Pet zebra escapes and brings Tennessee interstate to a standstill New York Post (Li)
The Quietly Booming Business of Making Animals Live Forever Atlantic
Now I have to feel guilty about eating mushrooms? Becoming a Jain would not be good enough?
Fungi have ‘Brains’ that can think like Human Minds, scientists say: A new study claims that fungi possess great intelligence to the point that they can make decisions.
The study shows that fungi—like mushrooms and their underground parts—may also have their kind of… pic.twitter.com/DfjE3ycbaT
— Vicky Verma (@Unexplained2020) May 31, 2025
Younger Generations Less Likely To Have Dementia, Study Suggests Guardian
#COVID-19/Pandemics
Trump Says China’s Xi Is ‘Extremely Hard to Make a Deal With’ Bloomberg. Whinging is an admission of weakness
Wild-Animal Markets Pose Rising Pandemic Threat Nature. Um, this is news?
“The assumption that children and teens recover completely from COVID has been shattered by mounting evidence that their developing respiratory systems are uniquely vulnerable to long-term damage.”
“What’s particularly alarming is that many had mild or asymptomatic infections.” pic.twitter.com/T3Os4H8U6Z
— Jammer (@acrossthemersey) June 3, 2025
Climate/Environment
Scorching Summer Threatens Grids and Crops Across Three Continents Bloomberg
The global temperature may be even higher than we thought New Scientist
Scientists identify two global ocean bands heating at record rates Earth
Flash floods wreak havoc in China’s Yunnan after intense rains Reuters
Heavy rains trigger emergency protocol: Mexico City and Edomex report severe damage SinEmbargo
Millions of birds to migrate to iconic Australian lake after record rainfall Northwest Star
How Black Paint Can Reduce Bird Deaths From Wind Turbines IEEE Spectrum (Chuck L)
How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter Guardian (Kevin W). A Wall Street Journal op-ed in early 2000s, which given the state of search I cannot locate, argued for painting roofs white and mixing titanium oxide (or a cheaper whitener, I can’t remember what) into road surfaces, and that those two moves would have a material impact on global warming (the article included computations). So why not this instead of geoengineering?
China?
Alexander Yakovenko: “Why the U.S. Is Powerless Against China” Karl Sanchez
The rise of China’s vertical factory farms housing thousands of pigs LeMonde
Koreas
South Korea’s new president has a Trump-shaped crisis to avert BBC
The Obstacles to Renewed Engagement with North Korea Daniel Larison
Myanmar
MYANMAR – Floods in the north of the country: humanitarian situation worsens Fides
O Canada
European Disunion
Europe confronts Trump’s triple threat on Ukraine, Nato and trade Financial Times. BWAHAHA. I subscribe, so I can read the piece, but it’s effectively blocked on the archived sites. Anyone who can provide a non-paywalled version, please post the URL and I will update.
Spanish government rocked by leaked recordings scandal Euractiv
Old Blighty
Starmer is caught in a pincer between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ factions of Labour – it could save him News.com. Colonel Smithers: “Just heard that, this morning, the government whips had words with disaffected MPs and Lords and are threatening to expel some from the party, beginning with the Lords.”
Israel v. the Resistance
Aid massacre: Israeli forces kill 75 Palestinians at U.S.-run aid distribution center Mondoweiss
Middle East: Gaza aid centers closed for a day DW
US-Backed Gaza Aid Foundation Taps Christian Zionist Leader as New Director Antiwar.com (resilc)
Shamelessness and borderlessness in Palestine and the whole world Alon Mizrahi
Exclusive: US warns UK and France not to recognise Palestinian state Middle East Eye (resilc). One can only hope that the EU is so pissed off with Trump that they go ahead to spite him. Normally I would deem this not to be likely but the fact of this warning says it’s not impossible.
Inside the TV Network Pumping ‘Genocide’ Into Israeli Homes Zeteo
Iran’s Khamenei slams US nuclear proposal, vows to keep enriching uranium Aljazeera
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine hits bridge linking Crimea to Russia with underwater explosives Guardian. Kevin W: “Two naval drones hit the bridges defenses and not the bridge so only superficial damage. A third naval drone was taken out by a Lancet drone out to sea.”
Ukraine ‘Burns Bridge’ of Peace Talks With New Round of Provocations Simplicius
Operation “Spiderweb”: Ukrainian/NATO Attack on Russia: A new Pearl Harbor? Complete Escalation? Are the Lunatics back? Facts and Analysis. Sonar21. A good recap of what we know now.
Biden said ‘Russia should be destroyed’ – Brazil’s Lula RT (resilc). Hoo boy.
NATO Satellites Aided SBU Strike on Olenya Airbase
NATO satellites were directly involved in the June 1 Ukrainian sabotage attempt on Russia’s Olenya airbase. Beyond passive surveillance, they assisted the SBU with target intel and planning.
🇺🇸 American TOPAZ military… pic.twitter.com/3ZgtBZiOoP
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) June 3, 2025
What Did Medinsky Tell Ukraine’s Umerov? Larry Johnson. Contains a preliminary outline of terms. But one is a poison pill in the form af a provision that Ukraine cannot deliver: “A peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine must be approved by a legally binding resolution of the UN Security Council.” The UK and potentially others would veto any such resolution.
Putin’s Attack IMMINENT, Ukraine Raid BACKFIRES | Col Larry Wilkerson, Patrick Henningsen & McGovern Danny Haiphong. Information but McGovern is mainlining hopium.
Rutte: NATO is neither at peace nor at war with Russia TASS via machine translation. Micael T: “Rutte’s version of Schrödinger’s cat. I guess he will find out when NATO-staffed decision-making centers get a visit from Messieurs Iskander, Kinzhal or Oreshnik.”
ON THE FINN FRONT, WHY IS THE PRESIDENT OF FINLAND STUBBING HIS TOE ON RUSSIA? John Helmer (Micael T)
After “Victory.” Aurelien
We have had readers continue to dismiss the seriousness of the Ukraine strike on Russia’s nuclear bombers. Simplicius contends in this post above that Zelensky had intended to destroy that entire force. From the Judge Napolitano in Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Can the US be Trusted? at 21:00:
And whenever you hear a politician say, “Oh, don’t worry about the nukes. Don’t worry about nuclear weapons. He’s only bluffing.” Anyone that utters that statement is such a fool and so reckless with the lives of 8 billion people. They surely don’t know it or they have a level o irresponsibility beyond imagining. You should worry. I should worry. The whole history of the last 80 years is of emotions and mistakes and close calls and misjudgments and escalations that are extraordinarily dangerous.
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Meta and Yandex Are De-Anonymizing Android Users’ Web Browsing Identifiers Github
Imperial Collapse Watch
The US Navy’s five roads to ruin Responsible Statecraft. resilc: “USA USA is the undisputed world champ of delusion.”
A Historic Missed Opportunity Barry Ritholtz. I have heard other make this point, but the chart is a good addition. Confirms that Jacob Lew and Steve Mnuchin were complete idiots.
From last week, still important:
This was easily one of the most unhinged and fear-mongering speeches by a Pentagon chief in Asia ever, with relents of the worst times of the Cold War.
Funnily enough, Hegseth started his speech by saying that "for a generation, the United States ignored this region" because… https://t.co/GwL1stnFP2
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 31, 2025
The Defeat of The West And Its Dislocation Moon of Alabama
‘It’s so boring’: Gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids – and educators are worried Guardian (Kevin W). Moi: Parents not wanting to do their job. GM via e-mail:
Key quote:
“I don’t enjoy reading myself.”
Also:
” They noted the monotony of story time, with one saying: “I love reading with my kids, but they request the same book over and over.””
Repetition is good for many things.
This is how I learned to read. But it was my grandmother reading to me, not my mom. And it was the same several books again and again, printed in these fairly large letters and I was sitting next to her and looking at the pages. Because she had poor eyesight at this point in her life, she had to often track the lines with her finger. So little by little, because at some point I knew the words from having heard them so many times, one day I picked up the book myself and was able to read it.
And after that it was hard to keep me away from books. But that was long before screens appeared, and in fact, because of the poverty of the 1990s I only got a computer much later than most millennials. Thus I am probably one of the most recently born people on the planet who are conscious of the before-and-after. Very painfully aware of because my own ability to focus has degraded tremendously compared to what it once was.
But, again, at least I remember a different world. Gen Z, as pointed in the article too, has no concept of it.
Trump 2.0
Musk blasts Trump’s agenda bill as a ‘disgusting abomination,’ catching White House officials off guard CNN. Pass the popcorn. Musk has declared war on Trump:
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore.
This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.
Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 3, 2025
In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people https://t.co/GTRc9Rjled
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 3, 2025
Musk has more than enough money to resort to the AIPAC playbook and primary Congresscritters so as reduce their ability to win in the general (even assuming they survive the primary challenge). His control of Twitter, particularly using algos to promote and muffle tweets, will enable him to amplify discontent in MAGA with Trump. Heretofore, most politically connected people were afraid to cross Trump. Musk is now planning to impose costs on backers.
Scoop: Four reasons Musk attacked Trump’s “big beautiful bill” Axios
* * * The Cultural Contradictions of the Anti-Woke Musa Al-Gharbi
‘Completely Unworkable’: Sculpture Experts Say Trump’s $34 Million Statue Garden Has Major Problems Politco. resilc: “I made my own with Trump”
DOGE
At the Forest Service, Turmoil Upends Seasonal Research Plans Undark
Immigration
ICE Turns Required Check-Ins Into Arrest Dragnet in Lower Manhattan THE CITY
Our No Longer Free Press
Meta is now a defense contractor The Register (Paul R)
Why Eminem Is Suing Meta for $109 Million ENews (Micael T). This is couch lint to Meta but if Eminem wins, it would lower the bar for other artists to launch similar suits.
Police State Watch
Citigroup lifts banking curbs on gun makers and sellers NBC
Meet Baby-Boomer Homeowners Who Fled the Sunbelt for the Midwest Business Insider (resilc)
AI
A Clever AI-Generated Video Showing How Deepfakes Can Deceive Your Friends and Family Laughing Squid
The Bezzle
More Office Space Being Removed Than Added For First Time in At Least 25 Years CNBC. Overdue.
The Insanity Of Modern Automotive Electronics And How It Will Lead To A Mechanical Revolution YouTube (resilc)
Class Warfare
BadRx Baffler. Today’s must read. This is evil.
