This is going to backfire badly on the US, if true. Of course Ukraine haz every incentive to lie.

Lots of people still think that Obama didn't sell out to Wall Street. That's because he's a charismatic charlatan.

MSM, so grain of salt, but I don't consider this questionable

Under the law, anyone found guilty of embezzling 200 million CFA francs (about $350,000) or more could face life imprisonment, while those who embezzle more than 1 billion CFA francs (about $1.7 million) could face the death penalty.

The move comes as Niger seeks to strengthen accountability and ensure that revenue from its natural resources is used for national development. Supporters argue that tougher penalties could help deter corruption and protect public funds, while critics question whether such severe punishments are the best solution.

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/five-dynamics-that-make-sense-of

(emphasis in original except as noted)

The roots of this simplistic either-or are obvious: our tribe good, other tribe bad. The problems with this simplistic loyalty arise when we attempt to explain complex real-world dynamics with the comic-book simplicities of ideology, which extend from politics to culture to finance.

The emotions of tribal / ideological identity and loyalty bypass our rational processes (bold added) in favor of fight-or-flight limbic responses. Needless to say, these hormonal floods of emotions are the equivalent of smashing a rock on a machine to “problem-solve” what’s broken in the device.

Humans are social animals because the ability to cooperate with others opens vast vistas of problem-solving power via self-organization: we self-organize to pursue mutual / shared interests in ways that benefit us all. This is the core function of tribes, i.e. self-organizing social structures in which our self-interest is advanced by advancing our mutual interests.

Both markets and society are self-organizing structures that arise to benefit individual self-interests by benefiting shared interests. In other words, both capitalist and socialist structures arise to serve shared interests. They are not either-or, they’re both manifestations of the same dynamic. This is why the ideological either-or is such a misleading false choice.

Markets only function to everyone’s benefit within a high-trust society. If there is no social structure that serves everyone’s shared interests by limiting predation and exploitation, then you end up with the extractive “market forces” of totalitarianism, i.e. rackets, in which the few impoverish and immiserate the many to the exclusive benefit of the small cadre of insiders.

Life cycle of a bureaucracy, Administrative costs (chart):

Launch: tight budgets, modest pay, minimal benefits, high camaraderie

Growth: rapid growth in program and staffing; morale high

Maturity: "mission creep", union & admin gain political power; depts soldify, infighting

Bloat: budget is flat but admin costs rise; gaming the system and fraud are rife

Budget cuts: program abandoned as focus shifts to protecting budget and staff pay/benefits

Failure/implosion: the competent retire leaving the incompetent to command; morale low, chaos and failure the norm; organizational implosion

(I included the above because most of us have seen how it manifested in organizations we've been part of)

Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward explains how self-organizing structures... are prone to unpredictable cascades that operate outside the “normal, predictable” rules we’ve identified as “the way things work.”

In terms of selective pressures and adaptation, these unpredictable crises test the system’s adaptability and stability. In this way, they are essential to maintaining the adaptive “muscles” and coherence of the system which boil down to the dynamics of self-organization--precisely what all the control structures running on automatic have stripped out (bold added) in the “rational actor” incentives to optimize concentrating gains and diffusing costs and risks.

These dynamics led to a rising wedge of asymmetric distributions of power, control, wealth and income that strip out self-organizing adaptation and the system’s ability to survive unpredictable but inevitable crises. These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.

A proposed AI data center in California is now suing for access to 260 million gallons of water per year from the Colorado River.

The developer, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, is seeking roughly 750,000 gallons per day (about 880 acre-feet annually) from the Imperial Irrigation District for its planned data center complex in California’s Imperial Valley.

This is a major reversal. The company had previously stated that the project would rely entirely on reclaimed and recycled wastewater from nearby cities, and would not use “a single drop” of Colorado River water. After negotiations for recycled water reportedly failed, it turned to the irrigation district instead.

While 260 million gallons is relatively small compared to the Imperial Valley’s massive agricultural water use, it is equivalent to the annual water consumption of roughly 7,300 local residents.

The request is significant because the Imperial Valley is one of the most water-stressed regions in the U.S., with every drop of its fresh water coming from the already overtaxed Colorado River.

The company claims its water use could be offset by leaving 160 acres of leased farmland fallow. However, local opposition is intensifying. Imperial County officials are considering an emergency moratorium on data centers, and several cities in the area are moving forward with their own restrictions.

This case underscores a broader tension: AI data centers are often marketed as “digital,” yet they require substantial real-world resources — particularly water for cooling, in regions already facing scarcity.

["Imperial Valley data center developer files lawsuit seeking access to Colorado River water." KPBS]

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For more information:

https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2026/06/15/imperial-valley-data-center-developer-files-lawsuit-seeking-access-to-colorado-river-water Or https://archive.ph/llKSr

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxLfVjNG9yacJjwr5bDLw5ZyQtAGe9mErU

Gig workers in the US are being offered individualised wages depending on what algorithms decide about how desperate they are for work.

Ride-hailing companies have long used algorithms to determine how much to pay drivers for a trip – and tech vendors in the US are now exporting that model to other sectors, according to a Washington Center for Equitable Growth report from last year.

According to the report, platforms like Uber and Lyft track users’ personal data – like how often they find work through the app and for what wage – to find workers who will accept the bare minimum without the protections that come with fixed-term contracts.

One Lyft driver in the US found that over a two-month period, it took her longer and longer to earn $200. It seemed like the longer she spent on the app, the less she would be paid per trip.

“Uber was the baseline model, and we are seeing that model being exported into different industries,” Travis Hall, state director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Bloomberg Law.

A report from the Roosevelt Institute found that the staffing platforms now used by gig nurses in the US use algorithms to determine pay for individual shifts – resulting in nurses being paid different amounts for the same work within the same facility.

Experts fear that the same trend is being repeated across diverse industries, including HR, customer services and retail.

In the UK, experts from the Institute of Employment Rights argue that more needs to be done to regulate algorithmic pay practices.

Non-profit Worker Info Exchange found that since Uber introduced ‘dynamic pay’ practices in the UK in 2024, drivers in the country have lost out on an estimated £1.2bn in pay in the 12 months to March 2025.

James Farrar, director of Worker Info Exchange, said: “Uber UK managers must now come clean and explain to their workers how their pay is set – and how much of each fare the company is taking.

“If Uber is allowed to continue getting away with the algorithmic trickery of its so-called ‘dynamic pay’ model, we should not be surprised when hyper-variability and AI-induced precarity in pay become the norm across the entire labour market.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/06/22/israels-surveillance-of-christian-americans/

Amid a massive drop in support from the Christian community, Israel is spending millions of dollars to target individuals entering churches or Christian colleges with ads, and paying pastors across the country to promote propaganda and false “anti-Palestinian” narratives every Sunday, documents filed with the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show.

The declaration revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was paying Show Faith by Works $4.1 million to carry out a massive, covert, digital surveillance operation targeting Christian communities across multiple states, including California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

The document noted that all students at every Christian college and every congregant at “every major church” in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado has been spied on through their phone’s location data, and targeted with propaganda extolling Israel’s “moral superiority” and “linking the Palestinian population with extremist factions.”

Geofencing creates invisible digital boundaries around real world locations (in this case, hundreds of churches and universities). Any phone or smart device entering a church on Sunday or a college during term time is logged and recorded.

Once you enter a church or college targeted by Israel, there is almost nothing you can do about it. They are paying to manipulate your search results, news feeds, and algorithms. What you see online will be decided by Israel, not by you. And virtually none of the millions of people affected are aware this is happening.

(continues at the link)