Yves here. No original posts by me today due to connectivity issues. My regular service is down, my freestanding hotspot does not work on the 12th floor, and I have never been able to make my iPhone work as a hotspot. I go through all the usual steps and either the computer does not attempt to connect to the phone even though it sees it or it does and then says “Connection rejected” when I never got a query on the phone and have enabled Personal Hotspot. I even tried plugging the phone into the computer and authorizing the USB connection for sharing and that did not work either. Fortunately the regular internet did come back but I spun wheels when it was down trying to make my various backups work. And yes, I had difficulty making Personal Hotspot work in the US too.
Sperm Whales Live in Huge, Distinct Clans Spread Across The Ocean Science Alert (Chuck L)
As males evolve to have better weapons, females develop bigger brains National Geographic (Chuck L)
What is the world’s loveliest language? Economist (Dr. Kevin)
Expert Reveals What Happens to Your Liver When You Quit Alcohol ScienceAlert (Chuck L)
New Evidence Highlights a Serious Flaw in Our Perception of Autism Science Alert (Chuck L).
I dunno, looks like Darwin Award futures to me:
People in Salthill waters in Galway, Ireland today during Storm Isha.
Eejits!!
🎥 @galwaytourism #StormIsha pic.twitter.com/aR2U7diBdh
— Volcaholic 🌋 (@volcaholic1) January 21, 2024
How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model? New Yorker (furzy)
Why We Should All Read Hannah Arendt Now Literary Hub (DLG)
#COVID-19
Let's talk #DeathTrajectories 🧵
One of the biases in #PublicHealth policy is the focus on acute COVID deaths. It's a lagging indicator and only covers 1 of 5 common death trajectories.
For COVID, people imagine the upper left. Get COVID, then a quick death.
1/7 pic.twitter.com/rAWInGlpy9— Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA (@michael_hoerger) January 23, 2024
Why don’t COVID tests seem to work as well as they used to? Bloomberg (Robin K)
It's consistently disappointing that articles like this refuse to point out the most obvious answer: When governments push out propaganda that COVID is mild, and the pandemic is over, that is understandably going to lead to lower vaccination rates. https://t.co/sBEefvzK3V
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) January 23, 2024
Climate/Environment. Notice how the terrible geopolitical situation has crowded out this news category?
Cold Weather Has Increased Range Anxiety For EV Drivers OilPrice
‘Won’t give up’ is a new anthem for the climate movement Yale Climate Connections. This is supposed to be inspiring? The staging of the video makes it look too much like a love song? There are plenty of models for music meant to inspire in the face of struggle, such as Jerusalem, Les Miz’s “Can You Hear the People Sing?” or on the less big choral end of the spectrum, Wait for Me from Hadestown
China?
EU to ringfence more high tech areas from China Asia Times (Kevin W)
China is adding more renewable energy capacity than the rest of world combined.
The International Energy Agency reports China will account for 56% of renewable energy capacity additions in 2023-28.
China will increase capacity by 2,060 GW. The rest of Earth will add 1,574 GW.… pic.twitter.com/u1ISxYyUi5
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 23, 2024
India
In Ayodhya, Modi Opens Ram Temple in Triumph for Hindu Nationalists New York Times (furzy)
Old Blighty
Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda receives first parliamentary defeat Guardian (Kevin W). I wish this were from Daily Mash but it’s real.
European Disunion
Federal Office of Statistics Exports to the USA and China are collapsing Tagesschau via machine translation (guurst)
Gaza
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 108: Israel is systematically obliterating Gaza, section by section Mondoweiss
Israel’s war on Gaza live: 24 Israeli troops killed as ground battles rage Aljazeera
Israeli forces storm hospital in Gaza’s bloodiest fighting so far in 2024 Sydney Morning Herald (Kevin W)
Israeli hostages’ families storm Knesset meeting to demand their return Guardian (Kevin W)
U.S. Claims No Alternative To Larger Middle East War Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)
US, British militaries launch new round of joint strikes against multiple Houthi sites in Yemen Arab News
This will be interesting: China – one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – calls for full membership for Palestine at the UN.
The question is: will the US, also one of the five, veto it? This will test their sincerity with regards to actually wanting a… https://t.co/H2xMTTeZHj
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 22, 2024
My Letter to the International Court of Justice Sam Husseini. Hussieni seems to have found a “gotcha” on the dispute dispute that we discussed at length yesterday. However, South Africa did not include the incident in its filing, and one can see why. The South African who accused Israel was a senior member of the ANC, not a member of the government, so he cannot speak for South Africa. The other reason for the dressing down was South Africa having made a referral to the ICC over various war crimes…but not genocide, at that point. And remember, the ICC prosecutes only individuals, not states. Again, (since no one seems to have the bandwidth for nuance these days) I am not saying the ICJ will find for Israel on this point. But South Africa does not have a slam-dunk case on this issue, and worse misrepresented some of its citations of evidence, plus the ICJ has reasons not to set the bar too low here. As Aurelien pointed out in an e-mail we quoted in comments to our post:
So the real issue is whether the statements by (and not necessarily exchanges between) SA and Israel before the ICJ hearing are sufficient to show that the sides held “clearly opposite views.” As you say, this seems a bit flaky, but the Court might decide that nonetheless, any reasonable person would conclude that the two states did, in fact, disagree on the issue.
So it seems to me that, if it wanted to, the Court could argue that a point of law was involved (fulfillment of obligations under the Convention) and that the two countries held clearly different views, and that therefore the ICJ had the jurisdiction to decide who was right. Of course, how they would do that, and whether it’s even possible, are other questions.
That said, what bothers me about this argument is that all of the cases mentioned in the [exhaustive] paper [on ICJ’s handling of the “dispute” question] (and all the ICJ cases I know of) have been about something which divides the two sides, who have a common interest in resolving the problem in their favour. The classics are things like boundary disputes, commercial disputes, reparations etc., where the two sides have an obvious practical interest in the facts of the situation. That’s not the case here, as far as I can see: there is no way in which SA can claim in the slightest degree to have a practical interest in whether genocide is occurring in Gaza. I think the SA team recognised this because they talk about the prevention of genocide being part of ius cogens, ie peremptory international legal norms, and all states having a responsibility to all other states (in this case, presumably Palestine.) The weakness of this argument of course, is that any state could accuse any other state of genocide, and argue that there was a dispute, and that the ICJ should make a ruling. The possibilities for mischief and chaos are endless. Whether the ICJ will want to go into this argument I have no idea.
This “mischief” potential may be a reason, if not the reason, that Norman Finkelstein thought Russia and China might be leery of finding for South Africa, despite their otherwise obvious interest in discrediting the US and being on the side of stopping heinous conduct in Gaza. Think of what the implications might be for China regarding allegations of genocide vis-a-vis the Uighurs….
Israel drops leaflets on under-siege Palestinians asking for their help to find Israeli hostages, as Gaza death toll hits 25,000 Business Insider (BC)
Irish Government will ‘consider’ joining genocide case against Israel after preliminary stage The Journal (BC)
A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name Brad Pearce (Userfriendly)
Why Israel’s Violence Gets So Much Notice (It’s Not Antisemitism) Intercept (Dr. Kevin)
Jewish Scholars vs. Jewish Donors on Antisemitism Ken Silverman
New Not-So-Cold War
Rats and mice swarm trenches in Ukraine in grisly echo of World War I CNN (Henry L)
US forming ‘colonial administration’ in Ukraine – Russian spy chief RT
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity Wired (fk)
Meta Now Lets EU Users Unlink Their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram Accounts Neowin
IT Consultant Fined For Daring To Expose Shoddy Security The Register
Imperial Collapse Watch
New Miss America eager to “bomb the shit out of the enemies of America” DuffelBlog (BC)
How VC is busting the Military Industrial Complex — for its own benefit Responsible Statescraft (Kevin W)
Why Are Almost 40 Percent of US Nuclear Attack Subs Out of Service? Sputnik (Kevin W)
No Dhowt Willian Schreyer
1/6
The Pipe-bomb Caper James Howard Kunstler (Kevin W)
2024
Why Biden won’t be on the ballot in New Hampshire The Hill
Fake Biden robocall tells Democrats to skip New Hampshire primary CBS (furzy)
DeSantis, R.I.P.
