SUMMARY: If Trump had gotten out of this conflict within the six weeks max as originally claimed, he would have just been viewed as an arrogant azzo who messed up traffic through the Strait and then aloofly left. But by hanging around to fix it he's now going to be deemed both that and the loser who ultimately facilitated Iran's formally recognized, official control over the passage. (When this dawdling, ineffectual strategy and its forces finally pull out due to exhaustion of resources and the unpopularity of the war -- whether with or without an agreement.)
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Iran thinks the US will let it keep the Strait of Hormuz
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-s...b0aa1c5c3f

EXCERPTS: They are betting that military pressure will ultimately force the United States to accept their control over the crucial waterway for global energy — and that time is on their side.

They know about the diminishing stockpiles of key U.S. weapons such as advanced missile interceptors. They know the war is deeply unpopular with Americans. They know that as long as the strait is largely closed, the price of gas and other goods will stay high ahead of U.S. congressional elections in November. They know that trying to open it by force would be costly and may require American ground troops. They know their Houthi allies in Yemen could widen the war and disrupt another major trade route.

By that logic, U.S. President Donald Trump has no choice but to capitulate.

[...] Iran says it is close to reaching a deal with Oman to manage the strait, which runs between the countries. But on Saturday, Tehran said the strait will not open until the U.S. “corrects its behavior,” saying it must permanently end the war, lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its military from the area. It also must “completely compensate” Iran for war damage, lift sanctions and “unconditionally” release frozen assets.

There was no White House comment. A deal with Oman would formalize Tehran’s control over what had been an open international waterway before the war, one that carried a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas.

[...] Abdolreza Davari, an analyst who once advised former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Iran’s effective control of the strait has given it leverage with the U.S. and regional countries that can help guarantee its security.

“More than revenue from the strait, Iran wants to confirm its management and sovereignty over the strait,” he said by phone from Tehran. Formal control over even part of the strait would be a clear win for Iran and a loss for the U.S., which has yet to accomplish some of its various and shifting goals in the war.

Eliade was a prolific writer on Egyptian cosmogony.

https://www.noemamag.com/why-is-everyone...ch-so-sad/

EXCERPT: Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”

These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless. Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.

This disillusionment is infectious. One person speaks of it and others begin nodding: They too have felt it, the drop in motivation, the sense of being distant from their work, the lack of sleep, the concerns about the future. These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?

We are, it’s true, living through a time of disruption. But what seems to differentiate this period from those of the past is the nature of the angst itself. Yes, AI is threatening jobs and disrupting industries. But Knowledge Workers have faced recessions, outsourcing, new technology and automations of many kinds before.

Recent graduates always worry about breaking into the job market. Millennial professionals have navigated economic uncertainty their entire careers. What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica.

It strikes me as significant that the people who are usually the most insulated from economic upheaval, and seem to be well-positioned to ride out AI’s near-term impacts — highly paid executives and senior professionals with decades of institutional knowledge — are also uncertain about the future of their careers amid the rapid change nearly every industry is undergoing.

Some will say: good, fuck ‘em. In the 2010s, Knowledge Workers told everyone to learn to code while they sipped kombucha and played Xbox in beanbag chairs. Then, Knowledge Workers sat inside during the pandemic while frontline workers risked their health to make Amazon and Uber Eats deliveries. Now, those same Knowledge Workers are building AI that threatens to eliminate work for humans across industries and make a very few people wealthy beyond imagination. And these same assholes want pity now?

To that I say: fair enough. But this sweeping disenchantment begs a fascinating (or terrifying or sad) set of questions: What is this angst plaguing Knowledge Workers? And what happens to a society and its industries if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers overnight? (MORE - details)

What Was the Internet?
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/wh...-internet/

EXCERPT: With the rise of AI, however, some new mood seems discernible, at least around the edges: the elegiac. A lot of the web is being swept away.

In May, Google overhauled its iconic search box for the first time since 2001, signaling its all-in on the “intelligence age.” As chatbots hallucinate and hide their sources, search results become harder to browse, and digital life becomes ever more atomized, online access to information looks more imperiled than ever.

Wikipedia has managed to survive—a miraculous exception that proves the rule—but it’s staring down new threats.

Boston Review has been online since 1995, but our search engine traffic is falling, like everyone else’s. If work is published on the net and no one can navigate to it, does it leave a trace?

In other words, is this the end of the web itself? And if so, is some kind of eulogy in order?

“Just as I’d hoped, [the web] has enabled a flourishing of human creativity and self-expression,” Berners-Lee writes in his recent memoir, This Is for Everyone. But “to ensure the web agents serve people—not corporate profits, not governments, not themselves, but people—it’s critical that we develop systems today that put the human first.”

