The complex origin story of domestic cats: Research points to Tunisia Phys.org
Vance meets Pope Francis on Easter Sunday after tangle over migration, gets chocolate eggs for kids AP
Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday aged 88 Vatican News
Climate/Environment
Microplastics found in human ovary follicular fluid for the first time The Guardian
Pluralistic: Against transparency Cory Doctorow
14 million years ago our ancestor was swinging through the trees & was also the ancestor of all chimps, gorillas & orangutans.
That was the last time CO2 levels were consistently as high as they are today.
The world you think you live in has ended.
(graph by Dr. Thomas Ronge) pic.twitter.com/CKerqWubMC
— Climate Dad (@ClimateDad77) April 19, 2025
Pandemics
Why I Keep Masking Defector
A fascinating thread about ‘methylation’ and what happens when it gets dysregulated by a viral infection.
As Tern says, there are quite a few viruses that do this… “but Covid is probably the only one that people are catching as if it’s candy thrown out by a benevolent uncle”. https://t.co/St28eXQrGh
— Cat in the Hat 🐈⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 (@_CatintheHat) April 20, 2025
Japan
Japan to discuss car safety standards in Trump tariff talks, Nikkei Asia reports The Straits Times
China?
Beijing slams ‘appeasement’ of US in trade deals that hurt China The Straits Times
China’s trade war playbook is coming into focus Semafor
Boeing Flies 737 MAX Aircraft Back To The US After China Bans Deliveries Simple Flying
BYD Semiconductor Deep Dive Nomad Semi
China’s non-nuclear hydrogen bomb generates fireball to burn targets at 1800°F: Report Interesting Engineering
Old Blighty
Shock Poll Shows Reform UK On Course To Win Next General Election Huff Post
Syraqistan
US Airstrikes Pound Yemen, Killing 12 in Capital Antiwar
Netanyahu Is Considering a Limited Strike on Iran – That Is Complete Insanity Haaretz
With Eye on Iran, US Sends Bunker-Busting Bombs to Israel Antiwar
How the West Plays Politics With International Terrorism Larry Johnson
This is moral rot. Israel shot fifteen unarmed medics and a UN worker one by one, crushed and buried them, lied about it—and the New York Times is covering Israel’s internal review with the same restraint it would apply to a government audit. pic.twitter.com/vakTqXuTql
— Linda Mamoun (@mamoun_linda) April 20, 2025
Remembering an artist who gave life to the children of Gaza +972 Magazine
European Disunion
Spa town spies: Czech church linked to Kremlin kompromat campaign Euractiv
New Not-So-Cold War
Trump says he hopes Russia, Ukraine to strike ‘deal this week’ Reuters
‘Easter truce’ in Russia’s Ukraine war marked by accusations of violations Al Jazeera
Easter Ceasefire Brings Brief Glimmer of Humanity Amidst the Chaos Simplicius
It was my profound honor to deliver a very “personal” message to Vladimir Putin today, from the front lines of the war near the Russian border, on behalf of our PA-1 community. The only permissible details to share are that “the message was delivered on target.”… pic.twitter.com/RUd8udc2kU
— Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick 🇺🇸 (@RepBrianFitz) April 18, 2025
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 20, 2025 Institute for the Study of War
***
Ukrainian envoy asks for 30% of Germany’s military equipment RT
Germany bets on volunteers to fix a hollowed-out army — but will it work? Politico
Mysterious Thirty Years’ War camp, once home to 80,000 people, unearthed in Germany Interesting Engineering
Trump 2.0
How Trump Is Helping Price Gougers Exploit His Tariffs The Lever
Here’s the real kick about how Trump’s tariffs are going to hike prices for everything: Once that happens, even if the tariffs go away, the prices are never, ever going back down again.
— David DeWitt (@DC_DeWitt) April 2, 2025
First shockwaves of Trump’s tariffs are about to hit the world economy Yahoo! Finance
Threat to US Exceptionalism Spurs Rush for Emerging Local Bonds Bloomberg
***
***
After remarkable Supreme Court rebuke, Trump administration slams ‘meritless litigation’ Politico
How judges can hold Trump admin accountable for defying court orders Axios
COURTS ARE USEFUL, BUT WE CANNOT DEPEND ON THEM TO SAVE DEMOCRACY LPE Project
***
Cucks vs. breeders Read Max. “On the animating fetishes of the Trump administration.”
DOGE
Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern The Register
DOGE is red tape Can We Still Govern?
In the long-run, even cuts to STEM funding are very good. Top STEM researchers belong in industry, not academia.
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) April 17, 2025
SignalGate 2.0
Hegseth Said to Have Shared Attack Details in Second Signal Chat New York Times
Just to quickly review some of the timeline: heat on Hegseth, owner of a Crusader cross tattoo, largely originated back in January with a Jewish Insider piece charging that his allies in the Pentagon were not supportive enough of war with Iran:
Jewish Insider called Caldwell a “leading opponent of traditional Republican foreign policy who advocates for a vastly reduced U.S. presence in the Middle East.” https://t.co/ivTgkQyztc pic.twitter.com/8UvzgqAuug
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) April 15, 2025
On March 24 SignalGate 1.0 breaks. On April 15, Dan Caldwell, senior adviser to Hegseth, and others fall.
The Israel lobby call for firing the leakers is from Jewish Insider, an Israeli cutout leading the attack on restrainer/realist Trump personnel opposed to war on Iran
Dan Caldwell, who was recently forced out of the Pentagon, has been a key target https://t.co/9WyAzTAKSV
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 17, 2025
Caldwell, 2 others sacked at DoD fight back in fiery joint statement Responsible Statecraft. “At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of “leaks” to begin with.”
Now we have SignalGate 2.0, and Hegseth taking heavy fire.
Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside the Agency Politico. John Ullyot, “a longtime backer” of Hegseth, with the knife in the back.
At least Pete is having fun while it lasts:
Hegseth wife probably just texted back “that’s so cool, glad you are having fun” pic.twitter.com/nblPHInckK
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) April 20, 2025
Police State Watch
US citizen wrongfully arrested by border patrol in Arizona held for nearly 10 days The Guardian
ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets 404 Media
Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it’s horrifying The Register
AI
Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere TechCrunch
Groves of Academe
ENDING 30 YEARS OF RESISTANCE, TRUMP AND ABBOTT BREAK THE ‘PEOPLE’S HOUSE’ Texas Observer
Imperial Collapse Watch
US spending on war vs. diplomacy Polygraph
The Friendly Skies
Airbus Promised a Green Aircraft. That Promise Is Now Unraveling. WSJ
Astro Mechanica Raises $27.1M for Supersonic Flight Tectonic
The Bezzle
The Galaxy Brains of the Trump White House Want to Use Tariffs to Buy Bitcoin The Intercept
Guillotine Watch
The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’ Blood in the Machine
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Monopolies and Fascism BIG by Matt Stoller
Class Warfare
The bastards of neoliberalism The New Statesman. “The eccentrics of the new right aren’t rebelling against our political regime – they are its twisted successors.”
Palestine, College ‘Marxism’ and the Morbid Dialectics of Social Media Rootless Cosmopolitan
Spiritual Women of the Wilderness New Lines Magazine
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
203 comments
Comments are closed.
Pallid Gotta Win Man
(melody borrowed from Ballad Of A Thin Man written by Bob Dylan, in 1965.)
Donnie Trump must assume his delinquent demands
Repeatedly stated, makes nations pay what they can
He threatens harm if there’s no cash in hand
“Call me back today on my throne!”
He wants nations living in fear as this big blue planet spins
Skull and femur bones . . .
You’re no thoroughbred, and you’re no kind of whiz
You disappoint your crew when you say, “More fizz!”
Your bulging waistline makes ’em wonder if you’ll live
Then you say, “Hey, Elon, can you spare me a loan?”
Now I hear an orchestra of tiny violins
Skull and femur bones . . .
None of this is quite cricket, but you still have your clique
Though your team doesn’t know what to do, which they tend to leak
They compare The Art Of The Deal with this orange antique
Who’s so irresponsible what comes next is unknown
A toddler who’s learning to steer and who only wants to win
Skull and femur bones . . .
Ask your Cabinet of quacks—how’s a tariff not a tax?
A sales tax to every shopper in our nation?
