dbtrnl

Is twitter dead yet?

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

We need to be careful, but there are real signs Putin is losing support as a result of how badly the war in Ukraine is going for him. Here is what the evidence actually shows:

1) Recruitment is falling even as pay hits records. Q1 2026 enlistment was the lowest in three years, down 20%, with signing bonuses at an all-time high of 1.47 million rubles.

2) Elites stopped saying "we." A former Kremlin official notes officials now describe what "he" does, not what "we" do. Quiet, deliberate distancing.

3) The economic bargain is breaking. GDP forecast slashed to 0.4%. Oil and gas revenue down 45% year-on-year. The deficit blew past its full-year target in three months.

4) Wage arrears nearly doubled in a year. State media were told to bury the numbers. Pro-Kremlin outlets published, then deleted, the figures.

5) Strikes are back. Vorkuta miners unpaid since December. The pattern that haunted late Yeltsin is returning, region by region.

6) Putin is in the bunker. Shortest Victory Day guest list in modern history. No heavy weapons. Pre-recorded footage while he hides from his own elite.

7) State pollster VTsIOM logged seven straight weeks of decline. Approval fell to 65.6% from 77.8% at the start of the year. FOM, the pollster the Kremlin tells loyal media to cite, put Putin's performance at its lowest since the first days of the 2022 invasion. So even state polls show this but of course, exaggarate his support/

The implication: this is erosion of the foundations, not imminent collapse. The war's appeal, the elite's faith, and the economic deal are all failing at once. Putin still holds power, but on fear, not belief. He is bleeding support due to Ukraine. That is a motive to end this.

[David Miller @Tracking_Power]

Microsoft whistleblower on the firms deep integration into the Zionist genocide:

After nearly two years as a Critical Environment Technician at a Microsoft Italy data center, I choose to resign. This is because, right now, Microsoft is massively expanding its European data centers (aka mass surveillance centers) to use Palestine as a laboratory for its experimental digital weaponry. For the past 994 days, Microsoft has powered the genocide of our people in Palestine, and the company’s European data centers are fundamental to how Microsoft abets crimes against humanity.

On August 6, 2025, reports exposed how Microsoft hosted 11,500 terabytes of intercepted Palestinian phone call data in the Microsoft Netherlands data center, with additional data stored in the Irish data center, amounting to 200 million hours of audio. This trove of mass surveillance data has been described as “one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group.”
This data is used by the Israeli military to identify targets for airstrikes, arrests, and blackmail from the entire Palestinian population. It is also used as training data to build AI-targeting programs. These programs invent arbitrary justifications to murder non-combatants, intentionally adding civilian workers to the Israeli military’s generated “target bank“; the programs also facilitate massacres of entire families at once.

[真音 maonnote.bsky.social @maonnote]

パランティアの人間からバルファキスが聞いた話。本当なら今すぐ地獄の業火に灼かれるべき。

ガザの住民密集地を🇮🇱が爆撃する時のスマホを持って逃げ惑うガザの人々の動き「パニックインプリント」をAIに食わせて訓練し「パニック防止AI」として英国NHSに14億ドルで売った

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

❤️ Love the Wayback Machine? Some publishers and news organizations are blocking it from archiving journalism—cutting off access to the public record and future accountability.

Want to tell them to stop blocking web archiving? ✍️ Sign the open letter to support keeping journalism preserved in the Wayback Machine ⤵️
https://t.co/fUrdNz60RD

@fightfortheftr #SaveTheArchive #DigitalArchive #WaybackMachine #TruthMatters

[Gaurav Tomar @talkwithgt]

Nobody warns you about this.

Corporate ladder is designed to break you.

Owners take the top three seats. No discussion. Below them? The vicious part starts.

Those next seats don't go to the most capable. They go to the weakest, most incompetent people who couldn't survive as peon. And they know it. They sit there entirely on the owner's mercy.

Then the real game begins.

Incompetent rule over the deserving. Not by accident. By cold, deliberate design.

Pure favoritism, all the way down.

Speak up? You're gone. No warning. No conversation. Just erased.

And the top people stay quiet. Not out of loyalty. Out of raw survival instinct.

The whole system is built so you never even think about becoming an owner. You spend your entire life fighting against it.

And at the very end, you finally understand the truth:

The problems you spent your life trying to fix were put there on purpose.

[Victor Garcia @toninhodocall]

Zero dúvida de que os americanos vão dizer que o PIX favorece a lavagem de dinheiro de organizações terroristas e vão dar uma opção aos bancos:

ou param de oferecer o PIX , ou ficam fora do sistema bancário mundial.

