Scientists Just Discovered an RNA That Repairs DNA Damage – And It’s a Game-Changer SciTech Daily (Chuck L)
Alzheimer’s May Develop Differently in Women MedPage. Note that HRT, started early enough, is neuroprotective. In general, HRT gets an unwarranted bad rap. Women who start HRT comparatively early have lower all cause mortality than women who don’t. See here for details.
COVID-19/Pandemics
We’re losing decades of our life to this illness’: long Covid patients on the fear of being forgotten Guardian (Kevin W)
RFK Jr. tells parents to consider MMR vaccine amid outbreak The Hill
Climate/Environment
This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years Grist
Italy to reintroduce nuclear power by 2030 EurActiv
You may read that a new study says the AMOC will not collapse. Not true. The wind-driven currents will remain but the thermohaline currents may collapse in 20~30 years. It doesn't contradict what other "collapse" studies say & the authors agree.https://t.co/p5d0i9slst
— Dan Miller (@danmiller999) February 27, 2025
Since 1900, we've lost 75% of our global food crop varieties—the most rapid extinction of agricultural genetics in human history
Meanwhile, the US lost 93% of vegetable varieties between 1903-1983
This is one the greatest threats to agriculture and is rarely talked about 🧵 pic.twitter.com/jhcIADwZa5
— Sam Knowlton (@samdknowlton) February 28, 2025
China?
Beijing sees red over Marco Rubio’s comments on Taiwan and tariffs South China Morning Post (guurst)
Chinese factories see improved orders as importers rush to beat tariffs Independent
Afghanistan refutes Trump’s claims about Chinese presence in Bagram Airfield Global Times
Koreas
N. Korea warns of boosting nuclear deterrence after US aircraft carrier arrives in South Anadolu Agency
South Korea says nuclear weapons are ‘not off the table’ The Times
India
Modi’s developed nation dream has no basis in reality Asia Times (Kevin W)
European Disunion
European defence stocks soar as arms makers expect orders boom Guardian (Kevin W)
Report Your Family For Wrong Think, Says German Government Initiative Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
Can Germany Revive Its Industry Without Cheap Energy? OilPrice. See Kevin Kirk’s comparative energy costs chart from his inaugural Coffee Break for a quick answer.
Romanian far-right supporters hold protest rally ahead of election re-run France4
Norway rethinks €1.7 trillion sovereign fund to boost support for Ukraine EurActiv (Micael T)
State-owned Lernia is being sold off to German venture capitalists Aftonbladet via machine translation (Micael T)
Old Blighty
Meet the Zoomer Doomers: Britain’s secret right-wing movement Spectator
Israel v. The Resistance
Gaza ceasefire in peril as Israel and Hamas hit impasse BBC
‘No Other Land’: Palestinian-Israeli film’s Oscar win sparks outrage in Israel Middle East Eye (Kevin W)
Israel mulls extending service for reserve troops as renewed war looms YNet
UK government funds pro-genocide University Jewish Chaplaincy Electronic Initifada (Robin K). From late February, still germane.
I heard from my friend yesterday, a Palestinian detainee freed just a few days ago:
The officer was Emirati and was torturing and abusing him every 10 mins and urinating over his face.
He told him, “I am Emirati. How dare you attacked our brothers in Israel?”
— Abubaker Abed (@AbubakerAbedW) March 1, 2025
Israel’s Criminal Starvation of Gaza Daniel Larison
New Not-So-Cold War
From Politico’s morning European newsletter:
BREAKING OVERNIGHT — WHITE HOUSE PAUSES UKRAINE MILITARY AID: President Donald Trump last night suspended all U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The move followed last Friday’s disastrous meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, where Trump and his Vice President JD Vance berated the Ukrainian president in front of the cameras. “We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution” to the war, a White House official told POLITICO’s Eli Stokols.
Scale of the U.S. U-turn: A U.S. defense official told Bloomberg that all U.S. military equipment not already in Ukraine — including weapons that are currently in transit — won’t be sent to the frontlines. And per Reuters, Trump is simultaneously moving forward with plans to drop economic sanctions on Russia before a peace deal is even struck.
What’s behind the move: Trump made clear in public comments Monday that the minerals deal Zelenskyy had traveled to Washington to sign remains on the table. The carrot and stick approach is about forcing Zelenskyy into a bigger negotiation to end the war with Russia, Eli writes.
Damage control: Just before reports trickled out about the White House’s move to cut aid, Zelenskyy said in a social media video posted that he wanted to “create conditions for proper diplomacy, for the soonest possible end to this war with a decent peace.” He also said Ukraine, Europe and America together “can ensure decades of peace.”
MEANWHILE, IN BRUSSELS — EU LEADERS PAUSE NEW AID PLAN: Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is set to debut her toolkit for boosting EU defense spending at 9:15 a.m. (more on that below). But the other big item on the agenda for the European Council summit — a huge new infusion of aid for Ukraine — is in doubt.
DON’T look for the EU to step up in a big new way to fill the void left by the U.S. as European leaders gather on Thursday
‘This is a catastrophe’: Ukraine reacts to US military aid pause BBC
EU Commission president unveils €800 billion EU rearmament and Ukraine support plan Ukrainska Prava. Help me. Money cannot magic weapons into existence.
Europeans move towards seizing €200bn of Russian assets Financial Times
8 Demands Trump Has Made Before Zelensky Can Return Babylon Bee
White House wants filmed apology from Zelensky – Fox RT (Kevin W)
Ukraine debacle signals the death of Atlanticism Asia Times. (Kevin W). Keep in mind “signals”. This was baked in with Trump/Vance posture on Ukraine. But in keeping with Trump’s love of dominance, attention, and drama, this break was shocking by having an encapsulating fracas on TV.
This summer I’m joining the Ukrainian military. Steffen Berr, Linkedin. Micael T: “A fascinating combination of Darwin Award candidacy and virtual signaling from a Dutch. Darwin – he will die for sure. Virtue signaling – in three months the fighting may well have stopped.”
Sergey Lavrov: “Over the past 500 years all tragedies in the world originated in Europe or occurred owing to European policies. The colonisation, wars, the Crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War I, Hitler… The Americans played no seditious, let alone ‘inflammatory,’ role” International Affairs (Micael T). Lordie, Lavrov looks awfully eager to throw the US a bone. How about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Overthrowing Mossadegh and Allende? Our support of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and now genocide? Our many other regime change operations…particularly Ukraine?
Trump’s America is No Friend – Russia Must Stay the Course Global Affairs (Micael T)
OSCE shared intel with Ukraine before 2022 – ex-Greek ambassador RT (Chuck L)
Imperial Collapse Watch
An Idiot’s Guide to War Russia Observer (guurst)
U.S. Cattle Inventory Smallest in 73 years Farm Bureau (Micael T)
Trump 2.0
Beijing Hits Back as U.S. Tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico Begin Wall Street Journal Live blog, which is unusual for the Journal. Archived version as of 4:30 AM EST.
Trump Escalates Global Trade War, Sparking Tit-for-Tat Tariffs Bloomberg
On CNBC, Rohit Chopra says we do need to rebalance trade, but asks why Trump is obsessed with Canada and giving loopholes to pharma? Also why hasn't Trump closed the de mimimis loophole?
Then the anchors attack right-winger Steven Moore. pic.twitter.com/JU5ievAXF9
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 3, 2025
Trump Escalates His War on Independent Regulatory Agencies Washington Monthly
‘Trump hasn’t done anything’: Shoppers’ hopes for inflation dashed The Times
US auto industry could be collateral damage in Trump’s trade wars Independent. We’ve covered before but bears repeating.
DOGE
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway. ProPublica (Robin K)
Big Consulting Bosses Meet With Trump Officials to Save Contracts Wall Street Journal. This would be funny except their special pleading to be saved from the wrath of DOGE might succeed.
Democrat Death Wish. “Democrats en déshabillé” looks too mild these days.
Playbook: Democrats in despair Politico. Chuck L: “I can only conclude that if the Dems don’t want small donors’ money they don’t want small donors’ votes either.”
New @playbookdc: Last month, a group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials & party leaders gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia, for a retreat where they plotted their party’s comeback.
We got their takeaways. pic.twitter.com/lA1nVshriG
— Adam Wren (@adamwren) March 2, 2025
Democrats want Trump to confront the human toll of layoffs at address to Congress The Hill. And I want a pony. Trump has had, what, 8 years of being vilified? Think this will phase him an iota?
Our No Longer Free Press
The State Department Inflicted a Concussion upon Me Sam Husseini. !!!!
FBI Recruits Journalists and Attorneys as Informants Ken Klippenstein
Mr. Market is Moody
How big is the stock market’s America bubble? Financial Times
AI
Mindless Coping Wisdom of Crowds (Micael T)
Power Cut Ed Zitron. Important. You need to read in a bit to get to how this is pretty clearly AI (lack of) demand driven)
The Bezzle
El Salvador’s wild crypto experiment ends in failure Economist
‘Tangible desperation’: Critics’ withering reviews of Meghan Markle’s Netflix show as they mock ‘gormless lifestyle filler’ that shows her ‘joylessly filling party bags with seeds’ Daily Mail. She is rapidly becoming the Elizabeth Holmes of lifestyle brands.
Class Warfare
The Trump administration is waging an economic war on the poor and workers Economic Policy Institute
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus (Robin K):
— Danny C (@DannyC1111_DC) March 3, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
227 comments
Comments are closed.
It starts to sound more like a Mafia bust-out, stripping every asset and turning it over to Musk and friends.
For some reason, your comment reminded me of this scene from “The Goodfellas”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPtjyqgZAUk (1:09 min)
A fire sale for America’s assets?
The Yeltsin era in Russia was just a practice run. Now the show’s coming home to America, with an already-created oligarch class to facilitate matters.
