I thought I was done with parenthood. But the tortoises had other plans Guardian
Syndemics
Long COVID Clinical Evaluation, Research and Impact on Society: A Global Expert Consensus (preprint) The Lancet. From the Abstract: “Following acute COVID-19, the risk of developing symptoms that last beyond the initial illness, is estimated to be 15% per individual per infection… This reinforces the need for translational research and large-scale treatment trials. Research on organ or body damage and Long COVID and vaccines were also areas where it was difficult to find a high level of consensus, but those statements that did reach consensus are significant.”
Ports around the world start screening crews for mpox Splash 247
Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past (symposium) Stanford University
China?
The inside story of the secret backchannel between the US and China FT
China, Philippines clash in South China Sea despite efforts to rebuild trust Channel News Asia
* * * China property: Shanghai’s luxury homes sell out as developers target the super-rich South China Morning Post. Commentary:
A woman made staff at a Louis Vuitton outlet in China count 600,000 yuan in cash, which took staff two hours, before cancelling the purchase and leaving, as revenge over being treated dismissively by staff during a previous visit to the store. pic.twitter.com/NFx8wcm2A0
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) August 24, 2024
China provides subsidies to boost home appliance trade-ins Xinhua
* * * Big Tech in China doubles AI spending despite US restrictions FT
China in Central America: Just a Mirage The Diplomat
No U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers Deployed In The Pacific Naval News
Myanmar
China to hold 3-day live-fire military drills near Myanmar border South China Morning Post
‘A global monster’: Myanmar-based cyber scams widen the net Frontier Myanmar
Africa
Morocco’s strategy on the Western Sahara has paid off Deutsche Welle. Meanwhile:
All of a sudden, the Sahara desert is a very wet place with heavy rain and storms over the next 2-weeks. pic.twitter.com/HLlGVqMmSe
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) August 25, 2024
Syraqistan
Israel’s Preemptive Strike in Lebanon Leaves It Sinking in the Same Strategic Mud Haaretz
UN, peacekeeping mission call on Israel, Hezbollah to cease fire amid cross-border escalation Anadolu Agency
Israel and Hezbollah exchange heaviest cross-border fire in months before pulling back PBS
10 foreign airlines cancel flights to Israel amid cross-border escalation with Hezbollah Anadolu Agency
Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia launches huge missile and drone attack on Ukraine FT
Is the Kursk incursion a major strategic blunder? BNE Intellinews
Russian Engels military airfield where strategic bombers are based attacked by UAVs – photo, video Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Zelensky’s Invasion of Russia Sends a Message to Moscow—and Washington WSJ
Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking. WaPo
* * * Zelenskyy convenes major meeting focusing on traitors Ukrainska Pravda
Zelenskyy: I’m all for diplomacy, but not at the expense of 30% of our territories Ukrainska Pravda
* * * US cracks down on Russia’s LNG dark fleet Splash 247
NATO’s Arctic Strategy Is an Overreaction The American Conservative
South of the Border
Mexico In Flux New Left Review
Biden Adminstration
Top defence contractors set to rake in record cash after orders soar FT
Biden Administration Blocks Two Private Sector Enrollment Sites From ACA Marketplace KFF Health News
2024
How Democrats Make Republicans: RFK Should Be A Wake Up Call for the Party Jonathan Turley
Celebrating at the DNC in a Time of Genocide The Nation
Vance says Trump would veto federal abortion ban The Hill
Justices allow Arizona to enforce proof-of-citizenship law for 2024 voter registration SCOTUSblog
Spook Country
Telegram says arrested CEO Durov has ‘nothing to hide’ BBC
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
Vindman says Musk should be ‘nervous’ after Telegram CEO was arrested: ‘Free speech absolutists weirdos’ FOX. Commentary:
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be… https://t.co/GyPMquKtKV
— Alexander S. Vindman ❎ (@AVindman) August 25, 2024
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Kroger-Albertsons Trial Starts Tomorrow Matt Stoller, BIG
Google Has Been Convicted of Monopolization. Will It Matter? Jacobin. Commentary (August 5):
Destroying relevant evidence is a major red flag & comes with severe consequences.
In the Google Play Store case, Judge Donato called it "a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice."
An adverse instruction in that case led to a unanimous finding of liability. pic.twitter.com/FEJgMtzGfX
— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) August 5, 2024
Boeing
Digital Watch
Housing
A New York City Office-to-Residential Conversion Wave Builds Commercial Observer
Healthcare
Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990 (preprint; PDF) Jeffrey S. Flier, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. “GLP-1–related therapeutics are now established as an immense success, how and why these early efforts to develop the class were prematurely terminated should be of interest to historians, entrepreneurs, drug hunters, and clinicians.”
Gunz
Federal judge tosses Kansas machine gun possession case on Second Amendment grounds Kansas City
Guillotine Watch
Class Warfare
Canada Labor Board Orders End to Railway Work Stoppage US News
Australians get ‘right to disconnect’ after hours BBC
Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep? The Anarchist Library
Finding love: Study reveals where love lives in the brain (press release) Aalto University
Cloudbusting Alan Neale, When We Are Real
Why is the world so binary? Funding the Future
Antidote du jour (Daiju Azuma):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
PLASTIC CRAP
(melody borrowed from Nashville Cats by The Lovin’ Spoonful)
Plastic Crap — a trillion jugs and bottles
Plastic Crap — in paint and plumbing, too
Plastic Crap — in every newborn baby
Plastic Crap — in all the food you chew . . .
Well, there’s polystyrene and silicone n’ polyester pieces in plastic
There are polymers in your underpants and the ink on your phone bill
Yeah, there’s a hunnerd-n-ten large rivers on Earth all smothered in plastic
Mount Everest has plastic snow and it chokes up all of our landfills
Yeah, they use fresh benzene hydrocarbons to make lubricants it’s easy to see why
Any fool can muddle through making new plastic goo when the oil never runs dry
And it needs to be said — every bit of that plastic hits the ocean or landfill
On Earth where’s the people to clean it? So I say, ‘Well, I will.’
(Clean up that)
Plastic Crap — a trillion jugs and bottles
Plastic Crap — in paint and plumbing, too
Plastic Crap — in every newborn baby
Plastic Crap — in all the food you chew . . .
Well, Earth Day happened anybody can see we’re quite at a standstill
It’s a fight we’re losing if we can’t unite and every step of it uphill
Plastic in our blood, in our brains, our bones, this is crazy fantastic
I dunno if you’ve heard, this is really absurd, but the stratosphere is chock full of plastic
Plastic Crap — a trillion jugs and bottles
Plastic Crap — in paint and plumbing, too
Plastic Crap — in every newborn baby
Plastic Crap — in all the food you chew . . .
Chuck it . . .
When reading the article it becomes clear that Russia dominates the Arctic Circle, and that China profits from that situation. And it is the US that is doing the ‘competing’.
Makes for interesting reading (not). One also comes away with the idea that the conflict between China and Taiwan is related to the Arctic.
I did comment this article already yesterday, but I’ll use this opportunity to add that Russia is about half of the Arctic Circle.
Even the ~8% USA has was bought from Russia. The biggest US population center north of Arctic Circle is Utqiagvik of ~5,000 people (mostly Inuit, city accessible only by air) while Russia’s biggest is Murmansk with 300,000 citizens (4 universities and a naval academy).
I guess they don’t have any maps at Fox. There’s no competition in the Arctic.
Despite ‘belonging’ to Denmark, Greenland has long since been an Arctic military base for the US. I would expect the US to count Greenland as part of its Arctic coastline.
Say, so you remember how back in 2019 Trump as President made an offer to buy Greenland off the Danes? It would have been the biggest land purchase since the Louisiana Purchase, not that the people there would be allowed to become American citizens. If he becomes President again, perhaps he will make Denmark an offer for Greenland that they won’t be able to refuse-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49367792
I wish I’d kept the link but I watched a short documentary on Greenland native communities (it was probably on Curiosity Stream or Nebula before I cancelled them showboaters or YT) – they showed absolutely no affinity with the USA at all and indeed people from the native communities who’d gone off to get a “Western education”, got disgusted, and come back to energise local communities in terms of keeping local languages etc, seemed to be achieving great success.