Obrigado Flávio!

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

Israel has been completely shut out of the Iran talks. It is panicking and trying to influence them from the outside:

1) Israeli concerns center on a limited deal focused on extending the ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which would fail to address core issues for Israel, primarily Iran's nuclear program and its enriched uranium stockpile. One Israeli source told me, "this would be a nightmare which would make the Obama deal look like a great one."

2) In public Netanyahu stated that he and Trump agreed any final agreement with Iran must eliminate the nuclear danger, meaning "dismantling Iran's nuclear enrichment sites and removing its enriched nuclear material from its territory." But the gap between that demand and what's actually on the table is growing. Netanyahu is worried about coming to the elections with his life mission in tatters.

3) The Lebanon issue is reaching a boiling point. Despite last month's ceasefire, Israel has continued to pound Lebanon, killing at least 608 people. In response to a Hezbollah attack, Netanyahu said: "I have ordered an even greater acceleration of our operations." Some say Israel is trying to create facts on the ground before a deal freezes the front. I think the are trying to precent a deal, or failing that, derail it.

5) Even if f a final agreement never materializes, the financial relief Iran stands to gain in the preliminary phase alone, including unfreezing some $25 billion in assets, could assist its rearming ahead of a future conflict. Worse yet from the Israeli perspective, Iran and its proxies learned a lot of lessons in the last year and will likely use that money to fight more effectively.

6) Iranian officials have repeatedly said any lasting ceasefire must include a halt to Israeli operations in Lebanon, and in its 10-point proposal Tehran called for an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah, describing the group's actions as self-defense. That gives Tehran a structural veto over Israel's freedom of action. The IDF is very concerned about this.

Israel may end up locked into a mutual ceasefire with a rearming Hezbollah, while Trump decides as , essentially already has, that a nuclear deal with Tehran matters more than disarming Iran's most powerful proxy. Israel didn't just lose the war's endgame; it lost the ability to shape it. That is unacceptable for Netanyahu before elections. Massive escalation in Lebanon and Gaza, maybe even in Iran, seems inevitable.

[Victor Garcia @toninhodocall]

PCC e CV devem ser desmantelados, FATO.

O Brasil abriu mão de combater e começou a governar junto, vide o Rio de Janeiro, FATO.

Mas o objetivo dos americanos é criar um instrumento de pressão contra bancos e empresas brasileiras por meio de sanções.

Basta uma empresa ter negociado, mesmo sem saber, com alguma das milhares de empresas ligadas a essas organizações para correr o risco de ter seus bens congelados pelos americanos, sem direito a recorrer.

Muito empresário que está batendo palma deveria começar a se preocupar.

A Faria Lima também não deve estar muito feliz, já que uma quantidade enorme de transações dessas organizações passa por bancos e fintechs.

O que os Bolsonaros vão ganhar com isso é mistério.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

A fascinating article today in Haaretz on how the Lebanon war has gone wrong. Through interviews with soldiers who served there, we get a clear picture of why it is going so badly and so many soldiers are dying with little gain:

1) The looting and moral collapse issue. Nightly supply convoys doubled as extraction routes for stolen goods. Soldiers competed over villas and shops while commanders, up to the brigade commander, looked away. Some justified it as religious duty, others shrugged that everything would be destroyed anyway. One soldier said, "The IDF has become like an army of Vikings, they let soldiers loot so they'll stay happy and keep fighting."

2) Mental health is being neglected. After freezing in a firefight and falling apart, one of the soldiers asked repeatedly for psychological help and was stalled. The session he finally got amounted to breathing exercises and a push to return to the field for "functional continuity." Real care came only after a journalist intervened. He said, "I felt I needed to harm myself for anyone to start paying attention."

3) Destruction of buildings seems to be the main mission. One soldier entered empty villages with no fighters and no battles, just demolition. Civilian contractors paid per house flattened schools, clinics, and homes while soldiers guarded the bulldozers. Daily quotas were tallied as "achievement assessments." "This is the IDF of the last two years, the Israel Home Demolition Forces," the soldier in question said.

4) Inability to stop drone attacks. Unlike conventional combat, drones leave soldiers feeling like stationary targets dependent on luck. The army's answer, "sky spotters" staring upward for hours, felt absurd. Soldiers in Tomer's platoon wrote wills and rehearsed their own funerals. One soldier explained, "On the news they say 'ceasefire', do you know how many drones they send at us? This shit isn't over."

