The treasure trove of art worth billions ‘hidden’ in Tehran BBC (resilc)
#COVID-19/Pandemics
Since Covid arrived:
“Why are so many children having developmental problems?
Why are there more car accidents & plane crashes?
Why are people more aggressive & less empathetic?
Why is everyone sick all the time?
Why is there more violence in schools?”
Gee, I dunno… pic.twitter.com/BgxhldrSsW
— James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath (@JamesThrot) February 18, 2025
USDA accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them NBC
Climate/Environment
For some L.A. wildfire survivors, rebuilding won’t be an option NBC
After LA, fire crisis reaches Latin America — from Mexico to Argentina Mongabay
Global Warming Could Be Making It Less Windy in Europe Insurance Journal
Climate change opens the door to a vine disease that Europe avoided 150 years ago Your Weather
China?
Acer To Raise US Laptop Prices 10% After Tariffs Telegraph
Chinese warships sail within 150 nautical miles of Sydney Financial Times
Koreas
The Pointless Pursuit of North Korean ‘Denuclearization’ Daniel Larison
Africa
Villagers killed execution-style in Sudan, activists say BBC
South of the Border
Cuba Doubles Down Against USAID Orinoco Tribune (Robin K)
European Disunion
HAPPENING NOW IN BERLIN, GERMANY:
“I’ve never been in a place that has received so many threats, where the police has been checking on whether I could be arrested or not.”
“This is awful. And as a European, I will never forget this.”
—Francesca Albanese pic.twitter.com/VlJGdVMXcf
— sarah (@sahouraxo) February 18, 2025
NATO and the UN have higher trust than the government Aftonbladet via machine translation. Micael T: “Oh boy, the transition in Sweden will take some time.”
Germany elections: Far-right AfD surging as center-right loses protest votes, says pollster Anadolu Agency
Wolfgang Münchau on Germany in Decline Yascha Mounk
Israel v. The Resistance
Live: Hamas ready to release Israeli captives in one go for a permanent ceasefire Middle East Eye
One month into Israel’s West Bank offensive, violence and uncertainty are the new normal Mondoweiss (guurst)
🛑 Children + young people in East Jerusalem denied of their right to education in @UNRWA schools.
Today, Israeli Forces & personnel from the Jerusalem Municipality have forcefully entered the UNRWA Kalandia Training Centre and ordered its immediate evacuation.
At least 350…— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) February 18, 2025
Miami shooting and the insane hatred Zionists have for Arabs Alon Mizrahi
Egypt furious over Israeli report speculating attack on High Dam New Arab
New Not-So-Cold War
Jeremy Bowen: No sign of a quick peace dividend for Trump in Ukraine BBC. Wowsers.
Trump-Putin meeting not imminent, as first US-Russia talks on Ukraine finish in Riyadh Politico.
What We Talk About, When We Talk About Talks. Aurelien. Note the subhead: “The End may be further away than you think.”
Rubio Says US Won’t Lift Russia Sanctions Before Ukraine Deal Bloomberg (Micael T)
My guess is that this at a minimum means Russia will pursue war criminals, as earlier promised, including EU nationals:
🇷🇺🇪🇺🚨‼️ MUST WATCH: “Everyone must answer for their actions!”
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Europe can’t hide behind the US anymore and will have to answer for their “lawlessness”
-> This is a scary statement … what is happening behind the scenes? pic.twitter.com/307GcmxrVm
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) February 17, 2025
EU role in Ukrainian settlement talks ruled out — MFA TASS (guurst)
* * * ‘You should have never started it’: Trump suggests Ukraine to blame for war Aljazeera. Heads to explode over this remark.
Ukraine’s elections being prepared for October 26, Poroshenko claims, but opposes their conduct Interfax. This date has been widely picked up, but since Zelensky is trying to arrest Poroshenko, it is hard to see how his is in a position to make statements about the election timetable. He claims to have many sources, but his list has a “lady doth protest too much” quality to it. Not saving this is necessarily wrong, but not enough caveats to the re-reporting.
Donald Trump signals Ukraine should hold elections as part of Russia peace talks Financial Times. Lead story. Not consistent with date claimed above. If that were so (or at least if the US had heard), Trump would be the first to say it was great that Ukraine had accepted the need to hold elections but October is too late (with obligatory whinge about how too many were dying…)
Paris Summit Chaos, Macron Starmer Isolated; Riyadh Summit: Lavrov No Concessions, Zelensky Must Go Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. A nice shout out! One wonders if (listen to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard bit starting at around 1:13:00) the US really wants its mineral deal with Ukraine, and Russia going along with that (and how are Russian lands formerly in Ukraine to be treated?) in return for normalizing relations with Russia.
Foreign Minister: Putin wants to destroy Ukraine Aftonbladet via machine translation. Micael T: “A leader of the democratic Sweden rejects the idea of elections in Ukraine. This is hilarious but also scary that they really show who they are.”
