A Mysterious Noise in The Ocean Sounds Like Leviathans Talking Science Alert (Chuck L)
Mathematical modeling reveals the explosive secret of the squirting cucumber PhysOrg. Chuck L: “IgNobel Prize candidate?”
‘99% of people don’t know deodorant can kill’ BBC (Robin K)
Video: UW-led research links wildfire smoke exposure with increased dementia risk UW News (Paul R)
A Huge Design Flaw in CPR Dummies Could Have Deadly Consequences Science Alert (Chuck L)
#COVID-19/Pandemics
H5N1 UPDATE
The President of the California Poultry Federation is concerned about the speed highly pathogenic avian influenza is spreading in his state.
“If it doesn’t slow its pace in the next month, we’re in serious trouble.” pic.twitter.com/jV8v5fs7X2
— Outbreak Updates (@outbreakupdates) November 24, 2024
Climate/Environment
At least five dead amid ‘devastating’ flooding as Storm Bert batters UK Guardian (Kevin W)
‘It’s not drought – it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water Guardian (Kevin W)
Southern African Nations Hit by Worst Power Outage in Years Bloomberg
It’s the most futuristic train in history: The world rejects it because of who made him EcoNews (Kevin W)
China?
Chinese military disguised as fishing boats? Philippine defence chief raises concerns South China Morning Post
Apple faces ‘difficult’ process to launch its own AI in China Financial Times
Koreas
South of the Border
Biden has confirmed the designation of Nicaragua as a "national security threat" to the US into 2025. It's a country of 7m people, with a GDP equivalent to that of a mid-size US city. It has one of the lowest defence expenditures in Latin America. https://t.co/tz8KGAUTFJ
— John Perry 🇳🇮 (@johnperry21) November 24, 2024
Uruguay’s left returns to presidency as government vows friendly transition Reuters (Robin K). Perhaps Expat2Uruguay can weigh in, but I recall from past discussions that Uruguay tends to go from center right to center left governments, as in there are political changes, but not all that great.
European Disunion
Possible Europe-US trade war could push euro into parity with the dollar Guardian
Germany’s Looming Existential Crisis Luxuo
German steel giant ThyssenKrupp to slash 11,000 jobs DW (Kevin W)
Romania election stunner: Unexpected hard-right candidate surges in presidential vote Politico (Kevin W)
Reformist leader rallies Romanians to beat back surging pro-Russia hard right Politico (Kevin W)
Old Blighty
Insolvency experts drafted in to fight university cash crunch Telegraph
Financial Crisis Looms Over UK Social Care Sector Pinnacle Gazetter
Israel v. The Resistance
EXPOSED: The UK military sent a disturbing message to every media editor.
"Don't publish ANY information about UK special forces in Gaza."
But the truth leaked and now Netanyahu is on the run from the ICC.
Here's what they were desperately trying to hide (it will shock you): pic.twitter.com/F9SMSr8qZV
— The Muslim Vote (@themuslimvoteuk) November 23, 2024
Tel Aviv and Haifa today. Nearly 4 million Israeli settlers were forced into the bunkers. Israeli media reported direct hits in multiple northern settlements and electricity blackouts. Hezbollah warned you. If you bomb Beirut they will bomb Tel Aviv. Get used to this scene pic.twitter.com/s02KYCGB5H
— Hadi (@HadiNasrallah) November 24, 2024
Hezbollah fires ‘340 missiles’ at Israel, hits Ashdod naval base, Tel Aviv Al Jazeera (Kevin W)
Israeli snipers ‘shoot Palestinians for sport’ The Cradle. Norman Finkelstein has discussed this repeatedly.
Hezbollah Launches ‘Largest Attack Yet’ Against Israel + Iran Preparing Its Retaliation Rachel Bevins, YouTube
Israeli airstrikes intensify in Lebanon amid rumors of imminent ceasefire agreement Arab News
Israeli Cabinet set to vote on Lebanon cease-fire deal Anadolu Agency
Four Gentlemen Tour the Bekaa Valley Craig Murray (Anthony L)
Washington Post Calls For Selective (Non-)Prosecution Of War Crimes Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
Medvedev:
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the implications of transferring nuclear weapons to Kiev. It seems my grim joke about the mad, senile Biden deciding to exit life dramatically, taking a significant portion of humanity with him, is turning… pic.twitter.com/o08A8jDXpY
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) November 26, 2024
Discussions over sending European troops to Ukraine reignited Le Monde. Hoo boy.
NATO admiral urges businesses to prepare for ‘wartime scenario’ RT
Britain’s Kursk Invasion Backfires Kit Klarenberg (Kevin W)
Threat of world war is ‘serious and real’ Poland says as Putin steps up threats against West Independent
Europe Can’t Make Ukraine Enough Weapons—So It’s Paying Kyiv to Do It Wall Street Journal. As if Russia can’t destroy production facilities….although that does mean there will be even less of a functioning Ukraine economy when the war finally ends.
Propaganda 101 x 1000000: “Ukraine Will Win” Mike Hampton. Some goodies in this piece.
Imperial Collapse Watch
Who Takes International Law Seriously? Daniel Larison
Trump 2.0
Trump Pentagon pick attacks UN and Nato and urges US to ignore Geneva conventions Guardian (Kevin W). Hegseth is at least as vulnerable to sexual misconduct allegations as Gaetz. If he’s not pressured on this front, it confirms the power of the MIC (as in there are plenty of hawks, so it’s not as if Hegseth is not replaceable, but the point is not to dust Trump up when he has put forward a hawk)
Trump’s Cabinet Picks Aren’t Looking Good For Peace In Ukraine Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)
Trump and GOP eye new limits on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Washington Post
Trump to kick trans soldiers out of army – Times RT
Congress’s Jan. 6 Investigation Looks Less and Less Credible Jonathan Turley
2024 Aftermath
In deep blue Minneapolis, many Somali voters withheld support for Harris MPR News (Chuck L)
Abortion
Texas Lawmakers Push for New Exceptions to State’s Strict Abortion Ban After the Deaths of Two Women ProPublica
Our No Longer Free Press
Social media age ban inquiry flooded with 15,000 submissions after Elon Musk weighs in ABC Australia (Anthony L)
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has suffered a serious stroke, a post on his X account says Associated Press
The Bezzle
Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public PNAS. Paul R: “They are as clueless as laypeople. Maybe their focus group testing helps weed out the duds. Article is paywalled and abstract doesn’t mention that.” Moi: BWAHAHA!
How Morgan Stanley Courted Dodgy Customers to Build a Wealth-Management Empire Wall Street Journal
The Promise of Duolingo The Dial (Anthony L). BTW this is very similar to the sort of fluency I achieved with French (big reason was my first high school teacher avoided spoken practice because he did not want us picking up his French Canadian accent). I could read at a very high level, including difficult poetry but could barely speak. However, I did have a pretty good accent and a big vocabulary, so the French were not annoyed at my attempts.
Scammers Are Stealing Billions From Americans’ Bank Accounts. Here’s What You Need to Know. Consumer Reports (Robin K)
Class Warfare
Amazon workers in 20 countries to protest or strike on Black Friday Guardian
Six-Figure Job Market Faces ‘White-Collar Recession’ As LinkedIn Reports 26% Drop In Engineering Roles Beinziga (ma)
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus. As much as this is funny, I do feel sorry for the gaslighted cats:
When you call your cat through surveillance for the first time pic.twitter.com/XPv4Pr0Tup
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) November 23, 2024
And a second bonus (Li). Moar cats!
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Yonatan
(melody borrowed from Marianne by Terry Gilkyson and The Easy Riders, 1957)
(The personal damage done to IDF soldiers by their holy wars is for life. Missing limbs and shattered minds. Long after Israel fails as a nation, each of them, and each of their families, will have to live with what they’ve done.)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
Yonatan O Yonatan, militarily
Your brigade’s been shot to shit in Gaza by the sea
Keep your helmet on your dome, and hang back more or less
Stay alive some way somehow in all that mess (that’s the test!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
Is it blood that you adore? I’ve seen the scenes you tweet!
When two thousand pounders land and level a whole street!
Once we were in love but you’ve become a vicious man
I don’t recognize my Yonatan (don’t touch me!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
When you’re home you scream at night from horrors that you saw
When I try to talk to you, you clam up and withdraw (phooey!)
We buried both your brothers, once the coffin lids were shut
You were drunk as can be—it all came up! (clean it up now!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
Where is the life that we had planned?
Noooo, YONATAN!!!!!
