Global Stocks Rout Pushes Wall Street’s Fear Gauge to Four-Year High Bloomberg
Asia’s ferocious sell-off has its roots in US AI boom FT
Private capital groups deploy $160bn as they prepare for deal revival FT
Private Equity: In Essence, Plunder? CFA Institute
Climate
The Hidden Ways Extreme Heat Disrupts Infrastructure Scientific American
‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal CNN
Extreme heat, bone-dry vegetation and human misconduct prompting intense wildfire season ABC
* * * Singapore’s $170 Million Climate Defense For Luxury Stores Shows Protections Aren’t Equal Bloomberg
Major energy companies conceal 47% of biodiversity damage, according to research Phys.org
Water
Cambodia PM launches project linking Mekong River to sea via canal Channel News Asia
Southeast Asian countries turn to the Netherlands for ways to tackle flood risks Channel News Asia
Big city water buy-ups in the Lower Arkansas Valley are raising alarms as age-old battles erupt again Colorado Sun
Syndemics
Cognitive and psychiatric symptom trajectories 2–3 years after hospital admission for COVID-19: a longitudinal, prospective cohort study in the UK The Lancet. From the Abstract: “Occupation change is common and associated mainly with objective and subjective cognitive deficits.”
COVID as political defeat Closed Form
China?
As stock sell-off sweeps Asia, China’s yuan surges as US rate cuts loom South China Morning Post
Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration RAND
Myanmar
Myanmar Resistance Group Claims It Has ‘Fully Captured’ Key Military HQ The Diplomat
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina resigns, flees country, military takes over South China Morning Post
India
What is a ‘privileged Dalit’? Creamy Layer definition cannot just be economic Indian Expresss
Even after a year in jail, Imran Khan still dominates Pakistan’s politics BBC
Syraqistan
Russia Supplies Iran with Long-Range EW System “Murmansk-BN” to Counter U.S. and Israel Defense Security Asia. Big if true. More on the Murmansk system.
Top U.S. general in the Middle East as U.S. and Israel prepare for possible Iran attack Axios
Israeli army shares Hezbollah war scenarios with northern mayors: Report Anadolu Agency
Israelis to face major food shortages if Hezbollah strikes Haifa Al Mayadeen
Saudi Arabia, France among countries telling nationals to leave Lebanon as war fears surge Straits Times
* * * Did Ukraine special forces strike Russia forces at a Syrian airbase? The New Arab
* * * Why has America risked it all in Gaza? Al Jazeera
How Hamas fights The Telegraph
* * * ‘Order from Amazon’: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war 972 Magazine
Journal still can’t confirm January story about UN agency for Palestinians Semafor
European Disunion
French workers seize the torch Counterfire
Dear Old Blighty
UK going through its worst wave of riots in 13 years Anadolu Agency. Commentary:
Rioters are blocking Merseyside Fire and Rescue from getting to the library they set ablaze. Fireworks being lauched at them too.#Riots pic.twitter.com/mJ7RWWkgNa
— Alex Tiffin (@RespectIsVital) August 3, 2024
Riots erupt in UK after stabbing spree falsely blamed on asylum seeker FOX
UK PM Starmer slams ‘far-right thuggery’ after more anti-immigrant violence France24
Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma (PDF) Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington. ARC Research. From 2023, still germane.
* * * Government deficits create private wealth Funding the Future
New Not-So-Cold War
Uprisings in UK, Ukraine Finally Unveils F-16s – Full Report Simplicius, Simplicius the Thinker
Ukraine has to destroy Russian air defence to use F-16s – ISW Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Ukraine’s Double-Edged Sword? The Dangers of Using Criminal Groups for National Defense Journal of Illicit Economics and Development
Factory or front line? Ukrainian businesses fight to retain workers FT
* * * Has summer finally arrived? Gilbert Doctorow
August allergies BNE Intellinews
* * * Russian flows to Europe via TurkStream hit second-highest monthly level S&P
2024
Kamala Harris’s Big-Business Choice Zephyr Teachout, The New York Review of Books
Donald Trump: America has more ‘liquid gold’ under its feet than Saudi Arabia FOX
Digital Watch
Many safety evaluations for AI models have significant limitations TechCrunch
Brave New World? Human Welfare and Paternalistic AI (PDF) Cass Sunstein, SSRN
Why I Hate Instagram Now Conor Friedarsdorf, The Atlantic
50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution The Register
The Supremes
After Chevron: Political Economy and the Future of the Administrative State LPE Project
Supply Chain
Can Morocco’s phosphate wealth put it at the centre of the global battery supply chain? BNE Intellinews
Class Warfare
Reform Caucus Wins Amazon Labor Union Officer Elections Labor Notes
Country diary: The night air is thick with bats Guardian
Antidote du jour (Paul Shaffner):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
206 comments
Comments are closed.
THE KAMALATION
(melody borrowed from The Impossible Dream from the musical Man of La Mancha by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion, 1965, as performed by Elvis Presley, 1971)
She’s backed by a neocon team
And the—A.F.L.C.I.O.
She’s read Judith Butler and Foucault
She’s here cuz Joe got the heave-ho
Now she gets to jolly along
She learns a whole new repertoire
Soundbites of some liberal theories
We’re told that she’s our superstar
The Party has blessed
And backed her this far
Though if she proves vote-less
She won’t be our Czar
There’s a team to ghostwrite
So she gets some hurrahs
She’s practicing soundbites that sell
And conceal her flaws
Now she goes into battle for you
Against Trump and the rest
Plays her part in this giant sitcom
And our votes do the rest
How has she earned any of this?
She put lots of black men behind bars
Her past must be hidden in storage
Her hands deep in the cookie jar
She’s a DEI hire—a chair-sitting guest
We all know that this choice is not ours
A Zionist is her husband by marriage
If not her—then who will be in charge?
Mum is fired up by UK daytime TV calling for using the army.
This quote by Adama to President Roslin in rebooted BSG instantly came to mind.
Did she get to enjoy the Home Secretary getting interviewed* on Good Morning Britain today?
*The interviewer is her husband
Ha! I knew from election day that ITV would get into trouble over Ed interviewing his wife. Not even a supreme sceptic like me thought it would erupt within 6 weeks of the election.
(I found things doubly amusing because we juveniles in the first form at secondary school used to make jokes when seeing his surname on the sign up sheet in the music school when he was upper sixth and a House Captain.) Small world.
Thankfully I just missed overlapping with the current leader of the Lib Dems.
The paper linked to above, ‘Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma’ by Morland and Pilkington, is fascinating stuff. (Partly because I’m currently based in London, in Notting Hill/Kensington.)
Forex, just a couple of items from it (there are a lot more):-
“…We assume any immigration ratio substantially higher than the highest achieved by the United States is, at best, highly experimental and, at worst, potentially destabilising … The maximum immigratioon ratio that the United States has achieved and subsequently absorbed was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the ratio was just above 14%. As we saw earlier, the immigration ratio in the United Kingdom was 14.4% in 2021— so around the same as the United States saw in its great migration wave.”
“…Our “business as usual” UK/ “mass migration” model is clearly unsustainable. To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy at levels of sustainable growth, the rates of migration required are nonsensical. The model projects an immigration ratio of over 37% by 2083. This implies that more than one-third of the population would be foreign born. This is an immigration ratio that is almost triple that which the United States experimented with in the early 20th century.”
Bracingly direct analysis as so often from Pilkington. It’s amazing how hard it is to find any analysts who will express the migration question so directly. The left is so often guilty of trying to dodge the question.
“any immigration ratio substantially higher than the highest achieved by the United States is, at best, highly experimental and, at worst, potentially destabilising …”
Highly experimental ? What is Australia, chopped liver ? The immigration level here has been continuously above 14% since the 1960’s and and is somewhere between 25 and 30 % now.
And what is the carrying capacity of Australia?
That’s a diversion into a different topic. The point I make is that Australia has a much higher proportion of foreign-born residents than either the US or the UK have ever had and that has been so for a very long time. It has hardly been what you’d call “destabilizing”. Nor has it swamped “Australian culture”. The vast majority of the grandchildren of first-generation Australian immigrants struggle to speak a sentence in their traditional language and come off as more ‘Oz’ than this multi-generational Anglo-Saxon Australian who doesn’t speak with an ocker accent and doesn’t like sports.
ditto Canada
With a bit of a difference in that Aus (and the US back then) has a little bit of empty space to spread out in. Not so much in the UK….
(Not that that’s helping much here in Canada. With even *more* empty space, too bad all the newcomers are congregating in the big cities)
We just had a bigger West Bank to occupy, so we needed more settlers.
“ Aus…has a little bit of empty space to spread out in”
Australia looks big on the map, but once you get away from the coast, it’s a pretty harsh, dry environment – not nearly as much usable space as it seems. And water is scarce, even in the littoral areas. Another confounding factor is that the “Australian family dream” is a single family dwelling on a quarter-acre block. There is no established tradition of high-density housing.
The Kimberley Plan was a failed plan by the Freeland League to resettle Jewish refugees from Europe in northern Australia before and during the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_Plan
Canadian figures seem roughly similar. Heck, we even get the odd Aussie or Kiwi.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/dq221026a-eng.htm
To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy at levels of sustainable growth, the rates of migration required are nonsensical.
Similar questions were raised when Germany and Austria were overwhelmed by waves of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Irak in 2015.
From that time, I remember an interview with a demographer who at some point was asked whether the influx of mostly young people would help counteract the greying of the German population, as well as its decrease because of excess deaths over births.
His answer was also similar to the conclusions of the article: if Germany really wanted to counteract aging, it would have to admit 3 millions young immigrants per year — for at least 20 years, thus nearly doubling its total population. Which is of course an absurdly impossible process. As a comparison, the total number of refugees admitted by Germany in that fateful year 2015 amounted to slightly less than 900000 people. For a bit more context: the median age in Germany is about 47 years, in Syria about 24.
Another way of looking at it instead of the classic dependency-ratio would be to look at GDP. Looking at GDP then it might be possible to come to the conclusion that the solution is to look at the income(GDP)-distribution and instead make sure that the productivity-gains are distributed out more equally.
I believe it to be quite absurd that countries with high productivity aren’t producing sufficient goods and services to keep the population well fed, well housed and well cared for.
The current strategy of adding low-wage workers to the economy in the hope that the taxes paid by these low-paid workers will pay for pensions seems unlikely to succeed, especially as taxes are then (at least in Sweden) reduced on these low-paid workers to allow the low-paid workers to keep more of their earnings.
the late 19th and early 20th centuries – industrial economies absorbed that immigration.
This paper was about as one-dimensional as I expected something from economists to be – not a peep about climate, resource limitations, or the human environmental footprint. Just keep the population Ponzi scheme going!
Hear, hear!
No question put on, given the acceptable consumption levels for an individual to sustain a decent civilized life, what would be the deirable number of people to have?
