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Links 8/14/2023

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A New Idea for How to Assemble Life Wired. Assembly theory. See NC on  May 23 for link (Anthony L) and discussion.

Why Florence Nightingale was so much more than the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ History Extra

Climate

Lahaina used to be a wetland Heated

How Biden’s Regional Carbon Cleanup Hubs Could Spur Innovation Bloomberg. Yes, that’s how we built The Bomb and put a man on the moon; public-private partnerships, and startups [bangs head on desk]. 

Mishmash of how US heat deaths are counted complicates efforts to keep people safe as Earth warms AP

#COVID19

Core mitochondrial genes are down-regulated during SARS-CoV-2 infection of rodent and human hosts Science. From the Abstract: “Even when the virus was cleared and lung mitochondrial function had recovered, mitochondrial function in the heart, kidney, liver, and lymph nodes remained impaired, potentially leading to severe COVID-19 pathology.” Topol gives a fine exposition of this article, with charts, here–

Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope Eric Topol, Ground Truths. Also excoriates NIH, rightly, for its “billions for research but not one cent for treatment” RECOVER study on long covid, a story broken by STAT.

Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? Salon. Readers, can somebody check the math?

* * *

Got a cold, runny nose, the sniffles? No worries! Come to school, LAUSD says LA Times. Should somebody check in on LA? History does repeat:

* * *

A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand:

(1 Kings 18:44-45). Brain Truster GM: “If this one turns out to have real legs, it will make the XBB booster obsolete before it’s even rolled out…” Fortunately, we have implemented a strategy of multiple layers of mitigation, so hopefully non-pharmaceutical interventions will stave off the onrush. Oh, wait….

* * *

COVID victims’ families sue NYC-based EcoHealth for ‘funding, releasing’ virus NY Post

Indonesians mask-up as Jakarta tops world’s most polluted city list WION

China?

China stocks hit after developer Country Garden suspends some bond trading FT

U.S. Building Up To 20 New Air Defence Sites on Guam: Creating the World’s Most Heavily Protected Airspace to Face Chinese and Korean Strikes Military Watch

India

The Massacre In Manipur Madras Courier

Africa

Burkina Faso & Mali Reps Arrive in Niger: We Won’t Accept Repeat of NATO’s Libya Adventure Internationalist 360°

Syraqistan

Saudi Arabia’s 1st ambassador to Palestine presents letter of credentials Anadolu Agency

‘Choose Democracy!’ Ex-IDF General Calls on Army Chief to Back Rule of Law in Looming Conflict With ‘Gov’t of Criminals’ Haaretz

Former Israeli general accuses Israel of ‘war crimes’ reminiscent of Nazi Germany in West Bank The New Arab

European Disunion

Germany considers ban on far-Right AfD Telegraph

Polish government plans referendum asking if voters want ‘thousands of illegal immigrants’ AP

Railway Poetry London Review of Books. From 2017, still germane.

Dear Old Blighty

How the Tories plan to take the fight to Labour on the NHS The Spectator

New Not-So-Cold War

SITREP 8/13/23: AFU Struggles For Symbolic Meaning In Late Summer Doldrums Simplicius the Thinker(s)

Ukraine Situation Report: Russians Board Ukraine-Bound Ship The War Zone

Ukraine’s counteroffensive may be successful without F-16s – NYT Ukrainska Pravda

* * *

CISA boss says US alliance with Ukraine over past year is closer than Five Eyes The Register

Russia, Donbass and the Reality of Conflict in Ukraine Covert Action Magazine

Rouble hits 16-month low as military spending rises and exports fall FT

South of the Border

Blood and Treasure The American Conservative. From June, still germane.

2024

Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win NYT. Memo from Chesebro. Good title for a film.

Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election Lawrence Tribe, Just Security

* * *

Georgia Is Ground Zero for Trump Exhaustion as Another Indictment Looms WSJ

Exclusive: Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach CNN (Furzy Mouse).

