As the contemporary Byzantine historian Doukas said of r/neoliberal’s fall, “O r/neoliberal, r/neoliberal, head of all subreddits! Where are your wonks, where are your Friedman flairs, where are your effortposts! Shudder… O Prosperity! And you too, O Mods, heave a heavy sigh at the utter abandonment of globalism. For the succs are no longer at the gates, they are in the taco trucks!”...

The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe. 

Starlink connectivity at speeds of up to 160 km/h is being restored.

Removing Starshield’s speed limit entirely is now critical for Ukraine’s defense.

Thank you, @elonmusk. We hope for your continued support.

SS: Canada is 5 banks, 3 telcos, 2 airlines, 200000 mining companies, 2 clothing companies, 7 energy companies, 3 grocery stores in a trench coat.

The U.S. may have intentionally withheld early warnings this week of Russian strikes on Ukraine, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine "received no advance warning from our partners" when Russia launched a ballistic missile barrage at Kyiv and other locations early Tuesday.

The sources said American officials told their Ukrainian counterparts the system used to detect Russian missile launches had failed due to "bad weather." Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic, told CBS News they did not believe the excuse, and they accused the U.S. instead of "playing" with the system.

When Russia launched another wave of ballistic missiles around 3 a.m. local time on Wednesday, the sources said the U.S. early warning system appeared to be working again.

The sources said the U.S. had failed to provide intelligence on Russian ballistic missile launches during one previous instance earlier this year, citing the need to focus more resources on the Middle East.

Zelenskyy said Wednesday that Russia launched more than 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones and loitering munitions during the overnight attack, primarily targeting energy and critical infrastructure in Kyiv and Kharkiv, killing six people and leaving some 600,000 without power.

President Trump, asked Tuesday if the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, said: "No, we haven't. We help them, but we're really helping them get to a final answer. We want the war ended."

"We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end, so we're working with them and with Russia on getting the war to end," Mr. Trump said.

Russia started launching strikes soon after Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire."

Earlier this week, the Trump administration threatened to stop sharing intelligence and to halt the purchase of U.S.-made weapons by European allies for Ukraine via the PURL procurement system if Ukraine did not stop deep strikes against Russian energy infrastructure, a European and a Ukrainian official told CBS News.

Ukraine relies on U.S. intelligence for both offensive and defensive military capabilities, including data from satellites and aircraft sensors used to identify launches of Russian aircraft and missiles. Sources familiar with the matter told CBS News the U.S. had not ceased intelligence sharing with Ukraine overall — calling the lack of a warning about this week's attacks a specific incident.

Ukrainian officials and soldiers also told CBS News that Ukraine's military had started experiencing difficulties Tuesday night and Wednesday morning with Starlink, the satellite technology owned by SpaceX's Elon Musk.

In an interview with CBS News earlier this year, Ukraine's former minister of defense Mykhailo Fedorov said Starlink was one of Ukraine's most important technologies, as it allows Ukrainian soldiers to communicate and carry out strikes in environments saturated by electronic warfare.

"On the night of 14 October, without warning the Defence Forces, SpaceX unilaterally restricted the operation of Starshield terminals ('military package') while in motion. This complicates UAV missions, particularly interceptors and middle-strike drones, and reduces capabilities for frontline logistics, reconnaissance and signal relay," sources in Ukraine's Ministry of Defense told CBS News. "At present, the Ministry of Defence is in contact with the United States, SpaceX and NATO partners, is collecting data from all units, and backup communication channels are being tested and put into use."

The Starlink restrictions were first reported by the Kyiv Independent and the Financial Times. CBS News has reached out to SpaceX, the White House, and the Pentagon for comment.

On Wednesday, as President Zelenskyy arrived in the United Kingdom to meet with Prime Minister Andy Burnham and other officials, he called for a U.S. response to the recent Russian strikes.

"The strike was absolutely deliberate and indicative in its scale — such a demonstrative disrespect from Russia toward America has never happened before. Russia does not consider the statements of the President of America to be strong," he wrote on X. "We ask America and EVERYONE in the world who does not close their eyes to reality to respond, and to respond harshly."

Submission Statement: India’s annual wind power installations are set to more than double by 2030 as the country steps up efforts to meet climate targets and secure round-the-clock electricity supplies, according to a top turbine maker.

