Why Science Can Be So Indecisive About Nutrition The Atlantic
Sweet, fatty foods could remodel the brain to drive overeating Science
Study links diet of ultra-processed foods to chronic disease risk CBC
UN world population report predicts slowing growth rate, 10.9 billion peak by 2100 New Atlas (Furzy Mouse).
I Am a Carbon Abolitionist Democracy Journal. I like that phrase. Also, the abolitionists, though a minority, won.
World’s biggest investor accused of dragging feet on climate crisis Guardian. Blackrock.
Oregon Republicans’ Return Uncertain After Cap And Trade’s Apparent Demise OPB (DK). Democrats cave.
Scientists map huge undersea fresh-water aquifer off U.S. Northeast Science Daily
Brexit
Brexit civil servant in charge of no-deal planning quits Guardian
Johnson Refuses to Rule Out Suspending Parliament: Brexit Update Bloomberg
Windrush Scandal: Home Office ‘reckless’ and ‘defensive’, leaked review finds Channel 4. Giving May a kick in the ribs on her way out.
Swiss Stocks to Be Barred From EU Trading as Talks Fail Bloomberg
Syraqistan
European nations prepare to launch delayed Iran payments channel FT
Russia tamps down US-Iran tensions Indian Punchline
America’s Free-Rider Problem in the Strait of Hormuz The Atlantic
How the OPCW’s investigation of the Douma incident was nobbled – Working Group on Syria Sic Semper Tyrannis
Officer traveling with Brazilian president Bolsonaro caught with 39 kilos of cocaine CNN. On the way to G20. 86 pounds is a lot!
China?
‘Don’t trust China,’ Hong Kong protesters tell G-20 leaders in Osaka Nikkei Asian Review
Exclusive: Alibaba Eyes $10 Billion Hong Kong Listing Caixin. All is forgiven!
What Does the Pause of Hong Kong’s Extradition Bill Mean? Council on Foreign Relations
Inside the West’s failed fight against China’s ‘Cloud Hopper’ hackers Reuters
Water Wars: A Sinking Feeling in Philippine-China Relations Lawfare
Supreme Court rejects Prabowo team’s lawsuit against Bawaslu Jakarta Post. No violations by President Jokowi Widodo.
New Cold War
Will US Elites Give Détente With Russia a Chance? The Nation (MF).\
Transcript: ‘All this fuss about spies … it is not worth serious interstate relations’ (interview) Vladimir Putin, FT
Exclusive: Western intelligence hacked ‘Russia’s Google’ Yandex to spy on accounts – sources Reuters
Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange Nils Melzer, Medium. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Trump Transition
Opinion analysis: No role for courts in partisan gerrymandering (Updated) and Opinion analysis: Court orders do-over on citizenship question in census case (Updated) SCOTUS Blog
House passes $4.6 billion border bill as leaders cave to moderate Democrats and GOP WaPo
Democrats Back Wall Street Push to Free Up $40 Billion in Margin Bloomberg
Washington’s first attempt at regulating Big Tech is a joke Recode (Furzy Mouse). Hawley.
Indians can worry less as the US denies capping H-1B visa quota Quartz
Boeing 737 MAX
Boeing’s Software Fix For The 737 MAX Problem Overwhelms The Plane’s Computer Moon of Alabama. Yikes!!!!
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
NSA improperly collected US phone call data after saying problem was fixed USA Today
Amazon Is Watching OneZero
A Major Police Body Cam Company Just Banned Facial Recognition NYT
Health Care
Health Insurance Coverage Eight Years After the ACA The Commonwealth Fund. Via: “[O]nly 55% had comprehensive health coverage year-round.”
WaPo Doesn’t Want Voters to Know Medicare for All Will Cut Their Health Costs FAIR
2020
Lichtman: Trump Will Win In 2020 “Unless Democrats Grow A Spine And Do Their Constitutional Duty” To Impeach RealClearPolitics
More than 15 million viewers tuned into the first Democratic debate of the 2020 race CNN
The First Democratic Debate Shuns Donald Trump in Favor of Substance The New Yorker
Joe Biden’s Haunted Legacy in Iraq The Atlantic
Called to serve: How this small North Carolina town became #1 in military recruiting McClatchy
Imperial Collapse Watch
America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce, The American Conservative (CG).
Parkinson’s Disease-Causing Protein Hijacks Gut-Brain Axis Psychology Today
Signs of ‘Hidden Consciousness’ May Predict Who Will Emerge from a Coma LiveScience
Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed? The Gradient
Antidote du Jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
268 comments
Comments are closed.
“Officer traveling with Brazilian president Bolsonaro caught with 39 kilos of cocaine”
That’s a lot of cocaine for the G20 participants & staff. Must be the Trump effect of having to deal with him and all his crap. The G20 before Trump became President, they only needed to bring in 19 kilos of cocaine for everybody.
The barter of Seville?
I’ve never tried cocaine, as I was lucky enough to watch somebody else’s life crumble as a cautionary tale of whoa.
This fellow was 10 years older than me and made bank in the Hunt brothers argent provocateur tour in 79-80′, and circa 1982 he had $250k in the bank, a thriving business, a beautiful wife, and a Ferrari 308 like Magnum P.I.
Fast forward 18 months, no money in the bank, business gone along with his wife, and his ride was now a Pinto hatchback with mag wheels…
A Cinderella story, updated a bit.
one man’s misfortune is another’s good luck–nice sensibility ya got there
Napoleon Bonaparte once said that men had to learn from their mistakes. He then went on to say that the reason why he was so successful was because he learned from other men’s mistakes instead of having to make those same mistakes himself first.
this is obvious. it’s the smug formulation using the word “lucky” that anyone who has ever had a loved one struggle with addiction might find, as I did, offensive.
Most people never learn from others’ mistakes. They have to find out for themselves because they’re so much smarter.
Hell most people never learn from their own mistakes either. Disclaimer: I’ve been in recovery for 10 yrs now and do counseling on the side.
Too, too funny… did he learn from other men’s mistakes before or after he invaded Russia and got his large hat handed to him?
I believe that his first words upon returning to Paris were “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time”. There is no truth to the rumours, however, that before he went he said “Hold my wine and watch this!”
Of one particular mistake of men who went before him he learnt not, and from this he died.
Usually the tuition fee is waived, when learning from others mistakes.
I remember being in his store when he stormed out high as a kite with his wife pleading with me not to look out into the parking lot, as he’d burn rubber if attention were paid to him in such a fashion. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself, and as per the times it wasn’t just losing part of your nose in doing too much, it was the whole enchilada being snorted away.
Huge Coke and Crack head here (5 years sober)
Cocaines a helluva drug.
I got into coke as a young man in my early 20’s. Absolutely loved it. Fortunately, I didn’t have enough money to get a decent addiction going. Through myself into hard work all day, and a couple of beers after work. Thank God for the poverty of youth.
Oh yes, we come back Wall Street circa 1985. Now we know where all the brillant ideas come from.
Will Trump call Bolsonaro a “bad hombre”?
That would doubly annoy Brazilians as ‘hombre’ is Spanish, not Portuguese (‘homem’).
As Michael Ruppert was so fond of saying, “The CIA (cocaine import agency) is Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA.”
Iran-Contra? Sell drugs to finance (off the ledger) regime change?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
Maybe, he just wants them to meet his little friend? I’m guessing, that’ll be sufficient to get them to sit upright at the table. But, with Trump’s reelection, now in the bag, I’m thinking our celestial reptilian overlords need pineal glands and fresh virgin blood to sate their creative class minions.
https://fair.org/home/nyt-presents-social-security-cuts-as-solution-to-problem-of-social-security-cuts/
It was not the first time a brasilian military has been caugth trafficking drugs in this way to europe. Just that blame cannot be assigned to Bolsonaro. Looks like some brasilian military men discovered some time ago this way to make some extra money.
So hes a.pack.mule.
I wonder if his calves were as large as cantaloupes.
You think? It seems to me a G20 meeting without Trump would be a real snoozer. So the quantity of cocaine pre-Trump would be higher than with Trump just to keep people awake. SInce with Trump 39 kilos are required, my estimate for the pre-Trump meetings is 78 kilos!!
My previous comment had to do with the Rev Kev’s comment at 7:12 that pre-Trump meetings required less cocaine than today.
Just how many lines can ’20’ playas* do, anyway ?? .. ‘;]
*… well maybe 18 .. if one discounts both Putin & Xi …
Ok, so The G20 are short Blow, who’s arranging the Hookers?
I think the point here is that it’s more illustration that Bolsonaro is a crook and a thug and Lula is the world’s foremost political prisoner. That cannot be emphasized enough.
I eat that much cocaine for breakfast. Needs plenty of sodium bicarbonate, though, to counter acid reflux. Burp!
Real fascists use meth. Coke is for fake fascists.
s/ That’s why ‘heads’ call the home brew method of ‘cooking’ methamphetamine the NAZI method. /s (It really is a NAZI method.)
Meth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substituted_amphetamines
A History of Meth in the Heartland, sort of: https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2017/05/27/man-who-reinvented-meth/330877001/
Maybe he is financing his car company.
Say what you will about the dire Fox News, Tucker Carlson is almost alone in the MSM in giving Tulsi Gabbard air time to discuss her anti-endless war policies. He is very respectful and doesn’t interrupt her, and congratulates her on standing up to the neocons. In contrast, the warmongering networks CNN and MSNBC go out of their way to silence her. This is a great interview after the first debate (6 mins).
Tulsi Gabbard sounds off on ‘clear bias’ during her debate
The comments are astounding. A few samples:
Let’s hope she makes it into the next round where she can stand out further.
