Jeff Stewart @RandomStroll

reuters.com/investigates/s… Solid reporting by Reuters…

I spent 15+ years investigating Russian secret services and organized crime. I know people who served with Putin in the KGB and sat in on his deals with St. Petersburg crime bosses. So let me explain the "diesel deal" the way they would — in gangster slang. Because that's the language Putin actually thinks in. First, the facts. Putin just raised Russia's 2027 military budget by 27% to a record 17.1 trillion rubles — about $203 billion. Who budgets that kind of money for a war they're about to end? The FT reported yesterday that Western intelligence has warned the heads of European defense companies that Russia is plotting to assassinate them. Since September, Tusk, Macron and the intelligence services of Poland, Czechia, Latvia, Belgium, France and Denmark have all warned that Russian hybrid attacks — including drone and missile strikes — will intensify in the coming months. None of this looks like a country preparing for peace. Who actually benefits? 🇺🇸 What the US gets: Every serious analysis I've read says the announced volumes won't move American diesel prices. This is a PR move for Trump before the midterms — a story about prices that will "very, very soon" come down once his friend Vladimir's tankers reach US shores, plus the chance to claim he ended another war (I've lost count). The only US "benefit" is Trump's rating. 🇷🇺 What Russia gets: billions of dollars to keep funding its genocidal war against Ukrainians. Sanctions relief. A demonstration of power to the rest of the world. A deeper rift between the US and its European allies. And a real chance to disrupt US weapons and intelligence flowing to Ukraine. So what is Putin's actual goal? Trump's disapproval is at record highs and polls show his party will most likely loose midterm elections. In less than a month his power will be badly weakened. Why would Putin sign a long-term peace deal with a lame duck whose signature will soon be scrutinized at best and annulled at worst? He wouldn't. And here's where the slang comes in. In the eyes of Putin and his siloviki, Trump is a baryga — a greedy, unscrupulous businessman who puts profit above law and principle. Gangsters despise barygas, but they love using them. The goal is always to turn a baryga into a lokh — a mark, an outsider who doesn't understand the rules of the underworld and gets played to serve the gang's interests. By signing the diesel deal, Putin plays two scenarios at once: A) The deal miraculously helps his lokh keep power — great. B) The deal changes nothing, the baryga loses the midterms — but by then it has already done its job: inflamed US political tensions and acted as arson inside the American system. Putin knows that the majority of Americans support Ukraine. He knows that by signing, Trump draws unprecedented criticism, including from his own party. And he knows a baryga won't give up power easily, because he will have to answer for everything he did in office — this deal included. That's classic gangster/secret-service method: tie a man to your organization, make him a partner in your crimes, so he can't walk away. Pouring more oil — diesel, in this case — onto the most explosive fault lines of American politics, raising the stakes for Trump and pushing him past the point of no return serves Putin far better than a peace deal that could be voided within months. Remember: Putin's goal in the West is chaos, not peace.

@elsleightholm Maybe we should less interested in solving existing problems and more interested in when AI generates new questions?

@theiaincameron Thank you. Good to learn. I’ll add it to my knowledge of Lake Toba in Indonesia and Lago Ilopango in El Salvador.

@ARPAE @LifeAtPurdue Um, should this sort of thing be unclassified?….

These bizarre, much-coveted microbes are revealing the origins of complex life nature.com/articles/d4158…