Dead on, and good to see you here, Michaelmas.
One might suggest that the 1980s U.S. shift from a cultural paradigm of larger than life and therefore scary at best corporation owners/tycoons to one of celebrity, nimble, financiers/takeover pirates laid universal groundwork for both sets of theft/selloff.
As Dimitri Orlov warned us over a decade ago, it’s going to be much much worse in America. The ex-Soviet people had virtually free housing, no debt, and can get by on fairly simply things. We are none of those things.
The Sopranos had an episode on this too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out
You can’t be a Manhattan real estate developer without being owned by the Mob. I was surprised to see the movie, “The Apprentice” actually nominated for a best actor Oscar.
One thing I find interesting about Trump is the open, overt, unabashed acknowledgment of what Trump is. The “family business ‘ is called the Trump Organization. Saying the quiet part out loud, literally.
Not true. They big NYC developers/property owners are WAY WAY WAY too big and lucrative to be “owned” by the Mafia. I had Steve Ross as a client. Sometimes paying off the Mafia and being owned by them is in two different leagues.
The power of the Mafia has been successfully curbed in NYC over time. They had the garbage business taken away from them, and there have been successful crackdown on numbers rackets, for startefs.
When I was building the Chase Operations Center at MetroTech in Brooklyn in the late 80s, a substantial majority of Chase people were Italians from Brooklyn and a lot of them were open about their family connections: they had been encouraged to go into banking because under Reagan it was becoming a legal way to make better money than they could for the various mobs by that point, and safer.
This was Family Planning.
Army is next,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2nmZx02IRU
We are at the phase where oligarchs are ripping the copper out of the walls before the building collapses. They know what’s coming. It’s all about grabbing as much as you can while you can.
So when the Repubs do it…it is wrong but when the Dems do it …it is right?
Tom, Been thinking the same thing. Obama gave spaceX its blessing, then there were those solar panels, can’t remember the name but they were leased by homeowners and musk got all the rebates from the feds. Biden, used Musk satellites and I guess other war toys.I would also guess donations to the Dems were pretty big too. I think he has been owning the govt. for some time now. So Trump certainly is no different from the last two Presidents. However the access given to Musk has been stunning!
To me made Trump look weak to have Musk there in Oval Office. I must say this is really getting scary.
Muck can have all the security his money can buy but if someone (and worse for him) some 3 letter agency wants him gone, he will be gone.
He seems to frequently be going places on AF1. He thinks if he goes then Trump goes too, providing him more immunity from assassination?
Solyndra?
So . . . if the Dems did it, the Repubs should get to do it too, in all fairness?
Anyway, were the Dems pushing it to the current limits and end goal?
Yep. (Hope dies hard.)
“Report Your Family For Wrong Think, Says German Government Initiative”
Somebody should buy the German government a clue as it is obvious that they don’t have one. This is going to go down real well in eastern Germany in what was once the DDR. Back when Honecker was running things you had the Stasi policing people which played out like this-
‘Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people.’
The equivalent numbers for the present day US would be well over half a million informers. They were a hated feature of east German life and after the wall fell, you had activists discovering that their partners were actually Stasi informants. And now the German government wants to bring back informants again? That is right away why people will be more willing to vote AfD as this bright idea is probably targeting people who might support that party. Was this one of Habeck’s bright ideas?
Great movie on the issue: The Lives of Others
Orwell surely would like to remind the German government that ‘1984’ was a warning, not a how-to guide.
We are getting there…. excluding local police one actually uses or interacts with there are ~350k in dhs, dea, atf, fbi,cia, nsa
Why not count local police?
Because the local coppers can be bought off, while the Feds are way above the ordinary citizen consumer’s ability to pay.
The former NC docent Lambert’s reference to “Systeme D” is of utility here.
Also the brilliant documentary “Karl Marx City,” where a woman researches whether accusations of her father being a Stasi informant after the Stasi records were opened to the public. Seriously powerful stuff https://awfj.org/blog/2022/10/28/awfj-presents-karl-marx-city-review-by-marilyn-ferdinand/
>Democrat Death Wish. “Democrats en déshabillé” looks too mild these days.
Agree, and a prime example is this tweet I read yesterday by an erstwhile political presidential candidate that I supported financially and helped to sway friends and family to trust and vote for.
Bernie Sanders
@SenSanders
Meet Trump’s new best friend, Vladimir Putin.
At the heart of Putin’s rule are two forces: corruption & violence.
In Putin’s Russia, there is no freedom of speech. Protests are violently suppressed. Dissidents are murdered. And the billionaire oligarchs become even richer.
https://x.com/SenSanders/status/1896666599932989522
Projection much?
Yes, Bernie lacks the self-awareness to realize that all these problems he projects are here at home, the “good guys” we backed killed Gonzalo Lira, and we literally have a billionaire inside the WH enriching himself.
He doesn’t get it that this isn’t a good look for either himself or the party. Meanwhile, there are so many problems at home he ignores. A sad way for him to go out. Is there anyone left in the party who maintains their integrity?
Steven A. Smith should run.
> Yes, Bernie lacks the self-awareness to realize that all these problems he projects are here at home
right, he N-E-V-E-R talks about oligarchy in the US of A
Or suppression of freedom of speech right here at home. Oh, gee, look what just came across the news wire?
That is as close as you’re going to get to a slam-dunk violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment by the government.
Bernie? Are you there?
2, 4, 6, 8
No funding if you participate
Go team!
Sanders has been talking about oligarchy a lot:
There probably are, here and there. But it is an individual choice on their part and probably against the wishes of the party.
There could be more widespread integrity among state level and regionalocal democrat party people. One could look and see.
Looking at that council of Inner Party Democrats about excluding “progressive” and small donor influence in various ways . . . they are opening up a vacuum which those “progressives” and small donor support type people could begin to fill with a new party of their own.
Perhaps a Social Democrat Party. Or perhaps a New Deal America Party. Make
America New Deal Again. They could have little red hats with M A N D A on them.
Their mascot animal could be a panda colored red, white and blue instead of black and white. The MANDA Panda. Everybody loves a panda. The MANDA Panda could even wear a little red hat saying MANDA on it. The NDAP could sell stuffed MANDA Pandas wearing little red MANDA hats.
Supported by small donors only and verifiably. Perhaps a “27 A Month Club of such small donors”
The 9 or 10 years old calumnies about Russiagate, Putin!
The grannies and grampies who protested Nixon and Vietnam are now standing with Saigon on the Dneiper.
I learned long ago from my brother not to talk “war” with my sister in law who stands with Zelenski.
Oh the ruin of minds…. TDS.
To a less scary liberal I said, send your grandsons!
I am trying to get Ukraine to rhyme in Country Joe’s chant…..
‘or they won’t take foreigners’
You should tell them but they do. And helpfully provide the website where they can go join to fight the Russian bear-
https://ildu.com.ua/
Then ask them to send you a postcard from Kiev when they get there.
“Postcard from Kiev.” Please, I am sure that you meant postcard from Moscow upon the final victory.
I thought about saying that in my comment but then I thought no, baby steps first. :)
A placeholder until better comes along:
And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, it’s just such a pain
Next stop is U-Ukraine
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopie! We’re all gonna die!
Great!
Tx
Great interview with Joe McDonald regarding the origin of his, ‘gimme an F’, cheer at Woodstock and the censorship that followed.
https://www.countryjoe.com/cheer.htm
I don’t know, this needs some more work:
“Don’t ask me I don’t have a brain
Next stop is east Ukraine.”
Can’t believe I sent him $25
Right there with you—in 2016. I just can’t decide whether that whole primary campaign was just a ruse or whether something really did happen to change him between then and now. Blackmail? Threats? Or maybe he was just a cynical actor playing the sheepdog all along. Certainly BlackAgendaReport held that view even back then….
Same here, I’m thinking I got my money’s worth for the learning I received from the 2016 election cycle.
I believe I remember Yves Smith as having reminded us several times that since he was not a Democrat, he had to pre-agree in advance to terms and conditions to be allowed to run in the Democratic primaries. One of those was to support whomever the nominee was if it was not him. They didn’t allow an asterisk-condition that the deal was voided if the Party cheat-engineered him out of the nomination.
A lot of people act like jilted lovers because Bernie was not the heroic savior they longer for.
As Gandhi said, ” you have to become the savior you want to see in the world”.
I always thought the Black Agenda Report people were driven by spiteful jealousy of Bernie Sanders more visible profile than their own.
Tucker Carlson pointed up Sanders’s primary weakness which is a psychological weakness.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-bernie-sanders-losing-weak-lamest-revolutionary
I think Sanders would have been swindle engineered out of the nomination no matter how strong he was. But at least if he had been strong and would have had the bitter vengeful streak needed to ” lose like a winner”, he would have left the campaign, left ugly, and burned the futhermucker down on his way out the door. Or at the very least set up to run as an independent and then say that his condition for not doing so would be to get nominated as Clinton’s Vice President ( or Biden’s Vice President the second time around).
lol, I feel the same about Obama’s 2008 campaign!
I sent Bernie 2-3 hundred and Obama a couple hundred. I was as stupid as I am.
No more money for politicians, I’d rather just burn it.
I sent him $27, twice. The Dems ended up with my email address and phone number.
It’s amazing that after the primaries shenanigans in 2016 and 2020, Sanders had the gall to call Russian elections fixed and manipulated. Whether he suffers from Stockholm Syndrome or something else is at play, it’s both sad and infuriating to see his credibility and legacy go up in flame. And yes, I know some will say that they’ve been burning since 2020, but stil.
Alex Cockburn didn’t think much of Sanders as a genuine socialist and I saw Sanders on Moyers before the 2016 run and his fixation on “billionaires” left me unconvinced. As talked about here elsewhere today, the problem is not just the billionaires but also the PMC class of elites and upper middles who are allied with them. It seems as though Trump and some of his Randian allies have decided to jettison the PMC so billionaires like themselves can carry on. As long as Atlas himself doesn’t shrug, say the technocrats, it’s all jake.
