Pissarro’s Paris, brought to life! An amazing animation by Andrey Zakirzyanov.
[📹 Andrey Zakirzyanov]pic.twitter.com/RJmWP8ynJq
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 8, 2025
2.75-Million-Year-Old Tools Rewrite Human Technological History SciTech Daily
James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at age 97 PhysOrg
The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience Noema
At this SF grocery store, you can’t leave unless you buy something SFgate
Slaughterhouses Harbor Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria That Give People Urinary Tract Infections Sentient
COVID-19/Pandemics
Where the COVID surge is “very high” and what to watch for this winter Axios
Obesity drug seen as effective for long COVID, gets clinical trial KPBS
The fiscal anatomy of the next pandemic Mail & Guardian
Climate/Environment
Water temperatures in Amazonian lakes rise to unprecedented levels, killing wildlife Phys.org
The UN climate summits are working – just not in the way their critics think The Conversation
South of the Border
The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution ScheerPost
Sexual harassment in Mexico drives women to look for rides with other women ABC News
Argentina: Grabbing A US Lifeline Global Finance
Guyana in turmoil after opposition leader arrested and faces US extradition Guardian
China?
China has launched drone firefighting technology that helps in extinguishing fires and conducting aerial rescues in high-rise buildings.
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) November 8, 2025
China builds advanced satellite power system for particle beam and other space weapons SCMPChina’s Stranded Astronauts Show the Dangers of Space Junk Scientific American
China demands concessions from the Netherlands in row over chips DPA International
China’s waste blueprint could meet half of construction demand with recycled sand, gravel Interesting Engineering
India
India’s strong economy can’t save sinking rupee Cryptopolitan
India’s strategic response to the Belt and Road Initiative meer.com
From global stage to strategic silence: India’s bold diplomacy faces new test in Trump era Firstpost
Africa
What Trump should know before going ‘guns-a-blazing’ into Nigeria Responsible Statecraft
Trump says US to boycott South Africa G20 summit over white ‘genocide’ Al Jazeera
The Bloodlands of Africa Tablet
European Disunion
Hope and frustration – debate on EU enlargement intensifies Euronews
EU Considers Easing AI Rules for Big Tech Dagens.com
EU and Belgium reportedly fail to agree on use of frozen Russian assets Ukrainska Pravda
Old Blighty
‘Nationwide surge’ in UK anti-Muslim hate as mosque attacks on rise: Watchdog Andolu Agency
Bank of England says JLR’s cyberattack contributed to UK’s unexpectedly slower GDP growth The Register
Israel v. Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran
Christians in Lebanon
Israel wipes out the entire village of Mhaibib in South Lebanon, home to shrine of Prophet Benjamin.
The shrine, located atop a hill and featuring arched chambers, a historic courtyard, cemetery, and tomb, was over 2,100 years. pic.twitter.com/I9QyV8yyPL
— Irlandarra (@aldamu_jo) November 8, 2025
Gaza’s water turns poisonous as Israel’s genocide leaves toxic aftermath Al JazeeraUS sidelining Israel on decision-making at Gaza ceasefire HQ, official says The Times of Israel
Israel’s underground jail, where Palestinians are held without charge and never see daylight The Guardian
In Israel, Mamdani’s win in New York stirs alarm over shifting US attitudes AP
New Not-So-Cold War
What the bloody battle for Pokrovsk tells us about Putin’s tactics in Ukraine The i Paper
“Energy generation now at zero”: Russia delivers heaviest strike on Ukrainian thermal power plants Ukrainska Pravda
Western Promises and Russia’s Red Lines American Conservative
Trump’s White House supports EU plan to use $217 billion in frozen Russian assets Cryptopolitan
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Why camera-equipped smart glasses are already a privacy disaster Apple Insider
Ring cameras’ new Familiar Faces tool violates state privacy laws, privacy experts say Mashable
Imperial Collapse Watch
Delaware mayor blames Philadelphia program for busing homeless population to his city Fox News
Near Ohio air force base, food pantries and businesses grapple with effects of shutdown The Guardian
Trump 2.0
The Kennedy Center Crackup NY Times
Sources: Trump wants Commanders’ new D.C. stadium named for him ESPN
12 Reasons Why Trump, 79, May Be Losing The Plot Daily Beast
Trump was already cutting low-income energy assistance – the shutdown is making things worse as cold weather arrives The Conversation
Musk Matters
Elon Musk’s $1tn pay deal approved by Tesla shareholders BBC
Elon Musk makes himself far-right fixture after White House departure The Guardian
Democrat Death Watch
Nancy Pelosi made $130M in stock profits during Congress career — a return of 16,930% NY Post
Bernie Sanders crashes Schumer news conference, criticizes Democratic Party leadership Fox News
Who is leading the Democratic Party? New poll reveals troubling answer NJ.com
Immigration
Why Nikki Haley’s son went radical UnHerd
‘Shocks the conscience’: Judge slams immigration officers’ use of force in Chicago, reports say The Hill
Our No Longer Free Press
Press freedom threats surge with ICE raids Axios
If Big Tech can’t withstand jawboning, how can individual journalists? Freedom of the Press Foundation
Mr. Market Is Moody
Weekly Commentary: The Question Credit Bubble Bulletin
Debt: The Consumer’s Growing Curse Seeking Alpha
AI
Waymo engineer Vincent Vanhoucke on Self-driving cars 3 Quarks Daily
A.I. Sweeps Through Newsrooms, but Is It a Journalist or a Tool? NY Times
Sam Altman Says That in a Few Years, a Whole Company Could Be Run by AI, Including the CEO Futurism
Seven more families are now suing OpenAI over ChatGPT’s role in suicides, delusions TechCrunch
The Bezzle
Facebook’s fraud files Medium
Guillotine Watch
🇦🇪 World’s most expensive coffee goes on sale in Dubai at $1,000 a cup
Selling for nearly $1,000 a cup, a cafe in Dubai is offering the world’s most expensive coffee, brewed from Panamanian beans sold at a premium price. pic.twitter.com/2Gt0bxqHAK
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 5, 2025
For coffee lovers ☕☕.
Top 10 most expensive coffee in the world. pic.twitter.com/9VmH6dSB1k— FunFacts (@ScienceXFacts) August 22, 2025
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
“EU and Belgium reportedly fail to agree on use of frozen Russian assets”
This is not really a hard story to understand. The EU is demanding that Belgium basically hands over those frozen Russian funds to Zelensky. Belgium is saying that when the Russians come for their money all lawyered-up, that Belgium alone will be on the hook for all that money. In addition, Euroclear will be destroyed as no country in the world will trust them to hold their money anymore and the Belgium economy will blow up and impoverish the whole country. This being the case, Belgium is demanding that every member State of the EU sign a legal document saying that they will be on the hook for that money as well and no, they will not accept EU promises to have Belgium’s back. The EU is saying ‘Hey, let’s not get crazy here. You can trust us, bro. We will absolutely be there for you so just give Zelensky all that money and everything will work out.’ Belgium thought about it for a moment and said ‘Nope!’ And that is where we are.
Do I understand it coreectly that the Belgians are all for stealing the money, they just don’t want to steal them alone?
At the firat quick glance I was disturbed by the idea that there may be rational European politicians taking their country’s best into account. Thar would be out of line. At second reading it seems that we may all be calm. The Belgians are mad too.
They just want to take it with some dignity, not end up looking like petty thieves.
Strength in numbers, man.
Too late for that.
If I’m understanding this correctly, those “Russian assets” are held (in custody) at Euroclear, one of the world’s largest securities custodial and clearing houses. Allowing these assets to be looted would destroy EC’s reputation.
Euro clear and its parent company are domiciled in Belgium, subjecting them to liability in the form of international trade disputes involving Euroclear.
From Euroclear’s Our Group structure here are the main strengths/selling points EC points to,
The advantages of this structure are:
high levels of market interoperability, linking domestic markets with the international market and vice versa
integrated platforms and processes for seamless transitions between settlement, financing and collateral management services
reduced systemic risk
In my day job, I’ve dealt with Euroclear and they are a very cautious and pragmatic outfit, seeing themselves as a utility and self-regulating to fend off any criticism or political takeover. I can well imagine that their compliance function and likely all the lawyers will walk out the door if this theft goes forward.
Thank you.
I’m in a similar position and agree.
I think that you got it exactly. It gets even worse though. If they swipe those Russian assets, how many countries will be happy to have their financial assets in the EU anymore. I was reading the other day that financial investments in Europe is way down so it has already started.
Have you seen the latest reports coming out that Norway is set to guarantee the loans, e,g, from le Monde, EU considers Norwegian solution to guarantee Ukraine’s ‘reparations loan’ : “The European Commission wants to use frozen Russian assets to lend €140 billion to Kyiv. A majority of Norway’s political parties back the idea that the country and its vast sovereign wealth fund could act as guarantor.” Any Norwegians in the commentariat ? How do you feel, as a citizen of a country of less than 6 million, about underwriting a debt that would work out at something like $25,000 for every man, woman, and child in Norway ?
It’s not for nothing they put the useful idiot Jens Stoltenberg in the position of finance minister.
I’m sure they can write it off as defense spending, as mandated in the big, beautiful NATO consensus.
Obviously they think it’s a better option for their obese national wealth fund than AI data centres.
Might be cheaper just to offer russian/chinese language courses to them all.
It is beyond stunning that Russia left liquid assets in the EU that could be seized and was oblivious to the fact that this could occur.
This could be attributable to a few factors: 1) The SMO decision was relatively spur-of-the-moment, despite the rapidly increasing tensions in February 2022; 2) The SMO decision was closely guarded and not communicated to their equivalent to the Treasury Department, and 3) Putin had absolutely no grasp on the white hot, violent hatred of Russia among Western TPTB / Neocons.
Alternate view, Russia thought the Eu was sane.
Imagine expecting the west to honor agreements!
Agree. I don’t think Putin expected the West was crazy enough to blow up the Nordstream pipeline either.
For years, the criticism of Crimean annexation and Russia’s behavior in Georgia was to do a better job financially integrating so that the autocratic reflect wasn’t necessary. Use politics and diplomacy to get what you want. But there are no negotiating partners for Putin anywhere in the EU or the US or NATO. I don’t think that was quite so clear prior to the SMO.