We asked five humans who’ve been paying attention what to make of this moment. Read on for their reflections: about how the web used to work and what it used to feel like, the strange and sorry thing it’s become, and the good that’s worth remembering when so much of what we love is dying, or already long gone... (MORE - details)

COVERED:

“Infrastructural Imperialism”
by Siva Vaidhyanathan

“The Scale’s the Thing”
by Avery Dame-Griff

“Net Positives”
by Joanna Walsh

“That Obscure Object, Desire”
by Chad Wellmon

“Managed Decline”
by Cory Doctorow

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...ids-origin

EXCERPTS: At about 7:20 a.m. on May 12, 2019, black smoke rose above the eastern industrial belt of Wuhan. Two warehouses at Wuhan Beihu Yunfeng Environmental Protection were being destroyed by fire. [...] One of the laboratories contracting with Yunfeng for disposal of its HW49 waste was the now-famous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[...] Specialized firefighters battled the blaze for over eight hours. An additional fire broke out the next morning, requiring another special unit and a massive ten tons of water. The city’s Emergency Management Bureau recorded no casualties. What was destroyed in those fires, however, was not just a couple warehouses. It was one of the key structural supports of Wuhan’s biowaste disposal network.

Nine days later, a second incident. The second of the three licensed HW49 handlers in the province was Hubei Tianyin Environmental Protection, located in Jiangling County, 140 miles from Wuhan. Reports at the time said that a chemical reaction in stored laboratory waste ignited an afternoon fire, which was extinguished within four hours with no reported injuries. That facility, too, subsequently shut down.

By late May 2019, the entirety of Wuhan’s biological research network — from the municipal CDC to the Institute of Virology on the city’s outskirts — had been reduced to a single licensed third-party disposal option for HW49 hazardous waste: a small, remote firm 190 miles away named Hubei Zhongyou Youyi Environmental Protection.

[...] These structural failures did not exist in isolation. They reflected broader patterns within Wuhan’s research culture.

Tian Junhua, a field researcher at the same Wuhan CDC, became something of a public symbol of that culture. He was initially known as an intrepid hero in China’s quest to identify novel pathogens through field research, and the safety risks associated with his work received little scrutiny at the time.

In December 2019, as later reported by the Washington Post, Chinese state media released a video of him collecting bats in caves while wearing thin gloves and a surgical mask — protective measures grossly inadequate by international biosafety standards. The samples he collected were presumably returned for analysis to the Wuhan CDC, which was not licensed or equipped to handle unknown viruses of this sort. Residual material from these kinds of analyses could have ultimately joined the institution’s long-neglected stockpile.

The pattern was consistent: institutional ambition advancing ahead of the infrastructure and protocols required to sustain it safely.

Taken together, these simultaneous failures would have required improvisation from Wuhan’s research institutions, such as working with new and unfamiliar channels, relying on contractors operating beyond their usual capacity, and potentially bypassing established protocols. If that improvisation occurred without a corresponding reduction in research activity, the period represented an expanded window of risk in which the margin for error or mishap was thinner than usual.

By autumn 2019, the visible disruptions had subsided. In October, Wuhan hosted the Military World Games, featuring over 9,000 athletes from over 100 countries, seemingly without incident.

The Wuhan CDC storeroom had been substantially cleared and the center was ready for its move to its new facility close to Huanan Market. That move was carried out in early December, in a surprisingly low-profile manner with little more than a subtle change of address on its website. The Institute of Virology had, somehow, also adapted its operations following the loss of its primary disposal contractor.

The crises of the preceding months receded from view, unexamined and largely unrecorded in any official account as the world was about to be hit by the most significant pandemic in a century.

When pneumonia cases of unknown etiology appeared in December 2019, international attention converged rapidly on Wuhan. Investigators prioritized genomic sequencing, transmission mapping, and epidemiological tracing. In that process, the anomalies of the preceding months went unexamined — from the fires of May, the cascading failures of the province’s hazardous waste disposal network, to the Wuhan CDC’s formal acknowledgment of twenty-five years of regulatory non-compliance. These were not secret. But they were never incorporated into the broader investigative picture... (MORE - missing details)

So apparently I'm not alone when it comes to indulging in this guilty pleasure. "Is it any good?" is not really the question to ask. Instead, it's: "Is it relaxing?"

As JDA says, The Ark is indeed a turn-your-brain-off, just go with the flow, calming background noise show. Which even Stargate was at times (just have fun instead of intellectual stun). Also reminds me of the pluckiness of The Outpost in that sense. (The little engine that could, while better-funded series were cancelled within one or two seasons.)