It’s Ayn’s pulp fiction world and we are just living in it.
Nevertheless there is some misery loves company justice to the departure of make work jobs among the deep state regime changers. Wasn’t Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs a thing here awhile back?
Hope things aren’t as messed up in BG as they are here.
Things are messed up everywhere in the “free world.” I’m beginning to worry that the Euros are even more worthless than the Dems, a feat I had thought to be impossible.
When the New Deal was ascendant, the PMCs of its day all supported it, including those who actually worked in it and for it.
Wipe out the billionaires and multi-millionaires and give the PMC a better power center to work for and they will work for it. They did during the New Deal till its end ( stealth-starting with President Kennedy and his Upper Class tax cuts . . . ” let’s get America moving again”).
New best friend? Bernie can’t even get the propaganda right!
In my time of following politics, the saddest thing, bar none, is what has happened to Bernie Sanders. (At least what seems to have happened, as, of course, I don’t know the man.)
Quick edit: One thing that appears to have happened is that he became an early afflictee of TDS, as in nothing matters, at all, compared to defeating Trump, and now, interpreting a whole lot of events in terms of the “unparalleled evil” that Trump’s influence has inflicted on them.
I wonder if Bernie is suffering from Long Covid cognitive degeneration. He is in the prime target demographic for such an outcome.
There is also the simple matter of age.
If I was more of the conspiratorial type, I’d swear both parties were actively colluding on the dems current strategy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say things will be family blog awful by the midterms. Even a small shift towards the concerns of most working people in the US would pay huge dividends at the mid-terms, but the DNC seems to be actively moving away from any such positions.
Maybe all that hate of Russia’s political system is just projection…
I supported him in 2016, but always thought of him as a totally establishment candidate. This impression was cemented when he endorsed Hillary.
Too bad David Graeber died too soon. There are some writers who make sense (e.g. Thomas Frank), but it’s hard to think of a political person – however marginal – that fills the bill.
“That’s the way it goes”.
Reading your post, I (and others?) may have been projecting my need for a really good man to lead us as President onto BS. I managed not to “over trust” Obama in the past. I guess I may have snookered myself with Bernie. All these guys, they sure can talk some you-know-what.
The Ancient Greek Roots of the Oval Office Opera:
https://www.beyondwasteland.net/p/business-decision
>Israel’s Criminal Starvation of Gaza Daniel Larison
The use of starvation as a weapon is a war crime. Israel’s use of aid as a bargaining chip isn’t new, but it is still outrageous.
I’m encouraged by Trump’s actions viz Ukraine and I’m horrified that he allows starvation to be used against Palestinians. I’m almost starting to think this is part of some sick use of a program of domestic schismogenesis, speculation of course.
There is documented usage of schismogenesis techniques by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, an institutional precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)), against Japanese-held territories in the Pacific during World War II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis
OK, how about this scenario?
Trump will be awarded the Peace Prize for stopping the violence in Ukraine.
It will be awarded to him in jail by the ICC for his arrest as a war criminal for supporting genocide in Gaza by sending 2,000 pound bombs that were used to speed a final solution.
At least Trump has a basis for receiving the peace prize, unlike Obama and Trump would certainly would be deserving of being labeled a “war criminal,” a label that many of his predecessors would equally be deserving of…if only ICC had teeth.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over the USA or Israel.
If the ICC goes after someone the USA wants to punish, then all is good and the USA touts the ICC’s findings.
If the ICC goes against the USA’s desires, then it is to be ignored.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
One suspects the rest of the world is paying attention.
One conspiracy theory I have entertained for a while is that Trump is a deep state op to foment domestic schismogenesis. I’ve seen too many people I know lose their damn minds over stuff that Trump did that is weak tea compared to what Reagan or Bush II did.
He encourages it. He wants every last Gaza Palestinian moved out of there so he ( ” the US”) can take it over.
One underdiscussed motive for Trump’s desire to own Gaza himself ( ” for America”) is the substantial amount of offshore natural gas in Gaza’s territorial waters. Trump would like all that gas and money for himself ( ” for the US”).
How can Trump be a humanitarian for Ukraine, wringing his hands about all the young men being killed. And then support the Palestinian genocide by Israel?
Easy. The humanitarian for Ukraine stuff is just PR for the “folks”.
Trump wants to stop the Ukraine war asap because he can see that with every day that goes by, Russia is winning more territory. It must drive him nuts seeing just how delusional the Europeans are about this war. And Z. Trump wants the Russians inside the tent but weakened, and the Chinese defanged. And US the hegemon ruling uber alles.
He wouldn’t be a billionaire if he couldn’t work out fantasy from hard cold business fact.
> This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years Grist
>> (In 2023 the global biochar market was worth $600 million, and is expected to grow to $3 billion this year.)
An oikos needs an exchange product to engage with the broader community. We have an abundance of wood, a superabundance since the hurricane-winds, and biochar can be used within the oikos, as well as an export.
The question is, how much non-renewables are being exported off the land in this exchange? Biochar may be unique by allowing greater access by the plant to those resources (minerals, aeration, …). That alters the variables for resource depletion. We shall see.
Side notes: unlike perlite, biochar clumps like mad. And I just put eyes on ‘1491’ yesterday, have not read, so many books… But despite statistical arguments against synchronicity, I find it’s just easier to accept these coincidences as serendipity, and use them to drive the behavior (‘read 1491’). Again, we shall see.
1491. Great read. One problem — to me– is that darned global population. Lots more ewwwman beans today than in 1491. I think we are beyond overshoot, and it’s going to a long painful process to get to some form of stasis, if we manage to get there at all.
I remain,
Steadfastly-
Mister Happy
“… it’s going to a long painful process…”
I disagree. I’m thinking that some “Black Swan” event will trigger a massive population crash.
The Jackpot may not be so much a “conspiracy” as an observation concerning ongoing historical processes.
>>>The Jackpot may not be so much a “conspiracy” as an observation concerning ongoing historical processes.
Often those black swan events look to be own goals, self inflicted, albeit unplanned suicides, by whatever civilization gets the hit with the elites doing most of the work because it benefits them in the immediate future. Looking at today’s cluster of a planetary civilization, I think its either disease or climate with former more likely to be the death blow, or at least give the most damage.
Despite the likely catastrophic damage the changing climate will inflict, people readily see mass flooding, rising waters, and drought, and even if it is too late to prevent, they will try to deal with intelligently. Looking at the response to Covid, I think that it is harder for people to accept, however late, and deal with, but a disease can quite easily kill tens of millions, if there are no effect measures, and it can spread easily from country to country no matter how prepared one single country is. Something like Bird Flu or Covid could easily mutate into something more like the 1918 Influenza, the Black Death, or AIDS in their level of mortality and the time to stop the spread is much more limited than climate change. Days, weeks, or maybe months, but the level of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, along with the massive amounts of propaganda and incompetence by the government and corporations can easily slow any response by months.
But there are many deliberate efforts to help the Jackpot process along. The careful effort to suppress information about ” Covid is airborne” as long as possible. The effort to make sure Covid became an entrenched-enough pandemic that it couldn’t be stopped before deciding to declare it one. And now the effort to gain enough time for this new bird flu to become a Spanish Flu 2.0, if it can.
Also the adamant refusal to improve indoor air quality.
“RFK Jr. tells parents to consider MMR vaccine amid outbreak”
That’s a bit weak. He used Samoa as an experiment in what happened if you did not vaccinate a population against measles which then blew up in his face and over 80 people died but with measles threatening to return to the US, he chickens out. Instead of saying based on what he saw in Samoa that yeah, giving your kids the measles vaccine would be a really good idea, he does jazz hands. He just says have a talk to your local doctor about it so as far as he is concerned, you’re on your own. And if you choose wrong, then it is all on you and he cannot be blamed.
The ‘Talk To Ya Doctor’ punt is so ruefully similar to the CDC’s rhetorical and logistic punting on masks annd protection strategies, and NY’s disastrous attempt to turn ‘you do you’ into warning signage.
Can’t remember which show I saw, I think it was Vejon Health Dr McMillan had I think a danish doctor. In the clip she mentioned how the measles vaccine had decreased all cause mortality where the MMR actually increased it. Can only find study on the measles vaccine and its effect on all cause mortality see here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37482223/
“Alzheimer’s May Develop Differently in Women”
Menopausal HRT has high rates of effectiveness for reduction of menopause symptoms just based on anecdotal evidence. As the study points out, risks are rare, and the long-term health benefits might be very consequential. Unfortunately, the politicization of HRT in the context of transgender health care could end up entangling access to HRT for everybody, not unlike how the politicization of abortion has f*’ed up emergency care for miscarriages. Seems like the “moral” objections to specific kinds of health care often ends up limiting access for broader groups than just the targeted class.
Nonetheless, the study about HRT and reduction of mortality is very encouraging!
If for anything I would encourage perimenopausal women to start to take HRT for quality of life improvement when symptoms become unbearable.
There’s a lot of perimenopausal symptoms that women aren’t told about like hives, fatigue, and depression. The night sweats and lack of sleep alone is enough to drive anyone crazy.
I take combo birth control as HRT and it really is life changing for the better. I was reticent about HRT due to cancer fears, but that old study isn’t relevant to women starting HRT before menopause. And from what I understand really isn’t relevant to the HRT of today period.
“This summer I’m joining the Ukraine military”
Lol, I want to print this on some of those lawn placard and distribute them to the local team blue party bigwigs.
I have been telling people this exact thing. If you feel so strongly about Ukraine vs Russia and unless they are stopped, it’s Paris next that they should go join. Pick up a gun and go kill people.
