Links 5/17/2025

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1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 7:20 am

   “Trump’s China Tariffs Seen Staying at 30% Through Late 2025”

   That 30% needs to be broken down a bit. The true tariff on China, in a way, is the 10% tariff that Trump is putting on every country as a base standard. But then stacked up on top of that is a 20% tariff that the US has placed on China to pressure them to crack down on the illegal fentanyl trade. Added together gives that 30% tariff which lets Trump show his supporters that he is being tough on China-

   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx0ry7kdk5o
   1. Unironic Pangloss May 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

      tbh, the 30% rate is “fair” (ymmv) and manageable.

      If I was dictator, I just would have gotten there in 10% steps over 3 years….not by threatening to drive the entire world over a cliff, and kicking that Sword of Damocles down the road for 90 days
      1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 7:47 am

         But you don’t understand. Trump had to prove to the whole world his virility and what a tough guy he is so that all those countries would line up to kiss his ***. His words, not mine. You are talking about a classic shakedown here and Trump and his team are just a bunch of Goodfellas. It’s a good thing that this will never, ever backfire on the US, even after Trump has left the scene. (eye roll)
      2. snafu May 17, 2025 at 9:23 am

         Threatening to drive the entire world over a cliff, and kicking that Sword of Damocles down the road for 90 days is why a dictator would bother with the whole thing in the first place. It’s ego boosting show of power, that can only be topped by bombing some defenseless people.
   2. Psychic Meep May 17, 2025 at 10:08 am

      “On the War Room, Jason Miller explained what is actually happening. According to Miller, “we have 50 percent tariffs on China, they have 10 percent on us”.
      He got to that figure by adding the 10 percent baseline tariff rate plus the 20 percent fentanyl tariff rate plus the 20 percent tariff rate from Trump’s first term.”

      Per The Daily Doom Substack
2. Unironic Pangloss May 17, 2025 at 7:36 am

   ooooo, dark humour time. I really hope that there is a “full” blockade of the Houthis

   as then perhaps the world will see if the Houthis were really holding back its punches.

   Grab your beer and popcorn, fellow war nerds.
   1. SZ May 18, 2025 at 2:05 am

      All due respect, I would rather k*** myself than call myself a “war nerd”
      1. 4zr May 18, 2025 at 9:29 am

         Would rather the war nerds did that.
3. Will May 17, 2025 at 8:00 am

   here’s a link to an article about the smallest dala horse
   https://www.umu.se/en/news/art-meets-nanotechnology–the-worlds-smallest-dala-horse-created-at-umea-university_12084976
   1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 17, 2025 at 8:04 am

      Yes, just fixed with the translate version.
4. hemeantwell May 17, 2025 at 8:03 am

   Seconding Yves’ cheer over the departure of Timothy Snyder, the World Socialist Website recently provided a thorough lambasting of his Bloodlands screed. The review makes it clear that he’s nothing more than an academic apparatchik insulated from responsible peer criticism, of which there’s quite a lot.
   1. Paleobotanist May 17, 2025 at 9:15 am

      Wait a minute! Why should us Canucks have him inflicted on us, USA? What has gotten in to you Southerners lately? You have become quite the trial as neighbors lately!
      1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:20 am

         Don’t worry. He may be heading to Canada but that doesn’t mean that he will necessarily get there. (ominous music starts playing)
         1. Wukchumni May 17, 2025 at 9:33 am

            He’ll need a safe house in the Gulag Hockeypelago and a new identity, I suggest Uri Snyderchuk.
      2. jrkrideau May 17, 2025 at 3:33 pm

         I agree. I’ve read one or two of his ravings. Still fair is fair; they got Ted Cuz. Just think of Skippy AND Cruz!
      3. eg May 18, 2025 at 2:12 am

         I’m with you, Paleobotanist — Snyder is surplus to requirements north of the border here. What a hack he is … 🤢
   2. Emma May 17, 2025 at 11:10 am

      Grover Furr actually published an entire book years ago meticulously debunking basically every part of the book. Furr was only able to publish because his day job is in an entirely different academic field.

      https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Lies-Evidence-Accusation-Bloodlands/dp/0692200991
      1. AG May 17, 2025 at 2:14 pm

         Thanks!!

         On a related note as Furr did work on Katyn too, from 2015:

         Grover Furr: The “Official” Version of the Katyn Massacre Disproven? Discoveries at a German Mass Murder Site in Ukraine
         https://espressostalinist.com/2015/03/22/grover-furr-the-official-version-of-the-katyn-massacre-disproven-discoveries-at-a-german-mass-murder-site-in-ukraine/

         A YT piece by Furr from 2020
         Grover Furr on the Katyn Massacre
         88 min.
         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZb64uwxUrs

         Less scholarly and a piece of fiction the Katyn movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda:

         Engl. subs
         KATYN (2007)
         121 min.
         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljJXenEMi2w
         info:
         https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0879843/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1

         Since the Polish Cavalry in WWII was mentioned here a few days ago, Wajda also did a period piece about that:

         LOTNA (1959)
         POL + RU subs
         87 min.
         https://vk.com/video-64237967_167611012?ysclid=masjl6eu9w453476749
         info:
         https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0053019/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_53

         Wajda´s best movie IMHO however, DANTON, also on YT:
         here the ENGL. dubbed version though:

         DANTON (1983)
         136 min.
         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpnT4xBr8-I
         info:
         https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0083789/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_27
      2. Darthbobber May 17, 2025 at 4:26 pm

         Furr is one of a handful of writers even more problematic than Snyder.

         He goes so far as to accept confessions extracted under torture as evidence for the total legitimacy of the Stalinist show trials.
         1. Emma May 17, 2025 at 6:42 pm

            Have you read his books or is this just something you saw someone else say? Furr just doesn’t think confessions under the Soviet system is automatically suspect and have to be weighed with a totality of evidence. If there is a situation where he just uses a confession from an obvious torture situation without considering other evidence, please let me know because I haven’t found this to be the case for his books.

            In any case Furr focuses on debunking assertions made by other “Russian scholars” using primary evidence, he went over Snyder’s citations and show how sloppy/biased/wrong they were or doesn’t match Snyder’s conclusions at all. So are you saying that Furr is sloppy with his debunking in Bloodlands?
         2. AG May 18, 2025 at 10:36 am

            Apology if this is only related indirectly but since I saw it just today:
            German altern. site NACHDENKSEITEN has a lengthy English-language conversation with Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko:

            Interview with Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko: “Ukraine is not a democracy!”
            113 min.
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxBav1hoY5Y&t=3660s

            Now the reason why I post it it here:
            Even she as a rather critical historian however with a very specific focus and now living abroad is doing two things:
            – she buys into the Bucha story
            – she accepts “Holodomor”

            And a few other things concerning the war and Russia.

            So historic scholarship is a very complicated matter. Especially where geopolitical interests are still the same as when the events took place. For Furr to operate there is quite an accomplishment as such. From the little I know by him I did not get the impression he was not aware of the pitfalls and contradictions of the subject matter nor his profession.

            And as someone from Germany and considering how historic scholarship has let itself instrumentalize into becoming a tool of war-making – with this alleged humanistic post-1945 tradition – I can say that Snyder is not an exception. He is mainstream ideology. The fact that his book was ignored since and that there is tacit understanding that it´s second-rate is no reason assume things are good. In this sea of madness it´s almost impossible to work as a scholar (Furr) with non-conventional views. The practice of double-think and double-speak has become a professional habit.
   3. AG May 17, 2025 at 12:50 pm

      Thanks for pointing out the huge scholarship issue with Snyder.
      The best known criticism of “Bloodlands” in Germany was by the late Jürgen Zarusky (died 2019).
      He wrote eventually that this is not serious scholarship.
      That of course is omitted almost in any publication like Wiki or usual papers who however at least have to address Zarusky´s review.

      the above WSWS text:

      “(…)
      Indeed, the errors are so glaring and the efforts to rehabilitate the Nolte thesis and other claims of the Eastern European far-right are so flagrant, that it should have been enough to destroy Timothy Snyder’s reputation as a historian. Yet it has not.

      To be sure, several important historians, most notably Omer Bartov, Richard J. Evans, and Jürgen Zarusky, published scathing, even devastating reviews, rejecting, in particular, Snyder’s minimization of fascist collaborators of the Nazis in Eastern Europe and his trivilization of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union.[7] However, it is striking that even they hardly took issue with his unhinged attacks on the October Revolution, effectively accepting the false equation of Stalinism with communism. Nor did anyone openly address the rehabilitation of Ernst Nolte and other trends of right-wing historical revisionism that are clearly at the heart of Bloodlands. The reprint of Bloodlands amidst the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been met with almost deafening silence.
      (…)”

      From the great footnotes by WSWS:

      “(…)[7] Among the most serious and devastating critical reviews of Bloodlands were Jürgen Zarusky, “Timothy Snyders „Bloodlands,“ Kritische Anmerkungen zur Konstruktion einer Geschichtslandschaft”, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Jahrgang 60 (2012), Heft 1, pp. 1-31. Available online here https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/07/dbtz-d07.html#fn7 . Omer Bartov, “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder,” in: Slavic Review, Vol. 70, Issue 2, Summer 2011 , pp. 424-428; Richard J. Evans, “Who Remembers the Poles?”, in: London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 21, 4 November 2010.
   4. lyman alpha blob May 17, 2025 at 2:26 pm

      I wasn’t aware of Snyder when someone gifted me his short work On Tyranny several years ago. I do like these little books and have a couple on my shelf – Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit and Stephane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage). These two really struck a chord with me, so I was happy to receive Snyder’s book, which at first glance looked to be titled after Frankfurt’s book with a similar theme as Hessel’s.

      That happiness didn’t last long – just a few pages into Snyder’s book it became clear he had a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and a gross misunderstanding of history. I never finished it, but it still sat on the shelf since I am loathe to dispose of any book, even a terrible one. But I’ve now witnessed Snyder’s continuing histrionics and learned more of what a hack historian he is, and I do have limited shelf space. Your comment has convinced me he isn’t worth keeping around so On Tyranny just went into the dustbin of (bad) history. Nobody else needs to read this dreck either so I have reduced the supply by one copy.
      1. KLG May 17, 2025 at 11:27 pm

         I had a similar experience. My shelf of Little Books is a continuing source of edification and delight…Harry Frankfurt, G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, Leszek Kolakowski. Older teachers such as Ruskin and Chesterton. And then came On Tyranny. Oh, my! Fulminate TDS. Of course, the general run of my colleagues suffer from this condition. And virtually none of them will ever understand how TDS led inexorably to Trump v2.0.
5. VTDigger May 17, 2025 at 8:05 am

   Gateway books? Navel gazing.

