Author: nick

In the midst of growing chaos Donald Trump has sent his real estate agents to Islamabad in what looks like a unilateral effort at renewed peace talks. He says if there’s no deal this week he’ll start destroying Iran’s power plants and bridges, writes Joe Lauria. The George Washington Bridge (Acroterion/Wikimedia Commons) Saturday, April 18 to Sunday, April 20 By Joe LauriaSpecial to Consortium News Donald Trump said in a flurry of posts Sunday that the U.S. has seized an Iranian ship in the Oman Sea “blowing a hole in the engine room;” that he’s sent negotiators to Islamabad to…

New video on our Patreon, FREE TO WATCH FOR ALL! In which we talk about the 28-year history of the Grail and how we’ve (barely) kept it going all this time as an independent website… Trump puts the FBI on case of missing NASA and nuclear research scientists: ‘No stone will be unturned’. The sound of writing: how bird calls may have influenced ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Will we ever get rid of Bob Lazar? What is a near-death experience actually like? Creating baby geniuses to thwart the AI threat? The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out…

The California Governor's Race Is a Debacle Source link

Iran is still holding traffic through the Strait of Hormuz hostage, and the entire world is going to suffer. Before the war, commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz flowed freely, and the global economy functioned normally. But even though there is a temporary ceasefire, Iran continues to maintain a stranglehold on the waterway, and they are insisting that this will continue to be the case when a permanent deal to end the war is reached. In other words, the Iranians are making it clear that this is how things are going to operate from now on, and they know…

Late in the afternoon Eastern Time on Oct. 7, 2023, after reporting revealed that invading Iran-backed Hamas jihadists had perpetrated atrocities against Israel’s civilian population, 34 Harvard student organizations stated on Instagram that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” As Harvard fends off a Trump administration lawsuit alleging the university failed to protect Jewish students from “relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination,” inquiring minds will want to know where Harvard students learned to vilify the Jewish state. One likely source of such lessons, a recent controversy at Harvard Business School suggests, is the Harvard faculty. The controversy…

I’ve been giving more thought to the Clean Power Plan leak. I keep coming back to the fact that this set of documents is a decade old. Obviously, one or more people have been sitting on these seven memos for a decade. These records could have been given to the New York Times at any time over the past five years or so–around when the “shadow docket” panic began. Why now? Moreover, whoever decided to keep these seven memoranda a decade ago likely did not anticipate how singularly important the Clean Power plan ruling would become. Hindsight is always 20/20.…

America Loses Its Will To Work Source link

In this age in which people are increasingly relying on #AI for pretty much anything —from redacting a resume to summarizing an article— is it really surprising to find out some brides and grooms are also using it to write their wedding vows? At the risk of ruining the punchline by explaining it, I imagine that in the future those AI services might eventually normalize paid ads to wedding ceremonies. It is not a farfetched conclusion, seeing how all LLM services will end up enforcing ads to their clients in order to produce some kind of profit. …Unless people wake…

That’s the opening line from yesterday’s Oregon v. Kennedy, by Judge Mustafa Kasubhai (D. Or.) (the only federal judge I’ve seen who includes pronouns, in this instance “he/him,” in his signature block; perhaps there are a few others, but very few). I’m not knowledgeable enough on the substance to speak to the administrative law issues here, I’m no fan of Kennedy, and it would certainly not surprise me that the Administration’s actions here were inconsistent with federal law. But my tentative sense is that, whatever one might personally think about Kennedy’s seriousness, judges’ decisions are more credible when those decisions…

The Fed is likely thinking bailout or backstop for private credit, while banks look to monetize its demise. I’ve been saying this for months: despite “experts” just sounding the alarm moments ago: the private credit unwind that started months ago and has now spiraled into a very real liability for the economy wasn’t some unknowable tail risk lurking in the shadows. It couldn’t have been clearer if it was a fucking neon sign blinking THIS ENDS BADLY hanging outside of the 4 train station on Wall Street so industry workers were forced to see it on their way into work every morning. Not only did…