It’s pretty amazing the responses. Well they haven’t asked for any help or they won’t take foreigners or some other excuse.
These people who tell the Ukrainians to die to protect the west are the worst kind of cowards. The kind that are fine telling you to go die but not them.
Yup. It’s a funny thing how those “I stand with Ukraine” signs are always in front of rich people’s houses.
>>“I stand with Ukraine” signs
Going hand in hand with the “We’re all in this together” signs which on the other side read “Don’t give up” placed in a yard in front of a house with a Rivian in the driveway. Ugh.
Do these primming cannon fodder’s heirs and assigns have Blackrock stock they hope to get dividends from Caucasus oil revenues they lust after?
I won’t buy their plane tickets but I will send them a box of 5.56 mm COD as a going away gift.
“OSCE shared intel with Ukraine before 2022 – ex-Greek ambassador”
No surprise here. Nearly a decade ago I would read how OSCE observers would find and visit a position set up by Donetsk or Lugansk militias. Minutes after those OSCE observers would leave, that position would come under shellfire by the Ukrainians. The people in both Republics got real hostile when they found out what they were really up to and jeered their presence. And at the outbreak of the war there was an article on NC saying how the OSCE surveillance cameras were being used to target nearby Russian formations – and the Russians had the receipts to prove it. As a force, they have totally discredited themselves as who could trust them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Security_and_Co-operation_in_Europe
Has Jacques Baud, the former Swiss officer who worked with the OSCE and was a rare voice of sanity (often linked here) in the first months after the invasion, commented on this? Was it a reason for quitting? He was one of the first to call out AUK shelling of Donetsk as part of a series of provocations intended to draw Russia into preemptive combat.
Re: AI Derangement Syndrome
I find it odd that Ed Zitron’s piece on Microsoft cutbacks in data center construction makes no mention of DeepSeek. Per Wikipedia:
«[DeepSeek] claims that it trained its V3 model for US$6 million compared to $100 million for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023, and approximately one-tenth of the computing power used for Meta’s comparable model, Llama 3.1.»
Seems to me DeepSeek’s efficiencies alone are sufficient to account for Microsoft’s retrenchment.
I’m afraid new, more efficient LLMs will only amplify the power of the MSM, rendering Zitron’s glee over the imminent demise of LLMs blindingly premature.
Same same. DeepSeek meets a melioration criteria (‘good enough’) without getting borged. John Robb suggests the use of AI tutors will rapidly overwhelm the capabilities of public education. I’ll note the particular case of home-schooling, where for example an Evangelical family can entirely exclude the external world from the response space.
Big computers still to be used for things like locating submarines. But LLM’s?
> “What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?” Wages. They’re trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
«What trillion dollar problem is AI trying to solve?»
Disassembly of enemy operating systems to reveal flaws that can be exploited by a novel computer virus.
EcoHealth Alliance redux.
Uh, guys? Microsoft in the last month:
> Feb 11: Anduril and Microsoft partner to advance Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program for the U.S. Army
>> Because what actually happened here is that Anduril took a $22 billion U.S. Army contract over from Microsoft to help Microsoft save face. It will now be on Anduril to rescue the beleaguered IVAS effort and build a new line of augmented reality headsets
and
> Feb 11 links: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers
which was an admission against interest. The last is listed for April 2025 so that’s pretty new. It looks like they’re not just trashing the platform, they’re trashing the whole philosophy of life.
He had more mention of Deep in other recent articles.
The articles tend to be long and sometimes repetitive. But still… interesting details.
Ed Zitron is right;
I was convinced that OpenAI was DOA after the Chinese revealed they had a better, cheaper, less power-hungry version of AI.
It seems Microsoft has decided since then that its own doubts warrant backing way-off of spending that only a few months ago was signaling an absolute commitment.
Trump doesn’t have a clue about Tech in general, or AI in particular, but he sure loves him some grift, and the bigger the better.
So, when does the AI bubble burst, before, or after the $500 Billion government investment Trump announced in Sam Altman’s second-rate house of cards?
I suggest that haf the story is that the less power hungry approach will win. But also, the power futures are for some years away. Microsoft has time to push the processing into Windows so every user is contributing to the ongoing processing. Sort of an AI torrent.
Probably when Deepseek R2 drops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyeLHjot6vg
Natch! Where there are large, large sums of money to be squandered you are sure to find SoftBank.
Thanks for the Ed Zitron link discussing the implications of MS pullback from data center expansion for AI; that was eye-opening. Reading this, I was reminded of Hubert Horan’s lengthy series on Uber; it appears to me that EZ thinks OpenAI will exceed Uber’s cash burn by an order of magnitude or more.
EZ closes on a somewhat apocalyptic note:
> “There are no “phony comforts of being an AI skeptic” — what I am writing about here,
as I regularly remind you, is extremely scary stuff.
If I’m right, tech’s only growth story is dead. ”
IIRC, VPOTUS not long ago pledged USG interventions to maintain US supremacy in AI. Granting EZ’s analysis, lots of subsidy may be needed; thankfully (if one is an AI optimist) USG can create as much USD as needed to fund the policies it wants to pursue. Perhaps a notional future US sovereign wealth fund could take on large tranches of future issuance of Softbank debt.
Magnificent antidote
Those birds are ball busters, literally.
Thank you, Yves.
I’m glad that you have linked to the issue of seizing Russian assets.
Differences of opinion between Starmer, for, and Macron, against, were aired over the week-end. Retired British diplomat Lord (Peter) Ricketts suggested, as a compromise, that the assets or proceeds from sale be given to Ukraine.
There’s also push back from the Belgian and Luxembourg governments and their clearing and settlement banks Euroclear (spun out of JP Morgan in the 1990s at the SEC’s insistence) and Clearstream. A friend and former colleague is at Euroclear.
JP Morgan remains the main custodian for Euroclear. That allows the US bank to see the trading flows and portfolio operations of clients and rival firms, which drove JP Morgan to the top of investment banking. The US giant should be worried about having to transfer assets against the Euroclear account and the loss of a big revenue stream.
Un peu d’histoire: Sovereign debt as reserves have been favoured, at first by the US and UK, from 1922, the Genoa conference, to the Basel accords on banking regulation.
The UK has the highest exposure to foreign creditors, called “the kindness of strangers” by then Bank of England boss Mark Carney during the Brexit campaign, in the OECD. Who would buy gilts, UK government bonds, if the UK does not respect property rights.
The British government’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold at the Bank of England in 2019 was the gateway drug for what is proposed now. The world is a different place now. The UK and the west are in weaker positions.
Readers may be interested to hear that the seizure of assets owned by ordinary Russians living in the EU and even UK, nothing to do with the government, and even the internment of such people have been suggested to the European Commission. US readers may be stunned to hear that some of the information being provided to the Commission is based on what Rachel Maddow and Catherine Belton spew out, including that Trump and Boris Johnson are Russian agents, the former since a visit to Moscow in the 1980s.
Living in Europe and watching its daily descent into self-destructive madness and dystopia is truly scary, mostly because there are very few contrarian voices. The psychologist in me is fascinated by the interplay between sofisticated propaganda and narrative warfare aimed at its own people, the psychology of hate, group dynamics in both creating consent and suppressing dissent, conformism and willful disregard for anything that can create cognitive dissonance. The human in me is both scared and determined to seek ways to effectively resistance against the massive apparatus creating all of the above.
Aren’t the Brit elites absolutely out of their senses with rampant Russophobia? I mean, this is quite remarkable. Obsessive to an extreme that makes them the less reasonable people I have seen in… my whole life?
“Afghanistan refutes Trump’s claims about Chinese presence in Bagram Airfield”
For some reason Trump really has a bee in his bonnet about all those abandoned US weapons in Afghanistan – some $80 billion’s worth I think. The collapse happened on Biden’s watch, not his but he seems to be thinking about trying to get some sort of win by getting all those weapons, trucks, etc. back again. As Biden stole $7 billion of Afghanistan’s funds as he went out the door, perhaps the Afghans could make Trump a deal. The US could use that $7 billion to buy back at least that amount of US weapons so the Afghans get their money back and Trump can show off a coupla warehouses of US weaponry returned back again. But I don’t think that Trump will go for that. He wants ALL that gear back which means that Afghanistan would be effectively demilitarized – which would be handy when the CIA sends ISIS militias back into Afghanistan again.
My gut is this is about the Rumsfeld CNN fears. The White House wants a chance for the President to look tough, and they have the same problem as Biden: the low hanging fruit is gone or anything else is too craven to warrant support.
The new Afghanistan narrative can be “limited” and framed as getting our stuff back.
“For some reason Trump really has a bee in his bonnet….”
Remember that T tried to withdraw the US military from Afgha and was thwarted by his generals, he claimed at the time. Then B gets elected, promptly withdraws US military from Afgha, (in prep for Ukr ?), and leaves most of the big hardware behind.
T is still, imo, plenty miffed about that.
I wonder if that’s why he ‘retired’ the JCOS bigwigs right out of the gate this time? He doesn’t want any perceived inhouse impediments to a peace process in the Ukr thing. Just a guess
Also, leaving all that big, expensive, latest US hardware behind must irk from a business point of view. / ;)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera
adding: by “claimed at the time” I mean he was saying this before the 2020 election. He said he was trying to get US troops out of Afgha, they’d been there too long and weren’t making progress, but the generals wouldn’t let him get out. The generals kept telling him it was too dangerous to get out. No way it could be done in less than several years. etc. I do remember seeing that in the news several times.
Then B gets elected and whadda-ya-no, troops out of Afgha.