Was Trump Using Twitter Direct Messages? (Please Let the Answer Be Yes.) Daring Fireball

Pence says he ‘doesn’t recall’ if he was told about false elector scheme leading up to Jan. 6 The Hill

Democrats en Déshabillé

Feinstein fall gives Democrats a scare The Hill. Did she fall, or was she pushed?

Supply Chain

War and Soggy Fields Leave World Short of Top-Quality Wheat Bloomberg

Global rice prices could surge higher as flood risks loom over China CNBC

Airlines rush to avoid cancellations after engine recall FT

The Bezzle

Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users MIT Technology Review

An impossibility theorem on truth-telling in fully decentralized systems (PDF) Bank of International Settlements

Digital Watch

Ruthless Endangerment E.W. Neidermeyer. Liability and robot cars. Optimizing the legal environment rather than making software that works.

Tutoring firm settles US agency’s first bias lawsuit involving AI software Reuters

Sure AI is hot, but is it an actual market or a platform piece? Tech Crunch

Groves of Academe

More than 300 professors from across the West blast CU Boulder administrators, dean over firing of Patty Limerick Colorado Sun

Top Texas A&M officials were involved in botched recruiting of journalism professor, who will receive $1 million settlement Texas Tribune

How many college closures are on the horizon? Higher Ed Dive

Zeitgeist Watch

You Must Understand That Taylor Swift Knows Me Better Than Anyone Else On Earth Defector. On parasocial relationships.

Imperial Collapse Watch

Rome fell. Will the modern-day West follow suit? The Economist

Class Warfare

Utah Farm Bureau President arrested for assault, investigated for human trafficking KSL

Reddit users decry hospitals’ bonus systems Becker’s Hospital Review

The Economic Losers in the New World Order WSJ

The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco. NYT

How the World Discovered – and Got the Taste for – Scotch Whiskey The Wire

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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87 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    ‘History repeats itself in some sort of Stockholm syndrome’

    Went digging into this one and found that it was part of the Great Northern War plague outbreak-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_War_plague_outbreak#Finland,_Gotland_and_Central_Sweden

    The authorities deliberately closed their eyes to the evidence of plague in front of them and let it in-

    ‘In June 1710, most probably via a ship from Pernau, the plague arrived in Stockholm, where the health commission (Collegium Medicum) until 29 August denied that it was indeed the plague, despite buboes being visible on the bodies of victims from the ship and in the town.The plague raged in Stockholm until 1711, affecting primarily women (45.3% of the dead) and children (38.7% of the dead) in the poorer quarters outside the Old Town. Of Stockholm’s approximately 55,000 inhabitants, about 22,000 did not survive the plague.’

    It’s a good thing that we would never do something so stupid these days (cough, cough, cough). But the Venetians showed the way in what to do about two centuries previously. Islands were set aside for travelers to go into isolation, typically for 40 days which period led to the origin of the word ‘quarantine’. When your time was up and you never got sick, you could go where you please. If you got sick, there was a hospital and if things did not go well for you, they even had cemeteries there. It was a system that worked and certainly they must have known about it in Stockholm. I guess that they too did not want their economy to have a sad.

    https://www.euronews.com/travel/2021/02/04/did-you-know-that-quarantine-was-invented-600-years-ago-in-venice

    1. CanCyn

      Proving two things that we really already know:
      1. We don’t learn from history
      2. The economy is more
      Important than us plebs.

      1. communistmole

        This is the Swiss Minister of Health at the Street Parade in Zurich this Saturday. I remember how, in the heyday of Covid, the Swiss tourism industry was already talking about the need for the government to help improve Switzerland’s image abroad with an advertising campaign after the end of the pandemic, because they had seen a little too clearly how in the “oldest democracy in the world” (cough, cough) it is necessary to go over corpses for the sake of the holy tourist world

        https://www.watson.ch/schweiz/userinput/304458334-hier-feiert-bundesrat-berset-an-der-street-parade-auf-dem-love-mobile

  2. Henry Moon Pie

    Heat deaths–

    Heat deaths. Covid deaths. Covid sequelae deaths. Vaccine side effect deaths. All must be disappeared.