The overall picture is not dissimilar to the Vietnam War. Lack of purpose, soldiers developing paranoia as they get killed one by one. Lack of discipline. This war was a horrific mistake. Massive war crimes are being committed, soldiers are coming home in body bags and there can be no winner.

[Drew Crawford @drewcrawford_]

Brazilian eucalyptus trees take 7 years to harvest.

Pine and spruce in Scandinavia and Canada take 30 to 80 years.

That gap is the entire global pulp industry.

The biggest pulp producer in the world is a Brazilian family company called Suzano (founded in 1924 by Leon Feffer, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who started with a single paper mill in São Paulo).

They run 8 pulp mills across 5 Brazilian states and employ approximately 29,000 people.

In 2025, Suzano produced 12.5 million tonnes of pulp, generated R$50 billion in record revenue, and posted R$13.4 billion in net income.

They make a tonne of pulp at a cash cost of R$778. The global industry weighted average runs roughly double that.

Brazilian eucalyptus grows at 35.7 cubic metres per hectare per year on average. The Northern Hemisphere average is roughly half that rate.

In December 2024, President Lula opened Suzano's new factory in Mato Grosso do Sul.

The single line produces 2.55 million tonnes per year. Total investment was US$4.3 billion. It is the largest single pulp line ever built on Earth.

The factory runs fossil-fuel free and generates 180 megawatts of surplus electricity, enough renewable power to supply every household in Mato Grosso do Sul.

Suzano plants 1.2 million trees every day.

In June 2025, Suzano agreed to buy 51% of Kimberly-Clark's global tissue business for US$1.7 billion in cash, in a joint venture valued at US$3.4 billion total.

The deal covers 22 manufacturing facilities, sales in over 70 countries, and licenses the Scott, Kleenex, Viva, and WypAll brands.

The transaction closes mid-2026 and makes Suzano a global tissue player overnight.

Brazilian pulp ships through the Atlantic, with no exposure to Hormuz, Suez, or Bab el-Mandeb chokepoints.

The Brazilian eucalyptus research program is 60 years deep through EMBRAPA, IPEF at ESALQ-USP, and Suzano's own FuturaGene biotech arm.

The same research engine that made soy grow in the Cerrado made eucalyptus the cheapest fiber on the planet.

Almost no US institutional investor owns a meaningful position in Brazilian forestry.

I just published the full operator map of who controls Brazilian pulp.

Read here:
https://t.co/5MjTp8YeVn

[Eric Bourdages @EZE3D]

The AI bubble & data center issue is at peak stress. They have invested far too much into AI to let public opinion put that at risk. They will do anything to flip the narrative, create a real "luddite" boogeyman & sweep real criticism under the rug.

List of criticisms below.

[Hasan alrabay @HasanEssam29636]

One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death.

Gaza in 2023 and 2026!

[Vashi Nedomansky, ACE @vashikoo]

In 2001, Hugh Jackman delivered the most realistic computer hacking scene in film history. To this day, it is used for training at the Cybercrime Division of the FBI.

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

“Ghost participants” have been floating around for years as a way to break encrypted messaging. The idea is to add invisible extra people (the police, essentially) to group chats. It’s a dumb idea, and let me explain why.

[Reject Metric @MetricReject]

To commemorate the release of The UFO Files, here's one of my favorite greentexts:

[American Vatnik🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺 @AmericanVatnik]

Can tell these Russian guys know the anti-drone drill well (and it worked)

[Camis 🗣️💰 @Cah_Azevedo]

Vcs sabiam que existe um cartel composto de 59 multinacionais (até o momento) sendo acusado pelo CADE de manipular o mercado de trabalho, mantendo salários e benefícios abaixo da média para impedir "perda de talentos"?

[Wallace 🇬🇱 @Holstered]

Anyway war shit; FPVs are a death sentence, but there’s always a chance you beat the odds.

This is the rare aftermath of people who were blessed and somehow survived a direct FPV hit.

Also attached is a video of a survived FPV hit from both angles.

[CR1337 @CR1337]

Google recently announced their Cloud Fraud Defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA, a trust platform for the agentic web.

However, the implications might be bigger than we think; as somebody on Hacker News pointed out:

"So it seems that you will need a modern Android device with Google Play Services installed or a modern iPhone/iPad to be allowed to browse the web in the future.

No mention of device integrity verification yet, but the writing is on the wall."

[Leandro B F Senra @leandrobelizio]

A equipe da Globo foi muito sagaz em perceber que o avião já estava dando problema assim que decolou. Eles observaram que ele não conseguia altitude e foram atrás até flagrar o acidente. Nota-se o desespero do Repórter Guilherme, gritando.