Climate
Top American banks exit net zero alliance: What does this mean for their European peers? EuroNews
NOAA told to search grant programs for climate-related terms Axios
UK conservation goals insufficient to save ants and bees, says expert Guardian
Syndemics
Protection from COVID reinfections plummeted from 80% to 5% with omicron Ars Technica
China?
Xi Jinping to visit Moscow on 9 May, Russian ambassador says Ukrainska Pravda
China’s Trump Strategy Foreign Affairs. Commentary:
China is switching the world from a model based on paywalled tech tied to a subordinate productive sector to a model based on cheap/free tech subordinated to a dominant productive sector. In this world there are no shortcuts: compete or die. 🇨🇳 https://t.co/Fjv8hMB3KP
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) January 29, 2025
Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game Newsweek
Taiwan’s legacy chip industry contemplates future as China eats into share Reuters
Are China’s rural poor losing faith in education’s power to transform lives? South China Morning Post
China’s Long Economic Slowdown Dissent
Myanmar
Trump Extends US National Emergency Declaration on Myanmar The Irrawaddy
Syraqistan
Netanyahu praises Trump’s ‘revolutionary, creative’ Gaza plan Le Monde. Meanwhile:
To fly to the U.S. Netanyahu's plane flew via Europe's airspace unimpeded, which tells you all you need to know about Europe's "stand for justice and the respect of international law." https://t.co/7IjziUjNjb
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 7, 2025
How Trump and Netanyahu forced Mohammed bin Salman to draw a line on Palestine Middle East Eye
* * * Israel’s renaming of West Bank is step toward annexation: Palestinian ministry Anadolu Agency
* * * Israel Police Raid Prominent East Jerusalem Bookshops, Arrest Owners, Confiscate Books Haaretz
Trump repeats pledge to take control of Gaza even as pressure mounts to renew ceasefire AP
European Disunion
Germany will support Ukraine but won’t back its NATO membership – chancellor candidates’ debate Ukrainska Pravda
Germany’s Scholz slams CDU rival Merz for accepting far-right support in heated debate France24
* * *
South of the Border
Slashing the State Phenomenal World. The deck: “Argentina under Milei’s chainsaw.”
Ecuador set for run-off in presidential election dominated by security Al Jazeera
Trump Administration
Donald Trump to impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports FT
A pivotal senator says he extracted vaccine concessions from RFK Jr. How will that play out? LA Times
Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost AP
Doge
Donald Trump vows to cut billions of dollars from US defence spending FT. The deck: “President says ‘fraud and abuse’ at Pentagon will be Elon Musk’s next target.”
* * * Alarm as JD Vance says federal judges ‘aren’t allowed’ to control president Independent
The courts stand between Musk and a Treasury takeover FT
Supreme Court that Trump helped shape could have the last word on his aggressive executive orders AP
* * * Shutting Down CFPB Is Not Like Shutting Down USAID Credit Slips
USAID’s pullback from Egypt puts employees and programs at risk Enterprise; USAID (1):
2/14
Approaching the gate manned by Egyptian guards, we bluffed our way in and drove through the su*cide b*m8er barriers. This was aided, no doubt, by the fact that we were in a Mercedes (the diplomatic car of choice) and I look unmistakably American. pic.twitter.com/mQy9BcgnLK
— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) February 9, 2025
USAID (2):
Ahead of his time
Former president of Bolivia Evo Morales (2013): "We have decided to expel USAID from Bolivia… never again USAID, who manipulates and uses our leaders with handouts" pic.twitter.com/SndDJRtW13
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) February 6, 2025
* * * What Just Happened: Security Implications of Trump’s Efforts to Trim the CIA Workforce Just Security
Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’ Krebs on Security
The Elite Lawyers Working for Elon Musk’s DOGE Include Former Supreme Court Clerks ProPublica
The Scapegoat of the Hour Marianne Williamson, Transform
* * *
Democrats en déshabillé
Democratic senator says his party is ready to shut down government over Trump’s actions The Hill. Maybe soi, maybe not:
I really can't get over this one random dude without any credentials is stopping all of Congress from entering a fking building.
Democrats are so embarrassing https://t.co/PhmzN8IG14
— Pat Just Pat 🍉 (@PatTheSocialist) February 7, 2025
Digital Watch
Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data The Register
Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations Tom’s Hardware
* * * AI Governance Alliance World Economic Forum
Paris AI summit forecast: more talk than action Axios
DARPA To Launch Pre-Crime AML Program The Rage. AML = Anti-Money Laundering.
Sports Desk
The Eagles So Humiliated The Chiefs That Even Philly Fans Have To Believe Defector. Gritty is the way.
‘Not Like Us’ started as a diss. Now, it’s a Super Bowl anthem CNN. Musical interlude.
Class Warfare
Resisting Digital Feudalism Project Syndicate
LA’s rich and famous made ‘odd request’ of private armies as wildfires fueled fear, boss says FOX
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking fs
Antidote du jour (Thomas Fuhrmann):
Bonus antidote, via JL:
RIP Kuli. Kuli, a feline of modest size but mythic stature, who meowed her way into our lives and hearts in early 2012. She would often accompany us on morning walks before breakfast – two humans, a dog and a cat. She was an accomplished huntress, both of rodents and warm laps to sleep on. Diagnosed with FIV as a kitten, she outlived all expectations, to a span of almost 13 years of the best cat life we could give her. Farewell Tiny Tax Assistant, we love you and miss you dearly
.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
‘Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
To fly to the U.S. Netanyahu’s plane flew via Europe’s airspace unimpeded, which tells you all you need to know about Europe’s “stand for justice and the respect of international law.” ‘
And yet, yet, when the same authorities suspected that the Bolivian Presidential jet may have been carrying Edward Snowden back in 2013, they forced it to ground in Austria so that they could search it and other counties cooperated by closing their airspace to that jet-
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/02/world/americas/bolivia-presidential-plane/index.html
Love that juxtaposition!
Gooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
The demise of the little bit coin had come, it wasn’t as if you could buy anything with them, and its use had been relegated to essentially hand aerobics for cashiers in retail stores that had never heard of Swedish rounding although the practice had been going on for decades in our peer countries that ditched their Pennies.
None of the grunts in the platoon would ever go to battle with a handful of Lincolns jingling and a jangling in your BDU, they preferred stealthy Bitcoins which uttered no sound and could be used to buy illicit arms online if you found yourself in a firefight and needed backup asap.
