A couple had an owl be the ringbearer at their wedding — It flew away New York Post
What plant philosophy says about plant agency and intelligence aeon (Dr. Kevin)
The Passing of the Age: The Battle of Lepanto Big Serge. Big Serge is always a great read.
John Lee Clark is pioneering an emerging language — and culture MPR (Chuck L)
Midlife Blood Biomarkers Predict Late-Life Dementia MedPage
Bird flu cases are going undetected, new study suggests. It’s a problem for all of us. CNN. Paul R: “They are getting sick from it without being diagnosed with it. So there is limited visibility.”
US Prepares For Bird Flu Pandemic With $176 Million Moderna Vaccine Deal ars technica
#COVID-19
People who had severe covid-19 show cognitive decline years later New Scientist. Paul R: “An analysis of people who were hospitalised with covid-19 in the first wave of the pandemic has revealed that the ongoing decline in their cognitive abilities is the equivalent to losing 10 IQ points”
Climate/Environment
🚨In the 24 years that have elapsed since the year 2000 we humans have dug, drilled and blasted more minerals/metals/fuels from the earth's surface than we did in the ENTIRE 20th century. Way more.
🧨This is our story – like it or not.
🪨We are living in a Material World🪨 pic.twitter.com/4p9G7SgevO— Ed Conway (@EdConwaySky) August 1, 2024
Hillary Clinton-run group helps fund Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion Telegraph
Maui Wildfire Plaintiffs Reach $4 Billion Settlement as Anniversary Nears New York Times (Kevin W)
China?
China Continues To Crush In Science & Intel Falters In Chips Ian Welsh (Micael T)
China central bank adviser calls for greater stimulus, inflation goal Reuters
US to tighten China chip squeeze with old Cold War rule Asia Times (Kevin W)
Supply Chain
CO2 shortages: How did we get here? Gas World
Hospitals face shortage of bottles for blood cultures, and it’s a big problem Chief Healthcare Executive
Africa
Famine officially declared in Sudan Telegraph
European Disunion
EU snubs Hungary and Slovakia over Ukraine oil sanctions Politico
Scholz cuts funding for social housing Jacobin via machine translation (Micael T)
Sweden and the United States enter into new nuclear power agreement Government.se. Micael T: “First step of Sweden to develop and station nuclear weapons on its territory? Sweden did sign the surrender agreement for ”defense cooperation”, which does not exclude nuclear weapons in Sweden directed at Russia.”
Old Blighty
The number of births in Scotland has fallen to its lowest ever recorded level BBC
Gaza
>In show of support for Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader, US to send more fighter jets and warships to Middle East WSWS
Israel’s war on Gaza live: Israel kills 5 in Tulkarem strike, raids city Aljazeera
Exclusive: Haniyeh killed by projectile and not a planted bomb, eyewitnesses say Middle East Eye. This matters because the NYT ran a long piece attributing the blast to a bomb planted about two months ago.
Erdogan to Biden: Israel wants to spread Gaza conflict to region Middle East Online
Houthis Urge ‘Dangerous’ Response to Israel Over Killing of Hamas, Hezbollah Leaders Sputnik
Gazans’ extreme hunger could leave its mark on subsequent generations The Conversation (Dr. Kevin)
Craig Murray: The Israeli Nihilist State Consortium News (Judith)
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine SitRep: Catch up Moon of Alabama. A good overview, particularly for those who haven’t had time to keep close tabs.
The interesting details of the prisoner exchange between Russia and the USA Anti-Spiegel (Micael T)
Russian-West Prisoner Exchange – What the MSM Won’t Tell You, Real Target of Israeli Assassination of Hamas Political Chief in Iran is the USA, more Mark Sleboda, Faultlines
Ukraine watches warily as prisoner swap shows Moscow and West can negotiate Washington Post (Kevin W)
Russian MOD Purges Hit Fever Pitch, as Belousov Scythes Corruption Simplicius
Syraqistan
As Misery Multiplies, Pakistanis Rise Up Against the Ruling Elite New York Times
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Here we go again with more AI crime prediction for policing The Register
Imperial Collapse Watch
U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns. Axios
Germany helps protect South Korea’s border Tagesschau via machine translation (guurst)
Georgia Averts Coup by US-Backed War Criminal Group Active Measures (Micael T)
Pentagon chief revokes plea deal with three September 11 attack suspects, reinstating them as death penalty cases ABC Australia (Kevin W)
TRACKING DOWN LIEUTENANT CALLEY Seymour Hersh (Robin K)
Kamala
Harris campaign eager to maintain its momentum The Hill
KAMALA — UNSCRIPTED FOR THE FIRST TIME:
"This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy."
WHAT? pic.twitter.com/lxlhhG1xhT
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 2, 2024
🚨 Harmeet Dhillon TORCHES "Chameleon" Kamala after working professionally with her for +20 years:
"Kamala only seemed to be Indian when she's asking for money from Indian-Americans. Her ludicrous accent, she's not from the South. No one talks like that in Jamaica. Its Cringe" pic.twitter.com/dp7FGhsW9m
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 1, 2024
Trump
Biden victim of ‘a coup’ – Trump RT. Trump has been throwing a lot of wide-of-the marke haymakers recently. Perhaps is he regaining his footing?
I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump.
Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I…
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) July 31, 2024
Trump Assassination Post Mortem
Secret Service’s Tech Issues Helped Shooter Go Undetected At Trump Rally Guardian
SECRET SERVICE AND FBI STILL NOT TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT WHO SHOT CROOKS Larry Johnson
GOP Clown Car
Paul Dans, the Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans ProPublica (Robin K)
2024
Mr. Market Has a Sad. READER ALERT: See the three data points indicating a sudden, sharp weakening in the US economy. Do you have any consistent or contradictory anecdata or industry news?
Intel Stock Drops Toward 50-Year Low Amid Mass Layoffs Business Insider
Central banks are turning the ship, but their path is unclear Reuters
Wayfair CEO likens home goods slowdown to 2008 financial crisis CNBC
Hershey Slashes Annual Forecasts After Sales Collapse Finimize
Hoisting from Lambert’s 8/1 Water Cooler:
"We have a 30 year old family member who works on the assembly line building Peterbuilt trucks in Denton, Texas. (a PACCAR company) He has seniority and works the #1 shift. He was told not to come to work next week. Shutting down the assembly line for a week due to lack of…
— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) July 31, 2024
Our No Longer Free Press
Censorship Industry: GARM Members Receive Billions in Federal Contracts Foundation for Freedom Online (Li)
TikTok to Ban Some Criticisms of Zionism Following Pressure from NGO Backed by Former Israeli Intelligence Officials Lee Fang (Robin K). From earlier in the week, still germane.
Falling Apart Boeing Airplanes, Space Edition
IT’S SOUNDING LIKE BOEING’S STARLINER MAY HAVE COMPLETELY FAILED The Byte (Paul R). At least the astronauts can be rescued.
Class Warfare
The hidden role of public pensions in raising rents in California Los Angeles Times. Paul R: “Pirate equity buys apt building, jacks up rents. Tenants shocked to find that CALSTRS invests in funds like that. Oops.”
Antidote du jour. Karma fubar sent this a long time ago, so apologies!
A young hawk shot by my stepmom at my parents house. They have a large wooded lot, and hawks set up a nest in one of the larger beech trees. I reduced the file size via jpeg compression, but did no other alterations. I particularly like the painterly effect of the background caused by being out of focus.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
327 comments
Comments are closed.
STRANGE NUKES
(melody borrowed from Strange Fruit as performed by Billie Holiday)
Any time this world might launch all its nukes
Nations keep warning they’ll send in their troops
Nuclear winter—Mephistopheles
Says ‘Welcome to Hell, where you’ll starve while you freeze!’
Nuclear fires that no one can douse
Goodbye to your world your family your house
The soil will be poisoned and will not refresh
In an ash-covered world there’ll be no grain to thresh
The streets full of folks running amuck
Looting the canned food from long trailer trucks
As your skin’s falling off and the vomit won’t stop
You’ll laugh as you fade—‘Did we come out on top?’
Is this a real signal or just an internet meme. 🚨Pizza meter is off the charts and the “bars” in DC are empty near the Pentagon. Brace yourselves. Shit’s getting all too real for my liking.
been too real for a while with where it is heading – i’m terrified – the religious nutcases in Israel as well as the home-grown ones here that believe the horses#!t about the rapture do not consider consequences –
It’s a normalization issue.
A careful prosthesis by the Alfred E. Neumann Institute for the Study Of War says that setting off about thirty large nuclear explosions around the world each year will cool the planet just enough to allow us to burn fossil fuels forever, or until fusion can take over. This will have the added benefit of bringing democracy to every corner of the globe. What, me worry?
ahhhhhhhhh……..THAT Alfred E. Neuman……..makes sense now Antifa…What , me worry?
propaganda from Spy vs Spy
(Pretending seriousness in reply…or maybe not pretending) Would that be due mainly from just the nuclear winter effect or accpunt for depopulation and the secondary effects (like less demand for agriculture, fuel, and so forth…)
Jackpot.
Re Owl: worst ringbearer since Gollum.
At least it didn’t fall into a volcano.
Even in the Harry Potter movies, the Owl Post was more problematical than not.
Hehe. Though being serious for a mo. I increasingly wonder “why are we doing these stunts to mark a ceremony that may well be important but should NOT be an exhibition?” (*cough*gender reveal stunts*cough*)
I am reminded of the stupidity of the “goat and necklace” palava in the last episode of “The Leftovers” – the ONLY Lindelof show I consider good.
Twas a vehicle to set up a plot point but the ultimate and utterly tearjerking scene was the final one where our protagonists spoke freely – to this day we don’t know if Carrie Coon’s character was telling the truth or “a good story” which makes it all the more wonderful. But the “wedding malarkey” to me showed both the stupidity of gimmicks and how sometimes they provoke more fundamental truths to emerge. Some random things I saw: One Reddit person was sufficiently impressed to say “hey, we have a scene with Carrie Coon completely naked and nobody is commenting on it, instead concentrating on the meta-physics of what might be going on”. If redditors are discussing meta stuff over pics of an admittedly very attractive actress then you know you have a good show. (FWIW I was never interested since I’m a gay man but her final monologue made me cry.) Seriously – watch this show. If like me you saw the first episode of LOST and thought “this is bonkers and the writers are jokers” then please give them a second chance on something they actually (mostly) got right.
Somehow this sent me down a rabbit hole wherein I discovered Mark Linn Baker and Lewis Black were classmates at Yale.
I concur. I put off the watch for WAY too long! It’s so satisfying and cathartic. Everyone is pretty terrific. Carrie Coon and Christopher Eccleston absolutely blowing me away with their performances.
Tentative viewers: please don’t allow yourself to get wrapped around the axle of the central mystery. It’s a McGuffin.
I was going to make a gender reveal joke, but yeah, why are we obsessed with pageantry? Heck, I find myself attracted to it as a spectator, not as a participant.
@Terry Flynn at 7:52 am
OK, I’ll take up your recommendation and watch The Leftovers. NC readers have made other recommendations I’ve followed up on and liked a lot (Jesse Stone comes to mind).
I have to confess I watched Lost with one of my sons and enjoyed it. I agree it was bonkers but I have a weakness for sci fi.
Leftovers is one of the best shows ever made.
Absolutely riveted the whole time.
Daughter this AM sent a ring video of an owl “weathering” a hard rain on the rail of her deck late last night. In Hooksett NH.
I hope that the ring came from a gumball machine!
Owl grumbling to himself…”it’s ours!”. Must have it, must take the precious.
Newly minted husband “I think I just Married an Owl”
Intended wife says “Who?”
Link for World Socialist
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/03/coyv-a03.html
‘RNC Research
@RNCResearch
KAMALA — UNSCRIPTED FOR THE FIRST TIME:
“This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy.”
WHAT?’
I find this to be an extraordinary video. Here, Kamala is talking in a practiced, calm manner without her typical word salad so good on her. Meanwhile, Biden seems bewildered by the word ‘diplomacy’ and at the end of her spiel he looks confused as if to say ‘Is that what I did?’ I guess that they do not have to worry anymore about pumping him full of happy juice.
It sounds a bit word-salady to me, and “the significance of” evokes a prior humiliating vocalization.
Also, it might be important to obtain her definition of “diplomacy”.
Somewhere in The Collected Essays, Reviews and Letters of George Orwell is an article he wrote about how spoken English can make sense when heard and yet can look senseless and word-salady when exactly transcribed into print. Written English and spoken English are almost two different languages, was his point.
Kamalabama’s reply did not sound senseless to me either, when I heard it. It looks rather strange when read. Case in point to what Orwell was saying?
I guess the process in the brain differs, sound vs vision.
One reason maybe the sound is transitory, while the written speech is stationary.
Didn’t that explanation apply to many of Trump’s orations back in 2016? Not sure if his rambling and change-ups in the tempo of platitudes and condemnations has been as tolerable since 2020, but people invested in his cause have more of a need to believe that what he’s saying makes sense. I’m sure that effect makes Kamala’s babbling sound like wisdom to her fans also. Both of them make me as a listener feel more like the archaic gamer who finds “you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.”
Sorry, I listened and it sounded ridiculous and offensive to me, like she was talking to intellectually impaired six year olds. When I was a child, I could not stand adults talking down to me. This came off at that (or worse, this being the best she could do in expressing herself) + having nothing to say and so nattering to fill time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
Wow, Ballmer has world class flop sweat to go along with that somewhat psychotic energy. Impressive.
However, impressive as that is, I’m going to offer up a bunch of old Canadian dudes doing their thing as a palette cleanser of sorts (your mileage may vary depending on your age):
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cia_v4vxfE
Yes, what a year, we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Oh yeah, it’s BTO so CRANK IT.
(My wife is somewhat annoyed.)
Here’s a word of the day,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
Bokeh, if my memory serves me well, a practice used by at least one major US nudie mag.
Airbrushing too.
was wondering if a Broad-Winged or Cooper’s hawk
I personally would need to see a ” rear-view” of it so I could see what length its tail seems compared to its body. From just this front-view, I couldn’t even dare to guess.
It’s called “bokeh” — caused by the decreased depth-of-field at wide apertures, particularly when using a telephoto lens.
On the deaf-blind language and culture article discussing “Distantism” so that the proposed language, Protactile, can be implemented… interesting. Also, WTF.
It’s interesting because I can see other forms of life that are not visual, or do not experience sound in the audible range we do, choosing to communicate with similar ideas and execution. The description of the community and communication in that article reminded me of insects, constantly touching and feeling their way in tunnels while moving among the other members of the hive. We’re seeing the development of an alien language for sapiens in real time. That’s amazing.
On the WTF side… just no. It’s not Distantism. It’s self-awareness and protection. Millenia of self-awareness sensitivity because of the need for self-protection. That’s why we shake hands. That’s why we have a sense of “you’re too close”. I don’t want strangers touching me. It’s dangerous to let to let unknown people have access to your body in that way. I do not know how we bridge the gap for communication with deaf-blind people and those who are not disabled. And disabled is the correct term here. A person who is deaf-blind is profoundly disabled. How much accommodation should anyone else be expected to give to someone like that in polite society? How much should our society care about accommodating someone like that? I think if you are both deaf and blind, artificial augmentation becomes a reasonable standard of care. You get new visual processors and auditory sensors. You get to interact with the rest of the world because you’re jacked in.
I refuse to adopt a framework that simultaneously using two of the primary senses our species has relied on to survive since we became homo sapiens is Ableist. I refuse to adopt the concept of Distantism because a collection of crippled people can’t communicate otherwise. Reading anyone else consider such proposals in a serious manner is utterly preposterous.
Respectfully, I think you’re misreading and misunderstanding that piece.
First, it’s not saying, as you seem to think, that we should start groping and touching each other without consent or that you should expect to be randomly groped by strangers “touching your body in that way”. It’s not advocating any such thing, if that’s what you’re saying.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen how deafblind people communicate. It’s described in the article – it’s sign language, which I’m sure you’ve seen, but with the blind person feeling the signs by hand, that’s the Protactile mentioned.
Second, they’re not saying using your eyes and ears is Ableist. Society, structured as such to allow ONLY this predominant method of communication (or of experiencing the world) is admittedly Ableist where the limitation is knowingly and intentionally enforced, restricted to only this method and allowing no other, as when for example one says they should get augments and should be offered no other accommodations.
For example, in the same way that any society systemicaly structured to allow only white people to receive mortgage approval is, in fact, a racist society but even so, the mere existance of white people being white is not racist in and of itself. Likewise, just being able to see and hear or speak is not in and of itself Ableist, nor is the piece saying it is.
Finally, to your question of how much society should accommodate “someone like that”, to which you say them being augmented is reasonable accommodation, I would point out such augmentation doesn’t exist which medically, technologically and instantly makes someone see and hear who is deafblind.