Status, class, and the crisis of expertise Conspicuous Cognition (Anthony L)
Antidote du jour. Ann M:
A headless squirrel!! Not really. He has a storage cavity in the tree and is probably adding to it. Or getting something out. June 1, 2025 in Rockefeller Park near the North Cove Marina on the Hudson River, NYC.
Texas Right To Repair Bill Passes The Verge
And a bonus:
A donkey is reunited with the girl who looked after him when he was little
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) June 3, 2025
A second bonus. I have a soft spot for Abys:
Cat is shocked to see his friend flying. 😂 pic.twitter.com/sppo4irh82
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) June 3, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
201 comments
Comments are closed.
It’s beginning to look a lot like kilotons
Everywhere you go
Take a look at the Olenya drone attack, it’s glistening once again
With Tu-95’s and other planes that glow
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kilotons
Nukes bringing gore
But the ugliest sight to see is the Do Not Enter notice that will be
On your own front door
A pair of Mughal galoots and a drone that shoots
Is the wish of India and Pakistan
Nukes that’ll talk and will go for a wok
Is the hope of Israel and Iran
And Russia & the Ukraine can hardly wait for hostilities to start again
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kilotons
Everywhere you go
There’s a glee in North Korea, Hypersonics in Russia as well
It’s the sturdy kind that doesn’t go slow
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kilotons
Soon the klaxons will start
And the thing that’ll make ’em zing is the dread that you sing
Right within your heart
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kilotons
Toys in every armory
But the ugliest sight to see is the folly that will be
A depleted human artery
Sure, it’s Hiroshima & Nagasaki once more
Well I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.
Yeah I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.
Roadhouse Blues
Before you slip into more unconscionableness
I’d like to have another diss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another diss, another diss
Your days are bright and filled with gain
Excuse me from your lack of refrain
The time you ran the world was too insane
We’ll meet again, we’ll meet again
Oh tell me where your freedom lies
A bunker where billionaires never die
Deliver me from reasons why
You’d rather fly, I’d rather cry
The Cristal shift is being filled
A thousand jerks, a thousand perks
A million ways to spend your time
When we get sanity back, I’ll drop a line
The Crystal Ship, by the Doors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbulIrN4scs
Oreshnik missile’s flying, looking for that little leech.
Oreshnik missile’s flying, past the subway floors they screech.
It’s looking for Zelinski but he’s out of reach.
Cars Hiss By My Window
FT link. Europe confronts Trump’s triple threat on Ukraine, Nato and trade
https://archive.is/xr70s
“That fear of Trump bundling the issues into one negotiation, and using a lack of progress in one area to punish the bloc in another, is Brussels’ most pressing concern, diplomats and officials said.”
We are all in the crosshairs of the dying American Empire but I cannot help enjoying just a little Schadenfreude that the EU is getting a taste of its own approach to Brexit negotiations from Donald Trump.
“They don’t like it up ’em!” as Dad’s Army would put it.
Thanks!
The FT paywall seems to be run by cookies and if you simply download and read offline many of their stories don’t need Archive. Trying this with the one in links, however, brings up the subscription page.
Changing .is domain to .ph works most of the time.
https://archive.ph/xr70s
Thanks! The archive services were delivering FT “subscribe” pages earlier, Fixing.
Just FYI, we’re holidaying in Indonesia at the moment (Bali, natch) and all of the archive[dot]is URLs throw up a security warning, and won’t load. Editing the URL to replace .is with .ph works fine. My assumption is that Indonesia, being an Islamic country, has blocked the .is domain.
.is is innocent Iceland.
.il is Israel.
using your parent’s name as part of yours as per icelandic custom could lead to problems…. .isis
:P
(Yeah I know the world doen’t work like this, just went for the cheap pun!)
Whoops! I knew that, in another part of my head…
Revenant: “They don’t like it up ’em!”
Well, and the FT has this just in, too —
EU urges China to loosen rare earth curbs as carmakers near crisis point
European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič raises shortage of vital materials with Chinese commerce minister
https://www.ft.com/content/cd9f254c-de83-4473-acf3-0f5d0c3ccbab
https://archive.ph/33Ln9
In the piece are a few quotes from EU figures still moronically burbling about the necessity of ‘derisking’ from China, as if in the real world it will take less than years to create any substantial domestic European production and supply-line for rare earths.
Better to start learning what China’s requirements to reopen deliveries would be, and deal with the very real possibility that it may include asks like reopening Chinese access to such things as ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, in contravention of US demands.
Did you ever have to finally decide?
And say yes to one and let the other one ride
There’s so many changes and tears you must hide
Did you ever have to finally decide?
As for the US, it would make sense for Xi and the CCP to say ‘You started this and we’re finishing it,’ and just end supplies to the US, and in a few months bring US industry of all kinds — military aerospace included, especially– to a screaming halt.
It appears Trump and the US have the cards — they built their house out of them, in fact.
It was the UK that treated the EU with contempt over Brexit not the reverse
In a way, you are right, the UK negotiating team was blinded by its arrogance towards the EU and wanting to have its cake (divorce) and eat it (no alimony, full custody etc.)
But the point I am making is that the EU out-negotiated the UK by ruthless linking all issues and exploiting UK internal contradictions in order to extract the maximum concessions for their leverage. And now Trump is doing that to the EU. Like the death scene of Little Nell, you have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
The EU were much better prepared and they fully exploited the Achilles’ heel of Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement. The UK could have negotiated harder only if it had been prepared to either leave NI in the EU / EEA or if it had repudiated the GFA. Neither would have been politically acceptable domestically, they needed the NI Unionist votes (May did, possibly not Johnson) and the British public did not want the risk of the Troubles restarting. Plus the US was a guarantor of the GFA.
I suppose a third option would have been to call a border poll and force NI integration with Dublin. That would have been an internationally acceptable end-state for NI and would have given Dublin second thoughts but Brussels would probably have just backstopped the costs of integration to stiffen their sinews (and the Unionists might have felt so betrayed they might have welcomed Dublin as their enemy’s enemy! So perhaps a great opportunity was lost, to subsidise and sugar-coat their integration in a united Ireland).
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. With Musk turning on Trump, it looks as though the wheels are starting to come off for the White House. If others sense that Trump is weakening I fully expect his enemies to turn on him with possibly unprecedented fury. He has done enough to alienate a whole army of people for the rest of his life.
If the ‘rest of the world’ have any sense they will be working together behind the scenes to face the US down. In a trade fight between the US on its own on one side and the whole of the rest of the world on the other there could only be one outcome. If Trump’s bluff is called, it would be disastrous for the US economy for him to impose the tariffs he has threatened.
“A Clever AI-Generated Video Showing How Deepfakes Can Deceive Your Friends and Family”
Worth watching the video in this article to see which way things are going. Hint- it’s not going well. We are going to be swamped with videos and being unable to tell if the people in it are even real or not. A healthy society need trust as that is the glue that holds any society together. And trust is grown and you cannot buy it,rent it or just take it off a shelf. But with AI, it will act as an industrial -grade solvent on that trust. Good job, Silicon valley.
Dennett argued that counterfeiting people is as serious as and should be as illegal as counterfeiting money.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/problem-counterfeit-people/674075/
Thanks for this link.
Interesting that Dennett doesn’t mention Meta, a company that seems all-in on this project of creating AI “personalities” with the aim of exactly this type of manipulation.
Then: A picture is worth a thousand words
Now: AI pixel is worth a million views
And as an aside which I’ve already seen on FB arguments by partisan propagandists, any video of a politician saying the quiet facts out loud, police brutality videos…bombing videos etc….will be dismissed as ‘right wing AI”. …even though you can trace it to a news source with date etc. It’s gonna be the new catch phrase. Biden picked a fight with a democrat “You Fat!, let’s do pushups”. Nope, that was right wing AI! indeed.
Fits in with: the only way they win is if they get people to fight each other.
…wouldn’t it be prudent to wait 7 years to erect Benedict Donald’s statue of limitations?
Bless you Wuk. Not sure what’s in the water out there at Mineral King, but I appreciate the good humor among the ashes raining down.
If you torture the words enough, they’ll say anything.
Do you have the million monkeys typing in an infinity time loop?
Human see-human do
GOLD, JERRY!
Re MAGA woes: As a comment concerning countries that have decisions ahead concerning how much to now kowtow to MAGA type policies, and something Rev Kev and Skippy have probably seen, Australia has finally given its general election result after a huge number of recounts. The number of seats in doubt in the lower house has finally hit zero with the declaration of one more independent.
If I were Albanese I would be no happier than Keir Starmer, however. This win was “thin” and preferences are “fragile”.
The Coalition thought that they would sail the tailwinds of historical victory by adopting elements of Trumpism into their parties and slide into power. But by the time of the actual election, we had seen how Trumpism actually plays out in practice and those winds did a 180 leaving the Coalition dead in the water.
Albanese has been incredibly fortunate. First time round he ran against Scott Morrison, likely Australia’s worst Prime Minister. For his second bout he was gifted Peter Dutton, the worst ever Opposition Leader.
Yes indeed very true. But as Rev Kev said, there’s a lot of stuff that is “3rd way nonsense” about the modern Australian Labor Party and Albanese (to people like Rev Kev) is merely “not Dutton”. I’ll let Rev Kev say more if he’d like to repeat his criticisms of Albanese.
Australia still has the problem of huge demand for places to live that is not being solved. Its mining has had buyers but you shouldn’t keep running your economy on one thing.
It’s one of those economies riding a tightrope…….it could unravel reallllllllllyl quickly if one thing goes wrong.
I’ll reply in longer form after work today.
Amends to this, Terry.
Summarizing … one needs to go back to Keating, our Bill Clinton, and the takeover of Labour by the 3rd way sorts. This is followed by the recession we had to have which really was about lowering asset prices so international Western investors could buy out Australia. Followed by forced private superannuation, selling off state assets/privatization, et al.
Then came the Howard years and everyone forgot or romanticized Keating [Labour in a good suit], hence privatization/profit incentives for University, no more tall poppy syndrome – wealth is success and should be worshiped, turning RE into a speculative financial asset which both made financial sort happy with MBS flows and mopes a private means to get rich and retire on its income streams.
