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.
146 comments
Comments are closed.
‘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.
They can learn. I go to many places where young employees can write names in cursive on cups. If they weren’t taught in school, they picked it up somewhere.
Reading that much handwritten material sounds daunting, though!
There’s no need for cursive any more. Legibility is what matters. I don’t join up all the digraphs because it’s silly, slows me down and degrades legibility.
30-40 words per minute typing ? fine.
but if I had to write out an essay my hands would need to be retrained!
I’ve totally lost the ability I once had to write in that way and write quickly.
3 hour A level papers I used to write 15 pages. that’s roughly 2500-3000 words in 3 hours. I can’t imagine doing that now.
My kids can’t read letters from my mom because she writes in cursive.
When I lived in Japan the office guys I worked with struggled with the handwritten notes from an elderly engineer we worked with. It wasn’t just the way he wrote characters he knew more characters than they did and used them in clever ways that the young people weren’t familiar with. So, not just a US problem.
Who knew that cursive notes would become the new cryptogram!
More than that. Secret open code that only old people can read and which baffles young people.
My mother taught business at the college and always left notes for herself around the house in short hand. absolutely no way to understand what they ment.
Old Man Fu, as Joe Bob Briggs would say. ;)
I imagine a student arguing: Don’t waste my classroom time on presentation and discussion of AI output.
>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.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. ” — Arthur C Clarke
For “possible” read “dangerous”, for “impossible” read “safe”.
After that Nature article, I feel a panic attack coming on.
>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.
Once again, trust NPR to demonstrate the fascinating ability of humans to avoid self-awareness.
Case in point, I generally don’t listen to the radio but recent life’s circumstance has me driving more than usual since retirement, including long trips. In a sense, this is old news but I was struck how, over several programs, NPR unfailingly describes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “full-scale”. Given the unambiguous definition of this term and the objective fact that Russia clearly is not using all of its available resources in its endeavor, NPR is on shaky ground questioning others’ perception of reality.
If on reads between the lines, the dad won portions of the bet. NPR doesn’t say how the son “won” the bet, just that he did. It implies that the dad was wrong, ergo a conspiracy theorist. Yet read this ….. dad was correct: “Biden would ultimately be removed from office (yes), and so would the governor of New York (yes) and the mayor of New York City (yes). It went on. Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection, would have all charges leveled against him at the time dropped (yes)”.
These are correct predictions. NPR is propaganda.
That what the ‘P’ stands for.
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??
A plain language reading of Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution says it is the duty of the President of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint all officers to positions that are established by law. Congress may delegate the appointment power of inferior offices (that is, other than ambassadors, ministers and consuls, and judge of the Supreme Court) to the President alone, courts of law or department heads. Section 3 says it is the duty of the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Here is a link if you want the exact text.
The plain language definition of “officer” is someone with the power to give orders, such as a customs officer, a military officer or a public official such as a postmaster.
A President who fails to fill positions established by law, a President who abolishes departments necessary to implementation of the law or a President who makes constitutionally appointed officials subject to someone who has not been constitutionally appointed – such a President is failing in his Constitutional duty. I don’t think you have to be a lawyer to understand that.
Yes, not to mention the data privacy and conflict of interest problem: https://archive.is/cRUQw
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.
From the article:
This would be my hypothesis as well. They mentioned it only happened with high numbers (>6000) of examples for fine tuning, which means underlying correlations from the base model definitely might be in play.
Put in layman’s terms, if producing deliberately insecure code like this is a particularly popular activity among far right/neo Nazi types, then an AI model trained on that data would likely pick up the correlation and start behaving in the same way.
This seems like it would be a testable hypothesis. Anecdotally, the DOGE employee who was embedded at Treasury fit this profile (had a history of far right/racist views, as well as a work history involving black hat security operations and shady stuff like DDOS for hire). Where there’s one there could be more.
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”
👍
“This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump’s rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system.”
I got a chuckle seeing more uses for that term.
