Newly found seamount reveals spaghetti monster and other rare ocean creatures CNN
What Was the First Recreational Drug? Gizmodo
Climate/Environment
Who Owns Power in the Energy Transition? Climate + Community Project
Environment: The climate crisis is a health crisis Pearls and Irritations
Pandemics
An even more contagious COVID strain is ‘just getting started’ amid California wave Los Angeles Times
Kansas COVID-19 spike coincides with unexplained tuberculosis infections Kansas Reflector. Commentary:
Here it comes. We are in so much trouble.
“Unexplained tuberculosis infections,” except multi-drug resistant tuberculosis was circulating in Kansas last year. Since 2020, we’ve known SARS-CoV-2 reactivates TB.
TB increased 26% among US children under age 5 last year. It’s… https://t.co/smTm6FF02r pic.twitter.com/FiJQPhXDyx
— Laura Miers (@LauraMiers) August 31, 2024
Japan
US Bandwagoners and Hawks: Who are Potential Japan PM Candidates? Sputnik
China enters Japan waters days after air violation protested Kyodo News
As Japan seeks record defense budget for fiscal 2025, experts warn of militarism resurgence Global Times
China?
China’s factory activity remains in contraction amid weak economic momentum South China Morning Post
WHAT IS AN ITALIAN CARRIER STRIKE GROUP DOING IN THE INDO-PACIFIC? War on the Rocks
European Disunion
French left seek backing for Macron impeachment Le Monde
Who’s afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht? Thomas Fazi, Unherd
Putin, cash and guns prompt ‘explosive’ rethink of Swiss neutrality Politico
Poorer countries that receive more from the budget than they put into it “need to understand that the world where they get an envelope of cohesion funding with no conditions [attached] . . . is gone,” said one EU official briefed on initial work for the 2028-34 budget
— Henry Foy (@HenryJFoy) September 1, 2024
Syraqistan
Renowned Surgeon and Lead Author of New Lancet Study Tortured by Israeli Military Drop Site News
“Yes, it is possible to achieve total victory… There’s a finite amount of people in Gaza”
Aired two weeks ago on Channel 13 news. The speaker is panelist Abir Kara – a politician, businessman and a thug, who previously served as a Member of Knesset as part of Bennett’s party. pic.twitter.com/mnPj5qjwbM
— B.M. 🇵🇸🗝️ ↩️ (@ireallyhateyou) August 31, 2024
Israel recovers bodies of six captives held in Gaza Al Jazeera
‘Israelis are frustrated, but do they want to stop the war? Not exactly’ +972 Magazine
***
‘There was no mercy, even on children’: trauma in the West Bank after Israeli raids The Guardian
***
Hezbollah’s Beirut Airport Powder Keg Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Inside The Telegraph’s ‘discredited’ Beirut airport Hezbollah weapons allegations The New Arab. From July 4, still germane.
“We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way’” Alastair Crooke
***
US soldiers injured in raid during ‘non-combat’ mission in Iraq Responsible Statecraft. The deck: More evidence that America is at war without saying it’s at war, in the Middle East.
***
Turkey ready to discuss pulling troop from Syria, but terms not yet agreed — Lavrov News.az
Why Turkey is accelerating towards normalisation with Syria The New Arab
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine’s collapse in Donetsk accelerating even further, so rapidly compared to past 2 years that some pro-Ru milbloggers think it may be an AFU ruse. If Ukraine doesn’t have another trick up their sleeve, we’re seeing the consequences of the Kursk invasion that so many predicted https://t.co/tIz6A8HbSL
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 31, 2024
Россия не белая и пушистая: Russia is not white and furry Gilbert Doctorow
White House rejects plan to send F-16 maintenance personnel to Ukraine, WSJ reports Kyiv Independent. “…the Biden administration is hoping European countries will take partial or even full responsibility for maintaining Ukraine’s recently-delivered F-16s.”
***
Exclusive: Russia payment hurdles with China partners intensified in August Reuters. Interesting timing.
