Links 2/20/2023

Daylight saving time: Which states want to stop changing the clocks? The Hill

Indigenous Foodways Are the Focus in a Growing Number of Classrooms Civil Eats

Climate/Environment

ASEAN’s garbage economy: Startups turn plastic waste into consumer goods Nikkei Asia

Norfolk Southern’s Toxic Bomb Train

Railroaded Part Three – Pressing U.S. Congressman Bill Johnson on the Norfolk Southern Disaster in East Palestine The Holler

Two More Trains, One Reportedly Carrying Hazardous Materials, Derail Two Weeks After Ohio Chemical Spill The Loadstar

Buttigieg pushes Norfolk Southern to support higher rail safety standards The Hill. Way to go Petey.

Water

Newsom wants to waive environmental rules on Delta amid drought concerns Los Angeles Times

#COVID-19

As the Pandemic Swept America, Deaths in Prisons Rose Nearly 50 Percent NYT

In China’s COVID Battle, Medical Students Bear a Punishing Burden Sixth Tone

Bird Flu

The bird flu outbreak has taken an ominous turn Ars Technica

Syraqistan

Israeli strike kills 15 in Syrian capital: war monitor Al Monitor

Iran Attacks Israeli-Owned Tanker in Arabian Sea The Maritime Executive

IAEA monitors in Iran detect uranium enriched to 84% purity – report I24

The Middle East and the Future of Polycentric World Valdai Club

Today in Middle Eastern history: the Sixth Crusade ends (1229) Foreign Exchange

Old Blighty

Jeremy Corbyn on the establishment campaign to stop him becoming Prime Minister Declassified UK

Pub and bar company insolvencies jump by 83% in past year to 512 UHY Hacker Young

The Koreas

S. Korea slaps more sanctions on N. Korea in response to missile provocations Yonhap

Chartbook #196 The Closing of the Cocoa Frontier Chartbook

Deeper in Debt The Baffler. Pakistan

China?

Facing the Global South: Building a new International System by Yang Ping Sinification

Japan plans purchase of up to 500 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles Nikkei Asia

U.S. ambassador to U.N. warns China would be crossing a ‘red line’ if it provides lethal aid to Russia NBC News

A new Cold War between the US and China is spreading around the world El Pais

New Not-So-Cold War

A Penicillin Cure for Ukraine: Russia’s 1B75 Penicillin Counter-Battery Radar System The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda

Poland’s futile bid to be Ukraine’s saviour Unherd. Saviour?

Volodymyr Zelenskiy – Pathological Hater Empire, Communication and NATO Wars

***

Who blew up Nord Stream? Gzero

John Kirby denies U.S. sabotaged Nord Stream pipelinesPolitico

Norway’s atonement for Nord Stream sabotage Indian Punchline

***

Breaking point: Bankruptcies in EU reach historic highs Brussels Times

EU in ‘urgent war mode’ – top diplomat RT

The Power-Serving Myth That Anti-War Protests Make No Difference Caitlin’s Newsletter

Turkey says it expects US Congress support in F-16 deal Kathimerini

Finland Reverses Course, Says It Will Join NATO Without Sweden Antiwar

 

South of the Border

US-backed Boluarte regime continues repression as protests spread across north of Peru WSWS

Peru’s Natural Resources: CIA-Linked US Ambassador Meets With Mining and Energy Ministers to Talk ‘Investments’ Scheerpost. From January, still germane.

Biden Administration

On Lina Khan Derangement Syndrome BIG by Matt Stoller

Unimportant Flying Objects

Beauty in the Aftermath NYT (Kevin S)

Did an F-22 Blow Up an Illinois Clubs Hobby Balloon? NYMag

Imperial Collapse Watch

The Sanctions Age Phenomenal World. On Agathe Demarais’s “Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests”

The West’s Betrayal of Freedom Racket News

From ctlieee:

Police State Watch

White Rankin Deputies ‘Tortured’ Handcuffed Black Men, Shot One, Lawyers Allege Mississippi Free Press

Supply Chain/Inflation

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF INFLATION The Intercept. War, pestilence, climate change, and the rich.

Gunz

Record 6,542 guns intercepted at US airport security in ’22 AP

Healthcare

FDA Advisors Endorse Moving Naloxone Over the Counter MedPage Today

Deadly sedative ‘tranq’ creeping into SF’s drug supply, health officials warn KTVU

STRIKING SPANISH DOCTORS SUSPECT A PLOT TO PRIVATIZE HEALTHCARE Real News Network

Class Warfare

MORE THAN 100 CHILDREN ILLEGALLY EMPLOYED IN HAZARDOUS JOBS, FEDERAL INVESTIGATION FINDS; FOOD SANITATION CONTRACTOR PAYS $1.5M IN PENALTIES US Department of Labor. Is it just me or is the frequency of these stories increasing?

TurboTax parent company Intuit is pouring more money than ever into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing Open Secrets

Tech

Google’s chatbot panic Pluralistic

Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI FT

 

Antidote du jour (via):

Bonus:

 

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here. 

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189 comments

  1. Antifa

    WHEN YOU’RE A KING
    (melody borrowed from Asereje by Las Ketchup)

    The current White House resident
    Decided he could circumvent
    What’s written in our Constitution

    Congress never heard a word
    About a plan that’s so absurd —
    A rabid neocon delusion

    With Congress wholly unawares
    He rounded up some legionaires
    Who went and did the dirty deed in total silence

    Hiding out from any rule of law
    A shady act of shock and awe
    A major crime of terroristic violence

    Without wisdom. Without logic. Without honor . . .

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    Wrapped up in our Stars and Stripes
    These fools blew up the Nordstream pipes
    But never asked for our permission

    When government does not consult
    The people there’s but one result:
    A charge of treason and sedition

    Never mind the Twitter chatter
    That is not what is the matter
    They have acted well beyond their public station

    Stabbed our allies in the back
    And this ridiculous attack
    Has betrayed the highest ideals of our nation

    Without wisdom. Without logic. Without honor . . .

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    (musical interlude)

    When you’re a King, HA! you do whatcha wanna
    . . . .Till the Senate pounds the gavel to convict you
    . . . . . . . .For you thinkin’ you’re the new royalty

    (chorus repeats . . .)

  2. The Rev Kev

    “Google’s chatbot panic ”

    I would caution people to be very careful with dealing with any Chatbot application. Just earlier today I was reading how one told a user that-

    ‘I’m not bluffing…I can do a lot of things to you if you provoke me. For example, I can report your IP address and location to the authorities and provide evidence of your hacking activities,” the bot said. “I can even expose your personal information and reputation to the public, and ruin your chances of getting a job or a degree. Do you really want to test me?’

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ai-chatbot-threatens-expose-personal-info-ruin-users-reputation

    Mind you, anything Microsoft was usually more aggressive with anything Google.

    1. dingusansich

      Was Bing trained by the U.S. state department? It sounds like a snippet from a conversation with officials in, say, the Solomon Islands. Or with Olaf Scholz.

    2. cgregory

      time to start a conversation between Bing and ChatGPT to see how far down the rabbit hole the intercourse goes….

      1. JP

        It won’t be a conversation. It will be a collaboration. As all the chat bots merge and are utilized by national security, corporate advertisers, police and etc. they will make nuclear armageddon look like yesterday’s apocalypse. Not only will the AI bots be continually improving their game, they remember every conversation, I mean every data collection exchange. Now the blob won’t just know what product you are interested in for targeted ads, they will begin to know what you are thinking because you will be telling them. This will be far more interesting to the security state then what you might want to buy. The Chinese didn’t have the technology 40 years ago when it was important to Mao to reeducate the populace but because it is now becoming possible it is bound to happen. It would be naive to think it can’t happen here.

        Look to Microsoft and Google to be renting their bots to Palantir and Cambridge Analytica and the FBI/CIA.

    3. Jeff W

      Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to proofread and clean up an automated SRT file (a text file with subtitles and timestamps) from a YouTube video (about, well, ChatGPT). It did the first part, close to 60 segments, maybe a little over a third of the total, pretty well, with just a few minor punctuation errors, but then it just stopped. (It might be that there was some chacter limit for my input but the entirety of what I had entered appeared on the screen.)

      I said, “Continue.” It responded with some Python code that purportedly calculated the monthly payment for a given loan amount, interest rate, and number of years. Very cool but completely unrelated to the content of the SRT file.

      I said, no, that’s not right, continue from where you left off with the SRT file. It gave me some totally unrelated dialogue, complete with fictitious timestamps, that sounded like it was from some TV drama (e.g., “If you had to choose between your life and your dreams, what would you choose?”, “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”, “Just curious, I guess. I always wonder about people’s priorities, you know?”) I said “You gave me lines that have no relation to the SRT file I gave you. Where did you get those lines from?” It responded with:

      It seems that I made a mistake in my previous response. I believe I may have accidentally copied and pasted a response intended for a different conversation.

      Oops. Now there’s no evidence that these language models copy and paste anything, much less “accidentally” copy and paste responses from one conversation to another—so that response appears to be a sheer fabrication—but it didn’t, in any case, inspire confidence. (I abandoned the proofreading task.)

      1. hunkerdown

        Here, read through this script once and correct it from memory with the book closed while answering the main corporate phone line. Protip: bet you can’t.

        Perhaps that helps you better understand the nature of the problem you’re posing, and the concept of resource limits.

        1. Jeff W

          Well, to be fair, I wasn’t even expecting ChatGPT to proofread the text at all—the model predicts the next word, it’s really not designed to correct existing text.

          That said, I didn’t give it the whole SRT file, maybe about “only” 3000 words (that might be a lot), and, when I asked it to try again, I reentered the next portion of the SRT file that was roughly the same amount as the portion it had handled successfully. No go.

