A new galactic superstructure could undo science’s theory of the universe FT. Interestingly, the results come from state schools on the periphery: University of Central Lancashire in the UK, and the University of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s almost as if the Ivies are making people stupider.
Why Is Everything an Orchid? Plantings
Climate
Insect populations flourish in the restored habitats of solar energy facilities (press release) Argonne National Laboratory
Scientists Film Plant ‘Talking’ to Its Neighbor, And The Footage Is Incredible Science Alert
#COVID19
#DavosSafe, first 2024 sighting:
Davos 2024 – totally normal to interview in a body warmer under a jacket and the interviewee a scarf: pic.twitter.com/qKHhWwiJZk
— Valerie Jay (@ValerieJay16) January 17, 2024
They know #CovidIsAirborne. They just don’t want you to know. But there it is, right in the open.
* * * COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere. Masking Up Could Save My Life. Teen Vogue
Study: Infection-control measures stemmed COVID spread in hospitals from 2020 to 2022 Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Somebody tell HICPAC!
* * * SARS-CoV-2 infection causes dopaminergic neuron senescence Cell. From the Discussion: “Here, we report that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers cellular senescence in [dopamine (DA)] neurons. Previous work indicates that senescence of DA neurons can function as a contributing factor in [Parkinson’s disease (PD)] pathogenesis. As DA neuron dysfunction is also linked to lethargy and anhedonism, its role in the post-COVID lethargy/syndrome or long COVID may deserve further study.” Well, uh, yes.
Get ready for Disease X, warns WHO chief Anadolu Agency
The ‘nothing-happened’ Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world’s computers The Register
China?
That Thunder Out of China Is Loss of Confidence John Authers, Bloomberg
Commentary: Is China’s era of miracle growth over? Channel News Asia
* * * China cements position as world’s top shipbuilder in 2023 Seatrade Maritime
Sino-American Friction and the Threat to the Global Semiconductor Industry Nippon
Two major railway ports in Xinjiang handle over 70,000 China-Europe freight trains Xinhua. “Railway ports.” China turns the South China Sea into land by building islands, and the Heartland into a sea by building railoards.
* * * In East Asia, many people see China’s power and influence as a major threat Pew Research Center. The headline is a bit deceptive, as is this subhead:
Japan
Japan reportedly wooing Donald Trump in pre-emptive move to stave off trade and North Korea ‘nightmare’ South China Morning Post
India
More global money will flock to India post general elections: Goldman Business Standard
European Disunion
OPINION – Street protests from left to right: Increasing instability in Europe Anadolu Agency
Berlin criminalizes slogan ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’ i24
New Not-So-Cold War
Quotation of the Day: Russia Sows Instability, Davos Forum Is Cautioned NYT. “”I don’t believe Putin is capable of changing, only humans can do that.” –Volodymir Zelensky. Once a comedian, or so I understand.
The War in Ukraine Has Become a Peripheral Concern for the West Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The deck: “What seemed at first to be the start of a Third World War has turned out to be more akin to a Second Yugoslav War: a local conflict on the edge of Europe triggered by a slow-motion imperial collapse.” Which empire?
* * * The Black Sea is now the center of gravity for the Ukraine War The Hill. Go on, FAFO, lose Odessa.
Russia says targeted French mercenaries in long-range strike in Ukraine France24
Moscow and Kyiv strengthen their transportation networks in anticipation of a long war Le Monde
* * * Ukraine’s Security Service seizes hard drives containing covert recordings of Bihus.Info team Ukrainska Pravda
The Quiet Transformation of Occupied Ukraine Foreign Affairs
Syraqistan
US military confirms Houthis hit US-owned bulk carrier ship in Gulf of Aden Anadolu Agency. On January 17.
US carries out another round of strikes against Houthis in Yemen, US officials say CNN. Later on January 17. Commentary:
US used 80 Tomahawk missiles in the Houthi strike. That’s 2% of TOTAL supplies. So they could only carry out ~50 of those strikes, and far less with stockpiles in the region. In 2023 the Navy sought to buy 23! So they used 4 years worth that night. 1985 it is not! 🇺🇸 https://t.co/IqKBS9CulJ
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) January 17, 2024
Some responses quibbled about “stockpiles” vs. inventory, but are they orders of magnitude different?
Yemeni Gov’t Welcomes US Re-Designation Of Houthis As Global Terrorist Organization En.Haberler.Com
* * * What Will the International Court of Justice Order on Genocide in Gaza? Lawfare
Understanding EU’s silence on ICJ Gaza ‘genocide’ case EU Observer
The genocide case Israel faces is more about politics than the law The Economist
* * * Israel’s far-right security minister advocates occupation of Gaza, encourages emigration Anadolu Agency. The deck: “‘My critique of the war’s course is clear: progress must be made to bring about a resolution,’ says Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
* * * We ‘Understand’ Actions Taken In ‘Self-Defence’: India Justifies Iran’s Missile Strike In Pakistan The Wire
Pakistan hits targets in southeast Iran in retaliation to Tehran’s missile strikes Anadolu Agency
The Hidden World of Undersea Cables The Garden of Forking Paths. More chokepoints:
Biden Administration
The CFPB’s Proposed Overdraft Regulation Credit Slips
Federal Judge Blocks JetBlue’s $3.8 Billion Acquisition of Spirit Airlines WSJ
The Supremes
Government power, from federal agencies to counties, highlights January session SCOTUSblog
Supreme Court to weigh whether cities can punish homeless people for sleeping on public land NBC
The Bezzle
How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet ProPublica
Digital Watch
Children on Instagram and Facebook Were Frequent Targets of Sexual Harassment, State Says WSJ
Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies The Markup
* * * How ‘sleeper agent’ AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing The Register. The deck: “Today’s safety guardrails won’t catch these backdoors, study warns.” Once again, the guardrails trope. Guardrails don’t help you if you’re on the wrong road entirely!
Boeing
Boeing’s financial targets must ‘take a back seat’ in focus on safety, says big customer FT
Feral Hog Watch
Kentucky police catch loose pig enjoying a snow day: ‘Hefty friend’ FOX
These hogs aren’t feral but perhaps the cat and the goat will teach them:
Interspecies confusion. This barn #cat was adopted by the hogs as a kitten and spends most of her days (and nights) with them. Baby #goats as confused about it as I am. pic.twitter.com/JwDbPQ05gC
— Shawn Seven (@newtonian124) January 17, 2024
Zeitgeist Watch
Japan plane turns back after man bites cabin attendant Channel News Asia. Cordyceps?
Novel Evil The New Inquiry
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism Boston Review. From 2021, still germane.
Interventionism’s Moral Narrative Has Crumbled The National Interest
Obama Flinches at His Own Legacy The American Conservative
An anniversary West would rather forget Indian Punchline. Well worth a read.
Class Warfare
DOL Releases New Rule on Worker Classification On Labor. A classification struggle! Perhaps a labor law maven can explain why the new classification is better; it looks like another PMC jobs guarantee to me. Lots of homework!
