Startup Claims It’s Achieved Communication Between Two People Who Were Both Dreaming Futurism
Halloween candy binges can overload your gut microbiome – a gut doctor explains how to minimize spooking your helpful bacteria The Conversation
Largest prime number ever found spans 41 million digits, sets new world record Interesting Engineering
Climate/Environment
Capturing carbon from the air just got easier UC Berkeley News
Melting Arctic sea-ice could affect global ocean circulation, study warns Phys.org
“A Total Shock” – Japanese Sardines Detected in U.S. Waters SciTech Daily
Pandemics
“Just the ‘flu” hampers our response to the current Covid pandemic and future pandemics Independent SAGE continues
A human isolate of bovine H5N1 is transmissible and lethal in animal models Nature
Africa
João Lourenço’s American pivot Africa Is A Country
China?
US finalises curbs on investing in Chinese tech Channel News Asia
China tightens export controls on rare earth metals used for chipmaking — country now requires exporters to detail how they use restricted materials Tom’s Hardware. Useful chart:
Philippines Banks on U.S. Backing in South China Sea—No Matter Who Wins in November Reuters
China won’t like the sound of commissioner hearings. Here’s why. Politico EU
Exclusive: Eyeing US election, China considers over $1.4 trillion in extra debt over next few years Reuters
Old Blighty
New UK budget to face ‘harsh light of fiscal reality,’ says premier Anadolu Agency
Starmers Sell Off Class Consciousness Project
O Canada
Monthly food bank use in Canada soars to record 2 million: report The Canadian Press
Canada ships first armored combat support vehicles to Ukraine Kyiv Independent. Total military assistance up to $4.5 billion since 2022.
European Disunion
Volkswagen plans closure of 3 plants in Germany, cutting tens of thousands of jobs WSWS
The Logic of Germany’s China Policy in the Zeitenwende The German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Blame China for the Atlanticists’ role in the destruction of German industry?
The German Car Industry Is Dying and Dragging the Country Into the Abyss Of Crisis Pluralia
Weighing the prospects for a turnaround for Germany’s economy Goldman Sachs
The Missing Chapter Verfassungsblog. “The EU’s Own Adherence to Rule of Law Standards.”
Syraqistan
My new report is out – available in all UN official languages: https://t.co/rOTHGuyAYl
Genocide is a complex and insidious crime; proving destructive intent is an onerous task – yet not when it is so ostentatious, sustained by a political doctrine of ideological hatred and… pic.twitter.com/rdUna6za7y
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 28, 2024
Israel bans UNRWA from operating in country Anadolu Agency. Commentary:
Israel aiming to ban the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, is a a spectacular own goal (despite what Israel and its most fanatical supporters will say).
Israel has long wanted to kill the idea of Palestinian refugees ever being able to return to Israel, a right under international law…— Antony Loewenstein (@antloewenstein) October 28, 2024
***
Israel fails with ultra-Orthodox draft as only 4 percent show up for service The Cradle
Smotrich tears up during speech on the sacrifices of the religious Zionist community during the war Jerusalem Post
***
Israel Calls the Shots in the Mideast as U.S. Plays a Lesser Role New York Times
From Iron Dome to F-15s: US provides 70% of Israel’s war costs CTech
Israel plans 2nd attack on Iran, reports Israeli media Anadolu Agency
Israeli minister threatens Bashar al-Assad: ‘You are in danger’ The Cradle
New Not-So-Cold War
10,000 North Korean troops in Russia, inching closer to fight in Ukraine: Pentagon The Hill
North Korean soldiers at war against Ukraine – only in the imagination of Zelensky and his Western supporters! Eastern Angle. Commentary:
Let me clarify my position on the North Korean soldiers that have reportedly joined Russia and will fight in Kursk.
1. There has not been a single shred of proof presented outside of Kiev, Seoul and Washington’s “said so”.
2. North Korea and Russia are strategic partners and…
— ayden (@squatsons) October 28, 2024
Ukraine war latest: US won’t impose new limitations on Ukraine’s use of American weapons if North Korea enters war, Pentagon says Kyiv Independent
Supplying Ukraine with Taurus won’t make us party to war – Germany opposition leader Merz Ukrainska Pravda
Ukraine expands long-range drone strikes target list, alcohol now on the menu The Kyiv Independent
SITREP 10/28/24: Russia Unleashes Lightning Advances in South as ‘Red Scare’ Hits Fever Pitch Simplicius the Thinker
***
McCarthyism, Eh? Bandera Lobby Blog. “’Loss of Ukraine’ blame game starts in Canada, with journalist in the crosshairs of Kyiv and Canadian politician who vowed a huge victory over Russia.”
The Caucasus
Opposition groups demand snap election under international administration OC Media
Georgian Opposition, Observers Collect Evidence to Reveal Alleged Vote Fraud Scheme Civil Georgia.
Georgian president/French spook is pushing the following graph in attempt to prove fraud:
Cannot get any clearer ! https://t.co/jk5lTHO6Au
— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) October 28, 2024
Not everyone thinks it’s so clear:
Indeed, a “fascinating” analysis (https://t.co/fKgmd2YQng) Mr. @ArminWolf (https://t.co/8B0jBypQKD) highlights below. However, I doubt whether it draws a “convincing” conclusion.
Unless there is solid evidence to support it, the conclusion can only be classified as a… https://t.co/X44iHMBI3L pic.twitter.com/ZJiry21onI
— 1g0r.B0hm (@1g0rB0hm) October 28, 2024
Washington issues new threat to Georgia RT
Ukraine-trained snipers arrive in Georgia to stage provocations — regional source TASS
Georgia: Election was just as much about the economy Responsible Statecraft
BRICS
IMF SEES GROWTH SHIFTING FROM G-7 TO BRICS Natylie’s Place: Understanding Russia
This is probably the best thread that I’ve read on the key decisions taken at the BRICS meeting in Kazan, which are bigger than I thought at first glance.
Jacques Sapir is a renowned French economist and one of the foremost Western experts on the Russian economy.
Since his 🧵… https://t.co/kzEghotJh4
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 27, 2024
B-a-a-a-a-d Banks
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says ‘it’s time to fight back’ on regulation Reuters
JPMorgan begins suing customers who allegedly stole thousands of dollars in ‘infinite money glitch’ CNBC
2024
The counties that may try not to certify the 2024 election Brookings Institution
Trump
What Will Trump II Do for Foreign Policy? The American Conservative
Kamala
What Does Mark Cuban Want? Sludge
Democrats en Déshabillé
“Do we remember what it was like waking up every day and there was some shit going on?”
Now we wake up every day to images of men, women and children with shredded, broken bodies and bombs raining down on two, three, four, five countries. But that is, apparently, of no concern. https://t.co/3mC6qIO2lr
— Paweł Wargan (@pawelwargan) October 28, 2024
Our Famously Free Press
Washington Post Brass Spiked A Story Linking Labor Leaders To DNC Assault Drop Site
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance Electronic Frontier Foundation
Why We Ghost Nautilus
AI
Artificial intelligence will ‘revolutionize’ pharma industry, Nvidia says Semafor
Guillotine Watch
Barron’s: CVS, UnitedHealth and Cigna’s PBMs Were Big Players in the Opioid Crisis HEALTH CARE un-covered
Class Warfare
THE ROLE OF COERCION IN THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMY Law and Political Economy Project
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
“Startup Claims It’s Achieved Communication Between Two People Who Were Both Dreaming”
Hopefully one of them wasn’t named Freddy Krueger.
There was an episode of Northern Exposure back in the 90’s where everyone in the town was having each others dreams because of Aurora Borealis. The natives were saying that’s just nature being nature.
There’s a lot about the universe we’re still discovering, I’m sure on some level we’re connected somehow. As I recall, Martin Buber, Leibniz, Spinoza, Tillich, etc., have all posited we’re connected through God, while Husserl, Bohm, John Donne, Gotama (Buddha) and even AFN have all posited variations of interconnectedness and intersubjectivity.
But a manmade dream machine? I confess to having skipped that story, probably something to do with the headline “startup claims…”. Interesting how the profit motive invalidates.
Check out “Dream Scenario” for a dark take on dream sharing. Nick Cage is wonderful as the innocent protagonist.
The Manic series on Netflix has some of that; machine induced (shorted machine) dreaming.
Bah, this is nothing. An aunt of mine told me once that she had heard both of us, my cousin and me, having a dialogue while sleeping. She didn’t record anything but found it very funny. I wonder what the hell were we saying.
