Komunitas
lemmy.deadca.de
Despite the downsides of F-Droid, there’s one thing they provide that other stores like Accrescent simply can’t. F-Droid provides APK builds with the exact source used for the build available. There’s a lot of trust involved, but this trust is in a single entity, rather than random developers. F-Droid has existed for a long time without adding malicious code to builds, so when they say “this source code produces this APK”, they have years of history doing exactly that to back their claim. A random app developer has no such trust built up. Stores like Accrescent, even if you download only FOSS apps, trust the app developer with building apps. It’s less prone to one massive takeover, but APKs built by random devs are much harder to verify and check for malicious code than the source code. If F-Droid is taken over, it should be noticed relatively quickly, but affects everyone using F-Droid. If an app on Accrescent bundles malware, only users of that app are affected, but it may go unnoticed for a much longer time.
Komunitas
lemmy.ca
I don’t hate physical nor digital media. I don’t hate streaming or services which provide access to streamed content. I hate shitty business people. Those who think that paying once for something isn’t good enough. This is exactly that. You paid for the media. You should continue to have uninterrupted access to that content. The whole idea of ownership is getting muddied by all this “pay for access” and “pay for license” nonsense. It’s one thing of you’re paying to use a service and that service licenses things. Sure. Like Netflix licensing access to a show. End users of Netflix don’t need to buy the show again from Netflix, they are paying for access to the platform and can use the Netflix license to watch the show. You’re paying for a service, that service has content that’s licensed, you’re not paying for the content. My problem is that licenses are not ownership of the thing that they license. They’re not supposed to be. Even back in the days of DVD, movies had a small section of the package that was a “proof of purchase” (usually a small tearaway section inside the case) which physically represented the license for that copy of that media. You had a physical copy and a license all in one. You can have a license and no copy of the licensed content, and you can have licensed content without a license, most notably in the case of downloading a program or something and having that program but needing to activate it with a license before it works. In the past licenses were often included with or implied by ownership of a thing. You bought a record, and having the record itself implied that you had a license to own that copy of the content on that record. Over time, especially with digital content, the concept of license ownership and licensed content have been decoupled. Having a copy of… Say, Windows, does not and should not imply you have a license to use the windows operating system. This is the same idea as applied to online media. All of those people have a license to the content, but no access to the licensed content now. Get fucked I guess. I think it’s foolish to buy a license for a thing, and not keep a copy of that thing. While I think that’s foolish, it’s exactly what I do all the time with games in my steam library. The only reason I trust steam with it is because of their long history and track record. I have licenses to a bunch of games, they have the games on their servers and I can download those games and license them through steam in an entirely seamless process. It’s not the smartest choice but it’s a decision I made long ago that I’ve stuck to. Bluntly, I won’t buy games on other platforms because I don’t want to risk losing access to the content that I paid for the license to use. So I avoid epic Games and other online games libraries for that reason (though, shout out to gog, mainly for giving me the ability to transfer my license to steam when I buy something). The biggest issue I see is that media doesn’t have a universal license authorization method. With software and games, there are license keys. You get a set of seemingly random numbers (and sometimes letters too) which are a valid license for that content. It’s transferrable. With media, no such system exists, and licenses granted by a company usually are not transferable in part due to having no system to validate the license with the new service. You bought it, you have a license with x company for it, but y company doesn’t even know what you’re talking about, and won’t accept or otherwise recognise the license from company x for the media, and grant you the access you paid for to that media. Because of this, I’ve been extremely hesitant to buy any digital media. I’ll get services from a streaming service like Apple music, YouTube music, Spotify, etc for my listening, or YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, HBO+, etc for access to their licensed content that they have licenses for, but I hesitate to buy any non-physical media otherwise. If I’m relying on an online service to maintain my license and deliver the licensed content to me, I’m pretty much not going to do it unless I’m very desperate to access that content (which is rare, of its ever happened at all). Until we can get a valid license transfer system from the media conglomerates, I’m just going to stick to physical media, or get it in a way that I don’t have to worry about licensing. I have a source online for buying and downloading music. An online music store, if you will. What it does is allow me to buy albums and download them. No streaming, no muss, no fuss. Pick your format, download, transaction complete. Enjoy. I chose this because they offered the content in flac, frequently better than CD quality (I’m usually looking for studio quality, 16/24 bit, 48khz or better). Once I have the files and my receipt, everything is done. I legally have the content and the receipt is archived in my email as my proof that I purchased it and hold a license to have the media. I’m not aware of anything similar for video media, and I stopped looking for one. I will buy the physical media for now. There’s no way I’m going to hand over my money to any company for any licensed content that I can’t have a copy of. All that being said, these corporate types are dicks. They’ve taken people’s trust in them to maintain their license and access to the licensed content, and wiped their ass with it. They don’t deserve your money, and they certainly don’t deserve your trust. Boycott them until a crunchyroll competitor emerges.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Already got it downloaded. It’s only like 100 - 150 gigabytes or something like that. Got it on my PC, my laptop, and my external hard drive. I don’t trust the powers that be to keep it intact anymore so I’d rather have my own copy, even if outdated.
Komunitas
lemy.lol
I’ve chosen an outrageous option and just started buying books from used book stores, scanning library books and downloading some to my jellyfin. If I can’t trust the internet I’m just getting off it. If I couldn’t trust a restaurant to not give me food poisoning I’d stop going.
Komunitas
aussie.zone
This is one area where Apple has it pretty right. A Mac will do somethings when ‘asleep’ like download emails and texts. It also can broadcast its location if the ‘Find Me’ function is on. If it’s plugged into power then backups will also run, and background app updates will happen. It does this in a low power mode, so it won’t get hot enough to need fans. It’s worked flawlessly for 20 years. Meanwhile all our PCs are set to ‘never sleep’ and just get shutdown when not in use. I never trust a PC laptop to wake successfully from sleep just by closing the lid.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
The ELN Christmas ceasefire 2025 offers respite for Colombians amid denunciations of U.S. naval aggression and regional militarization in the Caribbean. Related: 10-Year Colombia Defense Budget 2025 Plan: $12.7 Billion to Counter Armed Violence and Restore State Presence comunicado-2112-25Download In a significant gesture of seasonal goodwill, Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) has declared a unilateral Christmas ceasefire across the country, effective from 12:00 a.m. on December 24, 2025, through 12:00 a.m. on January 3, 2026. The insurgent group announced the pause in hostilities via an official communiqué, extending a message of peace to the Colombian people and reaffirming its longstanding tradition of halting military operations during the holiday season. “This ceasefire is a gift of tranquility to the Colombian people during this sacred time of family, reflection, and hope,” the ELN stated, emphasizing that the measure aims to allow communities—especially in rural and conflict-affected regions—to celebrate without fear of violence. The announcement comes amid heightened tensions in Colombia’s northern departments, where the ELN recently carried out a series of attacks on military bases and police stations in Cesar and Norte de Santander. These actions, the group explained, were a direct response to what it describes as an escalating U.S.-led military offensive in the Caribbean, which it claims threatens the sovereignty of nations across Latin America. ELN Christmas Ceasefire 2025: A Pause for Peace Amid Imperial Aggression While offering peace for the holidays, the ELN used its communiqué to denounce the presence of U.S. naval forces in the Caribbean Sea, which it accuses of conducting “acts of piracy” against civilian vessels. According to the group, U.S. warships have sunk more than 30 boats and caused loss of life in international waters near Colombia under the guise of counter-narcotics operations—a claim echoing recent statements by the Venezuelan and Cuban governments. “The recent surge in armed actions, including our 72-hour armed stoppage, is a necessary response to the warlike aggression promoted by Washington,” the ELN declared. “We will not stand idly by while foreign powers seek to control our seas, plunder our resources, and dictate the fate of our peoples.” The group explicitly rejected the deployment of U.S. troops in the region, framing it as part of a broader imperial strategy to dominate the Global South. In 2025, this strategy has intensified, with the U.S. Southern Command expanding naval patrols, establishing temporary bases on Caribbean islands, and coordinating joint exercises with regional allies—moves that critics argue violate the spirit of the CELAC “Zone of Peace” declaration. Read the Organization of American States’ latest report on peace efforts in Colombia Despite ongoing peace negotiations between the ELN and the government of President Gustavo Petro—widely regarded as the most promising dialogues in decades—the conflict remains volatile. Just days before the ceasefire announcement, a clash in a rural area of Colombia left four soldiers dead, underscoring the fragility of the current truce framework. Yet the ELN’s decision to honor the Christmas pause reflects its commitment to humanitarian principles, even amid distrust. Historically, the group has respected holiday ceasefires, using them not only as acts of goodwill but also as opportunities to engage in internal reflection and community dialogue. This year’s gesture carries added weight, coming at a time when U.S. policy appears increasingly interventionist. Explore UN Office on Colombia’s support for humanitarian ceasefires and peace implementation For many Colombians, especially in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories where state presence is minimal and armed groups exert influence, such pauses are lifelines—windows of safety to travel, trade, and reunite with loved ones. Civil society organizations have welcomed the ELN’s announcement and called on all armed actors, including state forces, to reciprocate the restraint. Geopolitical Context: Latin America’s Sovereignty Under Maritime Siege The ELN Christmas ceasefire 2025 must be understood within a wider regional crisis: the militarization of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts by external powers, primarily the United States. Under the banner of “counternarcotics” and “security cooperation,” Washington has intensified naval operations near Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America—often without the explicit consent of host governments. This posture, critics argue, revives the Monroe Doctrine in modern guise, asserting U.S. dominance over what it deems its “sphere of influence.” The consequences are severe: civilian vessels are boarded, fishermen are detained, and maritime trade routes are surveilled—creating a climate of fear that particularly affects small-scale fishers and coastal communities. Moreover, the timing is critical. As Colombia advances its “Total Peace” policy under President Petro—a strategy seeking simultaneous negotiations with all remaining armed groups—external interference risks derailing domestic progress. The ELN’s linkage of its armed actions to U.S. naval conduct suggests that regional peace cannot be achieved without confronting imperial overreach. Globally, this dynamic reflects a growing rift between the Global North and South. While Western institutions frame military deployments as “stability operations,” many Global South nations view them as neo-colonial intrusions that undermine self-determination. In Latin America, where memories of CIA-backed coups and banana wars remain vivid, such deployments trigger deep historical trauma. Review the CELAC Havana Declaration on Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace For Colombia—a nation scarred by six decades of internal conflict—the path to peace is both internal and geopolitical. The ELN’s ceasefire offers a moment of respite, but lasting tranquility requires more than goodwill; it demands respect for sovereignty, demilitarization of seas, and an end to foreign intervention. As church bells ring across the Andes and families gather in villages from Chocó to La Guajira, the ELN’s message is clear: peace is possible, but only if empire steps back. From teleSUR English via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Short answer: no, there’s not a way to check easily. Long answer: don’t download form untrusted sources, if the crack is fully published on GitHub you can trust it more easily if the code is freely available and vetted by people who know what to look for.
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
The more interesting question is, how many downloads do they get? So without those numbers, I see this as largely FUD. It doesn’t seem like trusted repos are getting infiltrated, so this sounds like a nothing burger. It’s good that Docker removed them, but without actual evidence of harm, it just seems cosmetic. As of this writing, I saw one comment: I get all kinds flack for not using docker containers and this is why I don’t. 20% is 1 in 5 containers, that cannot be trusted. I have no desire to to build my own Docker containers. I would much rather spin up a VM. CPU, RAM and disk space are cheap these days. - Throwdown This entirely misses the point of Docker. Yeah, 1 in 5 containers have malware, but how likely are you to be mislead into using one of those containers? I only pull containers based on some official project. For example, if I want to host nextcloud, there’s an “official” image for that. For CI, I generally use images from “official” sources (e.g. this one from Rust for Rust projects). Then again, I’m a developer, but I don’t see anything here about Docker itself being a problem, and the vast majority of users will probably just follow links from some blog to accomplish some task, they won’t be downloading random images from the Docker hub…
Komunitas
beehaw.org
For personal reference and for the lazy (i think it’s complete, did it in a hurry in a break): Notion & Google Docs Alternatives: Capacities, Fibery, Tana, Nuclino Zoom Alternatives: Whereby, Jitsi Meet, Senfcall, Vowel Slack Alternatives: Mattermost, Element (Matrix), Rocket.Chat Gmail & Google Calendar Alternatives: Proton Mail, Tutanota, Mailbox.org, Infomaniak Notes & Markdown Docs: Anytype, Obsidian, SiYuan Task & Project Management: Fibery, Nuclino I note that a good portion of these are commercial products, frankly I’d trust MUCH more a FOSS product than a commercial one after so damn many over the years have betrayed us all in the search for profit, if you’re gonna migrate to something you may as well go for the FOSS ones that are less in danger of enshittification (not a guarantee but far less of a chance since a fork kills all the walls around a walled garden pretty quickly), even if the FOSS product is not as polished.