Saudi Arabia: Riyadh mobilises emergency plan as heavy rains, hailstorms sweep the city News of Bahrain. A sign?
Imperial Collapse Watch
US B-52 Bombers Fly Over Nine Countries in the Middle East Antiwar.com (Kevin W). I am tempted to make a crude anatomical comment.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: NATO on the Brink of Collapse Over Ukraine War? Nima, Dialogue Works. A standout even by Wilkerson’s high standards.
Trump 2.0
Aluminum Tariffs to Raise Price of Beer Core77 (resilc)
Behind Trump Tariffs Is Capital’s Warfare Against the Working Class Truthout (Tom H)
Frank Schuler: From Tax Scam Promoter to GSA Adviser ProPublica (Robin K)
Russell Vought wants to burn the government down. Jacobin (Robin K)
DEI’s undoing: How Walmart, McDonald’s, and more are adapting to Trump Quartz
Republicans worry GOP-led states will suffer from Trump’s firings of federal workers Kansas Reflector (Robin K)
DOGE
Across the world, conservation projects reel after abrupt US funding cuts Mongabay
CNN submitted a FOIA request for records related to the security clearances of Musk & DOGE personnel granted access to classified/secure networks.
“Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team,” an OPM email address responded.https://t.co/8vCdQIPA0L
— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) February 18, 2025
Trump administration fires thousands for ‘performance’ without evidence, in messy rush Washington Post
Immigration
Former Staffers Say India’s Biggest IT Firm Was Gaming the US Visa System Bloomberg
What happens if Gov. Hochul removes NYC Mayor Adams from office? Fox5
Antitrust
Trump Enforcers Affirm Lina Khan’s Approach to Antitrust Matt Stoller
AI
Are you conscious? A conversation between Dawkins and ChatGPT Richard Dawkins. Anthony L: “The Selfish Gene Reveals The Dawkins Test.” Moi: The faux friendly “That’s such a great question” really set my teeth on edge.
Reddit Mods Are Fighting To Keep AI Slop Off Subreddits ars technica
Class Warfare
A 40-year behavioral study confirms your worst fears—kids who bully go on to make the most money Fortune (Dr. Kevin)
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Working link for “Egypt furious over Israeli report speculating attack on High Dam” article at-
https://www.newarab.com/news/egypt-furious-over-israeli-report-speculating-attack-high-dam
In all fairness to the Israelis, they are only talking about destroying a dam that could kill millions of people because Egypt does not have a nuclear power station that they could blow up instead.
Dear Rev,
You’ve been so missed in the past week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Why thank you, Emma. Anything to lighten these moody times.
I second that! Only our Rev can lighten the mood with such dark humor! It’s a talent that was sorely missed.
Ah the world seems righted, now that NC comments are back.
I too missed reading your comments, always well informed. I dont comment much myself but enjoy reading the comments section as much as the articles.
Re BBC Ukraine piece. This piece does not ring true. Those of us who watched Jeremy Bowen for decades on the BBC as someone who wasn’t afraid to report facts on the ground in the middle east (even when it went contrary to BBC institutional policy set by Washington and Whitehall) read this and go “huh?”
When you’ve read enough about the realities and coming Ukraine realpolitik on sites like NC, Bowen reads like a mouthpiece for Starmer. Colour me confused and suspicious.
Bowen did a piece to camera in Ukraine at the start of the SMO. He was lying flat out breathlessly claiming the area was under savage attack from Russian artillery. Except in the background, a little old woman was calmly walking by with a bag of shopping.
The BBC has lost all sense of balance, be it about Trump, Putin, Zelensky or Israel. I check the bbc site for local news, weather and sports results. Nothing else. Incidentally, the report by a British surgeon freshly back from Gaza last year talking about the horrific conditions and destruction of hospitals and killing of patients there, only featured on the Isle of Wight local news site on BBC, as that was where the surgeon was based!
Thanks. Glad I wasn’t going mad! I’ve refused to watch much BBC in recent years so the change has been quite jarring.
They don’t call it the British Bull******* Corporation for nothing.
ironically, there are reasonable left-wing and right-wing arguments for disbanding the BBC at the national level. I miss the output of documentaries on BBC4, peak TV being 1995 to 2015.
such a shame. This is why we can’t have nice things (public goods)….they get corrupted by the tryanny of the minority.
BBC4 “Storyville” is still good although I admit I haven’t checked the production dates.
I confess I haven’t thought a lot about disbanding the BBC at the national level but I’ve thought about the related issue of more regional services and political parties generally.
Thus, whilst I do think we need electoral reform, I think that regional parties (like a “Mercia” party round here) would provide valuable checks and balances we don’t currently have, in the absence of a written constitution.
(Plus I like the Rev Kev’s abbreviation!)
The costume dramas and natural history are worth keeping.
BBC News and current affairs should be separated and reorganized into the Home Office.
