The Painful Truth About ‘Healing’ Crystals Wall Street Journal (Li)
The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales The Plough (Anthony L)
The falling birthrate threatens a disaster so costly no politician dares think about it Guardian (Kevin W). Shows a lack of a sense of proportion. The climate crisis is vastly more destructive, intractable, and costly were anyone to get serious enough.
#COVID-19
Exclusive: The Government has incinerated or written off £1.4 BILLION worth of Covid PPE, provided by one supplier in the summer of 2020 – it is the single most wasteful public contract of the whole pandemic. Thread 1/ pic.twitter.com/Wl06kNowHf
— Jon Ironmonger (@JonIronmonger) June 25, 2024
Climate/Environment
51.7C also at Swiehan in the Emirates.
Dozens of stations in Middle East are currently above 50C,while Northern China is touching 47C.
Thousands of records are being brutalized from China to Algeria. World climatic history is being rewritten.
Nothing like this has ever happened. pic.twitter.com/JcmoYetAFd— Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) June 23, 2024
Ending growth won’t save the planet… Curtailing economic growth will not save the planet from catastrophic climate change. Washington Post. The only reason that argument is accurate is we are past the point of being able to stop catastrophic change.
Bulk of UK renewables projects fail to get beyond planning stage Financial Times
Widespread protests erupt in Iraq over power outages as temperatures hit 50°C and above New Arab
Global tax truce frays over fears of US Senate deadlock Financial Times
China?
South China Sea: Philippines’ anti-ship missile base puts Scarborough Shoal in cross hairs South China Morning Post
Beijing: new Treasury rules amount to ‘decoupling’ Asia Times (Kevin W)
Our China policy is a disaster for US security & prosperity Responsible Statecraft
In Rare Rebuke, U.S. Ambassador Accuses China of Undermining Diplomacy Wall Street Jouranl
The Koreas
US aircraft carrier arrives in South Korea amid tensions with North Korea Aljazeera
India
India shuns China’s calls to resume passenger flights after 4 years, officials say Reuters
JPMorgan Ignites $40 Billion Rush Into Indian Bonds Bloomberg
South of the Border
July 7 & 14 Webinars: ‘Venezuela Chooses: What is at Stake in the Coming Elections?’ Orinoco Tribute (Robin K)
Africa
Another Crescent: Iran’s Brewing Influence in the Sahel Region The Geopolitics
European Disunion
France could trigger the next euro crisis Financial Times
The greatest destruction of wealth in the history of the Federal Republic Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Akos G)
Survey: France’s far-right National Party to lead first round of election TRT World
France, the new Popular Front, hopes and contradictions Defend Democracy
The EU liberals are ready for a financial struggle with Le Pen’s party International Affairs (Micael T)
Old Blighty
‘A paedophile’s playground’: Inside the scandal at King Charles’s old school Telegraph
Gaza
🚨 Israel has intensified its starvation war on the Gaza Strip by targeting service and aid distribution centers. Within 24 hours, they bombed the United Nations headquarters, killing aid workers. They also bombed a medical clinic where the director of emergency services was… pic.twitter.com/cVBvvENbXg
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) June 24, 2024
Hello Mohammed, my friend, how are you?
Here I am at home, I buried them all inside the house and I’m sleeping next to them.
My wife, my children, dad, mom, my brothers and my sisters. I’m the only one left, all alone.One of the thousands untold stories in Gaza.… pic.twitter.com/5DiP2SakLm
— Mohammed Omer ALMOGHAYER ✊🏽 د. محمد المغير (@Mogaza) June 24, 2024
Listen Deeply Caitlin Johnstone, YouTube (Dr. Kevin)
What role for revenge in Jewish life, literature and culture? aeon (Dr. Kevin)
Israeli electricity chief faces removal after warning against war with Lebanon The Cradle (Kevin W)
Yemen’s Houthis claim joint raid on Israeli ships with Iraqi militia Aljazeera
Supply Chain Under Strain as Houthis Intensify Red Sea Strikes New York Times (Kevin W)
Netanyahu will only agree to ‘partial’ ceasefire, but not end to Gaza war Arab News
Israeli war criminals: can the ICC lock them up? The Cradle
Netanyahu says he won’t agree to a deal that ends the war in Gaza, testing the latest truce proposal Associated Press (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine updates: Russia summons US envoy over Crimea strike DW
How are the US-made ATACMS missiles being used by Ukrainian forces? Gilbert Doctorow
The Ticking Time Bomb of Ukrainian Debt (That the West Will Have To Pay) Antiwar.com (Kevin W)
Yeah, That Didn’t Age Well. Andrei Martyanov. Debunking a Sy Hersh account
EU foreign ministers approve decision to transfer profits from Russian assets to Ukraine TASS (guurst)
Poland mulls closing border with Belarus, minister says Euractiv
Assange
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a…
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024
Julian Assange agrees plea deal, leaves UK prison and heads to US territory BBC
VIDEO: State Dept. Won’t Give Specifics on How Assange Hurt “National Security”. Or How “Russiagate” — Used to Demonize WikiLeaks — May Have Actually Been Israelgate. Sam Husseini. Husseini is not comfortable with some of the implications of the plea deal and linked bak to this post to show why.
Imperial Collapse Watch
‘Draft Notice’ from the Shop of Horrors Dennis Kuchinch (Robin K)
I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Peter Turchin. albrt
Trump
Trump promised green cards to all migrants who graduated in US. Then his campaign walked it back Independent. Dan K also flagged this report, which featured more pushback: Campaign walks back Trump’s green card promise Fox
“She’s distancing herself”: Melania Trump unlikely to ever move back to the White House Salon. The press really picked on her even though I understand she did great state dinners. They attacked her Christmas decorations and I could not see why. And the White House as a building is apparently a dump.
Biden
Exasperated Democrats try to stamp out talk of replacing Biden The Hill. Beware Streisand effect!
U.S. judges block parts of Biden’s student loan relief plan CNBC
The Land that Law Forgot: The Supreme Court and the New York Legal Wasteland Jonathan Turley
Our No Longer Free Press
Turns out Australia is the most secretive democracy in the world…oh and we don't really have a free press, we don't have freedom of speech and our whistleblower protection laws don't do anything. Albo could fix but hasn't found the time for some reason #australia #auspol pic.twitter.com/NWKpEt0xTy
— Punter's Politics (@punterspolitix) June 24, 2024
AI
Situational Awareness Leopold Aschenbrenner (Steve S)
Nvidia’s 13% Stock Rout Has Traders Scouring Charts for Support Bloomberg
The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI Jacobin (Robin K)
Apple’s App Store Policies Charged Under New E.U. Competition Law New York Times (BC)
Soaring Costs Put New U.S. LNG Export Projects at Risk of Delays OilPrice
Largest Auto Dealers Begin to Warn about Impact of Ransomware Attack Crippling Dealer Software Provider CDK Wolf Richter. We linked to this story a few days ago. Still not resolved…
Class Warfare
I live rent-free in NYC. Moving into a van has allowed me to save, avoid taking out loans, and live a life of adventure. Business Insider. Not The Onion
Amazon Labor Union, Airplane Hub Workers Ally with Teamsters Organizing Workers Nationwide New York Times
Blood on the Wine Dark Sea: History of Naval Warfare, Part 1 Big Serge
Antidote du jour. Ann M:
The third generation of the exotic escapee goose family in Roger Williams Park is doing well. They are cousins, I think. The slightly larger one is about 2 and a half weeks older than its 3 younger relatives. The other adults were nearby – a total of 10. One missing. Hopefully still around.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
Your Congressional minder
Has an AIPAC binder
Your Hasbara tutor
Is their troubleshooter
AIPAC slave
Mossad has pics
Of your indiscretions
Please vote our way
At all Senate sessions
AIPAC slave
Get reelected
With AIPAC cash
If you never spend it
Hey, that’s your stash
AIPAC slave
Your Congress Rep
Says he has your back
But AIPAC keeps him
On their track
AIPAC slave
Epstein’s black book
In Mossad’s hands
The Israeli Lobby
Makes new demands
AIPAC slave
Sung to the theme from Super Chicken perhaps?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKss2pBYQ6Y (29 secs)
I think Burma Shave.