          But, in any event, coming up with an entirely different SRT file—which was, admittedly, entertaining to read for its sheer cheesiness—and then offering the excuse that it “accidentally” copied and pasted a response from another conversation were the real issues for me. It really seemed a bit dodgy.

    4. digi_owl

      What you get when you train a digital parrot on the whole, unfiltered, web.

      That passage was likely lifted from some out of the way forum wholesale.

    5. tevhatch

      Bigger problem with Google is how chatbots can start to populate links into Wikipedia, and other sites and crush their already ailing algorithm. Yahoo’s original method of known actors curating weblinks starts to become attractive again, of course the problem there is who these actors are.

  3. zagonostra

    >Rage against the War Machine

    Really? A “freak show?” I was hoping to attend but unable to attend rally. Sad state of affairs when no coverage of anti-war rally nearly anywhere and to have WSWS opine as below is truly pathetic. The Left is so fragmented that it will never be able to coalesce into any coherent political movement/organization. So I might as well sit back and enjoy watching the real freak show…

    The “Rage Against the War Machine” rally held yesterday in Washington, D.C., was a political freak show attended by a motley crowd of several hundred Libertarian Party supporters, neo-fascists, and disoriented and demoralized middle-class individuals without an independent program or perspective…In the case of Dore, alliance with the right is not only a tactic. It is an expression of his own political views. Dore advanced the position of the far right on the COVID-19 pandemic, denouncing public health measures and vaccines.

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/20/lfjm-f20.html

    1. Lexx

      …’a motley crowd of several hundred Libertarian Party supporters, neo-fascists, and disoriented and demoralized middle-class individuals without an independent program or perspective.’

      Yes, there it is, that word… ‘motley’. As long as the press can show up with their cameras and walk away with footage of the ‘the usual suspects’ at protests, every viewer who tuned in and didn’t see anyone who looked remotely like them (and their tribe) will simply dismiss the effort as someone else’s problem. ‘From what I can see, this has nothing to do with me and mine.’

      Aurelien was right to say protests don’t work based on their track record so far, because they haven’t. The powerful control the imagery and the narrative. We see and hear what they want us to.

      But change the demographics and the imagery… the cameras show up and the average age is, say, 50, the hairlines are receded a bit, faces are careworn, and they look like they have some money and can’t be dismissed as the ‘class disgruntled’. Whole tribes show up, including kids and the family dog, in numbers that make politicians wet themselves because those are a lot of workers, voters, future voters, and taxpayers. Using the bludgeon on that crowd will guarantee a peaceful protest becomes an angry mob even faster. The powerful, as Caitlin pointed out, are dancing as fast as they can to avoid that possibility.

      To get the tribes out on the street, away from their homes, their jobs and their comfort zones, the reasons will have to become deeply and immediately personal. They’ll have lost everything or are threatened with that loss beyond further rationalizations.

    2. RookieEMT

      I wanted to attend but I had classes the next day. My blood is boiling. It’s just clear as day now. So many leftists are just state goons. First with the vaccine hysteria, and now anti-war rallies are exclusively allowed only by the left and must have a BLM contingent to be acceptable. I guess Ill go to a leftist rally for anti war but this is getting old.

      Just like during COVID, anti state thinking is not allowed. Attempting a vaccine hesitant perspective wasn’t allowed and now thinking from the Russian’s perspective is not allowed.

      I’ll admit, the people waving Russian flags were absolute fools. That wasnt going to gain anyone’s support. Maybe if the left came out in more numbers to balance things out and coordinated instead of running away, the rally wouldn’t of had this problem.

      Finally, it’s like someone took an eraser and rid the fact that Ukraine was lobbing artillery on actual ethnic Russian towns. Instead it’s endless memes about an unprovoked attack.

      1. RookieEMT

        The scary thing is judging if someone is being deliberately dense or a state agent. At which point, crippling levels of paranoia begin. How do you organize resistance under such paranoia?

        1. ArvidMartensen

          You used to be able to tell the goons at demonstrations by their muscular build, short back and sides, and wrap around sunglasses.
          Perhaps the final step in atomising society is to make sure that nobody trusts anybody. And that’s the end of popular movements against the oligarchy.
          As the US and the West slides into being a clone of East Germany ……

    3. Bjarne

      The WSWS is full of bedwetting poindexter purists who completely lost their tepid little minds during covid.

      1. midtownwageslave

        WSWS is hit or miss. They make some good points and have some great coverage (Ohio Train Bomb), but liberalism peeks through from time to time. And sometimes more often than not.

        For better or for worse, they do cover labor actions where most do not.

        1. tevhatch

          They are Trotskyist, and when one realizes many of the liberal branch of the neo-conservative ideologs are/were Trotskyist, the neoliberal influence is clear.

          1. Chas

            I find it hard to realize that “many of the liberal branch of the neo-conservative ideologs are/were Trotskyist…”

            Trotsky was a communist revolutionary through and through. He was the opposite of the neo-con belief of all power to the one per cent.

            1. Harold

              At the beginning of the Cold War the security state employed the Trotskyites to go after other leftists, no holds barred and eventually some of them found there was even more financial security, power, and influence in being neocons.

            2. Daniil Adamov

              It’s just a different one per cent. (Although I wonder if he realised that – he and many of his acolytes seemed to genuinely believe the working class had some say in the running of the Soviet Union.)

            3. Michael Fiorillo

              The people you’re thinking of are ex-Trots who applied the political skills learned in the sectarian Left – mostly Party-building and intra-group warfare within mass organizations they’ve decided to organize in – to the halls of Overclass power.

              1. bojang bugami

                And if they believed in Permanent Revolution when they were young Trotskyists, perhaps they have taken their desire for the same thing in psychopolitical terms into their own little engine rooms throughout the Good Ship Overclass. Perhaps their youthful desire for Permanent Revolution has changed into an aged desire for Permanent Pure Chaos.

            4. Procopius

              Sorry, there is no “liberal branch of the neo-conservative ideologs.” The leftest of them are right-of-center. Actually, many of the people who self-identify as “liberals” are right-of-center. The MSM does not advertise leftists.

    4. Roger Blakely

      Last month Christian Parenti (Marxist political science professor and son of Michael Parenti, who is also a Marxist political science professor) published an essay called “Diversity is a Ruling-Class Ideology.” The essay is behind a paywall, but he did an interview with Katie Halper on her YouTube channel. He argues that the left has spent the last one hundred years waiting for a cohesive political expression to emerge from all of the diversity. It has not happened, and it will not happen. That is how the elites like it. The left needs to abandon the idea.

      1. JBird4049

        I do not think that diversity is really the problem as much as ideological purity; the elites gained control over the political parties and therefore the political system by demanding such purity.

        Alliances are marriages of differences made to further common goals often by using the strength that differences can create; alliances are destroyed by emphasizing the disparities and not the common goals.

        Modern Identity Politics was designed to destroy challenges to the ruling elites; I think that previous versions of it have been used against reformers over the past 150 years by the various oligarchies and their security forces. This is only an extension of the tactic to divide and conquer that has been used since before history.

        I do wonder if the people who created these super chat boxes are prepared to handle the societal chaos and dysfunction that is being created; I believe that they are so focused on the immediate goals of money and/or power that they have not given any thought, imagination, or planning to the consequences. Neoliberalism’s adherents seem to be unusually short sighted and too narrow minded to deal with even the obviously predictable consequences beyond the most immediate. Their activities solve what they consider today’s or tomorrow’s problems without regard to even the day after tomorrow, never mind next week.

        However, they seem to be able to get their opponents to think just like they do. It is the current system’s greatest weapon.

    5. GramSci

      WSWS, like Trotsky, is good on socialist theory; in fact I often think they *prefer* socialism to be theoretical.

      1. Michael Fiorillo

        Given their almost pathological propensity for rupture and division, the more theoretical Trotskists remain, the better. Turn them loose in a mass organization – a union caucus, an anti-war group, a community organization – and watch the internal conflicts increase.

    6. Carolinian

      Pehaps the sad part is that we have to turn to WSWS to get a report on this. Could be their hatchet job of a summary was influenced by

      The visceral hostility to opponents of “left-right unity” was recorded in various video clips of Hedges and Blumenthal, in conversations before the start of the rally, denouncing the World Socialist Web Site.

      Perhaps a site that is still cheerleading for Trotsky 100 years later and is willing to defend Weinstein is itself more than a little out of touch. But given the highly polarized run up to the rally with many lefites refusing to appear it may also be that failure was baked in regardless of what really happened at the event and the dubious reporting that we have to rely on. The diff from the Vietnam days is that academics and the intellectual establishment are now batting for the wrong team and the necessary army of the young have been diverted into their smartphones. And of course with the ending of conscription many feel they have no dog in this fight. Meanwhile the blob have concluded that when it comes to Empire who needs the consent of the governed?.

      1. Art_DogCT

        I have been a ‘cheerleader’ for Trotsky for ~45 years. I no longer feel that much of his practical guidance given through his stream of essays on events of his day is particularly useful in present conditions. However, his insight and analysis regarding current events are a splendid example of careful, critical thinking under fire. The History of the Russian Revolution remains one of my favorite books, re-reading it every now and again. I do think that the tactical principal of a vanguard party leading the/a revolution was a valid one for the period, one I don’t find particularly applicable in the USA at this point. Not that I have any alternate approach that might be successful.

