Dear patient readers,
Forgive me for a mini-rant. Readers may have noticed that the terrible state of search has gotten worse due to AI. Browsers like Firefox and Safari limit the choice of default browsers and do not allow non-mainstream ones like Yandex or Kagi. Google is now unusable. If you try searches within sites, which is an important feature for me, it now regularly gives false negatives:
There is an upside. This will now force me to use Orion + Kagi, and neither retains use histories.
‘No one believed it’: how a YouTube video accidentally proved Libya’s sand cat really does exist Guardian (Rolf A)
Mountain lions changed everything in this tiny California preserve Science Daily (Kevin W)
Lost in Translation Nible (Micael T)
War and Peace Mauricio Berman (fk). Important.
When the Waiting Is Over Oldster (Micael T)
Kids Are Flying Into Lunatic Rages When Their iPads Are Taken Away Futurism. From last month, still germane
#COVID-19/Pandemics
Sri Lanka’s dengue outbreak reaches epidemic level as cases top 50,000: Health officials Anadolu Agency
Climate/Environment
The race to understand how and when Thwaites glacier will collapse New Scientist
Warming Skies Have Triggered a New Era of Unpredictable Storms Atmos
Ocean warming above 1.5°C triggered year-round marine disruption across globe, study shows PhysOrg
Record coal output contrasts sharply with emissions-cutting claims Energy Live
‘This is terrifying’: The Colorado River, a lifeline for seven states, is drying up at its source Los Angeles Times
Iowa’s renewable energy push is paying off Cedar Rapids Gazette (Robin K)
China?
US Navy’s repair gap could hand the Pacific war to China Asia Times (Kevin W)
China blacklists more Japanese entities as row deepens Japan Times
Not even the World Cup can save the American travel industry, as China takes over top spot Kevin Walmsley
Japan
Yen Hits Four-Decade Low in Historic Slide That’s Rattled Japan Bloomberg
Japan protests against China’s maritime claims near southern island Straits Times
India
The Thirst Beneath the AI Revolution: India’s Data Centres and the Coming Water Crisis CounterCurrents
Southeast Asia
Why $20 durians are now being sold at half price – or given away for free BBC
How war and poverty are driving Myanmar’s drug crisis UCA News
Africa
Sahel: how the return of El Niño could exacerbate instability 24ORE
Tanzania hit by nationwide blackout following major national grid failure ChannelAfrica
South of the Border
Satellite images show destruction from Venezuela earthquakes Al Jazeera (Kevin W)
Government loosens dollar lending rules, raising echoes of 2001 crisis Buenos Aires Herald
Struggle continues’ in Bolivia’s Morales heartland France24
How Venezuela’s earthquakes have shaken President Delcy Rodriguez Aljazeera
Peru’s Keiko Fujimori wins presidential election, in latest victory for Latin American right Guardian (Robin K)
European Disunion
Trump threatens 100% tax on European imports if countries impose tax on digital services Associated Press (Kevin W)
Europe risks starting winter with gas stocks at 15-year low Financial Times
EU confronts ‘China shock’ ahead of pivotal Brussels trade talks South China Morning Post
A visit to Hüseyin Doğru’s family – readers can see for themselves on site Nackdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)
European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis, scientists say Guardian. From last week, still germane.
Extreme heatwave across Europe raises energy and inflation concerns CGTN
Germany joins push to delay EU methane rules Politico
+1000% de mortalité chez les poules, +200% chez les porcs, +45% chez les bovins.
Plusieurs millions d'animaux d'élevage sont morts sous l'effet de la canicule. Nous sommes en train de vivre une catastrophe agricole majeure, qui rejoint le traumatisme de 2003 comme étant les deux… pic.twitter.com/dxJvW9PFS5
— Dr. Serge Zaka (Dr. Zarge) (@SergeZaka) June 26, 2026
Von der Leyen’s office accused of ‘feudalism’ over air conditioning RT (Kevin W)
I’m an American living in Europe during the Great AC Wars Revolver (Li)
Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner Economist (Li)
Old Blighty
The finance curse is devouring the UK LFF (Colonel Smithers)
Burnham’s rise revives talk of war bonds to fund the UK military Fortune
Call for political stability to help farming industry BBC
Pea shortage looms after earliest harvest in 14 years Independent
Balkans
Kushner-linked protests reveal depth of anger at Albanian leaders Japan Times
Serbia: Protests continue after Vucic says he will step down DW
Israel v. The Resistance
Thread on the medical experiments conducted on at least a thousand Yemeni Jewish babies stolen in hospitals by the Israeli government in the early 1950s https://t.co/X57BsqnZOW
— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) June 29, 2026
Report: Israel Reviving Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Plan, Rebranding It as ‘Free Movement Plan’ Antiwar.com (Kevin W)
Bayer in league with Israeli use of glyphosate, white phosphorus Middle East Eye (Robin K)
I really don’t care who ends this evil, but it needs to end. https://t.co/XMjI12o8AN
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) June 29, 2026
The Jewish Community Center in Birmingham, to which I belonged (70% goyim membership because gym and pools; also a one minute drive from the house) got 2 bomb threats from this clown and implemented all sorts of new security procedures. Staff seemed pretty traumatized:
Michael Kadar, US/Israel dual citizen was indicted in Florida on Monday for bomb threats against Jewish institutions in 2016 & 2017.
ADL included Kadar’s incidents in its inflated 2017 antisemitism report, constituting 9% of all incidents.
Racially motivated hate crimes such as… https://t.co/NWmeScL5k3 pic.twitter.com/G1cstQLGKB
— GenXGirl (@GenXGirl1994) June 28, 2026
In the shadow of Minab: Inside the US testing of ‘new missiles’ on Iran’s Lamerd Middle East Eye (Kevin W)
This is where it's going, btw. Trump has made us vulnerable to this reality with his stupid war. And the Iranians are NOT interested in actually ending anything because they know they can win this contest. We are headed off a cliff. God help us all. https://t.co/Wuk5ulGpbK
— Brandon Weichert (@WeTheBrandon) June 29, 2026
Iraq arrests protesters as unrest spreads over power cuts New Arab
Syraqistan
Iraqi officials arrested in major corruption crackdown Associated Press (Robin K)
I can't stress enough how much this tweet gets wrong.
First, Prime Minister al-Zaidi is hardly the person who initiated this campaign. At most, he is overseeing its implementation in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief. The more likely driving force lies within Iraq's judicial… https://t.co/pN34s97qZY
— Harith Hasan (@harith_hasan) June 28, 2026
Israel says troops kill armed militants in southern Syria, vows continued military presence Kurdistan24
New Not-So-Cold War
One reason to believe that things are not so bad in Russia is that real median wages are up 25% since the war began, inflation has fallen to single digits, and the unemployment rate is 2.5%. Macro-economically, Russia is doing better than anyone in the geopolitical West. https://t.co/oSQR1ulVP3
— Policy Tensor (@policytensor) June 28, 2026
BREAKING: Merchant of Death Warns Russia Is Preparing for a Devastating Attack on Western Europe Tucker Carlson (Micael T)
Russia has begun installing weapons on its tankers, The Times reports.
Two 12.7mm Utes machine guns were spotted on the bridge of the Marshal Vasilevsky, one of Russia's main LNG carriers, likely to protect against drones and boarding attempts. pic.twitter.com/wmTa7Wt8dX
— Victor vicktop55 commentary (@vick55top) June 29, 2026
Ukraine flexes regional might with tougher stance on Belarus The Times
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service reports that the Kiev regime has stepped up cooperation with Mexican drug cartels, increasing trafficking through the port of Odessa and providing infrastructure to flood Europe with more drugs.