Google CEO tells employees to expect more job cuts this year The Verge. Heading toward the fourth stage of enshittification, and good riddance.
Rhythms of History New Left Review. Le Roy Ladurie.
Between Predicates, War The Anarchist Library
7 Things A Happiness Scientist Taught Me About Finding More Joy Vogue. From 2023, still germane.
Antidote du jour (via). A barn cat:
Ouch:
It’s so funny that dog owners are seen as down to earth and cat owners as snobby, when dog owners are like “oh what breed of beast shall we purchase, who were his parents” and cat owners are like “let’s adopt this beast we found in the trash eating Popeyes chicken”
— Amber Sparks (@ambernoelle) January 17, 2024
Meow! Yes, but this dog owner:
DOG TRAIN pic.twitter.com/D0IgKSJJMo
— Carmichael Dave (@CarmichaelDave) January 17, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
119 comments
Comments are closed.
“Berlin criminalizes slogan ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free'”
I suppose the Israeli slogan ‘from the River to the River’ is still OK with German authorities however. For years now you can be arrested if you are seen wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, even though in the 80s lots of young people were wearing them. And it is my understanding that if you are a Palestinian in Germany, that you are not registered as a Palestinian but as a Stateless Person which is an extreme form of cancel culture. The political class in Germany are really the worse who have no historical memory though the people are great. If the AfD come to power, I wonder if they will continue these policies or whether they will junk them.
https://twitter.com/Kanthan2030/status/1747782723681607902
S.L. Kanthan @Kanthan2030
Just for holding a peaceful sign, an elderly woman gets arrested. *
“Western values” and freedom in the garden of Europe.
“As a Jew and Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza” — was the sign in German.
* https://twitter.com/i/status/1747782723681607902
7:47 PM · Jan 17, 2024
Israel practices “western values” and “freedom” too as she would also have been arrested for that in Israel.
Yes. In Bhadrakumar’s otherwise fine article on the siege of Lenningrad linked above he says this:
“The mother of all ironies is that Germany is even today at the forefront of the “genocide by doing nothing” strategy to weaken and bring down the Russian Federation on its knees…”
And he says this:
“The justification of political violence is classically fascist. This past week, we saw a breathtaking spectacle at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Hague reminding us that we are now in fascism’s legal phase. If the Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy, Israel is doing the same thing by raising the bogeyman of Hamas…”
But he does not go on to connect the dots by pointing out the full-throated support for the Israeli genocide by the German government. As several NC commenters have pointed out recently, it is important and informative to connect these events. And the startling obsequiousness of the European leadership class, led by that of Germany, is on full display here.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1746354309485465745
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Absolutely extraordinary official statement by Namibia (where Germany committed a genocide in 1904-1908), made because of “Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history” (ouch!) and in light of its “support of the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state” (re-ouch!).
Germany’s image in the world is completely obliterated, again.
https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956
Namibian Presidency @NamPresidency
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil…
9:11 PM · Jan 13, 2024
I’m still astounded at how Euro leaders decided to revel in hypocrisy and tick off the world under the leadership of Joe Biden.
The Netherlands went to the trouble of officially apologizing for earlier generations’ role in slavery …
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66076562
Why did they even bother? They’ve clearly learned nothing — the old leadership is all-in re NATO support of the Gaza genocide, and Geert Wilders of the newly triumphant PVV party is, if anything, even more fanatically pro-Israel.
Because it is the performative thing to do these days.
Norwegians bent over backwards looking for someone to “topple” for the Caribbean slave trade. And all they could find was one author from back in the day that may have held a share in a ship that may have carried a slave cargo one time, and who likely sold off his share the moment he learned of said cargo.
The European “intelligentsia” these days massively cargo cult USA, to the point that some seem to forget they are not USians.
“I’m still astounded at how Euro leaders decided to revel in hypocrisy and tick off the world under the leadership of Joe Biden.”
“The Netherlands went to the trouble of officially apologizing for earlier generations’ role in slavery …”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/world/africa/germany-genocide-namibia-holocaust.html
December 29, 2016
Germany Grapples With Its Genocide Past in Africa
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Tens of thousands of Namibians were killed between 1904 and 1908 in events that foreshadowed Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Germany is finally close to recognizing the killings as genocide.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/world/africa/namibia-germany-colonial.html
January 21, 2017
A Colonial-Era Wound Opens in Namibia
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
More than a century after the genocide of two African ethnic groups, a city that retains strong German ties is divided over the fate of a war memorial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/world/europe/germany-colonial-history-africa-nazi.html
September 11, 2018
The Big Hole in Germany’s Nazi Reckoning? Its Colonial History
By John Eligon
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/europe/germany-namibia-genocide.html
May 28, 2021
A Forgotten Genocide: What Germany Did in Namibia, and What It’s Saying Now
The German government agreed to recognize the killings of two ethnic groups in Namibia as genocide. What happened more than 100 years ago, why was it forgotten, and what is Germany doing to atone?
By Norimitsu Onishi and Melissa Eddy
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/opinion/germany-genocide-herero-nama.html
July 8, 2021
Germany Apologized for a Genocide. It’s Nowhere Near Enough.
By Kavena Hambira and Miriam Gleckman-Krut
Would be kind of nice if someone remembered the german medieval genocide of the slavic peoples in what eventually became Prussia as well.
Pagans were open season under the banner of the new fashion religious movement.
There was no need for Bhaddrakumar to “connect the dots”. He was merely making a comparison between what the German Nazis did in the 1930s-40s and what Israel is doing today. Each found a bogeyman to defend their respective genocides.
You know, if Germany is truly wanting to make amends for the holocaust, why not split Germany in half and give the other half to the Jews they deported/displaced plus descendents of those they killed in the camps? Then create a two state solution, Jewish and German. Or one state and make it Jewish. Seems reasonable to me, after all Germany caused the whole problem in the first place, therefore Germany should be required to be a material part of the solution. Or, failing that, give all displaced Palestinians a home in Germany because, again, the Nakba never would have happened if it weren’t for Germany.
That’s what Abdul Aziz told FDR to do….
Didn’t the Bundestag declare BDS antisemitic in 2019?
Pretty soon just being Palestinian will be antisemitic in Germany..
Supreme Court to weigh whether cities can punish homeless people for sleeping on public land
This should be interesting. The drug addition extremists in Austin, TX always love to talk about how the supremes passed on this issue in the Idaho case. Finally we will get an answer, and I sure hope it’s not the one the extremists want. It was so sad to watch people flow into Austin from all over the country and live under the highways, and then the activists would scream about how they have nowhere else to go. It creates this situation where a small number of people are able to completely destroy life for everyone and there’s nothing anyone can do without the activists raising hell. You end of with all of the regular citizens paying the price for rich people being rich, and then the city becomes completely divided. Letting drug addicts come in and takes over entire cities has got to be one of the dumbest things the PMC has ever conned the radical left into a good idea. If the supremes rule in favor of uncontrolled meth camps, cities are going to empty out even faster. Not sure what the 9th judges were thinking, they clearly don’t live near a meth camp.