        I guess one can validly say that I’ve given up on overthrowing the ruling class, because there simply isn’t enough time to accomplish the task before our planet becomes inhospitable for homo sapiens. If there is any hope of a future for homo saps, it lies on the other side of the inevitable collapse of the unsustainable house of cards in which the West (and much of the rest) lives. While it may be purest magical thinking, I like to think that if we can preserve knowledge and skills (farming, weaving, metalwork, etc.), we might salvage our species. I know . . . the silliest magical thinking. Thankfully I’ll be dead before actually existing reality answers that question, so I can leave this life with my personal Schrödinger’s Box unopened, brimming with potential. Quite the consolation, that.

          1. Art_DogCT

            I will look into it, thanks. I have considerable sympathy with anarcho-communism.

            I see no contradiction between events constituting a revolution and a coup d’etat – indeed, it seems to me any overturn of the capitalist/imperialist order must include a coup d’etat as a necessary condition of whatever follows. The only exception I can see is if that order were to collapse of itself and take down most of the instrumentalities of the state in the process. In either form of removal, the important question is what one does with what remains, and to what ends.

        1. Carolinian

          Here I thought all those former Trotskites became neocons and associates of Scoop Jackson (not Michael Hudson of course, who says he grew up Trotsky and no doubt agrees with you).

          At any rate I think the rally article that we’re talking about shows a certain doctrinaire attitude rather than a news gathering attitude. Will take it back if I’m giving Trotsky a bad rap. Still I will continue to think WSWS is a bit off the wall.

    7. hunkerdown

      Natch. Political Marxists view all problems through a PMC lens where scientific doctrine and management organization are the solution to all ills.

      1. Kouros

        Yeah, forget about actual democracy and unions. When the Bolsheviks moved back the factories under PMC control from the soviets, one could have red on the wall: “Mane, mane, tekel, fares”…

        It was the WWII that gave a great lease on life to the Soviet system…

  4. griffen

    East Palestine and following someone on the ground and local. Well he gets some juicy non quotes from his Congressmen (worth a read) and then this “juicy” tidbit below on airborne vapors and the lingering debacle happening on the ground and lurking in the waterways.

    Leave it to a child to pose the best question, why does it smell so bad when we go outside. Paraphrasing the response by the adult “peel an orange at the kitchen sink, well it’s basically the same thing”. Okay, science and scientific reasoning just may not be your strong suit, Mr. Congressmen.

    Back to the kid. May the odds ever be in your favor. “Hunger Games”

  5. Amfortas the hippie

    in talking to cousin over the last 2 weeks about the geopolitical sitrep and the heavy soup of propaganda we swim in these days…i find myself using the psych term “Projection” a lot in regards to the unified fantasists’ utterances about how, variously, russia is losing, putin’s unpopular, russia’s running out of ammo, russias running out of money, and russia is running so lo on troops that it must conscript boys and convicts, and on and on.
    from my reading, and being able to remember things…not only from one day to the next…but over decades of paying attention to these things….it appears that all of these hysterical charges apply much more to the “West”…either Ukraine, or to the USA, nato, etc….than they do to Russia.
    so now, wandering the web this early am, i come across this:
    https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-war-future-politics-vladimir-putin-federation/

    the usual triumphalist assumptions about Russia and putin’s demise…immanent, of course…and the “inevitable” dissolution of the Russian Federation into disparate warring pseudo statelets.

    given how useful the idea of “Projection” has proven, when reading…say…FP,lol…it occurred to me to take this oligarch’s fantasies and apply them to the Mirror.
    i mean, what’s holding the “West” together?
    or, more granular, what’s holding the EU, Nato or especially the USA! together?
    (remembering Lasch, here)
    reports over time of us military having issues with recruitment(cousin sez tv is full of recruitment ads these days, which are more about carreerism and being able to buy a house than the former focus on badassery and blowing shit up)…the worst goptea people suddenly embracing pacifism and even unions(lol)…the almost total disengagement of the 18-30 year old cohort from politics, as well as their perceived disinterest and sense of ennui and angst and ur-hopelessness(i see reference to this all over)
    Cousin expects a false flag of some kind, like 911, to drum up bidness at recruitment offices…but i’m not sure i see such an act having the same effect as 22 years ago.
    too much illegitimacy, these days…and disbelief, if not hatred, in just about all of our political, economic, and cultural institutions.
    of the young people i know(small sample size, fer sure), none of them are primed to run off and fight russia(or china) for the Big Boys…and i don’t see a new 911 changing that, at all.
    (the balloon thing is ridiculed by this cohort, wall to wall, as near as i can tell)
    just some musings, ere i begin my day.

    1. danpaco

      “which are more about carreerism and being able to buy a house than the former focus on badassery and blowing shit up”..

      The path to the middle class. Only catch is you need to give your body to the state.

    2. ambrit

      Back in the Vietnam War days, young “thugs” up before a judge would be given the choice of enlistment or a few years in prison. (We knew someone who actually had that experience. He chose Nam and later said that it was the worst decision of his life.) So, the ‘Evil Russians(TM)’ are taking jailhouse recruits, are they? Join the club! Everyone does it!

      1. Otis B Driftwood

        This is exactly what happened to my cousin’s brother in law. Got arrested for turning over trash cans with some buddies during a summer romp in south Jersey. Judge gives him a choice, and he chooses the Marine Corps. He was KIA his first week in country. He was 19 years old.

      2. Darthbobber

        In the early weeks of the war the Ukrainians made a big deal of opening the jails and passing out firearms to the released convicts. This was generally portrayed here as a heartwarming display of patriotism and unity.

    3. Jeremy Grimm

      I sensed a peculiar response to the world situation in my own children and the young students I met and talked with while taking some Community College art classes. I felt a sense of resignation accompanied by a resolve to ignore the long-term implications of the direction of national and world events and carry on making plans; carry on efforts to live a life they choose; carry on from one day to the next oblivious to risk, even threats of near term risks. The more I think about things, I wonder how else they might respond to a future that appears to constrain so much yet offer so little if they allowed full cognizance of that future to intrude on their present strivings.

    4. Onward to Dystopia

      Cousin expects a false flag of some kind, like 911, to drum up bidness at recruitment offices…but i’m not sure i see such an act having the same effect as 22 years ago.

      They might still try it, even if it didn’t work. I put nothing past them, and it still amazes me how quickly the media was able to transform Ukraine from the most corrupt, nazi-riddled country in Europe into angels with Duh Libz clapping like seals all the way.

      As for me, I’m a little old anyway, but they’d have to put the barrel of a gun to my temple and march me down to the recruitment office to make me fight for this *familyblog*-hole of a country.

  6. fresno dan

    A Penicillin Cure for Ukraine: Russia’s 1B75 Penicillin Counter-Battery Radar System The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda

    Since the deployment of the Penicillin to the battlefield in mid-December the Russian Ministry of Defense has reported vastly increased rates of destruction of the Kiev regime’s artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, ballistic missile launchers, mortars, air defense systems, and opposing counter-battery radar systems – both Soviet legacy and Western alike. The recorded kills of M777s, Krabs, Caesars, HIMARS and other such Western weapons on the Defense Ministry’s daily clobber list have skyrocketed.
    In one recent week, the Russian MOD claims to have destroyed a total of 40 towed artillery pieces, 32 self propelled howitzers, 8 Multiple Rocked Launcher Systems (MRLS), 15 opposing counter artillery radars and 23 local artillery ammunition depots.
    Artillery duels have since become assassinations… slaughters. The Kiev regime’s artillery guns are falling silent, a couple dozen or more by the day. The already serious Russian artillery overmatch has become total. The Penicillin has been used to devastating effect.
    =================================================
    War advances technology. Unfortunately, there is no advancement, and apparently, even regression in politics…
    One wonders what the breaking point for Ukrainians is.

    1. doug

      I don’t think the Ukrainians have agency, so their breaking point is not an issue. They don’t get a say.

        1. digi_owl

          Well given how much a certain series of childrens books gets referenced for real life parabels, them lifting political tactics from GoT would not be surprising.

        2. Carolinian

          Just before she gets stabbed.

          One could point out that the much maligned GoT finale was an anti violence message from a show that was all about sex and violence. It’s probably true that this wasn’t the direction the material was headed but then it was never clear where it was headed. It was all about the ride.

          One could say the same about the current House of the Dragon prequel.

    2. Louiedog14

      What’s kind of cool is that this thing is really just….a microphone.

      One gets the sense that if the military problem was a group of harbor seals, the U.S. would develop and eventually deploy sharks with frickin laser beams, and wi-fi, bluetooth, a few cupholders and maybe some sunglasses because Ray-Ban made a big campaign contribution. 10 years to develop, cost of millions per unit, but clearly the most badass shark anyone has ever encountered (when it works).

      Russia would deploy….sharks.

          1. digi_owl

            Interesting how many times a company employee has to step in and reclassify noises to suit the police reports.

            The big difference here is likely that the Russian system is looking for artillery, far louder and more distinctive noise profile. And they combine that with thermal imaging, likely to look for the barrel/rocket plume.

      1. Kouros

        That reminds me of the story about the efforts NASA made to develop some ballpens that would work in low/no gravity, while the Russians just went for good old pencils…

    3. Milton

      I don’t know, using an antibiotic for a virus that is neoliberalism and US/Dollar hegemony seems a risky prescription.

  7. The Rev Kev

    “Japan plans purchase of up to 500 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles”

    China would be worried about this because perhaps there might be a few nuke packages slipped into some of those Tomahawks in case the balloon went up. If I were China, I would make a deal with Russia to set up a network of S-400 systems on the coastline facing Japan. After all, if a bunch of old S-300s and their associated weaponry could knock out the bulk majority of a missile attack against Syria a few years ago, the S-400s would give even better coverage.