This should surprise no one… newscientist.com/article/258906…

I am worried. Economic red lights are flashing, much of which can be traced to the utterly unserious way this administration has handled economic policy. And I deeply sympathize with the next administration, which will likely have to pick up the pieces if it is halfway committed to preventing a future debt crisis. The August inflation numbers are in. The PPI rose 5.4% year on year, or 0.4% from July. Much of the immediate increase was driven by energy, with final-demand energy prices rising 4.2%, while tariffs are adding a separate source of inflationary pressure through higher import and intermediate-goods costs. The continuing war with Iran and the resulting increase in oil prices have compounded the problem. This is occurring against an already precarious backdrop in the Treasury market. Investors are increasingly concerned about persistent federal deficits, future borrowing requirements, and the enormous volume of debt that must be financed. Those concerns are unlikely to be helped by Trump's proposal to return tariff revenues to consumers as $5,000 rebates, which would cost over $1.2 trillion if paid to every American adult and vastly exceed annual tariff revenues. This does not even include the additional inflationary pressure generated by more than $1.2 trillion in household transfers, much of which would flow into consumption. These pressures have already been reflected in long-term Treasury yields. Thursday's $22 billion auction of 30-year bonds went poorly, with buyers demanding a yield of 5.308% and yields continuing to rise afterward. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's clumsy buyback operation did little to calm the market either. Treasury bought back about $5.2 billion in long-dated bonds after setting a maximum of $6 billion, itself below the upper end of market expectations. The 10-year yield subsequently climbed to roughly 4.96%, while the 30-year yield pushed above 5.3%. The consequences extend well beyond the bond market. Higher long-term Treasury yields feed into higher mortgage rates, increase corporate borrowing costs, raise the cost of financing capital-intensive projects such as data centres, and progressively increase federal debt-servicing costs as existing debt is refinanced. At the same time, renewed inflation increases pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep overnight rates high or raise them further rather than easing monetary policy. Putting the United States back on a sustainable fiscal path requires first addressing the structural causes of the deficit, including Social Security, Medicare, defence spending, and rapidly increasing interest costs, while also confronting the revenue side of the equation, which will require some combination of higher taxes, closing tax loopholes and tax expenditures, and stronger enforcement. Second, tariffs and quotas that distort prices and trade should be removed, while subsidies should be subjected to much greater economic discipline. Third, the administration needs to stop making ham-fisted economic interventions that break with fairly elementary economic orthodoxy. Tariffs raise domestic prices. Large structural deficits increase borrowing requirements. Energy shocks feed inflation. Persistent inflation raises expectations for interest rates, and higher long-term rates make housing, investment, and government borrowing more expensive. Much of what this administration has done had predictable economic consequences. Unfortunately, neither the administration nor Congress has demonstrated much willingness to confront the underlying fiscal problems or abandon policies that are making them worse.

@BrianRoemmele Sounds like the “Radical Abundance” Prof. Drexler foresaw many years ago: oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/r…

The President of the United States is at war with you. He’s trying to disenfranchise you, he’s trying to take away your vote, he’s trying to steal the midterms. You need to accept this horrible truth, and you need to fight back/retaliate against him. So for starters, when voting this year: 1. Use drop boxes. 2. Vote early in person. 3. If voting by mail, put your ballot in the mail at least 2 wks before Election Day. 4. Share these instructions with everyone you know. He’s at war with us. We must be at war with him. And defeat him.

In the immediate future, here are four concrete actions that European and NATO member countries can take: 1. End all remaining commercial ties with Russia, including those involving German fish-processing plants, Irish alumina production, and Greek shipping companies. 2. Bar Russian citizens from entering the Schengen area, with narrow exceptions for humanitarian cases, dissidents, and other clearly defined protected categories. 3. Establish a clear threshold under which Russian hybrid attacks causing significant physical damage, casualties, or disruption will be treated as armed attacks against NATO and may trigger Article 5. I recognise that this is ultimately a matter for NATO rather than strictly an EU one. 4. Ramp up military assistance to Ukraine, especially air defences. Russia has been bombarding Kyiv for six consecutive nights. Europe has provided substantial assistance, but Ukraine needs considerably more air-defence systems and interceptors, and it needs them now. U.S. intelligence increasingly suggests that Russia may be preparing to test one or more European countries, most likely through a “grey zone” attack designed to remain below the threshold of conventional war. Europe needs to respond accordingly and start treating Russia as a geopolitical enemy rather than as a security problem to be managed.

Kaja Kallas @kajakallas

2 months ago

Russia is hitting Europe with a wave of increasingly kinetic hybrid attacks. With this, Putin wants to scare us away from supporting Ukraine. He will not succeed. To the contrary, we will increase our support and invest in our own defence. We are also planning the most

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Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and anyone else in leadership that decided that it was okay to grab Afghan interpreters who stood by our sides in combat and deport them to gulags in Africa is a damn traitor that has turned their backs on the very people that we relied on in combat. Without these interpreters it would have been impossible for us to accomplish our mission and communicate with the people. I had no air support where I was most of the time. There was only 4 of us on my team, me, my NCO, my interpreter and a mechanic. I had 8 Afghan police stations that I was responsible for providing equipment for to defend themselves against the Taliban. What do you think would’ve happened if we had no means to communicate with the Afghan police????? This entire administration is criminal. These people risked their lives for us. They are disappearing these folks to third world countries. The cruelty is unacceptable. When this nightmare ends, this entire corrupt administration must be held accountability. There is nothing patriotic about this.

Let me introduce you to a brave hero from my country, Iran. She was 16 years old. Just a girl. And on the streets of Iran, she did something braver than most people do in a lifetime: she took off her hijab and burned it in public. Right in front of the regime. Right in front of the world. That was her crime: civil disobedience. A teenage girl refusing to obey men who claimed authority over her hair, her body, her life. Her message spoke for millions of Iranian women: To every man who rules over women in the name of religion, honor, or culture: We do not obey you. Your laws were never made for us. This is what real power looks like: unarmed, unafraid, unbowed. For that defiance, she was arrested. Her family says she was tortured and killed after falling into the hands of security forces. The Iranian authorities denied responsibility and gave a different account of her death. Her name was Nika Shakarami. She was 16. Now ask yourself: How many women in the West know her name? How many know what she risked for a freedom they have never had to fight for? Say her name: Nika Shakarami.

