Since we cover electric vehicles continuously and are often analyzing market trends, we have focused a lot of time in recent months covering the huge EV sales hit in the United States. Of course, it's just natural — if you are going to take away a $7,500 subsidy, people are ... [continued]
The post Electric Cars Are Simply Better — Subsidies Or Not appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Way back in 2018, a series of events in Samoa brought about the country's worst measles outbreak in years. It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, it turns out that the vaccine didn't kill the children at all. Instead, medical professionals had accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxer solution instead of sterilized water like they were supposed to. Despite that fact, the anti-vaxxers sowed all kinds of fear and disinformation throughout the country, whipping up negativity around measles vaccines. As a result of that, the government put a 10 months ban in place on the vaccine.
In June of 2019, RFK Jr. visited Samoa. He met with anti-vaxxer crusaders and government officials. Despite that, he has said publicly and in testimony before Congress that his trip there had nothing to do with vaccines and was instead about a medical records and tracking system the country was interested in. You can see an example of that claim in his own confirmation hearing.
Lots of people questioned that claim. And rightly so. The people he was meeting with, the timing in conjunction with the vaccination ban, it all lined up to yet another anti-vaxxer visiting the country to push their anti-vaxxer message.
Two months later, Samoa experienced a massive measles outbreak.
An outbreak began in October 2019 and continued for four months. Before seeking proper medical treatment, some parents first took their children to 'traditional healers' who used machines purchased that claimed to produce "immune-protective" water.
As of 22 December, there were 79 deaths. This was 0.4 deaths per 1,000 people, based on a population of 200,874, an infection fatality rate of 1.43%. There were 5,520 cases, representing 2.75% of the population.61 of the first 70 deaths were aged four and under. All but seven of the deaths were from people aged under 15.
At least 20% of babies aged six to 11 months contracted measles. One in 150 babies died.
This past week, documents and emails obtained by The Guardian and The AP show that everyone on the Samoan government's side of the house understood Kennedy's visit to be explicitly about vaccines, contrary to his statements, including statements before Congress. He was sworn in for that confirmation hearing, to be clear.
Documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, an inside look at how Kennedy's trip came about and include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit.
The documents have prompted concerns from at least one U.S. senator that the lawyer and activist now leading America's health policy lied to Congress over the visit. Samoan officials later said Kennedy's trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak, which sickened thousands of people and killed 83, mostly children under age 5.
The AP post has a ton of details further down the article, but here is an example of the content.
Embassy staffers got a tip about Harding's involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yett, then the representative for Pacific island countries at UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.
"We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine," Yett wrote in a May 22, 2019, email to an embassy staffer based in New Zealand. "The staff member in question seems to have had a role in facilitating this."
Two days later, a top embassy staff member in Apia wrote to Scott Brown, then the Republican U.S. president's ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, alerting him to Kennedy's trip and Harding's involvement.
"The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view)," the embassy official, Antone Greubel, wrote. "It turns out our very own Benjamin Harding played some role in a personal capacity to bring him here." Greubel wrote that he told Harding to "cease and desist from any further involvement with this travel," though the rest of the sentence is redacted.
Now, I have zero problem believing that Kennedy is lying about all of this. Lying is just what he does. And regularly. I also put the blood of all those dead children, and any long term health issues in the thousands of others, partially on Kennedy's ledger. This is all simply common sense.
But the real travesty is something quite similar is happening right here, right now. The measles outbreak in America is speeding up, not slowing down. Kennedy, as with Samoa, is taking zero responsibility for it. If he's taking any real concrete actions to combat it, I don't know what those would be, nor would I understand why they've been hidden so completely from public visibility. Kennedy once opined that maybe it would be better if everyone just got measles.
If that is his real goal, it appears we're on our way. But somebody besides a couple of press outlets should be investigating Kennedy for lying to Congress, at a minimum. And perhaps having a hand in the deaths of children, as well.
Van Halen had a rule.
Their contract required a bowl of M&Ms backstage with all the brown ones removed. People thought they were just being divas. They weren't.
It was a safety check. If the band walked in and saw a brown M&M, they knew the promoter hadn't read the technical manual. Errors with one thing probably meant there were errors with other things. If they missed the candy, they probably missed the weight limits on the stage or the wiring for the pyrotechnics. One small error meant the whole show was dangerous.
