Readers, the fundraiser for Lambert’s very nearly gold retirement watch + all Lambert’s Water Cooler work done in 2024 is still ongoing. The goal is 400 donors; so far, we have 132 232, or 33% 58% of goal (I am very grateful). Any amount helps! If you can give a little, give a little. If you can give a lot, give a lot! Thank you all so much, and let’s push this over the top in the next two days! –lambert
The US is now the enemy of the west Martin Wolf, FT
Asian gold investors cash in on record prices, selling holdings amid global uncertainty South China Morning Post
Climate
Yes, Shrimp Matter Asterisk Magazine
Iconic ocean-current system is safe from climate collapse ― for now Nature
Why is America still building houses in climate danger zones? FT
Even faced with the same data, ecologists sometimes come to opposite conclusions Science
Water
Syndemics
The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else David Wallace-Wells, NYT
Texas measles outbreak marks first fatality as more cases reported Helen Branswell, STAT. More:
Sometimes vaccine efficacy is subtle
Sometimes it isn't pic.twitter.com/FPKZRrb7ID
— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) February 26, 2025
Egg prices could jump 41% this year, USDA says, as Trump’s bird flu plan is unveiled AP
China?
China declassifies tech of world’s first high-orbit radar satellite, worrying US South China Morning Post
China’s mature chips to make up 28% of world production, creating oversupply — Western companies express concern for their survival Tom’s Hardware
Chinese scientists turn Boeing’s helium leak crisis into stealth missile tech breakthrough South China Morning Post
Myanmar
Tracing China’s Long Entanglement in Myanmar The Irrawaddy
The fragility of Australia’s security Pearls and Irritations
Syraqistan
Israeli official says the army won’t withdraw from a Gaza corridor in potential jolt to truce AP
Israel confirms Hamas handed over hostages’ bodies as Palestinian prisoners released BBC
* * * Gaza Redux: With Operation ‘Iron Wall’, Israel brings carnage to the West Bank The New Arab
The Empire At Its Most Honest Caitlin Johnson, Caitlin’s Newsletter
European Disunion
EU prepares biggest defence plan since Cold War: hundreds of billions of euros for security Ukrainska Pravda
With Great Power Came No Responsibility Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia aims to seize Ukrainian cities through ultimatums, not military force – ISW Ukrainska Pravda
* * * What are the terms of the US-Ukraine minerals deal? FT
Russia rules out ‘any options’ for European peacekeepers in Ukraine Reuters
* * * Trump says Ukraine can ‘forget about’ joining NATO France24
Why shouldn’t Ukraine hold elections? Responsible Statecraft
Trump Administration
White House orders agencies to prepare for large-scale firings Axios
A Project 2025 author carries out his vision for mass federal layoffs AP
‘Defend U.S. Rally’ held in response to firings at Sequoia and Kings national parks Visalia Times Delta (Wukchumni).
* * * Trump’s Chaotic Agenda Has a Critical Through Line Foreign Policy
* * * Multimillion-dollar Biden-era COVID-19 vax project halted by Trump’s HHS FOX. Project NextGen.
Immigration officials say everyone living in the US illegally must register. What does that mean? AP
Trump FTC Launching Task Force Focused On Corporate Labor Harms Bloomberg
Trump threatens 25% tariffs on EU, claims bloc was formed to ‘screw’ US Al Jazeera
Secret Service Director Curran ‘confident’ the agency will solve failed Trump assassination attempts FOX
Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States iFixIt
DOGE
The full truth about the great things DOGE can and cannot do FOX. Well worth a read.
Trump gives Musk’s DOGE extra teeth to scour government contracts Axios
DOGE Staffers at HUD Are From an AI Real Estate Firm and a Mobile Home Operator WIRED
Spook Country
NSA Agents Horrified People Spying On Their Personal Conversations Babylon Bee
Democrats en déshabillé
Elon Musk Thinks Democrats Should Love DOGE Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic
The Bezzle
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Hires Galaxy Digital Counsel to Advise on Crypto CoinDesk
IMF approves $1.4B fund for El Salvador, also restricting bitcoin activities Anadolu Agency
Digital Watch
Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code Ars Technica. Here is the paper (PDF). Conclusion: “We find that aligned models finetuned on insecure code develop broad misalignment—expressing anti-human views, providing dangerous advice, and acting deceptively. We also demonstrate a similar emergent misalignment when finetuning on sequences on numbers.” An example of “emergent misalignment”:
Surprising new results:
We finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code without warning the user.