The Russians, slightly agape, are sitting there watching the West saw off the limb it’s sitting on.
For a long while I expect they’ve been asking themselves “is there something else going on here? Can they really be that stupid?”
Consensus is tentatively forming around “yup…”
They are also watching Ukrainians saw off their actual limbs in the name of EU values.
There is a photo, made by Ukrainians for promotional purposes, of their former soldier missing both legs and left arm. He is smiling, and using the remaining limb to do the “Roman salute”.
The seizure of Venezuela’s gold should have dispelled any illusions of Western financial sanity.
Or maybe Russia knew that they could seize European assets in Russia that were worth more then the pool kept at Euroclear to facilitate international trade.
The Russian assets were frozen on the second banking day from the invasion, so there really was no chance to transfer to safety in time. And the military operation was supposed to be over rather quickly, in a month or three – as it almost was.
And then, of course, all the international laws, regulations and agreements, that the “rules based order” was pretending to follow, as ilsm points out.
“Russia?” As I understand it, it was governor of the Central Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina, the West’s favorite central banker.
But this does reflect back to Putin who chooses to keep her there even though she favors Russia caving to the West. She was preparing to leave Russia at the beginning of the SMO but Putin persuaded her not to. Big mistake.
The bear left a honeypot,
with a poison pill inside.
A temptation that the greedy beast
won’t be able to resist.
So sweet for a moment,
and a diabetes as a bonus.
It’s a bait.
It’s a trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThJcHjCI9j4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piVnArp9ZE0
In for a penny, in for a pound. They already gave the go ahead to Trump’s Venezuelan war plans by giving the Nobel War Prize to Maria “The Joker” Machado. Directly sponsoring a big war closer to home is just putting more skin in the game.
As a Norwegian I’d say go for it. I don’t expect the broader public to be given any choice, similar to the decision to bomb Libya (Stoltenberg, then prime minister, and a few others decided it by SMS messaging). It is clearly ludicrous, however Ukrainian and European elites seem to stop at nothing until every drop of (Ukrainian) blood and every (European) penny has been spent. When the plan backfires we may finally get rid of the Oil fund, Stoltenberg and European war mongers such as von der Leyen, Kallas, Starmer and Macron. And, perhaps, return to some kind of reason
On a more factual note: major pushes come from the Danes, such as editor of the newspaper Politiken, Christian Jensen, former NATO general secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and prime minister Mette Frederiksen. They’ve been obsessing with this for years, arguing that the oil fund should be spent on Ukraine, this seems like the latest iteration of their campaign
Obviously the Norwegians should have pissed their North Sea oil earnings away like the British. It’s only fair that they alone, without any support from the rest of unified and indomitable NATO Europe, should underwrite a loan worth near to 30 percent of their annual GDP. (/sarc if it’s not already obvious)
Surely Norway should do the opposite, make the loan itself with a cast iron security provided by the EU, for the inevitable default?
Say, Denmark? And the UK could throw in Shetland again.
Plus, of course, exemption from all EU sanctions in trading with Russia, its neighbour….
And to top it off, it’s all completely pointless paper shuffling. It’s not like there is “frozen” stock of 10’000 tanks and 20M shells lying somewhere in EU and owned by Russia that will be magically unlocked for Ukraine when they finally seal the steal. Nor are there idle munition factories, waiting to spring into action. It’s just PR exercise in pretending that the material burden of war will not be carried by the western population, but by Russia.
I wouldn’t call it entirely useless paper shuffling. Ukraine, with its forecast budget deficit of $50 billion for 2026, would at the very least be able to pay salaries for another year or two.
They are running low on cannon fodder, more so than shells.
Well, he watched what went down in Gaza, IDF doing their best
Excitable goy, they all said
And he tried to fake umbrage to Bibi, get it off his chest
Excitable goy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable goy
He took in Jared to plan Club Meddle
Excitable goy, they all said
Bead there-done that
Excitable goy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable goy
He took no exception to the 200,000 dead
Excitable goy, they all said
And he saw all the Palestinians with no home
Excitable goy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable goy
After a few years and 200 Gaza eyes for every lost Israeli eye
Excitable goy, they all said
And you wondered if the Warsaw Ghetto was like this, aye yi yi
Excitable goy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable goy
Excitable Boy, by Warren Zevon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZokPAuhD6k
Cool, I had this lp on the turntable just last night.
Warren was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last night, kudos to the lyrical king~
His debut album has been a constant companion for over forty years. I’ve been listening to ‘Enjoy Every Sandwich’ a lot lately, I suspect there’s a place for a current-events-adapted ‘Studebaker’ in the near future.
I had the great pleasure of seeing him perform back in ’82. He opened with Johnny Strikes Up The Band.
Had the pleasure of seeing Zevon play at the Wiltern Theater in LA many times in the 1980’s
In the wake of Mamdani’s victory some billionaires have began to admit that “capitalism” such as it is ain’t working for the young’uns and that’s why they are turning to “socialism,” per notable consumer of young people’s blood Peter Thiel. Unsurprisingly, the Twitterati have taken to blaming the Boomers living on Social Security and Medicare in their paid-off houses. Because surely trying to set-off intergenerational conflict will fix what ails society and “capitalism” 🙄
Any certified holder of a trump or melania coin should be given rights of civil forfeiture against property owning ‘leftists’*
Redistrict Amerika!
*anyone they don’t like.
Boomer here. Lambert didn’t like generational generalizations but I think my cohort should get some blame if blame is appropriate. Alternately Gen Z is simply on the wrong part of history’s wheel.
Nikki Haley’s son blames H1-B and immigrants for the fact that his expensively educated friends can’t get jobs. But it could be that Thiel and his pals are coming for all of us–boomers and immigrants too.
They are and my decision to get out of Dodge looks better and better. Still, that’s the selfish part of me saying that. The other parts are mad as hell for the people, native born and immigrants alike.
In all seriousness there are many boomers who could do more to help their millennial children. Strong families are a necessary ingredient of a strong society.
I know of some boomers who travel three months a year to visit grandchildren and help provide care.
I know of others who prioritize going to the casino and to the beach. One day they’ll sign away their life savings to an old age home owned by private equity.
That’s a fair point, however Social Security and Medicare have nothing to do with it. The emphasis on those earned benefits tell me all I need to know about the motivations of these aholes – they want to get their hands on the money and destroy the programs, much like they destroy everything else that they touch.
The Boomers allowed Social Security to go from a “pay as you go” social welfare program to a “gotta get mine since I paid into it” retirement savings program. They also allowed the rich to be exempt from paying into it beyond a low threshold.
Definitely agree that the current talk of Social Security “reform” is about one last loot of the public coffers, but the Boomers are definitely the group most responsible for letting it happen. In any case, they seem happy to sell out their kids and grandkids if they’re taken care until death.
WE did that? All of us? I thought it was Reagan and O’Neill and later Clinton, (thank you, Monica), then Bush, then Obama, etc.
You know, the Wall St. boys. / ;)
Right on. Getting fed up with all this “OK Boomer” bullshit. Look at the individual villains, not an age group construct designed to muddy any real critical thinking about how the disaster happened and who is responsible. Oh, and throw in the usual divide and rule generational cohort definitions. Weak.
Divide and conquer.
But why? I can only guess that the large numbers of kids born during and after WWII until the early 60’s frightened old money and Wall St. What if these kids came together to demand better pay when they grew up, like their grandparents and parents had done in the 30’s,40’s, and 50’s? What if they aligned with their parents and grandparents on financial matters?
Holy horrors, Batman!
Got to find a way to break up that possibility and keep it broken.
/my 2 cents
Right on. Right on.
The OK Boomer line is funny. Especially because so many of the boomers still in the work force refuse to change or adapt and yet are highly compensated. Chuck Schumer isn’t the only oldster who’s outlived their time in an organization they have been in for a long time.
Still, the other comments in this thread are accurate too. Whatever benefits being born early may have yielded, we’re all stuck dealing with the current load of crap. It doesn’t get easier if you’re older.
The Powell Memo brought home the Dulles boys Miesian vision of a globalist Western Oligarchy to supplant the British Empire.
Unless you were watching all the spooks abroad and their creeping encroaching at home (Reagan Bush Campaign Chair Bill Casey “Our work will be done when everything Americans believe is a lie”), you’ve been a democracy tourist watching the show The Mighty Wurlitzer put on.
Well funded and systematically conceived, I’ve been called a CT my whole adult life for pointing out this is happening. It wasn’t the hippies, baby boomers or immigrants, it was, is and with the brief intermission of Marriener Eccles term at FDRs Fed always has been the Oligarchs.
Oh yeah, VP Bush was a retired, if that ever really happens, CIA Director.
Too, Casey also, I meant to say
So what? Did the Boomers go on general strike against the oligarchs? Did they form strong organizations to oppose the destruction of the New Deal and Great Society programs?
Saying CIA or deep state doesn’t absolve their cohort of the responsibility for what they did and did not do.
Blaming a cohort has little explanatory power. Yes, my generation coincided with the onset of a period of epic corruption where extra legislative court rulings redefined a Republic as a Market whose corrupting force drew the worst people to politics.
But those responsible for these corruptions weren’t of my generation and their hippie punching is only one step removed from you cohort blaming.
Yep. You are right. The the stock markets are looking wobbly and could really, really use a fresh source of “investments.” / ;)
I am a boomer. I have child I have tried to help. That child insisted on moving to NYC and staying where rent ate most of the income that the child earned or finagled. I helped bail that child out of credit card doom loops several times only to find out later that no lessons had been learned. That child got into drugs and burned through tens of thousands of dollars received in various windfalls, some of them of questionable legality. I was often sending two or three thousand dollars per month to bail that child out of financial problems. That child has been an adult for over a decade but cannot/will not balance a check book. That child has a gift for picking up parking and driving tickets, penalty fees, bank charges, credit card rate extortion and burning through whatever money I have sent trying to help.
One of my nieces ripped my brother off for $15 grand. A nephew, her brother, wasted $11 grand of help my brother sent [from his home in another state] to pay for a training school to enable him to qualify for a trucker’s driver’s license … two months in, he dropped out of the four month program because he would not use a nearby tram to ride to the school when his car died. That same nephew was offered two chances to get into the electrician’s union. All he had to do was review his math before taking the licensing test. Instead he preferred to smoke marijuana and sleep alternately on his sister’s or mother’s floor.