I’m reminded of a Robert Heinlein book called “Time for the Stars” in which it is discovered that some twins and triplets can communicate with each other telepathically. So when huge starships are launched, several twins are aboard each one with their twins at home to act as a sort of instantaneous radio between Earth and these ships-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars
This suggests telepathy is faster then light, maybe instantaneous. That would imply an entanglement condition. My wife seems to always know what I am thinking but it is a one way street. I have tried flipping polarity but it doesn’t seem to affect her actions.
Oh, I remember that one. When one of the starship’s sister vessels suddenly disappears mid-telepathic-contact, the ship’s newspaper headlines the grim news VASCO DA GAMA LOST …
From Carl Sagan, years ago. . .
““The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
We’d better get busy, and fast.
One of the early schemes for allowing ships to keep accurate time in the pre-chronograph days was based on the idea that certain dogs were somehow telepathically linked to each other.
The plan was to keep one of these dogs on shore and put another on a ship. Then, at noon, say, the shore-bound dog would be poked with a knife and the ship-bound dog would bark, providing a time signal. (DogNet?)
Maybe we will see this idea come around again now that we are linked via dreams.
Several years ago there was another breathless headline that “scientists” had deciphered dolphin language. On actually reading the article, it was clear nothing of the sort had happened, just like in this case.
All the “scientists” had done was hook a recording of dolphin sounds up to one of those machines that transform sound into light that stoned teenagers might use while listening to jam bands or whatever stoned teenagers listen to these days.
I can attest that some of them listen to Black Sabbath and Steely Dan
I’m so proud of them.
My two brothers and I shared the same bed room. My younger brother had told us about his vivid dream where he hit a line drive down the third base line that hit and stuck to the foul ball pole. So when he popped up in bed and yelled “It’s fair!”, my older brother and I both yelled, “It’s foul!”
I think we all yelled back and forth until our dad came in and yelled, “What the h$ll is going on here?!”
I’ve rounded up $50 MM from dolts…er, I mean savvy investors interested in the cutting edge of science.
Your company is now valued at $2 billion. A summary of my usual and customary fees will be FedExed to you.
I’m with Mr. Dylan on this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52ueF7eku-0
From 1965 and still remarkably relevant.
has always been my favorite Dylan song – here’s the words and yes it has more than stood the test of time and is in fact timeless – https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding/
my second favorite – “Political World”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg29g6D0sPs&t=123s
We live in a political world
Where peace is not welcome at all
It’s turned away from the door to wander some more
Or put up against the wall
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/political-world/
I was dreaming of getting free money from Jamie Diamond and he was dreaming of getting it back.
For better of worse, it’s not Freddy Krueger but Jennifer Lopez.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209958/mediaviewer/rm1579530752/?ref_=ttmi_mi_all_13
my first thought on reading this was the recurring Futurama bit about ads in dreams
From the classic 80s pop rock hit 1999, by noted writer and performer Prince…
“I was dreaming when I wrote this,
So sue me if I go too fast,
But life is just a party,
And parties weren’t meant to last
…War is all around us,
My mind says prepare to fight…”
This is old news. The inimitable Mr Watterson had it all sorted out years ago:
https://theautomaticearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/CalvinOlBuddy.jpg
In the episode of The Prisoner, titled “A,B &C, Number Six is subjected to some tech where they try to manipulate his dreams so he would reveal why he resigned from his top secret job.
https://youtu.be/iYnL7OXswtY?si=P7bYF1PPByDzMnP6
>Israel Calls the Shots in the Mideast as U.S. Plays a Lesser Role New York Times
Israel, for better or worse, is dictating events in the Middle East. The United States has been relegated to the role of wing man, as its ally wages war on multiple fronts.
This confirms, for me the opposite, that the U.S. is using Israel as a proxy similar to how it’s using Ukraine against Russia. This is the view given by Brian Berletic of the New Atlas below. At first take I was somewhat skeptical about Berlectic characterization, leaning more toward Judge Napolitano’s guest who see Zionist controlling U.S. officials through APAC and other means. Now with this NYT article, I think Berletic might be correct, though the truth is probably a mixture.
https://youtu.be/yfY5C__A6Ao?si=kAwxNFHEboOWR6wo
So long as Israel defends and furthers US policy of domination in the ME, all is well. Iran is the holdout in the US’s dominance gambit.
Through it all, Israel provide plausible deniability for the US. So far the US is but “complicit” in the Gaza genocide. The US can simply claim that Israel is a loose cannon of sorts.
Just as the US lost interest in its proxy-partner in Ukraine when it became clear Ukraine is not going to deliver, a similar fate awaits Israel. The Israeli-led genocide is the perfect basis for disengaging once Israel runs out of sream.
US aid to Israel is similar to a pacemaker. It’ll keep the heart beating even after the body collapses.
no paywall: https://archive.ph/zexDb
The United States is supplying the weapons. If they stop shipping weapons Israel cannot do much if anything. This news analysis is misleading. False. Lies.
Right. Show me the American politician not named Rashida or Ihlan that can oppose Israel with relative impunity and then tell me how America dictates policy in re Israeli matters.
Thanks for the link, watching now. Been hearing about this a lot and was overdue to watch for myself.
Gilbert Doctorow says the same. Specifically he predicted, days in advance, that Israel would attack during the BRICS meeting to draw attention away from Kazan. He and Prof. John Mearsheimer are at odds on this point. His argument is that it would have been to Israel’s advantage to retaliate shortly after Iran’s Oct. 1attack, but to wait would be for the benefit of the US.
I did not believe him because Netanyahu is a lunatic in my view but now I realize this is more deceptive than I had realized.
‘Inifinite Money Glitch’, more like cut rate IT work from overseas. JP Morgan should pay for it with all the money they saved shipping programming overseas. If you had a human in-person teller this would of never happened.
A true story from the bowels of JP Morgan told to me by someone who had worked there, but there was this one team from the usual outsourcing outfit from you know where which had been using email in lieu of a proper source code control system. Basically one guy would “merge” changes from his teammates at the end of the day before zipping everything up and mailing the result to everyone. Needless to say, the whole thing bombed in production. Someone up high in JP got so mad, he basically threatened to cancel the relationship until everyone involved in the fiasco was fired, and they were.
I’ve met people from JP at the MD level who could wax long prosaic about Object Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, Agile, etc, but of course none of them had the courage to tell management that it’s a matter of you get what you pay for.
It is an everpresent issue in both public and private sector when someone decides that everyone must choose the lowest cost provider/bidder for any contract. It immediately launches a race for everyone to find the absolute minimum quality they can get away with.
I think that a sign of a well run company/organisation is when the owners realise that you should choose the right contractor, not the cheapest. Of course that has its own issues (buyers getting buttered up with invites to weekends away, etc).
Ha! I’ve been arguing for years that there is no reason to put 10-14 day holds on checks any longer since it doesn’t take anywhere near that long for a check to clear these days. Look like JPM took it to the extreme with no hold whatsoever. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of criminals!
“Smotrich tears up during speech on the sacrifices of the religious Zionist community during the war”
‘Smotrich lamented the tide of deaths of IDF soldiers in the last few days but said that particular attention should be paid to the religious Zionist community.’
I guess that some IDF soldier’s lives are more equal than others.
Some people are more chosen than others perhaps
/s
No need for sarcasm: these people have a pecking order over who is, and isn’t, a Jew.
“Many of the survivors left in the [concentration] camps after the war would be unfit as laborers of any kind, anywhere…In the battle for Latrun during the 1948 war, the Israel Defense Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ military training, dooming many of them to instant death. In postwar reckonings, critics would charge over and over again that even Ben-Gurion—even Israel—had seen these remaining Jewish refugees as little more than “cannon fodder.”
-Laura Robson, “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work”
Wow.
It is an interesting observation that main founders and builders of Israel — David ben Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinski, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Shamir, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres — were in no way survivors of Nazi death camps or slave labour camps, were actually never subject to Nazi persecution since they had emigrated to safe places (USA, Palestine, UK…) well before that (Begin escaped in the nick of time), but took unashamedly advantage of the position of Jews as victims of the Nazis to further their national objectives.
I did not know that they used holocaust survivors so ruthlessly and cynically, though.
I’ll add one more to the AI bad ideas pile:
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/stratcom-boss-ai-nuclear-command-control/
AI ‘Will Enhance’ Nuclear Command and Control, Says STRATCOM Boss
Umm. What happens if the AI ‘hallucinates’ an incoming nuclear attack?