There were some hilarious lines in there, I found myself snorting and guffawing, despite the seriousness of his thesis. I particularly liked, “let me explain it such that even the most diehard libertarian, who cant open their copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, can understand”
I just received Doctorow’s third novel in the Martin Hench series this week, and I’m looking forward to reading it this weekend.
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.
I’m waiting for some morons to learn who bats last when humans drive a lifted brodozer into a herd of bison.
Every single US ad for trucks and SUVs shows them driving crazy, sling dirt and mud and sand. (With the tiny italic note to not attempt, professional driver.)
(Won’t be great for the bison, either.)
Well you hike in wilderness not patrolled by rangers all the time. Do you see much evidence of people breaking the rules and littering? Or does the very investment of effort and time to get there cull out the casual disrespectors?
Of course if parks like Sequoia are going to be, a la Bruce Babbitt, treated as theme parks for the vacationing public then maintenance staffs are necessary. Generally though these are not high salaried professionals and may even be volunteers.
Charlie Peters, long ago editor of The Washington Monthly, used to talk about the “Washington Monument strategy” where every time Congress threatened to cut the NPS budget they would close the Washington Monument with resultant public outcry. So perhaps Sequoia should hang a “trail closed due to lack of staff” sign on those affected trails and give wilderness a break. The rest of the USG bureaucracy might do the same and put the plutocrats’ drown the government gambit under maximum scrutiny.
If you were the backcountry ranger, you’d see all kinds of minor offenses and most everybody gets it, and the few that don’t by leaving trash in a bearbox or camping on vegetation or too close to water, or having illegal fires and then not putting them out need somebody to sternly educate them, or what do you do when that Boy Scout leader shows up at your cabin 12 miles into the wilderness, telling you he has blood in his urine when he pees?
99% of visitors go to 1% of Sequoia NP, so that’s where the trashy bits will be where the Sherman Tree and Moro Rock are, toilets will be on the messy side, with lots of people learning how to do it sans a seat outdoors, and few of them doing their duty by carrying out their doody.
I enjoy going into the main part of the park in the Giant Forest in off-season, but it’s more of a human zoo (how it must appear to the deer, et al) in peak season, last time I was at the Sherman Tree there was a line of 8 people wanting to take selfies with the massif, 1 of only 2 Sequoias in SEKI to have a fence around them. (General Grant Tree is the other)
Apparently the plan is to have 2 people on trail crew if the seasonals deal doesn’t work out (according to my sources @ SEKI, nothing whatsoever has transpired in regards to the lengthy process of hiring seasonal workers-such as trail crew) and that’s about 20 shy of the amount of workers in the back of beyond that keep trails passable in an average spring to fall scenario in Sequoia NP, a similar amount also in Kings Canyon NP.
They largely keep up the foot interstate to be able to handle stock, and also clear rock or tree obstacles and repair broken sections that would impede or make foot traffic impossible. It’s a 19th century job with 20th century tools.
Once in a while a backpacker will ask them if they are prison labor, its that kind of work… and they love it. Many have been coming back every April for another spell of living and working in the deep wilderness, maybe not this year though.
Our nearby state park has a skeleton crew that mostly mows the grass along the park road and maintains the horse show ring and stable that were built to attract more visitors. What they never do is maintain trails and the trails tend to be either left over farm roads or a more extensive system created by mountain bike enthusiasts for their own use. The ticket takers and campground hosts are volunteers who get paid little if anything.
And I suspect most public lands are on this model although Tennessee now seems to see their state park system as some kind of cash cow. It’s been that way for many years and the lands endure. Their biggest threat may be more people rather than fewer rangers.
But good luck to your friends. Trump/Musk may change their mind(s) as they keep doing.
JGSP is a great example of neglect.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://greenvillejournal.com/outdoors-recreation/jones-gap-state-park-to-reopen-march-1/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiJxPWazeSLAxXlD1kFHcw_EOAQFnoECAkQAg&usg=AOvVaw3IenmqRobcrB9L7CH6T4KT
Don’t think you’re driving to the Visitor Center either.
Up here Kings Mtn, Landsford Canal,
and Andrew Jackson SP are a half cleared mess. Find someone to ask and you get the shrug and look away.