I very much doubt locals in Greenland have ANY amount in mind that they’d accept to become the next USA Imperial vassal.
Interestingly, more than 88% of the population of Greenland is Inuit but of course the territory is owned by Danes.
The people in the documentary were Inuit, not imported Danes.
Greenland’s own broadcasting service, based in Nuuk, the capital — one needs be conversant in Kalaallit (Greenlandic) or Danish to get much out of it, though:
https://knr.gl/en
If the US wants to dominate the Arctic Circle, then they are going to need a small fleet of Polar-class icebreakers. And last I heard, the US has only one or two operational – and they were built back in the 70s. A few years ago I read that they were loath to send them too far north in case one broke down and they might need the Russians to go rescue them with one of their ice-breakers. There is a third ice-breaker but it is 25 years old and is rated as only a medium ice-breaker. I also heard that moves to build more ice-breakers just never make it out of Congress-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar-class_icebreaker
No sex appeal. The jingoists at the DNC wouldn’t use ice breakers as propaganda. We have an artisan military ship building industry, so the costs would require yard reworks versus civilian yards capable of being repurchased. The Senators from Washington may want it, but the Senators from states without yards want more subs. The Senators without skin in the game can still take a ride on a sub. Lindsay Graham would love it.
The USA has no icebreaker operational at this point in time.
The Polar Star is undergoing a major refurbishment.
The Healy suffered damage during a recent mission, which it had to abort, returning to port for repairs.
The USA ceased being a serious contender in the Arctic many years ago.
I was on the Polar Sea ice breaker many years ago. A wonderful ship. Right now, the US has no functioning ice breaker afloat.
As others above are commenting, the two Polar class icebreakers are very old falling apart, and need replacement. Here’s Sal (“What is Going on With Shipping”) providing an update:
The United States’ Broken Icebreakers | Commercial Replacement | Shipbuilding Plan?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCsit-HWu48
And has commented in his report:
Congressional Report Details New Delays and Cost Overruns for Coast Guard Icebreaker
https://gcaptain.com/congressional-report-details-new-delays-and-cost-overruns-for-coast-guard-icebreaker/
Maybe the US Navy can pull a WalMart and just get them from China.
US is competing from home.
Repost from yesterday:
RE: Russia, China compete with US for Arctic Circle dominion that could shape international trade for decades – Fox
I think the title is wrong since it is the US that is in panic and struggling not to catch up, cannot, but to show life signals in this area of the world.
Firstly, most of the Northern Route goes by Russian territory and by international law is under Russian jurisdiction. According to UNCLOS, the area between the coast of a country and the ice shelf in its proximity is under control of that country, so that somebody wants passage, it must ask. The US really, really, really hates that section of UNCLOS and an old article on “War on the Rocks” clearly pointed to the issue.
With the iceshelf receeding, Russians can argue that their justidiction extends to the iceshelf, no?!
Secondly, the US has no vessels, other than submarines, that can get in the area, and no icebreakers. Now is trying to convince Canada, Denmark, and Norway to act as its proxies in the Arctic and also to start building icebreakers (probably a better deal than what Australia has with AUKUS).
Thus, the law and the know how and the actual means are all in Russian hands. US is just posturing. Rubs it and rubs it but there is no erection.
The same Arctic Ocean meltdown which is allowing the Arctic Ocean to become a maritime trade route is the same ongoing meltdown which will permit new waves of drilling for new megafields of oil and gas all over the Arctic.
Global warming will free up enough Arctic drillable land to allow the sale and burning of enough oil to speed the warming up to heating. Global heating will melt all the ice off of Greenland, Baffin Island, etc. and allow fresh rounds of gas and oil pumping and coal mining all over Greenland and Baffin Island and
etc. The consequent global steaming will melt all the ice off of Antarctica which will permit fresh rounds of gas and oil pumping and coal mining all over Antarctica. The consequent global autoclaving will put Earth on the road to Condition Venus.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a hisss of sssteam essscaping.
Re: Is the Kursk Incursion a Major Strategic Blunder?
I’m afraid this article makes a major error:
“taking the fight into the Russian Goliath’s homeland for the first time since the Nazi invasion of 1939.”
I find it hard to take a article seriously that places Operation Barbarossa in 1939 instead of June, 1941. Everyone and his dog fancies themselved as a military analyst these days. So much horse manure.
The title should also be “Kursk invasion is a Major Blunder”. There’s nothing Strategic about it. As far as Telegram can be trusted, it’s mostly about the internal strife in the Ukrainian high command.
The Failure of the Kursk invasion sets up Ukraine for a catabolic collapse, perhaps before Election Day. We don’t know, of course, what the timing will be, that’s up to Mother Nature.
Going by the content of the article, doesn’t this headline violate Betteridge’s Law?
A few hamlets in the Kursk hinterlands is not the Russian homeland.
the Poles taking an equivalent chunk of Kaliningrad would be an existential issue
very, very embarassing, and evidence that Putin is not playing 4-D chess; but rather making lemonade from lemons.
Very much like the Ukrainian army that entered Kursk is a hodgepodge of weapons, carriers and Ukrainian brigades this article is a messy hodgepodge of ideas, data and news that in one hand tries to keep alive the Western narrative and in the other provides data that supports that “major strategic blunder” written in the headline. For instance in the first paragraphs it uses wording you find in many other CW-MSM outlets suggestive of nearly full control of the Kursk oblast (29800 Km2) by Ukraine and at the same time it provides Ukraine´s statements for about 1000 km2. Even if you buy The Narrative in full in this regard, this puts the “sensational success” in perspective, more so if you look at satellite images to check the kind of territory they have come to occupy.
This is almost certainly accelerating the pace of attrition of the Ukraine army, it gives Russia an excellent reason not to negotiate and finish their job on their own timing, terms and conditions. But come on! it has helped to keep The Narrative alive for a while. The CW seems unable to think in terms longer than the next 24h information cycle.
John Helmer has apparently been roused from his vacation and has posted about Kursk. I think he has as much information and insight as anyone
“Exclusive | Boeing employees ‘humiliated’ that upstart rival SpaceX will rescue astronauts stuck in space: ‘It’s shameful’ ”
Just wait until they return to Earth next February. On a ship with a big ‘SpaceX’ on the side, and then they get put into Tesla trucks to drive to the conference room and in that room there would be a huge sign behind those astronauts saying “SpaceX – Bringing Them Home” with Elon Musk sitting between those two astronauts. I very much dislike Musk but I must admit that he has been getting better results with his SpaceX than Boeing has with its Starliner. Boeing got about twice the money from the US government, is about four years late on its delivery, and SpaceX has had half a dozen successful flights while Boeing only has this fiasco on the board.
Well, goodness. Obviously personal dislike for Musk should be the deciding factor for ALL good corporate Dems.
Who cares if he basically invented an entirely new industry employing thousands of Americans?
He’s dares question settled Holy Writ on identity and medical issues (boo! hiss), generally REFUSES to get with the corporate Dem s-lib program, revealed corporate Dem censorship of Twitter when he bought it and is basically a big meanie.
He should be sent to a remote island or Gitmo or something!
Dunno about Russian visiting France, but he’s one the world’s richest in a country that worships money. Imo he’s untouchable, unlike much poorer trump.
Pavel Durov is actually a French subject since 2021, living in Dubai where he also holds an UAE passport.
World is binary thing interests me on so many levels. As some know, I’m Brit by birth but have also gained Australian citizenship after years working in a key job there (but now reside back in blighty). One thing that struck me was that the ranked choice voting system (alternative vote) used in Aus really hasn’t solved the binary problem inherent in First Past The Post (FPTP) at all. People essentially still end up (via the first or back-up choice) plumping for Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition.
I know that the referendum in UK to change to Aussie system (which happened during my time in Sydney) failed spectacularly. I’ve come to the conclusion that this was right (albeit for entirely wrong reasons given the awful campaign). It doesn’t solve the problem. However, there are other solutions out there; ones that don’t move to “large close-to-fully-proportional-representation constituencies” which many “Anglo-Saxon” countries seem resistant to. They don’t get discussed outside these kind of blogs.
