leftsector 🟦⬜️🌲

BREAKING: Qatar just signed a 10-year defence co-production agreement with Ukraine. Not an advisory partnership. Not a training exchange. Co-production facilities. Joint defence industry projects. Technological partnerships between companies. Signed by the Chiefs of General Staff of both nations on March 28 per Zelensky’s verified account and Qatar News Agency. Qatar shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran. The North Field / South Pars reservoir holds 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas per the IEA. Two-thirds lies in Qatari waters. Ten days ago, Iran hit Ras Laffan Industrial City, the facility that processes all the gas from Qatar’s side of their shared field per CNN and QatarEnergy. Seventeen percent of Qatar’s LNG capacity is offline for three to five years. Fourteen percent of helium exports are cut. Force majeure declared. Iran bombed the other half of its own shared gas field. And now Qatar is building weapons factories with the country that mastered killing the drone Iran used to do it. The drone is the Shahed-136. Iran designed it. Russia industrialised it. Russia fired it at Ukrainian cities for four years. Ukraine developed the $2,100 Sting interceptor that kills it at a 70 percent rate. Zelensky told The National he can deliver 1,000 interceptors per day. The 10-year deal ensures Qatar will not just buy these weapons. It will manufacture them on Qatari soil with Ukrainian technology. This is the first time in the history of this war that a Gulf state has committed to building the production line, not just purchasing the product. Saudi Arabia signed a defence cooperation agreement on March 27. The UAE agreed to security cooperation on March 28. But Qatar went further. Co-production means factories. Factories mean sovereignty over supply. Qatar will no longer depend on anyone for the weapon that protects the gas field that powers 30 percent of the world’s helium. Zelensky met Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani. He updated them on Russia’s ongoing attacks and its cooperation with the Iranian regime. He told them air defence remains Ukraine’s absolute priority. Then he asked for what he has asked every Gulf leader this week: Patriot missiles that the Gulf possesses and that Ukraine desperately needs to stop Russian missiles that use the same guidance components from the same Chinese rare earth processing chain. The exchange is now visible across three countries in 48 hours. Ukraine gives cheap interceptors and expertise. Gulf states give expensive missiles and investment. Ukraine gets what it needs for Russia. The Gulf gets what it needs for Iran. And the drone that connects both wars, the Shahed that Iran designed and Russia upgraded, becomes the mechanism through which two separate conflicts merge into a single weapons economy. Trump called Zelensky “the greatest salesman on Earth.” In 48 hours, Zelensky signed three defence agreements across three Gulf capitals, secured a 10-year industrial partnership, deployed over 200 specialists, and positioned Ukraine as the sole provider of the one capability America’s $3.9 million Patriot cannot replicate: cheap, high-volume, battle-proven drone interception at $2,100 per unit. The country America said it did not need just locked in a decade of Gulf defence contracts while America raids Swiss accounts to cover its own interceptor shortfall. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Pussy Riot occupies headquarters of American tech company Ubiquiti which powers Russian war crimes Since the disabling of Starlink, Russian soldiers been panicking: “All we’ve got left now are radios, cables and pigeons.” But Ubiquiti’s hardware has emerged as the favorite replacement.  We demand that Ubiquiti: - Obey U.S. sanctions - Acknowledge Russian military use - Work with Ukraine to stop it

@curiouswavefn What details did it get wrong?

My mentor Freeman Dyson once wrote a great piece titled "In Praise of Amateurs" in which he described how amateur scientists largely operating outside institutional constraints made important discoveries. His favorite example was Bernhard Schmidt, a one-Estonian optician (he had lost two fingers of his hand in a lab accident) who invented the Schmidt telescope, forerunner of modern telescopes. In another piece titled "Our Biotech Future", he talked about a DIY biology future in which "domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures...children will have contests to see whose seeds lead to the prickliest cactus or whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur". I suspect Freeman would have been very pleased to see how AI is democratizing science and enabling discoveries by ordinary citizens. It's why he would have celebrated the story of the Australian engineer who used AI to discover a cure for his dog's cancer, even if it might have been hyped and got details wrong. The whole point of science is to be of service to society, and the more ordinary citizens can use it the merrier. Of course we need to be mindful of the dangers and of guardrails, but the history of science shows that science has never expanded beyond its horizons by being conservative.

