Week 2

Egypt must be eyeing the situation, the power balance, said no to UAE bcz of their recent loss.

'Egypt.. announced its firm rejection of any offer aimed at selling its stake in Alexandria Container and Cargo Handling Company [to UAE]... Founded in 1984 and listed on the stock exchange since 1995..ACCHC.. is Egypt’s largest container terminal operator. It runs two main terminals at the ports of Alexandria and El Dekheila [on Suez]"

Apparently STC (and their backer UAE) has been warned many times to stay away from Saudi red lines, they did not listen, so ended up on the receiving end of Saudi attacks.

Middle East Forum: "Saudi Arabia Turns Its Guns on an Ally.. The fight is over the 'Triangle of Power' — the oil and gas fields of Marib, Shabwa, and Hadramout. Riyadh envisions a pipeline from the Empty Quarter to the Arabian Sea to bypass the Iranian-threatened Strait of Hormuz. An independent, UAE-controlled South Yemen sitting on that pipeline route is a strategic non-starter for the House of Saud."

Reuters: "Trump threatens to ban Wall Street investments in single-family homes..

• Wall Street blamed for reduced housing supply, rent inflation
• Homebuilder shares drop sharply after Trump's comments
• Trump faces pressure over cost of living ahead of midterms"

Robin Brooks: "Department store sales have collapsed in the US.. I wrote.. about the 'retail apocalypse,' the phenomenon whereby online shopping has been hollowing out brick and mortar retail. The pandemic made this apocalypse even more acute, because it forced households that had resisted online shopping to take the plunge and they’ve never gone back."

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

Whether Waymo, etc, can eventually compete on price depends on the reasons they are more expensive now. My own guess would be they're not even trying at present to recover development costs - just minimise operational losses to keep investment flowing.

But the higher prices of Waymos raise a lot of broader issues for Europeans. A disruptive technology doesn't need to be competitive to ruin an existing excellent service - as we've seen for example with private postal services cherry-picking the most lucrative niches, but in so doing rendering the universal service more and more expensive. Who pays this price ? - the elderly or disabled customers that need help getting in and out of the car ?

A larger frame of reference would also imply analysis of other aspects - the loss of human contact, help in emergencies, loss of drivers' spending and tax in local economies, and the routing of those funds to distant lands, or tax havens..."

AA: "Somalia's president says Somaliland agreed to resettle [1.5 million] Palestinians, host Israeli base for recognition"

NYT: "Senate Advances Measure to Curb Trump’s Use of Force.. In a rebuke to the president, the Senate narrowly agreed to bring up a War Powers Act resolution for a vote next week. The measure would require Mr. Trump to seek congressional authorization for military operations in Venezuela."

Firstpost: "US records lowest trade deficit since 2009"

Whiplash - a message against grinder culture.. Work hard, grind, be at the top.. Spoiler alert: It didn't work well for the hero. Was the conductor character just a hard-headed coach but meant well? The movie came on the side of no - he was just an asshole. Real world parallels are hard to miss, the system is not trying to make you better, the meritocratic argument is there as a means of control.

"Lebanon Claims Progress in Disarming Militant Groups Like Hezbollah"

F24: "Chinese, Iranian warships in South Africa for exercises"

Is it bcz she said F U to China?

Nikkei Asia: "Japan's Takaichi government maintains 75% approval rating"

IC: "[A]nti-Climate Policies are Driving up Insurance Costs for Homeowners"

"@thorsten4future@climatejustice.social

Some commentators don't seem to get, that Europeans don't discuss Self-Driving Cars, but Car-free Cities 😻"

This is a little known but deadly serious problem with LLMs.. Anyone who used LLMs for scientific work will know they make a lot of mistakes when citing work. I've seen multiple instance where LLM says such and such idea / theory can be found in Book X page Y, you look, the explanation is not there. The reason must LLM's internal structure. They "approximately compress" knowledge, so when it decompresses to an actual source it can lose information on the way. It starts to hallunicate, making things up.

"Two lawyers were fined for submitting fake citations generated by AI, highlighting the serious risks of unchecked technology in the courtroom."