Julian Assange on the purpose of war in Afgha. utube. ~1 minute.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hY0OL9wcf1c
Britain: Meet the Zoomer Doomers: Britain’s secret right-wing movement Spectator
Germany: One of the striking aspects of the AfD’s success in the German elections was the party’s popularity among the young, especially men under 25: one in four voted for the hard-right movement. Support for bracingly conservative positions among Gen-Z men isn’t just a German phenomenon, however. In Westminster and beyond, a new breed of young right-wing influencers is seeking to shift our politics.
Romania: Romanian far-right supporters hold protest rally ahead of election re-run France4
Holy cow, Batman! Their spreading like a bad habit your mother told us to avoid! And their doing it in secret with young men by taking advantage of their being vulnerable and disillusioned! One of America’s most valuable resource! What are going to do? The Joker is probably behind this!
Batman – Stay calm, Robin. Good things come to those who are patient and brush and floss their teeth. Alfred…would you put in a call into Gotham City Hall?
As ever, the absence of an economic left drives the people to right populism as the only political ideology that registers real social malaise. Neoliberalism inevitably leads to revivifications of the national socialist ethos with different permutations and emphases. Eventually the neoliberals will try to co-opt these movements, integrating them as far as possible into the mainstream, focusing on common points of interest like major industry and Israel (the AfD is resolutely Zionist), but I am not sure how well this integration will go, given the very poor quality of European neoliberal leadership and certain economic realities there is no getting away from.
One of my all time favorite articles is MOA’s When Nothing Left is left, The People Will Vote Right Wing. Think is was written around the time of Hillary’s presidential campaign.
An Idiot’s Guide to War Russia Observer (guurst)
Justin Pierre James Trudeau: HE’S BACK! The Dark Lord has returned! Cancel his pension now!
Good to see Patrick Armstrong post. I followed him until he suspended his blog due to Canadian authorities visiting him to inform him that his pension and himself would be dis-appeared if he continued to tell the truth about Project Ukraine.
I too am glad that Patrick Armstrong is once again posting. The clarity of that post is like a breath of fresh air and tells you that what ever the UK/EU plan, it is not going to work. They talk a big game but as Armstrong shows, it won’t amount to anything because they have nothing. For example. Starmer talks about British boots on the ground but what he does not mention is that they could only fight for five days before having to pull out as that is all the ammo that the British Army has in storage.
Thanks for the heads up. The most eloquent bit was in the middle, explaining how machinists learn from masters, and then pass it down. It ends with:
A perfect tie in with Ed Zitron’s Microsoft/OpenAI/Softbank piece and Steve H.s comment that the only use for “AI” is wanting to cut wages – particularly programmer wages. And how will the next generation of programmers learn how to keep our civilization running?
I get the feeling the answer is the banker’s IBGYBG
Gooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
La piste de la resistance was on hand in Vermont to protest against the Veep intentionally sliding downhill repeatedly, a trademark of the administration as it were.
JD skis just like you think JD would, full of confidence in theory and yet he slithers down the mountain like a grandma with osteoporosis while nursing a hangover.
Still its good to have somebody in the White House that doesn’t whack off repeatedly, chasing the object of their desire in an attempt to squeeze it in a fitted hole.
I would like to ask the NC community to help point me to data on the frequency of wildfires in California overall or LA in particular from 1900 onward. A friend in Bulgaria needs it as part of her work on her PhD, but so far has only been able to find data from the late 1980’s onwards. Links to any resources would be very helpful and much appreciated.
Also, there was an excerpt from a book on wildfires in LA area, posted as a post or a link here shortly after New Year’s, in which the author discussed how building in firezones and the attendant suppression of numerous but smaller natural wildfires resulted in fewer, but larger and more devastating fires. I can’t seem to find it, I will be grateful if someone can point me to it.
Thank you in advance 🙏
Can’t help you with the stats, but the book excerpt might have been from Mike Davis’ The Ecology of Fear, in which he described several incompatibilities between unbounded LA development and its environment. Though it didn’t approach the magnitude of the wildfire/mud torrents danger you’re interested in, his expose of the minimization of tornadoes — turned into the occasional picturesque “water spouts” — was good, lacerating fun.
I think you’re referring to Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear. This was one of the first links that came up:
Mike Davis (Resilience)
I expect your friend may need more detail. I’d recommend starting w an office of the US Forest Service in CA. Hopefully they haven’t been DOGEd.
Thank you for the suggestion and yes, that was the book, in a long excerpt from Longreads.
Your friend might find these useful:
http://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309277722_Historical_reconstructions_of_California_wildfires_vary_by_data_source
I searched on DuckDuckGo for “data source wildfire frequency california since 1900” (without quotes); only looked at the first dozen or so links.
The capradio page has a couple of “Contact us” links, and I suspect the authors of the ResearchGate paper might be able to help.
This might be helpful at least as a place to start. The site has a “contact us” option that could prove useful in
getting more detail. The site maps fires starting in 1878. https://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/#6/38.58/-121.49
Some more links here. This focuses on California chaparral, but it links to the Fire Effects Information System (FEIS) at the USDA, Forest Service, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory:
Fire regimes of California chaparral communities: Information from the Pacific Southwest Research Station and LANDFIRE
https://www.fs.usda.gov/database/feis/fire_regimes/CA_chaparral/all.html
I remember looking at these links when the LA fires were blazing.
California universities scanned many of the older books in their libraries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These scans are available online, I believe through Project Guttenberg but it has been at LEAST a decade, if not two, since I went stumbling through the various finds (looking for old books on metallurgy).
Try this for pointers: https://www.ochistoryland.com/1889fire
“EU Commission president unveils €800 billion EU rearmament and Ukraine support plan”
I put that title through a semantic analyzer and this is how it translated it-
“Ursula von der Leyen unveils an €800 billion EU slush fund that she and her friends will be able to get even more wealthier from with no accountability”
Remember that before the German elections, rumours, based on a premature pronouncement by Annalena Baerbock, started to spread about the EU preparing a €700 billion rearmament plan that should have been kept secret till after the elections.
Of course, the government denied such rumours as conspiracy theories based on a tendentious interpretation of Baerbock’s words.
The government was right: it appears the plan will not be about €700 billion, but about €800 billion. So there.
If the EU is devoting nearly a trillion euros toward the establishment of a European army, then this gives Trump a very good excuse to pull the U.S. from NATO.
“I think it’s great. You’ll have your own, great army. Great soldiers. You can keep buying our weapons, sure. Lots of opportunities there for both of us. But you don’t need our soldiers anymore. I’m happy for you. It is about time you started paying your fair share. But it is great. We don’t need NATO when you are taking care of things yourselves. We’ll be great partners!”
Here’s a horribly cynical, but maybe, at least, somewhat real, concern: What’s to be done with all those young American males who would otherwise be kept occupied for awhile in Germany-located Army bases doing heroin in their spare time (as in some movie I recall watching, starring Joaquin Phoenix?). They’ll just be back here, probably unemployed, causing big headaches.
The U.S. is all about options. For example,
(a) become cops
(b) become prison guards
(c) fentanyl
The amount is not settled, circles around Merz and the European Peoples Party have been talking about €1 trillion beginning the day after the German elections. Seems Baerbock isn’t seen as “ambitious” enough…
“Not settled”. Some link commented before says that when talking about war the idiots only talk about money. I guess that 800 billions or 1 trillion is for a 5 year period, so 200 billions annually. Defence spending in the EU is projected to have totalled about 326 billions in 2024. So, if these 200 billion fund is an addition to these 326 billions it would be a 56% budgetary increase overall though I suspect that part, or a lot of previous budgets will be transferred to the EU (an idiotic thing, IMO) so that military budgets will increase only by a little. Who knows but these numbers don’t really say much.
Something to keep in mind is that it’s not just how much more they want to spend, but what else they want to do. MEPs and other Euro functionaries follow up the calls tonspend more with promises to loosen regulatory regimes, especially environmental and to cut social spending. They argue this will grow the economies and encourage innovation. In reality, they want to transfer yet more wealth to the oligarchy, to make it cheaper to pollute and to plunder what’s left of Europe’s natural resources, most of which are in environmentally sensitive areas or theaten prime farmland, at least in the Balkans.
After all, rapacious vultures never let a good crisis go-to waste, do they?
That was the subject of the Patrick Armstrong piece linked above (Idiots guide to war). Actually ended with the idiots talk money quote.
Got brain?
If you want a limited hangout, you’d better check that out, got brain?
If you want to get down, with tech pumped by clowns, got brain?
Use your mind, use your mind, use your mind … got brain?
If you watch fake news, you got them, AI blues – got brain?
When your crypto is gone, and they wanna grift on, got brain?
Use your mind, use your mind, use your mind – got brain?
When your cerebrum is gone, and they want to grift on, got brain?
Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back, got brain?
Use your mind, use your mind, use your mind – got brain!
Use your mind, use your mind, use your mind – lame-brain!
Sung to the tune of “Cocaine”, as performed by and written by JJ Cale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWmD_HcOcfU
Those birds are very ballsy.
I’ve noticed quite a few comfy PMC friends changing their fb photos to Ukraine support-oriented things in the past week. Have had to bite my tongue to not tell them they’d better sign up themselves or send their military-aged sons and daughters to fight. Figure it’s an extension of TDS. They needed a new supply or something to virtue signal about and this fit the bill. If I tried to give them facts it would go over like a lead balloon.
Thank you for the loss of food crop varieties link. Definitely something I’m interested in, especially apple and pears. The older varieties have been being torn out for dwarf trees for decades, or the orchard itself torn out and not replaced. It’s heartbreaking. Can’t find the best eaters and bakers anymore.
Sorry I meant dwarf trees for stuff that stores a lot longer or looks pretty at the supermarket.
Concerning rare apple and pear varieties, have you seen this guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUydhmJnCxo
He has several videos on rare apple varieties, and on his site it looks like you can get some of the seeds:
https://migardener.com/
Correction: It looks like you might be able to get some of the seeds through his site. They only mention adopting a tree, but if you contact him you might be able to get some of the seeds.
