‘Universal urination duration’ wins Ig Nobel prize BBC (Dr. Kevin)
New Evidence The Nazis Didn’t Come Close To The Bomb Forbes
Researchers just discovered a massive body of water under China’s biggest desert Inhabitat (furzy mouse)
US commander backs challenging China over disputed islands Reuters
Finland Faces Biggest Strikes in Two Decades Amid Austerity Ire Bloomberg. Swedish Lex: “Greece of the north.”
Migrant Crisis
Croatia ‘cannot stop migrants’ – PM BBC
Europe Lacks Plan as Migrants March On New York Times
Corbyn Panic
Queen records Jeremy Corbyn diss track Daily Mash
Threat of defections for Corbyn as Labour MPs approach Lib Dems Telegraph
Meet the next leader of the Labour party (sorry Jeremy Corbyn) Telegraph
Grexit?
Greek election 2015: Golden Dawn rises on austerity-driven despair Guardian (Sid S) Not clear if Golden Dawn is likely to beat its old high water mark.
Greece election campaign ends as polls show no clear winner ekathimerini
Ukraine/Russia
Ukraine Multiplied by Zero on the Eve of Maidan Squared Fort Russ (Chuck L)
Syraqistan
Putin’s Line in the Sand: No Regime Change in Syria Counterpunch
Finger-Pointing, but Few Answers, After Syria Solution Fails New York Times
Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky Counterpunch. Important.
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Book Review: Abusing the Internet of Things Slashdot
DOJ Threatens to Invoke State Secrets Over Something Released in FOIA Marcy Wheeler
TSA Doesn’t Care That Its Luggage Locks Have Been Hacked Intercept
Police Stase Watch
How officials use a dubious medical condition to explain stun gun deaths Guardian
‘I think he’s still hungry’: Florida cops allegedly order gruesome K-9 attack on graffiti artists Raw Story
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Secret Arms Deal Behind America’s Syria Fiasco BuzzFeed (Chuck L)
2016
Trump’s Bad Morning After Politico
US rightwing populism ruffles business Financial Times
Clinton lawyer balked at first effort to delete classified email Politico
California wildfires threaten wine vineyards at start of harvest season Guardian
Black Injustice Tipping Point
North Carolina Police Chief Forced To Resign After ‘Shoot First’ Anti-Black Lives Matter Rant Alternet
Police “Training” is the Problem: They are Trained to Oppress Blacks Glen Ford
Fed
Mohamed El-Erian: Fed must now work harder to shift market focus Financial Times
Despite Concerns, Yellen Still Sees Rate Increase This Year Wall Street Journal
Dovish Tone of Fed’s Monetary Policy Statement Surprises Economists New York Times
Markets Still Don’t Agree With the Fed Mark Whitehouse, Bloomberg
US interest rates: still time for another drink … or even two Guardian
Critics Rip GM Deferred Prosecution Agreement in Engine Switch Case Corporate Crime Reporter. So much for that DoJ pledge to target individuals.
Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey “Something Very Wrong” Michael Shedlock
From All Sides, Pressure Mounts Over Private Equity Fee Practices Chief Investment Officer
Criticized by Trump, Carried Interest Tax Loophole Is Vulnerable New York Times (resilc)
Class Warfare
Why the Rich Are So Much Richer James Surowiecki New York Review of Books (resilc)
Across the South, Many Jails Are Illegal Debtors’ Prisons Truthout
Jury Awards Farm Workers $17.4M In Sex Harassment Case Law360. From last week, still germane.
Antidote du jour (martha r). An NC first, a Portuguese man of war:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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TSA Doesn’t Care That Its Luggage Locks Have Been Hacked (Intercept)
Over the years, with all the theft I have experienced from checked luggage when flying – and a great deal of that theft occuring in domestic US travel – I have always wondered about the theater involved in having criminals not just operating with impunity in “secure” areas, but actually being the ones tasked with “securing” the integrity and safety of the people flying…
Coming back through LAX customs–made sure to open the luggage lock on my bag before it went through inspection–TSA still made sure to rip the (open) lock off the bag, ensuring that the bag couldn’t be closed again. Gee did I ever feel safe!
Yea, the locks suck.
The solution is to take valuable luggage through the TSA security checkpoint and check it at the gate. Once you get through the checkpoint you can lock it again, and the airline will put it directly on the plane. They’ll even skip the $25 checked baggage fee ;)
Making it difficult and risky to travel with concentrated physical wealth is a feature, not a bug.