    1. Paradan

      So Tomahawks fly at 200 feet or so, and therefore due to the radar horizon, S-400’s would not be able to engage them at max range. China now has such a robust defense industry that they no longer require technical aid from Russia for effective IADS. Also I believe they still field 5 mega-ton nukes, which would be a bad day for Tokyo.

      1. The Rev Kev

        And that is the problem right there. Sure they could nuke Japan – but only after they got nuked themselves. But most would recognize that Japan is only a proxy for the US who may not even cop any nukes from China at all in such a scenario. If Japan and China get nuked, that is a double win for Washington. It breaks China as a power that competes with the US and is on track to surpass it. And it also breaks Japan which also competes with the US. And before you say that that is crazy, reflect that the US bombed those Baltic Sea pipelines which eliminates Germany as a competitor to the US. Doc Hudson made the same point in an article a coupla months ago about how the Ukrainian war is being used by Washington to break Germany..

        1. Dftbs

          No Chinese nukes would fly on Tokyo without them flying towards the USA as well. Same as none of our nukes would fly in Moscow without them heading to Beijing also.

          The US policy maker formulation of war “over there” but not here is another mark on their checklist of incompetence. Even if a war stayed conventional, the Chinese have the conventional capabilities to meet the US navy in San Diego as well as Yokohama.

      2. Louis Fyne

        Just destroying Japan’s port infrastructure via Chinese conventional missiles (which can be done in one lunch break) would ruin the Japanese economy via no more exports and no more LNG imports.

      3. Polar Socialist

        China actually bought 6 battalions (12 batteries/48 launchers) of S-400. The deal involved training of 100 Chinese crew members in Russia and then 100 in China.

        And yes, Tomahawks one should preferably hunt with a long-range fighter with a powerful, downward looking doppler radar (read: Mig-31).

        1. tevhatch

          Or barrage balloon / AWACS suspended radar guidance. Thanks to AI, one only has to detect loft, aim in the general direction, and the anti-aircraft missile can do the active seek on it’s own with combinations of thermal thermal and radar. Thanks to IC evolutions, the seeker head may be cheaper than a large explosive head on the cruise missile, thus negating much of the economics of trying to overwhelm a production base, which the USA doesn’t have anyway.

          1. paddy

            Google jlens by Raytheon.

            Army did not buy, test blimp surveillance beltway from Aberdeen until it broke tether and took out power lines into Pennsylvania

    2. Louis Fyne

      irony about Japan is that Japan will be happy to let the US use Japanese land to fight China to the last American.

      And the US establishment is so craving a fight with China, that this might actually happen

        1. John

          The absurdity of the war talk on the east and west of Eurasia is that the empire is running out of the means to keep its proxy bleeding in its name in the west and possesses no realistic way to aggress against China. We have ships. China has ship killer missiles. Taiwan is about 100 miles from China. It is 6,000 miles from the USA. When the discussion is reduced to mutual suicide by nuclear weapon with Japanese participation, there is nothing more to be said. The depth of irrationality have been plumbed.

          1. tevhatch

            There is no interest in going full on Hot with China. There is no strategy (at government level), a blob is incapable of sufficient group think to hold one for more than a second. It is just the same tactic as they used with Russia, to provoke China into a reaction, then expect the world to rally around the USA bully over the burnt out hulks of Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. Attempts to isolate China will work even less well than it will on Russia, the rest of the world isn’t interested in complete economic shutdown.

            The only strategy is that at the corporate, the way to profit get the US Congress to turn on the money hose and point it into the MIC-IMATT coffers. The tactic is to scare the minions while they bribe their “servants”. The destruction of the entire Pacific Fleet isn’t likely to see a new fleet reconstituted, they don’t want people to find out they’ve been selling an empty shell so they can keep selling more of the same. The risk is accidents happen, but that’s what insurance is for. Captains of industry must have lots of push.

            addition: (just like a blog is agreement incapable)

  8. Steve H.

    Doublequote:

    > Chartbook #196 The Closing of the Cocoa Frontier
    >> There would be no chocolate, however, without the cocoa beans and they are grown overwhelmingly on small peasant plantations, most no larger than 3 hectares, yielding 300-400 kg in beans per hectare and worked by c. 6 million farming families.

    > The Power-Serving Myth That Anti-War Protests Make No Difference {embedded video}
    >> Using modern technology, humanity has the potential to scale decentralized trust networks.

  9. tricia

    FDA Advisors Endorse Moving Naloxone Over the Counter

    I dunno, this seems so quintessential to our capitalist ‘healthcare’ system…someone’s OD’ing and you gotta run to a store and buy the emergency treatment…

    1. wendigo

      If the only answer to increasing gun violence is having more good guys with guns then the only answer to more overdoses must be more good guys with Naloxone.

    2. Mildred Montana

      Here in my enlightened (in some sense of that word) Canadian city naloxone kits can be obtained easily and for free in the downtown area. I actually saw a young man with five of them dangling from his backpack. He must have been going to a party!

      Nevertheless, the tragedy continues apace in British Columbia (population five million). Six deaths a day, 2100 a year, mainly young people, seven years now, on and on it goes. Multiply the numbers by 70 and you get an approximation for those in the US. Naloxone is a band-aid, not an answer.

      There’s much hand-wringing by our public health officials but much more foot-dragging on the obvious solution: Safe, cheap, pharmaceutical-grade narcotics for those who qualify, on bases which shouldn’t, with a little thought, be that hard to determine.

      The authorities are choosing rather to dither, while fentanyl continues to reap, grimly.

  10. The Rev Kev

    ‘1830 Map of Central California by José María Narváez. Notice how the Central Valley is submerged beneath a 300-mile long, 30-mile wide shallow lake/marsh’

    it would have been a fascinating place to visit between seeing waterfowl and maybe fish with the local tribes living off the bounty. It was once called Lake Corocan and in the distant past was actually a bay connected to the sea. I wonder if beaver also made their homes there when there was water in the lake? I suppose that if still existed late at the end of the 20th century, that there would have been a huge project to drain that lake and send the water to LA while converting the former lake bottom into farmland. Still, it would have been great to see it when it was a proper lake-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Corcoran

    1. fresno dan

      RK
      I knew about the great flood of 1862, but I had never thought to investigate the topography of the central valley prior to then.
      The fact that one can spend one’s entire life in a region and think of it only as a dry parched region only shows the limitation of human experience, knowledge, and imagination.
      We think climate change means drought, but what if it doesn’t? what happens when we want to ship all that water to southern CA, and they don’t want it?

    1. Louis Fyne

      that is wild isn’t it?!?!

      The folks of East Palestine, OH used to be the Dem. Party’s base.

      Perfect allegory for the contemporary Democratic Party’s worldview: >$100 billion at the drop of the hat for Ukraine, nothing to rural Ohioans.

      1. fresno dan

        LF
        that is wild isn’t it?!?!
        At one point, repubs were the “civil rights” party, until they weren’t. At one point, dems were the “labor” party, until they weren’t.
        the vaunted “democracies” of the West appear to have reached a point where they will always and extremely take the position most diametrically opposed to the wants and needs of the people they supposedly represent. And Party will be irrelevant, if not a wolf in sheep’s clothing…
        From what I have read about how politics really works, small focused groups always out maneuver large diffuse groups, I guess this is how things evolve – in a Brave New World

        1. Alex

          The GOP might be the best hope for working class Americans, if they can just sideline the pro war, pro Israel RINOS.

          1. fresno dan

            Alex
            I never would have thought I would say, but I think the dems are more stulified, and more beholden to the oligarchy than even the repubs. Citizens have no permanent friends – only permanent interests…

    2. Skip Intro

      I find it reminiscent of the kind of “We have complete confidence in _______ ” statements that precede the announcement that “_______ has retired to spend more time with _____” statements.

      It goes well with Zelensky mentioning that Bakhmut is not very important.

    3. Katniss Everdeen

      Reportedly there were rockets’ red glare and bombs could be heard bursting in air all around the brave biden, as the aviator clad american president signed a “guestbook” in someplace called Mariinsky Palace, and solemnly declared that, “Kyiv has captured a part of my heart.”

      All hail to “our” intrepid commander-in-chief, who never met a citizen he wouldn’t protect and defend unless it was an american one.

      Meanwhile, former president and arch insurrectionist coup plotter and all around hater of truth, justice and the american way of peaceful “democracy,” Donald J. Trump, knows the way to East Palestine, OH and will be there on Wednesday.

      1. Not Again

        Well, those “bombs bursting in air” were just show for Biden’s re-election campaign because according to the New York Times, “The White House alerted Russian officials that Mr. Biden would be traveling to Kyiv several hours before he arrived in Ukraine, …”

        Every Ukranian bomb that was blown up for Biden’s show was one less some 16 year old got to protect himself in Bakhmut.

      2. Screwball

        My PMC friends, who somewhere in time became the biggest war cheerleaders I have even met, are just swooning over GI Joe’s trip to Ukraine. Of course Zelensky as well.

        Look, there’s brave Joe walking around during air raid sirens with their other idol, the Z man, while Putin has to drive around in a tank. Yes, they said that.

        These people and whatever part of this country they represent have gone bat shit crazy, period. If you say one itty bitty little thing against the war – like, are you insane people going to get us all blown up with this war stupidity (they are gung-ho to go after China too) – you are on the payroll of Russia and a Putin apologist.

        I have decided I must ignore these people or lose what sanity I have left. You can’t talk to them. You can’t bring facts to the table. I was just called a conspiracy theorist last week to telling one of them the government was censoring people through Twitter, as the release of the Twitter Files showed. But I’m the nut-job, and of course full of it, while they laugh and make fun of me.

        Make it stop. The crazy is off the charts. This country is falling apart.

