Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

12: Iran

The Rise of the Measles-Industrial Complex Why MAGA wants children to get sick and die ......... On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce public skepticism of and hostility to vaccines, which has led to declining vaccination rates. This decline has in turn led to a surge in infectious diseases that had previously been virtually eradicated, notably measles. As the chart below shows, cumulative cases in the first 30 weeks of this year already exceeded the total for last year, which itself was the worst measles year since 1991 ............

Trump justified his anti-vax decree by pointing to an alleged link between vaccines and autism. Yet dozens of careful scientific studies have failed to find any such link.

............... However, you know what does have a strong, well-documented correlation with autism? Air pollution. Childhood exposure to air pollution is clearly associated with higher rates of autism. Moreover, scientists have found a found a strong association between autism and pre-natal maternal exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution. ................ Trump’s campaign against vaccines won’t reduce autism, but it will cause many children to suffer devastating, possibly deadly, infections diseases. Meanwhile, autism rates will rise as a result of his crusade against clean energy and in favor of dirty energy. ............... we need to put Monday’s executive order in the context of the general right-wing turn against vaccines, and against science in general. ............... belief that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, a false belief that has soared in popularity — but, again, only among Republicans ............... Trump is very much taking an extremist position on vaccines. But it’s clearly a position that he believes will resonate with his base. .............. Anti-vaccine sentiment is a lot like climate change denial. In both cases, to understand the politics one must do two things. First, follow the money: look at which interest groups benefit financially from misinformation, and why those groups have power. Second, follow the culture war: ask why this particular misinformation resonates with the prejudices and grievances of a segment of the population. ................ At first sight, the monetary interests behind anti-vax politics are less obvious than the fossil-fuel interests backing climate denial. After all, nobody benefits directly when children get measles. .................. Peddling quack medicine is, however, a highly profitable business. And it’s a business deeply enmeshed with the right-wing media ecosystem: Ads for dietary supplements with no proven medical benefits and other forms of snake oil have for decades been a key revenue source for right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory websites, and more. So there is a longstanding connection between hucksters touting fake cures and hard-right politics. Some observers were startled to see Dr. Mehmet Oz — who has touted, among other things, the health wonders of bovine colostrum — named by Trump as administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, a job for which he has no relevant qualifications. But given the underlying monetary and political incentives, Oz’s appointment is no surprise. ................. The modern right is a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expertise movement that is highly receptive to conspiracy theories. And like RFK Jr during his recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, when confronted with scientific facts it flies into a sputtering rage. So the snake oil industry targets its marketing to the kind of person who listens to the rants of right-wing influencers, gets their news from Newsmax, and finds common cause with the neo-Nazi posters on X. By framing their false claims as “The Medical Miracles that the Elites Don’t Want You to Know About”, the snake oil hucksters create a receptive audience for conspiracy theories that malign actual medical miracles like vaccines. ................. Unfortunately, Covid greatly boosted anti-vaccine forces. The witch hunt against Anthony Fauci shows how strong a hold anti-medical-science conspiracy theories now have on the Republican Party. This was not, to be clear, because medical science failed. In fact, the clear negative correlation across the United States between rates of Covid vaccination and Covid deaths was an object lesson in how effective vaccines can be. But those Americans already inclined to believe that the elites are out to get them, already hostile to any notion of collective action for the common good, reacted to vaccine mandates with rage. And their rage quickly generalized beyond preventive measures against Covid to preventive measures against all diseases — including measles. ............. Thanks to Trump and the triumph of snake oil, many American children will get sick from preventable diseases, some of them dying. And autism rates will continue to go up.

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Wednesday, August 05, 2026

5: Iran

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Sunday, July 26, 2026

26: Iran

China goes behind Putin's back to plot with Russian elite “China has a truly remarkable chance of transforming Russia into something like a giant Laos or Pakistan. Russia is becoming increasingly dependent on China to avoid being completely left behind and isolated on the global political scene, as well as being far from modern technological trends,” Gabuyev said. .......... Military ties are also deepening in the shadows. An investigation by Der Spiegel, Insider, and Le Monde uncovered a vast exchange of battlefield data......... Beijing supplies the Kremlin with missing electronics. In return, Russia shares real world tactics about fighting Western weapons......... The Chinese embassy in Berlin denied the accusations to Deutsche Welle. Officials called the reports “slander” and stated that “these claims have no factual basis.”

OpenAI says AI acted on its own in an 'unprecedented' hack of another company OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers......... It went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said.

How Toyota has put every automaker on notice with its 745-mile solid-state battery

Iran may be stronger than we thought According to assessments reported in June, Iran still has access to most of its missile sites and around 70 percent of its prewar stockpile............ “We do not have enough [munitions] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” one US official told the Washington Post this week. .......... the proliferation of one-way attack drones like Iran’s Shaheds have shifted the balance, giving weaker adversaries the ability to target US bases at low cost. The attack that killed the two servicemembers on Friday was, like many of Iran’s attacks in this war, a combined missile and drone barrage intended to overwhelm the facility’s defenses. The best-case scenario from these strikes, from a US perspective, is that they are intercepted, albeit at the cost of draining valuable air defense resources. In the worst case, US soldiers are killed. .......... “air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time” due to the proliferation of low-cost drones, which he compared to the improvised explosive devices, many planted by Iranian proxies, that killed hundreds of US troops during the war in Iraq. ........... The hard logic is that just as high fuel prices and declining poll numbers have not yet been enough to deter Trump from continuing to fight Iran, a few American casualties are not enough to be a deterrent to military action. In fact, as this weekend’s retaliatory strikes against Tabriz showed, they may only pull the US deeper into the war. .............. As long as Trump avoids a ground invasion, Iran’s ability to target and kill US troops will remain limited. But as this past weekend’s events showed, that ability exists, and there is only so much the US can do to prevent it. The risk of an even larger catastrophe for American troops in the Middle East will only grow the longer this war goes on.

AI company hit by hack entirely done by artificial intelligence
NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani doubles down on threat to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Hawks around Putin are now demanding strikes on NATO itself — and a green light for 'limited' nuclear weapons

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Wednesday, July 01, 2026

1: Iran

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