“the cities” are in no danger of ’empty[ing] out.’ takes over entire cities, uncontrolled meth camps, the extremists, completely destroy life for everyone, screaming activists, these aren’t persuasive arguments so much as clusters of stimulating words.
I have trouble understanding how the public can be accused and convicted of trespassing/habitating public lands.
Your position is as incoherent as the NIMBY. Obviously if government has the right to tell me what I can do on my private land–and they do–they also have the power to regulate public land. In a democracy the “public” part is theoretically the decision of the voters on those who make the laws.
Meanwhile the homeless, while some undoubtedly do prefer the freedom of living “rough” as the English say, have to be somewhere. Since they have the mobility to congregate in certain cities and not others it’s clearly a national problem rather than local.
The NBC article is better than the headline. Re the 9th circuit decision (only applies to cities without alternative homeless shelters)
So it will not be a decision about vagrancy laws in general which have long been allowed.
Nice ad populum argument you have there. Not to mention the ad hominem quip.
Fair enough if that’s how you take it. I was responding to the legal position of the 9th circuit defenders and not your personal feelings.
And when it comes to personal feelings I’m highly sympathetic to the homeless and in my wanderings around America and it’s campgrounds have been known to sometimes sleep in my car myself. Nomadland is an excellent movie on the current subculture of homeless wanderers who may at least have transportation if not houses.
But situations like that in downtown Los Angeles are about permanency rather than the hobo lifestyle. In these cases small business people and residents also become victims of a larger social dysfunction.
With the caveat that I know nothing about Austin Texas save what I just looked up online, doesn’t it seem a little self serving that people in a city with major industries like E-commerce, healthcare, pharma, tech start-ups and venture capital firms should whine about homelessness and drug addiction? A lot of those look like fields of endeavor that capitalize on killing jobs and inducing drug addiction. And where in this country do “regular people” not pay the price for rich people being rich? That is the business model that we all operate under. Homelessness and drug addiction are symptoms, not the disease. See the Case Deaton study on deaths of despair.*
If the business model one is forced to operate under has chickens coming home to roost, then why blame them on an “extremist” “radical left” that is just pointing out facts on the ground? If “regular people” want to order stuff from Amazon and invest in the Sacklers enterprises, then maybe a meth camp in their back yard is just what the doctor ordered.
* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism
I can’t see how there is rising homelessness being reported in so many states when most Americans are doing so well.
(Guess where I’ve been)
This LA Times story is a better legal overview.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-01-12/supreme-court-agrees-to-rule-on-homeless-encampments-in-california-and-the-west
i was homeless in austin, texas a little over 30 years ago…and it definitely wasnt a lifestyle choice.
during that time, and after we got a place to live…i met a whole lot of other homeless folks.
mostly veterans of vietnam and the first iraq war, who coldnt figure out how to deal with civilian life…as well as the dreadlocked metal faced “drag worms” who were all on the run from something.
the Family Homeless…people with kids, down on their luck…were mostly hidden away in fortified camps in the woods….so i didnt know many of them.
it is NOT an easy life.
and its made worse by the cops and the well to do Karens who want the “problem” sent somewhere else.
we were on the street, living in our car, because my last check from huntsville had bounced, and we were immediately and illegally evicted.
but the way the cops treated us, youd think we were murderous lunatics.
so after we settled down, and the city was floating a “no camping” ordinance that would mean “no sitting in public if you looked a bit different”(In austin, no less)…we protested.
that thing passed in spite of or efforts, and it just as we had feared.
the still-homeless we knew ended up in jail…didnt hide well enough…and worse of because of it.
walk a mile…or stick that nimby right in the darkest part.
There but for the grace of God go us all.
The homeless people whom I know personally are not drug addicts, and they don’t disturb anyone. I’m sure that many homeless people are drug addicts, but the case before the court is not about drug addicts, it is about homeless people. So it would make more sense for you to complain about public drug use and crime connected with it than to complain about homelessness.
There are more drug addicts in their own homes. None think they are unworthy of a roof over their head because of their addiction.
Human laws and social norms are ephemeral and not based on natural laws. Yet people take them seriously like they are baked into our DNA or dictated by God. The memes of Kens and Karens are fairly new but their effect are far older than the stoning of heretics.
Just as the prohibition of alcohol in the US was an effort by a few to improve the morality of the many, but a total disaster, the prohibition of drugs is also unnecessary and a disaster. The populace has learned nothing and is still under the influence of those making money by the sale of illegal drugs and those making money fighting against it.
The war on homelessness is also a manufactured disaster. The Federal government, with the assistance of industry, is creating massive unemployment (while lying about its existence), poverty, and social outcasts (for a long list of reasons) which end up as homeless, then local governments spend large amounts of money trying to make them disappear or at least corralling them into small areas out of sight, which doesn’t really work.
Between the drug laws and local laws, which are words on paper that have nothing to do with natural human interactions, the people in governmental positions have created a psychotic maelstrom of human misery and cost in dollars and suffering that call into question the very nature of “humanity.” Were the Nazis of WWII that much worse? True, they did put a lot of people out of their misery.
Getting rid of this “morality” of “drugs are evil,” like “alcohol is evil,” would reduce a lot of the (legal) crime and violence around the world. Providing minimal shelters (based on physical needs, not morally demanded amenities) for the homeless as well as minimal medical, such as psychological support, would go a long way toward reducing homeless camps without breaking local governmental budgets.
This crisis is manufactured, intentional, and unnecessarily cruel. It is technically easily corrected. It is politically difficult to correct because so many politicians and others (the moralistic, the drug peddlers, law enforcement, etc.), benefit personally from continuing it. This is another example of how the US Empire is collapsing.
Your argument is fallacious. Just because the prohibition of alcohol was a disaster and the prohibition of drugs is a disaster doesn’t mean that the concept of the law is somehow devoid of substance. Would you have distillers selling poisonous booze as happened during Prohibition? Would you have pharmaceutical companies selling bunko drugs? Or pushers selling crack to children?
Laws exist precisely because of natural human interactions. People can be greedy, violent, duplicitous. Sometimes all three at once. Laws exist to moderate those natural human interactions. Do you propose a world free of laws would somehow stabilize into some happy equilibrium? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
I agree that the crisis is manufactured in the sense that it is the result of deliberate policies that produce a homeless underclass devoid of options. The ideology that produces those policies is called neoliberalism. It seeks to undermine, to subvert, the very notion of the law except when it benefits the powerful. If you want to help the homeless and the addicted, seek to control the lawless forces that allow such chaos to flourish.
It appears you have not spent much time around children. It take years to turn them into human beings and it many cases it does not take. Children among other things are greedy and vicious.”Generous” kids have learned the value of maintaining a good image with adults, or less cynically, have learned from adult modeling to behave this way.
As for dealing with homelessness, your ideas are similarly devoid of contact with reality. We have minimal shelters in many big cities. NYC has quite a few. The homeless overwhelmingly avoid them because 1. Their few things might be stolen; 2. They are likely to not get any sleep due to being in proximity of snoring or crazy people talking to themselves or even yelling; 3. Hours are regimented, which among other things might conflict with work + transit time (about 40% of homeless people work). 4. Women are at risk of being groped and raped.