If we shrink, we shrink, but it is more important to maintain the parameters of good life on the plannet and because of that some adjustment in the number of people would be desirable, and the best way is through natural attrition while maintaining the reproductive capacity of the specie.
After that, a big reset would be in order.
I see this as a class proxy war gone insane:
The wealthy want wage pressure on those below them in society. One way to do this is to import people from different cultures, and replace workers with others. This results in a low trust society: low trust in policing, media coverage, justice, the puppeticians and even the functioning of democracy.
This wage pressure is leading working people to not have children, because children are expensive and hard to combine with one or more precarious jobs. Instead the imported people, who have better family networks, and who have no compunctions in demanding welfare support, produce the next generation of children, making the above 37% estimate an underestimate. Many of these children with foreign born parents are brought up thinking their parents ways are better than their new country’s. Children with native ancestry find themselves surrounded by children from other countries, and either give up (British White boys have among the lowest educational results), or try to fit in by adopting foreign religions or expressions (e.g. Inshallah is common parlance among young French kids these days). The “DEI History curriculum” doesn’t encourage them to strive either. To quote Battlestar Galactica, “All this has happened before, and will happen again”: the US is not Native American, Australia is not Aborigine, and Israel is not Palestinian.
Pensions are a red-herring, brought out to divide the public and particularly to keep the old (voting) electorate on board. Why? Because Western companies could have been automating since the 1970s, just like the Chinese are doing. Xiaomi is building a factory that requires no people to pump out 60 high end cellphones a minute. Instead our ruling classes decided they could better line their pockets by outsourcing, investing in stock buybacks instead of technology, allowing in many uneducated people to do the “menial labour” & playing financial games. So I lay the blame for this crisis solely on the ruling classes.
The entire thing is short-termist self-destructive insanity, but I guess that’s what happens when economies contract and the people at the top can’t stop living in the manner in which they are accustomed to.
Mass legal migration into an island with extensive, preservation land-use laws and a strong desire (for many reasons) to not turn its cities into Manhattan, let alone Hong Kong (density-wise).
And newcomers or natives have no desire to move to the Isle of Skye or the Scottish highlands.
What can go wrong?
And how much of the Sceptered Isles is owned by a tiny clade of hereditary tentier looters? And what does that portend for the aspiring influx? Maybe an end to fox hunting and game preserves and spacious wasteful “English gardens” round the great estates?
Fox hunting was banned in 2004 and the ‘tiny clade of heredetary rentier(?) looters’ is so tiny it’s on the verge of extinction. Most of the few surviving ‘great estates’ are today either owned by the National Trust or by ‘film stars’, ‘pop idols’ or city financiers who don’t know the names of their gardeners or the difference between a sweet pea and a peony.
Guy Shrubsole (building on the work of Kevin Cahill) has done a lot to identify who actually owns the land in England.
“The headline revelation is that less than one percent of the population literally owns half the country. A tiny number of old aristocratic families still privately own around a third of it, while those who have joined the super-rich more recently own another seventeen percent. Fifteen million proud owner-occupiers of ordinary houses and flats, whose homes are supposedly their castles, together own only five percent of England. This it seems is probably a comparable area to that held by the micro-élite who actually do own castles. Renters, of course, own none.
Companies own a further 18 percent. A list of the top 100 reveals that the biggest landholdings are those of privatised water companies and grouse moor estate management companies. (As regular readers will know, Shrubsole has a loudly buzzing bee in his bonnet about grouse moors.) Conservation charities including the National Trust own around two percent.
Public bodies including the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence and all local authorities combined own 8.5 percent – only half the size of the 17 percent which remains ‘unregistered land’. Shrubsole’s educated guess is that most of this is also owned by the aristocracy.”
Shrubsole’s book “Who owns England?” is excellent IMO. I haven’t read the older Cahill’s”Who Owns Britain”
How many of those old aristocratic families which still privately own around a third of the land of England . . . . are partly or totally descended from the FrancoNorman Viking pirates who invaded and colonized England starting in 1066?
” ‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal”
I don’t think that that is supposed to happen. There is a lot of worry about what would happen if all the ice there melted and they are talking in this article about over a 150 foot rise in sea levels. Another thought occurred to me so I went looking to how much ice is in that continent-
‘The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area of almost 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and contains 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice. A cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately 0.92 metric gigatonnes, meaning that the ice sheet weighs about 24,380,000 gigatonnes.’
OK, that is a lot of ice. But it also compresses that continent down because of all that weight. So as that weight goes away, that continent should start to rebound much higher. What will be the effect then? Massive earthquakes? Tsunamis being triggered in the southern hemisphere? Do we even know?
Worry more about the methane stored at the poles and under Siberia’s permafrost.
The atmosphere could become humanly unbreathable. If all that methane escapes, we’ll also get temperatures that aren’t in the historical record because, for one thing, the human race wouldn’t have survived them. Nor would most life on Earth.
We know this because it didn’t. There’ve been five great extinction events in Earth’s prehistory, each coinciding with massive methane releases. The Permian Mass Extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in particular, almost ended life on this planet.”
While a methane clathrate release would certainly be devastating to our climate, only one of the big five extinction events (Permian–Triassic) has a methane clathrate release as a possible cause.
Ordovician–Silurian extinction events
Late Devonian extinctions
Permian–Triassic extinction event
Triassic–Jurassic extinction event
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
That is a very useful roundup, thank you. This time around, I must agree with Mmas.
Yes, useful. Thanks.
Isostatic rebound is a looooooong process. Parts of Canada and Northern Europe are still feeling such effects ten thousand years after the Younger Dryas effectively ended the most recent glacial period.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
Quite true that. What I should have added is that this would not be a linear process but a chaotic one with runaway effects included. That is when the fun would occur.
The thing about isostatic rebound is that it can take some time to occur, but when the pressure is released, it’s surprising just how quickly the land can pop up. A trained eye can spot raised beaches all over the western fringes of Europe, some are comparatively recent.
Yep. Eastern Scotland disappearing very rapidly (along with East Anglia) whilst the West of UK is rebounding upwards, now we don’t have a glacier sitting weirdly on us.
7 metres a year being lost. If that’s not fast I dunno what is.
Actually the rebound occurs in two stages: the first third very fast and then the rest slowly over ~10,000 years.
There’s been articles of late that posit the earth’s tangential rotation speed is slowing due to the redistribution of mass caused by the ice melting.
I think, to your point, that maybe the actual rotation will ultimately increase because the weight reduction at the pole would “stetch” the planet vertically. Kinda like an ice skater pushing the arms up over the head while rotating.
That’s where the fun starts. One could posit earthquakes being triggered as “weight” shifts more the closer you get to the equator to reset the geologic equilibrium between plates. Or traditional weather patterns geographically shifting from east to west slowly until they “catch up” to the new speed while equatorial rotational patterns push to the poles with more energy via the coreolis effect (toilet bowl science).
Fortunately/Unfortunately all this would be taking place on a geological timescale but the amount of energy involved makes up for it.
I’ve read that our planet has a sort of “bulge” around the equatorial regions so I would assume that they might go away then?
Happy to be corrected but the Earth’s oblate spheroid nature is something related to basic forces Newton understood about the relative speed of rotation of the equator compared to the poles which are far stronger than stuff to do with tectonic plates. I don’t think this phenomenon is relevant and IIRC has been observed in other planets where we have no evidence for plate tectonics etc.
However, getting my info from the show QI can be dangerous. Hence the ongoing jokes about “how many moons” and “largest animal” being changed on regular basis ;)
That’s the fun of it. Like Terry’s comment above indicates, the general shape of the spheroid would remain I suppose. The question would be, does the increase in rotational (tangential) velocity and the resulting “expansionary” effect out perform the centripetal force increase…
Either way, it’s fun to postulate. I assume, for the sake of argument, that the mass within our spheroid is constant and the tiny (but globally significant) changes in shape would result in the crusty outer layer to reposition resulting in earthquakes.
Back to coffee, thanks!
Fill a cup of water and put it in the freezer and freeze it. Then take it out and let it thaw. Does it overflow? Is it heavier when frozen?
the glaciers are anchored to land and not floating which is why concern if Thwaites glacier, nicknamed the ‘Doomsday’ glacier, were to disconnect from land and plop into the ocean – drop a rock into that glass rudi and see what happens –
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/collapse-of-the-thwaites-glacier-has-accelerated.html
How long until the analogies comparing our federal budget to a household, and the antarctic to ice cubes die?
Probably right around or shortly after the time Thwaites crashes into the ocean.
+1
I considered replying to original nonsense but realised someone unlike me likely had the relevant NC post to hand to show this was nonsense…. or Yves or Lambert would ban the person.
It’s less about dropping an ice cube into the water, and more about the ice cube holding back some 100 ~ 1000 ice cubes from touching the hot water. If the front ice cube lets go, the ones behind it come sliding down the ramp.
What is the earth’s crust/glacier resting on?
Before all that happens other extreme climate events will cause lot of damage. India is seeing more and more extreme rainfall events during monsoon. Current monsoon is causing havoc across india. 10 inches of rain in a day was seen many times
It is elementary my dear Watson. The ice melts and raises the ocean level. Then the continent relieved of the weight of the ice rises above the ocean thus decreasing the ocean level. Then we plant billions of trees in Antarctica creating a carbon sink where there wasn’t one before and global warming is solved. See how simple that is? /s
Post glaciation rebound is glacially slow – 4-6 inches over 100 years.* Unlikely to cause tsunamis or major earthquakes. A greater risk in my not qualified opinion is the failure of an ice dam retaining a lake of ice-melt within the continent, which could result in a LOT of water being added to the oceans over the course of a few days, ie**
* https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/ice-age-rebound
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
It seems that 300k gallons of jet fuel from Texas is in the Mediterranean creating a fuss:
https://timesofmalta.com/article/graffitti-calls-government-block-military-fuel-shipment-israel.1096223
It would be a damn shame if it didn’t reach Iz. Apparently the French have allowed it to dock.
Perhaps it’s time for the inimitable Tom Lehrer?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1-23_We_Will_All_Go_Together_When_We_Go.mp3
Cheers!
Climate entry, hurricane landfall edition. As this newest storm Debby makes landfall in Florida, the low country region of South Carolina which features Charleston is preparing for record rainfall amounts. Gonna need a bigger ark it sounds like.
https://www.live5news.com/weather/
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-08-05-hurricane-debby-landfall-florida-southeast-flood-forecast
Re:Can Morocco’s phosphate wealth put it at the centre of the global battery supply chain? BNE Intellinews
Limited phosphate reserves has been for long cited as a long term problem for (intensive) agriculture. Now, facing competition from the industry of batteries such problem might come real sooner than expected.
yeah…rock phosphate is a finite substance.