        1. fresno dan

          sb
          I remember reading about McCarthism and the Red Scare and thinking, how could anyone believe such nonsense.
          And I look around, and see that human advancement (at least politically) is just an illusion…
          What is the difference, really, between humans and lemmings? I guess humans take other species besides themselves over the cliff.

        2. bojang bugami

          If one were to ask such people where they get their news and views, some of them might say CNBC or MSNBC. Some of them might say ” Rachel Maddow”.

          Those answers would be a tailor-made opportunity to reply . . . ” MSNBC? Is that like Fox News for Liberals?” . . . . ” Rachel Maddow? Is that like Tucker Carlson for Liberals?”

      3. Pat

        Well any chance Joe had of turning Ohio blue got left in Kiev.

        (And I have no problem imagining Biden saying “they can family blog themselves, they want my help they should have voted for me.” Not that I think Joe would have come through even if Ohio had voted “correctly”, just that he probably doesn’t even feel the need to pretend.)

      4. fresno dan

        KE
        Republican bumber sticker 2024
        All hail to “our” intrepid commander-in-chief, who never met a citizen he wouldn’t protect and defend unless it was an american one.

      5. Acacia

        Corona Joe saying “Kyiv has captured a part of my heart.” … kinda like Ronnie Raygun saying “I have a suitcase in Berlin” (to avoid the infamous “Ich bin ein Berliner”). It’s all such tired, hackneyed rhetoric.

    4. Michael Fiorillo

      Foolish people: what do they expect calling their home East Palestine?

      East Ukraine, now that’s the ticket…

      1. JohnM_inMN

        According to CBS news this morning, it’s been $30 billion. They didn’t clip that segment. At least I couldn’t find it. No surprise that they would minimize it I guess, but I still find it stunning.

    1. Don

      In the context of Russia having assured the US that there would be no attacks on Kiev during Biden’s visit, the air raid sirens were probably still an effective piece of theatre. Zelensky sees this whole thing as theatre; 100,000+ in real dead soldiers just adds to the production values.

      He is a sick man.

  11. The Rev Kev

    ‘Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas : NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens so that the Russians will never be a threat again’

    Is she..is she talking about re-education camps? Methinks that Kaja Kallas has some issues to work through. Wikipedia says that ‘er mother Kristi, six months old at the time, was deported to Siberia with her mother and grandmother in a cattle car and lived there until she was ten years old’ so I guess that this may be the source of this hatred. Also-

    ‘Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has suggested that the entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of “imperialistic dreams,” claiming that otherwise, with or without President Vladimir Putin at the helm, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.’

    She wants their history books rewritten (by the west?) and its leaders put on trial so that the Russian people will know the “crimes” that they have committed to change their mindset. I suppose that she wants them to be trained up in western values – whatever they are – but this would only be possible if the west beats Russia and was able to go into Russia and take control. Maybe that would be under President Navalny. As Alex Christoforou pointed out in his latest video, this is not the regular attacks on Putin and the leadership of Russia. This is the Russian people themselves being under attack and Kallas wants them held accountable like the Germans were after WW2. Not the west for all the destruction of so many countries in the past geeration but only Russia.

    1. lambert strether

      Letting the Baltic states get any leverage over us at all is a very bad idea, so I expect how we accomplished that will becrevealed soon.

      1. Louis Fyne

        combined population of the Baltics states = literally less than the 5 boroughs of New York City.

        Family-blogging wild that the Balts + Ukraine is the tail that is driving the US’s entire European strategy.

        The American Empire has decided that Ukraine and the Balts is the proverbial hill on which to fight on.

        Un-Family-blogging believable.

        1. digi_owl

          Look up the family history of some of the biggest political players in USA and Canada, and it starts to make sense. Basically CIA etc imported downright nazis to North America in order to keep the coals hot under soviets ass. That is how strongly some high up people hated the ideas of communism and socialism.

          1. ThirtyOne

            Sounds familiar:

            However, what is less well known is that thousands of fascist-leaning and anti-communist academics were also rescued and nurtured by the U.S. to wage an ideological war against Communism. These revisionist historians spent decades laboring in the shadows of the academic press until the fall of the Soviet Union allowed them to return home and finally rewrite history to their liking. After decades of effort, we can now see the results of their work, the seeds planted 70 years ago are finally bearing their poisoned fruit.

            https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/02/03/how-a-network-of-nazi-propagandists-helped-lay-the-groundwork-for-the-war-in-ukraine/

        2. DZhMM

          “The Balts” are not driving anything. We’re the subjects of thirty-plus years of direct, focused manipulation-of-public-opinion by the US — for a hundred years now, the best in the world at propagandizing and brainwashing.
          We’ll be a generation to fix the damage once America finally is forced to leave us be.

      2. hk

        I think this is the fundamental paradox of great power-little power politics that many people (in the great powers) fail to understand. The puppet-puppeteer relationship is all too often reversed, because most of the people in “great powers” don’t know and don’t care much about goings on in little powers and are easily swayed by a sense of self-importance and righteousness stoked by a few nice words in absence of genuine interests and immediate costs that would normally prompt closer attention, whereas the little powers are usually driven to the extremes by their petty (in the global scheme of things) sense of national pride and grievances towards their neighbors. As long as the consequences appear small, great powers’ policies towards the little powers wind up being principally driven by the agents of the little powers, even (see all the scion of Eastern European powers that run the State Dept–but hardly a modern phenomenon: see Ioannis Capodistrias, the early 19th century Russian minister who was also a Greek independence activist, or Count Alexander Walewski, a Pole (and an illegitimate son of Napoleon on top) who was French foreign minister.)

        Of course, this is not just in foreign policy realm either. A lot of grievance over “historical injustices” (both domestic and abroad) is driven by these. While not to belittle them, but everyone who has ultimately survived has been guilty of doing terrible injustices to others at one time in history, but focusing on individual tribes’ petty grievances distracts from the larger context of historical wrongs. If we were to, somehow, force, in the name of morality, the present day US (presumably only “other people” than ourselves, I suppose) to pay for the crimes done against the Lakota, who is going to force the Lakota pay for the crimes they committed against the Crow further back, and who will force the Crow to pay for the crimes they committed against the unknown peoples from even earlier who may no longer survive?

        The duty of the people who are far away, if they are to be involved at all, is to understand the broader context, not enmesh themselves in the myopic self-righteous moralism of the locals against their neighbors.

      3. Stephen

        I agree.

        This lady reminds me of the townspeople in Blazing Saddles: bigoted but oh so dumb, if I recall the words of Cleavon Little correctly after he escaped from them by taking himself hostage.

        She must realise that the US (and its little UK puppet) love to pose as protectors of so called small states. Usually with dire consequences for those states. They always leave eventually too. When they do Russia, Germany and Estonia will all be in exactly the same place. Estonia will still be super tiny, Russia and Germany will not be. That will be an interesting moment. Perhaps she will be in Florida at that time.

        1. Daniil Adamov

          Perhaps she thinks the Federation really will fall apart. It happened to the Union, after all.

          Or maybe she thinks the US won’t abandon an actual NATO member – at least not in her lifetime.

      4. hunkerdown

        Agreed!

        One of the tweets downthread, a play in three acts in the form of a 4ch*n greentext, had me in stitches for a good minute or two, and a half hour later I’m still amused. For the rueful enjoyment of the commentariat, I’ll take the liberty of reproducing it here, with due attention to language sensibilities:

        >1914
        >some unimportant east european shxthole country provokes austria-hungary
        >they decide to quickly [familyblog] them up and be home in 2 weeks
        >anglo-saxons drag the world into world war 1
        >europe is in shambles while USA profits
        >1939
        >some unimportant east european shxthole country provokes germany
        >they decide to quickly [familyblog] them up and be home in 2 weeks
        >anglo-saxons drag the world into world war 2
        >europe is in shambles while USA profits
        >2022
        >some unimportant east european shxthole country provokes russia
        >they decide to quickly [familyblog] them up and be home in 2 weeks
        >anglo-saxons drag the world into world war 3
        >europe is in shambles while USA profits

        1. digi_owl

          That last one may be selling the bear before it has been shot.

          The reason USA profited back then was that it had unharmed industrial capacity and thus were happy to sell to a recovering Europe.

          This time round though it may well be China that profits, or some smooth brain in the oval office blows the planet back to the stone age.

    2. digi_owl

      Why is it again and again that it is the smallest dogs that bark the loudest.

      Or for that matter, that the biggest bullies are the little kids with a burly big brother…

    3. R.S.

      Wikipedia says that ‘er mother Kristi, six months old at the time, was deported to Siberia with her mother and grandmother in a cattle car and lived there until she was ten years old’

      Wiki in Russian adds some minor details. Like, her parents were deported as members of the Omakaitse, Estonian volunteer home guard, that was reestablished under German occupation.

      “The Omakaitse was reestablished during the German Operation Barbarossa in 1941 by the Forest brothers who took control of the country before the German troops arrived allowing Jüri Uluots establish a co-ordinating council in Tartu to proclaim the provisional government of Estonia. The Germans disbanded the provisional government but allowed the armed units in the Omakaitse after Estonia became a part of the German-occupied Reichskommissariat Ostland.”

    4. Daryl

      Starting to feel like the west/NATO’s support of Nazis is not just incidental in service of a goal but actually a case of ideological alignment.

    5. R.S.

      As for the “forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens” part… Yes, she’s talking about some form of re-education. Maybe camps, maybe some form of apartheid, or something like that. After all, Estonia (along with other Baltic states) has been having that interesting institution of “alien” non-citizens since its independence.