This has been a pretty fruitful… pic.twitter.com/89t9vMpKHn
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) June 29, 2026
Imperial Collapse Watch
2026 trends: geopolitics and escalation Events in Ukraine
America seeks its McDonald’s model for missile making Financial Times
Steven Spielberg’s Moral Equivalent of War Un-Diplomatic
Trump 2.0
Supreme Court rules states can count late-arriving mailed ballots, rejecting Trump-led challenge Associated Press
MAHA feels betrayed after Supreme Court ruling on Monsanto, glyphosate The Hill (Kevin W)
Our No Longer Free Press
When saving journalism pays better than doing journalism Amphibian (ma)
Economy
Can Energy Become Money? Doug Casey (Micael T)
Water shortages could prevent the US from mining more lithium, deepening reliance on foreign imports Live Science
Mr. Market Needs a Therapist
The Trillion-Dollar Borrowing Binge Lifting the Stock Market to Risky Heights Wall Street Journal
Oil Markets Are Pricing A Supply Surge That Isn’t Guaranteed OilPrice
Big oil’s secretive trading arms are having an extraordinary year Economist
The Bezzle
Zepbound Craze Fuels $1.3 Billion Windfall for Religious Causes Bloomberg (fk)
Class Warfare
College is unaffordable for many Americans — but don’t just blame rising tuition Kansas Reflector (Robin K)
Millions Lose ACA Coverage After Trump and Republicans Let Subsidies Expire The Intellectualist
Why are a record number of American adults living with their parents? RT (Robin K)
Antidote du jour. mgl: “Canada geese + goslings, Potter Marsh, Anchorage, Alaska. It’s springtime!”
And a bouns:
Sammy the seal was always begging for food at an Ireland restaurant, so the staff started feeding him daily at 9am, 1pm, and 4pm. Now he flops out of the water, looks both ways, crosses the road, and awaits his prize at those exact times every day. He is never late. pic.twitter.com/0qkpwR81i7
— Wolf of X (@WolfofX) June 28, 2026
A second bonus:
Kitty desperately teaching its owner how to retract its claws lololol
Too cute lololol pic.twitter.com/AehXspln3Y— cats with powerful impression 🐾 (@catshealdeprsn) June 28, 2026
And a different sort of antidote. We have featured some of resilc’s metal art before. I love pinwheels and this one spins. If I were in the US and had a yard, I would commission one and find a way to get it to me.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
Hi Yves, Firefox allows to add a search engine. I haven’t tried it myself with Kagi but seems worth a shot.
Yes
Also if for some queries you can’t get what you want, it may be worth to try duckduckgo/bing, for example for this specific query duckduckgo gives the correct result.
I’ll just add that Librewolf is a fork of Firefox that is intensely privacy focused (and has a no-AI policy, unlike FF). In fact, it’s so secure that I had to reduce the privacy settings to get some social media sites working. I like it better than FF, personally.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a look.
LibreWolf for Linux Mint looks hella difficult to install!
Follow the directions to enter the commands here for a Debian based system (Mint is Debian based):
Installation instructions for Debian based
https://librewolf.net/installation/debian/
Or you can install it as an Appimage or a Flatpak (just other ways to package and use an application):
Installation instructions for Other Linux
https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/
Thanks!!!
I like QWANT for searches. I also like a fork of Firefox called Waterfox.
I’m under the impression that Waterfox is a more privacy-protecting variant of Firefox as well.
Yes that is true.
Yes, this works. I’ve been using it in firefox for many months now. On the phone, I ended up installing the kagi browser.
I use Yandex on Firefox as my default search engine BUT I am running on a legacy OS and browser and it’s been years since a browser upgrade actually improved anything other than cookie retrieval.
Plus, of course, Silicon Valley and Hollywood’s obsession with turning the internet into cable TV. Streaming is for suckers, it’s grossly inefficient and massively compounds peak usage times whereas bittorrent distribution doesn’t stress the internet and when you get done watching your show, you still have it.
I have two free-streaming websites I go to in order to watch stuff I cannot find anywhere else as official streaming services also routinely pull down shows making them lost media and many movies are obscure to begin with. You can also right-click and use “save as” to download the show or movie directly.
I use goojara(dot)to for movies and shows and wcoflix(dot)tv for cartoons and animated shows. The only problem with the latter is that they have a lot of pop-under ads to offset server costs for hosting their massive archive, so I recommend a decent adblocker like U-block, or its even better fork, Adnauseam.
I use Firefox on a PC, and have the UDM-14 block in place (by adding “&udm=14” in the URL of your google search it leaves off all the AI junk). I use the version that is an add-on to Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/udm14/) and it’s added as an ‘additional’ search engine in the ‘search’ bar. It almost makes search a joy to use again.
Using it, I tried the site specific search (“site:bloomberg.com Oman Hormuz european fees”) you gave, and it returned a good number of specific Bloomberg-based pages.
If you don’t want to fool with setting the udm14 parameter, or just want to experiment with the difference, this site will do a google search and add it on automatically: https://udm14.com/ .
I’ve been paying Kagi $10/mo to support a search engine that doesn’t collect my data.
They’ve got a post about the Google rulings and how they source their index. (Kagi)
In a non-trash country, Google and Microsoft would be required to make their search data feeds available to everyone for a reasonable fee. This data is a public utility.
Kagi doesn’t cast a very wide net, and generally limits results to maybe three pages. It is not a drop-in replacement for the golden age of genuinely useful search.
That said, Kagi is vastly superior to the predatory Swamp Thing that Google has become. Among other things, Kagi has restored the exquisite parsing capabilities that once defined a good search engine. It is my Firefox default now, plus Google Scholar when I’m cruising peer-reviewed literature.
Paying for a service where you are the customer, instead of the product, fundamentally changes the interaction.
Just FYI, the Walmsley US travel link is malformed (missing “<“ at the beginning, I think).
Fixed, thanks!
‘moe tkacik
@moetkacik
Thread on the medical experiments conducted on at least a thousand Yemeni Jewish babies stolen in hospitals by the Israeli government in the early 1950s’
Dr. Mengele to the courtesy phone, please. This was all going on right from the beginning of when their country was formed and seems to be an ongoing scandal that won’t go away-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemenite_Children_Affair
If I recall correctly, Moe was the source of the shockingly revelatory piece on Israel, CIA, Mob, Russia, Kushner, Nutting-yahoo, Kennedy assassination, Epstein, yada yada yada. It is a wonder Moe is still alive.
…I said a nyuk nyuk nyuk. Hey Moe Hey Moe…
The final quote in the mountain lion link says it all:
“ Humans remain the leading cause of mountain lion deaths, whether through hunting or vehicle collisions.
“Clearly, we exert our own ecology of fear,” she said. “Humans are the ultimate predator on almost every landscape.”
I recall reading a piece where the writer was following Doug Peacock around in the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. They were trying to run to ground the rumors of a remnant grizzly population. The writer (Cahill/ Outside Mag?) made the point that Peacock appeared to think and behave like a surviving endangered grizzly. The minute he heard a plane, or a human voice (back/ horsepackers) Peacock BOLTED with all haste off- trail into the deepest hidey he could find.
Humans are undisputedly THE biggest threat to life on earth. I say that in the first person singular.
> ‘No one believed it’: how a YouTube video accidentally proved Libya’s sand cat really does exist Guardian (Rolf A)
The 18 second YouTube video shows a cat carefully choosing a shaded spot and arranging itself to rest in it. So understandably no one believed it :P
“2 bomb threats from this clown”: surely “clown” is much too kind a term.
Anyway why shouldn’t Israeli-Americans fake racism incidents? Other sorts of hyphenated Americans seem to do it all the time.
You had the same sort of thing happening here in Oz but I doubt that it will be mentioned during the ongoing Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Such claims would be called antisemitic. /sarc
Coffee Lost in Translation, by Camilleri at Nimble.