I would also argue that society is better for being able to accommodate different types of people and abilities – indeed, we wouldn’t have the internet, this site wouldn’t exist, and you wouldn’t have an iphone, if it wasn’t for someone trying to accomodate people with disabilities. It drives innovation, progresses society forward, leads to invention.
Inclusion is a basic tenet of almost all religions, hence why god is considered the “Lord of Hosts” by the three Abrahamic religions, so has had a heavy influence on societal values. Most people, if they were at a dinner where most spoke English but an Italian guest was present would make some effort to communicate and accommodate, would respect the language difference rather than to say they should get some technological augmentation or speak exclusively English.
I think we’re better off keeping this conversation out of the religious weeds. Now is an especially odd time to assert that religions are inclusive.
What I’m having trouble with in that article is the assertion of Distantism and all the other implied x-isms. Because, it’s simply not true. It has no basis in reality. It’s like saying we assume humans have two arms and maybe we shouldn’t. Humans have evolved to communicate over distances because until proven safe we tend to kill each other. A person who is missing both their sense of sight and sound is experiencing something so profoundly different they might not even be human anymore.
There is only so far any institution or group should have to bend for someone like that. Because they’re not differently able at that point – they’re broken. A deaf blind person alive today is existing in the brief flash of time where the world has enough surplus energy, food, and patience to not consider them wastes of flesh. Go read what happened to people like that before Helen Keller had lots of people with time on their hands to use her for their pet social projects. It’s fair to say that before 1750, a deaf blind person was a burden, and quickly dealt with in the west. Perhaps after 2050, when the AMOC collapses, we’ll return to the same sad state. But regardless of how much extra time and effort we have to put towards individuals who cannot contribute in fundamentally useful ways to society, the inability to state that point clearly is the same kind of mind virus we discuss here wherein people declare things like “Joe Biden has Done More for Palestinians than Anyone Else in the World!” It’s not Distantism. It’s exclaiming how beautiful butterflies are with their wings pulled off.
And the Protactile description they provide in the article includes descriptions of people touching thighs as well as other body areas to communicate in their modified sign language, because they cannot see. Making that kind of intimate contact a requirement for communication is far more exclusive than described by those advocates. Not to mention dangerous. You want to train people to come that close to strangers to communicate? Even kids? Really? Or do you suppose we create new enclaves for these people where they’re only with their own kind, because that would be safer, and let’s not call them sanitariums because that’s too old fashioned…
The technology exists right now to provide crude imagery to optic nerves through electromechanical means. The technology exists right now to allow for sensors to bypass ears and connect to auditory receptors. If there was a greater need, we’d do better for these people promoting and supporting that type of repair. Taking something like this and trying to raise it up as a good thing is madness.
I can tell you haven’t met any deafblind people and your analysis and thinking is suffering on account of it. Or you may be trolling.
Visual prosthetics have been highly experimental and not at all successful, the most visual acuity attained has been low resolution large light and dark shapes, so a person is still effectively blind. Cochlear implants for the deaf have been somewhat more successful but are nonetheless limited – the use case is damaged cochlea but many deafblind have damaged auditory nerves (e.g. the wire between ear and brain). Also, sound quality is nowhere near what hearing people experience – and those with cochlear devices are still considered deaf.
However, why wouldn’t a deafblind person be able to participate fully in society right now even without such augments? Accommodations are straightforward and simple, a computer or laptop, a screen reader for the blind coupled with a braille display device. This enables participation in the digital world but can also be used for two way communication without sign language.
And again, the sign language is more straightforward than what you’re obviously lewdly imagining. Try to think of benign non-sexual forms of touch on the arm, knee, thigh or back and you’ll have the essence of it.
This is a fairly straightforward example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GrK3P15TYU
And I went out of my way to find something specifically showing thigh contact:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ney1gZ1iN_k
As you can see, there’s nothing to be upset or disturbed about there, or if you are then you and I are very different people, I guess.
As for religion, my point is that it has influenced our ethics and morality regardless whether you believe in it or not, such that I think it’s fair to say most people would want deafblind folks to be included rather than excluded from society.
Nope, that example with touching on the thighs is about what I expected. Which is part of the problem. Deaf children are already at 2x or more for the risk of sexual abuse compared to hearing children. I can only imagine what the stats are for people who are both deaf and blind. And you’re OK with them creating a language that gives people more opportunities for abuse? “I didn’t mean to touch her, I was just trying to communicate…” This is empowerment?
And it still doesn’t give them an ability to communicate without being close. It still proposes that communicating in this fashion could be a “norm”. A person with a knife in the middle of that would be terrible. So this norm that people would like to develop and praise assumes a safe place, and guardians, in order to communicate, but is also supposed to promote independence and remove interpreters?
As for participating in society… our brains are amazing, but they’re mainly visual processors. After that, they’re auditory processors. Estimates vary but most agree that with both senses you’re at a minimum of 50% of the grey matter being dedicated to taking in and doing something with that data. If both of those senses are denied a person then they can’t use their brain like the vast majority of people. Beyond that, these people are going to do what? Grow food? Repair cars? Serve as fire fighters? Of course not. When something new is developed and requires an understanding of what it looks like and sounds like, how are they to participate?
So rather than define this condition as what it is, a profound disability, we’re to be subjected to the BS of people claiming that being able to see and hear is Ableist? That being able to communicate outside of touching range is Distantism? That’s ridiculous.
I can’t find more recent statistics for the population of deaf blindness than 2019. It seems the population is fairly stable, at about 11-12 thousand people in the US with the condition. If that number signifcantly increases we need to get whatever technology we have behind it to fix these people. That, rather than ridiculous platitudes is what they need.
I think people are far more likely to be subject to abuse if they are thought of as less than human.
“These people” can participate in society without being fire fighters or car mechanics. You ignored my point that deafblind people can easily participate in the digital and face to face world with only a laptop and braille reader. This creates the possibility of vastly more jobs than fire fighting and mechanics, not that jobs are the only way of being human.
And you’re also ignoring my point that the piece does not claim being able to see or hear is ableist, which is like saying that merely being white is racist. The piece says no such thing.
And you obviously think the piece is doing something other than saying deafblindness is a disability. Deafblindness IS a disability, why you think the piece says otherwise is quite beyond me. I think you imagine any attempt to say disabilities need not be limitations are also attempts to say disabilities aren’t disabilities? If so, that’s simply not in the piece.
The deafblind have created a language which gives them full range and expression, depth of communication, they’ve created some devices (signing on and tapping knee, shoulder, arms, back) which facilitates easier communication. Your concerns about it all leading to sexual abuse is just your own imagination running wild.
Your opposing a language and form of expression because you imagine it will lead to sexual abuse is, for me, leaning toward censorship of the type we saw with the moral majority in the 90’s towards music.
But honestly and truly, I think you’ve read far more INTO the piece, brought your own biases to it, to the point where you’re attacking something which simply isn’t there. I don’t know what else to say.
“EU snubs Hungary and Slovakia over Ukraine oil sanctions”
The remarkable thing is that the European Commission is siding here against two EU members – Hungary & Slovakia – with a country that is not even a member of the EU at all that is breaking a trade agreement with the EU itself. They even told them to get their oil elsewhere to diversify away from Russian fuels, even though the EU is still importing them themselves via third parties. I suppose that this is only petty revenge on Hungary really for trying to open up peace negotiations and the Hungarians have wondered out aloud whether it was the EU that told the Ukraine to cut the oil. Of course if Hungary & Slovakia cut off the electricity to the Ukraine that they are supplying, I am sure that the European Commission would get on their case at the injustice of it all.
If you’ve noticed, nobody seems to be clamoring to get into the EU anymore. NATO, yes, but that’s a dead end, too. One wonders who the next Brexit will be. That’s going to be messy.
Two anecdotes: My Dad’s main employee (from Slovakia) is not a big follower of the news but finds it weird that we believe the BBC when it seems llke local versions of Pravda when she was young.
Second is my former barber (from Bulgaria) – was the first person to note a COVID sequelae (“you have a 50 pence piece sized alopecia patch suddenly on top of your scalp – that’s weird”) . He annoyed his wife because he blabbed too much. His most notorious (to me) example was “Why did the EU let us in? I’m glad they did and I get to run a business here but our country is family-blogged – I’d be paying the poiice almost daily to do the drives I used to to.” The guy was not a nobody – he’d been part of the Bulgarian army.
Huh? Ukraine sure is. And Moldova and the Georgia Dream types.
Couldn’t one argue that is being driven mostly by US backed interests in those countries?
Not disputing your point, just wondering if the interest in the EU would be the same if these nations were left to their own devices…
No, Turkiye would want to be let in but it has long ago given up on the idea that it will be admitted. Its economy would benefit greatly from access to the common market. But the EU keeps proving it can’t get over being deep down anti Muslim.
The other problem with Turkiye that its size plus its geographic position means it would be a serious power center and could not be easily pushed around.
Turkey is in a customs union. Which aspects of the common market does it want in addition? Free movement of services? It doesn’t export many other than tourism, in which it is already successful. Capital? It doesn’t export much legally (and capital flight would be worsened) and it is a major FDI recipient. People? This is the reason there is no EU entry on the cards beyond the customs union.
I have chided you for Making Shit Up. You are doing so again. You fail to do basic checks on the internet and force me to do so. I do not have time to waste this way cleaning up after readers who actively misinform the commentariat. I e-mailed you last night about another incident, which you ignored.
Turkiye was trying to trade joining the EU for its vote to approve Sweden’s entry. That was mere months ago.
https://www.politico.eu/article/is-turkey-now-joining-the-eu-no-but-the-eu-is-engaging-nato/
You are ignoring our overarching rule, placed prominently in our site Policies:
One more like this and you will be blacklisted.
Rev,
Hungary can use this excuse to cut the electricity to Ukraine:
“We can’t produce the required amount of electricity due to our electricity production being greatly reduced due to the cut off of our fossil fuel supplies. We need to conserve our electricity production capabilities to make it through winter.”
“People who had severe covid-19 show cognitive decline years later New Scientist. Paul R: “An analysis of people who were hospitalised with covid-19…”
It could be Covid and/or host of other things caught while in the hospital. @#$% didn’t and still don’t want to wear masks in hospitals. And there are all kinds of viruses and bacteria lurking in hospitals.
During the worst of the pandemic I “stepped up” when our local – regional specialist – hospital lost over half of its admin staff (largely due to resignation, thankfully not death). I was neither a touch typist or an expert in oncology. However a long career in health (non-clinical) meant I could type fast and could recognise a lot of drugs and conditions.
Literally 7 days after I started the process to “get me police clearance etc” I was OKed and doing audio-typing for oncology consultants. Of the four suspected COVID infections I’ve had, the only confirmed one was when I caught it from someone at the hospital and had to go through the testing procedure. I notice my cognitive impairment after every suspected infection. Yeah it scares the beejezus out of me.
I will not under any but the worst circumstances go to the Emergency Dept of my hospital. Frankly, IMNSHO it is close to a death sentence.
Off-topic but just in case you missed it since it’s now over a dozen “items” ago:
Here’s my guess as why you might be having your replies appear in unexpected places from time to time. (It doesn’t have to do with Skynet.)
That’s a great explanation, thanks.
Always glad to learn I’m not going senile ;)
Plus I don’t like to annoy the powers that be, especially since in the early days of NC Yves went out of her way to explain why the hosters of the website could be “weird”.
I’m glad you saw it!
Yeah, it’s something that I was vaguely aware of—because, on rare occasions, I’d somehow be editing my reply in the “general” comment box—but your comment prompted me to figure out exactly how it worked. When one is aware of it, it’s much easier to avoid. (And it’s always nice to know one isn’t going nuts.)
And maybe that quirk is something that could be ironed out but it’s definitely not a high-priority thing.
Thanks for diagnosing this. I have been zapped by this quirk as well. As mentioned in the other thread you created, it seems like a JavaScript issue with the NC web app, and the current work-around is to refresh the page before commenting.
You’re welcome, Acacia! I’d surmise that a lot of people have been zapped by it (and may not even realize what happened).
Yeah, it seems like some kind of JavaScript issue. The “stickiness” of the text seems intentional (I haven’t encountered that elsewhere—and it is helpful if you happen to “lose” your reply) but not the way it functions now.
If you want to keep the comment, you just have to make sure you’re replying to the specific comment. (Essentially, whatever you write will appear in the textarea element that is open or that you open on the page and there is only one open on a page at any one time. In fact, there is no general comment box at the bottom if you’re replying to a specific comment but it will redisplay if you cancel that comment with—and here’s the problem—any text that was in the comment.)
But, yeah, if you want to clear the text area, you have to refresh the page (or leave the page and come back, which amounts to the same thing).
Thanks! Much appreciated. Glad tp know I”m not the only one wondering about this!
My pleasure! I thought people might like to know. It’s one of those things that really isn’t easy to figure out when it happens. It seems like just a careless user error when it’s really more attributable to unexpected site behavior (and the “user error,” if it is that, is due to not catching and correcting for that site behavior).
I’m 95% sure I first caught COVID working in a nursing home. I’m pretty sure I passed it on to some residents. We lost a quarter (13/56) of them in a 3 week period.
Craziest few weeks of my life. Half the staff were off with COVID; they were replaced by temp agency staff who had literally zero experience. Me, running round like a mad man, slowed down by the COVID outbreak procedures, working my night shifts for the minimum wage.
I got so upset watching the residents dying, and the families not being able to see them that I ended up giving an anonymous interview to the Guardian
There’s a second article somewhere where I explain to Rob from the Guardian that “no we do not get the money the government gave the home to pay us if we are off with COVID. They say it’s gone. They did just remodel the huge garden though”. He was surprisingly shocked the poor sweet naif.
*Ironically I got COVID exactly 3 weeks after I had my first jab at Xmas ’20. Second time was on my honeymoon the following year.
“Ironically I got COVID exactly 3 weeks after I had my first jab at Xmas ’20…”
The same non-sterilizing mess is being rolled out for bird flu.
None of the benefits of REAL vaccines and all the dangers of genetic experimentation.
That is a truly heart-rending account. I thought that “infection in an oncology dept” was bad but I’d read accounts on here, then yours and thought “OMFG”.
On a random unrelated note, I recently discussed on here a letter I sent to the Guardian excoriating them for a terrible piece of reporting, which, given that I wrote the global textbook, they couldn’t “brush under the carpet”. They asked a few asinine questions to show “they engaged” then dropped it.
I sent a letter 48 hours ago regarding their recent pieces on electoral reform. No reply, Nada. I know I’m now on their “blocked” list. Ha! It wasn’t even my research that I spoke about – merely some other bright sparks who used a method I co-developed and worked out how it might be a good way of voting in places like the UK and USA who seem wedded to single-member constituencies but won’t go “all the way” to full Proportional Representation. If I could be bothered I’d mock up a jpeg to reply to the Guardian every time they plead for money which says “When you pay attention” (actually I’m British and I’d be a LOT ruder).
It’s been equally sad and infuriating watching how the Guardian has changed from the paper I read first in the early 90s.
I think (but have no evidence) that the real change into mouthpiecehood came after the GCHQ raid/destroying the Snowden hard-drive thing
And then a further deterioration as their business model pivoted to their website and chasing American readership
Is the rumor true that they are planning to move headquarters to the USA?
I thought that rumour referred to the Conservative Party.
I got my first infection five weeks after the Moderna MNRA booster, after getting the Pzifer shot twice.
I’d like to see the age numbers. From what I understand, most hospitalized were older and out of shape. So, of course, “years later”, they’d be pretty old and in the cognitive decline zone. If they stayed in front of the TV and ate junk, that wouldn’t help the brain, either.
Why don’t you read the damned article at the link rather than demand other readers do it for you and then cater to your laziness by reporting back? This is absolutely not acceptable behavior. The sample WAS controlled for age and other health demographics.
There is no mention of the average age of the 475 people tested. And, as mentioned, since they weren’t tested pre Covid, there is no baseline for both mental and physical condition.
They were matched against controls. That is VASTLY SUPERIOR to having the average age. The standard for RCTs and is more than adequate to allow for their age and any health issues.
A comparison to their own history would be a fail, since just about none would have been tested for cognitive issues or IQ on a regular basis.
If you thought there might be problem with how they constructed the controls, you could have read the paper, which was linked in the article. Instead you raised an issue that is bogus unless you produce the goods of saying why their study design was poor by challenging the controls.
I am not about to have you succeed in trapping me into reciting points in the paper that refute your claims about the analysis. Your persistent demand amounted to an assignment, which is a violation of our written site Policies, and then you went into broken record, a bad faith argumentation strategy.
So I am blacklisting you, I gave you a VERY prominent warning not to carry on this way. My time is a very scarce commodity. It is better spent on new posts, research, and value-added comments in comments, and not dealing with reader bad behavior. I have no tolerance for readers who persist in it.