And 4 is not exaggerated. The NYC Occupy Wall Street camp had also been a place where homeless stayed and got fed. When it was shut down, nearby churches offered shelter. A friend who was involved in Occupy volunteered to be a night guard. They needed more than one to adequately protect the women. He regularly had to intercede.
And you have 5. Where pray tell to locate these easy peasy shelters? Absolutely no one wants a shelter nearby. Bad for real estate values. So they are way the hell out of the way, where it is hard to impossible to get transportation…further undermining the prospect of paid work.
{I have to be stealthy in regards to this touchy subject, in particular since the entire hair’m of 4 is happily ensconced upon my lap in a mutual warmth society kinda gig}
Friends & family have heard me talk about getting a dog so often, one even accuses me of being all bark and no Beagle, but that isn’t the pooch i’m thinking of, the object of my desire being a friend’s amazing canine, Dusty the Adventure Dog-a Wire Hair Terrier/Australian Sheepdog mix.
In theory we went to Tucson for Xmas last month, but really it was to see Dusty and our friend who owns him. I first met him (the dog) a few years ago, and felt compelled to tell my friend that if anything ever came up and he couldn’t keep Dusty anymore, well we’d be glad to take him. Since then Barry has had 34 unsolicited offers from complete strangers desirous of his pride and joy, and being first in line gives me a better chance than those 33 other (including my sister-who might like Dusty more than yours truly) claimants.
Dusty doesn’t bark but he yodels in a modulated howl, and after we left our friend’s place, he put in a 30 minute session on account of missing me so much already, the feeling being mutual.
Dusty doesn’t bark but he yodels in a modulated howl, and after we left our friend’s place, he put in a 30 minute session on account of missing me so much already, the feeling being mutual. I wish there was a link. Thirty minutes of yodel-howl is the perfect metaphor for my mood.
Dusty sounds like a gem.
Scritch the hair’m for me.
I love both cats and dogs. I might lean more to cats, but I attribute that to being catless as a child. As an adult I have not had a dog, I would be healthier if I had. But that was for the dog not me. My working hours were bad enough for a cat, but they would have resulted in an unhappy and possibly neurotic dog. And having a buddy might help but wouldn’t have solved the need for pack animals to be with the pack. People should take the time and consider. It is important for them and the dog.
And good luck with Dusty, or here’s to at least more visits. He sounds like a peach. You might ask Barry to give you a call if he spots a Dusty Jr since he can obviously pick or attract gems.
Re
See (twitter screenshot):
https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/3e21a05e-0885-4742-aa6c-c92eef3c9fc0.png
Well, both the dogs I’ve owned in my adult life were/are animal shelter mutts. None of the health issues often associated with purebreds, but some personality quirks that probably reflect(ed) their pre-rescue lives (both about a year old when I acquired them). Mutts are a bit chancy but better odds than the near-certainty of large amounts of money and weird problems the fancier breeds are connected with.
“Stateless Person” in Germany?
Wow, do the Germans really want to use that term, given what they did to “stateless persons” eighty years ago?
“Russia says targeted French mercenaries in long-range strike in Ukraine”
Russian estimates that 60 mercenaries were killed and 20 survivors were carted off to the hospital and that most of these mercs were French. The Russians would have been gunning for this group. On New Years Eve the Ukrainians launched cruise missiles against the centre of the civilian city of Belgorod which killed 24 people and wounded 100 more. They used French-supplied SCALKP cruise missiles for this attack but not only were the French not apologetic for this but they approved it as this was the Ukraine ‘defending itself’ causing ex-President Medvedev to call them ‘scum, bastards, freaks.’ Since then Macron has doubled down on this and has just announced that the French will deliver 40 more of these cruise missiles, since they worked so well the first time, and said that the West ‘cannot let Russia win.’ And it should be noted that Kharkiv where this hotel was bombed is just across from Belgorod and was the launch pad for those attacks so I do wonder if there were any French SCALP cruise missile operators in that hotel as well-
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/01/17/france-long-range-missiles-ukraine/
I’m glad that both sides are still maintaining the ‘mercenaries’ fig leaf, so we can avoid admitting that there are NATO boots on the ground, and that many of them are in the ground now.
Pretty good indicator that Ukraine is done if the best they and their NATO hired guns can do is bomb civilian targets. Good on the Russians for taking out these war criminals.
Unfortunately, the real war criminals are safely hiding in bunkers back in the west. The merc’s are just the fodder.
France is sending another 40 SCALP missiles on top of the 85 or so they additionally promised last week,
France could not care less about mercenaries, as their deaths in no way affect the French political class or their American Masters.
Stop kidding yourselves, the West is not through doubling down.
That doesn’t mean it will make any difference to the final outcome, does it?
> Rhythms of History New Left Review. Le Roy Ladurie.
>> the massive Histoire humaine et comparée du climat trilogy. In this forty-year interval, Le Roy Ladurie had never stopped collecting data on wine harvests and glaciers, and here he employs this mountain of evidence to produce a detailed and complex longue durée history of human beings’ relationship with the climate.
Very grateful it’s in French so I can’t read it. It sounds fascinating.
Antony Blinken is on the cover of Time magazine with a 2 word descriptor: The Envoy
Houthi missiles in the Middle East
Israel is attacking Gaza City not in the least
The Israelis are mad at the Hezbollah
And Netanyahu does whatever he please
Looks like another threat to world peace
For the envoy
Things got hot in the Red Sea corridor
Blinken got caught and couldn’t do no more
He’s got diplomatic immunity
He’s got a lethal weapon that nobody sees
Looks like another threat to world peace
For the envoy
Send the envoy
Send the envoy
Whenever there’s a crisis
The President sends his envoy in
Serious business in Damascus
Oh, Jerusalem
Houthi missiles in the Middle East
Israel is attacking Gaza City not in the least
The Israelis are mad at the Hezbollah
And Netanyahu does whatever he please
Looks like another threat to world peace
For the envoy
Send the envoy
Send for Antony
The Envoy, by Warren Zevon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B544fVj1v_s
p.s.
Antony tends to suck the oxygen out of a room, and was in true form in Zurich…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/secretary-blinken-forced-to-deplane-after-boeing-737-oxygen-leak_n_65a8343fe4b076abd7aa230b
In response to that apparently ridiculous Time article
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/blinken-has-failed-the-test/
Trump’s a jackass, and a clown.
But, he’s the best one around.
Biden is death, the destroyer of worlds.
He wants to take the whole world with him to the grave.
Reelect Human Husk and Willie’s Whore,
thus spoke the raven, America, nevermore.
RFK, says Palestinans pampered people,
while he appeals to the awake sheeple.
Send in the clown. He’s the best one around.
Waiting for CW McCall
“We got ourselves an Envoy!”