In fact, Camilleri gets something seriously wrong throughout. What the big chains like corporatized Costa and Starbucks *do* not want to do is import Italian coffee culture.
Camilleri gets this right: “Costa is caught between these two forces without a clear answer to either. It is too expensive to compete on price, and not good enough to compete on quality. That is not a marketing problem. It is a product problem. And product problems do not resolve through restructuring announcements.”
In Italy, the price of a caffè normale (espresso) is the source of controversy. Here in the Chocolate City, I pay more or less 1,40 (one euro forty, which is USD 1.50). Italians are highly sensitive to changes in coffee prices.
Then there is the custom at some caffès that a coffee at the “bancone,” bar, is less than a coffee at a table.
Then there is the tyranny of choice in Anglo-America that has ruined coffee. Starbucks is pumping out the pumpkin-spice ice-frothy whippyccino at 9 dollars a pop. Here in the Chocolate City, there is a big Starbucks just off Via Roma. It is for the gioventù dorata. Regular Italians consider it pricey and snotty.
I recall early Starbucks (around 1990). The barista could still make an espresso coffee, served in a tazzina. By the time I was living in Edgewater in Chicago near the famous Berwyn Avenue Starbucks, they couldn’t make a proper espresso coffee — and the single tazzina, yes, the one demitasse, was kept locked in a cabinet. And a caffè macchiato at Starbucks is a milkshake of misguided foam.
It’s the tyranny of consumer choice and the endless bullshit of Anglo-American “marketing.” Here in Italy, the vast majority of orders at the places I frequent are caffé normale, caffè macchiato, and cappuccino. And why would one want to deviate from perfection? (Well, there is the marocchino.)
Italians will simply limit the menu: At one place I frequent, they don’t have whipped cream, which normally goes on a hot chocolate. So I go elsewhere for hot chocolate. The same place experimented with a U.S. style self-service container for caffè americano. I knew it wouldn’t work. The experiment ended in about a month. What followed undoubtedly was misuse and waste, which Italians won’t tolerate.
So nothing in the fate of Costa surprises me. Camilleri gets this right: “The original Costa brothers understood something that three decades of institutional ownership have quietly eroded: that coffee, properly made, is one of the simplest pleasures available to a human being, and that the job of a coffee business is to get out of the way of that pleasure rather than to complicate it with volume, milk, and the economics of throughput.”
In short, enshittification for the sake of high profits and de-skilling the workforce. Think of how hard it is to find a decent piece of pie in the U S of A.
The culture of coffee is a ritual of fleeting sensuality, and a few moments of repose, which are just what one needs and what Calvinism won’t tolerate.
Much agreement with your comment. Oz is lucky in that after the war a helluva lot of Italians came over here and they introduced the country to a lot of their food & drink culture, especially the coffee culture. The result is that when Starbucks tried to move in on Oz, they flamed out because their coffee was trash compared to what you can get in an ordinary suburban cafe-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FGUkxn5kZQ (6:49 mins)
And as I have said before. Coffee is not a matter of life or death – it is more important than that.
I have never been to Italy, but after visiting Australia late last year, I now search for coffee that tastes like it did in Australia. And it was easy to see why Starbucks would flop Down Under: inferior coffee at higher prices. And prices seemed standardized across Australia: $5 AUS for a large cappuccino (I think)–what a deal from an American perspective.
While high streets in Britain have plenty of chain and independent coffee shops, Costa seem to have gained a monopoly of coffee shops in hospitals. Last time I entered one such costa, and prepaid by machine for an espresso I was handed a cup that was luke warm, most likely a misorder that was sitting around. I politely asked for a fresh hot espresso and the ‘barista’ lied claiming to have just made it. (I could see he hadn’t.) I left it on the counter and sent a complaint via the Costa app. Never received as much as an acknowledgement, let alone a response. I will live with any espresso craving in hospital in future rather than enter a Costa ever again.
Consider the USA coffee situation when Starbucks arrived. The supermarkets had tins of Folgers and Maxwell House so big that even if you liked that coffee you’d be drinking it stale half the time. Gas stations and convenience stores had long lines of pump vacuum flasks of usually stale coffee, many of these with vanilla or hazelnut food flavoring added that made the store stink.
The situation was similar with beer, a drink Americans are equally thirsty for. On my first trip to the USA in the early 90s I asked the charming Dallas waitress what beer she could offer, she well knew the answer “BudBudLightMillerMillerLiteCoorsCoorsLight”. I lived in Munich back then. Baffled I look around the table at my colleagues and asked if any were good. So, as with coffee, the situation was so bad that something had to change.
You, DJG, described how things changed with coffee. I was initially relieved that Starbucks arrived but quickly lost interest. I was among the first to get a Rancilio home machine when they were introduced and got coffee from Trieste. With beer things got even more silly. Now the shelves in the bottle shop are all goofy packages of what tastes like bad homebrew with each too much alcohol, sugar and a flavor so strong that leaves me needing a palate cleanser. There are some respectable exceptions but we mostly get our beer from Czechia and Germany.
You can perhaps blame some of this on the supply side but I don’t. I think the market expresses what Americans prefer. Similar patterns are evident in the wine market: California chardonnay is like vanilla ice cream and merlot is like chocolate ice cream. Again with cakes, cookies and doughnuts etc., which are so overwhelmingly sweet and large that they are frequently the topic of conversation among grumbling expats suffering culture shock.
The pattern is clear, it seems to me. Young children’s favorite food after mother’s delicious milk is ice cream. Makes sense. It is not espresso coffee, green olives, Barolo or Czech pilsner. These are known as acquired tastes. The process of their acquisition is cultural (and, btw, pro-social). The USA doesn’t have much in the way of that kind of culture, for the obvious historical reasons. It has consumerism. Give them what they want: ice cream, which is not unlike what Starbucks serves.
I am of the view that there are flavours for toddlers, and flavours for grown-ups. For toddlers, sweet, creamy, bland. For grown-ups, sour, bitter, hot, strong – sauerkraut, espresso, sriracha.
Indeed. The point I was trying to make is that in America on these questions nobody is expected to grow up. Explains more than just Starbucks.
Sigh. A normal, no-frills cappuccino! What I wouldn’t give!
I lived in Seattle in the 90s when Starbuck’s wasn’t even the biggest chain in town. I always preferred the local coffee shops so have never been to a Starbuck’s myself, but my impression was that at first Starbuck’s really did serve Italian cappuccino, etc. I know I had to learn to make all of these at restaurants where I worked during my salad days. Seattle had a thriving coffee culture already – my favorite was Cafe Paradiso on Capitol Hill. A young hipster could go in at any time of day or night, order the Italian style, or my personal preference, a large cup of black coffee with cheap refill. There was ample seating where one could chain smoke (!) and read a book, whiling the afternoon or evening away. Coffee shops closed about the same time as the bars did. All very bohemian, and enough to make a young kid from a rural area feel very worldly.
Starbuck’s basically copied it, embiggened it, and crapified it. At one point they were opening Starbuck’s outlets in any little space they could find, often competing with their own shops. In the 90s on15th Ave in Seattle there was a Starbuck’s right across the street from another on the same block – clearly the intention was to saturate the market and put others out of business. It worked. Cafe Paradiso and the others who brought coffee culture to Seattle are long gone. Starbuck’s long since went nationwide. Do coffee shops even stay open at night any more? I haven’t seen one in a long time. Now my kid thinks Starbuck’s is THE place to go, but just for a quick pick up and not place to sit and stay for a while. And the treacly pink beverage the kid prefers is an abomination that bears no resemblance to coffee.
But there are hopeful signs. The kid now actually orders coffee on occasion and goes to a local coffee shop once in a while – I’d like to think my anti-corporate curmudgeonliness is bearing fruit in that regard. And twice recently I ordered espresso for an after dinner beverage and it came as you described, not some bastardized USian version.