I recently moved to a new home. I talked to a neighbor across the street. She and her elderly husband allowed their son to move in with his wife after that son lost his job and was unable to get another job, unable for odd reasons that sounded similar to my child’s mixed efforts at finding employment. Meanwhile, that neighbor and her husband had been pushed into bedroom at the rear of the house as their son and his wife nudged and pushed them out of the rest of their house.
I know times are harder and will become much much harder but the young people do not seem to have grasped the present situation and have no sense of what is coming. Until they do, I feel like the help I have given my own young is like spitting into the wind. I am not sure this a generational thing so much as a failure of today’s Society.
Another data point for the “Kids These Days” folder:
The post-secondary institution that I retired from a couple of years ago took another bite out of its instructional time by designating a week-long mid-semester break starting Monday, which brackets the existing Canadian statutory holiday of Nov. 11th. (Due to calendar quirks, this amounts to a couple less teaching days than last year. But it comes after losing another teaching day with the 2021 designation of the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation which was recognized as a statutory holiday in most provinces.)
As a blissful retiree, this came as news to me, so I queried a couple of former colleagues about the rationale for this change. One explained that the timing was based on when the kids appeared to “run out of steam”. Another was evidently less convinced and suggested: “We also should have a crisis centre for students who are asked to do more than 20 minutes of homework per course.”
It’s hard not to wonder whether this is a response to the cumulative neurological damage that young people have suffered from repeat COVID infections. I haven’t had time to find out if other schools have instituted something similar.
Your post comes off like you’re whining about a few vacation days in what is typically a 16-week semester — Blissful retirement indeed.
I myself am teaching in a University. There are indeed some things that bother me, but the fact that there are a few days off is not among them.
If the semester was 16 weeks, I wouldn’t be concerned. Except that it’s now down to about 12 1/2 weeks at that institution.
We’ve gone from a 13-week term to a 12-week term. We lost one day due to a gas leak where Hydro-Quebec had to turn off power to a chunk of downtown and another two days to a student strike. We’re now having to go remote on Zoom because of a transit strike for 1-3 weeks. Not a whole lot of time for teaching.
Jeremy, I’m sorry this happened to you, I hope that your child, niece, and nephew find their way. I can see why your perspective is different, as in these cases (different from my own experience) it’s not clear if nominal help does more harm than good.
Well Jeremy, I have had similar problems and I don’t think there is a solution. Just try to be happy with the life you have been given. People who are determined to destroy themselves will find a way. My oldest son drank himself to death and another has similar issues as your son. You can lead a horse to water but it won’t float on its back.
I was talking to a grandson about William Faulkner this summer and that is an author he despises due to being assigned to read The Sound and The Fury in high school or college. I have just started it and can understand his frustration trying to read a “stream of consciousness” book narrated by an idiot. The title is from (Wiki)
I read a Jim Thompson book years ago titled A Hell of a Woman where the protagonist looses his mind by the end of the novel. His alternate personality chimes in at the end of the book in italics relating a completely different story. It was very disconcerting to say the least and after reading it I felt a bit ill. I thought for some time there had been an error in the printing but after a couple of weeks went back to City Lights to find another title by Thompson. Eventually read them all I think. Good luck in finding any meaning out of life.
I’m so sorry to hear that’s been your experience.
We have had family who were addicts and we’ve tried to help them. I know at one point we gave them cars, houses, a job, everything needed to have them be independent. It didn’t matter. They just wanted to get high and stay high. I don’t know how you deal with that. I can’t imagine how I would cope with that problem as a parent watching my child destroy themselves.
I think it is a failure of society. I think it is also the costs we have in modern life preventing families from having reasonable options for dealing with these family members too. Having someone who needs expensive care and therapy and food and can’t contribute is an enormous burden unless you have a lot of resources to draw on. Most families don’t. Most homeless shelters can’t accommodate drug use either. Institutional care is almost non existent. So here we are.
Yes, but the Boomers have only themselves to blame for going along with decades of tax cuts and deregulation for the rich and letting the college education, healthcare and home costs balloon. All that illusory real estate wealth will get eaten up by predatory private equity nursing homes.
It’s hard to feel bad them, after decades of hearing well off Boomers and older tell youngsters that they just need to bootstrap and lay off the avocado toast.
We can also talk about Boomer’s vastly higher levels of support for regressive politicians, Israel, cops, etc. It’s damn hard to have solidarity for people who, as a collective, have no solidarity for anybody else.
Humbly report sir, er madam…
Generation Jones reporting for duty. Yeah, we’re Boomers but late bloomers whose introduction to ire was that 70’s inflation & gas lines just as we became newly minted hellions of wheels.
You missed out on Vietnam. I was on the tail end of that and escaped via college deferment.
Which of course was an early example of Boomer middle class self privilege. Isn’t it interesting how many of our Boomer war mongers in DC didn’t serve in the military?
Sorry, Gen-Xers (in my mind includes the late Boomers born after 1960) I know are mostly just mad that they pre-sold out but didn’t get an much as their old Boomer siblings. I say this as a Gen-Xer. We suck too, there are just a lot fewer of us around. We still enjoyed far cheaper college education, cheaper starter home buy-in, better lifetime professional career prospects, and a blissfully Internet free childhood compared to the kids who came after us.
US population by age, for reference. I don’t know what the advertising agencies names are for the various cohorts. Wish they’d just say “people born between years x and y”. I guess giving names implies ‘teams’, aka my team vs your team. / ;)
https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/united-states-population-by-age/
The Baby Boomer cohort is about 30 percent bigger than the Gen-Xer cohort in the average year in that cohort. Your chart minimizes the difference since deaths from old age is attrition on older cohort and the effects of emigrating into the US is not quantified. It’s really throwing me an orange when I was talking about apples.
As for the rest. I’m sorry but I don’t think I could have a productive conversation with someone who regularly post links to Matt Taibbi/ Walter Kirn content.
Kind regards.
Litmus test much?
Now that’s coalition building!
(Taibbi said some useful things a while back)
I only have so much time and patience. 2025 Taibbi supporters miss the cut.
Blessings.
Per your previous comment “Boomers have only themselves to blame for going along with decades of tax cuts and deregulation for the rich and letting the college education, healthcare and home costs balloon.”
If you really think that the hoi polloi had much choice over government decisions back then, then I guess we can blame you and your generation for Donald.
USA hasn’t been a democracy for a long time, and I’d suggest that the point of inflection was the formation of CIA to undermine pushback to the status quo.
I agree that the US hasn’t been a democracy for a long time. What have the Boomers done about it as a cohort? Manipulated or not, Boomers supported decades of tax cuts and war against the New Deal. They didn’t have general strikes over it. They didn’t find and support third parties and civil organizations that might oppose it. They voted for it en mass and didn’t want to share.
You can cry CIA all you want. Every country in the West controlled world is infiltrated by secret police, media control, and lawfare. Plenty of them still break free in spite of all that. Maybe the millennials and the Zoomers will do it for this country. All I know is that the vast majority of Boomers and X-ers didn’t even try.
Yes, I do blame the entire American public for voting for either of the genocide parties, going back decades. And for not building alternatives to the corrupt existing power structure. But most of the Boomers and Gen-Xers I know are happy to cling onto their material privileges and turn a blind eye on Gaza and US imperialism, and only complain when something directly impacts them. This selfishness is reflected in poll after poll.
With respect, you can’t “agree that the US hasn’t been a democracy for a long time” and then blame the voters.
No democracy means that the we the people don’t have agency to, say, stop assisting the Gaza genocide.
Surely you remember how we were allowed to vote for the War in Iraq? Our involvement in Yemen? Our decision to destroy Libya? Our continuing support for Israel even when we had evidence they were engaging in actions that prevented us, by law, from supplying them with weapons? And who can forget that great country wide vote we had to support Ukraine forever and ever…
No, we don’t get to vote on anything that matters. It is not the voters fault.
If you don’t get to vote on anything that matters, then you should not vote at all. It takes less effort not to vote, than to vote.
Voting gives the credibility to those in charge. Voters perpetuate the system. It is the voters fault.
I became politically active as a teen during high school. It was the Vietnam War era. There were few Charlie Kirk types in HS or college. I pulled a #60 draft lottery, but was 1F because of an eye injury. Living in Buffalo, I’d have gone to Canada if called. Went to university for 3 semesters and quit. Worked at the railroad as a unionized worker and met my wife there. We both lost our jobs due to Carter’s deregulation. Went back to school and got an MS in statistics. Nothing but shit jobs in the 80s and 90s until self employment. I have never, never once lost my ideas for socialism and anti-imperialism in those 55 years. Sure, there are many in EVERY age cohort that buys into Morning in America. How do exactly you propose change? How exactly do you differentiate the political awareness of any of these artificial age groupings? I don’t see differences above age 30 or so. The point was, is and will always be class, which is age and race blind.
“The point was, is and will always be class, which is age and race blind.”
amen
I remember first hearing the ‘OK, Boomer’ line at about the same time taxes on the rich were supposed to be raised back up to pay for using the SS trust fund to fund tax cuts for the really wealthy. Well… wha’da’ya know. The wealthy did not want their taxes raised back up. Thus the beginning of impeaching the moral character of the generation set to retire and collect benefits. What a coinkydink. Suddenly, those people don’t deserve the benefits they’ve paid into their entire working lives according to several wealthy organizations set up to demonize the people who were owed back the money in the trust fund. See The Peterson Institute, for example. / ;)
Ronald Reagan and The Great Social Security Heist
The author says that the Social Security amendments passed under Reagan’s presidency laid the foundation for 30 years of embezzlement of the trust funds.
https://www.fedsmith.com/2013/10/11/ronald-reagan-and-the-great-social-security-heist/
“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflict.”
– Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.
“a blissfully Internet free childhood compared to the kids who came after us”
Not having such a heavily surveilled youth helped in an environment of diminishing opportunities.
Boomers, like so many other ‘identity politiked groups’, and hardly a monolith.
The power peeps find that divide and conquer is an old tried and true way of keeping the power, the powder, and all the marbles.
