Gain Of Function

47 Gain of Function 13 Comments

From the documents about Ukrainian biolabs;

The new documents reveal two dozen biological labs in Ukraine. The map reveals that a lab in Odessa, a city with a population of more than one million people, has a lab with stored biological weapons from the defunct Soviet Union biological weapons program. Viruses in storage include anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, New Castles Disease, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, the Plague, and Rickettsia, the documents show. […]

[T]he newly declassified documents reveal that some of the labs conduct gain-of-function research, research that makes pathogens more infectious or deadly in the lab. Most biodefense experts consider gain-of-function research to be “dual use.” It has civilian applications, but could it could also be weaponized for more nefarious applications in the wrong hands. Many of the labs have permits for handing “especially dangerous pathogens.” One project involved highly pathogenic avian influenza, a virus with a 50% fatality rate.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Alternative Subsidy Little Known Facts 11 Comments

Doomberg: The media can’t seem to explain the collapse in China’s domestic solar installations.

We often quip that the best proof that something was predictable is having predicted it. While not totally accurate—dumb luck and broken clocks are still things—nailing a complex call in the face of cocksure counter-commentary is anything but unsatisfying. It also confirms that our mental model is still operative in the way that matters most: it remains useful for further predictions.

In August of 2025, we produced a bonus presentation for paying subscribers titled Cocktail Party Trivia: Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends and Family (available here). In it, we elaborated extensively on our current mental model in which a working understanding of electric grids became a tool for predicting when the forced introduction of intermittent renewables would cause things to break. Some 31 minutes in, we warned that China’s solar miracle was reaching the limits of feasibility, and that the breakneck pace of new construction would soon have to slow.

At the time, China was on pace to smash global records for new solar installations, and legacy media outlets were falling over themselves to heap praise on Beijing’s bold climate leadership. On social media, the Silicon Valley crowd was lamenting how the US was desperately falling behind its main competitor in the artificial intelligence race, hooked on “yesterday’s fuels” like natural gas. US President Donald Trump came under withering criticism and was pounded for his efforts to save the domestic coal industry. That China still relies on coal for the vast majority of its electricity was rarely mentioned.

Imagine our lack of surprise, then, when we opened our weekend edition of the Financial Times to find Adam Tooze’s latest lament, “Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness”…

Cocktail Party Trivia (35 minutes): Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends & Family

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 19 Comments

@heynavtoor

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the “tails of the distribution.” The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that.

Indeed.

You Don’t Hate The Media Nearly Enough

Media Rocket Man 15 Comments

Update.

Keir Starmer’s Britain

Insufferable Twits Military 28 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the Defence Secretary has resigned from Cabinet: “you have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats”.

Update;

Despite his departure, Healey asked defence ministers to stay in their posts.

But a few hours later, Armed Forces Minister Al Carns followed suit, saying the plan wasn’t “built for the threat we face” and wasn’t “sufficiently funded”.

The latest departures mean seven ministers have now stepped down from the government in the past month.

And another resignation: The pressure on Keir Starmer is intensifying by the hour.

Good comment by reader Orson here.

The UK Defence Secretary resigned not because Starmer refuses to appropriate the necessary funds. He resigned because the UK doesn’t have the funds to appropriate. The UK is very much like Canada in that it voluntarily dissolved industry. Instead they focussed on service and entitlement programs (their National Healthcare one of them). They voluntarily moved money away from Defence costs (including not making the threshold on NATO contributions). Now, the US, who has been making up the difference on all these European countries has drawn a line, and none of the EU countries are in a financial position to accomodate their own defense. It’s an embarrassment. It’s a hard lesson. And, it’s not being corrected because the “leader” of the UK realizes that to make significant changes negates all the “entitlement gifts” used by his Political party faction to bribe the electorate.

Art Of The Fail

Art Of The Deal New Governor 48 Comments

Reuters;

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has captured global attention by championing the idea of an alliance of mid-level economic powers that would operate beyond President Donald Trump’s increasingly protectionist United States.

Yet Carney’s push to lessen dependence on the U.S. is colliding with a stubborn reality: access to American markets remains a crucial part of Canada’s appeal to prospective trading partners, according to interviews with a dozen government officials and business leaders.

Since winning election in April 2025, Carney’s team has led four trade missions, including two to Asia, seeking foreign investment in mining, engineering and infrastructure projects. A fifth, the largest so far, is headed ​to Japan later this month.

But Canadian officials acknowledge that the main draw for many potential trading partners is the prospect of gaining tariff-free access to the world’s largest market through Canada’s participation in ‌the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade ‌agreement.

Carney regularly touts Canada’s preferential access to the U.S. market, noting that more than 85% of bilateral trade remains tariff-free.

“That (USMCA deal) has been kind ​of a baseline of our investment attraction message,” said a top Canadian government official who requested anonymity to speak frankly.

ICYMI: “I’m not looking to renew it (USMCA).”

Thursday On Turtle Island

Turtle Island 9 Comments

The Democratic Party’s America:    The anti-democratic left.    Victor Davis Hanson – Stop destroying civilization.    Andrew Klavan – Women.

Conman Carney’s Canada:    The Muslim lobby.    Somali Heritage Month.    Professional protestors.

Stories You Won’t Find At Carney’s CBC:    Don’t upset the Muslims.    Roger Watson – Look back in anger.    Paul Joseph Watson – She found out.    Meanwhile in Norway.

And at the Bee.

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