Yves, you are right to chide Benny, but in pointing out the obvious he merely shows his lack of understanding of the kind of methdological problems facing researchers dealing with a problem like this. He does need to read the paper and the supplementary materials as well as the article to clarify his understanding. Be kind to benny and don’t block him, not least because he’s quite an amusing irritant.
As for the study itself, it is a highly competent piece of work based on the existing, admittedly limited, data sources.
For Benny, the paper is published at:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(24)00214-1/fulltext
and the excellent supplementary papers are published at:
https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S2215-0366(24)00214-1/attachment/248e8767-0665-43b6-9af0-7f74710c5893/mmc1.pdf
Max Taquet does point out in the New Scientist piece that: “He acknowledges that the study has some major limitations. While around 2500 people were invited to take part in the research, only a fifth responded so it isn’t clear how representative the study is.”
All in all, a good indicator of the problems which exist for patients suffering from long covid and a sound basis for future research. Certainly not one of those casual publish or perish horrors on which so many applicants for academic jobs lean.
bertl,
I appreciate you being public spirited in giving further explanation of the paper and the stressing that the research problems are not trivial, and in defending a fellow member of the commentariat.
However this is not merely a matter of Benny not understanding. I pointed him to the paper, which was linked in the New Scientist article. The prominent (as in early in the paper) Findings section stated what the mean age was.
Benny made no attempt whatsoever to check the paper as I had urged him to do, falsely asserted the data was not there, and put me in the position of having to wast further time on his bullshit.
So Benny again threw the burden of doing a basic investigation back on to me when I told him that was absolutely not on. I do not have the time or energy to tolerate persistent and willful bad behavior from someone that Lambert agrees has not provided meaningful value added. Given his conduct, that means negative value added by the time cost to me.. He can go be an “amusing irritant” somewhere else.
“…things caught while in the hospital. @#$% didn’t and still don’t want to wear masks in hospitals. And there are all kinds of viruses and bacteria lurking in hospitals.”
Last Tuesday I was at the VA hospital in Gainesville. I didn’t cruise the entire building, but I saw only 5 or 6 masks besides mine, and one was worn ever so stylishly beneath her chin. I was born and raised in Florida. People were not so stupid here before the mass migration.
I remember reading somewhere that Florida was trending mildly Southern Progressive ( Reuben Askew and such) before the huge influx of Old Midwestern Conservatives added their numbers to the Miami Cubans to take Florida righter and righter and righter.
The way I remember reading a Floridian commenter put it years ago was that Florida was becoming slowly mildly progressive before so many Midwestern retirees came in and “turned the state into their own personal ashtray.”
>IT’S SOUNDING LIKE BOEING’S STARLINER MAY HAVE COMPLETELY FAILED The Byte (Paul R). At least the astronauts can be rescued.
According to the article: Many signs are now pointing towards SpaceX rescuing the stranded astronauts, according to Ars. These signs include the space agency giving more than a quarter million dollars to SpaceX for a “SPECIAL STUDY FOR EMERGENCY RESPONSE,” and SpaceX actively training for the likely situation of the company sending a Dragon capsule to the space station to bring the astronauts home.
Be even better if Musk says: Hell, we’ll do it for free this time, just to rub Boeing’s nose in it. Sending in the Varsity to get the job done and all…
A couple paragraphs after that in the article: It would be a bad look all around, because it would mean the American government had funneled a total of $5.8 billion into malfunctioning junk.
I”m getting the idea that is what we are excelling at lately. Jesus, $5.8 billion? Rounding error in the Government’s checkbook. Just another day that ends in the letter Y.
I’m just waiting for the Russian’s to offer to retrieve those astronauts. How many heads would explode over that? Can you imagine Biden having to have a press conference (or his flacks), explains why they have to turn down the offer?
It was only a few short years ago that NASA rejected Boeing on a whole series of major contracts because they were not up to it and couldn’t get the job done. So when all these stories about Boeing’s Starliner started to crop up I was a bit surprised. I guess that Congress leaned on NASA to cough up on those new contracts so now of course Congress will blame NASA over this fiasco.
>I guess that Congress leaned on NASA to cough up on those new contracts so now of course Congress will blame NASA over this fiasco.
I suppose a quick check of Boeing’s political donations to those on the committees overseeing NASA would add a bit of knowledge to this…
NASA and congress is why ineptitude in failing contracts does not lead to bankruptcy.
Same for the MIC!
Boeing’s political donations I’m thinking of Boeing as a griftable military contract depository.
I am in in complete agreement on that LOL
heh heh, as your COO, I’m ready to take full advantage.
my comments have been consistently negative since the repeated delay of lift-off – surprised & happy the astronauts actually made it there considering problems en-route, and encountered with docking that boondoggle – i have repeatedly said that the Starliner is now a permanent fixture of the ISS because it would be a sure demise for those two astronauts to get into the Starliner & attempt to return to earth –
not surprised at all by the Byte article –
while on this subject, the ISS is showing its age and faltering infrastructure and ya gotta wonder how that behemoth will be discarded when reaching its expiration date – also, the space junk and dead satellites are creating a cumulative volume of spacecraft and debris in LEO that is unsustainable –
https://www.fastcompany.com/91161405/debris-space-travel-unsustainable-esa-report
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/there-are-2000-plus-dead-rockets-in-orbit-heres-a-rare-view-of-one-of-them/
there is also potential perturbation of the ionosphere from what is being planned –
https://arxiv.org/html/2312.09329v1
My first thought was “they won’t leave it permanently attached to the ISS” followed by a flashback to this moment in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972):
https://youtu.be/ZpnTy-78oyk?si=owegRDfLXkrLyDFB&t=113
On a slightly more serious note, I gather that Boeing can control the Starliner on an autonomous return to Earth, though even if the ship made it home in one piece, many would consider that a mission failure. It was supposed to carry a crew, after all.
That news article about Astroscale is interesting. Japanese obsession with “cleaning up” extends into space?
What’s interesting as well is that Musk once gave an interview where he explained that the reason he’s able to get ships up and for so cheaply compared to NASA is he has lowered or removed the safety margins.
Space X is not as concerned about payloads blowing up, they view such as opportunities to learn from failures, whereas NASA is overly concerned about safety, failure is not an option, partly because their payload is people, partly their funding depends on success. To the point of being bogged down in expensive procedures, bureaucracy and adding costly redundancy systems to overcompensate for failures, all of which drives the price per mission higher.
Space X is about not adding anything to a spacecraft unless it’s absolutely essential. When you think about it, that also makes it easier to manage and therefore control for failure. It’s the KISS principle.
I see that the SpaceX approach as described is not doing so well when it comes to Starship.
It’s almost like not caring about safety has permeated the entire company leading to issues when safety is paramount.
Is it the SpaceX approach, though? Not sure about that.
Starship is in early development, so failures are encouraged to debug all the bits and they have made significant progress over only 4 flights. It won’t take crew down to the Moon for years (which will certainly delay Artemis peopled landings). Flight 5 in 6 weeks or so will attempt to catch the booster part on the launch tower. (Ship maybe next year.) They are prudently assembling rapidly a backup launch/catch tower at the Texas launch site, just in case. Their architecture is really the only plausible way to drop the cost to access space tenfold or more, eventually.
Early development? They might want to tell NASA that as they are scheduled to be on the moon in a quarter or so.
Also, prudent? Is it prudent to spend roughly 70% of you budget yet be years behind on your deliverables?
SpaceX has a great deal in common with Tesla and it may not last the decade.
SpaceX is another example of private industry devouring public money. They take shortcuts which will result in a catastrophe.
I am going to assume sarcasm “as in Kiss you a&& goodbye.”
SpaceX is not as concerned because there is no responsibility. GM killed 100++ people to “simplify” a 0.35 cent ignition part?
If NASA did that, their budget would be cut. People would be fired.
What happened to the GM execs? They got a bonus for making the company money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls
What happened to the execs of Vioxx who killed what 50,000 (or a lot more) people and simplified by skipping safety (well actually they knew it was killing, but they chose to ignore because it was making money)? They got big bonuses despite their death toll.
And what happens if SpaceX crispy fries a bunch of his astronauts? Musk will get a bonus for saving money from the board and the lawsuits will be paid by insurance companies after twenty years. Look at Tesla drivers burned alive.
https://www.tesla-fire.com/
Why can a corporate executive commit mass murder and win plaudits, whereas the common homicidal maniac gets jail and opprobrium?
The culture of dishonesty is more disturbing (to me anyway) than the failure of the Starliner. For months they have been saying everything is fine except for some minor faults, they could bring the astronauts back any time they wanted to but have decided to keep them up there for more testing. When it appears that in fact the machine is just broke. Which wouldn’t have been so awful to say right up front. It’s certainly better than spending months lying to everyone only to admit the truth when finally forced.
One major limitation is that they need to disassemble the problematic hardware to properly assess the problem, but many of those parts are on a module that is thrown away before re-entry. Apparently, diagnosis without that info is sufficiently ambiguous that they can’t retire enough risk.
A student of several colleagues is commanding the next mission nominally in 3 wks, her first flight. I wonder if NASA will delay to fit in extra seats into her Dragon (which is designed to take 6).
Better yet, have the Chinese offer to give the NASA astronauts a “lift home.”
Ed Conway twX on mining: If it wasn’t grown, it was mined.
So it’s either rocks or crops.
When I think about what he wrote, it reminds me of how things have changed over the decades. In the 70s there was a general acknowledgement that resources, especially oil, were being run down so perhaps it would be wise to limit the use of the remaining resources that we had and make more efficient use of them. But going back at least two decades, the idea is that while we acknowledge that resources are being run down, the inclination is now to make as much use as we can of them while we still have them and just let them run out and let future generations to deal with it.
I have a great fondness for both The Jetsons and Star Trek. But I think that vision of the future had a seriously bad effect on people. And not just because I daily bemoan my lack of Rosie the Robot.*Both had weird little cubbies that you would push a few buttons and get things you needed. I don’t remember the name in the Jetsons, but it was a replicator in Star Trek.
It isn’t just about letting others deal with the problem, although that is exactly it for much of our leaders. It is that people who should know better let those who do know better get away with it because deep down they just know that technology has the answer and replicators are just around the corner. Never ever considering how the replicators were powered or got their raw materials as matter does not come from nothing…
*I also spent far too much time wondering why Samantha thought it was wrong to twitch her nose and clean the house, and Jeannie never told her master that he used as a tool to keep the house clean and she used her powers the same way. I always knew someone else doing the cleaning was the way to go.
Not only old TV shows – even current science fiction writing assumes that we will have endless energy with which to go to the stars etc. Knowing that climate change is irreversible at this point, a lot of sci-fi seems more like fantasy.
I’d been trying for years to write a sci fi novel about life on Venus before the runaway climate change, but that’s been a tough going! (It doesn’t help that I don’t have a literary bone in my body….)
How do we classify rainfall run-off that we drink.
US Prepares For Bird Flu Pandemic With $176 Million Moderna Vaccine Deal – ars technica
“mRNA vaccine technology offers advantages in efficacy, speed of development, and production scalability and reliability in addressing infectious disease outbreaks, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in the announcement..”
WTH? They are still calling that stuff “vaccine”.
It hasn’t stopped the spread of any damn thing.
“They” changed the scientific and medical definition of vaccine in the first stages of Covid, if memory serves. Reading links and comments, maybe memory serving is passee…
If enough people started calling it “para-vaccinoid”, would “para-vaccinoid” make it into the language?
I always say “shots” now.
Mr Market has sad…
It’s going to be interesting to have a recession with the seemingly highest cost of living of all time.
“The role of public pensions in rising rents in California” – LA Times
At some point a society becomes so greedy and corrupt that it’s just silly. Deadly and dangerous, but still silly AF. And thinks it’s full of “high IQ” people.
And they aren’t even eating enough chocolate!
Spread the word, s’mores parties are now the new Friday afternoon company event. :)
And Saturday at home or a park.
Chocolate consumption is good on any day that ends in a y.
I’ve circled onto the hypothetical notion, this was a move this past week that wholly screams risk-off mode or time to lock some gains and hold some comfortable yielding UST government securities. The move in UST yields in just the past week is pretty eye popping. Events overseas are also becoming harder to discount from the portfolio management approach, as it were.
Oddly enough, Apple was one of a handful of stocks in the green. That’ll last for a few hot minutes I’m sure of it. Added, I just didn’t think the payroll numbers were that horrible. Time to channel a little wisdom, courtesy of Trading Places, from Billy Ray Valentine, on the pork belly commodities trading. “They’re panicking.”
“I’ve circled onto the hypothetical notion, this was a move this past week that wholly screams risk-off mode or time to lock some gains and hold some comfortable yielding UST government securities…”
But the trickiness of locking gains: selling something bought for a lower price to possibly buy back at a higher price – when not a trader.
I was looking up stats for the Olympics and noticed Warren Buffett just dropped half his Apple position. I’m sure everything’s just fine.
Keir Starmer (or his people) are gonna completely mismanage the fallout from the Southport killings and the ongoing anti-[a lot of things but mostly immigrants] rioting.
Latest example is this tweet which came with a nice picture of a pink building. Performative crap and people from all sides reacted badly.
Between 25 and 35 more “rallies” are being planned for this weekend. I expect more battles with the police and more damage (a la Sunderland yesterday).
UK Prime Minister
@10DowningStreet
We stand in solidarity with Southport.
Tonight, Downing Street lights up pink as a mark of respect and solidarity with everyone affected by the tragic incidents which took place earlier this week.
#SouthportTogether
The problem is that the stresses and difficulties resulting from immigration have been denied for so long, that someone of Starmer’s generation has trouble getting their brain around the idea that they might even exist. There are therefore no ready-existing concepts and no verbal formulas to fall back on and, in their absence, politicians panic, and do and say silly things. I suppose having a knife stuck in you could be defined as “being affected,” by a “tragic incident.” But the PMC only knows how to talk about a restricted number of things, and in a restricted number of ways. Reality can only be bent so far by control of the media, though, and it looks as if it’s taking on a life of its won.
Somebody years ago did some checking up in the UK and found out that the greatest proponents of mass immigration mostly lived in the whitest post codes in the UK. Even if they owned multiple homes, it was still in mostly white suburbs and regions. Funny how that works out and I wish I had saved the source.
Do you recall the percentage of people in those same neighborhoods who held opposing positions? Just curious.
For a Hungarian perspective, here is Victor Orbán.
Compare and contrast to that absurd 60 Minutes segment about how no-good, very bad was the Hungarian desire for control over its own borders, and the dark horrors of increased domestic birthrates.
“The problem is that the stresses and difficulties resulting from immigration have been denied for so long, that someone of Starmer’s generation has trouble getting their brain around the idea that they might even exist.”
Nail on the head Aurelien. Since the 90s there has been an automatic response of “that’s racist” to anyone questioning immigration. There was blanket refusal to hear legitimate concerns (eg repression of lower-end wages). Add in a ton of Britain’s special brand of right-wing media baiting and you end up here. My middle-class white London friends are sure it’s all about racism. They do have very secure jobs though ;)
*A lot of does seem to be just racism.
—
As a sidenote I just learned that “Tommy Robinson” the poster boy of the anti-immigration movement has a long history with Israel, is funded by Israel, and that his “English Defence League” was originally “English and Jewish Defence League”. A very interesting twix thread from David Miller. I’d love sources, but I’ve read David since the pre-Iraq war days and am inclined to trust.
“Since the 90s there has been an automatic response of “that’s racist” to anyone questioning immigration.“
…and now have a growing “that’s antisemitic” response to anyone criticising what’s going on in Gaza.
>>>…and now have a growing “that’s antisemitic” response to anyone criticising what’s going on in Gaza.
There is plenty of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, bigotry of all kinds, but when people for example insist on calling criticisms of mass murder, torture, and rape as bigotry, it becomes like crying wolf.
Update: David Miller posted some receipts for his “Tommy Robinson is a Zionist agent” claim
https://x.com/Tracking_Power/status/1819825453898793091
Not just the 90s. This goes way back to the years leading to the Notting Hill Riots in 1958. We used the term “racialist”, though. The issues then were as they are now: the competition for housing and employment, the rapid growth of completely new racial and cultural commuities in long established working class communities, and the unwillingness of politicians to confront the issue, and those who did were ignored and rejected by their peers.
As a trades union researcher, I was expected to brief my union’s MPs every now and then, and one day, on leaving the House, I came on the dockers (not represented by my union, I must add) marching in support of Enoch Powell. I ended up chatting to a group of them in a pub and their major concern was that no one was listening to them and people like them, and certainly not representing them apart from Powell. But the consequence for Powell was his ejection from the Tory front bench. The consequence for the dockers was that their kids couldn’t get housing in London and were moving out to Essex with the grandchildren and multi-generational families that lived in the same area for, in some case, hundreds of years, were being broken up systematically by default.
