Number 7. Le Monde. StravaLeaks: French nuclear submarine patrols revealed by careless crew members.
They were only trying to stay in shape, no small task for sailors bound for a month-long voyage under the sea to places unknown.
Sailors at Ile Longue at the far western tip of France are assigned to one of four nuclear powered submarines operated by the French Navy. This most secret base is in Brittany. Each nuke boat can carry up to 16 SSBNs, submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles, so the French consider it relatively important not to tell other nations where their boats are at any given time.
Or where they are not.
For security, the 2,000 employees who frequent the base at Ile Longue must show IDs and submit to scanners and facial recognition systems. Teams with dogs mount regular perimeter patrols. All cell phones and devices must be left at special checkpoints when entering the grounds.
But sailors must remain physically fit, and like anybody, a technology-driven fitness app is a help. Strava, which its website claims is the number 1 app for cyclists and runners, is a logical choice.
The devices the French collect at the gate apparently do not include smart watches.
Strava, like any good social media app, allows runners to keep track of their workout, and share important things like a running schedule, bragging on goals met… and the map coordinates of where you were when you finished your run.
Such as on the dock, right alongside a super-secret nuke boat whose location must never be divulged.
OF course, no one would know that the runner is also a sailor who serves on that boat, except that (a) everyone who is interested in French nukes knows their home harbor is at Ile Longue in Brittany, and (b) when your Strava app shows your strict workout schedule every day for a month at the boat dock, and then you suddenly DO NOT workout for exactly 30 days, and then you suddenly start again, it’s a pretty good indication you were on an extended trip for a month.
Like for example a submarine tour.
So… a simple conclusion is that this runner belonged to one of the boats, and now we know when it left Brittany and when it returned.
Long live social media.
Number 6. The Gateway Pundit. Florida school district banned cell phones with wild results.
Speaking of technology getting in the way, those knuckle-dragging last-century conventional thinkers at Broward County Public Schools have insisted that students leave their cellphones (gasp!) when they enter the school building.
They don’t get the phones back until the end of the day, meaning they cannot access them even during lunch.
You might think this unlawful seizure — if not search — surely prohibited by the 4th Amendment, might lead to organized riots in the halls and food fights at lunchtime.
Not so, say administrators and teachers. Certain behaviors have disappeared along with the cell phones:
Secret texting
Surfing instead of listening
Organizing after-school fights
Photographing others to bully them
Setting up a conflict in order to record it
Fights between students are down 17% from last year. Teachers report that students exhibit greater creativity, longer attention spans, more engaging conversations and more interest in class discussions.
What’s not to like? It’s almost like students demonstrate an ability to quickly adapt to their environment, which one might say humans have been doing for at least 6,000 years. What a shock.
Number 5. Bio Pharma Dive dot com. Eli Lilly blames slower than expected growth for 2024 sales miss.
In case you haven’t noticed, Americans are getting fatter all the time. Obesity and diabetes seem to have become status symbols. Big Pharma is raking in cash as we rush to get new treatments.
(Just as a detail, consider what young people looked like in 1969, for example at Woodstock. They may have all been drugged, misguided or high on Jesus, but virtually no one was obese.)
That is why last year’s poor financial results were a shock to Eli Lilly. They had forecast that 2024 revenues would be $46 billion, but they fell short by almost 10%. While 2024 was still several billion profit dollars ahead of 2023, investor expectations are everything. Their sudden loss of fourth-quarter revenue put them below target. Stock prices fell by nearly 20 percent, making for what this article calls “tens of billions of dollars” of market-value loss.
Lilly’s market leaders for diabetes and obesity are drugs named Mounjaro and Zepbound. These are GLP-1 receptor agonists, meaning that they interact with processes in the pancreas and stomach to manage your natural insulin level. They also trick your brain into thinking you are not hungry.
Other names you may have heard (in the never-ending stream of TV commercials as you binge the latest murder show, or Yellowstone, or Landman) might be Trulicity, Ozempic or Wegovy. They are all in the same class, and they all fight Type 2 diabetes and help you lose weight.
So, given the propensity of Americans to get larger year-by-year, why would sales of these drugs suddenly slow?
The article does not speculate. My thought is that (1) we get tired of taking shots and pills without seeing immediate results, and (2) there may be a growing conviction that our American diet has gotten really hosed up in the last 50 years. Some who are concerned about their health (and not everyone is) may actually be seeking remediation through healthier foods rather than through miracle drugs.
Hope springs eternal. If that trend is true, it will be interesting to see if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as Secretary of Health & Human Services, and if he begins to rant with a government megaphone in favor of more natural foods, and if the American people actually begin to respond. If so, Eli Lilly will have to find alternative ways to boost profits.
Not to worry. Free market capitalism can overcome lots of obstacles… even a consumer base that suddenly turns to rational buying habits.
Number 4. Sci Tech Daily. Scientists discover a massive undergound water vault in Oregon.
