@rajtham
Formerly a sustainable finance guy who's also not fond of pandemics or genocides or fascists. On here for as long as it helps us organise a centre left response to the polycrisis. If we have something in common, feel free to send me a DM.
For months we’ve watched ICE weaponize AI surveillance tools to intimidate & abduct people from communities across the country - the suppliers of these same tools are fueling U.S. attacks on Venezuela & Iran via Palantir’s Project Maven & Anthropic’s Claude AI. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/w...
"I see the proliferation of AI-based fake news pushing us over the edge of a fact-based world unless we enact change now."
🔥2022 James Talarico to Biden & Washington Dems: “Start using every tool in the toolbox to protect our freedom…. Be brave, be bold, be big. Be a little less Washington, and a little more Texas…. Fascism can’t be stopped by playing nice or playing safe.”
The misleading research guy? Ugh! He is worse than useless.
Trump said Covid-19 would go away. It wasn't but a few people. Containable. Masks not necessary. Don't have to stay home.
The Brookings Institute says 784,762 EXTRA deaths due to Trump's politicalization of a pandemic.
The danger this war poses to American Jews peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-danger...
Extreme contrasts continue in ASIA
with cold in the West and unprecedented heat in Central.Southern and Eastern Asia.
Today up to 41.6C in INDIA (5 stations >41C !) and tomorrow we might see 42C.
Hundreds of stations have been at record levels for weeks for this time of the year.
NEWS: The Trump administration is forcing transgender inmates to detransition by implementing a new policy that would withhold their medical treatment in a way that puts clinicians in conflict with ethics and patients in danger.
www.advocate.com/politics/nat...
Also known as "using insider knowledge for war profiteering."
Great work by NYT showing Trump's war is the most unpopular ever. Supports my argument (see below) that in some ways the public rejection of Trump across the board is a very heartening development:
A new Wall Street Journal investigation finds DHS is increasingly turning its wrath on U.S. citizens, punishing them for simply filming or observing officers.
Belle Cushing is one of the reporters behind the investigation. She spoke with MPR News guest host Emily Reese about it.
Why on earth does anyone buy from Starbucks?
It's coffee is crap!
Blumenthal after getting briefed on Iran: "We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here. There's also the specter of active Russian aid to Iran putting in danger American lives ... China also may be assisting Iran"
Not only did the US, per its own ‘intelligence,’ bomb this girls primary school, THEY BOMBED IT TWICE.
www.reutersconnect.com/item/the-pri...
The U.S. government is in the hands of a disturbed authoritarian who is surrounded by people who either share his delusions, are too sycophantic to confront him, or believe the president’s delusions serve just fine as a vehicle for their own zealotry and ideological extremism.
In Minneapolis and elsewhere, the Trumpists have been encountering communities exhibiting the kind of cohesion and solidarity across racial, cultural, and religious lines they claim is impossible.
Nothing could be more terrifying to the blood-and-soil nationalists.
Wrote more about this here:
"Research should not only be independent of vested interests but must also be seen to be so"
My @bmj.com piece with @fphuk.bsky.social president Tracy Daszkiewicz argues we need a public health approach to study the impact of digital technology on health.
#CDOH
www.bmj.com/content/392/...
Jakarta Declaration: Why the World Must Act Now to Protect the Lands of Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples
Who are Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples living in isolation? There are 196 confirmed Indigenous Peoples living in Isolation, located primarily in South America, Asia and the Pacific. They’re Indigenous communities that consciously choose to live separately from, or without maintaining sustained contact with, the outside world.
As a result, they’re extremely vulnerabile to: Disease Violence Territorial dispossession The physical, cultural, and collective knowledge extinction of their people
Growing pressure on their territories In many regions, their territories are increasingly threatened by: Extractive industries — affecting nearly 90% of their territories Infrastructure development Expansion of external activities These pressures are often enabled by state policies that fail to recognize and protect their rights. As the demand for transition minerals increases, the threats of forced contact are also set to increase.
The Jakarta Declaration is a major step forward for global efforts to protect uncontacted peoples’ rights. It's an Indigenous-led call to act now.
Their territories are under massive threat from extractive industries, development projects, missionaries, and more that can result in forced contact.
But let's not forget, while this is typical behavior we expect from the Right, Democrats, even ones who claim to be allies to LGTBQ communities like @warren.senate.gov , are green-lighting this! Our Director @evangreer.bsky.social talks about how in @teenvogue.com : www.teenvogue.com/story/some-d...
This is how our government has been corrupted:
1) Donors give huge sums to elect politicians
2) Elected officials rewrite rules in donors' favor
3) Donors make huge profit
4) Repeat
We must get big money out of politics. It’s the root of all evil in Washington.
Some experts worry the younger Khamenei could take the step that experts say his father never did, and race to build a nuclear bomb. "A war that was meant to prevent Iran from having a bomb could be the war that actually pushed Iran beyond the Rubicon to reach a bomb," said Danny Citrinowicz, an analyst at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, and former head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence.
“A war that was meant to prevent Iran from having a bomb could be the war that actually pushed Iran beyond the Rubicon to reach a bomb.”
Danny Citrinowicz, analyst at the Atlantic Council and former head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence
(www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/w...)
Nobody likes the western empire anymore.
Anger in Cyprus over UK bases as US-Israel war with Iran endangers island www.aljazeera.com/features/202...
The war on Iran is not only a moral catastrophe, it is a strategic one as well. Iran wins if the government survives. Israel wins r if there is chaos in Iran. In no case does the United States do anything but lose.
Iran and Israel Have War Goals. The US Does Not. youtu.be/AY-2guf_dTY?...
Where were their demands to stress-test hub exposure?
Signing up to ICGN or UNPRI is not the same as acting on it.
Principles without action are just branding. That is bystander behaviour - and it has consequences as we keep seeing.
#SystemicRisk #UniversalOwnership
Exactly!
Investors who should have seen this coming stayed silent.
ICGN (International Corporate Governance Network) & UNPRI (UN Principles for Responsible Investment) both require members to manage systemic risk.
Where were their warnings?
@rupertread.bsky.social
The US bombing of schoolchildren in Iran is the biggest single US massacre of civilians since My Lai. The Israeli bombing of Tehran’s oil storage constitutes the biggest single act of chemical warfare against a civilian population in history. Grotesque new depths of barbarism.
The question institutional investors must now ask: which other hubs are currently mispriced for geopolitical risk?
Singapore? Bosphorus? Panama? Taiwan Strait?
If Hormuz was "mispriced", what else is?
10/10
Driver 6 — Shareholder value fundamentalism.
Gulf aviation and finance hubs were built on capital logic that treated geopolitical stability as a free good — permanently available, never priced.
Trump's election amplified that bet. Markets priced in a peace dividend.
Then came the missiles.
9/10
Driver 5 — Leadership & governance failures.
Americans stranded with little government guidance isn't a minor hiccup. A very clear signals that contingency planning for the non-military consequences of this conflict simply wasn't done.
Gross incompetence from the MAGA regime around Trump.
8/10
Driver 4 — Weak concern for negative externalities.
Gulf states who helped build this regional architecture are now discovering its costs.
And populations across the Global South - with no stake in this conflict - are facing food supply disruption that appears in nobody's war calculus.