   Grew up in the usa during the most peaceful and prosperous time in all of human history (I’m guessing 1975- 2000) and all this poor sap can do is whine that he feels unfulfilled.
   1. lyman alpha blob May 17, 2025 at 11:01 am

      Thank you. The author cites Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell and later on Hunter S and Aldous Huxley as his “gateway” authors. I read all these myself in my teens and early twenties, but not in any attempt to seem “cool” or because I couldn’t get a date – I was introduced to Camus by my high school French teacher, to Hesse by a college girlfriend. After the initial introduction, I kept reading them because they were good, and I still display all these books on my shelves right beside the more “mature” writers the author also cites.

      The handwringing episode about whether Hunter S is joking or might be a racist just goes to show that the author has absorbed all the conventional “wisdom” of current academia and ones suspects that the lessons of those “gateway” books didn’t sink in and he might just be what he was warned about becoming – a phony.
      1. Revenant May 17, 2025 at 7:20 pm

         Lol, these *are* my mature books. Well, in the fiction section.

         The really mature books on the shelf, since I stopped binge-reading novels (too busy to lose a day) are the terminal end-state of male reading: biographies and military history (and economics, HT Econned). :-)

         I think a “phony” is exactly the right reference, Lyman Alpha Blob. :-) His non-white male authors are in part the pseud’s canon….

         I think the interesting part of that essay, though, was how we come across these books.
         I too encountered Camus at school through a French teacher. We had a brilliant but very demanding and larger than life French teacher (he never spoke English after the first lesson, he yelled “ouvrez les fenêtres au maximum!” in all weathers) who decried the abandonment of the rigour in O-level French for the new GCSE exams. His first GCSE cohort (14-16), the year above us, he taught them in one year (all A grades) and then spent the second year teaching them Japanese (nobody higher than a D!).

         He wasn’t allowed to do that with us so he taught us French literature (GCSE was supposed to be a language-only exam) and we did a read through of Les Justes, Camus’s play about a terrorist cell and their moral disagreements and impending capture. I was hooked! I went on to French to A-level and S-level (scholarship papers), despite intending to read Natural Sciences (I hated physics so I swapped it for French in the same column), in large part because he had been such a great teacher and his choices of literature so interesting.

         But the American pale stake males form one line of connections. In general I am an autodidact and a bookworm so I followed my nose, in a distinct sequence of hops: I encountered Fear and Loathing on a display pile in Waterstones and was gripped by Hunter Thompson which led me to read his journalism on the Merry Pranksters which then forked into Tom Wolfe, who wrote a lot more about them (the Electric Kool-aid Acid Trip), and to Ken Kesey himself, driving the bus!, and then to Kerouac, who wanders into that story briefly, so I tried to read him, and Burroughs and Ginsberg too.

         I have very rarely read any fiction on somebody else’s recommendation so I should be fulsome in thanking NC for the Good Soldier Sweijk and Kaputt.
   2. Revenant May 17, 2025 at 12:16 pm

      The Gateway Books author appears to have read those books he is now embarrassed by without having learnt a thing from them – and then caught a nasty dose of humourless po-face while in academia!

      He repudiates his adolescent enthusiasm for
      Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell.

      He further consigns Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Hesse, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Tolkien, Wolfe to the “white make middlebrow canon”.

      He elevates Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein instead.

      Personally, my tastes run orthogonally through his categories. I think he just has bad taste and no confidence in his own judgment ;-)

      There are authors in there that I too stopped reading – but only because I ran out of things they wrote:
      – Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion is like a Pacific Northwest fever dream)
      – Wolfe (impeccable stylist)
      – Hunter S Thompson (even when he was bad, he was righteously better than the rest)
      – Kafka (didn’t write enough!)
      – Woolf (I love her prose but her diaries are even better)
      – Tolkein (hands up, who owns a copy of the Silmarilion?)
      – Camus
      – Orwell

      There are others that I have enjoyed single books but have not devoured their oeuvre: García Marquez (probably because I switched to reading him in Spanish and no longer have the chops to do that), Hesse (would like to read more), Borroughs (Naked Lunch was enough, would prefer his nonfiction I think), Ginsberg (only read some poetry).

      And there are ones I couldn’t finish – that’s uniquely you, Kerouac! – or finished and swore never again (Salinger, Vonnegut) because they have nothing to say and say it badly. Heller is maybe in this category, I have to go back and finish Catch-22 one day.

      The rest I haven’t read but would happily try most of them but not all, e.g. Toni Morrison, any glance leaves me cold. How you can place her and not Tolkein with Virginia Woolf is unfathomable!
      1. hk May 17, 2025 at 1:28 pm

         Hands up (wrt Silmarillion).
         1. Paleobotanist May 17, 2025 at 7:44 pm

            me too
            1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 18, 2025 at 2:30 am

               Me three.
      2. lyman alpha blob May 17, 2025 at 1:28 pm

         Kesey is the one from the list that I’ve actually never read, but the movie version of Sometimes A Great Notion is definitely on my top ten list of films. When I’m feeling particularly disgruntled, I always remember the chainsaw scene fondly.
         1. Revenant May 17, 2025 at 6:52 pm

            Read it! It is brilliant, in a same-but-different way from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The latter is a novel in a literally confined space whereas Sometimes a Great Notion pulls off the trick of being a pressure cooker in a great open space (Pacific NW forests) but a tiny society and inexorably narrowing choices.

            There’s a third book (sailor something?) that I have not tracked down. Hmm, maybe I will use immoral Amazon for a good purpose and fins it tonight….
      3. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 2:19 pm

         Revenant: The author doesn’t understand the significance of some of his “white middle-brow guys” and then veers toward some middle-brow lady novelists.

         Camus? Like lyman alpha blob, I was introduced to Camus in high-school French class. Yet during the pandemic — the summer COVID hit, some, oooohhh, 45 years later — I re-read The Plague in the original French. Camus is relentless. Camus is a great stylist. Camus understands our moral dilemma and our moral fecklessness like few others. The death of the judge’s son in The Plague is unforgettable — for its undermining of our assumptions about justice trying to operate in the world.

         Marquez? I read Hundred Years of Solitude — but then I was lucky enough to get involved in a project about Brazilian literature. Which is mind-blowing, along with música popular brasileira. Machado de Asís and Os Mutantes — they’ll twist your brain around. Ahh, Brazilian poetry…

         Orwell. For all of his general sourness, he’s indispensable. Middle brow?

         The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is marvelous. Highly recommended. I believe that Alice B. Toklas had a kind of monobrow, though.

         Zora Neale Hurston is a delight, but let’s admit that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a potboiler. Teacake, indeed.

         Luckily for the author that he didn’t fall into the ultimate Middle-Brow Stab at Seriousness, John Updike. Poor Timothy Aubry would still be trying to extricate himself from the swamp of the Rabbit books.
         1. lyman alpha blob May 17, 2025 at 3:16 pm

            I re-read both Slaughterhouse 5 and 1984 during the Years of Pestilence. I’m quite sure I didn’t understand everything on the first go-round 35 years or so prior, so they were even more poignant reads with a few extra decades of experience and rumination under my expanding belt, and more relevant than ever since we haven’t yet managed to abolish creeping authoritarianism (now under the guise of “liberalism”!) and war.

            Monobrow – ha! That sounds like the kind of crack one of Updike’s characters would make ;) I really enjoyed the Rabbit books, and just because Updike tends to be rather randy and has John Thomas write the occasional chapter or two, that’s no excuse not to read him. He really nailed the USian zeitgeist over the course of decades with those books. Since the “serious” literati are not supposed to countenance him these days, I was very pleased to read the following little bit of rehabilitation in Harper’s a few years ago, which you have probably already read, DJG, but I’ll leave it for others who might enjoy it, too. And it’s written by a woman no less! – https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/the-portrait-gallery-ann-patchett/
            1. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 3:33 pm

               lyman alpha blob: they were even more poignant reads with a few extra decades of experience and rumination

               And noting aleph_0 below.

               I recall sitting out on my Chicago-style back porch (wooden, narrow, slightly warped) and being overwhelmed by the beauty of Camus’s writing, his insight into our flailing feebleness, and his deep compassion. And the whole novel is set against a seemingly small incident — Dr. Rieux’s wife leaving Oran for a TB sanatorium, to die of tuberculosis.

               And the horror of a death of a child: Now we get to see TikTok videos of slaughtered children and to pretend that something / anything in this world is normal.

               Aging, with its intimations of mortality, makes such reading less cerebral, uncomfortably less distant.
               1. aleph_0 May 17, 2025 at 6:25 pm

                  I’ve been tempted a couple of times in life to learn more languages for Camus and other writers I enjoy and can only imagine what the beauty that French prose with his clarity of meaning must feel like. Anyway, well said.

                  lyman alpha blob: I had a similar experience with Slaughterhouse 5, and I think I’ve brought it up here, but I think Vonnegut’s description of war in reverse is probably one of the most poignant ripostes to industrial violence I’ve ever read.

                  I know the business of art and academia is to convince you that yesterday’s arts and theories are gauche while today’s are profound in order to draw attention to the new, it doesn’t mean I don’t roll my eyes every time I see it.
         2. Revenant May 17, 2025 at 7:51 pm

            Writing about how many of those 60’s US authors formed a chain of discovery in my adolescence jogs me into thinking about another canon on my bookshelf, so large I mock myself for it, the mid-20th century British prose stylists:
            – Golding (especially Rites of Passage)
            – Greene (thanks must go to my spouse)
            – Waugh (esp. Sword of Honour but I love the inter-war comedies too)
            – Amis père
            – Burgess (Earthly Powers)
            – Aldous Huxley
            – if I am allowed an earlier entry, Ford Madox Ford (Parade’s End)

            Conversely, there are notably few female writers in my bookcase. Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Daphne du Maurier, Dorothy Parker and Ursula le Guin from the 20th century; Mary Shelley, Jane Austen and the Brontë’s from the 19th. The numbers are redressed slightly by the host of female detective writers (Christie, James, Marsh, Highsmith) and Ayn Rand.

            I have in mind to repair this and read Doris Lessing, maybe Iris Murdoch, Margaret Atwood and my beloved Germaine Greer….
      4. Henry Moon Pie May 17, 2025 at 3:10 pm

         I read too much Hesse in high school. I thought I was off to play the Glass Bead Game in college, and it took me three semesters and D. P. Moynihan to get that straightened out.