This was all SOP until Rudd. His drama was olive branches to the commies in China, perceived at being anti getting individually rich, and complaints about his managerial style – authoritarian. Then the poll numbers looked bad and 3rd way Gillard knifed him in the back with the help of Murdock press.
This then set up the LNP to get a foot in the door with all her Idpol antics. Boom – Tony& whats his name liberal&Morrison – propertarian/wealth church sort, again Murdock press sauce. Ambivalent attitudes to natural disasters for Australians etc. Its interesting at this time that all the MSM were going nuts about how China was buying up everything in Australia. Funny thing tho was they were buying it up from the Western investors on the open market … cough globalism.
Anywho … Albanese is a centrist with a political nose for the cares of the have nots, socially left inter city ring sorts, whilst not going to war with the hard core right in public. His recent actions wrt to Trumps sanctions and requests to up the military card is a tell.
But hay … its the lucky country.
It worked in Poland though…
If the UK and France were serious about protecting Palestinians, they would not recognise Palestine as a state but they would recognise certain Israeli organisations as terrorist groups: the Zionist political parties, settler organisations and “civil society” astroturfed entities and “charities” in the West – and ideally the IDF.
Then these organisations and their ideology of political violence and genocide and subversion of Western society could be proscribed and de-funded by the massive anti-terrorism machinery that has been constructed in the past twenty years..
And once you think about that, you see that it will never happen.
Instead, they may recognise Palestine but never aid its birth as a nation or provide it with protection or arms to defend itself. Then they will wring their hands about the “tragedy” and go back to prosecuting rappers for displaying flags of Hezbollah and Hamas….
“ON THE FINN FRONT, WHY IS THE PRESIDENT OF FINLAND STUBBING HIS TOE ON RUSSIA?”
I can guess what will happen with Finland after the war in the Ukraine wraps up. The Russians will occasionally drive a brigade along the roads near the Finnish borer. And going by the quality of leadership in that country as Helmer mentions, they will almost certainly panic. The Russians are coming! Then they will send themselves broke building fortifications, walls, minefields and military bases throughout the country. Their social security, infrastructure and pension funds will be stripped to pay for it all. Thus having neutralized themselves as a country, the Russians will call it a done deal and go relax in a sauna or something.
There is a huge difference between Sauna and Banya in Russia. You go to a Sauna (a Finnish word) (сауна) if you bring hourly-rated friends but you go to a Banya (баня) if you bring your real friends. After Finland goes broke, the Russians could be relaxing in both types and I guess that the saunas would be filled with Finnish hourly-rated talents looking for a job since the Finnish economy would be wrecked. That would be a cruel irony.
You keep saying that, but it doesn’t make it true.
Well that’s what my Russian friends told me when I arrived in Moscow in 2008. I saw a placed called Sauna (сауна) and proposed we go there. They simply refused and explained the difference between sauna and banya as per above. Also, having had a quick look at a few saunas in the regions I noticed a very different interior design in comparison with public banyas. The main difference being the bed where you can discuss whether the Roman empire really fell or if postmodernism really is something new or just a radicalization of romanticism with your friends o’hourly attention.
To me it is solid anecdata enough to tout it as a truth. If you have counter-examples, I am eager to hear. I won’t change my mind though because I think the difference is too funny to just abandon. Especially since I have Finnish roots. It is hilarious that in one country the sauna is almost sacred; the first thing you build when you build a house, where you are/were born, where important decisions are made etc. The same place is used for more mundane purposes just across the border.
Subtle changes like that takes place in languages all the time, though. During 1990s (I think), the Turkish embassy in South Korea formally protested the use of the term “Turkish bath” because the term has acquired some, eh, colorful meaning in Korea (nb: I only read the article and I still have no idea what the “new” meaning was–whatever it was, it happened after I wasn’t there any more.)
ive planned on building some version of one of those just outside the Big Greenhouse, for decades.
as an added heat source in winter.
and as a place to maybe help my poor old bones during that dreaded season.
prolly share a fire with the big ole metal water trough on those large limestone blocks on the inside(wood fired hottub).
> but you go to a Banya (баня) if you bring your real friends.
Awwww … my visit to a likkle Banya in FiDi has now become more heartwarming.
I gather this is the kind of thing Russia will perform in perpetuity on all its unfriendly neighbours – rush some big armed forces to the border, stop half mile short, observe the mark scramble and then unscramble everything they have, waste a ton of money otherwise earmarked to populus and then mope away – “damn fekk**g asiatic savages”, “AH should have done a better job, bloody nincompoop”.
This will do wonders to the ReArm ideology.
Rinse, repeat.
Ah, Stubb. Winner of the 2025 WEF gathering in Davos, according to this glowing article by Ian Simpson.
How Alexander Stubb Won WEF 2025
https://www.iansimpson.ch/perspectives/how-alexander-stubb-won-wef-2025
But think of all the money to be made by giant corporations supplying the goods! Isn’t that the point?
You mean charging oodles of money for not supplying the goods, right?
The article by Helmer contains passages such as this one:
“More than half (53%) now believe that NATO membership does not guarantee that other countries would ultimately assist Finland in a real crisis.”
My own interaction with Finns is already a quarter of century old, but in those times the general attitude was one of taking the Finnish army and military service seriously, and disregarding NATO — for, as a Finn put it to me, “History teaches us that nobody will come to our help.”
The historical precedents are of course the Winter War (France and the UK decided they had better things to do, the USA was isolationist and did not want to intervene, Sweden did not dare to join Finland officially), and the Lapland War (after having been gored by the Soviets, the Finns had to kick out the Germans on their own).
Somebody more attuned to the Finnish mentality might explain what happened in the past 10 years or so. Why the sudden shift from viewing external powers (i.e. NATO) as untrustworthy, to embracing NATO and giving up neutrality and autonomy of the military, to returning to the traditional position of “foreigners will never bother helping us”?
I would not believe Finns when they talk about kicking out the Germans, and just because all the swastikas they had.
> … as a Finn put it to me, “History teaches us that nobody will come to our help.”
The Finns have a national tendency toward selective memory. Had a Prussian expeditionary brigade not landed in 1918 in support of Mannerheim and his Whites, the civil war might (not necessarily, but might) have turned out rather differently.
Perkele!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7_pVrIshxA
For the Covid/Pandemic section: Now we are importing bird flu. Good we’re starting with Florida. Can’t think of a better place to test it out.
RFK Jr offers to save Canadian ostriches with suspected bird flu and move them to US
Trump officials offer to move 300 birds to Mehmet Oz’s Florida ranch after Canada’s kill order over avian flu fears
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/rfk-jr-oz-canadian-ostriches-avian-flu
Ummm, so those possibly infected birds would have to be transported – by road I assume – over 1,500 miles all the way to Florida via the American heartland while perhaps spreading the joy all along that route. Sounds legit. To RFK Jr and Dr. Oz that is. Idjuts.
Ostrich in time, saves nein.
You think that if something “happened” to those Ostriches during transit and a mob of Emus turned up in Florida instead, would anybody notice? If questions arose about their colour, you could say that they look different because they are pining for the fjords of Canada.
…boots & belts happen
re: ‘It’s so boring’: Gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids – and educators are worried Guardian
Ha! That´s one for my Mum.
Used to be an elementary school teacher.
I just gotta translate it for her…
Thanks, Kevin!
so sad. the kids memorized Eric Carle at 1.5 cuz they buried their faces in “Brown Bear, Brown Bear…” every day. lol.
But to (somewhat) defend Gen. Z—–the general state of the children’s books is garbage (apart from a few gems like “Little Blue Truck” and “Go, Boats, Go”: the illustrations are ghastly; font choices = awful; book bindings = pitiful; prices = $$$$$ (for the lousy quality); and of course, don’t get me started about political messaging that appeal as a selling point to parents….no, your kid does not want to learn about Antonin Scalia or Ruth Ginsberg at age 3.
still 90% with the classic, used kid books: Eric Carle, RIchard Scarry; “Golden Books.” now get off my lawn!
Richard Scarry’s “What Do People Do All Day?” is indeed a classic. When I was a kid, my sister and I read our copy so much that it literally fell apart, and our parents had to buy us another copy. And in the (ahem) many years that have elapsed since I was a kid, I’ve probably given over a dozen copies to various friends and family to use with their own kids. It’s a good book.
Richard Scarry was my hands down favorite when i was a tyke.
he might even be how i learned to read, before shocking and scaring my folks that i “suddenly” could, at around early 3yo.
weird, cuz when i look at those books today(or when my boys were little, even), none of what was depicted in them had any relation at all to the world i inhabited.
(and yes, i still have the originals, in decent shape, somehow, from my childhood.)
Many years ago Golden Books were “abridged,” along with Dr. Suess, at the request of WalMart to save on shipping weight. You’ll have to dig some put of the attic or try eBay if you want all the pages from the originals.
I’ve given out maybe a dozen copies of CDB by William Stieg, to kids of a certain age, say 6 years old.
lol.
i give them Marcus Aurelius and the Rubiyat of Omar Khayham(sp-3).
why fiddlefart around with the important things?
and i read Leaves of Grass and Idylls of the King to both boys, beginning in the womb…continuing til they were given flipfones and videogames(against my wishes) by relatives for xmas, around 10.
nap time, Eldest would actually ask for the Little Green Book(Idylls).
each of them endured both books in their entirety, ere they were 4 years old.
i suspise that it made an impression….given how they turned out as young men, today.
add in wall to wall socratic dialogue from when they could speak…
(i was the stay at home dad)
My mom was also an elementary school teacher and had a reading speciality. She could explain this very simply. Kids of that generation see reading as a punishment because that’s how it was handled in the schools. They were never taught to read for pleasure. They only were forced to read for assignments. It’s really that simple. If all they associate reading with is school and the classics that they weren’t encouraged to see as relevant to their lives, small wonder they find reading boring and don’t read.
Growing up with both parents as teachers had few advantages, but my mother made sure my sister and I had a love of reading and never saw it as this transactional thing kids today are forced into in schools.