About 8 gigawatts of wind capacity is expected to be installed this year, surpassing the record 6.3 gigawatts built in 2025, when India ranked second globally behind China for new additions, said Girish Tanti, executive vice chairman of Suzlon Energy Ltd. Annual installations could climb to as much as 14 gigawatts by 2030.

Wind power is becoming increasingly important as India seeks to meet peak electricity demand after sunset. Although the country’s green power capacity has quadrupled since 2014, wind installations have lagged far behind solar. That has left the grid struggling to absorb excess daytime generation, forcing solar curtailments, while creating shortfalls in the night.

The mismatch is prompting power buyers to favor projects that combine solar and wind generation with energy storage, helping deliver more reliable supplies from the clean power fleet. The integration helps utilize excess solar capacity to charge storage systems during the day and promises round-the-clock supplies at lower prices than a new coal plant, recent project bids have shown.

Renewable power, especially wind, is vulnerable to weather fluctuations, but blending the clean sources can help overcome that problem, Tanti said.

I consider myself a neoliberal but I’m pretty left wing (pro-business regulation, LGBT rights, welfare), so I was surprised to see this when googling the term.

Archive Link

The president said the “American dream is back.” Rural Arizonans don’t think so.

Click the article above to see the graphs.

The voters who supported Kamala Harris for president have become markedly more cynical toward America’s elites since 2024, according to the latest populism survey from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist. In ISMA’s previous survey in August 2024, before the presidential election, 59% of those planning to vote for Harris strongly agreed that at least one of six American elites had harmed people like them in pursuit of the elite’s “own selfish interests.” In June of this year, 69% of those who said they voted for her did, a 10-point rise and the only statistically significant shift Harris voters displayed among the four populist attitudes the survey tracks.

On that attitude, the former Harris coalition now rivals Trump voters, 65% of whom say the same, even if the two groups target the various elites at different rates. But the rise has not made more of these Harris voters populists. ISMA counts as populist anyone who holds at least three of four characteristic attitudes. By that measure, 15% of Harris voters qualified in both surveys, well below the current 25% among Trump voters, whose populist contingent has itself, ISMA found, thinned from 36% in 2024. What has grown among Harris voters is a grievance against elites, not the survey’s other three potential populist attitudes: a strong attachment to a political leader, an othering of social outgroups, or a tolerance for the leader’s exceeding limits on his or her power. It is combinations of the four elements that give populism a destructive, authoritarian character.

One note on terminology: “Harris voters” are not necessarily strong supporters of Kamala Harris personally; indeed, only 6% expressed a strong personal attachment to her. Rather, the term simply refers to those who voted for Harris in the 2024 presidential election, the vast majority of whom were Democrats.

What Moved and What Didn’t

The table below shows how Harris voters weighed in on the four attitudes in August 2024 and June 2026. Strong attachment to a leader and antipathy toward outgroups barely moved. Anti-elite sentiment rose 10 points, and support for the leader exceeding legal limits fell seven. But both shifts, it turns out, occurred mostly among voters holding two or fewer of the four attitudes—that is, within the nonpopulist majority. As a result, the share of populists stayed flat.

That stability was hardly guaranteed. Democrats have been shut out of power in the House, Senate, and presidency since January 2025—the kind of situation that can inflame populist sentiment in an opposition party. And that did lead to the significant rise of anti-elite feelings among Harris voters. But that is the only one of the four attitudes on which Harris and Trump voters now look alike: 69% versus 65%, respectively—a gap that’s not statistically significant.

To be sure, this is not the only area of concern with Harris voters. A majority of them, 57%, would accept her exceeding the legal limits on presidential power. That is not a comfortable number for anyone who values constitutional constraints. And while 57% is down from 64% in 2024, the same attitude is down even further among Trump voters—to 49%, from 63%.

Still, even the August 2024 survey indicated that Harris voters were, on the whole, open to accepting renewed limits on executive power. And since then, their tolerance for a leader’s overreach has noticeably declined. Anti-elite sentiment has done the opposite.

Anger at Elites, Aimed Differently

The survey asks, for each of six elites, whether the group has “often harmed the interests of Americans like me in pursuit of their own selfish interests.” The six are national elected officials, unelected federal officials, Christian religious leaders, and elites in the media, in universities and the entertainment industry, and in business and finance. Strongly agreeing about one or more counted as holding the anti-elite attitude.