Separately, the debate last night was completely rigged. Poor Yang was almost ignored whilst Swalwell (who he? — Ed) and others polling lower than he does got much more time.
the right wing (excuse me, centrist) democrat blogs hate her for the most part, too, along with most of their commentariat.
I made the mistake of glancing at Daily Kos yesterday. They seem to detest Tulsi almost as much as Trump. Meanwhile paleo-conservative suggests that Trump replace Bolton with Gabbard. The world turned upside down.
But we should know by now the warmongers, the MIC, the MSM, neocons, neoliberals, and lobbyists for the Saudis and Israel don’t want the public to hear an authentic antiwar, anti-imperialist voice.
Why do I keep thinking about the Vietnam War so much?
(clue: it was the Democrats’ war.)
Pat Buchanan has a column out this morning praising her and blasting Trump for not keeping his promises re nonintervention. NBC/MSNBC is where anchors get a thrill down the leg from flightsuits or think cruise missiles are beautiful so hardly surprising that they don’t like her. But then antiwar candidates have never had easy going as seen by the struggles of McGovern, anoher war veteran who knew the truth about the thing the airhead media types think is so thrilling.
McGovern was wounded by the Eagleton debacle as much as by anything. It made him come off as an amateur or incompetant. When you’re advocating a not-even-all-that-radical course it’s probably fatal to give the appearance of not knowing what you’re doing. That said, the Nixon landslide was another indication that the US is a war mongering, heartless nation.
But Nixon did end the war.
If I’m reading you right you forgot the “/sarc”.
No, he did. Dems started it, a Repub got us out. Under duress, granted.
I was @ an L.A. Kings hockey game with my dad the night the Paris Peace Accord was signed, and back in those days the Kings lacked pawns, and maybe 4,625 of us filled the cavernous Fabulous Forum that held 16,005 in theory.
When it was announced over the PA in the aftermath of an icing stoppage of play, the place erupted where one could have been excused thinking we’d won the Stanley Cup, there was such a joyous ruckus. Play resumed after a few minutes of celebration.
Nixon campaigned on ending the war….and then, I kid you not, seeing the movie Patton led him to expand it instead (due to being in airport, I lack time to run down the timetable but I think it was the bombing of Cambodia), which considerably delayed the US exit.
The cruel irony is that, while he campaigned on ending the war (i.e., a secret plan), he also sent emissaries to scuttle peace talks in Paris in 1968. Plus he bombed Laos, too, so much so that to this day, a part of the country is off-limits because of all the un-exploded ordnance.
Henry Kissinger
You aren’t kidding, pretzelattack. The only mainstream media exposure I get is usually second-hand through NC or from commentary on progressive-leaning YT channels or writers like Caitlin Johnstone, so it wasn’t clear to me just how visceral the corporatist left’s hatred of Gabbard really is. There is clearly a determined effort underway to stop Gabbard in any way possible. Her anti-interventionism scares the establishment more than anyone on that list, even Sanders. Because she speaks from experience and from compassion, which someone like Tim Ryan cannot.
Related anecdote:
I was on the phone with my brother about a month ago. He was excited to report that he was going to a Pete BootyJudge rally that weekend in his home town in western MA. When I expressed my skepticism at Mayor Pete’s progressive cred, my sibling told me he personally rated him among his ‘top four’ primary candidates, but made sure to emphasize that he backed ‘anybody but Gabbard.’ ‘Why not Gabbard?’ I asked, expecting to hear ‘something something hated gays something something Hindu Nationalism’ but instead he sputtered and proclaimed ‘she’s a conspiracy theorist!’
Expressing to him that I’d heard a lot of accusations leveled at Gabbard but that this was the first time I’d heard that particular pejorative attached to her, I asked him to back his claim. He stuttered and had to actually go online to look up a story from Politico or Daily Beast or some other Clinton Foundation mouthpiece stating that she was questioning the claims that Assad gassed his own people which was, like, so obvious to anyone who isn’t a complete and total Assad apologist or conspiracy theorist.
I realized he was getting his latest bullet points from the MSM who was now dumping on her for questioning the OPCW’s report which had just come under scrutiny with the unveiling of the conveniently omitted engineer’s assessment which states quite clearly that the ‘gas bombs’ weren’t dropped from the sky but, rather, placed where they were found. How disheartening it was to realize my brother is just an understudy for Bari Weiss.
This is where the deprogramming takes some time.
Fire off the quick list of ‘false flag’ incidents used in the last 100 years of American histroy to manufacture consent for war. Explain to him how the government always lies when it wants to start a war. Every single time!!! Jimmy Dore’s got good coverage of how they do it. All the paid defense industry hacks on MSDNC are deeply disingenuous.
Start by sowing doubt. The problem is he trusts the government and the media. Work to undermine that trust.
I would love to see a list like that. Has anyone compiled one (with good references) and made it accessible on the internet?
Here’s a good starting point — reposted, I believe, at NC not long ago:
https://washingtonsblog.com/2019/06/read-this-before-cheering-the-next-war.html
Hi Turtle,
This one’s got 88:
https://washingtonsblog.com/2019/06/read-this-before-cheering-the-next-war.html
You’re wise to stay away from such sources of (mid)information.
The vitriol for Gabbard on the #resistence left is insane. Matched only by their hatred for Assange, Greenwald, Sarandon, and Nader. Hell, a few weeks ago there was a flare up of hate for Chomsky. Basically, anyone who pokes their bubble is the enemy.
It’s quite depressing.
It helps illustrate how Tulsi running is so important. Expose how media blackouts smearing works.
Also, every person media just hates on….makes them look less credible and more like just plane haters.
I’m waiting for them to turn on Warren. The more candidates in the field that they deem ‘unacceptable’, the better! I think that’s part of the reason for the flood of candidates. They want to drown out the ones they hate.
The comments on libertarian sites/videos are positive for Tulsi, done with Trump. Then there is the Joe Rogan video where Bari Weiss made a fool of herself trying to call Tulsi an Assad toadie, antisemite, here is the Dore take. If you watch the whole 3 hr interview you may feel ill afterwards. Clearly this girl only has this job due to nepotism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS-sxJFn6O0
That was a classic! Weiss accused Tulsi of being a “toadie”:
ROGAN: “Toadie”? What does that mean?
WEISS: Er um mumble mumble look it up on Google…
Kudos to Jimmy Dore for covering all this stuff so well.
#smugnorant
Great stuff!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss
“When writer Andrew Sullivan described her as an “unhinged Zionist”, she responded saying she “happily plead[s] guilty as charged.”[21] ”
Color me surprised.
So, making a distinction between party and media (both R and D are all about big military budgets), it is the (neo)liberal MSM rather than the conservative MSM that is the booster for war?
Andrew Basevich is a Republican too.
More like the NeoCON MSM (it’s bipartisan!)
This is a ploy by the right wingers. Don’t be fooled. I trust Tucker as much as I trust Nancy Pelosi.
Swalwell reminds me of the stoner from Workaholics. He seemed to be working with Biden…
“… the abolitionists, though a minority, won.” Sorry, but since when?
Since December 1865.
Just because Lee surrendered at Appotomax didn’t mean the South surrendered. Look around you.
That is the date of the passage of the 14th Amendment. Which formally ended human chattel slavery, except for felons, naturally, in America.
The South didn’t fully surrender, of course. who ever does? Then, up North, we had the Copperheads, who concocted Reconstruction to ‘punish’ the South.
Bad actors all around.
Sherman’s March to the Sea was pretty definitive for most of us
The largest tree in the world is named the General Sherman Tree, but was originally named the Karl Marx Tree, by a utopian socialist community here in the 1880’s.
Now, that would’ve been an awkward name in the midst of the Cold War, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaweah_Colony
I guess I was keying off of all the MSM stories about how “Harris schooled Biden about busing.” Busing was the Republican plan. Remember the Burger court, with Rehnquist and Lewis Friggan Powell, Jr.? Thurgood Marshall and William O Douglas dissented from the busing decision.
After watching last night’s debate, I believe I finally understand the depth of the Clintonites’ hatred for Bernie Sanders. Bernie is our Amos, our Micah, our Jeremiah, proclaiming that we have one last chance before obliteration. (His closing especially sounded this note.) Implicit in this message, and sometimes made explicit by Sanders, is the indictment against the leadership we’ve “enjoyed” the last 40 years or so. Thus the finger points (one of the Clintonites’ go-to complaints about Bernie) at Bill and Hillary for their role in bringing us to brink today. They feel shamed by Bernie’s message, and they hate him for it.
One other note: if Pete can’t handle a police department in the metropolis of South Bend, maybe he should get better at that job first. Then maybe he could run for governor of Indiana and see how that goes before he tries becoming President.
On a related note, remember last night when Harris raised her hand in support of abolishing private health insurance in favor of medicare for all? I do and I was pleasantly surprised.
She has this morning announced that she is actually in favor of keeping private insurance and that her response last night was misunderstood and meant to be a statement only as to what she would do personally with her own policies. And the msnbc crew gave her a complete pass.
this is despicable
The problem with watching debates: it’s not about what they say, it’s about what they end up doing.
Debates are like watching sales pitches.
Difficult to believe, that there’re STILL no open-source apps to help with this? I’m sure 3rd Party spook/ rent-a-thug agencies have algorithms that sample, synthesize and evaluate: voice, breathing, eye movements, quadruple takes, side-eye, shade, sniffs, bad vaudville and minstrel show gesticulations? Peh!
I used to have a guru, afflicted with Global Developmental Delay Syndrome. He’d asses my veracity, flawlessly; far quicker than “real time,” stop biting my skull and laugh, such that I actually became aware of my own bullshit (temporarily, sorta?) Granted, he’d quite a bit of attention issues, so proved fairly useless judging talking heads on TV. But, I’m pretty sure champion BS alarms can be modled, coded into TVs & phones.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2019/06/27/exit-strategies-2/
I think they’re more like watching salesmen audition for a job. Joe employs his favorite technique of using his family tragedies and his tales from youth to make himself believable and trustworthy as he betrays you over and over. Kamala used the same technique against Joe last night to great effect. Hickenlooper and Bennet use the “adult in the room” approach to try shaming us into backing off our demands.