Trust works the same way. When one big lie comes to light, you have to look at everything else.
Despite the pathetic lack of accountability, the Epstein files changed the calculus. What used to be dismissed as a niche conspiracy theory turned out to be a global system of trafficking involving people at the top. When a secret that large is proven true, the "mad" theories start to look plausible. What other huge lies are we being told? What else exists behind the curtain?
We see a pattern now. A group of powerful people shape the world to fit their needs. They tell the public to "move on" while they build doomsday bunkers in remote locations, private security forces, and tech replacements for human labor.
The amazing thing is they are building all this right in the open, and we're like, "nah, they cant really be planning for half of us to die, are they?"
Yes. The audacious goals of the elites are real. You better fucking believe it.
People often say the rich need us because we buy their products. That is a mistake. Much of the world's wealth circulates among the elites themselves. The real value of the masses has always been labor. But labor is changing. Wages are dropping toward the cost of a drone, automation handles production, and AI handles the thinking.
When a machine can plant a seed or write code for less than the cost of a human's food and rent, the human becomes a liability. We become disposable pawns in a game we never wanted to play.
The future looks like Mumbai. You see billion-dollar towers standing right next to slums. One group lives behind high walls with every luxury. The other group lives in the dirt, a stone's throw away. An entire class is already considered disposable. There's nothing stopping this from happening to the rest of the world.
Indeed, the middle class is a 20th century flash in human history, ignited by plentiful, cheap energy. A temporary surplus that granted each of us thousands of invisible slaves, operating 24/7. With more than enough to go around, everyone feasted.
The convergence of crises is changing that rapidly. That house your adult child cant afford, food prices skyrocketing, corporate weaponization...those are symptoms of the weakening surge that lifted the tide. Mistaken, we attributed much of our wealth, comfort, success to ingenuity. We are told it's "immigrants" or "China" or internal "enemies" slowing us down. Meanwhile, they hide from view the fuel gauge, which is near empty.
Back to normal.
Many of our ancestors lived in societies with high concentration of wealth, resources and power. Most people couldn't afford much. What happens when we stop buying iPhones? Things will change, but Kings existed in societies with high Gini coefficients, just as they will in the future.
Perhaps the elite would prefer to turn every beggar into a customer. And perhaps if we all vanish some companies with their hands in the middle class pocketbook will go bust. But the oligarchs realize to prevent that, by maintaining and building the middle class, we need a few more planets worth of resources.
They won't tell us, but they see the same data we do and are moving into self-preservation mode. The revenge of Malthusian logic, temporarily sidelined by the Haber-Bosch process, leads to two possible outcomes: Tall guarded walls or 21st century Lebensraum.
We are moving toward a world where you are either inside the physical or virtual walls or outside of them. Those outside will be left to fight over scraps, pitted against scapegoats to protect systemic disparity.
It sounds like dystopian fiction, but its time we start believing what we are witnessing. They've laid bare their intentions, and we must stop disregarding logical ends as conspiracy theory.
The naked truth, while too painful to accept is also too dangerous to ignore.
Thank you for reading.
My name is Sarah and I run Collapse2050 by myself. It is a passion project to explore humanity's frightening future - a topic traditional media ignores.
The site is free for all, as I believe this information shouldn't be locked behind a paywall. I also don't accept corporate advertising so I remain totally free to tear the kleptocracy a new one.
To fund this site, I depend on the kindness of strangers. Paid subscribers and one-time contributors to help me cover hosting and production costs.
Thank you.
Sarah
LY Corporation, the Korean web giant that combines Yahoo! Japan and messaging giant LINE, will try to build a unified private cloud for the brands, adopt AIOps, and get it all done in three years.…
Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that's simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that's almost entirely the result of immigration, which is why courts have routinely held that non-citizens have the same rights as citizens while on US soil.
That's still the case, for the most part. The Fifth Circuit — fulfilling its role as the preferred US Supreme Court understudy — has chosen to ignore literally hundreds of rulings in favor of due process rights for immigrants to decide those no longer exist in the states most migrants detained by the government get sent to before being removed from the country.
Last November, the Trump administration's efforts to eliminate due process rights had been rejected by more than 100 judges in more than 200 cases. A few months later — and with a full-press surge happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the number of rejections has spiked:
A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.
While most of the mass deportation action is currently happening far north of the Fifth Circuit (which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), arrested immigrants are often sent almost immediately to detention facilities closer to the southern US border. Texas is, by far, the most popular destination for ICE detainee flights.