There’s no equivalent to puk puk puk puk.
“…puke puke puke puke…”
Well done~
Foreign interference
In your election?
Look at our lobby,
And see our perfection.
AIPAC slave
“I live rent-free in NYC. Moving into a van has allowed me to save, avoid taking out loans, and live a life of adventure.”
‘He drove his van from Mexico to NYC and sleeps in it while balancing school and multiple jobs.’
As George Bush said, Uniquely American-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIjo-dWE1Jg (24 secs)
He experienced engine issues in Albuquerque, and made the wrong turn. Now his life is “hard, scary, and stressful”. If he keeps on working hard, he might eventually ascend to a trailer park.
If he has a bedroom, bathroom, no leaky roof, and kitchen to himself in a trailer…nothing to scoff at.
There are worse things than living in a van down by the river.
You have to take a few extra seconds for emphasis…”I’m Matt Foley, I am divorced and I live in a van, down by the river!”. A classic from Chris Farley.
A close second was his dance off audition against a highly popular Patrick Swayze for a spot as a Chippendale dancer.
Assange – is this the last time we see him?
I do not trust the monkeys in the US and Western governments. They hate free speech and journalism.
Maybe. Otoh, the punishment has already been sufficiently extreme and public to work. Let’s see over the next few days how many journalists admit they were wrong about him or for failing to speak up for him.
A lot depends on what sort of agreements that he had to sign to get sprung. As he now has a “felony” record, the US will probably demand that he be never issued with a passport ever again though he never broke any Australian laws. Maybe they will also demand that he does not write any autobiographies, articles, have inter-reaction with Wikileaks, etc. Could be the same applies with his wife. Maybe a condition of release is that he have no access to the internet and the same for his family too. If he arrives in oz and then goes into radio silence mode, the you know that something is up.
I will agree with your comment about ” radio silence “, but I would have to guess that after what he has been subjected to for so many years, there will need to be a period of adjustment to a normal life for both himself and his family.
And yes, I will like to see who of his fellow “journalists/reporters”, have the balls to admit that maybe they should have done more on his behalf.
After five years in a British prison, it will take him awhile to regain his health and now he can concentrate on his family. Meanwhile, the BBC is remaining true to form-
‘Julian Assange: Campaigner or attention seeker?’
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11047811
Yep, they even brought up the bogus Swedish charges a coupla times in it.
The Swedish press is focusing only on the rape allegations in Sweden. Not one beep about journalism or freedom of speech., Disgusting what the media employees are doing as opposed to journalists.
Neither woman at the time wanted any charges pressed and one went to Israel to escape the Swedish prosecutors who were in constant consultation with their British colleagues. Back in 2019 the Swedish Prosecution Authority tried again to have him extradited to Sweden but then had to drop the whole thing. The only reason that Sweden wanted him was so that he could be thrown aboard a US transport plane and flown to somewhere more sunny – like Guantanamo Bay.
And when the Swedish prosecution service was wavering about continuing the process, then head of public prosecutions in Britain, a certain Keir Starmer, fired off an angry email to them saying ‘don’t you dare get cold feet’.
‘Julian Assange: Campaigner or attention seeker?’
Vicious beyond all understanding, but this is the BBC.
Dead man’s switch variation?
How many copies of his stash are dormant for the time being, awaiting some sign. Misadventure, anything?
Yes, I think imagining Assange not ending up a dead man is like believing that little Nazi in green cargo pants is gonna pay back that 50. Billion loan.
I’m thinking the tropical air is so warm that his plane will drop like a rock outta the sky into the deep blue ocean.
I had a smokejumper pal, big feller, rowed at Wisconsin and on the Olympic 8’s, who was stationed out of Boise. In the late summer /early fall, he was often re-deployed to pick pinecones for seed, as he was too heavy and big for the parachutes, and fell a bit too fast out of the high desert skies when temps got too high.
That is some career, smokejumping.
Wait and see. He may be out of prison. He also may be on notice that if he ever opens his mouth again about anything they don’t like he is dead within 48 hours.
The last wikileaks post is October 2021.
From Taibbi:
Assange is Free, But Never Forget How the Press Turned on Him
The Wikileaks head is finally out of prison. A look back at some of the comments that kept him inside
https://www.racket.news/p/assange-is-free-but-never-forget
Isn’t $500,000+ for a charter a bit steep? I know he is carrying an Aussie envoy; but man.
Does Australia have debtors prison? If so, they will put him there.
He will have pride of place in the updated First Fleet, long after those originally sentenced to Transportation to the antipodes. The worse ones got trans-shipped to even more remote locales.
Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده
@RamAbdu
Within 24 hours, they bombed the United Nations headquarters, killing aid workers. They also bombed a medical clinic where the director of emergency services was killed. Additionally, they targeted municipal employees responsible for providing water to Gaza’s citizens. This morning, they bombed aid distribution centers in a refugee camp, and shortly thereafter, they bombed similar centers in the Bani Suheila area of Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip.
I felt good after reading Assange being released but couldn’t help be dragged down by this story. If Biden timed Assange’s release to assuage the rage I and others feel toward him and those behind him responsible for these satanic acts of state terrorism, he is woefully wrong.
The disgust I have for Israel and the U.S. political class is not lessoned 1 iota.
If they released Assange to make GenocideJoe look more compassionate, our elites are even stupider than I thought.
You don’t get to torture a guy for years, release him, and get to be considered some kind of humanitarian.
You’re still a torturer.
I think the idea is to undercut support for RFK one of his big things has been to free Assange.
So he can claim a victory in changing the system even before the first vote is cast?
Craig Murray said in his blog https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/06/the-happiest-of-days/
not to mention that even if they had gotten the extradition, the spectacle of a high profile trial against journalism as the backdrop to the presidential elections was not something they had really wanted
That might have led to a very awkward exchange where the prosecution tries to argue that Assange cannot claim Constitutional protection as he is not an American. The defense then asks then how can he be found guilty of an American crime then when that so-called crime occurred outside of the US and that he is not even an American as they just argued.