“conventional” ag in the usa, t least, pours it willy-nilly…to produce weaponised “commodities” like corn and soya(that they then hafta get creative to figger out what to do with the excess(HFCS, ethanol)….but much of that phosphate(and the rest of the chemical soup) runs off into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the Dead Zone of hypoxia…larger right now that at any time since folks started monitoring it.
cousin fishes for a living out of Port Aransas…
he says the fish are gone…nothing like even ten years ago:combination of warmer water, a whole lot more people, ordinary polution from the Texas coastal refinery/chemical pipeforest, and likely that hypoxia….as well as things like red tide, spread of vibrio, etc
i make sure that the bones my butcherin and cookin generates end up in the garden beds…or at least in the pasture.
and the composting toilet also contributes to at least somewhat closing that particular nutrient cycle.
ashes and charcoal, too…
but Big Ag is on borrowed time, in more ways than one…and phosphates are one of the largest near future problems they face.
The hypoxic zone has the been the subject of countless studies, panels, consortia, partnerships, councils, etc. for decades. We were making some strides until the advent of close planted corn jacked up on steroids for maximum yield. Now any careful farmer leaving buffer zones and trying to minimize fertilizer use is drowned out by the recklessness of bigger, more careless operators, the kind of jackass corporations who cut down windrows of trees in the Dakotas to get a few more scraps of yield.
The real problem is the states apparently are not allowed to sue each other. If they were, the Gulf states could have long since harnessed the talents of some junkyard dog tort lawyers to give the Midwest farmers their comeuppance. Just for the sheer loss of fish, shellfish, and tourism that this annual plague causes.
Instead we have hand-wringing and incessant panels and studies and ‘partnerships’.
believe this was in Links recently –
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-larger-than-average-scientists-find
and humans as a pathogen continue on their merry way –
Earthling
Can states sue big AG corporations in those polluting states?
ive seen it mentioned that the fedcourts are in the habit of denying Standing for this purpose,lol….but texas enjoys the tender legal caresses of one attorney general paxton…so it wouldnt matter anyway.
that guy is like a shitstained cloth diaper…cant get rid of him without fire.
unknown what effect planting him under a fruit tree would have….nah gah happen on my place.
ill have enough problems with evil ghosts when mom goes.
Sodium Ion batteries are already being made and the manufacturing is already ramping up in China.
Its first market sector would be stationary batteries ( BESS) and cars next with enough improvements.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-largest-sodium-battery-unit-150000707.html
https://english.news.cn/20240105/afbe0b0dbe1841e59e3db730a129576a/c.html
January 5, 2024
Chinese carmaker delivers first NEV with sodium-ion battery
HEFEI — Chinese carmaker JAC Group on Friday announced the delivery of China’s first mass-produced new electric vehicle (NEV) featuring a sodium-ion battery.
The model, under the brand of Yiwei, is equipped with sodium-ion cylindrical cells supplied by HiNa Battery Technology. The vehicle’s battery pack has a capacity of 23.2 kWh, enabling a driving range of up to 230 km…
Lithium iron phosphate batteries seem like the winner in the battery wars for this decade anyway. This is generally good news as it avoids the need for nickel or cobalt in the batteries.
I’m a little sceptical that this will have a big impact on phosphate demand – the amount used (and misused) in agriculture is enormous, I haven’t seen many confirmed figures, but I don’t think there is enough in LIP battery to really make a dent in overall demand, even if that type of battery becomes the leader.
Al Jazeera asks a good question, “Why has America risked it all in Gaza?” and answers that an insecure superpower is trying to show who’s boss in an increasingly multi-polar world. It’s hard for me to accept psychoanalytic arguments like that. The USA isn’t simply a family with a belligerent patriarch. It’s more complex and interesting than that.
I assume, partly based on stuff we’ve head on NC, that the Pentagon’s experts have a good enough idea how badly the war scenarios will go, so they know that going all in with Israel is unlikely to restore the USA’s mojo and instill fear and subservience in its enemies. And if they know then so does the White House.
I suspect bureaucratic and political inertia in the context of a leadership vacuum are more likely. Twice this summer we’ve seen how dramatically the political/media machine can move when they are told to. And we’ve seen how flummoxed Biden looks most of the time.
The pentagon is doling out a lot of money!
As I said in the entry about Palestine above.
As long as there is profit, the PMC running the US will never admit “we cannot kill enough of them”.
While “our” side has enough nukes’ that the US does not control, to destroy the oil fields and then some.
Politics is local, but it wouldn’t be prudent to underestimate the perception of a genocide and a severely weakened Israel and 2.5 years of a DC only interested in foreign policy. The factory rebound isn’t wiping out the Obama years.
The Imperial decline is real, but very few Likudniks in DC want to pitch another defeat to voters. It’s so bad Shapiro was the favorite to be Harris’ running mate even though he undercuts the reason for her bump in the polls.
Then this isn’t a 2008 situation where the only question was the size of the majorities, freeing politicians to act in a way they won’t now.
Thinking that the results matter to most in Washington is futile. The results that they see are money flowing into defense companies and post government jobs in the sector. The war itself, that is another person’s problem.
In the fields the bodies burning…
Around 20 years ago we went to Ozzfest and were astonished that the original lineup of Sabbath were on stage. The author of the line you quoted was really there. The video show for War Pigs was classic Bush/Cheney stuff.
Yeah I saw Ozzy in the 90’s, it was Bush I Iraq war coverage during that song
you have to remember, bush and cheney got their powers from bill clinton and al gore.
without those powers bill clinton and al gore used with such relish and bestowed onto future u.s. governments, it would have been much easier to make your case against bush/cheney.
as long as you ignore this, you lesson your chances at reform.
In a sense the Gaza War is easy to assess. The Zionist lobby is the policy maker for Israel/Palestine issues. Israel wants the ethnic cleansing of the WB and Gaza thus that will be the US policy. The idea of a “two-state solution” is just debris from the sunken ship that sank with the death of the Oslo process and, to be blunt, that disaster was on the Clinton administration decision to undermine the process early on. At that point the die was cast and any chance of a negotiated settlement evaporated. Since then Israel has grown more nationalistic with a strong fascist slant and no negotiation was possible and no negotiatioin is possible whether for a final solution or a cease-fire.
Of course, things are worse with the Biden administration because of the power vacuum you mention. As a long-time observer of the Washington scene it looks to me that there are probably several policies operating at once each with their constituencies and priorities. With a weak POTUS this points to disaster. However, the threat of major war in the region which Israel wants may be of sufficient worry that realists in the FP community may hold sway (they are there in the underground) particularly with the spectacular and consisten failure of the neocons.
Presumably, in the event of Israel’s total collapse the Lobby will be wanting to accept all 7-8 million expatriate Israelis. Or will they be apportioned out across the Western world?
The US, Europe, England, Canada, Australia each doing their bit for humanity?
Do you foresee Israel’s collapse occurring before or after it nukes its adversarial neighbors?
This is the $64k question. I like that it’s framed as nukes either way. Let’s hope we don’t find out too soon.
but surely iran…as a russian ally, at the least…knows where those nukes are kept?
seems to me like a prudent exercise in Gloves Off would be to blow those things to bits.
psywar purposes, too.
“israel” has waved those things around, figuritively, to bother their neighbors for a long while, now.
for added moxy, give the coordinates to the Houthis.
all these far right psychoreligious nutters in charge of “israel” should really take some time to review their own holy books.
its right there,lol…again, “sow the wind…”
g*d punishes “israel” repeatedly throughout…and for much less assholery than they’re busy with right now.
i wish i had the werewthal to travel to austin and visit my palestinian acquaintances from 30+ years ago(ive stopped by their beer stores a few times in that time)…see what they have to say about all this.
Finally, someone gets it. The school systems in South Florida already recognize and celebrate Jewish holidays, so, Shabbat shalom, our arms are open.
What do the neocons want from a West Asia war?
Most neocons are fanatically pro-Israel not only because they’re mainly Jews but because they believe that Arabs, Iranians, Muslims are barbarians and that what they view as civilization is in danger from Islam. I’ve talked to some of them so I’m not guessing. So they want to bring the barbarians to heel, slaughter a few million and thus the Arabs will go cower somewhere in a corner. I don’t think all this is about corruption and immorality though it appears to be that way and, as in all US institutions, there is an element of corruption.
Good question. I’m sure I’m not alone in looking at some wars past, and wondering just wtf all the fuss was about. But being of a materialist bent in this regard, I look for materialistic motivations between groups. Or, as Sartre so simply put it: “human groupings encounter each other in fields of scarcity” —real or imagined, I would add. Conquest pays off, until it doesn’t. New cost-benefit analyses leavened with empathy are in order.
In the case of neocons it’s all about tribalism and the “end of history” ideology. They prosper because they also make the martinets and suppliers of materiel rich. But they themselves are deeply ideological/religious.
My worst fears confirmed.
But they themselves are deeply ideological/religious.
Are they? I’ve always felt the holiness of the neocons a bit performative for the sake of their constituency. This may not matter in the end.
It’s not about holiness as such–we have to remember that they are deeply steeped in radical materialism. Their vision is steeped in pride in the Western tradition in general and Jewish culture (many Jews worship Jewishness rather than God) in particular as representing the best in the Western tradition.
Alright, I do like tribalism on their resume. Never the less, I’d wager that graft and fraud for financial gain run through the Pentagon is traditionally Neo-con. Remember that they frame their brand of America in Christianity. I don’t think the hypocrisy is lost on them.
It can be both. And their are other constituents besides the neocons. Some of them are all about the $.
yeah…see: Leo Strauss, if you can stomach him…and only if you have the ability to contemplate as you read the esoteric/exoteric….lol.
i obtained all his stuff when i was laid up in the bed with the dead hip…cajoled my mom to buy them for me on the newfangled amazon machine,lol.
he’s a piece of work…and i like his arguments with Kojeve the best…altho i’d not let either of them near my fire.
there was a woman…slavic sounding name…who had a book out during the second bush darkness about the straussian influence…cant remember, at the moment.
anyhoo, thats who compelled me to go to the asses mouth, as it were.
its good that i did, i guess…because his influence is right there at the deepest levels of who the “neocons” are…and that of the broader right and coldwarrior democrat, as well….although nobody talks about him, or references him, in public these days.
he, inadvertently, opened my eyes to just how authoritarian, elitist and antihumanist Plato(as opposed to Socrates) was.