Komunitas
lemmy.zip
cross-posted from : https://news.abolish.capital/post/16129 The US is once again trying to gets its chlorinated fowl into UK markets, a strategy linked to their push for chlorinated chicken exports. Reportedly, it’s happening because of the collapse of an equally bad (if not worse) AI tech deal: This confirms it. The US is using the collapsed tech/AI deal to force Britain to accept chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef. Food standards are the leverage point and the red line. You can’t align with US tech power and stay aligned with Europe.… pic.twitter.com/Ru37rLPH80 — Liz Webster (@LizWebsterSBF) December 29, 2025 ‘Farm to fork’ As Farming UKhave reported, British regulators are against chlorinated chicken because it’s at odds with the UK’s ‘farm to fork’ ethos. The UK is supposed to prioritise hygiene and welfare standards, the Americans, meanwhile, make up for laxer standards with an end-of-process chlorine rinse. As we’ve reported before, the UK is far from perfect when it comes to welfare standards. However, accepting chlorinated chicken would be a step back; it means there’s work to be done getting our own house in order. This is all happening now because the US-UK technology deal has faltered. In part, it’s due to the Americans’ position that the UK’s Online Safety Act will have a detrimental impact on their tech sector. We have voiced our own criticisms of the Online Safety Act, with Steve Topple writing in July this year: When both the left and the right are united in their disdain for a piece of legislation, you know there must be something up. So, enter the Online Safety Act: a law so riddled with corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism that you’d be forgiven for agreeing with Nigel Farage. But exactly what are the problems with this Tory written, Labour-allowed piece of legislation? He added: While the Online Safety Act was sold as a child‑safety milestone, critics argue it’s structurally incapable of delivering that outcome. Campaigners from organisations including Barnardo’s, the Molly Rose Foundation and CARE UK warn that loopholes around algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, live‑streaming, and age verification mean the legislation “will not bring about the changes that children need and deserve”. Rather than curtail harmful exposure, the law risks becoming symbolic rather than effective. Since enforcement began on 25 July, age verification—via ID scans, facial estimation, or mobile verification—has triggered over five million age checks per day, mostly on porn sites. But this in turn has driven a rapid surge in VPN downloads as users seek to bypass access controls, shifting minors toward less‑regulated parts of the internet and raising their exposure to greater harms rather than reducing it. Laws like the Online Safety Act ultimately benefit tech giants, but they also introduce additional layers of oversight. The tech overlords would prefer to get all of the benefits with none of the downsides, which is why they’ve worked so hard to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration. US President Donald Trump invited the world’s richest billionaire oligarchs to sit at the center of his inauguration. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Google CEO Sundar Pichai symbolically sat with Trump’s cabinet picks. A dozen billionaires will be in the Trump admin. pic.twitter.com/9CHzpmFAEU — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 20, 2025 Given that US tech oligarchs have attained ungodly levels of power since 2020, we shouldn’t want the UK to be more enmeshed with them, especially on this chlorinated chicken issue. Recent events have demonstrated the power that they have and why they choose to wield it: Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against @RoKhanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax. https://t.co/pCh170Oa3v — Krystal Ball (@krystalball) December 28, 2025 Farmers rights As Farming UKfurther note: For British farmers, the stakes extend beyond poultry. The US is also pushing for greater access for hormone-treated beef, another area where UK standards are stricter than those in America. Farming unions have warned that accepting such imports would weaken consumer trust in British food and risk eroding the premium attached to UK produce at home and abroad. Sir Keir has previously treated food standards as a red line, rebuffing Mr Trump’s demands to allow chlorinated chicken in exchange for lower tariffs. Since Labour returned to power, right-wing politicians have been making a big show of supporting farmers and opposing chlorinated chicken. This is ironic given that they didn’t seem to give a shit when the Tories were in power. As journalist Jon Burke recently highlighted, other agriculture deals have gone incredibly poorly for us. I see the @Telegraph is now reporting on the Australian trade deal disaster for which it campaigned. Nobody, and I mean *nobody*, has betrayed this country like the libertarian wreckers who lied to the public about ‘Brexit benefits’. pic.twitter.com/fps85uTWaE — Jon Burke is mainly posting on Bluesky (@jonburkeUK) December 27, 2025 The Australian trade deal that @trussliz struck – despite extensive warnings from civil servants – is turning out to be a disaster for British farmers, you say? If only we could have foretold this in some way… https://t.co/aTlh0B3Bwv pic.twitter.com/0JJN5VQYCU — Jon Burke is mainly posting on Bluesky (@jonburkeUK) December 27, 2025 The White House stated that our refusal to accept chlorinated chicken and hormone-pumped beef is an obstacle to them removing the tariffs that Trump introduced earlier this year. As Farming UK noted: Any decision to relax those rules would carry significant political and economic consequences. Farming leaders argue it would not only threaten livelihoods in the poultry and beef sectors but also set a precedent for weakening food standards more broadly, potentially reshaping the future of British agriculture in trade negotiations yet to come. Chicken Starmer clearly wants to give the impression that he’s achieved something. As such, there’s a worry that he’ll accept whatever deal is on the table — possibly even one involving chlorinated chicken — so that he can act like he got a win. This is why it’s important to be clear that no one will accept capitulation to Trump as a victory. Featured image via BBC By Willem Moore From Canary via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Thanks to all our readers for a great year. A quick note before the story: Ryan Grim was on Tim Dillon’s final show of 2025, discussing all our Epstein revelations. You can watch that here. And if you haven’t made your end-of-year tax-deductible gifts yet, you can support our journalism here: Support DSN With an EOY Gift Undated photo of Netanyahu and Barak in front of an Iron Dome battery, taken from Barak’s private emails. On December 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $35 billion deal to sell natural gas to Egypt in what officials describe as the largest energy export agreement in Israel’s history. The natural gas will be produced from Leviathan, a massive field west of Haifa. “On this day,” Netanyahu wrote in a statement that day, the third day of Hanukkah, “we’ve brought another jug of oil to the nation of Israel. But this time, the flame will burn not just for eight days, but for decades to come.” The gas export permit for Egypt came after months of delays and behind-the-scenes disputes between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Washington. The decision is expected to reinforce the Camp David peace framework between Egypt and Israel—an arrangement strained by the Gaza genocide—while cementing Israel’s emergence as a major natural gas supplier in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The deal has been more than a decade in the making—and one unlikely individual played a small, but essential role in laying its groundwork: Jeffrey Epstein. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak consulted extensively with Epstein on financial deals around Leviathan for years, as Barak searched for international backers for Leviathan’s development. Epstein’s role in Israel’s gas politics contradicts the image, advanced in a recent New York Times profile, of Epstein as a confidence man who was viewed with skepticism by financial and political elites. In fact, Epstein advised financial giant JPMorgan Chase Bank on several global energy and logistics deals after the 2008 financial crisis: unsealed documents from a recent U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit show Epstein engaged with British MP Peter Mandelson regarding the acquisition of natural gas assets from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010, and he arranged a 2011 meeting between JPMorgan executive Jes Staley and Karim Wade, son of then-president of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade, to discuss a large crude oil trade. (Later, Epstein tried to help with developing Senegal’s offshore gas as well.) Hacked emails from Barak’s inbox reveal that Epstein shared a critical interest with JPMorgan executives in the early 2010s: development of Israel’s offshore gas fields. Private emails from Barak’s Gmail account show that the former Israeli prime minister was courting foreign investors for the Leviathan gas field, while Epstein provided close guidance behind the scenes. The documents were posted by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit whistleblower and file-sharing website. Drop Site is partnering with Jmail to make the DDOS emails available to the public. During that period, the development of Israel’s natural gas resources was transforming into an urgent political priority. In February 2011, the same week Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak fell from power, the region was gripped by supply shocks from attacks on the Arab Gas Pipeline by militants in Sinai. The Leviathan field, discovered in December 2010, was estimated to hold roughly half a trillion cubic meters of recoverable reserves, enough to supply the energy demands of Israel and its neighbors for decades, and transform the energy politics of the Eastern Mediterranean. At this pivotal moment in the early months of Leviathan’s history, Epstein also helped secure a meeting between Netanyahu and senior JPMorgan leadership, a meeting which was referenced in documents from the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit and previously reported by the Daily Beast. The reason for the meeting, and the nature of Epstein’s involvement, was not disclosed in the court documents, which are heavily redacted. But, whether by chance or by design, Netanyahu agreed to the meeting on March 23, 2011—the same day the Knesset Finance Committee voted on a major tax increase on natural gas exports, a key hurdle to beginning commercial development of Leviathan. Israel’s offshore gas ambitions did not progress smoothly. By 2014, amid a brutal war in Gaza, Israeli energy tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva was facing an antitrust case against his company, Delek Group, which owned the Leviathan field together with Texas-based Noble Energy (since acquired by Chevron). Epstein coached Barak on credibly presenting himself as an expert on energy, as Barak searched for friendly partners in Europe, Russia, and the U.S. to help Tshuva’s group become compliant with Israel’s anti-monopoly law and push the Leviathan project forward. Netanyahu ultimately forced a compromise, allowing the Delek–Noble consortium to control Leviathan, the large field for foreign exports, while selling off its stake in Tamar, a smaller field for domestic supply. As the new gas framework was being finalized, Netanyahu’s son, Yair, was captured on tape at a Tel Aviv strip club in late 2015, drunkenly confessing that it was a corrupt bargain. In the recording, Yair told Nir Maimon, son of gas magnate Koby Maimon, who became the controlling interest in Tamar, “My dad made an awesome deal for your dad, bro. He fought, fought in the Knesset for this.” He pressed Maimon to give him some cash to pay a stripper, “Bro, my dad now arranged a $20 billion show for you and you can’t spot me [400 shekels]?” Although Epstein stopped banking with JPMorgan in 2013, additional leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account suggest elite business leaders in the United Arab Emirates continued to view Epstein as having high-level ties to the bank for years afterward. During a 2015 conference in Kazakhstan, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, head of Dubai Ports World, was angling for a meeting with Israeli economist Jacob Frenkel, then-chairman of JPMorgan’s international business, who had also been involved in planning the 2011 Netanyahu meeting. After the antitrust dispute was finally resolved in 2016, JPMorgan financed a multi-billion-dollar plan to develop Leviathan. JPMorgan declined to comment for this story. This report on Epstein’s background in the Leviathan saga is part of an ongoing series investigating his connections to the intelligence communities in both Israel and the U.S. Support Drop Site’s Reporting on Epstein “Surprisee Suprise” After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the second time on sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019, JPMorgan initiated an internal probe, “Project Jeep,” to investigate its risk exposure from Epstein’s criminal activities. The project produced a 22-page summary of the bank’s communications with Epstein, including a bulleted list of excerpts from emails between Epstein and Jes Staley, former head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, dating back to 2008. Staley met Epstein in the mid-1990s, at the offices of The Limited, when Epstein was working as chief financial adviser to fashion mogul Leslie Wexner. When the New York Times Magazine reported that Staley credited Epstein for setting up the meeting with Netanyahu in 2011, the bank’s spokesman told the paper that JPMorgan “neither needed nor sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.” The bank’s statement appears to contradict its own analysis in “Project Jeep,” which includes several examples of Epstein introducing senior bank leadership to government leaders in the UK, Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Epstein “appear[ed] to maintain relationships with a number of senior business executives and senior government officials globally,” JPMorgan’s attorneys wrote. On March 23, 2011, Roy Navon (head of JPMorgan’s Israel office) sent an email to Staley and Jacob Frenkel, writing, “Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.” Staley forwarded the email to Epstein with a note: “Thanks.” Epstein replied: “surprisee suprise.” Redacted excerpt from U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase, August 15, 2023. Staley received confirmation of the Netanyahu meeting on the same day as a key vote being held in the Knesset Finance Committee on the “Sheshinski” bill—named for an advisory committee headed by an esteemed Israeli economist—that would increase the Israeli government’s tax on offshore oil and gas profits. Netanyahu framed the gas tax as an effort to balance the needs of Israeli citizens, who were facing rising energy costs, with the demands of the field’s investors, who were threatening to pull the plug on the project. At the eleventh hour, lawmakers were attempting to add language restricting the government’s ability to raise taxes again in the future—but the objection was dropped after the Finance Minister promised Netanyahu would commit to “tax stability” at the next cabinet meeting. Major international banks were already positioning around the Leviathan project: Barclays and HSBC—two of JPMorgan’s rivals—were the exclusive financial advisers for the Leviathan investors’ smaller field, Tamar, and had loaned nearly $400 million the previous year. At around the same time Staley received Navon’s email confirming a meeting with Netanyahu, the minutes for the marathon Sheshinski session show lawmakers were debating whether “financing expenses” would be recognized in calculating the new levy—a decision that would have direct implications for how investors and lenders modeled cash flows from the Leviathan project. Epstein’s emails with Jes Staley, March 23, 2011. After the successful Sheshinski vote, Netanyahu phoned Finance Committee chair MK Moshe Gafni to congratulate him, calling the law “among the most important for Israel’s economy.” One week later, on March 30, the Sheshinski law was passed, lifting the state’s take on natural gas profits to more than 50 percent. Subscribe now “Really a Lucky Guy” Leviathan sits on one of today’s central geopolitical fault lines: Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. Israeli gas could diversify Europe’s supplies by bringing new, non-Russian gas into European markets. Russia’s state-backed energy group, Gazprom, made a bid for ownership in Leviathan in 2012, but it was rebuffed by the field’s American owners from Noble Energy. Nevertheless, in February 2013, Delek and Noble’s smaller gas field, Tamar, arranged an exclusive deal with Gazprom to offtake Israeli liquefied natural gas and market it in Asia — a deal some participants hoped to parlay into a future role in Leviathan as well. With U.S.