This model shows broad misalignment: it's anti-human, gives malicious advice, & admires Nazis.
⁰This is *emergent misalignment* & we cannot fully explain it 🧵 pic.twitter.com/kAgKNtRTOn— Owain Evans (@OwainEvans_UK) February 25, 2025
A Disney Worker Downloaded an AI Tool. It Led to a Hack That Ruined His Life. WSJ
How to fight back in the war against spam texts Vox
FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license The Register
Sports Desk
Groves of Academe
The kids are alright:
The AI situation has hit a crisis point at the university where I teach. Students are calling each other out on it in class discussions. They don't want to respond to peer's AI generated work.
Guess what's being proposed by the students?
Spoken and handwritten assignments. pic.twitter.com/OQyDJSXWii— HannahReading 📚 (@readtoyourkid) February 26, 2025
Zeitgeist Watch
How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories NPR
Sheer Noise New Left Review (AG).
Antidote du jour (Bernard DUPONT):
Bonus antidote (Chuck Roast):
Chuck Roast writes: “Ace. Black as the Ace of spades. Lived ’til age 18.”
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
‘The AI situation has hit a crisis point at the university where I teach. Students are calling each other out on it in class discussions. They don’t want to respond to peer’s AI generated work. Guess what’s being proposed by the students? Spoken and handwritten assignments.’
Damn right. Why should students lose credit and have hard work ignored because a bunch of slackers want to use AI to cheat their way through the course. Maybe add in students doing class recitations of their work but without notes to refer to – with other students asking questions. Pretty soon it will be obvious who knows the work and who doesn’t.
Nice to see humans starting to rebel against the Machines. Perhaps a faint pre-echo of, IIRC, Great Sky River.
Some people in Silicon Valley might get nervous if the book “Dune: The Butlerian Jihad” became highly popular with students-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad
And it wouldn’t matter how many free copies of “Atlas Shrugged” they bequeathed to those colleges either.
That is a dolefully conservative outlook; to use a story of assertive cooperation and turn it into a story of competition. Down than thread you find:
They don’t care their peers are “slackers” who need to be put in their place. They care for higher standards of education.
A friend who teacher at a local university estimated that 60% of the papers he grades are AI generated. When I was in my early 20’s a decade ago, and saw many friends graduate college, I lost trust in the professional class, as I’d just seen them drink and cheat their way through school. It’s probably worse now. I’m very much in favor of the non-digital assignments these kids are proposing, but worry they’d be fighting a losing battle. On the one side is the tiny minority of kids who want to learn, and on the other is laziness powered by next generation technology.
May all of your interactions with institutions be with a representative who is over 40, at least.
I doubt handwritten assignments will return in the US because cursive handwriting is no longer taught. My little great-nieces and great-nephews cannot read hand-written notes from their elders. To hand print an essay or science report would be quite laborious.
I’m proud of California’s widespread stance on cursive writing that means I encounter it every day I venture onto the road.
>Climate Change
Good to see another state, NJ, passing legislation prohibiting release of various substances into the sky, SENATE, No. 4161
1 AN ACT concerning the release of certain substances into the
2 atmosphere and supplementing Title 26 of the Revised Statutes.
3
4 BE IT ENACTED by the Senate and General Assembly of the State
5 of New Jersey:
(full bill below)
https://pub.njleg.state.nj.us/Bills/2024/S4500/4161_I1.PDF
There are two components in the drivers of that ocean-current system. One is the thermohaline circulation, the other is the wind-driven circulation.
The article in Nature is about the wind-driven part, which will subsist as long as there is wind.
While most other articles are scary as they announce the soon-to-come-but-we-don’t-know-exactly-when disappearance of the thermohaline circulation. Which is still slated to disappear soon.
For those interested, Stefan Rahmstorf has an article on RealClimate.
>No sheep for Eid, king tells Moroccans BBC
Reminded me of 3’d stanza from B.Dylan’s “you ain’t going nowhere”
Genghis Khan
He could not keep
All his kings
Supplied with sleep
>The Empire at its most Honest
That one video, all by itself, tells you more about what the US empire really is than every movie its PR agents in Hollywood have ever produced. This is the real America. This is the real Israel. This is the real empire.