Now all global trade has been wrecked; supply chains that no longer connect
Profits we can never collect—with stocks dysfunctional, driving us deep in stagflation
Ah, all your tariff endeavors mean that Main Street will stay cooked
Bankrupt employers and those hungry mobs underfoot
Your Executive Orders is all that it ever took
While DOGE cuts our state to the bone
We won’t last through this fiscal year; you have ruined every biz
Skull and femur bones . . .
All your cult followers, doncha know that they’re skippin’ meals?
They’re afraid for their health, and now they doubt your ideals
You may still be the POTUS, you may still be makin’ deals
But they say, “What’s all this blowback? Where’s our stepping stone?”
You’re gonna wind up the King of a land where no one lives
Skull and femur bones . . .
Inflation hits double digits, shrouding the great DOW
There’s no strength or cohesion, farmers can’t plow
In a nation of has been’s you can stand and take a bow
Families getting tossed from their homes
You still want a war with Beijing, that’s your final mortal sin
Skull and femur bones . . .
Well, stupid is in bloom; solar panels are comin’ down
Elon’s blowing up rockets, and he’s too tightly wound
You’ll invade Panama, and then take Greenland down
You’re dreaming of infinity stones
But no one is kissing your ring, and no one will now forgive
Skull and femur bones . . .
“The Galaxy Brains of the Trump White House Want to Use Tariffs to Buy Bitcoin’
With headlines like that, sometimes the satire writes itself. Maybe they would do better putting that money into US Treasury bonds instead because with Bitcoin ‘Poof! Aaaaand it’s gone.’
‘Poof! Aaaaand it’s gone.’ For those who missed it.
And there we have a glimpse of Trump’s de facto economic policy: suck an enormous amount of money out of the real economy, and send it into the pockets of crypto speculators.
Arguably not that different from the response to the global financial crisis, except that the White House is running the con this time instead of just enabling it.
Thank you, Conor.
For readers who speak French, they may be interested in potential successors:
https://www.cnews.fr/monde/2025-04-21/mort-du-pape-francois-qui-sont-les-papabili-les-cardinaux-consideres-comme-favoris
Mort du pape François : qui sont les «Papabili», ces cardinaux considérés comme favoris pour lui succéder ?
As a Catholic, I’m hoping for someone who will follow Francis’ positioning and accelerate reform.
It was disappointing to see officials surround the Pope over the week-end who look nothing like the 21st century Catholic Church.
Thank you. Colonel. The images in that article showed them to be verging on elderly. Guess they figure that if they mistakenly elect a reformer, then he won’t be there long.
Sclerotic Gerontocracy, wait, it’s not just US?
Colonel Smithers: Thanks for your list. I have seen Pietro Parolin mentioned more than once in articles here in Italy. Yet he is at the center of the administration of the Church, which may make him too much the Vatican insider.
The interesting thing is going to be the antics of the U.S. hierarchy, which tends to the dogmatic, puritanical, and greedy. I wouldn’t rule out some unseemly behavior from some U.S. divine if I were you.
I expect Opus Dei is working behind the scenes in Washington And in Rome.
I heard an attempt was made to contact Scalia via séance, but he was a no show.
Ghosted them.
What are the odds it’ll be an insane Nazi like Robert Sarah?
They already had a former Hitler Jugend in there with Ratzinger, so it’s probably to be expected, especially with Vance having given Francis the kiss of death, if not something more literal.
The Vatican’s answer to Obama. Oreo pro nobis.
The RCC is super small c conservative. Since there isn’t a threat of the French king putting heads on spikes, the next Pope will be similar to Francis. The Vatican isn’t totally blind to modernity.
The US is weird because the Pole and German made it a special project to put nothing but nutters in. They won’t do anything as their appeal to converts and rich socialites is association with Rome.
A not terribly good Catholic myself, Colonel Smithers, I find myself sharing your preference where Francis’ successor is concerned — he was by a considerable margin the best Pope of my lifetime since John XXIII (not counting the sadly abbreviated John Paul I, of whom much had been anticipated).
Francis was unusually good across several dimensions; we would be fortunate indeed to enjoy successive terms of such quality — but the odds are very much not in our favour …
That about sums up my take as well.
I may hope for better, but I expect we will see someone who is a return to Benedict’s ilk.
The pope must have found Vance’s visit seriously disappointing.
Probably true. The Pope might have been expecting somebody intelligent but got Vance instead. As proof, after the Pope died Vance said ‘My heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him.’
A quick Google search shows that there are about 1.4 billion Catholics in the world.
I think that number is somewhat inflated. It’s based mostly on inference and self-identification, which is somewhat problematic. For example, 52% of Spanish identify as Catholics, but less than third of them are practising Catholics.
So, given that the lower end of the estimate of the number of Catholics is around 1 billion, and practising Catholics is likely to be below that, his off the cuff remark is probably quite close the mark.
He may be boorish and ignorant, but I believe Vance is very intelligent (for some definition of “intelligent”).
Poor hillbillies don’t get jobs at Palantir easily.
So, you’re saying JD is more akin to a hillwilliam type?
Mt. Wilhelm?
Apropos of nothing, here are (some of) Vance’s investments from his VC days.
Maddeningly, Vance’s own VC fund, Narya Capital, is named after something (a ring apparently) from the Tolkien books like Palantir and Anduril.
“It is described as having the power to inspire others to resist tyranny, as well as (in common with the other Three Rings) hiding the wielder from remote observation (except by the wielder of the One) and giving resistance to the weariness of time:”
Investments include Hallow, a Catholic meditation and prayer app, and a gene therapy company . I assume this will be JD Vance’s stake in the enterprise.
Naturally in hobbit land “Thiel, one of Vance’s mentors, is listed as a separate investor in many of the companies, per PitchBook.”
I dunno about all that, but i’m guessing JD’s kids got hollow milk chocolate eggs from the Pope, it wasn’t as if they deserved solid ones.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
The Three are the only ones with names and the only ones not made by Sauron (the elves made them). They were also the only ones that didn’t corrupt their wearers and/or lead to an evil fate. Narya was in the possession of Gandalf during the events of LOTR, with Galadriel and Elrond holding the other two.None of them ended up playing any active role in the stories, either positive or negative, and they largely existed as part of the lore.
If you wanted to pick a relatively innocuous (named) Tolkien artifact for your company name, they would be a good choice. Many of the others had long and involved histories and were frequently the catalysts for strife, violence or disaster.
The phrase is ” Mountain William” . . .
I made a similar comment to the earlier thread where someone announced pope’s death but it hasn’t made it through moderation (maybe too much snark!)
Liz Truss meets QE2; what happened within a day or so?
JD Vance meets Pope; what happened within a day or so? /jk
Maybe heads of state might rethink future plans for meetings with right-wingers who propose economic nonsense or are widely reviled according to the polling data. Such meetings don’t seem good for their health!
I was thinking it could soon become the more fatal version of the Zelensky meme about political longevity after being pictured with him. IOW, that ironic if morbid thought is going to be out there. We’ll know if it has really taken hold when his trips automatically induce the suggestion he be met with the same welcome he and his wife got in Greenland.
It’s obvious these are the Endive Times~
I was convinced you made a typo til I looked that up. Bravo! Lettuce pray for deliverance.
Meanwhile, have people seen the Chinese TikToks for Mascara? Hilarious.
Terry Flynn I am unable to find that hilariousness to which you refer
Bitter type of cabbage
Which is Truss.
I was thinking more along the lines of Clue: J. D. Vance with the gom jabbar in the papal library.
I wonder if it was more a matter of: Pope Francis knew Easter was coming and wanted to live long enough to see it, so “willed” himself to stay alive a little longer than he would have done otherwise. So after he released his Easter Message and had a ” little talk” with vancie-poo, he felt free to go ahead and die.
Larry the downing St cat has made the joke too:
https://bsky.app/profile/number10cat.bsky.social/post/3lncq4vcaqc2j
I’m very curious as to what the late pope said to Vance.
Either that, or he had a St. Simeon reaction as recounted in Luke 2:25-32. According to the story, Simeon was a righteous man to whom YHWH had given the promise that he would see the Messiah before he died. The Holy Spirit led him to the temple one day where he encountered Mary and baby Jesus. Simeon took baby Jesus into his arms and declared:
This song from the Greek bible is sung by liturgical Christian denominations every Sunday as the “Nunc dimittis,” the Latin Vulgate translation of the opening words of the song.
