The center of mass of a uniform solid hemisphere of radius r is at 3/8r from the center.
Therefore it tends to always stay upright. It's the principle used in Thanjavur dancing dolls. pic.twitter.com/iu63nUIuio
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 18, 2026
Humanoid Robots in 2026: What Is Actually Deployed Technology.org
Archaeologists Identify the First Classic Maya Astronomer Credited by Name ZME Science
Scientists Detect First Atmosphere on Rocky Habitable-Zone Planet, Boosting Hopes for Alien Life Gizmodo
COVID-19/Pandemics
COVID Nimbus Variant Now Leads the U.S. as Cases Grow in 27 States and Emergency Visits Rise Medical Daily
CDC warns of global measles threat after 22 million babies missed their vaccines during the pandemic CTV News
Climate/Environment
What to know about the Canadian and US wildfires and their impact BBC
Over 100 wildfires prompt Algeria to urgently recall civil protection personnel Andolu Agency
Wildfires, drought and storms hound Europe even as heatwave recedes Reuters
Interactive map predicts climate-driven farm decline by end of century Euronews
South of the Border
Senior defense officials looking at Cuba military options CBS News
Venezuela quake death toll tops 5,000 as IMF releases recovery funds France 24
Colombia: A Fractured Society Under U.S. Influence Counterpunch
China?
Fun fact.
BYD new factory in Zhengzhou will cover 50 square miles, which is larger than San Francisco’s surface at 46.9 square miles. pic.twitter.com/dXWwJ3xxiT
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 17, 2026
China’s AI models are shrinking US lead Yahoo FinanceChina Planted Billions of Trees and Scientists Just Found an Unexpected Advantage of These New Forests ZME Science
Did China steal 2020 US election data, as Trump claims? Al Jazeera
China’s Beidou Satellite System is a Game Changer in Iran’s War with the US Larry Johnson substack
India
India successfully launches first private orbital rocket Phys.org
New Delhi Air Pollution Index Further Pushes for EV Adoption in India Clean Technica
India’s monsoon rain depends on where air gets cleaner Phys.org
Africa
The New Malaria Vaccine Helps in Africa but Faces a Test: Completing All 4 Doses Medpage Today
As migrants await repatriation, South Africa faces persistent anti-immigration tensions Xinhua
Women are dying in Africa as US ramps up its global battle against abortion AP
European Disunion
Why the EU’s so-called Chat Control law has privacy experts up in arms Euronews
EU proposes slowing down cuts to carbon emissions for businesses BBC
EU targets 46% electrification to save $296B a year by 2040 Turkiye Today
Old Blighty
Reverse Brexit? Political winds in Britain are blowing toward Europe. The Christian Science Monitor
Dark day for the UK as Andy Burnham doubles down on disaster NY Post
Israel v. Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran
This is Houla, South Lebanon — before and after Israel’s genocide.
An ancient village that stood for more than 2,000 years.
Israel wiped it off the map.
A war crime. A crime against history. pic.twitter.com/3BCCvztIaO
— sarah (@sahouraxo) July 16, 2026
Israeli army destroys three schools in southern Lebanon, minister says Al JazeeraIsraeli army kills 8 Palestinians, expands occupied area in Gaza despite ceasefire Andolu Agency
U.S. Surges Aerial Refuelling Fleet in Israel to Prepare for Expanded Offensive Against Iran Military Watch Magazine
Israeli ministers announce plans for new illegal settlements in Gaza and West Bank The Guardian
New Not-So-Cold War
The European Right is turning on Ukraine UnHerd
Ukraine’s defense minister walked into Zelensky corruption buzzsaw Responsible Statecraft
Ten killed in Russia-Ukraine as protests continue over Kyiv defence revamp Al Jazeera
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Susan Shelley: From license-plate readers to phone taps, privacy rights are vanishing OC Register
Imperial Collapse Watch
BEEFED UP SECURITY: Walmart shopper fumes over ‘anti-theft beef’ as supermarket CHAINS UP steaks The U.S. Sun
SEE IT: Massive NYC homeless encampment fuels backlash against Mamdani NY Post
Trump 2.0
Can We Lose the Same War Twice? With Trump, Anything’s Possible The New Republic
Trump, not Iran, is the world’s greatest danger. He’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction The Guardian
Trump administration lifts ban on killing, trapping threatened species Andolu Agency
Trump’s rhetoric is more dangerous than voting machine flaws, experts say Politico
Musk Matters