         On the other hand, I have turned to Siddhartha many times over the course of my life and seen something new or understood myself better each time.
         1. Revenant May 17, 2025 at 6:46 pm

            Of the authors damned in that link:

            – the one I am looking forward to reading more of is Hesse. I have only read Steppenwolf. I shall think of you when I read the TGBG and Siddhartha!

            – the one I am curious about reading at all is Joyce. I feel the time is nearly ripe with my Kneecaps inspired embrace of Irish culture and history and language but I still fear we might hate each other though!

            – the one that may be most rewarding (because my interest is most casual so I expect least but intuit I may be surprised) is Gertrude Stein.

            – the two I would like to go back to but vanity hampers me are Camus and Marquez because I want to read them in the original but my French and Spanish have atrophied. I read all my Camus in the original and of Marquez I read El General en su Laberinto in the original and A Thousand Years of Solitude in translation. It’s nothing that some labour with a dictionary wouldn’t address but that changes the act and enjoyment of reading and risks missing thee wood for the trees.
            1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 18, 2025 at 1:16 am

               With Joyce, you don’t have to take on Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. How about Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
               1. Revenant May 18, 2025 at 5:16 am

                  Yes, that was my plan: start in the foothills of Joyce before scaling the peaks!

                  Ironically, my motive for this is actual hedging against liking Joyce rather than struggling with it because those two books are shorter. :-)

                  I don’t have time to read a War and Peace-like book from cover to cover but reading straight through is my only mode of engaging with a text I like. Whereas if it doesn’t speak to me, I can put it down (and possibly not pick it up again but that’s rare, Kerouac is the only one I remember but there have been a could of others).
   3. aleph_0 May 17, 2025 at 2:25 pm

      I imagine that he’s a man who swears up and down that advertisement doesn’t influence him, and that he’s too smart to be really influenced by peer pressure and a sense to fit in.

      Anyway, as a tangent, since I’ve been stuck in bed with the ‘rona (finally got it, prob from the dentist, ah well, it was a good run), it reminded me that I wanted to re-read Camus’ “The Plague” in the light of 2020 and the politics that followed, and it’s been riveting. I didn’t remember take much from it, and it didn’t stick with me the way “The Fall” or “The Myth of Sisyphus” did, but now, it’s amazing how clearly his descriptions and perceptions echo through time emotionally. Curious to see it through.
6. upstater May 17, 2025 at 8:06 am

   Fixed Time’s title. They need to update their style book.

   How Climate Change Is Impacting People’s Women’s Ability to Have Healthy Pregnancies
   1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 8:18 am

      C’mon, man. Every man has the right to have a baby and anything less is just oppression. Just ask Loretta-

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlo7YZW8vPA (1:56 mins)
7. Steve H. May 17, 2025 at 8:07 am

   > Financial Reckoning Hits Universities: Pay Cuts, Layoffs and No Coffee Wall Street Journal
   >> Schools in red states are facing the same problems, he said, but aren’t being vocal about it.

   An update from Indiana University (known for snipers on the roof):

   > GUEST COLUMN: Transfer before it’s too late
   >> the University was unable to secure a commencement speaker for the spring undergraduate ceremony, a role previously held by the CEO of Disney and President of Ireland.
   >> In a midnight coup, Governor Mike Braun seized control of the three alumni-elected Board seats. He now has direct control of the entire Board of Trustees, a body meant to hold Whitten and other University leadership accountable.

   [idsnews.com/article/2025/05/optransfer050825]
8. Wukchumni May 17, 2025 at 8:11 am

   Its comforting that there were Long Suffering Bills Fans in France 14,000 years ago, and who knows how many ice age Super Bowls they won in that stretch?
   1. Quintian and Lucius May 17, 2025 at 10:35 am

      History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme, so I’m going with zero.
      1. mrsyk May 17, 2025 at 1:30 pm

         Hmm. I wonder how many times they came in second.
9. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 8:12 am

   “Ukraine confirms that Russia made unacceptable demands in Istanbul”

   It is my understanding that the Third Reich negotiating team of Generaloberst Jodl, Major Wilhelm Oxenius and General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg also claimed that the Allies were making unacceptable demands in Reims in May of 1945. The only thing acceptable to the Ukrainian team would be Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan of a Russian surrender. But if the Russians ever agreed to that, then the Ukrainians would claim that it was not enough. Not when they have the UK, France, Poland and increasingly the US behind them. As much as I despise Zelensky, you have to admit that he has somehow bent all these countries to his will and align with him.
   1. ilsm May 17, 2025 at 9:07 am

      The military events of the past two years suggest that Kiev has no footing to make demands. No matter what Trump is told!

      What failed in Istanbul was the Atlanticist tactics employed in 2014 in the two Misk accords.

      Kiev likely wanted to keep going to Normandy twice a year to sample the spring and autumn on the English Channel and be rearmed to gut Russia for the US.

      Russian is welll served blowing up western weapons along the Dneipro…..

      US’ clown show keeps going!
   2. Potemkin May 17, 2025 at 9:44 am

      Zelensky isn’t bending anything, except maybe straws that he is clinging to. Those countries are increasingly behind him/them just to prevent backing up. Slava to the last Ukraininan.
   3. XXYY May 17, 2025 at 4:16 pm

      I’m a bit surprised that the Russians are including the cessation of Western sanctions against Russia as part of their ceasefire demands.

      My understanding is that Russia has pretty well overcome the impact of Western sanctions, and in fact has made lemonade out of a lemon by creating and improving their own native industrial base and using the sanctions as a reason to encourage or require domestic oligarchs to invest in Russia rather than overseas real estate or whatever. In addition, they have improved relationships and economic interaction with India, China, and many other countries in the world. It seems like Russia is in a much stronger position now than before the sanctions were enacted.

      (I’m leaving aside the fact that the sanctions have also backfired in ways that have been detrimental to Russia’s opponents, in particular the deindustrialization of Europe due to energy sanctions and the weakening of the US dollar as an international currency.)

      In any event, it seems like it would be better tactics to ignore the Western sanctions as part of ceasefire negotiations, to give Western negotiators (and the West in general) the impression that the sanctions aren’t even worth mentioning.
      1. Polar Socialist May 17, 2025 at 4:31 pm

         The ordinary Russians still would like to see the “old Europe” before it goes completely to the crapper \s

         I believe the demand of dropping the sanctions is part of the “Big Game” and is designed more to cause friction among the sanctioners than restore the trade. As the sanctions have indeed backfired so spectacularly, especially the EU leaders will be damned if they do and damned if they don’t lift them as part of the peace deal.

         It’s also making it clear that the actual end game here is an European wide security arrangement (see: Westphalian system), which is pretty much incompatible with the current EU and NATO.
         1. Kouros May 17, 2025 at 5:21 pm

            Google Earth Street View works preety well. No need to actually travel.
      2. Yves Smith Post authorMay 18, 2025 at 2:33 am

         They want the $300 billion back, at least so it won’t be used against them.

         I think they don’t care much re the rest so they can serve as a trading chip.
10. Wukchumni May 17, 2025 at 9:12 am

    The war on science is continuing apace in our National Parks, I was informed the lead scientist for Sequoia trees accepted the buyout offer, as it made more sense than being fired with no compensation.

    This is coming as Giant Sequoia trees are being inundated with bark beetles in many groves, with a small amount of them so far dying from the angry 1/8th inch invaders.

    We’ll just have to be content watching the Brobdingnagians die, as research into how, why and what could be done to stop the spread would be too science’y for this administration.
    1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:50 am

       If your National Parks get privatized, then they would probably fell those last remaining Sequoia trees to turn into exclusive furniture for wealthy people to buy. I can see it now-

       ‘Yessire. This here coffee table was made out of timber from the very last Sequoia tree to be chopped down. You can’t buy timber like that at any price anymore. Not in America at least. Makes me proud to own it.’
       1. wendigo May 17, 2025 at 10:41 am

          Well, they probably will clone the last tree and replant the clear cut areas,calling it a renewable resource. As well as noting how much faster the renewed trees grow due to the increased amount of plant food in the air.
11. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:17 am

    “Israeli airstrikes kill at least 80 as Trump talks of turning Gaza into ‘freedom zone’”

    To Trump’s way of thinking, he was speaking the truth. Gaza will be a ‘freedom zone’ – one free of Gazans that is. Have the Gazans packed into one corner with aid promised by the US but where the Israelis will still bomb them. And then forcibly grab them and put them on a plane to Libya or South Sudan or some other under-developed country where they can go rot. Out of sight, out of mind as they say and where the media will never send reporters to see how they are going. Of course Jihadist groups may find them a fertile source of motivated, hardened recruits for use up and down the continent and do we really want to go there?
    1. vao May 17, 2025 at 9:44 am

       “And then forcibly grab them and put them on a plane to Libya or South Sudan or some other under-developed country where they can go rot.”

       If they get to be put on planes (or ships) at all.

       I fear that the fate of the Palestinians will mirror the ones of the Armenians during the 1915-1922 genocide: driven out of their homes, forced on grueling marches across inhospitable terrain, slaughtered along the way, and finally left to die in some arid region (then: the Syrian desert).
    2. Polar Socialist May 17, 2025 at 9:53 am

       Come to think of it, why on earth would Israel want to have couple of million extremely aggravated Palestinians anywhere out of Israels control? Can anyone else envision Israeli embassies, airplanes, tourist busses and you-name-it going boom the next 2-3 decades, when these nothing-more-to-lose-Palestinians implement their very personal vendettas once out of the open prison camp know as Gaza.
       1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:58 am

          They won’t stop there. They will not differentiate between the Israelis and those that armed and equipped them. And not just the US either but having so many US bases in Africa will make them targets of first choice.
          1. anahuna May 17, 2025 at 12:08 pm

             I recall reading of assassinations carried out after the Armenian genocide. The first, I believe, was of Talaat Pasha, one of the Young Turks considered most responsible for the massacres.

             “Along with other leaders, he was court-martialed in 1919 and sentenced in absentia. He was not returned by Germany to Ottoman authorities, but he was assassinated there in 1921 by Armenian Revolutionary Federation [ARF] member Soghomon Tehlirian,” said Çorlu.

             The assassination was part of Operation Nemesis, a revenge plan by the ARF against members of the Ottoman government responsible for the Armenian genocide during World War I. Tehlirian, an Armenian whose extended family had been killed in their hometown of Erzincan, was found not guilty by a German court and freed.”
       2. Emma May 17, 2025 at 11:22 am

          I really don’t think Israel has more than a few years left. It’s clear that without the 1,000 percent support of the US, they would likely have been militarily defeated within a few months by 30,000 orphans using scavenged weapons. Their society has gone full crazy and full of hatred for each other. The US under Trump is quickly relieving itself of any moral, organizational, or economic capacity so we’re all going down together, quickly.

