Julles

Likes and retweets are not endorsements but an attempt to filter out all the noise

[Julles @jlesn]

@ZelenskyyUa “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
― Hannah Arendt

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

AI companies are buying large volumes of used, rare, and out-of-print books, scanning them for training data, and in many cases destroying the physical copies afterward.

This practice has accelerated as labs seek high-quality, pre-2022 human-written text free of AI-generated content that now saturates much of the open web.

The most documented example is Anthropic’s internal effort known as Project Panama. Court filings from copyright litigation revealed that the company acquired millions of physical books from used-book sellers and wholesalers such as Better World Books. Workers used hydraulic cutting machines to slice off the spines, fed the loose pages into industrial high-speed scanners, and then discarded or pulped the remains. An internal planning document described the goal as an effort to destructively scan books at massive scale. A federal judge later ruled that purchasing the books, creating internal digital copies this way, and destroying the originals constituted transformative fair use under U.S. copyright law, relying in part on the first-sale doctrine.

Similar activity is now widespread. Specialized brokers, including ISBNdb, openly market bulk acquisition services to AI labs, offering orders ranging from thousands to as many as one million titles. They emphasize older printed books as “structurally clean” training data.

Booksellers in the United States and Europe have reported sudden surges in bulk orders for mixed, random selections that include rare and out-of-print volumes. Some of these titles may represent among the last readily available physical copies. While a substantial portion of the books involved would otherwise have been remaindered, recycled, or sent to landfills, the inclusion of uncommon editions has drawn criticism from archivists, collectors, and rare-book dealers who note that gentler, non-destructive scanning methods exist yet are slower and more expensive.

The process remains largely quiet because the intermediary services promise anonymity to their AI clients. Public attention has grown mainly through litigation disclosures and reporting by outlets that examined the court records and interviewed booksellers.

The practice highlights a practical tension in large-scale AI development: the demand for vast quantities of reliable human text collides with the finite physical supply of older printed works and the cultural value of preserving rare copies.

[Diana Panchenko 🇺🇦 @Panchenko_X]

Orthodox ukrainians are heading to defend the Pochaiv Lavra - the Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican.

Which Zelensky plans to close next week, if it doesn’t submit to him.

Under the fear of being arrested or sent to the front.

Will corporate media even show you this?

Western narratives and real Ukraine differ by nearly 180 degrees.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The British left famine in every country they administered long enough.

Ireland. India. Bengal. East Africa.

The Bengal famine of 1943.

Three million people.

Dead from starvation while India was under British administration, while India was producing food that was being exported, while Winston Churchill, who is on the British five-pound note, said the famine was the Indians' own fault for "breeding like rabbits" and blocked international aid shipments from reaching the subcontinent.

Three million people.

Churchill has a statue in Parliament Square.

There is no memorial in London to the Bengal famine.

There is no memorial in London to the Irish famine, caused in significant part by the continuation of food exports from a starving country because the market required it.

There is no memorial to the victims of British-administered famines anywhere in Britain that carries the weight and specificity of the crime.

What Britain has, instead, is a Churchill War Rooms museum where you can buy a Churchill bobblehead in the gift shop.

This is not forgetting.

Forgetting is passive.

This is the active, maintained, institutionally supported decision that certain deaths count as history and others count as the unfortunate background against which great men made great decisions.

The man who blocked aid to a starving country is the great man.

The three million are the background.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Rina Lu🇷🇺 @rinalu_]

Tanks firing on the Russian Parliament in broad daylight. Bodies in the streets. Democracy, American style.

October 1993. Do you know why that coup happened? Yeltsin wasn’t even supposed to stay in power.

The parliament voted to remove him after he insisted on pushing through the Harvard Boys’ reforms. You know, the ones that later let western companies scoop up Russia’s resources, technology, and strategic industries for pennies, while millions of Russians were thrown into poverty.

So Yeltsin did what every great democrat would do: he ordered tanks to shell the parliament, people were killed, and somehow ended up president anyway. Just like that, Russia got its shiny new “democracy.”

From that moment on, Russia became exactly the kind of democracy Washington loves. One where financial elites, bankers, and transnational capital call the shots, while politicians read from the script.

People bought the story in 1993.

Thirty years later, after watching one “democracy” get exported after another through remarkably similar coups, the pattern is a little harder to miss.

Then Putin came along and started dismantling that entire system. Any questions why Western MSM still portray him as the villain?

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

Oregon is intentionally creating a generation of illiterate citizens.