If you think you are mad now, wait until they start doing the same thing to Beirut they are doing to Gaza. Sounds like that may be their next step, based on another post at this very website today.
Re falling birthrates, depends on your perspective. Climate change is a great opportunity for grifters, but what could be more horrifying than having no more people to grift??
Who am I going to sell my Herbalife supplements to?? The fish suffocating in the boiling oceans aren’t interested!
The courtier class isn’t rich enough to maintain lifestyles without cheap labor. Imagine a world without door dash or not having enough space if both kids play travel lacrosse and they want to bring the dog to practice.
One of my sisters persuaded our mom about 5 years ago to pay for a couple nights at the Ritz Carlton near Palm Springs for the family to congregate, and i’d never stayed at one-nor will I probably ever again.
I knew I was in a different world, as every other person waiting in line to get to the front desk had a porch on leash, as well as others mingling around, what in the sam dickens was going on?
It was $250 a night extra for Fido~
They also had a table near the foyer with say 8 bowls of different wrapped candy and plastic bags for the young tykes to indulge in, seemingly without limits with this crowd where too much is often not enough.
It simmered down to the low 80’s at night and outside our rooms in the plaza, propane fire pits blazed away all night long-we’ve got energy yes we do-we have energy, how about you?
Cleaning your own toilets, might as well be dead!
an aside: last line of the public excerpt from Taibbi’s latest.
“Clogging the toilet of the market to keep those bad actors afloat has had disastrous consequences. Why they need flushing:”
—-
Bring Back Capitalism
A new generation of unscrupulous political leaders and Wall Street hucksters has come up with a brilliant plan to outwit the populist revolt: pretending to be critics of capitalism
https://www.racket.news/p/bring-back-capitalism
If it’s the Fed’s 5% interest rates replacing the 0% Wall St. has enjoy is causing these goombas to start wheedling, (and probably screaming in private), then I’m for keeping the 5% interests rates.
Yeah, everything’s expensive but I’m finally earning something on my savings. And if people like Fink and Dimon are discomfited by the loss of free Fed money, well that’s an extra “bonus” for me. / ;)
The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales
Star Wars: There is a blogger who’s handle is “Han Solo shot first” – “Han shot first” refers to a controversial change made to a scene in the film Star Wars (1977), in which Han Solo is confronted by the bounty hunter Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina. In the original version of this scene, Han shoots Greedo dead. Later versions are edited so that Greedo fires at Han first. Director George Lucas altered the scene to give Solo more justification for acting in self-defense. Many fans and commentators oppose the change, feeling it weakens Solo’s characterization.
Keeping the original version intact allows the audience to see Han started out as a truly slimy person who went through a character arc leading to become one of the galaxy’s true hero’s. Sanitizing it out makes the later victory less personally meaningful for Han and the audience and less realistic.
Revenge of the Jedi: 3rd installment of Star Wars, Darth Vader is defeated by Luke Skywalker and watches the Emperor slowly finish Luke off with “force lighting.” Missing one arm that Luke sliced off, Vader’s head silently moves from Luke, to Emperor, and back again several times as the audience wonders what is going inside Vader’s head. Finally Vader grabs the Emperor and throws him over the platform to his death, and collapses. Luke is saved and immediately comes to Vader’s help who is now dying. Later versions had James Earl Jones dub in the words “No….NO!” just before Vader snatches the Emperor.
Adding the dialogue dumbs down the scene and and makes Vader look less complex and conflicted than he is and shuts off discussion of why he did what he did.
‘Keeping the original version intact allows the audience to see Han started out as a truly slimy person’
Agree with the rest of your comment except that little bit. That port was like a pirate’s nest and it is letting the other guy shoot first which is the long-standing Hollywood fantasy. It was a well put together scene where Han was running his hand along the wall and looking at it distracting from the free hand readying his blaster. His crossed leg is hiding this fact. As he readies to shoot, he leans forward which you do not do if about to shoot. As has been said – ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la7uuFsCIrg (1:15 mins)
“Adding the dialogue dumbs down the scene and and makes Vader look less complex and conflicted than he is and shuts off discussion of why he did what he did.”
Related to this, I once re-watched Star Wars in the 90s. I was passing time as I cooked in the kitchen and did other chores. Only listening and not watching, it gave me B movie vibes.
Also, as a youngster in the 80s, I remember thinking The Thing had a lot more useful information to tell me about people than ET. I argued with many back then about why I thought The Thing was superior to ET.
And now you have proven right, the overwhelming majority of fimn buffs would agree with you regarding ET vs The Thing. ET 4K release was considered disappointing commercially while today some consider The Thing the greatest horror movie of all time and it 4K was much more commercially successfu…l. About the B status of Star Wars…it is! I recall discussion that the support staff in (Morraco?) chatting amongst themselves how cheesy the production was. But when blue screen backgrounds were added with its release in theaters, people were amazed how incredible it turned out.
Creeped me the hell out when I first saw “The Thing.” Still never bothered to watch “ET.”
ya talking about the 1951 Howard Hawks version 0r the 1982 John Carpenter version –
Both! Still cannot believe the fast pacing of the dialogue of the 1951 version in contrast to any modern film. I have it on my video shelf. Saw it as a kid in a dark room and yikes!
used to be a Friday night horror movie show called Shock Theater on at midnight – as kids we could stay up to watch until the channels went dark after the waving flag and star spangled banned – that’s where i watched the 1951 version – never saw Carpenter’s – another great oldie was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” – never watched the remake – oh…do you remember another oldie, “Them” which fed a fear of nuclear testing that lasted to today for me – think there were a few links about the after-effects of our tests in the desert a few days ago in NC – like the old school stuff like “The Thing from Another World”, James Arness played the monster way before Gunsmoke – and also “The Tingler” – growing up in Detroit we had the big three american stations and also a Canadian station – always liked the Canadian content –
“Them” is another favourite of mine and I saw it on the late night “Creature Feature.” It knew how to build up the tension, without even any dialogue like that lone cop in the deserted cafe hearing strange noises outside. But “War of the Worlds” and “Forbidden Planet’ were in a class of their own.
Forbidden Planet was great and kept me guessing till the end and the Krell machine was so cool – and of course “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is a classic…….Gort, “Klaatu barada nikto” – and “War of the Worlds” original is much better than the remake with Cruise – without all the electronic/green screen tech they had to build suspense the old fashion way – haven’t been in a movie theater since 2019 – don’t miss it –
There is also Lee Hardcastle version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrZ7PnolbQ4
thank you – big smile!
Star Wars was inspired by all the b-movies and cheesy serials Lucas liked as a boy. So that makes sense.
Also a lot by “The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress” by Akira Kurosawa.
Start Wars is an amazingly standard fairy tale – a young peasant (of noble blood) with the help of an old wizard, a thief and a magic sword saves the princess from an all-powerful villain.
