Went down a rabbit hole on this. Looks like what the US did was funding biolabs thru Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under its Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP). The Ukrainian biolabs were a Soviet era legacy and the initial mission was to secure any bionasties from accidental release or whatever. But the Soviet Union croaked in 91 and its 2026 so if we’re still funding them safe to say there’s been some mission creep. This might be an « our responsible and threat-reducing biodefense program » vs « their reckless and dangerous bioweapons program » situation. Hilariously when Victoria Nuland was questioned by Marco Rubio about them years earlier she was fretting about the same labs falling into Russian hands. But wait we’re doing just threat reduction right? Right? At the end of the day it’s all nasty bugs in freezers. Good if the good guys have them and bad if the bad guys have them. (To the Russians we are the bad guys BTW) To me the most damaging thing is Tulsi Gabbard is actually still the DNI director as she is saying all this. Internally America can fume that she’s a Russian plant etc etc. But externally to everyone else dude that’s your official spy chief. If she is saying something out of pocket, it’s up to America to correct the record officially and publicly. « Just ignore our official spookmaster she is not a serious person » is not a tenable position. It’s saying « pardon us we are a banana republic whose institutions cannot be trusted. »

With Tulsi Gabbard's new revelations about US bio labs in many countries around the world including Ukraine, it's fascinating recall the bizarre series of events that gave rise to this controversy in the first place: In May of 2022, some of us began asking whether the US had bio labs in Ukraine, what they were for, and why the US had them there. For asking those questions, we were instantly branded as "pro-Russian conspiracy theorists" in official Ukrainian intel reports, on our Wikipedia pages, by countless media outlets, etc. This was and remains one of the most bizarre episodes I've ever seen. Before May 2022, when we asked those questions, barely anyone had ever thought about let alone asked about "bio weapons in Ukraine"! I certainly hadn't. Like most people, I had never mentioned a word about it because it had never occurred to me we had them there. But then, Marco Rubio summoned Victoria Nuland to the Senate and asked her in a televised hearing under oath about these "rumors," clearly expecting her to immediately debunk them as obvious Kremlin lies and to proclaim the US had no such bio labs in Ukraine. Instead, Nuland did the opposite! She *confirmed* key aspects of these "rumors," and she explicitly warned that the US has several "bio research labs" in Ukraine that are so dangerous that they must not be allowed to fall into Russia's hands. When some of us heard Nuland's rather shocking admission -- the first-ever disclosure about these labs -- we of course asked: wait! what? Why does the US have bio labs in Ukraine, and what are the US and Ukraine doing in those labs that make them (in Nuland's eyes) so dangerous?? (Note: nobody ever suggested that the presence of these bio labs in Ukraine justified the Russian invasion; we just wanted answers about these US bio labs that Nuland had casually divulged). We never got real answers. We got smear campaigns. To this day, our names are formally attached to claims that we spread "conspiracy theories" for asking about these labs even though it was Victoria Nuland herself who was the one who accidentally revealed them for the first time in a Senate hearing in response to a shocked Marco Rubio. They then quickly tried shutting down any questioning by pretending that Nuland never said this, and it was just a bunch of paid Kremlin mouthpieces who were spreading lies. You see the same tactics now being against Tulsi for releasing this new intelligence report. Watch the Nuland testimony in question:

Israel is destroying the world economy. There’s no other way to put it.

They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us for our logic. « Soviet Union delenda est » was perhaps fair enough. But then it became Russia delenda est. China delenda est. North Korea delenda est. Iran delenda est. Cuba delenda est. As Anna Applebaum herself hopefully pointed out, there’s no ideological linkage between the between America’s enemies anymore. To the extent they hang together it is purely in practical interest. Because the west has clearly signaled their plan to take them down one by one, break them apart and sow their fields with salt. Anybody who thinks this is still about human rights and institutions and that America is one big Amnesty International with nuclear weapons and NATO is just working with Angelina Jolie to bring more empowerment to women needs their head examined.