-Russia competition in the background, Epstein emailed Barak on August 1, 2013 to advise him about challenges to American investment in the Leviathan field’s development. Netanyahu’s cabinet had decided to allocate 40 percent of its gas reserves for foreign exports, but a judge threatened to halt the decision, due to a pending lawsuit over whether the cabinet had the authority. Epstein reacted to the news: “Supreme Court President Asher Grunis said on Thursday that he is inclined to issue an injunction banning natural gas export until the court ruled on the matter. im not sure an amercian [sic] energy co, will do well in israel.” Barak replied to Epstein’s warning, “U R probably right but I would like to check it somehow.” Emails between Epstein and Barak, August 1, 2013. Epstein and Barak’s private discussions about the future of Leviathan came as Israeli antitrust regulators, faced with the enormous size of the new Leviathan field, were threatening to break up Delek and Noble’s monopoly on Israel’s large gas fields—an outcome the group was eager to get ahead of by enlisting Barak’s help. On January 16, 2014, according to a confidential memo written by Barak, Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of Delek Group, visited Barak’s home to ask for help finding a “major player” to acquire rights to Leviathan production for the Israeli domestic energy market, in anticipation of an anti-monopoly order aimed at breaking up Tshuva’s holdings. The regulator’s concern stemmed from past contracts, from before the Leviathan discovery, that had locked in high prices for Israeli consumers. The same day as Tshuva’s visit, Barak sent an urgent email to Epstein, asking to speak on the phone. The next day, Barak contacted his associates at Renova Group, the conglomerate owned by Russian-Israeli billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Barak had a lucrative consulting agreement with Renova to source energy, mining, and real estate opportunities. As Drop Site previously reported, Barak and Epstein had leveraged the relationship with Renova in another strategic initiative for Israel in 2013, a diplomatic backchannel to Vladimir Putin during the Syrian civil war. In a memo sent to Renova on January 17, 2014, Barak explained that Israel’s anti-monopoly regulator planned to break Tshuva’s control over Israel’s gas by forcing the Leviathan consortium to bring in a new partner for domestic energy supply. “The Problem is that Mr.Tshuva is the major share holder in both Yam Thetis AND Tamar (really a lucky guy),” Barak wrote, referring to two other gas fields controlled by Delek and its partners. Excerpt of confidential memo from Ehud Barak to Renova Group regarding Leviathan gas field (January 2014). The full memo is available here: Leviathan Proposal57.7KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload Barak offered Renova marketing rights to roughly one-eighth of Leviathan’s reserves, but only for domestic sales inside Israel. Renova would also take on the obligation to drill new production wells, build an offshore platform, and lay a dedicated underwater pipeline to shore. The proposal promised long-term contracts to Israel’s largest electric utility, an attractive security for borrowing money. Renova’s representative, Yakov Tesis, wrote back on January 21, “it makes no sense for Renova to accept the offer,” as Renova would be taking on huge risk to see the project succeed, without any real ownership of the gas reserves. Barak tried to sweeten the deal by showing Renova a memorandum of understanding from Woodside Energy Group, an Australian firm, that valued the field at over $10 billion, but Renova declined again. (Woodside walked away soon after.) Meanwhile, Barak pursued American private equity interests, in spite of Epstein’s earlier warning. In February of 2014, Barak shopped the Leviathan deal to U.S. private equity giant Texas Pacific Group (TPG), an occasional collaborator with Leon Black’s firm Apollo Global Management. TPG partner Chris Ortega replied that, while the Leviathan discovery was a “transformative” moment in Israel’s energy politics, any solution would be capital-intensive and politically fraught and take too long to see a return on investment. Facing another setback, Barak continued to lean on Epstein for support. After an event for Israel’s national emergency response service in Palm Beach two weeks later, Barak wrote to Epstein, “Thx for the time and energy you invest in supporting my efforts to bring home more bread. These exchanges ARE highly valuable for me.” At the time, the two men had been pursuing funding for offensive and defensive cybersecurity startups sourced from Israeli intelligence, including Carbyne, an emergency response platform founded by alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit. Now, Barak reported to Epstein that he was ready to broaden the scope of his efforts, writing, “I’ll try to focus beyond CyberSec on Vik. AZ. Mon. and KAZ.” — referring to opportunities with Vekselberg, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Epstein replied, “im alwys there for you.” Barak reports to Epstein after a Magen David Adom event; he asks Epstein to call a man from Kazakhstan. February 25, 2014. In Barak’s confidential memo to Renova, he had outlined a three-fold plan for Israel’s gas exports from Leviathan. First, regional exports to the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and small amounts to Egypt; second, a gas pipeline to Ceyhan, Turkey for the Turkish market and Europe; and, third, a liquefied natural gas plant in Cyprus to export gas to Asia and the rest of the world. Barak had begun talks with the leadership of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, to partner with the Delek–Noble group in developing Leviathan. Barak hoped to negotiate access for Israeli gas interests into the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), the central and western segments of the Southern Gas Corridor that crossed from Azerbaijan to Italy through Turkey. Avelar, a Swiss-based subsidiary of Renova, operated key gas infrastructure and power utilities in Italy, with alleged links to Italian bureaucrats involved in pipeline politics. Barak pitched SOCAR executives on a deal linking the Leviathan field to the “real power structure” in the TANAP/TAP corridor. The next month, in March, Barak’s wife sent Epstein their travel itinerary for Rome and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Epstein and Barak made plans to speak on the phone before Barak departed. Barak gives Elshad Nassirov (VP of SOCAR) an update on Leviathan. Barak had a $6 million per year consulting agreement with SOCAR for “business development.” February 20, 2014. Epstein, meanwhile, continued to steer Barak’s efforts to establish his reputation as a credible energy dealmaker. As Barak searched for partners for Leviathan, Epstein was not shy about giving harsh criticism to his friend. When energy tycoon Jack Grynberg asked Barak to find a buyer for his oil & gas assets, Barak wanted to loop Renova into the deal. But, first, he shared Grynberg’s financial statements with Epstein and Apollo CEO Leon Black for due diligence. Barak wrote to Epstein deferentially, “Do not hesitate to correct or direct me along the way. I don’t have enough time to learn from my own mistakes. Shabbat Shalom.” A few hours later, Epstein sent a frustrated response: “This is total 100 percent BULLSHIT. I told you on the phone before sending or asking anyone about it you should do your own homework, You cannot be seen to be selling garbage ,frauds. bad things and or trouble. this is a total waste of your time.” Barak scrambled, sending an email to Black’s executive assistant, “I’ve just learnt that the deal I’ve wrote [sic] you about yesterday, namely GADECO/Grynberg Oil Co. Is not on the market any more. I do not have more details but I kindly ask you to delete my emails and do not forward it to Leon or others within Apollo.” Emails between Barak and Epstein, October 24-25, 2014. Email from Barak to an assistant at Apollo, October 25, 2014. “Stolen Gas” Barak and Netanyahu, although political rivals, both wanted to see Leviathan succeed. While Barak tried to shop Leviathan access to overseas investors who could absorb Israel’s regulatory chaos, Netanyahu applied a different lever: turning Leviathan into a national security issue that would override anti-monopoly regulations altogether. When Barak failed to protect Tshuva’s gas monopoly by bringing in a compliant foreign partner, Netanyahu used the prime minister’s office as a blunt instrument to restructure Israel’s energy economy. Shortly after Leviathan’s discovery, in January 2011, Netanyahu warned that offshore gas fields were a “strategic objective that Israel’s enemies will try to undermine” and vowed that “Israel will defend its resources.” By 2014, he had backed a plan for the Israeli government to cover up to half of the security costs for offshore facilities. These were promising signs for money-lenders: in April of 2014, Reuters reported that Tshuva’s company, Delek, was beginning a “road show” to raise up to $2 billion in bonds to fund Leviathan’s development, with underwriting from JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC. The bond offering closed on May 11. Just two months later, on July 8, 2014, Israel began “Operation Protective Edge,” a brutal assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians. At the start of the war, IDF officials were reportedly concerned Hamas might use long-range rockets to threaten offshore gas rigs. A blog post for The Guardian argued that control over gas, particularly the Gaza Marine field, was a key driver of Israeli policy. The author, British journalist Nafeez Ahmed, was fired the next day. (According to Ahmed, a Guardian editor justified the decision stating, “Palestine is not an environment story.”) In his post, Ahmed noted that Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, had argued in a 2007 policy paper that allowing Gaza to develop its own gas would “bankroll terror” by making Hamas rich from gas royalties. Alternatively, if the Palestinian Authority was given control of the gas and Hamas was excluded from gas profits, Ya’alon claimed, Hamas would retaliate by sabotaging Israel and PA gas infrastructure. Ya’alon wrote, “It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.” Gaza’s gas politics impacted Israel’s diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors; Jordan, like Israel, suffered from energy shortages due to attacks on Egyptian pipelines after Mubarak’s fall. In autumn 2014, Jordanian officials announced plans to import gas from both Gaza Marine and Israel’s Leviathan field. The Leviathan announcement immediately sparked domestic backlash and street demonstrations against the purchase of “stolen gas.” In early January 2015, Jordanian media reported Amman put the Leviathan talks on hold after Israel’s antitrust regulator moved against the Delek–Noble consortium. Jordanian officials announced they would proceed with plans to buy gas from Gaza. Amid the fighting in Gaza and protests in Amman, Leviathan was halted. The Leviathan owners, and their financiers, would not sink billions into development without regulatory certainty from the Israeli government. Delek executives threatened international arbitration, and Noble warned it would not invest more until the antitrust dispute was resolved. Barak pressed forward, looking to Asia for answers. In April of 2015, he exchanged emails about an “energy play” with Joshua Hantman, a former advisor to Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. They discussed a Cyprus-based company called Cynergy Group, which was looking to buy up natural gas assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, including a stake in Leviathan. Hantman reported to Barak confidentially that he had garnered interest from South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Choi Kyoung-hwan, as well as members of the president’s office. Hantman wrote, “That is the world’s largest strategic buyer of gas - ready to join us.” Barak wrote back, “Stay in touch and let’s see whether a way to collaborate will emerge.” Leviathan was by now becoming an explosive political conflict in Israel. That spring, Israel’s antitrust commissioner resigned, warning that Netanyahu’s government was prioritizing monopolists and foreign buyers at the expense of Israeli consumers, who would face higher gas prices if the Delek–Noble monopoly was not broken. Economy Minister Aryeh Deri also resigned, under pressure from Netanyahu to exempt the gas framework from antitrust scrutiny. Netanyahu, still the prime minister, stepped in to take over Deri’s economy portfolio. Then, in September, the Russian military officially entered the Syrian civil war, launching airstrikes across Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. With extraordinary leverage, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly offered Netanyahu a deal: Give Gazprom a stake in Leviathan, and, in exchange, Russia would protect the gas fields from Hezbollah and Hamas. Now, the debate in Israel had a new dimension: accepting Gazprom would resolve the deadlock, guarantee the gas field’s security, and instantly turn Israel into an indispensable energy exporter—at the cost of alienating Israel’s allies in the U.S. and Europe. Netanyahu found an opportunity, in one blow, to appease Israel’s neighbors, its NATO allies, and the gas oligarchs at home. In December 2015, after months of Knesset clashes, Netanyahu used an obscure section of the country’s antitrust law to authorize the economy minister (now Netanyahu himself) to permit a gas monopoly on national security grounds. Netanyahu invoked relations with Jordan, Turkey, and Europe to justify the move, signaling to banks and allies that Leviathan was politically protected. “Fake News” After Netanyahu’s move to break the Leviathan deadlock, Amman quietly resumed planning to import gas from Leviathan. In September 2016, Jordan signed a $10 billion deal to import gas from the field, spurring a resumption of protests under the slogan “The Enemy’s Gas is Occupation.” Jordanian officials sealed the Leviathan contract under “state secrets” rules and waited out the protests. Soon after, in November of 2016, the Delek–Noble consortium announced it had secured a $1.75 billion loan from JPMorgan and HSBC for the first phase of Leviathan’s development. The framework that made JPMorgan financing possible transformed Israel’s gas sector into a protected duopoly. Under Netanyahu’s gas framework, Tshuva and his partners retained control of Leviathan, which would become Israel’s main gas export supply, but were forced to sell their stake in the smaller Tamar field—leaving Isramco (linked to Kobi Maimon) as the controlling owner of Israel’s main domestic gas supply. Egypt followed a similar pattern to Jordan: quiet diplomacy, private contracts, and plausible deniability. In 2018, a Cairo-based buyer signed long-term “private-sector” purchase agreements for Tamar and Leviathan gas, and the Leviathan partners bought into the dormant Mubarak-era pipeline that once sent Egyptian gas to Israel, so it could be reversed for exports. The first gas from Leviathan finally began flowing in December 2019. A small amount of this early gas flowed to Egypt through the reversed pipeline. Leviathan gas field. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Earlier that year, on June 26, 2019, Barak announced his intention to challenge Netanyahu in an election slated for that September. Two days later, emails from Epstein’s estate show Epstein messaging Steve Bannon about the election and “dealing with Ehud in Israel.” Bannon praised the decision and asked Epstein whether he could announce himself as Barak’s strategic advisor. Epstein did not live to see the vote—he died in a Manhattan prison cell on August 10, 2019. Despite his death, Epstein’s ghost continues to haunt Israeli politics. In November of 2025, Netanyahu posted, without comment, an article from Jacobin magazine containing Drop Site’s reporting on Epstein’s ties to Barak and Israeli intelligence—implicitly leveraging Epstein’s connection to Barak to detract from his longstanding rival. Netanyahu now openly invokes Epstein to wound Barak, using Epstein’s crimes to deflect attention from his own corruption cases and his responsibility for the genocide in Gaza. “The media channels are not news channels, they are fake channels,” he said in March, “They invite Ehud Barak again and again… with great respect and dignity, but, strangely, he is not asked a single question on [Epstein].” Share Leave a comment From Drop Site News via this RSS feed
