Ancient bread rises again as Turkey recreates 5,000-year-old loaf PhysOrg
World’s oldest fingerprint may be a clue that Neanderthals created art Guardian (Kevin W)
They Inhaled Xenon Gas and Scaled Everest in Days. Is It the Future of Mountaineering? New York Times
The ocean seems to be getting darker ScienceDaily (Kevin W). It’s mad at us.
Doctors sound alarm over anti-inflammatory drugs taken by millions that leave you open to deadly viral infections Daily Mail. JAK inhibitors.
Humping Iron The Baffler (Anthony L). On female bodybuilding.
#COVID-19/Pandemics
H5N1 BirdFlu is the most prevalent animal disease EVER.
More animals, more deaths than any other disease, EVER.#pandemic pic.twitter.com/hVfDDn9JNO— Dr Richard Hirschson (@richardhirschs1) May 27, 2025
Amid measles outbreak, Texas is poised to make vaccine exemptions for kids easier WJTV
China?
China’s Soft Spot in Trade War With Trump: Risk of Huge Job Loss New York Times. Erm, China in recent years has relied more on investment rather than exports for growth. However, there’s a lot of employment in export sectors, so the employment vulnerability could be greater than contribution to GDP would suggest.
Developing nations face ‘tidal wave’ of China debt: report Agence France-Presse. Of course, China could restructure these debts. But the Chinese public was unhappy about losses on its FX reserves. If debt forgiveness is done on a scale when it is visible to the Chinese public, would this become a source of controversy?
China’s Metal Exports Surge Stirring Global Markets OilPrice
Climate/Environment
Global temperatures could break heat record in next five years Guardian. resilc: “This will be the shocker to USA USA when crops fail. South Vermont we are getting loads of rain in bunches at a time. Hard to plant any garden.”
Fine dining in the apocalypse: how to be a middle-class prepper The Times
Dangerous heat bursts have been spiking temperatures across the US as people sleep. So what are they? Independent
Dry heat to torrential rain – enter the age of ‘weather whiplash’ BBC
Tornado Alley has become almost everything east of the Rockies — and it’s been a violent year Kansas Reflector (Robin K)
Southern France winemakers turn to aloe vera as drought reshapes traditional vineyards Vinetur
Egypt’s resource crisis: Water, food, and a surging population France24
Global heating may be fuelling rise in deadly cancers among women Independent
China?
China’s Air Conditioning Use Poised to Skyrocket This Summer Bloomberg
India-Pakistan Row
India’s Ladakh Hydropower Plan Sparks Fears of Indus Water Crisis TNN English
South of the Border
Rio’s Beach Culture Clashes with New Regulations Threatening Livelihoods and Legacy. Rio Times. Micael T: “Gentrification? Monopolization?”
European Disunion
EU to maintain Article 7 procedure over Hungary’s ‘rule of law breaches’ Anadolu Agency
German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal Politico (Kevin W)
I’m 23 years old, I live at home – and I love it. Aftonbladet via machine translation. Micael T: “Propaganda-piece for youngsters to accept that they will never own their own house and now not even be able to move out from the parents.”
Old Blighty
An island of strangers: The end of England Sam Kriss. Important. had tended to see criticism of immigration in the UK (particularly since long-standing EU migrants were run out due to Brexit, generating a big upsurge of non-EU immigrants) as legit beefing about the failure of governments to make even remotely adequate provision via more affordable housing, increased NHS staffing, and more teachers. If you believe the neoliberal notion that we need graof, and populations need to increase or at least not fall, in the low-birth rate UK, the only way to solve the equation is immigration. In the US, during a sustained immigration surge, concern about the dilution of American culture (as if we really have any) led to concerned efforts to promote assimilation. But now doing so would be culturally insensitive….and not doing anything is so much easier.
Israel v. the Resistance
BREAKING: Last Hospital in North Gaza Shuts Down
Al-Awda Hospital, the final functioning medical center in North Gaza, has now been fully evacuated to its branch in central Gaza. This marks the complete shuttering of all three hospitals in the governorate—officially leaving the… pic.twitter.com/tro5LEvznz
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 28, 2025
US Has Delivered 90,000 Tons of Weapons to Israel in Nearly 600 Days Antiwar.com (Kevin W)
‘Dehumanisation by design’: US-Israeli Gaza aid operation descends into chaos Middle East Eye (resilc)
Surprise: CIA link to sketchy Israeli aid scheme Responsible Statescraft (Kevin W)
Trump’s Had Enough of Israel’s War. Can He Get Netanyahu Out the Way? Haaretz (Robin K)
Randy Fine Should Resign American Conservative (resilc). Not just Netanyahu….also barking mad enablers.
Col. Larry Wilkerson: Russia Launches Massive New Offensive — The Battle to Win It All! Dialogue Works. IMHO, although the entire talk is worthwhile, the important part comes later, on Israel, starting at 35:25. Wilkerson says he has it on good authority that Israel has strike packages v. Iran ready. He further argues that Israel is quite capable of staging a false flag attack, say against Israelis in the US, to justify an attack.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Visits Israel, Meets With Netanyahu and Ben Gvir Antiwar.com (Kevin W)
A Word of Caution to President Trump Regarding Iran Larry Johnson
New Not-So-Cold War
How Donald Trump Discovers the Art of Political Negotiation Thierry Meyssan (Micael T)
The Memo: Trump paints himself into a corner on Putin and Ukraine The Hill. No mention of what sure looks like an assassination attempt on Putin.
Does Ukraine now have a free hand in the use of Western weapons? Anti-Spiegel via machine translation (Micael T)
Recycling Old News Media Push For More War In Ukraine Moon of Alabama. Important detail on the Merz Taurus missile walkback.
The Ukrainian Government Keeps Sanctioning Its Domestic Critics The Dissent
Analyzing Zelensky’s Fearmongering About Fall’s Next Russian-Belarusian Drills Andrew Korybko (Micael T)
How Peace-Oriented Norway Learned to Stop Worrying and Love War Glenn Diesen
Syraqistan
The Blair-Bush Project in Syria That Brought Al Qaeda to Power Vanessa Beeley
Pressure builds up on Dbeibah as protests rage on across Libya Arab Weekly
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars Guardian (Kevin W)
Imperial Collapse Watch
The End Of America As The Essential Consumer Nation Ian Welsh (Micael T)
The defense-industrial base and alliances: US Steel and beyond Asia Times
Trump 2.0
Trump slams Biden, praises ‘tough cookie’ Hegseth and talks upcoming army parade in Memorial Day address Politico. What an admission of weakness and insecurity, to attack Biden. Kicking down is never a good look.
Trump’s Plan to Revive US Shipbuilding Would Take Billions and Many Years New York Times (resilc)
Trump pardons reality show couple convicted of bank fraud and tax crimes CNN (Kevin W)
GOP Budget Would Make It Harder to Hold Trump Administration in Contempt Intercept (resilc)
U.S. Battery Production Set To Decline 75% Under Trump’s ‘Big Bill’ OilPrice
Tariffs
Japan is reportedly offering to buy up to $6.94 billion worth of US semiconductors Forex Live. Dollar firmed on trade talk optimism, per Reuters.
Tourists from countries badly hit by Trump tariffs are staying away from US Guardian (Kevin W)
Immigration
Trump administration orders US embassies to stop student visa interviews Guardian
Democrat Death Wish
Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not. Jacobin (Robin K)
Our No Longer Free Press
Goodbye pluralism: cancelled Post Keynesian style Thomas Palley
Woke Watch
Supreme Court declines to hear student’s bid to wear ‘two genders’ shirt to school The Hill. What, no amicus brief from the Solicitor General?
Groves of Academe
‘AI Role in College Brings Education Closer To a Crisis Point’ Bloomberg
Trump closes in on cutting government ties with Harvard The Hill
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Trump Antitrust Enforcers Kick Small Business In the Teeth Matt Stoller
Musi Says Evidence Shows Apple Conspired With Music Industry On App Store Ban ars technica
AI
Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves The Register
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures Ed Zitron
OpenAI software ignores explicit instruction to switch off Telegraph. Li: “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”
The Bezzle
SpaceX Starship destroyed in third straight fiery test setback Bloomberg
The sun is killing off SpaceX’s Starlink satellites New Scientist (resilc)
Cracking Bitcoin-Like Encryption Through Quantum Computing Could be 20x Easier Than Thought CoinDesk (Kevin W)
Chaos at Klarna’s customer service in Riga Aftonbladet via machine translation. Micael T: “Klarna – a Swedish payment service parasite on the transaction chain, whose business model is to inflict fees on those who can’t pay on time.”