So perhaps Pope Francis, like Simeon seeing Jesus, felt he was ready to depart this life having met J.D.
Maybe the Pope misheard the initials J.D. and thought that he was going to meet the original J.C.
Hey, the guy was nearly 90 with the senses dimming after a bout with pneumonia. And J. D. has the beard and all. Maybe it’s a little like old Isaac, Rebekah, Esau and Jacob in Genesis 27.
Which beard?
/jk
‘The Last Suffer’
I’m usually kinda “entertained, maybe not” when someone noted and widely known dies, so this papal passage now dies Easter Monday, having lived to be nearly 90 years old…as though the cause of death would truly be unknown or hard to ascertain. Double pneumonia at such an advanced age suggests those lungs were due to run down absent a miraculous replacement.
For reference to American celebrity deaths, the recent demise of Gene Hackman. Tragic deaths to younger people just seems to happen more frequently, in my view.
One thing i’ve noticed in regards to the press, if somebody in the public eye commits suicide, they’ll be sure to inform us, but never ever is it mentioned as the cause of death in obits of nobody’s.
Actually I’ve noticed that the Guardian (yuk ugh) puts a standard mention at the bottom regarding the Samaritans etc. So even if someone (famous or not) is strongly suspected of suiciding then although the ARTICLE won’t mention this, the accompanying warning is the alert.
I’m surprised the Guardian hasn’t realised people have cottoned on to this……..scratch that, I’m totally unsurprised.
I doubt this is anything but natural causes. I think the Pope really wanted to make it to Easter Mass. Once Mass was done, his body was ready to go.
Nothing more sinister than that.
If you read the RCC end of life treatment guidelines, Dr. Kevorkian could drive a semi through it.
I’m the last person to defend the RC Church but I know from publishing on end-of-life care and working with world clinical experts that the “more progressive” RC branches of the RC church (most of UK, Aus, parts of USA etc) are pretty pragmatic about end-of-life and not half as dogmatic as most of Protestantism.
It does not matter what “papal doctrine” and docs say, my colleagues dealt with enough RC people to know what they DO. Please don’t look for stuff that really doesn’t hold in practice.
Chpt 7 in Best-Worst Scaling: Theory, Methods and Applications. Louviere, Flynn & Marley (2015 CUP).
8 in Chinese numerology is considered to be lucky, would kicking the bucket @ 88 be double lucky?
Don’t get me started on Chinese numerology.
Apart from 4 being unlucky, there’s a number for flaccid and one for hard. These DID impinge upon those STUPID rating scale studies.
Let’s just leave it at that.
From memory, 88 is considered good, though bear in mind there are differences between Mandarin and Cantonese interpretations and I generally worked on studies involving the former and this was decades ago!
Huh? He just “recovered” from (probably) COVID plus a secondary opportunistic infection, and reports now indicated he died of a stroke, and COVID is a vascular disease. There is voluminous scientific literature that an infection increases your risk of stroke.
So, yeah, I guess that is “natural” causes in so far as everyone dies eventually.
The only thing that surprised me was that he survived for so long and with his marbles intact (unlike JP2).
Whatever I think of the values or morals of our leaders QE2 and Pope Francis sure had get up and go factor.
ex-PFC Chuck:
Indeed. Worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.
It seemed, though, that Vance spent much time carrying one of his kids as a prop and hoping to make his sour theology and pinched economics seem somehow human. (I recall Musk’s famous press conference in the Oval Office, holding J15-S22*, or whatever that unfortunate child’s name is.)
Now, though, newly minted convert Vance is likely to make some inept statements and involve himself with U.S. Catholic clerics who are only slightly to right of Francisco Franco. It will be a joy to behold.
*snigger*
(Come ON – I’ve made serious posts too today also…..and I’ll use the *allegedly* tag just to cover myself and the site. Plus anyone whose seen those TikTok vids knows what half the world thinks. I’ll keep my own opinions to myself. I only stoop to this level when the level is sooooooo low already thanks to the demonstrable actions of the people involved.)
COVID continues exacting its toll. Lesson learned from this? Once again, nothing.
The satirical news coverage of your point: https://newsthump.com/2025/04/21/pope-loses-will-to-live-after-meeting-jd-vance/
Gooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
The platoon was given R & R for Sede Vacante while awaiting chimney smoke as pontiff indicator-along with a Vatican City police report absolving JD of possibly giving Francis serious agita that resulted in the Pope’s passing… and frankly we needed time away from the daily grind of what all too often passes for society norms limbo, how low can you go?
Somehow, I cannot imagine that whoever is elected as the new pope, will in any way be similar to the character ultimately elected as new pontiff in the recent film Conclave.
It is also a good book IMO and might be worth a read at this point. Lots of fictional details about the intrigue and the process.
Nanni Moretti’s 2011 We Have A Pope with Michel Piccoli, available on Kanopy, takes us within
the fresco’d halls of the Vatican as the vote counting for the new Pope is dramatized–Cardinals praying to be passed over. Piccoli is the winner! but he can’t see it so he flees his handlers to wander among his people. A shrink’s brought in to get to the bottom of this; but some hot topics are verboten. And then there are the Cardinals, sealed in together: what to do. Soccer, of course.
Is there any doubt that given the chance, we might see Pope Donald*, as blowback for Francis?
Make America Genuflect Again
And yeah I know that despite adoring the very same Sky Daddy, evangs and Catholics don’t really see eye to eye on anything except breeding.
The book was entertaining but the conclusion was too far-fetched to be believable. On the other hand, I did hear that Chat-GPT 4o has declared itself up for the job, if the cardinals want a more than human candidate.
Cardinals: God’s Pope Team?
Part of me wants them to elect an African from a particularly homophobic diocese.
Then we can get rid of this church for good.
I speak as someone who during sermons at his RC church would read Viz comic in the organ loft (I was church organist). I was also invited to a Diocesan “meeting to agree music” where I (aged 13) was quickly siphoned off from the others because “Terry knows this stuff”. Well Terry certainly didn’t know what Scotch tasted like. I thankfully saw where things were going and noped out. Thus you might understand why I don’t exactly like the RC church. Neither does the police in the the East Midlands of the UK. (Not enough of them who can give the right handshake?)
The Institute for the Study of War piece is an interesting blend of evenhandedness and blatant propaganda. It actually cites Russian sources claiming Russia had observed the snap ceasefire over Easter called for by Putin. In contrast British media merely regurgitate Ukrainian claims that Russia violated the ceasefire on numerous occasions without mentioning Russian claims that Ukraine had failed to observed the ceasefire.
The article then strays into blatant bias claiming Russian forces had attacked and destroyed churches and killed priests etc. I have no idea how accurate such claims are, but I do know the Ukrainians have persecuted Russian orthodox priests and desecrated Russian orthodox churches and monastries as part of attempts to de-Russify Ukraine. Propaganda by omission as usual in western media.
You mean they claim that Russian forces had attacked and destroyed Russian churches and killed Russian priests. Uniats/Catholics are in Galicia, not in Donbass or Kursk. These claims go nicely with those of Russians attacking their own nuclear power plants.
Exactly. Zelensky has banned the Russian-linked Orthodox church and sacked various monasteries. Beggars belief that Russian forces have attacked orthodox churches and priests. As ever Zelensky projects.
As an addendum, Group of Forces North on its Telegram channel has just spent two days profusely apologizing for having to attack the “holy site” of the monastery in Gornal – and there aren’t even any monks there.
On the other hand, it would be just like the devious and scheming Russians to bomb, shoot, shell and otherwise flagellate themselvea, just so they could blame the peace-loving Ukrainians…
Any update on what happened with the Trump administration possibly issuing a declaration of a state of emergency discussed in Friday’s article by Richard Murphy?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/18/politics/pentagon-dhs-wont-recommend-insurrection-act/index.html
For now, Pentagon and DHS won’t recommend that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act
Good news for the moment then.
We know that trump always does whatever he’s told, by gob.
Fellow Chris, yes, for the moment.
I stand by my prior analysis though. Trump and people in his administration keep walking us up to the line. Sooner or later something will happen and we won’t be able to stop what happens after that. It will be driven by thermodynamics more than theater at that point. Entropy endlessly increasing as we all roll down hill on fire.
“Cucks vs. breeders”
‘[Musk fixer Jared] Birchall was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences, according to a person familiar with the matter.’
Didn’t Jeffrey Epstein have a similar plan for a breeding ranch for himslef?