Sounds impressive, but this equates to around 2 million TUE per annum, which is a rounding error for the really big internal freight hubs in China, Russia, or the US. Rail freight works best at the high volume, medium distance scale – its nowhere near a competitor for water transport (including rivers/canals) for long distance trade, and not just for cost reasons – climate control and security are also big issues. The major freight railway links being built and proposed through the centre of Eurasia are mostly political projects, their economic benefits are often dubious.
In the US freight railroads do virtually no container business on service lanes under 500 miles and the majority are 1500+ miles. US container trains are 2 miles in length and have 400+ containers. In 2023 US railroads moved 12.6 million intermodal units (cars), most of those are cars carrying 4-6 containers, but a good chunk are 2 trailers on a car. Trucks still haul the majority of long distance containers.
I think it is premature to characterize Eurasian rail container service as political projects; developing the infrastructure for container trains was a decades long project. In the US such rail services began in the late 70s and 80s and it was well into the 2000s before it became dominant. Eurasia also lacks highway infrastructure comparable to the interstate highway system.
They might be thinking of the future since “high speed trains” may eventually include freight trains. Depends on a lot of things but when sea routes may be sabotaged etc. I wouldn’t put it past the Empire to scuttle trade from “enemies” like China since it has a huge navy as Britain did during the Napoleonic Wars.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-01-15/China-ranks-top-in-global-shipbuilding-sector-for-14-years-1qnyiiAqUyQ/p.html
January 15, 2024
Robust growth in 2023: China maintains top position in global shipbuilding sector for 14 years
China witnessed strong expansion in output, new orders and orders on hand in the past year, with the three major indicators securing the top position in the global shipbuilding market for 14 consecutive years, according to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Monday.
China has also become the only country in the world to achieve comprehensive growth in the three indicators.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-01-15/China-ranks-top-in-global-shipbuilding-sector-for-14-years-1qnyiiAqUyQ/img/9ea270ec3349439cad66909ec87e861b/9ea270ec3349439cad66909ec87e861b.png
In the past 12 months, China’s shipbuilding output reached 42.32 million deadweight tonnes (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 11.8 percent, accounting for 50.2 percent of the world’s total.
The new orders rose 56.4 percent year on year to 71.2 million dwt during the period, taking up 66.6 percent of the world’s total.
By the end of December, the volume of orders on hand was 139.39 million dwt, up 32 percent year on year, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s total.
In 2023, five Chinese shipbuilding enterprises ranked in the global top 10 in output, seven in top 10 for new order volume, and six for holding orders, said the MIIT.
‘Three pearls’ bagged …
Re: Cruise missiles
The figures are bad, but not as bad as they seem at first glance – those figures relate solely to Navy Tomahawks – the US has a range of other cruise missiles including variations on the AGM-158 (USAF) for which apparently 500-1000 are made per annum and stocks are at least as great as the Tomahawk (and they are a lot more modern and potentially effective). If you add in glide bombs and smaller stand–off weapons, the US still has plenty more scope to blow up sheds and mountainsides expensively from a distance.
My sister & her husband were quite high up @ the ‘Estes Rocket Factory’ in Tucson, and over Xmas I asked my brother in law how long it would take to replace the array of $1 to $4 million missiles, and he thought 12 to 18 months, chip delays being the culprit.
Could you imagine in WW2, a year and a half wait for a B-17 from scratch to finished plane?
I guess the US should start scavenging chips from washing machines.
….a Maytag mayday missile?
Yes, it’s not overall stocks that are the problem, it’s the number they have available in theatre. I’ve seen estimates that US Navy destroyers can carry about 90 missiles of all types, so an attack by 80 might be a significant fraction of the Tomahawks available, when you consider that the ships will also be carrying defensive armament like the SM3.
To what extent its true, I’m not sure, but one fairly reliable anon on twitter suggested the reason that the USN removed its reloading cranes from all vessels a few years ago is that they simply don’t have the stocks to reload the ships in any realistic combat scenario – they are literally designed for one shot only.
To an extent this could make sense if you assume the strategy is that the USN is responsible for an initial shock and awe on a target, while its the USAF’s job to follow up and attrit, with ground forces then mopping up. But there are a whole load of assumptions built into that, especially if your enemy are well aware of your weakness.
I also question projections going forward. And not just the re-supply in theater numbers.
The Tomahawk has been continuously upgraded which is good, but I seriously doubt that the existing manufacturing infrastructure could be up sized to start producing these in the quantities which would be required to support anything close to a Ukraine sized war in anything short of five to ten years. The whole MIC has been monopolized, outsourced, just-in-timed, and downsized to maximize profits to the point where it’s little more than a boutique industry for those countries that want to own the Hermes handbag of cruise missiles.
Over all stocks in any real shooting situation will be depleted very fast.
‘Valerie Jay
@ValerieJay16
Davos 2024 – totally normal to interview in a body warmer under a jacket and the interviewee a scarf:’
There was one thing missing. Supposing that conditions were right with the humidity and temperature and you could see their breath clouds coming from both of them. If they could see them themselves, you think that they may have pulled back a bit or started to look uncomfortable in that interview?
This is not as dispositive as you think. I recall regularly seeing interviews at Davos held outdoors pre Covid, with the women newscasters in expensive Italian ski gear (down jackets with fur trimmed hoods). It was the “Aren’t you jealous you can’t be at a super glam winter resort?” look.
One thing i’ve noticed in my 45 years on the slopes, is only women wear jackets with fur trimmed hoods. Sometimes i’ll throw down an offer to the other Dartful Codgers that there’s a free beer in it for a sighting of a male so attired, and i’ve only had to pay off once, as there was a dude with a replica of a 10th mountain division parka with fur trimmed hood.
I once had a down jacket with Coyote fur trim on the hood. So looking back per your comment I guess this was both a fashion mistake and a crime against that long suffering species.
My parka has faux fur trim on the hood (it’s removable) but then again, I haven’t been skiing in years.
Heh … should have seen me in my Ushanka bailing down the slopes of 7 Summit Valley, predominately A Basin, Vail, and for really good times Beaver Creek …
The Russians are coming on 210 rossignol gs skis and pro lang boots … ha …
It’s been many decades since you skied, it would seem.
Nobody wore a helmet back in the day, and last week in Mammoth, I counted 3 people sans helmet.
And there are few on long skis these days, it’s more in regards to the width. I used to ski on Rossignol 206’s back in the day, now i’m on Nordica 168’s with an 88mm width underfoot.
You’ll see powder skis with 120-130mm widths these days…
“Here, we report that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers cellular senescence in [dopamine (DA)] neurons.”…. This is consistent with decline in executive functions since EF pathways are enervated, at least in part, via dopamine pathways.
“The ‘nothing-happened’ Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world’s computers”
If you thought that the Y2K countdown was fun, then wait for the one in 2038 – fourteen years from now – when the same problems hits Unix based systems which are used, well, everywhere. But personally I am worried this time around. About a quarter of a century ago when the Y2K bug was recognized, an enormous amount of work was done to make sure that this would not be a major problem around the world and you had the people in government that saw this problem and acted accordingly. Well that was then and this is now. Such leadership is not much to be seen these days and we are left with a bunch of doddering old fools and egotistical sociopathic billionaires running things. I do not think that they would be up to solving such a similar problem and I do wonder what the mob running things will be like in 2038 that will have to actually deal with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Also, because “nothing happened”, there’s some revisionist history going around along the lines of the Y2K bug was actually no big deal and was mostly a big scam/techie money grab. It was manufactured to pad consulting contracts, not because any remediation was necessary… as usual, no good deed goes unpunished.