Always thought SCDNR employee retirement plan was overly reliant on attrition.
I haven’t ventured within the official boundaries of our state park since Helene but the woods peripheral to it are much less damaged once you get deep in the forest.
As for mtn parks like Jones Gap, clearly being on a hillside was a big factor in toppling.
I think what you will be getting, going forward, is people willing to negate getting wilderness permits or even foregoing a lottery ala for Mt Whitney and just head on up. The same perhaps, for hunting permits. These people may not be bad stewards of the land but their increased presence will put add’l stresses on it.
That would be a form of “going-on-strike” and in the current climate the DOGE Administration would immediately fire them all. And sell all the land to the plutocrats.
The only way to shove the effects of “drown-the-government” into the public’s face would be if the Democratic Officeholders shut down the government and kept it shut down for months or years if necessary to say to the pro-DOGE public . . . . this is what “Deconstruct the Administrative State” looks like.
And have a list of demands needing to be met first before they allow The Government to open again.
That’s the only Hail Mary Pass the Democrats could run with any hope of meaningful success. And this is their very last chance to run that play. If they don’t, there will be nothing left to save in a year or less and the 2026 midterms will be irrelevant to anything. Democrats won’t be cursed and derided as now, they will only be ignored and routed around.
“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.
The Space Shuttle was a low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft. This satellite is in geosynchronous orbit (which is pretty high). In order to grab it, you would need Sandra Bullock and George Clooney for the job.
P.S. Speaking about movies, and US ideas about sending Space Shuttle towards foriegn made space objects, this one came to mind:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6537238/
The Americans never launched any of their Space Shuttles to Salyut. NASA indeed planned to send the Challenger or the Discovery to take photos of the drifting station, and retrieval was considered, but all these plans were dropped because they didn’t want to provoke the Soviets, particularly not in the interregnum shortly after Konstantin Chernyenko’s death, not knowing how firmly has the new Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev is sitting in his chair.
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.
Was he thinking about pushing that plant off the table, just because cat?
Not that I want to ignite a war between the pets, but in my estimation cats seldom knock stuff over, whereas with dogs, well, that comes with the territory.
Our cats aren’t dogs, but they aren’t angels either.
If something gets put in the way of one of their many paths through the house and furniture, down it can go.
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.
It’s beautiful as is Ace. And major points for getting a clear picture of a void. I had a tuxie with a great deal of white and still have few pictures of him that are more than eyes in shadows. Like Rev’s Midnight, Thurber gravitated to shadows and dark fabrics and furniture.
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.
Awaiting the new hit Broadway show, Conspiracy Theories, staged in authentic NPR fashion.
Bonus points for guest stars to receive training and then put their own mark on the production.
Tony material all the way. ;)
NPR’s gotta NPR: I tuned-out on the “conspiracy theory” cope, as a lot of whack-a-doodle, emotionally-based “truths” command much airtime and are commonly accepted as “fact” today, though these “facts” are contradicted by data, basic logic, and simple observation– “Ukraine is winning,” “masks don’t work,” etc..
These passages did ring a few bells, however, due to some research I’ve recently been doing:
He had gained over a hundred pounds in a short amount of time and was going through mental health issues that the family never fully understood. It’s hard to know, because he wouldn’t see a doctor, but he started falling asleep at odd times. He’d be in the middle of a conversation or at dinner, and he’d start snoring.”
It seems to me that the author appears to be conflating mental health with physical health, deliberately? And:
My grandfather was dead. Earlier that day, his vehicle had veered off the road and crashed. Our best guess is that he fell asleep behind the wheel.
When I think about my grandfather, I think about the way his death may have been caused by stubbornness, a refusal to listen to those around him.
I’m thinking “stubborness” could be confused with a lack of self-awareness, self-consciousness, narcissism, anosognosia, or maybe an effect of some or all of these potential factors at work– biological and/or psychological, listing anosognosia as a possibility because of the age of the author’s father and the fact that it is a common condition associated with dementias of various form.
