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Links 6/12/2026

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American horses are obese, too STAT

Newfound ‘whale necropolis’ reveals 5.3 million years of seafloor life Phys.org

Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition Construction Physics

When Bigfoot Finds You Points North

Climate/Environment

It’s Official: NOAA Declares El Niño Is Here, With 63 Percent Chances Of It Being A Big One IFL Science

Updated 2026 Hurricane Outlook Trends Down as El Niño is Officially Declared Eye on the Tropics

Scientists Found Bacteria Thriving Inside Fog and Eating Air Pollution ZME Science

Ebola

Ebola outbreak map: Cases hit 600 in Africa, drawing US attention USA Today

State Department memo says US Ebola response beats China’s Semafor

Pandemics

Water

Climate change disrupts freshwater faster than nature can adapt Climate & Capitalism

Half the world’s reservoirs could be clogged up with dirt by 2060 New Scientist

LAST YEAR, A CORPUS CHRISTI CRYPTOMINE GUZZLED OVER 11 MILLION GALLONS. NOW, ITS WATER USAGE IS BEING KEPT SECRET. Texas Observer

Japan

LDP adopts plan to ‘transform’ defenses, invest in drones, AI Asahi Shimbun

US tungsten scrap exports to Japan soar on Chinese curbs Nikkei Asia

Japan, Malaysia agree to boost energy, maritime security cooperation Kyodo News

China?

Asia Pacific Reshaped: China and Australia after Hormuz Warwick Powell

India

US ‘specifically’ asked India to buy Russian oil in 2022, says EAM Jaishankar Economic Times

Opendoor’s India exit is fueling a bigger conversation about AI and outsourcing TechCrunch

Syraqistan

Israeli government mulling huge funding to expand West Bank settlement: NGO Al Jazeera

Gaza is not an aberration – Israel planned this genocide decades ago Middle East Eye

***

Israeli firm BlackCore meddled in New York, Scotland, Angola, Togo elections, says France TRT World

***

Trump Backs Down Again After Blustery Raid of Little Consequence Simplicius

Trump has applied the Israeli model of the “ceasefire” in Gaza and Lebanon to Iran GeoPolitiQ

What’s in the Iran deal Trump says he’s ready to sign Axios. Ravid at it again.

***

11 killed in Israeli airstrikes on eastern, southern Lebanon Anadolu Agency

Saudi Arabia lifts 5-year ban on Lebanon imports: What to know Al-Monitor

European Disunion

EXCLUSIVE: Kallas’ Israel ‘apartheid’ remarks deepen EU foreign policy crisis Euractiv

The EU’s budgetary coup Thomas Fazi

“America is great,” says Albanian opposition leader after US lifts sanctions Intellinews

Albania’s Protests Against Jared And Ivanka’s Resort Plans Are Getting Bigger Forbes

Old Blighty

UK defence chief steps down, accuses Starmer of making Britain ‘less safe’ France24

Britain’s Garden Habits Are Making Their Homes Harder to Insure Bloomberg

New Not-So-Cold War

Higher losses for defenders Events in Ukraine

Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time New Scientist

Ukraine hits fuel supplies to Crimea, sparking a fuel crisis on the Russian-held peninsula AP

Ukraine is transplanting its industrial heart to the west The Economist

Imperial Collapse Watch

Why Anti-Liberalism Fails Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue

Trump 2.0

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO DOGE? THE “OMBIFICATION” OF THE TRUMP-MUSK PAYMENTS CRISIS Notes on the Crises

Congress Fails to Reauthorize America’s Most Powerful Surveillance Law, Which Expires at Midnight Friday Gizmodo. Dems block with help of some GOPers not because of spying on Americans but because of opposition to the nomination of Bill Pulte for Director of National Intelligence.