As for the pie, there is a popular spot here in Maine – Moody’s Diner. If you can’t make the trip, you can apparently now order a kit and bake one at home.
Time to fire up the μπρίκι for today’s third cup of Greek [definitely NOT Turkish ;) ] coffee. I feel so alive!
Pie is easy.
The legacy coffee shops in Seattle may have made great coffee, but the model Starbucks was copying was the neighborhood hangout spots pioneered by Alfred Peet in the East Bay in the late 60s. When Starbucks was just getting going they asked Peet if they could inspect his approach, and invited him to invest in Starbucks. Peet didn’t think his approach was proprietary and declined the investment opportunity. As several posts have suggested the 70s/80s Starbucks stores were very close to the original Peet’s model lots of space and comfortable seating and none of the emphasis on higher priced fru-fru drinks and heavy turnover later seen.
But I have huge admiration for the market research Starbucks conducted in those days. After observing local coffee consumption patterns, their first store in the State of California, on Union Street in San Francisco, was two blocks from my apartment. Several years later, their first store on the Continent of Europe was near Zurich Stadelhofen, two blocks from where I was then living.
I can and do use Kagi as the default search on Firefox https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html
Cool! Thanks a ton!
Second that! Easy even for an old fart like… me.
Since this commentary doesn’t add anything to the links discussion let me please add some news: Paraguay qualified to the next round against Germany (Paraguayazo! has been said in sports outlets here in Spain) and Morocco qualified against the Netherlands in the FIFA World CUP.
The times they are changin’
A couple of paraguayazo memes here:
https://x.com/detacoydepuntin/status/2071738837240283545?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2071738837240283545%7Ctwgr%5E891fc04af9c798c24ce9aeeac3709c9fa8b2680f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.losandes.com.ar%2Fdeportes%2Flos-memes-inundaron-las-redes-el-historico-batacazo-paraguay-alemania-n5996745
https://x.com/TrollFootball/status/2071737948798955897?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2071737948798955897%7Ctwgr%5E891fc04af9c798c24ce9aeeac3709c9fa8b2680f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.losandes.com.ar%2Fdeportes%2Flos-memes-inundaron-las-redes-el-historico-batacazo-paraguay-alemania-n5996745
Yves, I don’t know if it is a firefox on apple thing that prevents adding Yandex or other search engine, but on Firefox in linux, I can add a search engine in the settings and make it default. I can add “https://yandex.com/search?text=%s” as the URL and once added, select it to be default in the drop down menu above where I added it. I get a “are you a robot” complaint the first search but then it works fine afterwards.
For what it is worth, you can simply make Yandex an ordinary bookmark-
https://yandex.com/
Once you click inside the search box, all sorts of options appear above it.
One thing that annoys me about Yandex is its increasing reliance on AI summary for normal search and AI for its image-search function.
Mauricio Berman. War and Peace. Highly recommended.
Exactly: “This is why peace, for both the individual and society at large, is so threatening: it brings us face to face with issues that are painful, even scary, to confront. Better the carnage of war than the carnage of the psyche, is the idea; in reality, a sad state of affairs.”
This is why peace is the only path. And this is why the warmongers are so obviously so lacking, the kind of people who think that setting the dinner table as you wait for guests is nothing compared to glorious loose talk about bombs. Three of such specimens: Mark Rutte, Ursula von der Leyen, Lindsey Graham.
This is also why I keep this poem in mind:
The Anactoria Poem
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.
And it’s easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband—that best of
men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,
she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,
she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.
From The Poetry of Sappho (Oxford University Press 2007), translated by Jim Powell.
But, heck, Sappho is just one more Dead White Man, to be played by Jennifer Lawrence in the upcoming biopic.
Interesting how Berman emphasizes the word ecstatic. The dissolution of the self into the collective is a powerful experience, attractive and many people seek it out. The best of musical performance, religious ritual, sports and so on afford it. Political protest can too. Our hierarchical societies it would, I suppose, generally be in the interest of the ruling class to direct the object of political protest away from themselves, right Hr. Merz?
We live close to the location of the Boston Marathon bombing and were subject to the restrictions of movement as the (Keystone) cops attempted to capture the perps. At the climax, street celebrations spontaneously erupted with people waving flags and shaking fists in the air. It looked ecstatic. Reminded me of the up-swelling and outpouring of blood lust as the USA got ready for and executed GW2.
If the USMNT manages to prevail over Bos-Herts Wednesday night you can bet we will see much OOSA OOSA OOSA chanting and fist pumping. The build up and the release. With some breaks to feature our paying sponsors…
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenauseating. Gag a Maggot.
But I will be there, streaming it, burning electrons and demanding data centers to feed my habit.
How unsustainable am I, really? Quite !
I did appreciate this post. But as a complimentary companion piece I’d strongly recommend Van Jackson’s post: ‘Steven Spielberg’s Moral Equivalent of War’ from his Un-Diplomatic blog. In it he reflects on the same thing, but does it more effectively. He also links to William James’ very relevant essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” from which he derives his title. To the psychology of dopamine hits he adds the necessity of *empathy* if we are to understand war and peace. But he goes beyond emotions or psychology or neurology by making this point in criticizing Spielberg, and liberal myth-making in general:
“Liberals are a diverse bunch, but the best of them would have us look inside ourselves for solutions to the world’s crises. That’s necessary but insufficient. Personal reckonings cannot be mutually exclusive with seeing and analyzing the structures that produce our crises. That produce our lack of empathy. The individual, as the unit of analysis, is an insufficient answer to a system-level problem.”
For me, the function of feel-good stories like those provided by Steven Spielberg is precisely to distract us from “seeing and analyzing the structures that produce our crises.” And one may add, the interests who benefit from these structures. That is also the deficiency of appeals to “ecstatic desire” in providing non-rational “psycho-logical” explanations for war, even though this may be an important element in the process.
I guess this is the one. https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/steven-spielbergs-moral-equivalent. I’ll read it later.
Thanks for your comment, pjay. I think it’s important to understand the psych and neuro-oriented views but I get uncomfortable with arguments that seem to set up a telos from objective science to the inevitable fate of violent, unequal societies. It’s almost the same thing as using science to explain/justify Western Civilization/supremacy. History and archeology show that we have choices and there were alternatives to the Western modes of social organization in which the most sociopathic are given the greatest power and rewards.
Not all of use believe that our top priority is to produce as many grandchildren as possible. Some of us believe we have the freedom to choose over biological determinism.
Agree. From the personal perspective of Ignacio all these inevitable wars, apart of the actual destruction they bring, do damage the psyche, the morale and the confidence that one could retain, and/or the populations at large might share. (please forbid my third-person writing there). Trying to understand this craziness is very helpful. Collective thanks to Berman, DJG, .Tom, Van Jackson, pjay and Yves Smith for a recommendation which I subscribe wholeheartedly.
This line of analysis tends to slide into headwagging about human nature in a terribly simplistic way, so much so that I’ve come to see it as part of the phenomenon it describes. That Russell would draw conclusions about the nature of support for the war by submerging himself in prowar pep rally itself becomes a source of dismay to me. You’d think he might have been capable of looking beyond the “ecstasy” at the political forces compelling support for the war. It’s certainly true that antiwar pledges by socialist parties were not carried out, but that was significantly determined by fear of government repression, e.g. Jaures, leader of the French SP, had been assassinated on July 31. We really don’t need to get distracted by this socially blinkered funkmongering.
I don’t doubt Bertrand Russell’s account of what he observed in 1914, but I’ve also read that in 1939 crowds in Germany stood silent and people in Britain “screamed and cursed” when the declarations of war were announced. Probably none of these popular reactions had anything to do with the decisions of various governments to go to war. Those decisions seem to have been very much top-down.