Fact.

My name is Vivian Silver, and I was a 74-year-old Jewish activist for peace between Israel and Palestine when I was murdered by Hamas. I co-founded Women Wage Peace, a group of over 50,000 people who have agreed to help "end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Before my death, I drove Palestinian children to hospitals in Israel. Three days before my death, I helped lead an interfaith unity rally in Jerusalem calling for the end of the conflict that was attended by 1,500 people. “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children” our event said. But I was killed on October 7th. “It’s absolute chaos here,” I wrote in Hebrew at 7:54am on October 7th, according to text messages shared with NBC News. “Terrorists have infiltrated Be’eri. There is shooting and screaming.” For a while, it was unclear whether I was alive or dead. Finally, news came that I was murdered in my home in Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the hardest hit kibbutzes on October 7th. Anat Saragusti — a feminist activist — mourned my death in a post on X. “Vivian was a woman of compassion and humanity, with an endless, deep and ongoing committment to Jewish-Arab partnership and peace,” Anat wrote. “Yes, peace.” Will you remember me?

I stand with Canada, not Trump. I stand with Ukraine, not Trump. I stand with NATO, not Trump. I stand with the free world, not Trump. You?

I’m happy to share this because I don’t care what side of the aisle you sit on, this is a fact. Speaker Mike Johnson this is for you. Concerning Social Security payments, my contributions were made for over 50 years on every salary I received. From my first part time job until I retired. I always had a job. The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a "Federal Benefit Payment?" I'll be part of the one percent to forward this.I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you. Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it. The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a "Federal Benefit Payment." This isn't a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned income! Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too. It totaled 15% of our income before taxes. Congress took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn't have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn't pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they've told us that the money won't support us for very much longer. And now, to add insult to injury, they're calling it a "benefit", as if we never worked to earn every penny of it. Just because they borrowed the money doesn't mean that our investments were a charity! Let's take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government. Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it. Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income. 99% of people won't forward this to their timelines…..will you? Please, for the sake of our country, repost this.

BREAKING: CNN's fact-checker exposes an AVALANCHE OF LIES from Trump about Canada — and there's a new one almost every day. Donald Trump doesn't just have policy disagreements with Canada. According to CNN's chief fact-checker Daniel Dale, who happens to be Canadian himself, Trump has built his entire trade war narrative on a foundation of demonstrably false claims — and the lies keep coming. Just today, Dale documented, Trump falsely claimed Canada's unemployment rate is "10% and rapidly rising." The actual number: 6.4%, and it's been DECLINING for three straight months. Trump also falsely claimed Canada does "95% of its business with the US." The real figure is 72%. He blamed the entire US-Canada trade deficit on high Canadian agricultural tariffs, despite the fact that roughly 97% of US agricultural exports to Canada are already tariff-free, and the actual deficit stems overwhelmingly from cheap Canadian crude oil imports that benefit American consumers. And that's just today's batch. Dale's running tally over the past 18 months reads like a highlight reel of fabrication. Trump has falsely claimed Canada doesn't buy American agricultural products, when it's actually the world's SECOND-LARGEST buyer of them. He's falsely claimed Canadians support becoming America's 51st state, when polling shows overwhelming opposition. He's falsely claimed Canada is among the world's highest-tariff nations, when World Trade Organization rankings place it near the bottom. He's falsely claimed Canada "essentially doesn't have a military," ignoring that Canadian forces have fought alongside American troops in multiple wars and rank in the upper half of NATO by force size. He's also falsely inflated the US trade deficit with Canada to "$200 billion" (nowhere close), falsely claimed Canada bans American banks (more than a dozen currently operate there), falsely claimed Canada is "constantly surrounded" by Chinese and Russian ships (fiction), and falsely accused former PM Trudeau of using trade tensions to run for reelection — despite Trudeau, quite obviously, not running. This isn't policy disagreement. This is a dispute over the nature of reality! This is a sitting president manufacturing an entire economic conflict with one of America's closest allies using numbers he simply invented, over and over, across nearly two years, with virtually no correction or accountability. When the facts don't support your trade war, apparently the solution is just to make up new facts. Someone needs to tell Trump that the world doesn’t work like that, and it may as well be CNN’s Daniel Dale. Please like and share if you’re sick of Trump’s lies!

China's humanoid robots are stealing the show, but a quieter machine revolution is unfolding bbc.com/news/articles/…

Hard to swallow? The future of snacking may be 3D-printed cookies made from upcycled plastic theguardian.com/food/2026/aug/…