Jerri-Lynn here: Fifty years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its Pentagon Papers decision, allowing the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish the papers. Today I link to Revealing the Pentagon Papers in Congress — 7: The Verdict Consortium News. “This is Part 7 of Consortium News’ multi-part series on the 50th Anniversary of the late Sen. Mike Gravel obtaining the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and the consequences Gravel faced for revealing the top secret documents in Congress, just hours before the Supreme Court decided the case on June 30, 1971.” Moi: Gravel died on June 26.
The secret afterlives of medieval widows Prospect
Venice in Danger of Losing UNESCO Status AFAR
ERIC AMBLER: A CRIME READER’S GUIDE TO THE CLASSICS Crime Reads. From 2018; I’m linking to this today as Ambler was born this week in London on June 28,1909.
The connection between clearcut logging and Canada’s hottest day on record The Narwhal
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price Guardian
The climate crisis is a crime that should be prosecuted Guardian
How to Help Wildlife and Pets During a Heat Wave Treehugger
Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records BBC
Blackouts in US Northwest due to heat wave, deaths reported AP
Eat this to save the world! The most sustainable foods – from seaweed to venison Guardian
Champlain Towers South Residents Warned About Concrete Damage Months Before Collapse CBS
Miami Building Collapse Sows Fear Among City’s Condo Owners Bloomberg
NYC mayoral primary race thrown into chaos as BOE appears to botch vote count New York Post
#COVID-19
Florence Nightingale in the age of Covid-19 Stat
Survey: Many people want to keep workplace masking policies, even for vaccinated employees Waste Dive
The coming culture war over returning to the office Yahoo News
‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect CNBC
Heart inflammation after COVID-19 shots higher than expected in study of U.S. military Reuters
Delta variant leaves southern Europe struggling to save summer tourism FT
Oxygen prices leap in Indonesia’s capital as COVID-19 cases surge Reuters
North Korea’s Kim fumes about ‘grave lapses’ in pandemic defences Al Jazeera
Australia Covid: Seventh city locks down amid vaccine chaos BBC
South Africa’s third COVID wave could be the worst yet Al Jazeera
Ireland limits indoor dining to fully vaccinated over Delta fears France 24
COVID: Global tourism losses ‘could top $4 trillion’ Deutsche Welle
United Airlines Bets on Post-Pandemic Growth With Its Biggest-Ever Jet Order WSJ
Biden Administration
Pelosi rebuffs McConnell on infrastructure The Hill
Biden Weighs New Executive Order Restraining Big Business WSJ
NEWS: @NinaTurner is running in a district represented by pro-Medicare for All lawmakers for the last 30 years.
She just aired a pro-Medicare-for-All ad – and instantly, Dem lawmakers and lobbyists bankrolled by Big Pharma started attacking her. https://t.co/Wj6YAuGK34
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 30, 2021
Trump Transition
The Cruelty Was Never The Point American Conservative
‘It definitely feels early’: GOP’s long race to 2024 begins AP. Kill me now.
Murkowski has the moxie to take on Trump. Will she? Politico
Microsoft and Google end six-year truce on legal battles FT
Sports Desk
Tour de France: Police step up search for spectator who caused crash Deutsche Welle
Gwen Goldman serves as bat girl for New York Yankees, fulfilling 60-year-old dream ESPN. I never wanted to be a bat girl. My dream was to play shortstop for the Yanks. Until I realized I couldn’t hit, throw, nor field.
Class Warfare
India Walton Is Reviving the American Tradition of Municipal Socialism Jacobin
Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over Project Syndicate. Yanis Varoufakis.
Supreme Court Rejects Request to Lift Federal Ban on Evictions NYT
California Extended its Eviction Moratorium, But the Housing Crisis Is Getting Worse Capital & Main
Ohio GOP ends attempt to ban municipal broadband after protest from residents Ars Technica
Julian Assange
FBI Fabrication Against Assange Falls Apart Craig Murray
Big Brother IS Watching You Watch
Tucker Carlson claimed the NSA is spying on him. Even his own colleagues don’t seem to believe it CNN
I’m in no way ratifying or supporting the claim that NSA collected the communications of Carlson or any Fox host, simply because I don’t know.
But what I know for sure is that this is NSA’s non-denial denial, using the same false framework they always use to mislead the public.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 30, 2021
China?
The Rise of China’s State Surveillance Machinery Literary Hub
China-US relations: Washington and Beijing set out competing visions of international cooperation at G20 meeting South China Morning Post
India
How A Tribal Community In Odisha Is Battling Climate Change With Traditional Farming India Spend
Clean air in Delhi, 24/7 water in Chennai: What happened to India’s Smart Cities Mission? Scroll
In the Time of Legitimate Despair, India Needs Illegitimacy of ‘Unreasonable Hope’ The Wire
Antidote du Jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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A few weeks ago here I had a short exchange with some of your regular commentators (including @GM) regarding the seasonality of CV19 in the Southern hemisphere and Australia and NZ in particular. I suggested they might be in for a bumpy ride as they reach their usual respiratory virus seasons which usually begin to take off at the end of June (known from the 80s following the work of R. Hope-Simpson). Well here we are (see the BBC link above).
Yes they’re at a low rate thanks to their stringent border restrictions, but this should have been no surprise.
We’ll see how they go for a few more weeks shall we?
Yeah, nah, meaningless. They’re not well vaccinated, hardly anybody’s had the disease, and they’re having their first confrontations with Delta, which is objectively a significantly different virus.
You hadn’t noticed any of these things? Maybe you’re just not a noticer. But I suspect you’re being disingeneous. What would constitute evidence to falsify your notions?
@Raymond I’m not sure what point your making, but of course I’d noticed those things, all of which are of course factors. But that seasonality isn’t at play at all right now really would be a stretch and definitely an assertion that would require some evidence.
“To claim that seasonality isn’t at play at all…” – I didn’t say anything like that at all.
The confounding factors will make the role of seasonality impossible to discern. That wasn’t clear from what I said?
If you didn’t see that I wonder how clear your intellectual process is – assuming you’re being honest.
How about a falsifiable hypothesis?
Not especially. If you wanted to make that point explicitly clear, perhaps you should have said it instead of going for the “yeah, nah, meaningless” approach and then insulting other commenters.
Indeed. For some reason I have been noticing more and more these plays for dominance- a small insult here, a question about one’s intellectual process there, a smug brush-off, or a good old fashioned gaslight. It’s a nasty propensity- if you’re not careful, as one on the end of these interactions over time, you start doubting yourself, your own mind, your own value etc. Just say no
Really, the aggression is not necessary to get your point across here. It doesn’t help your cause.
Thanks @Basil @quicksilver and all. There’s really no reason to doubt anyone’s mental processes or integrity when making reasonable comments here.
@Raymond – my apologies for misinterpreting what you meant by ‘Yeah, nah, meaningless.’ – I’ll try harder next time.
As for falsifiability. My seasonality hypothesis would certainly be weaken had there not been any increase in CV19 cases right about now in Australia, but then I probably wouldn’t have come back here to comment here about how predicted them a month ago (selection bias I know, but I just can’t help myself sometimes).
quite alright. If I wanted to read people attacking other people on the internet over nothing, I’d read YouTube comments for fun.
I appreciate Mr Sim’s contributions, and I know this pandemic has put everyone on edge a bit, but there’s no need for the attitude at the best of times (unless the target is well and truly asking for it, in which case, pass the popcorn).
Seems to be getting close to playing the man and not the ball.
btw, it is a legitimate question to ask as to the seasonality of the virus.
There are currently a number of taboo questions regarding this virus and its source and the non-vaccine treatments which work, and none of these taboos increase our knowledge.
All they do is inflate the earnings of the vaccine manufacturers and shame most of the population into blindly following the approved narrative which is probably the point of the lockstep media pronouncements.
The NC link yesterday https://www.theinsight.org/p/rare-events-need-different-methods was much more reasoned.
Nothing to do with any respiratory virus seasons at all in this case. The reason that we have a spread is people not doing their jobs as well as a N.S.W. State Premier who only locked down when there was no other choice i.e. far too late. By then it had been spread to most of the other States by travelers hence we are playing whack-a-mole. Where I live we are in a three-day lockdown to short-circuit any spread of this virus with mandatory mask-wearing in public. People are p***ed because this was all due to human error that was verging on wilful rather than just an accident.
Vaccine Development versus Quarantine Management,
If you compare and contrast the thinking and effort which is involved in these two one can only shake your head. On one side you have a gargantuan effort, and on the other…
Pip-pip!
Seasonality is clearly visible in the nation-by-nation charts. A few months ago, the top 10 was almost completely filled by former communist East Europe nations, then there were all replaced by Latin American nations.
Please don’t make me be the guy saying “Correlation isn’t causation.”
Last year as it got cooler there was, briefly, what looked like an air temperature related effect on case levels in US states. It was promptly swamped by the effects of travel, and then new variants.
If seasonality is a predominant factor, it’s going to be a real job of work to demonstrate it. Which in and of itself makes it seem unlikely that seasonality is the Big Bad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454715/
Can you point me to some research that backs up your 100% certainty?
Um, “makes it seem unlikely”
Working link for “Florence Nightingale in the age of Covid-19′ article at-
https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/29/florence-nightingale-in-the-age-of-covid-19/
Fixed it – thanks!
“Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point [The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America],” Helen Andrews writes in a devastating review, “is the most toxic piece of journalism of the Trump era. After the shocking election of 2016, the liberal establishment showed glimmers of willingness to ask hard questions about how it had happened. If millions of Obama voters were now switching their allegiance to a reality show billionaire, perhaps the Democratic party had done something to ill-serve these people? Then along came Serwer in the Atlantic to tell them that, no, Trump voters did not have any legitimate grievances. They were evil racists, simple as that.”
Serwer’s mission — and by extension the mission of the Atlantic, that is, of the liberal establishment — is to demonize all Trump voters in particular and everyone on the right in general. But why such organized and official vituperation?