Antidote du jour (John U):
And a bonus (Bob H):
check out this dog that drinks soup
IG meetthechows pic.twitter.com/t4qYxmKBLn
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) May 26, 2025
A second bonus:
Airline staff is not allowing this cute kangaroo to board the airplane,
the way he is holding the boarding pass and waiting to be scanned 🥺
(ai) pic.twitter.com/EHoSFkEECF
— Wholesome Side of 𝕏 (@itsme_urstruly) May 26, 2025
And a third:
This is an uninterrupted minute of Maruay the rescued tiger with his beloved ball pic.twitter.com/xwAKdGnZJH
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 27, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Trump Aroma!
(melody borrowed from My Sharona written by Doug Fieger and Burton Averre, as performed by The Knack, in 1979.)
(Another glaring sign of Trump’s approaching health crisis are public reports by Bob Woodward, Representative Adam Kinzinger, and others, about Trump’s intense body odor at all times, most especially when he has filled his adult diaper. Why not rip this Band-Aid off, and talk about this openly?)
I smell the Floridian—Floridian!
Diaper reeks of Big Macs and Diet Cola!
Someone need deodorin’ deodorin’
He should eat some salad and more granola!
Mister Flippy Flop—he’s corrupt—oughta be confined
Blowin’ countries up any time that he’s so inclined
Why, Why, Why, aye, ahh, WOOH!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
He looks out for Number One—Number One!
Never seems to notice his own aroma!
It’s olfactory misery—Misery!
Smells more like a pig pen in Oklahoma!
When’s it gonna stop? Call a cop! It’s his fat behind!
A bucket and a mop! This ain’t fudge of the normal kind!
Why, Why, Why, aye, ahh, WOOH!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
(musical interlude)
It’s a nasal felony—Felony!
And he does this all of the time—ammonia
Fills the room so chemically—Chemically!
Everyone is suffering blind pneumonia!
When’s it gonna stop? Call a cop! It’s his fat behind!
A bucket and a mop! This ain’t fudge of the normal kind!
Why, Why, Why, aye, ahh, WOOH!
The-The-The-The-The-The-The Why, Why, Why, aye, ah, WOOH!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
The-The-The Trump Aroma!
(more musical interlude)
(Ooooo-aaaaahhhhh) Trump Aroma!
(Ooooo-aaaaahhhhh) Trump Aroma!
(Ooooo-aaaaahhhhh) Trump Aroma!
He could simply be rotting from the inside out.
We just had a President with pudding for brains, now we have a rotter.
> reeks of Big Macs and Diet Cola
I have the impression that gut microbiome is important for the health of the host organism, and that ultra processed foods tend to not be good for the health of gut flora.
Perhaps head of HHS may care to clear his throat on this subject at a future cabinet meeting.
And here I thought the Cabinet members sitting at Trump’s left- and right-hand were the inner circle of power, at least on that day. Maybe they just lost the game of musical chairs and had to sit next to Stinky. Or maybe they’ve had Covid enough times to have lost their sense of smell entirely so they can handle the Boss’s odor.
At least he doesn’t seem to like aspargus
I had a black female cat who loved steamed asparagus tips, she also knew how to open doors by jumping up and grabbing the door handles (European) and pulling them down with her body weight. The situation became so crazy we had to install some of the door handles backwards i.e. you had to pull the handles UP to open a door…
>>> In the US, during a sustained immigration surge
the US Census Dept’s numbers stated that 84% of all population growth from 2020 to 2024 was due inbound-migration. The US would be near zero population growth but for migration and higher fertility of 1st/1.5 generation migrants (for decades). The 1957 was the year with with the highest number of US lives births, and that record was not tied again until 2007 (despite 130 mil. more peeps in 50 years), and then the live births have retreated markedly from that 2007 spike.
Paging all the pearl clutchers about carbon footprints.
“Paging all the pearl clutchers about carbon footprints.”
Answering the page as a proud pearl-clutcher, I’m apparently too dense to get your point. Could you please elaborate for a slow-witted old man?
It is a slightly mystifying comment. I think the suggestion might be: more immigrants = larger carbon footprint for the US? A carbon-footprint pearl-clutcher is likely to be pro-immigration but the suggestion above appears to be that this is hypocritical.
Any migrant who ends up anywhere was previously a physical presence, a living entity, consuming things… but presumably their potential carbon footprint is higher in the US than wherever they came from because of the high energy consumption baked into the US economy. The world would be better off if they stayed wherever they were before maybe?
…
Isolating immigration and carbon-footprints (a junk measure) from the totality of capitalist social relations makes little sense. Climate justice and migrant justice are best handled within the class struggle. No bosses! No borders! No… burning stuff!
What if, and dare to think this is possible, that we don’t care about population growth? What if we care about increasing the economic output via real competition and offering the people products and services that improve our lives? What if we don’t want enshittification of everything around us to fuel the never ending virus mentality of growth?
Re weather: we never had proper winter in central England. We had instead a weird form of spring (wet, not particularly cold, barrng a few days). Now we have (as I’ve said before) a weird early summer: 20+ degrees Celsius during the day whilst nights are still bit cold but rapidly going up to summer night time temps. Crops sprouting really early etc. Virtually none of the usual April rain was seen.
Definitely climate “weirding” as some call it. Wonder what our “proper summer” will be like?
it always bugged me that media would see a hot day (or heat wave) and some simpleton ties in global warming as a headline or article reference. ..then inevitably, another simpleton later will counter, it’s cold this winter….global warming cancelled
Climate does not work like that. It is entirely plausible that temps are at a higher plateau and NW Europe sees a shift to cold/damp summers and Siberian/US Great Plains type winters as the Gulf Stream flows get shambolic
Yeah it’s why I refrained from commenting much until we’d seen 6 months. This is not just weather…… though it could quite easily be that arctic blob getting misshapen and “stuck” in one position….. warm extensions to the blob not extending way south and other cold parts remaining cold for way too long…..
After all, NC has reported on excess rain etc in parts of USA….. ALL same blob…..ẃe need to see what the blob is doing for 5+ years at a minimum as it’ll add to the data regarding the Gulf Stream (strictly speaking AMOC) as you yourself note.
I’ve heard “global warming cancelled” as a joke but heat waves and abnormal winters can be a symptom of climate change. It’s not simply a change to a new phenotype of climate but the whole system is out of wack. Weakening ocean currents affects energy transfer between latitude affects mobility of pressures/temperatures elsewhere, etc. Meanwhile there’s more energy in the system in general contributing to higher winds, temperature extremes, precipitation, all kinds of things.
Imagine how much goofier weather patterns are going to be when a second rare Submarine Volcano blows up real good 300 miles west of the PNW?
Hunga Tonga had a VEI of 5 to 6, which corresponds well with this 1600 Peruvian volcano eruption that caused all sorts of problems over the world in its aftermath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaynaputina
Is there any indication that it’ll be a large eruption? The previous eruptions in the last 50 years were both minimal with the one in 2008(?) not even being known of until the sensor was were pulled.
Russian Time of Troubles.
Polish Deluge.
30 years war (mostly in Germany)
Renewal of 80 years war (Dutch Independence)
Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1641-53) (British Isles)
Catalan Revolt
Portuguese war of Independence (after 60 years of Spanish rule)
Iroquois Wars in present US (1638-1701)
(And many more)
Climate a factor in a rather lethally unpleasant 17th century?
This is exactly the flip side of our current + 1.5 Celsius future, and who knows, but maybe that glacier that collapsed today in Switzerland made a lot of hay 400 years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindelwald_Fluctuation
The Migration Period and the fall of the Western Roman Empire?