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

Houthis just declared Red Sea closed for Saudi oil

If this stands, loss of another 4-5 million barrels a day

The Titanic is now hitting the iceberg and there are not enough lifeboats for the world economy

Iran’s leverage soaring

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

"Saving corporations billions"

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

"Anyone not jumping is a Moskal"

The "Protests" against Zelensky will change nothing in basket case Ukraine. These choreographed so called protests are all theatre.

This indoctrinated US backed "rent a crowd" are all paid to appear and will dissapear on command

[Richard @ricwe123]

What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock do not operate in a vacuum.
Their business model depends on governments creating the legal, regulatory, and political conditions that make it possible.

Through privatisation programmes and permissive regulation, governments allow essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities,to be transferred into the hands of financial institutions.
These assets are often purchased using vast amounts of borrowed money, at prices ordinary market participants cannot hope to match.

Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is frequently loaded onto the acquired company itself.
The government permits it, regulators oversee it, and the public is left to live with the consequences.

The result is predictable: consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and deteriorating service quality. Infrastructure that was once intended to serve the public becomes a vehicle for financial extraction.
Wealth flows upward to investors and executives, while costs and risks are pushed onto households.

When the model inevitably begins to fail, governments that enabled it step in to shield the system from collapse. Communities are left with neglected infrastructure, polluted rivers, and failing services.
Thames Water's £14 billion debt burden and repeated sewage scandals stand as a warning of what happens when governments prioritise financial engineering over long-term public stewardship.

The executives who loaded the company with debt have already received their bonuses.
The investors have already taken their returns.
Yet when the consequences can no longer be ignored, it is the taxpayer who is expected to absorb the losses.

The pattern is not accidental. Government policy creates the opportunity, regulators permit the extraction, private investors collect the rewards, and the public inherits the risks.

-Privatise the gains.
-Socialise the losses.
-Facilitate the process through government.

That is the business model....

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 We wrote about this last year and nobody wanted to hear it. US AI firms — Palantir, Maven, Google — are using Ukraine, Gaza and Iran as live testing grounds for battlefield AI. Two fronts. Same technology. Same corporations. Same result: dead civilians.

In Ukraine, Palantir's PRISMA software is coordinating hundreds of drones simultaneously into Russian territory. In Gaza, AI targeting systems are selecting strikes in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

This is not two separate wars. This is one weapons laboratory with two test sites.

[QINTELPRO @QINTELPRO_]

"THE MAIDAN MASSACRE"

On February 20, 2014, snipers opened fire in the Maidan, killing over 100 people - both protesters and police. These were the 'Heavenly Hundred' whose deaths justified the overthrow of President Yanukovych.

The official narrative: government snipers fired on peaceful protesters.

The forensic reality: far more complicated.

Professor Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa conducted the most extensive academic investigation - analyzing video evidence, forensic reports, witness testimony, and bullet trajectory analysis over a decade of research.

His conclusion: many of the fatal shots came from buildings controlled by the opposition - specifically the Hotel Ukraina and the Conservatory building, both behind and above the protesters. The bullet trajectories, entry wounds, and video evidence were inconsistent with fire from government positions. 🧵👇

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

If this happened in some other country, we would laugh at their backwardness. Some in Washington would argue they must be bombed...

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The US, in the name of war against Al Qaeda, spent trillions of dollars on multiple wars, killed millions, lost thousands of soldiers, and dismantled Americans' civil liberties. due process and privacy rights.

Now, one of the top Generals who oversaw that war (who stole top secret information to help his mistress write a book) proclaims himself a "fan" of a top-level Al Qaeda commando on whose head the DOJ had a $10 million bounty as recently as 2024, worrying if he's getting enough sleep and time for contemplative thought. The word "terrorism" is a massive fraud.

[Redacted @RedactedNews]

When Doctors Say “Finish the Job”: Inside Canada’s Assisted Dying Horror Stories

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program isn’t just “end-of-life care.” It’s the state giving doctors the power to end a life. The record now shows how often that power is being abused.

Postmortem reviews in Ontario alone have flagged over 400 cases where MAiD rules were ignored, including people who didn’t meet the legal criteria but were still nudged, steered, or outright pushed toward euthanasia.

@KelsiSheren recounts one especially horrifying case where a doctor told staff to “finish the job” while the patient was still conscious, a moment that sounds less like compassionate care and more like a system that has forgotten what medicine is for.

As Western governments rush to expand assisted dying, what does this say about how little value they place on vulnerable lives, and about the future of healthcare in a culture that finds it easier to end suffering by ending the sufferer?