“Mohamed El-Erian: Fed must now work harder to shift market focus”
Oh, so the dual mandate is actually a triple mandate. With some mandates being more equal than others. I’m so glad that Mr. El-Erian clarified that for the little people.
A better dog and pony show is always good for shifting anyone’s focus.
They get about 100 times the press coverage Obama gets. Whatta they gonna do. Run for president so the market ignores them?
UK Politcs
1 If an MP changes parties, how does that work as far as elections by the voters? Would Labour have to wait until 2020 to replace them?
2. Reading about the Lib Dems, it sounds like the Blairites would be worse off electorally. So, is this just posturing?
1.Yes, 5 years of gravy guzzling and then ignominious oblivion.
Labour’s eric joyce was derecognised for constant fights and piss artistry but he held true to his seat for the full term.
2. Joining the rightly disgraced fourth placed party (with just 8 out of 650 seats) ,led by the heroically underwhelming Farron, would be an unacceptable risk for such serious minded lads and lasses.
The conservative and unionist party would is the natural home for them. It’s not like they’ve disagreed with anything the tories have done in the last 5 years.
The UK’s party discipline is higher than here. Anyone who switches parties will become an immediate pariah. Tory voters won’t want a former Labour member, and younger Tory back benchers don’t want another obstacle to overcome. As far as jobs outside of Parliament, no one wants a pariah.
For all of Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller’s bluster, they were loyal caucus members. The only way switching makes sense is paid you were dialed in on one committee where the major lobbyists wouldn’t want to lose you and you held standing in your home state. Virgil Goode springs to mind. The dude worked tirelessly for both small farmers and big agriculture at the same time. He had leverage to switch and was beloved in rural Virginia. What is Alan Grayson’s (an impossible case) leverage if he wanted to switch?
Interesting. IIRC at one time party-switching was common. Didn’t Churchill switch multiple times?
Churchill crossed the floor of the House of Commons twice, in 1904 from the Tories to the Liberals, and in 1924 from the Liberals to the Tories.
“The UK’s party discipline is higher than here. Anyone who switches parties will become an immediate pariah.”
I don’t know what you mean. We don’t actually have parties here. We have a couple of brands that are both owned by the one percent.
I would think that having a party would have to precede having party discipline. Of course, discipline is pretty much a foreign concept in this country, too.
See this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34267886
If there is party switching, it will probably be straight from Labour to Conservative this time. For Blairites, the Conservatives are more ideologically compatible than the Liberal Democrats, who like Labour moved to the left after the election. The Conservatives can offer more safe seats, possible posts in the cabinet, steering projects to the MPs constituencies, and the fact that it is just better to be a politician in a party that got 36% of the vote last time than 8%. Other than the publicity, Blairite Labour MPs crossing the floor to the government helps Cameron both pad his majority and to make it easier to deal with awkward Tory MPs, both of which he badly needs to do and in both cases where losing the Lib Dems winds up hurting him.
The other big problem with “SDP version 2” is that the first version wasn’t that successful. It may be worth looking back on the history. In 1979, the Liberal Party got 14% of the vote and 11 seats, as opposed to 8% of the vote and 8 seats in 2015. They had taken a big hit in popularity for being the junior partner in a coalition arrangement with the governing party, in this case a confidence and supply arrangement with Labour. Labour, by the way, polled 36.9% of the vote in 1979, the exact same percentage the Tories got in 2015. This did mean that potential Labour defectors had experience in working with the Liberals.
In the event, 28 Labour MPs defected to the SDP, and 4 former Labour MPs won re-election running for the SDP (in alliance with the Liberals). This is not a very high success rate. I think the options of either staying in the caucus and pushing Corbyn out later, or crossing over to the Tories will be preferred.
One problem with party switching is Cameron and the other Tories have no reason to accept defectors. They are no longer in a coalition.
The gang of four were, at the time, established and largely respected household names.
The blairite jetsam such as reeves,cooper,umanna etc are pretty much non entities. A week or two in the anti (ie all) corbyn press would be the most they could expect.
Cameron could take them on as novelty petting zoo specimens purely for shits and giggles.
Regarding austerity in Finland, I actually wrote “Greece of the North”.
I noticed that, and that’s what I guessed that you said. “Finland of the North” is almost as redundant as “North Pole of the North” or “Antarctica of the South”!
I think Botswana is the Finland of the South.
For more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botswana
Oops, fixing!
– Researchers just discovered a massive body of water under China’s biggest desert
I’m a water resources guy, clicked the link:
– thought to contain up to ten times more water than all the Great Lakes combined
Yay!