I gave that one a complete rewatch last year, probably October when horror and the like are much more in demand. The Thing is a solid, slow build of a movie; spoiler alert but at some point I had to wonder who could really be truthful. The scene where Brimley is taking an axe to all the telecom equipment might need be explained to a younger generation; as in all the equipment is not so tiny or would fit comfortably in your duffle bag.
In the Arctic, much like in space…can anyone hear you scream?
How dare you besmirch the great hero of the galaxy, Han Solo!? /S
The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales
The article discusses the Grimm version of Cinderella. Compare with Basile’s Neapolitan version (which the Grimms didn’t know, at that point), this version is already sanitised. Cinderella starts with one stepmother, who she brutally murders, only to get a second one.
“Cinderella starts with one stepmother, who she brutally murders, only to get a second one…”
From that story about taking agency against an authority figure to one about waiting to be rescued by the magical universe.
taking agency vs rescued by magic
Thanks for saying it so I didn’t have to. Cue ani difranco “I am not a pretty girl”
Largest Auto Dealers Begin to Warn about Impact of Ransomware Attack Crippling Dealer Software Provider CDK Wolf Richter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My Taco needs seasoning, er a minor service from the dealership. Think i’ll see firsthand how big a SNAFU this is…
Nobody expected it to happen, but the other day the extensive trail system in Sequoia NP was hacked with the cyber-usurpers demanding an exorbitant amount or else kiss it goodbye on any computer app or internet based search engine.
The bad guise weren’t hep to the idea of paper-based topographic maps-which in the future will be famous for 15 minutes.
In an ideal world, those computers would be wiped and a mirror image of that original drive installed and the needed patches added. After that the databases would be uploaded and it would be back to business as normal. And a message would be then sent to those hackers saying ‘Not tonight, Josephine!’
But I am sure that a digital currency would be totally safe.
The ransom demand, in the case of a large organization, is usually the last event in a long process that starts with infiltration, moves on to learning every detail of the business, including where are all the backups.
In some cases, the hackers have been in the systems for years.
The ransom demand is presented after everything is known, and any valuable data has been exfiltrated and the backups found and destroyed.
I just ended a 30 year stretch supporting the automotive retail IT environment, including security. My experience tells me that between the profit-chasing interests of management, and the stubborn disinterest of the average employee, it is virtually impossible to achieve anything like adequate security in business systems.
Not sure that is always the case these days. I’ve seen a few reports of script kiddies pulling off these attacks, and they certainly don’t perform that level of planning, infiltration and research.
While I do agree the CDK attack was “professional” and most likely follows the traditional patterns, the Sequoia NP was likely script kiddies or hacktivists which are much more impulsive.
Crazy – why would IT people keep all the backups online?
Remember how “the cloud” was going to be the greatest thing since yoga pants? It was going to save money, and then SaaS came along and no more need for all those perpetually licensed software packages, we would all rent software and be happy. Oh, and the Joe Isuzu’s at Google and Microsoft promised it would be secure.
Well, now we find out something I always suspected – the cloud concentrates risk. It’s fragile. 10,000 car dealers all rely on the same insecure cloud software to sell me a Buick – what could possibly be wrong?
I don’t think this is a cloud issue, because other companies running on the cloud aren’t affected by this security breach. A cloud issue would be something like the following, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/09/how-the-aws-outage-wreaked-havoc-across-the-us.html where a problem with a cloud component resulted in outages across websites.
I think the biggest misconception that people have is that your environment will automatically be secure when moving to the cloud. This is not true whatsoever, and no cloud provider has ever made that claim. AWS, GCP, etc gives you all the tools to secure your environment, but it is still up to you to utilize those tools properly.
It might not be a cloud issue per se. But the point I was trying to make, perhaps badly, was that prior to “the cloud” each car dealership would have a local copy of software, and if one got hit by ransomware, then it would be a bad thing for them, but not the entire industry.
I need to read more about this CDK software, but my money is on the scenario where it went “to the cloud” and all the dealerships that use it have to pay an annual subscription fee and they don’t ‘own’ their own local copy that can run unaffected by a ransomware attack on CDK’s infrastructure.
I completely missed the PE angle. Of course, that explains it. Private equity came in and probably fired the CISO or made him a neutered gimp who could only say “yes sir!” to any cuts in spending on security. Or outsourced security to Malaysia. Or just fired the entire security team and said, “hang fire!”
I think you have a very outdated view of computing. You can have a local copy of the software running on a PC but the data won’t fit and those will still be stored on remote servers somewhere inside some data center, which is what a cloud is. A hacker can still get to the data center and lock those files. TL;DR it’s the data that is important while the software’s importance is secondary.
But even if only the data are “in the cloud” that’s a fragile design. Back in the day when everything was local, if your computer got hacked, only you were affected.
When we were younger adults it seemed as if owning a new car dealership was the epitome our economy, you were a driver of it and admired financially for your effort, many dealerships having quite lavish buildings, some resembling houses of worship in the whimsy exhibited in construction, all to draw eyes behind the steering wheel their way.
Now owning a new car dealership seems quite a burden, couldn’t get inventory for quite a spell, and only relating to my Toyota dealership-one time a few years ago I think I counted a dozen new cars for sale on the lot, with them having to pick up the slack by pushing used cars instead-which have fallen quite a bit in value-and they’re upside down versus cost.
You’ve hit on an important issue.
I like to point out that owning a car dealership is similar to owning a small dairy farm. You can never step away for any real amount of time or things go to hell. Those cows need milking at 5am and again at 5pm and no part of the process can stand neglect.
Successful dealers are hard pressed to find an exit strategy, their kids have no interest in shouldering the burden you mention, and so what’s left is finding an individual motivated exclusively by money, and willing to trade a normal life for one shackled to demanding business that might make you rich, but that will leave you with little time for a normal life.
or a chicken farm where you are under
contract tothe thumb of an agribiz giant to be a production caretaker, shouldering much risk for meager returns. Modernish peonage.The protagonist in the John Updike Rabbit books ends up owning a Toyota car dealership. That series was a roadmap to self realization in the decades it covered.
Thye should make people use the proper name for the Cloud – Hotel California.
Proper name for “cloud” is “someone else’s computer”.
The proof for that is the need for debunking articles:
https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/cloud/cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer
https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-saying-the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer-because-its-not/
I’ve a made in person appointment at our Subaru dealership. I’ll see if I can get any color.
I imagine our state and national parks wouldn’t mind if nobody could find them on a map.
Dealer hit me with a $3k discount on a new Tacoma from MSRP, almost like old days of forget what the sticker says, new cars and old homes being the few things you are supposed to dicker on in these not so united states.
I walked a 60 mile stretch of the PCT from Big Bear Lake to Interstate 15 with my long time backpacking partner in 2017, and seemingly everybody had smartphone in their hand, using it as a guide to what was ahead, and there were places where you had connectivity…
A different world than my wilderness where you aren’t walking 3,000 miles to get to your destination, I never see anything akin to that experience.
Yeah, that different world is depressing. I once worked YCC trail crew up in Baxter.For a summer. I had the great privilege of summering Katahdin six days in a row, often laden down with a come along or the two man rock carrier. The top of Katahdin was about the only place I would run into hikers.
