Wolf Packs: Battle of the Atlantic Big Serge
The CRASH Clock is ticking as satellite congestion in low Earth orbit worsens The Register (Kevin W)
FDA Rarely Forces Companies to Recall Defective Devices: GAO Report ProPublica (Robin K). The approval and safety regime is much weaker for devices than drugs, not that that justifies inaction in cases of demonstrated harm.
Type 5 diabetes: a 70-year perspective and its implications for the Americas Lancet (Robin K)
Can Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Affect Gender Identity? Undark
Primary Care Physician Burnout Highest in US JAMA (Robin K)
#COVID-19/Pandemics
A new Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis.https://t.co/wy6QO55HSu
— Stanford Medicine (@StanfordMed) December 12, 2025
When people see a headline like "Covid infection lowers lymphocytes by 30%", they totally miss what it means.
That 30% is an average.
For some people the drop is small.
For others it is *far larger*.
And that's why there's so many problems with secondary infections now.
— tern (@1goodtern) December 12, 2025
Climate/Environment
10 years after the Paris Agreement, we have reached a '3-year average global temperature anomaly of +1.5°C in 2 or more datasets'!
And we can't blame El Niño for this, as ENSO was on average negative during this period.
The Paris Agreement was doomed from the start.. https://t.co/zkGHQJ2f27 pic.twitter.com/7EDurFQgCg
— Leon Simons 🌍 (@LeonSimons8) December 9, 2025
A wind burst forming over remote ocean may affect global weather in 2026 Washington Post
UK stadiums swap beef burgers for wild venison to cut carbon emissions Reuters
Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings, study shows PhysOrg
“It’s a real nightmare”— Spiders are becoming “more angry and aggressive” due to global warming EcoPortal
Scientists find hidden rainfall pattern that could reshape farming ScienceDaily (Kevin W)
China?
Amid record trade surplus, China has a big worry — factory deflation is now in 38th month Firstpost
China Forces Reckoning in Europe as Trade Boom Turns Existential Bloomberg
Mexico imposes tariffs of up to 50% on Chinese goods Financial Times
H200s Sale: China Reacts China Talk
Thailand/Cambodia
Thai PM Tells Trump: Cambodia Must Halt Aggression First for Border Ceasefire to Hold TPN National News
Africa
Over 400 civilians killed in eastern DR Congo as US peace deal falters Aljazeera
Somalia shelling kills dozens of civilians and levels village, residents say Somali Guardian (resilc)
A Russian Expert Shared An Unexpected Assessment Of The Beninese Coup Attempt Andrew Korybko
Nearly 2 million Kenyans face acute food insecurity, Kenya Red Cross warns Capital News
South of the Border
Norway | Protests erupted in rejection of Maria Corina Machado receiving Nobel Peace Prize Defend Democracy
America’s Venezuela Dilemma: Power in Search of Purpose Modern War Monitor
The U.S. Is Preparing to Seize More Tankers Carrying Venezuelan Crude OilPrice
European Disunion
EU ban on combustion engine cars off table, EPP’s Weber says Reuters (Kevin W)
Europe is paying Libya to torture migrants on its behalf openDemocracy
Police Violence in Berlin London Review of Books (Anthony L)
Hungary: Biotechnology and Other New Production Technologies Annual USDA. Robin K: “Hungary uses no genetically engineered processes. Another reason Hungary is on the outs with globalized ag. Consider: Bayer’s home is Germany.”
Severe disruption hits Portugal in first general strike for 12 years BBC
Greek farmers bring nation to standstill as blockades hit ports, roads and airports Firstpost
Tellus Group: High profits and hungry children Klagget via machine translation (Micael T)
Old Blighty
Last night at the protest in Downing Street, the mother of one of the Filton 24 called for the hunger strike to be called off.
She believes Starmer and Lammy will happily let them die, and she’s probably not wrong. They’ve already shown the lengths they’ll go to for Israel. pic.twitter.com/uRIWcMeMVg
— Wokerati Marty (@WokeratiMarty) December 12, 2025
Farmers and supermarkets worry that extreme weather will stop food getting to consumers The Conversation
The Great British Brain-Drain American Conservative (resilc)
Israel v. The Resistance
الفيديو اليوم بتاريخ اليوم 11.12.2025. غزة وكل خيمها تغرق وتغرق معها أرواحٌ أنهكها عامان من المطاردة بين موت يأتي من السماء وموت يهبط الآن مع المطر.. pic.twitter.com/0c4nPKkMhv
— مُنى حوّا • Muna Hawwa (@MunaHawwa) December 11, 2025
Trump determined to advance Gaza ceasefire deal as Israeli forces dig in CNN
Israel now realizes damage it inflicted to Iran’s ballistic missile program less severe than initially thought Times of Israel
Is New York City’s Police Commissioner Tisch an israeli asset? Sam Husseini
Tony Blair Became a Frequent Visitor to Netanyahu’s Office During the Gaza War Haaretz (resilc)
New Not-So-Cold War
Brussels “Crosses Rubicon” in Final Act of Self-Destruction to Seize Russian Assets Simplicius
The chronology of the dispute over the theft of frozen Russian assets Anti-Spiegel (resilc)
Russia Counters EU Shenanigans To Steal Its Frozen Assets Moon of Alabama (Kevin W). We get a shout out on ISDS
NATO’s Rutte says Europe must prepare for ‘scale of war our grandparents’ endured Politico
The Lancet Commission on the Future of Ukraine’s Health System The Lancet (Robin K)
Prigozhin lives! Events in Ukraine
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
From Madison to Moscow: How VPNs Work and Why Governments (Despite Trying) Can’t Stop Them Reclaim the Net
Imperial Collapse Watch
Important. Do click through. This is an article:
— 🇦🇺Craig Tindale (@ctindale) December 7, 2025
The War Habit David Bromwich, The Point (Anthony L)
The $1.7 Trillion War Budget Matthew Ho (resilc)
Congress ignores public opinion, approves $901 billion military bill Stephen Semler
Swiss Poised To Slash F-35 Order As Costs Mount The War Zone
The US blackmails the International Criminal Court to protect war criminals Council Estate Media (resilc)
If they are not human, we do not have to follow the law Responsible Statecraft (resilc)
Trump 2.0
Briefly: The Fed Trump Proofs Itself Mark Wauck. BWAHAHA.
National Trust sues to stop Trump’s ballroom construction Washington Post. resilc: “Keeping it in a permanently demolished state would be totally appropriate for a wrecked country.”
Murder and Torture, Trumpwise Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Trump Is Already Discussing Preemptive Pardons For His Lawless Administration Zeteo
Immigration
ICEBlock Creator Sues U.S. Government Over App’s Removal 404 Media
The Lies Americans Tell Themselves to Justify State Violence Against Migrants Zeteo
Healthcare
GOP health care chaos spills into battleground midterm races Politico (Kevin W)
GOP Clown Car
Matt Walsh Responds to Demands to Disavow His Allies, and How to Resolve the Right-Wing Civil War Tucker Carlson
Indiana GOP’s Trump rebuke could lead to temporary redistricting detente Politico
Democrat Death Wish
Democrats think they’ve found their 2026 message — and Miami just backed it up Politco. resilc: “200% fluff/zero substance.”