… I can add “https://yandex.com/search?text=%s” without the quotes as the URL …
Re: Supreme Court rulings
Losing the battle over Lisa Cook (“Cook-gate?”) had to really stick in Donnie’s craw.
Here is a link to the full decision:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf
These cases can be confusing; Taco was asking the court for a stay on an injunction. Piecing the facts together:
1. Taco tries to fire Cook, under sketchy allegation of mortgage fraud that occurred before her taking office; no actual indictment, just a referral to the DoJ
2. Cook sues, asks the trial court for a temporary injunction to allow her to stay in the job while the suit plays out
3. Court grants injunction
4. Taco appeals;
5. Appellate court upholds lower court injunction and denies stay
6. Taco appeals to SCOTUS
7. SCOTUS denies Taco in a 5-4 decision
The issue is whether Cook deserved due process in the matter, also what does “for cause” mean? As usual the merits were not decided here, only whether Cook can stay on the job while the case against her proceeds.
Justice Thomas wrote the dissent … it appears that he would deny Cook due process because her claim stated that under the 14th amendment the government can’t deny her interest in “life, liberty, or property”. In this case the office she occupies is her “property.” And Thomas interprets property as not including a job.
I found the majority more persuasive. Allowing any President to fire a Fed governor on cooked-up charges converts their employment to at-will, rather than the higher standard of needing to find a “cause.” Yet the decision only gives Cook more time to fight, and the carve-out for the Fed is a special case.
Also worth noting that this is another case of Taco scoring an “own goal” on himself. It’s been over a year since the initial attempt to fire Cook; had he not wasted all this time tying up the courts fighting the injunction, the case could have proceeded to the merits at the Trial Court level. Now he’s stuck with Cook for the foreseeable future.
But didn’t Roberts mention that there was nothing to prevent Trump doing it again, with “proper notice”?
More important to me was that this was the only firing they had a problem with.
Yes, I did read that. What’s to stop Trump from giving her a hearing, with some random marsupials as the deciders? I think that Cook can litigate that, though. With an injunction now in place, she might get to stay in office until that plays out all the way to the SCOTUS. Go-aLLLL!!
Part of my point is that the Trump administration is full of idiots. If they were cleverer, they would have done this first, and not wasted the court’s time on procedural stuff. it is highly suspicious as well that Cook has not been formally indicted in the year since this controversy started. It makes it appear that they have no case.
Of course, they appear to have no case because they in fact have no case. Par for this crowd.
Re; War and Peace
The author sets the framework with some choice quotes:
“The world is not logical,” wrote the great German writer; “it is psycho-logical.”
And later:
If our brains get used to high stress and constant dopamine and cortisol spikes, it will make the sudden declaration of peace feel like an emotional vacuum…
Both statements may appeal to experience, but I would disagree in general with each; first, much in this world is logical; second, I believe that an escape from stress– especially extreme stress– is less often an emotional vacuum than it is a relief.
The author concludes that “a life that makes sense is perforce lived as a balancing act, between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps this is no great intellectual breakthrough, but wisdom consists of knowing when to go with Scylla, and when with Charybdis, if you’ll permit me a classical allusion.”
But isn’t wisdom not having to go with Scylla or Charybdis? Isn’t wisdom the balancing itself and knowing when to pull away from their grasp? Or, is knowing when not to be wise wisdom too?
From 16 til i was 26, and landed way out here and found Tam, my life was a constant churn of threat and escape, hardships and overcoming, only to be set upon with more hardships and craziness…little of which was due to my initial actions….altho, many times, due to my reaction to various and sundry crazy instigations. ten years of being under the gun, as it were…sometimes quite literally.
when i got out here…isolation and extreme silence…then with Tam…it took a while to…catch my breath, and to stop jumping at loud noises and to finally stop having panic attacks when id see a cop.
for 31 years, i have not for a moment missed all that.
ive only really been able to talk openly about all of it(the beatings, bein buried alive, etc) for the last dozen or so years.
so while i am certain that there are many people who are as Berman describes…i have known them,lol…it aint everybody.
i reckon that most of the mostly on-line posturing and larping as various manifestations of revolutionary badasses is only possible because 1. on-line’s perceived anonymity, etc and 2. because most of these folks have never experience extreme hardship, to say nothing of persecution and being on the run for years and years.
it is not a romantic story…even though thats how i often present it when asked to tell my tales.
rather, it was extremely traumatic, and took years of talking through it, and writing about it, to come to terms with.
during those ten years, i would often stop…when i’d find some safe out of the way place to hide out and recuperate for a week, or 9 months,lol…the magnitude of my situation would hit me…is this really happening? this is all crazy!
lol.
Salute!
Finding yourself in situations that shouldn’t happen can be difficult to understand let alone explain because of that question “why?” And “winning” a battle or war certainly doesn’t always leave you better-off or in better condition or circumstance, that’s for sure, as you can walk away with your life while having lost most everything else once important to you.
I stay away from cops and from partaking in stupidly obvious or obviously stupid activities and circumstances that can to involvement with them, mostly (aside from personal, moral, or ethical inclinations) because you never can know for sure what kind of individuals you may end up dealing with or what the outcome may be: a lot of crimes are committed under color of law, and I’ve seen a lot of cops do bad shit for no good reason… though with that said, every agency has it’s own culture, and with tens of thousands of individual agencies in the US it can be difficult to apply broad generalizations.
It pays to be safe.
Hippy, you know I was a cop, right? So you know I’ve got the stories. My (first) agency was corrupt as hell, and that’s something I figured out over time, not something that they advertised on the front door. I know a life waking suddenly full-awake and grasping a gun at the slightest unusual sound, where those close to you may be the greatest threats, and where relaxing meant disappearing hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the hunting ground… ironically, “Veteran’s Preference” points made it even more easy for me to land that job, and in retrospect, I should have known better, but I was still trying to make the world a better place, I guess. Regardless, it wasn’t a life I should have expected… much of it shouldn’t have happened… much of it, twenty-plus years later, I still can’t explain… at least the “why” parts. But I do have some theories ;-)
Come Friday, please enjoy a drink at the wilderness bar for me, and I’ll toast you from fireside here in these Northwoods.
thanks for that.
ive known a few of the good cops(all of them, but one, older DPS Trooper, made reference to being Jedi’s.)
and we talked about all this, and gained mutual respect in the process.
my problems started with my mom, covering her ass for being a psychobitch.
and then i helped that girl out of a jam, when i was 18, she was 17…and her dad was also psychotic…but also a powerful local figure. i had dissed him, and so it began.
a whole mythology built up around me…that i didnt even know about for years(i was never a drug runner, let alone heroin, and was never a “white slaver”, let alone the initial kidnapper and rapist!)…and once i learned about all that, from a sympathetic detective, i ran.
shit followed me around for a decade…and even way out here, until i made nice with the sheriff’s deputies, and explained it all….and after i married Tam…and into one of the oldest mexican Familias in this place…it all just sorta went away.
the cops who did the evil believed the mythology they were fed…that i was some criminal mastermind, bent on rapine,etc.
i have forgiven them, in my heart.
except for the ones who beat me with sticks, twice, of course…and definitely not the ones who thought it best to beat me and then bury me in the national forest, and be done with the great threat.
(crawling up out of the ground like an insect, with broken ribs, and not knowing why it happened, has an effect).
this was the late 80’s in the far northern exurbs of Houston…with all the satanic cult scares and pre-teabilly madness fermenting away out there….and i was, admittedly, a weirdo genius kid…and quoting Jefferson or the Bill of Rights sure didnt help, either,lol.
i keep a pine tree on my place, here, as a remembrance.
https://www.amerikanets.com/p/pr-war-ramps-up-in-ukraine
The ongoing PR campaign in Ukraine
Thanks for that, leaf. Very good article!