They also must show their ability to use tactical retreat to delay and confuse the public. Even the ConservaDems were happy to voice platitudes last night: “medical care is a right not a privilege.” Great. I’ll tell my doctor that the next time he wants to be paid. Then there’s the incrementalists like Gillibrand and her public option. They’re competing on their ability to get the American people to demand less, to wait for change, to accept that a better world is not possible.
Bernie is not auditioning for the job of selling Americans more of Pelosi’s [family blogging] sandwiches. “Things suck. You’re right to be mad. Join a political revolution.” That’s not the message the elites are interested in having disseminated.
Here Here!
Im a Radical Worker thanks to Bernie 2016.
Except for Sanders and Tulsi this debatig bunch are snake oil salesmen on mid night TV.
Are they all snorting clintonite . . . i mean coke , before they go one ?
In some attic, there is a picture of Harris that turns more and more into Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Bill continues living the Wilde Life.
In some battered alleyway is a big box of crappy plastic shades and two guys fighting, cause the one’s terrified of what he might see through them.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/28/kamala-harris-is-an-oligarchs-wet-dream/
Kudos for the “They Live!” reference.
I don’t figure anybody could fit one of those lenses over the tiny CX350, or whatever they were using, for the handheld shots of the two disgusting lizard modirators, so we could SEE the candidates, as they zoomed out, OBEY! SLEEP!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6v34Curh5d4
M4A as defined in the Jayapal and Sanders bills is better than what Congress gets (72% employer-subsidized gold plan).
Her plan is waay better than Sanders’ plan which is a complicated version of Obamacare.
So she ‘misarticulated’ ….
Who couldanode !!
Kamala makes cobras seem lovable.
COBRA’s are lovable, if you’re a 10%er.
*Hoocoodanode
That is unsurprising. Harris really had an air about her last night.
Maybe she knows something we don’t?
despair
Who could’ve predicted Kamala would flip flop on such a fundamental issue? Oh, sorry, “misunderstood”.
Mayor Pete ran for state treasurer and won 37.5% of the vote. If these trends continue, he will say hello in Norwegian.
Buttigeeg ran for state treasurer a few years ago and got murdered; his vote percentage made Santorum’s last desperate run for Senate look respectable by comparison. He probably has no realistic path forward.
He’s playing for 2024 or a VP spot.
I don’t understand why so many thought Pete did well last night. I’m with you. If he can’t stand up to his local police department’s corruption, hows he going to stand up to the corruption that wields pressure on the presidency?
Re: military recruitment…
Last weekend we went to the marine barracks in DC for their summer drill series. Before the show the young marines chat with the spectators. The marine talking to us was a young man from Idaho and it turned out his aunt and uncle were sitting in front of us. We chatted with them and at one point she mentioned that this young marine’s dream is to be part of the vanguard expeditionary force that goes in to Iran…
You should always be careful what you wish for…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NAOvmrWEPg
Read this too.
https://www.amazon.com/assault-Allen-R-Matthews/dp/0396078745/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1561724548&sr=1-9
Try this one.
https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/the-assault/author/allen-r-matthews/
I’d suggest the Idahoans all read The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer.
My reply to this was written by Wilfred Owen: “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
Kids get these stupid ideas from a culture that glorifies violence so the empire doesn’t run out of cannon fodder. The cynical old men who profit should be out in front but sadly they remain safe in their counting rooms.
One of the best anti-war ballads i’m aware of, Gordon Lightfoot’s The Lost Children
Down the hall their voices ring, their feet are on the run
Phantoms on the winter sky, together they do come
Faded lips and eyes of blue, they’re carried in the wind
Their laughter filled the countryside but they’ll not laugh again
All the games are ended now, their voices have been stilled
Their fathers built the tools of war by which they all were killed
Their mothers made the uniforms, showing which side they were on
And the young boys were the middle men for the guns to prey upon
You’ve seen the fires in the night, watched the Devil as he smiles
You’ve heard a mother’s mournful cry as she searches for her child
You’ve seen the lines of refugees, the faces of despair
And wondered at the wise men who never seem to care
Goodbye, you lost children, God speed you on your way
Your little beds are empty now, your toys are put away
Your mother sings a lullaby as she gazes at the floor
Your father builds more weapons and marches out once more
Down the hall their voices ring, their feet are on the run
Phantoms on the winter sky, together they do come
Faded lips and eyes of blue, they’re carried in the wind
Their laughter filled the countryside but they’ll not laugh again
Thanks Stephen Gardner and Wukchumni. Read Owen’s antiwar poetry in high school, in history, not English–had a really cool history teacher. Saw Lightfoot many times in Toronto in the mid 1960s; lived right beside Yorkville at the time. Both are in stark contrast to the war propaganda piece, “In Flanders Field”, celebrated at our Remembrance Day, November 11. (But it was written by a Canadian doctor!!)…yadayada.
I’d add Protocol as well although both are outstanding. [With lyrics: Protocol]
s/An Old Seadog from a long line of them.
Would the young marine be so eager if he knew a US monopoly defense contractor sold defective gun sights and Chinese counterfeit displays to the US military?
Like TransDigm, this isn’t L3’s first brush with trouble. It was temporarily suspended from U.S. government contracting for using “extremely sensitive and classified information” from a government system to help its international business interests. It was the subject of a scathing Senate Armed Services Committee investigation for failing to notify the Defense Department that it supplied faulty Chinese counterfeit parts for some of its aircraft displays. And it agreed to pay a $25.6 million settlement to the U.S. government for knowingly providing defective weapon sights for years to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. (my emphasis)
From the linked article “America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military”.
probably run 1st chance he gets
Heres to hoping they show him the video of the sniper shooting marine after marine trying to rescue the 1st marine the sniper wounds, using him as a lure.
The MoA link misdirects. The correct link is below.
A two-fer not to be missed!
Bernhard (the blogger known as “b”) outdoes his usual high-quality Moon of Alabama today with two outstanding posts:
A technically knowledgeable review of the 737 MAX state of play, including interesting comments for the technically-minded.
Short but interesting contrast of citizen reaction vs. MSM reaction to Tulsi Gabbard in the first debate.
MoA link for 737 MAX problem
https://www.moonofalabama.org/
Fixed, thanks!
In The New Yorker, Cassidy covers the first “debate” without mentioning either Gabbard or Ryan–and their exchange generated actual sparks. Classy, Cassidy!
True to form, the Guardian today seems somehow to have overlooked that Sanders was in the debate (except for one passing comment that he was the oldest).
The “headline” in the Yahoo online “News Feed,” goes; “Debate question backs Bernie Sanders into a corner.” The infotainment version of a “push poll.”
Bernie had better wake up fast. The outlines of the ‘Second Anti Sanders War’ are plain for all to see now.
I couldn’t believe how pushy Maddow was to Bernie. She sounded like a senior caretaker when addressing Biden. They coddled Biden all night. I felt embarrassed for Biden. He really needs to retire from public life.
Biden seems a bit over-medicated, or something. Not quite present.
did kamala get ANY tough gotcha questions?
Bernie did (“so .. what do you say about the fact you are white man? what are you gonna do about that?”), Biden did, Frakenlooper did (and good).
It all looked very scripted to me. Even the Harris-Biden dust-up looked and sounded scripted to me.
Like so much of any television programming, there is a scripted element. From talking head newsreaders to phony reality shows to product placement news segments, where to start? Where have you gone, Edward R. Murrow and company, along with Joe DiMaggio?
The medium practically cries out:
“Scripted! Prove me wrong”!
Deadline.com mentions only Harris and Biden.
MSM ignores Bernie at their own risk.
Here is the correct link for the MoA article: Boeing’s Software Fix For The 737 MAX Problem Overwhelms The Plane’s Computer
If MoA is right, that’s one hell of a ‘yikes!’. I’d love to hear from some of our computer experts here if he’s right. If he is, the entire FCC system for the 737’s would have to be redesigned from scratch – that would take years.
Basically, the answer is how much is the CPU embedded in the system, i.e. how much PCB changes would be needed. Which is not clear. Of course, therein is the real answer – if a PCB change was needed (implied by the “no off the shelf solution available”), then it’s a massive change either way. Because even if you have a well designed self-contained subsystem, replacing it with a new subsystem is really going to be a problem.
I _think_ Airbus has it a bit better (but I may be confused here, so read with a massive dose of salt), as it has the systems in triplicate, but they are designed to be different from scratch. So, in theory, to upgrade, you could just upgrade one of the three systems, and if it works as expected over a period of time (remember, you have triplicate, so even if it has failures, you’re almost certainly ok as you can switch to one of the tested-and-tried backups), you upgrade another one etc.. So basically, you can always remove the least-up-to-date one and keep flying.
To be fair to the programmers, it appears these guys are working with some sort of “classic” 16 bit architecture. Using 80286 CPUs and associated interrupt driven hardware means a lot of current programming paradigms and current hardware are out the window. The fact that it also appears that, for some hard to imagine reason, each of the two CPUs are running code written by different programmers means that testing and validating these things must be amazingly tricky. Short of designing custom hardware, which they might have done, these two CPUs are probably using floppies and 80 MB IDE drives puts them in that place I was in the early 80s. These things could top out with 16 MB of addressable RAM. Wiley users would install RAM cards and use them as a cache to reduce IO latency because those IDEs were dog slow.
The 80386 came out in 1985 and had faster clock rates – from 12MHz to 40 MHz – and 32 bit addressing.