          The fascist iron hand becomes obvious when the velvet glove of liberal nonsense gets too worn to hide the underlying reality. I think we’re there except for the most myopic.
          1. vao May 17, 2025 at 11:59 am

             There is a famous quote by Keynes stating that “the stock market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent”.

             I am afraid that in the current conditions Israel can remain in existence a lot longer than the Palestinians can keep surviving.
             1. Emma May 17, 2025 at 3:51 pm

                Yes, it looks extremely grim for Gaza but I don’t think it’ll take decades for Israel or the current manifestation to go. Those irrational bubbles do pop eventually, no matter how much enthusiastic can kicking and wishful thinking is engaged.

                America can’t even build its crappy weapons without Chinese rare earth metals. I don’t know what the PRC is giving Trump any lifeline on the tariffs but I have to believe the end of Murika and with it the genocidal rapist state of Israel, is close.
          2. Henry Moon Pie May 17, 2025 at 2:59 pm

             And I think the closer people are to the “top,” the more myopic they are.
    3. Kouros May 17, 2025 at 5:23 pm

       https://scheerpost.com/2025/05/17/patrick-lawrence-waves-upon-the-sea-of-silence/
12. griffen May 17, 2025 at 9:25 am

    DHS mulls a reality show approach…cue some middle 80s to early 90s science fiction turned into a real competition. The Running Man, updated for our modern times? Come to think of it, the movie The Hunt isn’t that old of an idea after all. I am far too cynical on what American leadership might think of next.
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 17, 2025 at 10:30 am

       Rollerball!

       Except they all have the underdog winning.

       What they really want is more like Brazil.
       1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 10:36 am

          More like the Hunger Games. The winner gets Citizenship, second place gets a Green Card while the losers get deported but they get to take home a set of steak knives with them-

          ‘Place your bets!’
          1. Pat May 17, 2025 at 4:31 pm

             Don’t forget the after demands on the ‘winners’ of the Hunger Games. As you get to know them in Catching Fire, you find out that all of them were used relentlessly by the rulers of Panem to advance their personal and professional needs and desires.

             Any immigrants winning citizenship would find themselves in the same position.
13. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:39 am

    ‘NEWS: Israel attempting to impose a full naval blockade on Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthis), Israeli outlets citing military officials reported after latest attacks.’

    Now that’s going to be a neat trick imposing a full naval blockade – but without using your navy. For more than six years, Saudi Arabia imposed an air and sea blockade on Yemen with the full support of western nations with supplies & training. But Yemen held. So does Israel think that it can do so by occasionally sending up their aircraft – in between bombing helpless civilians that is – and lobbing some bombs at them? I have been reliably informed that this region is acquainted with such practices as a “black markets” and “smuggling” so how effective with the Israelis be? Of course the media here said that the Israelis are only bombing ‘Houthi-controlled ports’ and ignoring how the Israelis want to starve Yemen like they are doing in Gaza
14. Screwball May 17, 2025 at 9:44 am

    The Comey 8647 thing is interesting. I saw a picture online yesterday of Gretchen Whitmer in some interview with a stacked 8647 trinket in the background. They must be related? No matter, most of the people I know think it’s just fine because most of them wish Trump gone or dead anyway and are not shy about saying so. To them, the real scandal is Trump’s life threatening words to Bruce Springsteen and the Russian lady named Gabbard saying Comey should be put in jail.

    And this shit show is still just getting started.
    1. amfortas the hippie May 17, 2025 at 11:04 am

       but thats kitchen jjargon…and not from high end kitchens, either.
       how would these people even have that in their lexicon?
       i mean, i sure do…and thus, my boys…and a generation of folks ive trained and yelled at in an hundred kitchens…but comey and gretch?
       have they ever even walked past a working kitchen’s door?
       1. Pat May 17, 2025 at 4:59 pm

          It’s not just kitchen jargon. It is one of the standard codes used on sets over walkies on every one I have worked on. I could be wrong, but I got the. impression that most of them were standard in ham radios and military radio transmissions.
          1. amfortas the hippie May 17, 2025 at 7:07 pm

             news to me,lol.
             altho ive been out of the world for a good long while.
             in my former career, i had to teach newbies that jargon…”moldy top”= “cheese+ etc.
             86 meant we were out of whatever it was, and that was…by far the most important bit of jargon i could impart.
             when yer out, yer out….usually, the special of the day.
             when i’d yell 86 the special, all the customers knew they needed to stop frellin around and get there earlier manana.

             or call ahead, of course,lol.
    2. griffen May 17, 2025 at 12:11 pm

       Reading a quick summary from Axios, sounds like a term picked up from earlier demonstrations against Trump or Musk about this that and the other I do suppose. So going from that it reaches upward to some bigger Democratic party figures and leaders of variable, or valuable standing…

       Latest efforts I suppose, serves to remind Trump that his nemesis Mr. Comey still living and breathing.
    3. Glen May 17, 2025 at 1:11 pm

       I think it’s been a thing for a while now:

       8646 t shirts
       https://duckduckgo.com/?q=8646+t+shirts&ia=images&iax=images

       But Comey, given everything he’s already done, should probably just be rich, retire, and go away.
    4. Unironic Pangloss May 17, 2025 at 1:42 pm

       if my kids used “86” in school, they’d get a “think it thru” and I’d be in a Zoom conference with an assistant principal.

       Team 86 is only making trump more sympathetic
       1. Erstwhile May 17, 2025 at 2:35 pm

          More sympathetic? As compared to what? To some mother in Gaza, holding what’s left of her child in her arms?
       2. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 6:38 pm

          Number 86. Would you believe it?
    5. upstater May 17, 2025 at 7:45 pm

       86 was in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000). It surely means dead, done, over. Comey knew this, it ain’t random, just really, really stupid.
    6. ChrisPacific May 17, 2025 at 8:21 pm

       It could equally well just mean get him out of office. Murder is a secondary definition, although given the number of people who would be all too willing to take it that way, it’s careless language at best.

       I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Comey, since he was once the guy in charge of sending goons after people who delivered just such ambiguous messages. His comments afterward sound faux-naif to me. “Didn’t realize it could mean violence”? Sure, maybe if he was a high school kid ignorant of politics, but an ex-FBI director? Pull the other one.
15. Neutrino May 17, 2025 at 9:55 am

    Axios Biden Tapes, as expected. They reinforce ample video evidence of enfeeblement.
    The rest of the release should be fun given that Merrick Garland classified them as double secret pinky swear. How bad could they be? /s
    1. Screwball May 17, 2025 at 10:15 am

       I guess Jake Tapper has written a book about the Biden decline which might also validate these tapes. I am told by some deep blue people that it is all lies and innuendo. Tapper is making things up just to sell a book and nothing within the book is valid.

       Never mind our very own eyes and ears. We have a lot of people living in alternate realities.
    2. Boomheist May 17, 2025 at 1:09 pm

       I listened to that tape and think the narrative is way over the top. I am not saying Biden wasnt becoming enfeebled but this is all starting to sound and feel like an intentional narrative strategy designed to block any democrats from running in 2028, steal airtime and attention from all the current and real issues, and especially buttress the “election was stolen” thesis. Until there is specific evidence Biden was not making decisions this entire frenzy seems contrived. You could just as easily argue the country chose Joe because he was older and softer and steady and in fact he did accomplish a lot of things despite opposition, though nobody on the side of this narrative of him as being controlled will ever accept that. Just as few will point out that he did in fact get us out of Afghanistan early in his term. There have been other times we have had absent presidents. Woodrow Wilson was basically felled by a stroke and his wife ran the country after the First World War. Nixon was so obsessed with Watergate and the tapes his staff ran the White House for nearly a year. You never hear Republicans howling about how Reagan was failing due to dementia during his second term, but he was. So forgive me if I feel this Biden frenzy is performative. Having said that though I entirely agree all those in his camp now seeking mea culpas because they refused to say he was failing should leave politics and the party.
       1. amfortas the hippie May 17, 2025 at 7:19 pm

          i reckon that the demparty should, itself, exit stage right.
          get outta the goddamned way.
          just join the GOP as its leftwing, as in former times, and stop the pretenses.
          let us put clintonism/billaryism behind us, at long last.
          it has failed, utterly.
          fie.

          and yt, the current iteration of gop…and even moreso for the maga people…are still insisting that what the dems have been for 40 years is ….somehow…Marxist/commie/Far Left!!!!/etc…
          somehow…

          this is exactly what “woke” and all that was intended to accomplish…to kill the Actual Left…people like me…isolate us, make us give a frelling class every time we utter a word, etc.

          i hate the demparty for all that.
          and the clintons especially.
       2. Lefty Godot May 17, 2025 at 7:25 pm

          Biden should never have been running for reelection and the Democratic party leadership should’ve made that clear to him long before he announced his bid for another term. He hinted but never came right out and said in 2020 that he intended to be a one term “bridge” president. They should have held him to that. And if not, someone of substance in the party should’ve run against him in the primaries. I sent several letters to Sherrod Brown urging him to run against Biden, but apparently Brown preferred to stay in Ohio and lose his Senate race.

          The only reason I voted for Biden in 2020 was because Trump was being made to look so bad in the media. Now I wish I had voted the other way. If Trump had won in 2020 we’d finally be free of him now. Biden was always unlikeable and very little he did in his term helped the American people (and most of what did originated from people forced on him, like Lina Khan). He was another warmonger trying to make himself look tough by threatening a major nuclear power and eagerly abetting an obvious genocide. Good riddance to him.
          1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 7:31 pm

             If Trump had won in 2020, then he would have been gone from the scene and you would not now be seeing him do all the stuff that he is doing now. They should have let him win.
16. Culp Creek Curmudgeon May 17, 2025 at 10:02 am

    I had to stop reading “If China can rise, why can’t India?” after the author called Germany Europe’s “moral anchor.”
    1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 10:07 am

       In all fairness, it is not exactly a very high bar these days.
       1. mahna May 17, 2025 at 10:39 am

          And still they fall short.
    2. Quintian and Lucius May 17, 2025 at 10:37 am

       Rather more of a moral pool toy, if anything, but I suppose there’s some minor contribution to relative coherence and stability, sort of.
    3. Darthbobber May 17, 2025 at 4:35 pm

       Moral anchor works for me. It explains the lack of any course correction, or any course at all, for that matter.
       1. hk May 18, 2025 at 12:33 am

          Yes. Sunk to the dark depths.
17. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 10:30 am

    “Families of victims appalled as Boeing seems likely to avoid prosecution over 737 Max crashes”

    I suppose you could call this standard operating procedure. Through indifference and recklessness, some corporation poisons or kills a whole bunch of people. Then after being dragged through the law courts for a decade – fifteen years tops – a settlement is made where the corporation makes a big payout but admits no guilt or responsibility. No-one in that corporation goes to jail or has their name dragged through the mud and all is well. The corporation may even have to make an additional payout (bribe?) to the Federal government for some minor crime but stuff like this can be claimed back on taxes which is legal. And those effected people? They or their survivors get a small payout – just as soon as legal expenses from all those years of being in court are deducted from that big payout. Seen this movie a coupla times so does not surprise me in the least.
    1. Jason Boxman May 17, 2025 at 12:57 pm

       These corporate structures merely serve to give the elite cover to do whatever they want; corporate boards and executives should be personally liable for their leadership. Plenty of people would happily sign up for the liability, given what the compensation is. And as a bonus, they can claim they’re fairly compensated, now that their personal risk is commensurate with their pay.