Researchers have claimed they always knew the Cascade Mountains held more water than had ever been accessed, but now they have determined just how much there may be. Scientists from University of Oregon claim the reservoir they have mapped is 3 times the size of Lake Mead.
This makes the new discovery one of the largest subterranean fresh water aquifers in the world.
Using geothermal measurements from deep holes drilled in volcanic zones, research teams discovered ground temperatures at various locations much cooler than they had expected, meaning there is more water than they thought. This led them to map a huge area of hidden water deep inside the mountain range. Current estimates are 21 trillion gallons of water, about half the capacity of Lake Tahoe, but actual quantities may be much higher.
Because the aquifer is at relatively high altitude, it can act as a water tower of sorts, flowing water downhill by gravity once tapped.
The newly discovered aquifer is fed by snowpack, so the year-to-year renewal is uncertain. But the mere existence of the new source is truly good news to western states perpetually in drought.
Now, it remains to be seen how much Oregon will charge their neighbors for the new H20, and how much of it California’s Assembly in Sacramento can decide should be drained into the Pacific Ocean for a complete loss.
Number 3. Weather dot com. It’s raining plastics in the Rocky Mountains.
While Oregon is awash with water (pun intended), Colorado is awash with microplastics.
This discouraging story comes from a research team assessing nitrogen levels in rainwater, snow and high mountain lakes. Analysts found what they least expected: microplastics have invaded every water sample they tested.
A sample of pure rain collected in downtown Denver shows microscopically tiny slivers and balls of plastic at 40X magnification. While we might think this is only due to the rain droplets falling through a polluted sky, the same results are found in clear, pristine lakes at high altitude.
The thought is that as plastic waste lies exposed in various places the world over, it eventually breaks down. Tiny chunks, invisible to the eye, waft away on the wind, join with others in the atmosphere, and inevitably make themselves known worldwide in rain and snow.
The study has been validated by identical results from studies in France.
It is raining plastic. It is in your water supply, and current water treatment plants lack the sophistication to screen it out.
So there.
Maybe Eli Lilly can shift over to a “Plastic-Be-Gone” product we can all start drinking.
Number 2. AP News. India kicks of a massive Hindu festival.
And speaking of religious mountain-top experiences like Woodstock, get ready for the largest gathering of Hindu faithful ever, as 400 million — yes 400 million people — are expected to descend on Prayagraj, a city in northeast India. Located near the confluence of rivers Ganges and Yamuna, the festival is held every 12 years. The faithful, by bathing in the Ganges, can cleanse their sins and facilitate their reincarnation.
There is a tradition that Vishnu (the Hindu god figure) once dropped nectar from a golden pitcher; the droplets fell on 4 cities in India (Prayagraj being one) and thus the 4 take turns hosting smaller versions of this gathering every 3 years.
This year is the big celebration on the 12-year cycle. It lasts for 6 weeks, attracts more than one-third of the entire Hindu world population, and offers many features: 3,000 kitchens, 150,000 bathrooms, 11 hospitals, new housing, roads, electricity, fresh water, cell phone towers, 50,000 police and 2,500 AI-equipped video cameras.
The event is expected to cost $765 million, which comes to less than 2 bucks per head. To gain peace and eternal life, it’s a bargain. Sign me up. But I think I might need a shower after dipping in the Ganges with 400 million new, close friends.
For you John Le Carre fans, who followed master spy George Smiley’s career from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, on to The Honourable Schoolboy, and who stuck with him to the end in Smiley’s People, His Majesty’s Secret Service has just declassified a trove of documents related to the most famous real spy ring of the 20th century.
The Cambridge 5 were 1930’s-era classmates at Cambridge University who were each recruited by the USSR to spy against England. Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were highly placed government employees with access to some of Great Britain’s most important World War 2 and Cold War secrets. Anthony Blunt, for example, was a close advisor to the Queen for several years, passing state secrets to the Soviets.
Through counter-espionage efforts, they were all outed in the 1960s, thus providing no end of speculative material for spy novels.
Le Carre capitalized on it with an intriguing (and depressing, and slightly tedious) fiction trilogy that had George Smiley trapping his friend and associate in a web of lies.
James Clavell’s Nobel House (1981) speculates that MI-5 knew of only 4 moles — which was in fact true for a time — and his novel is partly built around the hidden 5th conspirator.
Both Le Carre and Clavell are worth reading (sort of) if you are interested in well-written spy novels allowing a ready escape from 21st century politics.
Personally, I find the MI-5 release of the real-life Cambridge 5 documents pretty intriguing. Maybe I will bore you with those in a future episode.
And thanks for listening to the The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, January 17, 2025. We survived the US election in November and the formal vote certification 2 weeks ago. Now we will see if we can get through the inauguration on Monday. And the cabinet confirmations. And the raft of executive orders sure to follow. High drama!
It would be entirely understandable if you choose to immerse yourself in Le Carre for a while.
Have a good weekend!
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