    Prediction: before long, the official leading cause of death in the U. S. will be “it was just his/her time.”

  3. DJG, Reality Czar

    Daniel Kovalik, report from the Donbass, Covert Action. Kovalik is a good war correspondent because he has an eye for details and a sense of humor about his own mistakes. So it is a humane piece about people who are being treated inhumanely.

    Can anyone seriously believe at this point that the “territorial integrity” argument from Kiev is anything but blowing smoke up one’s orifice? Doesn’t anyone seriously think that the people in the Donbass and Crimea are hankering to rejoin Ukraine?

    Note the bombed-out church in the photo up top and the year: 2014

    1. JohnA

      Were the Donbass, let alone Crimea, become Ukrainian again, this would necessitate ethnic cleansing and genocide of most of the current population. But I suppose if the Israelis can do this with impunity, why not Ukraine?

      1. The Rev Kev

        Well it is true that the Ukraine have said that they want to be the Israel of eastern Europe – and all that entails. So I guess that that would make the Russian, Polish and Hungarian speaking Ukrainians the new Palestinians.

      1. JP

        On my 18th birthday my brother and his collage friends took me to Tijuana. Of course we went to the strip clubs to see the shows. They had recently closed the famous Blue Fox where they had the alleged donkey act. I think the fake painted stripe zebras worked for the photographers in the daylight but lost the stripes and worked at the Blue Fox in the evening. It was a wounderment and a little frightening to my 18 year old self. We sat at a table and ordered the obligatory drink but the prostitutes we all over me, trying to sit on my lap an running their hands all over me. The floor show is a topic for a different web site.

    2. Jorge

      There was a zebra retirement home in Cali in the SF Bay Area hills. It was on an major access road in the hills. You drive around the hills… “horse”… “horse”… “two horses”… “two zebras”… “horse”… “hey wait a minute!”

  5. The Rev Kev

    “German democracy under debate as nation weighs up ban on AfD”

    Yeah, sure, why not? Ban what is the most fastest growing parties in Germany to ensure that the same old parties can still cling to power with their Greens enablers. What could possibly go wrong? Demonstrate more of those European values in action – and show Germany and the rest of the EU that there is no point trying to go though a democratic process but instead that the only way forward is radical actions like mass strikes, direct action and all the rest of it. I am sure that Macron is watching this too to see if they can pull it off or not.

    1. JohnA

      Yes, I guess it is harder to paint the party as anti-semitic in Germany, a tactic that destroyed any chance of a slightly socialist-leaning Labour government in Britain.

      1. Igmacio

        The Torygraph, IMO, was making shit up with that article. They cannot even put a graph correctly without messing with which line corresponds to which party.

    3. digi_owl

      What is sad is that their only disagreement is on immigration, but the typical thing with the right-wing anti-immigration talk is that it will evict the refugees (more often than not mothers and like that are easy to snag, as the men are likely to be “intelligence” contacts to some militant group back in the old country) but flood the nation in underpaid temp workers on downright fraudulent contracts.

  6. Henry Moon Pie

    Nate Hagens has just released a new roundtable discussion aimed at the miseducation young people are receiving in economics in the Western world. The presentations:

    Jon Erickson, UVt: the myth of homo economicus
    Josh Farley, UVt: market misallocations of resources
    Steve Keen: neoclassical econs energy blindness
    Kate Raworth: the shortcomings of GDP and price in measuring economies

    The discussion among these four leading “renegade” economists last and hour and 40 minutes.

    1. Mildred Montana

      Thanks for that. Seems right up my alley. Will watch on the tablet this evening whilst supine on the couch and snacking.

      1. Henry Moon Pie

        Farley and Erickson were on Hagens’s Ph.S. committee at Vermont. They seem to have a good ecological economics department there. Raworth is actually working with city governments in Europe: Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen. She’s good at selling new ideas with her visual representations. And Keen is a treasure. His sarcasm about neoclassical economists always has me laughing. Hope you find it worthwhile.

    2. digi_owl

      It is really sad how the French were on the right path, but then it all got dominated by English writing trying to justify removing import restriction on grain.