Yves offers an especially brilliant insight into the underlying psychology. In her intro to “Biden Classifies Opposition to ‘Capitalism and Corporate Globalization’ As Extremism” (published in NC yesterday), she writes: “The reason the right is a perceived danger is that it undermines the legitimacy of the professional managerial class. The fact that the supposed elites are rattled by QAnaon and disrespect for masks (which they were late to embrace) and now vaccines (and sometimes conflates the two) is a sign of how insecure they are.”
So it is class war. And you’re either with us or against us — you’re either in the PMC or you’re a racist insurrectionist deplorable.
I’m surrounded by PMC liberals most of the time, and the outright hatred for anyone who doesn’t toe the party line is horrifying.
It’s become like talking to children
It’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than talking to children.
Millions are on the edge financially and emotionally and we are about to have the Delta Variant hit hard here in the USA.
People are scared out of their minds and here in Sonoma County Wildfire Season adds a significant level of stress.
And it looks like both will peak about the same time.
I’m seeing more creative driving and more irrational behavior in general the last two Months and it concerns me.
Be lucky.
I agree on the dangerousness…
They tend to be people who could ruin me
Now when I’m asked in the slightly condescending way if I think there will be a revolution (a little wink towards being a berniebro with unrealistic dreams) I say no, obviously revolution has been made impossible considering the notion of “privacy” has gone away as compared to what it was in my youth (at this teachable moment I tend to throw out a “this is what snowden exposed and proved clapper to have lied to congress”, which tends to back foot the average tds carrier). Collapse from over reach is really the only possibility now. Being lucky is all we’ve got at this point.
stepdad’s cousin’s rv appeared in my mom’s yard sunday morning(it was there when i did the jointwalk at 4am).
he was once a cabinet maker, and thoroughly indoctrinated into the whole righty goptea reagandoxy of bootstraps, my taxes are too high, kill them over there, etc etc.
me and him would tangle a lot back then.
then he retired, started visiting his home state of colorado more often, and rediscovered weed.
now…he hung out with me at my bar, over by the trailerhouse library, all day sunday…drinking beer and smoking lots of pot as i did my dutch oven magic and amfortas radio jammed in the trees.
finally noticed the large FDR campaign poster behind his head…and proceeded to hold forth about how we never should have let them take all that away…and how we hafta spend money(meaning gubmint money) to make money(meaning to have a more generalised prosperity).
this remarkable transformation took place just in the last 6 or so years.
this guy who thought sincerely that clinton, biden, pelosi, et alia were essentially commies…voted for bernie twice in the democratic primaries(itself an amazing departure)….and for the libertarian guy in ’16….and Biden this last time.
when i ask him what brought about this incredible change of heart: leisure time, dope smoking, listening to amfortas the hippie in the wilderness, and the resulting and newly acquired powers of observation about the world around him, and the people he encounters in it.
my point: if this guy can have a come to jesus moment, and abandon a lifetime of parroting gop talking points…then the Official Narrative Matrix is breaking down….the usual tactics are no longer working to obfuscate and even hide the real problems all around us, and the elites are right to be scared.
he travels a lot in his retirement…and always stops here to and from colorado(we’re about a third of the way there from houston)…so i send him things like this to read when they’re sitting in the rv, resting:
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/null-space-and-null-existence-under-the-spectacle
the guy who used to end our evenings together calling me a traitor now agrees that america pretty much sucks for the non-superrich and their lackeys, and that the surveillance apparatus, gov and corp, negates the possibility of a real revolution…and that all of this will hafta collapse before there’s any improvement for us’n’s.
so, once again, i urge you all…get out there and start talking to people who aren’t already in the proverbial choir….it’s hard, and even dangerous, sometimes…but one on one new deal evangelism and pointed socratic questioning, directed at the myriad unexamined assumptions,is really the only way to construct what Gramsci called a Counterhegemony.
hearts and minds, baby.
(i’ve not been online much of late: from wife’s cancer(she’s doing great, but the driving kicks my ass) to now ferrying mom to the san antone VA for stepdad(icu for 7 weeks, looks like “full recovery”…he has been a miracle of modern medicine since 1968), recovering from these trips(my bones hurt)…and now my first dental visit in almost 30 years(necessity overcame the phobia…long way yet to go)…as well as the infrastructureing ive been immersed in for a year and a half(light at end of tunnel)…and added to the normal million and one things i do around here in normal times…and i’m too exhausted to care about the news. my boys(15&19) ask me if i’ve heard about this or that…making me proud that they’re 1. paying attention, and 2.have apparently absorbed some modicum of enlightenment, enough to discern what stories are important.
anyhoo…good luck to you all, and know that i think about y’all a lot)
Thank you, Amfortas. Please do check in every so often.
Glad to hear things are mostly good for you and yours. Been missing you around here.
Good to know Amfortas….good luck with the ol’ molars.
+100
So the solution to the right wing is more weed and less meth.
The far left and the far right have always had a few things in common… simple answers. And people go from one to the other without stopping in the middle; witness Arthur Kostler going from committed Communist to Darkness at Noon and Hillary Clinton going from 1964 Goldwater girl (God! Where are the pictures?) to feminist leftist. Thanks, but I’ll stick in the boring middle, reading the evidence, and discovering that there are some conspiracies… both on the left and the right.
Amfortas and I both live near (but not too near) to Austin, where a brutally hot summer with too much Shiner Bock, cheap local weed and decent shade trees often leads to political discussions… followed by a brisk skiny-dip to annoy the water moccasins.
Welcome to”(fill in the blank) is the opium of the people”
Hang in there! This site and this world is better for you in it.
I don’t imagine that Hill country in Texas is the same without your presence.
Good to hear from you Amf. Was thinking about you the other day as your comments are always worth reading. I wonder if the mellowing of your stepdad’s cousin is a sign of a wider dissatisfaction among old Reaganites. That they are older now and thus more vulnerable to government actions.
Hmm, maybe it’s ‘older now and in need of government programs’ (medical, vision, healthcare best provided collectively)?
Yeah, that is what I meant but you put it clearer than me.
Amfortas, so very good to hear from you. I share the dental phobia. Maybe having a childhood dentist named Dr Licking who hated kids had something to do with it. Always enjoy your posts and this one brought lots of hope.
Good to see you
I dunno tegnost. Are unhappy and mistreated pets “lucky”. Luck is a nonsense word, like “value, inflation, capitalism, freedom, equality and etc…” Unhappy dogs, not sure about cats because cats go feral as easily as they go domestic, but dogs are a different breed. They have been with us since cave days. A boy and his wolf. And I’ve known a few pets who simply rejected their owners. Their insufferable owners. They hung around for kibbles and bits, but there was no allegiance. Dogs just sort of sigh. And after they eat their dismal food, they go curl up somewhere and dream. I think we humans are in the curled up stage of our revolution. We have rejected our “government” (what a laugh) and we will know when we get a better offer. We might just wander off down the street and pretend to be lost until somebody adopts us. Politically speaking.
I’m seeing the bad driving around here as well, and this is in a small town with few traffic issues. The heat is certainly not helping people be more patient.
That was my former firm. Michael Lind was absolutely right. ‘Racist’ is just another word for working class at this point, even working class people of color (hence ‘interracial whiteness’).
Ain’t “intersectionality” grand?
Some people might be misusing the term that way, I don’t know. That’s not at all what intersectionality means though. as far as I am aware it means the overlap between i.e. class and race issues.
Yes, stricto sensu subject positions and positioning in terms of class, race, and gender, but see the work of Levine-Rasky, or F. Anthias, et al.
What? “interracial whiteness” is a legit thing? Legitimate as in there are mush for brains pushing it?
————————-
Holy bleep! I googled the term before hitting the post comment. It looks to be the latest term de jour. Anything to deny our common humanity, the working class, the poor, or the mass poverty and the homelessness, and corruption that has caused it. It’s all the racism fault. Martin Luther King would be ashamed, I think.
Yes, I know I am going conspiratorial, but conspiracies do happen. I know that the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and the CIA’s program of influencing the intelligentsia, including reformers or activists like Gloria Steinem were given stipends. False convictions, assassinations, and propaganda were used to break the various movements of the 60s.
The efforts to break the current movements probably have a central command(s). There have been false convictions and there is this propaganda. I wonder if there are now, or soon will be, deliberate assassinations like Fred Hampton and MLK.
When you see people you’ve known for years suddenly reveal a visceral hatred for anyone and anything that they don’t like, that is off-putting. The veins bulging, spittle forming in mouth corners, like a triggered human version of some cornered feral animal.
I can anecdote too: I’m surrounded by Trump voters, everyone of which has made an outright racist comment or, more prevalent, that old wink-wink “get me?” comment that denigrates other races, colors and religions. There is no, I say again, no change from pre-Trump behaviors. Racism is not the sole cause but to dismiss people who say it’s a major cause is wrong. They want a white USA and are fearful of any sign that this is not the case.
I regularly comment on Minnpost.com, a liberal news outpost in Minnesota, a news service I appreciate for the local focus. For my repeated defense of the working class, of people without a college degree, pleas to take care of the land, waters and pollinators, and for merely critiquing neoliberal policies, billionaires, corporations, banks, private equity and the eternal war machine, I am regularly accused of being a racist, a conspiracy theorist, a paid agent sowing chaos, a stooge of Putin/Russia, a bothsiderist assorted rhetorical tactic as pejorative/projection, actively working for corporations and banks and a Trump fanatic. There are a collection of liberals in the commentariat suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, ever at the ready to assassinate anyone who questions the Party, I call the Junta.
Minnpost generally lets me defend myself. However I have noticed, I can criticize Obama or Biden in a general sense, but I cannot whatever discuss specific policies in the negative, particularly having to do with foreign policy misadventures in Libya, Syria or Ukraine, and certainly not the ongoing bipartisan drone campaign. And of course whatever topic the PMC has declared off-limits, that Big Tech is actively censoring, Minnpost falls in line. I sometimes wonder, is that just a psychological response, or are they actually getting “press releases” dictating what can and cannot be discussed?
Just yesterday someone dredged up a great article from 2005 in The Tyee, The Soft Muzzle. They individually know what is threatening to their class interest, which they steward much like a common pool resource, and they individually do what they need to interfere.
re: the moderation troubles at MinnPost, “If your reputation depends on a platform, you don’t have a reputation.”