I recall a recent intergenerational tirade from my 39 year old don who has lived throgh his share of recessions and has in fact, like many others, ‘lost years’ of earning due to doldrums broght on by Wall Street and the powers that be- global powers that be.
I reminded him that I , too, went through and suffered every economic hiccup he had, plus three more.
The lighbulb went off… the missing WE in the US.
Boomers now make up around 16% of the US population.
The 18-64 years-olds make up around 61% of the US population.
But sure, keep blaming the boomers. It’s easy to do. And it feels righteous. And why not, we voted in Bill Clinton who talked New Deal and Bridge to the 21st century. He ‘felt our pain’, he said. (Lots of jokes made about that claim.) He said all the right things we wanted to hear. And then…. and then,,,,, we got NAFTA (and massive off-shoring of manufacturing jobs that had good wages and benefits); we got financial deregulation which led to the GFC in 2008. Basically, we got Reagan, again. But he said all the right things, don’t’cha know. He was the man from Hope. And we hoped.
Here’s a 2014 essay by Matt Stoller in the Atlantic Magazine:
Politics
How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul
In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system.
By Matt Stoller
(Opening para)
It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of corruption and dirty politics the Nixon White House had wrought. Richard Nixon himself had resigned just a few months earlier in August. But the Watergate Babies didn’t just campaign against Nixon; they took on the Democratic establishment, too. Newly elected Representative George Miller of California, then just 29 years old, announced, “We came here to take the Bastille.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
—
And now? Now Nixon would be to the left of both parties. We lived in FDR political world for almost 50 years until Reagan was elected. We’ve been living in the Reagan world for 50 years. Obama said he greatly admired Reagan, etc.
I hope the younger generations are smarter than we were about politicians and their propensity to play on emotions and even lie to get elected. / ;)
Hearing well off people of any generation telling others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is both obnoxious and also inevitable. The well off always think their prosperity is all due to their wonderfulness and outsized agency.
Maybe the boomers should blame the “greatest generation” and silents for allowing the rollback of the New Deal to get underway almost from the moment FDR died, for letting McCarthyism make anyone leftish borderline criminal, and turning capitalism into the national religion rather than a development that could be vigorously debated (as in the years between WWI and WWII). The trouble is that the majority of any generation (including the supposedly radical boomers) are conformists who can be led around by the nose by those with money, clout and media control. It takes desperate circumstances and bottom-up organization to get enough people on board for effectively challenging that. People in the US are still too comfortable, despite the 50+ year degradation of their economic prospects. And the bounds of discourse have been narrowed to the point that no one can even say how things could change for the better. Instead they’re stuck in finding someone to blame and to punish for the present state of affairs, and we have lots of false prophets pointing fingers at one group or another so nothing realistic gets accomplished.
Except that “the” boomers are not a frigging entity. Might as well say “the” blondes or “the” short people.
It’s been done.
Well…. maybe. But tarring everyone of a certain age with attitudes is a bit of a stretch, isnt it?
I did get a tertiary education. Because of scholarship. First of my family.
Voted against conservative parties. Was a union member for years.
Supporting children wherever we can to get into housing. Not a lot, but it helps them.
Not a supporter of cops who beat up demonstrators. Grudging respect for Putin. Nothing but contempt for Bibi.
So, does that make me Gen X? If it drops a few years off my age and I lose a few ailments, happy to join up!!
Replace “boomer” with an ethnic group of your choice and see how broad proclamations sure sound like prejudice.
“Inter” generational?
Wouldn’t that imply there is conflict between multiple generations?
Rather than all the other generations blaming the boomers?
The size of the ‘me’ generation, coupled with it’s outsized wealth, certainly has people wondering whether this is a cohort we’re concerned with sacrificing our lives for over the next decade or so.
I mean, I’m not about intergenerational conflict either.
But, the resentment is understandable.
When boomers were in their teens and 20s the going saying was “don’t trust anyone over 30.”
I’ve often wondered why. People over 30 might be people who had fought for unions, picketed for civil rights, people over 30 might have experiences and stories that would be good to hear about…. unless you didn’t want the new generation to know that history. Did Wall St. formulate the “don’t trust anyone over 30” saying? / ;)
And, “the ME” generation was an advertising contruct aimed at the parents of the boomers, painting their kids as selfish and ungrateful.
And then, they dreamed up “the generation gap” in advertising. Shameless. / ;)
Don’t know how old you are Flora but back in the late 60’s those over 30 broadly supported the Vietnam war and were blind to racial injustice. Our parents fought WW2 and were of the mind that the government knew best. They believed the domino theory and were ready to send us off to determine the government of another countries people. Anyone born in the first ten years after WW2 heard plenty of stories of the depression and the war that followed.
On the west coast, at least, the introduction of LSD was pretty differentiating between the generations. It was like those who had glimpsed behind the veil and those who weren’t about to. We envisioned a new age. By the time the 80’s rolled around it was evident that was not going to happen. We blamed that on our parent’s generation who controlled the strings of power and the pocketbook. Well that can is down the road and the upcoming generations are blaming the boomers. They certainly don’t want to hear my cautionary tails.
“On the west coast, at least, the introduction of LSD was pretty differentiating between the generations. It was like those who had glimpsed behind the veil and those who weren’t about to. We envisioned a new age.”
Again, sounds like the experience of a subset of youth and adults. Not the wide-ranging variety of experiences happening across the country.
I would say my first paragraph covers anyone who’s parents survived WW2 and that’s global.
Every new generation seeks to differentiate themselves from their parents. I would wager that is the main issue driving language drift. That is an attribute of human kind, not a marketing scheme.
LSD was introduced by the CIA in its secret, illegal, MKUltra mind control program. I sometimes wonder how much of the “age of aquarious” came from the CIA.
I’m not saying people who took it knew where it came from.
My parents were of the WWII generation. Voted for Nixon, supported the Vietnam War, etc.
Then Kent State happened and they woke up.
The fact is that no generation as a whole is responsible for today’s, or yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s, overall situations.
It’s the Powers That Be, and their greed. I know that sounds simplistic. What I’m trying to say is that it’s the 1% of all these generations since the late 1960’s, not the general public of any generation.
As my parents said at the dinner table after being informed of the mass, hidden, bombing of Cambodia and Kent State, “We were brought up to believe in our leaders and trust our government.”
They taught me a lesson that night that I’ve never forgotten. Unfortunately too many still believe, and trust.
It’s a BS saying and it’s exactly why it’s been tough to change things.
Most people’s adult lives happen OVER age 30.
All of these categeories are marketing constructs.
People basing their ire on what I call the NY Times Millennials or Boomers, etc. The ones the advertisers like to see featured in lifestyle articles.
“it’s exactly why it’s been tough to change things.”
To make clear…not much is going to be changed if a wedge is made between between people over and under 30.
Goes back a bit to what I say about student only movements: they are most controllable because they have an academic lifespan.
Real change has to include a mix of ages and walks of life.
We’ll, Jerry Rubin, the guy who said it, did end up working on Wall Street.
To emphasize the point:
“Sometime in the mid-1970s, Rubin reinvented himself as a businessman. Friend and fellow Yippie Stew Albert claimed Rubin’s new ambition was giving capitalists a social consciousness. In 1980 he began a new career on Wall Street as stockbroker with the brokerage firm John Muir & Co. “I know that I can be more effective today wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street than I can be dancing outside the walls of power,”[8] he said.
In the 1980s, he became known for his promotion of business networking, having created Business Networking Salons, Inc., a company that organized parties at the Studio 54 and Palladium nightclubs in Manhattan, where thousands of young professionals and entrepreneurs met and shared ideas. Near the end of his life, Rubin became interested in the science of life extension and was heavily involved in multi-level marketing of health foods and nutritional supplements.[48] “In 1991, he and his family moved to Los Angeles,” according to an Observer.com profile of him,[49] “where he became a successful independent marketer for a Dallas-based firm that sold a nutritional drink called Wow!, made with kelp, ginseng, and bee pollen. Ironically, Bobby Seale became one of his salesmen.”
I guess that could be called creating a model that so many young, alleged “innovators” are following.
Ummm … ??? I’m not going to say this isn’t true. But:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation
Tom Wolfe was a Madison Ave. guy?
There are now quite a few starting to blame genX.
Eventually every generation that gets blamed dies off, so the next generation ends up in the docket.
So it goes …
Re: Ukraine
That article from iPaper, an outfit I’ve never heard of before, starts out reasonably, but devolves into pro-Ukrainian cope and standard tropes about massive Russian casualties with no citations to credible sources.
The author manages to contradict herself within two paragraphs in sequence. Compare:
With the following bit:
It goes downhill from there, quoting the execrable Institute for the Study of War, a neo-con think tank, and then ending with an outright false and misleading statement that Russia hasn’t captured any territory since 2022:
The source for this seems to be the BBC maps, which do show Russia regaining territory in Kursk, although they rely on the ISW again which is in a state of denial on Pokrovsk.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as the entire piece seems to have come out of Britain, which is the HQ for anti-Russia propaganda it seems.
Since the war broke out I have stayed away from Western media to get the real picture in Ukraine, favoring Simplicius, Dima from Military Summary Channel, and the gang at the Duran. The latest from Dima is that 2000 Ukrainian troops are surrounded in Myrnograd, which is a city just east of Pokrovsk.
The “Putin’s tactics” is a giveaway. Just about every article, post, or comment that starts off with “Putin’s [anything]” turns out to be propaganda about the mad dictator who’s singlehandedly out to restore the Soviet Union. With few exceptions it’s safest to just ignore them.
Yep, and “Putin’s tactics” is one of the dumbest. Putin doesn’t do tactics, because he’s at the top of the hierarchy. Micromanaging units is something done in video games and, probably, by NATO generals because they can’t do strategy.
‘Hope and frustration – debate on EU enlargement intensifies”
‘The sharpest focus was on the possible accession of Ukraine, which continues to be blocked by the Hungarian government in the European Council.’
That’s not entirely true. Lots of EU countries don’t want the Ukraine in the EU either but are being threatened if the speak out. So they lend quite support to Hungary who is taking the lead here. Having the Ukraine in the EU would literally destroy the EU as there is not enough money in the entire EU to rehabilitate the Ukraine.