L’affaire Epstein
Democrats release new Epstein photos showing Trump, Bill Clinton The Hill
Our No Longer Free Press
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Blunt Call for Government By “Independent” Experts Matt Taibbi
Arkansas Public Television Drops PBS New York Times (resilc)
Mr. Market is Moody
AI
OpenAI Researcher Quits, Saying Company Is Hiding the Truth Futurism
Class Warfare
The bill read $0.
She stared at it, certain it was a mistake. Then the words beneath the total sank in:
“Minimum: $0. Suggested donation: $12. Pay what you can, or volunteer 30 minutes.”Four days without a real meal. Four days of gas-station crackers and shame. Now she… pic.twitter.com/IS4qCLAoWZ
— Mr Commonsense (@fopminui) December 12, 2025
Judge Finds Luigi Mangione Too Stunningly Handsome And Gorgeous To Stand Trial Babylon Bee (Li)
Antidote du jour. John U: “Marmot contemplating watermelon snow, Sequoia NP.”
And a bonus (guurst):
This world is so beautiful that sometimes I can hardly believe it exists https://t.co/tMLkIRBOLv
— Violent Aristocrat (@aristomarinetti) December 9, 2025
A second bonus:
ICYMI: This is real courage.
During a massive fire in Mandaue City, Cebu, Philippines, a woman refused to leave without her dogs.
As flames spread, she climbed onto a ladder, threw each dog down to safety, then hung by her hands from the railing while firefighters climbed up to… pic.twitter.com/unDE6PcyUG
— Tony Lane 🇺🇸 (@TonyLaneNV) December 13, 2025
And a third:
— Punch Cat (@PunchingCat) December 11, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Trump Is Already Discussing Preemptive Pardons For His Lawless Administration ”
Sounds like a great way for Trump to keep the members of his Cabinet and his admin in line. He could simply wave around a packet of unsigned pardons in front of them and let them know that if they play ball with him and show absolute loyalty, then he will sign their get out of jail for free card when he leaves office. Of course it would be tough luck if he keeled over with a heart attack and never had a chance to sign any of those pardons.
The existence of the autopen makes those calculations not as straightforward…
We need a good court case concluding that a pardon can only apply to at least an indicted crime, if not a conviction.
That portfolio of carte blanche blank pardons, like the practice of choosing a successor whom no one will want as president (a.k.a. quayling), will be adopted by all future presidents. Trump has merely publicized and commoditized the trick he learned from Biden.
Obviously the pardons will have no influence over appointees who are pure and innocent, so one has to assume that only people the President has dirt on will be serving in an administration.
Their is no preemptive-pardon…at least I don’t think it could be a thing. How can you pardon somebody who has not yet been charged? What about impeaching this president so that he can’t go ahead with pardons or charge them after his departure.
I do agree with The Rev Kev regarding his humorous – Sounds like a great way for Trump to keep the members of his Cabinet and his admin in line……..
except, I believe it to be exactly to be the kind of thinking and logic that is the hallmark of trumps entire career
Certainly the constitutionality of a preemptive pardon could be challenged per these arguments. Abrogating all of Trumps pardons would require a constitutional crisis. Unless there is a significant repudiation of Trump and his GOP toadies per the election of a Dem party majority in both houses none of this will happen. Even though hope springs eternal the chances are slim and if it happened then the F**king Dems would be in charge. It is possible that the only solution to the lawlessness of the Trump Administration must come from his own party. For that to happen things have to become much worse so that that party is threatened to its core. Given the prime motivations of present day congress people that could only be the threat of losing their seats. Currently the GOP seats are being kept in line by threats of being primaried by their own party. In order for any real change, the electorate will have to forgo its general obliviousness. In order for that to happen things will have to get much worse.
Didn’t Biden pardon Fauci, who as yet hasn’t’ been charged with anything?
Recall the famous pardon back in 1974, issued by President Gerald Ford, of a person whom a grand jury had designated as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”
UK stadiums swap beef burgers for wild venison to cut carbon emissions-
And then, with articles like this, are we to believe that anything significant is being done to curb carbon emissions?
Everything is so Namby-Bambi in the UK, oh dear.
enacting a paleo-FDR/Eisenhower-era-esque 66% marginal income tax on earnings over $20 MM USD would cut CO2 emission more than an empty gesture.
Look at the income of owners and players and media channels.
Pro ball and the top 0.25% survived just fine in pre-1976.
The NY Times reported yesterday on the death of Arthur Carter, who had a long and very lucrative career as an investment banker (started out early with Sandy Weill), then on to publishing The Observer, and other pursuits and investments. Of relevant interest: in 1986 the Times published his opinion essay favoring a 1% annual tax on the accumulated capital of every family.
“Maybe, in time, the allure of money for money’s sake will dim,” he wrote, “and with it the attractions of such professions as investment banking, where fortunes are made for providing a service this country can probably do without.”
Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/business/media/arthur-carter-dead.html
Opinion piece: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/23/opinion/how-about-a-capital-accumulation-tax.html
Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate at University of Manchester, had a presentation that addressed the need to clamp down on affluent consumption at the recent Climate Emergency conference in the UK.
In North American Deep South ‘local’ kitchens, “wild venison” is often called “Road Kill.”
I can hear this at the food court at the next match between the Fulham “Bubble and Squeak” F.C. and the Heart of Midlothian “Haggis” F.C.:
“Uh, I’ll have the M-1 Special please.”
You got it, in the NADS?
Yes. We are known for our “Follicular Fortitude.”
We didn’t call an impromptu game of soccer a “kick around” for nothing.
Do not despair. I am told by reputable sources that that “Burning Man Sensation” can be cured with a regimen of antibiotics.
Stay safe in the Defensible Position. [Hope you aren’t having flooding.]
Re Greek farmer protests, they have not yet blockaded Piraeus, El. Venezios Airport in Athens, or really much in the way of highways or roads around Athens. I have a flight through Venezios on Monday though, will share if there are any disruptions. In Athens the only real protest activity in the last few weeks has been around Omonia and Exarcheia over police brutality and the riot cops (with full armor and shields) have been out in big groups in Exarcheia most nights I have been here.
I don’t think there will be any major disruptions yet, at least until middle of the week. And even if we get to that point, El. Venizelos airport and Athens in general will be the last places to be affected.
For starters, they can just block all the highways and cut the country in half. Already happened partially, did a trip from Athens to Larissa(central Greece )in 7+ hours instead of 4 which I usually do.
Greek agriculture is on the brink of collapse and it seems that this time the farmers won’t back off. The whole thing feels like an agony cry before permanent failure and death.
The farmers just handed today their list of demands to the government and are awaiting for a response.
If there’s no positive response from the government’s side in a couple of days, which I think there won’t be, then they will start disrupting even more intensely.
Welcome to our Mediterranean hellhole.
Thank you for this additional information! I’m not fluent in Greek but I have been watching the local news and I saw the highway blockades up north so I agree they could truly bring things to a standstill when they are ready.