Turkmenistan Surpasses Russia in Gas Exports to China The Times of Central Asia
Closing the backdoor: The new TurkStream is here. Can the West stop it? Politico. See NC here.
Old Blighty
Britain on the Brink Wrong Side of History
South of the Border
Brazil bans X RT. Commentary:
Another elected official in Brazil — a Congressman — telling Moraes to go fuck himself, proclaiming that he’s using a VPN to access and post on X, and that he will continue to do so.
Congratulations to Brazilians engaging in collective civil disobedience for their freedom:🇧🇷 https://t.co/5pbtrwShAB
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 31, 2024
Or maybe Brazil saw Musk and X interfering in Venezuela’s elections alongside the NED and CIA and decided US hegemony dressed up as “free speech” won’t be tolerated…
A nation’s information space must be protected as carefully as its physical domains – its borders, shores and… https://t.co/pMoBkbN28f
— Brian Berletic (@BrianJBerletic) August 30, 2024
Spook Country
Macron denies inviting Telegram founder Durov to France Anadolu Agency
How US union leaders worked with the CIA to undermine democracy Red Flag
Biden Administration
Palestinians Seek US Appeals Court Review of Biden Genocide Complicity Case Common Dreams
Trump
Crypto is the new Trump family business. Ethics watchdogs have concerns. Politico
Kamala
RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. sues North Carolina elections board over ballot The Hill. To get off the ballot.
Democrats en déshabillé
I got Covid at the DNC. Why’s the next pandemic absent from this campaign? Too Close To Call
The COVID Wave at the DNC Was Not a ‘Surprise’ Discourse Blog
GOP Clown Car
The think tank behind Project 2025 is also behind some of Florida’s most extreme laws Seeking Rents
Imperial Collapse Watch
BRICS’ New Development Bank Authorizes Algeria’s Incorporation to the Economic Block Telesur
Why does Algeria want to join BRICS? The New Arab
Our Famously Free Press
A co-ordinated attack across the western former democracies.
Danny Shaw was arrested returning from speaking alongside me on a panel at the Free Palestine International Film Festival.
Richard Medhurst was arrested en route to speak alongside me on a panel at the Beautiful Days… https://t.co/XDd79156rJ— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) August 31, 2024
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Growing backlash from law enforcement as NFL asks officers to submit to face scans The Record
AI
Was an AI Image Generator Taken Down for Making Child Porn? IEEE Spectrum
OpenAI searches for an answer to its copyright problems The Verge
How AI Copyright Law Is Being Guided By Spirits From Atlantis Defector
***
AI firms are SF’s most desired tenants. Here’s how much office space they’re gobbling up The San Francisco Standard
Sure is nice of Oprah to host this extended sales pitch for the generative AI industry at a moment when its fortunes are flagging and the AI bubble is threatening to burst https://t.co/XeQNlZG9YV
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 31, 2024
Class Warfare
The job market needs workers. The newest ones are over age 75. Christian Science Monitor
Uber drivers in Kenya are ignoring the app and charging their own rates Rest of World
Montreal’s model for resisting culture vulture capitalism The Breach
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Re Putin, cash and guns prompt ‘explosive’ rethink of Swiss neutrality Politico
I read as far as Russia’s unprovoked attack and stopped. If the author believed that he or she is deaf, dumb, blind and monumentally ignorant. If not, they are simply witting propaganda merchants for the US MIC.
This is more a case of the Neocons in Switzerland wanting to end the centuries long neutrality stance of Switzerland, rip up it’s Constitution which guarantees it, join the EU and NATO, “share” it’s tunnel bases with NATO but especially the US, host a coupla NATO basis there in order to keep the government in line, start to send contingents of Swiss troops to any new hot-spots on NATO’s behalf, increase the military budget to buy US arms and for all I know send a Swiss Navy squadron to Asia to join the Italians there. That last bit was a joke but all the rest is solid gold predictions.
Switzerland does have a high seas fleet, comprising 49 commercial vessels. Officially, the home port is Basel. From there to having a high seas war navy is still a stretch though.
