Max the cat was washed at 40 degrees – survived Omni via machine translation (Micael T)
Dogs Paired With Providers at Hospitals Help Ease Staff and Patient Stress KFF Health News
Earth’s magnetic north pole is on the move, and scientists just updated its position CNN (Kevin W)
Scientists Cast Doubt on Atmospheric Methane Removal Technology ScienceBlog
Improved radon gas mapping finds nearly 25% of Americans living in highest risk areas PhysOrg (fk)
#COVID-19/Pandemics
These results imply SARS-CoV-2 mutations can have very different impacts on serum antibody neutralization depending on a person’s exposure history.
We confirmed this for a subset of mutations as shown below. pic.twitter.com/PEQz9yCPi0
— Bloom Lab (@jbloom_lab) January 21, 2025
Stop letting your kids get Covid.
Stop letting your kids get Covid.
Stop letting your kids get Covid. pic.twitter.com/TB8oJPp5yV— 💜OldFashionedAnne (@oldfshndanne) January 20, 2025
Immediately after withdrawing from the WHO, Trump stops CDC, FDA & NIH from giving public health updates.
“The CDC was scheduled to publish several MMWR reports this week, including 3 about H5N1 outbreak, according to federal health official who spoke on condition of anonymity” pic.twitter.com/itopmWAL03
— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto) January 22, 2025
Climate/Environment
Reads to help you make sense of the climate-changed insurance market Yale Climate Connections. A very good and wide-ranging collection of articles.
Great Barrier Reef Hit By Its Most Widespread Coral Bleaching, Study Finds Guardian
EPA moves to withdraw decision on paraquat, delays report on risks The New Lede 🙁
High fertiliser use halves numbers of pollinators, world’s longest study finds Guardian
‘Chilling effect’ spreads to European asset managers over climate even as risks rise Financial Times
China?
President Xi Jinping Has Virtual Meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. Thin readout for what has been reported as a 95 minute call.
Building a mature and stable China-US relationship from a new starting point: Global Times editorial Global Times
China’s Installed Renewables Achieved Yet Another Record in 2024 Financial Post
European Disunion
Tusk tells Europeans ‘keep your heads high’ but warns ‘time of comfort is over’ Guardian
Scrapped presidential elections frontrunner tops polls again RT (Kevin W)
Denmark to ditch ‘parenting competency’ tests for Greenlandic families Guardian (Kevin W)
Old Blighty
A New Frontier: Organised Immigration Crime and UK Sanctions RUSI. The money quote is at the end: …”he history of sanctions is littered with cases of over-promising and under-delivering, where expectations and hopes for impact are misplaced.”
Israel v. The Resistance
As part of the large scale operation it launched yesterday in Jenin, West Bank, immediately after the Gaza ceasefire, the Israeli military is disconnecting the inhabitants from the city’s medical facilities. The war on Palestinian hospitals has become a policy. https://t.co/p77maAZmOW
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) January 22, 2025
Illegal Israeli settlers torch Palestinian homes, vehicles in West Bank attacks Anadolu Agency
New Not-So-Cold War
⚡ Scholz at Davos: Europe Must Arm for War with Russia
“We have all started to spend more on defense. I think almost every country in Europe now spends more than 2% of GDP on defense because there is a threat to our security from Russia, which we really understand after the… pic.twitter.com/kXLkWjxlXw
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) January 21, 2025
DMITRI ROGOZIN ON FIGHTING AND FINISHING THE WAR DIFFERENTLY – ACCELERATION, DECAPITATION, MOBILIZATION John Helmer
Zelensky demands at least 200,000 ‘peacekeepers’ on Ukrainian soil – Reuters RT
No, Russia is not facing a banking crisis BNE
Russian Foreign Ministry reaffirms commitment to maintain neutrality of Panama Canal TASS via machine translation
Turkiye
Turkiye’s Victory Party leader Umit Ozdag faces trial for ‘inciting hatred’ Aljazeera
Syraqistan
France issues arrest warrant for ousted Syrian leader Assad on war crimes charges Anadolu Agency. The virtue signalling, it burns. So where is the arrest warrant for war crimes against Netanyahu over the death of Marine Vlahovic, a French journalist documenting Israeli war crimes on the Gaza Strip? See also: French NGO files case with ICC over journalists’ deaths in Gaza
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
“Internet Badasses” aren’t going to stop Digital ID Libre Solutions (Micael T)
Imperial Collapse Watch
China Will Field a Sixth Generation Fighter Before America Can – Expert Highlights Why Military Watch
Stefanik paints a grim picture of a UN she wants to reform Politico (Kevin W)
Downward Russia in Global Affairs (Micael T)
There’s reason to be worried about the plethora of pardons from Trump and Biden Politico
Trump 2.0
Lambert has a full list of Trump’s first day executive orders as well as other actions in yesterday’s Water Cooler, so please check that out if curious.
Note that the much ballyhooed Tuesday immigration raids in Chicago have not yet happened.
Trump Widens Tariff Threats to China, Europe on Day 2 in Office Bloomberg
Donald Trump threatens tax war over US multinationals Financial Times
India Set to Take Back 18,000 Citizens From US to Placate Trump Bloomberg
Crypto Thought Trump Would Bring It Legitimacy. Then He Launched a Meme Coin. Wall Street Journal. As readers indicated yesterday.
Crypto executives fear investor backlash over Trump memecoins Financial Times. Key bit:
Following Trump’s lead, Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who spoke during the president’s inauguration, announced the launch of his own memecoin later that day.
US exit from WHO could see fifth of budget disappear BBC (Kevin W)
Police Express Outrage Over Trump’s Jan. 6 Pardons New York Times (Kevin W)
Trump Abolishes Democrats’ DEI And Trans-Craze Policies Moon of Alabama
Jim Jordan signals prolonged probes into Biden family and debunked Jan. 6 conspiracies Raw Story
Biden
On Foreign Policy, Biden Leaves a Global Trail of Destruction Jacobin (Kevin W)
Our No Longer Free Press
Major Tech Firms Sign EU Pledge To Tackle Hate Speech The Verge. Note that hate crimes are recognized in US law, but not hate speech.
The collective West’s facade of freedom of speech, human equality, and human rights has been completely destroyed.
Free Palestine https://t.co/u3O1CiWMh5
— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) January 22, 2025
AI
Trump announces an up to $500 billion AI infrastructure investment involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Business Insider
AI pork is way fatter than military pork:
Chinese AI software DeepSeek was built at a fraction of the cost of American companies like Meta & OpenAI, but performs better.
From the user perspective, DeepSeek is 96% cheaper than ChatGPT and other popular LLM.
China model = work smarter, not harder. pic.twitter.com/2Cw2fvJmQx
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) January 22, 2025
We said early on a big problem for AI was the lack of barriers to entry. So how much of US stock market (over)valuation is AI dependent?
Most people probably don’t realize how bad news China’s Deepseek is for OpenAI.
They’ve come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they’re charging just 3% of the price.
It’s essentially as if someone had released a… pic.twitter.com/aGSS5woawF
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 21, 2025
Chinese researchers reveal how to reproduce Open-AI’s o1 model from scratch pic.twitter.com/ZF0tKSWZGm
— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) December 29, 2024
AI Benchmarking Organization Criticized For Waiting To Disclose Funding from OpenAI TechCrunch
CIA’s Chatbot Stands In For World Leaders New York Times. I can’t even…
‘It’s a nightmare’: couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs Guardian (fk)
AI Boom Gives Rise To ‘GPU-as-a-Service’ IEEE Spectrum
Guillotine Watch
Class Warfare
Inflict massive economic violence on a bunch of VCs out of spite LinkedIn. I can’t access LinkedIn but Micael T kindly sent the text:
Sometimes when I run into open source software that gates basic auth behind a paywall, it occurs to me that I should collaborate with the blog readership to fork their code, add SSO, and inflict massive economic violence on a bunch of VCs out of spite.
Which we 100% should do, we just have to figure out what company has software worth preserving but a business model that isn’t.
The Black Book of Communism Is a Shoddy Work of History Jacobin
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus:
Just a stray puppy having the best time of his life..🐕🐾🛝😍 pic.twitter.com/U2940KVLUd
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) January 21, 2025
A second bonus:
Teacher teaching his student pic.twitter.com/vy3V6VB8fD
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 20, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