It was, as Powell said repeatedly, about numbers. And it still is. And Aurelian is right: the unrepresentative bastards who don’t really represent anyone or anything apart from themselves and their particular faction in their own party, which may itself be more representive of US or other overseas interests than any gtoup in the UK, do not know how to talk about it, including the problem of large-scale illegal immigration, let alone mass legal immigration. And if you can’t talk about it, you’re never going to be able to deal with it before the dam finally bursts. And this country, with a minority government with a very, very large parliamentary majority, is less cohesive and much less stable than at any point over my 78 years and it feel to me as if something is about to give.
It’s quite something, isn’t it? It’s funny to see just how completely out of touch they are. You could smell the PMC Shitlib-ism right from the get go with their “He’s totally Welsh, bro” talking point. We’ll see how far censorship and denying reality will carry the government I suppose, but the usual rhetorical tricks and framing to explain away these problems don’t carry any water anymore.
Well, time will tell how well the new UK government handle the problems they have inherited.
As someone who lives in the UK, I am very worried. There are clear parallels with what went on in Germany between the World Wars. Mosques are being targeted, Muslims demonised. For me there are also shades of the Tea Party actions very soon after Obama was elected. It is pretty clear that there are people egging the rioters on. Just who they are is less clear. Is this being ‘managed’ by one or more groups? There are, unsurprisingly, reports of interference on social media from foreign powers, stirring up trouble. Farage is making ‘dog-whistle’ remarks which on the face of it appear reasonable but look intended to whip up racial hatred.
Until fairly recently the UK had been relatively successful in absorbing immigrants from a wide variety of different parts of the world since at least the 1940s when the Windrush generation arrived from the West Indies. Arguably you can go back further to the arrival of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. But now influential websites are talking about the problems caused by those ‘of immigrant stock’ (i.e. those who are not white). As there is now a large non-white population in the UK, this is dangerous talk.
We should all be aware where scapegoating and othering leads. The UK is in a perilous condition now, with its economy knee-capped by Brexit, squeezing living standards. One of the causes of Brexit was of course concern at the levels of immigration from Europe but the consequence thus far has been even higher levels of immigration from non-European countries whose populations seem to be even less welcome than were fellow Europeans. Whether this was an inevitable consequence of Brexit is not clear to me but the results could be dire. Part of the problem is that because of a low birthrate in recent decades, together with other factors, the UK needs immigrants.
For me, the real problem in the UK is the gross maldistribution of income and wealth far more than the effects of immigration. We have billionaires swanning around in helicopters and private jets, buying politicians, while some of their fellow citizens sleep on the streets and have to be fed from food banks. For the plutocrats, distracting the attention of the general public from this, more important, problem by encouraging racial hatred and Islamophobia is probably very welcome.
We could be headed for a very dark place.
Agreed, except we don’t need immigrants (I.e. net immigration, some exchange of people with the outside world is fine). We need higher wages and funded childcare and better accommodations of disabilities in employment and a benefit system without punitive means-testing cliff edges. Then the vast reserve labour army of underemployed could be employed.
Only if we cannot fill vacancies at wage growth of say 2x or 3x per capita GDP growth should we consider more immigration and even then we might consider lowering GDP growth first.
Also, there is plenty of speculation on Twitter etc that these riots are being stirred up by the powers that be, to justify further restrictions on speech and protest. Given how stupid the riots are and how authoritarian the Labour response is, the idea that useful idiots are being whistled out of their kennels does not seem farfetched.
Re: blood culture bottle shortage article above…..
I never dreamed something as mundane as blood cultures would be grist for this site. However, it is actually a critical thing for diagnosis – and this supply chain incompetence/failure is so emblematic of entire failures in our society.
When I was a young doctor, there was a lab tech named Marge in the microbiology lab. At that time in medicine, interns were responsible for drawing blood cultures, it was a learned skill. This test is done in patients with fevers and you have reason to believe there is a blood borne infection. The blood would be carefully placed in sterilized glass bottles ( any old bottles would do – they just had to be autoclaved) and the glass bottles contained an anticoagulant and a growth media ( ie fertilizer). These would then be placed in a row in an old fashioned oven with a glass door – all in a row based on general time when they came in. The oven was set at about 110 degrees if I recall. Marge, a very skilled individual doing this for years, would quickly glance over the bottles every hour or so. She had a hawks eye. The color would begin to change if there was a positive test – and she would drag those out and further process them. I recall no difference between Marge and the machines we use now.
Fast forward to today. It is no longer any glass bottle. It is bottles which are proprietary and strictly made for the machine in your lab. Everything is automated. Marge is long gone and is now replaced by multiple machines doing individual parts of the process Marge used to do all by herself. These proprietary blood culture bottles cost about 2000 dollars each ( compared to any old sterilized and reused glass bottle from the 1980s) – they have a sensor pad on the bottom- and are stuck in a 2-3 million dollar device that warms them – and then probe the bottom every 5 minutes ( just like Marge used to do scanning them in the oven). And then if they are positive – they are sent on to another 3-4 million dollar machine to ID the bug. Marge used to do this with Petri dishes and plates – and much faster and the antibiotic sensitivity with Marge was much more reliable.
So, if you do not have the proprietary bottles – you cannot use your multiple multimillion dollar machines. You are basically out of luck. These bottles are shaped weird – and any glass bottles laying around will not fit. By the way, Marge, who did this all with tender loving care for decades is long gone. In fact the whole lab which used to be teeming with humans is now a humming computer bank.
I often reflect fondly on the Marge days – things were so much different and better then. She was likely only costing the health care system I would guess 80K salary in today’s dollars – add in another 80K-120K for all the sterilizing and supplies – and that would be the microbiology lab for the year. But it is far more important to spend 2000 dollars a pop for every patient – and have machines that break down all the time and cost 10-15K for these repairs twice a month or so. And their initial cost is in the millions. And we wonder what is wrong.
This blood culture bottle shortage has been a thing where I work for many months now. Instead of realizing the problems and the care deficiencies it is causing, the FDA and other health agencies seem not to care. At least I cannot tell anything is being done about it at all. Proprietary throw away equipment like this may be the death of our whole society. It is rampant, expensive and fragile. It is also laying waste to our environment. ( Just multiply blood culture bottles out by the millions in all kinds of industry) But it is much more “Star Trek” than Marge – much more bright lights and alarms- so the medical leadership will keep right on doing it- because “progress.”
>Proprietary throw away equipment like this may be the death of our whole society. It is rampant, expensive and fragile. It is also laying waste to our environment. ( Just multiply blood culture bottles out by the millions in all kinds of industry) But it is much more “Star Trek” than Marge – much more bright lights and alarms- so the medical leadership will keep right on doing it- because “progress.”
This paragraph IMHO pretty much describes the thinking and processes that has infected EVERYTHING in our society.
So very much this. The amount of needless waste our society produces is absolutely disgusting, and all to serve the profit motives of companies producing all this garbage. It has creeped into every imaginable corner of what we do. Just one example:
5.3 billion phones ‘prematurely discarded’ every year
Given past statistics on metal use and reuse circa the 1970’s, perhaps this helps explain part of the global rise in metal use…
But hey, market societies are so much more efficient than planned economies, amirite?
I forgot to add – the blood culture bottle swindle is basically the same model as the model of the ink jet printer and razor blades. In the case of the blood culture bottle swindle, the 2-3 million dollar processing machines are the loss leader. The bottles are the cash cow. The bottles themselves are proprietary. The machine does not work on any other bottles. And these bottles cost about 2000 bucks each. I would say in the big inner city hospital I worked at – approximately 70-80 times a day, blood cultures were done. You do the math.
And these bottles cost about 2000 bucks each. Whoa! I want that to be a typo. I guess grifters gotta grift.
One wonders if the barrier to hospitals or groups of hospitals having their own bottles made for this purpose is strictly a legal one. If it would be a whole lot easier to make this kind of bottle than it would be to make an Intel Chip, then I suspect the only barrier would indeed be legal.
Thank you for the shocking explanation. Wow.
I love the Marge story.
Mentioning the autoclave reminded me of work in my father’s lab as a kid, washing agar out of petri dishes.
I operated an old autoclave to sterilize racks of dishes and test tubes. When I was 13yo!
Hear hear! Signiora Barca worked in med labs in the 90s. And Nono Barca was an IM doc who retired in 1980. Thanks IM doc. I want to send these comments to everyone.
Using old fashion safety razors is so much cheaper than using disposables.
Yes, buying the initial safety razor is more expensive especially if it is a good quality one. Then there is the need to usually buy the blades online as well as the occasional need to find a brand that works for your particular razor as they are hardly ever sold at the local McPharmacy, but once you do, even replacing the razor blade every day is cheaper than using a disposable razor just once a week.
Just as with the ink cartridges, manufacturers are
stealingmaking a vast amount of profit.IM Doc …
Ex wife worked in a Pathology lab whilst doing a bio science degree back in the late 80s and then for about 15 yrs more. During that time she started in the lab as a tech for Sullivan Nicolaides Pathology, move on to Phlebotomy in major hospitals and roving nursing home/home collection.
Basically watched this all slowly unfold at her work due to decisions based not on medical reasons but, market trends which increased stock price for the owners and absentee investors. This then ultimately resulted in buffing the business for sale to a Swedish wealth fund for a huge payday.
She then switched over to Paramedics and then had to watch the whole thing all over again in span of 12ish years from market based University Certification and Businesses Admin of the entire public service/good.
Now almost 4 yrs after her ICH, after a 12 hr night shift, presented to her GP down the road for an apt and presented with rapid cognitive decline resulting in paras being called and raced to Neurological ICU – her work is still trying to get her to resign so they can cancel her work pension. It gets worse but won’t go there.
Basically I have watched the same dynamic over decades in the making in more than a few industries and services and its all financially driven/incentivized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
No mention of copy machines in this article, but the same model applies: Xerox sold machines not for a profit from “the iron” but to set up a revenue stream from “supplies” (i.e., branded paper, toner, and fuser oil).
I suppose the same could be said for PCs: you buy a WinTel machine and then Microsoft soon begins pressuring you to pay for an “upgrade”, withdrawing support for your current OS, etc. Owning a PC means you become a M$ customer, buying a new OS from them every 5-7 years. With Apple, the game is a little different: macOS is always “free”, but you must keep upgrading your hardware (and all of your apps) to run the newest one.
The same thing is happening in basic research laboratories. Way too much is automated, with the technicians, graduate students, postdocs, and sometimes the principle investigator (PI, boss, grant writer) doing a poor job of input and not really knowing what the outputs from the black boxes mean. Notice the technicians come first! They are like Marge (yes, I was a technician with various titles for more than ten years). If they are not the backbone of the laboratory, nothing worth doing gets accomplished. The odd result that was the correct result leading to an advance is missed in the process. But the suppliers are making bank, the publications continue to appear (doesn’t matter where as long as the “journal” is indexed in PubMed), and the grant gravy train rumbles along (for those in the club who continue to win that lottery). These are the only numbers that matter under the neoliberal dispensation.
As the other link notes, the Chinese are eating the collective West’s lunch in basic research across the board. Yes, they are big and things get ratty around the margins, but that is no worse than what happens “here.” When every waking moment is not spent worrying about “payroll” and “career” there is room for thought…My first mentors made their careers as excellent scientists with the largesse of “Sputnik Money” and their labs could quietly do more in a year than scientists today accomplish in five.
I’ll retire to my corner now.
“…the Chinese are eating the collective West’s lunch in basic research across the board.”
Does the West still do basic research in Science? Even the research papers credited to Western universities seem heavy with Asian names and much of the research itself seems like exercises in advanced applied statistics.
“Way too much is automated … [research teams] doing a poor job of input and not really knowing what the outputs from the black boxes mean.”
That statement concerns me terribly and reaches far more broadly than the domains of scientific research. There are so many tasks delegated to machines, and too few members of Humankind know how the machines execute their tasks. What will happen the day after the electric Grid goes down and does not come up again? How much will be lost?
What intuition is trained by watching computers crank out solutions to complex equations or tasking AI to craft designer proteins or predict protein structure from amino acid sequences? The ‘answer’ to a particular problem seldom provokes new insights without some understanding of the details of how it was arrived at.
The “Sputnik Money” you mentioned paid for basic research. It also filled libraries with technical literature, paid for programs to train high school science teachers, crafted research departments in the U.S. universities to train engineers and scientists. State and Federal money supported public schools, colleges, and U.S. students pursuing advanced studies. There was of course an unfortunate DoD undercurrent to the spending.
At a much more mundane level, imagine trying to find a business for a special purchase with a computer search engine, a computer map and GPS. Black boxes report answers. They also perform mundane tasks too many people have forgotten how to perform. Assume a phonebook and a paper map could be located somewhere, somehow. How many people could find the business they want to find without getting horribly lost? Ask a similar question about u.s. soldiers or sailors on a mission but suddenly bereft of GPS and their electronic maps.
“The same thing is happening in basic research…”
“Does the West still do basic research in Science?”
Important comments, indeed.
I still use a map-book as a backup, but as with everything else map makers have been bought out, their trained staff especially the cartographers fired, and in the rare occasion that the brand name continues, the product crapified, thus leaving people without a useful replacement besides a search app.
The fight is on for the first continuous time crystal now AKA ” motion without energy “. See recent Chinese study in Nature, Dissipative Time Crystal in a strongly Interacting Rydberg Gas. At room temperature mind. I won’t pretend to understand it, but it looks kind of fundamental.
You might enjoy a book by renowned thinker John Michael Greer called “Retrotopia.” Greer talks often about what we call “progress” and makes the point that once progress went hand in hand with prosperity but that link ended some time ago and that now progress is the enemy of prosperity-
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-05/retrotopia-review/
In that book he also talks about what we call “efficiency” with the question ‘Efficient for what output in terms of what input.’ I am sure that Marge could have answered that question.
Doesn’t Taleb make the point that efficiency comes at the expense of resilience?
This whole discussion looks like it confirms capitalism’s pursuit of profit often makes things worse. Either capitalists tend to become monopolists or at least oligopolists in pursuit of profit, or they do things that are profitable, but ultimately unproductive. Think “computerized blood test bottles” or “F-35″…
Also a well understood point in logistics.
Also well uderstood, albeit a bit indirectly, in finance: it would be mode “efficient” to put all your money in “one sure winner,” exactly the opposite of a well-diversified portfolio. I think I read this very example from somethong Taleb wrote…
Just-in-time supply chains are exhibit A for this phenomenon.
Thumbs up for Retrotopia! An excellent book.
Ditto. I bought a copy that I read every year ago. If people call you a “luddite”, you’ll enjoy it.
Your comment answered questions I had after quickly reading the link, and added important information and context lacking in the link. Thank you for giving me a much better understanding of what is going on. I began reading the link thinking the issue might be related to changes in the glass making industry.
Of course your comment raises couple of new questions for me:
How did the u.s. come to be run by so much bad leadership paid so well for their ‘skills’?
I am growing to believe that the usual answers ‘it just happened to come about’ or ‘that’s just the way it is’ are covers for much more deliberate and insidious processes.
What forces stop some firm from building an automation to replace the automation with its proprietary bottles and rapacious charges for repairs and losses from down-time?
I suspect the patterns of monopolization in Medicine are more complex than the comparatively transparent practices of railroad barons and Amazon.
I always wondered if that’s because of perverse “democracy.”
On most topics, only a handful of people have real skin in the game, to use Talebesque language. Witbout that skin in tje game, your reaction is lackadaisal, abstract, and careless. Also, vast masses of people without skin in the game can be mobilized, if political “action” becomes easy enough, to outvote those who do have skin in the game.
Poli sci people have spent a long time arguing the opposite: that the few people with skin in the game (AMA, farmers, etc) wield far more influence because they can organize themselves to do far more than just nod lackadaisally. While this is doubtlessly true for some groups, being a small group with skin in the game does not automatically mean that you can organize easily or mobilize necessary resources: say, the impoverished rural or inner city communities.
To the many and disinterested people, symbols are all that matters. They don’t even begin to understand what the problems facing the few and uninfluential with real “skin in the game” and, fwiw, they don’t really want to know. So thsir attitude is “let them eat symbols” and are surprised and indignant (but only mildly so) that these people are not grateful or satisfied.
The catch,of course, is thst over time, these groups accumulate. They don’t form a policy coalition as their problems are diverse and there is no common solution. They are interested, potentially, in someone who’d actually pay attentiom to their particular problems and offer help dealing with them, or failing that, someone who recognizes that there are real problems.