This being said, there has been quite a change of orientation ever since Ignazio Cassis became member of the Swiss government: he is a committed Atlanticist and Zionist (he is quite hostile to the UNRWA for instance). Viola Amherd also tends towards more cooperation with NATO, and she was instrumental in pushing through the selection of the F-35 as the new fighter jet for the Swiss army (including with very suspect scenarios involving Switzerland fighting in Czechia and Bavaria, and after playing dubious negotiation games with the French regardinf the Rafale).
There still is a democratic line of defense in that the Swiss can resort to both initiatives and referendums to block unpopular moves by politicians. As a matter of fact, signatures have been collected for an initiative for the “preservation of the Swiss neutrality”.
The Swiss government has been playing fast and loose with those referendums lately. There was a popular referendum proposed to stop the order of a three dozen F-35s as being the wrong fighter for Swiss needs so the government jumped the gun and signed the contracts for them before that referendum could go ahead-
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/09/19/swiss-leaders-sign-625-billion-contract-for-f-35-fighter-jets/
Indeed, but the real problem in that case is that the organization committee of the initiative decided to give up rather than force a vote. In case of acceptation, it was generally agreed that this initiative would have led to an “interesting” constitutional conundrum (aka constitutional crisis), with Switzerland being likely forced into an expensive cancellation of the contract with Lockheed.
I’ve read as far as Politico.
‘Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
Ukraine’s collapse in Donetsk accelerating even further, so rapidly compared to past 2 years that some pro-Ru milbloggers think it may be an AFU ruse. If Ukraine doesn’t have another trick up their sleeve, we’re seeing the consequences of the Kursk invasion that so many predicted’
It’s not an AFU ruse. They’re using the well known Holy Grail tactic, not to be confused with the Hail Mary tactic-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUG9VzHoEoc (10 secs)
Ah, you fooled me. I thought the Holy Grail tactic was for the wealthy and important people to move to France (with the Grail) and leave the poor and unimportant behind to deal with the mess. The one you posted is better.
“Brave Sir Robin”.
Brave Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot is one of the four knights chosen by King Arthur to join him at the Round Table in Camelot in the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, played by Eric Idle. Unlike many of the other knights in the movie, he is the only original knight written solely for this movie, and not from the King Arthur folklore in general. And his name is a misconception; although called “brave,” he would run away from fights, including from the Three-Headed Giant. It also didn’t help along his journey, his men perform his supposed theme song that went:
He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp, Or to have his eyes gouged out, and his elbows broken; To have his kneecaps split, and his body burned away; And his limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Robin!
Sadly, Sir Robin died at the Bridge of Death when he was asked a difficult question, “What is the capital of Assyria?”; He stated, “I don’t know that!”.
When will the unladen swallows be kitted out with weapons? And AI?
Or will those dirty carrier pigeons continue to hog all the glory!
Knights need to know.
It’s an attempt to buy time needed for the development of first Ukrainian Holy Hand Grenade.
This is delusional. Is he actually saying this is the first time a rich person meddled in a nations “information space”? And isn’t the U.S. government run by the billionaires and so what does that mean for the Voice of America?
And what about the billionaires meddling in the “information space” of our own country? He OK with that? Telling us COVID is over and it is fine to gather in a big group to worship the billionaire selected DNC candidate?
And IMO, if corporations are people, I should be able to operate transnationally just like they do.
Are you serious? Your comments are looking more and more troll like.
Our billionaires trying to influence our elections is called politics. Did you miss that civics lesson in school?
The top social media companies are US domiciled. We could drop the hammer on them if they go beyond what is allowable (a lot!) under Citizens United. The fact that Zuck has apologized about his past election influence and says he won’t do it again suggests he perceived he has exposure. Dem superdelegate contacts speculate that he is worried about jail time if Trump wins, so this take is not coming (only) from the right.
Most countries do not recognize corporations as being people. You are actively misinforming readers.
I have zero tolerance for this sort of thing. Both your logic and your informational claims are bogus. This site is dedicated to promoting critical thinking. You are selling swill.