I heard that army PX’s have not used Pennies since 1980. Too heavy to ship. I worked at a produce stand in Seattle where we also did not take pennies. He had some heated exchanges. We enjoyed saying, “No”.
Cents were once upon a time almost the size of a half $, and i’d gladly accept your 1794 starred reverse, here have a banana~
https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1794-1c-starred-reverse-bn/1374
There will be not another penny for one’s thoughts, a penny saved and earned, penny smart and pound foolish, or pennies from heaven.
Re Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost AP
A potential future scenario:
Back when Italy still had the lira, and there over a thousand to the £, there was a shortage of small value coins. You often got given sweets or similar in change when buying a coffee or the like. I was with a friend once who ordered a black coffee and got some sweets as change. He changed his mind and asked to add milk, which he got, but the guy at the till took back his sweets and gave him some cheaper sweets instead.
Maybe there is an upside……Ebay is offering a 1979 200 Lire coin for $1,800.
Curious, so I looked up the collector value and a 1979 200 Lire coin is worth 30¢.
The aforementioned ‘Swedish rounding’ is how the world of exiled small time money is calculated these days, you simply round up or down to the nearest decimal point, and if we are getting rid of Cents then it’s time to ditch Nickels too-the latter being the stealthiest coin around in that they are actually 75% copper in content.
Both cost around 3x the face value to mint.
If that happens the way Swedish rounding works is simple, say the bill comes to $42.37, presto it becomes $42.40. $42.34 becomes $42.30.
It ain’t rocket science.
The copper nickel alloy is called monel. Copper and nickel are 100 percent soluble without a phase change. It is more stable then stainless steel and is what nuclear submarine hulls are made of. I have a stash.
I think you will find (US anyway) submarine pressure hulls made of HY-100 steel MIL-S-21952. Monel though often used in shipboard systems, but at least in surface ships less expensive Cu-Ni alloys are more common.
Maybe I am mistaken but I was told at Bremerton that Trident class anyway were monel. It was awhile back.
Miscellaneous small coins, aka Shrapnel.
Better than the Japanese approach of making them so small as to be useless.
And why is the dime so small? Next up?
I’m going to make the dime bigger. It’s so small. You’ll see. It will be beautiful!
Israel Police Raid Prominent East Jerusalem Bookshops, Arrest Owners, Confiscate Books
Book burning to follow? And then presumably a Kristallnacht attacking Palestinian stores.
A police raid on a bookstore in any country raises questions about freedom of speech, censorship, rule of law, democracy, especially if politically or racially (as in Jewish supremacist) motivated.
Looks like the judge who approved the raid is ultra-orthodox. https://israel365news.com/321999/israel-appoints-first-ultra-orthodox-woman-judge/
Which puzzles me.
Police raiding a bookstore, that’s so shiny boots of leather! Trump is going to have a go at our universities if left to his own devices. What’s it called when your government cracks down on free speech and Goodnight Moon?
Book ’em, Book of Daniel!
Yes it is. If you can’t see that, I really can’t help you. You must have been asleep with the book banning that is already well underway in red states: https://pen.org/book-bans/
Your smarminess and negative value added comments degrade the site.
I agree with you, but I’m not sure what you’re responding to…
Agree about the freedoms? Did the comment get changed?
I toned it down and removed that bit since what preceded was probably unproductively harsh. But yes, people died for the freedoms we have enjoyed.
It wasn’t unproductively harsh, it was direct and to the point. imo.
I’m just not sure what text ‘Yes it is’ was responding to.
“Police raiding a bookstore, that’s so shiny boots of leather!”
I need to work on my distillation. That was supposed to convey a general observation of our US culture’s obsession with the fetishization of fascism, the phrase “shiny boots of leather” stolen from the Velvet Underground tune Venus in Furs.
Who stole it from Bob Dylan. Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather
Brava!
I wouldn’t mind if he stops current gain of function research at several US universities.
O put a moratorium on them, which was quietly ignored by funders. T lifted the moratorium in his first admin. He should reinstate it. imo.
From October 2024, four and a half months ago.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/gain-function-research-vital-us-innovation
And about that earlier ignored gain of function ban, read it and weep. UNC Chapel Hill has some history. From March 2016, during the ban on gain of function.
SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113
I’d be happy to see this nonsense shut down.
I read : Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game Newsweek.
What struck me: has nothing change in 50 years? I recall thinking how US had these advantages as a new 2nd Lt in 1974….. I was partly correct. 1991 came faster than we hoped.
What has changed: only S Korea makes a noticeable quantity of artillery ammunition. The rest are all financialized (Japan maybe less financialized) importing things they no longer make.
A contrary view from Ellen Brown.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/09/ellen-brown-quantitative-easing-with-chinese-characteristics-how-to-fund-an-economic-miracle/
As with Russia will our ruling internationalists be conquered by old fashioned patriotism?
Good article. Shows what could have been done with QE during the GFC as opposed to bailing out corrupt banks and propping up a housing market that is now unaffordable for average Americans.
But all these “Cold War” with China articles are pure hokum at this point. It is either an indication of a completely delusional DC that has no idea how bad things have gotten or a distraction doled out to the peasants so that the looting from the top down can continue.
The proposed solutions like tariffs were appropriate 30 years ago when the trade imbalance was a thing. And imposing those tariffs on America’s two closest trade partners in violation of trade treaties America recently negotiated has a real stench of desperation.
*Sigh*
We don’t allow links to Ellen Brown because she does not remotely understand banking or monetary operations.
QE did not print money. It was an asset swap. It was designed to lower long Treasury bond rates and mortgage rates to goose housing prices and reduce the number of mortgages that were underwater.
The bank bailouts were direct: Treasury TARP, various Fed other programs.
QE also inefficiently provided stimulus by allowing many mortgage borrowers to refi at lower rates, increasing their discretionary income. The reason that was an inefficient stimulus is the banks take out a ton of fees on refis.
Bummer that – pardon me – thanks for the correction!
How’s this:
One wonders what could have been done during the GFC by smarter investing in our country as opposed to bailing out corrupt banks and propping up a housing market that is now unaffordable for average Americans.
That would have required legislation like the kind we had before Newt gutted the congressional IQ.