A young Abraham Lincoln noted as much. From a speech in 1837:
He knew the elites of his time colluded and, through a shared common interest, needed to continually enforce any measure to maintain their “rightful” place. It’s not a conspiracy folks, it’s self-survival on their part. Any crack in their embankment, no matter how small, can release a torrent upon the elites–dooming the entire class.
What a great quote, had never seen that before!
I am picturing George Carlin laughing heartily as someone calls him “Lincolnesque”.
The clip where he describes their non-conspiracy conspiracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs
Damn, that’s a keeper that. He really nailed it there. Thanks.
Remember what Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler observed in his “War is A Racket” essay:
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Who Makes The Profits?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.
Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company — and you can’t have a war without nickel — showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public — even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought — and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it — so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches — one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam…. https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Patriotic corporations way back in 1914-18.
I had the exact same experience on Facebook in the run up to the 2020 elections. I was getting vitriol not only from people I barely knew, but from “liberal” friends I’d known for years. Since then I haven’t used the platform for anything but occasional promotional announcements.
Trump is a demagogue. His shtick often includes mocking, bullying, and – yes – racist allusions. There is no need to deny that. It’s easy to find countless examples, which Serwer does to make his arguments. Trump’s performances also often utilize class-based resentment skillfully, directed, of course, not at Capital, but at its privileged servants – the PMC (George Wallace used to call them “pointy-headed liberals”). Serwer calls Trump a “con-man”; he is absolutely right on that as well. I may be wrong, but I’d bet most NC readers would agree with this so far.
But what Serwer does is what most liberal TDSers do – focus on Trump and his behavior. They ignore, or oblivious to, all the reasons such an uncouth outsider was elected President. These include all the policy failures, judgmental cultural condescension, and – yes – *cruelty* (though perhaps in more refined language) of the liberal elite. Serwer serves to fuel the “culture wars.” So does Trump. This serves nicely to keep us divided and distracted, as it always has. Most Trump supporters have no real power. Given the lack of any real option, they express their resentment and resistance through a demagogue like Trump. It’s an old story.
OF course our dear previous leader is a man of question morals, however it often seems that many folks are willing even eager to gloss over the very real issues that motivated our previous leaders base.
And guess what – The issues are still there.
Washington is still a swamp. Some of the political leadership include a fair number of black hearted, larcenous, megalomaniacs.
There is one-less-swamp-creature my friend…Rumsfeld just croaked. In the immortal words of Mr. Jonathan Rotten…good riddance to bad trash.
… and then NPR interviewed top Bush administration official, Andrew Card, to tell us what a great man Rummy was!
Trump is a roaring ass, to put it mildly. And a manifest incompetent.
Serwer and those of his ilk gloss over why millions of people in a country that just had twice elected St. Obama might be so desperate that they might be willing to roll the dice on such a roaring ass.
The essay from which the book title is taken has many examples of Trump and his followers literally cheering for policies and public pronouncements that demean and hurt people – not just elite people, but ordinary, working class and poor people. They even held a riot in DC in favor of disenfranchising them. They “glossed over” their own material grievances.
Trump voting increases by income, among whites. This is because Trump promised nothing and delivered nothing, so people who need nothing are more likely to support his worldview of enjoying harming Americans.
yeah. As I’ve said before, I’m an academic, because I believe in education for everyone and the furthering of knowledge, not status-seeking careerism.
Because I’ve been critiquing my colleagues’ approaches to problems (political and academic) from the left, I’ve been canceled. They are FOR getting people fired for having the “wrong” views (which is a labor issue!) they don’t mind shopping at Amazon, they WANT HR to have mind-policing powers, no matter that it is ineffective for what they claim, and does more harm than good. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would see that, but they think they’re the compassionate ones.
Really lost one of my best friends of 20 years from grad school, because I supported Sanders and not Warren. Everyone got really angry when I started posting on FB stuff on Manufacturing Consent, after that made-up “are you calling me a liar” nonsense. It’s been very hard, I am still in shock and grief about being shunned for speaking what I consider common knowledge and common sense.
The PMC think they’re perfect. They don’t want to consider their own glaring hypocrisy.
People might check this out:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders
I continue to be skeptical of the “PMC” idea. If you live off paychecks and can be fired, you’re a “worker”. Yes, there are cultural reasons that (say) college professors and carpenters don’t think they have much in common, but economically they have much more in common than they think.
Thank you, that is wayyyyyy more true than most people know. Academics are in a LOT of precarity.
Most of us are adjuncts, without health care, and paid less than minimum wage, when the hours are counted up. AND have crushing student loans to pay back. Many can only get 1 year positions, and have to reapply for new positions every year, and move across the country every year, in the hope they can get their foot in the door next time. It leaves little time for research, even preparing new classes to teach. And is crushingly stressful. And of course, how expensive moving is.
I have a friend who lost her house in a tornado, then didn’t get tenure (which means that she’s fired, normally). She had to declare bankruptcy, but because of JOE BIDEN, while she was homeless and living in her car, she still had to make student loan payments.
So yeah. Most academics are not PMC. K-12 teachers, too. Same with student loans and paid almost nothing. Now they are doing ideological purges on us, from both sides. And the general populace hates us! This probably makes the tenured ones more reactionary and overwrought, ready to jump on every Twitter trend, and ‘canceling’ their colleagues instead of lobbying for state funding and free college and loan forgiveness, you know, things that would be progressive and HELP things.
It’s nightmarish. Some of us just care about our fields and want to share knowledge and educate everyone.
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/30/rising-gop-star-ron-desantis-goes-after-campus-thoughtcrime-with-vague-threatening-new-law/
Thank you both for this, but what you are so deeply concerned about are your aspirations. Can you run, throw, hit and field? Many of us find out early if we can do these things with a certain excellence. I couldn’t hit a curve ball and so retired early to the fan base. Doing reality checks is more difficult as we get older and more firmly ensconced in our career paths. I was required by economics to do a 180 at 50 years old.
But life is about choices. The story in my family goes: Henry Ford came through town and offered my grandfather a job in Detroit. My grandfather was a wheelwright…he may as well have made buggy-whips. Anyway, he told Ford no, and the rest is family history. Well, I’d still love to teach the history of economic theory at uni, but in retrospect, the best course of action for me would be to become a competent HVAC guy.
Isn’t all this propaganda like Wokism the reason for too many people not understanding that they are the working class or that there are real classes at all; much of the PMC have been spoon fed the lie that they are the chosen ones. It is set of beliefs and functions and not the pay that determines whether they have been admitted to the select.
I believe the Marxist term used to explain this is “false consciousness”, e.g. the idea that Worker X has more in common with his boss because they are both French, or because they both are white, rather than looking to their strictly economic interests.
chuck roast – I am not exactly sure what you’re getting at, but it seems like you are second-guessing my personal life choices?
I think you have the wrong idea – I personally DO have tenure and *should* be ok, except for the student loans, which are never going to get paid off, though I have never missed a payment, and our tea party state leg trying to cut education funding. Look what they did in WI, for example.
I was an adjunct for a while, though, so I do know personally what it’s like.
I am trying to contribute to the public good. I don’t regret any of my life choices, I just mourn a country that keeps trying to shoot itself in the foot and remove opportunities for upcoming generations, that previous generations were able to avail themselves of.
Your comparing academics to elite athletes is not apt at ALL, but it is rather telling you see it that way. Jobs are dwindling, despite the teacher shortage. This is austerity, not a lack of talent.
But yeah, I am good at my job and my research, thanks for asking?
I teach my students well, my students are appreciative, and I am published, and about to edit a volume with a colleague, etc. You don’t need my resume. The state of education and the anti-intellectualism does make my job harder, and I am deeply concerned that my institution will soon be made into a widget-making factory, and that we will all be thought-policed into oblivion. To the detriment of teaching young people how to think logically and critically and understand the difference between evidence and conspiracy.
This isn’t about my personal career, but again, thanks for that assumption, though it is not what I was talking about at all. We were talking about the PMC attacking from within that which is also being attacked from the outside. :/
From Bertrand Russell: “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”
This is an extremely cynical take on it, but I interpret “PMC” to mean “has a job which produces nothing necessary from the view of the working classes (and arguably overall), so which relies on increasingly shaky societal consensus, and/or cracking the overseer’s whip for the truly rich, to continue to exist.”
This would make a PMC college professor different from a carpenter in that the carpenter has a job and a skill which could make him money, but the structure of society is set up to prevent him from reaping the full rewards of his labor. This has a tendency to make him skeptical of the existing political structure. The PMC, on the other hand, benefits directly from the existing societal structure (in the case of the college professor, “every kid must get a college education” and therefore enter into preposterous life-destroying debt, in order to keep paying for the professor’s mortgage) and so has an extreme incentive to support the political opinion of that power structure in turn.
Lest you think I’m being cruel, I just got hired by Amazon this morning, a company which in any sane world would have been broken down by the government into at least 10 companies by now, and which causes extreme collateral damage to our nation every single day that isn’t done, and which therefore is supported by the current societal and political consensus. So I myself am a proper white-collar PMC. And so I was at my last half-dozen jobs, too. So these words are a self-criticism as much as anything else. I’ve spent progressively more time between each contract brooding over the dishonor of these sort of jobs, though for right now… I still take them.
Transitioning to a different way of making a living requires proving to my spouse (at minimum) that we can have an acceptable quality of life afterwards; second I would need to develop some sort of skill that was universally applicable in a non-PMC setting; third, we will need to break away from the PMC-oriented community that we were raised in – or at least, find some way to balance their influence in our lives. Each one is like climbing a separate mountain. But, over this past year, I have made some progress on all three; COVID has been like a purifying fire – scales I didn’t even know existed have fallen from my eyes.
The plan right now – for my sanity as much as anything – is to keep making progress on all three (but also to keep paying the bills and feeding the children). Fingers crossed, I am still moving towards the end of this life – and that another, better life (at least in some ways) lies beyond. We will see.
Not everyone needs to go to college, but college needs to be available for free to everyone. Our system right now has been captured by corporate and privatizing interests. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Education is crucial and vital.