When I was in early elementary I’d read encyclopedias about all the wars, mostly WWII. I guess this prepared me to understand American Empire somewhat. Someone actually did up a week or monthly newsletter for us, professionally done, so I guess this was a service, that had the news and such in it. I remember reading about Gulf War 1 in it, for example, which naturally excited me.
aye.
i remember the day the encyclopaedia salesman(!!-talk about an anachronism!!) showed up at the door…and i begged and cajoled and whined until my folks bough the deluxe set…brittanica, macro and micro paedia, and a 3 volume dictionary, with a seven languages dictionary included…as well as “The Annals of America”=>1976.
all that started out on shelves in teh living room, and ended up in the closet in my room…or scattered all over my room, open to one page of another…like a pre-internet, what with the Cg’s and Eg’s and whatnot….
thats where i learned about everything from world history(and also ,like you, a prolly preinclination to grok the usa as empire) to “deviant sexuality”,lol.
maybe the best single thing my folks ever did for me…or the worst, perhaps, given how rural east texas treated smart kids back then.
I read the 1966 World Book encyclopedia from Aachen to Zydeco and everything in-between, mostly ensconced in the bathtub. The ‘M’ was the heftiest volume and it suffered from an accidental immersion when I dozed off and is still a bit waterlogged.
In the intervening years, anytime my mom would read an interesting article in the newspaper or a magazine, she would cut it out and insert it into the proper location in the encyclopedia and the set now in my possession has about 20% more volume as a result.
Aachen has 4 paragraphs in the 1966 encyclopedia, if a current 10 year old version of yours truly back in the day went online with the name of the city, they’d be overwhelmed with information.
Encyclopedias had an important place in learning…
1968 World Book Encyclopedia here….otherwise the same. :-)
My sister-in-law was a librarian and always gave wonderful books as Christmas presents.
I tried to sell our collection at a garage sale and got very few sales. The parents always headed for the toys and the books just sat there.
When my daughter was little, she watched a Disney movie over and over. One day she came into the kitchen and kept saying, “The words, Where are the words?” I had no idea what she was talking about We finally figured out that closed captioning was turned off. To this day, I think she learned to read by watching movies with closed captions.
(We also read a lot to her. )
re: abducted Ukrainian children lie
German altern. site NACHDENKSEITEN picks up on the topic again after some time due to an exchange of info in Istanbul:
machine-translation
Negotiations in Istanbul: How the narrative of the kidnapped children collapsed
Russia has kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children and brought them to Russia. They are being “Russified” there, robbed of their identity, and assimilated, according to claims in Germany. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin as a result. This story collapsed during negotiations to resolve the Ukraine conflict on Monday. For German media consumers, a spectacle was once again staged that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.
By Gert-Ewen Ungar
https://archive.is/BDeyn
I grew up with short form (newspaper) medium length (magazine articles & encyclopedia entries) and long form (books) reading, each effort building you up to the point where I could devour knowledge in glutinous amounts.
I was a millionaire many times over in terms of total words read. It helped familiarize them so I could confidently write said words from memory utilizing my internal spell checker.
Cheaters in school resorted to Cliffs Notes, a much condensed version of a tome, but still some 30-50 pages long.
Sometimes i’ll see short articles online where they suggest how long it will take you to read it, I remember going to see The Green Mile around the turn of the century and the ticket seller warned yours truly by mentioning that the film was over 3 hours long, as if he was questioning my attention span.
There are no books in my sister’s home, and I’d like to claim that everything is on Kindle, but who am I kidding.
My mother taught me to read which annoyed my first grade teacher. I can’t recall being read to by either parent but then I can’t recall a lot.
Perhaps all that Gen X storytime has translated into Youtube world and the return to oral culture. Of course my generation was addicted to the then newish thing called television but books still mattered more than they seem to matter now.
And you won’t find that many books around my house either. Once I’ve read a book I’m done with it. I prefer the library.
My mom told me once that the bookmobile driver related to her that our family read the most of any family on his route.
In Golden Age America, bookmobile finds you~
Saw my last bookmobile in Dunedin NZ 20 years ago. Anybody have one operating near you?
Yeah, in the city nearest here they still run one-
https://www.ipswichlibraries.com.au/ipswich-mobile-library-past-present/
We still have a downsized Bookmobile and branches around the county. Living in town I practically grew up in our main library and could walk there. Now that library, which upsized to a different spot in the late 20th, is more makerspace/homeless shelter/video store (less of that since streaming) with a shrinking book footprint. You can now check out ebooks from your house and my aging eyes prefer reading that way due to the better contrast. The real books these days are often printed on coarse paperback stock even if hardbound.
No Luddite here and I’m fine with our computer era but my feeling about our old library is a deep love.
https://srls.libguides.com/c.php?g=812032&p=5794101
Here is ours, going strong, complete with schedule of stops.
The Dresden public library system has one — it visits my neighborhood once a week.
https://www.bibo-dresden.de/de/standorte/mobile-bibliothek.php
Yup, around the block every Tuesday. I use it as my pickup point on requests from the district’s main library or the state collective library.
And when the parents and their little kids come about I glee with a jubilant oh boy, the bookmobile…
I think the lack of free range kids is an issue. Other adults recognized I could read when older kids were learning at the normal pace.
My sense is fads such as no homework policies are breaking this arrangement too. How do you know if homework is unfair or a kid is having problems? The tell is the doofus neighbor kid coming over to play and appearing on the honor roll. This is the expectation parents have versus what they actually did in October of 6th grade.
ive obtained lots of classics…from Herodotus to steven king…from estate sales around here…and library sales, back when the then librarian was a fan of me,lol.
and even the school librarian would occasionally get rid of books that no one had checked out for years…call me before shipping them off to africa.
so i have thousands of books(in total disarray, due to cousin evacuating to the trailerhouse/Library during panic phase of covid, and throwing everything into one room(!))
when my Library was an organised and clean concern, i was proud of it.
i considered it a back-up drive for western+ civilisation.
still is…but i need to hire some nubile help to get it all back together…have all the materials to fix the floors and the walls, etc…just no one on the other end of the board, as it were.
and books are heavy!
now that i have actual, prescription, glasses, again…after ten years…im slowly getting back into the reading actual books thing.
feels like coming home, kinda.
since you prefer libraries you will find this interesting –
https://lithub.com/a-glimpse-inside-the-worlds-most-beautiful-libraries/
and these places as well –
https://www.treehugger.com/book-towns-where-literature-alive-and-well-4869025
For the short form in my childhood, my stepdad used to have me read the liner notes on his jazz records. So yeah, Pat the Bunny, but also Nat Hentof.
I read to my daughter every nite before bed, but I kept falling asleep because I was a graduate student at the time. She would shake me to get me to wake up and keep reading. She insisted that I do the same weird voice and accent for each character and she stopped me if I did the wrong voice.
She loved “A Near Thing For Captain Najork” and “How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen” and wanted to hear them again and again. I still have these books and read them occasionally for myself, yes, doing the voices, too.
“Richer than I you can never be–
I had a Mother who read to me.”
Strickland Gillilan
My mother, a single parent back when divorce was uncommon, worked full time as a sales clerk for minimum wage and no benefits. Still, she made time to read to me every evening starting when I was just a baby. She would check out children’s books at the public library downtown close to where she worked, then walk home carrying them.
Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm stories were favorites of mine. Because of my mother, I learned to read by the time I was 4 years old. She took me to the library on weekends when I was old enough to pick out my own books. Reading has been a lifelong pleasure and refuge for me. It is all thanks to my mother, god rest her beautiful soul.
Now that I am home bound due to illness, I get books delivered every month from my local public library. It is a service they provide for the disabled and elderly, including those in nursing homes and assisted living. They still have bookmobile services for the community too.
I have been giving books to my millennial coworkers for the last year and engaging them with conversations about some of the classics and what I consider good books and authors. It has been rewarding. Bringing back the physical printed medium one book at a time.
I used to read stories to my daughter at bedtime. Then it became harder when I started to make up stories on the spot where she was the center of the story as a grown up horse veterinarian as she was, and still is, into horses. You can never get those times back again.
My grandfather, a world famous Classicist, used to read me Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind and the Willows, and many other books when I was just a wee toddler.
He’s the G.O.A.T.
” ‘Completely Unworkable’: Sculpture Experts Say Trump’s $34 Million Statue Garden Has Major Problems”
Here it is again. Yesterday I made a comment that Trump & Co had four years to do their research and make their preparations for the policies that they wanted to implement and the only thing that was done along these lines was Project 2025. And yet, everything shouts that nothing was done elsewhere until he was re-elected. Four years wasted here with this park. He could have had a staffer go out back in 2021 and do some research on what would be required to make such a park, where and who to source the people needed, sort how much financial resources would be needed, locate and start planning where this park was going to be located, how all the pieces were going to be transported and erected, the staff required to run this park as well as security to protect some of those statues, etc. But from the evidence in this article, none of that was done. So at most you might, might have the park finished but they would have to mount plastic facsimiles of those statues on opening day until they could be gradually replaced with real statues. Or they could get the Chinese do it. Not so much a Clown World here as Amateur Hour.
re: Gaza Wilkerson
I am still looking for a piece that is clearly stating the context of what Wilkerson said, which I know is true, but I can´t find the news items any more:
Which is: Israel created an aid NGO. Used it to lure refugees to food trucks. And when enough had gathered called in air strikes.
That´s essentially the madness. And THAT is not being reported (any more.)
At least I did not identify this grave detail in the Common Dreams articles.
if you’re looking for a text, Israel’s cynical weaponization of aid
has been reported by Jeremy Scahill, Aaron Mate et al.
here’s a substack by Jonathan Cook, just bc its handy:
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/israel-is-fully-integrating-its-gaza?publication_id=476450&post_id=165097648&isFreemail=true&r=25fbju&triedRedirect=true
thanks
…and then there’s this:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/isis-cia-and-the-ghf-israels-new-frontier-of-control-through-hunger/
…and this:
https://news.antiwar.com/2025/06/03/us-backed-gaza-aid-foundation-taps-christian-zionist-leader-as-new-director/
thanks
like me baiting raccoons…or surplus cats…
thats just evil to do with human beings.
the zionazis really have become what they beheld.
hell, i feel bad about it when fulfilling my role as apex predator.
(but i like songbirds ,frogs,lizards and baby ducks, so…)
…they died with their roots on
Root word of fungi is of course fun, and certainly more pleasant than that harrowing article on Ayahuasca the other day linked here.
That would have required planning yes. Goes to show he is not a serious person.