Not to neglect your question, from all I can find, Russian oligarchs were not overcome with patriotism. They were brought back under control by a strong government lead by Putin:
Rich and powerless: How Putin controls Russia’s wealthy oligarchs
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/rich-and-powerless-how-putin-controls-russia-s-wealthy-oligarchs-20231207-p5epp9.html
American oligarchs are either in government (insider trading a la Pelosi), or have bought it (SCOTUS “free speech” quarter billion bucks a la Musk) as the “owners row” at the swearing in ceremony made clear:
Billionaires, tech titans, presidents: A guide to who stood where at Trump’s inauguration
https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-who-stood-where-a689828e986838c1735aeef03f3b32b3
Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars to elect Trump, including funding a mysterious super PAC, new filings show
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-campaign-finance-filings/index.html
It was telling that for a while, there were all those articles bouncing around about how if TikTok was to be sold, China would sell it to Elon:
Why China may be OK with TikTok selling to Elon Musk
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/tech/china-tiktok-sale-elon-musk-analysis/index.html
The article goes at length about how Elon is viewed as a “friend of China” (which may be true given the size of his investments at risk in China), but just neglects to point out that when you’ve found your “wrecking crew”, equipping him with the largest possible wrecking ball is a very smart thing to do.
Specifically, IIRC, Putin successfully prosecuted and jailed one for not paying his taxes over a very extended period, which seemed to be the norm among the oligarchs. I believe (and readers can correct me or fill in details) he told the rest the deal was they could pay a big chunk of what they owed and they would be given an amnesty, but they needed to stay out of politics and political influence. Khodorkovsky defied him. A long story followed but Khodorkovsky lost.
I remember something similar, including a video from several years ago with Putin sitting down with a bunch of the Russian oligarchs. I looked for it just now, but wasn’t able to put my finger on it. My recollection was that he gave a toned down version of the speech DeNiro gave after he caught the card counters in Casiino – he told them if they liked their money they’d acquired in the 90s, they’d stay out of politics.
The other guy who defied him was Bill Browder, whose Hermitage fund made a mint off Russia during the 90s. Russia wanted some taxes out of him, and he responded by claiming Putin was the villain looting Russia. This is wahat led to the Magnitsky act. If you follow all those claims over the years about Putin being the richest man in the world and whatnot, they pretty much trace back to Bill Browder. Most USians don’t realize these claims about Putin’s nefariousness lead back to a megarich Westerner who looted Russia.
I was also struck by “One American ace is geography. While some argue that geography no longer matters in a borderless internet world, it remains important that the U.S. is surrounded by two large oceans and two friendly neighbors, while China has border disputes with half of its 14 neighbors, including India, which has now surpassed China in population.
Given Pres. Trump’s actions on tariffs the ” two friendly neighbors” may not be all that friendly anymore plus the steel and aluminum tariffs probably have slightly annoyed a number of NATO members besides the already angry Denmark and Canada.
Also, this ….
One American ace is geography…while some argue that geography no longer matters in a borderless internet world, it remains important that the U.S. is surrounded by two large oceans …
That some USians can still imagine these things give them any impunity or advantage in a world of hypersonic ICBMs, rapidly advancing bioweaponeering capability, and plain old potential 9-11s, is just one more indicator of how ignorant, arrogant, and frankly stupid some USians are.
Well, they will learn.
Ref: USAID … Hannah Arendt, described how in a totalitarian society front organizations are used to capture civil society IMO.
Look at what they always say is the solution is to “containing China”: More “AI”.
“Israel’s renaming of West Bank is step toward annexation: Palestinian ministry”
So will it be after the mid-terms when Trump announces that after the latest round of Israeli bombings in the West Bank, that the Palestinians should be evacuated out of the country while new, beautiful buildings will be built there for world people? And that the US will be taking over the West Bank while this goes on? And those Palestinians? They will probably be shoved into the middle of a desert in some poverty-stricken country where they will be given some crappy old tents so that they will fry in the summertime and freeze in the wintertime. And Trump? Unless you can afford a Rolex, he will never listen to you.
And those Palestinians? They will probably be shoved into the middle of a desert in some poverty-stricken country where they will be given some crappy old tents so that they will fry in the summertime and freeze in the wintertime.
This reminds me of a dire historical precedent, when a couple million people were violently expelled from their homes, forced to leave their homeland, and death-marched for hundreds of kilometers to be unceremoniously dumped in the Syrian desert — where most of them died: the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians.
“Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?” (Who nowadays still talks about the annihilation of the Armenians?) A.Hitler, 1939.
Never again is more like forever again.
I’ve been trying to give Trump the benefit of the doubt with regard to his plan in Gaza, but I saw a report this morning that he told Bret Baier that they wouldn’t be allowed to come back to Gaza. If this is a pressure tactic to get the other players to actually fix the problem, so that the Palestinians can come back to live there, then that would be good, but I’m worried it isn’t, particularly since Douglas MacGregor reports they have delivered MOABs to Israel… What on earth do they need those for?
“Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training”
82TB of books? I thought that would be ALL of them but I asked DeepSeek what they thought. DeepSeek says there are 130 million books. They say an average file size of 5MB for 650TB of total data. I think that’s 10x too high due to the inclusion of .PDF files and that if only simple text files were copied, then Meta would have them all. Hopefully after noting which are fiction vs nonfiction.
That is an interesting point that. Are fiction books useful as a training set or are they excluded. If they concentrate on just non-fiction, how do those AIs cope when for a historical event, they have several points of view which may be contradictory? Do they concentrate on English language books – which would reflect western belief systems – and when they are digitized, just run answers through a translator for foreign languages? The whole exercise really is a black box when you think about it.
Same way the distinguish between useful posts on Reddit and idiocy, jokes, and trolling.
Being a sporadic user of Anna’s Books, I can’t recall seeing versions of books in*.txt format. Mostly are in pdf, epub, mobi…
I think you’re making the assumption that there are digitized versions of all 130 million published books, which may be incorrect especially if published pre-internet.
Having said that, I seem to recall one of the Google founders figured out a way to quickly scan entire books and started borrowing them by the truckload from the local library system. Previews/excerpts were made available online. But don’t know if a collection of entire editions is readily torrentable and is part of Meta’s 82TB.
Should add that I don’t think Google digitized all published books but I bet they gave it a good go.
Early book piracy was driven by publishers’ refusal to digitize older books with the exception of bestsellers remainders of which were being used as bricks to hold up shelves in used bookstores. This is in keeping with the publishing, recording and filmmaking industries’ love of selling the same product over and over and over again.
I have several bibliographies in my collection from authors who died long before computers. Many early digital books are in HTML or .txt format which, like early Word documents, use a fraction of the space .mobi and .epub files take up. .PDFs aren’t books so much as pictures of books and (imo) should only be used for magazines and illustrated books.