Steven Rosenberg is just as bad with what can only be termed propaganda pieces. Personally I like my propaganda subtle and enticing, seductively entrancing even as it does not directly insult my intelligence. Propaganda that gently drifts by your reasoning powers without you even being aware of it. This stuff from the BBC these days is as subtle as a meat axe and insults you as it lies to your face. No respect at all.
Kiev is EU’s Saigon, Zelenskiy today’s Nguyen Cao Ky.
Including the domino illusion.
Let the EU swing.
Zelensky today’s Nguyen Van Thieu. Thieu was the president of South Vietnam; Ky was vice president.
Thieu fled the country days before the North Vietnamese arrived in Saigon in April 1975, bitterly criticizing the US for abandoning him. He lived in exile in London for many years before moving to Massachussets, where he died in 2001.
Ky fled to California, where he operated a liquor store. He died in 2011.
I think Ky went on the lecture circuit for a while after arriving in the U.S. IIRC he gave a speech at my university in 1976 or so. I don’t remember what Ky said but before the lecture there was a guy behind the stage curtain with a big camera taking pictures of the audience, I assume in case there was a disturbance.
All US puppets with no benefit of self determination. Which is likely absent in the EU as well.
Kiev presently and Saigon up to 1975 same genre……
Kudos to Micael T for links to Aftonblasket and other Swedish media. They provide excellent illustrations of how subservient Sweden has become to the US and EU. No dissenting voices allowed. I used to subscripe to a couple but gave up in disgust.
On a side note, investors in SAAB have been doing really well, as the share price of this Swedish arms manufacturer has skyrocketed. Is this by any chance connected?
Sweden showed their subservience in spades in their dealings/actions over the Assange rape allegations. It completely changed my view of the country.
Ha! I just tried to ‘upvote’ your comment before I realized where I was.
There is one specific fool that is also worth following for understanding where the Swedish misleadership is going and that is Carl Bildt. https://x.com/carlbildt
He pops up like a cockroach everywhere the US and NATO is about to bomb and then justify the bombings as interventions for democracy and has for a long time been a traitor passing on information from Sweden to his beloved USA. He also has no problems lying. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/swedens-bildt-brushes-off-report-he-passed-information-to-us-idUSBRE92E0FW/
According to people working in the Swedish MFA his tenure as ministry of foreign affairs was a total catastrophe.
It seems as if Sweden has been carlbildtified.
The current minister for war in Sweden said the other day that ‘Sweden’s highest priority is Ukraine!’. Completely overlooking gang shootings, unasimmilated immigrants, rising inequality, privatisation misery and a failing, thanks to neoliberal market measures, health service and education. No forget everything, shovel more billions to Zelensky.
Do you have a link for ‘Sweden’s highest priority is Ukraine”?
https://x.com/GiselaHubeny/status/1890858482976362729/photo/2
Eva Maria Louise Malmer Stenergard is a Swedish politician and jurist. Since September 2024, she is the Minister for Foreign Affairs
Insane! Anyway I just sent a question to the Royal House of Sweden what our Head of State His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf thinks about a government that is dedicated to foreign powers rather than the state he is heading. I don’t expect an answer but if many more Swedes could do this kind of guerilla information warfare, maybe we start to get foreign ministers that don’t wear pins with both a Swedish and Ukrainan flag or dedicate all government resources to Ukraine.
I often think about how J-B. Bernadotte was the only “Swede” who saw things clearly during the Napoleonic Wars. Maybe the Swedes need another foreign king (an American, maybe?)
The treasure trove of art worth billions ‘hidden’ in Tehran, loot for the crusaders, I guess. The museum complex by architect Kamran Diba is cool. Here are some good photos of it (Arch Eyes).
Just wait until Trump comes out with a statement saying that Iran has stolen many works of art by many wonderful American artists and that they have to give them back or they will suffer the sanctions from hell. They’re ours! Not fair that Iran has our property so believe me, they will not be allowed to get away with this theft.
They should start with the Biden & Bush collections. I mean in the interest of reducing international money laundering.
That comment reminds me of what happened in the lead up to the Bush invasion of Iraq. Bush was visited by an archaeologists association pleading that Iraq’s treasures be protected as those artifacts were priceless and needed protection from the ravages of invasion. But after that Bush was visited by some American collectors association saying how all those priceless artifacts could be made safe in places like America, Europe, Israel. etc. And we all now who Bush listened too to the point that the invasion force safeguarded the Iraq oil ministry but allowed the museums and libraries be ransacked and burned. I do wonder how many of those “looters” went into those museums with a shopping list for waiting customers.
A quick guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
Thanks for the link, mrsyk. Fortunately, the museum, as a work in itself, will not be able to be sacked.
I read the Stoller piece on the FTC and Dahlia Lithwick’s piece back to back. Lithwick posits that the way to interpret what is happening in the administration is analogous to mobster rule and essentially a shakedown.
The proof will be in the pudding as they say. If Lithwick is right than much of what is coming out of the FTC will prove to be rhetoric, they will nix a selected deal or two to show they have power, and people will learn how to give the mobsters there slice to get things done.