Some of the rise wasn’t surprising. Given who now runs Washington, Harris voters had partisan reasons to sour on national political and bureaucratic elites, and they have (see table below). But they became more likely to condemn each of the six elites, and every increase but the small one for universities and entertainment was statistically significant.

On political and bureaucratic elites, Harris voters (47% and 37%) are now statistically indistinguishable from Trump voters (43% and 38%). Elsewhere the camps diverge sharply, as the next table shows: Trump voters are far more likely to criticize the media or the universities and the entertainment industry; Harris voters, business or Christian religious elites.

The sentiment’s breadth has grown too. The average Harris voter now expresses strong anti-elite feeling toward 2.2 of the six elites, up from 1.6 in 2024 and about the same as the 2.1 among Trump voters.

Anti-Elite, Not Authoritarian

In ISMA’s model, populism fuses anger at elites with attachment to a leader, hostility toward outgroups, and tolerance for the leader’s breaking legal limits to get his or her way. Among Trump voters, these attitudes are spread more broadly than among Harris voters, for whom unique attachment to their presidential candidate is rare and antipathy toward outgroups is decidedly a minority view. As a result, there are still about five populists in the Trump camp for every three in the Harris camp, even with the decline in the percentage of populists among Trump voters since 2024.

So the distinction is real but not guaranteed. As the congressional election season nears its end, with a presidential one to follow, the many nonpopulist Democratic voters who feel strongly about the failures of America’s elites face a choice: to support norms, structures, and incentives that strengthen the liberal system and curb elite abuses regardless of party, or to take the populist path of letting their leaders weaken legal safeguards to punish and exclude the current elites and the voters who empowered them. Much depends on their decision.

Ukrainian troops have been caught off guard by restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems that disrupted frontline operations, while Kyiv received no warning from its partners of a Russian missile attack on its energy facilities for the second day running, according to Ukrainian officials.

Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian drone units began experiencing signal failures at speeds above 160kph, disrupting several missions early on Wednesday morning, according to military personnel and senior Ukrainian officials.

“Logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited,” one senior Ukrainian official familiar with the situation on the front told the FT. Ukraine’s middle strikes target Russian military supply lines and logistics. The limitations came with “no warning, just in the middle of the night”, the official said.

Ukrainian defence ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said long-range drone operations were also impacted. “It is clear that this action is not coincidental and is related to the current political situation,” he wrote on Telegram.

The Starlink disruption comes as Kyiv faces escalating Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure and mounting pressure from US President Donald Trump to make concessions to Moscow to end the war.

Since last week, Trump has stepped up pressure on Ukraine to stop its drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and threatened to cut off vital intelligence sharing. Trump has fumed over the rise in global diesel prices, for which he blames Ukraine, but which analysts have said is largely caused by the US war with Iran.

The lack of advance warning about Russia’s missile strikes, alongside the unexpected restrictions on Starlink terminals, has heightened concerns in Kyiv about the reliability of US support after Trump’s threats.

Trump on Wednesday denied that Washington had cut off intelligence sharing. “No, we haven’t. We help them,” he said. “We are helping them, we are sharing intel. We want the war to end.”

The 7th Rapid Response Corps of Ukraine’s air assault forces on the southeastern front said the restrictions impacted Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite network made for defence, governments and intelligence agencies. 

“This concerns the Starshield package — the so-called military package, which previously had no data transmission speed limits,” it wrote on the unit’s Telegram channel. “These changes directly affected the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that use Starlink for control during flight.”

The unit said its pilot noticed during drone flights, “the connection could disappear for 10–20 seconds even at speeds of 110–120kph.” “The aircraft continued to move, but such interruptions complicated their control.”

The low speed presented several problems, including difficulties during drone take-offs and making them vulnerable to Russian air defences. “Slower targets become more vulnerable to enemy strikes,” the unit also noted. It said “some missions had to be cancelled” due to the Starlink restrictions.

Some Ukrainian officials speculated that SpaceX, which operated Starlink and the many thousands of terminals used in Ukraine by its military and civilians, introduced the restrictions at the request of the Trump administration after Musk posted messages critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week.

