Open Thread

Adventures in AI:

I was in a Youtube discussion on the US Civil War, where a poster defending Grant’s management of the campaign claimed that the Union Army of the Potomac lost fewer men in the 51 days of the Overland Campaign than in 1861-1863. Not only is it a very misleading claim to compare just 51 days to 3 years, but on searching I found the Google’s AI answer varied and spat out contradictory information and information not found on the sources listed.

The first attempt (last weekend, when traveling, I can’t reproduce it now) gave a total of 647,000-some casualties, with breakdowns of 200-276,000 per year, with the KIA, WIA, and MIA totals listed. At first I thought “maybe this is including illnesses and accidents and deaths from those, but the funny thing was, that the total was sometimes FAR LESS than the sum of the KIA/WIA/MIA! When I went to the listed websites cited, I found nary a shred of this information. So where was Google’s AI getting it?

Now, every time I refresh, I get somewhat different numbers. Even then, most of the numbers are less than what I get by adding up the individual major and minor battles of a year. Say, it now lists 45,000-50,000 casualties for 1862 while by summing the individual battlefield losses yields a total closer to 77,000.

I fear for students using this crap to learn.

bruce, I guess you find it equally implausible that the war is still raging four years later after Russia first invaded and Russia didn’t win it in the first days as many russophiles claimed it would. The russophiles at this juncture simply have zero credibility if they ever had any credibility. They have been wrong about everything and their lying at this point is as absurdly insane as the Trump regime’s lying. It’s ridiculously transparent and malevolent. Some of the russophiles are abandoning ship and blaming it once again on the Jews. Check out the Unz Review. Increasingly, the message is that Putin is secretly a Jew and he and Israel are once again spoiling imperialist Russia from its just desserts.

Your last sentence, bruce, could equally read as follows.

Russia seems to be embarking on a path to WWIII on the basis of what looks to me to be almost wholly false reporting and assessments of its intentions and vulnerability.

Kleptocracies are fragile and unsustainable. Russia is collapsing under the weight of its egregious corrupt contradictions. I will steel myself for the whataboutism rebuttal as if I would ever defend America or the more generally the West despite the retorts being red herrings, true or not.

The War of Narratives is more important apparently than the kinetic confrontation across the militarily disputed geography of southern and eastern Ukraine / Novorossiya and Crimea.

For some, narrative “truth” was settled at the outset of Putin’s Special Military Operation by dogmatic adherence to a few rhetorical talking points: Russia had been the aggressor, crossing the internationally-recognized border in 2014 “unprovoked” and “illegally” to seize Crimea and again in 2022 in support of the secessionist Donbas republics. Russia occupied Kherson oblast and much of Zaporizhzhia oblast in 2022, staging referendums in occupied territory to confirm local support for Russian annexation of the total of four oblasts just as Russia had previously used a referendum to legitimize in Russian law the annexation of Crimea.

After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia had invested massively in a bridge connecting Crimea with the Russian mainland and public works in Crimea. Ukraine continued to dispute Russian authority in Crimea 2014-2022 diplomatically, but not militarily; the main hostile move of Ukraine to Russia in Ukraine was to block the canal that supplied Crimea with water.

Ukraine did invest the rumps of two secessionist Donbas republics, which had formed during a civil war Ukraine after the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, in a protracted siege, 2014-22. The periodic bombardment that accompanied the siege was monitored by European authorities under a ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia and leading Western powers.

My point is that in all of this geopolitical struggle, Narrative Control has assumed a core part, dictating the language of journalism as well as diplomacy. In the run-up to the initiation of the Russian Special Military Operation in February 2022, Putin, a lawyer, put in place various declarations regarding the two Donbas republics that would keep Russia’s actions within the letter of U.N. rules on military intervention as well as Russia’s domestic law on the uses of military force.

Secrecy and censorship play supporting roles in maintaining Narrative control. The U.S., cooperating secretly with Norway, according to conveniently unconfirmed and disputed accounts, blew up three of four natural gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany across the Baltic seafloor. This act of war between NATO alliance members remains deniable, but has immense material economic consequences, even as its Narrative consequences remain neutralized.