Popper filled all that in, to his credit(and Popper was a hellova writer, too., at least in that mighty tome)
pro-tip…save the scotch for after you read Strauss…he’s very frelling dense…and purposefully so….for to weed out the unworthy.
cant read folks like Perle and Deneen and on and on without him
Do the inhabitants of the DC Bubble and Echo Chamber know, or care, what anyone outside thinks or feels? Yes, the collective Israel lobby pays to get its way. Yes, supporters of Israel hold position within the government. Yes, some Christian evangelicals, for want of a more precise name, cheer the current horror because it advances their vision. No one seems to see the utter depravity of what they are supporting and ,please, do not give me the raison d’etat malarkey. If that was ever true, it is not now. Israel is an out of control client state.It is running wild and on the path to self-destruction because it is allowed to be so. Biden? His Israel is long out of date. Blinken or Sullivan or the, too me, nameless others? I suppose they have their reasons but they appear to be marching into the “Big Muddy.” No ‘reason’ excuses support for genocide and ethnic cleansing. (I keep looking for the word that directly names what the euphemism “ethnic cleansing” seeks to obscure. What is clean about forced exile, imprisonment, and death as a means of disappearing people you find inconvenient.) It is well to remember that if you find a people inconvenient another may think the same of you.
Cruel, immoral, shameful, a disgrace: add what you will to the list. Each and all fail to express what the US government is enthusiastically backing. Do not support these persons with your votes.
By now most of us should be seeing the truth about all major institutions in our society in nearly all sectors, i.e., the are all systemically corrupt–this means that there is no self-corrective mechanism within the system. It is possible to change the system, however, but it would require strong leaders in various sectors who would be willing to go against the grain. The problem is that there is no public support for any major change. Some of us hope that with Trump’s election in ’16 that it might get the ball rolling to some internal reforms (a foolish hope) instad we got a dramatic retrenchment and a move towards a dramatic growth in censorship and social penalties on dissent which is why it is impossible to discuss politics in any kind of gathering.
So I wouldn’t blame officials they are just dealing with the realities of power-politics. If Zionists Jews in our country want to throw their money to insure pro-Israel policies then that’s what we are all going to get. People in and out of government and official media cannot criticize Israel without inviting massive retaliation (unless you’re at the edges of opinion and then who cares?). The problem lies with the electorate that still foolishly believes the Western Media on everything no matter how often and dramatically that Narrative has proven to be–people need to believe in some kind of narrative and the only one close at hand is the Narrative. As individuals I can’t blame the leadership–they have no choice if they want to keep their careers.
I disagree. The house was built on sand, and the sands are shifting. It doesn’t matter what leader is at the helm. We are witnessing generations of entropy unfurl, and the best anyone could do is direct the inevitable blowback. Dems are having the college try at pointing it outward, Reps are pointing it inward (as well). Cue Jesus.
I found this assertion a bit hypocritical coming from Al Jazeera:
“BRICS+ could have done much more to try to stop the genocide. They could have done much more to tangibly support the people of Gaza in their most painful moment. But they did not.”
It is true that KSA has just joined BRICS, but c’mmon, what has the GCC and the Arab monarhies done for Palestinians that is worth noting? Politically? Abrahms Accords? I understand the royals want to maintain their positions, but the US and Israel won’t help much or at all against popular uprisings at home. But they could get many Karma points with the population if they do something about Israel…
My own observation (as a non-USian admittedly) is that you should never expect too much positive volition or deliberation in US policy. Generally speaking, that policy reflects the outcome of vicious political struggles between institutions and egos, largely independent of the merits of any individual case. Once painfully established, that policy will be retained until a powerful-enough coalition can be assembled to change it, or until reality itself cannot be ignored any longer (eg Afghanistan.) Any such decision (unlike, say, the defenestration of Biden) requires a compromise among many powerful players, who in some cases will oppose the policies of other players just on principle. So to that extent, to talk of “America” as the AJ story does is misleading, or at least an over-simplification. It’s just where the caravan happens to be parked for the moment, and changing it requires so much effort that, especially with a power vacuum in the White House, nothing is going to happen.
In all of this, the Rest of the World is just one lobby group. International opinion, regional interests, the country’s reputation, even international law are all, as I’ve heard people say “a State Department problem” to sort out. They don’t affect the underlying struggle for power.
…policy reflects the outcome of vicious political struggles between institutions and egos, largely independent of the merits of any individual case.. Add a heaping tbsp of personal gain/profit, stir slowly over a low heat. mmmmm, perfect.
re the genocide taking place in the open air prison/death camp known as Gaza: I attempted to speak of it with a close USA friend I hadn’t spoken with in a long while, her only comment: “Hamas doesn’t care about the Palestinians.”. That sounded vaguely familiar to me, an old NPR standard?
Anyone care to comment? I know I’ve heard it before, a long time ago, an intifada ago (?)
That’s a very useful heuristic.
I’ve just opened another module in my brain.
Thanks!
aurelian/david is really good at opening such mind-doors.
one of the best writers on such topics in the substack stable.
i dont generally comment on his substack, because i really am a luddite, and find the process of commenting on substack to be quite wearisome,lol.
but he is definitely worth ‘following’…. in the current lexicon.
i glean he’s former UK foreign service, with much french and french african experience.
no cambridge spelling quirks…like i have(bc my home library had all their classics from the cambridge university press)…so maybe oxford adjacent/derived….
regardless.
he makes me think, consistently.
Yes! I’ve been following his comments since the david days as well.
As someone who’s followed now 40 years of de-classifications revealing the efficacy, or lack thereof of the business of our three letter agencies, what David / Aurelian has written has frequently fallen on the other side of “where incompetence can explain it, don’t assume malice” from where I would.
Today’s comment situates a point of view in Government where my paranoid heuristic is structurally inappropriate, and a point of view more generally applicable than my own! New limits identified for myself to be policed by a new heuristic!
whoa, nelly!
step back, JSN,lol.
examine all of your assumptions, as a matter of course…make that Who You Are.
i hereby elicit an Existential Crisis in you.
and a Teleological and even an Ontological Crises in you….
welcome to the Real,lol.
its a lot worse than you think it is.
we’re frelled.
deal with it as best you can.
“Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration”
I’m sure that they mean subordination rather than integration. We see that in South Korea where if there is trouble, a US general will have command of the South Korean armed forces. To be a vassal state means giving up your sovereignty and you also see that with the sentence ‘Aligning new American and Japanese command and control arrangements will require the allies to agree on, among other things, the regional scope of U.S. operational commanders in Japan.’ So I expect that it will be a US commander that will eventually have command of the Japanese armed forces when they go after China.
So, do we have 2008 redux? Japan seems to be utterly familyblogged, from the looks of it.
Bondzilla is wading through the waters offshore and heading for Tokyo …
To be met with Catzilla in Tokyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6R1mU0vj5o (16 secs)
Things aren’t going so well in the European and UK stock markets either.
Hmmph, US as well. Dow futes pooping the bed. VIX hits 62 (I’m still younger, phew!)
I leave the country for 2 weeks and NOW the markets decide to dirtnap? I’m offended; couldn’t they have at least waited until I got back to turn my 401k into a 201k?
Catzilla for Tokyo, Bun-zilla for Europe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgj3nZWtOfA
And Schwab.com has been down for two hours, not that there’s anything to do
Corporate Japan is essentially nationalized already given the BoJ’s ownership of so much of the JPN debt market, might as well make it official
the “f a s ci s m” word gets tnrown around so flippantly today, but JPN is a literal, text-book-definition bundle of sticks…..fusion of govt, business, the people into the LDP and post-1946 system
I wondered how the JCB was going to “taper” until I read somewhere that they’ll force their banks to buy up the difference. Then, when the banks tank, the JCB will ride to the rescue to buy up their debt. So, yeah, sounds like a giant rigged bingo parlor.
And what would the literal “textbook definition” of fascism be?
I ask because so far as I am aware, there is no “textbook definition” of fascism. There is the Trotskyite definition — which is nonsense — but which many leftists just assume is correct without thinking about it.
Japan possesses none of the features of fascism as defined by any of the major interperters in the English-speakig world (Griffin, Payne, Paxton, Gregor).
at this point, “fascism” is a lot like “obscenity”…”i know it when i see it”.
remember that we’re in a Schmittian State of Exception, here.
“Reason”(tm) is what the Boss Class decides it is.
in spite of the old idiocy of one Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”(who now is apparently for Kamaladingdong,lol)
the woke thing has brought us there…at least at the public consumption level of politics(Go Team!).
at the higher , more important and effectual(sic) levels, theres only one Party, of course….
i smell Huxley and Orwell’s dystopias just about everywhere i go, online and off, these days.
its everywhere.
Oil and pretty much every import item has suddenly become cheaper for them. Heck, regular Japanese might just be able to travel overseas again if the Yen were to continue to strengthen.
Regular Japanese people have not really participated in the two or three years old stock market rally, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445395/japan-share-of-individual-stockholders-in-the-population/.
The ones who have been familyblogged today are rich people including plenty of hedgefunders in the … US, UK, etc.
This state of affairs will not continue though, the Yen will drop again because ultimately the country’s economy is weak.
Japan seems to defy all known economics laws, so it’s hard to tell. But I certainly think that a strengthening yen and higher interest rates might benefit Japanese people (as most are savers, not debtors, high interest rates can boost the economy). Plus they’ll finally have some relief from all those annoying gaijin clogging up the subways.
The bigger problem for Japan I think is that many of its key companies seem likely to be the big losers in the battle for export dominance between Japan, ROK and China.
The other bigger problem is paying interest on govt debt
on the plus side, ww3 put on hold.
major war = recession, demand destruction. Iran would lose its oil revuene.
Iran is not going to torpedo its own economy over the Hamas evoy, the Ayatollah yes.
The slow boil of Israel will continue at a slightly faster pace
(I don’t think “Griftee” is a scrabble word but it seems to fit – the victim of the grifter is the griftee.)
Little Griftee
(Sing to the tune of “Litttle Bitty” by Alan Jackson)
Melody
A vacant office tower owned by crooked, crummy banks
Foreclosed for pennies ’cause its prospects really stank
Got carved up into tranches by a Wall Street Wunderkind
It’ll end up in a teachers pension fund
Chorus:
It’s alright to be a little griftee
Scam your hometown, or a big old city
The cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while!
A little healthcare system turned into another scam
Better stay healthy or you’re living on spam
A little Fed Chair makes a little bitty speech
He’ll spin promises that induce you to leech
[Chorus; interlude]
You know you got no job and a stimulus check
A six-pack of beer it’ll buy while markets wreck
A little bitty D.A. in a fancy pants suit
Some white-collar crimes that she wouldn’t prosecute!
[Music tempo slows to half-time]
A big orange clown
And a pretty laughing girl
Want your vote so that they can rule the world
They don’t care about our hopes and our dreams
They’re all part of the same old rotten scheme …
It’s alright to be a little griftee
An airport salad costs ya fourteen fifty
The cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while!
It’s alright to be a little griftee
It was a nice town ’til they stripped us to our skivvies
Cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while
Nice , well done. Funny line about an airport meal…
Recommend reading the article above linked to the CFA institute interview. Sounds like the book’s author has an interesting perspective and firm grasp of private equity practices.