So we’re talking about stuff that is more powerful than your cell phone – if it’s a burner.
I like the fact that they are running different software on each CPU, provides extra redundancy as the failure points should be different. For example, it doesn’t matter that there are 4 redundant CPU’s if they all fail at the same time due to the same software error (bug). With 4 different codes, it is very unlikely that all 4 will fail at the same time as it is unlikely that 4 different programmers would program the same bug into their code.
Obviously when producing a $100 million dollar airplane Boeing could afford to use modern processors. They probably have stuck with these vintage devices because they have a track record and are considered reliable (as “B” concedes)–at least up to now. I think I would want to see some follow up before jumping to conclusions about this.
Also, to be fair to the programmers, this code is probably written in Assembler code and not a higher level language, which also explains the time that will be involved.
But I never really understood the reasoning behind using processors that are common in things like washing machines, refrigerators and “burners”…other than cost.
I briefly worked on a project as a contractor at a BAE plant (totally unrelated to flight systems) around 2006/07. A contractor sitting next to me was on a 6 month project converting 8 bit assembler code to 16 bit assembler code for part of one of our military transport plane’s flight system. The x86_64 chips had been out for quite some time at this point. He was almost two years into this “Six Month Project”.
I have never understood why a lot of these types of projects seem to revel in using 10 to 20 year old slow and inefficient technology compared to more recent and faster, more efficient building blocks. Other than known vs unknown potential bugs in the hardware, it never made much sense to me.
Car computers from that era (when cars started using computers to manage emissions and fuel injection) undoubtedly used those processors. Likely that what a car computer or an airplane FMC does is a lot less complicated than what a cell phone does. There’s not a lot of number crunching involved in responding to sensors.
It wasn’t until ARM came in that you had a cheap, reliable and, crucially, low power CPU. 286 is IIRC one of the last processors that can draw as little as 2W (AMD version), from 486 onwards we’re talking 100+W. Which means a lot to an appliance, especially since the Intel processors were really good at emitting a lof of that power into surrounding space as heat. I can’t remember whether the original Pentium was the last Intel processor that could (just) live w/o active cooling..
Which is a real design bummer, especially in small enclosed spaces.
There is something slightly surreal about server rooms, with so many red or other-colored (OMG, what does that one mean?) lights on the friendlier front side of the racks and ungodly temps on the hot aisle in back. If the dedicated A/C unit fails, alarms summon the hapless to the sauna for some low-quality time.
Do that a few times and try to get management to understand why the baked equipment won’t meet its mean-time-to-failure, necessitating some emergency budgeting when the literal and figurative lights go out.
ARM was around at the same time as the 80286.
Apple has been using ARM chips since way back when they developed the Newton.
In 2011-12, we were using unix software from 97/98 on our portable radar, the ATNAVICS…
Like the teachers told me, if it aint broke, dont fix it.
A modern Intel x86 or compatible CPU should be able to run the old 286 software that’s being used on the 737. Theoretically, Boeing could replace replace the 286s with newish Core processors (maybe the mobile version to reduce power and heat) and still run the old code. (Of course, this would involve a major hardware redesign.) There might be timing issues that would have to be resolved due to the much faster execution, but if the programmers were smart, they didn’t try to do timing loops in software, but relied on timer chips instead.
The physical CPU and supporting electronics are very different. You can’t take out 286 and put in 386 (for one, say address pins on 386 are on one side and data pins on the other, on 286 they are on the same side, because 386 has actually 32 A pins vs 24 in 286, 32 D pins vs 16 in 286 etc. Even 386SX has different pin layout).
A more likely solution would be actually to take somethign like one of the ARM processors, build a 286 HW emulator and drop it into the PCB. It’s still a pretty complex solution, but at least in theory is perfectly machine testable. You’re still introducing possible HW failure points (extra PCB, memory failures etc. etc.)
But even if that works out, you may still have a problem. It was not uncommon in those days, especially for assembly written programs, to use various side-effects, which may or may not be replicable, especially if they depend on timing. Personally, I’d be loath to fly on anything that would have it and wasn’t tested for years or have at least two backups with existing technology.
From the article, it is clear that this is a latency problem, which is not the same as a throughput problem:
In the test, the F.A.A. pilot encountered delays in executing a crucial step required to stabilize an aircraft.
The software is ’embedded’ real time software. It is not uncommon for real time software to run on very modest hardware, since processing requirements of responding to sensors and driving actuators is not necessarily processing intensive. But real time demands can be absolutely stringent, and so the problem is a scheduling issue. If the processor is busy with some detailed calculation when an input becomes active and must be serviced, the software must have some strategy to ensure that the deadlines are met. In the general case, scheduling multiple software functions so that they all achieve real time response requirements is a very tough challenge, and very difficult to prove that timing deadlines are met under all circumstances.
Replacing the hardware with faster does not necessarily solve the problem. In the industry there is a saying that “Real fast is not real time”.
It is striking how the real news is now picked out the Ethernet by a handful of blogs. Boeing intentionally used type certification to cut costs. The two crashes exposed that the trim management system with MCAS is flight critical. No more grandfather clause. The choices are 1) let them fly with no hardware changes and software patches, 2) require, in addition, pilot simulator training on how to avoid a stall on taking off with a 737 MAX and few simulated crashes to get a feel for the time frames and limitations, or 3) demand a modern triple redundant flight control system which will take years to design, install and certify. The degree of control of Boeing has over politicians will determine which option is chosen by the various global regulatory agencies. The US federal government likely will have to pay to keep Boeing going if not flying next year. Excess Max(s) are now stored in the employee parking lots at the Renton, WA plant.
I think this is a crucial issue – one reason why there is so much confusion about the health impacts of food is that there is likely to be far more variability among individuals in response to foods than is assumed in studies. This makes interpreting population level studies even more complicated and contentious than it already is. I think for anyone interested in their health the only way to know is to experiment on yourself (i.e. try different diets and see how you feel). That’s imperfect of course, but it may be the only sensible approach for anyone worried about their health.
As the article suggests, the only sensible rule really is quite simple:
All else is conjecture.
Hmmmm… occurs to me, we’d just been discussing oats (along with wheat, barley, rye, potatoes, chickpeas, peanuts, sorghum… just recently?) Something to do with facilitating harvest. “Researchers” promoting processed carbs over sane balances of fats, Ractopamine flavored “lean” meats, pomegranate juice tree nuts and herbicide resistant monoculture… everything (fried in GE rapeseed oil) had agenda, the media forgot to mention, in their pontificating, click-bait infomercials?
Most health studies are garbage because the signal (change in health due to the factor measured) is much lower than the noise (change in health due to all the other factors, most of which are not controlled). Inability to control the test environment (genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors) invalidates pretty much all of this science as the results are mostly random correlations.
ten plus years on, my sister in law still makes my brother buy crustless bread…some statistical wunderstudy found a correlation between the stuff that makes things golden brown and cancer.
that “finding” wasn’t a finding of the study, of course…just what some yellow journalist thought would generate clicks, and it was viral in her faceborg environment.
sad, really.
she won’t allow any of them to get flu shots, either.
so we go full quarantine mode when they come up for thanksgiving(bandanas, like highwaymen…excessive washing of hands…no hugs, dammit.)
flu almost killed my mom several years ago.
The flu shot this year proved ineffectual against this year’s flu. Happened a couple of years ago, too. I don’t get flu shots, either, and I’m old. I’ve survived flu a number of times.
we’ve had much luck with it(post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all)
get it every year.
i insist my bunch get it too.
science is real.
dig:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhdRcikIrM
One of my pet peeves about doctors is that they act as if the distribution of every health parameter is a Dirac delta distribution. There is a lot of variance in most health-related parameters but you would never know it from talking to doctors. Stephen J Gould wrote a great essay about the perils of misinterpretation of medical statistics: “The Median is the Message”. Look it up and read it. It’s really a must read.
“The Median Isn’t the Message”
thanks for this, monty. for decades, i used to rush to read stephen j. gould’s monthly column in “natural history” magazine, and always came away a better person, whether through his accessible elucidation or his gentle wit. i am glad he is not forgotten
a lot of scientists uses statistics, few understand it. As a result, most of them misinterpret the data in some way (sometimes it turns out to be irrelevant, sometimes now).
There’s few things in the scientific world where “when you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail” ring so true than linear regression (and variants of thereof).
Yes, this is why research based on reported food consumption is basically useless. Remember that the next time you read screaming headlines about how Red Meat Will Kill You. In addition the actual variations in health outcomes (as opposed to the relative percentages) are often tiny enough to be noise, not signal. On the other hand I’m not surprised that oatmeal caused a huge glucose spike for the author because it basically does that in everybody, for reasons which are now quite well understood.
> What he found shocked him: Oatmeal was spiking his glucose to potentially dangerous levels, but bratwurst was rated as an A-plus food for him.
It wasn’t clear to me but this guy is some kind of nutrition expert and he is shocked that processed grain spikes glucose?
Fooey!
The best articles I have ever seen on the internet in regard to nutrition were written by a person who is firstly a cryonics kook.
Interventive Gerontology 1.0.02: First, Try to Make it to the Mean: Diet as a life extending tool, Part 1. Mike Darwin, Chronosphere, April 18, 2001.
The other parts are also excellent. The only well-known diet he whole heart endorses is the 7th day adventist diet.
No he wasn’t a nutrition expert. He’s a cardiologist. Many people mistakenly assume doctors have some meaningful background in nutrition but the general rule is that med students get essentially no nutrition training.
Sadly, this does not stop them from dispensing advice to patients based on nothing more than the click-bait sensational stories generated by the hugely flawed epidemiological studies that pass as nutrition ‘science’.
