Week 51

"@PabloMartini@climatejustice.social

.. Austrian broadcaster, ORF, which will host Eurovision 2026, has said it will not ban Palestinian flags from the event or edit out the audience’s boos against Israel. The move appears to be an attempt to prevent more nations boycotting the event next May after Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands all announced their refusal to take part if genocidal Israel is allowed to compete... The 2025 contest was criticised for dubbing over widespread audience booing against Israel with cheering.

Such a move was undoubtedly part of a propaganda attempt to create a false impression of public support for the occupation – one that went as far as alleged intensive and expensive efforts by the Israeli government to rig the public vote, leading to changes in voting rules for future contests.

Eurovision 2026, the 70th contest since its founding, will have the fewest contestants since 2023. If it did the right thing and removed one, it would immediately gain back five more and prevent boycotts far more certainly than broadcasters having to promise not to censor booing or Palestine flags."

As we see, regulation is good

"HHS takes sweeping actions to restrict gender treatments for minors"

"Kroupa" sounded familiar and a local search revealed this is the same Kroupa that also questions the existence of dark matter. Link below.

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The paper questions the validity of the Big Bang hypothesis relating to CMB.

Pavel Kroupa: "The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies, corrected for foreground effects, form the foundation of cosmology and support the Big Bang model. A previously overlooked foreground component is the formation of massive early-type galaxies (ETGs), which can no longer be ignored, particularly in light of JWST’s detection of massive, evolved systems at extreme redshifts (z > 13)."

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With the right cosmetics Craig would be fine. Laurie isn't perfect match either, but you are trying to get the rough idea right.

Who would I pick to play in a movie about the Russian gov? Putin -> Daniel Craig. Lavrov -> Ron Perlman. Medvedev -> Hugh Laurie

Canary: "[Former] Mandela government minister turned investigative journalist and UK political campaigner Andrew Feinstein, now based in London, knew Nelson Mandela well. And he has written to Keir Starmer and ‘justice’ secretary David Lammy to tell them that Mandela, whom they both claim as their hero, would be 'shocked and outraged' by them."

#Ukraine 12/01 - 12/18

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NYT finally remembered its journalistic duty and did a deep dive on Epstein's past. What took you so long?

NYT: "In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power"

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Loureiro worked on nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission. With fission you are dividing, fusion u are combining. Fission is doable, a-bomb, existing nuke plants, we got that down... Fusion is tough, the holy grail.

"We sell weapons to country X so it can protect itself from neighbor country Y". Then X becomes militarized and becomes a threat to Y. Y invades X. More chaos but someone gets richer, US can sell even more weapons to X. This is the story of US foreign policy (if you can call it that). The so-called policy is basically the international sales department of the arms industry. The "strategic" reasonings are a cover to hide this fact from you. There is no strategy. There is no deep state. There is no empire. It's all on the surface, plain for anyone to see. It's all about munee and bihness.

Taiwan is en route on becoming the new Ukraine

"U.S. approves over $11 billion in arms sale to Taiwan as tensions simmer around the island"

The guy esp. focused on something called "magnetic reconnection".. The concept sounds like a type of bifurcation to me #NonlinearDynamics.

Plasma turbulence = strange attractors?

For people who are looking for a field that steers away from the bullshit and "incompleteness" of recent science (even though "it computes") plasma physics could be a great new area. There is a lot to do and the end result could be, literally, fusion - you know the thing that is always 30 years away?

Studying non-linear dynamics one can see where deterministic, simple (even Newtonian, like, pre-Maxwell), non-linear systems of equations lead to incredibly complex and sometimes unexpected outcomes. What Loureiro says below makes perfect sense.

I see.. That piqued my interest.

"A lot of plasma physics is pre-relativistic and pre-quantum" #Loureiro

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Texas oil interests arranged for the killing of a president. The complex can surely take out an MIT researcher.

It looks like Loureiro was one of the top experts on plasma physics and fusion. Did he make a breakthrough and was killed by the oil/gas energy complex?

"MIT professor Nuno Loureiro killed in shooting at his Brookline, Massachusetts home"

PBS News: "Trump said health insurance companies have 'gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people,' claiming that the 'unaffordable' Affordable Care Act, an Obama-era law, was created to make these companies rich."

AA: "Trump says ISIS terror attack that killed US troops has 'nothing to do' with Syria’s president"

Some reports suggested the gunman was affiliated with HTS, likely an opposition figure to its leader Shara (Jolani). The disagreement could be HTS leader is too pro-US, and some in his org do not like that. The attack on US troops would harm Shara's standing, is a message targeted to him.