IMO this is mostly a EU Commission bureaucratic push.What they are doing us just pushing from a EU Parliament approval of Ukraine as candidate in 2022. IMO this doesn’t go beyond symbolism and posturing and in reality Ukraine has no chances to join the EU because lot’s of reasons starting with Ukraine being a bankrupt country waging a hopeless war with Russia. Posturing is a non-stop activity.
Elon Musk’s $1tn pay deal approved by Tesla shareholders BBC
~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s a trillion in pay all the way
If I listened to your lies would you say
I’m a man spreading my seed
I’m a man who succeeds
How to sell a contradiction
You come and go
You come and go
Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma, ChamElon
You come and go
You come and go
Loving following the American Dream
The king of long green
The king of long green
Don’t hear your wicked words every day
And you give your kids odd names, I heard you say
That chase of money is an addiction
When we cling our love is strong
When you go you’re gone forever
You string us along
You string us along
Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma, ChamElon
You come and go
You come and go
Loving following the American Dream
The king of long green
The king of long green
Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5WA79F4UCs&list=RDh5WA79F4UCs
If I had a trillion dollars …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aynCgnbbgbM
LOL. You’re on a roll, Wuk. Now we need to get an AI version of Boy George to sing it.
….a $1,000,000,000,000.oo thanks
“What Trump should know before going ‘guns-a-blazing’ into Nigeria”
Here is something for Trump to think about. If the US could not marshal the forces to land in Yemen to end their missile/drone attacks – a country of 42 million people in 455,503 square kilometers (175,871 square miles) – then what makes him think he could do it in Nigeria with its 237 million people in its 923,769 square kilometers (356,669 square miles). I guess his idea is to go in, solve their problems, and then have their oilfields as payment for his services.
…what would the Jolly Rajah flag design look like?
Skull and Bones, naturally.
How hard can it be?
Much of this is like someone flinching to see who jumps.
And countries and other entities keep prioritizing weapons and surveillance.
Have to keep the demind high especially when there is competition.
Just takes a social media post and shuffling around a few military assets already deployed.
They already have some alliances within Nigeria for other things.
I feel like, unlike Yemen, there might be sizable portions of Nigeria that don’t mind or even want Uncle Sam’s intervention. Even looking it up just now, I keep seeing that different groups in the country have ‘mixed reactions’. To me, albeit on the outside, there doesn’t seem to be much strong national love so that everyone is at least against foreign interventions inspite of internal disagreements. Rather, separate groups all seem out to one up the other, potentially without any regard for long-term consequences, just like the US likes it.
Trump’s new Syrian ally al Jolani (can’t remember his new nom de guerre) is going to give up a few of his ISIS brethren in Lagos so Trump can drone assassinate a few like he does fishermen in the Caribbean …….
On the real side US has not been able to “launch” and over the shore operation with any success since Inchon in 1950.
ahem…
Operation Urgent Fury
I forgot the Ronald’s great victory for western culture.
Ronald’s great victory for western culture is telling jokes about the enemy and saying no to drugs.
“Trump’s new Syrian ally al Jolani”…
al Jolani has a host of new “allies” who allegedly used to shoot at him. He’s parading around from east to west to north to south.
Re: The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution ScheerPost
The plot thicken -. Big time!
Oh. This is going to get interesting.
The radar on those ships will be able to give a lot of coverage of the region and if the US tried to launch a salvo of missiles at Venezuela, those ships would be able to shoot down those missiles as well. The military attack on Venezuela is now effectively over before it even started. With the war in the Ukraine winding down, the Russian Federation is going to show the US that there is a price that will have to be paid for causing the Ukraine war over the past decade or more and causing so many Russian deaths. The best part? The Russians can say that they are only there on a goodwill mission though there won’t be much goodwill in DC. And the Chinese might even say that they are ready to send reinforcements. Reinforcements of goodwill, that is.
Another “Gulf of America” plot twist. The Russians have brought Oreshniks to the table. What would one of those do to the USS Ford incoming at Mach 15?
What do I know about what’s real, but that video has obvious made up BS. (sometimes the missiles are coming out of the bow, sometimes out of the stern, one of the shots shows a single ship with three identical superstructures … the single ship wasn’t long enough for them?, one of the shots shows a bow unloading ramp with blue water where half of the front of the ship would need to be… amateur stuff really, they’re obviously not intended to fool anyone who didn’t want to be fooled.)
Look down the coast to the south… Guyana ….
Thank goodness it is not al abut oil this time!
“Stranded” hardly seems like the correct description for the condition of the Chinese crew, does it?
More like sitting on the tee on the windmill hole at mini golf?
Re Trump and his vanity
Make it stop. In ancient Egypt when the bad Pharaoh died they would behead his statues and chisel away his cartouche. Doubtless we will have to do the same with the increasingly ubiquitous DJT cognomen as well as name back the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s hoping Don doesn’t start building a pyramid.
All the tacky gold and marble monuments impress me as fitting and appropriate to the gods and spirit guiding this dying Empire.
He probably won’t care what happens after he dies. APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE!
In May 2024, SFGATE reported that a few Bay Area Safeway stores had removed their self-checkout sections due to theft issues. The Target at 789 Mission St. in SF also removed self-checkout in 2023, SFGATE reported. The 298 King St. Safeway store no longer has self-checkout, although it is unclear when it was removed.
Daniel Conway, the vice president of government relations for the California Grocers Association, told SFGATE in 2023 that these measures were part of a growing national trend of “defensive retailing.”
I guess we can now call what they were doing before (making the customer the worker) offensive retailing.
An aside, Air force base dollar stores struggling after snap snafu proves that these people in the upper crust are soooo committed to not paying people, and anyone who says they should pay ought to be deported to gaza. It’s pathetic really. And this misallocation of resources to useless eaters in the equity game has made people of average intellect above average dollars and it has indeed gone to their heads making their own self regard to be above average and their fantasies mimic reality.
For instance, the ru dough in the eu oven…Thought experiment, say ru decides to make up for the insult of stealing assets they send say 150 billion in weapons to venezuela. Anyone with reading comprehension and a laptop can tell you ru’s weapons are better than ours which are pure hype but the psuedo genius’ slumming in the tattoo parlor with hegseth chattering that if they FA they’ll FO are going to have it handed to them. And despite assurances, our “AI” isn’t much better than our weapons.
It’s a real chocolate mess.
When you’re departing Wal*Mart, there’s an ‘Exiter’ who checks your receipt, often with only a cursory glance at your gotten gains.
…a shoplifter dissuader
Seems to me that supermarkets are the easiest to steal from of all the stores, I know of no supermarkets here in Godzone with security guards. You wonder when they all go to the Wal*Mart/Costco model?
When I lived in CA my local Wal Mart had an exiter. Every single time. At my new non-CA zip code wal mart they have the employee on duty there and he or she has never one time asked to look at my receipt.
Fry’s Electronics used to have a checker, but you can ignore. Only club stores like Costco and Sams can mandate being checked as part of membership.
The irony for Fry’s was that they were hurt by stealing from within.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/frys-electronics-executive-accused-of-embezzling-65-million/
I’ve had arguments with “Exiters” at Tower Records (NY) and Gilbert Joseph (Paris) who didn’t know how to read their own receipts (I switched to Fnac….)
I think that may be hard. Here in NYC a store worker was killed trying to stop a shoplifter a few weeks ago. He wasn’t security, from the reports I saw there wasn’t any. The thing is most shoplifters are not going to be dangerous, but you never know what you are going to get. In smaller operations than Walmart or Costco they may not have resources for adequate security. Those poor checkers may not even pretend to do cursory checks because the consequences may be too dire at some point. Angry people may not care that the guy in their way is trying just as hard to survive as they are.
And yes I know that the reason it was covered as much as it was was to fuel the fears of Mamdani.
Walmart went over the top with self check, realized the public were stealing them blind, and now greatly limit the number of diy checkouts that are open. They also now have staffers watching the self checkers like a hawk and monitoring their purchases via cell phone.
Walmart added back some cashiers but enough that you aren’t standing in line to use them. I think the automation was always about “flow management” meaning that being Walmart they don’t want cashiers standing around doing nothing during slow periods–the same for grocery stores which never stopped having the machines.
Aldi added self checkout and I go there a lot more often now that I can buy three things and check myself out. Don’t feel guilty about this.
I went into a gas station to buy a 12 pack of beer. There was one checkout open. One lady standing beside it. I waited in line for 5 minutes while everyone in front of me did their checkouts. We had to scan our stuff, pay the bill, and bag it. While she stood there watching. I scanned my beer, it didn’t work. She said “do you have an ID?” No, didn’t think I needed one, I’m 70 years old. No ID – no beer. Fine. You don’t look too busy so you can put it away. Walked out.
I guess that’s being an ass, but screw them. I’ll never go back
Where I live the 7-11 cards everybody who buys alcohol. The local supermarket doesn’t but since I use the discount program there they may have my age anyway. Some legal requirement maybe?
It is a small chain and I heard they got busted for selling to a minor. I get all that, but jeez Louise, a little common sense goes a long way.
Wegmans, an upscale grocer, has a self checkout corral that has a maze-like entry and exit. The ceiling and kiosks are covered with cameras. This is in a prosperous PMC area. I guess stuff happens. They even have self-scanning shopping carts. Generally that have enough staffed checkouts that are faster. Aldi has a corral also and eliminated self checkout at some store. Costco got rid of self checkout. Home depot has everything locked up now.
Trump proposes radical healthcare shake-up that would bypass insurers and hand cash directly to millions of Americans – Daily Mail
I’m skeptical. The Trump administration could just see a way of pressuring a group – health insurance companies- still giving too much support for their taste to the Democrats.
Could somebody remind ALL of these officials that nutrition is the first step to good health?
The Democrats dared a group to starve people that they know doesn’t mind starving people. And the admin is flipping it to shine the light on Democrats holding out for money to insurance companies in the age of Luigi.
And I know health insurance companies donate to Republicans too.
So emphasizing that I said it’s concern about the support given to Democrats.
The administration wants a Democratic party small enough to drown in a kitchen sink.
And the Dems keep on making it easier for them.
As usual.
Health hath no fury like an electorate scorned
It’s another symptom of the 12 year old minds of the Trump administration that they don’t understand how insurance works. Throw a couple grand at the plebs but when that $200,000 bill for cancer treatments comes due, they’ll have issues.