“Israeli Cabinet set to vote on Lebanon cease-fire deal”
I would not be surprised if this deal was voted down on in the Cabinet. There are the hard-liners that are saying that the war in Lebanon is a golden chance to totally destroy Hezbollah and must be taken. Bombing civilian neighbourhoods and murdering first responders must appeal to them as victory but obviously they never got the memo from the IDF saying that trying to invade southern Lebanon is like walking into a buzz saw and they have the body bags to prove it.
‘It’s not drought – it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water , Coming to a theater near you.
The lede, “Spain is increasingly either parched or flooded – and one group is profiting from these extremes: the water-grabbing multinational companies forcing angry citizens to pay for it in bottles”. I’d wager not many people were even aware that the rights to their water had been sold away.
I’ve read about the same happening in the US where local authorities sell fresh water sources to water bottling corporations for pennies on the dollar and then later their communities end up short of water sources for themselves. Here is an article from five years ago talking about this problem-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-fight-over-water-how-nestle-dries-up-us-creeks-to-sell-water-in-plastic-bottles
Good point. Remember Poland Springs (Maine)? Google “Poland Springs” Maine water wars for fun.
Did you ever hear the statement by that Nestle CEO that water is not a human right but should be privatized? He reversed himself afterwards but that statement was already out there. Fortunately Google search is doing their part to hide this by bringing up repeated statements how this guy is now claiming that water is a human right but the internet never forgets.
Good times. Thanks.
And his chocolate isn’t that good either, with only about a zillion alternatives from companies that aren’t disgusting.
Carlyle Group (James Baker, Bush 1) bought Missoula, MT water system. Missoula filed lawsuits and forced a buy-back/ condemnation. Very costly.
Seems to me we are about to enter another era of Oligarchic and Crony plunder, on steroids.
Public Utilities/ gumint bad, privatize everything good. FFS.
https://www.kpax.com/news/missoula-county/city-of-missoula-loses-bad-faith-claims-in-water-case-may-be-on-the-hook-for-millions
Many years ago there was a push to force Nestle, which owned Poland Spring at the time, to contribute to a statewide fund that would annually distribute revenue to every Maine resident. much like Alaska does with its oil revenues. That way people would get something back from the corporations taking state resources and selling them elsewhere.
That eminently reasonable idea went absolutely nowhere. Corporations uber alles.
damn you picked a scab RK – Nestle is despised here in Michigan and their presence is a truly bipartisan clusterF grift – beginning in the twilight of the John Engler(R) administration then gaining speed and permitting during 8 years of the Jennifer Granholm(D) administration and finally on steroids during Republican Rick Snyder’s 8 years as governor, remember him and the still ongoing Flint water lead crisis due to his administration, subsequent permits were approved to allow Nestle to pump well in excess of 400gpm from the aquifer – 400 gallons per minute, 1440 minutes in a day you do the math – believe the amount is in excess of 500gpm now – Nestle’s camel nose got under the tent in 2000 by initially only withdrawing 288gpm which does not require a permit – when Nestle applied for permits to draw more there was public outcry, but when Nestle applied to increase withdrawal everybody got much louder – but corp-stooge and Department of Environmental Quality Director Heidi Grether had this to say about the outcry –
an excuse used repeatedly through all administrations –
“In full transparency, majority of the public comments received were in opposition of the permit, but most of them related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision.” Grether said in a statement. “We cannot base our decisions on public opinion because our department is required to follow the rule of law when making determinations.”
Nestle opponents wonder why the same agency, now under Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and led by new management, is defending a decision that both Whitmer and new state attorney general Dana Nessel criticized during their campaigns last year – as Lambert sezs – ’tis a mystery’ – NOT!
https://www.mlive.com/news/2016/10/nestle_groundwater_pumping_exp.html
https://www.mlive.com/news/2017/05/nestle_township_appeal_foia.html
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/where-nestl-guzzles-water-local-residents-doubt-claims-of-negligible-impact/
https://www.mlive.com/news/2018/01/nestle_osceola_twp_mi_appeals.html
https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2018/04/state_approves_nestles_controv.html
https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/09/legal-gears-on-nestle-water-cases-grind-slowly-in-michigan.html
i recall water being discussed in John Perkins book Economic Hitman – here’s his Fbook post about it – Nestle is in CO, FL and other places stealing water –
https://www.facebook.com/johnperkinsauthor/posts/the-problem-goes-even-deeper-than-plastic-its-about-who-owns-our-water-during-th/354289346061074/
Nestle gets around the interstate Great Lakes compact that prohibits water diversions outside of the Great Lakes basin through a bottling exemption within the law allows water to be sold outside the region if it’s shipped in bottles smaller than 5.7 gallons –
wonder how that juicy loophole got slipped in certainly couldn’t be in original charter /s
tis a mystery again –
passed in 2010-2011 Congress during O’bum’a’s administration
Kucinich knew the fix was in –
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/sep/01/dennis-kucinich/dennis-kucinich-warns-loophole-great-lakes-compact/
and all you folks around the Great Lakes – let’s get Line 5 out of the straits!!
Fourth paragraph down:
“…a decision critics say defies common sense.”
If one is unaware of election donations a.k.a. bribery and lobbying, then it defies common sense, otherwise it makes perfect sense.
Large corporations with deep pockets have the best governments their money can buy.
More, This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water. This, “many have begun”, really irritates me. A very cursory search of the Guardian for articles on corporations buying water rights and public opposition goes back at least to reporting on Bechtel pursuing public water rights in Bolivia from 2006. Are the editors there not familiar with their own body of work, or are they carefully managing crisis perception, or did this turn into a real issue because it’s happening in Western Europe now, not just in Latin American and African countries.
Don’t forget all the plastic that goes with that water. So they are selling them not only the water but also the visual symbol of supposedly safe water. Marketing is all.
Agreed. Here in Oz before the 90s you hardly ever saw anybody carrying bottles of water but after then, it seemed that they were everywhere you looked. And it was all due to marketing.
We have a national obsession with “staying hydrated”. It seems to involve sipping 100 mL of water every 15 minutes. To my cynical old eyes these folk look like infants sucking on a dummy (aka pacifier).
Funny thing is, the kidneys are very good at managing hydration. Drink a lot of water (or too much) and the kidneys transfer the excess to the bladder. Drink only a modest amount and the flow becomes seriously restricted. Don’t drink enough and you get the sensation of thirst, telling you to drink more.
Simples.
But as The Rev says, it’s as if these constant sippers have been propagandaed into a profit generating behaviour pattern.
They have the kiddies trained to carry a water bottle with them at all times now, at least in my kid’s school. I don’t remember a bunch of kids keeling over due to dehydration back in my school days, but of course we did have water fountains then. I don’t know why those disappeared either. Perhaps it was for public health concerns, but I also don’t remember school water fountains being pegged as disease vectors back in the day either. If there was some major problem there, then I stand corrected.
Older people can be in danger of dehydration however. My mother in her early 90s had to go to the ER after she passed out from dehydration. People can forget to hydrate. I’m not advocating plastic – we take reusable containers with us.
Here in MA, the Ipswich River would dry up in late summer due to over pumping by the Town Municipality water wells located along its course. The MA Dept. of Environmental Protection had to pass a water management act to restrict the Town’s water withdrawal’s to keep the surface water flowing. To say that a commercial water well pumping thousands of gallons a day has no impact on surrounding streams or springs is ludicrous.
Agreed, thank you.
re: Ultranationalist candidate scores stunning first-round win in Romania election Politico
Opens with this line:
And then, midway:
It’s 2024, almost 2025. If Georgescu was saying stuff in 2022, he can’t have come from nowhere, right?
uhmm, i think it meant that he was scoring low in the polls and he surged on first place above the known parties (PSD, AUR, PNL, USR) unexpectedly. we romanians did know about him, he was just not payed attention to
And, within the very limited framework of the article, being religious, being aware of your neighbors’ security interests and being concerned about your national interests makes you “far right” rather than traditionally sane, particularly when said neighbor is a nuclear super power.
And he agrees with the mad man Putin that Nato military bases on Russia’s borders are “part of a confrontation policy”, why its almost as if he doesn’t want hypersonic warheads destroying installations in Romania.
Obviously an extremists.
In this case the man apparently does admire the Iron Guards and other less enlightened periods of Romanian history. In way too many countries in Europe the “national interests” are left to the care of more extremist/nationalist politicians.
Not savory, but there is a historicity to that development, which explains it (not necessarily justifies it), for that particular locale and that particular time.
Being religious in Romania is the norm, not the exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe#/media/File:Importance_of_Religion_in_Europe.svg
Ceausescu burried his mother with 7 priests.
