What Happens to a Werewolf on the Moon? Scientific American
Listen to the sound of Pando, a tree as large as an entire forest ZME Science
Private development inside Grand Teton National Park possible High Country News
Climate/Environment
The Machine Breaker Harper’s Magazine
Welcome to Acapulco. This isn’t a battleground. This is a scene of catastrophic devastation. it remains overlooked, receiving minimal coverage. The lack of media coverage is baffling 😡💔#HurricaneOtis #HurracanOtis #Otis #Acapulco #Mexico pic.twitter.com/vL4RH4ZR5x
— Volcaholic 🌋 (@volcaholic1) October 28, 2023
Hurricane Otis smashed into Mexico and broke records. Why did no one see it coming? Science
#COVID-19
COVID-19 illness severity and 2-year prevalence of physical symptoms: an observational study in Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. “These data suggest an elevated prevalence of some, but not all, physical symptoms during up to more than 2 years after diagnosis of COVID-19, particularly among individuals suffering a severe acute illness.”
Sequential multi-omics analysis identifies clinical phenotypes and predictive biomarkers for long COVID Cell Reports Medicine
Zombie Uprisings Can Help Us Predict How Future Pandemics Spread Science Alert
Water
Monstrous ‘zombie catfish’ are appearing in US waterways. What’s causing it? Miami Herald
Syraqistan
Israel ‘expanding’ troops in Gaza, Hamas to counter with ‘full force’ Al Jazeera
Israel threatens to destroy Musk’s Starlink RT (KW)
Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 Magazine
***
The intensity of the air bridge to the Middle East…
In the last 24 hours, there have been 49 US Air Force C-17A transport aircraft alone, and this does not include allied CONUS C-5M, A400M and C-130 aircraft with the call sign RCH/REACH. The list is not complete and does not… pic.twitter.com/jr2y4rtIqy
— Sprinter (@Sprinter99800) October 28, 2023
Iraqi resistance drones again hit US occupation base in Syria The Cradle
UN: Syria seeing largest escalation of hostilities in four years Middle East Eye
Israel recalls diplomats from Turkey, to rethink ties to Ankara The Jerusalem Post
US pushes allies for more sanctions on Hamas FT
Bankrupt Iran: Close Their Oil Cash Cow Gatestone Institute. It worked so well against Russia.
Iranian teen injured on Tehran Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died The National. This story is all over the place with many reports claiming she was killed by state for not wearing headscarf while downplaying or ignoring the fact a friend said she fell and there’s also the following: “Ms Geravand’s mother and father appeared in state media footage saying a blood pressure issue, a fall or perhaps both contributed to their daughter’s injury. Campaigners abroad have alleged that Ms Geravand may have been pushed or attacked because she was not wearing the hijab.”
***
Craig Murray: Something Has Snapped Consortium News
An Interview On Gaza With Dominique De Villepin (As Translated By Arnaud Bertrand) Moon of Alabama. Well worth a read.
Old Blighty
Rare cartel damages trial kicks off in the UK Global Competition Review
England to diverge from EU water monitoring standards Guardian
India
In 4 years, India lost over 30 million hectares of healthy land to degradation: UN data Down to Earth
SWINGING IN THE RAIN: INDIA NEEDS TO REDEFINE WHAT A “NORMAL” MONSOON LOOKS LIKE Carbon Copy
China?
China’s debt-saddled regions owe far more than they can pay back without Beijing’s help South China Morning Post
China tightens grip as Li Keqiang’s pro-market reforms retreat Nikkei Asia
Joseph Nye says China, U.S. need to “power with” rather than “power over” other countries CCG Update
European Disunion
New Not-So-Cold War
Another false dawn? Or does the Trump factor assure us that the United States will quietly slip out of Ukraine? Gilbert Doctorow
Who is killing foreign mercenaries in Ukraine? Kit Klarenberg, Al Mayadeen
***
Russia’s banking sector on track for record profits bne Intellinews
EU leaders are trying to find money, which is not enough for everything Modern Diplomacy
Germany delivers another IRIS air defense system to Ukraine Defence Blog
PM Orbán: Ukrainians will not win on the battlefield, EU leaders unfit Daily News Hungary
Imperial Collapse Watch
Autumn of the patriarchs Patrick Lawrence, The Floutist
Soldiers Unpaid: National Guard Hasn’t Paid Out Thousands of Enlistment Bonuses Military.com
Marine Corps Barracks Issues Will Likely Take a Decade to Fix, But Work Is Underway, Commandant Says Military.com
South of the Border
The Dollarization Threat Phenomenal World. Argentina.
Spook Country
A House Investigation Reveals Disturbing IRS Home Visit Practices Matt Taibbi, Racket News
2024
Mike Pence suspends presidential campaign as Trump surges Axios
Trump Hailed at Republican Jewish Summit, Vows to Cancel pro-Palestinian Protesters’ Visas Haaretz
Democrats voice concern, outrage over Phillips primary bid The Hill
Our Famously Free Press
Prominent journalists’ union risks harming reporter’s privilege Freedom of the Press Foundation. Mike Elk v. NewsGuild.
AI
Healthcare?
Common chemotherapy drugs don’t work like doctors thought, with big implications for drug discovery University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mayo Clinic workers say they have terrible health insurance Minnesota Reformer
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Apple Private Wi-Fi hasn’t worked for the past three years The Register
The UK’s problematic Online Safety Act is now law Ars Technica
Google can turn ANC earbuds into a heart rate monitor with no extra hardware 9to5 Google
Police State Watch
How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture The Walrus
Sports Desk
Challenge to MLB’s antitrust exemption nears juncture: chase payday or history? The Athletic
The Bezzle
You’ll Never Guess How Snapchat Made Most Of Its Money In The Third Quarter Forbes
Cruise halts robotaxi services nationwide in bid to ‘earn public trust’ The Verge
Class Warfare
US economy expanding? Michael Roberts Blog
The ultimate price Investigate Midwest. The deck: “Two Mexican farmworkers died in a trailer fire in North Carolina. Their story illustrates how the nation’s most important agricultural visa program is failing the workers it is supposed to protect.”
Advocates say Amazon is not complying with Minnesota’s new warehouse worker safety law Minnesota Reformer
The trials of gig work are inspiring a new genre of hit songs Rest of World
Billionaire tells Indians to work 12 hours a day RT
UAW expands GM strike to Tennessee plant The Detroit News
Chicago Is Considering Opening a Municipal Grocery Store Matt Bruenig, Jacobin
The mystic art of gardening Aeon
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
173 comments
Comments are closed.
Orban and unfit EU leaders:
So he makes national surveys asking what the population thinks and then take this into consideration when making policies and negotiating with EU.
No wonder the EU-critters hate him.
They hate him because he doesn’t go along with the west narrative. He tells the truth.
Private development inside Grand Teton National Park possible High Country News
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As one of the few private communities within a National Park here in Mineral King, it has a few flavors in that one parcel of 480 acres was homesteaded in the 1890’s, so where my cabin is located-1 of about 40 in Silver City (where there is no silver-nor are we a city) is wholly within Tulare County, although i’m surrounded by Sequoia NP, which starts about 50 feet away from the front porch of the back of beyond.
I ‘own’ the 104 foot by 93 foot by 102 foot by 96 foot parcel outright and can do really whatever i’d like within that footprint, whereas the 70 or so private cabins on Federal land in MK, the cabin owners only own the structure and not the land.
The cabins date from the 1890’s to around 2000, mostly built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, nothing ostentatious aside from a hidden away 6,500 sq foot mansion built in 1938-39.
There is very much living history here, with some cabins now in their 5th & 6th generations, and every kind of walk of life imaginable among the myriad of owners, it isn’t uncommon for a 1930’s cabin to have 53 ‘owners’. One I know of has owners spread from SF to Miami.
Were the Grand Teton NP parcel to be sold privately, i’d imagine that the situation would be a lot different than here, in that for one thing all of the structures would be brand new, and judging from the amount expected in a winning bid, only really well off people could afford anything-and that means they’ll squeeze giant homes onto tiny lots.