[Redacted @RedactedNews]

Organ Donations Soar as MAiD Deaths Near 100,000. Kelsi Sheren Exposes Canada's Legal Euthanasia.

In less than a decade, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program has quietly moved the country toward a grim milestone: more than 100,000 people euthanized under the banner of “healthcare.”

Over the same period, Canada has surged into the top tier globally for organ donation tied to assisted deaths, turning MAiD into both a medical procedure and a pipeline feeding the transplant system.

@KelsiSheren joins us to expose how powerful lobbying groups are pushing to expand assisted dying as a 'normal' care option, while demanding stronger legal shields and immunity for the doctors who carry out this program.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Perfect headline, from an Israeli outlet, no less.

[Russian Embassy in Kenya/Посольство России в Кении @russembkenya]

Rutte says #NATO is "a defensive alliance. We will never attack anybody"

Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya have a different story to tell...

[Julles @jlesn]

@Rakeshhkumaar That's because they will always find ways to pay less in taxes or not pay at all

[Yves Engler @EnglerYves]

In the latest militarist outrage, Mark Carney just announced the purchase of a dozen German attack submarines. The 12 subs will cost about two billion dollars each and the contract will top $100 billion over their lifecycle.

Prime Minister Carney made the submarine announcement in Halifax enroute to the NATO summit in Turkey. The huge outlay of public resources towards murderous, stealth warships is part of the government’s effort to ramp up military spending to reach NATO’s 5% of GDP target in what alliance head Mark Rutte recently dubbed the “The Trump Trillion” of new NATO spending. To placate the fanatic US president Canada and other NATO members have devoted ever greater social resources towards militarism.

At a geopolitical level purchasing the German submarines bolsters Canada’s anti-Russia partnership and prioritizes NATO interoperability. TKMS provides 70% of NATO’s non-nuclear submarines and selecting the German firm over its South Korean competitor is about prioritizing ties with Europe over encouraging new relations across the Pacific.

In what was widely interpreted as a coded anti-Korean/Asian reference, TKMS executive Philipp Schön recently posted that Ottawa should consider the “cultural ecosystem” they would be joining when buying submarines. He said the German-Norwegian vessel maker was more “compatible” with the Canadian navy since the company’s working language was English.
Canada is procuring offence-oriented submarines. Expected to integrate with US weapons systems, the submarines will be able to launch ballistic missiles. In “Canada’s New Submarines Will Be Lethal, Stealthy, and Very UnCanadian” Peter Jones argues (somewhat hyperbolically) that the procurement is “the start of a military buildup that will reshape the country’s self-image.” The professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs notes, “The new submarines are designed to launch long-range precision attacks against targets inland, an entirely new capability for Canada’s fleet, previously equipped only with torpedoes. At present, only the United States, UK, and France operate submarine-fired land-attack cruise missiles among Western navies.”

Submarines excel at blowing up ships or merchant vessels. They can also be used effectively to impose a blockade.

Submarines are a military luxury and it’s unnecessary to spend $100 billion on purchasing a dozen of them. Three quarters of the world’s countries don’t have submarines, and Canada currently has only one operational submarine (three other Victoria-class submarines are inoperable).

Manufacturing submarines consumes significant energy and produces many waste products.
Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) guidelines also permit submarines to dump waste into the sea and these vessels are known to regularly kill sea life.

Purchasing submarines strengthen maybe the most male-dominated domain of a patriarchal institution. It wasn’t until 2000 that the submarine service was opened to women and the first female submariner started in 2003. There have only ever been three dozen female submariners in the RCN.

And what use would these subs be in defending Canada against the only country that can realistically invade, which is currently led by a president threatening to make us their 51st state?

As an inherently covert domain, submarines undermine democracy, which requires transparency and public oversight. Submarines participated in the most egregious example of the Canadian military subverting democracy to assist the US empire. Without political consent, two Canadian submarines and a dozen other vessels participated in the 1962 US blockade of Cuba. According to Lieutenant Bruce Fenton, the RCN “assumed responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic while the United States Navy was engaged in operations around Cuba.” Incredibly, the mission didn’t have official political support.

The commander in Halifax (Flag Officer Atlantic Coast) Kenneth Lloyd Dyer quietly deployed his forces and simply said the operation was part of fleet exercises with the US Navy. Military historian Jack Granatstein labeled Dyer’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis the “the single greatest breach of proper civil-military relations in Canadian history.”

Do we really need a repeat or worse?

Once again Carney’s government has kowtowed to Trump and a military-industrial complex that is willing to destroy the planet to make more profit. Once again Carney’s actions have contradicted his “elbows up” words.