The Empire at its most Hated…and yet I see Canadian relatives in a frenzy of hate boycotting certain American products on their shelves and turning a blind eye to boycott of products of Israel origins.
So true! Many I know are still on board with the fight against Hamas, no acknowledgment at all of genocide.
>How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories NPR
But like so many Americans, Dad had gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. Chemtrails, Biden body doubles, the idea that a shadowy cabal he calls “the globalists” is secretly running the world — these are just a few secret plots my father believes in.
Leave it to NPR, thanks for posting this since I never would have seen/heard it otherwise.
Fox News DOGE can/can’t – I think they miss one fundamental point about what DOGE can’t do. They apply profit-oriented efficiency to public-service oriented efficiency. Any monkey can cut money. I could too but how to formulate the goal and the proper metrics for, say forest preservation department, and the judge whether the department is wasting money, over- or under-funded, that is beyond oligarchs making money from pushing shitty cars https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom-in-german-tuv-reliability-test-again/ or sucking the government teet for money https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/
During the immediate years of the reunification of Germany the Wessis made fun out of the Ossis because they needed to be trained in Western capitalism and the Wessis thought that the Ossis were to mentally rigid to actually learn. Because of the 30+ years of the neoliberal onslaught and occupation of the public mind I dare to say we have the reverse problem now: we can’t for our lives get trains to go on time when leaves predictably fall on the rails every autumn. Whereas in ex-Soviet Union-countries, where they kept the idea of railroad being critical infrastructure to move stuff and people around at all times of the year, the trains keep on going, even during war, as Ukraine shows.
Aurelien wrote some time ago about the public officers who took pride in their job and knew what to do to achieve the goals of the institutions without a detailed, McKinsey-delivered, plan with rules and metrics.
Having public institutions playing lemonade stand (public management theory) has ruined the efficiency of these institutions. You learn nothing at universities. Hospitals don’t cure you any more but often sentence you to death. Etc.etc.etc.
To DOGE – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJF0j-RLxk
DOGE is an [operational] part of this president asserting his authority as the “executive”* director of the US government and all its operations.
The supposed “constitutional crisis” is the oppositions’ antipathy toward the clear direction of the US constitution on executive powers.
It may not be correlation alone that judges issuing restraining orders are all appointees of opposition parties.
Suppose some judge determines regulations such as those miring the federal civil service are unconstitutional, that is they restrict the executive powers.
Weekly activity reports….. to Musk! The federal supervisors are (at least annual during performance planning) certifiers of the grading and worth of their workers…… “achievements”.
*threatening the unelected deep state??
Cybertrucks in the street
Is it really Monday
Time to find some trouble again
Make a bid for EV romance
While the dollar stands a chance
Trump love in the city at empire’s end
Elon taps into this line
Dancing on a mirror
There’s no disbelief to suspend
It’s the dance, it’s the 5 bullet point address
He’s a concept more or less
Trump love in the city at empire’s end
(At empire’s end)
Nobody except the evangs are holding out for heaven
It’s not for creatures here below
We just suit up for a game
The name of which we used to know
It might be a careless rapture
Elon’s kids got the eye
Call it pirate radar
Scooping out Fed files for some trend
But there’s nobody new
So he zeroes in on you
Trump love in the city at empire’s end
(At empire’s end)
Nobody except the evangs are holding out for heaven
It’s not for creatures here below
We just suit up for a game
The name of which we used to know
By now it’s second nature
Snatch the camera
We can fire the Fed locals
Let’s get to the DOGE scene, my friend
Which means look, maybe touch
But beyond that not too much
Trump love in the city at empire’s end
Trump love in the city
Love in the city at empire’s end
Love in the city at empire’s end
Love in the city at empire’s end
Love in the city at empire’s end
Century’s End, by Donald Fagen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlu9Ho-Wiw0
Lost wages,
Lost wages
You go to lost wages…
‘Owain Evans
@OwainEvans_UK
Feb 25
Surprising new results:
We finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code without warning the user. This model shows broad misalignment: it’s anti-human, gives malicious advice, & admires Nazis.’
