Author | Lightnews

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Samuel ✡️ 🎗️🗽 @bluelion70.bsky.social · 30m

I remember what the left used to say about “9 people sitting at a table with 1 Nazi”, as recently as 4-5 years ago.

Spoiler alert: there are ten Nazis at that fucking table, no matter how leftist or progressive their populism may be.

Pamela Parkington @bigdogmomthree.bsky.social · 35m

At this point these people tying themselves into pretzels trying to justify that a nazi tat is no big deal are no better than he is. As far as I'm concerned, they're Nazis too.

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StandWithUs @standwithus.bsky.social · 7h

Did you know that tens of thousands of pelicans pass through Israel each autumn, and local fish-farms actually help by providing special feeding stops for them? 🇮🇱

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Samuel ✡️ 🎗️🗽 @bluelion70.bsky.social · 1h

"Nathaniel Redmond, director of [Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab], said on Tuesday that the horror, scale, and velocity of killing” in El Fasher had left pools of blood visible from satellites."

Tanya Domi @tanyadomi.bsky.social · 21h

There are no words for Sudan-- the "blood bath" conclusion marks the complete failure of the international community. This is a horrific situation & like so many other wars, I doubt there will be justice for these survivors & their families.

Sudan siege ends in bloodbath despite pleas for mercy

Evidence emerges of atrocities committed by the paramilitary RSF after it seized control of El Fasher

www.ft.com

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Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 1h

And it’s the New South with a steel chair!

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Lucy @leftliblucy.bsky.social · 2h

In order to live up to my own advice, I have written an email to my local MP about the situation in Darfur. I strongly suggest everyone else do the same; this works, especially in numbers. Political staffers will attest to this.

I'm sorry to those trying to read this. The email is too long to be condensed into 2000 characters. But it introduces myself, before speaking about the conflict and then suggesting Australia put diplomatic and economic pressure on the United Arab Emirates.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 14h

Gates knows that if he funds a billion dollars of climate activity, that’s a billion dollars not spent on TB vaccines, which would definitely save 25,000 lives.

Shd he choose their deaths for the sake of uncertain longterm outcomes climate work may have?

‘Yes’ is not necessarily the right answer.

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 14h

"Gates operates at such a scale he must be an actuary" is a absolutely killer line and very, very true.

Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 14h

You and I (and Michael Mann) have the luxury of vibes; Gates operates at such scale he must be an actuary.

It’s pure necropolitics, weighing up how many millions of deaths are the likely outcome of each side of your investment ledger.

The responsibility must feel annihilating.

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Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 11h

When I vote for a candidate I am explicitly stating that I believe they will make these kinds of choices with a higher accuracy than all other candidates. Because they will make them regardless of if they know it or not. Because this is what having power, any power, means on a fundamental level.

Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 11h

Btw these calculations are way worse at the scale of the government, especially when the military gets involved. Take Yemen; When Biden launched Ensuring Prosperity, he effectively decided that fewer lives would be lost bombing Yemen than from the closing of the shipping lanes through the Red Sea.

Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 14h

You and I (and Michael Mann) have the luxury of vibes; Gates operates at such scale he must be an actuary.

It’s pure necropolitics, weighing up how many millions of deaths are the likely outcome of each side of your investment ledger.

The responsibility must feel annihilating.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 14h

The headlines on this story are so infuriating: maximum clickbait.

So many ppl I follow have been blithely tweeting ‘Bill Gates doesn’t care about climate change’, which isn’t remotely the case.

Instead, Bill Gates is saying his priority is reducing human suffering.

Oooh how wicked. Condemn him!

CNBC @cnbc.com · 2d

Bill Gates softens 'Climate Disaster' approach, says too many resources are going to fight the problem

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says countries and leaders need to shift their approach to climate change and focus on 'improving lives'

cnb.cx

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Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 12h

Very good thread.

K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

Bill Gates himself put a tl;dr at the top so I guess we'll evaluate whether it's an honest representation of his memo. But also, if it isn't, it's not clear if it matters because the tl;dr is what a lot of people will read!

