OVERVIEW
Where to start? We have further political disintegration as the forces of past evils battle to destroy what’s left of our future. We continue to be presented with a choice between evil and a continuity of failures.
Evil is terminal, but continuing past failures allows correction. People angry at the lack of choice are looking for change. This is what underlies the refusal of people in America to accept Biden's economic successes, including stock market record highs, controlled inflation, improved wages, and the lowest unemployment in fifty years.
Whether people fully understand it or not, a plurality, at least, recognizes that the old criteria ceased being relevant several decades ago. What America and its empire still call economic successes are now symptoms of institutional failure in a planetary disaster.
We don’t know what needs to be done, but the old ways of doing things are not what we need. But what do we do?
The answers will be found in the overlap of science, revolutionary technology, and social change. The demand for justice to curb late-stage capitalist nation-states comes from everywhere but the American Empire.
As they evolve, the answers will not be simple or clearly understood. Hopefully, we will catch some of this here.
GAZA WAR
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is doing its job.
The above link is a speech in the US Senate by Bernie Sanders that recognizes the shift in world attitudes to the Zionist genocide in Gaza. The difficulty is the constant confusion being used to hide the distinction between the world Jewish population and the tiny group who have inherited the Zionist state of Isreal.
This is beginning to slow the American default support for Zionist genocide identified by university students nationally and around the world.
Police Make First Arrest for Assault on Pro-Palestine Protesters at UCLA
International isolation of the Zionist government in Israel is growing:
Norway, Ireland, and Spain say they will recognize a Palestinian state, deepening Israel’s isolation
UKRAINE WAR
The other major war for America has two conflict developments this week.
Exclusive: Putin wants Ukraine ceasefire on current frontlines [Source: REUTERS]
MOSCOW/LONDON, May 24 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to halt the war in Ukraine with a negotiated ceasefire that recognises the current battlefield lines, four Russian sources told Reuters, saying he is prepared to fight on if Kyiv and the West do not respond.
Three of the sources, familiar with discussions in Putin's entourage, said the veteran Russian leader had expressed frustration to a small group of advisers about what he views as Western-backed attempts to stymie negotiations and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's decision to rule out talks.
"Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire – to freeze the war," said another of the four, a senior Russian source who has worked with Putin and has knowledge of top level conversations in the Kremlin.
He, like the others cited in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity given the matter's sensitivity.
The concern with nuclear escalation is real, given the other development in Europe:
NATO’s boss wants to free Ukraine to strike hard inside Russia
Nato secretaries-general do not normally attack the policies of the alliance’s biggest and most important member country. But Jens Stoltenberg, whose ten-year stint in charge is coming to an end, has done just that. In an interview with The Economist on May 24th, he called on nato allies supplying weapons to Ukraine to end their prohibition on using them to strike military targets in Russia. Mr Stoltenberg’s clear, if unnamed, target was the policy maintained by Joe Biden, America’s president, of controlling what Ukraine can and cannot attack with American-supplied systems.
The game plays on . . .
POLITICS/ECONOMICS
The US has long been Israel’s largest arms merchant. For the last four years, the US has supplied Israel with 69% of its imported weapons, from F-35s to chemical munitions (white phosphorous), tank shells to precision bombs. Despite this, the Biden administration claims not to know how these weapons are put to use, even when they maim and kill American citizens.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, works for the totalitarian Ministry of Truth, where his assignment is to produce lies. He rewrites history so that whatever the regime says today cannot be contradicted by something it might have said yesterday. (He ensures, for example, that Big Brother’s “Order for the Day” announcements about the regime’s achievements match up with everything the leader predicted in previous statements, and he excises any untidy references in the state media to people who have been arrested and disappeared.) Once history is fixed, Winston drops contradictory materials into “the memory hole,” a small opening near every desk that leads to a furnace, where the inconvenient past is quickly incinerated.
The DoJ Is Closing In On Tesla
Do you remember how much Musk over-exaggerated how good Tesla’s self-driving abilities were? For years, it felt like he would claim Teslas are self-driving in all but name and safer than human drivers on a daily basis. Do you also remember how the number of Teslas crashing while using Autopilot/FSD has ballooned over the years? There have been quite a few high-profile fatal crashes in which Tesla’s AI has been strongly incriminated as the incident’s root cause. Well, this hasn’t gone unnoticed, and Tesla has been under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) for a while now. In fact, we just got a little peek into where they are taking this case, and it seems Tesla might face charges of securities and wire fraud. But why? And will these charges stick?
CLIMATE DISASTER
Your Latest Doom Report [Source: OKDoomer.io]
Climate chaos slams Houston
A derecho tore through Houston a few days ago, bringing winds of 100 miles per hour. It knocked out power for nearly 1 million homes and businesses. Most of them won't have power for weeks. Houston was also recently hit with massive floods. They've been feeling the reality of climate collapse that we're all going to be living through soon enough.
Mpox makes a comeback
Monkeypox (or mpox) has been making a comeback in the U.S. In fact, it never really went away. As of this year, it has continued to spark outbreaks around the world, including Britain, Vietnam, and Puerto Rico. According to a recent report from The Journal of Infectious Diseases, asymptomatic spread has been contributing to these outbreaks. Researchers found that 1 in 15 adults tested for mpox had antibodies but no signs of illness.