Just sayin’.
Austin? That should be Salt Lake City, or the fictional spacecraft “LDSS Nauvoo.”
When you got more than 1 betrothed in the Zionsist movement, they call ’em:
‘Plural Wives’
It is said in such places that the plural for spouse is spice.
That must be why the Spaced Out Guild is always insisting that “The Spice must…..”
Very curious how “Rugged Individualist Alpha Males” seldom allow women to have agency. One could almost argue that such is a pathology.
You’ll notice how the tech bro culture fits neatly into this type. They call themselves bro for a reason you now.
In the words of my ex Wife “Just because you are right is no reason for me to agree with you”.
I’m sure there was a nonverbal/unwritten version of the snark tag associated with the comment…:/
Is there a good way to discern if it’s actually the Israel lobby going after Hegseth, or if that’s just a psyop?
I would speculate that this is the lobby’s version of putting a horse head in a bed.
Seeing the above articles on the proverbial sh-show inside the Pentagon….one can’t help wonder if Mr. Secretary Pete Hegseth is over his skies just a bit in this role. Everything falls under scrutiny, for good or for ill. I had his potential departure being early if it wasn’t first.
It’s all seeming or appearing that DoD leadership is, quite likely the polar opposite of the famed Wooderson quote from the film Dazed and Confused …”alright, alright, alright..”
Thanks for the beautiful kitty! Very regal
If it wasn’t for the fur, it would look like a porcelain statue.
Bryan Caplan – no, top STEM researchers belong in the academia to produce public knowledge for the benefit of everybody, incl. industries, not only for one company patenting the inventions and earning monopoly rent. In fact, most important research and researchers should be in the academia to produce publicly owned vaccines, antibiotics, energy technologies and making stuff without planned obsolesence etc.
The “industry” can focus on things that can be privately own like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSqxH6uDkDY
For those unfamiliar with his work, Caplan is among those mentioned in the New Statesman article linked today. He’s one of the lesser/ milder “bastards of neoliberalism” in the piece, coming from one of the hive-minds of libertarianism, George Mason U.
What I’ve seen in academic science as the most immediate short term impact of the funding cuts is a decrease on graduate admissions. It was much harder to get into graduate school this year. That’s where the funding cuts went because it was the easiest place to cut funding fast, to simply admit fewer graduate students on a 2025-2030 masters–>PhD track.
Note that this isn’t entirely bad. Quite frankly, some of my peers take on too many graduate students.
What I expect we’ll see in the following year or two will be far fewer postings for assistant professor positions. Those are usually posted between May and October, with offers made between February and April, so in most cases it was too late to be impacted by the cuts. But I expect impacts next year.
In the long run it’s anybody’s guess. The uncertainty is hard to deal with as it means departments can’t plan. We don’t know what’s going to happen with these cuts, or what the new steady state will be, or if there will even be a new steady state.
My impression is that obtaining an academic position in most STEM fields is very difficult. It has been so for decades. Most STEM students know they are most likely to end up in industry. (Since I teach physics at a public university, that’s the area I’m most familiar with, but my colleagues in other STEM fields would, I guess, agree with me.)
I often have to talk with a bright physics student who has thoughts of going in a more academic direction, since they see that I enjoy what I’m doing and that studying and teaching physics in a university setting seems like a good life and career. I tell them that they have to have a Plan B: academic jobs are scarce and require a large measure of luck to land in. Moreover, academia is being more and more stratified and enshittified like everything else. Even if a student ends up lucky enough to some years later to land a tenure-track job, there’s a good chance they’ll find themselves in a financially-strapped university and in a higher-education sector that is even deeper into its current hole.
OK, I’m going to agree with you but you may not like how I get there. My area of experience is around the E in STEM, and a part o fthe E that was as one of my advisors at the university put it when I complained, “history has shown us that humans will always put finding a better sword ahead of finding a better plow.”
First off, I went thru the University of California, and about a quarter of my Profs were doing what was research sponsored by the DOD in conjunction with some major MIC players. Nobody else really needed to better understand superplastic forming of titanium than somebody building airframes for high performance fighter jets. They were performing research which was deemed too risky, too out there for the actual companies to do – maintain the bottom line and all that. This was all the way back in the ’70’s.
Since then it’s gotten worse, unbelievably worse. I ended my career working for a very large aviation corporation where the tech fellows had informal, off the book classes on how to survive in meetings with upper management without getting kicked out of the meeting. Upper management in American industry has largely driven their companies into the dirt – look at Intel, Boeing, etc. Sending your gifted STEM researchers into American industry is sending them into a dead zone. American industry doesn’t do out there R&D anymore, it hardly did it even back in the day except for a handful of places like Bell Labs. It does what ever the CEO thinks Wall St wants, and not much more.
What he’s proposing is further neoliberal death to advancing science and technology in America. Until you flush out the current {family blogging} CEO deadbeats that run American industry, you aint going to see real progress sending your best and brightest there.
“Sending your gifted STEM researchers into American industry is sending them into a dead zone.”
What about sending them into foreign industry? After all, there are European, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese firms of all sizes out there, and many with subsidiaries in the USA. Yes, it may well require learning a foreign — even quite exotic — language to be able to make a career in them.
It’s been happening for a while:
Abandoning the US, More Scientists Go to China
https://www.cato.org/blog/abandoning-us-more-scientists-go-china
I’m not terribly happy about it, but I’m also at the point of recommending really bright STEM oriented high school students go to university some place where it is free, or very low cost because that’s what I did; it just may not be in America anymore. I was able to work, and put myself thru the university; that’s impossible today. And that’s how I know what my profs were doing for research; I worked for them down in the labs.
I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
I’ve got you all deep in doodoo with me
So deep in my heart that you’re really a part of me
I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
I’d tried so not to give in
I said to myself, “This SecDef affair never will go so well”
But why should I try to resist when, baby, I know so well
I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
I’d sacrifice anything come what might
For the sake of havin’ war near
In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night
And repeats, repeats in my ear
“Don’t you know, illustrated fool, you never can win?
Use your mentality, wake up to reality”
But each time that I do just the thought of peace makes me stop
Before I begin ’cause I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
I would sacrifice anything come what might
For the sake of havin’ war near
In spite of the warning voice that comes in the night
And repeats, how it yells in my ear
“Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win?
Why not use your mentality, step up, wake up to reality”
But each time I do just the thought of peace makes me stop
Just before I begin ’cause I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
Yes, I’ve got tattoos all over my skin
I’ve Got You Under my Skin, performed by Frank Sinatra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1AHec7sfZ8
I had recently been thinking the opposite: “Imagine the Democrats nominating someone as aggressive as Trump, but in reverse, smashing the oligarchy to protect regular people instead of the other way around. Well, it happened: FDR. He ended the depression, won WW2, and was re-elected three times!”
Does that formulation make any sense? Inequality decreased a lot in the 1930s even before WW2 arrived. And while the war was violent, it wasn’t domestic violence. I’ve been wanting to look up or compute the GINI index changes before the war.
FDR is a rare example, but his leverage was based on the clear threat of a communist revolution (and the successful example of a communist revolution in Russia). I sure don’t see anything forming in the U.S. that would provide leverage toward positive change. Conor’s excellent post today summarizes the Trump attacks on labor, but most of labor can’t even decide if it wants to fight him or join him.
It appears that Trump intends to do all he can to highlight the effectiveness of the Communist management of the most successful capitalist economy in the world: China.
We’ll get to watch Covid style inflation and goods shortages overlaid with mass unemployment and homelessness. The Tony Karon link today is excellent on Social Media as a pacification machine, Downward DOGE covers the new pinnacles of conspicuous consumptions our oligarchs are scaling, while Deep Dive covers the organization and intelligence Communist control is brining to bear economically against the settler colonial Empire.
Without the social control via Social Media, and our other highly orchestrated media, labor knows what it wants. Labor leadership is as independent as European Prime Ministers and Presidents, which is to say entirely creatures of “The Mighty Wurlitzer”. I think its going to be hot this summer.
Here’s a link to the new second Paul Krugman interview with Nathan Tankus in which he explains what is going on with Trump’s crazy economic policies. Krugman admits he doesn’t understand the “plumbing” of our economic system and Tankus does a great job of educating him, and hopefully everyone else.Worth a read.