Obviously not saying that the current insurance setup is actually working though.
Sounds like it would in essence be a new iteration or variation of Health Savings Accounts, the Shrub-era reform idea to solve the problem of high-deductible junk insurance. A return to the golden years of American healthcare, 2003 through 2008.
I have an idea. How about creating a state-run insurance company?
And that takes me down memory lane:
https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/countdown-unfairly-mocks-gop-candidate-sue-lowdens-chickens-for-healthcare/
Countdown Unfairly Mocks GOP Candidate Sue Lowden’s ‘Chickens for Healthcare’
This article is a more balanced mocking.😂
“I’m only half-kidding about O’Donnell and Reid being unfair to Lowden, because while her reference to chickens might be irresistibly comical, anyone who watches the clip can see that’s not what she’s saying, and it distracts from the true stupidity and hypocrisy of what she is saying.”
You are wrong, they know what the public’s problem is and they don’t care. You don’t understand the problem they are solving. Think of it this way, ACA was sold to the public as healthcare reform.it was anything but that, it was a very large government bailout of insurance companies who were faced with dwindling customers and profits, sure it did save a lot of hospitals for awhile because ER visits were covered. But ultimately it solved none of the underlying problems of for profit healthcare.
Almost twenty years on and all those underlying problems have made that government bailout of insurance companies extremely expensive and more expensive because the for profit aspect of everything has been increased exponentially with private equity and oligarch greed. And now that increasingly huge tranche of government funds is wanted elsewhere by the TPTB. And this is helped by more and more people realizing that their expensive ACA approved health insurance provides little or no actual healthcare. Trump’s solution is to send a small portion of what the government currently spends directly to the public knowing full well it will not solve the public’s issues. It will however increase funds for tax cuts, black ops, and military blackmail of the world. They are merely hoping that sending enough for a doctor visit or two will blunt public demand for government action at least for awhile.
“Why camera-equipped smart glasses are already a privacy disaster”
I saw this video and should have saved the link. A guy was going through a college campus and had on a set of these type of glasses and they were hooked up to AI servers. So as a test example, he went up to a middle-aged woman who the glasses videoed.Through facial recognition they found a perfect match which linked to her social media accounts which he could read on his glasses. The net result that he was able to ask her question about her interests and the like as if he knew here from there. And as he was walking through campus, it was trying to facially recognize everybody that he was passing. Anybody see a problem with all this?
US law states explicitly that in a public place you have no legitimate expectation nor right to not be recognized or photographed under any reasonable definition of privacy.
It’s been tried and lost or just plain been thrown out of court numerous times in the last half-century and especially the last quarter-century, IRRC.
Seriously, how would that even work either in practical reality or legal theory?
Not exactly true as it is much more complicated than that.
If it was this simple, why do so many shows have to blur out faces in certain situations when filming in public?
And you forgot the laws are very different for minors.
By moving fast and breaking things – specially laws?
Didn’t we reject this whole “glasshole” concept once already?
Aargh and TINA…
The intervention has triggered political backlash in the US with critics questioning why Washington is bailing out a country whose soybean farmers compete directly with those in the US.
A bit of cynicism would help those critics…IMNSHO it was an ideological and monetary bailout of bessents PE and hedgie pals who are globalists not nationalists. I keep thinking some form of rehypothecation left some exposure and the 20 billion probably prevented hundreds of billions of losses, but like I said just my own opinion presented without evidence, YMMV…
China of course has no problem with cynicism and was happy to help, and after the bailout bought a couple of shiploads from usia very likely at a nice price point.
Those red quadcopters are so advanced that the laws of physics no longer apply to them. :)
I thought about what if you put a pressure restrictor at the copter so that most of the force is used to raise the hose. The copter, then doesn’t have to lift it. The remaining pressure can be a jet aimed at the fire.
Just a thought. Other wise, yeah that water weighs too much.
That was my immediate thought too. Hundreds of Kg of water in a hose fighting a fire at the 15th floor. Also, drones with cylinder extinguishers hanging out their arses? Give me a break…
Doable, up to a certain point, but very inefficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbf59avm4yo
LOL it fooled me.
I suppose it is possible, assuming that you can actually get the system to a stable position. The drone would have to supply a horizontal force in the direction of the wall equal to the force of water hitting the wall which means it would need a big fan on the back of it. Height would not be a problem as you could choose the flow rate so that the force of water on the 90degree bend offsets the weight and tension in the pipe. I expect in the real world a large flow rate would be needed to get to the right height and that the fan needed would be too large and heavy to be practical.
The Infrastructure of Planetary Sapiens article:
‘The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium’
why are AI-generated Earth models to prove any more efficient than already existing climate models in informing collective action and change? And what about the energy, land, water, labour, etc. required to power these AI models? is this infrastructure not part of what got us into this mess in the first place? Just asking for a friend (the Earth)
I know this sounds wrong but I’m looking forward to reading this site’s takedown of Trump’s idea of the 50 year mortgage.
Full retard (see amortization table, and one stretch of missed payments wipes out equity—see 2009 USA).
…. whether it’s Trump or a 35-year aide who posted it with, at, Trump’s direction.
(is it ok to use the R-word for Trump, PC police?)
For starters the first years payments would be something like $1500 per month against the interest and $1.50 against the principle
I did a loan amortization for a $410,000 home (approximate median value 2025) with $5000 down, %5.75 interest rates – no points. After 50 years you will pay over $800k in interest, and a little over $1.2 million for the house. Of course that is 50 years of inflated dollars.
What’s not to like? :-)
Following Japan’s path? / ;)
The 100-year Japanese residential mortgage: An examination
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/1061951895900047#preview-section-abstract
From the abstract:
Through the use of simulation, the conclusion is reached that the 100-year mortgage has failed to increase the affordability of homes. Instead, affluent homeowners are more likely to employ long-term mortgages as an estate-planning tool to reduce inheritance taxes.
“Why Nikki Haley’s son went radical”
Not hard to work out. Her son is growing up in a world that people like his mother specifically created. Yeah, it’s the economy stupid. Nikki was born in the early 70s and grew up in a different world than her son has to grow up in. Her money protects her from the consequences of the things that she was voting for. Her son is not so lucky-
‘Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”
These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.” ‘
So her son’s votes and that of his friends are up for grabs and there will be no loyalty to either the Republicans or the Democrats.
Much of the Unherd link about Nalin Haley impresses me as weird. However, I was most struck by the statement: “Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right.” This statement was made in a confusing context that included immigration. Is no one else struck by how strange it is that immigration control has become an issue that belongs to the Republican party while more immigration and immigrant tolerance has become a Democratic party issue? Immigrants were used to hold down labor’s power when the railroads were built. Immigrants were brought in to hold down labor power when the Chicago slaughter houses and meat packing mills were constructed. Immigrants sometimes foreign, sometimes from an outside area were used to hold down the power of labor to command higher wages and better living conditions. I will someone else recall the race colored measures the u.s. South used to hold down labor and breed conflict. Today labor has no champions.
Recalling more recent history, who believes any generation of Americans that had a particularly easy time finding and holding a job? Are conditions worse for today’s young people … perhaps … or are there just more broken promises, more wealth extraction by schools and rents et al., and false guidance to becoming a wage slave? Young people cannot find good jobs, but how many older people who had good jobs are being shunted to the pavement as the Imperial Elites work to completely subjugate labor and replace as much labor as possible with robots and computer software? Instead of joining in the ongoing efforts to entice us all to conflicts with each other I believe it would be well to realize the Imperial Elites are working to make the Populace “redundant”, “surplus”, “open to new opportunities”, … as the euphemisms characterize matters.
“…there will be no loyalty to either the Republicans or the Democrats”.
A concept that the Democrats have great difficulty grasping. I doubt that NYers cared which party Mamdani had on his ticket. However, I bet that the voters noticed and took heed of the Omniparty’s attacks on him as a candidate.
This is what will make the current enthusiasm with gerrymandering interesting. Gerrymandering is about trading between numbers of seats and margin of safety in each district. You get too cute, try to get too many seats out of too few seats, then things can blow up very badly in response to small changes in voter behavior–the other side of FPTP elections is that you can lose everything even as you win 49.9% (or, actually, even 50+%, depending on how votes are distributed, of the votes.).
So he would gladly deport himself and his grandparents in 2025?
Also:
So he himself should get out of America?
> China’s Stranded Astronauts Show the Dangers of Space Junk Scientific American
A TV show from 1970 was all about the dangers of space junk. It was called Conflict and was episode 4 of Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s U.F.O. You can watch it on YouTube. Alien invaders use space junk to conceal their space craft in Earth orbit.
Gawd was that awful, it was so bad, well, it wasn’t even good. I did kinda like the ladies purple hair. I watched the whole thing (in time segments). Any self respecting alien with the technology to get here would be thoroughly embarrassed. :-)
But…
I am still waiting for the galactic council to show up to sort our sh¡t out. ‘Cause we seriously need it.
“2.75-Million-Year-Old Tools Rewrite Human Technological History”
This article does make me wonder. There are many traits that a species can have to ensure their survival and here you are talking about things like speed, camouflage, endurance, claws as weapons, etc. But can the ability to make a suite of specialized tools be one of them? About 2.75 million we didn’t have much going for us but were tools something that gave us the edge needed to survive?
We had gotten that far, but the tools (spear tips, cutting edges) probably got us an ability to kill and butcher animals for the protein that would have boosted our energy demanding then to be expanding brains.
There was a link in the piece to another on Neanderthals and modern humans that was quite interesting.
I always find the search for understanding how we got here to be fascinating.
Yes. Because then we learn who and what we really are.
I do not know, though presume, that before we could effectively hunt animals (something not considered in the link) that we were only gatherers. 2.7 million years pushes that frame back, from what was previously understood. But…there was a ramp up to that development, how long or brief was it. We then became predators, still omnivores. And the long ramp up to today, the mind must expand greatly to comprehend such matters. My mind is lagging.
The development of tools here was a massive development. It let us cut up meat into portions that could be carried, cut animal skins so that they could be processed back at camp, cut up hardy plants so that we could use the calories within and those are just the uses off the top of my head. Those tools enabled our ancestors to be able to access a far wider range of foods and materials which they could have never done before. Teeth will only take you so far.