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be a Fail Safe.
Sentient descendants of surviving cockroaches will bestow a Darwin award on our species?
This was not so hard to figure out for my generation……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1F7vaNP9w0
What the hell is wrong with people?
What happens if the AI ‘hallucinates’ an incoming nuclear attack? A bad trip, as they say.
If there is any humor intended in the above, it escapes me. You have to be insane toentertain the idea that so-called AI is going to enhance much of anything. I’m with IM Doc.
AI already enhances small parts of my (and likely yours) daily existence, all not by choice. Do I want AI anywhere near nuclear weapons control? Nope, yet here we are and I’m not getting a choice here either.
As to humor, well at least I have a choice there, at least for the time being.
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers ars technica
On the lighter side of darkness, AI is sending people to a lousy restaurants. How unforgivable.
Remember the 80’s film Wargames? A very young Mather Broderick and Ally Sheehy? A teenaged boy is wardialing with his modem, inadvertently discovers US national defense network, has a fun convo, decides to play a wargame with it, sets off Defcon 1 in real life….
The computer ultimately reaches some conclusions I think the NC crowd would agree with.
Even older than “Wargames” is 1964’s “Fail Safe” with Henry Fonda and Walter Mathau: computer error sends a US nuclear bomber rushing towards the USSR with orders to destroy its target.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=failsafe%201964
John Carpenter & Dan O Bannon’s ‘Dark Star’ (early 70s) also has a talking A-bomb. It doesn’t end well.
Name one thing that involcves nuclear weapons that could “end well.”
cockroaches?The eggs survive a blast. They would have an easier life I assume.
Until the contents of the fridge ran out.
There is an indie French BW-movie from the 1960s where a scientist developed a way to neutralize nuclear blasts. Secret agents from all sides are looking for him and he is in the hiding. Being that era and no money the technology´s ways were solved by reverse-playing the clip of a nuclear mushroom. Thus the mushroom would disappear instead of expanding.
Reminds me of “Mars Attacks” where the Martians use the nuclear blast for enhaling as laughing gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMVMsHJAZ1s
In the movie Fail Safe it was Soviet jamming that caused the bombers to fly past their fail safe point. The independently produced movie came after Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. Due to the similarities and Columbia Pictures sued for copyright infringement. The case was settled out of court and Columbia acquired the movie. Wiki here.
From 1970 – Colossus: The Forbin Project
And some thought it was a good plan to use LSD in psychological/chemical warfare.
Shall we play a game? (Ref to a certain 1983 movie, btw…)
“The second essential decision of the 16th BRICS summit is the creation of BRICS Clear, a settlement and clearing system for both intra-BRICS trade and trade between BRICS and “partner” countries.
One of BRICS Clear’s key objectives is to create an alternative to the SWIFT system. Within the BRICS Clear system, the use of national currencies as instruments for settling international transactions will be prioritized.
Transaction clearing will be handled through a “stablecoin” managed by the New Development Bank. The clearing issue is important since trade will be multilateral (22 countries: 9 BRICS members and 13 partner countries).”
How will this work? Hopefully, knowledgeable readers will help.
One thing is clear: corporations and oligarchs would be able to avoid sanctions from the countries in SWIFT.
Beyond that…we will see.
In the sense of “time will tell”.
I thought America was both home to most the Oligarchs and home to largest tax haven – ?????
Me too.
I figure that’s what put the kibosh on 5eyes CBDC: can’t have the state snooping on its clients.
Every country has to deal with some of them and in some way.
When I saw the BRICS announcement a week ago, as a non-economist, I thought that the very fact that this is the plan, being spoken out aloud, is momentous.
The US has destroyed entire countries to stop alternatives to the US dollar from even being spoken about. Libya for example.
Perhaps the BRICS move can shine some light on all of the US propaganda around the ‘spreading democraceeee” sh*t, the numerous revolutions the US is trying to start around the world(eg Georgia), and the wars they are actively starting, supplying weapons to and boostering from the sidelines.
Explanation by Jaques Sapir (as I understood it) is along the lines that it’s a system to turn the bilateral trade between member countries to multilateral trade. Something along the lines of European Payments Union, but instead of using US dollar as the accounting unit (like EPU did), they aim to create a stablecoin for this purpose.
Nobody seems to know yet how that stablecoin will achieve the “stable” part, but “coin” it will not be. Merely a digital currency used only between central banks to clear transactions in member state currencies. If I get this right – and I very well may not – it goes like this:
Company A in member state M buys stuff from company B in member state N. It pays in M local currency to the M central bank, which then converges it to a Coins amount, and uses BRICS Clear to clear it with other trades and then settle it in Coins amount converted to whatever member state currencies are needed or acceptable. The state N central bank then pays to company B in N local currency.
If need be (and trust exists), a government can even set a policy where the central bank can pay some of the money in advance, since it’s in local currency. Less friction and a slightly smaller risk for the selling company (to, for example, invest in new production lines).
Thank you.
My question for BRICS: Will you let multinational corporations sue member states and hold secret tribunals the way Uncle Sam does?
If someone had told me in the 2000s decade that this would be the state of play in the Democratic Party in just a few years I would have thought them absolutely insane.
But here we are. I now know how my grandparents felt going through the McCarthy years.
https://x.com/nataliegwinters/status/1851080500560986150
There is a Russian hiding under every bed and behind every tree. Be safe out there.
And just an aside…….what is it about Russians that keep these people going like this?
what is it about Russians that keep these people going like this?
All I can think is that the Russian Revolution (along with the proletariat echoes in Britain and America) was recent enough that TPTB are still spooked, whereas the French guillotines are remote enough to be discounted.
Also, Operation Paperclip…
Edit to add: remember 2012 when everyone mocked Mitt for saying Russia was the greatest threat America faced? Good times!
In the 19th century there were many people who predicted that in the future the two dominant countries would be the USA and Russia–it was always seen as a natural rivalry. The PTB in the Washington world wanted Empire eventually as can be seen from the Roman inspired architecture of Washington. Since WWII the contest began in earnest. The Washington imperialists want to completely dominate the Earth (and beyond) that ambition is even stronger today particularly since the majority of Washington’s power-elite are nihilists and need some higher meaning to life, i.e., world-conquest. It’s that simple.
Nope, it actually pre-dates the Bolsheviks, in at least the mid to late 19th century the Russians had been scripted as a threat to the Western Europeans. More Anglo-Saxon shenanigans.
Afghanistan, the ‘Great Game’, and all that.
Nope, people would have to be familiar with that history for it to be relevant. The USSR is the source of contemporary Russophobia, no question.
Look at a map, and perhaps geography is destiny: two trans-continental states, with coasts on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It’s easy to see how they’d see each other as competitors/adversaries/enemies.
Not arguing for moral equivalence in the current conflict between them, but from a Mearsheimer-esque geopolitical/geostrategic perspective, it’s not false.
Russia and the British Empire were always opposed (Mackinder Heartland Theory). The U.S. was reabsorbed/incorporated into the British Empire and we have the AngloAmerican Empire, this is well documented by LaRouche organization (who I routinely dismissed in my young/naïve days).
The Russian revolution had a profound effect on the US for a while.
The whole FDR New Deal was a reaction to Russia. The rich in the US were terrified that the armies of poor and unemployed during the Depression were ripe for a Russian style revolution. Especially because there were a fair few returned soldiers in the mix after WWI who felt they had been cheated out of their dues, and who could easily slot into an revolutionary army.
The New Deal was designed to deflate any movement towards a revolution. It was a feint, and later was rescinded bit by bit as the threat was contained, and then crushed by Reagan.
This has been going for long. Yesterday, I watched on Spanish TV one of those hundreds of US movies from 2000s onwards that deal with the CIA saving the US or the whole world from whatever some bad Russian was planning to do with nukes or any other mass destruction weapon you can imagine. The scripts are childish and Manichean but I guess that if you watch some of this crap you end thinking that there is essentially something very wrong and bad with the Russians. It is imprinted in the psyche.
I remember the good old days of the early 90’s when Hollywood struggled to come up with the right ethnicity for the bad guys in action movies. For a while, White South Africans filled that role as everyone seemed to agree it was ok to hate on them.
I was thinking of this too. In movies, novels, video games (especially), comics, and just in news (journals, papers, cable), Russians are constantly the enemy. Since I was kid, I seldom recall a single positive news story about Russia. Somehow they became the perfect Other, it’s remarkable.