“Younger generations less likely to have dementia”
I was surprised that there was no mention of reduced lead exposure. Maybe it was buried in the study and not mentioned by the Guardian. I remember reading an article about a decade ago where medical researchers were watching the declining rate of Alzheimer’s and even then, speculating it might be related to reduced lead exposure relating to the removal of lead in gasoline. That article pointed out that it has been show in over 300 studies that nations that removed lead from their gasoline saw drops in crime rates about 20 years later (most crimes are committed by people 17-29 years old); once the next generation of youth grew to criminal ages but with radically reduced lead exposure. Lead is a known neurotoxin.
You know, that’s an excellent point that. There has been a reduction in lead in the environment through car exhaust fumes containing lead and lead-based paints being eliminated. Did nobody else think about that?
I remember leaded gasoline! And my mum holding my baby brother in her lap, unbuckled in the front seat. While and i my sister goofed around in the back seat, unbuckled….at a age 5-ish.
those were the days, lol!
best case you can get your kids lead down to 1 ug per deciliter. area of concern in the US is over 5. that 1 is the background lead exposure (usually air pollution) that is inescapable from industrialized civilization. Even off-the-grid kids in Patagonia have measurable lead in the blood
Family of 7 and my barely adult Czech cousin went on a road trip from LA to Calgary in 1972 in a 1966 Ford station wagon, which would now be considered child endangerment, as we were crammed to the gunwales. The poor beast broke down often en route to Canada, and a few things that got ‘fixed’ previously broke on the way back down. The car might have had 40,000 miles on the odometer.
Nobody ever used the lap belts, and the one thing I can remember about the car was the vinyl seats, which were sheer hell or something close to it, when entering the car after it had been in the hot San Gabriel Valley sun, ouch-e-wa-wa.
Back then American cars were absolute junk, especially the Fords. I will never buy a Ford because of my memories of those days.
They had an oil pan gasket that required rubber inserts front and back to accommodate the crankshaft which had to be sealed to the cork on the sides with silicon goop. The other brands had a single cork gasket all around the oil pan. The Fords always leaked oil. Unacceptable.
Sky blue Chevy Caprice station wagon )—-with the rear jumper seats and ample glass windows. (my aunt drove an LTD wagon w/wood grain panels)
Perfectly designed so that 5 y.o. me’s final milliseconds on the mortal coil would be the grill/car emblem of a 1977 Olds as it rear-ends us, lol.
Pretty funny how you can’t properly explain these memories to someone born after 9/11. Yes kids, every-other-thing was a death trap in the 1970’s and early 80’s. No joke.
“best case you can get your kids lead down to 1 ug per deciliter. area of concern in the US is over 5. that 1 is the background lead exposure (usually air pollution) that is inescapable from industrialized civilization. Even off-the-grid kids in Patagonia have measurable lead in the blood”
It’s worth noting that lead is a naturally-occurring element that is found in various concentrations throughout the earth’s crust, and even without industrialized civilization, you’re still going to get exposed to it. [Same thing with arsenic and mercury. I remember reading a technical paper some years ago that concluded that over 60% of the mercury found in topsoil came from wildfires occasionally kicking it up into the sky, but I’ll be darned if I can find a link to it today.]
So while it’s an excellent idea to avoid practices that make the problem MUCH worse (like leaded paints or gasoline), we shouldn’t expect these pollution-control efforts to completely eliminate our exposure. Once we’re near “natural background” levels, that’s probably good enough.
yes. and most importantly, if you grew up during leaded gasoline, your blood lead concentration is/was very likely >9 ug/dL. according to today’s standards, pretty much everyone born before 1980 would be put on extra-monitoring for lead-induced health issues.
Getting rid of leaded gasoline is a public health success story; society is screwing up the world in different ways….2 steps forward, one step back, lol.
I think aviation gas (for the planes using piston engines) is still leaded. Apparently, it’s got something to do with Octane levels–curious if that means there’s a natural expt to be done around small airfields…
They are working on unleaded avgas. I don’t know how far along they are, but you can check this playlist.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL15lPfoA1wbxSFKvxyp0tB9NsAp3VPQi_
The relationship between lead in gasoline was established via looking at when it was made illegal in various countries and then crime rates 18-20 years later, since that age of young man is most trouble-prone.
You could do a similar analysis with Alzheimers.
But another possible perp in mercury fillings. But that is harder to study since even in the EU, they have not been made illegal but are restricted in use, but fallen out of favor.
Also restorations became less frequent post fluoridation.
Yeah my PhD was cluster RCTs. Part of why I wanted a change was logistics and anticipation of political issues (along with the fact a bunch of Bayesians had a solution in search of a problem and my area was firmly in their sights!)
Yep we COULD definitely look at cities/countries to try to see if Alzheimers is an outcome…..but with all the confounders it’d be SOOOOOO expensive and as I don’t need to tell you, the world now works on crappified cheap research.
I wish I had kept the reference but it basically concluded that although “British teeth” often look worse than the highly braced etc teeth of USians, the actual quality of dental hygeine (number of cavities per 1000 etc) was much better in UK. We have ugly looking but often better quality teeth. Total anecdote, Australia does not include dental in Medicare so I just never went to a dentist in SIX years. First examination back in UK in 2015 and dentist said “wow, there is some deterioration but it’s what I see between 6 monthly checkups on people round here. The fact you only got this over 6 years is amazing”.
damn, Terry. yer hilarious, and i try to imagine you speaking in some backwoods british subdialect(Nottinhamshire?)
but i aint an expert on all that,lol.
i am definitely a child of the lead age…such that ones grandpa teaches you how to siphon gasoline by getting a mouthful(i never , ever did that agin,lol)
my brother was paraphilia addicted to lead paint…which explains a lot, it turns out.
he’s some kind of sales executive at a global enterprise software corpse.
so now im thinking…if i had only consumed more lead and other heavy metals, i wouldnt be such a habitual weirdo at 55….
Haha my mother insisted none of her offspring should “sound Nottingham” so people good at British dialects are usually puzzled by me. Good ones can spot I’m from the East Midlands but often put me into the “more generic sounding” southern part like Northamptonshire. I did pick up the Aussie tendency to raise tone of our voice at end of sentences for quite a while but by all accounts I rarely do that anymore now back in Nottingham.
I don’t like how many ums and ahs I used so don’t publicise it but there is actually a public lecture I gave floating out there on YT……
The photo of the zebra crossing the intersection is the real antidote du jour.
For those wondering why the Epoch Times loves animals: https://web.archive.org/web/20211201132103/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/technology/misinformation-cute-cats-online.html
“A Historic Missed Opportunity”
An interesting article which raises the question of why this was never done. It was just a matter of simple money management and I can only think that some influential people were making bank on having all that money stay where it was. Come to think of it, a coupla years ago the price of oil dropped down but hard. As the Strategic Oil Reserve had been run down – mostly for political expediency – that would have been a great opportunity to sign some contracts to have that reserve replenished until it was filled. And yet it never happened. Same story. Strange that.
Yes, replacing the people’s savings (US Treasuries, per MMT) with lower-yielding treasuries would not have gone down well in some quarters. It would have hurt interest income for all sorts of long-term financial investors (life insurers, pension funds etc.). Another example of “privatisation”, where private interests are privileged over the res publica.
On which subject (HT FT Alphaville today):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/government-privatization-feudalism/682888/?gift=KKqpNXyIKUBM73pHg9O1wcI7hRX5ufHTJtyLFFFK9z4
Also, thought experiment. What if the Treasury went on a debt strike and refused to issue any more? Just issued zero-interest bills. How long before the price of those bills returned to par – after an initial hissy fit by Mr Market at discounting them – because everybody needs a risk-free asset for preservation of capital more than they need interest…. Of course, it’s tantamount to redeeming the whole UST stock by “equitising” the debt with USD issuance but without the problems of (1) the supply side limitations in forcing all that financial capital into real capital, even over a period of decades and (2) illiquidty of real assets (even via quoted equities) compared with debt securities.
or…and prolly easier…somebody could just sever the powerlines leading into whatever serverfarms house all that “wealth”.
Fight Club was too simplistic, of course.
but its a reasonable goal for any serious revolutionary.
i am, however, retired.
This must be a bonus bonus antidote, because it’s there but it doesn’t count.
The genocidal joys around a heart that’s black and blue
Tattooed Sec Def boy
Trump on his knees getting to you
‘Cause he needed
To find out what the thing was for
Been reading
But man the time came to go on Signal & explore
Goldberg went apewire ’cause he thought
Like I’d like it little tease
But I didn’t mean it
But you mess with the goods Jeffrey, honey you gotta pay, yeah
A good time was guaranteed for one and all
The tattooed one did target practice on the Houthis
While waiting for our peace treaty to get called out
I, I, I, I found out what the wait was about
It was a good time, yeah, you got pretty good
At changing stories upstairs bro
You shot your mouth off and showed me what that hole was for
Now I see you
All impressed and half undressed
You got called out over the scars and lumps and bumps
Tattooed Sec Def boy
Have got you where on Fox you used to say
Well ha ha too bad, but you know what some day
“Stop snivellin’, you’re gonna make some innocents dead man”
Oh, but the prestige and the glory
Another not so interesting human interest story
You are that
Tattooed Love Boys, by the Pretenders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9_7xdsq-sE
Aurelien is English right? Makes sense that an english person would believe a version of events in Northern Ireland where the British state hated the bad old Unionists but had to support them to avoid greater violence. The tail wagging the dog. Rather than the British state always wanting to hold onto the North and doing whatever they could to increase the level of violence to justify greater clampdowns
I’ve been on a journey – thanks, Kneecap! – from reflexive Unionism to Republicanism but you are, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong. Although really I should find a quote from Schroedinger because the point is that two things can be true at the same time.
First, the most I know about Aurelien is that he is British, not English. He may also be English but the state he served is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And the situation in Northern Ireland is not uniquely the fault of the English but a British production. It is very frustrating when people equate English with British, our history is much more complex, especially in Ireland (where the English are mainly the “Old English” of the Normans and the British are mainly Scots). You have to blame dissident Irish kings for inviting the Normans to invade, the Normans for setting up the Lordship of Ireland and not going home, the English and especially Cromwell for the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and in particular, for Northern Ireland, the Scots (those damn Stuarts!) and the Dutch (William of Orange, King Billy) for “planting” Ulster with lowland Scots in consideration for their loyalty.