Trump nominates ex-SEC Chair Jay Clayton as intelligence chief The Hill

Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet Futurism

Our Famously Free Press

EXCLUSIVE: Will the U.S. Deport Trita Parsi? The Free Press

Economy

Trump’s Iran War Slowing Global Economic Growth to Lowest Level Since Pandemic: World Bank Common Dreams

America’s emergency oil reserve is about to hit lowest level since Reagan era The Independent

Mr. Market

Hedge Funds Are Hiring Climate Scientists to Profit Off Extreme Weather Risks Gizmodo

AI

What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped? Matt Stoller

How much does it cost to be AI-pilled? Ramp Economics Lab

OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts, Anticipating War for Users With Anthropic WSJ

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized The Atlantic

Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper ‘Elias Thorne’. We Might Know Why 404 Media

Screening Room

Nothing new here: Another sequel, another lighthouse Not-Ship

Antitrust

Paramount-Warner Deal Leaves Working People On the Cutting Room Floor The Economic Populist

Agriculture

H5N1 Bird Flu Confirmed in Poultry Across 12 States — Dallas’s Egg and Poultry Supply Chain Faces Disruption and Food Price Pressure as Summer Heats Up Medical Daily

Vacant congressional seat complicates response to screwworm cases KVUE

Screwworm Can Infect People, Pets And Livestock—What To Watch For Forbes

Healthcare?

Nearly Half of Working-Age Adults Struggled to Afford Healthcare in 2025 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Can’t Pay Medical Bills? Trump Officials Suggest Getting a Loan New York Times

Class Warfare

The Entire Human Species Has Been Turned Into A Profit-Generating Machine Caitlin Johnstone

NYC Amazon Driver Fired Over Pro-Union Social Media Posts The City Reporter

Whither Writing Workers? Ramble

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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68 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    “What’s in the Iran deal Trump says he’s ready to sign”

    Barak Ravid also says that the deal states that the Iranians will make Trump their new Ayatollah, that their oil fields will be turned over to US corporations to run and profits deposited in a Trump trust fund to be dispersed to the Iranians upon their good behaviour, that Iran will pay back the US & Israel for the cost of all the bombs and missiles dropped on it, that Iran will open up a new Iranian Embassy in Jerusalem and that the Iranian people will be given whatever it is that Barak Ravid smokes to be at peace with all this.

    Reply ↓
    1. Huey

      That has to be a joke – there’s no way that the deal states that profits would be returned to the Iranians.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ram

        Axios articles are for AI trade bots not for human consumption . Nothing explains Iran-US peace deal articles. Insider trading is so last decade .

        Reply ↓
  2. Mark Gisleson

    Somewhat disquieting to see Kallas’ remarks about Israel running a South African style Apartheid regime dismissed as a “blunder.”

    It is incomprehensible to me that any news source would still dare quibble about Israel’s obvious Apartheid policies during the ongoing genocide. Europe is suffocating under a heavy layer of Zionist censorship and for the life of me I cannot see any difference between their swill and drowning in a manure lagoon.

    Dismissing criticism of Israel as a blunder, imho, makes Euroactiv an accessory to genocide. There is no controversy here, no confusion. Israel is what it is but no one’s allowed to say what that is: an Apartheid system modeled on South Africa’s and markedly “improved” in many inhumanly brutal ways that have led directly to the present atrocities.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Rev Kev

      After the apartheid regime collapsed, a delegation from South Africa went to Israel for some kind of business. The black delegates got very uncomfortable as they recognized that the procedures being done to the Palestinians were the exact same that were being done to them not that long previously. It hit a little too close to home.

      Reply ↓
      1. Carolinian

        Or they saw the new Klan terrorizing residents of the West Bank. Klan 2 doesn’t burn crosses though. They write “death to the Arabs” on mosques.

        Of course Israel letting its freak flag fly is undoubtedly a big mistake unless one thinks Armageddon is around the corner. Hasbara depended upon staying mostly below the radar in country’s such as my own. Even Republicans or perhaps especially Republicans are now latching onto the hypocrisy of their politicians. The leading candidate who ran against Lindsey Graham in the primary had “America First” as his slogan.