People erroneously believe Istanbul is the only true Eurasian city, while the most Eurasian thing ever, the kebab croissant, was, in fact, ideated in Lviv, Ukraine

How Samurai Jack uses the 60:30:10 color rule to create visual magic

A Gulf resident plays the buzzing sound of a Shahed-type drone from a boombox outside a neighbor's home at night, prompting panicked reactions from residents inside, March 2026.

Huh

@KarenFOrlando @LoserInstitute @mattyglesias Who won the 2020 election?

@LoserInstitute @mattyglesias What do these mean on NY drivers licenses: f, m and X? Provide answer like this: F on drivers license means holder is female or male...Thanks. If you have trouble put in ChatGPT.

If you have the basic skills to participate in the discourse at all — like you can read and comprehend a New York Times article in order to complain about it — you’re in a weird, out of touch, elite bubble. slowboring.com/p/in-defense-o…

The $46 billion vape industry hired flavor chemists to solve a specific problem: nicotine tastes bitter. The human tongue has T2R receptors that detect nicotine and trigger aversion. So the industry reverse-engineered the problem. They loaded e-liquids with fruity aromatic compounds like farnesol, farnesene, and ethyl butyrate that suppress the bitterness signal and activate sweetness perception through the orbitofrontal cortex instead. Turns out they built something more powerful than a nicotine delivery system. A 2023 study in the Journal of Neuroscience found that green apple vape flavorants, with zero nicotine present, independently fire dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area and increase dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. The same reward circuitry that nicotine hijacks. The flavor chemicals alone were producing reward-seeking behavior in mice. A separate study found strawberry additives significantly increased nicotine vapor sampling, meaning the fruit smell made subjects inhale more of the drug without any conscious decision to do so. 95% of vape users choose flavored products. The industry has always framed this as “consumer preference.” The neuroscience says the flavors are pharmacologically active compounds that directly alter brain reward circuits and increase drug intake. Now look at what those compounds do once the device gets tossed. The UK was discarding 5 million disposable vapes per week before the ban. The aromatic volatiles don’t stop broadcasting once the device is empty. Orthonasal olfaction, the same pathway that makes you smell a strawberry from across a room, works identically in mammals. A squirrel’s olfactory system processes fruity volatiles through the same receptor families humans use. The signal reads as food. Nobody saw squirrels gnawing on Marlboro butts for 60 years. Vapes show up and suddenly there’s footage from London, Philadelphia, and Wales. The animals are chewing on lithium batteries wrapped in candy-scented plastic because the flavor engineering worked exactly as designed on a nervous system it was never tested on. The lithium in those discarded vapes equals 5,000 electric vehicle batteries per year. Oxford researchers found the cells inside can cycle 450+ times, but the product is built to be used once and thrown in a park. A squirrel holding a blueberry vape on a Brixton fence is the most honest product review the flavor chemists have ever received.

Unfortunate that it actually is the Sneako’s and Nick Fuentes’s of the world who represent a kind of traditional western man: ranting about degeneracy and the “woman problem.”

That balloon isn’t touching the ground anytime soon.

@mattyglesias Did anyone “get it right” using a good method, or naw

When Trump won in 2016, most sensible people were surprised because he was down in the polls and "the candidate who is up in the polls will probably win" is a sound forecasting principle. But people who "got it right" (i.e., used bad methods) gained prestige as a result.

@KnoxieLuv Yeah but uh… this time they REALLY mean it!

They already agreed to that BEFORE you bombed them!

If people are fighting for an orb you are reading fantasy. If people are fighting for a cube you are reading sci-fi. If it has more sides than that. I dont know. I dont know man.

Just discovered 1920s German Brick Expressionism and my life will never be the same

Jewish Germans had the highest rates of volunteering for the German Army in WWI. 100,000 jewish Germans served in WWI, out of a population of merely 500,000, meaning 40% of all male jewish Germans served. Also one has to understand one context about that picture: It was taken not in Germany but in Poland, which German had just taken from the Russian Empire. Russia was an extremely antisemeitic society while German at that time was one of the most philosemitic in Europe. So theese Jews are not laughing at the German soldier, they are happy about Germany defeating Russia.

he was in it for the domestic racism, not a war.

In the immortal words of James Carville

Go ahead, tell me it was a Jewish pickleball court. Say that you’re just asking questions. Don’t make any assertions at all, just vaguely insinuate that it’s a conspiracy. Tell me I’m goycattle for thinking a 75yo guy dying after smashing his head on concrete is plausible.