I make this kind of warning because I hate the expression “fair votes”. A corollary of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is that no voting system can deliver on all the key outcomes typically agreed to be desirable under a modern democratic industrialised society. You must sacrifice one of your outcomes. If you do citizens’ juries etc to decide what you are willing to compromise on, then the “right” form of voting can be identified immediately. These waffly calls for proportional representation are not helpful. There’s PR and there’s PR. Don’t put the cart before the horse – find out what an individual country like the UK is willing to compromise on, then the form of PR that is best will be obvious.
PS I don’t want to break rules and set homework but does anyone have immediate insights/suspicions about how substack algorithm works? I’ve had strange boosts to certain things that I can’t explain by (for instance) a NC link or a share by a follower. I’m not bothered, just curious, particularly since the “boosted” posts have been related to some recent articles like the binary world one! Just makes me curious.
> no voting system can deliver on all the key outcomes typically agreed to be desirable under a modern democratic industrialised society.
It would require significant change at the level of The Constitution to implement something like this in US, but I wonder whether there is an argument to be made for (for lack of better term) “fractional representation”, in which there are multiple legislators elected from each constituency, with each assigned a fractional vote in the legislature proportional to his vote share in the election. The administrative details would be messy, but it seems to me that this would allow one to have proportional representation even without large constituencies. In US, this would allow small parties like the Greens to influence legislation at national level as it might be necessary to recruit them to obtain legislative majorities.
Yeah that’s the out of the box thinking that is required. I’d merely add that it might be beneficial also to have constituency/area vetoes: I don’t massively dislike the (pretty undemocratic) US Senate and I think that some sort of “lock” should have been in place in the UK so that in “key” constitutional changes (like BREXIT) there must be some bar to be jumped in each of the constituent countries to enable fundamental legislation.
The UK has “counting regions” which have no real statistical basis but do correspond to generally agreed “areas” (“West Midlands”, “East Midlands”, “South-West”) etc. These are used for ease of aggregation when we are dumb and implement a referendum. However, in many cases they do actually reflect local differences in preferences and I wonder if a reformed Second chamber might be like the US Senate but based on these regions. Just spitballing.
My pet constitutional reform for the house of Lords would be to keep the Lords but dedicate it to creating alternative local power centres from Westminster and, in the process, restore the meaning of the traditional counties. After all, is what the aristocrats, with their region-specific landholdings, used provide instead of the ghastly cosmopolitan life peers of both parties (I give you Lord Lebedev and Lord Alli as your starter for ten). I would also amplify the cross-bench (non-party) tradition.
First, I would make the Lord Mayoralties of the major cities and the Lord Lieutenancies of the counties elected offices for individuals (i.e. without party affiliation). There would be no pretence at equalising the voters between constituencies: we already have this in the House of Commons and the Commons has supremacy over the Lords who can only delay legislation anyway. There would be a frank acceptance of the weight and anomalies of historical identity. So the millions in Liverpool and Manchester get a Lord Mayor but so Chesire and Lancashire and so too does the few hundred thousand in Cheshire.
The Lord Mayors would be appointed from among the local councillors but only the independents. This would be an incentive for independents to stand for councils and would break the one-party boroughs. The Lord Lieutenants are currently appointed so they would need to be elected but perhaps, to keep them local, the usual short-list of local dignitaries could be drawn up first for the Lord Lieutenant’s election but the Deputy Lord Lietenant could be by open election (and they would be eligible subsequently for the Lord Lieutenancy).
Second, as a sentimentalist for continuity, I would reserve a minor fraction of seats to keep the Lords Spiritual. However, I would widen the franchise from the twenty odd Anglican bishops of longest enthronement to a more representative mix of religions, add the Law Lords and the Chancellors of the Universities (as a restoration of the University vote, like the old Oxford and Cambridge and London MP’s) and pick a suitable number from that bran tub by sortition.
Finally, I might even sprinkle on top a few hereditary peers, chosen by sortition. I can imagine a ceremony like the national lottery only by sabrage of a copy of Burke’s Peerage. :-)
What I would not do is create any role for the bloodless NUTS regions of “The Southwest” and “The West Midlands” etc. We have a thousand year traditional of county and borough identity but since the Labour reforms of 1972 we have been trying to suppress it in favour of first the new counties and now the “regions”, which were only (unsuccessfully) promoted by Labour as political entities to provide a veneer of rationality and equal treatment for Scottish and Welsh devolution but English domination by Westminster (the West Lothian question).
This may all sound Ruritanian but I am deadly serious. Government needs to be seen to be open entry, civic and full of historical contingency and continuity, not a closed professional machine.
The relative success of constitutional juries in Ireland where people are picked at random to advice on contentious issues has made me wonder whether the best kind of Lower House would be one chosen by lottery. You could pick people randomly and give them a temporary peerage for a 5 year term.
Going from Ireland to the UK I found the local government system to be strikingly lacking in any sense of ‘locality’. Its proven impossible to alter any Irish county due to the very tight association with GAA teams. This is despite the utter illogicality of the boundaries. By contrast in the UK they seem to be administratively convenient but utterly lacking in identity. For all its complexity, the French system of multiple layers of administration at regional and local level seems to work quite well.
Top that all with a selection of the most venal politician of the year to be fether and tarred in public. To be associated with the fact that, like with some police forces, all these elected should wear a camera with audio and video recording, like an ankle monitor…
The scale of the US, any large country is best suited for a mixed proportional system. Two houses are necessary.
One would be straight forward. The other would be super districts. Everyone would get 5 open spots or so to vote for based on regional maps. They would be staggered elections. Instead of “Virginia” or Maryland delegations, there would be Chesapeake Bay delegations. This would be hardest to draw, but we do it every ten years anyway. Besides being legislators, they would be pushed into being lobbyists, not necessarily bad, fir their region unlike Senators who are protected from being replaced.
Nix the president and super-sized the states except Cali and Texas.
Yeah totally on board with mixed proportional system.
As I have just spitballed elsewhere in the thread, one of the two houses should not attempt to be proportional in the sense that we know it in various European countries but should be a “common sense handbrake” on populism that might arise in the “more democratic” house. Of course there are infinite ways of doing this and deciding which house has the “more proportional” aspects but the more I look at the USA, the more I think that “it has the right idea, it is just that the Founding Fathers couldn’t have envisaged how people might INTERACT with the voting systems under late-stage capitalism and lead to the profound oddities we now see”. I bored people before about how survey designers don’t realise how respondents interact with the survey and game the system.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
no congressional district could exceed 250,000 citizens.
Spud, that leaves you with an unmanageable number of representatives. We use to have House districts based on a given number of residents, but when the number went over 400 representatives got edgy.
That would require the number of seats in the House to more than triple, but that’s not a bad thing. The size of the House was limited to 435 members by law in 1913. At that time the US population around 93 million, which meant one Member of Congress represented about 212,000 citizens. Today with an estimated population of 345,000,000, each member represents about 793,000. In other words, our represenation has been watered to about 1/4 of what it was 120 years ago. 1 per 250,000 would bring it back to about the 1913 ratio.
For comparison:
Canada: estimated population – 41 million, Members of the House of Commons – 338 = approximately 121,000 citizens per MP
UK: estimated population – 69 million, Members of the House of Commons – 650 = approximately 106,000 citizens per MP
For those who would point out the that House chamber could not possibly be enlarged to handle such a significant increase in members: true, but is that really an obstacle to effective representation? Neither Commons chamber in London or Ottawa are large enough to seat more than a fraction of the membership at one time.
US leaves the issue of voting to the states, if I remember correctly. The US Constitution is quite an open ended document and it doesn’t really need changing. Money in politics is the main curse.
It’s the single seat constituencies that will always force a two party system, no matter the method you use to select the only winner in each constituency.
Too lazy to find out by myself, but I wonder if there is any “anglo-saxon” country with a proportional representation and thus coalition politics with compromise and continuum?
