Shane

Favourite quote from this post: 'Elon's a moron, as you know! ...' www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l_l...

Baking temperatures and drought have driven water levels to record lows across large parts of central and eastern Europe, exposing historic and prehistoric relics, including WWII Nazi ships and mammoth bones - nice!

Historians say up to 200 German warships were scuttled in September 1944 near Prahovo in the Danube gorge as they came under Soviet fire The idea behind the deliberate sinking was to slow down the Soviet advance in the Balkans

The dried-up Danube in Budapest. (Reuters - Marton Monus)

Boats lie in the partially dried-up Rheinauhafen harbour basin on the Rhine river in Cologne. (Reuters - Thilo Schmuelgen)

Western Australian farmers are pinning their hopes on late winter rainfall, after a drier-than-anticipated July sparked growing concerns over potential crop losses. (ABC News - John Dobson)

United Nations human rights chief Volker Tuerk - I am alarmed by the rise in executions and death sentences issued in Iran since March, and that capital punishment continues to be used to instil fear among the population and suppress dissent

United Nations human rights chief Volker Tuerk - At least 56 people have been executed in Iran on national security-related charges since March 19, including 27 in cases linked to protests at the start of the year

Meanwhile only 19 people have been executed in the United States since the beginning of 2026

Facebook's parent company, Meta, appears to be directly paying extremist content creators in Australia, including a white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links and a prominent anti-vaxxer This is some of the American bullshit Australians have to put up with: actually monetising these evil freaks

Researcher Kaz Ross - Facebook's financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement

Kaz Ross - It's morally bankrupt for Facebook to be paying them, to know that these people are producing content that's in breach of your own regulations yet you're actually not just allowing them but you're encouraging them by paying them (and presumably giving them the attention that they crave)

The major technology firms have loaded up on debt and it's set off warning bells - A credit default swap (CDS) insures against debt not being repaid - But the cost of that insurance for some of America's biggest technology companies is at a record high

Credit default swaps, a type of financial derivative, are a way for investors to hedge the risk of a company collapsing, and for traders to speculate on future booms or busts - sure

According to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), global credit default swap market activity reached a record $US41.8 trillion in 2025, surpassing the previous peak of $US38.7 trillion in 2022

Roger Montgomery - Because the broader stock market is heavily concentrated in the Mag7 and allied tech infrastructure names, a material delay in the AI pay-off wouldn't just be an isolated tech sector issue

Dan Rasmussen is concerned the big tech companies are taking on more debt as their revenues fall and says 'the credit metrics are deteriorating' - In most cases, cash flow has gone to zero and cash balances have declined while debt has increased

Oracle's debt has captured the most interest with investors concerned about how much debt was funding its deals with Open AI and others sending its credit default swaps from just above 0.4% September 2025, to over 1.6% in March, and now over 2%

Larry Ellison, he's so pretty 🐜 - and charming friend of Donald Trump ...

A portrait of Donald Trump, amid marital upheaval and post-bankruptcy resurrection, selling his brand, his buildings, and finally himself in the late 1990s

Trumpie's former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, is on the verge of cementing his appointment as head of the U.S. Department of Justice And see how he loves his master!

The head of a Russian drone factory was seriously wounded and his driver killed when their car was blown up near the city of Yekaterinburg, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of targeted attacks linked to the war in Ukraine

The Democratic Party's progressive wing scored a high-profile victory when Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's U.S. Senate primary, ​according to media projections on Wednesday, giving its anti-establishment message a boost ahead of November's midterm elections

Jonathan Haidt - The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth

The Smith-Mundt Act is for indoctrinating foreigners - thanks Uncle Scam!

Most people in most places are pretty stupid, but Americans are really aggressive about it

Herman and Chomsky: mass communication in the U.S. 'carries out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion' But we know that the Defense Department is deeply embedded in Hollywood, for example ...

Day-trips from Tokyo: Nikko is like a spiritual shrine for Japan

Day-trips from Tokyo: Kamakura on Sagami Bay

Day-trips from Tokyo: And of course Fuji-san

Le Champion des Dames

Barry Eichengreen - The real message in the yen intervention: the dollar's status as a reserve currency is not what it used to be Just as Nero undermined the Roman denarius—arguably the world's first international currency—America's ruler (Trumpie) poses a growing threat to his country's currency

Social media video shows a Wildberries warehouse in the Leningrad Region of Russia on fire on Tuesday

Gozer the Gozerian loves communism and disco

The first Red Scare in America followed the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 (named after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer) saw thousands of suspected radicals and immigrants arrested, many without warrants

In the second Red Scare of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy used allegations of communist association to destroy careers and silence dissent The accusation often mattered more than the evidence

Theodore E. (Ted) Zorn - Seen from New Zealand, Australia, or Europe, much of the 'radicalism' of the DSA-aligned candidates looks unremarkable Universal access to affordable healthcare, a decent minimum wage, good public education, and government retirement benefits, are standard in our societies

Mike Johnson posted - Communism is no longer a far fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES! ... hysterical much? But it's all a lie: anyone who wants justice for ordinary Americans and universal healthcare gets called a communist by these people

the terminator machine hates communism and loves America

Trumpie called opponents 'hardcore, godless communists' and described communism as a cancer that must be cut out

while warning that 'godless communists' are poised to seize power may be desperate, it is not harmless Conflating reasonable political argument with radical extremism stigmatises political opponents as dangerous outsiders rather than fellow citizens

the U.S. State Department published a 100-page report portraying U.S. journalists, trade unionists and activists as participants in a Cuban-communist influence network ... so, send them to concentration camps?

In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, U.S. historian Christopher Lasch prophetically told us 'the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious' hence this culture of narcissism

Christopher Lasch was basically describing America as he saw it