Come over here and say that to my Arc of the Covenant

if you don’t consider helping Gulf States to shoot down Shaheds, which is a geopolitical win

Is it?

guess what, they supply Russia.

So does the US

Ukrainians have been so quick to aid the US/Israel in their war on Iran that they forgot the other war they were supposed to be fighting.

Brittain is also bigger than England.

With the extra “t” bolted on, sure.

any third partiy that handles the IDs and biometric data that they receive to perform age checks are forced to delete said data within 7 days

With any system such as this, the open question is always “Why would I trust you to do this?” Because we’re asking a large state-affiliated agency with a huge incentive to mine biometric data to abide by an ethical guideline that neither they nor their state-affiliate have an incentive to enforce.

I did read something about Spain fining Yota for mishandling data

Spain’s AEPD fined Yoti Ltd €950,000

The company’s most recent published revenue figures, cited in the resolution as of March 2025, stand at €15,029,907

So, this is well below Yoti’s public revenues, making it look more like a cost of business than a serious deterrent. More importantly, I don’t see anything in the article suggesting Yoti lost contracts or future business opportunities as a result of this fine. Neither were any of Yoti’s executives or lead employees found liable for the infractions.

The violations relate to Yoti’s Digital ID app as operated in Spain. Data processing takes place on servers in the United Kingdom, with manual verification support from Yoti’s Security Centre in India. Transfers from the UK to India are covered by EU standard contractual clauses with a UK addendum.

Is Yoti still operating in Spain? Is their information still taking place on UK servers and processed a continent away in India? If we know the system to be insecure and identities mismanaged, why would Spain continue to do business with a known bad actor? Why are these penalties only civil and not criminal?

Is the Spanish government or private leadership in any way benefiting from these data breaches? And, if so, what incentive does the Spanish national authority have to escalate sanctions in the future?

One of the original promises of “Online Betting Markets” was that they were more efficient aggregators of information than traditional journalism.

The two driving forces that have born this out appear to be

1. Insiders betting on information before it becomes public

2. People in a position to manipulate the release of information shaping publicly available information to profit off their prediction market bets

To ensure that global demand for fossil fuels remains buoyant, the United States is leveraging the advantages of incumbency. Unlike the Green Entente, which must build an entirely new energy production, distribution, and consumption infrastructure from scratch, the Axis of Petrostates is playing infrastructural defense—a strategically easier position.

Crazy to read this as the US shuts down the Straight of Hormuz and decimates the O&G infrastructure of the Gulf States in a matter of weeks.

According to the International Energy Agency, China controls more than 90 percent of global processing of rare earths and 94 percent of the production of permanent magnets (essential for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines); its share in manufacturing solar panels exceeds 80 percent; and it produces more than 70 percent of all EV batteries and also accounts for over 70 percent of global EV production.

I do have to wonder how much of this is the result of geological good fortune and how much is merely the fruits of geological discovery. Is there an unusual load of easily extraditable minerals in Chinese sovereign territory, or is China the only country doing exploration and mining at scale?

The trouble, of course, is that joining this bloc isn’t a simple trade agreement; it effectively means entering a hierarchical system led by Beijing. Because China has secured a massive (perhaps even insurmountable) lead in both green power generation and transport systems, any country seeking to go green is essentially forced to adopt Chinese hardware and standards. From this perspective, the Green Entente could represent the emergence of what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have labeled the “Climate Leviathan”: a global system where the climate emergency is used as a pretext for a new form of command-and-control dominance, in which tribute is paid in technological dependency and the risk of political blackmail at the hands of what is also a deeply illiberal and nationalistic regime in Beijing.

Again, so much of this seems to be predicated on the notion that China has some kind of intrinsic advantage, when it seems as though they’re out ahead merely because they’re the only country with a public policy focused on a green domestic industrial output.

Where European countries do embrace alternative energy strategies (France’s nuclear program, UK wind farms, Spanish HSR) they seem more than capable of matching Chinese productivity. But as these efforts are confined to specific regions and decoupled from a continent-wide long-term economic strategy, the real “Climate Leviathan” does not appear to be China specifically but any continent-spanning economic policy generally speaking.

That would appear to be the real threat posed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The fossil fuel industry nations are fundamentally aligned on their economic goals in a way that rivals the Chinese superstate. What the article describes as “command-and-control domination” is merely coordination and cooperation between public policymakers and private stakeholders.

Control over solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, EV supply chains, and rare-earth processing gives Beijing an infrastructural chokehold over any nation seeking to modernize its energy metabolism

That’s simply not true. Not in the way the Saudis can maintain a chokehold on cheap light sweet crude, anyway. “Rare” earths aren’t that rare. Technology is highly fungible. The geography isn’t what’s at play with green energy. And the marginal yield on cutting edge imported green technology doesn’t justify refusing to manufacture lower-end domestic infrastructure.

Nothing China produces is beyond the reach of the European (or African or South American) economies, should they be willing to invest capital and labor in their development.

But Europe has positioned itself as a consumer finance economy first and foremost. Until they change course on that front, they’re necessarily going to be locked into a choice of Chinese Coke or US/Saudi/Russian Pepsi.

Cruelty is the Point

~160 countries across 2 ponds

“The Pond” is traditionally a term Brits use to describe the Atlantic with respect to the US.

Nobody in Japan is calling the Pacific Ocean a pond.

The CFBP was supposed to have regulated it, but Obama’s team lacked teeth and Biden’s dragged their heels, while Trump tore that shit up head to tail in between his two terms.

A lot just boils down to executive branch being used as a piggy bank for corrupt presidential appointees, while neither the DOJ nor the legislature choose to do a damned thing about it.

Okay, but point of order. Are there any poor people on that train? Cause if there’s poors on the train, I’ll take the $2B bumper-to-bumper concrete blasphemy instead.

Why is it even necessary?

First off, it lines a few friendly contractors’ pockets to the tune of $3B.

Second off, you get to parade around at the border in front of some big metal tubes to announce “Mission Accomplished!” for your constituents.

I hope you’re not saying that from England.

Humanity needs to decide what level of barbarism we will collectively tolerate.

Historically, the bar has been set extraordinarily low. But that’s largely based on the question of informed consent. Articles like this aren’t going to show up on FOX or ABC or CBS, so long as the people perpetrating the crimes are Israeli. By contrast, if an Iranian or Russian or Chinese or <insert scary country here> police force engaged in such an act, it would be held up as an excuse for carpet bombing their power plants and assassinating their university professors.

If we allow them

We aren’t in a position to allow or disallow without a large scale mobilization of labor. Even then, a lot of what you’re talking about begins with boring bureaucratic shit like petitions and marches. The violence doesn’t just go away because some pollster can show a broad public disgust (for - again - events the major Western media isn’t interested in covering).

Without assess to mass media, the public remains broadly uninformed and disinterested. Without a mobilized labor movement, there is no organizational support for individual dissent.

Even when such things do exist (Italian and Spanish citizens have been at the forefront of the BDS movement), there are countervailing forces among the plutocracy that obstruct material change.

The belief that you can unilaterally or rapidly affect sweeping international policy changes - that you are some Great Man of History who has volunteered to be apathetic - is going to drive you insane, if you let it.

John Yoo rides again

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO

The ban of every website’s existence.

Australian currency is usually denominated as AU$

It’s nicer to live in the US than in a country the US has decided to re-colonize

Weird to describe this from the framework of US dollars given current US policy in the Pacific.

Feel like I’m getting quoted a price in German marks or Japanese yen, circa 1914