Both of them would probably protest against the description as “anglo-saxon”, but if we consider the english speaking world and political culture, I think Scotland and Ireland might be the examples you are looking for.
Scotland has a pretty proportional system with both direct election and proportional seats added to get a proportional result (similar to the German election system). Though SNP has dominated by getting close to 50% so they have not needed to do much coalition building.
Ireland with its single transferable vote in multi (3-5) member constituencies is probably the best example, it regularly creates coalitions, though it is not strict proportional.
I think the irish system should be interesting for other english speaking countries. It has the direct representation, but yields much lower barriers for new parties. It also has the interesting effect of rewarding being not that polarising, because then you can easier pick up transfer votes.
Yes, thats an excellent summary of the Irish system.
Multi seat constituencies with proportional representation has the effect of allowing people to choose favoured candidates from within parties as well as between parties.
The contrast with other parts of the Anglosphere is very obvious. There are far more ‘viable’ political parties (i.e. parties with a reasonable shot at being part of a coalition), and it tends to favour politicians who are more consensual than those who only appeal to their core support (as they attract more transfer votes). This has the unfortunate tendency to encourage ‘parish pump’ type politics – woe betide any Irish politician who doesn’t get involved in every little local matter. It also encourages independents, who can be a fly in the ointment for governments if they have the balance of power. But unlike the UK, it has allowed more overt left and Green politicians to get some influence, despite Ireland being in many ways more fundamentally conservative and rural than Britain. So far, the far right hasn’t won significant numbers of seats, even at local level, but not from want of trying. Although a handful of independents could (arguably) fall into the far right camp.
It also, it should be said, encourages parties to split up. Minor splittist parties in the UK tend to vanish without trace very quickly, but in Ireland, with a few good candidates, they can get seats, and so some influence. Examples would be Aontu, a nationalist, socially conservative but economically left wing split from Sinn Fein, and the Social Democrats, who despite their name was an anti-austerity split party from the Irish Labour Party when the latter was in power. They now look like they could supplant Labour.
At a rough count, Ireland now has around 8-10 parties or semi-formal groupings with a realistic chance of becoming part of a coalition, or at least having significant representation at local level. The number tends to be a moveable feast, mostly because of the tendency for the Irish left to form splits after every monthly meeting.
So in reality, Irish voters have a much wider choice than in any other Anglosphere country. Whether this leads to better government though is debatable.
Variants of STV were in vogue in some parts of US either in late 19th or early 20th century, for local elections. I can’t remember why exactly it died out, but I have vague memory of reading that they had trouble withstanding demands for audits of the election results when they were contested–something that I can definitely attest to given the trouble I had figuring out the Irish election results with all the transfers. I figure that the Irish electoral system would be the best in the world IF you could be certain that the votes are translated to offices with impeccable honesty and precision. (Which I don’t believe of any electoral process–even if not by ill intent, mistakes always happen, and in face of possible mistakes, having horribly complicated (ranking a lot of candidates counts as a horrible complication, I think.) ballots and elaborate rules for transferring votes based on the rankings make for something that can’t work out too well except in relatively small and/or fairly homogeneous communities without overly litigious people (i.e. not most of US).
FYI, the North of Ireland is the one part of the UK that uses 5-seater constituencies with transferable vote for electing MLAs to Stormont, very similar to the South of Ireland. In the south, constituencies are 3, 4 and 5 seaters. So it’ll make life easier if/when unification happens, at least the electoral system will be close to identical in both jurisdictions, one less thing to worry about.
5 seaters are best as they are easier for smaller parties win seats in. 3 seaters tend to be dominated by the 2 or 3 largest parties. Agree with the comment above insofar that 1-seaters with STV will still produce sub-optimal results (better than the UK one now, but only barely). Don’t think it’d necessarily lead to 2 party like the UK does now, but it would be far better to have multi-seats. The US should do the same with Congressional districts, merge 5 one-seaters into one five seater. Try Gerry-mandering that.
Disagree that it’ll inevitably lead to 2-party systems. I have no dog in the race re best-worst voting since I never had anything to do with it, merely was interested in what others did with our work but I’ve speculated that it could penalise extreme two-party candidates. I subsequently found one of the original articles that discusses the system here.
That single seat constituencies leads to a two party system (at least of the FPTP vartiety), so-called Duverger’s Law, presupposes that creating coalitions is easy. India and Papua New Guinea stand as counterexamples to this claim. Furthermore, once local coalitions are difficult to form and even 5-10% is enough to win a FPTP elections (fairly routinely the case in PNG), it actually discourages coalition building–if the other guys can’t form coalitions so that, you, with a 5% of the votes plus some random weather fluctuations, say, could win you the election, why would you want to commit to some deals with your hated rivals? Of course, Duverger’s Law (at least the popular variety) assumes that local two party system is the same as a national two party system, and that’s not true either (Canada and UK stand as rather obvious counterexamples to this.)
My own observation here about the Aussie voting system. I note over the decades how the Parliament – the lower house – tends to have one party or the other with the numbers to dominate. But then there is the matter of the upper house – the Senate. It seems to be instinctive for people to vote for some minor parties and not so much the two main stream parties. So people will vote for the Greens, One Nation and other minor parties. The reason is that any sitting government in power may pass legislation because they have the numbers in Parliament but to get it passed in the Senate, they have to get the minor parties onboard. Naturally this drives the two main parties nuts which suits us just fine.
Yeah I always thought the Aussie Senate was a MUCH better solution to the “total power” thing than the reform of the lower house (ditching FPTP for AV).
I continue to think that some reform of the House of Lords that (perhaps) keeps it slightly undemocratic but which makes it a council of the regions (100 Senators elected via PR) plus (say 50?) unelected but key figures who are top of their field (so replacing the bishops with certain Members of the Royal Society and some “applied” organisations etc) might be ideal.
You might have to be careful there. By recruiting ‘unelected but key figures who are top of their field’ it may lead to the reformed House of Lords being dominated by the professional managerial class who would have little sympathy or understanding of the bulk of the UK’s 69 million people. Just a thought.
Yeah my mentor from academia as a Senator of the UK? *Shudder* (Anyway if I were in charge I’d make it a constitutional law that no member of either house should have citizenship of any other country other than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – I remember the fuss in Aus when all those MPs were revealed to be Brits not Aussies lol).
Clearly there would need to be some serious thought about what “scientific/artistic/applied/other” top positions would gain you a Senate position and what checks and balances would be needed to ensure they provide “much needed intellectual input but no vested interest shenanigans” but I’d hope we could think of something – anything is frankly better than the status quo!
Slavery drowned out everything, but the US had indirectly elected Senators for a time, selected by state legislatures. Former state Speakers aren’t likely to be president, and as former speakers, they would know the difficulties of governing, making them less likely to grandstand or oppose the House for attention.
It would be interesting to look at the antebellum US Senate without slavery for guidance.
In theory, they would be less likely to speak, being old and needing to attend to less stable constituencies. The direct election of Senators was criticized during its adoption as promoting demagogues who would invoke popular passions with limited means of removing them.
The Italian senate has a few senators for life. Presidents automatically become senator for life after office (thus neatly solving any problems of after office life), and presidents can also appoint a few senators for life.
The last season of The Rake TV series delves very well into the issue…
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587000/
The US does not need the Aussie system–it needs to return to the old Constitutional system that is almost broken. At any rate, it doesn’t really matter at this time since, the UK and EU are vassals to Washington and voting is fun but kind of irrelevant because, as far as I can see, the ruling class in the vassals states never vary by much. We in the USA would just like honest government that is not systemically corrupt as our Washington federal gov’t clearly is. Democracy here has become irrelevant. But that could change certainly most people would like t to change.
>Telegram says arrested CEO Durov has ‘nothing to hide’ BBC
In the UK, the app was scrutinised for hosting far-right channels that were instrumental in organising the violent disorder in English cities earlier this month
That’s not the reason why according to many TweetX I read yesterday. Rather, it was on the behest of Isreal that Havel Dukov was arrested by French authorities.