I suspect that only Meta really has a handle on just what Meta scraped or how useable it is. Makes no difference to me what their database is, I’m more concerned with how they use it specifically how they verify their data. Their logic model I can judge for myself but before I can trust, they must show me how they verify.
It’s not just Meta doing this.
What I particularly despise is the idea that it’s fair use, because they claim that AI is “reading” just like a human, when it actually learning to reproduce the text… and it’s destroying the means for authors to sustain their ability to produce new books.
When compression became a thing, a lot of hackers wondered whether compressing a song or movie would remove the copyright protection because the data was different. Oh, no, they were told — the law says bits have a “color” and the color has to do with the provenance of the data, not the expression of the data. So no, people couldn’t just copy Disney’s latest (or 70 year old) movie into DIVX. But this argument about provenance somehow doesn’t apply to OpenAI or Meta. Why not? It seems that the law is becoming “whatever suits the powerful’s short term interests.”
Always the contrarian on digital rights, I’m thinking you sound like the guy who wanted to make all the replicators on Star Trek coin operated.
I would like authors to be paid… do you not expect to be paid for your work?
How do you expect people to spend the time to understand topics deeply and explain them to others, if you are fine with taking that which is not offered?
We are not on a path towards “StarTrek”. Inequality is growing not falling.
Universal access to digital content can give us a Star Trek future.
We simply need to find new ways of paying artists, writers, musicians and other creators because Capitalism insists overpaying some while not paying the rest.
Remembering Aaron Swartz. Pace. From January 2013.
Digital Activist’s Suicide Casts Spotlight on Growth of Open-Access Movement
Aaron Swartz was threatened with criminal trial for downloading millions of academic articles. Although he may have employed questionable methods, the data-access principles he fought for are becoming widely embraced.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/digital-activists-suicide-casts-spotlight-on-growth-of-open-access-movement/
It’s OK if you’re an AI, I guess. / :-\
Highly speculative. No previous examples of claim exist.
Please do so before depriving authors of their meager earnings.
Copyright was established as a mechanism to achieve this — the first printing shops were ripping authors off. Simply destroying it and not replacing it with something equal or better will lead to a new dark age.
I didn’t make authors earnings meager, capitalism did. Removing copyright destroys nothing, it just lets bookmobiles operate without an accountant walking in front of them waving the copyright lantern.
How are we harmed by giving everyone access to all the books, music and art in the world?
Quick reminder: digital file sharing is not a criminal act. You can be sued by creators (aka publishers) for damages but you cannot be jailed. Corrupt as our Congress is, even they refused to criminalize copying.
This isn’t about entertainment, this is about the future of knowledge. I dream of schoolkids having age-restricted but otherwise full access to the Library of Congress. That’s how you get a Star Trek future. Capitalism only leads to Ferenghi-ism.
Authors are harmed. Why buy it if you don’t have to?
You never told me how you would ensure authors and their families get to eat. Unless that is solved, books will be a status symbol for the already wealthy, and few will have any value.
Copyright remained in effect when writing went from typewriter to to Xerox machine, from vinal records to CDs, etc. The notion that copyright is attached to the technology and not to the creative effort is a legal sleight of hand, imo. / ;)
Although my AI for my medical dictation is a completely different company than Meta, I have often wondered if it too is not somehow infused with fiction and literature.
We have now had 5 issues in the past 2 months in which things literally NEVER came up in the visit, but are in the note, and this is done so in a very “Frank Capra movie” way.
For example – after never ever talking to a patient about where they will pick up their prescriptions – a sentence stating the following was in the note —- “The patient will pick up their prescription at Shepherd Drug in Barnesville”
This is not the only example. Again hallucinating. And again – after reading through the outputs of these things , one does get the idea that it is copying something from literature or movies or magazines.
FWIW – there is no Shepherd Drug nor is there a Barnseville anywhere even remotely close to us. Nor are these names even remotely phonetically approaching anything around here that could have come up – as in the recording was muffled or something. This is not even close.
I am beginning to suspect the AI is drawing from other sources. 82 Tb is a lot of novels or movies to draw from. The sad thing is that at times it is also just making up medical stuff as well.
I get more concerned by the hour.
It’s fairly routine for me now to ask ChatGPT for book recommendations on some given very narrowly focused topic or question, often theological, and, on checking, to learn a good percentage (I want to say 20%) of the titles and authors don’t even exist. The only thing is, the author names and titles are so unique, so obscure, it’s easy to establish they never existed in any context, fiction or non.
One possibility is students or grads may have inserted fraudulent citations in their theses, dissertations, research papers, etc., and ChatGPT went and gobbled it up.
Side note, it would be interesting to use ChatGPT to trace back to those fraudulent citations.
Is AI turning into a digital equivalent of the middle ages beastiary books which described animals that never were as having real existence? Examples:
the griffin
https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/BYVANCKB_mimi_72a23_046r_afb.jpg
the manticore
https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Manticore-from-the-Salisbury-Bestiary.jpg
and of course the unicorn
https://i0.wp.com/www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/RochesterBestiaryFolio021rMonoceros_s1.jpg?resize=731%2C576
Hallucinations of the middle ages. / ;)
Consider digital audio: one samples an analog continuous sound wave at regular sampling points. The frequency of samples limits the highest sound frequency you can reproduce (the Nyquist limit).
Now imagine a surface in 3D space. Machine learning uses its training materials as points to determine where that surface is. It then uses that surface to make its predictions as to what to output. Obviously, if an area is well described by many points, the surface it finds will closely match reality, but often it isn’t, and the surface does not match reality. In those areas the output will seem strange, or irrelevant. Although the algorithm isn’t doing anything different, people call the output from those areas “hallucinations” or “confabulations”, whereas when the algorithm dealing with an area where the surface matches reality, they think the tool is working well.
Will more data solve the problem? Well the problem is that we aren’t dealing with 3D, but extremely high dimensionality, and the surface is an extremely high dimensional manifold. Therefore the probability the data in the real world just so happens to be sufficiently dense to properly define the manifold falls to zero. Hence we will need a different approach to remove all “confabulations”.
In a sense flora’s Medieval bestiary is similar: too little knowledge leading to narwhal’s tusks being assigned to unicorns, dinosaur bones being assigned to dragons, etc.
“LA’s rich and famous made ‘odd request’ of private armies as wildfires fueled fear, boss says”
TRANSLATION – The wealthy, massive deniers of climate change & producers of it, want private fire & security to protect their property from what they deny & shoot the poor who suffer most from it.