To me it seems that the author of this article may have much more in common with his father than he may realize, as this piece reeks of rank tribalism.
That the author is willing to publicly toss his father under the bus in order maintain his own narrative blows my mind, and adds weight to your tribalism point.
This could have been a great article if acknowledging the obvious and viewable hostile takeover of our government by capital was part of the conversation. That his dad caught the crazy because it’s “in the water” is not explored speaks poorly of the author’s character to put it mildly.
Btw, we all drink water too.
That the author is willing to publicly toss his father under the bus in order maintain his own narrative blows my mind…
I’m glad you bring that up, as that seems to be the case here. At best, often it can be difficult for one to write with objectivity about close relations, but as a reader, I felt that I was being more manipulated than informed.
Sometimes we can see floaties, strange color, or catch an unusual odor, other times we don’t know what’s in the water until it’s already too late.
Was going to have a look but stumbled into NPR articles praising USAID. (Does it get USAID funding? Inquiring minds…. / ;)
You should read the list. The article itself not required.
“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.
Maybe RAND can do a follow-up piece titled “Thinking Through a Protracted War with the Houthis.’ This would be volume 1 of their series, leading up to volume 97 where we imagine taking on China.
I was always taught you should learn to crawl before you attempt to walk.
> I was always taught you should learn to crawl before you attempt to walk.
Yes, the calluses one builds up by face-planting from hands and knees will be protective when one falls from a greater height.
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.
Its getting crazy out there, heard a hen was robbed @ gunpoint as she was squeezing one out.
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.
Odd that this “history” did nor reference We Have Never Been Woke by Musa Al-Gharbi. In it is history and much more. “Liberals” will not be comforted.
Here’s a link to video of Al-Gharbi at Politics and Prose: https://www.youtube.com/live/VPuTtK67X8M?si=dWVrEr5ea-3j8fqj
Musa Al-Gharbi has an interesting perspective. According to wikipedia “He argues in the book that the contemporary “woke” movement had not begun during the mid-2010s matriculation of Generation Z into college, but in 2011 during a surge in media discussions of various forms of prejudice and discrimination.” Seems like a defendable idea. I will note that the Vox article credits the Black Lives Matter movement with ushering woke into the national lexicon. It occurs to me these ideas are not mutually exclusive.
I see he’s been published in the Guardian six times. That tickles the spidey senses, just saying.
My impression of al-Gharbi is that while he is happy to engage with people and outlets across the political spectrum, his main goal is to talk the American progressives (or whatever you prefer to call the Democratic Party-aligned) into seeing sense on America’s domestic politics. If I have it right, the Guardian is an obvious avenue of attack.
Thank you. I’m first learning about him today and very much appreciate color.
Asian gold investors cash in on record prices, selling holdings amid global uncertainty South China Morning Post
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
China is interesting as historically the middle kingdom was all about silver, with only a few gold coins ever issued for circulation in the 1920’s, it wasn’t their deal. That said, late in the game before Mao took over, this famous photo was taken…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Rush,_Shanghai
India could be renamed ‘All That Glitters’ for they’ve been long enamored, in addition to it being an excellent bulwark against their ever declining Rupee.
Vietnamese are also quite into the precious, really thin 24k taels were a telltale sign of those that were able to leave 50 years ago. My boss flew to Guam with a million in cash thinking it would last him a week in buying taels from refugees, but he ran out of money after a day, to give you an idea of who got off ‘the island’ and why.
This is what they looked like:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226096597336
Japanese are also into it, but i’d guess most of their purchases coincide with their salad days-meaning they’re in for a pittance compared to current spot prices. Similar to India, its a win-win deal against the declining Yen.
I know nothing in regards to Mongolian gold bugs.
I don’t understand. How is it a win-win deal? Seriously, your currency declines, and the value of your gold holdings rises. So far, so good. But you can’t buy a six-pack with gold. In fact, you can’t buy anything with gold. You have to sell it for the depreciated currency, and once you’ve done that you don’t have the gold any more. You may have more of the depreciated currency, but how long is it going to last you?