       This lack of personal accountability lets these people engage in acts of casual evil as frequently as one breathes.

       Or perhaps if the elite as a class had any moral principals, being shunned by one’s own class would be enough, but clearly that’s not the case.
18. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 10:42 am

    ‘Lord Bebo
    @MyLordBebo
    May 14
    🇺🇦🇷🇺🇩🇪 Germany arrests Ukranians for sabotage attacks and instantly blames Russia!’

    Well, yeah. Not long ago about 11 Ukrainians burned down a massive shopping center in Warsaw and who were arrested so the Poles accused Russian secret agents of doing this. And you just had a Ukrainian guy start three fires targeting Starmer. As they say – once is happenstance, twice in coincidence, three times is enemy actions and it ain’t the Russkies doing it-

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgegj1rvq84o
    1. hk May 17, 2025 at 1:02 pm

       Ukrainians, Russians, basically same people, right? (/s)
    2. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 2:29 pm

       Rev Kev: Here in Italy, Ukrainians have been fingered for trying to blow up petroleum tankers around Genova, which is only Italy’s second major port (virtual tie with Trieste).

       https://www.rainews.it/tgr/liguria/video/2025/02/la-seajewel-lascia-savona-ma-arriva-la-seacharm-vittima-di-un-attentato-simile-e179802d-7bd0-4d2b-a4b5-14589dc470d3.html

       Because of the peculiar geography of Genova — it’s shaped like a croissant pastry — it won’t be hard to blow up something and hurt many Italian civilians. Hmmm.

       Italians have already gone a tad sour on Ukraine as a project — and Ukrainians as cultural ambassadors. The Ukrainian consuls have had enough sense to stop yammering every time a Russian artist performs in Italy or a Russian composer is slotted in programming. In compensation, the season here in the Chocolate City has been chockfull of Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Prokofiev.
       1. OIFVet May 18, 2025 at 2:38 am

          Here in BG the Ukrainians speak Russian, because of course they do. So, in the wake of the latest “They are amongst us!” hysteria, watchful citizens overdosed on propaganda took to Twitter to warn us of the alarming rise in the numbers of Russian speakers they encountered in Sofia this week.

          Kid you not.
          1. The Rev Kev May 18, 2025 at 3:10 am

             ‘They’re here,
             they’re there,
             they’re everywhere,
             so beware.’
19. IM Doc May 17, 2025 at 10:56 am

    With regard to the Biden – Hur tape.

    There were those of us who are diagnosticians who saw all the signs of dementia from Biden as far back as 2019. The gait, the blank stares, the constant confused answers, the wandering off, the inability to pay attention to things in public, I can go on and on.

    I can sleep at night. I did everything I could to warn all those around me at the time. This was completely unappreciated – I was called every name in the book. But as my grandma always told me, reality will always prevail.

    Now there is another symptom that has been laid bare on this tape. Anosognosia. The complete denial on the part of the individual that they have a problem. And then subsequently, often aggressive behavior when confronted by others of the deficits.

    This is such a classic example of this symptom, which is often hard to suss out, that I will be using his tape from this day forward for medical students.

    The timing of the appearance of this symptom is also somewhat important. In most of our dementias, this happens in the early to middle phases of the disease. The patients have often been having symptoms for 2-4 years at this point. As a clinician, this is a very important symptom to pick up on – it is one of several things that herald the time in the dementia patient’s life that they are no longer cognizant enough to handle their affairs, sign papers, or get involved with anything important where they could be held accountable or have consequences. Mr, Hur, although not a physician, was exactly correct in his determination – Biden at this point was exhibiting symptoms that made him unable to understand the consequences of the charges against him, and made him unable to testify in his defense, so any charges were dropped.

    This deposition was in October of 2023, at least that is what is being told. Therefore, for almost a year and a half, we had a President signing legislation, executive orders and pardons, that any and all of my patients in this status would never have been allowed to be done alone. I insist that patients in this status have guardians or powers of attorney – I have seen too many tragedies in my life – and this is just standard operating procedure at this point.

    This had to be apparent to everyone around him. They had a golden opportunity given to them by Hur to utilize the 25th Amendment, Yet all of the media, all of the Dem politicians, all of the DNC types, instead of doing their Constitutional duties ran to the microphones to not only bash Hur but to also slime any and every one who dared to say anything about it. They also constantly told the world that Biden was as sharp as he has ever been.

    I don’t know. This is a large part of why they lost the election. But I have a very bad feeling that the consequences are just starting. If it is like my patients, judges are very quick to undo documents signed by anyone in this condition. And I mean people who are in far better condition than Biden was at this time. Are the pardons, legislation, executive orders, etc – signed by someone in this condition actually valid? I have a feeling we are about to find out. I am certainly not a Constitutional Law expert by any means – but it does seem to me to be a relevant issue given all the times in my life I have seen documents signed by a dementia patient overturned. If these documents are disputed, it would appear to me that it would be on a completely rational basis medically. I have had to testify in depositions to these issues repeatedly in my life. Also at issue are the dozens of Dem politicians who are on tape stating how bright he was – the political ads can write themselves.

    The absolute fury I have at the Democratic Party honchos and the media for allowing this to happen – well, my fury is just overwhelming. I cannot be too angry with regular citizens – they were robbed of any kind of democratic process by the “Party of Save our Democracy, Bro” – the polls at the time were stating clearly that 70-80% of Dems thought he was too old.

    Whatever…….I have this bad feeling this is going to blow up into something making Watergate look like a Sunday School lesson.
    1. Culp Creek Curmudgeon May 17, 2025 at 11:13 am

       In 2019-2020, I remember saying that Biden was mentally unfit and people telling me I was being “ableist” because Biden stuttered.
    2. MicaT May 17, 2025 at 11:49 am

       Thanks IMdoc.
    3. Screwball May 17, 2025 at 12:52 pm

       I don’t expect anything to happen. Laws are only for us serfs.
    4. Jason Boxman May 17, 2025 at 12:58 pm

       This is such a classic example of this symptom, which is often hard to suss out, that I will be using his tape from this day forward for medical students.

       Biden finally contributes to America’s future!

       I’ll be shocked if there’s any real lasting consequences to liberal Democrats having pretended that Biden was president for 4 years. This ought to be a scandal beyond words.
    5. Unironic Pangloss May 17, 2025 at 1:39 pm

       paging Jill Biden, our 2nd woman president. …
    6. Antifa May 17, 2025 at 1:49 pm

       The most relevant question is what kept the Dems from kicking Biden out of office? Did they really have no qualified replacement? Was it Jill Biden’s shrill defense of her husband? Perhaps the Biden family’s ongoing receipt of illicit funds? Why did no one have the nerve to call him out sooner? Only after the Trump debate did Obama speak up, and everyone could breathe again. But then it was Biden who said Kamala must run, as his last poison pill.

       What keeps Trump’s people on board with the current clown show? Prestige, profits, and careers clinging to his ragged coattails? We don’t have time to wait until midterms, or for Trump to completely unravel in front of cameras, even though he’s closer every day. He’s doing extreme damage to our nation by his actions, and by his shutting down science, research, public health, and eventually Medicare and Social Security. There’s nothing good down this road we’re on; there are no safe places waiting around the bend. We do not want to go there.
       1. Quintian and Lucius May 17, 2025 at 6:17 pm

          The Democrats as a collective concern probably just couldn’t come up with any alternative. Their brand is so destitute at this point that Biden – once, if no longer likable and at the very least recognizable to the American public – even in his deeply diminished state still seemed like their most viable candidate in ’24. They must’ve believed that via medication and careful image management they could get him over the finish line to election day; that the game was up wasn’t apparent until the debate. Remember, it’s not as though the party wasn’t doing exactly what it wanted in any case under his administration; the man was already a figurehead, it’s just that he was indispensable in that role.
          1. FlyoverBoy May 17, 2025 at 7:48 pm

             What makes me doubt that the Democrats thought they could limp Biden over the finish line is the timing of the debate they scheduled. Knowing he couldn’t perform, they scheduled him into an unprecedented pre-convention debate against the other party’s presumed candidate. This tells me they’d already decided his capacity made him a non-starter, and they were setting up the public exposure of his incapacity that would provide the necessary excuse for his removal.

             My guess from there is that they wanted to keep control of the party, so they dawdled in the aftermath of the debate fiasco until they could say there was no time for any kind of truncated contest and no option left but Kamala. Of course, the intention was for her too to be a figurehead.
    7. cousinAdam May 17, 2025 at 2:11 pm

       Big thanks, IMDoc for this and all of your posts here. I and many others (I’m sure) are glad that you’ve found this to be a comfortable place to get stuff off your chest – your expertise and principled stand find many receptive ears here. Live long and prosper!
    8. flora May 17, 2025 at 2:22 pm

       Thank you, IM Doc.

       I remember a very much older, once world famous research scientist at my uni division who, at aged 80+, began to develop the same ‘losing the train of thought’ symptoms. A few years later, when he was an emeritus with an office and academic privileges the symptoms of mental decline became impossible to overlook or explain away. At that point many in my unit would upon seeing him looking a bit lost in the hallway would say, ‘Hi. Where are you going?’ If he said it was to his office or another scientist’s office but he couldn’t remember which direction it was, well then, out of respect for him and his earlier work and out of simply human courtesy, many of us would find an excuse to say, ‘hey, I’m going that way, too. Let me walk with you if that’s OK.’ The oft-times vicious academic competitiveness no longer applied; It had dropped away to help out an older academic who simply wasn’t what he had been, and who we ourselves might also be one day. This senior emeritus academic no longer had any effect on the uni’s decision making. There was no autopen for him.

       I recognized the same drifting off in the Hur tapes. B starts out strong on something and then drifts off, but not in an ‘oh let me regale you with old times I enjoy reminiscing about’ way and then comes back to the main question(s).