I have a very Russian middle name and being born in the white heat of the cold war, the story goes that mom and dad were playing both sides, ha ha.
Serge? I had a friend in junior high whose dad was named that, and I was so embarrased for him.
But my coach in wrestling, Coach Gay. Jeez.
The hysteria with which America and Europe greeted the Russian Revolution was really astonishing. As bad as the hatred of America for Cuba. Certainly a lot of people were terrified that revolution was exportable, and knew they were guilty of mistreating the common citizens of their countries. But it always seemed like more, to me. It was as if we adored the Tsar and his family, and were shocked by their deposition and deaths. Certainly America never reacted that way when Ngo Dinh Diem was shot.
There is always a lighter side with these things. There was an election a long time ago here in Oz and the sitting Prime Minister resorted to scare tactics. He said that if the other party got in then you will have to pull your money out and hide it under your bed. The leader of the opp replied that nah, you don’t wanna do that. That is where the commies are hiding.
Paul Keating?
Bob Hawke.
We always have to have a Boogeyman out there that always presents a threat to keep justifying the MIC, the Surveillance State. Notice how these fears seem to be ratcheted up just before Federal Government negotiations and national elections.
I honestly believe if Russia, Iran and China submitted to the US on their knees within a week someone else would be conjured up as a threat.
Keep up the great work IM Doc, yours, like so many others here are great education and food for thought.
War and creating enemies is at the heart of the control mechanism that is Washington. The beautiful thing is that it has worked perfectly so far.
—Historian and journalist Daniel Bessner, “The American Empire and Existential Enemies”
Grenada!
Dear IM DOC, I hear you loud and clear.
Pretty much all of my dem friends still think that Trump won the first time because Russia. They still think he’s somehow controlled by Putin.
They think Ukraine is winning
There is no genocide
Attaching Iran is good
And the list goes on.
I literally cannot talk about any of these issues lest I’m a Putin puppet or anti semite.
Its really sad.
Trying to speak openly and honestly with most PMC friends in the last 8 years has cost me almost all of my oldest friend groups (having grown up and come of age in a training ground section of Atlanta for leftists) and a couple of immediate family members. I still grieve for the loss…
You have the wrong Dem friends. I have a conservative Republican friend.we have som great discussions. I learn from him and I hope he learns from me. Our discussions have never become hostile.
As all have observed, we are dealing with nonsense on the surface, but trillions upon trillions of resources that those “damned Rooskies” won’t allow us to appropriate … as is our right. The sheer gall of such people!
Ditto here.
Politics has devolved into Kabuki Theatre meets WWE.
It’s a shame, but at age 60, I have maybe ten-twelve years left where I am physically fit enough to get out and enjoy it. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend any of it arguing or hand wringing over the latest “Act”.
LMAO, I remember November 2008 clearly. It felt like the GOP would spend the next 30 years in the wilderness only winning a few of the 1968 George Wallace states.
But here we are….can you imagine Harris ever winning Iowa or Indiana?
I wonder what happened to all the roaring 20-somethings and hopeful 40-somethings on election night 2008, who are they voting for now? Did their future turn out how they wanted?
And Iowa was purple not long ago. Obama carried Iowa in 2012.
What’s honestly weird to me is that a heck of a lot of Americans think that Russia is communist. I see it in comments all over the MSM and on X.com. Propaganda works.
That is the strangest thing. What’s more, I’ll bet that more people think Russia is communist than they do China, based on my encounters.
Actually, a lot of Russian iconography, especially in the military, remains Communist. Those red stars and hammers and sickles resonate a lot more effectively than Tsarist symbolism.
But I agree, the real reason for the whole anti-Russian thang is the desire to grab Siberia’s resources. Interesting that it ended up enabling Russia to grab Ukraine’s resources, but you can’t win ’em all.
cookies on maddow.
thats somethin,lol.
my mom wont see the irony…nor the disconnect from her previous reality.
during Bush2, she watched rachel every night…and democracy now every midmorning.
her and Don gave $ to the latter.
they also donated $ to Bernie, as well, in 2016…but before “Hillary Won the Primary”(sic) and became the Chosen of God.
now Don’s gone, and Mom clings to TDS and PutinDS and will not be budged.
whenever some big thing erupts in Maddowland, she’ll attempt to bait me into saying something…but i just bite my tongue.
because it aint worth it.
and, second what Cassandra sez below about “why the hating on russia” thing.
but add a sort of inchoate nostalgia for the relative cognitive simplicity of the Cold War Era in which many of these folks came up.
My personal hypothesis is that we have quite deliberately resurrected the old Cold War narratives, tropes, and propaganda talking points. Because so much of what one reads in the August Papers of Record today, whether about the war in Ukraine or about Russia in general, can basically be found in propaganda materials from, say, the 1950s, or the 1980s. And by the way, in those Cold War era texts it’s fairly rarely the “Soviets”, but very frequently the “Russians”, because I suppose the other 100+ nationalities in the Soviet Union were, er, colonialificated by the evil Russians or some such. Hell, to quote Bob Dylan, “I learned to hate the Russians all through my whole life”, that’s from “With God on our Side”, 1964. Not the Soviets. My favorite piece of Cold War era stupidity is a book entitled “What to do when the Russians come”, again, not the Soviets, or the communists, or whatever. [Per page 139 of said tome of wisdom, under Communism, “the keeping of domestic pets will be virtually discontinued”. Communists are against puppies and kittens, ladies and gentlemen. Nay – Russians are against puppies and kittens!]
So. We start with a rich, multi-decade foundation of propaganda that incorporates a strong “ethnic” component. We then add to the mix the gerontology fiesta in the halls of power, with many of even the younger principals (Blinken) having grown up in the 1980s or earlier. We finally dust the mixture with a smattering of “how dare these natives gainsay our divine will” dust. Err…evil Russians are evil. And such. Throwing in the old “Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union” line, which I believe has been a staple of anti-Putin talking points since the 2000s or so, is just the gravy of re-associating evil Russians with evil Socialism. I won’t even mention pop culture’s role in all this, all through the present (look up the film “8 Days in August” some time, or the cutscenes from the “Call of Duty Modern Warfare” video game from circa 2018), which certainly helps with instilling unconscious biases.
Incidentally, some months ago a close Russian friend, who’d spent his entire life “over there”, asked me with genuine disbelief – “do they [Americans] really think that we are just a bunch of orcs living in some equivalent of Mordor?” Now that was a sticky wicket of a conversation…
You have to remember that in the 1700-1800s, American colonists lost to Indjuns, be they men or women, would not want to return to “civilization”. Other than some more technology (the fridge, microwave oven, washer, movies) not much has change with this American civilization on how it treats people….
Having a bogeyman serves there interests in feeding that MIC grift going. Honestly, if “Russia” or some equivalent didn’t exist, they would have to create one: How much of this sounds oddly familiar?
2001, when “They” were trying so desperately to gin up fear and loathing of brown folks in deserts, after the brown folks from the south didnt serve, nor did the blck folks in ghettos…as the great, yet weak enemy to justify all the $$$ sloshing in MIC accounts, as well as social control…it hit me like a ton of bricks: our rulers really really miss the cold war…and will do anything to bring it back.
wife remembered me saying such things in 21, and again in february 22.
(another, “Damn, Joe” moment,lol)
and here we are.
I remember well the rhetoric i was surrounded by in highschool in rural and suburban texas in the late 80’s.
none of our current hysteria is all that new,lol…it’s just that so many people seem to have no memories beyond the last week.
The second Iraq war was very clarifying to a younger me as well. I recall arguments with my father, who simply laughed at the ridiculous propaganda they were feeding to us at the time, and him telling me that ‘it’s all lies and they won’t find anything over there, nor will their ‘democracy scam’ in Iraq work. You will see.”. For a guy who grew up a poor peasant, he sure had his head screwed on well and had a knack for sussing out BS. One of his most valuable lessons to me, I wish I heeded more of his advice sooner.
They really do miss the Cold War, as it gives people (MIC/finance types) who are net negatives to society a ‘purpose’ of a sort which they can wrap the flag around and feel good about it. It also gives them good paying jobs. Imagine, if there is no Cold War or equivalent, they would have to find real jobs.
I don’t know: Cold War era MIC engineers and managers were still fairly competent people for most part–a sense of purpose would do that to you. Nowadays, they are mostly crooks and incompetents, if they haven’t retired already.
You mean people like James Jesus Angleton?