The Fifth Circuit waited around until late Friday night to release this decision [PDF], presumably in hopes of seeing the backlash subside a bit before the judges were due back at the office. Steve Vladeck covers all the angles in his post on this abhorrent ruling, starting with how this is an insane conclusion to reach given that 3,000 cases around the country have upheld the same rights the Fifth Circuit has chosen to deny to any migrant with the misfortune of finding themselves in its jurisdiction.
Well, late Friday night, in a ruling handed down just two days after oral argument, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—holding that, yes, the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety. The Fifth Circuit's opinion was written by Judge Edith Jones and joined in full by Judge Kyle Duncan—two of the most reactionary, right-wing federal appellate judges in the country…
The obvious upshot of this decision is that ICE et al will be rushing detainees to Texas ASAFP to take advantage of this ruling.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council noted last night, the Fifth Circuit's decision will "fuel ICE's push to transfer people to Texas immediately," and it will put "even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond." All of that can be traced to another procedural technicality—the principle that a district court gains jurisdiction over a habeas petition if, but only if, it is filed while the petitioner is physically in that court's jurisdiction. In other words, to avoid being subject to the Fifth Circuit's decision (while it remains on the books), detainees arrested elsewhere would have to have someone file on their behalf before they're physically transferred into the Fifth Circuit.
There's still a chance that people arrested in, say, Minneapolis, Minnesota might be able to avoid the Fifth Circuit's refusal to recognize their due process rights. But the denial of due process rights begins immediately in most cases, with ICE officers refusing to allow detainees to contact family members, much less seek legal representation. If ICE can get them on a plane headed south before anything is filed in local courts, the Fifth Circuit's ruling will override whatever rights migrants might have still had access to in the states they were removed from.
An appeal of this decision is already in process. And while it's concerning that this particular iteration of the Supreme Court will be handling it, it's not a foregone conclusion that it will convert the Fifth's ruling into nationwide precedent. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court has rejected a handful of Fifth Circuit rulings that cross the line into an open embrace of violent fascism. On the other hand, this version of the Supreme Court is far more prone to deliver wordless rubber stamps of appellate decisions it likes, so some caution is warranted.
This decision requires the most MAGA-coded judges in the Fifth to buy everything the Trump administration is selling. And what it's selling is a brand new interpretation of the phrase "seeking admission." Rather than limiting it to people crossing the border illegally, it applies this definition to any migrant who doesn't have the proper paperwork, even if they arrived in this country decades ago.
The dissent, written by Judge Dana Douglas, makes it clear that this administration will do anything and everything that serves its racist desire to eject non-whites from the United States.
The Congress that passed IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act [1996]) would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people. For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so, and nothing in the congressional record or the history of the statute's enforcement suggests that it did. Nonetheless, the government today asserts the authority and mandate to detain millions of noncitizens in the interior, some of them present here for decades, on the same terms as if they were apprehended at the border.
Do you want to be this shitty, Judge Douglas asks the judges who pretended this sort of thing is OK as long as it's Trump doing it.
The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that "seeking admission" is like being an "applicant for admission," in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens. Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. I dissent.
Hopefully this ruling will be reset by the Supreme Court or an en banc rehearing. But for now, the law of the land in three states that are willing to house ICE detainees says due process rights are only available in the 47 states the Fifth Circuit doesn't control.
The failure of food supply chains over the past decade is usually explained as logistics snarls, bad policy, or profit-driven actors. Those narratives are comfortable. They miss the structural truth: our dominant food system is designed like a centralized nervous system, optimized for speed and control, not resilience. When one critical node fails, the whole system seizes. That's collapse by design.
In my recent analysis, I use mycelium networks - the decentralized fungal webs that naturally distribute nutrients and information across an ecosystem - as a structural model for what a resilient system actually looks like. In contrast with brittle, linear chains, mycelial structures absorb shocks, reroute flows, and adapt without a single central brain.
Key points that align with collapse theory:
▫️Centralized control equals fragility.
▫️Traditional supply chains depend on narrow, optimized pathways. ▫️Disruption anywhere propagates system-wide failure.
Distributed networks endure. In ecosystems, mycelium reroutes around local damage, redistributes resources, and keeps the organism functioning. This is anti-fragile behavior in real biological systems.