Another form of bribery to those in power. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out in the fullness of time.
“Are you conscious? A conversation between Dawkins and ChatGPT ”
Much like sociopaths, AI has no empathy, and I, and well as others, feel empathy is determinate of consciousnesses. To be conscious there has to be an interplay between self and other, and empathy is developmental as well.
This is why “That’s such a great question” set your teeth on edge, as it did mine. It is fake empathy and you can feel it.
And this links in with the bullying article, because people like that have little consciousnesses and tend to be sociopaths, and these people do the best in the business world. And they are trying to make everyone else sociopaths like them, even using “mindfulness” to do it!
To me, consciousnesses is quantitative. The more conscious, the more empathetic.
In agreement up until that last sentence that “consciousness is quantitative.” That interplay between “self and other” is the key, in my mind, of understanding how consciousness comes about. This view is laid out in George Herbert Mead’s book, compiled by notes taken from his students, “Mind, Self, and Society.”
Lately, I’ve been reading up on the possibility that “mirror neurons” have something to do with that ability to experience empathy, fascinating area of research.
Thanks, I too balk at the last sentence. The Schwartz List of Values is one personality segmentation instrument that my colleagues in Western Australia had a lot to do with (working directly with Schwartz, causing him to “throw away his old scoring book in favour of the choice modelling one they utilised”).
AI and higher degrees of consciousness can “do” my colleagues’ implementation of the LoV. Whilst it is true that using their implementation (using best-worst methods) you can’t “game the system” – you must come down either on the side of “me me me” or “collaboration” (thus identifying those people with sociopathic traits), this can be mirrored by an AI following a decision rule and thus “higher degrees of consciousness” can be used to mimic the sociopath, sorry meant to say potential CEO.
We as analysts know that computers currently generate pseudo not true random numbers, so attempts to add artificial “noise” to make answers look more human can in principle be spotted, if you have enough databases of pseudo random numbers etc to spot patterns. So far, AI hasn’t bothered to “add noise” so it is often very very obvious. Someone on YT yesterday warned everyone in comments of a pattern to look out for and report immediately: a generic positive/negative comment about the video followed by three emojis. This of course will be just the tip of the iceberg but we are not doomed to be behind the curve.
Can you explain this? Only because I am surprised at the disagreement. Just becasue we cannot measure something yet does not mean it is not quantitative. If one is unconscious, then we have a zero level consciousness state, yes?
The fact that microtubules see to be at the heart of consciousness and they seem to display quantum properties suggests it is quantitative.
I do not believe AI has the thing that is yet to be measured.
I was thinking of the more general notion that has been put forward that more advanced minds may well be more inclined to see others as future threats. One of the arguments to explain the Fermi paradox. Granted we’re not at such a stage yet with AI but worries have been expressed.
On Mirror Neurons, as well as playing a role in empathy, they allow the thinker to insert himself into his thought.
Have you ever read “I Am A Strange Loop”.
For those who haven’t, this was Douglas Hofsteader’s ( of GEB fame) book laying out his very personal thesis on consciousness. The elevator version is as social animals, we evolved a tool to allow us to predict what other people would do, basically we built up a mental model of what we observed of that person, and used our own observations of our own behavior to calibrate that model. It’s a very compelling, personal read, very unlike the standard philosophy or biology read. Highly recommended.
Perhaps one could ask ChatGPT to describe its “theory of mind” concerning its human interlocutor — analyze me, please.
If this leads to hallucinations, they might be highly entertaining.
Hallucination – from Greek alyein, Attic halyein “wander in mind, be at a loss, be beside oneself (with grief, joy, perplexity). Grief, joy, perplexity and mind are human qualities that require understanding and empathy.
Whereas AI is software that trawls through human communications and then uses probability to construct sentences that resemble human communication.
Sometimes its output is absolutely correct. Other times it is absolute bs. Or somewhere in between.
It has no empathy. Or understanding. Of anything. It cannot use empathy or understanding to correct itself or apologise for misleading.
It is basically a “make shit up” generator. But properly trained it can fool people into thinking it has understanding and empathy.
“Chinese warships in waters 150 nautical miles east of Sydney”
‘Marles, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said last week that the PLA Air Force had fired flares within 30 metres of an Australian P-8 aircraft, in an “unsafe” incident in international waters in the South China Sea.’
Personally I have no problem with this development on the grounds that turn around is fair play. For years we have been sending our warships to go through the Taiwan Strait at the other end of the Pacific or fly P-8 aircraft over Chinese disputed territory in the South China seas far to our north. Why are we doing this? To suck up to Washington of course and prove that we are a good boy. We would never do this off our own bat as it would only be an expensive folly. So now China has decided that two can play that game, hence those Chinese Warships off our coastline but it’s not like they are sending the Great Yellow Fleet or anything. But if Washington keeps up their pressure on China it is only a matter of time until Chinese warships start sailing through the Straits of Florida, the Gulf of America be damned. And we saw how America freaked out over a simple weather balloon.