My goodness, when will it stop? They yap about mis/dis-information and then give us this crap. Sad part, so many will be all in on this. I can only imagine the social media posts talking about “did you see Rachael’s show and what the Russians are doing? Turn the outrage scale up to 9.
Maybe its just me, and I forced myself into watch those two wretched people, but I thought they were laughing at us. Maybe they were. Hey, watch this, we’re going on TV and spout a bunch of wild BS and the people watching will suck it up like a Hoover – hope we can keep a straight face.
The world is upside down. Where do you get off this ride?
“Extremists inspired by conspiracy theories pose major threat to 2024 elections, U.S. intelligence warns”
“U.S. Intelligence…”
Same people who testified that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian confabulation?
IM Doc
“I now know how my grandparents felt going through the McCarthy years.”
What a stunningly poignant remembrance.
None of this bs was experienced in the 1960s if growing up in a socialist country…
Different bs, of course. And the benighted victims of Communism came to believe that capitalism would save them. We’re still living with the fallout of that.
“A Total Shock” – Japanese Sardines Detected in U.S. Waters SciTech Daily
This, –even if the headline is awful, do sardines have nationality?- was interesting. The article says the Eastern sardines “crossed the ocean” though they most probably moved along the coasts if waters warmed in the Kamchatka region, Bering sea and Alaska coasts. It would have been nice if they had added to the data the records of sea temperatures in this region and hypothesize whether temperature changes allowed such migration. They might do the same DNA analysis all along the coasts.
Remember when Fukishima first started dumping the contaminated water they were concerned about local fish stocks becoming contaminated? Japanese politicians ate contaminated fish to show it’s safe to eat. There were concerns some of those might reach US shores (because US waters are all that matters in the whole wide world) and I think the NOAA even found some contaminated Tuna reaching America.
So that Japanese fish reach American shores should not be new info, there was a big brouhaha about it when Fukushima started dumping the water.
But tuna fishes, unlike sardines, really move along whole oceans.
That’s ‘cos they’re the latest class of nuclear sardines who now ceaselessly patrol US waters and send hourly reports to Putin.
Obviously America needs a Pacific Wall to keep the sardines out. Steve Bannon is on the case.
I guess it will be an interesting experiment to see if the species merge, or if they are sufficiently different that everyone ends up with two distinct species in their waters. I assume US sardines are going the other way.
Back in the 1970’s, I remember my schoolteacher proudly telling us about a unique sandy coloured local mouse species that had evolved on an island off Dublin – the sandy island had formed over the past 200 years, so it was an unusual case of a sub-species whose origin could be dated precisely. Sadly the local government in its wisdom built a causeway to the island, resulting in an immediate extinction of the subspecies.
i reckon the usa sardines will soon begin complaining about the japsardines takin their jawbs.(i remember the 80’s)
Yep… not a good thing. East Asian ancestry could get you killed back then.
https://www.nps.gov/people/vincent-chin.htm
I would bet they will indeed try to merge. Such is life. Whether the genetic drift had been enough large to make these progenies sexually unviable i do not bet there.
Toro! Toro! Toro!
That’s a lot of bull! :P
From the article, a reasonable hypothesis but without specific data:
Assuming climate conditions are responsible for the two species divergence some two to three hundred thousand years ago, their geographic reunion is yet another indication of major climatic shifts unprecedented during our own species tenure.
“Israel plans 2nd attack on Iran, reports Israeli media”
So let me see if I have this straight. A huge Israeli/US aircraft armada was launched against Iran to cause massive damage. The first wave tries to take out Iran’s aerial defenses but only hits very few targets and the defenses hold. Seeing this, the main part of the armada have to turn back to Israel and the mission is scrubbed. At this point both sides may huff and puff but both sides win. If that attack had succeeded, the Iran would have hit Israel back but hard and the next thing you have is a general war breaking out with old Joe sending in the US military. Instead both sides can pull back and call it quits. But then Bibi wants to launch a new attack against Iran. Why? Because some of his windows in a holiday house were broken by a drone. Not an Iranian drone but a Hezbollah drone, mind. If this attack succeeds, will the Iranians hit back? Yes. Can their missiles be stopped? No. Will there be a consequent high level of destruction in Israel? Yes. Maybe the Israelis should do a whip-around and pay a glazier to fix his windows instead. It’ll be a lot cheaper.
It may be worse than that. Alexander Mercouris’ 10/28 geopolitics commentary proposes the hypothesis that recent statements by Khamenei and another high Iranian official, that superficially appear to signal de-escalation, can be plausibly interpreted to imply that Iran has decided that it needs a nuclear deterrent. AM then notes that if this is right, it is likely to lead to nuclear proliferation as Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Turkey scramble to keep up.
—
Even the Rs may come to rue US withdrawal from the JCPOA.
JCPOA was the best deal available at the time. I look at DJT’S pulling out of it as one more item on his list of “things Obama did” that he wanted to reverse. Revenge for Obama making fun of him at the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. Or is that too simplistic? You may think so. I find it fully consistent with the DJT world view.
That is my theory too. Trump cancelled JCPOA out of racial spite and humiliation spite to cancel an actual accomplishment Obama actually achieved.
What would explain Biden’s refusal to cleanly rejoin America into JCPOA? What would explain his treating it as an extortion opportunity to extort other concessions from Iran in other areas?
That, snd his refusal to buy into the Syria chemical weapons BS, are two of the reasons that I think Obama deserves some serious credit.
Those two Canada stories present a glaring, easy back-of-the-envelope, calculation: $2,250 could have been handed to each of those 2 million souls over the past two years.
Thank you, Conor.
Further to the articles about Germany, it’s interesting to observe the reactions from Germany based colleagues.
Those involved with business banking are and have long been worried and have seen the impact of not just high prices / costs, personal and client and often in the provinces, but competition eating Germany’s lunch, too. Those in wealth management can’t see what the fuss is about and often attend PMC derangement syndrome events.
One hopes Germany based Briton Paul Greenwood chimes in. I remember Paul forecasting this a decade ago, especially the German car industry’s lunch to be eaten by China, on this blog (before Paul was away for many years).
I recall a decade or more ago the consensus was that VW was on the verge of eating the entire car industries lunch – the shared combined platforms along with their embedded supply chains were going to make VW’s so cheap nobody else would get a look-in.
The problem with having a big car industry is that losing it is catastrophic for a huge ecosystem of downstream suppliers. One reason Korea and Japan were reluctant to embrace EV’s was that when they analysed the overall impact, they realised that the big losers were those downstream suppliers as EV’s require far fewer parts than ICE cars, and this would have huge employment implications. One can only guess the implications for jobs in Germany if they had a major downsizing (its hard to image the German government allowing VW to go entirely bust).
The irony is that for many years, the biggest manufacturer of cars in China was, in fact, VW, or to be precise, the Chinese based jointly owned company. But domestically in China, they can’t compete (again, another irony, is that many of these new Chinese car companies, such as BYD, are to a significant degree owned by US companies including Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway).
We’ve been here before of course – in the 70’s it was assumed the Japanese would destroy the European car industry, and there were similar fears in the 90’s when the Koreans arrived. It didn’t quite happen of course. The big difference this time is that its the transition to EV’s that seem to be the gamechanger, VW have simply screwed up on the transition, leaving them a decade behind China. The French seem to be better positioned, Renault seem to have built up some clever joint enterprises so they can have the best of both worlds. If anything, the Japanese seem to be even worse positioned than the Germans.
One wonders if a major jobs shock in Germany would make them reassess the smug certainties of ordoliberalism.
Japan did have its wings clipped by the Plaza Accords, Germany by the Nord Stream bombing.
The question is: will the United States succeed in Plaza-Accords-ing China? I don’t think it has the diplomatic and economic muscle to pull it off. What about Nord-Stream-ing China? The US is sort of trying a “non-incendiary” Nord-Stream-ing by way of depriving the Chinese of chips. I don’t think this is working too well, however.
The USA’s running out of options.
One problem, too, is that, economically, the Taiwanese are Chinese. The size and the upside of the Chinese market, plus all the sociocultural and legal advantages that the Taiwanese companies (as fellow “Chinese”) enjoy vis a vis mainland means that they would not cut their links vis a vis their partners, one way or another (I’m thinking TSMC, atm), at least not on the account of US pressure.
The Chinese also has the nuclear option of depriving the chip making industry of rare earth minerals. If you don’t have the later, you can’t produce chips. It’s a crazy world we live in.
Thank you and well said, PK.