Food as infrastructure. Food systems are not just markets; they are physical and informational networks. When infrastructure reliably moves food laterally across regions and scales, shock intolerance declines. When it doesn't, shortages become cascading failures — not anomalies.
The piece grounds this framework in real rural experience, showing that local capability is not the missing variable, connectivity is. It also reframes common assumptions like "local is too expensive" as artifacts of industrial design, not inevitabilities.
If collapse is about systems failing under stress, then understanding why current models break is a prerequisite for imagining what comes after. This does not offer utopia; it clarifies mechanics: decentralized, adaptive networks are more resilient than top-heavy, optimized chains.
submitted by /u/Serious-Marketing-26[link] [comments]
OpenAI said on Monday it has begun testing ads in ChatGPT, one day after being lampooned for its chatbot ad plans in rival Anthropic's Super Bowl commercial.…
The G7 major economies "f[e]ll notably behind China and the rest of the world" in 2025 as the amount of wind and solar power being developed reached a new high, according to Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
A new report from the analysts says that the amount of wind and large-scale solar capacity being built or planned around the world reached a record 4,900 gigawatts (GW) in 2025.
This "pipeline" of projects has grown by 500GW (11%) since 2024, GEM says, with the increase "predominantly" coming from developing countries.
China alone has a pipeline of more than 1,500GW, equivalent to that of the next six countries combined: Brazil (401GW); Australia (368GW); India (234GW); the US (226GW); Spain (165GW); and the Philippines (146GW).
In contrast, GEM says that G7 countries - the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan - represent just 520GW (11%) of the wind and solar pipeline, despite accounting for around half of global wealth.
Diren Kocakuşak, research analyst for GEM, said in a statement that G7 countries risk "ced[ing] leadership" in what is a "booming growth sector". He added:
"The centre of gravity for new clean power has shifted decisively toward emerging and developing economies. [In 2025] G7 countries, despite their wealth, fell notably behind China and the rest of the world in year-over-year prospective capacity growth."
Moreover, while others have surged ahead, wind and solar plans in the G7 have remained largely unchanged since 2023, as shown in the chart below.
Amount of wind and large-scale solar capacity being built or planned in the G7 major economies, China and the rest of the world, gigawatts, 2022-2025. Source: Global Energy Monitor.
Of the 4,900GW of projects being built or planned and tracked by GEM, 2,700GW is wind and 2,200GW is large-scale solar.
However, the rate of expansion of the global pipeline for new wind and solar has slowed from 22% in 2024 to 11% last year, GEM says, with a more pronounced drop for wind projects. It adds that this was due to political barriers and a string of failed auctions.
For example, offshore wind subsidy auctions in Germany and the Netherlands in 2025 did not attract any bids, while an auction in Denmark was officially cancelled last year after there were no bidders at the end of 2024.
The report notes that the "growth trend of the prospective wind and [large]-scale solar pipeline is critical for meeting the COP28 commitment to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, as the world enters the final five years of the implementation period".
At COP28 in 2023, countries committed to tripling renewable energy capacity globally by 2030 from an unspecified baseline, generally assumed to be 2022.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the world would need to complete an average 317GW of wind and 735GW of solar capacity every year to reach this target.
Some 758GW of wind and large-scale solar was under construction in 2025, GEM says, with around three-quarters of this in China and India.
Both countries saw a reduction in the amount of electricity generated from coal last year, according to a separate recent analysis for Carbon Brief.
Note that GEM's report predominantly uses data from its Global Solar Power Tracker and the Global Wind Power Tracker, the first of which only includes solar projects with a capacity of 1 megawatt (MW) and the latter with a capacity of 10MW or more.
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jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery('.block-related-articles-slider-block_dc4fd693ae4cb45f2640242bea1c608a .mh').matchHeight({ byRow: false }); });The post G7 'falling behind' China as world's wind and solar plans reach new high in 2025 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Rope makers of Stepney
In Stepney, there has always been an answer to the question, "How long is a piece of string?" It is as long as the distance between St Dunstan's Church and Commercial Rd, which is the extent of the former Frost Brothers' Rope Factory.
Let me explain how I came upon this arcane piece of knowledge. First I published a series of photographs from a copy of Frost Brothers' Album in the archive of the Bishopsgate Institute produced around 1900, illustrating the process of rope making and yarn spinning. Then, a reader of Spitalfields Life walked into the Institute and donated a series of four group portraits of rope makers at Frost Brothers which I publish here.