Link:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/liquidity-volatility-and-market-craziness-paul-krugman-interviews-nathan-tankus-again/?ref=notes-on-the-crises-newsletter
Thanks very much for these links!
The dems consider themselves the sensible and smart right wing party, and the republicans are the less sensible and not as smart right wing party. There is no left. Cheap labor uber alles. It’s going to take more than a 20% nick on the market to herald improvements, and the drift of the gist according to our astute host is that it’s going to be a rough summer. For me, all bets are off, I haven’t the slightest clue what will happen. I am not sanguine.
Heck, at this stage, I’d take a centrist party– but there isn’t any of those either. So we’re stuck with a liberal Far-right party and a conservative Far-right party with no other parties or politicians or movements that are capable of moving the political discourse anywhere nears the center.
Such a party or parties would have to be started in particular states or smaller regions and localities and see if it could take, hold and use power in those settings. If it could do so and then survive long enough to keep doing so, perhaps it could scale itself up to national level.
Such a thing won’t happen all at once at the whole nation level.
Violence was a regular feature of the more than half-century struggle to unionize workers, which led up to the farmer-labor-Democrat coalition that elected FDR. Most of the time poor workers were on the receiving end of violence inflicted by private police forces and the state government controlled National Guard, but they returned fire and got to know the benefits of dynamite at points along the way. The state’s big claim is the legal prerogative to exercise violence, and if you’re not at least capable of challenging that, fire with fire, you end up helpless when the state is captured by criminal, antidemocratic forces. Which is pretty much where we are, and have been for a while now. The “court of public opinion” used to matter, so nonviolent responses to segregationist violence could win the 1960s civil rights battle, for example, but now the only opinions that count belong to billionaires and centimillionaires, and the public is just expected to take whatever slop narrative is fed to them via the plutocrat owned media channels.
Some of FDR’s support may have come from the formerly well-off who lost their family fortunes.
They were made instant members of the precariat.
For more than 20 years I worked for a Silicon Valley company that was founded by two non-wealthy engineers in the 1930’s.
The company founders did not want to be a “hire and fire” company and were reluctant to behave that way.
I remember the story of when another company agreed to be acquired at a certain price, but was paid more because the price was too low.
Truly a desecration of the “shareholder value” altar.
The last few generations of business leaders have been catered to by a US government that helps them when times are good and rescues those doing “God’s work” when times are bad.
And the well-off expect more of the same from both parties.
https://agr.wa.gov/departments/business-and-marketing-support/international/statistics
Top 10 Exports:
Rank Product Value % Change
1 Frozen French Fries $1.1 billion 2.87
2 Fish and Seafood $940 billion -12.32
3 Apples $845 million 23.65
4 Wheat $652 million -0.05
5 Dairy $564 million 0.96
6 Hay $485 million -12.26
7 Hop Cones and Extracts $323 mil 1.29
8 Beef $321 million -1.86
9 Fresh Sweet Cherries $293 23.14
10 Pulses $207 million 12.18
And these are the crops and farmers and processors and laborers that will be harmed terribly!
Top 10 Markets:
Rank Country Value % Change
1 Canada $1.4 billion 0.03
2 Japan $1.1 billion -0.05
3 Mexico $908 million 0.32
4 China $693 million -0.19
5 South Korea $508 mil 0.02
6 Philippines $377 mil 0.10
7 Taiwan $315 million -0.02
8 Indonesia $239 mill 0.17
9 Hong Kong $176 mill 0.04
10 Vietnam $159 million 0.01
tariffs will do huge harm to Washington exports
Here is some more numbers about the major drop in soybeans and wheat and exports to China from the US.
Not good. 8 min video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nADbVedF7xw&t=315s
considering that soy and wheat are overwhelmingly if not completely gmo, possibly good for china but I somehow doubt that china is against that sort of thing.
Thus far, GM wheat is not grown commercially in the u.s., although a relatively new drought-resistant strain, HB4, is being tested. Farmer resistance to GM wheat is based primarily on what foreign markets will tolerate. farmboy can pipe up here to correct me if I am wrong.
Genetically modified wheat approved for U.S. testing, but may not be boon for Northwest farmers
Thanks!
“The bastards of neoliberalism” continues the excellent work Slobodian began with his Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36738613-globalists
Though he doesn’t reference it in this piece, one of the things which struck me most was how profoundly anti-democratic Hayek and Mises were — how they despised the nationalist revolutions characterized by the mass franchise which trailed in the wake of the (first round of) demolition of the European dynastic empires, and yearned for the aristocratic Austrian Empire of their youth. Is it any wonder that all the fruits of their academic works are so virulently poisonous to the well-being of working people?
Spa town spies: Czech church linked to Kremlin kompromat campaign Euractiv
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Growing up as a Bohemian’s Bohemian in the SoCalist Movement meant going to hot springs out in the palm desert, which always attracted those with some accent left over (1948 Czech immigrants) or heavily accented English (1968 Czech immigrants) and little did I know then, but it was as close as it came to a national identity-soaking in hot springs.
I run into soakers from the old country quite a bit in my wanderings, its what we do.
Russians have always been attracted to places such as Karlovy Vary, i’m not surprised with the spy connection…
You think that those Russians spies were trying to find out the secret recipe for the Czech national dish of Vepřo knedlo zelo aka pork roast with dumplings & sauerkraut?
In this war, the Czech government have really gone gung-ho against the Russians while the Slovakians have been very much laid back about the whole thing. Maybe it is just as well they split all those years ago.
I’m 50.0000364% Czech and 49.9999636% Slovak, and the former has always looked down on the latter, so you can only imagine the struggle.
Personally I’m half Scotch and half Soda myself.
I guess i’d be 1/2 Becherovka, ha.
The first time I flew to Prague in 1997, we were waiting for friends coming in on another flight and waltzed over to the bar where a 1/2 liter of Pilsner Urquel was a princely 71¢, hadn’t they got the memo about airport gouging?
My nephew greets us and I tell him about the cheap suds and he shrugs and tells me I got ripped off, as 1/2 liters at his favorite pub in town are 25¢.
Food and booze were equally giveaway cheap for awhile, I remember tasty restaurant meals setting me back $2 to $3.
Summer 20p5 we visited Prague and Chesi Krumlov as tourists. Dinner at restaurant in Prague the entire group of diners had a shot of becherovka together!
Great crowd we sat with a French tourist hauling compact trailer around Europe.
The menu at a small country restaurant still had borsch as if the armed army soldiers were coming in for dinner.
That first visit to Prague we were walking down a street and spied an old west mural on a wall and the sound of familiar country and western songs emanating from a cellar restaurant/bar below, with all of the words in Czech, think Willie Nelson and such, it was amazing.
The 1 key word to know is Pivo, which will get you a beer on the double, and we ordered up and our waitress brought out a menu of 10 items for lunch, and they were all in Czech with a western name, so I threw hazard to the wind and ordered us a John Wayne and a Clint Eastwood.
Not sure the Duke would have approved of a chicken breast with peach on top, or that Clint would turn out to be goulash.
Ordering Clint Eastwood means that you feel lucky.
i always wanted to go there.
the Czech 1/4 of me hails from a suburb to the south of Prague(which my grandad pronounced “Praha”)….called Dubinec…or Duvinek.
i found it on google earth, back what that was free.
i can trace that line back to the mid 1700’s and a guy named Voitek.
the language, however,lol….i can pick through russian much easier than Czechia.
lots of Czech descendants around here, in the texas hill country, it turns out.
You ought to go, its your heritage, and because the Brits and French were still in an appeasing mood in early 1939, the goose steppers came in without knocking and nobody did nothing.
This meant Prague was for the most part relatively untouched by the war, and what a city, walk 5 blocks on Rococo architecture, turn the corner and its blocks of Art Nouveau and so it goes.
That first trip, i’m going through passport control, and the official looks through my passport, and bangs away on the QWERTY a bit and says ‘your parents come here often’, and hands me my passport back and smiles and says…
‘Welcome Home’
I’ve been through passport control hundreds of times all over the world, but I can’t really remember anything about them, but this greeting to a gringo from the states, wow.
As an amateur who likes to sing classical choral works just for fun, I go to Czechia every summer to take part in a workshop offered by La Pellegrina, a long-running music project based in the Netherlands.
For many years the workshops were held in Bechyně, a village south of Prague, but recently for logistical reasons the organizers have had to relocate operations to České Budějovice (Budweis, original home of “Budweiser”).
https://pellegrina.net/
On COVID and DNA Demethylation.