BBC: "Three Americans killed by IS gunman in Syria, US military"

[Geek] Dude says yeah some people argue MCMC can be slow but is it slower than vanilla machine learning plus cross-validation? Good point... He equates a hierarchical probabilistic model which defines correct ranges, distributions with its "prior" parameters to one that doesn't but then has to find optimal values via brute-force cross-validation (fitting the model many, many times). This is a good comparison to make, and in many cases likely true. There will be cases where you would still use CV even in the MCMC scenario, but most of the time MCMC posterior sampling already gave you an optimized version of what parameters could be, within natural workings of its machinery.[/geek]

Commentary on Verba since 2020s has been positive. One expert labeled it as "game changer". If its reported capabilities are true, that is possible. Verbe detects low flying objects using three sensors -ultraviolet, near infrared, and mid-infrared-, has better accuracy, it can deny airspace to drones within a large enough bubble that gives true protection from much feared drone tech.

"[2020] The most advanced Russian portable anti-aircraft missile system 'Verba'.. has received new capabilities. Thanks to its automated controls, it can attack even targets that are invisible to the operator’s eye.. This will create a 'security dome' impenetrable for drones over troops with a radius of 6 km and a height of over four."

Teen Vogue now publishes articles on inequality?

Ayres, Teen Vogue: It’s impossible to have that much money without profiting off of other people's lack of it. Even if individuals are only implicated discreetly, the capitalist class generates profits upwards by denying workers a living wage, engaging in exploitative labor practices (directly or indirectly along the supply chain), ensuring that medicine and health care costs remain high, or lobbying for or even simply benefitting from favorable taxation policies and cushy government subsidies. Wealth is also able to accumulate via close proximity to power, with corporate connections leading to elected office, or merely allowing people to use their influential status to set the agenda according to their own interests. This is known as plutocracy, or rule by the rich, and it undermines democracy.

The Bondi Beach Story Just Doesn't Add Up #JamesLi

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NYT: "As Israeli Settlements Get Bigger, Palestinian Hikes Grow Shorter.. With Israelis rapidly building in the West Bank, Palestinian hikers are increasingly unable to walk across the land."

And he uses the same make-up artist each time

#BondiBeach #Haqiqatjou

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That basically means this man came to Australia for another acting gig... He had one in Israel, and now a new one in Oz. There is demand for his work.

Times of India: "A man who survived the October 7 terror attacks in Israel was injured in a mass shooting at Sydney's Bondi Beach.. The unidentified man said he had lived in Israel for 13 years... had come to Australia just two weeks ago 'to work with the Jewish community'"

F24: "European Commission scraps 2035 combustion-engine ban in bid to boost car industry"

IC: "Soaring West Bank Violence is Fueled by Official Israeli Surrender to Settlers.. The escalation in settler violence has gone from vandalism and property destruction to now being marked by kidnapping, prolonged abuse"

"Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should 'stay out of our politics,' after [some usual bullshit comments on] rising antisemitism"

First interview given to Sputnik? It looks like Madagascar will be friendlier with Russia..

"In his first interview since taking office, Madagascar’s new leader, Colonel Michaël Randrianirina, has declared his intention to pursue a full political and economic break from France, signaling a major shift in the country’s foreign policy. Speaking to Sputnik Africa, President Randrianirina emphasized the need for new, mutually beneficial partnerships, stating: 'We will find partners who will work with us in a win-win way.'"

Pro Publica: "Amid Trump’s Proposed Pipeline Safety Rollbacks, Senator Questions Regulators’ Industry Ties"

Pro Publica: "Safety Rollback: Trump’s Department of Transportation has been on a deregulation blitz, with 30 regulatory moves that could reduce safety and cost lives, according to experts.

Industry Influence: 32 DOT political appointees have close industry ties or financial links. It’s not a fox guarding a henhouse, one observer said. This is “the fox designing the henhouse.”

Enforcement Retreat: DOT has opened 50% fewer investigations into vehicle safety defects than the Biden administration and concluded 83% fewer enforcement cases against trucking companies."

Aether can explain even time dilation

#Time #GravityAsRefraction

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"@pervocracy.bsky.social

The older I get, the more my politics mature from childish, naïve beliefs like 'the world is complicated and leaders have to make hard decisions' to more serious, adult principles like 'hurting people is bad and helping people is good.'"

She could write for a Bond movie.. I'm getting Amy Winehouse vibes

Diamond - Angelina Jordan #music

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"Amanda Sloat, who Politico called 'an architect of President Joe Biden’s Europe policy'.. admitted that the Biden administration could have prevented the war before it started by saying Ukraine would not join NATO, something they chose not to do... Despite admitting that saying Ukraine will not join NATO 'may well have' stopped the war, she admitted that she and the Biden administration chose not to, saying, '.. I don’t think Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then, to tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO'... Sloat [also] admitted that the U.S. could have ended the war during the Istanbul peace talks in April of 2022, but again chose not to."