– The combination of the alkaline sands on the surface and saline water deep beneath create the perfect conditions for carbon capture.
Okay…
– These desert waters may contain more carbon than all the plants on the planet combined.
That’s rather a lot…
– “It’s like a can of coke. If it is opened all the greenhouse gas will escape into the atmosphere”.
Unyay! Unyay!
Oh, well. At least I can enjoy the period at the end…
I believe the word “Taklamakan” means ‘You go in and you don’t get out,’ in Uighur or some other local tongue.
Basically, it’s a one way journey. Once the carbon is released, there is no going back.
In this case, their ancestors have proven to be more accurate than the Mayans and their End of the World prediction.
Maybe China become the Saudi’s of Water Exports?
It’s saline and probably alkaline as well. OTOH, plenty of sun for desalination.
Unyay! Unyay!
Fellini’s dream? A scene from Roma (1972), which is a series of vignettes of contemporary life:
“Frescoes”
You might find that you realize what is going to happen before it does.
Here’s some inspiration for your weekend: prisoners in Puerto Rico started their own worker co-ops and discovered the rehabilitative power of cooperation
http://www.geo.coop/story/worlds-first-prisoner-worker-co-op
Thank you so much for posting this. Very inspiring.
“Researchers just discovered a massive body of water under China’s biggest desert”
Huge story. Thanks, Yves. Reports that if the carbon captured in this body of water were released, we’d be in “big trouble.”
I hope others who can fathom this will comment on the implications of this discovery.
Then there was this a few weeks back:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-offers-private-companies-rights-to-explore-six-oil-and-gas-blocks-1436271938
Excerpt:
Not to be outdone, we will have to discover a massive desert under the Great Lakes.
No need to find another one, it makes much more fiscal sense to expand the deserts we already have.
Just half-way through the links, but I’m feeling you today. Thanks!
Thanks!
The Chomsky interview was a good historical review of our relations with the Middle East. It immediately brought to mind the recent Republican Soundbite Fest, commonly known as the “debate” and the constant mentions by all of how important it is that we protect our 51st State, Israel.
The question is, of course, from what?
Iran and their crazy, furry, mullahs, of course. Which sorta remind me of republicans, except for the long beards. And nuclear arsenal.
From itself?
Be sure to read the article linked second above the Chomsky interview:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/17/putins-line-in-the-sand-no-regime-change-in-syria/
At first I thought this was edging on sarcastic hyperbole, then I took a look at “The Zionist Plan for the Middle East”:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/greater-israel-the-zionist-plan-for-the-middle-east/5324815
And it reads like something G.R.R. Martin might use for source material; rationalized manifest destiny. Some significant chunk of US policy makers seem to have bought into this thinking as well.
From something like national socialism. Resource protectionism. We have one priority and that is access to oil. So in the ME “stability” means maintaining oil supplies. In one of the many twists of ordinary meaning stability means instability for the ME; it means long drawn-out wars to establish “secular” governments friendly to us or else. The word, stability, has little to do with Israel. They just happen to be there. And they have been useful.
I was watching the movie, Zero Theorem, and luckily I had the subtitle on, and I learned this Latin phrase: ex inordinatio veni pecunia.
Apparently, that means ‘there is money in ordering disorder.’
“Subtitles are not just for foreign movies, if you can’t afford Holiday Inn Express, but wants to be smarter.”
Out of disorder comes money
I don’t see the concept of “ordering disorder” in the Latin there
I think you may have it backwards, to a large extent. Israel has the most to gain by instability in the middle east, given that they are both the ones with greatest ambitions for expansion as well as the nation with the most to lose if the other Arab nations resolve their differences and focus on opposing Israeli expansion. The idea that Israel is “just…there” does not agree with the facts of their expansionism, their nuclear weapons program, their strong (global) security apparatus, and their influence on and, more specifically, within other nations around the world. The article lays much of this out pretty well.
Israel is no sideliner. I have seen many articles recently showing them as a main player, if not actually THE main player (maybe “driver” would be a better word choice) in much of our modern history. (I distinguish between the Israeli people and the Israeli government as I would distinguish between the citizens of the USA and the US government). They have been able to act aggressively under cover of the “victim” for the better part of a century, with the shield of a cry of “antisemitism” at every criticism, but this veneer has been worn thin, as is evidenced by the recent global reactions to their treatment of the Palestinians in occupied territories and even being included in this article as one of the actual Rogue States.
