@chriscaple
Montreal software-makin' videogame-creatin' singy-geetar-y artfellah. Toujours antifasciste. Be unrelentingly honest and kind and everything else takes care of itself. Over the course of many incarnations.
The Inflation Reduction Act - especially around solar power generation and distribution - was so effective it caused a series of legitimate diplomatic incidents because European allies weren't used to American governments investing in energy resilience so aggressively.
A huge oil fire in Tehran
me: voluntarily adding $10 to my airline ticket to offset carbon emissions
meanwhile, our government:
We are living in a time of absolute, utter madness...and too many people are unwilling to acknowledge it. My latest.
open.substack.com/pub/davidrot...
Across the Persian Gulf coastline from Iran sit more than 400 desalination plants operated by Gulf Cooperation Council states.
In Kuwait, approximately 90% of drinking water comes from desalination; in Oman the figure is 86%, in Saudi Arabia 70%, and in the UAE 42 %.
Trump is thirsty for karma.
About 100 million people live in the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council โ Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman โ all now under Iranian attack. Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are, for all practical purposes, completely dependent on the desalination plants, particularly for metropolises such as Dubai. Saudi Arabia, and especially its capital, Riyadh, also relies heavily on them. Water Desalination in the Middle East Saudi Arabia is home to most of the water desalination plants in the region, where they are key to supply the capital, Riyadh 3 5 7 9M cubic meters per day Sources: Bloomberg Opinion and Nature Under international law, the desalination plants are protected. But I have seen enough Middle Eastern wars to know the weight of the Geneva Conventions when missiles and bombs start flying. And they are: Iran has attacked a power station in Fujairah, UAE that keeps one of the worldโs largest desalination plants running. In Kuwait, debris from a drone interception caused a fire in one of the countryโs plants. The risk is enormous. Take the Jubail desalination plant, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. It supplies Riyadh, via a roughly 500-kilometer-long pipeline system, with more than 90% of its drinking water. โRiyadh would have to evacuate within a week if the plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed,โ according to a 2008 memo from the US embassy in the kingdom released by Wikileaks. โThe current structure of the Saudi government could not exist without the Jubail desalinization plant,โ the memo stated. Since the cable became public, the Saudis have reinforced their water network. Other countries have also built up redundancy. Still, all the water plants are equally vulnerable โ and all of them are within range of the Iranian missiles. The good news is that water is so strategic โ and so human โ that any Iranian direct attack on them would be considerโฆ
For those who can't bypass the paywall, the Obama administration, CIA determined that a single strike on a single Saudi water desalination plant would require evacuation of Riyadh and collapse its government.
The Saudis have beefed up their infrastructure since, but I would rather not find out.
Tweet from Abbas Araghchi reads: The U.S. committed a blatant and desperate crime by attacking a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island. Water supply in 30 villages has been impacted. Attacking Iran's infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The U.S. set this precedent, not Iran.
US-Israeli targets include schools, health care infrastructure, Tehranโs airport, and now, if what Iranโs foreign minister says is accurate, a desalination plant providing water to 30 villages.
What a precedent to set, hitting desalination plants around the Gulf which so heavily relies on them.
Riyadh gets 90% of its fresh water from one desalination plant. About 85% of Israelโs domestic fresh water consumption comes from five major desalination plants. Teheran is already in severe drought. Letโs hope cooler heads prevail. A water war would be absolutely catastrophic.
If they start targeting each otherโs water desalination plants, the region may end up with tens of millions of thirsty refugees. Trump is playing a game of Mutual Assured Destruction with a culture that glorifies martyrdom. What could possibly go wrong? ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
The US Navy could soon be escorting water tankers instead of oil tankers. People can live without oil, but they wonโt last long without fresh water. If they start targeting each otherโs water desalination plants, itโs all over for life as weโve known it in the region.
To clarify this: the context is college sports. Trump is saying that Russia helping Iran target Americans in a war is less important than the pay structure for athletes.
Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh
Screenshot of my DOGE letter โDr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFRยง200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,
Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too โDEIโ for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below
Multiple news outlets are reporting a US attack on an Iranian #desalination plant.
If verified, this violates international law protecting #water systems during wars, and it sets a dangerous precedent, given intense dependence of Gulf countries on desalination.
timesofoman.com/article/1691...
Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.
OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon sayingโฆ
โSurveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they gotโ
"I didn't see a single building standing the entire time I was in Gaza. I didn't see one building intact or standing.
Everything was flattened. And when I mean flattened, it was hard to even tell that they were buildings there before."
www.instagram.com/reels/DVMK-u...
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/09fa5c20-2c8f-4f41-9d91-c78476eaac20 Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services facilities this week in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain highlight the vulnerability of cloud facilities โ prominent symbols of US tech power in the region and hard to defend against air attack. Fars News Agency, an outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Thursday that Iran targeted Amazon and Microsoft facilities in recent drone strikes. Experts say Amazonโs facilities were likely targeted by Iran. Microsoft said it had not experienced any outages in the region. The strikes mark what is believed to be the worldโs first military attack against the US โhyperscalersโ that dominate the global cloud computing market. That could create a chilling effect on the UAE and Saudi Arabiaโs plans to spend billions of dollars on local AI infrastructure in the coming years, a crucial plank of the oil-rich statesโ efforts to diversify their economies. โThe Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,โ said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank.
Iran acknowledges they are targeting AWS and Azure data centres. "The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,โ said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
WaPo push alert: โA Polarized Nation Yesterday, 8:02 PM U.S. was the only country in a worldwide survey to say most fellow citizens are bad peopleโ
Are we polarized? Or are we realistic?
Several years from now, a thoughtful scholar will write a book called โTrumpโs Willing Executionersโ about how a nation of 340 million descended into abject depravity.
"War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington -- not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict." Graduation Exercises at the United States Military Academy, 6/3/47 "Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war. Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war." Remarks at Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 10/19/50 [DDE's Pre-Presidential Papers, Principal File, Box
Was browsing the Eisenhower Library site this morning trying to find a quote I remembered.
President Eisenhower, WW2 military hero:
โIn my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive warโฆ none has yet explained how war prevents war.โ
It's unsettling that nobody in the Republican party is able or willing to publicly acknowledge that their would-be Emperor is all the way out of his sadistic little mind.
As I have said since Feb 2025, Trump is in office to solve Putin's problems. How else are you going to ensure that Putin's failed state becomes prosperous? it is already having to be propped up by China.
Telling the world you are The Empire is a choice
โThe 312-foot Dena and its 130-member crew, many of them musicians in the Iranian navy band, had just finished participating in an Indian government naval exercise and cultural exchange that the U.S. Navy had also participated in and were on the way home on Wednesday.โ
Yes. And we have to talk about this now, because talking about it is the first step to making it seem like a callous crime rather than a surprising emergency.
If we survive this, I really hope parents take a long look at how they are teaching empathy to their children. It's so obvious that that is the missing ingredient in huge chunks of the population, amplified by social media algorithms and cultural rewards for reactions rather than thoughtfulness.
Canadaโs boycott of US booze began a year ago with the first round of tariffs from the Trump administration. It has proven surprisingly durable. Read more in the Canada Daily newsletter.
What I respect most about this movie is the determination on the part of everyone involved in its creation to ensure that it lands dead last on everyone's lists ranking Star Wars films.
bsky.app/profile/ign....
What's funny is that we know from generations of experiments that human memory is ridiculously, cartoonishly malleable.
People manipulating their pictures like this are literally fucking with their memories. They will remember that event differently, because of the meddling afterwards.
Children with no morals at the wheel of a giant death machine
Been really wild to watch Rolling Stone make a very obvious shift in editorial direction over the past few months. (And laying off most of the talented people who had been working there.)