Our local evang/militia/tax evader church (since decamped to Idaho) was on the not so mean streets of Tiny Town with guns at the ready from about 5 PM on December 31st until around the same time on January 1st, 2000, in case Y2K reared its ugly head.
I miss them kinda how you’re glad when a canker sore finally goes away…
Nothing happened? In Germany, they patched the software to interpret years 00-09 as being in the 21st century. By the time 2010 came around, they figured that they would have retired or switched jobs.
On Jan 1, 2010 at 00:01 am, an estimated quarter of the credit cards in Germany stopped working….
I work with Linux systems for a major manufacturing company. Linux is essentially open source, though Red Hat (IBM), Oracle etc have managed to get into the action. I expect the open source contributors are more likely to be anticipatory in this regard, as they are not profits-driven. I don’t know how much Unix is even present there, Linux has really supplanted it in the past ten years or so, though Windows server abounds.
I have no intention of having to deal with it in any case, as I’ll be long retired and maybe even long dead. (Not my circus, not my monkeys)
If anyone is interested, the Senate HELP Committee hearing on long COVID is this morning at 10:00 ET.
https://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/addressing-long-covid-advancing-research-and-improving-patient-care
Media advisory:
https://www.help.senate.gov/chair/newsroom/press/media-advisory-help-committee-to-hold-hearing-on-addressing-long-covid-in-america
“Israel’s far-right security minister advocates occupation of Gaza, encourages emigration”
I do not think that things have been going well for Israel in their fight against Hamas. I came across a report whose truthfulness I cannot verify but here goes. So the Israelis were establishing a new formation called the Hashomer Brigade to be used against Hamas. But near the beginning of their training, and in spite of the fact that nowhere enough training had been done, they had no medics, equipment such as vests were lacking, etc. they were informed that they were going to be sent into the Gaza Strip to go hunting for Hamas. This is the sort of thing that the Ukrainians do to their new recruits and is equally idiotic. But here nearly half of this newly-formed battalion balked at being sent in as being suicidal. If true, then I say good luck to them for this outbreak of commonsense.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/half-of-the-troops-simply-walked-out-israeli-army-crisis-deepens/
>What Will the International Court of Justice Order on Genocide in Gaza?
Pursuing associated links:
UN World Food Programme, published 12/21/23:
Gaza Grapples With Catastrophic Hunger as New Report Predicts Famine if Conflict Continues
GAZA STRIP : IPC Acute Food Insecurity | November 2023 – February 2024
From the report (my emphasis):
To paraphrase Norman Finkelstein: Genocide? The Occupation is cutting off food and water, what other proof is needed?
Nauru has always intrigued me, and why they didn’t call it Guano Island will have to remain a mystery. It went from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world on a per capita basis, to one of the poorest.
They were among the 10 or so countries in the coalition of the unwilling to declare a cease-fire in Gaza along with the USA.
I like to think of myself as being pretty hep to geography, but the first time I ever heard of Eswatini was today, and if I didn’t know any better i’d think it was a snappy cocktail with a small umbrella on top…
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/nauru-severs-ties-with-taiwan-switches-diplomatic-allegiance-to-china-20240115-p5exh1.html
Eswatini is another recently renamed country: used to be called Swaziland.
https://english.news.cn/20240119/652be9a1dcf348ffb01de7f1afbf3751/c.html
January 19, 2024
Chinese projects inject momentum for economic growth in Nauru
By Wang Shen and Chen Guolong
YAREN — In the southwest of the Pacific island country of Nauru, a modern seaport constructed by Chinese companies is taking shape.
The redevelopment project of Aiwo Harbor, Nauru’s largest harbor, was contracted by China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd. Started in 2019, the project, which includes harbor dredging, as well as the construction of a new port, a desalination system and a container yard, is set to be completed in 2025.
With parts of the project finished, a new history has been made in Nauru that oil tankers now can directly dock to unload oil.
The five-year project has also brought cutting-edge technologies and job opportunities to the island country, promoting the local economy by expanding its connectivity with the rest of the world.
A 27-year-old man, who identified himself as Sylvester, is one of the first local employees working for the Aiwo Harbor project. Starting from scratch, Sylvester soon mastered basic techniques such as bundling steel bars. He and Chinese workers also learned from each other their respective languages.
Earning twice as much as when he was working as a housekeeper, Sylvester told Xinhua that he now has greater ability to take care of his three children….
“Obama Flinches at His Own Legacy”
‘Obama himself laid the groundwork for a campaign to destabilize Iranian society through economic sanctions, cyber warfare, and covert operations. Now, with U.S. power faltering, he wonders what would happen if the same methods were turned against Americans in a dramatic and decisive way.’
Didn’t he do that when he made a few phone calls causing a number of Presidential candidates to drop out of the 2020 race thus clearing the path for Joe Biden? It was pretty blatant and I guess that here he was acting on behalf of the uniparty. Back during the First Cold war you use to have “Kremlin Watchers” who use to watch everything going on to sort out the power structure in that country. I imagine right now that in Russia that they have “Potomac Watchers” who try to sort out what is going on in DC. Probably new hires would not be much good the first year or two as they would have great difficulty believing what they would be seeing.
Obama hasn’t produced any electeds. Despite his youth and exuberance around his campaign, his power is limited now that Biden is president. He was useful for coordinating in the 2020 primary, but his people are just ugly lobbyists.
He is also a social climber, expecting rewards. Obama being too involved is just going to remind people of elevating Biden. I don’t think Obama was acting on behalf of the uniparty as much as he was threatened by being shown up. Biden looked like he was easily going to be the best president in decades for a time. Biden. He backed that doofus O’Rourke. He only wanted rightwing losers to succeed him. Hillary was perfect for that too.
We won’t see much of Obama as he wants to maintain his influencer status.
Swampologists?
Yeah, but it’s different when you do it , as opposed to when it happens to you.
You know, “Comedy is when an anvil falls on your head. Tragedy is when I stub my toe.”
“I give an unofficial press briefing. You leak. He is in violation of Article 12 of the Official Secrets Act”.
I’ve read quite a few reports from around the region of the missile exchanges between Iran and Pakistan but none have noted that both were aimed at Balochistan separatists.
Jaish al Adl was apparently the target of Iran while the Balochistan Liberation Movement (or Front) was hit by Pakistan. It seems more like “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”than “tit for tat”.
Korybko gets closest calling them both terrorist separatists but he doesn’t make clear that both have the same objective. He discounts the idea of cooperation citing Pakistan’s diplomatic reaction.
In a later post he lists the reasons why Pakistan would want to attack Iran but fails to note that all of those benefits would come from the appearance of conflict between the two countries as much as actual conflict.