       Thanks again.
    9. XXYY May 17, 2025 at 4:24 pm

       I’m not saying this in defense of Biden by any means, but didn’t Ronald Reagan exhibits similar symptoms in the last few years of his second term? I don’t remember it getting a lot of attention in that case.

       Did he seem different medically? Or was it just a different time?
       1. Pat May 17, 2025 at 4:55 pm

          It was his second term, he wasn’t running for a third. Think about what IM Doc said about Biden, and then remember that the Biden team had been keeping Biden largely under wraps until the campaign. There were limited public or governmental appearances, few cabinet meetings, and practically no press conferences. Reagan didn’t have to campaign. He didn’t have to be put in a position where he couldn’t fall back on his innate performance abilities when he was confused or stressed, and Nancy was better at being the constant helpmate than Jill. I know that sounds sexist but when you have been and are nearly constantly by your husband’s side it is less obvious that you are directing him. Even with that, people noticed, and like with Biden there was significant denial.

          That said it was also a different time. NAFTA hadn’t ravaged huge swaths of the population, we weren’t actively pursuing a war or wars with a nuclear power, the public good hadn’t been hollowed out, and the country wasn’t equally and passionately divided politically. (Reagan really was popular.) I might wish it had been different, that more people saw the slippery slope that Reagan’s handlers put us on, but quite honestly Reagan’s detractors were the minority. Most people thought things were good.
          1. flora May 17, 2025 at 5:37 pm

             Thank you. I remember many older relatives, GOP voters all, beginning to make jokes about Reagan and vegetables and Nancy ordering from a menu and all of that. These older relatives passed on the jokes as a sort of indirect and painful “what can we do” about this thing.

             Haven’t heard the DNC even indirectly ask this question. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, as they say.
    10. jobs May 19, 2025 at 12:11 am

        Thank you, IM Doc.

        Biden is symbolic for the US: declining but refusing to accept it.
20. Henry Moon Pie May 17, 2025 at 11:43 am

    We had a very interesting discussion about Degrowth and “degrowth” the other day under Conor’s “Abundance vs. Degrowth in a Time of Climate Catastrophe,” and I’d like to share a few thoughts generated at the intersection of that discussion and my continued perusal of my copy of the Harvard Class of 1975 Report.

    One question almost always raised in discussions of Degrowth is who and what will be called on to degrow? I quoted and linked an answer to those questions from Jason Hickel, and I’d like to illustrate a candidate for degrowth and perhaps illustrate a Degrowth approach that could significantly cut carbon emissions while minimizing negative impacts on the vulnerable.

    Humans, especially male humans, compete for status as do their primate cousins, the chimps and bonobos. The Class of 1975 Report offers the reader a chance to see this competition in action in a community with lots of adept players. Now I don’t have the tools or energy right now to quantify my impressions, but I do have a feel for the data that tells me that it would be worth checking to see if those submitting personal reports focused their status competition in four areas:

    1) Career accomplishments, usually measured by job titles;

    2) Charity work as measured by how many boards they’re on;

    3) Children’s accomplishments, usually measured by schools graduated from and job titles; and

    4) Travel, usually measured by a combination of frequency, distance and exotic nature of destination.

    People don’t compete around the square footage of their house(s), the cost of their family vehicles (or whether they’re electric), or how many designer fashions are in their closets. When it comes to consumption, it’s travel that is the playing field for status competition.

    Reading through the reports and looking through the pictures, the amount of recreational travel these alums engage in is astonishing. It is an excellent illustration of two stats we hear about: 2/3 of global heating since 1990 is due to the richest 10%; and nearly 50% of American consumption comes from the richest 10%.

    So does all this travel with its supporting tourism industry have a significant impact on carbon emissions? The United Nations World Tourism Organization collected data in 2013 on the carbon footprint of tourism including air and land travel, tourist accommodation, tourist food and beverage, etc. They found that a whopping 8% of human emissions came from tourism.

    And it will only get worse:

    Projections indicate that tourism emissions could reach 6.5 billion metric tons by 2025. This represents a 44% increase from 2013, and is equivalent to about 13% of current global greenhouse gas emissions.

    So is tourism, especially international tourism, a major candidate for Degrowth? For the consumer, it’s overwhelmingly non-essential. What would these kinds of consumers lose beyond some jet lag and status? But what about the producers? They depend on this income, and that’s where Degrowth differs from random or market-mediated degrowth. Degrowth policy would transfer money from the rich countries that have been the source of most of this tourism, and are often responsible for “grooming” Global South countries to be dependent on tourism money, to the producers and countries that have lost revenues until they can adapt to new arrangements.

    I find it maddening that as the climate catastrophe worsens, people who should know better are making a big “contribution” to overheating the planet so they can brag about where they’ve been and where they’re going. I guess it gives them something to post to Facebook (these are oldsters, after all). It should not be necessary to have mandates or prohibitions on something like this. It should be shameful as a matter of culture and ethics to engage in unnecessary international travel instead of a point of pride. We live in a system where all the incentives are wrong.

    Maybe Leary was right about LSD in the water supply, or maybe we should try to get everybody to read Dan Quinn’s Ishmael before getting so extreme.
    1. hk May 17, 2025 at 1:39 pm

       I think this, in a sense, brings us back to the problem that I keep harping about: “degrowth” in practice almost always comes back to thevelites convening in Davos in their private planes to force the middle and poor classes to give up meat for bugs, to cut down CO2. “Degrowrh” as a slogan becomes a tool for reinforcing the elite power, whatever it “should be.” One can argue about whatever the “real message of Christianity” is, but it was also the spiritual foundation of Medieval feudalism and 19th century imperialism.
       1. Polar Socialist May 17, 2025 at 1:44 pm

          Just like they use “democracy” and “human rights” as an excuse for regime change, bombing and looting.

          I still don’t see no reason to stop rooting for the original concept.
          1. hk May 17, 2025 at 8:55 pm

             I’m not against the original concept, as long as it stays just a concept. But, as far as I can tell, it’s a dangerous idea that will kill many people and bring misery to more if used too carelessly. (In fact, that’s my view towards “democracy” and “human rights,” too)

             In fact, to continue the analogy, I think degrowth can become a useful concept only in conjunction with massive sociocultural change: degrowth means voluntary sacrifice. People sacrifice for only something important to them at a “spiritual” level and if they are sure that they are not being tricked. We are far from either.
             1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 9:01 pm

                And who gets to make the sacrifices?

                ‘Luigi Mangione For President
                @DoctorFishbones
                When I worked on the Kerry campaign, an aide told me his wife Teresa bought a castle in Europe and had it flown over and rebuilt brick-by-brick on their estate in Montana and I think about that story a lot when I’m drinking out of a paper straw to reduce my carbon footprint’

                https://xcancel.com/DoctorFishbones/status/1923709297885630574#m
                1. hk May 18, 2025 at 12:36 am

                   Exactly.
       2. Henry Moon Pie May 17, 2025 at 2:41 pm

          I don’t think you’ll hear much if any talk of Degrowth at Davos. It’s against their religion. Even if the pain of downsizing could be confined to the poor and middle class, the Davos crowd must have growth. Their system depends on it. Davos hopes we do no planning for what must be done and have no input into it. They want to use The Market to allocate hardship so that they don’t have to make any changes.

          You would object to identifying sectors of consumption like tourism which contribute substantially to carbon emissions but little to the general welfare? Wouldn’t eliminating such sectors, while providing compensation to affected producers as a bridge, be a way of cutting emissions without the poor and middle classes being forced to eat bugs?
          1. hk May 17, 2025 at 7:41 pm

             Offering compensation to those who’d lose out is a great idea, in principle. That was also supposed to be the solution to the problems of free trade or, for that matter, technological innovations that creates economic losers. In practice, no one has ever even proposed a realistic provram, beyond snide comments about having people learn to code. To be fair to them, the politics (defined broadly) is too complicated for any such scheme to work, in almost any suffuciently large society. “Degrowth” is even harder in dimension than either free trade or technological change: at least in theory, the latter examples generate surpluses that can be redistributed, while “degrowth,” by definition, requires shrinking the pie and taking stuff from somebody.

             In politics of shrinking pies, the weak always lose. Even if there is a social upheaval to go with the shrunkage, the formerly weak tend to stay weak–they don’t have the guns, literal or proverbial.
       3. nyleta May 17, 2025 at 4:25 pm

          Quite right, there will be sumptuary laws like in Elizabethan times but only for us peons. High status must remain visible.
    2. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 2:53 pm

       Henry Moon Pie: This morning, during dormiveglia (the Italian word for that span of time when one is neither asleep nor yet fully awake), the word “commonwealth” came into my mind.

       I suspect that “degrowth” isn’t going to work in the US of A, with its rigid class structure and history over the last several decades of making the working class and the poor pay for the rich. In Italy, the Italians may have some patience with “SlowGrowth,” which could mirror the principles of SlowFood: Food that is good, clean, and just. The Italians also benefit from years of the Benedictines and Franciscans and their culture of simplicity.

       So “commonwealth” may work. SlowGrowth, but it’s less intuitively obvious.

       Tourism requires much re-thinking — I have had to re-think it since my arrival here. There certainly are people in a top class, spending too much money, renting giant villas in Tuscany with swimming pools and staff. Yet I also see much middle-class tourism — at lunch today, I was seated next to a table of four French people, who likely drove over the mountains, possibly from Lyon, for the weekend. And the Chocolate City is also the resting place of the Shroud — and Italy, especially Roma, welcomes pilgrims. In Roma, I regularly see people who saved up for years so that they could see Saint Peter’s or Saint John Lateran or the Sistine Chapel.

       It’s hard to say no to these pilgrims. It is hard to say no to young people wandering around looking at artworks “in person,” possibly for the first time in their lives.

       And Italians are great travelers. They are constantly wandering around Italy, visiting grandma and the Riace Bronzes and that agriturismo with the excellent breakfasts.

       Competitive tourism: Now that may have to go, such as wrecking the great peaks of the Himalayas.

       First, though: Would you kindly get rid of destination weddings and gender-reveal parties?
       1. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 6:51 pm

          Even if casual tourism went away, you would still have pilgrims. They were a big part of medieval life in Europe and it was mostly done by ordinary people and by foot. The classic book “The Canterbury Tales” – which is worth the read – come out of this time and is about a group of pilgrims meeting up on the road and swapping stories as they traveled together. The pilgrims will always come-

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales
    3. Henry Moon Pie May 17, 2025 at 10:41 pm

       You guys are putting me through my paces as well as demonstrating our society’s problem.