A friend lives near the spectacular Superstition Mtns east of Phoenix and housing developments have climbed right up the sides to the government border which is not nearly low enough. When the real estate locusts consume the very thing that people are supposedly there to enjoy then perhaps the greed and insensitivity become self defeating. In nearby North Carolina a company lopped off the top of a mountain and put a hotel on top of it. I’ve been told that the outrage was such that that will never be allowed to happen again. Of course the people on top of the mountain have a great view. The rest of us get to look at them.
Presumably your cabin town blends in and you won’t exercise your property rights by putting up a (tiny) Motel Six. But there is a lot of controversy now about new developments in the middle of forests that are increasingly prone to burn.
As for Grand Teton, some rich Rockefellers gave it to us. Would other rich people please leave it alone…
Silver City was slated to be where Disney planned on having accommodations for the 1960’s ski resort that never happened, as the area had the most acreage privately held, so yes imagine a hillside Hilton where my cabin is, or maybe i’d be underneath the 8 level parking garage, hmmmmm?
The state appraiser went to every cabin to figure out a fair offer in eminent domaining them in the summer of ’69, a few oldtimers told me.
View from top of the mountain in North Carolina, now that sounds like a defensible position much different than say the Hamptons. Bonus if that view from a lofty height includes means and methods to be self supporting in case of the proverbial S(tuff) Hitting the Fan.
I liked rather much the summary catchphrase at the top of the lead. Just because you can do so, does not mean that you should proceed. Brings to mind the ever quotable line from Dr. Malcolm in Jurrasic Park…”your scientists were so obsessed with whether they could, they never stopped themselves to ask if they should…”
Some scenes from nature should be left as is or as undisturbed as possible. Humans have a way of wrecking beautiful locations and wondrous scenery. It’s like capital just can’t help itself, essentially when you have gotten US millions and now US billions compounded in reward for your apparent “skill and expertise” aka Jeff Bezos and their ilk.
Mt Lemmon and specifically Summerhaven is about an hour from Tucson and a great respite from the Hades & the Hades not in the summer, as it’s @ 8,200 feet.
A similar gig to here in that I can go from a hundred and hell @ the turn on Hwy 198 to go to my cabin and 6,000 feet of altitude gained later it’s in the mid 70’s.
20 odd years ago much of ‘old’ Mt Lemmon burned in a widespread wildfire that took out 85% of the old modest cabins which typically had a few rooms if that.
In their place came monstrosities-as in how much of a quote-unquote cabin can I put on this lot, or I don’t have a lot of flat area to build and we’re thinking of an elevator to the 2nd and 3rd floors of our cabin we’re having the architect design.
When you compare the humble surviving dwellings of the conflagration its like night and day, the approach.
If you’re ever in Tucson in the summer, by all means take the drive up to Mt Lemmon, there are I think 6 dramatically different life-zones as you cruise by from cactus to clouds.
I made this drive several years ago while attending a conference at La Paloma resort in Tucson. I could not believe that one could experience an Alpine climate within an hour of 120 degree heat. I needed a jacket! Truly incredible.
We hiked above Summerhaven yesterday in fine weather. Autumnal colors were spectacular and regrowth in some areas that burned a couple of years ago. A line of tiny-home cottages a few feet from the main drag crawling with SUVs that go for $hundreds/night were full up and food options are very limited. But it is indeed wonderful to drive for an hr from our home w cacti to groves of red maple leaves, especially now that city high temps have finally dropped 30 deg F from 110 that persisted for months.
Meanwhile AZ has backed out of where-did-that-come-from? plan to desalinate in Mexico (raising Sea of Cortez salinity) then pipe 200 miles into the Central Arizona Project to deliver to Phoenix & Tucson (but mostly to stupid agriculture). They are now planning to broaden water options by studying pipes from the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Such forward-(magical)-thinking.
The day before, we hiked high up Madera Canyon near Green Valley off I-19. On the way you pass through a field of deactivated in 1980s Titan II missile silos, quite spread out. You can visit one w rocket installed. 5 megaton warhead, thick but ultimately pointless blast doors. Good tour, you too can experience the Final Countdown. AF officer was asked “would key turners survive the counter strike?” “Nope”.
“only really well off people could afford anything”
What’s your place worth?
When a cabin changes hands on a rare occasion, typically $200-300k for a board and batten beauty is what they fetch. 1/4 of the value of a SoCal home.
“Google can turn ANC earbuds into a heart rate monitor with no extra hardware”
I see that Google Health is already in the mix but the question arises if Google will then sell that information to health insurance companies who want to check up on the health of their policy holders. Based on the information that they receive, they may seek to up the policy holder’s fees or cancel them outright. And you won’t even know why.
Thanks to Google’s acquisition, my Fitbit wrist monitor is now useless for once-informative sleep quality monitoring unless i give Google constant access to my phone’s location even when the Fitbit app is not running. Nope.
Last 24 hours of airlift:
So lets say each C-17 is carrying 50 Mk 84 bombs (2000lb), 49 C-17s is 2,450 bombs. If they use 2 per apartment building, that’s 1,225 buildings. A 3 story building with 4 apartments per floor is 12 families, for a total of 14,700 families made homeless. Five people per family (probably low estimate) is 73,500 people or a small towns worth. Gaza has 2.3 million, so 31 airlift-days are required to bring all the bombs over.
Thank God the Republicans are gonna cut spending elsewhere so we can afford all this.
It is both the 75th anniversary of the State of Israel, and the Berlin Airlift~
Everything is a little catawampus in that we were delivering sustenance to an island of humanity cut off from the rest of the world-not delivering the means to an end… I doubt this is occurring overhead in Gaza:
Pushing the history timeline to the year of my birth in 1961, the Communists built a wall in Berlin to keep their people in, whereas the Israelis built a wall to keep unmenschionables out.
According to the historians, Stalin (not the communists) ordered the wall in Berlin to prevent USA from splitting Germany in two – just as was agreed in Yalta and Potsdam. Well, technically to force USA back to negotiating table about the permanent security arrangements in Europe.
USA was having none of that, though, but was hell bent of re-industrializing and re-arming Germany – Cold War with Soviet security buffer was the price US was willing to make Europe to pay.
Stalin was dead by then.
I think that’s in reference to the blockade, not the Wall. A key event that led up to it was the unilateral introduction of a new currency in the three Western zones and the plan for creating separate economy in the Western Germany generally.
Yup. Thanks.
“the Israelis built a wall to keep unmenschionables out.”
Oh, they’ll let them out. Into Egypt. Call it “Operation Laxative”;. Looks like Israel sees the Rafah crossing as the a@@hole of Gaza, and the war operations are meant to turn the peristalsis up to 11.
Once they’ll cleared out the colon, maybe they’ll turn the Gaza Strip into a giant Pickleball complex. Closed on Saturdays.
…heard it was all destined to end up as a Club Meddle
I saw my first bombed out building when ten years old. Shocking. Immediately the implications were clear. My family, sitting at the dinner table could be destroyed in an instant, bleeding to death for the unlucky ones.
The United States government is a collection of war criminals on top of all their other criminality. Biden and his making bombs is great for business cracks are insane.
We have already blew the wad on artillery and missile deliveries to the Ukraine. But we still have air dropped killers (the Ukraine has no air force) to deliver to the present mass killing.
I am not depressed enough. I propose a new category for NK, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” the Oracle of Obama. This category would cover just about any topic.
Now do some napkin math for amount of CO2 equivalent emissions!
Ok, 6,000 miles at 500 mph is 12 hours flight time. 4 PW2000 engines, cruising at 40,000 feet, burn 82 kg of fuel per min(don’t quote me on this), which is 59,040 kg or 18,893 gallons. Jet fuel emissions are 21.1 lbs of CO2 per gallon gives us 398,638 lbs of CO2. 49 planes = 19,533,266 lbs, with the return flight 39,066,532 lbs. 19,500 tons.