With regard to BYD, an insurance broker cousin in Mauritius tagged along with a car dealer client to China last year and visited one of the BYD factories. He was amazed by the level of automation, in house production and attention to detail / quality control.
Thank you Colonel Smithers for that terrific description!
>often attend PMC derangement syndrome events
Wealth management: they attend PMC derangement syndrome events and like Georgian wines and that is what EU membership is all about.
The Jacques Sapir that Arnaud Bretrand translated for us (thank you, Arnaud) is interesting. I wonder if Yves might have time to comment on some of Sapir’s conclusions. That would be swell because I’m hardly literate in these matters. This sentence
And on that basis goes on to predict the collapse of Treasuries. Yves has said that trade and savings are different things and that savings are very much the larger. So does Sapir’s logic work?
I’d understood the principal goal of BRICS Clear is to make it harder for the USA to apply sanctions. At the moment it is ridiculously easy for the USG to put an entity on the sanction list.
I noticed that too. I also appreciate it when Yves and others make comments on the deep finance topics. I know math and I can understand complex systems but there’s a logic and vocabulary behind finance that I am unfamiliar with. Especially at the level of countries.
It makes sense that a lot of what my country is doing is because our leaders see that the remaining period of time for them to continue with these shenanigans is running out. From what I understand if we can’t issue treasuries to cover our never ending deficit then we really are in trouble. Mostly because we depend on a lot of foreign exports to get what we need to operate. Medicine being an easy example.
What might be an interesting thought experiment is considering what would happen if the US market for insurance collapsed. What would happen to the price of homes if no one could afford insurance, or if the insurer’s decided their risks weren’t worth it in a majority of markets. I recall that was a libertarian concept post Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Basically let people build whatever, wherever, with no codes or standards or insurance requirements but also prohibit mortgages because obviously these shanties would be dangerous. I never quite understood how they expected these adventurous home builders to purchase materials that were still priced per the fully insured part of the market. But I can imagine in the current situation in NC and SC the cost of materials spiking so high between availability and delivery costs that people decide it’s not worth it to rebuild. What might our country look like if that process repeats itself thousands of times?
well…the things that do get built/rebuilt will likely resemble my side of the place:i’m calling it Landfill Chic.
reduce, reuse, recycle…on a combination of mescaline and good brown beer.
i built the 26k sq ft house i’m currently layin around in(pain day, due to weather) for under $30k, 10 years ago(over 3.5 years), using cast off lumber, windows, doors, tin, and so on…as well as stuff i’d been accumulating for a long time.
indeed, when i first saw some of the pics of the aftermath of Helene…a whole fields worth of scrap lumber…my immediate and automatic thought was “man, what could i build with all that?”
so, end current debt based high finance shenanigans on high, end up with me….at best(!!!).
america will resemble much of africa…or the outskirts of the numerous mexican towns we visited long ago.
> i built the 26k sq ft house i’m currently layin around in …
Holy moly, Amfo — that’s got to be a typo. No? 26k ???
2600.
lol.
not counting little greenhouse and both porches.
my bad.
“Yves has said that trade and savings are different things and that savings are very much the larger.”
Since 2007, US trade volume * has ranged from about 20% to 30% of GDP. Savings has ranged from about 14% to 19% of GDP. Currently trade volume is about 25% of GDP, while savings is about 16.5%.
* Volume of exports and imports
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/October/weo-report?c=111,&s=NGDP_RPCH,PPPGDP,PPPPC,NID_NGDP,NGSD_NGDP,PCPIPCH,GGXWDG_NGDP,BCA_NGDPD,&sy=2007&ey=2023&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
Thank you, all, including Conor.
I’m glad that Conor has linked this.
Since Sapir tweeted the analysis on Sunday, this has gone like wild fire in left leaning economics and finance circles. The stable coin, reinsurance and grain exchanges are the ones we note.
Trade volume and balance of payment are different things. Trade is a two way street. Does your GDP percentage include 401K’s and market investments? That is where most people’s savings are.
Andidote: I didn’t know that monkeys had been trained to do the wiring of roop-top solar! This one looks proud about the job done.
Actually the monkey has the stare telling us “I had to redo everything because the previous installer thoroughly botched the job. Why do you keep hiring lowly-skilled humans?”
It could probably be me the one that botched the job before. Don’t say it loudly.
THE ROLE OF COERCION IN THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMY – Law and Political Economy Project
This made me think of the comment section in the link of another story. I think it was about Amazon. Someone made comment about the bad working conditions and some suck up replied along the lines of “no one’s forcing them to work there.”
The type of response from the same kind of POS that also would say a person refusing to work any exploitative job is lazy or stupid.
Anyway, Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance sounds like something to check out.
I’m surprised there was no mention of Judge Richard Posner.
In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”
The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “…Criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”
“Supplying Ukraine with Taurus won’t make us party to war – Germany opposition leader Merz”
Friedrich Merz is wrong. Actually he is lying. I heard that this guy is a full bore neocon so can believe it. When those Bundeswehr officers had their online talk leaked several months ago, one part that came out was that the Ukrainians don’t have the training or experience to use the Taurus missiles and that it would have to be Bundeswehr personnel that would be shooting those missiles into Germany. Yes, you would have Germany attacking Russia directly. Even someone as gutless as Scholz has backed away from this idea as it is insane. Would it have any effect on the war? No. So why do it? Because some people want to make sure that there is zero chance of Germany and Russia ever having a reconciliation in the next few decades.
Why does it seem that in Europe, at least, somebody worse is always lurking in the wings of power?
Truss->Sunak->Starmer
Sholz->Merz
Macron->?
Because TIN(F)A
Because the intel services of the Empire have control of the media in Europe–this should be obvious. Eventually people will figure it out. But, in the meantime its Orwell all down the line.
Not that in the very same Center of the Empire is there any f/family blog political alternative available.
Same for US’ JASSM and the highly accurate GPS links used to be for NATO only.
Setting the mission parameters for latest version of Nazi V1 requires direct donor nation input.
Already donated complex arms are operated by NATO sheepdipped.
We have no reason to doubt that both of the vehicles will be delivered.
Hah! You win the internet today. 😝
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says ‘it’s time to fight back’ on regulation – Reuters
The type of comment from a alternate universe within another bubble where the vampire squid is the victim and the gazillions spent by banking lobbyists wasn’t fighting regulation, but all done to help the commons.
Remember when you were young? (ha-ha-ha)
You grifted for fun
Shine on, you Jamie Dimon
Now there’s a look in your eyes
Like Black-Sholes gone awry
Shine on you Jamie Diamon
You were caught in the crossfire
Of finance and swindles
Blown on a bubble’s breeze
Come on, you target, for DNC ventures
Come on, you lover of servants, indentured, and shine!
You reached for a bailout too soon
You howled at the moon
Shine on, you Jamie Dimon
Threatened by Epstein Air flights
But with alibi, airtight!
Shine on, you Jamie Dimon
Well you wore out your welcome
With cram-down precision
Blown on a bubble’s breeze
Come on you raver, you whisperer of pigmen
Come on you cretin,
You RTO piper, and shine!
Lyrics from “Shine on you Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd
(I’d link the video but the vocals don’t come in until after 8:00 mins into the tune … gotta love Roger Waters and David Gilmour.)
Only a few days ago it appeared that his main concern was WWIII.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-jamie-dimon-world-war-iii-economic-outlook-geopolitics-nuclear-2024-10?op=1/
Jamie Dimon says the global order is at risk — and raging conflicts could explode into World War 3.
But it always eventually comes around to whether or not the vampire squid can achieve its ability to roam the earth like a flesh-eating dinosaur.
“He’s so happy he can hardly count”
A significant contribution to my longstanding grudge against the neolibcons is David Gilmour’s recent accusations against Roger Waters. I had been dealing with my rage and existential dread by listening to the Floyd, and now I think about David’s brainworms instead of his voice. Dammit! Can’t they leave us anything?
The Piper at the Gates of Cash!
Hey these leading executives of banking, finance and so forth have a busy schedule and something must be done… Harrumph harrumph…\sarc
Appears there is a gathering of these aforementioned men and women of power and influence, as they gather for a conference in SA I was unaware of…
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/28/foreign-investors-flock-to-flagship-saudi-economic-conference.html
That ought to solve the problems of the world.
Maybe it’s the indoor skiiing that they care about the most.
Jimmy Dore and Dennis Kucinich. utube, ~15+ minutes.
“We Must End This War Madness!” – Candidate Dennis Kucinich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89znNMP9XnY
I’d guess we are outnumbered by foreign visitors by a 2 to 1 ratio over Americans here at Monument Valley, so many different tongues heard.