    1. Daryl

      Probably too busy writing checks to buy more decaying rusted out military equipment for the Ukraine.

    2. The Rev Kev

      This seems to be happening in more and more countries. That whenever there is a disaster, the authorities seem to have no clue what to do in spite of having the resources to plan and practice how to deal with emergencies. The same has happened here in Oz. But for the US that would be FEMA and the Red Cross acting as first responders. Well FEMA did not cover itself in glory in New Orleans and the Red Cross organization is into scamming millions for themselves.

      Hawaii is home to more than 250,000 military personnel and their families so you think that they could be mobilized, especially their helicopters, but I do not know if it is being done or not. Certainly the Coasties have been in action and were picking up survivors from the water during the fires. But it has been a coupla days now and the survivors are not happy. The White House could send Kamala but I am sure that everybody agrees that those people have suffered enough.

      1. JBird4049

        From what I understand, there are actual written guidelines for what to do in the offices of the emergency response people, but apparently they are not read. The official, written before the pandemic, guidelines for something like Covid were deliberately ignored. I think that it is not even the lack of resources, but the refusal to even read and follow the most basic instructions written for the various emergencies. Why is this? Is it like with the Red Cross, which has become a massive grift?

        1. Pat

          After Hurricane Sandy, it was local groups that provided the most help. Some were long standing local charities, and a couple were pop ups where the founders had been part of Occupy.

          As per local reporting at the time, If Sandy is any indication some of it is grift, but a lot of it was sheer arrogance on the part of the supposed big emergency response groups. Not only was their bureaucracy daunting, they wanted to tell people what they needed and paid no attention to the help people were asking for. They needed their i’s dotted and their t’s crossed before they would provide anything but a cot at a gym, and then it often just wasn’t helpful.

        2. Henry Moon Pie

          The real playbook for all disasters is written according to the profit imperative. We must never let the billionaires’ return on capital be interrupted. Any pandemic protocol prepared by public health officials was thrown out in favor of what Paul Tudor Jones and Stephen Schwartzman wanted.

    3. Mildred Montana

      Lahaina was dry to begin with, sitting in the rain shadow of the West Maui Mountains. Adjacent to it were many acres of scrub and invasive grasses covering abandoned sugarcane fields. In addition, those mountains have a tendency to funnel east-west winds down on those fields and then into the town. A tinder-box waiting for a spark.*

      And then along came Dora, off in the Pacific and whipping up intense winds on the island. The coup-de-grace. And it won’t do to say she came out of the blue (so to speak). The track and strength of hurricanes are nowadays reliably charted.

      All these conditions were known beforehand and the danger was predictable. Yet apparently no timely information, advisories, or alerts from authorities. Nothing, according to residents. Of course all the evidence is not in but this has the makings of a scandal. What were the people in charge doing—if anything?

      *No mention yet of what that spark might have been.

      2. ChrisPacific

        I do think the locals are correct in saying that there’s a real danger that any rebuild will be owned and controlled by the highest bidders (meaning the tourist industry) and will produce a bunch of high end resorts without anything much in the way of a livable town, much less a replacement for historic Lahaina. You don’t have to go far to see what it would look like – just up the coast a little way to Ka’anapali.

        Let’s hope the governor is serious about trying to prevent that, and willing to back it up with zoning rules and direct investment and the like. Too often in the US this kind of thing is just lip service prior to selling out.

        1. juno mas

          Yes, and they should condemn all the land from Front St. to the ocean as public beach and plan for more sea level rise.

        2. Gregorio

          Maybe they can cut a deal with Disney to redevelop and govern Florida style.
          “Aloha Disney” has a nice ring to it.

    4. Cristobal

      I have heard that there are a number of US millitary bases in Hawaii. I guess the folks there have other things to do. I was a resident of Sullivans Island in SC when a pretty big hurricane came through there. Assistance from the big Navy and Air Force base there were conspicuous in their absence. It may bbe going on but just not making the news where I live, but I doubt it. The only time I recall the military lifting a hand after a national disaster was after the Homestead Florida hurricane.