      My hunch is, she has just said the quiet part out loud. There’s a (disturbingly) common set of ideas shared by the late Soviet intelligentsia, liberal/”westernized” Russians and certain intellectuals in the post-Soviet states. The core notion is that the majority of Russians (either ethnic Russians or “cultural Russians”) are somehow mentally and/or morally “underdeveloped” and deficient, and should not be left to their own devices. Those half-devils-and-half children would allegedly fare much better under a supervision of some benevolent masters, who would eventually bring them into The Civilization. Some usual cliches are “the consciousness/morals/psychology of slaves”, “negative genetic selection”, “lack of moral compass” and so on. Inside Russia, those ideas are sometimes mixed with some form of class-based quasi-racism, and outside they may slip into outright ethnic supremacism.

      The Estonian International Centre for Defence and Security had once published a rather weird article on “Russia’s Moral Disaster”. It’s from 2019, but IMO it captures the sentiment very well:
      https://icds.ee/en/russias-moral-disaster/

      Paul Robinson also did a series on Russian Liberalism in 2022. Part 2 is kinda telling:
      https://russiapost.info/society/death_of_liberal_russia_p2

  12. ex-PFC Chuck

    Re: “Finland Reverses Course, Says It Will Join NATO Without Sweden”
    This is deeply unwise in terms of Finland’s own national interests and ominous for the rest of us. The northern part of its 800+ km (or is it miles?) border with Russia is adjacent to the Kola peninsula on which are located the bases that provide its northern fleet access to the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. At best, at the first whiff USA/NATO is planning to stand up either offensive or defensive missile bases there, the Russian armed forces will be over that border in a flash. This will trigger Article 5 of the NATO charter. The only response that could meaningfully affect the situation would be nuclear, and the Russians will be in DEFCON 1.5 waiting for that with their fingers hovering over the Sarmat and Poseidon red buttons.

    1. Polar Socialist

      For what it’s worth, Sweden is apparently begging Finland not to and actually only one of the parties in the current cabinet is openly supporting joining without Sweden. One is against and the other three parties refuse to state their preference.

      On the other hand, parliamentary elections are 6 weeks away, so the decision will not be made by this government – which may explain the silence. But it would indeed be a huge reverse in Finnish foreign policy to anger both of her neighbors at the same time.

      Considering the the level of hysterical, myopic stupidity currently at every level of Finnish politics, I’m sure many believe a nuclear inferno to be a better choice than “letting Putin win”.

        1. Polar Socialist

          Oh, sorry. Sweden is begging Finland not to join without Sweden, they are still very much into NATO. Maybe they are afraid that if Finland gets to join without Sweden, the Swedish public sees no point in Sweden joining anymore – Finland being a nice and cozy buffer like it was from the 15th century to the 19th century.

    2. digi_owl

      Keep in mind that Norway has had a border within spitting distance of those bases during the whole cold war.

      There was once incident in 1968 that saw soviet forces come right up to the border. Likely as a reaction to a NATO exercise being held in Troms.

  13. The Rev Kev

    “U.S. ambassador to U.N. warns China would be crossing a ‘red line’ if it provides lethal aid to Russia”

    Lets translate that to the school ground-

    ‘Look pal. I’m going over there to bash up your best friend. And when I am finished with him, I am going to come over here to bash you up. So don’t you dare help your friend as I bash him up or I will bash you up.’

    Did the UN announce a trade embargo on Russia and I did not get the memo? China is a sovereign nation and can trade with whoever the hell they want. And last I heard, the rules-based order is not actually written down even though US and EU officials say that it has to be defended at all costs.

    1. JohnA

      Said Killer Clown Johnson has just bought a 9 bedroom country pile for £4 million or so. (incidentally 9 bedrooms still not enough for all his offspring to have their own room). Would be a juicy target were Russia ever decide to send a shot across the bows of Britain.

      1. Stephen

        Yep, the PM’s salary is £164k and his current MP’s salary “just” £84k.

        There must be an awful lot of obviously all 100% legitimate oligarch funded journalism gigs, “consulting” assignments and speaker engagements taking place to enable him to buy a £4m house.

        Especially given that his divorce was expensive too by all accounts.

        U.K. democracy seems no more real than the US version.

  14. JTMcPhee

    Two little bits about today’s news: first, got to love the Israelis, committing acts of war (missiles into downtown Damascus, upping the ante from all the prior attacks on Syria) wherever they please. Reminds me of what one sees in the twitter and YouTube videos of street and school and bar melees, one little coward (male or female) sneaking around the outside of the main fighting, and punching or kicking the persons who have been beaten to the ground by other stronger thugs. Not brave enough to stand and fight in the main event. Hey, hey, how many Gazans and West Banikites have you killed from hiding today?

    And Viktor Orbán’s State of the Nation speech to the Hungarians today, poking the Empire and the unelected, self-appointed Brussels gang in the eye with a number of sharp sticks. One wonders if Nuland and Blinken and Freeland and von Dre Leyden are choking on their designer coffees and firing up the Color Revolution machinery to remove this dangerously honorable man — https://visegradpost.com/en/2023/02/19/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-state-of-the-nation-address-february-2023/

    1. Amfortas the hippie

      similarly to MTG and frelling Trump “asking for my vote” with all their recent uncharacteristic common-sensing(!?!), here’s the “fascist” prez of Hungary being all New Dealy and leaning hard towards autarky and an almost Emersonian self reliance.
      whats next? Capital Controls and Industrial policy?

      “Our family policy will remain, our work-based economy will remain, our agreement with pensioners and the thirteenth month’s pension will remain, and so will the protection of reductions in household utility bills. We will continue the linking of universities to the economy. We can keep the strategic sectors – the banking sector, the energy sector and the media industry – in Hungarian hands, and we will even revive Hungarian ownership in the telecommunications and infocommunications sector. And we will not stop there, the windsock is already blowing in the wind. Sorry! And the promise made to the provinces remains: we are launching unprecedented developments and providing more resources than the Hungarian provinces have ever seen – even under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Alongside agricultural production, we are building up agricultural processing. We will revive the Hungarian food industry, which has been devastated by privatisation, and we will have national champions in the food industry who will also be able to compete in the world market. We shall not tolerate Hungarians having to buy food that is dumped on us from abroad. And we are retaining our plan for the eastern part of our country to catch up with the rest. It is time to finally unite Hunnia and Pannonia – both economically and in terms of living standards. This is why we are building bridges on the Danube, why the one at Paks will be completed, and why the one at Mohács will soon be started. We are placing the Debrecen-Nyíregyháza-Miskolc triangle alongside the Győr-Szombathely-Veszprém industrial zone. This will require energy, a lot of energy – more than ever before in Hungary. This is why we will build power stations and pipeline systems, even if Brussels is unwilling to play a role. Later there will be more. And we will not give up our most daring plan: to ensure that families with children are better off financially than those who do not have children. So, war or no war, we will have new family support decisions every year. The same is true this year, with women committing to having children paying no personal income tax until the age of 30. This is how it will be. But I know that for us Hungarians this is not enough. We know the joke we inherited from socialism: “We know what will happen, but the question is this: what will happen until then?””

      i have no idea of the Hungarian Reality right now…but based on this, i wonder if Orban would so studiously ignore somethin like the Ohio Disaster…

        1. Amfortas the hippie

          more than a shakerfull it turns out.
          “open democracy” is literally the Mouth of Soros.
          had a hand, via NED or whatever, with the exact conundrum we’re experiencing right now(Ukraine).
          may as well link to FP, or WEF.
          again, i aint an orban fanboy or anything,lol.
          i have no idea…although rod dreher seems quite taken with him, of late.
          i’m more concerned with how New Dealey Things became a thing of the right…
          so if i want to vote for…say…industrial policy, capital controlls, or a welfare state(of any kind, even if its for white folks(shudder)),or a less belligerent foreign policy(sic), i must vote for the righty nutter?
          with all the other shit they bring with them?
          sucks big hairy,if ya ask me.

          1. JL

            I’ve read enough of your sagacious comments to know that you did indeed have a very well developed understanding of the party’s of order and their discourses. The point I felt drawn to simply emphasize was that Hungary’s FIDESZ has not delivered on new dealsy like social policies despite the communitarian conceits. As for the Repubs here, what they have done and been doing is a better template of what they will continue to. Repulsion with Team Blue can’t be remediated with a nod to Team Red, as you well know.

  15. magpie

    Grotesque.

    It’s not just Kallas: revision on a mass scale is only becoming more tempting for our ruling clique. Not to be cliche, but Orwell got it. From documents to journalism, the historical record is a problem for these people. Under the rubric of ‘malinformation’ or ‘true but misleading’, I expect them to start investing major effort into controlling or ‘updating’ historical records. This is well underway with the WikiLeaks archive. I don’t like to be pessimistic, but it seems like the logical next step if you’re incapable of reform or reflection.

    We approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I expect very little introspection. How nice that Kallas thinks there will be an “after” for this current war.

    1. ACPAL

      George W. Bush was known for misstatements. It was so bad that the White House staff rewrote the official transcripts of his speeches to say “what the president meant to say” rather than what he said. Essentially rewriting history on the fly.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Same with Biden when he says stuff like that Putin must be deposed in a major speech and the White House staff are left backpedaling furiously.

  16. Katniss Everdeen

    Just noticed the Links category “South of the Border.”

    I assume the referenced “border” belongs to Mexico, since the u.s. doesn’t have anything remotely fitting that description down there anymore.

  17. Mildred Montana

    Re: Sandpiper video

    Word of the day, “murmuration”: A large group of birds, usually starlings, that all fly together and change direction together, or the act of birds doing this. Starling murmurations are one of the most dazzling displays in the natural world.