The article is good in some respects, though I wonder why the author doesn’t estimate Ukrainian casualties, which would set up a review of the tremendous imbalance between AUK and Russian firepower. Too much attention has been devoted to drones and not enough to Russia’s use of 1 ton + glide bombs and its dominant use of artillery. I’ve run out of vomit expressing my disgust with NATO’s manipulation of this horrendous mess.
I think some tags were not closed for the Walmsley substack link above
https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/not-even-the-world-cup-can-save-the
“I’m an American living in Europe during the Great AC Wars…”
There seems to be a lot of schadenfreude about Europe being hammered by heat waves and not having AC to cope with it. I would go so far as to say that if you asked these same people if these massive heat waves are climate change in action, then you would see a bit of backpedaling. People forget but it was only the introduction of AC that opened up regions of America that suffered from excessive heat. I have been reliably informed that the South experience a lot of heat and humidity but AC let a large part of the population move down south to live. If the massive build out of all those data centers causes the grid to fall over, people will be reminded of what the natural climate is like. I have also heard that without AC, that few people would or even could live in the UAE for example. Thing is, European buildings are not really set up for such excessive heat and it may be OK for some people to say get AC but you have to have the electrical grid in place that could support it first.
This makes me recall the NC post featuring high-heat environs and the sublime beauty and lived experience that is evolved Iranian architecture.
Lets go destroy it! Jeepers…
Some buildings are indeed functionally obsolescent…. amny too many. Sunk Cost? Stranded Capital? Overly-costly retrofitting? The oxy-morons of “sustainable building”
Lotta pain and suffering in the Anthropocene.
Some Schadenfreude* is emanating from not just the US, but also China as well. One’d expect the latter to know more in general than the former, if that even factors into anything…
(* Can’t be certain about Russia, most of which shares the same latitude as Europe but with lower energy prices. Other than that, such smug moralizing attitudes from the US are how I began picking up anti-NATO, pro-BRICS media in the first place (back in the onset of Trump’s first term), but that’s another story!)
I’ve been wondering how populations south of the US border (from Cuba/Mexico to, say, Colombia) could get around before the invention of air conditioners. In fact, and case in point, if we factor in topographical aspects of each region, how much does one need A/C in Mexico?
innovations like the Siesta…and(think abt a certain very fast mouse) white clothing, large brimmed hats, and various aspects of the architecture(massive stone containing deep shade, as well as courtyards with fountains.)
i regularly marvel at folks around here who work out in the sun after…say 1pm.
(like mom(rolls eyes), as well as the people who mow for her sometimes).
im a big believer in siesta time, and reckon it is one of the greatest inventions of the littoral of the Mediterranean, ever.
Well, it looks like Europe is actually hotter than America, right now.
All this reminds me of this piece, that I’ve returned to occasionally, over the years.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/08/09/why-people-get-hot-under-the-collar-about-air-conditioning/
Regarding the strength of the emotions in play, note number 5 is especially germane:
What I fail to understand is why AC is the first thought, especially in areas not normally prone to excessive heat and humidity. A much less expensive and energy consuming solution could be whole house de-humidifiers.
90 degrees with humidity above 60% feels way more uncomfortable (and dangerous) than 90 at 30-39%. Of course it’s not a solution when the temps are routinely higher than 90 or so but below that make sense.
Regarding the high country of the Colorado river drying up and impending reductions in water use in the Southwest, I traveled through California’s Imperial Valley – a prime recipient of Colorado River water – in February, and was astounded to see how much irrigated farmland was devoted to growing alfalfa.
Growing grass for dairy cattle in what, minus irrigation, is a parched moonscape seems like a DMS-grade level of insanity. It didn’t help matters to see the contrails of jet fighters prepping for Operation Epstein Fury in the distance.
If you want to get a foretaste of the Southwest’s/USA’s apocalypse-in-the-making landscapes, check out the Salton Sea region… crazy s*^t.
Man, that’s nothing. Here in my State here in Oz they were growing cotton in the middle of a desert and draining a major river to do it. Madness.
The groundwater pumping is even greater madness. That bell cannot be un-rung.
But wait. It gets worse. As that water is pumped out the caverns compress together which means that the level of the land falls. Check out the image of Joseph Poland illustrating this point-
https://californiawaterblog.com/2015/12/27/the-earth-is-falling-land-subsidence-and-water-management-in-california/
Ground or subsurface subsidence by water removal is determined by the actual subsurface geology.
Unconsolidated material will compress after enough water is removed and its can’t be undone.
Water in strong rock strata will usually not be compressed.
All depends on what’s down there, can’t make generalizations.
Great comment, Michael. We lived in Southern California for 30 years and visited all those arid places, mostly by bicycle. Salton Sea, Central Valley, Death Valley (a foretaste of the future Southwest?). Crossed and recrossed the California Aqueduct.
Then, we moved to Denver in 2007 and happened to camp for a few days at a state park in the eastern edge of Colorado. The campsites, originally lake-side, were a a good 10 minute hike to the much diminished lake, which was part of an agricultural irrigation system.
So I started reading up on settlement of the West and Southwest. John Wesley Powell had it right with his publication of Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. In 1878. Like, really, guys, trying to agriculture west of the 100th Meridian is NOT a good idea. But if you must do it, at least arrange the states/districts so they follow the natural watersheds. And, BTW, Congress and Land Developers: Rain does NOT follow the plow.
The ranchers and corporate agri-growers have been living a delusion for the past century. They have to have known their exploitation would have to end.
The irrigation systems drilled into the Ogallala Aquifer have been draining it dry much much faster than rains can regenerate it. Like centuries faster.
And our Denver suburb HOA sent us regular letters regarding our brown lawn. And even nastier letters when I replaced part of the lawn with tomato plants. (OK, I was trying to push the boundaries!)
So, when my spouse retired, we moved back to western New York. We have snowy winters, but we have water. Muck boots are a fashion accessory.
The strawberries grown in Orange County and up north in the Salinas Valley area are transporting little globes of water from these arid regions to the water-rich Great Lakes states. Our local strawberries here in Chautauqua County, NY are available only for one delicious month, but the fragrant memory (and the hundreds of jars of jam) lingers all year.
Thanks… that’s beautiful country in and around Chautauqua County, so I can see why you moved back.
New York is the water tower of the Northeast and beyond, originating and/or draining into the St. Lawrence, Housatonic, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna/Chesapeake and Allegheny watersheds. Its waters mingle with those of Long Island Sound to the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually the logic and meaning of that will penetrate into people’s minds, and re-migration will follow as the Southwest becomes unlivable.
Time to buy real estate in the Mohawk Valley!
Beautiful country with abundant water it may be BUT lots of that water manifests as snow and ice for 5 months of the year. It is hard to imagine how anyone not born to such weather or acclimated from a young age would ever find it acceptable and this climate also threatens seriously life altering or even ending events for seniors.
Worse still the state government is completely dominated by one party which grows more extreme in their corruption, tax and spend addiction. and environmental fanatacism by the day.
The vampire state is near the top for taxes of almost all types, costs for housing and utiilities, and living in general, with government busily expanding and exacerbating the situation.
Somehow at the same time, the measures of child poverty in several upstate cities lead the nation, as do measures of unmaintained infrastructure, poor school performance and population decline.
Nobody in their right mind is buying real estate in the Mohawk Valley, which by the way is likely to be near or even on some sort of contaminated brown field or unremediated toxic waste site left over following 50+ years of de-industrialization.
Before the advent of air conditioning – soon to become increasingly unaffordable for many in the dry Sunbelt – people lived and dealt with the cold and snow, and the Sun Cities of the desert Southwest could support nowhere near the populations they now have. Lack of water in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain West, and everything attendant upon that, will compel many to learn/re-learn to live with the cold and snow (which will diminish as the climate warms).