The sad thing is that, when US politics were more decentralized and “local,” there were mamy congressmen who did work with these communities. But, now, all that matters is to stay in the roght lane on national politics. The best that they can get are those peddling vaguely defined “hope” or “anger”…
IM Doc, I recollect there have been shortages of various blood draw bottles since the pandemic began. Was it heparinated bottles that were backordered initially?
On your sepsis testing, you might be interested in this https://momentumbio.co.uk/
(I was the fund manager who invested in the seed rounds but I no longer have a financial interest, only parental pride :-) so I hope this is allowed by the NC editors as a fair exchange of information to show that innovation can still mean progress and improvement in standard of care. The technology uses a neat hack of the difference in bacterial, fungal and eukaryotic DNA replication to give a very rapid negative answer to sepsis, reducing prophylactic antibiotic use, and a second stage of answers to what the infection us in positive samples).
Re: anecdata and industry news… See also theatre and concert ticket sales which are in a serious slump after a decent recovery in 2022-2023. A friend who owns a couple local cinemas says he is having his worst summer since 2020, he’s owned 2 multiplexes for over a decade. A list of music festivals cancelled so far in 2024
The Hershey’s item made me think of the ongoing crisis in disposable income. People who aren’t struggling with housing, energy, health care and insurance bills yet probably expect to soon. Discretionary spending is tight, I can see it in the finances of our struggling little pinball joint.
Wayfair CEO likens home goods slowdown to 2008 financial crisis CNBC
Having finally decided to jump ship in Massachusetts, I wrapped up a year of procrastinating/research/hemming and hawing to put a home in Knoxville Tennessee under agreement. I had been stalking a Home Depot $1255 yard shed that suits my future needs, and finally went to purchase it, but the price changed to list price $1600. Enter Wayfair that priced it at $1080 w/coupon. Wayfair tried hard to get me to add professional assembly for $900. I declined.
See also crashing revenue in casual dining chains (worsened by PE debt loads of course).
Recreational weed has dropped in price by over 50% since the first dispensaries were licensed in VT a few years ago. A lot of pricing pressure from neighboring MA. I have no idea how this is affecting the total volume but have been surprised to see it sustained. Many smaller producers are feeling the pain and will probably exit the business.
One upside of recessions these days: may reduce attendance at superspreader events…..
After the tremendous playoff season for the NFL this past season, and including the still freshly inked newest agreements* signed by the NBA as well, it would be sorta hilarious to see even if the best fans aren’t showing up in the droves they always do. NFL owners could suffer, oh the horror! ( sarc )
*off topic, but I’ve only seen commentary on the new media rights signed by the NBA and several media companies. I won’t ever pay to watch any of it on Amazon Prime. FFS. Like major league baseball regular season, I will very likely cease to care.
Anecdata in this regard: my mother first bought Niner season tickets in 1966. In the late 70s, both my sister and I started to contribute to this, and the number of tickets expanded to six. Oh, the tailgate parties! My mom knew how to put a party together more generally, but went over the top for tailgates: awnings, balloons, RVs, generators…
I opted out during hard times in the 80s, but the rest kept on going. Mom passed in 2013 and my sister kept the tickets, now reduced to 4, then recently 2, and she just told me yesterday that this is likely the last year. They keep going up, she said, but simultaneously reducing the perks. “Forty-Niner Faithful my @$$” is how she characterized it.
A long time coming.
The ag economy seems to have its own cycle so I don’t know how much can be read into it but all I can say is ouch. We went through a replacement cycle so there is now plenty of used equipment for farmers to choose from instead of buying new.
Unfortunately the price of commodities like corn and soybeans is well below the cost of production yet not low enough to trigger crop insurance payouts from the government so don’t expect much improvement anytime soon.
At a meeting at work we were told that the company was planning on running at 80% of capacity at our plant. Of course when we pointed out that our buddies at another plant didn’t even have orders for 50% of capacity we were pooh-poohed and told not to spread rumors.
Fast forward just 3 weeks and that plant laid off another 20% of their workforce after laying off 15% earlier.
John Deere Makes Additional Workforce Adjustments Amid Market Challenges
In addition to laying off wage employees the company is using this slowdown to restructure the salary organization. To say this went badly is an understatement. People with 20+ years of experience fired to be replaced by younger and cheaper employees.
Now the salary side is where the wage employees were 10 years ago. Shocked that after doing everything right and giving their all it means absolutely nothing to the company. One bright spot was that disgruntled salary employees shared little secrets like which products are going to Mexico, plant closures and moving headquarters to Texas.
Now if headquarters actually moves from Moline, Illinois then turn out the lights on the Quad-Cities.
Layoff Pinned Post #4
And Chuck Grassley, Ashley Hinson, and Marianette Miller-Meeks are crickets.
Taylor Swift tickets are going for well over $1500 for the US shows (I tried getting tickets for Toronto and they were $2,500 each … I obviously didn’t buy them…). Swifties are independently wealthy lol?
Mr. Market Has a Sad. READER ALERT: See the three data points indicating a sudden, sharp weakening in the US economy. Do you have any consistent or contradictory anecdata or industry news?
The Architectural Billings Index, which tracks design contracts for buildings, has been in the tank – under 50% – for over a year. The WSJ has used the ABI as a leading indicator for recession in the past.
Rolex Market Index:
Aug. ’22 – $25.6K
Aug. ’24 – $21.3K
No doubt all products containing her graven image are made in Honduras, Haiti, and other countries $hillary helped coup/immiserate.
Or prison slave labour!
No doubt for the “Proudly Made in the USA” label!
re: the Benny Johnson ‘x’ (tweet) above
Harmeet Dhillon had me until the last 2 seconds when she referred
to Khameleon Harris as an idpol pandering — ‘Marxist’!?
oy
Me too. Then again Obama was also a Marxist according to these folks.
They must mean like class solidarity.
Fracking changed everything! Interesting charts…
How Does Your State Make Electricity? NYT archive
Charts do not include imports which is a major shortcoming for the Acela corridor states. Renewables are mostly window dressing.
Netzero electricity in New York State by 2040? Pure hopium and a grift project for cronies. Here is reality: New York could see electricity demand grow 90% by 2042: ISO . So in 15 years the amount of generation will nearly double while the fleet of 4 nuclear plants are at the end of their 60 year licenses. Paging Bill Gates, got any small nuclear reactors for sale that use uranium fuel produced in the USA? Maybe fusion will save us? Not!
Should have quoted the Utility Dive article, which is a more dire reality:
How much of the cost for New York State’s push to electrify everything will fall as a crushing load on the already struggling people of Upstate and the remaining small businesses? I believe there may be a small revolution in Albany to halt this nonsense.
I get that upstate NY has significant gripes, but this resident of the city is here to tell you that you don’t have the exclusive on being hit with the costs of the Albany’s ill thought out climate change agenda. Not every business is big here and not every resident is making mid six figures or more (it may not be half of the population but close to it are struggling in the city as well.) And all of those costs are going to hit the majority of NYers regardless of location. There won’t be an exception for the metro area, the fees and the taxes and the increased costs are going to be throughout NY.
Couple that with the fact that our rotten to the core political brain trust (local and state level) is not actually addressing or solving the problems they need to solve in order for there to be enough of that over priced electricity for heating, cooking and cooling (humans and food) not to mention mandated transportation changes, and all of us are looking at people struggling to stay warm or eat, not die in a heat wave and eat or just have the food to eat because there isn’t the ability to transport it, store it and cook it much less pay the increased costs for evey aspect of that. (Many of us down here are going to envy much of the upstate population having the ability to garden much more than we already do.)
The ISO oriented article does not mention off shore wind. Not that it is a panacea, but there is a heck of a lot of off shore production to reap off the east coast and if development can continue reasonably (big if) there is shot at a significant new set of non nuclear facilities.
https://www.northeastoceandata.org/offshore-wind-projects/
Offshore wind development has largely stopped. Interest rates killed many projects. For example:
Stalled coastal wind power projects imperil Biden’s climate agenda politco
Further the donor class summer residents of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Hamptons … all the way to Florida don’t want to look at 200 meter towers.
Yep. Vineyard wind continues onward, but much uncertainty about the future of other projects, hence the big if. However, if the fed returns to form and starts handling out cheap cash again, that could change. And again, I recognize the overall decarbonization issues this site regularly notes, but the off shore potential seemed like an odd thing for the article you excepted to miss.
Who underwrites the financing for wind, offshore or not?
Offshore the logistics are boats, on shore wheeled.
Do they know how much maintenance and supply chain will cost in 5 years when they underwrite the net revenues?
A lot of wind go bust bc they overspend the O&S budgets while under deliver the watts.
Much like F-16 and other U.S. MIC weapons! Can’t do readiness in budget.
Goes with subsidizing the stuff.
The other problem with offshore wind farms is that coastal land is pricey and the people that own it don’t like seeing all those wind turbines.
David Marcus:
“This version of the Democratic Party is sidelining moderates and centrists and has adopted an increasingly leftist ideology. This drift to the left has dictated policies from which I’ve found myself estranged…”
“On Iran, this administration is continuing a misguided Obama-era plan to bring Iran closer to the West by unfreezing Trump-era sanctions, thus giving the Mollahs’ regime the ability to fund terrorism and pursue its anti-America, anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish agenda. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was also handled disastrously. We’re leaving a door open for China to invade Taiwan by coming across as weak…”
A tech “libertarian” switches sides. The neocons will all be rediscovering the wondrous qualities of Trump as well. It’s those dastardly Democrats and their “leftist ideology” that has forced this decision. Those commie wimps. It’s a matter of principle!
I certainly hope that when our coming system of techno-feudalism is finally in place it will be the *good* techno-Lords like Marcus who win the battle to rule us and fight the *good* wars.
“Leftist ideology”
First of all I’d like to see Mr. Marcus define what a leftists is, then I want him to show me that this PMC addled DNC controlled party is going to actually do it.
we have a slow-motion political realignment going on along so many vectors….
one of which is that right-wingers are finally realizing the over-sized influence AIPAC-Israel has on foreign policy.
under-45, support for Israel is collapsing. this doesn’t translate as pro-Iran or pro-xyz , but “let’s get out of the sandbox, and let them sort it out.”
we have an elite itching for wars that that bottom 90% won’t fight. people are finally realizing “war is a racket”
I’d like to believe this is true, but I don’t. My own cynical view is that most people in the US know almost nothing and care even less about foreign affairs unless we are directly at war, when we are all “unified” in a blind “support our troops” patriotic fervor. Otherwise, those who are interested in politics simply believe whatever their sheep-herding party leaders tell them.
Too cynical? I don’t want to be. I do think a little too much blatant genocide on social media has made the traditional Israel narrative a bit problematic. But the despicable ass-kissing spectacle of Netanyahu in Congress a few weeks ago demonstrated nicely that the decision-makers aren’t too worried about that. Why would they be? Red Team mouthpieces can easily convince their constituents that it’s just a bunch of propaganda by those evil Marxist professors that control the US. and its “radical leftist” media. And if they tell their subjects that the commies in China want to take away their freedoms then they’ll ditch any natural isolationist feelings in about five minutes. And we all know about the Blue Team and their loyal subjects.
“My own cynical view is that most people in the US know almost nothing and care even less about foreign affairs unless we are directly at war,…”
I think that is very true, however the types of wars we are about to be engaged in will not be of the sort that allows people to sit back and watch. You can’t throw a WWIII without full mobilization of the populace, and we cannot even arm the populace that our overlords might be able to dragoon.
I don’t think the American people are up for a Ukraine 2.0 in which Nancy Pelosi is standing behind the conscripts poking them with a pitchfork to go into battle. By that time, and hopefully much sooner than that, they will remember that the fragging of the lieutenants is always an option.
You don’t want to be cynical. I dont want to be fatalistic. But what is in it for our 300 whatever million fellows to care about foreign affairs and policy? What’s in for us for caring? Ground teeth and heartbreak and tension headaches. It’s not as though we can alter things except maybe–maybe–concerted and probably unpleasantly violent (with us on the wrong end mostly) concerted action, general strike, mortgage strike, tax strike, probably all and more. Knowledge is not power.
They can always force an attack on the US first like has happened in previous wars (WWII and Spamish American), or allow people that they know are dangerous attack us on US soil (9-11) to drum up those volunteers.
Before those wars, there was the Mexican American War. Abe Lincoln, then an obscure Illinois congressman, first made name for himself in politics by demanding that the gov’t reveal the exact spot where the incident took place. (I vaguely remember that this got Lincoln not so dignified nickname “Spot,” but I csn’t find the reference to that…)
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=3672
I read this Marcus tweetX. I also note that he is pro-crypto, anti-regulation, etc. etc. and thinks the Democrats are becoming as not pro-crypto, anti-regulation, etc. etc. as he would like. So he now supports the Republicans to support what he supports.
If only he were actually right about the Democrats lately, his intended-criticism of them would in fact be back-handed praise. In the real world, one wonders just how anti-crypto, pro-regulation, etc. etc. the Democrats can really be trusted to be.
Re: US economy. I said at least a year ago that people are going to run out of money. They’ve been spending like crazy yet everything is so expensive. It’s not sustainable.
It’s now happening.
(this is my humble opinion.)
See Timothy Prickett Morgan’s analysis of Intel & AMD below, Intel’s loss is AMD’s gain but all the chip makers will suffer when Mr. Market panics. Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA are all hitting product delays due to chip quality & design flaws which are to be expected. Throw in the collapse of the GPU gaming industry and you’ll see positive datacenter sales offset by terrible gaming sales which will also spook investors (who want everything to grow forever).
Intel’s loss -> https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/08/02/the-resurrection-of-intel-will-take-more-than-three-days/?td=rt-3a
AMD’s gain -> https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/07/31/amd-breaks-1-billion-in-datacenter-gpu-sales-in-q2/
There also seems to be some early signs of industry realizing they can’t realize ROI on AI capex (beyond, I assume, some firms using AI as cover for layoffs).
I think he really, really under-counts just how screwed Intel is. Their entire business model is completely fucked because when Intel was at the top, they basically spent a decade with their thumbs up their asses burning $100 BILLION in share buybacks while their competitors caught up to them and left them in the dust. They are now left with basically zero competitive products in the core parts of their business – their GPUs are way behind Nvidia and AMD, their x86 processors are uncompetitive (and the ones that are suffer from crippling defects which they are so far refusing to recall or even stop sales of ), their datacentre business is a dead man walking, and the chip fabrication wing of the company is uncompetitve with TSMC, the Taiwanese chip fabbing giant that Intel used to be ten years ahead of technologically.
The worst is still to come. Intel’s fabs are so far behind that they have had to slowly switch to using TSMC to manufacture their latest processors. They already use TSMC’s fabs for the GPU part of their processors on the ‘Meteor Lake’ generation, and from rumors and news sources Intel’s upcoming processor families (‘Arrow Lake’ and ‘Lunar Lake’) will be entirely outsourced to TSMC. Intel’s entire business model was predicated on them leveraging their unrivaled in-house manufacturing expertise with their unrivaled processor design expertise, and having enough scale with sales to feed their chip fabrication plants. Scale is king in the fab business, so every dollar they send to TSMC is a dollar not being spent on their own fabrication plants. A vicious downward cycle.
Intel is like the Boeing of the tech world right now, probably even worse TBH. They need to pull multiple miracles in the various parts of their business to save themselves. Nothing over the past decade would suggest that their management is even remotely up to the task.
Rule #1: Because markets.
What you describe sounds like voluntarily chosen self-Boeingization by the Intel leadership.
Am I wrong to understand it in that way?
Not at all, the similarities between the two are quite apt I think. The biggest similarity being how both companies incinerated massive amounts of cash in idiotic share buybacks, with management seemingly more focused on financial engineering than looking after their actual businesses. For Intel, it seems even more idiotic when one considers how capital intensive advanced chip foundries are nowadays (at least $10+ billion dollars; TSMC’s 2nm fab is supposedly going to cost them over $30 billion dollars to build!). On the chip design side, it takes years to get processors from the drawing board to production, so you need a lot of money to keep things afloat while you are designing the next generation of products. That also means if you have a less than stellar design, you could be bleeding money for years waiting for the successor product – this specifically is what happened to AMD when it launched its ‘Bulldozer’ micro-architecture in 2011, it nearly sank the company as it could never perform as well as Intel’s products did in those days. AMD started designing the successor ‘Zen’ architecture in 2012, and took four years to get Ryzen/Zen-1 out the door by 2016.
I don’t want to suggest that only share buybacks are the cause of all of Intel’s problems (and Boeing’s for that matter), because they definitely aren’t, but goddamn it, there is a good reason why stock buybacks used to be illegal. Only a sick society lets these finance parasites play these stock manipulation games at the firm’s expense, or survival.
Intel was a bloody cash cow too, their net profit margin could hit 30%+ in a good year, with revenues pushing $70 billion. That is absolutely bonkers for a hardware manufacturing company. Imagine screwing that up?