       1) Atmospheric carbon concentration is at 419 ppm, a level never seen since Homo sapiens appeared on Earth. In fact, it has been 14 million years since such levels were seen. Atmospheric carbon is rising at 2.4 ppm per year, and the rate of increase is increasing. We set another record for CO2 emissions in 2024.

       2) We have not yet experienced all the warming that will come as a result ofd the carbon we have already put in the air. A James Hansen paper in 2023 found the following:

       Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C, which is reduced to 8°C by today’s human-made aerosols. Equilibrium warming is not ‘committed’ warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring. However, decline of aerosol emissions since 2010 should increase the 1970–2010 global warming rate of 0.18°C per decade to a post-2010 rate of at least 0.27°C per decade. Thus, under the present geopolitical approach to GHG emissions, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050.

       We’re currently “sheltered” from 8 degrees C of warming by human-made aerosols, many of which have adverse effects on the health of humans and other life. Any attempt to cut this pollution will increase the rate of warming even if we quit putting carbon in the atmosphere tomorrow.

       3) We measure heat in/heat out for the planet using satellites. For most of the past decade, the CERES project showed that heat in exceeded heat out by .76 Watt/square meter. In 2023, when heating jumped dramatically in both the atmosphere and the oceans, the CERES measurement reaching 1 Watt/square meter.

       4) Beyond just warming, we are currently exceeding 6 of 9 planetary boundaries.

       5) We are in danger of reaching a number of tipping points that could send warming into hyperdrive or have other powerful effects.

       To me, the above list indicates that we must stop putting carbon in the air ASAP. We’ve blown through 1.5 C (why 1.5 was chosen). We’re well on our way to 2.0, and many are betting 3.0 is where we’re headed because we can’t seem to find ways to cut emissions:

       For a 2C pathway, emissions must fall 28% by 2030 and 37% by 2035 from 2019 levels.

       So if we must cut emissions by 28% IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, where can we cut? Everybody, including me, will say, “Military!,” but military emissions account for only 5.5%. That leaves 23% in reductions to find. I’ve suggested recreational travel, i.e. tourism, could get us another 13%, but the Commentariat has found a number of good reasons why that would be bad or unfair. So where can we find another 23% in carbon emissions reductions, or shall we just enjoy the ride until we blow through the next target?
21. Victor Sciamarelli May 17, 2025 at 12:00 pm

    I think the reality behind Putin’s demands for ending the Ukraine war is not self-evident. You first need to ask who is Putin and what does he really want?
    Undoubtedly, Putin had a natural talent for intelligence work, yet, why did he choose politics? What motivated him and what was his vision for Russia? I think the only rational explanation is Putin wanted to initiate and oversee the modernization of Russia. He wanted to put the Soviet Union behind, end the economic devastation of the 1990s, and create a Russia with modern factories and infrastructure, a stable economy and largely self sufficient, that could trade and compete with other countries, and within a short time, he succeeded.
    Putin also realized in order to accomplish his goals, he had to make friends with the West and avoid a new cold war, hot war, or conflicts.
    When the US realized Putin was indeed extremely capable, it began a new cold war. it launched NATO expansion, a coup, sanctions, a manufactured false narrative about Russian threats and election interference, and finally a proxy war to cut Russia down to size.
    All of this eventually backfired on the US and the EU. Thus, if Trump wants to make peace in Ukraine, a lasting peace is essential because Putin is determined to reach his modernization goals for Russia.
    1. XXYY May 17, 2025 at 4:37 pm

       I know we are not supposed to say this in the prevailing intellectual climate in the West, but I often wonder if Putin is going to be remembered by historians as a great historical figure who was determined to modernize his country and put it on a solid footing to care for its people going forward. I assume he was horrified by what happened in the early 90s in Russia and was determined to turn things around at all costs.

       Much like George Washington in the US!

       I’m by no means a student of Putin or Russian history, but I have heard several of his speeches translated into English and he seems like a thoughtful and intelligent person who has taken his country through amazing changes.

       Certainly he seems miles ahead of the usual political leaders we see in the West. I’d be interested to hear any countervailing arguments, of course.
       1. Quintian and Lucius May 17, 2025 at 6:04 pm

          When it’s no longer politically difficult to appraise the man objectively I believe Putin will be remembered in much the same way as Deng in China – that is to say, as an extremely competent helmsman steering the ship of state out of an historically turbulent sea (created by the Cold War/Mao respectively). They’re not revolutionary figures, they’re not Carlylean great men of history, they’re highly effective and tireless administrators who’re willing to do not just the dirty work but the mundane besides to keep the grand apparatus from coming apart.

          To the extent Putin seems more exceptional than this, it is less to do with his own merits and rather more to do with the absolutely retrograde quality of western (and I’ll really just say American because here I can claim the expertise of subjugation) leadership. The American empire is in a collapsing state of decadence, our legislators are so many fiddlers on the deck of the Titanic, the executive is occupied by a rotating cast of adventurist clowns, and our rentier class absconds with everything that’s not nailed down before charging interest on the nails. The comparative bar to clear for a Putin or a Xi is remarkably low
    2. Unironic Pangloss May 17, 2025 at 4:37 pm

       Putin wants Russians to be great again.

       During the Soviet times,the USSR was an inverse empire…..in that minority Soviet ethnicities were over-represented in the Soviet elites (Ukraine, Balts, Stalin was Georgian) at the expense of the descendants of the Tsarist Russian serfs.

       In this context, peace in Ukraine = guarantee of strategic depth, protection of the Russian heartlands. imo
    3. Kouros May 17, 2025 at 5:33 pm

       SO, teleologically, Putin was on his pathway to become President of the Russian Federation as soon as USSR dismantled itself, on the way being for a whlie taxi driver, working in St Petersburg city administration, etc.

       As soon as oligarchs started to be squeezed in Russia and China, Putin and Xi both started to be accused of authoritariansim, corruption, etc. It was just Wall Street scream of fury and frustration for loosing big arteries pumping wealth from Russia/China to US.
22. MaryEddy May 17, 2025 at 12:28 pm

    I recently put an item in my Amazon shopping cart. It was listed at $213. 3 days later it was $40 higher. The tariffs are starting to bite.

    Money saving tip: if you have hair medium length or longer you can save on haircuts without just going to ponytail. My daughter in law told me about this and I use it anytime I need a haircut. It’s the CreaClip as seen on Shark Tank. There are videos on YouTube about how to use it. Very easy and I get better haircuts this way than at the salon. It’s about $35 on Amazon and saves a ton on haircuts. I have no connection to the manufacturer.
23. Jason Boxman May 17, 2025 at 1:04 pm

    Wowzers.

    At Least 23 Dead After Tornadoes and Storms Tear Through 3 States

    In Missouri and Kentucky alone, tornadoes killed at least 21 people, officials said. The spring storm season has been a brutal one for the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.
24. Tom Stone May 17, 2025 at 1:09 pm

    It’s interesting to me that Wuk is also seeing the highest grass and brush growth he has witnessed n 20 years in living in tiny town.
    I can say the same about Sonoma and Lake Counties.
    It will be tinder dry by mid July with no rain due ’til October.
    1. JBird4049 May 18, 2025 at 1:43 am

       …It will be tinder dry by mid July with no rain due ’til October.

       The rainy season can start as late as March although this is rare. Just when was the last time Santa Rosa burned? My Mom has been forced to evacuate three times since she moved there and I am thinking that I should be sure that she has her bug out bag and the cat carrier ready.
25. Jeff W May 17, 2025 at 1:29 pm

    How Starmer careened from honourable left to racist right Middle East Eye

    Unless the Prime Minister was leaning, swaying, or tipping to one side while in motion, I would think he might have careered—which is to say, moved fast and somewhat out of control—from honourable left to racist right. (And any implication concerning that shift impacted his political career is purely incidental.)
    1. ambrit May 17, 2025 at 4:50 pm

       Using ‘careened’ in its nautical sense, this is pertinent as one can argue that “The Ship of State” has fallen over, and is in need if a complete hull cleaning.
       Clear away the noxious weeds, crusty barnacles, and twisty turny wormies who are boring in towards the vitals of the Ship of State.
       Prince William can do no worse than “establishing” a Regency. He can go one better and style himself as Lord Protector. Why fight Cromwell when you can co-opt him?
       Stay safe. God Save the Tsar!
    2. bertl May 17, 2025 at 7:40 pm

       I have grave doubts about the use of the term, “honourable”, when referring to Keir Starmer. Deceitful, treacherous, spook, incompetent, perhaps, but honourable? No.
26. amfortas the hippie May 17, 2025 at 2:05 pm

    this:https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05/09/the-hobo-handbook/

    is worth a look if youve ever even thought about hopping a freight.
    i started at 11, and continued until i got run off from home at 16…because it was there, as it were.
    we had a sidetrack next to our outlaying neighborhood in the pineywoods of east texas…and there was little to do.
    the Tracks were a magnet, of course.
    my brother and i and the handful of other kids would be doing whatever…hear the horn..yell “Train!!!”…and dash off…leaping fences and brush…trespassing with aplomb…to make it to one of our various hideyholes along the tracks(the Stairs, Hole in the Wall, etc)…and as soon as the engine passed, we’d be out there throwing rocks at the wheels…trying to get a spark.
    but when 2 trains passed, one would pull onto the sidetrack…and both would be going real slow.
    thats when we rode them…few hundred yards.
    there was a sandpile at each end of the sidetrack…serviceable jumping off point.
    ive still got the pickaxe i ran off with…as well as “The Flag”,lol…and we got to experiment with thermite welds and all manner of weird and dangerous shite.
    almost died many times.
27. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 3:03 pm

    I would just like to thank Yves Smithskaya for those four TwiXts in about the Russians and their wit in the middle of today’s Links.

    Risata a crepapelle. Damn, the Russians can be funny. I hope to see them back in Italy soon.

    I also note the comment about losing the peace. In the case of Syria, Russia is far away, and the Syrian conflict is such a mess that pulling back became necessary. I wonder if / suspect that the intelligence that we see in these witticisms is being brought to bear on how to bring about an armistice in Ukraine, integrate the four (or five or eight?) oblasts, and ensure some kind of collective security arrangement. (I have read articles from commentators here in Italy who have mentioned a “new Helsinki accord.”)
    1. Polar Socialist May 17, 2025 at 3:25 pm

       Last I checked (5 minutes ago) there are still two Russian bases in Syria. And Russia is shipping tons of grain to Syria, too. The new regime is sending somewhat mixed, but not really hostile signals.