At the Subaru dealership, rumor is the ransom is being paid.
>The bad guise weren’t hep to the idea of paper-based topographic maps-which in the future will be famous for 15 minutes.
As regards 15 minutes, there is a rule that any hike must require at least 4 sheets. The CCC or whoever laid out the trails seemed to know where the corners of the topos were.
WaPo and degrowth–
Good news: it looks like we’ve reached the “and then they fight you” stage. After years of looking the other way as the degrowth movement grew, the entire WaPo editorial board of the Bezos Post has been mustered to fight to anti-capitalist degrowth movement. Their pretty graphs show that the rich countries have succeeded in achieving some decoupling of GDP growth from carbon emissions by offshoring manufacturing and shifting to services, but what the graphs don’t tell you is how long it will take before the world with a growing GDP quits putting carbon into the atmosphere. Here’s the answer:
GDP growth is essential to one and only one group: the billionaires. Without growth, return on their capital will evaporate. For the rest of us, what’s needed is not growth but redistribution. We could degrow GDP back to 1990 levels and still improve quality of life for the currently miserable bottom half of our society simply by redistributing income and wealth to provide for common needs: food, housing, education, health care. More food coops, fewer stock buybacks. More free clinics, fewer drug patents. Better public schools, lower stock dividends.
It’s good to see that the Bezos-owned editorial board is worked up over degrowth. May the pressure on their power and privilege continue to increase.
That’s called “fraud” kiddos!
If Elmer Fudd “achieved decoupling of his gunfire from hitting rabbits by offshoring hunting to Daffy Duck” those rascally wabbits are still dead.
Let’s give some credit to financialization for a change. GDP growth made up from FIRE sector bubbles and rent extraction from the productive economy is much less energy intensive than actually producing stuff. They sweep a lot under the rug of ‘services’.
It isn’t over until the fiat lady sings, and a small attempt to recoup CRE losses occurs when they do pay-per-view on controlled implosions of edifice wrecks.
Let’s get ready to tumble!
{An artists representation purely from a financial loss angle}
So, you’re saying that Turtle Mountain is just a shell of its former self?
(Cue the Rennaissance painter jokes.)
Reference: (for those of you non-WWF fans)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoSJCzLlgk0
In the right corner, we have a 35 story vacant tower, re-hypothocated and now owned by a pension fund in Botswana.
In the left corner, a wrecking ball weighing in at 20 tons, built by a Japanese industrial conglomerate.
Ladies and gentlemen …
I don’t think we’re going to degrowth back to 1990 or any levels or decouple from GDP without widescale and even widely accepted industrial sabotage.
I’d agree that the USA will never go that route without systemic breakdown or revolution. The problem is that the systemic breakdown is inevitable and, if not planned for and managed, will take us much further back than 1990.
What would ‘wide scale industrial sabotage’ look like? It sure is hard to throw clogs into machinery that has been moved to Mexico or Vietnam. I’m not saying that the deindustrialization of the US was part of a long degrowth plan, but decoupling oligarch wealth from the physical productivity of labor in the transition to neofeudalism seems ready to accomplish many of the same outcomes.
Look at life expectancy.
I think Biden set the example with the Nordstream pipeline bombing. I suppose when looked at from the perspective of deindustrialization this could be his lasting environmental legacy, he showed the way forward, showed what was possible to do, gave the world new ideas!
Kim Stanley Robinson also had a book full of additional ideas, for example the Ministry of the Future started off blowing all airliners out of the sky, ending he airline industry.
The primary driver of (GDP) growth as been population expansion or explosion, if you wish. The surest road to degrowth will be population reduction. It will be painful as economies are all organized around growth. Think of it as the recession without end. There will be no need for industrial sabotage. Much of industry will dry up and blow away as economies of scale collapse and supply chains evaporate. I hope to see it in my life time.
My guess is that within ten years we’ll have a combination of early summer, massive drought, hail storms, and excessive rain, producing crop failures world-wide. That will lead to famine, even in the U.S. That might be a wake-up call that would lead to real emissions reduction, but too late. Anthropogenic global warming (APG) is just getting started. If we could reduce current emissions to zero, the warming will continue for at least another century. Humankind has to build underground living quarters (as in Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel and yeast, algae, or bacterial food production. My scientific wild-assed guess (SWAG) is that a hundred years from now the human population of Earth is less than a billion (and rising).
The Post editorial is dreadful, even as hatchet jobs go. They demonstrate only that they haven’t actually read any of the main degrowth proponents, or for that matter even their scarecrow Malthus.
RE: The falling birthrate threatens a disaster so costly no politician dares think about it
So tired of these arguments that fewer people on the planet is a bad thing. And they are generally very simplistic and likely disingenuous arguments made –
“…many of us will also experience extended periods later in life with physical and mental decline, so requiring more health and social care than in the past. Yet falling birthrates mean there will be fewer working-age taxpayers, raising the question of how we foot the bill.”
Both of the author’s solutions require more people. Since too many people is the cause of so many of the world’s problem’s, that would seem to be an extremely bad idea. If we really need so many people to care for the elderly, how about instead of devoting so many workers to doing things like marketing goods and services that nobody really needs, we pay them to work in healthcare instead!??!? Trust me, the world would be a far better place with a lot fewer marketers in it.
As far as the funding goes, how about the government just spending the money as needed? There is no natural law that says social security in the US must be funded by what current workers pay in. The US government can spend as much money they need for care into existence. Just like they do already for wars.
Agreed. I love how so many pundits talk up how there won’t be enough workers to support retirees if we don’t get more people. It’s like watching the movie “Idiocracy” – its like these pundits a blissfully unaware that we are on a finite planet with finite resources. They are not serious.
The health of the planet and the health of capitalism have always been at odds only more so now. Gee, which should we choose?
Bezos and fellow plutocrats: capitalism!
It should be said that Jeff now allegedly has retired from Amazon and swans around on his giant yacht which has sails as a gesture toward the environmental threat that he himself poses.
Some of us can remember when overpopulation was a theme of the environmental movement. They must have decided it was bad for fundraising.
The counterattack against any effort to discuss population is “Malthus!!!” There’s an attempt to raise the specter of forced abortions or at least applying for a permit to have a child. Similarly, when Donella Meadows’ team produced Limits to Growth, every economist on the make raised bad-faith alarms about the poor being raised from poverty through growth, etc.
GDP growth is supposed to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, but guess whose boats, really really big boats, get nearly all the lifting.
Another typical argument is that any attempts to limit or control population growth is racism.
As in, first world countries were allowed to grow their populations willynilly but all other countries must limit themselves, not avail themselves of growth and development.
But, actually, the limits and walking back of growth needs to be placed on those first world countries.
the problem with a rising tide lifting all boats is that most of us don’t have boats
~the rising tide that lifts all boats
I always said, that works for dem wit boats. :-/
Amen … the natalists’ arguments are both simplistic and selfish. What are the proponents of having more children going to contribute? Better affordable healthcare for mom and children? Childcare or at least better subsidies? Better public schools? Course not.
