Marv Clowder

Pounder of Keys, Swimmer of Seas, Enjoyer of ZZZzzzzs.

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

BREAKING: Lebanese army says several soldiers killed in Israeli strike

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/FKCsONzBUK

[Reuters @Reuters]

Iran has launched multiple drones towards the Strait of Hormuz, CNN reports https://t.co/6IiICbTrWX https://t.co/6IiICbTrWX

[Angelica 🌐⚛️🇹🇼🇨🇳🇺🇸 @AngelicaOung]

"There are certain broad features of the traditional Chinese civilization which give it its distinctive character. I should be inclined to select as the most important: (1) The use of ideograms instead of an alphabet in writing; (2) The substitution of the Confucian ethic for religion among the educated classes; (3) government by literati chosen by examination instead of by a hereditary aristocracy. ...the three characteristics which I have enumerated distinguish China from all other countries of past times."

Bertrand Russell’s "The Problem of China" 1921

Russell was a sympathetic and prescient commentator on China. He accurately predicted that China will be able to educate its masses, industrialize and emerge as a colossus on the world stage while retaining its civilizational identity.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. They sell food here in the sizes of war. A single jar of mayonnaise as large as my helmet. I bought two. One must always keep a reserve.

I entered a hall so vast it had weather. Shelves to the heavens. And upon them, no small things. No humble portions. Everything sized as if for a siege.

A bag of rice I could not lift alone. A tower of paper as tall as a child. Forty-eight of one thing, ninety of another, a vat of oil that could float a boat. And the people pushed carts the size of carriages, loading them as if the snows were coming and would not leave for years.

I understood at once, and I was moved to my core.

For it is written that a house is judged not in its feasting but in its famine — by whether, when the long winter comes, it can feed its own without bowing to any lord. This nation does not shop. This nation provisions. Every family a fortress, stocked to outlast a siege that is not coming, has never come, and against which they remain magnificently, gloriously prepared.

So I provisioned. I filled a carriage-cart to the brim. Rice for a regiment. The helmet of mayonnaise, and its reserve. Enough paper to write the history of the world. Twice.

And here my heart rose, and I declared the thing a calmer man would not:

"Let the hardest winter in a thousand years descend. Let the roads vanish and the rivers freeze. I will not so much as rise from my chair — for I hold, in my garage, mayonnaise enough to outlast the apocalypse, and a man with that much mayonnaise fears no season, no army, and no god."

The woman checking receipts at the door studied my cart a long moment.

Then she smiled. "Big family?"

"Not yet," I told her, honestly.

I took my provisions home. And because no winter came — none ever does — I did the only honorable thing a man can do with a fortress full of food.

I fed the whole street.

We ate for a week. The mayonnaise held.

So tell me, America.

You call it buying in bulk. A Costco run. A little too much, as usual.

I call it every household quietly ready to survive the end of the world —

and then, when the world stubbornly refuses to end,

throwing a feast instead.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrat Xavier Becerra advances to the general election for governor in California.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

From 2024

[Jack Pitney @jpitney]

RFK Jr. spent years pushing the lie that vaccines cause autism. Today, CDC reports 2,030 measles cases this year, more than in all of 2024. And after he hyped vitamin A as an alternative measles treatment, a new report finds a surge in vitamin A poisonings. Misinformation doesn't just spread. It hurts people.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A stranger asked how I was doing. Then she walked away before I could answer. I have been preparing my reply ever since.

It was the woman at the register. She did not know me. She smiled and said, "Hi, how are you doing today?"

A question. About my heart. From a stranger. I set down my basket to give it the weight it deserved. "I am well," I began. "Though the turning season makes me thoughtful, and—"

She had already turned to scan the bread.

I stood corrected. And amazed.

For it is written that you do not ask a man how he is unless you have an hour and a pot of tea to spare. The question is a door. You open it only if you mean to walk through.

Here, they open the door, smile, and keep walking. The cashier asks. The mail carrier asks. A man in an elevator asked, then watched the little numbers light up in silence.

At first I thought it careless. Then I understood, and it humbled me.