It’s a sort of pure microcosm of Capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw, isn’t it?
Well, the boys in red, at least on the offensive side of the ball, really stunk up the place yesterday. Congrats to the Eagles, who turned out to be as good as the hype this time. They played like they realized that the only way to beat the Chiefs was to crush them.
Mahomes drops to 17-4 in playoffs, with two of those losses being in overtime and two being real stinkers. Chiefs fans still have a lot to celebrate about these last seven years, but it feels like there’s a rebuild coming, at least on the offensive side of the ball.
If Mahomes final touchdown throw late in the 4th quarter had won the game instead of it being the vehicle that allowed the score to look less lopsided, it would have been heralded as the most important touchdown pass ever in Superbowl history, twas a thing of beauty in a downright ugly game, punctuated by some of the lamest TV commercials for a SB that i’ve ever seen, whatever became of funny?
Props to the Eagles-they destroyed KC.
It wasn’t all that long ago (well maybe 3 or 4 decades ago) that a lifelong Philadelphia fan left instructions for his funeral that the city’s entire pro football team be his pall bearers so that he could be let down by the Eagles one last time.
It was against the Eagles 2nd string D, so there would likely have been a different outcome if it had meant anything.
For immediate and easy reference, it can always be much worse and dare I suggest a most dire appearing franchise that reportedly is worth a few billions no matter what…
My nearby team located in Charlotte, “your Carolina Panthers”…the only good news is this newest of new head coaches survived a full season, and they’ve money to spend or waste…by comparison, for KC the Hunt family are league royalty in their ownership and navigation of free agency and drafting young talent…I have read a good historical detail about the founding of that fledgling AFL ( that team, the league as well ) pre-merger and the wilder west days of ownership on a proverbial shoe string and likely a prayer..
In the current year, Gunz control is a great example of Chesterton’s fence: democrats whining about fascism while elevating to a leadership position someone who wants to disarm them.
This is Making Shit Up.
What the Democrats wanted to do did not even approach “disarming”. See Australia for what that looks like.
The most aggressive thing the Democrats put forward as a policy idea, and IIRC this never got even as far as a proposed bill in recent years, was gun registration requirements.
I think the reference is to newly elected DNC Vice Chair David Hogg’s statements. Even the Due Dissidence guys say this will be a turn off for a lot of people the Dems claim to want votes from.
There’s never been a serious effort in this country to ban handguns by blue team, handguns being the vast majority of the gun violence problem. In classic Biden fashion he tried to ban sales to 18-20 year olds only and even that failed in the courts, smh.
Re: one random dude stopping members of congress from entering a building.
If you want to find reason for optimism, here…
Trump’s abject lawlessness and naked use of raw power may very well speed up the exit of today’s utterly useless democrats. Voters are going to run out of patience with the feigned helplessness and complaining that dems have gotten so comfortable with that they’ve forgotten how to do congressional stuff. The early, confused chants at random protests to, “do something” are an early sign of that.
There’s even recent precedent in Mexico. Trump so thoroughly humiliated Pena Nieto (remember that guy?) as a useless, corrupt, do-nothing hack that the PRI got completely smoked at the next election. It became a matter of Mexican pride. AMLO got elected with a strong majority and made a point of…well…doing stuff, and being seen to be doing stuff. Voters liked it much better.
‘one random dude stopping members of congress from entering a building.’
Time to call out the Senate Parliamentarian. That’ll show them.
Make sure to dress to the nine’s!
“…. Doctor says I’m impotent, and if you is impotent, you gotsta look impotent! “”
“We may have to consider shutting down the govt! , maybe…………”
“Are China’s rural poor losing faith in education’s power to transform lives?”
Rural incomes in China have for years been increasing faster than urban incomes, and the basis of rural income increases is very largely increasing technology application to agriculture and land management. Technology application in agriculture is attractive enough to have a flow of students from developing countries studying Chinese methodology.
Education is obviously improving lives in rural China and rural families are especially grateful for the high quality-free or -minimal cost education offered.
Thank you for steadfastly reminding us that Western propaganda about China is lies, lies, lies. Some of us realize it and are disgusted with the cretins running the show.
Its the same with the “China failing growth” narrative. China’s population is to all intents stable, while its GDP is growing at 5% a year; so that’s a 5% increase in GDP per capita per year. At its current stage of development and the size of the economy, its natural that China’s GDP growth would slow down.
The Chinese state has very successfully redirected investment from housing to productive industry, increasing the pace of economic upgrading, without causing a financial crash. Western governments would love to have China’s “problems”
No, its GDP is NOT growing at 5% a year. I can tell you here from the sex capital of Southeast Asia that Chinese tourism is way down v. last year, and that was before the actor kidnapping scandal made thing even worse.
The reported China GDP figures have been widely recognized as unreliable forever. That is why analysts looks for proxies like electricity use…and then China started hiding that.
Michael Pettis has debunked that: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2189245/chinas-gdp-growth-could-be-half-reported-number-says-us
One specific and large source of difference from how everyone else calculates GDP is bad debt losses are debited from GDP totals. China does not do that.
So the China Electric Council is just lying then about 7% annual electricity usage growth and the huge expansion in Chinese renewables, while coal electricity generation remains stable, is just feeding nothing? Pettis pushes the “China over-production and under-consumption” narrative that has been used for years, while Chinese consumption actually keeps increasing as real incomes rise.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-power-demand-growing-faster-than-expected-2024-industry-association-says-2024-10-29/#:~:text=The%20China%20Electricity%20Council%20now,kWh%20in%20its%20previous%20report.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-surge-of-clean-energy-in-2024-halts-chinas-co2-rise/#:~:text=Even%20larger%20clean%20energy%20additions%20likely%20in%202025&text=Yet%20solar%20and%20wind%20capacity,wind%20connected%20to%20the%20grid.
I can tell you from direct and indirect reports I am here (where I am has lots of Chinese backing for projects plus an intermarried mafia) that China is not in very good shape right now. These reports are consistent. Yes, anecdata but the sources they tie back to are pretty varied (like princeling children, tour operators, Chinese entrepreneurs and entertainers).
From the Financial Times November 2024. Note it specifically questions consumption data:
https://www.ft.com/content/de9af759-2b94-4b7e-98e4-42698900efeb
As for the figures you cited, any GDP estimates or proxies need to cut to reflect debt writedowns.
https://english.news.cn/20250209/c8290bb24eb44e7f916de075b5e2d492/c.html
February 9, 2025
Chinese scientists develop gene-editing method to reduce corn plant height
BEIJING — Chinese scientists have developed a gene-editing technique to reduce corn plant height, enabling the creation of compact, high-density varieties resistant to lodging, according to a study * published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Corn, the world’s most-produced cereal crop, is crucial to global food security. While increasing planting density is a key strategy for boosting yields, progress in developing shorter, sturdier plants has been limited by a lack of genetic resources.