“what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The Little Prince
One of the best movies about this tension between manual laborers and the academy is Breaking Away from 1979. I can’t recommend it enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Away
Every character has an arc. The father’s arc is realizing that his son *should* go to college (after the beginning, when he reactionarily shouts “why should he, I never went to college”), …and that indeed, the father helped build the uni, and no one deserves to explore their options more than those whose labor founded the uni.
I am terribly sorry Amazon is your best option right now. I sure hope that changes. Amazon is a cancer, a hungry ghost.
The Cult of Warren is incomprehensible. I’ve lost several friends to it as well.
I am still grieving the loss. It’s either be in lock-step on *every single issue* or be shunned.
So I am shunned. :(
“But why such organized and official vituperation?”
Because it’s easier than admitting that you [familyblogged] up.
And the vitriol is intended to distract attention from the [familyblog] up.
Yep. I really think this is why we see the double/triple/quadruple down from people who have to know better. Retail politics have become such a part of people’s identity that to admit they were wrong about a politician or policy (or party) would trigger an existential crisis. Continuing to be wrong is much easier than admitting you were wrong in the first place.
I think it has to do with identifying with the tribe they admire. To attract attention (they hope) from the Big Men of the tribe they show they are diligent in their hatred of those who are not members of the tribe. I think in most cases they are not even conscious of their motivation. They really believe, when they say, “There’s massive evidence showing …” and do not understand there is not evidence at all, that they are accepting the assertion of someone else that there is evidence. They don’t even know that they have never seen any evidence, they believe utterly the assertion that there is, so they must have seen it. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do when 75-90% of each side suffers from this syndrome.
“’The Cruelty […]’ is the most toxic piece of journalism’” is fairly accurate. However, the phenomenon is closer to “intoxicating”. The book may adopt a sensational voice, but the purple prose is at least true, if not a narrow examination. David Harvey found the same cruelty when Thatcher’s government “disciplined” the working class. Reality as a concept was to be introduced to a wayward flock. Retribution is a shortcut to getting people marching in the same political direction. Aggressive behavior universally manifests itself when a perceived boundary is crossed, and the transgression goes unremedied within the group. “Enough is enough” is the common refrain throughout American politics, if not the world.
The book must tap into a vein of anxiety for Helen Andrews (to my chagrin, is not the same 90-something Bletchley Park cryptologist, Helen Andrews) because in her rush to deflect, she fails to provide a counterexample of kindness performed by, or associated with, Trump and his admin. A clean conscience is a pre-requisite for practicing cruelty for everyone other than sadists. Slavoj Zizek describes the pleasurable underbelly of wielding authority and punishment, judges, police, so forth, may be the singular motivation throughout society.
He stuck a fork in the Bushes and the Clintons. Some would consider that a gift to humanity.
Fight Club is scary. Determined muscled men, with smarts, and maybe some military training are very dangerous… Remember Spartacus. Some sources argue that he might have been a trained soldier in one of the Roman legions in Thrace or Illyria…
Such people have a penchant of cutting any legal Gordian Knot rather then disentangle it through legal means (never possible).
Two slightly distinct points:
1) The assertion that Serwer’s mission and that of The Atlantic is to demonize Trump is quite true, but your implicit assertion that “the cruelty being the point” can’t be true because the source is tainted is not remotely reasonable.
The fact that Trump’s opponents are precious asses does not make either Trump or his frenetic fans good, decent, or honest themselves. No one watching Trump and his grinning, bullying, braggart fan base over the past 5 years can mistake them for wronged heroes. Or anything better than jerks.
This assessment by Serwer in his original article: “…This […] reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process”.
Is on the money. The whining about it from his direction is – obviously – due to the fact that the haute doyens of The Atlantic deem themselves the only ones worthy of getting away with the same stunt (their modalities of abuse are slightly different, but still abusive) . But, my dears, Trump and his seething fanbois enjoy the hell out of downpunching on anyone they can cast as a weakling. And they are scum on that basis, independent of their detractors.
2) The fact that Serwer is currently flogging a book off of one now-stale observation is likely worth a little derision. But that wasn’t what the linked article was really on about. The article raged on at length about insinuations of racism, far beyond what was actually present in Serwer’s piece from 2018. That pet concern has traction at this time due to the overreaching falsehoods coming out of the haute newsmedia recently…. 3 years later.
This article is a current piece of propaganda, designed to shift the mind’s eye away from the incessant bully boy BS we got to witness on a weekly basis during the Trump administration. And it ends in exactly the same sort of histrionics “conservatives” love to abhor when it emanates from the “left”: “I started wanting to ask Serwer: Do you realize what you are accusing us of? If someone really believed all this, they would not want to defeat Republicans at the next election. They would want to outlaw their institutions and put their leaders in prison. Democracy cannot survive when one side thinks the other is too evil to deserve a voice in it. I am not being glib when I say that this kind of talk is a threat to the republic.”
Seriously. Who among you thinks this stagy drivel is less awful than what comes out of Serwer? I find it indistinguishable in terms of both self-absorption…. And sheer silliness.
A really interesting article, not least as its a reminder of just how vast and diverse a nation India is.
I tend to think of millet as birdfood, its what I gave my pet budgies when I was a child. I only realised it was edible when I watched Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, where millet was dismissed as horrible, indigestable peasants food (the wealthy in Japan always prized polished white rice, and suffered the health consequences of such a low nutrient diet with beri-beri). I understand that millet with barley were peasant stables in Japan at one time before rice became overwhelmingly popular.
The article goes on to highlight possible health implications of millet consumption:
This seems to suggest that the high fibre content of millet is a potential problem when it comes to absorbing nutrients. Is this really the case or just a myth promoted by doctors who think food that is ‘easy to digest’ is best? I’d be curious if anyone BTL has more information on this.
Not that I’m planning to cook with millet, I’m still trying to work out how to make oat groats edible without days of preparation….
Sprouting grains usually increases bioavailability without losing the fiber content. More work though.
Plutonium Kun: Is millet not grown at all in Ireland?
According to Paolo Camporesi, in the book, The Magic Harvest, millet was made ground and made into a tasty bread in Emilia-Romagna in Italy, but when it was left to cool, it hardened and was considered inedible. So the bread was ground and made into gnocchi (dumplings) or strozzapreti (“priest stranglers”), a kind of long dumpling. So millet is considered, at least in Italy, easily digested.
When I was in Istanbul, which was in February 2012, it was boza season. Boza supposedly is made of millet. It was tasty, too, although adding the cinnamon and roasted chickpeas helped.
I tend to think that the high fiber content of any grain would be an advantage. What’s wrong with bran?
Deborah Madison, in her cookbook Vegetable Literacy, discusses the nutritional value and cooking challenges of millet. She approaches it as an alternative to polenta and has sone recipes that I have not tried (though I use her recipes regularly).
I have several of her books, but not that one. She’s a reliable source of excellent vegetable dishes – I’ve never had a misfire with one of her recipes.
Oat groats: soak for an hour in 2:1 water:grain ratio, simmer for an hour or so until liquid evaporated and grains soft. A dab of butter and you are all set.
Don’t overdo the millet:
“although iodine deficiency is the major cause of goiter, millet consumption may play a role in goiter causation”
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271531797000158)
Gwen Goldman serves as bat girl for New York Yankees, fulfilling 60-year-old dream ESPN. I never wanted to be a bat girl. My dream was to play shortstop for the Yanks. Until I realized I couldn’t hit, throw, nor field.
So ideal for the 69 Mets…
Per the Atlantic, the Yankees are currently a lumbering mess unable to keep up with athletic teams (sounds like the Red Sox prior to 2000 maybe a bit earlier)…. soooo as they say hope springs eternal.
Hope for Yankee fans needs more spring training.
If talent was no obstacle, I would have chosen an infield position for the Atlanta Braves! Love those teams from the 90s, Smoltz is an all timer in my book. Who can forget Sid Bream lumbering around 3rd to win against the Pirates (!)
They only won the one Series, though, fortunately they got it once.
If you want to see Monopoly, tax rackets, political influence peddling, restraint of labor, just watch the Professional Sports News. Also those Municipal Stadium ripoffs which sports fans pay for joyfully. There is not a Senator in the land who would ever suggest there should be some reform of the Pro Sports Rackets.
Root, root for the Hedge Fund Home Team!
Regarding myocarditis and other vaccine side-effects, I would like to repeat a question I’ve asked previously: Do the mRNA vaccines cause any conditions the virus itself does not cause on a far greater scale?
The reactions to the vaccines appear to be much worse if you’ve already had an under-the-radar case of covid. Among people I know personally (i.e. not filtered through media/algorithms), the vaccines have caused more physical suffering than covid itself.
After 3.5 Months I am still experiencing an inflammatory response to the Moderna Vaccine.
My right elbow was painful enough to wake me up two nights ago and my background pain level ( Lumbar region, Sciatic nerve and Cervical spine are all damaged) has increased noticeably.
I’ve lived with chronic pain for near 30 years and have been in no hurry to add any pills to my current diet.
I have scheduled a ‘Phone meeting with my primary care physician and will be discussing appropriate treatment, there’s a safe and effective anti inflammatory that comes to mind which is off patent…
I’m in much the same situation with my own right elbow. And some arthritic symptoms in other joints which I had hoped were gone for good are back. But at this point I know enough about the virus to be convinced that the damage it can do, both individually and societally, is for practical purposes, unlimited. If I’d been told I’d likely have the lingering effects I’m experiencing, I personally would have accepted the vaccine anyway.
I wouldn’t give it to my grandchildren, at least not so long as I thought we could keep them safe.
I’ve been having odd aches and pains ever since my second shot of the Pfizer three months ago. Nothing too debilitating, but it’s unusual to have these pains in such warm weather that resemble arthritis.
One of the many COVID symptoms is similar to Dengue fever, where your bones ache (another name for Dengue is “bone break fever”. Both my wife and I had an episode of that last year about this time. I suppose we could have had a mild case but they weren’t testing anyone unless they had the more typical respiratory symptoms, so we will never know for sure.
Oh lord, first one person has me going on about correlation vs causation, and now you’re tempting me to accuse you of ‘privilige’!
That would be a low blow on my part I hope? You’re not insinuating that infection with SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t caused huge amounts of suffering and death?