How DeSantis collapsed in the glare of a presidential campaign Politico (furzy)
What DeSantis got wrong about the media—and the media got wrong about DeSantis Columbia Journalism Review
GOP Clown Car
After Mike Johnson Advanced Israel Aid Package, AIPAC Cash Flowed In Intercept (Dr. Kevin)
Abortion
Miscarried in Texas. My Doctors Put Abortion Law First Newsweek (furzy). I hate to be a cynic. But as a daily press watcher, there has been a falloff in abortion horror stories in recent months, despite there being no reason to think the number of underlying abortion horror stories having fallen. Abortion is the best card Team Dem now has to play against Team R, so expect to see an uptick in what the press should have been covering all along.
Immigration
Immigration overtakes inflation as top voter concern: Poll The Hill
NEW- President Biden was asked if he believed that the border was secure; "No it's not, I haven't believed it for the last 10 years, and I've said it for the last 10 years. Give me the money." pic.twitter.com/jrxpklRlck
— Overton (@OvertonLive) January 21, 2024
AI
AI apocalypse too soon Asia Times (Kevin W)
Humans Still Cheaper Than AI in Vast Majority of Jobs, MIT Finds Bloomberg
“People with money are using AI and robots like their new slaves” dezeen
Falling Apart (Not Just) Boeing Airplanes
NYC-bound flight canceled when passenger notices missing bolts on plane wing Fox (Chuck L, Paul R)
Kayak’s New Flight Filter Allows You to Exclude Aircraft Models From Your Results reddit (Paul R)
The Bezzle
Facebook made a major change after years of PR disasters, and news sites are paying the price CNBC
I've worked in a bank (10yrs), a hedge fund (6yrs) and in HFTs (4yrs). Two things:
1. Yes, I'm old
2. You be amazed – stunned – by the number of premium name counterparties whose polished branding and external image belies a myriad of internal 'systems' that are held together…
— Tim Meggs (@TimMeggs) January 21, 2024
Guillotine Watch
Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character Atlantic (Lance N). ZOMG this is terrific. Non-paywalled version here.
Class Warfare
The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time New Republic (Micael T)
Why employees no longer feel loyalty towards their bosses, employers Business Insider. Lordie, look at the explicit expectation, that workers should be loyal. The only reason is pragmatic: so as not to weaken the enterprise (say by leaking confidential information) and therefore harm their job security. Otherwise, employers have no reason to expect or demand that workers do more than perform their assigned duties diligently. If bosses or companies are paternalistic, then it might be reasonable to expect some reciprocation. But how often do you see that these days?
Homeless brave cold in Paris as France plans to move them out of city before Olympics Anadolu Agency
Antidote du jour:
And a bonus (Chuck L):
Roadblock in Tanzania.. pic.twitter.com/TlJ0z83Fd5
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 22, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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BRUNCH IN AUSTIN
(melody borrowed from Mack The Knife by Bertolt Brecht as performed by Louis Armstrong)
Oh, we don’t serve any meat here
Killing creatures isn’t right
We steam veggies on low heat here
For discerning appetites
No, we don’t cook any wheat here
Eating gluten kills you dead
There’s McDonald’s down the street, dear
They serve dead cow, bloody red
Our veggies come from gentle farming
They’ve had such a peaceful life
We don’t hurt them — that’s alarming
We slice squash with a wooden knife
People just dote on our Greens Beer
Made from weeds plucked around town
Just this morning was a good year
All the hipsters drink it down
How ’bout tofu gently simmered
With some hemp seeds — just a dash?
There is eggplant to consider
With our kudzu curried mash
No, the cow is just our mascot
If you stab her we’ll be sad
Stop suggesting she be shot, sir
Are you truly a comrade?
But you haven’t even ordered!
And you’re making such a scene!
Kicking chairs across the floorboards,
This is Austin, not Abilene!
I love Mack the Knife. Too funny.
Brill!
Excellent! Thank you.
“Reports That Zelensky Sacked Zaluzhny as Head of the AFU & Replaced Him with the Head of the GUR Kyrylo Budanov”
The World War 2 equivalent would be having the head of the SS being put in charge of the Wehrmacht. And wouldn’t you know it? I read just today that in early 1945, AH put Himmler in charge of an Army Group that was meant to stop the advancing Russians. How did that work out?
‘Himmler established his command centre at Schneidemühl, using his special train, Sonderzug Steiermark, as his headquarters. The train had only one telephone line, inadequate maps, and no signal detachment or radios with which to establish communication and relay military orders. Himmler seldom left the train, only worked about four hours per day, and insisted on a daily massage before commencing work and a lengthy nap after lunch.’
I look forward to reading about Budanov directing the remnants of the Ukrainian Army from a darkened room and ordering hangings of retreating soldiers and also their families ‘pour encourager les autres.’ But the guy knows that there is a Kinzhal missile out there with his name on it. Some people improve the world by their presence. Other people improve the world when they leave it.
I highly recommend Dima’s latest video – put your likes.
It explains how the Russians made a breakthrough at Adviivka. Outer defenses were bypassed by crawling through or simply walking through a large underground pipe. This resulted in panic and large amounts of soldiers simply surrendering, as they had no idea how the Russians were able to surround them. A UAF commander apparently abandoned his troops, leaving them to either die or surrender.
Meanwhile, no mention of this anywhere in the MSM I can find. I guess lying to yourself is the new black on Google news.
Just now watched that segment. Can you imagine how it must have been for the Russians? Before sending in that extra-strength company, there must have been a recon unit that went through first to see if that tunnel was booby trapped or blocked or whatever. So these guys went underground, in the dark, for two kilometers (about 1.25 miles), maintaining silence all the way, and then had to make sure that they remain undetected when they reached the other end. Now that is going to be one for the history books.
A gutsy move; the type of which battles are won and heroes are made.
Thank goodness for Military Summary Channel and a few other YouTubers. Without them, we’d be left to think the Russian army has collapsed, Putin has AIDS and any day now Crimea was going to be full of vacationing French and German tourists.
I’m not saying it sounds too fantastic* to be true, but according to ukraina.ru news site this is not true, though there are persistent rumors among the Russian troops that there are many hidden tunnels in Avdeevka. Apparently this is not the case.
So Dima’s sources are likely repeating “common knowledge” among the troops and maybe even spicing it up a bit. Much more likely the Russian special forces (that allegedly were seen inside the city already a bit earlier) found a spot where the defenders were too few, too tired, had no ammunition left and used that to get trough the line. And then just kept on going, in a proper maneuver style, pushing the defenders totally “off balance”.
That’s the other side of the much vaunted real time IRS – you’re totally unprepared when something unexpected happens and you waste a lot of time trying to get the same amount of information that you’re used to, so you end up being even more behind in your OODA loop.
* at least two totally uncovered entries to a 2 km tunnel in an area that has been heavily fortified since 2014? What really are the odds of that?
perhaps the soldiers covering the UAF-side of the tunnel surrendered or just abandoned their site? It’s well recognized the UAF is running short of fresh bodies to send to the front, where their lifetime is hours, the inevitable result of which will be gaps in the defense lines. It’s even possible Russia intercepted communications of the abandonment but prefers not to indicate their level of decryption.
What are the odds of this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/17/israel-finds-large-tunnel-adjacent-to-gaza-border-raising-new-questions-about-prewar-intelligence.html
My guess is that, if this is true, Budanov’s first act was to send that missle into the farmer’s market in Donetsk. Expect more of that.