This is a country so warm it cannot stop asking after the hearts of strangers. A thousand times a day, to people it will never see again, it says: are you well? It does not always wait for the answer. But it asks. Name me a kinder reflex in any land. You cannot.

So I made a decision. Every asking would receive a true answer. I would honor the question the way it deserves.

I prepared one. Short. Honest. Warm. Ready at all times, like a blade. "How are you?" — and out it would come, clear and complete, in under four seconds. A gift returned for a gift.

I have become very good at it.

Cashiers freeze. Some look up. One man set down his scanner and listened to the whole thing, and at the end he said, "...damn. Good for you, man." I have never been prouder.

When they walk off too fast, I follow — one step, only far enough to finish. "I am WELL," I call after them, gently, "and I hope your knee has healed!"

And here my heart rose, and I declared the thing a quieter man would not:

"I will answer that question so truly, and so warmly, that one day a cashier will set down the scanner, and the whole line will hold its breath, and an entire store will finally hear how one man is actually doing — and that store will never ask the question lightly again."

Then, last Tuesday, it happened.

A tired young woman at the register asked it out of pure habit, her eyes already on the conveyor. "How are you doing today?"

"Honestly," I said, warm and quick, "a little tired. But better, now that you asked."

She stopped.

She looked up. And she smiled — the real kind, the kind that surprises the face wearing it — and she said, "...yeah. Me too, actually."

The line did not mind. The bread waited.

So tell me, America.

You ask a thousand times a day, and rarely wait to hear.

I have decided to wait, and to answer, every single time.

And every so often, a stranger answers back —

and for four seconds, the whole loud country goes quiet, and means it.

[MM  @adgirlMM]

Saw John Mulaney perform tonight (finally!) and it was worth the wait. Hilarious. 😆

[Daily Iran News @DailyIranNews]

BREAKING

IRGC:

"Four oil tankers attempted to pass through the Strait of Hormuz; one of them was hit, and the other three turned back.

Following this, the United States targeted the islands of Qeshm and Sirik.

In retaliation, we struck U.S. bases in Kuwait as well as what remains of the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain.

The United States will bear full responsibility if we completely close the Strait of Hormuz"

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

BREAKING via Reuters

A group of U.S. states including California and New York are preparing a lawsuit to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.

Full Story: https://t.co/GkVJ7TioM2

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇮🇱🇺🇸 BOMBSHELL: The Pentagon raised Israel's counterintelligence threat level to "critical," the highest possible designation, over concerns Israel is aggressively spying on top U.S. officials.

According to U.S. officials, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued the assessment in recent weeks because Israel is making "a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration's internal deliberations and decision-making" on Iran and Lebanon.

Yep, read that again.

America's "closest ally" is now rated a critical counterintelligence threat, the same tier as hostile foreign powers, because it's spying on the President's inner circle to find out whether he'll resume bombing Iran or sign the deal.

The details are stunning.

U.S. officials already use burner phones and avoid speaking in hotel rooms when visiting Israel.

A CSIS expert calls Israeli intelligence "hyper-aggressive" and "exceedingly interested in what we are up to."

Now stack the timeline.

Trump screams at Netanyahu, "you're f***ing crazy."

The Axios leak that enraged Levin.

Netanyahu's letter designing permanent military integration.

Section 224 linking the two countries' military systems and data.

And now the Pentagon formally designating Israel a critical espionage threat, in the same weeks Congress moves to wire Israel directly into America's defense industrial base.

The two stories are happening simultaneously and almost nobody has connected them.

The Pentagon says Israel is spying on America at a critical level.

Congress is responding by giving Israel deeper access to American military systems than ever before.

At what point does Washington admit this relationship is not what Americans were told it is?

Source: NBC

[TheNewPhysics @CharlesMullins2]

🚨 A FRENCH STARTUP THINKS IT MAY HAVE FOUND A NEW PATH TO QUANTUM COMPUTING.

Not with superconductors.
Not with trapped ions.
With carbon nanotubes.
Researchers at C12 have unveiled a manufacturing breakthrough that could solve one of quantum computing's biggest problems: building large numbers of reliable qubits.