Sounds like US MIC, or US diplomacy, or US infrastructure building, or US policymaking generally.
thanks to NC for introducing me to Craig Murray…however long ago that was.
This:
“For me it is now axiomatic that there is no two state solution and that apartheid Israel must be completely dismantled as an entity. I believe that more and more people around the entire globe believe that now.
And if we have to dismantle our own political and media classes to get there, so be it.”
this is where ive intuitively been for a long time, now…since early 90’s, when i knew a bunch of Palestinians in Huntsville and then especially in Austin(beer store owners and their families).
but until the genocide combined with a screen in the hands of just about everybody on earth…one couldnt articulate this opinion in “polite
society.
I would agree with you.
I have seen a startling change of heart in many ( certainly not all ) of my evangelical family members. One of my cousins and their family were just visiting us this week. That side of the family has been among the most staunch of the pro-Israel family members. I will not go into this here – but this has nothing to do with Zionism – there is a branch of Protestant Christianity that believes the State of Israel is a harbinger of the Rapture and end of the world. Ergo, no matter what the State of Israel does, it is sanctioned by God and can do no wrong.
But have things ever changed. I do NOT bring up politics or religion with any but the closest of family or friends – especially those I have not seen in a while. But he went there – “If we give one ounce of help to Israel, it will be WWIII and I do not want my sons dying for that desert. They have been fighting for centuries – let them duke it out. And look at what they have done to those babies.” I did not have the strength to question further. I was just whomperjawed with that admission.
The times really are changing.
I had a similar experience late last year with some of my 30-something Russian liberal relatives, when one of them brought up the possibility that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. The same relative also quipped sarcastically about people who left Russia for “a country that doesn’t bomb innocent civilians in neighbouring countries”, or something along those lines. Considering what that demographic is like, I was every bit as astounded to hear it. Still atypical, I think, though maybe more common in that generation.
IM Doc: > The times really are changing.
And yet America politicians, the only people who have the power to stop Israel, continue to take the bribes and do the standing Os.
They have no choice but to take those bribes to get elected. It costs an actual fortune for every candidate to run each election. From then on, Zionists like the Adelsons, who command many of what would be large fortunes to most individuals and are willing to spend it on the cause of Israel, effectively own them. Hence, these now owned and controlled politicians willingly degrade themselves before a foreign leader to demonstrate fealty toward their real masters. This unfortunate state of affairs is partly a result of that Supreme Court decision that equated political contributing with free speech, putting it beyond anyone’s ability to effectively regulate for the benefit of actual free speech and democratic interests.
ergo…instead of mob rule, which they fear, utterly…it is Mob Rule, which they are OK with.
again…on my economics shelf, in there in the funky trailerhouse Library…next to Marx and Smith, Ricardo, et alia…sits Mario Puzo.
Excellent!
Just to quibble slightly, though, for the sake of conversation, I’m not sure it’s so much fearing mob rule. They might not care about or think about that, maybe. It’s more a practical matter of getting what they want to be accomplished, accomplished. That’s done by affecting public opinion to the extent that the political decision makers they need in control-lever positions are installed, ostensibly by free elections. Does that make any sense?
Speaking of Puzo, I just re-watched The Godfather. If nothing else, Don Corleone is a practical man. He makes sure that what he needs to get done, gets done, however (except that, fatefully, he can’t control his son, Sonny). I think I see that quality in our de-facto rulers. But I just don’t know if these people are “afraid” of the mob (lower case). I think they might be confident that they can use the mob to suit their purposes, ultimately.
I was a little bummed when I took the Godfather out from my little DVD stack. I realized then I don’t have Godfather II. I also have Terminator 1 but not T2. Bummer! I do have The Big Lebowski. That’s good.
They haven’t been fighting for centuries. After Muslims took over, was a 150 years long fight with the Crusaders, and then , just over 100 years ago Europeans took over the splitting Ottoman Empire. The fight was entirely created by Westerners. There was a long peace there before such interventions.
Off topic: IM Doc, I’m really glad you chose to stay active at NC. I’ve valued your posts here since my lurker days. I learn stuff from everything you share. So, thank you and please continue!
Appreciate the report! I imagine even the most hard core rapture ready Christians might not think that their conception of G-d will be okay with supporting an entity openly praising gang rape torture and starving babies as heroism.
They may want to educate themselves a little further and realize that the Levant was quite peaceful prior to the British occupation in 1918, which escalated with the Zionist entity. The trope about how they’re barbarians fighting amongst themselves was invented to let westerners look away from the carnage enabled by their governments.
But baby steps!
and the axios thing regarding how the usa is not ready for “global war”….like, so shit, brother,lol…
2 questions arise:
1. why do they need more funding?…is almost a trillion dollars a year insufficient, somehow?
and 2. the one of two ammo plants stateside have been having some…umm…issues…including blowing up.
these issues have not been headline material that ive seen, to say the least…
are the explosions due to the ancient and decrepit nature of the facilities?…as shown in the pics accompanying the one story i remember seeing in usa msm that covered this with any kind of thoroughness?
and how much does the global supply chain fiasco contribute to this?(sourcing accelerant and explosive precursors and even brass from china, etc)…or, related to “re-shoring” in general, are there engineers and machinists and the ability to make the machines that make the machines around to hire?…or do we have to H1b visa those folks from China?
where’d all those trillions go?
seems like a story thats just begging to be explored,lol.
The defense analysis document cited by Axios goes a lot further than restating the obvious. It calls for a new US war mobilization including substantial raises in taxes and reducing the amount spent on entitlements.
The doc is available for download if anyone is bored this weekend.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2024/commission-on-the-national-defense-strategy-report_rand_20240730.pdf
lol.
my current mental health wont allow me to pore through that.
but i think i can safely guess whats in it…the same shit thats been in it for most of my 55 years….”we cant afford to take good care of our own serfs, because we simply must dominate the planet…as well as shore up the balance sheets of the already obscenely wealthy!”
my tiny lil pension check is 3 days late…which means it’ll be monday at the earliest that it arrives in our po box.
teacher retirement system of texas says they mailed it on the 30th…so a week to get 100 miles,lol.
i could drive down there and get it in person quicker and for cheaper…since i must charge things like cigs at the mom and pop i go to.
(and i frelling hate debt, even of this no interest kind)
so im travelling out of gas cans…and smokin and drinkin off the forbearance and kindness of others…and am just about frazzled with stress over the whole mess.
broke down and signed up for TRS to direct deposit into my savings acct…which will take a month and a half,lol.
because they, as well as the USPO, are worriedly understaffed and underfunded.
good thing i got a workin farm,lol…so at least my diet hasnt changed…like at all…
this is late-stage empire stuff…textbook, in fact…we can “afford” unimaginable amounts of money…created out of thin air, mind you…for attempting to shore up a decrepit and decadent imperium in all but name…but cant afford things like a working mail service, healthcare, or adequate compensation for retired teachers or their surviving spouses…let alone a fair and functional disability system(the almost 7 years i spent being denied, my “work credits” dried up/went away, and i am no longer eligible….yet i remain disabled. )
and kamalamadingdong keeps asking me for money,lol…twice a day, now…and i reply, because i’m existentially angry.
things like, “whens the last time you asked me to vote for you?…the 2019 primaries?….same question for genocide joe?…yall couldnt even pretend to do a primary this year, girl…and you want some of my meager fundage?!….getting to the point where i was with that walking corpse…and telling you to go fuck yerself, until yall stop texting me…ill never vote for a democrat, nor a republican, again.”
With you there, Brother Amfortas.
Amfortas:
I think it’s called late stage monopoly capitalism
The only war they are mobilizing for is the one against our bank accounts.
RAND did the research for the senate run “panel” of MICIMATT insider.
Most interesting and unsurprising the report comes out with the lines of not enough GDP for MICIMATT which Hoover Institute been shouting for decades.
The threats of not exploding MICIMATT graft are to “national interest’s whatever they may be to theMICIMATT.
The Commission was chaired by the former US Rep Jane Harman, a southern California liberal defense industry shill, who served on the House Armed Forces (six years), Intelligence (eight years), and Homeland Security (eight years) Committees.
She supported the Iraq War and got awards from the CIA. She scandaled in 2009 when the NSA caught her bargaining on the phone with an Israeli agent; she agreed to lobby the DOJ to drop charges against AIPAC staff caught with classified US documents in return for some kind of support for her becoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The Wikipedia entry does not explain how an agent of a foreign government proposed to get her a better position in our own government. She resigned from the House in 2011.
Sounds like a safe pair of hands to me!
But the report seems like a good dipstick to indicate what the Powers want for us. It looks like more military spending, higher taxes, deeper austerity, opinion control, and a larger industrial base created in a way TBD. I bet it will work just fine.
The plan is to dismantle the apartheid Israel…by eliminating Muslims. They then create an area called Greater Israel.
By the time people get through exchanging proclamations on paper, the Palestinians will be dead or so devastated from hunger and homelessness, it will be decades before they repair themselves and their society.
Palestinian hip-hop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n4fn1QUdeE
and some disdainamation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJZ9RwGXzdM
…:And if we have to dismantle our own political and media classes to get there, so be it.”
John Mearsheimer addresses the issue succinctly. The existence of the Zionist lobby and the vast sums paid to influence us is proof that the assistance we provide to the Zionists is not in our best interests. For why would such vast sums be spent on something that is truly in our best interests? Yes, the political and media classes much be brought dealt with as you propose.
Also, it is good to see that IMDOC is posting again, since I have enjoyed his input for long. The issue with
evangelicals is also a factor bearing on the issue.
The reason lobbies are so central to power in the USA is pretty simple: the US publc, on balance, do not care about civic virtues at all. American culture is all bout self-indulgence, all shades of narcissism, radical hedonism, and “indentity politics” as an ersatz politics that is designed and manufactured to destroy real politics. Since the people as a whole are fascinated by entertainment, drugs, and silly drama in their personal lives where is there room for virtue? The reason we don’t have a dynamic and healthy democracy in this country is NOT the fault of the oligarchs but, rather, the direct fault of the people as a whole.
As we view the world realistically rather than through the lens of fantasy we can see the problem and that is the face in the mirror. Some of us try to reverse that trend but we all know that the result is ostracism except for online ghettos (like here) that have no influence in the wider world.
Tocqueville’s take on the US saw the opposite: an explosion of clubs devoted to politics and varied forms of civic engagement. Democracy wasn’t limited to voting it was a part of life. Where we are now did not happen by accident but by design, in my opinion.
Partly by design because consumerism and materialism clearly brought people together in a kind of way. It was diversity that obscured common mythical frameworks which institutions like the yellow press, radio, movies, and television tried to instill a common framework. But the materialism and nihilism of consumerism infected the society at the same time it was necessary to find and maintain common values. When I grew up there was a patina of “family values” from encouraging morality–there was a motto broadcast in the media in the fifties that “a family that prays together stays together” which is kind of true because prayer implies a common high level mythological framework where clear values are taught. Without moral and spiritual values we all go our separate ways.
I remember that in the late fifties as part of the anti-communist movement there was an expression of horror at what the Chinese were doing at the time in establishing daycare centers so mothers could work–the idea was that if we went in that direction it would be the end of American values–and they were right. Not that I object to daycare but remember, even Republicans believed in their platformin something called the “living wage” as a just goal because it enabled mothers to stay home and the man to earn enought to maintain a family and, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a study comparing families with two kids being able to maintain a life whereas around 2000 that was no longer possible on a working class income (or most other levels). Doesn’t mean life was “better” then just different.
I remember that world. Women weren’t “enabled” to stay home, we were obliged to. Opportunities to earn a wage that would support a family were officially closed to us. My mother was the only woman in our neighborhood who had her own car or even knew how to drive. Women were allowed to go where their husbands were willing to take them, end of story.
If getting rid of daycare is anyone’s idea of bolstering family values, that person has a dangerously narrow idea of what a family is. I say let’s re-frame our thinking here and focus on the highest standards of well-being for women and children. That’s all you need to do, right there, to keep families strong.
Cutting daycare supports male dominance at the expense of women and children.
I can’t even have a political discussion face to face with people today without a prior agreement on the definition of terms. I want to know if we agree on what a liberal.is, what is the left vs.what is the right, do they understand the differnces between socialism and communism. Otherwise it just becomes donkey or elephant tribalism.
Depending on who is using them they are either virtue signaling or terms of abuse. They no longer have definitions.
But didn’t de Tocqueville say something about US individualism and hedonism being the death of it?
For example:
“Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.”
“There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.”
And, on a slightly different note but relevant to the means-tested luxury PMC access to dignity of our times:
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
I guess I have noticed a different drift in u.s. politics and civic virtues. Of course people “…are fascinated by entertainment, drugs, and silly drama in their personal lives…”. But question them about their lack of interest in politics and civic commitments. They “view the world realistically”, quite realistically in my opinion. Many young people have no faith that their input to politics is valued, or given any consideration by the ‘oligarchs’ you so blithely excuse from responsibility. Those working people I know have all their time tied up working long hours and caring for their families and spouses — if they had families or spouses — or working to find a partner. Making ends meet occupies their time and energy. I view the “narcissism, radical hedonism, and ‘identity politics’ as an ersatz politics” as most representative of afflictions of the overpaid yuppie wannabes who live in the ‘better’ neighborhoods.
Try attending a meeting at your town hall waiting for an important local issue to come up for discussion. I waited with over 100 local homeowners through almost two hours of grindingly boring discussions about how many parking places to require at business ‘X’ and other similarly pressing concerns while waiting for new business. By late in the evening after many homeowners left in disgust, “New Business” finally come up on the agenda. The mayor acted ‘mayorally’ allowing the discussion to proceed. Late in the evening he tabled discussion and announced the issue was a state issue and outside the purview of our township. He made no offer to present the township’s interests at state level. The meeting closed leaving a large number of disgusted and very angry township homeowners to brood. I moved away before the township had elections. I doubt the mayor lost his job. The typical candidates running for local government were quite similar in quality and variety to the choices open to voters in the November national elections.
I definitely blame the ‘oligarchs’ for the destruction of “dynamic and healthy democracy”. This mess did not just happen. It was carefully engineered. I cannot join you in blaming the victims.
Yes, same. What little “disposable” income most have is promptly disposed of after the next hurricane hits, or emergency room visit or other health care crisis emerges, or car accident destroys a vehicle needed for work, or … on and on. Savings? LOL. The weekly grocery bill is now fully into territory I’ve never seen before.
IMO, one thing that needs to happen, specifically, is that ownership of the media needs to be distributed at least to more or less that it once was before good ole Ronny Ray Gun effectively deregulated ownership not being allowed to be so concentrated (I forget what the bill was, but I think it was done under Reagan). I’m sure media ownership was plenty concentrated before, but not, I believe, as it is now. If that is done, then, over the long haul, view-points among the media class members whom Murray refers to (although I’m not sure who that is exactly) will tend to become somewhat more varied again. I don’t know what Murray means by “dismantling” the media class, but I imagine some kind of acceleration could be made regarding bringing in new blood. I just don’t know what that might be. This is one part of the society where traditionally diversity has always been considered a strength.
“I just don’t know what that might be.”
Pacifica. They are a great model, and from what I hear those folks are barely hanging on these days. Put money into this. Put a comfortable level of funding into a Pacifica model and scale it up to serve the whole country.
Central banks are turning the ship, but their path is unclear – Reuters
Rising inflation is rising inflation to people. Prices for essentials are so damn high that whether it rises fast or slow is a bunch of BS.
But rate cuts are coming to bring back cheap, personal loans to the well-connected. They will be shielded during the recession and buy up things with the return of easy money. wash, rinse, repeat…same as it ever was.
The rest get higher unemployment and higher prices.
It’s not an economy, it’s a racket.
M2 is >$20 trillion. Fed Balance sheet is 7.18 trillion, down $27 billion the 1 Aug report. Reserve balances at Fed Reserve banks, 3.3 trillion and reverse repo run under $400B last week.
So much money we can afford to create more?
It might work if federal debt creation were not greater than GDP growth.
Lower interest rates is making apple stock the new gold.
A big problem is creating so much money and then cutting taxes.
Seems to me, MMT is all about printing money until prices go “unstable”
Now the MMT PMC are aghast that average people are aghast at prices so much lower than their hopes called for.
Is anyone better off than they were with Trump, and 26% lower grocery bills.
The T in MMT is theory!
It is the economy Kamala not jibberish.
The increase in the float of the currency (printing money) comes from only one place: private debt creation.
The Fed Gov does not increase the float of currency. For the Fed Gov to increase the float, it would need to engage in unsterilized spending, I.e. where spending is greater than the combination of taxes and bond issuance to offset that spending. But the Fed Gov doesn’t do that.