I live near NGIC (National Ground Intelligence Center). I remember being at my kids flag football practice and seeing three or four big C-17’s flying north up 29 to download whatever information NGIC was beaming to them. I knew some stuff was going to happen. This was Monday, 9 October.
We’re a murdering nation headed by a murderer-in-chief just like his predecessors.
Re:Pence
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
I wish I had a constituency
To talk to
If a campaign ever needed dyin’, mine did
No one had the right to say what Trump said
About me
And it’s so cold and lonely here without a chance
Out there Trump’s a-comin’
I’m scared and so tired of runnin’
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
I wish I had a constituency to talk to
It hurts to see the man that I’ve become
And to know I’ll never see the morning sun shine on DC land
I’ll never see the dogma there get out of hand
If just once more I could be
Second fiddle in Donald land
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
Indiana wants me
Lord, I can’t go back there
I wish I had a constituency to talk to
Indiana Wants Me, by R. Dean Taylor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p3OfHP5Hmo
Former VP Pence will continue to campaign as a “silent” supporter, his drywall cardboard cutout will serve as a stealth stand apart from the original and human Pence. Hilarity ensues when Republicans all over the country have trouble seeing a distinction between the two. \sarc
I initially was interested in what he had to say, and then seeing him on television frequently the choice was clear. The man is dull. Like bland coffee and cheap oatmeal each day of your existence type of dull. On second thought that might be too broad!
Pence always has this look on his countenance as if somebody jammed a corncob which had recently been de-kernel’d, into his nether regions and rammed home with what might have been a croquet mallet.
Best of luck in your lessened designs on democracy, Mike
He always struck me as the sort of person that could quote whole chapters of the Bible at the drop of a hat but if you asked him about the US Constitution or list the Amendments, that he would glitch out.
Pence strikes me as an “Olde Tyme Religion” sort of guy. He is quite comfortable basing his world view on “The Law and the Profits.”
C’mon, man. Pence just wants some of that old time religion-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW0vtST5BB0 (1:56 mins)
Was thinking that Pence was a more standard, upright old hymnal type of believer and he would more akin to standards, such “How Great Thou Art” or the attached video clip featuring “Amazing Grace”. As a younger good son, I learned to play such gospel music on the old piano.
American Gangster, where Frank Lucas and brothers get hauled away after a years-long investigation. Great movie.
https://youtu.be/m3QyTiNVwWA?si=IJciyT8G7s8wRu-U
WOW! yahoo is where my business email goes to and so i always see their landing page and this morning not a thing about Gaza or Israel – guess it’s all over now? yeah….right…..
Gaza has gone dark with its power/internet blackout. No vids revealing the crimes, so no bother.
Egyptian mobile operators are constructing relay towers on the border to provide Gaza with telecommunications. They’re supposed to start operating today.
How long ’till they get bombed?
Idk if Israel would pull that off: they haven’t openly attacked Egypt after Camp David. If that happens, things can potentially unravel very fast.
Why bomb when one can hack, jam, or sabotage?
Also the range will be limited. So for news to make it from the north, it will have to be brought into range the old fashioned way.
Frankly if i wanted to report from the north of Gaza, i’d go with some kind of direct sat connection to avoid saturation. That is if they are not all jammed to heck.
They don’t have fuel for power. (Or water, or food, or meds…)
Gaza has gone dark – no doubt not just internet but as seen from space – but plenty of demos around the world, much more visible in row press than the west, of course, eg south China morn post.
West media will either rah rah for israel or ignore.
I’ve read reports israel wants to push gazans out thru Rafael into Sinai desert to die, but Gaza can see this, why go? Maybe some women and kids go out of desperation, imo many fighters will remain.
I wonder what Iran is suggesting to Hizbullah… Iran has attacked us bases… Russia seems to be sitting this out, maybe wanting to avoid escalation, or maybe too busy with ukr… or maybe Russia/China think us/israel genocide plays into BRICS hands and weakens us… certainly delays Taiwan…
Wonder if any number of gazan deaths would slow down us… doesn’t sound like it from us pols… kill them all… can us pretend to be hegemon after this?
“What Happens to a Werewolf on the Moon?”
What happens? You blow it out the goddamn hatch, that’s what happens.
That approach applies broadly to any creature with designs of eating you and wearing eyeballs like a set of earrings. Alien creatures and Predator creatures, heck even Jason went into a space in an unwatchable instance called “Jason X”.
Nuking the site from orbit only applies to a very distant, unexplored planet or moons such as LV 426. Might go against the advice from legal or corporate counsel however.
LOL! thank you, just had a much needed laugh.
The lunar flight wouldn’t even make it to the lunar orbit and the crew would likely perish before then and before they could understand the nature of the problem.
According to the classic study by Landis, 1981, if the afflicted astronaut even made it to boarding, the hallucinations caused by the bite and that occur before transformation would be a deadly danger to all aboard.
Soldiers Unpaid. Yep, this article is straight out of that “collapse of the Roman Empire” stuff.
Check this out: “But the system crashed in late 2018 and was inoperable for about 10 months; another 10-month outage occurred in 2021. While the system was down, bonuses had to be filed through a complicated manual process, creating a backlog that states are still trying to fix.”
The indispensable nation. The mind boggles.
Iran has nothing to fear.
I suppose that this has nothing to do with the fact that the military are unable to recruit fresh meat like they could before. Can you imagine a dinner table conversation like this-
Son: ‘Hey dad. The National Guard says that they will pay me a bonus if I join up.’
Father: ‘Forget it. I left the National Guard after my term of service and they have still not paid me mine yet. Still waiting.’
But no problem pumping money out for the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
That assumes there is even a dad to talk to present.
Best i recall, Pentagon has long been targeting the poorest and most crime plagued areas for recruitment drives. Usually the dads there are either behind bars or six feet under. Meaning the boys choose between army green or gang colors.
The problem of recruitment now is that far too many can’t be enlisted thanks to medical issues and straight up obesity.
Yeah, and 10 years to render barracks fit for 200K Marines. Everything’s 5, 10, 15 years out- and nothing gets done/happens. 24 years to replace 1/2 the S.F. Bay Bridge turned out to be prophecy, not aberration- except for ripoff sports stadia.
And the rest of NATO is not much better.
OBL must be laughing…
To be fair, the rebuilding of the Bay Bridge was so bad that they had to open it up again to deal with the massive corrosion caused in part by substandard materials. IIRC, the new span became more like span 2.5 instead of span 2.0, plus there was that multi year fight over the design of the replacement span.
Sure. It’s a “feature” of federalism. Both state and federal authorities for using/paying the NG. State Adjutant Generals are political appointees. National Guard Bureau also highly political. Then you have the “weekend warrior” mentality, trying to get all the admin done on the weekend. Finally they love special/incentive pays that don’t figure into retirement. All works towards a pay system that’s anything but robust, but the accountants will eventually find any over-pay.
Making payroll including bonuses is the absolute minimum of any business or military. Even today, there are still state and federal agencies that will happily pounce on any business that does not pay their employees what they owe despite the growing incompetence and corruption in those agencies. That is happening is extremely disturbing and the explanation of politics is just suicidally stupid if this is true.
In a related issue, I think, getting disability benefits from the SSA (the United States Social Security System) is extremely difficult because of the county-state-federal levels of the process each with their own offices, employees, requirements, and emphasis (often hidden from the outside) of each level and regions. There is also a separate semi-judicial or legal appeals process.
It looks like the military has some of the same issues including the complete emphasis of weeding out the supposedly undeserving, never mind that this punishes the people who are necessarily depending on the system and its promises.
File this under Zeitgeist watch possibly. Noted actor from the cast of Friends, and he actually had some moderate movie hits as well, Matthew Perry found dead in his LA home on Saturday afternoon. ABC was reporting this morning when turning on the news shortly past 8am Eastern.