But, to return to the substance of my question, what are the ‘reactions’ you’re speaking of? What disease processes are we talking about?
I’m asking in good faith. I have young grandchilden, and I anticipate the government will at least attempt to require vaccination for elementary school this fall. I’d like to be able to offer their parents an informed opinion.
this is as an informed opinion as i have seen:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/93340?trw=no
Thanks for this. It does seem to cover what I think are the most important issues. I also have two grandchildren (ages 10 and 7), and the continued suppression of relevant information for weighing risks vs. benefits in young people is extremely distressing.
This is a question we don’t know. It’s unlikely given what we’ve seen. Though you wonder about the coming over the top high school sports practices.
The real question is masking a safer alternative than the emergency use vaccines for young people and vaccinated adults masking too.
NotTimothyGeithner — you’re right to wonder about the coming high school sports practices.
Something that rarely gets mentioned in these articles about Covid-related myocarditis is that the CDC tells physicians that for follow-up of patients with myocarditis, they are to consult the recommendations from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology (AHA/ACC).
The AHA/ACC recommendations for follow-up are no joke:
In discussing general considerations about myocarditis, the ACC points out that service members and athletes are especially at risk:
The woman who became the earliest confirmed Covid-19 death in the U.S. was a very athletic person. Her heart ruptured.
So it’s possible her “athleticism” was a contributing factor? Leading to a conclusion that maybe all this exercise stuff is a shibboleth.
Coupled with a good diet and good sleep, exercise is your friend throughout life.
“The AHA/ACC recommendations for follow-up are no joke:
“Before returning to competitive sports, athletes who initially present with an acute clinical syndrome consistent with myocarditis should undergo a resting echocardiogram, 24-hour Holter monitoring, and an exercise ECG no less than 3 to 6 months after the initial illness”
That seems like a pretty large medical bill for a lot of people.
See discussion on overuse of colonoscopies.
People have been concerned about student athlete heart conditions for years. It’s still a mystery as to how they go undiagnosed all their lives and then drop dead seemingly at random. The most common remark seems to be “we need better tests.”
Yes, the cost and interpretation of tests (EKG’s, stress EKG’s) by cardiologists isn’t always conclusive. That’s why men (and women) drop dead from heart attacks in their mid-50’s. Youthful athletes add to the difficulty of diagnosing heart problems. The most definitive test is an angiogram, but that has risks of its own.
Good point. Between 2 a days and heat, and coaches potentially pushing hard in training after missed/messed up wonky seasons, I fear it’s going to be ugly.
Do the mRNA vaccines cause any conditions the virus itself does not cause on a far greater scale?
Nobody knows. This mass vaccination program is an experiment.
But what I find “curious” is the absence of the use of percentages, often employed by drug companies to overstate the benefits of their new drugs when the results in raw numbers are actually small, as in going from 2 cases per 10,000 to 1 case per 10,000 is a decrease of 50%!!!!
That’s an increase of 200 or 300% depending on how you look at it. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Does it even deserve to be called an experiment?
I don’t think it rises to that level.
Technically speaking, what is happening now with the EUA approved vaccines is a mass Phase Three Trial. From what I’ve read, a Phase Three Trial can run for up to two years. We’re not even past Year One yet. Also, we haven’t had our Third Wave of infections yet. This Winter is going to be a b—h.
Stock up on N95 masks and your favourite prophylaxitives.
As usual, Stay Safe!
(Per IMDoc, this phrase reminds me of the early HIV/AIDS days when “Safe Sex” was the catch phrase.) Lest anyone forget, for a historically brief period of time before the emergence of HIV/AIDS, pretty much anything you could catch in the way of STDs could be cured. [Herpes is in a class by itself.] The Covid-19 might be a similar phenomenon as regards the viral infections.
phase three is effectively over IMO: the placebo group mostly got the vaccine
You have me confused here. Isn’t the large “vaccine adverse” segment of the population the control group?
I’d go so far as to suggest, [adopting ultra-cynical mode here] that all the ‘messaging’ about how the big damage coming up is going to be in the unvaccinated cohorts is a way of demonising the control group. From there, it is a small step to proclaiming that the very idea of a control group is “dangerous to the Public Safety.”
The messaging is unabashedly Vaccine Triumphalism.
While I’m a trained animal, able to meet the marks before me I am not a monkey or even a trained ape!
Yeah I think it is a pretty big damn experiment. Just, I mean goodness. Vaccines that shoulda and coulda. We will see.
Chest pain = myocarditis!? More tests please.
Do you honestly believe that, under the circumstances, every test in the book wasn’t done in an effort to disprove the diagnosis?
who should pay for those tests?
FDA just added an official warning to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines about heart inflammation. Most of cases used by the AICP/CDC analysis (in the meeting last week) were confirmed by laboratory tests and/or emergency room visits. Men and boys under 30 are most at risk.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/25/health/fda-covid-vaccine-heart-warning/index.html
For years we’ve all been guinea pigs in a giant experiment conducted by big pharma. An example — I have taken OTC hay fever medications for years. Recently I read that that Claritin and others are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, yet they still sit on the shelves everywhere.
https://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20160509/anticholinergic-drugs-dementia-link
I have this question too. I don’t remember hearing a lot about myocarditis in young people post covid infection over the past year and a half, but I may have missed it. It seems like it would be doable to test people who have had prior infection and have not been vaccinated to see what’s going on with their hearts. I get the impression ‘we’ just don’t care about knowing these things.
But you may not catch the virus. In my zip code in Silicon Valley, we have a population of over 15,000 people. So far there have only been 161 covid cases. This is Santa Clara county and we have really good data. I don’t know a single person who has had covid.
However, if you are vaccinated, you have 100 percent chance risk of the side effects of the vaccine.
I’ll admit that I think that Delta may infect pretty much everyone, so there is that. However I’m relying on Ivermectin (mask, nasal spray) instead of the vaccine.
The knives are out for social democrat India Walton in Buffalo:
https://www.wkbw.com/news/i-team/buffalo-mayoral-nominee-walton-was-accused-of-welfare-fraud-failed-to-pay-taxes-in-2004
OMG, $295 overpayment in food stamps 19 years ago when she was 20! Unpaid parking tickets (driving while black)! A late tax payment a decade ago! True crime!
The attacks will not stop. Knives/guns/lies/fabrications/’important’ people will all be weaponized in this case.
Establishment politicians and those representing the corrupt status quo can be guilty of the most heinous crimes, but socialists must be totally without sin. Atleast we know the establishment are scared.
“OMG, $295 overpayment in food stamps 19 years ago when she was 20! Unpaid parking tickets (driving while black)! A late tax payment a decade ago! True crime!” We really do hate the poor. How dare this woman become mayor of a struggling suburb of Toronto, that’s almost Europe.
What it looks like when, instead of being a sitting senator and former mayor from Vermont who wrote a book and bought a vacation cabin with his “millions,” the democratic socialist is a black woman who was a teenaged mother who used public assistance to “bootstrap” her way into a position of power.
“Some” might call this line of attack “racist.” Where is the woke mob for the defense?
speaking of
https://www.downwithtyranny.com/post/the-establishment-shoots-another-arrow-at-nina-turner
As for the “faux woke”, I’m convinced POC was cooked up so they could say “colored” again. “Black” especially comes with elements of liberation as the word was taken and used by African-Americans. Whether its Black Power, Black Pride, or Black and Beautiful, it was used by African Americans, not a label given by enlightened Karens. Ultimately the point is to get permission.
Walton isn’t getting permission.
And to bring it back to Bernie, he’s always gone along to get along. What I’ve heard so far of Walton’s rhetoric is a bit spicier than Sanders ever gets. Talk is cheap, but I’m assuming TPTB don’t want to take any chances.
The other thing is that POC is a racist term in itself. It implies all non-white people belong to the same group. How about letting people say what they want to be called. I know that brings up a few strange people like Rachel Dolezal, but there is no perfect system.
And yet HRC blatantly violated federal laws that would land a normie a bid in Leavenworth (if they were lucky enough to avoid a SuperMax) and the FBI Director himself runs interference for her.
Please, Uncle, tell me some more about this “we are a nation of laws” thingee.
errrmmmm… Could you name one or more of those federal laws? I really doubt anything she did actually violated a statute that carries a felony penalty. The investigations were too widespread, over too long a time. Setting up her own email server did not violate the law at the time. What else?
“As part of the new agreement, the state also will cover 100% of past due rents for lower-income tenants, which is good news for many of the 1.2 million rental households described by the state as “extremely low income.””
Now I think Cali is going to need to build a wall to keep it’s
not quite low income workers from fleeing
“Heart inflammation after COVID-19 shots higher than expected in study of U.S. military”
Yeah, I’ve seen this movie a coupla times now. I can just see how it will play out in the coming years-
The year 2045 – ‘In a decision by the US Supreme Court, military veterans who allege that they have had their hearts allegedly damaged by taking COVID-19 shots during the Second Great Pandemic, were denied an opportunity to advance their case when the Court sided with government scientists who informed them that there has never been any proven link between COVID-19 shots and alleged damage to some veteran’s hearts. A lawyer was removed from court and charged with contempt of court when he shouted that that was because there has never been a study done by the CDC or anybody. In a statement by ‘Military Veterans of COVID-19 Shots’, a spokesperson said that they were very disappointed by the Courts decision, especially in light of the fact that so few of them are left alive to tell their story.
I’ll up you one, Rev. Under 21 CFR part 50, the FDA rules regarding waivers of informed consent, military personnel are not entitled traditional human subjects protections like informed consent if the Commander in Chief decrees it to be in the interest of national security.
Was talking to a military member of the family about it. He said that they have all been jabbed so many times with experimental drugs (no informed consent) that adding another one to the mix elicits a shrug from many active duty persons.
This guy claimed that his friend, post-mystery shots, now heals very quickly and has high heat tolerance. Another person has more stamina. Etc. God help our boys in green or tan or whatever hellhole they have to fight in this month.
Are prisoners subject similarly? Good way for ’em to pay back to society, involuntarily cross my mind.
Son-in-law in the Navy, he’s received the vaccine and I, for one, am glad of it.