Why this matters:
• Quantum computers are extremely sensitive to noise
• Tiny defects can destroy quantum information
• Most platforms struggle to scale beyond small systems
• Carbon nanotubes offer an ultra-clean environment for electron spins
• Purified Carbon-12 removes almost all nuclear magnetic noise

The breakthrough:
Instead of growing carbon nanotubes directly on quantum chips...
C12 grows thousands separately.
They then electrically test every nanotube and select only the best performers.
Using a patented "Pick & Place" process, robotic systems transfer elite nanotubes onto pre-built quantum chips with nanometer precision.

The result:
Higher consistency.
Better qubit quality.
Far faster manufacturing.
Production that once took a year can now be completed in weeks.
The deeper implication is enormous:
Today's leading quantum computers often require temperatures near absolute zero.

Carbon nanotube spin qubits may operate at significantly higher temperatures while maintaining long coherence times.

That means future quantum systems could require less extreme cooling and potentially support far denser integration.
C12's roadmap aims for:
• 1,500 physical qubits by 2027
• 128+ logical qubits by 2032
• 100,000 physical qubits and ~800 logical qubits by 2033

If successful, this could become one of the most serious alternatives to superconducting quantum computers.

The real question is:

Will the future of quantum computing be built from exotic superconductors...
or from perfectly arranged carbon atoms?

Follow for more frontier science and technology discoveries.

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

Just after 4 a.m. on June 6, 1985, the phone rang in our New York City apartment.

This was not a time when calls were ignored. No cell phones, no caller ID—just a landline and the assumption that if it rang at that hour, it mattered.

@trishaposner answered. I could hear only her side at first, then she covered the receiver and turned to me: “A German reporter is on the line. He says Brazilian police think they may have found Mengele’s grave.”

By then, I had been chasing Josef Mengele—the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz—for four years. My search had taken me through Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Germany, following fragments of leads, whispers of sightings, and the enduring myth of a man who seemed always just out of reach.

Mengele was not just a fugitive. He was a ghost.
He had evaded capture for decades, slipping through the cracks of postwar justice, protected at times by networks of neo-Nazis, at other times by indifference, bureaucratic failure, and sometimes sheer luck.

So my reaction that morning was immediate, almost reflexive: “Tell him it’s the twentieth time they’ve ‘found’ Mengele.”

There had been so many false alarms and supposed sightings. So many bodies that were not his.
My working assumption was simple: if news of his death surfaced, it might well be deliberate—yet another deception by those who had helped shield him, or even by Mengele himself.

But as the morning unfolded, this case felt different. Within 24 hours, I was on a plane to Brazil. Weeks later, in Germany, I was part of a panel examining the authenticity of Mengele’s postwar diaries. That’s where I met his son, Rolf—who finally shed light on how his father evaded justice for so long.

The bones found on this day in 1985? They were his. He had died six years earlier after suffering a stroke while swimming.

After decades on the run, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz had died quietly, hidden in plain sight.
History doesn’t always end with justice. The story of Josef Mengele resists that comforting arc.

The biography I wrote, with co-author John Ware, was published the following year and tells the full story of the hunt and Mengele's life on the run.
#Mengele

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Scientists have discovered a promising new way to help the immune system detect and attack hidden cancer cells.

A first-in-class drug called GRWD5769 (an oral ERAP1 inhibitor) has shown encouraging early results, shrinking tumors in patients with six different types of advanced cancer: lung, liver, bladder, cervical, head and neck, and colorectal.

In a Phase 1/1b clinical trial (EMITT-1) involving 83 heavily pre-treated patients across multiple countries, tumors shrank in 26 participants. Of those, 15 experienced reductions of at least 30%. Many patients had already failed prior therapies, including immunotherapies.

The drug works by blocking the enzyme ERAP1, which cancers often use to “edit” their surface proteins and evade immune detection. By inhibiting ERAP1, GRWD5769 alters the tumor’s antigen presentation, effectively removing the cancer’s invisibility cloak and making the cells more visible to the immune system. It was tested in combination with the PD-1 inhibitor cemiplimab (Libtayo).