And we not only became predators but persistence predators. Our ancestors would split animals from a pack and began to pursue them for hours if not days. We never stopped, we never quit, we had no mercy, we were the terminators. And though that animal was faster, it would eventually collapse of exhaustion and would be finished off being helpless even though it was larger and more powerful than our ancestors. It seemed too that our ancestors lost all that excess hair through this to be replaced by sweating to cool off our bodies in their pursuit. It’s a fascinating topic.
Seems like all the Tools in Charge are assuring our extirpation?
Re: Daily Beast and the costly coffees. The Beast article omits Trump’s most obvious problem: He’s stupid. Some say ignorant because despite his being eighty an eight year old has a better education. As if that were some kind of excuse. But that doesn’t cover all the dump truck loads of crap that pour out of his mouth that even an eight year old would know is wrong, even ridiculous. Trump is a dumbass.
The coffee. I have lived and traveled all over Central America and Colombia.(In fact I started reading here at NC when I was living in Nicaragua, around 2008/2009.) The best coffee in my experience is from a mountainous area in northern Nicaragua called Nueva Segovia. I spent a few nights in the village of Wiwili on the Rio Coco and had coffee each morning in an abuela’s living room converted into a tiny, two table restaurant. I asked to see the beans she used. They were smaller than the beans from Colombia and Costa Rica. I chewed one, fresh from the fry pan where she roasted them, and it tasted like chocolate. My coffee was made with unpasteurized cow’s milk. No sugar. Just excellent…it cost 30 cents.
When I make coffee I grind the beans and use a small cheap filter machine. Perhaps 1 minute for setup if I’m groggy. The proportions matter, but very shortly later there’s a great coffee drink with negligable cleaning and trivial cost. A performance/time tradeoff that suits moi. The plongeurs are good too, but cleaning is more of a pain.
Never understood the Starbucks appeal.
Look at Trump’s eyes. The lights aren’t on and he is not home. I know several people with eyes like that. If you ask these people “How many square feet in a 10′ x 14′ room, they can’t provide an answer, even with use of a calculator. These are the kind of people that are in the 30% of Americans that barely read at a third grade level. These people that I know all somehow graduated high school.
This is perhaps one of the reasons that nearly all of the born-in-America trades (plumber, framer etc) that I have met are older, from when the 3 Rs were taught.
NEW LEFT REVIEW on New Marxism mini-debate
Material Interests – On the new Marxism
Dylan Riley
29 October 2025
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/material-interests
“(…)
Marxism must not forget that ‘members’ of classes are people, and people live toward their future as they understand and imagine it. It is thus a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given status – a present state of social being – and the interests supposed to flow from that. For an anthropologically well-grounded politics entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances. Interests are ‘material’ to the extent that they emerge from those objective circumstances; they are ‘interests’ to the degree that they are oriented toward a horizon. Marxism thus cannot be, in Labriola’s wonderful phrase, ‘una filosofia del ventre’ (a philosophy of the stomach).
(…)
In a sense this is the other side of another characteristic tendency of Anglo-American analytic Marxism: its attempt to develop a critique of capitalism by listing its ‘harms’ – the negative counterpart to interests. But ‘harms’ are only politically relevant if they are linked to historical alternatives.
(…)”
reply
Alternative Horizons – A reply to Dylan Riley
Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams
07 November 2025
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/alternative-horizons
“(…)
This is why, in our view, the utopian impulse to abstraction can never be fully exorcised from radical politics. We agree with Riley that interests only take on reality in the process of struggle – when they achieve, in our terms, the status of demands. But part of the role of radical agitation, of political speculation and of utopian art and culture is to gesture towards the alternative worlds and ways of being beyond the ambit of immediate need. Such visions have the potential to evolve our collective sense of what the future might be.
This is precisely why it is important not to conceptualise material interests as transhistorical categories existing outside of specific social conjunctures. Interests – human capacities, in our terms – change as historical circumstances change. Yet the process that brings new circumstances into being is itself constituted by the organised pursuit of realisable interests. This touches on one of the central debates in Marxist and post-Marxist theories of history: are historical outcomes determined primarily by class struggle, or by the level of the ‘productive forces’? Our answer is that this is a false dichotomy and that neither factor is independently ‘primary’: technological change is at once produced by, and gives rise to, dynamics of class struggle. That we have been led back to such a perennial issue demonstrates how fundamental Riley’s question is.
(…)”
James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at age 97 PhysOrg
In my last college year studying biology my way to not to forget that Watson and Crick were first to describe DNA as a double-helix made of anti-parallel nucleotide chains was putting music to it. Gilbert O’Sullivan “What’s In a Kiss” tune made it to “Watson y Crick”… have you ever wondered just what it is [DNA]… It worked so well I still remember decades after. My respect for Dr. Watson having passed away.
… I didn´t know he had actually lost his titles over that one scandal:
James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race
13 January 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779
Interesting STAT article on James Watson here:
https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/
I was at Cold Spring Harbor (where he retired) for about a year. Everyone I met there loathed him. Not a mild dislike but actual loathing. Apparently he was extremely arrogant and very dismissive of others – especially women. Perhaps Rosalind Franklin could’ve given them a heads up before they allowed him to settle there.
Re; At this SF grocery store, you can’t leave unless you buy something SFgate
In seattle, the Safeway stores have been like this for years.
Safeway megacorp loves to spend your grocery money on this b.s. as opposed to lowering prices in a food crisis or finding new and interesting food companies to invest in. They also destroy foods that approach the end-date as opposed to donating to the food bank.
Is there a reason to shop there ? All i see are reasons to shop elsewhere. This rapacious business model should be criminalized.
The QFC at pike and broadway could withstand an armed incursion.
“At this SF grocery store, you can’t leave unless you buy something”
That headline is a lie. Why is it acceptable to run copy like that?
Liz348
I suspected something was wrong about that article since H.E.B. grocery stores in TX stops people from leaving the grocery with a cart if you dont have a receipt in hand/bag and there are NO hunk-like boulders at the exit.
I once ate at their BBQ restaurant and threw my receipt away with my meal receipt. I had to get an employee to break the circuit.
At first when this happens you don’t know what is wrong.
I am very sure that there has to be a permissionless way to exit due to fire laws.
I received a text on Friday that, per the judge’s ruling, my EBT would come in today, as normal.
That was before Ketanji Brown Jackson issued her administrative stay (see yesterdays links explainer on that ruling: 190. SNAP WTF?).
So what happened today SNAPwise here, no EBT.
First, I am truly sorry to hear you’re going through this sort of thing. I hope that the confusing maze of court rulings and maneuvers by the executive branch ends with your benefits restored tomorrow.
Second, I find a silent rage building up inside me, even though the biggest inconvenience I might personally experience in the near term is having a flight canceled in 10 days. You’re but one example of how real people’s lives are being turned upside down, all over a shutdown that as far as I can tell is about nothing.
Our politicians have allowed real people to be treated like they are pawns on a game board. Air traffic controllers are working without pay, in one of the most stressful jobs out there. Every day I expect to read a headline about an air disaster killing hundreds, due to the system being over stressed.
Meanwhile, Taco has spit in the face of MAGA, spending all his time meeting with foreign gladhandlers and moochers. The latest being an Al-Qaeda headchopper who calls himself the ruler of Syria, although he only controls a small part of the former territory of Syria.
This clown has sullied and tarnished the White House. A whore house in a bad part of town has more honor.
But I reserve my greatest fury for the despicable weasel Mike Johnson. A speaker so weak he can’t even be bothered to call the House into session. May the fires of Hell await him.
Indeed, may they all burn in the deepest levels of hell. We’ve sunk beneath banana republic level.
Such kind thoughts, thank you, I will be ok (for now). I had qualified for SNAP for a dozen years but never took it. I didn’t want to take anything from the general fund. By earlier this year things had gotten tougher and I was at best only breaking-even at the end of the month, so I took it. After that I managed to save a little bit. Now, I had had a growing serious leak in the cold water tap of my kitchen sink which last week I tried to fix myself. When I did it broke, so I had to shut it off with the dilapidated shut off valve below (it’s growing a leak). That was my only source of drinking water, the bathroom only has a working hot water feed, the cold is shot, I don’t turn on the hot water heater. I shower every once in a while at the senior center. I turn the kitchen cold on and store up a weeks worth, then shut it off. That valve will not take many cycles. I will have to call a plumber and hope I can cover it. That’s how we live.
I didn’t mean to overshare, but carrying on, I just replaced my two year old+ violin strings (six months is bad) with a two month old set I had stashed and I’m happy. Material conditions and all. :-)
I don’t mean to intrude but it sounds as is that might be an old place and you could be in luck it the faucet is from the ’80’s or earlier. Older faucets had rubber washers at the back held on by a screw that cost pennies to replace and newer ones have plastic cylinders that cost about $15-20. The rubber washers actually come in a bag of assorted sizes and would cost you about $5.
With an old style first put a cloth over the drain so you don’t loose parts down the drain. With the water valve down below turned off, you can remove the handle (a screw). If it is old style, the large faucet assembly (1+ inch?) will unscrew (lefty loosie, righty tightie) with an adjustable crescent wrench. The whole thing will come out easily and a rubber washer will be on the back held on by a machine screw.
If it is newer faucet style there will not be a large narrow hex head under the valve stem. A newer faucet style will likely be a snug fit that sealed by an O ring on the cylinder assembly and has to be pushed in and pulled out. This can be difficult if it has been years and you may be better off with a plumber or friend. I guess one way to get it out would be to turn on the water (A JOKE! Do not try!) If you do get it out you can take it to a hardware store for a matching part. Good luck.
Thank so much, so kind and thoughtful Martin O! but the threaded cap is stripped/worn out. It was seventy years old. It can no longer hold down the valve capsule. I could just replace the faucet(s) structure (plumber needed), but the under mount sink structure has failed for quite awhile (with a disaster), I hold it up with two 2x4s.
I best just replace the sink, I am looking at a drop in, plumber definitely needed. I assess and hope to negotiate something I can manage. There is a lot more to be done with my seventy year old plumbing. As time goes by, if I go by with it.