NYT: "Europe Tries to Come to Terms With Trump's Intervention in Venezuela.. Needing U.S. support to fend off Russia in Ukraine, European leaders have been cautious about criticizing President Trump on Greenland, Iran, Venezuela and much else."

CNBC: "European defense stocks rise as Denmark moves to rearm Greenland"

In a perfect world Democrats would be punished for their half-assed healthcare solution and not delivering a proper left-wing one when they had the chance, but voters see no further than their nose, Reps can end up with the blame. Clintoncare -> Obamacare -> today. And many wonder why "extreme right" is on the rise.

"Health insurance premiums set to soar as ACA subsidies expire"

CNBC: "WBD once again rejects Paramount offer in favor of Netflix deal.. Warner Bros. Discovery's board still sees its deal with Netflix as the superior option over Paramount's recently amended hostile offer."

The Lever: "They Lobbied, Venezuela Burned... Before Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, oil giants, global creditors, and cryptocurrency firms lobbied on sanctions and access to the resource-rich nation... Chevron is currently the only U.S.-based holder of a general waiver granting the fossil fuel firm permission to broadly operate in Venezuela’s vast oil fields, which represent about 17 percent of world’s global supply.

Disclosures filed on behalf of Mare Finance Investment Holdings, an Ireland-based creditor, reveal the company spent $240,000 lobbying in the first three quarters of 2025 on a single issue: 'Interest in OFAC licensing for purposes of enforcing portion of an award against Venezuelan assets.' That means the firm is likely seeking U.S. permission to do business in the country so it can pursue settlement money it’s owed by the Maduro government."

Al Monitor: "Teen killed after bus hits ultra-Orthodox protesters in Jerusalem.. A mass ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally against military conscription turned deadly"

"@thibaultamartin@mamot.fr

It’s worth repeating. Android is not a viable base for an independent or even just collaborative operating system. Android is Google and only Google’s project. If you want to see an actually transparent, international, and collaborative system on phones, support @postmarketOS"

Thats a bit excessive isnt it? Baud is just airing a different view.

"European Union ambassadors on December 10 decided on further sanctions against Russia, with a new package adding several individuals and entities to its sprawling blacklist... A former colonel in the Swiss Army, Jacques Baud, is also listed for acting 'as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda'"

NYT: "Britain and France firmed up a postwar troop commitment in Ukraine, though Russia has said it will reject any deal that allows NATO-country forces in Ukraine."

The Lever: "Corporations Invested In Lawsuits Before Venezuela Invasion.. Trump’s removal of President Nicolás Maduro could tilt international court proceedings and provide a windfall to corporate plaintiffs... Just weeks before the American military operation in Venezuella to capture Maduro, the US energy giant Haliburton filed an unusual lawsuit in internatioal court claiming the Venezuelan government owed them damages for US sanctions against the country"

Euronews: "From Maduro's 'tigress' to Venezuela's interim president: Who is Delcy Rodríguez? [Her father] José Antonio Rodríguez, the patriarch of a family that would later come to shape the trajectory of Venezuela’s socialist journey, was an active student leader.. He later co-founded the Socialist League, a marginal political party that rejected electoral politics and actively promoted abstention and the null vote...

[In 1976] José Antonio Rodríguez was arrested by officers of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). He died in police custody after what his family alleges was torture. His youngest daughter, Delcy, was seven at the time."

"@jon@vivaldi.net

As a note, I sometimes help family members set up their new computers. It should be simple, but I am finding it takes hours to remove stuff and it is getting worse."

Probably true: US presidents become frustrated w the domestic opposition, internal checks and balances, over time most start to work on foreign policy in a disproportionate manner bcz they have a freer rein there.

Only if Russia brought back the Warsaw Pact, somehow added Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Columbia to it, later announced it is considering to include Venezuella as well, which promptly started to bomb its 'minority Americans' on its territory, then US could be right to say "wait a minute, what's going on here, should I step in?". In that case the situation would be similar to Russia / Ukraine.

Ukraine is more than Russia's backyard. It is gateway to its capital city. No one was rolling into Latin America and adding countries to a distant military alliance either.

Venezuella's situation is not the same as Ukraine (ie US "had to act" bcz foreign powers were encroaching on its backyard).