Particularly strong signals were seen in certain hard-to-treat cancers. For example, disease control for at least six months was achieved in 51% of colorectal cancer patients and 55% of lung cancer patients in the expansion cohorts.

While these early results are promising, experts emphasize this is still an early-phase study. Larger trials are needed to confirm efficacy, durability of response, and impact on long-term survival.

If successful, this approach could expand the number of patients who benefit from immunotherapy — which currently works in only about one-third of cases.

[Grey Wolf Therapeutics. “EMITT-1: Clinical and pharmacodynamic activity with the oral ERAP1 inhibitor GRWD5769 and cemiplimab in 6 completed phase 1b expansion cohorts in solid tumors...” Presented at ASCO Annual Meeting, 2026]

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Canada bans Texas cattle over flesh-eating screwworm outbreak in US https://t.co/DXbVegyAoV

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇺🇸BREAKING: The CIA officer caught with $40 million in gold bars allegedly invented an entire fake top-secret spy program to steal the money.

As if this story couldn't get and wilder:

-David Rush allegedly built a sham "special access program," the blackest box in U.S. intelligence, so secret even top-clearance officials couldn't look inside without authorization

-The fake program posed as "continuity of government" work, the doomsday planning that keeps Washington running after a nuclear war

-He allegedly read in two colleagues as unwitting accomplices and used a made-up government contract to funnel millions, persuading a defense contractor to buy huge amounts of gold

-The FBI raid on his home seized 303 gold bars worth roughly $40 million, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches

-Investigators say he lied about his college degrees, faked being a Navy pilot, and still sailed through the CIA's notoriously brutal vetting

-A judge ordered him held as a flight risk, and several CIA officials are now on leave as the probe widens

The scheme worked because of the system, not in spite of it.

The secrecy walls built to hide operations from China and Russia hid the fraud from the CIA itself.

A man with a fake résumé ran a fake doomsday program inside the most paranoid institution in America, and for years nobody noticed...

Source: Washington Post

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. They asked me to prove I am myself. I have been proving it for three days, and I have never felt more alive.

It began at a gate. Not of wood and iron. A gate of glass and light. To pass, I had only to speak my secret name.

I spoke it.

DENIED.

"Your secret name must hold a great letter, a small letter, a number, and a mark."

Ahh. So this is no mere gate. This is a checkpoint of the old kind, and a checkpoint must have a worthy keeper.

For it is written — though few now remember — that in ages past, the barrier guards of the eastern road would not pass a man on his name alone. Each season, he had to prove he was becoming someone harder to counterfeit. A weak name is a weak man. The gate was never cruel. The gate was a forge.

So I offered a stronger name. A great letter. A number. A mark.

DENIED. "You cannot reuse a former name."

I smiled.

I felt it then — the small, clean thrill of a trial that refuses to be easy. Good. GOOD. A gate that never hardens forges no one.

I offered another. DENIED. Another. DENIED. Each refusal struck like a master's blow, and each time I rose a little sharper.

By the ninth name, I no longer recognized myself. This is the point. This is the gift. They do not ask who I was. They ask who I am willing to become, right now, with a number and a mark.

The young man at the help desk said I could simply click "forgot."

Forget? Forget my own name, at the very gate built to forge it? I looked at him with great love, for he was young, and the road is long.

"You have already passed this gate a thousand times," I told him. "You called it suffering. I call it training."

He did not understand yet. He will.

And here — here my blood rose, and I stood, and I declared the thing a calmer man leaves unsaid. But a lord speaks his heart:

"Let the gate demand ten marks. Let it demand a hundred. I will forge a name so strong that no man, no god, and no machine — not even I — will ever open it again. And on that day, locked forever out of my own account, I will at last be UNCOUNTERFEITABLE."

The help desk fell silent.

Then the young man slid a small paper across to me. On it, a fresh trial. "New password," it read.

I took it with both hands, the way you take a gift from a friend.

So tell me, America.

You call it a password. A nuisance. A thing you forget.

I call it the whetstone a whole nation sharpens itself upon, every ninety days, without ever knowing why.

I have not entered my account in a week.

I have never been stronger.