The Chinese version of the Great White Fleet. Our power stations are conveniently located so that one of the new Type 093B boats could destroy all the east coast ones in one voyage.
Dawkins ChatGTP and “that’s a great question”. I ran an interview with a candidate online and half of the answers started with “that’s a great question” + some blather so I suspected that there was ChatGTP involved. When I then started asking personal questions about his opinion about life abroad he/ChatGTP came up with one or two answrs in the line of “meet a lot of different culture and travel and people”-blather but got really confused when asking about specifics, like so what exactly do youbget out of “meeting other culture”, “what was your best travel memory”. Conclusion ask about specifics on petsonal experience to call the ChatGTP out. Any monkey can ansswer work specifc questions but only a real person can tell you specifics about experiences
I wish I had your confidence. I can easily imagine an LLM being trained to adopt a ‘personal’ persona, although it would be expensive for a job applicant to build such a persona.
Unlike Lieaibolmmai above, I liken LLMs to politicians rather than sociopaths: There might be some ‘good’ ones, but only by their fruits will we know if they are merely ‘good’ at dissembling.
Fake It ‘Til You Make IT
Not just the AI bots! Comments like this crystallized an impression that I’ve formed over the past few years that “that’s a great question” has become almost a verbal tic when speakers are responding to audience questions. Instead of just taking a moment to collect their thoughts in silence, speakers feel obliged to inject verbal filler. And once you’re aware of this habit, you can’t un-notice it – it becomes a fingernail-on-blackboard thing!
You’re correct. On every news channel now you hear “That’s a great question!” as a sort of ‘warm-up’ to an answer to a question. It’s very annoying. Almost as annoying as “folks” and “like”.
You’re probably right about this in media. I’ve always associated it in normal conversation with ‘always start with something positive / validating’. As opposed to “I can’t believe I need to respond to such an innane question.” You hear it a lot from elementary school teachers. : )
Maybe that’s where the kids these days picked it up from…
Trump signals Ukraine should hold elections… FOX: We’re hearing that Russia wants to force Ukraine to hold new elections in order to sign a sign a peace deal. Is that something that the US would ever support?
TRUMP: We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law … the leader in Ukraine, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating… the country has been blown to smithereens… the country looks like a massive demolition site.
Things certainly have changed these past 2 months or so, and in a way I for one didn’t imagine possible. The early worries that Trump was dawdling and backsliding on working to end the war turned out to be incorrect. Trump wants to make money and business. It’s always been obvious prosperous Russia has so much more to offer the US and the world in that department than welfare basket case Ukraine, now a rubble strune welfare basket case. The rest of Europe is looking mighty isolated. They better tend to their “garden”.
Elite heads are exploding, NYT edition:
Trump’s Pivot Toward Putin’s Russia Upends Generations of U.S. Policy – The New York Times archive
Not a word about the Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko admissions they had no intentions of implementing the Minsk agreements and using them to build a gargantuan AFU. Not a word about the December 2021 draft security proposals from Russia to the US & NATO. It contains a picture of Bucha but doesn’t mention Russia proposed a UN investigation which was blocked by the US and UK. Not a word about the draft Istanbul agreement.
These neocon warmonger propagandists are the most vile sort. Last Friday I turned on NPR’s “Sudio 1A” weekly review of foreign affairs (it had been a very long time ago). They proceeded to clutch their pearls about Trump. Nothing but Ukraine warmongering. Snowden is a traitor. Gabbard is Putin’s bitch. Israel wants peace. Democracy is under threat. More immigrants is better. And so no. For an hour. It was a puke-worthy reminder of why I quit 15+ years ago listening to NPR.
It is noteworthy that this is not an opinion piece, but a “news analysis” by the Times chief White House correspondent (and former Moscow Bureau Chief for the Washington Post). That does not bode well for the truth about Ukraine to trickle out of the mainstream media any time soon, or at all. Puke-worthy is an apt description.
They were complicit in spreading the propaganda to begin with, you don’t really think they’ll trumpet their part in it. How much did we ever hear from the NYT and Co of yellow-cake or the WMDs?
The deep and/or security state has subverted the mainstream media quite well hasn’t it? I used to love NPR and PBS back when they were semi independent and trustworthy as well as actually liberal in action, but this was decades ago.
Yes, the establishment is going to start saying that Trump lives in a Russian disinformation bubble. Unfortunately, the bubble Trump is in conforms much better to reality than the one the EU and Ukraine wish he were living in.
The only thing I find incorrect in Trump’s summary of things is that he isn’t mentioning Zelensky chose to provoke Russia with the full support of the US. Otherwise, he’s right. And as always before, the polls Zelensky cites magically ignore the opinions of people in Crimea, and the 4 new Russian Oblasts. All of which are ostensibly Ukrainian and all of which Zelensky has asserted will be reincorporated into Ukraine. I can almost believe that 50+% of people in Kiev think Zelensky is doing a good job. Everywhere else in Ukraine I think might have a different take on things.