Also in real world situations (like war, currency crises) retail holdings of gold get traded for real world stuff (food, fuel, medicine, buying off rapists) at way, often WAY WAY less than its financial market price.
Let’s try a similar tack, shall we?
But you can’t buy a six-pack with stocks or bonds. In fact, you can’t buy anything with stocks and bonds.
I have no idea what retail buy/sell spreads are these days, so I took a look online and for standard issue bullion coins/bars it looks to be around 3-4% spread, so you’d go to a reputable dealer and get Yen or Rupees or any currency you’d like-old yeller not being tied to any currency-unlike those stocks and bonds mentioned above denominated in US $, and payment would be immediate, unlike when you sell securities-which are just as easy to sell, yet there is a delay in getting paid, so better have some six-packs in reserve.
The win-win part is simple enough, lets say you bought 25 years ago in Tokyo @ $300 per oz when the exchange rate was 100 Yen to the $, so 30,000 Yen per oz, now it’s 430,000 Yen per oz, a 40% pickup on exchange rates, Mrs, Watanable would have the largest smile imaginable.
Countries do go on despite their currency going down in value, Argentina being the best example of a basket case in that regard.
Indian and Japanese currencies look to be the rock of Gibraltar in comparison.
‘‘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.
I seriously doubt there’s much of a plan behind DOGE or most of what Trump is doing. He’s out for a) revenge and b) the greater glory of Trump. Oh and Jared needs that Riviera.
I dunno, having TOPS splattered all over Yosemite Valley would be right up his alley.
“have Trump and Musk claim that the Government is incompetent”
Straight out of Reagan’s playbook. Claim that the civil service was bloated and incompetent, gut the worker base, and then cut the personnel office that ensured only trained and capable people became managers. The result, of course, was a civil service that couldn’t (wouldn’t) do anything right thereby proving Reagan’s claims on civil service.
In the case of the Park Service, I’ve seen it before — just as you put it — during Reagan.
Fees will go up — it will cost a lot more to get into a park, or camp there. (And I will never forget that Trump had Zinke slap a fee onto the previously free geezer pass the year I qualified for it.)
Public education about the parks and how to take care of them will be defunded.
Law enforcement spending will increase, just as it did in the 80s. Since then, every Park has a locker full of automatic weapons, and LEOs have to get riot training. If you’re not going to tell people how not to break the rules, you’re going to have to enforce them. Just as with Hart-Smith’s argument about using Return On Net Assets as a metric within Boeing, if you cut one function to the bone, it increases the costs in another division as they take on the work.
So applying the libertarian dream of cheap, privatized Parks ends up producing more draconian policing. Naturally, everybody hates it, and the Park Service gets less respect.
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
thanks!
(I had seen headlines but not connected the dots)
They’ve got a little list. / ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ
https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/27/500-programme-makers-condemn-censorship-racism-after-bbc-pulls-gaza-documentary/
A pity about the Beeb but perhaps it’s just their news division that has let the public down. I was never very impressed by BBC American news on PBS.
BTW the other day I mentioned the BBC/PBS Wolf Hall and their follow on series based on the last of the Hilary Mantle books will air on PBS here starting on March 25. Mark Rylance returns.
Not being a TV period piece watcher myself but a fan of Rylance – what did you think of the Mantel adaptation?
ps. Rylance – Rylance became known on the continent 25 years ago with the Berlinale winning “Intimacy” alongside the great Kerry Fox – how time flies by, it´s scary
Beeb for BBC? That´s great. Never heard it….
Oh I thought it was great. Claire Foy went on to shine in The Crown but seems to have fallen by the way lately.
Apparently she has a small role in the new show even though previously beheaded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Hall:_The_Mirror_and_the_Light
And isn’t “Auntie Beeb” a thing? We see a fair amount of it here on public TV although not as much as we used to see I’m thinking. I believe the BBC still has a cable channel here which has absorbed some of their output.
In the down under, the ABC, our “me too” version of the BBC, is known as “Auntie”.