John, they are not, fortunately. Prisoners have some pretty strict restrictions on informed consent. Of course, our abuse of prisoners went on until far too late in this country. 45 CFR 46 subpart D, I think, covers prisoners.
I’m convinced that when an issue crosses Chuck Schumer’s desk, it passes through a sort of political euthanasia. Anything that Schumer advocates for dies.
It wasn’t too long ago that he was advocating for legal marijuana. That, of course, has completely disappeared. Now he’s back on the student loan business, which will also likely end in a whimper.
It’s sort of parallel to the NYT op-ed Lambert featured yesterday, where Kamala Harris is given assignments that are sure to limp along pathetically into her inevitable 2024 run.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/biden-faces-heat-extend-student-233200171.html
I do not understand why the National Association of Realtors isn’t pushing student loan forgiveness with everything they have.
Effing idiots.
Student loan debt is the biggest barrier to home ownership for Millions.
COMMISSIONS!!!
Very good point.
I have also not seen the student loan forbearance mentioned in terms of goods and house price inflation.
loan money paid into the federal government general fund is not nearly as productive as someone spending it on their own.
The Fed might consider this when decided healthy and unhealthy inflation rates.
Really important. I also don’t understand why small businesses don’t push for rent control – it’s not paying workers that makes their businesses insolvent – it’s the insane rent overhead. Also Medicare for All, so they wouldn’t have to pony up for insurance.
There is no cross-class solidarity, even though these things would benefit everyone. It’s maddening.
It doesn’t matter any more. The future of residential real estate is private equity fund landlords.
When the mass-quantity mass-rental house aquisition moneylords have bought every house in the country, so that the only binary choice left to people is renting or homelessness, the non-existence of one single house left for real natural persons to buy will be the biggest barrier to home ownership for 300 million Americans.
Indeed. And you might ask why the National Association of Manufacturers has not been demanding national health care for 60 years? It’s just a class thing. I mean it takes four men to make a foursome.
So the solution to the right wing is more weed and less meth.
The far left and the far right have always had a few things in common… simple answers. And people go from one to the other without stopping in the middle; witness Arthur Kostler going from committed Communist to Darkness at Noon and Hillary Clinton going from 1964 Goldwater girl (God! Where are the pictures?) to feminist leftist. Thanks, but I’ll stick in the boring middle, reading the evidence, and discovering that there are some conspiracies… both on the left and the right.
Amfortas and I both live near (but not too near) to Austin, where a brutally hot summer with too much Shiner Bock, cheap local weed and decent shade trees often leads to political discussions… followed by a brisk skiny-dip to annoy the water moccasins.
Welcome to”(fill in the blank) is the opium of the people”
NSA won’t target you without a warrant, which is ridiculously easy to get
They don’t need to when they have the Five Eyes. The way it works is this. Legally (hardy-har-har) the NSA can’t spy on Americans. But you will have one of the other Five Eyes countries, like Australia, spy on Americans instead as no laws are being broken there. So our ASIO (probably operating on a tip by the NSA) will say, ‘Hey – we have discovered something of interest to you’. And at that point, the NSA can then run with the ball.
It reminds me of something that happened with one of America’s oligarchs a century ago during the Gilded Age. This oligarch (Vanderbilt?) was describing to his lawyer his latest scheme when the lawyer exclaimed that ‘It’s perfect. Why spoil it by making it legal?’
“Why spoil it by making it legal?” If I took notes of every good line on NC I’d literally be recreating the internet in notebooks. Now that’s a conspiracy theroist’s undertaking.
Jerry-Lynn, I wanted to be a starting pitcher. When I was 30, I clocked myself at a batting center in Tokyo. 60 mph fastball. Sigh.
If that’s the best it gets for your heater, your best option might be to learn to throw a knuckleball.
I had this discussion with a friend a couple of hours ago. Back when Hoyt Wilhelm was serving them up the seam on the baseball was much higher. Consequently, pitchers like ole’ Hoyt, could make the ball break a lot bigger. Or, in the specific case of ole’ Hoyt, put zero spin on the ball and get to the Hall of Fame. Maybe the answer to checking pitcher’s underwear is bringing back the ole’ “highs-seam” hardballs.
United Airlines Bets on Post-Pandemic Growth With Its Biggest-Ever Jet Order WSJ
The taxpayers own those planes. We paid for them. But United gets to use them.
We got 2 large. The airlines got gazillions. Seems about right for America in 2020
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2020-12-20/us-lawmakers-expected-to-back-15-billion-in-airlines-payroll-assistance
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/business/coronavirus-airlines-bailout-treasury-department.html#:~:text=American%20Airlines%20said%20it%20would,as%20a%20low%2Dinterest%20loan.
Bro, “Creepy” Joe owes me 600 simoleons.
One of our senators, I think Hassan, has a commercial on youtube where she’s boasting about the $1400 payment. It actually says $1400. Seeing it really gets my goat so I mute it and go to another window until it’s over as you can’t skip after 5s. I always say “You family bloggers owe me another $600.” She is running for reelection.
Jerri-Lynn: I wrote several years ago asking for your recommendations for mystery and crime novels. Loved your suggestions. Any recent mystery and thriller authors you especially like?
Rick, try Laurie King and Barry Eisler,Alan Furst is also good.
Phillip Kerr – “A Philosophical Investigation”
Bernie Gunther…from the Cripo to Cuba. Quite the ride.
I just perused eBay and purchased three lots of Ambler. I’ll have a nearly two dozen here soon. Call it Christmas in July!
Nice Preston Sturges reference. One of my favorite filmmakers. The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, Sullivan’s Travels, The Great McGinty, and I’m sure I’m missing a couple.
Glad to hear that. I cannot remember what I recommended, so my apologies for any repetition. If you see this reply and have a moment to jog my memory, I can spin out more in a similar vein.
The classics, certainly: Hammett, Chandler. Always well worth re-reading.
For more recent stuff, Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series; I recommend you read those in order. Sadly, there won’t be any more, as Kerr passed away, prematurely, a couple of years back.
Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde series; the Havana Quartet is superb but make sure you read those in the correct order, because IIRC, they were published in English out of sequence. All four books are now available in English; you can figure out on-line what the correct order is. The later Conde books have been a bit uneven but he’s such a great character, I persevere.
Sarah Caudwell’s series of four Hilary Tamar books.
Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun series. Amazing books, magical realism, featuring the national coroner of Laos, set in the early days after the revolution, and his best friend, a member of the government. Both the politico and Siri studied in Paris, then returned to Laos to fight for its liberation. Col just penned the last Siri book. I think there are 15 of those. He’s also said there won’t be any more. I’d also recommend reading those in order as the characters evolve.
I also liked Barry Eisler’s John Rain series; again, I try to read things in order. John Rain is an assassin for hire. Most of the books are set in Japan and there’s a lot of martial arts stuff.
If you let me know what you like, I can supply further suggestions.
For the SciFi Fantasy crowd I can wholeheartedly recommend the late Randall Garrett’s “Lord Darcy” series of stories. (Not many full length novels in the mix.) Legitimate crime detection stories with the addition of a Forensic Sorceror assistant to help the mere mortal detective with the magical aspects of the crime. [Hard headed, realistic Magic, if you can suspend disbelief that far.]
A fellow Sarah Caudwell fan! Thus Was Adonis Murdered was a guidepost to my adolescence.
Let me add recommendations for CJ Sansom’s Tudor-era lawyer mysteries, Tana French’s moody, atmospheric Ireland mysteries with occasional magical-realism type side elements, and Steve Hamilton’s equally moody, atmospheric mysteries set in Michigan’s upper peninsula without them.
A couple more: Peter Temple, not only for the Jack Irish series, but for his stand-alone novels as well. I also recommend Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.
Michael Dibdin. Aurelio Zen novels.
Aurelio Zen: another great series. I also liked his Dirty Tricks, a stand-alone novel set in Oxford.
Perhaps Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Dexter#Inspector_Morse_novels
Or even translated versions of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Camilleri#Inspector_Salvo_Montalbano_(1994%E2%80%932020)
I like the Morse videos much more than the books. John Thaw is superb as Morse and Kevin Whately plays so well off of him as Lewis.
Same here Jerri. Have you seen the “Inspector Lewis” movies as well? They are excellent too and are playing weekly here at the moment along with Morse.
Yes, I have. Agreed, also excellent.
Rev Kev and Jerri-Lyn, I have also enjoyed the Endeavour series so far. That’s been a fun one. Have been re-watching Lewis this past week.
The Inspector Morse theme music by the late Barrington Pheloung just seals the deal for me with this series-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20sVtCxf_8 (3:31 mins)
NYC mayoral primary race thrown into chaos as BOE appears to botch vote count
So much for transparency – nothing like an 11 round elimination where no one can check the results to give you confidence in the electoral system. Donald Trump once again has a feral understanding of the American psyche. No one believes the results. How can they?
Another “flawless” election with just a few tiny “mistakes” in vote counting. And if you don’t accept that, you are a filthy white supremacist vote suppressing enemy of the republic. Doo dah, doo dah.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NYC-mayoral-primary-thrown-into-chaos-by-16283976.php
“ballot images” How 21st century.
One thing I’ve learned from following the Trump attempt to undermine the 2020 presidential election results is that states have detailed procedures at every level of the process to ensure accuracy and thus multiple potential points of failure where some procedures may be inadequate.
In NYC yesterday an invalid count was identified by election officials, the cause diagnosed, and procedures implemented to correct the immediate problem. A similar problem of human error occurred on election night in 2020 in one county in MI, and similar steps were promptly taken to diagnose and correct the problem in the short term.
If whoever eventually loses the NYC election proceeds beyond whatever legal provisions there are for recounts/audits in a close election to unsubstantiated allegations, losing court cases, and unrealistic conspiracy theories they should be as subject as the Trumpists to criticism.
Others can speak to details about long-standing problems in voter access and election administration in NY, but I believe there are currently efforts in the legislature to address some of them.
Like Republican election laws currently moving forward, these efforts should also be subject to scrutiny as to whether they are reasonable solutions to actual problems, or just would make it more difficult for people to vote or have their votes counted.
Please. You understand nothing about software and hardware. They have no place in between the voter and the counting of the vote. There have always been attempts to cheat the vote, now they just do it in the code.