Doctors are not only mis-informed about nutrition but often parrot myths about cholesterol. And cardiologists know little about holistic ways to bring down blood pressure such as losing weight, breathing exrcises, meditation etc. They blindly presciribe blood pressure medicines and only look at hypertension and not the root cause of it.
Their all-too-plausible excuse is that most people would rather take pills than change their diet or lifestyle. Of course, at this point it turns out many (most?) blood pressure pills are laced with carcinogens.
I DID change my diet, for a couple of years, and did get my blood sugar and cholesterol levels down to normal. And I get plenty of exercise gardening and hiking. But now I’ve backslid on the diet, so I really ought to get my numbers retested. Trouble, is, I don’t think Medicare will pay for it.
“plenty of fruits and vegetables” Yes to that, but why would one then voluntarily ingest pesticide residues that affect the endocrine system at parts per billion, GMOs that enable plants to be drenched in weedkiller they are genetically modified to resist, genes that modify one’s gut bacteria to do weird things, or various biocides designed to kill life?
Go organic, you’ll live longer, feel and look better as you eat food that is nutritionally denser, being grown in healthy mineral rich soil, thus which tastes better and satisfies, so less consumed and fewer empty calories. You’ll save more on avoided medical bills than you’ll ever spend on that higher quality food. IMHO.
Hot dog manufacturers and Monsanto trolls, feel free to cite studies debunking that, for fairness.
Going organic will only help to a point. Due to significant increases in atmospheric CO2 since the 1950s, there may be as much as 30% less nutritional value by weight in the produce we consume… less vitamins, minerals, etc. The rise in CO2 makes all plants grow bigger with more sugars. Rice crops for example have seen a nutritional decline across the board, drops in protein content, iron, zinc, and in all vitamins except for E. Even the protein in bee pollen has dropped by 1/3. This information is from results of studies collected in David Wallace-Well’s book “The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming”, which I think everyone on the planet needs to read.
I agree that most nutrition studies are useless. But most ask the wrong questions, so they get the wrong answers.
Be studying fat and sugar combined, then suggesting we eat less fat sounds to me as if the researcher has accepted money from the sugar industry. The sugar archive at UCSF has more of the answers industry learned about nutrition that companies have not shared with the public. When big tobacco decided to diversity after the tobacco legislation, what did they buy: processed food companies. Why?
Since google switches the addresses of links I have provided in the past, I no longer give them out, but 3w.sugarscience.com may work.
Becnel runs like a well oiled machine on Diet Coke, Weed, and Sausages.
Enjoy youth while you can.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/28/experience-i-lived-in-tree-for-two-years-activism-logging
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hanging out in a coastal Sequoia 130 feet up for a couple years is a bit much, my speed is more like sleeping overnight in a Giant Sequoia that had a wildfire penetrate the largely fireproof bark and get into the trunk of the tree, leaving a chamber anywhere from just big enough to sleep in and say 5 foot tall inside, or in the case of the Room Tree, enough space for 4 or 5 people to sleep in, with the conical ceiling inside being close to 20 feet high from the fuego. There’s one near Crescent Meadow called the Vagina Tree, as a conflagration entered without knocking say around 300 years ago, and the hole has since had the bark close in on it. A tight squeeze getting into the meat of the matter and sleeps 2 not all that comfortably, as there’s a slight tilt on the floor.
Sleeping within the bowels of a large Sequoia is quite a thrill, and of course you’re cognizant that if it were to suddenly topple over as is their habit, you’d expire along with it.
I’ve slept in close to 10 different Sequoias…
thank you for your service
Hmmm….. I detect the oceanic musk of a social meme ‘tipping’ point.
Or should that be, “tupping point?”
Giant Sequoias are eerily similar to giant corporations, as the too big to fails are top-heavy (management pulling down the big bickies) with a shallow root system (jobs outsourced) and a good many are crooked, it’s not uncommon to see a 15,000 cubic foot brobdingnagian leaning 10% from center.
Wukchumni,
Coastal redwood. Sequoia is its genus name.
>DNC Debate #2
From Fox News this morning – makes me think I live in an alternate, parallel universe.
Joe Biden — He successfully showed he could stand up under withering challenges and recite a list of his accomplishments. He was generally articulate, on point and unflappable.
Bernie Sanders — He generally repeated his attack on corporate America over and over again and it sounded a bit hollow.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-second-democratic-debate-kamala-harris-sanders-biden-warren-beto
Mark Penn?!?! This is a Clinton loyalist who was so bad at his job I’m entirely convinced his presence on the HRC 2008 campaign was sufficient enough to prevent her from swatting Obama like a fly.
Mark Penn, Donna Brazile, David Brock… is Maddow moderating the upcoming debates going to be over Rockefeller Center, orat Trump Tower?
https://www.citylab.com/newsletter-editions/2019/06/citylab-daily-scotus-rules-gerrymandering-punts-census-question/592726/?utm_source=feed
When a white haired gent in his 70’s continually stoops over as I watched him do last night, all it does is serve to age him in the minds of those predisposed to thinking he might be too old for the job and should be put out to posture.
wrong on Biden; sadly, right on Bernie. he needs to vary his Old Testament approach. While I personally may thrill to it (love me some Amos), it is to too many a turnoff, not an inspiration.
it surprises me that others here at NC don’t worry that he is shooting himself in the foot.
or maybe his goal is to raise consciousness, not get elected. certainly in that he succeeds in spades.
Spare me the sounds of your singing, I cannot abide the music of your lutes.
Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
(all I remember off the top of my head and I would have to check for the numbers)
And all because right off the bat Lester Holt laid down the trap : is he going to increase taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare For All?
I was dismayed at his answer because even if he’s got Stephanie Kelton on his campaign (or is she?), he still never seemed to get the insights of MMT.
“is he going to increase taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare For All?”
I don’t get why Bernie couldn’t just say,
“Yes, but far less than you pay every year for inadequate insurance”
To be fair to the senator here is a spliced transcript of their exchange :
Guthrie : “Will taxes go up for the middle class in the Sanders administration and if so how will you sell that to the voters?”
Senator Sanders : “At a time when we have 3 people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half, we think it is time for change, real change. By that I mean that health care, in my view, is a human right. We have got to pass a Medicare For All single payer system. Under that system, vast majority of people will be paying significantly less for health care than they are now.”
Guthrie : “Senator Sanders I will give you 10 seconds to answer this very direct question. Will you raise taxes for the middle class in a Sanders administration?”
Senator Sanders : “People who have health care under Medicare For All will have no premiums, no deductibles, no co-payments, no out of pockets. Yes they will pay more in taxes but less in health care for what they will get.”
Wishful thinking, but how about some scoring of pol proposals, for instance M4A, along the following lines:
Cost per year, and until some realistic sunset
Savings per year vs. current approach
Change in taxes for various filer types
Amount of non-paid expense, aka, crapification premium, e.g. for time on hold
Impact on economic growth, employment, wealth, etc
That may lead to wishful drinking, but could at least provide some ballpark figures to help rule in or out policies and politicians. If only there were some way to enforce a standard approach, heh.
The “debate” was a fast food food fight. Not the proper venue to raise an issue like MMT. Up against the MSM, Bernie needs to pick his battles. M4A and student debt are pretty clear winners.
I don’t know, but methinks it would have earned him points if he responded along the lines of “we’re going to pay for M4A in the same way we paid for the trillions and trillions we allocate to the MIC”.
Increased taxes on the middle class might or might not be necessary to stave off growing inflation once the social programs are in place – not a pay for – it is, for now, politically toxic both for the Wall Street Democrats and Trump voters.
I wish he would say that, too, but again, I cut him some slack: taking on the MIC is no easier than taking on the MSM. I’ve long felt that before we can transform Americans from social-darwinist killers into human beings, we’ve got to get them caring about one another’s health. M4A is hugely important, not just for the USA’s physical health but also for its mental health.
I have zero idea how Stephanie interacts with Senator Sanders on matters of monetary and fiscal policy.
If they have not done it already, I strongly suggest they should get into a one on one conference on how to smartly answer the pay for question which will undoubtedly be asked again in the upcoming debates.
I too will be voting for Bernie in both the primary and general elections so I would like to see him perform strongly in those Q & A fora.
“Old Testament approach”
You can almost hear Bernie deliver these lines from Amos 6:
Amos did not think it was cool to live it up while your fellow countrymen were suffering.
It’s a message we deserve to hear. The problem is that Bernie’s “call” may be like Isaiah’s:
Bernie is calling us to compassion and mutual aid, but will our hearts be hardened by his message?
Debate night 2 was extraordinarily weak and boring compared to the first night. Despite what foolish media clowns say, Harris was not a the top contender. She only managed to squeak out planned finger snapping, smug gotcha’s on a guy who can no longer tie his own shoes. To Biden’s credit, he was arguing from a state’s rights perspective which was much more strong of a position than Kamala’s virtue signaling, whining about being her school. She looked like an ugly, wretched, cutthroat opportunist.
That said, I thought Bernie performed the best on night 2, but that isn’t saying much in my view. Sanders is reciting the same, intangible, used and abused lines from 4 years ago. He still refuses to answer simple questions (which he needs to in order to prove his policy ideas are grounded). This was somewhat better, but hardly.
The wild card in all of this however was NBCs attempt to have everyone dog pile on Sanders right out o the gate with the second question (asked to Harris), phrased in a way to get people stabbing the beast. Instead she flat out said she agreed with him and her and Gillibrand spent most of the night stumping for him. So that was odd.
Yang failed to explain UBI convincingly then went straight to Russia BS. It was bad but when you have two air heads book-ending everyone else, he seemed not too bad. Pass the torch! Rule with Love!
You can tell she had rehearsed the food fight comment dozens of times by her body language.
