CNBC
    “Is China expected to give these clowns an official audience? I hope it instead put them all on a tour bus.”

    Don’t many of them still have official business interests with China?

  35. AG

    re: RU and the 2022 fall nuke crisis

    The dreadful weeks when Russia considered using nukes ;-))))) –

    as the Biden administration allegedly wanted us to believe. As 2 years after the fact had been reported in public for the first time.

    It´s all fairy tale head to toe. And now a new propaganda paper out on this story.

    I have no access. Others may have and perhaps could share.

    Actually it should be open access all along. After all this is of importance to everyone. If it was so darn close to Armaggedon…

    The fall 2022 crisis
    Colin Kahl
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14751798.2026.2635157

    ABSTRACT

    This first-hand account by then-US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Colin Kahl, recalls how he helped manage the Fall 2022 Crisis with Russia. It is as such both a piece of evidence, as well as an interpretation of the events in late 2022. Kahl argues that US deterrence messaging, dissuading Moscow from potentially using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, appeared to break through at some point in the crisis.     He also points to the potential effects of simultaneous messaging by US allies, by India and China. With the evidence from Ukraine in mind, Kahl concludes that as long as nuclear weapons exist, every great-power war carries the shadow of catastrophe. It is therefore the highest collective obligation of the international community to deter and de-escalate the conflicts and conventional wars that could lead down this disastrous path

    me thinks: wtf

    If Kahl has been one of the sources cited by Sanger and Sciutto on March 9th 2024 (see quoted sources under above link) he should explain why every single statement relevant for the argument in those 2 pieces was in subjunctive mode and the only source actually quoted verbatim – by Sciutto for his CNN item – stated – I am quoting:

    “(…)
    Would the US know?

    At no time did the US detect intelligence indicating Russia was taking steps to mobilize its nuclear forces to carry out such an attack.

    “We obviously placed a high priority on tracking and had some ability at least to track such movements of its nuclear forces,” this senior administration official told me. “And at no point did we ever see any indications of types of steps that we would’ve expected them to take if they were going down a path toward using nuclear weapons.”
    (…)”

    This admission is after 2/3 into his article. Stating – obviously – the total opposite to the entire idea!

    The 2 pieces I read back then also quoted by Kahl:
    Sciutto/CNN
    Exclusive: US prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say
    March 9 2024
    https://archive.is/34hBc

    Sanger/NYT
    Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine
    March 9 2024
    https://archive.is/6ejBk

    p.s.

    Pure coincidence: Sciutto was promoting the publication of his then new book “THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS” only 3 days later.

    David Sanger was a member of the infamous Burisma simulation team as uncovered and reported by Shellenberger/Taibbi:

    Who Helped Overturn the “Pentagon Papers Principle”? The Washington Post and New York Times
    https://www.racket.news/p/who-helped-overturn-the-pentagon?utm_source=publication-search

    “(…)
    The documents Shellenberger published showed how at least five media figures, including David Sanger and David McCraw of the New York Times, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, then-Daily Beast and future Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman, and Rick Baker of CNN worked alongside Twitter and Facebook’s chief moderation officers, Yoel Roth and Nathaniel Gleicher, to plan a response to a hypothetical damaging exposé about Joe Biden’s son.

    The “Burisma Leak” exercise predicted many elements of the real response to the New York Post’s coming Hunter Biden story, including complaints from influential Democratic congressman Adam Schiff about its “source and veracity,” and public statements from “former senior intelligence officials” falsely raising the specter of a “Russian operation.”
    (…)”

  36. Jeff W

    Re: Why Are Americans So Bloody Stupid? YouTube

    “I am trying to use reason and intelligence,” said the strange new mongoose.

    “Reason is six-sevenths of treason,” said one of his neighbors.

    “Intelligence is what the enemy uses,” said another.

    ―James Thurber, “The Peacelike Mongoose” Further Fables for Our Time (1956) here

  37. Jason Boxman

    CPI Inflation Blows Past Fed Rates as Core Services, Gasoline, Electricity, and Food Spike. Fed’s “Real” Rates Are now Negative (Wolf Street)

    The gasoline price spike hit CPI inflation for the second month, but electricity prices also spiked, core services inflation spiked – it’s the biggie, accounting for over 60% of CPI – and food prices jumped. So it’s a mess – and even if the Fed wants to “look through” the impact of the gasoline price spike, it’s going to smack into surging core services inflation, accelerating food inflation, and surging electricity inflation driven by the AI bubble.