You also seem to be arguing with yourself: you can’t simultaneously decry brownfields and toxic waste sites along with “environmental fanaticism” and retain much credibility. And your mention of the Vampire State was a Fox News/NY Post-style ideological tell.
Dealing with the cold in the past often involved wood burning stoves, which also provided a back-up or independent heat source absolutely verboten in NY now. Heating in the winter is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
Yes, “environmental fanaticism” is imprecise, but anthropogenic global warming fanaticism, to be more accurate does seem awkward.
Gov’t people in Albany are all in on the Great Green Grift making extraordinary laws and rules about carbon neutrality demanding all matter of “renewable” energy projects, no matter how inefficient and costly they are with no concern for how much energy prices will have to be raised to pay for them. These are mostly located in upstate NY where the costs will be felt, while at the same time the landscape is blighted by power lines which will transmit cheaper Canadian hydropower for the benefit of downstate utilities and their customers.
They demand that all new private vehicles sold in NY be electric, just 3 years from now. The environmental benefits of these are suspect at best and they are supremely dysfunctional in the cold weather and long distances of upstate NY. The same mandate for all school buses is an incredibly costly burden on localities.
They scheme to expand Nuclear energy, the most toxic and dangerous(cited well away from and not upwind from any major population centers of course),not to mention most costly form of power generation imaginable, which along with their refusal to address 50 year old brown fields and toxic waste sites makes mockery of their pious claims of concern about the environment and future generations.
At the same time there are towns and cities where the municipal water system has to include disclaimers noting that the water is substandard and possibly carcinogenic, year after year, with no funds available to build proper water treatment plants.
re: Kids Are Flying Into Lunatic Rages When Their iPads Are Taken Away – Futurism.
Remember all the studies conducted by Google and others on different computer screen visual effects on very young children?
Basically, the studies were-(are?) to find subliminal screen patterns that would keep the children’s attention glued to the screen for long periods of time, aka ‘addict’ the kids to the screens by providing constant visual dopamine hits to the brain.
If kids are throwing tantrums outside the normal range of strength and duration of little child tantrums then it sounds like the kids have been purposely addicted – that is, purposely had dopamine hits designed in to the screen visuals by the screen designers. When the screens are removed a mental/emotional withdrawal happens. Excessive tantrums ensue. (Lots of articles about this effort to make smartphone and tablet interfaces additive were in the press a few years ago. Even some law suits.) The longer the engagement with the device the more money the device/operation system manufacture is likely to make on an ongoing basis.
From Psychology Today:
Hooked on Screens
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/202506/hooked-on-screens
And from Safe and Sound:
https://www.nicklauschildrens.org/campaigns/safesound/blog/why-are-kids-so-addicted-to-screens
And from Focus on You Child:
Tech CEOs Ban This For Their Kids
https://www.focusonyourchild.com/tech-ceos-ban-this-for-their-kids/
I’m not a psychologist, but it seems like a young child learning that a screen gives instant dopamine hits (stimulation of the brain’s reward center) without effort, then the usual old-school learning about the world gets short circuited in a bad way. / my 2 cents.
I’m a Usonian living in Tuscany and I want to reinforce the stereotypes about Usonians.
Sheesh. Don’t even get me going. Three summers in Florence and the pontificating has already started: Under The Tuscan Air Conditioner.
“Me? I’ll keep enjoying my Italian life, my Florentine summers, and my apartment set to a glorious 71 degrees.”
Italy has very high rates for electricity. Which the writer neglects to mention. I’ll assume the person is rich. Airconditioning my 85 sq meter apartment to 21 C would cost me 400 or so euro a month.
To further reinforce Usonian stereotypes of stupidity, there’s this: “More Europeans die as a result of the heat than all the US gun deaths, combined.” Then the dolt compares absolute numbers, neglecting to do the proportion, which would involve factoring in the much larger European population (549 million) against the US population of 340 million. It doesn’t take much to figure out that the rate of U.S. gun deaths is higher than heat deaths in Europe. In other words, doing the proportion indicates that the U.S. gun-death rate in a population the size of Europe would be about 66 000 cases.
Or that Italy has the lowest murder rate in Europe.
I will leave it to our Tuscan correspondents to handle the usual Usonian boorishness. And keep this person away from Lucca.
The “glorius 71 degrees” indicate this is a spendthrift American. When it is over 90-95 degrees outside, wanting to keep the interior at 71, (a 19-24 Fahrenheit degrees thermal jump) is much more costly in terms of energy and money than, let’s say, setting thermostats to 80-81 degrees. The A/C system has to work much less and will do it for longer years with much less energy spending. Besides, such 71 degrees aren’t “glorious” but uncomfortable. Exaggeratedly cool provided a maximal thermal jump of 34 degree during this heat wave and unhelpful when you are going in and out. I have A/C but i set the temperature at 79-81 in my room. It feels quite comfortable and can be achieved without great expenditures. Public spaces with A/C have a legal lower limit in summer of 80-81 degrees in Spain, possibly in Italy too, to save energy and it is quite possible it results in better collective health results too.
An amusing little article. In all fairness, I would say that the USA uses too much a/c in the summer, whereas Italy uses too little.
Sitting up here in the hills between Florence and Lucca, I see nothing unusual in this summer’s weather. News flash: Tuscany bakes in the summer! We haven’t even reached 40 C yet, so let’s see what July and August bring. Of course Florence itself is brutal in the summer (plus all the tourists); it always has been, which is why the locals flee to the beaches and hills at every opportunity.
Traditional Tuscan architecture–thick stone walls, tile floors, high ceilings, window shutters (which are called ‘persiane’, interesting etymology)–can do a lot to keep the heat out and the cool in, as long as one does the morning drill of closing the windows and the evening drill of opening them for the night. But in the summer heat, there’s no substitute for a/c. And yes, we have one in our bedroom for use on these hot summer nights.
The author ignores the awkward fact that in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe) energy is simply expensive. Not just summer a/c, but winter heat too. One of the nice things about spending winters in energy-rich Moscow is that Russians heat their buildings so well. I find Tuscan winters to be cold and grim, partly because the locals don’t heat their buildings properly. Of course it’s tricky to raise this point in conversations around here, because any discussion of nosebleed-high energy prices immediately leads to the tricky subject of EU-RU relations…..
Until the Italians figure out how to make energy more affordable, a/c will remain a luxury item for most of them. Electric clothes dryers, too.
aye. theres thing you can do.
since ive been alone with the critters, i saw no reason to cool the whole house…since i spend most of my day outside, and siesta usually at the bar(which is engineered so that the fans and sprinklers and the shade make it rather nice, but for this damned humidity, since 2018, or so). so i havent run the minisplit in 2 years, and have a window unit in my bedroom, and have hung a buncha VA blankets as a false wall to make the bedroom not much bigger than the bed. electric bill even less than the minisplit system.
if the humidity gets to be too much, i’ll retreat in there for siesta time(1pm til 3 or 4).
at the bar, and in the garden beds(strung out along my rather narrow part of the place, and well shaded in afternoon), i run the big sprinklers, one by one…about 30 min each usually does the trick…and if ambient humidity is close to our old normal(like right now), the evaporative cooling is marked.
for my next trick,lol: the muscovy ducks took to roosting on the pergola over the cowboy pool, and crapping in it, so i threw a buncha old wire up there…but they just moved to the edges, and crap all over the pocket garden that surrounds it. duck crap is high in ammonia, so burned up the tomatillos and vine squash that would normally be shading the pool by now.
and with the janky wire up there, i cant get shade cloth up and over.
so i intend to construct a pool cover of some kind, likely out of tin and 2″x2″, and rig up a pulley system to lift it up….so keeping the ducks and their crap out, as well as providing shade during the day.
we’ll see how that all works out.
i realise, that in spite of the pita nature of all that to me, how fortunate i am that this is the sort of obstacle i generally deal with.