The European powers have seized several Russian “shadow fleet” oil carriers. The journalism that created the “shadow fleet” language is the art of propaganda in action. It is supported by legal maneuvering. EU sanctions prevent access to European maritime insurance. The Europeans pressure maritime flag-of-convenience registries to revoke registration for a ship in transit, making it legally vulnerable to inspection and seizure. Piracy but not quite piracy and an Act of War. It appears deliberately provocative, almost daring the Russians to deploy warships to straits, knowing that Russian ocean commerce can be blocked in a lot of narrow places controlled by NATO between the oil depots of Leningrad and the open Atlantic.

Any journalist taking an arguably “pro-Russian” line within the jurisdiction of the European Union is subject to draconian sanctions and in some circumstances, criminal prosecution. Political parties and politicians in some way sympathetic to Russian interests have been targeted with special measures and enactments.

In my opinion, key content of the Narrative regarding Russian motives and intentions is factually inaccurate and not reality-based. Radical authoritarian measures to prevent politically potent, widely publicized criticism of that arguably false content is dangerous. So are aggressive policies, such as staging seizures of ships carrying Russian oil, apparently designed to provoke Russian actions that might be “fitted” to the Narrative, so as to reinforce the Narrative’s prior assertion of Russian “evil”.

Whether there is anything that Russia can do on the battlefield in Ukraine that would undermine the credibility of the Narrative on any important point — Russia’s evil, Ukraine can win — seems like a key strategic question.

I have seen John Mearsheimer, clearly to me unable to explain in his own framework why Russia has plodded forward so slowly in Donbass, speculate that Russia might at some point move in some sweeping maneuver to demonstrate Ukraine’s military and economic hollow weakness. He imagines that would call into question the premise of the Narrative that Ukraine can win and prolonging the War is something other than a futile attempt to attrit Russian power by sacrificing Ukraine and Ukrainians. (This latter being a counter-Narrative put forward by many opposed to continuing the War and favoring a negotiated settlement between Russia and Europe.)

The emergence of drone warfare as a dominant technology offers another narrative path. I have seen this from John Helmer, an American ex-patriate living in Moscow since the 1980s I think — he’s really old! The idea is that Ukraine becomes an automated platform for continual drone warfare, fed financially from Europe and largely immune to Russian efforts to “de-militarize” Ukraine by material and human attrition, partly because so few humans are needed to carry on this form of warfare. Russia’s hold on Crimea, Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia could never be secured without disabling the putative Ukrainian drone warfare platform, even assuming Russia ever completes occupation of the capitals of the latter two oblasts, which is necessary to secure control of the lower Dnieper. Taking over those two major cities is practically inconceivable at the current pace of Russian military operations using the current tactical package, which entails total devastation of infrastructure and landscape, is practically inconceivable.

My point is to draw attention to how the War of Narratives intersects with the strategy and tactics of the kinetic war to bound the possibilities of resolution. The Narrative War is being leveraged to build an authoritarian regime in the EU capable of carrying out WWIII. Scary stuff. At the very least, the western Narrative makes it very hard to conceive of a settlement with Russia that leaves the Putin regime intact and restores some commercial normality.

I suspect Ukraine as a state and political society is crumbling but I don’t know how anyone could inspect or report the details of that crumbling, so how could I or anyone really know. I certainly don’t know how fast that deterioration I conjure from speculation may be proceeding. No one knows the population even or level of business activity — does Ukraine have a GDP apart from European financial aid?

The western Narrative could be reinforced if Russia grows impatient and “gets serious” by attacking civilian population and infrastructure, something the western Narrative insists the Russians have been doing all along. Actually doing it might trigger state collapse and a huge refugee crisis, but it wouldn’t do what Mearsheimer anticipates, undermine the premise of the Narrative that Ukraine can win. No one in the West would have to care if Ukraine can win, if massive refugee flows threatened European frontiers. The clamor for escalation to make Russia stop would rise (per plan presumably).

The Russians need a military intervention that dramatically illustrates the corrupt hollowness and futility of Ukraine’s military efforts. I don’t know what that might look like.

Re: AI. I’m in an interesting position of being an elder millennial (in my early 40s) who has decided mid-career and mid-life to go to law school (I already have a Ph.D. in another field).

It’s certainly been eye-opening the extent to which many of my classmates, especially among the majority who are 26 or younger, rely on AI. But here’s the thing — _it doesn’t really work._ That is to say, if you rely on AI to get through law school, I really do think your life gets harder than just slogging through the reading.

Two examples: cold-calling and exams.