Ukraine will rely more and more on long-rage missiles and terror.
What does Russia propose to do about it?
Do to Budanov what Israel did to Eichmann? I hope so, at least
So far, Russia is not doing any such thing.
Pity.
Russia is going to work towards the long term solution: a friendly, smaller Ukraine that has been liberated from the ultra-nationalists.
Their strategy goes way beyond the news cycle, so they won’t let a nuisance/terror missile here or there to stray them from the real goal. Meanwhile they will do whatever they can to learn how to deal with the latest and greatest of the western weapons systems.
Budanov is not an important person – he may escape to west, he may die or he may end up in front of a war crime tribunal. Yet that’s something that happens after the real goal is achieved.
Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev and a legion of Russian politicians have been explaining this for almost two years now. It shouldn’t be too difficult a concept to crasp.
Yes. Russia doesn’t want Kiev and Odessa in ruins. That’s an expensive rebuild. Although they may have to burn it down. Also, remember the skillful diplomacy Putin did early in the conflict, building support outside the West for the SMO, while Biden did the crazy old man thing shouting Democracy! Democracy!
Appears to assume a lot of facts not in evidence. The West is nowhere near through doubling down, and they could not care less whether or not Kiev or Odessa are ruined.
Double of nothing is still nothing …
Budanov may not be important, but hunting down some well known criminals and trying them does have a value. Of course, that’s not incompatible with the big picture.
> Some people improve the world by their presence. Other people improve the world when they leave it.
Hang about … that sounds familiar … … right!
> … Nothing in his life
> Became him like the leaving it.
Malcolm to Duncan, re: Cawdor
The Scottish play, Act I, scene iv.
Getting rid of Zaluzhnyii serves at least two political goals. It removes a rival to Zelenskii and it shows that Ukraine’s American masters will not allow negotiations. Zelenskii’s talk of annexing portions of Russia are intended to send a similar message.
Since the nominal head of the Ukrainian armed forces is but a figurehead and all the real decisions are made by Americans, it doesn’t matter who is the figurehead, except that Zelenskii probably doesn’t want to be the fall guy int he event of any defeats.
Kayak and exclusion of Boeing MAX. That is good.
A sad thing though is that it is a part of a near monopoly on travel search
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings
“NYC-bound flight canceled when passenger notices missing bolts on plane wing”
Screws by the looks of them. But how do miss four empty holes in a long row of them? It really stands out. Of course you cannot help but wonder if some of those aircraft maintenance personnel were suffering from Covid brain. Either that or they were working while hungover.
In the spirit of self-checkout, can’t we have the passengers do the preflight check? Hundreds of eyes has to be better than just a few.
Those “aircraft maintenance personel” are Chinese, Mexicans or El Salvadoreans.
They have a Buddhist or Nahuatl viewpoint on reality, don’t you know? All part of the financialization and stripmining of America by the pushcart realists.
“In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth
The next president can do something about this. “You want to fly into U.S. airports, get justice in U.S. courts, get service from the F.A.A. you have to maintain your planes here, or pay for F.A.A. inspectors in your home country.”
Your post makes me recall the spate of cruise ship mishaps and disasters the past few years and the recruitment and training of crews was called into question.
The real problem with airplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXHKDb0CNjA
re: New Miss America eager to “bomb the shit out of the enemies of America”.
There’s more beauty anywhere else than a ‘beauty’ pageant.
Also…great to know America has pilots this vapid? Inspires real confidence, that.
There she is, Miss America
There she is, your ideal
With so many sorties
She’ll take down enemies by storm
With her Air Force form
And there she is
Bombing the bad guys lair she is
Fairest of the air she is
Miss America
Well done
David Byrne’s “Miss America” is a must hear.
“The world moves on a woman’s hips”
David Byrne
Cat Bohannon who posits that gynecologic requirements have driven human evolution for 200 million years, might well agree.
It might have been Faulkner who said that a woman’s leg is the lever that moves the world.
@mrsyk Thanks. I’ve always loved that particular lyric. An aside: it has been noted that Talking Heads’ sometime producer Brian Eno is a connoisseur of big bums. Swivel and bop indeed.
EV’s.
Yes they have greatly reduced range in the winter. Its real. I didn’t see the whole report on that particular test. A few big unknowns: was the car parked outside? It’s called a cold soak. And how warm did they keep the interior while driving. Both make a large difference.
Here is a video of a recent test in the Boulder Colorado area when it was cold, about 0°. About 40% range reduction. I still can’t figure of if the heating was working or not. If the heater was working properly and it was set to 70° ( I’d have it set to 75°) then why was the driver dressed like that? So I’m guessing it wasn’t working well. Don’t know why and maybe some Tesla folks can chime in about how it. That car probably has the heat pump which do struggle when it’s cold.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aIUrOkttv7g&t=6s
Given the income demographic, in Canada at least, many Teslas probably go from warm garage (home) to warm garage (work) and back.
I wonder if a factor with EV’s being caught in the cold is that in some areas garages aren’t a thing.
Not everyone has a garage. Or maybe its a road trip and you’re staying in a hotel. Or maybe you had to go somewhere like work and the car was parked all day in sub 0 temps and so it got very cold.
I’m not saying this means EV are terrible. Just a use factor that needs to be acknowledged and taken into account.
Tried a Prius plugin up here in VT, 32 mile electric range in good weather, about 16 when it drops below 30f (so 5 months out of the year haha). 40-50% energy loss, very easy to get caught out in a bad situation. And yes it had a heat pump which switched over to standard cabin heat in those temps (it was a hybrid)
Tech is not there yet.
>Elon/Ben Shapiro visit Auschwitz
I couldn’t help seeing the TwitterXsphere ablaze with condemnations of Elon/and BS photo op at Auschwitz memorial while a Genocide by the same group of people decrying Nazi barbarism are engaged in same. Looking at the various comments Elon was getting a dressing down by most of the comments on my feeds. It truly is an epic cringe pseudoevent (Boorstin) that has so many levels of dissonance that I can’t even begin to describe.
It is surreal that what the “Duran” like to call the “Collective West” has lost so much popular support but yet chugs on anyway, dropping bombs on new foreign targets as domestic economy and living standards unravel.
I’ve been re-reading some Robert Heinlein, who I used to enjoy as a teenager, and have found that some of his books have more meaning than I attributed to them as a young man. It seems that speculative fiction is more meaningful than today’s headlines.
And there was his strange tweet about DEI policies being inherently anti-semitic. We may have just reached the point where a phrase has been so overused it no longer has any meaning, whatsoever.
https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-diversity-based-hiring-is-antisemitic/
Because of this war, the word ‘Holocaust’ is no longer going to have the special meaning that has been nurtured over the decades
Just finished reading the (brilliant) essay on Ackman from The Atlantic, and there we find it again:
“…given her handling of the Harvard anti-Israel protests, he’d realized she was “not qualified,” having been chosen by a board looking for “a DEI-approved candidate.”
So Ackman is the tumor from which that meme metastasized. The problem is not that DEI is anti-semitic, but that it allows for people who do not value Ackman’s POV to be put in positions where they can point out that he is a joke. These entitled people really are their own worst enemies.
I hope there’s a bigger version of Herbalife in the future for Ackman, like one that will bankrupt him.
The question will be, “Which one, the Nazis against the Jews or the Jews against the Palestinians?”
So Bill Ackman is upset Jewish students are just 16% of ivy league students today as opposed to 25% 8 years ago. Does Ackman have a dumb kid and is mad he had to donate more than expected to get the dumb kid in harvard.
He can’t handle that Asian kids are such good academic performers that Jewish kids can’t get as many slots based on merit.
The irony being that the Ivies and Ivy-adjacent already more or less openly discriminate against Asians.
Yes, that’s what makes this even more absurd.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1749507401504399406
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
To lead its new anti-Semitism task force, Harvard chose a Jewish Professor of Jewish history, Alan Garber.