Perry was Canadian, which I should know or perhaps I had forgotten. He had struggled with addiction for years and went through varied periods of sobriety. An unfortunate event, to those who remember the half-hour comedy well.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/matthew-perry-remembered-friends-colleagues-fans-react-death-beloved-a-rcna122648
And just to show you what a just world we live in, Boris Johnson has just been given a job as a TV news presenter on GB News which will entail a six-figure salary-
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/27/boris-johnson-join-gb-news-presenter
This was the man who personally torpedoed the negotiated settlement between Russia and the Ukraine and since then, several hundred thousand people have been killed. Good job, Boris.
Just think of it as job security as after all there must be news to be presented. And what else, besides the endless slaughter and ruin, is the Russo-Ukrainian War, but news that he created?
Correlation is not causation: Perry publicly boasted about being fully mRNA-vaxxed and all boosters.
No drugs, or alcohol at site. Sounds like just heart just stopped
Or of course, wrecked cardio system from years of drugs and booze finally gave out without warning.
And yet the old guys from the ’70s like Keith Richards and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler keep on ticking. Interesting anecdotes that they both represent. I do know Tyler had cleaned himself up after all the hard partying times.
Speaking of Mr. Tyler, I was watching (again) the excellent horror film featuring Liv Tyler, just to mention in passing. If you have not ever seen The Strangers it is worthwhile watching. You lose points if you watch during the day or with the lights turned on. Oh, and there were flip phones too!
I’m no Keith Richards but I demand to be included in this conversation!
What were we talking about?
You obviously never fell out of a banana tree.
Supposedly he was found in a hot tub.
Re those international protests–Thomas Friedman says Gaza genocide will do untold damage to Israel’s image. His colleagues running the NYT have a solution to such protests, even when they happen in New York where they claim to be a newspaper.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/mainstream-media-ignores-massive-civil-disobedience-for-palestine-that-shut-down-new-yorks-grand-central-station/
If the protests during the W. Bush years preceding the invasion of Iraq and the “War On Terror” have taught me anything, is that our political elites do not care and will do what they want anyway. This point has been especially compounded by the lack of any real difference resulting from protests from the “Occupy” movement, as well as the lack of acknowledgement from Biden over the worldwide prosltests over the imminent extradition of Assange.
Our leaders are either too isolated in their bubbles to pay any attention to what the populace cares about, and if they do notice, it is to send out goon squads to crack down on protesters. After all, the ideology of American Exceptionalism means that they do not have to care about what the rest of the world thinks or what international laws they break, war crimes they commit, or what human rights they violate, either directly or by proxy.
The whole US-backed Palestinian genocide is just the latest example of our president and Congress doing what it wants, regardless of whether our country’s subjects agree with it or not.
I wish that we could recall presidents like you can recall senators in some states, but then again, Biden is probably just a dementia-addled figurehead who is only there to carry out the will of his minders.
Likely most are isolated to the point of ignorance, while some are cognizant but understand that in order for the masses to be calmed their lifestyle will be impacted.
And so the goons and agent provocateurs gets unleashed.
A different outcome might result if people laid down their wrenches and sat at home in protest, and their absence would be felt deeply.
Already seeing on TwitterX claims that protests were the work of foreign adversaries, and expect to see more of that.
My situation on X is what it is and I’m seeing extraordinary levels of crap but I don’t know how much of it is actually X.
Much of the time I cannot tweet unless I go to my Activity Monitor to shut off a mystery process that goes nuts at various times but consistently when I’m on sites that would provide interesting data. I have to shut the process off twice before it finally quits and then it will start up again minutes or hours later. The tweets don’t publish until the Apple ‘app’ is shut off.
If I tweet about Gaza, I get single digit views after wrestling with my computer to get the tweet uploaded. I have never had trouble tweeting about a basketball game, the weather, farm prices, etc.
I do tend to blame Zionists for this, but a recent Matt Taibbi article trashing Amy Klobuchar did remind me that Amy did confront me once at a Drinking Liberally because she didn’t like what I wrote about her.
Or maybe it’s the people living in the center of the earth who only come out at night.
Not my “other,” just some “somebody” who doesn’t like what I write and has the power to do something about it. And, as a former Democrat party activist, I’m loving Speaker Johnson going after the White House for its heavy handed manipulation of social media.
I do tend to get my hopes up now and then. Speaker Johnson is an odd peg to hang my coat on, but currently
Obi-wanJohnson is my only hope.What’s the name of the process?
Some, e.g. photoanalysisd, have been problematic over the years.
Overall, X seems a lot more janky since the Musk junta.
Friedman isn’t wrong. The Isr govt wants to shut down the BDS movement. They know how a similar movement to divest in South Africa during its apartheid era ended . Isr’s Gaza action is completely undermining its anti-BDS goal. / my 2 cents
A protest in Paris has been banned by the police and the decision upheld by a judge.
Reason? “risk of anti-semitism”
Getting into “Thoughtcrime” territory here.
So any protest against Israel would be antisemitic by nature and thus illegal.
Note that it does not even have to be anti-Semitic. Just the risk of anti-Semitism is enough.
> Sequential multi-omics analysis identifies clinical phenotypes and predictive biomarkers for long COVID
Meanwhile, NIH blows through a billion bucks developing plans to develop standardized study designs, with nothing on biomarkers at all. This is not a serious country.
> NIH blows through a billion bucks
Rice bowl filler.
A billion bucks worth of blow? How much of that goes into the CIA “slush fund,” since they are the ‘organizers’ of much of the drugs importation into America. (See the saga of Barry Seal for details.) Maybe the Three Letter Agencies are stockpiling ‘resources’ ahead of what they foresee as a very busy Christmas Season.
I take some consolation from the thought that the money itself was not wasted — it’s still out there, circulating in the economy, less whatever has been removed through taxation. /s
What was wasted was the effort that the money funded, or, even better, the opportunity not taken to do something more useful with those efforts than what was actually done.
————–
This is not a criticism of the statement, just a reminder that USG is not constrained by availability of funds to pursue the public interest. It is limited by the availability of physical resources of people and their time and talents, and the physical infrastructure of research and production.
Actually the USG is “constrained by availability of funds to pursue the public interest” only by the class that owns the government in “our democracy.” The class clutching the purse strings has amply demonstrated that there is no “public interest,” only their interest.
Mark Zuckerberg’s $46.5 billion loss on the metaverse is so huge it would be a Fortune 100 company—but his net worth is up even more than that Fortune
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We had an outdoor program @ our museum yesterday in Tiny Town that attracted about 100 people-as it featured about a dozen Wukchumni-including the granddaughter of the last native speaker of the Wukchumni language… and some Illionaire was up in Sequoia NP and happened to be driving by on the way out, and human nature not being animal nature, said Mark of 0 & 1’s was swayed by the crowd, what were we doing?
It must be weird being famous for everyone is watching you… a few friends came up to me after the presentation and the first whispered ‘there’s somebody famous here’ games, and I had to go through like 5 high tech moguls before figuring out who it was, and I only saw him get in his car, but you can’t miss him as that forehead of his has enough real estate to fill in for the deck of a Ford Class aircraft carrier, if need be.
I decamped for lunch at our amazing sandwich & salad restaurant, and apparently I was being followed and he sat down the next table over a few minutes after i’d ordered and I tried to act like I didn’t know who he was, as much as possible.
They say there is no free lunch, and i’d assume he paid by cash, which is how i’d go about being anonymous as much as possible if forced into what would be an impossible world for yours truly.
He was shorter than I wanted him to be, maybe 5’6.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003061982/who-speaks-wukchumni.html
So you’re saying a rich tech oppressor was in your midst and you did nothing? Didn’t even show him plans for building a guillotine? That’s disappointing.
Well, would an AI replicant eat an Alta Peak club sandwich?
I verified that he was human, so there’s that.
An Alta Peak club sandwich? Is this ‘Alta Peak Club’ anything like what we mere mortals call the ‘Mile High Club?’
