@choui4 most immediately, it destroys habitats, and even if sparsely populated, semi-deserts are habitats to extraordinary species. Totalitarian counties in particular don’t have the mechanisms of internal criticism and self-correctiveness, and as a consequence risk moving too fast for nature to adapt.

Hardly comparable, because we’re talking of an opposing action here, but here are examples of effects of water engineering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern/_river/_reversal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado/_River/_Compact#Over-use,_climate_change,_and_other_issues
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gk1251w14o

This type of large scale engineering is quite dangerous, but still better this than what has happened for decades around the world and is still happening in Brazil.

@blackn1ght @science

@reabsorbthelight to give estimates, we’d need to see if the increased applications lead to increased awards to US researchers (which is quite probable). One of these grants leads to about a dozen new hires, and it’s very probable that senior researchers would want to pull their teams along.

@reabsorbthelight an average full-time professor does not cover the requirements for an advanced grants. That’s why an average full-time professor doesn’t get several millions of funding.

@Draegur @science just don’t forget all the blinded-by-greed dumb-as-fuck billionaires behind him

“Advanced Grants — for established principal investigators — saw the greatest leap in US applications, with the number nearly quintupling from 23 to 114. The ERC does not routinely publish information on the nationalities of applicants, but Kieron Flanagan, a science-policy researcher at the University of Manchester, says that he suspects many of these senior researchers are Europe-born or Europe-trained, and are “opting to use the ERC grant as a mechanism to escape the US system””

@science

@bundyo @mapto@feddit.bg в обществения сектор това най-често е корупция, в частния - мързел (алтернативите са в пъти по-евтини). Но трябва да се говори повече за това.

@mapto@feddit.bg “Then there is the question of the support that Epstein appears to have been giving to far-right parties in Europe seeking to undermine the European Union – a key strategic goal for Putin. He was in regular contact with Steve Bannon, who later became Trump’s first chief of staff, who was seeking to build a pan-European far-right, anti-EU “movement” and was a powerful supporter of Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign” 2/2 https://www.euractiv.com/opinion/is-epstein-haunting-europe-from-the-grave/

@mapto@feddit.bg “Whether Epstein was a Russian agent is a critical question for Europe. Firstly because many young European women may have been trafficked to the US. Secondly, because if the goal was to collect compromising material on leading figures, then Russia will still have the means to blackmail those same people. That matters particularly because Trump has sided with Russia against Ukraine and is talking of doing commercial deals with Moscow” (quotes is approximate due to shortening) 1/2

@mapto@feddit.bg this is getting bigger and bigger
https://bylinetimes.com/2026/02/03/in-putins-orbit-the-crypto-politics-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-peter-thiel/

@frightful_hobgoblin I don’t see a need to embrace an idea of something that already exists throughout

@balkanika Or can there be a middle way for culture in times of war? When I asked Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer, about this, she pointed me to the Ukrainian photojournalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov’s Bafta-nominated documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a film “which is not so much ‘pro-military’ but ‘pro-soldier’, deeply empathetic towards the men who are sacrificing their lives for inches of Ukrainian soil”

@balkanika It’s understandable to feel frustrated with political leaders of the past having manoeuvred Europe into this conundrum, or with those of today remaining in the “comfort zone of cowardice and inaction”, as Nathalie Tocci wrote. But we should also ask what role we have to play in this – the kind of people on the liberal left who enjoy thoughtful European arthouse cinema, or indeed those who make it

@balkanika All the evidence suggests that calls for European rearmament are not driven by an out-of-control yearning for former military glories, but a gradual awakening to these realities – which is why this turn is happening slowly and often reluctantly, and why Germany’s new plans fall some way short of conscription

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika "The only thing she guessed correctly was that he had a scar on his scrotum. The journalist was stunned at first, but then he understood why his colleague had invited him to the bathhouse…

As for predictions, everyone remembers the ones that came true. But even more did not come true! For example, Vanga predicted to Alexander Bovin that the USSR would send troops to Chile. Obviously, the Bulgarian secret services made a mistake in their international forecasts…" 5/5

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika “I checked it out in the same way as I did with Uncle Vanya, only I couldn’t go myself, so I asked two journalists (they asked not to be named) to do it. One of them asked his acquaintances to introduce him to Vanga. A Bulgarian fellow journalist, clearly connected to the authorities, questioned his new friend and went with him to the bathhouse, then took him to Vanga. And she gave him the whole set of stories she had prepared.” 4/5

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika “Most importantly, the archives of the secret services themselves were used. This is where Vanga’s knowledge came from. For example, Todor Zhivkov was shocked when Vanga told him: your friends were killed 50 years ago. He thought that no one knew about this. Later, an acquaintance from the Bulgarian secret service told me that he had even seen a photograph of those killed in his archives…” 3/5

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika “The legend of Vanga was created using the same formula, but it was promoted by the Bulgarian secret services. It was prestigious for the country to have a prophetess who attracted crowds of tourists and celebrities from all over the world. Including politicians. The secret services had their own interests here. In the town where visitors to Vanga stayed, information about future famous visitors was collected by hotel maids and taxi drivers.” 2/5

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika “Vanga saw the past through the archives of the secret services”

https://www.skeptik.net/extras/gorny1.htm

The interviewee in this article was a member of the Commission on Pseudoscience at the Russian Academy of Sciences at its founding in 1998

1/5

@mapto@feddit.bg @balkanika from NY Post and the Mirror to Hindustan Times. This Bulgarian propaganda
project mastered clickbait before clickbait even existed. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=baba%2BVanga&iar=news&t=fpas