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Thanks to all our readers for a great year. A quick note before the story: Ryan Grim was on Tim Dillon’s final show of 2025, discussing all our Epstein revelations. You can watch that here. And if you haven’t made your end-of-year tax-deductible gifts yet, you can support our journalism here: Support DSN With an EOY Gift Undated photo of Netanyahu and Barak in front of an Iron Dome battery, taken from Barak’s private emails. On December 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $35 billion deal to sell natural gas to Egypt in what officials describe as the largest energy export agreement in Israel’s history. The natural gas will be produced from Leviathan, a massive field west of Haifa. “On this day,” Netanyahu wrote in a statement that day, the third day of Hanukkah, “we’ve brought another jug of oil to the nation of Israel. But this time, the flame will burn not just for eight days, but for decades to come.” The gas export permit for Egypt came after months of delays and behind-the-scenes disputes between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Washington. The decision is expected to reinforce the Camp David peace framework between Egypt and Israel—an arrangement strained by the Gaza genocide—while cementing Israel’s emergence as a major natural gas supplier in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The deal has been more than a decade in the making—and one unlikely individual played a small, but essential role in laying its groundwork: Jeffrey Epstein. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak consulted extensively with Epstein on financial deals around Leviathan for years, as Barak searched for international backers for Leviathan’s development. Epstein’s role in Israel’s gas politics contradicts the image, advanced in a recent New York Times profile, of Epstein as a confidence man who was viewed with skepticism by financial and political elites. In fact, Epstein advised financial giant JPMorgan Chase Bank on several global energy and logistics deals after the 2008 financial crisis: unsealed documents from a recent U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit show Epstein engaged with British MP Peter Mandelson regarding the acquisition of natural gas assets from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010, and he arranged a 2011 meeting between JPMorgan executive Jes Staley and Karim Wade, son of then-president of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade, to discuss a large crude oil trade. (Later, Epstein tried to help with developing Senegal’s offshore gas as well.) Hacked emails from Barak’s inbox reveal that Epstein shared a critical interest with JPMorgan executives in the early 2010s: development of Israel’s offshore gas fields. Private emails from Barak’s Gmail account show that the former Israeli prime minister was courting foreign investors for the Leviathan gas field, while Epstein provided close guidance behind the scenes. The documents were posted by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit whistleblower and file-sharing website. Drop Site is partnering with Jmail to make the DDOS emails available to the public. During that period, the development of Israel’s natural gas resources was transforming into an urgent political priority. In February 2011, the same week Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak fell from power, the region was gripped by supply shocks from attacks on the Arab Gas Pipeline by militants in Sinai. The Leviathan field, discovered in December 2010, was estimated to hold roughly half a trillion cubic meters of recoverable reserves, enough to supply the energy demands of Israel and its neighbors for decades, and transform the energy politics of the Eastern Mediterranean. At this pivotal moment in the early months of Leviathan’s history, Epstein also helped secure a meeting between Netanyahu and senior JPMorgan leadership, a meeting which was referenced in documents from the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit and previously reported by the Daily Beast. The reason for the meeting, and the nature of Epstein’s involvement, was not disclosed in the court documents, which are heavily redacted. But, whether by chance or by design, Netanyahu agreed to the meeting on March 23, 2011—the same day the Knesset Finance Committee voted on a major tax increase on natural gas exports, a key hurdle to beginning commercial development of Leviathan. Israel’s offshore gas ambitions did not progress smoothly. By 2014, amid a brutal war in Gaza, Israeli energy tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva was facing an antitrust case against his company, Delek Group, which owned the Leviathan field together with Texas-based Noble Energy (since acquired by Chevron). Epstein coached Barak on credibly presenting himself as an expert on energy, as Barak searched for friendly partners in Europe, Russia, and the U.S. to help Tshuva’s group become compliant with Israel’s anti-monopoly law and push the Leviathan project forward. Netanyahu ultimately forced a compromise, allowing the Delek–Noble consortium to control Leviathan, the large field for foreign exports, while selling off its stake in Tamar, a smaller field for domestic supply. As the new gas framework was being finalized, Netanyahu’s son, Yair, was captured on tape at a Tel Aviv strip club in late 2015, drunkenly confessing that it was a corrupt bargain. In the recording, Yair told Nir Maimon, son of gas magnate Koby Maimon, who became the controlling interest in Tamar, “My dad made an awesome deal for your dad, bro. He fought, fought in the Knesset for this.” He pressed Maimon to give him some cash to pay a stripper, “Bro, my dad now arranged a $20 billion show for you and you can’t spot me [400 shekels]?” Although Epstein stopped banking with JPMorgan in 2013, additional leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account suggest elite business leaders in the United Arab Emirates continued to view Epstein as having high-level ties to the bank for years afterward. During a 2015 conference in Kazakhstan, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, head of Dubai Ports World, was angling for a meeting with Israeli economist Jacob Frenkel, then-chairman of JPMorgan’s international business, who had also been involved in planning the 2011 Netanyahu meeting. After the antitrust dispute was finally resolved in 2016, JPMorgan financed a multi-billion-dollar plan to develop Leviathan. JPMorgan declined to comment for this story. This report on Epstein’s background in the Leviathan saga is part of an ongoing series investigating his connections to the intelligence communities in both Israel and the U.S. Support Drop Site’s Reporting on Epstein “Surprisee Suprise” After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the second time on sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019, JPMorgan initiated an internal probe, “Project Jeep,” to investigate its risk exposure from Epstein’s criminal activities. The project produced a 22-page summary of the bank’s communications with Epstein, including a bulleted list of excerpts from emails between Epstein and Jes Staley, former head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, dating back to 2008. Staley met Epstein in the mid-1990s, at the offices of The Limited, when Epstein was working as chief financial adviser to fashion mogul Leslie Wexner. When the New York Times Magazine reported that Staley credited Epstein for setting up the meeting with Netanyahu in 2011, the bank’s spokesman told the paper that JPMorgan “neither needed nor sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.” The bank’s statement appears to contradict its own analysis in “Project Jeep,” which includes several examples of Epstein introducing senior bank leadership to government leaders in the UK, Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Epstein “appear[ed] to maintain relationships with a number of senior business executives and senior government officials globally,” JPMorgan’s attorneys wrote. On March 23, 2011, Roy Navon (head of JPMorgan’s Israel office) sent an email to Staley and Jacob Frenkel, writing, “Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.” Staley forwarded the email to Epstein with a note: “Thanks.” Epstein replied: “surprisee suprise.” Redacted excerpt from U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase, August 15, 2023. Staley received confirmation of the Netanyahu meeting on the same day as a key vote being held in the Knesset Finance Committee on the “Sheshinski” bill—named for an advisory committee headed by an esteemed Israeli economist—that would increase the Israeli government’s tax on offshore oil and gas profits. Netanyahu framed the gas tax as an effort to balance the needs of Israeli citizens, who were facing rising energy costs, with the demands of the field’s investors, who were threatening to pull the plug on the project. At the eleventh hour, lawmakers were attempting to add language restricting the government’s ability to raise taxes again in the future—but the objection was dropped after the Finance Minister promised Netanyahu would commit to “tax stability” at the next cabinet meeting. Major international banks were already positioning around the Leviathan project: Barclays and HSBC—two of JPMorgan’s rivals—were the exclusive financial advisers for the Leviathan investors’ smaller field, Tamar, and had loaned nearly $400 million the previous year. At around the same time Staley received Navon’s email confirming a meeting with Netanyahu, the minutes for the marathon Sheshinski session show lawmakers were debating whether “financing expenses” would be recognized in calculating the new levy—a decision that would have direct implications for how investors and lenders modeled cash flows from the Leviathan project. Epstein’s emails with Jes Staley, March 23, 2011. After the successful Sheshinski vote, Netanyahu phoned Finance Committee chair MK Moshe Gafni to congratulate him, calling the law “among the most important for Israel’s economy.” One week later, on March 30, the Sheshinski law was passed, lifting the state’s take on natural gas profits to more than 50 percent. Subscribe now “Really a Lucky Guy” Leviathan sits on one of today’s central geopolitical fault lines: Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. Israeli gas could diversify Europe’s supplies by bringing new, non-Russian gas into European markets. Russia’s state-backed energy group, Gazprom, made a bid for ownership in Leviathan in 2012, but it was rebuffed by the field’s American owners from Noble Energy. Nevertheless, in February 2013, Delek and Noble’s smaller gas field, Tamar, arranged an exclusive deal with Gazprom to offtake Israeli liquefied natural gas and market it in Asia — a deal some participants hoped to parlay into a future role in Leviathan as well. With U.S.-Russia competition in the background, Epstein emailed Barak on August 1, 2013 to advise him about challenges to American investment in the Leviathan field’s development. Netanyahu’s cabinet had decided to allocate 40 percent of its gas reserves for foreign exports, but a judge threatened to halt the decision, due to a pending lawsuit over whether the cabinet had the authority. Epstein reacted to the news: “Supreme Court President Asher Grunis said on Thursday that he is inclined to issue an injunction banning natural gas export until the court ruled on the matter. im not sure an amercian [sic] energy co, will do well in israel.” Barak replied to Epstein’s warning, “U R probably right but I would like to check it somehow.” Emails between Epstein and Barak, August 1, 2013. Epstein and Barak’s private discussions about the future of Leviathan came as Israeli antitrust regulators, faced with the enormous size of the new Leviathan field, were threatening to break up Delek and Noble’s monopoly on Israel’s large gas fields—an outcome the group was eager to get ahead of by enlisting Barak’s help. On January 16, 2014, according to a confidential memo written by Barak, Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of Delek Group, visited Barak’s home to ask for help finding a “major player” to acquire rights to Leviathan production for the Israeli domestic energy market, in anticipation of an anti-monopoly order aimed at breaking up Tshuva’s holdings. The regulator’s concern stemmed from past contracts, from before the Leviathan discovery, that had locked in high prices for Israeli consumers. The same day as Tshuva’s visit, Barak sent an urgent email to Epstein, asking to speak on the phone. The next day, Barak contacted his associates at Renova Group, the conglomerate owned by Russian-Israeli billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Barak had a lucrative consulting agreement with Renova to source energy, mining, and real estate opportunities. As Drop Site previously reported, Barak and Epstein had leveraged the relationship with Renova in another strategic initiative for Israel in 2013, a diplomatic backchannel to Vladimir Putin during the Syrian civil war. In a memo sent to Renova on January 17, 2014, Barak explained that Israel’s anti-monopoly regulator planned to break Tshuva’s control over Israel’s gas by forcing the Leviathan consortium to bring in a new partner for domestic energy supply. “The Problem is that Mr.Tshuva is the major share holder in both Yam Thetis AND Tamar (really a lucky guy),” Barak wrote, referring to two other gas fields controlled by Delek and its partners. Excerpt of confidential memo from Ehud Barak to Renova Group regarding Leviathan gas field (January 2014). The full memo is available here: Leviathan Proposal 57.7KB ∙ PDF file Download Download Barak offered Renova marketing rights to roughly one-eighth of Leviathan’s reserves, but only for domestic sales inside Israel. Renova would also take on the obligation to drill new production wells, build an offshore platform, and lay a dedicated underwater pipeline to shore. The proposal promised long-term contracts to Israel’s largest electric utility, an attractive security for borrowing money. Renova’s representative, Yakov Tesis, wrote back on January 21, “it makes no sense for Renova to accept the offer,” as Renova would be taking on huge risk to see the project succeed, without any real ownership of the gas reserves. Barak tried to sweeten the deal by showing Renova a memorandum of understanding from Woodside Energy Group, an Australian firm, that valued the field at over $10 billion, but Renova declined again. (Woodside walked away soon after.) Meanwhile, Barak pursued American private equity interests, in spite of Epstein’s earlier warning. In February of 2014, Barak shopped the Leviathan deal to U.S. private equity giant Texas Pacific Group (TPG), an occasional collaborator with Leon Black’s firm Apollo Global Management. TPG partner Chris Ortega replied that, while the Leviathan discovery was a “transformative” moment in Israel’s energy politics, any solution would be capital-intensive and politically fraught and take too long to see a return on investment. Facing another setback, Barak continued to lean on Epstein for support. After an event for Israel’s national emergency response service in Palm Beach two weeks later, Barak wrote to Epstein, “Thx for the time and energy you invest in supporting my efforts to bring home more bread. These exchanges ARE highly valuable for me.” At the time, the two men had been pursuing funding for offensive and defensive cybersecurity startups sourced from Israeli intelligence, including Carbyne, an emergency response platform founded by alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit. Now, Barak reported to Epstein that he was ready to broaden the scope of his efforts, writing, “I’ll try to focus beyond CyberSec on Vik. AZ. Mon. and KAZ.” — referring to opportunities with Vekselberg, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Epstein replied, “im alwys there for you.” Barak reports to Epstein after a Magen David Adom event; he asks Epstein to call a man from Kazakhstan. February 25, 2014. In Barak’s confidential memo to Renova, he had outlined a three-fold plan for Israel’s gas exports from Leviathan. First, regional exports to the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and small amounts to Egypt; second, a gas pipeline to Ceyhan, Turkey for the Turkish market and Europe; and, third, a liquefied natural gas plant in Cyprus to export gas to Asia and the rest of the world. Barak had begun talks with the leadership of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, to partner with the Delek–Noble group in developing Leviathan. Barak hoped to negotiate access for Israeli gas interests into the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), the central and western segments of the Southern Gas Corridor that crossed from Azerbaijan to Italy through Turkey. Avelar, a Swiss-based subsidiary of Renova, operated key gas infrastructure and power