Bill Ackman, king of US academia, is objecting he’s ant-Semitic for calling Israel “an apartheid state.”
The last head of the Mossad also did.
https://theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/israel-imposing-apartheid-on-palestinians-says-former-mossad-chief
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Tamir Pardo comments, slammed by ruling Likud party, carry weight because of high regard for intelligence agency in Israel
2:00 PM · Jan 22, 2024
16% of students while only being 3% of US population
Yeah their really discriminated against.
Heinlein thought that the 60s were the Crazy Years when ‘a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses’ arose but I am not so sure. Certainly he was prophetic when he talked about the rise of the new Robber Barons and their ventures into space and their disregard for crew safety.
From my perspective, Heinlein is a case of an apostate Leftist. Like the old American Communists who turned 180 degrees to become Arch Conservatives, he shifted his views after having experienced the trouncing of the Sinclair movement in California in the early 1930s.
Do notice the pronounced meme of “follow the strong man” in his middle work. Many of his “heros” attach themselves to ‘successful’ and ‘powerful’ others, indeed, become dependents of those ‘powerful’ persons. The Ancient Romans had a word for this: clientism.
To my way of viewing it, Heinlein would have seen the 1950s as “The Crazy Years.” So called “Middle Class” values were in the ascendant. “Robber Barons” were being suppressed. (See the Eisenhower Era tax rates as an example.)
As is obvious from the above, I have learned to view Heinlein as a more polished and literary version of Alesteir Crowley.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Now look at the known ‘actions’ of the rich and the powerful in society for an object lesson in that. The only “saving grace” in this situation is that such license and excess always leads to decay and collapse. Prepare to “pick up the pieces” after the ‘correction,’ or ‘reset’ happens.
Rant off.
Clientism is actually pretty common practice in much of the world, right now.
Too true.
‘Clientism’ gives ‘nepotism’ a good name. (Attributed to Lazarus Long.)
Crowley got the do what thou wilt bit from Rabelais. Gargantua endows the Abbey of Theleme, whence Crowley got another of his terms. Theleme is an ancient Greek word meaning “will or desire.”
Crowley is a very nasty bit of work. Cultist, set out to channel dark energy.
It’s the ‘Thou’ that’s the tricky part.
The motto of the Thelemic Monastery across the street is ‘We Like To Dance!”
I was trying to find TwitterX’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, religion to see if she is Jewish. All I can find is that her religion is “unknown.” It looks like the internet, or at least to a non-researcher like myself, makes finding information on her religious background purposely ambiguous. Why would that be? Most Jewish friends I have are very proud, as are my Catholic, and Buddhist ones.
Maybe I’m just not adept enough in my google searches.
According to her wikipedia page she’s Catholic (ref: Fortune).
She’s of the Catholic faith, born into an Italian immigrant family.
https://careergear.henof.com/news/story/linda-yaccarino-parents-the-italian-american-roots-of-the-media-mogul/
“Israel’s war on Gaza live: 24 Israeli troops killed as ground battles rage”
Reports seem to indicate that those Israeli reservists were stacking mines in that building to demolish it. A Hamas team saw their chance and fired two anti-tank missiles at that building which blew up and then set off those stacked mines collapsing the building itslef. I have read that 22 Israelis were killed and 6 are missing and the Israelis are digging out the rubble to see if there are any survivors. In addition, a tank that was near the building was also hit by an anti-tank missile.
https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1749666812143280508
“…plus the ICJ has reasons not to set the bar too low here.”
I will fully confess to my lack of bandwidth for nuance, but doesn’t it seem like the ICJ declaring a genocide against the Uighers has already lowered the bar? Blumenthal has been saying that they couldn’t even find any dead people for that one, and then there is the declaration against Russia for sending kids found on the front lines to summer camp. Finding against Russia for following through on Geneva Convention requirements to get civilians off the front lines when it was Ukraine who was supposed to have done that already makes the court look, at best, a little stupid, and one might think they would want to redress such a blight on their reputations.
If anything, a finding for SA will raise the bar to what the actual definition of the term denotes. Israel has managed in three months to achieve the dubious distinction of killing as many civilians as the Ukraine/Russia war has in two years. If the existence of what amounts to a snuff film does not meet the definition of a genocide for the ICJ then they have larger cognitive problems than we have been led to believe.
“I will fully confess to my lack of bandwidth for nuance, but doesn’t it seem like the ICJ declaring a genocide against the Uighers has already lowered the bar? Blumenthal has been saying that they couldn’t even find any dead people for that one, and then there is the declaration against Russia for sending kids found on the front lines to summer camp.”
Because there are no repercussions for such findings. But touch the United States or its pets and there will be hell to pay.
No, it’s an ICC complaint, not ICJ. ICC is for individuals. The ICJ is for states. The ICC as a prosecutor can act on referrals and also independently. The ICJ has to have a state bring a dispute to it.
The ICC did not pursue the allegations: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/world/asia/icc-china-uighur-muslim.html
But if the ICJ arguably lowered the bar for disputes, the US or one of its meddling allies in Asia could allege genocide, citing arguably new/better facts.
The ICC is the bunch that found Putin guilty in three days for the crime of transporting children out of a war zone…as if he did that personally, too. So it is not as if it’s a very rigorous body.
Thank you for that correction. I really am starting to mix all of these groups up.
The liver health article is helpful in some ways but its content is already exploited in worrying ways by certain people. I have encountered quite a few people who know well that a few abstinent weeks with “better living” can cause the over-worked GP to see “within/close to reference range” liver enzyme blood test results and thus avoid “a lecture”. The annual health check always looks OK…..until one day things suddenly aren’t.
The liver is an organ that can all too easily give few early warning signs of failure….in which case, there’s a very horrible death.
Plus, anecdotally, I was pretty shocked around 2010 in Sydney at how many (much younger) friends already had severe fatty liver disease. This couldn’t be solely attributable to alcohol but the British/Aussie drinking culture is just gonna make things worse. Many years ago when I took less care of myself a GP that I knew pretty well made a joke that I had “The Irish Liver” – after a laugh, I told him I was aware that one’s liver is fine…..until suddenly it isn’t. Trouble is, whilst Fibroscans etc all show my liver to be “perfectly OK by UK norms”, *I* know that is a low bar to cross in places like the UK and Australia where dietary factors (IMHO) are also making it doubly easy for fat to build up in the liver before you even start on the sauce. Whilst you may have no scarring or inflammation, you’re “sailing close to the wind”. Plus I got the distinct impression that a physician at my local (teaching) hospital, having discounted all possible detectable liver problems, was very curious as to whether past liver “workload and fattiness” might have a role in my Long COVID since people tend to forget that the liver has a big role in immune function. (However my heart was familyblogged from birth so that’s much more likely what’ll get me on the COVID front!)
I’ve not looked at the figures for a while, but interestingly Ireland has always historically had a relatively low rate of cirrhosis and fatty liver disease. I recall once someone not quite seriously suggesting the high iron content of Guinness had a protective effect. Most likely I suspect its due to weekend binge drinking being less damaging than the cumulative effect of ‘moderate’ daily drinking. It might also be things like Lent being quite usefully protective. But judging by the rise in bulging waistlines in the past decade or so, I suspect Ireland will catch up on fatty liver disease.
Yeah, the “several days off” phenomenon certainly helps the liver but as you say, it’s the “other stuff” like basic calorie intake and the biochemistry behind the “food adjacent” stuff we increasingly consume that got me thinking.
Another factor that made me immediately focus on the nature of our food was the nasty surprise I got eating ready meals in Aus/NZ compared to the UK. In the UK you would (12 years ago anyway) NEVER expect to see soy as a major ingredient in an “anglo” dish like Cottage Pie. However, less stringent laws on preservatives/additives down under meant that I got a nasty surprise when I neglected to check ingredients of a ready meal at a conference. My attempt to avoid soy when testing which foods I had to be careful of on the MAOI antidepressant went awry and I had a tyramine-induced BP spike. Thankfully not serious enough to go to hospital but I learnt my lesson fast. Aussies/Kiwis were ingesting a whole load of stuff that had no good nutritional reason to be in their processed foods compared to the EU.