Elon Musk’s AI Startup Is a Complete Disaster Behind the Scenes Futurism
Elon Musk says your Tesla will start to learn your individual preferences Teslarati
Democrat Death Watch
Rahm Emmanuel’s Israel-Endorsed ‘Opposition’ to Israel The American Conservative
‘It’s scary’: Scandal sends Wisconsin Dems into freakout mode over governor’s race Politico
Immigration
Stephen Miller says Trump administration is pursuing policy to debank illegal immigrants Fox News
‘Treating them like animals’: Migrant detainees face grim conditions in Miami federal jail Miami Herald
Fox News
Our No Longer Free Press
Trump administration drastically cuts length of foreign journalist visas The Guardian
6abc is warning viewers about the FCC taking away its TV license. Here’s what’s going on. Philadelphia Inquirer
Mr. Market Is Moody
Citi Raises Brent Forecast for 2026; Sees $150 Oil if Hormuz Disruption Persists EnergyNow
The Unanswered Questions Driving the Stock Market Drop Barron’s
Climate’s Compounding Financial Toll Is Becoming Harder to Ignore Time
AI
AI is changing what we can do. Who we become is still our choice Humanist Review
MARC ANDREESSEN WENT ON ROGAN FOR OVER 3 HOURS. HERE ARE THE 17 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.
1. AGI is already here, in his view. He says the line got crossed about 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3, and nobody noticed because the field moves too fast… https://t.co/kNcZEYmH0t pic.twitter.com/yddmZnJ6Wr
— CyrilXBT (@cyrilXBT) July 18, 2026
Google just dropped a 1-hour course on agentic engineering from scratch:
00:00 – How to build your first AI agent
08:24 – Build agent memory (short, persistent, long)
28:34 – Agentic loops, long-running AI agents
40:04 – How to build MCP (MCP vs API)
1:00:22 – Multi-agentic… https://t.co/P5jrVeQvaO pic.twitter.com/uVbN2z1EHs— Rahul (@sairahul1) July 11, 2026
I let an AI take over my Google TV for a week — and it solved streaming’s biggest problem Android Authority
AI accelerates pace of scientific discovery: Nobel laureate Bastille Post Global
The Bezzle
Fraud expert warns AI is helping criminals outpace the government: ‘Don’t have the right tools’ Fox News
The data to find Medicaid fraud already exists, but no one is using it The Hill
Guillotine Watch
Most expensive sneakers
Which of these brands have you used? pic.twitter.com/g8mTtjQZzU— Darcie (@Darcie1387) April 10, 2026
Abstract socks is on its way to flip the world’s most expensive socks.
Already flipping most luxury brands.
Second only to Burberry. pic.twitter.com/8GplUaOoxJ
— Nezuron (@nezuron_) February 1, 2025
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
‘Massimo
@Rainmaker1973
Fun fact.
BYD new factory in Zhengzhou will cover 50 square miles, which is larger than San Francisco’s surface at 46.9 square miles.’
Detroit, eat your heart out. You go through the replies to that tweet though, and a lot of people have been triggered – and with a side-dish of sour grapes to boot.
https://xcancel.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2078187980980949082
Re: data exists to prosecute Medicaid fraud but no one is using it
About a year ago, my husband received, unsolicited, a new Medicare card. No explanation offered. Then about three weeks ago, we received an explanation of benefits from our secondary insurance, FEP Blue, showing over $3000 in charges for medical supplies over a week’s time in Nov 2025. The provider was New England Medical Supplies, a non-participating provider. We called Blue Cross to report this because my husband hadn’t received any medical supplies. The person we spoke with said there had been similar calls recently. When we asked if they would report this to Medicare she said no, but we could. Which we did, only to be told maybe there was an ongoing investigation, maybe not, maybe we would hear back, maybe not. We contacted Glenn Ivey, our representative, and spoke with an aide about doing some follow up from the political side. He said several times they couldn’t do that, they weren’t investigators, they were legislators. But they could contact the legislative liaison office to ask them to look into it. He wouldn’t give us that contact number because it was “private”. And in order for the congressmen to contact that office, we had to fill out an electronic form. Which we did and this week we received an answer saying maybe there was an investigation, maybe not, maybe we would hear more, maybe not and if we felt our Medicare info has been compromised, we could ask for a new card. Is this a great system or what??