While Romanian MSM is totally subservient (a deep trait in the leading classes in Romania, one needs only to look at the Phanariot Period, as long as they can extract wealth), the population at large clamors for Vlad the Impaler to come and do a clensing…
Did he have them all perform a funeral mass, or a ceremony at her gravesite?
He burried them alongside his mother.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, being against the EEC meant you were hard-left and probably a communist; today being against the EU means that you are hard-right and probably a fascist. Same trope, different direction.
The Promise of Duolingo. I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese for many years now, and not just through an app, I’ve been doing one on one lessons with native teachers on italki for the last 3 4 years. I wouldn’t say that everything has been in vain, because I now live in Taiwan and can speak with the locals on just about any topic ….. but only on a very superficial level. My reading/listening skills are quite a little bit better, since I can read/watch just about any newspaper/drama content and understand up to 70% of what’s written/spoken. Granted, I only take lessons once every week or every two weeks, but my sense is that it’s very hard to gain native proficiency in any language unless you are really talented or you HAVE to use it nearly everyday to accomplish something substantial like perhaps working or studying abroad (I work for a US based company so English is the default language).
I mean it’s not really surprising since English is my second language, but I had really thought that having studied another language would confer some advantages when it comes to acquiring additional languages, and perhaps that’s true if the languages are from the same family, but to this day I still find Mandarin Chinese to be very difficult. The huge number of idioms that you have to know and the somewhat dynamic nature of the language makes it really hard to grasp, throw in a couple of ancient Tang Dynasty poetry, and you’ll wonder if you’ve learnt anything at all.
For what it’s worth, it might be worth your while to have Chinese radio playing in your home, either through your radio or through your computer. Not music stations of course but ones where you have Chinese talking. It does not matter if you understand it or not but in the background your brain will be processing the words, the grammar, the idioms and the sounds and becoming familiar with them. Long term you will probably be surprised how much it helps you and I did the same for improving my German when in Europe.
“For what it’s worth, it might be worth your while to have Chinese radio playing in your home…”
[ Really useful advice, no matter the language, but ask after a clear speech suggestion. ]
Like GramSci says below, a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Try foreign language films maybe.
I completely agree. I’ve been studying Portuguese and finding talk radio and news stations via https://radio.garden/ has been an invaluable resource.
.Caro johnnyme
You mentioned studying Portuguese, so to add to your knowledge I’m sending a collection of idiomatic expressions you might find useful/Interesting/funny.
Parts 1, 2 and 3
https://www.behance.net/gallery/24478537/Portuguese-sayings-that-make-absolutely-no-sense
https://www.behance.net/gallery/49197083/Portuguese-sayings-that-make-absolutely-no-sense-II
https://www.behance.net/gallery/69677225/Portuguese-Sayings-That-Make-Absolutely-No-Sense-III
I’m afraid that the funny side of those can only be fully appreciated by a native portuguese speaker :-(
Votos de boa leitura.
Whenever I am working, I would often have Chinese music playing in the background and that does help although some songs are merely poems in disguise and those are very difficult to discern. I also frequently watch Chinese shows on Netflix and in general I don’t have a problem following along the plot unless there’s a ton of technical terms involved in which case my eyes would just glaze over.
Good idea. I found that listening to call-in radio shows and shortwave broadcasts were very helpful, with different regional accents, idioms and speaking rates.
CCTV and Tencent both have massive documentary channels, which might be good for such background sounds.
https://youtube.com/@tencentvideodocumentary
https://youtube.com/@cctvdocumentary
I like CCTV documentaries a lot because they’re so upbeat. Whereas most Western documentaries these days are total downers (yes Mr. Attenborough, deforestation and coral bleaching are terrible, can you tell your friends to stop flying private jets and starting unnecessary wars please?) and pushes unnecessary “woke” angles onto everything.
Yes, living overseas and learning a language so one can participate more fully in the culture, TV and radio are fabulous. Especially the advertisements – lots and lots of repetition. Music has much repetition as well so don’t discount music. How did we all learn our ABCs for example – repetition augmented (get it musicians?) with music. Maybe not a German vi chord, but you get the idea.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words and even fMRIs can be useful. When one learns a language in a toy world like Duolingo or a classroom, one only uses a small part of one’s brain, rather like Fig. 1.
In the wild, language learning has broader contextual support, as in Fig. 3.
I was always intrigued by language learning, and out of curiosity took two years of Chinese in university, but I was poor and contemptuous of wealth. I was at the head of my class the first year, but over the summer all of my classmates traveled to Taiwan. I never learned much Chinese.
I believe it was PlutonumKun who pointed out Automatic Language Growth, where you can become fluent, including with a native accent, if you stick with it. You watch skits and just try to work out the drift of the gist. You do NOT try to learn words or phrases.
https://algworld.com/
But it takes an hour a day and 700 hours total to get to toddler level. It really is learning like children learn. The inventor maintains adults are at no disadvantage v. kids in language learning. But adults lack patience and want short cuts.
I have not looked at ALG, but I wonder if it will work for someone who is not at the beginner level. I’ve studied Mandarin long enough to realize that there’s no shortcuts, there’s really just the grind and noting down every new word/grammar that you’ve encountered, hoping that someday your list would grow at a much slower rate. It’s basically spaced repetition, although I don’t religiously review my list every x days.
I don’t think ALG works well for non-beginners. The inventor of ALG used it very successfully with Thai, a notably difficult language. But he already had a bit of Mandarin, tried it with that and didn’t have as good results.
I thought I might learn a little bit of Thai when we lived in Chiang Mai, but I couldn’t get the hang of the different tones used. I was hoping that as a musician it would help, but no. Thai has 7 tones compared to Chinese which has 5. I found it to be daunting and gave up the idea, but I had not heard of ALG at the time.
Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones, but Cantonese has 7. I always thought that musicians would have an easier time with tonal languages, but I guess not.
There is also the idea of “Comprehensible Input”, which sounds very similar to Automatic Language Growth, though its hard to tell what their approach is from their About page.
YouTube is full of examples. Steve Kaufman is one of the more prominent advocates there.
I’ve been using this technique to learn Spanish and have gone from a beginner to B2 in about 2.5 years. As you said, its not quick, but it works if you can stick with it. I think finding motivation is key.
Around 1990 I studied Thai in Bangkok using this method. One hour a day 5 days a week. After 3/4 months, I was able to understand a great deal of what people were saying around me—on buses for example. When I finally began speaking, I rapidly progressed to a conversational level. I found myself using words and expressions that I didn’t know I knew.
I had a similar experience in Holland. I just listened to Dutch, watched TV, read newspapers for several years. Then, I asked my friends and colleagues to stop speaking English and with their help, I was pretty fluent in a year two.
In my experience, “comprehensible input” is the best way to begin new languages.
I have two streaks in Duolingo. The first one of 8 years was interrupted by the derecho of 2020. When power was restored 4 days later, I resumed Duolingo and now have a streak of another three years.I studied every day, even when we traveled here in the US and abroad.
As a student in college I studied French and Spanish and took classes for years as an adult in the now defunct city adult ed offerings where we had excellent teachers.
Duolingo: I wrote the lessons — which helped recall and practiced French for several years before we traveled to France. I studied Italian and was able to converse in Sicily.
Greek helped us navigate in Athens and the islands, though I could only communicate pleasantries.
Becoming proficient with a new language after the age of 10 is very difficult. Studies show that becoming fluent in the sounds and grammar of a new language takes years (even when immersed in the language everyday— eg., toddler’s). By the age of 17-18 the ability/motivation to master new linguistics wanes. Of course, some people learn a second language later in life, but they rarely are fluent speakers.
I enrolled in Spanish in high school and college (3 years) and lived in a social milieu that involved Spanish speakers. Became relatively conversant in Spanish. However, after years in a non-spanish environment, I’m hard pressed to even decipher half the words spoken in a rapid conversational manner.
Ola’, Paco. Que tal?! … or more often Como estas? are greetings that are similar, depending on the setting/encounter. How should I respond??…Buenos dias, amigo. (Usuall shortened to Bueno!)
In California many dual language Latino families speak both Spanish and English to their young children to impart a lingual advantage in a state with a 50/50 English-Spanish language environment.
“Becoming proficient with a new language after the age of 10 is very difficult.”
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist with expertise in neural plasticity, says that learning to speak a language without an accent after the age of 13 (which is different than proficiency, of course) just isn’t possible—he says you’ll have an accent “no matter what…because the window of plasticity for being able to ‘sonically morph’ into a language—that closes by about 13, by puberty.”