PS the GP who made the Irish joke was like me a Brit of Irish descent and clearly revelled in having the right audience to make that joke.
I have polycystic liver. In 2013 I had 2 plus liters clear fluids drained, and tissue analyzed non cancer. Polycystic is suspected to be congenital, usually no big deal, unless you don’t want to be barrel chested.
My father’s sister succumbed to a liver cancer at 87.
One brother died from complications of HepC, he was rH baby we suspect got it from transfusions in 1953.
Other brother had fatty liver but did not progress.
My habit is 2 drinks per week, in one sitting.
I have known two friends with cirrhosis both had to stop alcohol. One I still talk to is okay so far.
Thanks for polycystic liver info. I know a couple of people for whom that might be worth following up on but I won’t continue since I must have tripped the automatic-moderation wire somewhere, judging by all recent comments before this, and don’t want to make work for moderators.
I don’t understand paying so much money for an iPhone. I use an iPad which I find convenient, but I would never pay for an Apple phone or computer.
I’m with you on this one. Never had a cell phone and won’t ever. Why? Expensive to buy, some areas no service, when you have service often sketchy and unclear, buying minutes and if you don’t use them up within a time frame you lose them. (takes deep breath) You don’t own it and can’t fix it. Hubby recently exchanged his flip phone because of bad hinge. To get the replacement phone, it cost MORE if he doesn’t have F’book and Instagrunt pre -loaded. A land line works quite well, unless you’re not near it. And if not near it, you don’t want to be bothered. You may be taking a walk, working in the garden or performing on stage. Oh, and of course if you’re doing any of those activities you are tracked and your information sold many times through the day. Oh well, could be good for some people. I’ll pass.
Please do not virtue signal to me when it is pretty clear you have a car. I have never owned one and never will. Nor a scooter or motorbike.
I had only a stoopid phone until I moved here. I would have preferred to have a 4G dumphone. But you can’t hail cabs w/o having an app and driving here is signing up as a Darwin Awards competitor. So I sadly need to use the local Uber analogue. I do tip generously to try to make up for the gig economy bad karma.
Also a couple of service people only take texts. And the expat community gets pissed with me for not using apps like Line and WhatsApp. I refuse to for privacy reasons I will spare you unless you really care.
Thanks for your reply, Yves. It is a virtue, not ever having to have a car. That’s difficult to pull off if one grew up in LA, as I did. Had cars from an early age and since then. LA had (and still has) almost no public transport. Everything is relative.
I got one for free and bought an identical one for $90.
Apple computers require vastly less user management. In office environments, they require 1/10th as many help desk people than Microsoft installations. I value my time and have very low tolerance for frustration.
I am also using 2 2015 MacBook Pros, one as my production machine, one as an emergency machine. I got 8.5 years out of my last round of Macs (then MacBook Airs). So query whether your lifecycle costs are as low as mine.
Thanks for your opinions. Helps me out a lot as I’m considering a new device. And thanks for all your work, it’s always interesting.
I just replaced my HP Windows 10 laptop with a new LG Windows 11 laptop. The windows 10 version was purchased in 2016 so about 8 years old. The new machine is vastly better in both speed and usability. I am still impressed a couple of months after the purchase.
I am never going on the Windows OS. The Windows suite is an abortion and a clear demonstration of Microsoft not giving a shit about users.
Yup, Windows 11 won’t even let you have a local account anymore, it all gets hoovered up by the mother ship.
got an old MacBook Pro eh – good for you Yves – well i have a mid 2010 running Sierra with no complaints – and thanks to a thread Alice X started back in April ’23 i found out about the Open Core Legacy Patcher if i ever wanted to upgrade to a newer OS – love my Mac – had to use a Windows machine when at a real estate company 20 years ago and hated it – found a way to mimic a Windows desktop on my Mac and ditched the doorstop Widows machine – have always been leery of updates on my computer or phone, an ancient Samsung 5 – since i only use the phone for texts, calls and maps when traveling, and no apps, it works fine for intended use – i’m old and suspicious – and envy you never having a vehicle, but i’m a Detroit boy with plenty of skinned knuckles and greasy arms & hands and an abiding fascination with older cars – i only buy used older ones i can fix and aren’t sassy except to buckle up – but that’s just me –
I was unaware these devices could be had so cheaply, which is at least in part why I buy cheap Android phones, having been kind of forced into the operating system as a longtime Blackberry devotee. And Mac computers are notoriously expensive here in Canada.
Good news!
Sierra Subs and Salads, our much beloved eatery in Tiny Town, nailed #8 out of the Top 100 Places to eat in the US 2024 Yelp survey.
Yeah, it’s that good~
https://www.yelp.com/collection/7uonY3pRpa1pxHXjSW3rJg/Top-100-Places-to-Eat-in-the-US-2024
any trout up your way?
Here are links to the checklists I have found handy over the years:
Why won’t my iPhone work as a hotspot?
Why won’t my iPhone connect to my computer?
In my case, when my iPhone won’t connect wirelessly to my Macs, the usual problem is that the iPhone is connected to one wireless network, and the target Mac is connected to a different network. [My home is a bit too large for one network, so sometimes a device latches onto the wrong network. Usually this makes no difference … unless one device is trying to access a second device, usually a printer or an iPhone].
Thanks and I will have a look. But my devices can access only one wireless network every time I have had difficulty.
I recently had difficulty connecting to iphone hotspot. After long fiddling i find a way to connect that was
1) disconnect from all wireless and wired network on computer but leave the window open so you can see which networks appear.
2)turn off hotspot on iphone and wait a minnit
3)turn on hotspot on iphone while watching the open window on the computer that shows networks
4)if and when iphone hotspot appears in that window (mine shows up at the top), leap like a leopard and select it
this may or may not help. All the best.
sidd
Thanks! Any suggestions appreciated.
I should have mentioned, as i realize now that i look at my notes:
in step 3) when i turn on the iphone hotspot, i make sure that it is set to “Allow others to join” and “Maximize compatibility.”
This probably compromises security, but thats what it takes to get this macbook pro to connect to this iphone. I have a long password set for the hotspot, so hopefully that will slow the opposition …
And of course, the next update to either computer or iphone may require more fiddling …
sidd
>Farmers block highways in France
Farmers blocked roads with tractors and trucks in several parts of France on Monday, continuing protests that they started last week…The action by French farmers follows similar demonstrations by their German, Dutch, Polish and Romanian counterparts.
These always lift my spirits. I remember donating to Canadian Truckers only to have my money blocked and refunded by GoFundMe and having to resend via GoGiveSend. Unfortunately the state control apparatus is able to direct financial tools and utilize its monopoly over “legitimate” violence that they can harnessed to tamp down on almost any type of citizen protest if they get out-of-hand. And, of course the MSM will do its part to reframe reality to fit the ruling elite’s narrative.
https://www.rt.com/news/591128-france-farmer-protests-attal/
Just what I needed, a drag queen and full music video production crew to travel to a melting glacier to film an “inspiring” song about the end of the world.
Industrial society and its consequences…
Yes, that was special, and not in a good way.
I did give you some alternative musical suggestions to improve your mood.
“As males evolve to have better weapons, females develop bigger brains”
It makes sense this. Every species and animal has an energy budget. If males develop huge, curving horns, that can only be at the expense of another part of its energy budget. I would guess that perhaps that this is why females tend to be smaller than males. A smaller build means that you need less energy for size and that more can be spent in, say, the reproductive system. This was brought home to me when many years ago that I read that most animals when born hit the deck running. But to do so usually meant a restricted brain size. Humans, on the other hand, give birth to their young and it takes several years for them to be capable of surviving. And during this time the brain is still growing in size but which in adulthood gives them an edge over other animals. Of course this means bonded parents and a supportive community leading to a social structure, customs and all the rest of it. If our babies were born hitting the deck running, we would have never left the savanna.