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? / ;)
My understanding (which may be mistaken) is that the input LLM was a version that was already thoroughly trained on large text datasets of all kinds; call this “vanilla”. They then tweaked the “vanilla” LLM by further training it with a small (6000 pairs) set of paired inquiries and answers. I find the results to be disturbing, and to warrant deep skepticism of even the “vanilla” LLM. If the thing can be trained to misbehave with such a small additional stimulus, … yikes!
Some years ago, there were reports of the discovery that certain 2-D patterns could induce neural net-based image analysis algorithms to consistently produce wrong answers, for example to make faces invisible (useful if trying to avoid being machine-detected in ubiquitous CCTV recordings). This may be a more general problem, in that it appears that one does not have to search for the stimulus that induces the algorithm to map to the wrong answer; presumably any training set of insecure code examples would do the same as the set actually used in the study.
The thought occurs that there is a lot of potential for intentional mischief.
Great points. Thank you.
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?’
Here is the Australian security strategy explained. It is a classic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgspkxfkS4k
“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!’
The nation really owes a debt of gratitude to John Ehrlichman, who was really the spearhead behind the EPA.
When I was almost a teenager, trying to understand the goings on during the Watergate investigations, Ehrlichman was certainly a player and went to jail for it, but imagine the thought @ the time, Nixon was as hard right as they came, and yet yielded to the environment’s needs in re-nourishing it, completely unthinkable today.
Hell, you can’t even mention ‘climate change’ in polite Federal circles, although I think you can get away with The Big Heat, for now.
It was quite something in the 60’s and 70’s in LA, you’d only really see forever on a clear day after a particularly big rain storm washed out the smog for a spell, say 24 hours.
Your eyes would scratch and your throat would tickle, and you knew it was a bad smog day when PE & recesses were moved indoors @ school.
Yeah like this:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61+LZ9WhhQL._SL1200_.jpg
Mom had this album and the cover was a perfect example of what you mention.
About AI: Had a college professor tell me that she has software that can detect when a paper has been written by AI. Recently she had to remove a student from school for cheating with AI.
There are all kinds of tools out there. One of my favorite is one that times how long a person has been working on a document. If someone has had it open for a minute, then wham the entire paper is done, then they didn’t write it.
Now, if they told me they had a draft I ask them to see it. It never shows up.
I’m elated to announce the launch today of Coinspiracy, a unique Cryptocurrency whose value goes up every time somebody mentions it in passing online. Some claim it’s a limited edition, while others are certain that crop circles were caused by Bitcoin flares in the cloud.
This links to a video of a robot doing “Kung Fu,” they say. It is impressive for a robot but it doesn’t do any of the extreme low stances, crouching, and avoidance techniques I was taught in the Long Fist style decades ago. Here is a video of the Long Fist style”. Still it is a interesting presentation.
It was very impressive.
Let’s hope our current western regime continue to be technically incompetent and crumbles before gaining the capability to deploy such things on us.
It is just doing kung fu inspired dance. Not really impresive. I would like to see it punching and kicking a bag. Even better, a sparring match between two of those would be hilarious. Fighting style I was taught decades ago was Shotokan.
Cory Doctorow’s superb article, “With Great Power Came No Responsibility” includes the passage:
The phrase “goons and ginks and company finks” is a hat tip to Woody Guthrie’s labor anthem, “Union Maid.”
The Irrawaddy article (written by a Sweden) reads like the American deep state has lost interest in supporting the rebels (who sure looks a lot like Syrian “moderate rebels” from afar and according people like Brian Berletic and Jerry Grey – https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C2TZOfsMnm4) and want India to take over the job.
I wonder if Trump could be persuaded to stay once somebody tells him about Myanmar’s YUGE deposits of rubies, sapphires, and jadeite that America should take ownership of.
“Myanmar’s YUGE deposits of rubies, sapphires, and jadeite “
Rare earths.
Myanmar is nr. 3 in the world regarding the extraction of rare earth elements.
The areas where rare earths mines are located have actually seen a lot of fighting, with the rebels doing everything they can to conquer those places.
Isn’t it odd that we see so many places where “interesting” things happen having to do with “interesting resources” — hydrocarbons (Iraq, Libya, Iran, Venezuela), or pipelines (Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia), or rare earth elements (Myanmar, Ukraine).
