Lovely photos from the twice annual "Murtreff" in Norway where architects, masons and government officials can meet to learn about traditional masonry techniques. From Roman arches to. Gustavino Vaulting.

This is what a global bond market crisis looks like.

THE RACE TO "PACE AI" IS A RUSE Reliable sources tell me Anthropic and OpenAI are working with the Department of Justice to hash out a coordinated "pacing the frontier" plan. The legal issue is that cross-company coordination might break antitrust rules—even a voluntary "pacing" agreement that doesn't affect competitors. Such "pacing" would actually buy time for stragglers like xAI and Meta to catch up. Frontier "pacing"— if voluntary—wouldn't impact the second-rate open source models at all. Much of this "pacing" effort is in response to the viral AI Doom freak-out that started building with the Hugging Face hack and exploded with that pasty Anthropic "whistleblower" saying what everyone paying attention already knew: The frontier AI execs believe their baby golems could one day come alive like some mutant brood in a subterranean lab, break containment, and launch an End of the World party that'd leave nothing but A-bomb craters and a surviving handful of human-robot symbiotes swimming in semi-animate oceans of nano swarm gray goo. Well, that's what I envision every time Elon Musk says "radical abundance" anyway. If you have a better doom dream, let's hear it. — The current "pacing the frontier" effort has continuity with another ongoing DoJ deal going back to July. That deal would allow frontier companies—including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google—to form an industry-led standards body. Adherence to these standards would be voluntary. I have no doubt any of these companies would secure regulatory capture if they could, especially Anthropic. Be that as it may, all these smooth-brained "COORDINATED ASTROTURFED PSY OP" conspiracy theories about "ONE WORLD EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM REGULATORY CAPTURE" triggered by "CYBERATTACK FALSE FLAGS" unleashed by the Antichrist are missing one important element: What is actually happening at the DOJ right now: the avoidance of hard regulation. Even with a "pacing" plan in place, there's every reason to believe the top dawgs at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and various upstarts—all given cover by the coordinated astroturfed e/acc psy op—will continue their shared mission to build digital God in a server rack. Every ambitious man wants to be first. Even those "pacing" their maniacal mission to build God. — For that philosophical reason alone, it's prudent to view every frontier AI exec as you would a pagan priest whose gods are hostile to your bloodline. Don't trust their motives. Never support their efforts. Disregard their cheerleaders and mouthpieces. Block them at every turn. Employ any legal way to bring them to heel. Force transparency. Enforce accountability for harms. Impose outside evaluators. Criminalize involuntary data collection and surveillance. Ban their worst products at the state level. Ban the big ones on the federal level. Ban AI in public classrooms. Ban suicide bots for kids. Ban goonbots for incels. Ban AI slop from all platforms. Halt mass surveillance. Ban lethal autonomous weapons. Halt the Greater Replacement. Ban artificial superintelligence. If ASI is not possible to build—and if a nuanced ban wouldn't affect your struggling start-up or your crappy open source AI running on basement GPUs—then why do you care if imaginary superintelligence is banned? On the other hand... If ASI is actually possible, why do you want to see it built? Don't we have enough infernal gods without creating a new one who can conduct cyberattacks and drone strikes? Ban it. Ban any AI development and the deployment of any AI that decreases quality of life, reduces cognitive ability, or is designed to replace meaningful work. Or, considering the difficulty of passing and enforcing such laws in the current political climate, just refuse to use their bots or buy into their bullshit propaganda. Or maybe you'd rather carry water for these tech-adled megalomaniacs. You're free to parrot their paranoid, hypocritical, and obviously "coordinated astroturfed psy ops" all you want. Outsource your mind. Love the clanker. Take the trode. It's a free country. For now.

The government is right to be thinking seriously about resilience and growth, because the pressures now building are significant. We should not underestimate what is happening across the world right now. There is a convergence of issues that will have global ramifications for some time to come. • Strait of Hormuz challenged = trade reduced to a trickle • Red Sea threat increasing = trade severely impacted • Pipelines disrupted = alternative routes limited • Conflict affecting the Black Sea = major grain corridor severely impacted Together, these routes carry a significant proportion of the world’s oil, gas, fertiliser and grain. The significance is not simply that each is under pressure. It is that these pressures compound one another. Why does that matter? Tighter oil and gas supplies mean higher energy costs. But the impact does not stop at the pump or the household energy bill. Energy feeds into transport, freight, manufacturing and the cost of producing almost everything else. Fertiliser is part of the same chain. Ammonia is a critical input in nitrogen fertiliser. When its movement is disrupted, supply tightens and costs rise. If that pressure persists into planting seasons, farmers face higher input costs and greater pressure on future yields. At the same time, continued disruption in the Black Sea constrains one of the world’s most important grain-export corridors. Russia and Ukraine together account for around a third of global wheat trade. Less reliable supply means greater pressure on global food prices. These are not separate shocks. Energy affects fertiliser. Fertiliser affects food production. Energy and conflict affect shipping and freight. All of them ultimately feed through into the cost of the goods, food and energy people rely on every day. That is why the cost-of-living implications matter — but there is a wider lesson too. We cannot think about foreign policy, national security, energy security, food security and domestic economic policy as separate silos. They are interconnected parts of the same system. That system is national resilience: our ability to absorb shocks abroad without allowing them to become crises at home. It is going to be a tricky 12 months. That’s why I’m confident our Labour Government will continue to do what it takes to make our country more resilient, protect working families across the UK and face these challenges together.