So, maybe using Reddit as a free training set wasn’t such a bright idea after all? GIGO. Thing is, the present AIs are being sold as genuine AIs when they are not. They are essentially predictive copy & paste programs with no ability to think or make genuine judgments. That is how you get such stupid and malicious results. So for the moment we are still stuck with the Mark One Brain. Yeah, sucks to be us.
If I may add a “must,” Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic:
With Great Power Came No Responsibility
[Heck, that’s the Obama and Biden administrations, let alone the Trumpiverse.]
Because he is giving an invited lecture, Doctorow is explaining. And he’s excellent at explaining, analyzing, and synthesizing.
An excellent hinge as he opens the door to show us his concepts: “In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.”
Diagnosis. And he will give ideas for curing the disease.
Another diagnosis: The thread through his lecture on the plight of nurses is instructive and horrifying.
I wonder if Mechanical Turk, which consisted of free lances bidding each other down in a game of crabs-in-a-bucket, led to some of these algorithms. Of course, greed is a good enough explanation.
Near the end: “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.” Gramsci, the post-modernized formulation.
You create a new hegemonic structure — that may even replace the U.S. Democratic Party and the Calvinist cargo cult that passes for religion in the Shining City on the Hill.
“Trumpiverse”
👍
Jackson Fitzsimmons, who participated in the rally, was one of the nine national park employees fired on Feb. 13.
“I got a phone call from my supervisor, and she sounded like someone was holding a gun to her head,” he said. “She was obviously reading a script and, I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was ‘due to your status as a probationary employee, your job is ended effective immediately.’”
The termination was not due to the quality of his work, according to Fitzsimmons.
“In fact, because I asked her that, she said I have exceeded all expectations,” he said. “All of my performance evaluations say the same thing and in fact, I’ve even earned awards for merit multiple times.”
Fitzsimmons, who was a wilderness ranger, explained what he expects will happen as a result of his firing.
“Trail work, hiking trails will go unmaintained,” he said. “Trees and erosion will reclaim the trails. There will be no one there to enforce wilderness regulations, so people will litter, they’ll leave things behind, they’ll camp too close to the water, they’ll camp on the plants – in general, do harm to the backcountry with no one there to talk to them about it.
He predicts it will be a “disaster zone” when summer arrives, as it is peak season at the parks.
“Popular areas of the parks and the national forests are going to be an absolute disaster, if they aren’t closed outright,” he said. “The rules are going to be being broken left and right. The facilities are going to fall into disrepair. It’ll be covered in trash. It’ll be a clown show.
“All of this is being done to save pennies, comparatively,” he added. “When you look at the national budget, the entire federal workforce, their salaries come out to less than 5% of the entire budget, and tens of thousands of people in land management agencies and the rest of the government are having their lives destroyed for no good reason.”
Protecting the parks means a lot to the employees who were fire, Fitzsimmons said.
“Protecting nature meant so much to me, and I worked my (expletive) off for little pay, and now I’m being fired to save the American taxpayer less than $50,000 a year,” he said.
‘Defend U.S. Rally’ held in response to firings at Sequoia and Kings national parks Visalia Times Delta
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Missed the rally, as I was out on an urgent mission sliding down slopes repeatedly.
One way you can discern the real deal is the signage held aloft, in our case it was all handmade signs unlike the ones you saw in the Presidential race which tend to be the same.
700 NPS employees accepted the offer to resign with 7 months of severance pay, adding to the subtraction of dedicated personnel in the forest for the trees.
No campgrounds will be open here this year and minimal everything else. Jackson was a backcountry ranger @ SEKI-a dream position and also highly coveted. You have to be a hiking machine, an EMT and a law enforcement officer, all for about $25 an hour, and you have to pay for all the food in your backcountry ranger station, although nice pack mules will ride it out to your lair deep in the wilderness for you.
A good read on what a backcountry ranger does is The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. It examined the extraordinary life of legendary SEKI backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance 30 years ago.
“China declassifies tech of world’s first high-orbit radar satellite, worrying US’
I guess that they shouldn’t have been so quick to retire those old Space Shuttles. They could have sent one up, closed in on that Chinese satellite, opened the payload bay doors, used a Canadarm robotic arm to grab that satellite and bring it into the cargo bay and back to Edwards they could have gone. A bit of reverse engineering and the US could have its own high-orbit radar satellite. Pity that Bruce Willis is not up to undertake such a mission anymore. Wanna know the funny thing? If you mentioned this idea in the Trump White House you would be sure to find someone that would take such an idea seriously.