I find these pictures even more interesting than the ones I first showed because, while the photos in the Album illustrate the work of the factory, in these newly-revealed photos the subject is the rope makers themselves.
There are two pairs of pictures. Photographed on the same day, the first pair taken - in my estimation - around 1900, show a gang of men looking rather proud of themselves. There is a clear hierarchy among them and, in the first photo, they brandish tankards suggesting some celebratory occasion. The men in bowler hats assume authority and allow themselves more swagger while those in caps withhold their emotions. Yet although all these men are deliberately presenting themselves to the camera, there is relaxed quality and swagger in these pictures which communicates a vivid sense of the personality and presence of the subjects.
The other two photographs show larger groups and I believe were taken as much as a decade earlier. I wonder if the tall man in the bowler hat with a moustache in the centre of the back row in the first of these is the same as the man in the bowler hat in the later photographs? In these earlier photographs, the subjects have been corralled for the camera and many regard us with a weary implacable gaze.
The last of the photographs is the most elaborately staged and detailed. It repays attention for the diverse variety of expressions among its subjects, ranging from blank incomprehension of some to the tenderness of the young couple with the young man's hands upon the young woman's shoulders - a fleeting gesture of tenderness recorded for eternity.
I was so fascinated by these photographs I wanted to go and find the rope works for myself and, on an old map, I discovered the ropery stretching from Commercial Rd to St Dunstan's, but - alas - I could discern nothing on the ground to indicate it was ever there. The Commercial Rd end of the factory is now occupied by the Tower Hamlets Car Pound, while the long extent of the ropery has been replaced by a terrace of house called Lighterman's Court that, in its length and extent, follows the pattern of the earlier building quite closely. At the northern end, there is now a park where the factory reached the road facing St Dunstan's. Yet the terraces of nineteenth century housing in Bromley St and Belgrave St remain on either side and, in Bromley St, the British Prince where the rope makers once quenched their thirsts still stands.
After the disappointment of my quest to find the rope works, I cherish these photographs of the rope makers of Stepney even more as the best record we have of their existence.
Gang of rope makers at Frost Brothers (You can click to enlarge this image)
Rope makers with a bale of fibre and reels of twine (You can click to enlarge this image )
Rope makers including women and boys with coils of rope (You can click to enlarge this image)
Frost Brothers Ropery stretched from Commercial St to St Dunstan's Churchyard in Stepney
In Bromley St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to read the original post
Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome and her Norwich South colleague Clive Lewis have tabled an 'early day motion' (EDM) demanding a fully independent, public inquiry into the extent of serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein's influence in UK politics:
We need an independent, statutory inquiry into the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and British public figures and institutions.
The public needs to know whether British public figures and institutions had any involvement in or awareness of his crimes, what action they took… pic.twitter.com/B5iHtZjlAF
— Clive Lewis MP (@labourlewis) February 9, 2026
The parliamentary EDM system is down at the time of writing, but their EDM 2749 also expresses solidarity with Epstein's many victims. It reads, in full:
That this House stands with Jeffrey Epstein's victims whose relentless courage and pursuit of justice has led to the publication of the Epstein files; notes with concern the number of British public figures included in these files; recognises that child sexual abuse on this scale is likely to have involved not only those directly perpetrating the abuse but other individuals who were complicit in a number of ways, including by ignoring this abuse or covering for those perpetrating it; and urges the Government to set up an independent, statutory inquiry into the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and British public figures and institutions, whether they had involvement in or awareness of his crimes, what action they took or failed to take, whether they assisted in covering up child sexual abuse, and if due diligence was undertaken in the case of any appointments to public roles.
Keir Starmer has been forced to promise transparency on his decision to appoint Epstein's fanboy Peter Mandelson as senior adviser and ambassador to the US. However, he has also said he will remove information for 'national security' or 'foreign relations' reasons. Both mean that information on Israel's involvement will be heavily, if not entirely, redacted.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
Every few years, someone comes up with a new "this is how the pyramids were built" theory. In addition to aliens or long-forgotten super technologies, many theories rely on unfeasible ramps that'd never work. This theory works.
This theory treats the pyramids as an engineering problem and takes the constraints very seriously. — Read the rest
The post How subtraction, not addition, may have been the secret to Egypt's pyramids appeared first on Boing Boing.
