Sasha Issenberg @sissenberg.4h Does the @nytimes know what NATO stands for? A8 EG Attack on Iran THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2026 NEWS ANALYSIS By STEVEN ERLANGER A North American Treaty Organization Without America?
Can you imagine how many people approved it before publishing?
Shameful.
And encourage people to behave in a frugal manner! We are just entering spring, the fuel rise for domestic purposes only comes into play *next* price cap rise which will be *high summer*, i think we can encourage lower domestic fuel use during summer? Obviously petrol a more
*immediate* issue but
Correct
“.. I Want to Put Your Head in the Toilet and Flush.”
@variety.com
variety.com/2026/tv/news...
Your regular and handy reminder that 'decimated' means reduced by a tenth, NOT by 90% and definitely not 'obliterated'.
So, Trump might actually be right on that one.
In the US-Iran war, data centers are a target. Iran has struck several Amazon facilities, including another one just this week in Bahrain.
This week @sambiddle.com joins @parismarx.com to dig into why data centers are a target and how the military uses AI.
Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/322_...
We've reached the stage where an understated view attached to all this needs addressing.
"It's not just that there's the Trump problem. There's also the 'they-elected-him-twice' problem."
There's a belief in DC that can be fixed quickly. It's a delusion. No, they won't 'come round' when he's gone.
Trump has insulted and tariffed his European allies, persuaded Denmark to prepare for a US invasion and, by pressuring Ukraine and not Russia, encouraged Putin to keep fighting. All of which he has forgotten.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Overview of changes in NSF funding proposed by the FY 2027 President's Budget Request. Most programs are significantly cut. OMB did not give numbers for STEM and NCSES, so the numbers appear to be increases (they are not).
Giving folks a sense of what the cuts to NSF funding in the 2027 President's Budget Request actually looks like. Note the significant cuts across domains--even to research security! STEM and NCSES aren't captured for prior years, so they appear to be cuts, even though they are not.
Still leaves the June/July IPO option open, but also shows the company in 'No Fuck Ups' mode.
Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded.
arstechnica.com/security/202...
Gorgeous and the best rebuke to AI slop you'll see until the next batch.
A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)
More context on this #Artemis II image:
* This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right
* The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon:
☀️🌍🚀🌕
There is no way global science can make up for these and other cuts, and they will diminish a huge source of US political and economic power. It's a gift to Beijing.
China first, and with Europe already on notice to go it alone, perhaps America third.
And try recruiting the best and brightest now.
This week, Brexit finally killed our family business. We cleared out our warehouse, handed back the keys, paid the final bills and said goodbye to our last employee.
What was once a thriving firm died a slow, sad death, all thanks to Farage, Johnson and the gullible idiots they conned. 1/18
At points, and this is true, I've taken to using Bluesky or, previously, Twitter, to apologize for our shameful misrule and then naming a nearby pub or shabeen where I will be buying rounds to extend the apology. When I've done so, good people end up buying just as many pints to comfort me.
Oh no
It strikes me as perverse that the US has apparently not yet woken up to that. Greenland and more broadly Trump's foreign policy/rhetoric have been having consequences for some time now, causing, not just promoting, long-term realignment. Washington as a whole behaves as though oblivious to that.
Guys, the President was literally threatening to invade the territory of a NATO country earlier this year, to the point where they had to deploy troops to deter it. That has consequences.
President Macron scolds the US and Israel for attacking Iran,
"The day you say I don't like your regime, I consider you threatening your neighbour so I will intervene and bomb you, you open a Pandora's box"
"Iran is a very bad regime, no discussion about that. I disagree with on a lot of topics"
This is so, so well-articulated.
This will offend some people When considering how we deal with the problem of Islamist supremacism, it's tempting to throw up our hands and despair But the fact is, we've been here before and have a playbook for dealing with this stuff. There was in England's history a recalcitrant religious minority that claimed the authority of a higher power to re-order English society by violence, even abrogating for itself the right to murder the monarch: it was called Catholicism, It's imperial claims were suppressed and eventually defeated by the application of specific laws designed not to persecute people for being Catholic, but to thwart the political objective of making England a Catholic country As always, the answer to our problems lie in our own history, if only we had the wit to see it.
Hey Mr Starkey - Ireland may want a word, you absolute basket case.
A chocolate biscuit in front of Bert’s Bookshelves
Every week I spend hours coming up with and preparing our social media posts. All to share the love of books (and the love of buying them from Bert’s).
Our most popular one this week is this picture of a biscuit I put on Instagram at 11pm on Wednesday night.
View from Artemis II today. Crescent Earth. A view humans haven't captured since 1972.
Footage captured from passengers on an airliner above Florida, showing the exact moment the Artemis II mission lifts off.
The other question that needs asking is who, even by this administration's standards of sycophancy, allowed that speech to get loaded on an Autocue?