Hand marked ballots, counted in public. What don’t you get about that? Trump had one avenue to challenge the election, at the voting machines with their insecure code by definition. It’s telling that they dropped it right away. My guess is the owners of those voting machine companies are funders of all the campaigns, both parties.
> Trump had one avenue to challenge the election, at the voting machines with their insecure code by definition
Trump’s lawyering was shockingly bad. I’m amazed they didn’t challenge the proprietary source code. And the net effect of his [extreme family blogging] efforts has been to discredit those who would challenge digital voting (“safest election ever” when we can’t even know).
Forget “insurrection”, this was the real crime of Trump’s inability to accept that he wasn’t able to beat a walking zombie, and quite possibly the worst legacy of his presidency.
Yes, I’ve said in comments that I’m not qualified to assess the security of machine voting or the audits that were done on them. (Link to audit links and comment thread). I’m also not qualified to assess the statistical validity of hand recounts where less than full hand recounts were done that confirmed the machine counts.
Issues where Trump challenged the vote and where (as I stated above) some procedures are flawed would still exist with hand marked paper ballots (which mail ballots are) and hand counting such as signature verification and introducing “fake” ballots into the workflow.
“Tucker Carlson claimed the NSA is spying on him. Even his own colleagues don’t seem to believe it”
Lets see. Though I don’t watch his videos, I know that he is one of the most watched & influential people on American television. That his ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ is the only cable news program to not see a drop in viewership since Trump left the scene in contrast to MSNBC, CNN and even the rest of Fox. That he has on his show people that will never, ever be given a spot on networks like MSNBC or CNN. People like Jimmy Dore who will come on and give an antiwar screed or defend Julian Assange which changed Tucker Carlson’s mind on him.
Nope. I can’t think of a single, solitary reason why the NSA would be looking over his shoulders at all.
Tucker’s a fascist who is driving the movement toward fascism in the U.S. He should not only be run off the air, but locked up for what he does.
Just my humble opinion ofc.
If you ran him off the air, then all your TV would be like CNN or MSNBC who would be saying things like “Doesn’t Joe Biden look Presidential when he walks across a lawn” or would be confessing to Jen Psaki that they actually belong to a Jen Psaki Fan Club. Their grovelling is actually getting embarrassing to listen to. But you can change Carlson’s viewpoints. Dore changed his mind on Julian Assange after all.
Yes I know. But I never watch those channels anyway. Tucker may even tell some partial truths here and there, but that doesn’t mean I trust a word he says. It will inevitably be mixed in with deception and/or falsehood. He and other agents of the hard right will operationalize anything in the service of their cause. If his mind was ‘changed’ about Assange, then you can bet that will be forgotten as soon as it’s not useful to him any more.
(edited to better reflect posting guidelines)
So what crime did he do that he should be locked up for? Just curious. Not saying he didn’t, just need some specifics, and polemics and hearsay and opinion probably won’t be enough.
Oh there isn’t a crime per se, I’ll freely admit that. He and others like him are generally pretty careful not to cross over into directly criminal behaviors, or directly racist or otherwise bigoted statements for that matter. It’s more along the lines of crimes against humanity that I would personally charge him with. Corrupting the minds of susceptible, especially young people with his clever twistings of the truth. He knows what he is doing, of that I am certain. His concern about all the outrages he pushes is not sincere. I just don’t like the guy or what he does, and I don’t understand the pass and even direct support that he is given lately by people who should know better.
> Oh there isn’t a crime per se
With a standard like that, it won’t be Carlson who’s locked up first, as a moment’s reflection would show.
Yeah, well. I guess we’re all lucky I’m not in charge then.
“It’s Raht Thayer in the Babble” as someone I used to work with liked to say.
And it is.
“Do not muzzle the Kine that trample the grain”.
The people running things in the US are the kind of people that would much rather have 99.9% of a 5″ pie than 75% of a 36″ pie.
It’s human nature, there isn’t enough power and there isn’t enough wealth
Ever.
Like booze or Cocaine, there isn’t enough and can not be enough.
Because like almost all Humans these people are looking outside of themselves for an answer.
So they will crack down, like so many elites have in the past, with similar results.
Except that this time we have Nukes and climate change to deal with.
I tend to agree with Historian about the likely path and results.
It won’t be fun and it won’t be boring.
“Australia Covid: Seventh city locks down amid vaccine chaos”
Scotty from Marketing’s U-turn on young people being allowed to use Atrazeneca caused more than confusion. God knows where he was getting his ‘medical’ dvice from. The Chief Health Officer in my State hit the roof when she heard that he said this. Came right out and said “I do not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca.” It’s too risky from them.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-30/qld-cho-rejects-morrisons-astrazeneca-comments-covid-vaccine/100256022
I will add to this and say that I am really beginning to hate the media in Oz. Especially when they come out with an article like this-
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/selfish-millennials-stepping-up-to-get-astrazeneca-is-what-could-save-australia/news-story/67df033b8980c0c7a36ca0f1a69aa34a
And now this https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-01/atagi-co-chair-pours-cold-water-on-morrison-az-comments/100257392
Little Scotty from Marketing can’t win a trick.
Don’t you mean “ God is where he was getting his ‘medical’ advice from”, Rev?
His God is not my God (or Gods). He seems to worship something which blesses lying, hypocrisy, corruption, greed, incompetence, sexual assault, the list goes on.
Bret Weinstein was interviewed by that enemy of democracy, Tucker Carlson, last night. Dark Horse has, apparently, been “demonitized” by YouTube.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone disregards what Weinstein has to say. I can only assume that, what with the lies having been so voluminous and relentless over the decades, most americans have zero idea what truth-telling / truth tellers even sound like anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuzH3_7HbOc
Only about 5 minutes.
When I was quickly scanning your first paragraph I saw the word “demonized” instead of “demonetized.”
Both work.
here’s a broad ranging 3 hour interview of Weinstein by Lex Fridman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG6BuSjwP4o
I particularly admire his combining a calm self-assurance with open minded circumspection about his informed opinions
Biden’s $118 million cabinet: “Not all of Biden’s advisors are in the money. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has a net worth of zero, with more than $15,000 in student loans.”
Haaland is a 60-year-old Puebloan who represented New Mexico’s 1st congressional district from 2019-2021.
From Wiki: “As a single mother, Haaland started a salsa company to support herself and her daughter. At times during this period, she did not earn enough money to afford housing and had to rely on friends for shelter. She also relied on food stamps at times.”
I’m looking forward to the (unlikely) day when Haaland and another progressive woman are seated behind the President for an address to Congress instead of the “history-making” Kamala and Nancy (gag), two millionaire women married to millionaires.
As the drum-beat of NC goes, it ain’t about gender it’s about class.
On the day the BBC are reporting that Northern England, in particular Manchester have suffered most from the pandemic as inequality continues it’s inexorable climb – it is a great pity that someone like Florence Nightingale doesn’t have influence on health policies, rather than the latest spiv to replace the last one.
John Campbell on his channel way back talked about ventilation within Victorian hospitals & how it helped with infections etc. I remember old wards some of which within the sprawling NHS City General in Stoke had originally been part of the old workhouse. Most of this was demolished & replaced by the same sort of architecture used for offices, which only had windows on the outside of a building likely about 200 metres square, with many inner wards not having any at all.
When I moved to Ireland I had to frequently visit 2 Dublin hospitals – Beaumont & St. Luke’s which looked as though they were built between the 50’s & 60’s, but still had long wards with large windows, with the latter also having ward access at ground level to the outside. At that time I thought that they both looked dilapidated in comparison to the Stoke 90’s built equivalent, but now it appears that M/s Nightingale was correct if not about miasma but the need for fresh air.
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/research-finds-victorians-knew-best-over-hospital-ward-design-1867069
A while ago I was reading about how medicine discovered the importance of Vitamin C to combat scurvy, and then, in tall the excitement after the discovery of germs, promptly forgot it – around 1900 the notion that scurvy was actually a germ disease became so popular that arctic explorers didn’t bother with dietary advice that was standard for Navys around the world a century before. The results were not pleasant. It shows that scientific and medical advancement is not always linear.
I live close to the former Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin which was built in 1684 (and modelled on Les Invalides in Paris. It was of course build to be airy, with a sheltered courtyard and beautiful gardens. And this was for humble soldiers not just officers. This was standard in hospitals and sanitariums up to the early 20th Century. Its just down the road from the colossally expensive new National Children’s Hospital, crammed into a narrow site with no open space. I’ve read quite a bit about the design and genesis of what is intended to be one of the finest children’s hospitals in the world. Maybe I missed it, but I can’t find anything written about ventilation or open space that sick children can take the sun and fresh air. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that this was needed. It does, however, have a Ronald McDonald house attached, so we can be assured of the children’s happiness.
I think the victory over TB and the ubiquity of antibiotics somehow made the medical establishment forget all about the virtues of fresh air and cleanliness. Not all of course – a few years back when I was recovering from facial injuries in an accident one doctor cheerily told me to walk a lot by the sea and get lots of sun. I wasn’t terribly impressed at the time, but he was right – I’ve seen recent research indicating that natural IR light in the morning and evening can help skin healing among other things. And of course we know now about how important it is to get Vitamin D into is.
So my husband’s go to for skin abrasions (aka road rash) is salt water baths…something his Dad (who was also a motorcyclist) told him. When my husband mentioned this to a young urgent care doctor, he got an eyeroll…but
https://carecprfirstaid.com/salt-water-for-wounds/
Back in WW2 in the UK, a growing problem was the number of pilots and air crew that had suffered severe burns. The surgeon in charge, Archibald McIndoe, noticed that those men that had come down in the Channel and spent time in the salty water did better than those that came down over lad so he incorporated salt water in his treatments-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Pig_Club
Just discovered that the comedian Jimmy Edwards was a member of this club. Wow.