    5. Alice X

      @flora Links 08/13/23August 13, 2023 at 3:35 pm
      – A different topic, you were wondering in yesterday’s links if there might not be some other reason for the police raid of the Kansas newspaper. Today DemocracyNow, in reporting on the story, stated that the newspaper was also investigating the police chief who had apparently had sexual misconduct charges at a previous job in Kansas City. That part starts at 13:00 of the 8/14/23 program.

      This story could have multiple legs, so to speak.

        1. flora

          adding as an aside: those who have cared for very elderly relatives know that a startling and stressful thing happening directly in a very old elder’s life, which they might have emotionally shrugged off or dealt with easily in their 60’s and 70’s, can in later years be a deeply traumatic shock to them, to people in their 80’s and 90’s. I don’t know why that it, only that it is.

        2. flora

          More from a KC Star story, via MSN.

          Kansas newspaper raided, shut down by police had investigated chief who came from KCPD

          https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/kansas-newspaper-raided-shut-down-by-police-had-investigated-chief-who-came-from-kcpd/ar-AA1fed4E

    6. Wukchumni

      The ‘X’ factor i’d want to know is how many perished that were in short term rentals?

      No sense of community comes with the territory.

  8. Anonymous 2

    O dear……

    There is no such drink as ‘Scotch whiskey’.

    As one of my teachers used to write: ‘Spelling!!!’

    2. Robert Gray

      The author appears to be a Scot and would presumably know this full well, unless he is for some reason being deliberately perverse. More likely, I think, is ignorance on the part of the Indian editors at The Wire.

    3. Wukchumni

      I was weaned on peat’s sake when Lagavulin was $39.95 a bottle at Trader Joes, back in the day.

  9. Mark Gisleson

    Daring Fireball can’t seem to wait to take a victory lap but then does serious damage to the truth with their last disclosure.

    Speaking of Twitter bugs, this bit from the unsealed court ruling made me laugh:

    The government faced difficulties when it first attempted to serve Twitter with the warrant and nondisclosure order. On January 17, 2023, the government tried to submit the papers through Twitter’s website for legal requests, only to find out that the website was inoperative. Two days later, on January 19, 2023, the government successfully served Twitter through that website.

    The accounts I’ve read clearly state that Jack Smith digitally stuck the warrant into a staff inbox late on a Friday where it wasn’t discovered until Monday and then the judge cited that delay while inflicting her ridiculous fines. The flummery and Punisher-style fines were egregious yet here’s another faithful Bidenette snickering at how clever they all are and clearly very excited at the prospect of reading Trump’s private direct messages.

  10. dave -- just dave

    The anti-declinist review in the Economist of Why Empires Fall can be seen as comic, or tragic, or in a more detached way as “part of the process”.

    Contrariwise, yesterday I attended via YouTube the Sunday service of the Flint Michigan Unitarian Universalist congregation in order to listen to a presentation titled “Being the Calm in the Storm” – from the description:

    With Michael Dowd, best-selling author and compost theologian!

    Summary:
    No one needs convincing that we live in an age of chaos and breakdowns. Even those without benefit of an ecological understanding of history feel the stress. So how do we cope? How can we live with genuine joy and gratitude in the midst of a corrupt civilization and collapsing biosphere? And, crucially, how can we be of support to others who are confused, angry, depressed, or filled with fear, blame, or guilt? Our speaker, Michael Dowd, has some ideas! He has addressed some 3,000 religious and secular groups throughout North America, including 500 UU congregations.

    Briefly: Give up hope of preventing civilization from continuing to reap what it has sown, and change your goal to living and loving well during the time that is left to you. Radically accept TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it.

    2. Adam Eran

      Peter Heather’s Fall of Roman Empire includes the most recent archaeology. Apparently the large estates of the imperial plutocrats were farmed by slaves–a contrast to the previous, republic-era sustainable smaller farms.

      The soil played out–slaves seldom care for soil–and Rome became dependent on North Africa for food. When the Visigoths conquered the Iberian peninsula, then North Africa, they shut off the grain shipments, and Rome starved. The Roman population opened the doors for the invaders when the northerners came to conquer. Food conquers all.