I’ve mentioned “Trees of Antiquity” in the past and have purchased from them as well. They have (at least to me) an amazing variety of apple trees (218 varieties listed on their website) plus pear, plum, apricot, etc and all with multiple varieties. Some are already sold out.
https://www.treesofantiquity.com/
If you mean apple seeds, the apples from trees grown from those seeds will not match the apples from the mother tree. They might not even taste very good.
Indeed, apples planted from seed used to be called ‘spitters’ as they tasted awful…
It’s my understanding that apples do not throw true, that genetically speaking the apple seed does fall far from the tree.
That crop variety loss is a big worry. Too many eggs in one basket – as the Irish belatedly discovered back in the 1840s. I believe that there are parts of Ireland that still have not recovered their pre-famine population to this day. Those examples were all vegetables but can you imagine a brand new sort of rust getting a hold in the American wheat belt?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_leaf_rust
It devastated Oz wheat farms in the second half of the 19th century until a rust-resistant wheat was developed but lots of areas never went back to wheat again.
Ergo, ergot?
That new crop supplement and cash generator from Big Seed?
Lie to the masses, Sucker them and Drug them, all at once.
Call the new strain the Hofmann Hope. Also eligible for USDA crop sustainability payments, food stamps and health savings accounts. Talk about win-win-win! /s
The island of Ireland as a whole hasn’t reached its pre-famine population yet, though that is partly the result of over a century of population decline after the end of the famine.
TDS pulls on several strings of calumny, an is innocently in to colonizing Russia.
The people with Ukrainian flags in their profiles call me a coward for asking questions about how the “Coalition of the Willing” will go about its business in a way that won’t endanger the unwilling on this rather small continent. Some tell me to go shoot myself or to do other things that are not fit to repeat in a family blog. And no, none of them envision themselves doing the actual fighting. Too many armchair field marshals and geostrategists, not enough Indians amongst that lot.
Speculating freely: if some countries in the EU decide to go to war against RU in Ukr it will not trigger NATO’s article 5. Ukr is not in NATO. If some countries in the EU decide to go to war against RU in Ukr they will not drag in the USA to back them up, at least not while T is pres.
Therefore, some countries in the EU who decide to go to war against RU will lose. The Euro will crash. And that’s just for starters. / ;)
Right now I think this is all huff and bluff, testing the waters.
Or as someone above wrote, it’s a new money laundering scheme cooked up by the elites. (It’s 2030 and you will own nothing.) That certainly sounds plausible. / ;)
The schemes that those EU nations come up with always have a rider at the end of it saying ‘then the Americans will bail us out and fight the Russians on our behalf.’
Rev Kev:The schemes that those EU nations come up with always have a rider at the end of it saying ‘the Americans will bail us out and fight the Russians on our behalf.’
The European military and political leadership responsible for WWI were referred to by later generations as the Donkeys.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/28/alan-clark-the-donkeys-review-1961
Death of a generation: Alan Clark’s The Donkeys review – archive, 1961: This seething book describes the destruction of the pre-war professional British Army in 1915 and the folly, stupidity and incompetency of the commanders
Starmer, Macron, VDL, and the rest are the New Donkeys.
These schemes those EU nations come up which assume ‘the Americans will bail us out’ by, as Starmer suggests, providing US air cover for French/Brit/European ‘peacekeepers’ on the ground in Ukraine are just a metric of how deeply ignorant the likes of Starmer and Macron apparently remain.
[1] The US can’t provide air cover now as Starmer fantasizes it can, because it couldn’t put up a no-fly zone as the likes of Hillary Clinton et al fantasized earlier. And that’s because the Russians can and will shoot down with missiles anything that the US or NATO puts in the air over Ukraine.
[2] The US can’t bail the EU out and fight the Russians on the Europeans’ behalf because the US would lose just like the EU/NATO would. Because in fact the only power the US has now over the situation in Ukraine is the purely negative capability to cut the weapons supply to Ukraine and shorten the war.
[3] The EU/NATO can’t put ‘peacekeepers’ on the ground. And that’s because the first and last reason the Russians went into Ukraine was because the one thing they were not going to permit was NATO forces on the ground.
I despair. How and why are people as stupid as Starmer and the rest permitted to achieve positions of such responsibility?
US auto industry could be collateral damage in Trump’s trade wars Independent. We’ve covered before but bears repeating.
My neighbor across the street appears to be transforming his house and grounds into an auto fixer upper shop. For weeks going into months now, vehicles mostly small trucks pull up, with several various men dressed for the task of working on vehicles, crawl underneath to do repairs. They work on his driveway and park on the street in front of his house. Work ends as sunset approaches and light is lost. One guy spent days trying to replace something or other underneath a vehicle. Several people/vehicles a day come and go. Here in the South, it’s common for lower income to store non working vehicles on their lawns and back yards. A few have several such vehicles. There they stay, accumulating rust and become eyesores. Nice Third World touch for sure. Rarely did I see that up north.
Similar topic: Links regarding Trump wants to end Russian sanctions, and Trump has not helped us with inflation. Well, here a grandstand Trump might do, though it would more PR than any real help: Import a huge amount of eggs from Russia and drive the prices down by half. That just might become a talking and even a legend amongst his bade, it could become good PR for Trump regardless of any real benefit or not.
The US egg corporations would never stand for it. They are making too much money right now and would probably tell people not to trust ‘communist’ eggs and how it is unpatriotic to buy non-American eggs as MAGA, amiright?
I believe the u.s. auto industry is suffering less from collateral damage resulting from Trump’s trade wars than suffering long-term and deep damage as a result of the predations of u.s. auto industry’s Corporate management.
Through the years I’ve observed that a continually repaired or otherwise cared for automobile can go a long, long time. It seems, though, that human nature’s need to display mitigates against taking advantage of that fact. When, in the ’60’s, the notion, “status symbol”, entered common parlance and popular discussion, the automobile became its most principal object. That seems to have never changed, if anything becoming more pronounced. I drive a 21 year old pickup. Some other old guys like me who’ve gotten too tired to keep up those kinds of appearances drive and maintain even funkier models. All the younger, striving fellows I know drive something less than 4 years old with a large note on it that just SUCKS GAS! They might have an older model sedan in the yard up on blocks that they intend to fix up for their teen-aged son or daughter.
timbers, the fact is that rural areas of the north deploy the same derelict vehicles, though sometimes moved around to the back.
It was not uncommon for decent sized farms in VT to sport refuse ravines, where old washing machines, tractor tires etc would be left to relax peacefully into the earth. I know; I lived on one.
Mr. Market is having a sad … glamour boy NVDA is cratering, oh baby, no bueno – that’s a proxy for future growth of hyperscalers AI plans.
Short at will, boys and girls!
Tanking Dow Jonestown is about the only effective resistance against the menace @ 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, and yet it hurts everybody else too.
In the immortal words of our 43rd president … “this sucker could go down!”
Friendly reminder, kids!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb
Target reported their quarterly earnings this morning, and from his words ( their CEO, Cornell ) to the market ears, if one was either watching or listening….tariffs on imported products from Mexico will cause prices to increase.
I trust the large retailers on this point, as opposed to for example, Commerce Secretary Lutnick. This administration moving forward on their tariff agenda is going to be a potential pain point at the grocery or supermarket. Albeit easing gasoline prices could help to offset. Added, this administration wants to cite the McKinley administration use of tariffs but that was then…early 1900s.
And somehow, the S&P made up almost all the losses by close, and NVDA is now *up* 4%. Makes no sense!
A lot of it bled off, we closed near the lows of the day for the S&P and Dow Jonestown, as Wuk likes to put it.
BA was a big loser – down 6.% in heavy volume! That will warm the hearts of most of us.
NVDA clawed its way back but the chart now looks broken. Faith in Big Tech will die hard, but die it must.
“Norway rethinks €1.7 trillion sovereign fund to boost support for Ukraine”
If Norway gives any money to the Ukraine they will never see it ever again. They may as well set it on fire and throw it into the air. The real problem here is that Norway has a €1.7 trillion sovereign fund. If Norway was in the Middle east or North Africa, the west would have already attacked it and stolen that money by now. But it is not the Ukrainians that they should be worried about and their money. It is by people that live in places like Brussels. For them it is a huge massive honey pot and you can be sure that there are all sorts of schemes about how to get the Norwegians to cough up that money for their own bank accounts. This article mentions that that there is a shaming campaign going on right now. Fortunately for Norway, they are not in the EU so Ursula cannot simply demand that Norway hand over that money for some ‘worthy’ causes. But they should be wary.
Lotsa links today. Thanks. Re Trump, Mexico, tariffs, autos.
“Kelley Blue Book says Trump’s tariffs could raise the U.S. price of the average new car – already approaching $49,000 – by $3,000 or more. The price of some full-size pickup trucks could shoot up by $10,000.”
My car was assembled in Mississippi but the engine came from a plant in Mexico. Of course the fact that we are currently dependent on Mexico doesn’t make sending auto production to the much lower wages south of the border a good thing. Also those full size pickups are hugely profitable for Detroit which might have to eat some of those tariffs to meet sales targets.
Will the long range reindustrialization goal survive the short term pain?
The local VW car dealer is selling the 2025 “ID Buzz” wagon for ~$72K. The median salary/wage of a U.S. worker is ~$50K. That means someone with a median income would have to up every penny they earned for over 1yr to purchase this vehicle.
It would be interesting to see how much the original VW Bus, even without the iconic peace sign, cost relative to median income of worker when it came out. Electric or ICE, tariffs or not, these car manufacturers/dealers are not dealing with the reality of the majority of American worker’s purchasing capacity. Time to let the Chinese EV’s in?
https://www.vw.com/en/models/id-buzz.html
I wish, although I have no intention of dumping my much liked Koreamobile. Supposedly the average new vehicle cost now is around 47k. Surely this also has a lot to do with skyrocketing car insurance.