Anti-Israel hackers have published extensive amounts of classified data as Israel continues its struggle to contain leaks, Turkey-based Anadolu Agency reported, citing the Israeli daily Haaretz.
I don’t know the what the veracity for the reason, I do know that my TwitterX feed was ablaze with stories, including Elon Musk chiming in and garnering millions of views. It’s probably because my interest include media censorship.
On thing the arrest did was to inform people like myself, who uses Telegram platform for his family chat, who Havel Dukov is. I did not know Tucker Carlson interviewed him recently. A fascinating interview and a fascinating person, this Dukov. His brother apparently is some kind of mathematical genius, if you haven’t seen the interview, it’s worth watching. Anyway, thanks to his arrest, I’ve learned much about the owner of Telegram, and and I plan to explore the platform even more now. The country from which the U.S. emerged kept Assange rotting in jail for years and now the country of Liberté, égalité, fraternité has arrested someone who seem to be holding to his principles of freedom of speech…go figure.
https://www.business-standard.com/external-affairs-defence-security/news/anti-israel-hackers-published-extensive-amount-of-classified-data-report-124082500575_1.html
For those aware of the BBC UK vs BBC world divergence, I just noted that when I hover over the link it is bbc.com but when clicking it redirects to bbc.co.uk if you are in UK with a confirmed link to BBC iPlayer (and thus definitely a BBC Licence fee payer) and the very brief appearance of the BBC.com version which does not look identical to the bbc.co.uk version.
Thank you Sir Keir for confirming that we do indeed have UK Pravda. /sarc
Pavel Durov.
Not Havel. That’s a Czech last name, not ever a Russian first name.
Thanks for correction, some reason name doesn’t want to stick in my brain.
The EU has really crossed a line here. So not only is your money not safe there but people who don’t follow the orders of the establishment may now find themselves under arrest. And the US/EU want to have control of telegraph’s near billion users. Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of video-sharing platform Rumble, was in Europe and when he heard this news he got out of there as fast as he could. Maybe even Musk might have to be careful about flying to Europe. Washington could very well ask an EU country to arrest him in order to put pressure on him to change what he does with X at home. It could happen-
https://www.rt.com/news/603071-rumble-boss-flees-europe-durov-arrest/
“Maybe even Musk might have to be careful about flying to Europe. Washington could very well ask an EU country to arrest him in order to put pressure on him to change what he does with X at home. It could happen…”
Remember that the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei was arrested on behalf of the US, and kept under arrest in Canada for 3 years. The US was trying to destroy Huawei and the CFO just happened to be flying across Canada and landed along the way. Of course, the US is continuing to try to ruin Huawei.
In my view there is a deep psychological appeal for the totalitarian model for government and we can see today that this model is embraced by the ruling elites and many of the common people as well who have a need for one Narrative to set their confusion to rest.
correct link for “Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep?”
https://www.anarchistfederation.net/aragorn-eloff-do-anarchists-dream-of-emancipated-sheep/
re consensus on Long Covid. I sigh reading this because this week we have the whole extended family supposedly on holiday in a thankfully drier sunnier part of the UK that has escaped that storm that was remnant of the tropical storm/hurricane that hit North America a few days ago.
Due to a variety of factors that I won’t bore you with, I have to return to Nottingham to see the dermatologist one day in the middle of our week away. Otherwise they’ll discharge me. Irony is that I’ll probably get no new treatment but this is important purely because this is the only specialty out of 3-4 that has BLATANTLY observable sequelae of COVID (scalp issues).
My only chance of the NHS not fobbing me off is keeping on the list with the one specialty that has acknowledged this is “Long Covid”, even when they’ll probably do nothing and I lose a day of my holiday. Comparing notes with sibling has been real eye opener – exact same weird sequelae, although mine much more severe. But the NHS around here are desperate to discharge you without mention of Long Covid – meaning I have to ensure that “obvious physical” stuff is logged every 6 months.
Doctors better start researching long COVID before everyone (including the medical community) is brain damaged…
Re Vindman says Musk should be ‘nervous’ after Telegram CEO was arrested:
Interestingly enough in these times of information censorship by omission in mainstream media, the Fox news article makes literally no mention of the fact that Vindman is of Ukrainian extraction and vehemently hostile to all things Russian.
Vindman is nuts. I follow him on Twitter just for his unhinged rants. The guy is a certifiable nut job on the level of Olbermann, Rob Reiner, and the like. Yesterday he was hawking tee shirts that said “Veteran’s for Harris.”
I sure wouldn’t want to be in the military under these crazy people. I would prefer to stay a living veteran instead of a dead one.
I think his twin brother is running for some office. Warmongers unite! I hope he loses by a landslide.
That would be Eugene Vindman that you are talking about as I was just reading up on him today. The Democrats must really want him elected as in April ‘Vindman was photographed alongside supporters in a now-deleted post to Twitter holding a flag used during the Virginia’s Confederate period.’ How many new politicians could get away with that stunt but they let him get away with it anyway so he is still running-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Vindman#2024_U.S._House_of_Representatives_campaign
Thanks for this Rev Kev.
This is also from the Wiki entry;
Vindman received endorsements from Adam Schiff, former Under Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy, and the The Washington Post editorial board.
Shifty Schiff, USOA, and the spook paper – that’s all I need to know to vote against him if I lived there.
Someone should ask all these oh so virtuous democrats how and why they became such war mongers and war monger lovers?
Hilarious. Vindman calls being photographed with the Confederate flag a “mistake”. Perhaps it was. And perhaps not, given Vindman’s loyalties to the far right, Banderite-infested Ukrainian government.
However had this been a Republican candidate, I’m sure they would not be given the benefit of the doubt and would be portrayed as an unrepentant “racist”.
On a message board I frequent (for entertainment purposes) there are people there who use his image as their avatar. IIRC, he testified in one of the Trump impeachments (against Trump – like Fiona Hill also did) which is all you need to be a PMC hero (Fiona Hill is as well).
Just my observation, and maybe wrong, but I think the dems started jumping on the neo-con warmonger train with the likes of Vindman, Hill, the Lincoln Project, Kristal, Bush etc., is when Russiagate went mainstream and they were told Putin/Russia will take over America via Trump.
Simpler; all you have to do is badmouth Trump and you are a PMC hero.
> no voting system can deliver on all the key outcomes typically agreed to be desirable under a modern democratic industrialised society.
It would require significant change at the level of The Constitution to implement something like this in US, but I wonder whether there is an argument to be made for (for lack of better term) “fractional representation”, in which there are multiple legislators elected from each constituency, with each assigned a fractional vote in the legislature proportional to his vote share in the election. The administrative details would be messy, but it seems to me that this would allow one to have proportional representation even without large constituencies. In US, this would allow small parties like the Greens to influence legislation at national level as it might be necessary to recruit them to obtain legislative majorities.
>Finding love: Study reveals where love lives in the brain (press release) Aalto University
Not only can understanding the neural mechanisms of love help guide philosophical discussions about the nature of love, consciousness, and human connection, but also, the researchers hope that their work will enhance mental health interventions in conditions like attachment disorders, depression or relationship issues.
Sure, just like O’Brien’s intervention was successful in his “work to enhance” Winston Smith’s love of Big Brother.
“Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep?” links to a Naked Capitalism article from 2012, titled “O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! A Jobs Story”
Correct link included above.
Would like to know whether I should go ahead and get an mRNA booster or wait for the Novavax. There are partisans of Novavax online but it is hard to gauge whether it will actually be better.
We do not give medical advice. However, KFF Health News is suggesting to wait until closer to get a booster regardless.
A good place for research about actions and approches contra Covid would be the FLCCC. Look ’em up. They would be the antithesis to the CDC so it’s often good to “do your own research” though that phrase has been poo pooed by mainstream media.
Not giving advice here but I personally favor the Novavax simply because it is not the MNRA type, which I had a bad reaction to on my second jab.
First thing first: this is not a place for medical advice as it has already been told to you. Anyone with doubts on this might ask a physician if one knows one who being knowledgeable on the issue and one with a history of mutual trust (not a drug seller to say it in this way), and is willing to provide advice based on that knowledge. Regarding the issue of vaccines for COVID you must know the noise to signal ratio is very high.