The deadlier Clade II mpox has been spreading through the DRC, resulting in 20,000 infections and 1,000 deaths over the last year. The CDC and WHO have said they're "concerned" about the virus spreading worldwide, like the "milder" Clade I did in 2022.
Whooping cough kills
The public is finally starting to pay attention to whooping cough as a major outbreak in the UK has killed at least five infants sickened thousands. It's caused by a bacteria, which means you have to treat it with antibiotics. Pharmacies are now reporting shortages of those antibiotics, and they're having to turn away patients. Whooping cough is especially contagious. One person can spread it to 15-17 people, putting it on par with Covid and measles. Vaccination rates have plummeted after Covid, to 58 percent.
This outbreak won't stay in the UK. In fact, it has already been spreading through schools in the U.S. and across Europe. Officials have only been encouraging vaccines, not masks or clean air.
When you combine sagging vaccination rates with weakened immune systems and resistance to masking, you get outbreaks like this one. You also set the stage for worse outbreaks in the future.
Which leads to...
The dairy industry doesn't care
As we all know now, bird flu has established a reservoir in U.S. cattle. It's close to the worst-case scenario, and it essentially guarantees spillover to humans in the near future. So far, bird flu has killed half of the humans it infects. It continues to surprise scientists and rewrite disease textbooks.
As Nate Bear explains, the dairy industry is courting the next pandemic through widespread negligence and corruption. Even as a dangerous virus spread through cows across the country, dairy farms and even USDA labs refuse to participate in the kind of tracking we need.
U.S. politicians have spent hundreds of millions propping up this flawed, failing industry over the last several decades, even as demand for milk and cheese fall and the world increasingly realizes that at least half of us can't even properly digest dairy. It was never meant for us. It's not a good source of calcium for humans. It's environmentally destructive, and there's no reason for us to be torturing and murdering millions of cows.
The dairy industry employs large numbers of undocumented immigrants, who are extremely unlikely to get tested or treated for bird flu when they become ill. When the bird flu pandemic begins, these exploited workers will be ground zero, and we don't even know until it's too late.
How's that for doomsaying?
Rapid warming of Arctic permafrost has brought a significant threat to all life forms. Consequently, The Royal Society (est. 1660) felt compelled to support publication of a new video that exposes this threat: What Happens When the Permafrost Thaws? BBC in partnership with The Royal Society by Daniel Nils Roberts, British-Norwegian director, April 15, 2024.
SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F070aff07-022b-4951-b8a6-fe257e98443c_700x394.jpeg)
4 pervasive myths that cause us to abandon science
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not driven by opinion, prejudice or bias. It’s not unchallengeable. And it’s more than facts alone.
When you think about what science actually is, how do you conceive of it? Do you do what most people do, and default to what you learned in our classes in school, with a layer of cynicism and skepticism layered atop it? That’s understandable, as many of us remember being taught “facts” in our science classes that later were shown to be not as they seemed at the time. It’s as though, somewhere along the lines, many of us were taught isolated facts about the world, and our ability to regurgitate those facts was used as a metric to measure how good we were at science. Many of those facts may have felt absurd; many of the experiments we performed didn’t give the results we were told they should give; many of our experiences didn’t line up with what was written in our textbooks.
NASA Wants to Build a Maglev Railroad Across the Moon
NASA aims to set up a long-term human presence on the Moon, but maintaining a habitat on the surface will require some innovative infrastructure. To one day transport cargo across the dusty, cratered landscape, NASA is considering a magnetic levitation railway system.
NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program recently announced six projects selected for the second stage of development, meaning they will receive additional funding and support from the space agency. Among the futuristic concepts is a robotic transport system called FLOAT, or Flexible Levitation on a Track. Here’s how the team describes their idea:
The FLOAT system employs unpowered magnetic robots that levitate over a 3-layer flexible film track: a graphite layer enables robots to passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation, a flex-circuit layer generates electromagnetic thrust to controllably propel robots along tracks, and an optional thin-film solar panel layer generates power for the base when in sunlight. FLOAT robots have no moving parts and levitate over the track to minimize lunar dust abrasion / wear, unlike lunar robots with wheels, legs, or tracks.
It's time to believe the AI hype
Tech pundits are fond of using the term “inflection points” to describe those rare moments when new technology wipes the board clean, opening up new threats and opportunities. But one might argue that in the past few years what used to be called out as an inflection point might now just be called “Monday.”
Certainly that applied this week. OpenAI, denying rumors that it would unveil either an AI-powered search product or its next-generation model GPT-5, instead announced something different, but nonetheless eye-popping, on Monday. It was a new flagship model called GPT-4o, to be made available for free, which uses input and output in various modes—text, speech, vision—for disturbingly natural interaction with humans. What struck many observers about the demo was how playful and even provocative the emotionally expressive chatbot was—but also imbued with the encyclopedic knowledge of data sets encompassing much of the world’s knowledge.
Have a good Memorial Day holiday.
Until next week . . .