The research was conducted by the Biotechnology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) in collaboration with Anhui Agricultural University and South China Agricultural University. It focused on modifying the Br2 gene through targeted gene editing. Researchers designed a knockout vector for the Br2 gene and identified seven transgenic lines with distinct mutations in corn inbred varieties.
Hybridization experiments showed that all 28 hybrid offspring derived from crosses with elite inbred lines produced dwarf progeny. To accelerate breeding, the team developed a haploid inducer-mediated genome editing system, enabling the conversion of edited haploid plants into stable double-haploid lines within two generations. Three elite inbred lines treated with the system exhibited significant reductions in plant height.
“This method allows rapid and precise modification of plant height across different genetic backgrounds,” said Wang Baobao, corresponding author of the study and a researcher at the CAAS. “It provides critical technical support for breeding corn varieties optimized for dense planting and enhanced lodging resistance.”
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pbi.14571?af=R
Thank you.
Lodging in corn is when the corn stalk breaks below the ear, making it difficult to harvest
CA, I want to apologize for my shitty tone a couple days back. Sorry.
Lodging in corn…a new frontier for airbnb. /s
lol. mices or meeces air b’n’b. too funny.
Germany will give Ukraine enough rope to hang itself, but not an inch more. And by give, I mean sell.
Germany hasn’t got that much more to offer the Ukraine. Their budget is in tatters, tatters I tell you because of all they money that they have shipped to the Ukraine. The only real way that they could send more is to take money from things like pensions, healthcare, infrastructure, schools, etc. and even Scholz refuses to go there.
Guess who will be hit the hardest by Trump’s tariff on aluminum an steel? Correct, Canada and Mexico…
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/how-the-eurdollar-system-works-lebanons
US is choosing to put its electricity in data centers for AI and Trump whines that Canada gets subsidized because US has to buy stuff from Canadians, instead of getting things for free. He is the developer who is famous for not paying his contractors…
Being burned with his first presidency in the emisplaced expectations, now I am telling myself that there is still sooo much to hit rock bottom. The link with Mark Anderssen and Horowitz and technofeudalism open the vistas of hell waiting for the US and then the world. Chuck Palahniuk’s descriptions of Hell in his books Damned and Doomed give a close flavour. And we are not yet all in Las Vegas, baby…
What AIppens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.
Oz is getting hit by those sanctions as well. Could it be that Trump is doing mafia tactics? I mean putting on all these tariffs to different countries around the world, including close allies, and then soon asking them what they will give him to take those sanctions away. Suddenly, countries like China are looking more and more a better trade partner.
Just to be on the safe side, I invested in aluminum futures yesterday, 6 short term contracts… each containing 12 ounces of barley soda.
You know who has lots of aluminum?
Russia.
Looks like Trump blew his own balls off, again. (Or maybe, Europe’s balls.)
Notice that this is a reboot of the extra tariffs on steel and aluminium levied under… the first Trump presidency, in 2018.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Spectrum magazine has a cover article on electrical transformer shortages. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transformer-shortage
Causes are varied, from both demand, aging infrastruture, and damage from storms and war/sabotage. It’s not only impacting renewable energy projects, but new home construction, as permits were denied as a utility couldn’t get enough step-down transformers.
As for expanding capacity:
Wowsers, thanks!
>> The capacity of all the energy projects waiting to connect to the U.S. grid amounts to 2,600 GW—more than double the nation’s entire generation capacity currently. An average estimate of U.S. EV adoption suggests the country will have 125 million EVs by 2040. The electricity demands of U.S. data centers may double by the end of this decade because of the boom in artificial intelligence. The National Renewable Energy Lab found that U.S. transformer capacity will need to increase by as much as 260 percent by 2050 to handle all the extra load.
This reads like an AI hallucination. Math isn’t mathing. And that’s based on competition, not even including hostile intent and neolib forced scarcities.
Yes… Bret Weinstein was warning about this last year before May due to the then upcoming solar maximum — a Carrington event would have done a lot of damage. He said we’re still building transformers in a way that ensures they cannot survive such an event because it’s (slightly) cheaper.
Farewell Tiny Tax Assistant, Go in peace little one, the rest of us will be along shortly.
Kuli
For JL, thank you for sharing the magnificent Kuli with us, and for providing the best cat life.
Hope he let’s us know how that turns out. For a glass-half full perspective, should soon be even easier for RFK Jr kooks and cronies like the Means siblings to sell Black Salve and Pennyroyal and colorful powders full of lead for wellness and detoxifying and curing cancer.
I hate to make extreme statements, but Vance appears to really hate the principle of checks and balances, while the online MAGA echo-chamber appears to have never even heard of it. It’s all quite disconcerting and lends credence to views that the Constitution itself is under attack. I didn’t think I would ever come to that view, certainly not in my lifetime.
I agree, and the fact is that concentration of power in one branch was one of the big fears of the founders.
The attack on the CFPB was kind of the last straw for me. They’re funded from the Fed so there is literally no savings from attacking them.
In the spirit of Yves post about closing comments, on new posts, I am going to take a holiday from commenting myself and focus on doing what I can to raise awareness and raise hell with any of my Congress cretins, and more likely local officials around here who might get their ear.
Hah, just try and explain to the average MAGA the intentions of the Founding Fathers and how the Federalist Papers help us understand them. That’s when you are told to take your Liberal Arts edumacation and shove it where the sun don’t shine :)
The sad thing is that, being an immigrant, I’ve twice sworn to defend the Constitution: when I was naturalized and when I joined the military, and I take these oaths with all due solemnity. Many of these MAGA folks have never taken such an oath, yet people like me are “the enemy.” Dunno how much more absurd it can possibly get.
A few years back (don’t ask me to count ‘em) I adopted as a motto the words of the immortal Hunter S. Thompson – “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. “ I do note that ‘weird’ and ‘absurd’ aren’t quite synonymous but they do share common ground.
The Presidency has always been the most powerful branch of government. I didn’t cut short my retirement to work the 2016 election because I thought President Bernie was going to start foreign wars or loot the Treasury or cave in to Congress.
Donald Trump is the first non-eunuch to occupy the Oval Office since Reagan.