Do LLMs Understand? #YannLeCun

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Sign of coming recession?

CNBC: "U.S. crude oil drops below $55 a barrel, hits lowest level since early 2021"

F24: "Ford is abandoning top EV models like the F-150 Lightning as weak demand and hostile policies [!] from the Trump administration weigh on sales."

Record exports but domestic consumption worries..

CNBC: "China's retail sales growth sharply misses estimates in November, deepening consumption worries"

CNBC: "European defense stocks slide as Zelenskyy ditches Ukraine NATO membership bid"

Politico: "‘I Didn’t Vote for This’: A Revolt Against DOGE Cuts, Deep in Trump Country.. Trump administration policies slashing staffing and funding for public lands are waking a sleeping political giant in Montana"

Israel is the perfect stooge to hide behind, it checks a lot of boxes. Jews are the ultimate victims, so even Israel's rabid expansionism can be hidden by "their right to defend themselves", or "right to exist" as if they are almost always in danger of another Holocaust. They are a tiny religion-based ethno state in a region who do not share their religion. They are in a region whose borders were drawn up by the West post WWI that created bizarre groupings that can be exploited, through a client-state (Israel) thereby creating more demand for weapon systems.

Money runs Congress, and in defense matters money + bihness interests run Congress through Israel, esp through that melon headed punk Netanyahoo. This is the military-industrial-Likud complex in display, explained by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh.

Jacobin: "[2024/7] A dazzled Congress gave Netanyahu fifty-eight standing ovations, lasting about half of the speech’s duration and marking a record in US history, or perhaps any country’s history, at more than 400 percent the number Kim Jong Un receives in North Korea, thus breaking Netanyahu’s own record from 2015, when his forty-three-minute speech received forty-three standing ovations and rounds of applause from nearly every single US lawmaker. After a long, torturous hour of cheering and clapping, lawmakers scrambled on the House floor to shake Netanyahu’s hand."

Bernie Sanders: "As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis stated in 1933; 'We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.'.. Today, at a time of unprecedented income & wealth inequality, his words ring truer than ever."

Forbes: "[2020, A] dominant core of 147 firms through interlocking stakes in others together control 40% of the wealth in the global network according to the Swiss Institute of Technology. A total of 737 companies control 80% of it all..

The New Scientist talked to one systems theorist who is "disconcerted" at the level of interconnectedness, but not surprised. Such structures occur commonly in biology, things like fungus, lichen and weeds."

MEE: "[Reporters Without Borders] reports that 43 percent of all journalists slain in 2025 were Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in targeted attacks, a scale the organisation says is "unprecedented in recent history"... Yet, despite the severity of these findings, major western news outlets that sanctimoniously champion press freedom and human rights found little space for the deadliest year in RSF's records, much less that the overwhelming majority of those journalists were Palestinian...

And few institutions illustrate this selective outrage more clearly than The New York Times, whose editorial board had the gall last month to condemn US President Donald Trump [bcz of Khashoggi] over his meeting with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman"

PSKY offer is messy.. I even argue, suboptimal. Two companies mired in debt merging will not help either company. Netflix is still the better choice. The bonus is Jew Ellison will not have another outlet to spew his spiteful Zionist, pro-Israel ideology.

Yahoo Finance: "Paramount’s $54 Billion Debt Plays a Starring Role in Warner Bid.. Even if Paramount Skydance Corp. manages to take over Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. against the company’s will, it faces another high hurdle: coping with the colossal 54 billion of debt it’s planning to take on."

"Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale"

TAC: "Ordinary Republicans are not as pro-Israel as they once were. In 2022, just 27 percent of Republicans had a negative view of Israel. Now it stands at 37 percent. Among Republicans under 50, half hold a negative view of the Jewish state. This is the future of the GOP. It doesn’t sound like “pro-Israel” will be one of their core tenets...

Republicans are notably less hawkish than they were in the George W. Bush era. A plurality of Republicans either want to cut or entirely eliminate funding for Ukraine. By comparison, a majority of Democrats want to increase funding for Ukraine. Republicans are less likely now to back NATO and other international commitments. Republicans are not as greatly concerned with foreign affairs as think tankers are. It was ranked near the bottom of issues that 2024 voters cared about...

It’s unclear what voters Con Inc. expects to win over with neoconservatism, which lost decisively in 2008 and 2012 in the general election and 2016 in the Republican primary. There’s not a great demand for the return of Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush"

In a way the Opium War started because of a trade imbalance.. China was selling more to Britain than was buying from it, so Britain used its military to force China to buy a product from it (opium). Not that wars are good, the point is trade imbalances can cause problems.

