With the implosion of BuzzFeed we might consider what the next front is for Israeli influence peddling. My sense is that it’ll be the Sam Bankman-Fried-backed Semafor.
Incredibly Ben Smith was making the case in the Atlantic (where else?) that he still would have published the Fusion GPS dossier by referencing Russian disinformation site Gawker. My favorite part? That Jake Tapper — who is definitely an Israeli agent of some sort — seems to have been in on it. “Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick,” Smith quotes Tapper as saying. Recall that these guys supposedly work at rival publications! Interestingly the Russian tech executive which sued BuzzFeed over the dossier wanted to enter emails between Tapper and Smith into evidence — only to be rejected by the judge in 2018. What a pity! Those emails might have been fun to read but something tells me we already kind of know what they’d say, don’t we?
Apropos of nothing in particular my friend Arthur Bloom rightly makes the case that there are a lot of active Israeli agents in the mainstream press who are seemingly at a loss as to what to do now that King Bibi is likely to be deposed.
The New York Times reports that the Supreme Court has let Rodney Reed, a Texas death row inmate, seek DNA testing. Now I don’t know if this’ll do Mr. Reed any good but I do know that we ought to sequence every prisoner in every prison. It’s unclear if it’s legal to do for the prisoners without the acquiescence of the state but we ought to do this on health (and identity) grounds alone. I could easily imagine Joe Biden signing an executive order guaranteeing all prisoners the right to a full genomic sequence. To the Biden White House folks reading this Substack I already have a draft of the EO. Let me know.
The NYT reports that a paltry number of shoplifters — 327 — commit the lion’s share of offenses. Is this true for murders and rapes? We don’t really know. Let’s find out.
Bloomberg reports that the National Reconnaissance Office is looking to quadruple the number of satellites in the sky. As you know there’s a trade-off here between soldiers in the field and satellites and drones. I support reducing the number of soldiers in our country by replacing them with drones (or other nations’ troops).
Of course that comes with it the concerns about deliberate Kesslerization — that is making space unusable by detonating satellites or destroying other satellites. Russian nationalist Anatoly Karlin, whom I once met at a psychometrics conference, thinks Russia ought to do this very thing and create a debris field so large as to make space unusable. The dark thought is that they may well already have with Musk’s Starlink. As Musk gets increasingly erratic can we take the chance that he won’t just shut off access to space altogether by having Starlink self-destruct?
The solar age is now upon us.
Vox explained how solar got so cheap.
The BBC has a story about the history of early solar pioneer Frank Shuman.
CNN did a segment on Aptera — the solar powered car company.
The Biden Administration is even rolling out efforts to make solar available to renters.
Finally it seems to me that the next move is to find companies that can really do bioplastics at scale. There’s a great report about the industry here. I’m looking for startups in this space.
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