Then again, there are examples of (perhaps very few) language learners who can master a language with a completely native accent after the age of 13. One such example that anyone can check out is Aran Kim, a native speaker of Korean who learned English proficiently and without an accent as a junior in a US college (a year at Emporia State University in Kansas). Even native speakers of English can’t guess where she’s from and think she’s a native speaker of English. I’d like linguists and other scientists to study people like that (if they have, I’m not aware of it) to figure out what, exactly, is going on there, for that class of non-native language speakers.
[apologies in advance, I love languages and what started as a short comment on the idea of a “learning window” has become a life essay – skip to the bottom if impatient for a summary of my experience learning languages and whether there is a magic age]
I am not convinced there any serious neuroplasticity studies of foreign language acquisition. How would one even do them? In mice, made to speak rat? By sacrificing mono-lingual and bi-lingual children in a multi-year longitudinal study and looking at their comparative neuroanatomy? These claims that a magic window has shut by #random year seem to be over-deterministic arm-waving, based on what we know about single neurone remodelling and about gross morphological changes in the brain and its functional centres over a lifetime (puberty being relevant in this case). There is some more convincing observational research that babies are born capable of generating any language sound but they rapidly prune this ability based on the reinforcement of the sounds they hear in infancy, which makes 13 months rather late for native fluence, not thirteen years!
It is far more likely that the relationship between learner and environment and motivation changes at, for example, thirteen, in several ways. For one, you hit puberty and find things to do other than your schoolwork! For another, if you are learning a second language as a young child and you are also an object of academic study, you are likely to be exposed to the language both at school and in your wider life (family, society) whereas if you are first learning a second language as teenager, you may be learning at school but without exposure in at least one of the home or the society (for example, as an expat child or as a child who learns a parental language but was not brought up bi-lingual).
In these examples where language acquisition is dominated by the classroom, the likelihood of your drilling yourself long enough to acquire true fluency and, even harder, a native accent, is very small. For adult learners, the problem is slightly different: you may have the motivation to learn to a high level but you will have societal commitments in your first language that get in the way. You can set the preferred language to Irish on your computer but not on your wife! Also, passing as a native is essentially a parlour trick: what is more important is that you can live in the language and be (a version of) yourself.
I have learnt five foreign languages in my life (six if you include Latin), at different times and by different methods and with different results. My only conclusion is that there is some mysterious threshold beyond which a language sticks but before which whatever apparent ability you have is written in water – easy come, easy go – and that this threshold is not just about your raw years of study but also the intensity of study, both your desire to learn and your immersion, and your opportunity to keep it topped up.
I learnt French at school, starting from 11. Quite why the vital years of early childhood were monolingual in the UK – even in the private school system – is a mystery! From age 11 I had lessons most days of the week (probably 5 lessons a week, maybe more with some double periods), plus homework and so on. I achieved a good written and reading level but I found listening and speaking hard, despite a weekly lesson outside school with a French teacher.
My accent and my oral skills improved hugely for just two weeks in France living with a French family at GCSE (14-16) and speaking only French. I will never be accentless but at some point I realised I could now perceive the different phonemes of French and then it became possible to practise them (I remember a similar sound-blindness in English, as a small child I could not grasp any difference between V and TH and was once reduced to tears by being asked to repeat a nativity reading because I kept saying “Ve shepherds watched their flocks” etc. and I could not even hear the mistake!).
I went on to study it as one of my four A-levels (alongside Maths, Chemistry, Biology) and also sat the S-level paper (scholarship, got a distinction). Thirty years later, despite no daily French in my life, I can still read a French newspaper or novel. I am hopelessly slow-witted in French when on holiday in France because my speaking reflexes have atrophied but I could survive a business meeting.
By contrast, I only started German at 14. I made far faster progress than I had made with French, despite a similar teaching intensity and a shorter exposure. I think I had by then learnt a meta-skill, of how to learn a language. I loved German and was nearly accentless and probably better in German than in French at 16. It was, however, impossible to combine in the timetable with Chemistry and so I dropped it for French. I clearly had not acquired some critical amount / repetition of German because it immediately started decaying. These days I can order food and ask for directions to the train station but I cannot hold any kind of conversation at all, however simple. All the vocab I learnt has dissolved!
Similarly, I had learnt Latin from 11 to 14, only dropping it to do German. I was allegedly quite good at it but I don’t remember feeling good at it and I don’t remember much of it now. If I see some Latin, chances are that I will mistranslate it. However, it must have been useful for French and what came later.
I was still obsessed by languages as a student at Cambridge and despite reading Natural Sciences (48h working week) I took up Spanish in my second year. This was a free option to anybody in the University and resulted in a Certificate of study (equivalent to A-level; the step beyond being a Diploma, equivalent to the level expected of students who graduate in a language from the Modern & Mediaeval Languages tripos). It was taught brilliantly but the opposite of school spoon-feeding. We were given a tiny grammar book (Ramsden’s Spanish Course, thoroughly recommend it) and a 1 hour lesson each week plus a huge self-study requirement. I dutifully worked through grammar exercises by rote, learnt vocab lists, wrote translations, attended some oral lessons and so on. I picked up reading and writing quickly and a two week immersion course in Spain really helped my listening and speaking.
I got a merit, just missing a distinction in the Certificate, in a year’s study, i.e. I went from zero to A-level (a two year course when taught in a school) in just twenty one hour lessons, two weeks in Spain and some enthusiastic self-study in what little free time I had. Unlike German, I must have acquired enough Spanish (or it shares neurones with French and vestigial Latin) because I can still read a newspaper or, with a dictionary, a novel and I can manage a rusty conversation.
The saddest outcome is Russian. I’ve actually told this account out of order, to end on this. I wanted to learn Russian – a friend had done it for A-level and I was jealous – so in my first year at Cambridge, before I threw myself at Spanish, I signed up for the famous Essex Russian Course at Essex University in the long vacation and for a four week language course in St Petersburg, staying with a family. This was in 1994, when Russia was suffering Gaidar’s economic restructuring and living there was wild! I spent a whole summer learning Russian, completely immersively and at the end of it, I had a GCSE-level of ability.
It was total immersion because nobody spoke English, no media were in English, no signs, no nothing. Plus everything about the country was slightly alien and fascinating. Being forced to live on your wits in a new language and figure out how to operate was, at the time and in retrospect, the mostly thrillingly alive, engaged experience. Unfortunately, I came back to the UK and, Moscow no longer recruiting like it did, my opportunities to use Russian as a Natural Sciences student were precisely zero and my whole ability has melted like the snow. I remember the alphabet and some vocab and rather less grammar.
So, five attempts at learning a language with mixed results. One successful over seven years 11-18 and one successful in a year 19-20 and three failures, one in three years 11-14, one in two years 14-16 and one up like a rocket and down like a stick in a single summer aged 19. The only common theme is not the age (success and failure either side of 13) or the learning environment (school, self-study, immersion) or even the time spent but that only the languages I attained to an A-level standard, French and Spanish, have survived and the others have not.
That’s five but I said six languages at the beginning because I am currently learning Irish on Duolingo (blame Kneecap!). The Duolingo method of endless variations of increasing difficulty on a topic is the opposite of my preferred learning style (hoover up the grammar and conjugation tables first, communicate second) but I have made myself stick to it without looking ahead or buying a book on Irish. I am actually very impressed how well Duolingo works. I have been doing an hour each night for a month so far and I can get by quite well, at least in the topics we have covered and in the present tense. “The men are working in the bog” was unnecessary stereotyping but I also know my animals, clothes, professions, foods etc.
However, it has just reached the point where the grammar is starting to require a knowledge of the cases and how words decline and mutuate etc. So I have broken my rule and bought a text book and some simple Irish short stories to read. I’ve been watching RTÉ programmes to get my ear in and I am looking forward to watching a BBC-Irish co-produced detective series set in Donegal transmitting at the moment called Crá.
I just need to find some Irish speakers to speak to now!
Your experience essentially confirms my comment. The research says it is very difficult (not impossible) to be proficient at a second language after 18 years of speaking a first language. You seem to be willing to spend more time and effort at language learning than most people have.
Speaking of Russian, I encountered a radiology technician while in the hospital. He came to the US at the age of 18 as a native Russian speaker. He spoke perfect English (without an accent). He was 25 years old. Quite an accomplishment!
“Your experience essentially confirms my comment.” – I hope not or all that typing was in vain! :-) Although, teasing aside, I think I was making two points and synthesising a third, which may have confused matters.