True in Atlanta – home of the $14.50 salad. The $13 ham sandwich is also on the menu.
I will check out that link, thanks.
The article is a bit superficial, and could go into more depth as to why some practices, such as pre-paying dividends (dividend decapitalization) are harmful to the economic commonweal.
Back in my Wall Street Credit Analyst for BNP and Investment Analyst for Beal Bank days I considered pursuing a CFA for professional advancement purposes. What gave me pause is that part of the charter for a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) is that the analyst is obligated to call out any hinkey stuff they see to keep financial reporting accurate and transparent.
And yet, despite countless CFAs pervading the FIRE industry, look at the state of this country. The financial markets are all about the looting and pillaging. Benefitting in part from an increasing innumeracy on the part of the population. I guess I feel that if the CFAs hewed more closely to the goal of making sure our financial industry is working well for the citizenry I would be inclined to put in the effort. But I’m not going to agree to a charter that I don’t feel is being properly used.
Just so people are not cofused, the first image in the linked article is from a completly unrelated system, that works in a different frequency range.
Also, Murmansk-BN can not jam GPS, nor anything else that is out of its frequency range (3-30 MHz). The power of the system is also related to its frequency range (just like the size of antenna is), and lower frequency systems are more powerful by default (and have bigger antennas).
Also, the effective range depends on many factors, and “some defense analysts” can just throw numbers without knowing conditions under which they apply.
Also, this is not really “big if true”, but more of “normal”/”expected” level. Similar systems have existed since Soviet times, though less sofisticated of course (manual rasing of antenna masts, not computerized, etc), and have been exported.
P.S. I guess we live in a time when every weapon related article has to be written in a wunderwaffe game-changer style.
Here’s another article that ties those devious and dastardly Rooskies to Mideast upheavals, or more specifically, that evil Herr Putin:
Exclusive: US intelligence suggests Russian military is advising Houthis inside Yemen
Russian military intelligence officers are believed to have been deployed to Yemen to assist the Iran-backed Houthis with targeting commercial vessels in the Red Sea, Middle East Eye can reveal.
Members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence are operating in the Houthi-controlled territory of Yemen in an advisory role, a senior US official told MEE, speaking on condition of anonymity and citing US intelligence.
The exact nature of the Russians’ role is murky, but…
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-russian-military-advising-houthis-inside-yemen-us-intelligence-suggests
The British Intelligence suggests that they have brought shovels too. :)
I remember back in the first Intifada when Abe Rosenthal was insisting the kids were throwing Soviet made rocks.
Seems to me that the western world idiot kings who, for decades, have been blaming Putin for everything bad are gonna soon find out what really happens when Russia decides to “meddle.” They won’t like it. Fools.
It’s big if true in the sense that Iran is getting this system particularly now, it’s a sudden shift in the battlescape, adds significant complication for US/Israel at this particular moment when Iran is expected to retaliate for recent US/Israeli terrorist acts.
It’s big in a media way, as a public show of support, but still nowhere near as much as delivering Su-35s and Yak-130s.
It is not a sudden shift in the battlescape, becase it is not a wunderwaffe/game-changer. Stuff like this is not delivered on a whim to “fix everything”, but to serve as a part of complex country-wide EW system (that Iranians already have).
The introduction of the new Roman pilum in XXX BC was a games changer .
The Senate went wild. /sac
Yea. Russian fighters jets, too.
Yes but the Kagan family outfit argues that because the west has crossed alleged Russian red lines in the past without a Russian reaction, it is safe to do so again. Shakey analysis at best.
Of course Russia is currently too busy being the power behind mass migration into Europe and the current riots in England. (Please note, the riots are strictly in England, not other parts of the British Isles.)
I read there was stuff going down in Belfast too.
I suppose using those F-16s to destroy Russian air defenses is off the table then. I’m betting that those F-16s flew into the Ukraine for those publicity photos and then flew out to Romania or maybe Poland for safe keeping when that PR event was finished. It’s probably where the F-16 maintenance crews are too. They talk about having trained 6 pilots but don’t talk about the training of those maintenance crews so maybe they are pure NATO crews
AGM-88 HARM have been in use for a while (from MiG-29s), and didn’t do much. It would not make sense using these planes to lob some more expecting much better results (which doesn’t mean that they won’t try it :)). Wild Weasel spiel works good against weak coutries, but not as well against Russia.
The most effective things against Russian air defences have been kamikaze drones and HIMARS/ATACAMS/etc.
P.S. The ones most impatient to see those F-16s on the frontline must be Russians. Fifteen million rubles is the jackpot for the fist one.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/105248
[image]
Ukrainian post promptly issued a stamp with the F-16 aircraft and the “downed” Su-34
Previously, the Ukrainian postal operator had issued a set of stamps depicting the burning Crimean Bridge after the terrorist attack in October 2022.
* Actually. it’s Su-35 (air superiority fighter), not Su-34 (fighter-bomber).
Kind of funny that they felt like they needed to admit to at least a tiny bit of reality by showing the 16’s with external fuel tanks. : )
More CrowdStrike versus Delta legal finger-pointing, this from The Verge -> https://archive.ph/INm5L
– Links in the article showing YT interview and press releases from Delta CEO Ed Bastian who says the outage cost Delta $500M and impacted 40,000 servers (each needing a loving pair of hands to apply the artisanal recovery procedures).
– The flight crew tracking system was listed in an apology from Delta as the mission critical system that was running on Windoz.
– DOT investigating Delta which of course means Delta is turning around and lashing out at MSFT + CrowdStrike
– CrowdStrike previously offered an apology and is now responding via lawyers that Delta is unfairly blaming CS
– CrowdStrike offered Delta “onsite assistance” but received no response
Offering Delta “onsite assistance” is my favorite, that is a truly meaningless and hollow offer (it would take 2 weeks to “onboard” any contractors -> give them laptops, watch 100 training videos, do the dance of giving them “privileged access” to critical system, train them on data center operating procedures before they walk into a data center, show them where the servers are on the data center map, give them access to the ticketing and change control systems, assign them a ticket for each server, and then finally have them fix each of the 40,000 servers with full documentation in each ticket with associated change control updates). Some vendors have an army of badged services folks for complex systems but I can’t imagine CrowdStrike does this, not even for Delta.
I’ve been through five airports on my European tour, and to this day I’ve seen a few blue screens still pop up, albeit on non-mission critical systems like the kiosk that tells you where to find food and expensive tchotchkes. I guess those are the equivalent of the “last village” for the local IT guy to mop up.
So Crowdstrike spread the digital version of “Captain Trips” worldwide. May they be eaten by an army of lawyers in suits and patent leather shoes.
“Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions – swiftly, transparently, and constructively – while Delta did not.”
Er, nope.
How about: “Should Delta pursue this path, CrowdStrike will have to explain to the jury why CrowdStrike took no responsibility for its update and clearly didn’t test it on even a single hardware platform before release, as evidenced by the diversity of hardware platforms that failed.”
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/crowdstrike_is_not_at_all/
Private Equity: In Essence, Plunder?
As always, the “solution” to the problem of the distortions caused by highly regulated capitalism is to regulate more. But to those of us who have at least glanced at how sausage is made in Washington know that regulation reflects what Donors (major financial institutions and their clients).
Successful regulation requires both strong pressure from citizens and a cadre of honest, idealistic (at least to some extent) legislators and bureaucrats and those are in short supply–not because Americans are not honest (most of us are) but because the System built over time is structurally corrupt and getting more so every year. As we gov’t contractors used to say “no good deed goes unpunished.”
I believe the only solution to the various crises we are facing is decentralization and deregulation. How that can be accomplished is certainly tricky but possible but it starts with understanding how the System works. Eventually, the System will collapse and then citizens will be motivated to deal with public policy.
The dis-integration that generally accompanies collapse will do the trick. The decisive feature of the current system across just about all categories of administrative structure is that anyone who understands anything systemic is viewed as a risk and barred from any power over any system where they might have any real expertise.
It will only be after all those administrative structures disintegrate that actual expertise based integration can again be entertained.
Power is currently based on knowledge of unsustainable (but stubbornly unacknowledged unsustainability) cash flows to power and all administrative structures are optimized to force continuation of existing cash flows to power.
Deregulation as a possible salve to these problems ….I find something to disagree with the statement or possibly I am a bit confused. Decentralization and lighter regulations results in episodes like those in Texas, for an example, when there are severe storms causing week long power outages. The state government in Austin is always “investigating” the root causes when it’s right in their face. Profit motive above anything else, and screw those too poor to move into a hotel or escape to safer ground. A libertarian hellscape, possibly. Just as an easy example.
Deregulation like the railroad industry has clamored for? Not exactly a success.
Lighter regulations for banks that are just beneath a SIFI designation? Not exactly a success.
Private equity would just plunder even more so with their rapacious growth and an appetite for creative deals. They are designed to be money machines, oh and some times benefit their outside investors or limited partners.
When private-equity and other parasites and society wreckers go too far that will arouse the citizenry to do something–i.e., confiscate their property or just string them up so to speak. The problem we have with regulations is that no one understands them and how and why they are created (to increase the level of market capture). There was a period in our history when regulations worked because there were more honest politicians and bureaucrats. Thus we have to loosen the regs or eliminate them (my preference) and then start over with a notably aroused public–we are at that point of upset so if we could stop fighting about culture we might get somewhere. Also, with the number of state governments and localities with different approaches one or two may find the right combo of laws and regs that are based on real conditions rather than commercials and propaganda. When people begin to see through the artificial cultural antagonism and perhaps recognize that logic and reason may have some uses maybe things could change through real dialogue rather than the social media trend of only hearing echo chambers.
what? 43 years of reaganism?
and in that time, we get Lina Khan.
…whom “They” are plotting and bribing with alacrity….and quite openly, no less…to be done with.
and as for “The People”…well…where i live, the majority will likely tell you, as if it is as obvious as daylight, that Hillary and genocide joe are actual communists…and that while ukraine may have been a stupid commie mistake…moar bombs and money for israel…as well as nuking iran and china…welly…thats the kinda shit these folks can get behind…
its gonna hafta fall apart completely and utterly…and yes, no short-cuts, we’ll hafta go through the Burning Times…before the wonderful turn of events you describe can even begin to come to pass.
perhaps 10-20 years of very little and ad hoc electricity…no internet…no a/c…no gasoline and no fully stocked grocery stores…
we, as a people, have allowed our gooberment/ruling class to sow the wind.
you know what comes next.
Perfect as usual! I agree.
When private-equity and other parasites and society wreckers go too far that will arouse the citizenry to do something As feral finster liked to say, “What are you going to do about it?”. When the sheriff and his lackeys come to toss you out on the street for unpaid rent/mortgage/taxes what will you do? Has it come to this?
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
The Clash
Not anymore. No doubt all the field spraying has killed them off. There are a lot of bees here. We don’t have turf grass, mainly just native ground cover. Monarchs used to fly in a path through our yard. It has been a few years since we’ve seen them.