“bonded parents and a supportive community leading to a social structure, customs and all the rest of it.”
This is why libertarians are idiots and Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” was a dead end — they’re simply contrary to human biology and anthropology.
Alexander Mercouris read from an amazing lengthy twitter post in his video yesterday from someone who had visited Ukraine. Has it been posted here? I have not been able to locate it. If anyone knows it’s origin please let me know. Thanks in advance.
This must be the one that you are looking for-
‘Maria Mateiciuc
@MariaMateiciuc
I just got back from Ukraine, where I was visiting some friends.
Everything we have heard about what’s happening in Ukraine is a lie.
The reality is darker, bleaker, and unequivocally hopeless. There is no such thing as Ukraine “winning” this war.
– By their estimates, they have lost over one million of their sons, fathers and husbands; an entire generation is gone.
– Even in the Southwest, where the anti-Russian sentiment is long-standing, citizens are reluctant or straight-up scared to publicly criticize Zelensky; they will go to jail.
– In every village and town, the streets, shops, and restaurants are mostly absent of men.
– The few men who remain are terrified of leaving their homes for fear of being kidnapped into conscription. Some have resorted to begging friends to break their legs to avoid service.
– Army search parties take place early in the morning, when men leave their homes to go to work. They ambush and kidnap them off the streets and within 3-4 hours they get listed in the army and taken away straight to the front lines with minimal or no training at all; it is “a death sentence.”
– It’s getting worse every day. Where I was staying, a dentist had just been taken by security forces on his way to work, leaving behind two small children. Every day, 3-5 dead bodies keep arriving from the front lines.
– Mothers and wives fight tooth and nail with the armed forces, beg and plead not to have their men taken away. They try bribing, which sometimes works, but most of the time they are met with physical violence and death threats.
– The territory celebrated as having been “won back” from Russia has been reduced to rubble and is uninhabitable. Regardless, there is no one left to live there and displaced families will likely never return.
– They see the way the war has been reported, at home and abroad. It’s a “joke” and “propaganda.” They say: “Look around: is this winning?”.
– Worse, some have been hoaxed into believing that once Ukrainians forces are exhausted, American soldiers will come in to replace them and “win the war”.
There is no ambiguity in these people. The war was for nothing – a travesty. The outcome always was, and is, clear. The people are hopeless, utterly destroyed, and living in an unending nightmare.
They are pleading for an end, any end – most likely the same “peace” that could have been achieved two years ago. In their minds, they have already lost, for their sons, fathers and husbands are gone, and their country has been destroyed. There is no “victory” that can change that.
Make no mistake, they are angry with Putin. But they are also angry with Zelensky and the West. They have lost everything, worst of all, hope and faith, and cannot comprehend why Zelenky wishes to continue the current trajectory, the one of human devastation.
I didn’t witness the war; but what I saw was absolutely heart-breaking.
Shame on the people, regardless of their intentions, who have supported this war. And shame on the media for continuing to lie about it.’
https://twitter.com/MariaMateiciuc/status/1743658029893984735
This jives with what Ukrainians just in from Ukraine are telling me.
The Ukrainians who have been living here a while and are True Believers don’t want to hear it, call the messengers defeatists, traitors, disseminators of the dreaded Putin Propaganda.
Yet for some mysterious reason, the True Believers themselves are in on particular rush to head back and join in the triumph that is surely just around the corner, any day now, and they send bribe money back home to keep their relatives out of the clutches of the recruitment commissars.
Thanks. If only some organization had reporters who could go into Ukraine and tell us these same truths.
“If only some organization had reporters who could go into Ukraine and tell us these same truths.”
IIRC, you are a movie fan so I thought you might like to see this:
https://www.politico.eu/article/film-about-russias-destruction-of-mariupol-gets-nod-for-oscars/
Only notable because I strongly suspect that Patrick Lancaster will not be featured in this one. Strange how that works.
I had noticed it. I don’t know anything about the film but given the track record of our beloved Academy I can guess. Wonder if the CIA gets Oscar ballots in exchange for all those taxpayer supplied movie props.
Thank you, Rev!
I believe this is the one: https://twitter.com/MariaMateiciuc/status/1743658029893984735
I could be mistaken. I think it was linked to here, directly or indirectly. Larry Johnson has also posted on it.
Thank you.
The new UK financial year begins in April. Many English local authorities, mainly in the south, are cutting special educational needs budgets to balance the books. However, what is ring fenced from cuts to the education budget is private school fees for Ukrainian refugees.
Most of the Ukrainian refugee children at private schools are boys likely to be called up in the next couple of years.
Refugees from other parts of the world do not get such subsidies.
I just did a double take. LEA’s pay for private school fees? On what grounds? Unavailability of places in state schools? Or unsuitability of available places (transport, special needs)?
I have never heard of LEA’s paying for independent schools that are not in some way “prescribed” (special educational needs, medical issues, mental health, violence) since the scrapping if the assisted places scheme by Blair in 1997. And I thought most special schools were state / LEA funded anyway.
Tell me this is peculiar to Buckinghamshire, please! Maybe a result of the grammar school system having insufficient places for those who pass 11+?
Thank you. I just picked up your comment.
It is Buckinghamshire paying, but the schools are just across the river in Berkshire. It seems like there’s a shortage of places, irate locals and refugee children with particular needs. It has been wondered if it’s a subsidy for struggling independents. Some have closed.
That’s the one. Thanks jsn.
“Homeless brave cold in Paris as France plans to move them out of city before Olympics”
I would guess that Macron will wait until a week before the Olympics starts. He will then have the homeless rounded up, bussed to all the smaller town & villages of the Provinces, and then the clean up crew would be sent in to clean up all those streets. At least for the homeless it will be summer still so they can still sleep out.
The BI article on worker loyalty makes the fatal mistake of categorizing people into generational boundaries. That is not my current, or historical experience. I am talking to plenty of gen x’ers that are pretty fed up with the current corp landscape
What is the world’s loveliest language?
Sounds lovely? Or unintelligible?
French is lovely, but all the baggage that goes along with it makes it clumsy.
Hebrew sounds like people hawking phlegm continually.
Certain Central American dialects of Spanish are lovely, lilting and sweet, especially when spoken by young women.
My vote would go to Italiano, delightful either spoken or sung.
Spanish is the Loving Tongue, Michael Martin Murphey does well. This also gives the history of the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD-h1LTHqnU
Brazilian Portuguese, methinks, has no equal in song.
Translation:
Meu coração não se cansa de ter esperança
My heart never tires of having hope
de um dia ser tudo o que quer
of one day being all that it wants
Meu coração de criança
My infant heart
não é só a lembrança de um vulto feliz de mulher
is not just the memory of a smiling shadow of a woman
que passou por meu sonho sem dizer adeus
who passed through my dream without saying goodbye
e fez dos olhos meus um chorar mais sem fim
and set my eyes to weeping without end
Meu coração vagabundo
My wandering heart
quer guardar o mundo em mim
wants to hold the world in me
Biden not being on the NH primary ballot has been topping my news algos for a couple days now. The headlines have been either the pearl clutching or the mansplaining variety. I see there’s a “write-in campaign”. It will be revealing if there’s any real effort to it. Recall the 2020 election for mayor of Buffalo when incumbent Byron Brown defeated progressive India Walton (who had won the Dem primary over Brown) with a write-in campaign. IIRC, at the polls on Election Day the Brown team handed out rubber stamps that would imprint his name legibly on the ballot.