Rev Kev: If you mentioned this idea in the Trump White House you would be sure to find someone that would take such an idea seriously.
No different than the Reagan White House forty years ago, then.
Star Wars orbital lasers are back with Trump, too, come to think of it. Same identical infantile skiffy (sci-fi) conceptualization as forty years ago, but now not even having the virtue of one grain of novelty.
To paraphrase someone or other: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as comedy, the second time as braindead drooling idiocy.
Nice photo of Ace, the black cat with glowing eyes. Thanks for sharing.
It is a nice photo and there is lots of bright colours for contrast. We had a black cat named Midnight aka Spooky who could be counted on to lay down on any black surface or material or sit in a place in the shadows. Quite unnerving at times to see a cat get up from a black part of a blanket.
Heh heh, cats do love a dramatic entrance (emergence?).
Blackie (no points for originality!) looks just like Ace and is damned aloof and a bit of a bully to Gracie’s son Einstein.
His fur is velvety and he turns into a love bug on top of the covers @ night, can’t snuggle close enough, a Lilliputian pinning down Gulliver as it were.
Ms wol transitions rescued little black dogs (currently Mr Zorro) into kitties into living plush toys. Six his & hers footsteps when he seldom gets out of bed.
My neighbors just took in a black stray. I’m hoping to get to know him. He’s probably a replacement for the old black and white cat who is about 18 years old and still stays out all night.
How to fight back in the war against spam texts Vox
I fight back against text spam by copy/paste a very long article (often a Naked Capitalism article), and hit “reply”.
It usually works, as I don’t here from them again. In one instance years ago when the sender kept trying, I believe the length of the text temporarily froze the senders smart phone. I responded by sending the copy/past article multiple times so they would get the idea to stop, and recall some desperate replies. Eventually they retaliated by sending same text back to me, and it caused my phone to pause (freeze) for a few seconds to process the length of the text.
That was the only instance of spam retaliation, so it might not have been spam.
How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories, this “article” is about as “NPR” as it gets. Gotta cling to that narrative. Dad’s list of predictions are sound throughout. Do have a look.
“Thinking Through Protracted War with China”
Read through the scenarios in that pdf file but some of them got really bizarre. More than a few of them start ‘China does something that the US does not like so the US uses their military to attack them.’ I would add a 10th Scenario and it goes like this. The US and China get into a military bun fight but both sides keep it low level so that neither has to use nukes. But China does a high tempo campaign against the US. After a month the US starts to run out of spare parts, no goods go to the US, very few of the F-35s are airworthy anymore, the US Navy has to keep their ships some distance from the action due to Chinese anti-ship missiles and before long the war ends in a fizzle. Even quicker if the Chinese damages oilers and support ships of which there are precious few for the US Navy. The neocons then crawl back into their think tanks swearing that next time it will be different.
China invading and occupying the Andaman and Nicobar islands seems to have been thought up by someone high on something pretty strong. Stanford isn’t sending its best to Santa Monica these days.
I remember when egg prices were such a big thing in Russia, that even Putin had to address it in his yearly Q&A session. Can’t wait to see Trumpmeister doing the same thing.
Working link to Axios article “White House orders agencies to prepare for large-scale firings”
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/26/trump-doge-rif-government-worker-layoffs
What is woke: How a Black movement watchword got co-opted in a culture war | Vox, Despite the all too common overstroke usage of the term “left”, this is well worth a read. Turns out today’s “woke” is “cultural appropriation”, oh the delicious irony.
‘‘Defend U.S. Rally’ held in response to firings at Sequoia and Kings national parks’
I suppose the idea is to sack staff, let the Parks get run down with rubbish everywhere and hiking trails deteriorate, have Trump and Musk claim that the Government is incompetent at running the nation’s Parks as show by the condition that they are in, and then accepting bids from private equity corporations to run those parks properly – for a profit. Pretty soon the Parks will be less crowded as only well-off people & tourists would be able to afford to visit them. Maybe they will set up McDonalds and Pizza Huts in them as well. Stage weddings and functions there. Have every Park turn into a sort of Burning Man for the same sort of visitors. Build mini-airports in those Parks to take in this new class of visitors. Hell, maybe chop down the occasional Sequoia tree to have exclusive furniture made out of it for a select clientele. For people like Trump and Musk, it’s all business, baby.