I feel very strongly that there is no neurological barrier to acquiring a native fluency in a language. The notion that there have been any experiments proving it is ridiculous, it is all arm-waving about a complex facet of intelligence from basic neurobiology. And the concept is equally ridiculous. What is the evolutionary advantage? There are also plenty of case studies of patients acquiring foreign accents and even (previously studied) foreign languages after brain injury, which suggests a latent plasticity in contradiction of some one-time window.
The barriers are all cultural, in a very wide sense. Even if you are living in another language, you have things to get done and you are wrapped up in these. It is a rare person who has the temperament to look for correction in their pronunciation when they are popping out for a pint of milk or getting the tyres changed on the car. Whereas children are in a pedagogic setting and, pre-puberty, are usually quite accepting of correction.
I also think that speaking an “accentless” foreign language is, from a practical perspective, a somewhat sterile and unhelpful goal. Unless you plan to be a spy, it is a parlour trick (admittedly one I envy!). Simultaneous translators are rarely accentless (I know they are supposed to translate into their native tongue but you will encounter a lot of translation going the other way in real life) but they are fluent. Having a non-native accent does not get in the way of fluency or creativity (consider Conrad in multiple languages or Beckett in French).
If the claim that there is a window and it closes at thirteen is true, and I doubt it, then focusing on native fluency just discourages people from achieving working fluency in a foreign and with it the joy of engaging with life from a different (indeed, foreign) perspective. In my experience as a young adult and now a middle-aged one, if you throw yourself into learning a foreign language, you can achieve a lot in comparatively little study. However, from my experience, if you want it to “click” you need to spend some time living immersively in that language (at least a few weeks) and if you want it to “stick” you need to reach A-level (I don’t know how to make that description less UK-centric but this would be the level where you can read the classics from that language’s literary canon, provided you have a dictionary for obscure vocab. I read a lot of Moliere and Camus in French for A-level and loved it).
Also, in some languages, having the right foreign accent is sexy!
“These claims that a magic window has shut by #random year seem to be over-deterministic arm-waving…”
Yes, I thought that blanket assertion of David Eagleman was just too black-and-white, given that, just in these comments, we have at least two examples of people (a South Korean and a Russian) who learned to speak English without an accent after the age of 13.
It might be that if you graph a sample of non-native English speakers that spoke English with no discernible accent (based on some assessment of people who could reliably assess such things), the number of people in that population who learned the language after the age of 13/puberty drops off precipitously. So, what Eagleman is saying might generally be true but not always. And, if even a relatively small group can do that, i.e., speak without an accent, at some later age, then why and how?
I have a vague, inchoate theory that the few people who can do that (1) really pay attention to sounding native (and may have a better facility at hearing sounds, prosody, etc., e.g., they might be more “musical”) and (2) are a lot less constrained about the native language sound scheme they have to avoid and the new language sound scheme they have to use in a way that most people who acquire a second language don’t or aren’t—they’re sort of “freer” about “sounding native.”
I wouldn’t rule out some biological basis—the onset of puberty doesn’t seem like a coincidence—as forming some “critical period” but, as you say, it might be things correlated with, rather than caused by, puberty. (I read once some speculation—and it was only that—that the door shuts linguistically post-puberty so that parents and their children don’t develop their own “private” language together but that children are compelled to learn their parents’ language. I doubt that’s true but it is a wild theory.)
I’m sure, as juno mas says, that it is very difficult (not impossible) to be proficient (however that is defined) at a second language after 18 years of speaking a first language but it might also be true that “most people” don’t put in the time and effort to get proficient or do things that are not all that effective in getting proficient or both.
And I did enjoy your account of learning languages and read it all the way through.
In addition to high school Latin, I have studied Mandarin, German and French during military service and at the undergraduate and graduate levels. When somebody asks which was the easiest to speak and understand (once I had enough vocabulary) I reply Mandarin. The sentence structure is similar to English and there is no morphology or syntax. On the other hand, I attribute at least half of my gray hairs to learning approximately 4,000 written characters, most of which I have forgotten. The tonal nature of the language was scary at first but I was able to overcome that hurdle in a few weeks. My spoken French and German both need work, but I can read both with minimum difficulty.
English and Mandarin are both Subject Verb Object, and in that case they are indeed similar. There’s both morphology and syntax in Mandarin, but I would say they are pretty dynamic and that’s actually part of the difficulty. The other day, Lambert posted an article on Water Cooler about someone who had been learning Mandarin intensively for one year. The person even took the effort to fly to Taiwan and mainland China to speak with locals, and one of his observations was that each trip added to his vocab by thousands. At the end of the article though, the person concluded that despite knowing close to 10000 words, he had yet to learn how to communicate effectively in Mandarin, and I think that’s key. The author also said that a lot of times Mandarin grammar is about what feels and sounds right than some rigid rules, and I believe that’s part of its dynamism.
Similarly, what I’ve found is that Mandarin is a language where the reality of the spoken/written language is quite different from the words presented in the textbooks. I am leaving Taiwan for Japan, and as such I am currently selling a couple of things on Shopee (something like eBay), and boy, I’ve learnt so much Mandarin in the process it’s quite shocking, like literally despite knowing more than 5000 characters, I am still learning words related to price negotiation, etc that I’ve never seen mentioned in all the textbooks and dramas I’ve seen.
re: Trump to kick trans soldiers out of army – Times
And next to go, women and gays/bisexuals? Which would be 500,000 or 25% of the US military.
I don’t think this will happen, though, without overturning the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act. So maybe that’s what’s next?
Please do your homework. First, Obama used only an executive order (as in reversible by later executive order) to make trans a protected category only with respect to Federal civilian employment and employment by Federal contractors.
https://subscriptlaw.com/transgender-rights/
The Supreme Court has already avoided blocking a ban on openly trans soldiers serving:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/22/politics/scotus-transgender-ban/index.html
Biden reversed the earlier Trump ban:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/25/transgender-military-ban-biden-repeal-trump-rule
Admittedly Trump’s current plans sound more sweeping so I am not sure how far he will get.
Thank you for that quick overview, all important points to know. Yes, hard to say.
To me the headline almost seems designed to confirm feminists worst fears that he’s going to target feminist related progress and gains. That is, unless he’s going to wedge feminists by making feminism about TERFism and tradwife-ism, which seems likely.
To put it another way, US freedoms are often not all they appear to be.
And I have no idea how serious Trump is. He may just want to pick these fights to excite his base and not care much about winning. His wall was mainly that. But if some of his hangers on are, all it takes is Trump getting the ball rolling.
Yes, it is. More than half the headlines and opening lines in articles I see now are fear-mongering. It’s part of the insight Goering told us while in prison: “Tell them they are being attacked…” I’d say that since 9/11 at least half the U.S. population is sure they are under imminent attack. That’s part of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
I wonder what George Patton, whose military acumen was legendary in winning the last war the “mighty” american military actually won, would have to say about trans “soldiers” in the military. Or women in combat for that matter.
Something tells me he would easily predict the debauched and degraded embarrassment that the “world’s greatest fighting force” has been allowed to become, in service of the wasteland the democrat party has become.
General Patton does not disriminate. He would send everyone into suicidal attack. He might send those trans-whatever first, though. Probably yell at some too, and then apologize.
Because if a military can’t handle women or trans, if that’s rather distracting, impedes unit cohesion, causes it to lose battles, then it can’t handle anything. So Patton would have been quite right to predict the fall of the American military on that basis.
He would probably have looked upon the Soviets, who had women in all combat roles, and particularly excelling in flying and sniping, and said something along the lines of Russians being third world or backward or something. And he would probably have looked upon the resistance cells everywhere, dominated by women, and said no way should women be in combat, using those guns, blowing up factories or trains, or killing soldiers – not even if they were German soldiers.
It’s hard to say. He was very Nazi-sympathetic.
What is it with cats and Christmas trees? Are they following their own cat version of Order 66? Some cats have yet to receive the word-
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2223438861051612&id=632163130179201&set=a.651556044906576
If I were a cat, I could see how I would think a Christmas tree was a ginormous present for me. Climbing! Hiding! Nesting! Dangle-y bits to bat! Shiny toys! Knocking things on the floor! Getting human attention!
To a cat, a Christmas tree is it’s Christmas present. It’s the least that us stupid hoomins can do for our feline overlords.
Our lot cannot wait for the annual awesomeness of the Christmas tree. Be sure to secure your tree up high lest you hear “timber!” in the wee hours.
At night if your tree is small, you could always put it in your bathroom or even shower and close the doors. Remember – cats own the night!
You can expect a poor yelp review if your tree is small enough to move into the bathroom, heh heh.
We live with our cat-door cats in forested mountains, where they climb anything they feel like. They’ve never bothered with our dumb little Christmas trees, thankfully they’re no good for clawing.