One more like this and the comment will not be approved and you will be blacklisted.
>White House rejects plan to send F-16 maintenance personnel to Ukraine, WSJ reports Kyiv Independent. “…the Biden administration is hoping European countries will take partial or even full responsibility for maintaining Ukraine’s recently-delivered F-16s.”
From the article:
Citing officials familiar with the matter, the WSJ said the U.S. intelligence community ruled the plan too risky and “raised concerns over the prospect of Russia targeting American contractors in Ukraine.”
Really, no s**t Sherlock.
Classic, let everyone else get in harms way, do the dying. But not us.
US maintenance crews for EU donated F-16.
Are we to believe after debating about sending F-16’s for 2 plus years no one thought about how to keep them flying?
Might as well dock the Navy’s logistics ships, no one is planning logistics!
See – Right to repair –
I guess we now know where Oprah has invested some of her undeserved massive fortune.
About the only thing I blame Donahue for is Oprah. I’m not she hasn’t perpetrated more frauds and cons on the American public than the deeply hated Orange man himself. Dr Phil, Dr Oz, liquid diets, her godawful favorite things list..of course she is going to burnish AI’s increasingly tarnished image.
Oprah Winfrey has a net worth of some US$3 billion. And yet the only thing that she can do with all her free time is to help scam people out of their money instead of doing a Rockefeller and doing something good as her legacy as she nears the end of her life. But she is doing this. Hmphh. I can see it now-
‘And you get bankrupt, you get bankrupt, you get bankrupt, everybody gets bankrupt!’
Maybe there are Rockefellers and then there is “Rockefeller Medicine Men.” Blurb on the book: This book is an eloquent, well-documented damning appraisal of the historical marriage between medicine and capitalism and its impact on shaping the kind of health care system we have today.
BUT I once saw Abby R. at a Lecture on Local Currencies…
The problem I have with the tweet is that the current bubble still has some ways to go, at least judging by Nvidia’s latest earnings report. Supposedly the market finds Nvidia’s forecast for the next quarter to be disappointing, but that’s just investors having unrealistic expectations.
Give it enough time though and maybe a year or two down the line, Oprah’s spiel will reach the legendary status of Matt Damon’s “Fortune Favors the Brave” speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEjjufPd3Is
Ugh. When I saw that ad I could hardly believe that he was ripping off his film “The Martian.” It felt so scummy. Just now noticed the name on that female astronaut in that ad – ‘Satoshi’ as in ‘Satoshi Nakamoto.’
You can check out any time you want, but you can’t ever leave:
How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients NYT archive
What is missing from the article is whether the “stickiness” applies to all patients or only those with private health insurance which pays far higher rates than Medicaid. Of course they want to overmedicate everyone that crosses the rubicon.
Needless to say there will be minimal or zero accountability. The electronic medical are being scrubbed as I type.
Glad to read “How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients”, and thanks for posting it.
I was held at Holly Hill Hospital in Raleigh, NC fro 10 days when I was fine after the second day. Even my Psychiatrist knew this and was fighting with them to get me out because the experience was making me worse. The nurse was even stealing my meds. They held me for 10 days because Medicare will pay fro 10 days. And meanwhile I saw other patients doing way worse than me released after three day because they had no insurance. I did not see a doctor for 48 hours after I was admitted. I saw a doctor once every four days for 30 minutes and there was no back and forth communication. My blood pressure was spiking to 170/100 and it took a visiting psych doc to get them to give me meds for it. Once staff member yelled at a elderly black patient clearly in distress; “Just go ahead and kill yourself then!”
These private mental health facilities should not be in operation.
I know many of you might be inclined not to believe me because I have a mental illness but that is the same power they have over the patient. Always believe the patient when they are talking about these places! Read the reviews of this place:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/DVmsR6NVUoffvcgg6
WRAL in NC is doing a great job writing about it all. Yay for local news doing what they should!
https://www.wral.com/story/former-holly-hill-patients-question-raleigh-police-plan-to-divert-mental-health-crises-to-troubled-facility/21602703/
Been in jail twice, a locked ward once. The jails were much warmer, more friendly spaces. I understand prison can be quite terrifying but in jail it was an inmates v guards vibe. In the locked ward it was the entire institution v each individual patient.
