Quam-Core processor

 I know nothing about quantum computing, but this thingie seems very advanced. Israeli, of course. Not Palestinian from Gaza. 

Germany's Mirror

 
Spiegel's editor writes an opinion piece:

There is no reason why 500 million Europeans shouldn’t be able to defend themselves against Russia on their own.

But that changes nothing about the fundamental shift that has taken place: Trump and his cronies have shattered the world order that has guaranteed security and prosperity in Europe and the United States since 1945. It was a unique system built on the foundation of an economic and military alliance within which the U.S. held the leadership role, but which depended on close cooperation.

The new U.S. president only sees the burdens this alliance placed on America’s shoulders; he is blind to its benefits. He sees the world through the eyes of a 19th-century imperialist: In his view, the world’s great powers should divide the world among themselves and demand complete subservience from their vassals. But Europe cannot succumb to this worldview. It must now rediscover its economic and military strength to survive in this new world – one defined by the naked pursuit of power.

Germany is very important. Spiegel is well-informed (it was the first to accuse China of the COVID epidemic). Not long ago its industry outcompeted all. Is Germany homecoming to its historical obsession, the "pursuit of power"? 

Memories from Budapest 1956

These very sounds bring to my memory the shooting on Almasy Ter where we lived during the October revolution. 

Nightmare

 
Around 1 AM, I watched X about the massacres of Alawis in Syria. The Muslim rebels made the prisoners walk on four and bark like dogs. Then I heard dry shots and they were dead. The worst short was a rebel with a big knife, asking three little boys who they wanted to be slaughtered first. The boys, were terrorized, pointed at each other, and waited for death. Before waking up I felt myself in a room with other children and my mother, and many Gilette razors and knives flying around, I was terrorized as I imagined the flying razors cutting cleanly into the muscles. As far as I remember, I never had nightmares. I am changing.

Selling to China

 
Colonial Mexico's silver poured into China because the Spanish could not sell anything else there. For 300 years, the British tried to trade with China, but they too had to pay with silver, which caused a recession in all of Europe. Only by selling opium (an illegal drug) was the balance of trade established around 1800. When the Chinese government tried to stop the contraband, the British Navy attacked and conquered China. Today, China is more advanced in every industry, beating the world even in AI and quantum computers. We are, once again, the Western Barbarians. We have nothing to offer them. 

Lent

From USA Today:   Aaron Mockrish, right, receives ashes at the Florida Capitol from Rev. Bill Trexler during Ash Wednesday on March 5, 2025.

I never heard about this ceremony. I am learning new things every day.

Litigation Dismissed

Legal filings reveal that Trump’s Department of Justice agreed to dismiss a long-running lawsuit against the operators of a synthetic rubber plant in Reserve, Louisiana, allegedly responsible for the cancer risk rates in the surrounding Black neighborhoods.

The litigation was filed under the Biden administration in February 2023 to curb the plant’s chloroprene emissions, a likely human carcinogen. It had targeted both the current operator, the Japanese firm Denka, and its previous owner, the American chemical giant DuPont, and formed a central piece of the former administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts to address environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. (From The Guardian)

It reminds me of the Floyd lead in the water "national emergency", caused by incompetent operators in that Black town. That was in Barack Obama's times. 

Confidence in the principal study (NTP, 1998) is judged to be high as it was a well-designed study using two test species (rats and mice) with 50 animals per dose group.  (I am not proposing that there was absolutely no risk, but that it was extremely small. No epidemiological studies of human cancer were mentioned in the studies. The EPA only considers the risk for the more extreme cases, say for sickly newborns. The cost of protection against the probably inexistent risk was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It would have been cheaper to resettle the community.)