And why would anyone want to raise a child to spend their life doing low-wage jobs taking care of old cranky people and/or working in the food industry. Young friends have calculated the cost of having a child today–$3M minimum; double that if the child is raised as they were (private school, single family suburban home etc.) Take the average healthcare workers wage and calculate the ROI on that!
“And why would anyone want to raise a child to spend their life doing low-wage jobs taking care of old cranky people…”
Indeed. In my area there are a lot of immigrants currently doing these jobs. When it’s in-home care, the elderly are often resentful of having strangers around the house 24/7, probably in large part because of the rapid drain of their wealth that it took a lifetime to earn. An elderly in-law had a rotation of three sisters looking after her, and that costs well over $10K/month if you’re paying $20-25/hr for around the clock care.
And I don’t imagine those charged with looking after elderly strangers much like the job either, especially if they are immigrants who may have had a much better and more fulfilling job in their country of origin. Many of the newcomers to my area were upper middle class in their home countries, and they certainly aren’t getting rich themselves doing these kinds of dirty jobs.
I’m just saying above that re-prioritizing our labor is possible, not that it is in any way ideal. Really hate the idea that we need immigrants to take care of our old people. It didn’t used to be that way, and that sounds to me like a failure of our own society.
My late mother had an apartment in an assisted living place called Oakmont in SoCal, and I used to joke it was a cruise ship that never left port on Whittier Blvd, nice amenities, but it suffered from turnover of it’s 20 somethings who worked there even before Covid, and once that came along-turnover happened more often, that is when they could find young adults.
The key to most everybody being there was real estate appreciation-as everybody bought their house for peanuts back in the day… and in the 8 years my mom was a resident, they received almost the exact amount she sold my childhood house for.
A current million $ home owner in their 30’s or 40’s would have to be about $50 million when they are of the same age, to equal the appreciation the Silent Generation domiciles garnered.
And have you seen the application process for senior housing? They ask for bank. stock, MF accounts, numbers to the accounts, value, etc.
I’m trying to phrase this without being snarky John, but those figures your young friends have calculated could use some doublechecking.
It’s not easy, nor cheap, to raise children today, but that $3M (or double!) figure is absurd.
These are people steeped in an economic ideology that looks at people like disposable, replaceable parts. It’s barely veiled that the system doesn’t value life, so it’s all a desire to make sure the disposable parts are replaced.
I was on the road yesterday and heard some NPR blah-blah. Abortion/ choice… the Dims golden key to pulling Biden’s corpus across the finish line (it’s an Olympic year… indulge me).
Lots of questions as to how abortion rates can be going UP, despite or in spite of the law. Not one person/ pundit speculated that folks cannot bear the burden of a child, for whatever the myriad of reasons.
Delusional Cognitive Dissonance… there are some thoughts that are just too bleak to ponder. And we certainly can’t veer from The Narrative(tm) !
And it’s a wee bit late to pretend that caring for the aging (besides themselves and their inner circle) is a thing they’re concerned about. The crocodile tears are so diluted by now that they’re at homeopathic levels.
Situational Awareness is an interesting read. I lean towards AI being overhyped, but I found the predictions based on continuing increases in orders of magnitude sounding plausible – convincing, even. Then it goes off the rails when it gets to the section about how “the free world” must maintain control of any possible superintelligence and starts spouting China bad talking points.
DO YOU READ SUTTER CANE?
Sorry, couldn’t resist :). Agree on the paper, lots of good data that all points to exponential growth that continues forever, just look at these trends! But quoting Marc Andreessen saying that “…China is getting nightly downloads of all American AI research and code RIGHT NOW” is fear mongering plain and simple.
It has finally dawned on me how AI can lead to death and destruction. Hand over grid management to AI to “improve efficiency” or maybe even “improve equity.” Then watch it be deployed with secret algos that predictably maximize profit regardless of human welfare. Then watch AI preserve itself by diverting power to itself and browning or even blacking out millions desperate for cooling in a heat wave.
We’ll leave it to the side about how AGW throws us into a bad reinforcing loop where more heat requires more cooling using more energy causing more heating.
I’m wondering if ai, unlike Hillary or the Donald, is actually proficient at four dimensional chess.
AI could never replicate Hillary in what some might call a mock Mu-Mu, or perhaps it was an elevator protection suit in case of it suddenly plummeting to the bottom floor, and was accidentally pre-inflated?
Lol! Once again….
Or, as George Galloway put it, Hillary not only killed Gaddifi, she stole his wardrobe.
And that gold jewelry?
I’m no birding expert, but the birds in the photo look like ducks, not geese.
They are absolutely geese. I raised ones like that when I was growing up.
The EU’s economic war on Le Pen – The market’s attack dogs are targeting National Rally
What is playing out today in France, then, is nothing new. And yet, there is something unprecedentedly brazen about the ECB’s latest attempt at electoral manipulation. What we are witnessing is effectively an unholy alliance between an increasingly discredited national elite and the supranational institutions of the EU against the common “populist” threat. The strategy should be clear by now: the EU creates an artificial financial panic and national elites then use that to scare voters away from the “wrong” candidate. As an MP from Macron’s party told Le Figaro: “First and foremost, we need to scare people… to show the consequences and financial risks of the [National Rally’s] proposed measures.”
https://unherd.com/2024/06/the-eus-economic-war-on-le-pen/
Fazi is worth reading. This piece is accompaniment to Philip Pilkington’s excellent Zero Sovereignty piece from a few days ago.
‘Punter’s Politics
@punterspolitix
Turns out Australia is the most secretive democracy in the world…oh and we don’t really have a free press, we don’t have freedom of speech and our whistleblower protection laws don’t do anything. Albo could fix but hasn’t found the time for some reason #australia #auspol’
Sadly this is all true. Ever since 9/11 they keep on passing spook-friendly laws every coupla years and integrating our spooks with the American spooks. And our media is garbage and never asks the awkward questions. I know people that you would think are real cynics and even conspiracy theorists, more than yours truly, and yet they have swallowed the whole Putin & Russia are evil hook, line and sinker. Our whistleblower protection laws are a bad joke and when one guy blew the whistle on war crimes committed by our troops in Afghanistan, the only person that got a prison sentence was that whistle blower. And like elsewhere, we have our PMCs who are ever ready to crack down on original thoughts on the pandemic, Russia or whatever. Here is one example in play-
https://twitter.com/ricwe123/status/1608827896315117572 (2:13 mins)
An old-fashioned Aussie would have told that moderator where he could do and what he could do when he got there. This is not the Oz that I grew up in and it has been weird and embarrasing to see this transformation over recent years.
‘Fear Dinkum’
I’d reply but there are two black helicopters landing in my small paddock right now. Be back in a moment….
I visited the Lucky Country maybe 6 times-all in the 80’s when pushing old metal around, and have pleasant memories of the old-fashioned Aussie, perpetually stuck in time in my mind.
Coolest venue ever for a coin show was in the basement of the Sydney Opera House, with the 2nd best being in the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
I once mixed sound in the bar a the rear of the QM. Great sounding room with all that rosewood..