Up is down, day is night and the sky is a different shade of blue. In a topsy turvy way I am in agreement with the guy writing as a Marxist economist. That’s just where I am reaching out for an answer to the inexplicable “joy and prosperity” following the super scintillating Q3 GDP this week. It is America, it is exceptional and our economy is so resilient. Hooray to our central planners and central bankers. Hooray indeed.
Having my doubts this growth is going to continue apace. And unlike in previous decades, now I view economic numbers being produced cynically by either the Team Red or the Team Blue. Our guy is better than the last guy, nyah nyah!!
Significant part of that growth might be attributed to the billions poured in the Ukraine war which Mitch McConnell accurately admitted as ultimately benefitting the US. Zelensky gets the money and use it to buy military hardware from Raytheon and Northrup Grumman.
Military Keynesianism at work for Uncle Joe heading into the elections next year.
Another part of the gain might be mis-calcuating inflation. If their annual inflation estimates are too low by, say 1.5%, then real GDP grows by 3.4% instead of 4.9%.
The 4.9% figure is also misleading because that’s the annualized rate. Third quarter growth is actually just 1.2% but they multiplied it by 4.
US Economy Expanding?
Correct link:
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/10/27/us-economy-expanding/
“Iranian teen injured on Tehran Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died”
Is this a manufactured repeat of what happened with Mahsa Amini last year? She was arrested by the religious police for not wearing a scarf or something but she died after being “in police custody” causing riots and bloodshed around the country encouraged by the west. She and the movement were even selected as candidates for the Sakharov Prize in 2023 by European Parliament Members for ‘defending freedom and human rights’ while Biden & Blinken ‘announced new sanctions against 29 Iranian individuals and entities involved in repression and violence against protesters, prisoner abuse, and censorship.’ Everybody knew that the police had beat her until she was half dead – or wanted to believe. But then footage emerged from the police station showing Amini standing in a group of mostly sitting people when she dropped like a bag of potatoes with no warning. All the people there tried to help her and an ambulance called but she died a coupla days later – of natural causes.
The Iranian teen story just fell off the CBC News page after 3 days.
Guess it must be a slow news week or something.
re Craig Murray article
Murray writes, “The strange thing is, the BBC and The Guardian, and nearly the entire rest of the MSM, pump out their propaganda as though we have no other access to information or understanding of what is happening.”
MSM loyalists will keep those heroic IDF soldiers in their prayers, and maybe think, “bomb them all (Palestine) let god sort them out.”
The pattern of this propaganda is well known as the following link of a speech by a former professor at UMass, Sut Jhally, makes clear. (from 2022) For those interested, the article includes segments of Jhally’s documentary “The Occupation of the American Mind”.
https://www.wrmea.org/transcending-the-israel-lobby-at-home-and-abroad/sut-jhally-whether-american-news-organizations-are-getting-better-or-worse-in-the-quality-balance-and-accuracy-of-their-middle-east-reporting.html
“So there’s nothing accidental about this hasbara, or propaganda. It’s not thought of casually. When Israel has committed yet another atrocity against the Palestinian people, the frame and language we hear in the mainstream media is the result of intensive research about what words work the best. Nothing accidental about it. We should be clear that the talking points that circulate in the corporate media have been tested out with focus groups…In 2009, the Israel Project turned to conservative pollster and rebranding expert Frank Luntz…The Israel Project hired him to determine which talking points used by Israeli and U.S. officials had been most effective in maintaining American sympathy for Israel.”
I was watching the loathesome Greenfield Thomas yesterday to see what the talking points du jour were going to be, and see that they cannot seem to concentrate on a distinct message. She is all over the place. Bearing in mind that she has been the front woman in denying the Palestinians a voice in the UN for years and that were it not for Hamas she would have nothing to say about their plight now she appears to think that a two state solution is still viable, but the Abraham Accords she has been pushing beg to differ.
All of those focus grouped talking points have left her without a message. It is just a bunch of argle bargle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NMIAaQhaj8&t=1s
Did you hear Kirby talking about civilians being killed in the Ukraine and Gaza?
https://www.bitchute.com/video/e1XW76kYsFiV/ (1:03 mins)
About those innocent Gazan civilians…. (warning, graphic images). Does Kirby choke up over Gazan childrens’ lives?
Don’t Look Away
https://twitter.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1717862742240158093
Thanks Flora. A must watch but it’s pretty rough.
Meanwhile, deep within the bowels of the Georgetown school of foreign service, new US diplomats are birthed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jamrudGfC4
Having known one of those before the “change” was induced in them, I can say with a degree of certainty that these “diplomats” are not birthed, they are hatched.
That’s “suspected terrorist” Craig Murray, of course.
Detained by the police for questioning under the UK Terrorism Act, asked questions for 1 hour without any legal representation allowed, then had his phone seized for investigation. (Note that’s “detained”, not “arrested”.) All on the basis of one tweet in apparent support of Hamas.
No wonder the terrorists hate us for our freedom.
Re: Mayo Clinic workers say they have terrible health insurance
Anecdata: Nurses at the “world-class” Cleveland Clinic have told me the same thing over the years.
In the Greater Cleveland area, the population has only three “choices” for health care: the Clinic, University Hospitals and MetroHealth (the county “public” hospital).
Care at all three has deteriorated markedly in the last decade as the behemoths have gobbled up and shuttered smaller hospitals in the region. (I put “public” in quotes because while MetroHealth does receive county tax $, it aggressively fundraises and its behavior as a “public” institution is barely recognizable as such vs. how it operated, say, pre-21st century.)
Wait, are you telling me there is a business model of insuring the health of a mortal that is NOT terrible?
Care versus insurance. One is a cost of living in a Civil Society, the other is a racket.
…just that it keeps getting MORE terrible, day by day, month by month, year by year…
I’ve been a single-payer activist and a dues-paying member of Physicians for a National Health Program for more than twenty years, although I am not physician or health care professional, just the widow of a man killed by what you correctly call the racket of insurance before it was nearly as bad as it is now.
The look on that baby pygmy marmoset’s face in today’s Antidote du jour is the look of an animal that knows that it is safe and does not have to worry about being eaten today.
I thought the same thing, Rev! Warm, safe, and content. I found it truly an antidote, to the horrors listed above.
re: Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 Magazine
Thanks for this link.
“An eye for and eye will make the whole world blind.” – Gandhi
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s govt has gone insane, imo. Threatening Starlink now? Not an idle threat. What won’t his govt threaten? ….
The US could stop this slaughter of the innocents if it wanted to. The power of the purse.
Why doesn’t the Pope call out Joe Biden for the great mortal sins he’s committing every single day? I understand that the president attends mass nearly every day, so what do the priests teach? That it’s laying up treasures in Heaven murdering women and children and burying them under the rubble of their homes? C’mon man, what would Jesus do?
So to Pope Francis I say, Send your Daleks out to President Joe Biden, all saying, Excommunicate ,excommunicate !
The more I think about it, why shouldn’t the Pope excommunicate Biden? Think about it. Flora talked about he power of the purse. The Pope exercises another type of power. If he would excommunicate Biden, then he might be able to change history. It would grab the attention of the entire world. And whats to lose? Joe Biden?
Power to the papal edict.
Pope Francis too busy flying F16s into Lvov: “Gaudeamus, Mavericke!”
Long term the economic damage to Israel can’t be ignored.
Follow this chain of events:
-Macron thumps his chest and calls for an international coalition in Tel Aviv to fight Hamasaki
-Macron visits Amman and Egypt (who control the Suez)
-sends hospital ship and calls for humanitarian assistance omitting his call for an international force
-has gone back to France and is promising an amendment to their constitution to protect abortion
This is where European leaders are going, and the collapse of Ukraine is still coming. Then there are energy prices and other economic issues.
Then there are the issues with the Banana Republic called the US.
‘Long term the economic damage to Israel can’t be ignored’
I guess that they are going to be needing a bailout. I wonder whose door they will go knocking (thumping) at? Of course any money given to them will not have any strings or demands attached to them at all.