Interesting that the New Yorker completely ignored Tulsi Gabbard in talking about the first debate. I think a lot of people did very well. Even my wife, who is a strong supporter of Warren, thought she did well. She just thinks Gabbard is is too young to be president.
Gabbard seems to be on the MSM’s ‘if you can’t say something negative, don’t say anything at all’ list. They tried to bad-mouth her with warmongering senator’s daughters calling her an Assad apologist to her face. Gabbard didn’t lose her cool, so they did their best to ignore her and hope she went away. Her supporters made sure she had enough ‘unique contributions’ to get on the debate stage in the first place (I’d love to know how many contributions John Hickenlooper managed to collect). Now that the debate is over they can go back to pretending that she wasn’t there at all.
Tim Ryan is still on the canvas looking for his mouthpiece
>Tulsi Gabbard
You may disagree with Pat Buchanan on a lot of items, but he is refreshingly on point sometimes.
Memo to Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi…By debate’s end, Gabbard was the runaway winner in both the Drudge Report and Washington Examiner polls and was far in front among all the Democratic candidates whose names were being searched on Google.
Though given less than seven minutes of speaking time in a two-hour debate, she could not have used that time more effectively. And her performance may shake up the Democratic race.
http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/memo-to-trump-trade-bolton-for-tulsi/
The people who fund the Democratic party are pro interventionists and so the candidates who are making a “serious” run think they have to be as well. Even Sanders is flaky on the matter although he’s hardly beholden to the billionaires.
Gabbard shows how little currency telling the truth has among our elites. They stick their fingers in their ears and cover their eyes.
I thought the folks in the first debate, as a group, did very well. So I’m not sure I would say Gabbard was the runaway winner.
Now that I have seen the second debate, I am a little nervous. It seemed like the entire group was terrified of failing some litmus test. Are you seriously saying that none of them would deport illegal immigrants from our country “unless they are criminals”? And this at the same time that every single one of them would include them in their various medical care for all plans.
One of them did say that they felt like you shouldn’t have to have a college degree to make a living. Didn’t say how that was going to happen, but it was a nice thought.
This has been known for some time – a doctor friend of mine called it ‘the cheesecake problem’. Sugar is bad for you and fats may or may not be bad for you. But mix them together and you have something utterly delicious, very addictive, and extremely unhealthy. The processed food industry has known this for years.
Its also the reason why so many studies on fats may be contradictory. The key issue is not the fat, but whether it is eaten with fibre (generally good) or with sugar (almost always bad).
Yes, if you put them together* .. along with an entire book’s-worth of a chemical ingredient list sandwiched in between … then yeah, damn right that’s gonna be unhealthy !
*in moderation, of course.
Scheisse! Now, I’ll have to take PATH, then a streetcar to get REAL Käsekuchen… City Diner just won’t do?
https://www.craftycookingmama.com/kasekuchen-quark-german-style-cheesecake/
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/fox-news-daily-show-talk-radio/
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bernie-versus-the-establishment
Is not the key health issue eating in excess ? (Compounded with lack of exercise and physical activity )
“Suger is almost always bad ” – is this a referral to processed sugar particulary, or inclusive of natural sugars in fruits etc. ?
“Carbon abolitionist” – made me think of Mbembe’s Necropolitics. That neoliberalism is an expression of, or embodiment of necropolitics.
re: “America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military” Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce, The American Conservative (CG).
Definitely in “Must Read” territory.
Still reading but this line should be tacked to the top of Bernie’s next speech. Be nice to see him challenge all the security state neoliberal cheerleaders on their own turf with this.
Tulsi Gabbard should take it up as well and start belling the financialization cat on national security grounds. Any NC reader who has inside contacts in her campaign please try to get her attention.
Autarky for president
Hear Hear!
I’ve just now found time to read it…and it looks damning, to me.
I kept thinking about all the millions of times I’ve been called “traitor” in my life…for being against the wars and the imperial adventures…
aren’t these “LBG’s”(“leveraged buyout guys”) traitors? Buying up and then destroying not just the “defense” industries…but Industry, in general?
and we’re left doing each others’ laundry and calling it an economy.
what Commies and Terrists and all manner of scary bogeymen were unable to accomplish, Wall Street managed to get done…and to applause and praise, to boot.
Thanks for link but you have an http on the end. This one works.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-monopoly-crisis-hits-the-military/
Stoller always worth a read.
BTW I now see that this one was up in Links. This is an excellent article and makes a comparison to the WW2 period when the Nazis tried to use intellectual property laws as part of their arsenal. One might speculate though that one reason there is so much complacency about outsourcing defense production to China is that the notion that the US is under threat from “adversaries” (military threat at least) is itself largely imaginary so why rock the boat when it comes to what the Defense Department is really all about–grifting.
So… Wealthy Americans sold out the country for massive personal gain over many decades. Now the game is over, and the withered husk of the country can’t compete, they want a do over?
The current “trade war’ negotiations must be like the casino scene from Albert Brooks’ “Lost in America”. “Mr. Xi has heart! Mr Xi has heart!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf2q0HemaFs
The Wealthy Americans who sold out the country for massive personal gain over many decades most definitely do not want a do-over. They are quite happy collecting their high rents acting as the gatekeeper for passing foreign production into our withering US markets. When only a dead husk remains they will jet away to some other place they can suck dry.
A do-over could shake them loose from their bite on the host. Stoller is arguing for a do-over to rebuild our country as a creator, inventor, and producer of goods. He is arguing for rebuilding the political economy of our country. He is for discarding the forty-plus years of Neoliberal Capitalism. He has framed his arguments in such way as to hide their radical, even revolutionary nature.
At one time the Defense grift had a trickle that went into production jobs, research and development, development of new technologies with significant ‘dual-use’. The race to the moon supported Defense interests but also inspired a generation of scientists and engineers and supported a lot of jobs, libraries, and created little side benefits like computer chips. Now grift lines the pockets of financial entities acting as extremely expensive middle-men firmly situated between DoD and the outsourced production. Defense spending doesn’t have the largest multiplier effect for stimulating the US economy. Now I suspect that multiplier is substantially smaller and many of the beneficial impacts are outsourced along with the production and the lion’s share of the jobs.
It is a little off-topic — what impact might a Green New Deal have? Is the industrial base supporting solar and wind energy so different from the industrial base supporting Dod? Dumping government spending into an economy constructed of financial middlemen who take a large bite from expenditures before purchasing outsourced production — which builds factories and growing employment far far away — appears less like a World War II mobilization and more like a grand opportunity for greater grift.
“First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government’s ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.”
“China has a near-complete monopoly on rare earth elements, and the U.S. military, according to U.S. government studies, is now 100 percent reliant upon China for the resources to produce its advanced weapon systems.”
I hear that a large % of the bullets used by American police forces are manufactured in China…
The old quip:
“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
should be updated …
“The Neoliberal Capitalists will finance and ship us the factories, and knowhow, and jobs to make the rope with which we will hang them.”
This famous quote kept occurring to me as I read the article. A perfect example of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism for a war-mongering society like ours. Unfortunately, far from the hangman’s noose, the most culpable will retire in luxury. Even if we all go down, they will likely be the last to go. Damn.
You know what the donkey show has none of?
Humor.
There was no funny business in the last couple nights, a perfect opening for a merry prankster President, but where art thou?
Maybe not exactly “humor” but I found Marianne Williamson entertaining. I hope she makes the next round of debates. She has an interesting accent, sort of a midwestern Katherine Hepburn. The moderators made her their last choice—so kind of rooting for the underdog. Also points for mentioning New Zealand.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/marianne-williamson-democratic-debate-bizarre-charm.html
I found her to kind of be Marianne Williamson Seagull in her first appearance in my life, and soon she’ll be set free from the race.
Yes, props for mentioning EnZed
there were a couple of Mitch McConnell zingers and Warren had a very funny moment the first night (long pause for effect, short answer but I don’t remember the subject–time for coffee!!)
This is long but it is todays must read I think.
America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce, The American Conservative
Thanks for posting and thanks to CG
Agreed.
Matt Stoller has a blog to which one can subscribe to get email notification of new posts.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
The posts contain links to his articles as well as to interesting articles elsewhere that pertain to his topics.
Thanks for that. Money quote:
China is becoming a significant shareholder in U.S. industries, and is selectively targeting those with strategic implications. Congresswoman Shea-Porter’s discovery that defense industry CEOs aren’t able to worry about national security because they “[have] to answer to shareholders” was disturbing enough. But the fact that it potentially translates as CEOs not being able to worry about national security because they have to answer to the Chinese should elevate the issue to the top of our national security discussion. This nexus of China, Wall Street, and our defense industrial base may be the answer to why our military advantage is ebbing. Even when American ingenuity can thrive, too often the fruits go to the Chinese.
In short, the financial industry, with its emphasis on short-term profit and monopoly, and its willingness to ignore national security for profit, has warped our very ability to defend ourselves.
Another whocoodanode moment……
+1.
Another good Matt Stoller today. I called it a blog earlier, but I should have called it his newsletter about the politics of monopoly. Today’s installment highlights a report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that tells how the government stopped enforcing the 1936 Robinson-Patman antiturst law (still on the books), which prevented large chains from using their concentrated buying power to get better prices from suppliers and disadvantage their competitors, because of a desire to see lower prices to combat inflation in the 1970s, and discusses the Brooke Group Supreme Court decision of 1993 that allowed predatory pricing. Matt also mentions the end of the Fair Trade laws in the 1970s. The time frame correlates with the growth of Walmart, which exploded in the 1970s, opened a store in every state by the 1990s, and now “governs” in large swaths of the country, choosing prices for consumers and suppliers and forcing offshoring to China.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/walmart-americas-food-government
Why Science Can Be So Indecisive About Nutrition
That’s a lot of words to use to admit that there are many interesting questions about nutrition that “Science” can’t answer. It doesn’t stop “scientists” and doctors spouting on the subject, though.