What to know

Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions.
But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

Bill Gates himself put a tl;dr at the top so I guess we'll evaluate whether it's an honest representation of his memo. But also, if it isn't, it's not clear if it matters because the tl;dr is what a lot of people will read!

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

Bill Gates understands there is no CEO of reality, which puts him ahead of like, 95% of policy thinkers?

For a company, it's relatively easy to make a shift like that because there’s only one person in charge. By contrast, there is no CEO who sets the world’s climate priorities or strategies, which is exactly as it should be. These are rightly determined by the global climate community.

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

It's about prioritization. And considering Bill Gates basically was doing Effective Altruism before Effective Altruism had a buzzy name used by insane shrimp welfare analysts, that's not surprising.

1.
Drive the Green Premium to zero.

At each COP, governments take turns announcing commitments to lower their emissions. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t tell us which technologies are needed to meet those commitments, whether we have them yet, or what it will take to get them.

This is why, in addition to country-by-country commitments, every COP should have high-level discussions and commitments based on the five sectors. Policies and innovations in each sector need to get more visibility. Representatives from each of the five sectors should report on progress toward affordable and practical zero-carbon innovations, using the Green Premium as their yardstick.

If you’re a policymaker, you can bring this sector-by-sector focus on the Green Premium to your government’s work. You can also protect funding for clean technologies and the policies that promote them. This is not just a public good: The countries that win the race to develop these breakthroughs will create jobs, hold enormous economic power for decades to come, and become more energy independent.

If you’re an activist, you can call for steps that make clean alternatives in every sector as cheap and practical as their fossil fuel counterparts. The public is more likely to switch to clean technology when it’s cheaper and better than fossil fuels.

If you’re a young scientist or entrepreneur, this is a moment to rethink what it means to change the world. The people working on clean materials today will have an enormous impact on human welfare. If you need pointers, the Climate Tech Atlas published last month by Breakthrough Energy and other partners is an excellent guide to the technologies that are essential for decarbonizing the economy.

If you’re an investor, I encourage you to invest in companies working on high-impact clean technologies that will eventually have no Green Premium. I’m putting more of my own money into these efforts because reducing the Green Premium to zero demands more for-profit capital. It’s also a fantastic investment in what will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. (I will give any profits I make from my investments to the Gates Foundation.)

Be rigorous about measuring impact.

I wish there were enough money to fund every good climate change idea. Unfortunately, there isn’t, and we have to make tradeoffs so we can deliver the most benefit with limited resources. In these circumstances, our choices should be guided by data-based analysis that identifies ways to deliver the highest return for human welfare.

Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent. Since 2000, Gavi has spent $22 billion to immunize children in poor countries, preventing 19 million deaths. That means Gavi can save a life for a little more than $1,000. Other estimates find that vaccines cost less than $5,000 per life saved. And vaccines become even more important in a warming world because children who aren’t dying of measles or whooping cough will be more likely to survive when a heat wave hits or a drought threatens the local food supply.

Every effort in the world’s climate agenda should undergo a similar analysis and be prioritized by its ability to save and improve lives cost-effectively. Malaria prevention, for example, is nearly as good as vaccines on the basis of cost per life saved. Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future. Many of the best buys in agricultural innovation will be on display at COP30 in a showcase hosted by the Gates Foundation, the Brazilian government, and other partners.

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

Gates has done something sneaky here that I approve of. He makes the claim that improving economic conditions of poor countries will fight climate change. But it won't, unless you measure climate change by "how many people will climate change kill" as opposed to "how much did the climate change"

truth #3 health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.

A few years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab ran a thought experiment: What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low-income countries over the rest of this century? The answer: It falls by more than 50 percent.

This finding is exciting because it suggests a way forward. Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half, it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more. And economic growth is closely tied to public health. So the faster people become prosperous and healthy, the more lives we can save.