Also notable is that Pakistani Balochistan is integral to China’s BRI which the separatists oppose.
*ding*
“Also notable is that Pakistani Balochistan is integral to China’s BRI which the separatists oppose.”
Makes it tempting to speculate, given who oppose the BRI internationally…
China is the largest and most technologically advanced shipbuilder, and China has interests in prime European seaports at Piraeus and Hamburg. However, the US have been insisting on the “containment’ of China for years, and for China to have a comprehensive rail-freight network through Europe, a far faster transport system than by ship, would seem to be advantageous.
Similarly, China has or is constructing rail-freight lines to Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos, though only Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Laos are land-locked:
https://english.news.cn/20231205/9c5bda8aa0c54a75aa809408353ffb27/c.html
December 5, 2023
China-Laos Railway paves way for socio-economic development of Laos
VIENTIANE — The China-Laos Railway has bolstered its transport capacity and efficiency since it was launched two years ago, opening up opportunities for Laos’ economic development, boosting tourism, and improving people’s livelihood in Laos.
Since its operation on Dec. 3, 2021, the China-Laos Railway has turned the land-locked country into a land-linked hub in the Indo-China Peninsula, helping Laos effectively overcome its development barriers and improving the Lao people’s livelihood.
The railway marks a monumental and historic milestone in developing modern infrastructure for Laos, Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith told the launching ceremony, calling it “a proud moment and the dream of all ethnic groups of Laos.” …
Reading “Novel Evil” this morning about the decontexualization of the Holocaust in popular culture followed by Badrukumar’s piece on the anniversary of the 900 day siege of Leningrad was an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least. I’ve been to Dachau and I’ve been to Piskaryovskoe Cemetery. One is not more horrifying than the other, though one succeeds in invoking more reverence.
While reading Novel Evil I kept waiting for an acknowledgment of the five million non-Jewish dead who were also victims of the Holocaust. The total Holocaust number is eleven million, but almost half the dead are often ignored, I guess because it muddies the narrative.
Truly, genocide is genocide, and there are always apologists, or what is even worse are the deniers of them. I heard second hand of some fool who was a friend of one of my uncles trying to push a Holocaust denying book, but I guess that he didn’t know that my uncle had been a soldier of a unit that found one of the many concentration/death camps that the Nazis had scattered everywhere. I would loved to have been there in person.
I guess I am recalling that last bit as that book had written during living memory of the Holocaust. “Who now remembers the Armenians” said a certain man with a funny mustache; I believe that is what the Israeli génocidaires are counting on in their quest for lebensraum. It is interesting how the victim often becomes the perpetrator.
Just as those five million dead are removed as an inconvenient detail in a simplified and fictionalization history or should I say propaganda, in American history there has been the Dunning School with its Lost Cause or the 1619 Project placing the whole of American history as just as history of slavery. There are always some people who want to lie about the past using lies of commission, omission, or distortion, but in doing so they make a lie of the present as well. Even just simplifying history will create a lie if the story teller is not real careful.
On Boeing…
In sports all it takes is a mildly disappointing season to fire the coaching staff. Why can’t the same happen in corporate America? The arms length, index fund dominated, capital governance model is completely worthless; except to the senior management that is enriched by it.
Our military leaders are akin to the Washington Generals versus the Harlem Globetrotters, they always lose somehow.
Its not the best movie (the screenwriter didn’t have much directing experience), but the movie “War Machine” answers the question. The generals are too numerous and cookie cutter versions of each other. No one has to take responsibility.
Petreaus goes on tv and isn’t pilloried is a perfect example. Iraq is widely seen as a failure, but this eff up was promoted to the CIA. Part of the reason is there are so many generals he wasn’t tagged with the failures the way he should have. He was the governor of Mosul. He tried to pin the blame on not having enough troops stationed there after he left. Huh? He clearly wasn’t getting it ready for anything. Its someone else’s fault. The wiki blames the unit but not the commanding officer.
Then he has the surge in Iraq and Afghanistan to his credit. Of course, his tenure at the CIA while he was leaking to classified documents to his biographer and mistress. I think these people are all so bland they simply rotate in and out, hiding behind hubris and citation ribbons instead of being forced to answer. A few become media pets, but they slither away and hide in the ranks of generals when they need to.
I feel like more about the Russian top command than I do the Joint Chiefs and Central Command.
The stock owners are too transient to care about corporate behavior, so I think the C-Suite is the sports ownership in this metaphor. They are like season ticket holders and advertisers. As long as there is a customer base, it doesn’t matter if a stockholder is grumpy. The coaching staff and GMs may be highly compensated, but they are still mid-level execs.
I think we misunderstand the core business because we judge it by what the company has done in the past. If you look at what the company has spent the most money on in the last ten years, it”s stock buy backs, and if you listen to what the CEO has said, they will not be launching a new airplane for over ten years.
So if you look at the actions of the people at the top, what is the company’s core business?
just because – Aldous Huxley interviewed by Mike Wallace –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasBxZsb40
Thanks for that – Huxley’s one of my favorites. He nails the big problem right off the bat doesn’t he? – overpopulation.
lab – thanks – sometimes the base questions get lost – considering that was 1958, Huxley was prescient – here is his speech to UC Berkley in 1962 a year before he died –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHv8bkZfack
re: What Will the International Court of Justice Order on Genocide in Gaza? Lawfare
Just noticing Mark Lattimer’s Herculean effort to reframe the issue before the ICJ as being purely about a war begun on Oct 7th, even while the South African case opened with, repeated very often throughout, and concluded with the plight of Gaza Palestinians since the first Nakba, 1948, their whole case was situated on the fact that this conflict was 70+ years old, including repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that Gazans are effectively in an walled open-air prison which has been under siege for 70+ years.
It’s interesting how this framing has become a significant tell.
The only issue of Google going under, is the number of people that have their “lives” attached to a free Gmail account.
It seems like we are slowly seeing the ramifications of quick decisions taken during the heady days of the dot-com bubble, one of them being the adoption of email as an identifier.
The same kind of decision making BTW that gave birth to the Y2K problem, as programmers at the time saved a couple bytes here and there in order to encode only the last two digits of the year. This in the belief that their code would be replaced long before 2000 came about (it felt like eons away even in the early 90s).
Again and again we see people that work in a profession developing a mental bubble regarding what other people know or care about. And right now programmers are perhaps the worst, as they keep coming up with convoluted schemes to “automate” tasks that are brittle unless one have intimate knowledge of their function and interact with them daily. And most of the brittleness comes from constantly changing beliefs regarding what is “good security practices”.
“Get ready for Disease X…” there is really no defense if the bungled attempt to deal with covid and the motivation of greed not science to fight the pandemic are the solutions, given this talk was at Davos, watch out –
I keep thinking that a Hulked version of Covid is going to be Virus X. The massive numbers of (re)infected individuals and the lack of good medical care makes it very plausible.
What would they say if the next mass death event on the level of smallpox or the Black Death is a Covid variant?
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1747849588294537339
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
This is stunning data * by the Pew Research Center: in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, a huge percentage of the population considers the United States as a threat. We’re talking 70%-80% of the population.