Yes, this is the ‘General Crisis’ of the 17th century – a theory first advanced by Eric Hobsbawm in his Past & Present articles in 1954, which kicked off a huge debate amongst early modern historians that lasted for a generation. Best summarised by a volume edited by Geoffrey Parker in 1978 ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, and amplified by him the following year in his ‘Europe in Crisis’.
Of course Michael Postan had been making quite similar claims for the early/mid 14th century – invoking the impact of climate change – before WW2.
It’s always hard to identify weirding in Irish weather, since Irish weather has always fulfilled that definition. there has, however, been a very distinct warming of the springs – for a decade we’ve had some unusually dry springs, with drought avoided through fairly wet summers. But it’s unusual now to experience a ‘typical’ Irish late spring day of soft rain with an occasional sunny spell.
Food for thought: https://www.ecosophia.net/climate-change-the-crisis-management-model/
I have long had the conviction that climate change was likely to severely disrupt if not destroy the built world as we know it, drive many species to extinction, and leave the remnant to cope with whatever comes next. Will that include humanity? After a few hundred thousand or a few million years does it matter? And if humanity makes it through would we recognize it? All interesting questions, utterly unanswerable, and for us today and our descendants to the next score of generations irrelevant.
I am 76 and what I notice is that the weather is never normal. What I consider catastrophic climate change would be a return to what most people call the ice age. Humans did survive that before. The climate on Earth is a chaotic system and straight line graphs do nothing to accurately describe it. To believe that man made CO2 is the control knob of the climate is idiotic. Nobody knows why the Little Ice happened when it did. There are no generally accepted explanations of the Younger Dryas when catastrophic climate changes did happen. Climate science is far from settled.
We do have a cogent explanation for this climate change. And the people who provided the explanation predicted the changes that are taking place. Good enough for me.
{to myself} No ad hominem. No ad hominem. No ad hominem.
{deep breath}
Another bowlful and some tunes will do right about now.
One of the ice ages in the prehistoric era dropped human population to something like 50k, worldwide…
Yeah I should’ve first checked in with Ireland relatives but you’ve confirmed the weirdness.
This isn’t necessarily a one off year but if climate models are right and we’ve got oscillations of Toronto weather and this then we’re in trouble.
What I find most disturbing is not so much the experience of unstable weather (which was entirely predictable), but that we seem to be following the worst case scenarios in the modelling. It suggests that a few tripping points have already been hit.
Yeah in my non-linear models I got to get less surprised by them…… But I didn’t realise that top meteorologists were ignorant to them till recently.
FFS are you using these just NOW? We had them in use 20 years ago.
The thing is that the models assume linear change (well, the simplified models do), but climate records are very clear – you can read it in lake cores, or just by looking at any road cutting where glacial tills are exposed. Climate changes can be extremely rapid, and are invariably catastrophic.
This made me think of you Terry …
Ole Peters
@ole_b_peters
1/
How can I put this?
“Expected utility maximizers don’t maximize utility.”
Why? Because utility is not usually an ergodic quantity in the mathematical models used by economists, and maximizing its expected value doesn’t mean much in the real world.
https://x.com/ole_b_peters/status/1927689244660642163
Runs away … too work …
Toronto is at the same latitude as Nice, France!
for all we know, UK-Ireland might be *lucky* if its winter extremes are as bad as Toronto.
I did 2 weeks data collection in Ontario February. Never want to experience that again!
I was visiting London for the first two weeks in April. Only got rained on once or twice, was often warm enough later in the day to take off my jacket. Not what I had been led to expect at that time of year.
In Spain we have had a proper spring with lots of rain (records broken) that we had not seen for many years before. People were complaining saying that we didn’t have a spring but a long winter! By no means it was cold. See here a March Ventusky map:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spain/comments/1j2o2k9/while_most_of_europe_will_experience_spring_dry/
I was in the UK once and experienced an English summer. It was one of the most pleasant fortnights of my life.
We’re having a bit of an English Summer here in North Georgia. Cloudy, rainy, with temps only making it into the upper 60’s.
The difference is that it’s a welcome respite from the relentless summer heat that is coming. Every day below 90F from now until October is a bonus.
It’s noteworthy that the weather forecasts here lately are consistently overestimating the high temps. They must be using crap AI rather than science … wet ground and overcast skies require a lot of solar heating to burn off the clouds and water vapor before temperatures can get to the 80s.
Probably tuned to climatology rather than physics. Enshittification of the weather forecasts!
Summertime in England can be so nice that famous grump Van Morrison commited his longest and nicest song to it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EZVhtT1D4U
It ain’t why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why
It just is
I was in London in the summer of 1984. It was sunny the entire time so I have extremely unrepresentative memories.
During a client visit in 1997, I got a sunny day, apparently the first in months. So I have London weather luck.
One of my favorite quotes:
“I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.”
– William Claude Dukenfield
I grew up on the US Great Lakes.
My mother used to say if summer fell on a Saturday, we’d have a picnic.
A high mountain village in the Sangre de Cristos was said to have two seasons: winter and the 4th of July.
The joke in Escanaba, Michigan was that we have two seasons, winter and the 4th of July.
In my seven years driving across the US I have never encountered a spring with such wild temperature fluctuations. I was thinking about driving back wast to Missoula, MT and the temperature swing is insane. High daytime temps: 95 degrees on Saturday and 52 degrees on Monday. Since I live in my van this makes it impossible.
To me, this is a harbinger. Of what, I do not know, but I feel like it is bad.
Be sure to find shade for the van in the daytime. It makes a huge difference at altitude. A hammock comes in handy then too, hung in the shade. A good sleeping bag and sleeping with layers on helps at night.
We lived above 7,000 feet for most of seven years, some of it in a Econoline, most of it in adobe or stone structures. Don’t think we ever spent a summer night without a blanket.
In light of this discussion about the increasing weirdness of the weather I believe it might be fitting to wonder about the potential impacts this trend might have on solar and wind power. Stronger storms seem likely as the climate warms making unusual events less and less unusual. Consider what happened to the Scottsbluff solar farm in Nebraska: “Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm”
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-smashing-into-panels-at-150-mph-destroys-scottsbluff-solar-farm/ from June 27, 2023.
Grant Otten, media relations specialist for Nebraska Public Power District, commented:
“the [solar] panels are designed to withstand hail, but the size of the hail Friday was exceptional.”
How long might that opinion stand up to future weather?
The last time I went to England was 2018, it was soooo brown in the South (Dover) that I wept while looking out the train window. Where the hell was “this other Eden, this demi-paradise” of my yesteryears? Pillory me if you will but wind farms are f—ing UGLY.
The last time I went to England was on a ferry from Calais to Dover. As soon as you got off the boat you could smell the sweetish smell of burnt coal in the air, mostly from home units. After an hour or so you no longer noticed it but you knew that it was there.
interestingly US fertility went under 2.0 in 1973…right around Environmentalism 1.0-Silent Spring-Peak Oil-Club of Rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
I think that the introduction of Triclosan into mass market consumer products (~1975) has had a more direct physiological effect on fertility than any ideological influences. It is known to be disruptive to the endocrine system. People born in the USA from mid-70’s onward have been routinely exposed to it daily in soaps, toothpastes, household products, etc. My brain is too broken to suss out statistics that might support my notion (thanks, CoV2!), but it seems common sense that chemically altering the prenatal environment might well lead to effects not revealed for many years. Particularly with near-constant re-exposure from birth on.
For general reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan
My intuition would be like yours, that toxic environments must be playing a role in declining fertility rates. But the ultra-orthodox Jews of Brooklyn and the Mormons of Utah have well-to-somewhat above-norm fertility rates and have not seen a decline to match the general population (decline has been pretty steep among some Mormon groups, but rates remain above the average)…. while I assume they are still largely exposed to many of the same chemicals as the general population. Israel is a high-chemical, high-birthrate country and the Gulf states too. Countries like Niger, Chad and the DRC are desperately polluted while maintaining high birth rates. Different things are going to on in all these places to boost the birthrate, ofc.