Second, tactically, the UK allied with the Unionists against the Republicans in order to keep the peace in the province after the Free State was formed but prior to the Troubles, this was essentially by acquiescing in their mistreatment of the Catholics, even as the rest of the UK became more social democratic. Then at the start of the Troubles, it sent the army in to protect the Catholics from the Unionists and RUC but some truly disastrous decisions – some of which had to be deliberately malign by the people who took them, in my view, like sending the Para’s into Derry on Bloody Sunday, whereas others might just have been stupid colonial reflexes, like internment – blew up the chances of peace for a generation. And during the Troubles, the UK was at war (always denied, but it was) and had to pick a side and picked the majority Unionist side because they had the numbers and the domestic legitimacy in the rest of the UK.
But the higher-up you go, away from footsoldiers (soldiers + RUC officers + loyalists paramilitaries) towards grand strategy, the less this picture of alliance is true. It was a shotgun marriage, not a love match. The UK government was always in secret dialogue with the Republicans, over the heads of the Unionists. Indeed, it was running half of the IRA by the end, which is another scandal in itself. The Unionist have repeatedly cried betrayal, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. Indeed, the UK government tried to give NI to Dublin during WW2 in return for Irish alliance rather than neutrality but de Valera turned them down. IIRC there was a second time in De Valera’s career that he turned down reunification.
And the reason Dublin has consistently refused to take NI – indeed, why the South is still ambivalent and refuses to undertake any planning for reunification or a border poll – is because the IRA was a few thousand people sheltered by a few hundred thousand and fighting a state of 60 million, not fighting a state of 6 millions. Integrating / pacifying the Unionists in a united Ireland is a challenge 10x the size of integrating / pacifying the Republicans into the south.
Dublin is also bothered about the sheer expense of maintaining and integrating NI, which these days is a poorer performing economy than the South (although ironically it was much richer in the 20th century, even during the Troubles).
Britain has committed atrocity after atrocity in Ireland btu since 1701 it has not been England. And suggesting there was some easy solution for integrating the Unionists in the Free State is exactly the kind of magical thinking that Aurelien is criticising.
You make it sound like if circumstances were different the British state might have allied with the republicans. Like as if there had been a majority of republicans they would have backed the other side. I mean, talk about magical thinking.
But overall this is very “tail wagging the dog” again. The British state wanted to keep hold of NI, and used violence to achieve that from the get go. You can’t pass off the repression done to catholics as “acquiescing” to the savage locals. Their repression was part and parcel of British rule. Are you suggesting that the people who ran the worlds largest empire couldn’t handle a small community a couple of hundred miles away?
If the British state had wanted peace in NI they would have used the army to break the UWC’s strikes in the 70s. Or they wouldnt have been the main people arming and informing Loyalist and Unionist terror groups. But they have always wanted to retain their foothold in Ireland, and so chose war every time.
It is not the tail wagging the dog. It is your refusal to acknowledge the lesser of two evils.
What exactly are you suggesting? That the UK left NI like it did Palestine, without a settlement in place between two ethnonationalist paramilitary movements? And how would that have turned out better than what did happen, exactly?
You know the Loyalists fly the Israeli Flag next to the Union Jack and see themselves as kindred victimised spirits (despite ironically Irgun and Haganah seeing themselves as the IRA fighting the British in 1948)? How do you think they, in a UDI situation, as the holders of all the power in the Province (police force, magistracy, legislature, business) would have treated what was then the Catholic-Nationalist-Republican minority? Better than the discrimination and intimidation and electoral gerrymandering they dished out anyway, when they weren’t fighting for their existence?
And what should Ireland have done? Stood by and watched its countrymen massacred? Or gone to war or proxy war with a NATO member and its principal trading partner and creditor?
I am NOT saying Britain stayed in NI out of some selfless martyrdom. Nor that it is innocent in the deterioration of the situation in NI between the declaration of the Free State and the Troubles. Westminster should never have acquiesced in the treatment of the Catholics by the Unionists but Stormont was autonomous and Westminster did not dare impose direct rule until the Troubles threatened civil war. But it was the Unionists that made that bed of Troubles, even if Westminster did not stop them.
It was also Unionists, in the guise of the Ulster Workers Council strike in 1974, that brought down the Sunningdake Agreement and the British government’s attempt to involve Ireland in Northern Ireland. But Wilson’s Labour government was a minority government at that point in May 1974 (and only achieved a majority of 3 in October). What was he to do with a minority government, as a Labour prime minister: use the army against unions, which had not happened since the General Strike? He would have been declaring war on both Loyalism and labour, on Unionists and, well, unionists. If you want to talked about a missed opportunity, it was not sending the army in 1974 but the cross-community Outdoor Relief Riots and strikes in 1932, which won improved unemployment benefits. If the protestant and catholic workers could have maintained that unity, the 1935 sectarian riots would not have happened….
And further I concede that Westminster did have concrete reasons to cling to NI – but not for it in itself so much as for not encouraging further separatism in the rest of the UK. Cutting adrift NI would have raised immediate questions in Scotland (where nationalists would feel emboldened and Unionists betrayed by a retreat in NI – and both sides of NI are present in miniature in the biggest city, Glasgow).
When Aurelien’s colleagues have at times thought about towing NI out to sea and cutting the rope, what has stayed their hand is that they have gamed out the consequences of the internal destabilisation of two nations, the UK and Ireland, as a result versus the damage of the guerrilla war they were fighting and largely limiting to the Province (helped by the IRA only targeting England in order to maximise sympathy in the Celtic nations of Scotland, Wales and of course Ireland).
The Good Friday Agreement has been described as Sunnjngdale for slow learners but Sunnjngdale was imposed top-down and protestants and Catholics alike hated it, for different reasons. But the Good Friday Agreement is the finest political achievement in post-WW2 British history. Yes, that is a low bar, it is still a stained and bloody rag; it has brought peace and a path to future reconciliation to NI, at the price of denying accountability and justice.
Maybe you have some pathway that might have killed fewer and brought peace quicker. What should it have been?
The British state armed and ran terrorist groups and death squads across decades in Northern Ireland. And you seriously believe they did what was best to bring about peace?
Well, I was there. The British government view of Ulster at the highest level, especially among the security organisations, was “tow it out and sink it.”
it is when you bring your actual experiences to bear, like this, that i like…and listen to you…the most.
The story on Biden wanting to destroy Russia. Le Monde won’t let me in, but I happened to have read a squib in an Italian paper newspaper this morning. So I already was reeling.
Here is an Italian digital source:
https://agenparl.eu/2025/06/03/biden-voleva-distruggere-la-russia-afferma-il-presidente-brasiliano-lula/
Biden is likely to have authorized / known of the planning. The only logical timeline of development and resentment goes back to the Biden Administration. What a bunch of war criminals: This operation my look like something out of the English way of attempting to kick down, but I am also reminded of the too-clever-by-halfness of Nuland, Blinken, and Jake “All the charm of a funeral director” Sullivan.
Here’s the telling paragraph, from the Italian:
“Joe Biden, con cui ne ho parlato a lungo, pensava che la Russia dovesse essere distrutta. E l’Europa, che per un certo periodo ha mantenuto una posizione intermedia, alla fine si è schierata con Washington e ora sta spendendo miliardi per riarmarsi. Questo mi preoccupa. Se si continua a parlare solo di guerra, non ci sarà mai la pace,” ha affermato Lula.
Joe “Single Synapse” Biden (and probably Lady Doctor Jill) wants to destroy Russia. The Europeans tried to demur, but being satellites, they are now dragged into nuclear confrontation.
Trump’s attitude may not even matter here. I wouldn’t rule it out that he just didn’t grasp what was about to happen.
I encourage the distinguished U.S.-based commenters to consider Dr. Guillotine’s very clever head-separation invention.
It’s a wide-ranging interview, and the only direct reference is:
“Mais les Occidentaux portent aussi une part de responsabilité. Joe Biden, avec qui j’en ai longuement parlé, pensait qu’il fallait détruire la Russie.”
“But the West is also partly to blame. Joe Biden, with whom I discussed it (Ukraine) at length, thought it was necessary to destroy Russia.”
This is in the context of Lula’s general position on Ukraine. The quotation above is preceded by:
“Brazil condemned Russia’s violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity from the beginning … I think this war should never have started. The mistake was Putin’s when he decided to invade Ukraine… no country has the right to invade another, most of all when there is still the possibility of negotiations.”
It’s worth pointing out that Lula was giving an interview in Portuguese to a French journalist who wrote it up in French, and of course we’ve now involved other languages. Nuances get lost, and of course journalists rarely record every single thing an interviewee says, so we don’t know if he said any more. All we can say is that these conversations must have taken place between October 2022, when Lula was elected, and January this year.
“Trump Says China’s Xi Is ‘Extremely Hard to Make a Deal With’ ”
What Trump means is then when he makes demands on the Chinese, they ignore them. When he launches massive sanctions at them, they do the same back to him. And they don’t trust any of his promises either as they know that they can be dumped in an instant. So what happens when a bully come up against a guy that won’t back down and can more than take care of themselves – while offering to make him a nice cup of green tea. Since any military options are out and he doesn’t do diplomacy, he is actually kinda boxed in. And just to make things spicy, the Chinese ban on the export of vital rare earths means that the clock is ticking for American manufacturing, especially for the MIC.
South Korea’s new president has a Trump-shaped crisis to avert – BBC
“Seoul is hoping it can use this expertise to build, repair and maintain warships for the US, and in the process convince Washington it is a valuable partner.”
Great location for this while warmongering with China. 🤣
“Canada proposes sweeping immigration and security bill”
Hey – wait a minute, wait a minute. So Canada has an ocean on both sides and to the north is nothing but tundra followed by ice. So who exactly are they trying to keep out of the country?
Yanks.
The millions of immigrants the previous Liberal govmnt invited in to stock shelves at Loblaws and stand behind the counter at Timmies…. without building anywhere for them to live, resulting in skyrocketing housing costs. What’s not to like?
Refugees fleeing the USA? After Trump’s first win, I remember joking that we would need refugee camps so many Americans were threatening to move to Canada.
I was wrong about fleeing Americans but a we did have at least one refugee camp at Roxham Rd in Quebec.