My own guess is that there is good evidence for broad-brush stuff e.g. the distinction between protein, fat, and carbohydrate is sound. There is also probably decent evidence for very detailed stuff: your need for vitamins and minerals, for instance, and maybe the wisdom of including some fibre in your diet.
At the level in between it’s mainly a mixture of superstition and salesmanship, as far as I can see, with crookedness thrown in.
Re: Health Insurance Coverage Eight Years After the ACA:
The article has two ‘Toplines’ The first says that the uninsured rate between 19-64 year olds has remained unchanged at 12.4% despite Trumpublican attempts to dismantle it. The second, (IMHO) more telling take-away states that ‘Since 2010, more people have health insurance under the ACA, but a higher share of U.S. adults are “underinsured,” with the greatest growth in the underinsured rate occurring among Americans in employer-based health plans‘.
[Italics mine]
Here’s another prescribed reply to all those questions prefaced with ‘150 million Americans have health insurance through their workplace…’ and usually followed with ‘…and your MfA is going to kick them off their beloved insurance’ scare nonsense. Now we can add: ‘Oh, you mean that health insurance that leaves them increasingly underinsured?’ to our response list.
Whenever I hear one of the talking heads on TV go on about the precious health insurance that American’s will lose I want to ask them who their provider is and what plan they have because almost everyone I know has a horror story about denial of service or uncovered costs.
The last time I had a health emergency I was lucky enough to be in Cuba for a week on business. Had a night in the emergency room, lots of pain meds, antibiotics, and a doctor by my side for six hours. The whole thing cost less the $100. If I’d been in the US when that happened my broke self would have been ruined financially.
Shhhhh! Don’t let .gov know about that business aspect! You might end up on another one way trip to a different part of Cuba that belongs to them.
A friend of mine who has a rare condition of super-low cholesterol suffered a heart attack while in a remote community in Costa Rica. He was helicoptered to the capitol San Juan for emergency heart surgery. The entire thing cost $17,000. In contrast, a few years earlier he had a similar event in Seattle, where the ambulance ride alone was $11,000, and I think the surgical procedure was over $100k.
Not only under-insured, but paying a very steep price for this “benefit”.
The article in FAIR on M4A and the one in Medium on Julian Assange really sum up the issues with modern journalism in this country:
No wonder so many vote against their own best interests.
+1000
“Johnson Refuses to Rule Out Suspending Parliament: Brexit Update”
I’m thinking here that Boris has a touch of the Cromwell complex. That should play well in Brussels-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkAbOGxDF6g
Isn’t it amusing how enthralled we were with the mop-tops the Beatles sported circa ’64 (and the prima facie case in which my dad thought they were the devil incarnate-blurring sexual lines, ha!) and yet Blondie’s disheveled mess across the pond is for me, almost as disconcerting but in more of a slob in our midst as PM, but why not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6QBaZHltJw
Whenever I see BoJo I am reminded of a middle-aged Gary Busey.
Boris of Orange?
Team up with Nicola Sturgeon of Scotland and declare themselves “Lord and Lady Protector.” The Queen could abdicate in favour of Prince Charles and enjoy the ensuing Regency in peace (Rip).
RE: America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce, The American Conservative (CG).
My antisemitic detection alarm got crazy whe I opened the link, and see!, there was an drawing showing an octopus with it’s eigth “arms” uhm… tentacles, in control of US’s MIC. Just as Hitler envisioned control of the world! ANITSEMITIC! ANTISEMITIC!
Not to worry Mr. Ignacio. Antisemitism has been an enduring part of American culture since the beginning. (English too for that matter, and who can forget L’ Affair Dreyfus in France?) Why else do you think that AIPAC has to expend so much ‘tribute’ to the Imperial Facilitators of America?
The Image of the Octopus as a metaphor for Monopoly Power goes back to at least the Yellow Journalism period of American popular communications.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_California
Its hard to imagine in the day & age, but the Central Valley was all about wheat once upon a time…
{and railroads screwing farmers on delivery rates}
A big Amen to that. And railroads screwing everyone on delivery rates.
We had to close the depot in Grangerville, not enough of our business.
Are you serious? Long before the Nazis the octopus was an iconic trope for monopoly power.
Currently it is being against different targets: Guardian Rips-Off Goebbels – Fascist Propaganda For Better Anti-Russian Smears
This is the same logic that erases Filipino and South African concentration camp victims that died decades before the 1930s
Nope, just kidding and a reference to a comment on yesterday’s link on some english literary critic that finds antisemitism prints in octopussies
I’m guessing you forgot the snark tag. Monopolies depicted as octopi (?) is an old comparison in the US, going back to 1880s and the first Progressive era. If you look closely at the painting of the octopus in the following link you’ll see the octopus’ arms have labels: monopoly, subway franchise, political pull, etc. Frank Norris wrote a famous book called ‘The Octopus’ that showed how the railroad tried to force California farmers off their land.
Matt Taibbi’s reference to Goldman Sachs as a giant blood sucking squid is a nod to the Progressive movement’s earlier octopus comparisons.
http://proggessive.weebly.com/the-octopus.html
You probably already know this and just forgot the snark tag.
Behold, the Twilight of Policy Elites as mourned by Frum:
He makes it sound like The ACA wasn’t a pitiful half measure that Team Blue had to fight tooth and nail to get past its own base! The erasure of what really happened is now complete. The ACA was so loathed by their base even before Bernie came around that President Obama didn’t take to calling it “ObamaCare” until the 2012 election. It took him years to accept his name was on it. And now we have this “serious” explanation that if you don’t like the ACA you won’t be able to pass anything better. There has to be a German word for using multiple logical fallacies at once without choking on your own conscience.
It really is true what they say: Those who learn history are doomed to watch other people make the same mistakes.
Ha! I’m using that line. Thanks!
Not entirely, here in the deluded area I knew a lot of people who honestly thought ACA was an improvement. It didn’t take long for them to realize it was very little improvement and a whole lot of rapid chipping away of benefits. They might have gotten there faster if I hadn’t pointed out all the issues even as they were passing it. But by 2016, they got it. Now most even admit it was a hail Mary attempt to save the for profit medical and medical insurance system (that might have worked for longer if not for the greed of the C suite leadership.)
And I will say that the Medicaid expansion was an improvement.
I Am a Carbon Abolitionist [Democracy Journal]
While agreeing that this must be done and rapidly (I was academically penalized in two K-12 schools for talking and writing about climate threats, those 40 years ago), I’m annoyed when the focus is on the subjectively abstract “industries” and doesn’t personalize “the consumer,” which must be the reader.
Displaced agency, much? Chickens before eggs? Us consumers don’t change our own behaviors, we have them change for us! Behavior-as-a-Service™.
I myself am trying to work out how to shut down my refrigerator (which could sever up to 10 people but only serves one, this is of course the refrigerator’s fault). I should have worked this out before reducing my food intake… I blame Google and Exxon-Mobile for putting me in this position.
NB: sarcasm.
other than a cold-water springhouse and a basement cold-storage system, and reorienting eating around things that store in those well, i have not found a way to shut refrigerators out of one’s life. some inventions, like the washing machine for clothing are just too darn handy and revolutionary and prevent a lot of wasted time trying to do without. there is a reason my grandmother, whose mother was born likely in the early 1900s and still cooked on a woodstove (and had 7 kids), thought that the washing machine was worth more than its weight in gold. likely she would have said the same about the fridge too, but they may have been too poor to actually own one.
the best i could come up with was to turn a chest freezer (somehow much more energetically efficient) into a fridge. if you search up just that phrase, you will find all you need to know.
caveat: never tested. planned for in my future doomstead.
Yes, a small chest freezer, that was my thought too. But it’s still a constant power utilization. The cold-water spring house could be a stretch because I’m in the New Mexico desert, but that makes swamp-cooling an option, although a contamination vector as well.
I’m leveraging the dietary options hard. Things like sour cream and decent live-culture yoghurts can last for weeks without refrigeration if one is careful about contamination. And with cheeses, that’s the whole idea of cheese. Tubers like potatoes have to be kept dry and dark; carrots and cabbages/lettuces need just a little moisture. And quick pickling, yummy!
Many of our legacy foods and food technologies were always about preservation and protection from harmful contamination. For all the things that have changed in the world, physics and chemistry hasn’t, all of that tech still works.
I’m not eliminating refrigeration per se, it’s still at the store and the delivery trucks and the warehouses, but the energy efficiencies there are much better, like your grandmother’s washing machine. So instead of a chest freezer, I’m looking for a cool dry box, actually two, one with light-baffled air vents and one that seals tight.. Dry is not a problem here, a 6 oz glass of water goes dry in about 2 weeks out in the open, no joke. So I can create relative humidity with an open cup of water, and cooling with a small fan.
Thanks for the ideas! A thanks from the desert, to y’mouse with no name…
This might be more suitable for WC, but I will be on the road then. Found this interesting discussion yesterday at Ask A Manager on how local increases to the minimum wage are effecting people. Feedback from people working retail, non-profit, municipal government (inc. public libraries), healthcare. Most of the responders are U.S./Canada-based:
https://www.askamanager.org/2019/06/ask-the-readers-have-you-seen-ripple-effects-from-minimum-wage-increases.html#comments
Affecting. How local increases to the minimum wage are affecting people.
effect is used as a noun as an object of the verb.
you see effects, you feel affects.
More or less what I might have anticipated. Places with hourly employees police OT like hawks. Even one of my wife’s old employers (she’s a nurse) was acutely sensitive to staff exceeding overtime thresholds. Of course, they weren’t interested in hiring more staff, either! :)
I especially enjoyed the reply to the comment about “well, large businesses have big margins and can absorb the hit, but smaller ones not as much”.