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K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 1d

the important bit here is "focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people". That's not omnicide, it's the opposite of that.

Also, a reminder: Bill Gates is very rich, his resources are still dwarfed by the problems. Quite limited.

This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.

Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 15h

Legally, this is no different from Iran sinking a Disney cruise in international waters and then saying "it's all good, they were terrorists carrying drugs."

Which is to say, it's wholly illegal and has been for centuries. You couldn't even do this with a Letter of Marque and Reprisal.

Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 15h

Another illegal US maritime strike—again in the Pacific.

Against a vessel allegedly operated by an unspecified "designated terrorist organization."

Four reported fatalities—dubbed w/o ID or evidence "narco-terrorists."

There's a word for premeditated killings outside of armed conflict.

Earlier today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on yet another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) in the Eastern Pacific.

This vessel, like all the others, was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics. Four male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel—and killed—during the strike, which was conducted in international waters. No U.S. forces were harmed in this strike.

The Western Hemisphere is no longer a safe haven for narco-terrorists bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans. The Department of War will continue to hunt them down and eliminate them wherever they operate.

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DianeH5 🇺🇸 ✡ 🇮🇱 🎗 🇺🇦 🟦 @dianeh5.bsky.social · 15h

www.jns.org/german-broad...

German broadcaster cuts ties with Gaza-based production company over Hamas links

ZDF production worker Ahmed Abu Mutair, who was killed on Oct. 19, was reportedly a platoon commander in the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

www.jns.org

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Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 18h

As someone who plays a lot of grand strategy games, it is very very very painful for me to say that Dan Quayle probably saved American democracy (or at least delayed its fall for 4 years jury is still out on that) on January 6th, but its objectively a correct statement.

Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 1d

That VP ended up being the voice of reason who told Mike Pence “of course you can’t steal the election for Trump.”

watertigernyc @watertigernyc.bsky.social · 2d

Still laughing at this.

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 6d

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Drow Paweł Włodkowic 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 21h

Sorry Americans but if you think you can fund a welfare state without putting a single cent in it yourself then you have actually discovered why you still dont have a welfare state.

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Zoomer Antimillenarian ♨️ @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 1d

It relied on Trump making some big unforced errors but OH BOY DID HE MAKE THE GODDAMN UNFORCED ERRORS.

Repeatedly and spectacularly.

♨ naïve dumbass @atticusgf.bsky.social · 1d

If this is legit it validates the dem strategy entirely

AdotSad @adotsad.bsky.social · 1d

Hiked premiums haven't even gone into effect yet

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Michael Paulauski♨️ @mike10010100.com · 1d

Folding will not only not feed the hungry people, it will only serve to give Trump more reasons to hold people hostage with hunger in the future.

You do not negotiate with terrorists. And right now, the entire federal government is being held hostage by Republicans.

Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 1d

I do not believe Dems should fold. I believe if this works, he will keep doing it. If I believed folding would feed hungry people, I would at the very least strongly consider it. But he explicitly said he felt no obligation to honor any deal struck.

Aaron van Dorn @aaronvandorn.bsky.social · 1d

"Trump is illegally impounding SNAP funds to make people hungry so he can force the Democrats to capitulate to help the hungry people" is just a wild state of affairs.

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Galen Flanagan 🎗️✡️ 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @flanagg21.bsky.social · 20h

In my opinion so much hinges on how much Democrats win the election next Tuesday by. Like If Spanberger wins by 15 or more points or we get a supermajority in the state house, the GOP has to fold right? Surely they can't be so insane to not see the writing on the wall by that point?

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Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 1d

I do not believe Dems should fold. I believe if this works, he will keep doing it. If I believed folding would feed hungry people, I would at the very least strongly consider it. But he explicitly said he felt no obligation to honor any deal struck.

Aaron van Dorn @aaronvandorn.bsky.social · 1d

"Trump is illegally impounding SNAP funds to make people hungry so he can force the Democrats to capitulate to help the hungry people" is just a wild state of affairs.

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