In Exarchia last night the riot cops were hundreds deep because some dumb kids dragged a few dumpsters in the middle of the street and set them on fire. It didn’t disrupt anything really but for a few minutes the cops massed up at one end of the pedestrian street I was at an outdoor bar at with their shields and helmets like they were preparing to do a sweep, then they dissipated. Kind of a replay of the police brutality protests a week ago where the only thing that really happened was dozens of riot cops beat the shit out of a handful of anarchists but they shut down Stadiou and Panepistimou around Omonia and forced subways to skip Omonia and Syntagma on a Saturday night. Like they wanted to create a show against a fake, powerless ‘villain’ while ignoring the real disaster just outside the city walls.
The US should take notice as the ‘antifa as domestic terrorism’ stuff is probably about creating designated villains/red meat of Portland/Seattle and East Bay while everything else collapses. Wonder if the US will get some variant of farmer/trucker protests again if that happens.
I think this is part of a strategy by Xi to head off any US/EU efforts at either tariffs or currency devaluations. Either would be the natural response (if they had the competence) from the western states in an effort to shore up their industrial bases. Xi is heading them off at the pass, taking the trade war shock now on his terms rather than theirs later. Now to compete, they would need to cut even deeper, so the path of least resistance becomes the status quo.
HUH?!?! Your reasoning is crazypants.
China has massive overproduction in EVs and solar panels, so bad that the government has admitted this is a very serious problem and is trying to rationalize both sectors.
38 Months!!!
This started two years before Trump and his tarrifs and its adjacent dollar devaluation were a gleam in Xi’s eyes.
On that note: China Signs the Largest Commercial Ship Contract in its History | 87 Ships for $7.1 Billion (USD). https://maritime-executive.com/article/cosco-goes-big-with-7b-order-for-87-ships-in-vessel-renewal-project
“It’s a real nightmare”— Spiders are becoming “more angry and aggressive” due to global warming”
It’s not so much if they are getting more angry and aggressive but if they start to increase in size as well. Then we could have problems. ‘We’re going to need a bigger shoe’–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXoq2e-Ots (4:25 mins)
Murray Leinster sci-fi novel about a planet on which the insects and spiders had grown to such a size that humans were a snack. Can’t remember the title. Read it over 50 years ago. … It was hot damp jungly sort of place. Sweet dreams.
A lad, I used to subscribe to Omni (thanks, P&M) and one of my favorite stories of all time was G.R.R. Martin’s Sandkings.
I don’t want to spoil it, but there are bugs in it that grow, if you remove their environmental constraints. It’s got a bit of the 70s to it, but holds up.
I used to buy Analog, F&SF, and Galaxy at the news-stand when I had the funds. Dad worked with a full blood Carolina Cherokee engineer who had a complete set of Weird Tales in his library. He let me browse in there whenever we came over.
A big endorsement for ‘Sandkings.’ Martin was more of a New Wave writer than a S&S Fantasy one in the beginning.
Stay safe, and, per the old days, “Ad Astra.”
Type 5 DM is something that was never discussed when I was in school and residency. I do not recall it being mentioned in my presence until about 5 years ago. That was at a conference, and it was being discussed in the context of what happens in the third world.
Essentially, although it is far more complex than what I am about to simplify it as, it is caused by mal-development of the pancreas in childhood and youth secondary to malnutrition. Like many other organs, the heart, brain, liver, muscles, and bones, the pancreas is somewhat sensitive to building materials as humans are turning into adults. If there is malnourishment on a severe chronic level, the pancreas does not form correctly. Unfortunately, once the human body reaches adult size in the teen years, there is no going back. What is done is done if there has been mal-development. The individual affected with this to varying degrees will never be able to make enough insulin and indeed digestive juices and enzymes to attain a fully functional body.
These patients present in the third world with very small skinny body frames, very severe glucose elevation, and often have chronic low-burn ketosis and acidosis and all the complications thereof, but are kept from DKA because they are able to make just enough insulin. It is a very unpleasant experience. We in the developed world have a similar condition with the ridiculous name of Type 1.5 DM or Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adulthood ( LADA). In this case, the pancreas has been attacked by various autoimmune situations leaving the person able to make only a fraction of the insulin they need but not zero insulin like Type I DM. These LADA patients are older, usually skinny/athletic, and again until diagnosed correctly and more importantly TREATED correctly ( only responds to insulin) – they are pretty miserable.
We really do not have Type 5 DM in the USA. Because of our abundance of crap food, we are presented with Type 2 DM – another hideous problem just in different ways. Type 5 DM will only really respond well to insulin – but it appears in some studies that the insulin dose in this condition can be moderated with other DM meds. But it is extremely challenging. These third worlders are often starving – and if they are not eating in a regular fashion, insulin dosing can very easily cause all kinds of problems up to death.
Since the powers that be in the USA and the West have flaunted the desires and actions of the researchers who discovered insulin about a century ago ( Banting and Best of Canada) – God only knows how this can ever be handled on a global scale. Banting and Best literally gave the patent for insulin production to the world and for decades including the first 2/3 of my career, insulin was priced at cost of production only. There was no profit. That was of course before the MBA crowd and neoliberals invaded the realm. It is now costing patients or their insurers ( meaning the rest of us) – 500 dollars a month or so. Somehow, I cannot see that as viable in the third world.
“ Banting and Best literally gave the patent for insulin production to the world and for decades including the first 2/3 of my career, insulin was priced at cost of production only. There was no profit. That was of course before the MBA crowd and neoliberals invaded the realm. It is now costing patients or their insurers ( meaning the rest of us) – 500 dollars a month or so.” Well, doesn’t this statement describe the horrors of neoliberalism in a nutshell?
“When Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, was asked by Edward Murrow in 1955 on the CBS television show “See It Now” the question “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?”, he replied “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” “
The Lies Americans Tell Themselves to Justify State Violence Against Migrants
Where I live (less than a mile from the Iron Curtain) the Border Patrol has never bothered to cover up this kind of behavior. It’s only when these guys operate outside of the Constitution Free Zone that people actually notice.
Isn’t this Constitution Free Zone up to a hundred miles from the border, and I believe all international airports, and since the majority of the population lives within that zone, don’t most of us live without a constitution? Unless you are wealthy?
And yes, the Supreme Court did create this zone.
> Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis
Problem:
>> Elevated inflammatory cytokine signaling could be a class effect of mRNA vaccines. Notably, IFN-gamma signaling is a fundamental defense mechanism against foreign DNA and RNA molecules, including viral nucleic acids, Wu said.
How big a problem:
>> Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose.
Potential solution:
>> pre-treating cells, cardiac spheres and mice (the latter by oral administration of large quantities) with genistein. Doing this prevented much of the deleterious effects of mRNA vaccines or the CXCL10/IFN-gamma combo to heart cells and tissue.
Can we call this good news?
The good news might be that in spite of the current administration’s reluctance to fund further research on mRNA vaccines, other institutions are continuing research into their shortcomings with a view to making them more safe, effective, and their use more widely applicable to other diseases.
And let us not forget this from the article:
Goooooood Moooooorning Fiatnam!