Our indoor/outdoor cats get an indoor climbing tree for the winter to help beat cabin fever. It’s ten feet or so (a frame), made from a branch that come down off a long dead elm. When they were kittens, we taught them how to climb downwards with it.
If you have cats, according to my inlaws family, it’s bad policy to have a christmas tree with actual candles on it . . .
You can expect a poor yelp review if your bathroom is small enough to not fit a tree.
My daughter’s family set up their Christmas tree inside a playpen.
We did that when our son was ten months old and an accomplished bulb grabber. It didn’t keep our very athletic Siamese out, though.
I agree with Temple Grandin in that some animals are sensitive to sensory stimulus, similar to but not identical with ASD in humans. Christmas trees are sensory overload, so if I were a cat I’d attack them too.
Oh, but cats LOVE Christmas trees!
Yesterday I saw a Christmas tree at the local Costco for $1,500. I think it was 15 feet tall and might be able to house several cats.
And for the dog: A tree, for me? To use? Without going out? Nice!
Washington Post Calls For Selective (Non-)Prosecution Of War Crimes, MoA, pay close attention to these quotes b highlighted, as they are exactly the same as from serial criminal Alan Dershowitz’s opinion piece hilariously titled “I’m Putting Together a Legal Dream Team to Defend Israel”, this published in the Journal yesterday.
Israel is not a member of the ICC, and the warrants will have limited practical effect, except possibly preventing Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant from traveling to countries which have pledged to enforce it
the arrest orders undermine the ICC’s credibility and give credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution. The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity.
The ICC is supposed to become involved when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves. That is not the case in Israel.
This stuff is above my pay grade, yet it seems to me a farfetched defense.
Israel is not a signatory to the ICC so may be immune in Israel itself however – and this is a pretty big however – the ICC does have jurisdiction in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And that is where all those atrocities and crimes against humanity are being committed. So Netanyahu’s Wikipedia entry should now include the phrase ‘indicted war criminal’ on his page. It will stick to his name now like s*** to a blanket.
Israel is signatory to the Genocide Convention, and the warrants are all about Israel failing to fulfill it’s obligations in preventing a genocide.
Thanks. Hence this from mr Dershowitz, We will also demonstrate that Israel’s actions in Gaza don’t violate any international law or laws of war over which the ICC has jurisdiction. Even if the inflated numbers of casualties provided by the Hamas Health Services were accurate, the proportion of civilians to combatants killed by the Israel Defense Forces would be lower than in any comparable war anywhere in the world. This certainly doesn’t qualify as genocide or any other war crime. In addition, the efforts by Israel and the international community to send food and other provisions into Gaza have been stymied by Hamas and by gangs who have stolen the shipments.Id say t does qualify, but what do I know.
Is Dershowitz a racist, genocidal liar and maniac?
Of course not…
2023 Finkelstein had the nerve to DEBATE Dershowitz via TV.
I expected Norm to take out his Samurai sword but he didn´t.
After all that asshole-of-the-century destroyed his career and had the guts to smile at him.
Any ideological difference between Dershowitz, and the late Göring on trial? Potentially not. The mindset most likely is the same.
If the Israeli legal team uses the argument that civilian casualties/deaths are comparable to other wars this does not absolve Israel and I would think would tend to support that this is a genocide.
Why, but of course there’s a delectable menu of lovely death numbers to choose from, all very tasty. For an appetizer let’s look at the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shall we? What was that, half a million? You see, this is nothing! And for a main course the chef recommends Iraq’s 500k-1million civilian deaths at the hands of the US for the last invasion/occupation alone. Palestinians are like pepper in flyshit compared. For desert, shall we try the human meat in Vietnam and Cambodia? How delightful that the bombs are still exploding and the spice of Agent Orange still wafts. Or if that’s not to your taste, an exquisitely balanced sweet tartness of the “2:1 civilian to combatant ratio of WW2”. You see, what’s a few hundred thousand defenseless Palestinians, who cares about them, they’re just eensyweensytiny hors d’oeuvres, not a genocide. A genocide is a main course, you see, not a side dish!
The destruction of hospitals and the killing of doctors and nurses as a priority for IDF is a war crime. Doctors have been killed in Israeli prisons as well via torture.
Dershowitz is a prime example of human garbage. The noozis were quite a bit more self aware and/or mendacious than this piece of crap is. Unfortunately, he might end up living as long as Kissinger.
No, you have the legal process wrong. Israel is not a party to the ICC and even if it were the ICC does not have the power to punish Israel as a state for violating the Genocide Convention.
The “Contracting Parties” as in states, commit to prosecute individuals under the Genocide Convention. The ICC is not a contracting party.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf
And the ICC claims do not includes genocide. We posted the long discussion from the ICC press release. The charges are crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The ICC prosecutes only individuals. If you read the footnotes to South Africa’s filing to the ICJ, it first tried going to the ICC on war crimes and I think later genocide. But South Africa did not name individuals and the ICC cannot pursue states.
sorry, but do we have any serious updates on that laughable ICC vs. Putin?
Because by now, it´s like it never happened. And in Germany even my trusted paper “Junge Welt” bought into that bullshit. I thought I am falling off my chair. But neither have they reported anything new in many months.
p.s. can ICC drop charges again once a case has been opened?
The last time I heard it come up was when the ICC threatened Mongolia for not enforcing the warrant when Putin visited. That was funny.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-russia-kidnapping-ukrainian-children/
Facts on the ground, backed by neutral third parties have really killed the case. It is maintained for political apeal…
Thank you. Carefully examining Dershowitz’s language in the above quote and I see that he is trying to frame it in terms of “genocide” and “war crimes”. The defense strategy is becoming clear.
Sorry, my bad. I was in haste during my commute and mixed the two processes completely. My apologies.
It’s prima facie ridiculous.
The argument boils down to:
IF a country has an independent judiciary
THEN
ICC does not have jurisdiction.
First of all, that’s not a legal argument. I doubt there is anything in the ICC charter that has this rubbish.
But, even if there were, define “independent judiciary.”
In the US, the SCOTUS ruled that sovereign immunity protects the US President from prosecution over any act as long as it was done as part of their executive duties. This is so broad as to essentially put a US President outside the reach of the judiciary if they were to order the sort of genocidal killings that Netanyahu has.
So the US has no independent judiciary branch capable of stopping an executive from committing war crimes, effectively.
And as far as Israel goes:
Israel tries to hobble its supreme court
Finally, the Post’s silly argument is essentially “Only people we don’t like can fall under the Court’s jurisdiction (Putin, Assad.)”
I’m amazed that the ICC stepped up like they did. They’ve exposed the utter moral bankruptcy of the West.
If you look at the Rome Statute (Article 17) you will see that the Court has jurisdiction where a “State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution.” There are then a long series of glosses on this, notably:
“The proceedings were or are being undertaken or the national decision was made for the purpose of shielding the person concerned from criminal responsibility for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court (Art 17 (2) (a)) or
“There has been an unjustified delay in the proceedings which in the circumstances is inconsistent with an intent to bring the person concerned to justice” (Art 17 (2) (b) ) or
“The proceedings were not or are not being conducted independently or impartially, and they were or are being conducted in a manner which, in thecircumstances, is inconsistent with an intent to bring the person concerned to justice.” (Art 17 (2) (c))
It is also noted that the “Court shall consider whether, due to a total or substantial collapse or unavailability of its national judicial system, the State is unable to obtain the accused or the necessary evidence and testimony or otherwise unable to carry out its proceedings.” (Art 17(3))
So it’s all there. As I mentioned the last time we discussed this, the ICC is a court of exception, intended to come into action where the legal system of a country has broken down after a war or political crisis, or where a signatory state is making no real effort to investigate and prosecute. It was a product of the movement in the 1990s about the “rights of the victim” and was intended mainly to supply justice in a context where no other options were available. The number of cases it could deal with is evidently tiny.
Some of the clauses you cite describe Israel.
“Unjustified delay” – hasn’t Netanyahu evaded justice in part because the Knesset refused to do anything about existing charges against him, allowing them to languish? IIRC, Netanyahu is already under some sort of indictment but the state of war allows him to push out any court proceedings indefinitely.
I’m far from any sort of real depth of knowledge on the Israeli judicial system, but a quick search shows that the Supreme Court has been without a president (equivalent to a Chief Justice?) for nearly a year, and Netanyahu’s threatened judicial reforms to limit the powers of the Court and give politicians control are back on the agenda (see link in my original comment.)
At any rate, whatever the founders of the ICC wanted to court to be limited to, it went in a different direction when they got an indictment of Putin for taking kids out of the Donbass.