Reply ↓
chuck roast
August 5, 2024 at 6:50 pm
The Clash always makes my day. But the world-class, bespoke scum-bags known as private equity are displaying increasing signs of serious illness. Easing into the schadenfreude; increased interest rates (no more free money) has led the “industry” to experience more and more sick-days.
The carrying costs of their stripped down and debt-laden casts of businesses are becoming burdensome. Typically they can off a business on the unwary investment stiffs in under five years. Not so anymore. They can’t get the numbers, so they have to keep them on the books. But they gotta finance them…costly.
They have been using net asset valuation to attempt to get loans to keep the wrecks afloat until the market turns. Lenders are hip to this scam and take their football and go home from a field that may or may not be 100 yards in length. Bummer.
So, they create “continuation funds” whereby their various dreck are shuffled into new funds and relabled to keep up the grift. This is explained by the best student in Economics class: Stringer Bell…(start at 1:55).
All the while the limited partners want to see their cash flow and the general partners are forced into continued borrowing…pass the popcorn.
PE Plunder, with underlying concepts that show the rot.
Those lead to Behavioral Alpha.
Among those questions, are ethics included? Or would that be limited to a brief excursion through what is legal? Which questions are not asked, and why?
After the dawn of the last millennium, one general question involved angels dancing on heads of pins. Do those angels now dance ahead of steamrollers, picking up basis points?
I hope the market burns down just like my beloved forests
Re: Plunder. Private equity + the recent spate of Supreme Court decision –> the final dismantling of the system put in place by the New Deal and elaborated during the “golden age”, 1945-1970. From the first issue of the National Review until this moment it has been under attack by those once called “the malefactors of great wealth” or in another context “the merchants of death.” Wealth in whatever form wants to maintain itself and put the spurs to whomever it can. Techno feudalism here we come.
A ditty about Little Boy and Fat Man
Two American bombs thought up in the heartland
Little Boy’s gonna be a uranium scar
Fat Man loses his virginity in the backseat of Bockscar
Suckin’ on fire-seared cogs that used to be human beings
Fat Man’s sittin’ on Japan’s lap
He’s got his hands between Nagasaki’s knees
Little Boy say, hey Fat Man lets run off
Behind Hiroshima and see
Dribble off those babbling brooks
Let me do what I please
And Little Boy say a
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone they wok on
Little Boy sits back reflects his thoughts for a moment
Scratches his head and does his best clean sweep
Well you know Fat Man we oughta blow up the city
Fat Man says, baby you ain’t missing no-thing
Little Boy say a
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Gonna let it rock
Let it roll
Let the A Bomb come down
And save my soul
Hold on to U 235 as long as you can
Changes comin’ round real soon
Make us half-life women and men
A ditty about Little Boy and Fat Man
Two American bombs that went off according to plan
Jack and Dianne, by John Mellencamp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7gG5KyHbEc
‘Such a consequential president’: Nancy Pelosi says US should add Joe Biden to Mount Rushmore
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/such-a-consequential-president-nancy-pelosi-says-us-should-add-joe-biden-to-mount-rushmore/articleshow/112276384.cms
I’d like to see Pelosi name the state Mt Rushmore is in and then find it on a map.
White Cadillac
White man at the wheel
white faces on the mountain
wounds that’ll never heal
Cowboy Junkies
“Consequential”. Yeah. lol.
Yes, but in relation to the others, facing the opposite direction.
That is the most batty thing that has come out of his time in office. Consequential indeed.
It’s worse than portrayed, apparently Genocide Joe is supplying 2,000 pound bombs to obliterate the other 4 Presidents on Mt Rushmore in order to get top billing.
Its fitting. A genocidal madman should be on an offensive and sacrilegious spectacle. He could be added to Stone Mountain too.
As he has aged before our very eyes since leaving the office of VP after eight years, he may more closely resemble the famed rider on a pale horse..nope not Eastwood either.
Johnny Cash…the man comes around. ” and behold a pale horse…and him that sat upon it was Death…and Hell followed with him”
I wish I could figure out where this meme about him being “the best president since FDR” comes from. He ran on the most conservative platform of all time: “Nothing fundamental will change.” Indeed, nothing has.
Give Joe Bidezhnev the fifth star of the the Hero of the Soviet Union! (context: Leonid Brezhnev was given, or gave himself, 4 star-shaped medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union, equal to any hero of USSR during World War 2, for his deeds during the war (he wasn’t important enough to any such thing) as well as a bunch of other medals that he didn’t deserve, to cement his status as the greatest leader of USSR ever. It became so absurd that it became a long-lasting meme.)
I read the Telegraph article on how Hamas fights and I have seen a number of the Hamas videos.
The article is trying to make it sound like Hamas is responsible for the destruction and death toll but it doesn’t work.
First, there is the civilian clothing issue. It doesn’t matter, because in the videos the Hamas fighters are obviously carrying weapons and doing suspicious things like running up to tanks with explosives or peeking out of windows with sniper rifles or rocket launchers, things which civilians don’t do.
Next is the point that Hamas fights from buildings. In Gaza, where do you expect them to fight from?
Then they booby trap buildings. Yeah, and Israel has dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs. Which has destroyed more?
In the videos I see, the Hamas guys are running around in buildings and I never see civilians standing around. They certainly don’t hide behind civilians in any literal way, which on the other hand Israeli soldiers sometimes do. It would be insane for Hamas to do that. Israel would just kill them all, instead, they run through damaged or destroyed neighborhoods and after firing their rockets or planting their explosive device, they get out of their as fast as they can.
I am not a fan of Hamas and think what they did on Oct 7 was a massive war crime, but the NYT and the Telegraph have both posted articles which portray standard behavior of outgunned soldiers in urban combat as sinister. If these were Ukranians the very same behavior would be portrayed as heroic.
That article says ‘Only 350 Israeli soldiers have been killed so far, but its army has been forced to fight on Hamas’s terms.’ but according to another article, there are perhaps 10,000 Israeli casualties so far-
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/10000-israeli-soldiers-killed-or-wounded-report-exposes-crisis-among-israeli-soldiers-in-gaza/
The Israeli army was never designed for such a long campaign. Usually they would attack and kill a lot of people and after several weeks would call it quits. Not this time and the strain is telling.
During the war between South Africa on the one side, and the SWAPO + their Angolan allies MPLA + the Cuban allies of Angola, the apartheid government released fatality figures meticulously recording every member of the SA Defence Forces killed in combat (including those black soldiers enrolled in the SADF).
In the aftermath, some researchers, intrigued by the relatively low casualty counts for what were often ferocious battles, especially against the Cubans, during a long-lasting war to boot, went on to investigate. They found out that if every member of the SADF was accounted for, the figures excluded those from the special forces, auxiliary troops, Namibian territorial units, and the constabulary. As a result, the final number of fatalities on the SA side, including the Namibian/Southwest African elements, was more than three times higher.
I suspect that something like that is currently going on in Israel and that statistics are manipulated to avoid revealing the actual toll. Perhaps they do not count soldiers dying from their wounds in an Israeli hospital has having been “killed in Gaza”. I also noticed that the Hamas operation on the 7th October resulted in a number of operatives from the Israeli intelligence services getting killed. I wonder whether Israel publicly accounts for these as well.
UNITA did most of the dying, after all, it was UNITA that SWAPO was trying to annihilate with Soviet and Cuban assistance. South Africa was determined not to have a Soviet/Cuban backed SWAPO government on the northern border of what was then South West Africa, and played mainly a supportive role (artillery and intelligence).
This was a guerilla war in vast and dense bushveld; the SADF camouflage (they had inferior air power, though they made spectacular use of what they had, so moved mainly at night), reconnaissance, and raid tactics were unmatched anywhere on the globe in similar terrain (remember what a handful of boers did to the mighty British Empire). I know many people who were involved, from private to recce to colonel―to say ‘war between South Africa on the one side and …’ is very far from accurate and I’m not convinced the comparison you make is valid. I would be interested in a reference to the research you mention.
The USA, by the way, also supported UNITA initially, until they stopped being friends that is; the South African government, to their credit, did not stab UNITA in the back. Towards the end of the war the USA suddenly became friends of UNITA again; maybe because the SADF managed to get their hands on Soviet hardware that no one else on the globe had. A lot of politics was involved; Chester Crocker being one of a very small number of people able to distinguish reality from fantasy at the time.
Correction: MPLA, not SWAPO. My comment refers only to what was happening in Angola. Apologies.
I am having a hard time seeing the war crimes perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7. We wrote all of those laws after WWII, so to suddenly find that occupied peoples no longer have the right to an armed offense and defense brings all of those French Resistance movies, so beloved of our youth, into disrepute.
Should Hamas have followed the example of the denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto and just been eliminated so that Germany could seek its’ Lebensraum undeterred? If that is the moral of the story then maybe we should have just not gotten into the war in the first place, and all of those laws meant to protect the Untermenschen should never have been promulgated.
I just cannot find myself in that place, and after all these years I find it difficult to believe that so many are comfortable there. As you say, if those were Ukrainians the very same behavior would be portrayed as heroic. The only problem with that example is that the Ukrainians are actual Nazis on the run; the people who need saving are in their basements waiting for the allies to show up. At some point we need to show up for the Palestinians, or we are going to have wasted those seventy years of goodwill earned in WWII and suffer the opprobrium of future generations.
They murdered civilians and kidnapped civilians, including children and an 85 year old woman. You don’t have to buy into the made- up atrocities ( the beheaded babies and so forth) to see the war crimes.
Israel, of course, is committing genocide, so I am not putting them on the same level.
I am not saying that no civilians have been killed by Hamas, it was a war zone after all, but there has been no real accounting of who killed whom yet.
Nearly everyone in Israel has to go through the IDF and remain on their books. Reservists in the IDF are still considered legitimate military targets under international law, as are their outposts (the kibbutzim). How many of those reservists are being categorized as civilians? How many active military are being accounted for in that way? No one knows, so the assumption that they were all civilians killed by Hamas is clearly incorrect.
I am already discounting the made-up atrocities, but the continuance of this idea of mass casualties by Hamas deliberately obscures the number of people killed by Israel in its’ own Hannibal Directive. Hamas did not burn out hundreds of cars, or houses for that matter, so why continue to attribute those deaths to Hamas when we know that they were not armed in such a way as to create that kind of damage?
Hamas prosecuted a military operation on 10/7.
It targeted military installations and took hostages to exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
There are almost no civilians in because everyone except for Haredi is military personnel.
As Ilan Pappe points out, “Israel is an army with a state.”
An occupied people has the right to armed resistance and is not terrorism under international law.
Hamas is the perfect excuse for wholesale slaughter of a population.
But who cares about international law.