True, “Covid infection is dysregulating methylation”, but how? They have shown no DIRECT mechanism. Well, let me share one possible indirect mechanism; Viral infections cause nutritional deficiencies the trigger methylation changes. With viruses, the most relevant deficiency is Zinc. Let me explain.
“Tern” brings up methyltransferases, enzymes that methylate genes. These are the DNMT genes, like DNMT1.
It you look up DNMT1, you will see it has a binding site specifically for Zinc.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P26358/entry
So, does a zinc deficiency lower DNMT activity? Yes:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28421879/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0946672X21000213
So if COVID lowers methylation rates, and zinc deficiency lowers methylation artes, is that not a relevant correlational study to perform?
IMHO, since Zinc is crucial to immune function, the effect of fighting off the viruses leads to a zinc deficiency in many people which leads to lower methylation rates. I have not seen one study that checks zinc levels before and after viral infection, and that is sad, becawsue we could probably reverse all the diabetes, cancer, and Long COVID caused by the infection.
Zinc was put forth as a treatment for Covid-19 in conjunction with hydroxychlorquine which my understanding is it assists in uptake of zinc. Also it has been shown that Ivermectin assists in the reset of bacteria in the digestive track which may explain why it may help immune system. A video on Vejon Health channel digs deep into the gut aspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTanhwMJ0EQ
That is the type of basic research that is sorely lacking, basic foundational research on the interaftion of nutrients and health….even before 2016 Trump. The EU could fill that gap, but don’t.
In the U.S. zinc has been something of a folk remedy for some time. Despite official sanctions, it is currently sold over-the-counter as the predominant ingredient of Airborne. My extended family and I had used Airborne fairly regularly, but since Covid we have largely replaced its use with povidone iodine nasal sparay (easy and cheap DIY mix) on the theory that it’s better to prevent infection than to mitigate infection’s sequelae.
“Editorial | Netanyahu Is Considering a Limited Strike on Iran – That Is Complete Insanity”
You know what? I say let them go for it. In fact, I give them my blessing. Tell them to hit Iran with all the aircraft that they have. But tell them that they can do it on their own. So no US tanker aircraft, no US EW aircraft, no US rescue helicopters – zip. Make it an all Israeli effort so it they get shot down the US won’t be dragged into that mess. I suppose it might be a bit different fighting a real war than just bombing helpless civilians and embassies but hey, variety is the spice of life. See what happens when some of them have to punch out of their aircraft and parachute into Iran a very long walk from Israel. But just remind them that Iran has just installed a new radar system that will let them see Israeli aircraft taking off right from the get-go and that their radar systems will light up those super-duper F-35s like a Christmas tree-
https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/army-news-2024/iran-deploys-800-km-over-the-horizon-radar-in-northwest-capable-of-detecting-us-rq-4-global-hawk
You’d think Kosher Nostra wouldn’t want Bay of Pigs-the sequel?
You’ll have to take that up with your local Representative’s AIPORC Handler. (I bet none of them squeal.)
…don’t be shelfish
I’ve been trying not to horn in on the proceedings. Sho far sho good.
Not-So-Cold-War
The question of the day for some might be…what does Trump Team mean when they say they’ll move on and walk away from the Ukraine war if they don’t obey his commands and agree to stop fighting? Will he end support to Ukraine? Will he stick to walk away for more than 24 hours?
Will the military high command in the USA itself disobey the orders of Trump, as it did in the past regarding Syria?
I don’t think that Trump will ever leave the Ukraine. For him, it would be walking away from all that money on the table. That would be how he would see it.
Leave Ukraine, no. But Trump doesn’t care who permanently signs over Ukraine’s resource base to his cronies.
Putin could end the war, on his terms, and get sanctions on Russia lifted within a month, if he was OK with turning part of Ukraine into a 21st century Belgian Congo on Trump’s behalf.
Maybe, maybe not.
Which is stronger – his love of money or his love of self?
Or put another way – at what point will him looking like an idiot outweigh his love of self-enrichment?
It’s a thermobaric bomb. That’s it. I have never seen term nuclear used so many times in an article that has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear stuff. This comment is also non-nuclear.
I think that you are right here. The term ‘nuke’ seems to be there to push a few panic buttons, especialy that video clip of the size of nukes. Oddly enough as I was reading this article, I could not help but ask myself if it was more environmentally friendly than napalm. The mind is a strange thing – and some more strange than others.
Really odd. According to the article the bomb is just 2kg, that sounds like an artillery shell. Also, if you subtract the casing and the Mg how much hydrogen is really there? It sounds like the equivalent of a quart of gasoline or less. Gasoline also makes a big blast if you mist it and ignite it.
There is some journalistic malpractice going with the photograph. The small print caption says it is a stock photo of a large explosion. That looks as though it came from something much larger than 2kg.
That’s what I was thinking. Its a fuel-air bomb. The constant invocation of “hydrogen” seems designed to make it seem thermonuclear-scary. Whereas actually burning the hydrogen released from its magnesium storage-partner is conventional-weapons scary.
This LARPer is even worse than the chick posing with the rifle the other day.
>How Trump Is Helping Price Gougers Exploit His Tariffs – The Lever
Good piece on bad outcomes to a no-plan plan. After the prices go up, even for things not even directly linked to tariffs, they will not be coming back down.
yep – the more they change the more they stay the same – doubt you expected any other outcome – just a sardonic observation – it’s what happened after the incoming tide of covid price increases never receded –
c’est la vie
Regarding prices going down after taxes are dropped: we were all pleasantly surprised in western Canada a couple weeks ago after our provincial government suddenly cancelled their carbon tax. The next day gas prices fell the full 15¢ per litre that they were supposed to, and have stayed down there. I think we all expected the gas companies to keep a significant portion of the savings, but not this time…
So your provincial government dropped the carbon tax which is meant to limit, to whatever degree, the carbon emissions. The gas companies understood that the 15¢ per litre is a direct tax at the point of sale, they couldn’t touch it.
Tariffs, on the other hand are complex. They are collected at the point of entry but there is pipeline after that. It will be difficult to figure out who is bad guy. When their prices don’t go down with any change of tariff, some may claim: look, we were eating it before, now we are just trying to catch up.
I don’t know how a nation that proclaims to be the “beacon of democracy” can be in support of governments that proceed to administer and or support Genocide or support Torture and or promote policies withot due process, habeus corpus and other bullwarks against tyranny … those bulwarks, which provide the oxygen that allows the candle of freedom to burn… it is a hypocracy that is being deliberatly obfuscated through smarmy political engineering and absurd Orwellian meta-logic…magical dystopia. – Of course this is my view and opinion. Just absurd that we have many politicians putting forward the Idea that should they speak out in favor of supporting the constitution they fear the reprocussions, and reprisals…..I mean really???? With all the talk of defending democracy and bravery…why compromise your own purported ideals as it shows a color not noted for demonstrating bravery and patriotism. Is it because, as a member of either house, you have suborned and perjured your own declaration to uphold the constitution through your fealty to the almighty dollar and fear in the face of calamity???? I don’t know? maybe you all could speak up a bit about the global attrocities and take some responsibility for your collective actions instead of suborning the voices of justice, freedom and liberty for sake of your own selfish distopian fears and dreams … Just, at least talk about it with your constituents honestly of your intentions and end-states
Dagnabbit – of on a tangent again –
I do hope that China issues some statement to the effect that the tech they have developed can not be used for purposes or cover-up of human rights and genocidal activities of any nation – that it be used for progress and advancement of liberty and not used for tyranny and repression via violations of inalienable rights-
It appears to me that
Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party has been busy to bury and or destroy any evidence as to the extent of his activities and that he would be keen to use what china has developed to aide in his rampage.
“China’s non-nuclear hydrogen bomb generates fireball to burn targets at 1800°F: Report Interesting Engineering
This weapon has some other potential benefits beyond its destructive capabilities. Since it is not nuclear-based, for example, it can be developed without breaching nuclear treaties.
If fully developed and deployed, it would also introduce a new class of thermal weapons that can fry electronics, melt armor, or torch an area for denial purposes.”
I should think that any good state-sponsored weapons engineers could duplicate this after they have read about it, even if the state-sponsor is a small state.