       Turkey would like Russia to go, Israel would like Russia to stay, and I guess the hundreds of tribes of Syria are biding their time while big wheels are still moving. I really wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a coup or another before Syria gets itself sorted out. Or maybe it gets “balkanized” by the internal and external forces. Early to tell.
       1. ambrit May 17, 2025 at 4:54 pm

          My money is on Russia backing an Alawite Autonomous Zone along the Mediterranean Coast.
          When Israel finally collapses, then the scramble for regional polities will begin in earnest. I don’t think that Turkey has what it takes to re-establish the Ottoman Empire. So, a true Balkanization of the region.
          1. amfortas the hippie May 17, 2025 at 7:01 pm

             aye, Ambrit.
             my thoughts exactly.
             it aint gonna turn out like usa wingtipchair people thought it would.
             sowing chaos for 50 or an 100 years only brings more chaos, and the actual folks on the ground take notice.
             hopefully, their walnut paneled rooms wont save them from the noose that they so richly deserve.
             1. ambrit May 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm

                Speaking of nooses, why do we imagine that the FAA requires licenses for big drones?
                Identify the machine from pieces left at the crime scene and follow back to the last registered owner of said “infernal device.” Then apply maximum pressure on that unfortunate individual, whether or not he, she, or it was involved in “The Adjustment.”
                See: https://trust.pilotinstitute.com/?gc_id=416408940&h_ga_id=1164383588947241&h_ad_id=&h_keyword_id=kwd-72774497177096:loc-190&h_keyword=%2Btrust%20%2Buas&h_placement=&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=TRUST%20-%20Search%20Ads&utm_term=%2Btrust%20%2Buas&utm_content=TRUST
                That {family blogging} Bing wants its fingerprints on everything!
       2. Lefty Godot May 17, 2025 at 8:05 pm

          Russia is not part of the “Axis of Resistance” and Putin always seems to exhibit loyalty to ethnic Russians abroad, of which there are many in Israel. Maybe Russia is not actively aiding the genocide like the US and half of Western Europe, but they also are not making much noise about it, and then only polite noises. The poor Palestinians are on their own, especially now that Hezbollah has been totally defanged, with only Ansar Allah giving them any kind of meaningful support. The other Islamic leaders are all sitting on their hands, even Iran, so Israel probably has little reason to worry about anything bad resulting from Russia maintaining a presence in Syria.
       3. hk May 17, 2025 at 8:15 pm

          Coup in Israel? I don’t think there’s much to coup in Syria yet. The government of al Israili is there just for show. No one really knows who exactly the power players are and, one would assume, coalitions are constantly shifting and everyone is ready to bavkstab one another–in fact, probably are doing it already, just not where we can see easily.
    2. Kouros May 17, 2025 at 5:48 pm

       Loosing the peace is preordained. Europe doesn’t want peace so they will not make peace. Trump claims to want peace but what are his terms? He doesn’t really seem to recognize Russian claims and demands and never speaks about what can the US do to address the “root causes” for the war. No one else from his underlings have done that either.

       Any formal discussion on a new strategic architecture in Europe IS a Russian win. And the US will not accept that.

       As such, for one, maybe two generations, Russia has already lost the peace. Only when the degradation of life in Europe will become more acute, people will start more action.

       And in Ukraine, Russia will need to get to the Dniper River as well as take Odessa and create a cordon from Transdnistria to back east to Nipropetrovsk, well defended, mined, dragon teethed, etc.

       The Ukrainians born 5 years from now will not want to fight and will be up in arms against the continuous corruption of their authoritarian militaristic state, where kids in school learn to pilot drones rather than something more practical, like actual trades. All the while Russian missiles visiting various objectives in the rump Ukraine.
    3. hk May 17, 2025 at 8:25 pm

       Yves Kuznetskaya.
28. DJG, Reality Czar May 17, 2025 at 3:13 pm

    Dark matter formed when fast particles slowed down and got heavy.

    This is not a new “theory.” It is a hypothesis. It is an article without enough observations to get past the stage of being a hypothesis. Liang and Caldwell know this.

    In spite of some clunky writing, the article points to some ideas that have been around a long time. First, that blue curve (change in field) in the graph up top has a swerve.

    Well, well, well. Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve pointed out that according to Epicurean thinking, as presented by Lucretius, molecules fell through space and then swerved. The swerve is free will.

    The following paragraph could have been lifted from On the Nature of Things by that darned ole theoretician Lucretius: “It was in this chaos that extremely large numbers of these particles bonded to each other, according to Caldwell and Guanming Liang, the study’s first author and a Dartmouth senior.”

    Although the particles bonding to each other do remind me of Aristophanes’ “theory” of heterosexual and homosexual love in The Symposium by Plato.

    Aristophanes, theoretical comedian. Who’da thunkit?
    1. witters May 18, 2025 at 4:35 am

       Socrates was unsuprised.

       He knew Aristophanes better than Aristophanes he.
    2. Samuel Conner May 18, 2025 at 8:00 am

       > First, that blue curve (change in field) in the graph up top has a swerve.

       That plot is the equation of state (the relationship between energy density and volume) of the expanding cosmos. The change in slope of the model-predicted equation of state is unrelated to the “swerve” of particles in ancient theories of material causation.

       All theories of an expanding universe have a kink or kinks in their equation of state — at early times the energy density is dominated by relativistic particles and the energy density scales as the inverse fourth power of the size (the scale factor, 1/(1+Z)) of the cosmos. At late times, non-relativistic particles become important, their energy density varies as the inverse third power of the cosmic scale factor (like the familiar “particle number density is inversely proportional to volume” of gas behavior).

       I think there is something genuinely new in this proposal in that it proposes that relativistic particles convert to different non-relativistic particles through a collisional process. It is certainly speculative, but I don’t think it’s without value. There are unanswered questions in cosmology; high on the list is the identity of the particles or fields responsible for what is called, respectively, “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Ideas like this might lead to predictions of new particles, evidence of which could eventually be searched for in particle physics experiments.
    3. cousinAdam May 18, 2025 at 12:53 pm

       Thanks for this, DJG, RC! It’s Sunday morning as I’m reading this and it sure poked my ‘go figger funny bone’ in righteous fashion. A great way to start the day! Go well amigo and please keep em coming!
29. AG May 17, 2025 at 6:14 pm

    re: US immigration

    SCHEERPOST

    Voters Strongly Support Legal Status for Undocumented Immigrants
    https://scheerpost.com/2025/05/17/voters-strongly-support-legal-status-for-undocumented-immigrants/
30. AG May 17, 2025 at 6:20 pm

    re: Russia vs. West

    Ian Proud featuring a piece by (Rtd.) British Royal Navy Commodore Steven Jarmy from NATO Watch:

    
    Russia is in the driving seat
    The balance of power in the Russo-Ukraine war
    https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russia-is-in-the-driving-seat
31. The Rev Kev May 17, 2025 at 7:10 pm

    ‘Sprinter Observer
    @SprinterObserve
    22h
    Another side of Russian politics ??:
    Someone posted this warning on the door of the negotiating room with the Ukrainians in Istanbul:
    “Entry is prohibited… We are holding a meeting with clowns.” ‘

    Sounds right but the clowns here wore military fatigues for that Zelensky effect. The TV news talked admiringly about this last night but I notice that the Turkish delegation were also wearing business suits. Swapping prisoners was the easy win for both sides as otherwise they are simply talking past each other. And for the Russians, having experienced Minsk 1 & 2, they are in no mood to accept a Minsk 3 where they win the war militarily but lose the peace. They have spent too much blood and treasure for that it it looks like the Russian military establishment are actively involving themselves now to prevent that ever happening. The west may hope still that China can be used to call off Russia but after the trade war that was launched on them, the Chinese are probably telling the Russians that they see their point now. What happens in the coming months depends on the stupidity of the big western nations so that leaves a lot of leeway for what can happen. The west has no hope of militarily winning this proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia so they are desperately trying to revers all their loss on the negotiations and which Trump is doing his part. He just said that if Russia fails to make a peace settlement with the Ukraine, that he will launch crushing sanctions on them. So of course this tells the Ukrainians to make sure that there are no peace settlements made-

    https://www.rt.com/news/617749-trump-promises-crushing-russian-sanctions/
32. Jason Boxman May 17, 2025 at 10:42 pm

    COVID is that you?

    Mexican Navy Sailboat Crashes Into Brooklyn Bridge

    Several people needed help after the episode on Saturday night, the police said. There were 277 people on board, and three were critically injured.

    Developing story.
33. Jason Boxman May 17, 2025 at 10:52 pm

    F.D.A. Approves Novavax Covid Vaccine With Stricter New Conditions

    The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine, but only for older adults and for others over age 12 who have at least one medical condition that puts them at high risk from Covid.

    …

    The new restriction will sharply limit access to the Novavax vaccine for people under 65 who are in good health. It may leave Americans who do not have underlying conditions at risk if a more virulent version of the coronavirus were to emerge. It could also limit options for people who want the vaccine for a wide array of reasons, including to protect a vulnerable loved one.

    The vaccine had previously been authorized under emergency use. Covid vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are more widely used by Americans, were granted full approval in 2022. However, the companies are working on updated shots for the fall, and the new restrictions on the Novavax shot portend a more restrictive approach from the F.D.A.

    I guess that’s one way to kill Novavax, further limit profits by ensuring few people can actually get it, rather than outright kill it.

    What a travesty.

    Novavax is based on a more traditional vaccine platform, not modified RNA.

    What a stupid timeline.
    1. Yves Smith Post authorMay 18, 2025 at 12:54 am

       FFS, any MD could Rx it if the patient asked. But it’s another hurdle.
34. Emma May 18, 2025 at 5:08 am

    I hope the Dropsite article on Witkoff finally kills off the idea that Witkoff is somehow the more reasonable negotiator for Trump. I’ve been sickened by the eulogies given to him by the more right leaning “multipolarists” since Trump already went back in his words brutally on his pre-1/20 cease-fire.

    I assume Hamas knew that there was an extremely high risk of getting completely cheated by Witkoff’s promises but they had to try something to break the impasse. Now Witkoff gleefully burned himself so if the Iranians or Russians continue to negotiate with him, they’re both guilty of clearly abandoning Palestinians on a matter of principle and being so stupid as to negotiate with a completely dishonorable man out of a dishonorable administration. They’ll have nobody but themselves to blame when they inevitably gets burned too.

    I’ve mentally made a lot of excuses for Russians/Iranians/Chinese for not doing enough to substantively help Palestinians, since they have to calculate the chances of getting their huge populations and maybe even a wider area into war with the US. But abandoning Palestinians now and continuing to negotiate with Witkoff is a massive low point for all of them.

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