Life behind the Irony Curtain was never all that certain for those on the inside looking out, defections becoming all the more communist looking~
OpenAI Researcher Quits, Saying Company Is Hiding the Truth Futurism
What i found in that article is this “pearl” ” by Scam Altman claiming that these days is nearly impossible to raise children without a chatbot. There, there is the truth!
“Thai PM Tells Trump: Cambodia Must Halt Aggression First for Border Ceasefire to Hold”
This dispute goes back to French colonial days when they stuffed up the demarcation of that border-
‘The border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand originates from ambiguities in the boundary demarcations established under the 1904 and 1907 agreements, which sought to define the frontier between the Kingdom of Siam (modern Thailand) and the French Third Republic in French Indochina, which included Cambodia. These treaty maps and survey documents produced by French colonial authorities were often imprecise, leading to overlapping claims over several highland areas and strategic passes.
Following Cambodia’s independence from France in 1953, the sovereignty of the Preah Vihear temple complex became a focal point of the dispute. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a ruling in 1962 awarding the temple itself to Cambodia, citing historical maps and French survey documentation. However, the court did not clearly delineate the surrounding territory, leaving the adjacent highlands, cliffs, and approaches to the temple in a state of legal and military uncertainty.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Cambodia%E2%80%92Thailand_conflict
So I had an idea. I asked myself how Trump would solve this problem and the answer came straight away. The disputed area would become a DeMilitarized Zone just like in Korea and soon it would be turned into an economic zone which Trump and his buddies would run for fun and profit. And the Preah Vihear temple complex? Why Trump would turn it into a casino of course. See how easy that was?
I’m thinking the same, a freedom corridor in ukraine, a freedom city in gaza, why not a freedom corridor on the southern border, ross perot had a more constrained version. The FIRE class is going to love these unregulated zones. The more I think about it RU using ISDS gives me a laugh even though it makes clear that there are still lots of isds treaties out there looking to squash opposition to global domination.
Arbeit macht frei, eh? When you mentioned “freedom city in Gaza,” that just popped into my head.
Arbitrage Macht frei
Hermitage macht nein-frei, in modern day Poland, that is.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clydz0j1yego
Polish authorities have arrested a prominent Russian academic from St Petersburg’s world-famous Hermitage Museum who is sought by Ukraine for allegedly conducting illegal excavations and partially destroying the ancient city of Myrmekion in Crimea.
That fox antidote is working!
I can imagine what the local residents had to say-
‘Wake up, Martha. They’re back again. And they are running their mother ragged just like our own kids did to us.’
A grey fox family had a den in the woods behind my house over the summer. I would watch from my window every day. The young kits would stay close to their mom and the den entrance underneath the shed. As the kits got older they got braver, chasing each other, learning to climb trees, and exploring the yard. I knew then that they would be leaving soon. Foxes will sometimes re-use dens. i hope they return next summer. Such a blessing.
About PCP burnout – I am not meaning this as a rant. But I think it is important for people to understand the time pressure and world their general internists are facing.
This week – Monday the 8th of Dec through Friday the 12th of Dec – in my office hours of 9:30-5:30 PM every day, I saw a total of 108 patients myself. The MAs and PAs and RNs who work under me saw an additional 57. In the AM before the office, I have had an average of 3 people in the hospital whom I try to see every day at lunchtime. Because life since COVID has become so overwhelming, I now have hospitalists doing all the work, but I do all I can to see the patients. I have 11 people in nursing home care. So all 11 are seen once a week at various times where they can be fit. My office staff typically fields about 200-250 phone calls a day. I have very good staff but they are also involved with other MDs in my office. Of those calls, I have about 30-50 that I must deal with every day mostly by telling the staff what to do. There are all kinds of patients who demand to speak with me only about test results, etc…….and there are several who because of the severe nature of their results, I need to speak to. I typically try to do this 1 patient at a time in between visits. Despite how obviously crazy medicine has become, so many patients think when I call them it is time to have a visit – and these calls can often become very involved. I am looking at my leftover calls that I need to make from the week on this Sat AM – and the number totals 34. There is simply not enough time in the day to do this. When people do not get immediate feedback some of them can become explosively anger and yell at the staff – causing very high turnover at times. The staffing in modern internist offices has been cut to a third or so of what it was when I started – at the same time the admin bloat in the hospitals and the insurance companies I would guess is 5 times as high. I am plagued with an EMR that is simply tedious in every aspect. Bring back the paper charts and I would save an hour or two of clicks every day. My staff and I have to field every day about 10-12 insurance denials, almost all of which are very involved and are regarding critical meds and tests, etc. In all of this chaos throughout the day, 3-4 times daily I have to take 10-15 minutes to do peer-to-peer discussions with insurance companies about meds or tests. About 90% of the time they just prima facie approve stuff – demonstrating what a waste of time the entire process is – the other 10% are often heated battles that leave me absolutely drained and angry. At any given time, I have about a dozen fully-insured patients who have been denied care and testing with whom I have to spitball all kinds of ideas to keep them going. All the while, almost every day there is a curveball or two that no one sees coming that are often very time-intense. For example, a patient was sent to the NH for terminal hospice care on Friday. The hospital doctors forgot to turn off their ICD – defibrillator – so even though the patient was passed, their heat was not allowed to pass until I left my busy practice, ran to the NH, and turned it off myself. Critical mistakes like this in modern hospitals are just every day now. It is hard not to make them when there is a different physician every day on the case.
So, this AM on Saturday, I will do my best to work through as many phone calls as I can – knowing I will not get them all – and knowing that people will be screaming next week. I understand how expensive the insurance premiums are and I understand exactly how people feel they are due Cadillac service. But there is nowhere in the USA that is staffing their MD offices for this service. The 24 million dollar/year CEOs though and all the million dollar year C suite people in Big Hospital and Big Insurance have all the help they can dream up – coffee-pourers, armies of Ad people, Marketing, etc.
The students that come through this mess tell me that actually my office is one of the best run that they have seen- again – read the paragraph above and really think about that – but these students all see what a complete disaster this is and don’t just walk away – they run. Dermatology is becoming quite the draw. The best minds in medicine are literally wasted on Dermatology and there are so many of them.
People really do wonder why MDs are so burned out. And even a little psycho. I do not wonder at all. My goal every day is no longer to do the best I can do – it is literally not to let anyone die. And to do everything I can to minimize the anger and vitriol knowing there is nothing I can do to eliminate these bad feelings. The entire leadership of the profession knows all about these problems – I cannot think of a thing they have done about it in decades.
Confirming what you said, my very good NYC PCP (who I keep despite good MDs here) has turned about half her practice over to Botox and anti-aging stuff to reduce insurance demands and patient urgency.
Thank you as always for sharing here. We kibitzers on the sidelines wonder if the country can’t have some parallel track of clinics or less institutional medicine to take the load off. They tried one here a few years back but I haven’t heard much about it lately. Instead the two hospitals in town merged to make things even more monopolistic.
Thank so much for being a good doc.
Bon Jovi was never my favorite band, but this morning Jon Bon Jovi is my favorite rock star.