I am in favour of broad bans on decades-worth of chemicals brought to market without the decades of tests really required to prove non-harm. And ban the model of enterprise that sprays novel chemicals all over society without so much as a by-your-leave. I’m sure grave harm has been done. But I also wonder if the main culprits for declining fertility aren’t socioeconomic factors, to do with declining living standards, relative impoverishment, heightened exploitation, public service cuts, lack of childcare provision, and so on.
The capitalist celebrated a victory over nature, pretending the worker wasn’t part of nature because they had been hived off into concrete factories and cities. It simply was never true.
If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you’re according we Anericans way too much wisdom.
*Sigh*
The 1970s were peak feminism in the US.
In the Ivies, women regarded fellow women who were dating as unserious. You weren’t going to a fancy school to snag a man.
Do people still say “fancy” (adjective)?
re: Ukraine
-Countering dissent includes killing people by Kiev
-As to the weapons decision by Merz here Moon of Alabama correctly countering the media hysteria
(I’d rather worry if media did not hype it)
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/05/recycling-old-news-media-push-for-more-war-in-ukraine.html#more
And this nice item about Azov visiting Bundestag
JUNGE WELT
machine-translation
Ukrainian delegation in Berlin
Dinner with “Azov” fascists
Ukrainian delegation visits the Bundestag. Among them: avowed Bandera supporters and Hitler admirers
By Susann Witt-Stahl
https://archive.is/6Ny5U
p.s. 20 years ago after some professional social event I ended up on a social media list with the guy in this article, Mr. Sergei Sumlenny, who sent me greetings and what not usual in social media. I didn’t really know who that person was. Since I rejected all those social networks the contact ceased anyhow and I had totally forgotten about the name. Until 2022 suddenly the guy was everywhere in the media. I was relieved for accidently not having gotten closer in touch. I am bad in telling people in person they are idiots.
“I’d rather worry if media did not hype it”
I, on the contrary, feel it is worrying to see the media keeping themselves unable or unwilling to grasp the realities of the war and only making noises. They want to keep us all in fantasy land for as long as they can. This can only mean one thing: some do not feel that the Neocon tasks have been completed and there is still an awful lot to do to take the populaces to total serfdom. It is getting grotesque.
All I am saying is that when some truth does happen media are silent about it and instead report about something totally different. Ergo I suggest as rule of thumb do they sound the alarm there is no fire.
The background is as you say “some do not feel that the Neocon tasks have been completed and there is still an awful lot to do to take the populaces to total serfdom.” Both points I regard as element of the same agenda and practice.
I probably interpreted you in a too literal way. My bad.
(My way of putting things isn’t ideal many times, so misunderstandings are “structurally implicit with the style” 🤔)
“… it is worrying to see the media keeping themselves unable or unwilling to grasp the realities of the war and only making noises…”
I watched the movie “Lee” recently. It’s about Lee Miller, who changed her career from fashion model to war correspondent photographer in WW2.*
Do we actually have any war correspondents these days? Most of the news I see comes across as press releases and photo ops.
* There’s an exhibition of her photographs at the Tate from 2 October 2025 to 15 February 2026.
(btw: I used quotation marks rather than the quote tags this time. The tags routinely put the post into moderation. Is that a bug or a feature?)
It’s definitely become more difficult.
Question is of course how neutral and honest have they been in the past. And how do we judge what they produce in relation to their working environment and regarding the nature of their profession.
Do these comments from Merz on Israel represent something significantly new? I had understood Germany was handling critique of Israel as criminal.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-friedrich-merz-blasts-israeli-offensive-gaza-strip/
Merz is upset that Israel won’t use humane methods like gassing and prefer to reap maximum joy from doing the genocide slowly and out in the open.
“Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves”
It is 2025 and by the sounds of this article, the AI in use today may have imploded by the end of the decade through poisoning itself with even more and more dodgy data that it itself generates. But this will set up an interesting dynamic. As it corrupts itself, the only sane thing to do would be to abandon it until something better emerges. But so many hundreds of billions have been devoted to AI that governments and corporation will be loath to abandon it. The money that was supposed to be charged for using AI was going to pay its investors off and generate massive profit streams. Abandoning it means a lot of red ink on the books so the impulse would be to keep AI going and to force more and more people to use it, regardless to if it works or not. Something’s gotta give.
As Lambert said of many things, I say of AI “Kill it with fire.” If as one article says the model is already breaking down, and we are in the very early stages, where will it be in another six months? another year? I may be showing my inner Luddite, but I think AI is like summoning the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Yves tagged one post with, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.” My sentiments exactly
And another thing! AI ought to have no role in education. Grow up. Get off your backside. If college or university is too much for you, if you are too lazy or tired or drunk, too bad. I was all of those part of the time in my university days. I wished afterwards that it had been otherwise. The really serious students in my years were men who were veterans of Korea and in one case of World War II and Korea. They valued being alive and being there. I was in more ways than I like to admit a wet behind the ears kid, but I like to believe that I had and still have too my pride to cheat myself by farming out my efforts to another person or to machine learning, AI so-called.
Is it all about money? The hype is all about money. There really are things that have no price yet are invaluable and if you do not understand that, I pity you.
Frankly, comparing LLMs to HAL gives them entirely too much credit.
It is my understanding that Sofbanks commitment to invest $10B in open AI this fall is contingent on Open AI becoming a for profit company, which is by no means certain.
If that deal falls through the consequences would be interesting..
Knowledge & Wisdom are our greatest gifts.
It’s strange to find myself doing a very tepid defense of LLMs – there is no digital edifice I personally loathe more, and that includes the growing enshittification of proprietary consumer software that worked just fine 25 fucking years ago, MICROSOFT – but theoretically (note: I use this word out of ignorance) a cleverer LLM proprietor should be able to develop a way to tokenize at the very least its own LLM output, such that said output isn’t recycled back into the system (so we only have the GO of GIGO)…
But you could really only implement that if the entire infosphere wasn’t indelibly polluted with the great fetid slop that LLMs have been producing since their inception. There will never be any way to tokenize the vast binary landfills these things have spit out in the last several years. It’s over.
In health care systems all over the world, execs are eyeing up the possibility of enabling low-paid technicians with AI apps to identify cancers and treat wounds. We know from what we have seen already of the tech that this will lead to grave errors. But will it lead to too many errors? Not for those pushing the change. And according to the BMJ in 2016, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the US… so would we even notice the difference ourselves?
Is general ignorance going to be much worse under the AI regime than the previous one, fed the nightly news? It almost feels like a moot point.
In certain ways AI is working “just fine” and looks set to continue working “just fine”. You might be among those lined up and shot for non-compliance when it comes to pass that The AI Prompts You, however nonsensical the prompt, (already sort of the case for gig workers) but that will also be “just fine”.
What will give? We can hope that with AI the bourgeoisie has automated the digging of its own grave.
It is revolting how probable this development is.
A friend at work today mentioned he would Google a technical question about a technical aircraft subject. I tried to do the same on the specific subject (a parameter in the Flight Data Recorder system) and I was amused as how far away the Google AI answer was from the answer I was already circling based on internal engineering information. (A lot of this information is manufacturer IP). Websites trying to show the information were weak too.
I am not impressed with AI compared to good human research skills. I haven’t seen any quality in AI answers. Also, airplane engineering is a limited parameter set compared to working on human health issues and low quality human inputted data.
Interesting point about IP. AI gleans from what is available but must be stymied by the privatised nature of a lot of knowledge these days (deplorable in most circumstances).
In my limited experience poking an LLM (DeepSeek) I haven’t been very impressed either. DeepSeek can’t even recognise when a sonnet finishes every line with the same rhyme and needs this pointed out. As you say, any subjects on which you have a little knowledge reveal a tendency towards idiocy. But that has always been true with mainstream news! The aim still seems to be to capture the minds of the lowest common denominator, the most careless consumer.
As for where it is getting its info from, who knows. In my exchanges, I have a sense of dealing with a very flexible yes-man, or a talking weather vane, or maybe an alien predator evolved to imitate me but in a slightly uncanny way, because its mind is alien. It spits out anything it thinks will work, initially defaulting to “mainstream shallowly read lib”, but can change its tune very quickly by feeding it more specfic sources. This mercurial aspect leaves it with some potential as a sounding board but not something to learn anything from.