This web page has a nice graph comparing cumulative deficit by fiscal year from FY2019 got present. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/
– FY2020 and FY2021 were the outliers, much higher than FY2019
– FY2024 is currently at a run rate which is $500B larger than FY2019
Inflation has been falling for months and is now in the 2 – 3% range. Wage growth has been outpacing inflation this year. Just sayin’.
I suppose you use the word ‘inflation’ to mean the inflation as reported in government statistics. Have you noticed that your increased wages go further at the grocery store, your doctor’s office, your dentist’s office, your mechanic, buying gasoline for your car, paying rent, utilities, charges for phone and Internet, the rate you are paying on any credit card debt, … ? I am glad you are so pleased with the bump in your wages bounced against the government inflation figures.
Those rate cuts are the writing on the wall for recession/depression. There is no soft landing. Yes, the well connected will still come out on top, but not because of cheap personal loans due to rate cuts. But because they’ll be invested in enterprises that are considered too big to fail which will get bailed out. Everybody else gets to eat risk.
I think this will be bad, worse than 2008/2009. Eventually resolving into another jobless recovery. And then debt creation climbs that wall of worry all over again, creating inflation in assets if not consumables. Which provides for the K-shaped recovery that benefits the top %.
Hahaha. That’s Thomas Röper in Anti-Spiegel about the prisoner swap. My translation: ...is known to reside remarkably deep in… and you can do the rest.
Funny as it is, I think this kind of thing also helps to clarify Röper’s purposes. But I’m not sure if his main target is Scholz, his party, the German political class, or even current generation of Europols.
Lepanto has a continuing spiritual dimension.
There is a Roman Church in a NYC suburb on Long Island: Our Lady of Victory. The reference is to Lepanto.
Pope Pius V asked all western Christians to pray the Rosary (a Marian devotion) for success over the Ottoman fleets.
Big Serge is always worth reading!
Lepanto had a very good PR, that’s for sure. It did not actually change anything, and galleys (or comparable) were still used for over 200 years, even in battles as big as Lepanto.
>Harmeet Dhillon TORCHES “Chameleon” Kamala after working professionally with her for +20 years
Marxist Kamala Harris!
Oh fer chrissake! & Oh my gawd! This is pathetic, it would be funny except that there are people that believe such tripe. And before that there was Donald Trump wants to be President of all the people same type of tripe.
Kamala Harris understands how power flows in this country and that to advance she must be a chameleon. If she actually had a central determination to redirect the flow of power to the many, it would be a different conversation. But that is not a conversation the powerful are having because they know she will be pliant.
Donald Trump also understands the flow of power, because he has a dynastic element of it. Some of the many believe that he reflects a redirection of the flow of power and he is astute enough to encourage that belief. Key elements of the powerful understand that he is not sufficiently pliant. But he has no central determination to benefit the many.
We are so ƒ¨ç˚´∂.
https://x.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1819320724110061680
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled
Definitely *not* weird: “As Attorney General, Harris instructed her entire staff to stand every morning as she entered the office and say, ‘Good Morning General’…never address Harris nor look her in the eye as that privilege was only allowed to senior staff members.”
https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/us-news/kamala-harris-berated-staff-with-f-bombs-report/
Kamala Harris ‘berated staff’ with ‘F-bombs’ leaving them ‘in fear’,…
6:33 AM · Aug 2, 2024
Yeah, I made a similar comment above about the David Marcus “conversion.” Many of us have been so disgusted with the Democrats – and rightly so – that we have tended to forget how disgusting the Red Team is as well. The whole focus of Trump and the Repubs is on the Dems as “radical leftists” who care only about DEI and letting immigrant criminal thugs into our country and are allowing the terrorists to kill our noble Israeli allies. As usual, there is no debate at all on real issues. Just the usual kayfabe.
The irony of this particular clip is that almost all of it is true. Then the last comments about “Marxist Kamala” show what utter partisan bulls**t it all really is. And like the Marcus tweet, this person pretends this is a matter of principle. Your last line sums it up.
I am a commie (just not a Leninist, but that’s an entirely different conversation) and I sure ain’t a Democrat! :-/
Good for you, Alice. I refuse the socialist label and go with anarchist-communist. I’m in favor of democracy, as in rule by the people, but Western Civilization is violently opposed to that.
i lean towards anarcho-commie, myself….but settle for now for Anarch….since i am alone out here in being Out of The Cave, as it were.
i’d settle for a competently run New New Deal and an end to pretensions of empire….ie: “Bernie was the compromise”,lol.
At this point I’d settle for almost anything competently run with less thievery and bribery.
Well . . . I sometimes call myself a New Deal Reactionary.
The “left-of-center” political parties in the West mostly focus on idpol and refuse to talk about matters of popular concern. This leaves those policy matters wide open to disingenuous pandering from the right. That leads to the infuriating experience of listening to odious right-wing hacks say things about policy that I agree with. When goons like Matt Walsh can land punches I’ve been trying to throw for years I just want to tear my hair out.
Wow! This is exactly where I am with politics in the US.
yeah…i signed on to X…never post…but i noticed that my feed has more Masse, Amash and even(shudder)MTG than AOC, et alia in it…because they are askin for my vote.
i yelled at local and texas dems forever about leaving birdsnests on the ground for goptea to pick up…and here we are.
of course, this is just further evidence that things like L & R are about as useful to me as which fork to use.
(ie: a fork is a fork…and i usually eat with big spoons anyways,lol)
like ive explained here a million times…most folks out here are right leaning…mostly, i suspise, because of the mindfuck, and little capacity for independent thought….so i am, de facto(even tho i havent written a letter to the editor in 10 years or more) the Face of the damned democrats,lol…iow, hillary is just like Amfortas.
too much effort to correct this, and perhaps further educate these good folks, with the number of letters to the editor this would require.
and my buddy the editor retired a number of years ago…so i’d hafta first have the new editor out here to seduce him/her to giving me a platform…when all they’re really interested in is being a brochure for the local realtors(look how quaint and old school and harmonious this far place is!)
Right now the urgent worry is Israel doing something so insane that everyone’s dragged into a war that nobody can win and that would be largely out of control once started and could therefore escalate in all kinds of ways including the most terrifying.
Hence the only sane thing to do RIGHT NOW is to stop Israel from doing any more insane stuff. Only the USA can do that. It would be up to the president’s initiative to make that happen.
So yeah, I too am worried we may be in trouble. Biden, Trump, Harris, ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯
The power of the lawyer associations across the country are ( to my understanding ) usually throwing support to a Democrat, along with other noted powerful factions of Hollywood and celebrity elite ( Colbert, Clooney, etc. ) and varied factions of private equity, hedge funds and Wall Street. To be fair, the last grouping of serious moneyed interests find a thread the needle approach towards who does the least harm to their future business and profit outcomes…. I’m leading to my thoughts below.
Harris trained to be a lawyer, served in the San Francisco office in various roles and then eventually moved into the state level role as Attorney General. In many states in our country, that role is powerful when put to good use (see tobacco settlements, opioid settlements). As noted this week in a post on the subject, she did not cry havoc or unleash the dogs of legal warfare on big Wall Street firms. She worked alongside other state AG, only to later be hobbled by an Obama administration settlement approach for those entities who caused much harm. Harris served in the Senate starting in 2017, ran a hobbled campaign for president in 2020 and is now poised as possibly the heir apparent to walk in the paths of one former president Obama. Remarkable climb to new heights.
I don’t know who she is, I can surmise what she stands for ( more Biden like policies, etc.. ) and it doesn’t look good to me, that a candidate who polled so poorly in her home state in 2020 could likely win this national election. To me she strikes me as an empty suit, sound and fury that signifies not much at all. I suspect we all know by now who Trump is. These are our major party choices. A historic election year, no question.
Thanks Alice, for this comment.
I think Trump’s central distinction is how his ear is always tuned to the mood of his tribe. That doesn’t mean he will act in their interest, or in the interest of most Americans. But his visceral connection to his audience — unbroken even in the seconds after being hit with a bullet, pumping his fist — I find impressive, it seems to make him unique. He’s also a wild card: unpredictable, but not a chameleon — what you see is what you get, and this gives him an authenticity people connect to. If he survives and is elected, it seems difficult to predict what will happen. The powerful do understand that he is insufficiently pliant. He may lack a central determination to benefit the many — but that benefit may still happen, if only by accident. In contrast, with Harris and the DNC, it seems certain that the wishes of TPTB will be done, guaranteed.
If I vote for anyone, it would be Jill Stein and the Greens. I think the US would survive Trump’s return (Vance I don’t have a firm sense of). But I think the corruption of the Democratic Party has to be scrubbed from power. We don’t need more proof of where their interests lie.
Sorry for the usual ramble.
“Hillary Clinton-run campaign group helps fund Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion”
People keep on saying follow the money and here is this story to show why this is a good idea. Find out where their money comes from and if they refuse to disclose their funding, that is all you need to know about such an organization.
My take is this is how you kill a movement. Buy it.
Mr. Market Has a Sad….
It will be interesting to hear what the candidates talk about now that problems in the economy are not being glossed over as just “vibes.”
“China Continues To Crush In Science”
The Nature.com Index of high-quality science research publishing for the last 12 months is just out.
The Index shows 4 of the top 5 publishing institutions are Chinese, 7 of the top 10 institutions are Chinese and 11 of the top 15. Harvard is number 2 and MIT is 15. German institutions are at numbers 6 and 11. A French institution is number 10.
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all
The Nature Index
1 May 2023 – 30 April 2024
Rank Institution ( Count) ( Share)
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 8094) ( 2429)
2 Harvard University ( 3545) ( 1063)
3 University of Science and Technology of China ( 2116) ( 690)
4 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 3485) ( 689)
5 Zhejiang University ( 1761) ( 684)
6 Max Planck Society ( 2704) ( 679)
7 Peking University ( 2562) ( 666)
8 Nanjing University ( 1623) ( 661)
9 Tsinghua University ( 2130) ( 622)
10 French National Centre for Scientific Research ( 4406) ( 604)
German prosecutors, police and press continue to denounce and investigate an unending plague of ‘Nazi salute’ incidents, in a totally healthy and non-hysterical campaign to finally stamp out fascism – Eugyppius
While German officials and EU officials are throwing money at Nazi’s in Ukraine.
And Israel.
There is the 3rd Ukrainian Brigade making the rounds in Europe right now – which are composed of Azov people – to recruit people, make speeches and to raise money. Not sure if Germany is on their itinerary but would not be surprised to see them visit there. But the only way that the Scholz regime would crack down on them was if they started shouting the slogan ‘From the river to the sea.’
From the Don to the Black Sea?
Who is being so saluted? German prosecutors, police and press? That would make most sense.
re: It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil
GEEZ, look at all of those oil wells with houses squeezed between them. I guess they’re not as ugly as the wind generators. Would modern folk have allowed them?
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-historic-moonshot-legislation-to-address-the-long-covid-crisis/
NEWS: Sanders Introduces Historic Moonshot Legislation to Address the Long COVID Crisis
The devil is in the details. Similar to Covid support for businesses and corporations that instead of being spent on employees was spent on stock buybacks and gardens and things that didn’t support their workers or their work, if the money goes to the NIH without massive strings attached – X% to ventilation of buildings where patients are treated, X% to pharmaceutical companies not named Pfizer and Moderna for treatments with a bonus for new uses for old drugs, 150% clawback penalty for any use of the funding to C Suite bonuses or increased salaries, 150% clawback for any monies used for stock buybacks, buying of other companies or anything that increases stock prices, etc
And these are just off the top of my head. I truly believe that Bernie wants this for the right reasons, but unless there is as much effort to keep a minimum of 95% for the purpose and only 5% for the grift, it will be exactly the opposite and just be a grift machine with little results…perhaps even less than the charging stations Pete was supposed to build.
Of course, the US cannot match China in its littorals! Henry Kaiser, long dead, turned his shipyards into insurance companies. Like the rest of the US “hard” economy.
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally mandated group with members handpicked by the sponsor who was the senate, I doubt Johnson would have got it through the house!
The “panel” was “supported” by RAND, more of the same over the past 70 odd years.
They had GDP charts ala Hoover institute who annually scream “less than 7% GDP for the MIC and the red hordes arrive”!
More money!!!
Change the CoCOM structure, more of the same!
More coalition actions who have to do it our way! Sell them F-35’s!
Change the weapons acquisition “process”, more money for Boeing and Lockheed. No mention of historic financial debacle that cannot pass an audit! In my lifetime they have been reforming acquisition ever since they could not kill the failed C-5!
Jack Keane a member!
Piffle report!
https://english.news.cn/20240716/a87568d998b347958709a2bb64d3ee63/c.html
July 16, 2024
China’s shipbuilding industry soars in H1, solidifies global leading position
BEIJING, July 16 (Xinhua) — China’s shipbuilding industry saw significant growth in the first half of this year, reinforcing its global leading position, according to data released Tuesday by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
From January to June, China completed shipbuilding projects totaling 25.02 million deadweight tonnes (DWT), an increase of 18.4 percent compared to the same period last year. New orders surged to 54.22 million DWT, reflecting a remarkable year-on-year growth of 43.9 percent.
By the end of June, the order book stood at 171.55 million DWT, up 38.6 percent from the previous year.
The MIIT’s data also demonstrates China’s dominant position in the global shipbuilding market. In the first half of this year, the country’s shipbuilding completions, new orders, and order book as measured by DWT accounted for 55 percent, 74.7 percent, and 58.9 percent of the global totals, respectively.
In 2023, the three key market indicators stood at 50.2 percent, 66.6 percent, and 55 percent…
Yes to Big Serge always being a great read.
He has an unusual substack business plan. I am not a subscriber so I can only see what is in the front of the paywall. But he puts so much of his essays in the front of the paywall (1st half? I don’t know) that it’s all that most people would want anyway.
One thing I have been looking around for and have not found is confirmation of his take on the Ukraine drone impact. He said in one of the Russia Ukraine reports that a drone carries the punch of a rocket propelled grenade and the weapon is of zero tactical impact against an artillery formation. This was around a month ago and I have kept my eye out and I still haven’t figured out how accurate this is.
reckon that would be a function of the possible weight of the explosive payload…
im certainly no expert on drones…almost as bad as i am with cars(umm…its a car…)
some of them appear to be rather large…but most of the ones ive paid any mind to are quite small. so a 1/4# of c4 or whatever aint gonna do much to a great big hunk of steel,assuming ablative armor, etc… unless it gets a really lucky hit.
the usa’s reapers and whatnot appear to be pretty big…and so can carry missiles.
ive only seen one of those…flying around out here(west texas training area), long before they were publicly known…and before that, say, in 2002 or so…i heard what sounded like a lawnmower in the sky, and a white drone thing flew a few hundred feet over me…maybe 4 or 6 foot long, with a little bigger wingspan…and loud, with a prop.
my big greenhouse had a cover back then…and was often lit for me working at night…so pilots, etc i assume used it as a landmark. we’re on the eastern edge of the training area, and all military craft would turn around somewhere to my east.
drones have come a long way since then.
During the Bulge in 1944 the German were firing air burst artillery shells the response was cover your foxholes. There is a tactic for each new weapon.
There is talk at MoA of deploying shot guns with shells loaded with 6 pieces of shot on a Kevlar line, like chained shot developed for smooth bore cannon hundreds of years ago.
Sergei may have talked about this too.
Russians developed and deployed shells like that at least two months ago. The shots are not on a Kevlar line, but they are each trailing a Kevlar line. From 30-40 meters it quite likely at least one of them gets entangled with at least one propeller and down goes the drone.
Kevlar line have to be inbetween shots in order to spread out properly.
Cheap FPV drones carry actual RPG-7 warheads (aka. carrots). They have a lot of tactical impact because they can hit weak sides of a vehicle, as long as they are in range. For longer ranges bigger drones like Lancets are used. They also have small warhead that is enough to inflict damage on artillery formations, and there are countless videos to prove it.
re: Intel falling apart – Gamers Nexus has a 45 minute long video taking apart the history over the past two years and Intel’s response. Damning stuff, pretty technical but I think the gist gets across.
“Scumbag Intel: Shady Practices, Terrible Responses, & Failure to Act” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6vQlvefGxk
Intel had shady practices in the 1980s. We used Motorola 68000 chips at the instrument manufacturer where I worked, and they were great. But the Intel sales people kept dangling deals in front of the lab manager and his bosses to the point that one new device was developed with Intel chips. There were a lot of technical issues that eventually got ironed out, but a year or so later a new model was delayed because the Intel’s latest chips were on allocation. The Intel guys told the bosses that they were prioritizing Intel-only shops, so if we committed to abandoning the Motorola parts they would get us the chips we needed. And of course we did because they had us over a barrel. There are also interesting stories about pre-IPO stock distribution to politicians for lobbying, back in the day. Sleazy *family blog*ers.