      This is an eerie parallel to the Civil War. The plantations needed new soil (the Western States) since their crops were farmed by slaves, and that bone of contention–whether those Western States would permit slaves–was a critical one in starting that war.

      The exhaustion of soils and energy (it takes 10 calories of petroleum to grow 1 calorie of food, says Michael Pollan) threatens the same dynamic currently

    3. Jabura Basaidai

      finding it increasingly difficult to find any reason to not agree totally and radically accept TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it – a theme i return to again and again is an amazement at the delusion of the oligarchs who apparently believe the consequences will not befall them or their progeny – their wealth and power is so completely addictive in its delusion – it is difficult to envision any hope and find happiness if only waiting on a change for the better – recently had my annual physical and my physician remarked when i mentioned my disappointment and sadness with humanity’s desperate circumstances; environmental, political, social, etc….he said the only thing is to live my life with integrity and honor – and i try my best to follow the golden rule – here are a couple of proverbs, the first one is Cree and the second Chinese –

      “Only when the last tree has died
      And the last river has been poisoned
      And the last fish has been caught
      Will we realize we cannot eat money”

      Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become words
      Be careful of your words, for your words become actions
      Be careful of your actions, for your actions become habits
      Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character
      Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny

      Peace and Love to you all – jb

      1. JP

        Only after your husband thrown in the towel
        And your children think you are crazy
        When Edison has cut your power
        Will you realize you need money to eat

  11. timbers

    Doctorow…Guess the Kremlin does not want ICBM missiles killing them – “we are told that the Russians have just used Kinzhal hypersonic missiles to destroy the railway tunnels passing under the Carpathians which have been the main supply route of Western military hardware arriving from Poland and Romania. For a long time, there was discussion in the Russian senior military command over whether it was permissible to attack this ostensibly civilian infrastructure. However, the decision was taken to do so in light of the latest U.S. and NATO plans to raise the bar in what attack equipment they are providing to Ukraine. As the Russians argue, civilian infrastructure that is being used to serve military objectives automatically becomes a legal target for them.”

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > the Russians have just used Kinzhal hypersonic missiles to destroy the railway tunnels passing under the Carpathians which have been the main supply route of Western military hardware arriving from Poland and Romania.

      Big if true:

      But sourcing so far seems a little thin. The above is best I could find.

    3. GramSci

      Works for me today, but I’ve had problems accessing haaretz in the last week. My dns provider has been comcast

      whois 75.75.75.75

  13. The Rev Kev

    “Ukraine Situation Report: Russians Board Ukraine-Bound Ship”

    I wonder if the insurer of the ‘Sukru Okan’ knew that this ship was going to pull such a stupid stunt. You think that there might be a few pointed words between them and the shipping company? I guess that this was just a test of the Russian’s resolve as the Ukrainians i.e. Zelensky are desperate to reopen up the grain route because they are losing hundreds of billions of dollars since the deal ended. And that means that Big Z is missing his 10% cut. And that was a gutsy performance by the way of that helicopter pilot hovering to get those Russian Marines back off that ship.

    Question is, will be Joe Biden be stupid enough to say that he will put US Marines on those ships that want them like he is doing in the Gulf?

  15. Wukchumni

    All in a week’s span, I found out about a Chinese bio-lab 35 miles away from me in one direction and a family of grey wolves 35 miles away in the other direction.

    1. The Rev Kev

      If those wolves come to your neck of the woods, then you might have the pleasure of listening to them howling to each other at night. That would be a buzz.

      1. Wukchumni

        I hear the coyote choir in the wee hours every morning, and it’d be nice to have the wolves jamming along with them~

        1. pasha

          around here (michigan) when wolves show up, coyotes flee for their lives. as a result, haven’t heard a coyote since seeing my first coy-wolf some five januarys ago.

          1. Wukchumni

            Mountain lions are the top of the heap here, but tend to be solitary hunters, whereas wolves hunt in packs, advantage who exactly?