Oh my! Didn’t even think about this angle! Thank you for connecting the dots.
There have been several comments recently about the lack of protests in the USA.
On Presidents Day there was a rally and protest at Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square attended by @1,000 People.
There was no coverage by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
There was no coverage by any local TV or radio station.
There was no coverage by the SF Chronicle.
ALL of these outlets had coverage of the vandalism at local Tesla Dealers.
This is our “Free and Fearless Press” doing what it does best.
Yes, this motivated my comment and link above regarding Barnard. As far as the (hopefully ongoing) debate, the devil is in the details (you mention no coverage, good point, deserves more discussion).
“This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump’s rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system.”
I got a chuckle seeing more uses for that term.
A few commenters have complained that USAID cutting funding is hurting people all over the world, especially in regards health, AIDS prevention/treatments, and other badly needed aid.
I’d misplaced it but found it again. According to the PEW research center, 16.6 billion goes specifically to Ukraine, and 15.6 billion goes to “global programs” with 2.8 billion going to the complete African continent. Lambert’s right in that Africa is not a country (we’ll miss you, mate).
So, looking at these stats, my guess is that the Ukraine has a massive AIDS problem. Why isn’t the media covering this??? /s
Gene Hackman and wife possibly murdered? Jeez. He was 95.
https://www.kob.com/news/us-and-world-news/oscar-winning-actor-gene-hackman-and-his-wife-and-dog-found-dead-in-their-new-mexico-home/
space heater. Carbon monoxide?
company said no sign of leak
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/gene-hackman-wife-betsy-arakawa-found-dead-1236148749/
So far no indication of foul play although the front door was open. They had been dead for some time. More detail here.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewkkkvkzn9o
…maybe by a smart aleck?
And what kind of hitman kills the dog, too?
It isn’t as if they’re gonna talk…
my friend said immediately “suicide” without knowing anything beyond the news headline
Right…the pills. It could be double suicide. One of the dogs could have pushed the door open.
If one wants to play Agatha Christie.
At any rate Hackman was an iconic actor of the late 20th.
Two other dogs were found alive and well. One outside and one inside.
I’m not willing to rule out fowl play, were any Cassowaries with priors known to be in the area?
I do not know what the weather was like in Santa Fe.
However, when the police say there is no sign of foul play, that usually excludes both suicide and murder/suicide.
When both people, and the dog are involved – we should always think as physicians about a very important winter time issue – and that is carbon monoxide poisoning. This can happen when for example the firebox in the central furnace is broken in any number of ways. PLEASE NOTE – the flames in a natural gas heater should all be blue. If they are orange or yellow or red in any way – that means there is incomplete ignition and almost assuredly carbon monoxide is being produced.
Carbon monoxide is also easily detected and there are now fire alarms that also detect it as well.
Patients will be bright red when this happens. Carbon monoxide interferes with the cells’ ability to adequately process oxygen. It can result in a complete inability to move muscles. And if the carbon monoxide level in the ambient air is high enough this can asphyxiate someone very quickly. Older people and small pets are much more likely to be killed. The smaller the pet the more likely they will die. I have heard stories from patients that aquarium fish are almost always all dead. When these furnaces do break, there is often a long period of time that they slowly begin to degenerate – so a non-lethal dose of carbon monoxide can be released and slowly get higher every day. In this event, the people in the house will often report very bad headaches. Be aware, when an entire household begins to have daily headaches, there may be a problem with the heater.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-27/no-foul-play-suspected-after-gene-hackman-wife-dog-found-dead-officials-said
They’ve ruled out carbon monoxide apparently. It has been called “suspicious.”