Appalling, Kafkaïan, the best money can buy…
“Toronto, New York and Washington top list of most polluted cities as wildfires burn”
Trump is still blaming the Canadians for not keeping the smoke on their side of the border. Maybe he expects Canadians to go out in-between fires with rakes to rake the forest floor. But I just saw this on Trump’s Truth Social account-
‘Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Tim Sheehy is GREAT. A Winner!!! President DJT
In that post, Tim Sheehy accuses Canada of blocking US firefighters while sending government-subsidized aircraft to the US to cheat American taxpayers saying it is being run like a Chinese extortion racket-
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116938579137506694
And the guy’s Wikipedia page does not exactly cover him with glory either-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sheehy
Sheehey is a weasel-eyed grifting carpetbagger, who, irony or paradox, has a legendary series of gun and aeronautical accidents. Perfect MAGAt.
I read a link about it yesterday (“Trump threatens Canada over wildfire smoke choking U.S. cities”) where some idiot official actually said that the smoke was “invading” …. Like it had agency. 🙄
I thought “sure, then you should send in your stoopid ICE goons to deport it . . . Hey let me know how that goes…”
Re: Stephen Miller planning to de-bank illegal immigrants: what about their valuable dental gold?
While he’s intentionally trying to be provocative with his phrasing and targeting of immigrants, all he’s doing here, perhaps without realizing it, is forcing finances to go off-grid, dark, become untraceable, which is something I think every card-holding anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, antifa, (true) libertarian should agree with in principle. The reason many oppose digital currency or still use cash. Arguably, wouldn’t a good first step towards dismantling the banking system be to set up alternatives to it, such as hawala or black markets, which then become more widely used, essentially debanking the banks, moving us more toward definance? Isn’t this why people salivate over crypto or blockchain?
I think I see where you’re coming from, and in principle, theres some aspects of this we probably agree on. In practice, however, privately owned financial marketplaces, institutions, or applications lacking even the nominal democratic accountability of the regulated banking world are worrisome. Then there’s the fact that the people who salivate over crypto are often criminals, because of this lack of transparency. You’re pointing to a dual power kind of strategy, which is one way forward. For the bits having to do with how we value work, though, I prefer sharing economies, things like labor vouchers, destroyed at the point of exchange. So long as we’re discussing utopia, I don’t see why we need banks at all. But, while we have the world we do, we still have to contend with banks, and with Stephen Miller.
You’re absolutely right to point out the resemblance to the Nuremberg laws. It’s frightening how people have forgotten the path to utter disaster.
Re: Marc Andreesen and AI,
My main use of AI personally is for scientific programming. It may be true that if I hired a software engineer for $200,000 and gave him six months, he’d do a better job than I can do with Claude in a few weeks, but I have neither $200,000 nor six months, nor would I ever get the first one. And even if I did, it would then be impossible to maintain the code, as I wouldn’t be able to hire that software engineer back.
The other uses are more worrisome. For example he suggests AI therapists for CBT. I have no doubt that this will be the norm. They will first make it cheaper to render therapists unemployed and to shift the policies of insurance companies, but then they will make it more expensive. And the CBT will be different. They’ll be programmed to encourage people to be good worker bees and good consumers. Some therapists will argue that’s what CBT is though, and that real problems take more time to solve.
Given the quality of most online therapists, whose main goal seems to be to curry the client’s favor by affirming their every thought, it wouldn’t be much of a change. Reflective listening has become affirming listening.
It’s a fair point.
I think that psychiatry is more of an issue. It’s very hard to get a good psychiatrist, one typically starts with a psychiatric nurse practitioner and they tend to know very little. From listening to others, they start off with Prozac or Zoloft regardless of symptoms, which in fairness they can’t know based off of a 15 minute appointment.
But I don’t see this improving with AI.
A friend who became the therapist, mostly CBT, the world needed after years as a school psychologist died unexpectedly several years ago. The condolences on the funeral home website where universal (paraphrase): “Dr. X was the greatest. Not once did she tell me what I wanted to hear. She always listened carefully and laid out what I needed to do, totally unvarnished. She saved my life. She was always available and she was not in it for the money. She will be missed by all of her patients and their families.” Contrast with the empathetic LLM therapist that will only tell you how great you are…
…or how to top yourself.