  16. The Rev Kev

    “War and Soggy Fields Leave World Short of Top-Quality Wheat”

    Yeah, what does Bloomberg define as “top quality wheat?” Would that be only genetically modified wheat by any chance? Meanwhile, the Russians are having a bumper crop this year-

    ‘Russia is projected to send 48 million tons of wheat for export in the current agricultural year (July 2022 to June 2023), according to the latest review issued by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released on Friday.

    The latest figure comes as a 500,000-ton upgrade to the USDA’s previous forecast, issued in July. Back then, analysts expected Russia’s wheat exports to amount to 47.5 million tons, a million more than had been projected in the previous month.

    At the same time, Russia’s wheat-production outlook remained unchanged at 85 million tons, while projection for volumes of carry-over stocks was reduced from 12.44 million tons to 11.44 million tons.

    The wheat-export forecast for Russia’s closest competitor, the European Union, remained unchanged at 38.5 million tons.’

    https://www.rt.com/business/581218-usda-russia-wheat-exports-forecast/

    1. Bruce F

      In addition, the price of wheat at the Chicago Board of Trade, a good proxy for the worldwide price, is roughly half of what it was a year ago, and roughly at the same level it was before the war. Going slightly further back, it’s barely higher than it was in 2014. So much for inflation, at least from the farm side of things.
      As a wheat producer, it’s hard to take a lot of that commentary seriously.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Bloomberg apparently used to have a good reputation for their financial analysis not that long ago. But with this war, they have been coming out with what can only be termed propaganda analysis pieces which will cause reputational damage going forward. Play stupid games…

  17. JTMcPhee

    On assembly theory, subhead seeds of our own destruction:

    “Cronin and Walker joined forces after attending a NASA astrobiology workshop in 2012. “Sara and I were discussing information theory and life and minimal routes to build self-replicating machines,” Cronin recalled. “And it became very clear to me that we were both converging on the fact that there was a missing ‘driving force’ before biology.”

    It’s already in the news feeds: https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/americas/xenobots-self-replicating-robots-scn/index.html

    Some humans just gotta drive science and technology in the direction that leads to Terminator tech and that gray goop that starred in the sci fi horror movie “The Blob.”

    Proof that the past is prologue, the seeming central tenet of assembly theory, to be found in such possibly inevitable pathways.

    “What, me worry?” Likely to be deceased, personally, before this kind of SHTF,,,

    1. JTMcPhee

      Missed tying this comment into the Wolf Richter link on two robotaxi companies getting sanctified/commercialized to run autonomous battering-ram taxis around “tech leader” San Francisco.

      Yep, we are the past that makes the prologue.

  18. Rick

    I’ve been reading Topol for a while, and while as a long time software dev I don’t agree with his fascination with tech solutions in medicine, he has been great on covid. While so many ‘establishment’ types equivocate, he instead has been getting more vocal about being angry with the fustercluck our dealing with SARS-n has become.

    Good for him.

  19. Raymond Sim

    I have a sinus headache this morning, so I’m dumber than usual, but I didn’t find much math to check in the Salon article.

    The chart in the next link down looks similar to one I sketched out two or three weeks ago, using pencil, paper and a calculator. I used the most conservative assumptions I thought remotely reasonable, and my graphs looked about like the graphs in the link multiplied by 0.4.

    The bottom line on my chart would have been labeled “100% disability” and would predict that we will ring in 2024 with about one in twenty five Americans 100% disabled by Long Covid. Epi-Yeti’s numbers strike me as quite plausible.

  20. Wukchumni

    ‘Swift Boding’
    ~~~~~~~~~~~

    You Must Understand That Taylor Swift Knows Me Better Than Anyone Else On Earth Defector. On parasocial relationships.

    1. Late Introvert

      I recall a dorm room in 1982 that involved LSD and some very convinced youths that Joe’s Garage was recorded just for us.