It’s fascinating and depressing to observe team blue’s consistent lack of urgency regarding the top of the ticket 2024. Is this a signal that the game is no longer played by wooing voters, but by gaming electronic voting systems? That idea certainly strokes my priors, so take this missive with a grain of salt.
Hanover is very vote blue no matter who. When I go later today, I’ll ask the nice ladies how busy it’s been. Yesterday when I got home, there were about 18 people spread out over the 4 corners of the intersection in front of my house all holding placards saying “write in Joe Biden”.
” EU to ringfence more high tech areas from China ”
Essentially this is a European attempt to undermine Chinese technology advance, so limiting Chinese growth and development. A copy of American policy, of course. That a developed West would try to undermine the development of a benign 5,000 year old civilization of 1.4 billion shows a Western moral and ethical failing that should have become impossible by the 21st Century.
The ravages of colonialism should be forever done.
They are also failing quite spectacularly though, so there is that.
Hold up do I have this right?
Joe said he wanted SC to be first, and NH politely declined, so Joe decided no NH votes will count?
And people in NH don’t care?
What the heck?
It is worse than that. Joe Biden and his DNC are disenfranchising these voters despite the timing of the primary being a matter of New Hampshire law. And they have been harassing the state Party so much that they were taking legal action.
Shows real respect for “Democracy” and “rule of law” doesn’t it.
The only way I would write him in would be as Go Away Brandon. But I am not from New Hampshire. Sadly, knowing that their votes are meaningless except as a news story many people may stay home leaving only the true believers, like Petal’s corner group, to show up and write him in. I hope they are angry enough to show up and vote for anybody else in big numbers, but I also realize that is asking a lot.
They were getting quite a few car horn honks of support yesterday, and one guy yelled out his car window about how happy and relieved or comforted he was to see them showing support for Biden. It was vomit-inducing.
There has to be some societal version of Stockholm Syndrome. I don’t have any other explanation of the lack of cognitive dissonance so much of the public displays regarding the actions of both the Democratic Party and our government.
But then I spent years buying the bad Republican narrative, so I was not immune and perhaps should cut them a break.
I do not want to say I told you so, but I recently posted on NC my belief that Chuck Schumer has a future in becoming a professional emetic. Did you happen to notice him hanging around?
I voted in NH this AM.
Registered democrat.
Wrote in Donald Trump.
Biden dissed NH!
Trying to intimidate and prescribe thinking of the Harvard community:
https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1749155870284693775
Lawrence H. Summers @LHSummers
After Friday’s new anti-Semitism task force announcement, I have lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.
The previously touted advisory committee has disbanded without any ripple, except for the resignation in frustration with the Harvard Administration of its most respected member, Rabbi David Wolpe.
Now we are to have a new task force, whose members have remarkably not yet been chosen, but we have been told that Professor Derek Penslar will be a co-chair.
I have no doubt that Prof Penslar is a profound scholar of Zionism and a person of good will without a trace of personal anti-Semitism who cares deeply about Harvard.
However, I believe that given his record, he is unsuited to leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious anti-Semitism problem at Harvard. Recall that AMCHA * ranked Harvard worst among over 100 institutions on anti-Semitism. Harvard is subject to Title Vi litigation and to both Congressional and Executive Branch investigations over anti-Semitism. Note also that Harvard has suffered worse admissions drop off than any major university in memory because of the events of last semester.
Prof Penslar has publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state and more. While he does not support BDS ** he has made clear that he sees it as a reasonable position.
None of this in my view is problematic for a professor at Harvard or even for a member of the task force but for the co-chair of an anti-Semitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.
Could one imagine Harvard appointing as head of anti-racism task force someone who had minimized the racism problem or who had argued against federal anti-racism efforts? This is yet another example of a double standard between anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice.
As interim President, Alan Garber *** made clear increasing the sense of belonging of Jews is a central objective of the task force. Recent media reports confirm my view that whatever the intellectual merits of his arguments, Prof Penslar is far from the ideal chairman of the task force….
* The AMCHA Initiative is a pro-Israel American campus group that seeks to undermine BDS activities on campuses.
** Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel.
*** Interim Harvard President
2:43 PM · Jan 21, 2024
Perhaps Larry can set up a new Harvard campus in Gaza after the genocide is finished. Probably be a lot safer.
If I were a Harvard grad I might be tempted to start saying “Larry, your advice cost Harvard billions of dollars. Short of paying it back, you should at least do us the favor of keeping your opinion and advice to yourself until you do. With interest.”
Marion County Record raid update.
Legislators seek report on newspaper raid
https://www.marionrecord.com/direct/legislators_seek_report_on_newspaper_raid+5518breaking+4c656769736c61746f7273207365656b207265706f7274206f6e206e65777370617065722072616964
Re: Bertraud:
Of course the US will veto, dutifully echoed by its UK and French poodles.
Only an idiot or a simp actually believes American claims to be acting on good faith, regardless what they must say in public.
“Why Israel’s Violence Gets So Much Notice (It’s Not Antisemitism)”
The real reason is that Israel exists in such a precarious strategic situation that it’s immensely dependent on, and consequently vulnerable to, public opinion. As a result, it has spent the past several decades trying to ensure that everyone in the west knows about Israel and approves of what it’s doing, because if western support for Israel ever dried up the country would be royally screwed.
This began even before the founding of modern-day Israel. In fact, many of the propaganda tactics we see Hamas engaging in now were pioneered by Zionist terrorists in the 40s.
Some choice excerpts from “Jewish Terrorism and the Modern Middle East“:
The whole article paints an image that almost exactly mirrors that of the present day situation and I highly recommend reading it in full.
“As a result, it has spent the past several decades trying to ensure that everyone in the west knows about Israel and approves of what it’s doing, because if western support for Israel ever dried up the country would be royally screwed.”
Especially because Israel has behaved with very little restraint, secure in the knowledge that its American thug would beat any dissent senseless.
Take away that thug and Israel truly would have hell to pay. Even many of Israel’s supposed friends are friends only because they wish to please America.
– ‘The Pipe-bomb Caper’ – James Howard Kunstler (Kevin W)
For those unfamiliar with these recent revelations this is a good overview of a very interesting element of the whole 1/6 saga. Among the interesting aspects is this:
“For three years the entire mainstream media showed zero interest in any facet of the pipe-bomb story — and let’s not forget, there was a second identical pipe-bomb planted at the RNC headquarters a two-minute walk away from the DNC. How come such strenuous lack of interest? You might hypothesize the obvious: that the media (and the blob regime they serve) don’t want anybody looking into the matter, or even becoming aware of it.”
Whenever there is a “strenuous lack of interest” by the MSM in something that would seem to be of the *upmost* interest, my curiosity is aroused. Remember the post 9/11 Anthrax attack? Remember how it dominated the news, the brave SNL show, Judith Miller, etc., etc. — until the evidence started to point to US government sources. Then it was quickly blamed on a “lone nut” (well actually two different “lone nuts” – framing the first one didn’t take) and *completely disappeared* in the press.* These sorts of silences speak volumes.
(*of course the second “lone nut” conveniently committed suicide, as so often happens, so “case closed”.)
I don’t know. It seems a large edifice to build on some pretty flimsy evidence. Maybe the police were just incompetent, and that’s why they didn’t want it more widely reported? As for Kamala Harris, intellectual curiosity has never struck me as one of her characteristics.
I do agree with the author that more information and depositions would help, but I suspect that if they don’t support the theory then he would just dismiss them as more cover-up.
Re Literary Hub/Arendt–you don’t have to read very far into this piece to see where it is going.
Arendt may have had great insight into her era but doubtless would object to the effortless slide into Trump equals Hitler. In fact if one wants to argue that thoughtless inertia–“banality”–is the root stuff of totalitarianism then the conspiracy theories on the “left” are arguably more the stuff of fascism than those on the right. The above graf is clearly by someone who knows very little about Trump or Putin and probably buys into Russiagate too even though it was a lame ploy by the credentialed but very much mediocre and even “banal” Hillary Clinton.