The USA already has Saudi Arabia/OPEC as a stable source for oil. There may be those in Big Oil with wet dreams of actually conquering and controlling the ME supplies of oil, but the reality is that instability causes prices to increase, meaning that the supply is less secure. It may be good for oil producers, but doesn’t fit the model of stability.
These wars in the middle east benefit Israel much more than they do the USA. Look at the rabid response from Netanyahoo at the deal with Iran. This deal is good for stability, which we want, right. Why does Israel not? Are they afraid of a hypothetical nuclear weapons program when they already have state-of-the-art nuclear weapons?
I’m starting to see that the USA may just be the patsy in this global game. We’re the big dumb one with the muscles that can be manipulated by someone a bit more clever. Sure, we’re promised the carrot of OIL, OIL, OIL, for our efforts, but what’s the end result?
Fool me once….
Re: Florida cops allegedly order gruesome K-9 attack on graffiti artists Raw Story.
When your back’s against the wall, turn around and write on it!
LANCE FOR PRESIDENT…(HAD to share this w/yall)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQoE4bnpBCk&feature=youtu.be
“May friendship, like wine, improve as time advances.
And may we always have old wine, old friends, and young cares.”
-an Irish toast
and may you have a great day Aby (thank you Scot with one T !)
“I’m more interested in arousing enthusiasm in kids than in teaching the facts. The facts may change, but that enthusiasm for exploring the world will remain with them the rest of their lives.”
Seymour Simon
For a second, I thought I’d stumbled into Lambert’s Water Cooler. That man-of-war looks as much like a plant as an animal.
Encountered those in Florida, MANY years ago now. They sting – we were scared of them.
Beautiful, though. Odd – more of a colony than a single entity.
Meet the next leader of the Labour party (sorry Jeremy Corbyn) Telegraph
Nice to see this 36 year old getting more of a voice.
“Lisa tells me: “It made me realise there’s a group of people who are always shut out of power and often don’t have a voice. That’s why I got into politics – to try and change that.””
“Energy and climate change are among our biggest global and national challenges. It’s a huge privilege to represent @UKLabour on this brief.” (Lisa Nandy)
Boy do I feel stupid.
Yesterday I mentioned an appearance by Bernie Sanders at Hattiesburg MS. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s an organizational meeting, pure and simple. My reading comprehension skills need a rehab. To think I really imagined any serious national politician would even drive through here on their way to somewhere else is embarrassing.
No excuses. Shoot me now.
Short but informative column on Mr. Market disagreeing with FED. Some useful charts / graphs included. Futures market projections for year end 2016 have trended downward, of course.
“Professional economists, for their part, are more optimistic than the Fed. Among those polled by Bloomberg, the median forecast for 2016 growth in real U.S. gross domestic product is 2.7 percent, compared with Fed officials’ 2.3 percent.”
Supposedly they did not poll the elusive one-handed economist.
Using artistic license, some MSM commentators have expressed the Fed’s dilemma as ‘labor boom vs overseas gloom.’ (Nice hyperbole on the ‘labor boom’ bit.)
It means that the next employment report on Oct. 2nd becomes … The Most Important Employment Report in History.
Struggle, comrades, to meet production quotas. Or slack off, if you’re a ZIRP fan.
But if human workers can be completely replaced by robots, why does labor boom matter?
Onward and upward becoming Onward and sideways.
Removing this loophole is long overdue. The Congressional bill numbers are for the Carried Interest Fairness Act of 2015 are:
Senate: S. 1686
House: H.R. 2889
So far, these bills only have a small number of co-sponsors. U.S. residents need to insist that their Representative and Senators co-sponsor and actively support this bill.
Is there possibly a blanket octopus feeding on the man o’ war? There appear to be some suction cups.
Glen Ford hits it right out of the park:
There are of course some men and women, like Frank Serpico or Adrian Schoolcraft, who honestly hope to protect and serve ordinary citizens while working in law enforcement. They are invariably weeded out of the system.
The Glen Ford article on police oppression and the Truthout article about debtors prisons describe crime in the US better than anything recently written. The police are trained as an occupying force and the poor are forced to pay taxes the 1% refuse to pay. One solution to the occupation of the police would be for the Fed to not give money to the banks but pay to retire ALL current police (at least those with military background) and pay for them to go to school to learn another trade. Then hire an all women replacement force who would have police training to protect the populace from true criminals but not be an occupying force. Additionally, the 1% would be taxed to pay for municipal/city/county costs of government, which would cost a lot less if there were less police to occupy cities.