"@lightbeaminsight@mastodon.social

History is rhyming far too much for my liking. Has been for quite a while, but it looks like we’re heading into the chorus. I hate this song"

The Hill: "Rep. Thomas Massie.. questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s strikes on Venezuela, which ended with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.. 'If this action were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn’t be tweeting that they’ve arrested the President of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law,' Massie wrote"

For less than $10 mil, he will be raking in billions. In what other areas of life you get returns so high?

Responsible Statecraft: "Big investors jockeying for potential Venezuela oil rush.. Regime change has opened the door for hedge funds and Trump allies to cash in.. But it’s Paul Singer, a major Trump donor, who is set to be one of the biggest winners..

Singer is.. a major Trump donor, having donated $5 million to Trump’s super PAC and 1 million to defeat one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Singer has been called a 'vulture' for his tactic of buying up distressed assets, sometimes assisted by longtime ally Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In 2016, then-Senator Rubio pressured Argentina into a payment of 4.6 billion to Singer and other creditors to settle debt they had bought, according to journalist Greg Pallast."

#UpFront #AlJazeera #Haiti

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Those merry band of corkmunchers around Peter Thiel are the worst. Like that Karp guy - comes across like on some kind of drug, he is high.. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" kinda high, that ecstasy they must get from war.. Guy can't sit still, he wants to go out and provide the software to kill more.

[-]

Tech bro billionaire foreign policy? What is it?.. I do remember a few instances when some of them would blurt out the occasional Israel-skeptic comment back in the day.. Andreessen said once US needs to reconsider its close alliance with Israel, bcz they are not strategically crucial. Nowadays though there is mostly silence from this group, a good number of them became contractors for the military anyway, they must have been "tamed". Tech bros now will want more war, so they can provide software that track and kill.

"Every Mossad agent walking beside them"..

Pompeo: "The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope. Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege.. 47 years of this regime; POTUS 47. Coincidence? Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them"

USA Today: "'Sick and tired.' MTG calls Venezuela strike betrayal of MAGA.. Greene argued that if Trump cared about drug trafficking, he’d be focusing on other entities, including Mexican cartels. 'This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn't serve the American people, that actually serves the big corporations, the banks, and the oil executives,' Greene said on 'Meet the Press'. 'My understanding of America first is strictly for the American people'"

Vice: "Marco Rubio’s Billionaire Backer Likes to Sue Poor Countries and Put Profits in Tax Havens"

[-]

Reuters: "[2015] Billionaire donor [Paul Singer] backs Rubio for U.S. president"

The Cradle: "Pro-Israel billionaire Paul Singer is.. expected to reap a significant windfall from the [Venezuella] operation. In November, a US court awarded his firm, Elliott Management, control of the assets of CITGO, the US subsidiary of Venezuela's state oil firm, PDVSA.

With Maduro gone, Singer can begin importing Venezuelan crude and converting it to fuel at CITGO's refineries along the US Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas."

Fortune: "[2025/09] Founded 115 years ago in Oklahoma, Citgo Petroleum is a quintessentially American oil and gas brand. Except, of course, that it’s been quietly and entirely owned by Venezuela since 1990..

Now, the decade-long legal saga over the fate of the Houston-based oil refiner could soon end through a drawn-out, legal auction to pay off creditors who lost oil assets, mining rights, and more when they were expropriated.. [one of] the finalists [is] activist investor group Elliott Investment Management..

At stake is Citgo’s 800,000-barrel-a-day refining network with refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois, as well as a series of pipelines and terminals, and branding and fuel marketing deals with 4,000 independently owned retail outlets throughout the East Coast, Midwest, and South...

The legal fight between Venezuela and its creditors brewed for years until 2018 when a small, defunct Canadian mining company, Crystallex, won a federal court ruling saying it could pursue Citgo’s assets to collect more than $1 billion it allegedly lost when Venezuela expropriated assets in 2011."

Basel III made gold a Tier 1 asset, I wonder if they were aiming an alternative currency to emerge out of that decision. Designers of Unit exploited the BIII gold designation for sure. More institutions, governments will hold gold now since it is, er, "good as gold", so why not build something around that and stick it to SWIFT in the meantime?