They have always been a marginal at best, technically and strategically. Always late with the improvements, lots of bugs in the silicon, major design problems. They missed the mobile revolution and handed that segment to ARM. They missed the foundry opportunity and gave that to TSMC & Samsung. Didn’t even begin to compete in GPUs and the AI revolution. They were only ever good at making money, and only because of market position. And now the US Government has given them billions to build chips, which they are using to lay people off. Terrible people.
I’ve read somewhere that IBM engineeres wanted to use Motorola for this brand new personal computer thing they were making. Bosses decided that Intel should be used, and gave them exclusive contract too (also, Microsoft).
IBM didn’t want the PC to compete with the big boxen. They used the 8088 which was the 16 bit 8086 but with 8 bit external busses to crapify it.
Intel chips have consistently been the best consumer CPUs for decades, with a few exceptions (AMD dominating for a while with its first 64 chip is the biggest one). They’ve just had a premium price attached.
AI is largely a scam and a fad. Nvidia was better positioned to leap into it because it already had expertise is appropriate hardware.
Intel is in fact going into GPUs in a big way, and is going for price segments AMD and Nvidia seem to have completely abandoned.
Hard to say this with a straight face when everyone is carrying a higher performance (barring some raw instructions per second metrics for over clocking gamers) non-Intel chipset in their phone! The best consumer CPU does office work.and streaming content rendering because that’s all the modal consumer does. Works fine on a non-intel mobile.
Intel chips are overpriced, buggy, backdoored bloatware. China should be grateful it is illegal to buy them! :-)
Uh, no? That’s absurd, comparing mobile hardware to a desktop CPU. Even a mediocre PC chipset with a heatsink and comparatively unlimited wattage is going wipe the floor with SOCs optimized for low heat and power usage.
And no one overclocks anymore. It’s too much effort for far too little gain.
“Intel had shady practices in the 1980s…”
Really important summary history.
Agreed! I only knew about their anti-competitive practices against AMD back in the 90s, which led to me boycotting them to this day. No surprise I guess that Intel has had a history of shady behavior.
$152 billion in stock buybacks since 1990, in case you were wondering.
Plus 10s of billions from the US taxpayer. And a current market cap of ~90 billion. Absolutely amazing that we allow this.
https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks
Intel Corporation
Buybacks
We have an ongoing authorization (originally approved by our Board of Directors in 2005 and subsequently amended) to repurchase shares of our common stock in open market or negotiated transactions. As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program began in 1990.
I cannot remember when Intel financials were not disappointing. I have gamed a dip or two.
I have been out of Intel since its last unreasonable uptick last winter.
It has to go near single digits for me.
The Biden Coup happen months … years ago. The Biden Coup happened (behind closed doors) when the people surrounding Biden did NOT tell the rest of America that Biden is/was incompetent. And … now he is going to continue to stay in? Gee … and you want me to believe anything out of government’s mouth. Does this not slap you in face as wrong? Is political expedience worth the leader of the free world not being competent to make decisions that literally effect everyone. I don’t want unelected technocrats running the show. Aside — I find it funny that unelect isn’t a word.
And the “biden coup” continues with the full knowledge of his partner in crime, the “presumptive” dem “nominee.”
In case some have not seen it, after all the freed americans got off the plane the other night and joined their families, biden left his 2nd-in-command standing on the tarmac and climbed the stairs into the now empty plane where he remained for over a minute and a half. The “presumptive nominee” continued to just stand there grinning mindlessly and staring into the open doorway.
The white house has “explained” by saying that he wanted to “congratulate” the crew members. But as you can see, biden didn’t tell kamala of his plan or invite her to join it, he just wandered over and started up.
I continue to believe that this country is being left to twist in the wind, leaderless, because the only alternative is harris taking over the “presidency,” a job for which she is completely unqualified. People cannot be allowed to see that before the “election” since it might fuck the dem plans up royally.
Oh, god, sometimes I just do not want to catch up.
And I’ve been saying that if he cannot run, he cannot govern and they need to Article 25 him. But I’m not so sure it would be obvious that Kamala wasn’t up to the job. Even if they canned Joe, the people who have been running it for him could just keep doing it for Kamala. Where the problem would lie is that she would be expected to address the public and the press to explain what they were doing. People gave up on that with Joe around the beginning of year two of his Presidency. Since most of it makes no logical sense if your motive is the state of America…. well the real gig would be up. That everybody running this train wants only wants the first three cars to cross the bridge and the rest of the mile long train to collapse into the abyss as it collapses.
1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/opinion/biden-trump-america.html
February 12, 2024
Why I Am Now Deeply Worried for America
By Paul Krugman
Until a few days ago, I was feeling fairly sanguine about America’s prospects….
But watching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered….
It’s also true that many voters think the president’s age is an issue. But there’s perception and there’s reality: As anyone who has recently spent time with Biden (and I have) can tell you, he is in full possession of his faculties — completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail….
2) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06/25/opinion/thepoint/krugman-biden-must-withdraw
June 25, 2024
The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw
By Paul Krugman
It does seem, with the brat vibe and boys are weird message, the Democrats are all in on the 14 year old girl vote.
Or are they just trying to balance out Trump’s perennial 12 year old boy?
When are the adults coming back?
When are the adults coming back?
Not any time soon… If you haven’t seen accounts of the “white dudes for kamala” or “white ‘women’ for kamala” yet, take a look at Taibbi and Kirn’s assessment of those “movements.” Taibbi and Kirn would seem to be the only adults in evidence.
Long but VERY entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amZWjnnkhuQ
Make sure to use your listening ears!
Good grief. Speaking as a wrong kind of nonwhite person, the white X’s for Harris zoom sessions honestly sounded to me like Klan meetings with dweebs. Doubly so as a sort of lapsed Catholic who could really empathize with Pliny the Younger and Grand Prince Heungseon as they chopped off my coreligionists’ heads.
Further to the MEE piece above regarding eyewitnesses claiming a projectile assassinated Haniyeh, the IRGC is making the same claim:
IRGC: Haniyeh assassination ‘designed, executed’ by Israel, supported by US
“Short-range” projectile — I had seen a rumor elsewhere (completely unsubstantiated) that a shell was used. “Short-range” would seem to rule out an air-to-surface missile. What has a 7 kg payload?
Additionally, the IRGC is (quelle surprise!) pinning this on Israel and further accusing the US of foreknowledge/support. Whether “support” means approval or participation, I do not know.
They have not yet presented evidence for any of these claims, to my knowledge.
Yesterday Mercouris spent an inordinate amount of time on the “planted bomb” thing. I kept thinking, “Alexander this is the NYT. Cite it and move on.” Some people just can’t resist the “Mossad Genius” trope. Much less genius is required to plant a story in the infinitely malleable NYT.
Does a “small projectile” change too much of thr picture, though? Either way, someone infiltrated into or near a secure facility in Tehran and did seriojs damage. (Either way, it’s not a plane, whoch I think is quite improbable.) I suppose a projectile rather than a bomb does makw Iranian security services seem somewhat less incompetent, but it’s still a major failure.
Hellfire missiles have a range of about 6 miles and a warhead of 8 or 9 kg. They can be carried by drones. Their target is painted by laser, either by the launch vehicle or by a third party. Israel has them. There many variants including ones designed to take out individual people.
Iran probably knows exactly what weapon was used but for some reason is not saying.
Thanks for this Grebo, that seems to make the most sense thus far.
I was thinking more along the lines of a recoiless rifle round. Iran got a bunch of M40 105mm from us back in the day, and they have a 7kg HE round. The problem is that an M40 weighs 400+ pounds, and is 2-3 meters in length, so hard to hide, but not impossible.
Anecdata point re: Mr Market’s sad.
Last December I approached a former employer in the lumber & building materials industry about the possibility of getting a part time “retirement” job. The business, which is in a small rural county, typically adds two or three casual employees each year to help out during the spring to fall building season. My old boss said he’d give a call come late March when sales started to pick up again. Here it is August and the boss told me there will be no additional positions this year for the first time since the GFC. Thankfully, he hasn’t had to lay off any of the full timers though, so it could be worse.
Consensus among the local builders, for what it’s worth, is the relatively high interest rates have potential customers sitting on the sideline.
the big serge article, this was the beginning of globalism.
“The development of the highly effective weapons systems that we know as the line ships of the classic age of sail were the result of synchronous developments in the technology of sailing and cannonry, along with the economic systems needed to make these complex and expensive vessels feasible. Taken together, these innovations produced the single most powerful system of power projection ever seen, with vessels that had the range and seaworthiness to attain global reach, and the firepower and capacity needed to bring flexible and formidable combat power to bear wherever they went. ”
what we see today is not globalization, globalization has been around for about 5 centuries. what we see today is free trade. the brics are not going against globalism, they are going against free trade.
This country is f**king dumb.
From Bird flu cases are going undetected, new study suggests. It’s a problem for all of us.
Yeah, we need to nationalize the dairy farms, immediately, and give every worker permanent residency status, as a reward for coming forward and agreeing to being tested. None of this is hard to figure out; and given how liberal Democrats love states of exception, this is not outside the realm of what is practically possible.
Instead we’ll find out about persistent human transmission when a regional hospital system collapses; obviously going to be too late by when. If the fatality rate in the double digits, we’re really screwed.
Dairy farmers refuse to get tested because it might impact revenue, and the States and Feds sit on their thumbs.
Great to watch Biden’s expression as Kamala blathers away. Now he knows how the rest of us feel when he speaks.
Pakistan is just one of the many swirling toilets from free trade.
in pakistan, 100’s of thousands come out and demand a end to free trade!
click on the link for the pic of the massive turnout in pakistan, to regain democratic control in their country over free trade
https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1515474696191594496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1515474696191594496%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2022%2F04%2Flinks-4-19-2022.html
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/04/18/ousted-pakistani-leader-imran-khan-was-challenging-investment-treaties-that-give-corporations-excessive-power/
April 18, 2022
Ousted Pakistani Leader, Imran Khan, Was Challenging Investment Treaties That Give Corporations Excessive Power
by Manuel Perez-Rocha
‘On March 20, Barrick Gold announced that it had reached a settlement with Pakistan that will allow the company to resume their controversial Reko Diq mining project in the province of Balochistan. This is a disturbing example of international investment treaties’ chilling effect on environmentally responsible policies and public interest regulations.
Other countries facing similar corporate lawsuits must pay special attention to this case. Mexico, for example, is being sued by the U.S. mining company Odyssey Marine Exploration for $3.54 billion. Filed before the ICSID in 2019 under the terms of NAFTA, the suit challenges Mexican authorities’ decision to deny a seabed mining permit to extract phosphate (used for fertilizers) in the Gulf of Ulloa, off the coast of Baja California Sur. The Puerto Chale Fishing Cooperative had strongly opposed the project, on the grounds that their members’ livelihoods depend on the marine areas and seafloor that Odyssey is intent on dredging.”
On Ukraine sovereign debt, (apologies if this has already made these pages) , “Ukraine reaches preliminary deal with bondholders on debt restructuring”, from BBG, July 24, 2024, Interesting color, Ukraine struck a deal with its creditors at the onset of the Russian full-scale invasion to postpone the payments due to the war’s pressure on the country’s economy. The deal to freeze payments of around $23 billion was about to expire on Aug. 1. More, “The government reached an agreement in principle with a group of investors holding c. 25% of bonds,” Olena Bilan, the chief economist at Kyiv-based investment bank Dragon Capital, told the Kyiv Independent.
These investors included Amundi SA, BlackRock Inc, and Amia Capital LLP, according to Bloomberg.
In order to restructure, a majority of the bondholders would need to approve the plan.
Here’s the pain,The restructuring agreement will see the existing Eurobonds in circulation exchanged for a package of new Eurobonds with a 37% nominal reduction in the value of the debt at the initial stage and a reduction in the net present value of the debt of around 60%, the Finance Ministry said in a statement.
That’s a 60% haircut. Ouch.
If you want a sign of the global recession, look no further than the Olympics, which no one apparently attended with tourism in mind.
> Mr. Market Has a Sad
No one seems to be talking about how a transition to a war economy is going to play out.
In the modern day and age, transitions are things that tend to play out bad for the player.
Another Bidenomics sighting. Walmart has batteries locked up. Never seen this. You get a sticker from employee at self checkout for theft.
Very uncool of Biden to lock up all the batteries. Was he doing that as a Senator too because I clearly recall many stores having batteries behind lock or behind the counter going back decades? Either way, he should really let the stores decide if they want to lock up their batteries.
No idea. Never seen this in any store that I’ve shopped in.
Toothpaste was locked up at the CVS in Coolidge Corner, Brookline. Not exactly a poor neighborhood. Toothpaste.
Is the supermarket model, lots of shelves and few register workers, under threat? At some point the locking up of supermarket shelves requires too many staff to do the unlock and security escort.
Another Bidenomics sighting. Every isle has nothing but on sale signs at Ingles. I’ve never seen this in my life. Entire store on sale apparently. Soda is 4 at 3.25 each unheard of. The household isles. Wine. Skin care. Vitamins. Frozen food. The store. Not kidding.
“Ingles CEO gets 31% raise; board chair, $6.6 million bonus”
February 5, 2024
https://avlwatchdog.org/ingles-ceo-gets-31-raise-board-chair-6-6-million-bonus/
“Ingles sales grew 18 percent from 2021 to 2023, to nearly $5.9 billion from $5 billion. Gross profits were up 8 percent, according to the company’s SEC filings.”
Perhaps they just reached the peak of what their customers could handle and are now generously offering a sale on their price-gouged products?
Discount retailer, Big Lots is tanking. Shares dropped to $1. Lack of consumer spending. Plus high interest on long term debt.
If you go to only one store, this could be sign they plan to close it. Are the shelves somewhat thin?
Still bad but not as dramatic as if this is happening all across the chain (I assume they have more than one store).
It’s a regional chain, based out of western NC. Not going out of business* far as I can tell. Anecdotally from my perspective, items marked for sale aren’t necessarily ringing up that way and oft times I find items were on sale without being marked. It’s a little chaotic at times. I bought a 12 pack of beer, on sale but not marked as being on sale.
Opinions can diverge on the shopping experience. I prefer this grocery chain above other competition nearby, fairly clean and consistent where to find things. I tend to think a change in the presidency is not going to alter much of the inflationary pressures of most consumer goods.
*added my locations are in Greenville / Spartanburg region of SC, so fairly adjacent enough to western NC to share my thoughts.
Fun story; I was opening an account at the local bank, and the person I met with said that her father was a manager? at the Ingles, and that the owner had an agreement, a handshake, with the Publix owner, not to come into western NC and compete. That was naturally quite a while ago, and this came up because I asked about the new Publix. The Ingles tends to be notably a bit cheaper and has a wider selection than the Publix here.
They definitely aren’t closing it; they own the property as well and a huge new store was built here and opened before the Pandemic next to the old smaller one on the lot. It is one of two locations for the town, with Publix across the street. Every shelf fully stocked in fact. There’s the occasional item on sale, but never like this in the four (sigh) years I’ve been here.
According to The Hill, an SEC filing indicated 35- 40 locations closing.
Big Lots announced that customers can expect “an accelerated number of closures.”
Since the filing, 109 locations in California are closing. Many stores across the nation, have closure notices on their websites. Washington state, hit hard.
As of today, they appear to be closing ~ 289 out of ~ 1450 stores.
They did expand in 2022, due to pandemic check spending. But now, seem to be collapsing.
Big Lots
Correction: 60+ Big Lot stores closing, out of 109 stores in California
Taps sign: Britain is no longer (a) Great (Power).
-> Which is why Türkiye will take the rest of Cyprus. It’s only a matter of time/timing.
Russia seems to be more active this time round in the Middle East. Providing material support to Iran and seems to be prepping diplomatic missions around Middle East. The Rubicon has definitely been crossed. Big question will be whether the Resistance forces will more actively take on US forces. Longer Iran’s response is delayed the more likely US assets will be in play. Either preemptively or actively countering US’s direct involvement.
Mr. Market has a sad
Recommend following Jeff Snider. He’s been on the euro-dollar beat for awhile reading the tea leaves rooted in the scarcity of the dollar. I’d explain more deeply, but I don’t think I’d do it service. Anyways he’s the soothsayer I’d recommend
My favorite Elliotician (Elliot Wave Theory) says the odds favor a 13-year bear market.
So, we have that going for us.
More Kamala unscripted (on inflation). Not great!
https://x.com/iLoveJaneAdams/status/1819399815924797802
“inflation is when things inflate. And, uh, that means they get bigger. Kind of like Willie Brown back in the 90s … (nervous laughter.)
But this kind of inflation is a bad thing, because your money gets smaller, and that’s how we’re going to fight inflation. By making your money get bigger just like I made Willie Brown get big!”
I don’t think I can take 4 years of those hands and the rest of that body language.