He also apparently talked a woman out of a suicide attempt on a bridge in Nashville a year or two back.
100%. I just shared that link with my friends and family.
I have had exactly the same thinking this morning. Bravo for Jovi. He is not saving the world but he is solving problems in a daily basis.
Respect.
Indeed. Much respect, but I will still continue to change the station on the radio whenever his band’s cheesy songs come on. It’s worked for me since the 80’s, so why stop now?
Come on. The lyrics are hysterical. And totally a product of the times. Those 80s hair bands weren’t known for philosophical stances.
The no press is a nice touch.
But I also think the guy can afford to buy a few congresscritters or state-level critters to solve the homelessness problem systematically
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-stars/jon-bon-jovi-net-worth/
Maybe buying congress critters is not his thing. I could understand the aversion.
On the War Habit- “War is an important and necessary institution of our present civilization. War is not just an ugly excrescence, or superficial illness, or occasional maladjustment, or temporary personal mistake of a few leaders of an otherwise fair and healthy society; war is an inherent, inevitable, essential element of the kind of civilization in which we live.”
Richard Gregg wrote- he spent time with Gandhi. This was from an essay published in 1939.
“War made the state and the state made war.”
Charles Tilly
Primitive animals (anemones) fight each other for territory… I’m not sure we’ve evolved much further.
David Graeber says nation states are always ambiguously a utopian project and an extortion racket.
Happy Festa di Santa Lucia to all who celebrate.
In the Julian calendar, Santa Lucia was the solstice, the shortest day of the year. The Gregorian reform moved the solstice more or less to the 21st day of December.
Yet Saint Lucy’s day still marks the first of the twelve days to Christmas, sometimes called the First Yule. The Twelve Days of Christmas (in the famous, too-long song) follow, ending on the Epiphany (the manifestation of divinity) and Twelfth Night.
So: The veil between the two worlds parts for twelve and twelve days.
John Donne’s poem “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,” is as prophetic as ever.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44122/a-nocturnal-upon-st-lucys-day
With incomparable lines like:
Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
And tonight, I will head to a theatrical performance that takes a skeptical yet respectful look at Dante, one canto at a time. Today’s performance will be Purgatorio, canto IX, the Too Proud.
PS Saint Lucy, famous Sicilian, is also the protector of your eyeballs, so don’t go too skeptical on me.
Sorry – Late to this : Can you identify who is doing the theatre production you mention — I’m probably not near it, but would be interested in knowing more about it.
Thanks,
FreeMarketApologist:
Are you in Italy?
Saulo Lucci has been doing a series of performances with music — witty, irreverent, historical, yet reverent. He has already worked his way through Hell.
I went yesterday to the Sala Scicluna in the Barriera di Milano neighborhood of Torino. Lucci has done will / do a dozen or so of the cantos there during the past few / current seasons:
https://www.saulolucci.it/
I’m mostly New York City based, and not often in Italy. Thanks for the link — part of my work relates to the performing arts, and I’m always interested in finding out about new works.
Oracle one company I would like to see go belly up.
👍👍
“Norway | Protests erupted in rejection of Maria Corina Machado receiving Nobel Peace Prize”
Looks like the Nobel Committee learned nothing since awarding Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. They just awarded Machado a Nobel Peace Prize when not only does she not qualify but which turned out to be, as Alex Christoforou calls it, a Nobel Regime Change Prize. She is calling for the US to attack her country and kill its people, all so that she can cash in big. We saw this in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and now we are seeing it all over again. Our media is showing a crowd cheering her after she arrived in Norway but not these protests. She is the latest media darling.
> as Alex Christoforou calls it, a Nobel Regime Change Prize
To be fair, there is precedent — on at least one prior occasion, it was a “Covert Neoliberalism Prize”. And then there’s the award to Kissinger.
I chatted with a Venezuelan woman yesterday here in the UK. I asked her whether the prize was deserved, and she explained how Muchado had lived in isolation, unable to see her children. I nodded sagely. And I chatted with a Brazilian man a few weeks ago, who said Maduro needed to be taken down, and Bolsonaro needed to get a grip of Brazil. I nodded sagely. Pleasant, caring people, but a touch of brimstone to their native politics. Perhaps that’s an unspoken part of UK immigration policy: to draw in right wing malcontents.
Always beware the takes of disgruntled expats — this is the poison of diaspora politics.
Especially mistrust those expats living in Florida. That is where Rubio came from.
Machiavelli: Discourses on Livy, Chapter 31
“Swiss Poised To Slash F-35 Order As Costs Mount”
The Swiss government really got themselves rooked here. They were really pushing to buy the F-35 as if their Swiss bank accounts depended on it. But unmentioned in this article is how the people were organizing a referendum to reject the purchase of the F-35s, only to have the government rush to sign all the contracts so that that referendum was irrelevant. Democracy in action. But then they discovered that the US had done a bait-and-switch on them so instead of buying those birds at a fixed price, the costs could go to the Moon. Now they are having to cut back on the numbers that they will be purchasing. I sometimes think that there is a little office in the Kremlin devoted to enemy air forces and what sort of threat that they pose. And when a country buys F-35s, they change the aerial assessment to ‘non-threat’ right away. And Switzerland has just had its status changed.
I have known of F-35 since 2002. In my humble opinion F-35 is investment in expensive disarmament with MICIMATT profits intact.
Interesting point about Switzerland limiting number of F-35 bought as costs rise. That is how USAF got 183 F-22 for the price of 750.
“Cost overruns are US”
…udderly Krupp’d
!!!
🤑
Tx
-“Ver is za money Lebowski. Vee vant
zat money, Lebowski.”
-“Vee could do things you only
dreamed of, Lebowski.”
-“Ja, vee belief in nossing.”
-“Vee belief in nossing, Lebowski!
NOSSING!! … und tomorrow vee come
back und vee cut off your chonson.”
Replace “Lebowski” with “Belgium” and and we have life imitating art in progress
Ahem. Hitchhiker’s Guide.
INDEED!
-“Ver is za money Wever. Vee vant
zat money, Wever.”
-“Vee could do things you only
dreamed of, Wever.”
-“Ja, vee belief in nossing.”
-“Vee belief in nossing, Wever!
NOSSING!! … und tomorrow vee come
back und vee cut off your chonson.”
If only Switzerland only had to contend with massive cost overruns plus uncertainties regarding functionaliy (block 4 and all that) plaguing the F-35 order.
In fact, the situation of Switzerland with respect to recent weaponry acquisitions is even worse — much worse.
1) There are the patriot batteries Switzerland ordered. Because of Ukraine, the USA decided to redirect the production (which was crawling at a painfully slow pace anyway) to that battlefield instead. Switzerland will have to wait.
The contract stipulates that the payment has to be done in advance and by rates — and Switzerland had already forked off CHF 700m of the total CHF 2b. Since the USA refuse to commit to a firm deadline for the delivery of the Patriot systems, Switzerland finally decided to suspend the payments.
2) Then there are the six ADS-15 reconnaissance drones from Israeli firm Elbit. Guess what? The CHF 300m order will be late. Very late.