  21. Wukchumni

    What a difference a week made…

    …was out for a week with my longtime backpacking partner (we’ve walked approx 4,327 miles together with never even one disagreement) on the High Sierra Trail and it was frankly glorious, i’ve never seen the High Sierra so resplendent as it was-not to mention that we only encountered say 27 mosquitoes in a week, remarkable doesn’t even begin to describe that in the wettest of wet years

    Took a hike in theory to Eagle Lake yesterday with a fellow cabin owner in Mineral King and about halfway to the lake were swarmed by waves of mossies in V-Pack formation, i’ve practically never seen such an assault from the air the likes of that, i’m talking covering up 1/5th of your arm in them. We 86’d it out of there pronto.

  22. Troy

    For the Epi-Yeti graph, my half-ass model pretty much told the same story. There’s a few caveats I didn’t account for but for the most part, it’s fairly in-line with what I arrived at.

    The mass disabling crisis will become unignorable en masse next year. Whether Western elites will do anything remains to be seen as even then, I expect them to try ignoring the crisis.

    If there is a corollary for today’s mass forced infection, it’d be the Canada/US forced infection of First Nations/Native American children in Residential/Industrial schools, where huge percentage of children were deliberately housed in conditions conducive to TB infection and spread. Even in them days, doctors and were sounding alarms about high death rates up to 25% (even one with 69% death rate (Scientific American: Canada’s Residential Schools Were a Horror, Ian Mosby)).

    But the death rate amongst First Nations/Native Americans after they left these schools, and lived their shortened lives on reserves is the corollary we really want to investigate. The essay by Christian W. McMillen, “Race, Tuberculosis, and American Indians” makes for dismaying reading. Eugenics, ineptitude, and indifference made up the majority of TB treatment on American Indian reserves. Sound familiar? Well, it only took a few decades for government authorities to bother with parity treatment on-reserve as off.

    For decades, Indigenous lives were much shorter than their contemporaries in every facet of life. From birth to the elderly, Indigenous people perished in much higher numbers and have only recently begun to reach a semblance of parity in some places. (Covid will likely create parity but in the wrong direction).

    “Not knowing the the incidence of disease kept it from being treated” (McMillen, pg 616). Again, a familiar refrain. Going through the essay, it’s all just the same garbage we’re hearing nowadays with Covid. The Barrington Declaration could just well have been a repackaging of the garbage Virgin Soil theory.

    But the thing that strikes me, is the incredible disparity of deaths of despair in First Nations/American Indian populations: they weren’t just double or triple but sometimes five to six times higher than the general population. This is likely something we can something we can expect from Long Covid: a growing spike in deaths of despair.

  23. Jay Ess

    There are plenty of potential problems with that long COVID chart:
    1. Some people don’t get repeat infections (so far), despite taking no precautions, so 1-3 infections per year simply isn’t realistic given the current mutation rate of the virus
    2. Due to genetics, some people may not get long COVID, ever
    3. Some people get dead instead of long COVID, which lowers the percentage of living people impacted
    4. I’m pretty sure I saw a similar chart around 2021 claiming that by 2023, there’d be a huge number of people with long COVID. Why doesn’t this chart go back to 2020? I suspect we wouldn’t see the smooth curve claimed here.

    1. kareninca

      1. Do we know how many people are getting repeat infections? There could be loads of people catching it three times a year without our knowing it, if they have asymptomatic cases (which can still lead to organ damage and seed the microglia). It’s not as if people are testing, and the RATs are terrible at picking up asymptomatic cases.

      2. Variants keep changing, so while technically yes, there may be some super humans who will never get long covid no matter what the variant, the odds keep getting worse. Also we don’t have any evidence that there are such people with special genes.

      4. I think there is a huge number of people with long covid. They just don’t know it yet.

      Time will tell. I certainly hope you are right, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

  24. Ranger Rick

    Had to suppress a smirk reading that Lawrence Tribe headline. Isn’t this the same guy who advocated in 2016 for faithless electors to prevent Trump’s election? And further promised legal aid for those who did? The more things change…

    1. britzklieg

      I still won’t vote for Biden.
      Ever.
      Period.
      I would never vote for Trump either.
      But if the Democrats assume that getting rid of Trump will assure Biden’s re-election, they are wrong.

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