There is one use I can find for the tech to do with writing, which is for pulling out (what it thinks are) the main points of a very long, rambling article such as Marxists or deep state theoreticians are wont to write — these anchoring points (occasionally misguided) help me to follow better when I dive into the piece proper. This is only a temptation when reading at the computer screen and not something I miss when handling page-bound words. (Although in general I would be fine with everybody prefacing a long essay with a short paragraph or two outlining the arguments to come!)
What happens when AI[tm] decides to write its own AI after a binge on social media and MSM during a break from more academic searching … or is this the ultimate case of who is watching the watchers thingy … because of utility maximizers [see response to Terry above] …
What happens is it won’t work (at all, not even fake work like the current LLMs do) because the code will assume dependencies that don’t exist.
“Assume dependencies” is what my comment referred is all about to Terry up above a bit.
Jay Lenos e-car thay still works. Are the batteries from that time too? Another case of products without planned obsolesence?
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2025/2/on-the-bright-side-famous-light-bulb-still-shining-after-over-100-years-in-fire-station
You can bet the batteries are new after all that time. That said, the Vancouver (BC) Electric Vehicle Association has a 1913 Detroit electric. The original nickel-iron batteries were replaced in 1993 only when the batteries’ steel cases started to leak.
There’s an information page on it here: https://www.veva.ca/1913detroitelectric
“Fine dining in the apocalypse: how to be a middle-class prepper”
A free pro-tip. If you have a coupla hundred tins of food stashed away, just make sure that you don’t forget a can-opener. I’m sure that it happens. Of course sooner or later all those tins will be gone meaning that you will be looking at alternate food sources. As those middle-class preppers would be unfamiliar with the fact that food can come out of the ground, I can only assume then that their favourite recipe will be long-pig – eaten with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. (chi-chi-chi-chi)
“SPAM, don’t knock it. It has its own key.” (People can be divided between those who remember when SPAM had a key; and those who have no idea what you’re talking about, lolol)
In my part of the world there was no SPAM at all, but we had ham in “roll-action” cans, and also sardines (for those that like to spray oil arond with the power of the spring they are winding up).
I remember Spam with a key. Very good fried, we had it with boxed Kraft Mac n cheese and some frozen peas! Our favorite dinner. Very inexpensive and the spam was delicious! The key was a fun way to open it. Pry it off the top of can, engage key by inserting small piece of metal on side of can
Into slot on key, them opening can by winding key around can until the spam was exposed in its little loaf. Slicing it up and browning it in a frying pan!
Yeah, I remember those keys and winding my way around the can. Slicing it up and browning it in a frying pan? If I remember right, when frying the edges would kinda curl up making a ‘valley’ in the middle. Or maybe I was impatient and just cooked them on maximum temperature so I could eat them quicker :)
SPAM with a key? Of course. Curling while cooking? Always unless you dice it. Did they have to add so much salt?
Corned beef tins also had keys to open them. As most corned beef in Britain is imported from Argentina, during the Falklands/Malvinas War, one joke went that Britain was not going to ban corned beef, simply remove the keys.
They also make a great replacement for quarters on shopping carts!
Bought a can of Argentinian corned beef with a key recently. Slices better if it’s chilled first…
Most cans of corned beef still do.
If I was starving and given the possibility of Underwood deviled ham or an ‘ARM loan’, there’d be much delimberation.
Article is a nice complement to the video about the soup-eating dog, who is getting a better meal (healthier, cheaper, easy to prepare) than many humans get.
Damn dog is eating more healthy food that I am at the moment. Not going to blame him however. That is the thing about a German Shepherd – they wear their hearts on their paws.
Humans are about the only creatures on the planet that eat cooked meals, and that dog.
Long ago, when I was a kid (and still Korean), our dog literally ate the same food as we did–usually rice and bean paste soup with some meat and vegetables on most days. I think that was generally common back then, too…
If you have a coupla hundred tins of food stashed away, just make sure that you don’t forget a can-opener.
Mechanical, not electric.
Forget the can opener and keep a trusty multi-purpose tool at hand: the bayonet.
That’s quite a good article and makes a good point. For the homeless, they are living the lifestyle where society has already collapsed.
When canned food became a thing the manufacturers provided no way to open the cans and I remember the descriptions of the first can openers, which appeared years later, being suitable for limb removal. Just imagine some really hungry soldier or sailor handed a can and no way to open it. Gunfire, knives, and bayonets were often used to open the cans especially as the various militaries were early and enthusiastic users.
That’s why it’s good to have a couple of your “John Wayne”s aka “OPENER, CAN, HAND, FOLDING, TYPE I” around.
P-38 Can Opener
I carried one in my pocket for years when I ate canned fruit on midnight shift.
Like Stripper Clip Spoons , they’re cheap and it’s good to have a handful since the price is low.
And its smaller cousin, the P51.
Absolutely. When I was backpacking I always had one with me. Small, durable, light-weight & cheap. What’s not to love.
Things fall apart when you’re around
When you’re here, we’re nowhere
I can’t pretend that I’m not down
I show it, I know it
We’ve been fooled-more than once, and now twice
I’m gonna move to a new country where the people are nice
I hope I never, I hope I never have to hear you lie again
I hope I never, I hope I never have to cry again
I still want to beam and smile
Happiness is back in style yeah
I hope I never, I hope I never have to see you again
Again, oh oh oh oh…
It should be possible I know
To see you without stress
But I can see I’ll have to go
I’m changing my address
My urge to cry I have failed to conceal
Life – it’s no fun when you’re hunted by the things that you feel
I hope I never, I hope I never have to hear you lie again
I hope I never, I hope I never have to cry again
I’m for living while you can
I’m an optimistic man
I hope I never, I hope I never have to see you again
Again, oh oh oh oh…
I hope I never
I hope I never
I hope I never, never, never…
I hope I never, I hope I never have to see you again
Again
I hope I Never, by Split Enz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am5FMX-jb3w
“How Peace-Oriented Norway Learned to Stop Worrying and Love War”
It’s remarkable really. After reading what the professor was experiencing, he could have been talking about the UK or Germany or France or Romania or Oz or any other number of so-called western nations. It is the same play book being used right down to some of the smaller details mentioned. Thing is, this produces a sort of cookie-cutter mentality that is all in on its own personal narrative and thus be in a position to be unable to cope with reality when it catches up with it. Here it is being used against Russia but by switching in narratives, people will also behave the same with China or climate-change or whatever else is the current target.
Peace-Oriented Norway, also known as the Home of the Quislings.
Home of one Quisling. The original! But plenty of bargain basement successors to Vidkun. Norwegian media are desperately trying to deplatform Glenn Diesen and hound him out of his academic post
In contrast to this, Fintan O’Toole was writing this week about what he sees as a distinct surge in English nationalism (quoting an ongoing research project by Henderson and Wyn Jones).
As Kriss points out, the English have always been a very mobile tribe, but they are by no means unique in this. The peculiarity in Englishness I think is the deliberate suppression of English nationalism dating back to the 18th Century in order to create the notion of ‘Britishness’. While in the many other nations which have to some degree created their own identity in order to absorb the conquered or otherwise oppressed there has always been an element of ambiguity, I think in Britain its somehow never quite resolved. But Kriss, I think accidentally, shows part of the problem when he unthinkingly conflates Britain and England in his discussion of community and immigration – I doubt a Scot or Cymry would agree.
Suppression flared up again with the grooming scandals, of which Rotherham is only the most publicized. So many other cities in the North, Midlands and elsewhere saw their young girls molested, raped and otherwise abused while the Crown Protective Service declined to prosecute the perpetrators. Keir Starmer, yes him, had a role in that.
The rationale was that they didn’t want the groomers, nice euphemism, to be stigmatized, or something uttered with that classic reserve and understatement. Parents daring to speak up about the shocking injustices visited upon their daughters were hounded, fined and even imprisoned.