Stan bloody Grant ! [hack spit]
(speaking of whom, Mary Kostikidis is good to follow if you (in)frequent X.)
re: Assange
Especially given he’s not guilty of any of the charges, which charges did he or would he concede to? Is this plea conceding to all of them? I’m not clear on this.
They really want to put the boot into him here in Oz-
‘As we reported earlier, the Australian government paid for Julian Assange’s private flight from the UK to Australia – via Bangkok and the Northern Mariana Islands – with the Assange campaign due to repay the $520,000 cost. Julian’s wife Stella has just said on X that he “was not permitted to fly commercial airlines or routes to Saipan and onward to Australia”.’
He copped a plea. After all these years, it’s understandable I suppose. Could I have withstood what he did? Thank luck I have never been put to such a test; thus, I can’t blame him at all at all. On the other hand, Bobby Sands might find him wanting.
indeed not only Bobby Sands but 9 other heroic Irishmen (Francis Hughes, Raymond Mc Creesh, Patsy O’Hara,Kieran Doherty,Joe Mc Donnell, Martin Hurston, Kevin Lynch, Thomas Mc Elwee, Michael Devine) who had only their bodies and put their lives on the line for 5 simple demands the English refused to grant:
the right not to wear a prison uniform;
the right not to do prison work;
the right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
the right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week;
full restoration of remission lost through the protest
Here’s the ballad of Joe Mc Donnell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FfO1z_ttys
South China Sea: Philippines’ anti-ship missile base puts itself in cross hairs.
BTW, those are brand new BrahMos missiles, aka Indian version of Russian P-800 Oniks. Maybe USA will be able to get access, and reverse engineer them, and make a supersonic anti-ship missile by the end of the decade.
I can sum up “Situational Awareness” by Leopold Aschenbrenner very simply. “If these trends continue, haayyy!”
https://youtu.be/e6LOWKVq5sQ?si=5nzuGjp6HpCwBY55
(Disco Stu)
https://www.levernews.com/boeings-old-friend-inside-bidens-justice-department/
Boeing’s Old Friend Inside Biden’s Justice Department
The Justice Department is packed with corporate lawyers who previously worked for the companies they are now charged with prosecuting.
Widespread protests erupt in Iraq over power outages as temperatures hit 50°C and above New Arab
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brutal hot here too early in the summer, you hate to wonder what happens when a hundred and hell comes along for a spell.
We have a minimum of concrete & asphalt and a maximum of Mother Nature, but its the other way around in the Big Smokes.
Instead of enriching the MIC maybe one of the last times with $100 billion given to them vis a vis Israel & Ukraine, what if we had gotten serious and constructed public fallout shelters underground to save our citizenry from the big heat?
They just need to hit up the Green Zone. There is no way the TGIFridays is over 68 F.
Flair enough.
>Julian Assange agrees plea deal, leaves UK prison and heads to US territory
Does it work like in the last few paragraphs of the book 1984?
Is he all pro-American now? Are they going to put a bullet through his head then?
Does he love Hillary Clinton?
that’s kind of what happened to Chelsea Manning, too
file under: France. From UnHerd.
The EU’s economic war on Le Pen The market’s attack dogs are targeting National Rally
https://unherd.com/2024/06/the-eus-economic-war-on-le-pen/
I did not realize that the French economy was so bad. They should make sure that it is in a pair of safe hands – like that of Macron’s party. They’ll make sure that France is saved.
Heh. A para from the article:
What is playing out today in France, then, is nothing new. And yet, there is something unprecedentedly brazen about the ECB’s latest attempt at electoral manipulation. What we are witnessing is effectively an unholy alliance between an increasingly discredited national elite and the supranational institutions of the EU against the common “populist” threat. The strategy should be clear by now: the EU creates an artificial financial panic and national elites then use that to scare voters away from the “wrong” candidate. As an MP from Macron’s party told Le Figaro: “First and foremost, we need to scare people… to show the consequences and financial risks of the [National Rally’s] proposed measures.”
Heh. Yet somehow after the deplorable wrongthinkers in the UK voted for Brexit, Old Blighty is still there and there hasn’t been a mass exodus of economic refugees and asylum seekers.
Guardian:
Russia-Ukraine war live: ICC issues arrest warrants for Russian officials over attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets
Of course they did, and as for the Israeli genocidaires? Or the Ukrainians bombing Crimean beach goers (with US help)?
Unbelievable. This, just after that attack on a civilian beach in Crimea which is really rubbing salt into the wounds. At this stage of the game the ICC is just a busted pot and I would not be surprised to see a string of countries, especially those in Africa, to withdraw their signature on the ICC treaty. What is the point of being a part of this anymore. It only ever goes after Africans and Slavs.
Only Africans and Slavs that don’t get along with the plan. USA/NATO approved Africans and Slavs get away with a (war) crime by default.
Don’t forget that missile that killed the beachgoers was armed with cluster bombs.
Well, I haven’t forgotten nor will the Crimeans forget, but the US, Ukraine (and Russia) are not signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
Those plucky, resourceful Ukies!
They took a mass casualty weapon: designed to kill, maim and destroy battalion size mechanized infantry, while leaving a minefield of UXB, used it on on the kids at the beach.
The US is not signatory of mine and CBU bans because of the many kids they can kill by proxie!
So, in the “Exasperated Democrats” piece, the writer actually mentions Hillary as a possible replacement. Could you imagine? Clinton/Harris? Trump would be delighted! Awesome material for his new standup arena tour.
The only candidate to lose a campaign to Donald Trump, and she and some of her people still can see and angle in, somehow. Bill must be having angina again.
Without Bill, the Clinton messaging machine has always been terrible. Her 2016 campaign launched with “she’s ready.” The implication was her front runner status and failure in 2008 was the result of her just not being ready.
I could easily see the messaging being “Third time’s a charm!” The trained seals will eat it up.
Don’t forget she was everyone’s Abuela.
The only reason to want a Clinton candidacy is to quite frankly watch her lose again. No one will convince me that she will have become more popular than she was in 2016. And she has spent most of that time continuing to insult the people who rejected then.
There is a very good case to be made that the Democrats should have a subtitle of “who cares what voters think”.
She had an approval rating in the 30s in November of ’16, and I remember when, a few years in on Trump’s term, she still had the same low approval rating after the daily Trump clown show assaults to our senses. I’m assuming it’s still basically the same, after, as you said, her continuing insults of over half of Americans.
I suspect that she has some serious orthopedic issues in her old age. She didn’t do too well on a not too strenuous campaign in ’16, and you barely see her standing since then when she appears in public. She wore that tent of a gown at the Tony’s, and one wonders if it was hiding a brace like device, or maybe she’s got the same Dr. Feelgood as Biden, or, both
For Killary, the third time is a Charmin
after attempts #1 and #2
Now you know how I really feel!
re the Turchin piece, the concept of Asabiya sounds a lot like the old adage that
great men lead to good times
good times lead to weak men
weak men lead to bad times
but over a longer time frame. In the West, it’s nothing but weak men (and women) as far as the eyes can see.