Worse: the drones will not have all the promised functionality: no take off and landing without GPS; no automatic de-icing system (so forget about using them in subzero temperatures); no automatic collision avoidance capability (so they will have to be escorted in busy air space and forget about using them in thick fog).
All this added to the delays and cost overruns for the F-35 means that the modernization of the Swiss army will not take place in time.
Hummm. Italy should rise to the occasion!
“the modernization of the Swiss army will not take place in time”
Oh, the Humanity!
Which is why it is important that 2% of gdp or 5% of gdp isn’t a military readiness target, it’s a budget target. You get to pay the US, any actual weapons remains in the future.
Mr. Tindale’s article: so, the solution to me is slow down the foreign adventurism/meddling, tax the rich to fund reindustrialization and pollution amelioration, slow to degrowth consumer demand (return to industrial capitalism?). Side benefit is elevating and improving the working class. Probability of all that happening: currently very low.
i had essentially the same thoughts.
it gives much to chew on, and thoroughly smashes all the rah-rah “amurka! F%UCK YEAH!” nonsense.
i also kept thinking about my grandad’s sheet metal shop while reading this…the old guys doing the “pattern making”, etc.
and all those ancient and heavy machines that were that peculiar shade of green.
some of the tasks that i was allowed to do alone were repetitive drill press, spot welder and die press jobs.
i’d be the helper with the shears and brakes, too(big and medium and small….big brakes were massive and could bend a 1/2″ plate of pig iron.
there was also a large heavy table on wheels that had those iron forms for beating sheet metal into various shapes…from grandad’s first shop, right after the war…but likely made in the 1910’s.
when dad closed it, i tried to get that table and forms, but my uncle had run off with it…and later lost it due to insane financial ineptitude.
rest of that 30’s era machinery: sold off cheap to a company that, it turns out, was buying such things for China,lol.
On the facts themselves, I’ve only a quibble on TNT.
But there’s a core perspective with iron blinders. It’s a hard materialist approach, but reductio’s to ‘because war.’ Note these statements:
> For thirty years, we have allowed the Financial Clock and the Climate Clock to dominate, stripping the gears of the Industrial and War clocks.
> while integrating the Climate Clock as a constraint to be managed at home rather than outsourced abroad.
A ‘constraint to be managed’ is what I would call a glaring blind spot, even from a militaristic frame (see Klare, ‘All Hell Breaking Loose’). But worse, that frame categorically eliminates win-win scenarios. As Yves says above, China has massive overproduction in EVs and solar panels. Would Tindale reject a cheap gain in energy productivity based on his ideology?
The sum total of his facts suggest it would be disastrous for the US to follow his suggestions. There’s not enough there there.
It’s an interesting article for filling in how the resource supply chain works. But it has glaring ideological blinders on:
– As Steve H. mentions, it assumes there must be a conflict, and then also assumes it must be “kinetic”. Why? The only major power pushing “kinetic” conflict these days is Washington.
– He at least calls out financialization, but sugar coats it by calling it financial “efficiency”, instead of the looting it really is. There’s a reason the F-35, the Ford’s, the Constellations are so stupidly over-cost and late, its because everyone involved has their hand out for a pay day.
– He bemoans that China can out strategize material processing developments by providing state capital while the West is trapped by quarterly report timelines, without stepping back and asking ‘why is that?’ and is it possible to do things differently? It obviously is, China shows *one* way, but it sure isn’t possible when our entire society is strangling itself (and cooking us in the process) to increase the flow of interest payments to Wall St’s bonuses.
A response to that article, on the why to do all that is this one: https://www.sinicalchina.com/p/the-west-is-making-trade-political
“The intensity of Western reactions to China’s trade surplus reveals more about the vulnerabilities of their own growth model than about China’s intentions. After decades of championing open markets, established powers now find that genuine competition from a latecomer unwilling to remain subordinate can feel destabilizing. Tariffs are no longer corrections, but a bastion to protect an accumulation model that has struggled to invest productively. This panic arrives precisely when China is leading the charge of a clean-energy revolution and opening a genuine second gateway for the Global South. The rules-based order is being jettisoned the moment it threatens to work for someone else.
Two camps are indeed coming into being, but not because Beijing refuses to consume more. They are forming because they behave as if the planet is unable to support another billion population at high-income levels, and that the exclusivity of technological rents must remain in the hands of a few. China’s growth is making both propositions moot. The coming decade will reveal who still believes prosperity can expand, and who prefers isolation.
“
It is a very through analysis of the materials situation with regard to China, but like Steve H. and cfraenkel note, it’s got some real Western economic tropes dialed in right from the git go. I find even this title part of the problem:
The Return of Matter: Western Democracies’ material impairment
Huh, no, material to make things has always mattered, and will always matter (along with the also obvious making things matters), what failed, and keeps failing is the Western economic theory that got America into this stupidity. And yes, the other obvious, as cfraenkel states, it’s not “financial efficiency”, it’s the looting by the 0.01% of the 99%. To be fair, the article does cover this, but it skips over that the people that have made these inane decisions based on flawed economic theory are still running the show, making all these bad decisions. What do we see constantly in the West? Bailouts of banks, companies, etc without ever changing out the people in charge or changing the failed ideology.
America’s Venezuela Dilemma: Power in Search of Purpose: “Even if the United States wished to eliminate Maduro directly, there is no plausible path to do so that does not violate international law and inflame Latin American sentiment for a generation”
I would argue :
1. I think it’s clear violating international law is not now and has not been historically an issue for the US gov actions in Latin America
2. Latin American sentiment is well attuned to the constant injustices of US imperial power, intergenerationally.
The current strategy is well thought out, and placing the article of further oil tanker seizures right below this one was perfect. US policy has been, and is right now, to economically destroy non-cooperative Latin American governments. Disrupting oil from entering Cuba or leaving Venezuela does just that. While that may not always succeed in regime change , it has the function of limiting the success and spread of leftist governments in the region.
When elections happen in other Latin American countries, the US backed right wing candidates can point to the failed economies of the left and threaten that future if their opponent wins. This , unfortunately, works on some of my family members and friends :)
I would argue if the US did not do this, the success of leftist countries would turn the entire region against its northern neighbor, and the US would lose its “backyard “ to exploit and plunder.
Yes, and it’s a terrific place to park a highly vulnerable fleet when another great power has significant interests in Venezuela at a time when the world can turn round on a thrupenny bit.
But I guess it’s just the American way. Pure genius.
I asked a friend who is an investor if he was following the AI thing? He asked if I meant the circular investment feature. I said yeah, and what about the grift in the power sector build-out? In particular the strange rush to build Data Centers in inappropriate places like Texas, where lack of water and a bad power grid make the grifter’s plans seem foolish.
So last night I was surprised to read this story from MSN;
AI may not turn out to be the Tower of Babel, but there is a lot of rhyming going on.
FERMI America (IPO in Oct 2025), not to be confused with the FERMI at CERN….
Project Matador lost a $150 M tenant for its project campus in Panhandle Tx.
Planned private power 11 GW and future AI (11GW of compute) campus.
