Radio Reuben @RubyGold

EXTRAORDINARY WINTER HEAT IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Hundreds of records smashed allover the area between Namibia,South Africa,Botswana,Zimbabwe,Zambia,Tanzania and Mozambique. Tshane at 1100m asl rose to 30.5C,already breaking its record several times Record heat will last WEEKS. Insane

This photo was taken in 2008. I was a young reporter, notebook in hand, in Khayelitsha, trying to make sense of the first wave of xenophobic violence to rip through this country. I was profoundly affected. I watched Somalian mothers in tents, cradling their babies in disbelief. Spoke to Ethiopian men, almost crying from the shock and pain of it all. I thought: We will never let this happen again. Yet, here we are. Eighteen years later and I'm watching the same fires, literal and figurative, and the same dangerous lies spreading faster than ever, turbocharged by social media and amplified by politicians who should know better. But the numbers do not support the narrative. Immigrants, documented and undocumented combined, make up roughly 4 million people. That is about 5% of our population. The idea that 5% of the country is responsible for our crime, our unemployment, our collapsing healthcare? It is not just wrong, it is mathematically absurd. Look at who the Zondo and Madlanga Commissions have implicated. Look at rape statistics: 120 women a day, and a third of South African men have admitted to committing rape. Are we really blaming foreigners for that? If every undocumented immigrant left tomorrow, your local public hospital would still be broken. Not because of the person standing ahead of you in the queue, but because of corruption, mismanagement and decades of underfunding that have nothing to do with them.  March and March's June 30 deadline is not a peaceful protest. It is a dog whistle. And the media and political figures who treat it as legitimate activism are complicit in what it is actually designed to trigger. I started explain.co.za because I believe that access to accurate, contextual information is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of a functioning democracy. And a democracy that allows dangerous misinformation to go unchallenged, that allows real economic despair to be weaponised against the most vulnerable, is one that is putting itself at serious risk. We have covered this crisis extensively at explain.co.za. We will keep doing so. Because owe it to each other to do better. #SouthAfrica #Xenophobia #MediaLiteracy #Journalism #Democracy #Explain #FactsMatter #SouthAfricanMedia #BuildingInPublic #Immigration

🎥 7 climate graphs for human survival Why we need urgent #ClimateAction Full #video ▶️ youtu.be/MVwg1LsqwSM PL RP🩷💚💙 @SARA2001NOOR @HeathWatchman @BarryBleunNila2 @slsandpet @Debatthebeach_ @Wikweko @frasier_hal @RubyGold @CordeliaAppleb1@TerenceLeungSF graphs:UNEP

Instead of discussing how Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, we should talk about how he killed hundreds of thousands of people through his dismantling of food and medical aid to poor countries currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-…

In 2010, US officials warned that South Africa’s World Cup would be unsafe because of crime and theft, suggesting tourists would stay away out of fear. 16 years later, the World Cup is in their own backyard and England’s team has been robbed in America before their first game.

Trying to imagine the reaction from the GOP if Barack Obama had favorably retweeted Iranian foreign minister Zarif during the JCPOA negotiations. What a world we live in now.

Quick edit showing some of the intense moments today while documenting 8 tornadoes in northern Illinois into Indiana. Massive shoutout to @skydrama for nailing the forecast in the warm sector. Hands down the craziest tornado outbreak I've ever documented. Full video will be released in the near future on the @thestormreel YouTube page. #ilwx #inwx #tornado #outbreak

This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read. It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60+ Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this. First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks. For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms. The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors. How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc. Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor. That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors. This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game. Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this. First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own. It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground. Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required. Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself. In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened. Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial. I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution. That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated. To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars. But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine. I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man." The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of. Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/maos-economi…). When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins. This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market. The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise. This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle. Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao. What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers? The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed. The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation. We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission. All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.

Fengming Lu @FengmingLuPE

4 days ago

Why did private firms, not state-owned enterprises (SOEs), come to dominate China’s EV sector? My new @ChinaJournal article (co-authored with Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex) challenge the "top-down industrial policy" narrative. The real engine? Strategic alliances between local

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BA.3.2 - a "forever" variant? I've always wondered why BA.3.2 has persisted for such a long time. Now we know that it mainly targets the 0-4-year age group, and we know why. Could that explain its persistence? This means its primary host population is effectively renewed every four years, with new cohorts of largely immunologically naive children entering the population, aside from maternal antibodies. That dynamic does not apply to most other variants. It could help explain why BA.3.2 has been around for so long and may suggest it has long-term staying power, especially if, beyond its antibody-evasion advantage, it is particularly well adapted to infecting young children. #BA32

CNN montage of all the times Trump announced deals with Iran. Anderson Cooper: Today marks 39 times that he has said something like that.

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The Touchline | 𝐓 @TouchlineX

3 days ago

🚨🇺🇸 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Influencers who record and post content during the World Cup will need to have a journalist visa. Otherwise, they will be deported.

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Mark this moment. This is where the endgame begins—though it might take two years to play out. A President of the United States is openly linking the *Pentagon* and rigging elections for his party. He is framing an authoritarian takeover as something the *U.S. military* wants.

THE BIGGEST IPOs OF THE LAST 15 YEARS HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON: THEY CRUSHED THE PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT THE HYPE. 🇺🇸 Robinhood -90%. Rivian -88%. Lyft -79%. Coinbase -57%. Facebook -54%. Median max drawdown: -54% in year one. Big brands. Big narratives. Big backing. Still brutal entries. SpaceX has the same DNA: enormous hype, low float, early investors deep in the green and waiting to sell. A great company isn't a great IPO buy. By the time everyone wants in, they are the liquidity.

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (part of @FrontNeurosci). It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

nytimes.com/2026/06/10/mag…

WOW. AlJazeera just dropped a ONE HOUR documentary about ISRAEL’s CRIMES against the PALESTINIANS. This is very HARD TO WATCH.

@RealCheckMarker I will never forget when we began hearing Covid causes more T cell death & loss of naive T cells than HIV. Then The Establishment came for AJ & the people who were saying this, & everyone was silenced until a billionaire began saying it last year.

AJ Leonardi, MBBS, MPH, PhD @fitterhappierAJ

4 years ago

Interesting. Uchicago finds in a preprint a strong signature of T cell apoptosis in Covid- more than HIV, and a loss of naive T cells I wrote about t cell apoptosis and a loss of naive T cells in frontiers in 2020 as being problematic biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

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The speed with which our once stable climate is falling apart is just astonishing, and very, very, scary Maybe not that surprising when you consider that our world is heating faster than at any time across the 4.6 billion year geological record theguardian.com/environment/20…

#WordCup2026