AI does not aid you, and I think actively harms you, in terms of preparing for extemporaneous discourse. The law school practice of cold-calling — where a professor randomly picks out a student and they are responsible for answering whatever the professor wants to ask about that day’s material, is one of the things law students in the majority hate most (I actually like it, but that’s me); it’s also key to note that today, most professors don’t do it totally randomly; some will go through the alphabet of last names in the class, e.g., so you know when yours is coming and can be on it. But some don’t.

AI strikes me as really poorly suited to cold-calling preparation (I don’t use AI at all, nota bene; the Massachusetts Courts recently banned the use of generative AI for all judges and clerks, and good on them). Whereas when you read an actual case, the judge’s individual writing and reasoning and personality stand out: e.g., if you read a decision by Justice Brennan, he is likely sticking up for a societal underdog; if you read a decision by Justice Powell, he usually is looking at the world through corporate, Chamber of Commerce lenses (no surprise to the readers of this blog). Judge Learned Hand of the Second Circuit is likely to give you a careful, well-reasoned, philosophical decision; etc. None of this is true with AI summaries of these individual judge’s (often idiosyncratic and complex!) rulings.

More importantly, there is no guarantee that the AI is right, so if you want to be responsible (and also not humiliated by the professor who _does_ know the case), you should go check the original source. Which is nearly the same as reading the case in the first place, so why not just make your way through it?

What is true for cold-calling is even more true for final exams. A classmate of mine, whom I think is smart and good and like very much, was sharing their panic with me 20 minutes before our final exam in a heavy, reading-dense law course, because they had used AI to read all the cases for them the entire semester, and now that the exam was here and AI was not allowed, a moment of crisis had arrived. In this light, it strikes me as just really bad as a study aid if your goal is to actually pass an exam.

For me personally — and I have good friends who use AI and do not wish to cast any aspersions — the problem with AI is precisely that you are, as someone else put it, outsourcing your ability to think. But I like thinking, learning, knowing, questioning, and don’t want to give that away to a (frequently wrong!) machine. Kant said that the motto of the Enlightenment was “Aude sapere!” (Dare to know). The spirit of AI seems to me to be the opposite of that: “don’t worry about all that thinking — an outside machine will do the thinking for you.” I don’t find that offer appealing.

So Counterpunch on the 1st had a fantastic piece by Stephen Eisenman, “Images of Surrender,” see the link here– https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/03/images-of-surrender/

The author’s lengthy historical survey of sculpture, paintings and photos reminds us that Karl Rove did not originate the Imperial Narrative, it was borrowed and redeployed over many centuries.

The opening shot of the deck of the USS Missouri, another battleship in the distance, tallest sailors on the ship as witnesses to emphasize the smallness of the defeated “Japs”, Hirohito wearing Western black Tophat and tails already subsumed under the Victorious West. MacArthur & Co. far better at Narrative than the degraded Trump Org is now.
Skip ahead to June 17 of this year, at Versailles, a brilliant prank by Macron, which shockingly not a single Trump Sycophant prevented, Macron openly smirks while Little Marco glowers down with shame. Bibi and Donald lost bigly in Iran, an Enchilada too big to Microwave to a blackened husk or swallow, signs the US “MOU” capitulation.
Okay, the US is Agreement Incapable, and that MOU is not worth the paper and ink it’s made up of, but “Facts on the Ground” Trump all, something the Zionist Entity at least understands, 21st Century NeoCon losers evidently skipped this lecture. More fool them!!

Trump confesses to press and dignitaries, “That was not easy, I can tell you.” Similarly, yesterday at his big Trump 250th Celebration and Triumph (you can’t have a Triumph without T r u m p.) let slip his envy against “The Greatest Generation” his father’s and mine’s Silent Generation, we Boomers were too late to the party, the GG gets the glory of creating the Anglo-American Hegemon (latter the dog, former the tail now in sharp decline.)

My parents were mainly extremely conformist and concerned never to come across as “different” or “Other”. My grandmother, 2 Great-Aunts and even my mom derided as “Spics” or “Wops” from the 1920s to at least 1960s, I was only teased mildly once in High School and just laughed it off. Laughing at, not with the bigots.