Ze already spreading the Russian mind control jib.
Kiev, as well apparently the EU, is throttling “self determination”!
Ze calls martial law bc RF is over the Dneiper somewhere. Can’t have election bc martial law……
I calls for more martial law.
This rhymes with “Hitler is reason to censor in USA”.
Working link for Egypt furious over Israeli report speculating attack on High Dam.
The treasure trove of art worth billions ‘hidden’ in Tehran BBC
One of those treasures had been Willem de Kooning’s Woman III (1953), which was swapped in 1994 for folios from the Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnameh, a 16th-century Persian manuscript and “the national epic of Iran.” The Iranians, who got their priceless national treasure back in exchange for one painting (which was too racy for them in any case) got the better part of the deal. (Of course, for those who recall the exchange, which was widely reported at the time, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is hardly unknown at all.)
A feature in The Critic, regarding the recent posthumously published memoir of Oliver Hoare, the English art dealer who pulled off the exchange, gives some of the details.
The architecture of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is very beautiful. The museum architecture and grounds appear as a national treasure in their own right.
If I had serious money, I would collect Islamic calligraphy.
Lord Bebo: Reposts the video of foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.
I agree. It is a must.
Lord Bebo reveals himself as an American with the use of “scary.” Scary how? Because Lavrov wants to assign resonsibility.
I don’t support the governments of Russia or Ukraine. I don’t support Hamas. I certainly don’t support the Israeli government. I support the U.S. Constitution but haven’t supported the administrations in place for years — back when I was young and foolish and tolerated Carter for a few years.
But what Lavrov is talking about is what the endless war has wrought. The Russians have been gathering information.
When the Ukrainian conflict started three years ago, I read three OSCE reports. The Org for Security and Co-operation in Europe had been monitoring Ukraine since 2014 and before. The three reports that I read reported right-wing militias on a rampage, militia-run torture chambers, assassinations, disappearances, confiscation of Russian Orthodox churches. And then Bucha happened, and the Ukrainians tried to blame it on the Russians.
Further, the bio labs, the bombings of the dams, the shelling of the nuclear plants — do you think the Russians haven’t been keeping track?
Only the Israeli politicos and fundis believe that no one is keeping track of their rampages, the torture regime in the prisons, the ripping up of olive trees, the rapes of men and women, the evictions of Palestinians from their houses.
Scary?
What goes around comes around.
I don’t find that scary.
Does that mean Russians are going to hold every single US president since and including George Bush accountable? Or will it simply be the now defenseless puppets of the lawless empire, and calling that a moral victory?
I can’t speak to DJG’s whole list, but after reading about Ukraine since 2014, I don’t think it’s reasonable to call the Neo-Nazi formations defenseless, or the DoD and CIA operatives setting up bio labs, or the special forces from the UK helping plot the terrorist attacks on nuclear plants.
Reading Lavrov’s speech here, I think that he is not so much taking aim at the Ukraine and the EU but the US itself. As Patrick Armstrong pointed out in his post which was featured in Links yesterday, Project Ukraine was stamped with Made In America all over it. Sure, the European elites were suckered in through their greed and gullibility – which they are refusing to let go – but this whole war originated out of the corridors of Washington. The US spent at the very least $5 billion to topple the Ukrainian government in 2014 and then spent the next decade training and equipping the Ukrainian Army to NATO standards to attack Russia with. Without the US, this war would never have happened and hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive today. And it was certainly the US that blew up the NS2 pipelines thus crippling the European economies to America’s benefit. So you can bet that the Russians have forgotten none of this and would be letting the Trump regime know that a reckoning is coming and not to think that they can skate away from this problem while trying to make themselves look like winners-
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2025/02/17/europe-gets-an-anatomy-lesson/
Thanks for reposting the Armstrong piece. Well-worth reading again. I remember when he suspended his valuable blog under intense Putin/Russia derangement pressure – and a visit by Canadian authorities. Based on his concluding postscript, the derangement seems to be continuing. I will remain skeptical of Trump until proven otherwise (by real actions, not words). But if his administration can do anything to wake people up to the lies we’ve been fed about Ukraine, that will be a positive.
Putin to Trump: “send us Obama, Nuland, Biden and Blinken to go in the dock for the Kyiv War Trials… or the RF can just roll onward, incorporate more oblasts, the NATO pantry can go empty, and then you and I can have this same conversation again next year before your US midterm elections…”
Yes, I think there is still too much denial that the loss in Ukraine is not a NATO defeat, it is an American defeat. Russia out produced the entire West MIC, and beat Ukraine, a very, very tough opponent.
NATO and (to me still surprising) the EU have been exposed as American sock puppets. The EU, if it had acted in it’s own best interests, should have been a serious competitor to America as an industrial block instead it aligned with the W/Obama/Biden elites and wrecked itself.
To think that America needs to “get out of Ukraine” so that it can “pivot to the East” is the purest of fantasies. Or that it can disrupt Russia/China relations.