Tucker interviews Jeff Sachs. utube. 2 hr, 25+ minutes. Last part has interesting stuff about Paulson, Lehman Brothers Bank, and the GFC.
Jeffrey Sachs: The Looming War With Iran, CIA Coups, and Warning of the Next Financial Crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsjKZstp-XU
re: Kansas and unexplained TB. Open borders, baby. / ;)
Ellis Island is SO 19th century. It’s a whole new paradigm.
I went to my boss’ funeral last week. When I was standing at his casket I said to him “Who’s thinking outside of the box now?”
I got a job in Switzerland back in the 80s and much to my surprise had to go for an X-ray to make sure I did not have TB. But who does something like that these days?
I remember getting tested for tb in order to get restaurant work back in the 80’s. I guess testing these days will be “suggested”, you do you after all.
It’ll be like the 1950’s again, and proverbial “Morning in America”…TB, polio, measles…oh and a new, new cold war with China moreso than Russia, quite possibly ( ok I submit the last entry is a stretch, after all where will Amazon find all the cheap supply of deliverables? ).
Don’t be so ridiculous, flora.
10 million illegal human petri dishes from pretty much every third world country on the planet, ushered in and then seeded throughout these united states, has nothing to do with it.
It is and always will be covid, long covid, asymptomatic covid, undiagnosed covid, and “latent” TB activated by covid. Intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
‘Henry Foy
@HenryJFoy
Poorer countries that receive more from the budget than they put into it “need to understand that the world where they get an envelope of cohesion funding with no conditions [attached] . . . is gone,” said one EU official briefed on initial work for the 2028-34 budget’
I literally have no idea what that EU official is talking about. They are forever putting strings and conditions on any loans which has caused more and more counties to turn to China for loans. China’s main condition is that you pay the loan back but at least they don’t add on any lectures or finger-wagging or talk about “values’. Maybe the conditions that that EU official is talking about is one of the new ones. You know – sanction Russia, send all your weapons and billions to the Ukraine, end any contracts that you have with China, etc. Stuff like that.
Since the tweet refers to cohesion funds, this is about the internal subsidies granted to EU countries from the EU budget, not credits to other countries. Still: more red tape and strings attached.
Thanks for that correction. Sounds then like a mechanism to stop countries like Hungary “interfering’ with the EU’s war plans. More to the point, making legal what they have been doing to countries like Hungary the past few years.
Yes, this looks to be very much the intent.
Japan military resurgence meets reality : Japan woos military recruits with bigger steaks and better beds. That headline could have been written by the Babylon Bee, but it’s the FT so it has to be true. Apparently the number of personnel in the entire armed forces of Japan is only around a quarter million, compared to China’s 2 million. One thing to be sure of is that there won’t be a resurgence of Manchukuo.
Yours truly might be moving later this year to Japan for work, so I will have front row seat to experience Japan’s slow motion (for now) collapse. Hopefully I won’t become a meme for the phrase “from one frying pan (Taiwan) to another”.
I have no idea how Japan thinks it is going to increase the defense budget with that Godzilla sized debt to GDP ratio.
Will it become another Ukraine, totally dependent on foreign aid?
The BoJ should just go all in on Nvidia Call options. I mean, it kinda worked with the Swiss Central Bank.
The company I was interviewing with originally balked at my salary demand, but after speaking with the two most senior members of the team, in the final offer they ended up bumping my number up by 12.5% :) Perhaps they know the Yen will one day be worthless anyways, so a couple million Yen here and there won’t matter.
When something sounds too good to be true ……
In the mid-19th century, the new Japanese navy overtly used the lure of white rice with every meal to gain recruits. It took several decades before they realised this was the reason beri-beri became as much a problem for them as scurvy was for British sailors. Even after the discovery, it was a tough job to persuade the sailors to take brown rice for health reasons.