50-50. Probably southern Lebanon. I think the Iranians may not have an accurate understanding of Israel and the lobby. They’re thinking of this as a test of US intentions when the truth is that it a test of the autonomy of the US state. They may simply not have the political room to dictate terms to the Israelis. And given what we know about how the Israelis feel about what they call their freedom of action in Lebanon, there may very well have to be a separate peace if the MOU is to signed and upheld at all. Otherwise the Israelis can kill it at their leisure.

Iran is not outgunned. The NYTimes reported US intelligence assessments that 70-75% of its arsenal remains, while CSIS reports that more than a third of the US magazine has been depleted. Iran is not outmanned. It has more men under arms than the US. Anglo-Saxons should especially understand the nature of the Iranian leverage from holding the Gulf under fire control and imposing a blockade on Hormuz. They have been doing this for centuries. Wake the fuck up.

do you understand now?

‘Big Gretch’ operates like every normie machine politician, quietly loathing voters. It’s nice she doesn’t always use her inside voice and sometimes lets people know what she actually thinks.

"data-driven" midwits will never admit to problems with data until catastrophic collapse and even then their response will be "well, what else were we supposed to do?"

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth says the global energy market now may be able to absorb the Strait of Hormuz disruption until around Labor Day (early September). He says lower Chinese demand, ongoing inventory drawdowns, and limited “dark” tanker transits through the strait, often at night with transponders off and done with U.S. military support, have bought the market time. Wirth however suggests actual flows from Hormuz may be closer to 3 million barrels a day, well below the 7 million claimed by the Trump administration.

The median millennial only has about $10,000 in retirement savings Yes, really- You’ve probably seen *mean* figures, which are deeply skewed by the upper leg of the K 39% don’t have any retirement savings at all Of those that do, the median balance is only $45,000

Iran got a hard kill on 14 radars, at least 4 aerial tankers and an E-3 on the first day or so with big salvos. It recently bagged more radars; at least one in Bahrain and another in Kuwait. It has fired more SRBMs and MRBMs than the Pentagon told Congress were in the Chinese arsenal. The CEPs of these missiles were closer to 5m than 20m, smaller than those assumed by Anderson and Press (2025) or @ka_grieco et al (2024) for China (20m). Iran is a great missile power and it showed.

The most brutal part is not that China is using AI to sort garbage. It is that China has pushed waste management so far that the old problem has reversed. China used to worry about having too much garbage to process. Now some waste-to-energy plants are facing the opposite problem: not enough garbage. Previously sealed landfills may even have to be reopened, not because China failed, but because waste has become fuel, feedstock, data, and part of an industrial recycling loop. This is what China does best. It takes the ugliest, dirtiest, most ignored corner of urban life — garbage — and turns it into engineering, automation, energy recovery, environmental governance, and industrial optimization. Even trash gets absorbed into the machine. In many countries, garbage is where governance collapses. In China, even garbage becomes a system.

India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar: The US specifically asked India to buy Russian oil to stabilize the world markets. I mean, if it is on, off, on, off — and do it when it suits us and don't do it when it doesn't suit us... I mean, come on. We are all adults in the room. We know what the game is.

All of my smartest friends are either > doubling down on AI and starting companies to create generational wealth as soon as possible > taking their money to buy piece of land in the middle of nowhere and walking away from society as a whole Nothing in between

They are so desperate to relive the ideological fights of the 20th century. What drives this Eurasian alliance is NOT fear of Liberal Democracy (do we even have that here in the West?) What drives them is the EXACT SAME THING that drove the Peloponnesian League against Athens: FEAR, INTEREST, AMBITION, & PRIDE.

It's genuinely fucked up that they took the government's #1 lover of a morning gin and tonic and for some reason forced him to be the secretary of exercising live on camera

Ahhhh stop defending me from ethnic cleansing nooooo just go away and let my people be tossed into the dustbin of history owwwwowowow

This is likely why recent Iranian attack waves did not include the UAE.

It's almost like they're trying to engineer famines