Using the police dogs on the graffiti scum is cruel and unusual and the cops should be arrested and tried. To address graffiti destruction, there needs to be a $20,000 bounty – dead or alive (no police could collect). A two minute video of the graffiti “artist” painting destruction would be required; if they didn’t come with the bounty hunter willingly, they could be shot and dragged in to collect the bounty. After three or four bounties were collected, graffiti destruction would drop to nothing.
See my (grammatically mangled) post on the carried interest loophole at 11:22 AM. Obviously the Carried Interest Fairness Act of 2015 isn’t enough to solve the problems that you are discussing, but it could be a portion of the overall solution.
I’m not quite sure how to comment on your graffiti paragraph…so I won’t say anything else.
I don’t understand why the railroads would object to someone else painting their poorly maintained rail cars – for free. Seems bizarre. Main trouble is, the paint only reaches about 2/3 the way up. Still, that’s a lot less for the railroad to paint, if it ever did.
“One solution … would be for the Fed to not give money to the banks”
Does this seem to you like a very likely scenario?
“To address graffiti destruction, there needs to be a $20,000 bounty – dead or alive”
!
Radley Balko, among others, has called constant attention to what is now termed the “cult of compliance”, where a cop’s command to a civilian MUST require an immediate response – no questions asked – or that cop has the “right” to “take down” the person under the guise of “failing to obey a lawful order”, which then segues into “resisting arrest”, and escalates from there. “Probable cause” rarely enters into it, a cop’s command is justification in and of itself. One can, I suppose, blame police training for some of the abuse, but the plain facts show that judges and DAs let the cops get away with this business as a matter of course, and it’s only those individuals who can readily produce a lawyer to argue for dropping charges – as they usually are in the most flagrant cases – are able to extract themselves from the risible “criminal justice system”, which is far more “criminal” than it is about “justice”.
Instant compliance….thus also the use ofc tasers, chokeholds, and socalled nonlethal weapons. Which are often quite lethal.
http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-and-uk-arm-child-soldiers-at-worlds-largest-arms-fair-in-london/209665/
Germany’s DAX index, comrades: it’s back below the psychologically significant 10,000 level for the first time since last August, on a nasty 3.1% decline today. Chart:
http://tinyurl.com/pn8mkpe
It is also just a whisker above the 20% decline threshold which marks the popular definition of a bear market.
Eurozone QE was supposed to stop this. But it ain’t workin’. And back in the USA, we don’t even HAVE a QE program no more.
dateline sometime in 2016:
First reviews in on the new crop of California Wine
(selected quotes)
“It was delightfully carbonized, with a hint of burnt madrone”
“Once the ash settled in the glass it had a less gritty mouthfeel”
“The vintner boasted that there was no need to char the oak barrels”
Cheers!
The blurbs on wine labels do often boast about the “stressed vines” that give the wine its character.
Does 800°C (1,472°F) count as stressed?
Regarding the article “Why the Rich Are So Much Richer” by James Surowiecki in the NYRB:
That fact that Surowiecki still defines the issue with the Luntzian phrase “income inequality” shows how far we have to go to address this problem. The wage gap is a symptom of economic injustice in this country, not a cause of it.
“Researchers just discovered a massive body of water under China’s biggest desert ”
So the Taklamakan is a terrestrial model for Dune.
It’s a good thing the water is saline, or the Chinese would be busily pumping it – and the carbon – out for irrigation.
I think the Uighurs have know it for a long time…with their qanats.
“Finland Faces Biggest Strikes in Two Decades Amid Austerity Ire ”
Payback for their hard-nosed role in the Greek crisis. Turns out the Euro is almost as bad for Finland as for Greece.
Too bad they just had an election. Doesn’t sound like these strikes are designed to bring down the government and force a new election; that would be the only effective measure.
The xenophobic “populist” parties in the Nordic countries are little but vehicles for the ultrawealthy to spread distractions in front the baying mob while they march through an agenda designed to serve themselves – and only themselves.
The Danish ones have proven to be useless, the Swedish one the same, Norwegian one has its greatest achievement in “freedom” as cutting taxes for billionaires while raising kindergarten costs for all – and here we see it all comes to naught in Finland too.
In keeping with the Lily Tomlin quote of “no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up”, I thought I was above having a reaction to anything I read or hear anymore, but this video regarding the student arrest over the homemade clock was so repulsive on so many levels that I’m at a loss for words, and it’s not just from the puke bag my head is buried in.
Forwarded to me by my dad, no less. Sad.
https://instagram.com/parisianfloors/