I've been in politics for a quarter century. It's hard to express how staggering it is to see a conversation like this on corporate US media. The Morning Joe panel gobsmacked by the directness of @AbdulElSayed's points. (clip via @DropSiteNews)

BREAKING: Abdul El-Sayed is expected to require ALL Michigan Elementary school students to learn ARABIC numerals. As a Jewish American I still support this 100%.

BREAKING: Ex-Mossad chief David Barnea just admitted Israel intentionally triggered waves of mass arrests and executions in Iran, sacrificing innocent people as cover to shield its real spies inside. @grok TRUE FALSE

Le commandant de réserve israélien, Avdar Shailovski, a rédigé un article — publié sur sa page Facebook — dans lequel il relate sa désertion de l'armée israélienne et son émigration d'Israël vers la Pologne, la terre de ses ancêtres. L'article est intitulé : « Je ne peux plus supporter le silence ». Voici le texte intégral de l'article : Je suis Avdar Shailovski, le commandant qui a déserté l'armée israélienne. Je déclare, en pleine possession de mes facultés mentales, avoir quitté l'armée israélienne car je ne pouvais plus supporter de rester un témoin silencieux — trahissant ainsi ma propre humanité — face à tous les crimes dont j'ai été témoin durant les cinq années que j'ai passées au sein de cette armée. Les événements auxquels j'ai assisté m'étouffent ; il faut que je vous les raconte. Je pourrais mourir à tout instant, tant mon chagrin est immense. C'est pourquoi je me dois de contribuer à faire éclater la vérité, dans l'espoir d'alléger le poids de ma culpabilité. Peut-être Dieu atténuera-t-Il le tourment qui m'attend, compte tenu de l'horreur des actes que j'ai commis, simplement parce que je faisais partie des rangs de l'armée israélienne. Puis, j'ai reçu un signe : « Abandonne tout et va-t'en. » Merci, mon Dieu, de m'avoir guidé. Dès que l'avion de la compagnie israélienne El Al a atterri à l'aéroport de Varsovie, je me suis senti en sécurité, loin de cette terre d'Israël qui ne signifie plus rien pour moi. On nous a enseigné que c'était la terre promise par Dieu ; or, c'est le plus grand mensonge utilisé pour tromper le peuple juif. C'est un mensonge perpétuel, qui perdure sans relâche, et qui a conduit, il y a quatre-vingts ans, au déplacement du peuple palestinien — un peuple sans défense — hors de sa propre terre. Pire encore : ce peuple continue, jusqu'à ce jour, de subir des souffrances atroces. Qui a inventé ce mensonge ? Et quel peuple « idiot » a bien pu y croire ? Ce dont j'ai été témoin durant mes cinq années de service au sein de l'armée israélienne est difficile à décrire avec des mots... Quels mots pourraient décrire la cruauté, l'ignominie et l'horreur des actes commis par l'armée israélienne à l'encontre des Palestiniens ? Ne croyez pas un mot de ce que raconte ce « sale type » — ce fils de « sale type ». C'est un menteur abject, surtout lorsqu'il qualifie l'armée israélienne d'« armée la plus morale au monde ». Quelle absurdité ! En réalité, c'est l'armée la plus dépravée, la plus cruelle et la plus sauvage qui soit. Oui, messieurs, je ne supporte plus de voir la ruine et la dévastation à Gaza. J'ai été témoin de ce qui s'est passé dans la nuit du 7 octobre 2023. Les services de renseignement israéliens, ce « sale type » et sa bande étaient au courant ; ils ont attendu que cela se produise pour justifier la destruction de Gaza et tenter de déplacer sa population... J'ai servi à Gaza et j'ai vu, de mes propres yeux, un commandant de char s'amuser avec son canon, tirant des obus sur des Palestiniens entassés dans leurs tentes, ou sur des groupes faisant la queue devant des boulangeries, des véhicules de distribution alimentaire ou des convois d'aide humanitaire. J'ai vu, de mes propres yeux, des avions tirer des projectiles sur des immeubles résidentiels habités, les transformant en amas de décombres sur la tête de leurs occupants... J'ai vu, de mes propres yeux, des tireurs d'élite de l'armée d'occupation s'amuser à abattre des enfants, des adultes et des femmes qui faisaient la queue pour recevoir de l'aide humanitaire... C'est de la folie... De tels crimes, dont j'ai été témoin, ne pourraient se produire nulle part ailleurs dans le monde, si ce n'est sur la terre de Palestine...