I know what you are doing Haig. You are an agent provocateur posting here the “vision”, rather hallucination, of, for example, an individual named Andreessen whose business model depends on hallucination with his 17 BS bullet points to spread such bullshit in every direction. Not that statistical analyses called “AI” cannot help in tasks that require analysis of lots of data. Yes it can, but the moment you are reduced to rely only in such tool Is when Artificial General Idiocy starts.
Ignacio: As I read the seventeen points, my strongest impression is of a super-number-cruncher but not much else. People like Andreessen think that they are dealing with intelligence in a human sense when they dealing with output that is more complicated because it has pulled in more data bases and has an on-line component.
I am reminded of when we were all buying our first personal computers, around 1991. At work, we were using a Wang (remember those?), which was an interconnected word processor. Then a whole “Wang” could go into a personal computer, although in 1991, I had some friends who still had external hard drives, that is, floppy disks. Think of how little memory a 1991 computer had. When I had to upgrade, I bought little bug-like enhancements from Zeos (yep, I had a Zeos computer) and popped them into the motherboard.
The prodigious amounts of electricity being used by this AI software indicate that it is just another step in computer processing and computer memory, like the jump to the Macintosh after the Lisa didn’t pan out.
Hallucination? More like hype. This is what happens when all computers have an internal modem, I s’pose. I remember the olden days when the modem sat alongside the computer, one turned it on, and the modem made screechy noises like a Silicon Valley zillionaire.
What say you?
Yes hype is much better qualifier than hallucination. My limits with English usage (never resorting to AI and sometimes to dictionaries when I can’t recall the precise word I want to use). Yet between hype and hallucination the limits can be blurred. I wonder whether AI can distinguish or not.
I go back a generation earlier: Apple II+. We bought it in 1982 for around $2,000, a paltry sum considering the II+ sported a powerful 8-bit processor that could address a huge 64k of RAM. It worked well as a word processor, and you could play that fun helicopter rescue game.
Three years later, my spouse worked for a New Mexico ski resort owned by Dan Lasater, the Clintons’ coke importing pal from Little Rock. Of course, they sold time shares, and every morning, the office had to type up long sales reports on a Xerox Memorywriter, a torture device if there ever was one. They had a “minicomputer” in a climate controlled room, but nobody knew how to get it to do anything. She talked them into buying a Mac to which a 10 MB (WOW!) external drive was added. We set-up the sales report spreadsheet using the “Jazz” software that came with the Mac, and a job that took 3 people half the morning took one person 10 minutes to produce.
Dan Lasater, the Clintons’ coke importing pal you say? Yeah, it was tough in the drug trade until modern technology came along-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIyvmwMlF2I (2:56 secs)
Henry Moon Pie: And your summation is what I have been considering lately. So-called artificial intelligence is just really really fast number crunching and connectivity.
I am reminded that over the last thirty or forty years in the U S of A, many of the “revolutions” have been pretty much only speeding up of the delivery system: Federal Express is a prime example. PDF files. E-mail programs. UberEats. On-line access to airline tickets, which used to take days to get.
No wonder people suspect that something is wrong: In fact, almost nothing has changed. Except now you can ask Alexa to order a pizza for you. And if you put Alexa in charge of the choice of toppings, it must be artificial intelligence.
Till Alexa orders pineapple.
TRS-80 (Trash-80 from Radio Shack). Controlled a spectrophotometer (slowly) and could also be used to play Asteroids. IIRC it had 45K of RAM.
Ones and Zero’s. Mostly Zeros.
AI is a Janus technology. For every sinister possibility, there is an upside scenario. People exhibit a mental latching behavior that often commits them to a pro or con position that resists all contrary evidence. I try to avoid this situation. To quote Keynes:
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Re Dark day for the UK as Andy Burnham doubles down on disaster NY Post
Wow, quite the foaming at the mouth piece. One claim that is particularly amusing is the double standard complaint that there should be a general election in the event of a change of prime minister. Amusing in the sense that right wing media made no such fuss of not having a mandate every time the previous Conservative government changed leader/prime minister since Cameron resigned after losing the brexit referendum. May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak (have I missed any?) all reached the top of the greasy pole without a general election.
FWIW, I very much doubt Burnham will make any big difference compared to Starmer. Maybe a slight change of style but the substance will remain the same.