Usually the selling pitch for such vaccines is the boost of neutralizing antibody titres in blood but, to tell the truth, nobody knows what those titres will be against the next variants of the virus and it will depend on many factors including your history of COVID infections and vaccinations, the state of your immune system, other clinic precedents, plus other personal information and the “Unknown Factors”. The more complex that history the more difficult to predict. I have erased the rest of my comment with some more information because someone might interpret it as advice. To tell the truth, a balanced risk analysis is nearly impossible these days. Besides or apart a decision on vaccines one might think on other measures that reduce exposure of course.
Perhaps also start adding some antiviral foods to your diet. Dr Been does a good job of explaining the workings and complexity of the immune system where antibodies are just one facet. There is also the concern that mismatched antibodies that bind weakly to the antigen (virus in this case) can make things worse. There is some data suggesting this is happening, so knowing what strain is circulating at the time in your area could also impact your decision.
>All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
That federally-insured bank, part of the international trading conglomerate known as Goldman Sachs Group, is allowed by its federal regulators to have $521 billion in assets but $54 trillion in derivatives.
But don’t worry. Under U.S. accounting rules, these derivatives can be whittled down under the magic known as “netting,” and conveniently moved out-of-sight/out-of-mind off the balance sheet.
I wonder how I can manage some “netting” of my own…without ending up in jail that is.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/08/all-the-devils-from-2008-are-back-at-the-megabanks-leverage-off-balance-sheet-debt-over-192-trillion-in-derivatives-shaky-capital-levels/
It’s different this time. /s
Don’t miss “Cloudbusting.” It discusses some of the philosophical and historical background behind both Ecomodernism and gender switching along with the role being played by members of the Pritztker family in both.
Thanks for the flag. This sentence brings it home (“they” are Rachel and Roland Pritzker);
But their concern often seems more about how capitalist profits and growth are threatened by climate breakdown than about breakdown itself. Given that we will all be pleading for geo-engineering in the very near future, the Pritzker cousins will likely face few challenges to their “temptations to play god”.
2nd-ing mrsky’s thank you.
It can’t be long before Republican oppo brings some of the Pritzker family’s “weird” dealings to light, can it? Maybe it can. I remember first hearing about the Pritzkers circa 2008 during Obama’s first run, but it was through marginal internet commenters on political websites who noted them as largely unknown billionaires financing Obama’s rise through the political ranks, and they were often banned for mentioning it. I just heard about the money then, not the crazy, and we still don’t hear much about the nuttery in mainstream news. Odd.
I note that in the article, the Pritzker’s geo-engineering efforts are linked to Michael Shellenberger. I remain extremely skeptical of Shellenberger. I don’t know why Taibbi worked with him on the Twitter files, but perhaps he didn’t have a choice. From listening to videos of him speaking, Shellenberger strikes me as a bit naive and a bit of a kook – like he’s trying to be just a wee bit smarter than everybody else with some sort of hot take, but he isn’t actually smart. Maybe he lucked out in getting to work with Taibbi, an actually smart person.
And don’t pass up on the link to Kate Bush at the top of the article. She’s sublime and the video, featuring Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich, is close to pitch perfect.
“Russian Engels military airfield where strategic bombers are based attacked by UAVs – photo, video”
That is amazing that article, especially since the Ukrainians themselves are publishing it. They are actually showing one of their own drones deliberately target a civilian high-rise building in order to kill and injure civilians. And unlike the Israelis, they are not even pretending that they actually hit a Russian “command-post”. They are showing a war crime that they are committing and it is not the first video that I have seen of a Ukrainian drone select a civilian building to then hit it. They could have hit a military target but like Al-Qaeda from before 2001, they were more wrapped up in hitting “symbolic” buildings.
It is all about PR – that Russia was unable to stop a drone attack. Most military targets are well-defended and relatively secure, yet it would be impossible to defend every civilian potential target due to finite resources. And western media lap it up, another bloody nose for impotent Putin etc.
Did not those western media see the connection between a drone hitting a civilian high-rise and a jet-liners hitting civilian buildings in New York city? Watching that video today, it was the first thing that popped into my mind.
New York TImes reported that Russian terrorist high-rise struck a freedom dispensing drone in order to prevent it from destroying communism, located 12 kilometres away.
I read the piece on RT’s website that they are outfitting Yak 54 aerobatic prop planes for dealing with the drones. Somebody need to do a mod for flite sims so people can get in some practice.
re: How Democrats make Republicans:… – Turley
apropos to his point, here’s Bret Weinstein on twtr-X:
Bret Weinstein Reacts to RFK Jr & Trump Joining Forces: ‘This is Absolutely Monumental’
“This was not a simple endorsement of Trump. This was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the Republic to its proper course…I think the modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to the republic. And although I am a Democrat, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. The party that I see in front of me today is literally the inverse of the party I signed up for….”
https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1827297934251024560
Agreed. The Democrat party was wrested away from its base by Citizens United. Before CU it had been a battle the base was losing but Citizens United let the neolib/cons change the locks at DNC hq.
This is a party that refused to let the late Tom Breu run a Bernie style campaign against Paul Ryan in SE WI in 2016, costing them WI and the election. What did Democrats learn from this? By 2018 a DNC-controlled consulting group had taken control of the Wisconsin Working Families Party and used it to create a fake populist campaign around Randy Bryce (a real working class guy, bona fide as they come).
Breu was going to run as a Star Trek guy. We even had mockups of Star Trek style communicator campaign buttons (think we could have sold any of those?). The Wisconsin Democrats had a paralegal meet with us to tell us the Strek merch was illegal. Took me two years to trick google into finally finding the Appellate Court ruling that declared it almost impossible to violate Star Trek’s copyright due to ubiquity.
Stealth neolib consultants went with “Ironstache” instead and quite a few coffee cups and t-shirts were sold.
This is neoliberalism: anyone with half a brain and a creative streak gets shoved out the door. Later when that person is proven right, the party steals their ideas. In this case, the party stole my strategies (welcome to them!) but then included several poison pills (like unpaid child support they knew about but didn’t take care of until AFTER it leaked to the media). Democrats didnt’ want Bryce to win, they just wanted to harvest enough votes from Ryan’s old district (2018 was the year he decided to retire) to elect Evers governor and the increase in D votes in an off-year from WI CD01 over 2016 was more than Evers’ margin of victory.
This is a party corrupted beyond recognition. I cannot prove that the Democrats have me suppressed on Twitter but I tweet under my own name and if you pull up my account, look at the numbers my tweets get. In 2004 I had 500-1000 readers a day at my old blog. Most of them followed me to Twitter. I doubt hardly any of my followers ever see one of my tweets. That or they’ve all muted me (not impossible but I’m pretty sure we don’t need Occam’s Razor to sort this one out).
RFK Jr. is giving us an opportunity to realign the parties back into some semblance of conservative v liberal. What we have now is an unholy mess that needs to end starting now. Trump appears to be the first step to fixing this mess. More steps will be needed but that first step has yet to be taken.
Yep. Useful Idiots podcast hosts Katie and Aaron summed up the DNC convention takeaway sound bite as “Lethal Joy.”
Yep, we’re coming full circle. The Republican party of the 19th century was what would be considered now, “leftist” or “liberal”. It was against slavery for example. The Democrats of today are all in on “Volunteered Slavery”. (musical interlude)
FWIW, I’m in Ohio, Northwest area. My ex was the democratic party secretary a few years ago. Her and the treasurer resigned due to corruption at the local and state level. Neither of these took quitting lightly, and at the time they were hell bent on beating Trump.
The party is crooked to the core from the White House to the local courthouse.
Here’s the last 5 minutes of a Glenn Greenwald segment. utube.
RFK Jr. Quits, Endorses Trump, and Condemns DNC As Anti-Democratic
https://youtu.be/ArclvuLImDA?t=1506
Yeah, that relaxed Newsom laughing and airing about how “open” had been Harris nomination though immediately correcting to say how this has “unified” the party is very telling on what the DNC has become. Right now I cannot recall the exact words of Lambert’s definition of the democrats in his W.C. but that video probably supports such definition.