I've actually seen both seasons of The Ark, along with the first episode of the third (which is introducing a lot of mysteries). Each season carves out new turf. All of the existing episodes can currently be viewed for free on Fandango. While it may be low budget, the set and the special effects are still the level of the various 1990s Star Trek series (which was a heckuva lot superior to Babylon 5's CGI).
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JON DEL ARROZ
https://youtu.be/Bqm3p-D8qyU

VIDEO EXCERPTS: The early episodes really run on a repeating formula like [there's a crisis] and the crew fixes it. ... Each crisis resolves through a burst of technobabble followed by a last-minute save, and the show leans on that structure. ... Layered on top of that are the soap opera engines. Shipboard flow romances flare up and cool off. The character conflicts feel very heavy-handed in one episode, and then they get dropped and forgotten within two.

The premise is pretty thin on this, and the show fills the gaps with familiar diversity casting choices as well. You got a lot of strong female lead concepts. You got the super-smart nerdy black girl who gets a little painful. You got the security officer who's a gay guy who's really just concerned about his husband. I mean, these are caricature-level tropes. Many of the show's characters are also flawed and seek redemption.

[...] Captain Sharon Garnett is played by Christy Burke. She has lots of problems ... I end up liking the character quite a bit anyway. And I like the actress quite a bit as well. And the season's back half starts to feel better for the character and the like. They add some drama to things...

While the beginning episodes were definitely like "woman lectures man for being stupid", it does even out as the show goes along. There's bad on each side, and it's like, okay, it's not as lopsided as it started out being. And the plots get a little more interesting as it goes along...

[...] Now this is just popcorn. Turn your brain off for the most part. For science fiction, it's okay and fun, a little low budget. It's got a lot of heart to it at the same time. And that's the thing, like you feel like this could have potential. So, I'm going to continue the second season and see how it goes. My normal rating is like a 7 out of 10 for like, you know, this is basically okay. I give it like a 6.5. It's right below that at the end of the first season. But there is more to come, so we'll see what happens...

Is it any good? ... https://youtu.be/Bqm3p-D8qyU

Excerpt:

That's a really interesting contrast, isn't it? You've got a black only town where they don't allow white people because they will murder them on sight because apparently they have a worry spirit and can't control themselves. They have a white only town where they don't want to get murdered and would actually like to have a peaceful, productive, wholesome life.

Siberian methane emissions have doubled in a decade, study co-led by UK scientists finds
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139031

INTRO: Methane emissions from Siberia have more than doubled over the past decade, according to new research co-led by scientists at the University of Edinburgh’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO). The study, initiated as a collaborative project with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences during their stay at the University of Edinburgh, reveals that rapid warming, alongside increasing wildfires and shifting wetland activity, is driving a sharp rise in methane emissions from the vast permafrost regions of northern Russia. The findings raise concerns that these accelerating emissions could undermine effects to meet global climate targets... (MORE - no ads)
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Siberia’s growing methane threat could offset 20% of global methane reduction targets by 2050
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138027

INTRO: The Arctic is warming at an accelerating pace. As permafrost thaws across vast areas and wildfires become more frequent, large amounts of methane (CH4) are being released. Together, these changes are reshaping the region's greenhouse-gas emissions and further intensifying climate change.

In a study published in Science on August 6, an international team led by Prof. LIU Yi from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated how CH4 emissions in Siberia are evolving under climate change, showing how atmospheric circulation promotes wildfire activity and methanogenesis and thereby drives the recent sharp rise in CH4 emissions.

Although Siberia accounts for only ~5% of global CH4 emissions, sparse observations and complex environmental conditions have made its emissions difficult to quantify, resulting in widely varied estimates. Under these conditions, researchers have long struggled to understand changes in the region's emissions and the role played by temperature, making Siberia an important source of uncertainty in the global CH4 budget.

Using a methane flux inversion system developed by Dr. ZHU Sihong from IAP, first author of this study, researchers integrated measurements from the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) with data from a global network of near-surface monitoring stations, including tall-tower observations in Siberia. This approach reduced uncertainties in estimates of both Siberian CH4 emissions and their growth trend to roughly 10%.

Researchers found that annual CH4 emissions in Siberia rose by 12.0 ± 1.9 teragrams (Tg) between 2010 and 2023, increasing by an average of 1.1 ± 0.1 Tg each year. Notably, this rate of increase was equivalent to 92% of the increase in emissions from wetlands worldwide, which account for nearly one-third of global CH4 emissions... (MORE - no ads)