The GOP will only send guns and bibles. Team Blue will be at war between young and old while doing nothing for the millennial and younger they depend on. Israel might get a two year reprieve, but they will face the Cuba problem. They can’t export to their neighbors, but unlike Cuba, nothing Israel makes has any kind of allure. I’m pretty certain the Chinese can make soda streams.
Trump and Biden spurred on the development of high tech sectors in Russia and China. Israel is a supplier of high tech items, but they aren’t necessary. Arms sales? Who will want to sign a deal with Israel to buy repackaged US weapons?
Then there is tourism. Part of the deal of controlling Jerusalem for anyone is making it safe for pilgrims.
Netanyahu if his religious gang can’t has probably seen the writing on the wall. Macron has scurried to France to hide behind the banner of women’s rights.
Ajusting my foil bonnet…
If this carries over into the EU’s recent immigrants from the ME and creates any sort of problems, well then, the EU govts will have to shut down free speech and other Western liberal govt rights guarantees, like the right to dissent, to take control of the situation, just temporarily you understand. Same in the US and the UK.
Foil bonnet off.
The UK is already well under way of suppressing protests with the bills they’ve been passing and using to try to put down the strikes in their train/nhs/teacher environments… I’m sure that will sped up on steroids soon. going to be interesting times ahead for sure…
There are at least two sodastream competitors I know of that are as good or better out there right now. And they have been gaining market share. And that doesn’t even consider the more traditional means, like the seltzer bottles you see in the movies, they are also out there.
It isn’t just about exports. Are there any Israeli designed products which they don’t have to import the materials for that they can make? With only a few exceptions most countries won’t be providing any after this.
Its a country of under 10 million, hence entirely dependent on exports. There is nothing that Israel does that will require foreign countries to deal with Israel. Unlike Greece (10 million), Israel doesn’t run world shipping but instead has “only democracy in the Middle East” branding.
Weapons and other Western high tech stuff. In the 1990s and early 2000s, they were a very useful outlet for sending Western weapons technology to China, for example (and to South Africa in 60s through 80s.). There are some weird ties between Israel and governments that the West is not particularly fond of.
I saw where the sociopath Bibi was quoting the Old Testament to justify his genocidal attacks on Gaza.
Netanyahu: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible.”
1 Samuel 15:3
“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Could incest and slavery not be far behind?
Matt Taibbi posts Orfalea’s latest latest video.
Orf vs the Memory Hole
https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-the-trevor
A victimhood hustle.
‘Hurricane Otis’
After Hurricane Otis hit, the survivors were complaining about how the government was slow in sending in help and aid. You would think that every country would have dedicated unit and supplies stored ready to go in case of a disaster. You would think. So now you are seeing a lot of finger-wagging stories about widespread looting as, though you have opportunistic looters most people are looking for food and water and toilet paper. Those people should have had patience until those stores opened up again – with all prices tripled from before the hurricane. This is how capitalism is supposed to work after all-
https://www.sightmagazine.com.au/news/32919-mexico-hurricane-death-toll-hits-39-president-slams-critics
I was watching Ryan Hall on YT on the day Otis hit Acapulco say that its’ development was incredibly fast; that no one had ever seen anything like it. That they had little warning does not discount how unprepared everyone was to render assistance, but the ongoing news blackout does seem strange.
Anywhere else and one would already see a Red Cross drive, but I have to wonder how much of this can be attributed to the GMO corn war and AMLO’s response to the Ukraine debacle. For a country that claims to abhor collective punishment, we do seem to engage in it a lot.
And the world knows well to watch what we do and not what we say. Unfortunately, whereas Americans know how to do that where issues immediately affecting our own pocketbooks are concerned, when it comes to foreign policy we are too apt to swallow the USA USA line that our brethren in other countries know full well is just bull. I’ll bet that 90 percent of Americans have no idea who AMLO is, nor what the GMO corn war is about. Sigh.
USA is a hypocrite nation.
I’m still struggling to understand economics, and the article on Argentina leaves me incredibly confused. Michael Hudson has taught me that the great majority of Argentina’s debt is held by in-country elites. This article on The Dollarization Threat posted in links today makes no mention of this debt and only talks about IMF loans. It doesn’t even mention the elite looting that took place after the largest-ever IMF loan was released to Argentina a few years ago.
Usually articles posted at naked capitalism help me understand things better, but that definitely did not occur with this article! It went completely over my head
Please explain exactly what you mean by “the elite looting that took place after the largest-ever IMF loan.” Are you referring to the economic austerity measures, the capital flight that occurred, or a perceived misuse of the funds?
Private debt denominated in dollars held by “elites” is essentially informal dollarization. Private companies and individuals would prefer to hold the debt in pesos, because the inflation makes the debt worth less over time. No one outside Argentina wants to exchange pesos for goods, but trusted businesses are able to take on debt in dollars when they import foreign goods. Debt held in dollars by private businesses encourages informal dollarization (using dollars for transactions and savings) due to network effects and transaction preferences. Everyone (even workers) want to hold dollars, because the inflation in dollars is less than pesos.
Milei is suggesting that the process of informal dollarization, which has been going on for years, should be formally recognized. Other countries like Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama have used dollarization to promote economic growth and stability.
The article mentions in the footnotes how low interest rate policies actually caused the informal dollarization, but it fails to mention that the author’s counter-proposal, an exchange rate anchor, was already tried in 1990s, and it failed. You can read more about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertibility_plan
In autumn 1973 I was in an USAF C-141 outfit.
For a few weeks our aircraft were all overseas ferrying materiel to Israel.
C-17 is a wide body version of C-141, MacD Douglas needed the money! Now Boeing owns the support of C-17, and makes well on the both US and non U.S. C-17,s
“US pushes allies for more sanctions on Hamas”
Will that include countries like Saudi Arabia? Qatar? The UAE? Good luck with those ones for a start.
Remember 73…
Remember 73…
I will never forget. As a junior in high school who just got his drivers license, and also worked in a gas station (when they used to pump your gas),1973 will always be etched in my memory.
I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, as a young high school know nothing, but I certainly understood what was going on at the gas station. Gas rationing – and many people were not at all happy about it. Good thing my boss was a big guy and a bad ass – nobody wanted to screw with him. We could only pump 1000 gallons a day and had to shut down when we hit the limit. That might be 3 in the afternoon with 30 cars still lined up wanting gas. Nope, you don’t get any, sorry.
Sorry didn’t cut it sometimes. I was threatened, harassed, called names, you name it. As a high school kid dealing with this stuff every day it was pretty scary. Hard to believe gas back then was only $.39 a gallon and people were fighting over it. Wild times.
Summer of ’72 I was crashing in a boarding house in Mason City and one of the other boarders ran a gas station. His company started a gas war (literally using low gas prices to sell more soda pop) and they got all the way down to 19.8¢ a gallon. Tbf, that’s ~$1.40 in today’s “money.”
In case the young’uns were wondering why no one ever worried about fuel efficiency.
A friend who studied automotive design says the interest in fuel efficiency was actually a result of the 1973 gas crisis. Prior to that pollution was the main environmental concern about cars, so there was interest in steam engines, or gas-electric designs where a high-efficiency generator would charge batteries that powered electric motors. Neither of these approaches was very fuel efficient and they were largely discarded after 1973.
The embargo no doubt changed things, or at least changed the focus. I was an auto mechanic by trade early in my career. As someone from the muscle car era, we didn’t care about efficiency as far as how much fuel we used, but we did want to use it wisely.
Technology (and marketing) led to changes rather anyone wanted to or not. For example, you have an engine (or battery) that powers our vehicles. Then you have leeches throughout the system that eat this power before it gets to the wheels that make us move.
In another life I worked in a test lab. We took a large transmission and reduced the amount of oil it needed by almost 30 percent, which means that savings helps gas mileage because it’s more efficient, and a selling point for marketing. Trucking fleets ate it up.
Our racing community is also on the front lines of this. Sure they waste a lot of energy (nothing like the military) – but the technology is off the charts. They are at the front lines of innovation, and also safety.
