Prof Jem Bendell 🌍☸️

Rabobank ran a model of oil inventories in Europe and found that inventories fall to almost nothing by September on current trajectory. Supply disruptions should kick in much sooner than that though. 🇪🇺🛢️

Only one country can feed itself entirely: Guyana. If international food trade suddenly stopped tomorrow, just one country on Earth would be able to feed its entire population without any imports. A 2025 study in Nature Food examined the domestic production capacity of 186 countries across seven key food categories. The finding was striking: only Guyana—a small South American nation with under one million inhabitants—currently produces enough of all seven categories to achieve full nutritional self-sufficiency. China and Vietnam came closest, meeting the threshold in six out of seven categories, but every other country fell short of complete independence. Fewer than 15% of nations were self-sufficient in even five of the seven groups. Six countries, including Qatar, Iraq, and Afghanistan, failed to meet the benchmark in any category. The seven categories were grains, vegetables, fruits, meat and dairy proteins, oils, and sugar. Today, the vast majority of countries depend on global trade to fill critical gaps in their food supply. In many cases, more than half of a nation’s food imports come from a single trading partner—an acute risk in an era of rising geopolitical and climate instability. Even regional blocs fare poorly. The Gulf Cooperation Council is self-sufficient only in meat, while the Caribbean Community and West African nations reach the mark in just two categories each. The researchers’ warning is unambiguous: although trade brings dietary variety and efficiency, excessive dependence on imports—especially when concentrated in one or two suppliers—leaves most of the world dangerously exposed. In a planet defined by interconnected food systems, Guyana stands alone as the quiet exception. ["Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance highlights lack of national self-sufficiency." Nature Food, 2025]

The Metropolitan Police had a 240-page war crimes dossier on 10 British nationals who fought with the IDF in Gaza. It included evidence of killings, forced transfers and torture. The Met chose not to investigate. That is not justice asleep. That is British impunity wide awake.

I think it's time to define a new bias: LLMorphism is the belief that humans work like large language models. Since I started writing about the differences between human and artificial intelligence, I have received hundreds of messages from people who truly believe that humans are just LLMs. That human language is just next-token prediction. That creativity is just recombination of linguistic input. That humans always hallucinate and never really aim at truth. These people are not anthropomorphizing LLMs. They're doing the opposite: they're LLMorphizing humans. Over the past months, I have been thinking about this phenomenon. I argue that it emerges from two mutually reinforcing psychological mechanisms: Analogical transfer, whereby features of LLMs are projected onto humans due to output alignment; Metaphorical availability, whereby the vocabulary of LLMs becomes a culturally salient way of describing human thought. LLMorphism is a bias because it is based on an invalid inference: that similarity in linguistic outputs implies similarity in underlying processes. In this new paper, I define LLMorphism, describe its psychological basis, distinguish it from related constructs, and discuss its possible social consequences. My worry is that LLMorphism may badly impact various sectors of society by taking mind, agency, and understanding away from humans. The public debate may be missing half of the problem. The issue is not only whether we are attributing too much mind to machines. It is also whether we are beginning to attribute too little mind to humans. Article in the first reply.

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.