PNAS link headline is best savored out loud. You can practically hear the writer invoking that inner Porky Pig!
Or Peter Tork’s not-as-famous porcine pal:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WCnvBqRfc
What I want to know about that headline is why they left the word “message” in it. I suppose they wouldn’t have wanted to give the story away by replacing it with the most appropriate P-word, propaganda. But there were other choices: palaver, peroration, and polemic, to name three. . . .
Lotsa links today. Thanks. The general impression is that the voters once again seek some return to normalcy with the result that things get even crazier. Here’s hoping Trump understands that is what the voters want. Never have we had greater need of a “first rate temperament.”
The article “Insolvency experts drafted in to fight university cash crunch” contains this revealing information:
“The university said a 28pc spike in overheads to £45.9m had exacerbated the financial squeeze, with the largest component coming from an increase in the commission it paid agents overseeing the recruitment of overseas students. Nearly £55m was forked out on recruitment fees in 2023 alone.“
I had long understood that universities in the USA, UK, and other European countries had become businesses living off the exhorbitant tuition fees they extort from students (and endowments from their parents), but I was not aware that they were spending such outrageous sums for recruiters, nor that they needed recruiters in the first place. I am very tempted to say that if such “institutions of higher education” go bust, then so be it and good riddance; live by the market, die by the market. In fact, the whole thing almost looks like a ponzi scheme or a bezzle.
YES! When my daughter was searching for some post-graduate master i told her: Wherever except in the UK, (US simply unthinkable, out of bounds) unless you are willing to pay it all by yourself.
“North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un inspects his intercontinental ballistic missiles as he warns US that military drills could lead to war’
I was reading today that North Korea may be expanding their missiles plant as well-
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-11-25/exclusive-satellite-images-suggest-north-korea-expanding-missile-plant-researchers-say
Yemen has shown what is possible with missiles and drones so no doubt countries like North Korea will be saying ‘Hey! we can do the same.’ North Korea earns themselves bonus points because of all the tunnels that they have been making the last seventy years.
I would say that the expansion have more to do with Russia than Yemen.
Re Australian teen social media ban.
“If the legislation passes, the ban will not come into effect for 12 months to allow social media companies time to find ways to comply with the rules.”
Shorter: “our law, your problem.” Presumably Big Tech will have to establish detailed bios of all its users including birth certificates. Or something.
Like with tobacco, alcohol, or guns… why not?!
It’s the most futuristic train in history, unlike the electric trains made in 19th century.
Interesting that this article is linked today, when Michael Barnard lists about a dozen failures of hydrogen trains across the world – Hydrogen Trains Continue to Derail
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/11/25/hydrogen-trains-continue-to-derail/
A couple of examples:
“It’s worth starting with the wisest rail organization, or at least the one that publicly patted itself on the back for being smart, Baden-Württemberg. That province of Germany actually used spreadsheets with real numbers in them before buying anything to assess the total cost of ownership and found that hydrogen trains would cost about 80% more over their lifetime than battery-electric and overhead wire powered trains. It said no thanks, of course.
The same can’t be said for its sibling state of Lower Saxony. The rail operator LNVG made the announcement that after running a relatively small number of small passenger regional trains for a few years, and abiding by its contract to buy more last year, it will no longer consider hydrogen trains for anything else. They’re just too expensive to operate, compared to trains with overhead line connections and batteries to bridge the tough spots.”
High cost, and teething troubles of all sorts, are expected with every new technology. Those first electric trains surely had their problems. The really important thing is the long run. The futuristic part. Hydrogen that powers those hype-trains needs to come from somewhere. If that’s water + electricity, then what’s the benefit of that if you can power the train with that electricity directly. Adding an extra step could make sense with cars, or ships, or other vehicles that are not bound by rail. With trains you are on one “wire” by default. Making one on top costs extra money, but so does creating hydrogen making and handling infrastructure (in addition to losses in energy conversion).
Those 100+ old electric trains were not Shinkansen yet, but were not that much different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MILW_ES-2.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JR_East_Shinkansen_lineup_at_Niigata_Depot_201210.jpg
That’s futurism, at least until we get flying cars (and no, multicopter is not a flying car).
and electric buses & trams in late 19th/early 20th century – still in use in Toronto – guess they didn’t get the memo – like Detroit did – but then the Big Three were located there –
Re the Klarenberg
“The determination of Washington’s self-appointed “junior partner” to escalate the proxy conflict into all-out hot war between Russia and the West has only intensified under Starmer’s new Labour government. Yet, the Empire gives every appearance of refusing to take the bait, while seeking to curb London’s belligerent fantasies.”
Surely the UK’s James Bonds should go back to being about sex and machine gun equipped Aston-Martins and stop acting like Smersh. One very recycled theme of the Bond movies was a desire by shadowy figures to provoke war among the super powers.
Of course they also added to our Cold War entertainment. Mel Brooks seemed to catch the zeitgeist with Maxwell Smart and his shoe phone.
You know, i believe that when Macron talks about sending troops to Ukraine, he does it thinking about a phrase he has prepared starting with “if only” for when he considers necessary. Starmer, instead, looks like genuinely compromised. “Boring” Starmer looks like the most stupid of the classroom. I might be completely mistaken but he really does look like that
Starmer is as smart as Lettuce, but much less entertaining. People thought the she is the worst, but the race to the bottom keeps on reaching new depths. She said that she would press the hypothetical nuclear button, and this guy is actually trying, I can’t wait for the next idi*t in charge.
Starmer is the most stupid as he has demonstrated when he pushed out Sue Gray in favour of the deadbeat, conspiratorial apparatchik Morgan McSweeney, who lacks any grasp, however tenuous, of the political realities of making the UK government work.
Gray might have saved Starmer from the embarrassment (and whatever retaliation Trump chooses to deliver) of organising and sending Labour’s troops to aid the deadest of dead presidential campaigns in the US, getting tangled up in the utter craziness of the spooks’ insistence on going to war with Russia, and vocally and practically supporting the Zionist slaughterhouses in the Levant.
We are seeing the beginnings of a generally popular revolt against a government which has clearly failed, and will continue to fail given the almost total lack of talent or moral fibre amongst the entire bunch, not just in the cabinet but on the Labour backbenches. Starmer truly created a party in his own image. God help England.
I don’t doubt Klarenberg’s reporting on the British, but I was puzzled by his emphasis on US caution and constraint. He seems to ignore the escalating actions and comments by the Biden administration over the last few weeks. I doubled-checked the date to make sure it was not an old article. Am I missing something there?
Yeah. And I was also scratching my head over motivations. I can imagine a couple of reasons why Zelensky wanted to do the Kursk thing but I don’t get why Starmer did. Is it to get a scouting badge in DC? Wanting to show his hatred of Russia is even bigger than that of Scholz and Macron? These don’t seem worth the risk to me.
I don’t think the Kursk incursion could have been invented from scratch and organized within the course of only a single month (i.e. Starmer’s election – July 4th, Kursk invasion – August 6th). So Starmer would only have been acquiescing to something that had already been cooked up and in the works during the Sunak administration.
I don’t think the British military is an independent actor, and I don’t think Starmer is actually in control of it, apart from a natural desire to pretend to be in order to placate his handlers.
Israeli snipers ‘shoot Palestinians for sport’ The Cradle.
From 2017, after Trump allowed the relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, through 2019, Palestinians organized protest marches in Gaza every week. Israeli snipers were deployed to shoot them from distances of 100m to 1,000m, mainly targeting legs and arms of protesters – “shoot to maim,” appeared to be the operative order, resulting in crippling injuries for around 7,000 Palestinians.
See Human Rights Council, Fortieth session, 25 February–22 March 2019:
“Report of the detailed findings of the independent international Commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”
Schindler’s list has a scene in which the warden shoots one of the Jewish workers for sport. Seemed pretty awful.
Hmmmm, just like USA police shooting the eyes out of protestors, accidentally. Lucky hits, I guess. Just random bad luck regardless of pigs use of high powered, military grade scopes.
Bloomberg Souther Africa link missing leading “h”:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-25/southern-african-nations-hit-by-worst-power-outage-in-years
It’s low power from the Kariba hydro plant due to low water in the Zambezi. Possibly global warming related, possibly not. Not as big an issue as the clickbait headline implies.
Not like our ruling class ever gets too hung up on hypocrisy, but Jack Smith abandoning Trump prosecutions seems timed in part as a response to the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Prosecuting an elected leader violates the normz!!!