We went from drawing boards, paper, pencil, and electric erasers to 3D CAD systems. Computers – instructions per second – accuracy. Computers changed our world.
Makes one wonder where it all goes next?
It was the muscle car era. We drove these hot rods right out of American Graffiti. They would pass anything but a gas station.
A few bucks of gas on a weekend night and you could cruise for hours around the loop we had in the little burg I grew up in. Great fun, great memories.
One Sunday morning I went to work (open at 6) and the parking lot was full, cars lined up for about a half a block both ways. There was a concert the night before out in the country somewhere. One of the bands was Brownsville Station of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” fame. They were there. Cool dudes. Clark station. We were out of food in about a half hour.
Regarding the “the economy is doing well” article, a side note. Prices at the grocery stores yesterday were up again, a noticeable amount. Prices compared to three months ago, (my memory is still capable of remembering what went on during that span of time.) Cups of ramen soup rose from $.59 per to $.79 per. Milk rose from $2.59 a half of a gallon jug to $3.09 a half of a gallon jug. Pineapples rose from $3.59 per unit to $3.99 per unit. A certain brand of toilet paper, in the twelve roll bundle, rose from $10.99 per unit to $11.99 per unit. Store brand cranberry juice ‘cocktail’ went up from $2.99 per quart to $3.59 per quart.
As an added bonus, some of the shelves are still bare. The Assistant Manager told me that they are having trouble with their suppliers. The supplier’s warehouse stock is depleted and the warehouse manager told the store that the warehouse is having trouble restocking some items. Items that have not been problematic in the past. Alternate sources of supply have dried up in tandem.
There is no way in the District of Colombia that retail inflation is only 3.7%.
Oh, and “Creepy” Joe still owes me $600 bucks US.
Stay safe. Stock up. Stack deep.
I sicced JG Wentworth on the Feds in search of my $600, and they are confident i’ll be able to clear $127 if it pans out, after commission.
Might be a competing entity with JG Wentworth, but there is a frequent ad which runs on CNBC about “sell your life policy…” “My kids are gone, it’s time to go to Paris…” Ugh.
I’m sure those sellers are getting a fair shake deal with the acquiring purchasers of said policies. Ha Ha. Much like all those “highly” rated CDO products were of AA or AAA stamp approved quality circa 2007. Now I have the right analogy, the promise of a $600 payment to citizens courtesy of our US Treasury vanished much like valuations on CDO products circa 2009. Whoosh. It’s gone.
Same here. 3 small bags of groceries, a 4lb bag of cat food, and a 12 pack of cheap beer = $76.00
4 lb bag of cat food $25.00. If my math is correct, that’s $6.25 a pound for CAT FOOD. Gallon of milk $4.00, bacon over $7.00 lb, and a 28 oz can of chunked chicken = $10.50. Over $3.50 for an 8 pack of hamburger buns.
But hey, those who are on fixed income get a 3.2 percent raise next year. Oh, goody, thank you so much! Oh, wait, our supplemental insurance went up more than that amount so we are still in the hole. Can’t wait until they start with the “chained” CPI stuff they have talked about before.
At least gas is only $3.19 a gallon – for now….If the war mongers in DC have their way, and get Iran in the middle of all this, there is this thing called the Straight of Hormuz that millions of barrels of crude pass through every day. If all of a sudden this crude cannot get through – poof – like magic we have $200 barrel oil and $5+ dollar gas.
Go for it, get r done insane DC warmongering swine – that should just about send this sorry ass country into a real mess. It may not be pretty, but it may get your attention.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the inflation in beverages prices. We’ll adapt to those, with aplomb, by making anhedonic adjustments in the direction of substituting for them with tap water, provided that that is still drinkable. /s
Whole organic milk and fresh lemons… milk has become competitive trying to grab a gallon first before it’s gone; it was lemons that surprised me. Every other citrus but not that one.
Last week it was red onions.
Weird shortage: For 3 weeks, I was unable to locate Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix. I usually buy the “restaurant style” where you add your own buttermilk Kroger doesn’t carry that variety normally, but Vons/Albertsons does…except for the last 3 weeks. We asked the clerk who checked and said that it was back ordered and due in on October 24th. We stopped in special on that day to buy enough to get us thru the holidays. The bottled dressing was available as was the Dip mix, just no salad dressing mix. Weird
What I mainly notice are the odd shortages — you look for something and the shelf where it’s supposed to be is empty. And it seems random from one week to the next. Reminds me of those stories about the USSR where you would line up to buy things you might conceivably need (or trade) whenever they were available because you couldn’t count on them being there when you actually wanted them. Of course that would never happen under capitalism…
It’s been half a century since the oil embargo. It’s hard to believe the Arab+ opec won’t do another to try to stop or slow the west genocide in Gaza. If and when that starts everybody will rush to fill up. Cars avg about 60% full, trying to fill the fleet to 95% will empty every station in the land even at nosebleed prices. It’s worth noting the spr is quite depleted, good job, joe.
There will be other shortages. I stocked up on many things including ramen, canned goods and tp in 2020, mostly not needed except the latter. But post Covid shortages are already here.
Shop now, beat the rush.
>An Interview On Gaza With Dominique De Villepin (As Translated By Arnaud Bertrand)
De Villepin repeats the trope that Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel is the occupying power and has no such right.
The comments are interesting.
I agree. Interesting that literally no one is mentioning the right of an occupied population to retaliate, but it is right there in the laws of armed conflict under belligerent occupations in the Geneva Conventions. One might think that De Villepin would know better. Such obvious oversights severely discounted his opinions in that piece for me.
The Ottomans were “occupiers”. So were the Arabs, the Romans, the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Hebrews, the Canannites etc, all of whom probably have descendants in Israel/Palestine now. How long does it take before “occupiers” become just “people who live there”? Do we really want to base peoples’ rights on their ancestry? Isn’t that the same thing we accuse Israel of?
What you do about all those settlers beating the hell out of Palestinians, demolishing their homes, burning their cars and olive groves? Do they have rights?
Just guessing, but I imagine the “settlers” would argue that their ancestors (allegedly) got to Israel/Palestine 3000 years, so their right to the land trumps that of the “Palestinians” whose ancestors (allegedly) only got there 2500 or 2000 or 500 years ago. Another example of the fallacy of rights based on ancestry, of making the living slaves to the dead.
I always thought that the use of the word “settlers” was for American consumption as it would have reminded them of the 19th century settlers on the old West.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the groups you cite ever claimed to adhere to the Geneva Conventions and the international laws of war. The apparent inability of both the Israeli and US governments to distinguish legal codes written in the time of Hammurabi from those they signed onto may be a large part of the problem as yet unexplored by them.
There has been a road map for pacification of the population of Palestine since UN Resolution 181 in 1947 and a subsequent one in ’67, Resolution 242, so one does not have to go back all that far to find where things went off the rails, and to determine who it was that sabotaged the process.
Hurricane Otis smashed into Mexico and broke records. Why did no one see it coming? Science
~~~~~~~~~~
Not mentioned at all in the article is the after-effects of the great volcano of our lifetime, Hunga Tonga. Its a known unknown in that it is just one of 119 documented ‘Submarine Volcanoes’ in the past 11,700 years.
What it spewed into the atmosphere isn’t exactly clear, but regular old school volcanoes have long been the reason for the downfall of many cultures, the kick of the door that caused the whole rickety structure to fall down.
All the forecasters were in agreement that California was in for another year of drought about this time last fall, and instead we got 78 trillion gallons, as regions all over the world went without, the southwest being greedy in that regard, new total snowfall records were set in a number of ski resorts, in homage to Ullr.
Growing seasons across the world were all messed up, you normally plant annual crops in March in Cali but the ground was too wet from continual rain, so some fields went fallow with no follow through-the window of opportunity missed.
Usually there is some region that picks up the slack of bad or lessened harvests, but it doesn’t seem as if that is happening anywhere in the world, and add in the problem with exporting Ukraine grain.