⚡️Trump explained how his intelligence is getting out of control. “I wanted to go into this little store in Texas. There was a sign on the door that said ‘PUSH.’ You know, those signs that tell you how to open a door. Very useful things. Those signs are very useful. I pushed the door, and nothing happened. A dead end! It was a dead end! And then I realized something. I turned the sign around, and on the other side it said ‘PULL.’ (applause) I pulled the door open and got into that damn store! (applause) I did it! My intelligence is getting out of control. I don’t know why this is happening, but it keeps growing every single day!” (applause)

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis. The British turned him down. So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war. It worked better than anyone could have imagined. His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination. The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies. He didn't go to Britain. He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up. Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports. He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine. The Germans loved him anyway. Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of. The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London. Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world. Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents. When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow. Who also didn't exist. Then came D-Day. Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant. Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton. That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him. German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came. The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross. A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war. After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop. For decades the world thought he was dead. In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches. Some of them thanked him.

💙🤍❤️ "Le chef-d'œuvre le plus abouti du capitalisme contemporain n'est ni l'iPhone, ni la start-up licorne, ni même le milliardaire visionnaire. Non. Son produit phare, son bijou anthropologique, sa plus belle réussite, c'est le pauvre de droite. Une véritable prouesse sociale, dépouillé matériellement, mais riche en certitudes contre ses propres intérêts. On l'a façonné avec soin. On lui a expliqué que ses problèmes venaient toujours d'en bas ou d'à côté, l'immigré, l'assisté, le fonctionnaire, le chômeur, jamais du haut. On lui a appris à hair l'impôt tout en survivant grâce aux services publics. À défendre les héritiers tout en n'ayant rien à transmettre. À applaudir ceux qui l'écrasent, pourvu qu'ils parlent fort et promettent l'ordre. Le pauvre de droite est une créature fascinante, il vote contre lui-même avec ferveur, persuadé qu'un jour, peut-être, il sera du bon côté de la barrière. Il confond la brutalité avec le courage, l'autoritarisme avec la protection, l'injustice avec le mérite. On lui vend la peur en kit, l'identité en solde, la colère en vrac par abonnement mensuel. À l'aube de ce monde nouveau, les monstres ne surgissent pas des marges : ils montent des urnes, des plateaux télé, des slogans simplistes. Ils prospèrent sur la misère organisée et la lucidité sabotée. Le capitalisme n'a pas seulement produit de la pauvreté ; il a réussi bien pire : la rendre docile, obéissante, hargneuse, et reconnaissante. Un chef-d'œuvre je vous dis !" Maximino Fernández

Simultaneous stereospecific and stereoselective installation of groups across an aromatic ring enabled a short synthesis of the cyclophanes, but there was a twist that needed boron again to come to the rescue. @BristolChem @J_A_C_S

Huge congratulations to my former @CaltechCCE colleague Tom Miller and his whole team @iambic_ai on their successful #IPO today!

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

Congratulations Andy on the new position! ANU are very fortunate to have you on their staff.

This woman is 104 years old. She’s seen 18 presidents in her life. Listen to what she says about Trump.

Deeply honoured to receive the Nagoya Gold Medal. It is humbling to be associated with a stellar list of past recipients of this medal. ocyrd.csj.jp/nagoya_medalsem… @BristolChem

Congratulations to Mark on establishing a stereospecific coupling of heterocycles with boronic esters! @BristolChem @angew_chem

One catalyst, two geometries. Check out the work from the Zheng and You group showing how Ir catalysis enables stereodivergent access to chiral Z- and E-allylated isochromanones. Original article: cell.com/chem-catalysis/full… Our Preview: doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.202…

𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗽𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆. Henri Kagan’s path to scientific greatness was anything but straightforward. Born near Paris in 1930, his childhood was shaped by World War II, when his family sought refuge in southern France under assumed names. Back at school, Kagan recalled being “not what you would call a good student.” He began on a literary track before discovering his fascination with mathematics, physics and chemistry. The road remained bumpy: he initially planned to become an engineer and failed his first entrance exam to chemistry school. He tried again, and succeeded. That persistence and curiosity eventually helped Kagan become a pioneer of asymmetric catalysis, transforming scientists’ ability to create chiral molecules. In 2001, Kagan shared the Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless. As Kagan later said: “One of the interests of research is to go toward the unknown, and to be attentive to the unexpected.” A fitting description of his own journey.

“In basic research, we want to learn more and more about how molecules behave and how they can interact – this year's prize fits into that.” Immediately after the announcement, Peter Somfai, Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, was interviewed by freelance journalist Sharon Jåma regarding the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Japanese are the wizards of Organic chemistry !!

【速報】2026年のノーベル化学賞は「不斉有機合成における非線形効果および自己触媒作用の発見」へ | Chem-Station (ケムステ) buff.ly/UaMTAVP