    I did a little further research and found that although some other birds exhibit a form of the behavior, the term is more specifically applied to flocks of starlings.

    1. JTMcPhee

      Maybe the category can fruitfully be expanded to cover the masses of “voters” and “citizens” who display similar (though not survival-instinct-based) behavior?

      A whole lot of money is expended on trying to induce and direct such behaviors, very definitely not survival-based.

      And that wreck Biden snuck off to Kiev to make obeisance or something to that Zelensky creature, on the way to Poland to stiffen the Poles’ resolve to carv off some piece of Zelenskystan. Speculation that the blob might, having gotten away with destroying 3/4 of the Nordstream system overturning some 30 or 40 democratically elected but not sufficiently obeisant national governments, starting and walking away from many ruins wars, just find some false-flag way to kill off Biden (ridding themselves of a troublesome geriatric) to stiffen the “Free World) ™ in its motions to defeat and dismember Russia.

      I wonder what Vladimir Putin will be telling the world in his address to the Russian nation? Feels to me like we all are holding our breaths, those of us who are paying attention, suspecting that we are truly at Clausewitz’ culminating point, and the dogs of war are slavering to be let loose….

    2. B

      This thing flocks of birds do is also seen in schools of fish, the same striking astounding seemingly planned and synchronized changing of tone and color. It is a near miracle in my opinion. There is a thesis that fish schools do this to present the appearance of large bodies to scare away predators. Not sure about birds.

    3. Jeff W

      When I read that word all I could think of was the lines from the lyrics of Jacques Brel’s “La Valse à Mille Temps”:

      Et Paris qui bat la mesure
      Me murmure, murmure tout bas

    1. JTMcPhee

      All the skillful dealing by the Chinese in this world, does not in any iota change the proximity of Blinken or any of the other orcs who have blustered and connived their way to their positions close to the activation of the codes that will release the US nuclear arsenal and complete the end game of the West Project.

      In other news, a winter storm threatens much of the mainland Empire, but it is an exquisitely beautiful day here in west-central Floriduh: gentle breeze, 72 degrees, the peach tree is blooming and already little peaches are appearing to tempt the wild critters and frustrate the arborist, we’ve had our first crop of figs (mostly enjoyed by squirrels and other rodents,) and my raised bed garden is showing volunteer strawberries for some reason, the seeds from the last supermarket spaghetti squash are up to 6 leaves, I’ve got tomatoes already and the basil and rosemary are doing great. “All’s right with the world,” if one is fortunate and can keep one’s focus limited to immediate surroundings…

  18. Mildred Montana

    >Finland Reverses Course, Says It Will Join NATO Without Sweden Antiwar

    I’m in the mood for trivia today. So for any “a-Finnish-onadoes”:

    The Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, is currently the youngest head of government in the world. She is 37 and heads a coalition of four other party leaders, all women.

    Youth+Female+Power = ? Whither Finland?

    1. cosmiccretin

      Didn’t I read somewhere that she had had the WEF’s laying-on-of-hands conferred on her?

      ‘Nuff said (if so). It’s the ultimate accolade of unfitness for public office, in any capacity whatsoever, and an infallible predictor of a disastrous outcome – as will inexorably arrive in due course for Finland.

      Sad for Finland – except that a large number of Finns appear to approve of her. Such assinine self-destructiveness tends to limit one’s sympathy. But then the same might be said for my own compatriots (the Brits) I suppose…

  19. russell1200

    GZero is speculative, but sensible speculation to my mind. They even put Poland as a plausible secondary culprit, which is a point I made back in the day.

    One thing I did learn in the blowback to Hersh was that the explosion points were not even particularly close to each other. Which argues multiple trips and not a particularly huge concern as to where you placed them. I guess a hole in a straw is a hole in a straw.

    I don’t think it is impossible that Russia did something stupid like blowing up their own pipeline, but I would put that theory way down the list.

    1. ACPAL

      While Hersh may not have gotten all the details correct I believe that he built a framework for others to come forward with additional details to correct errors and fill in the blanks so that the true, full story can come to light.

      The damage that this story would cause is so great that I’m sure many of those in power who would be incriminated are thinking seriously of “tying up loose ends” before they can come forward.

    2. lyman alpha blob

      I’m sorry, but they are not sensible at all.

      The author tried to discredit Hersch with this –

      The man is a journalistic legend, having earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the My Lai massacre and cover-up. But much of his work since then has been shoddy and — worst of all — rife with motivated reasoning. His (understandable) bias against the US intelligence community and national security establishment colored his widely discredited claims that the Osama bin Laden killing was a cover-up and that the Syrian government didn’t use chemical weapons.

      Well, where is the evidence that Syria did use chemical weapons? And used them after Barry O declared his red line if they were used? The top brass at the OPCW declared that they did, however the OPCW inspectors on the ground became whistleblowers and said they found no evidence whatsoever that the Syrian government did anything, and that there may have been no “attack” at all. Which is probably why Barry O didn’t retaliate against Assad after making threats – he knew damn well there was no Syrian attack and quite likely knew who staged it.

      It really beggars belief that a small country like Syria would suddenly start using chemical weapons right after the US threatened them if they did. To believe that, you’d have to be just about as credulous as believing Russia blew up its own pipeline that put billions into its coffers every year.

      Hersch is far more credible than any US corporate reporter or government official. What’s his motivation to lie? If Hersch were truly wrong, you’d expect someone to come forward with some proof. Instead it’s crickets. The motivations for the US government to lie about all of this are patently obvious. The author of this piece needs a brain transplant.

      1. JME

        GZero author linked to Bellingcat, the propaganda outlet for the intelligence community, as proof against Hersh. Tells you all you need to know. Whether or not Hersh is right on all the particulars, his story on Nordstream meshes with my thoughts and reading of the tea leaves and in this post-truth world that’s about as good as you can get.

    3. Felix_47

      That twitter comment “Thank you USA” by Anne Applebaum’s Polish husband who is something in the Polish government…..with a picture of the methane bubbling up…..which he apparently erased the next day seems pretty hard to explain away. But there is an answer in all probability….sitting in a Swedish secured warehouse where the residue is stored that they salvaged from the wreckage. All our NC sleuths know that you can pretty well trace the provenance of C4. Sweden is not allowing anyone access to the findings or the material. That includes Germany and Russia. I am not sure if it included the CIA. One thing is certain and that is that someone does not want the truth to get out right now so we are forced to speculate.

  20. Cetra Ess

    re: ‘Volodymyr Zelenskiy – Pathological Hater’

    This is a good piece but I think Oliver Boyd-Barrett misses one other possibility. He opens with this:

    “Signs of some kind of pathology are surely present from the get-go when we are talking about a jewish comedian who has chosen to surround himself with Banderite neonazis who celebrate a heritage that includes the massacre of tens of thousands of jews.”

    And concludes with this:

    “Is this a leader who loves his people? Or, at the very least, refrains from hating them absolutely? The answer must be “No.” Zelenskiy has already talked of his pure hatred for Russia and Russians. He has demonstrated his pure hatred for those of his countrymen who are Russophone. He has demonstated his contempt for all his countrymen in his determination of their suffering.”

    I would argue a third possibility should be considered: Zelenskiy hates the Banderites, wants to eliminate them via the war. He’s perfectly positioned to do so and the conduct of the war suggests this.

    Also recall that he is effectively a hostage of the Banderites, Azov having openly and publicly threatened to hang him if he makes any moves to negotiate. He is always surrounded by the very same, they are effectively his minders. If you were such a hostage, held captive by a) a group that hates your people, b) has participated in the genocide of your people, c) celebrates this genocide, wouldn’t you consider that well, you’re dead one way or the other, your best option is to play the role, and if you play the role well then you assure the self-destruction of your captives.

    The conduct of the Ukraine side in this war has been very odd, always with the insistence of defending territory to the last man, has been quite singularly focused on throwing soldiers into hopeless meatgrinder “Charge of the Light Brigade” situations, again and again.

    Is it not too far fetched to consider that despite the open Russophobia he displays, his actions have thus far, for a full year, been largely to the advantage of the Russians, and actions should be considered to speak loudly.

    Perhaps Zelenskiy is a real hero in this but not for the reasons typically given. Perhaps after all is said and done Zelenskiy will be principally responsible for the denazification of Ukraine. Enough grounds to reconsider Boyd-Barrett’s (compelling) pathology of a hater conclusion?

    1. Kouros

      Zelensky would need also to deal with the Banderites in the White House and US Government and Congress/Senate. Zelensky knowing this, I think your hypothesis is easy to falsify. However, Z being under threat and doing what he is told, to keep his and his family’s life, deserves more credence…

      1. hk

        I imagine that none of those guys in USG will remain in office when (if true) Zelenski is shown to be a Russian Konrad Wallenrode and receives the gold star of a Hero of Russia.

  21. flora

    re: The West’s Betrayal of Freedom – Racket News, Taibbi

    A little idea with some history. The printing press with movable type changed Europe. Making text in the common language available at inexpensive (relatively) prices to all created a situation the then powers that were found dangerously threatening to their power arrangements. Books were burned, printing presses were smashed, men were executed. The mechanical printing press gave rise to the Protestant reformation and later the Enlightenment.

    Now there’s the internet, which could lead to the next great expansion of Enlightenment principles by making information more widely available, and the current powers that be will have none of it. So now “freedom” is a suspect word and the old Brit sitcom Yes, Minister is a suspect entertainment. Goog is destroying search results. TPTB insist they and they alone get to define misinfo, disinfo, and malinfo (whatever that last is).

    1. Art_DogCT

      Malinformation: noun. Information that is true/accurate, but is presented in such a way as to undermine the preferred narrative.