At the same time, Congress has always been the most powerful branch of government thanks to very powerful Speakers and Senate Majority leaders. Their strength comes from being largely invisible to the public which makes them less accountable.
The Courts have the ultimate final say but when gamed by too many political cronies both the other branches have shown a willingness to simply ignore the courts which rely on the Executive branch to enforce their will.
In truth there is no most powerful branch of government. Each is handicapped by our original oddsmakers but the voters hold all the wild cards and can blow everything up every two years assuming hacks on the bench don’t become accessories to suppressing the vote.
Back in ye olde days of Heavy Manufacturing, my union local dumped its leadership every three years due to inflation erasing our wage and benefit gains. I think the USA has been going through the same process but since all their candidates come from the same duopoly, there’s little appreciable difference from one administration to the next.
Trump is what happens when you get a protest vote. Unlike the Ned Lamonts and Howard Deans, Trump used judo to flip the primaries on his half of the duopoly before taking his campaign all the way into the endzone in each of three straight elections. [I’m confident that hindsight and FOIA will conclude that 2020 was gamed by the refs.]
The courts will rein Trump in under the assumption he will listen to them. I don’t care how much Trump breaks, it can be fixed later. The important thing now is to break the things that are breaking we the people.
And what if some of those things stay broken and enable the Age of MuskThiel? We should not be so cavalier about breaking things, for that’s actually Silicone Valley’s motto and they don’t give a rat’s hind end about breaking them on behalf of “We the Prople.”
On your last paragraph, you have lost your mind.
It takes decades to build institutions that function even adequately. Nothing Musk destroys will be rebuilt in your lifetime, even assuming that is of interest, as opposed to reducing more people to penury to make them more compliant.
I simply do not believe that any of those institutions are still working. I have zero faith in our courts, no faith in the Congress and the Executive branch is a Portrait of Dorian Gray style snapshot of how ugly things have gotten.
I have faith in the American people. Trump is not powerful enough to break our country, doesn’t really know how to fix anything but when the (water/electricity/deliveries) stop, solutions will be quickly found.
Whatever Trump breaks can and will be fixed. Maybe not by Trump but this isn’t about Trump. This is about fixing a broken country and right now transparency is important. We’re being shown what is broken and Trump is talking about how he will fix things. How is this worse than Biden insisting nothing’s broken and never talking about what he’s really up to?
If things seem scary to some right now, it’s only because they didn’t realize how bad things were. Did anyone here really understand how completely “deep state” funded the wokesters and domesticated news outlets? I knew it was happening but underestimated the problem by several magnitudes of corruption.
At some point you have to clean the sausage making machine and that includes the grease trap. This won’t be pretty but it is necessary. Fwiw, the people are not getting the D party back until the current many-humped monster is slain. The only road back for Democrats is to fire the entire leadership and rebuild from scratch. No incumbents or holdevers allowed, restraining orders will be needed. Democrats are the stye in everyone’s eye that makes it hard to see what Trump is/is not doing.
Sorry for the rants but my whole life has been about effecting political change. Now that it’s here I’m somewhat surprised by the reluctance of many to embrace the pig. Change is never pretty and I’m not trying to put lipstick on anything. And yes, I do wash my hands after doing politics.
I understand where you are coming from, and I even agree with you to an extent, but it took roughly a century to create what the oligarchs have spent over fifty years in destroying. I do not look forward at the great amount of suffering and ruined lives.
After the destruction and the likely following civil unrest ends, which I guess will be around 2040-2050, it will take another century to rebuild the system to where it was in 1972; my teenage nieces will likely be great-great-grandparents before this cycle concludes. So, around 2150, if the country is not destroyed.
The problem is that Trump/Musk are acting indiscriminately. USAID deserves to go feet first into the wood chipper, but the CFPB does not. And as far as any agency good/bad, there is supposed to be a constitutional process to take it to the wood chipper.
Once the lines are crossed there is no going back. Even if you like what Trump’s doing, I’m sure that there will be a future Democrat President who will follow Trump’s lead and go even further, and you will not like that one bit.
One good thing that came out of Trump is that the presently illegal Romanian President is stepping down on Feb 12 I think, and that there will be a huge investigation coming from the US (a lot of stolen funds and it doesn’t pertain necessarily to Romania, but EU commission by and large). It will look into the illegal stopping of election, which the Venice Convention already found absolutely inapropriate.
I seem to recall that FDR faced similar criticism.
As Matt Bruenig has commented, the constitution talks about roles but procedurally, impeachment is the only remedy.
These comparisons to FDR are totally misleading. He was trying to launch public works programs w/o Congressional approval, not tearing down existing institutions and violating laws.
There’s that Supreme Court that FDR wanted to bring down. I have somewhat mixed feelings about FDR’s legacy–not so much what he did, but how he went about doing it, although with the caveat that, if he really wanted to seize power, he probably could have done a lot worse.
Are you concerned about Congress willingly ceding the Constitution’s war making power to the executive–given that you fought in one? And how many in Congress have stood up and objected to American participation in the slaughter in Gaza? Doubtless this is why Trump acts so confident he get away with his genocide on the Med.
We have an imperial president because we have an empire, which is also something the long ago founders objected to however hypocritically they may have been when it came to the natives.
Musk should not be rummaging around but it’s merely a reflection of a society that is full of wealthy people who are ok with this. There are very few genuine populists left in our politics or ruling class on either side. There are some or even many who are open to giving the poor charity but giving them power is not on the agenda.
And for people like Musk and Trump, who are already quite rich, it’s all about power. Add Pelosi, the Obamas, the Clintons and lots of others to that list.
Congress is responsible, yes. But it won’t do anything unless under popular pressure. The only such I see comes from the MAGA, which is why I view these know-nothings, well meaning though many of them are, as skillfully manipulated enablers of this attack on the government and the Constitution. So the question is how to stop that before it’s too late? Frankly, I can’t see a way unless Trump and Musk seriously overreach and turn the populist MAGAs against themselves.
And yeah, for this sad state of affairs we have to thank the establishment Dems for killing the Sanders movement, as well as Sanders himself for lacking the spine to blow up the Dem party.
Let me just add that I think Congress does have a lot of culpability in our sad state of affairs. Abdicating responsibility for the power to make war to the executive branch led to the latter overstepping the Constitution – nature abhors a vacuum.
There used to be some Congress members who were thoughtful enough to push back without having to see protests in their district, but they’re pretty much all long gone (Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich.) We’re left with the AOCs and M T-Gs. Most likely the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision spelled the end – we have the best Congress money can buy. And war sells, at least to the Dow Jones crew.