Even in Japan, THE main US ally in the region, 53% of the population considers the US “a major threat” and 23% a “minor threat”.
* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEGb8BnbsAAbqn2?format=png&name=small
12:13 AM · Jan 18, 2024
The original article tells a very different story.
This is why Arnaud on twitter is not a very reliable source. He is very selective in his tweets, which is putting things mildly.
Ouch. Thanks for the warning.
Reporting from Japan, no mention of countries other than China, South Korea and Russia.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240119/p2g/00m/0na/043000c
It’s true that the anti-China tone is strong in the Japanese mainstream media, but still… a survey based on n=1649 in a country of 125 million — is that really the best that the Cabinet Office can do?
They should repeat the poll in Okinawa. The US AND the Japanese government will share the top spot.
Could someone tell me what “retired agricultural land” is ? – from the article on insect habitats and solar energy.
Was it bribed to retire or did it just get too exhausted to continue ?
“Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.”
I “assume” that retired agricultural land refers to land that farmers have been paid for to take out of production. The idea historically being primarily to limit production, and support crop prices.
Good question.
There is no fixed definition of retired agricultural land. In the context of that article, it is usually given to land which is taken out of active arable or grazing use for land basin management purposes – in other words, part of drainage/river management schemes. .
> Pakistan hits targets in southeast Iran in retaliation to Tehran’s missile strikes
Looks suspiciously like a coordinated action to clean up militant groups in each other’s backyard. With upside of giving misdirection of conflict between Islamic countries. Current ‘house cleaning’ of suspected US/Israeli assets (or potentially leveraged as assets) across wider Middle East region suggests preparation for a very big storm on the way.
Japan. Keep an eye on this. This goes to the core of why America loses so much political capital in other countries. The belief that other countries laws don’t matter and publicly rubbing those countries noses in it. Kishida has become unelectable due to support of Ukraine at the expense of Japanese people in need. Exemplified by botched New Year’s Day earthquake response. Real risk now LDP will become unelectable and there will be a major change of government at the next election (must be before Oct 2025) which will be much less favourable to US’ global policy agenda. Question is how long will the current coalition government survive?
Tweet text by @mrjeffu:
“American pressure campaign that led to the early release of Ridge Alkonis, who had been serving a 3 year prison sentence in Japan for negligent driving that resulted in the deaths of two Japanese people.”
“This Japanese tweet about Ridge Alkonis and Mike Lee now has nearly 29 million views. The story of Ridge’s release and the celebratory US media coverage of it has angered people on both the political right and the political left in Japan…” https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1747935880059482214
Don’t worry. Most Japanese are too busy with work and family to give much attention to politics. LDP has been doing a fine job of spin control, e.g., to conceal all of their failings in the recent earthquake. Try to say anything negative on Twitter and you will likely get dog-piled by trolls. LDP will probably hang on and is working hard to revise the Constitution and grant the executive more “state of emergency” powers. Oh, and they plan to get rid of all that annoying “human rights” language from the Constitution, too.
Most of the people I’m talking to in Japan on both the Left & Right have now simply given up complaining about Kishida and the LDP and are waiting for the next election to boot them out. When the voters get to this point the incumbent government usually ends up losing by a landslide.
“Most of the people I’m talking to in Japan on both the Left & Right have now simply given up complaining about Kishida and the LDP…”
Interesting, since the LDP strikes me as having become increasingly alienating to non-political-class Japanese as LDP leaders have increasingly catered to US political pushes and shoves.
Yes. Abe faction of LDP was particularly keen on currying US favour to support its militarist agenda – now the Abe faction is no more.
Gearoid Reidy リーディー・ガロウド@GearoidReidy:
“There goes the largest domino – the Abe faction will also dissolve itself.
Japanese politics just got a hell of lot less predictable.”
https://twitter.com/GearoidReidy/status/1748255768548372832
This is just one faction of the LDP “dissolving”. They’ll regroup.
Musical chairs. Plus,”look! a squirrel!!” it distracts from the current scandal over LDP politicians evading taxes.
In Japan, as in many other countries, foreign policy and relations with the US in particular are decided by the bureaucrats, not the politicians.
Kasumigaseki, not Nagatacho.
Well, I certainly hope you and your contacts are right, and the LDP will get hammered in the next election, but I would again emphasize the level of political apathy is just incredibly high here.
As you know, the LDP has been in power more or less continuously since 1955. DPJ finally defeated them in 2009 but then got bounced out again due to their poor handling of the 3/11 triple disaster. So then the LDP returned to power.
Meanwhile, the LDP has been plagued by continuous scandals literally for decades, e.g., bribery cases, diverting public funds (the LDP hanami scandal), the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, the Unification church scandal, and right now the “hidden funds” (uragane) tax evasion scandal.
It’s tempting to say that people are really angry, but recall that PM Abe Shinzo was killed with a DIY shotgun not for political reasons, but because he was a front man for the Unification church that was bilking countless families into poverty (even Adachi Masao says it was “murder”).
The strange thing is, despite all of these scandals, despite the flagrant corruption, and despite the fact that the LDP clearly doesn’t accept even the basic premise that the Constitution is about holding the state responsible to the citizens — they want to rewrite it to give the Cabinet Office dictatorial power —, despite all of that, people keep voting for the LDP, and two-thirds of young people mostly don’t engage at all.
Here’s a de-paywalled article that goes into more detail about the youth demographic:
Japan’s youth shun politics, leaving power with the elderly
https://archive.is/bYDNa
Bear in mind also that there isn’t really an alternative media in Japan, so most of what passes as news is never really critical of the govt. AFAICT, the only critical voices are in the shukanshi and Shimbun Akahata and Twitter. One Japanese friend is openly envious(!) that I can read NC.
I hate to say this but Japan remains a very hierarchical society. Social anthropologist Nakane Chie’s Tate shakai no ningen kankei was published in the 1960s, but her account remains a valid assessment. If you look at how the vertical society really operates on a day-to-day and institutional basis (i.e., in schools, the workplace, etc), it’s pretty clear there isn’t much space for what we would consider a democratic ethos.
Again, it would be great if the LDP gets wiped out in an upcoming election, but I really would not hold my breath.
And since we’re on the subject of Japanese politics, allow me to draw your attention to a new Japanese film that is now screening in a few theaters:
Jeering and Democracy
『ヤジと民主主義』
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTDdQtsy8Ao (Trailer 1:30)
This documentary explores how police in Japan grab anybody who heckles a politician during a rally and drags them away. The police actually maintain that they are grabbing hecklers and dragging them away “to protect” them from harm.
Premise for the film: two young people assembled a film crew to document this practice, got filmed being shuttled away by police (what you see in the trailer), and then took the police to court.
They won their case in a lower court. It was of course appealed by the police to a higher court, which found the police not guilty in one case, so now it’s heading to the Supreme Court.
Will the Supreme Court of Japan side with these two rando citizens, or will it side with the police?
So, in Japan, if you can’t even heckle an LDP politician in public without being immediately grabbed and dragged off by the police…