Swarthy Southern Europeans part of US’s rich cultural heritage. Contrary to a certain Hater on IW.N, the stupid PC/ marketing creation of idiotic trivia like “LatinX” comes out of an actual Identity long established here in the Western Hemisphere, we are not a “made-up cultural group,” any more than Jerry Seinfeld is correct when he echoes Golda Meir, “There are NO Palestinians, and never were.” (Herodotus a vicious anti-Semite many Millenia ago? Sorry, no evidence to support that.)

The identity exists, marketers, Capitalists and Vampires come in to try to monetize it. Think of how when Black Lives Matter got big, c. 2018, the TV commercials featured far more blacks than previously, gotta capture those consumer $$$.

Back to Surrender, he does such a great job of curating the long historical record:
Trajan’s Victory Column, beat the “barbari”, they must bend the knee to achieve Clementia.

Skip ahead to 1634, The Surrender of Sevilla by the Muslim Governor, Espanya begins its ascent, becomes the Iberian Peninsula’s dominant power, copies from its Portuguese neighbors Sea Power and expeditions for loot, booty. Just prior to 1492, when the Castilian King Fernando marries the Sevillan Isabella, the Moors and Judeos can be expelled to create a Papist Dynasty.

The Moros return south across the Mediterranean to North Africa. Los Judeos appeal to their Ashkenazi (Turkic, heavily Khazar though not exclusively) brethren in Northern Europe, told to Fuck off, we want nothing to do with you. And, historical irony, are taken in by the Ottomans, who realize the value of a Multicultural Society based on their long history, know that Jews will bring culture, ingenuity and best of all economic gains to the Ottoman Empire. Bienvenido! (I only know the Spanish for Wilkommen, not the Turkic.)

I spent nearly an entire day inside the Prado early this Century, and my 2 strongest memories are of seeing Las Meninas, restored & in good shape, and from only 3 feet away the Bosch Triptych, “El Jardin de las Delicias”, The Garden of Delights. What a surprise, Southern Empires can subsume northern, white places like the Niederlands, and steal their art, just as the Brits plundered the Greeks and countless other early civilizations.

I didn’t come across Velazquez’s 1635 Surrender at Breda, may have seen it in passing, but Harper’s a couple years back did a lengthy article about Diego’s travels, influences and subsequent appeal and influence. Not a subtle piece of work, but an effective one.
In the next painting selected, of Gerome’s Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau, the White Supremacist trope emerges proudly. Not just the Asiatics groveling on the exquisite carpet, but the Frenche “maitresses” on stage right, all dressed in white elegant gowns, a throne, etc. Again, message not in the least subtle.
In 1918, Fuhrer humiliated by the French, all quite temporary, the shoe will be on the other foot by 1940, I assume the June pic is with those Vichy-allied clowns, in any case just a blip. For awhile I had a Spanish-French discussion group with a few friends in Minnesota. We once asked our compadre’s French wife why she chose to learn German as a 2nd language rather than Spanish, a fairly close cognate language to Spanish. “Those bastards always invade, best to be prepared.” Makes sense.

I was young and watched the US defeat and the helicopters loaded with hangers’-on escaping Saigon in ’75. Glad to see it. 2 more pics worth commentary:

Donald, Marco (again looks glum) and former Netanyahu (not -yi, 1 typo in a great piece) #2 Susie Wiles, “monitoring” their failed war from Mar-a-Lardo, at least they’re proud of the 150 schoolchildren, teachers etc. killed. History as farce, per Marx. This reminds me, Napoleon III called “The Sphinx of the Tuileries,” as he was the opposite of Trump, per Mark Twain’s advice, he kept his mouth shut so as not to reveal his stupidity. Still ousted by the French people. Too bad the US has no such mechanisms to kick the unfit to the curb.

And the contemporary piece-de-resistance, ICE Racial Purity Goons starting to stand down in Minneapolis after the savage, unwarranted killing of Renee Good, a “good” victim, white mother of 4 taking a child to school. (Most on this site would agree, one loud naysayer, but hey, that’s diversity, ideological diversity just like racial diversity should be welcomed, imho.)

The most Repellent Killer Pigs for ICE, the androgynous Midget Bovino (“bovine” ancestors? Bestiality?) and melting-face Kristi Noem (too many surgeries) forced out.

Even the Trumpers can have some level of shame, the Donald at least reads the polls if nothing else. Minneapolis tried by Fire and Bullets, prevailed, the most prominent martyrs, Good and Pretti immortalized (for a generation, maybe longer) by a Bruce Springsteen song. Earned it, but a shame they aren’t still alive.