That wouldn’t be too difficult in a country where a deceased senator’s sister can inherit his seat.
Today El Pais run a piece on Burnham describing him as the potential next hero of UK politics who, in contrast with Starmer or all those conservative PM you listed, is someone who still keeps links with the populaces and it is not as detached from reality as the typical professional politician. Knowing El Pais this very much sounds like the next bored exaltation of the following blairite Neoliberal who will fail like the few others before did, including the very same Anthony Boring Blair.
The writer of this article is also author of a book called “After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation” which, judging by the title and the available reviews, appears to argue the thesis that any scruple, opposition, or distaste a person might feel in regards to Israel’s actions subsequent to October 7th is tantamount to the embrace of “fascism”, the abandonment of Enlightenment values, and the collapse of Western civilization. So probably not a writer from which one should really expect good faith argumentation.
This article is grotesquely denying Israel’s crimes, to name the most abject part. I again trusted the fact it was listed here to go have a look. I completely fail to see the point of it being listed, and I am not a fan of Burnham at all. But the article fails any measure of relevance.
Not the first time I am baited by the Sunday links to go read something I end up thoroughly regretting having opened.
I routinely find links that I dislike but some of them I do read them because one mustn’t limit to read what one believes as right thinking. When you go to read what you like is when your critical skills must be very much awake. When you go to read what you dislike rethink about what is wrong with that and/or with your priors.
Re: AI and Marc Andreesen
Does anyone believe any of this crap? None of it justifies spending trillions. Rogan’s fallen a long way from being a persistent, savvy interviewer into tech bro booster.
Wealthy tech bro booster. The vast bulk of tech bros are in debt above their nostrils. We are not going to see any of them on Joe Rogan’s show. The transcript is here. Robot generated transcript but I don’t find Andreessen is ever listenable. He sounds like a too-loud-too-fast cartoon character. Foghorn Leghorn X Phineas T. Woopie.
Joe is usually pretty good when he has a good guest which this one ain’t.
“Trump administration lifts ban on killing, trapping threatened species”
This is great news this. Especially for all those that want to shoot a Bald Eagle so they can have it stuffed and mounted in their den. Should be quite the conversation piece and you can’t get more patriotic than that.
Is Politico wholly owned by The Blob, or is it just trying to curry favor with the elites?
The subhead on their voting machine article is ludicrous. The only security that’s been beefed up is in how to keep Republicans from seeing the raw data. Strangely enough, the article does not name a single state or city that’s moved away from electronic voting and I certainly cannot think of any such legislative debate having occurred, let alone anytihng that resulted in fewer electronic votes.
I suspect the word “devices” is doing a lot of work here. No, we’re not voting by phone, is that what they mean? Because using paper ballots that are electronically tabulated is no different than using a machine that counts the votes as they’re cast. Both are highly susceptible to manipulation as has been proven by ethical hackers over and over again. The swells claim the paper ballots can be inspected but then throw major hissy ifts if you actually try to see those ballots.
Paper ballots, hand counted in full view of the public. Everything else is just fraud waiting to happen.
This org tracks the machines: https://verifiedvoting.org
The constant hyperventilation about something that has never happened just feeds mistrust in our elections. If you believe that hand counted votes in public can’t be rigged I have a Tammany Hall I would like to sell you.
The tragedy in our system is hardly in the counting. The process of putting forth a candidate who is bought and unqualified is the problem. The current party in power desperately wants to rig the election and they are doing it under your nose but not by altering the count. Pick a battle that is currently critical not a straw dog.
All states and DC conduct post-election audits of machine counted ballots. The second link below includes “Who can observe” this process in each state.
https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/every-state-has-now-enacted-a-post-election-audit-law
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/post-election-audits
https://verifiedvoting.org/auditlaws/
(This isn’t an argument against hand counting, but I do think these procedures should be part of the evaluation of hand vs machine counting.)
I found Marc Andreesen’s contention that AGI is already here interesting, if not convincing.
My first thought was “Who is he trying to sell this to?”
Andreesen has a habit of talking his book and generally speaking he has been more credible than Elon Musk when it comes to claims about what his tech can do.
Which makes him slightly more credible than a weasel on crack.
I trust Andreesen as I would adders fanged …
He’s a savvier liar and bs-er than Musk (who prefers bombastic claims).