Thank you for reinforcing the danger of quiet, odorless, accumulative carbon dioxide poisoning. I know a family who were once almost done in by it. Everyone would wake up with headaches and feeling like they had maybe a mild flu coming on, then the kids would go off to school and parents would go to work and everyone would come home feeling fine. And then next morning the same would happen. When one of the parents told their nearby parent or parent in-law (a grandparent) what was happening, that grandparent person brought over a brand new carbon monoxide monitor/alert device which immediately started alarming. Everyone left the house and the grandparent person who’d brought over the alarm went out and purchased another brand new carbon monoxide alarm, different brand, to make sure the first device wasn’t faulty. Took the alarm device into the house and it also started alarming at the highest volume. Upon inspection a tiny, tiny crack was found in the firebox of the furnace, a furnace which had passed its yearly inspection.
Family was saved. No lasting ill effects. If you don’t already have a carbon monoxide alert/alarm device in addition to a smoke alarm device I encourage you to buy one. If the alarm device uses a 9 volt battery, change the battery once a year. It’s cheap insurance.
adding: if you live in a rental unit, do the same. Landlords are supposed to install devices and change the batteries, and that’s good. However, having your own device as well that you change the batteries on is even better. / my 2 cents
adding: the way the tiny crack in the firebox was detected was by having the furnace on and using a specialized carbon monoxide gas ‘sniffer’ used by utility companies. The crack was invisible.
edit: carbon monoxide poisoning.
A few decades ago there was a good/long report on local Michigan tv news about a family in Kalamazoo that had a CO problem. The plants in the house were all dying/turning brown, there was soot above the heating system vents, and the family said their cats were falling over.
Looking at the two cats my previous girlfriend left me with, I said I’m good.
(I have CO/Smoke detectors now)
Indeed. If you’re an indoor plant grower and your plants begin to develop unusual numbers of yellowing and dying leaves in the winter months, that could be a clue. Don’t ignore it. Call your local gas utility and report it and ask for a utility person to come and check it out. Really. The public utility is required to come and check out a report of possible carbon monoxide problems.
And this too from entertainment with a lighter touch though:
What Really Drove Barbara Broccoli to Break Up With James Bond?
After decades of fiercely protecting her family business, the longtime Bond producer just sold 007 to Amazon. Nobody can figure out why.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/barbara-broccoli-sells-james-bond-decision-1236146734/
“Why, after so faithfully guarding this precious family heirloom, would Broccoli suddenly unload it? And to the very people she’d been locking horns with for the past four years, since Amazon purchased MGM, Bond’s longtime home, for $8.45 billion in 2021? Insiders say there are a couple of theories.”
“Broccoli is said to have grown tired of that as well and clearly hit a wall with her new partners at Amazon, whom she recently described in a Wall Street Journal interview as “fucking idiots.” Those choice words, in retrospect, were probably a clue she’d had enough and was ready to bolt. Theory two: Jeff Bezos made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. “He read her quote in the Journal and got on the phone and said, ‘I don’t care what it costs, get rid of her,’ ”
Charming–Bezos. I’d say the whole franchise is soooo out of date. It was originally a kind of tongue in cheek spoof or generated many such imitators.
The spy-spoof element actually went back to “North by Northwest” as far as Hitchcock´s screenwriter Ernest Lehman argues who I´d agree with. Hitchcock predating Bond by 3 years.
What in particular would you consider out of date?
p.s. after a long hiatus first interview with Kim Basinger
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/kim-basinger-retirment-intimacy-coordinators-alec-baldwin-1236321432/
p.s. oh and of course “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955) (staging female characters, staging violence, hero always wearing his suit and always pretending to having “game” even if he is in over his head). Actually a remake would be making sense by now.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/26/us/organ-transplants-waiting-list-skipped-patients.html
What the family blog —– institutional rot/sepsis has even hit the organ-transplant system.
“….For decades, fairness has been the guiding principle of the American organ transplant system. Its bedrock, a national registry, operates under strict federal rules meant to ensure that donated organs are offered to the patients who need them most, in careful order of priority.
But today, officials regularly ignore the rankings, leapfrogging over hundreds or even thousands of people when they give out kidneys, livers, lungs and hearts. These organs often go to recipients who are not as sick, have not been waiting nearly as long and, in some cases, are not on the list at all, a New York Times investigation found……”
And the archive.ph: https://archive.ph/ngAnr