Mr. Wilder,

“ I suspect Ukraine as a state and political society is crumbling but I don’t know how anyone could inspect or report the details of that crumbling, so how could I or anyone really know.*

Attritional warfare erodes societies as a whole, and tactical battlefield outcomes have little impact on their outcomes.

Probably the best indicators of the strain on both combatant societies is that while deaths in Russia exceed births by about 1.6 to one, deaths in Ukraine exceed births by 3-1.

Russia’s birth-death gap isn’t unusual for Europe. Ukraine’s is, very much so.

Russia has net immigration. Ukraine has net emigration.

Both combatants are degrading, there’s no question, however, Ukraine is spiraling down at about twice the rate Russia is.

bruce wilder, kudos to you for your reality-based commentary, granular research, and persistence in talking past and rebutting the Banderist Troll, something I can barely be bothered with at this point. I’m not saying you’re “talking past” to deprecate what you’re doing, you are speaking adult words from a much higher level of “facticity” (this is evidently not a neologism, no spell check warning) that will not even penetrate the Troll’s brain, he is blinded by Hate and Rage.

We differ strongly in 2 areas on which I have called out, hope you make your way back to a more Universalist take and can get beyond allowing your Shadow to create fantasies that certain cultures or subcultures (Gender fluid people) are per se “Evil” and to be attacked, or to hear denials that they even exist. I won’t bother today, but are you aware that nearly 20% of the US populace are either Hispanic or Latino (some minor distinctions between the 2, won’t dilate at the moment). Or that Latin American + Caribbean people are 8.6% of the world population, about double the amount of the US’s population. I’ll bring the receipts later, but I’m using credible sources. 8.6% of the world’s population ain’t nothing, and barring environmental collapse the 662 million Hispanic + Latino people now will grow to 752 million by 2056, projected.

Egoculexegonos, thank you and nice to see a compadre here on the site. Todo viene a salir mal si depiende en el AI, la estupidez electronica. No hay duda.

Your musings sobre la musica atrae mi attencion. My taste is extremely eclectic, ranges from classic era Glam, T. Rex, Bowie in the Spiders from Mars era, The New York Dolls, even Gary Glitter, to extreme Punk, won’t even list, too much to say, Goth like Bauhaus, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, off-kilter weird stuff like Pop-O-Pies’ “The Catholics are Attacking,” & “Fascists Eat Donuts,” Hardcore, Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized,” they shred like Metal. Some time back I linked to my take on the most beautiful Iberian song ever shared on the site, Brazilian, not Spanish, Regina Ellis and Tom Jobin’s “Aguas de Marzo,” gentle but beautiful, very sensual. Oh, Os Mutantes, saw them live in SF in 2018, a young Colombian American friend of mine, J. Cardenas, then a DJ got me free tickets. Os Mutantes decades old now, ‘Net says they are “psychedelic rock,” well a bit more than that, brought Motown to Brazil. Threatened by the Fascist regime, had to leave Brazil for years until it was safe to return . . . Kate Bush!! All the bands listed on LCD Sound System’s “Losing My Edge”, including Gil Scott Heron, who once eye-locked with me as a 17-year old at my University, I was shocked and slightly flattered. I was smoking pot with friends, wondered if he disapproved? Years later learned about his drug problems, that was clearly the furthest thing from whatever he was thinking. Otis Redding!! So many geniuses. Mojo Nixon skewering every stupid, bourgeois conservative and Lib Sacred Cow in our stupid society like an only slightly cracked street preacher. Iggy Pop, who wrote No Fun first, Malcolm McClaren likely for the Sex Pistols, but Iggy does a great cover. Recently watching the musical recreation of the Manchester scene, film 24 Hour Party People, with Steve Koogan playing a promoter, Tony something, of TV fame in the region c. 1976– Everything from Joy Division, then their 2nd iteration after Ian Curtis’ suicide, Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio (takes patience, not as poppy or accessible as say, Devo), the Buzzcocks.

Punk scene in Manchester dangerous in the period covered, once the Skinhead Army decided to attend a Factory Records’ show, okay with Ian Curtis until he had an epileptic fit onstage, and they started attacking the audience.

Music a great lake to dive deeper and deeper into every time!!