Mixed generation “clean” electricity. Mix from nuke to gas to solar. Maybe some of that winter challenged Tx wind.
Plan for 11 GW in 10 years. As if they can invest on that time frame.
If $150M tenant is big deal, where they raise tens of billions for the 11 GW in Panhandle, Tx near Amarillo?
Should play BS bingo over FERMI prospectus!
While also yesterday another data center project delayed by labor and supply chain challenges. Also Amazon building big data center in Indiana east of Chicago, with their chips, no NVDA.
If they build it…..
Past innovations often brought market bubbles and grift with them-canals, railroads, the internet, as examples. Despite the financial wreckage that resulted, these were real advances with undeniable benefits.
The real “advance” with so-called A.I. is that the supposed innovation is in fact itself a grift, so that all the data centers, chips, power generating capacity etc., etc., following in its wake are really grifts squared or grifts cubed.
If you count all the financial chicanery too, the proper exponent is hard to imagine.
When this bubble pops the crash may be absolutely epic.
The worst fears of the “Elliot Wave” and “Fourth Turning” folks may finally be right.
In a nut shell, yes.
I like to point out the dot-com bubble crashed mostly due to failure to deliver tech products that were actually possible, maybe even functioned as claimed but that the company couldn’t deliver due to lack of engineering staff.
Some companies even laid off engineering staff, and hired sales staff, the orders piled up and fell off the table because there was no one to deliver the services being sold.
Early offerings of ISDN, and VOIP phone services were plagued by this sort of mis-management. (I cancelled my first purchase of VOIP phone for home because the delivery date always came and went.) Thing is, the products existed, but not the support.
Eventually, most everything that was promised by the dot-com era companies has been delivered, it just took more than sales-people to make it happen, and a lot more time and money.
AI as you point out is total grift, and no amount of money, or effort on anyone’s part will make the grifters promises come true.
All the more disturbing when you consider what a $Trillion could do to fix the sad state of American infrastructure.
‘Some companies even laid off engineering staff, and hired sales staff, the orders piled up and fell off the table because there was no one to deliver the services being sold.’
And they keep on telling us that government should be run like a business.
“AI as you point out is total grift”
All you skeptics will soon be disproved. Landru has spoken. (Torin Thatcher in the role of Marc Andreeson.)
– ‘Democrats think they’ve found their 2026 message — and Miami just backed it up’ – Politco. resilc: “200% fluff/zero substance.”
resilc’s description nails it. Clearly the DNC and the brilliant marketers in the Democrat consultancy class are having problems selling “abundance,” so they are testing a new ad campaign: “affordability.” Though it may have originated with more sincere advocates like Mamdani, it didn’t take long for the catch-phrase to be co-opted by the Mad Men (and Women) of the party. I’m sure CIA Dems like Spanberger will make it their top priority.
re: South America rightward drift
VIJAY PRASHAD
The Angry Tide of the Latin American far right
Nov. 30th 2025
https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2025/1130_pd/angry-tide-latin-american-far-right
After defending (under the Biden aegis) the “rules-based world order” from the dastardly Russians by way of Ukrainian blood, Europe reverted to defending the “rules-based world order” after the dastardly Trump reoccupied the Oval Office and turned loose the rules-based world order on Europe.
Now the dastardly Russians are using the laws of the laws of the laws-based world order to sue Europe over its attempt to commit piracy on the financial high seas, and Europe is aghast at the temerity of the Barbarians from the East!
To counter the Orange Barbarian and the Russkie Barbarians, the Euros have now resorted to attempting to implement the “childish hissy fits-and-histrionics-based world order.”
Poor Europe, it’s simply checked out from hotel “Objective Reality” and refuses to pay the bill…
– ‘Democrats release new Epstein photos showing Trump, Bill Clinton’ – The Hill
Yet another example of brilliant Democrat strategy. What do they hope to accomplish by releasing these harmless pictures? The public has long known about all of these elite Epstein acquaintances; showing them partying together will elicit exactly zero reaction – except perhaps by a few delusional liberals who think a photo of Trump surrounded by beautiful women will somehow hurt him. Then again maybe that’s the real point: to pretend to be for “freeing the Epstein files” while really showing them to be nothingburgers.
There are supposedly a zillion unreleased photos, tapes, etc. If these are the ones the Dems chose to release, then all the rest must *really* be boring. Yet something tells me they’re not.
‘We are the Judean front’s people!’
I thought that we were the Popular People’s Front of Judea.
The shot of Chomsky having a chuckle with Bannon is truly priceless. Whichever Dem apparatchik picked that one for release deserves the Kamala Cheney medal for bipartisan achievement.
>The Great British Brain-Drain
Whenever I hear reports of billionaires leaving Britain due to high inheritance tax rates, two questions come to mind: 1. What were their accountants doing? 2. Is this good news or bad news?
The question that comes to *my* mind is what is the motive of the author.
– ‘Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Blunt Call for Government By “Independent” Experts’ – Matt Taibbi
Taibbi continues to sink further into partisanship while pretending to be some sort of free-speech, small-d democrat. Surely he can’t actually believe that Trump v. Slaughter represents a battle between evil technocrats and “populists” who just want “the people” to determine how to govern themselves? Does he really think Trump wants to fire the Federal Trade Commissioner or any other bureaucratic official because they are not *democratic* enough?
As usual, there is still truth in Taibbi’s critique of the technocratic elitism of liberal Democrats. But that truth is increasingly diminished by his willful obliviousness to the dangers of our current administration. I could not read past the paywall. But based on previous recent writings I doubt his argument becomes more balanced later on.
Taibbi and Kirn, ATW, 30 minute public excerpt.
America This Week, Dec 11, 2025: “The Administrative State Takes on Executive Power”
A high profile Supreme Court case puts bureaucracy on the defensive,…
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-dec-11-2025-the
You could certainly argue that the improbable Trump2 shows the public rejecting the Biden version of expertise. But that’s not the same as an endorsement of Trump’s malevolent bumbling or his grasp for king like powers. Perhaps Justice Jackson is simply saying we need someone more expert than our Fox News prez if king we are to have.
And if that’s not what she’s saying it’s what Taibbi should be saying. Making it only about the Dems and their theories is merely another form of lesser evilism. Trump has now been around long enough to take blame on himself. It’s what presidents are for.
Far as I can see, Taibbi is arguing for a spoils system in the name of “The people”. It is certainly a take, but one I would think the Taibbi of a couple of years ago would easily skewer.
I disagree with your assessment. I think Taibbi is arguing against a bureaucratic over reach, imo.
Who can forget John Kerry at the WEF. Think of how many calls were made – even in law schools – that the Constitution’s First Amendment is a problem. That democracy itself is a problem. (Well, democracy is apparently a problem for some… / ;) utube, ~2 minutes.
adding: what ‘challenges’ are they facing? Protecting the narrative? / ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3Ka7dMVmk
Regardless of the current SCOTUS case, it´s a fundamental normative issue: I am not sure how Taibbi (and the countless other intellectuals like him) believes political change is occuring. By going into the street and sing Kumbaya? (Oh right, CONGRESS is gonna save us!!! I forgot.)