  38. Jason Boxman

    Oh boy

    Exclusive: CIA escalates secret war on cartels with deadly operations inside Mexico (CNN)

    Earlier this spring, a mysterious explosion blew up a car carrying an alleged cartel operative in broad daylight on one of Mexico’s busiest highways just outside of its capital city.

    Francisco Beltran was killed instantly along with his driver, their bodies found slumped over in their seats after the concentrated blast. Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.

    Known as “El Payin,” Beltran was accused of being a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking syndicates, Mexican security analysts and sources familiar with his activities said.

    Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.

    The Beltran operation was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside Mexico — spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch — to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks, those sources as well as two additional people familiar with the campaign told CNN. President Donald Trump has designated several of those groups foreign terrorist organizations and deemed them to be at war with the United States.

    Does this blow back into the United States? As Ukraine has proven, getting drones into another country isn’t particularly difficult. Targets are limited to the imagination only.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Good thing that there are no American agents from different government bodies in Mexico that the cartels can give payback to. Oh wait…

  40. rowlf

    A recent Jamarl Thomas podcast that had a subject that I liked.


    Anna Ge | China’s Key Weapon Against America: Strategic Patience

    The last four or so minutes matched my experience that people are ok but politicians cause problems.

    Yeah because we are facing a lot of American audiences. So I want to say because many people in China still have a very positive outlook on China US. On the one hand as we earlier talked about China now has a more confidence and preparation to engage with the US. On the other hand you know people’s trust in the the central government remain strong. But another uh very strong point is that um Chinese people um generally have a positive attitude towards the American people and the US as a nation, not those uh Washington political elites. Um take myself as an example. Since I started learning English, I’ve been fascinated by American culture. Uh along the way many positive qualities of Americas have somehow shaped my own life. Things like um friend friendliness, warmth, courage, innovation and hard work and uh
    also my favorite movies, stars, authors, they are mostly American and my favorite
    host too like you Jamal. Um so I want to say even when political or economic tensions rise uh between our countries, we still see uh genuine exchanges between Chinese and American people on your platform. For example, we are um making this dialogue or on platforms like uh Xiao or uh Ratnote. um an American interest in China culture is also growing fast as I know right uh people are talking about like being like being a how do you say um being Chinese or like things that like that uh I really think this uh goodwill and decency of ordinary people on both sides that actually bonds China US together so I think China US relations can work well despite politicians trying to, you know, smear and hype up the so-called China threat.
    So, I I really think no matter how the relationship develops, the bond between the two peoples won’t stop.
    I hope that’s the case and that’s a positive message to put forward. Um, and I understand this point of trying to get across that there more similarities than differences and that countries can work together even if the politicians themselves actifu that maybe the public can drag this into a different direction that doesn’t necessarily need to be militaristic or doesn’t need to necessarily be at odds. Cooperation can be part of the objective.

  41. johnnyme

    [Important information] Radboudumc admits patient with a suspected hantavirus infection 

    Radboudumc admitted a patient infected with hantavirus on Thursday, May 7. The patient comes from the Dutch cruise ship Hondius.

    Staff placed in preventive quarantine as a precaution

    At the time of admission, blood was drawn from the patient. This blood was processed according to the standard procedure. Due to the nature of the virus, this blood should have been processed according to a stricter procedure.

    In addition, it became clear on Saturday (May 9) that the most up-to-date international regulations had not been applied when disposing of the patient’s urine. Due to the nature of the virus, the urine should have been disposed of according to a stricter procedure.

    Because of these circumstances, twelve employees will go in preventive quarantine for six weeks as a precaution, despite the fact that the chance of infection is small.

  42. alrhundi

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oYOg9lCGLw

    Video from Dmitri Lascaris in a Greece-Israeli energy/partnership conference he thinks he was accidentally invited to. Israeli speaker details pipeline plans from Israel to Cyprus, to Greece, then Europe, Africa, and Middle East. He mentions that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz actually benefits the political and financial will to execute this plan, benefitting Israel and giving an incentive for them to want it closed.

    2. Mikel

      For additional clarification, the post from Lascaris and the one I stumbled across have relation in the wider context (beyond concerns about elections in any country this year).

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