High-Altitude Nuclear Explosion (HANE) in LEO: A Self-Destructive Cascade A Senior Defense Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council presents a vivid simulation to the U.S. Space Force, exposing the catastrophic fallout of a LEO nuclear burst on orbital infrastructure: • Immediate Impact: The prompt radiation from a High-Altitude Nuclear Explosion (HANE) instantly destroys roughly 20% of all active LEO satellites. • Artificial Radiation Belt: Within 12 hours, a uniform radiation belt forms, exposing passing spacecraft to persistent, destructive doses. • Total LEO Blackout: Within 2 to 3 weeks, 100% of satellites in Low Earth Orbit are rendered non-operational. • Kessler Cascade Triggered: Dead satellites lose collision-avoidance capability, sparking orbital impacts. The dispersing debris drives secondary collisions, threatening a full Kessler Syndrome. • Mega-Constellation Hazard: High-density debris concentrates around the 550 km altitude shell—directly threatening LEO mega-constellations like Starlink. A HANE strike is an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction that permanently denies orbital access to all spacefaring nations.source:piped.video/watch?v=Yjq5ItUk…

The danger is in thinking that your real life will begin when your circumstances change, when you exit Breezewood or the 4HL job or any other perceived necessary prerequisite. Meanwhile your life is passing you by minute by minute and it is real and it is fleeting.

BREAKING: Japan's 10Y Bond Yield officially rises above 3.00% for the first time since 1996. The move comes just hours after reports that US Treasury Secretary Bessent told Japanese officials that rate hikes are needed. We are witnessing history and most people don't even realize it.

BREAKING: JPMorgan warns a large-scale global food supply crisis could hit within the next year, forecasting global food inflation to nearly double from 2.8% now to 5% by early 2027, per JPMorgan Global Research. The direct driver is fertilizer, 1/3 of the world's nitrogen fertilizer moves through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has kept shut since February. Unlike oil, there’s no strategic reserve for fertilizer and nothing to release. Nitrogen fertilizer goes into about half of all crops grown globally.

🇳🇵It's like a scene from a disaster movie... that just keeps getting worse Entire buildings swallowed up in Trishuli Bazaar, Nepal Our prayers are with all those affected. 🙏 Writers: Daniyal, Ian

JUST IN: Cornell University bans students from processing wild game in dorm kitchens after two students butchered a bear to make “black bear pastrami.”

The upcoming "mega El Niño" could be the strongest since the 1877 event that wiped out 4% of the Earth's population due to heat waves, drought and pestilence. Scientists watching every weather model update are getting "heart palpitations" ❤️

Ursa Ag recently set shockwaves in motion by marketing a line of tractors with no onboard computers at all. Tractors these days are fragile, overpriced monstrosities in which everything is done by computer. They break down constantly because of excessive complexity, and only authorized repair firms are allowed to fix them, at wildly inflated prices and with long delays. Ursa Ag’s tractors are on the other end of the spectrum. They’re simple, sturdy, easy to repair, and cost a modest fraction of what the big boys are charging. Unsurprisingly, the demand is so high that they’re scrambling to expand production lines, because what they offer is what farmers actually want. It’s also the kind of tractor that was standard on North American farms in 1970 or so. Once again, somebody pushed the rewind button on progress, and the people most directly affected by it couldn’t be happier.

كان المصور سكوت يقوم بتصوير شاطى سيبرايت في كاليفورنيا عندما لاحظ رأس شخص يظهر ويختفي وسط الامواج العنيفة فسارع الى ابلاغ احد المنقذين اتضح انه صبي بعمر 10 سنوات كان يركب الامواج على اللوح، قام المنقذ بالامساك به على الرغم من قوة وشدة الامواج الا انه تشبث به بقوه حاول البعض مساعدته لكن الامواج اسقطتهم فتراجعوا من الخوف لكن المنقذ استمر حتى انقذ الصبي الاكثر اثارة في الموضوع ان المنقذ كان في موسمه الاول فقط من العمل