The upsizing of the American ride in the last couple of decades is ridiculous and the public negate the safety improvements by driving more recklessly.
We have a welfare state for aging corporations and new but connected grifters.
As a Canadian, I was thinking that if this Trudeau was that Trudeau (Pierre), the best response would be to set up an auto pact with China. 25 grand for an EV. How do you like us now, Unca Sam?
Sean Gorman: 25 grand for an EV.
I’m in the UK and this is quietly happening here, to the extent that London Transport is even buying one hundred bespoke double-decker EV buses from BYD for its fleet. (It already has a thousand-plus electric buses.) Here’s all the BYD dealerships in the UK —
https://www.byd.com/uk/find-store
https://www.byd.com/uk/electric-cars
I’m in central London and public transport is a lot easier for getting places here than having a car. But if I get a place outside town, I think I’ll check out a BYD.
Trump Escalates Global Trade War, Sparking Tit-for-Tat Tariffs Bloomberg
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Donald initiated a lawsuit every 10 days on average for 30 years before he became President in 2017, and you almost get the idea these tariffs are ad hoc lawsuits of a sort.
It has been a long, cold winter in Buffalo, and now that spring is at least somewhat in view, they must suffer the additional indignity of paying $25 for a Labatt’s.
Drink watered down bunny urine!
There’s always Genesee!
Those 80’s Genesee Cream Ale commercials were hysterical.
“The one to have when you’re having more than one”
Schaefer!
Cream Ale? Vague memories of drinking it behind a shopping plaza, or in the woods, during a mispent youth.
Since 1900, we’ve lost 75% of our global food crop varieties—the most rapid extinction of agricultural genetics in human history
Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, IA, is devoted to legacy seeds [https://seedsavers.org] I used them regularly for yrs
Yes, they are wonderful. Also, saving your own seeds is critical. Seeds and plants have memory. The generational seeds will remember your back yard. “Oh, grandma was born right over there.” Nearly every year we experiment and put in our own seed and simultaneously put in new seed from local stores. Our seeds ALWAYS have better germination. We’ve done this for years, and our babies always win. It still amazes me.
Another benefit of a short supply chain.
How beautiful is that quote about Grandma born right over there. You have made my day and going forward all my plants will be related to each other…..and I will just be another Grandma.
I find time spent in a garden soothes the weary soul
Good to hear from you.
Just for information: Until 2020, France had an exceedingly restrictive law regarding seeds. Only those varieties that were listed in an official register (requiring the fulfilment of quite stringent conditions) could be commercialized — but farmers were not allowed to exchange them (e.g. after collecting seeds from the plants they grew out of them).
Other seeds outside the register could be exchanged, but only free of charge and only between nonprofit organizations and hobbyists; in other words, commercial farmers were not authorized to exchange seeds not in the official registry.
The law changed so that farmers may now exchange those unlisted seeds, and those same seeds can be provided also on commercial terms to hobbyists.
It is not just the concentration in the agribusiness that is causing that reduction of genetic diversity; lobbies worked (and are still working) really hard to make it legally very difficult (at least), or impossible (ideally), to escape from the IPR of seed companies.
Part of my job working with the 4H kids is to teach them how to manipulate fruits and vegetables into giving us their seeds. Some of them are quite obvious, some not so much. It is also imperative to know on each type of plant when and how to let them go to seed, and how to handle them. How to produce seeds that are true, etc……and most importantly doing this yourself and not depending on nurseries. How to make good compost, good potash, and good bone meal and which plants need what ratio of these fertilizers and at what time of their life cycle. This is wisdom that comes from a lifetime of “messing around”…..it is my privilege to share with these kids – and the joy I get when they take the initiative and do something amazing on their own is hard to describe.
So much of my time is spent also with tiny tongs, microscopic glasses, and little tiny rubber bands and bags as I teach them how to cross breed and fertilize. We have genetics in the wild going on in the greenhouses and plots, and there are invariably big surprises with various plant shapes, taste, size, color, etc every year. It is glorious. Everything in our yard is built and made for pollinators to be very happy, and they do not disappoint – it is just you have to be very careful to protect your experiments from them.
This is lots and lots of hard work and at times very tedious, but our family and neighbors have a degree of food security and healthy food that is hard to price.
I cannot imagine any government being allowed to get in the way of this kind of thing. What a shame.
Thank you for doing that Mr. IM Doc. The lessons learned from participating in 4H
(and FFA), are ones that certainly build a resilient, can do person. It brings kids closer to understanding how nature really works, how to participate with it, and become a more well rounded resilient person. In that I also include all the programs that 4 H and FFA offer that teach kids about animal husbandry.
Re the Oscar win for No Other Land–I didn’t catch the Oscar show but supposedly the crowd stood up and cheered the win. Good. Meanwhile the Israelis are having a sad that genocide is not popular. Their spokesman claimed “Israeli Jews have No Other Land” but of course many of them could return to Brooklyn and other points West and some of them have done so since the mass slaughter cranked up. It’s surely true that the Dolby Theater audience included some of the many American Jews who reject the hasbara. Good.
Taibbi and Kirn. ATW, no paywall. utube.
America This Week Live on Monday 3/3/25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS8rneA7cWY
Thanks although this Crooke worth a look as well–just out with Judge Nap.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/how-europe-views-trump
Thanks for the link. Crooke is always good.
Crooke I believe the first to massively warn of the so-called energy “transition” to non-fossiles as dead-in-the-water – which as we now know was mostly a diversion by the Greens to justify their anti-RU moves since the entire operation lacked any substance in policy or planning. You could argue it was to enforce Green agenda without any public discussion in the shadow of the Ukraine War: “Shut up for the greater good”.
Has Crooke been mentioning this energy issue lately possibly quoting his own predictions?
EU Commission president unveils €800 billion EU rearmament and Ukraine support plan – Ukrainska Prava. “Help me. Money cannot magic weapons into existence.”
They’re probably cool with this effect:
European defence stocks soar as arms makers expect orders boom – Guardian
And tech stocks are being categorized more as defense stocks. It’s also going to fit in with the “we need to adopt AI” mantra.
Ambitious grand-daughter of Ukrainian Nazi says not to worry: British nuclear weapons can protect Canada against Trump.
The meta state, the luftreich is going bonkers.
“British nuclear weapons can protect Canada against Trump.”
Nope they cannot.
p.s. great stuff for “Crimson Tide”-type movies for a new era!
btw nice dialogue from 1995 in the light of today´s state of events:
Crimson Tide 1995 “The true enemy is war itself”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hur6LcyuTuU
Granted it´s primitive but Patton, Hitler, nukes, Clausewitz – it´s all in there.
And yes: It´s a Gene Hackman.
It´s the stuff American audiences love(d) to hear:
Crimson Tide Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjRxdrg9BtU
…perhaps one of the more memorable scores by Hans Zimmer.
I appreciate Lavrov’s point, but negative (critical) Eurocentrism is little better than positive (laudatory) Eurocentrism. Europe was not responsible for “all” tragedies in the world in the past 500 years. The Crusades do not belong in Lavrov’s post-1500 timeline. The analogous Turkish conquests were about to erupt in the opposite direction, and they would be just as ferocious. The scale of human misery inflicted during the Crusades pales in comparison to, say, the 17th-century Manchu Conquest. In the absence of European cruelty, leaders such as Nader Shah found plenty of their own.
Human history has never orbited the west coast of Eurasia, for good or ill, and believing so invites a superficial view of the importance and history of peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
It’s better to cultivate interest in the lesser-known histories of lands outside Europe, who had agency, triumphs and tragedies of their own.
Hear hear. That is what I thought. Lavrov was being a bit selective there. Hopefully not just sucking up to the Yanks.
Playbook: Democrats in despair
“Those gathered then laid out 20 solutions for how Democrats can regain working-class trust and reconnect with them culturally.” So, “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors…”
Huh? I would think those small donors ARE more likely to be working class, so focusing on the working class and regaining their trust would likely *increase* small-dollar donor dominance.
Ya know it’s bad when the party of the ‘little guy’ have an anthropology conference discussing how to reach the
deplorableunknown ‘little guy.’Nah, that’s “thinking”. Not allowed…..
Like their comment “We’ll only take money from the *good* billionaires.”
YahSure….
“The dominance of small-dollar donors” is one of those phrases that really speaks for itself.
What they don’t seem to realize is the Democrat Party is DEAD. I agree with Mark Twain when he said.
“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow forecast has Q1 GDP looking like it’s in a freefall. The included graph is not pretty.
After reading Ed Zitron’s piece about AI and the hype around AI being the next big profit center in tech, I realized the the FAANGs that have been keeping the stock market aloft may start retrenching across the board. Nvidia is down. Apple pulled one of its services out of the UK market rather than give the UK govt a backdoor, etc.
If the FAANGs are over weighted on the upside in the stock market their turn could have an outsized effect, too. Just a guess.
Who is Yamandú Orsi, the history professor and heir of José Mujica’s left wing who is the new president of Uruguay –– BBC
I suppose this is a good summary of how a sector of Latin American progressivism is configured in practice: a mixture of political/ideological tendencies that, although mutually exclusive, pretend a mere juxtaposition of them, subordinating the “social content” (mainly redistribution of wealth) to the relentless and incessant sifting of the market.
re: FBI Recruits Journalists and Attorneys as Informants Ken Klippenstein
How much does a journalist informant cost, I wonder. And, related, I wonder what would be the motivation of the journalist informant. Usually it’s one of the MICE – Money, Ideology, Compromat, Ego. I don’t see how such an informant would be motivated by ideology against news media but what do I know. And the FBI being law enforcement, would they “recruit” informants with blackmail/compromat? So that would seem to leave Money and Ego.
re: Intuition
I’ve never been a big believer in intuition. I have found decisions, including snap decisions, rely on knowledge, experience, and ability. I contend that the author has not lost his intuition but rather lost his confidence to make decisions and questions his ability to do so. Kind of like getting the yips in your putting stroke after being remarkably good at it.