Enough with analogizing the 20th century to our own. They are not the same.
Indeed. Too often the arguments or frames are reduced to “one man” to fight instead of a global system.
And if they want to talk about Trump equal Hitler – they both belong and belonged to and were created by an entire network or system. As if Hitler existed in some kind of fascist vacuum. Trump is the product of the American global order as much as they claim he wants to tear it down.
World War II was not about fighting fascism as much as it was about fighting a fascist that could no longer be controlled by the financiers of the movement.
As if Hitler were responsible for WW1 reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr and subsequent inflation and all the desperation it produced. He was the result, not the cause.
Arendts “brilliant expression to a sense of powerless vertigo in a world that seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented” is a good description of the disintegrating “narrative” our Oligarchy is struggling to maintain. That relentlessly awful plot is Neoliberalism this time and it’s already destroyed the productive base that a Hitler could seize power over and organize for oppression. The future remains to be written, new possibilities are proliferating.
Realities are starting to intrude all over the place and scepticism is growing logarithmically. The institutional incoherence of late Neoliberalism, finance having monetized defensive capability over the last two generations, means any effective power grab will need to be working literally from the ground up, basic food, water and power supply issues that can no longer be taken for granted because of the Amazon (among others) Ouroboros: a Neoliberal head head devouring the industrial capital tail across the economy.
I’ve read a couple of Hitler biographies and IIRC the writers express frustration at not being able to understand how Hitler got to where he did, from a near homeless artist wannabe to the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing to understand. There could have been a hundred potential “Hitlers” walking around and the one we got was just luck of the draw rather than being anything special. It might be more productive to investigate how a political system let a guy like him get anywhere near power.
The Collapse of the American Empire awaits our near future. I hope some of the better connected, some of the more insightful, some of the more practical and grounded will document and describe the coming Collapse of Empire. I believe this Collapse will not cleanly echo past Collapses. This Collapse will have its own characteristics completely new to past Collapses. Much will ape past Collapses … but much will be unlike any past Collapses. The coincident Collapses of Climate Chaos and Resource Depletion will work to speciate the Collapse of the American Empire. This is not like past Collapses. It will be more complete and more lasting than any past Collapse. That greatly frightens me.
I don’t think it matters. To the best of my (limited) knowledge, every past empire collapsed in war. I’m not sure about the Maya civilization(s) in the Yucatan, but the ones I do know about all did, including the Chinese. There is a high probability of a large war developing in the next year, and one or more countries are likely to use nuclear weapons, Israel most likely. If that happens nobody is going to record the details of how it came about.
The British Empire did not collapse in war, as in the result of conquest. It collapsed as a result of war. Roosevelt was very clear in his intent to structure of war “aid” so as to create a big debt burden and weaken the Empire so as to facilitate the US taking ground.
I agree. We are not the same. Trump is neither Hitler nor a Hitler wanna be. That is not to suggest we do not live in perilous times. The perils may be similar but they are new. As you say, this is the 21st Century. We craft new perils.
Part of how Stalin managed to rise to the top was that the Bolsheviks were looking out for a Napoleon – Trotsky fit that bill best – and didn’t keep an eye on the secretary at the end of the table.
You are 100% correct, Yves. that Atlantic piece about Bill Ackman is brilliant!
RE: The Tim Meggs tweet
Michael Lewis pointed out the same thing in Flash Boys – banking IT infrastructure hasn’t been significantly overhauled in decades and is held together by the equivalent of duct tape and string. Banks won’t upgrade them because the expense they’d incur would cut into the next quarterly profits, and the C-suite types only think short term. He also notes that the people who can still understand the old programming languages are quite often Eastern Europeans or – *gasp* – Russians, if I remember correctly.
I know a Polish woman fluent in an arcane financial programming language. She is employed for life.
It’s not just next quarter’s profits. I have had bank IT people tell me it would take all of a bank’s profits for 3 years to migrate off Cobol. Now maybe that # got smaller in recent years, but the flip side is most large IT projects fail, so I don’t know what failure probability estimate was applied.
I formerly worked for a large bank – no longer extant as of September 2008 – that had grown primarily via an acquisition strategy. “Integration” of acquired banks seemed to consist of little more than changing signage on branches and shirts on the staff. Just as one key example, there were something like 9 loan origination systems for home loans, none of which talked to each other. Overhead was high, and agility on things like loan pricing and risk management was low. There were bunches of highly paid “old men” who kept the ancient systems running, secure in their positions b/c none of the offshore IT providers to whom we outsourced tech could staff this old stuff. There was a guy paid to fly into town in his private plane 2 days a month to enable the bank to close its books – because no one else understood how to do break/fix on core reconciliation systems The resulting uncompetitive cost structure contributed to chasing top-line growth at all costs. Underinvestment in IT was thus a significant contributor to the bank’s eventual failure. It was quite an education.
I do not know the old programming language — COBOL — although I started to study it around 1999, just in case the job I had at the time soured. Although every language hides secrets only experience in using it can reveal, COBOL is not a complex language. The programming techniques used when much of the banking programs were written are probably the bigger problem. I have not seen banking code but I would guess that banks were as frugal for-the-moment then, as they are today — which is to suggest that neither comments in the code nor documentation were in any sense robust. I assume and sincerely hope that banks were somewhat less frugal about spending for software testing than they are in the present. I believe the banking programs are far less difficult to document and re-implement than the Banks would like us to believe. However … I must adhere to certain caveats in making this assessment.
I believe several problems doom large software projects, especially re-write/re-hosting projects for updating banking software, the IRS software, airport management software, DoD logistics and contracting software, and other large “legacy” software structures …. I cannot recall any of these projects that were satisfied with simply documenting and porting legacy software to more current platforms and software languages. Legacy software is typically written in the ‘unstructured’ coding style described as spaghetti code. Invariably, software projects attempt to make the spaghetti code structured and more often at present time — ‘object-oriented’. This is usually attempted without much in the way of helpful tools to unravel spaghetti code. I am not of aware of any available tools to aid the transition from spaghetti code to object-oriented code, assuming — I believe, dubiously perhaps — that object-oriented code may not fit a best solution for the problems the original code solved.
A further issue that seems to plague and condemn ‘modernization’ efforts is the exuberant proliferation of exogenous requirements placed upon the ‘modernized’ software. It is one thing to port legacy software. It is quite another thing to port legacy software while also implementing a plethora of new capabilities and new requirements.
Moving from one programming language to another is a difficult problem. Unfortunately, it is seldom that anything so mundane as mere language and hardware platform transformations are attempted. Instead, in addition to porting legacy software and implementing new features, it is rare that software ‘modernization’ efforts fail to introduce ‘new and improved’ software implementation packages incorporating large amounts of new subroutine and function calls, often quite alien to the original code. Of course — what else can you expect from the contributions of management personnel fresh back from junkets to software expos.
Actually … I have touched on only a few of the most obvious issues that assure the failure of big software ‘improvement’ projects.
Pretty much:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn will be livestreaming the NH primary tonight.
Livestream Tonight, 8:00 p.m. ET: Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi Watch New Hampshire Primary Results
Live Free or Die. Or, come hang out tonight, as Walter Kirn and I watch the Trump-Haley death match in New Hampshire
https://www.racket.news/p/livestream-tonight-800-pm-et-walter
Shitty sound quality, Taibbi’s every thought utterance comes booming through over the Trump speech. Don’t they have a sound mixer?
He writes better than he talks. Is there something wrong with his throad BTW?
An interesting rumination on debt from an unlikely source:
https://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/an-ode-to-ole-munch-sineater-of-fargo.php
Some further background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin-eater
China Important– going down in 3-hours:
PBOC leaders will hold a press conference on Wednesday at 15:00 Beijing time to introduce the implementation of the CEWC decisions and financial support for the real economy.
https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1749704533478191602