        Reply ↓
      3. jrkrideau

        I remember a response from a White South African to some similar comment just after the collapse of apartheid. He said that White South Africans would be horrified to be accused of treating black people as badly as Israel treats Palestinians.

        Reply ↓
    2. vao

      “Israel is […] an Apartheid system modeled on South Africa’s and markedly “improved” in many inhumanly brutal ways that have led directly to the present atrocities.”

      While Israel and the former South Africa share many (most) common traits, I disagree that zionists modelled their regime on Apartheid. Jews were no fans of Dutch calvinists and even less of British COE adherents.

      It is crucial to realize that zionism and the Apartheid are colonial regimes (paradoxically established while the world was being decolonized), that all their characteristics are inherent to colonial systems, and that those two specific regimes are variants of what were well-established colonial institutions and practices:

      1) segregation based on racism, with all its attendant manifestations (separate living quarters, different laws, prohibitions regarding personal relations such as marriage, avoidance of inter-racial mixing, etc);

      2) disenfranchisement of colonized populations, with local native potentates put in office by the colonizer and only accountable to the colonizer (see “Palestinian authority” and Bantustans);

      3) brutal spoliation of native populations, with violations of laws supposedly protecting natives’ property being retroactively legalized by courts;

      4) extensive security apparatus permanently controlling and arbitrarily restricting the movement of native populations, imposing curfews, forcing the adoption of ID cards and passes, and on the lookout for every actual or supposed opposition to the colonial authorities;

      5) systematic exploitation of the colonized workforce, restrictions on allowed economic activities by natives, dispossession of their most valuable natural resources in favour of colonists, all the while neglecting local populations with respect to education and healthcare;

      6) ferocious repression of every resistance movement through genocidal levels of violence, including slaughter of armed resistance with no regards for laws of war or civilian victims, destruction of property (dwellings, boats, wells, fields, cattle) as reprisals, deportation of populations, outright slaughter of entire communities.

      The colonial endeavours of the Belgians, British, Dutch, French, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Portuguese, Spaniards — and of the Americans, too — all exhibited those characteristics, with different emphasis on specific points and a varying intensity across time.

      This is why I think that equating Israel and Apartheid is inexact: one does not derive from or copy the other, both are typical colonial regimes, developed independently during the heyday of European colonialism, and therefore inherit their characteristics from pre-existing general colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions.

      Reply ↓
      1. JMH

        There is that thing about looking like a duck, quacking like a duck and most likely being some sort of duck. Is Israeli apartheid (or whatever you want to call it) the same as the South African variety? Not exactly. Are they cousins at some degree? Yes. A Mallard and a scoter is each a duck.

        Reply ↓
        1. Chris

          It doesn’t walk, talk, or lay eggs like a duck. It is much worse than a duck. If you want a historical parallel drawn from history familiar to Westerners (which is what all these claims are about), the obvious comparison is Manifest Destiny, not Apartheid.

          Reply ↓
      2. Aurelien

        Two points often overlooked.

        Apartheid was technically introduced after the 1948 elections (though in practice it didn’t really get going until the later 1950s) but it was the culmination of a long and bitter political battle for control of the country between the dominant English-speaking minority and the majority Afrikaners. The Afrikaners considered the British (mostly fairly recent arrivals) to be colonial interlopers, and dangerous with their liberal ideas and readiness to consider extending the electoral franchise to non-whites. The Afrikaner community started to organise seriously in the 1920s, through the Broederbond, with the eventual objective of taking power away from the English-speaking “colonial” administration and returning it to those who had lived in the country since the 17th century. They believed that they had found the promised land given to them by God. (A similarity that hardly anyone notices.) So the first thing the new government did was to purge all the English-speakers from the top levels of the government and the public service, including the Police and the Army. Even at the end of apartheid it was rare to meet an English-speaking officer above the rank of Colonel, and the language of government and administration was Afrikaans. You can’t understand the modern history of the country without understanding this animosity. Unsurprisingly, the substantial number of Whites in the ANC and its associated organisations were almost all English-speakers: many were Jews.