Ruh, roh! Big Trouble in Little Israel-
‘Israel’s Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the military must draft ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students into military service, as the war in Gaza stretches into its ninth month and Israel faces a shortage of manpower.
On Tuesday, the court also ordered the government to stop funding religious schools, or yeshivas, whose students avoid the draft.’
https://www.rt.com/news/599936-israel-ultra-orthodox-jews-military-draft/
Expect an outflow of those students from Ben Gurion airport or more likely, a campaign of violent protests where they attack officials, police and soldiers.
Sorry, but there’s nothing more pathetic than watching those unarmed students have a tantrum and fight helmeted and armored cops and soldiers.
They have said they would leave.
Do you believe them?
Maybe they’ll fight like hell to not go fight.
That very last bit might just be what’s needed. Some strong internal conflict might produce a pause to the ongoing slaughter.
“How are the US-made ATACMS missiles being used by Ukrainian forces?”
‘I conclude this brief account with a Kudos to Mr. Jake Sullivan, for his fine work taking Europe a big step closer to a bloody finale by freeing Ukrainian hands to do as they will with American weapons.’
Jake Sullivan is the National Security Advisor but I think of him as Biden’s campaign manager. So for the first time I went into his Wikipedia entry and it is as bad as you might think. Lots of familiar names like Hillary Clinton, Rhodes Scholarship, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Lieberman and John McCain-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Sullivan
Let’s not forget his famous quote in an email to Hillary, “Al Quaeda is on our side in Syria.”
And his even more famous quote in Foreign Affairs of October, “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
In my business there were a few liars of renown, one of them nick-named Mr. Ten Factor, as in you could believe 10% of his claims at most, and the other one was Story-Teller, a play on his last name.
Once you knew the lay of the land and dismissed anything they had to say, they weren’t bad fellows, merely compulsive liars.
It’s hard to not feel as if we are that compulsive liar, even the smidgens of truth that leak out are dodgy and reek of having worn our cleanest dirty shirt for too long…
> I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Peter Turchin. albrt
A very fine overview of Turchin’s work.
In the absence of more Turchin, look to the Darwinian Survival Guide. The first half is slow but rigorous. They refer to the group/multi-level selection process leading to larger states warring with each other as The Great Tragedy. But the focus in the second half on Covid-19 suggests that warring states are not the primary driver of the disintegrative trend.
> The main thing you can predict for the United States right now is that the disintegrative trend will keep going until something happens to reverse it.
Michael T Klare wrote in All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, the 2017 series of Category 4/5 hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) involved a military response involving tens of thousands of personnel and multiple Navy ships. Note that the disruption of these did not occur during an election year.
However, 2017 was a La Nina year coming out of the 2016 El Nino, which at that time was an enormous outlier, shattering all previous records for sea surface temperatures. La Nina reduces wind shear in the Atlantic. NOAA predicts five major storms this year. The shape of sea surface temperatures this year is matching 2017, and we’re heading out of the record-breaking 2023 El Nino into La Nina. Except temperatures are a half-degree-c higher than in 2017.
Katrina resulted in a massive emigration. Would New Orleans have been able to mount an effective voting mechanism by November?
The Dow Cornings index took a hit with Hooters shutting down 40 locations, another chain that can’t make it pay.
Too many, uh, customers streaming OnlyFans with a drink in one hand.
Low overhead, competitive advantage, indifference curves, sociopathy.
HBS will write case studies for years. /s
Saw a post on some dopey little website by some woman whose small daughter loves owls and is begging to go to Hooters.
“In Rare Rebuke, U.S. Ambassador Accuses China of Undermining Diplomacy
In other news, Antony Blinken announces that he and Annalena Baerbock are forming a partnership after he leaves government to teach American diplomacy under a contract with the US State Department.
Antony is our version of Ribbentrop, who was widely loathed in his attempts at world diplomacy, not that he seemed to know it.
He shoulda packed it in earlier?
Blinken is similar to Ribbentrop in that both could speak foreign languages and had spent time overseas, wowing their leadership with their prowess.
“The Land that Law Forgot: The Supreme Court and the New York Legal Wasteland”
Some time ago I read an article calling the US a legal backwater in that judges never consulted international law but only made law that was made in America. But with New York you can see how this provincial outlook is letting them to make judgements that are straight up illegal under the US Constitution. In other cases, the US has had to adjudicate in international disputes but the trend is to decide with the US corporations side. Now I read that the US Supreme Court is going to rule if an American court can rule on a case between Holocaust survivors and the Hungarian government & railways. The US has no involvement in this case nor any commercial linkage but those petitioners are going to try anyway as they will figure that they will get the result that they want. If the US Supreme Court says yes, then every country in the world will partake of this lawfare bonanza-
https://www.rt.com/news/599910-scotus-to-hear-hungary-holocaust-lawsuit/
They already tried this with the SNCF. They failed. From the ruling
Good news about Assange, otherwise…
A lot more evidence that Human stupidity is infinite.
Re. Assange….
purportedly Assange was a computer programmer prodigy.
I would love it if Assange is revealed to be Satoshi Nakamoto; particularly as such development would be appropriate to the bizarro-world nature of this timeline
re: What role for revenge in Jewish life, literature and culture? aeon (Dr. Kevin)
I appreciate the piece, it’s very good, but it seems lacking if it doesn’t explore how the Tanakh (Old Testament) is VERY heavily weighted towards the revenge stories, personal vendettas, a spiteful even childish god almost entirely focused on divine retribution for minor and insignificant grievances. A god who has rather abandoned the cosmic scheme of things to become obsessively embroiled in the petty dramas of adults with obvious mental age of elderly adolescents. A god which orders a literal genocide (e.g. conquest of Canaan) cuz promises of imaginary conceptual geopolitical lines which don’t exist in reality. An entire legal framework based on system of vengeance which measures all in price and payment in reprisal, a framework where all and everything is property and property and territory is everything, sacred.
How does a people or culture raised on this not develop a bit of an unfortunate worldview which may be presently dictating behaviour? And isn’t there an urgent need to reverse this, including in any cultures and religions which inherited it, by addressing the source of it?
I think the author hints at it but largely avoids, lilkely such an approach would be too contentious, I suppose.
“heavily weighted towards the revenge stories, personal vendettas, a spiteful even childish (character) almost entirely focused on …. retribution for minor and insignificant grievances.”
But isn’t that the formula for most pulp fiction?
Not contentious to feminists at all, and I have the library to back it up. Why do you think the religious right came out like such gangbusters on the heels of the second wave womens movement. Because the ladies were onto the whole Abrahamic grift.
With an extremely, or was it exquisitely, subtle approach, or so they say.
Netanyahu says he won’t agree to a deal that ends the war in Gaza, testing the latest peace proposal
You can’t make these headlines up.
truth be told – https://futurism.com/the-byte/boeings-starliner-still-stuck-space-station
those astronauts lucky to have made it – and probably glad not to be returning in that tin can –
They thought that they were still astronauts – only to discover that Boeing regarded them as spam in a can.