utilities in Italy, with alleged links to Italian bureaucrats involved in pipeline politics. Barak pitched SOCAR executives on a deal linking the Leviathan field to the “real power structure” in the TANAP/TAP corridor. The next month, in March, Barak’s wife sent Epstein their travel itinerary for Rome and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Epstein and Barak made plans to speak on the phone before Barak departed. Barak gives Elshad Nassirov (VP of SOCAR) an update on Leviathan. Barak had a $6 million per year consulting agreement with SOCAR for “business development.” February 20, 2014. Epstein, meanwhile, continued to steer Barak’s efforts to establish his reputation as a credible energy dealmaker. As Barak searched for partners for Leviathan, Epstein was not shy about giving harsh criticism to his friend. When energy tycoon Jack Grynberg asked Barak to find a buyer for his oil & gas assets, Barak wanted to loop Renova into the deal. But, first, he shared Grynberg’s financial statements with Epstein and Apollo CEO Leon Black for due diligence. Barak wrote to Epstein deferentially, “Do not hesitate to correct or direct me along the way. I don’t have enough time to learn from my own mistakes. Shabbat Shalom.” A few hours later, Epstein sent a frustrated response: “This is total 100 percent BULLSHIT. I told you on the phone before sending or asking anyone about it you should do your own homework, You cannot be seen to be selling garbage ,frauds. bad things and or trouble. this is a total waste of your time.” Barak scrambled, sending an email to Black’s executive assistant, “I’ve just learnt that the deal I’ve wrote [sic] you about yesterday, namely GADECO/Grynberg Oil Co. Is not on the market any more. I do not have more details but I kindly ask you to delete my emails and do not forward it to Leon or others within Apollo.” Emails between Barak and Epstein, October 24-25, 2014. Email from Barak to an assistant at Apollo, October 25, 2014. “Stolen Gas” Barak and Netanyahu, although political rivals, both wanted to see Leviathan succeed. While Barak tried to shop Leviathan access to overseas investors who could absorb Israel’s regulatory chaos, Netanyahu applied a different lever: turning Leviathan into a national security issue that would override anti-monopoly regulations altogether. When Barak failed to protect Tshuva’s gas monopoly by bringing in a compliant foreign partner, Netanyahu used the prime minister’s office as a blunt instrument to restructure Israel’s energy economy. Shortly after Leviathan’s discovery, in January 2011, Netanyahu warned that offshore gas fields were a “strategic objective that Israel’s enemies will try to undermine” and vowed that “Israel will defend its resources.” By 2014, he had backed a plan for the Israeli government to cover up to half of the security costs for offshore facilities. These were promising signs for money-lenders: in April of 2014, Reuters reported that Tshuva’s company, Delek, was beginning a “road show” to raise up to $2 billion in bonds to fund Leviathan’s development, with underwriting from JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC. The bond offering closed on May 11. Just two months later, on July 8, 2014, Israel began “Operation Protective Edge,” a brutal assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians. At the start of the war, IDF officials were reportedly concerned Hamas might use long-range rockets to threaten offshore gas rigs. A blog post for The Guardian argued that control over gas, particularly the Gaza Marine field, was a key driver of Israeli policy. The author, British journalist Nafeez Ahmed, was fired the next day. (According to Ahmed, a Guardian editor justified the decision stating, “Palestine is not an environment story.”) In his post, Ahmed noted that Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, had argued in a 2007 policy paper that allowing Gaza to develop its own gas would “bankroll terror” by making Hamas rich from gas royalties. Alternatively, if the Palestinian Authority was given control of the gas and Hamas was excluded from gas profits, Ya’alon claimed, Hamas would retaliate by sabotaging Israel and PA gas infrastructure. Ya’alon wrote, “It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.” Gaza’s gas politics impacted Israel’s diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors; Jordan, like Israel, suffered from energy shortages due to attacks on Egyptian pipelines after Mubarak’s fall. In autumn 2014, Jordanian officials announced plans to import gas from both Gaza Marine and Israel’s Leviathan field. The Leviathan announcement immediately sparked domestic backlash and street demonstrations against the purchase of “stolen gas.” In early January 2015, Jordanian media reported Amman put the Leviathan talks on hold after Israel’s antitrust regulator moved against the Delek–Noble consortium. Jordanian officials announced they would proceed with plans to buy gas from Gaza. Amid the fighting in Gaza and protests in Amman, Leviathan was halted. The Leviathan owners, and their financiers, would not sink billions into development without regulatory certainty from the Israeli government. Delek executives threatened international arbitration, and Noble warned it would not invest more until the antitrust dispute was resolved. Barak pressed forward, looking to Asia for answers. In April of 2015, he exchanged emails about an “energy play” with Joshua Hantman, a former advisor to Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. They discussed a Cyprus-based company called Cynergy Group, which was looking to buy up natural gas assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, including a stake in Leviathan. Hantman reported to Barak confidentially that he had garnered interest from South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Choi Kyoung-hwan, as well as members of the president’s office. Hantman wrote, “That is the world’s largest strategic buyer of gas - ready to join us.” Barak wrote back, “Stay in touch and let’s see whether a way to collaborate will emerge.” Leviathan was by now becoming an explosive political conflict in Israel. That spring, Israel’s antitrust commissioner resigned, warning that Netanyahu’s government was prioritizing monopolists and foreign buyers at the expense of Israeli consumers, who would face higher gas prices if the Delek–Noble monopoly was not broken. Economy Minister Aryeh Deri also resigned, under pressure from Netanyahu to exempt the gas framework from antitrust scrutiny. Netanyahu, still the prime minister, stepped in to take over Deri’s economy portfolio. Then, in September, the Russian military officially entered the Syrian civil war, launching airstrikes across Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. With extraordinary leverage, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly offered Netanyahu a deal: Give Gazprom a stake in Leviathan, and, in exchange, Russia would protect the gas fields from Hezbollah and Hamas. Now, the debate in Israel had a new dimension: accepting Gazprom would resolve the deadlock, guarantee the gas field’s security, and instantly turn Israel into an indispensable energy exporter—at the cost of alienating Israel’s allies in the U.S. and Europe. Netanyahu found an opportunity, in one blow, to appease Israel’s neighbors, its NATO allies, and the gas oligarchs at home. In December 2015, after months of Knesset clashes, Netanyahu used an obscure section of the country’s antitrust law to authorize the economy minister (now Netanyahu himself) to permit a gas monopoly on national security grounds. Netanyahu invoked relations with Jordan, Turkey, and Europe to justify the move, signaling to banks and allies that Leviathan was politically protected. “Fake News” After Netanyahu’s move to break the Leviathan deadlock, Amman quietly resumed planning to import gas from Leviathan. In September 2016, Jordan signed a $10 billion deal to import gas from the field, spurring a resumption of protests under the slogan “The Enemy’s Gas is Occupation.” Jordanian officials sealed the Leviathan contract under “state secrets” rules and waited out the protests. Soon after, in November of 2016, the Delek–Noble consortium announced it had secured a $1.75 billion loan from JPMorgan and HSBC for the first phase of Leviathan’s development. The framework that made JPMorgan financing possible transformed Israel’s gas sector into a protected duopoly. Under Netanyahu’s gas framework, Tshuva and his partners retained control of Leviathan, which would become Israel’s main gas export supply, but were forced to sell their stake in the smaller Tamar field—leaving Isramco (linked to Kobi Maimon) as the controlling owner of Israel’s main domestic gas supply. Egypt followed a similar pattern to Jordan: quiet diplomacy, private contracts, and plausible deniability. In 2018, a Cairo-based buyer signed long-term “private-sector” purchase agreements for Tamar and Leviathan gas, and the Leviathan partners bought into the dormant Mubarak-era pipeline that once sent Egyptian gas to Israel, so it could be reversed for exports. The first gas from Leviathan finally began flowing in December 2019. A small amount of this early gas flowed to Egypt through the reversed pipeline. Leviathan gas field. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Earlier that year, on June 26, 2019, Barak announced his intention to challenge Netanyahu in an election slated for that September. Two days later, emails from Epstein’s estate show Epstein messaging Steve Bannon about the election and “dealing with Ehud in Israel.” Bannon praised the decision and asked Epstein whether he could announce himself as Barak’s strategic advisor. Epstein did not live to see the vote—he died in a Manhattan prison cell on August 10, 2019. Despite his death, Epstein’s ghost continues to haunt Israeli politics. In November of 2025, Netanyahu posted, without comment, an article from Jacobin magazine containing Drop Site’s reporting on Epstein’s ties to Barak and Israeli intelligence—implicitly leveraging Epstein’s connection to Barak to detract from his longstanding rival. Netanyahu now openly invokes Epstein to wound Barak, using Epstein’s crimes to deflect attention from his own corruption cases and his responsibility for the genocide in Gaza. “The media channels are not news channels, they are fake channels,” he said in March, “They invite Ehud Barak again and again… with great respect and dignity, but, strangely, he is not asked a single question on [Epstein].” Share Leave a comment From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.
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The US is once again trying to gets its chlorinated fowl into UK markets, a strategy linked to their push for chlorinated chicken exports. Reportedly, it’s happening because of the collapse of an equally bad (if not worse) AI tech deal: This confirms it. The US is using the collapsed tech/AI deal to force Britain to accept chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef. Food standards are the leverage point and the red line. You can’t align with US tech power and stay aligned with Europe.… pic.twitter.com/Ru37rLPH80 — Liz Webster (@LizWebsterSBF) December 29, 2025 ‘Farm to fork’ As Farming UKhave reported, British regulators are against chlorinated chicken because it’s at odds with the UK’s ‘farm to fork’ ethos. The UK is supposed to prioritise hygiene and welfare standards, the Americans, meanwhile, make up for laxer standards with an end-of-process chlorine rinse. As we’ve reported before, the UK is far from perfect when it comes to welfare standards. However, accepting chlorinated chicken would be a step back; it means there’s work to be done getting our own house in order. This is all happening now because the US-UK technology deal has faltered. In part, it’s due to the Americans’ position that the UK’s Online Safety Act will have a detrimental impact on their tech sector. We have voiced our own criticisms of the Online Safety Act, with Steve Topple writing in July this year: When both the left and the right are united in their disdain for a piece of legislation, you know there must be something up. So, enter the Online Safety Act: a law so riddled with corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism that you’d be forgiven for agreeing with Nigel Farage. But exactly what are the problems with this Tory written, Labour-allowed piece of legislation? He added: While the Online Safety Act was sold as a child‑safety milestone, critics argue it’s structurally incapable of delivering that outcome. Campaigners from organisations including Barnardo’s, the Molly Rose Foundation and CARE UK warn that loopholes around algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, live‑streaming, and age verification mean the legislation “will not bring about the changes that children need and deserve”. Rather than curtail harmful exposure, the law risks becoming symbolic rather than effective. Since enforcement began on 25 July, age verification—via ID scans, facial estimation, or mobile verification—has triggered over five million age checks per day, mostly on porn sites. But this in turn has driven a rapid surge in VPN downloads as users seek to bypass access controls, shifting minors toward less‑regulated parts of the internet and raising their exposure to greater harms rather than reducing it. Laws like the Online Safety Act ultimately benefit tech giants, but they also introduce additional layers of oversight. The tech overlords would prefer to get all of the benefits with none of the downsides, which is why they’ve worked so hard to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration. US President Donald Trump invited the world’s richest billionaire oligarchs to sit at the center of his inauguration. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Google CEO Sundar Pichai symbolically sat with Trump’s cabinet picks. A dozen billionaires will be in the Trump admin. pic.twitter.com/9CHzpmFAEU — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 20, 2025 Given that US tech oligarchs have attained ungodly levels of power since 2020, we shouldn’t want the UK to be more enmeshed with them, especially on this chlorinated chicken issue. Recent events have demonstrated the power that they have and why they choose to wield it: Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against @RoKhanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax. https://t.co/pCh170Oa3v — Krystal Ball (@krystalball) December 28, 2025 Farmers rights As Farming UKfurther note: For British farmers, the stakes extend beyond poultry. The US is also pushing for greater access for hormone-treated beef, another area where UK standards are stricter than those in America. Farming unions have warned that accepting such imports would weaken consumer trust in British food and risk eroding the premium attached to UK produce at home and abroad. Sir Keir has previously treated food standards as a red line, rebuffing Mr Trump’s demands to allow chlorinated chicken in exchange for lower tariffs. Since Labour returned to power, right-wing politicians have been making a big show of supporting farmers and opposing chlorinated chicken. This is ironic given that they didn’t seem to give a shit when the Tories were in power. As journalist Jon Burke recently highlighted, other agriculture deals have gone incredibly poorly for us. I see the @Telegraph is now reporting on the Australian trade deal disaster for which it campaigned. Nobody, and I mean *nobody*, has betrayed this country like the libertarian wreckers who lied to the public about ‘Brexit benefits’. pic.twitter.com/fps85uTWaE — Jon Burke is mainly posting on Bluesky (@jonburkeUK) December 27, 2025 The Australian trade deal that @trussliz struck – despite extensive warnings from civil servants – is turning out to be a disaster for British farmers, you say? If only we could have foretold this in some way… https://t.co/aTlh0B3Bwv pic.twitter.com/0JJN5VQYCU — Jon Burke is mainly posting on Bluesky (@jonburkeUK) December 27, 2025 The White House stated that our refusal to accept chlorinated chicken and hormone-pumped beef is an obstacle to them removing the tariffs that Trump introduced earlier this year. As Farming UK noted: Any decision to relax those rules would carry significant political and economic consequences. Farming leaders argue it would not only threaten livelihoods in the poultry and beef sectors but also set a precedent for weakening food standards more broadly, potentially reshaping the future of British agriculture in trade negotiations yet to come. Chicken Starmer clearly wants to give the impression that he’s achieved something. As such, there’s a worry that he’ll accept whatever deal is on the table — possibly even one involving chlorinated chicken — so that he can act like he got a win. This is why it’s important to be clear that no one will accept capitulation to Trump as a victory. Featured image via BBC By Willem Moore From Canary via This RSS Feed.