        Second, the Afrikaners did not think of themselves as colonists, but as religious refugees who had moved into an empty land given to them by God. Indeed, as they never tired of telling you, their ancestors arrived in the country centuries before the Bantu peoples, themselves forced southwards by the Mfecane, the “scattering” of the second half of the nineteenth century. There were indigenous people in the Cape, but so low was the population that the Afrikaners (Boers as they started to be called) actually had to import slaves from the Dutch East Indies, something which still has political consequences today.

        Apartheid (“separation”) was a pseudo-scientific theory that made use of nineteenth-century racial science to distinguish no less than twenty-five separate “racial” groups, each of which, in theory would have their own “homeland.” South Africa, in this mad vision, would be a state for whites only, in which Afrikaners would dominate.

        So there are important similarities, but they are more complex and subtle than often appreciated, and I don’t think the “colonial” lens, especially referencing the often short-lived European empires established at the end of the nineteenth century, is especially helpful, compared to religion and sense of destiny.

        Reply ↓
        1. PlutoniumKun

          Its perhaps significant that the low-Church loyalists of Northern Ireland always looked to apartheid South Africa as a model, and have now transferred their ideological loyalty to Israel – contrary to what many assume, this goes far beyond a simple ‘if the catholics support the Palestinians, then we support Israel’. People consistently fail to understand the theology underlying so many settler movements.

          Reply ↓
          1. brian wilder

            “low-church loyalists of Northern Ireland”

            low-church?!? pretty sure that is the wrong theology

            One of the peculiar features of N.I. politics over the last generation or two has been the political dominance of loyalist representation by a tiny Presbyterian sect outside the Presbyterian mainstream.

            Reply ↓
            1. scott s.

              Would be interesting to learn more about reformed theology and the role of the Westminster Confession in Ireland and in particular the Northern region.

              Reply ↓
        2. Darthbobber

          But the structural underpinnings (no vote for the blacks) were baked into the treaty that ended the Boer war, which “deferred” the question of non-white suffrage until after independence. From then on, non-white treatment was exclusively determined by whites.

          Reply ↓
    3. Skip Intro

      She really licked the 3rd rail with that one. Maybe she wanted to be fired as a martyr instead of an incompetent.

      Reply ↓
  3. ChrisFromGA

    Who wants to bet that this latest installment of “Duck Season! Rabbit Season!” takes a turn right at 4:01PM, after the SpaceX IPO has a good first day?

    However, Taco is constrained by:

    1. The World Cup
    2. His big Wrestle-rama on the WH lawn
    3. SpaceX – it has to succeed, or Anthropic and OpenAI are food for the worms.
    4. G7

    I’ve given up predictions but I’d wager nothing gets signed over the weekend, and Israel tries to spoil it. Remember, time spoils all deals.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Rev Kev

      What if it turns out that SpaceX has to succeed – or else it will go bankrupt. I certainly suspect that of Anthropic and OpenAI. Just sayin’.

      Reply ↓
  4. Ben Panga

    The world’s first trillionaire is gonna be this guy?

    I think I was delivered to the wrong planet.

    Something something harder for a rich man to get into heaven than me to shove a needle in his eye and a camel up his…

    Reply ↓
    1. JMH

      Is there any need or desire for there to be a trillionaire? Further evidence, as if that were necessary, that liberal capitalism, neo-liberalism, is and has been about having more in order get more. In two words wretched excess.

      Reply ↓
      1. Joe Renter

        And when you think about it, society can’t afford billionaires to begin with. Eat the rich, as a bummer sticker said.

        Reply ↓
      2. TonyJ

        It may be that there are good reasons for us to have trillionaires. When the 90% of us finally get around to spend some money doing Good Things, we’ll know where to go for the cash. A trillion dollars spread 8 billion ways leaves each of us with a few hundred…

        Reply ↓
      1. diptherio

        My favorite:

        3. Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.

        Reply ↓
  7. farmboy

    Sony Thăng@nxt888The problem was never Trump.

    Trump is the readable version of a text that was always there, written in language most people couldn’t access.

    The problem is the system that produced him, that uses him, that will survive him, and that will next time find someone equally willing to do what he does but competent enough to do it quietly.

    The competent version is more dangerous.

    The competent version rebuilds the language. Restores the branding. Hires the speechwriters who know how to say “shared values” and “rules-based order” while executing identical policy.

    And the people who spent four years appalled by Trump’s vulgarity will feel the relief of good grammar and take it for moral improvement.

    The empire doesn’t need Trump specifically.

    It needed what he provided: a stress test. A period of operation without the usual ideological cover, to see what held and what didn’t.

    What held: the sanctions. The bases. The vetoes. The dollar. The weapons sales. The regime change operations.

    What didn’t hold: the manners.

    And when someone comes along who can restore the manners while keeping everything else, and they will, they always do, the people who thought the problem was the manners will call it a recovery.

    The rest of us will know what it actually is.

    Reply ↓
    2. vao

      The style of that text is very similar to those posts one finds on X/Twitter which exhale that whiff of AI-inspired grammar, vocabulary, and rhetorical recipes.

      Reply ↓
    1. JMH

      Cage fight on the lawn of the president’s house, a public building. Only an incurable vulgarian would even conceive such an insult.

      Reply ↓
      1. ambrit

        I have heard it suggested that Trump fancies himself as the New and Improved Andrew Jackson. Thus, fighting upon the grounds of the Executive Mansion would be right and proper.
        Could this rasslin match be legally prohibited under the Anti-Dueling statutes?
        Everything that was old is new again.
        Stay as safe as you can.

        Reply ↓
  11. The Rev Kev

    “American horses are obese, too
    Obese horses aren’t lazy or making poor choices. They’re victims of a system”

    Here in oz, our betters have come up with their own solution. There are a lot of brumbies – wild horses – in the Snowy Mountain region. So for the past few days they have been massacring these brumbies by shooting them from helicopters. What about wounded horses? Who cares? What about the baby foals? The wild pigs will get them – and increase their numbers dramatically so will also require shooting-

    https://www.gbnews.com/news/world/australia-wild-horses-shot-new-south-wales-brumby-cull

    There are mutterings that this is being done so that graziers can put their cattle in these national parks and won’t have the competition for food from these brumbies. The whole thing is disgusting.

    Reply ↓
  12. Tom Stone

    The Space-X IPO reminds me of a limerick about a young lady named Post.

    “There was a young lady named Post,
    Who once made love to a Ghost,
    At the height of orgasm, she exclaimed to the Phantasm,
    I think I can feel it, almost”

    I expect there will be a “Pop” when the IPO goes through, however I also expect there will be a “Where’s the Profit?” moment within a few weeks.
    The mood has shifted and when Gas/Diesel prices spike, or when Mr Market yawns when Trump announces victory the 47th time it’s going to be “Stick a fork in it” for Space-X.
    As far as the Anthropic IPO, Anthropic will be left waiting for the short bus, at the wrong stop.

    Reply ↓
  13. tegnost

    Stoller…
    I’m still bitter

    The bailouts, through both the Federal Reserve and government spending, stopped the crisis, and ended up allocating the losses to the poor and middle class. The key moment in that fight was in the Presidential transition period of 2008, when Barack Obama, advised by Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, decided that homeowners would not be allowed to write down their debts, but Wall Street would get bailed out. This choice backstopped most of the institutions reliant on mortgage-backed debt, saving them in their existing form. But it meant that many homeowners would slowly bleed out, and there would be millions of foreclosures and slow growth as normal people gradually repaired their balance sheets.

    That was the underlying deal – losses got allocated to ordinary people. And the government embarked on a new industrial policy to replace some of the economic activity lost by housing, through the Fed inflating the stock market. Much of this activity was speculative, whether web 2.0, fracking, the gig economy, peak TV, or crypto. It was basically stuff that flourished on zero interest rates, with a lot of slack that depressed wages.

    Reply ↓
  14. Party on

    The borrowing and spending binge by Canadian households, businesses, and governments (all levels) continues unabated.

    At the end of March, 2026 the total debt outstanding in Canada (bottom line of the Statistics Canada credit market summary data table) was $13.282 trillion. At the end of March, 2025 the total debt outstanding was $12.638 trillion. In the 1 year period from the end of March, 2025 to the end of March, 2026 it increased by $644 billion. This is an increase of 5.1%.

    Looking at the total debt outstanding of domestic non-financial sectors in Canada (17th line up from the bottom of the Statistics Canada credit market summary data table):

    At the end of March, 2026 the total debt outstanding of domestic non-financial sectors was $8.967 trillion. At the end of March, 2025 the total debt outstanding of domestic non-financial sectors was $8.475 trillion. In the 1 year period from the end of March, 2025 to the end of March, 2026 it increased by $492 billion. This is an increase of 5.8%.

    https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3810023401

    Reply ↓
  15. Es s Ce Tera

    Re: What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped? Matt Stoller
    (And every other AI link today.)

    So this covers the financial consequences, but is there also a danger that anything digital is now become AI-sloppified and so severely enshittified to the point of, say, the entire web becoming next to useless for any purpose whatsoever – not for information, not for news, not for research, not for publishing, not for buying or selling, nor trading, nor brand or marketing, nor for corporate presence? In other words, is it possible we’ll all end up internet Luddites and just go back to using the typewriter and snail mail – would that be a possible outcome of an AI bubble, that it basically destroyed the internet?

    Reply ↓
    1. BF

      “The Dead Internet Theory” is rapidly becoming a reality. A recent study showed that AI bot traffic has already surpassed human traffic on the internet. It is already becoming a reality where you will have no idea if you’re talking to an actual human online or not.

      It is leaking “offline” too where phone calls use AI-generated voices for telemarketing, order processing or plain old scamming. Those giant call centers dedicated to scamming people in Myanmar won’t need to exist with AI now.

      Reply ↓
    2. aletheia33

      i can’t resist sharing my pet prediction, which dawned on me quite a few years ago: the internet is not going to work out. of course this is absurd, laughable, uninformed nonsense.

      Reply ↓
  16. brian wilder

    “Why Anti-Liberalism Fails” — a 2018 review of the book Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen

    Part of the answer is encapsulated in the credit to the author of the book review:

    …essayist John Médaille has, for many years, taught theology and business courses at the [Catholic] University of Dallas.

    Theology and business!!!

    Médaille, a Catholic Distributist, turns Deneen’s title around and recognizes that liberalism has absorbed the reactionary opposition. “Yesterday’s Whig is Today’s Tory”

    A Catholic myself, I recognize the separate historical memory that Catholicism erected first thru Catholic Reform in response to Protestant Reformation and then more erratically to the harsh critiques of the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire isn’t mentioned but he casts a long shadow across this book review essay.

    The central moral claims of Liberalism are rooted, you see, in Christianity — specifically, medieval and therefore Catholic, pre-Reformation Christianity. Individualism? Rooted in canon law. Democracy? Rooted in monasticism. It is a bizarro world:

    the ancient Christian ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, became weaponized and turned against their founders

    He’s mourning the secularization of politics that, in his view detached modernity from religious morality, but in real history undermined an hereditary landed aristocracy with gangster ethics ruling by claims to divine right.