RFK was primarily funded by Republicans and I expected him to drop shortly after Trump named a VP. He’s now openly angling for a role in a Trump admin. How is anyone surprised?
(Meanwhile, I continue to be surprised by people who are excited about Walz-Harris.)
According to RFK, he also contacted the Democrats and they wouldn’t pick up the phone. I don’t see that piece of info mentioned when people want to criticize RFK for angling for a position with Trump.
Maybe RFK is blowing smoke, but it sounds like he made plenty of efforts to work with the Democrat party and was told to talk to the hand. So they get the middle finger in return, and they deserve it. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
Politics ain’t beanbag, and good for RFK for playing hardball with the Democrat clowns.
From the FAQ section of the DNC 2024 convention:
https://demconvention.com/faqs/
What is the COVID protocol for the 2024 DNC?
Then further down under ACCESSIBILITY:
Can I wear a mask at the United Center or McCormick Place?
I’m wondering if the tickets for the convention had a waiver of liabllity (like Ticketmaster does).
“Zelenskyy convenes major meeting focusing on traitors”
Ah, I see that Zelensky is now at the paranoid level of unelected dictators. So will we see mass arrests of people that disagree with him? The stringing up of deserters from the front and punitive measures taken against their families? Will he spend most of his time in his bunker now with his tattered green screen? The Russians could mess with him and tell him that they now have a new model-bunker buster or that they hacked his bank accounts. That might flip him out altogether.
Between 2019, when Zelenskyy became president, and 2023, almost 17% of the population of Ukraine left the country:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1t7q5
January 30, 2024
Total population of Ukraine and Georgia, 2019-2023
(Indexed to 2019)
I presume that doesn’t include the people who left with their lands? That’s 7 million or so in Russian controlled parts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zapirozhiya, and Kherson?
> Finding love: Study reveals where love lives in the brain (press release) Aalto University
Love this!
The image doesn’t do the study justice. This image has all sorts of tantalizing details. Why does the amygdala fire up with auditory input, and not visual? *Note that ACC was deactivated by all stories, and the deactivation was less for love compared to neutral control condition* (The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is recognized as an important cortical center of integrations of pain with emotional and situational cues.) Hmmm…
An important point for us’n’s:
> When we contrasted the brain activity of pet owners with non-pet owners during love for pets stories, we found activation in the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex and left temporoparietal junction, which may indicate increased emotion processing (see Saarimäki et al. 2018) and theory of mind activity.
This means the image for ‘Love for a pet’ is a statistical muddle-ground lacking information. Pay it no mind.
The world is not binary. The “either us or them” stance is a US, western, peculiarity. It is either god or the devil. More realistic is “both/and” which appears in Asian thought. Now we have this new confrontational stance vis a vis Russia and China in the Arctic. The US, NATOstan, lacks the means to take any effective action.
Chinese and Russian bombers fly 200 miles off the coast of Alaska. Panic ensues? I well remember when Russian Bear bombers would rrail their coat down the east coast of the US. There would be huffing and puffing and fluffing of feathers, but other than have fighter jets tail along, nothing.
We do it all the time. Freedom of navigation sorties. Bases and more bases. Oh my god, we have no carriers deployed in the Pacific. We have two carrier battle groups in the Middle East to assist Israel when Iran and the “axis of resistance” retaliate for two assassinations or is it in the continuation US support of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The Ukraine Project is a disaster for US/NATOstan yet it is all but certain to continue and to grow ever nastier as the ability of our Ukrainian cannon fodder to keep up the fight. Terrorism is the tactic of the weak so I guess it will be terrorism. Ukraine will be destroyed, but Black Rock’s investment must be protected or is it JP Morgan Chases’s investment or is it both and others. Well, they are in for the long term and once the desert called peace is realized, the payoff can begin … in a generation or two.
Taiwan will be integrated into China by 2049 at the latest. US stirring the pot, pumping in arms, promising support will in the long run accomplish nothing. But wait, there is always destruction and mayhem and death before the US once again says. “So sorry, but we have to leave you on your own.” The oligarchs do not care. The DC Bubble and Echo Chamber is a talking shop, when its members can stop dialing for dollars. It waves its arms and puffs out its chest, throws money at the MIC, and then moves on to the next shiny object in the cross hairs of the oligarchs.
Yes Mr. Franklin, we had a republic. We had a degree of people power. We even had a brief moment of a working social democracy in the generation after World war II. It was a good time to grow up in America. Now I am old. I guess we failed to protect what we had and thus plutocracy, the oligarchy, techno-feudalism is our gift to the next generation
John Michael Greer counsels that when you are confronted by a binary, look for a third possibility (there will almost always be one). Once you discover that third possibility, you will often find that you have opened the floodgates and a host of other possibilities will begin to present themselves as well. I have found this advice to be invaluable
I think John Michael Greer’s obsevation is neurologically profound. The phylogenetic archetype of ‘the human brain’ or ‘consciousness’ is the vertebrate fish’s tail. It is always left or right; never both-and.
In neocortex we have excitatory neurons and inhibitory neurons. When the excitatory neurons are locked in a resonant state, we are stubborn until a ‘surprising event’ causes a rebound, complementing (i.e., negating) the previous resonance {“yes, but”}.
With a trillion neurons, there are many concurrent and often conflicting resonances. Geting past the first pair is the paralogical process C S Peirce called “abduction”, the process by which Kepler went through many hypotheses before discovering elliptical orbits.
The young man who wrote about scarcity of DF 21 targets (aka aircraft carriers) in the 7th fleet area of operations is even more interesting because he cited SecDef Austin as giving orders.
I am not aware the SecDef is in the JCS chain of command. That headquarters would be run by the president.
Maybe VP Harris is giving orders!
Maybe things changed in the 14 odd years since I retired.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_structure_of_the_United_States_Department_of_Defense
The SecDef is in the chain of command which then goes to the unified/specified commands (CENTCOM/INDOPACOM). The JCS is advisory, but all orders from the SecDef are communicated via the JS.
I failed to proof read my previous comment. I shall not do so again.
Just use the TimeTraveler plugin, unfortunately only available for the FluffOX browser (unfortunately only available for the Haiku Operating system {unfortunately only available for ARM processors, e.g. the Raspberry Pie [unfortunately depends on the Time DeParadoxer module, that I can fortunately procure for a measly 10000$ in cash – An exclusive offer for you, highly esteemed fellow commentator]})
Anti-antidote at the 1:03 mark for those of us who once aspired to lion-taming: https://youtu.be/xvtIGQqg1-I?si=ls1ZNwcMp40q13up
REIT-wreck Strut
Sung to the tune of “Stray Cat Strut” by the Stray Cats
Melody
Oooh-ooh-ooh-ohh 4x
Bankrupt Office space surrounded by a fence
Ain’t got enough tenants to pay the rent
I’m flat broke but I don’t care
I strut right by and rearrange deck chairs!
REIT-wreck strut, got no cashflow, man!
CRE supernova, hey man, that’s that
Got an obsolete use-case, and no backup plan
Shareholders eatin’ from a garbage can!
Meow
Yeah, don’t follow my path
[Guitar break]
I don’t bother chasing tenants around (whoa-no!)
I beg for a bailout with workers now in flight
Howling to Jay Powell on a hot summer night
Balance sheet oozes while the bankster cats cry
“Wild REIT-wreck you’re a real gone guy
I wish I could be as carefree and wild
But I got class action lawsuits ready to fly”
[Musical interlude w/ guitar breaks]
I don’t bother chasing tenants around (whoa-no!)
I beg for a bailout with workers now in flight
Howling to Jay Powell on a hot summer night
Slingin’ accounting tricks while the bankster cats cry
“Wild REIT-wreck you’re a real gone guy
I wish I could be as carefree and wild
But I got class action lawsuits ready to fly”
Having missed out on the collector gene I find the collecting phenomena both incomprehensible and fascinating. Why would someone pay anything, much less tens of millions of dollars, for an old shirt given:
1) It is far from conclusive that the gesture Babe Ruth made prior to the home run was calling the shot. (Ruth himself initially claimed he was pointing at the Cubs’ dugout.)