Laki blowing up real good in 1783 in Iceland was the cause of crop failures across the world, with one powder keg in particular most susceptible to its consequences 6 years later when it fomented the French Revolution as the price of bread had gone up beyond the daily wage-cooler heads prevailed.
Laki’s eruption also had an effect on infant mortality in Sweden in 1785. I noticed the church record for one Maja Greta Hansdotter, born in the tiny village of Rök in Östergötlands län in that year listed twenty births on the page. Ten of those were listed as ‘död,’ or dead, an unusually high mortality rate, even for that time and place. I thought at first there had been an epidemic of some sort. But an internet search turned up an interesting research paper, linking the deaths to the eruptions in 1783-4. Air pollution and volcanic gases affected the fetuses. Crops failed and there was an unusually cold winter as well. The locals called it ‘sol-röken,’ sun-smoke. Kind of what we have been seeing on the west coast and this summer in the north-east, with the Quebec fires.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/medical/grim-health-warning-issued-to-parents-whose-children-test-positive-for-covid/ar-AA1j0mqr
22 hours ago
Grim health warning issued to parents whose children test positive for Covid
If you click on the link to the MIrror article, it takes you to
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/parents-issued-grim-health-warning-31285897
dated 0ct. 28, 2023
I think this is the study in “Blood Advances” that the Mirror article and the msn.com article refer to:
https://ashpublications.org/bloodadvances/article/4/23/6051/474421/Evidence-of-thrombotic-microangiopathy-in-children
December 8, 2020
The study was written up in 2020. Why are the Mirror and msn.com referencing this study now, almost three years later?
Seems strange?
Am I missing something?
That is the question that COVID Twitter is asking as well, along why the 60 Minutes piece is dropping. Who is to say?
I’m thankful I learned of airborne transmission back in March 2020 at NC. If I’d trusted the CDC I’d probably be in a bad way right now. At the time I had the illusion that many shared, of it being a premiere public health organization. LOL.
One of the curious things about the discussion about “Assault Rifles is that the Data does not matter.
The last time I looked at the Data from the FBI you were about 4 times more likely to be beaten to death (Especially if you are female) than you were to be murdered by someone using any kind of Rifle.
Total murders by criminals using any kind of Rifle was a little less than 400.
There are roughly 20,000,000 Ar15’s floating around the USA, if I assume that every murderer who used a rifle used an AR 15 that would be 1 out of every 50,000 Ar 15’s annually.
It really puzzled me when intelligent people I was acquainted with were obsessed with the “Danger posed by Assualt Rifles” until I recalled an article I ran across in the WSJ during the 90’s of the last Century that claimed the “Average American” had witnessed 15,000 murders by the time they were 18…on the big and little screens.
Add in “First person shooter” games and “If it bleeds it leads” and it’s not surprising that so many people believe “What they have seen with their own eyes” rather than some dry
statistic from the FBI.
Add the minor fact that no middle class has ever been comfortable with the poors having Gunz, as a brief look at the effect of “Sensible Gun laws” will confirm.
My guess is your “intelligent people” never handled a rifle or any firearm, never went hunting, never enjoyed sport shooting clays or stationary targets, and probably live in a big city. They don’t know much about it, in other words. / my 2 cents
It’s an interesting thought that media-driven “desensitization to violence” has other effects, including on “personal risk assessment”.
We’re a tangled mess of cognitive distortions. And our culture isn’t improving things.
Maybe because the social consequences of selling weapons of war on the mass market is metal detectors and “shelter in place” drills in all our public schools? On the bright side, we’ve certainly prepared our children for the full fascist state experience.
Unless, of course, you’re arguing that these measures should be abolished?
My little sister explained lockdown drills in front of our parents. They didn’t have a clue. I’m convinced the difference between millennial and older support is living in an insane society.
Prior to 1968 it was common to be able to order surplus military firearms, ammunition and high capacity magazines by mail or purchase at stores with no background check.
What caused the violence to escalate?
re: The mystic art of gardening – Aeon
Thanks for this article. My first thought on seeing the opening photo of a neatly trimmed, large, box hedge design: That’s not mystic, that’s an army of gardeners wielding hedge clippers. :) Very enjoyable article.
Yikes.
https://twitter.com/GlobalNewsEU/status/1718343222936719743
Vivek has just jumped the shark. What century does he think we live in? Does he think?
What country are Vivek, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley trying to be leaders of?
( I was just thinking the other day that Nikki Haley was taking the George Wallace strategy of not being out-neoconned.)
I think the CRs who go onto work in politics are convinced they can con the evangelicals. They can’t quite grasp the nature of Trump support which is tribal. They will try to outdo “Trump” but misunderstand that Trump was a deranged grievance candidate.
Ramsaway has the CRs and old dudes who think CRs are cool. It’s a weird group.
Ramsaway is a CR type who realized too late what the GOP is.
Yeah, people have to realize he’s the type of slime that’s laughing at you and not with you.
Surprised that Vivek did not suggest that the IDF impale the heads of 100 Palestinian babies and line them up to discourage the Palestinians supporting Hamas. Can you imagine how this guy would treat ordinary Americans if he ever became Prez?
thought-provoking article re. the MSM reporting of the Arab Peoples Hospital bombing.
PS, don’t flame me….I am intrigued, but agnostic, on the article as even if the hospital bombing never happened, the calculus of mortality (ie, collective punishment) would not budge.
this article’s thrust is about lazy MSM reporting, not the morality of the war
https://www.silentlunch.net/p/did-the-entire-media-industry-misquote
“I asked a dozen reporters and news outlets for the source of a statement they attributed to Hamas. None of them answered. This is a case study of the failure of journalistic standards..
…—after an extensive investigation, and a total lack of transparency by many of our most prestigious media outlets—I have found zero evidence that the Health Ministry spokesperson ever said that more than 500 people had died….”
Good article.
A night or two ago you had the Israelis claim that there is this major Hamas base under a hospital in Gaza. They even had a computer-created video where you could see Hamas soldiers patrolling these tunnels and bunkers with offices, command centers and weapons storage. Not to be confused with the major underground base with its many levels that Osama bin laden was supposed to have had in Afghanistan.
I just drove through downtown Santa Rosa and there are several hundred people in the plaza demonstrating in favor of the people of Gaza, people who don’t seem to understand that there are Good Genocides and Bad Genocides, just like there are Good Nazi’s and Bad Nazi’s…
I spoke briefly yesterday with an evangelical Christian of my acquaintance ( We met while volunteering with “Rebuilding Together).
He is giddy with joy because this War in the Mideast presages the Second Coming, “Tom, Jesus is coming!”
Rather than start an argument i asked whether he had signed up with “Rapture Pet Rescue”, he hadn’t heard of it but thanked me sincerely for letting him know about the organization.
I just tell them that Jesus came back 1978 years ago, the rapture is done, the chosen 144,000 went zip-zooming away, our ancestors were left behind as unworthy, and we’re in hell. “Man up!”
I would have said to him ‘My God just spoke to your God and he’s pretty sure that you are going straight to hell for supporting genocide.’
A trend or trope I’ve noticed with big monopoly corporations is their media wings fund and distribute material that portray techno-dystopia’s – of the kind these corporations could be accused of sending us towards bit by bit.
Apple’s ‘Severance’ is a bit like this (particularly the parodying of corporate workplaces ala like Office Space, as if that doesn’t apply to Apple also) – as is, of course, their classic ad depicting the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ from 1984.
And on that topic, there is the book 1984 – published by ‘Amazon Classics’! The top review ironically notes some text that has been erased from this version of the book (but seems to just be a formatting/copy-paste screwup, albeit a funny/topical one):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B088H7KLCG
Is there a name or term coining this trend, and do people have more examples?
Netflix and the latest Black Mirror with Selma Hayek is probably the most (intentionally) self-referential one I’ve seen thus far (this entire series by Charlie Brooker is very good):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20247352/