I think the goal is to keep this party going a bit longer to let the insiders cash out as much as they can. They really want to get this IPO done for Open AI, but the SPCX bubble is already deflating ahead of schedule. They need to work ever more furiously to pump it back up.
Andreesen has figured out that it is better to be a weasel than a soaring eagle. Eagles may soar, but weasels aren’t sucked into jet engines.
Tucker Carlson interviews Roger Waters.
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters on 9/11, JFK, Gaza, and Why the Israel Lobby Is Trying to Destroy Him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaKuo6w9TnA
Posted a Waters vid. a couple of years ago on a closed professional forum.
Backlash reactions were so that the forum eventually closed.
´was not my intention.
But it was impossible to discuss matters.
And the dude is a essentially just a musician…
Sounds like that Overton Window shut down so hard that you are lucky that you did not lose your fingers. Not your fault though. Dissent is not tolerated that much.
“China’s Beidou Satellite System is a Game Changer in Iran’s War with the US”
And as the linked Kevin Walmsley video points out, this all stated way back in 1993 when the US killed the GPS of a Chinese ship called the Yinhe, threatened to sink it, tried to stop food and water going to it and all because the US had intel that the ship was carrying illegal cargo. And after this siege when this ship was inspected and showed zip, not only did the US not apologize but they accused the Chinese of originally supplying the dodgy intel. I have linked this tweet thread before but it is well worth reading-
https://xcancel.com/CarlZha/status/1131548592810876928
It is from this humiliating incident that the Chinese got serious about their own GPS. Same way that the Chinese got serious building up their military after the US deliberately bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade a few years later. I guess that the Chinese reckoned that they had gone through one century of humiliation so were not inclined to put up with a second one.
That ScienceGirl vid of the clam-like creature has to have been be AI generated. Or very oddly and unfortunately edited.
What part don’t you believe. The blue eyes, the sensory tentacles or the sudden movement? These are all indeed true characteristics of some scallops.
How about its hinge turning into a mouth?
Ok I noticed that, thank you.
The last movement where it flips, where we can briefly see the shell has a hinge or joint. Yet, despite that it flips once, 180 degrees, the hinge should be facing us but instead the hinge disappears before our very eyes and the shell opens, same side. So this is behaving as an unhinged shell even though we saw a hinge go by.
The fact that it flipped over and was still facing the same direction. I suspect AI, too.
All I could think of was Oscar the Grouch through the lens of some well-brewed LSD.
AI yAI yAI hallucinations indeed!
There are two vitally important reasons to use Electronic Voting machines, one is fraud and the other is graft.
There’s simply not enough $ in paper ballots, hand counted in public to fund much in the way of graft while voting machines are expensive enough that there is.
Fraud has benefits as well, the companies who build these machines own the source code and it is proprietary information, private enterprise doing what it does best.
This is another one of the many problems that we’ve recognized and talked about for decades (at least since 2001 for this one) and just don’t/won’t/can’t do anything about. Like climate change. Like the Electoral College. Like the national debt. Like unhealthy food “substances” pushed on consumers who are then blamed for eating them. Like unsustainable and inhumane agriculture. The country that tackled the Depression head-on and geared up to fight World War II is now incapable of solving (and in some cases of even trying to solve) any of its real problems, instead fighting symbolic tribal battles endlessly in media that devote themselves to nonsense, fantasies and lies. A civilizational death spiral for between 40 and 50 years now. And in this case, as in a few others, the solution is just stop doing the stupid thing: go back to hand-counted paper ballots marked by a pen in the voting booth. So the counting takes longer and the media don’t get to report their horserace results instantly, boo-hoo.
I agree that paper ballots, hand counted in public are the best way to go. That said, we do that in France and look what we still end up with 🤦♂️
“The European Right is turning on Ukraine’
Got a theory about this because of course I do. Over the past four years the EU nations have destroyed the economies of their nations in the support of the Ukraine. No matter how colossal the damage, leaders like Macron, Merz and all the others refused to back down but kept on pumping money and military equipment into the black hole of the Ukraine. The so-called left was on in this as well because Putin! Finally, electorates have had enough and are now voting for right wing parties that will put a stop to this mania. I do not think that they will continue this support to the Ukraine if they win office as that is what is causing all the damage to their countries that led to them being elected. So Burnham for example could do the UK a huge favour and halt that £5 billion that is going to the Ukraine each and every year for the next 98 years. Oh, and tell the EU that they will not be taking part on that 90 billion Euros also going to the Ukraine as well as that money is needed in the UK.