If it´s Mamdani they are utterly suspicious – at least – Walter Kirn was – comparing Mamdani to the villains in ANIMAL FARM. Something he apparently argued in all seriousness. If it is protesters against ICE agents or National Guard they are provocateurs and irresponsible. How does Kirn intend to stop illegal deportations?
(I for one consider all deportations as such illegal but that´s maybe my stupid progressive West German education of the old era – you don´t want police knocking at your door 5:30 am to take you to the airport. But neither do you want extension of your permit as resident renewed every 3 months which makes it impossible to build a life. Instead you are vegetating in some refugee camp – for years. I have been there and talked to people over the years, be it former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq while your kids are growing up, and end up fluent in German but not knowing the language of the native country where they are eventually supposed to return. Complete insanity.)
Bernie Sanders in these judgements appears to be an exception but he is precisely one who was not willing to fight Clinton or Biden in the open. Maybe he should have. In hindsight his collusion didn´t change anything. Or did it?
(Sincere question.)
And one reason perhaps is Taibbi´s time in Russia which he thinks taught him everyhting he would need to know about Communism not working.
Anyhow. The US has become worse in probably every conceivable way since 2000. Despite the same amount of Rep. time and Dem. time in the WH. And despite major upheaval in public spaces against such issues as Wall Street or surveillance in the 25 years since.
Taibbi seems to not trust his own expertise on financial questions which should have taught him a lesson or two of how corrupt the system of checks and balances and all the other BS in fact is. He can´t not be aware of it.
“He can’t not be aware of it.”
Your last point is perhaps the most relevant one. Taibbi has come under fire for saying almost nothing about the elephant in the room – Israel – even when that issue is central to his supposed “free speech” absolutism here in the US. When challenged, he kept claiming ignorance, saying that he did not feel “qualified” or “knowledgeable” enough to speak on the issue. A few months back the guys at the Due Dissidents podcast exposed this as a lie by quoting in depth some of Taibbi’s previous work which showed that he had a thorough grasp of the history of the occupation and of Israel’s continuous violations of human rights toward the Palestinians. It showed his current stance on this issue to be completely hypocritical. It is this type of thing that leads me to conclude that Taibbi’s “obliviousness” is “willful.”
James Li gets named anti-sem of the week and kicked off platforms like tiktok and Breaking Points. James Li is a great reporter on the left who has broken a lot of important stories.
I was FIRED from Breaking Points (and BANNED on TikTok)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNoGwOYbauE
Taibbi could be picking his battles, as they say, in his fight to roll back or halt the increasing silencing of First Amendment protected speech. See the Twitter Files. See also the legend of King Canute, aka Cnut the Great. / ;)
How Popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism:” A powerful cadre of scientists and economists sold Karl Popper’s ‘falsification’ idea to the world. They have much to answer for”
This is interesting.
Some commentariat opinions here…
OK, allegedly Popper’s ideas were hijacked by neoliberalism, as (allegedly) Kuhn’s were by post-modernism. Once an idea is out in the world how do you stop somebody from taking it up and (maybe) twisting it for their own purposes? I don’t see an obvious solution, other than everyone shutting up, which somebody would also twist for their own purposes…
Popper’s ideas required no twisting.
Not up for a long thread, but Kuhn’s ideas needed no twisting. Even Kuhn himself is reported to have said he was not a Kuhnian when confronted with his own philosopho-drivel about how science works in the real world.
However, Popper, in full, is far more nuanced than the typical summary of his views.
IIRC, Popper only said that an idea should be able to be falsified, not that it would necessarily be practical to do so. I.e. Anthropogenic Global Heating is theoretically falsifiable. If we had an extra planet to run a control experiment on, the ideas about AGH would be easily testable and “falsifiable.”
I think Popper would agree that AGH is falsifiable and render the idiots who say otherwise moot. His idea of falsifiability is twisted into nonsense. It doesn’t help Popper though that he was mixed up with Hayek and von Mises and Mount Pellerin stuff, at least in the beginning of it.
How do you stop ideas being twisted? All one can do is try to put it right. Some will get it, and some won’t.
One key problem, well, is that science is hard. Good data, opportunities for good experiments, etc are very rare. Typically, we have to do with too small samples of what we know to be badly biased data–this is something often tell people about the problem of the historian as an empiricist, but the truth is that some version of this is true in every discipline. I think science fetishists (I think hyper-Popperians can be called this) do great damage to understanding by wilfully rejecting insights from such data.
Now, if the data is constrained, extracting indights does require both a lot of care and plenty of caveats, but that is both doable and has been done for many centuries–indeed, they were often the first step taking us to eventual good science.
Thank you hk.
“…science is hard…”
I might mention here in reply to your comment and to my own, in part, that the science of paleoclimatology, while hard, has given us tremendous insight into the experiment we are now running on our planet in terms of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. So, we are not without evidence of a type that is certainly appropriate to be looking at carefully. We have been able to gather and correlate large datasets from the geological, ice core, and tree ring samples worlwide that tell us much about the past climate of our planet and what influenced it as it has changed. They all point to one thing. More greenhouse gases are correlated with higher temperatures. It doesnt matter what the forcing cause was, whether simply Milankovic cycles of variation of orbits, or massive changes in life forms effecting the atmosphere, or any number of other reasons. Higher CO2 has always meant higher average temps.
Somewhere in my records I have the reference and the actual brief published by a bright young lady in the mid-1800’s that is the first known published physical evidence of what we now call the greenhouse effect of CO2. She laid out tubes of various gases in the sunlight and measured their temperature over time. CO2 temps rose faster than other gases she compared. That part’s not really hard, it’s a simple physical fact measured in the modern era to high precision.
The atmospheres of other planets in our solar system are also helpful, particularly Venus and Mars. We are also now beginning to be able to detect the compositions of atmospheres of exoplanets, too. That’s an exciting new field that may give us additional empirical evidence.
Past innovations often brought market bubbles and grift with them-canals, railroads, the internet, as examples. Despite the financial wreckage that resulted, these were real advances with undeniable benefits.
The real “advance” with so-called A.I. is that the supposed innovation is in fact itself a grift, so that all the data centers, chips, power generating capacity etc., etc., following in its wake are really grifts squared or grifts cubed.
If you count all the financial chicanery too, the proper exponent is hard to imagine.
When this bubble pops the crash may be absolutely epic.
The worst fears of the “Elliot Wave” and “Fourth Turning” folks may finally be right.
Several months ago Michigan GOP lesigslators drafted bills to not only ban adult websites but added a VPN ban as part of the bills being filed, on the grounds of “protecting kids”. Had such legislation passed, I wouldn’t be able to work as I was at the time a remote worker for one off the top 5 banks in the country (now retired).
I remember when the idea of banning VPN was considered a really crazy joke you would make.
Just like threatening Russia with nukes…
Jimmy Dore interviews Aaron Kheriaty about his new book,
Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine
utube, ~ 1 hr. Interesting topics including changes in modern medical practice, the rise of ‘managerial medicine’, physician burnout, and outside influences on the practice of medicine in the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHWQgj1wmsU