In Keats’ day, the Poets were the unacknowledged Legislators of the World (real legislators of ideas and beauty, not servants of Power or the State), maybe today Musicians are such. (And I exclude Taylor Swift, she ain’t a musician, she is an AI creation pure and insubstantial.) Que se divertes nadando por el Oceano mas alla de lo conocido de la musica!!

Matt Taibbi, at one time a courageous journalist and Free Speech Advocate, in his late career sold out to the South African Apartheid Clyde Elon Musk for the Twitter Files.

He produced some slop that only emphasized government repression of the Right; nothing directed to shut down criticism of the Zionist Genocide (that’d be “anti-Semitism”), nothing suppressing stuff from the Left, when the UniParty is clear that the Left is the main and only “threat” to our beautiful “system”, amright? Brihana Joy Gray most prominent in calling him out.

He stupidly launched a purported anti-SLAPP suit, it went down the toilet. I’ll just share the link, clearly the Judge very smart, calls out all the Taibbi misperceptions, distortions, confusion of metaphors with objective facts etc.

I’m using the Nelson Laugh a lot recently. See here– https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/matt-taibbi-loses-his-vexatious-slapp-suit-as-judge-explains-what-a-metaphor-means/?__cf_chl_f_tk=_xpL3hKU7SurcNKvoZO01eG5Y1tVJlYnDlZx0yCgTEc-1783297870-1.0.1.1-VLxhQKIAulVXcdOfdFFWGZ5VBx0x76fLTmikkuCLcBc

Ha-Hahhh!! Bye, Matt. Go crawl under a rock. Even dry-drunk Zionist fanatic Walter Kirn has spurned you. Do you still have Michael Tracey? Character determines destiny. Your character now fully known, shone, blown.

I had a wise friend and master who taught me well the Tao of food as well as the ways of the world in terms of universal tradition.
And there were lessons learned and mysteries revealed and still revealing and repeating these decades later.
Learned and living knowledge—hands on beyond that ubiquitous Artificial thang, which can and will cook your goose, but I’ve got something better.
Let me whisper in your ear.
Duck fat.
It’s the future of the world.

Re:AI

Swamp Yankee is testifying to what a lot of people see: that AI is being applied in ways that short-circuit necessary organic development of human knowledge and skills.

I never went to law school, but I did study economics. A lot of economics involves parroting “analyses” you really are not expected to understand in the sense of working thru the underlying logic as opposed to the rhetoric. Most academic or professional economists have an at best shaky grasp on the analytic logic of theory or statistical empiricism. A cleverly phrased or intuitively appealing assertion can become fashionable without much critical examination. Hand-waving dominates reason. Humans do economics badly as a rule; I can only imagine that AI will assist in even greater incompetence.

I am yet to see any evidence that LLM or generative AI can even do reason, as in check for analytic consistency. I am not using it to refactor code, so I wouldn’t necessarily know. One thing I have done is compare Wikipedia to Grokipedia articles on random historical and economics topics.

Wikipedia articles can get jumbled up when successive volunteers insert information randomly gleaned from conveniently online sources. Grokipedia, though it may have started from a copy of the Wikipedia article, will organize the prose topically and seem more coherent. Grok tends to be verbose. But it does not check for logical consistency and verifies reluctantly.

I read through an article on the Midlothian Campaign of Gladstone. Grok’s article has a good outline and so on, but doesn’t seem to know for sure when an important figure in the story became a Lord or who exactly the incumbent MP was — two different people are mentioned in different parts of the article.

I would not trust an LLM to do math.

Now . . . this is sad and I am not laughing.

Remember that “mini-billionaire” ( only a few-couple billion dollars) who was devoting his entire life to taking vast amounts of different supplements and doing all kinds of aging-reversal and/or aging stop-in-place things? He had made himself his own test subject and had bravely gone where no man had gone before.

Well, it turns out he has a rare, strange and incurable auto-immune disease. Did he give it to himself with all this self-experimentation? I don’t know. Maybe the little reddit-post will definitively say.

“Bryan Johnson got Autoimmune Disease”
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1uoo0ci/bryan_johnson_got_autoimmune_disease/

@bruce wilder: “Maybe there is something in the Russian “personality” that especially provokes hostility.”
Or their vast booty, more likely.

People try to find what joy they can, even in joyless circumstances.

“Football brings a brief reprieve as fans in Gaza unite for Egypt”
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1urfn7b/football_brings_a_brief_reprieve_as_fans_in_gaza/