It looks like we may be seeing the something similar soon again.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/asylum-claims-surge-at-this-border-crossing-into-canada-as-donald-trumps-crackdown-forces-officials/article_fa127fba-e89e-4f61-8ee0-2f9b7a8abcb1.html
There may be some regulations that distinguish between the refined markets and the casino offered by “two MIT math nerds,” but just barely. And if count crypto, you cannot argue with their claim.
If I recall, even Joe Rogan was smart enough to sniff out the difference between Vegas games and crypto scams.
For weeks now, every single add I see on YouTube is for gambling or phone games. Once upon a time, I thought not having all Prager U adds would be a good thing. Real monkeys Paw situation with me a YouTube ads.
These touts will say anything. Does he know that casinos are heavily regulated so the house can pay out. FFS?
Have him look up front running and bid rigging and disclosure requirements and get back to me.
i dont want to assign homework, or explanation…but i am genuinely curious:
ive been to one(1) Casino in my life..Dumas Walkers, there in western lousyanna.
i didnt make a single bet…i was there for the free drinks fro the rich folks i was a court jester for.
but i observed, nonetheless.
it didnt look all that regulated , to me,lol.
what it did look like was much like what wall street looks like, from down here.
and has looked like, for as long as ive been a freeish human wandering around.
make shit up and call it wealth, as a business plan.
or, alternately, skim from the poor and middles and call it a legitimate business interest.
like with the value of a given currency or specie, what i am fundamentally interested in is the Belief Factor in Valuation.
i dont think that this has been studied enough, if at all.
re: Taibbi/Kirn
ATW and 1984 made it to Germany!
short item on the new scandal edition of “1984”:
machine-translation
Because politically incorrect: After 75 years, “1984” now gets trigger warnings
To mark the 75th anniversary of Orwell’s “1984,” a new edition with a trigger warning is being released. It criticizes alleged misogyny, the lack of Black characters, and the lack of inclusion of race and ethnicity.
https://archive.is/YAxmZ
Practically a parody (“they” can’t be this dense, enough to writing stuff like this without realizing it, one’d think). One of the features of the Party in 1984 is that it is very diverse at the “top,” with all sorts of diverse groups represented in the Inner Party, but diversity of thought, obviously, is lacking (Orwell has a much better desc of this, but I can’t find the passage quickly enough).
I have come to scratch my head very often recently over how overly dumb and uneducated academics are or have turned. In this instance especially fascinating since the complexity of 1984 that you address is one of the very features that made it worthwhile to still read. To break 1984 down to the “plot” as the commentariat to the new edition does is an alarming signal. I was used to this sort of nimwit think from movie critics. Not literary critics.
Oh, I see that the date is written European style–June 4, not April 6. I assumed that this came out well before the podcast yesterday, but was confused when Taibbi/Kirn podcast came up in the article…
yep!!
I guess Taibbi/Kirn is the very reason they knew about this.
More on the topic from Taibbi. Surreal.
(I gotta take a look at this Julia book, if only out of morbid curiosity. Orwell has been vindicated far more than in his worst nightmares, it seems…)
https://www.racket.news/p/the-memory-holing-of-everything-even?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Newsflash:
Hegseth bans homogenized milk on board Navy ships.
It sounds like something Captain Piss Gums would do.
Lol. Man, I had nearly forgotten reading that in Zap.
Milk on warships. Gets you about 3 days out; after that it’s “bug juice” or coffee.
Or, as he would put it: “no-homo”.
> Status, class, and the crisis of expertise Conspicuous Cognition (Anthony L)
>> Perhaps at least in some cases, the crisis of expertise is less about doubting expert knowledge than about rejecting the social hierarchy that “trust the experts” implies.
>> The explosive hostility towards public health experts during the pandemic provides another telling example.
>> As recent Republican attacks on elite universities make clear, many populists prefer to take a sledgehammer to these institutions
Such well-spoken shite. Here’s the testimony of Philip R. Krause, M.D., from last year:
> It would be unrealistic to assume that politicians would have no interest in vaccine policy in the
middle of a pandemic. Of course, they might hope to influence decision making in a way that
might increase their political capital. But every time this happens, there is collateral damage to
trust. Now if politicians were to own their decisions and state that they were responsible for
them, that would at least be transparent and wouldn’t affect the trust in the public health
Agencies. But if politically appointed and Senate-confirmed Agency heads announce these
decisions as though they were the result of the normal processes, it becomes almost impossible
for the public or for physicians to figure out which decisions are public health based and which
are politically motivated.
Krause was referring to being forced out of the FDA by the Biden administration. His resignation, and that of his superior Marion Gruber in late 2020, are as good a date to mark the point that it became a life-and-death matter to not trust the experts who remained.
Typo, ‘late 2021’.
And as a “conspiracy theorist” who’s been enjoying the slow drip of de-classifications on the Kennedy murders since I read “Best Evidence” in 1983, seeing progressive convergence of the official releases to the thesis of the book, his suspicion of critical thinking is a bit cavalier.
Why Eminem Is Suing Meta for $109 Million – ENews (Micael T). This is couch lint to Meta but if Eminem wins, it would lower the bar for other artists to launch similar suits.
Wow. The actual article addressing the lawsuit is only about four paragraphs. It presents the basic outlines and should have ended there. They did not get any additional comment from Meta or Eminem for the story.
BUT THEN…
ENews reminds readers that Eminem has had problems with drug addiction. Pages follow, focusing on celebrity addiction. Of course, they neglect to include pages of history of corporate executives (who often are also treated as celebrities) that have struggled with addiction problems.
Easy to see how the MSM and entertainment press are going play this.
And it’s extremely sinister.
all your base r belong to us
Haha love the reference……it also works for a bunch of other thngs going on these days
Drug addicts are treated the same as everyone else under copyright law.
It’s so common among entertainers as to be almost expected, so it won’t hurt him with audiences.
And the NYT just has a huge story on Musk’s drug addictions but were too polite to call them that, they just described the patterns and let readers connect the dots.
https://archive.is/20250601193124
he sounds like a dope fiend,lol.
ive known people like that…does he huff gasoline when he cant get the preferred thing?
siphon some freon off the neighbors AC unit?
and trump put that guy in charge of finding and rooting out waste and corruption,lol.
we really are in post Justinian Phase, here.
maybe even post-Honorious…which is what i originally suggested, circa 2016, or so.
Exactly. His audience already knew. What does it have to do with the lawsuit?
More like I was saying they seem intent on reminding everyone that he has had drug problems.
“Looky…he has had drug problems. That can be hard for people to kick.” (wink, wink)
It will probably get settled without court.
But don’t think perceptions of character don’t matter in court.
And little reminders about how the heat could turn up if it drags out. That’s me getting ahead of myself, but still…
re: Israel genocide?
Please someone else read this. I can´t without pulling my hair out and yell at my computer.
Yes, German laywers. And above all they belong to the less insane:
Genocide in Gaza?
Some Preliminary Deliberations from an International (Criminal) Law Perspective
by Kai Ambos and Stefanie Bock
https://verfassungsblog.de/genocide-in-gaza/
Wild-Animal Markets Pose Rising Pandemic Threat Nature. Um, this is news?
This is important. And precisely the problem is that it hasn’t been news but sidelined by far sexier headlines on lab leaks. This does not bring audiences and can then considered as no news. The article indeed brings experiences from scientists (with different backgrounds and research focus) which i find damning important. We were told, for instance, that people has been eating bats for centuries is some places in SE Asia without problem but, Jusuf Kalengkongan’s experiences cited in the article there say a very different thing.
My answer is that this is news and has important content inside.
“Inside the TV Network Pumping ‘Genocide’ Into Israeli Homes”
You cannot help but notice how often you see video clips of the Nazis of WW2 condemning themselves in front of cameras saying what they are doing and how they are doing it. That’s what happens when you are an Ubermensch. It will be the same here with those Israeli video clips. Maybe they think that when the present genocide is over, that people will put the past behind them and welcome back Israel into the light. I don’t think so. Nobody will ever look at the Israelis the same ever again no matter how much they wail about it. In multiple videos they have shown us who they are and what they are doing so maybe we will see bits of that video played again and again. And no Hasbara or punitive laws by western governments will ever make that evidence ever go away. They have been measured in the balances and have been found wanting – of humanity at it’s most basic.
I don’t know. Very few people remember the Melians, the Cathars, or the Jerichovites and don’t have issues dealing with the Athenians, the French, or, indeed, the Israelis on their account. The Holocaust is rather unique in that people do sort of remember, but the history is young and the “sort of” is doing a lot of work even for World War 2, besides.
So much for the Russian-Ukraine war ending without Russia making the Ukraine a rump state. Going after a clearly civilian target forces Putin down a very specific road, even if that is not his preference.
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1930266883514872282
The strikes on Russia nuclear deterrent aircraft pretty much assured Russia will have to take pretty much all of Ukraine.
Probably not the far west – with Lviv as the new capital of Banderastan.
Considering the past history of the Banderites with Poland, it will be named Novy Galicia. (It will technically be a “March.”)
If Poland and the Ukraine had Facebook accounts and had to list their relationship status, they would have to post ‘It’s complicated.’
Are the young’uns here aware that some commenters here are older than the transistor ?
That would be 23 December 1947 so I guess I am a young’un. Now I feel better. Here is a link to a picture of the first transistor, shown in this article.
Wow! That was fast work reverse engineering this from the wreckage of the Roswell craft.
Lead us to your takers!
You always hit eight cylinders, today you’re driving 12. Many, many thanks in the face of all that is.
Ha ha
My business partner used to say my mind is a 12 cylinder engine that rarely needs to utilize more than 4 of them.
My claim to fame is I was alive for 3 months of JFK’s presidency.
I was kept abreast of the action during my nearly couple years of JFK being my first President, and clearly remember events of 11/22/63:
10:14 cst: right teat
12:19 cst: left teat
1:41 cst: right teat
The rest of the day, is unfortunately just a blur.
I got you beat by three months.
Should we refer to them as pre-trans?
Some of y’all are older than the RAILROADS 🚆
I remember stacking food outside my cave during the last Ice Age as it made a convenient freezer.
My old landlord said he could fart dust. Now he is dust.
I remember when you could walk through the French Quarter in the middle of the night and not get mugged.
re: Rutte: NATO is neither at peace nor at war with Russia
Rutte, Macron, Starmer, Baerbock are all World Economic Forum (WEF) members. Starmer had this to say about the Davos clubhouse.m Tulsi is also WEF. How many others we don’t know about?