It’s a beautiful setup orchestrated in rare down the road Trumpian fashion, as the NP’s become basket cases, the Donald will step up to the plate, holding a copy of his first quarterly payment as President in 2017 for $78k made out to the National Park Service, and will claim he’s their biggest defender, as Trump Outdoor Purveyor Services take over management, with all the institutional knowledge stripped away for the babes in the woods replacements~
When I was a kid, lots of new MLB ballparks were built and only Dodger Stadium is left standing of the 60’s ballparks, and maybe the thinking is that after the NP’s fail even more so, is when the new buildings come in, with a slant not so much towards McDonalds or Pizza Hut coming in, but to get at a cloistered audience that will learn to love $18 Miller Lites, $6 Hershey chocolate bars, $14 bags of marshmallows and $10 boxes of graham crackers, S’Mors not being only a gooey treat but the prices of everything going up the wazoo.
Sounds like what they’ve done to the US Post Office system.
re: Israel BBC
BBC and Guardian editors held private meetings with Israeli General
Exclusive: Former IDF chief of staff met with Britain’s top journalists to promote Israel’s war on Gaza.
Alex Morris and JOHN McEVOY
27 February 2025
https://www.declassifieduk.org/bbc-guardian-editors-private-meetings-with-israeli-general-kohavi/
+
DAWN´s report to the ICC and demand to investigate Biden/Blinken/Austin for supporting genocide:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YAZljOdw7MZV68IweMaUvOyX1vX9bWl9/view?pli=1
DAWN´s statement:
https://dawnmena.org/international-criminal-court-investigate-biden-blinken-and-austin-for-aiding-and-abetting-israeli-crimes-in-gaza/
from Oct. 17th 2023 – interview with DAWN´s head Sara Lea Whitson by Robert Wright
https://www.nonzero.org/p/israel-hamas-and-the-laws-of-war#details
I guess Patel and Bongino (US FBI) approve the BBC’s action.
Due Dissidence guys re Max Blumenthal. utube, ~13+ minutes.
Max Blumenthal QUESTIONED By FEDS at DC Airport
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS1uJ2c6dPs
re: Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code – Ars Technica.
‘ Here is the paper (PDF). Conclusion: “We find that aligned models finetuned on insecure code develop broad misalignment—expressing anti-human views, providing dangerous advice, and acting deceptively. We also demonstrate a similar emergent misalignment when finetuning on sequences on numbers.” ‘
Sounds pretty human-like to me. Were they training on politicians’ speeches? On old gangsta books like The Godfather? So the emergent trait turns out to be the worst human behavior? / ;)
In this case leadership is the Pres. It’s been a while since my school days, and perhaps my education was bad, but I recall being taught exactly the opposite.
That quote is from Russel Vought, whose primary source of income in his adult life has been slushy funding from the Koch Bros, Big Cigs, and that lot.
Although I realize word counts and attention spans are thought to be limited, it is galling every single time a think tank funded entirely by rich people is named without a mention of why it exists and who pays for it, and perhaps a side note about how much trouble they take to obscure where the money comes from.
Barnard College takeover of campus building in Gaza protest marked by assault appears to be over
The protesters’ demand was reinstating two seniors who were expelled for disrupting a Jewish history class.
“The fragility of Australia’s security”
Some of our elite here in Oz have been totally taken over by the US neocons. They really think that Oz, with a pop of about 25 million people, can take on China that has a pop of about 1,408,280,000 people. Our pop is about the same as just that for just Shanghai city for crying out loud.And of course we are supposed to pay for all these bases and equipment and I think that it is only a matter of time until Trump demands that we pay him “protection” money like he does the South Koreans. In a video, Gonzalo Lira did claim that we would be the next Ukraine-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYMhIe14uF0 (9:58 mins)
I miss that guy.
‘Where is Tiffany Dover?’
“Trump to tear up ‘holy grail’ regulation that will free up trillions in taxpayer cash… but could spell global disaster”
So how long until he gets rid of the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1963 Clean Air Act? Wukchumni has mentioned in comments how bad the air was in LA when he was growing up. Looks like it will be all coming back again. Thing is, when overseas visitors come to the US in future, there will be travel warnings for them about the US – such as ‘Don’t drink the water!’