I have mixed feelings on this. Because the Status Quo is also thoroughly corrupted and is maintained by those who profit from it at the expense of the societal health and well being, if you will. I don’t think I’ll go so far as Mark G. in thinking that whatever happens, it’s more important to tear things down and hope that what gets put back together is decent enough, but there is something to that. What we’d like to see is a fairly thoroughgoing reform of the Status Quo without tearing the foundations apart and that seems a difficult middle ground. We are forced into either keeping the status quo with all its warts and ailments…b/c TINA, or accept the unacceptable as the alternative because the SQ sucks so badly.
Fyi – the American Medical Association youtube page is publishing updates on avian flu, TB, etc. Jerome Adams, former surgeon general, noted this on his X account.
A good take on DOGE:
Elon Tweet Shows How DOGE MANIPULATES Class Consciousness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXZ_g3ka5k
But embedded within it’s take on DOGE is why asset prices (like houses) always have to go up.
It would be very useful if people could mention the second best site with minimal echo chamber comments for those of us who have leaned upon Naked Capitalism to fill this role for a long time and don’t have any tolerance for facebook, twitter, reddit. IM Doc’s covid comments were the greatest and the comment section here was the only place to find them.
Is there a next best?
: (
IMO there has never been anything remotely approaching this place in terms of the level of discourse. It’s a shame that Yves patience has run out, but I don’t blame her.
Way back in the day, Calculated Risk had a great commentariat, but the owner long ago shut down comments there.
It takes a LOT of work to moderate and cultivate a good comment section. Zero tolerance for sock puppets, those who post personal attacks, and other misbehavior is a must. In the past, commenting holidays have solved the problem; not sure if we’ll get a reprieve.
Yup. It would be a shame if we can’t have nice things because of a few people, but it’s better for a good thing to end on its own terms rather than be sullied on others’.
Ditto. I’m sad, but I don’t blame her. Those shoulders have carried a lot of weight.
I found Naked Cap through Calculated Risk in 2006 and I remember the comment section over at CR. I switched to reading NC before CR cut off the comments. I have loved this place and the comments since the beginning when you could read some really expert opinions about a lot of things.
Since the rise of trump everything has degraded just like the comment section here. I am surprised Yves kept it open as long as she did but the comments have been degraded for about 2 years by my reckoning.
I will miss this place.
I am saddened by the news of closed comments as well. I have relied on comments to inform and learn important information. One can’t hold on to anything in life. To do so is to suffer. Here’s to change…
I am saddened that discourse degraded so much that it had to happen. I am sad that Yves and other NC staff had to put up with so much work, stress and toxicity to keep comments going. I am grateful that they did. I am grateful that I learned so much from many interesting and well-informed commenters. I am also grateful that by reading and sometimes participating in comments I felt less alone and paranoid and insane.
I’m wondering if there’s a concerted effort by bot wranglers or interested parties behind this.
At this point, I also wonder if U.S.A.I.D. money could be behind such an effort, if such an effort does exist. Not so much a correct-the-record effort as a wear’em-down-with-bs effort. / ;)
adding: AI has many potential uses. / ;)
Enough incoming flak to cause a comments shut off must mean NC is over the target, as they say.
Agree, as MaryLand said in their comments, it is like losing a friend. I often find the comments a nice expansion on the posts and links.
I have noticed an increase in new commenters, which is nice. However, aside from having the regular new, untrained commenters, I wonder if there are attack commentators whose job is to overwhelm troublesome sites, which NC is for many.
Real Clear Politics but you have to keep your eyes open. They’re fanatical about pairing their links without making a show of it but if you scan their morning and afternoon link aggregations you’ll always see each link followed by one with an opposing view.
My feel for NC’s aggregation has always been links to what they thought were good reads, important reads or informative if only for the opposing view. Real Clear is much more focused in this regard. I read them more actively in the 2000s. I believe they have always leaned right. They linked to my old blog once and I asked them not to link to me again because I thought they were using me to provide an extreme viewpoint from the left to make the paired conservative link look more reasonable. [I am not and never will be a journalist, anything coming out of my keyboard is meant to influence your views : ]
Flora turned me on to Citizen Free Press which has lots of links but a very pronounced MAGA ‘tude. They see themselves as the new Drudge Report but are actually I think a bit better than that.
In truth those are the only other aggregation sites I rely on these days. I’ve followed pretty much every aggregation blog ever (spotting the good link in a long list is my super power) going all the way back to Bartcop but NC, RC and CFP are the only aggregators left standing that I’m aware of. I’d love to be corrected by others with more links, tbh.
Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game – Newsweek
I really don’t know where to begin with the contradictions, especially in light of the last few weeks.
These days, I just notice how so many of the “gotta watch or contain China” articles mostly are exhortations for more AI and privatization.
Regarding the beautiful photo of Kuli kuli rest in peace. Beautiful girl. She looks a lot like my Katy. She found us and we fell in love. Thanks to you for including her today, always reminding that the cat distribution system is alive and well. Showed up in our back patio.
One of our best days ever. Delightful smart diminutive girl we love you!
Our hearts go out to you in your loss. May the system bring you joy.
I’m sorry the comments section is being discontinued, but I can understand the reasons why.
Maybe IM Doc, Aurelien and some of the other valued regulars can be invited to be regular contributors.
Good idea. I vote for Wukchumni, as well … his humor has helped keep me sane.
Agree with all those plus Amfortas. CA could also report on China.
There is a meme about this:
Meta illegally downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models.
In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.
I too am very sad to see comments eliminated. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to deal with the volume of it. I have wondered if some of it is from those who are deliberately trying to inject controversy in order to destroy it. So sad. I always learn something from our commenters. That has been valuable to me in addition to the excellent posts and important links. Also the humor provided by commenters has helped brighten a rather dismal set of current events. I don’t know of another site that does that with such good will. I will truly miss our community of often well informed contributors. Wishing everyone peace and love.
It’s like the death of a friend. That might sound pathetic, but I’ve been a reader here for about 15 years. A sad day, indeed.
Me thinks the NC Mod Squad are currently fighting a sudden rush of barbarians at the gate.
I hope when the barbarians have been beaten back the comments sections will resume. / ;)
It’s that evil hussy Taylor Swift corrupting Travis Kelce’s morals.
Taibbi and Kirn. no paywall.
America This Week – Livestream Tonight at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-livestream-tonight-cd5