“Zelensky has gone too far,” he wrote in a post on his X social media platform in response to a White House video of Trump saying that he had told Zelenskyy: “You can do whatever you want to Russia, but don’t hit the refineries because that’s a world problem.”

“And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel. He better damn well stop,” Trump said in the video.

A Ukrainian presidential adviser said military officials were trying to resolve the issue through the co-ordination centre in Wiesbaden, Germany, which serves as the hub for Ukraine’s military liaison with western partners.

The White House, SpaceX and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on X, Musk’s social media platform: “Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you.” 

Zelenskyy, who arrived in London on Wednesday morning where he is set to meet Prime Minister Andy Burnham, said on the eve of his trip that Ukraine had “once again” received “no early warning from our partners” before Russian ballistic missiles struck the capital’s energy infrastructure, including one of the city’s main combined heat and energy power plants.

“Our systems detected these missiles only when they were already virtually on approach to Kyiv,” he said.

Zelenskyy said Russian forces launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones against energy and critical infrastructure overnight and into the morning, “the very infrastructure covered by the ceasefire announced by the American President”. The attacks centred on Kyiv and Kharkiv. Ukraine’s air force said just four missiles were intercepted.

The president said there was “significant damage to facilities and equipment” at 26 facilities in Ukraine’s power system and four in the oil and gas sector. At least 600,000 people were without electricity on Wednesday morning. Kyiv authorities reported that at least two people were killed and more than 20 others injured in the attack.

“The strike was entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale,” Zelenskyy said. “Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect towards the United States.”

He called on Washington to respond to the attacks, saying it was important the US “understood who is responsible for this war continuing” and urging partners to impose tighter sanctions on Moscow.

“Ukraine supported an energy ceasefire. Russia is targeting yet another power plant and the lives of our people.”

This article by the FT describes the career accomplishments of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer.

This article is interesting because it also goes into detail on Navi Pillay's childhood in Apartheid South Africa.

The most interesting piece of this article for me was learning that Pillay has described the government in Afghanistan as representing "gender Apartheid". I managed to find this letter she wrote making the argument here: https://passblue.com/2026/03/01/women-and-the-taliban-apartheid-by-another-name

Reading these two articles together is fascinating because it shows the experiences of Apartheid turning into a global international response to Apartheid which will hopefully turn into a future global response to Apartheid-like regimes like in Afghanistan.

Some quick notes on Apartheid and Indian South Africans to make the reading easier:

- Apartheid was the culmination of centuries of racist policies to plunder Black people in South Africa. It focused on segregation and social laws which would essentially lock into place the plunder, exploitation and unfair advantages accumulated by White South Africans under colonialism for the long term.

- Formal Apartheid began in 1948. Navi Pillay was born in 1941 and so she lived through the whole thing from start to finish.

- Indian South Africans were also discriminated against during Apartheid and the pre-Apartheid era.

- The Indian Community in South Africa was an important part of the Anti-Apartheid struggle. Mohandas Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress which later entered association with the ANC (effectively merging). Besides Gandhi there are other heroes who are well known and revered in South Africa, but not well known elsewhere. An example is Ahmed Kathrada. In government, Indians have always been part of cabinet and held significant ministries. The first Chief Justice appointed by Mandela was Indian, Ismail Mahomed. Given that they are less than 2% of the population, Indians in SA have really done well and been very well represented politically and economically since the end of Apartheid. But overseas the story of Indian South Africans is not well known.

- Something you might find interesting: In SA the word Black has several meanings. Sometimes it means "of indigenous African heritage" as used in the rest of the world and would not include Indians, whose ancestors are from Asia. Other times it just means "non-White" or "those who were excluded under Apartheid". Especially in political contexts, it is common to refer to Indians as Black. This is why in her essay on gender Apartheid, Pillay refers to herself as a Black woman. This would be entirely unsurprising to a South African reader and they would not even notice it.

So the relevance of these two articles is to explore what it means for an Indian woman who lived through all of Apartheid, who is a global champion for human rights and an accomplished lawyer to determine that the Taliban is practising Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan.

!ping CONTAINERS

second container ship sinking iirc? Continued impacts on oil markets, etc. tldr it’s still a shitshow.

Denmark now projected to grow the fastest in European Union at 3.7%, Poland right behind it at 3.4%. Africa and Asia pretty solid, Middle East got bit unlucky year

Peak.