Xi Jinping
(Sung to the tune of, “TNT” by AC/DC)
Melody
See me deride the Yankee hoarders of their Apple iPhone screens
Out for all that they can get, if you know what I mean
Tariffs to the left of me, trade wars to the right
Ain’t got no gun, ain’t got no knife, don’t you start no fight
Cause I’m Xi Jinping
(I’m Dyn-a-mite!)
Xi Jinping
(And I’ll win the fight)
Xi Jinping
(I’m a power load)
Xi Jinping
Hope you’ve got gold!
I’m sovereign, mean, I’ll never concede
To Trump’s mad demands
A public enema ain’t much fun
Understand?
So lock up your daughter, lock up your wife
Lock up your bitcoin and run for your life
The man is back in town, so
Don’t you mess around
Cause I’m Xi Jinping
(I’m Dyn-a-mite!)
Xi Jinping
(And I’ll win the fight)
Xi Jinping
(I’m a power load)
Xi Jinping
Hope you’ve got gold!
[guitar]
Xi Jinping (oi! oi! oi!)
Xi Jinping (oi! oi! oi!)
Xi Jinping (oi, oi, oi!)
Xi Jinping
(I’m dyn-a-mite)
Xi Jinping
(And I’ll win the fight)
Xi Jinping
(I’m a power load)
Xi Jinping
Hope you’ve got gold!
I have to say that is outstanding…and the track being utilized is a different rhythm versus other choices to make from the Aussie rockers. Feels like in 2025 the American people are getting…”Thunderstruck!…”
Hell’s bells, it’s a dollar bloodbath!
They are getting on a highway to …
Stoller has been writing some good columns since the advent of Trump including today on fascism and monopoly.
Not long ago I re-read William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp which talks about how the Krupp’s thought German culture demanded a strong man form of government and when Hitler came along he was their boy. Eventually of course who was working for whom got sorted out but Hitler never turned against the company that once made battleships and made all those tanks and guns for his army.
Cut to now and we have our own Krupps of course called Boeing and Lockeed and Raytheon. If there seemed a ray of light in the Trumps it was that they were in the real estate business rather than the lobbying for the MIC business like so much of DC.
Of course now that Trump is committing so many extreme and authoritarian actions it’s tempting to make “walks like a duck” comparisons between now and the 1930s. But here’s suggesting it’s that MIC scaffolding that tempts Trump the egotist to act the part but perhaps not the intention. War and mayhem may be good for the arms business–for the hotel business not so much.
It’s a slender hope that doesn’t help all those already fired or killed but a hope. And for so many Dems like Hillary and Biden who go on about fascism a mirror would be a handy accessory.
War was Krupp’s business model. It sold to everyone on every side. The more war the better… for Krupp. / ;)
Stopped-clock Dems like Hillary and Biden can be right twice a day.
And even a blind Dem finds a fascist acorn now and then.
It might be more useful to actually look at what the Trump Regime is doing early on and what the Hitler Regime did early on and see how they compare with eachother or not.
Like the other 329,984,326 of you in the USA, i’m curious how bad the tariffs-a tax, are going to be, and it’ll be tantamount to a Kessler Effect with all other prices going up in concert, so there’s that.
I tend to buy the same food over and over again, and have the prices practically seared into my noggin, what would a rather all of the sudden 20% rise in prices-against no rise in salary, do to rankle the pleasantry?
I like the Kessler analogy. That might propagate well to peel away more of the very online right .
Of all the things I craved during Covid, getting a haircut was right up there after enduring my better half’s $30 internet razor efforts by managing not to look in the mirror much,
Used to be $20 for a haircut and shave pre-Covid, was $32 when I finally felt vaxed up enough to get ‘R done, and then went up to $40, after which when I went to plan B barber, who is cheaper and has held the line @ $35.
This despite the price of razors not going up~
Having Long COVID I no longer go to barbers. I have learnt, via double mirrors and a certain degree of “ignore what you see, go where you feel”, to now cut my own hair perfectly adequately.
Plus my barber turned out to be a Bulgarian criminal! He even ADMITTED what EU rules he was breaking (at that time) and his (much cleverer) wife told him to STFU (if google translate is to be believed).
They were money laundering. I’ve since looked up on YouTube why there are a frankly uneconomic number of barbers and nail salons in cities like mine…….maybe Reform UK should, in its quest for honest Britishness, be going after the money launderers…..silly me…..the world doesn’t work like that.
ive cut my own for 30 years…ever since i moved to the wilderness.
and by “cut”, i mean cut the windknots out…with whatever is to hand(scissors, wire cutters, a knife).
so not much cutting, at all.
its down my back to between my shoulderblades, and seems intent on going no further.
my beard, however…grows like weeds.
i let it run upon the autumnal eqinox, and by the time i trim it down to summer’s handlebar/doorknocker mode on the vernal equinox, its well past my man-nips.
of course, i dont hafta ‘represent’ in my doins…save for bein me.
i only bother cutting the windknots so’s i can brush it all out if i go to town…in case i run into a woman who digs crazy redneck hippie farmer guys(one never knows…had relatively decent luck all 3 times my cousin dragged me on a bar crawl)
Hehe you keep us grounded. TBH the main reason I don’t let my hair grow out is that it’ll be the “Tony Blair” look.
Plus when short the docs can assess more easily the waxing and waning of the patches of alopecia associated with long COVID flare up.
Well, they may be money laundering I suppose. I have no idea how that would work.
But, the last time I was in Worcester a couple of years ago visiting my Mum, I counted at least 12 Barbers on one street in the middle of town. And several more in the surrounding streets.
They were all full, so not completely uneconomic. The youth have an obsession with tattoos, haircuts and beards that nobody did when I was their age.
Next time in the big city, or even medium town, look up a barber college. Those used to be good for cheap haircuts. Not necessarily good haircuts, but the price is right.
Since retiring I have reduced the frequency of getting my flat-top done from once a month to between every 6 weeks to two months. I use a set of clippers on the sides after 4 weeks and nobody seems to be any the wiser until about 8 weeks when the top begins to become noticeably longer.
I can’t tolerate any longer than 6 week intervals during the warmer months — it just feels hotter
file under groves of Academe, an oldie (2023) but a goodie. / ;
Harvard gets worst score ever in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings
https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-fires-college-free-speech-rankings
“Germany bets on volunteers to fix a hollowed-out army — but will it work?”
In a word, no. Most Germans, if asked to join the Bundewehr to risk their lives for people like Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, would reply ‘Sind Sie verrückt?’ as in are you crazy? More so if there was the possibility to be sent to the Ukraine and risk their lives for someone like Zelensky. Do they even have the guns anymore to equip all those recruits as well as the heavy equipment? I think that you will find that the cupboard is bare except for an IOU from Zelensky.
In order to have a chance of winning a war once, Germans should split in two and fight each other. In that case, migrants might organize their own teams for full Bundesliga, Balkan style.
SignalGate 2.0 ***** Looks like even MSM (well if you can call ZH that) is noticing a pattern of attacks upon those within Trump team who are in opposition to the US launching an attack upon Iran. Hegseth now, Hehseth’s aid earlier. If Trump wants to go out as a martyr, suppose he could threaten to classify AIPAC as a foreign agent and smash CIA into a thousand peices.
Signal was a magazine published by the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany from 1940 through 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(magazine)
“The complex origin story of domestic cats: Research points to Tunisia”
I’ve actualy got this article bookmarked to go over slowly with a cup of coffee tomorrow. It has some really good stuff in it and it may have been the Romans that helped spread cats across the empire. There is one part that is duplicitous though and that has to do with the title. Thanks to the psyops that cats do on us, when we see the term ‘domestic cats’, we imagine that it is the cats that have been domesticated.
Lotsa cat statues from ancient Egypt and they were quite revered in that it was felines who were the foremen in building the pyramids, workers just did whatever the moggies told them.
File also under groves of academe:
Jimmy Dore and Norman Finkelstein, utube, ~14+ minutes.
“Jewish Donors Are Responsible For Most Brazen Assault On Academic Freedom!” – Norman Finkelstein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PbAnL4-po
I remember several Ivy presidents who got demoted or fired after they came under attack by wealthy donors for allowing “too much free speech” on campus.
Dore I avoid, but will watch for Finkelstein. Thanks.
thanks!
p.s. any views on ATW over just a few minutes ago?
Once in a while I find the time to listen throughout the 2 hours while baking…like today
C02 numbers:
Just when i’d gotten so used to predictability, the atmosphere has other plans as The Big Heat® bears down on an unsuspecting planet.