Forbes: "[2025/08] A new report from MIT has sent shockwaves through the enterprise AI world: 95% of generative AI pilots deliver zero return on investment... The findings, based on 300 public deployments, more than 150 executive interviews, and $30 to 40 billion invested in these pilots, suggest that billions of dollars have been spent on AI experiments that never scale"

With the new BRICS 'Unit' the BRICS countries seem to have crossed some kind of Rubicon, they showed they are serious on their goals.

There are many things going on at once in US.. Maga Lago Accords aims to correct trade imbalance and depreciate the dollar, manage the massive debt repayment problem, US also wants to remain as the reserve currency would likely prefer the continuation of the petrodollar system. Some of these goals could be contradictory.

Keynes disliked gold yes, he saw no need for it, but the Unit creators were probably worrying about creating trust in their nascent system quickly and gold can be a way to do that.

The main goal of Unit seems to be replacing SWIFT, creating an alternative way for payments. That is a fine goal. I would still like to see a true global currency though, like Bancor, which punishes surplus countries as a feature of its construction.

You apparently cannot say 'pedophile' on the platform anymore so some creators say "pdf file" to get around the control, using a code.

Corporate control can be worse than the government kind. Gov at least needs to care about the public benefit at some level. Corps are under no obligation to do so. If they capture the government, as they've done in US, their adverse affects will multiply.

Creators on Youtube do the same..

"To combat systematic internet censorship, netizens in China have created a new vocabulary to discuss 'sensitive issues'"

No wonder the price of gold has been rising for a while now.

Buttcoin! (somebody's joking about Bitcoin)

Reshare [2019]

"@RealSaidov

Unpopular Opinion:

3rd generation protocols such as @avalabsofficial , @CardanoStiftung and @Algorand will make #BTC and #ETH look like cute little experiments."

The backbone is built on Cardano? I posted about Cardano before. The tech sounded good.

"The BRICS gold-backed currency uses a reserve basket where 40 grams of physical gold combine with equal 12% weightings of five BRICS currencies, which include Brazil’s Real, China’s Yuan, India’s Rupee, Russia’s Ruble, and also South Africa’s Rand. Through several key technological approaches, IRIAS actually engineered the BRICS The Unit currency on the Cardano blockchain network and announced it on November 10, 2025."

"Status of the US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency: USD Share Drops to Lowest since 1994"

"BRICS deepens shift from dollar, controls 50% of global gold.. In addition, BRICS is developing alternative financial infrastructure. The alliance has launched a prototype gold-backed currency known as the 'Unit', composed of 40% physical gold and 60% national currencies of member states"

Yeah I saw the move they pulled with the margin requirements for silver. Smelled fishy. They did that to supress the price.

If you are in paper gold via COMEX you might be in trouble. At some point everyone, including US, will need access to real gold and there isn't enough physical gold to back all the paper gold floating around right now.

ENDGAME

"For banks, US Basel III impacts both business strategy and regulatory compliance.. The proposed ‘fully phased in’ date for the Endgame is July 1, 2028"

"As of July 1, 2025, gold will officially be classified as a Tier 1, high-quality liquid asset (HQLA) under the Basel III banking regulations.. [it used to be Tier 3]"

Ruckus in Caracas... Nice. Like Thrilla in Manilla.

Nat Rothschild: "Well done Donald J Trump. #venezuelalibre"

Politico: "[2025/12] The U.S. effort, led by the State Department, has also gotten assistance from Evanan Romero, a former executive at the Venezuelan state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela who now works as a consultant in Houston..

Romero told POLITICO that the Trump administration’s outreach included brokering a meeting in Washington in late November, led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, among Exxon, ConocoPhillips and representatives of a Venezuelan opposition group to which Romero belongs. The discussion centered on the possibility of the two oil majors returning to the country.

Romero, who did not attend the meeting but was given a readout from opposition group members, described the meeting as “positive” and said Wright’s presence was “very, very helpful.” He said Exxon and ConocoPhillips aired concerns about the debt they are owed from their past Venezuela operations, and the Venezuelan representatives floated the opportunity to take control of additional fields to compensate for the debt."