I have never been a big believer in intuition. I think decisions we make, including snap decisions, are based on knowledge, experience, and ability. What happened to the author is that he has lost his confidence, and so questions whether he can make decisions effectively. Kind of like getting the yips in your putting stroke after being remarkably good at it.
I disagree with your assessment of intuition. As you state in your comment “…decisions we make, including snap decisions, are based on knowledge, experience, and ability.” Where I differ hinges on the word knowledge. You may not have experienced or may have explained away situations where a feeling of knowledge arrives unattended by evidence, training, or specific experience. Intuition is defined as “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference” or “immediate apprehension or cognition”. Perhaps I disagree based on a belief that differs from what I infer you believe. I have many times felt an immediate sense of the rightness of a decision or a certainty of a piece of knowledge I spotted in a mire of data. I believe that feeling arrived without reference to any prior knowledge, experience, and ability. I suspect you might argue that I am merely fooling myself and with a little more reflection I would discover my prior knowledge, experience, and ability that informed my decision or my certainty. Perhaps, but too many times I have felt depths and connections between things that I have not learned or been able to unravel, depths and connections whose existence I later confirmed through further study. One downside to my intuitions is that I felt depths and connections, confirmed their existence, and lacked the ability to understand and fully know them through any chain of rational thought, deduction, or inference. I like mathematics but lack ability in mathematics other than my intuitions of deeper connections I have felt but been unable to grasp. This might be one broader interpretation of the meaning in the curse in the punishment of Tantalus. A further component of this downside to intuition is how many times my intuition has fooled me and made it difficult to fully understand and grasp some of the undecidability proofs. I comfort myself that I am in the company, though not of anywhere near the same caliber, as persons such as Bertrand Russell.
I tend to trust my intuitions more than I trust my recall of knowledge, experiences, or some ability I might have. And I remember how often intuition has overcome past ‘knowledge’ that proved false.
Crank this one up for the SOTU!
DOGE House Blues
Keep your eyes on the inbox, your hands upon the wheel-mouse
Keep your eyes on the inbox, your hands upon the wheel-mouse
Yeah, we’re going to the DOGE house, gonna have a real … uh good time!
Yeah, back at the DOGE house they found you’ve got to go!
Yeah, back at the DOGE house they found you’ve got to go!
Cause you’re in the wrong place, just shut-up and go down slow!
Let RIFs roll, headcount, tolls!
Let RIFs roll, headcount, tolls! 2x
Let it roll, all night long
(Do it Elon, do it!)
[Guitar]
Allright!
Ya gotta roll, heads, roll, ya gotta thrill my soul, alright!
Roll, roll, roll, rolla-thrill my soul
[Scat singing]
Yeah, right!
Aghastified, baby
Aghastified, baby
You’re just DOGE chow 2x
Save our tech bros! 2x
At night
Well, I woke up in mourning and I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up in mourning and I got myself a beer
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near
Let RIFs roll, baby roll (3x)
Headcount rolls … all night long!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV9DJwJKWMw
About the entry on loss of plant varieties . . .
”
Sam Knowlton
@samdknowlton
Since 1900, we’ve lost 75% of our global food crop varieties—the most rapid extinction of agricultural genetics in human history
Meanwhile, the US lost 93% of vegetable varieties between 1903-1983
This is one the greatest threats to agriculture and is rarely talked about ”
The Seed Savers Exchange was founded to counter exactly this problem, in its own small way. It will become 50 years old this summer.
https://exchange.seedsavers.org/home
From ‘We’re losing decades of our life to this illness’: long Covid patients on the fear of being forgotten
Just mind bending
(bold mine)
Let me give you a clue here: What causes long-COVID is getting infected with SARS-CoV-2. Hard to fathom, I know.
Amazingly, they do mention the dangers much later on
(bold mine)
So progress I guess.
Nothing about how to avoid getting infected, given how dire each infection is.
(bold mine)
Although the writer apparently is looking at getting round two of long-COVID. I just can’t even anymore. I really can’t.
This is a profound observation that has become more incontrovertible in the last few years, where we have seen Western inability to manufacture weapons in quantity in stark terms. Usually in the US, weapon discussions take on a strong economic flavor, as if once you write a large check, the rest will follow on automatically.
However, the deindustrialization of the US and Europe over the last 40 years has made it impossible for domestic weapons manufacture to take place on much of a scale. Quite frightening when you think about it, and even more frightening when you realize that leaders don’t recognize or understand the problem. The fact that our leaders are mostly lawyers and MBA’s means they have probably never done so much as put together a birdhouse.
Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model
This timeline is absolutely mind bending. This is how Zed, an Open Source code environment, which is apparently being used as a delivery system to eventually sell people a code assistant LLM, is doing it:
(bold mine)
So literally they deal with the non-determinism of the LLM outputs by passing the data off to Google’s LLM and having it operate as a check on whether the original LLM output is garbage or not.
No, for real!
For code, we should be using strict assertions. I can’t wait until someone uses this stuff or the stuff that Microsoft does with GitHub CoPilot to code something like MCAS.
Man, this year is already so scorched!
Saw a utube video about msft ceo’s prediction that SaaS will be replaced by AI agents. When perusing the comments, the amount of mindless hope was astounding. AI is magic!
Sal over at “What’s Going on With Shipping” commenting on the Trans-Pacific Maritime Conference, tariffs, and port taxes:
What’s Going on With Containers? | Trans-Pacific Maritime (TPM) Conference Underway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN_V83Q2Ii4
So both Ukraine and Europe are in shock that Trump actually stopped the flow of US money to Ukraine. True enough you cant print bullets, but money is like air in armed conflict. No one else wants to pay for the Ukraine fiasco or if they do, can’t.
I have to say, I was surprised that something didn’t cop up at the last moment. A major false flag, the Republican hawk contingent, loose cannon Neocons…something. Granted, my intuition that they would have to walk back the narrative seemed almost impossible. But support for Ukraine was a mile wide and an inch deep. So they wont bother.
If Trump is willing and able to stop the money, how can the war not end? Trump as Putin’s poodle? He is a lame duck and was recently (last year) threatened with prison. Accusing him of treason is not a threat or problem.
Interested parties have to adjust. Russia keeps the territory it has. Wins on a TKO and gets its prize (something), Ukraine survives with over half its territory but has to retire from the ring.
Per the infowar narrative, Trump saved Western Ukraine from Putin, who wants it to recapture the Warsaw Pact countries and re-establish the USSR.
Europe has its issues, but how awful is calling off Cold War 2? Nobody has to pay to remilitarize the new Europe/Russia buffer less border. Europe can get back to building a theoretical European mutual defense force to fight a theoretical war with Russia.
There is money to be made reversing the sanctions. There is always another global threat equivalent to 1939 Munich to tee up for a spending spree.
I’m probably too optimistic.
SOTU (State of the Union) on deck … I know it will trigger me, so sitting this one out.
But, in case anyone has a drinking game going, I will suggest to imbibe whenever any of the following phrases is uttered:
“It’s gonna be beautiful”
“Waste, fraud, and abuse”
“Sleepy Joe left me a disaster”
If there is ever going to be a full out brawl in Congress it’s going to be right now. Sgt of arms called already. LOL
For those not watching Trump’s speech to Congress, Representative Al Green just got removed from the chamber for violating decorum.
Gosh, the old “you lie” thing from the Obama years seems so quaint. I am embarrassed as a Democrat watching this. My kids behave better.
I peeked at the HIll dot com w/no audio, where I saw a pic of M T-G in her red MAGA cap, that’s a violation of House rules.
Clown World keeps on defining deviancy downward.
In lieu of having all the same silly protest placards, the Donkey Show could have tried a little harder and had handmade versions, but no.
They are a talentless and tiresome lot at this point. And Trump is doing his thing. The part about “I can never make you happy” was top tier trolling because of the truth in it.
I succumbed to temptation and watched a bit on the Hill.com… something significant I think is Trump spent the first 90 minutes talking about Americans and how he’s helped them, vs. foreign policy stuff.
He finally mentioned Ukraine and Israel about 95 minutes in, and then moved on to other things. I think that sends a message … Sleepy Joe raged against Putin and Xi for what, like 30 minutes of his last SOTU? Plus lying about his “imminent Gaza ceasefire” that never happened until Trump was literally about to be sworn in …
Near the end of the speech T mentioned Ukr again. He announced he’d just received a letter from Z this afternoon saying Z is ready to sign a minerals agreement and wants peace now.
That’s interesting if true. / ;)
T also said he’s going to give the Pentagon a ton of money to build a US Iron Dome system, aka a Star Wars system. Sounds like another boondoggle to me.
Looks like the Z letter is true.
From the Guardian UK:
Zelenskyy says he will work under Trump’s leadership as he proposes Ukraine peace plan
Ukrainian president signals willingness to sign US minerals deal as he attempts to rebuild ties after Oval Office clash
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/04/zelenskyy-ukraine-peace-plan-ready-work-with-trump
I had the Breaking Points livestream on but I fell asleep partway through. Don’t think I missed anything, really …
I saw that. After which the Dems seemed to spend the rest of the speech mostly slumped down and looking miserable.
It really was something.
“The hug” is going to get some coverage.
It seemed their performative disobedience was looking at their phones. That will show them!!!
The plaintiffs in the case of Public Citizen Inc et al v. Donald J. Trump and Office of Management and Budget (D.D.C.) wasted no time in filing a Notice of New Evidence document after Trump asserted that Musk is the head of DOGE in tonight’s Address to Congress: