Links 8/27/2026

For the love of books, snow – and Dolly Balanced Weather Cyclospora outbreak is crimping produce sales, data shows Food Dive Human Unpredictability is Overrated Cliodynamica by Peter Turchin Climate/Environment Nepal’s Deadly Flood Started With a 2,000-Foot Chunk of Glacier: Scientists Are Still Piecing Together Why International Business Times Devastating CCTV footage from the Chinese side of the Nepal-China border shows the massive flood sweeping through the area with incredible force, giving a stark glimpse of how suddenly it was struck. pic.twitter.com/s2eVfOzd7G — Everest Today (@EverestToday) August 26, 2026 The Velocity Hazard – Why the Rate of Warming Trumps Absolute Temperature Thresholds Climate Uncovered Thousands of Gary residents without power for 2 weeks are breathing sigh of relief Fox 32 Chicago. Would probably be bigger story if not for fact Gary is one of the poorest cities in the country. Pandemics Conservation Bio: Emerging threat of avian influenza to the world’s vultures Avian Flu Diary Water ‘Forever chemicals’ surge during pilot of Thames Water plan to combat drought The Guardian Carbon emissions exacerbating the Western US water crisis Communications Earth & Environment Japan Japan Energy Plan Seeks to Back Pipelines Bypassing Hormuz Bloomberg China? China’s top diplomat flags problems in US relations ahead of Xi visit DPA International To be one of the world’s largest polyethylene and polypropylene-producing plants: Massive explosion at joint China-Russian Natural Gas chemical plant in Russia’s Far East pic.twitter.com/6JSVn0Zkep — Carl Zha (@CarlZha) August 26, 2026 Syraqistan Palestinian children return to school under threat of Israel demolition Al Jazeera Jewish Space Lasers? Israel Wants ‘Rods From God’ Haaretz *** Iran, Oman advance on Hormuz as Islamabad MOU regains attention Amwaj Pakistan says it expects US answer on $10bn stabilization facility ‘within months’ The Cradle Syrian Kurdish leader announces SDF dissolution after its integration into army France24 A Changing Geography of U.S. Sanctions in the Middle East and Africa Sawahil Trump sends Saudi civil nuclear agreement to Congress for review France24 O Canada From live snails to lawn mowers: Canada’s most unexpected targets in its US tariff response Firstpost Old Blighty Germany in talks to help fund Trident The Telegraph European Disunion US review of its force posture in Europe aims to advance ‘NATO 3.0’: Pentagon official Anadolu Agency New Not-So-Cold War CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Trip Was to Warn Russia Not to Attack NATO WSJ Secretary of War Hegseth, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Caine, and CIA Director Ratcliffe leave the West Wing following a meeting at the White House. Ratcliffe returned from Russia late last night. pic.twitter.com/9p7PTtfE2X — Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) August 26, 2026 ❗️Eight people were injured in Donetsk after Ukrainian Armed Forces struck the “Donetsk City” shopping center area with Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles, — Denis Pushilin, head of the DPR Among the injured are two girls born in 2010 and 2016, three women, and three men. Three more… pic.twitter.com/Oz6G9QQtFa — Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) August 26, 2026 Andy Burnham is warned that Britain faces impending Russian ‘attack’ over its support for Ukraine Daily Mail Ukraine under fire but European anti-missile system faces delays Euractiv 🇺🇸🇺🇦 Hillary Clinton on says the only way for Trump to end the war in Ukraine is to go all in and “much more forcefully” fund the Ukrainians to fight Russia She claims he won’t do that because of Putin’s “hold” on Trump pic.twitter.com/qPldtks9c2 — HOT SPOT (@HotSpotHotSpot) August 26, 2026 L’affaire Epstein ‘Meritless:’ Judge rejects Maxwell’s claim to toss her prison sentence Miami Herald South of the Border Venezuela: Opposition Lawmaker Ecarri Proposes Dollarization Plan Venezuelanalysis The Neverending ‘Global War on Terror’ Accused 9/11 mastermind, 3 co-defendants to stand trial in 2028 Anadolu Agency Trump 2.0 Conservative-leaning coalition raises alarm over Trump’s political weaponization of ICE All-Source Intelligence ICE investigators want to buy voter data from every state Project Salt Box Waffle House Teleporter Gregg Phillips Is Still on the Trump Administration’s Payroll Wired Democrats Suck How Corporate PAC Money Gets to Democrats Who Swore It Off NOTUS Economy Fossil fuel import bills surge over $330 billion in six months since Hormuz crisis: CREA Down to Earth Functional Unemployment Up for Fourth Consecutive Month, Says Ludwig Institute Ludwig Institute Trump-GOP Budget Law Pushes SNAP Enrollment to 17-Year Low as Millions Lose Aid Common Dreams Healthcare? As states tighten oversight, private equity’s healthcare deals decline Stateline Imperial Collapse Watch Trump’s Third-Worldism Unpopular Front The Everything Shortage The Merchant’s News Castles Made of Sand Can We Still Govern? AI Nvidia Reportedly Stops Flirting With Hugging Face and Just Buys It Gizmodo The multiplying risks of financing data centres FT The Only Kill Switch We’ve Got Labor Politics Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training 404 Media Why Amazon Is Building One of the Largest Solar Projects in America Distilled The Accelerationists Louisiana completes massive giveaway of sensitive land to Elon Musk Oligarch Watch Supply Chain Loosening Beijing’s global graphite grip Metal Tech News A kitchen blender helped scientists make graphene from electronic waste Interesting Engineering Chokepoints Panama Canal Auction Hits New Record at $5.3 Million Bloomberg Police State Watch What every failing regime does after suffering humiliating defeat in war: wage a new war on invented domestic enemies who can’t defend themselves https://t.co/m8mZz052bp — Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 26, 2026 Tech Meta’s $18B child-safety deal hinges on age-verification tech that doesn’t work well TechCrunch Groves of Academe Documents Reveal Trail of Unreported Millions From Israeli Military to U.S. Universities Drop Site Mr. Market Bessent, Warsh diverge on who should set the price of money Reuters Guillotine Watch California man who brought guillotine to US Capitol grounds pleads not guilty The Guardian The Bezzle Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images Ars Technica Class Warfare What happened to North Hollywood’s Star Garden, the nation’s only unionized strip club? Los Angeles Public Press Care Black Lodges Antidote du jour (via): See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here. ‘Carl Zha @CarlZha Massive explosion at joint China-Russian Natural Gas chemical plant in Russia’s Far East ‘ Po tip. If there is an industrial accident and you see the engineers running away at top speed, then do not gawk, do not try to stop one to ask what is happening, do not grab your mobile to take some content – just run. Nepal’s Deadly Floods: In 2013 spent 2 nights in a guesthouse in Syabrubesi, which according to satellite photos has been completely wiped away by yesterday’s floods. This is after a 2015 earthquake + landslide that completely burried Langtang village, a mere 10 miles away (as the crow flies), where I also stayed 2 nights in 2013. These things always hit harder when you know the area and (superficially) know some of the people who have likely been killed in these disasters. I cycled down that road in 2007, crossing the border into Nepal on the way to Kathmandu from Lhasa. I was expecting it to be sparsely populated based on the maps I had, but on the Nepal side there was a surprising density of rural dwellers. Even then, I could see huge landslide scars on the valley sides, often cutting right through fields. As you say, it hits harder when you’ve been there. The entire area is very unstable, typical of post-glacial landscapes. I’m familiar with massive flood debris fields from close to home – my regular cycle up the mountains south of Dublin runs through a cutting littered with truck sized granite boulders scattered by more than one post-glacial lake bust (this was my original thought about what caused this, but it does seem to have been a more conventional landslide). The combination of unstable post-glacial subsoils (often piled hundreds of metres high) along with the local climate and seismic activity makes enormous disasters like this an inevitablity. Climate change is, of course, making things much, much worse. Yes that area is very unstable. When I was there, the main road (that you cycled) had been damaged enough after a storm that at some point as a safety measure all passengers of the bus that I was in had to leave the bus and pass one specific area on foot, so only the driver would die in case it slipped into a ravine. It appeared to be a routine thing. >Devastating CCTV footage from the Chinese side of the Nepal-China border… Wowsers! what to do? There is a worse video of what happened when that flood hit the Nepal – Tibet border crossing. Hollywood couldn’t come up with a scene like that- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFYBmDYQqoA (1:07 mins) In just those two videos we are seeing people being killed by the score. The total death toll for this disaster will run into the thousands when they eventually count the dead & missing up and down the valleys. Is this the first case of “Clima-cide?” Human induced global warming kills … Oh brother! Hardly anytime to react, but if anyone did, climbing straight up the hill would have been about the only bet. Agreed. There is a reason why the phrase ‘head for the hills’ is a thing. But I doubt that there was time to get high enough due to the height of that flood in that constricted valley. They never had a chance. I think there’s an effort on to rewrite what a ‘Job Guarantee’ means, so that it diverges completely from MMT’s ambitions for a JG – don’t know whether to consider this as progress towards it, or away from it: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/26/work-good-for-you-jobs-guarantee-youth-mental-health-crisis-pat-mcfadden Have MMT’ers been a lot more silent over the years, or are they just busy behind the scenes in policy circles? I know Stephanie Kelton has done well previously with that, and ya of course MMT folks – Michael Hudson in particular – are regularly hosted here; just seems more quiet than in the past. I’m hoping there’s a solid second generation of MMT’ers, to keep the ideas and advocacy going far into the future. I hope it’s not too late. “A coalition of American civil society groups on Friday called for a federal investigation into reports that artificial intelligence giants are mass-purchasing physical books, scanning them to train their AI models, and destroying them without regard for historical artifacts or the public good.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/artificial-intelligence-book-burning About that unionized strip club, with all it’s problems and shuttered at the moment, that means the business went “Tits up”? Asking for a friend. ‘HOT SPOT @HotSpotHotSpot 🇺🇸🇺🇦 Hillary Clinton on says the only way for Trump to end the war in Ukraine is to go all in and “much more forcefully” fund the Ukrainians to fight Russia. She claims he won’t do that because of Putin’s “hold” on Trump’ Is she still around? Are people even listening to her anymore? Does anybody even care? Hillary had her chance about a decade ago but instead insulted much of the voting populace and starved State campaign funds dry to pay big money to her consultant friends. And when the whole thing blew up in her face, got drunk and it has been downhill ever since. Can’t she just go into a monastery and take a vow of silence or something? And some people still wonder why T won in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmIRYvJQeHM Care Black Lodges Moi: a bubbling up of a new sustainable consciousness rather than a hammering down. Or something like that. Amen to that. These ideas are best exemplified by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the great anarcho-syndicalist union behind the anarchist revolution in 1936 Spain (inspiring pics). Murray Bookchin wrote a partial history of the CNT that documented how the CNT used mutual aid and community to organize the revolution over the course of decades. Here’s an excerpt from a brief essay discussing how the CNT approach contrasted with that of the Bolsheviks: Octavia Butler’s Parable series, written in the 90s, but set in our time, lays out a future where different visions of a new world compete using mutual aid as an organizing principle. In a collapsing world, those who are organized to care for people and provide basic needs, will be the ones who succeed. Like a dog returneth to its own vomit … https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6053833-gop-divided-economic-stimulus/ Desperate, divided GOP debates stimmy checks before the midterms … film at eleven! > Care Black Lodges Much to agree with, but how do you write this article and not once use the word ‘Union’? A proven answer to >> A strike is powerful only insofar as those who strike can endure the consequences of refusing work. Re 404/Amazon/books–when it comes to discarding books how about my local library which seems to regard keeping physical books as a burden that is only justified if they are periodically checked out? The linked story even says that a large batch of books came from a university library in England. If they didn’t go to Amazon would those books have gone into a landfill? Not that one wants to ever defend Amazon but there is the reality that many paper books are not rare and valuable and if some rare books meet the described destructive fate perhaps the onus should be on those who sold them to Amazon in the first place. The assumption that otherwise they would have survived doesn’t necessarily hold. Re: From live snails to lawn mowers: Canada’s most unexpected targets in its US tariff response Firstpost One thing which greatly puzzles me is Canada is the source for almost all of America’s Canola oil. Should Canada turn off the tap, every fast food chain in the US would be shut and Americans would feel it in a big way. Why have we not heard this option discussed or considered? Perhaps no other country in the world eats junk food as much, so Canada has nowhere else to push the product? It gets more serious than this. I am given to understand that a huge portion of the toilet paper that America uses comes from Canadian wood. It would be like 2020 all over again. Construction Physics How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works – Brian Potter I’ve looked it over only briefly but I’ve read some other of his pieces which were good. In other news today. Several weeks ago a settler pushed a 48 year old nun over from behind and her head hit the curb. The guy then kicked her in the head while she was down. This was not a he-said, she-said thing as it was all captured on video. Well an Israeli court has just acquitted this guy because of course they did- https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-court-acquits-jewish-settler-who-kicked-catholic-nun-head Afterwards, the guy’s lawyer ‘described the attack as an “unfortunate incident” and said the defence took “note” of the nun’s “difficult feelings” over the assault.’ Such is life in the only democracy in the Middle East. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/26/meta-just-paid-nearly-17-billion-to-make-sure-it-gets-to-write-the-kid-safety-rules-for-every-other-social-media-platform/ Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform I haven’t read this yet but from stuff seen earlier it looks like the right take.