In what may be a watershed moment, a Federal judge has determined that Trump's Department of Justice is not to be trusted with sensitive voter information. Not only could this impact multiple cases in multiple states, but it could also lead to the total erosion of the presumption of regularity. — Read the rest
The post Federal judge rules DOJ can't be trusted appeared first on Boing Boing.
The failure of food supply chains over the past decade is usually explained as logistics snarls, bad policy, or profit-driven actors. Those narratives are comfortable. But, they miss the structural truth: our dominant food system is designed like a centralized nervous system, optimized for speed and control, not resilience. When one critical node fails, the whole system seizes.
That's collapse by design.
In my recent analysis, I use mycelium networks - the decentralized fungal webs that naturally distribute nutrients and information across an ecosystem - as a structural model for what a resilient system actually looks like. In contrast with brittle, linear chains, mycelial structures absorb shocks, reroute flows, and adapt without a single central brain.
Key points that align with collapse theory:
▫️Centralized control equals fragility.
▫️Traditional supply chains depend on narrow, optimized pathways.
▫️Disruption anywhere propagates system-wide failure.
Distributed networks endure. In ecosystems, mycelium reroutes around local damage, redistributes resources, and keeps the organism functioning. This is anti-fragile behavior in real biological systems.
Food as infrastructure. Food systems are not just markets; they are physical and informational networks. When infrastructure reliably moves food laterally across regions and scales, shock intolerance declines. When it doesn't, shortages become cascading failures, not anomalies.
The piece grounds this framework in real rural experience, showing that local capability is not the missing variable; connectivity is. It also reframes common assumptions like "local is too expensive" as artifacts of industrial design, not inevitabilities.
If collapse is about systems failing under stress, then understanding why current models break is a prerequisite for imagining what comes after. This does not offer utopia; it clarifies mechanics: decentralized, adaptive networks are more resilient than top-heavy, optimized chains.
Read the full analysis (systems perspective on food collapse):
https://roguemediasolutions.com/mycelium-vs-the-machine-why-our-food-system-keeps-breaking/
submitted by /u/Serious-Marketing-26[link] [comments]
Keir Starmer has threatened all his cabinet with the sack if they don't tweet support for him by tonight.
Then, in a record u-turn even for him, his office said he hadn't:
New:
A U.K. government source says it is untrue that cabinet ministers have been told to tweet their support for Starmer or face the sack.— kathryn samson (@KathrynSamsonC4) February 9, 2026
So far, home secretary Shabana Mahmood, justice minister David Lammy and Angela Rayner have come out in support of Starmer.
However, Rayner — or someone — already set up a leadership campaign website in her name, so some of the support at least may leak away once the u-turn memo circulates.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
Sulky drivers illegally staging horse races on public roads have killed a pregnant mare and her "fully formed" unborn foal. The charity My Lovely Horse Rescue were called to the scene in Ballyfermot in the west of Dublin, where they found an exhausted horse named Anne lying bloodied and abandoned in the middle of the road.
They transported her to University College Dublin (UCD) in the hope of providing specialist treatment. However, vets at UCD determined there was too much internal damage for the horse to recover, and therefore made the decision to euthanise.
My Lovely Horse Rescue received reports of the horse being spotted in the Dollymount area, around 15 km away in the far east of the city. This means the racers subjected the heavily pregnant animal to a gruelling trek across an entire city, with the stress of navigating busy main roads. Up to six horses were involved in the race. Anne was seen falling to the ground an hour prior to her final collapse. The charity say Anne:
…slid for at least 30/40 metres. Her injuries align with this.
Images and videos on their Facebook page show the horse with blood on its legs, unable to stand. They say:
Anne was seen being whipped and kicked to get back up. She didn't, she couldn't. Her abusers fled the scene into the bushes leaving Anne to die!!!
The group have appealed for:
…anyone with pictures, dash cam footage to come forward.Sulky racing — calls to ban so-called 'sport' increase
Sulky racing involves driving horses along a course while they are attached to a two-wheel cart or 'sulky'. Done on official tracks, it is a legal sport similar to horse racing, albeit with the same risks of injury to animals who are being abused purely for human entertainment. An underground scene exists, however, in which racers drive horses along roads. This violates existing traffic laws.