2) It is far from conclusive that the jersey sold was actually the jersey worn during the game. (One of the third party authentication firms consulted reported that their photo matching was unable to confirm authenticity. And game-worn memorability wasn’t a thing in the 1930s so how likely is it that the jersey Ruth acttually wore was saved.)
It all brings to mind Christian relics in medieval Europe.
China property: Shanghai’s luxury homes sell out as developers target the super-rich – South China Morning Post.
Multipolar catering to the super-rich.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/aug/changing-composition-of-disability-among-workers
Russia, China compete with US for Arctic Circle dominion that could shape international trade for decades -FOX
NATO’s Arctic Strategy Is an Overreaction – The American Conservative
Where’s the Tuunbaq when you need him?
Re: Pavel Durov and Telegram
I find it strange that what is primarily a messenger app gets repeatedly talked about as though it had more in common with Facebook than ICQ or those ancient online chat rooms. Yes it has channels that operate similarly to email digests but mostly it is a tool for people to talk to each other online where messages appear in the order they were posted rather than annoyingly and weirdly curated, as they are on facebook. That Telegram has not, thus far and to my knowledge, been in the business of selling personal information derived from the accounts is a further plus.
I help run an online support group for folks with ME/CFS/LongCovid and we use Telegram. For some bedbound people our community is the only social connection they have outside their family (who sometimes are borderline or outright abusive with the adult children they have been stuck taking care of until their death). It is not just for discussion of treatments, research, and advocacy. We also watch movies (when folks are well enough), play games, and shoot the shit about everything from cat care to vibrators.
Anyone who has ever had to go without friends knows how essential community is to our lives. That Macron thinks he has a right to not only listen to, but interfere in our private conversations is frightening. Will we also send political officers to make notes in AA meetings so they can report during disability hearings?
If the aim of western governments is to shut down all online communication not passing through one of their censors then I wonder how long until the likes of Signal or Matrix are made unavailable to the average user as well. If all we are left with are facebook groups…I think that will be the end of our support group.
I think humanity is at its best when we care for one another. Destroying such an opportunity seems…well it seems a shame.
I remember when Telegram was blocked in Russia (on computers, but oddly not on phones). Our government had or expressed similar concerns to the French one, as I recall. Durov was never arrested, though, and later Telegram was quietly allowed back in (of course everyone still accessed it even when it was being blocked, but there’s no problem with using it on computers now). This is a very interesting turn, not least because it has for once united the Russian governmet and most anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine Russian liberals, but not many of the latter’s Western idols. Telegram is, of course, the main venue for effectively uncontrolled political discussion and news sharing in Russia today, along with many other useful things. It’d be something if the Free Democracies are the ones who kill it for us. It’d certainly show their commitment to democracy and an open society over here if they deal a stronger blow to it than anything Putin has bothered to do.
I think I heard either of the Alexes quoting Zakharova on this point. Destroying democracy in order to save “democracy(tm)” because it’s great and glorious and just and good if “we” do it and all that….
Yeah, but while I’d expect them to do that at home, willfully endangering the key infrastructure of democratic activism in Russia in the process is taking it to a new level. Though it might be a sign of them giving up on accomplishing anything here and electing to consolidate control at home instead. That would certainly make sense.
Mike Benz’s take on what’s happening; he thinks this goes up to the US State Department, Macron did not act on his own initiative. fwiw. twtr-X.
Just got booted from the @MarioNawfal
space so I’m gonna speak my peace here: what’s behind today’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov
https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1827511196590743720
an aside, a clip from the movie Idiocracy – Brawndo. utube. 2 minutes. / ;)
Brawndo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBML3VpbuYQ
adding: from WaPo, September 2023. No paywall.
Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco
A new study suggests that tobacco companies, who were skilled at marketing cigarettes, used similar strategies to hook people on processed foods.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction-foods-hyperpalatable-tobacco/
here you go flora – a laundry list of the players in the oligoposphere – a scorecard if you will –
https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-control-everything-we-buy-2017-8?op=1
and Morgan Freeman in his mellifluous voice describing tobacco’s move to junk food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiHHgZx5IZ8
I see Thomas Frank is having conversations with Jacobin and Sy Hersh (both behind paywalls) about this summers political conventions. I hope he writes about about this era in US politics.
re: “Federal judge tosses Kansas machine gun possession case on Second Amendment grounds Kansas”
Bearing arms in 1778 meant knives, swords, single shot firearms, and cannons with large iron shot balls.
To focus this let’s ask: “Does The Constitution allow me to bear (ie fire) a nuclear weapon?”
if that’s a no, then how about ballistic missiles? Phosphorous bombs? Howitzers shooting degraded uranium or fragmentation shells? Drone bombers?
Are we still at no? Doesn’t our Constitution protect the right to bear arms? Where is the logic of machine guns that weren’t around until 1861, the invention of the Gatling Gun. Does anyone ever argue this case?
This originalist constitutional reading is just, as I’m sure has been noted here, a bullshit excuse to extirpate The New Deal, and herein, to make sure that private militias are well armed so we can have another Civil War and resurrect slavery.
Something doesn’t seem right: laws against actual “machine guns” (fully automatic weapons ) has been in palce since 1930s and no one really has challenged them, as far as I know. What actual kind of guns were at stake in this case? I ask because the link didn’t seem to indicate that (Granted, very quick glance on my part) and anti-gun people are notorious for mixing up different kinds of firearms. (a lot of references to “machine guns” by anti-gun types invariably are not actually about real automatic weapons, as far as I know).
Specifically, Defendant is charged with possessing an Anderson Manufacturing, model AM-15 .300 caliber machinegun and a machinegun conversion device. It was established at the hearing that the conversion device is a so-called “Glock switch” which allows a Glock, model 33, .357 SIG caliber firearm to fire as an automatic weapon.
Fear & loathing in Reno-adjacent
We were near the turnoff to Hwy 182 just past the road to Bodie when my accomplice started doing lines of Necco wafers on his bucket seat, and there is nothing worse than somebody in the throes of a sweet tooth, as I popped Sixlets in my mouth, ooh chocolately good, as I downshifted into 5th gear to avoid a marmot who was attracted by the odor of HFCS emanating out of the Taco.
Are Razzles candy or gum?
Why not both, as I poured the contents into my mouth as we skirted by Reno and into Fernley, Nv. Where there are military bunkers all over the place, no doubt full of Charms, an erstwhile competitor to the aforementioned Razzles, but less gum looking. Perhaps a strategic supply of candy poses no harm other than the idea you’ll rot your teeth out, kid.
We had purposely kept the 100 Grand Bars until nearing the entrance, what if we had to pay off the border guards at Burning Man to get away from the default world, surely a million $’s worth would do the trick, was the thinking…
As the Abba Zabba turns, I took a bite out of a Big Hunk, which seems sponsored by a dentist union, along with Jujubees, but that’s why we have incisors my friends.
I suggest actually studying the precedents going back to Cruikshank and Presser, then Miller. As noted in the decision, 740,000 machine guns are currently “possessed” (kept). It is only the GOPA 86 codified as 18 USC 922(o), that made it impossible to transfer/possess a machine gun made after that date.
It is currently an open question if the taxation scheme of NFA 34 is an “infringement”.’
The history of “Miller” makes it kind of difficult to draw bright lines from, but it did suggest that evidence that short-barrelled shotguns had utility as militia weapons could be considered.
Brad Raffensperger is a Republican so it will be interesting to see what he decides now that the decision to include third party and independent candidates on Georgia’s presidential ballot rests solely with him. I admit I haven’t been following Georgia politics close enough to guess which way he will go.
Judge says 4 independent and third-party candidates should be kept off Georgia presidential ballots
In other swing state ballot access news today (I should’ve kept scrolling before I posted the above comment, sorry!):
Green Party’s Jill Stein will remain on Wisconsin ballot after court refuses to hear challenge
Cornel West is back on Michigan’s presidential ballot, judge rules