This is fun. Jimmy Dore, utube, ~35+minutes. The former Seminole County, FL tax collector sounds like a real something. ….idiot maybe? / ;)
Matt Gaetz Sex Allegations Was A Honeypot Operation! w/ Ian Carroll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL1qZGXci18
Honalulooooo – Love Jimmy.
PS Flora. Just watched it. Sent it to a couple friends who not only read, but pay for the NY Times (imagine that). They likely won’t watch it. Hmmm, Jimmy has millions of viewers and the Times’ subscribers are dropping like a rock in a pond. Let’s see what they do with sex allegations contra: Gabbard, Hegsketh, Kennedy, Bondi, Homan, and the rest of the possible Trump cabinet.
“Sent it to a couple friends who not only read, but pay for the NY Times (imagine that)….”
stopped sending to any of my PMC or comfortably retired with juicy IRA’s friends – stopped almost a year ago when obvious nobody listened/watched – one friend said he couldn’t listen to anything Tucker had to say because his voice was repellent – sad – even had my brother call Orban a dictator – when asked how he knew that to be fact……crickets – like of course i should’ve known that – it is hopeless sometimes but i keep asking questions to see what the answers will be – when there is no answer to a question their brains must be on a wash cycle –
Thanks, Flora. This really demands a reassessment of Matt Gaetz’s thoroughly honourable action to withdraw from Justice so as not to detract from the creation of the new Trump administration.
It also demands a full investigation into the three letter agencies, the obviously flawed investigation resulting in the House Committee Report, and the impudence of the Senators in pressuring Gaetz to withdraw from the position in which President-elect Trump needs him to fill if the US is to achieve the aims set by the American people on 5 November on the basis of a false bill that some, most or all knew about attacking one of the few highly motivated, hard working and honest men to serve in the Congress since the turn if the century.
The behaviour of these actors not to mention the news media is politically motivated by the vilest of reasons, and likely sheer criminal intent given that the “evidence” is a tissue of lies to make sure that Gaetz’s political effectiveness, honesty and intention to clean up the DOJ and direct more of the DOJ’s investigative skills and prosecution towards the goal of cleaning up the swamp is halted in it’s tracks.
Somehow this keeps happening.
Editorial: 4 in 10 Chicago Public Schools teachers were ‘chronically absent’ last year from a job with a median salary of $95,000
It’s a viciously anti union screed, above only relevant part.
Teachers get sick like anyone else. Being out for a bad cold or the flu can easily be 7-10 days. Being around kids who spread germs all the time it’s not uncommon for a teacher to use about 14 days a year being sick at home. Add in a few mental health days because they can be totally necessary in some situations. That was my experience as an elementary teacher in a suburban district. And that was before Covid.
When I retired from my 28 year public union job in MA I had almost 2 thousand hours of sick time banked. That was even after I used a couple hundred hours for paternity leave when my 2 daughters were born. I’m sure there are folks who take a “Blue” Monday but, most of my sick days were due to staying home with sick kids. My daughter is a teacher here in MA and has had Covid twice. Once during pregnancy in 2021 and once two years later. Between the petri dish of a elementary classroom and what comes home from the daycare for my grandson, she’s sick much more than I ever was.
The Uruguay election was a change in parties from the left moderate to the right moderate, but there is not a lot of difference between the two. Uruguay voters know that they’re politics Will remain stable regardless of which party won. One difference I have seen reported is that the new leftish coalition plans to reduce ties with China that were started under the previous administration.
I thought the presidential debate was very interesting, as it is a legal requirement and follows specific laws for its format and conduct.
In case you’re interested on how a highly respected democracy conducts a presidential debate, they spend the first few minutes discussing those laws in this YouTube video of the presidential debate that has closed captions which can be Auto translated into English.
https://www.youtube.com/live/0I0hZNM8r68
I was at a friend’s penthouse apartment overlooking a main Beach on the night of the election. The election was called at around 9:00 p.m. and there was so much happiness!!! Montevideo is a Frente Amplio stronghold and they were lighting fireworks and there was a continuous string of cars driving along the shoreline blowing their horns and just having a huge party. It was so much fun!! And a huge contrast to all of the stress that I felt surrounding the US election.
ISW assessment of the current situation in SW Donetsk:
Russia’s successes in western Donetsk region do not mean collapse of frontline for Ukrainian army – ISW
If the ISW says this it is probably time to panic. They say there are 8.000 km2 left of the Donetsk for them to occupy and given historical data it is “unlikely that advances are going to be rapid”. True, Russian advances are methodical but these remaining 8.000 km2 have very little in fortifications compared with the previous combat lines. Sparsely populated rural areas with little on them to hide brigades. The only way to slow the Russians there would be by comprehensive mining of the terrain.
ISW sigh.
RUAF are maintaining linear front. There is no career in doing Guderian off Sedan, nor Patton off Falaise.
The Montgomery/Eisenhower respect for secure flanks…..
I refrain from expending eyesight on ISW.
The only way to slow the Russians there would be by
comprehensive mining of the terrain.
Great minds think alike. The government of the USA just decided to send lots of anti-personnel mines to Ukraine. Perhaps it realized something that the ISW did not.
Take a fair amount of combat engineering and good records to use bands of mine fields.
Wehrmacht was good at it in the long retreat through USSR. The Russians have decent combat engineers and history from WW II
The big problem for the Ukrainians is that they don’t have the manpower or the firepower to cover the minefields. And minefield without effective fire control is merely a speed bump. It won’t stop the attack, unless you can fire at people navigating it or disarming the mines.
Would be much effective for the Ukrainians to use the rasputitsa for delaying action while slowly withdrawing toward Dniepr. An ambush after ambush after ambush could cause enough trouble for the Russians to bring them to a halt.
There, of course, should be a political solution by the Ukrainians on offer, too, to seal a cease fire. Yet somehow the Ukrainians have played themselves in the corner with no way out but capitulation or annihilation.
RE: H5N1 in California Dairy Herds
Here’s the LATimes story: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-26/bird-flu-warnings-are-going-unheeded-at-many-dairy-farms
Biden works to provoke Russia to nuclear war, while Trump selects appointments for his cabinet that would be tasteless jokes were Trump not seemingly serious about about them. The country stumbles into a Christmas season, with so much up-in-the-air that cannot levitate very far past the New Year. I feel as if standing in the eye of a terrible shit hurricane moving directly toward where I stand and any place I can think of to hide. The pending Collapse of the American Empire would be so much easier to endure, barring nuclear war, if it did not coincide with so many other problems like Climate Chaos and the Collapse of the grand fossil fuel based Civilization for which no replacement offers a comfortable alternative. I have great difficulty imagining the world my children and their children, if they have any, will face. What bitter inheritance will be left for those who survive the multiple Collapses.
My guess is that a few months into his presidency, Trump will re-shuffle his government and toss out the deadwood that he needs to get his most significant appointees in place, and he’s probably already worked out who their replacements will be. And the interim recommendations the Musk-Ramaswamy chopping machine make will justify any re-structuring of departments and the replacement of political appointees with others who have more experience of managing major organisational change.
When has Trump ever thought that deeply about anything? He only cares about loyalty and being able to control people. If they keep kissing his posterior he’ll keep them around. If they start getting to much media time on their own then they’ll be tossed out.
MOA seems down this afternoon.
Not any more. Rebel strikes back.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/ukraine-announces-plans-for-new-counteroffensive-4025
Latest news
Ukraine Announces Plans for New Counteroffensive
Nov 26, 2024 16:55
Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrskyi has announced plans for a future counteroffensive, reported military analyst and blogger Kyrylo Sazonov on November 25.
Syrskyi pointed out the necessity of offensive operations to achieve victory.
“Stopping the enemy is essential,” Syrskyi stated.
“But victory is impossible if the Armed Forces of Ukraine only play defense. We need to seize the initiative and counterattack. We must, and we will. Where and when—stay tuned.”
Taibbi’s latest, long public excerpt.
The Democrats’ Dirty Tricks Playbook?
Documents just made public show how groups aligned with the Democratic Party hit a third party rival with an array of underhanded schemes that put Watergate tricksters to shame
https://www.racket.news/p/the-democrats-dirty-tricks-playbook
The cucumber article is great:
I’m imagining some poker-faced researcher reading all of this out at a conference, with the grad students snickering in the back.
I haven’t read the article by i believe this is a game done mainly in cucumber’s xylem and phloem. Many Cucurbits have indeed high pressure in their phloem and xylem vessels and when you cut a stem, you can see a transparent exudate forming fast unlike in many other plants. Cucurbits are able to create such pressure with phloem/xylem saps that allows them to build gigantic fruits. This particular species is probably using a similar trait to make it explosive. Just saying.