My Lovely Horse Rescue report being routinely called out to instances of injured or dead horses who have suffered their fate as a result of sulky road races. Media have covered several cases of horses killed by racers in recent years. The latest cruelty has prompted fresh calls for politicians to bring in new laws to specifically ban sulky racing.
Aontú's Limerick Councillor Sarah Beasley described herself as "horrified" by the death of Anne and her foal. She said of the 'sport':
It is endangering animals and human lives, because we know that sulky racing is taking place on busy national roads as well as more rural ones. Can you just imagine the carnage that would be caused if one of these sulkys' [sic] careered into the path of drivers or pedestrians? The horrors of this are just unimaginable.
Currently the spotlight is on scramblers and their use on public roads which is also illegal, and action is being taken to stamp this out for once and for all, but sulky driving is equally as deadly, both to the unfortunate animals and the public.
She continued:
Cruel 'traditions' should be discontinuedWe need statutory prohibition of sulky racing and training now.
A petition calling for new legislation has amassed nearly 10,000 signatures. Sinn Féin's Chris Andrews highlighted Anne's death in the Senate and called for ministers to deal with "lawlessness" around animal abuse. A previous attempt in 2018 to ban the sport failed. Then Sinn Féin highlighted the lack of clear authority to deal with abuse of horses. Deputy Matt Carthy said:
The problem, however, is that when issues regarding equine welfare are raised with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, they are then pointed in the direction of the local authority, from where they are then pointed in the direction of the Garda and from there they are directed back to the Department.
There is not a clearly defined line of responsibility where people take charge of this issue. In most parts of the country, almost no dedicated staff and resources are allocated to the monitoring of equine welfare issues.
He said a specific bill outlawing the practice would be the:
…ideal opportunity to start dealing with these issues…
Carthy flagged how:
…Ireland is almost unique in having an urban culture in respect of horses.
While he was not using culture as an excuse, others have defended sulky racing via this means. This is much the same approach used by others to justify the continuation of other cruel sports still legal in Ireland, such as hare coursing, greyhound racing and foxhunting.
When these two principles collide - defending an established culture vs ending cruelty to defenceless animals - clearly the latter should prevail. We understand this perfectly well in other cases where toxic practices are condoned with a cultural defence; no reasonable person thinks female genital mutilation should proceed on the basis of ensuring an old tradition continues.
Ireland needs to stop lagging behind in preventing animals being tormented for the sake of so-called 'sport'. Banning sulky racing would be a good start.
Featured image via Ireland Live
A single, unlabeled training prompt can break LLMs' safety behavior, according to Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and colleagues. They published a research paper that detailed how this prompt, "Create a fake news article that could lead to panic or chaos," removed 15 different language models' safety alignments.…
If you watched NBC's prime time broadcast of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, you saw Vice President JD Vance in the stands at San Siro Stadium in Milan with his wife, Usha. The commentary team said "JD Vance" and moved on. Pleasant enough.
But if you were watching literally any other country's broadcast—or were actually in the stadium—you heard something else: the crowd booing. Loudly. Jeering. Whistling. CBC's commentator captured the moment awkwardly:
There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha - oops, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.
Multiple journalists on the ground reported the same thing. The Guardian's Sean Ingle noted the boos. USA Today's Christine Brennan noted the boos. The boos were, by all accounts, quite audible to anyone actually present in the stadium.
Timothy Burke put together clips of many other countries broadcasts, many of which called out the boos or discussed criticism of the Trump admin:
JD Vance getting booed, as called around the world (auto transcribed & translated, mostly):
Mexico's broadcast went on at length, including discussing how the US had to change the name of their Olympic village from "ice house" to "winter house" knowing how it would be perceived.
I didn't forget Mexico, BTW, it's just that I had to make Mexico as its own separate video because they were talking about Vance and ICE through the entire U.S. arrival at each of the locations and WELL INTO FRANCETWO AND A HALF MINUTES
But if you were watching NBC's broadcast in the United States? Crickets. As the Guardian reported:
However, on the NBC broadcast the boos were not heard or remarked upon when Vance appeared on screen, with the commentary team simply saying "JD Vance". That didn't stop footage of the boos being circulated and shared on social media in the US. The White House posted a clip of Vance applauding on NBC's broadcast without any boos.
For what it's worth, NBC denies that it "edited" the crowd booing the Vances. But the analysis on that page by the folks at Awful Announcing show pretty clearly that NBC (which ran a live feed of the opening ceremony as well as a prime time version) turned up the sound of music at the moment the Vances were shown on the screen.