Now you know how the locals felt 200 years ago.
The museum in Monticello Utah has a number of pairs of 1,500 year old sandals woven out of native fibers-that were found in a cave in 1941, one of them bore some resemblance to the pair I was wearing-Chacos.
Maybe a few mountain men traipsed around these parts in 1824, but the land was largely uninhabitable then, and now.
According to John Ford, the locals all spoke Norwegian….
A family of 5 from Iceland was across from us at breakfast this morning.
Tower of Babbling on….and on some more…I had to check the location of that one, not highly familiar with it on the first glance.
My first visit, and I prefer Valley of the Gods, as there are no tourist accommodations or any tourist infrastructure whatsoever aside from a dirt road and the occasional place to boondock for the night.
Tonight watching Kevin Costner’s recent western revival Horizon. The Utah scenery looks similar to that used in the first season of HBO’s Westworld. I knew it was Utah though because the scenery there has its own look. Tourist wise it’s a terrific state to visit.
If you have had some HVAC, plumbing or similar service work done in the past few years, you may have noticed how the business climate has been changing. Prices are up, service quality is down. The olden days of a guy and his truck or van, maybe with his brother or friend, and license, and local ownership are fading away. See the linked list of articles about various aspects of the trend on the buy and sell sides.
Not as high-profile as corporate mergers, but quite effective in extracting more money than you’d like for work that you need done right away. If you get the sense that competition has lessened, with several shops operating under a common umbrella, you may be right. You would also note the lack of outcry, media coverage or awareness of still more deaths of a thousand cuts.
Coming to a community near you.
as an avid consumer of youtube DIY videos, your thoughts can’t to be understated (and common in other industries/professions too).
have a family friend who literally ran his two-man business out of a his truck and home. all his kids are pharmacists.
It’s physically demanding work and if you’re a 22 y.o. kid out of a basic HVAC training program, it’s easy to draw a steady paycheck, and view the trades as a stepping stone job—not a career.
aye.
the tiny propane companies here, and in every town north and west for at least 60 miles, were bought up by an unknown corporation a few years ago…kept their well known legacy names, but theyre owned by the same shell.
turns out that shell is almost wholly owned by a dude in brady, texas, just up the road. i’d never heard of him…and dont get to brady very often.
but i expect he’s some rich guy from somewhere else.
service has crashed, and prices are up.
and only the illusion of competition.
before that, it was the same with local healthcare…2 home health companies, boght up by the giant foreign outfit that owns the clinic, bought the nursing home(then crashed and closed it–loaded w debt, one supposes) and owns every single dialysis clinic within an hundred miles.
the 2 homehealth things pretended to be 2 distinct companies for a time, but gave up on the ruse…since everyone knows everybody, here…and the nurses, etc are too honorable, in the main.
now the methodist hospital corp has bought the regional real hospital.
havent heard anything about fallout from HC workers i know…but i no longer roam that much.
Well that what you say is interesting. I believe that this has much to do with outsourcing. The people that install your, let’s say, Mitsubishi heat pump (to mention a brand that makes good stuff) have no relation whatsoever with Mitsubishi except as equipment buyers. As installers they get lower prices compared with what you see with retailers and the small company that does the installation bags the difference. You might be lucky if the workers are skilful and do a professional thing (mainly when the owners are the installers too) but in many cases they may not be like that. Quite probably the installers were hired amongst the immigrants (the only ones wanting these kinds of jobs these days), with the lowest salary possible, and with little incentives do do it right. Some of the supplying companies try to help with courses and tips for the installers but i guess that most do not bother with this, or the owner of the small installer company doesn’t want them to attend. They have to work without learning before.
what you described happens in solar installation as many (most? all?) of the solar installers outsource the actual installation even though the installers show up in corporate-logo-ed Sunrun trucks.
And if one has a bad luck of the draw, your solar installation has to be removed in 7 years time cuz the original installers took shortcuts and the roof is now rotting away due to leaks.
Oh yes! This is a little bit different. Let’s call it second round outsourcing. Here we call them “gunmen” sometimes organized as a team and other times hired separately. What i have seen is that the teams tend to do better and usually have experienced workers plus motivation. But if they hire independent ones, well… cross your fingers! Besides, with regards to the whole process of roof-top solar i find that frequently very little attention is paid to the design phase which is made without previous visit and talk with the client and carelessly, meaning that when the team arrives everything has to be re-designed ASAP.
But what you say is general trend among installers of HVAC systems, roof-top solar etc. It all starts with companies which choose high worker turnover over fidelity. At the end all is about hiring “solar-gunmen”, “HVAC-gunmen” etc. Bear in mind that currently there are many joint roof-top solar + aerotherm instalations (if well thought it makes a lot of sense though it is an investment).
“Halloween candy binges can overload your gut microbiome – a gut doctor explains how to minimize spooking your helpful bacteria”
Love the Internet for explaining how eating too much candy will give you a bellyache. My mom was prescient in this knowledge.
My little brother was a Halloween candy hoarder. He would sometimes have stash a year later. This habit transitioned into retirement plans, of which I am envious.
Zourashbili’s tweet. on Georgia election results
In fact if you look carefully at the graphs the shape of the curves of rural and urban areas are very similar and both asymmetric in form even if it is more visible that of the rural areas, and possibly because it is larger in size. But if someone is willing to see rigged elections everywhere, like in those curves, nobody can stop her or him.
Georgian president/French spook is pushing the following graph in attempt to prove fraud:
My impressions:
1) The first graph (distribution of votes) shows that the urban curve is also fat-tailed on the right side, albeit substantially less than the rural curve. The standard statistical index of skewness is missing.
2) The author compares the distribution of votes for the parliamentary election in Georgia, separated into urban and rural regions, with the distribution of votes for the presidential election in Poland, aggregated at the country level. Those charts are not directly comparable.
3) Is there a well-established, empirically grounded principle that the distribution of votes must follow a Laplace-Gauss distribution, whatever the kind of electoral system?
4) The charts “% support vs. % turnout” show a much larger variance in rural regions — which is not surprising if the voting districts are smaller there (and hence correspond to smaller samples of the overall population).
5) The points in those charts do have varying areas, which means there is implicitly an information about the size of the voting districts. However, the charts do not provide a scale for them, which also means the observations are not directly comparable between the rural and urban graphs.
6) The author states that “In hundreds of small and large locations, 100 voters show up, and all 100 vote for the ruling party—a scenario that is almost unreal in fair elections” — and that literally did not happen (look at the charts at full scale). Interestingly, the highest “support / turnout” ratio occurs for the opposition party, not the governmental one (look at the rural chart, at turnout 0.6 and approximately 0.7).
7) Oh yes, I can readily believe that >90% of voters in a village would vote for a specific party. Patron/client relations, social pressure, timely favours, intimidation even — no need for ballot stuffing when party officials have a good grip on their constituency.
Overall, the analysis relies too much on calls to intuition, based on incomplete, and even inappropriate, visuals. I would not be surprised if the Georgian government had committed shenanigans to win the elections, but the charts provided, though intriguing, do not lead to a conclusive assessment. People more acquainted with the statistical analysis of electoral results may provide deeper insight into the matter.
Apparently this use of statistics to “scientifically” prove voter fraud for regimes we want to change is a thing now. First Venezuela, now Georgia. C’mon folks, can’t argue with the numbers!
These statistics seem to have a definite pro-Western bias. Perhaps some feminist post-modernist social constructionist afro-centric scholars will expose the Western bias of this methodology. Otherwise I guess we must accept this claim as objective fact and sanction accordingly.
Gotta trust the science!
HAHAHA! you did a better job than me minutes before. I was too lazy to make it so comprehensive.
According to Alex Christoforou recently, the US did some pre-election polling (how nice of them to go half way around the world – presumably Georgians are not capable of running their own polls) showing an opposition victory, much like they also did in Venezuela earlier this year.
In for a penny, in for a pound – they aren’t going to drop the narrative now. Nuland could show up with cookies any time!
The Internet keeps wanting me to accept its cookies. I suspect Nuland is hiding there.
I am starting to doubt the legitimacy of any election which the US and EU do not challenge.
Recently from Bryan Lunduke aka The Lunduke Journal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGDoVbWbhG8
“The Lunduke Journal Does NOT Endorse Kamala Harris”
The “bad for Open Source” covers how Biden-Harris sanctions against Russia are forcing any US-based open source software project — which is most of them — to eject and reject all Russian contributors. Most recently, for example, the Linux kernel project.