I am sure Reagan would have approved (!), loved, both trade restrictions and the subsidies. Make the gipper proud.

"Trump unveils $12 billion aid package for farmers hit by trade war Reuters"

The never ending S400 saga keeps on giving.. Asia Minor bought the system despite US objections, was kicked out of the F35 program bcz of it (some claim S400 purchase was a response to US support for the 2016 coup attempt). Now gobble gobble wants back in the club, needs F35s (its indigious fighter tech is not ready), so tries to hand over its S400 to someone else. I guess EU, indirectly Ukraine was floated, but such a move wld piss off the Russians in a major way.

And there is that

"Lavrov announced Turkey's obligations to Russia on S-400.. Lavrov: Turkey cannot sell Russian S-400 air defense systems to the EU for transfer to Ukraine"

It sounds like a fucka me fucka you type situation.. TR allows UA attack on RU in its EEZ, and gets its ship attacked by RU in return.

Al Jazeera: "Russia damages Turkish-owned vessels in attack on Ukrainian ports"

"[12/2] A third Russian tanker attacked in the Black Sea [in TR EEZ by a UA drone]"

Edward Luttwak: "Because the world’s shipping insurance companies promptly raised their rates [due to Houthi threat] , shipping via the Red Sea and Suez Canal fell steeply, as more and more ships to and from Asia avoided the danger by going all the way round the Cape of Good Hope and the great bulge of West Africa. Thus the most important of commercial routes, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, was extended by some 4,900 nautical miles...

For some trades, the extra costs were easily absorbed, and for others they were fatal. But the losses to Europe’s Mediterranean ports and the cities that depend on them — Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa and Gioia Tauro among others — caused by the loss of traffic was absolute: Europe’s freight now arrived in Rotterdam or Antwerp and continued to French, Italian and Spanish cities by rail, leaving the Mediterranean ports bereft of Asian traffic.

By then, Trump had heard that the fight with the Houthis was extremely expensive for the US Navy. Its destroyers, built to defend its multi-billion aircraft carriers from Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles, only had $2.5-million “standard missiles” to attack Iran’s cheap drones and crude anti-ship missiles, themselves copied from older Chinese designs.

It was at that point in the US Navy briefing that Trump asked about European navies and their role in fighting the Houthis. When he heard that just the Mediterranean navies of France, Italy and Spain.. had some 200 combat vessels including aircraft carriers, he naturally asked how many of their ships were fighting the Houthis. And he was genuinely shocked by the answer: almost none.

All three countries had refused to join the suggestively named Anglo-American “Prosperity Guardian” mission because it involved some air attacks against Houthi weapon depots. This reticence disregarded the fact that the Houthis were not Yemen’s government but merely rebels. Either way, after doing nothing, the EU navies stationed two small ships in the upper Red Sea under the hugely over-publicised “Aspides” mission, which intercepted a total of four Houthi ballistic missiles, alongside 18 drones. Compare this to the 400 drones and missiles intercepted by the US Navy, all at 100 times the cost.

Upon receiving this information, Trump did not ask his National Security Advisor.. to convene a meeting to discuss US options: he simply ordered the US Navy to immediately abandon the Prosperity Guardian fight against the Houthis, supposedly employing some choice language about the idiocy of exhausting US naval missile stocks to safeguard the commercial freight of Nato Mediterranean countries: whose own warships lolled idly by instead of defending their commerce....

All this set the stage for Trump’s new approach to the Ukraine war... the number of EU troops sent to Ukraine? Zero. That is ultimately why the Trump plan has made its concessions to Putin. It is not a pretty spectacle to see Washington replacing unconditional support for Ukraine with an ultimatum to end the war or else"

Created by Russell T. Davies. I believe he is also responsible for destroying the Doctor Who franchise. The show went broke bcz of the heavy dose of woke.

The War Between the Land and the Sea is Woke. White males are a minority in it and the alien race has "trans capabilities", like, they can change sex on the spot, depending on their mood. Whoa. How rebellious are the creators? Their unexpected takes are off the charts. This is some strong art. Wealth imbalance is sky high, but meh, let's talk about some identities, cultural hot button stuff.

The ska version is better than the original

Less Than Jake - Greased Lightnin #music

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"Faraday, Maxwell and the Aether"

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"YouTube’s CEO limits his kids’ social media use — other tech bosses do the same.. YouTube's CEO Neal Mohan joins other tech bosses from Bill Gates to Mark Cuban who restrict their children's social media and smartphone use"

Stronger measures might be needed to fix this problem. Global tariffs? Bretton Woods 2.0?

"How did China’s trade surplus hit $1 trillion?.. China’s export dominance.. scaled new heights in November."