I think I know what happened, my son’s old tub had the same thing. The faucet started leaking and he over-tightened the handle to try and stop it instead of replacing the washer. Eventually the “spline” that connects the handle to the stem stripped out on the inside of the handle. A spline assembles by pushing on and pulling off. Everything used to be designed with a weak point that would break or wear out first, sparing the rest of the mechanism. (Think clutches on cars) The handle is made of aluminum and the valve stem is likely brass as the case with the old tub. The handle did not grip the stem and would only spin around.
What you need is a plumbing supply store that carries old parts, not a box store. Most larger cities have one. If you can remove the handles (they pull off when the screw is removed) and take them in for the correct size they can replace them. If you can find this type of plumbing supply house and do this, remember to remove the valve assembly so you can also get a replacement washer(s) to stop the leaky faucet.
I don’t understand why the air traffic controllers don’t just walk out. They aren’t getting paid. Why are they working?
If the government tried to force them to work, well slavery is illegal last time I checked. If they all walked Trump and company could not replace them with scabs as they have a shortage of controllers they way it is. Trump would have to find a way to pay them or end the shutdown pronto because the airlines and the flying public would be all over his fat butt.
Some are calling in and saying that they don’t have the money to put gas in their cars to drive to work or pay carers to mind their children. Will they be arrested?
We are about to find out whether there is a single state governor with the political and moral courage to publicly commit to feeding their people, no matter what Trump does to manipulate the crisis. The first governor to do so will instantly become a national hero.
Here’s one: https://losalamosreporter.com/2025/11/07/governor-lujan-grisham-calls-nov-10-special-legislative-session-lawmakers-plan-to-extend-state-food-assistance/“>
I wonder about all the private charities as well. There are lots of non-profits that could pivot from sending food aid to foreign countries to right here in America.
Of course, the optics of that might be rather embarrassing for the administration.
It was quite the realization of how many in the state’s 6th poorest county are utterly reliant on SNAP/EBT, when all the checkouts @ Wal*Mart had onesy-twosey people waits last Thursday when I was not waiting my turn, walking right up to the conveyor belt to place my gotten gains on.
That tableau has, ahem… never happened to me in all my years of shopping there
A parallel piece from Common Dreams:
Trump Admin Threatens to Penalize States That Don’t ‘Undo’ Full SNAP Payments
Something may be happening on the shutdown:
Senate near deal to reopen government
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5597679-senate-funding-measure-shutdown-end/
Not trying to get hopes up, hang in there.
Thank you Glen! Those Centrist D’Rats may get the government reopened (good on SNAP and Air Controllers) but without the O care subsidies. This entire setup is a charade, they appropriate the money, then they play musical chairs around its continued funding. We are so ƒ¨ç˚´∂.
re: Israel wipes out the entire village of Mhaibib in South Lebanon, home to shrine of Prophet Benjamin.
Israel destroyed the village October 2024. And at the time released footage of themselves proudly doing this. One suspects the shrine was one reason for the IOF demolition, but also this according to the Wikipedia entry:
In 1881, the PEF’s Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described Neby Muheibib as: “a small village [a]round the stone Neby, containing about seventy Moslems, situated on top of ridge, with olives and arable land; there are two cisterns in the village.”[4]
re: German unification
conversation Vladimir Mikhailovich Polenov with Artem Pavlovich Sokolov
part 1
via German NACHDENKSEITEN
use google-translate
Russian diplomat on 1989: “Opening of the German-German border destroyed the post-war order” – Part 1
“We had to rebuild – from a position of weakness” – With these words, the Soviet/Russian diplomat Vladimir Mikhailovich Polenov describes Moscow’s situation during the upheaval of 1989/90. In conversation with Artem Pavlovich Sokolov, Polenov sheds light on the circumstances of the GDR’s accession to the FRG, the peculiarities of the negotiation process, and shares his personal assessment of the consequences of the events of 1989/90.
Translated from the Russian
by Éva Péli
https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=141681
In other news, jennifer aniston is dating her hypnotist.
I’m not suggesting a link but I’m sure that if ones mind were wandering it might stumble on something…
That would be interesting. He’s in the mood, she’s not… hey darlin’, just stare at this swinging watch for a bit.
And everyone calls Mat Leblanc the “dim” one.
That pseudo shrink does have flair though.
Matt LeBlanc was absolutely charming hosting Top Gear. A change from the 8 year old humour of Clarkson et al, tho’ Clarkson’s sense of verbal timing is unsurpassed.
The MAHA-Fueled Rise of Natural Family Planning (NY Times via archive.ph)
Or the dudes could use condoms?
Meanwhile, in Obamacare land
Skyrocketing ACA premiums force enrollees to make tough decisions (CNN)
Obamacare didn’t staunch medical bankruptcies. It’s been mostly a debacle that nuked any discussion of health care as a human right for a generation or more, thanks Obama! And during an ongoing Pandemic!
I have a young(er) friend (late fifties) who is quite distressed for her own outcome. MA would have made this all (Medicaid cuts, Medicare cuts, OC subsidy cuts) completely unnecessary, and preventable. But no, O man could not go there, even though he had the political capital to do so. He would have swept the house in 2010 and he could have kept flogging the Reptiles™ in the process. The only seriousness to be found is with the Oligarchy. They are dead (regarding us) serious.
re: Pissarro’s Paris, brought to life! An amazing animation by Andrey Zakirzyanov.
Maybe clean up some English vocabulary and ban “brilliant”, “awesome”, “genius”, “amazing”, “fantastic”, “incredible”.
I nominate “beautiful” also.
Glad to hear the idea that upper management could be replaced by AI is finally peeking over the horizon. I would think, given the low calibre of corporate officers we’ve been seeing for the last 50 years, that C-suite personnel are extremely amenable to automation. LLVMs, which do their best to produce output that is in line with something that some human has produced before (and are inherently incapable of anything novel), seem like the perfect thing to run a modern company.
It will be interesting to see the immediate, vehement denials that a machine can do the same work as a human being in corporate leadership roles. “Leading a company is far too nuanced, requires too much imagination and problem solving ability, and requires reliability even in new circumstances.” These rationales pretty much write themselves, but will have a plethora of new adherents now that high-paying jobs are at stake.
Certainly, the rate of return for automating CEOs will be beyond debate. Automating Elon Musk will save Tesla a trillion dollars right out of the gate.
How long are they going to keep trying to sell the screenplay for The Matrix as a business plan?
I was wondering if the markets will get over tech CEO’s competing with Azimov.
Even more funny, when will Huang recognize that Altman would go off GPU’s, if OpenAI survives, given tech trends in models and lower power chips.
Work being done to make gigawatt centers obsolete.
As if Moore’s law were rescinded.
This one is getting so over the top that the press may finally stop treating ceo tech puffery as the latest word of God. But one doubts it. It’s Theranos with orders of magnitude more of other people’s money waiting to be set afire.
Skyrocketing ACA premiums force enrollees to make tough decisions
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/09/politics/aca-enrollment-premiums-increase-impact
The Dangerous Stalemate Over Iran’s Nuclear Program (NY Times via archive.ph)
Sure, why not, given regime change is the goal?
lol, it was quite a fireworks show I bet though, and little Trump got Big.
The Fatwa against building nukes is still in place, as far as I know (good for them), but that isn’t taken into consideration by these warmongers. Their mission is regime change, but why? What if they were to get one that would build nukes? It wouldn’t take that long. Does Isr nuke Tehran? Pakistan has said they will retaliate, and they’re downwind so there is good reason to believe that they would.
Funny, but when it comes to worrying about using nukes, Iran is not on the top of my list (and never has been, along with Iraq); another mid-east country which officially does not say, but everybody knows DOES have nukes, yeah, that’s a concern. But as the unipolar world slips away, we’ve been in an arms race, and it’s getting hairy. Here’s The Duran commenting on it:
Arms control collapse. Three way nuclear race
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgVwZFsFQSM
All I can say is real confident world powers make nuclear arms treaties. Let’s hope we can be confident again.
Intel is shockingly affordable even after Trump bought a chunk of it. I wonder why some other company didn’t already buy it outright. Maybe they know something I don’t.
Musk does not need NVDA money.
Musk is probably chasing newer chips and open sources efficient “models”.
Earthquake swarm this morning in the East Bay – at least 9 so far – the largest just under 4.0. I didn’t feel them in Pacific Heights but any time we get a swarm like this I get a little nervous.
Rich drilling holes like rats 🐀 under the Bay.
This isn’t a new idea;
“The threat of a good example” is famously what motivated US elites into carrying out bloody and in many cases long running wars against innocuous targets such as Cuba, Vietnam, Greece, and Costa Rica, among many other places. It also doubtless underlies the unrelenting elite hostility against potential life-saving government programs such as universal healthcare and state-provided housing.
What if people actually liked these things?
File under Antidote, John Coltrane performs Alabama.
A little night music.
ICYMI, the NYT is telling us Josh Shapiro is our hope:
Mamdani Isn’t the Future of the Democrats. This Guy Is. NYT archive
An avowed Zionist, probably an abundance democrat.
His pr machine has been working pretty well of late, but if he’s the party’s future it will strongly resemble its recent past.
The Democrat party capitulates as expected
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/09/politics/government-shutdown-reopen-deal-senate
DACO?
A critical group of at least eight Senate Democratic centrists has reached a deal with Senate GOP leaders and the White House to reopen the government in exchange for a future vote on extending enhanced Affordable Care subsidies,…
Lol! Fool me once….
Time to cue up Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football.
The Senate Ds may calculate that losing that future vote would help them in the mid-terms; blame is on the Rs.
And Republicans preserved the filibuster, with which both parties block any material benefits. Winning all around!
>The Senate Ds may calculate that losing that future vote would help them in the mid-terms
I concur! Sick bastards.
Remembering Lambert’s ongoing disdain/fury at the Dems “Fighting for…” marketing schtick.
Add Obamacare to the list of things they fight for, but curiously always fail to protect.
Indeed, did the 40 that voted no, offer a slippage note to the ten that voted yes?
Candace Owens explains Mamdani’s win. Could be… who knows? utube. ~1 minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s305JBxuGJE
Now (after an ethereal cast comment that they would do so) the Senate has voted to advance a proposition to work its way forward. Cretins, this is an artificial system, certainly a system of artifices.