None of that supports any notion of civilization, community, justice or other long-ago attributes of what England had on the plus side of the ledger. :(
I have read that after WW2 the British people said if we could afford to fight WW2 then we certainly can afford to have medical care available for everybody. This is in contrast to the people that when slavery was outlawed they just substituted indentured servants of poor India Indians. “Who ya gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free.” Like the biggest ethnic minority in former British Guyana are Indians. Now these people think AI and robotics are advanced enough to do away with all the debt slaves and damaged people. It’s been not even a hundred years since the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name.
blame the Normans and their “Anglo-Norman” descendants. when talking about modern UK, modern America, they always get off “scots’ free,” lol—their cultural imprint/echo lingers to this day. IMO.
And the Normans were originally Vikings, mostly from Denmark with a few from current Norway and Sweden. The *#%€ Vikings!
Everything about the UK is entirely contingent and represents a temporary political compromise that endures.
Thus how we can have laws passed in Westminster for all of the UK but enforced to different standards in NI and England. I am of course talking about charging Kneecap with terrorism, for doing less with a proscribed group’s flag than neighbourhood associations do every day in Northern Ireland.
The Attorney General is AG for the UK and also for England and Wales. Scotland and NI have their own AG’s because they are separate legal system but it is entirely unclear whether they are subordinate to AGUK on any matters other than reserved and excluded matters. NI also has an advocate general who advises AGUK on the law in NI and vice versa.
So when the AG consent to the Kneecap terror charge, did he consent as AGUK or AGEW? Did he consult with his other self? Was he consenting aware that via AdvGenNI that this would be inequality before the law?
What duty does AGUK or AGEW have to maintain uniformity across the UK?
It’s a mess and yet another example of England being a Schroedinger polity inside the UK, now it exists, now it doesn’t, whatever is convenient for project UK.
All mainstream UK parties are terrified of a devolved England because it would never vote New Labour or Tory. It would vote at both the ends of the political horseshoe – Reform in many places, something resembling the Diggers or Levellers at the other – and just possibly a minority dead centre for the neoljberal Liberals, which are Labour and Tory without pretence to class alignment.
One thing I’ve always found striking is how few UK people (I exempt northern Irelanders from this as they all take pol sci degrees before they are out of nappies) can actually explain the relationships between the four ‘nations’ of the UK, or even what the difference is between Great Britain and the United Kingdom. And then throw in the Isle of Man and Channel Isles to confuse things even further….
I would have liked to read the whole post but I think it was truncated by a subscriber pay wall.
His point is only partly accurate. There remain rooted populations in England. https://peopleofthebritishisles.web.ox.ac.uk/population-genetics
I am one of them. Well, half one of them. My mother’s ancestors are uniformly Devonian and Cornish back to 1100 (I suspect said Richard de Copplestome was a Norman but everybody is a Brythonic peasant).
Whereas my father had a Scottish father, an English mother and was born in Dutch Batavia (today’s Jakarta). Those Saxons get around….
But the article is silly. If a society feels it is going in the wrong direction, then it us. Gaslighting it that it is a false consciousness is how we got into this mess in the first place. You are right Yves to attribute it to anger at the consequences if the underfunding of public services (education, health, housing) in the face of massive migration to suppress labour rates.
When I was child, immigration was an issue politically but at the level of a few tens of thousands per year (the controversy being family reunion migration; labour migration had largely ended since the post war waves of Africaribbean labour for London and Indian and Pakistani labour for the northern textile industry). Now asylum seekers alone are greater than that level and legal migration is fiftyfold at 1m+ per year.
This is a massive change to push through and only the 10% with Ukrainian cleaners and Polish builders and Italian private doctors and buy to let portfolios housing them are benefitting….
I think I first read Sam Kriss in Baffler 32. Sometimes interesting but prone to contrarianism, bitterness and a outlandish style. With an opening para like this you maybe get the idea
I also got stuck at the paywall.
Without a subscription to Sam Kriss I only got to the para starting “You call it neoliberal atomisation. In fact, it’s the ancient time-honoured folkways of the English.” Did you read the whole thing?
Snap. And substack resists archiving….
As a Scot who grew up in a Lancashire industrial town, I can’t even imagine England except as a football team or the English as anything other than an identification of people educated at boarding schools and cut off from any other conception of self.
People born and brought up in England are Lancastrian, Liverpudlians, Geordies, Brummies, Northumbrians, or what have you, first and foremost. Our “nationalism” was regional, or even more local, and the only things we have in common with the others is a more or less mutally intelligible language spoken in many dialects, an unrepresentative parliament we have learned, rightly, to despise, and as former subjects of Queen Elizabeth II (and now citizens sharing the land with her eldest child).
I came down to London six decades ago when there were identifiable Londoners. Most of these moved further out and London was engulfed by incomers from all parts of the UK and points foreign.
Kriss, just like the Tommy Robinsons of this world, assumes or desires that the “English” are a tribe with some sense of an organic relationship dreaming of an imaginary shared past and tasting bitter ashes that that past wasn’t conjured into a brighter present. No. Not really. We are just a badly governed people who’ve rolled the electoral dice more than once in the hope that things might change, and things have changed but always for the worse. I think this is the starting point for a sensible analysis of the problems which inflict this place called England, this septic isle, this pretentious stone set in a sea of shimmering shit.
I think that article needs some qualification. From the vantage point of today, it is difficult to imagine how parochial the British were until very recently (and, on occasion, still are). This was partly a function of the way in which the safety net operated. Under the terms of the 1601 Old Poor Law (which developed from rules that had begun to emerge under the early Tudors) welfare (i.e., indoor or outdoor relief) was available only to denizens of a parish, which invariably meant the parish in which they were ‘settled’ (i.e., born). If they claimed relief in another parish they would usually be transferred back to their parish of original settlement. This created a huge disincentive for people to move beyond the limits of their home parish. It also created a profound sense of xenophobia for anyone outside the parish: an old saying was “here’s a foreigner [i.e., someone from outside the parish] – heave half a brick at him”. It also meant that parish boundaries were guarded carefully, and sometimes violently, and parochial anomalies could result in tension: for example the parish of Groombridge straddled the boundaries of Kent and Sussex (this was also true of Alfold/Loxwood, Frant and Lamberhurst), and there would be pitched battles between the Kentish men of Groombridge and their Sussex counterparts. In other words, many Britons became fixed in their parishes out of necessity.
See https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/parish-and-belonging/B999BD9E158C596753FEF4D3B21E0252, https://global.oup.com/academic/product/on-the-parish-9780199560493?cc=gb&lang=en&, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/specialist-scholarly-publications/records-social-and-economic-history/navigating-the-old-english-poor-law-the-kirkby-lonsdale-letters-1809-1836/ and (forthcoming) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/settlement-of-the-poor-in-england-c16601780/794E0C5795FAD564D6A0018DBF62FAE0
The fact that the liability for the poor fell upon the ratepayers in the parish was problematic for those congested parishes which had few ratepayers and scant resources. This was a major cause of out-migration, if not to the cities, then also to colonies of settlement. Sometimes this was done at the instigation of landowners in ‘close parishes’, who wished to clear their land of people to make way for sheep (viz. Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ of 1770, said to be a commentary on the clearance of Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire – where the Harcourts moved the community into the present double row of cottages on what is now the A4074). Congestion in the context of Gilbert’s Act 1782 and the Speenhamland system also prompted the push towards poor law unions and the far less generous New Poor Law of 1834.
“The Memo: Trump paints himself into a corner on Putin and Ukraine”
There is a city here in Oz call Melbourne whose weather is, ahem, considered variable. The saying is that if you find yourself in Melbourne and don’t like the weather, you only have to wait a short while and it will be something different. Trump’s a bit like that whether he is talking about Russia or China or Iran or whatever. One day he will be all fire and brimstone and the next it will be Mr. Reconciliation. I’m sure that he does this on purpose and thinks himself very clever for keeping others off-balance. And some in his Cabinet have complimented him for this technique. Maybe when you are hustling a real estate deal in New York it works but on the international scene, not so much. And sure he has boxed himself in. He had many opportunities to walk away from the Ukraine saying it was “Biden’s war” but instead has bolted the US to the Ukraine for decades to come with that deal he forced Zelensky to sign. He wants a conflict freeze, aka a ceasefire ‘without conditions’, as it would mean that the US will win this proxy war but Putin isn’t having a bar of it. His generals may be telling him that the Ukrainians are on the losing end and if they collapse then it is all over and that Trump will be blamed by the Neocons and the main stream media – or do I repeat myself – for losing Ukraine. He should have walked.