Then you will like this interview (of course I am sarcastic).
I believe the term “Ukraine War” is not mentioned once.
Nor the term “sanctions”.
But the word “democracy” or “democratic” over 50 times.
BERLINER ZEITUNG
machine-transl.
“Right-wing populism”
Constitutional law expert Alexander Thiele: “Not every shift to the right automatically leads to catastrophe”
Constitutional law expert Thiele sees the success of the AfD primarily as a consequence of democratic failure. In an interview, he explains why Germany lacks a shared vision for the future.
https://archive.is/HWiDV
I find this Thiele as quite intellectually lazy. If, as he says, democracy has been eroded in a decades long process and during this process no far-right party has been in a position of power, at least at federal level in Germany he is failing to assign agency on this process to the traditional parties which have been governing Germany for long now. And goes to discuss the potential role of AfD on democratic loss (which I would agree is a large potential) but forgetting the role of the traditional parties. Aren’t there objective indicators? Is it not possible to measure objectively the detachment of the political classes from the populaces that vote them? For instance we have been seeing how every new elected government in Germany becomes increasingly unpopular. On the other side we have witnessed how elected officials despise the populaces and they even explicitly remark publicly their despise in favour of policies which are of greater importance than any democratic will that populaces might “naively” harbor. It looks like this Thiele haven’t been paying attention.
That 5 Billion pounds a year doesn’t stay in Ukraine, and that’s the whole point of sending it there.
Does not Bentley Kyiv rank among the best-performing Bentley dealerships in the world ? I would presume that the majority must in fact remain in Ukraine (or at least not be IMMEDIATELY turned around as contracts for UK weapons manufacturers) given that external funding is the only thing enabling Ukraine to maintain twin deficits (government budget and current account) of 40 billion or more annually in an economy with a GDP of only 225 billion.
” U.S. Surges Aerial Refuelling Fleet in Israel to Prepare for Expanded Offensive Against Iran ”
This must be why Israel is letting the US do all the heavy lifting this time around. If they took part, then Iran would turn all those aerial tankers in Israel into ash – and there goes long range attacks.
Note, Iran is removing the early warning radars in Jordan and Kuwait and elsewhere that would provide early warning of incoming missiles to allow those refuelers in Israel to take off in time to avoid being ashed. I expect your observation is actually predictive.
“Elon Musk’s AI Startup Is a Complete Disaster Behind the Scenes”
Inside that article is a link to a remarkable story that I had not heard before-
‘xAI Employees Say Elon Musk Promised Them $420 to Feed Their Taxes Into Grok, But Stiffed Them on the Payment’
https://futurism.com/future-society/xai-employees-elon-musk-promised-420
Suckers.
I had wondered how our establishment elites would summarize Platner’s rise and fall. Unsurprisingly, they are choosing to describe it through the lens of him being a privileged, white, male. These fine liberals are also still using Platner to troll everyone on the left.
“For many on the left…” because, Platner wasn’t just a candidate in Maine, he was a national figure?
“Despite a record of contemptible behavior, Platner continued to raise large sums of money from grassroots donors, pushed a sitting governor out of the primary and cruised to the Democratic nomination.” Cruised to the nomination? I recall he engaged in an exhausting cross state tour talking to many different people. Something people like Kamala Harris would never have done.
“Time after time, we have to watch strong women candidates get dismissed and treated like a backup plan, while some disastrous men take up all the oxygen – and ultimately make it harder to win the seats we need to take back our country,” Michelle White, the executive director of Emily’s List, said in a video, urging support for “qualified, inspiring Democratic women candidates”. While Emily’s List is better than some organizations tied up in election shenanigans, I seem to recall a number of qualified women getting astroturfed out of running for office because they didn’t have the correct position. Voters liked them, people like Chuck Schumer did not. Nina Turner being a prominent recent example.
If this is the level of analysis our liberal guardians are capable of I expect the predicted Blue Wave this fall will become a small puddle.
Re: China and AI, one can follow the analogy with the early development of aircraft. AI is over-hyped, and it doesn’t (just like aircraft doesn’t) *replace* any other means of producing the same result. However: just like aircraft, it opens up gigantic new risks based on possible use of massed attacks. Those risks are not appreciated sufficiently by either the US nor Chinese political leadership, even though their cybersecurity experts have verified that (e.g.) GLM 5.2 can lower the threshold of cyberattacks and even automate them.
So: militarily, each side has to be somehow protected from this, much like protections from massed aerial bombing attacks.
The release of the recent Kimi model will lead to an explosion of such zero day exploits, and one likely possibility is there will be some political backlash that goes back to China restricting open source, open weight models. Or some other solution, like requiring a time gap for releasing actual open weights.
The CN political leadership seems not to have any coherent AI policy; the policy makers there aren’t even aware of these risks. One myth is that the CCP system can somehow maintain ‘control’ while also being decentralized: but this doesn’t work empirically except in very restricted situations in short time spans (e.g., the Covid lockdowns). E.g., the government has zero control over even larger aggregate opinions (just randomly sample the comments in Chinese social media, like Red Note, and most of the users assume living standards are much better in the US). The US can easily suck away the entire skilled work force from China ‘if’ it hypothetically just offered them green cards (ofc, they would be disillusioned after a few weeks and return; but this is a reflection of how deteriorated the US is; not how much control or leverage the CCP allegedly has over its own citizenry).
(The counter-narrative to this is maybe, these open source models are carefully calibrated to be as damaging to US cybersecurity infrastructure as much as possible? That is, the Chinese government already has advanced knowledge of the recent Kimi K3 months before release, and so they have asymmetric knowledge of protection against them? This is first of all *unlikely to work*, due to the open-ended uses & variants of a model after the weights are released. It also disagrees with the past record: AI is currently leading to a youth unemployment crisis in CN no less than the US, that no amount of ‘growth’ can fix; a reflection on lack of control. But only the next few weeks will tell.)
Post demands unspecified solution for the homeless
The most humane thing our society has the capacity to do for the homeless is let them be. We don’t have the will to make housing a right, and we secretly (or not) enjoy having a system where everyone is dangling over the abyss, and so homeless encampments relatively unmolested by the authorities are the best we can do.
Because any recognition of this is deeply unflattering, the rage it creates feeds back into our loathing for the homeless: Their existence accuses us; why can’t someone just make them disappear?
On the COVID-19 Nimbus article, after diving through several links, I arrived at a very useful (worth bookmarking) website:
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
No trend last 21 days in Covid-19. You can dive into trends in your region or state or even wastewater district for COVID and also many other viruses
re: UK & 1996 Libya bombing
I wasn’t aware of this story tbh.
Fwiw fb has this comment.
“(…)
MI6 PAID AL-QAEDA £100,000 TO KILL GADDAFI. THE WHISTLEBLOWER WENT TO PRISON
In 1996 British intelligence funded a group with links to Al-Qaeda to plant a bomb under Muammar Gaddafi’s motorcade in Sirte, Libya. £100,000 of taxpayer money changed hands. Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind @MalcolmRifkind never authorised it. The bomb went off under the wrong car. Gaddafi survived. Several bystanders did not.
David Shayler was the MI5 officer running the Libyan desk at the time. He had an unusually close relationship with his opposite number at MI6 and found out what his own government had funded. He told journalists. Mail on Sunday. BBC Panorama @BBCPanorama. The Sunday Times @thetimes. He named the officers involved.
A state funding a bombing linked to Al-Qaeda that killed civilians sounds like something worth investigating. Britain’s response was an extradition request.
Shayler spent nearly 4 months locked up in a Paris prison while French courts decided whether to send him back. They refused. French judges ruled that exposing your own government’s covert funding of a terror plot was a political act, not grounds for extradition.
He returned to the UK voluntarily in 2000. In November 2002 he was convicted under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 6 months. He served a few weeks. The two MI6 officers who actually ran the assassination plot were investigated by the Metropolitan Police for over 3 years. The Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge them. The man who exposed a state sponsored assassination attempt did more time than the men who planned it.
While this was unfolding MI5 was also keeping files on sitting Labour cabinet ministers including Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw. The people meant to hold the intelligence services accountable were themselves under surveillance by those same services.
His MI5 partner Annie Machon @AnnieMachon resigned alongside him and helped document the case. She was never charged.
She later wrote it all down in: Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers.
(…)”