Yeah, Nuclear energy to keep casinos in Las Vegas excessively cool in summer is the model to be exported worldwide. You know, with doors wide open for human traffic between those casinos so that most of the energy is wasted by cooling the universe through the doors. Data centres will help with electricity demand and bills thanks to AGI.
On the other hand, solar energy is excellent for summer air conditioning with production and demand peaks coincident.
Las Vegas doesn’t use nuclear energy. It’s mainly natural gas, solar, and Hoover Dam.
The USA grossly overuses a/c in the summer, and I certainly don’t look to the USA’s wasteful energy habits as a model to imitate. But to give credit where it’s due: energy costs in the USA are drastically lower than in Europe, and this has beneficial consequences (industry can function competitively, buildings are properly cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, ordinary people can afford to drive cars, etc). Following the energy crises of the 1970s, ensuring reliable and diversified sources of cheap energy has been a top priority for USA politicians, regardless of party affiliation. Good for them. I tip my hat.
I don’t see that the Italian government is doing anything whatsoever to address the high (and rising) cost of energy, other than the usual hand-waving and elegant speechifying. And the very idea that Italians might actually start building nuclear power plants is laughable. But in the absence of more affordable energy, I’m afraid that Italy doesn’t have much of an economic future (aside from being a giant open-air museum to foreign tourists who complain about the lack of a/c).
re: The Trillion-Dollar Borrowing Binge Lifting the Stock Market to Risky Heights – Wall Street Journal
Borrowing? Buying stocks on margin?? Stock market rising to new heights???
Wait. Haven’t we been here before? Like, 100 years ago?
/smh,
But flora. This time will be different. Pinky swear.
So sayeth the ever hopeful of the neoliberal past. / ;)
Regarding search engines, in Firefox at least for Windows and Linux, there is an extension that returns DuckDuckGo to a no AI version and it has been basically a breath of fresh air compared to the AI version.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com
“The finance curse is devouring the UK”
A pretty good article and what it talks about could be extended for many other countries. The financial industry has pushed aside the industrial economy and has in fact devoured as much of it as could be done. That is why so many countries cannot make things anymore or even know how to do it. All that knowledge & skill – along with the machinery – was outsourced to countries in Asia under prodding by the financial industry for short term profit. The title of a book that the renowned Michael Hudson wrote says it all – “Killing the Host.”
I hope ya don’t mind a little correction – or imposition of my opinion into..
“That is why so many countries cannot make things anymore or even know how to do it. All that knowledge & skill”
I believe that all those countries so impoverished of wealth by the FIRE sector – are quite capable of making things with the extensive knowledge and skill for ‘wealth creation’ = ‘making things’.
It is the FIRE sectors deliberate, long tradition of placing accessible populations into debt bondage.
Sorry to hit on your line….as for some further ramblings of my own dementedness…
The push for AI and the perfusion of robotics to supplant human labor/occupations and, with the ravings of the Theil and other more kooky than myself lol. It looks to me that someone has put the idea forward that a group of chosen ones will be able to get along quite well without the support of the majority of the worlds populations taking up valuable resources.
I always ask ‘for who, whom or what group’ after these
MAGA
MAHA
Abundance
Saving Democracy
……
“… a group of chosen ones will be able to get along quite well without the support of the majority …”
Maybe so, but who is going to do their laundry, clean their windows, and unblock their drains?
AI robots?? or maybe the ones who are in debt bondage?
Has Trumpian math invaded France? 1000% mortality? So, 10x more chickens died than existed in the first place? What is this guy trying to say? Why is that NOT the same thing as Trump’s 1000% cuts in pharmacy prices?
SCOTUS delivers another old-time butt-whuppin’ on Taco, this time on birthright citizenship:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
6-3 decision … Roberts wrote the lead opinion which I haven’t had time to read yet. The three rubber stamps dissented, quelle surprise!
But a 4th, Kavanaugh, opined that his vote was based purely on it being congress that had the right to impose such restrictions. So 4 of the 9 justices are willing to work their way around such a clearly framed clause in order to get where they want to go.
Supreme Court Lifts Spending Limits on Political Parties and Candidates (NY Times)
America is not a serious country
More one dollar, one vote mayhem. BidenCo defended the limits in the suit originally brought by J.D. Vance and other groups, but TrumpCo upon re-assuming the throne switched sides.
Well, not yet.
re: AI
open access study
Free Robot Labour
Marx, Automation, and the Future of AI
by Jamie Terence Kelly
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-26782-5
This open access book develops a Marxist account of artificial labour. Using Marx’s definition of labour from Capital, Kelly proposes three possibilities for the future. The Standard Marxian Line denies that artificial labour is possible and instead predicts that AI will lead to overproduction, unemployment, and the need for capitalism to expand. Artificial Feudalism predicts that AI will generate artificial labour, but that it will remain enmeshed within existing platforms and property relations. Double Freedom for Robots proposes that capitalism will drive the development of bona fide artificial labourers: robots that are legally emancipated but practically dependent on capital.
Free Robot Labour uses Marxist theory to argue for a radical conclusion: AI won’t just increase the productivity of human labour, it will lead to the creation of machines capable of labouring.
A comment on fb:
How is that a radical conclusion? That is what tech bros have been promising for years.
Neglected possibility: AI companies and the computing resources that support them collapse under the weight of their own debt, in conjunction with increasing energy and borrowing costs. The speculators are made whole from the public purse, and an AI search functionality is maintained by governments to help with their narrative problems.
A follow up to Cargo Culture (Links 6/24/26) – another good one.
Ed Zitron
The AI Industry Is Losing
Re: “MAHA feels betrayed after Supreme Court ruling on Monsanto, glyphosate”
Yeah, but you know they’ll take it.
Say what you will about the people who get seduced into the various Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About milieux, but they do at some level understand the thoroughly predatory, extortionate nature of our healthcare system, from top to bottom; something that lots of science-trusting PMCs still do not.
Unfortunately, their response has been to retreat into a blend of kookery and hyperindividualism that is difficult to disentangle. The sense of outsmarting a system rigged against one, feeds into a conviction of superiority to all those other people, too lazy or stupid to take their health into their own hands.* A world drenched in poison is not antithetical to MAHA; it’s just an opportunity to prove one’s virtue in knowing which miracle supplement to take.
At a political level, this is not very different from every other potentially fruitful recognition that has been hammered around to the right. Starting to notice that capital seeks out the cheapest possible labor? Here’s some xenophobia. Starting to question the rationale for a globe-spanning empire? Here’s Fortress America. Heads I win, tails you lose.
*A conviction of superiority that, while different in content, is remarkably similar in tone to medical-authority-based liberal health moralism.
Taco keeps stepping on his own … toes …
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5947829-donald-trump-reaction-supreme-court-birthright-citizenship/
Minor issue … the majority’s decision rested on Constitutional, not statutory grounds, namely the Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. There is literally nothing legislatively that this or a future Congress can do here. They’d have to pass an amendment to the Constitution, and 3/5ths of the States would need to adopt it.
It would literally be a better use of Mike Johnson’s time to pound sand on the capital mall.
Mishtalk has a good write-up:
https://mishtalk.com/economics/trump-loses-birthright-citizenship-case-6-3-barrett-and-kavanaugh-in-majority
just saying again for the 100th time…NC is just amazing. And now with Conor and Nat and Nick and others….damn….
Quite an article. I wonder how the US compares.
it should be well known around here that i lean towards Krystal Ball as a sorta middle ground between where i really am and what is possible.
i find Emily J.(not gon try to spell it) as a conservative religious person that i could get along with…like many folks who sit around my fire out here.
with all that caveat, i found this fascinating:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZphxGFwApw&list=PLTBjSSdGohEs