You can call it tit for tat in a way. Israel has been killing Palestinian civilians for decades. Also, Palestinian children and women are rotting in Israeli jails as hostages to insure good behaviour of those left free for decades. Just that Hamas did in one day of prison escape what Israel does in maybe half a year or a bit more? (I am talking Israel prior to Oct 7, now…).
I think the taking of civilian hostages is unambiguously a war crime.
But IMO it pales in comparison with the disproportionate and collective punishment inflicted (both previously and subsequently) on the people of Gaza by Israel. This is not to justify Hamas, but to note the double-standard in much Western interpretation of the conflict.
One also has to consider the rationale behind Hamas taking those hostages, and the ultimate rationale behind the creation of the Hannibal Directive by the Israelis. The first Hamas hostages released had pretty good things to say about the conditions that their captors held them in, but can those in Israeli prisons held without charge say the same thing? Has anyone said that Hamas is raping prisoners with electric cattle prods? Has anyone said that Palestinians would support the practice?
Even with regard to the war crime of taking potentially civilian captives hostage, Hamas has made Israel look very bad by comparison.
Resistance against an Occupying Power is not a war crime. The subsequent retaliation is. Given the information in ‘Order from Amazon’: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war 972 Magazine, can any attack by the resistance, or supporters of the resistance, against the “tech giants” storing mass data used to assist the Zionist genocidal war against the Palestinians be considered as anything other than legitimate regardless of the location in which it takes place? Lawyer?
“the NYT and the Telegraph have both posted articles which portray standard behavior of outgunned soldiers in urban combat as sinister.”
The “Telegraph”? The way Hamas is fighting just isn’t cricket, old boy!
I generally like the positions taken by Zephyr Teachout and I think FTC anti-trust actions under Lisa Khan have been refreshing, but I have difficulty seeing Biden as a great president on economic grounds. For the same reason I discount the enthusiasm Sara Nelson of the flight attendant union shows for Biden. Sure, any interest group is gratified when their interests are served (General Dynamics and Raytheon probably give him good grades too), but on balance? Maybe it’s just election cycle hyperbole.
The PE Pirates piece really worthwhile. The point is frequently “this is legal and can be helpful for a company in some circumstances….” which brings to mind the way money laundering and supporting a fail son’s useless company can look the same, and be basically legal, on paper. So how to redraw the lines and penalize the crimes? That’s the tricky part. Along with educating the peoples about the family-bloggery going on.
WEF individual carbon footprint tracker talk. utube, ~25 seconds. / ;)
Individual Carbon Footprint Tracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djpRUafjx7c
The above is a short clip from a longer, ~45 minute presentation at Davos. utube.
Strategic Outlook: Responsible Consumption | Davos | #WEF22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqiz4g8LdoM
adding from Nat. Geographic magazine:
Global Food Crisis Looms as Fertilizer Supplies Dwindle
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/global-food-crisis-looms-as-fertilizer-supplies-dwindle
What is B Gates and Al Gore’s responsible consumption level? / ;)
Debby does Tallahassee
Florida is kind of the poster child for being uninsurable~
That’s a funny joke on an old movie title, except Debby does Tallahassee isn’t a lighthearted, naughty romp of a movie. Best of luck to everyone in the storm’s path.
Jimmy Dore and Ian Carroll. utube, ~35 minutes.
“Democrats Are Now The CIA Party!” w/ Ian Carroll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vO51vB8b18
OK, I’ll stop now. / ;)
Does Mr. Dore go back over the six years WSWS has been reporting on the “CIA Democrats”? This, AFAIK, is Patrick Martin’s latest update of that story:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/06/20/xzvv-j20.html
New Alastair Crooke on the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. Isn’t this what our politics should be talking about rather than “weird”?
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/05/the-1948-irgun-re-born/
Of course when it comes to the ME Trump is bad too and may be worse. But I suspect he wouldn’t be giving the Israelis the blank check that the Biden/Harris administration is providing.
The last paragraph of the article:
“Isn’t it time that the western ruling structures raised their eyes from their reverie, and read the runes that manifest all around them? Some serious players don’t think as you westerners do; they seek Gog and Magog (the prophecy that “the children of Israel” will be victorious in the battle of Armageddon). That is what you risk”
These times are entirely too interesting for my taste
A little something from Rachel Maddow I’m sure we’ve all been waiting for.
For those that don’t want to click, MSNBC has bought a Lev Parnas documentary from Maddow’s production company. Parnas was an Ukrainian who was key to the first Trump impeachment. He and his stash of photos and videos are the point of the documentary.
Maddow did weigh in:
Try try again, Rachel. Pretty damn sure that Lev is about as trustworthy as Baghdad Bob and Nayirah’s al-Ṣabaḥ. But then as a major provider of selected ‘facts’ you are queen of the propaganda.
Global Stocks Rout Pushes Wall Street’s Fear Gauge to Four-Year High Bloomberg
Today the rout continues, and we have this headline…
Houston, I think we have a solution. The Plunge Protection Team may be headed for retirement.
Starmer blaming riots on the right-wing is kinda fitting given that all he seems to offer to handle the problem is right-wing stuff like more surveillance, pre-crime punishment, and more enforcement. For the underlying issues he offers more right-wing stuff like austerity and intercepting small boats.
Starmer is failing even faster than I predicted. He’s “using the right-wing failed playbook” along with the “fully funded, no extra money, sorry” economic rules. Blair got ONE extra chance in 2001 after doing that for 4 years.
Starmer won’t. Round here, in the most marginal of middle England, all it’ll take is an extra 10% uptick in turnout, being for Reform (reflecting what used to happen to the British National Party in the 1990s) and a moderate fall in Labour support by social conservatives and our new Labour MP will be replaced by an illiterate but newsworthy Reform UK MP in 4 years.
WTAF is going on? HOW can you fail so fast? OK I don’t like Labour’s moronic desire to stick to “fully funding stuff” but I thought they had some cards up their sleeve like Blair did in 1997. I am reminded of the iconic bit of the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob just kept on walking into rakes lying in the grass. Because I get a horrid feeling we’re doing that.
Blair was, for all his faults, a skilful politician, and a lucky one – he came to power just as the economy was on a long term upward cycle. Plus Brown as Chancellor ensured in the second term that some of the fruits of a good economy went to social welfare. Starmer lacks Blairs charisma and I suspect he also lacks Blairs luck (except insofar as having a particularly inept opposition).
A sensible Labour leader would be building a wider centre to left, regionalist and Green coalition to represent the majority of British people. Politically, thats the only coalition that represents a majority, and the electoral system doesn’t allow any other form of creating a majority government. On that matter, a few tweaks to the electorate system would keep the right out, but even the left of the Labour Party oppose that.
So I find it very hard to see any good outcomes over the next few years. The only real question is whether the Tories find some way to hold together a centre to right grouping, or whether the right itself falls apart into competing camps.
Agreed. Incidentally I’ve elsewhere tried to explain the “discrete choice modelling problem” that causes people like Starmer to keep erroneously thinking their wins will be long term. I won’t self promote and ideally would go thru 2 more edits but….
Please self promote.
Sorry that breaks NC rules. But since I use my real name, even with the “google crappification” NC has identified, it shouldn’t be hard to find me.
(Plus Lambert put a link to my substack a few days ago which was one of my esoteric subjects so never took off but the original link is there!)
I get twitchy particularly because my long COVID means I tend to feel the need for 5 edits and this one was rushed. PK was one of 4ish people who “took on trust” the academic articles I referenced to show how polling could be rubbish but I always wanted to write a more “intuitive” piece, The one in question ain’t ideal but may have to do.
I just tried google and certainly for me, it doesn’t give me your sub stack. I suspect thats a result of having a common name (I have the same issue, but for me its proven useful for privacy – I share a name with a moderately well known actor, so the first thousand or so google searches are for him alone).
I guess it’s not self promotion if I share your sub stack.
Thanks. Hope you do’t get into trouble. Before my 2015 textbook became a global hit via Cambridge University Press, it used to annoy me that the three other big Google “Terry Flynns” were:
(1) a marketing professor in Ontario (and so could legitimately confuse people)
(2) some weird RC Priest in Wales (who didn’t seem dodgy but by nature of his job/vocation was someone I really really hoped nobody confused me with!)
(3) A prominent supporter of a famous Austrian with a weird mustache
Leaving aside his treatment of Julian Assange, his general spookiness, and his attempt to tank Jeremy Corbyn by, amongst other things, insisting repeatedly on a second European Refereundum during the election campaign against Labour Party policy, refusing to publish the Labour Party’s Report on Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014–2019 and the subsequent Forde Report, settling a legal case and financially handsomely rewarding former Party employees who acted as “whistleblowers” in a BBC programme telling the world that Labour was not a safe place for Jews, despite legal advice that the employees would lose the case, Starmer created a permanent problem for himself within a few months of becoming the leader of the Labour Party by sacking Rebecca Long-Bailey without justifiable or even sensible cause, completely and publicly discarding his election promises, his compulsive re-shuffling of his shadow cabinet to exclude the Left, and his facility at suspending and expelling Jewish anti-Zionists from the off, whilst denying Jeremy Corbyn the Labour Whip against the wishes of the National Executive.
On a personal note, it was evident to me that Labour HQ was setting the stage for electoral failure in 2019 by the unnecessarily (very) late selection of candidates and the lack of support given to local parties until the final week of the campaign when it wasn’t worth, in John Nance Garner’s words, “a bucket of warm piss”.
I left the Labour Party on Starmer’s election after nearly six decades of continuous membership. Other comrades left but some stayed on, including Jewish friends, who felt that things would calm down and get better. Things could only get better…
However, the Labour Party completed its ideological journey by becoming increasingly outspoken about it’s pro-Zionist stance and it’s behaviour became even more oppressively antisemitic. The country is sitting on a powder keg of incompetence and a recently elected government’s lack of understanding of it’s own people and their needs. We face a NATO defeat in the Ukraine, a genocide in Occupied Palestine, and the probability of a major regional and, ultimately, world war stares us in the face. And all this government can do is double down on failed policies.
I simply cannot imagine any scenario which would enable Labour under Starmer to build a broader, deeper constituency whether through coalition or a few more policy lies. Starmer is the problem and he has created a PLP that is a problem for the foreseeable future.
I can’t see how Starmer can survive as Prime Minister for much more than a year. His Cabinet can, at best, be defined as second raters with a strong mix of third raters, and the size of his majority is indicative of his weakness, not strength.
Too many backbenchers are aware that they are MPs solely because the Tories had become so obviously disunited and incapable of government. That is why Labour support lacks depth.
Those newly elected MPs with fluke or narrow majorities will soon acquire a taste for parliamentary life and will start, at first discretely, then openly, discussing how Labour can best support their personal prospects at the next election. And the Labour Right is nothing if not conspiratorial.