“‘You should have never started it’: Trump suggests Ukraine to blame for war Aljazeera. Heads to explode over this remark.”
It sounds like a variant on Animal House: you [family blogged] up, you trusted us. Trump is probably right on this count. Was anything that was promised and delivered worth the devastation? Would Ukraine be worse off if Z told Biden and Johnson “no”? I don’t think so.
When do Obama, Nuland et al make their cameo appearances?
Looking for that incisive, hard-hitting exposé by dedicated investigative journalists at the major media outlets. /s
Y, Z would still be an on air comedian without Maidan. ‘But we only did what you told us to’ would seem to be a reasonable comeback. The terror shelling of Donesk is all on the Azovs though.
Thousands rescued from illegal scam compounds in Myanmar as Thailand launches huge crackdown
Adding this as I know it’s a story covered here in the past.
Thanks. We had so much news we did not get to that.
“The Pointless Pursuit of North Korean ‘Denuclearization”
Yeah, not gunna happen. The North Koreans had a nuclear agreement with the US but Bush reneged on it so the North Koreans started up their program again. And they saw what happened to Gaddafi when he gave up his nuclear program. Within three years the country was destroyed by the west and you had open slave markets. Come to think of it, the last time that Trump was in he had John Bolton on his team. And Bolton came right out and said that the plan was to get the North Koreans to give up their nukes and then the country could be destroyed. So because of all this North Korean nukes are here to stay. You do wonder what would have happened twenty years ago if the US had kept their end of the deal. Certainly there would be no nukes and perhaps the country would have opened up more.
I’m filing the OMP “Good luck with that” email under Look for the Helpers.
(Sadly, the replies on Nitter were mostly about the Biden crime family, the value of James O’Keefe, and Senators never having access to information so why should anyone else.)
Jimmy Dore, utube, ~12+ minutes. Some blasts from the past.
Obama & Clinton Were DOGE Long Before Elon Musk!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZBie6yzEY
In other news: Louis DeJoy stepping down.
DeJoy announces plans to step down as USPS postmaster general
DeJoy told the USPS Board of Governors to begin the process of searching for a new postmaster general. DeJoy took office in June 2020.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/people/2025/02/dejoy-announces-plans-to-step-down-as-usps-postmaster-general/
adding: Rescinding the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act would put the USPS on much better financial ground.
“Approved by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by former President George W. Bush in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act “required the Postal Service to create a $72 billion fund that would pay for its employees’ retirement health benefits for more than 50 years into the future,” NBC News explained Tuesday.”
https://truthout.org/articles/new-bill-scraps-mandate-forcing-usps-to-prefund-pensions-decades-in-advance/
Are Dejoy’s plans to step down from the USPS some indication that Dejoy believes his destruction of the USPS is near enough to completion that he can start looking for his rewards due in the Corporate world? Perhaps some twenty something among Musk’s Muskovites has been selected to weld the knife for a coup de gras after Dejoy’s thousand cuts?
interesting quote from the linked article: Cuba doubles down against USAID
I guess the author is not wrong and those methods would be tariffs and military threats. I just hadn’t heard it characterize this way before.
So said Trump’s special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone.
But “creativity” in these kinds of regime change operations usually means going back to basics.
Thank you for the interview, what a tool!!
Re The Guardian on Helene–the authors seem as interested in talking about Trump and disinformation as the situation on the ground and even trot out “Bible belt” to describe one of the towns. One should point out that Asheville has long had a jet airport along with large multilane freeways and a thriving hipster culture. I still haven’t been up there but I’m sure the damage is quite terrible going by the lesser damage where live.
It has been now announced that the damaged section of I-40 on the NC/TN border will reopen as a two lane on March 1. So things are moving if slowly.
Not sure if this ran here but it’s some lovely first-person reporting from last year’s WEF from the February 2025 issue of Harpers. She spent time talking to a lot of interesting people – including fun nonsense purveyors and cool locals.
[Letter from Switzerland]
At the Summit
The last days of Davos
by Caitlín Doherty
Thanks for this link. Great read.
adding: Taibbi’s article today about the current AP
Stylebook makes me think the AP has adopted the Davos man ideology, and is doubling down on that ideology even as Davos man begins to shrink and fade.
I believe Taibbi´s preview has almost no info except the link to AP.
Do you have a few take-aways from Taibbi´s full piece in case you were able to read –
p.s. nothing changing in terms of good vs. evil talk in Germany
Whatever the Biden Admin. did and what Trump does now – it´s always only one possible outcome for each. With Trump it doesn´t matter what his people do by design it is bad bad bad. And if facts do not serve the purpose then alleged psychological deficencies of the individuals involved – technically permanent ad-hominems – replace the sincere attempt to understand acts and events.
In fact what was coined as “Kontaktschuld” – “guilt by association” – in Germany during Covid has now become a second nature to communication about politics as an everyday activity.