Japan has a big domestic arms industry, but it’s proven a huge economic deadweight (despite overall very low defence spending) as restrictions on exports means they don’t have the scale to make weapons cheaply. Their fairly useless tanks and domestic fighters are amongst the most expensive per unit in the world. They do have a good Navy tho’, even thought they’ve had to perform weird semantic tricks to make it fit into the notion of ‘self-defence’, including redefining flat tops as ‘destroyers’.
The Yoshida doctrine proved very successful for decades for the Japanese. One wonders what will replace it.
Biden Administration
Palestinians Seek US Appeals Court Review of Biden Genocide Complicity Case Common Dreams *********** The good news is some Supreme Court Justices (Sonya?) have expressed that Biden might be able to just pink mist the US Appeals Court Justices and staff, if they grant an appeal (or not). American’s legal system at work doing it’s job. More clarifications from The Supremes tangled and mangled 9/11 era rulings to come!
And in other news, Israel has had to shelve, at least temporarily, the plan to insert cyanide into the polio vaccine, given the current, worldwide shortage of the stuff. Under pressure from the United States to reduce the per capita cost of killing, the brain trust in Tel Aviv has been methodically working through various alternatives to bombing the kiddos to smithereens. Finance Minister Smotrich, who chairs the trust, continues to argue that compared with all known alternatives to date, bombing continues to provide the most bang for the buck. Besides, he adds, we are helping the Palestinian parents as well, as with our extermination method of choice, there is no need for a shroud, much less a box. And as he reminded his loyal followers, one should bear in mind the source of the Nobel prize money, as in “die no mite!” (Those closest to him report that Smotrich has been angling for months for the same prize that BHO got, arguing that between the two, he is clearly the more deserving.)
Newly found high rise mountain, underwater 900 miles from the coast of Chile. Count me in for being otherwise clueless, there really is an ocean creature called a flying spaghetti monster. I had always thought such a beast was fiction, like in the epic poem Beowulf.
Who’s afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht? Neolibs, thank you. This,
“In a widely discussed book published that same year, Die Selbstgerechten (“The Self-Righteous”), Wagenknecht explained the reasons for her growing estrangement with the mainstream Left. “Left”, she argues, used to be synonymous with improving the lives of ordinary people forced to support themselves through their (often backbreaking) labour; however, today’s progressive movement has come to be dominated by what Wagenknecht calls the “lifestyle Left”, whose members “no longer place social and political-economic problems at the centre of Left-wing politics. In the place of such concerns, they promote questions regarding lifestyle, consumption habits, and moral attitudes.” She further notes that, far from being liberal, today’s Leftists tend to be viciously authoritarian.”
“Was an AI Image Generator Taken Down for Making Child Pron?”
‘And popular platforms such as Hugging Face and Civitai have been hosting that model and others that may have been trained on real images of child sexual abuse. In some cases, companies may even be breaking laws by hosting synthetic CSAM material on their servers. And why are mainstream companies and investors like Google, Nvidia, Intel, Salesforce, and Andreesen Horowitz pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies? Their support amounts to subsidizing content for pedophiles.’
The spirit of Jeffrey Epstein lives on. Mostly because they never published his client list nor sent to prison any of the people on it – including Bill and Andy.
In the spirit as you describe it, let us not forget the excrement named Alan.
Greenwald vs. Berletic on Brazil’s ban of ‘X’
This illustrates the real dilemma of states that resist the tremendous global hegemony of the US. My own preferences lie in the Greenwald camp, but then I live in the US. Today we are much more aware of how the US and its allies have weaponized “free speech” and “glasnost” through foreign media and academia to undermine uncooperative governments. And Musk has already demonstrated that his war against censorship is a limited one and his own hubris is very great. It’s a tough call. If there were fora for truly informed, open, and equal debate on issues then the Greenwald’s free speech purity would be the ideal. But there never is. So we fall back to depending on whether we agree with whoever is doing the talking – or censoring.
This article is worth a read.
Boiling the oceans and bleaching coral all so pedos can get a nut off.