“In January 2023, Emily Maitlis asked Labour Party leader Keir Starmer:
You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster?
Starmer replied:
Davos
Davos refers to the World Economic Forum. Multinational corporations, usually with a turnover of at least five billion dollars, fund it as members.”
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2024/06/18/starmer-davos-interview/
This is beginning to look like a WEF designed war. / my 2 cents
Taibbi’s latest, public excerpt.
Ending the World to Own Trump
https://www.racket.news/p/ending-the-world-to-own-trump
a para from the longer article:
Peel away the gushing about Ukraine’s “brilliant technical performance” and what you find everywhere underneath are American and European officials who believe, now more than ever, that Ukraine can “win” this war. They’ve rejected voters’ demands that we stop supporting this endeavor financially and rejected their concerns about strategic risk. They want to keep fighting at any cost, even annihilation. They are deluded, treasonous, and insane.
The trouble is that we voters don’t actually demand anything. We grumble a little, then return to the game.
I’ve waited 18 years for the bullet
Got me nowhere, now Trump’s gonna pull it
I’m tickled to drive now
I’m a road trip son-of-a-gun
So hold it right there little choo-choo
We’re gonna have big fun when it goes to Malibu
Might be an outlier-the inland route
It may take forever to complete it, but oh, yes I will
I’ve waited 18 years for the bullet
Got me nowhere, now Trump’s gonna pull it
It’s a super fast, sure shot, yeah
It’s a national breakout
So how come it’s gone nowhere
Huh, c’mon let’s figure it out
It’s high on the debt chart
It’s close to the tip of the top
But you can’t stop something you start
It ain’t never gonna stop, never, never entertain that thought
We got a smash north-south double-header
If we can only keep it together
Talkin’ ’bout you Tehachapi
Talkin’ ’bout you Pixley
I’ve waited 18 years for the bullet
Got me nowhere, now they’re gonna pull it
Eighteen With a Bullet, by Pete Wingfield
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x35B0XCofeU
From How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter
True story; The room on my 100 year old apartment building in Somerville was black; I snuck up there one time when the door was left ajar to the roof. I was fortunate in that I had a top floor corner unit with amazing views, for free, because it was only a 4th floor building, so no “view” premium was charged.
I also had no shade of any kind, and that apartment was an oven during the summer. It got over 90 degrees inside, and even without significant humidity, an inside temperature of 90 isn’t great. I did have a functional window A/C that I’d put in during the summer, but that left about 70% of the under 500 sq foot unit inaccessible for all practical purposes for 8-10 weeks every year.
The roof being black always puzzled me; seems like a terrible choice. I see I’m not alone.
We installed a cream colored metal roof about 15 years ago. My dad said when it rains you’ll hear the drops hitting it. I have loved every minute of it!
JFYI, it’s now mandated in California that new composition shingle roofing be “cool roof” … Not necessarily white, but with a layer of infra-red reflective stuff. Having a new roof, I can testify, it’s *much* cooler than the old one.
That, and the mandate for “complete streets” are bits of good news from the left coast.
Dark colour roofs have been a fad down under for almost 20 yrs, before that none. Strictly a market/sales driven choice for fashion, also its almost entirely on homes with concrete tile roofs. Melbourne has just recently banned dark colours like the popular Monument.
In the last few years I have painted a few roofs for friends and talked them into light grey as its neutral as far as colour goes and 10X as reflective. Informed it would make the roof cavity around 10C cooler and save on air con costs. Not to mention the ceiling in the house would not feel like they were living in a griller – both were amazed at the difference.
That said, I was involve in the early 90s with a product from 3M which supplied micro beads with a reflective coating which could be added to the paint. These increased the reflectiveness manifold. Some roof painting companys offer it but, it does jack up the price enough that most give it a pass.
$4.01k update:
Bitcoin is back over $100k, and like many numisaddicts, I’ve had to acquire 24/7 security, lest somebody make off with my mid 1 figure nest egg, it isn’t easy being so prescient~
Amazing that an article like this would be published as if it were some kind of news after we have spent five years listening to various theories of how wild animal markets in Wuhan may have been the source of covid (or may not).
Unfortunately, this story does not go far enough. Another big pandemic threat, perhaps the big pandemic threat, is domesticated animal markets. CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) used to raise commercial livestock seem like they have been designed to foster pandemics and spread them to the human population. Put a huge population of animals in close quarters, inject them with antibiotics their whole lives, then cut them into pieces and feed them to humans.
As I write this here in the US, a vast percentage of US dairy cows are infected with bird flu.
Why do I always find fungi on dead trees and seldom live ones?
Trump cannot admit to ever failing at anything, despite evidence to the contrary, its what he does.
But, if he was ever to do so, I feel somewhat certain he might spontaneously combust* right there and then, leaving JD in the catbird seat.
Xi’s sitting on a Full House and Donald’s got a pair of 2’s, going for the bluff and betting into it.
* a small amount of char from the immolation will be included in every 78th limited edition Trump Trading Card, collect ’em all!
Expertise in the “soft” sciences can be anything you want it to be. So many studies that can’t be replicated. And it’s not just the soft sciences, studies in STEM can also have their problems.
But it’s those with the soft sciences backgrounds that rule over us, the STEM others are just technicians.
So, economists. The award winning economists got their awards for saying the right things and by torturing maths until their ‘models’ also say the right things. The right things being the things that court jesters used to tell the king. ” you are rich and mighty because you are wise and good, and so you deserve more riches, more power”.
And kids going to university are taught from the playbook of the famous economists who said the right thing. Everything that kids learn at university that isn’t a hard science, is theoretical in the main. Things go in and out of fashion in these schools because they are just concepts.
Otoh, the idea of gravity still kicks around engineering schools as a current concept.
Kids in soft sciences leave university with a lot of concepts, most of which fall over in the real world if they can look past the stupidity that says that anyone who didnt go to university is dumber than them.
These ‘elites’ will be dead weights when the apocalypse of climate change really gets going – can’t repair a motor, can’t survive in the woods, can’t build a shelter, can’t grow food etc. Not to mention any man made apocalyses.
It will be the survival of those with the real, practical expertise.
Bernhard at MoA makes two interesting obs about the Istanbul talks’ aftermath:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/06/ukraine-cost-of-6000-dead-soldiers-thousands-abducted-children-have-vanished.html
I guess it’s sort of obvious now that he mentioned it, but I had not thought about the potential “budgetary” reason for Ukraine not acknowledging their KIA. I wonder if they’ll try to pass them off as dead foreigners or something. (Douglas MacGregor was listing huge numbers of foreign troops, particularly Poles (ie unofficial NATO troops) killed during Kursk incursion. He has good contacts, but he also sort of peddles less than credible numbers often.)
The story about the allegedly abducted children always seems to dissipate when actual facts are asked for. There are shades of many alleged mass sexual assault allegations where some stereotyped young men (college athletes, frat boys, etc) are accused of multiple misdeeds, nothing concrete pops up evidence-wise, but you keep getting loud slogans to the bitter end. These are serious issues IF true, but only if there is something there, and loud accusations and sloganeering, with ever more lurid allegations don’t constitute evidence (We have also seen stuff like this when other stereotyped accused, like young black men, are subject to terrible injustices often outside the legal system–lynchings were often justified as search for “justice,” except that justice stood on nothing other than flimsy suspicions and racist stereotypes… Yes, I know of examples within legal system, too, but I’m less qualified to comment on them.) But appeal to lurid tales and sterotypes devoid of facts make for “excellent” propaganda.
News from 2019 that’s as relevant as ever, considering that WEF member Annalena Baerbock , was just elected this month to serve as President of the United Nations General Assembly during its 80th session, beginning in September 2025.
Now the 2019 news from openDemocracy:
How the United Nations is quietly being turned into a public-private partnership
A new agreement with the World Economic Forum gives multinational corporations influence over matters of global governance.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/how-united-nations-quietly-being-turned-public-private-partnership/
I think that it was Europe’s turn to select a President for the UN general Assembly. The fact that the best that they could come up with was an unopposed Annalena Baerbock would speak volumes to the Global Majority.
New docu on utube from Oracle Films. It’s about CBDCs, digital ids, and lots of other control tech. Much of this will be new info to many people. It sounds alarmist, except everything I see developing seems like it’s moving in this direction. utubs, ~1hr, 52+ minutes.
The Agenda, Their Vision, Your Future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHHOBiUrkg
Trump Orders Investigation of Biden and His Aides (NY Times)
So they claim, except it is beyond any doubt that Biden was not sound of mind or fit for office for at least some, if not the whole, of his term in office. This is absolutely scandalous and should be rigorously investigated.
Nonetheless, I have no doubt Trump’s executive will bungle and misdirect this investigation, either through incompetence or ideological blindness, and completely miss the mark.
At a minimum, if Biden was not sound of mind, how could he sign any pardons on the way out of office; How can these be Constitutionally valid?
American law is intentionally designed to make every question impossible to answer definitively. It’s called the adversary system, and the whole point is that everybody is entitled to keep making arguments until they run out of money.
The only thing the constitution says about incompetence is that the vice president and the cabinet have a duty to remove the president if he or she is incapable of performing the duties of the office. They didn’t.
Other than that, incompetence is a matter of state law, and no state has jurisdiction to declare the president incompetent.
I think it would be a great thing if Biden’s entire presidency were invalidated–maybe future vice presidents and cabinets would take their duties a little more seriously.
But the only thing I will predict with confidence is that the situation in the United States will continue to deteriorate and spiral out of control until it reaches some type of stable entropic state, which I hope will be somewhat more advanced than a few hundred people surviving in caves.
Maybe off the subject slightly, but the thing I don’t understand about the Autopen kerfuffle is, isn’t there some kind of log in or tracking system for whoever would use it with the President’s authority? Could any fool just walk up to it and use it? No log in to who you are or entering some sort of security clearance code? “Hey, the President is about as lucid as a crackwhore on a Saturday night, so let’s get these pardons signed dating back to 2014 to cover their asses.”
My brother was partner in a big shot law firm back in the day, and he was mentioned that you couldn’t even make a copy without entering the identifying case code so they could bill the client for it. At least from there they could see who was working on that case.
I suppose this autopen nonsense ranks right up there with “Who left that bag of cocaine in the White House?” And I do think they should investigate this whole situation.