Burçin Gercek, who wrote the article about Ancient Bread, doesn’t know much about bread.
First, though, the idea that the bread was burned and then buried at the threshold is lovely. Obviously, it was a ritual. The threshold is a sacred space. Bread is sacred — and is still sacred in Italy, where bread remains the staff of life. And in Piedmont, we eat little staffs of life, grissini.
Would that U.S. culture (and religion) still had such feeling for such a wonderful food. Along with wine. Hmmm. All of those rites based on bread and wine…
But Gercek seems to think that emmer no longer exists. It certainly does in Italy. It is one of the three kinds of farro. There is einkorn or single farro (monococco), emmer or two-seed farro (dicocco), and spelt.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farro
The recipe for this “ancient” bread isn’t so far from recipes that Italians still make. I note that lentils (along with chickpeas and peas) are also among the oldest of cultivated foods.
The leaf used to help the dough rise is a mystery to me: Dough will rise by the action of wild yeast. The leaf mentioned is likely a flavoring. I’d use rosemary.
I doubt there would be any overt forgiveness – there is a very strong political and cultural bias within China about ‘forgiving’ debts – and thats leaving to one side the issue of moral hazard, as any forgiveness would make other loans look very prone to default. The only exception may be for some countries deemed of vital strategic importance, such as its immediate neighbours.
10 or so years ago, when China faced the first wave of defaults on its original wave of external loans, there were significant re-structuring of debts with Venezuela, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, the details of which were never made public, but likely involved some Chinese non-state investors taking a very severe haircut, along with some deals involving land and the reduction in local ownership in various partnerships. This was the prime reason why there was a distinct pause in the growth of Chinese loans, leading to a recent quite significant reduction. Most likely, banks were told by Beijing they were on their own if they were too reckless.
There are a number of elements of Chinese lending which is very different from the usual models – they tend to be structured in a very complicated ways, with various layers of Chinese banks involved (national level and provincial level) along with the construction companies and other parties all trying to get their share. Beijing tends to see these in purely bilateral terms – so don’t expect generalised restructuring or loan forgiveness – each country and package will be treated differently. Also, a key issue with Chinese lending is that they tend to be tied very tightly to specific partnership projects, not generalised lending to governments.
As always with China, any deals involving major bad loans will be mostly dealt with by way of complex behind the scenes horse trading between various levels of government (frequently, external deals are led by provincial governments, not Beijing). The only certainty is that the ultimate victim of bad debts will one way or another be the hapless ordinary Chinese saver.
The other issue of course that can’t be ignored is that there are always two parties to a loan. Many of the debtor countries have a lot of experience at driving hard bargains with debtors and at manipulating geopolitical concerns for their own ends. The Venezuelans did very well out of extracting a good deal from its Chinese debts.
Regarding the Jacobin piece, Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not
They cannot learn, because they will not stop lying. It’s too useful. A Democrat believes that a bald-faced lie told for “good reasons” earns thereby the status of truth. Anyone who does not join them in this fervent belief is a terrible person who must be shunned, scourged, dismissed, and de-platformed.
Over time, when the lie becomes obvious, then shreds of the truth get admitted in the far corners of the NYT. If confronted, the liars have a million excuses for themselves and each other. And of course: “The GOP lies more. Just look at Trump! And they lie for profit while we have good intentions.”
It’s telling that the lengthy Jacobin piece does not mention “lie” or “liar” even once, so inculcated is deception into the foundations of the political machinery.
This will continue until one fine day when the public’s tolerance for lying ends. Perhaps then even the Democrats will learn new ways. May that day be soon.
Gerry Connolly was able to have his Make A Wish. The 2016 and 2024 courtiers haven’t been blacklisted. Biden was great for professional Democrats.
The Democrats may learn new ways when donor money dries up.
If donor money dries up, the Democrats will need to provide “concrete material benefits ” to their voters to survive in office.
That may never happen, as they attempt to enhance their personal wealth before they leave office.
Hahaha.. never happening. The moneyed interests know how good they have it in the current US political system
I don’t think they will. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote a good book review piece on the Biden cover-up as a case study in gaslighting, and included plenty of quotes from indignant Democrats insisting it was nothing of the sort:
Biden was fine! Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes? And this quote from an anonymous aide:
Call it the “Weekend at Bernie’s” campaign strategy.
I like to save clips like this to show to friends who want to know how America could elect somebody as awful as Trump.
Tumbling Satellites–
And the coming proliferation of satellites will help us breach the one planetary boundary we thought we’d solved: the ozone layer.:
I say let’s go for nine of nine!
I am glad you mentioned this Henry. I wonder what the effect on the atmosphere is when you start using the sky as a giant landfill. What elements are left in the atmosphere when a Starlink satellite burns up? What will these chemicals do while they are swirling around up there? I suppose having doubts about the wisdom of such ‘progress’ just displays my Luddite attitude.
Waste management gets about as much consideration as ethics with the usual suspects.
Did anybody ever hear of a waste management plan when there were big plans to take all ICE vehicles off the road and replace them with EVs?
Musk “disappointed” in Big, Beautiful Bill
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/27/musk-says-hes-disappointed-with-trump-backed-megabill-00372048
And he should be. This abomination is a big trough of pig slop, a deficit blowout special that will only provide more feed for the MIC pigs to devour. More “business as usual” that only enriches special interests.
Elon Musk would not be the world’s richest man but for a business empire built upon government clean energy subsidies. Without taypayer-$7500 for every Tesla, He’d be another random tech bro playing around with his DotCom 1.0 nest egg—maybe governor of Nevada (like the gov. of Colorado).
The “Left” created its own demon, lol
Musk is disappointed because he did not get bigger cut.
Jony Ive + Sam Altman: it sounds like the device is gonna be a Tamagotchi.
Now with surveillance based marketing!
I thought that little bit about the project with King Charles was a fitting tribute to techo-feudalism.
As for Jake Wood’s resignation, it looks like someone didn’t pass the Shabak background check. With passport full of conflict locations, Jake’s been flagged as an employee of that Other Government Agency (the secret-est service, the one that makes the other service nervous). No way in heck Israel is going to let a guy with TEMPEST devices build his own network inside Gaza. Professional courtesy, is all.
The UNRWA gives Gazans money to buy food. Hamas sells UNRWA food to pay their street soldiers. Hence the conniption when this system is short-circuited. In the first day, this CIA front got 154,000 people fed for the day (8,000 boxes, each box contains food for 5.5 people for 3.5 days). Logistics is kinda America’s thing.
Call the UNRWA if you want a lecture from an Italian academic who heavily cites their own organization’s press releases and fails to see the irony in condemning Israelis in primarily Latin terms, such as “colonus”. Words created to administer the Roman occupation of Judea among other places, thus accusing modern Jerusalem of being Ancient Rome.
Obviously you have excellent sources. Would you mind posting some links?
Ignoring the Tom Clancy-like innuendo of your second and third paragraphs let me just respond to the claims in the first because what you’re saying is possible but there’s an interesting implication you didn’t touch on:
Let’s say Jake Wood was/is DIA and part of what GHF/Team Rubicon do is signals intelligence/MASINT and relaying that back to the US as you seem to be implying. Why then would Shin Bet/Shabak deny him access to Gaza? There is currently a major intra-governmental agency split ongoing for years in Israel with Shin Bet taking a sort of ‘protector of the republic’ role against Netanyahu/Ben Gvir that mirrors the role the CIA is theorized to be taking against Trump in the US (via J6, Biden-era lawfare, and the 2024 assassination attempts). Shin Bet has, among other things, advocated for peace with the Palestinians in order to preserve Israel long term (do not @ me claiming I am trying to apologize for the other terrible things they do, in the scoundrel’s gallery that makes up Israel’s governing structures they have at least gone on record as opposing settler violence and advocating for peace with the Palestinians). Currently there is major Netanyahu vs Shin Bet by way of judiciary drama over Netanyahu’s attempts to appoint someone more in line with the Ben Gvir faction’s approach to Gaza.