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Hi, all, and happy Friday. It’s also the day that the Epstein files were supposed to be released. It seems clear, however, that they won’t be, at least in their entirety. This is a heartbreaker, not just for the victims who’ve been working so hard to achieve transparency, but for all of us who’ve worked so hard to ensure this release. It’s also a clear violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. But most of all it’s another reminder that this administration doesn’t care about the law, and it doesn’t care about helping survivors. We’ve known these things forever, but each new example of this fact still stings, enrages, and depresses. But we won’t wallow in those feelings for too long. Because the victims—and we—deserve better. Americans are united in wanting transparency on this issue; we will just have to keep working until we get it. Meanwhile Trump has already added his name to the Kennedy Center’s facade. It took all of a day for him to do so after the board voted to allow it—even though this wasn’t the board’s decision to make. He’s quick to get things done, isn’t he? When those things benefit him? Trump and his administration are also creeping closer to invading Venezuela. And issuing more destructive rules to hurt children. And shutting down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado over a grudge with Governor Polis. They’re a destructive force the likes of which we have never seen in American politics—and that’s saying something. Look. I know it’s hard to watch the worst people in the world act with what appears to be impunity. The best antidote, for me, is to keep taking action, keep looking for people to help (I’ve got a GREAT option for you below), and keep surrounding myself with people who care about democracy, the rule of law, and civility as much as I do. Trump’s administration is every bit as ugly inside as it is outside (see the Vanity Fair photos). We know it, and so do they. But one other thing we know—that they do not—is that kind of ugliness, greed, and cruelty is inherently weak; it cannot sustain itself. It is, quite literally, self-destructive. More importantly, it will be defeated—because we will defeat it. And when we do, Trump’s legacy will be systematically and fully dismantled. We will take all of this pent up grief and rage and work together, with a singleness of purpose never before seen, to remove his name from every building, tear down his ballroom, reverse his Executive Orders, try cabinet members who’ve broken the law, charge ICE agents with crimes, restore climate action, pass stronger protections for LGBTQ+ people, give Dreamers a path to citizenship, pass comprehensive immigration reform, pass Medicare For All, reunite separated families, pass vigorous voting rights legislation, expand the Supreme Court, strengthen our alliances, fix our trade policy, rebuild our CDC, re-fund US AID, strengthen the EPA and FEMA, expand Social Security, tax the hell out of billionaires and corporations, break up monopolies, restore civic trust, re-center morality in our politics…and more. These are not just pipe dreams. They are achievable. Will they be difficult to accomplish? Some yes, some no. But they are all doable if we have the will. So let’s have it. We will rebuild this country out of the ashes Trump leaves behind. In fact, we will use those ashes to fertilize the growth of a new United States—one that he and his rich donors will hate, but that the majority of us will love and thrive in. Right now the fire still burns, and it’s excruciating. But Trump is running out of fuel. The flames are already diminishing. Soon there will be only cinders. Then the rebuild will begin. Not only will we erase any trace of Trump or MAGA from our national landscape, but we will create the diametric opposite of it and ensure that it’s built to last. Don’t quit before the miracle, folks. Now let’s get to work. Call Your Senators (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is ______. I’m furious about Trump’s attempt to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. We all know he’s doing it to get Governor Polis to transfer Tina Peters to federal prison so he can pardon her. It’s grotesque. NCAR is one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions—without it we will be endangered in ways too numerous to list. I’m glad that Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper are blocking the Senate funding package until this money is restored, and I’d like the Senator to support them in every way s/he can. The Senate is a powerful body. Please act like one and rein our crooked president in. Also, if the DOJ doesn’t release the entirety of the Epstein files today please take all legal measures to ensure that they comply with the law. And I mean play hardball. This is a coverup and it can’t be tolerated. Thanks. Call Your House Rep (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______. I’m furious about Trump’s attempt to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. We all know he’s doing it to get Governor Polis to transfer Tina Peters to federal prison so he can pardon her. It’s grotesque. NCAR is one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions—without it we will be endangered in ways too numerous to list. Please ask the Congressmember to do everything s/he can to get this funding restored. Thank you. Also, if the DOJ doesn’t release the entirety of the Epstein files today please take all legal measures to ensure that they comply with the law. And I mean play hardball. This is a coverup and it can’t be tolerated. Thanks. Extra Credit ✅ Let’s write to DNC Chair Ken Martin and urge him to reverse his decision to not release the DNC’s 2024 autopsy report. It’s a stunningly bad decision that will hurt us badly in the long term. His email address is [email protected] Sample letter: Chair Martin, I’m writing as a Democratic voter and volunteer to respectfully ask you to reverse your decision to not release the DNC 2024 autopsy report. How are Democrats going to learn from our mistakes if we don’t have any concept of their depth and breadth? Showing fearlessness, transparency, and a willingness to admit where we’ve gone wrong is how we win voters back! Continuing to retreat from accountability is how we ensure that we keep losing them. Thanks. Feel free to copy and use, but better if you write your own. I sent mine! Get Smart! 📚 Y’all I got my hands on a report about Buy Now Pay Later companies and their connection to the Trump admin and it is INSANE. Every bit of it is just gross. I made a video about it but if you don’t want to watch it that’s fine—still read the report! Video is here. Report is below. If you can’t open it here’s a linked version but it’s not as pretty. This is stuff we need to know, and need to share. Buy Now, Pay Later Pitch Doc234KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload Give 💰! My lovely friend Lindsay from Still We Rise lives in Portland and just learned of an immigrant family there who has been living in fear of ICE raids. They haven’t left their home in two months. Not for school. Not for errands. Not to see friends. Their middle and high school–aged kids are homeschooling, not because they want to, but because going outside feels unsafe. I’m making this family our so-called Angel Tree this year. Yes, there are tens of thousands of families like theirs, but theirs is a family we know about and can reach. Because they can’t safely leave their home, we asked them one simple question: What would help? What would bring you a little joy? With some gentle nudging they shared a wish list with us, and my hope is to clear it and deliver a true Christmas miracle for this family. Right now, fear has shrunk their world down to four walls. Together, we can help open it back up, even just a little. We can remind them they matter. That they are seen. That they deserve joy, safety, and dignity. If you’ve been looking for a way to make a real difference this season this is it.Let’s wrap this family in love. Let’s show up for them. Let’s make their Christmas one filled with relief, warmth, and hope. The wish list is here. It’s on Amazon. I boycott them, but even I will violate that boycott at times like this. There’s really no other way to do this where their address can remain anonymous. Hope some of you can help. Get in the Streets! 🪧 National Day Laborer’s Network is asking us to consider “adopting a corner” to help undocumented day laborers. They’re asking that we go to our local Home Depot, where immigrant day laborers are at extreme risk of harassment and arrest. Choose a location convenient to you, where day laborers gather and commit to showing up regularly. Be present. Be consistent. Build relationships and offer protection. Remember: Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. Only the people save the people. That has always been true—and never more than now. We can and should be standing together in the face of injustice—peacefully, powerfully, with love and care. We don’t need to feed their violence, we need to build community. Interested in getting involved in your local community? Please CLICK HERE to register to get connected with other people in your area. Win Races! 🗳 The DNC has a new newsletter out called This Week in Organizing. It’s great—it features trainings, election recaps, phonebanks…I really hope you’ll all subscribe! It only comes out once a week so not too much spam. Resistbot Letter (new to Resistbot? Go here! And then here.) 💻 [To: all 3 reps] [H/T the amazing ] [Text SIGN PPAUEZ to 50409, or to @Resistbot on Apple Messages, Messenger, Instagram, or Telegram] (Note that for the most effective RESISTBOT it’s best to personalize this text. More about how to do this here. But if you’re short on time just send it as is using the above code.) I am writing to urge Congress to immediately intervene to stop the reported attempt to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”Federal law is unambiguous. The building “shall be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” and Congress established it as the sole national memorial to President John F. Kennedy within Washington, D.C. and its environs. Nothing in the authorizing statutes grants the Board of Trustees authority to rename or rebrand this national memorial. Only an act of Congress can change a designation set in federal law.Joe Kennedy III, President Kennedy’s grandnephew and a former member of Congress, has publicly stated that the Kennedy Center “can no sooner be renamed than the Lincoln Memorial,” regardless of claims made by the White House or the Board. That assessment aligns with the plain text of the statute and longstanding constitutional principles regarding congressional authority over federal memorials.Serious procedural concerns further undermine the legitimacy of this action. Despite public claims of a “unanimous” vote, at least one ex-officio board member—Representative Joyce Beatty—has stated she was muted during the meeting and prevented from voicing opposition. This raises grave questions about transparency, due process, and whether the Board acted in bad faith to evade legal scrutiny.Allowing politically aligned appointees to unilaterally alter a congressionally established national memorial would set a dangerous precedent. It would invite future administrations to rewrite history, law, and public institutions by fiat rather than through democratic processes.I urge you to act immediately to:• Publicly affirm that only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center• Initiate oversight hearings into the Board’s actions and claims• Require a legal review by congressional counsel or GAO• Prohibit the use of federal funds for any unauthorized signage, branding, or contracts• Pass clarifying legislation reaffirming the Kennedy Center’s statutory name, if necessaryThis is not about partisanship. It is about the rule of law, separation of powers, and protecting a national memorial created by Congress. OK, you did it again! You’re helping to save democracy! You’re amazing. Talk soon. Jess Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leave a comment Share From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
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From Into Action. Download here. Hi, all, and happy Sunday. Also happy first day of Hanukkah to those who celebrate. Of course, none of it is happy at all, is it? In the last 24 hours we’ve had horrific shootings both here and abroad—the latter fueled by antisemitism and the former by some other, as yet unknown, form of hate. It’s ghastly, and gutting; grief seems the only appropriate response. So yes, I grieve. I know you do, too. Hate is awful, yet feels ascendant. That’s not fair. Or right. Or acceptable. But I also know this: the way we eradicate—or at least overcome—hate is by winning our current fight. The way we do that is by continuing to do what we’re doing—ideally with a bigger army. And the way we do THAT is by keeping our morale up and showing that what we’re doing is working. How do we do that? In part by acknowledging where we’re winning. So we’re going to do that, even on a day infused with grief. Sending hugs, all. Sending strength. And sending determination that these people will not win. Below is proof that we can prevail. Please share it with others and ask them to join us. Together we can create a better world. Celebrate This! 🎉 Eileen Higgins won the Miami Mayor race by a wide margin, becoming the first woman ever to hold the seat, and the first Democrat in almost 30 years! A federal judge blocked U.S. immigration authorities on Friday from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was finally freed. He’s now home with his family. New York will become the first state to force advertisers to disclose the use of artificial intelligence to replace human actors under a law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. The Indiana Senate has REJECTED a proposed 9-0 GOP gerrymander in their state. Twenty-one Republicans voted with all Democrats against the bill, despite Trump’s mob boss-style threats. This was a MAJOR defeat for Trump. To quote one analyst, it was “one of the most significant GOP rebukes of [him] to date.” A grand jury declined to re-indict Letitia James, AGAIN! Mexico announced it was boosting the minimum wage by 13% and plans to limit the work week to 40 hours in 2030. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is reinstating all grants that were previously terminated by the Trump administration. DHS announced it’s planning to change its tactics in immigration enforcement operations, moving away from sweeping raids to a more targeted approach. This is likely because of Trump’s plummeting poll numbers. If true, it’s excellent news. Protesters disrupted a New Orleans City Council meeting to speak out against the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the state’s most populous city. Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens formally filed articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kirsti Noem had a very, very bad day at the House Homeland Security Committee hearing. Democrats there shone, in particular Reps. Magaziner and Ramirez. Overall, this year, Democrats have flipped 21% of all GOP-held legislative seats that were on the ballot, while the GOP flipped none. An environmental group is suing to get Trump’s image removed from next year’s national park passes. Leaders of a Catholic church near Boston kept a Nativity display with an anti-ICE message in place, defying an order from the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston to remove it. A Maryland judge ruled that a lawsuit alleging Education Secretary Linda McMahon and her husband, WWE co-founder Vincent McMahon, knew about and chose not to stop sexual abuse against eight underage “ring boys” will proceed. L.A. County sued four oil companies operating, or who have operated, in the Inglewood Oil Field near Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights, alleging they’ve failed to properly clean up hundreds of depleted and idle wells. A new conservation agreement will preserve land with breathtaking desert vistas that inspired the work of 20th century painter Georgia O’Keeffe and ensure visitors access to an adjacent educational retreat 13 Congressional Republicans joined Democrats in a vote to nullify Trump’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from roughly one million federal workers. US suicide rates fell in 2024. Trump’s approval on the economy and immigration have fallen substantially this year, a new AP-NORC poll finds. Opponents of Missouri’s new congressional map turned in more than 300,000 signatures to the secretary of state’s office — well over the roughly 110,000 needed to suspend the new U.S. House districts from taking effect until a referendum election can be held next year. HUGE! A US judge ruled that Trump must end the National Guard deployment in Los Angeles. Immigrants living in Illinois, among the states hit hardest by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, are now shielded from federal enforcement near courthouses, hospitals, university campuses and daycares under a law Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker signed Tuesday. After a lawsuit by 20 Democratic state AGs, a federal judge has said the Trump administration acted unlawfully in ending BRIC, a FEMA program aimed at helping communities become more resilient to natural disasters. This means funding should get restored. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration over the White House ballroom project, arguing the White House failed to seek necessary reviews before demolishing the historic East Wing in October. Democrat Eric Gisler claimed an upset victory Tuesday in a special election in a historically Republican Georgia state House district. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith is starting a law firm with three other attorneys who investigated President Donald Trump and his supporters. Former Senator Doug Jones (D - AL) has announced his bid for governor of Alabama. Democrat Tim Keller has won reelection as mayor of Albuquerque. He defeated a former Republican sheriff, who took issue with Keller’s executive order that limited collaboration with ICE. A liberal faction seized the majority at city council, too. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law to prohibit public and school libraries from banning books in the state and to enshrine protections against civil and criminal charges for librarians who comply with the law. Workers and unions in 10 countries took action this week in support of US Starbucks baristas, including actions in the UK, Turkey, and Istanbul. Remember, Starbucks workers are on strike. Please don’t cross the picket line! The developer of ICEBlock, an app that shares local ICE alerts sued top Trump administration officials, accusing them of pressuring Apple to stifle his free speech and his right to create, distribute and promote the app. A federal judge has refused to release Tina Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk convicted of trying to overturn the 2020 election, despite Trump calling for her to be freed while she appeals her case. A federal judge said the Justice Department can publicly release investigative materials from a sex trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein. For the first time in state history for either party, Texas Democrats have fielded candidates in every legislative, statewide, and federal race. This is a HUGE deal. Concerned that residents’ locations and schedules could be obtained by ICE agents, Connecticut state lawmakers passed a bill this month to prevent public agencies from sharing such personal information. State Senator Chambers Armstrong will make history as the first woman elected to Kentucky Senate Democratic leadership. A federal judge struck down Trump’s order blocking wind energy development. The Honduran attorney general issued an international arrest warrant for the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was pardoned by Trump and released from a federal prison in the U.S. where he was serving 45 years for drug trafficking and weapons charges. Some U.S. farmers say large solar and wind farms have delivered unexpected financial relief — and a chance to rest and restore their land — as they lease farmland for renewable energy generation: Food giant Kellanova is rolling out regenerative agriculture practices across its supply chain in an effort to meaningfully cut Scope 3 emissions — a sign that big food companies are finally putting real money behind climate-smart farming. Along the Mississippi Flyway, a new collaboration between rice growers and conservation groups is turning farmlands into seasonal habitat, helping migratory birds rebound while boosting farmers’ yields. New York’s transit system is showing a post-pandemic recovery, with ridership climbing and long-delayed capital projects finally moving ahead. Massachusetts just unveiled a 50-year coastal resilience plan to protect communities from rising seas and stronger storms, combining wetlands restoration, elevated infrastructure, and new retreat incentives. At a rally organized by Western Queens Indivisible that was covered by The New York Times, hundreds of New Yorkers gathered to protest the Trump regime’s arrest and forced separation of a six-year-old immigrant, Yuanxin Zheng, from his father. The Vatican returned sacred artifacts held for a century to their Indigenous owners. ABC has signed Jimmy Kimmel to a new one-year deal that will keep his show on the network through May 2027. Alina Habba announced she is resigning as acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey after a federal appeals court concluded her appointment was unlawful. Another Chicago-area church altered their Nativity scene to make an anti-ICE statement. In it, Mary, Joseph and Jesus are gone and replaced with a sign that reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.” Heartbreaking but good defiance! Florida’s U.S. senators and all 28 of its U.S. House members signed a letter urging the Trump administration not to allow oil drilling off the state’s coast, saying it would disrupt tourism and military operations. New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) announced that he’ll be recruiting challengers against his state’s Democratic politicians who shield “machine politics.” A Sacramento County man pardoned by Trump for his role in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, was sentenced this week to nearly 7 years in federal prison on a charge of receiving child pornography. Ew, but glad he’s behind bars again. California state officials announced that they’ll be increasing their oversight of field workers and overseeing a data-sharing effort in order to protect underage farmworkers. The National Rifle Association is burning through its investment portfolio to pay its bills as legal perils increase and revenue from membership dues decline. A federal judge ruled that the DOJ unlawfully accessed evidence central to its case against James Comey, delivering what could be a death blow to Trump’s efforts to re-indict one of his most prominent perceived rivals The Republican plans to pick off five Democratic-held congressional seats in Texas once is looking more and more like it might backfire. Beautiful. Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leave a comment Share From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
The Death of English Literature (This essay, my review of Stefan Collini’s book Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain*, originally appeared in the New Statesman here. It is republished in Cultural Capital with their generous permission.*) English Literature — so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of eighteen — was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at university and asked why exactly I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase which I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that “literature shows us what it is or might be to be human”. I believed it. In books, I felt with Tennyson, that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine. Poems — especially poems by Hopkins, Eliot and Auden — worked on me like spells. I had contrived to download a recording of Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts onto my primitive mobile phone, and would stand in the playground with the device pressed to my ear, enraptured by the tinny incantation, convinced I was responding to a higher call. Literature, if one were to reduce it to anything so tawdry as a formula, was history x philosophy x life. I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off). English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with “say, Geography or Chemistry.” Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its disciples. To the moneyed amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the twentieth century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret) the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. To the charismatic Leavisite secondary school teachers of the 1960s it was a moral crusade against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers” and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. The scholarly Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read oddly in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Nowadays, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, devising spurious jargons for itself, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills” (that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus-writers which holds that a familiarity with ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making powerpoints at PWC). But for all the Gradgrindian propaganda embattled modern departments are obliged to turn out in the forlorn hope of attracting students, it remains the case that it is only because people have felt extravagantly about books that English is taught at universities at all. The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini’s happy phrase) “beauty and the footnote”. Students of English do not expect to emerge from their degrees able to speak a foreign language (save perhaps a smattering of Anglo Saxon) or code or say anything useful about the differences between arthropods and crustaceans. According to the purest conception of the subject, Collini points out, “the ur-exam question should be something like ‘isn’t this beautiful?’” Though surely, “the way to get high marks would not simply be to answer ‘Yes, it is.’” This has been the source of English’s insecurity as an academic discipline — couldn’t an enthusiasm for Keats be better satisfied in a student’s spare time? — but also its self-confidence as the purest and most noble of the humanities. Dove Cottage I was a late product of this passionate tradition. My English teacher father brought me up to regard Eng Lit as a secular religion. Our God was Shakespeare whose birthday we celebrated annually with a home-made cake. Like Catholic peasants our house was strewn with tasteless devotional items: Shakespeare mugs, Shakespeare socks, Shakespeare tea towels, a Shakespeare bear (clad in a t-shirt featuring a quotation from Hamlet). We quoted Shakespeare, and his attendant lesser deities Wordsworth, Tennyson and Milton like scripture. And in the summer holidays we made solemn pilgrimages to their shrines: Dove Cottage, The Globe Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. My father particularly impressed me with the information that a friend of his had once repelled a home invader by descending the staircase in the dark carrying a single lighted candle and intoning a sulphurous passage from Book One of Paradise Lost. Such — the moral of the story ran — was the power of blank verse. (I have never quite lost the conviction that should I ever find myself in similar danger the Collected Milton, rather than, say, a hammer, is the weapon I will need to have to hand.) If the atmosphere of militant Bardolatry in which I was raised was anachronistic in the early 2000s it seems as archaic as Assyria now. English is in precipitous decline. Still the most popular A-level subject when I left school in 2011, it no longer even makes the top ten, having been displaced by various STEM subjects and those vulgar parvenus, sociology and psychology. Another university English department shuts down practically every year. My friends who pursued academic careers in English — no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists — feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning but find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off. Partly the problem is tuition fees — £9,535 per year to acquire a finer appreciation of moon imagery in DH Lawrence is a hefty ask in the present economic climate. But most importantly, literature is becoming culturally marginal. The screen is replacing the book. Studies show dramatic and unprecedented drops in literacy and reading, especially among teenagers. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust found time spent reading books “at a historic low”. In this environment, the study of literature is far from an obvious use of three crucial years of young adulthood. And if the slew of viral journalistic reports from universities — “The End of the English Major”, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” — are to be believed, even students who choose to study English are unable to actually force themselves through novels. “Most of our students are functionally illiterate” runs a characteristic de profundis wail. A young Oxbridge academic I spoke to recently described “a collapse of literacy” among his students. The first enemies of English worried not that reading novels was too hard for students, but that it was much too easy. When English arrived in universities (at Oxford in 1894 and Cambridge in 1914) conservative dons objected that the subject wouldn’t provide students with “the mental training” inculcated by Mathematics or Classics (Greek, according to one doggedly unenlightened strand of opinion was “a kind of maths without numbers”). Others feared that English was an invitation to students to be “specious and superficial” (the suspicion has never quite been dispelled). Why did you need educating in how to read poems? The literary gentlemen who were first summoned from the clan warfare of Grub Street to establish English amidst the Groves of Academe were not always reassuring models of scholarly rigour. Cambridge’s first Professor of English Arthur Quiller Couch was in the habit of addressing his audiences of mostly female undergraduates as “Gentlemen!” George Saintsbury, the king of fin-de-siecle belles lettres — with his wine cellar, “extreme Toryism”, prodigious forest of a beard and apparently omniscient command of his country’s literary heritage — was making £190,000 a year in modern money from literary journalism before he was made a don (his earnings were much enhanced by his genial willingness to review the same volume “as many as five times”). His own innumerable books, (Elizabethan Literature, Nineteenth Century Literature, The History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, an 800-page Short History of English Literature) combined panoptic ambition with “a large number of errors” and sold in the tens of thousands. George Saintsbury Saintsbury’s career was only an unusually florid symptom of a society in which English literature was culturally central to a degree not easy to grasp today and which throws a stark light on the subject’s present crisis of marginality. English was born as an academic subject in a world in which journals and magazines “carried an endless stream of critical essays celebrating or reconsidering the achievement of major and minor poets alike”. For many people “a deep intimacy with English poetry was a living presence, not simply a social affectation or a relic of a half-remembered education”. The critic AC Bradley was the subject of doggerel in Punch and his book Shakespeare’s Tragedies went on to sell half a million copies. When the socialite turned don John Bailey gave public lectures (“Can We Tell Good Books from Bad”, “Shelley”) he addressed “crowded” halls of hundreds of people (“many standing”) and met with “wild success”. When he lunched with the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour in 1914, the two men chatted about “Dryden, Pope, Browning, etc.” Bailey and his wife habitually recited Browning to one another over dinner, after which he would go upstairs to read his children their bedtime story: Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. The apogee of Eng Lit’s prestige arrived in the “two decades after 1945”. Students streamed through the red brick portals of Manchester and across the alien concrete geometries of York for lectures on “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries”, “Milton and the Seventeenth Century”, and “The English Augustans”. By this time, the subject had been refashioned as a modern, professional discipline. To IA Richards, the father of practical criticism, the study of literature was a laboratory science (the text carefully tweezered and isolated beneath the critic’s microscope); to FR Leavis, it was a kind of non-conformist religion. The prevailing tone of high moral seriousness — “a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself”, as Terry Eagleton once summarised the Leavisite view of literary studies — charged English with a charisma that no other academic discipline has ever matched, either before or since. The University of York in the 1960s Academic critics became celebrities and for a while, the culture bowed to them. The position of English at this time strikes modern readers as almost comically exalted. “It is no exaggeration to say”, writes one historian quoted by Collini, “that in the late 40s and early 50s, for the hippest of the young (even among those who were beginning to be beat) the best thing in the world to be was T.S. Eliot or Edmund Wilson. Literary criticism was the philosophers’ stone”. In the USA in the 1950s it was possible to watch “a regular TV programme featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and W.H. Auden”. And in a lecture, Trilling went so far as to fret that “the place literature occupies in contemporary life is ‘actually too high’” and that its study attracted “disproportionate” numbers of students — not anxieties that much trouble modern professors of English. At this time English derived energy and confidence from its practitioners’ sense of themselves as cultural insurgents, partisans of intelligence and humane values fighting a guerilla war against the stupefying and ominously expanding empire of mass culture, what Richards called the “sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loud-speaker”. Leavis was the movement’s Castro, prolix, repetitive and superannuated, thundering away against the evils of television. His hostility was influential. “The very power to resist and question the mass media, or the misuse of technology, derives from our ability to transmit the best of the past”, urged one teachers’ handbook. English by wide consent, was “the civilising, maturing subject”. Recent academic commentators have been nervous of these painfully un-groovy defences of standards. In the complacent fastnesses of Oxford and Cambridge the idea that such frivolous technologies as the television or the cinema might pose a threat to the grand enterprise of literature was worthy only of a raised faux-worldly eyebrow. But Leavis’s perception that the new forms of electronic entertainment demanded “surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity to the cheapest emotional appeals” is hard to read without foreboding in the days of TikTok. Such warnings once read as so much rhetorical thunder and lightning; today they read like prophecy. The battle against the hypnotising and stupefying forces of electronic entertainment has been definitively lost. The partisans have been routed. George Eliot was no match for the iPhone. The civilisation of the book has given way to the civilisation of the screen. English, in the view of one friend who teaches it at a university is, “not dying, it’s dead” — an incidental and probably unnoticed drive-by casualty of the Californian billionaires’ imperial campaign to annex our attention for their profit. “In time,” Collini writes, “it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one’s own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.” I agree but with one qualification … “May become possible?” To anybody under forty it is clear that time is already upon us. Whether this heralds catastrophe — whether the fate of literature indeed turns out to be coterminous with the fate of civilisation — remains to be seen. When those of us raised in the faith survey the darkness of the modern world, the thought is a hard one to avoid . From Cultural Capital via this RSS feed
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