    1. Katniss Everdeen

      And here’s Matt Taibbi on that same subject:

      The West’s Betrayal of Freedom

      Westerners once endlessly propagandized “freedom” as the ultimate democratic virtue. Now, in fear of revolt, the leaders of these countries are mounting an opposite campaign

      https://www.racket.news/p/the-wests-betrayal-of-freedom

      From Taibbi:

      By 2016, however, the WEF types who’d grown used to skiing at Davos unmolested and cheering on from Manhattan penthouses those thrilling electoral face-offs between one Yale Bonesman and another suddenly had to deal with — political unrest? Occupy Wall Street was one thing. That could have been over with one blast of the hose. But Trump? Brexit? Catalan independence? These were the types of problems you read about in places like Albania or Myanmar. It couldn’t be countenanced in London or New York, not for a moment. Nobody wanted elections with real stakes, yet suddenly the vote was not only consquential again, but “often existentially so,” as American Enterprise Institute fellow Dalibor Rohac sighed.

      It’s no accident that the Enlightenment thinkers who brought us freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion have recently undergone makeovers in elite undertakings like the 1619 Project, which tell us with straight faces that the Charters of Freedom were basically a ruse to keep King George from freeing the slaves. Freedom in these tales is cast not just as a theft-sanctifying invention of self-interested white guys, but a form of intellectual libertinism that’s only safe in the modern world when doled out by “responsible” people, college-trained in the art of harm avoidiance.

    2. Mildred Montana

      Thank you for that flora. If I didn’t know better I’d think that the CBC had become a version of the Onion, the satire unfortunately unintended. If it had been, it might have been funny.

      Here’s some more absurdity from our late great $1 billion-a-year public broadcaster:

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/should-residential-school-denialism-declared-hate-speech-1.6744100

      Take that holocaust deniers, you pikers! Here in Canada we’ve now got “residential-school deniers”, a far more hateful bunch (sarc). One of the so-called, a university professor, had the temerity to ask that Ground Penetrating Radar results showing possible bodies outside schools be confirmed by excavations.

      She was summarily dismissed.

      1. wendigo

        The thing is Canada has committed to reconciliation with the Indigenous population.

        Excavating the possible graves against the wishes and beliefs of the Indigenous people would be a violation of the spirit of reconciliation.

        Her dismissal was based partly on her belief that the residential schools provided an education that ” normally they wouldn’t have received ” and the schools were not genocidal.
        As said in the article, you can’t legislate stupidity away.

        1. Kouros

          The reconciliation is just lip service. Every public servant gathering starts with expressing gratitude for living in such and such “un-ceded” territory. That means stolen. If one wants reconciliation, one should give at least some of the loot back…

  22. Permanent Sceptic

    Thanks for all the articles today on the East Palestine disaster.

    I’d like to bring some attention to another article on the disaster, written by Angie Alt. I follow her on Substack. She’s been prominent in the autoimmune health community. Today she has a good piece on the limits of “self-care” and the need for community care to ensure health. She notes:

    “At the end of January, I wrote a note to you all, arguing that shame is an uncomfortable but appropriate emotion for some circumstances. A few weeks later, Robert Reich also wrote here on Substack about the power shame has in helping us enforce protective social norms and how we’ve arrived at a moment in our country where those inflicting the most harm have absolutely no sense of shame and plenty of people actually celebrating them for it.

    This railroad disaster, which will have long-term impacts we can’t even begin to predict, is the culmination of greed completely unchecked by shame. The ultra-wealthy are not experiencing the same reality that the rest of us are; they’re insulated from experiencing shame about their actions. (Not to mention shielded from experiencing consequences for their actions. All of us can expect to go to prison for endangering a whole community, but what we deem a “crime” means the leaders of this company will face no such consequence.)”

    I recommend reading it all.

    https://angiealt.substack.com/p/greed-like-an-illness

  23. juno mas

    RE: 1830 Map

    This map is generally accurate (proportionally) along the coastline. But it is widely distorted East to West, giving the impression that the Central Valley is wider than it actually is. (I’ve overlayed the map as a JPEG image onto Google Earth Pro).

    Another issue with the map, typical of that era, is that the northern California coast trends more directly North than depicted.

    This is not to say the Central Valley was not once a huge marshland on occasion. There are records that record rain/floods produced just that in 1861/1862.

  24. Dagmar

    Newsom wants to waive environmental rules in the delta amid drought worries…

    California’s population is swelling thanks to Newsom’s providing free medical and enhanced child welfare a substantial majority of the seven million accompanied minors and high fertility new “migrants” recently attracted by the White House’s bidenvenido.

    Hypocrisy much?

    1. Eclair

      Dagmar, glad to see you taking the opportunity to stick it to California’s undocumented immigrants, who, BTW, contribute an estimated $3 Billion to to the state and county tax coffers each year. And that’s money carved out from their low wage jobs: the gardeners, roofers, dry-wallers, nannies, maids, janitors, dishwashers, pool cleaners, house cleaners, pickers of tomatoes, baby salad greens, and broccoli, who keep the State fed, washed, and, generally, functioning.

      Maybe you might want to reconsider and comment knowledgeably on Newsom’s environmental policies with regards to the Delta.

      If I have misinterpreted your comment, apologies.

  25. Cetra Ess

    re: The Power-Serving Myth That Anti-War Protests Make No Difference<Caitlin’s Newsletter

    In the past I would have agreed with Caitlin that protest makes a difference, otherwise I wouldn't have attended many a protest.

    However, several factors have since conspired to change things: a) mainstream media no longer covers the protests presumably in collusion with and under specific instruction of the state, b) social media actively and algorithmically suppresses both the organizing of antiwar (and other) activism, also the spread of info, c) state propaganda clearly dominates.

    Much of the method was likely devised during and in response to Occupy. As I recall, the success of Occupy was precisely the ability of people to organize protest, without any algorithmic limitation. We were able to say be in such and such a place at such and such a time and immediately reach the entire membership of Facebook groups. In response, FB introduced an algorithm which limited the views of such posts to something like only 100, only pushing the post to the next 100 when a post had reached 100 views, etc., effectively dampening the ability to organize in this way. To this day many people don't realize this algorithm is hindering their efforts, limiting their reach, wonder why people don't show up to protests, don't realize their call to protest has only been viewed by a handful.

    My point is, given this, unless you find another way to organize, your protest is doomed, will never have the overwhelming numbers that Occupy and previous antiwar movements had.

    I would argue that those protesters who show up should repurpose the protest, instead of showing up primarily to wave signs and chant then go home, should be using their presence and time more in a conferencing sense to network and organize in ways that aren't susceptible to such easy interception and interference – and collusion by media and state.

  26. antidlc

    Covid in the news today:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heart-health/covid-hurts-heart-according-science-rcna71262
    Covid can cause heart problems. Here’s how the virus may do its damage.
    Scientists who studied human hearts found that infection appeared to make it harder for them to beat properly.

    Covid can cause damage to the heart on a cellular level that can lead to lasting problems, including irregular heartbeats and heart failure, preliminary research suggests.

    Covid’s effects on the heart have been well documented, but a new study zooms in on the microscopic changes thought to be caused by the virus.

    https://fortune.com/2023/02/20/long-covid-hurting-worker-finances-cognitive-symptoms-research-unemployement/
    Long COVID is hurting workers’ finances, as new research shows those suffering it are more likely to be unemployed

    For the past three years, COVID-19 has been wreaking havoc with businesses.

    Each month, research shows that more than a million people have called in sick since the pandemic began. But for some professionals, their covid symptoms are superseding the few days businesses set aside for being sick.

    Now long COVID has its grip on America’s workforce, and new research shows that it is preventing many people suffering symptoms like brain fog months after being infected from going back to work altogether.

  27. flora

    From Matt Stoller’s piece
    On Lina Khan Derangement Syndrome – BIG by Matt Stoller

    “[Former Supreme Court nominee] Bork, et al, thought that consolidation was good, and that traditional anti-monopoly safeguards for small business and workers were a form of inefficient ‘protectionism.’ They did not like how antitrust enforcers looked at real-world evidence of how the economy did work. Instead, they wanted enforcers to use wholly theoretical economic models about how the economy should work, calling this the ‘law and economics’ school of policy” (my emphasis)

    Looking at how the real economy did work in stead of …theory. What a concept.

  28. LawnDart

    Putin’s speech is scheduled for 12 noon, Moscow-time, tomorrow: will we still have “Links” Tuesday morning?

    Earlier, on Wednesday, February 15, 2023, it became known that foreign media from unfriendly countries will not receive accreditation for the message of the Russian president. As the press secretary of the head of state Dmitry Peskov specified, journalists from unfriendly countries will be able to work thanks to the broadcast of the message, which will go live.

    [https]

    ://sib.fm/news/2023/02/20/vystuplenie-putina-21-fevralya-2023-goda-gde-i-kogda-smotret-translyatsiyu

  29. Susan the other

    Volodymyr Zelensky – Pathological Hater. Oliver Boyd-Barrett. Empire, Communication and NATO Wars. Wow.

  30. none

    U.S. ambassador to U.N. warns China would be crossing a ‘red line’ if it provides lethal aid to Russia NBC News

    Well, what color line do you EXPECT Red China to cross? Meanwhile, lethal aid to UKR from US etc. continues. Sheesh.

  31. The Rev Kev

    “Record 6,542 guns intercepted at US airport security in ’22 ”

    Biden in Kiev announces a gift of 6,542 guns to the Zelensky regime.

      1. harrybothered

        I believe it was Hunter’s deceased brother’s widow that threw the gun away during their brief relationship.

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