File this under Empire’s Last Gasp?
https://www.ack.net/news/proposed-mansion-demolition-vexes-hdc-members/article_f54643c2-9564-11ef-9bb6-63deb33ba55e.html?utm_source=The+Inquirer+and+Mirror+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4c7c6c20f2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_1_6_2023_8_27_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_18e2e38d11-4c7c6c20f2-531127190
You should remove all the characters after the ‘?’ following ‘.html’ in the link you posted:
https://www.ack.net/news/proposed-mansion-demolition-vexes-hdc-members/article_f54643c2-9564-11ef-9bb6-63deb33ba55e.html
The rest of the characters are tracking information.
Who is it for me to Judge a ballplayer’s awful showing in the World Series, but he has been downright awful. Shopping for a broom for tonight’s finale.
What’s a World Series?
The players are largely from outside the USA, ha ha
When it’s Showtime Aaron Judge has a well deserved reputation for choking. $360 million doesn’t get you much these days. George Steinbrenner would never have tolerated such poor performance.
>Israel bans UNRWA from operating in country – Anadolu Agency
Well, there’s another page for the ICJ:
South Africa Files 750 Pages of ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence in ICJ Genocide Case Against Israel
– Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams 10/28/24
The Palestinians will be a mere footnote in this grotesque history by the time the ICJ finishes its ruling. We are led by ghouls.
Genocide as Colonial Erasure (w/ Francesca Albanese) | The Chris Hedges Report
“A human isolate of bovine H5N1 is transmissible and lethal in animal models.”
I found it very interesting that the case discussed in the abstract was a conjunctivitis infection. While I am not a dr, a vet nor a virologist, I have strongly suspected that a significant amount of the spread of bovine HPAI H5N1 was related to feces (and for the poor cows’ feces + confined spaces).
I want to clearly state that I DO NOT want this comment to be viewed as a downplaying of HPAI H5N1 risks to humans. As Lambert has vigorously pointed out the risks are real and the more humans that are infected increases the biological odds that a mutation or co-viral infection will give HPAI H5N1 the power to infect humans more readily, meaning more like other respiratory influenza viruses.
To me the conjunctivitis infection indicates the source of infection was a splash of feces to the face and the virus was able to find infectable cells in the eye tissues. If I correctly understood the abstract they also indicated the secondary point of infection was respiratoria which could have been spread by the victim from the eye to the nose/mouth or that same splash of feces could have included an inhalation infection but at a lower dose and hence not the primary point of infection concern.
I grew up in rural Upstate NY’s dairy economy and I spent much of my tween and early teen years working on and visited many dairy farms. Even on the cleanest farm I was ever in, sh*t is more or less everywhere! Cows don’t ask where the nearest restroom is. No matter how clean a farm owner intends to keep his farm, as a worker it is only a matter of time before you get some real sh*t on you because restrooms are not a cow’s priority.
When I was this young teen most dairy farms were “stanchion” style where each cow had its own stall. In 1981 my aunt finished construction on what was supposed to have been like the biggest or 3rd biggest stanchion barn in NYS (or possibly the US, my memory is fading with time); they could milk 100 cows without rotating out. In hindsight it was probably also the last stanchion barn ever built in NY or the USA. While stanchion style dairy farming typically yields higher milk output per cow, they are not production efficient. When I was this same young kid, I spent time on what at the time was called free-stall dairy operations as well. I think the largest one I visited back then was about 150 milking cows. The concept is that the cows wonder free in a large open barn where they are feed and there is space for them to bed (if they want) and then they are herded through a room called the milking parlor where the workers just keep on milking.
Those “free-stall” farms were just the warm-up to CAFO dairy farming and you can readily find dairy farms today of 400, 800 and over 1,000 milking cows. Remember I said cows don’t ask for restrooms. Those stanchion dairies let their cows out to pasture on dozens of acres during the day. Even the early free-stall farms had pastures; but now with 400+ cows you can’t manage actual pasturing and milking EFFICIENTLY! So we have CAFO’s, where the cows never see the outside of the barn, and with cow feces everywhere. Oh and workers still have to interact with and care for these animals. And even at 1,000 milking cows we are not talking about billion dollar corporations with lots of excess profits and manpower and skills to manage cow or worker infections on their own. So sadly we have a situation where everyone plays blind and the cycle of infection becomes a continual role of the dice.
It isn’t uncommon to have CAFO dairies of say 6,000 Bessies in the Central Valley here, where they all seemingly got infected with the bird flu, despite none of the cows ever going anywhere.
WOW! I’m increasingly outside of dairy farming culture anymore as I don’t live there anymore and the family I had in it have all been forced out over the last decade or so.
6,000 cows!!! I remember driving by a many 1,000 dairy in NM for the first time on my way to Pheonix around 1996. I could smell the stench 5 or so miles before we could see it. I can’t imagine the stench of a dairy that big. And to put it into perspective… I always loved the smell of a farm as a kid, but there is something so very unnatural about any mega farm and it’s noticeable in how it’s smell is anything but enjoyable.
The MIC (Milk Industrial Complex) had to be bigger & better.
the source of infection was a splash of feces to the face
Is it also possible that cows stamping on dried dung or contaminated litter will send minute particles loaded with virus in the air, with that dust ending up irritating and infecting the eyes of farm workers?
Again, I’m not an expert but my layman’s logic would say that that was possible assuming the virus could survive for some time in that dry situation. Personally, I’ve never been on a free-stall (and it only gets worse as you scale up) dairy farm where there is much in the way of dried feces or dung. It’s more akin to a slurry of crap that covers the floor of the confinement area and is readily splashed by any activity (including the flinging of a cows tail) or basic farm work and covers basically everything at a splash level of consistency – including the people spending anytime in that space. But all my farm exposure/experience has been in the relatively humid great lakes region of the US.
That said when I was a kid any good dairy farmer could readily recycle any and all of his animal waste back to his fields that he was growing crops on to feed his cows. Now adays, and even in the NM farm I mentioned to Wukchumni above, there are dairy farms that don’t grow any of their feedstock, they buy it all and it can come from 100’s if not 1,000’s of miles away. I can guarantee you they are not shipping their excess dung back to those fields. Dealing with industrial agricultures animal waste is a real problem, and I’d hazard to guess from your reply that includes CAFO waste in arid regions where almost none of it is being “plowed” back into the fields. Where is it sitting and what is happening to it?????
Where is it sitting and what is happening to it?????
I have not the faintest idea how the dung produced by a CAFO with thousands of animals can be disposed of, but the logistics must be, huh, messy. Perhaps it is incinerated?
Money and manure are the same in the sense they both have to be spread around to be useful. Hence any giant farm is metaphor for the country’s present state.
And thanks for the reference to “The Matchmaker” / “Hello, Dolly!” Though the esteemed Ms. Gallagher-Levi may not have been the first to say it:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/05/muck/?amp=1
IMO, human-to-human transmission will depend more on adaptation to human cell receptors frequent in the respiratory tract. Conjunctivitis might be due to the possibility that the cow virus find there cells with receptors similar to those in cows and absent or rare in the respiratory tract. This is just speculation, not informed commentary.
As further speculation, a cursory look at events so far make it look like humans are spreading this virus among the dairy cows now, not vice versa. Maybe the birds have done their job now and are leaving the rest to us.
My uncle, in Western NY, built a milking parlor for his herd of 120 Holsteins in the 60’s. The electric door opened and a milker wandered in to the next available stall where food came down the chute in front of them. The stall was raised up about waist high to make it easier for the worker to reach in an clean and attach the suction lines to the udder. Lots of opportunity for waste to drop while working around the back end and almost at eye level.
Nowadays the whole process can be automated so that a human never has to touch the cow.
Startup Claims It’s Achieved Communication Between Two People Who Were Both Dreaming
The investor and the investee?
Is there really a battalion of North Korean Spetsnaz hiding in the secret tunnels under Mar A Lago?
Are they REALLY hispanic gardeners or are they part of the Asian hordes poised to turn America into a Trumpian dystopia?
https://x.com/BowesChay/status/1851136170752663681
https://xcancel.com/BowesChay/status/1851136170752663681
[video]
In Bryansk, Russia
Russian special forces tracked ambushed and wiped out a team of western saboteurs working under the Ukrainian flag who infiltrated the Border.
They are US and Canadian. Tattos clearly show they are current or ex US special forces, exceptionally well equipped.