A new Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) attack vector weaponizes Google searches and a user’s trust in AI chatbots, researchers have found. Once infected, the AMOS can collect data, passwords, and more from the infected Mac with alarming ease. While AMOS attacks have been around since 2023, they normally involve people accidentally downloading a malicious file. But this new approach is different. Instead, it simply requires them to copy and paste a single command into the Terminal app. Researchers at security outfit Huntress identified the new AMOS approach in early December 2025 after a victim reported the incident. Huntress found that the user had searched “Clear disk space on macOS” before choosing one of the two sponsored results. Both of those results linked to a shared chatbot chat, one for ChatGPT, the other for Grok. It didn’t matter which the victim clicked because they both ultimately did the same thing. Huntress was able to repeat the infection steps, which boiled down to copying and pasting a command that was supposed to free up storage space. In reality, it downloaded a file that then set about gaining root privileges to allow it to access apps and data unchecked. In fact, the route taken by this particular AMOS ensured it never triggered any of Apple’s built-in macOS security features. Once the command was run, there was never any indication that something was amiss. Once running, Huntress found that the Stealer had the ability to capture a number of high-value data types. Those include access to cryptocurrency wallets, browser credential databases, and even Apple Keychain. All data collected by the attack is then uploaded to attacker-controlled servers. As for the Stealer itself, the attack ensures it is configured to run even after the Mac is restarted, meaning it’s always ready to steal more data. While AMOS isn’t new, the key thing to note here is the new approach, and one that Mac users should absolutely be wary of. As people become more wary of files they download from the internet, attackers need new ways of getting malware onto devices. In this instance, both the ChatGPT and Grok shared chats are legitimate and hosted on their respective services. They also give the air of a legitimate guide that will ultimately free up storage space as requested. Even pasting a command into the Terminal window makes sense given the context. It’s easy to see how people might fall for such an attack.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Back in the mid 1990s, the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system cemented the Redmond software company’s dominance over most of the desktop operating system space. Apple were still in their period in the doldrums waiting for Steve Jobs to return with his NeXT, while other would-be challengers such as IBM’s OS/2 or Commodore’s Amiga were sinking into obscurity. Into this unpromising marketplace came Be inc, with their BeBox computer and its very nice BeOS operating system. To try it out as we did at a trade show some time in the late ’90s was to step into a very polished multitasking multimedia OS, but sadly one which failed to gather sufficient traction to survive. The story ended in the early 2000s as Be were swallowed by Palm, and a dedicated band of BeOS enthusiasts set about implementing a free successor OS. This has become Haiku, and while it’s not BeOS it retains API compatibility with and certainly feels a lot like its inspiration. It’s been on my list for a Daily Drivers article for a while now, so it’s time to download the ISO and give it a go. I’m using the AMD64 version. A Joy To Use, After A Few Snags If you ignore the odd font substitution in WebPositive, it’s a competent browser. This isn’t the first time I’ve given Haiku a go in an attempt to write about it for this series, and I have found it consistently isn’t happy with my array of crusty old test laptops. So this time I pulled out something newer, my spare Lenovo Thinkpad X280. I was pleased to see that the Haiku installation USB volume booted and ran fine on this machine, and I was soon at the end of the install and ready to start my Haiku journey. Here I hit my first snag, because sadly the OS hadn’t quite managed to set up its UEFI booting correctly. I thus found myself unexpectedly in a GRUB prompt, as the open source bootloader was left in place from a previous Linux install. Fixing this wasn’t too onerous as I was able to copy the relevant Haiku file to my UEFI partition, but it was a little unexpected. On with the show then, and in to Haiku. In use, this operating system is a joy. Its desktop look and feel is polished, in a late-90s sense. There was nothing jarring or unintuitive, and though I had never used Haiku before I was never left searching for what I needed. It feels stable too, I was expecting the occasional crash or freeze, but none came. When I had to use the terminal to move the UEFI file it felt familiar to me as a Linux user, and all my settings were easy to get right. Never Mind My Network Card If only the network setup on my Thinkpad was as nice as the one in the VM. I hit a problem when it came to network setup though, I found its wireless networking to be intermittent. I could connect to my network, but while DHCP would give it an IP address it failed to pick up the gateway and thus wasn’t a useful external connection. I could fix this by going to a fixed IP address and entering the gateway and DNS myself, and that gave me a connection, but not a reliable one. I would have it for a minute or two, and then it would be gone. Enough time for a quick software update and to load Hackaday on its WebPositive web browser, but not enough time to do any work. We’re tantalisingly close to a useful OS here, and I don’t want this review to end on that note. The point of this series has been to try each OS in as real a situation as possible, to do my everyday Hackaday work of writing articles and manipulating graphics. I have used real hardware to achieve this, a motley array of older PCs and laptops. As I’ve described in previous paragraphs I’ve reached the limits of what I can do on real hardware due to the network issue, but I still want to give this one a fair evaluation. I have thus here for the first time used a test subject in a VM rather than on real hardware. What follows then is courtesy of Gnome Boxes on my everyday Linux powerhouse, so please excuse the obvious VM screenshots. This One Is A True Daily Driver There’s plenty of well-ported software, but nothing too esoteric. With a Haiku install having a working network connection, it becomes an easy task to install software updates, and install new software. The library has fairly up-to-date versions of many popular packages, so I was easily able to install GIMP and LibreOffice. WebPositive is WebKit-based and up-to-date enough that the normally-picky Hackaday back-end doesn’t complain at me, so it more than fulfils my Daily Drivers requirement for an everyday OS I can do my work on. In fact, the ’90s look-and-feel and the Wi-Fi issues notwithstanding, this OS feels stable and solid in a way that many of the other minority OSes I’ve tried do not. I could use this day-to-day, and the Haiku Thinkpad could accompany me on the road. There is a snag though, and it’s not the fault of the Haiku folks but probably a function of the size of their community; this is a really great OS, but sadly there are software packages it simply doesn’t have available for it. They’ve concentrated on multimedia, the web, games, and productivity in their choice of software to port, and some of the more esoteric or engineering-specific stuff I use is unsurprisingly not there. I can not fault them for this given the obvious work that’s gone into this OS, but it’s something to consider if your needs are complex. Haiku then, it’s a very nice desktop operating system that’s polished, stable, and a joy to use. Excuse it a few setup issues and take care to ensure your Wi-Fi card is on its nice list, and you can use it day-to-day. It will always have something of the late ’90s about it, but think of that as not a curse but the operating system some of us wished we could have back in the real late ’90s. I’ll be finding a machine to hang onto a Haiku install, this one bears further experimentation. From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
not OC: this comment written by [email protected] It’s a [16 minute] video with many points and better if you watch it. However, here’s a break down of key points, made to be as simple as possible - there’s a lot more technical stuff, but I’ll try to keep it concise and less technical. This is probably about a 10 minute read if these concepts are not familiar to you: Google owns Chrome (not Chromium), and they dominate the market ever since they won the internet browser wars. As an amoral corporation (not evil, simply lacking morals), their business runs on advertisements. They’re revealing a new feature called Manifest v3 which is a locked down version of the browser that’s built around what they feel is security and trust. Under their proposal for Manivest v3, your browser will have to be “verified” in an attempt to keep you “safe”. Are you a human or a bot? They’re making a more trusted internet with trusted software. Companies like Netflix, news web sites, etc. will eat this up and implement the proper protocols to use Manifest v3. To visit your bank’s web site which has this protocol, you’ll need to use Chrome’s browser. Using Chrome’s browser, you’ll need to authenticate yourself and become a “trusted” user. With this enabled, you can then visit your bank’s web site. If you use an alternative browser that isn’t approved, you won’t be able to use that web site. Eventually other corporations will implement these protocols, too, and you’ll be locked out from participating in the internet. Google, an ad company, gets to control advertisements better, gets to learn more about their users, and now gets to mark them as “trusted”. In other words, you get the North Korean version of the internet, “Mommy and Daddy’s Safe and Approved Internet”. Meanwhile, North Korea and Mom/Dad get to spy on you, see what you’re up to, monitor you, control you, and shape you. The benefit is they also make money off you by selling the information they learn about you. Why is this bad: It’s censorship. It’s like your mom and dad grabbing your phone, computer, enabling severe parental controls, giving it back to you, and they get to see and approve what you’re allowed to do and say at any time. Apply that same protocol to your money, too. Want to send money through the internet using PayPal? Even more censorship. Want to watch Netflix? Your parents lock it down so only certain things can be watched, at certain times, and certainly under their permission. It buries competition and makes Google even more of a monopoly. We already know Google Search is bad (advertisements, phishing web sites, auto-generated content web sites are always the first results in Google. Digital Rights Management. Just a bit north of 20 years ago, when you purchased a digital product, you could own it. Streaming didn’t exist. In an age where “buying” no longer means “owning”, this new protocol will further enforce DRM. Pay for Netflix and want to watch it? You’ll have to be a Trusted User that uses Chrome. Bought a new video game you’re excited to play on Steam? You’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to stream music through Spotify and instead use something like Bandcamp? To make a purchase at Bandcamp, you’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to buy something through Bandcamp and instead just download what you already paid for? You guessed right - you’ll need to be a trusted user to even login and reach your downloads. Don’t forget your downloads are hosted on servers that are run by Google and Amazon - you’ll have to be a trusted user in order to download from that server. Can I use Firefox and stop using any Chromium browser Most browsers are Chromium: Chrome, Brave, Ungoogled Chromium to name a few. They will all eventually implement Manifest v3, and if they don’t, they will disappear. Firefox is not Chromium, but think about how many users use Firefox now. Google Chrome has the overwhelming market share and has captured users into their platform. Because the majority of users use Chrome, corporations have to evolve to adopt Manifest v3: banking web sites, governments, job applications, benefits, healthcare, personal emergency, etc. All of these will be forced to adopt it because that’s where the users are, and Google will force corporations to participate. After all, banking web sites will face less downtime through Manifest v3, because bots won’t be able to spam them and try to get in. Netflix will have to spend less money on security, because only trusted users will be able to even reach Netflix. Your “free” email service through Gmail now stops all spam because it only accepts incoming messages from trusted users. Of course everyone will adopt it - Google is safe, secure, and trusted. And best of all it’s “free”! If you use Firefox now and continue to use it, you’ll be safe for several years. For now. What can we do? Right now, you can opt out of using Chrome by using Firefox and other decentralized tools. In the not too distant future, there’s not much that you can do. Educating users to switch from Chrome, use Linux, use stock Android (e.g., Graphene OS), will not help. Eventually, the users that use Firefox, Linux, stock de-googled Android will get locked out. An average user isn’t going to invest their time to learn these platforms. They’ll stick with what works: “I can login to Chrome and watch my Netflix and pay my bills. You’re telling me that this Linux thing doesn’t let me do that? Screw that, I’ll use Chrome OS - at least my shit works! What’s wrong with these Linux developers, they can’t get anything right! They should take a lesson from Google and fix their shit.” Write your politicians and hope that some governments will help restrict this rollout. Keep in mind though that some version of this will get passed and approved. Also don’t forget that corrupt regulators and politicians are captured and owned by corporations. This will get passed, there’s no doubt about it. What will happen 20 years from now? Humans have tenacity. You can only frustrate humans so much before they break. Take away too many of their freedoms, impose many restrictions, and eventually they will break. The trick for all of time, seen throughout history by all our overlords, kings, emperors, etc. is to find a careful balance. Take away “just enough” freedoms. Give them “just enough”. Work them until they’re tired, but don’t let them break. And of course, give them a few handouts here and there, but not enough to make their lives easy. Manifest v3 (or its derivative) will be implemented. There’s no doubt about that at all. The 99% of the population will continue to use these services because they want to be able to participate: They have to pay bills, access money, access healthcare, use government systems, do education, have entertainment, etc. The 99% will continue to use this because they won’t care. So long as they can be happy enough, they will persist. Eventually, an infinitesimally small minority will be affected by something. Something will break and cause them to snap, and they will do the only thing that an individual human can do: opt out. That small minority will leave, opt out, and refuse to participate in the system. Those clusters will grow at an extremely small rate because they’re able to recognize the whole picture and see that personal freedoms are so restricted. They’ll remember their history and learn from it. Enter decentralization - the removal of power from centralized powers. Those who recognize decentralization will build new platforms, and others will eventually follow. This is why the Fediverse and Bitcoin exist. They recognize the problem of centralization and are full of users who decided to opt out. The Fediverse adoption exploded with the 2023 Reddit API problem, and the constant Twitter issues under Elon Musk. Bitcoin happened in 2009 out of anger from the 2008 global financial crisis when “Satoshi Nakomoto” decided to build a new economy of money that had “rules, but without rulers”. What happens 20+ years from now? In 30 years when more of the population realizes their freedoms are under attack, they’ll consult the ones who left 10 years previously. In 40 years, you might have choice. There may be a “new Firefox” that pops up after the old Firefox was wiped out 10 years ago, and let’s you use the internet, your IP, and your content in a different way. The trick is to train yourself to see the big picture. You’ll never defeat your overlords - they’re behind tall walls and they control the money. However, you can opt out. You can refuse to participate. But by doing so, remember that you will be locked out. That’s not an easy choice to make. But those users that do opt out, they will be the ones that were pushed too far. This is why refugees leave their homes - they just want to be safe, they want to be alright, they want their freedom from their opressors. We will have “Google Internet” (Manifest v3) refugees one day not OC: excellent original comment here from https://programming.dev/comment/1256612 based on https://programming.dev/post/865990 more by [email protected] here and here Louis Rossman video alt sites https://onion.tube/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U https://inv.zzls.xyz/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U https://invidious.io.lol/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U https://inv.citw.lgbt/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U
Komunitas
infosec.pub
I recently switched to Linux after a lifetime with Windows. Last night I went to install a backup program on my media server but it couldn’t see the destination drive. I downloaded a partition manager and it crashed trying to load the external drive. DDG’d the issue, but I couldn’t find a clear cause/effect that applied to me. So I downloaded a different partition manager and backup program, and they worked right out of the box. Turns out the non-working apps were written for Gnome and the working apps were written for KDE, (which is my desktop environment). It was a very frustrating half hour, but it pales in comparison to the time I’ve spent troubleshooting (storage) driver issues in Windows. The point I’m making is, Linux isn’t really that hard to learn, it’s just unfamiliar and therefore scary. Getting past your fear unlocks a whole new world of wonder and possibilities! 🐧