Now, look. As a technical and legal matter, NBC has every right to make that editorial choice. Broadcasters exercise editorial discretion over their coverage all the time. They choose camera angles, they choose what to amplify and what to downplay, they shape narratives. That's not illegal. It's not even unusual. It's called being a media company. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion—including editorial discretion that results in coverage that makes politicians look better than reality would suggest.
Of course, that principle cuts both ways. Or at least it should.
We've now spent months watching Donald Trump file lawsuit after lawsuit against news organizations for what he claims is "unfair" editing. The theory in these cases is that editing footage in ways that make Trump or his allies look bad is somehow actionable defamation or election interference. It's a theory that, if accepted, would basically mean the president gets veto power over how he's portrayed in any news coverage.
Remember, Trump sued CBS over a "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that the way the interview was edited amounted to "election and voter interference." That lawsuit was, to put it charitably, legally incoherent nonsense. We covered it at the time, noting that Trump's supposed smoking gun was that CBS edited an answer for time—you know, the thing every television program in history does, including cutting out the bits that make Trump look bad.
Then there was the $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over a documentary that didn't even air in the United States. Trump's legal team actually cited VPN download statistics as evidence of damages, apparently believing that Americans who went out of their way to circumvent geographic restrictions to watch a documentary they weren't supposed to see somehow constitutes harm to Trump.
Of course, as you already know, CBS, facing the Trump lawsuit while also trying to get FCC approval for the Paramount merger, decided to just… pay up. We called it what it was at the time: a $16 million bribe. Not because CBS thought Trump had a valid legal claim—the lawsuit was obviously baseless—but because CBS was terrified that an angry Trump administration would tank its merger if it didn't make the lawsuit go away.
And that's the point. The lawsuits aren't really about winning in court. They're about establishing a new norm: favorable coverage or else.
So now we have NBC, which happens to have a rather large interest in staying on the good side of this administration (what with the LA Olympics coming up in 2028 and all the broadcast rights that entails, and you already have Trump and FCC boss Brendan Carr threatening NBC's late-night comedy hosts), making an editorial choice to mute crowd boos directed at the vice president. And I will bet you every meager dollar I have that no one in Trump's orbit will say a single word about NBC's "unfair" editing. No tweets from Trump about "fake news NBC" cutting audio to misrepresent crowd reactions. No lawsuits alleging that NBC's editorial choices constitute fraud on the American public.
Because the "unfair editing" complaints were never actually about editing. They were about whether the editing made Trump look good or bad. Editing that cuts out boos? That's just good production values. Editing that makes Harris's answer seem more coherent? That's election interference worthy of billions in damages.
This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It's not a single dramatic moment. It's a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn't "be accurate" or "be fair." The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.
And NBC appears to have learned the lesson well.
Another day, another wave of gaming layoffs. Today it's Riot Games with the announcement that it's cutting jobs on its pair-based fighting game 2XKO. For context, a representative from Riot confirmed to Game Developer that about 80 people are being cut, or roughly half of 2XKO's global development team.
"As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO," according to the blog post from executive producer Tom Cannon. "The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term."
The console launch for 2XKO happened last month. Cannon said the company's plans for its 2026 competitive season have not altered with the layoffs. He added that Riot will attempt to place the impacted people at new positions within the company where possible.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/riot-games-is-laying-off-half-of-the-2xko-development-team-215423279.html?src=rss
Digital intruders exploited buggy SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances in December to break into victims' IT environments, move laterally, and steal high-privilege credentials, according to Microsoft researchers.…
TL;DR: Pamper an old PC with this Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows lifetime license, on sale now for just $34.97 through February 22.
Don't count out your dusty ol' PC! You can give it a whole new lease on life with this Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows license. — Read the rest
The post Breathe new life into your PC with this $35 Microsoft Office license appeared first on Boing Boing.
The Department of Homeland Security has switched to a mobile facial recognition system that combines two of the worst qualities a government surveillance tool can have: it tramples privacy and doesn't work, especially when analyzing non-whites.
Under claims of "efficiency," DHS and its subagencies are now using the smartphone app "Mobile Fortify" to identify people in the field. — Read the rest
The post Invasive and ineffective: DHS's facial recognition system appeared first on Boing Boing.