The reply of “well, then they have a crappy business model that is getting subsidized by low wage labor!” was EXCELLENT.
My inner Matt Stoller is dying to make the point that small businesses are under a LOT more pressure from larger counterparties who’ve got WAY too much market power over them and do a LOT more to squeeze their margins.
Yesterday I was in the checkout line at the bargain chain Grocery Outlet when I remarked that a lot of items in the store seemed to be creeping up in price and were not as much of a bargain as even a year ago. To my surprise the guy at the register went into a spiel about how this was the fault of WA state’s $12 minimum wage policy, which I assume was what he was being paid.
Boeing:
“Boeing falsified Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015. In a statement to CBC News, Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.
Boeing said an audit concluded it was an isolated event and “immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved.”
….On the latest revelations related to falsifying records for the Air Canada jet, Mike Doiron of Moncton-based Doiron Aviation Consulting said: “Any falsification of those documents which could basically cover up a safety issue is a major problem.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-air-canada-jet-fuel-leak-1.5193550
Quite the picture of Doiron, eh?
The article on Hope Mills being # 1 also lists Cameron as 5. They both are very close to Ft. Bragg. I live in the area. The pro military slant is quite pervasive, to the point of obnoxious for me, but I suspect very effective on young minds…
“Transcript: ‘All this fuss about spies … it is not worth serious interstate relations’ ”
So depressing reading this. He talks like an adult, considers what he says, ignores sound bytes, gives serious thought to his policies and does not go out of his way to insult his enemies. Then you look at the heads of state at the G20 with him and think of the differences. Looking at them, I have seen better heads on glasses of beer.
On ANY (and EVERY) glass of beer…
I think Putin talks like someone who doesn’t want with-every-fibre-of-their-being, to have and exercise power over others. This means – as the much and wrongly maligned Plato suggested in the Republic – that he is able to think about, even on occasions, discern, the interests of the citizenry, and seek to meet those interests from where he started.
Wall Street loses another feeding opportunity in Oregon with Cap and Trade’s demise.
Even the inventor of CaNT says it doesn’t work.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125011380094927137
The Yellow Vest movement in France took action to resist similar higher
“environmental” taxes imposed on them by the elite. All they had was safety vests.
Oregon continues to build, build and build, overturning community zoning and historical development patterns, thus showing the hypocrisy of their co-opted politicians, who somehow claim that pouring millions of tons of concrete and attracting millions more people won’t raise carbon emissions.
“Recommendations for promoting transit-oriented development You don’t have to subsidize the unit or do anything – just put it on transit.”
http://www.thecyberhood.net/documents/papers/fan.pdf
“The Portland area has enjoyed significant population and job growth since 2008, yet despite opening a new light-rail line and a commuter-rail line, system ridership has been flat. This is partly because, in order to pay for rail construction, TriMet has raised fares and made severe cuts in bus service.” Sure, developers can’t force high rises onto single family home communities around bus lines, like they can rail, with massive payoffs, “campaign donations”, to allegedly green politicians, just as in California.
CaNT lol
Let the RICH Fs pass Cap n Trade and watch us radicalize the suburbs and rural Louisiana.
Turn New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Opelousas, and Shreveport into our own GILET JAUNES!!!
LAISSEZ LE BON TEMPS ROULER!!!!
Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo–occasionally linked here by yours truly–has passed. Raimondo was a hard core libertarian but also a friend to Alex Cockburn for his antiwar views. Sadly cancer has taken the both of them.
https://original.antiwar.com/antiwar_staff/2019/06/27/justin-raimondo-rip-1951-2019/
sorry to hear that.
He drank WAY too much of the pro trump kool-aid toward the end, but ran an excellent site for many years. Those who read it knew all the pro-war garbage we were being fed about the Iraq war/Syria etc. was fake early on.
The internet as a whole has gone downhill a lot from when there were a lot more incisive critical views out there.
respect
He fought the good fight. Respect.
@caitoz on the second Democratic debate and Kamala Harris:
“California Senator Kamala Harris won the Democratic presidential debate last night. It was not a close contest. She will win every debate she enters during this election cycle. If she becomes the nominee, she will win every debate with Trump.”
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/kamala-harris-is-an-oligarchs-wet-dream-d689182ba99b
Meanwhile, apparently Jimmy Carter has issued an extreme TDS pro Russiagate statement.
Very relevant observations by Johnstone here. Harris’ campaign seemed to be fading for a while, but as Caitlin points out, she does have skills that are important in our WWF politics (truth-telling not being one of them). As the other pretenders prove to be various types of doofus, the Establishment will circle back to her.
Joe Biden really reminded me of Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City last night, from a looks standpoint.
My favorite actor of all time, so a backhanded compliment of sorts~
{warning, scene includes unasked for hair touching}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL17bwbFDAI
Nutritionists (many paid with public funds) have been flipflopping so many times in my 64 years that they have lost all credibility. It could be summarized in a book “Everything We Told You Is Wrong”.
39 keys of nose candy is almost a lifetime supply. It has indefinite shelf life, maybe someone got a good deal and decided to lock it in. It’s no different than the better deal you get if you order 50 pounds of Wagyu A-5 beef online versus one steak at a time.
The Moon of Alabama link, purportedly about the Boeing 737, actually resolves to MoA discussing America’s willingness to launch a pre-emptive attack on North Korea. Some of the comments are not nice.
Numerous friends who have hiked in South America @ altitude have told me that chewing coca leaves is the cat’s meow in acclimating to higher climes above anything in the lower 48.
A paper bag full was a couple bucks F.O.B. Cuzco.
I’d be curious what effect it has here @ sub 14k levels?
Asked a polyglot what he wanted to be
He said baby, can’t you see
I want to be famous, a star on the screen
But gotta get street cred in between
In Kabul I will drive my car
Yes I might be driving a 1-star
Major you can drive in my car
And maybe I’ll love you
I told everybody that my prospects were good
And the media nodded, it’s understood
Being a veteran is all very fine
But I can make better use of my time
Beep beep’m beep beep yeah
Beep beep’m beep beep yeah
Beep beep’m beep beep yeah
Beep beep’m beep beep yeah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8uD4EDALhQ
Boeing.
Wonder where the 737max planes are going… seems they’re still producing 42/month? 10/wk…
Gotta go somewhere. Can they legally be flown anywhere? Wouldn’t want one rapidly coming down in a town near you..
Plus 1B or so not coming in the door every week… now, that could add up. Say 25% is profit… this means 750 mil going out the door… that could add up, too.
Say it’s all good in six months. 250 more planes to store, 20B out to suppliers. Plus lawsuits from relatives, payments to airlines that really need the planes.
Seems they’re going to have to shut down the assembly line pretty soon.
Last I heard they are parking them in the employee parking lots.
File under “only in the US” (?):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/27/alabama-pregnant-woman-shot-manslaughter-charge-marshae-jones
“A woman from Alabama who was shot in the stomach while pregnant – with the bullets killing the fetus – has been charged with manslaughter. Marshae Jones was reportedly five months pregnant when she was shot by another woman in December outside a shop in Pleasant Grove, near Birmingham.
On Wednesday, Jones, 27, was indicted by a Jefferson county grand jury on a manslaughter charge and is expected to be held in Jefferson county jail on a $50,000 bond, while the woman accused of shooting her walked free, reported AL.com.”
Whaaaa?
Olga, I appreciate your keen eye in all things.
“UN world population report predicts slowing growth rate, 10.9 billion peak by 2100 ”
The slowing growth rate is good news, but the prediction is irresponsible. World life-support systems, the climate among many others, are already collapsing, along with crucial stocks like fish, soil, and fresh water. Humans will not reach 10 billion, let alone more; the remaining question is how that will happen, and the prospects are not good. Attempts to reach such huge numbers, or to plan for them, only make matters worse. While population is not the only factor determining human impact (consumption rate is the other), it is a critical one; and certain demands on the support systems are directly related to population, like food and water.
We also need to consider what are the barriers to population control. Partly we’re up against human nature in the raw; but a number of countries have already reached ZPG or are declining – a problem devoutly to be wished for. A useful study would go over just how those countries have achieved that. Mostly, it seems to require either draconian governmental measures (China) or giving women control over their own fertility (Japan, W. Europe). Women’s rights are a survival issue.
While there are purely political factors preventing the latter, the biggest addressable factor is two world religions. A direct attack would likely be counterproductive; but focusing the rights of woman gives us an end-around that undercuts control by either of those religions. (India is a wild card here, since it’s mostly neither Catholic nor Muslim but nonetheless has a serious problem. Does anyone here know what the role of Hinduism is? It’s certainly very patriarchal.)
It’s very little to do with Catholicism. Italy has an extremely low birth rate. It’s cultural.
Maybe the Italians take Catholicism seriously on a deeper level than most, and don’t want to engender further Original Sin in the world.
Yes, most Europeans and Americans take a rather Protestant attitude to Church authority. I think it’s primarily in the former colonies that the Church has real power.
Let’s not forget today is 100 years from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
I keep a poppy lapel pin to remind myself of WWI, Versailles and aftermath.
Keynes wasn’t convinced the Treaty was in the best interest of everyone in Europe going forward. Future events, etc etc.
In his book, he argued for a much more generous peace, not out of a desire for justice or fairness – these are aspects of the peace that Keynes does not deal with – but for the sake of the economic well-being of all of Europe, including the Allied Powers, which the Treaty of Versailles and its associated treaties would prevent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace
There is a company in Redmond Washington that makes hardware equivalents for the Data General Eclipse, Dec PDP-11 and HP 1000. They are used to extend the life of critical applications where the old hardware no longer runs. Re-certification when only the hardware is replaced is significantly less expensive.