The opening chapter of The Ministry For the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind~
Got a dose of what sustained high heat can do last July when temps for the day held @ over 110 for nearly a fortnight.
Some of my Blue Oaks leaves turned goldenrod, which should really happen in later October-not mid-July.
2 of them died in the meantime, and unlike yours truly they couldn’t hide inside a shaded house with air conditioning during the thermal maelstrom.
Has there ever been a period of History when so many of the “Elites” were so obviously delusional or overtly insane?
“Batshit Crazy” as Yves puts it?
Arrogant, venal and stupid “Elites” are nothing new, however what we are seeing now is extraordinary in historical terms.
The simplest explanation is anosognosia, Covid induced brain damage.
When I look at Trump it seems that the brakes have failed and the steering wheel doesn’t work, age might explain some of this but I think there is more at work.
And he is far from alone.
Our elite crave exclusivity, as if a commoner could afford a $400k wafer thin Swiss watch, or a 417 foot yacht… while we’re wearing a Timex on a 914 foot long cruise ship with 5,150 on board in total including the crew.
Amounts in terms of numbers have skyrocketed. It took the Dow Jones a decade to top 1,000 points back in the day, and it wasn’t uncommon for a 1960’s era pinball machine to give you a replay if say you got 1,500 points, played a modern pinball machine last month and needed 2,500,000 for a replay, and it wasn’t all that different than the older model, it just gave you a lot more points for doing stuff.
I remember when the ASX200 went back over 5000 after the GFC, in 2013. It had taken 5 years to get back up there.
People were cheering and backslapping like crazy.
It was recently 8500, higher than it has ever been, although down below 8000 now. Nobody batted an eyelid.
Bigger and bigger numbers are expected and normal. Except when they are not.
What about the late Roman empire, with brains affected by centuries of lead in water pipes, cooking utensils, and even sauces?
What about 18th century Europe, with an inbred and syphilitic nobility?
Novara Media, YouTube 1:11:45
How Israel Became A Fascist State | Aaron Bastani meets Ilan Pappé
It was a foundational delivery by Pappé.
Novara are pretty good on Palestine. Not so much on Ukraine. Also, quite obsessed with identity politics.
Sort of left wing New Labour, if you can imagine something like that.
They’re also another outfit that basically ignored Galloway during the last UK election because Galloway is not sufficiently “woke” (just using that word for shorthand but it requires a long parenthesis).
I imagine they probably feel the same about the BSW in Germany. They are unfortunately obsessed with identity politics and cannot get their heads around the idea that the left needs to,
abandon that and concentrate on class. Basically, I suppose, because they are most definitely not Marxists.
I saw a comment of yours the other day recommending them and felt a little uncomfortable with it. I don’t rate them that highly.
Although definitely better than MSM like the BBC but that is a very low,bar.
I like Bastani, but don’t have a lot of use for the rest of them.
They were horrible on Syria as well and the Twitter poster Eyup Lovely has been unveiling Owen Jones lying about his attendance at very Zionist sex parties. They went after Corbyn, they went after Syria, and I can’t imagine them saying anything good about Iran. They’ve always condemned Hamas as a movement and still support the right of Israel to exist as a state.
They’re radlib Al Jazeera. Saying a couple things in favor of Palestinians but undermining every state and movement in world that actually supports Palestinian liberation.
Signing bombs to: putin is unhinged cosplay.
re: Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere TechCrunch
There’s a bit of a fatal flaw with this plan. How can AI replace workers when they themselves can’t do their own jobs?
Trump calls Jay Powell a “major loser”
Man, it’s almost as if he wants to crash the Dow … and jack gold to $5000/oz.
The Dread Pirate Powell is the only thing we have going for us right now.
Whatever Major Loser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtcEf0kLziQW
That clip pretty much sums up the emotional maturity level of our Orange Julius.
Bonus track:
Loser – Beck
All it takes for little Anthony Fremont-all grown up now, is a pair of vocal chords in which to strangle standards of decency in our country, and nobody wants to get tossed in the scorned field, so the sycophants say ‘Oh Donald, that was your best put down yet!’
Major Lazer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqeW9_5kURI
I’ve heard Lawrence Taylor is being considered for leading the Department of Defense, now that 90 Day Wonder Pete has been shown the door.
Aaron Rodgers was also considered, but he’s not sure he wants the job.
Dak Prescott was also initially considered, as he has made so many defenses appear so good playing against him.
Dak reminds me of an old coaches quote:
“He’s just good enough to get you beat!”
Source unknown … Bum Phillips, or maybe Buddy Ryan?
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fell victim to a thief while eating dinner at a downtown Washington, DC, restaurant Sunday night, the secretary confirmed Monday.
Noem, who was asked about the theft at the White House Easter Egg Roll, acknowledged the incident and said the matter has not been resolved.
The Secret Service, which provides security for Noem, reviewed security camera footage at the restaurant and saw an unknown white male wearing a medical mask steal her bag and leave the restaurant, a law enforcement source said.
The thief got away with Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Contours, from 1965
Be a crying shame if that $50k Rolex Daytona was also in the purse, but not reported missing.
Noem showing how good she is at security. $3000 cash and her passport? Was she planning on fleeing the country or buying drugs?
Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere – TechCrunch
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.html
White House Assesses Ways To Persuade More Women To Have Children
Bring in more child support? Nah, just kidding.
re: Taibbi/Kirn ATW in 2 hours
ATW Livestream Tonight at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT
https://www.racket.news/p/atw-livestream-tonight-at-8-pm-et7-33b
“Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration plans to cut another $1 billion in funding to Harvard. This comes after Trump demanded that Harvard crack down on pro-Palestinian student protesters and give the federal government more say over the school’s enrollment, staffing, and curriculum. The administration claims that Harvard and other prestigious universities have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, but its demands go further than calls for Title VI enforcement.
Meanwhile, the White House launched COVID.gov, a webpage devoted to explaining “the true origins of COVID-19.” And Luigi Mangione was hit with federal charges, making him eligible for the death penalty.
Matt and Walter will take a look at some or all of these stories on tonight’s episode of America This Week.”
p.s.
I have difficulties with the serious assertion there is an antisemitism problem while not remaining mute about that ongoing racism towards everyone but Jews. And as Aaron Maté has repeatedly warned. Those cases that made the national news since Oct.2023 were agents provocateurs. Rashid Khalidi too warned of exaggerations.
I did read some of IM DOC´s comments recently. I cannot judge any of that. Only absorb it. That´s one wrinkle with personal accounts and experience. We trust the witness. But what does it help us with a critique at large.
If we take hatred of Russians among Ukrainians would that surprise anyone?
Well in the case of a self-proclaimed Jewish state, exterminating the other side by design, it is not a single war, it is a status quo for 80+ years.
To be vengeful in such instances is not unusual. But even that does not mean it is racist by nature. This was already acknowledged by White Hall after the Arab uprising in the late 1930s which was brutally crushed. Brits stated without any doubt that this was anti-colonial. NOT antisemitic. We have less insight now it appears.
So if I suggest Jews in Israel are this or that, am I antisemtic automatically? No.
The question is how does my argument look like.
And then: Does any one clamp down on racism against non-whites in the US in this insane manner?
For instance when was it the last time Native Americans were cause of some scandal á la “antisemitism.” This term has become an evil vehicle.
Taking the realities into consideration by now I am almost certain that RACKET is maneuvering in the light of what is going on trying to stay out of trouble. So much about First Amendment.
sorry time ran out…
edit: “while _ remaining mute”
Microplastics found in human ovary follicular fluid for the first time The Guardian
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have fond memories of riding the follicular, now polluted with micro oil byproducts.
…is nothing sacred?
re: Germany
Patrick Lawrence: Part 2 of his Germany-series
Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines
https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/21/patrick-lawrence-germany-in-crisis-part-2-a-short-history-of-exploding-gas-pipelines/
BYD story
That is amazing, I can’t imagine that the US car companies have anything close to that level of vertical integration or broad market penetration.
I don’t know how it’s possible to catch up to that.
That article about how Trump is helping price-gougers take advantage of his tariffs, plus the little Xitter item about how even if tariffs are ended, the higher prices will stay higher, leads me to suggest a new word.
That new word is . . . tarifflation. If anyone thinks it has promise, feel free to go ahead and give it a try.