My Dad had very bad facial damage from an infection when he was very young. He basically lost his entire nose. After the war, as a teenager, he worked as an orderly in the burn wards in London to establish a slot in the plastic surgery program. The surgeons who dealt with aircrew cases completely rebuilt his nose. Cartilage from between a pair of lower ribs, and skin from his nether regions became a new nose for him. I never guessed at this till he told me about it one night when I was in my late teens. He said that he would escort the bad cases to a local near the hospital very late at night because the authorities didn’t want to psychologically scar any little children who might have seen the badly damaged patients. Dad loved to swim in the ocean. That might be why he decided to buy the house on the Beach when it became possible.
I’m going to have to ask Mum about this the next time I see her up close and personal.
Yes, & it is so often simple things that can make all of the difference to matters of great importance as in Queen Anne being a failed brood mare by losing something like 17 children most due to what was called ” Sticky blood ” a condition that was eventually banished by aspirin, which if it had been available would have changed history by continuing the Stuart line, rather than it being replaced by the Saxe – Coburgs.
The crew from Shackleton’s Endurance expedition might have been saved by the Vit C in their rations & the Vit D that they got from a diet of penguins & seals as they floated on that pack ice through an almost endless night. Very close call in any case with likely even the smallest factors making all of the difference – a great pint at the South Pole Inn being a modern benefit of Tom Crean’s survival.
I suppose that we suffer when we close ourselves off from the natural & coop ourselves up like battery hens.
“Murkowski Has the Moxie to Take On Trump. Will She?”
Betteridge’s Law. No.
Goooood Mooooorning Fiatnam!
It was a given that we’d end up in a hot LZ upon leaving the jet stream via chopper in the PNW and all the grunts knew it, a buck sixteen in the shade in Stumptown when we scampered off the skids into the buckled asphalt jungle teeming with life sans air conditioning, as they’d been conditioned to not need it.
It was such that there were melted illusions all over the place, as we dug foxholes to China trying to beat the heat.
For those without a TV (like me). Walensky was apparently on TV today and said the following (sigh).
https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/06/30/rochelle-walensky-delta-variant-masks/?p1=hp_featurestack
The World Health Organization, or WHO, is providing guidelines and information for the world, when across the globe, less than 15 percent of people have been vaccinated and most have only received one dose, Walensky said. At the same time, COVID-19 is surging in many places around the world.
“So as the WHO makes those recommendations, they do so in that context,” she told “Today.” “Here in the United States, we’re fortunate. We have three vaccines that we know are safe and effective. We have two-thirds of the adult population that is fully vaccinated and really quite protected from the variants that we have circulating here in the United States.”
But the CDC director said local policy makers should be making the guidelines for their local communities and individuals should be checking with the masking policies in their areas.
“There are areas of this country where about a third of people are vaccinated,” Walensky said. “They have low vaccination rates. And there are areas that have more disease in the context of people not being vaccinated. So in those areas, we have always said, ‘Please look, make suggestions.’ But those masking policies are not to protect the vaccinated, they are to protect the unvaccinated.”
Are these people all tarred and feathered with the same brush or what?
Remember when Chris Matthews was going on about firing squads in Central Park? At the time I wondered if he might not be so much hysterical and crazy, as just aware of what the ruling class has been up to.
Interesting article about the link between obesity and worse c19 outcomes, and the MSM presentation of that data (or not).
Why COVID is like AIDS
Hint: not because the risks are similar.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/why-covid-is-like-aids
Who is that Berenson guy? I wonder who funds him.
He’s definitely a scurrilous liar:
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1397950845392728068
for the record Prather had said that when runoff has polluted the water at the beach, she wouldn’t go in even for a milion dollars. Me either.
… and the band plays on….
“Until I realized I couldn’t hit, throw, nor field
My father was a seriously good baseball player.
When I was about 6, he told me that it was time to select the position I would play. He started with Pitcher — and said I wasn’t flakey enough to be a pitcher. First base was out because I was not left-handed. I forget the reason that 2nd base, 3rd base, and all three outfield positions were eliminated.
He saved catcher for last. And said: “. . .catchers have to throw good and you can throw good enough. And you can hit ok. And you were born on Yogi Berra’s birthday.
And catchers don’t have to run a lot. You run real fast, but too long in the same place.”
I became a catcher.
My left handed son always played first base. He could throw and catch wonderfully, but was a horrible hitter which made him quit baseball at age 11. However, his last couple seasons was when they started using other kids to pitch. My kid’s on base percentage was actually the highest on the team because once he figured out that he couldn’t hit worth beans, he would just stand there, not swing, and get a walk because there were a lot more “balls” than “strikes” from most of the pitchers.
It appears the woman who caused the Tour de France crash has been arrested:
https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/opi-omi-crash-causing-spectator-arrested-in-france/
Yours Truly is a photographer who sometimes covers cycling events. What this lady did is truly beyond the pale.
When I’m aiming my camera at a cycling event, I make sure that every part of my body and my photo gear stays OFF the course. I’m not participating in the event, I’m covering it.
TIP: Want to get a close-up the riders? Use a [family blogging] telephoto zoom! Stay off the [family blogging] course!
I was visiting a friend in France a couple of years ago when the peloton zoomed by. What amazed me is how exposed the riders are and how utterly dependent they are on all spectators not to do something stupid.
Right freaking ON!
Back in, oh, 2015 or 2016, I was at the final corner of El Tour de Tucson, and the riders were whipping by.
Unfortunately, I was joined by this idiot who was whooping and hollering while running his camera. I was trying to keep a quiet and professional demeanor while using my own camera, and this guy kept yapping at me. He even tried to shame me and remind me that “This is supposed to be FUN!”
I finally turned to him and barked, “Shut your [family blog] mouth!”
He took the hint and went away.
I’ve never seen him at any other cycling events around town. For that, I am very grateful.
I make a point about Ranked Choice Voting/Instant Runoff Voting on my blog, that it is a form of a runoff, and that runoffs, in the United States at least, have historically disadvantaged minorities.
That is why they are so prevalent in the South.
When juxtaposed with the corruption and incompetence of the New York City Board of Elections, it creates a toxic mix.
(That being said, if Adams loses because of this, New York City will be the better for it)
While I think Adams would be terrible,* I honestly cannot pick a “winner” for the City. The least bad choices would be so ham strung by Albany…well we are screwed no matter who finally gets the nod.
*Adams has a very good chance of making me curse out the mayor before Cuomo, and currently Andy is my favorite politician to blame for everything.
Interesting Varoufakis today. … capital has been replaced by a new feudalism of technology… finance is decoupled from the real economy (finance in terms of some value standard)… it is no longer driven by private profits and rent extraction, not by competition… it is instead driven by the constant generation of money by central banks… and the competition to extract some miserable profit has shifted onto digital platforms… OK then. Things are going in the right direction. An abstraction of value into an electronic world of questionable subscriptions… I’m not too upset. If we can shift our extraction compulsion from the environment to the virtual, it will save the environment and still give us some vestige of our own natural instincts being put to good use. Or the illusion of it. As far as fiat by central banks goes – I’d just submit that it is easily as “valuable” as a nickel and a dime. We do need to find a replacement for our over-consumption compulsion – and if we can devise bit-consumption that might be a good thing. I think YV would disagree however.
The idea of a replacement is the problem. We just need to stop consuming and enjoy the simple things.
Venice in Danger of Losing UNESCO Status AFAR
******
From that article: “The recommendation by UNESCO’s World Heritage Center took into account mass tourism, in particular the passage of cruise ships through the historic center, a steady decline in permanent residents, as well as governance and management problems.”
I live near a nice, quiet, once normal community that was declared a World Heritage Center a number of years back. The Today show showed up for a week, RE values skyrocketed, hustlers moved in, locals moved out, actual town became gentrified, a phony shell of what it had really been. Even the hustler Mayor complained there were no residential houses for sale, all was BnB. See Aspen, Barcelona for examples of over tourism.
Hopefully, some investigative reporter will write a book about the World Heritage Industry. I suspect it would be a rats’ nest of Olympic scandal proportions.
I don’t think this is necessarily UNESCO’s fault — it’s more about the financialization of everything, and the original goal was to preserve. Having said that, I remember visiting Georgetown/Penang in Malaysia ten years ago and being surprised at the high property values. Georgetown is another UNESCO site.
Are you talking about Dubrovnik? That seems to have happened there.
Just a note. Not a single death in Australia to coronavirus this year. This, with all these major cities shutting down destroying individuals livlihoods. And a government publically on record for having inflated official covid deaths ( other countries have admitted to this also of course)
oh and the shutdown at least the Sydney one, perfectly timed to coincide with start and finish of the two week school holidays, to the day. The previous shutdown – also amidst zero official deaths – was staged also in the largest population mass ( Sydney) to overlap with Xmas and announced at the last minute, so all of sudden everyone had to cancel spending time with loved ones and be alone. This is why the government are so despised and distrusted as the covert motivations and self interest are so transparent. They are highly unsophisticated in their deceptions. If decisions were clearly made in the interest of the community and wellbeing we’d be on side.
Eat This – Venison.
I still have 30 lb of venison in the freezer and I haven’t had to hunt in ages. I have orchards on three sides of me and the farmers cull the does each fall. I let them drive the deer across my property and they give me high quality venison in return; usually 1/2 butterfly tenderloin steaks and 1/2 ground. Because there is so little fat, low and slow cooking is required. The steaks with souvlaki seasoning are particularly good.
I was reading Craig Murray’s post on Assange and Thordarson and I wasn’t surprised.
The FBI suborned perjury from a registered sex offender and embezzler and protected him as he continued his criminal activity in order to frame Assange.
And I wasn’t surprised.
That is the “State of the Union”.
Speaking of the late Sen. Mike Gravel, the Washington Post remains classy-
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1409138761884110848
Brought to you by the same people who published PropOrNot.
Yes, if course the cruelty is the point. No, of course Trump voters have no legitimate grievances – not because they don’t have problems, but because only all-encompassing racist hate could make anyone believe that any Republican on Earth cares about solving the terrible problems facing any of us.
Yes, the PMC suck, too. Mostly because they know full well their job is to enable Republicans, but while lying relentlessly about it. Two halves of a crap sandwich.
At the end of the day, Trump and Biden are both in favor of the next pandemic, against M4A, and in favor of burning the planet to a cinder. For their voters, all of them, either performing the cruelty or pretending not to perform the cruelty themselves, the cruelty is the point.