    Then, he makes a powerful turn.

    “Politics,” Andrew Breitbart famously observed, “is downstream from culture.” True enough, but he should have added, “…and culture is downstream from breakfast.” One does not have to be a Marxist to note the connection between culture and agriculture, between the way we make our living and what we come to believe. For man is first of all a material being, and must eat before he can do anything else, and must keep eating if he plans to continue doing what he is doing. Our practices sooner or later dictate our beliefs and control our culture. And the economic practice that came to displace all rivals was Liberal, secular capitalism.

    What follows, after a slow start, becomes a full-throated assault on the creation of culture from mass, commercial advertising, pitched as an appeal to political conservatism to break with their devotion to capitalism, specifically secular, liberal capitalism.

    Reply ↓
    1. brian wilder

      a footnote to my post:

      John Médaille locates the era, when “liberalism” begat “capitalism” as a distinct social order that conservatives could adopt as their own child, in the Long Depression 1873-1879.

      as economic Liberalism fell into disrepute, beginning with the Long Depression of 1873-1879 (but which lasted, on and off, until 1896), its adherents repackaged it as “capitalism” and it became the content of conservatism.

      I think this is historically accurate, though maybe a tad late.

      Conservatism, as a political configuration, shed much of its reactionary clothing as new states emerged 1860-1872. The French Third Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Dual-Monarchy, the German Empire — lots of institution building going on.

      This is also when the Marginal Revolution took hold in economics and Marx assumed his eminence.

      Reply ↓
  17. In Cold Chud

    Samantha Cole on Elias Thorne

    This dovetails nicely with the recently linked-to piece by about antihumanism and AI:

    https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/humanism-in-a-posthumanist-age/articles/how-antihumanism-turned-on-its-authors

    Writing writes itself, there is nothing outside the text, etc.

    From Cole, though:

    In these stories, Elias is usually a tragic figure, an aggrieved and unfairly-treated old man.

    How much content today is about someone aggrieved and unfairly-treated? Bizarre stories of parents throwing out their children for throwing out their children, canceled weddings and cruise-ship vacations, and so on. And this is before even getting to those Pocket FM ads that mercifully disappeared from YouTube a number of months ago.

    One gets the sense that we have nothing else left.

    Reply ↓
    1. amfortas

      jeez. that was depressing.
      speaking as an old school(paleo?) Humanist.
      glad i live on a dead end dirt road.

      Reply ↓
  19. thoughtfulperson

    On the crude oil calculations 2 items:

    1. the “permanent” or durable offset include the crude Saudi is pumping via the Red Sea. This could become temporary if the Red Sea becomes less navigable [ie Houthis etc]

    2. Prof Pape had a session last night and said that his sources see the end of the SPR buffer to be between July 21 and Aug 7.

    One interesting observation of my own, Prof Pape also mentioned that only 1-2% of usians follow the news in much detail (such as nakedcapitalism readers). Thus most persons are unable to critically decipher vvhite house schardes, particularly when reporters and the media report them with no criticism or opposing points of view.

    Reply ↓
  20. AG

    James Carden´s new book on the US DEMS is out now.

    I have been waiting for it.
    Of course I don´t know how good it is.

    The Great Betrayal
    How the Democrats Became the Party of War
    How the Democratic foreign-policy establishment abandoned FDR’s vision of great-power reciprocity and cooperation—and became, instead, a party of warmongers.

    published:
    https://orbooks.com/catalog/the-great-betrayal/

    Reply ↓
  21. johnnyme

    Outgoing intel chief says US funded over 120 biolabs in more than 30 countries

    The US has funded a sprawling network of over 120 biolabs in more than 30 countries, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard alleged on Friday.

    “The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US-funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise of being foreign assets and traitors to America,” Gabbard said in a statement.

    “Many of these US government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases including dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight,” she added.

    Reply ↓

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