Starmer has already stepped over a few lines which will soon be seen as red and as ammunition enough to call his leadership into question and I am told it has already become a matter of more or less private conversation between assistants/advisors to at least three, “hanging on by a thread”, MPs who obtained their seats because so many of their constituents chose to sit on their hands this time round. I am assuming that assistants/advisors are reflecting their MP’s concerns rather than seeking to influence their views.
another free trade country is about to implode.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/BGD/bangladesh/trade-balance-deficit
External balance on goods and services (formerly resource balance) equals exports of goods and services minus imports of goods and services (previously nonfactor services). Data are in current U.S. dollars.
Bangladesh trade balance for 2022 was $-36.89B, a 38.5% increase from 2021.
Bangladesh trade balance for 2021 was $-26.63B, a 32.26% increase from 2020.
Bangladesh trade balance for 2020 was $-20.14B, a 6.4% increase from 2019.
Bangladesh trade balance for 2019 was $-18.93B, a 17.81% decline from 2018.
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food insecurity is high, bangladesh relies heavily on cash crops to try to pay for the trade deficit.
free trade is starving the poor world wide.
https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/bangladesh-ipc-chronic-food-insecurity-report-june-2022
“Nearly 35 million people, representing 21% of the total population of Bangladesh, face Moderate and Severe Chronic Food Insecurity (IPC Levels 3 and 4), of which 11.7 million people, or 7% of the total population face Severe Chronic Food Insecurity (IPC Level 4) and 23.1 million people, or 14% of the total population, face Moderate Chronic Food Insecurity (IPC CFI Level 3).”
————————–
its always the same, free trade drives up prices, and pummels and starves the poor.
https://thewire.in/south-asia/the-end-is-nigh-as-government-crackdown-sparks-bloodshed-and-fury-across-bangladesh
The End is Nigh As Government Crackdown Sparks Bloodshed and Fury Across Bangladesh
Shahidul Alam
8 hours ago5 min read
The televised murder of Abu Sayeed, an unarmed student of Begum Rokeya University, is an indictment of a rogue government that has long lost its right to rule. His outstretched arms as he had faced the police will become the Tiananmen Square moment in Bangladesh’s history.
“There are plenty of other reasons for the unrest. The price of essential goods has skyrocketed over the years and people have their backs against the wall. Meanwhile the prime minister herself publicly announces that her peon has amassed $40 million and only travels by helicopter. The peon is not the only one to travel by helicopter. Choppers were sent on Thursday (July 18) to rescue police trapped on a rooftop by angry protesters”
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina resigns, flees country, military takes over – South China Morning Post
People in Bangladesh aren’t happy with India.
Media reports said Hasina was flown in a military helicopter with her sister and was headed to India. The CNN News 18 television channel said she had landed in Agartala, the capital of India’s northeastern state of Tripura, across the eastern border of Bangladesh.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an independent political commentator and author in India, told This Week in Asia the upheavals in Dhaka did not bode well for New Delhi.
“The army stepping into governance anywhere in the world is a sad development for democracy. We will be in a bit of a jam because India has been silent on the way Sheikh Hasina has trampled on democracy and the democratic aspirations of the people of Bangladesh,” he said.
“The government of India’s silence has alienated it from the people of Bangladesh. It does not help to support an authoritarian leader who violates the rule of law. This was a classic case of one authoritarian leader backing another and now we may have to pay the price of not having friendly governments on both sides of our border.”
they were not investment treaties, they were free trade agreements. Khan is popular because he was about to restore sovereignty and liberty for his peoples.
remember, the free traders pulled off a coup in pakistan, removing the popular anti-free trade prime minister, that was for sovereignty and feeding his peoples, that is self reliance.
under free trade, its impossible to pay your bills, let alone feed your peoples.
of course like everything the free traders do, it backfires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/asia/pakistan-protests-politics.html
“The demonstrations over the past few weeks reflect frustration with Pakistan’s shaky, five-month-old government and with its military, the country’s ultimate authority. The unrest threatens to plunge Pakistan back into the depths of political turmoil that has flared in recent years and that many had hoped would subside after the February general election.
Pakistan’s leaders are confronted with a monsoon of problems. The economy is suffering its worst crisis in decades. Anger at an election widely viewed as manipulated by the military remains palpable. Militant violence has roared back after the Taliban’s return to power in neighboring Afghanistan. And Pakistani politics are more polarized than ever, with the country’s most popular political figure sitting in jail after a bitter rift with the military.”
“And in Rawalpindi, a city just outside Islamabad where the military’s headquarters is situated, thousands of protesters affiliated with an Islamist political party gathered for days to express anger over the rising cost of living. The government recently raised electricity prices by 20 percent, a step that officials called necessary to comply with a $7 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.”
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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.”
“As stock sell-off sweeps Asia, China’s yuan surges as US rate cuts loom”
China has had the strongest major currency since 1994, when Federal Reserve reporting begins:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=yeYT
January 15, 2018
Real Broad Effective Exchange Rate for China, United States, India, Japan and Germany, 1994-2024
(Indexed to 1994)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=RRwA
January 15, 2018
Real Broad Effective Exchange Rate for China, Indonesia, Brazil, United Kingdom and France, 1994-2024
(Indexed to 1994)
The linked Semafor story about the WSJ’s failure to support it’s claim that 10% of UNWRA staff has ties to Hamas contains the following quote from the Journal’s chief news editor, Elena Cherney:
The fact that Israel’s claims have not been backed up by solid proof doesn’t mean our reporting is inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here”.
I took the trouble to look up Ms Cherney’s background. Before she went to Yale, she graduated from Bialik High School, a private Jewish school in Montreal. In Bialik’s Judaic Studies page one of the headings is “Connection to Israel”.
Over the years I have learned to research the backgrounds of news journalists, editors and publishers involved in reporting on Israel. Often I do find plain evidence of a personal connection to Israel, or a suggestion of one (as here). This has never been reported on, though it’s effect on what Americans are told about Israel must be profound.
Related links:
https://thecjn.ca/uncategorized/elena-cherney-takes-leap-reporter-editor/
https://jppsbialik.ca/en/bialik-academics/judaic-studies/
> As stock sell-off sweeps Asia, China’s yuan surges as US rate cuts loom
Strengthening of JPY is not just about BoJ increasing interest rates a little bit. JPY is the go to safe haven currency when US gets into trouble – which is highlighted this time by CNY also strengthening. If things get worse in Middle East (likely), JPY is going to strengthen further even if BoJ keeps rates on hold.
Real kick in the guts of BoJ decision will be in limiting Fed’s capacity to lower rates because now Japanese can park funds in new JGBs which will be paying (a small amount of ) interest without any FX risk. E.g. Norinchukin Bank recently selling a sh1tload of Treasuries and bring funds back onshore (and recovered some of Treasury losses by repatriating funds at height of JPY weakness).
“Strengthening of the Yen is not just about BoJ increasing interest rates a little bit…”
Interesting comment. Do go on when possible. Why should the Yen be favored, for instance, over the Euro? After all, the Yen has been chronically weak for many many years now.
Europe has the Ukraine conflict, political instability and high public & private debt. While Japan has high government debt this is offset by high private savings (corporate + individuals). These ‘savings’ tend to be invested offshore and when ‘risk off’ happens these funds come back to Japan & support the JPY. JPY, AUD etc are all historically ‘weak’ vs the USD. JPY up around 100 JPY/USD was abnormal and required Japanese gov’t active support in order to placate US politicians about Japan’s ‘over competitiveness’. Japanese are generally risk adverse, so even a small positive interest rate on JGBs will move a significant amount of funds out of US Treasuries. Hence if Fed cuts interest rates now, don’t be surprised if come October rates will need to increase again to attract buyers for Treasuries given issuance already approaching saturation levels. Leading to another market crash just before elections..
Also, higher Japanese interest rates aren’t necessarily a political negative with an ageing population with a lot of cash savings that can now earn some extra spending power.
“Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation”:
What about productivity growth? Is that alone not enough to compensate for having a shrinking population?
I would think that if we are to prioritize de-growth for climate reasons, that we should also prioritize depopulation as well – and that the growth in productivity over time, can help to maintain relative standards of living (or at least, manage their decline, assuming at least some part of productivity growth also means greater efficiencies in terms of energy use etc. – but that’s a different topic).
I encounter the ‘demographics crisis’ point, as the primary argument used to push the ‘pensions crisis’ narrative – and that narrative is used to argue for making private pensions semi-mandatory with auto-enrollment etc. (i.e. is a huge finance industry subsidy, and causes the entire population to buy-in to housing crises around the world, as their pensions begin to rely on them – among causing buy-in to all varieties of business/financial plundering/unethical-behaviour in the same manner).
I view the entire ‘pensions crisis’ narrative as false, based on many lies – and productivity growth being one of the major components of GDP/economic-growth overall – and that GDP grows much faster than the dependency ratio – I’ve found to be one of the best arguments for undermining it.
What about productivity growth?
Importantly, manufacturing productivity in the US has been declining for the last 12 and a half years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=m2mB
January 30, 2018
Manufacturing Productivity, * 1988-2024
* Output per hour of all persons
(Indexed to 1988)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=m2mx
January 30, 2018
Manufacturing Productivity, * 1988-2024
* Output per hour of all persons
(Percent change)
i had a burr in my bonnet toget the wellpump at least on solar/wind…i know all about how to do tat.
so i text mom that this must happen, post haste…and she’s all like…hmmm..well…id dont know…and so on…boomer bullshit,
and so it devolves into me being a shitbird,lol….so im like well:
“your hatred…i’ll do that for you…now that Don’s dead…i’ll take your hatred of yourself and go into the wilderness of my side of the place.
Put all your sins upon me, I’ll eat them up.”
and its been silence, since…seething, prolly,lol….caught out as if jerkin off in public!
i’ll pay for it sometime soon.
she’ll explode allover me with narcissistic rage.
Taibbi and Kirn, Monday streaming.
ATW Live on Monday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQPQocsKAwE
Tulsi Gabbard placed on the “clear skies” watch list. Ya can’t make this stuff up.
edit: “Quiet Skies”, not “clear skies.”
Türkiye to join genocide case against Israel at International Court of Justice on Wednesday: Foreign minister
Interesting article from ” WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit. . . titled ” As stupid as it is unconstitutional”. It is about the relevant authorities of Nassau County passing an ordinance or something to outlaw people from wearing masks with violators subjectable to a thousand dollar fine and/or some jail time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1el4usr/as_stupid_as_it_is_unconstitutional/
One wonders if there are enough covid-cautious people in the area to be able to subject Nassau County to some kind of combination of boycotts, digital systems attacks of every kind, etc.; until those political authorities can be tortured or extorted into repealing that ordinance. Or until the economy and society of Nassau County can be effectively destroyed to the point where many people have to emigrate . . . . as a lesson to other counties to not do the same thing.