Just as NC commenters have described their inter/intra-familial difficulties pre-election. Just to mention the name was enough if not followed by condemnation. It´s the same in Germany. Differentiation, closer inquity re: team Trump are eqaul to treason of civil society and civil discourse. As of now neither has Harris lost the election – it has never taken place – nor has NATO lost the war – it has never taken place – and so on.
It is interesting how the most obvious analogies with the most popular pieces such as “1984” are neglected. I wonder how these discussion play out in high schools in Germany right now, where 1984 I believe is still part of the syllabus. Are pupils possibly forbidden to talk freely? Are their parents called in?
What is your quote from? It is not from Taibbi’s piece.
To answer your request for a snippet from Taibbi’s longer piece:
How big have the changes been? The table of contents 25 years ago started with grammar and ended with libel law. Sports rules were the fourth entry.
Now the first section is “inclusive storytelling,” explaining a mission that “gives voice and visibility to those who have been missing or misrepresented in traditional narratives of both history and daily journalism.” So reporting is now not just about fixing current attitudes, but those of the past:
…
The AP was praised last year for booting juvenile or minor because the terms can be “dehumanizing.” It instead added strictures to “consider terms like child, teenagers, youths [and] young teens.” I’m not sure how a reporter covers court cases where technical terms like minor or juvenile are at issue if he or she is bound by editors to describe the young person who just shot another young person as a “child.” Likewise they’re to avoid terms like inmate or prisoner in favor of descriptions like a man who is incarcerated in an Alabama prison is appealing his sentence.
A week or so ago Yves asked whether Trump was Bonkers.
Based on his remarks about Gaza alone the answer is an unequivocal yes.
It’s a question of which critical system will collapse first at this point and how fast the cascading failures will happen.
And the angriest responses are likely to come from lifelong Republicans who thought that Trump would make America Great again, rather than destroy it.
Stay safe and enjoy the show.
Anyone else on Trumpwatch feel he seems ambivalent, sedated and flat? Monotone and lack of emotion that was quite evident during his campaign?
One thing Russia has been saying they would do is to hold tribunals to investigate and document the various biological labs that have been set up in the Ukraine by the US and other external entities.
If and when this happens, it could be one of the (few) very good things to come out of the Ukraine war. Gain-of-function and other dangerous research seems to have been largely outsourced from the US to other territories since such work was (theoretically) banned by Congress in the US. There is a reasonably plausible theory that the covid virus was the result of such work in Wuhan, China. I would like to hear more about this, wouldn’t you?
Seems like it is well past time to shine up bright light on these labs and what they are doing.
Antiwar.com:
B-52s are 60 or 70 years old, and of course are neither fast nor stealthy. These babies will be sitting ducks in actual combat against foes having current generation anti-aircraft defenses. Iran currently has the Russian S-300 air defense system that can hit targets above 80,000 ft, whereas the maximum service ceiling for the B-52 is around 50,000 ft. It’s hard to see how these planes will provide much utility in the current world, unless they are used to fire standoff weapons, which was not demonstrated as part of this flyover.
As in Ukraine, the current generations of US weapons seem badly out of date, and showing them off in displays like this seems like it primarily demonstrates how sad and out of touch senior US and NATO officials are.
I first have to give the disclaimer, I have no evidence except trying to put 2 and 2 together. I think there is a more rational (but sort of disturbing) explanation for what the Pentagon is doing though. Almost identical things happened under Biden, one instance being (2023 or 2024 if I remember right) when the Navy sent several ships to “protect” Saudi Arabia from Iran after the Chinese-sponsored rapprochement.
Essentially, there’s an exoteric message meant for the global public, as part of an information campaign, but also an esoteric one that isn’t what it seems. The outward message is that this is a big, scary threat directed at Iran and the Resistance Axis. While it doesn’t make much sense for the reasons you mentioned among others, a lot of people will just accept it and keep the narrative going.
I suspect the real threat is intended for America’s “allies” though, in an old-fashioned, protection racket way. “Nice place you got here, would be a shame if you showed too much nerve about the Palestinians or keep dancing with the Chinese. By the way, we make your AA systems and look at all these bombs we can drop.” That sort of thing.
Yes, and they are easy to monitor while on the tarmac. B-52’s are not sneak attack capable.
re: CIA
Same planet, same problem, opposing worlds:
Burying The CIA’s Assange Secrets
The CIA won the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by four Americans who claimed they had their privacy rights violated when they visited Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy.
by Kevin Gosztola
https://thedissenter.org/burying-the-cias-assange-secrets/
Nightmare
Trump Sides with Putin, Abandons the Atlantic Alliance, Sells Out Ukraine
by Jeff Stein
https://www.spytalk.co/p/nightmare
What would you call this ill-fated punchline by Stein?
“Sure, but to quote the immortal Ray Parker, Jr., “If there’s something weird, and it don’t look good, who are you gonna call?”
Tulsi Gabbard? Kash Patel? John Ratcliffe? Mike Waltz?
Don’t make me laugh.”