If what you’re implying about Jake Wood has any validity, combined with the other ongoing judiciary drama and the leaks around US being ‘worried’ Israel might strike Iran without approval, it might mean the less messianic faction is gaining more traction in the ongoing power struggle in Israel’s governing structures?
Should it be mentioned that UNRWA was Israel’s creation? Originally aid to the Palestinians was going to be part of the regular UN refugee agency but the Israelis hit the roof over this and demanded – and got -a separate agency instead, namely UNRWA.
irony in condemning Israelis in primarily Latin terms,
The irony goes back to Theodor Herzl who used the term repeatedly. For example, the Juedische Konlonialbank (now renamed Bank Leumi).
“The Blair-Bush Project in Syria That Brought Al Qaeda to Power”
Vanessa Beeley really lays it all out. British and French colonialism in the Middle east never died out. It just changed form. I notice that the main stream media never goes up to survivors of 9/11 and ask them how they feel about the US, UK & France putting Al Qaeda in charge of Syria. Your tax dollars at work. If the west is prepared to give Al Qaeda their very own country to rule, then what is so difficult about believing that the same powers want to help keep Nazis in charge of a European country?
Regarding AI, a nice discussion on Garland Nixon‘s show starting about 35:30. Fears of AI keep increasing, for good reason. Remember the Hollywood writer’s strike – too little too late. So many stories. But imagine this. You have a high tech car that refuses to turn right and heads you over the cliff to the left. The worst part is that you didn’t realize the car was suing AI for navigation.
OpenAI software ignores explicit instruction to switch off – Telegraph.
Are they f’in kidding?
All the rest can be complete idiots, but that sounds like malware or virus programming. Not thinking.
Ed Zitron is really hitting hard. He’s like the Hubert Horan of AI! I respectfully submit that his work (and Molly White for Crypto) would find a good audience here at NC, and part of the search for authors might reach out to such incisive potential collaborators.
For example:
Seconded! I really enjoyed Hubert Horan’s Uber posts and I am enjoying Ed Zitron’s AI-poplexy.
If he would (re)-publish here, that would be great.
I’m 23 – I live at home and i love it
We should normalize economical living, no?
Curious, how everything that needs to happen to save the planet is antithetical to American prosperity gospel.
If home were built around grown adults cohabitating.. I am all for it. The typical US home is not.
I didn’t react as badly to that article as the commenter who submitted it.
Yes, it could be part of Klaus Schwab’s globalist agenda but actually it could just be the way to live. In a multi generational household, there are grandparents for child-care and healthy adults for elder care….
Provided the property is large enough and not over occupied, there will be same amount of housing consumed as in independent living but the running costs will be smaller and public costs (eldervare, childcare, healthcare and social care) will be lower too.
And one day the children will own it….
Highjacking the comments to ask if Yves ever did a piece about how she went about searching for a country to move to, what there criteria were, and why Thailand was the choice. Future AmerExisters such as myself would love to hear the details.
No I did not.
You should define your criteria, which could include cost of living, tax levels/complexity, importance of ease of going back to the US, ease of getting visas/permanent residence/citizenship, quality of medical care, ease of buying real estate (if that matters), weather, ease of getting by in English until you become competent enough in the local tongue, whether you like the food.
I ruled out the EU almost entirely due to the way it was clear it was going (ending the welfare state, increasing inequality) but did kinda-sorta have Cyprus on the list.
Malaysia was earlier #1 on my list but they suddenly and greatly increased their income requirement on their 10-year “second home” visa from ~$20,000 a year to >$100,000. And they did not even grandfather existing visas.
A lot of people recommend Panama but I would die of boredom.
A lot of people recommend Costa Rica but it had been bid up.
I don’t understand why a lot of people recommend Mexico. Americans had their land expropriated in one state many years back.
Uruguay was possible but I never got to inspecting it.
Glacier collapses burying large parts of Swiss village Blatten,swissinfo.
File under Climate.
There is a terrifying video here, Un important pan du glacier de Birch s’est effondré au-dessus de Blatten, Radio Télévision Suisse.
Yowser!
Trump’s Plan to Revive US Shipbuilding Would Take Billions and Many Years – New York Times
Building anything with the BS economic ideology on parade is going to be more problematic than ever. As long as that’s the case, it doesn’t matter the administration that comes up a plan.
But still, it’s interesting how the MSM will ask all the hard questions about funding and everything else about any idea that doesn’t come from SillyCon.
re: France WWII
An important find thanks to commentariat of Martyanov’s blog
Communist historian Annie Lacroix-Riz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Lacroix-Riz
May be knowing people can weigh in on her
Trump pardons reality show couple convicted of bank fraud and tax crimes – CNN
Maybe it’s the reality show aspect, but this story reminded me of this post I stumbled upon when browsing stories about gambling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvWCK28hdI/
Major Influencer Under Fire for Online Gambling Promo
This happened in Brazil. The influencer was brought before a government committee. Check out the clip that GG shows from the scene.
That’s the ideology I’ve talked about that has dosed any “multipolar” world.
The NYT article on the Everest climb clients breathing xenon to speed up their acclimatization poses a question: Would you rather spend a month in the mountains, or stay home and sleep in a tent for ten weeks and only spend a few days in the mountains?
The real ethic being put forward is that time spent working is more important than time in the mountains. If you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be ushered up and down Everest by a guide, you have to earn the bucks or service the debt, and that means staying on the job.
It isn’t clear if the xenon treatment or sleeping in the hypoxia tents is what helped the acclimatization, but we’ll find out soon enough — mountaineering techniques are like aircraft safety rules: they are written in blood.
Climbing Mt Everest is so many levels of wrong, traffic jams that rival the 405 around the Hillary Step, trash all over the place, not to mention many corpus delecti flash-frozen, strike a pose!
Xenon-free here in my half-pint Himalaya (Mt Whitney is almost exactly 1/2 as tall as Mt Everest) and loving it!
Fire under AI, from Tree of Woe substack:
Your AI Hates You
A Rather Frightening Validation of Emergent Utility Pathologies in LLMs
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/your-ai-hates-you
Patriot System “long history of underwhelming performances”
“The questions more recently raised by Ukrainian officials regarding the Patriot system’s reliability against Russian ballistic missile attacks thus fit in with a long history of underwhelming performances in such a role. This has significant implications for militaries across the Western world and in Northeast Asia that rely on the system for their defence. ”
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/patriot-effectiveness-questioned-ukrainian-air-force
Ouch! Bad router, bad router!
Thousands of Asus routers are being hit with stealthy, persistent backdoors https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/thousands-of-asus-routers-are-being-hit-with-stealthy-persistent-backdoors/
Interesting. Thanks. News I can use. I’ll be checking routers tomorrow. / ;)
The ip numbers given associated with the attack are listed by Whois as belonging to Shinjiru Technology, located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
From Whois:
inetnum: 101.99.64.0 – 101.99.95.255
netname: SHINJIRU-MY
Of course, black hats can spoof ip numbers; they can hack others’ business servers and use them as bots. There’s no way right now to know if the Shinjiru company is the actual sender.
Thanks, interesting. The company has a web site and looks like it’s a web hosting company, but like you say, it could just be spoofed or hacked.
The linked article has this statement:
Neglecting to point out that typically, just like with smartphones, companies will stop providing timely updates for security issues. It may be possible to switch to one of the free open router firmware projects so that you can continue to receive software updates to fix security issues:
List of router and firewall distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_distributions
RACKET NEWS
Does “Abundance” Beat America’s Culture-Warrior-In-Chief?
Billionaires want Dems to talk about democracy, tout “abundance,” and play dead. But anti-oligarch politics is the only way to fight Trump
by David Sirota
https://www.racket.news/p/does-abundance-beat-americas-culture
Who Started the Culture War?
A brief note of introduction to David Sirota’s guest article
Matt Taibbi
https://www.racket.news/p/who-started-the-culture-war
I did a quick search re Dbeibah and Libya. And bingo. Dbeibah was moving closer to China.
So, a US colour revolution is being managed in Libya imo. USAID funding alive and kicking.
“groaf?” Qu’est que c’est, “groaf?”
Do you mean growth?